“So you’re saying that Felix could faint if he got up on stage?”
“I was reading about the symptoms and they’re really odd. You start off feeling sick, then your heartbeat becomes very fast and erratic; your chest gets tight and you start to breathe too fast. The rapid breathing actually causes chemical changes inside you that make your hands and feet feel numb—that awful tingling when they’ve fallen asleep, you know?”
Janey nodded.
“The nausea then gets worse and is followed by headaches and cramps. And those are just the physical symptoms. Your brain also goes a bit mad. Everything begins to seem unreal. Apparently there can be the sensation of an out-of-body experience, or peculiar changes in the quality of light so that you lose your sense of depth and perspective. . . .”
“It sounds horrible,” Janey said. “Is that what happened to you?”
“No. I just fainted, straightway.”
“Lovely.”
“And if all of that isn’t bad enough,” Clare went on, “there’s also something called anticipatory anxiety that comes from just thinking about a panic attack. It apparently brings on a lot of the same symptoms as the actual attack. I saw a bit of that in Felix when he was telling me about it.”
Janey was quiet for a long moment.
“I wish he’d told me this when we used to argue about him touring with me,” she said.
“He was too scared to.”
“Scared? Of me?”
Clare nodded. “Of your laughing at him—as you did when I started telling you about this a few moments ago.”
“Well, I didn’t really mean to laugh. It’s just. . .”
“I know. It’s hard to imagine Felix being frightened of anything. But he didn’t want you to laugh at him and he also thought that you wouldn’t think as much of him if you knew about his fear. A male ego thing, I suppose, since stage fright isn’t something that many people take very seriously. It’s always an ‘Oh, get on up there; you’ll feel better before you know it’ sort of a thing, isn’t it?”
“I suppose.”
Janey was thinking about all the times she’d bullied people to get up and play on a stage and began to feel horrible about it.
“He thought you’d think he was like Ted Praed,” Clare said. “Remember him?”
Janey started to giggle at the thought of Ted and his quavery voice, but then she realized what she was doing.
“We weren’t very nice to him, were we?”
“Well, as I told Felix, Ted wasn’t exactly the nicest person himself to begin with.”
“But still. . . .”
“But still,” Clare agreed. “Think of all the jokes—and Felix was there to hear them all.”
“But he used to laugh, too.”
Clare nodded. “He laughed, but if you think back, he was never the one who started the jokes, or told any himself.”
“I could never think of Felix as being anything like Ted Praed—stage fright or no stage fright.”
“Neither can I,” Clare said. “But I did want to tell you so that you’d know why he feels the way he does, before you brought it up.”
“I won’t bring it up unless he does,” Janey said, “and then I’ll certainly not press him to get up on stage.”
“That’s good.”
They were very near the village now, just coming on the south side of Raginnis Hill.
“How did you get him to tell you?” Janey asked.
Clare smiled. “I don’t have the same things at stake as do the two of you, so I just browbeat it from him.”
Janey laughed.
“Trust you,” she said as she pulled the car up in front of Clare’s house. “Did you want to be let off here,” she added, “or are you coming on down to the house?”
“I’d like a chance to see the book,” Clare said. “Before it’s hidden away forever.”
Janey smiled. “We’ll read it together,” she said.
Taking her foot from the brake, she steered the car on down into the village proper.
The Bargain Is Over
Power without abuse loses its charm.
—PAUL VALÉRY
As their train crossed the Tamar River at Plymouth, John Madden sat up straighter in his seat. This was why he’d opted to return to the land of his birth by train, rather than by one of the more expedient methods of transportation that he could so easily have afforded.
The same clackety-clack rattle of the carriage’s wheels against the tracks that had helped put him into a half-waking, half-dreaming state now rang with the heartbeat of the land for him and set his pulse drumming to ancient rhythms. A music sang inside him. A native music—that of crowdy crawn and pibcorn. He felt more alert, more awake than he had all day, and he knew it was due to the enchantment of the venerable countryside through which they journeyed.
This was Arthur’s land.
Tintagel lay to the north, craggy and majestic; Arthur’s birthplace, standing now in ruins above the mysterious depths of Merlin’s cave. Dozmary Pool was on Bodmin Moor, where the Lady of the Lake had reclaimed Excalibur from Bedivere’s hand. There was an Arthur’s Chair, where the king was said to have sat and watched the sea. An Arthur’s Cave, where he and his knights still slept. . . . The Once and Future King had been a West Country man—Madden had always believed that and over the past few decades the work of modern archaeologists supported that claim.
But there were older mysteries than Arthur hidden in this countryside.
Lyonesse, the drowned land, once stood between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly. The Scillies, and St. Michael’s Mount near Penzance, were all that remained of that land today, though one could still hear the tolling of its bells beneath the sea.
And older still. . .
The land was riddled with Bronze Age stone circles, standing stones and other prehistoric relics.
There were the Merry Maidens near St. Buryans.
One tale held that the stones of its circle, and the two solitary menhir standing nearby, were dancers and musicians turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday. An older tale held that they were mermaids, caught by the sun one dawn and turned to stone like trolls, “merry maiden” being an old sailor’s name for the women of the sea.
And Gwennap Pit between Redruth and St. Day.
The Methodists claimed it was an irregular mining sink that John Wesley was instrumental in having remodeled into its present form in 1806, but folklore told another story: Of how when Mervin the harper of Tollvaddon cracked his skull, he played his harp until his fingers were worn to the bone. The harp god Larga showed pity on him then, removing his wound and transferring it to the earth. So those who preferred the folktales called that great pit “the hole in the harper’s head.”
And the Men-an-Tol near Morvah.
The largest tolmen in the British Isles, archaeologists believed that it could be all that remained of the entrance to an ancient barrow or tomb. But tradition had it that passage through the holed stone brought healing to those who were ill and that it marked not the entrance to a barrow, but to the Barrow World, the land of the muryan, or piskies.
But beyond legend, beyond stone relics, Madden knew that the land itself was enchanted.
He was not alone in this understanding. Crowley, a native son, had known it. Dylan Thomas had been drawn to this countryside, living in Newlyn and Mousehole, a poet rather than a magician, but then again, at one time there was no difference perceived between the two. Dennis Wheatley had lived in the West Country as well.
And others, modern as well as the old:
Colin Wilson, whose career Madden had been following since his remarkable theories were first aired in The Outsider, now lived in Gorran Haven where he continued to study the Mysteries with a scientist’s precise documentation. And Peter Goninan, the reclusive theurgist with whom Madden had crossed swords on occasion.
The land gave them birth, or drew them to it. Its hold ran deep, far beyond its simple pastoral
beauties or coastal splendors. It ran as profound as the ancient granite backbone of the land, as instinctive as the inexplicable urges that first drew a man or a woman into the Mysteries, so that there was no choice involved, only inevitability.
An untapped wealth remained in the heartbeat of this land and every time Madden returned, he wondered anew why he had ever left in the first place. The secular concerns that drove him to live in other parts of the world seemed insignificant whenever he again set foot here.
“Kernow,” he breathed.
Rollie Grant turned to him when he spoke. “What’s that?”
Madden smiled. “The ancient name of an ancient country—this country.”
“What, Cornwall?”
Madden nodded.
“I thought it was just like a state of the U.K.—you know, like Rhode Island or Connecticut.”
“It’s a state of mind,” Madden said, remaining deliberately oblique.
Grant looked past him out the window for a long moment, then shrugged and returned to the business papers he was reading. They didn’t speak again until they reached Penzance where Grant wanted to call a cab to take them from the train station to the hotel.
Madden laughed. “This isn’t New York,” he said. “We can walk.”
“Walk?”
“Yes, walk,” Madden said, still chuckling. “It’s not far.”
He glanced at a couple who were arguing a few carriages down from where they had disembarked, then hefted the small overnight case he’d brought and set off along the ocean front. Grant collected his own bags and hurried after him.
It was a fifteen-minute walk at Madden’s slow pace to where the Queen’s Hotel stood at the corner of Morrab Road and the Western Promenade Road, but it took them longer because Madden kept stopping along the way. Near Battery Rocks, he stood at the site of the old gun battery and looked out across the bay for a long time, breathing in the salt tang of the sea air, watching the waves spray against the rocks below, listening for the sound of bells. Across the road, he admired the St. Anthony Gardens and dawdled in front of the shop windows along the way, for all that most of them were closed and only carried tourist souvenirs anyway.
When they finally reached the Queen’s Hotel, Grant looked up at it and sighed.
“This is the best the town’s got?” he asked.
“No, but it’s charming, don’t you think?”
Grant smiled. “You’re really in your element here, aren’t you?”
“I’ve come home.”
“I thought it was your father—John Madden Sr.—who was born in Cornwall.”
“It was,” Madden lied. “And my grandfather as well—in the 1850s.” Another lie. “But it still feels like coming home.”
Grant nodded and gave the hotel another look. “Well, I did tell Lena to keep a low profile. Looks like she’s actually been listening to me for a change.”
“When you come to another country,” Madden said, “even one that in many ways is similar to your own, what’s the point of staying in a Holiday Inn?”
“Comfort. Security. You know what you’re getting.”
Madden shook his head. “What you’re speaking of is complacency, Rollie, and that will simply put you to sleep.” He led the way towards the door. “Shall we register?”
They went to their own rooms after registering, meeting a few minutes later in Madden’s when they had both had a chance to freshen up. There was a little confusion in reaching Lena, for she didn’t answer her door when they knocked, but a request to the desk had their call transferred to where she was, and soon they had joined her in Jim Gazo’s room. Madden settled into one of the chairs by the window, Grant in the other. Lena perched on the edge of the bed after giving her father a welcoming hug. Gazo stood by the door.
“Do you want me to go for a walk, Mr. Grant?” he asked.
Grant glanced at Madden who shook his head. As Gazo started to lean against the doorjamb, Madden indicated the head of the bed.
“You might as well be comfortable, Jim,” he said. “It is your room.”
Madden could read Gazo’s thoughts easily. Sure, it was his room, but Grant was paying for it. Gazo was just on the payroll and being in Madden’s company made him nervous, though if Gazo had been pressed he wouldn’t have been able to say why he felt that way.
Which was how it should be, Madden thought. The nervousness of sheep was something that he cultivated. It kept them alert—or at least as alert as sheep could be—and stopped them from having too many thoughts of their own because they were so busy trying to stay in Madden’s favour.
“Why don’t you tell us how things have gone?” Madden said to Lena.
She spoke for some time, obviously choosing her words carefully because she knew that Michael Bett was Madden’s protégé, but laying out all the facts. Madden was impressed with her delivery. He felt she was holding something back—something to do with this Felix Gavin—but it didn’t appear to have any bearing on his own immediate concerns, so he didn’t press her on it. But while she was tactful in how she spoke of Bett—making no judgments, but rather allowing Madden to make up his own mind from what she had to report—her father had no such reservations.
“He’s out of control,” Grant said when Lena was done.
“Perhaps,” Madden said.
“I’m sorry, John, but we’ve got to face the facts. He’s working on something for himself.”
Madden nodded slowly. “I expected this,” he said.
Only not so soon. He’d known all along that the reincarnated spirit of Crowley would eventually turn against him. Crowley had always been a leader, as witness his altercations with MacCregor Mathers and the like, but Madden had still expected to have some time before it was necessary to deal more firmly with Bett. He had thought to squeeze a few more years of service out of the man and then, depending on his loyalty, decide whether he would be discarded or rewarded.
He had half imagined Michael as a son. . . .
“What are we going to do about Michael?” Grant asked.
“That will require some thought,” Madden replied. “First we must discover exactly what it is that he is up to.”
“That’s simple,” Grant said. “He wants what you want. He wants whatever it is that Dunthorn hid from us.”
Madden nodded. “If that is true, then I’m afraid we will just have to deal with him before he has the chance to find it.”
But what a waste that would be. Michael had such potential.
His mistake, Madden realized, was in thinking of Michael as a kind of tabula rasa—as though he could create whatever he wanted from the blank slate of Michael’s spirit, when all along that spirit had already been formed and shaped and fired in an iron will of its own—not through merely one lifetime, but through many. It was easy to forget that he wasn’t teaching Michael; he was helping him remember.
The danger had been in allowing him to remember too much.
Madden wasn’t terribly worried about that, however. Mistakes were unfortunate, but if caught in time, they were only temporary setbacks. They could be corrected. Not always easily, not necessarily without regret, but they could be corrected.
And Madden had no compunction about seeing that it was done. None whatsoever.
His only loyalty had always been to himself.
2.
Sam Dennison was in a foul mood.
He was feeling punchy and red-eyed from a lack of sleep and wished, not for the first time that day, that he’d known Bett was going to call him this morning. He wouldn’t have had quite so many drinks the night before if he had. Hell, he wouldn’t have had any. He would’ve turned in early and been all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for this gig. As it was, his patience level was right on the edge and he had to catch himself from wanting to hit someone just to ease the tension.
It wasn’t so much the flight over, nor the wait for their train and the subsequent five-and-some-hour journey to the West C
ountry, as the traveling companions with whom he’d been thrown together on this job. The woman was bad enough.
Connie Hetherington was a good-looking woman—at least Dennison thought she was, somewhere under all that makeup and the teased peroxide hair. She had an hourglass figure that would do a college kid half her own age proud, and legs that just didn’t stop, but she carried herself like a tramp. Not to mention dressing to fit the role: skimpy skirt and high-heeled pumps, low-cut blouse and cheap fur jacket.
She was a looker, but Dennison was embarrassed to be in her company. And not just because of the way she dressed and came on to just about anything wearing trousers that got within talking distance of her. She chewed gum with her mouth open, chain-smoked, and hadn’t stopped whining since they’d left Kennedy Airport first thing that morning. Baby-sitting her was like being trapped in the opening frames of a porn flick—unending hours of inane conversation and double entendres that had him gritting his teeth by the time they finally arrived at Penzance Station.
Ted Grimes was the opposite end of the spectrum.
He was dressed in a tailored dark suit and didn’t look in the least bit rumpled from the hours of travel. His black hair and dark complexion placed the source of his genes in the Mediterranean, but Dennison didn’t figure him for a wise guy, never mind the way that Grimes moved with the ice-cool, easy cruising style of one of the Cerone Family’s enforcers. He didn’t have the size—coming in a half head under Dennison’s own six-one—but there was something of a shark about him all the same and Dennison could tell, the moment he laid eyes on the man, that if Grimes wasn’t a hitman, he’d still done his share of killing for hire.
He might not be connected, but he had the flat, dead eyes of the type, and Dennison figured that his own baby-sitting duties didn’t include looking after Grimes. They hadn’t exchanged more than two words since Dennison had collected him. Grimes had ignored Connie as well after giving her one cool look when they picked her up. He hadn’t even batted an eye when she pointed to his prosthetic hand and asked him, “Hey, you got a vibrator attachment to go with that thing?”