Authors: Robert J. Wiersema
Bedtime Story (27 page)
There was another e-mail waiting for me from Cat when I got home from Prospero’s. Another lengthy reply.
Chris,
I’m fine with you calling me Cat, so long as I can call you Chris.;)
You’ve probably got a deadline to meet so I wanted to get back to you quickly. Besides, I don’t get many opportunities to talk about Lazarus these days. I like to seize these chances when they come along. I trust you don’t mind.
You’ve certainly asked some interesting questions: I’ll do my best to answer them from what I recall hearing my mother and grandmother say, and if you need more details I’ll venture into the archives.
The reason for Lazarus’s move to the United States has never been entirely clear to me. Coming as it did so soon after the war, I suspect it had something to do with that. Lazarus and Cora were great believers in personal liberty, and I think the experience of Europe in wartime, and the restrictions they suffered at that time even in England, soured them on the land of their birth. I don’t think it’s any accident that they ended up in Oregon—we’ve always had a strong live-and-let-live attitude here.
I stopped reading and picked up my pen, writing the work
Oregon
into my notebook, circling it several times.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that there were always whispers in the family about something that had
happened in England, an accident of some sort that created a certain amount of notoriety which apparently plagued them for a long time. This may also have contributed to their decision to leave England, but I don’t really have any concrete information—it wasn’t something that was much talked about.
As to the question of magic—that’s a long story, and I’m not really clear on a lot of the details. I do know that both Lazarus and Cora, in their younger years, were members of a group called the Order of the Golden Sunset, a group run by a man named William Thorne, with some vague lineage to Aleister Crowley and the Order of the Golden Dawn. They left this group in the 1930s, I believe, along with several other members of the group, forming a new group called the Brotherhood of the Stone. Again, this is not something that was spoken of much when I was growing up.
I wrote the name of the Order down in my notebook, then scrawled:
Stone = Sunstone???
The sense that I got, however, was that Lazarus wished he could have the same renown in magical circles as Thorne, but he lacked the selfish sadism which contributed so much to Thorne’s legend. I don’t think Lazarus was a wizard or anything like that—as I mentioned, he wrote volumes of lore and ritual for the Order, but my impression is that he was more of an observer. A “pagan-type earth-devotee” as you put it in your e-mail. Suffice it to say, I never heard of any blood sacrifices or satanic orgies, but we did observe the solstices and equinoxes when I was growing up.
I’m sorry for going on so long—as I mentioned, I don’t get a lot of opportunity to talk about Lazarus.
Yes, I represent the literary estate. My mother let his books go out of print before I was born, and they’ve stayed that way ever since. Frankly, it’s a matter of laziness and nervousness on my part—I simply don’t have any idea how the
publishing industry works or how one would go about getting the books published again. Do you have any advice or connections that you can share?
As for Lazarus’s papers, there are still pages and outlines and books from his time here in Oregon, but he sold his earlier papers to the Hunter Barlow Library in New York prior to coming to the United States. In fact, I suspect the sale helped finance the move. If you’re ever down this way, I’d be delighted to show you what I have, though.
I suppose I should sign off here—I’m starting to feel like one of those little old ladies who prattles on and on about things you probably have no interest in. I’m sorry about that. Please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any more questions.
With best wishes,
Cat
Oh, and no, I’ve never heard of Alexander Press. Is that a publisher that might be appropriate for Lazarus’s books?
I leaned back in the chair, rubbing my eyes. It took a while to sort out what I was feeling, to try to separate my inherent interest in a good story from my need for answers. This correspondence with Cat was interesting, but she clearly didn’t know anything about her grandfather’s fifth book. And there were much more important matters at hand.
Matters of life and death.
The ringing of the cell phone woke me up. I was startled to find myself in my reading chair,
To the Four Directions
open on my lap.
“Chris? Where the hell are you?” Jacqui’s voice was ragged, and I could hear the thickness of tears in her throat.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, adrenaline surging, burning off the vestiges of unexpected sleep.
“David’s had another seizure. Where the hell have you been?”
I glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall and my heart plummeted. 8:51 p.m.
“There has to be a way,” David cried.
“Maybe,” Matt said as the raging river filled the small chamber.
“What?” David said. There could be only seconds before the wall collapsed.
“This might not work—”
“Matt,” David warned, as another ripping sound echoed through the chamber, a crack suddenly running to the opposite corner of the wall.
The spirit drifted close to him, the mist coalescing into a face, looking back at him.
“Do you trust me?” Matt asked.
David nodded.
“Then breathe out. Push all the air out of your lungs.”
The stone screamed as the wall cracked again. The solid rock seemed to bulge under the river’s pressure.
David tried to focus on his breathing, on pushing all the air out of his lungs. He flexed his diaphragm until it hurt, until he felt completely empty.
“Now breathe in,” Matt urged him. “Breathe deep.”
The air rushed into his empty lungs, sweet and cool.
The mist in front of him dissipated, as if blown asunder by the force of the water.
“Now run!” Matt screamed, as the wall exploded.
I darted out of the elevator, my bag swinging on my shoulder as I raced toward David’s room, and I didn’t even see Jacqui as I rounded a corner.
“Chris,” she called from behind me.
When I turned around she was standing motionless, her arms folded across her chest. Her face was pale, except for the red, moist patches around her eyes.
“Where were you?” she choked as she stepped toward me. She pushed against my chest, slapping it with the flat of her hands. “Where were you? Where …?” She kept repeating herself, kept slapping at me. Fresh tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks.
I did nothing to stop her.
When the anger gave way to anguish, she fell into my arms, small and defenceless, her back heaving.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I lost track of the time.” I couldn’t tell her what I had actually been doing: I had to add another lie.
“I can’t do this alone,” she whispered.
“Is he okay?”
She shook her head. “He’s bad. He’s really bad.”
My eyes slipped closed as I tried to fight the sense of vertigo that came over me, the feeling of the world opening up under my feet like it might swallow me whole.
“It was the worst one yet. I had to come out here while they …”
“Should we go back in?”
She hesitated for a moment, then nodded.
Two nurses and a doctor were leaning over him, their backs to the door. Jacqui and I waited. When they straightened up and turned toward us, I had to look away. I could never have prepared myself for the sight of my son.
David was the same white-grey as the hospital sheet. His lower lip was thick, bloody and swollen, and stitched in a wide U almost its complete width. It looked like a second smile, a black, rough line under his lips.
“He bit through his lip,” Jacqui said. “And his tongue. There was blood … there was blood everywhere.”
I brought my arm up around her shoulders, eased her closer to me.
His hands were twitching and flexing. There was a new leather strap across his chest, holding him fast to the bed.
“He dislocated his shoulder as well,” Jacqui choked. “It took four orderlies to hold him down so Jane could give him an injection.”
The doctor looked familiar, and he stepped toward us. “Mr. Knox, I’m Dr. McKinley. I treated David when he was admitted the other night.” The doctor from the ER. “I’m guessing that Jacqui has brought you up to speed.”
“A bit,” I said.
He nodded. “I’ve got a call out to Dr. Rutherford. He should be in
in a bit. I’m—” He paused, as if trying to decide how to proceed, and whether he should. “I’m very concerned about the increasing severity of the seizures that your son is suffering. We’ve got him on Dilantin—that’s a powerful anti-epileptic.” He shook his head. “With the dosage he’s on now, we should be seeing a reduction in the attacks.”
He glanced at his watch, and at his colleagues who were standing between him and the door. “I’ve got to get back down to the ER, but if anything happens—” He looked at me, then at Jacqui. “Have me paged.”
The moment the doctor and nurses were out the door, Jacqui dipped a tissue in the plastic cup of water and brought it to David’s lips.
“Hey, Davy,” she said, her voice a singsong whisper. “Let’s get you cleaned up a little bit, okay? I’ll be gentle.”
She touched the tissue to his lips, lifting the blood away in the subtlest of increments. How many times had I watched her scrub something away from David’s mouth with a tissue, dampened with the tip of her tongue? But never with such attention, such tender care.
“It’s not coming off,” she said, in a voice I had never heard from her before, a sound of barely suppressed anguish. “It’s not coming off.”
“It looks okay.”
“It’s not coming off,” she said, her voice breaking. “I can’t do it,” she wept. “I can’t get it off. I can’t do it. I can’t do anything.”
The wall exploded. Water smashed through the chamber. The remaining shades, drifting near the edges of the room, dissolved with the force. The torch winked out, plunging the chamber into absolute darkness.
David stubbed his toe on the edge of a step, stumbling a little, catching himself with the hand not holding the cylinder. A wind out of the chamber urged him up the stairs as the roar of the water grew behind him.
He held his free hand out as he ran, wishing he still had the torch. It was so dark, and he didn’t dare slow down. His hand and shoulder bounced and scraped off the stone walls as the stairway twisted upward.
He could hear the water coming closer, the full force of the river
swallowing the Sunstone’s chamber, then forcing itself up the narrow stairway, the pressure building and building, like soda foaming up into a bottle’s neck. He could picture the water bursting out of the cave and washing his battered body all the way back to the castle.
His chest burned and heaved; his legs screamed in agony.
“Come on, David,” Matt’s voice urged, very close to him. “The water’s getting closer.”
“I know,” he gasped, through gritted teeth.
The staircase, which had seemed endless when he was climbing down, seemed even longer now. And then a hint of light appeared far above his head. He redoubled his efforts, knowing that the end was in sight.