The Watchtower (32 page)

"But you're too weak."

"No, I'll be all right. Help me up."

He scooped me up in his arms, and I let myself lie there for a moment, cradled against his chest, which still felt warm from the blood he'd drunk. His lips touched mine and my mouth opened. We could stay here tonight, I thought, and make love ... what was one more night?

One more night,
the smoldering reeds moaned.
One more night.

"I think," I said, my lips moving against his, "that there are traps here for faithful lovers as well as faithless ones."

"I could make love to you here
forever,
" he said, his jaw clenched.

"Exactly."

He sighed and put me down on my feet. "I think that's what happened to
them
." He pointed to the far side of the tomb, behind an empty plinth. White bones lay in a mingled heap. Two bodies that had twined themselves together in death. I shivered. Not from the cold but from the sudden urge to lie down beside them with Will and make love together until the flesh fell from our bones.

"Yeah," Will said, "we'd better go now. Before it gets light again. I can't tell here how long the night lasts."

"But if you get stuck in the daylight..."

"We'll have to risk it. If we stay here any longer..." He strokmy face, let his hand trail down my neck, caressed my breast ...

"Yeah. Now." I grabbed his hand before it got any lower and pulled him toward the door, pushed him through. We stumbled out into the circle of standing stones. Eight standing stones.

"Were there only eight stones when you got here?" I asked.

"By the time I got here I wasn't in any shape to count stones. I was half out of my mind from wandering in the reeds." He was striding up a hill, pulling me behind him, heading away from the reeds.

"What did they say to you?" I asked, half dreading his answer. What awful things had the reeds said about me to make him doubt his love for me? But it seemed to me that unless we faced what the reeds had said to us, we would forever hear their whisperings. "They told
me
you couldn't love me or else you'd have already become mortal and come back to get me."

He stopped on the crest of the hill and turned to face me. "They told me I didn't deserve you. That if you knew all the evil I had done in my four hundred years as a vampire, you wouldn't love me. That the Will you thought you loved was a mirage. That once you saw the real me, you would realize I was a monster and run screaming."

I looked up at him. He was above me on the hill so he seemed even taller, a giant looming over me. The violet fluorescent light in the sky made his skin glow like marble and his lips stand out a deathly blue. I felt my heart thud with fear. I touched my hand to my chest ... and found the watch pendant. I gripped its cold metal in my hand and felt resolve settle in my heart.

"I'm still here, aren't I?" I said.

He grinned. "God knows why, Garet. But I hope I never give you cause to regret it." He turned away and I watched him start to climb over the hill, leaving the Valley of No Return. Maybe it was called that because once you crossed it, there was no going back to who you were before. Although I felt resolved to love Will as he was, I knew that he would always torture himself with his past deeds. If only he
could
go back to who he was before he had committed those terrible deeds. If only the last four hundred years could be erased. It seemed the only way he'd ever forgive himself.

But that couldn't be. I let go of the watch and followed Will into our future.

25

A Poem and a Letter

I've learned that love's perfection isn't
time,

or anything that can be measured. No,

it's merge beyond all comprehension, rhyme

between two hearts and minds. A river flows

into another, and they love the sea;

two butterflies, sunkissed, both dart and dance

in ecstasy of nearness. Fleetingly,

they've reached communion, passion's deepest trance.

And even humble atoms, that I sense

within my very flesh, will spin and glow,

attracted to a neighbor, or the sun.

Amazing, Marguerite, what I now know--

as student of our separation's pain--

It's not
how long.
It's
seeing
you again!

Will wrote this sonnet late that night, after Marguerite was asleep. He sat in a chair by the window and wrote in the pale light of an amber half-moon, quill-point scratching across parchment as if with a will of its own. He wrote partly to reconcile himself to this new situation in which they were joyously together but he must not wish for anything more, and partly to send a love letter to Marguerite. But even as he laid down his quill and read his sonnet over with satisfaction unbecoming a working poet, he sensed disquiet deep within him, like a ripple at the bottom of a deep well. He tried to suppress this unease, and the idea accompanying it, that he could
never
reconcile himself to the gulf of time between them, but was unable to.

No, he
must
be with her always, he reversed himself, out on the vast promontory of time on which she lived. Even if fierce winds tried to blow him off continuously. If he wasn't out on that promontory with her, he would die. Not just physically (eventually) but spiritually
right now
! The realization tore across his mood like a cyclone. He tried to suppress it, but it was the truth. Sadly, he folded his reconciliation poem and put it back in his pocket. Maybe at some other moment he'd feel differently, give it to her. But not now.

Then, in the shadowy light of the amber half-moon, he began to noiselessly scan Marguerite's travel chest for where box and ring could be hidden, assuming she had them with her. This time, without success.

* * *

The next day, Will and Marguerite dined at 1:00 p.m. at the most elegant establishment in Paimpont, the unassumingly named Goat & Boar. They were sitting at a sumptuously provisioned oak table with a rainbow awning when a slender foot messenger, clad in black, approached Will. He asked him to confirm his identity and, satisfied, gave him a letter in a scarlet envelope, which Will put into his pocket unread.

Marguerite gazed quizzically at him. "Not interested?"

He smiled awkwardly. He wasn't sure whom it could be from and didn't want to share such an uncertainty with his beloved. A missive from an old flame in Somerset--Bess, perhaps?--couldn't be ruled out. "Boring--business--I'm sure," he muttered. "Nothing worth disrupting our time together for." He tried to smile more engagingly. He'd never discussed any sort of business with Marguerite. Their conversations tended toward the ethereal.

The look she returned his with was penetrating, bordering on disbelieving. But she didn't pursue her skepticism, and the letter seemed to vanish as they lapsed into silence, then drifted on to other exchanges. Early on the evening of the same day, as Marguerite napped before supper, Will went to his chair by the window and read the letter, which turned out to be from John Dee.

My good Sir--

I sit in my tower room at Pointe du Raz, at the very ends of the earth. It is the middle of the night and a summer storm is howling, so that my skull might cave in. The surf crashes against the stone foundation of the tower so as to topple it, and the ocean is whipped to a boiling froth that might cleave my skin right off if I fell in. Nonetheless all I have on my mind is you, good boy: why have you not come to see me with those items I requested? Why, when immortality is at your fingertips, when you and I could stand atop this breathless pinnacle together, are you nowhere in my sight?

I know you have been in Paris, my boy, and I know that you have now journeyed to Paimpont. For my spies are everywhere. Paimpont is not so far from Pointe du Raz. You can leave immediately on the final leg of a wonderful journey, should you will it. Come to me in my tower with those items I've requested, Will Hughes. Come.
Note: you will only be admitted after the sun has set.
But come!

Faithfully yours, [signed] John Dee

Will folded the letter back in its envelope and sighed with an uncertainty his rational mind found startling. For, even after the previous day's encounter with Russwurin, who added another connection on top of the Paris alley sighting between Lightning Hands and Dee, he could still not rule out dealing with the man. Not if nothing else worked regarding immortality. Reuniting with Marguerite had been wonderful and uplifting, but it hadn't solved the problem. Maybe Dee had nothing to do with the robbery, and maybe he had planned it--but then discovered the golden bough to be worthless to him--but in either event, Will could not continue with Marguerite this way.

As he then turned to look at her in bed, he noticed, even in the waning light, that a few bricks in the wall near her head seemed slightly out of line with the others. The pattern was subtle, but he was looking at it from exactly the right angle now. It seemed the bricks might have been placed there more recently than the others, or by a different set of hands. Curiosity flooded him, but he couldn't explore the anomaly with Marguerite a few feet away. The bricks could not likely be removed easily, let alone silently.

The abbey's bell rang the half hour, Marguerite stirred, and Will cast aside any absurd second thoughts that he wasn't immediately rushing off to see Dee without the required objects. Awakening suddenly, Marguerite began to struggle up into a sitting position, and Will took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. Soon enough they had dressed and were on their way out to sup at Goat & Boar. Will cast a glance at the errant bricks as they left the room, and something stirred deep within him, something with wings that were akin to hope.

* * *

Sometime in the middle of the night, Will was awoken by a thunderclap so loud it was as if he had been sleeping on a nearby cloud. A reddish orange cloud, he imagined, from the strange light that filled the room. He sat straight up in bed, and before he knew his own name observed that Marguerite was not in their bed, nor in the room. He was lacerated by panic for several long seconds, even as he fumbled about for clothes to go outside in, before he had the thought that she could simply be taking a walk. She loved to walk and had slept a lot more yesterday than he had, hence might have arisen because she was unable to sleep.

Will went to the window and saw immediately the source of the strange light: the full moon had a bloodred cast to it. Despite some nearby thunderclouds, it bathed the town in ruby light. Perhaps this was why Marguerite had gone out--to observe the effects of the crimson moonlight on the abbey and the lake. But as he looked about anxiously, he saw no sign of her or anyone else in the street. As he turned back to the room, planning to leave and search for her, he caught another glimpse of the irregular bricks he'd noticed the night before.

He approached them with that same tingling hopefulness, almost breathlessness, he'd felt the previous evening. Will sat on the side of the bed and with gentle fingertips established that four of the bricks were loose. Tenderly, brushing off dust as it fell on his hands, he removed the bricks and placed them on the bed. Then he extended his right hand into a dark opening and, feeling around in a space that seemed to have no rear boundary, brought out the ring and the shallow silver box that Dee had referred to, neither of them with any covering or wrapping over them, and laid them on the bed. Nothing else seemed to be in the opening. He gazed with sentimental fondness at the gold-and-black ring. For the first time he noticed a pattern carved into the stone--a tower with an eye above it. The eye made him feel doubly like a thief as he slipped the ring into his pants pocket. He felt so guilty that he took off his own ring, the silver signet ring with his family crest of a swan rising, and put it in the compartment as a token of his commitment to return.

Will glanced next at the box: it was the one Dee had described, and it also had a fine oval pattern of lines etched into the cover that seemed to be moving now, rippling as if it were the image of the ocean in a tidal surge. As if calling him to the ocean.

As if calling him to Pointe du Raz.

Will blinked at the dizzying motion of the lines and turned away. He tried to collect himself. He might have stuffed the ring in his pocket, and he might be intrigued by the box, but he'd made no decision to go to Pointe du Raz. None! Especially after the coach to Paimpont horror. Going would also mean leaving Marguerite, for he could hardly ask her to cooperate in his quest for immorning.y after they'd had such conflict over it. That Dee had been able to track his whereabouts to Paimpont was almost certainly due to reports from miseries such as Lightning Hands and Russwurin, or worse, and that hardly recommended Dee as a person he wanted to put his fate in the hands of. Theft was theft, and to leave with these items, even if he'd somewhat replaced one of them, was theft from his beloved.

A flash suddenly erupted from the box as if some incendiary material inside it had exploded. The lid flew open and silver flames erupted upward, nearly reaching the ceiling. Will could smell something like gunpowder in the air, with a strongly sulfurous tinge to it. Then he felt himself shoved over backward into a prone position on the bed, as if invisible hands, or a violent wind, had pushed him down.