In The House Of Secret Enemies m-9

by George C. Chesbro

I began a systematic search of the room. It didn't take me long to strike pay dirt. This time there were personal notes and correspondence written in a language I could understand.

  Two things became very clear: Borrn was not the leader of the coven, and Harley Davidson had, indeed, had a "secret enemy."

  The door sighed open an hour or so later. Sandor Peth stood in the doorway, staring down at me where I sat on the bed. Borrn and the rest of the coven stood slightly behind him. All were dressed in crimson, hooded robes adorned with mystic symbols. The lights had been turned out in the large chamber, and there was a loud hissing sound; firelight flickered and danced like heat lightning.

  I looked at Peth. "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

  Peth's milky blue eyes didn't change. "You are a very persistent man, Dr. Frederickson," he said evenly. "And fast. I'm afraid I seriously underestimated you."

  I motioned to the firelight behind him. "Rather newfangled, isn't it?"

  "One of the exigencies of living in New York City."

  "You want to tell me what this is all about?"

  "Like in the movies?"

  "Like in the movies."

  Peth motioned to Borrn, who came forward and searched me. I didn't put up any resistance. It wasn't the time. I wanted to find out what Peth had to say-if anything. Also, I thought resistance might be offensive to the thirteen of them.

  "All right," Peth said when Borrn had finished with me and stepped back into the group. He entered the room and sat down on a chair across from me. "First, why don't you tell me what you've surmised so far?"

  "You killed Davidson, and you were trying to cover your tracks."

  "The second part of your statement is correct. But I-or we-did not kill Davidson; we caused him to die."

  "An interesting legal point."

  "Yes. I suppose it is."

  "How'd you do it?"

  Peth motioned to himself and the others, as though the answer were obvious. There was a faint ringing in my ears.

  "You're telling me you put a spell on him?" I decided he was crazy, and I told him so.

  Peth shrugged. "You asked me what this was all about, and I am trying to tell you. Of course, the fact that we caused Harley to take his own life is unprovable. However, the papers in this room, which I'm sure you've seen, do prove intent to do harm, and could prove embarrassing in a courtroom. I'm truly sorry you proved to be so conscientious."

  "Why did Davidson have to die?"

  "We depend on people-you would probably call them 'victims'-for our financial resources. All of us, in one way or another, are involved with people, and these people unwittingly provide financial support for our activities."

  "What activities?"

  "Simply put, the accumulation of power that will enable us to control even more people. As you know, fame and fortune in the rock-music business is ephemeral. Harley was at the peak of his earning powers. The power which you scoffed at had enabled me to secure Harley's power of attorney and convince him to sign a will leaving all of his rather large list of investments to me. Also, I had managed to buy a million dollars' worth of insurance, without a suicide clause, on Harley's life. Very expensive, but I knew I wouldn't have that many premiums to pay. At that point Harley became more valuable to us dead than alive."

  "And that's when Borrn went to work on his head?"

  "We all participated in the process. We knew that Harley would eventually kill himself, but we did not know when or how. If I had known he would do it the way he did-by swallowing pills inside a locked house, as reported on the radio-I would not have proceeded the way I did. However, I knew that I, as the beneficiary of very large sums of money, would come under a great deal of suspicion. That's why I went to your brother. I anticipated his reaction and thought that would be the end of it, with my innocence established in his mind. However, when he suggested that I come to you, I felt I had to take the suggestion."

  "You did some pretty thorough research on me first."

  Peth looked surprised. "No. As a matter of fact, I didn't. I should have. If I had, Borrn would have been prepared for your visit, and you would not be in the position you find yourself. As it was, Borrn did not know you were a dwarf-I hadn't had a chance to tell him-and you gave him a false name."

  "You're lying. Why? It's a small point."

  Again, Peth looked surprised. Suddenly he laughed. "Borrn gave you a reading, didn't he?"

  Something was stirring deep inside my mind; it was blind, soft and furry, with sharp teeth. I ran away from it. "You took Davidson into your coven, right?"

  "Borrn made Davidson think he was a part of the coven-in which I, obviously, was the missing member. Of course he was never really a part. All of the ceremonies he took part in were actually part of a magical attack on his deep mind."

  I'd heard enough to convince me that some kind of legal case could be made against Peth, Borrn and the others, and the papers I'd hidden inside my shirt would give me a shot at proving it. At the least, New York City would be rid of one particular supercoven composed of thirteen megalomaniac cranks. There remained only the slight difficulty of finding a way to get past thirteen men, and out of a sealed room. I tried not to let that depress me.

  "What happens now?"

  "Must I state the obvious?"

  "You'd be a fool to kill me."

  "Really? Why is that? I think we would be fools not to kill you. The fire is very hot. It will leave no trace of you. You will simply have disappeared."

  "My brother knows I'm investigating Borrn. He'll find this place."

  "Oh, I don't think so."

  "Somebody's building it."

  "Haitians, who appreciate our powers. They are afraid of voodoo spells. They would tear their own tongues out before they told anybody about this place. It's true that Borrn will be investigated, but I have no doubt that he will come out of it clean."

  "People know he's a witch."

  That shook him. "How is that?"

  I decided against mentioning Garth or Uranus. "It's in his witch's diary. Davidson's."

  Peth was silent for a long time. Whatever he'd finally decided wasn't going to be shared with me. He rose from his chair and gave a slight nod of his head. As one, the twelve figures outside the door entered the room and began to fan out around me. Their movements were slow, almost mechanical; it was like seeing a guillotine blade descend in slow motion.

  I smiled in what I hoped was a disarming manner, and gathered my legs beneath me. I focused my gaze on Peth's solar plexus. I couldn't fight thirteen men, but a few of them were going to discover that I was one deadly dwarf. Peth would be my first candidate for instruction.

  " O Pentacle of Might, be thou fortress and defense to Robert Frederickson against all enemies, seen and unseen, in every magical work."

  Uranus' voice drifted down from the darkness in the outer chamber. Before all the lights went out I caught the looks of utter astonishment on the faces of the coven members. I was a little surprised myself, but not so much that I forgot the way out of the room. I lunged forward in the darkness, caromed off a few sheeted bodies and landed on my face on the concrete outside. I got back up on my feet and raced off to my left, taking cover in the darkness, beyond the firelight. I'd traded in one trap for a new, slightly larger one; as long as the lights remained out, a few people were going to pay a heavy price for trying to find me.

  That left me to meditate on the question of what Uranus was doing in the building.

  Peth and the others seemed to be preoccupied by the same question. I watched as they slowly emerged from the darkness to spread out in a circle around the raging fire. Peth stood at their head, gazing up toward the spot where the hole in the north wall would be.

  "Who are you?" Peth asked in a whisper that carried throughout the chamber.

  "All wise Great One, Great Ruler of Storms, Master of the Heavenly Chamber, Great King of the Powers of the Sky, be here, we pray thee, and guard this place from all dangers approaching from the west?"


  Peth and the others knew a few rhymes of their own. There was no visible signal of any kind, but their voices rose in a chorus that made chills ripple through my body:

  "Amodeus, Calamitor, Usor! You who sow confusion, where are you? You who infuse fear and hate and enmity, I command you by the power of Disalone and Her Horned Consort to go!"

  "So mote it be!"

  "So mote it be!"

  There was a pause, then Uranus' voice again, soft, drifting like a sonic feather:

  "Four corners in this house for Holy Angels. Christ Jesus be in our midst. God be in this place and keep us safe."

  The response was a blast of psychic hate:

  "It is not our hands which do this deed, but that of Amodeus the Horned One!"

  "The trespasser must die!"

  "So mote it be!"

  "So mote it be!"

  I was watching a duel of sorcerers, and I felt thrown back in time a thousand years, thrown to the ground at the mouth of a cave in which moved dark, strange shapes.

  There was a long silence. Peth made a motion with his hand and the other members of the coven turned and started to fan out. It was dwarf-hunting time.

  "Stop!" Uranus' voice was weaker, ragged, as though she were short of breath. The movement of the coven members stopped. "I am Uranus Jones, and Dr. Frederickson is under my protection. You have heard of me and know of my powers."

  Peth's voice drifted softly through the room, waxing and waning like some invisible moon. "I have heard of you, Uranus Jones. You are a member of our family, a unit of the Universal Mind. Respect our wishes. This is not your concern. Leave us. So mote it be."

  Again, the faint, muted tones: "I repeat that Dr. Frederickson is under my protection. You harm him at your own peril."

  Her voice drifted off strangely. The muscles in my stomach began to flutter uncontrollably. There was movement to my left.

  "Mongo! Shoot the leader if anyone moves again!"

  Uranus' voice seemed stronger now, as though she had successfully passed through some great ordeal. I liked her suggestion, except that I didn't have a gun, and Peth knew it.

  "He doesn't have a gun," Peth said, underlining my thoughts. I wondered why he sounded so uncertain.

  "He does now," Uranus said. "Open the doors and let him pass."

  It was the beginning of an argument between two other parties that I was going to lose. It seemed a good time to excuse myself from the debate.

  I remembered the scaffolding hanging from the hole in the north wall, and tried to picture in my mind exactly where it would be. I knew it was about ten feet off the ground, and I would need tremendous momentum if I hoped to reach it.

  Circus time. I shoved off the wall and sprinted across the floor, getting up a good head of steam. Somebody reached out for me and missed. Twenty feet from where I judged the wall to be I launched into a series of cartwheels, then, on the last turn, planted my feet on the floor and hurled myself up into the air.

  At the apogee of my leap my hands touched wood. I gripped the edge of the scaffold; I scrambled up onto the platform, shinnied up the rope and dropped over the concrete cornice onto a pile of building supplies.

  The entire escape had taken less than fifteen seconds.

  I could see Uranus now in the glow of the firelight reflected off the walls. She was slumped against a girder, next to a large circuit breaker; her appearance frightened me more than anything that had happened previously. She appeared to have aged into an old woman, devoid of energy; her beautiful, silver hair hung in wisps from her head.

  I ran over to her and grabbed her around the waist.

  "Fire exit," she gasped. "Off to the left."

  I started to my left, pulling Uranus after me. I'd expected to hear a furor from below or, at the least, a few well-chosen curses. There was silence.

  "Why the hell didn't you tell me about this place?" I whispered through clenched teeth. "It would have saved everybody a lot of trouble."

  "Scry," Uranus sighed in the same broken voice that had so frightened me before. "Knew. . felt. . you in trouble. Called Garth but afraid. . there wasn't. . time."

  She seemed to be regaining her strength. I released her and she scrambled along beside me. I found the window she had come through. We both went out, then started down the fire escape.

  "The gun," Uranus said. "Do you have it? They may try to come after us."

  "I don't have a gun."

  Uranus said nothing. I could hear the sirens of Garth's cavalry coming to the rescue. Judging from the sound, they were closing fast.

  "Let's go watch the show," I said, starting down the alley leading to the front of the building.

  Uranus grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the darkness beside the building. She looked herself again, though still pale; it was as though she had passed through a near-fatal illness in a matter of only a few minutes.

  "I can't go with you," she said.

  "Why the hell not? Knowing Garth, he'll have an army of cops with him."

  "That's not the point. I don't want to answer questions. I don't want anyone to know exactly what happened in that building tonight."

  "Peth will tell them."

  "No, he won't. And none of the others will either. I must beg you not to speak, Mongo, for the sake of our friendship. When I called Garth I told him simply that I had a hunch about you and the warehouse. Garth has learned to trust my hunches."

  "This is no time for games," I said impatiently. "How did you know where I was?"

  She ignored my question. "There will be reporters out there, questions that I'm not prepared to answer. I would no longer be able to carry on my work at the university, and you know how important that is to me. It's my link with the. . rest of the world. Please, Mongo. Don't take that away from me."

  She turned and ran off into the darkness without waiting for an answer. I walked slowly toward the flashing lights at the front of the building.

  The proverbial mop-up of Peth and his crew was decidedly anticlimactic. When Garth and the other policemen broke down the secret door the members of the coven were waiting calmly.

  Their robes and, presumably, all of the records had been consigned to the gas-fed bonfire still roaring from the pit in the center of the floor. They offered no resistance.

  As Uranus had predicted, no one mentioned her presence in the building earlier. For some reason I didn't fully understand, I didn't either.

  I was exhausted, and my head felt as though it had been stuffed with rotting cotton. Still, I managed to drag myself down to the police station, where I turned over the papers I had taken and made some kind of statement. Then I went home and poured myself a tumbler of Scotch. I wanted desperately to sleep, but there were still a lot of things on my mind.

  There was nothing that had happened which could not be explained by a few good guesses and a lot of abnormal psychology emanating from some very sick minds. I needed the Scotch because I realized that Uranus possessed one of those sick minds. A woman I loved was, in my opinion, desperately ill, and I had to find the courage to confront her with this opinion, to suggest that she see a psychiatrist.

  Having resolved this, I slipped off my jacket and threw it toward the bed. Only at the last moment did I realize that it somehow seemed heavier than it should. The jacket slid across the smooth bedspread and fell to the floor on the opposite side with a heavy, metallic clunk. The sound shrieked in my ears, echoing down to the very roots of my soul.

  Whatever was in the jacket, I didn't want to know about it. I raced around the bed, picked up the jacket and in the same motion sent it hurtling toward the window. The weighted cloth shattered the glass and dropped from sight.

  I stood, shaking uncontrollably and breathing hard as the cool wind whistled through the broken pane. Even as a tremendous surge of relief flowed through me, I knew that throwing away the jacket was no answer. If, indeed, there were the forces outside the "circle of light" Uranus had mentioned, it would do no good for me to deny it: I would
merely remain ignorant of their existence. If the jacket was lost, I'd spend the rest of my life wondering what had been in the pocket-and how it had gotten there.

  I drained off the Scotch, then went back into the night.

  Book of Shadows

  It had been a long day with absolutely nothing accomplished. I'd spent most of it grading a depressing set of mid-term papers that led me to wonder what I'd been teaching all semester in my graduate criminology seminar. After that I'd needed a drink.

  Instead of doing the perfectly sensible thing and repairing to the local pub, I'd made the mistake of calling my answering service, which informed me there was a real live client waiting for me in my downtown office. The Yellow Pages the man had picked my name out of didn't mention the fact that this particular private detective was a dwarf: One look at me and the man decided he didn't really need a private detective after all.

  With my sensitive ego in psychic shreds, I headed home. I planned to quickly make up for my past sobriety and spend an electronically lobotomized evening in front of the television.

  I perked up when I saw the little girl waiting for me outside my apartment. Kathy Marsten was a small friend of mine from 4D, down the hall. With her blond hair and blue eyes, dressed in a frilly white dress and holding a bright red patent leather purse, she looked positively beatific. I laughed to myself as I recalled that it had taken me two of her seven years to convince her that I wasn't a potential playmate.

  "Kathy, Kathy, Kathy!" I said, picking her up and setting her down in a manner usually guaranteed to produce Instant Giggle. "How's my girl today?"

  "Hello, Mr. Mongo," she said very seriously.

  "Why the good clothes? You look beautiful, but I'd think you'd be out playing with your friends by this time."

  "I came here right after school, Mr. Mongo. I've been waiting for you. I was getting afraid I wouldn't see you before my daddy came home. I wanted to ask you something."

  Now the tears came. I reached down and brushed them away, suddenly realizing that this was no child's game. "What did you want to ask me, Kathy?"

  She sniffled, then regained control of herself in a manner that reminded me of someone much older. "My daddy says that you sometimes help people for money."