George Chesbro - An Affair Of Sorcerers

But I thought I did. The darkness beyond the light of science, the void of night that Mad had been trying to explore, had finally swallowed her up.

Madeline slowly rose to her feet, and we rose with her. For a moment I thought-hoped-that it was finished, that a catharsis had been achieved and Madeline was ready to give up the gun and come with us. It was a false hope. She still held the gun in a reverse position, its barrel pressed even more tightly into her stomach, one thumb resting against the trigger. Again she raised her face to the sky and cocked her head, as though listening to voices in the storm that only she could hear.

"I've seen a lot of things in the past few weeks, Mad," I said quickly, driven by a sudden, terrible need to fill the space between us with words, as if I could filibuster away the dreaded sound of a gunshot muffled by Madeline's flesh. "Maybe most of the things I've witnessed are beyond scientific measurement. People like you and Krowl have strange talents, and most of us don't know how to deal with them. But some of these things bite if you don't handle them correctly, and you finally came to realize that. As much as you kept telling yourself you were simply being a scientist by keeping a foot in both camps, you wanted out; you wanted to be saved from the coven you'd created. You had a nervous breakdown because of your guilt-right after you'd made the recording that saved Kathy's life. My God, you've been dropping clues on me all along with those references to the Wizard of Oz. You once told me you were interested in the pursuit of knowledge, not personal power; it started to come together for me when I saw that sign in Esobus' cubicle. But you were never willing to come all the way out. You kept hoping right up to the end that you could run around putting Band-Aids on something that had to be amputated."

"Shut up, Mongo," Garth snapped. "You're being too hard on her. She's also helped a lot of people."

Madeline shuddered with cold, slowly shook her head. "No. Let Mongo finish. He knows I. . need to hear it all."

The catharsis would come, I thought, and felt immense relief. That was what Mad seemed to be telling me: say it all, get it out in the open, and she would come back with us.

"You ran back to the cubicle in the factory building because you had to retrieve the tape you'd put on to cover your movement to the other end of the catwalk." I smiled tentatively and tried to establish eye contact, but Mad's gaze kept slipping away. I considered trying to knock the gun away, but rejected the idea. I couldn't assume that risk. "You took the tape off and threw it away somewhere into the darkness. A fleeing man might have stuck a knife into you, but it's highly unlikely he'd take the time-or be accurate enough-to carve a perfect cross on your forehead. No, Mad. The cross is your own, self-inflicted, mark of Cain: disfigurement as a form of expiation. It isn't enough, Mad; it's dues time for the Wizard of Oz."

"I couldn't live with it any longer, Mongo," Mad said evenly.

"I know. Now you don't have to. And Garth will tell you there are extenuating circumstances. You've saved lives."

I began to seriously doubt the old chestnut about a man's entire past flashing before his eyes at the moment of sudden, violent death. Or perhaps I wasn't really dying, because it wasn't that way at all. Quite the opposite. I was seeing things that had not yet happened, as though the thunderous explosion had blown my own book of shadows open to pages that had not yet been written.

Now Mad looked at me directly. She smiled as she said something, but she had lost control of the wind, and her words were lost. I watched her lips and thought she said, "Thank you," or "I love you"; or it may have been simply "Goodbye, Mongo."

Garth was with April, Kathy and me at the zoo, laughing at the orangutan. Ironically, Garth-the biggest and strongest-seemed to be the only one who had sustained a lasting injury. He was hobbling around with his right foot and ankle in a walking cast.

Madeline suddenly stiffened, as though an invisible metal rod had risen from the ground and skewered her. She flipped the gun around so that it was facing away from her, then raised both arms above her head. She slid up on the skewer, balancing on her toes, extending her arms even higher, bowing her head until her chin rested on her chest.

Now the camera began to grind in ultra-slow motion. Madeline's body had become a ramrod-straight, steel-tipped spear thrusting itself up into the air. She was offering herself, and I knew she was going to be taken.

My brother knew too. Garth and I leaped as one toward April.

But we were moving so slowly, divers straining every muscle to trudge along the bottom of the sea.

April and I had finished making love while Kathy napped. We lay in each others arms, watching snow gather on evergreens outside some mountain lodge. It struck me that months had passed, and we were still together.

I desperately hoped it was more than death's anesthetic dream.

Straining, but still moving in slow motion. Garth grabbed one of April's arms; I grabbed the other, and we dived.

There was an exquisite sensation of floating, totally out of control and thus free of the terrible responsibility of thinking and making decisions. There was nothing to do but ride.

As I slowly flipped over in the air, I saw the bolt of lightning poke its sharp head from its black home. It seemed to hesitate, looking around. Finally it saw Madeline and began to drift lazily down a jagged route toward the gun in her hand.

I wanted to shout a warning to my friend, tell her to throw the gun to one side and float with us away from the lightning. There was time; everything was happening so unbelievably slowly. But when I tried to yell, my voice was no more than a deep rumble, like sounds from a record being played at very slow speed. I could see the words come out of my mouth, explode and stick to my face.

Beyond my horror was a childlike fascination with how pretty everything was-the way the lightning passed through the air, firing the surrounding molecules into a lovely, shimmering white glow. The smell of ozone was pleasant in my nostrils, something like burning leaves on a cold fall afternoon.

But I was losing sight of the spectacle as I rotated in the air. Garth and I bumped into each other, then drifted apart again as we both tried to protect April with our bodies.

I was actually auditioning for an orchestra-but not the New Jersey Symphony. Too bad. It was a pickup group of extremely talented Julliard students interested in playing modern music. There was plenty of Boulez and Messiaen, but no Tchaikovsky. The incredibly complex rhythms were driving me crazy, but I was having a perfectly marvelous time. April was sitting in the first row of the auditorium, smiling broadly at me while Kathy excitedly pounded her mothers thigh.

Garth was in the back of the auditorium, grudgingly-very grudgingly-nodding his appreciation.

At least, the bone-cracking, wet cold was gone. It had been supplanted by a sharp, tingling sensation that hurt my joints, but had an overall warming, liquid feel. The electricity coursing through my body was oddly invigorating, and made me feel as though I could run for hours without getting tired.

If only I could stop floating and get my feet on the ground.

I'd lost sight of Mad during one half turn. Now, as I came out of a slow spin, I could see that the lightning had completed its journey to the barrel of the gun. Mad was softly aglow, like a fluorescent bulb; she would have been beautiful, except for the way the electricity made her hair stand out from her head, each individual strand vibrating like a sliver-thin tuning fork.