The response was a blast of psychic hate:
"It is not our hands which do this deed, but that of Amodeus the Horned One!"
"The trespasser must die!"
"So mote it be!"
"So mote it be!"
I was watching a duel of sorcerers, and I felt thrown back in time a thousand years, thrown to the ground at the mouth of a cave in which moved dark, strange shapes.
There was a long silence. Peth made a motion with his hand and the other members of the coven turned and started to fan out. It was dwarf-hunting time.
"Stop!" Uranus' voice was weaker, ragged, as though she were short of breath. The movement of the coven members stopped. "I am Uranus Jones, and Dr. Frederickson is under my protection. You have heard of me and know of my powers."
Peth's voice drifted softly through the room, waxing and waning like some invisible moon. "I have heard of you, Uranus Jones. You are a member of our family, a unit of the Universal Mind. Respect our wishes. This is not your concern. Leave us. So mote it be."
Again, the faint, muted tones: "I repeat that Dr. Frederickson is under my protection. You harm him at your own peril."
Her voice drifted off strangely. The muscles in my stomach began to flutter uncontrollably. There was movement to my left.
"Mongo! Shoot the leader if anyone moves again!"
Uranus' voice seemed stronger now, as though she had successfully passed through some great ordeal. I liked her suggestion, except that I didn't have a gun, and Peth knew it.
"He doesn't have a gun," Peth said, underlining my thoughts. I wondered why he sounded so uncertain.
"He does now," Uranus said. "Open the doors and let him pass."
It was the beginning of an argument between two other parties that I was going to lose. It seemed a good time to excuse myself from the debate.
I remembered the scaffolding hanging from the hole in the north wall, and tried to picture in my mind exactly where it would be. I knew it was about ten feet off the ground, and I would need tremendous momentum if I hoped to reach it.
Circus time. I shoved off the wall and sprinted across the floor, getting up a good head of steam. Somebody reached out for me and missed. Twenty feet from where I judged the wall to be I launched into a series of cartwheels, then, on the last turn, planted my feet on the floor and hurled myself up into the air.
At the apogee of my leap my hands touched wood. I gripped the edge of the scaffold; I scrambled up onto the platform, shinnied up the rope and dropped over the concrete cornice onto a pile of building supplies.
The entire escape had taken less than fifteen seconds.
I could see Uranus now in the glow of the firelight reflected off the walls. She was slumped against a girder, next to a large circuit breaker; her appearance frightened me more than anything that had happened previously. She appeared to have aged into an old woman, devoid of energy; her beautiful, silver hair hung in wisps from her head.
I ran over to her and grabbed her around the waist.
"Fire exit," she gasped. "Off to the left."
I started to my left, pulling Uranus after me. I'd expected to hear a furor from below or, at the least, a few well-chosen curses. There was silence.
"Why the hell didn't you tell me about this place?" I whispered through clenched teeth. "It would have saved everybody a lot of trouble."
"Scry," Uranus sighed in the same broken voice that had so frightened me before. "Knew. . felt. . you in trouble. Called Garth but afraid. . there wasn't. . time."
She seemed to be regaining her strength. I released her and she scrambled along beside me. I found the window she had come through. We both went out, then started down the fire escape.
"The gun," Uranus said. "Do you have it? They may try to come after us."
"I don't have a gun."
Uranus said nothing. I could hear the sirens of Garth's cavalry coming to the rescue. Judging from the sound, they were closing fast.
"Let's go watch the show," I said, starting down the alley leading to the front of the building.
Uranus grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the darkness beside the building. She looked herself again, though still pale; it was as though she had passed through a near-fatal illness in a matter of only a few minutes.
"I can't go with you," she said.
"Why the hell not? Knowing Garth, he'll have an army of cops with him."
"That's not the point. I don't want to answer questions. I don't want anyone to know exactly what happened in that building tonight."
"Peth will tell them."
"No, he won't. And none of the others will either. I must beg you not to speak, Mongo, for the sake of our friendship. When I called Garth I told him simply that I had a hunch about you and the warehouse. Garth has learned to trust my hunches."
"This is no time for games," I said impatiently. "How did you know where I was?"
She ignored my question. "There will be reporters out there, questions that I'm not prepared to answer. I would no longer be able to carry on my work at the university, and you know how important that is to me. It's my link with the. . rest of the world. Please, Mongo. Don't take that away from me."
She turned and ran off into the darkness without waiting for an answer. I walked slowly toward the flashing lights at the front of the building.
The proverbial mop-up of Peth and his crew was decidedly anticlimactic. When Garth and the other policemen broke down the secret door the members of the coven were waiting calmly.
Their robes and, presumably, all of the records had been consigned to the gas-fed bonfire still roaring from the pit in the center of the floor. They offered no resistance.
As Uranus had predicted, no one mentioned her presence in the building earlier. For some reason I didn't fully understand, I didn't either.
I was exhausted, and my head felt as though it had been stuffed with rotting cotton. Still, I managed to drag myself down to the police station, where I turned over the papers I had taken and made some kind of statement. Then I went home and poured myself a tumbler of Scotch. I wanted desperately to sleep, but there were still a lot of things on my mind.
There was nothing that had happened which could not be explained by a few good guesses and a lot of abnormal psychology emanating from some very sick minds. I needed the Scotch because I realized that Uranus possessed one of those sick minds. A woman I loved was, in my opinion, desperately ill, and I had to find the courage to confront her with this opinion, to suggest that she see a psychiatrist.
Having resolved this, I slipped off my jacket and threw it toward the bed. Only at the last moment did I realize that it somehow seemed heavier than it should. The jacket slid across the smooth bedspread and fell to the floor on the opposite side with a heavy, metallic clunk. The sound shrieked in my ears, echoing down to the very roots of my soul.
Whatever was in the jacket, I didn't want to know about it. I raced around the bed, picked up the jacket and in the same motion sent it hurtling toward the window. The weighted cloth shattered the glass and dropped from sight.
I stood, shaking uncontrollably and breathing hard as the cool wind whistled through the broken pane. Even as a tremendous surge of relief flowed through me, I knew that throwing away the jacket was no answer. If, indeed, there were the forces outside the "circle of light" Uranus had mentioned, it would do no good for me to deny it: I would merely remain ignorant of their existence. If the jacket was lost, I'd spend the rest of my life wondering what had been in the pocket-and how it had gotten there.
I drained off the Scotch, then went back into the night.
Book of Shadows
It had been a long day with absolutely nothing accomplished. I'd spent most of it grading a depressing set of mid-term papers that led me to wonder what I'd been teaching all semester in my graduate criminology seminar. After that I'd needed a drink.