The Glory Hand (30 page)

'But why would anyone be playing it now?'

'How should I know?' he snapped, so suddenly that Barbara suspected he
did
know.

'Otto . . .' Even as she started to ask him, even as she started to plead with him to tell her, she was sorry she had come, sorry she had requested his help. Sorry, most of all, that he
would
tell her everything.

'Music has always voiced the most primitive, the most forbidden of human urges, Barbara. Passions that go deeper than words. Musical instruments were first developed, you must understand, for ancient rites, by cults sacred ... or profane.' He was trying to ease her into it gently, she thought, like someone breaking the news of a death.

I don't want to hear this.

'In my studies of ancient musical instruments, I had to learn things, Barbara, delve into secrets that sometimes I wish I had never uncovered. Music, especially the most primitive ... it can bring one to the outer reaches of the soul.' His voice hushed, and she was surprised to hear his arrogance give way to humility. 'Even if you grew up hundreds of years ago, when those instruments on the tape were crafted, you never would have heard them played together.'

'Why?'

'Because for hundreds of years, people believed that when certain instruments were played together . . .' He gestured to the separate cases. '. . . some of those we have classified here ... It was believed that their music had an evil power.'

'Then . . . who played them?'

'I suppose I would have to say,' Otto murmured, 'that they were played by the damned.'

Barbara felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. 'I don't understand . . . How could Jake have recorded that music in the middle of nowhere?'

Otto's eyes had taken on a faraway look, as if he were trying to focus them on something indistinct in the distance. 'It's been so long since I read the literature . . . But in the summer - yes, that much I do remember - they gathered to play in the summer.' His eyes glazed over with a melancholy she had not seen in him before, and he suddenly seemed as ancient and fragile as the instruments that surrounded him. 'Three hundred years ago, it was not uncommon to hear them in the woods of Massachusetts. But after the trials in Salem . . . 1692 ... it became too risky for them to gather for their rituals near populated areas . . .'

'Salem? What are you talking about, Otto? Witches? You don't expect me to . . .'

'What you or I think doesn't matter. What
is
important is that some
did
worship Satan . . . And some still do.'

'Don't be ridiculous!'

Otto ignored her outburst. 'The trials, the hangings didn't stop them. The fact is that three of those who were convicted of witchcraft in Salem were never sent to the gallows, They were set free ... an act of clemency, or so it seemed at the time.'

'What do you mean?'

'The women were pregnant. And they bore their young, a saving remnant.' He raised his hand to silence the objections on her lips: 'Hear me out, Barbara. I had to learn the secrets for my work. Now you had better learn them too.'

He beckoned for her to follow him as he threaded his way among the instruments in the vault, to a cabinet that was as chaotic as the instrument cases had been immaculate. It was crammed floor-to-ceiling with manuscripts, sheaves of music, and books bound in peeling Morocco leather. He rummaged among them, finally pulled a book down from the top shelf and pored through its pages.

'The music . . . they played it on summer nights ... a kind of prelude.' He slammed the book shut - apparently it didn't give him what he wanted - and returned it to the shelf. He chose another, smaller book, flipping through the pages. 'Each summer, the first gatherings were insignificant, dress rehearsals, really, for Lammas.'

'Lammas?'

'The vernal exaltation of the Prince of Darkness.'

'What you're saying . . .' Barbara was amazed at herself for taking him seriously, if it's true . . . Otto, why?'

'The music they played on the final night, the night of Lammas, was certainly strange enough,' he continued, 'but the true abomination wasn't . . . well, it wasn't the music at all. It was something else, something much more monstrous. They needed an unbaptized male each year for the Grand Sabbath . . . someone who had not been anointed with holy water . . .'

Barbara's mind reeled back to the rainy April night when Jake had told her about the ad for the cabin on the music department bulletin board. 'When Jake called to rent it, they asked him questions, the kind of questions . . . The way they asked him to repeat his name, he thought they were trying to find out if he was Jewish, that if they knew he was Jewish they would turn him down . . | She stopped herself.
What if that was the very reason they chose him?

Otto was feverishly poring through still another book, its pages a maze of what looked like astrological charts. He stopped at a page, ran his finger across a row of numbers: 'The dates of the lesser Sabbaths were governed by the lunar cycle. They change every year. But Lammas . . . the night of the Grand Sabbath ... it was always - it
is
always on the same night.

'When?'

'The night of August first.'

'But. . . that's tomorrow, isn't it?'

Otto twisted the watchband on his wrist to read the tiny gold date on the dial. 'No, Barbara.' He shook his head. 'It's not tomorrow. It's today.'

His words were all but lost, for . . .
No, it was impossible
. . . the bagpipes in the glass case were beginning to moan, their skins filling with air until the membranes stretched taut. The stuffed head of the fox on one bobbed as it played, as if it were stirring back to life.

This isn't happening,
Barbara told herself.
This can't be happening,
she stared around her at the instruments - the copper and brass distorted their faces into grotesques, like fun-house mirrors. She stepped back as timbrels and cymbals shivered, electric, like the warning from a hundred rattlesnakes.

'What's happening?'

'Barbara, you've got to . . .' Otto stammered in his haste, as though to answer her questions before she could ask them, while there was still time. 'You've got to get Jake out of there!' Rumblings from a row of kettle drums drowned him out. Accordions and tubas groaned, coronets shrilling a raucous fanfare, quivering from the power that had seized them. The cacophony built to a crescendo until Barbara pressed her hands over her ears and Otto tore out his hearing aid. He was yelling something to her, and though she couldn't hear his words over the bedlam, she read his lips:'
Get out\'

She staggered out of the door of the vault, past pianos where a hundred invisible fingers rippled the keys, past trumpets that invisible lips filled with air. Blaring, resounding, the instruments started to shake in their cases along the walls. A piccolo shrieked, shattering the glass, and others joined in, clattering to the floor.

Barbara overcame her panic long enough to turn back to try to get to Otto. But there was no way to reach him. An ebony grand piano had slid across the floor to block the door, trapping him inside the vault. As the music shrilled to a deafening pitch, she backed away, down the corridor.

For a fragile moment, when her back pressed against the fire exit, one note rang out above the rest - a note more piercing than flute or woodwind, a cry that she recognized as distinctly human in its pain. And when she heard it, she knew that Otto had escaped the bedlam, into silence.

She threw her body against the fire door. It yielded, and she dashed up three flights of cement stairs to the
museum
lobby. She burst through the milling crowd and outside into the humid air, stumbling down the broad steps of the Met towards the sidewalk. Only then did she realize that she had left the tape behind. But the tape didn't matter anymore. It had told her more than she had wanted to know.

It can't be,
the precise, rational museum curator inside her protested.
Don't believe it.

And yet she did believe. The proof was back there, in the second sub-basement of the Met.

She ran blindly into the traffic, waving frantically to hail a taxi. The honking horns that assailed her sounded like raucous trumpets heralding the onset of Lammas.

Chapter 26

For a moment, swimming back to consciousness, Cassie thought the cool hand on her forehead was her mother's. Until the voice cut through the gauzy dream, as if to reminc her:
Your mother's dead.

'Cassie?'

'Where am I?' The words were garbled by the thermometer someone had slipped into her mouth. Her eyes focused with difficulty in the gray light - the rain that trickled down the window warped the cabins beyond the lawn into crooked huts. The cubicle was crowded with chipped enamel furniture: a bedstand, a chair, a dresser. It reminded her of the viewing room at the mortuary where she had last seen her mother.

'Welcome to Germ City.' Sarah's fingertips felt soothing against Cassie's skin, but the smell of Lysol and rubbing alcohol brought bile up from her stomach.

Cassie ran a hand along her arm, remembering the
mud
that had caked her body in the forest. Someone had cleaned her up, put her in a coarse green hospital nightgown. She was soaking wet, but not from the rain, she realized. It was fever sweat. She pressed a hand to her temple. The rain drumming on the tin roof of the infirmary magnified the throbbing in her head. 'What happened?' She tried to swing her legs over the side of the cot, but the wave of dizziness forced her back down on the pillow.

'Drink this.' A teaspoon rattled in a cup. it'll help.' Sarah withdrew the thermometer from Cassie's mouth and put the ceramic rim of the cup to her lips. Cassie inhaled cinnamon and cloves, the scent replacing the nausea lingering in her throat. What looked like dried rose petals were floating in the liquid, tinging it a warm pink. 'Different herbs are good for different things,' Sarah said. 'Mint's great for upset stomach. Camomile's for insomnia. This one's . . . well, it's good for the nerves.'

Her mother had given her home-brewed tea, too, Cassie remembered, tea made from herbs she had grown at Cliff's Edge. She took a sip. The liquid was sweet on her tongue, warming her, and as Sarah promised, it calmed her, too.

'Better now?' Sarah asked.

'Thanks.' Her face beaded with sweat as she finished the cup.

Sarah's fingers smoothed the strands of Cassie's damp hair from her cheek. 'When you didn't show up last night for "lights out," I went looking for you. That storm made rivers out of the trails. I don't know where you thought you were going, running around in the woods in your leotard, but I found you lying face down in six inches of mud. You've been out cold all day. You're lucky you don't have pneumonia . . .' She checked the thermometer. 'Yet.'

Cassie strained to clear her head, to think back to what had happened, but her memories from last night were blurred, like the view through the rain-wet windows. It hadn't been raining last night when she had left the cabin, had it? No, the moon had snuck out from behind the clouds, shining just long enough for her to see . . .

'Runt . . :
The word sounded strange on Cassie's lips, false somehow, as if she were uncertain whether she had really seen him. 'Something horrible had happened to him.'

'Something horrible almost happened to
you.'

'I went to find Iris . . . and there was ... I mean, there were two of them - Runt, he's my father's bodyguard, and this other guy, the guy who chased me into the ice house yesterday . . .' She tried to sit up, but Sarah eased her gently back down. 'You don't believe me!'

'I believe you saw
men
... or what looked like them. But not Runt, or whatever you said his name was.'

'Who were they?'

'You weren't supposed to know about them yet.'

'What are you talking about?'

Sarah sighed: 'I told Abigail to wait to put them up unti the last day of camp.' She glanced outside at the rain. 'Until just before they needed them for the farewell ceremony. They'll never get those straw men lit now.'

'But they weren't straw. They were real. I saw Runt, and . . .'

'Now take it easy, Cassie . . .' The concern in Sarah's voice deepened: 'Let's not overdo it.' She turned off the overhead light, bathing the room in shadows. 'I'll go over to the lodge . . . bring you something for dinner. There's fried chicken tonight. Or something that passes for friec chicken.' When Cassie closed her eyes, Sarah tucked the sheet more snugly around her, slipped on a yellow poncho, and walked out the door.

Cassie waited until Sarah dissolved into another warped, crooked shape beyond the rain-drenched window. Then she sat up slowly, her legs shaky as she dropped them over the side of the bed. But she made it to the door.

The smell of Lysol and rubbing alcohol from the infirmary faded away in the drizzle outside. In the crisp air she could detect a faint but persistent smell impregnating her hair. Sarah had cleaned away the mud, she thought, along with the wet, sticky pine needles, but not that smell. A smell that told her that last night hadn't been a nightmare. As the rain drenched her hair, the scent emerged more strongly ... a smell from school in Washington . . . from science class . . . Chloroform.