by Jenn Bennett
“Hold on. So you’re telling me that this Frater Karras person was a skilled magician, and they hired him like a plumber?”
“Yep.”
“His brother, too?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But was Frater Karras employed by the Hellfire Club in the early eighties when the Snatcher was active? If Bishop wanted to undergo the transmutation spell so badly, what was to stop him from hiring Frater Karras on the side?”
“Good question.”
“Is Frater Karras still alive?”
“Even better question. I don’t know. He disappeared. Not all that uncommon for rogue magicians. They change names, move around. . . .”
“Like me.”
“Like you. But you know how Cindy said the original Snatcher was a short man with mismatched eyes?”
I stared at him. “No way.”
“Yes way. I nearly had a stroke when she said that. Fucking Frater Karras had one blue eye, one brown.”
“Crap! If he was the person who tried to take Cindy, then—”
“Maybe he’s the person taking the kids now.”
The waitress returned briefly to leave our check. Lon always insisted on paying for dinner, so we had a standing agreement that I’d take care of the tip. I glanced at the check and counted out cash, lost in thought. We knew the original Snatcher’s true identity. How were we going to find out if he was still alive? As I unwrinkled dollar bills and shuffled them into a neat stack, another nagging detail almost slid into place inside my head.
“Frater Karras,” I said. “That name . . .”
Lon gave me a strange look. “Yeah?”
“Karras, Karras . . .”
Lon shook his head, not following my line of thought as Jupe bounded up to the table.
“I need dough, yo. Small bills or quarters. They’ve got all kinds of awesome stuff in there. Double Dragon, Altered Beast, Ghosts and Goblins—it’s a freakin’ gold mine!”
“I’m not a piggy bank,” Lon complained. “Forget it.”
“What do you want me to do? I’m too young to get a job working fast food after school. I can’t just make money materialize.” He lowered his head near mine and added in a hushed voice, “Or can I? There’s not a spell for that, is there?”
“No, but I bet there’s one to seal your mouth shut,” Lon said grumpily. “Besides, I thought you were ‘independently wealthy.’ Use your fancy new savings account.”
“I said small bills, Dad. Those games are ancient. I can’t put an ATM card in them.”
“Life is tough.”
Jupe groaned then looked at me. “Why were you guys talking about The Exorcist?”
Lon’s nose wrinkled. “Huh?”
“You were talking about Father Karras. I heard you when I walked up.”
“That’s it! The Exorcist!” My knees banged on the underside of the table in my excitement. “Father Damien Karras from The Exorcist!”
Jupe squatted down in front of the table and rested his chin on top of his folded arms. “Played by Jason Miller,” he confirmed. “The younger Jesuit priest who threw himself down the steps at the end of the movie to get the demon out of his body.”
“So what?” Lon said tersely. “It’s just a name. Magicians don’t use their given names when practicing.” I knew he was referring to me, but as many promises as I’d made to him regarding Jupe, he’d made some to me too. Jupe would never know my real name. Never, never, never.
“That’s right,” I said, ignoring his accusing glare. “Magicians don’t use their real names when practicing. And there’s a crazy old magician who runs a Silent Temple somewhere in Morella. He goes by Frater Merrin.”
“Oh!” Jupe exclaimed, not having any idea what we were actually discussing. “Father Merrin, played by Max von Sydow. He’s the older priest in the movie who dies during the exorcism.”
Lon sat up in his seat. Now he was paying attention. I pressed my hand over his knee and bit my lip in euphoric glee. I could be wrong—had been before. But this was an awfully big coincidence to ignore.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. Don’t Silent Temples usually celebrate their Sabbath on Saturdays, not Sundays?” Lon asked in a low voice while Jupe continued to chatter with geektastic movie factoids about The Exorcist.
They did, and even if “Frater Merrin” wasn’t working there anymore, maybe someone in the temple could clue us in to his whereabouts.
“What’s a Silent Temple?” Jupe asked, suddenly interested in our discussion.
Mr. and Mrs. Holiday better be up for some Jupe-sitting, because I damn well wasn’t hauling the boy along to a Silent Temple. Magicians in esoteric orders might be loopy, but those people were insane.
I had to make a few calls next morning to find out where it was. Silent Temples don’t advertise, aren’t in the book, and there’s little talk of their locations online. Sure, you could find discussion boards populated with fringe people who post bizarre tales, told to them by a “friend.” Rumors about temples in certain cities, that kind of thing. After surfing for an hour, you were more likely to have picked up some filthy virus from one of the web sites than to have discovered an actual location, which notoriously changes every few months.
That’s when it pays to have friends like Bob. Though he hadn’t quite gotten over the cannery terror, as long as he didn’t have to follow me into dark abandoned buildings, he was willing to help—and did. It took him fifteen minutes to call me back with the current location of the temple in Morella: an old brick high school in the Eastern Foothills district.
The neighborhood was beyond sketchy. A shame, really. It had some killer views of the mountains in the distance. But no view was good enough to make up for the largest number of homicides in the city, or the fact that they made the national news last year because of an infestation of superlice that closed down every local school and motel in a five-mile radius.
The sprawling former high school that now harbored the Silent Temple had been split into thirty-plus separate apartments and dubbed the Mountain Lofts. Some people rented them for homes, others for businesses. And, from the looks of the boarded-up windows pasted with 4:20 stickers and psychedelically colored tribulation posters, I was guessing most of those businesses weren’t exactly legal. Maybe Hajo got his sømna here.
We drove around the block twice looking for the temple’s unit number, then decided to try on foot. After we weren’t able to find a vacant parking space around the building, we parked Lon’s SUV at a nearby gas station.
The rain didn’t help matters. We huddled under an umbrella and hiked around the building, splashing through puddles. Lots of interesting sights at the so-called Mountain Lofts, such as a courtyard filled with brightly painted sculptures made from welded scrap metal . . . an overflowing city Dumpster being rummaged by three homeless people . . . a woman in a red-and-white-striped tube-top holding a soggy piece of cardboard over her head to block the rain, asking passersby if they’d seen her cat—which might’ve been some sort of prostitution code word. The whole place was classy with a K.
A few gutter punks sat lined up against a brick wall under a dripping cement eave that extended from one side of the building. This is where we finally found the unit number, painted sloppily on the brick. No temple sign. No sign at all, other than a ripped piece of brown paper bag taped above the handle. Scribbled on it in black marker was the instruction, Door remains locked. Knock for service until 11 a.m. After that time, doors will not be opened. DO NOT KNOCK after 11! An inverted pentagram served as a signature.
Lon glanced at his watch. “Not eleven yet.”
I knocked three times in quick succession. A mini caduceus and a piece of red ochre chalk were both stashed in my jacket pocket. Inside Lon’s was his loaded short-barreled Lupara. I could see the outline bulging through the worn denim. So could everyone else if they took a second look—which was the point, Lon said.
After a few moments, a metal square opened in the center of the door, revealing a gri
my security window and a pasty face peering through slender iron bars.
“Yes?” A tinny voice floated through a small old speaker beneath the window.
“We’re here for the service,” Lon replied.
The face leaned closer to the window. Eyes roamed over Lon’s fuck-you countenance, then flicked to my skunk-striped hair and tight jeans. That must have been enough to persuade him that we weren’t officials from an esoteric organization coming to bust them, because we were let inside, no questions asked.
A small foyer was crowded with a motley assortment of templegoers. Goth kids mingled with old-money elderly Californians dressed in expensive cruise wear. All of them were speaking in hushed library voices, and most of them were Earthbound. Everyone looked up when we stepped inside. Cigarette smoke mingled with a cloying incense that was drifting in from the entrance to the main temple. The rain outside was churning it all into a foul-smelling stew.
We stood frozen in place for a moment, wondering what to do next. The man who’d let us inside tapped my shoulder, looking slightly oddball in a plaid dinner jacket and mismatched bow tie, with deep frown lines etched into his face and loose chicken-wattle skin drooping below his chin. He asked us if it was our first time attending. After we confirmed that it was, he instructed us to take seats inside.
We parted a beaded curtain and entered the main temple area. It was surprisingly spacious inside . . . wood floors, high walls lined with built-in bookshelves—the old school library, likely. The windows had been blacked out with thick coats of paint.
Mismatched furniture filled the center of the room. A collection of yard-sale loveseats, patio furniture, and armchairs that had seen better days were set in three rows facing the opposite wall. Lon and I claimed a stained love seat at the end of the back row.
Two sets of stairs hugged the front wall, both leading to separate loft areas. Between the stairs, a large marble sculpture stood—a winged, naked man with the head of a lion and a snake winding around the length of his body. Zodiac signs were carved into his skin. He held a set of keys in his hand.
“Leontocephalous?” Lon whispered, nodding toward the sculpture. I nodded in confirmation. An obscure Roman god associated with the Mithras mysteries. His keys were thought to open doors to other planes, Æthyric and otherwise. Two lighted metal torches were set into wall holders on either side of him.
The mood of the room was reverent and quiet, cut with a thin whisper of impending danger. You could see it in the way people held themselves, formal and wary, their eyes darting defensively as if they were hunters in the wild expecting to be attacked by a pack of wolves at any moment.
I grew up in an esoteric organization, so I had plenty of experience attending similar ceremonial functions. But they were never held in places as shabby and depressing as this. I thought about those local superlice outbreaks and found myself scratching under my clothes before I realized what I was doing.
Right before eleven, the remainder of the congregation filed inside and occupied the remaining seats. Someone dimmed the lights. Two altar girls lit torches on either side of the room. They wore long, red pioneer dresses, and their hair was braided and pinned to their heads. They could’ve been satanic stand-ins for the girls on Little House on the Prairie.
“If anything goes wrong, you banish it, you hear?” Lon whispered.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” I assured him. The Silent Temple put on this little freak show every week. Hopefully their casualty rate was low. “Wait until the ceremony’s over before you go shooting a hole in the ceiling,” I suggested, sneaking a quick scratch under my sleeve. Lice made me think of roaches, and that made me think of the cannery. I shuddered.
Epic, dark opera boomed over speakers near the altar. From Wagner’s Ring cycle. I was pretty sure that was the equivalent of playing Eye of the Tiger at a wrestling match. The altar girls finished with their task and stood sentinel at the bottom of each set of stairs, their handheld torches held above their heads.
Two figures descended, one from either staircase. The first was a wiry boy, maybe early twenties. He wore a black T-shirt and matching pants, and had one too many pointy facial piercings. His booming voice didn’t match his thin body as he announced the second figure descending the second set of stairs—
Frater Merrin.
“I’ll be damned,” Lon mumbled, tensing up as the man greeted the congregation. Guess Frater Merrin really was his old Frater Karras. Ten points for Jupe’s not so useless horror movie trivia.
The magician looked to be in his sixties. He was extremely short, balding like a monk, and dressed in standard gray ritual robes, with a hood lying against his back and zipper at his throat. Bare toes peeked out below the hem. Dark, pouchy circles gathered under mismatched eyes that swept across the congregation. He nodded occasionally at those who waved or called out to him.
“Welcome, Sisters and Brothers, to the Morella Silent Temple,” he announced, holding out his arms while ambling by the front row. “For those of you who are first-timers, I hope you are enlightened by what you’ll witness today. For those of you returning, I hope your faith will be renewed.
“Other churches,” he continued, “talk a lot about miracles. But talk is cheap. I’m not saying that the beliefs that fuel other religions are wrong, I’m only saying that I can prove that our faith has substance. Our beliefs are grounded in what we can see and hear, not just what we’re told.”
The magician walked to a short table and picked up a small brass container with an elongated, skinny spout—somewhere between an Arabian oil lamp and a watering can. He carried the object to both sides of the altar and held it up for each of the girls in the red dresses to kiss in blessing.
A red circular carpet lay in the center of the altar. While the magician moved behind it, the girls rolled up the carpet and carried it off between them. And what do you know—where that carpet once lay was now an exposed summoning circle, though not as fancy as the glass tubes in the floor of the Hellfire caves. This one looked to have been constructed of a cement disk that had been recessed a couple of inches into a hollowed-out portion of the wood flooring. The edge was ringed with a dark stained channel, into which the magician poured oil from the spout of the brass watering can.
“From fire they are born, and to fire we all go. Let the sacred oil flow,” Frater Merrin said. The congregation repeated these words in an off-key drone. After he made it all the way around, the prairie girls took their places at either side of the circle. The magician chanted something in Latin. His back to the congregation, he kneeled—with no small effort—in front of the sculpture of the lion-headed deity, and prayed.
“This is ridiculous,” Lon complained in my ear.
“You think?” I hissed back. Pomp and show. A bloated ritual to impress the crowd.
The magician gave a signal to the girls. They held their dresses tightly around their legs and knelt by the oil-filled channel, touching their torches to it. A foot-high flame leapt up and spread, filling the entire circle in a flash. A ring of fire.
Yes, quite a production.
The humans who came to see it weren’t savages. They believed in demons. They couldn’t see the halos on the Earthbounds who sat alongside them, but they had proof, nonetheless: their church conjured up a living specimen every Saturday.
I crossed my arms, listening as the magician recited the real words to set the summoning circle.
If the occult organizations got wind of this place, they’d fan the flames licking around this circle and burn the whole temple to the ground. Especially my order—this was so against E∴E∴ policy. I mean, come on. A rogue magician conjuring demons in front of nonmagicians—conjuring demons to be worshipped, to boot. Such a big no-no.
Like most esoteric orders, the E∴E∴ believed Æthyric demons were to be summoned only for two reasons: information and tasks. They should be tightly controlled at all times, and there should always be another magician present in case something goes wrong with the
binding.
Of course, I never followed these rules myself. And in the big picture, what the Hellfire Club did every month—summoning Æthyric demons for heaping helpings of sex and violence—was far worse than what this guy was doing.
But I didn’t really care about that either. All I wanted to know was whether the magician in front of us had kidnapped, and likely killed, seven human children in the early ’80s, and if he was the one who’d been recently abducting Hellfire kids.
Merrin brought out a caduceus from under his robe. The wood was blackened at the bottom. He stuck it through the wall of flames and hit the inner ring of the summoning circle. The low lights in the room crackled and dimmed for a brief moment, throwing the room into near-dark, the only light coming from the torches on the wall and the ring of fire.
The summoning circle was set. Under the fire, it glowed with blue-white Heka, strong and stable.
Merrin whispered an incantation. An indistinct form solidified inside the circle. The temple was dark, and it was hard to see clearly, but what appeared in the circle was mostly human-looking. Male. Definitely male. His body was divine—perfectly sculpted, ropy muscle over long, pale limbs. A sleeveless white tunic clung to every hard curve. Long auburn hair was pulled back into a tight knot on the crown of his head, backlit by a dancing halo that took on a reddish hue in the firelight. At the front of his head were two gently curving horns, and from a slit in the back of the tunic, a long tail whipped back and forth, striking against the invisible circle walls.
He was startled . . . and very pissed off about being summoned.
A low buzz floated around the room as the congregation recited some ridiculous poetic nonsense at the trapped demon in the fire circle. Between their practiced lines, Frater Merrin was reading the summoned demon his Miranda rights, commanding it to obey. The demon didn’t respond. He just scanned the congregation, searching the faces in the dark. He stopped when his gaze connected with mine.
