by Paula Guran
She nodded, then followed him into the withdrawing room. It had been cleared of furniture, and there, by the light of three candles, he showed her what she would do. “Do not let the darkness or the incense frighten you. It will be no different than the way we have done it now. I will always stand just here, and you will know by the candles by the door and by the mantel when you are in the right position. I will not fail you, Countess.”
“Nor I you,” she promised him, her long hands clenched . . .
DeVre did not like the fit of his robe, and complained bitterly that it was not seemly for him to be wearing such outlandish things.
“That is up to you,” Giuseppe said coldly. “But if you are not protected, I cannot save you from the demon.”
Martillion chuckled unpleasantly and looked toward his older brother, the Count du Lac Saint Denis. “It’s a masquerade,” he said lazily.
This was much too close to the truth, and Giuseppe did what he could to turn their minds from the idea. “Of course it is a masquerade, gentlemen. Hell is clothing its own in flesh.” He gave Gries a robe and warned him not to drink any more.
Henri Valdonne studied the others, thinking himself above all this. His position as the aristocratic head of shippers who traded in China gave him a certain world-wise reputation. He did not comply with Cagliostro’s orders immediately, but made a show of inspecting the garment. “I have heard that such garments must be without seam,” he challenged as he pulled off his brocaded waistcoat.
“In some rites this is so. But we are not concerned with virgins tonight, Chevalier. Only when a virgin is sacrificed must the robes be of seamless cloth.” And seeing the faces of the nine men and four women around him, Giuseppe was deeply grateful that he was not subjecting a virgin to any such as these.
When all were dressed in their robes, Giuseppe led the way to the rear withdrawing room. None of the halls were lit and there were no servants in the house. Giuseppe moved quickly and was pleased that the others went clumsily in their unfamiliar robes and unlighted passages.
The pentagram and circle were already on the floor. The sword, chalice, wand, wafers and salt stood at each point of the pentagram outside the circle. Giuseppe went quickly to the bay of heavily curtained windows and made a show as if to adjust the curtains against prying eyes. He saw that the concealed levers were set and ready. He turned back to the others who stood, uncertainly glancing about them in the dim light. He put his foot over a spring that worked the concealed bellows.
“Kneel!” he told them, and his generally pleasant voice was stern as a field commander. “Go to the pentagram and kneel.”
He watched while the white-robed figures sorted themselves out. In a moment they were ready, and had begun to whisper among themselves.
“You must be silent!” Giuseppe pulled a diamond medallion from around his neck and hung it in front of the nearest branch of candles. A flick of his finger set it to swinging. “We call on the Forces of Darkness,” he intoned, garbling the invocation so that he would not inadvertently summon an unexpected Power. “We suppliants call the Forces of Darkness on this, Lammas Night, when they have sway in the darkness.”
Martillion tittered and his hands strayed toward the chalk marks.
“Do not touch that!” Giuseppe’s voice cut like a knife. “That is all that will protect you from the fires of hell. If any one of you break it, none are safe.”
There was a pause and Martillion drew back. The others moved back, too.
“We summon you,” Giuseppe went on, “in the Glory of your Power.” He moved toward the circle and reached first for the chalice. “Here we call you with the call of blood.” He elevated the chalice. Then, like a priest, he went from one kneeling figure to another, tilting the red-colored liquid into their waiting mouths. He did not tell them that what they drank was salted mead in which he had steeped Persian hashish. The color was nothing more than dye, but Giuseppe could see the concealed revulsion on the faces of his ill lot of initiates. Good. If they were revolted, they would not be too critical of the taste of what they drank, and the salt was enough to make most of them believe.
Returning to the window bay, he said, “I summon you, demons of the pit, I call on one of your number. I tell you that there is work for you here, that the souls wait for you. I, Alessandro Cagliostro, call you. I call you.”
The figures waited, but nothing happened. Giuseppe came forward again, and picked up the wand. With this he tapped all the others on the forehead, and when that was done, he drew blood from their fingertips with his sword. When that was over, he took the wafers, and marking each with the print of a cloven hoof, he passed these to each of his celebrants. They were a paste made with poppy syrup, and they took strong effect.
Sure now that the thirteen before him were muzzy in thought, he began the call again. He touched a loose board with his foot and hidden bells rang. A wind from nowhere chilled the room as the concealed bellows began to work, and extinguished one branch of candles. Then Giuseppe pulled one of the hidden levers and the room was plunged into darkness.
A moan came from the group, and in the next instant the niches with their candles had revolved back as the false hearthstone returned to its proper place, and in the circle stood a blazing female demon, alive with fire and with smoke in her hair.
Giuseppe almost smiled as he saw his acolytes draw back from this apparition. He waited until the whole effect had sunk in, and then he cried out: “Demon! I, Alessandro Cagliostro, charge you. Identify these who kneel before you. Tell us the names of those who kneel. Tell us the secrets of their souls. What are the abominations that will condemn them to perdition on the Day of Wrath?”
There was a pause, and then Beatrisse du Lac Saint Denis began to recite the vices and crimes of those gathered before her, calling up every lewd boast of her husband, every shoddy bit of gossip she had heard, every detail that had caused her shame and embarrassment. The list was a long one, and it frightened the thirteen kneeling around the pentagram.
Gradually the room grew darker as Giuseppe once more pulled the lever controlling the candle niches. One of the initiates was breathing hard and Giuseppe knew he would have to give the count a composing drug before he let him leave the house.
At last the long catalogue of debauchery was over. Again the bells rang and the room went dark. In the returning light the figure of the demon was seen shimmering before them. Giuseppe forced the bellows into greater breath.
Giuseppe clapped his hands three times. “Depart! Depart! Depart!” he commanded. Suddenly the air was very still.
And the demon shriveled, became a single flame, and then disappeared entirely in the center of the circle.
“Are they gone?” Beatrisse du Lac Saint Denis asked when Giuseppe came into his quarters a little more than an hour later.
“They are gone.” He held out his hand. In it lay a wired dress of red silk which trailed a long thin thread. “Perhaps you might want this, Countess.”
She touched it, a secret smile on her face. Then, with a decisive nod of her head, “No. There is always the slim chance that my husband might find it. That must not happen.” She paused. “I pulled the thread when the bellows stopped.”
“I think you will find that your husband is not well. When he left his pulse was very rapid and he had a look about his eyes that was not good.”
“Did he?” she asked, disinterested. “I left the bath water, as you said. It is quite red. The servants may see it.”
“The powder removed it all from your skin?” he asked. He knew his servants would never see the reddened water.
“Yes.” She pulled her maid’s dress about her more tightly. “Do you think he will ever suspect?”
Giuseppe laughed outright. “Madame, after they had drunk wine tainted with hashish and eaten wafers of poppy, you could have come in there in your most famous toilette, and if I had told them you were a demon, they would have believed it.”
She nodded. “A bellows and a wired dr
ess. How simple to make a demon.”
“You are troubled, Countess?” Giuseppe took her hand solicitously.
“It is just that I do not know when you will betray me,” she said after a moment.
“I might say the same of you,” he said easily. “Come, this is our secret. You know what I did to make the demon, and I know the demon is you. If you cannot trust me out of faith, remember that we both have a hold on the other.”
The countess nodded once more. “I must return home,” she said.
Giuseppe stood aside. “I have ordered a hack for you, Madame. It will take you home, if not in fashion, at least in victory.”
At that she smiled. “I saw his face, you know, as I told him all the dreadful things he had done. His eyes were like an animal in a trap. He could not move.” She went to the door. “I will always remember his eyes, Cagliostro. It will give me strength.”
“You have the amulet as well, Countess. It is for your heart’s desire.”
“Surely you do not expect me to believe that?” she asked incredulously. “When you are nothing more than a charlatan?”
When the door closed behind the countess, Giuseppe Balsamo, known to the world as Count Alessandro Cagliostro, went into his withdrawing room to remove the chalk marks from the floor. And to remove the holy water and Host that had protected that venal gathering from the perils of Lammas Night.
Pinion
Stellan Thorne
The angel in Stellan Thorne’s story breaks human law, and a tough, if vulnerable, veteran cop arrests it. Angels do have a biblical connection with the law – angels played a part in giving Moses the Ten Commandments. In the Old Testament, (Deuteronomy 33.2, NIV) this is not clear. One assumes the “holy ones” are angels: “He said: ‘The Lord . . . came with myriads of holy ones from the south, from his mountain slopes.’” But in the New Testament, it is specifically angels who help deliver the laws of God: “you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it”. (Acts 7.38, NIV).
The witness was beautiful, in a way that was almost hard to look at. His face was abstract and fashionable, all eyes and angles, with a luminous innocence too perfect to be entirely sincere.
Detective Greyling wondered idly how that face would look with a fat lip. Like a magazine cover, probably, a model fresh off a photo shoot. Saturday night fight fashion. A little trickle of blood down one corner of his mouth, like smudged lipstick.
“Cigarette?” Greyling asked.
“Please.”
He leaned over the table to offer a light – sparks off a grinding wheel, cheap plastic sticky in his hands.
“I don’t usually smoke.”
Not cigarettes, at least, Greyling thought. He lit up his own; the two cherries pointed away from each other like strabismic eyes, glowing in the gloom.
“I guess I’m a still a bit shaky.” The witness smiled, quick and charming, the kind of smile that knows it is currency. The exchange rate was low here, in Greyling’s territory – he hated charm, hated its tawdry uses – but he nodded.
“We just need your statement,” he said. The tape recorder was spinning slowly.
“I’ve told the officer at the front desk everything already.” Just a little schoolboy wheedling in his tone, a little note of oh-do-I-have-to?
Greyling smiled. It was not charming. “This is for the official record. Please.” He gestured at the tape recorder.
The witness cleared his throat, with an actor’s skill, and began. “I was robbed by an angel last night.”
Nobody had wanted the case. “He’s high or he’s a liar,” the desk sergeant had said. “Angels don’t rob people.” On the first two points Greyling agreed; he wasn’t sure on the last. In the end, he’d ended up with the case. Better that than hear some rookie piss and moan when it landed in their lap.
He went around the neighborhood with a rough sketch, and saw faces shutter with suspicion. They had seen the suspect, he was sure of that, but they kept their silence.
He thought of returning later, when he was off duty. Sidle up sideways to his questions, in dive bars and on street corners. He thought better of it almost instantly. He’d never been good even at that half-undercover kind of work – that had been Mayer’s thing, Mayer with his blankly handsome looks. Greyling’s face, once seen, was hard to forget. In any case, he seemed to always wear an invisible uniform; he spoke and smelled like a cop.
He ducked into a corner store. The pack of cigarettes tucked in his inside pocket was empty already; this was looking like a two-pack day. He laid his money down on the counter; the clerk held it up to the light before giving him his smokes.
He took out the sketch and brandished it at the clerk. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen—”
“No habla ing-less,” he said, in a flat Midwestern accent, and grinned.
With slow clarity, Greyling saw himself grabbing the clerk by his collar, dragging him across the counter, breaking his nose. There was no joy in the fantasy; it was like a worn film reel, looping methodically inside his head. He turned away, crumpling the sketch in his hand.
Then he saw it through the window: a flash of nacreous white. A winged figure. It was standing not fifteen yards away, on the other side of the street. Watching him.
He was out the door in a moment. “Hey!” He started towards it, taking swift strides. “Hey, stop right there!”
It froze for a moment, wings outstretched. They looked terribly fragile, a delicate latticework of feathers. Then it ran, and Greyling took off after. It ducked under a fire escape, tucking its wings in close. A few steps away, beyond the building, Greyling could see the blue of empty sky.
With lungs like bellows, the great engine of his heart clanking, Greyling ran. A few more feet and they’d be out from under the fire escape – those wings would pump once, twice, and his suspect would be gone. He lunged, all the world contracting. He hadn’t moved this fast in years.
He landed hard but upright, and the angel was beneath him. He kneeled down on the curving joint of a wing. Great muscles strained up underneath him. That fine fragility was a con. One hand came down on the angel’s head – its hair was duckling-soft – and tangled hard, jerking upward. “You’re not going anywhere.” His breathing was labored, paunch and nicotine conspiring. “You have the right—”
A massive wing-heave nearly lifted him – nearly sent him sprawling. For a moment he rode the angel like a broncobuster. His heart was wild with pain, chest burning. Then, victory: it sagged beneath him, breathing slowly.
He cuffed together long lovely wrists, then bent back one wing at a painful angle. The angel cried out with a voice like a tuning fork. “Try to use these,” Greyling said, “and you’ll get a bullet through them; that’s a promise. You’re under arrest.”
The angel was locked in the back of Greyling’s car, and he had just got off the radio – he wished, for the first time in months, for a partner, any partner, even a whining rookie. Just someone else to make the calls while he was trying to catch his breath.
He looked in the rear-view mirror at the suspect. The angel was gray and white; a layer of city grime had settled lightly on its essential cleanness. The wings, massive in the back seat, quivered like wind-caught sheets.
“I am a messenger of the most holy,” the angel said. There was no arrogance in its voice, just a calm surety.
Greyling lit a cigarette. He couldn’t think of driving just yet. “You’re a thief.”
Wings shrugged, like a cat raising its hackles. The angel’s eyes were colorless in the mirror, like water or wind. “I don’t understand.”
“The man you robbed – you don’t remember that?”
“Robbed?”
They looked alike, a little, Greyling thought, the angel and the victim. That same invincible prettiness, so hard to sully. “You threatened him, took his guitar and his wallet.”
“Yes. I was protecting him.”
Greyling snorted. “Oh yeah? From what, playing bad music?”
>
The angel was silent.
“So, what, are you his guardian angel or something?”
“Yes.”
A low anger rose, like an ulcer. It figures; the charming boy got an angel all his own. To protect him. His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Well, he turned you in. So I’m taking you in.”
He started the car. It took several tries, fingers fumbling with the key. Wings blocked the window and the mirror; he stuck his head out the window and carefully maneuvered onto the streets.
“Jason Greyling,” the angel said, “will you not let me go?”
He grimaced. “That’s ‘Detective Greyling’ to you. And I strongly advise you use your right to remain silent.”
“I have done what is right.”
Again that calm surety – the tone of the innocent or the insane. Greyling supposed the angel fell somewhere in between.
“Will you not let me go?”
“Shut up,” he said.
He was still shaking, he noticed. His heart would not calm. He sucked at the cigarette dangling hands-free between his lips; the ash fell in his lap.
He missed Mayer with sudden fierceness. He would have handled this better, his old partner. Mayer was never shaken, not by anything – Greyling only had the armor of his cynicism, imperfect protection against miraculous things.
A feather brushed his neck, so lightly. The tip of a wing slid in between the cross-hatched metal partitioning back seat from front. He flinched away, at first, then pounded the cage – it left diamond-shaped imprints on his hand.
“Your heart is known in Heaven,” the angel said. “And all that you are.”
Blackmail, Greyling thought vaguely. His hand ached; his lungs ached. Maybe he should consider retiring.
The traffic was impenetrable before them, loud with horns and smoke. Again there came the soft brush of a feather, against his cheek this time. He swallowed, Adam’s apple shifting painfully in his throat. Charm. “You’ll want to stop that,” he said, voice level, “or you’ll end up stuffing a pillow.”
