The Cornerstone (11 page)

The view of the green tops of oaks and elms from the eastern window over the sink was pleasing enough to make up for any missing amenities. Tom was accustomed to living frugally, and when he was on the move, he carried his worldly belongings in a bedroll strapped to his bike. In the far corner, a queen-sized mattress and box spring took up a large chunk of the floor space. A card table with a folding chair against the opposite wall served as a desk. His backpack and bedroll were stashed underneath.

He pulled a Guinness from the fridge, kicked off his boots, and stretched out on the bed with the pillows bunched up behind him, determined to find out if anyone else had felt the tremors. He didn’t have a computer or television, but he’d recently acquired a smartphone as his means for staying connected to the outside world. He powered it on and thumbed through his Internet apps for local news. He didn’t really think he would see any mention of earthquakes and got exactly what he expected. Nothing in his email, either. He took a long gulp from the Guinness and set the bottle on the floor beside the mattress. In the local forums where he was a lurking presence, he also found nothing, except one lone topic posted about an hour ago.

Hotlanta trembler – u feel it?

Pulse pounding, Tom clicked on the link and read a brief but astonishing exchange between two forum members.

yeh thought it was an explosion

i werk at Allnite Pizza. glasses shook n everthin

awesome where r u

N Highland got 2 fotos

Where on North Highland? He clicked on the image icon and a grainy photo filled the tiny screen in his hand. A deep crack ran all the way across the street. He clicked and saved the image. There was a second photo, taken less close up so part of the sidewalk and the buildings beyond were visible. Tom caught his breath—clearly discernible in the background was the façade of the Janus Theatre.

Friday, same night
—
1:30 A.M.

“Ecce signum.”

Acknowledged.

“As master of the
buachloch
, I bid thee attend me.”

We are here. We have been waiting.

Bayard tipped the thermos just enough for a thin red line to trickle over the spiral sun signs cut into the stone a thousand years ago. The blood sank into the rock and was consumed at once, leaving no trace.

A young one, by the taste. The soul is both bitter and sweet. Give us the rest.

“All in good time.” Bayard let another trickle wet the top of the stone. “I have questions.” That didn’t begin to describe what was in his mind at that moment. He had much more than questions—call them misgivings, forebodings, suspicions, apprehensions. Things were not right and he wanted to know why.

We might answer. The voice was nectar-sweet laced with the prickle of venom. What could we offer that the great Christopher Marlowe, acclaimed playwright and master spy, does not already know?

“Why did the blade seek prey of its own choosing, without my knowledge or agreement?” He tried to keep the anger out of his voice, but wasn’t sure he succeeded.

The basement was utterly still, the tiles on which he lay cold as a glacier. Seconds turned to minutes…it was as if the stone had gone dead. Bayard allowed a thicker stream from the thermos to coat the surface.

“Was my question not stated clearly enough?” He might have the patience of that fool Job, but it would do him no good if the banshee refused to cooperate. She was bound to serve the master of the stone, to suspend his death and preserve his life, but she did not have to make it easy.

Aye, we heard thee. Silence followed.

She was becoming more recalcitrant lately, and that was the main query that he needed resolved. When she was in this mood, he would have to cajole, and if that failed, threaten. He bathed the stone again.

“I was told by the previous master of the
buachloch,
the great magister John Dee, that if I desired, I could speak with shades whose souls have been claimed by the lord of the underworld…is this indeed true?”

Screechy laughter filled the basement cavern and ricocheted off its hard planes and surfaces.

Who would ye wish to bespeak, yer worship? Great Lucifer himself? Or perhaps a lesser demon who will most certainly attempt to deceive ye.

Bayard waited for the laughter to subside. “I would bid Doctor John Dee himself appear before me.” A long silence ensued as he lay unmoving, head under the stairs, right arm angled in to reach the stone with the thermos spout. A faint scent of smoke came to his nostrils. Was she going to burn the building down around his ears? Not likely. Who else would she get to bring her offerings of blood and souls?

He poured the remainder of the thermos over the stone. “I command the
bain-sídhe
to bring me the shade of John Dee!”

Smoke filled his eyes and lungs and he jerked back, banging his head on the stair risers. Before he could even utter the most choice sixteenth-century oath he could remember, a loud crack shook the basement and popped his eardrums. On his hands and knees, Bayard stared into the gloom and then caught his breath. Stretching full across the basement floor, from one end to the other, was a foot-wide crack.

He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the painful bump swelling at the back of his skull. Smoke burned his eyes and coated his tongue. He coughed violently, as the building trembled around him. He half expected to see the cliché of fire and brimstone wafting up from the crack, but that wasn’t happening. Instead, the actual air in front of him split. Bayard rubbed his hand over his eyes, but the image held. A vertical line nearly as tall as the ceiling formed and hung right in front of him. Slowly it widened as if the fabric of reality that was the Janus Theater on a city street in a southern metropolis were slowly being ripped apart. Bayard began to shake—into the rift he saw only void, flat black with no light or shadow…only the soul-freezing cold of empty space.

But within the gradually widening rip in his universe, something was coalescing, a vague form materializing at the center of the gap. A man-shaped figure.

A second deafening boom shook the building. The support pylons groaned and debris fell from the ceiling—Bayard feared for a moment the theater might come down on top of him. The rift in space-time had disappeared, but a tall, bearded man stood where it had been. A tight black skullcap covered his head from his hairline down to the nape of his neck. His beard and mustache were white with streaks of gray, the manicured beard reaching halfway down his chest and tapering to a point. His heavy black scholar’s robes were cut in the style of a Cambridge don. Staring down the length of a long straight nose, his dark eyes raked the face of his summoner.

“Fie!” Bayard’s voice was a croak. His vocal cords had forgotten how to function.

“I am come, as I was bidden.” The voice sent icicles forming along the rafters.

Bayard took a step forward. “Is it really you?” The specter looked for all the world like the scholar and alchemist who’d somehow duped him into trading his immortal soul for the promise of suspended death. But he knew well that the minions of Hades were devious, and perhaps this was not the person he sought at all.

Shivering like a plague victim, Bayard faced his unwelcome patron. “D-do you remember me?”

“I ne’er thought to return to this realm,” said the icy voice. “What wouldst thou of me, sweet Marlowe, that I am untimely plucked out of oblivion?”

Bayard’s throat constricted. It
was
the man he knew, no doubt. How to voice his apprehensions without making it sound as if he’d lost all control over the banshee? In a flush of anger he’d bent her to his will, but hadn’t thought out how to articulate his queries if she could actually bring Dee to him. He’d seen unfathomable things since he’d given up his mortality, but some small corner of his once-human mind chattered in terror at this apparition from beyond the grave.

The sepulchral voice continued. “By human reckoning, ‘tis been nigh on four-hundred twenty years since we two met. The fact of thy continued life should be evidence enough that what I promised thee has come to pass. The Black Coach has not come for thee, yet thy visage is of a man of thirty.”

“Twenty-five.” Bayard found his voice. “Let’s be accurate.”

Stalactites of ice reached down from the ceiling as the specter responded. “Death’s Herald remains ensorcelled within the
buachloch
. Thou art still the master. What is thy question?”

Try as he might, Bayard could not stop his tongue from stammering. “Something is d-different…t-things are not right. Your knife—”

“This?” Dee held out his left hand and the pearl-handled athame appeared. “What of’t? I did give it into thy care for safekeeping. Wherefore question its power?”

“To…to what end did it choose a victim without me?”

“Mayhap it hears the mistress’s voice more clearly than thine.”

Bayard flushed. “I hear her right well enough! Always there if I listen, always demanding. You never warned me it would be like this!” He felt an angry tirade building and clapped his jaws shut.

The knife vanished from Dee’s outstretched palm, and Bayard felt its weight in his trousers pocket. He tried again. “Something isn’t right. She fights me, and…” He dreaded to say what was really in his mind. “There are omens. Signs…of something I don’t understand. Has your master changed his mind regarding our bargain?”

The cold voice frosted the stair rail. “Thou’rt bound fast to thy fate.”

Fury bubbled over. “I saw the red mist onstage—what was
that
supposed to mean? Just paying a friendly visit, to see if the play represents your lord’s interests to his liking?”

“I ken naught of that.”

“How can you not know?” Bayard was feeling beyond exasperated at this verbal fencing. “Don’t demons and spirits know everything that happens on the earth plane, once they cross over?”

The floor of the basement became an ice sheet. “Thou’rt a fool, if that is what ye believe.”

“Tell me the truth.” Bayard’s voice shook with fury. “Can she force me to turn control of the stone over to another? Because that’s what I think is going on here. There’s a plan being hatched behind my back, isn’t there? Mutiny? Maybe she’s looking for a new master, but you promised me the stone would be mine until I myself chose to give it up. I command you to tell me!”

Silence fell like a pall over the basement. Then, “Death’s Herald is not the only presence within the
buachloch.
Thou’rt a clever wag—think on’t for thy answer.”

For a split second, Bayard felt the airless vacuum of empty space, cold beyond measure, and despair so achingly pure he would have slit his own throat with Dee’s knife if he could have moved his limbs. Then he gasped in air and fell forward, hands touching the gaping crack across the floor. The shade of his tormentor was gone.

What the hell, the bastard had just told him to figure it out for himself? Bayard was beyond fury. He scrambled back down on his belly and put his hands on the stone.

“Radha Ó Braonáin. Attend me!” He was also beyond cajoling. As master of the cornerstone, he was taking charge and demanding a proper response.

This time, instead of the dead silver eyes his mind always saw when he touched the stone, a woman’s face of indeterminate age framed in iron gray hair wild as a storm over the heather took hold of his imagination. He’d not seen that face since the day he’d claimed the stone as its new master. He’d shed blood and smeared the stone with it while Dee spoke the words of power, sealing the transfer of ownership. The banshee had appeared immediately when summoned, a horrific presence swaddled in gray shrouds that billowed in an unseen wind. Behind her lurked another, a human figure, a woman. He’d had no interaction with the latter during the claiming ritual, but Dee had identified her for him.

“What are you scheming?” Bayard demanded, stretched out on the cold tiles of the Janus basement.

“Master Marlowe.” Her low voice was a counterpoint to the faint background scree of the banshee. “Well met, indeed.” Her laugh was guttural, all tricksy and not to be trusted, which he absolutely did not.

“I command you to reveal to me what is in your heart and mind.”

Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “I am yer obedient servant, so I am.”

In his mind’s eye, the witch reached out to him, drawing him into her skinny arms and pressing him with an iron grip against her boney breast. As she held him, she began to squeeze tighter, to the point of discomfort. His body lay on the floor, but he felt every pressure point of her deadly embrace, pulling him ever tighter. And then it wasn’t just her arms wrapped around him—an aura of malice enveloped them both, pressing against him from all sides. His bones began to crack as pain wracked his body, both on the floor and in the illusion playing out in his mind. She cackled and wrapped him in her hatred, slowly and deliberately crushing every bone in his body.

“I cannot slay thee,” she whispered, almost below hearing, “but I can indeed shew thee what is in my heart.”

Blood leaked from the eyes and ears and mouth of the body on the floor. Bayard screamed into the void. At last she released her hold and withdrew, sinking back into the stone. His mind was blank with pain, barely able to process the fact that his ribcage was crushed against his spine, his arms and legs pulverized to shards, his neck broken…not as a dream or hallucination, but real time, in his flesh and blood body.

He stared at the stone in white-hot agony, feeling his bones slowing finding their way back together, knitting with excruciating, glacial slowness, relentlessly mending the damage done. He saw the corpselike face of the banshee with its fish-silver eyes watching him writhe.

“I remind you,” he gasped, choking on the blood in his esophagus, “that you …must…conceal evidence of our little party…” His vision was tunneling, his consciousness shutting down.

At that moment thunder boomed outside, and a downpour like to the original Deluge drowned out all else. Before he passed out completely, Bayard had a brief mental image of the street outside the theater. Torrents of rain obscured a gigantic crack in the pavement that was gradually repairing itself.