The Magic Circle Read online

  And it did. That was how Sam became Grey Cloud, and how our totem spirit blessed us with the light, and how I became part Indian, by the mixing of our blood. From that night forward, it was as if a knot had been untied inside me, and my path through life would be forever straight and clear.

  From that night until now, that is.

  The U.S. government has been accused of wasting taxpayer dollars, but never on lavish work facilities for its employees. Especially not out here in the provinces, where every nickel that might have provided comfort in the work environment was squeezed tightly or, better yet, put back into the till. As a result, more cash had been spent on paving the six acres of parking lots surrounding our work site, where government workers parked their cars, than on constructing, furnishing, repairing, cleaning, or heating the buildings where actual humans had to work.

  As I pulled into the vast parking lot just after lunchtime, patches of snow still clinging to my car, I surveyed the lots as far as the eye could see. As I’d suspected, by this late in the day the only slots left in the official employee parking areas seemed to be located in western Wyoming. And at this time of year and after a melt like this morning’s, the late afternoon wind chill could drop to sixty below; ice pebbles were already kicking against my windshield. I decided to risk a penalty and leave my car at the front of the main complex, where a small strip of official visitor parking was located. Employees were forbidden to park there, or to enter through the guest lobby. But I could usually talk a security guard there into letting me sign the logbook instead of making me hike outside all the way around the vast complex to enter through the official mantraps for employees at the rear.

  I slid into one of the open spaces, pulled up my sheepskin coat, wrapped the long fringed cashmere scarf around my face, and pulled my wool ski cap down over my ears. Then I leapt from the car, locked it up, and made a dash for the glass front doors. Not a moment too soon, for the gust that came through as I stepped in nearly ripped the door off its hinges. I managed to yank it shut, then went through the next set of doors into the lobby.

  I was unwrapping my scarf and wiping my windburned eyes when I saw him. He was standing at the reception desk, signing out. I froze.

  I mean, how could I forget the lyrics of “Some Enchanted Evening”—“you will see a stranger …”—when Jersey used to play it over and over, that recording of herself singing it with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau onstage at the Salle Pleyel?

  So here was the stranger. And while the setting was not exactly idyllic—the visitors’ lobby of the Technical Science Annex—I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that this was the one human being on earth who’d been created just for me. He was the gift the gods had sent me in consolation because my cousin Sam was dead. And to think I might have entered by another door instead. How subtle are the mysteries the fates have in store for us just around every corner.

  He actually looked somewhat godlike—at least, like my picture-book image of a god. His dark hair swept back in abundance to his collar; he was tall and slender, with the chiseled Macedonian profile one always associates with heroes. The soft camel coat and tasseled white silk scarf he wore swung loose from his broad shoulders. He carried a pair of expensive Italian leather gloves lightly between long, graceful fingers. This was no cowboy engineer, that was for durned tootin’, as Olivier would say.

  There was in his posture and demeanor something of aloof, regal composure that bordered upon arrogance. And when he turned from the security guard Bella—who was looking at him with her mouth open like a fish—and headed toward me, I saw that his eyes, beneath dark lashes, were the purest dark turquoise, and of an amazing depth. His eyes swept me, tightening for a moment, and I realized that in this getup I had the sex appeal of a polar bear.

  He was coming toward me to the exit. He was leaving the building! I felt in a panic that I must do something—fall on the floor in a faint or hurl myself spread-eagled across the door. But instead I closed my eyes and inhaled him as he passed: a mixture of pine and leather and citron that left me a bit dizzy.

  It may have been my imagination, but I thought he whispered something as he passed me: “enchanting,” or perhaps it was “exquisite.” Or maybe it was only “excuse me,” for it seemed I was partly blocking the exit. When I opened my eyes, he was gone.

  I went to have a look at the logbook, but as I got to the reception desk, Bella, having recovered her composure, slapped a piece of paper over the open page. I looked up in surprise to find her glaring at me in non-security-guard fashion. It was more the look of an angry cat in heat.

  “You’re to use the mantraps, Behn,” she informed me, pointing at the door that led back outside. “And the logbook is confidential to management.”

  “All the other visitors can read the book and see who’s been here when they sign in,” I pointed out. “Why not the other employees? I’ve never heard that rule.”

  “You’re in nuclear security, not premises security; that’s why you don’t know,” she retorted with a sneer, as if my field were some kind of primitive throwback compared with her own.

  I yanked the paper out from beneath her mauve lacquered fingernails before she knew what was happening. She grabbed at it, but too late. I’d already read his name:

  Prof. Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser; IAEA; Krems, Österreich

  I hadn’t the vaguest where Krems, Austria, was located. But IAEA was the International Atomic Energy Agency, the group that patroled this industry worldwide—not that it gave them very much to do in recent years. Austria itself was a nuclear-free country. Nevertheless, it trained some of the top nuclear experts in the world. I was more than interested in having a serious look at the curriculum vitae of Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser. And that wasn’t all.

  I smiled at Bella and scratched my name on the log. “I have an emergency appointment with my boss, Pastor Dart. He asked me to get over from the other building as quickly as possible,” I told her as I took off my wraps and hung them on the lobby coatrack.

  “That’s a lie. Dr. Dart’s still out to lunch with some visitors from Washington,” Bella informed me with a snotty expression on her face. “I know, because he signed out here with them over an hour ago. You can see for yourself—”

  “Gee, so I guess the log isn’t confidential to management anymore,” I told her with a grin, and I swept through the inner doors.

  Olivier was sitting in the office we shared in this building, playing with his computer terminal. We were the project directors in charge of locating, recovering, and managing “hot waste” such as fuel rods and other transuranic materials: that is, materials that had an atomic number higher than that of uranium. These were tracked by programs designed to our requirements and developed by our computer group.

  “Who is Professor Doctor Wolfgang K. Hauser of the IAEA in Austria?” I asked when Olivier glanced up from his machine.

  “Oh lord, not you too?” he said, shoving back his swivel chair and rubbing his eyes. “You’ve only been back at work for a few minutes. How could you have picked up the sickness so fast? He’s like the site plague, this fellow. To date, not one woman has failed to succumb. I really thought you’d be the one to resist. I have serious money riding on you, you know. We’ve opened a table to wager the odds.”

  “He’s absolutely gorgeous,” I told Olivier. “But it’s more than that. There’s some kind of—I don’t know what to call it—not really an animal magnetism—”

  “Oh no!” cried Olivier, standing up and putting his hands on my shoulders. “It’s far worse than I imagined! Maybe I’ve lost the grocery money too!”

  “You didn’t wager the exotic gourmet herbal tea budget?” I asked with a grin.

  He sat down again with his head in his hands and moaned. I suddenly realized that Professor Doctor Wolfgang K. Hauser was the first thing in a week that had made me smile and forget, for an entire ten minutes, about Sam. That in itself made up for Olivier’s lost wager and a few pounds of glamorous herbal teas to boot.<
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  Olivier jumped to his feet as the alarm system started hooting and a voice came over the loudspeaker between bursts:

  “This is a test of the emergency alarm system. We are conducting our winter fire drill. This drill is being timed both by local fire officials and federal safety officials. Please proceed in haste to your nearest emergency exit and wait in the parking lot well away from the building until the all-clear signal is blown.”

  Holy shit! During fire drills, we could only use the emergency exits. They sealed all mantraps and doors that led back into the building, where people might get trapped in a real emergency—including the door to the lobby where my coat was. The outside temperature, well below zero when I came in, would be colder by now. And a fire drill could last thirty minutes.

  “Come on,” Olivier said, pulling on his parka. “Get your things—let’s go!”

  “My coat’s in the lobby,” I said as I started walking briskly in his wake toward the exit across the vast floor of already vacated desks. A sea of people was flowing out the four exits into the bitter wind I could see outside.

  “You’re completely insane,” he informed me. “How many times have I told you not to use the lobby? Now you’ll be transformed into a block of ice. I’d share my coat, but we can’t both fit inside it—it’s snug. But we can each pass it back and forth until the other starts to turn blue.”

  “I have a down parka in my car, and my car keys are here in my handbag,” I told him. “I’ll sprint to the car and turn the heat on. If the drill goes on too long, I’ll go over to the cowboy bar and have some hot tea.”

  “Okay, I’ll come join you,” said Olivier. “I guess if you came in the front doors, that means that you parked illegally, too?”

  I grinned at him as we burst out the doors with the crowd, and we jogged around the side of the building.

  When I went to unlock the car door, I saw that the button locks were already up. That was strange; I always locked my car. Maybe I was just so distraught today I’d forgotten. I crawled in, put on my parka, and turned on the ignition as Olivier got in at the other side. The engine turned over sluggishly, so it was good that I’d been forced to come out and start it. In weather like this, with little protection, the oil in your crankcase could turn into a snow cone.

  And then I noticed the knot, hanging from my rearview mirror.

  Sam and I as children had a pet project of learning all kinds of knots. I’d become an expert of sorts. I could tie most knots single-handed the way a sailor could. Sam said the Incas of Peru had used knots as a language: they could do mathematics or even tell a story with them. As a child I used to send knot messages to people—or even to myself, to see if I could recall later what they meant—like tying a string around your finger.

  I had the habit of leaving pieces of yarn or rope in different places—like the rearview mirror. Then when I was under stress or working out a problem, I’d tie and untie them, sometimes even working up a complex macramé. And as the knot pattern was worked out, miraculously, so would be my problem. But I didn’t recall seeing this piece of yarn on my drive home, or even this afternoon coming in to work. My memory was getting pretty flaky.

  I touched the knot as I felt the car warming. It was actually two knots, if you included the part wrapped around the mirror bar: a Solomon’s knot, signifying a critical decision, and a slippery hitch, meaning exactly what it sounds like. What did I have in mind when I’d put that there? I undid the yarn and started playing with it.

  Olivier had turned on the radio and located some of the awful, twangy cowboy music he loved so much. I regretted inviting him to share my vehicle retreat; after all, we spent ninety percent of our lives under the same roof, as it was. But then I recalled that I’d seen no traces of Olivier’s entry and exit, or, indeed, anyone’s snowprints when I’d pulled up last night—correction, this morning—before the house. Though the snows and winds might well have been constant and heavy, there should have been something to show he was there. Indeed, why hadn’t he brought in any of my mail if he’d been in residence the whole time? The plot thickened.

  “Olivier—where were you while I was gone?”

  Olivier looked at me with dark eyes, and he kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Darling, I must confess,” he told me, “I met a cowgirl I just couldn’t resist.”

  “You passed the blizzard with a cowgirl?” I said, surprised, for Olivier had never been the overnight-pickup type. “Fill in the blanks. Is she pretty? Is she a Latter-day Saint like yourself? And where was my cat while all this was going on?”

  “I left the little argonaut with a large bowl of food; he fixes drinks on his own, after all. As to the lady, the past tense would best describe our relationship. It melted away along with the snow; by now, I’m afraid it’s as frozen as the ice outside.”

  Very poetic.

  “I have to go to Sun Valley next weekend,” I said. “Are you going to desert Jason in that frigid basement again, or should I take him with me?”

  “Going skiing?” said Olivier. “Why don’t you take us both with you? I was just trying to figure out where to go to catch this new snow. In Sun Valley they have forty inches of base on the slopes, and in the bowls sixty inches of powder.” Olivier was an excellent skier and floated like a feather in the powder. I could never get the hang of powder myself, but I loved to watch him from afar.

  “Well,” I said, “I probably won’t be able to be on the slopes much. My uncle’s coming to visit. He wants to discuss family matters.”

  “I should imagine!” Olivier agreed. “You seem to be getting plenty of attention from your formerly absent family, now that you’re an heiress.” Then he suddenly looked sorry for having mentioned it at all.

  “It’s okay,” I told Olivier. “I’m getting over it. Besides, my uncle’s very wealthy himself. He’s a famous violinist and conductor in—”

  “Not Lafcadio Behn? Is that your uncle?” said Olivier. “With so few Behns in the world, I always wondered if you were related to any of the famous ones.”

  “Probably to all of them,” I said with a grimace. “It’s the Behn of my existence.”

  The all-clear signal blew just as I was telling Olivier he could come along this weekend if he liked. Reluctantly I turned off the warm engine to go back out into the bitter cold again. As I was locking the car door, I remembered that I had locked it on my way into the lobby. It wasn’t my imagination—someone had broken into my car.

  I looked in the hatchback where the backseat was folded down. Everything I usually had was still there, but it was slightly rearranged. Someone had searched the car, too. I locked the door anyway, a kind of reflex action. I followed Olivier around to the back entrance, almost bumping into my boss, Pastor Dart, as he was going in.

  “Behn—you’re back!” he said, a grin crossing that pugnacious face of his. “Come to my office in about half an hour, when I’m free. If I’d known you were coming back today I’d have cleared the decks. There’s a lot I need to discuss with you.”

  Bella the security guard, filing back in just in front of us, turned and smirked over her shoulder. I told the Pod I’d be there, and went back to my office just as the phone started ringing.

  “You get it,” Olivier said. “I forgot: Before you came, a lady from a newspaper phoned about some documents she said you’d inherited. But the rest of the morning, every time I answered the phone they just hung up. Probably some crank.”

  I picked up the phone on the fourth ring. “Ariel Behn, Waste Management,” I answered.

  “Hi, hotshot,” said that soft, familiar voice—a voice I’d believed I would never hear again except in a dream. “I’m sorry. Really, truly sorry that it had to be done this way—but I’m not dead,” Sam said. “However, I might be, soon, unless you can help me. And fast.”

  THE RUNE

  MARSYAS:

  Black, black, intolerably black!

  Go, spectre of the ages, go!

  Suffice it that I passed beyond. />
  I found the secret of the bond

  Of thought to thought through countless years,

  Through many lives, in many spheres,

  Brought to a point the dark design

  Of this existence that is mine.

  I knew my secret. All I was … all I am.

  The rune’s complete when all I shall be flashes by

  Like a shadow on the sky.…

  OLYMPAS:

  Through life, through death, by land and sea

  Most surely will I follow thee.

  —Aleister Crowley, AHA

  I had to sit down, and fast. The blood drained from my brain like the vortex in a sink, as I dropped like a rock into my chair. I ducked my head until my forehead was grazing my knees, to keep from blacking out.

  Sam was alive. Alive.

  He was alive, wasn’t he? Or maybe I was dreaming. Things like that happened sometimes in dreams—things that could seem very real. But Sam’s voice was still there, humming in my ear, though I’d just returned from his funeral. It was clearly time for a sanity check.

  “Are you there, Ariel?” Sam sounded worried. “I can’t hear you breathing.”

  It was true: I had stopped breathing. It required conscious effort to begin again, to jump-start even this most basic autopilot function. I swallowed hard, gripped the arm of my chair, straightened up, and forced myself to squeak out a reply.

  “Hi,” I said into the mouthpiece. I sounded ridiculous, but what on earth was I supposed to say?

  “I’m sorry. I know what you must be going through right now, Ariel,” Sam said: the understatement of the century. “But please don’t ask questions until I can explain. In fact, it’s dangerous for you to say anything at all unless you’re completely alone.”

  “I’m not,” I told him quickly. All the while, I was still trying to harness my runaway brain and bring my biorhythms under some semblance of control.