The Hollow Ones(75)

Half out of his mind, Hugo Blackwood rushed to the door, pausing only to take up the spear again. He raced to his stable, riding to John Dee’s house in a fugue. The sliver moon barely lit the way. He was courting madness; he cared nothing for himself anymore.

He pounded on the door, prepared to smash a window to gain entrance. The lock was thrown inside, the door pushed open a few inches. Edward Talbot peered out, his face shadowed by candlelight.

“Go away, Blackwood,” he said. “Begone.”

“Is she here?” said Blackwood, gripping the door, pulling it from Talbot’s hand, wedging the ash-wood handle of the spear inside the opening.

“She has been here many times,” said the scryer. Quite a turnabout from the scared, haunted man who’d visited Blackwood’s kitchen a few days before.

Blackwood shoved inside past Talbot, sending the older man sprawling, his candle extinguishing upon impact with the stone floor.

Blackwood raced through the wide halls of the dark manse shouting Dee’s name, pole weapon in hand. He turned the corner and slowed, seeing the doors to the great library open.

An eerie green light, the soft, sweet green of parrot feathers, shone out of the doors with enough vibrancy to illuminate the hallway. Blackwood heard a voice speaking in a bizarre language he recognized but did not understand: the Enochian language John Dee had spoken at the initial séance in that very library.

Blackwood started toward the library, but a pair of hands grabbed at him from behind. Talbot restrained him, pulling him back.

“Don’t interrupt the communion—”

Blackwood elbowed Talbot off him, driving him back against the wall with the shaft of his spear up against his throat. Talbot’s skullcap slid off his head, revealing the butchered sides of the forger’s head, the ears Talbot had lost as punishment for his earlier crimes.

The earless scryer looked like any of the heretics and convicts Blackwood would see in shackles in the Old Bailey, on their way to Newgate dungeon. Blackwood threw him aside, turning back to the open doors, entering Dee’s notorious and celebrated library.

The green glow and its weird energy made him throw his arm up to shade his eyes. He saw the philosopher John Dee, his customary white gown and snow-white beard bathed in green, standing across from the spectral image of Orleanna Blackwood, her nightdress and raven-black hair rippling as though from facing a windstorm. Her beautiful face, unnaturally tinged by the liquidy light, glowed with the fullness of wonder.

One hand was outstretched, the crystal orbuculum cupped in her palm, the source of the radiating green light, offering the sphere to John Dee.

Blackwood stared, unable to comprehend. Orleanna had been catatonic, she had seemed hours away from certain death.

Was she dead now? Was this her spirit? Had she ascended to another form?

If so…why did she rush to John Dee?

She spoke to him in a strange low tone, the Enochian language. The idiom of angels. Why was she the one summoned by their invocation? Was she now speaking from the beyond?

Dee’s face was suffused with adoration, engaged in spiritual congress with an astral being. He had achieved the impossible. He had bridged the schism between science and magic.

The spear fell from Blackwood’s hand. He walked to the form of his wife, his Orleanna. Was she real?

“Orleanna!” he cried, over the hum of the weird light.

Dee broke his spell, speaking English. “No, Blackwood! No!”

Blackwood stood before her. Her eyes were lost in the green light swirling in the globe in her hand.

Dee yelled, “The angels have chosen her!” He was enraptured. “She is their messenger! She knows all!”

Blackwood looked at the glowing vision of his wife, his love. Lost to him now. Their life…their home, their future…any hope of children…all gone.

But as he mourned for her there, he sensed that it was not his Orleanna standing before him. He sensed evil, hidden behind a mask of beauty.

He looked away from her face. His eye was drawn to a window. Outside, before the grieving branches of a blighted willow tree, a figure in white, with raven-black hair.

It was his Orleanna, reaching for him as her form retreated into the darkness. Beseeching him. Warning him.

And then she was gone. He looked again at the figure before him.

She was a double. A fetch.

He reached out to her torso, the fabric of her dressing gown. She was insubstantial. His hand went right through.

Dee said, “Get away, barrister! The angel communes with me!”

Blackwood turned in a rage and shoved the old philosopher back against a shelf of books. He took Dee’s place, facing the fetch of his wife, only the glowing orb between them, nearly floating in her palm.

Blackwood gripped the orbuculum. A jolt of power surged through him, something he had never felt before. Pain ran through his joints and up his wrist into his forearm, but he held tight.

The bright-green light changed shades, becoming chartreuse, sickly and sour. The energy it emitted took more violent form, wind swirling around the famed library. A great tempest, knocking over books, ornaments, and occult instruments.

Blackwood saw deeply into the form before him. He saw his wife, the real Orleanna, and felt her suffering. She was not here in this room. She was trapped in some netherworld, banished for his transgression and the dark magic of Edward Talbot and John Dee.

Blackwood saw that she was to be punished for what he had done. In that moment was also revealed to him his solemn fate. His terrible destiny.