Day 63

 

Flagrat.

A word, I believe, of Boehme’s own coinage.  A flashing forth in the darkness.  An ardent fire-breath in the poisonful Mercury and Black Bile of the heart.  In the bitter Astringency of the Turba, a boiling, upsurging sude of sudden brightness. 

I have seen this flagrat here in my dungeon.  Strange as it sounds, it is here in my prison that I have felt the first faint flutterings of the spirit of freedom.  The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.  Certitude, certitude, and the birthing of the painful longing that gives birth to all things.

Is this not the irony of ironies?  The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing.  And yet to those who hunger and thirst is given the great blessing.  I did not believe this until I came here. 

All my life I chased after words and their meanings.  All my life I prized language, yet I never really knew language.  I did not recognize the paradoxes words conceal:  that death is life, weakness strength, and sorrow joy.  Until I was plunged into the dark fire of this pit, I did not see the brightness behind all things.       

Today, as I chipped away at the mortar between the stones, there came to me a revelation of a most unexpected kind.  Mingling alternately with the dull strokes of my own rude tool I heard a distant sound:  a tap, tap, tapping.  A gentle, steady, patient beat, faint but clear.  A regular ticking clock-work sound, as if some man or machine (and hoping past all hope I dare believe it might be man) were gradually picking its way towards me from the other side!  Blessed thought!  It spurred me to redouble my efforts, and soon another block of stone broke free.  There are now five that I can remove and replace at will.               

Meanwhile, the vermin—my former word for them—continue to thrive.  In the chinks between the corner-stones the baby rats squeal with delight.  Their cries no longer fill me with the tincture of anger or despair.  Instead, I smile at the sound.  I smile because I know the tiny creatures are gobbling their food—my food—under the watchful eye of mother-love.  And so the love-lubet rules over the fire-lubet …            

* * * * * * * * * *        

At the bottom of the basement stairs he shoved the door open, and stepped into the dungeon.  It was pitch dark inside.  Crossing to the workbench, he fumbled for the desk lamp and switched it on.  There on the table lay The Life and Times of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.  He threw himself into the chair and opened the heavy volume.

The first thing to meet his eye was a large illustration:  a sixteenth-century woodcut depicting a short, bald, grim-faced man wearing a high lace collar and holding a long two-handed sword.  The sword had a spherical pommel and an ornate crossguard.  Both blade and quillion were inscribed with what appeared to be strange letters.  Beneath the picture was a caption:  Azoth, the fabled Sword of Paracelsus.

The Sword of Paracelsus!  Morgan had to read the words over to make sure he’d seen them correctly.  Paracelsus had a sword?  A “fabled” sword?  A sword covered with weird markings?  He’d never heard of that before.

The wheels of his mind whirring, he reached under the table and retrieved the blue bundle.  Once more he undid the wrappings and drew the shining blade into the light.  It was impossible to be absolutely sure—the picture was a bit fuzzy and far too small for the characters inscribed on the blade to be legible.  Still, thought Morgan, the sword in the woodcut and the sword he was holding in his hand might be one and the same.

Scanning the surrounding text, he discovered the following sentences near the bottom of the following page:

 

       For many years Paracelsus never took off a giant sword he wore—not even when he slept.  Various accounts have been given of the nature and significance of this sword.  Some report that it possessed the power to deflect the hatred of his enemies.  Others say that in the sword’s hollow pommel Paracelsus kept a miraculous powder capable of transmuting metals, healing diseases, transporting bodies from one place to another. 

 

Hollow pommel.  Miraculous powder.  Morgan’s brain was spinning.  He thought of his grandmother lying in bed.  So much had happened over the past few months.  He hadn’t thought about the Philosopher’s Stone for a long time.  Lately his keen interest in finding his father had driven every other concern clean out of his mind.  But now he couldn’t help wondering:  what if the Elixir of Life were to fall into his hands when he wasn’t even looking for it?  What if Paracelsus had actually succeeded where so many had failed?

He held the hilt closer to the lamp.  If the pommel were hollow, there must be some way to open it.  It must have a seam or a crack or a hinge somewhere.  He eyed it closely.  He ran his fingers over it.  It was as smooth and even as a ball of glass.  Opening a drawer, he drew out a big magnifying glass and looked closer.  Still nothing.

Maybe it screws off, he said to himself.  Placing the crossguard firmly between his knees, he gripped the golden orb with both hands and strove with all his might to twist it off.  When that didn’t work, he clamped the hilt in a vice on the workbench and pulled at the pommel until his hands were raw.  After that he wrapped it in cloth and attacked it with pliers.  It never budged.

At last he thought of consulting the book.  Perhaps he’d find instructions of some kind somewhere in the text.  It was worth a try.

Putting the sword aside, he plunged into the musty old volume, searching feverishly for something, anything at all, about the construction of the sword’s hollow pommel and how it might be opened.  There was nothing.  Instead, the passage he’d been reading turned an abrupt corner and proceeded to discuss Paracelsus’ theory of toxicology.

He skipped ahead, ten pages, fifteen, thirty at a time.  He scanned the subject headings for clues.  He jumped to the index in an attempt to locate the information he was seeking.  And then it happened.

As he turned over the last fascicle, something slipped out from between the pages and tumbled to the floor.  Morgan stooped to pick it up.  It was a small notebook—a slim, narrow, thin-ruled, staple-bound notebook with a faded green cover.  Flipping it open, he found it filled with writing.  Its pages were covered, front and back, in a neat, closely written cursive script in blue ink.  At the top of the first page stood the words, Notes, Thoughts, and Ponderings:  January 19__ to October 19__.

Morgan recognized the handwriting.  It was his father’s.

“Mom,” said Morgan at the dinner table that night, “did you know the Knowleses are back in town?”

Mavis Izaak put down her fork and looked up.  “Not quite,” she said.

“‘Not quite?’  What does that mean?”

“Not quite all the Knowleses.  Baxter and his mother are back.  Mr. Knowles has … well, he’s still in New York.”

Morgan felt his heart skip a beat.  “Then it’s temporary?”

Mavis lowered her eyes.  “I’m afraid not.”

He studied her closely.  It was plain that she knew more than she was saying.  As a matter of fact, he had the oddest feeling that she was actually embarrassed, maybe even ashamed, to say anything else.

“I don’t get it,” he said.  “Something about it must be temporary.  I mean, if they’re here and he’s there, then—”

Mavis stopped him with a glance.  “They’re splitting up, Morgan,” she said, her cheeks coloring delicately.  “His parents are splitting up.”

“They’re getting a divorce?”

She nodded.

Against his better judgment, he wrinkled up his nose and snorted.  “Doesn’t surprise me!  I wonder how they stood each other this long!”

“Morgan, please.”

“Now that big shot Baxter will find out what it’s like not to have a dad!”

Mavis said nothing.

Morgan stood up.  “Mom!  Why are you acting like this?  Why should you care so much about the Knowleses?  It doesn’t have anything to do with you!”

She looked up at him.  “But it does,” she said quietly.  “Everything that happens to our friends and neighbors concerns us.”

“Well, they’re not my friends!  As far as I’m concerned, the Knowleses deserve everything they get!  All of them!”

She frowned severely.  “I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of talk,” she said.  With a sigh, she glanced over at a steaming plate of food on the sideboard.  “Why don’t you take your grandmother’s dinner in to her?”

Something in her tone told him that it was time to quit.  Biting his lip, he went to the sideboard, picked up the plate, and carried it out through the dining room and down the hall.

Grandma Wilma Izaak had been living with them for several weeks—ever since Grandpa Charles had died of a stroke at the beginning of August.  She had to live with them, Mavis said, because she couldn’t take care of herself.  Grandpa had done everything for her while he was alive:  cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, driving.  What’s more, she had to have a room of her own because she spent all of her time in bed.  That wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t Morgan’s room.  He’d been sleeping on the living room couch for nearly two months now.

Grandma Wilma had been in bed for as long as Morgan could remember.  Nobody seemed to know exactly why.  She talked as if she were deathly ill, but all her doctors said they couldn’t find anything wrong with her.

That didn’t put Grandma off her story.  Nor did it keep her from describing her ailments in detail to anyone unfortunate enough to be within hearing range.  She was sick and weak and faint all the time.  On some days her legs hurt.  On others her stomach was “out of sorts.”  On still others she suffered from heart palpitations and anxiety attacks.  The complex constellation of her symptoms seemed to change, like the shifting colors of a kaleidoscope, with every passing day.  You never could tell what new malady she’d be complaining about when you went in to see her.

Balancing the plate on one hand, Morgan approached the door of the room and knocked lightly.  Without waiting for an answer he turned the knob and stepped inside.  Though the sky outside was still light, all was obscure in this somber chamber where the shades were perpetually drawn and the curtains always closed.  The air was still, cold, and heavy.  The whole place smelled of disinfectants, medications, and freshly laundered linens.

“That you, Morgan?” said a voice from the bed—a voice as thin and frail as dry eggshells.

“Yes, Grandma.”

Treading softly, he went to the tray beside the bed and set the food down.  He could barely make her out in the faint light.  Her head was propped up against two big pillows, and her thin, withered face looked like a raisin in a bird’s nest of frazzled white hair.

“I brought your dinner, Grandma,” he said.

“What is it, dear?  Your mother knows I can’t eat just anything.”

“Corned beef and cabbage.”

The figure in the bed shifted slightly.  “Take it back,” she muttered.  “Get me some chicken broth.”

“But why?  This stuff is good.  Even I liked it.”

She drew back her withered lips and winced.  “If your gums were as sore as mine you wouldn’t ask.  That biscuit you brought me yesterday was hard as a binnick!  Go get me some chicken broth.  That’s a good boy.”

“But I—”

“And Morgan,” she said, clutching his arm and drawing him closer, “don’t forget what I told you.”

Morgan sighed.  “I know, Grandma.  ‘Perilous times.’”  He’d heard the sermon so often he knew it by heart.

“Signs in the heavens and signs on the earth.”

“And earthquakes,” Morgan volunteered.  “And famines and wars.”

“Earthquakes, yes!  We just had one of them!  A doozie, too!  Young men will see visions.  Old women will dream dreams.  I’ve seen him, Morgan, in my dreams.  Perilous times.”

Seen who? thought Morgan.  But he didn’t feel inclined to ask.  Why drag this out any longer than necessary?

Grandma, meanwhile, coughed feebly and ran her tongue gingerly over her gums.  Morgan wondered how anyone who believed so fervently in miracles could be so sick all the time.  “I’ll get you that chicken broth now,” he said.

“Wait!” she said, lowering her voice.  “One more thing!”

Morgan sighed.  “What?”

“Your father knew all this.  He never said so—not in so many words.  But he knew.  He still does.”

Morgan froze.  My father?  This was something new.  He peered at her intently through the dimness.  “Still knows?  What does he know?”

“Perilous times,” she repeated, nodding vigorously.  “John knows.  I saw him.”  She fell silent and motioned him away with a wave of her hand.  “Chicken broth,” she said.

Morgan backed away.  Bumping against the bedside tray, he picked up the plate of food and stumbled out the door.

 

*  *  *  *  *

(To be continued …)

Baxter Knowles was back.

How this had come about, Morgan didn’t know.  Why it had happened, he could not explain.  Heaven’s reasons for permitting such a disaster to occur lay beyond the scope of his limited understanding.  There was nothing he could do about it.  He could only hope that the tyrant’s return from exile, like Napoleon’s, would be short-lived.

Meanwhile, the facts had to be faced.  He had seen Baxter on the schoolyard.  He had heard his voice echoing through the halls like the voice of a young Mussolini or Pol Pot.  He had even witnessed his election as captain of one of the football squads in Physical Education.  Vehemently as his mind recoiled from believing any of this, he couldn’t deny it.  In his imagination he pictured the citizens of Needles proclaiming a Jubilee.

One bright spot mitigated the bleakness of the situation.  Because there were an odd number of boys in gym class, and because Baxter had drawn the short straw when it came to choosing up teams, Morgan, who was always last to be drafted, had escaped falling under the dominion of his nemesis.  And since his team had thirteen members and his captain couldn’t put everyone on the field at the same time, he had been granted a blessed reprieve:  he’d been sitting on the bench for the past three days.

He was sitting there now in the bright September sun with a book in his lap—The Life and Times of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, Also Known As Paracelsus—when a commotion on the playing field forced him to look up from the page.  He noted that the rest of his team was shouting frantically.  Even his bench-mate was on his feet and yelling at the top of his lungs.  Casting his eyes around, he saw the other team’s quarterback doing a wild “victory dance” in the end-zone.  But it was neither this, that, nor the other that had roused him to attention.

What had stung him like a pin-prick in the backside was the unmistakable sound of Baxter Knowles’s voice.  He could hear it distinctly, raised above the tumult on the field like the whirr of a buzz-saw.  The mere tone and timbre of that voice set his pulse to racing.  It made his intestinal tract begin to churn.  He got up and moved a little closer to find out what was going on.

What he saw made the sweat break out on his forehead.  It was a scene all too familiar to him from his own miserable past.  On the ground sat a boy he recognized as new to the school—a small, dark boy with delicate long-fingered hands, a thin, sensitive face, and black hair and eyes.  Baxter, who was surrounded by his usual gang of cronies, was berating the boy in words that poured over Morgan like a storm of hail mingled with blood and fire.

“What’s the matter with you?” shouted Baxter.  “You let them tear a hole in our line!  I told you to block, dork!  Didn’t they teach you how to block in Madagascar?  I oughta—”

All at once, and without warning, the voice fell silent.  In the same instant Morgan became aware that Baxter’s eye had fallen upon him.  The ranting bully had ceased his raving and was staring at him over the heads of the other boys in the crowd.

Morgan froze.  His pulse pounded in his ears.  A bead of sweat dripped down his nose.  Now I’m going to catch it, he thought.  He winced.  He braced himself for the expected verbal assault.

But it never came.  Instead, Baxter’s face went red to the roots of his strawberry blond hair.  His handsome gray eyes clouded over.  An embarrassed grin brought out the dimples in his fleshy cheeks.  Without a word, he dropped his gaze, turned around, and walked away.  Then the bell rang and the rest of his gang scattered.

Tentatively, Morgan edged his way over to the dark-eyed boy and offered him a hand.  “My name’s Morgan,” he stammered.  “And believe me, I know what it’s like.”

Ten minutes later, when everyone else had gone, he was still standing at the edge of the field, staring out into the street through the chain-link fence.  Never in his life had he seen Baxter Knowles behave like that.  His brain hurt just trying to make sense of it.  However he stacked it, it didn’t make sense.  So deep was his reverie that he would have missed his next class had it not been for the sound of a blaring horn.  Stirring himself, he looked up to see George Ariello driving by in his old rattle-trap of a truck.   

“Hey!” called George, grinning broadly and waving from the cab.  “How’s the fishing?”

*  *  *  *  *  *

(To be continued …)

“Honey, what on earth’s the matter?” blurted Moira with a look of deep concern when Eny stumbled into the dining hall on the upper terrace of the church’s Christian Education complex.  “And why are you so late?  I’ve been worried sick!”

“It’s okay, Mom.  I’m fine.  Really.”

Moira, in a white apron and with her auburn curls restrained beneath a black hair net, stood behind a row of tables just outside the kitchen door.  She and a couple of other women in similar attire were ladling vegetable soup from a stainless steel tureen into Styrofoam bowls.  On the other side of the tables were ranged the patrons of the afternoon meal program:  a long line of unkempt, unshaven men in soiled denim and worn corduroy, some with red or blue bandannas around their heads, some barefoot, all of them dragging canvas duffle bags or carrying big packs on their backs.  Scattered among the predominantly male crowd were a handful of dowdy old ladies in baggy dresses and tough-looking young women in jeans and faded tank shirts.

“How often have I warned you about the kind of people who walk the streets of Hollywood?” scolded Moira as a tattered old man flashed a toothless grin and mumbled a few words of thanks for the soup.  “You can’t dawdle out there the way you used to.  We’re not in Santa Piedra anymore!”

“I told you, I’m okay,” protested Eny, joining her mother behind the table and taking down an apron from a hook on the wall.  “Something happened on the bus, that’s all.  Something weird.”

“Weird?  In what way?”  Moira looked intently at Eny over the tops of her wire-rimmed spectacles.  She reached over and laid a hand on her forehead.  “Are you running a fever?”

“No, Mom.  But there was this man on my bus …”

“What kind of a man?”

“He stopped a couple of bullies from picking on me.  I’m not sure why.  But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that he looked a lot like Simon Brach.”

Moira bent down and took her daughter gently by the shoulders.  “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times.  Simon’s gone!  This is an unhealthy obsession.  You’ve got to forget about Simon.  That’s why we came down here in the first place—to get away from all that.”

Eny pulled away from her mother and slipped the apron over her head.  “That’s not exactly true,” she said.  “The real reason we came here was to—”

She stopped short.  There was music in the air.  Stunning music.  Glorious music.  Music of a kind she had never expected to hear in this dim auditorium, with its dingy green tile floor and pale yellow walls.  Someone was at the baby grand piano at the front of the hall, reeling off the most amazing sounds she’d ever heard, sounds she didn’t think any instrument capable of producing, sounds like rivers of liquid gold rippling over stones of polished silver.

Standing on tiptoe, she strained her eyes to see who it was.  Hunched on the piano bench sat a small, thin figure, his bony fingers leaping and racing over the keyboard, his arms and hands flailing to keep pace with the furious rise and fall of the notes that were flying up from the hammers and strings like streams of sparks from a tongue of flame.  Most of his face was hidden beneath the shadow of a broad-brimmed hat.

“That’s Chopin,” commented Moira, noticing her daughter’s interest.  “The Fantasie Impromptu.  It was a favorite of my dad’s.  Second only to ‘Paddy Fahy’s #14.’”

But Eny wasn’t listening to her mother.  Her attention was focused entirely on the diminutive person at the piano.  Without realizing what she was doing, she leaned across the table to get a better look at him, upsetting the soup tureen and sending bowls and spoons clattering to the floor.  She did not hear Moira’s cry of protest, for she was possessed by a burning, unreasoning desire to gain a clearer view of the pointed chin and crooked nose that peeked out from under the broad-brimmed hat as the player swung his head from side to side.

At last the music rose to a climax.  It fell like a wave on the shore and gently ebbed away like the flowing tide.  With the final notes still ringing in the air, the wiry little pianist jumped to his feet and bowed deeply.  As he did, something flashed upon Eny’s eye—an odd something dangling from his waist—something like a drawstring purse or a lumpy old leather satchel.

She blinked and stared.  Then she looked again.  Was it possible?  Could a bag man from the Boulevard actually turn out to be one of the Fir Bolg of the Sidhe?  It sounded crazy.  Then again, after her experience on the bus she felt ready to believe anything.  Either way, she had to know for sure.

In an instant she was out from behind the table, leaping over bags and backpacks, ducking under arms and between legs.  Politely but persistently she elbowed her way through the crowd until she came to the rows of tables in the middle of the hall where some of the patrons were already eating together in groups of twos and threes.

Picking out a pathway between the tables, Eny followed it straight to the front of the auditorium.  She began to run, stumbling over chairs, bounding against unwary patrons, excusing herself and apologizing profusely every step of the way.  As she neared her goal she became aware of two bearded men standing in her path, directly in front of the piano, their heads bent together in earnest conversation.

“Excuse me!” she cried, bearing down on them like a runaway train.  “Can I get through, please?”

Eyes wide, mouths gaping, they parted like the Red Sea before her and she plunged ahead without hitch or pause.  But as she passed between them, her foot caught the toe of a boot and she pitched forward violently, her hands slapping the floor with a loud smack that could be heard all the way across the room.  Stunned, she got up on her knees and wiped her stinging palms against the front of her apron.

“What’s the hurry, girl?” said one of the men, taking her by the arm and helping her to stand.  “Are you hurt?”

But Eny didn’t answer.  Her eyes were fixed on the empty piano bench.

The flashy little pianist was gone.

 

Eny stopped writing and glanced up from her notebook as the bus bounded over a pothole and rumbled through the intersection at Hollywood and Highland.  Someone in the seat behind her had tapped her on the shoulder:  tap … and then again, tap … ever so lightly.  Or so she thought.  She turned to see who it was.  The seat was empty.

Eny shook her head.

They must think I’m a complete idiot.

With a cool eye she scanned the rows of seats between her own and the back of the bus.  The corners of her mouth turned upward in a grim smile.  Inaiah and Randall.  Just as she had suspected.

Inaiah and Randall were a pair of troublemakers from her algebra class.  The same pair who had apparently entered into a dark and solemn pact to make her life as miserable as possible.  They were sitting about five rows back, staring innocently out the window at the imposing façade of the Egyptian Theater.  Eny aimed a smirk in their direction.  They didn’t seem to notice.

Without a word, she tucked a loose strand of coppery hair behind her ear and went back to her poem:

 

        L. A. in the barren heat

            Inclines my soul to bleak defeat …

 

No, she thought.  She bit her lip and squinted at what she’d written.  Inverting the pencil, she scrubbed it out and tried again—

 

     L. A. in the autumn heat—

                     Withered dreams, barren street …

 

Thok!  Something small but hard and forceful, like the fillip of a flicked fingertip, struck her directly on the back of the head.  She spun around just in time to see the two boys duck down in their seats, showing her only the tops of their inverted baseball caps.  Sounds of muffled laughter rose above the low growl of the bus’s engine.  Eny shot an inquiring glance at an elderly woman in a shawl and frumpy purple dress sitting two rows behind her.  The woman returned her look with a non-committal shrug.

Once again she attempted to concentrate on her rhymes:

     Pierced by the pitiless glare on glass

         Of cars and buses as they pass … 

 

Splat!  Starting violently, she dropped the notebook and reached up to touch the back of her hair.  In disgust she flung the spit-wad out the window and wheeled fiercely on her assailants who were now laughing and jeering openly.  The old woman, who was busy searching for something in her bag, appeared not to have witnessed the assault.

Eny felt her neck stiffen.  Her jaw clenched and a burning clot of red-hot anger welled up behind her eyes.  Desperately she fought to remember everything her father had ever told her about self-control.  Turn the other cheek, she thought.  Trembling with the effort, she reined in her fury, faced forward, and returned to her composition for the third time:

 

     My thoughts stray to another world

        In comfortable gray encurled …  

 

“Aaak!” shrieked the old woman.  Dink! went the bell telling the driver that a passenger wanted to get off.  Once more Eny looked back over her shoulder.  Apparently somebody’s aim had gone astray.  The old lady, with a distressed expression on her face, was cursing and pawing the back of her neck.  Reaching into her backpack, Eny found an unused tissue and offered it to her.  As she did, the brakes squealed and groaned, the driver pulled over to the curb, and a tall, lanky man in a hooded sweatshirt stood up at the back of the bus.

She was not prepared for what happened next.  With one big-knuckled hand the tall man gripped Inaiah by the shoulder.  With the other he seized Randall by the scruff of his collar.  Yanking the pair to their feet, he drove them to the front of the bus and escorted them down the steps just as the door hissed open with a whoosh.  It was all over in fifteen seconds.

Eny craned her neck and tried to get a better look at the man as he stood there on the pavement with the two culprits firmly in hand.  The soup kitchen, she thought—perhaps that was where she had seen him before.  He had his hood drawn up over his head, so it was difficult to be sure.  But as the bus pulled away he turned and gave her a momentary glimpse of his face—a narrow, craggy face with deep-set, sky-blue eyes.  At the sight of it, she gasped and caught her breath.  Then the bus lurched forward and the vision was gone.

Stunned and speechless, she stumbled off the bus at Gower Street and moved numbly up the sidewalk.  She had no explanation for the strange event she’d just witnessed.  Nor could she account for the emotions it had stirred in her.  She felt certain that she did not know the man who had delivered her from her tormentors.  And yet …

The more she thought about it, the more her brain began to reel.  As if in a daze she walked the two blocks north to the Presbyterian Church.  Its tall brick tower, which reminded her strongly of the shattered tower of St. Halistan’s, loomed above her in the shimmering heat.  And as its shadow fell across her path another vision rose up before her mind’s eye:  a vision of storm and wind and darkness, of giants and flying ships, of lightning and thunder and a gallant figure wielding a glittering sword.

This vision hung in the air during the time it took to draw two long breaths.  Then it dissolved like smoke.  As it faded, Eny saw a big black crow flutter down from the top of the tower and alight upon a windowsill just above her head.  It cocked its eye at her and croaked loudly.

Hitching up her backpack, she picked up her feet and ran as fast as she could to meet her mother at the soup kitchen.

(To be continued …)

*  *  *  *  *

Day 49

 

If, when my bones are found crumbling to dust in this lightless hollow beneath the earth, someone should happen to come across the pages of this unhappy history lying scattered among my blasted and bleached remains; if, I say, someone should take the trouble to read what I have written here, his first inclination may be to ask how a wretch in my position could possibly have produced such a record under such conditions.  The Morrigu, of course, has not been so accommodating as to provide me with pen and paper. 

The explanation is simple.  Ingenuity answers every need; and need, in turn, spurs the needy to invention.  Nothing comes from nothing; everything arises out of opposition, conflict, and hunger.  This, as Boehme writes, is the universal principle behind the Primal Essence.  This is the creative role of the Astringent in the unfolding of the fabric of the cosmos.

To state it plainly:  I have contrived to make ink by depriving myself of water.  Every other day I mix half my ration of the precious fluid with a drop of my own blood and some of the soot that still lies beneath the blackened hearthstone of an ancient fireplace in the corner of my cell.  My paper, too, is compounded of water and fibers from various sources—my own rotting garments, bits of straw picked up off the floor, and shreds of my ragged bedding.  Pens I have managed to whittle out of splints of wood chipped from the bedstead.  My knife is made from an iron bracket that once held the bed-frame to its legs.  This rude tool I have painstakingly whetted and sharpened against the stones of my prison wall.

With a similar implement of my own design I have at last initiated the slow, almost imperceptible process of chipping away at the walls themselves.  The reader who chances to stumble upon this sad account of my life underground may well laugh at the naiveté of my plans for escape.  If so, I can only respond that he does not know what it is like to lie where I am lying now.  The human soul cannot live without hope.  Idle hands soon wither and die.  At any rate, time is of no concern to him who no longer senses its passage.  And so I have no reason not to continue as I have begun—dig, dig, digging the pasty mortar out of the dime-thin spaces between the slimy stones …

 

When George was gone, Morgan went back to Eny’s letter:

 

I know this is hard for you, Morgan, but you’ve got to accept it.  I know you’re dealing with issues of your own.  You have reasons for wanting to find a way in.  I realize that.  I’d help you if I could, but I can’t.  I’m under geis.  I made a vow, a promise.  I’ve got to keep that promise now that you-know-who has the Stone.  Everything depends on it.  Even my dad and Rev. Alcuin agreed that this was the best plan.  Somehow you’ve got to see that too.  What if She were to come back to Santa Piedra looking for me?  It makes me shiver just to think about it.   

Even here, in the middle of the big city, far away from St. Halistan’s and the Cave of the Hands, I’m always looking over my shoulder.  I get nervous every time I see a crow.  I cry a lot and don’t sleep much.  Worst of all, I haven’t picked up the fiddle since we got to L.A.— it just isn’t the same without Simon.  But I know that I’m in the right place.  At least for the time being.  It’s too dangerous at home.  And if I were to go—you-know-where—well, that would be like handing myself over to the enemy.  I can’t do that. 

Got to close.  It’s late, and there’s school in the morning.  Write me.  I’ll write again as soon as I can.  Remember that I’m your friend forever.

                                               Love, 

                                                          Eny  

Gently, carefully, Morgan folded the letter, sliding the crease between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.  For a brief moment he held it to his nostrils, hoping to catch some faint hint of his friend in the scent of the paper.  Then, replacing it in the envelope, he pulled his backpack out from under the table, slipped the letter into a concealed pocket deep inside the bag, and zipped it shut.

After that he sat for several minutes with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, staring steadily at the long blue bundle at his feet.  Reaching down, he lifted it into his lap.  Slowly he unwound the flannel wrapping.  Gripping the hilt with his right hand and resting the blade on his left palm, he held the sword up to the light of the desk lamp.

But what was this?  Squinting narrowly at the blue blade, he noticed now for the first time that it bore strange markings.  He blinked and looked again.  Slowly he shifted he sword in his hands, deflecting the glare and studying it closely in the changing angle of the light.

He had not been wrong.  There could be no mistaking it now.  Three long, straight lines ran lengthwise down the shining steel, crossed at intervals by perpendicular hatch-marks.  And on the curved crossguard was an inscription in an unfamiliar alphabet—

Morgan let out a low whistle.  Lightly he ran his fingertips over the strange letters.  They were engraved deeply and solidly into the silky smoothness of the glittering gold.  Somehow it gave him a sense of profound satisfaction just to touch them.  They spoke to him of permanence, antiquity, and power.

Turning the sword over, he discovered yet another inscription written in the same outlandish alphabet on the obverse side of the crossguard.  It was shorter than  the first one—

He stared at the alien characters until his eyes were sore.  Again and again he turned the sword in his hands.  How was it possible that he hadn’t  seen these odd engravings before?

And then it occurred to him:  never once since the sword had fallen into his possession—not until this very moment—had he taken time to study it closely.  Yes, he was familiar with its shape and size.  He had hefted its weight and even witnessed the stunning release of its powers.  He was acquainted with it in a general way.  But he did not yet know it intimately.

The reasons were obvious.  When he had wielded it on the night of the Battle for the Stone, it had been in the midst of darkness, terror, and tremors of the earth.  When he had heaved it up to strike the rock at the rear of the cavern, his thoughts had been intent upon a single goal:  that of opening a door into the Other World.  The rest of the time—two long months—he had kept the miraculous thing hidden away in its flannel graveclothes, fearful of discovery, anxious to protect it from prying eyes.

Now his mind flew back to the anguish of that bleak afternoon in the Cave of the Hands.  Again he saw himself lying on the barren floor of the silent and dripping chamber.  Again a nameless and powerful longing swept over him.  A determination to find his father at any cost gripped him by the throat.

But then another thought flashed across his mind—an inspiring, energizing thought.  These inscriptions, this writing, these unknown words—perhaps they held the secret he was seeking.  Perhaps they could provide him with the key that would unlock the power of the sword and subject it to his will.  Suddenly he felt sure of this.  There was not the slightest shred of doubt in his mind.  All he had to do now was learn to read the ciphers.  And what could be simpler?  Hadn’t his father been a linguist?

His heart pounding, Morgan wrapped up the sword and stowed it away.  Then he rose, crossed the room, and pulled down five or six ancient volumes from the bookshelves on the opposite wall.  In a cloud of dust he dumped them in a heap upon the workbench.

Then, seating himself in the chair, he began searching for the key to the unknown language.

 

“Ah.  I see you got it!” said the broadly grinning figure on the threshold.  “That’s good.”

George Ariello, resident caretaker and head custodian of St. Halistan’s Church, was leaning into the room from the bottom step, one hand on the door-jamb and the other mopping his brown forehead with a red bandana.  “I brought it over as soon as the mail came.  Figured you’d come straight here as soon as school let out.  What’s the matter?  You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

Morgan felt the hot blood rush up his neck and into his cheeks.  “Nothing’s the matter.  You startled me, that’s all.  And yes, I got the letter.  Thanks, George.”

He was sitting at a scarred and battered workbench in the corner of his new retreat:  the big janitorial closet adjoining the electrical room in the church basement.  George had offered him this space soon after the fall of the tower, and Morgan had spent most of the summer lugging boxes down the stairs and getting things organized.  Three rows of unfinished pine shelves along the west wall held everything that remained of his father’s books and alchemical equipment:  pestles and mortars, alembics and cucurbits, hermetic jars and several coils of copper tubing.  The workbench and office chair were gifts from Rev. Alcuin—overflow from the clutter in the minister’s museum-like office.

The “dungeon”, as Morgan called it, had taken some getting used to.  Compared with his old lab in the tower it was dark, damp, and mildewy.  Mops and buckets stood clustered around an antique washing machine in one corner, filling the air with a wet, musty smell.  Like everything else at St. Halistan’s, the walls were made of the speckled granite quarried in the coastal hills around Santa Piedra more than a century before.  So old and permeated with ground moisture was the mortar between the stones that it had long since begun to crumble away into moldy paste and dry dust.  There were no windows, and the door at the bottom of the basement stairs was the only way in or out.

All things considered, the “dungeon” was far from ideal.  But it was his, and Morgan had to have a place of his own.  There were, after all, certain things that couldn’t be done—and some things that couldn’t be kept—at home.  Especially with his grandmother in the house.

George, who was still hanging in the doorway, cleared his throat.  “I was just wondering,” he said.

Morgan looked up at him and raised an eyebrow.

“Wondering why she sent it to my address.”

“I don’t know.  Why?”

“It’s just that I don’t hear much from either one of them.  Most of the letters that come to my house are for you.  I’m not surprised about Moira, of course.  But I hadn’t counted on losing contact with Eny.  I let them go south because it seemed the right thing to do.  The Reverend said so, too.  But they haven’t called or anything in over a month.”

Morgan shrugged.  “Maybe she thinks you’re busy.  Maybe she’s busy.  Maybe she sends my letters to your address because she thinks I don’t spend much time at home.  Maybe she doesn’t want my mom to be bothered.  There could be a lot of reasons.”

George shrugged.  “Maybe so.  You don’t spend much time at home.”  He turned to go, then ducked back through the doorway.  “Everything okay over on your side of the wall?  Between you and your mother, I mean?”

Morgan nodded.  “Just a little crowded right now.”

George gave a short, hoarse laugh.  “And me right next door, with more room than I know what do with.  Funny, isn’t it?  I used to say I said I’d give anything to be rid of that woman.  But it’s no fun living alone.”

Morgan shifted in his chair.

“So just remember what I told you, Morgan.  Mi casa es tu casa.  If you need some space, you’re always welcome over on my side.”

“That’s nice, George, but I’ve got all the space I need.  Thanks to you and Rev. Alcuin.”

Even as he spoke, Morgan saw George’s gaze drop.  Suddenly he had an uncomfortable feeling that the custodian’s eyes were probing the shadows beneath the old workbench.  With a swift involuntary movement, he moved his chair to block up the exposed space.

George frowned.  “What you got there?”

“Where?”

“There.”  He inclined his head towards the workbench.  “Under the table.  The long blue thing.”

“Oh, that.  Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, not exactly nothing.  Something for school.  My … gym class.”

George grinned. “First time I’ve known you to show any interest in gym class.  What is it?  Looks too thin for a baseball bat.  Besides, this is football season.”

Morgan hesitated.  “It’s a fishing pole.”

George looked doubtful.

“Seriously.  I signed up for a fishing class.  Third period.  Down on the Point.”

George’s thick black eyebrows arched upward.  “Fishing?  For P.E.?  Never heard of that before.”

“Sure.  They offer all kinds of Phys. Ed. electives now.  Bicycling, weight training, bowling, fencing.  Fishing.”

George shook his head.  “I guess schools nowadays are more progressive than I thought.”

With that, he turned and climbed back up the stairs . ..

(To be continued)

September 23,  _____

Hollywood, California

 

Dear Morgan,

Hollywood isn’t what you think it is.  It isn’t what anybody thinks it is. 

Sure, there’s the Walk of Fame and the Chinese Theater.  There’s the Pantages, and the Hollywood Sign, and the Capitol Records Tower (Mom says it looks like a big stack of pancakes with a needle on top).  Down on the Boulevard you can see people selling maps to Stars’ homes, and every once in a while a big double-decker bus rolls by full of gawping tourists.  I guess some people find it exciting.  But when you live here you can’t help noticing the grunge around the edges of the glitter and glitz.  And behind it all, down the alleys and up the side streets, back in the neighborhoods where the real people live—well, that’s a whole different world. 

It’s a world where men sleep in dark stairwells wrapped in dirty blankets.  Where bag ladies in heavy overcoats stalk the streets pushing shopping carts filled with all their worldly possessions.  It’s a place where hollow-eyed kids sit on the broken doorsteps of empty houses and play behind chain-link fences in parking lots littered with broken glass.  It’s a land of noise and neon where almost everywhere you go somebody comes up and asks you for money.  That’s the real Hollywood. 

I still can’t get used to the sidewalks.  They’re covered with black spots, like a leopard’s skin—blotches of discarded chewing gum.  The medians are all dirt and asphalt and weeds, and most of them are thick with cigarette butts and beer bottles.  Some of the walls are so loaded down with graffiti that they seem to be crumbling under the weight of it.  And there are metal bars on all the windows and retractable padlocked gates, like steel accordions, on every shop front. 

Mom and I are staying with my aunt Grania in her apartment on the south side of town.  She’s the reason we came to L.A.  We knew she’d take us in, and it seemed like a good place to be anonymous.  Grania’s nice, but a little scatter-brained.  She says she moved here to break into “the Industry.”  So far she’s been in a couple of stage plays at the local “Actors Co-op.”  She spends the rest of her time waitressing at a Thai restaurant.  We don’t see a whole lot of her.

There’s a meal program for the homeless every afternoon in one of the big Sunday school rooms at the Presbyterian church.  A sort of soup kitchen.  Mom volunteers .  Sometimes I stop by after school to help her serve.  You see some interesting characters there.  Up close and personal, too.  Most of them don’t smell very nice. 

School is kind of scary.  The kids are tough and unfriendly—gang-bangers, some of them.  It’s hard to connect.  I’m new, and nobody wants to talk to me.  A few of the girls make fun of my blue eye. 

I eat alone at lunchtime, out in the sun.  The “cool” people get all the shady spots.  I guess September must be the hottest month of the year in Southern California.  My dad used to say that the folks up north want to secede from the south and start a new state of their own.  I’m beginning to see why.    

No, you’re not bothering me.  I’m always happy to hear from you, but I do wish you’d stop begging me to come home.  You already know why I can’t do that.  As for the other idea you mentioned, I’ve told you a hundred times why I can’t even discuss the possibility of going back to—well, you-know-where.  There’s no way in the world that I can take you there.  Not now.  Not ever.  Not even if I wanted to.  Please don’t ask again.   

I’m not angry with you, Morgan.  I hope you’re not angry with me.  I never asked for any of this to happen.  It wasn’t my idea …  

 

Morgan looked up at the sound of footsteps descending the stairs.  Shoving the blue bundle under the table with his foot, he tossed the letter aside and swiveled in his chair to face the door …

(To be continued)

 

Kneeling, he laid his bundle on the sandy cavern floor.  Slowly, almost reverentially, he began to unwind the folds of blue flannel.  A glint of gold gleamed forth from beneath the soft layers of fabric as he pulled them aside.  Then, with something approaching tenderness, he drew the shining object from its humble shroud and held it up to the light.

It was a sword.  A long blue sword with a large gilded pommel and an ornate, deeply curved crossguard.  For a moment he stood regarding it with a steady eye.  He turned it over and over, studying it intently, a warm glow of excitement and hope rising in the pit of his stomach.  If Eny had been present, she would have seen a slow, satisfied smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

He knew it was no ordinary sword.  Not in the least ordinary, though he had found it in the commonest, obscurest spot imaginable—the umbrella rack behind the door of Madame Medea’s shop.  At just the right moment it had offered itself to him on that night of nights when the dark-haired woman, her green-eyes blazing, stunned him with those knife-edged words:  Do not prove as useless as your father!

No one else seemed to know the sword was there—not even Madame Medea herself.  And that was odd, for somehow Morgan had sensed in an instant that he’d made the discovery of a lifetime.  In that moment his heart had told him that this sword would alter his fortunes in ways he couldn’t foresee.  And this hunch had been confirmed almost immediately when he saw her lumbering henchman cower and flinch before the glittering blade.

From the alchemy shop he had carried it out into the storm, where it flashed in the night with a light of its own.  With a grim smile Morgan replayed the scene in his mind.  Once again in his imagination he looked upon the astonished faces of Baxter Knowles and his gang as they watched the sword carve the darkness in a wide electric blue arc.  He laughed, and the cavern walls rang softly, as he pictured the bullies turning and high-tailing it through the slanting rain.

No.  It was no ordinary sword.  If ever there was an object belonging to Eny’s Other World—as native to that world as the Stone of Destiny itself—it had to be this remarkable sword.  That’s why he’d been holding on to it all this time.  That’s why he’d kept it secret and hidden from prying eyes.  That’s why, after much deliberation, he had carried it over the rocky trails of La Punta Lira, down through the stone archway at the head of the Laguna, and up the pebbly strand to the Cave of the Hands.

Gripping the hilt with both hands, he turned to face the two boulders at the rear of the chamber.

She knows something about my father.  After everything that had happened, Morgan was more determined than ever to find the man who had vanished from his life while he was still a toddler.  And he was convinced that the green-eyed woman could show him the way.

Straining his powers of vision as if by sheer effort he could pierce the barrier of solid rock behind the two round stones, he planted his feet firmly in the sand and raised the sword above his head.  Then he closed his eyes and whispered words into the silent darkness.

“I have seen this sword do wonders,”he said.  “I know it can do wonders again.  Reveal to me now the way to Eny’s Sidhe!”

He opened his eyes.  The sword gleamed dully in the dim light.  Nothing had changed.

Remembering the Arabian Nights and the story of Ali Baba, he aimed its point directly at the space between the pair of boulders.  Then he spoke in a loud commanding voice:  “Open!”

Nothing happened.  He waited a minute more.  The back wall of the cave was as solid and gray as ever.  Not a crack or a gap to be seen.  No gateway opening onto a tunnel of light.

Morgan’s heart fell.  Seizing a lock of his own yellow hair, he pulled it hard and kicked a pebble from one side of the cave to the other.  He threw himself against the cavern wall and beat it with his fist.

And then, in that dismal moment, he suddenly recalled everything his mother had told him about the power of prayer and faith.  Brightening, he bent down on one knee, stuck the sword point into the sand, and bowed his head upon the hilt as if it were a cross.

“I believe!” he said earnestly.  “I believe this sword belongs to the Other World!  I believe I have found the key that will open the door!  Answer my prayer!  Take me there now!  Show me where I can find my dad!”

Nothing but the sound of water dripping in the silence.

Slowly Morgan got to his feet.  His heart was pounding.  His hands shook.  His eyes were dim.  Sweat dripped from his brow and he seemed to see a cloud of red haze shimmering in the air before him.

All at once he lunged forward, straight at the place where the boulders stood at the foot of the sloping wall.  With a cry he flung up the sword.  With another he brought it crashing down upon the nearest of the two rocks.  Up flew the blue sparks.  Backwards rebounded the ringing blade, stinging the palms of his hands like fire.  So furious was the assault that he was hurled to the floor by the recoiling force of the blow.  For a moment he lay there, still as death, listening to the silvery reverberations echoing off the walls and fading away into the deeper recesses of the grotto.

Then he rolled over onto his stomach and buried his face in the crook of his arm.

 

September.

To anybody of an even slightly imaginative or otherworldly bent, perhaps the least enchanting, least picturesque time of the year in Santa Piedra.

September in Santa Piedra is intensely normal.  Everything is out in the open.  The light is clear.  The air is free of swirling mists.  The sun shines bravely from morning till night, its yellow beams splintering off the great Rock and sparkling over the wave-tips of the Inlet.  The shops along Front Street stand neatly in a row, brightly colored, sharply outlined, undeniably real in the afternoon glare.  The sky is blue, the beach is white, the cliffside caves lie open to the probing fingers of the sunlight.  Gone are the shadows and secrets that lurked beneath the fogs of spring and summer.

Morgan felt all of this keenly as he came slogging through the shallow surf at the foot of La Punta Lira, a long blue bundle tucked tightly under his right arm.  Somehow he knew—he could smell it in the air and taste it on his tongue—that the magic of May and June had departed with the mists.  He had no idea how to get it back, and he wasn’t sure he could make his plan work without it.  But he was convinced he had to try.

Pausing in the ankle-deep water, he shoved a strand of straw-colored hair out of his eyes and squinted up at the black hole gaping down at him from the base of the cliff.  He could feel his heart thumping beneath his ribs.  He could taste the salt of his own sweat mingling with the salt of the damp sea air.  Rubbing his nose with a briny knuckle, he glanced back through the slanting sunlight at the amber glow lying upon the town on the far side of the bay.  Then, tightening his grip on the blue bundle, he marched up over the strand, his red tennis shoes squelching with sea water as he went.

She knows something about my father, he said to himself as the pebbles crunched noisily beneath his feet.  ‘He was taken.’  And she knows where.

Morgan, of course, had never been of a particularly otherworldly turn of mind.  For him, September had always been a season of discontent chiefly because school was in session again.  School still played a big part in the shaping of his mood.  But in another way things were different this year.  This year he was looking at his situation from an altered point of view.  It’s hard not to be otherworldly when you’ve had a glimpse of another world.

Trudging up to the mouth of the cave, he stooped down and peered inside.  Yes.  This was the place.  La Cueva de los Manos, the Cave of the Hands—his best friend Eny’s secret retreat, her private “laughing place,” her home away from home.  He knew it by the ancient painting on the inner wall, the work of artists who had plied their trade four thousand years before his time:  a cloud of ruddy hand-prints pressed upon the dark gray stone in rust-red ochre—hundreds of human hands reaching towards the cavern ceiling with long, thin fingers like tongues of living flame.

Eny had actually been to that other world.  By her own account, she had entered it through an opening at the back side of this very cave.  Descending through tendrils and coils of light—or so the story went—she had found her way into a marvelous land under the ground where she had lived with dwarves, encountered giants, sojourned among fairy folk, and fled from a dark enchantress.

As for Morgan, he believed it.  Practical and worldly as he was, he could no longer doubt that what she said was true.  He had, after all, seen the giants himself.  Quite apart from his own plans and purposes, he had been caught up in a whirlwind of enchantments and paranormal adventures.  He, too, had played a role in the unfolding of uncanny events.  And so, for him, blind unbelief was not an option.

Standing there at the mouth the cave, he cast his mind back over the things he had witnessed in the time of the summer mists.  Angels on the stairway and flying ships in the air.  The catastrophic battle for Lia Fail, the fabled Stone of Destiny.  The fall of the tower of St. Halistan’s church.  The seizure and abduction of the Stone.  Morgan knew that the strange woman who called herself Madame Medea had taken it.  He knew that she had fled with it into the depths of that other world, a place Eny called the Sidhe.  It was to find a way into that world and to hunt down that inscrutable woman that he had come to this hole in the cliff at the edge of the western sea.  This, he believed, was his destiny.  And he was determined to fulfill it.

She knows something about my father, he muttered again as he ducked inside the cave and stood on the threshold, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light.  When he could see clearly, he cast his gaze from one side of the chamber to the other, carefully scanning the cavern walls.  No opening was discernible.

Hoisting up his bundle, he stepped to the face of the rock and pressed his fingertips against the fingers of the painted hands.  The moment he touched them he felt a tingle like an electric charge run up his spine.  The hair stood up on the back of his neck.  Now we’re getting somewhere! he thought.  

Without breaking the connection between his skin and the cool, damp surface of the rock, he followed the wall back into the furthest corner of the cavern.  At length he came to a place where the dripping ceiling sloped down to meet the floor in a hollow space behind two squat boulders.  A spark of recognition flashed through his brain.

Yes, he thought, recounting the details of Eny’s narrative for the hundredth time.  This has to be the spot where she found the tunnel of light.  It fits the description exactly!  But whatever Eny’s experience may have been on that spring day so long ago, he could discover no trace of any such passage now.

Slumping against the wall, he passed a weary hand over his forehead.  If only Eny were here now!  She could explain the next step.  He was sure she would be able to show him the way.  But Eny, too, was gone.  Gone with the enchantment.  Gone with Lia Fail.  Gone with the ever-elusive mystery of summer’s shrouding fogs.

Well, then.  He’d just have to try another tack.  He certainly wasn’t going to give up now.  This dead-end was not going to stop him—not if he had anything to say about it.  Experience had taught him better.  That’s why, keenly mindful of the many times his hopes and dreams had fallen flat, he’d come armed with a backup strategy.  He had one more trick up his sleeve, a plan he’d been revolving in his mind all summer long.  He’d thought about it long and hard, but it had taken him until now to drum up the courage to put it to the test.

(To be continued…)

 

Day 30

 

Thirty white lines scrawled on the black and dripping wall.  Thirty days and counting.  So long, by my reckoning (and without these scratches I would long ago have lost all track of time) have I languished in this watery tomb.

 Thirty times through the orbed splendor of the rolling astrum has the sun, unseen by me, pursued his endless journey, a perpetual fixity in perpetual motion.  Even now, I suppose, he must be shining in the glad Somewhere beyond both Underworld and Overworld, riding high above the impenetrable heap of rock over my head. 

It must be so.  But what does it matter?  I mark the passage of time by the renewal of my bread and water alone.  Neither cloud nor sky, moon nor star can pierce the dimness of my dungeon.  Thirty days have I lain hidden from the light of the outside world.      

I knew it would go hard with me when I refused her demands.  I had no idea how hard.  I never imagined how far she would go to wring the secret from me.  Perhaps things would have gone differently if I’d taken a different tack.  Perhaps. 

Even now the memory of that last night looms before me.  I see myself standing at the window.  I watch the white hand of mist overspread the moony sky.  I remember how it shaded from gray to black as it blotted out the stars and burst into my study.

When next I knew anything at all, I was lying in this pit, calling upon my wife and child.  They did not answer.  For days my only comfort lay in summoning up the image of their faces.  Now I can no longer bring it to mind.                 

As I write, there is a scrabbling behind the damp wall-stones in the corner.  Something vile scuttles across the grimy, stinking floor.  The tin plate rattles at my side.  The Something makes off with the last of my daily ration—a moldy biscuit and a rancid bacon rind.  I shrug my shoulders and curse the darkness.  What more can I do?  My tears were all cried out long ago.        

Maria Prophetissa!  That’s what she called herself in the beginning.  I told her how my investigations into the meanings of words had led me into a quest for all knowledge.  She said I could achieve nothing until I grasped the inner essences and properties of things.  She assured me that once I had gained such knowledge—which she alone could give—I would be a true artist, a full-fledged mage.  I believed her. 

Besides the vermin, hunger is my only companion.  It gnaws my belly even as the rats gnaw my food.  I am shattered like a broken reed.  I am pressed down and poured out like water.  The deeps surround me.  My head is wrapped in sorrows.  It is she who has reduced me to this state.   

Maria Prophetissa.  Of course it was a lie.  By the time I realized it, I had gone too far.  And yet, here in the darkness, I begin to see that I have not lost quite everything.  In this black hole I have been granted at least one small glimmer of light.  I know now that the promises I swallowed were hollow and vain.  And that in itself is something.  That in itself is a morsel of bitter but incontestable truth.   

Here in this prison, where the sun never shines, I have come at last to know her as she is.  I have found her out.  I have discovered her true name. 

It is not Maria Prophetissa.  Neither is it Medea. 

It is Anand.  It is Raven.  It is the Daughter of Ernmas.

It is Morrigu.    

 

 

Faint scorings on a dank, dark wall.

Desperate lines scribbled in a makeshift diary.

The interminable drip, drip, drip of the passage of the indistinguishable days.

Who is it lies there in the corner of this squalid, stinking cell?

Only time will tell  — time and the unfolding tale of The Sword of Paracelsus.

The story begins tonight …