The Wicked Garden (8 page)

and she will give him despair. 

When he finds the stone again,
 

He will find his heart,
 

and all may be redeemed.
 

The first and the second and the psychopomps

will follow the Horned God to the underworld.

Amethyst is the key that will open the buried box.

When the spirits are set free,

all will be redeemed.

Look to the twenty-first to find the second.

Find her, and all shall be redeemed.
 

             
When she was done speaking, the crone cocked her head to one side and looked as if she were listening to a silent sound. Then she turned to Diana. “The veil is closing, and I have said what I came to say. Life begins in water. Don’t let the life of another of my kin end there.”

             
“Are you sure this prophecy is for
me
?” Diana asked. “There’s nobody else who can undo this curse?”

The crone’s eyes were still embers. “
Whit’s fur ye’ll no go by ye,
” she whispered with a slithering rasp.

Diana had more questions on the tip of her tongue, but she was struck silent by the appearance of another woman in the clearing. The newcomer was a redhead, tall, with a scar that ran from the top of her cheekbone to the edge of her chin, as if her face had been slashed with a knife.

She walked up to the crone, nodded, and then looked to Diana. “I am Carlin.”

Diana flipped through the encyclopedia of folklore in her head.
Carlin. Scottish variant of Cailleach. Another crone—although this woman doesn’t look old. Sometimes the carlin is a witch
.

The woman continued, “Look at my face. Remember it, and remember this scar. Find my face, and you shall find the living descendants of the Solstice Twins.” Diana focused, trying to memorize Carlin’s face.

“Is that all?”

“We are out of time.” The crone returned the necklace to Diana’s outstretched hand. “But Claire and the others will help you.”

“I don’t much trust fairies,” Diana replied.

“Smart girl,” the crone cackled. Then she opened her fist and blew sparkling dust into Diana's face.

Diana’s eyes became heavy. They closed—

             
And just as quickly, they reopened. She blinked, wondering where she was now. She felt the softness of the pillow beneath her head, and remembered.

“You’re back,” she heard a soft voice say.

She turned and saw her lover smiling his beautiful smile. As happy as she was to see him and his crazy curly hair, she discovered that she was disappointed to find herself in bed, as if she had never left. The crone, the prophecy, the whole adventure—it really was just the LSD. She let out a sigh.
Oh, well
.

“Take this, Diana. Hydrate.”

The water her lover offered her was cool and refreshing. She drank it all, and through the bottom of the glass she noticed a sparkling light coming from the dresser. Hanging from a spindle at the top of the mirror was the amulet.

∞

              Diana and her lover were sitting in a doctor’s exam room, waiting. “I do like the haircut, Diana. It suits your personality. Short and sharp,” her lover said, as he touched her new slick bob.

“Thank you, darling. Those damn fairies traumatized me. I ma
y never have long hair again,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have taken that LSD.”

“And miss your chance to
be
the mystery? You can’t be serious.”

“That’s really more your thing, isn’t it? I prefer to keep mystery safely contained on the page.” Paper crinkled as she wiggled her bottom on the exam tab
le. “So, how will you feel if the prediction is true?”

He gazed at her with eyes of a deep aqua blue.
A son.
The thought whirled in his mind like a loose firework. Was it possible that while exploring the numinous temple of her body and mind he had created something so miraculous and pure as a new human life?

“My dear, I would be the happiest man on earth if it were true.” He kissed her forehead, and then gently rested his hand on her abdomen.

“You already are the happiest man on earth.” Diana smiled one of her rare smiles. He was as naturally joyous as she was prickly.

“But a son!” His eyes twinkled and he grinned like the Cheshire cat.

Diana looked tenderly at the man who challenged her thinking, pushed her toward her calling, and loved her beyond her wildest dreams.

“You do realize our lives would change dramatically. Things can’t stay the way they are,” she said.

“Honey love, everything is constantly changing anyway. All of reality is a temporary, shifting thought.”

Diana allowed herself a gentle eyeroll. “You know what I mean. You’re still stirring things up, which is who you are, but it’s dangerous. I shudder to think what’s in your FBI file. We can’t raise a child on the run,” she said, trailing her fingertips over his cheeks. “If I really am pregnant, my son must be kept safe.”

“I think you really are with child, my love. I already sense the fierce protective spirit of Demeter,” he smiled. “My life is malleable, Diana. I see no problem. If you want privacy, then privacy you shall have. We could go to Carbondale for a while and stay with Mother, until we find a place—and a time—to settle.”

“Yes, going underground might be safest. I just couldn’t bear it if they took you away from me.”

“And
I
couldn’t bear for my son to grow up fatherless when I clearly have a choice in the matter.”

Diana stroked his face lovingly. “You could care for the baby while I start my research on the Solstice Twins. If we do have a son—if he is part of this prophecy—I need to know how to help him.”

He smiled at her thoughtfully. “Oh, of course I would care for our baby. Nothing would bring me more joy.” He paused for a moment, reflecting. “Maybe I should change my name….” he smiled.

“That might be a good idea, and it would definitely be fun.”

“What do you think of Peter?”

Diana snorted. “It suits you perfectly, my eternal boy.”

“We should go out for dinner to celebrate tonight,” her lover said.

“We don’t even know if we have anything to celebrate.”

“I’m thinking Mexican,” he mused, as he drifted off into dreamy enchilada oblivion.

“Again? It’s a good thing I love you.”

“Oh yes, it is a very good thing.”

A throat cleared, and they both looked up to see the doctor standing in the doorway.

“Well Mrs. Stewart,” the doctor began.

“It’s
Ms.
Stewart,” she proclaimed proudly.

The doctor gave her a disapproving snare, and then looked back at his chart. “Well
Ms
. Stewart, your hunch was correct. You’re pregnant.”

CHAPTER NINE

Portland and Champaign, 2010s

Eli stared out the window as his plane took off from Portland International Airport en route to Champaign, Illinois. The sky seemed to reflect his mood: bleak and miserably dull. It was the Winter Solstice, the sun god’s birthday. It also happened to be Eli’s birthday—his thirty-ninth. It was a day for new beginnings, but Eli was lost in the past.

It wasn’t long before a flight attendant offered him a drink, but he waved her on. Stuck in transit on his birthday. Moving forward, yet not moving at all. Eli was not surprised. This had been the paradoxical theme of his life for the last seventeen years.

Eli was bored—utterly, existentially bored. For someone who had grown up surrounded by creativity, imagination, and action, boredom was an abomination. And by now, Eli knew this state well enough to know it would take a powerful outside stimulus to break through this self-inflicted inertia. He also knew that commercial air travel was unlikely to provide him with a suitable diversion. He continued to stare out the window.

His life hadn’t always been hopeless. He had been a happy kid, an only child, only grandchild on both sides of the family, showered with love. His had been an unorthodox childhood—given his background, that was inevitable—and it had given him opportunities and freedoms that most kids never knew.

Eli had grown up in Oregon, where his parents had settled in the late 70s. His father, who went by the name of Peter Stewart, hadn’t changed his ornery ways. He was still pushing the psychotropic envelope –and while the FBI seemed to have lost interest in him sometime during the 90s, Peter was so imbedded in the counterculture that he couldn’t quite give up his paranoia. Eli’s mother, Diana, ignored her husband’s delusions of persecution. Eli indulged them.

As a kid, Eli had been thrilled by the idea that his father was a wanted radical, and, when Eli was thirteen, his father even gave him a role to play in his underground intrigues. Peter handed his son a package and a plane ticket, and sent him on his first mission. Eli had been making similar trips for his father ever since.

He wasn’t on one of his father’s errands tonight, but this in-between time gave him ample opportunity to reflect on the mission that had changed his life forever. For better or worse, Eli still couldn’t say.

His father had sent him to southern Illinois in the early 90s. That’s where he fell in love for the first time—the only time. Six months later, it was over.

Well, not over. Not really. It would never be over for Eli. He was thinking about the girl he’d lost while he was stuck on this cross-country flight, just as he was pretty much always thinking about her—or trying very hard to find ways to
not
think about her.

When Eli looked out at the gray mist that surrounded the plane, he could see her tear-streaked, defeated face as she made her choice to walk away. His mother had seen it, too, and that fact still colored Eli’s relationship with Diana.

After leaving Carbondale, Eli had finished his education at UC Berkeley, ultimately earning a Masters of Fine Arts with a concentration in photography. Eli had had no idea what he was going to do with this degree, but a sailboat he received as a congratulatory gift from his family allowed him to ignore that particular problem for a while. He spent a year sailing with his maternal grandfather, not worrying about what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

When his grandfather’s declining health required a return to shore, Eli put his boat in dry dock and embarked on an aimless decade of world travel. Like his mother, Eli had a trust fund that ensured that he never had to work.
Unlik
e his mother, he wasn’t driven to work anyway. Oh, he dabbled—he kept travel journals for “inspiration” and he took ridiculously dull photos of famously beautiful places. He tried to do something to fill the void that washed over him at night, but nothing could stop his haunting thoughts of a wild redhead with the longest legs he’d ever seen.

Eli was a photographer who couldn’t shoot, and a poet who couldn’t write. His muse was gone. Occasionally, he’d sense a trace of her—an angle of light that reminded him of the sparkle in her gray eyes, or a whiff of the fresh strawberries she always seemed to smell of–but then she’d be gone again before he could capture the moment.

Finally, tired of traveling, and of playing hide and seek with a ghost, Eli gave into inertia and ennui. An errand for his father had taken him to a small town in Oregon, and that’s where he had stopped. He bought a piece of land, built himself a house, and prepared to spend the rest of his days succumbing to the dull ache of his loss.

Eli had surprised himself by taking an interest in farming—well, farming of a sort. Intrigued by a playful suggestion from his father, Eli had discovered that his little piece of temperate rainforest was an ideal environment for cultivating mushrooms of the mind-expanding kind. The work of foraging and classifying, of coaxing some of the rarer species to flourish, proved to occupy him for hours at a time.

Eli also became an active—if mostly anonymous—philanthropist. Both his parents had taught him to keep a low profile, but they had also taught him to respect the earth. He gave a good deal of time and money to programs dedicated to upholding environmental sovereignty. And, as much as it hurt him to be anywhere near a battered woman, he found himself growing more and more involved with local shelters, providing them with resources and money. It was the least he could do, he reasoned.

The mushrooms were a nice escape, and the giving felt almost necessary, considering the size of his inheritance. In Oregon, Eli forged a small circle of likeminded friends and even found a woman, a sculptor, willing to put up with his gloomy moods and emotional unavailability. And it was almost enough.

The plane began its descent, and the clouds outside his window were replaced by snow-dusted grids of dormant soybean fields, and then by the slightly less regular patterns of suburban neighborhoods.
Almost enough
, Eli thought, resting his forehead against the cold glass.

There was only one person who had ever been enough, and she was practically a figment of his imagination now. He didn’t even have a photo to produce as evidence of her existence. He had taken hundreds, but his mother had burned the prints and destroyed the negatives. Because the girl was not a descendant of the Solstice Twins, Diana had no use for her, and she had tried to convince her son that he didn’t, either. Eli shuddered at the memory of the burning photos. His mother had always been intense, but it had been a
cool
intensity. There was nothing cool about her that day.

Despite his mother’s tyranny, Eli could not forget the girl. She was the only one who would ever be enough for him, and she had been gone for seventeen years—and, for seventeen years, he had gone, too. More or less.

             
He thought of her still as he rode in a cab through Champaign, where his mother was giving a lecture at the University of Illinois. He could almost see the details of the redhead’s face when he closed his eyes and cleared his head. It was hard for him, doing this. It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember what she looked like—he knew every eyelash, every freckle—but seeing her again was like cooking his own heart over an open flame.

Finally, he shook his head, trying to dislodge the vision. The wild brown curls he’d inherited from his father rustled against the vinyl of the cab’s backseat, and Eli tried to think of his mother instead. He hadn’t seen her in almost a year, though they lived less than an hour away from each other. She’d been in Scotland, doing research on the folkloric mystery that she had been investigating since before he was born. The Solstice Twins fascinated Diana just slightly more than they failed to interest her son—despite the fact that she had assured Eli that he was a central figure in the prophecy that sprang from their story.

She would only be in the States for a week before jetting off to Greece for a conference. Diana spent a lot of time abroad. Eli was used to it. It had been that way his whole life. He was used to her blithe self-centeredness, too. Case in point: it was
his
birthday, and she had demanded that
he
come to
her
so they could visit before she left the country again.

Eli sighed. He was looking forward to this reunion—she was his mother, after all—
but he was also preparing himself for the usual tensions. His mother was too wrapped up in her own obsession to have much patience with his.

∞

Walking through the lobby of a hotel in Champaign, Eli tried to shake off his anxiety. His mother was… herself, and he couldn’t help but smile at the prospect of seeing her again. She was a complicated woman: a psychologist, the author of several popular books on mythology, and a compulsive researcher. Eli begged her to slow down, but she vowed that she would only retire when the prophecy she had spent forty years studying was fulfilled. Or maybe when Eli had given her some grandchildren. Both seemed equally impossible.

The mystery of the Solstice Twins was her great ques
t. She had traced their descendants from seventeenth-century Scotland to Chicago in the early twentieth-century, but then she had struck an impasse. The last descendent she had found, Carlin Fitzgerald, had disappeared at the age of fourteen. Diana had spent more than two decades trying to find out what had happened to her, with no success.

Diana was driven to see the prophecy fulfilled, and not just because she was a stubborn Scot. Diana knew that her peers had little respect for transpersonal psychology—the field to which she and both her parents had devoted themselves. If she could just see the prophecy through to its conclusion, it would justify her own work and that of her parents. She believed that, if she could find the current descendants of the Solstice Twins and help lift the curse that had been set in motion by the death of the first twin, she could present a definitive account of how mythic archetypes manifest in the contemporary world. Diana had assured Eli—more than once—that she was preoccupied with the prophecy because it involved him, but he knew his mother well enough to realize that concern for her son was not her primary motivation. And, at this point, he was also pretty sure that he was old enough to not care. Pretty sure, anyway.

“Eli!” Diana cried as she opened the door of her hotel room. She pulled him into a huge mama-bear hug. Eli bent down so that she could kiss his cheeks and ruffle his wild hair. She couldn’t help noticing that there were more white strands than there had been the last time she’d seen him. “Happy birthday and Happy Solstice, darling. How’s my boy?”

“Just smashing, Mother,” he smirked.

“And Rebecca? How is Rebecca?” she asked with a smirk of her own. After ascertaining that Rebecca was definitely not the second woman in the prophecy, Diana regarded her as a nuisance and an impediment.

“She’s as fascinating as ever. She’s working on a new sculpture for Burning Man; it’s a seven-foot wide vagina with twenty-one tiny heads poking out. You simply must see it.” He rolled his eyes and plopped down on the sofa.

“You know, my friend Estella has a freshly divorced daughter. She’s a history professor, no children, drop-dead gorgeous, and just looking for a little fun, like you."

He rolled his eyes again. “No.”

“Oh darling, you may not realize this, but you are so incredibly handsome. You’ve aged well just like your father. It’s such a waste for you to be so lost and lonely.”

“It didn’t have to be this way,” Eli mumbled under his breath.

Diana didn’t miss a beat. “She wasn’t a descendant, Eli. The second love will…”

“If I
just
could have told her who I really was. If you
just
would have let me go after her…” Eli said.

“She wasn’t the woman we’re looking for! There will be another, Eli!”

“I’ll make sure there’s not another, if for no other reason than to spite you,” Eli groused.
Dammit
, he thought.
I hoped we could hold out for more than two minutes before getting into this bullshit.

“Nonsense,” Diana said without much energy. This was a conversation they’d had many times before. Evidently, she was getting a little tired of it, too. “You cannot stop fate.”

“Maybe not, Mother, but for all we know, Gretchel still has the amethyst. Even if she has given it away, it doesn’t matter, because I’m not capable of loving another woman like I love her!”

Diana stared at her son incredulously, and without a trace of compassion.

“That girl was pregnant and psychotic the last you saw of her, Eli. I don’t know if she belonged with that other man, but I do know that she didn’t belong with
you
.”

“Maybe she wasn’t the woman you’re looking for, Mother, but she’s the only woman I will ever want,” he said as his eyes glassed over with ancient emotion.

Diana softened, slightly. She sat down next to him and brushed a lock of curls out of her son’s amazing aquamarine eyes. “You were chosen for your role in this prophecy by the fates, darling. We both were. I don’t why, and we may never know why. I only know what my father drilled into my head and what I’ve tried to drill into yours: a Stewart finishes what she starts.”