Faerie Tale (47 page)

“What?” Mark’s dark eyes seemed to bore through her.

She explained what she had seen in the corner as best as she could, and Mark said, “How much has Gary told you?”

“A lot of weird shit,” Phil answered. “He couldn’t seem to believe half of what he said himself, but he told me what you let him in on just before he left for Seattle. But he was holding something back.”

All Mark said was, “It’s worse than he told you. I’m going to have to leave again, for two reasons. The first is that man with Aggie tonight. He’ll have friends, and they’ll be coming after him quickly. Some may be on their way here even now. If they find me, they might kill me.

Gloria appeared on the edge of hysteria as she sat wide-eyed, holding a hard ball of crumpled Kleenex in her fist, pressed against her lips.

Mark said, “We’re going underground for a while, Gary and I. Running will only delay the inevitable. They’ll find us sooner or later. But when they do, I hope we’ll be able to bargain with them.”

“Who’s ‘them’?” demanded Phil.

Mark ignored the question. “The other reason I’m leaving is to go someplace, Phil, and you have to come with me.”

“Where?”

“To a place where few men have ever gone, to prevent a great deal of harm to a great many people. I need help, but Gary’s got to do some things that prevent him from coming with me. I have no one else to ask, but I don’t ask you to come to help me. You have a very personal stake in coming.”

“What reason?” asked Phil.

“I’m going to the place your sons have gone. I’m the only one who can help you go after Patrick and Sean.”

“What do you mean?” asked Gloria, her voice barely a whisper.

“I went to your house and Gabbie said Sean wasn’t at the school when she and Jack went to get him. They’ve called the police, but they won’t find him. I know where he is. He’s gone to get Patrick back.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Mark! You come in here telling us Aggie’s dead and somebody’s after you and all sorts of mysterious bullshit, and then you’re on about Sean going off into the night after Patrick!” Phil’s voice rose as frustration and anger sought to fight their way out of that place he had bottled them up. “Now, it may have escaped your notice, but Patrick is over there in that ward, brain-damaged but otherwise intact!”

Mark put his hand on Phil’s arm. His voice remained steady, but there was a hard edge in it as he said, “That’s not Patrick in there, Phil.”

Phil pulled away from Mark’s grasp. “What are you saying? I know my own son.”

Mark glanced at Gloria and suddenly pushed past Phil toward the ward door. Phil stood motionless a moment before springing after him.

Mark walked in and glanced through one glass window and the next until he saw Patrick. He walked straight to the nurses’ station. Keys lay on the desk while the woman read a magazine. Most of the patients were quiet this time of night, asleep or watching television.

Mark just took the keys, and before the woman could react, he was trying them in the lock to Patrick’s room. “Sir!” shouted the nurse. “What are you doing!” Before she was halfway to him he had the door open and was through.

The nurse was rudely shoved aside as Phil and Gloria entered. “You can’t go in there!” she shouted.

Phil entered to see Mark standing at the foot of Patrick’s bed. The boy lay tied by heavy leather restraints. He glared up at Mark, hissing like an enraged snake.

Mark pointed at the boy, saying something to him in a foreign language. Patrick flinched and cowered, trying to pull away from Mark, as if terrified by the man’s presence. The boy’s restraints were stretched taut. Phil reached Mark’s side, but before he could grab him, something caused his heart to freeze. For the first time since the night of Patrick’s illness, there was a shrewd intelligence in the boy’s eyes. A keening sound issued from the boy’s mouth and he pulled at the straps, then he looked at Phil and spoke. “Daddy, he’s hurting me.”

Gloria gasped and shrank back, clutching the door-jamb. Mark continued his chanting, and Phil recognized the language as something Gaelic, ancient Scottish or Irish. Then Patrick pulled and one of the restraints ripped. Three more yanks and the boy was free of the leather restraints. He crouched before Mark’s accusing finger, bending his head as if the words were somehow hurting him. He backed away until he reached the head of the bed, then he continued his movement and began to crawl backward up the wall.

Mark continued to point at Patrick and began to shout at him in the strange language. Gloria screamed, and the nurse went ashen at the sight of Patrick climbing the wall. Two burly orderlies pushed past Gloria and the nurse, and stopped at the sight of the boy climbing backward up the wall.

One of the two orderlies, a huge black man, said, “Holy shit! Fuckin’ Spiderman!”

Then Mark’s voice rang out. “In the name of God give us back the bairn!”

“Never!” hissed Patrick and his form began to shimmer.

“Bring back the bairn!” commanded Mark.

“The Compact is broken!” cried the thing that hugged the wall. “You may not compel me!”

Mark turned and found a pitcher of water and threw it at the child. “Water cleanse thee! The glamour be banished! The spell be broken! Changeling begone!”

The water spattered over the boy and suddenly Patrick was no more. Hugging the wall was a creature about the same size as the boy, a squat, fat thing with spindly arms and legs, huge belly, and enormous penis. But its head was twice the size of the boy’s and its face a frog mask of hate and rage, its wide mouth split in a hideous grimace. A long tongue lolled out between sharp teeth that could be seen even across the room. Frog eyes with yellows around red irises darted about the room. The creature’s skin was a dull grey, and ears like small fans or seashells rose up on each side of its head. Both feet and hands were tipped with black-taloned fingers and toes. It was a nightmare made real.

The creature threw back its head, opening wide its mouth, and howled, a terrible sound like a claxon, echoing with a deep rumble. A stench of rotten eggs filled the room and the creature’s voice shot up in register, from bass to tenor, until it shrilled, “My master is great. You are his meat.” With a peal of laughter that raised goose-flesh like the sound of nails on a blackboard, the creature sprang from the wall, upon the bed, and bounced as if it were a trampoline. It hurled impossibly through the air,
smashing through the window, sending glass flying outward as the thing fled into the night.

Mark hurried over to the window; honking and screeching sounded from the road as motorists swerved to avoid the creature racing across the highway. The sound of several cars crashing into one another filled the night. One of the stunned orderlies looked across the room at the shattered window and said, “That’s impossible! That’s safety glass. You couldn’t break it with a sledgehammer!”

Mark took Phil by the arm and half led, half dragged him past the man. Gloria was crying, hysterical with shock, and the nurse was trying to control her. Another nurse had arrived at the door and had fainted, and the black orderly was trying to revive her.

As they made their departure amid the bedlam erupting in the psych ward, Mark took Phil by the arm and led him calmly through the visitors’ area. He ducked into the stairwell and continued to hold Phil’s arm as they descended the stone steps.

Phil seemed to lose his stunned confusion and asked, “Where are we going?”

“Erl King Hill.”

Mark herded Phil out the stairwell and through the relative calm of the main waiting room of the hospital. He motioned for Phil to move calmly toward the main door. “This won’t keep for long. As soon as someone up in psych starts yelling, this place is going to be crawling with nurses, orderlies, security types, and a couple of doctors. And they’re all going to be looking for the madman who broke into the kid’s room.”

“What do we do?” asked Phil. He glanced over his shoulder. “Gloria.…”

Mark kept his voice low, but his tone was intense.

“Phil, someone’ll take care of her. All hell’s about to break loose. You and I have to do a lot in the”—he glanced at the clock on the wall as they crossed the room; it read eleven—“the next hour.”

“Mark, what’s going on?”

“We’re going to use magic to save the world. And get Sean and Patrick back.”

Phil blinked. “Magic? Sure, why not. After what I’ve just seen.…”

Mark said, “My rental car is out in the parking lot. There’re records of me having it. Gary has my car. We’ll take yours.”

They left the lobby and crossed the parking lot to Phil’s car. Phil started up the engine and asked, “What’s Gary doing?”

“Being my insurance, I hope.” Mark looked at Phil and there was sadness in his eyes. “The people we’re dealing with might think nothing of snuffing us all out.” Phil backed the car out and turned it toward the road. When another car turned into the lot, its lights playing across the two men, Mark glanced away, turning his shoulder so the other driver couldn’t see his face. As Phil pulled out into traffic, Mark said, “Over the centuries, thousands of people have died to protect some incredible secrets, Phil. Gary and I know those secrets now. We may have something to bargain with.”

“Jesus, Mark, what the hell are you talking about? What secrets?”

Mark seemed to sink down into the car seat as Phil accelerated down the road. “It’s a long and complex story. And anyone who has even the slightest involvement is … well, they’re all potentially in danger. I don’t know.” He glanced out the window as if collecting his thoughts and pointed at an approaching crossroad that would take them through town. “Head over toward Barney Doyle’s. I want to get to Erl King Hill, but I don’t want to use the path at your house, in case … they’re already waiting for me.”

Phil turned. “Just who are these people you are so afraid of? And what would they be doing at my house?”

Mark looked out into the rainy night. “I was in Friedrichshafen—on the border of Switzerland. For a week I was held prisoner. They got a little sloppy one night and I escaped. It took me three days to get to Paris—I had some problems at the border and had to pull strings. I think they almost found me twice.”

“Mark, I know you’re stressed out, man; we all are. But you’re not making sense. They who?”

“The Magi.”

Phil said, “Magi? Like in ‘We Three Kings’ …?”

Mark’s face was illuminated briefly as they passed under a lamp at an intersection. “Gary sent me some translations of what he’d taken to Seattle, while I was still in New York, and they gave me the leads I needed. Along with what I’d gotten translated in New York, it all fit together with what I’d come to believe. I knew that Kessler’s group was still around.” He paused. “Well, they found me.

“The guy in the car with Aggie was named August Erhardt. Erhardt was a Magus.”

Phil glanced at Mark. “Like in the John Fowles novel?”

Mark said, “There’s a lot of history here, and we don’t have a great deal of time, so I’m going to just skip across the high points.

“About 550
B.C.
the Persians conquered Media, what is now Azarbaijan in Iran and Azerbajdzh in the Soviet Union. There was a secret priesthood in Media called the Magi which was quickly assimilated into Persian society, becoming a political power. Historians don’t know a lot about them.” A car passing in the other direction shot a shower of water at Phil’s Pontiac that drenched the window in a curtain of wavering fluid. Then the wipers swept it aside. “When Persia fell to Alexander the Great, they survived. They also survived Rome, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane. By the third century they’d become one of the dominant religions in the East. It was thought they were finally destroyed by the Shiites during the seventh century, when Islam conquered Persia. But it turns out they weren’t.”

Phil shook his head, unsure of what he was hearing. “You’re saying that this man with Aggie was a member of some supersecret Persian cult that’s been around twenty-five hundred years?”

Mark nodded.
“As was Fredrick Kessler.
Kessler, Erhardt, and Gary’s friend up in Canada, Van der Leer, all were inheritors of some tradition that came down over the years from that ancient Magian priesthood. And that Persian tradition is directly linked to a primitive spirit worship that has evolved into legends of fairies and other races which lived on Earth alongside mankind.”

Phil said, “That thing in Patrick’s room? That’s some sort of fairy changeling?”

“Something like that, though there’s a lot more here than fairy tales can explain away. I’ll know better after we get where we’re going.”

“Then tell me, how could these Magi be around all these years and no one knows about them? Couldn’t it just be some sort of group that … claims to have gone back all those years?”

“You still don’t believe, truly believe, in the magic. You’ve seen it, that thing in the hospital, but you still don’t believe it.” Mark thought a moment as Phil drove. “The Masons claim a history back to the founding of Solomon’s temple. And other groups claim ancient roots as well. Who can say not? All I know is there was a lot about Fredrick Kessler that made no sense, until you understand he was backed by a powerful organization that provided him with the way out of Germany, smoothed over things with the German and American governments, gave him his capital for investment, his introduction to local bankers, everything. It was the same for Van der Leer in Canada. He had a lot of the same advantages.

“What happened in Germany at the turn of the century was a completely unnecessary conflict between this secret priesthood and the traditional religions. One of the Magi went insane and tried to go public. He turned some of the peasants around, returning to ancient rites, until the local religious leaders opened up on him and his followers. It was open warfare for a time. And it was the
other Magi
behind the efforts of the churches to hush things up. They arranged for anyone who was known to have connections with the crazy Magus to leave Germany. Other Magi took their places.”

Phil pulled over to pass a slow pickup truck and was reentering the right lane when another car came speeding around a curve in the road. Lightning tore the sky as headlights briefly illuminated the passing vehicle.