The scroll they had found was written in Avestan and contained an actual ritual designed to call upon Ahriman. They compared it to demon summoning rituals from various sources, and once satisfied of its authenticity, they spent weeks in preparation, gathering the required ingredients, memorizing the Avestan inscriptions, researching the protection spells, preparing themselves mentally. Viktor may not have been a believer, but he respected the potential of the unknown enough to proceed with caution.
Incense poured forth from charcoal braziers, rolling through the forgotten basement they had discovered beneath the college of religion. Light the candles, Darius said to Viktor, scroll in hand. Eve, start the invocation.
A cold breeze passed across Viktor’s face, and he started. It was May in England, and the weather was still quite cool—but not that cool. Moreover, he knew he had shut the cellar door. Had he read one too many novels by Dennis Wheatley, imagined the breeze?
As practiced, they began to chant in unison, each of them reading from an exact copy of the scroll to ensure no missteps. Vials of mercury in hand, they stood on previously drawn extensions of the three greater points of the pentagram, forming a triangle just outside the protection spells, each extension inscribed with one of the three words of power—Primeumatun, Anexhexeton, Tetragrammaton. Resting on the two lesser extension points were human skulls they had stolen from the med school, each of the skulls bearing, like the three living souls in attendance, different markings symbolizing one of the five elements.
Darius took out the ritual knife he had prepared with the proper runes, actually using a soldering iron to carve the characters into the blade. Continuing to chant, Darius walked around the circle and made a shallow cut on each of their arms. They held their arms over the chalked pentagram for a count of three, infusing the circle with life. The pentagram was not to be crossed again, lest the summoned entity escape.
Viktor felt a mixture of annoyance and nostalgia. This was to be his last foray into black magic: He was graduating in three weeks, and for some time had been ready to move on from the practice of magic to the pursuit of greater truths, the search for other hidden doorways. Darius, he knew, was far from finished, still convinced that real power simmered in that mysterious nexus of magic and faith.
And Eve, his eccentric and beautiful Eve: For the first time, Viktor had moved away from the shallows of youthful romance and stepped into the deep and turbulent waters of love. Whenever he thought about leaving Eve for graduate school in Paris he felt as if one of those American mechanical bulls had been loosed in his stomach, twisting and kicking his insides. He had decided to ask for her hand after graduation, and he relished her surprise.
Did anyone feel that breeze? Eve asked.
I did, Viktor said. There must be a crack somewhere.
Silence, Darius hissed. The forces are stirring. From this point forward there can be no more chatter, or we risk breaking concentration. And I needn’t repeat that under no circumstance can anyone enter the circle. Eve, do you understand? I’m quite serious about this. No matter what you hear or see, or how he tempts you, you must not break the circle.
And just exactly what will happen, she asked with her usual world-weary sarcasm, though the quiver in her voice belied her cool tone. Viktor knew Eve harbored religious beliefs ingrained in her from childhood, and that a sense of spiritual trespass into the realm of evil, more than any belief in ancient sorcery, was the source of her anxiety.
You don’t want to know, Darius said, though without his typical smugness. The statement had been uttered with respect but also with a trace of fear, which surprised Viktor. He had never seen Darius afraid of magic.
The ritual began in earnest. As set forth in the scroll, the middle of the pentagram was stuffed with Persian inscriptions and numerology that comprised the bulk of the spell. Darius and Viktor had worked hard to translate the Avestan, even consulting experts at the college. They knew it was designed to call to Ahriman, but still did not understand the full meaning of the scroll. The symbology reminded Viktor of something out of the kabbalah, especially the use of the pentagram.
They had filled the other portions of the pentagram, the triangular tops of the five points, with the required ingredients, such as the clay golem and pillar of salt at Viktor’s feet, representative of the element of earth. Darius stood on fire, Eve on spirit, and the two skulls guarded air and water.
All that remained was to chant and stay the course. They had no idea how long it would take, though Darius had suggested hours, perhaps the entire night. Nor did they know what to expect. Would Ahriman appear as a disembodied voice, a burning bush, a whirling djinn ready to grant their every desire?
Viktor, of course, expected nothing. If there were truth to magic, Viktor thought, then it did not involve three college kids summoning an antediluvian Persian god from a cellar.
As time dragged on and the minutes became hours, something happened they hadn’t planned on: The incense smoke from the five braziers clouded the air, creating a dense and aromatic fog that made Viktor light-headed. He hadn’t thought it possible for the braziers to put out that much smoke, but the lack of ventilation added to the effect.
After another hour Viktor could see Eve shifting back and forth, and he knew she was weakening. How long would this nonsense go on before they put a stop to it? He knew Darius would continue until he dropped, but Eve was nearing her limit.
I feel something.
Eve’s words so startled Viktor that he took a step backwards. He saw her slap at her arm, and then her leg. Something’s pricking me. There must be an insect in here.
There’s no insect, Darius said evenly. Ahriman is coming forth, and he will test us to see if we’re worthy. He’ll concentrate on the weakest link.
Thanks for telling me that beforehand.
There’s no cause for alarm. You’re strong.
I’m tired.
Eve! Continue chanting, or we risk disruption of the ritual. Remember, under no circumstances do you break the circle. Quit or leave if you must, but don’t cross the barrier.
Eve resumed chanting. The cadence of their combined voices returned, a steady current of words in a forgotten language. In rituals such as these, Viktor knew the alleged power of magical incantation lay not just in the content of the words but with the repetition, the continuous beseeching to the astral plane that was supposed to unlock or awaken certain forces. He would later learn, from studying various religions around the world, that the effect of such a ritual was to induce the participants into a somnolent state, thus producing the reputedly magical effects or visions. But standing in that smoke-occluded room without the benefit of years of phenomenological study, feet standing at the point of a pentagram filled with occult symbology from an Avestan scroll, mind numbed by the unceasing chanting, Viktor found himself fully in the moment. With a sense of increasing dread, he had to keep reminding himself his fear was a product of his imagination.
Viktor had been staring off to the side, and his head jerked up when Eve screamed. His eyes focused on her across the obscured pentagram. She was hugging herself with her arms, eyes locked in the center of the circle as if she could see something inside the chalked barrier.
She screamed again, and Darius’s voice rose in volume, his chanting cutting through her scream.
Eve, Viktor said. What’s wrong?
She started rubbing her arms, and her voice cracked when she spoke. Make it stop, Viktor. I can’t bear it.
Viktor could feel Darius seething at the interruption. What is it?
The things in the circle, they’re terrible.
I don’t see a thing, he said. When she screamed again he said, Just step back. Shut it off.
I can’t.
Eve! Darius’s voice rang loud and clear. No one was chanting now, and Viktor was surprised Darius would risk disrupting the ritual, knowing he would have done so only for Eve.
You must be strong, Darius said. We’re at the endgame. We have Him.
Darius was no longer looking at Eve, his fierce gaze trained on the circle, his frail body somehow commanding as he stood with raised arms, now shouting the words of the ritual.
The incense obscured the air, Eve’s svelte frame barely visible in the gloom. Her screams turned to whimpers, and she put a hand towards the circle, as if reaching in supplication.
Darius’s voice grew louder still, ringing off the walls, enunciating each syllable with his powerful will. Viktor saw Eve wobbling as if she were going to faint, and both outstretched arms reached towards the circle.
Enough! Viktor roared, and started towards Eve. She wobbled and started to tumble forward into the circle. He lunged for her.
His hands just missed her as she fell, her feet scuffing the chalk. She landed in a crumpled heap in the middle of the pentagram. Viktor scooped her in his arms, holding her and stroking her hair.
It’s over, he said. It’s over for good, my love. No more rituals, no more magic. Just you and me.
Darius approached through the fog of incense, staring in shock at the broken circle. He looked to Viktor and then to Eve, then slowly backed away from the circle, eyes wide.
Viktor carried Eve out of the basement in his arms, and she peered up at him with a tired smile. It was then when he noticed that her irises, once as blue as the glacial lake beside his parents’ house in the Alps, had turned black as oil.
A voice whispered his name. “Viktor.”
At first he thought he was still in the past, but then he realized he was on the couch in his suite in San Francisco, the lights from the city a neon glare outside the window. The voice came to him again, two mocking, drawn out syllables that cut through the fog in his brain. “Vik-tor.”
He knew he was very drunk, and of course he knew about the hallucinogenic effects of drinking too much absinthe. He did not feel like he was hallucinating, but then again, one never did.
“Viktor… Viktor… Viktor….”
Darius’s voice.
Viktor lowered his head in his hands, uncaring if Darius was somehow whispering his name or if he was imagining it, because in his mind, after what had happened next, the terrible thing, he deserved the torture.
He deserved it all.
He reached for the bottle. “Come, then,” he bellowed, shaking the bottle at the air. “Convince me, spirits. Convince me you exist, reveal yourselves, torture me if you can.”
He sank to his knees, swigging the rest of the bottle and letting it clang to the floor. “Come if you will, but leave my memories be.”
Viktor woke the next morning on the floor, slumped in a sticky mess of spilled absinthe and drool, the dawn light bruising his temples. He pushed to his knees, feeling sick from drink for the first time in twenty years.
He stumbled to the same coffee shop and had a double espresso before his customary cappuccino. With sobriety came shame. Viktor could barely remember the end of the evening, except for the whispers lingering in his mind. He blamed it on the wormwood.
He thought again of the events of the day before, trying to see an angle with the Crowley information. Drumming his thumbs on his cup, he forced his thoughts into focus.
During the First World War, after living in New York for a time, Crowley had also made trips to New Orleans and San Francisco. The three best places in America to search for an ancient occult text. But according to Zador, Crowley already had the rare treatise when he had arrived in San Francisco.
Perhaps Viktor was taking the wrong approach. He checked his watch: He had about an hour to spare before heading to the airport. As he pushed away from the table, he noticed, in the corner of the coffee shop, the same dark-haired man he had seen in Zador’s bookstore the other day, the last customer to leave before Zador had locked the door. The man was absorbed in a magazine, but when Viktor stood he had glanced his way. Or at least Viktor thought he had.
Viktor feigned a trip to the restroom and concealed his cell phone with his suit jacket, managing to take a photo of the side of the man’s face. He texted the photo to Grey and Jacques.
After walking a few streets over to ensure the man wasn’t following him, which he didn’t appear to be, Viktor hailed a taxi and strode into Zador’s shop. Viktor rang the bell, and Zador emerged from the stacks.
“We’re back, I see,” Zador said.
“You said there were only six copies of The Ahriman Heresy in existence,” Viktor said. “Do you know where Crowley obtained his copy?”
“Ah, a clever question at last.”
“Do you?” Viktor said.
“No.”
Viktor clenched his hands. “Do you know where it is now?”
“I thought you might never ask.”
Viktor took a step forward, eyes sparking with an intense light. “And?”
“The York Circle of Magicians is known to possess select rare items from Crowley’s estate.”
Viktor dashed to the airport, on his way to the walled city of York to investigate both the delivery of the newest letter, as well as Crowley’s copy of The Ahriman Heresy. As he pondered these developments, just after seeing the same man twice in twenty-four hours in a city of a million souls, he thought of Grey and his scorn for coincidence.
Viktor felt the same.
LONDON
Grey spent the flight to London staring out the window, struggling to force away the image of the girl in the cavern, feeling the greasy residue of the violence. It didn’t matter how necessary or right his actions had been. The violence still affected him, chipped away a little more of his soul. That was the price.
After landing he took the Tube to Notting Hill. Viktor had given him the address for Alec Lister, one of the Clerics of Whitehall as well as a barrister with an office on High Street Kensington. Grey had no idea how Viktor had gotten the name.
Grey had lived in London when he was twenty after drifting out of Southeast Asia, a coiled spring of restless energy. He worked the odd nightclub security gig, fought when he had to, and spent his days taking the Tube to random parts of the city or walking the city’s parks, pondering life amid the throng of foreign faces.
London had been everything Grey thought it would be: immense, chaotic, sodden, diverse, a city bolstered by the grandeur of its past and pulsating with the swagger of its present. A megalopolis could be the loneliest of places, but Grey was used to being alone, and at least in London he felt alive.
Notting Hill looked the same to Grey as it had a decade ago, vibrant sidewalk cafés sandwiched between antiques and vintage shops, pubs so quaint they seemed fake, the pastel facades of the townhomes on Portobello. He found an Internet café, caffeinated, and did some quick research.
He didn’t find a word on the Clerics of Whitehall. What he found on the Monks of Medmenham, however, affirmed the sordid story Viktor had hinted at: gentlemen with too much money and time on their hands whose idea of a good time was orgiastic rituals and debasing religious icons.
Lovely men, these pillars of society.
Realizing how hungry he was, he stopped for lunch at a sushi bar in Notting Hill lined with black wood and neon-blue lighting. After lunch he walked a few streets over to a more commercial area, entering a four-story office building and taking the lift to the barrister’s address. The secretary, an East Indian woman with her hair in a bun, sniffed as Grey approached.
“I’m here to see Alec Lister,” Grey said.
“And you are…?”
Grey took out his Interpol badge. “Dominic Grey. I have a few questions for Alec about Ian Stoke.”
The secretary’s eyes registered nothing. She rose, opened a solid oak door, and disappeared inside, emerging seconds later. “I’m
afraid Mr. Lister is engaged with conference calls the rest of the morning, and then he’s due in court. He wants to know if you could call back later in the week?”
“I’m afraid not.” He thought for a moment, then said, “Tell him Sir David Naughton sends his regards from Harare.”
Grey had neither the time nor the inclination to go through local law enforcement to get Lister’s attention, so he took a gamble. Sir David Naughton was a British diplomat Grey had met during the Juju investigation in Harare, and he had a proclivity for poking his nose into dark and secret places. Grey thought him an exceptional candidate for membership in the Clerics of Whitehall.
The secretary disappeared, then reappeared and flicked her wrist. “He’ll see you now.”
She closed the door behind Grey. A plush office sprawled before him, with a window overlooking the bustle of Kensington. A lean older man with wispy gray hair, large ears, and tufted silver eyebrows sat behind a desk, an arrogant lilt to his mouth.
“I’m afraid I’ve no idea who you are,” Alec said. “You say Naughton sent you?”
“I knew Naughton in Zimbabwe, when I was looking into the disappearance of an American diplomat at a Juju ceremony. I thought you might know the name.”
The silver eyebrows angled upward.
“Right now I’m investigating the death of Ian Stoke,” Grey said.
“Who?”
“Don’t.”
“I’m afraid I’ve no idea—”
Grey slammed his hands down on the desk, and Alec jumped. “You’re a member of the Clerics of Whitehall, as was Stoke.”
Alec said nothing. Grey let him stew. The best interrogation technique, especially when Grey had as little actual information as he did, was to let Alec’s mind run wild with possibilities. Was Grey here to bust him? Did the authorities know about the secret ceremonies and the underage attendees? Grey was sure Alec Lister had plenty to think about.
When he started fidgeting Grey doled out a little more information. “Ian got a letter a week ago, didn’t he? A letter giving him six days to step aside as leader of the Clerics.”
The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) Page 14
