Serpent Mage Page 5

  “I’d rather let others have the electricity, those who need it more,” she said. “Improve our country’s productivity, pump it into big factories.”

  “She’s a bit hazy on how the power net operates,” Robert explained.

  “Perhaps, perhaps,” Mrs. Dopso said lightly. “I’m just so pleased to have Michael as a guest. We have so much to talk about.”

  “Perhaps not all at once,” Robert suggested.

  “Have you ever heard such a son?” She hurried into the kitchen, hands twisting slowly back and forth at her sides, and returned with a bowl full of steamed vegetables. Next came a cheese and tuna casserole, followed by a plate heaped high with uniformly sliced bread of virginal whiteness. “It’s not a feast,” she said. “It’s just food, but the talk is more important than the dinner.”

  “Mother knows you’re the caretaker for the Waltiri estate.” Robert scooped vegetables onto his plate. He handed the casserole to Michael, who took a generous portion. Thanks to his upbringing—and a few months of deprivation—he had nothing against plain food.

  “If we start talking now, we won’t finish eating until midnight, and it will all be cold,” Mrs. Dopso said. “So we will...um...skirt around the main topic and just fill our tummies. Then we’ll...yes.” She smiled and placed a modest forkful of casserole into her mouth as an example.

  They exchanged only light pleasantries until the meal was finished. Michael felt slightly apprehensive. Mrs. Dopso and her son were being politely mysterious, and that bothered him; they behaved as if they were privy to knowledge that he might find useful.

  Robert cleared the table and brought out a bottle of wine. Mrs. Dopso bit her lower lip as he lifted and cradled the bottle for Michael’s inspection.

  The label was similar to that on the bottle he had found in the newly opened cellar. The double-shadowed sundial, the rose and the red grapes, the fraktur lettering.

  “This is our last bottle. We thought we would open it tonight,” Robert said. “Mr. Waltiri gave it as a gift to my father almost fifty years ago. You might have heard of the gentleman who provided it to Mr. Waltiri.”

  Michael raised an eyebrow.

  “His name was David Clarkham. He was a friend of Mr. Waltiri’s, although I gather they had a falling out before I was born.”

  “Yes, dear, a year or two before you were born,” Mrs. Dopso said.

  “My father met Mr. Clarkham several times and was very impressed by him. Mr. Clarkham was a connoisseur of wine. He tended to talk about unusual vintages, German wines mostly. Many of them my father had never heard of, and he was himself quite a connoisseur.”

  “But all this,” said Mrs. Dopso, “is neither here nor there.”

  “No. Father last drank one of these bottles fifteen years ago, and judged it quite good, if unusual.”

  “Do you remember what he said?” Mrs. Dopso asked.

  “Yes, ‘A bit otherworldly, with a most unusual finish.’”

  They seemed to expect a reaction from Michael. “I found several bottles like that today,” he said.

  “Good! Then this isn’t the last. Notice there’s no clue as to what kind of wine it is. Red, obviously—but what variety of grapes?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “What we’re leading up to is that we’re curious about that house. We’ve lived next to it for a very long time.”

  “One morning, very early,” Mrs. Dopso said, her face warmly radiant in the candlelight, “I got out of bed and looked over the cinder block wall. It was foggy, and I wasn’t sure I saw things properly. My husband was on a business trip, so I called out to Robert—poor, sleepy child—to confirm or deny.”

  “I confirmed,” Robert said. “I was eight.”

  “The house was absolutely covered with birds,” Mrs. Dopso said breathlessly. “Large dark birds with red breasts and wing-tips. Blackbirds and robins the size of crows.”

  “She means, with the characteristics of blackbirds and robins, but crow-sized.”

  “And sparrows. And other birds I recognized. They blanketed the roof, and they lined up along the wall. All silent.”

  “Hitchcock, you know,” Robert said with a grin. “Scared the daylights out of me.”

  “And when the fog lifted, they were gone. But that’s not all. Sometimes we’d see Mr. Waltiri and Golda—dear Golda—leave the house in their car, the predecessor of the one you drive now—funny-looking thing—and after they had gone, when the house must have been empty—“

  “We’d hear someone playing the piano,” Robert said, equally breathless now, leaning forward.

  “Playing it beautifully, just lovely music.”

  Robert uncorked the bottle and poured the wine into crystal glasses. Michael sipped the deep reddish-amber liquid. He had never tasted anything like it. It was totally outside his experience of wines, which admittedly was not broad. The mellow, complex finish lingered long moments after he swallowed, succession upon succession of flavors revealing themselves on his tongue. The flavors stopped suddenly, leaving only a clean blankness. He took another sip. Mrs. Dopso closed her eyes and did the same.

  “As wonderful as I remember it,” she commented. “To my dear husband.” They toasted the man whose name Michael did not know.

  “I think perhaps the only person who was not aware that something was going on,” Mrs. Dopso said, “was Golda. Arno protected her fiercely. Nothing would happen to dear Golda while he was around. But you know...after he departed, died, I mean, things became too much for her. A strain. She must have had her suspicions over the years. How could one not?” Mrs. Dopso sipped again and smiled beatifically. “We did not volunteer to tell her, because while we knew something was odd, we couldn’t be sure... Other than the birds.”

  “Now that you’re living there,” Robert said, “what do you think?”

  Michael stared into his glass and swirled the liquid reflectively. “Pretty quiet now,” he said.

  “Do you play the piano?” Mrs. Dopso asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Someone does,” she said dramatically. “We’ve heard it after you’ve driven away. And the music is not quite so lovely now. It’s angry, I would say. Robert?”

  “Heavy-handed, skilled but...pounding,” Robert said. “I’m not sure I’d call it angry. Powerful perhaps.”

  Despite himself, Michael shivered, and his arm-hairs stood on end. “I haven’t heard any music,” he said, putting the glass down.

  “It’s so familiar to us,” Mrs. Dopso said, “over all these years. We wondered if Mr. Waltiri—Arno—or perhaps even Golda—had a relative who stayed with them.”

  “An old hunchbacked cousin,” Robert suggested with a sly grin.

  “No,” Michael said, smiling broadly. “I’m the only one living there.”

  “Bring out the tape recorder, Robert,” Mrs. Dopso instructed. Robert left the dining room and returned with an old Ampex reel-to-reel deck, the tape already looped and ready to play. He set it on an unused dining chair near the wall outlet and plugged it in. Then he turned it on and stood back.

  Michael heard a piano playing. The sound was fuzzy and distant, but the music was indeed powerful, pounding. There was no melody, as such.

  “When did you record this?” Michael asked.

  “Yesterday,” Robert said.

  Michael raised a bushy red eyebrow.

  “We’re very curious,” Mrs. Dopso said. “It’s something of a mystery, don’t you agree?”

  Michael nodded, the dinner suddenly heavy in his stomach. “I can’t tell you what’s happening. I just don’t know.”

  “The house is haunted by a spirit that loves music,” said Mrs. Dopso with a firm nod, her expression again beatific. “How very appropriate. For Arno’s house, I mean.” She leaned forward, staring at Michael as if confiding or extending a conspiracy. “I do not think you’re in danger in that house, young man.” She took a deep breath. “But if you should find out more, do let us know?”

 
She went to bed shortly thereafter. Robert explained, chuckling, that his mother “Rises with the birds. She thought you’d like to... hear. Goal-oriented, you know. Having accomplished her goal, she goes to bed. Pardon our intruding.”

  “No intrusion,” Michael said. “Has anybody complained?”

  “We aren’t complaining; please don’t think that. And no, nobody else has commented.”

  “If you hear it again, will you record it for me again?”

  “Of course,” Robert said. They shook hands at the door, but Robert escorted Michael to the sidewalk anyway. Dusk hung deep blue above the rustling black outlines of the neighborhood trees. “Thanks for speaking with my mother. She won’t pester me so much now.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Michael returned to the Waltiri house. He stood by the silent grand piano, tapping the rich black surface of the lid. “Arno?” he asked softly, the name again raising the hairs on his neck and arms.

  No answer.

  He hadn’t expected one. Not yet.

  A shaft of late afternoon sunlight warmed the hardwood floor beneath his feet. He sat in Waltiri’s music library, the old black phone in his lap, surrounded by tapes and records and books, and dialed Kristine Pendeers’ home number. A man answered on the third ring, his voice deep and indistinct. Michael asked to speak to Kristine. “Who’s this?” the man asked.

  “My name is Michael. She’ll know me.”

  “She isn’t here right now...Wait. She’s at the door. Hold on.” In the background, Michael heard Kristine and the man talking. There seemed to be a disagreement between them. The man’s hand made squelching sounds on the mouthpiece. She finally came on the line, breathless.

  “I’ve found what you’re looking for,” Michael said.

  “I was just coming up the steps...to our house. Wait a minute. I’m winded. I heard the phone. Tommy got it before I...I could. You’ve found what...45?”

  “I just opened a sealed basement door and found it among other papers below the house.” He realized he didn’t sound particularly happy about the discovery. Why was he calling at all? Perhaps to talk with her again, meet with her. Using the discovery as an excuse.

  “That’s wonderful. It really is. When can I take a look at it?”

  He gingerly ran his fingers over the discolored, shimmering manuscript on Waltiri’s desk. “It’s not in very good shape. We’ll need to copy it. Maybe a copy machine will work, and maybe not.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “You’ll have to see it.” Dangerous, dangerous! Simply staring at the manuscript was enough to bend a person’s view of reality.

  “Can you bring it here, or do I come over there?” She seemed to catch on that he was playing a game, and she didn’t sound comfortable.

  “I think you’d better come over here,” Michael said. “Not tonight. I’ll be busy. Tomorrow. In the morning, perhaps?”

  “I’ll have to be there early. About seven-thirty.”

  “Fine. I’ll expect you.”

  “You sound strange, Michael.”

  “I have a lot to do between now and then. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” There was an awkward moment of silence and then simultaneous good-byes. He replaced the receiver and returned the phone to its niche on a bookcase. Then he held the manuscript up to his nose and smelled it. The sweet fragrance this time smelled fainter, like dried fruit.

  Any world is just a song of addings and takings away... The difference between the Realm and your home, that’s just the difference between one song and another... So Eleuth had informed him in the Realm.

  Was it possible, then, to create a song—a piece of music —that actively contradicted the song of a world and subtly altered the world?

  He wished he knew how to play the piano and was better at reading music. It was possible he had actually heard some of the music contained in the manuscript, when Clarkham’s house and the replica of Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome had collapsed in the Realm, but he couldn’t remember what it sounded like now. The tune was elusive and the orchestration had faded from memory

  He slipped the manuscript into a manila envelope and placed it in Waltiri’s safe. After memorizing the safe’s combination, written in Golda’s hand on a piece of masking tape attached to the door, he removed the tape, burned it in a metal cup on the desk, and shut the door. Why the precautions were important, he wasn’t sure.

  (Perhaps it wasn’t Arno—in any form—playing the piano when the house was empty...)

  He had a lot to do this evening. He would not be back until early the next morning.

  At dusk, as the moon-colored streetlights switched on and a breeze sighed through the green leaves on the maples, Michael stood before David Clarkham’s house. The air felt brisk and alive, playful.

  He had not come to this place since his return from the Realm. The house was in worse shape than when he had last seen it. The lawn had gone to seed, a definite contrast to the green, well-kept grounds on both sides. Unruly hedges thrust themselves over the driveway of parallel concrete strips, branches like arms reaching out for the cracked white stucco walls. A FOR SALE sign still leaned at an awkward angle on the front lawn; either the realtors handling the property were not pushing it or the buyers were not enthusiastic, or the sign was a sham. There was no phone number attached, and Michael had never heard of the firm before: Hamilton Realty.

  He closed his eyes and found the region nestled between his thoughts that controlled evisa and casting a shadow. It was not difficult to find, and the act was as easy on Earth as it had been in the Realm.

  He left an unmoving and slowly fading decoy of himself by the curb. Anybody watching would soon lose interest and turn away; and if they didn’t turn away, then the image would smoothly disappear among the shadows of the trees, and they would be none the wiser.

  Michael approached the front porch with pry bar in hand. Best to begin at the beginning.

  In four minutes, he had the door open. The house radiated something unpleasant; more than just unkempt, it was distasteful, as if the part of the world it occupied had been ill-used and now brooded resentfully. Michael didn’t like the sensation, and his dislike went beyond mere association with the last time he had entered Clarkham’s house.

  He switched on his flashlight and closed the door to a crack behind him. The hallway before the living room stretched before him, dusty and quiet; the living room itself, empty and drained and faintly melancholy. Square samples of the streetlight across the way illuminated the back wall.

  Despite the unpleasant sensations, there was nothing magical or supernatural about the place. Michael could feel no hidden power or lurking residue. He walked down the hall and checked the ground floor rooms sequentially, shining his flashlight into each. Dusty floors; emptiness. He returned to the middle hallway and played the beam up the flight of stairs to the second floor. The carpeted stair steps exuded thin puffs of dust at each footfall.

  At the head of the stairs, a hallway led past the three second-floor rooms, ending at the bathroom door. Clarkham’s house in the pleasure dome had been laid out in just such a fashion; no surprise. Michael peered into the first bedroom. Nothing. The second bedroom was broad and empty, its windows draped with sun-tattered expanses of old cloth slung over bent curtain rods. Cupboards and file drawers covered the far wall, reminding Michael of a morgue. The cupboards and file drawers contained more emptiness.

  “Nothing here,” he said in a soft whisper. He was not afraid, not even particularly wary, but he knew that the preternatural sensibilities instilled in him by the Crane Women had brought him here for a reason and not just to satisfy old curiosities.

  A thin layer of dust dulled the dark wood of the floor in the final bedroom. He took two steps into the room and played the beam back and forth across the dust. Footprints interrupted the grayness in the middle of the floor. The prints led to the hallway and passed beneath his feet, where they had been erased by his own shuffling. He knelt
and examined them more carefully. The dust around the footprints was undisturbed. Only one pair of feet—wearing moccasins or sandals, since the prints were unbroken by an arch—had made the prints, and the owner had moved without hesitation, beginning his journey (his because the feet were large and broad) in the middle of the room

  Michael touched the nearest complete print. There was something odd about the amount of dust disturbed. He walked beside the prints, noticing that near the center of the room, where they began, they were quite clear. Toward the end of the trail they became less distinct, disturbing the dust only slightly, as if the person had weighed much less.

  He pointed the beam at the air above the floor where the prints began and saw nothing unusual. Felt nothing unusual. The house was otherwise undisturbed and normal. The sensation of earthly reality was seamless.

  Still, Michael knew beyond any doubt that Clarkham’s house had once again become a gate.

  The Tippett Residential Hotel appeared regal and desolate and out of place against the ragtag architecture of the Strip. Its sad, sooted, broken windows and the trash chute attached to its face gave it a painful air, as if it were a victim of patchwork surgery, of half hearted and ill-guided attempts to bring it back to life.

  Through the chain link, Michael saw that the main entrance had been securely boarded with big sheets of blue-painted plywood. Yet the former owner—if that was what the raggedy man was—had hinted that a few people still managed to get into the building, however foolishly. There had to be other ways inside.

  He had looped the short pry bar onto his belt, hanging it down inside his pants. A palm-sized flashlight rested in his jacket pocket.

  On the building’s west side, a broad patio and empty, leaf-strewn swimming pool were visible through the trees and shrubs pressed against the fence. Steps rose from the patio level to a terrace on the south side, overlooking the city. All this was dimly illuminated by streetlights along Sunset, and the general sky-glow reflected from the broken cumulus clouds above the city.