The Wicked: A Love Story

Eight

Reunion

Love one another with burning

-The Book of the Law

It was that morning sun that was so gold it was white, and the fields were white with snow covered wheat and snow covered grass. Or maybe this white was the color of the vegetation, for it wasn’t cold at all, and a high pure voice was singing:

I like to rise when the sun she rises,
early in the morning
And I like to hear them small birds singing,
Merrily upon their laylums
And hurrah for the life of a country boy,
And to ramble in the new mowed hay.

Seth looked for the source of the voice, and he was approaching a girl, or a woman. It seemed that when he was trying to distinguish if she was young or old then there were, distinctly, two of them, a young laughing girl, and a doting mother, but as he settled on it not mattering there was only one woman, and she was wrapped in white and crowned in white and white hung about her neck, and all the white was of wheat and flowers and snowflakes. Her eyes were wide and deep like chunks of amber and her skin was like his, not dark, not light, neither black nor white.

Beside her, though, was a man not nearly as indescribable. He sang with her:

“In spring we sow at the harvest mow
And that is how the seasons round they go
but of all the times choose I may
I'd be rambling through the new mowed hay.”

“Seth!” he called, and now that Seth had spent some time with the Strausses he saw that this tall man, more like a boy than like the sad man he had seemed, had Kris Strauss’s coloring, Peter Keller’s build and somewhat sharp features, but above all and despite his darkness, Jim Strauss’s wavy hair and movie star looks.

“Nathan,” Seth said, and turning to the woman, “Lady. What happened? Am I dead? I’m not ready to be dead.”

Nathan grabbed Seth’s shoulders.

“You fainted, buddy! But you’ve got work to do.”

“You do,” the Lady said.

But now she was surrounded by others, bright and burning and some dark and burning, and she said, “You fainted in our place, so close to the borders of things.”

“Does this… does this mean anything?”

“It means you are Aos Si,” one of them spoke. “Like us. You are about to wake now.”

“Should I say anything?” Seth asked. “Are there any messages?”

The others looked at Nathan Strauss and he said, “At this moment no. The last thing they need is me sending messages. For now the message is you. Just love them.”

“He’ll be fine,” Seth heard Lewis saying as he came back into consciousness. His head did not hurt. He felt, really, as if he’d been asleep. Jim was sitting on the pew, and Seth was laid out on the pew beside him, and as he turned on his side and then tried to sit up, he saw that the church was empty.

“What happened?” Seth asked.

“You fell,” Jim said, quietly. “You passed out.”

“Where is everyone?.” Seth whispered.

“Oh, they’re gone,” Lewis replied, not quiet at all, and apparently quite able to hear Seth.

“Father Jefferson left me the keys when he heard the name Dunharrow. Apparently they regard this, sort of, as our church. Extraordinary!” Lewis said, but in a different voice, bending over to look at something.

When Lewis did not elaborate, Seth got up and, not without genuflecting, moved up the flagstone aisle, and then turned past the altar to where Lewis was standing. It was in the corner of the church beneath the altar of the Blessed Virgin. Mary was to the right of them and they were near the door that led out to the little portico on the northeast of the church when Lewis murmured, “The Golden Lantern.”

“But it is the Golden Lantern,” Loreal insisted.

It had a brassy holder and hook, but the majority of the lantern was of glittering stain glass, and the base of it transparent so that golden light burned clear from the bottom, filling the rest of the lantern with rosy color. It stood on a table beneath the open right hand of the Virgin, and Loreal looked behind them and said, “And yes, there it is.”

When Seth looked back, he saw, fairly new, a wide, round, glass baptismal font and, beside it on a table was a heavy glass dome that must have been used to cover it. A little futuristic, Seth thought, for such an old church, but good none the less, nothing like the old stone baptismal font across from it, carved with figures and Loreal said, looking from the glass one, to the stone one, “The Glass Orb, and the Stone Bowl.”

“And lastly,” Lewis said, looking to the communion cup which was set up on a dais in a display case near the back, “the Silver Chalice.”

Seth looked to Jim, but Jim said, “I don’t know. This seems like your business.”

“They are the Four Treasures of the Four Castles,” Loreal explained. “It’s on a chart that came from Grandma. It’s the way the witch clans of old traced their circles and did their rites. The way Wiccans have four watchtowers.”

` “Only the Castles are real,” Lewis said, “and so are the treasures.”

“But this is a church,” Jim said.

“Built by our uncle,” Lewis looked about.

“See…. Over there, in that window.”

“A saint. Ah,” Jim shrugged, “I don’t really read the Bible like I should. Or at all, really.”

“Saint John the Baptist,” Lewis said. “After a fashion. But no, it is he Lord of the Wild. And there, that is the White Lady, the one some called Arianrhod, dressed as Saint Solange. And there is the Lady of the Waves, she who is called La Sirene and Yamaya, but is also Aphrodite or Don, as Saint Mary Magdalene. They are all here, disguised in the walls and the carvings.”

Lewis sighed. “Of course. Augustus would never give a damn about building a church that’s just a church. He is a Catholic like the rest of the family. It is the outer form of the inner worship, and even Augustus worships as a witch. He didn’t build this church for the poor Black Catholics of Lassador to worship. That was accidental. He built this,” Lewis gasped, looked around, seeing in all of the paintings something wildly different than he had seen before, seeing the stations of the Cross a mild interruption to what Augustus was trying to do.

“He built this as a witch’s temple.”

“You say it like you admire him,” Seth accused.

“I do admire him,” Lewis said. “Who could do less? I don’t care for him as a person and I certainly won’t let him oppose me. But admire him.” Lewis sighed, grinning and looking around. Oh, yes,”

“What we did in Chicago was phenomenal, the lines of power leading from all over, converging under Saint Jerome’s. But Saint Jerome’s in itself was not our making. The chamber was, and the chamber was great, and it is a mighty work. But this, this was what the witches of old in Africa and Spain and England did. This is what the people of the old faith did with their half memories, carving green men and goddesses into cathedrals, raising up Chartres in France on the sight of a druid temple, placing the labyrinth on the floor when men had forgotten what the labyrinth meant. But in America? What witch has done this in America? Built a witch temple and had it blessed by the Church of Rome? Put in daily use for over a century?

“When everyone else was gone, this must have been the place where the witches of the area gathered for their own worship, the way we only dreamed of doing at Saint Jerome’s. Amazing.”

Chris watched Lewis, who was shaking his head in wonder

“Well, I’ll bet,” Lewis continued, “that there is some line of power which connects this church to Saint Jerome, and I wonder, if we follow the lines here, what else will we find?

“What else will we find, what else will we find?” Lewis stood up tapping his chin, and Chris turned to Jim and said, apologetically, “He gets like this sometimes.”

“All the time,” Seth said.