The wind snapped at Fortunato's coat and blew faint traces of Eileen's perfume at him. "It's a hell of a story," Amy Fairborn said. "Nobody knows anymore how much of it's true. Balsam was supposed to be a witch of some sort, lived up in the hills. First anybody heard of him was in the 1790s. Nobody knows where he came from, other than Europe somewhere. Same old story. Foreigner, lives off to himself, gets blamed for everything. Cows give sour milk or somebody has a miscarriage, they make it his fault."
Fortunato nodded. He felt like a foreigner himself, at the moment. He couldn't see anything but trees and mountains anywhere he looked, except off to the right where the church held the top of the hill like a fort. He felt exposed, vulnerable. Nature was something that should have a city around it. "One day the sheriff's daughter over to Kingston came up missing," Fairborn said. "That would be the beginning of August, 1809. Lammastide. They broke in Balsam's house and found the girl stretched out naked on an altar." The woman showed her teeth.
"That's what the story says. Balsam was got up in some kind of weird outfit and a mask. Had a knife the size of your arm. Sure as hell he was going to carve her up."
"What kind of outfit?" Fortunato asked.
"Monk's robes. And a dog mask, they say. Well, you can guess the rest. They strung him up, burnt the house, salted the ground, knocked trees over in the road that led up there."
Fortunato took out one of the pennies; Eileen still had the other one. "This is supposed to be called a Balsam penny. Does that mean anything to you?"
"I got three or four more like it at the house. They wash up out of his grave every now and again. `What goes down must come up,' my husband used to say. He buried a good many of these folks."
"They put the pennies in his grave?" Fortunato asked. "All they could find. When they fired the house they turned up a keg of 'em in the root cellar. You see how red it looks? Supposed to be from a high iron content or some such. Folks at the time said he put human blood in the copper. Anyways, the coins disappeared out of the sheriff's office. Most people thought Balsam's wife and kid made off with
'em."
"He had a family?" Eileen asked.
"Nobody saw too much of either of 'em, but yeah, he had a wife and a little boy.
Lit off for the big city after the hanging, at least as far as anybody knows."
As they drove back through the Catskills he got Eileen to talk a little about herself. She'd been born in Manhattan, gotten a BFA from Columbia in the late sixties, dabbled in political activism and social work and come out of it with the usual complaints. "The system never changed fast enough for me. I just sort of escaped into history. You know? When you read history you can see how it all comes out."
"Why occult history?"
"I don't believe in it, if that's what you mean. You're laughing. Why are you laughing at me?"
"In a minute. Go on."
"It's a challenge, that's all. Regular historians don't take it seriously. It's wide open, there's so much fascinating stuff that's never been properly documented. The Hashishin, the Qabalah, David Home, Crowley." She looked over at him. "Come on. Let me in on the joke."
"You never asked about me. Which was nice. But you have to know that I have the virus. The wild card."
"Yes."
"It gave me a lot of power. Astral projection, telepathy, heightened awareness.
But the only way I can direct it, make it work, is through Tantric magic. It has something to do with energizing the spine "
"Kundalini."
"Yes."
"You're talking about real Tantric magic. Intromission. Menstrual blood. The whole bit."
"That's right. That's the wild card part of it."
"There's more?"
"There's what I do for a living. I'm a procurer. A pimp. I run a string of call girls that go for as much as a thousand dollars a night. Have I got you nervous yet?"
"No. Maybe a little." She gave him another sideways glance. "This is probably a stupid thing to say. You don't fit my image of a pimp."
"I don't much like the name. But I don't run away from it either. My women aren't just hookers. My mother was Japanese and she trains them as geishas. A lot of them have PhDs. None of them are junkies and when they're tired of the Life they move into some other part of the organization."
"You make it sound very moral."
She was ready to disapprove, but Fortunato wouldn't let himself back away. "No,"
he said. "You've read Crowley. He had no use for ordinary morality, and neither do I. 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.' The more I learn, the more I realize that everything is there, in that one phrase. Its as much a threat as a promise."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I like you and I'm attracted to you and that's not necessarily a good thing for you. I don't want you to get hurt." She put both hands on the wheel and watched the road. "I can take care of myself," she said.
You should have kept your mouth shut, he told himself, but he knew that wasn't true. Better to drive her of now, before he got any more involved.
A few minutes later she broke the silence. "I don't know whether I should tell you this or not. I took that coin around to a couple of places. Occult bookstores, magic shops, that sort of thing. Just to see what I could turn up. I met a guy named Clarke at the Miskatonic Bookstore. He seemed really interested."
"What'd you tell him?"
"I said it was my father's. I said I was curious about it. He started asking me questions like was I interested in the occult, had I ever had any paranormal experiences, that kind of thing. It was pretty easy to feed him what he wanted to hear."
"And?"
"And he wants me to meet some people." A few seconds later she said, "You've gone quiet on me again."
"I don't think you should go. This stuff is dangerous. Maybe you don't believe in the occult. The thing is, the wild card changed everything. People's fantasies and beliefs can turn real now. And they can hurt you. Kill you."
She shook her head. "It's always the same story. But never any proof. You can argue with me all the way back to New York City, and it's not going to convince me. Unless I see it with my own eyes, I just can't take it seriously."
"Suit yourself," Fortunato said. He released his astral body and shot ahead of the car. He stood in the roadway and let himself become visible just as the car was on him. Through the windshield he could see Eileen's eyes go wide. Next to her his physical body sat with a mindless stare. Eileen screamed and the brakes howled and he let himself snap back into the car. They were skidding toward the trees and Fortunato reached over to steer them out of it. The car died and rolled onto the shoulder.
"What . . . what . . ."
"I'm sorry," he said. He didn't manage a lot of conviction. "It was you there in the road!" Her hands still held the wheel and tremors shook her arms.
"It was just . . . a demonstration."
"A demonstration? You scared me to death!"
"It wasn't anything. You understand? Nothing. We're talking about some kind of cult that's a couple of hundred years oid and makes human sacrifices. At the least. It could be worse, a hell of a lot worse. I can't be responsible for you getting involved."
She started the car and pulled onto the road. It was a quarter of an hour later, back on 1-87, before she said, "You're not quite human anymore, are you? That you could scare me that badly. Even though you say you're interested in me.
That's what you were trying to warn me about."