Spiritwalk (19 page)

Eagle
, she signed.

The Eagle. Release from bondage.

The old shaman smiled as his name came from her hands.

You must go
,
manitou
, he signed.
Your own world calls you
.

Esmeralda nodded. But she wanted to show her respect for him.
I have a friend
, she signed quickly,
in need of his true name
.
Will you help him find it
?

Migizi’s smile broadened.
I would be honored
.

His palms returned to the skin of his water drum and the sound of its voice rumbled through the ghostly glade. As Esmeralda took Emma’s hand once more, a great rushing sound filled her ears, hard on the heels of Migizi’s drumming. The place of mist tattered like smoke. There was a moment of vertigo, and then they were standing in a wooded clearing in the Outer World, drawn to the place where Emma’s body awaited the return of her spirit.

They saw Blue holding Emma’s body, Judy Kitt with a shotgun in her hands, and two strangers. For one long moment they held to their spirit forms; then Esmeralda’s flesh returned to cloak her spirit while Emma’s fled into her body. She stirred in Blue’s arms, the symbols on her skin fading, evaporating away, into the late-night air, until they were gone.

“Jesus on a Harley!” Ernie Collins said softly. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

8

It was just after dawn when Esmeralda returned to the knoll in the center of Tamson House’s gardens. The bird chorus was in full song all around her, the sun’s light just rising over the gables of the east side of the house.

“
Gaoth an lar
,” a voice said softly. Wind of the West. “You’ve returned from your journey.”

Esmeralda smiled at the crippled bard. “Journeys never end,” she said. “You must know that.”

“Yet your feet are still.”

Winds rose to tousle her hair and his. She touched a hand to her chest.

“Only when the heart is still is the journey over,” she said. “And even then...”

“There are rivers to cross.”

Esmeralda smiled. The old Celts also believed that one crossed a great river when they died. So much seemed different in the world only to be proved that it was the same thing, merely wearing an unfamiliar shape.

“I met a man last night,” she said, “who knows your true name. Will you come with me to hear it from his lips?”

“And then?”

Esmeralda looked beyond the garden to where she could see the roofline of the House through the garden’s trees. “Then we’ll return to this place.” She smiled. “It can be as much an inspiration as a refuge, you know.”

She could already hear the music that his one hand would call forth from the synthesizer that Blue was going to pick up this morning. But the bard would need his true name to make that music. And when she had eased the winter of his heart? There would be others for her to help. She and Emma. There would always be others.

Rising, she offered him her hand. By the time the young playwright Tim Gavin had made his way to the garden’s knoll, to call them in for a celebratory breakfast, there was only a stirring of leaves to show where they’d been.

GHOSTWOOD

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object be looked upon,
That object he became....

—Walt Whitman

There are wildflowers in the woods,
there are owls who wake and guard the forest paths.

—Susan Musgrave,
The Charcoal Burners

Lead Into Gold

The Cave—
entrance to the Otherworld

—Weirdin disc; Secondary: Second Rank, 36.a

To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

—Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy

It was time to die.

Albert Watkins looked out the window of the house that he and his wife Eleanor were renting on Clemow Avenue. Across the street, stretching either way to the end of the block, was the enormous bulk of Tamson House. The facade it presented to the world of being a long row of town houses meant no more to him than it did to any long-term resident of the neighborhood. Everyone knew that it was all just one building; for them, the secret its facade hid was merely the odd turn of mind of the man who’d originally commissioned the building and had then overseen its curious construction. But Watkins knew the true secret its facade hid:

Tamson House was a place of power. It was a door to Otherworlds and magic breathed in its walls, mystery slept restlessly in its enclosed garden. In a world where the ancient mystery traditions had been mostly relegated to bad plot devices in Hollywood films or New Age fantasies in equally painful novels, Tamson House presented irrefutable proof that more lay beyond the scope of the shallow world than most men and women could perceive with their sleeping senses.

To comprehend the power that lay in the House’s walls—the potent forces of energy matriced in the ley lines that collected under its foundations as though the building were some ancient stonework, rather than a curious, overly large structure—required a mind that demanded more of itself and its body than the autopilot thought processes and reactions with which most of humanity confronted the world. There was no one in this neighborhood awake enough to appreciate its potency. There were even people living in its maze of hallways and rooms who hadn’t the first inkling of what lay underfoot, of what hummed within its walls and was stored in its perfect puzzle of stonework, glass and wood.

But Watkins knew. Reading the works of a namesake, Alfred Watkins—the name was close enough to his own to make no difference, to Watkins’s way of thinking—he’d first begun to understand the complexity of the earth lines that gave the sacred sites of the world their potency. From ley lines and their mystic crossroads he’d delved into the lore that accompanied them.

Common knowledge and quaint folktales had led him into a study of ever more arcane texts and finally, through perseverance—“The superior man heaps up small things in order to achieve something high and great,” the
I Ching
said—through studies and interviews with various spiritual teachers—Native American shaman, Eastern swami, cabbalists, Western mystics—but mostly through the sheer audacity of his own wit, he learned how the world worked. He learned of the otherworldly powers that lay waiting in this world’s hidden places. He learned how to tap into their potency and so quicken his own resources. And ultimately, he learned how he could have it all.

It required one’s own death, but repaid that death a hundredfold with eternity—but not in some nebulous afterworld. What use was that? No, the dividend that sacrifice repaid was a return to this world and the promise that one could be whatever one wanted, have whatever one wanted.

Forever.

Watkins was nearing the end of his natural life. The past years of his searching had taken on a fine edge of desperation. He knew the power was here in this world, waiting for the man or woman brave—or foolhardy—enough to take it up, and he had found its hiding places. A stonework in the Hebrides, another in Brittany. A mountaintop shrine in Tibet, another in the Andes. A jungle pool in Sumatra, a river in Oregon. But they were all too well protected. Their guardians were fierce and dangerous beyond compare for they swallowed not the bodies, but the souls of those who came with plunder in their heart, rather than respect.

And then Watkins found Tamson House. It, too, had a guardian, but his guardianship was eroding. He was new to his task—a novice, and an untutored one as well. His mind was still too enwrapped in the human concerns of the life he had led before he’d acquired his responsibility. The guardian of Tamson House had yet to learn how to focus on the task at hand to the exclusion of all else.

Watkins had no such difficulty. He had but one thing on his mind. When he looked at the night-silhouetted skyline of the building, he saw neither its darkened gables nor the shadowed outline of its roof, but the sparking glow of its power, a shimmering aura of power just waiting to be harvested that glimmered and spun webs of fairy-gold light from roof ridge to chimney, cornice to gutter.

Tonight it would all be his.

It was growing late. Dawn would soon be washing the eastern sky with its soft pastel light. But he knew that before the first pale ghosts of the sun’s light could streak the sky, he would be dead, his spirit embracing the mystery that was Tamson House.

He had been monitoring the guardian’s increasing distress with heightened eagerness. The whys of that distress were immaterial to Watkins’s concerns. What interested him was that the guardian was attempting to reach out from the confines of his guardianship—reaching, stretching himself thin, thinner—until tonight his hold on the House was so vague that Watkins knew that any moment now the guardian would lose his grip on the House and be gone.

Where he would go was also irrelevant to Watkins. All that was important was that for a time—perhaps it would only be a moment—the House would be unprotected. A moment was all that Watkins would need to slip in and take control.

He turned from the window and went to sit on the edge of the bed, lifting a glass of clear liquid from the nightstand.

“You don’t have the courage to fulfill your potential,” a so-called wise man had told him once. “The art of what we pursue is not to gain power, but to become more complete, to fully understand the complex simplicity that makes us what we are and by doing so, understand the mysteries of the world of which we are an integral part. Acquiring power is child’s play—any half-wit can accomplish that; it takes courage to forgo the concept of self and take one’s rightful place in the natural scheme of things.”

Watkins held his glass up to the light.

“This takes more courage,” he said softly.

The liquid was a distillation from the fruit and roots of the hemlock.

“And offers greater return,” he added.

He wasn’t frightened. There was no room in the tight focus of his mind for fear or doubt. He closed his eyes, his mind monitoring the spirit of the House’s guardian across the street as it tugged and stretched itself away from its responsibilities. The guardian was pulled taut now, every point of his being concentrating on his effort, just as Watkins was entirely focused on his own task.

The guardian pulled free from one tower.

Watkins smiled.

There was a momentary hesitation on the part of the guardian; then he strained again and suddenly he was free.

Gone.

The House unprotected.

Watkins lifted the glass to his lips. It would be like a kind of alchemy, he thought, his passage from life, into the mystery held by the House, and then back again. Transformed.

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.