Authors: Tony Richards
The sky was turning red again, the color spilling out across it and then thickening, getting darker. And the crowd started to come properly alive. It had been half asleep all day. Now, some of them were blinking curiously at the mayor. Others were looking upward and around, wondering how they had even got there.
They all seemed to accept their circumstances, in the end. And they stayed put.
My gaze darted toward the huge, dimming bulk of Sycamore Hill. And sure enough, the adepts were on their way. They were coming, in the form of swiftly moving black smudges against the darkening firmament. They seemed to swell as they approached. Swept above us in formation. Then, passing over the Town Hall’s roof, they turned and plummeted toward the stage.
Gaspar Vernon and Judge Levin both appeared there. Followed quickly by the McGinley sisters, Kurt van Friesling, Cobb Walters and Martha Howard-Brett.
A huge ripple swept through the crowd. But this was a completely different experience to seeing it relayed by the white jewel. For starters, there was sound this time. Some people applauded. A few children shouted out, either happy or astonished. But the generalized murmur that swept across the square was far louder than that. A solid thrum of conversation rose toward us, as the townsfolk wondered, speculated, hoped.
It wasn’t just what reached my eardrums, though. It was what touched my nerves and heart. Minutes ago, all these people had been silent, passive. But between one moment and the next …
You could feel the excitement from up here, and it was growing all the while. The townsfolk felt certain something was going to be achieved. And they seemed to be convinced that it was something good.
If only they could understand the truth. Could see what I had witnessed.
Mayor Aldernay had already launched into his speech. The loudspeakers were blaring with it, overloading slightly. He was standing too close to the microphone. I racked my brains again.
A Changer of Worlds might be our only answer. But
what
Changer of Worlds?
Cassie had said something, hadn’t she, back when we had talked about this? She’d pointed something out. Her world had been changed altogether by the guy who’d robbed her of her family. The same was true of my own life. Except that
couldn’t
be the answer. She’d been talking about our personal histories, not the entire town’s.
I gazed down, feeling increasingly helpless and baffled.
The sun, half sunk away, had taken on a harsh carmine glow that made you squint. There was now more shade than light in front of the stage. The smaller children had already become so lost in the dimness you could barely see them. And the adults all around them looked only semi-real. You could pick out heads, and make out individual features. But the rest was just a formless mass, the gathering night trying to absorb it all.
They had fallen silent as the mayor continued talking. But they looked on edge, expecting marvelous things to happen once the sun was gone.
The best magic always did happen in the dark. The adepts spent most of their lives in it, after all.
Their mood hadn’t infected Saul Hobart, I could see. He was expecting something too, but not as optimistically as them. As I watched, he crouched a little further down and spoke to his own people on his walkie-talkie.
I looked back at the general crowd. And … what might change
their
world? I was still trying to think of something. What might alter it completely? My mind hunted for an answer.
What had changed our whole town in the past? The coming to Raine’s Landing of the Salem witches. Certainly that was true, but I couldn’t see how that was any use.
Aldernay had finally stopped. Most of the audience clapped – this has always been a polite community. But the sense of impatience grew stronger. They wanted to get on with it. Proceed. Cast the strongest spells they’d ever managed in their entire lives, and free this place from …
Was
that
it?
I remembered more of what the jewel had shown. And I already knew what was going to become apparent next. The mayor would take a pace back. Gaspar Vernon would step forward. He would raise his arms.
And on that signal, hundreds of torches would be lifted from the throng. Flames would be applied to them, in memory of …
Yes, I
had
it.
So I reached across, grabbing Cassie by her wrist. She winced at me surprisedly, her mouth agape.
“Where’s your bike?” I shouted.
“Parked out back,” she answered. “Why?”
“I have to get back to Raine Manor, Cass. I have to get back
now
.”
We crested the Hill with the Harley’s needle teetering around one-fifty. I kept thinking, Saul would have a fit if he saw this. Raine Manor was looming up ahead of us. You could see its peculiar spire beyond the tangled mass of trees.
Cass finally slowed down, then skidded to a halt beside the open gates. The driveway ahead was so overgrown, even she would have real trouble negotiating it at any serious speed. But that wasn’t why she’d stopped. Whatever might be happening now, she didn’t want to go any further. Dealing with the likes of Woody was my territory, not hers.
I looked back. I had a perfect view of the center of the town from here. Torches, hundreds of the things, were blazing in Union Square. They gave the place an almost medieval look, as if the bad old days had come back. I could not make out the townspeople any longer. They were lost among the fire and darkness. The ceremony was well underway.
So I slid off the pillion.
“Wait here,” I told her.
“Suits me!” I heard her shout, as I began to run.
The house grew larger in front of me. The front door swung open as I reached the porch, Hampton standing just behind it, and back in his full uniform. So it seemed that Raine had known that I was coming.
I went past the chauffeur, skidding to another halt. Once more, there was faint candlelight coming from the ballroom. There were plenty of other rooms in this place. Did he spend his entire life in there?
I got a fresh surprise when I reentered, because Woody’s narrow shape was not the only one that I could see. Willets was still here as well, a surly outline in the shadows. He’d come back, in spite of all his earlier protests. His red-flecked gaze returned mine challengingly.
“I simply thought that there was no sense going home, with all this happening,” he said.
And let’s face it, a little while longer and we might not have any homes left to go back to.
“I decided to wait it out, in case …”
He faltered, seemingly embarrassed. I finished the sentence for him soundlessly, inside my head. In case he was needed again. He
did
want to get involved after all. He simply found it difficult to rationalize that, or explain it.
Woody, naturally, had no such trouble, since ideas like that didn’t even come into the equation.
“Nice of you to drop in again. But what do you want now, old chum?”
His solemn manner of before had vanished. His tone was breezy, like we were all at a picnic. What was taking place seemed rather lost on him. And I would have got annoyed with him again, but this wasn’t the moment for it.
“The Eye of Whosis. You made it look into the future, sure. But can it look into the past?”
His features went unreadable. He’d obviously never even thought of that. But then he began pacing gently round, turning the concept over.
“That’s an interesting question. Gosh, I wonder if that’s possible?”
He and Willets exchanged glances.
“Um … I suppose that we could take a stab at it.”
He lifted his right arm, and the jewel came floating to his grasp. Woody balanced it delicately in his open palm, as though it were a living thing, a butterfly. And it behaved like that next instant, rising up again into the air between them.
He and Willets spread their arms, the same way that they’d done before. Its facets all started to wink, sucking in the candlelight and increasing its glow.
But they didn’t seem sure what they were supposed to do after that. This was a brand new feat of magic I was asking for. They tried out a few different incantations which had no effect at all. I just ground my palms together, wondering what was happening back in the square. How far had the ceremony gone? It was entirely possible that, whatever they managed, it was going to be too late.
But then I heard the adepts go back to the first spell that they’d tried. They simply said it backward.
“Got it!” announced Woodard Raine.
I looked around at what they’d done.
The pyramid of light had reappeared beneath the stone. And within it, the events of the past few days were being replayed, in reverse. There were me and Hobart, speeding to St. Cleary’s to do battle with the Dralleg. There I was, being chauffeured up here the first time around.
Raine beamed at me delightedly, looking atrociously pleased with himself. I just ignored that, nodding.
“That’s impressive.”
“Isn’t it just? So, sport, how far back exactly do you want to look?”
And when I told him, even his big golden eyes became a whole lot larger.
It was night, pitch-dark above. The mob was beating at her door. The women in it – and there were plenty of those – wore shawls and white bonnets, tightly fitted. And the men had on those high, wide-brimmed felt hats that I t
hought were called ‘sugar loafs,’ in spite of the fact that they were uniformly black.
It was nearly the close of the Sixteen Hundreds. And practically the end of a certain woman’s life. Probably the most famous event in all the Landing’s history. Certainly the most familiar name.
Some of the crowd were carrying blazing torches, just like the folks down in Union Square. And a few of them had pitchforks too, as my grandfather had guessed. Their faces were lumpen and their eyes dull in the amber glow, their expressions savage and twisted. It was frightening to see how hatred became magnified as soon as it was shared.
There was no sound, exactly like earlier. But these ancestors from our past had to be baying like a pack of hounds. I stepped around the pyramid of light anxiously, watching the dying moments of the person who had genuinely changed this town for centuries to come.
It was a cabin that the crowd was pressed around, out on the edge of what had merely been a good-sized village. It had stout log walls, but only a thatched roof. The door was obviously barred from the inside. The mob kept pounding at it furiously.
I became uncomfortably aware of Willets’s gaze on me, and glanced across at him a moment. What exactly was I looking for? We were
both
wondering that. I’d only know it when it came in view.
So I returned my attention to the scene.
The cabin door crashed inward, the next second. And the outraged mob went spilling through.
They emerged, a short while later, dragging someone with them. A woman, in her early thirties by the look of her. I hadn’t understood until now just how beautiful Regan Farrow had been. She was absolutely striking, in spite of the way her face was twisted up with fear. She was very tall and slender. She had tousled auburn hair that ran halfway down her back. Her eyes were olive green and had a brilliant sparkle to them. Her complexion was extremely pale.
There was a long gray cloak thrown over her day clothes, like she’d been planning on going somewhere. The hood was tilted back. And, as she was dragged clear of her front door, she began to scream.
The mob had her by the wrists and shoulders and were towing her remorselessly along. Some of the fury had gone from their expressions. It had turned to something even worse, a sadistic amusement. I could see a few of them were even laughing.
One of them lobbed his torch onto the cabin’s roof. The flames took hold, crackling fiercely.
The rest paid it no attention whatsoever, hauling Regan off toward the Common. Where the stake was waiting, and the piles of kindling. And a priest was standing there.
I remembered what I had been told, all those years ago. It was the site of Union Square, these days.
I felt pretty uncomfortable, watching the scene unfold. And it wasn’t just the horror of it. What if I was wrong about this? If it was
merely
Regan Farrow who had been the Changer of our World, then there was nowhere left to take this thing.
Or … could there have been something else involved, not merely her? All I could do was keep on watching, almost shaking by this stage.
Regan had stopped screaming and – just like in the legend – she was pleading with the crowd instead. I couldn’t hear the words that she was speaking, but remembered what they were.
“I’ll go away, and never come back. You’ll never hear of me again.”
The mob’s answer was more laughter and jeers.
She began struggling furiously, but there were far too many of them. They hoisted her up against the stake and tied her there with lengths of thick rope, wrapping it tightly round her upper arms and body. They had left her forearms free, I saw.
“They did that,” Willets explained, stepping quietly up beside me, “so that, in her final moments, the witch could put her hands together and pray for forgiveness. Ugly, ain’t it?”
Yes, it was. I set my teeth.
Woody had stepped in closer too, his face illuminated by the cone of light. And even he looked strangely moved. Did he identify with her, I wondered, one sorcerer to another?
Regan Farrow was still begging with her captors as they piled the kindling around her. But it did no good at all. They were not listening. They were moving practically like automatons, absolutely certain that what they were doing was just and proper. It struck me what an awful thing belief like that had been.
As they started to apply the flames, she went stiff and stopped begging. Regan seemed to understand that there was no talking her way out of this. I could see it by the coldness that swept over her fine features and her olive gaze. She realized she was done for.
Her expression filled with anger and defiance. And she stared around at her tormentors, showing them they’d not get the better of her. She’d not spend her final moments sobbing like a child.
The flames were climbing up around her. They were scorching the hems of her cloak. The heat had to be washing over her, because her features creased with pain. Then she pushed her head forward, and her whole face caught the light and seemed to shine.
I watched, aghast, as she began to mouth the words that had cast this town into its solitary abyss. I’d never thought I’d get to see this.
“If I cannot leave, then none of you ever shall. And you shall dwell alone here.”
It was so much a part of our heritage. Those words … they had made Raine’s Landing what it was today. I felt light-headed, watching her actually speak them.
But what was
that
? My gaze jerked, and I tried to understand what I was looking at.
The witch was clutching at something directly below her throat with her right hand. I couldn’t make out what it was. The cloak was hiding it. And something had happened to her features. They seemed blurrier than they’d been before. Was that the fire, or perhaps the spell was going wrong, somehow?
Next instant, the flames spread up her cloak. She howled, and let her grip go.
“Poor girl,” I heard Woody sigh.
But I had caught sight of the briefest glitter, just above her breastbone.
An instant later, Regan Farrow’s entire body was engulfed in flame.
It was sickening to watch. But I was not here simply to be horrified. I had to find out what she’d had her palm pressed to.
“Can you run it back?” I asked, in an urgent tone.
When Woodard Raine stared up at me, I could see that there was dampness in the corners of his eyes, glistening like liquid gold. A line of it ran down one cheek. His face was oddly rigid, except that his lips were trembling slightly.
So he
did
have a human side. His voice was very hushed when he replied.
“This isn’t a VCR, old chum.”
But then he looked across at Willets.
“We can start the scene again though, I
guess.”
“We can take it from the point where they begin to burn her,” Willets added, nodding quickly.
There was a curious look on his own face. So he had probably spotted something too.
They both raised their hands and shouted a few words. The scene disappeared. I began to pace, massively frustrated, while they prepared themselves again.
Then Raine whispered, “Ready.”
They resumed their backward chanting. And I stopped dead still. We were back to the point where they’d applied the flames.
I knew what the problem was. Why I’d missed the things I had been looking for. I’d been so fascinated, watching Regan mouth her curse, I hadn’t taken too much notice of the other things that had been going on.
But I knew exactly where to look on this occasion. I went around a little to the side, anticipating it. The pictures in front of me were not flat, like a movie screen. They were three-dimensional. And I needed to see under her cloak a little better.
Just before she spoke those words, something happened that amazed me. I’d noticed her face becoming less distinct before. But now I could see that it wasn’t only that. It didn’t simply blur.
I squinted. Willets did as well.
Then I drew in a sharp breath. It had happened in an instant, but … there seemed to be another face, superimposed over hers. Who was that?
It was smaller and far narrower, and looked very old. Creases covered it, and there was gray hair hanging down from its scalp the same dry texture as straw. A woman’s face though, definitely that. But my guess was, not European. This looked native. The cheekbones were flatter, the temples more prominent, and the nose was hooked. The eyes were almost black and they looked very sad and wise.