Cliffhanger

Prologue

PrologueThe old man sat, staring out across the Catskills toward the setting sun. The sky was turning violet above the intense pink glow of the horizon as the first, brightest stars were showing in the twilight firmament. It was cool up here, high above the river, and the scent of newly mown fields and pine filled the air.

He lifted a heavy cut glass tumbler to his lips and drained its contents. Raising himself slowly out of the carved high-backed chair, he walked over to a side table placed against the north wall. It was carved to match the throne-like seat at the center of the covered porch. On it sat a half-full decanter of whiskey, a leather-covered lap desk, and a circular silver dish.

The man refilled his tumbler and immediately emptied half of it in two gulps. Setting the glass down on the table, he picked up the lap desk and moved back to the chair. Once again seated, he placed it across his knees and removed from it a small sheet of letter paper, a gold-nibbed pen and an inkwell. After a moment’s thought, he quickly dipped the pen and wrote a note, signing it with his characteristic flourish: Alexander Bencliffe.

Returning to the table, Bencliffe replaced the writing materials, then folded the letter and placed it on the silver dish, covering up as he did so the enigmatic oriental symbol inlaid in gold and niello at its center. He had never understood its meaning or purpose, any more than he had understood the two inscriptions inlaid around the dish’s rim, one in Hebrew, the other in Arabic. Both of them said more or less the same thing, he had learned, having something to do with twilight.

He lifted the tumbler once more and drank the last of the whiskey. Setting it down next to the decanter, he moved over to the slender cast-iron columns that framed the western vista. The sun was barely above the horizon now, a lurid sliver of red against the dark tops of the mountains. Leaning wearily against the column, Bencliffe felt every one of his seventy-five years.

Over the past fifteen years, he had been up here endless times, at this very time of day, waiting for it to begin again. The dreams had haunted him since his father’s death, and he had found they worsened with the approach of every full moon, at the equinoxes, and at the solstices. Even during the day, they buzzed faintly in his ears, blessedly dimmed by the sunlight, but still present.

He had trained himself to ignore them, mostly. He had at times tried to understand these dreams, or whatever they were. He had even attempted to embrace his curse, to seek some use of the maelstrom of thoughts that assaulted him every night. He had built this place, this very porch, removed from the city, to try to master what was in his head, to unravel its meaning. He had brought the Vessel here with him, trying to divine its purpose. All for naught.

And now the Vessel was broken, whatever power it might have had rendered null. It had never brought him full relief, and he had decided—too late, perhaps—that it was the source of his affliction, rather than a solution. Bencliffe turned and looked over at the table, at the silver dish with the folded letter on it.

Finally, it was dark, the last trace of twilight gone and night in full sway. As Bencliffe watched the undulating horizon, he could feel it start. The buzzing. The fragmentary, flashing images. As it always had. A sleeping draught would let him rest but had never truly driven the images from his brain.

With surprising agility, given his age, the old man levered his legs up and over, one at a time, until he was seated on the cast-iron balustrade, using the ornate iron column for balance. He looked once more out over the dark expanse of the Catskills. He breathed in the nighttime scents, the freshness of the countryside. Then, with a final thought of his wife and children, and a muttered prayer for forgiveness, he pushed himself out and into the void.