A Touch of Magic
1 Beyond the Veil
Saturday, 21 June 1969, Greenwich, Connecticut
SEREPTE PLAYED the flute as she sat in her room at her godparents’ house. The door was ajar. Her godfather’s butler, William, requested it because her playing meant so much to Doc. Doc and Margaret, her godparents, were sooo old. And Doc was sick. Dying, she’d heard Margaret whisper.
She’d been sent to Connecticut as soon as school was out in May. It was supposed to be so her mother could prepare for her trip to England with the college theater troupe. At least that was the cover. Serepte knew that her mother, Rebecca Allen, had been commissioned with an important task for the Great Circle and even tonight, on Litha, they would be celebrating the completion. Whatever it was, Serepte’s initiation, promised for her thirteenth birthday, was now delayed a second time.
Strange things had been going on around the campus her mother taught at and Rebecca wanted Serepte out of the way someplace safe. If all went well, Serepte would join the circle at Lughnasad. It was still six weeks away.
To top it all off, she started her first period. Life is so unfair! Margaret tried to help but she was old. More than fifty. William, the sweetheart, went to a store and bought a box of every different kind of feminine protection that was on the shelf. But it was so embarrassing! Thankfully, he also brought a bottle of Midol and a hot water bottle. That and playing the flute were the only relief she got from her first ever case of menstrual cramps.
“Serepte,” Margaret said softly. “How are you doing, dear?”
“Better. I guess.”
“I remember how badly I hurt the first time I got my monthly visitor. It isn’t something you’ll soon forget.”
“I’m just being a baby.”
“You hurt, dear. There is nothing babyish about that.” The two sat on the edge of the bed, Margaret’s arm awkwardly around Serepte’s shoulders. “I hate to ask this…”
“What?”
“Would you come and play for Phillip? He wants to give you his blessing and…” Tears filled Margaret’s eyes. “It will ease his passing,” she choked. I’m going to see him die. Dear Goddess, no.
Serepte carried her flute into the room and was shocked at how the disease had ravaged the old man’s body. This dear man who was so important to her mother for the past fourteen years was in real pain.
Anger flooded Serepte’s senses. The disease had no right to take Doc! She raised her flute to her lips and a long piercing note issued from her breath. She felt flooded with power as if she were lifted up by dozens of voices, her mother’s in the lead, chanting hope and power into her mind and body. She continued to play, looking at Doc as she blew passionately across the lip plate. Before Doc could speak, Serepte felt the ripping attack of the disease at his internal organs. Playing faltered under the overwhelming flood of pain that leapt from his body to hers.
Panic gripped the girl. She could not escape from the pain and disease. She screamed but the pain would not relent. Color returned to Doc’s face as if he’d been resurrected. She managed one more long, soulful note from her flute before she crumpled to the floor.
Rebecca arrived three days later to find her daughter comatose in the hospital. Next to her, Doc, Margaret, and William held vigil. She’d left the college group Sunday evening, as soon as she received word from Margaret. Getting to London and getting a flight to New York had seemed to take forever. She had to reach her daughter and no immigration officer or customs official was going to stop her.
Doc, though weak from his extended time bedridden, showed no sign of the cancer that had riddled him. His doctor was ready to call it a miraculous remission. But no one was celebrating. They sat next to Serepte’s bed, each lost in the memories of the goddess of Metéora as told to them in stories years before.
Rebecca flew into action. She asked Margaret and William to leave the room, closing the door firmly behind them.
“I know you are weak, my friend, but I ask you, Brand, one time the Flamekeeper of Coven Carles, watch over me while I work and pull me back should my control fail,” she said.
“Sadb, it has been many years, but I will do my best to watch over you,” the old man said. Having addressed each other by their most secret coven names, Rebecca went immediately to work. She stripped off her clothes and laid out her tools surrounding Serepte.
“Guardians of the watchtowers, I summon you to guard and protect your servants as we work a mighty work. Lend us your strength, protect us with your power. Shield us and defend us from all that would harm. I summon you by the names of Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel. Place your protection upon this place.”
A tangible wall of light sprang up around the room and Rebecca immediately reached for her star stone pentacles. She had not used the artifact from the City of the Gods for healing in many years, but focused through it on her daughter.
Physiologically, the doctors said, there was no sign of injury or illness, but symptomatically she appeared near death as if she were eaten by cancer. Her fingers kept flexing as if still playing the flute. But no matter how she struggled to focus her talisman, Rebecca was unable to search out the illness that was eating her daughter. After an hour and a half, Rebecca finally let her wards drop and collapsed into Doc’s arms.
“I can’t reach her,” she sobbed.
Serepte could still hear her flute. It echoed a thousand times in her mind as she struggled to find the next note. And then she awoke. Only she was no longer in her body.
The sun was brighter, birds sang songs she’d never heard, and she saw colors more vivid than any colors she’d seen before. The note she’d been holding since dropping her flute in Doc’s room burst into a whole song and she moved her fingers as if the flute was still in her hands. She heard a symphony. Heart-achingly beautiful beings floated from place to place. She saw pain and suffering as… beautiful creatures, caught in… or birthed in the wrong world.
It was so beautiful!
And they loved her music. When she breathed another note of the strange music in her head, illness, disease, and pain left her and entered this beautiful world where it belonged. As the pain slipped out of her, it bowed gracefully and thanked her for releasing it to its true form. It was alive and loving. The beings meant no harm, but they suffered from being captured in human hosts and longed to be free.
Having entered a world where pain was a beautiful thing, Serepte discovered with a shock that she did not know the way back to her own world. She could see it, but she couldn’t reach it. She floated in the room looking at her body, watching her mother trying to work magic to bring her back. But Serepte was in a different plane of being—a different loka.
As she sat and observed the hospital room, she heard music that did not come from her flute. Someone else played at the edge of her consciousness. And this went on as days and nights passed in her hospital room. She couldn’t catch the musician until one night she swung rapidly toward the music and shouted, “Who are you?”
Fog lifted around her and she walked into a beautiful garden with all the things of home in it. The flowers, the grass, the birds—everything had a magical glow, but earthly, unlike the natural world. She walked in the presence of the creator. She saw the world through the eyes of the one who thought it into existence.
In this wonderland, Serepte wandered until she saw her own home in Indianapolis. It looked like her home but was imbued with the mystical light. She stepped through the door. It was her home as if idealized. It was a little grander and some details were very much like other places she thought she recognized. The detail of William’s carvings that hung in Doc’s house looked alive. She wondered if she were making up the house in her head. A fire was laid in the fireplace and a man stood there in front of it looking at her.
He held out his arms and she flowed into his embrace. She had found her father—or he found her. His arms were filled with warmth and love and comfort.
“I have been calling for you, my daughter,” he said softly. “You have been so wrapped up in the pain of your body and the beauty of the other world that you could not hear me.”
“Father? Daddy? Where are we?”
“In my head, I guess. In my world. I can’t leave here without bringing this world to an end. Can I do that? Perhaps I can if you help me.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You will discover it eventually. For now, what you must do is learn to release the pain and suffering without crossing into their world and becoming trapped. You are as much a foreigner in their world as they are in yours.”
“I don’t want to cause them pain. They’re beautiful,” she said. “What should I do?”
“Use your music like your mother… like your muse did. It is your great gift and even greater burden. You can accept the pain of others into yourself through your intense empathy, but you must learn to release it quickly so that you can survive.”
“It hurt, Daddy,” she cried.
“One day you will find that it is not duty that impels you to accept the suffering, but love. When that day comes, I will be waiting for you and will join you in your world,” he said. “Now, my daughter, before it is too late, play for me.”
She picked up the flute lying on the piano and he seated himself to accompany her. She played all the music memorized over the past years and no matter what she played, his accompaniment was impeccable. Finally, out of repertoire, she moved to lay down the flute.
“Play,” he said. “Don’t be frightened. Your flute knows you well. Kiss breath into her and she will show you your very soul.”
She’d run out of music and he was asking her to play something she didn’t know. Music that simply came from breathing life into the silver tube. His accompaniment ran beneath a beautiful new sound that emerged from the silver tube. It was her flute, her hands, her breath, but the music was its own. They played the improvised and spontaneous music, deviating from the patterns of staves and notes as they broached new and unexplored paths, coaxing sounds from the instruments that they were not intended to create. And in that music, the secrets of life were opened. Her soul was laid bare and she saw beyond time and space.
At last, the music fell silent. Father and daughter wept in each other’s arms. The house and library and music faded away, and they stood together looking at Serepte’s body in the hospital bed.
“You must decide, daughter, and you must do it quickly,” he whispered. “Will you accept this gift you have been given or will you flee from the pain that it brings with it? The time is now.”
There was a sudden flurry of activity around the hospital bed. Rebecca cried. Serepte realized her body had just died. The moment had truly come, whether she was ready for it or not. She looked back, but her father and all the world that surrounded him were gone. The hospital room became her only tangible reality.
And then the gateway opened and Serepte was reborn.
She heard a loud gasp as air rushed back into her lungs. They ached, as if she’d been holding her breath for a long time. It hurt so much to be alive! She sang out the notes so recently played and let the pain escape through an open window to its world. Rebecca and the doctors spun to look as the girl so recently pronounced dead suddenly filled her lungs and sang. All the aching in her life—her loneliness, fears, lack of direction—went rushing out like a tidal wave. With her next breath, she cried out, “Mommy!” Suddenly people crowded around, and Rebecca held her daughter and wept. As the pain fled, Serepte saw a remnant of the beauty she had known for such a short time.
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