“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Denis said.
Together they ran their fingers along the edge of the bookcase, inspecting the place where the pencil-width line of darkness had appeared.
“Here,” Denis said, pointing to a partially concealed hinge near the top. He pushed the hinge gently, and the heavy piece of furniture swung out.
Carl had to remind himself to breathe as he peered into the darkened alcove. The dread of being found out—of being watched, really, specifically by some secret Order—crept over him. He recalled what the strange man in his dream had told him, the Archangel Oriphiel.
The creature’s voice boomed in his head—“Do not fear. In no way do we, or anyone else, oppose the book. For now is the time of knowledge and decision…”
Denis stepped inside. “Take a look at this.”
Carl’s hands perspired as he grabbed a hold of his pant legs, managing only to jingle some coins in his pockets. He got a flash of the night with Roaring Rolf. The rundown warehouse where he’d been hiding out, the mutilated bodies, the captured eight-year-old girl—Ashley—who’d gone missing the week earlier. Carl had discovered her chained to a corrugated tin wall at the back of the building, naked with a sock stuffed in her mouth, surrounded by Nazi paraphernalia and old, ragged Third Reich flags.
He had to take a slow, relaxing breath.
Get a grip on yourself, pal.
The alcove was no bigger than a walk-in closet. Most likely it had been built into the wall by Adam because it didn’t appear flush with the original walls and ceiling. It was partially askew, giving the impression of being inside a carnival fun house.
Denis yanked the chain dangling above their heads, igniting the low-wattage bulb. Yellow illumination trickled down, permeating everything. “I feel like I’m in an Indiana Jones movie,” he said.
Carl laughed uneasily. “Or Sherlock Holmes.”
The walls were scribbled with carvings: dodecahedrons, crucifixes, concentric circles and squares and compasses, a host of unrecognizable shapes, swastikas—even a crude caduceus staff, the sign of the United States Medical Corps.
Symbols traversed up and down in a dizzying whirlwind of forms, and Carl felt nauseous looking at them.
An altar was erected near the back, overhung by a purple velvet cloth with gold fringe, and two brass stands stood to either side: one obviously used for burning frankincense resin, the other used for holding some kind of dark, blackish liquid.
“Is that what I think it is?” Carl asked.
Denis bent and sniffed the dark liquid, dipping the tip of his fingernail into it. “I think it is.”
Carl reeled at the confirmation.
“Here’s another of those knives, too,” Denis added.
The weapon lay across the top of the altar, a gleaming serpent in the bulb’s light. Next to it rested several very dusty, very old-looking books. On top of them, a small piece of parchment that showed Castle Heidelberg and its Palace Gardens.
Carl held the parchment up to the light. “A rubbing of the painting by Jacques Fouquières. Old, too.”
He replaced the parchment and moved on to the books, carefully inspecting the top one. “I think this is the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in the original German—Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Occult text that some scholars speculate may be set in the halls of Castle Heidelberg.” He glanced at the other titles, his bibliophilic interest slowly eroding his dread.
“Let’s see here... The Monas by John Dee.” He opened the cover and there was the old Monas Hieroglyphica engraving beautifully depicted, the twin pillars done up in black and gold.
Carl moved on to the final volumes. “The Confessio Fraternitatis and... this one... which I’ve never encountered before, the Necronomicus by Abd-al-Hazred.” He stood away from the altar and sighed. “Talk about incomparable editions.”
Denis gave him a look.
“What?”
He shook his head. “Sometimes I don’t know about you, man. Don’t you ever do anything normal, like watch a Yankees game?”
“I did once, about ten years ago. I’m still recovering.”
Denis laughed. “Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
Above the altar hung a large ornate mirror, smudge-free, the frame encrusted with multicolored jewels. Carl glanced at his reflection as he bent forward to pick up the Necronomicus book, catching his tired blue eyes in the glass.
“Why would he need a secret place to stare at himself in the mirror?” Denis asked.
“I don’t know. But it makes me think of the Evil Queen and the Magic Mirror from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
Denis nodded. “Magic mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest security guard of all?”
Carl flipped through the Necronomicus. Most of the text was in Perfect Latin so he couldn’t actually read it. But he recognized some of the other languages, even one that looked like Ancient Greek. Diagrammatic charts, tables, and alchemical symbols filled the pages. And the binding felt rubbery and coarse, as though the book was bound in something other than regular cowhide.
A reddish book ribbon held a specific place, which Carl opened the book to. The small noise of terror he emitted was swallowed by the cramped space.
“You find something?”
Carl held the page out for him to see. Denis glanced at it then swallowed hard. “Holy fuck.”
An engraving in the center of the page showed a diagram ringed by numerical symbols, a picture describing the layout for some bizarre ritual. A dodecahedron with a mirror placed in the middle, above which hung the inverted representation of a nude human being. Tiny spots of blood spattered the glass, dripping downward from the person’s neck.
The two detectives glanced at each other.
“This case just got a lot freakier,” Denis said. “If that’s possible.”
Carl nodded. “And a lot more likely to be ruled out as murder.”
Denis opened his mouth to say something, but immediately clicked it closed. Carl turned the page. Here the left flap depicted the drawing of a dagger that was serpentine in shape, with an elaborately ornamented hilt.
“Look familiar?”
Denis scratched his hair.
The right flap showed the ritual scene again, only this time the illustrator had closed in on the surface of the mirror. There was something in the glass, a shape in the background, amorphous, seeming to rise up and outward.
Denis pointed to it. “Wait—what’s that?” His voice sounded slightly hysterical, and Carl thought he could smell their perspiration in the air—although whether from the cramped space or the contents of the Necronomicus remained unclear.
“Turn to the next page,” Denis said.
Carl did, revealing the final engraving before the book returned to blocks of text. The scene was another close-up of the mirror’s surface, only this time the once amorphous black shape had been given form.
And it was halfway out of the glass.
The shape was clearly a person, similar to the one hanging above the dodecahedron, but this person was alive, a male fully clothed in a strange white robe, and in the midst of crawling out of the mirror’s surface—hoisting himself into the world.
Carl flipped frantically through the rest of the engravings, but found no others related. So that was it.
He returned the book ribbon to the original marked place and set the Necronomicus back on the altar. His nerves were fried and his head felt cloudy. He didn’t know how much longer he could stand inside Adam Francis’s private alcove without screaming.
The filaments in the low-watt bulb flickered, making a buzzing sound, and fizzled out. Darkness was sudden, and Carl gulped stagnant air as Denis cried—“What the hell was that?”
A glow seeped into the room from somewhere directly before them, a sickish otherworldly luminance, the color of lunar landscapes. The mirror began to rattle. Carl and Denis both flinched.
/> “The building’s coming down—it’s an earthquake!” Denis yelled.
Carl shook his head. “Impossible.” He felt his muscles tightening up, especially in his jaw. He wanted to get out, but somehow he was fixed in place.
The glow rolled in from the mirror, tumbling, vaporous clouds of light that grew larger in the glass, coming closer to meet them. The reflected image of the room and its occupants became a blur, until only the spectral, alien cloud remained.
Denis shouldered him. “Jesus Christ, are you seeing this?”
“I am!”
The mirror rattled and banged against the wall. Then the cloud was right up on the opposite side of the glass. The light streaming into the room became unbearable and they both shielded their eyes.
The ghostly cloud swirled, churned, and parted, cleaving in half like a cotton ball. What came from the center filled the glass right up to the frame. It stared out, a massive watching face, its eyes burning into the room.
Carl saw the face and totally lost it, his mind liquefying. He screamed in terror, and then Denis screamed alongside him. A spell of tension gripped the room, and then ceased. They both went tumbling out of the alcove, sprawling onto the bedroom floor.
The face in the glass vanished, taking the swirling cloud with it. The alcove and the mirror darkened, and the walls ceased to shake. Eventually, Carl and Denis stopped screaming.
Denis stood up first, rubbing his face with his hands. He put fingers in his hair and glanced around the room dumbly. When his eyes found Carl, he reached for him. “Come on,” he said.
Carl accepted the hand and was hauled up. They left the room together. He’d fallen hard on his hip and now a throbbing pain sent messages up to his brain at regular intervals. He was not as young as he used to be. Even his chest hurt as his heart threatened to bust through his ribcage.
Denis led them into the living room, then out through the sliding glass door to the back balcony, where a small patio table and three chairs were set up.
He helped Carl to sit before sitting himself. They both remained quiet, watching the placid waters of Jamaica Bay and the wheeling seagulls. Several people walked along the dock.
“What the fuck was that?” Denis said finally.
Carl produced a cigarette from his pack of Camels and lit up. Denis looked over and held out two fingers.
“You quit,” Carl said.
“Give me one.”
Denis’s voice was hard with determination, and Carl thought it best not to object. He handed Denis the one from his lips, then lit another for himself.
Denis coughed. “Tastes like shit. But for some reason it feels so good.”
“Welcome to my world,” Carl said, chuckling.
They spent a few minutes smoking, letting the experiences of the alcove wash over them. Everything seemed to pause around them, waiting for their thinking to catch up. Carl considered whether or not to tell Denis what he knew.
“It had to’ve been an earthquake,” Denis said, frowning at the smoldering cigarette before he stamped it out on the table. “What’s the alternative, huh—what? Satanism? Witchcraft? Ghosts? I’m a detective, for Christ’s sake. I’m supposed to deal with facts, with truth—not with magic.”
Carl was only half listening and only half conscious when he said, “I’m not sure how to tell you this, Denis, but you know that face in the mirror?”
Denis glared. Instead of speaking, he nodded only once.
“I saw the same face in a dream last night.”
Denis kept up his glare.
“He came in my sleep and told me to leave off this case, to focus on my book instead. He said the end of the world was coming, or something like that. I also had a visitor. I didn’t see who it was, but they left this outside my door.”
He reached in his jacket pocket and withdrew the letter from the Golden Rose Croix Order of Oriphiel. He handed it to Denis who quietly read it. Carl could tell this whole thing was taking its toll on the younger detective. He rubbed his bruised hip and took a drag on his Camel. It was taking its toll on him, too. Reality didn’t seem as sharply defined as it had a week ago. The winds of change were coming to this land.
“ ‘The OLD ONE who has presently stepped close to the threshold of the world WILL PASS THROUGH, in this year of our Lord, 2013.’ What am I supposed to make of this, Carl?”
“I think it has something to do with my book project. When I started writing about these secret organizations and their influence in history—especially American history—sure, I believed they were real, that they existed, but I don’t think I considered how real or how closely they guard their secrets.”
Denis handed the note back. “It sounds like you’re telling me we’re getting ourselves into deep waters: Men in Black, government cover-ups, C.I.A., the J.F.K. assassination—is that right?”
“You’re close. The German alchemists I told you about, the ones who hung around Castle Heidelberg—”
“Rosicrucians?”
“Right. They still exist today. They’re known by many other names such as the Brothers of the Rosy Cross, the Brotherhood of the Rose… and, apparently, the Golden Rose Croix Order of Oriphiel.”
“The ones who wrote the note?”
“I think so.”
“Do you believe they had something to do with Adam Francis’s death?”
“Most certainly. In fact I’m starting to believe Adam Francis was one of them.”
“A member?”
“Exactly.”
Denis was silent. At last he said, “It doesn’t explain what happened in there, though.” He hooked a finger toward the bedroom.
Sighing, Carl flipped his cigarette over the balcony. “The best I can surmise is that a form of illusion—magical illusion, maybe alchemical illusion, but illusion nonetheless—was at work in there. Rosicrucians are masters of matter and perception—which is how they’ve influenced entire world governments.”
Denis chuckled. “It’s almost like fate that I brought you on board this case.”
“Leave out the ‘almost’ part.”
“Do we tell Jennifer?”
“How can we avoid it? She’ll see the alcove behind the bookcase now that we’ve opened it—this is her case, after all. But I think we should censor ourselves. We’ll leave out the mirror and the part about my dream. We can show her the note, though.”
Denis nodded in agreement, then leaned back in his chair. The Manhattan skyline loomed on the horizon. Carl found himself sleepy, despite the shock he’d been given.
“I think I understand,” Denis said. “But I feel wasted. I can’t do anything else until I get some sleep.”
“I hear you there,” Carl said.
“I’m gonna go back to my place to catch a nap. I’ll meet with Jennifer later and fill her in.”
“Good plan.”
“Can I have that note to show her?”
Carl hesitated, then handed it over.
“What are you going to do? Want a lift home?”
“Nah. I’ll poke around here for a while and catch a cab to the library to do some research. I want to take those books off the altar in the bedroom.”
“Jennifer will have a fit.”
“Pretty please?”
Denis reached into his pocket and took out a small thumb-drive, handing it to Carl. “Add anything you find out to the murder book while you’re at it.”
Carl held the tiny device briefly between his fingers, marveling at how cheap, how plastic, and how fake it felt. He preferred the good old days when murder books were blue binders stuffed with papers. The future was condensing things. Part of him missed the physical weight of the paper trail.
“I’m retired,” he said, “which means I don’t have to write up a report. Leave that to you and Gawain. But I will add to the case file my notes and whatnot. Though I have to tell you, I think this murder book will become a suicide file in no time.”
“Do you think the Rosicrucians are involved? Do you thin
k they’re evil?”
“Like any other mystery school, there are students of light and dark roaming its halls. But they’re involved, all right. After seeing the diagrams in that book, I realized something. I think Mr. Francis did this to himself—as a form of ritual suicide. I think he was trying to summon that other weird person-thing through the opposite side of the mirror. Maybe the Golden Rose Croix Order of Oriphiel put him up to it.”
Denis trembled slightly. “That’s a freaky thought. Gawain has it in her mind that this was the first in a long line of future murders—the birth of a serial killer, in other words. She thinks it’s someone who knows Mr. Francis, was friends with him. She’s waiting on fingerprint results now. I was on the same page with her but I’m starting to wonder. And what we just experienced—man!” He whistled, as if to dismiss his fear.
“Get some sleep and call me tonight. I’ll give your copy of the murder book back to you when I see you. Hopefully I’ll have updated a thing or two.”
Denis got to his feet. “Thanks, Carl. I owe you one.” He spun around and then hesitated before returning into the apartment. “It’s funny, I’m almost too spooked to go back in there.”
“Come on, if you can square off against deranged killers, wife batterers, and out-of-control methheads, you can handle this.”
“I suppose you’re right.” He hung his head. “See you later, Carl. You’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be all right.”
Then he vanished through the doorway.
***
It took several minutes, but Carl finally managed to put his tired bones in motion. His body felt like a giant wet blanket, and he knew it was because of the alcohol. Been a long time since he’d gotten drunk. Would be a long time before he did again, too.
He stepped into Adam Francis’s apartment and slid the sliding glass door shut behind him.
The inside rang with silence. The furniture seemed to watch him, to follow his movements across the living room, back down the hallway. Carl plunged ahead, ignoring his internal fear. He was an old hand when it came to that emotion. If nothing else, fear served to sharpen his mind, to block out distraction.
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