The Cornerstone (7 page)

He hurried, surefooted, down the steps and into the gloom of the basement. Going immediately to the spot under the stairs where the cornerstone pulsed dusky red, visible to his eyes only, he put his own heartbeat in synch with the stone. Ignoring the dirt and grime, Bayard stretched out on the floor, his head under the stair risers and inches from the theater’s foundation masonry. He closed his eyes and spoke the summons: “
Ecce signum
.”

A response formed itself in his mind.
Acknowledged.

“As master of the
buachloch
, I bid thee attend me.”

As quick as thought, the answer filled his mind.
So full of yourself. We are here
.

Bayard opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on the stone’s pitted surface. It was now black as obsidian, radiating the galactic cold of the void beyond the land of the living. He set his jaw and reached out with both hands. The moment his fingers brushed the surface, the stone became a glistening, pulsating heart, its truncated aorta spewing ventricular blood in a river over his hands and arms. The flood washed over his body, its spicy-sour stench filling his nostrils and engulfing the lowermost stairs.

Bayard struggled to keep his chin above the red tide and shouted, “Cease, damned crone!”

At once the river of blood evaporated, leaving a single drop quivering on the chipped tile beside his hands. Bayard got to his knees and glared back at the stone. “Such theatrics are wasted on me. I won’t be intimidated.”

The drop of blood smoked around the edges.
Take care an’ ye not lose thy grip.

“Don’t threaten me,” Bayard warned, anger rising like a flame. “I can send you away as quickly as you were summoned.”

Aye, great one, with each libation thy vigor increases. Have I not kept ye hale and hearty these many seasons, while ye feed me the poorest of libations? A hag’s sneering face hovered over the shining surface of the droplet. Her silver eyes followed his every move, shifting with the pulse of his own heart. What is my master’s will? She infused the word “master” with such contempt that Bayard held his tongue for a heartbeat.

He recalled fleeting memories of Dee extolling the stone’s powers and explaining how he and his mysterious friend had trapped the banshee along with the Irish witch who’d summoned her. He refocused his will, holding the specter at bay. “Servitude becomes you,” he whispered. Wisps of acrid smoke curled around the hag’s face, forming a writhing halo. “Hear me,” said Bayard grimly. “If you place any value on your miserable existence, you will do as I require, and swiftly.”

The basement was still as a mortuary.

“You have not adequately provided the wealth and fame promised me. If anything, my presence has diminished over the centuries. I want to see immediate improvement. And this too…I want to know instantly if anyone touches the stone besides myself. You will transmit this to me without hesitation. You will protect me from any source of danger at all cost.”

The hag’s face disappeared in a puff of smoke. Slowly the droplet congealed and stretched into a red line that coiled around Bayard’s ankle. Scales began forming along its ridge.

“Stop! I forbid it!” The serpent lay half-formed, frozen in the moment. Keening laughter clung to the shadows and hugged itself in the cobwebs.

Bayard swept his hand over the malformation, erasing its near existence. He clambered to his feet and brushed dust from his trousers with trembling fingers.

“You
will
obey me,” he whispered to the empty air.

Friday morning

The alarm went off in the gloom just before sunrise, pithing Claire’s brain with its high-pitched buzz. 6:05. That gave her barely enough time to stumble to the bathroom, get into her uniform, tie her hair back, cook a toaster waffle, find her keys, and drive to the emergency service center by 7, the start of her shift. The sky was just turning gray-blue when she pulled into her parking space. Yawning, she got out and headed through the automatic doors to the break room/lounge where the teams spent their between time, waiting for calls.

“Mornin’, Sunshine.” Paul was already there, watching the local news.

“If you say so.” She gave him a weak smile. Just hearing his voice with its brotherly/fatherly everything-is-under-control vibe made her feel better. Maybe today the entire city would drive like sensible, responsible adults and all the looming heart attacks would hold off at least a week. How long had it been since they’d had a slow day? She couldn’t remember. Four days of twelve-hour shifts that often stretched to fourteen, then three days off to recuperate, then back into it again. She lived for those days off.

A new hire was in the kitchen, trying to outsmart the coffee machine with no luck.

Claire took pity on her. “You got to lift the handle all the way up, so it’ll reset. Then you can punch in the cup size, like this.” A flick of the wrist, one quick poke, and the K-cup oozed its brown liquid into the new girl’s cup.

“God, thanks. I was about to give up on it.” The newbie had a slightly Hispanic accent. She didn’t look a week over eighteen. Claire wondered how long she’d last.

“Rule number one. Never give up on your morning coffee.” Claire tried to sound reassuring, remembering her first week on the job. “Everything going okay so far?” She poked a Jet Fuel K-cup into the machine and pushed the 10-oz button over her own cup.

“Yeah, so far.” The girl was smiling.

“That’s good. I’m Claire.” She held out her free hand.

“Angela.”

“If you, like, need anything or have any questions, just ask me.” Good grief, she was sounding like the nurse at her mother’s doctor’s office. Feeling old as Methuselah, she took her coffee and went back into the lounge area.

She was just settling back against the couch cushions with a gulp of Jet Fuel in her mouth when the first call came in. Paul was on his feet, pulling his jacket over his brawny shoulders. “Time to roll. Bring that with you.”

They settled into the ambulance cab, Paul in the driver’s seat. Claire snapped a lid on her cup and nestled it securely in the holder, then buckled up, listening to the dispatcher describe the situation over the dashboard radio. It was a vehicular accident, on Piedmont Avenue near the beltway intersection, involving a motorcycle and one or more cars. Claire’s stomach tightened.

“Traffic’s moderate to heavy, police just now arriving on the scene,” the dispatcher’s voice was measured and precise.

Paul turned on the siren and the lights and stomped the gas. “Here we go.”

Claire nodded.

Paul plowed through the traffic as if the great lumbering beast that was their class III ambulance had an invisible cowcatcher attached to the grille. Claire focused on the dispatcher’s voice, continually feeding details as they homed in on the accident site.

“We have one person on the ground, condition unknown.”

Paul crossed lanes and flew around an SUV that hadn’t pulled over.

The radio crackled. “We have a car overturned, occupant trapped inside.”

“Gonna need the Jaws of Life,” Paul commented.

Claire said nothing. The morning was off to a great start.

They pulled up to the crash site, cordoned off by a bank of cop cars, lights flashing. Cars and trucks streamed past, slowing for a few seconds as drivers gawked and then sped away. Paul parked the ambulance on the shoulder of the highway as close as safely possible to the point where the crash had taken place. Claire could see the cyclist, still in his helmet, lying on his, or maybe her, stomach. Hard to tell gender from this distance. At least the person seemed to be all in one piece. A small gray car sat on its roof, wheels in the air, a hundred feet or so down the side of the road where black skid marks left the pavement. The motorcycle lay on its side not far from its rider.

Paul killed the siren. “Take the guy on the ground, I’ll check the one in the car.”

“Right.” Although both were licensed paramedics, seniority made Paul the team leader, which was just fine by Claire.

She jogged past an apparent eye witness, telling his story to one of the policemen, a note of awe or admiration in his voice. “His cycle blew the back tire and instead of flipping, he just laid it down on the grass of the shoulder nice as you please. I ride a bike, too, and that was a pro landing. Hardly any damage to the bike. Dunno about the guy, though…”

Claire reached the crumpled cyclist just as he rolled over onto his back. He fumbled with the chinstrap of the visored helmet.

“Hey, let me do that,” she told him, pushing his head gently but firmly back to the ground. “Don’t move a muscle—just let me do the lifting. Everything’s all right now, you’ll be okay.” She slipped into the comforting mantra that she used with accident victims to keep them still and not freaking out.

“I’m just going to lift your head now and slip the helmet off, okay?” She heard a muffled response that sounded a little dazed, but not freaked.

She eased the helmet off, put it aside, and stared.

“Tom!”

“Hey, Claire.” His voice was shaky, but he didn’t seem traumatized.

“Just lie still…” She checked for broken bones.

“I’m okay, how’s the bike?”

“Better than you should be. Do you hurt anywhere?”

“Just my head.”

“How many fingers?” She made a V sign.

“Two.”

“What day is it?”

“Friday. Trust me, I’m fine. I need to call the bookstore—“

“You aren’t fine until I say so. Just stay still, please.” She went through her protocol checklist and finally decided everything was in working order. Only then did she allow him to sit up. He groaned and looked around at the flashing lights and people in uniform milling around the upside-down car. Claire could hear Paul, asking questions and giving orders in that steady no-nonsense voice she relied on.

“Holy shit. Is that person dead?”

“Doesn’t sound like it.” Claire stood up and took a good look. Paul was on his knees, his arm reaching through the smashed driver’s door window. He must have released the handle because at that moment the door fell open.

“Are you okay to just sit here for a few minutes? I need to go help over there.”

Tom waved her away. “Sure, you go.” He felt around inside his leather jacket and pulled out his cell phone. “I won’t go anywhere, just need to make some calls. Looks like I’ll be late for work.” Well, if he could joke around, she decided there couldn’t be much damage done.

It didn’t take too long to get the college student extracted safely from her silver Nissan. They strapped her to the backboard with her broken collarbone stabilized and loaded her into the ambulance. She was weepy, but not hysterical. Tom was on his feet now, looking down at his bike and frowning. Claire scanned his stance, still alert for anything off. He knelt and put his hands on the flattened back tire, probably looking for the nail or whatever had caused the blowout.

“You sure you won’t come back with us to the hospital? Just sit around for a bit and be sure there’s no residual sign of concussion?”

Tom looked up, his expression friendly but determined. “Don’t worry about me. There’s nothing wrong.”

“Well, would you mind signing this waiver stating you refused further treatment?”

“No problem.” He reached for the clipboard, quickly scanned the sheet, and signed his name, Tom Brennan, in big looping letters. “You’re a good medic, Claire. I appreciate that.”

Nonplussed, she retrieved the clipboard. “I-I try to be. If the situation was reversed, I’d want somebody competent to work on me.” Self-conscious, she shrugged but couldn’t quite muster a laugh. “Well, I need to go. You’ll be all right?”

“Don’t worry. I’m just gonna sit down here with the bike until the wrecker shows up.” He frowned again. “That was a new tire.”

Claire allowed herself to look at him more closely than she’d done in the theater. She’d always been somewhat put off by his shaved-head-leather-jacket look, but now she saw a young man about her age, maybe even younger, with clear gray eyes under dark brows. She guessed his hair might be black if he allowed it to grow. High cheekbones and a thin, tight mouth gave his face an intense expression. But it wasn’t just bone structure. There was something else going on with him. Something repressed…maybe that was where he was pulling his performance as Faustus from, some dark well of angst. Then she really did laugh—what a romance novel scenario. Tom would likely be mortified if he knew what she was thinking.

“Something funny?” The skin around his gray eyes crinkled just a little.

She heard Paul crank the ambulance. “Nothing worth mentioning. Well, I’m out of here. You be careful…I don’t like leaving you by yourself after a fall like that.”

“
Das macht nichts
.” He waved a dismissal.

What? He did German as well as Latin? Claire climbed into the back of the ambulance with their patient, her head full of questions. The Mummers had a company full of strange people, no joke. Maybe that was why Danny’d chosen to leave—he was too normal.

Saturday night

Tom shifted his butt in the high-backed chair onstage. His side was stiff, and when he’d showered earlier he could see his left hip and shoulder were purpling where he’d hit the ground in yesterday’s accident. Nothing broken, which was lucky, because he didn’t need something like that slowing him down. Good to know, though, that if he
had
been in bad shape Claire and her laconic teammate could have ably taken care of him. She knew her stuff, and his estimation of her had gone up as a result of the encounter.

He’d wondered why she wanted to join the company since she seemed to know so little about acting or the theater or dramatic literature. She was very detail oriented, though, which made her the perfect choice for prompter and keeper of the master script with all the performance notes. For his part, Tom relished the role of Dr. Faustus. There was latent magic in those lines—and it wasn’t just the beauty of the language. He could feel it when he spoke the words extolling the virtues of the underworld, greeting Lucifer and his minions as an equal, and especially the invocations that summoned the King of Hades’ second in command, Mephistopheles. The first time he’d said that passage in Latin, what flowed through him was indescribable, even better than a hard-on. Raw power that flayed flesh off the bone. It had taken him a couple of minutes to recover. Morris had felt it too, he could tell. In fact, it had scared the shit out of him—he’d seen it in the man’s eyes. The moment passed as soon as Bayard stopped the scene, but Tom felt the lingering sensation well past the end of rehearsal.