Authors: Tony Richards
It covers the northeast edge of town, and is hidden just beyond a narrow stretch of parkland with a double row of fir trees, a couple of broad avenues leading in and out. A lot of the townspeople have jobs up there. But nobody lives there, with one exception.
Big warehouses and four-story office blocks were going past me before too much longer. Looming behind them was a huge Victorian smokestack that’s not seen use in years, The grid of streets was quiet, almost no one out of doors. It’s always struck me as an unwelcoming place, with little in the way of human touches.
There were signs for all the companies, pretty much what you would expect for an area like this. Printers, office suppliers, packagers, business goods. We make a lot of furniture in this town – trucks show up from the outside world and haul most of it away.
At one intersection, I looked right and caught a quick glimpse of the green walls of the lumber mill. It has been there since the early Thirties, and is still a working concern. Just because folk can’t leave this town, it doesn’t stop them walking off into the forest with a chainsaw, dragging back a log. A flatbed truck piled high with them was reversing toward it at this very moment, a man with a hardhat and thick leather gloves signaling to the driver.
There were higher-tech ventures here as well, mostly in the smaller and more modern buildings. Ironically, one of them produced a top-selling video game, called
Witch’s Curse
. You were trapped at the center of a medium-sized town, and had to find your way out past the warlocks and hobgoblins.
Artifice imitating life, in truth. Except that nobody outside this place had any way of knowing that.
I reached the final street, out on the edge. It was only trees, beyond that. The shadows in the forest seemed to peer at me, as I got out.
The pavement was all broken up and full of weeds. And there was just one building here. Its dark red brick had become faded down the decades, and was crumbling at the corners. Where the sun could not reach, there was moss. No lights were on. Its windows were smeared and murky, those that were not broken. Apparently abandoned. But everybody knew the place still had one lone inhabitant.
Dr. Lehman Willets – quite uniquely for this town of ours – had not been born here. He came from Charleston, South Carolina, originally. Had taught comparative religion at Boston U. But his main interest was in a field far more peculiar than that. He wrote books about, and investigated, paranormal phenomena.
What had brought him here was the same kind of research that Goad had undertaken. That, and a keen sixth sense when it came to the supernatural.
“I could hear the voices, telling me to turn back, yes,” he’d told me once. “I could feel this freezing chill inside my bones. But I’d encountered that before, in haunted houses and the like. And it wasn’t easy, but I kept on going.”
When he’d arrived, people had kept gawking at him. And his first thought had been,
What, you’ve never seen a black man?
It had gradually dawned on him what was going on, just the same way it dawned upon the townsfolk. Some were suspicious, some relieved. An elderly couple from Vernon Valley had eventually taken him into their home.
And Lehman Willets, using all the town’s resources, had started to learn about real magic.
I walked quickly to a door in the side of the building. It was metal, and looked more like it belonged on a ship. A lizard scuttled away from my advancing feet and disappeared through a gap in the brickwork. There was a wasps’ nest in an air vent near the top – I could see the humming specks going back and forth.
“Sanderson’s Supplies,” read a huge sign painted overhead. Supplies of what, no one even remembered.
I tugged down on the handle of the door and pulled it open. It let out a rusted creak.
And then, the music came skirling up at me. A distant-sounding, rather frantic, saxophone. Willets was playing his jazz again. But I’d already been expecting that.
Back when he’d begun his study of the Salem arts, he’d been puzzled at first, but then learned quickly. Had turned out, after about a month, to be better at it than he ever could have dreamed. Perhaps he was simply a natural adept. Whatever, his power grew exponentially after that. He became capable of massive feats of witchcraft in mere weeks, and sometimes even days.
He could fly before long, without becoming a cloud or a bird the way the Sycamore Hill set had to. He could transmogrify objects or summon them up. Change the weather. He didn’t even
need
a crystal or a talisman.
Then he started healing people, pulling tumors out of them and getting them up out of wheelchairs. And that was the highest art of all.
But that was where it all went wrong.
This doorway didn’t lead into the main part of the building. There was just a flight of dingy metal stairs below me, leading to the basement. It was where the man had lived for years now. Ever since …
“Come to me, people! Let me share this glory with you!”
The magic had affected him, driving him totally over the brink. You’re still wondering why I don’t like the stuff? It was normally the feeble-spirited who went this route. But his power had become so vast that it had overwhelmed him. He’d harbored messianic aspirations long before Woodard Raine had done the same.
My tread reverberated on the first step. The frame seemed loose and trembled a little, so I grabbed onto a rail. There were cobwebs all around me, and some dark mold on the walls. Only the dimmest light was visible, below.
“We can all be holy! We can all shine with a bright, pure glow! Gather, brothers, sisters! Let me show you how!”
He’d been floating just above the struts of the Iron Bridge, the river gurgling beneath him. The air around him practically danced with the power surging from his body. And most people gave him a wide berth. They’d learnt, a long time back, to be wary of a force as strong as this.
But twelve mostly young folk
s, credulous, approached.
He smiled at them as though they had become his children.
“You are my special ones, beloved,”
he had told them.
“The mysteries of the Universe will be revealed to you.”
He had spread his arms, and then his fingers. Bolts of light had shone out from them, far more dazzling even than the webs I’d seen van Friesling throw. They had leapt from individual to individual …
Some of the charred corpses, in the end, were so heavily fused to the sidewalk that they’d had to pull up entire paving stones and bury those.
The madness had died from his eyes, to be replaced by an unbearable remorse. And he’d fled society, become a hermit. And had lived here ever since.
So far as I knew, I was the only person who ever visited him. Not that I felt easy about that. My heartbeat quickened slightly as I made my way down. There was no blue glow, no electricity, like stepping in to see the Little Girl. But I could feel his power all around me, moving the air and making it stir in unnatural ways. The shadows were far blacker than they should have been. The dimness almost seemed to inhale and exhale.
He could hear me coming, obviously. But he’d have known that I was on my way if I had trod as quietly as a mouse, although he didn’t respond in the slightest to my presence.
He was sitting on his folding camp bed, over by the far wall. And his head was down. His hair was gray and curly. He was wiry, medium-height. Was wearing his usual tweed jacket and a pair of blue serge pants.
The place couldn’t have been more sparsely furnished. A single naked bulb hung from the ceiling, about forty watts. A small, neat fire of twigs was burning over in the corner, with a black iron kettle suspended above it
– where did the smoke go? He only had the clothes he wore, although those remained impeccably clean, just the same way that he never sported stubble and his hair was always the same length.
Here was a man frozen in time and recollection.
Hundreds of books kept him company. He simply conjured them up whenever he needed one. Huge leather-bound tomes, for the most part. Since he had no shelves to put them on, they lay in neat piles all over the floor. Some of the lettering on the spines was golden leaf. And some of it was in an alphabet I didn’t even recognize as human.
At the center of the room there was a matt black plinth with a turntable on it. His pride and joy. No amplifier. No speakers. But all the same, the saxophone chords kept churning out.
If he had one passion left in his whole wounded, dried-out heart, it was his music.
“Morning, Devries,” he mumbled, still not looking up.
“Quite a morning,” I replied.
He must have understood what I was talking about, but he ignored me.
“You know who this is?” he asked me, nodding at the turntable.
I glanced at the spinning vinyl disc, but couldn’t read the label. Alicia had been fond of jazz, however, so I knew a bit about it.
“John Coltrane?” I ventured.
And he nodded again, slowly.
“Know the tune?”
There were other things, far more important, that I needed to talk to him about. But with Willets, you took it slowly. Let him set the tone, the pace.
“It’s from ‘The Sound of Music,’ isn’t it?”
“’My Favorite Things.’ Whiskers on kittens and lah-dee-da. As white bread as they come. I think that ‘Trane chose it deliberately, because of that.”
He hunched down a moment, listening to the track intently.
“Hear what he’s doing? Plays it normally at first, and then starts taking it apart. Like an expert mechanic with an engine block, until it’s all lying across the floor in little pieces, nuts and cogs and bolts. And then what does he do? He puts it all back together again. Deconstruction. Reconstruction. The perfect demonstration of be-bop.
That’s
magic.”
From another person’s mouth, it might have all sounded enthusiastic. But Willets’
s tone remained a somber one. Deeply brooding. Deeply pensive. As though he felt sure that he was missing something here. And was he wishing he could reconstruct those dozen souls?
I looked around, then up. We might be the only humans here, but we were not alone.
The ceiling was so dense with cobwebs, it was like a great translucent canopy which shimmered in the bulb’s weak glow. Its inhabitants were moving around, and they were large ones.
Something else came writhing from a low vent in the wall. It was the largest millipede I’d ever seen, rustling along the floor, its black carapace gleaming. There were other good-sized bugs down there as well, massive beetles. And from the darkest corner gleamed two shining sets of eyes, a pair of rats. Motionless. Just watching him.
Not that the place was dirty. But it had been this way for a good while. It was the energy that I had felt, coming down the stairs. It simply drew most living creatures to him. They never came close. They just stared at him from a safe distance. And they barely ever turned their gazes away. Maybe they were wondering what he was going to do.
Nothing at all, I knew, if he could help it. Ever since that day on the bridge, he’d kept his use of magic to the barest minimum.
His head came up at last. His narrow face had deep lines on it. Not wrinkles – he was only in his forties. More like a perpetual frown. His eyebrows were salt-and-pepper, and his lips looked like he chewed at them a lot. His gaze was a medium chestnut brown.
Except for his pupils, which were definitely not commonplace. The size of pinheads, they glowed a searingly bright red, as if coals had been lit inside that pointy skull of his. They always made me stiffen up a little. It was something you could not get used to.
“But you haven’t come here to discuss be-bop, have you?” he whispered through the dimness at me.
Which was stating the obvious. I understood how bad, how guilty the man felt. But nothing could be done about it. Perhaps he ought to try starting to let it go a little, a process that began with forgiving yourself.
I wasn’t even sure, though, he was capable of that.
He twitched the fingers of his right hand. The plinth and the turntable blinked out of existence, the last chords dancing round the cellar and then fading off. A straight-backed chair appeared on the same spot. For my benefit, you see. I nodded my thanks to him, and then settled onto it.
“You’re aware of what’s been happening?”
“Of
course
I am!” he snapped impatiently. “What do you think I am? Blind? Stupid?”
Merely sitting here, I knew, he’d sensed it all.
He was never in the best of moods. Today was no exception. And he doesn’t get much chance to hone his social skills, you understand.
“Then you have to know that I’m here for your help.”
His gaze grew slightly hotter and he scowled at me. “Can’t give it.”
I hadn’t been expecting
that
fast a refusal. He peered at me from his folding bed like I was wasting his valuable time.
“You must know what’s at stake here?” I came back at him.