Serpent Mage

  “Back to the Earth. They have not the power to go anywhere else. Adonna built the Realm close to the Earth on the string of worlds. They can only return.”

  “The hauntings?” Kristine asked, looking between them, eyes wide.

  “I thought as much,” Michael said.

  “The stone I took is a direct route to Los Angeles,” Nikolai said. “Nobody explained why. It was certainly convenient. If I haven’t done myself a mischief...” He fell back on the couch pillow and closed his eyes. “Do you have aspirin?”

  Michael brought a bottle of aspirin and a glass of water. “Where did you arrive in Los Angeles?” he asked, stooping beside the couch and dropping two tablets into Nikolai’s hand.

  “Hollywood,” Nikolai said after swallowing the tablets and draining the glass. “A tall building on Sunset. Very bad shape, filthy. Worse than Ellis Island.”

  “Are you hungry?” Kristine asked. Nikolai regarded her as if she were a saint.

  “Very hungry,” he said.

  “Then let’s have breakfast.” She went into the kitchen. Nikolai smiled weakly at Michael.

  “She is very nice,” he said. “You have been well since your return?”

  “Healthy, getting stronger,” Michael said.

  Nikolai appraised him shrewdly. “Stronger, as in arm-strong, leg-strong?”

  “That, too,” Michael said.

  “I surprised you, no, by coming back? I’m not a great magician, not even of much concern to the Sidhe, yet I made it home. What year is it—truly, I mean? I look at the city and think perhaps centuries have passed.”

  “It’s 1990,” Michael said. “May the twelfth.”

  Combined grief and dismay crossed Nikolai’s face. “Not as bad as I expected. So many changes! I am Rip van Winkle now, true?”

  Michael nodded. “There doesn’t seem to be any link between time in the Realm and here,” he said. “I was gone for only a few months, yet five years passed on Earth. And you...”

  “It is good to see you, very good,” Nikolai interrupted. “My brain swims. I cannot think clearly now. Perhaps some food.”

  Michael spread his hands out beside Nikolai and frowned. The man’s aura was extremely weak, almost undetectable. The way the morning light from the front windows played on Nikolai’s eyes was also subtly wrong—the reflections seemed bland, lackluster.

  Nikolai got to his feet and wobbled, shaking his head. They joined Kristine in the kitchen and sat at the small table. She complimented Michael on the larder he had stocked. “You’re pretty self-sufficient. Most bachelors act as if their mommies were still around to do everything for them.”

  “Most women I know would have freaked out long before this,” Michael said.

  “‘Freaked out,’” Nikolai repeated, chewing on a slice of toast he had slathered with butter and marmalade. “That means go crazy, perhaps?”

  “How long has he been gone?” Kristine asked.

  “Sixty, maybe seventy years,” Michael said.

  “Sixty-seven years,” Nikolai said. “You would have made a fine dancer, Miss Pendeers.”

  “My legs and hips are too heavy,” she said.

  “Not at all. It is strength that is important, and grace. You have grace, and the strength—” He slowly lowered the last scrap of toast to the plate and paled, as if ill. “Oh, Michael, it is not good. It is not working.”

  Michael could not detect Nikolai’s aura. Instinctively, he reached out to hold Nikolai with both arms.

  “I am going back!” Nikolai bellowed, standing and rocking the table. He held his hands up to the ceiling and moaned, clutching at the air. “Please, not—“

  His last word ended in a high-pitched squeak. The table rocked on its pedestal, upsetting jars of jam and cups of coffee. Kristine screamed and backed against the sink. Michael had taken hold of Nikolai’s skin jerkin and felt the material squirm between his fingers as if alive.

  The table settled, and a cup rolled to the floor and shattered. Where the man had stood, the air was wrinkled by a heat mirage. That also faded. Nikolai was gone.

  Kristine began to cry. “Michael, what happened to him?” She wrapped her arms around herself, leaning backward over the sink.

  Michael stepped away from the table and stood with his arms hanging by his sides, clenching and unclenching his fists helplessly.

  “What happened?” she asked again, more quietly.

  “I think he’s back in the Realm,” Michael said. The eggs that she had begun frying now smoked in the iron skillet. He lifted the skillet from the stove and carried it carefully around her, lowered it into the sink and filled it with water. She watched him as if hypnotized.

  “Nobody’s joking, right?” she asked. “This is serious?”

  Michael nodded and took her hand, sitting her down in the chair he had occupied. He righted Nikolai’s chair and ran his hand over the seat as if to search for a trace of the vanished friend. Kristine sat in silence for several long minutes, not looking at him. Her breathing slowed, and she swallowed less often.

  “Do you still want to go on with it?” he asked.

  “The performance?” She shrugged with a sharp upward jerk of her shoulders. Her arms shook. “This is frightening. It’s...”

  Michael squeezed her hand and looked at her intently.

  “It’s not like anything I’ve experienced. I mean, that’s obvious, but... It’s incredible.” She was high from terror and excitement. “I want to go on with it. Oh, yes!”

  “Why?” Michael asked, his tone close to anger. “You saw what happened to Nikolai. It’s no game.”

  “What do you want me to say, then? That I’m going to give up? I don’t understand you.”

  “I’m angry at myself,” Michael said.

  “That’s your privilege,” Kristine said, drawing herself up. “I think I’m doing rather well.”

  Michael laughed and shook his head, then sat in Nikolai’s chair. “You think it’s an adventure,” he said.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Do you understand the danger?”

  “Is Nikolai dead?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Will someone try to kill me? Us?”

  “Very likely,” Michael said. “Or worse. The Sidhe can turn people into monsters, or they can lock them away in limbo.”

  Kristine’s face was bland, seemingly peaceful, as she considered. “When I was nineteen,” she said, “I thought about committing suicide. Everything seemed cut and dried. Art and music were fine, but could they explain anything? Could they tell me why I was alive or what the world was all about? I didn’t think so. And ever since, I’ve lived a compromise: I wouldn’t try to kill myself, because there was always a chance something would happen to explain everything.”

  Here was a depth to Kristine he hadn’t begun to reach. He could feel, without probing, a melancholy and rootlessness in her words that shook him.

  “When I listened to your story, I had a crazy hope that it was true and you weren’t just crazy or putting me on. Even if the world was a wall of paper and everything I had learned was wrong. Because it meant there was something behind everything, some purpose or greater...” She gestured with the fingers of her right hand. “Something. Life is such a mess most of the time, and everything that’s supposed to be important—love and work and all of it—can be so petty and senseless. Now I’ve seen a man just vanish, after confirming your story. And...” Tears on her cheeks. “God damn it,” she said, wiping them away hastily. “I’m so goddamn grateful, and scared, and excited. There is something else, and maybe I’ll be really important.”

  Michael smiled. “You have real courage,” he said.

  “Why do we have to perform the concerto?” she asked, expressing no doubts about the project but simply requesting a reason.

  “I wish I knew.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Kristine stayed in the Waltiri house only two nights. She then found a small studio apartment, splitting the rent wit
h an older geology student who spent most of her time on field trips in the Mojave Desert. No mention was made of Tommy; there seemed to have been a clean break. Nor did Kristine speak of Nikolai again; her panicked enthusiasm of that day had subsided.

  She kept up a feverish activity arranging for the concert, but whenever the possibility of something more came up—something more intimate—she backed away. A look came into her eyes. As tempted as he was, Michael did not probe. His own emotions seemed to have slipped into neutral. The times they met and discussed the performance, he felt more relaxed and open, unpressured. But as interested as they were in each other, their relationship did not advance. It was necessary for Kristine to reevaluate, and for Michael as well.

  Students from the university came to the Waltiri house and carted away truckloads of papers. For a week, Michael simply kept out of the way of a group of musicologists and librarians who spent the hours from eight in the morning to six at night cataloging, re-recording and safeguarding Waltiri’s masters. They worked mostly in the music room.

  Two weeks passed. He experienced no further visions or revelations, and there was nothing overtly unworldly in the news. Twice Michael inspected the Tippett Residential Hotel, and once, late at night, he revisited Clarkham’s house, but all was quiet.

  The quiet times would end soon.

  He began sleeping in the master bedroom in late May. Kristine’s occupation of the room had dispelled some of the groundless taboo Michael had felt about the marital bed of Arno and Golda. He found he slept more peacefully there; it was quieter even than the rest of the house. His sleeping awareness felt sharper in that room.

  On an overcast, drizzling night in early June, Michael dreamed of the reoccupation of Earth’s oceans by the Pelagal Sidhe.

  He floated just above the level of deep-ocean waves cresting at thirty and forty feet. On the horizon, a wickedly glorious sunset came to its climax, tipping each wave with red and gold. Columns of clouds advanced east from the squat red sun, each wearing a cap of fading glory and resting on a base of shaded slate-brown. Rain fell in sheets to the north. Michael could feel the freshness of the ocean wind and the cold of the sea spray; he could smell the salt and the fresh rain. He had never felt more alive, and yet he knew he was asleep and that his sensible body was nowhere near.

  The west darkened. The clouds lost their glow, became gray and dark brown with edges of green. He seemed to look up at the zenith, rotating his nonbody somehow, and sensed a discontinuity in a massive gray cloud high overhead. Water began to fall, not fresh rain but salty and brackish, copper-colored like the sea beyond Clarkham’s Xanadu. Michael thought of water breaking during birth. A radiance of night ate away the bottom of the cloud, and out of the blackness, an entire ocean fell, not in drops, but in solid columns dozens of yards wide. In the columns, Michael saw deep-sea-green male and female Sidhe ride the fall with webbed feet pointed down, arms held high over their heads and fingers meeting in a prayer gesture, eyes trained down, huge bubbles flowing around them from air trapped between the columns and the Earth sea below.

  The ocean seethed with foam for miles around, and the air filled with a noise beyond the capacity of ears to hear, even had he listened with ears. Waves surged outward from the fall in immense rolls.

  The sky closed and the cloud dissipated.

  Michael’s point of view shifted. He now looked down on the roiling Earth sea, its surface lime-green with breaking bubbles. Fog and salt mist hid the horizon on all sides.

  A dozen, then a hundred, a thousand, a myriad of the Sidhe breached the surface in graceful lines, ordered themselves in cylindrical ranks beneath the waves and swam from the site of the fall.

  Michael came awake abruptly and lay on the bed, his body cold as ice. After a few moments of hyloka, he warmed again.

  The mass migrations had begun.

  Kristine parked at a lot across from the studio’s tan and gray Gower Street gate. “Edgar’s very busy now. He’s doing sessions on the score for Lean’s new picture—a real break for him, you know. Lean has always used Maurice Jarre.”

  Michael nodded, more intent on examining the studio than the names. The bare tan outer walls seemed more appropriate for heavy industry than a dream factory.

  Kristine crossed the street and opened the glass door for him, pointing to a reception desk on the left side of a small sitting room. Behind the desk sat a woman in a blue and gray security uniform, appointment book and computer terminal before her. She smiled at Kristine.

  “Betty, this is Michael Perrin,” Kristine introduced. “Betty Folger. She keeps out riffraff like us most of the time, but...”

  “Mr. Moffat?” Betty asked, smiling. She referred to the screen, then to the book. “He’s logged you in for eleven fifteen. It’ll take you five minutes to get to recording studio 3B. If you start now, you’ll be right on time.” She held up a map, but Kristine waved it off.

  “I know the way,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Michael followed, impressed by the quiet and sense of order within the studio. Kristine led him down a corridor lined with offices and out of the building, across a small grassy park shaded with olive trees and then between two huge hangar-like sound stages. Beyond one rank of sound stages and before a second, nestled between backdrops imitating sky and rocks, was a quaint western town, quiet now except for a repair crew and a blue Ford pickup loaded with paint and supplies.

  “It’s magic, isn’t it?” Kristine said.

  Michael agreed. He had never visited a studio before, not even on the déclassé Universal tour. He knew the basics of motion picture production—location shooting, interior sets built within the sound stages, special effects and opticals, but the actuality was still magic.

  They skirted a shallow, dry concrete basin covering at least two acres, with a rough-hewn wooden pier jutting out to the middle. On the sound stage immediately behind the basin, a monumental blue sky and clouds had been painted. A line of painted dead palm trees hid the foundation of the sound stage.

  “3B is back around that way,” Kristine said. “We’re taking the long route. I wanted you to see the sets. No tour complete without them.”

  They entered a long, white two-story building across from the studio fire department, passed down yet another cool, darkened hall lined with framed photos of studio executives, composers, and movie sets, and stopped before a door marked “3B—Authorized Only.” A red light above the door was not glowing. Kristine knocked lightly on the door, and a dark bearded young man in a Black Easter T-shirt and jeans answered.

  “Frank, this is Michael Perrin—Frank Warden.”

  Warden shook Michael’s hand and returned to a bank of sound equipment covering an entire wall. 35mm spools unloaded their tan recording tape through a maze of guides and heads, while rows of lights blinked nearby and dB meters bounced their needles in reaction to sounds unheard. “Edgar’s listening to the playback now. Might as well go in. We’re about to dump a flighty saw man and do it all digital.” He gave them both a stern, meaningful look: rough session.

  “It’s a different world from Waltiri’s day,” Kristine commented softly as they took the right-hand door into the control room. Edgar Moffat—in his early fifties, balding, with a circlet of short-cut gray hair—sat in a leather swivel chair before a bank of sliding switches, verniers and three small inset computer screens. Compact earphones wrapped around his head played faint, eerie music. Through the glass beyond the controls, Michael saw two performers in a soundproofed recording studio, one clutching a violin and the other an elongated band of flexible steel. They were exchanging bows with each other and trying them out, in complete silence, on the band saw and the violin. Moffat removed his earphones and shook his head, then punched a switch. A squeal of vibrating metal invaded the control room.

  “Gordon, George, it’s still off. Take a break and get your shit together. We’ll want it right next time or we synthesize it. One more blow against live performers, right?”

  The musi
cians nodded glumly and set their instruments down.

  Moffat swiveled to face them with a broad smile. “Kristine, good to see you again. It’s been weeks since you last slummed from the heights of academe.”

  “It’s been busy. Very busy. Edgar, this is—“

  “Your new boyfriend. You dumped that Tommy bastard, right?”

  Kristine gave him a pained look. “This is Michael Perrin. He’s executor for the Waltiri estate.”

  Moffat’s expression intensified, and he stood up. “Sorry, but he wasn’t worthy of you, and you know it. Michael, glad to meet you. Kristine told me about the situation. I worked with Arno in the fifties and sixties. You might say he gave me my start. Tough old bird.” He raised a bushy white eyebrow as if hoping for a reaction.

  Michael calmly shook his hand.

  “Kristine says you’ve found 45.”

  “We’re going to perform it, if I have my way,” Kristine said proudly.

  “Christ, I always thought it was a myth. I talked with Steiner once—he said he was there, at the Pandall. He plugged his ears with cotton. Now I ask you, is that to be believed? Others weren’t so lucky, he said. Friedrich, Topsalin—where are they now? Topsalin sued, so the legend goes.”

  “It’s all true,” Michael said. “That’s what Arno told me.”

  “Well, Arno never talked about it to us. Not even to Previn, and he was really intent on making Previn a protégé. Previn resisted, unlike me, and look where he is, and look where I am.” He held out his hands, smiling ruefully. “Arguing with a man playing a blunted cross-cut saw.”

  “I brought a copy along,” Kristine said, unzipping her bag. She handed Moffat the manuscript. He motioned them to sit in worn but comfortable chairs crammed into a corner, then put on a pair of glasses and peered at the pages.

  “Mm,” he said on the third page. “I heard once that Schönberg liked this better than anything else Arno had done. Heard that from David Raksin. More legend. Arnold and Arno. Arnold kept accusing Arno of doing nothing but Hollywood.” He briefly assumed Schönberg’s Viennese accent. “‘45 is not Hollywoody. Finally!’ I can see why he said that. I wouldn’t dare put a score like this in front of a bunch of union musicians. This is difficult stuff. The piano... Jesus, how to mangle a good instrument. Brass bars on the strings, a microphone hook-up...hell, he was asking for an electric piano. Cosmic honky-tonk.” He spent several minutes leafing through the first third of the concerto, then closed it and sighed. “Absolutely insane. You can’t even call it discord. It’s wonderful. So who’ll perform it?”