Summer's End (7 page)

October 30

Before Dawn

Fever dreams:

I soar into the night sky, but
instead of more stars appearing the higher I go, they disappear, one by one,
then whole galaxies, and I realize something huge has reared up between me and
space. Something completely black and lightless, huge and freezing.

Bal-sab. Lord of Death.

I look down, and the earth is
below me, but it’s no longer my earth; I’m in the past now, looking down on the
ruins of the great Celtic palaces. It’s Samhain, and there are no Druids left
to sate Bal-sab’s hunger, so he takes his sacrifice in other ways. He waves a
vast limb, and the portals to the Otherworld open, releasing the
sidh.
They ravage through Europe, bringing the Black Death with them; when wise women
attempt to banish them, they fester in the minds of neighbors, judges, priests
and inquisitors, who torture and burn the women. The witches.

Centuries pass, and Bal-sab’s
voracious appetite continues unabated. He finally tires of letting the
sidh
do his dirty work, and he takes to whispering in the minds of great men,
infesting their brilliance with visions of mass destruction. Those he seduces
produce ever more powerful weapons: Catapults, cannons, nerve gas, nuclear
bombs.

Where are the other gods? Why
do they allow this?

“Because we must,” answers the
Morrigan, and I feel her presence beside/inside me.

“Why? Why can’t you stop him?”

“He is Death. Death, more than
any of us, must continue. Without Death, there would be no balance.”

“But…” I struggle to find the
words. “The world wasn’t always like this.”

The Morrigan’s sadness courses
through me like tears in a creased cheek. “No. And it need not be this way
now.”

“How?”

But I know. Even as I ask it, I
know.

“Even Death can be forgiving,”
she says, before disappearing.

I awoke, then. It was early in
the morning, still dark outside, but my fever had broken and the pain from the
cuts was gone. I got up to drink some water, then returned to bed, still weak.
Before I drifted off again, I made my plan:

I’d call ó Cuinn in the new
day.

October 30

Day

Conor was surprised to hear from me.

“We need to meet today,” I told
him.

We made arrangements to have
lunch at a coffee shop near me. We’d meet there at two, it would be fairly
empty by then. We’d need to talk where we wouldn’t be heard, because we’d be
discussing murder.

ó Cuinn was right on time. I
knew the waitress—Ricky and I ate here frequently—and asked her for a back
booth. The place was quiet, just us and a few other groups closer to the front.
Conor ordered black coffee, I asked for an iced tea.

“You look tired,” he said, once
the waitress left with our drink orders.

“More than tired…I fought the
sidh
last night. They got in a few good jabs, but I won.”

The way his jaw dropped would
have been comical under other circumstances. “You…you banished them?”

I nodded. He forced his jaws
closed. “How…?”

“I improvised. It worked. They
clawed me in a few places, but Mongfind left a cure for that, and it worked,
too.”

“So…?” He left his question
unasked, but I knew what it was.

“Yes,” I told him, before
adding, “so let’s talk about the Samhain ritual.”

The grin that crossed his face
made him look uncomfortably like the
sidh
, and for a moment I regretted
this meeting.

“Well, that’s brilliant. You
know it won’t work without you.”

“Do you have…everything?”

He was about to respond when
the waitress brought our drinks. Conor stopped abruptly, averting his gaze,
nervous and guilty, and I wondered how he’d possibly stayed out of jail if he’d
acted this way with Bertolucci. Once she’d gone, he leaned close and whispered.
“Yes, everything’s been arranged.”

“Everything,” of course,
included a human sacrificial victim. One I would be required to help kill.

I almost asked him how he’d
manage that part—maybe he’d lure a junkie or transient with money; he was
slightly built, and I couldn’t picture him physically subduing anyone—but I
really didn’t want to hear details.

I know now, of course, that I
was an idiot. I should have asked him. If I’d known what he had planned…

But I didn’t, whether from
cowardice or simply revulsion. I didn’t ask him who we’d be killing.

“There is one thing only you
can bring,” he said.

“What?”

“Recall that the ritual
indicates the use of a wand; it’s crucial in creating the circle that will protect
us. I can’t supply you with that—you must find your wand on your own.”

“Is that Mongfind or J.K.
Rowling?”

He grimaced briefly, then
added, “Children’s fiction aside, magicians often speak of wands finding them,
rather than vice versa. The wand is most likely found near a special tree, or
forested area.”

“Why do you know that? How long
have you been studying this stuff?”

He actually reddened at that,
revealing a secret passion. “I…it was just a purely academic study. Until…”

“Of course.”

He reached into his jacket and
removed a long bundle wrapped in a white handkerchief. “This is mine. I
acquired it several years ago, from the area of Tara
^[18]
in
Ireland.” He pulled the white linen away to reveal a surprisingly plain, sturdy
foot-long twig. The only unusual feature was a sort of groove that wound around
the narrower half. “This is ash. The spiraling around it is the result of vines
growing in the trees; finding something like this is quite rare.”

“Have you used it, Conor?”

He looked away, abashed. “Only
once…”

“When you summoned the
sidh
.”

“Yes.”

“Well, at least we know it
works.” I enjoyed mustering that sarcasm; I still didn’t like Conor ó Cuinn,
despite the fact that we would soon be partners. “So…have you thought about
where…this…will happen tomorrow?”

He nodded. “Mongfind specifies
that it must occur in a sacred oak grove. There isn’t much sacred here in
Southern California, but at least there are plenty of oaks.”

Touche. I had to admire the way
he’d just repaid my sarcasm. “Thousand Oaks
^[19]
,
perhaps?”

“Actually…yes. I’ll e-mail you
directions.”

We sat silently for a moment;
when we weren’t discussing the supernatural, we really had nothing in common.
After a while, Conor said, “You understand that there is an element of danger
to us in this.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant the
ritual or kidnapping someone to be offered as a blood sacrifice. “Do you
mean…?”

“Summoning Bal-sab. That’s why
the first part of the ritual calls for the creation of a protected space.”

Of course I’d read Mongfind’s
description of encountering Bal-sab, but I realized only now that I’d still
thought of it as fiction. A real encounter with a physical representation of
Death…do any of us know ourselves well enough to perfectly anticipate how we’ll
react when confronted with something genuinely terrifying?

“Then we’ll just have to be
sure we create that space well, won’t we?”

That shut him up.

The rest of the meeting was
devoted to lunch. We ate quickly and quietly. A last meal? Or the last meal of
an old world?

As we finished, Conor asked,
“Do you know where you’ll look for your wand? Maybe you’ve got a special park
you like, a garden…?”

“I do know, but it’s…neither of
those things.”

He realized I had no interest
in sharing a private plan with him, and he accepted that without further argument.
“Well…tomorrow afternoon, then.”

He left. I followed him out of
the restaurant, climbed in my car, and headed toward the 5 freeway. Even though
it was just past three p.m., traffic was heavy, and I headed south at barely
ten miles an hour.

What will this all be like, if
we succeed? Will there still be traffic jams, road rage, smog, hundred-degree
fall temperatures thanks to global warming, gas at five dollars a gallon,
increasing ranks of homeless, greedy corporate heads, ambitious politician, junkies,
cancer, and all the other things that grind us down every day even as we take
them for granted?

It was hard to imagine a
renaissance in the middle of the SoCal metro sprawl.

October 30

-

October 31

I left the freeway at Cesar Chavez
Avenue and headed east. My destination was only a mile from the freeway.

When Conor had mentioned a
“special tree,” my thoughts had immediately gone to a photo I’d taken sometime
in the early 1980s. Back then, I’d briefly considered going into professional
photography for my day job, and I’d worked to assemble a portfolio. One day,
completely by accident, I’d stumbled across an amazing cemetery just east of
downtown L.A. At the time I didn’t know that Evergreen Cemetery was the oldest
extant cemetery in Los Angeles, but its melancholy beauty, age, and hodgepodge
of monuments and headstones had yielded some of my best photos.

My real prize, however, was a
picture of a gigantic spreading oak that overlooked a significant chunk of the
graveyard. In the final black-and-white print, the tree looked impossibly huge,
and somehow wise.

I knew exactly where to find my
wand.

At this time of the afternoon,
on a weekday, the cemetery was mostly deserted. I was also saddened to see that
it had fallen into some disrepair in the years since I’d last visited, but I
spotted the oak easily enough, and parked as near to it as I could.

Evergreen dated back to 1877
and supposedly held some 300,000 interments. There were no superstars resting
here, no shining beacons of Hollywood history, but Evergreen was home to many
of L.A.’s more interesting historical figures. A tall, white monument marked
the plot of the Lankershim family; Isaac Lankershim had once had a town named
after him, until that town was renamed North Hollywood in 1927.

I strode across the lawn, and
was saddened to see patches of dying grass and headstones that had literally
fallen in disrepair. A few graves were clean and well kept, testament to
longstanding families that still honored their dead.

I passed the quaint,
cobblestone cottage that would be opened for funerals, and elaborate granite
memorials that were taller than I was. In some places, the headstones were so
crowded together that it was hard to see ground beneath them. I passed a stone
angel I’d shot thirty years ago, and saw it was now missing most of one
upraised arm. 

The oak had been significantly
trimmed back, but it was still there, providing a surprisingly lush green
canopy for those resting beneath. The sun was slanting in from the west now,
but there were still areas beneath the oak hidden from light, perhaps
permanently. The ground was spongy here, and I sidestepped around a large gray
mushroom cropping up from the cracks in a plaque that marked an 1892 burial.

I didn’t know what I was
looking for, really, so I searched for a place to sit. There were no benches in
this area, and I finally opted for a small patch of dry grass without a marker.
Was it nonetheless a grave, one for which the marker had crumbled or been
removed? I offered a silent apology to the resident beneath me, if that was the
case.

I’d picked a spot in the sun,
but the day’s autumn warmth faded quickly, even as the sun’s light did not. I
shivered once, wondering why the temperature was dropping when sunset was still
hours away.

The first tiny nudge—it wasn’t
truly a physical sensation, but I can only compare it to that—came then. I
turned, expecting a visitor or a guard, but there was no one to be seen nearby,
just a few distant joggers on the path that encircled the cemetery. A leaf,
perhaps, that had fallen from the tree…

It happened again, this time
feeling more like a small puff near my ear, like a sentient breeze trying to
whisper its secrets. Then I remembered something from Mongfind’s book about
contacting the dead:

“The new Druid will experience
the initial attempts by the dead to reach us as the smallest of touches or
sounds, or perhaps a movement half-glimpsed when nothing’s there…those with
experience, though, will understand that the dead are anxious to communicate,
and that we need only open ourselves to them.”

Open ourselves to them...I
wasn’t sure what that meant, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. Weren’t
close encounters with death at the heart of most great horror fiction? I’d
certainly written about it myself dozens of times, everything from a story
about a haunted bookstore
^[20]
to flesh-eating zombies
^[21]
.
Again, I had to ask myself how much deeper I wanted to explore the real version
of my fiction.

Yet I felt no fear about this
potential meeting. Perhaps it was the gentleness of the approaches to me; there
was something timid about it. Maybe the ghosts were more afraid of me.

And I hadn’t come here to
parlay with spirits; I was in search of a tool. But I had no idea how to go
about finding what I needed; perhaps one already dead would know how to help me
deal with a Lord of Death.

It was, paradoxically, too
bright to see them, so I closed my eyes.

Whether what took place was
dream or reality or trance or some other state, I can’t say.

It was:

Gray, as if all light and color
had been leeched from the world. And in this gray realm were gray people…hundreds,
thousands, of them. They were dim—not translucent, not see-through shades with
faint blue glows, not cheap movie effects, but rather like someone you’d
glimpse from a distance standing in an unlit corner of an attic. I could see
just enough of them to make out a few details: An out-of-fashion cut of hair, a
nineteenth-century uniform, a woman’s dress from the 1940s. Some of them moved
slightly, wavering as if they were underwater. It was hard to tell how much
awareness they possessed, but a few seemed to be murmuring. I could hear their
voices, but too faintly to make out any words.

I watched them for a while
before I rose to move among them. They didn’t react…nor did I. There was
nothing frightening about them; if anything, they seemed…sad. Stuck. How many
of us feel like this in our lives: Drained, trapped, unaware? Death should be
different, but perhaps it was just an extension of life.

As I walked through them, I saw
a change happening, slowly: As the sky darkened, they brightened. Colors faded
in on their clothing and skin; some took tentative steps.

And they began to notice me.

I wasn’t sure when the first
pair of faint eyes locked with mine, but I knew that they followed me as I
walked by. More began to track me. A small, wizened woman in a shawl stretched
out a veined arm as I passed.

I realized it was night now,
and that was why they had changed, become slightly more substantial. I still
felt no menace from them, but I did wonder how it was possible that night had settled
in at the cemetery and I hadn’t been asked to leave. Didn’t they lock up
graveyards at night? Wouldn’t they have at least noticed my car, even if they’d
somehow missed me?

I considered trying to find my
car, seeing if I could leave, but I still didn’t have what I’d come for. I’d
walked out now from beneath the oak tree, and thought perhaps I should return
to it.

Somehow I’d lost my bearings,
and everything looked different in the gloom of night. Was that my tree
ahead…or was it that silhouette against the sky behind me? The figures around
me now were almost all Asian, some dressed in obsolete robes, and some in the
loose-fitting clothing of nineteenth-century railroad workers. I also saw
westerners here and there, but they didn’t look like those I’d passed in other
areas of Evergreen; these people were noticeably poor, with gaunt frames and
threadbare garments of another age.

Potter’s Field.

I remembered something I’d read
about Evergreen: That it had once housed L.A. county’s Potter’s Field, where those
too impoverished or just too forgotten to be buried elsewhere had been
interred. But it wasn’t just the transients and addicts and outlaws who rested
there. Back in the nineteenth century, L.A.’s ruling whites had refused to
integrate Chinese into their graveyards, and had charged the immigrants to be
buried with the indigents. Now their spirits stood side by side, taking no
notice of each other, proving that intolerance died with living skin.

A colder breeze caused me to
tremble, but it wasn’t just the temperature—that wind was tinged with something
else, the mental equivalent of the smell of rotting meat. Then I saw the
spirits being pushed aside by some greater mass. Something was flowing up out
of the ground of the Potter’s Field, something that was far blacker than the
night sky. Even the dead were distressed now: I saw mouths open in soundless
horror, hands upraised to ward off whatever it was that came.

What the fuck was I seeing? I
ran down possibilities: An unidentified murderer or rapist who’d been interred
in the Potter’s Field, an accumulation of the misery the poor had suffered
while alive, before the answer came: Surely this could only be Bal-sab. The
black cloud was exactly what Mongfind had described, and a sense of immense
hunger radiated from the heart of the thing. I turned to run, with no clear
direction except away from it. My legs moved as if in a dream, they pumped
furiously, my heart hammered, but my forward momentum was slow. Perhaps running
through ghosts dragged on me, or Bal-sab had the power to pull me towards him.

I knew he would be on me in
seconds; reason was replaced by the flight impulse. There was something mixed
with Bal-sab’s palpable hunger: he emanated glee at my panic, and I knew that
if he caught me, he would toy with me, torture me, linger over every shriek and
shiver, and it wouldn’t end with my physical death. My suffering would make the
pathetic souls of the Potter’s Field seem blessed by comparison.

This was why the Druids had
protected themselves before calling on him.

I could feel him closer behind
me. My feet caught on headstones and tiny hills in the grass; I stumbled, but
didn’t go down. If I fell, it would be my final act.

Then, among the shades before
me, I saw a woman who possessed more color than the rest. She faced me,
fearless; she wore a sort of frock dress, and held something in one hand. I
instinctively ran towards her, and she didn’t falter as she turned her
attention to my pursuer. She raised her hand, which I saw held a narrow rod,
and she pointed it at the Death that came for me.

There was no sound or explosion
of light, but the sensation of nightmarish pursuit vanished immediately. I knew
without question that she’d somehow driven Bal-sab back, with only a gesture. I
envied that confidence and power, regardless of the fact that she’d been dead
for at least a century.

I walked towards her, full of
questions, but when I opened my mouth I couldn’t seem to speak. Who are you?
How did you do that? Can you teach me? Are you a Druid?

She smiled as I approached, and
held out her hand…no, not her hand, but the length of wood in it.

The wand.

At first I thought she meant to
cast some sort of enchantment on me – a protection, perhaps – but then I
realized her true intent: She wanted me to take the wand. I held up my own
hand, looked at her tentatively, and she nodded. I reached out, wrapped my
fingers around the slender length of wood—And woke up.