Chapter Six
On the last night of October the blue dusk came early.
Darkness fell across the lawns and hedges, yet light was cast by the candles set in pumpkins on porches and in front windows.
Already the streets of Cambridge were swarming with children going house to house in pursuit of magic.
They knocked on doors begging for candy, collecting chalky, sweet Necco wafers and fireballs that burned their mouths and turned their tongues red, racing across lawns, and shrieking like goblins.
The boys were dressed as cowboys and spacemen; the girls were either princesses in sparkly pink or witches in black capes and hats, with the witches far outnumbering the princesses.
Residents of the city locked their doors when their children were done trick-or-treating, and they set out bowls of apples on their front porches, for apples were said to be witches’ favorite treat, and such gifts were said to help ensure there would be no tricks played, no soot coming down the chimney, no one jumping off a roof, no children roused by dreams of women dancing in the grass.
What was now called Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve had originally been known as Samhain, the festival that marked the world’s journey into winter’s darkness, celebrated with bonfires and dances.
It was a time for welcoming the dead to walk through the world of the living, for it was when the veil between the worlds of the human and the spirit dissolved.
Even nonbelievers had to admit there were many more witches in Cambridge than anyone might have imagined, and for these few hours on the last day of the tenth month, the darkly glimmering world belonged to them.
They were schoolteachers and nurses and librarians; they had gardens filled with rue and rosemary and lavender and roses; they went unnoticed as they had their coffees at the Peacock Café or treated their children to ice cream sundaes served in cold, silvery dishes at Bailey’s in Harvard Square.
Everyone practicing the Nameless Art came to join in the dance on this night, whether they were beautiful or plain, young or old, whether they were bloodline witches or simply women who had faith in the natural world around them.
Lauren and Lionel had attended these gatherings ever since they were children, and they still took a childish delight in celebrating Samhain, throwing off their coats and going barefoot, even though the air was chilly.
It was said that on this night, spirits of the dead could arise on the cemetery paths, invisible but there all the same.
If you remembered the dead, you would be free from the rules and responsibilities that restricted the living.
Bring a photograph of someone who had passed and say their name; look into the darkness, and you would find there was still light.
You could dance all night and forget your sorrows rather than be blinded by grief; you could be fearless and watch the stars turn white as chalk.
On this night, Lionel was quite silent and not in the least celebratory.
Just that afternoon he had been in attendance at an unsuccessful trauma surgery at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.
An unconscious nineteen-year-old woman who had been dumped in a heap outside the door to the emergency room had suffered cardiac arrest, and all attempts to resuscitate her had failed.
The young woman had undergone a botched abortion, and despite the surgical team’s frantic attempts to save her, she had died.
She’d had ID, so at least they were able to contact her family in Wellesley, who had come to mourn her in the waiting room.
When nothing more could be done, the medical students were let go for the evening.
They went to a local bar to drown their sorrows, but Lionel stayed behind to sit with the body.
He spoke a blessing and paced the room. His instructor, a middle-aged surgeon who’d seen death more times than he could count, had come by after a nurse alerted him that one medical student had refused to leave the operating room.
The older surgeon had seen it before, and he’d seen Lionel Bell’s empathetic nature when dealing with patients.
“We do the best we can to go up against the Angel of Death, but sometimes he wins,” he told Lionel.
“The Angel of Death wasn’t the problem,” Lionel responded. “She should have been able to have a procedure here, in a hospital, not in some back room at the hands of someone who was likely not a doctor.”
Lionel thought the surgeon would argue with him, perhaps even report him to the dean of the medical school, but instead the doctor simply shook his head. “Hopefully that will be true someday. Until then, we do the best we can.”
Lionel had forced himself to leave the hospital, but even now, at the Samhain gathering, he couldn’t let the lost patient go.
When he’d stopped by the chapel, her grieving parents had told him she’d been a student at Boston University.
He’d sat in his car in the parking lot for some time—it was as good a place to cry as any other—then he’d pulled himself together and met Lauren at the cemetery gates, just as they’d always done.
To explain his foul mood, Lionel simply told his sister it had been a lousy day at the hospital, but she saw through him.
She could still read his mind when he wasn’t careful enough to pull a curtain over his thoughts.
“You’ll save more lives than you’ll lose,” she assured him.
“Will I?” Lionel wondered.
“You absolutely will,” Lauren said with certainty. Healing was his gift and his skill, and it always had been.
Lionel had been considering love’s many forms and had come to think of it as a saving grace, the reason to be in this world.
When he went to the clubs on weekends, he was no longer in search of encounters that never lasted beyond a night.
He wanted more, and he often found himself thinking of the scenes he’d witnessed during his hours in the hospital.
The wives who sat at their husbands’ bedsides, the overwhelming emotion that sifted through the rooms where children were born and men and women died.
He no longer wanted to meet someone new every Saturday night.
He wanted true love, the real kind, the kind that would last.
When he thought it might never happen, he’d stumbled onto exactly what he’d been looking for.
Lionel was headed down an alleyway when the private club he visited, frequented by Harvard professors and students, was warned about a raid.
As he sprinted away into the soft darkness, a panic rising in his chest about what an arrest could mean to his career, he tripped and fell.
When he lifted his eyes, he found a detective standing over him.
The light was behind the officer, and at first Lionel thought a dark angel had come upon him.
Perhaps he’d died, and the angel was there to lead him to the next world, but when the detective reached down to help Lionel off the ground, he saw that his companion wasn’t an angel.
All the same, this man was everything, angel or not.
Lionel knew it as soon as they exchanged a look, which contained all that was reckless and all that was divine.
“You should avoid this place,” the detective told him.
They were close enough to feel the heat from one another’s bodies.
The detective was perhaps twenty-five, with dark Irish looks and surprising green eyes.
He was a local boy, and his accent might have made Lionel laugh if this was a different situation, but it wasn’t.
“It’s dangerous,” the detective went on.
There were police officers searching every room in the club, but this young man had just made detective and he’d stepped outside on this evening, unwilling to arrest people merely for being themselves.
“If you wind up in jail,” he told Lionel, “there will be little I can do for you.”
“What can you do for me now?” Lionel found himself saying. He felt as though he were drowning, but he didn’t mind. He would drown a thousand times if need be to remain in this man’s presence.
And then it had happened. A single wild kiss before the detective ran off as though he’d been stung.
Lionel had been in a state of shock, unsure of what was a dream and what had been real.
After he made his way down the alley, he went to the riverside and took a tab of lysergic diethylamide acid on a thin sheet of paper that dissolved in his mouth.
He had been in a study at the hospital to see what benefits LSD might have, and he’d been a perfect subject, expanding his mind.