Chapter 3
“Stop!” said my Great Aunt Sarah.
I stopped. Now ordinarily I am not particularly fond of adults ordering me around. If, for example, my mother had ordered me to stop like that, I would have stopped–when I got around to it. Maybe in fifteen or twenty minutes.
But I had this powerful feeling that Great Aunt Sarah was completely on my side–even more on my side than I was myself. Somehow I knew that she loved me. So I did what she said. I stopped.
I turned around and looked at her. She glared at me. “Do you have any idea what is going on?” she asked fiercely.
I was pretty sure she already knew the answer to that question, and as I thought about it, I started to see her point. I had kind of leaped in without thinking very much.
“Probably not,” I said. “But how do you know about this?”
She glared at me a bit more fiercely, just to prove she could, I think. “How do I know? Do you think these things happen by accident? There are great forces at work. And you–You have power.”
“I do?” I asked in surprise.
“You do, young fool. Many do. Power is so ordinary. It runs in many bloods, in my blood, in your father’s blood, in yours. Power proves nothing and guarantees nothing, not even safety. Power makes you visible. That is why I gave you the cross. Else you would become cannon-fodder without choice, thrust willy-nilly into battles too great for you.”
“But that cross got me into this,” I said.
“Yes. That changes things. Now you must learn your choices. That is why I am here.”
I looked away from her for a second. I wondered how she could have lived so long, burning with such fierce intensity all the time.
“Attend,” she said. I looked back at her.
“You have three choices. First, go watch television. Second, go back to your books. Third, take up your cross. That is it. Oh, and throw away that hunk of metal I gave you. You don’t need it. Good bye.”
Before I could say a word she had walked out the door, closing it silently behind her. I rushed over to the door and threw it open. My father was standing there, but Great Aunt Sarah was nowhere to be seen.
“She’s like that,” he said. “I mean, rather abrupt at times.”
“So you know about this too?”
“Not as much as she does, and I’m not going to tell you anything she hasn’t. Take care of your mother. I left because–sorry.”
Then he turned and walked off. I felt the old anger welling up. Come on, dad, I thought. You have to do better than that. Explain yourself. Make an excuse even. Why couldn’t you two get along?
Then I thought about what Great Aunt Sarah had said. Three choices. The first: go watch television. I hated television. I’m sure she knew that. But on the other hand, what did television represent?
It represented living a normal life. Doing what everyone else did. (It suddenly occurred to me that my dad had married my mom because he made this choice.) Finding ways to dull the pain, take the edge off. (I had always wondered why life had to hurt so much.)
Well, I couldn’t do that. No, that’s too quick. Could I? Was this a possible choice for me? Why would I want to do it anyway?
First, it was safe. I wouldn’t be aware of the magic, but then again they would probably ignore me as well. Second….I could think of no second. It would be like poking out my own eyes.
A picture arose in my mind of a girl with long black hair that was being blown around her head by a wind that came from–where? That went–where? I could not say. But I wanted to know.
OK, the second choice–go back to my books. My studies? No, not those books. The ones I had found…the ones that talked about how to do magic, how to take the blood and what to do with it.
I had power. I could do it. I could meet Clary on her own terms, and the hooded man, I could defeat him. Or…perhaps not. But I could fight him. I could be one of them. I could….Then I remembered what Great Aunt Sarah had said: “Yours is not the way of taking blood.”
Come on, can’t anyone just say things straight out? Why did Great Aunt Sarah have to be some kind of weird prophetic oracle? Why couldn’t she just say, “You have a choice between avoiding the issue entirely, fighting it out with the same weapons the rest of them use, and….” and what?
The third choice–take up my cross. What did that mean?
OK, as long as I hung on to the cross I was safe. Did she mean that? Wouldn’t that be the same as the first alternative? Everyone would probably leave me alone, because I could see them and interfere with their magic.
Wait a minute–she told me to throw away that hunk of metal.
I was now officially confused, and that meant I didn’t have enough information. I didn’t know what “taking up your cross” meant. So I did what any normal cyber-punk would do. I googled. I typed in “take up your cross” and clicked the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Near the beginning of the page I found the following words: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.”
Right. As in “Yeah, right.”
Well, maybe I don’t know everything after all. I didn’t get this “take up your cross” bit. It sounded like “drinking kool-aid.” A cult had killed itself off by drinking cyanide-laced kool-aid back in the ’70s. All for nothing, for being stupid.
I walked upstairs anyway. At the very least I’d get rid of – what? I saw the books I had bought, lying open on my desk. I saw the dresser the cross was in. I did know it all. I knew what would happen if I hung on to that hunk of iron. And what would happen if I kept reading those books. There was only one thing I didn’t know. I thought, “Why not?”
After taking a bunch of stuff down to the garbage (during which time my mother returned and complimented me on cleaning out my room–if only she knew) I decided to go for a walk. I walked aimlessly for about half an hour.
I found myself walking past the alley where I had bashed the hooded man on the head. I walked over to the place we had left him. The air was suddenly still and heavy. There was a kind of snapping sound like the sound a fly makes when it hits a bug-zapper.
Then I had a great idea. I thought, “I should go to the place where Clary got on the bus. Maybe that’s near where she lives.”
The sun was setting and the sky was blazing with a dull red glow. I couldn’t decide if it looked like heaven or hell. It was certain, though, that the sun was leaving, heading for whatever place he called home, and if I didn’t hurry I would be left in the dark.
So I started floating. I floated smoothly toward the bus stop. I couldn’t figure out why I had never thought of doing this before. It was so much easier than running to catch a bus.
Once the bus came, I floated up and landed on the roof. Why waste the money for busfare? Several other people seemed to have had similar ideas, and they all smiled knowingly at me as we clung to the roof of the bus.
I laughed as I watched mere humans get on and pay to ride. But my companions put their fingers over their lips, as if to say, “Don’t gloat. We don’t want to make them jealous.” So I quieted down.
We came to the place Clary had gotten on the bus that rainy day two months ago. I floated down. When I touched the ground, my floatiness seemed to depart. But that was normal when you got off the bus.
I looked around. I started walking. Too bad, it was dark now. But that was OK.
There were some trees on the right with the usual claws that reached out like bare knuckles on a skeleton. I laughed as I avoided their playful swats.
The eyes of the feline familiars glowed like embers as they yowled their secrets at one another. The stars, now luminous globes the size of grapefruit, dropped bright blue meteors that dusted the ground with fairy dust.
A gigantic silver dish filled half the sky, scattering the stars as it moved with stately stride among them. Dark shapes flitted across it. Bats, vampires, witches, owls, warlocks, flew, as they did every night, to their usual mysterious destinations.
Cracked stone steps loomed before me. Home, I thought.
I began walking up those steps. I saw torches guttering through homey windows in comfortable looking cracked stone towers high above. I slipped on one especially cracked step and skinned my knee.
“I’ve been meaning to get that step fixed for a long time now,” I said to myself. “I’ll have to get a stonemason. I wonder if there are any in the yellow pages. I hope he can get that old worn look so it matches the rest of the steps.”
All this time part of my mind was trying to stop me, saying that something was wrong. But it was so obvious. Everything was the way I expected, the way I had dreamed.
I knew that Clary awaited me at the top of these stairs, sitting in a throne in my high chamber. There we would talk again, just like when I first met her, and we would make spells together that would overcome all the evil and….
OK, now I was starting to feel really funny. I knew I wasn’t supposed to do spells. But I was so powerful. That’s right! I had power! Great Aunt Sarah had told me! Great Aunt Sarah….
At that point things seemed to clear up all at once. They didn’t go back to normal. But instead of looking dazzlingly real, all the illusions looked like cardboard cutouts. I could see where they all were. But I couldn’t see past them.
Worse, I was still following the path set out by the illusions even though I knew they were illusions.
I walked up cardboard cutout steps, into a cardboard cutout castle. I walked through rooms filled with cardboard cutout suits of armor, cardboard cutout tapestries…you get the picture.
What was most annoying was when a group of cardboard cutout retainers saluted me and shouted my praises.
“Oh, knock it off. You got me, stop the games,” I said, testily.
But the illusions continued, my feet following the fake carpet laid out for me right up to the fake throne in the fake high chamber, next to a twin throne, also fake, where Clary was sitting. I sat down. I felt iron clamps on my wrists and the illusions dissipated.
I was sitting in a chair, a rather uncomfortable wooden chair, in the midst of a dingy attic room. It was dirty and had a mildewy smell.
As someone who had lived in an attic for many years, I recognized immediately that this attic had not been appreciated. I looked around, and sure enough, there were the expected boxes and old furniture covered with sheets.
My hands and feet were held with iron clamps to the chair, though the catch on the clamps was made of some orange-brown metal, perhaps bronze. I assumed they were not iron so the sorcerer could manipulate them without affecting his magic.
The clamps were tight enough that I wasn’t going anywhere, and if they were not released soon they would probably cause injury.
About fifteen feet away from me sat a familiar dark-haired, dark-eyed girl also clamped to her chair.
“So,” she said glumly, “he got you, too.”
“No,” I said, “I was looking for you.”
Which was true.
“And I’ll have you out of here in no time.”
Which very likely wasn’t.