It was a place that hung between worlds. To the east was the poor, black Fillmore neighbourhood and to the west the wealthy Pacific Heights. To the north was the Panhandle, an idyllic green retreat that led to Golden Gate Park, and beyond that was the political activism of the University of San Francisco.
The minute Church stepped off the bus into the swarming crowd, most of them barely old enough to be out of high school, he could feel the influence of the Blue Fire. This wasn’t like Krakow when they had visited John Dee. There the atmosphere had been pure, invigorating and electric. Here it was conflicted, ebbing and flowing, and at times there was almost a sourness in the air that was suffocating the energy.
‘Can you feel it?’ he said to Niamh. ‘This place is gearing up to be a battlefield.’
‘It is … exciting.’ Niamh looked around at the strange faces and extravagant costumes with a faint sense of wonder. It reminds me of the Far Lands.’
San Francisco was filled with big, old Victorian houses where rooms could be cheaply rented. They found a place on Page, just up the street from a condemned mansion where Big Brother and the Holding Company and some of the other San Franciscan bands hung out. As Church stashed his clothes, he realised this was a lull before the ground started shifting under his feet. Big things were coming, events that had been 2,300 years in the making. He hoped he was up to it.
Police were everywhere, watching the colourfully dressed men and women with contempt and barely repressed aggression. As he moved through the streets, Church realised he was being watched, too. One cop followed him for half a block before making a phone call.
As they made their way to the newspaper offices to check the small ads, they came across a disturbance. A freckle-faced woman in a gold-starred headband was raving about monsters that had killed her boyfriend in Golden Gate Park. Church wondered if she was having a bad trip, but she didn’t have the telltale disoriented look about her.
‘It’s started,’ Church said.
In the park, a group called the Diggers were handing out free food to the hungry kids, and leaflets urging the local businesses to distribute their profits to the community. One of them directed Church to a thick copse where a huddle of people had gathered.
The victim was young, probably still shy of his eighteenth birthday. His face was covered with weeping sores that looked like the latter stages of some plague. Fearful of infections, Church pulled Niamh away, but not before he had noticed something else: where the skin was peeling it looked as if there were scales just beneath the surface, and on his forehead two protrusions had broken through like horns.
Church caught one of the Diggers, a pale-faced man in a leather hat named Jerry. ‘I don’t know what’s going on around here any more, man,’ he said, concerned. He doled out a bowl of rice to a painfully thin girl. ‘People seeing far-out things-’
‘What kind of things?’
He shifted uncomfortably. ‘Monsters, they say.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s just crazy talk, but … It’s not just one or two. Not the real freaks. A lot of regular guys. That chick said she saw something weird kill off her boyfriend. It’s like the Outer Limits, you know?’ He returned to the food, but Church could see he wasn’t alone in his uneasiness. The sour mood was visible in the faces of many who passed, jumping from one to another like a plague as the strange stories were passed on.
14
After two days of exchanging notes, Church and Niamh finally met up with Gabe and Marcy in the I-Thou Coffee Shop, a hippie hang-out filled with beatnik poets, polemicists, writers, musicians and other movers and shakers of the local scene. They were not alone. Tom was there, surly-eyed and suspicious, with a young woman with long, black hair and hypnotic grey eyes.
The first thing that struck Church was how much they had changed. Marcy’s delicate features only emphasised the hardness of her new militancy, with her Malcolm and Martin T-shirt, tight denims and biker boots. Gabe had grown his hair long and wore a Day-Glo ‘Never Trust a Prankster’ T-shirt. A camera hung around his neck. Tom, too, had embraced the hippie aesthetics. His prematurely greying hair was tied in a ponytail and he wore glasses with one red lens and one blue.
‘Better late than never,’ he muttered.
Gabe hugged Church warmly and Marcy kissed him on the cheek before fetching coffees. Tom introduced the other woman as Grace. He fixed Church with a stare: ‘A Sister of Dragons.’
Grace opened her eyes wide. ‘This is the one? The first?’
Church felt uncomfortable with Grace’s uncontained awe, but Tom said pointedly, ‘She recognises the important role you are supposed to be playing in events.’
‘I’m here now,’ Church snapped guiltily.
‘If it’s not too late. Things are already in motion.’ Tom contained himself and changed the subject. ‘Grace is a member of a coven up on Divisadero. Two weeks ago her use of the Craft started achieving astonishing results.’
Grace looked scared. ‘I had to leave the coven. I mean, there are more witches in San Francisco than musicians, but suddenly everyone started getting spooked out by me.’
‘She’s the first,’ Tom said. ‘We’ll find the others soon. This is the time, this is the place.’
In the performance area at the side of the floor, a poet was chanting, ‘The doors of perception are opening,’ over and over again.
‘But first,’ Tom said, ‘we have to make you whole.’
15
In the twilight, the mist rolled up the streets from the bay. For once the Haight was unnaturally still. Inside, the atmosphere was tense. The ambience had been designed for introspection with candles, incense and soft, ethnic music in the background. Gabe and Marcy had agreed to retreat to Niamh’s room; they appeared to have been arguing. Grace had pushed the furniture back in the lounge so she could mark out in salt her sacred space. Tom, Niamh and Church sat at three of the cardinal points and in the centre of the circle was the lamp.
‘So, like, do we get a genie if we rub it?’ Grace said.
‘Something like that.’ Church had yearned for the missing Pendragon Spirit to be a part of him for so long, but now it was about to happen he was apprehensive. Once he was whole again he would be out of excuses. ‘You know that once it’s inside me again I’ll light up like a flare in the Enemy’s perception.’
‘You can still turn away from this,’ Niamh said.
Tom had been watching Church all afternoon as if he expected that very thing. ‘Sooner or later you’re going to have to take a stand. Might as well be sooner.’
‘That’s easy for you to say.’
Grace completed her ablutions and began the ritual. For ten minutes she chanted and whispered, and just when Church thought nothing was going to happen, the atmosphere in the room altered perceptibly: the shadows lengthened and the temperature dropped several degrees. Their breath clouded as webs of frost formed on the inside of the window.
Grace sat silently for a moment, and then blue sparks began to crackle around the lamp, building in intensity. They became tiny jagged lines of lightning until suddenly a column of Blue Fire roared up from the lamp’s spout. In the flames, Church saw a familiar face.
‘You made it, Church,’ Hal said. ‘I could have told you everything you needed to know to get to this place, but you did it yourself. And on the way you learned a lot about who you are that will help you in the trials ahead.’
‘Haven’t you been bored sleeping in that lamp all this time?’