Dark Arts Page 5

  Miranda was frozen to the spot, confusion slowly replacing her expression of alarm. Bernie checked Max’s pupils then fixed him with an irritated look. “You’re fine and clean. Wait, did you say sandwiches?”

  The whole situation sunk in for Maxwell. The likely possibility that everything he fought to disbelieve was true, that he was nearly killed by his father’s downed headstone, and that he just spent ten minutes trying to upchuck sandwiches that he suspected may have been poisoned under the supervision of Bernie’s father, a man he saw as more of a father than his actual dad. It sunk in, and all he could do was laugh. It was a high-pitched, raspy, unrestrained kind of heel-kicking laughter that put him flat on his back when Bernie let him go.

  “You asshole, I thought you’d taken something and it was going wrong,” Bernie said. “It’s going around today.”

  “Does he do that?” Miranda asked, unable to stop herself from smiling a little in reaction to Max’s unrestrained laughter.

  “He does magic mushrooms sometimes, some weed, but chemicals,” Bernie said, shaking his head. “No, not for a year, probably longer. The last time he did acid we couldn’t get him out from under the bus until sunrise. You all right, mate?” the last he asked with his own terrible impersonation of a British accent.

  “Is he okay?” Miranda asked, still looking amused.

  “No, I think he’s lost it this time. I don’t even think he’s been into the weed, his pupils are fine,” Bernie said.

  “Okay,” Max said, taking a deep breath and recalling the sobering scene he’d just witnessed in his vision, or hallucination, he wasn’t sure. “Okay, I’m all right.” He turned away from Miranda while he wiped his nose and mouth, then tried to clean his hands in the grass. He put the pentagram on his left middle finger, and the heavier Seal of Julius on his right middle finger then pocketed his other rings. “It’s been a hell of a day,” he said, standing up and turning around. “Everything’s gone strange today, but not all bad,” he looked to Miranda then. “Glad to meet you again after all the bad news this morning, then dark sprits and murder attempts from beyond the grave. My head was under that a second before this geezer turned his stone down,” he said, kicking his father’s headstone.

  “Bad omen,” Miranda said. “Lucky you got out.”

  “Bernie, you know I do everything I can to step lightly around what you and your dad believe,” Maxwell said. “I want to believe that these are just patches of dirt, with people’s old bodies under ‘em like old clothes. All used up, nothing hovering around or moving on.”

  “You’re good at stepping around that, it’s cool,” Bernie said.

  “If that’s how you feel, I’ll tell my Aunts,” Miranda said. “They’ll back off.”

  “Right, well listen. I don’t want to say I’m a believer, because I’m half way to checking myself in to the special wing of the hospital, where they keep people in padded rooms, and half way to cracking one of your dad’s books to find out what I just saw here. Who I just saw here.”

  “Why? What did you see?” Bernie asked.

  Maxwell ran his hands through his long hair and sighed. “All right, all right, let’s pretend for a minute that I believe everything your Circle are into. Ceremonies are important to the seasons, there are as many spirits as there are stars in the sky, and the moon’s a big cheese wheel.”

  Miranda sighed and rolled her eyes.

  “Okay, not the last bit, of course,” Max said. “So, I fall asleep there, and when I wake up I’m about to be pancaked by my father’s gravestone. I narrowly avoid that, and when I look around it feels a bit like fall, chilly, and the sky is grey. I see a family, six, maybe seven men women and children hanging from a great old tree there,” he pointed to the crossroads at the end of the graveyard drive. “Just where the old fence post is. That church is in fine condition, some old priest is standing in front, glaring daggers at me, and one of the hanging kids turns me around to tell me I have to free him over water.”

  “Then you started throwing up?” Bernie asked.

  “Well, that’s all gone, the suns down over the treetops, so I must have been asleep for a couple hours, at least, and I’m thinking the only thing that could do that – logically – are drugs, so I try to empty the tank.”

  “Well, it makes sense, but you’re fine now,” Miranda said. “If you were high enough to hallucinate that, well, you’d still be tripping hard.”

  “She’s right,” Maxwell sighed. “And I wasn’t dreaming, I woke up first. So, let’s say all of it was real, face value.”

  “Then you saw spirits trapped in a terrible event,” Bernie said. “They’re trapped here, maybe by the priest you saw. It’s also doubtful that this is consecrated ground now, if that’s what’s happening here. Something was done to desecrate the area a long time ago, but that’s just a guess.”

  Miranda closed her eyes for a moment, visibly relaxing, then tensed as her eyes opened again. “We have to leave,” Miranda said, looking across the aged tombstones as though realizing where they were for the first time. “There is something wrong here.”

  “We can look it up later,” Bernie said. “Our family library will have something about it, there are records about the whole area.”

  “Now, I’m just temporarily believing, playing along, you understand,” Maxwell said.

  Miranda fixed him with a patronizing smile and kissed him on the cheek, her lips’ touch was feather light. “Uh-huh, you cling to that as long as you can, sugar.”

  “So, what you got from Panos is the real thing?” Bernie asked, looking slightly worried. “That could be a part of this.”

  The trio began walking towards Max’s motorcycle. The memory of the dark pastor in the church’s doorway made him wary of the fallen structure. “Your father and her Aunt tells me that what I’ve got on me will draw spirits from their shadows and graves, then I pay my dad’s grave a visit and have a full-on vision? Either that’s proof positive that the book and stone I got from Panos is real, or nothing is. Don’t tell anyone I said so. I’m still clinging to sanity here.”

  “Would you rather be crazy or wrong?” Bernie asked, hesitant. Max knew that his friend had always wanted him in the fold, amongst the believers.

  “Well, if I’m stoned, someone drugged me, because, I haven’t taken or smoked anything today. I haven’t even been smoking, not since this morning. I want a cigarette so bad I could smoke my sleeve.”

  “So, not drugs,” Miranda said.

  “And I know you’re maybe a little off center, but you’re not crazy,” Bernie said. “I’d testify to it.”

  “So I’ve got visions, a book that could break the world, and a piece of petrified wood that could have come from who knows what, maybe even the first Sun Prince,” Max finished.

  “Is that what it is?” Bernie asked, alarmed. “You brought that here?”

  “First Sun Prince?” Miranda asked.

  “Great story, ancient history stuff. There was a young man who claimed to be the son of a god sometime around five thousand B.C. and he was murdered by a pharaoh because he was afraid the boy would threaten his power. The boy rose from the dead to prove to his followers that he was really god-like, or a god himself, then retreated into the desert never to be seen again. They say he was born again two thousand years later, named Amun, and he struck down a corrupt slave master before he was killed, did the same resurrection act as before, but then ascended into the heavens, joining or merging with Ra, he Sun God, known as Amun-Ra for a few centuries until the cult of Ra was eventually disbanded, but temporarily, so Ra rose again later.” Maxwell said. “So, the first Sun Prince had a staff, and there’s suggestions that this petrified wood is a piece of it. I have a doubt, and I don’t care, to be honest. If it really does what the Circle says it does, then I’d rather drop it in a deep, dark hole and be done than carry it around like an unlucky rabbit’s foot.”

  “Wow,” Miranda said, wide-eyed.

  “My Dad never stopped teaching, the whol
e Sun Prince thing is the kind of bedtime story he’d put me to sleep with. I had some strange dreams growing up,” Max said.

  “I wonder how much of his lessons you actually kept up there?” Bernie asked.

  “Old geezer tested me on whatever I had to read, whatever he told me. It was like coming home from school to another school, you were there, mate,” Max said.

  “I was, but your dad was never as hard on me,” Bernie replied.

  “I had traditional teachings, practical things, and some history. Most of it was about Europe since the fall of Rome, and how our people survived as pagans,” Miranda said. “I’ve never heard of a Sun Prince. I’ll take the car this time,” Miranda said as Max got onto his motorcycle. “If my aunt sees anyone else driving it, I’ll get the evil eye from her for the rest of the weekend.”

  “Everyone’s gone lakeside,” Bernie said.

  “Good enough, just run interference between me and everyone who wants me to be a believer.” He strapped his guitar onto his back. “I need to look some things up, see if I was dreaming.”

  “Keep me in on it, none of this is safe if you’re doing it alone. You know the rules: There is always a conjurer, a weaver and a watcher.”

  “Yeah, I never thought I would have to pay any attention to them myself,” Max replied. He looked to the roadside then, where Miranda was getting into her Aunt’s Skylark. It was a beast of a green car with a great, frowning grill. “Could have warned me that she was coming.”

  “You two were separated when her mother died for a reason, Max,” Bernie said. “Your father had a vision before he died, and my dad carried his wishes out.”

  “Fucking geezer,” Max said. “That goes for both of ‘em.”

  “You guys were always hanging out when you were kids, and she was my other best friend. I wanted to tell you she was still writing every few months, but my Dad made sure I didn’t say a thing. I don’t have all the details, but my Dad used to tell me that you two would be too much of a distraction to each other growing up.”

  Max turned the situation over in his head. His father was always manipulating people, and it didn’t stop there. He grew up overhearing conversations about portents and visions, listening to his elders talk about how to prevent this, or to ensure that. It all added up to self-serving nonsense to him. If a vision predicted that something was going to happen, why would it take so much work to make sure it did? That was only one of the many questions that no one ever answered, and it fortified his disbelief. “I missed her.” Max looked at his old friend, who looked worried. “I still remember strummin’ to her singin’, and I never forgot her laugh. Now she’s something else, we missed all that time between.”

  “It was hard, man, keeping everything I knew about her away from you, especially at first, but I guess I just started having faith in the plan after a while. By the way, what’s in the case?”

  “Half your first year college tuition,” Max replied. “What’s the plan?”

  “I don’t know, they just had to keep you two apart, that’s why I fell back on faith. She wasn’t happy to move either, she tried to get her Aunt to take her back for years, if that helps. New York was close though, she almost stayed, but things are going disco there too, not much of a future for a singer like her.”

  “So, she’s going to stick around?” Max asked. “Don’t think I can stay away now, don’t think her aunts want that for us either. They were grinning like they had clothes hangers in their mouths when we rolled in on my bike. Not the reaction I’m used to when someone’s daughter is on the back of my bike.”

  “Be careful, Max. I know she’s grown up foxy, but she’s your match, man,” Bernie said. “Like your equal, just as cool, seen more of the world, and done just as much as us in it. She was on her own in New York for a year.”

  “Miranda,” Max said her name as though slowly rolling it over in his mind and his mouth and watched as she started the car twenty feet away. “All this spiritual shit’s getting me sideways, but that ride has been in my head since this morning. Be careful,” Max shook his head once and sucked air in between his teeth. “Too fucking late, mate.” He jumped down on his kick-starter, and the engine failed to turn over.

  “Careful, she’s cooling off. On the way to the graveyard she was saying you didn’t seem to enjoy that ride you can’t forget,” Bernie said. “Let her know, man, let her know.”

  “Stop talking about me and get in the car!” Miranda said, leaning out of the window and honking the horn.

  “Think she heard us?” Bernie asked.

  “Not bloody likely,” Max replied, trying to kick start his bike again and failing.

  “Oh, yeah,” Bernie said, starting to walk away. “You’ve got a mess to clean up, Zack’s tripping hard on some LSD he picked up. The guys have him cornered on the bus, but who knows how long that’ll last.”

  “I’m kicking him out of the band,” Maxwell said. “I know we’re retiring anyway, but firing him is the best way to make sure he doesn’t disco all over our songs.”

  “Saw it coming,” Bernie replied, jogging to the car at the sound of Miranda blasting the horn again.

  “C’mon, old girl,” Max said under his breath as he kicked his starter again. The engine turned over and he increased throttle. “There it is.” He reached into his pocket for his pack of cigarettes and tried to pop one out only to find that the last one had been crushed to paper and crumbs. “Days like these,” he said as he crumpled it up and tossed it into the wreckage of the church in front of him.

  He spun his tire, spraying the yard with dirt and gravel until his bike was turned around one hundred eighty degrees. He couldn’t leave the graveyard fast enough.

  IV

  “I hate when one of my aunts are right, now that both are right, there will be no living with them,” Miranda said. She drove a car like Maxwell did, her foot down, and her front right tire right along the outer edge of the road. On the highway it was quick and a little alarming, but on dirt roads it was terrifying. It made him wonder if she was a better rider than a driver like Maxwell too.

  Bernie gripped the dash with his left hand and the edge where the door met the window with the other as they made a tight corner. Max passed them as soon as they were past it, roaring by. He tried to ignore the shared insanity between Miranda and Max. “What do you mean?”

  “They’ve been telling me for the last year that Max was my destiny, trying to get me all worked up about visions of him and me getting together now that we’re both ready.” She huffed, flicking her hair over her shoulder. “They actually cursed me with a memory spell for two weeks. I kept having dreams that were just memories of Max and me. You know, him playing that old acoustic and me singing along beside the barn. A few where we’re just running around like the kids we were, having fun. There was one, it must have been when Max was eight, I was seven, we were all snuggled up in the yard in one of those night time family circle ceremonies and my mother wraps a blanket around us. When I woke up I could remember how sweet and comfortable and safe that moment was. Riding his bike with him was just as good. No, better, because there was more, like our auras were merging, it was just amazing and right. Then it’s over and he says ‘take it easy,’ like I was just another saddlebag, and my aunts are standing there grinning, because they know I won’t be able to stop thinking about him, and I can’t, even though I should be just as happy to see both of you, we grew up together, until I got kidnapped off to Italy, and Spain, and New York. Maybe I should just stay away from him to make a point,” she actually made a growling sound as her lips pressed together with such tension that they were drawn across her face in a straight line. Meanwhile, her foot was getting heavier on the accelerator.

  Bernie was rattled in his seat as the car went over a section of road that was recently flooded, small potholes and loose stones. “Easy, these roads aren’t nice to speeders.”

  She slowed down to a slightly more reasonable speed and turned the radio on, Wish You Were Here wa
s playing, one of only a few songs that Bernie sang on stage every once in a while, usually to buy Zack time to get on stage or decide that he was finished pitching a fit over the latest slight.

  “You heard me, right?” Miranda said.

  “Oh, yeah, destiny, you didn’t want to like him,” Bernie said, realizing that Miranda was paying more attention to him than she was the winding road. “Road, road,” he said, pointing over the dash.

  “I’m a great driver, never had an accident. Then again, I didn’t drive in New York, and I don’t have my license here, but this isn’t much different from Italy or Spain, lots of dirt roads there. Anyway, you had to know why they separated Max and me back then.”

  “No, I just heard your mother died and you were going to live with your aunt,” Bernie replied. “I was sad about it for a few months, well, maybe a few weeks, but Max was pissed. First, at loud, slamming doors and skipping school to play guitar, then he didn’t talk about it, he was just low, you know? I knew why, but no one at school did, so we started high school and he was just this quiet, dark, kind of unpleasant English guy to them.”

  “Wait, when I left he was what, fourteen, fifteen?”

  “He was about to turn fifteen,” Bernie said.

  “So, how long did his pouting last?”

  “It wasn’t pouting,” Bernie said, emphatically shaking his head. “At first, when he was loud about it, yeah, but then he got quiet and didn’t come back up unless you counted the noise he made with his guitar. He wrote some amazing stuff back then, we played constantly after his father died. Music was how he connected to people, and I think he jammed with everyone who could play three chords or more. He just never really got happy again, like when we were kids.”

  “So why would my Aunts and his dad agree that I had to go half way across the world and pretend he didn’t exist? I mean, I guess I wasn’t distracted either, they taught me everything they knew, and other than not having too many friends I had a great time growing up, well, until New York, things were okay.”