Unquiet Dreams Page 11

  "I didn't know," my friend said softly, a single tear crawling down her cheek. "I didn't believe…it. I'm sorry." And before I could begin to puzzle the meaning of her words, Brigitte pushed herself away from the wall, the ledge and, arms wide, fell into the air. I could not separate her scream from my own until the sickening smack of her body on the concrete below silenced her wail. The crowd, temporarily chased back by the imminent impact, bunched once more around her prone figure. I withdrew.

  The next day, when the sad calls had been made, when the campus police and the one reporter had gone, I sat at last alone with Dr. Praetorius. As advisor to us both, he shared with me the stunned confusion at Brigitte's impetuous act. The friendly competition between us had brought out only our best efforts and solidified our closeness. No one knew Brigitte better than I, yet I was shocked by her sudden turn.

  "Was there anything—?" Praetorius began, then halted. His gnarled hands, authoritative with age, gripped one another then fell helplessly in his lap.

  I shook my head. "Nothing. Her family is fine. She's been too busy for lovers lately, and her last parting was amicable. And of course, her work was going well—in fact, just yesterday Brigitte told me she had hit upon a fascinating new angle that was sure to add a great excitement to her research. I just don't understand it. Or her last words." I had repeated them to Praetorius, who shared my puzzlement.

  We parted sorrowfully, my advisor reluctantly bearing away some of the books he had loaned to Brigitte. I stayed behind to begin sorting through papers, as Brigitte's parents had requested. With luck we could have her dissertation published posthumously as a tribute. She had been so close! Brigitte had been breathing new life into the medieval text—making the saint and his demons vivid to any modern reader. And her analysis of the Vita Sancti Guthlaci was sure to spark a popular audience as well as a scholarly one.

  A sheaf of papers in her small neat hand formed a hasty array across the otherwise orderly desk. Her new "angle"? The uppermost sheet displayed a grid filled with runic letters, each square of it also annotated with a cryptic description. Though I recognized the format from much later alchemical texts, this diagram was clearly Anglo-Saxon—yet completely unfamiliar to me. The pages under this chart seemed to further annotate the grid, various versions with selected runes circled or arrows drawn from one to another, but each page ending with an underlined "WRONG!" Puzzled, I poked through the other books on the desk. As always, Felix's Vita lay close at hand, as did her Lewis & Short and Clarke-Hall dictionaries. A volume of the Anglo Saxon Poetic Record lay open to the first pages of the "Old English Rune Poem." A slip of paper in a companion volume marked the "Nine Herbs Charm." This was indeed new. What did pagan poetry have to do with the saint's life? I opened the Vita to a page marked by a folded half-sheet. The pages told of St. Guthlac's tribulations with the demons. The marker, unfolded, revealed a Xerox of one of the Harley Roll images of the saint's life—of the very same scene. The bestial forms menaced the holy man, tongues thrust out, claws eager, whips and clubs brandished by several of the fiends.

  It was so unlike Brigitte. Her briskly efficient research focused on the tropes of faith, the language of sanctity—she had no time for the flashy hyperbole of demonology. No, the wailing descriptions of hells and punishment were my realm, something at which Brigitte had always wrinkled her aristocratic nose. What had led her here?

  Scanning the page, my eye fell upon one of the footnotes—"On Guthlac summoning the demons, see Kirschherr 138 passim." I flipped to the bibliography and found the entry: De Institutione Pandemoniae, Berlin, C. A. Grippa Verlag: 1843. On an impulse, I lifted a small stack of books, each bearing the blue strip indicating an interlibrary loan—ah ha! Here was Kirschherr. A beautiful volume bound in smooth black leather, the surface looked pristine, very odd in a book of its age. Gingerly opening the cover, I found that the text was hand-written—what library would loan such a book? It belonged behind glass in carefully regulated temperatures with artificially low humidity. Unthinkable that it had been loaned—most unusual.

  I turned to the frontispiece to see what library owned this rare manuscript: Rheims Allgemeinische Esotericke Bibliothek. Curious. I thought I knew every medieval collection in Germany. I flipped through a few pages. Kirschherr's language was a highly stylized and idiosyncratic Latin, matched by his peculiar penmanship. Turning to the contents at the back, I found the chapters dealt with all manner of demons in the medieval world, from the torturers of Augustine to the scribes of Hrotsvit. I flipped to the pages on Guthlac indicated in the footnote.

  A curious prickling sensation rose up my spine as I read. Kirschherr wrote that the saint had actually summoned forth the demons who harassed him—summoned them with a complex shamanistic formula descended from pre-Christian times. An ancient ritual passed down by word of mouth, it was codified in runes at some point and given to the learned man. Pre-Christian? Ancient? What were demons before there was a Christ? Old gods? This did not sound like the gods of the Anglo-Saxons, even though they too became "demons" to the Christian missionaries. I thrust my hands deep into my pockets and pondered, then sighed. There was nothing for it but to put on a pot of tea and settle down to some research. I must know. I had to know what cost Brigitte her life.

  Three hours had passed before I looked up. By then night's cold shroud had fallen and I shivered. Brigitte's tiny studio had never been very warm. She had chosen it for the view and the high ceilings that left plenty of room for her tall bookshelves. How often I had envied her collection. My own remained small. Perpetually short on resources, I relied almost wholly on the library. Not the most convenient thing, I would grumble, when running through the inevitably rainy streets on the daily trip to my library study, or when trying desperately to drown out the undergraduate chatter from nearby tables. But I shook off my envy, remembering that its object had swan-dived to the pavement just a day ago. The tea in my cup was cold and I was more bewildered than ever.

  I had gathered that Kirschherr had uncovered something that other Guthlac scholars had ignored. His knowledge of the occult had helped him recognize clues in the saint's life that led to his deducing the runic pattern for the summoning. His studies in the Vita were annotated by information from the Rune Poem. For the old German linguist, all the pieces had suddenly fallen into place, but it remained an obscure mystery to me. I was missing some keystone that was obvious to Kirschherr—what could it be? I sighed, frustrated, and held the Harley Roll picture in my hands once more.

  And all at once it dawned on me. I grabbed for the runic diagram—yes! It had to be. How simple and yet, how magnificent. Clever that the key was a key. In the Harley Roll picture of Guthlac borne aloft by the demons, one held a key to the Hellmouth below them. Inscribed—ever so faintly—upon the key was the word wergulu. The name of the herb was not important itself, but when those letters were used to organize the grid…

  My god, it was an invocation!

  Brigitte had indeed stumbled across something amazing. I must write it out, I cautioned myself, before I lose the thread. I brushed aside the foolscap upon which I had scribbled various theories and started with a fresh white sheet. I tried to still my furious impulses and write neatly, clearly. I had to show this to Praetorius in the morning—he would share my delight at Brigitte's brilliance, for surely I could not have deciphered it without her lead.

  I sensed more than saw the light change as I wrote, but passed it off as reflections from the cars on the street below, foolishly. I even heard the dull thump of clubs and the scratch of claws, but the page and ink seemed to possess me. I think I knew, I knew all along. But was my will too great—or the pull too strong?

  As I wrote out the concluding words of the puzzle, I finally made the conscious recognition. "This is a summoning! My god, Kirschherr was right, the old saint had called forth the demons who attacked him—"

  But my self-congratulatory cries were cut short by the distinct hum that seemed suddenly to come from all around me. It was only
when I looked around that I realized the walls had become translucent, and the susurrating sounds had been joined by the clank of chains and the groans of misery. A summoning! One that still worked—oh god, Brigitte had known, she had. And she had halted the onslaught by hurling herself from the ledge. I looked at the paper in my trembling hands. I should destroy it, rip it to shreds, erase it somehow, and stop the demonic march. Yet, I hesitated.

  All my life I had hoped for an experience beyond the natural, beyond the realm of the mundane world. Here I was on the verge of such an experience. Even if it should cost me my life, I could not resist the chance to see such phenomena, the hidden face of the powers of the universe. I could not bring myself to hurl my body out the window when all my unspoken desires were at last to be met. Surely they would be horrible—already the groans and shrieks grew louder, promising pain and torture beyond my darkest fancies—but I could not resist the temptation of seeing, of tasting that forbidden thrill. I could face the cost to my soul, to my body, just to know.

  I was a fool.

  At last, through the black void that the walls had become, they arrived. They were hideous. No, that is too little. Their horror chilled my blood, dried my throat, and clenched my bowels. The drawings that the unknown artist of the Harley Roll had made were tame next to the reality, and yet he had captured something of their grotesqueness, the colors, the skins. The saint had described some of them as having the face of a tiger, the limbs of a dog, and the trunk of an elephant. The truth was something much more uncanny—a wrongness that immediately marked them as otherworldly. Several passed over me on their way across the room, and I shuddered uncontrollably at their cold wetness, flinching from further touch. They went at once to the windows, pressing their damp palms to the glass and tapping with their great claws.

  One among them stopped before me and regarded my quivering form. "Our deliverer!" it cried, though the voice seemed to come from within and to issue from no visible orifice. The speech carried the dank wretchedness of the subterranean depths and a coldness beyond mortal ken. I felt panic cover me like a cold sweat and knew I would soon begin screaming, because the thing spoke into my brain. Not words; nothing so crude as that, yet I understood. "You have freed us to enter this realm once more, our thanks. It has been some long time since last we were here." I wanted to shriek, to scream, to release the horror I felt gripping my bones, but all I could manage was a few ragged breaths. A tentacle—or was it only a long arm?—slid searchingly around my neck, and the claws drew up before my face. "You shall be known as our deliverer by this sign," and the tips of the claws bored into my forehead and I feared I would pass out from the pain. Stars danced before my eyes and I felt the rush of blood pour down my nose and cheeks.

  "Kill me," I breathed, at last. I had, finally, seen more than I wanted to see. Now oblivion was all I sought.

  A hideous laugh seemed to bubble from the dark mysteries of the creature, even as its mates broke through the first window with the clubs and forged chains. "Oh, no. We cannot sacrifice our deliverer. You shall live. You shall watch as we destroy your world, as we corrupt the innocent and torture the wicked, as we kill and maim and force all to suffer our joys, our playfulness, our exquisite pains." It leaned closer. "And you shall see it all and know that you opened the door."

  And only then could I scream.

  The Rook

  for Maura

  A rook perched on the headstone. Charlie stared it down, but the bird appeared unruffled by his presence. It was one of the old headstones, a worn Celtic cross. Turn of the century: today the trend was shiny black plaques on pedestals. The adjacent grave had them -- heart-shaped black slabs with the legend "brother" or "father" or "Joe" written in shiny gold letters. He found it revoltingly slick.

  One had the shape of a mobile phone, with the deceased's number indelible in gold, as if it were possible to make a call to the afterlife if only you knew the prefix to dial.

  Charlie removed the desiccated blooms from the vase and opened the crinkly plastic around the daffodils. How Clara had loved that golden sign of spring, cooing with excitement with the first yellow trumpets. He arranged the stems in the thick green glass, trying to keep them from listing to one side but despite his best efforts the vase looked lopsided.

  A loud laugh made him look up. Just the rook. Its bright eyes regarded him with what appeared to be humour, though Charlie thought it was foolish to assume any such emotion on the part of the bird. Smart birds, sure; but people tended to anthropomorphise them far too much. It was just their nature to sound like chuckling pirates.

  He kneeled down and laid a hand on Clara's headstone. The pink granite chilled his palm. "A year to the day," he said, the words barely audible. "Here I am and here you are and it's not any easier, little sis."

  The finality of the etched letters -- and even more so of the carved numbers -- bludgeoned him with the truth. While we remember, his mother had said, holding her locket to her breast, his father's fading portrait mouldering inside, they live on.

  Charlie had bit his tongue to stop himself saying, not much of a life that.

  With closed eyes he pictured his sister's smile, the way she brushed that lock of hair from her face that always fell across her brow. He heard her laugh too. It echoed loudly and his eyes snapped open.

  The rook had flown over to Clara's headstone and perched not a foot from Charlie's head. It leaned forward to croak at him, its broad beak open as it squawked. An irrational anger filled him, as if the bird were somehow desecrating her grave.

  "Shove off," he shouted waving his arm. The black bird flapped its wings and hopped as far away as it could yet remained on the top of the granite. It tilted its head and regarded him seemingly without fear.

  He found it unsettling. The chill in his hand seeped into his flesh and he stood up awkwardly, his legs stiff. The rook made a few clicking sounds. Charlie turned and walked away, unable to shake the discomfort the bird provoked.

  Out of the gates of Bohermore and turning his steps toward the centre, Charlie kept hearing the rook's voice. Don't be ridiculous, he scolded himself. He reached Eyre Square and found it chock full of students and tourists as usual. He hadn't noticed how many rooks there were, too, fighting for scraps with the gulls. Their mutual cacophony drowned out the people's chatter.

  I should go to work, Charlie thought, but found his steps taking him to the Long Walk. He found something calming in that spot where the wild waters of the Corrib poured into the bay. Nimmo's pier on the other side of the channel hummed with joggers, dog walkers and visitors, but once you got past the museum, this side stayed fairly empty.

  He sat down on the set of steps leading down to the water. The waves lapped the bricks. Distance muted the sounds of the feeding frenzy on the opposite bank. An elderly woman fed the swans and gulls with some bread from a carrier bag. People snapped photos.

  A rough croak broke his reverie. A rook perched on the lamp attached to the blue wall of the houses. Charlie started, then told himself, it's not the same one. He turned his gaze back to the water, but the bird persisted. He looked again. The bird hopped over to the steel railing and regarded Charlie with its shiny eyes.

  A graveyard chill rippled through him again. The rook sidled closer making a variety of clicks and vaguely human-sounding noises. Charlie assumed they only made that kaah sound, but supposed they must be capable of making sounds like these. As long as it didn't get too weird.

  "You're not going to say 'Nevermore' are you?" Charlie said aloud then immediately wished he hadn't. The rook opened its beak as if to answer, but made no sound as it opened and closed it making audible clicks.

  He'd never seen one so close. The beak offered an impressive shape. The shaggy legs fluttered in the wind and its broad wings flapped as if it were considering what to do next.

  Charlie reached out a tentative hand. He couldn't have said why precisely: to show he meant no harm, perhaps, or to suggest he had no fear. The rook ruffled its feathers, hover
ed for a moment in the air, then approached his outstretched hand. Charlie had a moment to panic that the bird might attack him, when it opened its beak and dropped something into his palm.

  Charlie stared.

  It was a gold claddagh ring with a rough dent in its side that came from wearing it while playing field hockey, which she wasn't supposed to do. "You'll bend it all out of shape," their mother had warned.

  Charlie rolled the ring around. The morgue had lost it. He assumed someone had pocketed it. He looked up at the rook. It leaned forward, croaking again loudly, eyes fixed upon him. Then with a kind of laugh, it flew off. Charlie stared at its shrinking form.

  I'm not going to work today, Charlie decided.

  A Gift House

  It really didn't bother her at all. Yes, it was gruesome, but as Betty told her sister Jerri the day they got the good news, these things happen. And the house of their dreams was affordable because of it: no more cramped bedrooms, mildewy closets, cardboard walls and unsavory sounds. Elaine and Michael were going to grow up in a real house, with a big backyard and a swing and a tree-house—well, maybe next summer anyway—but a home. One the size of which her dreams had not permitted when she and Everett sallied forth with that tiny bank loan.

  Yes, she'd felt that sinking in her chest when Ms. Gordon coughed through the explanation, why such a magnificent place as this was going for a price they could just barely afford. Six bedrooms! And closets enough for any packrat, not to mention the huge yard—two acres almost—and the row of poplars discreetly screening the nearest neighbors. Perhaps that's why no one had seen anything.

  No, Betty admonished herself, firmly slipping the 12th volume of the Children's Encyclopaedia of Knowledge into the remaining space of the box, we won't dwell on that. Bad things happen everywhere. She rolled the tape dispenser over the lid of the box and again crosswise. All sealed up. Just a few more to go and they'd actually be ready for the movers, a first. Brakes moaned low in the parking lot below, followed by three quick door slams. Her family was back, Elaine loudly demanding to carry the pizza, Michael giving up without a word. Betty regretted moving them to a different school mid-year, but her daughter could make friends even waiting in line at the DMV and Michael, well, Michael really didn't have friends, did he. Betty let the curtain drop and went to get the napkins and plates out. Things would be better at the new house; maybe even Michael would find a friend, if not a puppy—yes, that would be a good idea.