An Affair Of Sorcerers

us that the barrel of the gun was turned inward, pressed against her stomach. Garth slowly sank back down on his haunches.

'That's a.38 Police Special, Dr. Jones,' Garth continued in the same quiet, even voice. 'If you shoot yourself like that, you're going to put a big hole in yourself. But you may not die right away. Don't do it; don't gut-shoot yourself. You'll suffer terrible pain, and there'll be nothing we can do to help you.'

'Please, let's go, Dr. Jones,' April said. 'Come back with us. This is a bad place. I feel it; you feel it.'

Madeline looked at April for a long time. 'It's the right place, April,' she said at last.

'Talk to us, Mad,' I said. 'Get it out of your system.'

'You talk,' she replied in a dark, stranger's voice.

'Can we go someplace out of the rain? We're cold.'

Madeline shook her head and seemed to tighten her grip on the gun.

'I'll talk, Mad,' I continued quickly. 'I think you want me to.' I took a deep breath, wiped the water off my face and formed a shield over my eyes with my left hand. 'You saved my life last night-for the second time. The first time was when I was floating in Smathers' fish tank. You also saved Kathy's life-after you found out what had been done to her.'

'I don't understand, Robert,' April said in a shuddering tremolo. 'If Dr. Jones is Esobus, wouldn't she have known everything the coven was doing from the time they planned to do it?'

'Knowing Mad as I do, I don't think so,' I replied to April, at the same time watching Madeline carefully-very conscious of the gun in her hands. 'In fact, I think that, of all the members of the coven, Madeline-or Esobus-knew the least. Like I said, she is a busy woman, traveling all over the world in her role as a leading researcher in cosmology. I think Mad began this coven business as some kind of experiment. One day she discovered it had all gotten out of hand, but she didn't know what to do about it. Am I right, Mad?'

Madeline said nothing; instead, she raised her face to the sky-as though she were looking or listening for something. She made no sound, and the rest of her body didn't move; with all the water on her, it was impossible to tell for certain, but I was sure she was crying.

'You see,' I continued, 'Esobus' image was an all-powerful, mystical and supersecretive inspiration. But Esobus was a leader only in name, not a person the other coven members could sit down and plan things with. The coven meetings Esobus attended probably consisted almost entirely of ritual-there was no practical business discussed. Besides, Esobus was a fraud-not a ceremonial magician at all. But only Madeline and Smathers knew that.'

A giant chill squeezed me in its icy hand and shook me. April held me tightly until it had passed.

'In Mad's mind, she was probably conducting an experiment in witchcraft that would finally reveal some kind of truth about the occult to a very suspicious scientific community,' I continued, forcing the blurred words out through stiff lips that felt paralyzed. 'These were the same people who'd laughed at her because of her ideas about astrology. Madeline's obsessed with the occult; in setting this whole thing in motion, she saw herself as a kind of pioneer. She's been looking for the lost Atlantis of the mind, if you will, but she found that she couldn't control it. Maybe she couldn't even decide if she should control it, considering the fact that it was an experiment; for a little while, she may have had trouble deciding whether to remain an aloof scientific observer, or intervene. Fortunately for Kathy and me, the human being in her won out over the dispassionate scientist. But right up until this morning, she was still trying to hedge her bets and get out of this whole.'

The wind was rising again, as if the storm had regrouped its forces and was returning for another major assault.

'I'm so sorry,' Madeline whispered softly. Incredibly, her voice could be heard clearly in the rising cacophony, as though her words had slipped through cracks in the wall of wind. 'So sorry.'

'A big question,' I said, raising my voice in order to be heard. 'I doubt that you were originally interested in witchcraft. What's the connection between you and Smathers? How did you find out that Smathers was a ceremonial magician, and how did you get him to set up the coven for you?'

'He was my. . lover,' Madeline said in a voice that was suddenly strangled. 'I was his mistress for months before I found out about. . the other things. Then I became intrigued with the question of what would happen if a coven of ceremonial magicians was formed-and with the problem of how I could become a part of it. Vincent was. . amused by the idea; we planned the Esobus thing together. You've guessed the rest. Vincent took care of all the planning. I really didn't know about …' Her voice trailed off.

'Smathers was a madman,' I said, making no attempt to hide the disgust I felt. 'And he was a pervert. How could you ever get involved with a man like that?'

'Powerful,' Mad said distantly, her voice still mysteriously overriding the wind. 'Vincent was … so strange and powerful. You wouldn't understand, Mongo.'

But I thought I did. The darkness beyond the light of science, the void of night that Mad had been trying to explore, had finally swallowed her up.

Madeline slowly rose to her feet, and we rose with her. For a moment I thought-hoped-that it was finished, that a catharsis had been achieved and Madeline was ready to give up the gun and come with us. It was a false hope. She still held the gun in a reverse position, its barrel pressed even more tightly into her stomach, one thumb resting against the trigger. Again she raised her face to the sky and cocked her head, as though listening to voices in the storm that only she could hear.

'I've seen a lot of things in the past few weeks, Mad,' I said quickly, driven by a sudden, terrible need to fill the space between us with words, as if I could filibuster away the dreaded sound of a gunshot muffled by Madeline's flesh. 'Maybe most of the things I've witnessed are beyond scientific measurement. People like you and Krowl have strange talents, and most of us don't know how to deal with them. But some of these things bite if you don't handle them correctly, and you finally came to realize that. As much as you kept telling yourself you were simply being a scientist by keeping a foot in both camps, you wanted out; you wanted to be saved from the coven you'd created. You had a nervous breakdown because of your guilt-right after you'd made the recording that saved Kathy's life. My God, you've been dropping clues on me all along with those references to the Wizard of Oz. You once told me you were interested in the pursuit of knowledge, not personal power; it started to come together for me when I saw that sign in Esobus' cubicle. But you were never willing to come all the way out. You kept hoping right up to the end that you could run around putting Band-Aids on something that had to be amputated.'

'Shut up, Mongo,' Garth snapped. 'You're being too hard on her. She's also helped a lot of people.'

Madeline shuddered with cold, slowly shook her head. 'No. Let Mongo finish. He knows I. . need to hear it all.'

The catharsis would come, I thought, and felt immense relief. That was what Mad seemed to be telling me: say it all, get it out in the open, and she would come back with us.

'You ran back to the cubicle in the factory building because you had to retrieve the tape you'd put on to cover your movement to the other end of the catwalk.' I smiled tentatively and tried to establish eye contact, but Mad's gaze kept slipping away. I considered trying to knock the gun away, but rejected the idea. I couldn't assume that risk. 'You took the tape off and threw it away somewhere into the darkness. A fleeing man might have stuck a knife into you, but it's highly unlikely he'd take the time-or be accurate enough-to carve a perfect cross on your forehead. No, Mad. The cross is your own, self-inflicted, mark of Cain: disfigurement as a form of expiation. It isn't enough, Mad; it's dues time for the Wizard of Oz.'

'I couldn't live with it any longer, Mongo,' Mad said evenly.

'I know. Now you don't have to. And Garth will tell you there are extenuating circumstances. You've saved lives.'

I began to seriously doubt the old chestnut about a man's entire past flashing before his eyes at the moment of sudden, violent death. Or perhaps I wasn't really dying, because it wasn't that way at all. Quite the opposite. I was seeing things that had not yet happened, as though the thunderous explosion had blown my own book of shadows open to pages that had not yet been written.

Now Mad looked at me directly. She smiled as she said something, but she had lost control of the wind, and her words were lost. I watched her lips and thought she said, 'Thank you,' or 'I love you'; or it may have been simply 'Goodbye, Mongo.'