Zenobie
Date: 2015-06-28 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Mystery
Description: Sequel to the Windrose series. Computer programmer Joanna Sheraton’s hippie mother asks the help of her daughter’s partner - exiled wizard Antryg Windrose - in getting rid of a spectre which seems to be haunting the New Age Consciousness-Raising Center in Bayou Chien Mort, Louisiana. Upon arrival, Antryg and Joanna begin to suspect that there is a lot more going on than anyone is willing to admit, with results potentially more deadly than noises in the night and a little blood on the walls.

ZÉNOBIE

by

Barbara Hambly

Copyright 2015 Barbara Hambly

Cover art by Eric Baldwin

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Table of Contents

Zénobie

About The Author

The Further Adventures

ZÉNOBIE
by

Barbara Hambly

“And what do you do?” asked Joanna’s mother, when the waiter had jotted their order and departed into the bright-lit clamor of Jerry’s Famous Delicatessen on Ventura Boulevard. “Oh, look, dearest,” she added, with a gasp of delight, “there’s Larry Hagman! Do you really think they’re going to kill off Pamela Ewing? In Dallas,” she explained breathlessly, to Joanna’s look of blank enquiry, and frowned in the direction of the actor. “They always look so much smaller in real life. Do you think it’s true that he smokes marijuana? And what do you do?”

Her attention returned to Antryg, whose hand Joanna had squeezed, to prevent him from asking who was murdering whom in the Texas capital and why such a deed would not be forestalled if everybody seemed to know about it beforehand. She gave him a glance that said, I’ll explain later, though it would be difficult, Joanna guessed, to explain the long-running so-called drama to anyone, much less why anyone would watch it for ten years.

Antryg propped his round-lensed spectacles more firmly onto his beaky nose, and replied, “Well, I tend bar four nights a week at Enyart’s – although the reasoning behind some of the beverage nomenclature escapes me – and on weekends I read tarot cards at Madame Pittman’s on Saticoy Boulevard. I’m afraid I’m not nearly as accurate at it as I am in my own universe,” he added, as if worried that the mother of his partner might question his prognostications. “Magic doesn’t operate in this world, so the energies don’t align properly – in my own universe I’m a wizard, you know.”

Joanna lowered her forehead to her knuckles, and sighed. At least he didn’t go into the fact that he’s the Archmage of the Council of Wizards…

“I’m in exile – well, in hiding, really – and there aren’t a great many jobs that a wizard can do in a universe where magic doesn’t exist. I do pay my share of the bills, but it’s extremely difficult to get a credit card.”

“Do you know—” Starshine Worlds-Daughter (whose name had been Susan Sheraton twenty-seven years previously when she had birthed Joanna into the world) leaned across the table and laid one extensively-manicured hand on the wizard’s wrist, “—when I was taken through Past-life Regression Visualization Training I learned that I was a White Witch during the Dark Ages, which explains why I have this strong spiritual connection to the energies of the Universe. I always travel with my incense kit and vials of pure Heaven-Water – rain or glacier melt from snow-caps.” She dug them from her purse to display. “Iceland or Thibet are the best, but my blood-type will work well with Antarctic water also. Our Teacher – he’s really an ancient Indian guru named Lal Siva, but he channels through Dr. Conyer – says the Tarot is a manifestation of Cosmic Inter-Connectedness, but he also says my aura is one of the most brilliant he has ever seen. It’s mostly green, you kow, with traces of yellow – or was it blue? A few months ago I did a reading for Melinda Moonwillow – You remember Lindy Sorenson, darling? She and I are Water-Sisters now…”

The sixties, reflected Joanna resignedly, had hit her mother hard. Now – 1988 – she still sported the beaded headband, Indian-braids, and embroidered Cossak-shirt (worn as a mini-dress: Joanna would have bet her next three checks from computer consulting that she hadn’t done that embroidery herself) popularized during the last third of that eventful decade. Next to Antryg’s graying curls, Jefferson Starship t-shirt, gaudy love-beads and rhinestone earrings, they looked like two refugees from a time-warp.

Except of course, Antryg Windrose really was an exiled wizard from another universe.

And the Archmage of the Council of Wizards.

It was usually easier to let everyone think he was crazy.

He listened with fascinated absorbtion to Starshine Worlds-Daughter’s scattershot monologue about meditation under a fig tree in the botanical garden at the University of Arizona campus near her current home (“Our Teacher says it HAS to be an actual fig-tree because its inner vibration is so much more valid…”) and how it had improved her intuitive understanding of her dreams (“I’ve kept a journal of them since I was in my twenties…” Joanna well remembered making her own school lunch, at the age of seven, combing her own hair and letting herself out to go to school, because her mother would spend several hours every morning reading her dream-journal entries to other members of her Consciousness Raising group over the telephone; “Oh, have a good day, honey…”). “Just as soon as our Teacher—” (Dr. Norman Conyer in his human incarnation, who taught seminars in The Cosmic Connection for U of A College Extension – “You really MUST buy his books, dear, I guarantee they will change your life…”) “— puts together the financing he’s going to set up his own Institute, where all of us in his Inner Circle can dwell together…”

Joanna refrained from inquiring about the previous Institutes and Life Coaches of one ilk or another that her mother had embraced and discarded over the years, not to speak of instructors in Kama Sutra exercises, vegan juicing (her mother was currently consuming a hamburger), cake decorating, Universal Energizer system seminars, color-ology, blood-type diets, and Dressing for Success, not that she could have wedged a word into her mother’s discourse had she wished to do so. And it was better on the whole than being lectured on her eating habits (“Have you put on a couple of pounds, dearest? It’s not surprising, if you have meat in your diet…”) or the way she wore her mane of blonde curls: “SO ‘seventies, dear – At your age it doesn’t pay to date yourself…” But on the way back to Granada Hills after the lunch was over (Joanna, as usual, paid) and her mother went on her way to her Life-Enhancement Workshop, she felt called upon to explain to Antryg that her mother’s current re-birth into a New Dimension of Cosmic Reality was probably not really the life-altering cataclysm she’d spent two and a half hours claiming it was.

“With my mom it’s always something.” She edged her worse-for-wear blue Mustang into the always-heinous traffic on the 101 Freeway – as usual, the account of her mother’s latest life-altering cataclysm had elongated lunch into Rush Hour, a time at which no sane person, except under threat of filial disrespect and Being a Selfish Person (and Just Like Your Father), would attempt to drive from Studio City to Granada Hills. “She got into macramé when I was in Junior High – got all the books, and the special hooks and tools and beads and pots and feathers, and turned my bedroom into a studio for herself so I had to sleep on the couch, and took three classes a week in it and workshops every weekend – and then she decided she was going to do hand weaving instead, and bought three looms and her own spinning-wheel and bales of wool, before a friend of hers introduced her to Pathways to Clarity seminars. I was stepping over industrial spools of hemp cord and bales of merino wool in the living-room til I left for college. She’s always going to find The Answer in whatever it is – the year before last she re-modelled her kitchen into a greenhouse so she could raise orchids – and six months later it’s like it never existed.”

“At least she’s still looking for The Answer,” pointed out Antryg in his brown-velvet voice. “And she’s looking outside of herself, and not at the bottom of a bottle. There are worse ways to spend huge amounts of money.”

“There is that,” agreed Joanna with a sigh. “But I did miss having a bedroom.”

“Also a mother, I expect. Your mother reminds me of a number of people in the village where I grew up – in any village in the Sykerst, really…”

Joanna felt a curious combination of nostalgia and dread at the mention of the Sykerst, what little she had seen of those empty lands when she had journeyed through the Void to Antryg’s home universe. Endless miles of steppe, taiga forest like an ocean: strange trackways of standing-stones that led nowhere, villages huddled in soul-crushing isolation. Stillness, beauty, magic, wind. And mosquitoes. Lots of them.

“Wandering Teachers came through the villages all the time, and no two of them ever preached anything remotely resembling each others’ doctrines. It was all the worst sort of heresy, and the local priest would be tearing his tonsure out and threatening to call the Inquisition – not that there was any way for him to do so in under a month – and the villagers would flock to them, and everyone would study their words in secret for about six weeks and argue about nothing else, and then the next Teacher would come along. Or it was shamans from out of the forest, or dog-wizards peddling love-spells, or medicine-men offering to teach one the secrets of the Universe…” He ticked the examples off on his long, crooked fingers.

“Sometimes one or another of them did understand some of the secrets of the Universe. But the Universe has a lot of secrets, you see, and they’re concealed in some very odd places. And this Teacher your mother speaks of is quite right about the fig-trees. They do have an aura totally different from any other species. What is macramé?”

So for the forty minutes that it took to cover twelve miles at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon in Los Angeles, Joanna enlightened her roommate on the manufacture of elaborate pot-hangers, owl-shaped wall-hangings, ceiling-suspended furniture and counterculture garments, with digressions into the wonders of growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. Antryg listened gravely, his graying brown curls tangled by the smoggy Valley wind, and Joanna reflected on what her world must sound like to him, who had grown up alienated even from his own alien world: a mageborn child whose powers had been co-opted at puberty by the deadliest Teacher of them all.

No wonder nothing bothers him.

But beyond that reflection – and she doubted that Dr. Norman Conyer, a.k.a. Lal Siva, Teacher of Cosmic Inter-Connectedness for all who were willing to pay for his seminars, could be half as malign as the yellow-eyed soul-stealer Suraklin – the subject of her mother did not arise again until two months later. Then on the first of August she received a phone call begging her to bring “your wizard friend” to the brand-new Institute of Cosmic Inter-Connectedness in Bayou Chien Mort, Louisiana, and save the world from psychic annihilation.

*

Rather to Joanna’s surprise, the overnight letter which followed the phone call contained two first-class tickets to New Orleans rather than a request that she put the transportation costs on her own AmEx card, the more usual pattern of transactions involving her mother. This was explained by the young man who met them at Moissant Field two evenings later in a servicible Land Rover: “Ben paid for them,” he explained brightly, carrying Joanna’s two suitcases across the paved chute of roadway that separated the terminal from the parking structure. “Ben’s our guardian spirit.”

“Ben Hallard,” amplified Starshine Worlds-Daughter, trotting at Joanna’s side, with just the faintest hint of smugness in her voice.

“Ben Hallard?” Joanna stopped dead in her tracks. “As in, the lead singer in Drybone, Ben Hallard?” Visions of a leonine black Afro, rhinestoned denim vests, way too much eye-makeup and amps the size of Stonehenge blazed like touchwood in her memory.

“He’s the one who made it possible for our Teacher to purchase Zénobie Plantation. A truly inspired man! He’s having his name changed legally to Universe, you know, in honor of the great Source of all energy. You really must take Lal Siva’s seminars, dearest – I mean, Dr. Conyer… I just know they’ll break you out of that dull, unimaginative limbo your life has been trapped in all these years. It goes without saying—” She turned to beam at Antryg, “—that you’ll both be admitted to our Teacher’s beginner seminars, to compensate you for your time…”

“We’re very honored.” The wizard, still bemused from his first journey by airplane, stopped gazing around at the dank and mould-smelling twilight and gave her a grin like a daft jack-o-lantern. “I look forward to it.”

The damn thing was, Joanna was certain he was telling the truth.

“But in the meantime, Starshine, tell me about the danger that threatens the world.”

*

Zénobie Plantation – a.k.a. The Institute of Cosmic Inter-Connection – was haunted.

“Well, of course Lal Siva – being an ageless spirit himself – knew it was the moment he set foot inside,” explained Starshine, as the handsome Chad Rainforest guided the Land-Rover out of the airport and west on Highway 90 and into the dark-green monotony of the bayous. “I think even you will be conscious of them, dearest.”

“None of us minded,” put in Chad, with a glance over his shoulder. “The real estate agent didn’t try to conceal it or anything.”

Probably charged you extra, reflected Joanna.

“Lal Siva teaches us that the spirits of those who have passed Beyond bear the living no ill-will.”

“So what’s the problem?” Having lived with a wizard from another universe for two years, and crossed through the Void with him to deal with such abominations as occasionally leaked through that shocking emptiness, Joanna didn’t exactly disbelieve in ghosts. But a childhood of ghost-walk tours and séances, not to speak of her mother’s numerous supernatural encounters which had included an alien abduction and a number of post-mortem conversations (paid for by credit-card at $60 a minute) with John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix, among others, had left her skeptical, at least where her mother was concerned. Her mother’s friend Lindy Sorenson – now apparently re-christened (“re-BORN, darling…”) as Melinda Moonwillow – had been abducted by aliens three times, once to have invisible (and scientifically undetectable) nano-recorders implanted in her bone-marrow and twice to have the data extracted, though Joanna was hard put to imagine that a civilization which had developed hyper-light drive and scientifically undetectable nano-recorders had not yet perfected wireless transmission.

“The problem is that we need to have the Center open by the first of September.” Chad took the turnoff marked “Chien Mort,” onto a two-lane country road that rapidly turned into a one-lane strip of crumbling blacktop through dark-green fields of shoulder-high sugar cane. White egrets picked their way along the sides of ditches velvety with duckweed. The steady drone of cicadas, which had begun shortly after they’d left the airport, grew louder in the humid darkness. “If we weren’t having our first Convocation of Light then, it really wouldn’t be an issue. Even angry or discontented spirits usually respond to Cosmic Energy very quickly.”

“And I take it,” said Antryg, “the inhabitants of Zénobie remain malevolent despite all you can do?”

The remainder of the drive – and Chien Mort lay a good twenty miles off Highway 90, in a rural wilderness of bayou, cypress swamp, isolated houses and mobile-homes balanced precariously on stilts (“Flood insurance kicks in at fourteen feet,” explained Chad) – was devoted to an account of The Teacher’s efforts to come to terms with those who dwelt in the old plantation’s darkness.

“The house is haunted by Zénobie, you see,” explained Starshine. “She was a beautiful slave-woman whose master put her aside to marry a white wife. But he kept Zénobie’s daughter – Alys, her name was – and made the new wife adopt her. The story is that Zénobie murdered them both – the new white wife and the little girl – and then hanged herself in the tower room where the murders took place. Her master killed himself with grief – and served him right! – and his son, or maybe it was his grandson, was killed in the Civil War, and the whole place had to be sold for debts.”

“Charlie Trasher – the contractor who’s doing the air conditioning for the guest-houses – is related to the family,” added Chad, with another glance back over his shoulder. Joanna wondered how that waist-length hair and androgynous handsomeness went over with the local labor-force. “He told us the whole story.”

When visualizations and repeated affirmations didn’t work (“We hereby claim and affirm that Zénobie, Alys, and Rowena Trasher are children of the Cosmic Energy, that they are flooded with the Light of Goodness and filled with the spirit of forgiveness…”), various members of the Institute – with Lal Siva’s benign blessing – went on to perform salt-water cleanses, smoke aspersions, prayer vigils, and exercises in psychic channeling, all without apparent effect.

“Monday night – the night I called you – we found ROWENA written in blood just outside Ben’s room – horrible! And a week before that, Lindy – Melinda —” she corrected herself, “—was wakened in the night by whispering, words she couldn’t make out. Other people have heard footsteps, and there was blood found in Brightsky’s room also, sprinkled all over her clothing and bed. Whatever it is, it seems… I won’t say stronger, but resistant to all our Teacher’s spiritual resources.”

*

“My chief concern isn’t the financial loss, even if we’re not able to open in September.” Dr. Norman Conyer stroked his mustache as he spoke, a habit he had, Joanna noticed, as if it were a beloved pet. He was barrel-chested, of medium height, fifty-ish, and though not particularly handsome, was extremely sexy: the kind of man that all eyes went to the moment he stepped into any room. The female members of the Inner Circle – and Joanna had to work at not thinking of them as the Coven – were certainly watching him under their eyelashes, from the various pieces of wicker porch-furniture where they sat. Eight of the Teacher’s ten disciples were women, ranging in age from their early twenties to a little white-haired lady in safari shirt and shorts, with five-carat pink diamond earrings and at least a ten-carat pink diamond ring: Mrs. Durham, she’d been introduced as.

Several of the younger ladies – Brightsky, Crystal, Cherí, and Naomi – seemed vaguely familiar, and Joanna had gathered from her mother that this was because they were actresses or models whose faces she’d seen without learning their names. Universe (formerly Ben) Hallard, on the other hand, was barely recognizable, the monumental Afro of his glory days cropped short and his whipcord body softened by a small paunch. Joanna recalled hearing somewhere that he was making an acoustic comeback album – he’d certainly been playing a guitar as her mother had conducted her and Antryg up the tall double curve of steps to the plantation’s main-floor gallery.

She did recognize – with delight – her mother’s friend and Water-Sister Melinda Moonwillow (formerly Lindy Sorenson of Burbank), tallish and sweet-faced, with her mud-brown hair grown long and starting to gray. It was clear also that three alien abductions hadn’t diminished her delight in baking cookies: a plate of them graced the long dining-table that occupied the gallery, and the scent of another batch drifted from the open French doors of the house. “For goodness sake, honey, you can call me Lindy now!” the older woman admonished as Joanna had hugged her.

“Whatever you say, Mrs. Sorenson.”

Like most old houses in the region, the Big House at Zénobie had originally been constructed on seven-foot brick piers, which had later been enclosed with stucco and brick to form a series of store-rooms beneath the house. Lumen – “Our Teacher’s wife,” her mother had phrased it during the introductions, a tall blonde with a runner’s calves and a wary expression in her gray eyes – gave them a brief outline of the construction and renovation that had taken place so far: ten guest-houses were being built on the site of the old slave-quarters to the north of the house, and both air conditioning and heating were being installed, “Because it can get quite cold here in the wintertime, you know. The contractor’s men cleared out the store-rooms below the house, but locked them securely, and the rooms in the north wing where the floor had to be torn out to be repaired are also kept locked. I thought, myself, that there might have been some sort of wildlife – possums, or nutria – that got in—”

“That wouldn’t explain the whispering I heard!” protested a beautiful dark-haired model named Brightsky.

“—but we found no evidence of it,” continued Lumen, ignoring the younger woman as if she had not existed. “The contractor’s men have the only keys.”

“Naomi heard it, too,” Brightsky persisted, with a nod at a young woman whom Joanna belatedly recognized as having been brutally ax-murdered in the trailers for Friday the Fourteenth Part Seven.

“You’ll have to excuse my daughter,” added Starshine, with a deprecating smile. “She was absolutely born without an imagination – I think she dreams in black and white!”

Thanks, Mom.

“I’m sure you, of all people, will understand, Antryg,” said Dr. Conyer gravely, “that my system of Cosmic Inter-Connectedness can raise tremendous power, linking, as it does, the unlimited potential of fully-awakened human minds with the raw power of universal energies. We can, literally, open the powerhouse of the cosmos, and focus its energies for our benefit – and our first conference here is already sold out. Businessmen, politicians, scientists, educators will be here, some of the finest minds in this country and from as far away as Sweden. It would be potentially devastating, for the whole of the world, to have a malevolent force so strong, so violent, here at the very heart of such an overwhelming psychic node.”

He shuddered as he said it, an incongruously bright figure in a silk Hawaiian shirt and neatly-pressed cargo-shorts. “Evil has a way of spreading.”

“Indeed it does,” Antryg agreed, while Joanna reflected that among businessmen, politicians, scientists etc. – some of whom would probably be bringing their wives (Bet me the Conference is going to include swamp tours and a crawfish boil down by the bayou) – word would also have a way of spreading, if knocking, whispering, and writing on the walls in blood started targeting the guests. “You’re quite right not to risk it.”

“I’m glad you understand. Starshine assures me that we can trust your powers—”

“Good heavens, I hope not,” exclaimed Antryg, “since I don’t have any. I’m a perfectly good wizard in another universe,” he added, to the Teacher’s look of startled dismay. “It’s just that there’s no magic here for me to work with. But I do have experience with ghosts, so if we can’t come to terms with Madamoiselle Zénobie – or whoever the ghost actually is – at least we’ll know more about the situation than we did before. You didn’t think to save any of the blood you found, I suppose? Pity.”

“We’re trying to keep things quiet.” Ben Universe Hallard set aside his guitar (and the anorexic blonde who sat at his feet) and joined the little group at the long dining-table. His voice had the gravelly roughness of long abuse, but was surprisingly quiet and pleasant. “We’ve got local guys working on the guest-houses – I’ll show you around them tomorrow—” His gesture indicated what could have been an outhouse or the Taj Mahal, for all that anyone (except perhaps Antryg) could see. There was no lighting on the grounds. The darkness was absolute. “And to be honest, Chien Mort’s a pretty primitive place. We were afraid they’d walk out if they thought Miss Zénobie was getting—” He paused, fishing for words.

“Restless in her grave?” suggested Joanna, with a sly glance at her mother.

“Pissed at the new owners?” Antryg inquired.

Hallard grinned. “Pretty much.”

Starshine looked shocked at the idea that the dead woman might not be as spiritually evolved as Dr. Conyer’s disciples.

“The contractors are in and out of the house,” added Crystal, a plump red-head whose milky Irish skin was wallpapered with henna designs. “So we had to clean the blood up fast. And anyway, Brightsky had to sleep in that room.”

“You couldn’t move her?” Joanna frowned, disconcerted at the idea. The eerie stillness of the bayou night, the multi-voiced peeping of the tree-frogs whispered of things altogether darker here than copious marijuana and auto-suggestion.

In the pause that went on just a little too long Joanna saw the glance Lumen gave Brightsky, whose eyes flickered Dr. Conyer and then back with wide innocence to Lumen, while the Teacher gazed with equal innocence out into the night. Chad Rainforest came out of the house with a tray of tea-things.

“I’ve made up a bed for you guys in the library,” he said to Antryg and Joanna. “I hope you don’t mind, but the only room in the north wing that hasn’t had its floor torn out for the air conditioning is Galadriel’s. I didn’t want to kick her out—”

“No, we’re fine,” said Joanna, and glanced around at the group on the porch. “Galadriel?”

“My daughter.” Hallard ducked his head apologetically. “Who thinks the whole Institute is hippie New Age bullshit. According to her, the footsteps are figments of everybody’s imagination and the blood is just some kind of game somebody here is playing—”

Did his eyes also, Joanna wondered, go from Lumen to Brightsky’s virginal countenance?

“How anyone who’s seen this place could still refuse to admit the reality of spirit manifestations—” Starshine looked aggrievedly at her daughter as she spoke.

“She’ll tell you all about it over breakfast, I’m sure.”

*

Lying on a futon on the floor, in the smothering darkness of the paint-smelling library, Joanna dreamed about the tower. Square and Victorian, like something out of a Charles Addams cartoon, it rose from the corner of the main block of the house a story and a half above the steamboat-gothic gingerbread of the main roof-line. A woman, thought Joanna…

A woman who paced the empty chamber at the top, heat-lightning playing over her fine-boned face. A brighter stroke showed Joanna the two bodies that lay near the center of the room, skirts spread about them, dark hair mingling on the floor in a dark and sticky pool. A woman and a child…

There was a trap-door at one side of the room and through it Joanna heard voices coming up from below. The woman stopped her pacing, went to the opening and stood for a long time listening, eyes gleaming in the shadow. Joanna recognized – or thought she recognized – Antryg’s voice, and her own.

*

“So is the place haunted?” she asked Antryg the next morning over coffee, when the other members of the Institute had retired to the deck at the end of the garden to “call down the powers of the Universe to Universal Good.” It was the received wisdom of every ghost-story Joanna had ever read that nothing happened in haunted houses the first night one slept there, but she had the suspicion that Antryg could smell ectoplasm the minute he crossed the threshhold.

“Good Heavens, yes!” He looked surprised she’d had to ask.

“Badly?” She didn’t mean her voice to sound as timid as it did.

“Well, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a haunting that one would describe as ‘excellent.’” Antryg solemnly broke one of Lindy’s chocolate-chip cookie into pieces with his crooked fingers. Fresh daily batches were evidently Lindy’s self-appointed mission in the Institute. A small basket of them – wrapped in cellophane to dissuade Louisiana’s ubiquitous ants – had been waiting for them on their futon last night on the library floor.

“Damn it.” Joanna dripped cream into her cup. “I was kind of hoping it was somebody trying to sabotage Dr. Conyer’s upcoming conference, or chase off Mrs. Durham…”

“Why on earth would anyone want to do that?”

“Sabotage the conference? To make the place go bankrupt – Chad said last night there were descendants of its original owners still living in town. Or maybe the locals just don’t want a bunch of New Age woo-woos bringing immorality into town. Any one of the contractor’s men would have access to underneath the house, and once you’re down there you can make footsteps anywhere you want by tapping the underside of the floor with a broom-handle.”

“New Age woo-woos?” He pronounced the words with puzzled care.

“Most of the country isn’t like LA, Antryg. And I noticed last night that while everybody’s sharing rooms in the wings out back, ‘guardian spirit’ Universe Hallard – who put up the dough to buy this place – and his girlfriend have a bedroom in the main house upstairs. The only others who have rooms in the main house are Conyer, Lumen – separate bedroom from Conyer, I notice – and Mrs. Durham, who’s got enough crystallized carbon on her to buy the city of Van Nuys. I’m sure she’s got family members who don’t want to see her dumping their inheritance into Dr. Conyer’s pockets. I’m sorry,” she added, flushing at the recollection of her mother’s words last night. “I don’t know why I’m so skeptical. I get this way when I’m around my mother.”

“You’re skeptical all the time, my dear.” Antryg set down his tea-cup, and gently kissed her hand. “It’s a faculty I treasure in you. You know this world far better than I do; you understand the nuances of how people are likely to interpret a given situation, like the fact that your mother was talking about a television show back in June rather than an actual homicide. But the place is haunted—”

He extended his hand, and held it, fingers spread, close to the newly-white-painted clapboarding of the house wall. “—and quite nastily, by the feel of it. And think how silly we’ll feel if Dr. Conyer’s system does precisely what he says it will, and there is something malevolent – and powerful – here that could devour and build upon the forces that it raises.”

The rap of hammers drifted to them from the semi-circle of half-built guest-houses fifty yards to the north, the sound sharp against the drone of cicadas in the woods all around. In the absence of air conditioning, meals were taken at the long dining-table on the porch, and the remains of scrambled eggs, labneh, bagels and Lindy’s latest batch of chocolate chip cookies littered the snowy expanse of polyester-linen, waiting for the “help” from town to carry them into the kitchen at the back of the main block of the house.

“By the sound of it, something certainly seems to have stirred it up,” added Antryg thoughtfully, and propped his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose. “Although it could just be the remodelling. Ghosts hate that.”

“Or the presence of the girl.” Joanna sipped her coffee. “Isn’t it true that poltergeist activity – and blood is a pretty common poltergeist manifestation, isn’t it? – usually centers around a child or a teen-ager? Even if she isn’t doing it herself, I mean…”

“Dad said I should show you around.” A girl stepped from the dark of the house, small and slight and very clearly Ben Hallard’s daughter. “If you’re done with your breakfast, that is. I’m Galadriel.” She held out her hand.

Antryg rose, took it and bowed deeply; Galadriel Hallard studied him through glasses almost as thick as his own, as if trying to align his lanky height, graying tousle of curls, mad gray eyes and truly regrettable earrings with whatever her father and Joanna’s mother had told her about him. Gauging what her reaction should be – or maybe just wary that she was being mocked. The daughter of a rock star – however minor, Joanna reflected – would have grown up watchful from her cradle.

Joanna got to her feet and shook the girl’s hand. “I’m Joanna Sheraton; this is Antryg Windrose.”

“So are you the Ghostbusters?” Galadriel relaxed, poured herself what was left of the coffee, doctored it heavily with cream and sugar, and took half a cookie.

“That’s us.” Antryg grinned. “I take it you’re not an enthusiast of morning affirmations in the garden?”

“As if.”

Joanna recalled, when she herself had been in junior high school, reading about Ben Hallard’s marriage to an extremely wealthy groupie. The blonde girl he’d been holding hands with last night didn’t look old enough to be Galadriel’s mother, and in fact looked only six or seven years older than Galadriel herself. No wonder the kid looked pouty.

“So what do you think?” inquired Antryg. “Do you think there’s a ghost here?”

“Please.” But she looked aside as she said it.

She took coffee and cookie with her as she led them through the house, past the door of the library where they’d slept – a cat-thin woman from town was already vacuuming where Antryg had packed up the futon before coming out to breakfast – through the kitchen, and onto the back gallery. The house, Joanna now saw, was built as a long U, to funnel what breeze might flow up from the bayou, the main block standing two stories above its tall brick foundation, the tower, three. Behind the main block, two wings stretched, enclosing an unfinished-looking garden between them, and like the main house the single-story wings were also built up on a seven-foot foundation, its stuccoed walls covered with straggly vines and its doors pad-locked.

“Charlie Trasher from town got that whole wing set up for air conditioning before we arrived. ” Galadriel pointed to the south wing. “But the compressor didn’t arrive. And none of the ducts are here for this wing. My room’s the only one on this side that doesn’t have holes in the ceiling and floor. Charlie’s a dork.”

At the far end of the garden – lush with semi-tropical foliage and smelling of yesterday’s rain – an octagonal deck had been built, roofed over but open at the sides, far too large to be called simply a gazebo. Dr. Conyer – presumably chanelling the ancient guru Lal Siva – and his Inner Circle sat on folding chairs, hands joined. The murmur of their voices carried indistinctly through the thick, moist air. The galleries that ran along both inner sides of the wings had been recently repaired, the one on the north side still in a half-constructed state at its far end.

“This room here against the house on this end is going to be a bathroom,” added the girl. “Only it’s not finished, either. That’s a bathroom, too—” She nodded to the corresponding chamber against the house on the south wing. “Next to it is Brightsky’s room, then Chad’s, Crystal and Naomi, and the one at the far end is your mom and Mrs. Moonwillow. Dr. Conyer’s in the main house, with Lumen, my dad and Cherí, and Mrs. Durham.”

“And do the people who put up the most money rate bedrooms in the house?” inquired Antryg, and got a quick sidelong grin from the girl.

“Pretty much. Dad paid for the house, and Mrs. Durham – her husband owned NamCor Pharmaceuticals and sold it for about a zillion dollars – is paying for the guest houses.”

“Is your dad going to make a come-back album?” inquired Joanna, curious. “He did a couple of acoustic numbers on Bent Light—”

“It’s CD-only – no vinyl – so he doesn’t have any kind of distribution. And it’s really my mom who paid for the house.” Sudden bitterness laced the girl’s voice. “And I bet Cherí and all her pals—” She stopped herself with visible effort, and looked aside.

“Are these rooms kept locked?” They had walked the length of the south wing gallery; Joanna gently pushed the French door of her mother’s room. It swung open, showing two beds, a dresser, and a calico cat sleeping on top of the tumbled calamity of her mother’s wardrobe. Jeans and lace thongs and embroidered tops were scattered broadcast over every item of furniture, along with damp towels, bottles of moisturizer, and half a dozen books all written by Dr. Norman Conyer: Lal Siva Speaks, Cosmic Wealth, God Wants You Rich, The Avalanche of Success, et al. Judging by the books in the library, Cosmic Inter-Connectedness was for the most part supposedly a means of inducing the Universe to send you large amounts of money on demand. No wonder businessmen, politicians, educators et al were clamoring to come to the conference here in September.

“Some of them are.” Galadriel pulled herself together with the speed of long practice, her face once more a non-committal mask. “Brightsky locks hers – she did even before the blood showed up all over her stuff – and so does Lumen and my dad. But Dr. Conyer has the keys to everything and there’s spares all over the house.”

“And where have the footsteps been heard?” Antryg stepped into the room, ran his hands testingly around the door-frame, an inch or so from the wood, and then along the walls.

“Pretty much in every one of these rooms. But the whole house creaks,” the girl added. “I’ve never heard anything in my room.”

“Fascinating.” Antryg stepped out onto the gallery again, licked his fingerips and pressed them against the wall, then leaned his ear close to the spot, frowning as if listening to some sound within the wood. “Fascinating.” He sat down cross-legged on the gallery planks, pulled a deck of playing-cards from his pocket, and laid out one of the innumerable patterns that Joanna recognized from his Tarot readings, the Simple Ellipse. Looking down over his shoulder, Joanna could see no pattern in the hearts, clubs, diamonds…

Would a Tarot deck tell him something different?

He scooped them up again and stood. “Let’s have a look at the tower.”

“Tell me about the tower.”

“Nothing about the tower,” retorted Galadriel shortly. “It’s just a bare room.” Tension was palpable in her voice. They passed through the kitchen and into the house’s big central hall, climbed the stair to the gallery that ran around three sides of the hall at the second floor level. “That’s where the blood was.” The girl pointed to the faint, brownish stain on the stretch of plaster that separated his door from the narrow one that led to the tower stairway. “It said, ROWENA. That was the wife. The one Zénobie is supposed to have killed.”

Antryg pressed his outspread hands, then his forehead, against the wall, and said, “Fascinating,” again.

“What are you looking for?” asked Joanna softly, as Antryg sat down on the floor again and produced his cards.

“Something I haven’t found yet.” He bent the deck between his fingers and scattered a reading of 52-Pickup all over the new beige wall-to-wall of the hall.

Derisively, Galadriel watched him crawl from card to card on his hands and knees. Who IS this guy and what are you doing with him?

“Duh. You think everybody in this stupid house doesn’t know their Teacher is sneaking Little Miss Brightsky up to his room every night? They’re all, Oh, it’s a ghost, it’s a ghost, and nobody’s about to say that it’s Lumen—” She nodded to the door that lay beyond the tower stair, “—trying to spook Brightsky, who’s about a smart as a pencil-eraser, into leaving. The only reason Lumen hasn’t started divorce proceedings against The Teacher is because he finally got my dad’s brother – who’s dad’s agent – to crack into the trust account where all mom’s divorce-money gets put for me, and buy this place. My dad’s an idiot,” she added. “But Lumen’s waiting to see if this place is going to pick up in value or not, before she makes her move. So, do you see disaster in the cards, Mr. Windrose?” she asked, the good manners that had probably been trounced into her by an expensive private school – Joanna was willing to bet – coming unexpectedly to the fore, despite the kidding sarcasm of her tone.

“Well, in fact, I do.” Antryg sat up, gathering the cards into his hands again. “But it’s difficult to tell whether it’s in the future or the past. And please, my dear, call me Antryg… This is the door to the tower?” He opened it – narrower than the doors to the bedrooms on either side of it – and revealed a rather gray and ill-lit ascending stair.

“You go.” Galadriel tried to look casual about it. “I’ll wait down here for you. The place creeps me out.”

*

“I’m not surprised it gives her the creeps,” said Lindy Moonwillow after lunch, as Joanna helped her carry to the kitchen the groceries that Chad had brought from town. Rain had started while she and Antryg were up in the tower, accompanied by sullen flashes of lightning in the northeast. It had been considered adviseable to make a grocery-run, in case the road flooded later.

“She didn’t mention it, I suppose? One of the first indications we had that all was not well in the house was Galadriel… I suppose she must have sleepwalked. I gather it isn’t an uncommon symptom, when there’s family stress. Her mother’s father – Larry Pell, you know – made a horrible stink about her father donating the money to the Institute to buy Zénobie—”

“Larry Pell?” Joanna stared at her in surprise. She’d heard Ben Hallard had married a wealthy groupie – wealthy enough for their child to merit a substantial trust-fund out of the divorce, evidently – but not that wealthy. Not international banking, natural-gas drilling, owns-four-resorts-and-a-major-league-baseball-team wealthy…

“Oh, yes.” Lindy started shelving boxes of oatmeal, cartons of milk, eggs, egg-whites and organic yogurt, crates of produce and extra bags of birdseed for Lumen’s canaries (I guess Bayou Chien Mort can’t be THAT tiny a burg, if they’ve got a PetCo and a health food store) into the sizeable pantry and the two stainless-steel refridgerators that graced the kitchen. “Not that she ever sees him. Nor her mother, I’m afraid,” added Lindy, with genuine sadness, shaking her head. “Not for years, by the sound of it. I gather there was a horrendous lawsuit over custody… Would you like to help me with the baking this afternoon, sweetheart? They’re saying now that it’s going to stay raining— I think she regards it as a point of pride,” she added, with one of the flashes of perspicacity that even at her ditziest, had given Joanna a regard and respect for her mother’s friend, “not to admit that any of this troubles her.”

Not only rain, reflected Joanna, with a glance through the windows out into the long, narrow garden between the wings of the house, but wind, whining eerily around the eaves of the house and hurling the rain intermittently against the windows of the big dining-room on the south side of the hall. Galadriel was right: as the wind increased, the whole house creaked as it swayed, very slightly, on its high foundation, and Joanna could well imagine the effect if one were sitting up late at night…

“She didn’t say anything about sleepwalking.”

Lindy nodded. “Drat it,” she added, as display of the micro-wave and the coffee-maker cut out, then returned, blinking 00:00 with an annoying beep. “I hope we’re not going to lose the power, after we’ve just bought all those eggs… Yes,” she went on, “she sleepwalked up to the tower. We found her up there a week ago Thursday morning. She’s just lucky the windows were shut, or goodness knows what might have happened.”

*

Joanna thought about the tower that evening, as the members of the Institute foregathered in the dining-room to watch Antryg lay out his Tarot cards. In keeping with the up-beat flavor of Cosmic Inter-Connectedness, the public areas of the house were illuminated with sufficient brightness to perform brain-surgery, and Dr. Conyer sat in his wing-chair, reading the Upanishads, with the benign air of Buddha listening to small children playing on the beach: Go about your foolish make-believe if it will reassure you, my little ones. But *I* know that this poor benighted spirit will eventually yield to the positive glow of cosmic affirmations.

Brightsky, Joanna observed, had taken the chair nearest his and was reading Lal Siva Speaks, but her glance kept flickering toward the table, and Joanna had the impression that had Dr. Conyer’s soon-to-be-ex-wife not been part of the dining-table group, she – Brightsky – would have joined them. But evidently the opportunity to impress The Teacher with her own serene detachment was not one to be passed up.

“Can you communicate with the Dead with Tarot cards?” inquired the actress Naomi Bennett, a slender blonde with enormous eyes and prodigiously augmented breasts. “My spiritual advisor – the one before Dr. Conyer, I mean – could diagnose fluctuations in my bio-field with them, and prescribe the appropriate healing herbs.”

“Could she?” Antryg looked up, with his usual air of fascinated delight.

“I keep telling Joanna,” said Starshine, with a loving smile at her daughter, “that if she’d take just one course of electronic bio-field enhancement, it would so much improve her capacity to connect with people. It certainly did for me.”

“Oh!” cried Crystal, wiping henna-paste from her fingers, “I took that!”

“And she could do the same thing for my car,” continued Naomi. “Tell when it was going to need repair, that is.”

“My spiritual advisor,” put in Mrs. Durham, lowering the Wall Street Journal, “could cure me when I’d suffer attacks of negative vibrations, just by a telephone call.”

“Is that the sort of thing they teach you in wizard school?” Starshine asked.

“Well, most of the time it’s just memorizing lists.” He laid out a spread of cards, studied the curiously disturbing images there, then gathered them up as quickly as he’d picked up the playing cards on the gallery, and laid out another spread. He’d been doing this since dinner-time, reminding Joanna of the nights when she herself would be checking the diagnostics on a computer program that wasn’t performing correctly: open this program, open that program, hunt for an anomaly or a missing code…. “Wizard school can actually be extraordinarily dull.”

Ben Hallard, softly noodling tunes on his acoustic guitar at the far end of the table, glanced up and grinned.

“Is that the tower?” Crystal leaned across the table, the lemon and eucalyptus smell of the drying henna-paste (she’d been doing her own feet) mingled with the warm scent of Lindy’s latest batch of cookies. She pointed to a card in the latest spread. “That’s the third time that’s turned up in the past hour.”

From associating with Antryg, Joanna knew that the Tower itself was a card you didn’t want to see in your spread. Was it here, she wondered, only because of the murders in the tower over a century ago? Or was it a warning – as it was in most spreads – of oncoming disaster?

In the dreary rain-light that morning, the tower room had seemed indescribably sinister, the more so because it was exactly as Joanna had seen it in her dream. Tall, narrow windows on each wall of the twelve-by-twelve chamber had looked down on the wet landscape of monotonous dark green broken with silver: the bayou, the marsh into which the old sugar-fields had devolved, woodland ponds and sinks. A thousand glimmering puddles among the half-built guest-houses where the contractors’ men had moved to and fro.

She had recognized the trap-door – literally a door set in the floor, opening upward – that covered the stairway down, beside which the woman had stood in her dream. Could have marked with chalk the place where, in her dream, the bodies of the woman and the girl had lain. When she’d told Antryg this he’d nodded – unsurprised – and had sat down in the center of the room and dealt out all the cards in his pack – which he’d gotten from Delta Airlines the previous day – in a circle around himself. “What do they tell you?” Joanna had asked, and he’d replied,

“Not a thing.”

Now Naomi said, “Could we maybe try my ouija board?” She carefully pronounced it “wee-jah” – to make it sound more scientific, Joanna guessed – rather than “weejee,” which was how Hasbro’s commercials said it on TV. “Crystal and I tried it the night after we heard the whispering in our room—”

“Could you understand what it was saying?” asked Joanna, and Naomi shook her head.

“You wouldn’t have been able to,” pointed out Mrs. Durham reasonably. “She was probably whispering in French.”

“But we both heard it. I was waked up by it, and woke up Crystal—”

The red-haired artist nodded her confirmation. “It was sort of hoarse and angry—”

“Was it a man’s voice or a woman’s?” inquired the old lady. “Do you think we’ll be able to speak with her ourselves?”

“It depends,” remarked Antryg, “on whether anyone here speaks French—”

The lights flickered. In the absolute silence that followed, a soft knocking could be heard, echoing in the dark of the front hall.

That was NOT – Joanna felt cold with shock – the creaking of the house in the wind.

Her hand closed around Antryg’s.

The broken chapel of the Sykerst village of Far Wilden came to her. The soft, hollow tapping of the dead thing that dwelled there in darkness.

But that had been in Antryg’s universe, the universe of magic and shadow.

This was here, the United States, 1988—

Brightsky whispered, “Oh, my God—” and clutched at Dr. Conyer’s arm as he rose from his chair. She looked green with shock and horror.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.” The Teacher disengaged her hand and started, very calmly, toward the door that led out into the central hall of the house.

Lumen said, “Don’t be silly, Norman,” and Ben set his guitar aside. Both he and Cherí got to their feet to flank him.

The lights went out. For a moment there was no sound but the soft cry of the wind, and the constant, furtive rustle of the trees around the house. Then softly, irregularly, the tapping started again, and any possible thought that it could be a branch, or a loose board, or something moving with the swift river of air pouring over the old plantation dissolved from Joanna’s mind.

The knocking had the rhythm, the decisiveness, of human action.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Dr. Conyer repeated, speaking now not to his disciples in the room, but out into the dark of the hall. He raised his voice slightly, his light tenor easily filling the hollow blackness that rose up two floors through the house’s heart. “Zénobie, we are here with good will. We mean neither you nor any of those who dwell here—”

His words were drowned by sudden crashing, hollow and thunderous; Chad yelped with shock and one of the girls screamed, “Fuck!” Joanna, who had been following the progress of the storm-front on the radio all afternoon and had been expecting a power-failure, dug in her pocket for a flashlight. Whatever was out there, it couldn’t be worse than the things that had flitted and scrambled through the blackness of the vault below the Citadel of Wizards—

She hoped to hell it couldn’t, anyway.

She flicked the light on, flashed it around through the door into the hall. The noise had been loud enough that she expected to see dents in the plaster, splinters hammered out of the doors. But there was nothing. In the terrible silence after the hammering everything looked queer and stiff by the pale glimmer of the flashlight, as if there were something waiting. Behind her in the dining-room, Cherí backed soundlessly to the door that communicated with the bathroom on that side of the house, and so through it to Brightsky’s bedroom beyond. She took the key from the inside of the door and locked it from the dining-room side.

Like that’s going to stop a ghost…

Antryg had joined the little group in the doorway, his head cocked, listening. Dr. Conyer started to call out into the room again, “Zénobie—” and the wizard held up his hand for silence. Far off – In the library? In the parlor? – the tapping sounded once more.

“It doesn’t sound like there’s any pattern to it,” murmured Antryg after a few moments, and Joanna shook her head. “Stay here—” He had advanced a step into the house’s central hall, but gestured Joanna to remain behind when she would have followed him. “And stay together.” And he moved off soft-footed across the hallway, toward the double door of the parlor beyond.

“Galadriel,” whispered Ben. “She’s in her room—”

“Does she have enough sense to say there?” Joanna spoke over her shoulder, still watching the tall figure open the parlor door, slip through. The knocking paused, resumed…

“She has candles,” provided Lindy. “And I honestly don’t think she thinks enough of Zénobie to go chasing around after knocking in the night.”

“It can’t hurt her,” said Conyer firmly.

But can it induce her to hurt herself?

The knocking paused again, and against the black windows spatters of rain fell. The tropical storm was moving southeast toward Lafourche Parish, the radio had said earlier in the day – Just what we need. No lights and a hostile ghost wandering around the place…

“How exciting!” whispered Mrs. Durham, obviously completely thrilled. “Do you think Mr. Windrose needs help? I—”

“I think we need to follow his instructions exactly.” Joanna knelt, and on the edge of the oak floor between the dining-room door and the oriental carpet that covered the main hall, tapped with the back of her flashlight, three quick raps.

Long silence. Then the tapping resumed. No pattern – as if whatever made it, held no regard for those who listened in the darkness to the sounds of her anger.

*I* sure as hell wouldn’t want to be sitting in my room alone – candles or no candles – listening to that.

But I sure as hell wouldn’t want to step outside on the dark gallery either, or cross through the blackness of the unfinished bathroom and the silent library, the black kitchen and the echoing hall, to get to the dining-room…

The lights came up again. Suddenly, as if the breaker-switch had been thrown…

Everyone in the dining-room made a surge toward the door into the hall and Joanna wondered if she should – or could – stop them. But a moment later Antryg emerged from the parlor doorway, three or four lustres from one of the parlor lamps in one hand and shoving his thaumatrope back into his pocket with the other.

“Was that you who tapped three times, my dear?” He looked down at Joanna, who nodded. “It didn’t really sound like her. In fact—”

The door at the back of the hall opened. Ben stood framed in it, his hair and the shoulders of his t-shirt flecked with rain: “Galley’s gone from her room.”

The candles in her room hadn’t been lit, and the light had been switched off. Galadriel’s shoes stood neatly in the little rank of footwear at the bottom of the armoire, and her glasses lay, folded neatly, beside the lamp. Lindy said at once, “She’s sleepwalking—”

And Joanna said, “The tower.”

“Don’t everybody come up at once!” ordered Ben, as the entire population of the Institute streamed back into the house, to the backstairs that ascended from the kitchen.

Dr. Conyer – to his total credit as far as Joanna was concerned – said, “Antryg, you’d better go. Joanna – Lindy…”

Which proved, to Joanna, that The Teacher – reincarnated Indian savant or not – had at least been paying attention to which of the women in his little coterie would be best able to deal with a possibly traumatized thirteen-year-old. “Honestly,” protested Starshine, “I don’t see why she should go and not me. Children naturally love me—”

Galadriel lay in the center of the tower chamber, deeply asleep. She didn’t wake when Ben lifted her, and carried her down the stairs: “Her pulse is normal,” Joanna heard him say to Lindy, “and she seems to be breathing okay—”

“I get just like that,” squeaked Mrs. Durham down below, “when I’m having an attack of negative vibrations…”

Joanna turned from the trap-door, the weak yellow illumination of her flashlight outlining Antryg’s skinny shape against the darkness. No moonlight came through the chamber’s four tall windows. The sky was like tar with the storm; as in her dream, lightning flared and died, flared and died in the window. Rain rattled against the glass and the old house creaked, very softly, on its tall piers. Beyond Antryg, writing glistened a little on the wall. The blood – and she could smell the blood, the way the scent of a single rose can perfume a closed space – was still wet.

It said, ALYS.

*

There was talk over breakfast of Galadriel leaving Zénobie. “Oh, come on,” said the girl, exasperated. “So I sleepwalked? Big deal.” Despite her obsessive neatness – better turned-out, with her washed hair and neat polo-shirt, than the three actress-models of the party – she looked sleepy and a little haggard as she stirred her coffee, and her voice was filled with pubescent contempt for the concerns of grown-ups. “It’s not like the windows up there are ever open, or I could fall out, or anything.”

“You could fall down the stairs,” pointed out Mrs. Durham, and Galadriel rolled her eyes.

“Besides, where would I go?” She glanced at her father. “I know Dad’s gonna want to stay here to make sure the guest-houses get done before your conference—”

“I can do that,” offered Chad.

The look Galadriel gave him – Yeah, right – seemed to be echoed in the long pause among the others, into which nobody, not even Dr. Conyer, leaped with assurances that by golly, Chad would certainly do a great job bossing laborers from town! At length Ben Hallard said, “Well, if you’re sure, honey…”

“Do you have a friend you can go to?” asked Lindy.

“Marcie and her folks are in Hawaii,” retorted the girl. “And Tory’s family isn’t going to be back from Maine ‘til school starts.” Marcie and Tory, Joanna had learned yesterday during the guided tour, were Galadriel’s BFFs.

She noticed with interest that nobody suggested Galadriel spend the time with her mother.

By mid-afternoon the topic was moot anyway, when news came over the radio (there was, of course, not a TV in the Institute) that Highway 90 back to town was flooded with the worsening of Tropical Storm Beryl, so Galadriel wouldn’t have been able to go anyplace even if she’d had someplace to go. Joanna, whose mother had started leaving her home for two and three days at a time at the age of twelve, could sympathize. Staying in an empty house with a stack of frozen dinners, a twenty dollar bill, and the neighbor’s phone number had been unnerving sometimes – she’d had very few friends – but it had been a whole lot better than the prospect of going and staying with her dad and whoever his current girlfriend was.

By three, the water was knee-deep around the house and rising.

This didn’t surprise anyone. Antryg went out and walked the circuit around the house again just after breakfast, when the wind was strong enough almost to blow Joanna off her feet and the air was filled with flying debris from the woods: branches, leaves, ragged clumps of kudzu and Spanish moss. “What are you looking for?” asked Joanna again, as the wizard stopped and studied each of the three doors that led into the store-space under the house, passing his hands across the stout wood and the heavy new padlocks the contractor had left, and Antryg only shook his head.

“The house was Zénobie’s,” he said, turning his shoulders to the hammering wind, “before Trasher – her master – brought in a new wife. At least that’s the story, which may not be true. The contractor in charge of the repairs is a descendant of the original family. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Not unless this is the first time there’s been a Trasher on the property since the tragedy.”

He raised his eyebrows, turned the padlock over in his crooked fingers and ran his fingertips lightly on the wood all around. “I wonder.”

The bayou was beginning to flood even then. By the time Antryg lowered himself down through the floor of one of the deserted bedrooms on the north wing, and into the space beneath the house itself, the water was ankle-deep. Antryg sloshed the length of both wings, and around among the stout brick piers that supported the main block of the house, reaching up now and then to touch the foot-square cypress beams, put into place by unfree labor almost two centuries before and bearing both the new aluminum sheathing of new electrical wiring, and the carved work-signs of the slave-gangs who’d raised the house.

“Can you feel them?” asked Joanna softly, as Antryg ran his fingers over a larger sign, a grid-work of crossed lines and stylized snakes. “The people who made the house?”

His spectacles flashed as he nodded. “Their wizard put a spell on the house,” he said softly. “A number of spells, actually – the slaves used to come down here and mark the underside of the floor, look—” He turned her flashlight up to the thick boards over their heads. “I presume so the master would walk across these signs. Signs of hatred, of sickness and grief to all who dwelt there. Look here—”

He dug his fingers into a dark cranny between the beams, brought out a cracking fragment of what looked like coarse sacking, and from it unwrapped with withered remains of a chicken’s foot, and a dirty crumble of earth and salt. “These things don’t go away.”

After that they climbed to the tower, and Antryg studied the now-dried blood-writing by daylight, straggling letters crudely drawn, first with his glasses on, then with his long nose almost touching the whitewashed plaster.

“Where does the blood come from?” Joanna asked softly. “I’ve read about poltergeist activity involving blood dripping from the walls or the ceiling – and I assume that the blood from that thing we dealt with back at that village in the Sykerst was from its victims… I’ve read that when they’ve tested the blood at poltergeist sites it’s human. But how would it show up on a DNA test? Whose human blood?”

“Whose indeed?” He wet his finger, dabbed it along the dried letters. “In my own world we don’t have DNA testing, but a trained mage can see – can feel – the victim of the original murder in the blood, so I presume this would test as the blood of whoever is the guiding spirit here. Probably Zénobie, possibly the woman Rowena, or the child Alys.

“I do need blood,” he added, and turned from the wall to look out the window beside it. The woods heaved and thrashed like a dark-green ocean, and Joanna could see, up to the wall of the house, the sullen pewter waters of the flooded bayou shuddering with the movement of the storm. “I presume one could just get a couple of rats from the pet store in town—”

Antryg knew all about feeder-rats from Mr. Parker, who lived next door to them in Granada Hills and had three boa constrictors and an anaconda.

“—but I doubt we could get into town at the moment.”

“Why do you need blood?”

He looked a bit surprised that she’d have to ask. “I plan to spend tonight here in the tower, of course.”

*

In the end Antryg cut open his own arm, and mixed the blood he drew with a great deal of water in one of Lindy’s spare mixing-bowls (“It’s the wrong size for my current mixer, so it can just be thrown out afterwards…”). “Won’t the ghost know the blood is watered?” asked Starshine, observing Antryg in fascination as her daughter wrapped a field-dressing tightly around his arm. “My goodness, where did you learn to do that, dearest? You used to faint at the sight of blood.”

“You can have some of mine,” added Crystal, holding out her henna-squiggled arm. By this time, knowing the sorts of things Crystal customarily had in her blood-stream, Joanna wondered what sort of effect that would have on subsequent manifestations. Psychedelic paisley ghosts, presumably…

“Until I know what I’m dealing with—” Antryg put his thumb on the bandage so Joanna could finish tying it, “—I’d rather my blood be the only type our friend has contact with.”

“Is it true what the Teacher says?” Ben’s sweetheart Cherí leaned her elbows on the kitchen table: group summons of the power of the Universe aside, Joanna had quickly found that the kitchen was the place that most people gathered in the afternoons. “That this – this spirit, this thing – can use the energies raised here to spread out over the world? And do what? Spread hatred? Are we looking at some kind of catastrophe?”

The last light was fading from the wide kitchen windows, the long, narrow garden beyond. The wings of the house protected it somewhat from the wind, but with the rising of the storm-surge from the Gulf the whole countryside was drowned crotch-deep in flood-water, and the house’s bones shuddered under the flail of the wind. At the counter, Lumen was lighting the emergency oil-lamps, as the electrical power had failed again, this time presumably from natural causes, and the soft glow seemed to intensify the familiar smells of Lindy’s cookies, cooling on their racks, and of the vegetarian lasagne in the oven.

“To be honest I haven’t the faintest idea what we’re looking at.” Antryg covered the bowl with Saran wrap – it was astonishing how little blood it took to encrimson half a gallon of water – and stowed it in the refrigerator. “I’ll need salt, and iron—”

Everyone looked at each other blankly at that, until Lumen said, “Do you mind if it’s rusty? When they were clearing away the old slave-cabins for the guest-houses, somebody found what used to be the plantation forge, and there was about a quart of old nails there. I think they’re in the unfinished bathroom.”

“And I have a half-gallon of kosher salt up in my room,” added Mrs. Durham helpfully. “It keeps the negative vibrations away, but the maid keeps vacuuming it up.”

Enough light remained for Joanna to see the guest-houses through the window when she went into the library, perched up on their piers several feet above the water; something small and black paddled determinedly out of the woods, scrambled up on the steps of one of them, and shook itself. Nutria? Squirrel?

Rat, probably. Joanna grimaced. God knew what the flood was going to chase out of the space under the house, and Chad had warned her to watch her feet if she walked along the galleries of the rear wings that night. It wasn’t uncommon for snakes to be flushed from their holes by floods and there were several notably poisonous varieties in the near-by swamps. When she’d gone to her mother’s room earlier in the afternoon, she’d heard the scuffle and scurry of movement in the attic above the wings. Just what we need.

And she thought again of Galadriel, in her solitary chamber in the north wing, lying there listening to the darkness when everyone had gone to bed.

Reason enough, she thought, to set off poltergeist activities in that self-contained and withdrawn girl… If that’s what’s doing it. Whatever the girl said, Joanna was certain it wasn’t some petty rivalry between the Teacher’s Ex and his Pending. Both had been in the room during the tapping episode last night and both had looked shaken and scared.

And anyway, I DREAMED ABOUT HER.

Dreamed about her in the tower. Dreamed about her pacing the floor, with the bodies of Rowena and Alys lying in their blood in the moonlight…

*

She dreamed about her again.

Zénobie. Tall and beautiful – older than Joanna had pictured her – with fine black hair like wavy silk bound close to her head, and dark eyes wide and full of fury in the thin moonlight that came and went through the ragged clouds.

The wind had ceased. The rain had fallen for a time, then eased, though the floods still stood in the lands. Zénobie paced the tower, but instead of the bodies of the woman she’d slain, the daughter she had chosen to see dead rather than given to another, in the center of the tower sprawled a complex protective circle wrought of iron, salt, silver – coins, chains, earrings – and blood.

Wait, I was going to go up and be with him…

But Antryg wasn’t there.

Only a huge puddle of blood lay in the center of the circle, fresh and glistening, the stink of it filling the room.

I have to wake up. He’ll need me…

She heard a man come into the house from the gallery behind, through the kitchen, up the backstair. Walking heavily, under some burden limp in his arms…

I HAVE TO WAKE UP…

Zénobie turned to listen, and her face twisted with hate.

Joanna jolted from sleep. Her heart raced, but her mind felt groggy and stupid. She lay fully dressed on the futon – I was just going to lie here and read for awhile, have a few cookies until Antryg was done reading his cards in the dining-room and went up to the tower…

How the HELL could I fall asleep?It was only nine o’clock

By the glowing hands of her wristwatch it was midnight now, the house sunk in silence like death.

Except for the weighted tread of someone climbing the stair.

Joanna crawled to her feet and staggered, sleep still gumming her thoughts. Am I dreaming this?

She knew she wasn’t.

She took a poker from the clean-swept library fireplace, checked that her flashlight was still in her pocket, but some obscure instinct whispered to her not to turn it on. She slipped barefoot from the library (with uneasy reflections about copperheads and cottonmouths slithering up the gallery steps and into the house) into the thin moongleam of the kitchen, stood at the bottom of the backstair listening.

Brightsky sneaking up for a surreptitious boink with The Teacher?

She knew it wasn’t.

Stonne Caris, grandson of the Archmage Salteris Solaris and a healer now himself, had told her once that when climbing stairs in silence one should keep to the wall, and to the edge of the step, that the riser should take one’s weight. Joanna climbed in silence, poker heavy in her hand (Like a poker’s going to impress a ghost?). When she reached the upstairs hall she saw something – a ball of glowing phosphorous, like a silent fireball – on the opposite side of the gallery that ran around the well of the main stair from the hall below. It seemed to appear near the door of Mrs. Durham’s room and roll toward her, then vanished, and as Joanna stood, frozen in the dark entryway of the backstair, she heard someone coming down the stair of the tower.

A man, by his weight.

Moving quietly, on stockinged feet.

Thin moonlight showed her his face as he emerged. She’d never seen him before: not as tall as Antryg but heavier built, buzzed hair and a broken nose, and a face of the cruellest and most uncaring calm Joanna had ever seen. He wore something dark – she couldn’t see what – but she did see that he had a military pistol on his belt and a sheathed knife with a twelve-inch blade.

Soundlessly – it was eerie how quietly he moved – he opened the door of what Joanna knew was Ben and Cherí’s room and went inside.

What the HELL…?

Joanna almost made a dart across from the backstair to the tower stair – it was less than twenty feet – but her nerve failed her at the recollection of that craggy dead-eyed face. He’ll kill me if he sees me.

She knew it, as she knew her own name.

Antryg’s in the tower.

Asleep, as I was asleep… Dead-asleep? Drugged-asleep? How could somebody drug people in the house…

Cookies. She remembered how Galadriel had sagged limp in her father’s arms last night when he’d found her in the tower. How groggy she’d been that morning. How easy it was to come and go through one or another of the house’s many doors and windows and how many hours each day all the bedrooms sat unlocked and unwatched. You could swap Lindy’s chocolate chip cookies for cookies loaded with strychnine, let alone methaqualone or whatever the hell it is…

The door opened again and the stranger emerged, carrying Ben slung over his shoulders.

Ben the rock-star— But she knew this wasn’t a thrill-kill stalker. He isn’t dripping water on the floor. That means he’s been hiding in the house all afternoon. Attic, probably… It’s got to be a professional hit. That means money.

She padded softly – still holding to the wall – to the bottom of the tower stair, heard the assassin’s feet ascending in the darkness ahead of her. I’ve gone up against a Dead God and a trans-dimensional Devourer… against abominations from across the Void and soul-stealing wizards, and the smartest thing for me to do would be to wait down here at the bottom with a weapon and kill him when he comes down…

Except that by that time he’ll have already killed Ben and whoever else it was he took up there – Galadriel, it’s got to be Galadriel – and anyway there isn’t a gun in this house and I will NOT go up against a professional hit-man with a poker—

A man’s harsh voice yelled “Fuck!” and she heard Antryg cry out in pain.

And flung herself like a tiger up the stairs.

Antryg had, of all things, a six-foot piece of clothes-pole (He has to have got it from one of the guest-houses…), with which Joanna knew he was murderously adept; the hit-man had got inside his guard and opened a gash on his right fore-arm. Only secondarily did Joanna spot Ben lying like a sack of laundry just beside the open trap-door of the tower stairs that led down, and Galadriel unconscious in the room’s far corner. Antryg twisted out of his assailant’s way and tried to trip him, but the other man was trained, and cat-fast. Antryg ducked back, trying to get enough distance to use the pole and to put as much space between himself and the knife as he could. He caught sight of Joanna, yelled “Joanna, RUN!” in the same moment the hit-man turned, broke off his attack and lunged for her—

Hostage…

She bolted down the stairs like a rabbit, the stranger – whoever the HELL he was – at her heels and gaining.

If I hide in any bedroom that’ll make THAT person the hostage…

She plunged down the main stair toward the hall and the hit-man leaped over the bannister and landed on the stair in front of her, knife flashing in the moonlight as he darted up toward her. She rammed the poker straight at him like a sword-thrust (Thank you, Sensei Shimada…) and though he blocked it, it broke his momentum. She darted past him even as Antryg, likewise, jumped the bannister of the upstairs gallery and landed on the stair (If I tried to do that I’d break my leg…) directly behind the stranger. From the hallway above, Lumen’s voice yelled, “Norman!” (Whatever drug it is, thought Joanna, the dose must be small enough to wear off quickly—) and she skidded to a halt at the bottom of the stairs as the assassin threw himself on Antryg, ducking a savage thrust with the pole.

Conyer’s voice shouted “What the hell—?” followed by an extremely un-self-realized remark, and as the hit-man drove his knife into Antryg’s side Mrs. Durham’s voice called,

“Watch out, dear!” followed immediately by the roar of a shotgun.

Plaster exploded from a wall yards from the two combattants, but both men dropped flat to the stairs, arms over their heads. The hit-man recovered first. He bounded to his feet, plunged down the stair. Joanna ducked behind the newel-post into the black shadows of the hall, but guessed – even as groggy as she still was – that she was in no further danger of being used as a human shield. As far as their visitor was concerned the jig was definitely up, and he pelted past her without a glance. Antryg, Dr. Conyer, Lumen, and Mrs. Durham (it was a double-barrelled shotgun, so running made good sense) piled down the stairs behind…

Something cold passed across Joanna’s back. For a moment the smell of foulness, like rotting meat far-off, gagged her, and what appeared to be fast-blowing shreds of luminous mist flowed by her and into the hall. The hit-man had already torn open the front door, plunged out into the raggedy cloud-streaked moonlight.

Antryg, ahead of the others despite the blood soaking his t-shirt where his hand pressed to his side, flung out his arm to block the pursuit as the glowing mist swirled in the hall. Conyer gasped, “What the—?” again and Joanna heard the thunder of boots on the front gallery, and saw through the open door their visitor spring down the steps and start to run, sloshing through the steely glimmer of the flood-water, toward the woods.

The mist drifted after him, seeming to dissipate in the moonlight.

He’ll get away – He’ll try again…

Joanna ran to the door, the others – including Antryg – behind her.

The hit-man was wading fast through the water toward the woods. There was something weirdly dream-like in the monochrome world of moonlight, the spiky black islets of the guest-houses, the floating branches and packing-crates and cut ends of two-by-fours. Or maybe it’s just the drug, thought Joanna detachedly, as Mrs. Durham raised her shotgun for another try and Antryg slapped it up from beneath the barrel: her target was far out of range.

The whole of the surface of the water shuddered suddenly, and what appeared to be several hundred small, thick black triangles appeared, trailing gleaming arrowheads of wake. Now and then, one would resolve itself into three feet of whipping tail.

They converged on the fleeing man, swimming far more swiftly than he could run.

Joanna said, “Shit!” and closed her fingers tight on Antryg’s hand where it rested on her shoulder. Dr. Conyer said something even less refined.

Lumen said, “Cottonmouths—”

The hit-man screamed, staggered, swatted futilley at the water as the snakes swarmed around him. Joanna thought there were a dozen of them hanging onto him when he regained his feet and tried to continue wading toward the woods.

He fell again, and didn’t rise.

After a few moments the snakes boiled to the surface, and swam away in all directions. The water grew still. Then Joanna thought she saw the mist rise up, and hang above the surface for perhaps five seconds before it dispersed.

*

“I should guess,” remarked Antryg to the Lafourche Parish sheriff, when that gentleman put in an appearance the following afternoon, “that the first place to make enquiries as to our visitor’s employer would be with the family of Miss Hallard’s mother or grandfather.”

“Grandfather.” Ben Hallard sipped his third cup of black coffee – he looked like ten miles of bad road – and spoke without the smallest sliver of doubt in his voice. “Bree’s – my ex-wife’s – father always hated me. Don’t take my word for it,” he added, with a glance at the white deputy who was taking notes. “You can look up any interview Larry Pell has given in the past fourteen years, on the subject of ‘nigger degenerates’ marrying good white girls like his daughter.”

The sheriff – a stereotypically Fat White Southern Sheriff from any B-movie, except for his eyes – nodded thoughtfully. “I read ‘em,” he said. “Minute I heard your name was attached to this here Institute, Mr. Hallard, I went to the library an’ looked you up. Read up on Mrs. Durham, too, and Miss Bennett. Just like to know who we was havin’ here in the Parish.”

He considered Antryg and Joanna for a moment, on the other side of the long dining-room table, as if adding together the wizard’s love-beads and air of daft geniality with the bandage on his arm and the knife-cut on his cheekbone. “You figure he counted on it bein’ put down as another Manson case? Rock star goes nuts in a haunted house, offs his daughter and then kills himself?”

“With lots of witnesses to the supernatural goings-on,” affirmed the mage. He gestured – with a wince where his wounded side pulled at its dressing – toward the equipment they’d found that morning, in the far end of the attic of the unrepaired north wing. Along with the miniature sound-equipment by which the knockings, rappings, and whispers had been produced, had been found vials of blood (“I think you’ll find the clerks at the pet-store in town can identify him, as having bought feeder-rats a day or two before each incident of blood-writing.”), and an assortment of chocolate-chip cookies which proved, on later analysis, to contain precisely measured doses of a mild hypnotic: enough to knock out those who sampled the cookies, but not enough to cause noticible after-effects.

“You have to admit it’s an excellent plan.”

“That it is,” agreed the sheriff. “I’d have bought that story myself, after all the talk there’s been about this house for the past hundred years. I think everybody in town’s heard about Miss Hallard ‘sleepwalking’ that first time… I’d have tested your blood, Mr. Hallard, and your daughter’s, if you’d been found dead in the mornin’, but I don’t think I’d have thought to test everybody’s in the house.”

“If I hadn’t been in a panic adrenalin-rush from a nightmare I had,” confessed Joanna, “I’d probably have rolled over and fallen back asleep. And if I hadn’t wanted to go up to the tower with Antryg when he summoned the ghost.”

The sheriff returned his calm blue glance to Antryg again. “You put all them little drawin’s on the tower floor to summon the ghost, Mr. Windrose?”

“I should have been delighted had she appeared.” Antryg gave the officer a bonkers smile. “But since, that morning, I had observed that the letters supposedly written by the ghost on the wall in blood had actually been made with a paint-brush – you can see one or two of the bristles still sticking in the blood – I thought it best to take a stick with me also, in case the problem had a more human explanation. When I heard our friend coming up the stairs the first time, carrying Miss Hallard, I concealed myself in the shadows in a corner of the tower room. When he left her there and went downstairs again I guessed he was going to fetch her father, and was waiting for him when he came up. I have trained with a fighting-staff,” he added, half apologetically. “I had no idea Mrs. Durham had firearms in the house.”

“I thought you said the place was really haunted,” whispered Joanna, when Sheriff LePic was called to the front gallery by a deputy with the word that they’d found the assassin’s body. Nobody had wanted to go wading after it while floods and darkness – not to speak of about a hundred cottonmouth vipers – had covered the land, but when it began to grow light, Antryg had put on some fishing-waders of Chad’s and had sloshed away through waters still thigh-deep, the five miles to town. By the time he’d returned in Sheriff LePic’s high-set off-roader, the floods had begun to sink. In his absence the others at the Institute had found the cache of sound-equipment in the attic – which Ben had easily identified – as well as a rain-wet slicker and boots, and a pee-bottle which had indicated that yes, the assassin had been hiding in the attic probably since afternoon.

If the death of a financially inconvenient son-in-law and grand-daughter were to be blamed on supernatural murder-suicide, Joanna guessed, one couldn’t have drippy trails of rainwater all over the house.

“Anyway,” she added uneasily, “it is really haunted. What the hell was that… that mist?”

“I think the entire incident is what one would call an induced haunting.” Antryg poured himself another cup of tea and offered Joanna the plate of cookies – Lindy had made oatmeal-raisin that morning, just to make sure nobody got mixed up with the evidence.

Joanna shook her head. She felt she had had enough cookies for the moment.

“It’s what puzzled me, you know,” the wizard went on. “I was looking for a cold spot – the most common manifestation of a haunt. Yet there was none in the house. I could feel there was definitely an entity present in the house, but there was no… no sense of malice, no change in temperature, no smell of the dead, during the events of Thursday night. And my card-readings all showed up perfectly random. There was nothing, in fact, to indicate that anything genuinely supernatural was going on at all. This was confirmed when I had a closer look at the blood-writing in the tower Friday morning. I’ve seen the writing of actual spirits and it looks nothing like that. It was crudely-formed, but more or less on a line, and at the eye-level of a person close to six feet tall.”

“So why’d you try to summon the ghost in the tower,” asked Ben Hallard, “if you knew it wasn’t involved?”

Antryg widened his eyes at him. “To ask her what was going on, of course.”

“And you’re saying our visitor – the hit-man – woke her up?” said Joanna.

“Woke her up… and angered her.” He glanced across at Ben. “I suspect it was because he meant to injure your daughter,” he added. “She may even believe that Galadriel was her daughter – and that the man who came up to the tower, filled with the cold indifference that doesn’t care who it harms, was the man she hated, the man who had given her daughter to another woman.”

He rose, and walked to the window, through which Sheriff LePic and two deputies could be seen making their way through the ankle-deep weedy slush that was all that was left of the flood. The deputies carried a stretcher between them. LePic shook his head; Joanna, standing at Antryg’s side, heard the sheriff say, “Damndest thing I ever seen—”

“It is a very great mistake,” said Antryg softly, “to anger the dead. I think you’ll find he came in as one of the contractor’s men. As such he’d have a key to the store-rooms under the house – at least, there was no sign of the locks having been picked – and from there he could come and go at will, unseen, through the holes in the floors of the bedrooms in the deserted wing. From under the house he could make the footsteps, the rapping noises – loud or soft – and the whispering Brightsky heard, by putting the speaker against the floor-boards.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” said Hallard softly. “And it doesn’t surprise me that old Pell would do this. He’s hated me and hated Galley, ever since he failed to get custody of Galley when she was three. My brother Ivar – who’s my manager and a hell of a lawyer – got the court to set up a trust-fund for Galley from the divorce settlement, but Grandpa Pell’s never liked it. He’s tried to break it twice, even though Galley’s his only grandchild…”

His mouth hardened. “He talks about ‘bad blood.’ The damn thing is, we can’t prove it was Grandpa Pell who hired this man. And knowing Pell, I know he’s going to try again.”

*

In point of fact, the hit-man – whose name turned out to be Clay Denny, or at least that was the name under which he’d been employed by Charlie Trasher to install air conditioners – had taken care of that problem himself. Evidently – so the Star, the National Enquirer, the Globe and the Sun gleefully informed the American reading public over the course of the next several weeks – Mr. Denny had doubted his employer’s good faith in the matter of paying up the $500,000 (the Enquirer said $250,000) negotiated for the hit, and had informed Mr. Pell that “If anything happens to me, tapes of our conversations are going straight to the FBI and to every major newspaper in the country.” (Presumably, not the major newspapers that Mr. Pell owned).

And when something indeed happened to Mr. Denny in the course of the hit, the tapes duly went out, and 65-year-old billionaire Larry Pell – whose new wife was expecting their first child – found himself under investigation for trying to eliminate the grand-daughter who had a claim on a substantial portion of the fortune he hoped to leave to his new family.

“Marty LePic in Lafourche Parish told me you had the whole set-up pretty well nailed,” said Jon Sheraton approvingly, four months later, when he appeared in Los Angeles to take his daughter Joanna and her “beau,” as he referred to Antryg, out for Thanksgiving dinner. Joanna suspected that this was at least in part to introduce her to his most recent wife, a dazzling blonde who probably looked a good deal like Starshine Worlds-Daughter herself had looked at the age of twenty-seven. “He says you went straight for exactly what a trained officer would have checked: possible entry to the house, and how the effects could have been produced… You ever do any police work?”

“Only in an amateur capacity in my home town as a teen-ager, sir. I’ve never had any kind of training. But I like to think I have the habit of observing things, and anything out of the ordinary will draw my attention. I do love things,” added Antryg with a grin, “that are out of the ordinary.”

“I don’t know any good cop who doesn’t.” Joanna’s father had mentioned in passing, in the course of setting up the meeting at Jerry’s Famous Delicatessen that evening, that he’d made Chief of Police of Trenton, New Jersey, the previous year, something her mother had never thought to mention during the week they were in Louisiana. “And what do you do?”

Joanna got ready to kick the wizard under the table, but Antryg replied, “Oh, tend bar, tell fortunes….”

Her father’s cheekbones and ear-tips turned bright red, and she could see him getting ready to yell, Don’t we have enough of that crap in this family already? But the beautiful blonde Annie caught his eye, like a gentle, warning chime, and he visibly got himself in hand, took a deep breath, and merely grimaced. “Oh, I bet Susan loves you…”

With a little deft guidance from Annie (whom Joanna had liked instantly: she was long ago used to stepmothers her own age) the conversation turned to hunting – like most wizards, Antryg knew a great deal about birds and animals – and to the martial arts. “Glad you got Joanna into learning a little self-defense. She needs to get out more. Stop spending so much time staring into a computer screen.”

“I never thought you’d get along with my dad,” said Joanna later, as she drove home through the rain-slick glare and darkness of Victory Boulevard. Christmas lights blared from every mall and store-front. A dozen billboards trumpeted the season’s offerings of G-rated films to keep bored kids busy. Joanna could only be profoundly glad that she’d seen the last of both parents, with luck, for another year or more. Antryg’s earrings alone, she suspected, would have set her father off if he hadn’t been on his best behavior.

“I don’t suppose he’ll ever approve of me.” Antryg craned his neck briefly to observe the long line already forming on the sidewalk outside a Toys R Us that advertised the new Cabbage Patch Kids would go on sale at midnight. “But why wouldn’t I like him? He, and your mother, both contributed to making you what you are – and I very much like you.”

“What were your parents like?” In over two years it was the first time she’d thought to ask him. Having grown used, all her life, to not speaking of the tensions between a wildly enthusiastic flake and a driven alcoholic, she had fallen out of the habit of thinking that other people might have equally bizarre home-lives.

In the long interval of silence she glanced sidelong at him, but his eyes were hidden behind the reflection of oncoming headlights in the lenses of his glasses, and his wide mouth was settled in an expression of sadness. “They were poor,” he said at length. “And frightened. I was the oldest of nine; my mother always had something else to do. And like yours, my father was drunk a great deal of the time—”

He must have seen her startle, because he paused, and the next moment Joanna realized that though her father was clearly back in AA these days, the broken veins in his nose and cheeks were a giveaway. Maybe other signs as well. To a wizard, or perhaps to anyone who’d grown up hearing yelling through the wall every night.

“They tried to cover up my powers, when I was tiny. It’s never good to be a wizard, in my world. If you’re mageborn, you can work all sorts of little magics when you’re four and five years old, and then it all goes away, and you spend about ten years wondering whether any of it ever really happened, before they start to come back. I’d forgotten I’d had powers, until I was fourteen. When I was fourteen Suraklin took me away—” He shook his head. “I never saw my parents again. I suspect they didn’t even miss me.”

“It all comes back to family,” said Joanna, “doesn’t it?” and pulled her Mustang down the long, pot-holed gravel drive into the yard at 75313 Porson Avenue, the shabby bungalow rising before them against the night.

“Doesn’t everything?” Antryg unfolded his tall height from the front seat, and followed her up to the porch. “Is that from Ben Universe?” he added, as she picked up the slim package that the postman had left against the screen-door.

She unwrapped it. It was a CD, bearing a black-and-white photo of Zénobie plantation on the front, with the title, Songs of Cosmic Light. Enclosed was a short note from Ben.

“Nothing from my mom, you notice,” observed Joanna with a sigh. “If she’s even still into Cosmic Inter-Connectedness. Maybe one of these days I’ll be spiritually evolved enough to quit hoping she’s ever going to be different from what she is. Was that what was missing from the so-called haunting? Because you didn’t sense the rage that anyone would have had – my mother, or yours, or Ben Hallard – to have their child taken away?”

“I’d certainly like to think I was that wise.” Antryg hunched his shoulders, in their threadbare pea-coat, against the autumn chill. “Actually, it was just that all the manifestations were aural – something which anyone could reproduce. And the girl Galadriel was an anomaly, the only one who wasn’t part of the Inner Circle. So of course I looked in her direction first. As the mage Isar Chelladin wrote, that which is likely, but impossible, should be considered sooner than that which is possible but unlikely. Because we have no idea, really, what is possible.”

“Aristotle said something like that.”

“Really? Perhaps he knew Isar Chelladin.”

Perhaps, thought Joanna, he had. “I wouldn’t have thought it was likely,” she mused after a time, “that my mother would say she was proud of me. But she did, you know. As we were getting on the plane to come back here.”

She smiled reminiscently. Of course, her mother had added, Even though you actually had nothing to do with catching that awful man… But I’m proud of you anyway, dear. Her kiss had been a light, cool touch, perfumed with the mix of frankincense and cannibis that Joanna recalled from her childhood.

She still smiled at the recollection of that scent. In an odd way it was good to know that Starshine Worlds-Daughter wasn’t going to change.

“I guess that’s about as good as I’m going to get, for now. Ben says—” Joanna held the note up to the porch light, then dug in her pocket for keys. “—their Teacher held the Institute’s first Cosmic Conference and—” She angled the message, “—raised enough pure psychic energy to alter the course of the world. That was on the first,” she added. “I haven’t noticed any alteration in the psychic energy of the world.”

Antryg licked a fingertip and held it up, as if testing the atmosphere of the rainy night. “So far,” he said thoughtfully. “So far.”

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.

Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

The Further Adventures
by Barbara Hambly

The concept of “happily ever after” has always fascinated me.

Just exactly what happens after, “happily ever after”?

The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold. (It’s a very strong horse.)

So what happens then? Where do they live? Who does the cooking?

This was one of the reasons I started writing The Further Adventures.

The other was that so many of the people who loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the 1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those characters too, and I missed writing about them.

Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website and started selling stories about what happened to these characters after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each series.

The Darwath series centers on the Keep of Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a mage.

The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers. With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil, too.

In the Winterlands tales, scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do their best to protect the people of their remote villages from whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.

Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior - meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the 1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might come through.

Though out of print, all four of these series are available digitally on-line.

To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color, Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.

I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I added these four stories to my collection.

Quest For Glory is a stand-alone, a short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction convention at which I was Guest of Honor.

Sunrise on Running Water is tenuously connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie Titanic - and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that vampires lose their powers over running water - I just had to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than about the characters.

The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me - and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.

Life goes on.

Love goes on.

Everyone continues to have Further Adventures for the rest of their lives.

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Novels in the Antryg Windrose Series (out of print but commercially available digitally)

The Silent Tower

The Silicon Mage

Dog-Wizard