Smoke and Dagger

by Douglas Wynne

  “It’s what brought you here. Don’t you see? Your dream. This is what you were meant to find. And it makes sense. You’re to be my new scarlet woman.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “The gods Candy catalogued—she saw them in this.”

  He went to the kitchen table and swept the papers aside, then placed the mirror in a wire bracket, propping it up at a shallow angle. The sketches on the table were horrible enough, but they at least froze the abominations in time, filtered them through the eye and hand of an artist. There was no doubt that Marjorie Cameron was gifted, but it was still art, not so different from the hellish visions of Heironymous Bosch. The prospect of seeing such things directly was another matter altogether. And yet, she found her body drawn to the chair Jack had slid back from the table, found herself sitting and peering into an infinitely deep darkness. Because she had to see, had to know if there was more than myth and shared psychosis at work here. She had seen something in the night, in the smoke. But she’d also been sleep deprived— and who knew what drugs might have been burning in the incense powders?

  She tore her gaze from the glass and looked at Jack. His eyes were alight with anticipation and a kind of hunger. But the focus of that hunger wasn’t the mirror; it was her…and what she might see in it. “Doesn’t it require some kind of spell first?”

  He shook his head and ran his fingers over his thin mustache. “Only to invoke a specific entity. Right now, I think it wants to show you something.” His voice was quiet, as if he didn’t want to disturb a process that was already unfolding. And maybe it was. She could feel the magnetic pull pulsing from the glass, tugging at her mind. The air around the disk shimmered, and she felt another sensation, an alien scrutiny.

  A silver cloud swirled in the black glass. She let her eyes track its motion and felt herself drifting into a trance not unlike the hypnagogic state before sleep. Subtle imagery emerged from the cloud, textures that resembled coarse fur, pallid flesh, the ridged curve of a goat’s horn. She knew Jack hadn’t moved from his place at the table, but her sinuses were flooded with an overpowering musk, a dank animal stench that made her gorge rise.

  The front door of the castle flew open and Catherine jumped in her seat, her trance broken. Jack was on his feet, moving toward the intruder, raising placating hands as Abdelmalek lurched across the room, wild-eyed and sweaty. He came at her with the intensity of man moving to douse a fire before it can spread, shrugging off Jack’s hands, an effort that almost cost him his balance and sent him sprawling on the floor. But he recovered and limped to the table. His chin and the collar of his white shirt were crusted with dried blood. Had he been in a car accident? He reached past her and slammed the mirror facedown on the table, then spun around to seize her by the shoulder, tilting her chair back on its rear legs. Jack snapped out of his confused paralysis at the sight. “Stop it! What’s gotten into you? What happened to you?”

  “Get out!” Abdelmalek shouted at Catherine. From her position in the chair, he towered over her, threatening to spill her backward onto the floor. He jabbed a finger at the open door he’d come through mere seconds ago. “You can go back to the white coven and tell them they will know our secrets when Cthulhu rises!”

  Jack grabbed him by his bloody lapels and pinned him against a wall. Catherine’s chair touched down again, but she was already on her feet, retreating from the men and the mirror.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Jack yelled.

  Abdelmalek grimaced, his face contorted with disgust, nostrils flaring with rage. It was clear the effort to intimidate her had used up what little strength he had left in the aftermath of an ordeal.

  “She's a fucking spy, Jack. A spy! And you’re showing her this?” He gestured at the mirror.

  Jack released his grip on the man and looked him over—the blood on his shirt and face, at the way he slumped awkwardly against the wall. “Who did this to you?”

  “The spooks I told you about. The ones I saw watching the house. They jumped us in the hall at Madam Gamal’s. Dragged us into an empty room and tortured me.”

  Jack looked shocked. “Christ, Kamen. What about Salome? The bayb–”

  Abdelmalek cut him off with a look. “She’s okay. They didn’t hurt her. They dumped us on the street and I took her home.”

  Jack turned to Catherine with a new hardness in his eyes. She knew she should be edging toward the door but was frozen in place. She was afraid, but the more calculating part of her was willing to wager that they would only throw her out—and she wanted to collect every clue they might spill in her presence before that happened. What could they do to her? They were being watched by the authorities.

  “You’re one of them?” Jack said. “You’re with the FBI?”

  “They’re not FBI, Jack,” Abdelmalek said. “And she’s not one of them. She belongs to the Golden Bough.”

  Jack shook his head, as if trying to clear it. “That makes no sense. They’re like the Freemasons. Men only.”

  “The agents that grabbed us, they tracked her in New York. They said the Golden Bough sent her. They think we’re working together.” He scoffed.

  “And you believed them? These men who tortured you. If they’re not FBI, who are they? Maybe they’re Golden Bough. Maybe they’re trying to turn us against each other.”

  “They’re some kind of secret police, Jack. I know their kind. No matter the country; those guys are the same everywhere.”

  But Jack wasn’t listening anymore. He was studying Catherine with dark intensity. “You said you saw this house in a dream. Was that true? Are you even a student, or was that a lie, too?”

  He moved toward her, his face hard with anger, but she held her ground, raised her hands in a placating gesture.

  A scraping sound reached her ears, signaling the animal part of her that she’d miscalculated her chances in the lion’s den, and when she flicked her eyes toward Abdelmalek he was brandishing a long knife he’d taken down from the wall. She didn’t know the name for it, but it looked Philippine, with a nasty leaf-shaped blade, rusted from the salt air.

  “I’ll tell you everything if you calm down, Jack. I’m an Anthropology student at Barnard, just like I said. I was approached by someone from the Golden Bough because of my sensitivity, that’s true. They know you’re doing something real out here. I don’t know how they know that, but they asked me to find out what it was. I don’t know about your rivalry with them. I don’t understand it. You’re both looking for the same thing…ancient wisdom…something transcendent. I would think you’d be on the same side.”

  “That’s not what you said when we met on the beach. You said you saw this house in a dream and then just stumbled on it. Like it was providence. You lied to me, Catherine.” His eyes roved to the Persian rug in front of the hearth and he winced. “You’ve been prowling around my house. What else did you see?”

  “Jack. Look at me. You want to know what I dreamed? Ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed of finding a true magician. In a castle by the sea. I’d go looking for that no matter who sent me to find it. My whole life, I’ve suspected there was more to the world than what you could see on the surface. My only loyalty is to my search for the truth.”

  Abdelmalek had crept close to her. He smelled of stale sweat and the metallic tang of spent adrenaline. The flat of the blade brushed against her leg. “You can’t trust her, Jack. There’s too much at stake. We’re so close now.” His voice was husky—the voice of man who has screamed too loud and too long—but the warning in it spoke loudly of secrets she had yet to uncover.

  “Jack…” Catherine began. But he wasn’t listening to her. His eyes narrowed and she heard the low rasp of a car prowling past the house.

  His eyes flicked to the blade. “Get out,” he said. “Don’t come back.”

  “Jack…”

  “Get out!”

  12

  Back at the beach cottage, Catherine sat on the bed in a white t-shirt with a to
wel wrapped around her hips, her hair still wet from the shower, contemplating the phone. She should have called Hildebrand as soon as she reached the cottage, but her emotions were running too high at the time. The long walk across the beach had burned some of the edge off her nerves, but as much as she knew she needed to warn him that the Starry Wisdom was onto them, she also wasn’t ready to explain how badly she’d cocked the whole thing up. She’d needed to wash the acrid smell of incense out of her hair first and collect her thoughts: How to frame the situation, what move she might suggest next, and how to convince her mentor that she could still accomplish what she’d come here for.

  At least Jack and Abdelmalek were too angry to take a methodical approach to her expulsion from the castle. They hadn’t searched her, hadn’t found her camera or the spiral note pad that now lay on the bedside table next to the phone. She glanced at the clock and did the math. It would be 4:30 PM in New York. If she didn’t call the museum soon, she was liable to miss him. She flipped the pad open to the back cover where she’d inscribed the direct line to his office, then dialed the operator to connect her. After a brief exchange with the receptionist in the museum’s administrative offices, Hildebrand came on the line and accepted the charges.

  “Catherine. Are you safe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been able to ingratiate yourself to our friend?”

  “Yes. Things have happened quickly. I’ve learned a lot in a short time, but I’m afraid my cover is blown.”

  “They know I sent you?”

  “Not you, specifically. The order. You’re being watched. There’s some kind of government agency spying on both the Starry Wisdom and the Golden Bough… probably the OTO as well.”

  “We are aware of that.”

  Catherine scoffed. “You could have mentioned that. Did you consider that I might not want to get blacklisted before I even graduate?”

  “Please accept my apologies for not making the risk explicit, but if one is going to meddle in the affairs of secret societies, my dear…well, one must accept the likelihood that one is being watched. How did Parsons learn you’re one of us?”

  “Abdelmalek, the mathematician he’s working with was interrogated by these government goons. They told him.”

  “Why would they do that?” The question sounded rhetorical, as if he were musing aloud.

  “To isolate Jack and the threat his work poses, I imagine. To make sure the Golden Bough can’t pick up where the Starry Wisdom left off if they shut Jack down before he succeeds in opening a portal.”

  “That may be. And in your estimation, is he close?”

  “I’ve seen things I didn’t believe possible. He’s making powders that enable partial manifestation of dark gods. But it depends on certain vocal overtones to work. Chants. I don’t understand it.” She told Hildebrand about the obsidian mirror and the photos she’d taken of the scarab pages from Abdelmalek’s cache of Starry Wisdom documents. “I think the pages are from a copy of the Mortiferum Indicium, but if they have a bound copy of the whole book at the castle, they’re keeping it hidden.”

  “You’ve done well, Catherine. Do you think you can do more?”

  She looked out the window at the beach where children and a black dog splashed in the surf. “I don’t know. This is a lot weirder than I expected. I thought I’d just be flirting with a mad scientist and trying to get a look at his library, but…what do I do if these agents pick me up?”

  “Tell them the truth, that you’re trying to stop the Starry Wisdom from unleashing an apocalypse, just the same as they are. If they’ve had any success in surveilling us, they should know that’s true.”

  Catherine considered this. “There’s more,” she said. “There’s a woman who might be important. Has your mole in LA mentioned someone named Salome?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “I’m not surprised. She’s from a different branch of the Starry Wisdom church. Long Beach. The chanting I mentioned, that activates the smoke. She’s the key to that. Her voice is unique. I’ve never heard anything like it. Also, I think she might be pregnant, if that matters.”

  Was that an intake of breath on the line, or just the sound of the phone handset scuffing against Hildebrand’s beard? A few seconds of silence unspooled. At last he spoke. “Can you learn more? Are you willing to try?”

  A strong part of her wanted to tell him no, that she was packing for the next flight back to New York, that all of this spy craft was more than what she’d signed up for. But another part of her, the part that had felt not only fear, but a rush of adrenaline and metaphysical awe sitting in Jack’s kitchen mere inches away from a window to another world, held that voice down. “I may be able to patch things up, convince Jack my loyalties have shifted.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it. Don’t endanger yourself…”

  “Too late.”

  “But if you can obtain the mirror, do so. Failing that, it would be best to destroy it.”

  “I think Jack’s chemistry set is more dangerous than the mirror. In the glass, they can only appear. They can’t pass through.”

  “Yes, but they can instruct him, and that is the source of his progress.”

  “Okay. I’ll see what—”

  Knuckles rapped on the weathered cottage door, not loud, but firm and clear. “I have to go. Someone’s here.”

  “Good luck, Catherine. May Kephri light your way.”

  Catherine stared at the door, reluctant to move as the line went dead in her hand. When the knock came again, she placed the handset in the cradle, stashed her notepad under the pillow and traded the damp towel for a long skirt.

  * * *

  The man standing on the threshold wasn’t what she expected. He was one of the agents—had to be in a suit like that—but his frame was thin, his empty hands delicate, and his features too soft and intelligent for someone who tortured people for information. She opened the door wider and looked beyond. He appeared to be alone, which made her doubt her first impression. Could this be someone Jack had sent? Then again, in California, she couldn’t even rule out an evangelist for yet another fringe cult canvassing door to door.

  “Ms. Littlefield.” It wasn’t a question. This man had seen a photo in a dossier, or had perhaps watched her through binoculars. “I’m agent Jeremy LeBlanc. May I come in?”

  “Agent? What agency do you work for? Do you have a badge?”

  For the space of a breath, she could tell he was calculating the possible trajectories of the conversation. She tried to convey with her eyes that if he told the truth she might respond in kind. “You haven’t heard of it,” he said.

  “Why don’t you rectify that then?”

  “SPEAR. It’s an acronym.”

  “What does it stand for?”

  “Depends on who you ask.”

  “And I’m asking you.”

  “Special Physics Exploration And Research. It was formed during the war to investigate new technological threats. You spent last night at the residence of John Whiteside Parsons. We are interested in Mr. Parsons and his houseguest, the Iraqi mathematician Kamenwati Abdelmalek. I understand that your relationship with these men ended as abruptly as it began. Maybe you’d like to know something about the kind of people you’ve recently become involved with.” She wondered if this statement was meant to apply to her associations on both coasts. He looked around at the beach. “May I come in?”

  She thought it might be prudent to insist that they talk outside, but then, nothing she had done since meeting Hildebrand in December had been prudent. She knew he was scanning the beach out of a justified concern that someone connected to Jack and Abdelmalek might see them talking. She stepped aside and let him pass. He removed his hat and stood in the area that served as a kitchen, dining room, and den, looking awkward. She felt a reflexive impulse to offer him something to drink, but decided that if he wanted refreshment he could ask for it. She settled on a kitchen chair and gestured at another. “Please.” He sat
and rubbed his thumb around the brim of the fedora lap. It was too hot outside for a suit. She supposed the shade thrown by the brim of his hat was the only relief he’d had from it while trekking across the beach from wherever his unmarked car was parked.

  “Let’s not beat around the bush, Mr. LeBlanc. Jack kicked me out because you thugs told him I was a member of a rival religious order when you tortured Abdelmalek. How long have you been following me?”

  “Since your first contact with the Golden Bough. December. Letting your affiliation slip in Abdelmalek’s presence was regrettable. I would have liked to keep that under wraps.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought we should approach you before making a decision about it. My partner jumped the gun.”

  “Where is he, anyway?”

  “He had another engagement.”

  “Does he know you’re speaking with me?”

  LeBlanc laughed. “You know, this is not how it usually goes.”

  “How does it go?”

  “Usually I’m the one asking all the questions when I’m talking to someone whose loyalty to their country is in question.”

  “My interest in the occult is academic, not political.”

  “Is that right? Was your participation in last night’s ritual orgy academic?”

  Catherine’s face flushed with heat and she knew her pale skin was competing with her red hair for a moment. “I didn’t participate.”

  “But you watched? In your role as an anthropologist?”

  “I think you should leave.”

  He swatted his hat against his hand and sighed. “Sorry. I’m taking the wrong tack here. My partner, he’s a religious man. A Christian. For him, everything is black and white, good or evil. He sees people communing with anything that isn’t God and his angels and, to him, that has to be devils and demons.”

  “And you? You’re not religious?”

  “No, Ma’am.”

  “So…you don’t believe in any of this? You only care if people are communing with communists?”