Word & Void 03 - Angel Fire East Page 10

  Once, ten years earlier, he had lost his faith and given up on himself. He had settled in one place and tried to make a life as other men do. He had failed at that. His past had caught up with him, as he now understood it always would, and he had gone back to being what he now understood he must always be.

  Thoughts of that past and this present drifted through his mind as he walked the business district of Cannon Beach. Hemlock, its main north-south street, was the center of almost everything of note, and he did not deviate from its path in the forty minutes his walk required. He was looking for a beginning, as he always did. Sometimes when he was in a larger city, he would simply take a room at a YMCA and go from there. That approach would not do in a vacation town or in the circumstances of his present endeavor. He would be in Cannon Beach until close to the end of November. He needed more than just a six- or seven-day room at the Y.

  He found what he was looking for more quickly than he had expected. A small, hand-lettered sign in the window of the Cannon Beach Bookstore, which was located at the south end of Hemlock where the shops and galleries began to peter out, read Help Wanted. Ross went into the store and asked what sort of help they were looking for. The manager, a sallow-faced, pleasant man of fifty named Harold Parks, told him they were looking for summer sales help. Ross said he would like to apply.

  “That’s summer sales, Mr. Ross,” Harold Parks said pointedly. “It doesn’t extend beyond, oh, maybe mid-September. And it’s only thirty, thirty-five hours a week.” He frowned at Ross through his beard. “And it only pays seven-fifty an hour.”

  “That suits my purposes,” Ross replied.

  But Parks was still skeptical. Why would John Ross want a job for only two months? What was his background concerning books and sales? How had he found out about the position?

  Ross was ready with his answers, having been through this many times before. He was a professor of English literature, currently on leave so that he could try his hand at writing his own work of fiction, a thriller. He had decided to set it on the Oregon coast, and he had come to Cannon Beach to do the necessary research and to begin writing. He needed a job to pay expenses, but not one that would take up too much of his time. He admitted to having almost no sales experience, but he knew books. He gave Parks a small demonstration, and asked again about the job.

  Parks hired him on the spot.

  When asked about lodging, Parks made a few calls and found Ross a room with an elderly lady who used to work at the store and now supplemented her own small retirement income with rent from an occasional boarder. At present, both rented rooms were open, and Ross could have his pick.

  So, by Sunday evening he had both living quarters and a job, and he was ready to begin his search for the gypsy morph—or, more particularly, for the place the morph would appear just after Thanksgiving. He knew it was somewhere close by and that it was a cave the elements and time’s passage had hollowed into the side of the bluffs that ran along the ocean beaches. He knew the cave was flooded at high tide. He knew what the cave looked like inside and a little of what it looked like from without.

  But the beaches of the Oregon coast ran all the way from Astoria to the border of California in an unbroken ribbon of sand, and there were thousands of caves to explore. For the most part, the caves lacked identifiable names, and in any case, he didn’t know the name of the one he was searching for. He believed he would have to walk the coast for a dozen miles or so in either direction to find the right one.

  He began his search during his off hours by walking north to Seaside and south to Arch Cape. He did so during low tide and daylight, so his window of opportunity was narrowed considerably. It took him all of July and much of August to complete his trek. When he was done, he had nothing to show for it. He had not found the cave.

  His progress as a bookseller was meeting with better results. He had a gift for selling, and since he was familiar with and a believer in the value of his product, he was able to impress Harold Parks with his effort. His landlady, Mrs. Staples, liked him well enough to give him the run of the house, including the use of her own refrigerator, and she came to visit him frequently at work, always insisting that Mr. Ross be the one to help with her buying selections.

  It was Mrs. Staples who suggested he talk with Anson Robbington.

  By now it was nearing September, and he was beginning to be concerned about his lack of success. He had not found the cave in which the gypsy morph would appear, and he still had no idea what the morph would look like or how he would capture it. He had not asked for help from anyone, thinking that he could manage the search on his own and not involve others. When it became clear his plan was not working, he then had to decide how to ask for the help he needed without revealing what he was really up to.

  So he mentioned to a few carefully chosen people, rather casually, that he was looking for someone to talk to who knew the Oregon coast around Cannon Beach.

  “The man you want,” Mrs. Staples advised at once, “is Anson Robbington. He’s explored every inch of the coastline from Astoria to Lincoln City at one time or another in his life. If there’s something you want to know, he’s the one who can tell you.”

  Ross found Robbington two mornings later holding down the fort at Duane Johnson Realty, where he worked part-time as a salesman. He was big and weathered and bearded, and he dressed like the prototypical Northwest iconoclast. He was slow talking and slow moving, and he seemed lost in his own thoughts during much of their conversation, rather as if he were busy with something else entirely and could give Ross only a small portion of his time and attention.

  Ross approached his inquiry in a circumspect manner, asking a few general questions about the geological underpinnings of the bluffs, offering a short synopsis of his imaginary book’s premise, then detailing, as if it were his personal vision for his writing, a description of the cave he was thinking of including.

  “Oh, sure,” Robbington said after a long pause, gray eyes wandering back from whatever country they’d been viewing. “I know one just like it. Just like you described.” He nodded for emphasis, then went away again for a bit, leaving Ross to cool his heels. “Tell you what,” he began anew when he returned, “I’ll take you out there myself Monday morning. Can you get some time off?”

  The bright, sunny Monday morning that followed found them driving south along the coast in Robbington’s rackety old Ford pickup, motoring out of Cannon Beach, past Tolovana Park, the turnoff to Arcadia Beach, and onward toward Arch Cape. The cave he was thinking of, Anson Robbington advised, lay just below Arch Cape on the other side of the tunnel, cut into the very rock that the tunnel burrowed through. It was six o’clock in the morning, and the tide was out. At other times, when the tide was either coming in, all the way in, or going out, you wouldn’t know the cave was even there.

  When they reached their destination, they parked the truck, climbed out, and worked their way along the bluff edge to a narrow trail, so hidden in underbrush it was invisible until they were right on top of it. The trail led downward toward the beach, winding back and forth amid outcroppings and ledges, switchbacking in and out of precipitous drops and deep ravines. It took them almost fifteen minutes to get down, mostly because of the circuitous route. Robbington admitted they could have gone farther down the beach to an easier descent and then walked back, but he thought Ross ought to experience something of the feel of bluffs if he was going to be writing about their features. Ross, making his way carefully behind the old man, his bad leg aching from the effort, held his tongue.

  When they reached the cave, Ross knew immediately it was the one he was looking for. It was cut sideways into the rock where the bluff formed a horseshoe whose opening was littered with old tree trunks, boulders, and broken shells. It was farther south by less than a half mile from where Ross had given up his own search, but he might not have found it even if he had kept on, so deep in shadow and scrub did it lie. You had to get back inside the horseshoe to see that it was there, war
ded by weather-grayed cedar and spruce in various stages of collapse, the slope supporting them slowly giving way to the erosion of the tides. It bore all the little exterior landmarks he was looking for, and it felt as it had in the eyes of the crucified Knight of the Word.

  They went inside with flashlights, easing through a split in the rock that opened into a cavern of considerable size and several chambers. The air and rock were chill and damp and smelled of dead fish and the sea. Tree roots hung from the ceiling like old lace, and water dripped in slow, steady rhythms. The floor of the cave rose as they worked their way deeper in, forming a low shelf where the rock had split apart in some cataclysmic upheaval thousands of years ago. On the right wall of the chamber into which the shelf disappeared, a strange marking that resembled a bull’s head had been drawn over time by nature’s deft hand.

  Ross felt a wave of relief wash through him at the discovery. The rest, he felt, would come more easily now.

  He explored the cave with Robbington for twenty or thirty minutes, not needing to, but wishing to convince his guide that he was working on descriptive material for the book. When they departed, they walked the beach south to a more gentle climb, and then returned along the shoulder of the highway to where they had left the pickup.

  As they climbed into the cab, Ross thanked Anson Robbington and promised he would make mention of him in the book when it was published. Robbington seemed content with the fact that he had been of help.

  John Ross worked in the bookstore that afternoon, and that night he treated himself and Mrs. Staples to dinner out. He was feeling so good about himself that he was able to put aside his misgivings and doubts long enough to enjoy a moment of self-congratulation. It was little enough compensation for the agonizing burden of his life. All the while he had been engaged in this endeavor, his dark dreams of the future had continued to assail him on a regular basis. Once or twice, they had shown him things he might otherwise have acted upon, but he had not, for fear of jeopardizing his search for the morph. It was difficult to ignore the horror of the future he lived each night in his dreams, and his first impulse each morning on waking was to try to do something about what he had witnessed. But there was only so much he could do with his life, only so much one man could accomplish, even as a Knight of the Word, even with the magic he could summon. He must make his choices, stand his ground, and live with the consequences.

  In the days that followed, he returned to the cave many times, seeking something more that would help him when the gypsy morph finally appeared. He studied the configuration and makeup of the walls, of the separate chambers, of the entry. He tried to figure out what he might do to trap something found in that cave. He did his best to imagine in what way he might win over the creature he would snare so that it might trust him enough to reveal itself.

  It was a hopeless task, and by the close of September, he was no closer to finding answers to his questions than he had been on waking from his dream. He had thought he might have the dream again, that he might see once more the Knight on the cross and be given further insight into what he must do. But the dream never returned.

  He was beginning to despair when, on a dark still night as he thrashed awake from a particularly bad dream of the future, a tatterdemalion appeared to him, sent by the Lady, and summoned him to Wales.

  Chapter 9

  John Ross paused in his narrative and took a long, slow drink of his coffee. His gaze drifted to the curtained windows, where the sunrise burned with a golden shimmer through the bright, hard, cold December dawn.

  Nest Freemark sat across from him at the kitchen table, her clear, penetrating gaze fixed on him, assessing his tale, measuring it for the consequences it would produce. She looked pretty much as he remembered her, but more self-assured, as if she had become better able to cope with the life she had been given. He admired the calm acceptance she had displayed the night before on finding him on her doorstep after ten long years, taking him in, asking no questions, offering no conditions, simply giving him a room and telling him to get some sleep. She was strong in ways that most people weren’t, that most couldn’t even begin to approach.

  “So you went to Wales,” she prodded, ruffling her thick, curly hair.

  He nodded. “I went.”

  Her eyes never left his face. “What did you learn there?”

  “That I was up against more than I had bargained for.” He smiled ruefully and arched one eyebrow. “It works out that way more often than not. You’d think I’d learn.”

  The big house was quiet, the ticking of the old grandfather clock clearly audible in the silences between exchanges of conversation. The sun was just appearing, and darkness cloaked the corners and nooks with layered shadows. Outside, the birds were just waking up. No car tires crunched on the frosted road. No voices greeted the morning.

  The boy who had come with him to Nest Freemark—the boy the gypsy morph had become only a handful of days ago—knelt backward on the living room couch, chin resting on folded arms as he leaned against the couch back and stared out the window into the park.

  “Is he all right?” Nest asked softly.

  Ross shook his head. “I wish I knew. I wish I could tell. Something. Anything. At least he’s quit changing shapes. But I don’t have a clue about what he’s doing or why.”

  Nest shifted in her high-backed wooden chair, adjusting her robe. “Didn’t the Lady give you any insight into this?”

  “She told me a little of what to expect.” He paused, remembering. “She gave me a kind of netting, so light and soft it was like holding a spiderweb. It was to be used to capture the morph when it appeared in the cave after Thanksgiving.”

  He cleared his throat softly. “She told me how the morph was formed, that it was all wild magic come together in shards to form a whole. It doesn’t happen often, as I’ve said. Very rare. But when it does, the joining is so powerful it can become almost anything. I asked her what. A cure or a plague, she said. You could never tell; it was different each time and would seek its own shape and form. She wouldn’t elaborate beyond that. She said wild magic of this sort was so rare and unstable that it only held together for a short time before breaking up again. If it could find a form that suited it, it would survive longer and become a force in the war between the Word and the Void. If not, it would dissipate and go back into the ether.”

  He twisted his coffee cup on its saucer, eyes dropping momentarily. “The gypsy morph is not a creation of the Word, as most other things are, but a consequence of other creations. It comes into being because the world is the way it is, with its various magics and the consequences of using them. The Word didn’t foresee the possibility of the morph, so it hasn’t got a handle on its schematic yet. Even the Word is still learning, it seems.”

  Nest nodded. “Makes sense. There are always unforeseen consequences in life. Why not for the Word as well as for us?”

  Hawkeye wandered in from outside, trudged through the hallway and into the kitchen for a quick look around, then moved on to the living room. Without pausing, he jumped onto the couch next to the boy and began to rub against him. The boy, without looking, reached down absently and stroked the cat.

  “I’ve never seen Hawkeye do that with anyone,” Nest said quietly. Ross smiled faintly, and her gaze shifted back to him. “So, she gave you a net?”

  He nodded. “When the gypsy morph appeared for the first time, she told me, it would materialize in a shimmer of lights, a kind of collection of glowing motes. As soon as that happened, I was to throw the net. The light would attract it, and the net would close about it all on its own, sealing it in. Immediately, she warned, the morph would begin to change form. When it did, I was to get out of there as quickly as possible because the expenditure of magic that resulted from the morph’s changes would attract demons from everywhere.”

  “And did it?”

  He lifted the coffee cup from its saucer and held it suspended before him.

  He remembered how it had begun, his
words as he spoke them recalling the moment. He had gone to the cave at sunrise on the day of the event, having rehearsed his role many times, having explored the grotto and its surroundings so thoroughly he could detail everything with his eyes closed. It was bitter cold and damp that day, the rains of the past two having ceased sometime during the night, leaving the chill and the wet to linger in the earth and air. Mist clung to the edges of the beach and the surface of the water in a thick, impenetrable curtain. Clumps of it had broken away from the main body and wandered inland to hunker down among the trees and rocks like fugitives in hiding. The ocean surf, calm this windless morning, rolled in a steady, monotonous whoosh onto the beach, advancing and receding, over and over in hypnotic motion. Gulls screamed their strange, challenging cries as they flew in search of food, smooth and bright against the gray.

  He had once again borrowed Mrs. Staples’s Chevy. It had carried him back and forth to the cavern often enough over the past three months that it probably could find the way on its own. Leaving it on the shoulder of the road where the beach access was easiest, he descended through the mist and gray and damp, a solitary hunter in the dim dawn light, and made his way back along the broad, sandy expanse to his destination.

  Inside, it was dark enough that he was required to use his flashlight to find his way to the rock shelf, where he began his vigil. He did not know exactly how long he would have to wait, only that the morph would appear this day before sunset. Besides his flashlight and the spiderweb netting given to him by the Lady, he carried a blanket and a small basket of food and drink. The dead Knight’s memories carried with them a clear image of where the morph would appear, and so Ross knew how to position himself.