The Third Magic (4 page)

THE HEALING WATERS

Dawning Falls, New York

F
ar away from the
farmhouse in Jones County, South Dakota, on the northern ridge of the Laurel highlands, flowed a body of water known to the locals as Miller's Creek, named for the family that had built a house over it in the early 1880s.

No one had paid any attention to Miller's Creek until a few years ago, when a member of the Dawning Falls Gardening Society noticed the exquisite condition of the land on either side of it. Although it only ran above ground for a few hundred feet, its banks were lush with grass fragrant as perfume. Flanking the creek were fields of flowers and tangled vines of wild, sweet grapes. Huge warrens of rabbits honeycombed the soil nearby. Beyond it, long past the point where the creek ran underground, the tall trees of a great pine forest dropped cones the size of pineapples.

But the landscaping around Miller's Creek was not what drew more than five thousand people to Dawning Falls each day. They came because something about the water contained the miraculous power to heal.

It healed flesh wounds, hereditary diseases, bone deformities, cirrhotic livers, weak hearts, skin rashes, tumors, blood clots, enlarged prostates, swollen glands, and hyperactive thyroids. It alleviated migraines, nausea, menstrual cramps, erectile dysfunction, gall bladder disease, and a thousand other ailments.

There had been not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of documented cases of people who had been confined to wheelchairs, dependent on walkers or canes suddenly standing in astonishment after drinking or even touching the water that flowed from the stream, and then walking away unassisted. Children who had been brought to the water blue and nearly lifeless left it skipping. The elderly emerged from Miller's Creek still old, but free of pain. At night, deer maimed by hunters found their way to the water and then, brought back from the edge of death, bounded whole again into the pine woods.

What was more, nothing could taint the purity of the water. On one occasion, a man who was obviously deranged threw a container of what he claimed was rat poison into the creek. The area was closed and a sample of the water, as well as the now empty container, was taken immediately to a laboratory in Corning for analysis. The results showed that the container had indeed been filled with rat poison, enough, in fact, to kill thousands of people. The water, however, tested absolutely devoid of toxins.

The creek had not always exhibited this remarkable property. Four years before, when the land upon which it ran was sold to an idealistic young New Yorker named Zack Diamond, it was no more than a narrow, marshy strip of water running beneath a tumbledown frame house assessed at twelve thousand dollars.

Diamond, who bought the land as agent for an eccentric British gentleman named Taliesin, had been charged with the task of protecting a singular artifact: This was a pitted, misshapen, handleless cup of greenish metal which, depending on who possessed it, could bring either great good to the world, or great evil.

The young man had hoped that he would be a worthy custodian of the cup. With Taliesin's permission, he pulled up the floorboards of the house and dug straight down until he reached the running creek. Into it he placed a concrete block containing the cup, covered the water with a layer of flat rock, then filled it all in again with earth and replaced the floor. As a result, all the water in Miller's Creek flowed over the cup before ascending to its short overland outcropping.

He knew well what the cup could do. It had saved his own life. It could, he believed, save the lives of countless others.

And so its magic was offered free to anyone who came to Miller's Creek. Despite the warnings of early cynics who claimed that anything this good had to be a hoax from which someone was making money, the miraculous water turned out to be neither apocryphal nor profitable, for the young man or anyone else. The only restriction was that no one was permitted to take any of the water away. It was, Diamond felt, the only way to maintain the simplicity of the healing waters, and the cup as a sacred, if hidden, relic.

For he knew what the cup was, and why he had to keep it away from himself and everyone else. It had been healing wounds on earth for thousands of years, mostly in secret, and mostly in the service of evil men. In fact, it was an enormous irony known only to a select few, including the dismayed Mr. Taliesin, that the only two people in all of human history who might have been able to keep the cup without being corrupted by it had both willingly let it go.

One of those men was Jesus of Nazareth. The other was Arthur Pendragon.

And the cup, which might have kept either of those individuals alive for all eternity, had been known as the Holy Grail.

G
wen Ranier watched, unnoticed
, as her mother smiled into the mirror. "Honey!" she called, arranging a coral-colored silk hibiscus flower behind her ear. "Hon . . . Oh. I didn't see you standing there, angel." She lifted a limp hand to her heart. "How's this look?" She turned around, fixing Gwen with the full wattage of her smile.

At forty-six, Ginger Ranier was still abundantly beautiful. She wore her dark hair long, pulled back like a girl's. On anyone else, the effect might have looked like a fading woman trying to hang on to a vanished youth, but Ginger was able to carry it off. She was shapely, well groomed, and her face, naturally exotic with wide-set, amber-colored eyes and a sensitive aqualine nose, was enhanced by expertly applied makeup.

"You almost can't see the bruise," Gwen said.

"What did you say?" her mother shrilled.

Gwen shook her head sullenly. "Why don't you cut your hair?"

"Oh, so that I can look like you?" Ginger asked. Her voice was soft, but her daughter felt the barb.

"You're a prize, Mom. A real prize."

For a moment the two women stared at one another's reflections in the frilly boudoir mirror. They could not have looked more different. In contrast to her mother's studied youthfulness, Gwen appeared to be much older than her seventeen years. Her eyes were circled with a thick rim of black pencil. Her lips were black, too, although sometimes she lightened them to a deep eggplant color for daytime wear. Her hair, also dyed black, was short as a boy's and spiked straight up, causing her to look as if she had just been electrocuted. Her earrings, silver and black beads, hung to her shoulders like long dog ears.

"You should talk," Ginger said. "You look like a freak."

"And you have a nice day, too," Gwen said, turning away.

"Hey, I'm sorry," her mother called. "Please come back."

Gwen turned back with an exaggerated sigh. "Only if you get rid of that stupid flower."

Ginger took the hibiscus from behind her ear and twirled it thoughtfully between her fingers. "We're so different," she said.

"Duh."

"Why do you dress that way, honey?"

"What way?" Gwen asked, feigning innocence.

"Oh, come on. Scary, like."

Gwen made a face and wiggled her black-nailed fingers at her mother's reflection. "You think I'm scary?"

"No, I think you're wonderful. Smart and kind and good to me, probably better than I deserve. You've never complained about any of the crap I've made you put up with. And you're a super artist, too. You really have talent."

"But..." Gwen said, arching her eyebrows, waiting.

"But you make yourself look weird."

"God." Gwen snatched the flower from her mother's hands and threw it in the wastebasket. "Are you doing this so we won't have to talk about how you look?"

Ginger took a deep breath. "Could be. But I'd still like to know."

Her daughter smiled. "Well, that's honest at least." She took a long look at herself in the mirror, then shrugged. "Maybe I want to look like this so that people can look at me without seeing me."

Her mother looked blankly into the mirror for a moment, then smiled. "I think that's too deep for me," she said.

Gwen smiled back. "That's okay."

"We can talk about me now," Ginger said humbly. "What's wrong with me, I mean."

She sounded so innocent, like a child waiting for punishment, that Gwen wanted to put her arms around her.

She had always been, in some respects, her mother's mother. Ginger was an artist; that was always the reason she gave for failing to provide Gwen with things like lunch money, clean clothes, or a resident adult. "There's nothing wrong with you," Gwen said.

Ginger was still staring into the mirror. "Do I look..." The words seemed to hurt her as they emerged from her lips. "Well,
old?"
A whisper.

Gwen had been holding her breath, but at her mother's question, delivered with such blushing shame, she nearly laughed aloud. Old! If her mother only knew the names people really called her!

Ginger was a sort of icon among the local women and their daughters. With her long dyed hair and rouged cheeks, she was everyone's favorite object of scorn. Who's Ginger sleeping with now? Oh, no one, dear. Haven't you noticed—she hasn't had a black eye in months!

It used to hurt Gwen beyond measure to hear these remarks about her mother. Her mother, who was, actually, not bad for a mother. She was loving and gentle and kind to everyone, including animals. Over the years she'd found dozens of injured dogs, cats, birds, raccoons, turtles, and even a badger, which she'd nursed back to health.

The only one Ginger couldn't seem to keep out of harm's way was herself. But Gwen knew her mother wouldn't understand that in a hundred years.

"It's just jealousy, baby," Ginger had said so often that it had become a kind of mantra. “Those wrinkled old bags just wish they could look like me."

She was, in fact, a virtual miracle of regeneration and good genes. Her nose had been broken at one time, as had a cheekbone, a forearm, a finger, and several ribs. Whenever one of the earthy paramours with whom she was fond of mating took out his frustrations on her with his fists, Ginger had run to the battered women's shelter with Gwen in tow. She was always wild-eyed and weeping, her nose streaming blood, her perfect makeup smeared grotesquely, her eyes swollen, beginning already to blacken, her lips thick and stippled with cuts, her body bruised.

But she had never filed charges. Not once, not even against one man who had almost killed her. He was the father of her child, she explained, forgetting that she used that explanation for all of them. In truth, the real father of her daughter had been quite respectable, a student from Cambridge University in England, passing through Dawning Falls on vacation.

But that had been nearly eighteen years ago. Ginger never talked about him.

The day after each of her encounters with the wild side of love, Ginger would once again be smiling, her long hair shining and lovely, her makeup perfectly applied over the bruises and cuts.

She had not been to the shelter in some time now, and for nearly a year had not become involved enough with a man to invite him to live with her and her daughter in their small rented house.

For Gwen, that had been a tremendous relief. The men had always frightened her. The men, and their fists, and the blood on her mother's face. In the past year she had finally begun to relax in her home.

But her mother had taken up with someone again. She could tell. The flowers, the careful makeup, the faint streak of blue over her cheekbone, the slight swelling. "No, Mom," Gwen said dully. "You don't look old."

The relief on Ginger's face was visible. "Well, that's a blessing," she said. She picked the flower out of the wastebasket casually, as if the wind had blown it there. Held it up to her experimentally. Looked at her daughter's reflection with puppy eyes, as if asking Gwen's permission. Finally she set the flower down. "Okay, I'll leave it off if that'll make you happy," she said.

"And cut your hair."

"John likes it," Ginger said, tossing the long curls.

The gesture disgusted Gwen. "John?" the girl asked, remembering another lover of her mother's with the same name. When she had made the mistake of mentioning him to a classmate, the girl had asked if "John" was the man's name, or his relationship to her mother.

Ginger stood up and straightened her skirt. Her eyes did not meet Gwen's. "He's very nice, really. I've been thinking about letting him move in for a while."

Gwen froze. "What?"

"Well, it wouldn't be for long. He's a little down on his luck, and—"

"You mean he doesn't have a job," Gwen said.

"He could help out around the house. Fix that leak in the roof. We could sure use some help with that, couldn't we?"

"How many times has he hit you?"

Ginger's hand went to her face. "That was just an accident," she said. "He didn't mean anything. John's really a sweetie."

"How long have you known him, a week?" Gwen demanded. It had, indeed, been a week. "Please don't let him move in, Mom."

"Look," Ginger said with a smile. "I can take care of myself."

"Then you don't need him!" Gwen felt her shoulders begin to tremble and her voice quaver. Not another one. Oh, God, not another man in our house.

"I mean I can control the situation," Ginger said evenly. "I'm not going to let anybody use me for a doormat, believe me, Gwen. Now we're going to go over to Miller's Creek. John's not from around here, and he wants to see if the waters'll get rid of some scars he got in the service. You can come, too."

Gwen ran her hand over her eyes. "Why would I want to do that?"

"Just so he can meet you, honey." As an afterthought she added, "And you can give him the once-over, too."

"If I don't like him, will you tell him he can't live here?"

Ginger hesitated for a moment, then smiled. "Sure," she said, taking her daughter's hand. "It's you and me, baby girl."

"Yeah," Gwen said, feeling her eyes start to fill.

"What's the matter?" Ginger asked.

"Nothing." Gwen wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Go ahead and wear the flower," she said softly. "Never can tell when Mr. Right's going to come along."