The Serpent Mage (10 page)

"Isn't that what a poet is supposed to be, powerful and ghostly inside, raise the hair on your neck?"

He had never heard it expressed quite so well before. He nodded. But —

…
Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings
—
stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again
. Adonna, Tonn, had told him that.

"So you're a real nightmare," Kristine said, smiling again.

"Better than being a nerd, I suppose."

"Tommy… he's the fellow I live with. We share a house with Stephen and Sue. A big four-bedroom place. We have a room and bathroom all to ourselves. Tommy's nice inside, but he doesn't know himself. He has no self-confidence. It makes him go off the deep end, like he has no real self-control." She held up both hands, one clutching her napkin, and leaned her head back as if looking for the right words to be printed on the silk canopy.

"If I left him now," she said, "he might just fall apart."

"Do you love him?"

To his distress, he saw tears in her eyes.

"Damn it," she said, touching the napkin to her cheeks. "You don't know me that well, to ask such questions. Let's get the check."

"I'm sorry. I'm just concerned."

"Oh, bullshit," she said, not unkindly. "You're on the make. No. I don't love him now. He's the albatross I get around my neck for having bad taste in men."

They split the bill, and Michael insisted he leave the tip. He expected Kristine to say good-bye and leave with the manuscript, but instead she began walking down Gayley toward Westwood, apparently expecting him to follow. He kept pace with her. "You know, maybe we could have a big concert in the summer," she said crisply. "Sort of the opposite ends of the early twentieth century German tradition — Mahler's Tenth and Waltiri's Infinity Concerto. Wouldn't that be an occasion? I'll mention it to Dillman. Maybe Crooke will have his performing version finished by then, and we can premiere it." She led them by a brightly lighted theater front. Michael automatically glanced at the movie posters on the side of the four plex — a Blake Edwards romantic comedy called
Tempting Fate
, two theaters showing David Lynch's
Black Easter
, and a reissue of
The Black Cauldron
. The poster for
Black Easter
showed U.S. Army troops fighting demons around a city whose walls were made of red-hot iron.

Long lines of people waited behind ropes suspended from brass poles along the sidewalk. Michael feather-touched their auras automatically as he and Kristine walked past. The people were bright, expectant, full of the awareness that they were on a kind of social display; they were very much alive and enjoying themselves. Michael felt a fullness of love for them beyond immediate explanation.

"I'm an ambitious woman, Michael," Kristine said, walking ahead of him past the theater entrance. "Or didn't you get that impression already?"

"No, I didn't. I wouldn't use the word ambitious."

"Then I'm a dreamer. How's that?"

"That's a good word," Michael said.

"Jesus. All these fantasy movies." She looked back over her shoulder and shook her head. "Won't they ever go out of style?"

"Maybe there's a reason everyone's interested in fantasy," Michael suggested.

"What?"

"The hauntings. Dreams of wild horses."

"What about them?"

"Never mind."

She didn't press him. They came to a bookstore and looked, in the windows. "Wouldn't you like to see your books in there, sometime?" she asked.

"I would," Michael agreed.

"And what I would like it to go by Vogue or Tower and see my music on CDs all over the windows." She laughed, but Michael saw her eyes were still moist. "Okay. I think it's time we went home. Tommy has the car tonight. I came here by bus. Can you give me a lift back?"

"Of course," Michael said.

Michael drove east on Wilshire, following her directions. The night was warm and the air relatively clear, with a few bright stars showing through low, orange-lighted clouds. Kris-tine stared up through the open sunroof, "I'm not really a complainer," she said. "My life is going along okay. I enjoy my work." She glanced at Michael. "Even so, I want to get away sometimes. Have you ever had that feeling? That you'd like to go away someplace far from everything, away from all the responsibilities and cares? That must be a common fantasy."

"I suppose," Michael said.

"Is that what you did? You said you were away for five years."

"I didn't get away from responsibilities."

"Can you tell me where you went? I've been doing all the confessing this evening."

He smiled and shook his head. "If I'm putting the make on you, then I mustn't scare you away by making you think I'm crazy, should I?"

"All right," Kristine said.

"But I will confess one thing."

"What?"

"From what you've said about Tommy, I don't think I like him very much. If he makes you unhappy."

"Michael, I'm the one who makes
him
unhappy. We make each other unhappy."

"Then why don't you leave him?"

"I told you. That's the street up ahead — South Bronson. Turn right." They entered a neighborhood of old, large homes, most in the California bungalow style. Kristine told him to slow down and pointed out the house where she lived. Two stories high, fronted by a broad porch with low brick walls and pillars supporting a second floor porch, it looked dark and ill-kept. Faded yellow paint peeled from the clapboard siding. An old black Trans-Am with gray patches of primer along its side and rear waited by the curb in front of the house, seats unoccupied, lights off and engine running. Someone stood in the shadow of the porch. Michael did not like the circumstances at all, but Kristine didn't seem alarmed.

'Tommy's back," she said. "You can just let me off here."

Michael stopped, and Kristine opened the door and stepped out. The figure on the porch came down the steps slowly, methodically, with an exaggerated cowboy walk. Michael quickly probed the man and found sullen anger, neat tidy rooms full of engine parts and tools, a flicker of light at the back of a long, dark hallway. The man crossed the street as Kristine shut the door. She leaned into the window. "Thanks for the ride. I'll call you about meeting Edgar and coming to the department. And we'll talk about having the library people take a look—"

"How cute," Tommy said, stopping several yards from the car. He was of middle height, black-haired, powerfully built and slightly bow-legged, his legs packed into faded jeans and his crossed arms revealed by a black T-shirt. "A Saab. Real powerhouse. College professor, right?"

"Tommy, this is Michael Perrin. He was good enough to drive me home."

"I'm sure. Pleased to meet you, Michael."

"Same here," Michael said.

"I've been waiting."

"You were gone when I got home," Kristine said. "I couldn't leave you a message. And you had the car." She looked back at Michael as she touched Tommy's arms.

"Fine," Tommy said. "Thanks for dropping her off."

Michael could not believe what happened next. The man reached out casually with one arm, as if to embrace her. She stepped closer, and he made a half-spin, striking her cheek with his hand. Kristine dropped to the street in a half-crouch, one leg stuck out to keep from falling over. Her purse hit the pavement, and the envelope slid out.

There was no thought involved in his reaction. He heard Tommy say something in a quiet voice to Kristine, and then he heard the Saab's door open. Michael stood on the street long enough to let the man know he was there, and then Tommy was on his back with his legs spraddled and blood pouring from his nose.

Michael had deftly lifted his leg and reached out with the toe of one running shoe to clip Tommy's face. Kristine had reached for the envelope and her purse and had not seen the blow connect. Now she scrambled across the pavement, dragging her purse, and knelt by Tommy.

"Bastard," Tommy said thickly. "Gib be a Kleedex."

"It isn't broken," Michael said with certainty, still calm but feeling the hot lava of angry reaction rising in a volcano tube to his head.

"Goddab," Tommy said, clutching her proffered scarf to his face.

"Are you all right?" Michael asked Kristin. The print of Tommy's blow was livid on her left cheek.

"I'm fine," she said. "He didn't mean to hit me hard. Oh, Jesus, what am I saying?" She seemed to be keening over him, repeating, "You idiot. You poor, stupid bastard."

"Leave be alode," Tommy said, pushing her away. She got to her feet. "You dod't go out with subwud else, dot without by dowing," he said.

"It was a God damned business dinner," she said. "Michael's in charge of the estate I told you about."

Michael probed Tommy as he stood, trying to predict what he would do next. Tommy's anger was now evenly mixed with shame, somewhere a small boy crying, light flaring red at the back of the dark hallway. Michael suddenly felt very sorry for the man and confused.

Kristine confronted him. "You're my protector, are you?" she asked, her voice level, her stare glassy.

"I apologize."

"That was sharp," Tommy said, grinning through the scarf. Black smeared his jaw in the orange streetlight glow. "That was do college professor's trick. Dod't get bad at hib, Kris-tide. I pulled a stupid studt, and he showed be. He showed be."

Kristine looked between them as if they were both crazy. Then she shook her head and walked to the house.

"Okay, Bichael," Tommy said, backing off the street and onto the grass strip beyond the curb. "You showed be. So dow leave us alode, huh?" He turned off the idling engine of the Trans-Am and followed her up the porch steps into the dark house, keys dangling from his hand, the other still clutching Kristine's scarf to his nose.

Michael stood in the dark living room, having walked unerringly on a path between the furniture to the piano, and with his eyes closed wept for a time, his arms trembling and his chest heaving as he tried to subdue the sobs.

The real world.

How far away the Realm seemed now, and how cut and dried most of its problems. With every breath, every choked-off sob, the real world exploded behind his eyes. Growing up, trying to fit into society, trying to decide who and what he was: the immediate reality.

Making mistakes. Taking actions in which there was no apparent right or wrong.

Hitting a man who was already deeply confused, hurting.

But he struck Kristine.

Justified or not, what Michael had done that night simply tore him up inside. What made it worse was the knowledge that as a hidden part of what the Crane Women had taught him, he could have easily killed Tommy.

The impule had been there — raw indignation quickly bursting into anger. He could still feel it in his gut:
The world would be better off without Tommy
.

Something in his memory tickled. Something about Kris-tine. From the Realm. How was that possible?

All his emotions seemed to retreat like a fast sea tide. He stood in the dark, made suddenly afraid by what he remembered, and wondering why he had not remembered before.

After the death of Alyons, Wickmaster of the Pact Lands, at the outer border of the Blasted Plain surrounding the Pact Lands, he had encountered for the second time the hideous snail-like creature with the death's-head shell. With a woman's voice, it had implored Michael, "
Take me with you. Take me with you. I am not what I seem. I do not belong here
."

"What are you?"

"I am what Adonna wills."

"Who are you?"

"Tonn's wife. Abandoned. Betrayed. Take me with you!"

He walked in a wide circle around the creature. It made no further move toward him.

"You are a mage," it said. "Take me where I might live again. And I will tell you where Kristine is."

"I'm sorry," Michael had said. "I'm no mage. And 1 don't know who Kristine is."

He had crossed the border of the Blasted Plain, leaving the skull-snail — Tonn's wife — alone and trapped, a victim of Sidhe sorcery even more hideous than that used to transfigure Lamia and her sister.

His back crawled. Tonn's wife had referred to him as a mage. And by implication, something would happen to Kris-tine that Michael would have little or no power to prevent.

The Waltiri house seemed less and less a sanctuary and more his own special kind of trap.

Chapter Eight

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"I've opened that basement door," Michael told his father. They sat on the back porch of the Perrin house while his mother prepared iced tea and sandwiches in the kitchen.

"Oh? What'd you find?"

"A basement. It's crammed full of papers."

"John has something to ask you," Ruth said stiffly, laying a tray on the glass-topped table. She sat across from them, her face drawn. She had tied her long, dark red hair back in a bun.

"LAPD came by yesterday, in the form of a detective," John said. "He asked us questions about you, about your time away. We told him we'd rather discuss those things with you present."

"What did he say to that?"

"He smiled," Ruth said. "He said that was okay and that he had talked to you already. He said you were mysterious but seemed to want to cooperate."

"Then why did he come here?" Michael asked.

"I don't know," John said. "I suppose all this is linked with your disappearance."

Michael picked up a cucumber sandwich, examined it and then set it back on the plate. "I'm going to tell you everything," he said. "I don't care whether you believe me or whether you want to hear. I mean, I care, but I'll tell you anyway."

Ruth wrapped her arms around herself. John glanced at her. "I think it's about time, myself," he said. She sat beside him and nodded slowly.

"All right," she said.

Michael pulled a small cardboard box from his pocket and opened it on the table. There, embedded in cotton gauze, was the glass rose given to him by Mora, Clarkham's Sidhe mistress.

And he related the story, much as he had spun it out for Bert Cantor, from the summer days he had spent with Arno and Golda to the few days in Clarkham's Xanadu; from the end of Xanadu to the opening of the basement and the discovery of the curiously altered manuscript of The Infinity Concerto.

The telling lasted into the evening, with a pause for dinner. There were many glasses of tea, and later of beer, and Ruth wept quietly once toward the end, whether for his sanity or in commiseration with what her son had experienced, Michael couldn't judge.

Twilight was deep blue above the trees and hedges in the back yard. Michael sat with his father while his mother went for a sweater in the house.

"It was always twilight in the between-place," Michael said.

"Where Tristesse waited for travelers," John said.

"It was odd in the between-worlds. Muddy, peaceful. I mean, the sensation of reality there was thin. It was more like a dream, or a nightmare. In the Realm, everything was sharply real, but it didn't feel the same as this, now." Michael tapped the table.

Ruth re-emerged with a pink silk and angora sweater draped over her shoulders. "Do things like that happen?" she asked her husband, matter-of-factly. John barked an astonished laugh.

"Damned if I know."

"I've always made myself be the practical one in this family," she said, face turned toward the fading blue in the west. Michael detected a falseness in her voice, almost a posturing. He realized she was playing a kind of role, using this persona as armor against something she felt threatened by. "John's the master at wood, and Michael… wordsmith, scattershot talents. I could never be sure what Michael would end up being." She glanced pointedly at her son. "You know I've always preferred Updike to Tolkien."

"
Witches of Eastwick?'
John asked with a small grin.

"It wasn't like Tolkien," Michael said*.

"No, I suppose not. And this is the only evidence?" She touched the glass rose.

"There are several places I could show you. The Tippett Residential Hotel and Clarkham's house. Arno's basement could be first."

"I suppose the rule is, you'll have to show us three impossible things before breakfast," John said, picking up the rose gingerly to inspect it. It still kept a faint interior glow in the evening gloom. He sniffed it.

"Do you know what the hauntings in the newspapers mean?" his mother asked. Michael shook his head.

"Not exactly. I think I know what they're leading up to, though, which is why I'm telling you all this now."

"Is that why you're letting Kristine Pendeers get involved?" John asked.

"I don't know how I feel about all that." Michael stood and helped his father clear the dinner dishes from the table. When they were done, and the dishes had been stacked in the dishwasher and the table and counters wiped down, Ruth stood in the porch doorway with her arms folded.

She was crying. Her cheeks were shiny and drops beaded her sweater. "I just can't believe it," she said. "I've been saying this is all a nightmare for so long." Michael came to her, and she held him, running the fingers of one hand through his hair.

Michael started to say something, but John caught his eye and shook his head, no.

Later, after Ruth had gone to bed, Michael and his father sat in the back yard under the dim Los Angeles stars. "There's something she's going to tell us," John said. "She's had it inside her as long as I've known her. But it's never come out. Seems to me what you said tonight almost shook it loose."

"What is it?" Michael asked.

"I really don't know," John said.

"Is it important?"

"To her, it sure is."

Lieutenant Brian Harvey stood with Michael in the rear bedroom of Clarkham's house and peered at the footprints that began in the middle of the floor. "So there's no real estate company by that name," he said. "So there's no record of ownership for the house — no record of when it was even built. So this is supposed to be an empty lot. We're still trespassing."

"Are you worried?" Michael asked ironically.

"I suppose not," Harvey said. "It's a good trick, that." He pointed to the prints. 'I can guess how it was done. Sprinkle dust around the floor—" He extended his jaw and rubbed his lower lip with his index finger.

"Your dad's an artist type, the kind that might enjoy this sort of thing, isn't he?"

"! suppose."

"You told them everything you've told me?"

"In more detail. There was more time. It took most of an afternoon and evening."

"Magic and ghosts and alien worlds," Harvey sighed. "Okay. So this Tristesse was transformed — is that a good word? — by the Shee."

"Sidhe," Michael corrected.

"I'll never get it right, and don't try to make me," Harvey grumbled. "They gave her extra joints and turned her into a mummy."

"She was a vampire," Michael said, "Did you look at her teeth?"

"No. Did you?"

Michael hadn't even seen her face. "What did her face look like?"

"I don't remember. A mummy's, I suppose. But you know, that
is
odd — I don't remember."

"Is she still in the morgue?"

"They were both cremated after nobody claimed them and the coroner's office couldn't prove homicide. I think they dumped the fat woman and the mummy just to keep from having them around. But I have photos on file. And in my car."

"Why are you still on the case?"

"Because I go in for weird things, Mr. Perrin. And I wanted to know what your connection was. What Waltiri had to do with it. I'm a mystery fan. There're so many unsolved crimes and so damned few
mysteries in
my work. Do you understand?"

"I'd like to see the pictures," Michael said.

"I thought you would. Tit for tat. You tell me the story, show me around, and I show you the pictures. You've fulfilled your end of the bargain."

Sitting in the unmarked police car, Harvey handed a file folder to Michael. "They're grim," he said.

Michael opened the folder and took out the facial shots of Lamia. There was a coldness to the black and white photography, and the way her flesh had slumped after death added to the sense of unreality, of a poor cinematic makeup job.

He turned the picture over. The photo beneath it was ruined; an oily, varnish-like stain had obscured the middle of the print. Michael held it up for Harvey's inspection.

"Damn," Harvey said. "I'm sure there are other prints. We'll get new ones from the negative."

"I don't think you will," Michael said. "She must have been very beautiful, and very sweet."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because the Sidhe turned her into a monster and made certain no one would ever really see her face again."

Harvey sat silent for a moment, holding the ruined print in his hand. "Now you're spooking me," he said. "What in hell are we going to do?"

Michael shrugged. "Wait, I suppose. Do you want to investigate this case any more?"

"What's to investigate?" Harvey said. "There's nothing here that would mean anything to anybody in my profession. Only the end of the world."

"It may not be quite that bad," Michael said.

"I'd be scared stiff if I were you."

"Oh, I'm scared," Michael said.
But I can't just stop everything in its tracks
. There was a process under way, of which he was only a part — and how big a part, there was no way of knowing.

A mage. A face in the blown snow.

What scared him most of all was the dawning realization that his part was likely to be very big indeed.