The Hollow Ones(74)

Then Solomon saw the ten or so people who remained on the other side of the street—literally and figuratively. The unrobed, uncaring Klansmen.

Solomon remembered something Blackwood had said that night in the woods, after the Klansmen fled the hanging site in the dark.

Those masked men arrived at this town like dark spirits invoked.

Sheriff Ingalls and SAIC Macklin were out of the church now. Flames raced across the roof of the old wooden building. The deputies were clearing everyone back.

Solomon, mind racing, waited for the two lawmen to come to him.

Sheriff Ingalls said, “What happened? You were in there. Who did this?”

Solomon looked at Hugo Blackwood standing on the sidewalk, brushing ash from his shoulders.

Sheriff Ingalls said, “Answer me, goddammit! These people are going to riot.”

“Answer him, Agent,” said Macklin sharply.

Solomon stepped up to the two men, his back to the Klansmen across the street, making it clear that he was talking about them. “I saw who set the fire,” said Solomon. “It was two of those concerned citizens over there.”

The sheriff looked at the men, then back at Solomon, unhappily.

Solomon said to him, “If word of that gets out, you’ll get your riot, by God. You’ll see this whole town in flames. You need to do what you should have done before, and that is get those Klansmen out of this town. Or else I tell these church people what happened.”

SAIC Macklin said, “Solomon, you’ll do no such thing—”

“I will tell them what I saw.” He stared down the sheriff. “Your choice. Your town. Your way.”

Sheriff Ingalls looked at Macklin as though blaming him, then scowled deeply at Solomon, jabbing his thumbs deeply into his gun belt. “You son of a bitch,” he said. Then he started across the street to hassle the Ku Klux Klan.

Leaving Solomon looking at his superior, Macklin.

Macklin said, “You telling him the whole truth and nothing but, Agent?”

“Yes, sir,” said Solomon, before starting back to Hugo Blackwood. “As far as you know.”





1582. Mortlake, Greater London.



Hugo Blackwood had not slept or eaten in days. Orleanna lay in a catatonic state in their bedchamber. She had been visited by three doctors and a priest, each departing deeply dismayed, unable to offer either a diagnosis or a cure. Her malady was somewhere in the netherworld between a disease of the body and a disease of the spirit. Neither discipline could diagnose the cause of her sickness, nor recommend a cure. She existed in a realm of suffering beyond the reach of medicine and religion—the very schism Dee had endeavored to reconcile.

As did Blackwood. He was at his wit’s end, unable to understand what accursed illness had ensnared his love, only that he had played some unknowing role in its divination. And this knowledge haunted him, darkening every thought, cursing every moment. He wasn’t ready to mourn her, and had already decided that her demise would lead inexorably to his own.

The scream—an ungodly shriek of pain and panic—brought him running from the kitchen to her bedside. Orleanna lay still, her flesh pallid and clammy, eyes distant—but untroubled. She was not the source of the outcry.

Another screech made him shiver, tearing at his heart, originating outside. He threw open the window shutters on the early night and saw, just steps away, a silver-furred wolf with a mink thrashing in its mouth. Two other oily-furred minks gnashed at the wolf’s legs. An extraordinary portrait of cruelty in nature, one from which Blackwood would normally have hastily retreated. But the fighting went on, the minks’ cries so shrill, the wolf’s manner so savage, the confrontation resounded in his head. Blackwood became crazed.

He left the bedchamber, finding an ornamental spear and charging outside to confront the animals. He went at the wolf with the forged steel tip of the spear, howling at the wretched minks. The wolf bared its bloody teeth at Blackwood, the mink falling from its jaw, dead. The other minks shrank away from the wolf, racing away.

Blackwood faced the bright-eyed wolf. He was enraged at nature, and meant to go at the beast, jabbing the spear at the animal’s head as it pawed at the ground with a low, guttural growl, wanting to pounce. Blackwood felt the confrontation coming to a head, until the growling stopped, and the wolf’s eyes widened, and its gums lowered over its sharp teeth. It almost seemed to be looking past Blackwood, into the air behind him.

The animal was scared. Its tail lowered and it backed off, forsaking the dead mink, turning and bounding away.

Blackwood lowered his weapon. Had the wolf seen Blackwood’s murderous intent, his killer instinct having curdled its blood? Suddenly sense came flooding back into Blackwood. Shaken, he turned away from the dead mink and returned to his domicile.

He splashed water onto his face in the kitchen, cooling his composure, his thoughts. He prepared a bowl of water to take to his Orleanna. Arriving, he realized he had left the window open to the night. When he saw the bedclothes thrown back, the bed empty, he dropped the bowl of water at his feet. She was gone.

He went to the window, seeing only the bloody mink in the mossy ground. To the side, just a glimpse, a white-clothed figure rising in the distant night, out of sight.

He leaned out as far as he could but saw no more of it. He did not trust his eyes but could not think where else his wife could have gone. And then he remembered the wolf’s cowed expression: Perhaps it had been intimidated by the sight not of him, but of her, rising from the open window into the sky.