The Glory Hand (32 page)

Jake.
She didn't regret that she'd come. Because despite the bad times they'd been through, she still loved him. She thought ahead to the moment she would see him. She wouldn't allow either of them to talk - hadn't there always been too much talk? - she would hold him, press him in her arms, and he would understand what she meant to say. He would thank her for coming.

Wouldn't he?

What if he were furious? What if he refused to leave with her? What if . . .?

Like the doubts buffeting her, a crosswind toyed with the car, threatening to hurl it off the road.

The fuel guage dipped towards empty. Damn the rental agency, she thought. No, it was her own fault. They had warned her, but she had been in too great a hurry to stop at the airport gas station before setting out on the desolate road. Even if she found her way to the cabin in this maze of wilderness, even if she could persuade Jake to leave with her, there might not be enough gas to make it back to Bangor.

A turnoff up ahead. A fence topped with barbed wire, a gate padlocked with a rusty chain. Her headlights picked up the letters burned into the wood sign above it:
Casmaran.
She hadn't seen that sign yesterday, which meant that tonight she had driven too far. Cursing, she skidded into a 'U' turn, her tires spraying mud.

The evergreens skewered what was left of the sun, leaving a bloodstain in the western sky. She switched on her lights reluctantly, an admission of defeat. It felt as though darkness had plunged her into hostile territory and it seemed that even her high beams were powerless to pierce it, as powerless as they were to probe the dense forest that rose up on both sides of the road. And with nightfall, the same wind that brought the sweet scent of wet pines, brought something else.

The music.
Hearing it through the open car window, what surprised Barbara wasn't the music's ferocity - she had expected that. What caught her off guard was the way it attracted her, enticed her. Its tempo seemed oddly in rhythm with the beating of her heart.

She rolled up the window to shut out the perfume of the pines, and the music, for fear that together they might seduce her, just as she was certain they had seduced Jake. But the music filtered through the glass, and it was growing louder. She flicked on the radio, hoping that country-and-western or punk rock would drown out the melody. But the forest music seemed to be coming over the radio too. She twisted the radio knob frantically: the haunting music was on every frequency, as if it had erased all other sound from the air.

Lightning seared the sky, and the music echoed louder, like thunder, so loud that it drowned out the engine. She hoped that the next flash of lightning would reveal the turnoff to Jake's cabin.

But the next blinding blue spark showed her something else.

At first she thought that the swarm soaring in the sky was a flock of crows. But they were too large, and'they were speeding towards her too rapidly for that. One of them struck the windshield, a blur too sudden to identify, its impact imprinting a jagged spiderweb in the glass. Then the others hurtled towards her, shadowy forms coming head-on, and the car shuddered as one by one, each thudded against the windshield and was gone before she could make it out through the riddled glass.

Gone?

No, they were circling, coming back at her again.

Her foot was already pressing the accelerator to the floor, but she forced her weight down on it as though to wring out a final burst of speed. The shadowy escort darted around the car, spiraling faster and faster, whipping the wind into a deafening howl. And swept up in the slipstream, the car screeched out of control, careened end over end towards the shoulder.

Barbara's body tensed as she waited for the Chevette to hurtle to earth in an explosion of splintered glass.

But something else was happening. Something she could neither have foreseen nor defended her self against. The tires of the Chevette were easing up from the pavement, axles groaning from the stress. The car was lifting off the

g.h.-h
ground. Barbara clutched the steering wheel more tightly, denying it, denying it just as she had denied the music in the forest.

Her eyes stared out of the window, unblinking: The car was skimming the treetops . . . She was looking down upon . . . cabins ... a dock ... a lake where in the next explosion of lightning the car was reflected like a dead moon.

And beyond, in a clearing in the depths of the forest, a bonfire raged.

The earth sped away as the car hurtled higher, forcing Barbara to shut her eyes in a sickening rush of vertigo. She was about to gag, when suddenly the nausea vanished.

The car had stopped its upward spiral in mid air and the doors rattled on their hinges. She could feel her mind sinking back into the dream: she was dangling by a noose in mid air, her feet kicking wildly, unable to touch the ground, unable, she knew, ever to touch the ground again.

Then with cruel abruptness, the law of gravity that had been so capriciously violated, was applied with rigor.
('Guilty,'
Otto had said, '
Guilty]'
) And there was no time left for Barbara to protest her innocence.

The car shot into the lake, a cold meteor. And after the crescendo of impact, the music rose in a requiem that cast a pall over the forest. As if a second, deeper night were falling, a night from which all who heard the melody would never awaken.

Chapter 29

The Burning Man. He rose out of the sea, cloaked in flames that devoured the oil slick spewing from the guded ship. Reaching out across space and time, the Burning Man had come, and Cassie floundered in the water as He neared, a fiery wave cresting to engulf her. But His touch was surprisingly gentle as He swept her out of the numbing cold. As gentle as her mother's. As gentle as a lover's . . .

Cassie strained for a glimpse of his face, but she was swallowed up in the watery darkness.
You must be dead. . . You must be dead to be so blind and cold and still.
But as slowly as sunrise, her eyes were opening to reveal the glow of a fire. The flames did nothing to warm her, but soaked her with sweat, so that she felt as though she were burning and drowning at the same time. And this time, the Burning Man knelt so close to her she could feel his breath.

'It's going to be okay, Cassie. You're safe now.'

The roar of the ocean in Cassie's ears softened to rain tapping on the roof of a cabin. Jake's cabin.

He sat down on the mattress where she lay. 'Iris . . .' she began, but it hurt to speak and she stumbled over the words. Rain sizzled on the logs in the fireplace, and smoke seeping from it into the room made her cough. At last she managed, 'Take . . . me . . . home.' Her voice was small and scared as she said it, but she no longer cared whether she sounded like a child in front of him. Just so he helped her.

'I found you in the clearing,' he said. 'I'm getting you on the next plane out of Bangor.' Before she could throw her arms around him for saying it, he stood up and walked over to the Moog. Cassie watched as he selected a tape and began threading it onto his Nagra, like a hunter loading a gun.

'What are you doing?'

He didn't answer. The storm had suddenly died, the drumming of raindrops reduced to a staccato beat, and he was listening to another sound, dimly perceptible beyond it. He tilted his head, as though the sound froze him in place, and Cassie strained to hear it too.

The music. The flames in the fireplace flared as if they were being fed by the sound. The music seemed to be fanning some flame inside Jake, too, she thought, something feverish and intense. She didn't like what it did to him, the way his muscles tensed, the way his eyes took on a haunted look.

'I've got to go . . .'He pulled a sweatshirt over his head.

'You said you were going to take me . . .'

'I will. But first I've got to find out where it comes from. I...'

'No!' Her voice was suddenly shrill: 'You won't come back. You . . .' She tried to pull herself up from the mattress, but the cramps in her stomach forced her back down again, onto the grimy sheets. 'Please . . .' She began to cry softly.

'Come on, Cassie I'll be back soon.' Cassie detected impatience beneath his smile. 'Look, I'm a devout coward. As soon as I see what I need to see - whatever it is - I'll run like hell.'

'Please!'

He kissed her on the forehead. 'Try to sleep. When you wake up, I'll get us both the hell out of here.' He grabbed his Nagra and headed out the door.

'You bastard!' she shouted after him. 'Bastard!'

When the door slammed shut behind him, the flames in the fireplace flickered, dying. The room edged into darkness, as though the storm had seeped through the plywood, permeating it with a widening stain. The walls groaned in a sudden gust of wind, and Cassie felt as if the cabin were slipping towards the lake, to sink into the depths, like the
Pandora.

The notes echoing through the trees filled Jake with a surge of energy, and he clawed his way through a thicket, scrambled over granite boulders, drawn to the source. Last night when he had set out on this same hunt, the music had eluded him, dissolving like a mist as he had advanced towards it. But tonight it was guiding him.

Summoning him.

The music hung heavy in the air, like incense, and the forest that had thwarted and threatened him suddenly seemed welcoming. Through the soles of his feet he could feel the soft earth throbbing to the rhythm, the branches of the pines overhead swaying to its cadence.

The wonder of it.

A glow filtered through the trees, as though the music were incandescent, shimmering the boughs. Sap oozed from the bark in the heat, a molten amber that filled the air with an intoxicating scent that drowned out the other smells, smells less familiar, less pleasant, drifting towards him.

One final ridge of black volcanic soil, where a wall of brambles grew, and the earth's crust rose steep. And then he stepped into the clearing.

After the darkness of the forest, the brilliance of the bonfire dazzled him. Its flames leapt twenty feet into the air, spewing galaxies of sparks towards the stars. In its aura, images were haloed with golden light - naked women drawing horsehair bows across the strings of instruments carved in ivory and ebony and sandalwood, blowing into animal-hide bagpipes, pounding on timbrels and blaring horns, the brass glinting in the firelight.

Their music . . . details which had eluded Jake from the distant vantage-point of his cabin stood out in bold relief: subtle cross-currents of harmony, odd syncopations, their feverish intensity, their passion, magnified. He did not bother to switch on his tape recorder. The music seemed too fragile, too ethereal, to capture on tape. Besides, there was no need. After tonight, he felt certain the music would be forever locked within him. He let the tape recorder slip to the ground, the tape unreeling in the dirt.

Cassie cried for help until she was hoarse, scratched and bit and lashed out with her fists, but there were too many of them, and they fought too fiercely. Abigail, Robin, and Iris had dragged her from Jake's cabin, forced her onto the back of a black stallion. And now that she had surrendered, too numb to resist any longer, now that she clung to his mane as they led her through the forest, she noticed they were no longer treating her like a prisoner. They looked up at her with a respect she couldn't fathom. As they led the horse into the clearing, it seemed they were escorting her like a victor, as though she had won some prize she did not understand.

* * *

You will see only what you want to see tonight,
the music told Jake.
You will hear only what you want to hear.

The yellow smoke that swirled around him smelled of incense, the holy scent of a cathedral, and the fire's arches of red and yellow and blue dazzled him like stained-glass windows, overwhelmed him with a glory that had been denied him in the vaultlike synagogues of his youth. The choir that stood at the shining altar . . . theirs wasn't the sad wailing of the old men dovening in temple, old men wailing Kaddish over the dead. Tonight, Jake felt as though he were hearing pure joy, the songs of angels, unashamed in their'nakedness. He could hear fragments of the words: '
Blessed . . . sanctified . . . Master of the Universe . . .'

The wonder of it.

He watched as Sarah took communion wafers and held them out to the girls in turn. Each closed her eyes as she took the wafer on her tongue. His mouth was dry, his lips sealed tightly shut, but he felt as if he could taste them, pure and blessed. The taste of salvation. He did not know whom they worshipped, only that he could hear a voice rising within:
Praise Him.

Jake was blind, but Cassie could see.
She smelled the sulfur fumes swirling around her, mixed with the stench of sweat, and the wafers made of excrement that the girls savored. There was no shining altar, only a block of obsidian, like a charred meteor where crude niches had been carved to hold the black candles. With a dagger, Sarah was inscribing a circle in the volcanic earth, and within the circle, at the initiates' feet, she scrawled a five-pointed star.

Sarah sprinkled salt on the earth before her, then beckoned with the dagger for a black ram to be led into the circle. With a quick slash of the blade, she slit its jugular vein, and its blood gushed out into the goblet she held beneath it. The ram fell to its knees, and she pressed the goblet to the wound until the brim overflowed with the hot red liquid.