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Coven at World's End
Four
Pywacket scratched at the back door at dawn the next
morning. Beth ignored the fluffy blue Persian until she had finished
Sarah's pancakes and juice.
She called up the stairs. "Sarah! Rise and shine! I'm going across the
street to talk to Rebecca! Breakfast is on the table and getting
cold!"
Sarah's return call wafted down the staircase. "I'm coming, Mom!"
Beth followed the trotting feline across the street with a smile,
thinking of how enthusiastically Sarah greeted each new day. She
wished her own zest for life had not been sullied by worries
of an uncertain future and hoped it would never, ever happen to Sarah.
Only one other house shared the short leg of her dead-end street, the
one directly across from it. Even from the street out front she could
hear the rattle of a keyboard through opened windows. She let herself in
unannounced.
The cat trotted before her, calling to her to follow, leaping promptly
onto a counter alongside a coffee urn. Beth poured herself a cup and then followed the cat into the den.
Rebecca Sagget, looking like a wild woman with her unkempt strawberry
blonde hair, sat rigid before her computer
monitor, her fingers a blur on the keyboard. The screen was split, one
half showing transcription text translated by computer software and rife
with errors, the other filled with
endlessly scrolling, corrected and neatly formatted medical notes, letters
and reports. Rebecca only
worked two, two hour shifts during the day as a medical transcriptionist,
but easily supported herself with resources to spare for the community.
Beth had always thought it strange that the woman preferred company while
working, and isolation when idle, although just about everything about
Rebecca and her autistic life was strange.
Beth pulled a stool closer and sat down. The cat leaped into her lap
and curled into a vibrating ball of fur.
"I sense a disturbance in the force," Rebecca said with mock severity.
Beth chuckled. It was funny because it was true. Rebecca could quite
easily sense an disturbance in the surrounding psychic void.
"Rite of passage?" Rebecca said, sensing the persistent thought
floating about close at hand.
"Sarah brought home a boyfriend," Beth explained. "The fairies chased
him off. They bit him, Sarah tells me. Twice."
Separately scrolling screen halves continued their erratic upward flow
undisturbed, one slowly, the other swiftly. "We have always suspected
their nature,"
Rebecca said.
"An outsider was attacked. It bothers me."
"Sounds innocently prankish," Rebecca said. "There is more to the
disturbance, however. Something unsettling lurks close by. It is new to
my experience."
"And the nature of this disturbance?" Beth asked in growing concern.
"An intrusion of consciousness. I cannot be certain of its
origin or nature."
"I'm not aware of it as yet," Beth confessed. "What would you have me
do?"
Rebecca took a moment to answer. "Question the Montegarde sisters."
"I'd have an easier time pulling the teeth of a pit bull."
"Conceded, but they monitor, and a presence will have attracted their attention. They
may have information. They certainly need to be warned to keep their
distance."
Beth didn't like the stern note behind Rebecca's warning. "Do you sense danger?"
Rebecca paused to flex her right hand. She saved her document
manually, called up a new file for transcription, and then continued typing.
"I do."
"I'll report your advice to the Council." Beth was thinking that she
would call a meeting for the morrow.
"Sooner," Rebecca said, following her train of thought.
Beth frowned. "This evening?"
"Events will unfold with unexpected swiftness," Rebecca said softly.
"You will see for yourself during the course of the afternoon."
And with that, Beth felt Rebecca's focus of awareness shift away from
herself. Dismissed in Rebecca's usual, impersonal manner, Pywacket jumped
from her lap.
Beth paused on her way out to watch the sun rising in the east. Sarah
came flying out the front door across the street. She threw her
knapsack
over her shoulder and extended an arm.
"Bye, Mom!"
The utter stillness of World's End swallowed her cheerful cry. Sarah
started off across the meadow, taking her usual beeline route to the bus
stop at the highway junction beyond the unseen gateway to the ordinary
world.
Sarah had been the most trouble free child imaginable. She seemed
to have her own
special agenda in life and pursued it with unmindful vigor.
Beth's moment of pleasant interlude evaporated in the wake of the
anxiety Rebecca had set stirring to life. She turned away to pay her
reluctant visit to the infamous Montegarde sisters. She did not anticipate a
pleasant experience.
The Montegarde sisters were old school, rigid in their
unyielding and unimaginative beliefs of a hierarchical universe of good
and evil. In their view, World's End was a gateway into the broader
universe, and they stood as sentinels, passing harsh judgment on the outsiders
of the ordinary world and guarding against psychic intruders from
elsewhere in time and space.
It was these intruders who were suspected of having attacked the Coven
in the past. Had it not been for the Coven, the gateways to the
ordinary world would have been penetrated, although nobody who stood in
the way of their assailants had survived unscathed. Nobody, therefore, fully
understood what had happened. Most of the residents of World's End were
survivors and refugees of a catastrophe they had been too young to
understand at the time.
The Montegarde sisters had been part of the
previous generation affected and thought themselves guardians of World's
End. Most of World's End thought of themselves as refugees from a
violent and noisy world of ungifted human beings. Few thought of
themselves as guardians. A few went along with the notion that they
might be witches, considering their special abilities. It was true
that the unseen gateways seemed to be guarded by an intelligent force, but not
by the women of World's End. Nobody understood how the gateways worked.
Outsiders could not visit World's End unless accompanied by a resident.
Neither could they leave with clear memory of their visit. Residents
of World's End came and went without obstruction.
The Montegarde sisters specialized as spiritual mediums, conduits for
communications with conscious entities from elsewhere. They
monitored the
unknown. They fantasized the nature and origins of the intelligences they
contacted, but without the native intellect to understand much of their
communications, they at least made no effort to edit or direct its
content and their work was considered of value to the Council. The ungifted lived their lives in a three-dimensional
universe. World's End was aware of the multidimensional nature of that
universe, although they could never pretend to master it.
The old Victorian mansion belonging to the Montegarde sisters had
originally sat on a lot outside Salem, Massachusetts, and had been
disassembled piece by piece and rebuild by two young witches with
aspirations to bring a new religion to the ordinary world. The workers
brought in to perform the labor, like those hired to construct and
maintain the newer homes of World's End, had come and gone with no
memory of their accomplishment, forced to make due with cover stories offered by World's
End and wages far too high to dare question.
Earlier in their lives, just after the invasion that had cost the
sanity and lives of others of their generation, the Montegarde sisters had tried
to publicize their séances in the ordinary world. The value of the arcane
manuscripts the sister's published went unrecognized on the other side of
the gateway. Enraged and bitter, the sisters had already been on a path of social isolation and eccentricity when they and their generation were attacked. Since that
time, neither the sisters nor their deteriorating fortress of a mansion
had aged at all gracefully.
Agnes and Delores Montegarde had erected the house in the permanent
shade of oaks and in doing so had inadvertently doomed the house to a short span of
usefulness. The constant shade and humidity mercilessly rotted the wood.
Beth could smell its musty odor a block away. She could feel the moisture
in the softened wood when she knocked at the peeling front door. The
sisters had painted the porch area earlier in the summer. The paint had
not adhered and lay about Beth's feet in curled flakes.
Nobody answered her knock. Beth threw the door open and held her
breath against the stench of decay that wafted from the bowels of the
house. "Agnes, Delores, I know you're home."
The house had once been a treasure-trove of antique furnishings. It
had since become a storehouse of ruin. She stepped inside and closed the
door behind her, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim light before
turning into the study, a room centered with an oak table upon which
sat a Ouija board and planchette. Bound as the sisters were by the late
eighteenth-century trappings of spiritualism, the board was a central tool
of their trade.
Beth fingered knick-knacks at random, knowing her mock disrespect would
infuriate the sisters and drive them out of hiding. She caught no sight
of movement and sensed no human presence in the room, but when she turned
at one point, she found herself facing a gnarled figure of a woman who
nevertheless stood her own height and whose eyes still blazed with a clear
and hostile intelligence.
"Be gone from our home, Elizabeth Mannhardt," the apparition rasped.
"I have need of your services, Agnes."
A questing eyebrow shot up. "And your method of payment?"
Only then did Beth sense Delores standing behind her, and she stood
very still. The sisters were not considered dangerous, but she distrusted
the stability of the minds inhabiting bodies so defiled by contained
anger. "River
crystals," she said, deciding she could part with two of her collection.
The sisters fancied the common silicon dioxide crystals as dynamos of
psychic energy. "Clear blue. I have several. You can have the two
largest."
"You would not give either stone unless you thought we had information
of life and death importance." The words were spat from a toothless mouth
and festering gums. The odor thrown in Beth's face was stifling. "If we
accept the agreement, you must satisfy yourself with whatever information
we have to offer. We know of no matters of life and death."
"Agnes, the stones have no intrinsic value, and I have no life or death
questions to ask of you. I'll satisfy myself with your answers as long as
I sense no deceit."
Agnes' smile was twisted. "You will sense nothing of my thoughts,
woman. My mind is closed to you."
Which was probably the truth.
"Is it our private lives you intent to invade with your questions,
Elizabeth?" Delores asked the question from behind her.
"Sarah has had a bad time with her fairies," Beth said. "Rebecca
senses a disturbance in the psychic void. I need to know if you have
encountered a presence that may be responsible."
Agnes was the cold-hearted sister. Delores was the softer and least
assertive of the two. Delores moved in to stand by her sister with an
expression of stark fear on her heavily lined face. "Rebecca has been
known to have perceptions of events that have not come to pass," Agnes
reminded her. "At least not in our world."
"That may well be the case, but she's generally
quite trustworthy, and we must be prepared."
"We have channeled nothing of consequence. We provide a monthly copy
of our records to the Council."
Beth had a question to ask. She didn't know to tread on a subject so
delicate.
But Agnes sensed the nature of it. She turned away, gesturing for Beth
to follow. With Delores following on her heels, Agnes hobbled her way into
the drawing room. The two sisters sat side by side on a hard-backed
couch. Beth took a seat facing them. "You are wondering if there are
parallels between the disturbance Rebecca sense and events preceding the
destruction of the Coven," Agnes said. "You fear it may happen again."
Beth breathed a sigh of relief. She had assumed the two would not want
to speak of the incident.
"We are the oldest surviving members of the Coven of your mother's
generation," Agnes said. "Only three of us survived its destruction,
Delores and I, and Lisa, your mother."
"My mother's sanity did not survive the experience," Beth
reminded her, and
left unsaid the suspicion among the residents of World's End that the
Montegarde sisters may not have escaped unscathed themselves.
"Lisa's sanity did not survive," Agnes said begrudgingly. "Neither did
her memory
of the event. Or ours."
"Truthfully? You have no memory of what happened?"
"You've heard us speak of a great battle with the forces of evil. That
story came from your mother's lips immediately following the destruction,
not from our own memory of it. We were vowed to silence."
"So my mother told me."
"What did she tell you, Elizabeth?" Delores said breathlessly, braving
a scathing look from her sister for interrupting.
"She told me World's End would best not be burdened by memory of
something it could do nothing to anticipate or prevent," Beth said. "She
was clear-minded that one evening I talked with her when you were all
taken to the Oak Grove hospitals for observation. By the next day, she was
unresponsive." Beth looked between the two for the answer to her next
question. "Are you committed to keeping my mother's secrets to the
grave?"
Agnes shook her head regretfully. "There are no secrets of any great importance to
tell. Your mother spoke of three things. She spoke of an invasion of
evil. She spoke of doorways between worlds, many of them, more than we
ever imagined. And she spoke of the madness the swarm inflicted upon
her. She gave no details of these things. She only mentioned them in
passing."
"The swarm?"
"We believe she meant the lights in the forest."
Beth grew rigid with tension. "Are you sure she was speaking of the
lights in the forest?"
Agnes leaned close. "We know of their tyranny. We know of the
terrible fate they bestow upon those they favor."
Beth doubted if they knew any such thing. Nobody knew anything
concrete about Sarah's fairies. The sisters had indulged in too much
fantasy. They had softened their minds with their petty melodrama and
fiction.
"Lisa spoke many times with Dr. Vladimir Corellian," Agnes said
unexpectedly. "Remember that the good doctor still lives."
"He would never talk with us before. Do you have reason to believe he
will now?"
"He is the only source of information left of the destruction of the
Coven." Agnes leaned forward with a mischievous gleam in her eye.
"Unless, of course, you would allow Delores and I to penetrate the veil
for you."
The two were perfectly capable of penetrating the veil between the
worlds of the dead and the living, but she had always distrusted the
origin of information from unknown and unknowable realms. "If my mother
had anything to say to me from the other side of the veil," Beth said with
even-tempered firmness, "she'd find a way to do so herself."
Beth rose to her feet. "I'll try to speak with the doctor. Please
keep the Council posted on matters that may bear on the security of
World's End."
"Of what use would it be if we are branded liars as we often are?"
Agnes said with her usual bitterness.
"It's not falsehood you stand accused of," Beth said. "You simply have
no respect for the boundary between knowledge and unfounded belief. Information of
unknown origin must stand on its own merit. You cannot judge the value of
material from unknown sources. I can't imagine why you persist in doing
so."
Agnes' jaw tightened. "We trust our intuition. It has served us
well."
The argument was as old as World's End itself, and Beth didn't want to
go another round in the Montegarde sister's smelly old house. She turned
away and started for the front door, desperate for a breath of fresh air.
"We have seen your silver-haired child playing in the forest,
Elizabeth."
Beth paused. Hackles rose on her back.
Agnes cackled sadistic glee. "Once infected, she will never be free of
them. They will rule her life. Remember that your mother
believed that evil had befallen us in the past. She thought it
strange that we have no history, no knowledge at all of our origin, even of our
own children. What force is it that puts us here if not the swarm?
Your mother believed, as your daughter does, that the swarm are living
entities."
It was the one belief the sisters held that could very well be the
truth, the theory with no supporting evidence that World's End existed to guard the ordinary world
from harm. Hopefully, it was not a truth.
Beth left the fetid house and hurried home.
Events will unfold with unexpected swiftness, Rebecca had said.
You
will see for yourself during the course of the afternoon.
She returned home and fetched her purse on the way through. Leaving by
the back door, she tossed it through the window of her Subaru sedan and
slipping behind the wheel.
Enough of the afternoon remained to justify a visit to Vladimir
Corellian. She hadn't visited the old man in ages. She assumed his
advanced age rendered his memory of the Coven's destruction unreliable,
whether he chose to speak of it or not. It had always irked the Council
to know that the only individual who may have known the reason for the
Coven's destruction had been an outsider who would not have believed a
word of anything his special patient may have told him.
But one last visit wouldn't hurt. She would visit the doctor and then
deliver Rebecca's warning and her findings and recommendations to the
Council. Hopefully, tomorrow would dawn without a trace of the faceless
disturbance her duties were forcing her to investigate so assiduously.
