The Old

Part Eight

Enter Seth

He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone to stone.

-The Red Book

The first time he had met Lewis was after his parents died, when he had come here, to Suzanne’s house. Old Suzanne was a relative. This was all he knew, and Owen and Lewis were visiting at the time.

“He will come with us,” Owen said, and Suzanne had not declined.

Seth had been living in that house for a few weeks. He had met Eve and her father and the young Loreal. He had even met Augustus. That side of the family was odd to him. Then with a sort of urbane sophistication, ease and laughter, the other Dunharrows did not know, Owen had swept in with his his nephew Lewis.

Referring to Owen’s penchant for city life, Suzanne said, “I had always thought a witch should be close to the land.”

“Suzanne,” Owen reminded her, “the land is everywhere. Earth Water, Air and Sky are in the city as much as the country.

That had been the end of it, and the agreement had been that Seth would go back to the city. This farm house, Seth had always found stifling, the trees the meadows, the largeness of the house, the old town were not open to him but odd and ghostly, and the moment they had driven away, although they were driving over country roads, Seth already felt like they were coming back into the city.

“You should be with us,” Lewis had said. “We’re closer kin anyway.”

While they were driving a police car had stopped them.

Owen had sighed and rolled down the window while the patrol man, smacking his gum and hiding his eyes behind aviator glasses said, “Would you step out of the car?”

“I most certainly will not,” Owen said.

“Are you refusing the request of an officer?”

“I am,” Owen said.

Lewis leaned over toward his uncle and added, “We are.”

“I’m going to have to ask you again to step out of the car. Both of you?”

Had they seen him? Seth wondered. No one seemed to.

“You haven’t even given us a reason,” Lewis said.

“Look,” the officer said, “there was a time when you people knew how to behave.”

“My dear officer,” Owen began, “we are the Dunharrows, and we are behaving the same as we’ve done for two hundred years.”

That’s it,” the officer took his gun out. Seth let out a cry.

“You niggers think you can just come in here and take everything. Don’t talk down to me, Get out the goddamn car.”

“Put the gun in your mouth,” Owen said, simply.

The officer twisted his mouth to say something, but just like that, the gun was in his mouth. He was shoving it firmly down his own throat.

“Undo the safety,” Owen continued, “like a good man. There you go. Now squeeze.”

While the officer watched his own fingers, his body trembled, and now Seth saw his trousers darken with a path of urine.

“Hold it right there,” Owen continued. “Now, for a moment I’m going to let you contemplate how close you are to death, how, at any moment I could command you to end your life, and end it in a most horrifying way. Are you thinking about it? Nod your head if you’re thinking about it.”

The officer’s helmeted head nodded. From behind the aviator glasses trickled tears, and Owen said, “Now take the gun from your mouth.”

The man did, trembling, his arm shaking, the gun almost falling, but it was gripped tightly in his hand and Seth thought that this was Owen’s doing. Even from his seat in the back of the car, the man stank of fear and piss to Seth.

“What do you say,” Owen asked him, “about harassing people on the road for your own amusement? What is the proper thing to say?”

“S-s-s-sorry.”

“Yes,” Owen returned like a grim school master, “sorry indeed. You may go,” Owen told him. “Go. Now.”

As the patrolmen tottered away on unsteady feet toward his car, Owen said, without malice “Watch your step.”

As they had driven toward the city, Seth was exhilarated by this casual display of power and terrified all at the same time. Such almost nonchalant expressions of the Craft were common for Owen and for Lewis as well, understated, almost unamazing, but ever present.

In the night, Sethis not sure if he has fallen asleep or not. Feet move past him. He opens his eyes to see hooves glinting in the moonlight, but there is no moon and by the time he realizes this, the hooves are gone. Cold and aching, he turns on his back, and he has heard on again off again voices.

“There he is.”

“He is there.”

“Let him sleep.”

“So young. So young.”

“It has been a long while since such a one has come to us.”

“The Hunt and the Harvest. The Hunt and the Harvest.”

“You’ve taught meso much, but its just teaching. What of the doing?”

There can be doing,” Lewis said. “There is always doing, but you must give yourself first. They say there are three rituals. The Initiation, where you go out to meet him, where you toss away everything you have, all of your stake in the normal world, and then the offering, where you dedicate yourself, and after these the initiations into the Orders.”

“And you are in the Clan.”

Lewis smiled and showed the bronze disk inscribed with the labyrinth, hanging at his throat.

“I am.”

“Would you teach me?”

“I will teach you. Or someone else. But first you must let the Teaching teach you. First you must give yourself. Before you give yourself to the teaching, you must give yourself to the God.”

Give yourself to the Teaching.

To the Teaching.

Years later, finally here in the November cold, all sound and all dreaming was gone. He was merely cold. The candles burned low, shining dimly on the matte brown bark of the trees.

“I’ll get my death of cold,” he said, and wrapped himself in his cloak, lying back down, still naked, but not on his way to freezing.

“Nothing has happened!”

“No?”

“Why are you…” he began, then, “Lewis, you said I was witch blooded. You said the power was in me, but nothing happens. Not a single spell has come out. I’ve learned a few things A lot of things. But nothing has come.”

Lewis sat on Seth’s bed his legs wide apart.

“Is it because I have not been dedicated?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Lewis said. He was home from college and Seth had missed him, even when he was being enigmatic.

“In a manner of speaking… What do you mean? Why don’t you speak straight?”

“I speak straight most of the time,” Lewis said, “And what I mean here is you have not dedicated to yourself.”

“What?”

“Magic is an act of the will,” Lewis said, “and as of yet, you’ve not the will.”

Seth waited for Lewis to continue, and his cousin said, “You treat your altar like everyone who comes to a church. Begging the Gods to do something, asking, pleaded, hoping, asking, and there is goodness in that, but you must have a will in it. You must learn to call upon those things you desire.”

“If it was that easy, everyone would be a powerful sorcerer.”

“But it is not that easy,” Lewis said. “Very few people have a will, know their will. You must know yours.”

Seth said nothing and, now Lewis said, “Spells are no easy thing. They are what they sound like, a spell, a moment in time, and magic often takes a great deal of time. It is a long haul thing. The spells turn out or they don’t.

They sat silent together and, at last, Lewis said, “You want the story of power thrust upon you. You want to say, I don’t want it. I don’t want it. But, oh, I suppose I’ll take it. It does not work that way, my heart. You have to want it.”

One night Seth stood up and closed the door, locking it behind him. Lewis was surprised by this, but said nothing. Now Seth stood before Lewis and then, with deliberateness, he raised his shirt and placed it on the bed. While Lewis waited to learn what was about to happen, Seth undid his black trousers, and he pulled them down and then, with a swift movement, his small black briefs so that he stood before Lewis naked.

“What are you…?” Lewis began.

“You said it,” Seth said, moving to touch Lewis’s shoulder, to begin to pull up his shirt, to respond to the heat of his body. “You said we must know our power, know our will, and bring it into being. I know it,” Seth said as Lewis lifted his arms so Seth could pull of his shirt. His older cousin brown skinned, smooth chested, stood before him, so that Seth saw his Lewis’s sex rising, stretching out of his trousers, “This is my will.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am almost eighteen,” he said.

When he said it, Lewis felt his penis stiffening even more.

“This is for us,” Seth said.

Lewis allowed Seth to undress him, while he felt his own trousers fall, his cock bob up, thick and hard.

“It’s always for us,” Lewis said, his voice half a whisper.

“Please,” he said, “Kiss me. I’m not a slut, I promise. I’ve never done this before.”

Lewis bent down and kissed him hard, holding Seth’s face, the body thrumming with need. He pulled Seth into his arms, then roughly brought him to the bed. He lay Seth on top of him, and the boy spread across him, kissing him deeply, thrusting his tongue into his mouth. And then Seth moved down, and Lewis’s eyes closed tight and his mouth opened in a silent gasp, as Seth pulled his throbbing cock into his young mouth.

Lewis lifted him to his feet.

“Come on,” he had said, his breath baited, and he had taken Seth out through the kitchen, past the back porch and into the yard of the brick house on Bryn Mawr. He fucked him under the stars.

“Don’t hold back,:” Seth hissed under him, “Don’t hold back.”

“I’ve always wanted to fuck you,” Lewis whispered in his ear. They gave themselves up to it and Seth did shout but he sighed and cried out in silence while Lewis moaned thrusting into him over and over again. Lewis’s hands gripping his shoulders, Lewis’s cock thick so that it hurt stretching Seth, filling him.

“Please, don’t stop. Please don’t please…”