The Brotherhood of the Wheel (38 page)

“I think Four Houses is like that,” Agnes said. “A sliver of memory, something vaguely recalled from a dim past, but not too clearly. I think the history of the place, of the name, is that foggy remembrance, but it is more, much more, Ava. It has apparently always been very difficult to find this town, and it doesn't seem to exist on any map. You come to Four Houses because it invites you in, guides you to it. We are all part of some larger design, some half-dreamed life we awake from and forget. It would take a lifetime to understand this place, and maybe even a lifetime wouldn't be enough.”

Agnes led her to a door that was just outside the kitchen. The door was on the back side of the main stairwell in the foyer, by the main entrance. It was locked with a deadbolt. Agnes slipped the bolt and unlocked the door. It opened into yawning, cool darkness, as deep and impenetrable as the space between galaxies. She tugged on a thin cord hanging from an unseen ceiling. There was a click, and then washed-out yellow light from a feeble bulb showed a ceiling that angled down to a cobblestoned floor, dusted with dirt. Agnes clutched the old wooden rail and began to descend slowly. Ava followed, ready to intercede if the older woman lost her footing.

“For a long time after the fires, Chasseur ruled the town through fear and intimidation. Many families fled in the dead of night; others were blackmailed into staying. Back then, people could still come and go from Four Houses of their own will, but in the fifties something changed. I honestly don't know what, but Chasseur became much more powerful, and he was able to seal the town, like a door that only he had the lock to.”

“How could he do that?” Ava asked as she descended the stair behind the old woman. “How the hell could he still be creeping around since the 1800s?”

“He controls death here now,” Agnes said. They had reached the basement. The old stone floor was uneven, and Ava saw their breaths drifting in the air, like silver gauze, in the dim light of the bare bulb. “He gifts those who serve him with eternal life while they are young and vital, to better act as his agents. I can only deduce that whatever entity, or force, grants him his immortality allows him to give a similar gift to others.”

“This is crazy,” Ava said, looking around the low-ceilinged room. “A psycho biker who's hundreds of years old? A town you can't find or leave?” There were huge, heavy wooden shelves against the walls. Several shelves held rows of canned and preserved fruits and jellies as well as vegetables. Other shelves held dark brown jugs with wide corks jammed into the stoppers. They looked like the moonshine jugs overall-wearing hillbillies in old cartoons would be clutching. Ava suspected that the jugs on the shelves contained some kind of high-octane rotgut. Other shelves held old books, scrapbooks, journals, boxes of letters, and even some very old, browned parchment rolled up like ancient scrolls. There were old photographs of anonymous families in antique silver frames, golden pocket watches, tiny bronzed baby shoes, a sheet of glass with rows of four-leaf clovers sealed behind it, an old, yellowed-bone powder horn, and a heavy brass compass and nautical sextant were among the treasures adorning the wide shelves. There was a pair of old, comfortable chairs sitting by the shelves of books and artifacts. A shaded floor lamp huddled conspiratorially between them. A worktable was set up under the stairwell with a single bench. Ava saw molds and dyes and some kind of press. There were loose bullets of many different sizes on the table, manuals and textbooks and boxes and flasks of chemicals, and empty shell casings as well. Stacked neatly on one side of the worktable were full boxes of bullets, dozens of them. A hunting rifle, a shotgun, what appeared to be an old military-style rifle with a curved magazine, and several handguns were hanging on hooks on the pegboard wall behind the worktable.

“I saved the best for last,” Agnes said. She walked toward the center of the room. There was a circular well, about four feet wide. Its base, made up of smooth rounded stones and crumbling mortar, stood about two and a half feet above the floor of the basement. A massive stone capstone sealed the well.

“What is this?” Ava asked as she and Agnes circled the well. There was a symbol carved deeply into the capstone; it was a circle with a crescent on either side. Both crescents faced away from the circle, points outward, the inner curve touching the edge of the circle.

“Watch this,” Agnes said. There was a pair of small cracks in the capstone, and Agnes plucked away a small, V-shaped chunk of the heavy, crumbling rock that intersected the two cracks. As soon as she lifted it away, there was an audible hiss, like the air leaking from a tire, and then a
whoosh
as a shaft of blinding white light spilled from the small opening.

“Oh, my God!” Ava shouted above the roar of the perfect, brilliant, all-encompassing energy. “What's happening?”

Agnes's face was painted in the light, and she looked beautiful, Ava thought, and terrifying all at once. Agnes closed her eyes for a moment and sighed, a look of serenity on her face. She opened her eyes and carefully placed the V-shaped piece of rock back in its place in the well's cap. Instantly, the light vanished, and silence filled the cramped basement.

“That,” Agnes said, “is power as old and terrible as what Chasseur traffics in. Couldn't you hear it singing?” Ava shook her head slowly, looking at Agnes and remembering how otherworldly, majestic, and terrible she had seemed only a few moments ago. “Perhaps it only sings for me,” Agnes said, “to paraphrase the Eliot poem. Come along, dear. You need more tea, clearly.”

Back upstairs and at the narrow kitchen table, Ava sipped more cold, sweet tea while Agnes brewed herself a proper hot cup.

“Just when I'm one hundred percent sure that none of this can get any weirder,” Ava said.

Agnes poured the hot water into her cup and lowered the small silver tea infuser into the water as she sat in the chair across from Ava. “Are you familiar with the concept of sympathetic magic, dear?” Agnes asked.

Ava shook her head. “No,” she said.

“It is the belief that by creating a proxy of a thing you can forge a link to the actual thing and have influence over it—like a voodoo doll, for example. I think this house, the other two houses that Chasseur burned down, represent proxies for … some … power. When Chasseur destroyed them, it decreased their influence and gave the power he serves greater influence.”

Agnes removed the infuser, carefully added two lumps of sugar, and poured a stream of cream from a small porcelain pitcher. She stirred the ingredients with a thin silver spoon. “The town's name is Four Houses, dear,” Agnes said. “Chasseur's is the fourth house.”

“If you know all this—” Ava began.

“I know nothing,” Agnes interrupted. “I suspect, I feel, I intuit, I deduce, but I don't know if any of what I just told you is true. It's simply what feels right, true, to me, Ava.”

“Okay, it sounds like a pretty good guess to me,” Ava said. “Why won't you help me get my friends away from the pervy fucking Scodes and this Chasseur asshole? I saw you the other night shooting those shadows. You are badass, Agnes! You used to be a spy. I can't do it by myself. I need your help. Please, Agnes!”

Agnes frowned and sipped her tea. “I used to work for Her Majesty's Government,” she said, and then paused. “It still is
Her
Majesty's Government, correct? That big-eared ponce isn't in charge now, is he?”

Ava grinned. “No, no, he's not.”

“Good,” she said. “As I was saying, I did a job—at first it was during the war, and then later it was because I loved my work. I'm no—oh, what's his name, Sylvester Schwarzenegger? I'm an old lady.”

“You saved me,” Ava said. “I just want to help them.”

“If he has them, I don't think you can, dear,” Agnes said, looking down into her tea. “I'm sorry.”

“Bullshit,” Ava said, standing. “You're not sorry, you're scared. I don't get it. You weren't scared the other night when those things were coming out of the dark straight at you. You shot them as calm as if you were baking cookies. You're avoiding telling me why you won't help me, and you're ashamed of it, too. I can see—I'm not a fucking infant.”

“At present, your language would tend to refute that statement,” Agnes said, a cold, hard edge slipping into her voice as she looked up at Ava.

“Fine!” Ava said. I'll do it my fucking self! I'm going to go to those houses and see if you're right, see if there is some kind of power there; maybe it has the guts to help me save them.” She grabbed her satchel off the back of the kitchen chair. “And, if not, then fuck it. I'm going to get Cole and Lexi, and if the Scodes or Chasseur or anyone else gets in my way I'm going to blow their sick, fucking heads off!” She removed the small gun Agnes had given her and examined it. “You want this back?” Agnes shook her head. Ava fumbled to open the cylinder. “And then I'm figuring out a way to get out of this fucking fishbowl of a town, since no one else here seems to give a fuck about being stuck here!” She examined the five rounds. Three of them had a red ring on them, and Ava recalled that Agnes had told her they were the fire-and-light-producing tracer bullets. She honestly had no idea what she was doing, but in the movies and on TV you always checked your gun like this before you went into the deep shit.

“Thanks for everything,” Ava said.

“Don't,” Agnes said. “This is not goodbye. I will expect you home before dark, young lady. Good luck, dear.” Ava looked at her hard, the anger vibrating in her eyes, and Agnes had to look back at her tea. Upstairs, Dennis was coughing, a dry, rasping sound. Agnes stood to attend to him. Ava strode out of the kitchen toward the front door. “Ava!” Agnes called after her, even as she was opening the front door. “Go to the house on this side of the road. Go there. I think you need to.” The only response was the slam of the front door. “I'm sorry,” Agnes said to the empty foyer as she began to ascend the stairs to see to Dennis and his unrelenting cough. “Damn it all to hell.”

*   *   *

Ava headed north, up the two-lane. Her anger began to fade a little. Agnes was taking care of her very sick husband, and she didn't want to leave him. Ava had clung pretty tight to the old woman in the few days since Agnes had rescued her. Ava and her mother had a brittle relationship at best. They could talk about reality TV shows and singing-and-dancing celebrity shows. They could talk shoes and clothing. Beyond that, they hadn't had a meaningful conversation about anything real in more than ten years. They playacted in public and at family events to present the “perfect mother-daughter combo,” but it was all hollow bullshit—an accessory for both of them to coordinate along with the event and the color of their eye shadow. In a few days' time, Agnes had given her more attention and seemed more interested in her—in
her
—than her mother ever had. Maybe this wasn't about Agnes being the one who was afraid.

“Shit,” Ava muttered to herself.

A half mile up, on the other side of the road, Ava saw one of the dilapidated mansions. It sat back from the road and was surrounded by a moat of a yard, filled with overgrown grass and weeds. A chain-link fence bearing a large N
O
T
RESPASSING
sign circled the front yard. A wide, long gravel drive stretched from a gate on the fence, next to the house, sloping down and ending at the edge of the two-lane. The house's façade was blackened from fire and festering with ragged holes from ages of neglect and decay.

Ava paused across the road and looked at the house. She imagined a well in the dark, silent basement—she could almost feel the cool stone, the crumbling mortar. Something chewed at her gut. It wasn't just Agnes's suggestion as Ava had walked out the door. In fact, Ava had planned to come to this house specifically because Agnes had suggested the other one farther up the road. But now her instincts, her gut, was telling her it wasn't for her—to move on, not to cross the road. Was it fear? What was happening in her? After a few moments of staring at the wooden corpse from across the road, Ava began walking again, headed toward the other house.

It took her another fifteen minutes of walking to reach the driveway of the other blackened, crumbling house. It was little more than a charred skeleton of rotting wood. Like the last time she had approached it, when she had been walking to Buddy's Roadhouse, Ava felt a pull to walk up the cobblestoned drive. Before, she had seen a man standing in the shadow of the tree line beyond the house, had felt eyes following her; this time she sensed no such presence, didn't see the man in the woods with the eyes that burned like cobalt. She reached the end of the drive at the top of the hill and cautiously crossed the main threshold, which no longer held a door. The sensation of remembrance, of homecoming and safety, filled her strongly, like the effects of a drug suddenly crashing down on you. The feelings had flirted with her when she last visited these ruins, but crossing the entry arch had somehow crystallized them in her.

The spring wind whipped and snapped off the hill, wandering brazenly through the collapsing walls and blackened timbers, making some loose tar paper and stripped Sheetrock covering shudder and snap. Ava found a room that may once have been a grand ballroom or dining hall. The wood floor was warped from rain and cold. Shafts of sun fell through the ragged roof, creating a silent forest of light and shadows. Ava walked slowly through the room, her hand in the pocket of her jean jacket, cradling the smooth metal of the gun, making sure each shadow was chained to an object. She turned a corner and found a cellar door resting at an angle on a single rusted hinge. She jerked on the handle of the door and the door made a sharp, snapping sound, tore free of the hinge, and crashed into a pile of rotten, splintered wood. Ava jumped back and nearly drew her gun. There was enough daylight for her to see the upper portion of the wooden stairs descending into pitch black. She wished she had a flashlight, but she didn't. She put her reading glasses in her satchel and pulled out a white Bic lighter. Ava snapped it on and cautiously took her first step on the creaky old stairs. The first one held her weight, and she carefully stepped onto the next one, the feeble flame of the lighter bouncing and shuddering with each step into the darkness.