Chapter 2

"Isn't there anything that you know that can help us?" Julia asked Angelique with desperation.

"I never learned much of gorgons. Yes, we knew they existed, but the secret of restoring their victims, if it exists, has been lost. There are stories about gorgons, but no one I knew said anything about anyone being transformed back."

"But there must be!" Julia protested.

"If there is, I do not know of it."

"You mean that, with all you know..."

"I looked into Stokes' notes too. He knew a great deal, and yet there is nothing there. He did not even know that gorgons and mermaids are the same species."

"But someone must know."

"Not someone living."

"Someone dead?'

"You want to hold a séance not knowing who to call, not even knowing if they have been reborn already?"

"There has to be something."

'How about you?"

"I will run out of samples long before I get answers. And I am scared that one day I will get careless and will look at it with the microscope..."

"I know that it is hard."

"It is not that it is had. It is that we are getting nowhere and we are just too dumb to recognize it! And we are going to keep giving Sabrina and Tammy false hopes until the day they die!"

Barnabas went down the basement. He kept the statues there, both Maggie and Joe, where they could be protected from the rain and from blows that might shatter them. He knew that the rain could not destroy them, but they could corrode and blur their features, so that when they recovered...

If they ever recovered... Neither Julia nor Angelique had sounded optimistic...

It had been so sudden, so much like a bad joke. Adam brought the head instead of letting crabs munch on it. Maggie wanted to know what he had brought. Joe wanted to see what that strange thing was.

And so it ended, the whole sorry mess that had started in 1967. A mess that started because Maggie Evans looked like an eighteenth century woman long dead...

And it all came down to him. Not Adam. Adam had been a fool, but Maggie would have never gone poking into the basement were it not that she knew that there was a cell there where she had been kept a prisoner. And now Joe and Tammy paid for it... And that sorry mess was to be settled this way, with Maggie back in his cellar...

He realized that it was getting late. He had to go and say goodbye to Vicky and Phillip. Phillip who had recognized the evil before anyone else, but who had been dismissed because of his being too high strung, and too traumatized by his own experience.

He had said goodbye to Vicky once, as she had left with her husband.. But then it was more of a storybook ending, with Vicky firmly expecting that Peter would take care of her. Now Vicky knew that she had to take care of Phillip, that for a while at least she had to be a pillar of strength for him..

Had he loved Vicky once? Yes... maybe... It was hard to recapture the feelings and thoughts of a time when his brain did not work... A time when he made as little sense as Violet Upton...

He got there in time to help Phillip load the car with their things. "We are taking this for now. We will see later what we can get, and what we can bring over, and what we might as well sell." Vicky said.

"You have a place to stay?

"Yes. A fixer upper. Comes cheap this way."

"And I will fix it." Phillip said.

Which would keep him busy and happy, until he was calm enough to look for any other work. Vicky would be the breadwinner for a while, for quite a while. But fixing up an old place did not have the stigma of being a househusband...Vicky was smart, Barnabas had to admit.

He saw them get in the car and drive away... As she and Peter Bradford had driven away so long ago...

But they were close enough and they would come back, or he could go and visit...

Adam looked abashed in front of Quentin. And well he might be, Quentin thought, a bit bitterly.

"I guess that it is not enough if I say that I am sorry." Adam finally said.

"Oh, Adam." Quentin said. "How could you have gotten into such a mess?"

"I did not realize what it was all about. I did not want any of this to happen. I wished no harm to Maggie and Joe."

"And yet they did come to harm. The result is the same whether it comes from malice or carelessness." he sighed. "I really should not be the one to say these things, even if they are true. I used to be exactly the same way that you are now. I too would have dived after a mermaid, just as you did, and probably with even less thought that you gave it. It is only thanks to you that I have better sense now..."

"I wish I had not done it. I wish I had let Carolyn apologize to me, and tried to patch up the marriage. But I was so sore for the way she had been treating all that this time, and I did not even know why."

"I know. I did have a talk to Carolyn on the subject... "

"She is too wrapped up with her uncle, and with the kid, Edmund. And now that she has the baby, I wonder if she will have room for me."

"I suspect that she does not want another overgrown child. But I think that she could use a man. Are you willing to be a man, Adam?"

Angelique took the I Ch'ing wands. She had told the truth to Julia. No one alive knew how to restore Joe and Maggie. The secret, if there was one, had been lost in the past.

So the answer was to go back to the past. Going back to the past was not without risks, specially in her state (George would have a fit if he knew what he was about to do), and she had left too many unpaid debts behind.

She would gladly let someone else go. But who? Not Barnabas. it would be even riskier for him. He could end up chained in his coffin again, with no one to release him. Or worse, Trask and the others could be waiting for him. They had lost power over him in the present. But not it the past...

So it was up to her to take the risk.

She threw the wands on the table.

"Danger" she felt the words hit it. "Not for you." "Reconsider" "Find advice."

All the words came to her in a flash.

If she entered the I Ch'ing door she may never return.

And she needed to find advice.

But from whom? Eliot Stokes? Eliot Stokes did not know anything about gorgons...

Or have Amy read the cards for her?

Amy laid down the cards. "There is a trip through a wilderness" she said, indicating the clubs. "This suit is also called wands"

"The I Ch'ing wands?"

"Yes, that's it. A dangerous journey. Too many wands. Too many paths Easy to take the wrong one."

"Let this card be the signifier for the spread."

"Yes. You are right. I will do the basic spread for it, the Celtic Cross." she laid down the first card "This covers it."

It was the Hermit. The seeker, the one who would search through the maze..

"This covers" Angelique muttered "sounds like 'discovers."

"This crosses it."

It was Strength. The strong female who overpowered the lion. The gorgon and the damage she brought.

"This crowns it." Judgment. The raising of the dead. Their goal, what the Seeker was looking for in the maze.

"This lies behind it."

The Knight of Swords. A young rash male, whose folly started it all: Adam.

"This lies beneath it."

The Ace of Clubs. Powerful. Part of the maze. Old magic... what caused the gorgons to be, what could be found in the maze... or the magic which caused the maze to exist."

"This lies ahead of it."

The eight of swords. Great danger. The maze would not give its secrets easily.

Four more cards. The first was usually the subject's image of itself, but how could an inanimate object have a self image? Still it might help the seeker to know how to view the search.

Ten of cups. A card of unselfish love, or giving without expecting return.

The next one, the environmental influences. The wheel. Too many dangers, and opportunities.

The next one was the Chariot. The position of the emotions. Daring. Rashness.

And the last one, the outcome. Ace of Swords. Victory.

Amy looked at it, then she spoke. "The Knight of Swords will ride the Chariot. Adam is the one who can find his way, since he touched the gorgon's fresh blood. And by seeking an answer he will perform an act of contrition for the harm he's caused."