THE OLD
“But why is he here?” Lewis whispered to his uncle.
Owen looked back into the living room where Kris was laughing at something Uriah said.
“Because your uncle Uri says that he should be here. Says that he is one of us.”
Lewis eyed the young man with the unshaven cheeks and icy blue eyes.
“He’s very good looking, and not a little bit odd, but he’s certainly no witch. I can tell that.”
“He’s something else,” Seth said, looking down at the table.
“What?”
“The moment he came in, I was excited, and then I realized it wasn’t me. Nathan was excited.”
“Your Nathan? Dead Nathan?”
“Yes,” Seth said. “So I know this guy is supposed to be here.”
“And besides,” Owen added, “there are other things beside witches in this world, as you well know.”
As if to prove this there was a knock at the door, and Owen murmured, “Really?”
“I’ll get it,” Seth called, and Owen asked, “Where is Loreal?”
“She’s at Saint Jerome’s already. Listening to Lessons and Carols.”
Seth moved through the living room and dining room, giving a sidelong glace to Kristian Strauss and asking silently, “What is he? What is he to you?” but Nathan said nothing. Had seemed to flee altogether.
Seth opened the door, and there was talking, and in the living room, Kristian and Christopher had stood up and Owen noticed his nephew and said, “Long tall, blue eyed white boys really do excite you.”
“I’m going to ignore you,” Lewis said, walking in, followed by his uncle. And coming into the living room were Laurie and two others flanking him.
“Have you banked the fire?” Lewis asked.
His uncle said, “Of course.”
Laurie spoke.
“Good evening, Owen. Seth had invited us into your house, but you may resend the invitation. This is Dan Rawlinson, Lieutenant of the House of Kertesz, my House. And this is—”
“Kruinh!” Chris cried.
The older blood drinker, distinguished and not unlike Owen, but darker and without glasses bowed regally with a small smile.
“Well,” Owen said, “It appears we’re all here. We have to go. There isn’t much time.”
“Who’s driving?” Laurie asked, “and… what’s going on?”
“What’s going on,” Owen said, “will soon be explained.”
He touched the fire place on one side, and Uri touched it on the other, and then Lewis came and bent, touching a stone by the fender. As he moved away, the hearth began to turn with a great scraping and it opened, moving away to reveal a stair way descending into darkness.
“No one’s driving,” Owen said. “We’ll be walking.”
As they continued down the long walk under the earth, their feet making a hollow sound while some walked with flashlights and the vampires followed last, careless of the dark, Lewis said, “You are wondering why you came here? Or wondering if all of this is a joke.”
“I am wondering why I haven’t shit myself,” Kris Strauss said, “and if there’s a bathroom on the way in case I have to.”
“Fair,” Lewis said. “Fair.”
“Are you…?” Kris began, “are you telling me those are vampires?”
“I’m not telling you anything, and up until a few months ago they were certainly news to me too.”
“And you…” Kris said, “you’re a…”
“Witch. That’s really the best word for it. Not immortal and not always reliably magical, but yes.”
“Goddamn,”
“Goddamn indeed.”
“Why am I here?” Kris wondered.
“Why are they here?” Lewis jerked his thumb back. “It’s hard to say. It just seems like on this particular night we are all called together.”
“Do you see a light?” Kris pointed ahead and his tower of hair almost bobbed before him.
“No,” Lewis said, looking at him strangely as his pale blue eyes shone in the night, “I didn’t. But… now I do. It’s nothing, My vision is not very good.”
“Sometimes I think mine is better at night,” Kris said.
] But he was right, and soon they came out into a chamber which was lit and round and large and of warm limestone and the floor was carved with: “Is that a pentagram?”
“It’s a pentacle,” Lewis said. “And it’s only upside down because we came at it from this direction.”
There were three other tunnels so that there was one for each direction and Lewis realized they had come from the south. At the mouths of the north tunnel were Eve Moreland and her brother Ethan.
“You missed your grandmother’s funeral,” Owen said.
“So did she,” Ethan returned.
“Ignore him,” Lewis said.
“Friends, my cousins, Eve and Ethan, also known as Loreal’s older siblings.”
“Where is she?” Ethan demanded. He was green eyed and fair like Loreal, and Laurie wondered how someone he was so repulsed by could look so similar to and be the brother of someone he had to admit he loved.
“Up in the church,” Uriah said.
“Uriah,” Ethan smiled, “It’s been so long.”
“Why isn’t your grandfather here?”
“He had business elsewhere.”
“I’ll have my business with him soon enough,” Lewis said.
“Oh, how you preen,” Eve said, coming forward. “Oh, you’ve already made yourself a lord. Well, cousin, it takes more than a ceremony to make you a great enough witch to think about summoning Augustus. By the way,” Eve turned to Kris Strauss. “This is for you. Or rather, for your sister.”
She laid it in his large hand and he read:
To Marabeth Strauss,
The Queen of the Pack
When she is ready.
- A. Dunharrrow
“What the fuck?” Kris snarled.
“Just remember,” Eve said.
Lewis’s eyes scanned the envelope and then turned away, and Laurie came forward with at the large bowling bag Dan Rawlinson had handed him and said, “And if you are Eve Moreland, then this is for you.”
She looked at him strangely, her beautiful face so like and yet so unlike Loreal’s, and then she took the bag and retreated to the circumference of the chamber. She calmly opened it, looked in, then threw it down screaming, as the open mouthed, opened eyed head of Theodore Coach thudded on the floor and stared up at her.
But just as she recovered herself enough to snarl, in through the last door, in black robes with pale gold white haired, came three women, and the first of them wore a black gown open so low it nearly revealed her nipples, yet her grey eyes were serene. and she was grand, and carried before a great golden dish, and the other women had jars of wine and stacks of herbs.
Owen bowed fully to her, going to his knees, and planting his sword before him. Lewis knelt as well, bowing, and the women bowed low, and then the first woman raised the bowl.
“Behold I am she whose name is hidden,” the woman called, “the Light on Waters, Babalon the Great. I am she who is called the Maid.”
“And now,” Owen murmured, while Kris looked on, his eyes darting from the discarded head these women were unbothered by, to the jangled Eve Moreland, to the three women, “let the ritual begin.”
Inside the great brick fortress of Saint Jerome’s, the organ thundered, and the people’s voices rose like waves over the organ.
“Of the Father's love begotten
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the Source, the Ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see
Evermore and evermore.”
Loreal felt the tug on her shoulder, and she looked up to see her brother Ethan.
“Oh, that birth forever blessed
When the Virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving,
Bare the Savior of our race…..”
“It’s time,” he said.
Loreal nodded, and she stood up in the darkened transept. It was like a cave and across it she could see the greater nave, and in the dark above, the blackness of the stain glass window glinting like a sea at night. She followed Ethan out of the transept and into the old confessional where Eve stood.
“You came too?”
“It was required,” Eve said in a stilted voice.
They did not sit down to confess or pray, put pushed the wall in, and it moved like a door, leading down a stair with a barely visible light at the bottom.
“You may as well go first,” Ethan said.
Ethan spent so much time with their grandfather, Loreal wondered if he might push her down to the bottom of the stair.
You missed Grandmother’s funeral, she wanted to say, but did not as she traveled the stair which began to wind slowly beneath the church and through the walls and from above, while the organ still thrummed through the walls, she still heard
,
“This is He whom Heaven-taught singers
Sang of old with one accord;
Whom the Scriptures of the prophets
Promised in their faithful word.
Now He shines, the Long-expected;
Let creation praise its Lord
Evermore and evermore.”
They emerged now into a great round hall lit with candles. In the right frame of mind it would have terrified her, Loreal thought. The floor was of plain stone and engraved into it in gold was a pentacle, in a circle. From the north and the south and the east and the west shot out tunnels that were, at least for tonight, lit. Above them the organ began again. This was the service of Lessons and Carols before the monks chanted their midnight prayer for the Eve of Christmas, and Loreal hoped that this would all be over—a horrible thing to say—before that service begun. Christmas Mass, even midnight Mass, was something she had no time for, but the songs and chants that ushered in Christmas Eve she never missed.
In the middle of the room, in a great black robe, rigid and regal sat Lewis, and beside him, standing equally noble was Owen.
Eve was here and so was Ethan. Mother had come and there was Uri. Seth of course. And she knew Chris and was surprised but not displeased to see Laurie. But there were others, a solemn but kindly looking chocolate haired young man in a leather jacket.
Cheesecake, Loreal thought, for some reason he is making me think of cheese cake. A man, not small or tall who reminded her of Owen and of Lewis but who was certainly not, a witch was there. What was he? He was… yes, like the chocolate haired man, and like Laurie and Chris, a drinker. Why so many vampires here? And beside Uriah, handsome looking in a tired bookish way, a tall, almost unshaven man in thin pants and white shirt in a rumpled old jacket with messy pale brown hair and he had the palest blue eyes..
And then, with their alabaster skin ,the skin that was not of white women as people who were called, “white but not entirely” with their Cleopatra hair, white blond and mushroom, and at the head of them, in her black robe so low her breast were nearly exposed, holding the golden Crater, the Maid herself. She exchanged greetings with Loreal.
“Daughter, hello.”
And Loreal knew no words had been spoken. She bowed low. But Laurie must have seen her. He blinked and bowed, and she wanted to go to him, but as she did suddenly Owen intoned, “This is the night when the Master shall pass and a new Master shall come. This is the night of the return of the Master.”
Loreal remembered her grandmother saying how once, long ago, they had lived on the coast of the Carolinas, and in those days she had been a richer lady. She said this is how she met Augustus, Loreal’s grandfather, and though her father was displeased, her mother had understood.
“My mother was from the islands,” Susanna had said.
But in the journals, Loreal had read more, and now she understood Susanna’s great age.
“My mother was from the islands, and her skin was like alabaster, not the alabaster of white women, but a different tone. In those islands had lived witches, and in those islands, were also pirates, just as you have heard. No one disturbed them. The witches had crossed the sea from Cornwall, and some said they came with the buccaneers. They brought with them a golden bowl.
Loreal remembered the dream, the slave ship tossed up on shores. It had come to her the night before she had read the journal and reading the journal had confirmed all things.
“My mother told me, as her mother told her, that the first Maid, the first Maid they knew, came off of a slave ship. She and her people had raised up the storm to save their lives. They lived among the Cornish they found. They married with them. Her blood was in me. Her blood was in my sister. My sister had silver white hair. She was the Maid in that generation. All the Maids came from her.
“The old story was that there were two ships the old Clan was on. The other crashed in the Caribbean with one called Melek. It was he who bore the Sword. When I saw your grandfather and his brother, I saw that their uncle bore that sword. His name was Malachy. So when I married your grandfather, when I ran off with him and enraged my father, my mother understood. She had kept the secret of her blood for so long. The Crater was in a cupboard like a curio, but when me and my sister ran off to the islands with Augustus, and with Octavian, we took the Charge. When we came together the Clan was restored, and the Dunharrows were born.”
Named after emperors, one emperor really, Augustus and Octavian. Octavian had married Virginia, the Maid in her day as he was the Master. From them had come several children. One of them was Zebulon, the father of Owen, and the great-grandfather of Lewis. Another was Eugenia from which Seth had eventually come, and then there were Mary, Salome and Abigail. The Maid standing before them surely sprang from one of these.
“This is the night a very long ritual will be made short,” Lewis said, interrupted her thoughts, “because never have so many people been here before, and never has the need been so great.’
“And,” the Maid added, “never has this been done on the even of the birth of the Winter Child.”
The Maid came forward, and as she did, Loreal knew this was the end of the story, or of the first one, at least. The Maid, of whom she had heard so much but knew so little, this blue eye man in the corner, this chocolate haired vampire, they were the next parts.
I am glad he did not have to die or be kicked out of the clan but everything is so screwed up. I look forward to reading what happens next. Great writing and I hope you have a nice weekend!
