The Tenth Gate
~ Part Five
Hearts beating a little too fast, they walked out of the
museum.
They walked briskly, not speaking, trying not to glance behind.
Turning down a side street they ran to the car, fumbled for the keys,
and held their breath while she started the engine. Ella felt her
skin grow clammy with fear, but no one had followed. They’d
got
away with it, and had carried the tenth etching, smooth and unfolded,
home between the papers they had brought with them.
There had
been an unspoken agreement to leave the final task until later, until
the shade of evening grew. Ella knew what she wanted to find, the
demons she wanted to conjure, and the uses, both dark and light that
she wanted to make of the knowledge that would fall from the newly
reunited pictures. The witch that she could be had reached out for
them, called them back from across the years. But she didn’t
know
what Corso would want. Her reading of minds was, as yet, imperfect,
and centred on the emotions. Cold hard scheming fact was impossible
for her to reach into. And that was what he did best, the sharp
mental pivot around which his daily life revolved. Greed and power
drove him, but she didn’t know which held the upper hand, or
if
those weaknesses could be used to bind him to her. She’d
drawn him
in to get the etching, planned this moment from the day she’d
first
seen into his thoughts in the library, the day she’d used his
lonely imaginings to set the trap that was baited with what she had
found in the hidden corners of his mind. But she still didn’t
know
what he would do.
And she hadn’t expected to have to deal
with the infection he had brought to her, the stalking, treacherous
love that grew, threading its way inside. That hadn’t been in
her
take-it-and-leave-him plan.
*******
The first cold
touch of autumn had crept into the late August’s evening air.
A
shroud of damp mist edged from the river across the flood banks and
onto the fields towards her open windows. The sickly miasma of the
rot that follows ripeness, the first advances of the mortality that
the harvest season foretold hung in the stagnant air. The greens of
summer were dusty and faded, tinted with decay. Somehow they both
felt the chill and the sadness of a change about to come. Not enough
warmth in the evening air to give comfort, the fire had been lit. The
hearth spluttered with this first flame of the new season, damp and
green wood spitting and smoking, angry in its new role.
A
yellowing paper, thick, clearly hand-made, lay on the dining table,
surrounded by the nine others he’d pulled from his bag.
Reunited at
last, they almost glowed, a shared recollection of times past. There
was some magic about these things from the past, things that had seen
more than today’s eyes could hope to see.
Corso looked
closely at the ten pictures. How would they work magic now that they
were reunited? How would it change him, that touch of something so
old? Are the atoms of a thing created from desire changed by the
emotion that flowed around it? Is its character changed when it
becomes the subject of cheating, of avarice, of love? Do echoes of
the times it’s passed through sound within it? Does it absorb
something of the chaos it creates?
He ran his possessive
hands over the ten, picked up the new one, and studied what it
showed. Figures, back view, leaning over a round table, a room with a
fireplace, ten pictures in a circle. A pool of light lay in the
middle, a hand dipping into it. The legend beneath was a single word.
Veritas. Truth. He knew that this was indeed what they had looked
for. The style of today’s find was the same, the paper
contemporary
with his nine, and the signature matched. All that would be needed
was the incantations, the words spoken in the correct order, the
catalyst for the chemistry.
And he knew that this time it
would work. This domestic stage had none of the drama of the scene at
the castle, but this setting matched the way the pictures had been
used before, by Ella’s ancestor. The scene in the last
picture
matched this room, the circular table and the flaring hearth. This
was the place where he would find his devil.
As the sun
faded, they began. A long look at each other, a hope to find trust in
each other’s eyes. Both longing and guardedness. Set the
etchings
out. Light a candle. Read the words. Watch and wait. But nothing.
Ella paced, anger rising. Try again. What was wrong? They had set out
the ten pictures, the circle was complete. They had read the words.
Still nothing. Tension leaking into the air. Few words spoken. All
should be well- the pictures were real, and they were set out as they
had been shown. Open a bottle of wine, light another cigarette. More
wood to spit in the hearth. Try again.
Still nothing. Bats
swooped outside the still, open window. The sky that dreadful blue
that is so nearly black. Night crept across the fields towards them.
“We need a fresh view of this.” Corso’s
voice was
quiet, determination forcing cold logic to take over from the hot
panic that fills the mind when things don’t go right.
He’d always
been a planner; he worked by knowing what he’d do in advance.
He
didn’t like reactivity. He slumped into the corner of the old
sofa,
the firelight lighting half his face, darkness covering the rest, and
drew heavily on yet another Lucky Strike. The wine was almost
finished, but he felt absolutely clear headed.
“Come and
sit down. Ella, we’re going to work this out.”
She turned
away from her vigil at the table. “Will we? Sometimes plans
don’t
work as they should, you know that.”
“No, they’ll work.
Maybe not right now, but this is a set of clues set to be broken.
Your family, the way we got the last picture, it’s meant to
be. One
final piece to find, that’s all. We’ll do it. Come
and sit down.”
She moved over to him, warming her hands in front of the
glowing logs. He was startled, shocked, to see that she was close to
tears. Giving in to her feelings was not the sort of thing she did.
Since he had met her, she had been in control. Emotion did not pour
from her. Lust maybe, and sometimes he wondered if there was the
faintest trace of love.
“Does it really matter if this
doesn’t work?” He knew the answer before the
question faded away.
“It does, you know it does.”
“Why? Ella, why is
this so important to you?”
She looked hard at him, blinking
through the tears. “Because I’m angry. Because I
don’t like
failure. Because this mind-reading, this witchcraft, is a thing I can
only half do. I can only do it sometimes, and only incompletely. I
want to command my abilities, to have the power that they did all
those years ago.” She hesitated. “Just because I
know I can.”
Sitting down, she drew her palm across her eyes, wiping away
the weakness.
Somehow, it felt right to put his arm around
her. It was his choice. He felt comfortable with the act. He felt how
well she fitted into the hollow between his arm and his chest, how
soft her hair felt as she rested her head against his neck. He
breathed in her scent, a slow inhalation, the sweetness of her skin
mingling with the nicotine and wine tastes on his tongue. He brought
his arm closer, drawing her into him, feeling the warmth of her body,
the little swells of muscle and the sharpness of her small frame. She
gazed past him into the dying flames, lost in thoughts of the
day’s
events, the theft of the picture and the failure of the magic that
the pictures should have brought. But as he stole a glance at her, he
saw that she still cried. No sound, but a silent weeping. However
guarded you keep your soul, failure comes hard. A lesson he had
learned from bitter experience. The taste of being used was hard to
forget, but he wanted to hold her, take away her pain, absorb the
misery that flowed from her.
However guarded you keep your
soul, he thought, love can creep inside.
Leaning towards her,
he kissed her cheek softly, almost brushing the tears away with his
lips. The lightest, the tenderest of touches. A touch that did not
signal sex. Somewhere, sometime over the last few days he had
changed. Since his storm drenched arrival, she had worked on and
erased all his fantasies- the bathroom, the kitchen, the library-,
and now his mind was cleansed and only reality remain. The only thing
left to fill his mind was the warmth and the softness of the kiss
itself.
She lifted her face, turned her lips to his. She
tasted of honey, and tobacco.
All his senses were lost in
those soft wet lips and the lightness of her exploring tongue.
“Make love to me.” She only whispered it. Love, not
sex.
He took her hand and drew her upstairs, knowing that love was what
the strangely changed man he had become needed.
*********
In Ella’s cluttered and bookish room, Corso looked up from
the bed they had at last shared. The night that fell on the
countryside was different to that which fell on the city. No sodium
glow, no growl of traffic making its way through the dirty streets.
Only nature’s sinister choir of clicks and insect
chatterings,
rustles and pouncings. The brittle and unnerving sounds of a world
that came out when the human world retreated.
Asleep beside
him, wound in the crumpled sheet, lay Ella, her breathing light and
regular, her hand beneath her head. He looked at her and wondered why
she had chosen him, why she had given herself to him so completely.
Their love making earlier had been different to the sex they had
shared before, but the words to say how escaped him. Here he lay in a
room filled with books, with words all around him and yet he was
lost, unable to put what he felt into coherent expression. Words
would not come. Why had it been different? What had changed? What was
this new feeling?
When he had cupped his hands around her
face, felt the smoothness of her skin, what had he thought of? Only
that feeling. He had let his hands ease off her clothes, saw them
fall in untidy folds on the floor as her white skin and dark shadows
revealed themselves. Her hands had explored him, her soft caresses
echoing his. What had he thought of? Only that touch. They had lain
so close, length of their bodies touching, each cautiously learning
and understanding the need they created in the other.
He had
kept his eyes open as they made love. He wanted to see if she smiled,
he wanted to be able to tell if she loved him. But all he saw was
beauty, the beauty of the simple act of trust that made him want to
please her, make her shudder, cause her the little death that takes
all the world’s cares away. Love had made him generous, and
he
realised the freedom that giving created in his lost and shuttered
soul. As the blackness of night enveloped them the ecstasy of
despair, the emptiness of the mind that the moment brings, had broken
over them both. When they looked into each other’s eyes, they
saw
nothing but each other.
Their bodies still wrapped together,
he lay wordless and still. Now there was no need for language.
Silence prevailed. This, he realised, was what sex without fantasy
was like, sex where he concentrated on his and another’s
minds and
bodies. Sex that sprang from the soul, sex that was making love. And
it was the most erotic he had ever experienced.
The words of
the books around him were not enough to describe this love making.
The nouns were too coarse, their sounds too clinical. The verbs were
too simple and the adjectives too trite. The syntax of his language
did not seem sufficient to explain. But he knew that he had found his
missing piece. And at that moment, he realised that lust and love
were not the only dimensions that mattered. His missing piece, the
part of his soul that was lost, was the ability to care. It was the
alchemy that turned sex into making love, the piece that had filled
the empty space in his mind that had once held his fantasies.
***********
The smells of night were on the air as he
finally came to terms with the knowledge that sleep would not come.
He had thought about the last day incessantly, and he now knew that
he loved her. But, her need for the etchings still fresh in his mind,
a sickness ran through him - he didn’t know if she felt the
same
way.
Sitting up, taking care not to disturb her, he reached
for his cigarettes, pulled a robe around him and went back downstairs
to where the pictures still lay. The last red glowerings of the fire
lit the room, the dark wood of the old table reflecting the greasy
sheen of a gibbous moon between the scattered pictures. The night was
quieter than he’d known it, the last bats swooping away as
the
first false dawn rays greyed the misty air. Ella’s cat slept
on the
grate, avoiding the chill that leaked from the open window. Nothing
moved except him, leaning over the pictures, touching them, hoping to
gain the inspiration that would tell him their secret. The clock
ticked, so loud in the silence that he could hear its cogs grate and
springs relax.
The clock! The action of the clock! The
revelation hit him out of the silent darkness. Weren’t all
things
demonic the opposite of the way the world tries to make things?
Wasn’t the devil the Anti-Christ? He had laid the etchings
out
wrong, he had set them clockwise around the table. What if…?
Working fast, he moved the sheets around, anti-clockwise now.
Did the moonlight on the table glow more brightly? Did some mist
spill in through the window? He whispered the words in sequence,
ending with the last, veritas, the truth. Silence and stillness. A
pause like a moment of falling, where the air is drawn from the
lungs. And a shimmering light, the gelatinous surface of a pool of
not quite liquid emerging on the table within the circle. A liquid
that gave light but did not allow reflections, a pool of tarnished
quicksilver.
Corso looked very closely. The picture had told
him what he had to do. Like he had seen in the last picture, he
dipped in his hand. Nothing, only a sticky blood-heat dampness. It
has no smell, caused no changes. What was it? He smoothed the oily
liquid between his fingers. Still no change. He put his fingers to
his lips, and touched the ghostly mass with his tongue. Nothing, only
bitterness. He turned away in disgust.
And then he saw the
cat. But to say saw did not describe it. He not only saw the cat, but
he knew about the cat. He knew it dreamed of the barn. It tasted the
night’s kill in its mouth. He tasted the same blood and
feathers,
felt the warmth of the dying logs on smooth licked fur. He felt as
the cat felt, traced out its thoughts. He felt the freedom that comes
to the self-centred. He felt the coldness of a creature who kills for
sport. He knew how it would soon search out another prey, and how it
would delight in cruelty. He could see each malicious, manipulative
thought that passed through the creature’s mind. An animal
mind,
devoid of morality. For the few seconds before the vision faded, he
knew everything the cat knew. He had perfect, terrifying knowledge of
another’s mind.
Corso sat heavily on the sofa and stared at
the fire. His hands shook as he reached for a cigarette, and a sweaty
pallor glistened on his skin. Now he knew. The spell had worked, but
the devil it conjured was not the fire and brimstone apparition that
all the picture’s users had expected. It brought a devil,
certainly. The devil it brought was knowledge. The ability to see
inside another’s mind, to spy on their soul. A blessing and a
curse.
As the clarity faded Corso, head in hands, considered
the value of this knowledge, and, scraping his shattered feelings
together, considered how he would use it. Profit or a more personal
gain? This could be a useful asset for a book dealer. Buyers would
rarely tell him even half a truth and sellers even less. Business
would thrive. He had only to take the pictures and run. But there
would be other uses. His mind in free-fall, he thought of Ella. When
he had looked for love, what had he seen? Did she think of him, or
only of the pictures? Was it love he had seen in those brown and
gold, tear filled eyes?
The man that he had been would not
care. But the man that he was now hoped it was. But with it would
come the commitment and responsibility for another. Would the
knowledge that she loved him be a greater burden than finding that
she didn’t?
But she couldn’t love him. Why should she
feel anything for anyone like me, he thought. Perhaps he’d
been
sure all along, but not knowing left him with a grain of maybe, a
last and forlorn hope that she felt like he did. The pictures were
the temptation to lose his final fantasy, the fantasy that Ella loved
him, the one he wanted to cling to.
And if, Ella long
abandoned, he ever met another woman, if he ever was close enough to
call a man friend, he knew he would tempted to do the same.
Quick
decisions were what he did best. That hadn’t changed.
He’d take
the hurt and uncertainty he felt now over the greater hurt that he
would find when he put the liquid to his lips and looked at Ella.
He’d always been independent; it was one of his strengths.
Bleak
necessity meant that he was used to being alone. He would cut this
necrotising love from his soul. He needed no-one. His old life could
be reclaimed. Better the devil you know, he thought, lips narrowing
under the irony.
Moving very quietly, he went upstairs,
dressed and packed. He did not look in at the sleeping woman who had
bewitched him, but gathered up his memento mori of failure, his nine
pictures, carefully stowing them in their usual place in his worn
shoulder bag. He would not take the last one, which belonged with
her. He threw on his old green coat, and took a last look around the
room, fixing forever the memory of this place he had almost made
home. Last thoughts about the choices he’d made flew though
his
mind. He tried to keep his face expressionless. There was a
sulphurous flare of a match, the red glow of a final cigarette, and a
broken, bitter murmur.
“You wouldn’t have fitted here.
Close it down, shut it out. Learn and move on.”
He rubbed
his thumb across the corner of his eye and smeared a bead of salty
water across his cheek and into his greying hair.
The truth
was not beautiful, he told himself as he turned and picked up his
bags. He turned his back on the dying fire and, determining not to
turn back, walked towards the door.
He looked down. His hand
hesitated for the briefest of moments before resting on the handle. A
last and final reconsideration or a gathering of courage before a
hard necessity?
The chill draft of the cold season yet to
come made the curtains billow as he clicked the door softly shut
behind him and walked slowly away into the grey dawn light.