by Rex Baron
In her hands, cradled against her chest, Helen bore the Hand of Glory.
“No!” Lexi screamed aloud. “I can't do this. It's too much.”
She jerked forward on the sofa, and opened her eyes as she gasped for breath.
“It's horrible. There are millions of them,” she said, pressing her trembling hand to her dry lips.
Lexi stared around the unfamiliar room in bewilderment. Miss Auriel still crouched in front of her, but the clock on the absurdly harmless little piecrust table next to her told her that she had left consciousness for nearly an hour.
“I'm sorry to put you through this, my dear,” she said, “but now you understand that your consciousness alone can find the possessor of the Hand. You are the only one able to go inside and find them. That service is invaluable to us.”
Lexi stared incredulously at the other woman's hand, which held hers in a gesture of gratitude and friendship. She pulled free and ran her fingers through her hair, as if trying to make some sense of what was jumbled inside her head.
The circle of others in the room offered their fragile smiles of approval, and one frail old woman clapped her hands together like a child.
Lexi rose to her feet and nervously smoothed the sides of her rumpled skirt.
“I'm glad I was of some help,” she said, “but now I really must go.”
She started toward the door, but Ellen rose from her crouching position and blocked her progress.
“Oh, but you can't go now,” she insisted, holding out her arms wide in the doorway. “We need you for much more.”
Lexi took a step forward but was blocked by Miss Auriel's stalwartness.
“There is no more. It’s out of the question. I can't do it,” Lexi said, her voice wavering with suppressed fear.
“But you mustn't betray us,” her would-be mentor pleaded. “You can't just walk out and forsake us all. You mustn't disappoint those who depend on you to do what is right and good.”
“It won't be the first time. I seem to make a habit of disappointing and destroying those who count on me,” Lexi said, as she forced her way through the blockade.
She ran from the foyer in tears and disappeared down the path that led to the safety of the meadows and farms of the open countryside.
Ellen let her body drop into an overstuffed armchair and sighed out her disappointment.
“Goodness, where does that leave us now?” Mrs. Etterton asked in dismay.
Miss Auriel did not answer at first, but tapped her chin with an index finger. She let out another sigh of resolution.
“I suppose one would agree that it's far more ethical if she worked with us of her own free will, but if she will not, then we have no choice but to use her without her permission.”
• • •
Lexi wearily dragged across the field toward her cottage. She had run nearly all the way home after having escaped Miss Auriel and her handful of old lunatics. She had been mad to allow that bullying woman to talk her into such a horrid exercise in mental charades.
She found the key in its all too obvious hiding place and let herself into her damp little cottage. She rubbed her sides against the cold and scowled at the ugly little oil heater that was meant to warm the room but remained cold, thanks to the advent of the war and the rationing of fuel oil, and served only to remind her how bleak and purposeless her life felt at the moment.
Suddenly, without any prelude to the thought, an image of the professor came into her mind. Her body warmed with the memory of the night they had spent together. He seemed to understand what the loss of her family and country meant to her, and sensed some inkling of the secret guilt she felt for denying her heritage and her people.
If she had only found a way to force her stubborn uncle from behind the ridiculously dwarfed school desk and taken him to safety. But he would not have left, even if she had come with a full pardon for his supposed crimes of race and indiscretion. He would not have betrayed his people, and she knew that he went proudly to whatever fate befell him, trusting in his ancient God and resolute faith in his people.
Sebastiaan too was a courageous man in his way, taking risks and sacrificing for what he believed in. Lexi felt unworthy and dismissed the image of the man from her mind. She could not think of allowing herself to fall in love with him.
She kicked off her shoes and put on a pair of woolen stockings to warm her feet.
Now, she almost regretted having fled from Miss Auriel and the others. They had offered her an opportunity to redeem herself and be of some service, even if only in the minds of a handful of deluded occultists. Still, what real harm had there been in it, and what had possessed her to escape in such a state of terror?
As she sipped her tea and thought on it, it seemed nothing more than a game of suggestion. They had set her up with conversation about the armies of the dead and whatever other nonsense her poor mind had been prompted to conjure up. Yet there had been the apparition of Helen, pulled in the chariot like an ancient queen, cradling the Hand of Glory.
Her macabre musing was interrupted by a knock on the door. She peered out the window, then opened the door to reveal a boy, dressed in the uniform of the postal service.
“I've come with a telegram for you,” he said, offering the folded envelope into her hands. He balanced his bicycle with his free hand and waited, watching her with an expectant expression. After an awkward moment, Lexi fumbled in her pocket for a few pence to give him. He tugged politely on the brim of his cap, vaulted onto his bicycle and disappeared down the hill.
Lexi stared down at the envelope, frightened of the news it might contain. It could be the final verification that Mischa or Uncle Jacob were dead, a realization that she had refused to give life to for years. Without closing the door, her trembling hands tore at the glued flap and slipped the pale yellow rectangle of paper into her hand. Her eyes hurried to the signature and her heart raced to find that it was from Sebastiaan.
“Had to go to Suffolk to do some business and look after a few things from the old country. It’s Thursday. How time flies. Miss you. See you soon.”
Lexi's hands quivered as she read the last line of the coded message. He was telling her that he would be returning to Holland to save another masterpiece. He would be flying out that very night from the Air Force base in Suffolk. He would be parachuted into occupied Holland, behind enemy lines, and met there by the Resistance. The casual tone of Sebastiaan's note, implying little more than a business outing, did little to dissuade the fear rising inside her.
He was in grave danger and she feared she might never see him again. He had taken a great risk in cabling her at all. Surely, it signified that the night they had spent together meant something to him.
Her eyes darted to the clock on the mantle that told her it was half past four. She was no more than two hours ride on the bus from the airstrip, and she wagered that his flight would not leave until the sky over the Channel had been cloaked in the vague safety of darkness. There was not a moment to spare. She must take the chance of seeing him, to let him know that his caring and gentleness had healed her pain. She stripped off her woolen stockings and fumbled into her shoes.
• • •
It proved to take longer than she had anticipated. The bus had made countless stops, and she was forced to sit in frustrated anxiety as the local villagers boarded and exited in what seemed like slow motion. Finally, she reached the airstrip just after seven.
At the entrance gate a soldier asked her for her authorization pass, but she had none.
“Please, you don't understand,” she said, “ I must see someone who is flying out tonight.”
The soldier shook his head and refused her permission to enter.
“There are no flights authorized tonight,” he said politely.
“I must see him before he leaves, I must,” Lexi insisted in a rage. She burst into tears and the soldier was compelled to telephone a superior.
“There's a woman here with a foreign accen
t, who says she needs to get on the base to see some professor. She claims he's flying out tonight. I told her, there were no flights out, but she says it's urgent and she won't leave… I'll tell her that we're looking into it.”
Lexi stood her ground and waited, glowering at the simple soldier who seemed oblivious to the urgency of her request.
Nearly half an hour passed as she stood in the night air, watching the sky over the airfield, listening for the sound of motors and the glow of unnatural stars overhead. Finally, after an endless time, she heard the rumble of flying engines and saw a dark shape, bejeweled with tiny red and amber lights, arch into the sky, heading due east into the night.
“I told you he was leaving! You lied to me,” Lexi cried, as she beat her fists on the guardhouse door. “Now it's too late and I'll never be able to tell him what I need to say.”
Lexi collapsed against the small, framed shelter and sobbed, pressing her face against the mesh of the chain link fence. She hobbled in despair back to the bus stop and stood trembling, lost in anxiety, fearing for the life of the man she only now realized she loved.
The hours passed on the bus, but she was unaware of anything that took place in her hot, damp surroundings. She sat numb and motionless, in a state of shock that was akin to sleep. Her mind filled with images of Sebastiaan falling helpless from the plane, twisted in his parachute, an easy prey for the beasts that scoured the hostile countryside for allied intruders and fallen angels such as he. She thought of the empty shrine on the road near his house. Inside the inverted roof of the small wooden edifice, she envisioned the likeness of her lover, bound hand and foot and pierced through by arrows, sharing the sacrificial fate of his saintly namesake.
She tried to tell herself that he was protected, a capable and resourceful man, and yet she knew that it was not true. By the very fact that he had become involved with her, he had somehow become the sacrificial lamb, which, by its offering, would redeem her of her sins of betrayal. But the price of her redemption was too high. She could not let him perish for her sake. She had to do something to intervene.
Once again, in her half sleep, the figure of Miss Auriel appeared, clad in the armor of the Crusades, brandishing her sword against the night sky.
“I have come to you on this other plane to bid you to return to us,” the shining specter said in a haunting voice. “There is more at risk than your own safety. There are those who love you, who depend on you to see them through. I am with you and will remain so to guide you, but rest assured there is no hope for your future if you deny us now.”
When the bus pulled into the station, it was after ten o'clock. Without even considering her action, Lexi hurried to the door of the American spinster.
Chapter Twenty
England
“We've been waiting for you, my dear. I'm glad to see that you have come to us,” Miss Auriel said, placing a reassuring hand on her back and guiding her into the flat. Inside, the group of elderly people she had met before gathered around the table, wearing their coats and fortifying themselves with hot tea.
Lexi still moved as if in a dream, only half aware of what lay around her. Her eyes scanned the room and fell at last upon the engraving of the murder plot and the Hand of Glory that was now neatly matted and framed over the dining table in the alcove.
Without taking her eyes from the engraving, she addressed the expectant group.
“I have come to help,” she said. “I will do whatever you need of me. Perhaps, in the end, it is the only way that I shall ever really be whole again.”
• • •
Miss Auriel led the procession silently to the churchyard of St Margaret’s. They threaded their way through the ancient gravestones, like a ribbon of elderly mourners come to bid farewell to one of their own. They had done just that often enough, but on this night they had come with another purpose in mind. Lexi followed along, uncertain as to her place in the customary ritual. She shivered beneath her thin woolen coat, and tried to stave off the fearful images of Sebastiaan, lost and in danger, by concentrating on the moss-covered headstones and statues of angels as they passed.
Miss Auriel had told her that the churchyard was the site of a mystical crossing of power under the Earth, serpents of energy that had been revered by the locals since time immemorial. It was the place where witches and any like themselves, who knew the wisdom, could gather to summon their collective forces.
They had come to send up the cone of power. There was no time to lose. Those among them who had taken passage in recent days, or even in the last few hours, had seen the invincible army on the astral plane at the very shores of their beloved island.
They moved noiselessly out into the meadow behind the ancient graveyard, and formed a circle of linked hands. They closed their eyes and inclined their heads toward the heavens of their inner minds.
Lexi and Miss Auriel stood unlinked at the center of the now slowly rotating chain of devout believers.
“You must close your eyes and, once again, locate the evil one who holds the Hand,” Miss Auriel whispered to Lexi, as she lightly placed her hand on the German's forehead. “You alone can find it and guide us in directing the force to destroy it.”
Without a second's delay, Lexi's consciousness was focused inside her head on a small golden beam of light, just outside the area of her physical forehead. Immediately, she heard the din of the advancing, unseen army, approached. Once again, her mirror image appeared before her and seemed to meld with her into one fleshless being of pure light. Together they flew to the place where the invasion was taking place. Before them lay an endless panorama of countless soldiers.
“It has begun,” she heard a voice explaining from inside her head. “They are invading the minds of the helpless, at this moment, as they lay sleeping. If they are successful and advance unchallenged, the idea of defeat will be planted in the mind of each and every one of our people and all hope of winning the war will be lost.”
In the midst of the hordes, she saw the chariot that carried Helen and the accursed Hand. Kurt, dressed in a fur loincloth, his bare chest shining with oil, sat astride a black stallion and rode as escort to the chariot of his exalted queen of the night. Beside him, as his chief lieutenant, walked the young officer, Kessler, whom he had killed in sacrifice during the initiation ritual.
Somewhere from behind her consciousness, Lexi heard her name called. She turned away from the overview of the army to see her brother's face before her, shining through the darkness.
“Michael,” she called.
The shining countenance smiled down at her.
“My name was Mischa,” he answered. “But it is of little importance now. I have many names, all the names that I have ever known and been called. Come,” he said, “I have something to show you.”
Without reply, her consciousness followed the light of his face through numerous veils of glowing color that signified time and space in this realm. Finally, he pointed through the mist of undefined matter, directing her attention to a scene that caused her to gasp for breath. It was Sebastiaan, tangled in his parachute, as she had feared, the prisoner of a uniformed German soldier who stood over him, holding a rifle against his head.
“I must help him,” Lexi cried.
The face of her brother remained placid and gentle.
“Then you must destroy the infernal Hand, and stop the power it channels to those on the worldly plane.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Holland
Sebastiaan lay crumpled against the trunk of a fallen tree. He stared into the eyes of a very young soldier, who held the rifle on him with trembling hands. He was no more than a boy, but more dangerous than a man because he feared his captive rather than hated him. He kept the boy’s eyes locked in a standoff, mesmerizing him with a steady gaze, careful to keep him occupied and calm so that he would not panic and unintentionally fire the gun.
Sebastiaan indicated that he wanted to move his twisted leg from its unnatural position under
him. The boy nodded his understanding and gently, without taking his eyes from the deadlocked stare, Sebastiaan moved his leg out straight. The agonizing maneuver completed, he sighed with relief that he had not had his head blown off. He sensed that the boy sighed as well, as his body settled again into its resolute state of watchfulness.
He had parachuted into the wind as he left the plane. There had been a miscalculation and he had been carried a mile or two downwind of the appointed safety zone, where he was to be met by members of the Dutch Underground. He had no idea where he was. There was no way of telling. He could be only a matter of a few hundred yards from help, but the facts remained that he had probably broken his leg in the fall and was certainly on his way to an internment camp, if the young man holding the rifle had his way.
“I think my leg is broken… you have nothing to fear from me,” Sebastiaan spoke in German to the young soldier.
“I have no fear. I am a good soldier of the Reich,” the boy answered in English, drawing himself up to look as manly as possible.
“I didn’t say that you were afraid,” Sebastiaan replied, “I only wanted you to know that I cannot move, so you can relax. Entspannen… relax…” he repeated the word, trying to get the youngster to take his finger off his rifle’s trigger.
“You look very young to be a Corporal, but I see by your jacket you have a number of decorations.”
The boy’s face flushed red with a questionable embarrassment.
“It is the coat of a fallen comrade,” he admitted. “My jacket was cut away when I was shot, and there was no other for me to wear.”
It was only then that Sebastiaan noticed that the boy barely had use of his left arm, which hung nearly lifeless at his side.
