by Hiatt, Bill
“What did you do to Principal Simmons?” she asked. I had one of those, “Someone just stepped on my grave,” shudders.
“I just put her to sleep for a very short time, and I told her to forget everything connected with the boxing match, or something like that.”
Nurse Florence gave me her best “we have to have a talk” faces. “Do you remember when you told me you didn’t erase Stan’s memory of your secret because you were afraid to?” I nodded. “Well, you were right to be cautious. You run less risk perhaps than trying to compel someone against a deep seated moral code or even a strong desire, but risks there still are, nonetheless.”
“Is something wrong with Ms. Simmons?” I asked, dreading the possible answer.
“At some point after you left the office, she found her notes on the boxing match. She could see she had written them, but she couldn’t remember writing them. Do you see how frightening that could be?”
“Of course, but I had no way of knowing she had notes.”
“Well, how about this, then—something else frightened her. She could no longer remember what boxing was. She thought she must have had a stroke or something and ended up in the emergency room.”
“Will she be all right?” I asked shakily.
“Considering she didn’t have a stroke, yes, physically, she will be all right. But you have shaken her confidence in herself. She is a fine educator, and now you’ve made her wonder whether she is still competent to be in charge of teenagers.”
“I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Of course you didn’t. But this brings us back to my initial point. You didn’t plan very well, and someone got hurt.” I leaned against the wall, hardly able to think. I was tired, so tired of having every move I make produce some kind of catastrophe.
“Tal, I know this kind of thing is new to you. The first Taliesin didn’t have to hide who he was. He never needed to worry about how to erase memory. You’ve learned that skill more or less on your own in a very short period of time, and you’re good at it, but that doesn’t mean you can be casual about it.”
“Sometimes there may be no choice.”
“I’m not saying you should never do it. I’m just saying word your instructions carefully. It is the mind of the person being magicked that actually carries them out, the subconscious mind, as far as I can tell, and it is very literal.
“And plan what you are doing next time. I don’t want to keep repeating myself, but you simply cannot afford not to. I know you have thousands of years of experience, but all that experience is packed into an impulsive teenage brain, and your actions show it.”
“I promise I’ll be much, much more careful,” I said. “Is there anything I can do to help Ms. Simmons?”
“I appreciate the thought, but it is probably better to leave that to me. I think I can fix the problem—don’t worry about that. Go and enjoy the party.”
“I don’t feel much like going now,” I said dejectedly.
“I did want you to take your magic—and your planning—more seriously, Tal, but I really didn’t want to lay a guilt trip on you. Considering what you have had to deal with, I’m not sure anyone could have done better.” She patted me on the arm. “I told you before, well, actually through Dan, but you know now it was me, what has happened to you is completely unfair. No one should have to bear this burden at such a young age.
“Now,” she said, motioning me toward the door, “we both have important things to take care of. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”
The fact that Nurse Florence knew what The Voice had said to me through Dan made me even more certain that she was my ally, and just as sure Carrie Winn was my enemy. I opened my mouth to tell her about Ms. Winn, then closed it again. Nurse Florence could have learned what Dan said in some other way—and hadn’t she just cautioned me about acting impulsively? No, better to go to the party tonight and see if I could ferret out some more definite proof.
Looking at my watch, I realized I only had a few minutes until the limo picked Stan and me up, so I thanked Nurse Florence and scurried home, grabbed a quick shower, fended off my mom’s worried inquiries, put on my second best suit—the first best one, my Founders’ Day suit, seemed somehow unlucky—and raced out front to rendezvous with Stan.
I was eager to tell Stan about the boxing match, but he already knew—and, much to my surprise, he wasn’t the least bit happy about it.
“Do you really think I’m that much of a wimp?” he asked me in his “I’m about to cry” voice, though the irony seemed lost on him.
“Stan, you know I don’t think that way about you!” I protested.
“Then why didn’t you let me box?”
Well, at least that was a question I could answer.
“Stan, I have seen you face death and stay calm. I know you aren’t a wimp…”
“You just don’t think I can fight my own battles.”
“Physically, you are still a work in progress, but that isn’t why I didn’t tell you about the match. I was trying to pull something decent out of this train wreck. I wanted you and Dan to come out of this well, and if Dan had let you get beaten up, there wouldn’t have been enough magic in the world to get people to forgive him. That’s if he could have found anyone to fight you in the first place. He might have done it himself, which would have been even worse for him.”
“In other words, you don’t think I’m a wimp, but everyone else does, and that’s why they would have hated Dan—for letting poor, pathetic Stan get roughed up.”
“Listen, even as things turned out, there was a real risk that Dan’s name would have been mud for letting poor, pathetic me get roughed up.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Stan, I didn’t do this to hurt you. I did this because it was the only way I could get you what you really wanted. You really wanted things to go back to the way they had been before your trek to the woods with Eva, right?”
“Yeah,” Stan admitted grudgingly.
“Well, trust me, there is only one road to that destination, and we’re on it.”
At that point the limo’s arrival mercifully interrupted our conversation. I had never before ridden in a limousine—in this life, anyway—and neither had Stan, a good thing considering it gave him something to think about besides the boxing match. And what a limousine it was: a jet black Mercedes Benz air-conditioned to exactly the right temperature and equipped with a sizable TV screen and wet bar with a good stock of soft drinks and ice. The driver, who acted as if he were our personal chauffeur and had known us for years, opened the door for us, asked if there was anything we needed, then closed the door and got into the driver’s seat. The windows were very darkly tinted, so I couldn’t be sure, but I was betting both my mom and Stan’s were out there somewhere taking pictures. The car ran so smoothly I barely realized we had already pulled out from the curb.
“You know what would make this better?” asked Stan after a few minutes.
“What?”
“Girls!” he replied, with a little smile. I breathed a little easier, knowing that, at least for tonight, he was going to drop the boxing match conversation. Maybe I could actually relax a little myself.
I really should have known better.
I had seen the Winn “house” from a distance; everyone in Santa Brígida could say that much. But this was the first time Carrie Winn had actually thrown a party for high school students (or indeed for anyone but the movers and the shakers of Santa Barbara County). At a distance the place was impressive; up close it was overwhelming.
If most of the town was carefully coordinated Spanish colonial revival, Carrie Winn’s home looked like it had been built with the first wave of the Neo-Gothic revival in the 1740s, then swept up in a hurricane and dropped in Santa Brígida instead of Oz. No, not even Neo-Gothic; more like real Gothic. No question, she took the idea of a man’s home being his castle rather literally. The walls had the look of solid stone, the massive front door of heavy oak. No windows broke the stone expanse for the fir
st two or three floors, as if Carrie Winn was expecting to have to repel a siege. Looking up, I could see some windows, a mix of plain glass and extremely ornate stained glass, the latter certainly more Neo than Gothic. The wall culminated several floors up in medieval crenellations, and four massive towers, one at each corner of the building, rose far above the roof level. One might have expected an eighteenth century formal garden, but instead one got a carefully stage-managed forest, not unlike the one north of the school, only much, much bigger, extending up from the Winn “yard” into the surrounding hills. There was even an ornamental moat surrounding the place, though I could smell the chlorine as we walked across the drawbridge—no, I am not kidding—about the chlorine or the drawbridge. The drawbridge took the place of front steps and did not actually look as if it could be raised. The heavy chlorination of the moat struck me as odd, but perhaps at some point in the past Carrie Winn had had a run-in with Kelpies, or maybe just mosquitoes. Doubtless the place boasted all the modern comforts of home inside, but if one could somehow block out the paved driveway and the fleet of limousines, one could almost believe oneself back in the Middle Ages.
It was not surprising that such a magnificent dwelling, following the European precedent, had a fanciful name: Awen, which originally meant poetic inspiration, coincidentally, one of the characteristics I was supposed to have gained from a magic cauldron so many centuries ago. Actually, I had begun to doubt that there was any such thing as coincidence, but the place had been named long before Carrie Winn had ever heard of me, much less met me.
An attractive woman, looking like a young Joan Collins and perky as a cruise director, met us at the entrance, smoothly checked off our names, and passed us off to a neatly attired guide, who it was clear was there to make sure we got to the dining room without getting lost along the way. But what really caught my eye—yes, more than the attractive woman—were the two security guards, standing at the entrance with a demeanor that reminded me of Hollywood’s version of secret service agents. (I had never seen the real thing.) Just between the entrance and the dining room, I think I counted twenty of them; whether that made me feel really safe or really trapped I wasn’t yet sure.
I was sure that Carrie Winn’s medieval fixation did not stop at the front door. Indeed, it was impossible to look anywhere without seeing some reproduction (or in a few cases, I was pretty sure) original medieval relic. Highly polished suits of armor were strategically positioned along each hallway. Medieval tapestries and paintings with medieval themes, while they did not take up every inch of wall space, somehow seemed to surround us completely. If one looked too closely, the montage of unicorns, dragons, grails, and swords-in-stones threatened to become dizzying.
As expensive and as interesting as all this was, like the rest of the town, it had a “trying too hard” feeling to it. Ms. Winn had clearly never heard the expression about less being more. No, even worse than trying too hard, the place showed the nouveau riche desire to display wealth without the sense to avoid making it entirely obvious what one was doing. It was the interior decorating equivalent of a Gatsby party.
“Look,” said Stan, poking me, “she has the same decorator you used for your room.” I poked him back, but on some level he was right. My display was cheap by comparison with hers, but I now realized there was something of excess about it, some weird compulsory homage to my deepest rooted former lives.
Was it possible? Could Carrie Winn also have been overwhelmed at some point by all her former lives?
At first I had chuckled at the idea of needing to be guided to the dining room, but I now saw the necessity of it. To someone unfamiliar with the place, one hall might look much like another—and there seemed to be a lot of halls, each seductive in its own way, each calling out to me to examine its unique treasures. I visualized tripping over the skeleton of someone who had fallen under the house’s spell and died there, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. Certainly, I was letting my imagination run wild, but the place did seem to encourage that.
Finally we reached the formal dining room, expansive enough for at least two hundred, set up tonight for fewer, but still more than I had ever seen—except at Founders’ Day. That memory gave me an involuntary shudder, and I reached down to make sure White Hilt still hung at my side—unnoticeable, of course. This time I was not going to be caught by surprise.
I wondered how many people it took to keep up a place like this. More than King Arthur ever had at Camelot, I was sure. The hardwood floors glistened, the china, silver, and crystal on the tables sparkled, catching the light from brilliant chandeliers, bright enough to reveal the spotlessness of the white table clothes. This room felt more Bel Air than medieval, but just behind the head table (with a throne-like chair in the center that could only be Carrie Winn’s), was an immense tapestry that looked like a gargantuan reproduction of Edward Burne-Jones’ Quest for the Holy Grail. Why that theme would have attracted her I wasn’t certain; by the look of things, she probably had the grail somewhere in her silver service.
I had half-feared place cards in such a setting, but clearly Carrie Winn understood the teenage mind, at least well enough to let us arrange ourselves. I sat next to Stan, naturally enough—and Gordy Hayes plopped down on Stan’s other side, though whether to express his newfound appreciation of Stan or whether to annoy Dan Stevens, I was not entirely sure. Part of me wanted Dan on the other side of me from Stan, but, without making a big show of it, he found a way to sit as far from Stan and me as possible. The tall, brunette, sultry, and currently unattached cheerleader who did end up by my side should have cheered me up, but for some reason she didn’t.
I had also feared the possible menu, but Ms. Winn had the sense not to try anything really exotic, though it would almost have been worth the price of admission to watch Gordy Hayes struggle with lobster. Fortunately, everything was pretty conventional, though superbly prepared. I recognized all the courses—yes, there were several, but mostly light, except for the culminating prime rib, carved to order and certainly the best I had ever tasted. The only problem was figuring out the silverware. Which fork to use when might have been a real ordeal, but instead of getting stressed we ended up laughing at each other and somehow getting the food eaten, wrong fork or no. Then came the dessert, an excellent chocolate soufflé I noticed some of the cheerleaders sent back untouched. I guess fitting into those uniforms on game days took a lot of self-discipline.
Carrie Winn ate at the head table with the coaching staff. Security guards flanked them, as if an assassin lurked among us. I found myself chuckling inwardly about that, too. I’m sure this was all deadly serious for the adults, but I was still a teenager in the present life, and still able to see the humor in a situation like this.
Then came the moment for Ms. Winn to speak, but fortunately, as I had noted at Founders’ Day, she was a charismatic speaker and even managed to keep a mob of teenagers entertained, no mean feat. She talked about the fine tradition of homecoming, the great heights to which our team had risen, the possibility of the state championship. She had an inspiring quality that rivaled the best pep talks I had heard—in this life or any of the others. And it definitely became a feel good moment for the football team. Even Dan seemed more relaxed than I had seen him recently.
Ms. Winn also knew when to stop, perhaps the greatest blessing of all, given what had happened with some of the speakers at Founders’ Day. She invited her teenage guests into the ballroom to dance “just for a little while,” as she had promised the coaches, so the players wouldn’t get home too late. The ballroom, adjacent to the dining room, looked fit for royalty: more glowing chandeliers, a dance floor big enough to get lost on, a massive window on the south side with a romantic sea view. Somehow, I hadn’t really thought about going upstairs when I first came in, but the dining room and ball room were clearly at least a few floors up, judging by that view. I had been so engrossed in sightseeing I hadn’t even noticed the climb.
The cheerleader w
ho had sat next to me at dinner was sidling up next to me with obviously interesting intentions, when someone behind us said, “Mr. Weaver, can I steal you away for a moment?” I jumped a little, not having realized anyone else was so close, turned around, and found myself face-to-face with Ms. Winn again. “I’m sure the young lady will understand.” Judging by her facial expression, I doubted the young lady did understand, but she nodded agreement. Even a teenage girl in Santa Brígida knew enough not to get between Carrie Winn and what she wanted.
I glanced discretely around, decided that Stan was taken care of for the moment—dancing with a cheerleader, God bless him—and no one else seemed likely to need me for a few minutes. “Certainly, Ms. Winn,” I replied.
We exited the ballroom on the north side, went up some stairs—this time I noticed—and ended up on what felt like the top floor of Awen…with two security guards following at a discrete distance. Give me a break!
“A little quick business,” said Ms. Winn, slowing her pace. “I’m giving a little party on Halloween, and I would love for the Bards to play, at least part of the time. Your group would be well-compensated.”
Well, that I could believe.
“I appreciate the offer, Ms. Winn, but I’m a little puzzled. There isn’t that much call for Rock/Celtic fusion bands at adult functions. We’ve played teenage venues, mostly.”
“You’re too modest,” she said, with a little laugh. You got good reviews at the Troubadour, did you not? Oh, did I mention the entertainment editors for several of the local papers will be here? The Bards would get very good exposure.”
The guys would smear me with honey and tie me to an anthill if I said no to an offer like this, and there didn’t seem any reason to refuse. “We’d be honored.”
“Very good, then. You’ll only be playing part of the time. The rest you’ll be invited guests, free to enjoy the party. Ah, here we are. Boys,” she said, turning to her security men. “You can go back down. I don’t think I’m going to be needing much protection from young Taliesin here.” Both men nodded and walked briskly off toward the stairs.
