The Magic Circle (15 page)

As I said, my family relations are rather complex.

“It seems, Helena,” I told her, “that since you learned so much at this press conference which I unfortunately missed, someone there must have had a clue as to where these important manuscripts actually
are?
” They certainly weren’t mentioned at the reading of the will, as I could attest.

“Why, yes, Ms. Behn,” she told me. “That’s the reason I’ve phoned so soon, of course, because time is of the essence. According to the executor, in the event of your cousin’s death all his property was to be placed in your hands no more than one week after the date of the reading of the will.”

Holy shit. My life had been put in danger—I’d been completely set up—and all by my own true blood brother, Sam.

Actually, it was not totally impossible to delineate my familial relationships for others. It was just a damned unpleasant experience.

My grandfather Hieronymus Behn, a Dutch immigrant to South Africa, married twice, first to Hermione, a wealthy Afrikaner widow who already had one young son, my uncle Lafcadio, whom Grandfather Hieronymus adopted and gave the Behn name. This marriage of Hieronymus and Hermione produced two children: my uncle Earnest, who was born in South Africa, and my aunt Zoe, born in Vienna, where the family moved just after the turn of the century. Therefore these two children were half siblings to my uncle Laf, since all three shared the same mother.

When Hermione became ill in Vienna and the children were still small—so the story goes—my grandfather, at Hermione’s request, hired an attractive young student from the Wiener Musik Konservatorium to serve as a sort of nanny or
au pair
to the younger children and to provide their music education. After Hermione’s death this young woman, Pandora, became in swift succession: my grandfather’s second wife; mother to my father, Augustus; and, after deserting them both to run off with my uncle Laf, the most famous opera singer in post-Secession Vienna.

To further tangle matters came the complex issue of my black-sheep aunt Zoe. Zoe—who’d supposedly been practically raised by Pandora and who had barely known her own sick and dying mother, much less her busy father—elected to run off
with
Laf and Pandora, thus creating, in a single blow, what later became known as the “family schism.” Zoe’s subsequent life as Queen of the Night, the most successful
demimondaine
and camp follower of the great and famous since Lola Montez, would take some describing.

What I now was dying to know, so to speak, was how much Uncle Laf, a key actor in the family drama, knew about these manuscripts I’d inherited; whose they actually were, Pandora’s or Zoe’s; and what role they played in the overall picture—information I hoped I’d glean this weekend. If I lived that long.

It was clear that Sam, too, knew far more than he was able to communicate. But why some decades-old letters and diaries were still too hot to handle, or why my father had said they were all in code, which no one else had mentioned, or why Sam had faked his own death with the aid of the U.S. government and set me up as the fall girl at a last-will-and-testament-blabbing press conference—all these remained to be seen. This last item still left me speechless with impotent rage. But for now, since I wouldn’t be able to confront Sam even by phone until tomorrow afternoon at the No-Name cowboy bar, I would have to figure out how to hedge my bets and stay alive.

My first step was to ring off the phone with Helena, star investigative journalist for the
Post
(who’d told me a good deal more than I’d told her). I said I’d let her know first thing, if I got the manuscripts.

My next step, critical to events in the days ahead, was to decide whether to let the parcel lie a bit longer in anonymity at the post office, leaving me with only this tiny claim check to conceal, or to pick up the package and try to figure out what to do with it until I could get it to Sam. He certainly deserved to have it returned with equal zeal, like the hot potato it actually was. Whatever the contents—and I was certain by now I didn’t want to know—they’d probably have been better left buried. What a fool I’d been ever to believe I could escape my awful family by burying
myself
here, potatolike, in Idaho.

That night before bedtime I lifted my woven, feathered “dream-catcher” down from the place where it always hung, keeping away bad dreams, just above my bed. I put it in a drawer instead. I thought if I planted the idea in my psyche, just before falling asleep, I might catch a dream that would place in my hand the thread I needed to guide me through the labyrinthine nightmare that was swiftly becoming my life.

I awoke before dawn in a frantic sweat.

I’d dreamed I was running—not upright, but on all fours—as fast as I possibly could through canelike underbrush so dense I could barely see. Behind me I could feel the hot breath of a large dark animal with ravenous, slathering jaws, its gnashing teeth snapping at me. I saw through the cane that I was coming to an open space of meadow with a wall just beyond. Could I cross it fast enough to leap up and escape the pursuing beast? I gave one extra push of power, though my lungs were already bursting; I crossed the patch of grass and leapt for the wall.

Just then, I woke up and sat bolt upright in bed. Jason, who’d crawled into the bed and somehow wedged himself flat beneath me and the warm pillow, was lying on his side, his eyes shut tight. But his feet were paddling back and forth as if he were running fast to escape something fearful. I started laughing.

“Wake up, Jason,” I said, shaking him until he opened his eyes. How dizzy could you get, I thought, tuning in to the dreams of your
cat
?

But I
had
awakened with at least today’s first decision resolved in my mind. I’d pick up the package from the post office. I had no other choice. I’d never recover if I put it off and the damned thing vanished. Where to hide it was another question. My office wasn’t safe: too many people in and out all day. And until I actually saw the parcel I wouldn’t be sure I could even put all the documents in one place—a drawer or briefcase, for example—since it hadn’t fit into my mailbox.

When I went out, I was relieved to find that Olivier’s huge borrowed truck was no longer blocking the drive, so I could back my car out without going off the side. He must have had to pick up Larry the programmer extra early.

I pulled up before the post office about ten minutes after they opened for the morning. There were no cars yet parked in front as I pulled into the lot. I got out and nodded greetings to the postal worker who was scattering rock salt on the steps. The pounding of my heart and my head sounded from inside like a tympani section hooked on Latin American rhythms. Why was I so uptight? Absolutely no one here could have any idea of the contents of what I was about to collect.

I went up to the desk and handed George the postal clerk my yellow slip. He went in the back room and came out carrying a large parcel—bigger than a ream of paper, wrapped in brown paper with twine tied around it.

“Sorry you had to come all the way down here to pick this up, Miz Behn,” said George between wide-gapped teeth as he handed it to me. He scratched his head. “I’d a been happy to give it to that fella you sent for it just now, but he said you lost the claim slip. I told him then you’d have to come in person or send a signed note that it was okay to give it to him. But I guess you found your claim slip anyway.”

I was standing there deaf and dumb, as if all sound had been shut off, as if I were in a glass jar. I held the package in my hands, not speaking. George was watching me as if maybe he should give me a drink of water or fan me or something.

“I see,” I managed to choke out. I cleared my throat. “That’s okay, George, I had to come this way anyway. It’s no inconvenience.” I started for the door casually, trying to think of a way to ask the question I desperately needed the answer to. Just at the door, I found it.

“By the way,” I said to George, “I mentioned to a couple of folks to pick it up if they came this way. Who finally came by, so I can tell the others not to bother?”

I expected him to say “new fellow in town” or some such. But what he said made my blood run cold.

“Why—it was that Mr. Maxfield, your landlord. His postal address is just down from yours. S’why I felt bad not to be able to give him the parcel. But rules is rules.”

Olivier! The bottom fell out of my stomach. In my mind flashed the image of those truck high beams last night—and the drive empty of anything but tire tracks when I left this morning. I tried to smile, and thanked George. Then I went out and got into my car, and I sat there with the parcel on my lap.

“It’s all your fault,” I told it.

I knew I shouldn’t, but I had to do it. I reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the bone-handled deer knife I kept there, that had never touched a deer. I cut the twine and pulled the paper open. I was desperate to know the brand of my hemlock before I had to drink it. When I saw the first page, I started laughing.

It was written in a language I couldn’t read, with letters that weren’t even letters of the alphabet, though they did seem oddly familiar. I riffled through the rest like a deck of cards: about two reams of paper, and all alike, each page printed in black ink by the same hand. The pages were filled with feathery stick figures with little circles and bumps protruding here and there like forms dancing across the pages, like the symbols painted on an Indian teepee. What did they remind me of?

And then I knew what they were. I’d seen them in a cemetery once in Ireland, where Jersey had taken me to visit her ancestors. They were runes: the language of the ancient Teutons who’d once lived all over northern Europe. This bloody manuscript was written entirely in a language that had been dead for thousands of years.

Just as that knowledge dawned, from the corner of my eye I saw the flash of something dark moving in the parking lot. I glanced up from the manuscript and saw Olivier walking across the pebbly, salted ice, headed for my car! I tossed the manuscript on the passenger seat, where it slid partly out of its wrapper and a few pages fluttered to the floorboard, which I ignored. I was trying to jam the key into the ignition, but in my hysteria I missed twice. By the time the engine turned over, he was almost at the passenger door. Frantically I shoved down the door lock with my elbow, which caused all the car doors to lock in tandem, as I threw it in reverse.

Olivier grabbed the handle of the passenger door and tried to yell something through the window, but I ignored him and threw the stick forward. I tore out of the lot, dragging Olivier along until he finally let go. I glanced at his face for one instant before I took off down the street. He was staring through the glass at the manuscript!

Now that I was out on the street driving, and I knew Olivier was really after the manuscript, and I knew he knew I had it, I was becoming even more hysterical. The chances of hiding it anywhere in town, at this point, were absolutely nil. I knew I had only one choice, and that was to get it somewhere out of town to hide it. But where?

Olivier knew I was meeting my uncle at Sun Valley this weekend, so that was too obvious. I
had
to get on a road in some direction—and fast, before he got back to his car to follow me. The absolutely worst thing that could happen was for me to get trapped with this manuscript in my car.

With no time to think, and with no thoughts leaking into my brain anyway, I headed full speed down the road to Swan Valley, to run over the Teton Pass into Jackson Hole.

THE SNAKE

THE SERPENT:

The serpent never dies
.

Some day you shall see me come out of this beautiful skin
,

a new snake with a new and lovelier skin. That is birth
.

EVE:

I have seen that. It is wonderful
.

THE SERPENT:

If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very subtle
.

When you and Adam talk, I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’

You see things, and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things

that never were, and I say ‘Why not?’

—George Bernard Shaw,
Back to Methuselah

It would be a good two-hour haul, with winter road conditions what they were, across the Idaho border and into Wyoming. But it would be my first chance to think things through since my return from San Francisco—was it only yesterday morning?

I had a job I’d already been absent from for more than a week, and a boss who wasn’t too happy just now because I had cold feet about leaving for Russia. If I went AWOL at work on my second day back, I might not
have
a job. Then too, there was my critical arrangement to wait by the phone at the No-Name cowboy bar this afternoon. But now, with this unexpected loop, I had no idea how I’d ever contact Sam again. The final disaster struck my beleaguered mind just before I reached the end of the valley: I couldn’t leave my cat in the same house with a villain—especially a villain I still owed for this month’s rent!

At the end of the valley, the road spiraled down like a corkscrew to meet and follow the curving sweep of a river that seemed to appear from nowhere out of the dense undergrowth. I knew every twist and turn by heart. I took the dips like a slalom course. Dropping beneath the crashing two-tiered waterfall, I descended to the chain-linked valleys carved out by the rushing waters of the Snake.

The Snake is one of the most beautiful rivers in North America. Unlike the broad, complacent rivers that water the Midwest, the Snake behaves more like its namesake: a dark, mysterious reptile that only feels at home in wild and inaccessible crevasses of the mountains. It winds in a narrow zigzag for most of the thousand-mile meander from Yellowstone in Wyoming through Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State, where it joins the massive Columbia in its headlong sweep to the ocean. But the glassy sheen of most of the river’s surface hides the underlying serpentine treachery, which strikes swiftly and often lethally. These waters are so rapid, the current so strong, the hidden pools so deep, that few of the bodies swept away are ever found. Indeed, even whole automobiles have been swallowed and never recovered. This may explain the rumors of the enormous water beast lurking there, who devours everything he drags to his underwater lair.