Four Dominions

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Her second double espresso kicked her out of stasis. Throwing down some euros, she left the café, retracing her steps through the gates of Père Lachaise. It was almost closing time, and she half-ran back to the memorial, heading around behind it, but everything was locked up tight and no matter how hard she tried she could not regain entrance.

  *

  “NO MATTER,” Highstreet said when she returned to his atelier. Instead of skylights, the double-height space was filled with a light of another kind. Thirty screens of dazzling digital effects, experimental source code, and the hard drives he’d cracked open with his resourceful and implacable worms were ranged around him on three sides. “I have the complete stream of your meeting with Obarton.”

  Lilith sat down beside him. Unlike a traditional artist’s atelier, Highstreet’s space was dim as twilight and almost as chilly as a meat locker, to accommodate both the flat-screen images and the complex electronic hardware.

  Before setting out to meet Obarton, Lilith had Highstreet fix her up with a miniature video feed. She had no idea what he wanted or where he might take her. Paranoia was essential following her bloody coup; she wanted everything on Highstreet’s record in case something untoward happened to her.

  “So you saw that... hideous thing at the same time I did,” she said now.

  “Smoke and mirrors, Lilith. Smoke and mirrors.”

  She was startled. “What are you talking about?”

  “I ran the feed back and forth and in slo-mo, frame by frame, even. I didn’t know what I was looking for, and, frankly, it was so well devised I would have missed it if I hadn’t fast-forwarded the tape to get to the end.”

  “The low light must have been a hindrance.”

  “You’d think so, right? But actually it was the low light that helped me out.” His fingers manipulated the keys on his master board and the sight of the glass jar and the thing hanging suspended inside it came up, threatening to turn her insides to liquid. He punched the fast forward key and the images started to blur as if reflected in a dark mirror. Then, out of nowhere, a bright flash lit up the extreme upper right-hand corner of the screen. It was there and gone so fast that she wasn’t sure she’d actually seen it, until Highstreet confirmed its existence.

  He ran the tape back until the flash was freeze-framed.

  “What is that?” Lilith asked.

  Highstreet grinned. “It’s the mirror, albeit an ultra-high-tech one.” His grin broadened. “Or actually it’s a laser—an extremely sophisticated one, I might add, bounced off several mirrors.” Then he rewound the tape to the moment Obarton switched the LED torch to red and the Fallen Archangel leapt at her. “What you’re seeing is a hologram, a form of VR image.”

  “Wait. Wouldn’t I need goggles for virtual reality?”

  “Under most circumstances, you would. But the low light combined with the red LED beam refracted and intensified the image, turning the space in front of the jar, precisely where you were standing, into what amounts to a VR tube.”

  “You mean this thing in the jar doesn’t exist?”

  “You saw what Obarton wanted you to see. It was an illusion.”

  Lilith shook her head. “But it looked so real.”

  “This is the illusionist’s genius. He makes the impossible appear real.”

  For some time, Lilith remained mute and motionless. Being quite familiar with her silent phases, Highstreet went back to his own work, ignoring her as if she weren’t actually there. When she had processed everything she had seen and heard she would let him know.

  Lilith was lost deep inside herself. Her current situation vis-à-vis Obarton was difficult for her to deal with. Being taken in and manipulated by him, feeling her power ripped out from under her, reverberated through her, amplifying a past she could neither forget nor escape. How much she blamed her parents for her uncle’s transgressions she could never quite figure out. Her inner rage was like a tide, rising and falling with moon-like phases. They hadn’t known—in retrospect this was clear enough—they hadn’t even suspected. But their cluelessness only fueled her rage. They should have known, at least suspected. They were there to protect their children, and they hadn’t. They’d let the predation continue, while it went on night after night under their noses. They’d let her shame and fright build to intolerable levels. From ages five through eleven, when the family’s beloved uncle lived with them, he had inducted her into the hideous secret ways of sex without consent, without even an understanding of what was going on. He professed to love her, to cherish her as no one else could; that was the insidious nature of the predation.Our little secret, our private world, our sacred space. He knew all the code phrases, employed them all like an army on maneuvers. She was outflanked, overwhelmed, taken prisoner. With her lying in the secret boudoir of his strong arms and engorged loins, he sang softly to her as he worked her body like an instrument. He was never less than tender with her; to this day she believed that he loved her, but that love, like Humbert Humbert’s in Nabokov’s Lolita, was an awful thing, a monstrous dungeon into which she been consigned.

  But in her twelfth year, like a switch being thrown, a heady flood of hormones kicked in, overrunning everything including her captor. She woke up one morning to the realization of who and what he truly was, and that her younger sister, six years her junior, would be in imminent peril the moment she became too old for her uncle’s repugnant tastes. Everything he had done to her took on an intolerable double meaning; bad enough she had to endure his molestations, she could not allow Molly to be his next victim.

  She sat under the pear tree in the backyard, in the summer rain, the warm wetness mingling with her tears. She thought about going to her parents, but would they believe her? Her uncle would of course deny everything. Then doctors might become involved, cold fingers probing her private parts. A shame of intolerable proportions engulfed her. It was her fault; she let him do whatever he wanted to her. Had she come willingly into his arms, into the warmth and protection he provided? But it wasn’t protection at all—that was the illusion he was providing, the illusion that had gulled her into insensibility, to being what amounted to his emotional slave.

  No more, no more.

  That very night, turning on a newfound false coquettishness, she lured him out into the woods behind her parents’ house. A half mile away, the ground sloped down toward the local reservoir. Appealing to the tiny atavistic brain between his thighs, she shed her clothes—all but her underpants—held her breasts out to him, then whirled away, laughing. He followed her under the cyclone fence protecting the reservoir.

  She let him catch her when the water purled around their calves. Grabbing one arm, he reached for her underpants. She stumbled backward, just as she planned, and he fell forward on top of her. Grabbing a sharp rock she had scooped up in the woods and hidden down her pants, she slammed it into the side of his head. When his eyes opened as wide as his mouth, she struck him again between the eyes. He went down, rolling off her. She held him under the water, patiently and methodically counting to a thousand. An owl hooted; then it passed overhead, silent as death. From behind her, in the woods, the rustling of small nocturnal mammals foraging for food. Crickets chirped, applauding her actions.

  Gathering rocks from the bottom of the reservoir, she stuffed them in the pockets of his jacket and pants. She stuffed the remainder into the place where his erection had been. She was an excellent swimmer, confident and powerful, but his weight made her journey to the deep part of the reservoir difficult. Not impossible, however. She swam on, listening to the crickets.

  Forty minutes later, she was on the other side of the cyclone fence, having brushed away her footprints with a fallen pine bough. She dressed, returned to her house. All the lights were off. No one saw her. She went to bed and, with the singular relief of the freed, fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  She was somewhat in that state again—a kind of self-hypnosis she had developed a knack for—as she sat in Highstreet’s ate
lier. If she were to be honest with herself, which she could be from time to time, she felt most comfortable, safest, even, when she was here. Highstreet himself had something to do with it, though there was nothing sexual between them, and couldn’t be, considering both their natures: Her uncle had negated all sexual desire in her, had left her with the lasting assurance that love was dangerous, a weapon of enslavement. She could not bear to have a man touch her in a sexual way and Highstreet, well, he didn’t think about sex at all; it was as if he had been born without a libido.

  But there was also this: being surrounded by the screens, by the flickering images, the scrolling source code, the gentle susurrus of the fans cooling the equipment was like crickets chirruping. Inhuman hearts that could never harm her, never prey upon her, never take from her what she did not want to give. She loved these mighty machines that could do so much, render unto Highstreet, and through him, to her, so much information, so much commentary on post-modern life—windows on the world. Yes, she was safe here, safe with them and safe with Highstreet, with whom she had the most remarkable and rewarding relationship of her life. And why not? After all, he was half machine himself.

  “Hugh,” she said, and when he turned from his work, giving her, as he always did, his undivided attention, went on with her thought, “Obarton did this to me to teach me a lesson. He knew he couldn’t stop me the way the others had wanted to, so he found a way to humble me, to bind me to him in fear.”

  “But you have no fear.”

  Of course this wasn’t true, her constant ruminations on the past proved that. But in another sense it was, indeed, true. In this life she now led she feared no man, knowing she could find the most direct way to expunge the threat, as she had done with her uncle. But she did fear the supernatural; her dedication to the Church assured that. Like a nun, taking on the mantle of Christ had marked her break with her old life, opened the doorway to the life she now led. That she could be a devout servant of Christ and kill without a single iota of either guilt or remorse wasn’t a paradox. Rather, she was following in the long, bloody tradition of the armies of the pope, Christ’s mortal emissary on earth.

  “In this archangel of the Fallen—what you have identified as a hologram—Obarton held up my own fear for me to witness. He made me tremble, fall to my knees, beseech God to protect me. He knows my weakness, Hugh. He has gotten to me via the sanctity of my adoration of the divine.”

  “The man’s a charlatan. A sideshow, nothing more.”

  So Hugh. He was angry on her behalf, and she smiled to let him know she appreciated that. “No, Hugh. He’s an illusionist, and there’s a difference. His belief in the power of the illusions he creates is his weakness. A chink in his armor I mean to exploit.”

  “Ah, yes. I see your point.” Highstreet knew the game was afoot, and he was already warming to it. “How shall we proceed? How shall we turn the tables on him?”

  “Obarton wants something from me—something I would never agree to unless he brought me to heel. Now that he believes he’s succeeded I’ll nurture his misconception.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He believes the Fallen are real, that they caused the fire at the castle in Malta. He wants me to go after them. He wants me to be his stalking horse, to feel them out, define their strengths and weaknesses.”

  “If he’s telling the truth. On the other hand, he could be sending you on a wild-goose chase to keep you away from his own real initiative.”

  She really did love this man, in her own way, in the only way possible. She nodded. “Always a possibility.”

  “Either way, he might be sending you to your death.”

  “How lovely for him.”

  “And how elegant,” Hugh said. “Not a drop of your blood on his hands.”

  “Obarton is nothing if not fastidious.”

  They both laughed at the same time, as if they were each a reflection of the other observed in a mirror. But this was all business as usual—why Hugh was so happy. She gave him no hint of the inky turbulence underneath. Obarton had gotten into her head. No matter that it was only for an hour or so, the fact that he’d been able to do it at all came as a wake-up call to her. It was no wonder her uncle had surfaced after she had viewed the illusion of the Fallen Archangel named Dagon. He had gotten into her head, too, so much so that she had never told anyone what had happened. No one ever found his body; no one knew where he had gone or what had happened to him. Only Lilith, and she would never tell anyone, not even Hugh Highstreet.

  “But seriously, Lilith,” Highstreet said now.

  “Yes,” she said, mentally engaging him again, “seriously.”

  “He must be disposed of.”

  “Softlee, softlee, catchee monkey,” Lilith said in a childlike singsong voice. “We cannot afford to underestimate Obarton. He may look like a self-satisfied fool, but he’s far from stupid. He knows how to play the Vatican game better than I do; he’s been at it far longer, he knows more of the right people.”

  “Including Cardinal Duchamp?”

  “Ha, no. I’ve gotten under Felix’s skin. He’s a man as well as a servant of Christ, unlike Obarton, who is neither. Felix’s lapses are my meat.”

  “What has he told you?”

  “For one thing, he’s not prepared to believe in the Fallen. For another, his prime objective for the Knights was and is finding the gold in King Solomon’s mines. That’s the path he’d set for Aldus Reichmann, the previous Nauarchus of the Circle Council. Valentin Kite, the explorer Reichmann chose to head the extramuros expedition to Tannourine, where Valentin swore the mines were located, went insane before he died. But it was his wife, Maura Kite, who became the center of attention for Bravo Shaw and the Gnostic Observatines.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Excellent question.” Lilith sat back, fingers laced in her lap. “Reichmann sent his crack extramuros team to Istanbul to retrieve her from the Gnostic Observatines.”

  “They were successful.”

  “They were. They brought her back to Malta.” She frowned. “But the morning after was when the fire broke out inside the castle, killing nearly everyone.”

  “And Maura Kite?”

  “Well, that’s the mystery. Nothing more was ever heard from her, so it’s assumed she was incinerated in the fire.”

  Highstreet’s gaze searched her face for what seemed to be missing. “You have doubts?”

  “The bones of a female were never found in the ashes. Two separate teams searched for days.”

  “Maybe they should have searched longer.”

  “Perhaps.” Lilith’s frown deepened, creating facing parentheses above the bridge of her nose. “But, to tell you the truth, no one could get the teams to stay a moment longer. No one slept; no one ate. A kind of existential fear stalked them. A fear that no one would talk about, let alone define.” She sighed. “After that, the Circle Council, with the advice of Cardinal Duchamp, declared the site off-limits to all Knight personnel.”

  “But the castle...”

  “We’ll build a new one on the other side of the island. We have too many centuries of history in Malta to abandon it. It wouldn’t exist in its present form without our historic intervention.”

  “So, bottom line, the cardinal doesn’t believe in the existence of the Fallen.”

  “Not exactly,” Lilith said. “The Fallen Seraphs, Thrones, Dominions, Powers, Archangels, Angels, and the rest exist in the canon of Catholic orthodoxy. But he believes in them only to that extent. As for the possibility that they are here among us, no. He dismisses that idea outright. And with good reason. He has witnessed more than a half-dozen so-called exorcisms. All were fakes, as were the insane subjects. They were possessed all right, but only by the demons that, from time to time, bedevil all of us.”

  “Which brings us back to Obarton. What path is he bent on setting you on?”

  “As to that,” Lilith said, “we’ll just have to find out together, won’t we, Hugh.” She
rose. “I’ll take my orders from him, like the good little girl he believes me to be, while you continue to monitor him twenty-four-seven via the electronic bugs I’ve placed.”

  11

  Halicarnassus, Turkey: Present Day

  The unholy Fallen sat at the edge of a forest waterfall, waiting. Birds fluttered overhead; tree frogs chirruped; dragonflies glittered in patches of sunlight; flies hummed softly to themselves as they searched for offal or shit on which to alight.

  This profane Power—a warrior angel—that had Transpositioned from Maura Kite to Emma Shaw despised its body. But then it despised all human hosts. It ground Emma’s totally inadequate teeth—teeth useless for rending and tearing—at the indignity of having to inhabit mortals at all. The bodily functions alone—the eating, drinking, eliminating waste—disgusted it. At least it could short-circuit the host’s need for sleep for periods of time. It had killed a number of hosts before it realized that human brains required a sleep so deep they dreamed; without dreaming, something inside the brains went haywire, making them as useful as a dish of butterscotch pudding.

  The Fallen’s name was Beleth, and, as if on a wheel of torment, its thoughts kept returning to the beginning, when Lucifer and his angels rebelled against God in Heaven, and with unpardonable hubris presumed to test their strength against his. Then God, by his almighty power, and the mighty army led by the Archangel Michael, overcame the strength of Lucifer, and sent him with all his Fallen like bolts of lightning from Heaven to Hell. But Lucifer, chained and bound as he was by God’s will, still plotted with subtlety and guile to gain victory over God, Michael, and mankind before the Day of Judgment.