Bless the Child (11 page)

Ellie listened carefully. “It’s a good thing you’re talking to me, Maggie,” she said with great seriousness. “Satanism is nothing to mess with. It’s a lot bigger and better organized than you could possibly imagine. Magic, White or Black, can be a very potent force—one you’d damn well better learn about, if you’re going to try to fight it. Believe me, I know a lot about this, and not just from this ditzy little lifetime, either. A Black Magician of High Degree, say a Magister Templi, or God forbid, an Ipsissimmus, could attack you on the Astral Plane while you sleep, Maggie. Or he could pit the energies of the whole Black Coven against you. Even if he didn’t kill you, which he might, you’d go mad as a hatter. There are thousands of people in lunatic asylums for no other reason than that they pissed off a Black Magician, with or without knowing it.”

Maggie shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know what to say. This is all so far beyond me . . .”

Ellie looked speculatively at Maggie. “Generally speaking, people don’t find themselves touched by magic unless they’ve practiced it in other lifetimes . . .you may find you know more than you think. Your soul is probably trying to remember what you already know, so you can fight off this current danger. Maybe you should try some past-life regressions, to see what it’s all about, and where we’ve met before.”

“What do you mean, where we’ve met before.”

“There are no accidents in the Universe, Maggie. You didn’t walk in here today, by chance . . . odds are you were drawn here by your need for something . . . an ally, maybe. Look. Why don’t you go home, finish these books, and then let’s talk some more.

“I’ll need to do some meditating on the story you’ve told me, too, of course. I mean, I don’t go running around looking for ways to put my astral ass in a sling for strangers . . . but, then, what if you turn out not to be one? Tell you what . . . why don’t you come back for dinner at my place tonight and we’ll see if we can’t figure things out.”

Ellie handed her several more books to read, and Maggie went home mind-boggled that there could be so much information about a subject she barely knew existed.

ELLIE climbed up the small step stool she used to reach books on the top shelves of her library, and passed two down to Maggie. Her apartment was high-ceilinged and full of prewar Village charm.

“This is a fabulous apartment, Ellie,” Maggie said admiringly. “It’s like a sea captain’s house . . . full of exotic treasures.”

“God bless rent control,” Ellie responded. “How could I ever afford a two-bedroom apartment with fireplaces, if it weren’t for rent control? As to the treasures, I’m far too attached to things, I’m afraid . . . probably my Leo moon that’s responsible. I’ve lived in a lot of places and brought back keepsakes.”

One of the bedrooms had been turned into a library-study; books lined every wall and surface. The excess crystal inventory from the shop was scattered ubiquitously, under chairs, on tables, inside cabinets. In the bedroom, an immense pink rose quartz lived under the bed. “Great for opening the heart charka,” Ellie explained, with a grin. A huge bronze gong was flanked by two exquisite Thangka paintings from Tibet. Maggie’s appraising eye noted the sensitivity of taste which each piece had been chosen.

“I can’t figure out how you’ve got these books arranged,” she said, bringing her attention back to the orderly shelves. “How do you find things if they’re not alphabetized?”

Ellie handed three more volumes to Maggie and laughed.

“Oh, they’re alphabetized all right. By author’s first names. Just a little intellectual snobbery on my part. Sometimes I get pissed off knowing people dismiss me as a pea brain because I’m into metaphysics. So, I fight back in little ways to amuse myself. I suppose that’s why I’ve got half a doctoral dissertation in my top desk drawer.”

Everything about Ellie was a surprise, Maggie thought, suppressing a smile. The wifty effervescence she affected belied a swift intelligence and an intuition that obviously perceived life through a different set of lenses.

“Where’s your master’s from?” she asked, liking the woman.

“Berkeley, where else?” Ellie answered, pouring a glass of wine from a cooled bottle. She was cooking something Muscovian, she said, rattling off the name in a superb Russian accent. The pungent aroma filled the apartment tantalizingly, and balalaika music lent its melancholy strains on the stereo.

“I’ve done the whole nine yards, Mags, since the late sixties.” Maggie noticed, amused, that Ellie had given her a new nickname without any ceremony. “Anything an intellectual flower child could do, I did. Lived three years with a guru in India to study Sanskrit . . . lived a year and half in a Zen monastery, sitting zazen at four A.M. every day and freezing my ass off, while I chanted.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Oh yes, and let’s not forget how I wandered around South America for eighteen months, going to crystal digs and studying Capoiera. Then I came home and apprenticed myself to a Chinese doctor for two years, so I could learn acupuncture.”

Ellie had a good, strong-boned face, Maggie saw, as she talked so earnestly; pretty, interesting, betraying little about her age.

“I did everything you might expect,” Ellie said with a likable grin. “Protested the war, got jailed in Chicago, helped run an abortion referral service during the coat-hanger era . . .” She took a sip of wine and stirred something on the stove, sniffed, added some sort of pungent seasoning, then sat down again on a zafu in the middle of the floor.

“And a few things I wouldn’t expect?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. My family is half Russian and half Cherokee, so I was doomed from childhood by being psychic . . . visions, out-of-body experiences, past life memories, more vivid than kindergarten ever was. I had it all.

“Fortunately, I was raised mostly by my grandmothers, since my mother worked and my father wandered. I bounced back and forth between their two worlds, and neither side of the family thought it was odd to have my gifts, they more or less expected it. So instead of discouraging me, the taught me—magic from one side, spirit guidance from the other. They were both unbelievable women—tough as leather, female as Moon Maidens. I go to Mother Hale’s every Wednesday night to hold AIDS babies, as my way of paying back the Universe for all those two gave me.”

“How extraordinary,” Maggie said, thinking how conventional her own childhood had been. “Whatever would have happened to your gifts if you’d been plopped into an ordinary family, I wonder?”

“Oh, I don’t think the Universe lets mistakes happen, Mags,” she said seriously. “They put you exactly where you need to be, in order to work out your karma. I wasn’t visiting those two grandmas for the first time—I was completing a cycle with them.”

Maggie frowned a little. “I’m still having a hard time with all this, Ellie. It’s difficult for me to accept someone as intelligent and educated as you believing in magic.”

Ellie straightened up from bending over the table. “Don’t get hung up on nomenclature, Maggie. Magic is just a word used to describe forces that aren’t understood yet. You’re going to have to stop thinking with your twentieth-century education, and start using your intuition . . .
feeling
out truth, rather than accepting what you’ve been taught as gospel. The world was once thought to be flat. The atom was thought to be unsplittable. If somebody told Isaac Newton in a few hundred years, pictures would be beamed into living rooms from satellites, he would’ve thrown the apple at him.”

Maggie saw the point. “May I ask you an impertinent question, Ellie?”

“Shoot.”

“Why would someone with half a doctoral dissertation in the drawer be content selling crystals and smudge sticks? Didn’t you ever want to choose a different track?”

“Good question,” she answered, seating them both at the table that served as dining place or workbench, depending on need. The fire blazed behind them and Maggie thought it one of the most charming dining room settings she’d ever been in.

“I knew from my grandmothers, at a very early age, that I had spiritual gifts, and that those gifts carried obligations. It says in Scripture, ‘For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required.’ That seems fair to me. It also says, ‘You can’t serve God and Mammon,’ and that’s true, too, Mags—you have to choose, in a given lifetime. If I’d been a doctor or lawyer or marketing director, I would have to devote all my energies to success . . . there’s nothing wrong with that, mind you. I’ve done it myself in many lifetimes. But I needed to study other things, this time around. Kind of tricky to find a fast-track life that would have allowed time for all the esoteric learning I’ve done.”

They were genuinely compatible, despite their different backgrounds, Maggie thought later, as she helped with the dishes. Character has nothing to do with birth or bank accounts, her father would have said. Ellie was a bona fide character; the kind the Village had once abounded with, before Burger Kings had replaced the coffee houses, and SoHo had become chic and then a tourist trap. Individually and intellectual questing had been prized then, at least as much as fame or fortune. They’d been better times.

“So what do you suggest I do now, Ellie?” Maggie asked over coffee.

“You read the books I gave you and let me ask my Guides what’s up. I have a hunch this passage you’re in may have to do with allies. The Universe never pits us poor mortal against the forces of Evil without providing allies, here and on the Inner Planes. Of course, the only allies we have any control over are the ones we can see . . . like me, maybe. If I’m right, you’ll be bumping into more.”

Maggie nodded, in for a penny in for a pound. “Why are you doing this Ellie?” she asked. “Why would you consider endangering yourself for a perfect stranger?”

“I don’t think we’d be holding this conversation if you and I were perfect strangers, Mags. I’m involved here, somehow . . . we just don’t know how, yet.”

“But what could you possibly get out of this awful mess that would make it worthwhile for you to become involved?”

“Enlightenment,” Ellie replied with a grin. “It’s the only prize worth fighting for.”

C
ody followed the maid listlessly on her way from the kitchen to the nursery wing. Sometimes Ghania left her with the maid for a little while, and when she did they always went to the kitchen. In the beginning, Cody had tried to talk with the girl, but she didn’t know many words in English. Ghania said she was from the Old Country, but Cody didn’t know what that meant. And besides, the girl never smiled or tried to be friendly.

The child kept her head down now as she walked, letting her eyes follow the pattern of the flooring, just for something to occupy her mind. First, the tiles in the kitchen . . . then, the parquet of the hall . . . then, the carpet of the parlor . . .then, the black and white checkerboard marble of the foyer . . .

That’s how she saw it.

A tiny gold button, halfway under the radiator leg, at the edge of the foyer door.

It was Mim’s button!

From the jacket she wore on the first day she came to visit. Cody’s heart leaped at the tiny token, and suddenly she knew why it was there.
It was there to keep her safe!

Cody’s hand darted out and closed on the golden treasure. It jiggled loose from it’s corner with only a small tug, and was in her palm before the maid even turned to look.

Cody’s heart pounded frantically as she slipped the button into her sweater pocket, fingers still tight around it.

She could practically
feel
Mim’s love in it,
see
her face
hear
her voice . . . all
alive
somehow, in the little gold keepsake.

Cody padded along behind the maid, up the nursery steps, into her hated room, but none of it mattered anymore.

She had part of Mim in her pocket.
She would find a place to hide it, where Ghania would
never
, ever look. The child’s eyes darted around the room with a new sense of purpose. If this precious button was here in the house, maybe there were other things, too. Parts of Mim, that Ghania couldn’t take away.
Now
there was hope . . .

Cody waited until the maid was gone, then she went to the small shelf where her books and toys were kept. She pulled down the battered Teddy Bear that had been in the nursery when she arrived. He was the only thing in this terrible place that was nice. He reminded her of the Love Bear, who slept with her in her bed at home. The bear had a hole in his neck, under the old satin ribbon that circled it. Stealthily, she slipped the button into the hole and quickly readjusted the ribbon, her heart pounding.

Cody put the bear back on the shelf, with careful hands. Tonight when everyone has gone to bed, she would be alone with her secret.