up? Not a chance!
He nodded again, as if her answer was what he had expected. 'Tell me what you know,' he said.
Katelynn took a deep breath to hide her excitement and began. 'Besides the general facts like his parentage and where he was educated, not much. I do know that he was a loner, almost the exact opposite of his brother Elijah, and he got into trouble with the authorities on more than one occasion while he was growing up. He left Harrington Falls to attend school in Boston and then spent many years overseas.'
'Sounds fairly normal to me,' Sam said.
'To an extent,' Katelynn agreed. 'He returned some years later a changed man, however. The wild attitude of his childhood had been replaced by an intense studiousness that seemed to please everyone. He’s mentioned several times in historical documents of various types after his return, attending a town meeting here, appearing at a dinner engagement there, just as you would expect from a wealthy member of one of the town’s founding families. But soon after that, the world seems to have lost track of him. Right up until the spring of 1760 he’s a fairly prominent figure, but then there’s nothing. After 1760, there isn’t a single mention of him anywhere I looked.' She sighed in exasperation.
'The various family histories seem to ignore the question of what happened to him as well. I couldn’t even find a record of his death.
Unconsciously, she shivered. 'It’s as if he fell off the face of the earth and no one noticed that he was gone.'
Next to them, Sam listened to her litany, fascinated. It was all news to him. He’d heard the man’s name mentioned once or twice in the past and seemed to remember something about there once having been a statue of him in the town square that had been torn down for some reason. He was beginning to feel the same sense of mystery that had infected Katelynn.
It was obvious that Gabriel was troubled by what she was saying. Sam had known the man too long not to recognize the subtle clues; the changed look down in the depths of his eyes, the nervous tick of his little finger. He was upset, and for a moment Sam was certain he wouldn’t tell them anything. Then Gabriel turned and looked out the window, gathering his thoughts. Sam had seen the same expression whenever the old man was getting ready to tell one of his tales of the mystical past.
'Sebastian Blake,' Gabriel said softly, as if tasting the words on the tip of his tongue and finding them bitter. 'I haven’t thought of him in many years. And with good reason; he was not the type of man one allows into his thoughts lightly.' He turned to face them, and they both saw that a sadness had descended over him, a blanket of weighted sorrow that for the first time made him seem old in spirit as well as body.
He went on, 'The natives of this country believe that when the Great Spirit made this world, he populated it with many strange and wondrous creatures, some good, some bad. One of these was Coyote.'
Katelynn glanced over at Sam, and by the look on her face he could tell she was wondering what on earth this had to do with Sebastian Blake. Gabriel had his own way of telling a tale, and Sam had learned long before that it was no use trying to hurry him along. He’d tell it his way, in his own good time, and that was that. Besides, Sam reflected, he always said things for a specific reason, and what at first seemed trivial was often important later in the tale. He calmed her with a subtle motion of his hands.
Gabriel was still speaking, and Sam refocused his attention. 'Coyote is one of the great spirits of the Indians. According to legend, he taught man many things; the use of clay to make pots, the way to make mats from the reeds that grew by the river’s edge. The arts and crafts of the People that have been preserved from the beginnings have all been taught to them by Coyote, according to their beliefs. Yet, Coyote had two faces, and it wasn’t long before the People realized this. At heart he was a bullying, greedy trickster. He would roam among the People in a form none could see, and he would wreak havoc whenever he found the opportunity.'
Gabriel looked directly into Katelynn’s eyes, and for a moment she was frightened of the old man, so forceful was the strength of his gaze. 'The man you speak of was much the same way, but it took those who lived beside him much longer to recognize him for what he truly was.'
It took her a moment, but she at last found her voice. 'So he wasn’t the Mr. Nice Guy that he appeared to be when he returned from Europe?'
'Outwardly, he was. But it’s not what a man is on the outside that divines his essential nature, but what he is in here,' one long thin finger touched the center of his chest, 'that makes him who he is. In the heart of Sebastian Blake, there was nothing but darkness.'
The sun went behind a cloud then, as if echoing Gabriel’s words. Sam was struck by the uncomfortable feeling that it was hiding, not wanting its precious light to be sullied by what they were saying. The old man must have felt it, too, for he looked toward the sky, and then nodded, as if the sun’s behavior was entirely appropriate to the moment.
'My great grandfather used to speak of him when I was a boy, passing on tales he had learned from his father before him. A wise man was my great grandfather, wiser than I can ever hope to be, I suspect. From him I learned many things about the true nature of the world. But of everything he ever taught me, the most important was this: evil walks in the world, under many faces and many forms, in sunlight or in darkness.' His gaze lost its focus, as if he had turned it inward, down a road neither of them could see. 'I don’t think I ever really understood what he meant, until I met Sebastian Blake.'
The last was said in a near whisper, and it took a moment for Katelynn to realize just what it was that he had said. When she did, she spoke without thinking. 'Oh, come on! Met him? That would mean you’d have to be over two hundred years old!'
The tone of her voice brought Gabriel out of his reminiscing with a start. He appeared confused for a moment, and then smiled gently. 'A figure of speech, of course. Knowing about him was as close as I would ever want to come to meeting him, I assure you.' His grin widened, and he winked at her. 'Then again, maybe I am over two hundred years old. But I bet I don’t look a day over seventy-five, right?'
Katelynn grinned back to acknowledge the joke, and relaxed. For a minute she’d thought the old man wasn’t nearly as lucid as he seemed.
'Blake was a man who searched for forbidden learnings, for knowledge that was best left far from the eyes and ears of man. Instead of embracing the philosophies and teachings that had brought Man out of the Dark Ages and into the modern world, he sought after ancient beliefs and legends, delving into areas of darkness, seeking the company of the Dark Ones.'
'You mean the Devil?' Sam asked excitedly.
Katelynn cast him a sour look. She was here to do some serious research for her thesis, and she didn’t want to waste time indulging Sam’s love of the fantastic. If he wanted to think that devils and demons and things with a thousand legs haunted the dark and forgotten places of the world, that was fine, but she didn’t want it interfering with what she’d come here to accomplish.
He didn’t seem to notice her look, and neither did Gabriel, for he turned to reply to the question.
'Not exactly, Sam. At least not in the way that you mean. You’ve got to remember that this was in the early days of this settlement. The people who had come here had fled the Old Country out of a desire to escape religious persecution. For them, belief in God and the Devil was not just something to indulge in when they felt like it, as so many of today’s religions have become. For them, it was a question of eternal salvation or damnation. But Blake wasn’t interested in that limited view of the universe. He looked beyond that, to an older and darker view of the universe, and sought to recapture the power that the ancients supposedly had through their rituals and ceremonies.'
Katelynn interrupted him before he could go any further in his explanation. 'Wait a minute!' she said sharply, her mild irritation at Sam’s question having rapidly grown into annoyance with Gabriel’s response to it. 'Are you trying to tell us that Sebastian Blake practiced witchcraft?'
'Dark Magic might be a more appropriate term for it, but yes, that is what I am telling you,' he answered simply, the congenial expression never leaving his face.
'Cool!' Sam exclaimed happily. When he’d agreed to bring Katelynn in to see Gabriel, he’d expected to sit through a long conversation about a guy who’d long since turned to dust and who’d led a life so boring that no one even remembered him. Now all of a sudden they were talking about something that was right up his alley; a real, live warlock, right here in his own town!
Katelynn, however, was far from thrilled at the news. 'I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe that,' she said.
'Why not?' Gabriel asked, a playful smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eye.
