The Glory Hand

THE INITIATION
¹

The torches flared through the thorn branches, tipping the tiny spines with barbs of flame, as the procession snaked towards her. Abigail led the seniors, and though their firebrands must have been heavy, they held them high as they marched with an eerie silence through the woods. Cassie could smell the torches and the smell brought back the straw men, and the way the fire had breathed them to life the moment before they burned.

What were those bitches going to set on fire tonight? she wondered. Or whom?

The seniors planted their torches in the sand, then joined hands to surround the girls from Lakeside, circling faster and faster around them. 'Robin . . . Robin . . . Robin . . .'they chanted, as though the syllables were an incantation with its own magical powers. Slowly, Abigail raised her palms upward, beckoning for Robin to stand.

'Stay here,' Cassie whispered to her. 'They can't make you . . .'

Robin's voicie was distant. 'I have to. I. . . I. . .
want
to.'

'Are you out of your mind? Robin,
don't. . .'

(WAYFARER BOOK STORE" j5T;KITTS_

The Glory Hand

PAUL & SIMON BOORSTIN

SPHERE BOOKS LIMITED

London and Sydney

First published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd 1984, 30-32 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1X 8JL Copyright © 1983 by Boorstin Ink, Inc

Publisher's Note

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

This book-is sold subject to the condition it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Set in Times

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins. Glasgow.

To our parents

PROLOGUE

They had spoken of love before, but now, in their struggle, words were forgotten. The man and the woman shed their tenderness, shed all emotion until only the hunger remained. Pleasure overwhelmed them like pain, their bodies gleaming with sweat from the fever, the heat fusing them into one -flesh into flesh, blood into blood, until they formed one creature, committing a mortal sin.

Forgive them.

Forgive.

On the stone mantel, like an altar in the room where they lay, the hand flared to life, five fingers tipped with needles of blue flame. A lump of flesh the color of tallow, imbued with a power beyond life, a portent of unholy revelations.

In their final, shuddering moment of release, the hand glowed with a power greater than either the man or the woman could have conceived, a spell overwhelming and eternal.

From the violence came the seed, a human life with a secret at its core, a mystery spawned at the moment sperm pierced egg, a riddle that would grow each day until it was inseparable from the child's being. Yet for all its terrible nearness, the future would be beyond the child's comprehension, an enemy lurking within.

So much that was unfathomable, unleashed in one final moment that looked strangely like murder. But in the aftermath, lying drugged side by side, the man and the woman knew nothing of what their hunger had spawned. They collapsed, victors and victims, lost in sleep, thinking the struggle had ended, when really it had yet to begin.

Forgive them.

Forgive.

Part One

THE BECKONING HAND

Chapter 1

'If your mother knew you were out here, she'd . . .' The wiry teenager ran his thumb across his throat, and scrambled a few more steps up the trail that cut a scar up the sheer face of the cliff.

'She won't find out,' Cassie said, following him, but she chose her next handhold carefully. Moonlight bathed the surf 200 feet below in a glacial glow that flickered out when it hit the boulders, submerging the shore in a deeper night.

One slip and you'll fall, crushed on the rocks, like she warned.

'Careful,' she shouted to him, 'this is where it gets hairy.'

'Give me a break,' he laughed. But suddenly the root he was holding snapped. His feet were slipping, showering her with clots of dirt. He clutched at the cliff wall with his knees, groping for a rock to cling to as he slipped back towards the edge.
'CassieV

She clutched his hand, but still didn't have a foothold, and the weight of his body was pulling her down now too.
'Hang on
.' She could feel his fingers slipping from her grasp. 'Over there!' She nodded to a faint niche in the granite, and he dug the toe of his boot into it, crawling back up onto a ledge.

She pulled herself up beside him. She wasn't even breathing hard, and her legs felt no strain. 'You're lucky I'm in such good shape from dancing
... Mr Macho.''

'Shit . . .' His voice was lowered in embarrassment as he brushed himself off.

'You all right?'

With a toss of his head he swept his blond hair from his eyes and shoved his hands into the pockets of his parka, changing the subject: 'How come your mom freaks out if you go near the water?'

'I don't know . . .' Her mother's fear of the sea - Cassie called it the Chill because of the way it seemed to creep over her until her hands went clammy and her teeth chattered and

God, it pisses me off.

It was because of her mother's Chill that Cassie wasn't allowed to go out on Todd's catamaran . . . that she wasn't allowed to go down to the beach near their summer house, not even in broad daylight. Which was the reason why, even though she didn't lie to her mother, Cassie had lied to her tonight.

'I mean, what's she afraid of?' he pressed her.

To avoid answering, Cassie started up the trail ahead of him. She didn't know
why
the Chill had such a hold over her mother. All she knew was when it had started, and she wasn't about to tell Todd that.
When
had been that terrible night on the
Pandora
when she was four and her mother . . .

Get him off your back.

'Look, my mother's no crazier than your father . . . the way he freaks out when you put on your hang-gliding wings and jump off a cliff . . .'

'It's worth it.'

'So was this.' She looked back once more at the waves, glinting like steel coils below. The last of the
scorpaena
had vanished. For two hours the phosphorescent plankton, galaxies of tiny diatoms, had impregnated the sea with a ghostly green glow. 'It was unbelievable.'

'Even my old man's never seen it,' Todd said, 'and he's lived on this island all his life.'

Cassie glanced up to the top of the sheer rock face. Cliff's Edge, her family's rambling old summer house, loomed ahead, its three sharp gables like ship's sails stabbing into the night sky. She had never liked the way the three-story shingle and brick structure seemed to tilt crazily over her when she came upon it from the beach below. With the years, the wind and the sea had gnawed away at the cliff, bringing the weathered mansion perilously close to the brink. She hurried up the last few feet of the trail, feeling that one more moment beneath the brooding shadow of the house and it would topple to crush her.

A brass ship's lantern glimmered on the porch, but the leaded windows on each of the three floors were dark. If her mother was waiting up for her - and she always waited up for her - then why were all the lights out? Usually her mother left every light on when her father was away - Cassie had even teased her that without him, she was afraid of the dark. Then why tonight, Cassie wondered, when he was off for another round on the political glad-handing trail, did the house look as if it had been boarded up for the winter?

You're just uptight because you went out on Todd's boat instead of going over to Robin's like you told her, and you're afraid she'll find out.

Todd pulled her up onto the top of the cliff. The flinty escarpment softened into knee-high grass, and he loosened his grip on her hand as though afraid she might lead him somewhere even more precarious than the cliff trail. In the boat tonight he had been so confident, she thought, just as he was confident soaring in his hang-glider off the cliffs. But get him off of the water, or out of the sky, get Todd back on land, and he was shy about everything
Face it. You would have snuck out with Todd tonight even if the
scorpaena
hadn't made its big once-in-a-lifetime appearance off the coast of Nantucket.

Tonight was her last night on the island before spring vacation ended, before she had to return to Washington, and prep school, and the hassles that came from being a US Senator's daughter. It was also her last chance to see Todd before summer. She intended to make the most of it.

But now that her time with him was ending, she froze. For once,
she
was the awkward one, not knowing what to say, what to do next. It struck her that what had been daring about tonight wasn't sneaking out to see the
scorpaena
or climbing the sheer cliff in the dark. It was facing this moment.

She hesitated before the oak door that had been hewn from the bulkhead of a clipper ship. It was unlocked - no burglar would bother to come out to this remote corner of Nantucket - but she didn't open it. Instead, she turned to face him.

It was one thing to be alone with Todd on his catamaran, or holding his hand as they climbed the trail in the dark. But standing so close to him, he seemed different, as though she hadn't spent every vacation with him on Nantucket since she could remember. Suddenly she didn't know Todd Stites at all. Though in August they had been the same height, barely seven months later she had to tilt her chin up to meet his gaze. The fine layer of brown hair on his upper lip - it hadn't been there in August, had it?

Zip-zip.

He was nervous, too, zipping and unzipping his red goose-down parka, his tongue flicking a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. The March night was balmy, even here on this promontory that was usually ripped by the sea winds. So why had he worn the heavy jacket?
Zip-zip.
To defend himself from her?

She looked away from him, catching her fragmented image in the beveled glass of the foyer window. Her chestnut hair looked black in the shadows, her dark, almond-shaped eyes almost oriental, and the light from the ship's lantern on the porch accentuated her high cheekbones and long neck. People told her she was pretty, and she believed them, though she never believed them when they said she was as pretty as her mother.

Todd was staring at her in the window. 'I'd better get back down to the boat,' he said, biting down hard on the toothpick. 'The tide'll take her right out.'

'No, it won't.' Cassie felt a twinge of panic: couldn't he see through her? Couldn't he see the confidence in her voice was just a sham? 'Come here.' Her breath caught in her throat, but not because of the steep climb up from the beach.

He took one step and stood facing her in the narrow pool of light at the front door. Sweat drenched her hands and she wiped them on her Levis. It frightened her: she put in two hours of ballet practice a day, watched what she ate, allowed herself exactly eight hours of sleep a night - all to keep control over her body. And now she was a basket case.

Zip-zip.
Todd stepped closer.

He pulled the toothpick out of his mouth and slipped it into his pocket.
Zip.
The zipper stuck. Then, as if he had nowhere else to put his hands, he slipped them around her waist. He was so close she could smell him - salt spray and clean sweat.

She closed her eyes because that was the way they always did it in the books she had read, the way she had always imagined
she
would do it when the time finally came. At first it seemed strange that it should be happening with Todd Stites, but now that it was happening, it made perfect sense: better with the boy she had called her 'summer brother' than with one of the preppies in her class at the Windward Country Day School in Washington.