His wife appeared in the door to the bedroom and he smiled at her.
“It’s time, isn’t it?” Eleanor said.
“Time indeed,” Watkins replied.
The fear and doubt that could find no purchase in his mind lay creased in the worry lines of her features like the oil and grime encrusted in a mechanic’s hands.
“I’ll be back,” Watkins told her. “I’ll never forsake you. I’ll be young again, Eleanor.” He paused, then added the lie, “We’ll be young again. Young forever.”
Before she could speak, he swallowed the bitter liquid. He set the glass down on the table and lay back as the first shiver of pain lanced through him. Eleanor crossed quickly to the bed and sat beside him.
Ignoring the pain, he crossed his arms upon his chest and closed his eyes, concentrating on the defenses his body would require while his spirit was straying.
When he stopped breathing, Eleanor gave a small gasp. She reached out to touch him, but some invisible force repelled her hand. It pushed her fingers forcefully away just before she could touch him. Small sparks flickered and the smell of anise briefly stung the air.
It was just as he said it would be, she thought, looking down at her husband’s composed features. God help them....
She rose and went to the window, seeing only the dark bulk of the strange building across the street. She could see no magic aura, no mystic energy, no sign of her husband.
God help them, she thought again, then realized what she’d been thinking.
They had strayed too far from God’s garden to expect His aid now.
“Just come back,” she whispered.
She straightened her back then, determined to allow herself no more fear. Albert was depending on her to be strong. There was nothing she could do anyway.
Except wait.
The utter freedom of leaving his body behind almost seduced Watkins into simply letting himself go. He found himself surrounded by darkness except for a small glowing spark that seemed to lie far before him, as though it was the light at the end of a tunnel. That light woke a yearning in him that was almost impossible to ignore. It took all his will to turn from it and send his spirit into Tamson House.
With the guardian gone, it was child’s play to enter the building. He raced through the matrices formed by its walls and hallways, exulting in the power that leapt and crackled in welcome to his presence. He drew it to himself and could feel himself begin to swell with its potency.
Take care, take care, he warned himself.
Too much, too soon, and he wouldn’t be able to assimilate it before it consumed him. And that wasn’t the only danger. He had not been alone in watching the guardian depart. Other presences clamored for the power that the guardian had left behind unprotected.
He wasn’t alone, but he was first.
In the same way that he’d protected his body, he now sealed off the House, using the immense power that crackled so intensely through every particle of his being to shape a new Otherworld to house the building and all within it—an Otherworld sealed away from the greedy attentions of his rivals. He then seeded that world with a protector of his own making—the ghost of a primeval memory—so that if any spirit should manage to slip through his seals, they would still be dealt with.
Only then did he allow himself to drift away, high onto a mountaintop in his newly created world. There he floated in the dark night air, a pentacle shape, arms and legs outstretched, the five points of his body each touching the inner perimeter of yet another safeguard—a third circle of power to protect him.
He had time now to gather the full power of the House at his leisure—slowly, surely, without risk to himself. When that was done, he would turn his attention to finding a suitable victim to take the place of the sacrifice he had made of his own body.
Human sacrifice had always been the ultimate cost of such magicking, but it was a fair price, he thought, for the rewards one could gain. Especially considering how he would soon regain all that he had lost with the subsequent death of that proxy he had still to choose.
For all his knowledge and self-acquired insight, he was unaware of how much, in such a minute fraction of time, the power had already corrupted him. He thought only of the alchemy he worked, the transformation he was undergoing.
As he congratulated himself on his success, he also deceived himself into believing that everything that existed revolved solely around him. Had he been with one of those spiritual teachers he had forsaken, they would surely have argued the point with him, little realizing that, in this pocket world he had created—neatly joined to all those myriad layers of time and place that encompassed the Otherworld—he was not so far from the mark.
The Hooded Man
The Forest—place of testing and unknown peril
—Weirdin disc; Secondary: Second Rank, 29.a
Blow out the lights. Listen.
You can hear the willow
dancing.
—Ingrid Karklins
1
Something wasn’t right.
Tim Gavin lifted his head, cocking it like a cat who’d just heard something but couldn’t quite decide what, if anything, it was that he’d heard. He’d just turned twenty on the weekend, but he looked younger—a thin ascetic in jeans and an old “Radio Clash” T-shirt, his dyed blond hair cut so short that it was only a bristle upon his scalp.
He’d been trimming the profusion of vines that had lately threatened to swallow the minotaur statue by which he knelt. Laying aside his clippers, he looked around the garden. There wasn’t much he could see from his vantage point. Trees enclosed the small glade he was working in, cutting off his view of the rest of the garden. It wasn’t simply those trees that stopped him from seeing the whole of the property.
Although it only took up some three and a half acres—enclosed on all four sides by the various rooms and corridors of Tamson House—the garden had always given him the impression of having a much larger acreage. So much larger that Tim sometimes got the curious notion that it wasn’t so much a garden in the middle of a house the size of a city block as a door to some... other place. What kind of other place he didn’t know. An ancient forest, maybe. A place familiar, but strange.
But then the House itself was like that: strange.
He’d come for an evening’s visit a few years ago with some older friends, then ended up moving in when he decided that he really wanted to make a go of writing plays. He’d thrived in the House’s odd environment, with its tangled maze of rooms and hallways and its unique sense of place, and especially liked the ever-changing cast of characters that could be found wandering through its corridors at any time of the day and night.
It was sort of like a commune, he supposed, but nothing like the image he used to carry in his head of burned-out hippie Socialists living on the fringes of society. While the House definitely catered to an alternate kind of life-style, the people here didn’t drift indolently through a dope-haze. Rather, they seemed to have a sense of purpose to their existence. Most of them were creative people—musicians, artists, writers—using the House as a stepping-stone, a place where they could find the time to create, to get a start on their careers, without having to scrabble about trying to make a living at the same time.
There was also what Tim referred to as the Mondo Weird Contingent—the ones that Blue called the Pagan Party, as though they were some kind of political movement, which in a way, Tim supposed, they were. He just didn’t have as much patience for them as Blue did. They were the kind of people who believed everything that Charles Fort or Whitley Streiber had to say, or were into old religions—pagans, Wicca, those kind of folks. Still, he could see what drew them here as well. The House had the feeling of a wizard’s sanctum about it and there was definitely a sense of mystery—give it a capital “M”—locked in its walls.
And running loose in its garden.
He’d never met the woman who owned the building. She was always abroad, it seemed—for some
reason, the people in the know usually had a funny look in their eyes when they said that—but he certainly appreciated what she was doing for the people she let stay here. He’d never felt so inspired... so ready to work... as he had when he moved in. But oddly, his priorities shifted the longer he stayed.
He still worked on his plays, yet now—as had happened with some of the other long-term residents like Blue, or Ginny, or Esmeralda—he found himself devoting more and more of his time to the House’s maintenance. And not resenting those hours stolen from his writing, either. Which was weird, particularly since what he’d taken upon himself was the responsibility for the garden’s upkeep and he’d never liked gardening in the first place. Still, day after day, he’d be out here trimming and weeding and the like, while at night he read up on various gardening techniques in the magazines and books that Ginny located for him in the House’s huge library.
And he was enjoying himself; feeling as much of a sense of purpose doing this kind of work as he did when he was writing.
He’d developed a whole Tao for what he did—approaching the garden with a kind of Zen creativity that utilized what was at hand, each thing in its place, sculpting, editing, adding, but always retaining the garden’s original flavor. Because what the place didn’t need was a look out of some Better Homes and Gardens glossy spread. He just saw to it that the overgrown flowerbeds were brought back to their original beauty, the hedges were clipped where they were supposed to be, allowed to run rampant where that seemed more appropriate—that kind of thing. And then there were parts of the garden—what he thought of as the Wild Walks—where he didn’t trim a twig. There he just sort of tiptoed about, soaking up the ambience of the place, not even wanting to change—to tame—a single solitary leaf.
“You would have liked Fred,” Blue told him once.
Fred was before Tim’s time, but from all Tim had heard of the old man’s devotion to his work, he could only agree. Apparently it was Fred who, back in the fifties, had set himself the monumental task of making some sense of the jungled garden that had been let run wild for thirty years. When Tim saw what had been happening after just a few years of neglect since Fred’s death, he couldn’t begin to imagine where Fred had even started.
But start he had; started, and maintained, and finally left a legacy of which any woman or man would be proud.
Sometimes Tim could almost feel—which brought him dangerously close to the Mondo Weird Contingent, he knew, but what can you do?—that Fred was still here in the garden with him: guiding his hands, or speaking softly in his ear.
It brought Tim a sense of, not so much peace, as... companionship.
What he heard—sensed—now wasn’t that familiar spirit. It wasn’t the garden’s memories of the old master’s hands at work, but something else that had stopped Tim in the middle of his task. An anomaly: something not quite sinister, but not quite right either; something that, well, yes, it might belong in a place like this—but more to its Wild Walks than to the cultivated areas.
When the feeling wouldn’t go away, Tim finally stood up. He brushed the dirt from the knees of his jeans and started walking—no precise destination in mind, just letting himself wander, letting his subconscious become a dowsing rod focused on that oddness he felt and so steer him in its general vicinity.
When he reached the center of the garden, where an ancient oak overhung the fountain, he stopped dead in his tracks and wished he’d never come. He wanted to look away, but couldn’t tear his gaze from the sight.
Hanging there, from the lowest boughs of the tree, were three naked children. Three dead children. Two boys and a girl—the oldest couldn’t have been older than eight or nine.
They were thin-limbed, with knobby joints. Their skin was a kind of leaf-green, their hair the dark brown of freshly turned sod. Their dead eyes bulged froglike from their sockets. Wrapped around their necks were vines and it was from these that the children dangled like awful fruit from the boughs of the oak.
It took Tim all of a handful of seconds to see this, to have the image frozen on his retinas, burned there for all time. He saw the green skin, but it didn’t register as being alien or wrong. All he really saw were three dead children. Children that someone had killed, hanging them up here to be found by the first unfortunate person who happened to come by.
And then he fled.
Back through the garden, now grown mysterious with a more malevolent mystery than it had ever held for him before.
Back to the House, where, stumbling and out of breath, he found Ohn Kenstaran sitting on the stone bench by the door that led into the Silkwater Kitchen.
He was playing a zither. He was bent over the instrument, long brown hair falling forward to hide his features, one hand—a healthy hand that had a harper’s dexterity and skill in every joint and muscle—plucking a melody that belled and rang forth as though it came from an instrument three times the zither’s size. His other hand was a withered claw, incapable of finger movement, hidden from sight in a thin brown leather glove. He used it to steady the zither on his lap.
He looked up at Tim’s sudden approach, his features creasing with worry when he saw the state Tim was in.
“There’s... they... I saw...” Tim began, making a jumble of the words as he tried to get them out.
“Easy,” Ohn said.
He set the zither aside and motioned Tim to sit beside him.
“Take a breath,” he said, his good right hand resting on Tim’s shoulder. “Hold it in—that’s it. Steady, steady. Now let it out, but slowly. And again.”
Ohn’s imperturbable presence helped Tim stabilize the thunder of his heartbeat as much as the slow breathing did.
“There’s these kids,” Tim said when he finally stopped hyperventilating. “Out by the fountain. Somebody’s...”
The image burned into his retinas flashed in his mind’s eye, bringing back a rush of panic.
“You’d better show me,” Ohn said.
The older man led the way back to the center of the garden, back to where the oak’s branches overhung the fountain, Tim following reluctantly on his heels. When they reached the knoll on which the oak stood, there were no children dangling from its boughs.
Tim stared, the memory of what he’d seen still too fresh, too strong to be forgotten. He turned to Ohn.
“Oh, man. They were just hanging there. Three dead kids....”
“This is an old forest,” Ohn told him. “Haunted with ghosts. Perhaps what you saw was some memory called up from the tangle of its slow dreams.”
“Forest?” Tim said. “What’re you...”
His voice trailed off. He thought about what he called the Wild Walks, about Fred’s ghost and how the garden always seemed so much bigger than it actually was, like it was a finger of some primordial forest, thrusting through space and time to lay an echo of its mystery on its garden, never mind that it was tucked away in the middle of a modern city.
“Great,” he said. “Now I’ve joined the Contingent.”
It was Ohn’s turn to look confused.
“The what?” he asked.
“The Mondo—never mind.”
Tim didn’t know Ohn well, but what little he knew of him, he liked. He’d been told that Ohn used to play the harp, but then he had this accident with his hand—Tim didn’t know the details—and he’d refused to touch one since. He’d had a different name back then, too, Ginny had said one day when Tim asked her about the harper. Ginny seemed to know everything about everybody, for all that she spent ninety-nine percent of her time moled away in the library. She told him that Ohn’s name used to be Taran—that was what his present surname, Kenstaran, meant, “once named Taran”—but he’d gone off with Esmeralda one day to some kind of naming ceremony and come back with the new name.
Tim remembered Ohn as a pronounced depressive back then, always moping around and not big on talking to anybody. That had all changed when he came back. Maybe the new name had cheered him up, or maybe he’d brou
ght back some good humor along with the new name; whichever. Ohn, for all that he was a good head these days, was still a prime candidate for the Contingent and Tim didn’t feel like insulting the guy.
He looked back up to where he’d seen the dead children hanging earlier.
A memory called up from the forest’s dreams, was it?
Sure. Why not. Better that then it having been real.
But as he and Ohn headed back to the House, he had to ask himself, if it hadn’t been real, then how come it still felt so damned real? The memory of it was a whole lot clearer than stuff he knew for sure had happened. And how come the whole garden felt different now, like it was all a part of the Wild Walks? Was he going to keep seeing weird things? Maybe spaceships next? Or Elvis, sitting on one of the stone benches, crooning “Love Me Tender”?
I don’t need this, he thought.
He stayed out of the garden for the rest of the day. Sitting in the nook of the Silkwater Kitchen, he drank endless cups of tea and just stared out the window at the garden until night finally fell and the familiar shapes of the garden’s trees and shrubberies blurred into one large smudge of shadow.
But if he couldn’t see—from the lit kitchen out into the darkened garden—he could still be seen. Hidden in a thicket of hawthorn where it nested up against a stand of silver birches just a lawn’s length from the House, three children watched him; children with eyes too old for their age and too feral to be human, muffling giggles with their knobby green knuckles pressed up against their mouths.
2
There were maybe thirty-five, forty people staying in Tamson house that summer—not a full house, but more than enough so that there was always someone interesting to hang out with if you wanted the company. They were as good a bunch as had ever been guests in the place: old friends, new friends; a few strangers who’d probably become friends because that was the kind of place the House was—it just drew the right kind of people to it.
But Blue didn’t want company tonight.