Heartland

XXXI

In each corner of the room, squat stands with a dozen candles each provided illumination. Not enough to reach to the ceiling, not enough to reach to Heaven, but enough to light the lower realm. Opposite me, hidden by muslin screens, was a narrow bed, and shadows danced on the wall behind the bed, phantasmal figures partially visible over the top edge of the screens. Whoever lay in the bed was tied down. I could see enough through the gaps between the screens to discern that the figure wore a plain cotton habit, and judging by the shape of the bare foot I glimpsed, it was a woman.

Kneeling beside the bed-on the side where there were no screens-were three figures. Plain brown robes, belted with long strands of polished beads. Their hoods were up, hiding their faces. The one on the left was holding the long strand of his rosary, his fingers working the beads as he prayed. The one on the right had his hands clasped over his ample stomach, and from the angle of his hood, I wondered if he was praying or sleeping. The one in the middle leaned forward, his hands on the edge of the bed, listening intently to the sounds coming from the woman's mouth.

She was making guttural noises: not quite words, not quite moans of pain; growling as if there was something in her mouth, something obstructing her lips and teeth. Whatever she was saying was important enough that he listened, but not so important that he took the gag out. As if the sound of her voice was more important than the actual words she was trying to say.

What I say and what I mean are never the same.

Something cold touched my side, and startled by the invasiveness of the sensation, by the reminder of my own flesh, I tore my gaze away from the tableau of the madwoman and the priests attending her. There was a hole in my chest, one that wept blood, and for a moment, I couldn't remember how I had received such a wound.

I fell, John.

A fourth priest, kneeling beside the chair in which I was sprawled, was wiping the flow away with a blood-stained cloth. He held the rag over a narrow basin and wrung it out. Blood spattered on the dusty floor, leaving tiny blots of blackness.

My right arm ached; more blood-stained rags were wrapped around the truncated end, and around my forearm, a chain of glass beads-black as night-had been cinched tight. The rosary tourniquet. The silver medallion lay on the underside of my arm, pressed tight against my skin by the loops of the beads. The silver ball on the end of the chain-the sphere that hid the cross-hung from an inch of chain near my elbow. It knocked against the wooden frame of the chair as I shifted my dead weight.

The priest attending me pressed his cloth against my chest wound again and I recognized the blunt shape of his hands. I reached over and tugged back his hood. "Hello, John," I said. "Thank you for trying to save me."

Detective John Nicols nodded. "They say you can't feel anything, but I think they're wrong." As a spirit, he looked much more rested. More at peace with himself.

I looked away, directing my attention to the three wise men. "They've been pretty right so far."

"You're letting them be right," Nicols said. "You're believing what they tell you."

"Why shouldn't I?"

"Because they've also said everything they tell you is a lie."

Nothing is true; everything is possible. When Nicols and I had first met, I had thrown that old phrase at him. Mainly to rile him up, but there was some truth to its seeming contradiction. You could find some freedom in the chaos of that phrase. You could liberate yourself from the tyranny of those old manacles of William Blake's-those mind-forg'd ones-by adopting such an axiom as the foundation of your belief. Nothing is true, and so why believe in anything other than what you wish? Everything is possible, so why not dream of meeting God?

"Why are we here?" I asked.

"Because she Saw us," Nicols said.

"Who?" I looked at the woman on the bed. "Hildegard?"

"Yes," Nicols said. "She looked into the future and Saw us."

"You too?" I asked. "Eight hundred years of Western history preordained by this woman. I don't believe it. John. I can't."

"You can't dismiss it," he countered. "Remember the vision? The figure with all the eyes? The child who ascended into Heaven?"

"I can't trust anything Vivienne told me," I said bitterly. "Especially now."

"But you know, don't you? In your heart, you know she is right. You know who those two figures are."

"I'm sorry, John. I should have been stronger."

He pressed the cloth to my chest, and when he took it away again, there was less blood. "Strong enough," he said. "It's all right, Michael. I know it wasn't your fault."

"I can't subscribe to the belief that this all happened because it was supposed to. It makes it all so meaningless, and so many people died, John. There has to be some meaning to it. There has to be some hope that we could have made a difference." I closed my eyes as a wave of pain ran through me, a shuddering pulse that rippled from front to back. When it passed out of me, I choked and coughed, and there was blood in my mouth.

Nicols didn't say anything as he leaned forward and wiped my lips clean.

"She only had twenty-six visions," I continued when the shakes passed. "She saw key points at best. She couldn't have seen everything. Like Nostradamus. And look at his track record."

"True, but you're assuming you know everything he wrote. Maybe the material that was clearly the ravings of a madman are the only works that were made public. What of the rest?"

"Well, I guess I wouldn't know, would I?" I nodded at the three wise men clustered around the bed. "Not having all the answers like them." Now that I had acknowledged John's aid and that he and I were talking, I was stronger. More anchored in this dream. It was easier to breathe now, easier to speak.

"I'm willing to guess that the old batshit Frenchman didn't squirrel away a bunch of papers where he put things down in a much more lucid way. Even if Nostradamus had secret papers, deciphering them would still be a matter of interpretation, wouldn't it? Like the vision Vivienne showed me. It could mean anything. It doesn't have to be a representation of what happened in Portland."

Nicols smiled. "Of course, it doesn't. But that's the case with all of the secrets, isn't it?"

Through the gaps in the screen, I watched Hildegard suffer her ecstatic fervor. Was she Seeing the future? Like Husserl had said: scry reality and fix it in place by Witnessing it. Had her records been better than Nostradamus', or had they been the same sort of vague poetry that we associated with him: open to so many interpretations that it could fit whatever excuse you needed to justify your actions?

But the mission of the Watchers had always been to be True Witnesses, objective observers of history so that there was at least one record that was untainted by special agendas or personal biases. Or was that just the lie all of us eager neophytes wanted to believe?

How different was that from any history we learned?

I got lost in the woods, a scared little boy who was afraid of the dark and the monsters that might lurk within it, and so I invented a way to be strong. I invented a history for myself that would sustain me, that would allow me to understand this strange new world in which I had found myself. And what had that gained me? Wisdom? Understanding? Peace? Hardly. It had been a way to justify the pain.

Hildegard moaned and bucked on the bed, straining against her bonds. Her head moved on the bed, and there was a smear of blood on the mattress. Were her visions any different? What she saw, what she wrote down: Was it a record of the future, or a justification of her pain?

I looked down at my wound, now a pale hole in my chest. The bleeding had almost stopped, and the hole looked like a shadow on my skin. Nicols squeezed the rag over the nearly full basin, and pale blood spattered the surface of the pool. Like rain falling on the ocean. Why did we feel pain? Why had the Creator given us this failing? Why hadn't He made us stronger?

If you believed we were His eyes, distinct observers who could look upon His work and validate it by Witnessing it, then our purpose was to inhabit this world, to be part of its existence as a way of giving it all purpose. It is a grand extrapolation of the question about a tree falling in an empty forest: If no one is there to witness creation, has it really happened?

But was it more than that? Were we justification of His pain? Were our eyes, our minds, our hearts, our nervous systems, our souls a means by which the Creator expressed His own apprehension of being? Was our pain an infinitesimal part of His, split and shared across billions and billions of points of light?

"Of course, it is," Nicols said. He sat back on his heels. "All existence is suffering. Don't you remember the Eight-Fold Path?"

"Why are you here, John? And don't tell me that you're the guilty part of my conscience. I don't think I can take you parroting back to me everything I told you."

He smiled. "No, I'm a volunteer."

"Why?"

"To watch over you."

"What about them?"

"They're transient. They won't stay much longer."

I recalled Husserl's comment about the Architects. They will leave you.

"When?" I asked Nicols.

"Soon." He lifted his shoulders at my expression. "It's not my place to tell you." He looked at the three men and the possessed priestess. "You will know, I think. When it is time."

"But not yet."

"No." He shook his head.

I lifted my stump from the chair's armrest. The candlelight reflected from the silver medallion pressed into the pale flesh of my forearm. Cristobel's magick circle, meant to protect him from injury. What good had it done him when an entire building fell on him?

"I fell, John. Antoine threw me down an elevator shaft. I should be dead."

He took my shortened arm and turned it over so he could examine the medallion too. "You should be."

"But I'm not."

He smiled. "Not yet. Death isn't a part of this place. Neither is time. We are like that kitten. The one in the box."

"Schrodinger's."

"That's the one. Caught on the cusp. Neither one nor the other. Not until someone looks in the box and observes us."

"Who?"

"God, perhaps."

I shook my head. "I don't believe that. That would imply that there is a place where I can go that He cannot. That would invalidate His existence. That would invalidate mine."

"Unless you were God."

"But I'm not."

"Are you sure?" he asked. "You thought you were once."

"That was different."

"How?"

"I was trying to rattle Bernard. I was trying to get him to doubt himself. To doubt that he was right. He was going to kill us all with his insane plan to harvest everyone's soul. I didn't have the power to stop him; I had to trick him. I had to plant a seed of doubt."

"It worked, didn't it?"

"Yes, but-"

"So why does it have to be a trick? Why couldn't it be the truth? One you were more ready to accept than him?"

"I'm-I'm not sure. . What do I believe, John? What's the point of trying?"

Nicols laid the rag down on the floor and stood up. He offered me his hand, and waved his fingers when I looked at him dumbly. "Come with me," he said.

"I'm-" I indicated the hole and then, realizing I was pointing at it with the stump of my right hand, I waved that at him too.

"Those are the limits of your flesh," he said. "They don't matter here." He gestured again. "Come on, Michael. We need to wake her up or she'll never stop dreaming."

At first, I felt the pain of all my wounds, recent and historical: every bone ached, every joint complained; the old holes in my chest-imagined and real-burned like hot coals had been placed against my skin; the new hole, this one made by Antoine too, spewed a great rush of dark water-tears and blood; I lost sensation in my right arm again, a frost descending upon my nerve endings. The chair exerted a tremendous pull on me, like a mother's embrace. But I stood.

"There," Nicols said. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

I looked back at the body sitting in the chair. "It looks pretty bad."

"Well, you were never easy on it. That's for sure. Time heals; chicks dig scars. That sort of bullshit."

"I had to be brave, John."

"I know, Michael. We all have to find our own way."

He led my spirit over to the bed, moving one of the screens aside, and as we stood at its foot, the bound woman visibly relaxed. There was blood on her face, in her hair, and on the mattress beneath her. There were old marks on her legs-this wasn't the first time she had been bound. A stick had been forced in her mouth, tied in place with strips of cloth around her head. Her hair, much longer than I had ever seen it, was in a wild disarray about her face.

It wasn't the woman from the painting. It wasn't Hildegard. It was Marielle.

The three priests looked up, their heads moving in such unison that it seemed like they were all working off the same marionette string. Cristobel. Philippe. Lafoutain. My three wise men. All looking very somber and stoic.

Their mouths were all stitched shut.

Nicols shrugged as I looked to him for an explanation. "You shouldn't listen to them. You know how they are. Schemers. The whole lot of them. I'll be glad when they're gone."

"Are they crowding you, John?" I found the idea funny, even in these circumstances.

"No," he said. "But you're still fragile. You still don't trust yourself. You'll listen to them because you think you need that reassurance."

"And I should listen to you instead?"

He waved a finger at me. "I hear sarcasm. That's good."

"Is this a pep talk, John?" I glanced around the tiny room. "Is all of this an elaborate excuse to cheer me up?"

He snorted. "You remember my last pep talk?"

I did. He had held a gun to his head and threatened to shoot himself if I hadn't shown him that I could care about someone other than myself. It hadn't been a hollow gesture. He would have done it. The fact that I was instrumental in driving him to the brink of suicide hadn't been lost on me, either.

"What am I supposed to do, John?" I sighed. "I couldn't stop Bernard. He wiped out more than fifty thousand souls. The Watchers let him. Even if Philippe hadn't known the others were plotting against him, he should have Seen Bernard's plan. How could he have been so aware of the little details but have missed the big picture?"

"He pushed you there, and because you were there, only fifty thousand died." He raised his shoulders and wouldn't meet my gaze. "It could have been worse."

"But that's no comfort," I said. "It's still too many."

"I know." His voice was almost a whisper.

Cristobel's glass eye was weeping, and Lafoutain was looking down at his hands. Only Philippe was still looking at me. He didn't look away. Burn it all down.

I shook my head and when I looked away, my gaze fell on Marielle, tied to the bed. She was staring at me too, her expression filled with as much focused anger as her father's.

He was still there in my head, even though Nicols had gagged him. Part of him was still welded to my being. Part of me still knew why the Key of Thoth had been built. Why it had been activated. Because Philippe had failed. Because he had become too proud to accept that he was too old to lead them anymore. Too infirm. He had held on too long, and paid the price of that hubris.

"And what was I supposed to have done? Finish the job for you? Tear everything down because you failed. Was that it? I was supposed to wipe the slate clean? Kill all your friends because they betrayed you too. Was it all that petty?

"And you," I said to Marielle, my voice rising now. "What about your role? You used all of us. You preyed upon Antoine's jealousy. Upon Husserl's greed. Upon my naivete. You used me, so that your fucking boyfriend could have it all. You threw me away."

I surged toward the bed as if I was going to throw myself on her, and Nicols forced himself between us. I raged against him for a minute, which was like throwing myself at a giant redwood, hoping to knock it down with the force of my frustration. When I ran out of steam, I realized there was another voice in the room, a whisper of sound that ran without pause, without breath.

Laughter.

I looked around for the source and realized the shadows on the wall weren't thrown there by the figures in the room.

"Samael," I hissed.

The black streams flowed together into a coherent shape, and the laughter from many throats became a single voice. "Still so bright, my pretty one. Still so eager to believe me. Are you ready for my help? Are you willing to accept my love?"

"Never," I said. "Never again."

He laughed once more, and more than anything else, I wanted to never hear that sound again.

"Don't listen to him," Nicols said. "That's all it takes. Just stop listening."

I pushed against Nicols slightly, more to make him give me some space than to try to shove past him. "Then who should I listen to, John?"

His eyes were bright, shining with a wet light that reminded me of the Grail. "I can't tell you, Michael."

"Because I'm not supposed to listen to you either, is that right?"

He nodded, and when I brushed against him again, he broke into smoke. Wisps of white light that streaked around me, that moved through me. He was both gone and everywhere. All at the same time.

On the wall, the shadow of Samael was frozen, a smear of black ink that begged for interpretation. A demonic Rorschach blot, waiting to be given shape and definition by an unknowing witness.

The woman on the bed wasn't Marielle any longer. She was younger, her face unblemished and unlined as if she had never felt any lasting pain. The wooden gag was gone from her mouth, and as she stared-unblinkingly-at me, her lips began to move. Her voice was so low and her words so quick, I couldn't follow what she was saying.

I wasn't sure I wanted to hear what she had to say anyway.

The three priests approached, and before I could pull away from them, they circled me. Cristobel took my shortened arm in his hands and pressed the rosary-wrapped stump against his lips. Philippe stood behind me, his hands resting on my shoulders so that his fingers touched in the hollow of my throat. Lafoutain took my other hand and placed it over his heart.

Listen, the Chorus said.

"No." I struggled in their grip. "I'm done listening. Not to you. Not to your proxies. I'm done. Let me go."

Be still, the Chorus echoed.

"Tranquilla tuum animum," he said, and I looked over my shoulder at the chair in which I had been sitting. Just like the picture in the Grail chapel: one hand across his knee, palm open, fingers pointing at the ground; the other raised toward the dark ceiling, a tiny sliver of frozen light laid against his stiff fingers.

"Omne imaginum meae cordis sunt."

Everything is an echo, the Chorus said, the whisper of their voices overlapping the magician's. But their voices trailed his by a split second. Echoing. Everything is an echo of my heart.

Philippe's hand tightened about my throat, directing my attention back to the bed. I let him guide me, and the flash of light from behind me wiped the black stain off the wall over the bed. The light went through me too, through the woman on the bed as well. Through all of us.

Phantoms. Every last one of us.

The light took my anger with it, and my pain and fear. All the shadows in my heart fled, and all that was left was the placid stillness of an untroubled pond.

Hildegard's lips moved again, and her words-in a language I didn't understand-fell upon me like a gentle rain falls upon water. Tiny drops that barely left any trace on the surface. They fell into the water, and vanished.

You can't see a raindrop as it falls, and you can't find it after it hits a pool of water. The only part of a raindrop's existence that you can participate in is the moment it hits the water. Even then you don't see it, you only see the reaction of the water to its impact. The raindrop, for all you know, may not have existed at all. But something went from above, down to below, and when it passed across the threshold between the two spaces, you were witness to its transformation.

It's a cycle. Water flows down to the sea, evaporates into the sky, becomes a rain shower, falls back to the ground, and runs down to the sea again. The only part of the cycle that we can perceive is the echo of its passage.

I fell, John. Antoine threw me down an elevator shaft.

I know, my son.

What is left? I've been betrayed by everyone I ever loved.

Not everyone. I have never forsaken you.