The Barbed Coil Read online

  The driver of the pickup truck hit the accelerator and roared past Tessa in the inside lane. As the pickup pulled ahead, Tessa noticed the bumper sticker I DON ’ T TAKE IT — I CREATE IT spelled out in bold, black script on the back bumper. Instinctively she eased off the accelerator.

  She knew she drove too fast. She couldn’t help herself. During the summer she learned to drive, her tinnitus reappeared, and she quickly discovered that the farther down her foot was on the accelerator, the more noise the car engine made. The best way to deal with tinnitus was to mask it: to offset the high-pitched sound in the ears with an equally loud but low-pitched external noise. The theory was that the two sounds canceled each other out. Which wasn’t entirely true, but it did help. Sometimes more than others.

  Spotting the turnoff for the I-15 North, Tessa guided the yellow Honda onto the left lane, slipping directly behind the black pickup. The brake lights on the pickup flashed the moment her car was in lane. Tessa’s foot found the brake pedal. The freeway was clear, yet the pickup’s lights flashed twice more in rapid succession, forcing Tessa to slow down.

  The I-15 junction was a third of a mile ahead, according to the California Transit sign. As Tessa’s gaze dropped from the sign back to the pickup, the noise in her ears sharpened. The brake lights flashed red again. Tessa slammed her foot on the brake. She felt the force of the seat belt pushing her back in her seat. The driver of the pickup smiled into his rearview mirror. He had a dark mustache, a double chin, and a small mouth crammed with teeth. Anger flared hot in Tessa’s sights. She wanted to ram the back of his truck, ram it, then cut in front and slam on her brakes.

  Old words came to her ears, though. Words of caution well worn from twenty-one years of use: “Calm down, Tessa. Calm down. The doctor said you were never to get excited—it might make the noises come back.”

  A lifetime of self-control exerted itself over Tessa and she pumped the brake, forcing the Honda to fall back to fifty-five. The pickup shot ahead toward the turnoff. Tessa was shaking. Gray noise ground through her temples. Suddenly she didn’t want to take the I-15 North. She didn’t want to meekly follow the pickup truck, defeated. Palms damp upon the wheel, Tessa pulled out of the exit lane and slipped back onto the 8 East.

  Angry at herself now, she felt the tinnitus growing worse. It was always this way: She wasn’t supposed to get excited, yet the very act of not getting excited agitated her even more.

  The Honda sped eastward along the 8, past clinics and strip malls, DIY warehouses, and apartment complexes promising “Free Move-in and Cable” on worn pastel signs. Back up to seventy now, Tessa tried to relax and let the engine noise soothe her worn nerves. She no longer knew where she was going. Mission Trails, with its old oaks and pines and its hiking tracks leading through shaded valleys and over sandy hills, had been her intended destination. Now she was simply driving east.

  The incident with the pickup had left her shaken. Tessa tried to put it behind her, but the tinnitus—the ringing in her ears that appeared and then disappeared in sharp bursts throughout her life—was getting worse.

  “Soothing music,” her last doctor had said, “will help whenever the noises start.” Dr. Eagleman had handed Tessa a cassette of something entitled The Healing Ocean, for which he had billed her $99 one month later. The cassette turned out to be a mix of waves lapping against the shore, threaded through with some tinny New Age music that would have sounded right at home in a small-town airport lobby.

  Fumbling in the driver’s door pocket, Tessa’s hand closed around The Healing Ocean. She brought it up to the dashboard, took the cassette from its striped blue box, and yanked on the length of exposed tape. Streams of shiny brown ribbon raced through the spools and into the air. Holding the cassette firmly against the steering wheel, Tessa pulled and pulled on the tape until there was nothing left of it in the cassette.

  The sight of the tape spaghettied on her lap made Tessa grin. Dr. Eagleman’s Healing Ocean did have therapeutic properties after all—it had just taken her a while to find them. For good measure she tossed the empty cassette onto the backseat. Yes, she definitely felt better now.

  The Honda Civic sped eastward past La Mesa and the sprawling expanse of El Cajon. Tessa, her nerves eased by the small act of destroying the cassette, risked turning up the radio. Something classical was playing—Bach, she guessed. If her father had been with her, he would have known for sure. Easing back into her seat, Tessa settled down to enjoy the drive. Hospitals, gyms, and furniture stores gave way to self-storage units, gun shops, and For Sale signs. The freeway narrowed to two lanes and began to climb up toward Alpine Heights.

  Despite the fact that the Honda was speeding along at seventy, the shrill, metal ringing increased. The sound was close to the surface now. Tessa could almost feel it straining to break free of her skin. She turned Bach up a notch and deliberately shifted her thoughts away from the noise.

  Mike Hollister would be arriving at her door right about now. Always polite, he would knock softly—even after he realized that she had run away on him. Tessa felt bad about that. She liked Mike a lot. He was a kind man, a good father to his four-year-old daughter, and he shared Tessa’s interest in illuminated manuscripts. That was how they had first met—at an exhibition of medieval books of hours given by the San Diego Museum of Art. Mike was the curator. When Tessa reached out to touch one of the tiny, leather-bound prayer books, Mike had been the one to tell her touching wasn’t allowed. The penalty was dinner with him and his daughter.

  Tessa smiled as she guided the Honda around the twists and bends in the road. She couldn’t understand why she felt such a great need to break up with him.

  By turns the freeway wound then sliced through the hillside, offering dizzying views downward one minute and high walls of jagged rock the next. The way ahead was steep, and Tessa slipped into third. The gears screeched as they moved into place. Tessa winced. The noise in her ears sharpened to a high buzz. It sounded like someone screaming.

  Why was it getting worse? She’d done nothing to bring it on. Since moving to San Diego seven years ago, the only time she had experienced the sensation was when she attempted to do anything that required great concentration, like filling out her IRS forms or attempting to copy a pattern that caught her eye.

  Patterns fascinated her: Celtic jewelry, Oriental rugs, Victorian tilework, Roman mosaics—anything where shapes and forms repeated themselves to form a design. Whenever she came across a complicated pattern she tried to copy it. At some point during the process, though—when she became so involved that she began to perceive the strategy behind the lines and the grid beneath the forms, catching a whiff of the artist’s intent—the ringing in her ears would softly start. Gentle as a pulse felt by hand, but a warning nonetheless. Tessa had long since given up trying to do anything too ambitious. She allowed herself only to admire patterns now or trace them idly with little thought.

  Tessa yanked the steering wheel left. Her concentration had been slipping and the Honda had begun to drift to the right. A drop of sheer shadows had torn chunks from the roadside, narrowing down her lane and exposing a dark pine-wooded valley like a bed of nails below.

  The buzz in Tessa’s ears extended outward, forming a band of noise across her forehead. A needling migraine of a noise, a thousand times worse than any headache. Tessa bit her lip. Her eyes never left the freeway for an instant.

  She was surrounded by a world of green now. Hills and valleys bristled with pines. Bushes and shrubs crowded close around the road. She hadn’t been this far east on the 8 for nearly a decade. If she remembered correctly, the freeway led through the center of the Cleveland National Forest. By the looks of all these trees she must be getting close.

  A sign on the left of the road welcomed Tessa to Alpine. The population was offered beneath, but Tessa couldn’t take in the numbers. The tinnitus was a serrated blade cutting through her thoughts.

  Something flashed red in her lap. Glancing down at the ribbons of cassette tape st
ill coiled there, Tessa saw a drop of blood soaking into the fabric of her jeans. Quickly she wiped her chin with the back of her hand. The skin came back bloody. She had bit right through her lip.

  She knew she should stop. Pull into one of the quaint wayside restaurants with wooden eaves and old-world signs promising fresh pies and hot coffee, and rest. Take a couple of Tylenol, massage her aching temples, close her eyes, and wait until the noises subsided.

  Tessa didn’t stop, though. The distance between knowing what was best and doing what was best was growing longer with every second. The ringing in her ears was no longer an irritant, it was a crowbar driving a wedge between reason and action.

  The Honda sped through Alpine and into the wooded hills beyond.

  Tessa felt as if the tinnitus were driving the car for her. Bends were taken sharply, motor homes were passed with rallylike precision. Accelerate, brake, turn. Tessa had little experience driving on mountain slopes, yet her hands shifted gears with the skill of an old-timer. When a turnoff came, she took it without question. With her thoughts ripped to shreds by screaming sirens, questions were the last thing on her mind.

  She drove and drove. No longer on the freeway, Tessa wound inward toward the heart of the forest. The paved road gave way to a dirt road and then deteriorated to a hunting track.

  Tall gangling pines formed armies to either side of the path, blocking out light and barricading all exits. Tessa had no choice but to move forward. When she glanced in the rearview mirror, the very forest itself seemed to have closed in across the road.

  Noises hammered through Tessa’s temples. Tears swelled in her eyes. What was happening to her? The noises had never been so bad before.

  A grove of oaks and willows appeared ahead. The wide and sloppy trees looked liked a haven amid the disciplined pines, and Tessa, spying a fork in the path, steered the Honda toward them.

  The temperature in the car cooled the moment she turned the wheel. Once in the shade, the light level dropped farther and midday took on the look of twilight. Tessa shivered. The dirt track flared out to form a semicircle and came to an end. Bringing the Honda to a halt, Tessa rubbed her throbbing temples. Blood drummed fast and hard against her fingers. She had to get out of the car.

  The Honda door squealed as she opened it—another sharp ribbon of noise that bound the tinnitus tighter. The sound in her ears was unbearable now. Hardly aware of what she was doing or where she was going, she stumbled through the trees. The canopy of oaks and willows blocked out the midday sky. To Tessa’s tear-glazed eyes they seemed unnaturally close to each other. On and on she walked, finding a path then losing a path, through brush and grass and trees.

  The pain in her head was like a wire that pulled her forward. Her feet took steps that her mind had no part in, and her eyes discerned forms she was no longer able to name.

  The terrible, unbearable noise defined Tessa McCamfrey. She was no longer a twenty-six-year-old woman with a job at Clairemont Telesales and an apartment short of furniture and attention; she was a child seeking comfort. And when she topped a small rise and came upon a cleared glade, she found what she was looking for.

  Lying amid the yellow grass and long-dried-out bushes, nestling in a collection of positions and angles, like playing blocks scattered over a nursery floor, were hundreds of dull gray boxes. All open. Their contents in small piles, flapping gently as their weight permitted.

  The minute Tessa saw them the noises in her head stopped.

  T W O

  D everic, counselor to kings, scholar of the ancient texts and master of the old patterns, slumped against his scribing desk, clutching his chest.

  A trickle of dark blood ran from his nose. Following the lines of his much creased face, the droplet slid down to his chin and then splashed against the illumination that lay beneath his left hand. Blood spattered both manuscript and skin. Even now Deveric was more than wise enough to know a message when he saw one. This would be the last pattern he ever scripted. His last and his best.

  Five days and five nights he had worked on it, his old eyes squinting, his shaking hands stilled first by drugs and then by his assistant. Every pattern Deveric knew was encompassed in the illumination. Every rule had been adhered to, every interlacing of animal and plant life properly separated by the correct set of lines. Everything—the symmetry, the repetition of shape and color, and the mirroring of motif and symbol—had been perfectly rendered down to the last line and curve.

  Great power had been drawn into the illumination. Enough power to tear through the magic of the Shedding. In that deeply creviced place, where the debris shed from all worlds accumulated as silently and inevitably as dust above a mantel, something stirred. Deveric had felt it building as he worked; each turn of his quill was a summoning, every scratch of the nib drew forth something extra with the ink. Patterns so intricate they defied the eye, paired with symbols of such weight that even to paint them seemed a kind of sacrilege, combined to make the illumination shine. Not with light, as the word suggested, but with truth and meaning and might.

  The pattern, with its elaborate filigree of loops, shapes, and colors, was a work of sorcery as much as art. Creating it had taken everything Deveric had inside him. His heart, his mind, his very soul, were now lost within the lines.

  It was only fitting that his blood was now upon it too.

  “My lord?” came a soft, hesitant voice. “My lord, are you all right?”

  Deveric heard the words, understood the meaning, but was powerless to reply. His very old heart had beaten for the last time. The second the final curve was drawn, the instant the pattern was complete, his heart had broken in two.

  He had done his job, drawn forth a chance for hope. The world of warm sunlight and cool evenings was lost to him now. It was a good life he had lived, with children and grandchildren and a wife who loved him dearly. If his sons had only been kinder, he could have asked for nothing more.

  “My lord. Wake up! Please, wake up!”

  Deveric smiled. Emith, the gentle man who was his assistant, whose love and loyalty could be heard on every breath and whose life for the past twenty-two years had been dedicated to serving his master, had no idea of the power that had just been drawn. The tanglings of the pattern—the strands that twined and retwined across the parchment, the shapes that chased each other around the borders, and the threads that brushed quill close yet never met—were the key to its drawing. Yet to Emith they were little more than lines.

  Pain cleaved through the collapsed muscle that was now Deveric’s heart. He would miss his old assistant very much.

  All he could hope for now was that this final pattern, which in itself formed part of a larger pattern that he had worked on for the last twenty-one years, would do what it was scribed for: bring together those who could set a monstrous wrong to right.

  Today a man would crown himself king of a country that lay east beyond the mountains. Garizon had been fifty long years without a sovereign—and with good reason. The ruling house of Garizon consumed land with all the mindless greed of a firestorm.

  Even now, before the Barbed Coil had been placed upon his head, the one who would be king was looking to the west.

  Deveric knew what he wanted. He knew the nature of the man.

  Glancing down, Deveric counted the specks of blood that had splashed from his chin. Five: three on the parchment, two on his hand.

  As the world faded away, as his assistant fussed and pleaded and physicians and family were called for, Deveric did the last thing he would ever do. Turning his wrist so that his palm was facing upward, he smeared the two drops of still-wet blood on the back of his hand onto the parchment.

  There.

  Five drops of blood on the illumination. Five drops of blood on a pattern colored crown gold, sea blue, forest green.

  House deeds, wills, stocks and bonds, war medals, marriage certificates, naturalization certificates, employee of the month certificates, high school and college diplomas, address books, love
letters, hate letters, children’s drawings, hair clippings, faded ribbons, photos, videos, and greeting cards. Tessa sat in the yellow grass surrounded by a spiked railing of pine trees and sorted through the contents of the security deposit boxes.

  The papers and photos on the tops of the piles were fading with the sun. Those on the bottom, lying upon the ground, were damp and covered in blue-black mold. Tessa knew what they were the instant she had spotted them: the stolen security boxes from La Havra National Bank. Already she had seen enough to know that anything of value had been removed. There were no family heirlooms, no jewelry or currency. No cash, coins, bearer bonds, or gold.

  The only things remaining were papers, books, and photographs.

  Tessa was beginning to know the people who owned these boxes. The Sanchez family’s box was a testament to their good-natured pride; all five of them smiled up at Tessa from photos of family reunions, engagement parties, high school sports galas, and Disney World vacations. A handsome family with wide brows and square shoulders. Their father had taken out a second mortgage on their house.

  Lilly Rhodes’ box smelled of violets. A newspaper clipping proclaimed her “Deb of the Season” for winter 1938. A second clipping told of how her fighter pilot husband was shot down over the English Channel in 1944. It showed the couple on their wedding day; Charles’ and Lilly’s shoulders touching as they leaned forward to slice the cake. Lilly looked like Rita Hayworth.

  Gary Ubois was dead. His box contained a photocopy of his death certificate. He had been an athlete. Dozens of photographs showed him limbering up before races, crouching for his mark, running across finish lines, and holding up trophies to small but enthusiastic crowds. Neatly lining the bottom of his box was a single row of birthday cake candles. Nineteen. One for each year he’d lived.