The Glory Hand (33 page)

Then Sarah lifted the goblet to the sky:

'Blessed among the angels

The Evil One who forgives our Evil,

The Sinful One who forgives our Sin,

The Lustful One who sanctifies our lust with His.'

Sarah passed the cup among those who knelt before her, Abigail and Robin and Iris and the others. They sipped from it delicately, as if not to spill a single drop, and when they had finished they murmured as one: 'Anoint us.'

Sarah dipped the blade into the goblet of blood: 'Blessed be He, the Black Lord . . . The son of Midnight . . . The Accursed One.'

'Anoint us
,' they chanted.

'The Vigilant, the Possessor, the Undiminished.'

'Anoint usV

Sarah pulled the dagger from the goblet and touched the blood-drenched tip to the eyes, the breasts, the lips and loins of each of the girls as they recited in unison:

'Blessed be my eyes, that I may see your path. . .

Blessed be my breasts, that I may suckle your young

Blessed be my loins, that I may be fruitful with your daughters. . .'

'Accept Him as your savior,' Sarah said when the last of the girls had been annointed. 'There is no other.'

'Praise him!'

You will see only what you want to see . . .

'Praise . . .' Jake could taste the words, sweet on his lips, but could not yet say them. The bodies dancing in a circle around him were tinged golden in the firelight, like gilded saints. Their bodies were so lithe, so young ... He admired their taut muscles, their skin the color of the amber oozing from the pine boughs. The music given flesh, he thought. He wanted to join them but his body seemed drugged, leaden.

You cannot dance,
the voice in his mind said,
but you will dance to His music in your heart. In your soul.

Jake was blind, but Cassie could see.
The oil painting that she had found in the ice house hadn't been the vision of a madman. It was congealing to life before her eyes, in the same lurid yellows and greens as those of the canvas. But she could see only fragments of the tableau, as if to grasp it all at once would overwhelm her.

One by one, the girls knelt to kiss Sarah on the buttocks. Then they merged into the undulating serpent of flesh, and women, older women with withered thighs and hanging dugs, joined in - mothers from Visiting Day, joining with their daughters in the revel. The 'proper,' the 'well-born,' the 'right' people, Cassie thought bitterly, reduced tonight to . . . beasts? No, something else. Something worse. Bereft of her conservative silk dress, her naked breasts smeared with grease that smelled of animal entrails, was Abigail's mother, Margot Burgess, the FBI Director (the betrayer, Cassie thought); and Loren Bradshaw, the General, using one of the black candles as a wax phalus. And Robin's mother, her body writhing in the dust as a wolf lapped between her thighs. Robin leered up at Cassie from where she sat near the bonfire, nursing the black manx at the third nipple under her arm.

Then Iris pulled Cassie from the horse and dragged her to the block of obsidian, forced her down onto it with a strength Cassie couldn't defy. The stone felt cold against her back, like a slab in a morgue, she thought vaguely, her emotions too raw to fight back. Iris placed a crucifix upside down, at Cassie's feet, then smeared it with excrement.
Pass out,
Cassie tried to command herself, but her senses were too numb even for that.
Stare up into the night sky.
But.it did no good to retreat into herself, for she was waylaid by a word echoing in her mind ... a troublesome drone, like a trapped and dying insect.

Pandorapandorapandora . . .

Suddenly she understood what power had lured her here through a labyrinth of time. She knew who the mothers and daughters of Casmaran were waiting for.

The icy water and the oil slick burning on the sea . . . The ferry boat groaning as it turned over to die, victims lost in the vortex of its plunge into the deep. . . The escape into the water that had cradled her so terribly close to death . . .

She had seen Him only once, but she could feel His touch in the flames of the bonfire, flames that pricked her like the pointed fingers of her mother's ring. It was as though the bonfire had been spawned on that distant night years before, aboard the
Pandora,
and had smoldered dormant over the years, waiting until tonight to reach flashpoint.

Naked and proud, Sarah was smiling down at her, a smile of welcome, even of love, i know how you must feel, Cassie. The shock. The horror. When I was your age, when it was
my
night, I felt it, too . . . And the pain. But the pain has to be.'

'You can't make me . . .' Cassie's voice locked in her throat. She didn't know what they meant to do to her. The only thing she knew for certain was that it must not happen.

'Casmaran. In the mother tongue it means "summer's promise." Tonight, when you join us, that promise will be fulfilled.'

'I won't!'

'This is a special night, Cassie. Your night. Because you were born to be one of us.'

'I could never be like you!'

'But Cassie, surely you must have realized by now. You must have guessed: your mother was one of us, too.'

Cassie flinched as if she had been slapped: 'You're lying!'

'I have no reason to lie to you, Cassie. Your mother came to Casmaran when she was your age, just like her mother and grandmother before her. We loved her like a sister . . . because she
was
our sister . . .'

'No!'

'She learned to worship the Dark Prince. And she knew that her daughter was destined to worship Him, too.'

'That's . . . not. . . true!' (
It's all lies. It has to be.)

'He wanted you early, Cassie, before your time. If only you knew what an honor that is . . .'

'You're out of your fucking mind!'

'He would have taken you that night aboard the ship, but Ann stopped Him. He had given her the ring because she was His favorite; He never expected that she would use its powers against Him.'

Cassie remembered the scars on her mother's legs, and the limp; hidden signs of a struggle she had never understood. 'I don't want to hear!' She pressed her hands to her ears, but the childhood memory that had been so out of focus, so blurred in her mind, sharpened with startling suddenness:
The last gasp for breath, then the bile of the sea forced down her throat. . . Her mother had never tasted it. While the others had been drowning around her, her mother had floated on the surface (flashes of Abigail and the seniors, rebounding off Lake Casmaran). Cassie floundered, drowning, but her mother had swept her out of the waves, into her arms.

'Ann wanted you all to herself, Cassie. She loved you more than she loved His spirit. But when she denied His right to take you, that made Him want you even more. So He bided his time. Ten years are nothing to Him ... A hundred years, a thousand years, are nothing. He waited until the year of your womanhood. This was your summer to come here, Cassie, but Ann refused you to Him again. She said it was because she loved you too much to give you up, but it wasn't love, Cassie. It was selfishness . . .'

The bonfire roared like the sea outside the window at Cliffs Edge, and Cassie remembered the gauzy curtains flailing, writing shadows like flames across the floor . . .

'You
were there that night,' Cassie whispered.

'We tried to reason with her . . .'

'She was screaming at
you!'

As Robin and Iris held her down on the obsidian slab, a vision from last night assaulted Cassie: her mother lying in bed, bathed in sweat in the moonlight, the open window letting in the cruel breath of the sea as it never had before . . . Her mother had been so still on the sheets that at first Cassie had thought she was . . .

'You killed herV
It was a cold awareness, that she realized had been lurking inside her for days, but that only now could she say aloud:
'You killed her because she wouldn't let you take me:

'If there had been any other way . .

'The letter ... the letter I found in her purse . . .' Cassie murmured,
'You
wrote that letter!'

'How else could we have gotten you here? We did it for you, Cassie. I know you can't see that now. You can't accept it. But someday you will.'

She died for me,
Cassie thought.
She died to save me.
The awareness sapped her rage - sickened her with longing and guilt. It made her want to yield, to be taken by the forces that had taken her mother. To join her, if only in death.

She started to cry, and Sarah reached out to smooth a strand of hair from her eyes. 'Your mother couldn't have stopped it from happening. No one could have. Because you're the thirteenth, Cassie. The final member of the coven. We are all His brides, but in your generation, you will be His favorite.'

Sarah dipped the dagger into the chalice, and dripped blood from it onto Cassie's breasts, her thighs, her lips, whispering in a language that Cassie could not - that she did not
want
to - understand. She lay deathly still and the blood felt cold against her skin, like the waters off Nantucket where she had almost drowned. She closed her eyes and wished to God she
had
drowned then. At least she would have escaped Him.

'Soon you will admit Him into your body, Cassie,' Sarah whispered. 'And then you will invite him into your heart.'

Naked, Sarah extended her hands to Jake as he entered from the clearing, as though she were welcoming him to her corner of the night. He could see the shadow under her arm of the third nipple that had so repelled him before, but he no longer felt the revulsion. 'The Dark Prince needs the body of a man,' Sarah whispered. 'The body of a man who has not been contaminated with Holy Water.'

And I am a Jew.

It had all been part of their plan, Jake realized that now.

It was the reason they had rented him the cabin ... the reason they had seduced him with the music. So that they could summon him here tonight. But he didn't resent the conspiracy. He felt strangely grateful to have been chosen.

'The thirteenth comes to us a virgin, on the night she has become a woman,' Sarah said, beckoning Jake closer. He could smell the jasmine woven in to her hair. 'Allow the Dark Prince to possess your body. Welcome Him, and through you He will initiate her.'

Suddenly, before his eyes, the bonfire flickered with flames from years before. The Burning Man. Jake remembered the fanatic who had burned himself alive the night of Jake's disastrous concert at Lincoln Center, as part of some unspoken protest. But tonight the horror was gone from that vision of charred flesh. The image Jake saw in the bonfire before him was an angel with wings of fire, the Burning Man rising from the inferno. It struck Jake that his career, which had died that night, too,
had
to die, in order to be reborn tonight, to rise, phoenix-like, out of its own ashes.

'He needs your body, Jake. And you need His Power. Submit to Him and receive all you deserve,' Sarah said quietly. 'Yield to Him and He will exalt you as a composer. As a man.'

The bargain. Jake would have refused it once, and yet now his face creased with what he sensed was a drunken smile of acceptance. He was ready to sell himself. After all he had been through, he was thankful for the chance.

And what would he be giving up in exchange for all that he wanted? Would he be commiting so heinous a crime? The initiation - the act of violation - it would be done by another, really. The music throbbed in his ears, and he could feel a tingling between his thighs.

But the guilt? Where is the guilt?

He realized that he felt none, that it had been drained out of him by the music.

Praise him.

The girls who had been circling the fire in the dance turned to him, and he let them strip off his clothes, their fingertips stroking his skin, arousing him. As they led him to the altar of black obsidian, he could feel that he was erect, from a power outside himself.

In the light from the black candle at
heF
feet, he couldn't see who it was that lay there - only the chestnut hair that fell around her naked shoulders, the childlike body. The women urged him forward with whispers of encouragement.

One more step towards the altar.

'Cassie!'
Jake's eyes snapped into focus when he saw her face.

Praise Him,
a voice said from within, him.
Praise Him.
But the voice was growing weaker, the ecstasy, the euphoria, replaced by something else. He inhaled deeply: for the first time he smelled the sweat of the naked bodies, the stench of sulfur and excrement, the metallic odor of blood.

'You'll be helping her, Jake,' Sarah prodded. 'Because once He uses your body to initiate her, she will be ours. She will feel pain, but only for a moment. After that she will feel no pain ever again, I promise you.'

But it seemed to Jake that Sarah's voice had lost its gentleness, as harsh as the stench around him. His mind swam with images, images that cut through the haze that had deluded him: the cobwebbed, crumbling works of other men - other Jews? - who had been lured here in summers past, to live in that cabin ... to give their bodies. What had become of them? Had they been exalted as artists? Had they won the recognition that had once been denied them? Or, as Murdock in the grocery store had told him, had they disappeared without a trace?