Serpent Mage Read online

  “You’ve talked to people who knew him?”

  “It’s part of the project. I know a composer named Edgar Moffat. He orchestrated Waltiri’s movie scores and acted as his assistant in the fifties. He’s in Burbank now working on the score for a David Lean film. You’ll have to meet him. I’ve interviewed him several times in the last few months. He was the one who told me about the Waltiri estate. He didn’t know your name, but he had heard rumors.”

  “Did he say anything about David Clarkham?” Michael asked.

  “That was all before his time, I think. He’s only fifty-three.”

  “Why are you studying music?”

  “I’m a composer,” she said. “I’ve been writing music since I was a teenager. And you?”

  Michael smiled. “I’m a poet,” he said. “I’ve been writing poetry since...for a long time.”

  Kristine’s expression became faintly jaded. “Anything published?”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t even been writing much lately. Lots of things to think about, lots of work to do.”

  “Poetry and music,” she said thoughtfully. “They’re not supposed to be that far apart. Do you think they are?”

  How could he answer without making her think he was either pretentious or crazy? What he had learned in the Realm—that all arts were intimately related, that beneath each form lay a foundation that could be directed and shaped to yield a song of power—was not something a student of music at UCLA was likely to understand. “They’re very close,” he said.

  “I’ve never been word-oriented,” Kristine said. “It was a struggle just to get through English classes and learn how to write a clear sentence.”

  “I don’t know much about music,” Michael said. “Two sides of a coin.” That, he thought, might be a bit presumptuous.

  Kristine watched him intently, brow slightly furrowed. “I think the music department has a place for Waltiri’s papers,” she said. “If the estate agrees, we help you get them organized. Preserve them. Archival folders and boxes, de-acidify the papers... Maybe that would speed up finding the manuscript.”

  Such a move could also leave him without a job, or feather-bedding on the estate payroll after he was no longer needed. “I’ll consider it,” he said. Was that what Waltiri would have wanted?

  Kristine pushed her plate away decisively and attracted the waitress’s attention with a raised hand, then asked for the check.

  “My treat,” she said. Michael did not protest.

  “When can we talk again?” she asked. “You can meet with Moffat at Paramount... Tour the library, the music department. The department head could explain how we take care of collections...”

  “I make my own schedule,” Michael said. “Anytime.”

  She put down a generous tip and stood with check in hand. He accompanied her to the cash register and then outside. She said, with a hint of regret, that she had to return to the campus. Michael’s car was in the opposite direction. For a moment, he contemplated walking with her anyway but decided not to be too demonstrative.

  “It was a pleasure having lunch with you,” Michael said. She cocked her head to one side and squinted at him.

  “You are really very strange, you know,” she said. “Something about you...” She shrugged. “Never mind. Give me a call if you find anything. Or just want to talk music, poetry, whatever.”

  She walked off toward the campus, and Michael strolled toward his car. On a hunch, he stopped off in Vogue Records and asked a dark-haired, slender male clerk with a prominent hooked nose if there were any recordings available of music by Arno Waltiri.

  “Just the RCA collection,” the clerk answered, eyes languid. “You have that already, don’t you? Charles Gerhardt conducting?”

  Michael said he didn’t. The clerk emerged from behind the front counter and took him to the extensive movie soundtracks section and found the compact disk for him. Michael scanned the contents: selections from Ashenden, The Man Who Would Be King, Warbirds of Mindanao and Call It Sleep.

  “Have you ever heard of a recording of the Infinity Concerto?” he asked.

  “We can look it up in Schwann, but no, I haven’t heard of it.”

  A search through the thick paperback Schwann catalog revealed that the RCA collection was the only Waltiri album currently available. Michael thanked the clerk and purchased it.

  On the way home, he stopped at a stationery store and bought a blank book. He felt it was time to start working on his poetry again, if only to build up his self-confidence and put some conviction in his voice the next time he confessed what he was.

  In the car, he removed the plastic wrapping from the book, wrote his name on the flyleaf, and then shuffled through the pages, as he always did when starting a notebook.

  In the middle of the book, centered on an otherwise unmarked page, were the carefully typeset words:

  Give it up. Finding it won’t do anybody any good.

  His hairs bristled. Michael felt the message’s raised ink with one finger and then slowly closed the book.

  Chapter Four

  Michael’s father came to the house the next day, a Saturday, ostensibly to finish looking over the woodwork and foundations and make sure everything was in order. He arrived at two in the afternoon. Michael followed him as he made a circuit of the outside of the house, peering into the crawl space vents.

  “Your mother’s worried about you,” John said, using a small ball peen hammer to sound out the wood immediately within a vent opening. He crawled halfway into the vent, his voice echoing. “She thinks this job might not be all that healthy for you.”

  “I’m fine,” Michael said.

  John emerged and pulled cobwebs from his hair. “Seems sound enough on a cursory look. Well, I’m worried about you, too. I haven’t the slightest idea where you were those five years, but I’m wondering how much you grew up during that time. What you experienced.”

  “A fair amount,” Michael said. His father regarded him steadily and got to his feet.

  “It’s funny, the way your mother won’t talk. And I suppose I’m funny, not wanting to hear unless she listens, too. She hasn’t even hinted that she’s curious...to you, I mean?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “Wasn’t something like William Burroughs, was it?”

  “Nothing to do with dope.”

  His father’s face reddened at Michael’s light tone. “Dammit, don’t patronize... me or anybody.”

  Michael shook his head. “I don’t think you’d believe me.”

  “I’m not a dullard. I have known lifestyles other than this.” He waved his hand around the neighborhood. “Hell, I’ve even tried dope.”

  Michael looked down at the grass.

  “Something you’re ashamed of? Something...sexual?”

  “Jesus,” Michael said, shaking his head and chuckling. “I did not run off to San Francisco and...whatever. You can reassure Mom about that.” He hated the edge of whine that entered his voice just then.

  “We didn’t think you had. Believe it or not, we know you pretty well. Not so well you can’t surprise us, but well enough to believe you didn’t do anything self-destructive. We just think it might not be good for you to stay cooped up in this house all day, going through old papers.”

  “I’ve been getting out.” He told John about the request from UCLA and pointedly mentioned Kristine. “I also take long walks.”

  Michael led him through the back porch into the house. John inspected the water heater.

  “Looks like the tank’s okay, but I’d like to drain it and remove the sediment, see if it’s going to rust out soon.” John paused and rapped his knuckle on the paneling covering a broad bare space between the heater cabinet and the pantry door.

  So what could Michael ultimately tell his father—that he didn’t think normal life was going to prevail, that something indefinitely momentous approached this world? .

  “Any problems elsewhere?”

  “I don
’t think so,” Michael said. “I can call in maintenance people if I have to.”

  “Come on, give your old Dad a chance to feel needed. Is there any better carpenter in Southern California?”

  “No,” Michael said, grinning.

  The door chimes rang. Michael loped to the front door and opened it to find Robert Dopso shifting restlessly from leg to leg on the porch. “Hi,” Dopso said, stretching out his hand. “I saw you checking out the foundations. Thought I’d see if you needed some extra kibitzing.”

  Michael grinned. Three would make the conversation less awkward. “Sure. My father’s here. We’re looking at the service porch now. Come on in.”

  “Saturday boredom, you know,” Dopso said. “Bachelor’s lament.”

  Michael introduced them. “Robert grew up here,” he told his father. “He and his mother knew Arno and Golda well.”

  “Speaking of Mom, she’s invited you over for dinner tonight,” Dopso said. “Another reason I came over.”

  John was still inspecting the wall. “Is there a closet or something on the other side?” he asked. The rap of his knuckles on the paneling made a hollow echo.

  “No,” Michael said.

  “Odd to find an unused space this big.” John looked down at the floor and kneeled. His finger followed a thin arc-shaped scrape in the linoleum just beyond the edge of the paneling. “Used to be a door here. I don’t think Arno needed to hide skeletons...do you?”

  Michael frowned and shook his head. Dopso bent down and ran his own finger over the join.

  “I don’t remember any closet here.”

  “Still, there was a closet or something, and now it’s sealed up.” There was a twinkle in John’s eye. He winked at Dopso. “Would Arno take it amiss if we investigated someday, when you have time? Probably find nothing but spider webs...”

  “Probably,” Michael said. He didn’t want his father or Dopso involved, somehow. The discovery was both exciting and unnerving.

  “Come on,” John said, walking into the kitchen. “Where’s your sense of adventure? An old house, a mysterious space... Maybe Arno hid his treasure in there.”

  “Maybe,” Michael said.

  “That’d be interesting,” Dopso said. “Something to look forward to in a dull neighborhood. Not that it’s always been so dull.” His glance at Michael seemed to be an attempt to convey some silent message. Michael hadn’t the slightest idea what Dopso was hinting at.

  After a few more spot checks, they stood in the foyer. John firmly invited him to dinner the next evening. “Let your mother lay out a feast for us. It’s in her nature to worry, Michael.”

  “I know,” Michael said, still uneasy. “Dinner tonight at Robert’s, and tomorrow night with you and Mom. No lack of hospitality.”

  “Good. Six o’clock? And let me know when you want to pry loose some paneling.”

  After Dopso and his father had left, Michael returned to the service porch. He tapped the paneling, idly wondering whether he should feel for secret levers or buttons. It seemed to be nailed tight.

  He found a flashlight and went outside to peer into the crawl space again. Prying out the vent his father had replaced, he shined the light under the house and followed the contours of beams, braces, wiring and pipes. The light fell against a dark gray wall of concrete approximately under the service porch.

  A basement.

  Wiping his hands on his pants legs, Michael went to the garage and searched through a chest of. He found a pry bar and a claw hammer and carried them through the back door, setting them on the floor of the service porch.

  When had the basement been sealed? He didn’t remember any doorway when he had been a frequent visitor to the Waltiri house, almost six years ago, Earth time.

  But he hadn’t been in the service porch often, either.

  Could the door have been sealed during the five years he was away, after Golda’s death? Or had Waltiri sealed it himself?

  Here was his chance, he thought. He knew there was something unusual in the basement. When a man—or a mage—like Waltiri sealed a doorway off, there had to be good reason. At any rate, Michael could have his father witness the opening, see whatever there was to see, and perhaps then be prepared for the entire story...

  But if the basement held something dangerous, then Michael did not want his father present. John could not throw a shadow or use any other tricks to escape.

  He ran his hand over the panel again, feeling it carefully not for secret latches but to gather some sensation, a clue. He concentrated on what lay behind, closing his eyes and pressing his palm flat against the wood.

  Nothing.

  But then, the Crane Women had not gifted him with the boon of prescience or second sight. No guiding voices gave him clues, ambiguous or otherwise.

  Taking pry bar in hand, he removed the trim from the panel edge, cringing at the squeak of nails pulled from wood. With the strips removed, he inserted the bar in the gap between panel and wall frame and shoved.

  The panel held; he succeeded only in bruising his palms. He tried again, with no better result, and moved the bar to another vantage.

  After several minutes of fruitless effort, he noticed that the panel wobbled in its seat and that the nails holding it fast had poked their heads a fraction of an inch above the surface. With the claw hammer, he removed one of the upper corner nails and put the bar there, shoving against it with all his might. For this he was rewarded with a groan of wood and a half inch of give, as well as several more nail heads ready for the claw.

  In ten minutes, he had loosened the panel sufficiently to grip it with both hands. He pulled it suddenly free and fell back against the washing machine. Propping the heavy three-quarter-inch plywood panel in the kitchen doorway, he surveyed what was revealed: a door, pristine white, like virtually every other interior door in the house, with a brass knob instead of crystal and a perfectly innocent air.

  There was a lock beneath the knob, and in the lock, a key.

  Michael reached out and twisted the key and then the knob, and the door opened smoothly inward, revealing darkness. Dry, stale air wafted out, tangy with dust. A sweet, flowery fragrance, somehow familiar, overlaid an odor richer and less easily described. He pocketed the key.

  On the right wall he found a black push-button switch. He pushed the top button, and at the base of a steep flight of stairs, a bare, clear bulb cast a dour yellow glow.

  Michael walked down the first flight, turned the corner, and peered into the half lit gloom below. At the end of a second flight of steps, at a right angle to the first, lay a cubicle barely four yards on a side, with a low roof. The cubicle was filled with boxes, some of them covered by a dark fabric tarp. To his right, cramped close to the steps, sat a large black armoire. Michael wondered how such a bulky piece of furniture could have been brought into the basement.

  He descended the four final steps, his shadow falling huge across the boxes. The light hung in such a position that he could see almost nothing in front of him; his shadow obscured anything he approached.

  He turned toward the armoire and opened one door. The interior, barely visible, was filled with small boxes stuffed with papers. He pulled out a drawer and found more papers: envelopes, packets tied with string, a small wooden cigar box stuffed full with what appeared to be letters. A small wine rack with three dusty bottles had been jammed in the lower corner.

  Michael swore under his breath and ascended the stairs to get a flashlight. Returning, he played the beam over the contents of the armoire, seeing that most of the papers were letters, and most of the letters were in German. Curious, he removed a bottle from the rack and read the label, with some difficulty deciphering the fraktur lettering.

  Doppelsonnenuhr

  Feinste Geistenbeerenauslese

  1921

  The label carried a sundial, the gnomon casting two shadows. Beneath the lettering was a rose and a cluster of red grapes. He replaced the bottle carefully.

  On an upper shelf abov
e the drawers, he spotted a black loose-leaf notebook, its spine rippled. The heavy sweet odor...

  (And he remembered what that fragrance reminded him of—himself, whenever he had touched water in the Realm—the odor of the bearer of a song of power.)

  ...intensified as he opened the notebook. The paper within seemed to squirm under the flashlight beam, shimmering like a film of oil on water, the writing surrounded by warped dimples of oily red, purple and green.

  It was a music manuscript. Holding his finger under the title on the first page, he was able to still the play of light enough to read:

  Das Unendlichkeit Konzert

  Opus 45

  von Arno Waltiri

  Each turned page exuded a stronger, more clearly defined perfume, until Michael could stand no more. The cubicle seemed to close down around him, oppressing him with the mixed smells of sweet rain, decaying flowers, dust, and endless abandonment. He closed the notebook and shook his head, snorting.

  He doubted the notebook and the manuscript within had had these peculiar qualities when the music was first penned. Since that time, something had altered the very paper on which the concerto had been written.

  He shuddered and replaced the manuscript, closing the armoire doors.

  In the clear April afternoon light in the back yard, Michael squatted on the grass and picked at a few blades, face crossed with intense thought.

  Everything was laid out before him; he had only to choose what to investigate first. Which gate to take.

  He did not have the luxury of not choosing.

  Chapter Five

  Robert invited Michael in and introduced his mother. Mrs. Dopso was in her mid-sixties, sandy hair frosted with gray, frame small and delicate. “I’m so glad we’re finally getting a chance to meet!” she enthused, fluttering one hand as if shooing away moths. One of her blue eyes canted upward with perpetual concern, and a blissful smile lighted on her face frequently as she spoke.

  They sat down to dinner within minutes of six o’clock. Shadows lay deep in the old house, which was much smaller than the Waltiri home. Robert explained that his mother’s favorite hobby was saving electricity. She lighted candles in brass holders on the table, her expression grave as she applied match to wick, then grateful as the flame grew.