On her final day within the grendel's lair, I tour the laboratory of sorcerer-engineer.
Beyond the entrance, a sacrifice upon the wall in an illuminated style reminds me we have entered another religious enclave. In a simple cell, she exchanges her armor for a rough-spun robe, her weapons and equipment guarded under lock and key.
A choir monk, a sorcerer-technician, walks me through the checklist of spells he prepares while training a novice and replacement. A heavy metal door leads to a lead-lined vault sealed against legions of tiny, conjured demons, nines of millions in number, who can know no escape for the havoc they would wreak upon this world. She is positioned at the center of the armillary sphere that fills this room. It lifts and tilts on ponderous, whirring gears as they align it under mirrors reflecting calibrated shafts of light. A template is fitted to focus the fiendish magic. Numbers and symbols scroll through the air above her head, glowing, scarlet and angry. We retreat to safety before hoards of evil gremlins become unleashed.
The control room is carved to resemble a Norse rune called the Gateway, a thorn upon a rose marking Thor's domain where giants and demons stagger under his hammer blows. Each station faces a different chamber, one for penetrating demons, another for the superficial. Sorcerer-technicians scry upon her through crystal balls to monitor her progress, possessing no wards powerful enough to allow anyone to stand beside her. The demons have eaten through two apparatus with their vitriolic dispositions. Both will be replaced before the moon has turned.
The chamber is darkened, a button pushed, the magical accelerator uncovered and unchained. Its beam is set into motion, its ray invisible to our eyes. No torches dim, no candles flicker. Only a red lantern is raised above the threshold to remind us not to enter. The monks and sisters observe a moment of silent contemplation for the instants that the witching lasts.
And she is free.
She rearmors quickly before we depart. At the gate the lay sister who greeted her every morning from the tollhouse assigns an angel to perch upon her shoulder, a golden reminder of an ordeal now both judged and passed.
On the journey home, concentric rings spread across glassy pools of water with each drop of rain falling from a leaden sky like unshed tears of joy.
© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III
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I went with Karen for her last radiation treatment. The radiation oncologist offered me a tour, which I got the impression he did regularly for spouses on final treatments.
The first thing that struck me was the shape of the control room, which was exactly like the Norse rune The Gateway (yes, symbology is that embedded in my brain). I couldn’t remember which rune it was at the time, but recognized it and looked it up once we got home. The technician I talked to was training her replacement.
The doors into the treatment room are huge and lead-lined, like bank vault doors. There is a red light above the door that indicates it’s in use, like you might see in a radio or recording studio. And the numbers running on the computer screens in the control room looked like a bridge scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Radiation is generated by a linear accelerator. For each dose, they aligned Karen with lasers based on the three marks they’d tattooed onto her. The table she could rotate with three degrees of freedom. All very high tech, and cool in a very detached and abstract way.
The radiation oncologist’s practice was attached to a hospital founded by Franciscan Sisters, so most of the waiting rooms had a crucifix somewhere on a wall.
Picture notes: Raindrops in a puddle in the gutter in front of the house. For a long time, Karen had been trying to figure out how to capture them. On the day she took this picture, she succeeded. Our unwept tears of joy.
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