The Hollow Ones(55)

Blackwood jumped back. The wall behind was unmarked, and unremarkable.

“There, you see—?”

He turned around but Orleanna was lying back upon her pillow again, eyes closed.

“Darling,” he said, feeling her cheeks, patting her hand. She breathed deeply, suddenly and completely asleep. Blackwood stepped back from the bed, a spike of terror in his chest.

He returned to the kitchen to find Talbot pacing nervously. “What is it?” Talbot asked.

Blackwood gripped the man’s shoulders. “We must go to Dee.”



The white-gowned occult philosopher swept through his grand hall with, for him, a quick and eager step.

“On the contrary, a great and profound success!” John Dee said, refuting their concerns. “We have finally pierced the veil of the mystical.”

He led them toward his esteemed library, but Talbot leapt ahead, blocking the door. “Not here,” he said. “Anywhere but in here.”

“Edward,” said John Dee, with the disappointed look of a parent at a weak child. “Come now, spheromancer. Don’t tell me you lack the courage of your convictions.”

Talbot shook his head, eyes averted. “I saw things,” he said. “I felt things. You must smash that orbuculum.”

To Blackwood, Dee said, “To arrive at the precipice only to lose one’s nerve. Come.”

He led them instead to his observatory, its glass ceiling inviting the night into the room.

Blackwood was impatient; he needed to return to Orleanna. He hated leaving her alone and untended.

Blackwood said, “Perhaps you have succeeded in some way, Master Dee, and should be commended for it. But what if…I say, if…you have touched a realm across a divide that you were not meant to breach?”

Dee shook his head, his silken white beard swaying. “No such thing.” He stepped away before turning back to look at Blackwood and Talbot. “You are like agents of doubt sent forth from this earthly plane to cloud my mind, to beg me off this great revelation. Guardians of the old world, my own co-conspirators, turned against me. The final obstacle I must obliterate before the transcendence. This is to be my moment of doubt, is it?”

“Mage,” said Talbot, “have you not witnessed strange portents here, auguring darkness?”

“Wonderful marvels,” said Dee. “I have seen spiritual splendors. We have done it, Talbot! We have synthesized the magical and the scientific. We have invoked and conjured an Enochian angel to guide and instruct us. This will return me to my rightful place in the queen’s court. First, we will witness it. Second, reveal it to the world. And third, understand it.”

The brilliant sorcerer’s wide-eyed boasting deeply troubled Blackwood. “Understanding it is third, is it?” he said.

“Marshaling it is fourth.” Dee looked upon his barrister contemptuously. “Do not concern yourself with matters of the spiritual world, barrister. Your world of laws and writs is but a soft candle to the thunderbolt about to strike. I have opened a seam into the mystical world.”

“Or,” said Blackwood, for a moment glimpsing a megalomaniac inside the philosopher’s robes. “Or have you opened a seam into this world from the mystical? How do you know if you have penetrated another realm…or merely allowed another realm to penetrate ours?”

Dee looked at Blackwood a long moment. Blackwood saw that his words injected a bit of doubt into Dee’s bravado…before Dee quickly expelled it. “The riddles of lawyers,” he said. “I am surprised the invocation succeeded in the presence of one so…unworthy.”

“Wormwood,” said Talbot, apparently hosting a separate conversation. “It has bittered our souls…”

Dee sat in a brocaded chair with silver arms, like a wizard usurping a king’s throne. “It was always to be this way,” he said. “Alone shall I navigate into the realm of the mystical. The journey, and the rewards, shall be mine.”

Talbot walked toward him. “You can have it, mage.”

“Leave, then. Leave me to await the angel as it assumes human form.”

Blackwood shook his head at this impertinence, his gaze running along the books of celestial spheres and astral planes, next to tomes of astronomy and cosmology. Had the old wizard conflated the two, the mystical and the scientific, but instead of arriving at a unifying theory, lost his way?

Blackwood looked skyward for a moment, not knowing which way to turn. As he did, he spotted a glowing white form peering down at them from a gabled roof—or perhaps hovering behind it. A human figure in a white bed dress, levitating, black-eyed.

With one last leering look, the apparition slid, soundless, behind the peaked roof, and vanished.

With a shout and audible gasp, Hugo Blackwood fled the observatory, racing through Dee’s wide hallways to the door, out into the chilly, damp night. Almost falling on a patch of muddy turf, Blackwood turned the corner, eyes skyward, searching the roof and all its peaks, seeking out—and simultaneously terrified of finding—the leering apparition.



Forgetting Talbot, even forgetting Dee, Hugo Blackwood took to his horse and raced back to his home.

He burst inside the front door, moving to the bedroom. Orleanna lay in bed as before, only now—and strangely—the tapestry was pulled over the bedclothes.