The Cornerstone Page 15

  “And the things that happened in that imaginary place…you can’t process the experience. Can’t shake it off.”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Is that what happened when you froze during the call this morning? Some trigger flashed you back?”

  Claire looked up, relieved this was Paul she was unloading this crap to and not somebody else. “Yes. That’s exactly it. I can’t get the experience out of my mind. Could a hallucinated state seem so real that you were convinced you’d been hit in the face and could feel the pain and taste the blood?” She looked down, embarrassed. Her hands were trembling again.

  Paul reached out and took one of them in his big calloused fist. “Okay, here’s the deal. I need a partner I can absolutely rely on, and in your present state you shouldn’t be on call. Agreed?”

  “Yes,” Claire said in a small voice.

  “What’s it gonna take to get you past this? Just talking to me probably won’t be enough. You need to go see the staff psych.”

  “I don’t want to be medicated. A couple of Zolofts and I won’t be able to function.”

  “There are meds, and there are meds. It doesn’t have to be anything that turns you into a vegetable. The point is, if you slipped up with a routine procedure, what else could happen?”

  “I can’t lose my job.”

  Paul chewed his thumbnail for a minute. “Tell you what…you call in sick and take the day off. I won’t report this morning’s screw-up. See if sleep and a stress-free day puts things right. If not, promise me you’ll get help. Why do you think we got the services of a shrink? This is the kind of work that drives people crazy because you can’t just leave it at the office, and the longer you do this kind of work, the more susceptible you become. You should take advantage of having a professional on staff to talk to. ” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze and let go. Settling back in the driver’s seat, he cranked the ambulance.

  “Thanks.” Claire’s voice was barely audible.

  “Just do what I said.” He pulled out into the flow of traffic. “’Cause if you don’t, I’ll be a hard-ass like you never saw before.”

  She nodded. “I promise.”

  * * * *

  Claire turned the key in the lock and slipped inside. The house was cool. She checked the thermostat—67°—and cranked it up to 72. Normally she kept the house warmer at night, but she also hadn’t expected her shift to run three hours late.

  She went down the hall to her mother’s room. Her mother was lying on her side, her back to Claire, wrapped in the comforter she used on the couch. “Mom? Everything okay?” No response. Claire’s stomach clinched. “Mom?” She’d steeled herself countless times in her imagination for the moment, which could be now, but which she hoped with rising panic was not.

  She clicked on the bedside lamp, its shaded glow barely illuminating the room. Claire touched her mother’s wrinkled cheek. It was chilled. She pulled Gwen over onto her back and put her ear to her mother’s thin lips. There was a ghost of breath. Maybe.

  “Mom! Wake up!”

  Gwen’s eyelids fluttered, and Claire sank down on the bed beside her. It appeared now was not going to be that time.

  “What?” Her mother’s voice was faint, dream fogged, as if she’d come a long way back just to find out what her daughter was on about. Her eyes opened fully and she tried to sit up. “What’s…the matter?”

  “Nothing. I just had a hard time waking you.”

  “I heard you.” There was a hint of peevishness in Gwen’s soft voice.

  Claire allowed herself to not obsess over how this might have been the perfect end to the unbelievably crap day she’d gone through. Losing her mother at the close of this shift would have been the end of the line, she knew that much.

  “What time is it?” Her mother rubbed at her eyes.

  “Seven-thirty. I was going to make supper…what do you want?”

  Her mother shook her head. “I don’t need anything. Just knowing you’re home…” The sentence remained unfinished.

  Claire got up. “Well, I’ll check on you in a bit. Maybe you might want to watch TV or something.”

  Her mother gave her hand a squeeze, the one Paul had engulfed in his massive paw. “Maybe.”

  Claire went down the hall to her own bedroom and changed into her shapeless old sweats. Comfort clothes. She went back into the living room, took a quick look at the mail she’d pulled from the box by the front door—snail mail spam and a nasty looking bill with an address window—and went to the kitchen. She got pump ‘n rye marble bread out of the fridge along with sharp cheddar slices, spicy brown mustard, and a stick of butter. Heating an iron skillet, she melted chunks of butter, swiped mustard on the bread, stacked it with cheese, and watched it sizzle in the pan. Comfort food. She flipped the sandwich over at just the right level of toastiness and sagged against the counter. Who was she kidding? These comforts were all surface tricks, disassociation, going through the motions and pretending everything was normal when she knew effing well it wasn’t.

  She plunked the grilled cheese onto a plate and took it to the table near the patio doors. Insulated drapes were pulled over the glass, protection against the cold. Claire scarfed the sandwich down in a few bites and then went looking for something sweet to balance it out. Nothing but a nearly empty jar of Nutella, which she smeared on a couple of vanilla wafers. It was almost acceptable, as desserts went. Close to chocolate but not quite.

  Licking her fingers, she went back to her room and sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor. This had once been her safe space, her one place where everything was the way she wanted it and regardless of what went on in the world outside, here she was happy. The smallish room was filled with the oversized crème and gold trimmed French Provincial bedroom set her parents had given her the Christmas before she’d entered middle school—wide gray-white dresser and mirror against the wall that held her tiny closet, double bed with scrollwork headboard and footboard lodged against the wall opposite the dresser, three-shelf nightstand beside the door. She’d picked it all out herself from a display set up in the furniture store where they’d gone looking for an upgrade to the rollaway bed and second-hand chest of drawers from their old apartment. An extravagant choice at the time, she understood it now as a deliberate attempt to step outside her narrow notions of self image, of what she thought she was allowed and what she could be. The room had been her fantasy escape pod all through middle and high school. These days, functional modern suited her tastes better.

  The large pieces left little room for anything else beyond a small modular desk under the single window. She’d spent a lot of time studying at that desk, for whatever good it had done her. The folding white-painted door to her closet was open and a jumbled mess of shoes, socks, medical scrubs, backpacks, clothes destined for Goodwill, and empty shoeboxes filled the shallow space. Not too many clothes on hangers. She’d always preferred jeans to dresses.

  Claire wrapped her arms around her ribs and shut her eyes. It felt like everything that had anchored her to a meaningful reality was being relentlessly stripped away. Her dad was gone and with him the means to pay for any further schooling she might have fantasized about. Jackie would be gone soon, and probably her mother in the not too distant future. Her job was in peril, and even the stupid theater gig she’d joined for recreation had turned sour. In fact, it had turned upside-down stark raving crazy. Claire shivered. Maybe she had a fever coming on. Just her luck to catch a virus when she needed to be on game.

  Paul had told her to rest and get some stress-free sleep. She couldn’t help but laugh, sleep being the one thing she most wanted to avoid, no matter how exhausting her day had been. Sleep brought dreams of that terrifying presence she’d touched in the Janus basement. The resident ghost? She sure as hell hoped not.

  She didn’t believe in the supernatural the way Addie did, but she did believe people could go insane and delusional—total barking mad. It occurred to her that all her attempts to rep
ress the black void of depression and its break with reality had shunted that lava plume of craziness up a side fissure. The blowout had let her obsessions over Dr. Faustus and everything connected to it morph into a full-blown psychotic episode. Claire began to shake uncontrollably. She considered adjusting the thermostat again, just to get her hands and feet warm.

  The only shred of comfort in all this was knowing that Paul had experienced the dream state/waking delusion syndrome and somehow moved past it. She knew that PTSD dreams played the same traumatic event over and over like a broken record because the brain wasn’t able to process the threatening memories—it would just keep cycling through them, again and again, until you cracked up completely or found some way to abort the cycle. In her case, the nightmare she’d been locked in before coming on duty this morning was the same one that played in her slumbering mind every night since she’d hit her head in the Janus basement.

  There was one particular detail of that dream that had transfixed her with the I-V in hand over poor Mr. Reynolds. Before the alarm went off that morning she’d been dreaming of the ghostly woman wrapped in her gray windswept shroud, staring at Claire with those dead-fish eyes. And she’d seen herself walk into her mother’s room with a pillow and place it firmly down over the sleeping face. It hadn’t taken much pressure, and just a couple of minutes…almost too easy. Then she’d hooked up an I-V that drained all her mother’s blood into an airtight bag. Part of her sleeping mind was screaming in revulsion while the rest of it felt daring, even exhilarated, to be doing something off-the-charts terrifying and forbidden. She’d startled awake, covered in sweat with tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. But worse, the spectral woman had been in her room, at the foot of her bed, hovering about three feet off the floor with her seaweed hair strung out in a swirling wind that Claire neither heard nor felt. But the fingers-on-chalkboard shriek that came out of the creature’s mouth had sent Claire diving under the covers with her pillow over her head, shaking so violently she could barely breathe.

  She hid, paralyzed, under the quilt until her muscles ached from the strain, waiting for cold hands to rip out her spine or worse, but when she finally dared to look, the terrible manifestation was gone. She lay crouched and awake, barely breathing, until gray daylight began to fill the room.

  Chapter 15

  Wednesday—Noon

  Bayard sat on a folding chair in the center of the basement, arms crossed over his chest, facing the alcove at the bottom of the stairs. The stainless steel thermos he used to hold blood rested on the floor beside his foot. He’d been careful not to make contact with the stone during this morning’s libation, as he had no wish to repeat his encounter with Mistress Ó Braonáin. He remembered her name quite well. In fact, he remembered the night on which he’d first been shown to her as if it had happened this week.

  The year was 1589. Three years before that, he’d been a scholarship student at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, about to graduate at age twenty-two with his M.A. However, certain naysayers had tried to prevent his matriculation and void his scholarship. Bayard remembered with perfect clarity a conversation he’d overheard in a quiet cloister. The College administrator’s querulous voice and that of the bishop were unmistakable.

  “The man is impious, a known atheist, a wastrel, a blasphemer, and moreover ’tis said he doth consort with both men and women.”

  “But my Lord Bishop, his scholarship is unquestioned—”

  “He is a danger to this College and the Church itself.”

  “‘Tis most likely idle boasting, my Lord, just a student’s merriment—”

  “Art thou defending the troublemaker?”

  “Nay, my Lord, but…”

  Bayard had listened to them talk of tossing him out of the university altogether in spite of his obvious intellect and creative genius. But then, someone from the Queen’s Privy Council had intervened, and a certain very famous gentleman, the Queen’s counselor and advisor in all things scientific and arcane, Dr. John Dee, had interceded on his behalf. Shortly afterwards, the objections and obvious calumny had been waved aside and his degree duly granted. Bayard smiled a wicked little smile, remembering how his liturgical benefactors had expected him to repay them by taking Holy Orders, when instead he’d bid them farewell and made straight for London, copies of his plays under his arm.

  The following year, a production of his first serious drama, Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, was mounted at The Rose, a small theater in south London, and met with thunderous acclaim—demands for more from the talented pen of Kit “the Fox” Marlowe poured in. He’d considered his playwriting career well and truly launched, yet all the while he continued to be tagged as a wit and a wag, a hothead who’d say anything with a few tankards in him, just to draw a rise out of his audience. Idiots all. Irony and subtlety were unknown to them. He’d been quite willing to thrash his defamers to a bloody pulp in the street, but he preferred sparring with words, his best weapon. He relished a spirited debate among friends whose knowledge and intelligence matched his own, ignoring the dimwitted knaves who presumed him to be all one thing or all another without understanding his intellectual complexity. Bayard frowned. He suffered no fools, not then and not now. Especially not now. Which went some way toward explaining his brief dalliance with Morris, with whom he was in complete agreement concerning the moronic and the ignorant.

  And which brought him round to Claire Porter, who’d done a very foolish thing that he could not explain. When she’d joined the company, she’d seemed to be extremely level-headed, dependable, predictable, what have you…all those things that made for an excellent crew member, right there on task when someone’s lines got dropped or a prop couldn’t be found. She was reserved, even-tempered, and of a humanitarian disposition, although he’d begun to get annoyed at her sudden interest in the welfare of the unfortunate Danny. But what in the name of all the gods had she been doing lying unconscious at the foot of the stairs in the basement? That was a dilemma his superior powers of deduction could not answer and his inner guidance could not suss out. She told him she’d been looking for Tom, which was plausible enough, but such a simple explanation wasn’t sitting well. So here he was, tasting the room with his not-quite-human senses (a faint whiff of the charnel house permeated the air when the banshee hovered near the veil between their words) and plotting how to trick the creature into revealing what was really afoot…because something certainly was. He hadn’t lived in thrall to the cornerstone for nearly four centuries not to recognize that something was different, the balance shifted. The witch had never attacked him openly like that, and he wondered what had made her so bold.

  He shifted his butt on the chair and thought back to the invitation that had come in the winter of that year when his career was just taking off. The language of the letter was formal, even academic. A scholar’s tone that had immediately piqued his interest and hooked his curiosity—as he now understood was its intention. That single sheet of vellum had launched his life on a trajectory he couldn’t have imagined then in his most lurid opium dreams, and even now, at times, the fact of his non-life seemed impossible, yet inescapable.

  “To Mr. Christopher Marlow, a briefe and graciouslie sent request and invitation,” Dee had written in careful, elegant penmanship. He alluded briefly his recent trip to Poland, “my last voyage beyond ye Seas, was duly undertaken by her Maiesties good favour and licence,” during which he had been entertained by certain members of the nobility, not the least of whom was Emperor Rudolf II who received him at Prague Castle. He mentioned having met numerous influential scholars and thinkers whose writings on matters spiritual and arcane—“thinges invisible, thinges transitorie, & momentarie, thinges mortall”—far surpassed that of anything he’d read before arriving on the Continent. He skirted around the notion of being Her Majesty’s eyes and ears abroad, and finally arrived at the kernel of the invitation: Marlowe’s name had been put forward by both Sir Philip Sydney and the right honorable Secretary of the Qu
eene’s Privy Council, Sir Francis Walsingham. In short, Marlow had guessed, reading between the lines, it was a recruitment letter: an offer of patronage of his theater endeavors in return for a little spywork on the side, something a clever fellow like himself “should fynde no great inconvenience.”

  The letter had promised a “humble repast in ye company of learned gentlemen,” with the promise of a showing of what remained of the fabled library known to many of the London literati and that still held untold rare volumes in spite of the thievery inflicted upon it. The letter concluded, “Very speedily written, this twelfth even, and twelfth day, in my poore Cottage, at Mortlake: Anno. 1589. Your humble servaunt, John Dee.”

  Bayard still had the very letter somewhere among his personal papers. While the offer of becoming a spy in Her Majesty’s service appealed to his sense of adventure, his strongest incentive to honor the invitation had been to see Dee’s famed library. He’d hoped the rumors of a break-in and plundering while the entire household was abroad hadn’t been as dire as reported. He remembered feeling intense loathing (as he did now) for knaves who held theoretical discourse of the thinking mind to be of little value and the books chronicling such thought worth even less, but it had then occurred to him that someone who knew the value of the books had probably taken and sold them to a collector much like Dee himself. In fact, it was highly likely many of the missing books would resurface years hence in someone else’s rare collection. Bayard smiled, seated on his metal folding chair in his theater basement in the twenty-first century, knowing now that this was exactly how things had turned out. You could even look it up on Wikipedia and find out where some of those missing Latin and Greek tomes had landed. Four-hundred-year-old hindsight had its perks.

  He’d sent a response back to Dee almost immediately, accepting the invitation. Remembering the letter sent his thoughts arrowing back to the day when life as he’d experienced it had stopped forever. He could see it now, Threadneedle Street, set amidst a twisted maze of alleyways and crowded cobble-paved roads defining the London neighborhood where he rented rooms at the top of a five-storey timbered building—his landlord’s tapestry shop on the ground floor and living quarters rising two rooms per level above it. He’d stood at the window of his sitting room, surveying the hustle of life flowing through the narrow street below. The sun was still well above the line of trees and church spires across the river, but heading westward. He turned away.