That night the boys and Tess successfully sneaked back to their rooms, leaving Bishop Bowes after study hall had concluded. But though the night was a success, and they now knew Mr. Stryker’s plans, they had no clear notion of how to stop them. In the weeks following the committee meeting, the four talked endlessly about what to do. Since Mr. Stryker seemed able to control the adults around him, appealing to them did not seem to offer any hope. Julian remembered what Ms. Sayers had said to him about the Board: they could sell Parker’s Piece if they chose. They could even fire Dr. Stephens. They ran the school. And apparently Mr. Stryker ran them.
Julian thought about going back to Ms. Sayers and asking for her advice. He even thought about talking to Dr. Stephens. But realistically, what could either of them do? While Ms. Sayers might not scoff at the idea of magic, she had no more control over the situation than anyone else. And Dr. Stephens might well consider him crazy. In the end, Julian approached neither of them. He just wrestled with the problem in his own mind and with his friends.
As April approached the weather became warmer, but Julian’s spirits did not rise with the temperature. The endless conversations led to only one conclusion, one which terrified him: they had to get into the coming Board meeting, they had to confront Stryker and somehow stop him; somehow they had to get the Board to see what was truly going on. Hieu, in his methodical way, did have one other plan: “We find out everything we can about Stryker. That should be easy enough.” He was sitting at his laptop in the library with the other three on a rainy Saturday in early April.
“But no one will believe it as long as Stryker controls them,” Julian said.
Hieu looked at him: “I’ll get the goods on him, then you’ve got to set them free. Once they’re released, then we can show them the proof of Stryker’s connections and we’re home free.” He began tapping at the keyboard, running searches on Stryker and BRC. “Wow,” he said after a few minutes. “He’s good. I found the Board of Directors of BRC–which stands for Broughton-Rice Corporation, by the way, they’re a big developer in the mid-Atlantic—and Stryker is not on it. They have a holding company, Rollins, and Stryker’s not on that board either . . . hmm. Wait a sec., here’s another company that’s listed as a parent company of Rollins . . . what’s the difference between a holding company and a parent company?”
Julian rolled his eyes at Ryan and Tess and they simply waited.
“Oh, OK, a parent company is a company that owns a controlling share in another company, and not just shares. Anyway, this other company, ah, Stearon International, Stryker is on their board. The bastard.”
Hieu busied himself with collating what he had found and in the discussion that followed, they all agreed that they had to be at the upcoming board meeting. It turned out the meeting was in late April, on a Friday two weeks away. If the opportunity presented itself, they could present the evidence, but if not, they had to stop Stryker and then do whatever they could afterwards to present their findings to the board. It was not much of a plan, but it was the best they could think of. Julian was uneasy with it, primarily because it assumed that he could stop Stryker and break his power. His original anxiety over Dark Magic returned. He knew that Stryker could control or at least influence the minds of others, but what else could he do? And what could Julian do against him?
The other problem was how they would get into the meeting. Students of course were not allowed, and the board met all day. When did they have to be there? All day? They would have to skip classes, and what if they missed the vote? Ryan, always on good terms with everyone, said “I can solve the when problem. I’ll hang with Mrs. Hampstead. She probably has to do agendas and stuff for the meeting. I bet she’ll know the schedule, or there’ll be one on her desk. Once we know when to be there, we can meet between classes and head over.”
“But how will we get in? They won’t just hold the door for us!” Tess said.
“Actually, they will.” Julian could hardly believe what he was saying, but he’d just had an idea that, scary as it was, would get them in to listen.
“Huh?” Ryan snorted.
“They’ll hold the door. They’ll have to, because we’ll be invisible.”
~
In those last two weeks, Julian worked on invisibility. He had no idea what Stryker might throw at him, and so he couldn’t prepare for that. But he could practice invisibility. For the others, it was strange to watch as Julian slipped into a state of calm and then gradually faded from view. It was even stranger when Julian, confident now that he could make himself invisible and even walk around if Ryan led him, began to work on the others. As he made progress, they felt nothing, but watched as their bodies eerily faded from view. It was disconcerting, but it seemed to work as long as Julian wasn’t distracted, so they figured out a plan for the day.
Based on the agenda that Ryan had seen on Mrs. Hampstead’s computer (“You know, I happened to be there, just hanging out and asking her about her kids, when she had some computer trouble, and I asked if I could help”), they needed to be there at 3:30. That was when the motion for the sale of Parker’s Piece was slated to be discussed, following a presentation by some people from BRC. The timing couldn’t have been better. Third bell let out at 3:25, so they planned to meet in the stairwell of Bishops Bowes right at the end of class and go from there.
The day approached quickly, and before he knew it, Julian found himself waiting with Tess in the third floor stairwell, trying to breathe evenly and calmly as Ryan and Hieu climbed the stairs to join them. Once they were together, they knew they didn’t have time to waste. They lined up, Ryan first, then Julian, followed by Tess and then Hieu, each of them holding on the next. Once they were invisible, they planned to walk down the hall, wait for someone to enter the room, and slip through the open doorway. As he was clearing his mind, Julian thought of the famous picture of the World War I soldiers blinded by mustard gas, walking in a line, each with a hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him. Grimly, he pushed the image out of his mind, hoping that they did not end up that way.
~
It went much more smoothly than Julian expected. Several board members had apparently left to use the restroom in the hallway and were heading back in. They were able to shuffle along behind the last, and no one seemed to notice that the door stayed open a little longer once the last member entered the room. The room itself was slightly dim, as the LCD projector was in use, showing an artist’s rendering of Parker’s Piece with houses built on it. As the students moved as quietly as they could to the back of the room, they realized that Mr. Stryker was addressing the board, following an architects’ presentation.
Earlier in the day, Ms. Cavenaugh had presented the motion for the sale of Parker’s Piece, and the architects’ presentation had been a part of the consideration of the proposal. Now was a period for open discussion, leading to a vote. Mr. Stryker was presenting the same arguments Julian had heard already in the earlier meetings: that the school desperately needed more endowment funding, that this would lead to more security and stability for the school, to better programs for the students. And, should the board choose to pursue it, it might also create an opportunity for discussions with corporations that run schools for profit. They, as the discussions in Washington, D.C., showed, were “getting better results on testing than traditional approaches to education.”
Once again, Stryker seemed to have nothing but the best interests of the school in mind, speaking persuasively about what a larger endowment would do for the students and how a new direction for the school would launch St. Eligius into the 21st century, with its demands for new student skills. While the traditions of the school must of course be maintained, the times called on the board for visionary leadership and for decisions that “might seem, upon first consideration, controversial, but which, upon reflection, were clearly needed to set St. Eligius apart in the coming world.”
Mr. Stryker went on to say that while he was not one to question Dr. Stephens’ leadership, he did think that more time should be spent on these types of questions, “positioning the school strategically for the future,” and less on questions of the history of the school and “if I may say so, rather arcane” concerns about clocks donated by discredited former teachers and “other minutia.” Here, Stryker, for emphasis, picked up the clock’s pendulum, which, Julian realized with a gasp, was sitting, along with the key, on one of the tables. He explained briefly that these came from the clock now in the library, “regrettably” vandalized by students irritated by its noise. Stryker of course abhorred vandalism in any form, but in his mind it did raise the question of why the Headmaster had taken the trouble to put the clock there, a gift from a discredited former teacher who had left St. Eligius in disrepute. The clock, he said, waving the pendulum for emphasis, was “symbolic” of a backward looking vision. It and the vision should go, replaced by the “limitless vista of the future.” The pendulum, old wood and tarnished brass, seemed to underline Stryker’s point admirably, tying Dr. Stephens to a distant, and no longer relevant, past.
The board members, arranged around tables set up in a square in the front part of the ornate room, were listening raptly. No one questioned how Stryker had gotten the pendulum, or why he himself seemed concerned with something so irrelevant. No one was objecting to his proposal, not even Dr. Stephens, who sat mutely at one of the tables. As Julian listened, he became more and more angry. He simply could not believe what he was hearing. The anger surged inside of him, and his own consciousness began to dominate him. He realized that he was losing the magic, that his anger was tearing him away from his connection with unity, that he and his friends were becoming visible. At that moment, he didn’t care.
“I know what you’re doing! Your own firm wants to buy Parker’s Piece! You don’t care about the school! You want the money from the land and from the houses, and you’re influencing the board to get your way!” Julian’s voice rolled across the room with a resonance that surprised even him. Board members turned in their seats to stare at the back of the room, where Julian, Tess, Hieu, and Ryan, now plainly visible, stood defiantly. Mr. Stryker, his mouth still open in mid-sentence, looked at them with shock and anger, but then mastered himself and reassumed the mask of concern for the school with which he had been so persuasive.
“I beg everyone’s pardon, I’m sure, but I did not know that we allowed students in board meetings.” Stryker’s voice was polite, smooth, and confident, a picture of mildly offended dignity.
Dr. Stephens rose to his feet, shock on his face. “I assure you, sir, we do not. I do not know how they got here.”
Beside himself, Julian blurted out, “We’re here by magic, just as Stryker is using magic to control you all, to do what he wants!”
Mr. Stryker’s face took on the look of someone modestly tolerating a misbehaving child. “Magic? But that’s absurd.”
Around the room, board members were muttering to themselves, and Dr. Stephens was leaving the table to walk back to where the boys stood, the irritation plain on his face. Julian realized with a gulp that pointing out the reality of the situation would not be enough; the board was spellbound by Stryker’s influence. Looking at Tess, he whispered, “He’s controlling them, I’ve got to free them somehow or we haven’t got a chance.”
“Can you do it?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve got to try.”
Julian closed his eyes, trying to drop away from the scene, away from Dr. Stephens advancing on him, away from the mutterings of the board members, and most of all away from the calm but smug look on Mr. Stryker’s face. As he gradually let go of his anger and anxiety, he felt the scene drift away. He knew he had to keep the room enough in focus to act, but that he could not let his feelings toward Mr. Stryker get in the way. This had to be for the right cause, or it would not be at all. How he wished the clock were working. He knew it would help him. That wasn’t possible, though. He had to do what he could on his own. Imagine what needs to happen, imagine the board throwing Stryker out, not him. Imagine . . . just imagine the board being free of Stryker’s influence. Julian felt his self-consciousness melt away, became lost in an overwhelming sense of freedom. Freedom from control, freedom to simply be.
The others looked at Julian a little alarmed. Julian had closed his eyes, and a faint white aura began to emanate from him, so that in a few seconds it was like they saw Julian through a thin, glowing fog. The aura slowly expanded until it enveloped most of the room and as it did so, board members looked around as if they had just awakened. Dr. Stephens, in particular, changed. He stopped in his tracks, turned back towards the front of the room, a frown on his face. Mr. Poindexter, the chairman, also stirred, and said,
“Is this true, Stryker? Do you have connections to BRC?”
The issue of why and how the students came to be in the room, and whether they should be there, seemed forgotten.
Mr. Stryker did not reply to this question, though it and others like it came from several men and women around the table. Instead he looked again to Julian, dropped the clock’s pendulum on the table, and pushed his left hand toward Julian in a palm-out gesture of defiance. A darkness, but a darkness shot through with an eerie, spectral glow, like an X-ray or photo negative image created in the photo editing software Julian was familiar with, spread outward from Mr. Stryker’s hand, and where it touched the white aura, the aura faded. The board members did not seem to notice the darkness, but where it overtook them, their questions ceased, replaced by the same quiescent agreement they had shown earlier.
Now the battle was truly joined. If before Julian had been in training, playing with magic, now it was for real. Without seeing it, Julian sensed the advance of the darkness, sensed that the freedom he had given to the board members was slipping away again. Reaching deep within himself, deep down to that place of transcendence, that source of being and unity of which he knew Stryker’s power was but a corruption, he pushed the white back against his foe. And so it went, the white and the black locked in a struggle, now the one would overtake most of the room, now the other. Julian could not defeat the power Stryker’s hatred and lust gave him, but neither could the nothingness that Stryker unleashed win the day.
Finally, Stryker seemed to become disgusted. Turning his palm away from Julian, the darkness disappeared and with a wave of his hand, Stryker took a different tack. Gasping with effort, Julian released the white, and it too dispersed. As it did so, Julian noticed that silence had fallen. There were no more questions, no sound at all from the others in the room.
Horrified, Julian saw that everyone in the room, Dr. Stephens, every board member, and even Ryan, Tess, and Hieu, were still and silent.
“Let them go!” Julian shouted.
“Calm yourself, boy. They are unharmed, but I will not battle you for control of their minds. I will destroy you alone, and then bring them back.”
Then it came, a force of malevolence so strong that Julian staggered back, momentarily raising his hands to defend himself physically. Then he let go as his instincts reminded him that this was no physical assault, but the power of evil, lust, and greed, the power born of the denial of any source of life outside itself, striking out to take all life into itself. With that, Julian sensed something new. He realized that deep within the power of the darkness there was more than power or anger or hatred. There was envy, there was the greed of nothingness for something, of dark for light, of cold for warmth. Instinctively Julian knew he could never defeat this power, for by matching it he would only join and enhance it. But he could resist it. He could resist not by trying to destroy it, but through understanding and pitying it. Was that really the price to be paid to stop this assault, to understand and empathize with the monster across the room from him? Pitying its denial of the unity of all things, its arrogant insistence on its own existence in isolation from others? Unseen by Julian, whose mind was wholly absorbed with protection and, gradually, resistance, Mr. Stryker’s face was twisted in inhuman fury and maniacal glee.
Julian thought of Tess, frozen beside him with Ryan and Hieu. He thought of Dr. Stephens, frozen across the room, and of the trees and beauty of Parker’s Piece. He thought of his great-grandfather, whose deep love for this place was lost in the disappointment of having to leave. His great-grandfather who had stood in this very room. Julian felt sadness and connection and love. Opening his eyes for an instant, he saw, too, the misshapen face of Mr. Stryker, and he felt his anger ebb, to be replaced by sadness and pity. What would it be like to replace the friends he had found at St. Eligius with acquisition and control and power? Ultimately empty. The sadness of that flooded through Julian, and he felt the assault lessen as what he wanted became clear in his mind: peace. The peace Dr. Drake had sought, had wanted for the school, the peace he had taught Julian to find.
If Julian could have seen it, the flow of darkness from Mr. Stryker surrounded him, but now it was not so close. An envelope of light slowly pushed outward from Julian, though the force of hatred radiating from Mr. Stryker continued without letup. The darkness rushed forward to meet the ellipse of light around Julian and dissipate. Slowly, slowly the circle of light grew larger, until Tess and Ryan were inside it and stirred, looking around in fear at the scene. As the power to resist grew in him, Julian began to notice the room around him, and he saw Ryan’s movement. Julian knew that he would never be able to speak, but as he teetered between the unity that gave him the power to resist and his own existence, he found a balance, and resting on that knife’s edge, he reached out to Ryan with his mind.
“The clock. The pendulum and key. The clock. The pendulum and key . . .”
Freed now by Julian’s resistance, Ryan could see better than Julian the situation in the room. Mr. Stryker stood in the front of the room, sending forth his torrent of darkness, which enveloped much of the room but dispersed upon meeting the shield of light surrounding Julian. In the middle of the room, in front of the board chairman, lay the pendulum and key of the clock. Though they were barely visible, Ryan could see that the light was close to reaching them. With his athletic grace, Ryan seized the moment to pick up the nearest object at hand, a dirty plate from the luncheon served earlier, and hurled it across the room like a frisbee. It struck Mr. Stryker full in the face. Though it did him no real harm, it did distract him momentarily from his supernatural efforts. As the cloud of darkness receded, Ryan ran across the room, grabbed the pendulum and key from the table, and darted towards the door. With a snarl, Mr. Stryker sent the uncanny darkness outward once again, trying to recapture Ryan before he escaped. The light and the dark met at the doorway, catching Ryan temporarily between them. He cried out in pain, at the same time throwing himself through the doorway, and escaped.
With Ryan gone, the two forces continued to meet in the middle of the room. More comfortable now with the balance he must maintain, between unity with being and his own identity, Julian wondered how long he could do this. He felt confident he could resist, but how could he make Stryker stop? How could he ever resolve the situation, and bring it all to a peaceful end?
Then he knew. He knew that just as the truth had given him the power to resist––the paradoxical truth that the many are truly one, and the one is truly many and that to live as many, we must accept our oneness––he knew that that truth could stop Stryker, whose power was the power of denial. But how to reveal that truth? Julian knowing it would do nothing to help. Indeed, Julian’s grasp of the balance he must maintain wavered again as Stryker renewed the force of his attack.
The darkness stretched forth, and though dark it was, the real threat lay in what was not there. Julian found himself gripped in a miasma of fear that struck at his very being. For the darkness was that of utter chaos. Every pointless act of violence and hatred in human history seemed to stare him in the face, every victory of destruction and mindlessness and greed, which ultimately ends in death, stared him down. And worse, Julian knew without thinking—indeed, he could not think and keep his resistance intact—that his own death called to him. The ultimate threat of annihilation, the panicking thought of his own non-existence, of nothingness, tore at him like circling crows, picking away at his confidence and strength. Julian experienced sheer terror for the first time in his life, and his precarious balance, the balance that undergirded his own existence with the support of oneness, began to slip away in his panicked worry about himself.
Beside him, Tess watched with growing fear and worry. The darkness was terrifying, and she felt her mind giving way before the sheer horror of it. And she felt Julian struggling and her fear for herself was closely matched by fear for him. She knew Julian was in trouble, but she did not know how to help, what to do. Hieu was still trapped by the darkness, and Tess knew that she would be soon as well.
~
As Julian approached this moment of terror, Ryan raced down the hallway to the elevator, stabbing at the down button in his haste. No sound or light greeted him, and Ryan realized that the battle in the board room must somehow have disrupted the electricity in the building, or maybe the whole campus. Thinking that he didn’t know what was impossible anymore, but that he simply had to do what Julian had asked, he continued down the hallway to the stairwell, pushed through the door, and raced downwards, taking the stairs four at a time. Two flights down, Ryan burst through the doorway into the level of the archives and the display cases. Hurrying over to the clock, where it sat in the quiet and the dust, Ryan wondered if he could do what was needed. He had seen Julian start the clock. It’s just a clock, he thought. How hard can it be?
Ryan paused before the clock, to wipe his hands on his jeans and to calm his breathing. Then, seeing his face dimly reflected in the glass door of the clock, he reached out and opened the door. Gently feeling inside with his fingers, he found the hook where the small pendulum hung, and he carefully put it back in its place. Finding the key in his pocket, he fitted the barrel into one the of the two winding holes in the clock face, and turned the key clockwise, repeating the motion until it would go no further. After repeating this for the other key hole, Ryan realized with a start that he had no idea what time it was. He knew it was sometime in the afternoon, and making a guess, he pushed the hands around until they read 4:00. Hoping accuracy wasn’t important, he stepped back, took another breath, and then gave the pendulum a gentle push to set it swinging. The clock began its measured ticking, the pendulum swinging back and forth as if it had never ceased. Would it work? Would it matter? Gratefully, Ryan realized he could feel serenity, realized that yes, the clock was working. This was what Julian had wanted. But would it do what he needed? Ryan had never been as scared as when he came out of the trance he was in to see Stryker’s face and the horrifying forces he was unleashing. Hoping somehow to help, Ryan swallowed his fear and turned for the door to go back to the last place he wanted to be: the board room.
~
Julian needed help. The dark, swirling formlessness now stretched across most of the room. The aura of light had grown smaller, surrounding only Julian and Tess. Julian had become more and more aware of himself and his predicament. As his fear grew, he began to panic and to lose his confidence. Stryker’s voice did not help.
“Give up, boy. You’re a mere child. You stand no chance against me! I don’t care who your great-grandfather was. I am more powerful, and I get what I want!”
Julian wanted so desperately to resist further, to fight back against this man who brought evil into the very room around him. But that desire made it harder to maintain the balance he needed, and he felt himself growing more and more angry, scared, and powerless.
Tess knew that Julian was losing, knew that the darkness was about to overcome her and then Julian. Her mind numbed with fear, she could think of nothing to do, no action to take. But as the darkness closed around her, she did think of one thing to say. She took refuge in the saying she and Julian had discussed when he was first struggling with magic, and she offered it to him in thought: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Tess’ voice, quietly but irresistably, echoed faintly in Julian’s mind. And just as Julian truly lost the battle, just when the force of the formless darkness enveloped him, just as he began to be aware of himself and to lose his connection to the unity of all things, he grasped at this lifeline, steadying himself metaphysically. Then he felt it. It was there without being anywhere, a sense of timeless, placeless rhythm, a flowing context for the universe. And then he knew, all would be well, if he was a part of that context. Not annihilated by it, but living in it and buoyed by it, acknowledging it as the source of his own being. Julian let go again, his terror dissolving in a warm whiteness that spread out from him. Julian’s last conscious thought was, “Ryan did it!” For he knew the clock was working again, affirming the unity of all things at the very heart of the campus, Dr. Drake’s magic come back to help his own. And then he thought of a mirror.
The light spread out again from Julian, but now it was not shapeless. It became a wall, a mirror, and the darkness met it and was repulsed. No longer did the light struggle to push the darkness away, it simply was itself. The darkness, formless, chaotic, full of nothing, hit the light and reflected back. Back, back across the room, back to the one who had summoned it from the well of nonbeing.
Julian’s knowing the truth could not defeat Mr. Stryker, but Mr. Stryker’s confronting the truth did. Nothingness reflected back upon itself. The truth, that in itself there is nothing that is, but that only in connection and unity is there being, struck Mr. Stryker and the force he had unleashed. The unearthly darkness consumed itself, its power of nothingness vanishing in a swirling, shrinking cloud of sepulchral light as its own denial of being destroyed itself. With a horrified and horrifying scream from Stryker, the darkness contracted on him, and then vanished, leaving nothing behind except a room of stunned men and women wondering where Mr. Stryker had gone and how he could have left so suddenly.
Copyright 2021, Alfred Reeves Wissen.