Book of Shadows (31 page)

The night manager frowned and began sniffing the air. “That’s funny. Do you smell it?”

Marisa, eyes glazed, looked down at her wrist. She had pressed Bess’s handkerchief against the cuts to stop the bleeding.

“Smoke,” said the night manager. “Now how do you like that? It’s July, mind you, and someone’s got their fireplace going. The things people think they’re entitled to do when they have money.”

Marisa looked past him and still holding her wrist, lifted both hands and pointed. The night manager looked in that direction.

She said, “Over there. That room.”

“A bedroom,” said the manager. “But there’s no fireplace in that room. At least I don’t think so.”

He crossed the room, opened the door, then turned his head away. “My God, there
is
something burning in here. Can’t see. Looks like something’s on the bed. Oh Lord, it’s a body! The bed’s burning and someone’s in it!”

Marisa, eyes smarting from the smoke, turned to see Bess running toward her.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “Two men upstairs. Dead. Gina. Is she—”

The manager, doubled over and coughing, was unable to speak when Bess asked him, “Anybody inside?”

The manager nodded repeatedly, a hand pointing towards the smoke-filled room.

And as the manager ran to find a telephone, Bess stepped into the bedroom.

Marisa knew what he would discover there.

Eyes tearing, a coughing Bess backed out of the room. “Looks like a man. Could be Bofil, but it’s hard to tell.”

“It is Bofil,” murmured Marisa.

Bess drew air into his lungs and spoke between breaths. “Those two men back there. Stabbed. Somebody cut them good. Christ, it’s a goddam mess back there.”

“Gina,” said Marisa.

“No!”

“She killed three men tonight. She killed Bofil and the other two. Bofil died by fire ritual.”

“You’re crazy! You’re fucking crazy!”

The tears in the detective’s eyes had nothing to do with smoke. “Don’t you understand? She’s my kid, she’s all I have!”

“She’s a murderer. She’s a Celt. And she is
not
your kid. Her people also killed your wife. Right now she’s returning to her village with the book, returning to save her mother and her brother from being burnt alive. You’d kill to save your family; she killed to save hers.”

Bess shook his head.

Marisa said, “You don’t want to believe. Well, neither did I. But you’ll end up believing, just as I have. You’ll be forced to. Those people come from some hidden darkness, from a time that doesn’t exist anymore, and they kill and they kill. They will pursue you to the ends of the earth, and they won’t give up until they get you. Oh, you’ll end up believing. Just as I have. These people exist and Gina’s one of them. She’s a Celt, a descendant of Druids, and she’s gone back to them. She comes from a culture that the rest of us can only imagine and she’s killed three men, whether you like it or not. Believe it. Believe it.”

He came to her weeping, his body shaking with the greatest agony of his life and she took him in her arms and wept with him.

I
N THE VILLAGE THE
boy listened with pride as his sister told the tribal elders of her deeds of bravery, deeds the elders knew were true, for others had confirmed these deeds. His sister had killed three men, men who had not seen her as a danger, for she was only a girl, a child. But they hadn’t known that she was of the same grandfather as the boy, of the same fierce Celt blood.

The girl had struck without warning, using a kitchen knife first on the man who lay sleeping upstairs in his room, then wrapping the knife in a towel and walking up to a second man who had been watching television in his room and she had cut his throat to prevent him from crying out and that left only one, the one who awaited her alone in his bedroom downstairs.

He was the changeling called Bofil, Bofil the traitor, and he had died in the old way, the way traitors should die. The boy’s sister, called “Gina” in America, knew Bofil’s lust had left him a prey to her.

And after cutting his throat, she sliced the nerves at the base of his spine so that he couldn’t move, placed on his chest the straw mats she’d brought from the kitchen and lit the fire using Bofil’s own cigarette lighter.

Aided by other changelings, the boy’s sister fled America with the
Book of Shadows.
And it was an elder who finished Gina’s story, triumphantly adding that for now no news of Druids or the village would find its way to the outside world. Bofil’s political party wanted to protect its image and to do so it would have to protect Bofil’s reputation.

Which was why the world was told that Anthony Paul Bofil had died while smoking in bed.

His dead bodyguards were found miles away, each in a separate place. The newspapers weren’t interested in their deaths, which police stated were a result of petty underworld feuds.

Authorities listened to the actress and the detective, but it was Bofil’s party that had the last word. And so the world learned that a pair of psychotics, having taken a dislike to the actress because of her unsympathetic role on a popular television series, had attempted to kill her. The actress managed to defend herself and kill them, though the couple did take the life of one of the actress’s dear friends.

Bofil’s “accident.” Marisa Heggen’s “dramatic survival against an attack by murderous fans.” The press and public devoured both stories then went on to other things.

Anxious to put the entire matter behind them, the actress and the detective went along with the cover-up. They had no choice. Who would have believed the truth?

Who would have believed that Robert Seldes hadn’t committed suicide, that he had actually been thrown from his twelfth-floor apartment by the boy’s grandmother?

Who would have believed that the man in Bofil’s party, the man responsible for the cover-up, was actually a changeling sworn to protect the village?

It was he who assured the village that these things would soon be forgotten, forgotten along with the disappearance of the boy’s sister, just one of 600,000 American youngsters who ran away from home each year.

These things would soon be forgotten.

The September leaf was brown, crisp, and Marisa kissed it lightly, her eyes on Joseph Bess, who had presented the leaf to her. They were in a supermarket buying groceries and Bess was counting his change carefully before putting it in his pocket. The leaf, he explained, was his first month’s rent. He’d decided to move in with Marisa and he was back to being strictly a milk drinker and Marisa couldn’t be happier.

She’d wanted him to move in and to stop drinking, but he wasn’t a man you could push, so she’d waited. When the alcohol had gone to work on his ulcer, Bess had been forced to give it up. Which was what Marisa wanted, for when he drank he brooded about Gina. No booze meant no Gina. And when he’d asked Marisa this morning if the invitation to move in was still open, she had drawn him to her in their bed and said it was.

They left the supermarket arm in arm. Marisa carried the leaf inside her blouse and against her breast. She was happy. She was living a script she could easily play the rest of her life.

In the supermarket, the boy stood near the front door and watched them walk down the street. He thought of the thick silver bracelet hidden in his closet at home, where no one could find it. His grandfather’s ritual knife was hidden there, too.

And then his “mother” appeared and he grinned, holding out his bag of potato chips to her. She didn’t know he wasn’t her son, that he was not of her blood.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1980 by Marc Olden

cover design by Connie Gabbert

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