I wasn’t sure there was a choice. According to Dr. Juan Rivera, the practitioners of the system called medicine had just about played out their string. I risked nothing but making a fool out of myself. Kathy had considerably more to lose. There was a sudden ringing in my ears.
“All right. Within the context of ceremonial magic, why is Kathy dying?”
Uranus looked at me for a long time, then said: “Belial is claiming a bride.”
“Come again.”
“The gown: It means that the child was to be a part of the ritual. My guess is that her parents were offering her up to Belial in exchange for whatever it was they wanted. He killed her parents, and now he’s taking her.”
“You’re saying that Kathy is possessed?”
“Within the context of ceremonial magic, yes. And she will have to be exorcised if you hope to save her. To do that, you will need to know the exact steps in the ritual the Marstens were using. Needless to say, that’s not something you’re likely to find in the public library. And I don’t mean that to sound flippant. Assuming that such a ritual does exist, it would have taken the Marstens years to research from some of the rarest manuscripts in the world.”
The ringing in my ears was growing louder. I shook my head in an attempt to clear it. It didn’t do any good. “God, Uranus,” I whispered, “this is the twentieth century. I only have a little time. How can I justify using it to chase … demons?”
“You can’t, Mongo. Not in your belief system. Because demons don’t exist in your belief system. But they did in the Marstens’, and Kathy Marsten is dying.”
“Yes,” I said distantly. “Kathy Marsten is dying.”
“Consider the possibility that you are what you believe. What you believe affects you. The witch and the ceremonial magician perceive evil in personal terms. Belial, for example. Most men today prefer other names for evil … Buchenwald, My Lai.”
“She was talking about the mind of man,” I said. “That’s where the demons are. It’s where they’ve always been. The question is whether or not evil can be personified. Can it be made to assume a shape? Can it be controlled?”
Garth shook his head impatiently. “That’s all crazy talk, Mongo. You’re too close to it now. Give it some more time and you’ll know it’s crazy. There’s an explanation for everything that happened. There aren’t any such things as demons, and you damn well know it.”
“Of course there aren’t any such things as demons,” I said, lifting my glass. “Let’s drink to that.”
“Uranus, what’s a ‘book of shadows’?”
She looked surprised. “A book of shadows is a witch’s diary. It’s a record of spells, omens. It’s a very private thing, and is usually seen only by members of the witch’s coven.”
“A few hours before the fire Kathy Marsten asked me to get back her father’s book of shadows. She said it had been taken by a man named Daniel.”
Something moved in the depths of Uranus’ eyes. “I know of Daniel,” she said quietly. “He’s a ceremonial magician.”
“Meaning precisely what?” I asked.
“A man who has great control over his own mind, and the minds of others. Some would say the ceremonial magician can control matter, create or destroy life. The ceremonial magician stands on the peak of the mountain called the occult. He is a man who has achieved much. He works alone, and he is dangerous. If he took someone’s book of shadows, it was for a reason.”
“Then there could have been bad blood between this Daniel and the Marstens?”
“If not before Daniel took the book, then certainly after.”
I didn’t want to ask the next question. I asked it anyway. “Do you think one of these ceremonial magicians could start a fire without actually being in the room?”
“Yes,” Uranus said evenly. “I think so.”
“I want to talk to this Daniel.”
“He won’t talk to you, Mongo. You’ll be wasting your time.”
“You get me to him and let me worry about the conversation.”
A Philadelphia bank seemed like an odd place to look for a ceremonial magician. But then nobody had claimed that Daniel could change lead into gold, and even ceremonial magicians had to eat. It looked like this particular magician was eating well. He was sitting in a bank vice-president’s chair.
He looked the part; that is, he looked more like a bank vice-president than a master of the occult arts, whatever such a master looks like. Maybe I’d been expecting Orson Welles. In any case, he matched the description Uranus had given me; about six feet, early forties, close-cropped, steely gray hair with matching eyes. He wore a conservatively cut, gray-striped suit. There was a Christmas Club sign to one side of his desk, and beside that a name plate that identified him as Mr. Richard Bannon.
I stopped at the side of the desk and waited for him to look up from his papers. “Yes, sir?” It was an announcer’s voice, deep, rich and well modulated.
“Daniel?”
I looked for a reaction. There wasn’t any. The gray eyes remained impassive, almost blank, as though he were looking straight through me. I might have been speaking a foreign language. He waited a few seconds, then said: “Excuse me?”
“You are Daniel,” I said. “That’s your witch name. I want to talk to you.”
I watched his right hand drop below the desk for a moment, then resurface. I figured I had five to ten seconds, and intended to use every one of them. “You listen good,” I said, leaning toward him until my face was only inches from his. “There’s a little girl dying a couple of hours away from here. If I even suspect you had anything to do with it, I’m going to come down on you. Hard. For starters, I’m going to make sure the stockholders of this bank find out about your hobbies. Then, if that doesn’t make me feel better, maybe I’ll kill you.”
Time was up. I could feel the bank guard’s hand pressing on my elbow. Daniel suddenly raised his hand. “It’s all right, John,” he said, looking at me. “I pressed the button by mistake. Dr. Frederickson is a customer.”
The hand came off my elbow, there was a murmured apology, then the sound of receding footsteps. I never took my eyes off Daniel. He rose and gestured toward an office behind him. “Follow me, please.”
I followed him into the softly lit, richly carpeted office. He closed the door and began to speak almost immediately. “You are to take this as a threat,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper. “I know who you are; your career is familiar to me. I do not know how you know of me; I know of no person who would have dared tell you about me. But no matter. There is absolutely nothing—nothing—you can do to me. But I can … inflict. You will discover that to your surprise and sorrow if you came to trifle with me.”
It was an impressive speech, delivered as it was in a soft monotone. I smiled. “I want to ask a couple of questions. You answer them right and you can go back to changing people into frogs, or whatever it is you do.”
“I will answer nothing.”
“Why did you steal Jim Marsten’s book of shadows?”
Daniel blinked. That was all, but from him I considered it a major concession. “You have a great deal of information, Dr. Frederickson. I’m impressed. Who have you been speaking to?”
“What do you know about the girl? Kathy Marsten.”
His eyes narrowed. “Why?” Suddenly he paled. “Is that the little girl you—?”
“She’s dying,” I said bluntly. “Fast.”
His tongue darted out and touched his lips. “What are you talking about?”
I told him. His impassive, stony facade began to crack before my eyes. He abruptly turned his back on me and walked across the room to a window, where he stood staring out over the bank’s parking lot. Once I thought I saw his shoulders heave, but I couldn’t be sure. His reaction wasn’t exactly what I’d expected. He asked my about my role, and I told him that, too.
“I will need help,” he said distantly. Then he turned and looked directly at me. “I will need your help. T
here is no time to get anyone else. We must leave immediately. There are things I must get.”
“Daniel, or Bannon, or whatever you call yourself, what the hell is this all about?”
“Kathy Marsten is my niece,” he said after a long pause. “Becky Marsten is—was—my sister.”
“Then I’d say you have some explaining to do. Do you know why Kathy is dying?”
“I owe you no explanations,” he said evenly. He studied me for a moment, then added, “But I will explain anyway, because the time will come when I will ask you to do exactly as I say, when I say it, with no discussion and no questions.”
“You’re out of your mind. Why should I agree to do that?”
“Because you love Kathy and you want to save her life. In order to do that, you and I must touch a dimension of existence the Christians call hell. To do that and survive you will have to do exactly as I say.”
I nodded. I hoped it looked noncommital. “I’m listening.”
Daniel’s words came rapidly now, in an almost mechanical voice. He was obviously a man in a hurry, and I could tell his mind was elsewhere.
“I don’t know the extent of your knowledge about witchcraft,” he said, “but witchcraft is undoubtedly not what you think it is. It is a religion: a very old religion—an Earth religion. The Marstens and the Bannons have practiced witchcraft for generations. You will find witches in every walk of life.”
For a moment I thought I saw him smile. He continued: “Some witches—some magicians—even become bank vice-presidents. For most of the Blessed, witchcraft and magic are a means to higher wisdom, toward becoming a better person. But there is a dark side to it, as there is to every other religion. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Inquisition, not to mention the Salem witch trials where human beings were burned alive.”
He paused, then went on: “In any case, Jim Marsten became interested in the black arts, in demonology, about two years ago. He was warned of the possible consequences to him and to his family. He chose to ignore these warnings. At a certain point I tried to get my sister to leave Jim, but she had already been corrupted by the dreams he had laid out for her. Then I discovered that they intended to try to summon the demon Belial. That ceremony involves the spiritual sacrifice of a child, and I knew that child would be Kathy.
“I knew there was no way I could reason with them—they were beyond that. But I could stop them, and I did—or I thought I did. I knew there was one place, and only one place, where the ceremony would have been recorded.”
“The book of shadows,” I whispered.
“That’s right. A witch’s holiest book. I took it.”
“How?”
“How I do what I do is not important. Please remember that. What is important is that Jim and Becky apparently tried to proceed without the exact ritual in hand. They paid for it with their lives. Belial was released into our dimension, and he is sucking Kathy’s life away from her.”
It was crazy. Maybe I was going crazy. I heard myself asking, “How do you know you can succeed where the Marstens failed? What is your power? And where does it lie?”
“First, I know the ritual. That is absolutely essential for the exorcism.” Again, there was a fleeting grimace around his mouth that might have been a half-smile. “I am a ceremonial magician, Dr. Frederickson. You come from an academic background, and you understand that to move up in your world requires study, perseverance … and talent. The same holds true in mine. If you wish, you may think of a ceremonial magician as a witch with a Ph.D.”
I tried to think of something to say and couldn’t. I’d run out of options: I’d called Dr. Rivera that morning and been told that Kathy was now perilously near death. So I was along for the ride with the ceremonial magician, straddling a nightmare train of terror that I couldn’t stop.
And I knew I was going to do anything the man called Daniel asked me to do.
At exactly twenty minutes of midnight, as instructed, I parked my car across from the hospital and got out. I lifted Bannon’s knapsack from the rear seat, strapped it on my back, then headed across the street. I went around to the back of the hospital and started climbing the fire escape that would take me to Kathy’s room, where I had left Bannon four hours before.
I stopped at the third floor, leaned over the steel railing and peered into the window on my right. There was a small night light on over the bed and I could see Kathy’s head sticking up above the covers of her bed. Her face was as white as the sheet tucked up under her chin.
Bannon was lying on the floor beside the bed. He was stripped to the waist. His eyes were closed and his breathing was deep and regular. Sweat was pouring off his body, running in thick rivulets to soak into the towels he had placed under him.
Suddenly the door opened and a young, pretty nurse stepped into the room. Bannon was in silent motion even as the nurse reached for the light switch. He rolled in one fluid motion that carried him under the bed. He quickly reached out, wiped the floor with the towels, then drew them in after him.
The night nurse went up to Kathy’s bed and drew back the covers. It was then that I could see a series of wires and electrodes attached to her arms and chest. The nurse felt Kathy’s forehead, then checked what must have been a battery of instruments on the other side of the bed, out of my line of vision.
She gave what appeared to be a satisfied nod, recorded the information on a clipboard at the foot of the bed, then turned out the lights and left the room. I tapped on the window.
Bannon emerged from the beneath the bed. He was no longer sweating, but he looked pale and haggard, like a man who had finished a marathon wrestling match. He came to the window and opened it. I climbed through. He immediately began removing the knapsack from my shoulders with deft fingers.
“What time is it?” he croaked in a hoarse voice.
I glanced at the luminous dial on my watch. “Five minutes to twelve.”
“We must hurry. The ceremony must begin at exactly midnight. Your watch shows the exact time?”
“Yeah. I checked it out a half hour ago.” I was beginning to have second thoughts, to feel like the face on the front page of the morning’s edition of some of the country’s more sensational tabloids. “What happens if someone else shows up?”
“This is not the time to think about that.” He paused, then added, “I think we will have time. The nurses have noted an improvement in Kathy’s condition.”
I resisted the impulse to clap my hands. “If she’s better, what are we doing here?”
Bannon grunted. “She only seems better because I made it appear that way. But the effect is short-lived. Belial must be driven from her mind. Now, let’s get busy.”
Bannon quickly opened the knapsack and emptied its contents on the floor. There was a white hooded robe, a dagger with occult symbols carved into the ivory handle, two slender white candles in pewter candleholders. In addition there was a charred stick, a heavy lead cup, and numerous small containers, which I assumed contained incense.
The last object out of the sack was a thick volume of papers bound between two engraved metal covers. The symbols inscribed on the covers were the same as those I had seen on Kathy’s gown. It was Jim Marsten’s book of shadows.
Bannon donned the robe, then opened a small container filled with blue powder. He bent over and spilled the powder out in a thin stream, forming a large circle around the bed. When he had completed that, he drew a second, smaller circle at the foot of the bed, on a tangent with the first circle.
In his costume, he seemed a completely different man. No longer did there seem to be any relationship between the banker and the man—the witch—before me. He was no longer Bannon. He was Daniel.
“Time?” he asked in a strange, hollow voice.
“One minute of.”
He placed the candles on either side of the foot of the bed and lit them. “You must stand with me inside the second circle,” he said as he arranged the other items in front of him. “No matter what happ
ens, remain inside the circle.” He picked up the book of shadows and opened it to a section near the back, then handed it to me.
The book was much heavier than one would have suspected from looking at it. The metal was cold. The writing, in purple ink, looked like a series of child’s scrawls. It was completely illegible to me. “Turn the page quickly when I nod my head,” Daniel continued. “And remember not to step out of the circle—not under any circumstances.”
“Look, Daniel—” I started to say.
“No,” he said sharply, turning his head away from me. I tried to look at his face beneath the hood and couldn’t find it. “There is no time for discussion. Simply do as I say. If you do not, you may die. Remember that.”
I allowed myself to be led into the circle, and I held the book out in front me, slightly to the side so that Daniel could read it in the dim glow from the candles and night light. Daniel picked up the dagger and held it out stiffly in front of him while he removed a single egg from the pocket of his robe and placed it carefully on a spot equidistant between the two candles. Then he began to chant:
“Amen, ever and forever, glory the and power the, Kingdom the is Thine for, evil from us deliver, But—”
It was a few moments before I realized that Daniel was reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards. I felt a chill. The book of shadows seemed to be gaining weight, and my arms had begun to tremble. I gripped the book even tighter.
Daniel finished the inverted prayer. He stiffened, described a pentagram in the air with his arm, then stuck his dagger into the middle of it. Finally he placed his left palm in the center of the book.
“I command thee, O Book of Shadows, be useful unto me, who shall have recourse for the success of this matter. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost! In the name of Yahweh and Allah! In the name of Jesus Christ, let this demon come forth to be banished!”
He turned slowly, taking care to remain in the circle, continuing to describe pentagrams in the air. My eyes were drawn inexorably to the candles: There was no draft in the room, and yet I was positive I had seen them flicker.
In the House of Secret Enemies Page 21
