Jack of Ravens (57 page)

And on Christmas Day 1965, the Libertarian came to town.

9

‘You don’t get it, Gabe. Standing up and fighting for what you believe in is the only way. Malcolm was right. If you turn the other cheek they’ll just keep slapping it.’ Marcy had changed more than all of them in the months they had been together. She’d developed a flintiness as a defence against the attacks that were coming from all quarters.

She trudged through the snow towards the convenience store in her boots and ragged jeans, a thrift-store coat pulled tight for warmth, annoyed at the childish frivolity of Church and Gabe who had stopped for a snowball fight.

‘If you get involved in violence and confrontation you’re just as bad as the people you’re opposing,’ Gabe protested. ‘There’s always a peaceful route. JFK could have bombed the Communists like all the hawks in the White House wanted, but he talked his way out of it and saved the world in the process.’

When she was trying to keep her anger inside, Marcy always held her head in a way that made her appear haughty. ‘This is a war, and you’re on one side or the other. There’s no room for sitting on the fence. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Sooner or later you’ve got to choose, Gabe.’

‘You know I’m with you.’ Gabe turned to Church. ‘What do you think?’

Marcy snorted. ‘There’s no point asking him. He’s already dropped out.’

Her comments were delivered off the cuff, but they stung Church. The hardest part was that he couldn’t argue with her because she was right.

While Gabe and Marcy went into the store to pick up supplies, Church watched the children playing in the park across the street and the gulls swooping across the Windy City’s skyline. It was a grey and white world of dirty snow and industrial smoke, the kids’ anoraks the only colour.

Every day his thoughts turned back to that day in Leary’s study and the revelation of why the world was the way it was. He hoped that soon it would fade and he could drift into a soporific acceptance. Marlowe must have known the truth all those years ago when he briefly broke off from his spy games to write
Doctor Faustus: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it
.

After ten minutes the cold began to get to him, and Gabe and Marcy were still not at the checkout. He ventured into the store, but they were nowhere to be found.

When he came back out into the cold, puzzled, he was met by a boy with red cheeks and a nose caked with dry snot. ‘Mister, your friends have gone over there.’ He pointed to a derelict tenement further down the street. The windows were broken and the walls were scarred with graffiti. Scrawled in big white letters were the words ‘Watch out for the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders’. The message was everywhere these days and it gave Church a kind of black satisfaction to know that he had set it in motion. When he turned back to ask for more information, the boy had already skipped away to rejoin his friends in the park.

The building smelled of damp and turps and long-dead fires. Church couldn’t understand how Gabe and Marcy had slipped past him even though his back had been turned, nor why they had come to such a desolate place. He called their names, but only echoes replied. He started to wonder if the boy had been playing a trick on him.

But on the top floor he came to a large space where all the walls had been knocked out, and there he saw two people sitting on chairs in the middle of the floor, their backs to him. It was Gabe and Marcy. Their heads rested against each other and they were unmoving. A pool of blood grew beneath them.

Church backed against the damp plaster, torn between the recognition of what was clearly a trap and the devastating shock of grief for his friends.

‘Is it really so bad? I’d have thought you’d have been used to it by now.’ The fruity voice rolled out from behind a pillar of bare brick and yellowing wallpaper. The Libertarian stepped out, dressed all in black, coat swirling around him like some silent-movie villain. A crescent of blood darkened the fabric covering his chest. He removed his sunglasses to wipe stray droplets off the lenses and fixed his lidless, red gaze on Church. ‘Surprised to see me again? I suppose you thought you could just slip back into the woodwork with all the other vermin.’

Church wished he had Llyrwyn and imagined himself hacking the Libertarian’s head from his body. He glanced at the dripping corpses of his friends, tongue-tied, trying to comprehend how things could slip away so quickly after months of inactivity.

‘Why did you kill them? There was no need.’ He hated himself for the pathetic tone he heard in his words.

‘There’s always a need for death. It reminds us why we’re alive.’ The Libertarian circled the bodies slowly.

Church followed, wanting yet not wanting to see Gabe and Marcy’s faces one last time. As they came into view, he was surprised and relieved to see that the two bodies were not his friends after all, but had been carefully selected to resemble them from the rear.

The Libertarian smiled as he watched realisation dawn on Church’s face. ‘It’s important to make an impact to drive a message home.’

‘You killed two people randomly to send me a message?’

‘You’ve been very good recently. No dashing around waving a sword trying to upset the apple cart. That’s very satisfying. And it’s how things should continue.’

‘I’ve walked away. There was no need for this.’

‘But you’re a contrary sort. I wouldn’t want you having second thoughts. See this as a subliminal affirmation. Picture the image you saw the moment you walked through that door. This
will
happen to your friends, wherever they are, if you start getting ideas above your station.’

‘You come anywhere near them or me again, and I’ll kill you.’

‘Wooh!’ The Libertarian flexed a mock-defiant fist.

Church backed towards the door.

‘You should be careful,’ the Libertarian continued. ‘We’re getting very close to the Source now. We’re getting stronger. Soon you can shine your little blue light all you want and it won’t do any good. You’ll be just like them.’ He nodded towards the two bodies.

Church marched out of the tenement and back to the apartment, where Gabe and Marcy were putting away the groceries. Church took Gabe to one side. ‘We need to split up. For a while.’

‘I thought you liked us travelling with you.’

‘I do.’

‘We’re like family, man.’

‘That’s why I’m doing this. There’s danger. I want you away from me until I’m sure it’s safe.’

‘We could go to San Francisco.’ Marcy was leaning in the doorway thoughtfully. ‘There’s a lot of energy out there, a lot of kids moving down … organising.’

‘All right,’ Gabe said. But you’ll join us, right? Every month we’ll put a small ad in the local paper, telling you where we are.’ He masked his sense of abandonment and went to pack his bag.

Tom was smoking in his room while Niamh lounged nearby, listening to music. Church told them about the Libertarian. ‘We need to hit the road, keep on the move.’

‘He’ll find you wherever you are,’ Tom said dismissively. ‘This is his world.’

It was Niamh who raised the most pertinent question. ‘If he could have found you at any time, why did he feel the need to come to you now, in this place?’

Church considered this and realised Niamh was right. The Libertarian would not have seen the need to send a message unless he perceived a threat. But what was it?

10

After Gabe and Marcy left, the atmosphere in the apartment was tense. Tom had very little patience with Church and showed it at every opportunity. Church wanted to head to New Orleans. Tom flatly refused to set foot in the south while civil rights were being resisted. Tom wanted to go to Mexico to check out the sacred mushrooms that Leary had investigated. Church wasn’t interested.

Finally Tom stormed out and disappeared for two days. When he returned he had an armful of cheaply produced magazines, all of them garishly illustrated. He tossed them at Church.

‘See what’s happening? Existence is organising. People are hearing the call, rising up. But if they’re going to make a difference they need a king to lead them.’

Church flicked through the magazines: articles on ley lines and Earth power, calls to arms against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, against the force for repression that was manifesting across the world, academic discussions of the occult, Wicca, Sufism, all sorts of Eastern spirituality.

‘Freedom equals Life. Love equals Life,’ Tom said. ‘Control equals Anti-Life. This is war. And you’re needed.’

‘You sound like one of those hippies out on the West Coast.’

‘When you want to destroy something you give it a name so you can mock it. Even the
filids
of the Celts knew that. But maybe these hippies are right.’

Church lay back on the cushion and closed his eyes. ‘I don’t want to argue, Tom,’ he said wearily.

‘Well, I do. You sank into depression after your woman died, and I can understand that – I’ve fought against it ever since I walked out of the Court of the Final Word. A broken heart’s a terrible thing, but you can’t stay sinking down in the black waters for ever—’

‘It’s not just Ruth. What I saw in the Court of the Final Word showed me that the human race is nothing—’

‘That’s what they want you to think.’

‘The Demiurge, the Void, whatever you want to call it – it rules this world already and pretty soon it’s going to control the Far Lands, too. It’s
beyond powerful, Tom. Surely you can see that. I’m one man. I can’t make a difference.’

‘One man or woman can change everything.’

‘More stupid hippie talk.’

Tom studied Church for a moment and then began to collect his magazines.

‘What are you doing?’ Church asked.

‘What you should be doing. I’ve been living in fear ever since I was dragged out of my life and into this whole miserable business. But I don’t have the luxury of being scared any more.’

‘You’re very clever, Tom, but you’re not going to make me feel guilty.’

‘The Blue Fire and everything it represents has been sleeping for a long, long time, since the Age of Reason came in at least. But now it’s being woken again. By ordinary people, Church – normal, everyday people filled with hope, who need help. Somewhere out there are new Brothers and Sisters of Dragons, who may well be the most powerful in generations. They need someone to shape them, before Veitch gets to them, or the Libertarian, or Salazar.’

‘How are you going to find them?’

‘That’s my problem now.’

Church listened to Tom in his room packing his haversack, and soon after the front door slammed. He’d left all his records for Niamh with a warm, affectionate note, but for Church there was only a silence that spoke volumes.

11

1966 was a year of running away. Church and Niamh travelled to New Orleans and then to Boston, and finally to Maine, as far away as possible from the conflict that was beginning to grip the rest of the nation.

In San Francisco the Grateful Dead staged the first light show in front of 10,000 people, and Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company performed at the Fillmore with Janis Joplin. Anti-Vietnam War protests brought tens of thousands onto the streets of New York City in March, and two months later another 10,000 marched on Washington DC.

At the same time the FBI was working hard to ensure that LSD had a bad press, and the Bureau launched a raid on Timothy Leary’s Millbrook Mansion, arresting him for possession of marijuana. Leary, in true showmanship style, refused to take it lying down. In September he held a press conference announcing the formation of a psychedelic religion, the League for Spiritual Discovery, where he called on the world to Turn on, tune in, drop out’.

Church found himself growing closer to Niamh by dint of shared time and experience; they were rarely apart. At first she was difficult to comprehend. Over meals she would tell him sad stories of the Golden Ones unable to find their way back to their mythic homeland where they would finally feel complete. She wove tales of adventure, magic and mystery that reached back long before humanity ascended. The gods in those stories were alien and unknowable, but gradually he came to understand Niamh as a woman who was a product of her culture, struggling to come to terms with her own mortality and emotions that had been repressed by her upbringing.

And as she listened intently to his own account of his childhood, and the dreams he had nurtured in his formative years, he accepted that she had fallen in love with him. The moment when he finally recognised her feelings for him was ironically banal, as she sat next to a beaten-up mono record player, listening to
Songs for Swingin’ Lovers
over and over again as she struggled and failed to comprehend his love for the music of Frank Sinatra. She felt more at home with the bands Tom had championed, the groundbreaking guitar music of the Yardbirds, the Beatles and the rest, and she was unaccountably happy when Church would sit and listen to them with her.

It was in the late autumn that everything changed. The trees were a mass of red and gold and the leaves rushed back and forth along the empty sidewalks of the small town in which they had rented a white clapperboard house. As they walked, deep in conversation, through the late-afternoon woodsmoke and wind hinting of coming snow, Church became aware of a man waiting under an oak tree ahead. His hair was fashionably long and he wore frayed denim and a battered military surplus jacket. It was only as they neared that Church realised it was Lugh, his golden skin resembling a honeyed Californian tan.