Things happen that should make you die. There was a veil of white fire. I fell back, shielding my eyes. The fire flared and vanished. The door reached onto open space. Seizing the doorframe, I tottered on the edge of a black void, standing now on curving ice. It was moving, almost too fast for me to take it in. Stars whisked by, and I looked up to see a streaming cloud, the colors of an unnatural fire.
Help him!
A tiny voice, imperious, compelling.
“What the hell are you?”
He is dreaming! Wake him!
The colors were coalescing. As I stared, a figure started to form, made out of cascading light. I started shaking. I knew that I was in the presence of death, not the normal end to my life, which, at seventy, could not be that far away, but something which strove to wipe me out, as one might remove a speck of dust from a sheet of glass. It reached out a hand, long finger and thumb ready to pinch, and I felt it touch the edge of my soul, which shriveled.
Then fear overcame me and I slammed the door shut, knees trembling. It took all my strength, as though a vacuum were sucking the door open.
“Granddad? Are you all right?” Serena was standing on the landing. The pictures were back on the cream-papered walls; everything was still and normal and midnighty. In her white nightgown, with her blond hair, Serena looked like a small, pale ghost.
“Yes. Thought I heard something. In the study. Nothing there.” My sentences stuttered out as if I were a puppet.
“Oh, okay.” Serena looked reassured. “Maybe the window catch is loose. It’s really windy out there now. You didn’t shut one of the cats in, did you?”
“I—yes, possibly. Anyway, everything’s all right.” Paternalism was coming to the fore now. Mustn’t worry the girls. “You hop back into bed—you’ll get cold.”
She nodded and vanished into her own room. I staggered back to mine and collapsed on the bed to stare into space—except it wasn’t space, just air and the ceiling. I’d seen space, many times, and it didn’t look like this. What an odd expression that was…But I’d witnessed it from observatories, traveling the world, when I was attached to universities: mountaintop places in the quiet nights, star-staring. I’d never seen it up close and personal, and I didn’t think I wanted to do that again.
Because I thought I knew where I’d just been. I knew what comets looked like.
I didn’t think I’d end up talking to one, though. But had I been? Or was that pale figure something else? If it was on the comet, how could its messenger appear in an English churchyard? Talking to me made a little more sense, magician/astronomer as I was. Yet I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it. What about the woman on the landing? Was she connected? Visitations often come in clusters. I mulled all this over until a chilly dawn began to creep around the curtains, and then I went down to the kitchen and made some tea. I took it back to the study, and I don’t mind confessing that I had a bad moment when I opened the door. But there the room was, the usual bookcases and muddle. No black depths of space, no icy void. I released a breath and stepped through the door. I wanted to look up Akiyama-Maki.
Google gave me the basics, which I already knew. What was niggling at the back of my mind was when the comet had appeared before. We knew it had been named in 1964, but a lot of these comets turned out to be “the great comet of 1569” or somesuch, and given the woman’s apparently Elizabethan costume, I wanted to see just what had been visible in the heavens during the old queen’s reign. Not exactly a precise science; I’d only caught a glimpse of her, after all. I leafed through one of the older books on celestial phenomena and found seven comets during the period of 1558 to 1603. Most of these were known. It should be possible to work Akiyama-Maki’s path backward, so I did some calculations, and it had appeared within that window: in 1571.
I closed the book and looked up. The woman was standing in the doorway. She regarded me gravely. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her voice. Her skin was very pale, and there were lights moving within it; it was then that I knew she wasn’t human, not a ghost. But what was she? A spirit, surely. She looked as though she was standing in a breeze, tendrils of black hair drifting out from her elaborate coiffure, and the dark green skirts of her gown rippled, the heavy silk like water. Emeralds glinted around her throat, above the spikes of her ruff. She held out her hand to me, offering a sprig of sage. Its spicy, late-summer scent filled the room. A moment later, she winked out, as if she had never been. I was left sitting over the book, my mouth open.
I spent that afternoon looking through my library, searching for a sign of her. I failed to find it. We’d lived here a long time, the Fallows, and this is our story: the men in our family don’t do so well. The house had been built by a woman: Lady Elinor Dark, who was widowed and married a Fallow. The names in the family tree interweave through one another: Dark, Fallow, Fortune, Lovelace. The women run the house—formidable chatelaines with hoops of keys, dreamy poetesses, stout orchard wives. The men die young, or simply fade. I am an exception. I’ve never been sure what I’ve done to deserve this honor. My granddaughters all have different fathers: no shame in that, post 1960s. None of them have stuck around.
Moonecote is not a mansion. It was conceived as a farmer’s house, and over the years it grew, but not very much. Elinor’s portrait hangs on the stairs; she has an oval Elizabethan face, like an egg. I’m sure she wasn’t that bland. She does not wear emeralds, nor does she dress in green. She bore little resemblance to the black-haired woman who had just visited me. So who was the latter, then? What could her connection to the comet be? It made me nervous of going onto the landing, but I did. No one was there.
And nothing happened that night. At one point I woke, nerves jangling, but the bedroom was quiet and undisturbed. Now, however, the silence was anticipatory; it felt as though something huge was waiting to happen. I even went to the window again and looked out, but everything was normal. The fields lay under a crisp frost, moonlight-touched. Orion marched away to the west with his blue dog at his heels. It was all winter-clear. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and went with some trepidation up to the attic, where I keep the telescopes.
The moon was gibbous, and there was a single bright star beneath it, guiding it to moonset like a tug with a ship into the harbor of the dawn. The star was Spica: the only really vivid body in the constellation of Virgo. A binary star, comprised of a blue giant and a Beta Cephei variable, if you want to get technical. If you prefer to be historical, an early temple of Hathor was aligned to Spica, and Copernicus did many observations of its passage. Now, not far before sunrise, it burned in the cold sky. I watched it and its fellows. Jupiter was visible now, the red spot a dusky rose. Akiyama-Maki would first appear above Arcturus and travel northward, heading up the handle of the Plough. I looked, but it was not yet visible.
He is coming! said a voice inside my head. I started and looked around, half expecting to see woman or flame, but there was nothing.
* * *
—
…Fermi Asian Network (FAN) was established in 2010 to promote collaborations among the high-energy astrophysicists in Asia with particular focus on using the data obtained by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope for observational and theoretical investigations. Over the last few years, we have published a series of papers related to gamma-ray astronomy…
It was two days after my night in the attic, and I was on the train, heading north. I looked up from the abstract I was reading, watched the gray fields flash by. We rarely get snow in the Southwest, but the Midlands were another matter.
“Jane’s in Wolverhampton,” Stella had said that morning, privy to the mysterious revelations of Facebook. “That’s near Birmingham, isn’t it? And she says there’s snow. Do you want me to look at the trains for you?”
There were no cancellations. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. The conference was only for a day: a series of not uni
nteresting papers. Now that I no longer taught, there wasn’t a great deal of call to attend, but I thought I ought to take an interest, keep my hand in, all that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the invite had arrived in July, on a sweltering day when any thought of bad weather was very far from the mind. Winter, my late wife said once, is like childbirth: you never remember it properly once it’s over and done with. She was right. Now that the conference date was actually here, I was faced with the usual problems of the wrong kind of snow on the line, the numerous excuses that the national rail network seem to conjure up to explain its inexplicable delays.
However, Alys got me to the local station for seven-thirty; the conference didn’t start until ten. I would have to change at Bristol, but then it was a fast service straight through. Bristol was the usual scramble—wrong time of day, full of commuters—but Alys had booked me a seat, and I sank into it gratefully. We stopped once at Parkway, then belted through Gloucestershire, the hills vanishing into cold, low cloud. Everyone had long since settled down by then, and all the seats were taken, but a few stragglers were going up and down to the buffet car in search of more coffee, so when a woman brushed past me, I didn’t register it until she was past me. Then the green of her gown caught my eye. I looked up. She glanced over her shoulder; an emerald in her hair flashed in the overhead glow and she gave me a small, enigmatic smile in which I thought I read something of triumph. Then she was gone.
Green for “go.”
Inside my head, my inner voice said: It’s not the house, you bloody fool. It’s you.
After that, I got really jumpy. No one else seemed to have noticed her, although admittedly they were all absorbed in laptops and the newspapers, but women in Elizabethan gowns are not common on trains. I got the feeling that I was the only one who could see her, but it made me nervous all the same; what if she popped up during the conference? Thank God I wasn’t giving a talk. It had, of course, occurred to me that I was simply becoming senile, but these visions seemed too specific, too precise. As I’ve said, I was pretty much used to the house being haunted—but then the flame in the graveyard had, as far as I knew, appeared to me alone. And now so had she.
I reached the conference center in something of a state. Pretend to be a normal person, I kept telling myself. Inevitably, I ran into some people I knew in the lobby and was immediately hauled into one of those slightly-oneupmanship-dominated conversations that academics often engage in. But the first talk was due to start soon. Together, still chatting, we filed into the lecture theater, and confronted with a deeply earnest paper on the nature of gravitational microlensing, I managed to push the woman to the back of my mind.
For reasons that I hope are obvious, I’d always kept my magical interests separate from my worldly job. It’s not a good idea, if you’re a university professor, to start babbling on about astrology—one of the dirtiest words in professional astronomy. But it hasn’t always been the case: look at Newton, returning to alchemy at the end because he didn’t think this physics stuff was ever really going to hack it. You can’t get away with that now, but as the talk—which was frankly rather tedious—dragged on, my mind started to wander back to the Renaissance, to magic. To planetary spirits, which each planet possesses, along with its own sigil, its own quality. Jupiter confers wealth; Venus is the bringer of love. Now, in an age that demotes planets annually (poor old Pluto), it’s perhaps hard to enter a mind-set in which celestial matters have an eternal quality.
All of this was lurking at the back of my mind throughout the series of seminars—some interesting, some turgid. During the latter, I found myself doodling in my notebook like some lackluster undergraduate; it had always been a bad habit. I drew a woman’s face, a series of traced lines, not very good, and a sprig of sage. As I drew, I could almost smell it and I glanced up fearfully, expecting to see her there, but the room was full of my mercifully dull colleagues with no Elizabethan ladies in sight. I stopped doodling after that, afraid I might conjure her up. But there was something brewing in my unconscious; I could feel it, nudging me like the memory of a dream, and it stayed with me all through the buffet lunch.
During the afternoon break, I managed to collar one of my more comet-informed colleagues by the tea urn and I asked him, in what I hoped was a lightsome tone, about Akiyama-Maki.
“Oh, yes, wonderful. Marvelous to have such a visitor. Should be visible from tonight, you realize? Just a smudge, at first.” Dr. Roberts was enthusiastic. “Really will come awfully close, though—at least half a million miles.”
I smiled at this routine joke, but Roberts wasn’t really kidding. For a foreign body traveling the solar system, this isn’t far off a near miss. It sounds like a long way off, but it isn’t in astronomical terms.
“Conspiracy theorists are having a ball, of course. I’ve had at least five emails a day asking if it’s the end of the world.”
“How exceedingly tedious.”
At this point we were interrupted by a young man summoning us back to the lecture theater, so our conversation came to a close. That morning’s encounter with the woman had put me on edge so much that, making the excuse of worries about the weather, I bailed out of the communal Indian meal organized by one of my former colleagues and picked up sandwiches at the station before catching an earlier train home.
Not that it made any difference. We were held up before Bristol, with a fault on the line. I was grateful that I’d brought a book. I texted Alys with some difficulty—you’d think a scientist would adjust more readily to modern technology—and told her I’d call from the station. When we finally got into Temple Meads, the train out was delayed. I could have gone for a curry after all, I thought gloomily; I’d arrived after the original later train was due in. By now, close to ten p.m., the platform and the surrounding fields were heavy with frost. My breath steamed out before me in clouds, and even in woolen gloves my hands felt immediately pinched. I rang Alys, fumbling the phone, and told her that I’d meet her on the road. The station is too small for a waiting room, and I didn’t fancy sitting for twenty minutes in the open bus-stop affair on the platform. So I set off at a brisk, but careful, pace down the lane that leads to the station. The moon hung high, outlined by cold: a ring of ice crystals sparkled around it, and its light caught the frozen hawthorn. My footsteps rang out on the hard ground. I came to the summit of a small rise, which carried the lane down to the main road. Here, a gate revealed a long rolling vista of fields.
I paused for a moment, knowing that Alys was still some way off, and looked over this pale, unfamiliar landscape, then upward, seeking the comet, but before I could orientate myself beneath the stars something shimmered in the distance. Someone was coming over the brow of the field. Hard to see—they were wearing white, not some farmer encased in an ancient Barbour—and who, I realized with sudden shock, would be in white in the middle of a field in the middle of winter?
I knew who it was: not the death that comes to us all at our end, whose hand is not always unkind, but the other death, the one who snuffs out life as though it has never been, who steals the candle of the soul. The figure passed down the field, heading for the gate. He wore a headdress in the form of a star, like a child’s drawing of Jack Frost, and long robes that sparkled like the crystals around the moon. He was more solid than the form I’d seen in my earlier vision. He was moving swiftly, gliding over the ground. I had an impression of black, inhuman eyes; a long lantern jaw. I was, almost literally, frozen to the spot. As he neared the gate he looked up and reached out a finger like a claw. Then he blinked out, like the woman had done. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to see him, but he was gone in an instant, and I was alone with the hawthorns and the moon. Distant on the road I heard the throb of the Land Rover’s engine, and a moment later saw Alys turn down the lane.
Gradually, I started to warm up. I felt that I’d been touched by a cold that was much greater than that of a frosty January night. Alys kept glancing a
t me in concern, and eventually she said, “Dad, are you all right?”
“Just tired.”
“You can have a rest tomorrow,” she remarked, encouragingly. Normally, I bridle at being treated like a poor old thing, but tonight I found I didn’t mind so much. When we finally got home, driving slowly over the frozen roads, and the bedroom door closed behind me, I thought: Enough.
* * *
—
Despite the tiring previous day, I woke early next morning. It was about six-thirty, and not yet light. When I drew the curtains, I saw frost flowers decorating the pane for the first time in years. We have double glazing, and anyway it’s rarely cold enough in this mild part of the country. I was reminded of childhood, when there was a magic in such things. There still is. I traced an icy star with my finger. When I took it away, the skin was faintly silvered.
In magic, there are really only two choices. You can act or not act. You have to be clear about your decision, though, and your reasons, and you have to be prepared to take the consequences. Be careful what you wish for, and all that: the monkey’s eldritch paw. Now, I thought I was clear; I knew what I wanted. Knowledge. And irritatingly, I thought I already had it: that subconscious push beneath the surface of my mind was still present, and still insistent. But I wanted more of an answer.
But first I needed tea. I went to the door of the bedroom, took hold of the handle, and the subconscious push broke through the surface of my mind in a shower of crystal drops.
Sage juice with trefoil, periwinkle, wormwood, and mandrake placed will increase gold, accumulate riches, bring victory in lawsuits, and free men from evil and anguish—
It was my own inner voice, not some external agency, and I knew where it came from. Cornelius Agrippa: theologian, physician, soldier, occult writer, much more besides. Many of the correspondences in magic come from Agrippa’s obsession with noting what goes with what, macrocosm and microcosm. In the Book of Hermes, he speaks of the fixed stars—known as the Behenian stars—and their influences and attributes. Each star is associated with corresponding plants and gemstones, and the idea is that you make talismans that accord with these correspondences: a metal ring inscribed with the sigil of the star, and containing the planet and stone. When I was a young man, and becoming interested in magic, I had made such a talisman, but for Mercury, not a star. I thought I knew where it was: in an old box, containing a number of semiprecious stones of the tumbled kind that you can buy in any New Age shop. They’d been around for a long time, however, ever since I was a boy, and I didn’t know where they had originally come from. Now, I thought I knew exactly which stones were in that box: the ones that corresponded to the Behenian stars.
The Book of Magic Page 29
