Two

AUGUST 14, THE PRESENT

UPSTATE CONNECTICUT, USA


Since she’d left Paris six weeks ago, every day when she woke up, Jac L’Etoile vowed she was going to heed her brother Robbie’s parting advice and be present. When they’d said good-bye, he’d kissed her on the forehead, brushed her curls back off her face and said, “If you can do that one thing, Jac, you will begin to heal.”

Now, as she trekked through the woods with Malachai Samuels, she tried to pay attention, as Robbie would say, to this moment, right now, and not allow her mind to drift and sink into grief.

Be present.

There was much to be present for. The air was fresh with the smell of grass and apples. She was with a trusted mentor, who had something important to show her.

Be present.

She noticed a fence of No Trespassing signs up ahead. As they approached, the lovely summer day clouded over. The electric scent of a coming storm blew in and Jac felt a chill. A foreboding that they should turn back. Then chided herself for her childish reaction. This was no Grimm’s fairy tale. She wasn’t Gretel. And Malachai certainly wasn’t Hansel. The Oxford-educated psychoanalyst was the codirector of the prestigious Phoenix Foundation in New York City, a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old institution dedicated to the scientific study of reincarnation. He owned this land. These woods had been in his family for nearly two centuries. There was nothing bad that could happen to her here.


***

Earlier, after finishing lunch, Malachai had suggested she get ready, that they were going to take a walk.

“Where?” she’d asked.

“To see my secret garden,” was all he’d offered.

Malachai was unapologetically secretive in a way that was both old-fashioned and refreshingly avant-garde. He performed sleight of hand without revealing his tricks. Cured children of their nightmares while refusing to explain what spells he used. He was a magician. Perhaps the only true one Jac had ever known. Hadn’t he made her own mental illness-hallucinations that had plagued her as a child-disappear and vanish into the Swiss Alps’ crisp mountain air when she was fourteen?

Dressed for their hike, she and Malachai exited the turreted and gargoyled manor house through the great room’s French doors. Stone terrace steps led down to a well-tended formal garden nearing the end of its summer glory. They followed a pebbled path that bordered organized-chaos beds of blue hydrangea, late-blooming sedum, pink roses and lavender Russian sage.

The floral bouquet scented the air and stayed with them as they passed through ornate iron gates. By the time they reached the Victorian gazebo the smell of fresh-mown grass joined the mix.

From there it was a few dozen yards to an apple orchard. The trees were old and gnarled but the branches were laden with hard green fruit, still weeks away from ripening.

Coming out the other side, they climbed a small hill and arrived at the wood’s apron.

Here the cultivated grounds gave way to unbridled nature. Gone were all signs of civilization save the handmade notices that hung at odd angles off naked tree-trunk poles tamped into the ground at six-foot intervals. The warnings were written out in uneven letters painted in black on rough wooden planks.

Private Property.

Intruders will be prosecuted to the fullest extent.

Pilgrims and tourists alike.

Pilgrims?

Jac wanted to ask Malachai to explain, but he was already yards ahead, waiting for her on the other side of the implied border.

She met him at the edge of a grove of hemlocks and pines and they stepped inside the forest.

The blue-green darkness and its scent assaulted her. Usually she loved the smell of tree resins, but its intensity here was overwhelming. It stung. As if the sharp tips of the evergreen needles were pricking her olfactory sensors.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Malachai asked as he opened his arms, embracing the woods.

“Yes,” she said, but she was thinking that there was violence here as well as beauty. The primeval forest that rose up around her seemed threatening. She felt slight beside the trees. These pines had outlived her mother. Many were older than her grandmother. They inhabited this land. She was the interloper.

Jac and Malachai were completely inside shadows now. Submerged in them. The canopy of trees so thick it filtered out whatever sunlight broke through the clouds. Jac felt enveloped in a pervasive gloom.

As someone who produced and wrote a cable TV show exploring the origins of myths, Jac knew all too well the deep significance shadows held in ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology.

Of all the classics she’d read, the most frightening-the one that she often visited in nightmares-was the tale of Agave, Pentheus’ mother. Under Dionysus’ spell, Agave lost her shadow and with it her identity as a mother and a woman. Assuming masculine attributes, she became dark, brutal and less emotional. As her rational impulses yielded to irrational ones, her passions trumped her intellect. Wild rage consumed her. More and more often her unconscious overwhelmed her conscious mind. Until in one final furious frenzy, she did the unthinkable. Agave murdered her own son.

It was then, after the filicide, that she suffered the fate that haunted Jac. The fate said to be the most difficult to bear of all. Agave buried her own child and lived long past him, evermore mourning her loss.

Jac had read what Jung wrote about our shadow selves being the negative, unresolved aspects of personality. The part of the psyche we must confront and come to terms with if we ever hope to become whole. Jac knew she hadn’t yet confronted all her shadows. And that one day she’d need to.

Malachai knew it too. He’d been the Jungian therapist assigned to her case at the Blixer Rath clinic in Switzerland seventeen years ago. They’d been talking about her shadows for a long time.

“Are you all right?” Malachai called from up ahead.

“Fine,” was all she trusted herself to say. How to explain her inexplicable overreaction to this place without making him nervous? He watched her too carefully since her trip to Paris in May when she’d gone home for the first time in years to help her brother look for a lost book of fragrances that was part of a family legend. She’d wound up helping save Robbie’s life, but the danger they’d been in and the memories that had been stirred up had taken a toll on her equilibrium. And so now Malachai took her emotional temperature too often. Seemed almost constantly checking to make sure she was all right. He hadn’t been this concerned about her well-being since she was fourteen years old.

No, Jac didn’t want to ruin this excursion by worrying him. Malachai had made it clear it mattered to him that she see this special place. For all he had done for her, the least she could do was to soldier on. But before she took the next step, she did turn and look back. The path they’d taken to get here was no longer visible. Even if she wanted to escape, the way out was lost. They’d left no trace of their route.

Escape?

They were not venturing into danger but taking a walk on the grounds of his estate. Her imagination was spiraling.

Be present.

Following Malachai’s footsteps, she trod the next stretch of forest as the route wove through monstrous pines. A thick carpet of needles and leaves camouflaged aboveground roots and fallen twigs and made the trail treacherous. She tripped, but Malachai was ahead of her and didn’t notice. Only the birds bore witness to her clumsiness. Righting herself, she continued on.

Suddenly, from somewhere in the distance, she heard a new sound and smelled a new combination of scents. Both were hard to identify until she and Malachai rounded a bend and came upon a waterfall cascading over boulders. The spray on her face smelled of iron. The air, of petrichor, the oil produced by plants when they’re wet. The aroma intensified as the path followed the resulting rushing stream down a slight incline.

“Do we have a destination?” she asked, when they’d been hiking for more than thirty-five minutes. “Or are you just showing me the woods?”

A dead pine, a victim of a storm, or rot, blocked their way.

“Time is too precious to squander. I always have a destination. You should know that by now. The one I’m taking you to today might be just what you’re searching for.”

“What do you mean?” Even as she asked, she knew he wouldn’t answer. Malachai loved to be provocative. As she watched him navigate the felled tree, climbing awkwardly because of his injured hip, she worried for his health. She wasn’t sure how old he was, but guessed he was in his mid-sixties, perhaps older. He was the most determined man she’d ever known. Sometimes his emotional immunity in light of his resolve to accomplish something made him seem inhuman. But he wasn’t. He wouldn’t always be there for her.

She was doing it again. Spiraling into the negative. Since coming home from Paris she’d been more anxious than usual. Existential dilemmas that used to pique her curiosity now disturbed her profoundly.

We are all fragile.

Tragedy can strike in an instant.

Almost nothing is within our control.

On the other side of the tree, Malachai brushed off his hands.

“We’re almost there,” he said as he returned to the path.

After another three or four minutes, the trail stopped twisting and became as straight and sure as a cathedral’s central aisle. At its end, Jac glimpsed a clearing.

Malachai threw open his arms expansively. “Welcome to my secret garden.” He smiled enigmatically and led her into the grove of oaks in full leaf. The air was cooler inside this copse. The sensual, earthy odor of oakmoss scented the darkness.

When dried, oakmoss smells of bark, of wet foliage, even of the sea. But since ancient Greek and Roman times its importance had never been its individual odor. Instead, its greatest value was as a bonding agent; oakmoss brought ingredients together, imbuing the end result with a velvety, creamy oneness. Adding an unrivaled richness and longevity to a perfume.

“These are amazing trees,” Jac said.

“Majestic.”

The oak was important in mythology too and so had a special relevance to Jac. “The name Druid means ‘knowing the oak,’ ” she said. “The priests carried out their religious rituals in oak forests.”

“Interesting you chose to mention Celtic mythology.”

“Why is that?” she asked.

Malachai didn’t answer, just motioned for her to follow.

The path through the trees was hidden by layers of last year’s dead leaves, twigs and acorns. For a second time, Jac tripped. The moment slowed. She began to fall.

Before she hit the ground, Malachai’s hand gripped her arm and he helped her find her balance.

“Are you all right?” he asked in the concerned tone she’d heard so often that summer.

“Fine. Thanks.”

“The roots and sinkholes are impossible to see under all that foliage. You need to be careful.”

Jac nodded. She’d been paying more attention to everything but the uneven terrain. By now she was almost drunk on the aroma of the moss, decaying leaves and moisture. The fragrance teased her. Tricked her into thinking she was smelling the passage of time. This was the scent of earth turning over year after year, of flora and fauna regenerating and becoming nourishment for the next season’s growth.

It could have been a scent of rebirth. But instead Jac smelled the encroaching fall. She smelled death.

They’d reached an outcropping of quarried stones carefully arranged in a double circle. Like other ancient calendars she’d seen here in New England and in Europe, there was little question as to its function. No wonder Malachai had commented on her Celtic reference.

Her host walked around the impressive ruin with her as she examined it.

“I’m sure you’ve had these dated?” Jac asked.

“They predate two thousand BCE.”

“Fantastic.” She felt a real kick of excitement.

Approaching a slab set just outside the circle at twelve o’clock, she began her inspection. For a few minutes, she examined both its sides and scarred surface. “Based on these burn marks, this looks like it was a ritual site.”

“I concur,” he said. “But we haven’t been able to verify it.”

“No, it’s hard to find detailed answers in scarring. There’s so much we don’t know about the past,” she whispered as she ran her hand over the weathered stone, trying to imagine what-or who-might have once lain on its smooth surface.

Malachai chortled. “And so much we could know were we not afraid of exploring outside realms of traditional science.”

She felt chastised but didn’t respond. Malachai was one of the leading reincarnationists in the world. They’d argued enough in the last two months about her refusal to accept reincarnation as a fact. Yes, she’d had a half-dozen unexplained hallucinations this summer in Paris. But they weren’t necessarily past-life regressions. Yes, they had appeared to be a response to an olfactory trigger. But that in itself was not unusual. There were many substances in nature that functioned as hallucinogens when ingested, imbibed or inhaled. Shamans and monks, mystics and Sufis had been using them for years to enter meditative states and receive visions.

Malachai was certain the wild rides she’d taken in her mind were reincarnation memories, but Jac wasn’t ready to completely accept them as such. Finally she’d asked Malachai to stop pestering her and told him she needed time to work out what had happened. He’d reluctantly agreed. But jibes like this one sometimes still slipped out.

“Who do you think built this circle? Native Americans?” She nudged the conversation back to the ruin.

“Well, we’ve found arrowheads, pottery fragments suggesting Paleo-Indians, but we believe there were others here before them.”

“So you do think it’s Celtic?”

“Let’s keep going, there’s more to see.”

The stone circle alone would have been well worth the hike. “More? Really? This is exciting, Malachai. How many more sites are there?”

“Several. This parcel is two hundred and forty-five acres and we’ve identified at least five ruins dating back that far.”

“How long has this land been in your family?”

“The group of transcendentalists who found it believed the site was sacred. But my ancestor Trevor Talmadge was the only one of them who had the money to buy it. He purchased it in the eighteen seventies with the intention of building a retreat here. The plans for it are in the library.”

“What happened?”

“He was shot to death before he got around to it.”

“How horrible.”

“No one was ever apprehended. I suspect fratricide. After the murder Davenport Talmadge conveniently married his brother’s widow, moved into the family manse, adopted his niece and nephew and took over management of the family fortune. Younger brothers can harbor great resentments.”

Jac wondered if there was more to Malachai’s comment. The tone he’d used in describing Davenport was strangely sympathetic for someone who might have been a killer.

The trees had thinned. Walking through areas of grass and thick shrubbery, they passed an earth mound with a small stone hut built into the risers-only its entrance exposed. It was another typically Celtic structure from the same period. She itched to stop and examine it and asked Malachai if they could.

“On the way back,” he said.

“This place is a treasure trove. How come I’ve never read about it? How have you kept it a secret for so long?”

“With great effort. Especially because Trevor Talmadge’s death was quite newsworthy. There’s nothing like a few skeletons dangling off the family tree to keep historians nosing around. We’ve had to work diligently to keep this sanctuary private.”

“Not to mention the noise you make investigating reincarnation. Being in the news for cutting-edge scientific inquiry into past-life regression therapy techniques isn’t the best way to keep a low profile,” Jac joked.

“Hardly.” Malachai laughed. “But we’ve managed nonetheless. There was a bit of attention about thirty years ago when a local Native American tribe attempted to claim the land. But since there was no evidence the ruins were built by their forefathers, their fatuous claims were quickly dismissed.”

“No. Even if Indians found this place and used it, they didn’t build it,” Jac said.

Malachai gave her an approving glance. They’d reached an incline and he led the way, climbing a staircase of rough-hewn rocks. Despite his hip’s giving him a hard time, he didn’t falter.

Above them the storm clouds intensified. The sky darkened. Jac looked up just as the first few droplets fell.

“You don’t melt, do you?” Malachai asked, smiling.

She always had thought his smile was odd. His mouth moved the right way, but the sentiment somehow eluded his eyes.

“Not that I know.” She smiled back.

“Then there’s no reason to be afraid of a little rain, right?”

No, Jac wasn’t afraid of rain. Or of storms. And Malachai knew it. Just as he knew she panicked at edges. The rare phobia had first cropped up when she was a child. She and Robbie had been playing hide-and-seek and she’d gone out on the roof looking for him. The many chimneys and eaves were excellent hiding places. As she crawled around, looking for him, she heard voices. Walked to the edge. Looked down. Her parents were below, standing in the street, arguing. Their altercation was especially nasty and loud. She was so absorbed in their insults and threats she didn’t hear Robbie coming up behind her. He said her name, startling her. She turned too fast. Her left foot slid over the edge. She was falling. Robbie grabbed her, held on, and pulled her up across the tiles. Scratching her as he dragged her, but saving her from what would have surely been broken bones or worse.

In her therapy with Malachai, they’d explored the metaphor of her almost falling off that roof and into the violent argument. When talking about it hadn’t cured her, Malachai had worked on the phobia in a series of hypnosis sessions. When that didn’t work either, he’d suggested her fear was a holdover from a past-life tragedy.

As she did with every attempt he’d made since those early days at Blixer Rath, to connect her present issues to a past life, she’d rejected the idea.

“If it gets too nasty we can always take refuge in the stone shelters up ahead,” Malachai reassured her. “I wanted to show them to you anyway. During the summer solstice the sun enters a pinhole in the east wall, sending a light beam onto the floor and illuminating a series of stones incised with runes. No one has yet been able to translate the symbols.”

“Can I take a fast peek?”

He nodded. Jac walked closer and began to inspect the hut. Dropping to her knees she ran her finger over the carved runes.

“I recognize some of these designs,” she said.

“You do?”

“Look at this one.” She pointed. “To me he looks like Dagda, the chief father god in Celtic mythology. He had a harp made out of oak that he played to keep the seasons in order. Don’t you think this could be a carving of that harp?”

Malachai stared. “You know, you might be right. We can come back this way again. We should go now. I want to show you the rest before the rain comes,” he said.

“I can’t believe the huts aren’t the main attraction,” she said.

He chuckled.

As they continued on, she asked who’d dated the sites. She wasn’t impressed that whoever he’d brought in hadn’t recognized the harp symbol.

“It’s been a delicate dance-wanting information but fearful someone would become too excited by what we’ve found and reveal our secrets and location. Generous grants to the archaeologist’s and historian’s personal research funds have proved a satisfactory bribe in every case. There’s not a trace of what we’ve found in a single book or anywhere on the internet. But at the same time there have been experts I haven’t been able to bring in.”

Up ahead was an allée of gracious giant oaks. Just past it, in the center of a clearing, Jac glimpsed a monolithic rock. Even in the darkened afternoon it shone silver. What was making it glow like that? Mica chips?

When they were within fifteen yards, Malachai held her back.

“Wait. Before you get any closer, tell me, how do you feel?”

“Great. Why?”

“I want you to focus for a moment. Become aware of your psychological and physiological state.”

“But why?”

He shook his head. “All in time. Just do it, please?”

She nodded. Closed her eyes. Got her emotional and physical bearings. Then she nodded at him. “Okay.”

Still holding her arm, he led her forward. “Several of the experts I’ve brought here concur these structures were built at least four thousand years ago. One highly respected member of the esoteric movement actually thinks the area was once an intergalactic portal. That people took off and landed here.”

“But you don’t believe that, do you? Reincarnation is one thing, but extraterrestrial activity?”

“Extraterrestrial activity… a Celtic monument… whatever it might be, given your search for a new myth to base a season on, I thought this might tempt you.”

Malachai was referring to Mythfinders, Jac’s television show and also the title of the book she wrote on the same subject. “That’s amazingly generous,” she said. “Especially because I thought you wanted to keep this place secret.”

“I do, but surely you can film here without giving the location away to the public.”

Jac was thrilled by what he was saying. If there were enough ruins here, this forest might be the end of the long tunnel she’d been traveling since the early summer, looking for her next mythic mystery to feature on her show. Before she could start suggesting myths that might have some connection to a place like this, he started talking about the gigantic menhir just yards way.

Jac had never seen one this large outside Western Europe.

“I believe this stone”-Malachai gestured-“this monument, is the heart of the entire ancient complex. We can examine it more closely if you like.”

There was something curious in his voice. Had they been anywhere else, had she not been so intrigued by the ruin, she might have questioned him about what he wasn’t saying. But what she was looking at was too enticing.

In a clearing was a giant boulder. Standing over eleven feet tall, the rock was at least sixteen feet around. She took a few steps closer. Weathered by the centuries, its surface was smooth and incised with runes. Craning her neck, she thought she recognized Dagda’s harp again. And perhaps his bottomless cauldron of bounty.

On the ground, a two-foot-wide moat of pebbles encircled the plinth, cutting it off from the grassy mound.

It started to drizzle steadily. Jac looked away from the rock, at Malachai. “Can we wait a few minutes before we head back? Can I just go up to it, touch it?”

He nodded.

Jac crossed the gravel stream, walked up to the monument and reached out.

Its surface was warmer than the air. She sniffed and searched the encyclopedia of scents in her memory. This was how she had always imagined the moon to smell. Gunpowder, earth and salt mixed with a harsh but beautiful metallic note.

She turned to ask Malachai, who’d stayed on the other side of the moat, what else his experts had said about the stone, when she was overcome by a profound and sudden wave of sadness. More than anything, Jac wanted to weep.

Rooted to the spot, as the rain fell on her, she waited for the feeling to pass. But it only intensified.

“Jac?” Malachai’s voice was low and caring. “Are you all right?”

She couldn’t find her voice, but she nodded.

“Jac? Are you really all right?”

“No, not really.” Her voice sounded shaky in her own ears.

“What is it?”

She didn’t know what to say. All her efforts at being present had failed at once. How to explain how alone she suddenly felt? As if her mother, who had been dead for seventeen years, had just died. As if she had this moment learned of her father’s Alzheimer’s. Of her grandparents’ passing. As if today, not eight weeks ago, she’d said good-bye to Griffin North in Paris.

All the grief was pressing down, forcing her to feel the magnitude of all the deaths, all the defeats, and of the fresh loss of the lover she’d so desperately wanted to hold on to. Jac felt as if she’d walked into a giant silken web woven of sadness and was now trapped in its threads.

“What’s happening to me, Malachai?” she whispered. “This has nothing to do with any myth I’ve ever heard of.”

“Scientists have gotten extreme electromagnetic readings here that they believe have an effect on the emotional center in the brain. I prefer what those who are more evolved suggest: we’re in a sacred vortex. The earth’s energy is being channeled and collected here for a purpose we’ve long since lost the ability to recognize. You are being affected by that energy.”

Jac wanted to escape. Cross the gully of gravel and step back over to the mossy bank where Malachai was, clearly, safely out of the range of the electromagnetic field. But she couldn’t and stood rooted to the spot as if she were, like the magnificent trees surrounding her, part of this landscape now.

“Do you feel it too?” she asked Malachai.

He shook his head. A look of frustration mixed with misery crossed his face. She’d seen the same expression when she’d asked him if he had past-life memories and he’d admitted that he never had. No matter what he tried, from meditation to hypnosis to experimenting with drugs, the man who spent his life studying regressions had never been able to access one of his own precognitive memories.

Suddenly a clap of thunder cracked. A downpour followed immediately. It happened so quickly, neither Jac nor Malachai was able to run for cover. Almost instantly, they were soaked.

This wasn’t a kind rain but an angry outburst. A fury unleashed. In less than a minute the moat around the rock filled and Jac was encircled. Logically she knew the gully couldn’t be deep at all and that she could jump across it without any problem. Even step in it if she had to. But the pervasive sadness restrained her. Pinned her to the stone and prevented her from moving.

One after another, three flashes of lightning lit up the dark sky. Each was followed by a burst of thunder. Each outburst louder than the last. This was the sound ancients ascribed to Tarnis, the Celtic god of thunder.

Malachai was shouting too, but she couldn’t make out his words over the storm’s fury. From his gestures, she knew he was telling her to move, to come to him.

She wanted to, desperately, but she just couldn’t.

The next round of thunder was deafening. And then a wild bolt of lightning illuminated the scene in its electric radiance. For a moment Malachai seemed to glow. A tree limb fell nearby. Jac smelled the bitter, burned wood.

Malachai was gesticulating wildly and yelling. She made out the words-take cover-but she still couldn’t move. Wasn’t even sure she wanted to. All the tears she had held back for so long were somehow being released by the sky. She needed to honor them. To let them pour down and wash her clean so she could finally be present.

“Jac!” Malachai yelled just as thunder and lightning hit almost simultaneously.

Time slowed. The rock’s scent, even stronger in the rain, overpowered her. Jac felt suspended between now and the next instant. Sensed it might never come. Thought everything might end in the brilliant burst of illumination. She was aware of exactly what was happening and was surprised at just how acute her senses were. Astonished by the number of separate thoughts she could cram into so few seconds.

Research she’d once done on Zeus flashed in her mind like lightning. She remembered excruciating details. At any given moment 1,800 thunderstorms are playing havoc somewhere on the planet. Lightning strikes 80 to 100 times a second; 40 million strikes a year.

The amount of electricity discharged, like so many other things in nature, was a mystery still to scientists. But not to shamans. Not to mystics and wizards. Not in myths. In those last crazy seconds, Jac was aware that a woman standing in a clearing in a storm was an ideal target for the massive electrical discharges filling the sky, searching for places to touch down. A woman standing out in a clearing was the perfect vessel for the lightning’s ire. For its one fiery kiss.

Загрузка...