Greenmantle (16 page)

* * *

Two figures stood up from where they’d been sitting under the shadow of the gray-blue stone on Wold Hill. They looked southward.

“He’s coming back now,” Mally said.

Lewis nodded. “The dogs are right on his tail.”

“They won’t catch him—not this time.”

“But they will?” Lewis asked, making a question out of what could as easily have been a statement.

“Not if you don’t let them.”

“I’ve talked to Tommy, but I told you, he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Mally nodded. “You’d better go now, Lewis. I’ll see you later.”

He looked at her, trying to read the expression on that fox-thin face, but the brim of the hat made a deeper shadow of what the night already hid from him.

“See you then,” he said and hurried, as much as his old body could, out of the little glen and down to his cabin.

Mally watched him go, then turned to look at the southern end of the clearing. A man came running out from the trees—half-goat, half-man, then more stag than goat, then fully stag. Mally puckered her lips and whistled softly.

“Come, now,” she said.

The stag paused before soft-stepping its way across the grass to where she could lay her hand on its flank. She stroked its wet coat, murmuring all the while.

“It’s not belief that binds you here,” she said, “nor disbelief—no matter what all their scholars say. It’s just reason—all those straight lines that they lay on the land and in their minds….” The stag nuzzled her shoulder. “You’d better go now—they’re close. Too close.”

She slapped it on its rump and it sprang toward the stone. The shadows were thick there. It might have disappeared inside the stone, or changed its course at the last moment and dodged around it, but by the time its pursuers bounded into the glen, the stag was gone without leaving a sign. Mally met the hound-shaped shadows, arms akimbo.

“Too late again,” she said softly.

The lead shape moved forward and she doffed her hat, reaching inside. When she brought out her hand, it was full of light—tiny sticks of light, the size of small bones or twigs. The lead shape paused, then they all scattered as she flung the light in an arc toward them.

Where the sticks touched their shapes, they hissed and burned, but most came nowhere near their targets as the shapes fled. In moments the glen was empty again, except for Mally. She stuck her hat back on her head, tapped a pair of fingers against its brim in a salute to the standing stone, then slipped in among the trees on the side of the clearing that was closest to Lewis’s cabin.

* * *

The Toyota’s engine had developed a knocking noise by the time Earl turned onto the dirt road that led to his friend’s cottage on the southeast shore of Calabogie Lake. The car rattled along in the ruts, trees scraping its sides for at least half a mile, before the square glow of a lighted window appeared ahead of them. Earl steered the Toyota in beside a Dodge van and a Honda Civic, then cut the engine. Going around to the passenger’s side, he opened the door and hauled Howie to his feet.

“Oh, Jesus!” Howie cried.

“Take it easy, man. We’re here now.”

Supporting the smaller man, Earl helped him to the cottage door. An old Charlie Daniels LP was playing at full blast, so Earl didn’t bother knocking. Keeping one hand close to the weapon stuck in his belt, he opened the door, then half-carried Howie inside.

The cottage was almost all one room with a couple of doors leading off on the far side to smaller bedrooms and the can. Sitting on floor pillows and a beat-up couch were two men and three women. They all looked up when the door opened. The cottage was warm with a good-sized fire in the hearth. The smell of marijuana was strong in the air. One of the men reached over to the stereo and took the needle off the record, dragging it across the grooves.

“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded, coming to his feet.

Earl left Howie propped up against the door. “Steve,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”

The man who was standing peered closer, then a broad grin cut across his features. “Hey, hey, hey! Fercrissakes, Earl. What’re you doing up here?”

“Looking for a party—what do you think, Steve?”

Steve Hill nodded in appreciation—there wasn’t a better reason to be doing anything. He was a tall thin man, wearing a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt and cut-off jeans. He didn’t bother introducing his friends.

The other man looked like a biker—long black hair pulled back in a ponytail, a silver swastika hanging from one earlobe. He was wearing cowboy boots, greasy jeans, and a plain white T-shirt with the arms torn off. The three women seemed all of a kind—one blond, two brunettes, but all three were sleepy-eyed and stoned. One of the brunettes was only wearing a pair of bikini briefs. The other two women wore shorts and halters.

“You want a toke?” Steve asked, offering Earl a joint.

“Thanks.” Earl took a long drag, then held the joint up to Howie’s lips. “We had us a little…hunting accident,” he said as he handed the joint back. “You got a first-aid kit, man?”

“Hey, we got a fucking nurse here tonight.” He nodded to the women and the topless brunette looked up. “See what you can do for the man, Sherry.”

Unselfconsciously, Sherry stood up and approached Howie. She took in the amount of blood that his shirt had soaked up, then crooked her finger at him. “Let’s go to the can,” she said. “What’s your name, tiger?”

Even through his pain, Howie had trouble keeping his gaze from her breasts. He glanced at Earl.

“Go on,” Earl said. He waited until Sherry led Howie away, then looked back at Steve. “You got a phone in yet?”

Steve shook his head. “I come here to get
away
, man. What’s up?”

“I got some serious business that can’t wait.”

Steve glanced at the butt of the gun sticking up from the belt and thought for a long stoned moment about Howie’s shoulder. “You need reinforcements or something?” he asked finally.

“No. But I got to make a call to a certain man—the sooner the better, if you catch my drift.”

“Where’s the call going?”

“I’ll make it collect.”

“Hey, Lisa,” Earl said. The blonde looked up. “You want to take my friend here up to your place so he can use your phone?”

Lisa’s gaze ranged up from Earl’s shoes to his face. “Sure.”

“Wait a minute,” the other man said. “You’re with me toni—”

“Cool it, Max—okay?” Steve grinned at the bigger man and tossed him a small glass vial. “This is strictly a phone call, nothing else. Right, Earl?”

“You got it.”

Steve nodded. “So check out the nose-candy, Max. Talk to Pam here and Lisa’ll be back quicker ’n she can shake her ass.”

Lisa sauntered over to the door where she put on a jacket and a pair of leather sandals. “Have you got wheels?” she asked when Earl and Steve joined her outside.

“Not so’s you’d notice. We drove up in the Toyota—it’s on its last legs and it’s hot.”

“Steve?” Lisa asked.

Steve tossed her a set of car keys. “Take the Honda.” Then to Earl: “You bringing anything down on us?”

Earl shook his head.

“Anything in it for me? Can you use a couple more bodies?”

“I’ll know more after I make this call.”

Steve grinned. “All right. I owe you one anyway.”

“I know,” Earl said.

The smile faded on Steve’s face, but Earl didn’t notice. He’d already turned to follow Lisa to the car. Steve waited until the Honda’s taillights were out of sight before going back inside. Maybe he could get some information from the guy Earl had left behind. Sherry was coming out of the washroom as he stepped inside.

“How is he?” Steve asked.

“He’ll live. The bullet went through muscle tissue—missed the bone. He should go to the hospital for stitches, though.”

“I’ve got a needle and thread.”

“Gimme a break. That’s not the kind of—”

“No hospital, Sherry. Too many questions—understand?”

“Yeah. Sure.” She didn’t look happy about it.

“So you gonna sew him up?”

“Here, Sherry!” Max called and tossed her the glass vial of cocaine. “Maybe this’ll steady your nerves.” He and Pam laughed.

Steve took her arm and steered her back to the washroom. “I’ll give you a hand,” he said.

* * *

After leaving Mally by the stone, Lewis made his way home where he sat in the dark for a long while before finally lighting a lamp. He went to the bookshelves and walked slowly around, reading the titles. Yeats’
Trembling of the Veil
stood alongside theosophist classics like Annie Besant’s
The Ancient Wisdom
and Mundy’s
I See Sunrise
. There were books by Madame Blavatsky, Raymond Buckland, Israel Regardie, Robert Graves, T.C. Lethbridge, Eliphas Levi, W.B. Crow and Charles Williams. There were some contemporary writers represented as well, such as Colin Wilson and E.S. Howes.

The subjects ranged from Fiji firewalkers to the Order of the Golden Dawn, Freemasonry to the Rosicrucians, Jung to spiritualism. All of the mysteries were represented, but it was up to the reader to discover which out of those thousands of volumes held a kernel of truth, and which were out-and-out quackeries.

Lewis stopped in front of the shelf that held Aleister Crowley’s books. He thought of the stag and its mystery and tried to compare its wonder with Crowley’s poor showing. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” That was the fundamental assertion of the self-confessed Beast. He had borrowed it by way of Rabelais and William Blake, but given it a new resonance, a Nietzschean morality. Only the strong should survive. Wasn’t this nature’s way? The natural way?

Lewis sighed. He took down a volume by Ackerly Perkin and brought it over to the table where he sat down, the book lying unopened before him.

Perkin had been a contemporary of Crowley’s—the original owner, in fact, of much of this library. It was he who had first caused a shadow to fall on the stag, on the piping, on the rites that bound the two to New Wolding.

“Man needs illusion,” this particular volume of Perkin’s journals opened with, “for without his illusions, man is nothing. The strength of your illusions is dependent upon the strength of your will. The stronger your will, the more you will rule, for other men will always flock to him whose illusions are the most potent.”

It was a circumspect approach to Crowley’s assertions, but where the Beast had gone on to the magical uses of sex and the use of drugs like mescaline, Perkin withdrew from the world, seeking his illusions in microcosm, rather than the world at large. What he found merely intensified his belief in the need for illusion.

When he became aware of the piping and the stone, of the rites and the dancing and what they were calling to, he used what influence he had to evoke his own illusions to counteract the one he believed the villagers upheld. For while he would allow all men their illusions, he would not allow those illusions to manifest themselves in this world. Such a thing should not be possible. If, however, such a thing
was
somehow possible, then he was determined that the only illusions that would be manifested would be his own.

When Lewis tried to find out why Perkin would have done this, the only reason the journals gave him was that Perkin did what he did simply because he could. Because he believed it all to be illusion.

“Which is more illusory?” he asked in one entry. “Illusions built upon belief, or those built with reasoned disbelief?” Around this point the journals ended and Perkin returned to the wandering life he’d known before moving to Lanark County, leaving the library in his old house.

Mally had first appeared around this time and it was she who had helped a younger Lewis transfer all those books to his cabin in New Wolding. “The dark man won’t be back for them,” she told Lewis. “He’s found his god in war now. He thinks it to be a reasoned exercise, or the greatest of all illusions, but whichever he decides on, he won’t be back.”

Lewis often wished that he had never read any of Perkin’s books, especially those that Perkin had written himself. Before, Lewis had been a simple man, content with what he had. But when Vera died and Edmond fled, the books were all he had left to sustain him. They filled the emptiness inside him with questions until sometimes he no longer wanted the answers.

He longed then to return to the simple belief that he’d once shared with the other villagers, but it was far too late for that. Just as it was too late for the village to survive. There were only four of them under the age of twenty now. The old folk had died; the younger ones gone out into the outside world seeking…illusions, he supposed.

When he had asked his own son why he was leaving, Edmond had replied, “There’s nothing for me here.” Lewis hadn’t had an answer for that then. He didn’t have one now.

Lewis flipped through the pages of the book, then let it close with a thump. If the hounds that chased the stag were Perkin’s creations, if they were his illusions, then why were they still here, fifty years after Perkin had left?