The Glory Hand (34 page)

Jake stared in dumb horror around him at the altar, the writhing, hysterical bodies, the carcass of the butchered ram that had been bled dry. He had felt such certainty a moment before. It had all seemed so simple. Now he was certain of nothing.

Robin and Iris held Cassie down on the slab of obsidian. As Jake stepped towards her, naked, she tried to break free once more, but their strength was greater than hers. Abigail handed Sarah a carved wooden box, holding it as carefully as if it contained jewels.

Sarah opened the lid.

A severed hand, a pallid green, the color of something covered with scales instead of flesh. The skin had shriveled until it stretched tightly over the bones, making the fingers spidery, hardly human. It was a hand that seemed to be neither dead nor alive, but lingering in some strange purgatory.

Yet Cassie saw proof that it
had
once belonged to a man: the faint mark of a tattoo on the wrist, reduced now to a dark stain. It was distantly familiar, like the hazy recollection of a dream: the effigies swinging from the Hanging Tree . . . the blood dripping through the straw. '
Runt
,' she murmured.

'The Glory Hand was taken at midnight,' Sarah said, 'soaked in a brine made of mandragora and jimson weed. It was cured by moonlight, consecrated for this moment.' As Sarah held up the Glory Hand, for the first time Cassie noticed the silver ring in the shape of a hand on her finger. 'Tonight I'm wearing the ring,' Sarah said. 'The ring He gave your mother, the ring that can summon the power of the Glory Hand.'

She thrust her dagger into the bonfire. 'When the fingers of the Glory Hand have been lit, Jake, your body will be His.' The steel blade flared like straw, and she touched it to the first finger on the Glory Hand. It burned, phosphorescent, a hissing blue flame, the smoldering flesh more foul-smelling than any candle of wax or tallow. And as the tip of the dead finger burned, the bonfire dwindled, as if its heat had been focused into the single needle of flame.

Slowly, of its own accord (
Cassie could not believe what she saw, and yet how could she deny it!)
the hand began to move, like something that had been long-frozen starting to thaw, turning towards the flaming dagger like a flower soaking up the light of the sun.

Sarah lit the second finger. The hand was moving, Cassie could no longer deny it, its fingers quivering with life.

'When all the fingers are lit,' Sarah said, lighting the third finger, 'His power will be yours.'

She lit the fourth finger.

Cassie stared at Jake, praying that he would spare her. He seemed to be hesitating, his eyes darting from the Glory Hand to her, as though his mind were struggling to reach a decision just beyond his grasp.

And then abruptly Jake wasn't wavering any more. He stepped forward to the altar, and the women murmured approval at his eagerness. Cassie struggled to free herself-until she realized that he wasn't reaching for her. Instead, he wrenched the Glory Hand from Sarah's grasp.

'Let's
go!' He tore Cassie away from the girls who held her down and half-carried, half dragged her towards the forest.

The music died with guillotine swiftness, and with the howl of a sudden wind that spun the fallen leaves into tortured spirals, the coven started after Cassie and Jake.

We can't run fast enough,
she thought, fighting back the image of Runt, and the force that had mutilated and murdered him. And yet she
did
run, her bare feet bloodied by the thorns on the trail. Jake held the Glory Hand like a torch, the burning fingers shooting sparks, lighting the path in their glacial glow.

Only four fingers are lit,
Cassie told herself as they crashed through the forest.
Only four. It takes five flames to summon Him.
She glanced at the Glory Hand in Jake's grasp, to reassure herself.

The thumb, with its claw of flame, was stretching out to light the fifth finger.

The thunder of trampled brush behind them ended. Cassie glanced over her shoulder - the women weren't chasing them any more. In the sudden silence, she could hear a low hiss. Green smoke billowed from the tips of the five fingers.

He stood facing them, blocking their path, the branches of the trees near Him smoldering from His heat, bathing Him in an aura that dazzled Cassie. She could feel His eyes admiring her, caressing her body, and she felt a strange and troubling spasm of pride: He recognized the woman in her.

He glistened, hard and lean, and though she knew she should run, she didn't want to. What terrified her wasn't the cloven hooves, the hint of horns at His temples. What terrified her was that she was attracted to Him.

He was smiling at her, a smile not of vengeance, but of recognition, as if He had been reunited with someone He cared for deeply - as if her dash to escape Him had really been a race towards this very spot, where they were to rendezvous, like lovers.

The look of wisdom in His eyes (and forgiveness, there was forgiveness in them, too), it forced Cassie back into childhood, towards a memory of her first longing, her first wish, an emotion she hadn't allowed herself to feel since the night on the
Pandora
: the overwhelming urge to go with Him.

No, he wants to hurt you . . .

But His eyes denied it. They were a wise man's eyes, gentle from having seen so much of life that nothing could shock Him, that all sins could be understood and forgiven. Beneath the visage of a beast, the face seemed as familiar as her father's. Hadn't her mother once loved Him, too?

But He'll hurt you . . . He'll fuck you . . .

And yet a louder voice within her said,
Go to Him.

Jake thrust the Glory Hand into Cassie's arms and shouted at her to run. When she didn't move, glazed-eyed, he slapped her hard across the face. It cleared her head enough to see that Jake was picking up a fallen tree-branch to use as a club. He stepped towards the Burning Man and when she heard the low snarl coming from the face that had seemed so gentle, so wise . . . when she saw Him bare His claws, His pointed teeth at Jake, she broke into a run.

The face of the Burning Man . . . Jake could see that it was his own. The eyes of the Burning Man terrified him because in them he saw himself, his weakness, his selfishness. His lust. At least the struggle he faced would be a chance for him to redeem himself. If he had been a failure as an artist and as a man, he thought, then he would make up for it with murder.

Jake's body responded to his jolt of rage with memories from a childhood spent defending himself: the hammerlock, the choke hold he'd learned growing up on the edge of Harlem. But the Burning Man knew how to turn Jake's rage against him - the more desperately Jake fough , the more he felt his strength ebbing.

Go for his throat
... But when Jake pressed his thumbs into the snake-smooth neck, it was he who felt all breath choked off.

Gouge out his . . .
Jake dug his fingers into the bony sockets, but
he
was the one who was blinded.

Jake dimly perceived that he was destroying himself in the struggle. It was as if he and the Burning Man were really two halves of himself, tearing each other apart. Yet in a sudden flurry of thought, his mind seemed strangely aloof from the pain.

Why did you turn down the bargain? Why did you say no?

For a fleeting moment it struck him that this was the first time he had done something that was truly brave, and that he had done it to crush out a part of himself. If he could kill the evil within him, and save the good . . . His hand slipped around the snake-smooth throat once more, and he squeezed, squeezed until the hot breathing gurgled to a stop.

Cassie groped for a handhold, scrambling down the steep rock face, and as jagged chunks of granite opened the old wounds from her mother's ring, she welcomed the pain.

Your mother died for you . . . Jake died for you, too.

Shivering in the night air, Cassie realized that the Glory Hand she carried to light the way shed no warmth. If only the Burning Man had taken her, back then on the
Pandora,
she thought, her mother and Jake would still be alive,

At the foot of the cliff a stream cascaded over rocks into a shallow pool. As she neared it, she was astonished to see a man kneeling on the bank, splashing water on his face, his skin as pale as the moonlight reflected in the water. '
JakeV
He looked up at her and smiled weakly. 'You're . . . okay . . .' she managed, through her tears.

He stood up to face her and she realized both of them were heat-scorched and naked. Her sobs turned into giddy, hysterical laughter, and she waded into the water towards him, to thank him for saving her - to thank him for still being alive.

But his face . . . the features were Jake's - the deep-set eyes, the full lips, the curly beard - but . . . what was it about him?

The eyes . . . cunning . . . malicious . . . They were not Jake's eyes. The face was only a mask, she realized, And the body? She looked down into the stream: steam was rising with each step that he took towards her through the water. And a serpent, smooth and black, stabbed from the snarl of coarse hair between his thighs. It was stiffening, rearing its forked head, like a cobra about to strike.

The cry that rose from Jake's mouth melded anguish and triumph. In a helpless reflex, Cassie raised the Glory Hand before he took the final step.

EPILOGUE

'Make a right here . . .' Cassie said, but instead the driver skidded to a stop. He squinted through the ice-veined windshield at the turnoff and puffed on his pipe for warmth, stroking his coarse gray beard. 'You've got to be kidding. This thing's a taxi, not a snowplow.'

Cassie jumped out of the taxi and waded through the fresh-fallen drifts to the split-rail gates. They had frozen shut, and she pounded on them with her fist, her breath puffing white smoke from the effort. A final kick with her boot and the gates yawned open with the squeal of rusted hinges.

Strange she thought as she climbed back into the taxi, that there wasn't a set of rabbit tracks in the snow. No hint of squirrel or deer - not even a single crow - as though with winter all life at Casmaran had ceased.

Grumbling, the driver fishtailed the Chewy off the icy blacktop, its chains cutting two scars across the white expanse. The taxi jolted through a pothole, and Cassie steadied the brightly wrapped package on her lap, then rubbed away the condensation on the window to watch the procession of bare branches, stark and dead against the sky. She took off her glove and ran her fingers through the fur collar of her coat, remembering her excitement when this tunnel of maples had been shimmering with leaves the day of her arrival at camp. The excitement she felt now was different, perhaps, but no less intense, the anticipation of something familiar. A long-awaited return.

Covered with snow, pure and still, Casmaran reminded Cassie of her mother, the way she had lain in the coffin, like a replica in white marble of someone who had once been alive. The once-imposing stone lodge ahead, the neat row of cabins, seemed smaller under the snowdrifts. Without the leaves on the trees, without the flowers, it was a bleak landscape, a lonely one, she thought, but she understood how the ice men could have lived here, through the long, cold months so many years ago. It was a season free of confusing summer shadows, free of the concealing mask of leaves. There was something crisp and clean, something certain, at last, about many things. The reason she had come here today was as clear, as sharp, as the icicles on the eaves.

'Anywhere is fine,' she said, as the taxi skidded across the frozen parking lot and lurched to a stop in front of the steps to the main lodge. The driver pulled the fur flaps of his cap more tightly over his ears and stared around him, taking in the stillness, pumping the accelerator pedal to keep the engine alive. 'You don't have to wait,' she said, fumbling in her leather shoulder bag for her wallet.

The driver rested his hand on the metal flag of the meter, but didn't turn it off. it's fifteen below. No place to be stranded. I'll wait.'

it's okay. Really it is.'

'This place is closed up like a tomb. Who's gonna take you the hell back to Bangor?'

'Thanks for the ride.' She pulled her scarf noose-tight around her neck before she opened the door.

'I don't feel right about it,' he said. 'I don't feel right about it at all.' But the crackle of the tens she slipped into his gloved hand silenced him, and she slammed the door behind her.

For a moment the wheels of the taxi spun helplessly in the snow. Then the gears ground into first, and the car churned back up the road. Cassie watched until the Chewy dissolved into the snow, the rumble of its engine merging with the wind.

She set herself a brisk pace, the stiff crust of snow crunching underfoot. Since summer, she had doubled the time she spent dancing, and her muscles were taut. But despite her confident stride, her fur-lined leather boots couldn't keep the cold from numbing her toes as she trudged past the main lodge. She walked faster, each step punching a hole in the icy gloss of the snow.

The doors to the arts and crafts building and the infirmary were padlocked, as if to seal in what was left of summer, she thought: the warmth of the sun, the scent of wildflowers. And the mischievous laughter. The camp was so still, so very still, yet somehow also fragile. Precarious. She wondered whether, like one of those crystal globes filled with snow, a single jolt would be able to shake it into a blizzard.