Firemaggot (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

  “Not if you’re trying to maintain an open gate into an enclaved universe.” His boots scrunched on the jagged surface as he crossed unerringly to the right-most of the three aisles that opened from the clearing. “How do you think we knew that the mutandion was concealing itself at Misselthwaite in the first place? It took us – Well, it took Joanna,” he amended handsomely, “—almost three weeks to narrow our field of search down to south-western Ventura County, but once we’d done that, an hour in the Ventura County Assessor’s office let us pinpoint the exact location. When Emily Violet had the house built and the gardens laid out, this part of the property was a rose-garden. In 1941 she had a maze built, and if you look at the contractor’s plans it’s a perfectly ordinary copy of the maze at Richmond Palace in England. Then in 1953 she suddenly had the inner portion of the maze renovated, replaced the box-hedges with yew, and incorporated these… these nodes of glass, salt, iron, and water. The pattern partially reproduces many of the elements of a sigil which amplifies and channels psychic and supernatural resonances.”

  “Emily Violet?”

  Joanna understood the tone in Saldana’s voice. It was like being told Shirley Temple was an agent of the Dark Side. She temporized, “I don’t think it was conscious on her part. For one thing, from everything I’ve ever read about her – and this past week I’ve read a lot – I don’t think she had either the brains or the imagination to put it together that there really was something in the maze that was influencing her dreams. And for another thing, I understand that in her later years she drank a lot. She would just wake up with these great ideas. And God knows she had the money to put them into operation.”

  “In a way it worked to both of their advantages,” Antryg amplified. “The mutandion wasn’t obliged to explain itself or come up with reasons why it wanted her to produce a three-acre collecting-sigil… and Miss Violet was never obliged to… Ah,” he whispered suddenly. “What have we here?”

  And Saldana just said, “What???”

  What they had there, nearly covered with the overgrown branches that met thickly overhead, was a door. An oak door, its panels edged in carved flowers, set in a wall of plaster and wainscot—

  “That’s the door to one of the bedrooms in the house.” Saldana turned, looked behind them into the choked foliage of the path as if he expected to see carpets and lamp-fixtures. “Look, it’s got flowers around the edges—”

  “Violets.” Antryg pressed the old-fashioned lever of the handle.

  “You’re not going in there—” protested Joanna, but he was already through the door. Grimly, she unwound another couple of coils of her kite-string, and followed.

  *

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “Somebody’s boudoir…”

  “I know where we are,” snapped Saldana, in contradiction of his question moments before. He switched off his flashlight. The room was bathed in the pinkish glow of three extremely beautiful Tiffany lamps. “I mean how’d we get into the house? This’s the front bedroom, but it’s got all different furniture.”

  Joanna looked around her at the deleriously swan-shaped bed, the swagged chains of white silk violets and gauze that tented it, the ebony dressing-table crowded with rouge, powder, lipsticks and the pink-papered walls crowded with photographs. A bouffant Dior dress lay across the foot of the bed, half-masking the shimmer of pearls. Sweet-peas and white violets crowded a pink glass bowl on the table – Joanna crossed to touch the petals. They were real, soft… picked that morning…

  A woman’s picture smiled from the dressing-table beside them, radiently beautiful. Joanna said, “What the…?”

  “That’s weird.” Saldana stepped up beside her as Antryg prowled to the curtained window. “That’s the same dress she had on in that last photo of hers for Life Magazine. The original’s downstairs. But she’s like seventy-five years old in the original… Why’d she take it in the same dress?”

  “She couldn’t have,” objected Joanna. “That’s a Givenchy she’s wearing, and he wasn’t even in business when she was this young. This is—”

  “This is what she sees.” Antryg came back from the window. “This is what she thought that photograph of herself in 1975 looked like. Probably what she thought all her own pictures looked like—”

  “She’s got to have.” Saldana turned from the wall of photographs, baffled. “Look at these. The police found a whole drawer-full of them, when they went through the house after The Daemon’s death. I thought, Man, they were gross at the time. Because she was like sixty or seventy years old… WAY too old to be posing for shit like this. But these are the same shots. Not just the same poses, I mean like, even the cat on the windowsill is the same.”

  Joanna said, “Wow.” Because Emily Violet, queen of the Silent Screen, was beautiful in them: beautiful and twenty years old, young enough to be posing in pearls, boots, and a happy smile. If she thought she really looked like this at age seventy-plus, no wonder she was smiling.

  “It’s what he paid her.” There was infinite compassion in Antryg’s deep voice. “What it paid her, the mutandion… And a simple enough gift to give. It gives you the thing you want most. The thing you need to survive.”

  “In return for what?” Saldana’s dark eyes narrowed. “Letting it take over the world?”

  “Good Heavens, no.” Antryg pinched a cluster of white violets from the bowl, tucked them into the buttonhole of his ratty jacket. “Well, of course the spawn do get out, and kill whatever they attach themselves to… but on the whole, mutandion aren’t any more concerned about the fate of their spawn than you’re concerned about the fate of the hair you leave on the bathroom floor. But as the mutandion gets older, it begins to produce more spawn… a great deal more. It knows to remain in the protected enclave, the mini-universe at the heart of the collecting-maze that its protector builds and defends. But the spawn get out. That’s the usual way of tracking one of these things. By the creatures that the spawn destroy.”

  He produced the map of the maze from his pocket again, studied it by the glow of the lamps. Almost to himself he went on, “And yes, they do take a person now and then… and as they age, that hunger grows, too. Generally the hosts oblige. And in time, the boundary between host and mutandion… erodes. They – absorb them, the way the spawn do, but more subtly. A few cells at a time. The host – the protector – generally isn’t even aware that he – or she – is being absorbed… that his – or her – thoughts – and flesh - are no longer quite their own. Only that they want, more and more, to be with their… guest. Their friend. Because in its presence, they have what they most want. And will do anything to keep it.”

  “Like let this thing live in our world,” said the guard softly. “And eat up people like Che.”

  Antryg seemed to hear the brittle fury in the young man’s voice, for he looked up from the map, startled. “Not our world,” he said. “A sort of… niche… connected to ours by a gate. Mostly it feeds on the energies that are drawn through the gate, the energies that keep the gate open. Without a collecting-maze of some kind, the gate will close, and the mutandion will starve. Most entities that cross the Void between Universes find the worlds they end up in, inimical to them in some way,” he added. “Lacking something they need to survive.”

  “Like you with magic?”

  Antryg was silent for a moment, gray eyes behind their heavy spectacle lenses meeting the guard’s. Then his glance shifted away. “Yes.”

  And Joanna thought – only it wasn’t thought but sudden and total awareness of truth: It’s talking to him.

  Talking in his head, the way it’s whispering in mine.

  They acquire a protector…. give him the thing he wants most, needs most –

  Appalled, she stared at his face, wondering if he was lost in thought, or simply… considering options.

  HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN CALLING TO HIM???

  Since first he saw the spawn three weeks ago, and knew there was one near-by?

  As i
f he heard her thoughts he looked up, his eyes meeting hers: wide, gray, and completely without innocence.

  And she knew she was right.

  She remembered his face last night as he’d sat by the window, hand outstretched… Searching the world, this universe, for what wasn’t there.

  Without his magic, he was not what he had been.

  He wanted it back. Wanted to be a wizard again.

  The silence between them was like the terrible stillness immediately before – or immediately after – the ending of the world. Joanna didn’t even know if she drew breath.

  Saldana asked, “So what does it need?”

  “The same.” Antryg turned back to him, casual and confident. “After its fashion. It wants the power to work its own magic, to keep itself safe with its dreams. It has that here, in the enclave – the mini-universe – of its own molding. When The Daemon first entered the maze in the early ‘60s, it recognized in him someone it could use. Miss Violet was nearing the end of her life… She wasted away toward the end, didn’t she?” He returned to the carved door, under which Joanna’s kite-string ran, opened it, and walked – without comment – out into what was no longer the overgrown aisle of the maze, but a narrow walkway raised a few inches above a white seethe of ground-fog. Shocked, Joanna looked around, as Saldana’s flashlight beam skated out over the darkness, picking out in the distance what looked like the shapes of standing-stones or walls…

  “What it wanted was its own world,” Antryg’s voice went on, from out of the darkness. “And we’ve been in it for about a half-hour now.” Somewhere in the open night, the rattling whine of the spawn’s wings whispered – in the panicky flash of the light-beam Joanna thought she saw a glint of silver, swiftly gone.

  “Can we get out?” asked the guard. “Like, follow the string—?”

  “If you don’t think the mutandion has had your friend Che, or Officer Nagy, cut it, we could.” They caught up with him on the walkway: he was holding the cut end of the string in his hand,the ground-fog swirling around his boots. On the walkway beyond lay no trace of any clue to the way out. “But simply departing would still leave us with a problem. Namely, that eventually one or the other of The Daemon’s wives is going to win that court-case, and either turn Misselthwaite into a tourist attraction like that place in Tennessee – Presleyland?”

  “Graceland.”

  “Or, more likely take advantage of the fact that this is one of the few large tracts in Ventura County that isn’t protected by the National Forest system, or already subdivided for development. A mutandion in its enclave is extremely dangerous. But what you don’t want is a mutandion out of its enclave, trying to protect itself from the world at large.” He walked forward, between the softly-billowing seas of mist, sword unscabbarded and seeming to burn in the starlight. “Trust me on that.”

  *

  “So are we back in the real world?” whispered Saldana. They had left the causeway of mists – and the place where the walls were stone – and the interlocking tangle of reeking mud-filled trenches – behind them. They had passed a half-dozen nodes, as Antryg called them, where the small circular clearings in the maze were floored with salt or iron-filings or concrete blackened with the marks of old flame. The walls were yew hedge again, mingled with spiky-twigged bouganvillia or wild roses, or datura hanging like pale deadly elf-hats. Joanna had sprayed at least a dozen spawn – one of them on the back of Antryg’s neck, and how he stood still and let her do it she had no idea – and the deadly silvery rattle of their wings seemed to hiss and whisper all around them.

  Antryg replied softly, “Nowhere near it.”

  They had passed through the house twice more, once through The Daemon’s recording studio in what appeared to be present day – silent equipment shrouded in plastic, gold records and photographs gleaming faintly on the walls – and once through the same room as the doomed rock-star had known it. On the bench beside his black-and-purple Stratocaster there were sketches of the Firemaggot logo, The thing that waits for us all at the End of Time: like an early version of a Dune Sandworm, pale and eyeless and puffy, ringed and maned and striped in flame. The thing that will give us what we want… what we need…

  Around it on the sketchpad were lyrics Joanna remembered – “Two Lines of Tracks,” “Calling My Name,” “Torment” – and rough designs for those astonishing shows: groundbreaking, in the mid-70s, still talked about and emulated. “That was what it paid him, wasn’t it?” she’d whispered. “All those articles – They all said how he wanted to be the best, but that he wasn’t particularly good. Until he suddenly formed Firemaggot and turned into a Guitar God.”

  The maze was there, too, on that sketch-pad, as she’d seen it in finished form in the Assessor’s Office plans; aisles re-routed, new nodes laid out, consciousness and imagination superceding a vain woman’s dilattante dreams. She wasted away, Antryg had said…

  As The Daemon had wasted, once he’d inexplicably quit touring, to become the full-time servant of the thing in the maze.

  Crashing somewhere in the dark thickets behind them. Saldana swung around, gun pointing, but there was nothing. Still, Joanna knew they were being followed, and by more than one pursuer that sounded like it was the size of a man.

  “Tell me this,” whispered Saldana. “We gonna be able to get Che out of here when we’re done? Nagy, too – He’s a good guy, and he’s got a wife and a couple of kids—”

  “We should,” said Antryg, and all his old confidence was back in his voice. “But you must do as I say, exactly as I say, and without question. You, too, Joanna—”

  She cast a swift glance up at his face, the round lenses of his spectacles pale with the blue flickering light filtered through the leaves ahead. “What about you?”

  “I know what I’m doing. I just need the two of you to keep them off me…”

  She started to ask, “Keep what—?” when there was a salvo of shots, and the things burst out of the hedge.

  There were three of them, but only two were in good enough shape to walk. The third – crawling, stumping like a hump-backed worm – had been dead longer than the others. Saldana yelled something like “Yahhh!” and fired at the nearest, which swung at him with what looked like the handle of a garden-rake: Joanna had a glimpse of the rotted face, the withered hands, but what she recognized was the dirty checked coat of the corpse they’d found near the start of the maze.

  Evidently the mutandion’s power within the maze extended far beyond maddened coyotes and hawks.

  At the end of the aisle two shadows fired on them, that she could only assume were Che Esparza and Officer Nagy. She snatched up the rake-handle as Saldana’s shots knocked the first zombie sprawling, shoved her AgNO-pump around behind her and dug in her backpack for a cleaver. When she’d packed it she hadn’t been completely sure she’d be prepared to use it, but when the second zombie grabbed Saldana by the throat and the first one started to get up again – the crawler throwing its long arms around her thighs to bring her down with its weight alone – she found her hesitations dissolved quickly. One whack took the crawler’s head most of the way off – there was, she thanked Heaven, no blood left in the dessicated arteries – and a second took off one of the arms at the elbow. Joanna scrambled free as Saldana’s shots brought down one of the other zombies as well, and she strode in and took off the head before it could get up again.

  Amazing what a good martial-arts class did for your reflexes.

  The queer blue light that had flickered around the next corner flared suddenly brighter, and the whispering mutter that had plagued her thoughts took shape: Needs my help, Saldana needs my help…

  She’d shoved the rake-handle in his hand and dove to relieve the second – and now downed – zombie of its weapon, a weighted length of chain, even as the shadows of Esparza and Nagy came running at them.

  Can’t defeat them without me…

  Dimly, she heard Antryg shouting her name.

  Keep them off me, he’d said.<
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  “I’m good!” yelled Saldana, and Joanna wrenched herself away (If I leave he’ll die, and it will be my fault…) and headed after Antryg at a run.

  She saw the Firemaggot and she saw Antryg with six of the spawn on him, and only paused long enough to note, Not as big as the sand-worms in the movie, anyway, before standing off and pumping silver nitrate at the winged things that clung to the wizard’s face, shoulders, and hair. Even as she pumped the Firemaggot struck, startlingly quick for its leathery bulk; the flame that swirled from its head and gills at least was no illusion. She could feel the oily heat on her face as its toothed mouth ripped the leg of Antryg’s jeans. Antryg’s katana sliced into the thick flesh above the mutandion’s many-fanged mouth and the creature drew back, changed direction, struck again, this time at her—

  Joanna pumped the blackish silver nitrate at it and thought, This had better work…

  Whether it did or not she didn’t know, because Antryg cut at it again, the fire clinging to the blade this time as it drew away from the alien flesh. Only dimly aware of her surroundings – of the tangled circle of hedges, the broken-down guest-house that had been in the center of the maze - Joanna let the creature have another dose in the open wound before she scrambled back out of the way. The Firemaggot – mutandion – struck again, then drew back, coiled, and Joanna gasped as – out of the blue – the thought struck her: Wait a minute! If you increase the backbone line to 45 mega-bits, YOU COULD UNITE ALL THOSE COMPUTER BULLETIN-BOARDS INTO A SINGLE SYSTEM—!!

  Blinded by the certainty of how this could be done, she almost didn’t see the creature lunge at her. Antryg dove between her and it, shoulder-blocked her aside, sliced at the queerly tough hide, the gelatinous flesh. Joanna tried to shove from her thoughts that dazzling torrent of gateway protocols and inter-nexus text-links – one single, searchable system transformed into a world-wide web – but her whole mind shrieked, You have to remember this! This is IMPORTANT!!! as before her eyes, spawn slivered out of the Firemaggot’s wounds and hurled themselves, flashing, at the wizard’s face.