The Third Magic (36 page)

A NEW DAY DAWNS

"I
think someone's at
the door," Hal said.

It was hard to tell. The rain was pouring seemingly straight down, and thunder boomed so loud that it was difficult to hear anything.

Emily pulled aside the curtain to look outside. "Who in the world… It's Arthur!" she said, running to let him in.

He was soaked and shivering, his red hair plastered to his face, and his eyes looking lost, with the vague, wide aspect of someone in shock. "Emily, is Hal here? I... I need..."

"What is it?" Hal demanded, knowing that Arthur would not hunt him down idly on a night like this.

"It's a girl," Arthur said, embarrassed. "Her name is Gwen.”

"Who?"

"Gwen Ranier?" Emily asked.

"Yes. I have to find her, but I don't know where she lives."

Hal made an effort not to laugh out loud. "Are you telling me you've been out in this rain looking for a girl?"

"I called all the Raniers in the phone book, but I couldn't reach her." Arthur wiped his face with his bare hands. "I think she's in trouble, Hal."

"How do you..." Hal was going to say "know," but the one thing he had learned from his experience with Arthur was that it made no difference how the boy knew the things he did. He simply knew them.

"I think she's going to die."

Emily gasped.

Hal took a last, long look at the storm outside. Then he grabbed his coat. "All right," he said. "If you want to look for her, I'll help."

"Haven't you heard the radio?" Emily shouted. "There are tornado warnings... Wait," she said, rummaging in her pocketbook. "At least take my car." She tossed him the keys, then scribbled Gwen's address along with some quick directions.

"Thanks," Hal said. He was halfway out the door when he turned back to face her. The wind was gusting so hard that she had to squint against it. Rain sloshed in a puddle inside the doorway. Dressed in her bathrobe, she embraced him. "Please come back," she pleaded.

He kissed her mouth. "Get inside," he said. "You'll catch cold."

The rain hit the pavement of the street so hard that there seemed to be a fog three feet high snaking over the neighborhood. Into this river of vapor walked the two men Emily loved.

E
ven with the windshield
wipers on full, it was nearly impossible to see. All the streetlamps were out. The only thing going for them was that there were no other cars on the roads.

"I think we're in over our heads," Hal said.

Arthur knew he wasn't talking about the rain. "You mean I am." He shrugged. "I can't help it. What's happening, I mean. I can't."

"I know," Hal said. "Is the girl..." He didn't know how to phrase it. "Is she part of the story?"

"I think so."

Hal's jaw clenched. "It's the old man," he said. "He's trying to bring back Camelot, the bastard. Lock, stock, and barrel."

"He's not just trying, Hal. It's working. We're all here." He held out his arms, as if displaying himself. "All ready to serve good old King Arthur himself. The only problem is, I'm not a King this time around. I'm a nut, as far as the world goes. But the truth is worse than that."

"Arthur—"

"I'm an artificial man, Hal. Only instead of being made of steel and electricity like Frankenstein, I'm made of ghosts. And everyone around me, except for you, is a ghost."

They rode in silence for a time, aware only of the wall of water against the car's windshield and the blinding intermittent flashes of lightning.

"Are you going to marry Emily?" Arthur asked finally.

Hal looked startled. "Where did that come from?"

"It would be good for you if you did."

"Why?"

"She's not a part of this," Arthur said. "You could have a life. A real life, instead of being a character in a fairy tale."

Hal waffled. "I don't know if you're right about all this, Arthur."

"No? Do you remember Lakeshire Tor, Hal? Where there used to be a legend that the ghosts of King Arthur's knights would ride through the streets every year on the night of the summer solstice? Well, I've been reading about it. That doesn't happen anymore. Do you want to know why? Because those ghosts have been brought back to life. They're in Dawning Falls, New York, right now, along with Merlin and Guenevere, and just a short distance away are the young King himself and his champion, Sir Galahad."

He stared at Hal. "It's like some weird dream, except that it doesn't end. We're all caught up in that story all over again, only there's nothing for us to do except to keep on running. Forever."

Hal drove in silence for a time. "Besides, there's this new stuff that's happening," Arthur said quietly. "The healings, the trances. Something's happening to me. Something bad."

Hal tried to control his alarm. "How does it feel?"

"Like... like I'm dying," Arthur said. "Every time it happens, it's harder for me to come back." He looked out the window at the patterns of rain on the glass.

"Listen, Arthur—"

"I'm telling the truth. I don't have much longer, and I don't think things are going to get better before the end."

Hal's knuckles shone white on the steering wheel. The rain pounded on the car's metal roof. "What about the knights?"

"They'll go with me. Wherever that is."

"You're talking about dying."

"They can't die, Hal. They're already dead."

"I mean you."

"Nobody can stop that. The point is, it's time for you to get out." Arthur looked meaningfully at Hal. "You still have a chance for some kind of life. Take it."

Hal smiled. "Suggestion noted," he said.

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning I can handle it, okay?"

"No." Arthur was getting belligerent. "Don't you get it, Hal? It isn't going to end. Look where we are. In the same place as the Grail. We can't get rid of it. The story just keeps on playing itself out...."

At that, they both looked at one another.

"The creek," Arthur said. "That's where she is. By the cup."

Hal turned the car around and stepped on the gas.

"Will you think about it, at least?" Arthur asked. "About marrying Emily?"

"Yeah, all right." Hal said.

But both of them knew he wouldn't. Hal would never leave Arthur. He would sacrifice his entire life to stay with the boy who was brought back to be King of a world that no longer existed.

T
itus set the egg-shaped
bombs in the house and scattered papers around the floor. He could not be sure about the efficacy of the bombs. The first two that he had set off had been fairly controlled, but they were the weakest of the bunch. The last three might blow the place sky-high, but they could just as easily fizzle. If that happened, Titus would have to rely on fire to achieve the effect he wanted.

He had been careful to shoot Pinto directly in the heart. No bones broken, no telltale bulletholes in the skull. When all the evidence was in, the place would look as if Pinto— wearing mud-wet leather gloves to preserve his fingerprints—had killed the guard and the girl (
your daughter
,
Titus
, the unwanted voice in his head taunted) before being trapped in an accidental explosion from a homemade bomb. It would come out that the cup, now removed from the building's foundation, had been destroyed in the blast.

For good measure, he would leave something of his own inside, in a place where part of it might be retrieved. Something that would identify the innocent bystander kidnapped in South Dakota by the homicidal biker named Pinto. Something that would make the FBI stop looking for a second man.

You'll go to the Tor...

What had she meant by that? Titus squeezed his eyes shut and forced the memory away.

The arrival of the girl had been an unfortunate coincidence. It had thrown off his pace. He was not a man who enjoyed inventing life as he went along. For Titus, occasions were better when they were planned, when they were expected...

...
to make things right.

Wasn't that what she had said? He took a knife from his pocket.

Go to the Tor to make things right.

He set his left hand on a table strewn with papers. Then, clenching his teeth, he cut off his index finger at the second joint.

Panting with the exertion, he groped in his jacket for the cup. "Come on, come on," he said, as he fumbled the thing into his hand and placed it over the stump of his knuckle.

He waited for the throb of vitality from the cup, its warmth, the sense of well being he had felt before.

But nothing happened. His blood poured onto the table. Sweat mixed with rain dropped from his sodden hair into his eyes. A feeling of panic welled up inside him.

Go to the Tor, the Tor, to make things right…

Titus slapped himself to make himself think clearly. The pain from the wound was clouding his mind. He needed air.

He staggered out of the house. What had gone wrong? Why hadn't the goddamn cup worked? He looked dolefully at the two bodies outside. He had meant to bring them into the house, but what did it matter, really? They would not need to be consumed. In fact, it would be better if they were found murdered. It was just a question of getting away before...

Oh Titus, you killed her.

…before the police came around. But they wouldn't see the bodies anyway, most likely, not in this rain.

Your daughter. You killed your daughter.

He checked the detonator. His finger was losing a lot of blood, but he would be all right, he told himself. He just had to get to the woods, explode the five bombs inside the house, and then take off for Atlantic City.

Sea Legs
would be waiting for him.

He scrambled toward the woods like a crab, his hands held over his body to protect the detonator and the cup, his face red with his own blood. Just as he reached the treeline, he stopped to vomit.

Why hadn't the bloody cup worked?
he wanted to scream.

Because you killed her, you killed your daughter, Hassam Bayat, and now you're going to

"There's something over here, Hal!"

Titus inhaled sharply. It was the boy, he thought, amazed. The Christ Child, of all people, out here in this tornado. Titus stared at his finger, where white gristle showed through his raw red flesh. He toyed with the idea of shooting the boy, but such an act would probably only add insult to injury. If the baby Messiah were operating true to form, he would have a mobile news crew behind him to film Titus's arrest. The Coffeehouse Gang would play the film clip for the next fifty years. He wondered as he fashioned a bandage out of strips of cloth from his undershirt if anything else could possibly go wrong.

The boy knelt over Gwen's body as another figure ran up the hill past the house.

Titus almost laughed when he recognized him. Of course it would be him, he thought. The ex-FBI agent, the one who had supplied Titus's description to the authorities. After two very nearly successful attempts on his life, the lucky bastard was going to see Hassam Bayat in all his blue-eyed British splendor get carted away by the constabulary of Dawning Falls.

Even though he knew it would probably be a fruitless move, Titus was about to make a run for his car on the other side of the woods. It all just seemed so common, he thought, to be caught running red-handed, as it were....

And then the girl sat up.

Titus vomited again.

She was dead, I knew she was dead.
He swallowed hard. A voice, very deep, very far away inside his mind, laughed.

The FBI man backed away, then walked slowly toward the house, his head swiveling from side to side, watching for danger. "Jesus Christ," Titus heard him say as he peered in the doorway.

There were no other vehicles on the road, Titus noticed. No TV vans, no police escorts.

Hal walked inside.

"Oh, yes," Titus said aloud as he pressed the detonator.

I
t had been clear
from the moment Arthur saw her that the girl was dead. She had felt like meat from the butcher's, cold, flat, slow in the process of decay, but already beginning. The hair at her temple was matted with blood, congealed around the charred-edge hole of the bullet's entry.

"I'm sorry," Hal said. "She's gone. This one, too." He wiped Pinto's hair out of his face. "Oh, good God."

"What is it?"

'This is the biker who shot me in Sturgis." Hal looked through the man's pockets for ID. There was none. He looked back at Arthur. "You sure you're all right?"

"I'm okay," Arthur said flatly.

"Look, you are what you are, and you do what you can. And sometimes you can't do anything. You may not like it, but that's the way it is."

"I know," Arthur said.

'Then I'm going to check things out. You stay put."

The boy nodded.

They had arrived too late. Arthur heard his breath pour raggedly out of his mouth. It would have been better not to know, he thought. The gift for healing that he possessed meant nothing in the face of death. Even the cup could do nothing now. All the miracles in the world stopped short of death.

Keeping his natural revulsion in check, he reached over to close the dead girl's eyes.
You are what you are and you do what you can,
he thought. Now, all he could do for the girl who had struck the deepest chord in him that he had ever felt was to close her eyes in death.

"Good-bye, Gwen," he said.

At the moment he touched her, the first image appeared, blinding, inside his eyes. It was the image of Guenevere speaking the word "Excalibur" at the same moment that Arthur himself learned the name of the great sword. That image flashed inside his brain with such intensity that Arthur was rendered physically immobile. And then came the other images, of Guenevere hurtling through the air as her horse bolted; Guenevere, veiled and bedecked with white flowers, accepting his ring on the day of their marriage; Guenevere sad-eyed, childless, meeting his eyes as he told her that he would have to put her away in a Christian nunnery in order to please the petty kings.