The Darkening Dream (43 page)

Today, he and Sarah had worked together not just as teacher and student but as collaborators. She didn’t have his depth of knowledge or experience but she did possess a certain creative unorthodoxy. Not that he was entirely comfortable with her attempts to introduce ideas from other disciplines. And when she tried a synergistic technique borrowed from a book on witchcraft, he’d drawn the line.

Still, it was Sarah’s idea to use
Binah
, the aspect of God representing the ‘womb of wisdom,’ to allow the ward’s energies to literally give birth to the realm of the celestial temple. He in turn had used his more analytical male conceptualizations to bind this power into the silver
mezuzot
they each wore about their necks. That way, when the need arose, either of them should be able to open or close the gateway. If they succeeded in luring the vampire and his demon-loving disciple into the esoteric realm, it would be essential to make sure they stayed there.

The Williams twins arrived just before sunset.

“Our father finally came home an hour ago,” Anne said as Joseph took their coats.

“How’s Emily?” Sarah asked.

“Worse.”

Sam said, “Dad brought her a new puppy from Aunt Edna’s but she didn’t even seem to notice.”

Alex helped him drag in a steamer trunk filled with a frightening array of crosses, sharpened sticks, and firearms.

Joseph was not comforted.

About an hour after sunset, the house shuddered as if hit by a round of heavy artillery. Joseph felt the strike to his wards like a bullet to the gut. Around him, the temple-like structure rippled and wavered. A huge hole had been punched through the esoteric roof and entire construct threatened to unravel.

Joseph lurched toward the sitting room, where the children were gathered.

He’d failed to consider what havoc a warlock’s spell might wreak on his personal defenses. By the time he stumbled in, his ward was in shambles and the pain even more intense.

There were only three teenagers in the room. Alex carried a long stake in one hand and a pistol in the other.

“Where’s Sam?” Joseph said.

Anne pointed. “And he’s always saying my bladder’s a pea—”

The plaster ceiling shattered and a creature of nightmare fell into the room. A shadowy raptor plunging from the sky, black wings buffeted away all hope.

Joseph’s hands moved in prayer, but the thing was far too fast. Alex’s stake and gun were thrown out the window in a gout of shattered glass. The shadow blurred and solidified behind Sarah.

Joseph had never seen a vampire before and he looked not unlike a Goya caricature — a man’s shape with a demon’s face. But this cartoon held Sarah’s arms behind her with one long taloned hand. The other gripped her hair, pulling back her head to expose her throat.

“One twitch, one word,
magi
, and your daughter’s blood will flow like a river!”

No one moved.

“You will open the passage to the Horn. Now.”

Joseph’s insides twisted. Not again! Why was
Hashem
always testing him and his children?

“The gateway is in the cellar,” a new voice said from above.

Joseph glanced up to see a pair of suited legs dangling from the hole in the ceiling. Pastor Parris awkwardly lowered himself down. His hair had thinned and whitened since Joseph saw him last.

Parris backed out of the room. The vampire dragged Sarah after.

Joseph and the others had no choice but to follow. His debilitated wards hammered his head like a migraine headache. The vampire was so fast, there was little Joseph could do before he’d kill her. He’d have to hope that if he opened the passage, the creature would take the bait and enter. But what incentive did the monster have to leave Sarah unharmed?

The pastor led them to the back of the cellar, where the roots of the great sycamore protruded from the earthen wall. He lit a candle and its green flame filled the chamber with putrid light.

“Here,” the ungodly man announced.

“Open the passage,” the vampire said, “or I stop playing nice.”

“Let her go and I’ll do it,” Joseph said.

Open the passage to the Horn
!

If he’d thought his headache bad before, now it felt as though a dagger plunged into his eye. He fell to his knees. The fading strength of his wards allowed him to resist compulsion, but any other action was impossible. He—

Someone stepped into the swamp-colored light. Sam placed the barrel of his cowboy pistol to Pastor Parris’ skull and thumbed back the hammer.

“Let Sarah go or the warlock loses his head,” the boy said.

That’s when things began to move fast.

Joseph felt the gateway to the celestial temple open and give way. Sarah — she’d triggered the portal.

The very fabric of reality cracked and shattered like glass. The cellar wall burst outward. Earth, brick, and wood fell away into a gaping hole — an empty place of only orange sky and chalky clouds.

A howling wind siphoned through the room. The teenagers and their two captors were drawn into a vortex of dirt, stone, and roots. Sarah and Sam tumbled away into nothingness, taking Joseph’s heart with them.

The pastor managed to catch hold of a root, but his weight and the sucking wind snapped the branch and he was lost, buffeted about like a newspaper caught in a storm.

The vampire let out a shriek and transformed, his huge wings struggling against the gale. For a moment it looked as if he might prevail, then a chunk of masonry tore free and knocked him too into the void.

Joseph knelt. Emotional and psychic punishment rendered him only marginally capable of thought. Earth pelted him from behind, drawn into the vortex. For a moment he could still distinguish the tiny dots of his daughter and her friend, then even these were lost in the distance.

Alex and Anne crouched nearby, struggling against the howling gale.

“Anne?” Alex screamed. “She’d go in after you.”

Sarah’s best friend looked terrified. “You would have to say that.” She reached her hand out to Alex.

“The Holy of Holies!” Joseph screamed. “Try to get the monster into the Holy of Holies.”

Alex pulled Anne into the maelstrom and they pinwheeled away, Anne’s scream lost in the roar of the wind.

Joseph wanted to plunge after but felt the shape of the power coursing through him. He was the lever holding the dike open. If he went in, the passage would close forever, Sarah would be lost forever.

He settled himself on the dirt and began to pray.

Fifty-Two:

Grand Entrance

Unknown Locale, Thursday, November 20, 1913

S
ARAH LAY ON HER BACK,
half propped up. Someone must have rolled up a towel and shoved it under her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, but the glow of the sun penetrated her eyelids.

“Sarah, wake up.” A hand shook her.

The last thing she remembered was the cellar. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes—

And shut them against the blinding glare. She opened her eyes again, but only a crack. Sam knelt beside her, dressed in an odd brown robe with a metallic breastplate.

“Where’d you get that crazy costume?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It came with a helmet, sword, and spear — hey,
your
clothes have changed too. This whole place is really weird.”

Sarah sat up. Sam’s outfit looked handmade — and heavy. She glanced around. No sign of the vampire. Or anyone else.

They were on a sandy hilltop. Scruffy vegetation and a few scattered olive trees sprouted from the dusty earth. In front of them the slope dropped off, revealing a strange sky, intensely bright and sunset orange, but everywhere, not just in the west. Even stranger, the sun itself was nowhere to be seen. Queer clouds churned like milk poured into a draining sink, and huge white birds circled overhead. The orange glow rendered everything in this world more intense.

She hoped Alex, Anne, and her father were safe back in Salem. Opening the gateway had been the right choice. The vampire wouldn’t have let her — or anyone else — live. She knew that now, should have known it the first time she saw the merciless pits of his eyes.

She placed a hand against her breast and felt the
mezuzah
beneath the thin fabric. Her father felt far away, but Sarah could sense the bond between the pair of silver boxes.

When she’d fallen out of the cellar, she’d been dressed in a heavy wool skirt and jacket. Now she wore only a thin linen gown of some sort. Much too short, only to mid-thigh, and her pale legs and feet lay bare on the sandy soil. The creamy fabric was sheer, and she wore nothing at all underneath. She crossed her legs and tugged at the gown. Sand rasped against her naked buttocks.

“Sorry, I didn’t see anything.” Sam turned red. “Well, not much of anything.”

“Who dressed me?” Sarah asked.

“I’ve no idea. I woke up only a few minutes before you. I think we might be dreaming.”

“This isn’t a dream,” she said. “I should know. We fell through a hole between worlds.”

She stood up, trying to keep her hands over crucial spots in the translucent fabric. Her legs wobbled, but Sam caught her forearm.

A hot dry breeze hit her face. The sand burned under her bare soles. She recognized her garment as a tunic, the kind of thing you saw sometimes in ancient Greek art. The wind blew right through it, flattening the material against her naked form. If there had been a viable way to die peacefully of embarrassment, she’d have taken it.

“You’re wearing something on your back,” Sam said.

Could it get worse? She twisted around and saw a feathery pink mass, some kind of… plumage? She tried to touch it, but the awkward location and her reluctance to contort in the tiny gown made it impossible.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Um, I think they’re wings. They make you look like an angel — not that you don’t always.”

Sarah twisted again. She felt the subtle drag on her shoulders.

“What holds them on?”

Sam stepped closer, touched them gently, then moved around behind her.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, but I don’t think anything does. Your dress has little slits, and the wings grow right out of your shoulder blades. Let me tug on them, see if they come off.”

Her heart beat fast. She felt him tugging at her arm — her other arm, the mysterious winged one growing out of her back.

“So now I’m an angel?”

He shrugged. “What am I, then? Julius Caesar?”

“No, your outfit isn’t Roman.”

He picked up his helmet and weapons. The helm looked bronze, with engraved writing.

“Let me see that,” Sarah said.

He handed it over. The writing was Hebrew, or maybe Aramaic, archaic regardless. Some kind of dedication to God, and to King David and King Solomon. She gave it back.

She inched forward to the edge of the cliff, and Sam followed. Their hill descended steeply into a large valley. Below the churning clouds and swirling birds, on another hill, stood an enormous temple. She squinted, wishing her eyes were better, or her glasses weren’t lost in some inter-dimensional limbo.

The temple was rectangular, ringed by outer walls that grew from the hill like extensions of the cliffside. Inside the outmost perimeter was another set of walls, far thicker, with four huge gates. Within that, separated by a great courtyard, was a square-shaped arrangement of stone buildings. These structures ringed a central courtyard from which thick black smoke wound its way skyward. A single building near the middle glinted bright, like a single gold tooth lording over its enamel neighbors.

“Sam?” Sarah said. “Back in the cellar, you appeared out of nowhere and grabbed the pastor.”

“I was leaving the bathroom when I felt the explosion, and before I got to you I heard the pastor say, ‘in the cellar,’ so I ran ahead and hid down there.”

“Quick thinking. Thanks.” His face could have outshone the golden building.

A series of horn blasts shattered the quiet. Short notes first, then a long mournful tone. The note faded and hung in the air long after the sound itself was gone.

Sarah shivered. “Papa’s magic worked. That’s the
Beit HaMikdash
, King Solomon’s Temple.”