The End of Magic, page 29
“You got me,” past-Lyse said as she walked over to the potting table and leaned her weight against it. “I’m at the nursery.”
Lyse imagined Eleanora sitting at her round oak kitchen table, elbows pressed into the tabletop as she held the oversized beige handset to her ear, worrying the coiled telephone cord between her fingers as she decided the best approach to take with her niece.
She didn’t remember what Eleanora said, but past-Lyse’s response was curt.
“It’s fine. I stay late here all the time.” The tone was noncommittal.
Under normal circumstances, Lyse and Eleanora were never at a loss for words. She remembered the awkward pauses as she’d waited for Eleanora to get down to business. There had been something off about the phone call.
She remembered how the next few moments of the conversation had changed her world forever. Past-Lyse closed her eyes but wasn’t fast enough to stymie the flood of salty tears as they slid over her bottom lids and cascaded down the curve of her cheeks.
“You’re dying?” past-Lyse said into the phone, and her voice was taut as piano wire. “But it’s not fair.” Past-Lyse’s voice stretched out into a plaintive whine.
Lyse remembered that on the other end of the line, Eleanora had laughed. Not a harsh sound, but one that was as soft as a sigh.
Then she’d spoken the truest words Lyse had ever heard: “What’s fair about life?”
Lyse realized that this was not the place in time that she was looking for. She closed her eyes.
Take me to the moment, she thought. The one I’m looking for.
And when she opened her eyes again . . .
• • •
. . . she was standing on the red lacquer bridge that spanned Eleanora’s koi pond. Niamh was beside her, holding the Dream Journal. Lyse looked down at her own hands, saw that the journal was indeed gone, and became very confused.
“What happened?” she asked Niamh.
“What do you mean?” Niamh asked, frowning.
Lyse knew better than to elaborate. She’d been pitched back in time because somehow she’d done something wrong.
“Nothing,” Lyse said. “I was just thinking out loud.”
“Well, so you think we should go soon?” Niamh asked—accepting Lyse at her word. “Not that time really matters now.”
Niamh had said those very words the last time they were here.
“Yeah, I think we should go. Doesn’t matter about time,” Lyse said.
“Shall I open the book?” Niamh asked.
“Yes,” Lyse said, and watched as Niamh flipped open the cover of the journal and a glowing gold light shimmered all around them.
Lyse knew she was going to have to take Niamh with her this time. She waited until Niamh placed a hand on her shoulder and then she called up the orb. Just as before, the blue light turned gold . . . but this time, Lyse allowed Niamh to come with her.
Take me to the moment when everything changed for me, Lyse thought—and when she opened her eyes . . .
• • •
. . . she and Niamh were squatting together in a tangle of bushes near the edge of Echo Park Lake.
“Where are we?” Niamh whispered.
“The lake the night I killed someone for the first time,” Lyse replied.
Niamh gave her a funny look.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Lyse truly wished she were.
“Wait, is that you?” Niamh asked, distracted by something ahead of them.
Past-Lyse was curled into a ball on the path in front of them. As she cried, her body shook from the shock of just having helped kill a man. The luminous shade that was Eleanora knelt beside Lyse’s past self . . . reaching out as if she could cradle past-Lyse like a child.
“I miss you,” her past self murmured, pushing pieces of dark bangs from her eyes.
“Don’t.”
Eleanora’s tone brooked no argument, and past-Lyse nodded, beaten. Then she opened her mouth to speak but instead pressed her hands to her face, covering her eyes. Blinding herself to the reality of what was before her.
“The Flood is coming, Lyse. Prepare yourself,” Eleanora whispered—and then the Dream Walker dissolved into the ether.
When past-Lyse removed her hands, her face was ugly with tears. She turned her head, looking for the ghost, but Eleanora was gone.
“Eleanora?” past-Lyse whispered, swiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, her hot tears finally spilling.
There was no reply. Only the gentle hum of the night. Past-Lyse sat beside the broken body of the Lady—only a few feet from where Lyse and Niamh sat hunched in the bushes—for what seemed like hours, her gaze far away. Then she climbed to her feet, and with an unsteady gait, she walked out of their view.
“That’s so creepy,” Niamh whispered.
“It’s even creepier when it’s your own body that you’re watching,” Lyse replied.
“So now what?” Niamh asked.
Lyse sighed—she wasn’t sure about what came next, but she had an inkling.
“C’mon,” Lyse said. “Let’s go take a look.”
She crawled out from the bushes, Niamh behind her. The two of them walked over to the broken body of the Lady of the Lake . . . and the dead man who lay pinned beneath her. But he didn’t really count.
Lyse stared at the beautiful stone beauty that lay smashed to smithereens. The moon hung back, hidden behind a sheet of clouds, not willing to shine its light on the abomination. The abomination not being the Lady and her destruction, but the man trapped beneath her stone body.
Flesh and meat that once held human form—yet there was almost nothing human about him now . . . except for one pale arm peeking out from beneath the stone, its long fingers curled into the approximation of a claw. He was crushed like a cockroach under a shoe, and there was too much blood for him to be anything but dead. The Lady of the Lake was not a waif; her body was large and imposing, and when the man found himself under her as she toppled forward, his fate had been sealed.
Lyse didn’t feel bad for the way the Lady had been used as a murder weapon by Eleanora and past-Lyse. Her uncle David deserved what happened to him.
The moon chose this moment to reveal itself again, illuminating the lake. The face of the water reflected back the moonlight, the surface sparkling like diamonds on black velvet. As if called down by the moon, the prickling fingers of a cold breeze tickled the Lady’s broken body.
“Lyse?” Niamh whispered in her ear. “Why are we still here?”
“Because we have to undo what was done here.”
Niamh stared at her.
“Bring someone back from the dead?” she said, indicating the corpse under the broken statue. “That’s not possible.”
Lyse smiled, but there was no warmth in her eyes.
“Oh, I think it’s entirely possible,” Lyse said. “Besides, I can’t throw my uncle into a singularity if he’s not there to be thrown. And if we do this . . . I think it will be the thing that returns the balance of power to our world and takes away The Flood’s advantage.”
Lyse was sure that returning her uncle to the living . . . was the moment she had come here to change.
• • •
The breeze was almost a warning that magic was fast approaching. There was a slowing down of time, a swirling of the ether around them, and then the air split apart like someone shucking the husk from an ear of corn as a bolt of lightning shot across the sky.
“Are you sure we can do it?” Niamh asked Lyse. She sounded tentative, unsure of herself.
“We are both capable of so much more than we even know,” Lyse said, and then she began to hum.
The song was not something she knew consciously, but once she opened her mouth, it flowed out of her. The tune was rambling and old—no, not old . . . but timeless. It came from before, when the world was new and magic lived in every living thing that took its sustenance from the Earth and sun. The song called to the Lady, to the stone she was made of, which had been taken from the Earth and would one day go back to it. Lyse felt the great stone body begin to stir.
Niamh rested her palms against the Lady’s shattered torso, the tune Lyse hummed encircling the splintered pieces of the statue’s body. With the grinding of stone on concrete, the pieces began to move back toward one another as if they were magnetized. Lyse continued to hum, while Niamh moved the pads of her fingers along the Lady’s back. When she finally took her hands away, a powerful magic linked both her and Lyse to the statue.
“I can move through space and time,” Lyse murmured to Niamh. “And you are the maker.”
Niamh left her kneeling position and rose to her feet. The magical link between them pulled the Lady into the air, where she floated weightlessly. Using the same magical tune, Lyse sung the Lady forward, swinging the heavy stone figure back onto the pedestal from which she’d watched over Echo Park Lake for almost a century—all without so much as lifting a physical finger.
Niamh came to stand beside Lyse and grinned at her.
“We did it,” Niamh murmured, her voice soft with wonder.
But Lyse knew it was not over yet. She took Niamh’s hand.
“Now we raise the dead.”
Niamh shuddered.
“Are you sure?” she asked Lyse.
“We leave him there and past-me goes to jail,” Lyse said. “I get up tomorrow morning and come running down here, all set to tell the police that I’m the murderer. Though I don’t know how anyone could think I was capable of toppling over our lovely Lady here.”
Lyse reached out and patted the Lady’s stone pedestal.
“Still, we don’t need past-me rotting away in jail right now,” she continued. “Not when The Flood is just about to make its big move.”
“No, I have to agree with you about that,” Niamh said. “So how do we do it?”
“We cast a circle of life,” Lyse said, “using the Dream Journal.”
She didn’t know how she knew this would work. It had just come to her as soon as Niamh had asked the question. She went back to the bushes where the two of them had been hiding and found the Dream Journal sitting in the dirt. She picked it up, brushing off the soil, and carried it over to her uncle’s body.
She placed the tattered old journal on her uncle’s crushed chest and then quickly stepped away. The less she had to look at the dead man, the better.
“Now take my hands,” Lyse commanded, reaching for Niamh—and as soon as their fingers touched, the book burst into a golden flame that encircled them both.
The light was so bright that Niamh closed her eyes, but Lyse refused. She wanted to see every second of what was about to happen. As they raised their arms into the air, the golden light shot upward, sparkling like a Roman candle between their wrists, both sets as slender as the trunk of a birch sapling. Lyse opened her mouth—and she thought she was going to hum the same tune as before . . . only it wasn’t her voice that poured from her lips. Instead, it was a chorale of men and women, a cacophony of different tones and timbres, each vying to be heard over the din of the others. As the voices wove together into one, the golden light became something alive and malleable. It coalesced into something solid . . . a glowing mail made of golden chain.
As the song grew in pitch, the voices became frenzied, and the mail expanded in response. It began to lengthen and stretch, blowing itself up like a hot-air balloon until it was a large sphere that encapsulated both the Lady of the Lake on her pedestal and the dead man on the ground. With a loud boom, the Earth began to rumble. Lyse closed her mouth, abruptly ending the song and invoking a silence that cut the air like a scythe. But the glowing globe of chain mail continued to shimmer and grow as if it had a mind of its own.
Then the silence was replaced by a low growl. One that started under the Earth and bubbled up like a geyser, splitting the concrete around the Lady’s pedestal with its power.
“With enough pressure, even the blackest coal can be transformed,” Lyse said—and lowered their hands, the action ratcheting up the pressure inside the sphere. “Now return as you were.”
She dropped Niamh’s hands and clapped twice. The sphere popped, sending a shock wave out into the universe, one that echoed like a shot through the dreams of anyone nearby who had the misfortune of being tucked up in bed. Many people would wake up the next morning and wonder if there’d been an earthquake in the night. One they’d managed to sleep through, though it had managed to somehow infiltrate their dreams.
“It’s done.”
Lyse spoke the words, breaking the spell they’d cast.
The Lady was whole again, returned to the state she’d been in when Eleanora and past-Lyse had called upon her to act. Below her, the dead man was whole again, as well. His handsome face had filled out once more with flesh, bone and skin uncrushed. He had a head of steely gray hair, buzzed short against the crown of his head.
Niamh reached out with a toe and prodded the dead man’s shoulder. The dead man did not stir.
“Are you sure he’s alive?” Niamh asked.
Lyse knelt beside the prostrate figure and picked up the Dream Journal, tucking it under her arm. Then she leaned forward so her face was within inches of the dead man’s ear.
“You will remember nothing. You will know you have failed in your task, but not how or why. And you will leave me alone. For now, you will not act until you see me one final time at the hospital in Italy.”
Lyse whispered these words into the dead man’s ear, careful not to touch the dead flesh with her lips. The dead man continued to stay where he was, but Lyse stood up and pointed to the careful rise and fall of his chest.
“He’s alive. I hate it and I hate him, but it’s done,” she said, turning back to look at Niamh.
• • •
Lyse and Niamh watched from their perch behind the bushes as the Lady of the Lake stood vigil over the dead man until the morning light crested the hill and split open the day. Luckily, the dead man started to stir just as the first jogger of the morning hit the playground and began her lonely circuit of the park. She passed him, already breathing hard from her exertions, as he sat up and groaned, grabbing his head in pain.
To the jogger, he was just another homeless drunk sleeping off a bender. Only Lyse knew who and what he was. She watched as the dead man climbed to his feet, his dark clothes stained with dirt and sweat. He coughed and spit a globule of phlegm into the grass before stumbling off in the direction of Sunset Boulevard.
Lyse watched him go—and she cursed him:
May your end be painful, Uncle David. Painful . . . and long . . . and in a dark place of my choosing.
• • •
Once her uncle David was gone, Niamh turned to Lyse.
“That wasn’t the moment, was it?”
Lyse shook her head.
“No.” She wished that it had been . . . had hoped that it would be. But it wasn’t. She felt gutted. She didn’t know what to do now.
As if reading her thoughts, Niamh asked, “Where do we go from here?”
Lyse sighed and said, “You don’t go anywhere.”
Niamh stood up and walked back over to the Lady of the Lake. There was a bench not far from where the Lady stood, and she sat down on it. A moment later, Lyse joined her there. They stared out past the water at the massive downtown skyscrapers that rose up in the distance like metal mountains.
“You have any clue where you’re going?” Niamh asked, finally.
“I think so.”
Lyse was a liar. She had zero idea of what the next step would be.
“And will I be stuck here when you go?” Niamh asked.
Lyse shook her head and held up the Dream Journal—it was brown and singed where the magic had burned a hole through its middle.
“I’m taking you back to when we left.”
“No,” Niamh said, shaking her head. “I can’t let you go alone. What if you don’t come back?”
All Lyse could think to do was to hand Niamh the Dream Journal.
“I have to come back. You have the Dream Journal.”
It was a lame attempt to reassure Niamh—and she could see from the look on Niamh’s face that it hadn’t worked.
“C’mon, it isn’t the end . . . just hold on to this and give it to me when you see me again,” Lyse said, forcing a smile onto her face. “If I do this right, then the power will shift and we can stop The Flood from killing everyone on the ship . . . or maybe even stop The Flood from coming into power at all.”
Niamh’s eyes filled with tears, but she took the Dream Journal and held it to her chest.
“Until we meet again,” she said—and then she leaned over and hugged Lyse tight.
• • •
As soon as they arrived on the ship, the others surrounded Niamh, surprised to see them back so soon. While Niamh kept them occupied—like they’d prearranged—Lyse took her leave, calling up the neon-blue orb as quickly as possible. She didn’t have the heart to say good-bye . . . again.
• • •
Once more, Lyse stood on the red lacquer bridge over the koi pond at Eleanora’s house in Echo Park. It was the place she felt safest, her refuge. She had come here because she didn’t know where else to go. Everything she’d done had failed. She wasn’t sure what else there was to try.
And then a thought popped into her head. If she was The Hierophant . . . then that meant she was, literally, the crossroads. She was the place where everything started and everything began. As soon as she realized this, she knew how—though not where—to go.
Take me to the beginning of me, Lyse thought—and closed her eyes . . .
• • •
. . . and when she opened them, she knew immediately that something was different. Lyse was not a watcher this time; she was a participant. She was inside the body of someone else.
