The Witch of Babylon

by Dorothy J. Mcintosh

  I bent my head and rubbed my eyes. “What did the police say?”

  She took a minute to respond. “The detective was kind of guarded. He just said that Hal had died, probably from an overdose. A neighbor called 911 after hearing a disturbance. He’s the one who identified Hal. Thank heavens I didn’t have to. They aren’t releasing his body yet.”

  “Laurie, Hal got tangled up in something. Nothing to do with opiates. He tried to sell a really valuable relic, a collector’s item. That’s what the woman was after. Do you know anything about it?”

  “You think that’s why he died?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought he sold everything from Peter’s collection. You handled it all for him. If something was left, why didn’t he go through you?”

  “It didn’t belong to Peter. It was a stone engraving Samuel brought over from Iraq. Hal took it while I was in the hospital. This woman, Eris, found out about it somehow. Did Hal ever mention her?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.” Laurel eased herself up and walked over to a credenza against the wall. Every inch of its marble top was covered with stacks of file folders and documents, along with some dusty photos sitting beside her computer. One of these, her wedding picture, showed a bride with high cheekbones, a slight Slavic tilt to her green eyes giving her face a faintly exotic look, her shiny brown hair swept up. She was dressed simply in a white satin sheath, holding a spray of ivory roses and baby’s breath. Beside her, Hal, ramrod straight in a severe black suit, looked uncomfortable, as though he already knew the marriage was doomed to fail. Like some omnipresent ghost, Hal’s mother, Mina, a little blurry but clearly identifiable, could be seen in the background.

  Laurel saw me looking at the photo. “Do you know there isn’t one wedding picture with just the two of us? Mina always lurked somewhere, making sure she was in the shot.” She ran her fingers through her hair. Usually this was the gesture of a flirt. In her case it simply revealed an overload of worry and tension. She flipped through some of the files but didn’t find what she was searching for. “Somewhere Hal listed all the property that hadn’t yet been sold, mostly from this place, but I can’t find it.”

  She turned toward me. “John, there’s something you need to know. Hal and I had talked about getting back together. With Mina gone and Peter in a place he’ll never leave, there was finally an opening for me. Hal was brow-beaten by his father and too close to his mother. He adored her. Did you know he used to call her his jewel?”

  I shook my head and let her talk.

  “Things had been going well. My sublet was up and he offered to let me stay here because he’d moved back to the townhouse temporarily to care for Peter. Everything was great until I discovered he was using heroin again, even though he’d sworn that was over with. We used to see each other every day. That stopped last week when I found out. I was furious.” Her bottom lip trembled.

  “Junk is the devil, Laurie. It’s so hard to shake. Hal once told me he’d crawl through a sewer just to get some. He got that from an expert, by the way—William Burroughs. You can’t change the past. Try to just focus on the good times.”

  A gush of tears threatened to turn into a waterfall. “Hal was desperate for money. He had to cover all the costs for the townhouse and for here. Taxes alone were more than six thousand a month, plus paying for Peter’s care.”

  “Why not just sell the townhouse?”

  “The power of attorney forbade Hal from selling it. Peter made sure of that before he got too sick to think.”

  “What did Hal do with the cash from Peter’s collection?”

  Laurel shut her eyes for a moment, trying to regain her compo sure. “He went through it all. He was losing his position, too. You know he was deathly afraid of social events, but he threw that party as a last-ditch effort to get on Colin’s good side—his contract was up.”

  “Hal told me Colin fired him.” The few times I’d met Colin Reed he hadn’t impressed me. “How well do you know Reed? Does he know anything about antiquities?”

  “Not well. I’d see him at NYU when I’d go there to meet Hal. Or at parties and stuff. That’s about it. Never liked the man much. He teaches the great German philosophers—Kant, Schelling. He’s considered an authority on Hegel. As far as I know, that’s about as close to the past as he gets.”

  “Reed was there last night. Tried to implicate me, the bastard. I’m wondering why he’d do that.”

  Laurel shrugged her shoulders. I noticed how graceful her movements were, even in her slightly inebriated state. “Don’t take it personally,” she said. “Reed’s the type who’d do that just for a laugh.”

  “Where would Hal’s computer be—at the townhouse?”

  “His laptop’s there. His desktop’s in his cubbyhole at NYU.”

  I’d have to check both of them out. There had to be something on them to give me a lead on Eris’s identity.

  Laurel let out a deep sigh. “It feels so strange to be surrounded by Hal’s family things. Now it all belongs to the bank.”

  “Speaking of his possessions, he still wore your wedding ring. Did you know that?”

  “You mean the gold ring with the solitaire diamond? That’s not his wedding ring. He had it made from an antique ring when his mother died. He was more married to Mina than he ever was to me.”

  An odd way to put it, but accurate. Hal’s mother had always been very possessive. I could see what a challenge it would be for a new wife to wedge herself in between the two of them. “What about this place? It must be worth a fortune.”

  “Mina’s brother left it to her. Peter deliberately held off separating from her until she’d been awarded the estate to make sure he got half the value. She had to take out a mammoth mortgage to buy him out. Everything will have to be sold just to cover the debts.”

  I didn’t challenge her on this. Maybe she was just bad at math. Even if Mina had been forced to mortgage half the place, that still left a sizeable sum. But perhaps Peter had somehow managed to entail this place too.

  I got up to stretch my legs. I wasn’t sure I wanted to share Hal’s letter with Laurel just yet, but I desperately needed some advice. I took the sketch of the puzzle I’d printed from my pocket. “Hal created a kind of game to show me where he hid the engraving. Does this make any sense to you?” I held out the drawing to her.

  “Why would he want you to have it?” Instead of me. I could hear her thinking that loud and clear.

  “There was nothing altruistic about it. He set a trap. He deliberately sent Eris after me.”

  Laurel took the paper from me and scrutinized it, then put her hands up to her face. I folded my arm around her and let her cry. After a few minutes she moved away and found a tissue, holding it to her eyes. “He expected you to figure this out?”

  “Looks that way.”

  She let out a deep sigh. “He always beat me at these word games. Trying to solve it would make me feel like I was playing with a ghost.”

  “I don’t think there’s a lot of choice. Not for me, anyway.”

  “You’re telling me Hal is lying in the morgue now because of this. Is that where you want to end up too?”

  “He was totally out of his league. I’ve got a few street smarts, don’t forget. The words he’s used, they’re unusual.”

  “Some of them refer to alchemy, like the Picatrix. It’s a handbook on magic going back to the thirteenth century. The words black and white probably refer to two of the stages of converting base metals to gold. Melanosis, the blackening, comes first to eliminate the impurities by fire and next is leucosis, the whitening. The final stage would be iosis, the reddening or achieving the pure form.”

  “Alchemy? Honestly? That’s surprising for a committed academic like him.”

  I found it curious that Hal’s puzzle was loaded with words relating to alchemy. How did that link to a Neo-Assyrian relic? Had the Assyrians experimented with methods to turn common metals into gold? I’d always thought alchemy originated with the
Egyptians, not the Mesopotamians.

  Laurel handed back the sketch. The tip of her fingernail was shredded and the cuticles red, signs that her worries had begun well before Hal’s death. “Actually it’s not. Come with me—you need to see something.”

  Seven

  Ifollowed Laurel through the kitchen into a dark corridor that seemed to stretch to infinity. Dim lights came on when she flicked a wall switch. Laurel led me to a closed door about thirty feet down the hall. “I don’t usually come in here. It’s too eerie.” She pushed open the door. “You’ll have to wait a minute. The wires leading to this room were purposely cut off; there’s no electricity in here.”

  She shuffled forward. After a moment a match struck. Flames leapt from tall white tapers fixed into two large crystal candlesticks, the flickering lights glittering on their facets. “Voilà,” Laurel said, waving her arms, “‘the spirit room.’ That’s my name for it, anyway.”

  The room was windowless and had probably once been a large pantry. Its walls and ceiling had been painted dusky grape. Lingering in the air was a scent of must mixed with a strange odor I couldn’t place, like the smell of rotting fruit. There were no pentacles drawn within a circle on the floor, no goat skulls or upside-down crosses, no dripping black tapers—nothing hokey like that. Still, the room possessed an aura that was chilly and uncomfortable; it was a place you wouldn’t volunteer to spend time in.

  An old cabinet with glass doors held curious objects: prisms of several sizes, egg-shaped stones in different colors, an old-fashioned brass scale with weights and measures, blue apothecary bottles filled with powders. A silver statue of a horned goddess sat on top of the cabinet beside a cruel-looking knife with a blade curved like a sickle. A large tapestry hung above that, a medieval scene showing a robed and masked woman mounting steps leading to a citadel on a hillside, a wounded knight in the foreground, a raven wearing a gold circlet flying in the sky.

  “This is wild,” I exclaimed. “What on earth was Hal tangled up with?”

  Laurel crossed her arms over her chest as if protecting herself. “This was Mina’s place, but lately Hal spent a lot of time in here.”

  “Mina was into all this new-agey stuff too?”

  “She’s the one who originally got Hal involved. I know most people think it’s flaky, but you can’t dismiss it out of hand. The old alchemists laid the groundwork for modern chemistry.”

  “When Hal and I were kids Mina wasn’t around a lot; usually only the staff were there—housekeepers or maids. The rare times I did see her she was pretty distant. She always came off as a bit formidable, almost scary.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  I sensed there was more to Laurel’s words than simple agree ment. “What do you mean?”

  “Hal never said anything?”

  “About what?”

  “Mina was a practicing witch.”

  I had a sudden vision of Mina drinking some potion, her image transforming before my eyes into a hag with green skin, a long hooked nose, and one tooth, sailing off the terrace at midnight to cast her evil spells. I broke into a laugh. “I know you didn’t like her, but that’s absurd.”

  Her eyes registered a quick flash of annoyance. “The last thing I’d do is make a joke about it. She took it very seriously. That knife on the cabinet is a boline, a witch’s tool. Witchcraft is older than most religions, and it’s become quite widespread, you know, especially here and in the UK. Mina was an eclectic.”

  “And that is?”

  “A sole practitioner. She didn’t belong to a coven. She became an authority on witchcraft practiced in medieval Germany. Well-known scholars would come from around the world to consult her.” Laurel shivered and crossed her arms. “I found out about all this just after her funeral. Hal was very emotional, and one night it all tumbled out. He said he was going to make her immortal.”

  “How did he plan to pull that off?”

  “He wouldn’t say and I didn’t want to indulge him in that crazy talk. I wanted to get his mind off her.”

  “As far as I could tell Mina was strictly Park Avenue. You’re making her sound like the madwoman in the attic.”

  “Look at the book over there if you don’t believe me.” Laurel pointed to a single large volume sitting on a table in front of us. “That’s the Picatrix, her spiritual guide.”

  The book’s cover consisted of an intricately worked ivory relief with a border of interlinked geometric designs and a center panel of occult symbols. Fine cracks in the yellowed ivory told the book’s age. Two tarnished silver clasps had been fixed into its right edge—a locking mechanism—but the hasps were open.

  “It’s a grimoire,” Laurel said. She seemed wary of the volume and stepped away from it.

  “Sounds appropriately sinister.”

  “A book of spells and incantations, ways to call up demons or communicate with angels. The original Arabic title was Aim of the Sage . It was translated into Latin from Spanish. There are supposedly only seventeen copies in existence, all under lock and key in European libraries, so where Mina got this one I have no idea.”

  I moved beside her and, taking a tissue from my pocket to protect the pages, opened the book.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” Laurel asked. “It’s said that once you open it, the book has a hold over you.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and turned the first pages. “Those tales were usually circulated to discourage people from looking at forbidden material. If it’s really old, it’ll be worth a lot. You should probably put it in a safe-deposit box.”

  A little vexed, Laurel replied, “Yeah, along with the million other things I have to do.”

  I lifted the pages gently, fascinated by the illustrations. Framed in a circle, one of them showed a king, dressed in a multi-colored garment, sitting on a peacock rendered in radiant silver, golds, and greens. On another page a nude Hermes appeared against the backdrop of an old sailing ship. “I can’t read Latin.”

  “It’s a kind of handbook for proactive astrology and magic. If I remember what Hal told me, in those times you could die just for owning this. It has instructions for creating magical talismans and shows how to make images of your enemy to defeat him.”

  “Defeat?”

  “Well … kill, actually.”

  “Nice.”

  She shuddered. “You know, all this talk about the Picatrix jogs my memory. That woman you mentioned. Hal was a member of an online group, a website for people with a serious interest in alchemy. Could he have met her through that? He talked about it several times, but do you think I can remember … Oh, I know. I think it was called Alchemy Archives or something like that.”

  “Let’s check it out.” I grabbed my cellphone and pulled the candle as close as possible. A search for the name brought up the website immediately.

  “Are these supposed to be real people?”

  “Hal said so. Those symbols underneath them represent planets: Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Together with Sol for the sun and Luna for the moon, they symbolize the seven celestial objects believed in antiquity to revolve around Earth. They’re supposed to represent the five hosts of the website. It all feels like a lot of hocus-pocus to me.”

  “Why hide their identities?”

  “They’re professionals, not the flakes you sometimes find on a site like this. My guess is they didn’t want people to know they were dabbling in this kind of stuff.”

  Or perhaps they had other strong reasons, like the need to hide their crimes. “So they took this stuff seriously.”

  “Oh, for sure. You’d be surprised. Some people spend millions setting up labs trying to convert lead into gold. It’s called transmutation.”

  The Alchemy Archives website

  “The woman I met. Could she be one? Maybe she’s Venus.”

  “It’s possible. Hal told me he was Saturn, but he didn’t name anyone else.” She peered at my cellphone screen. “Well, it looks like at least one woman belon
gs to the group.”

  “You can’t tell from that. Those are full porcelain face masks, and anything can be digitally altered.”

  Laurel rubbed her eyes. I could see she was exhausted. When I closed the Picatrix I noticed the white edge of some paper at the back of the book. I gently slid it out. A photograph, at least part of one. The image came from our time at Columbia, one of our legendary parties. It captured me in my student days, long hair and all, passing a joint to the woman beside me. The picture certainly wouldn’t help me to remember who she was because her head had been neatly cut out. My own face had been colored blood red, a crudely drawn symbol inked in above it.

  I dropped the photo as if it had bitten my hand. “What the hell is this?”

  Laurel bent down to retrieve it and gasped. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before.”

  The photo had to be Hal’s work, his mind far more hate-filled and twisted than I’d thought. “It’s some kind of stupid curse.”

  “I should never have brought you in here. I’m sorry,” Laurel said worriedly.

  Still feeling freaked by the photo and the implications of what we’d seen in that room, I felt certain Laurel was in danger too. As we walked back to the family room I knew I had to say something. “Listen, this whole thing is getting really bizarre. I’m concerned about you. Is there anywhere else you could stay until I get this situation sorted out? Eris might try to get to you here. I’m surprised she hasn’t already.”

  “Are you kidding? This place is locked up tighter than a tomb. I’ll be fine.”

  I gave her my business card so she’d know how to reach me and got her cell number. “I’ll call you then. Just to make sure you’re okay.”

  She hugged me. “Watch out for yourself. Don’t worry about me.”

  “You didn’t get much sleep last night, did you?”

  “Next to none.”

  “Why don’t you try to rest? Do you have anything to help you sleep?”

  She shook her head but took my advice and curled up on the couch. I bunched one of the pillows under her head and tucked a mohair throw over her. She smiled her thanks. I heated up some milk in the kitchen microwave and brought the cup to her.