Go ahead, bring it on, Mr. Francis.
He returned to the bedroom. The bookcase still yawned open, the altar and mirror peering forth from the dark. Carl wondered if the officers keeping watch outside had heard anything when the walls shook. Unlikely. If so, they would have come rushing in, guns drawn.
He did another scan, his pulse pounding as he poked into dresser drawers and looked under the bed. In the closet he found several pairs of navy blue pants and two button-down uniform shirts; also a security hat with a badge on the front. Strange robes and cowls were mixed in among Francis’s belongings—even a pristine white apron such as the Freemasons wore. Expensive-looking suits, for which no average low-ranking security guard should have any use. Leather dress shoes, belts, ties. Old issues of Playboy in an empty piece of luggage.
Eventually he gathered up his courage to return into the alcove. The room was silent and dim—creepy, to be sure. Avoiding the serpentine dagger, he picked up the books and placed them under his arm.
It struck him to peek under the purple covering cloth, to see what the altar was really made of. Lifting the corner, he folded the whole thing back and saw it was actually a small wood cabinet wrought from cedar. Tiny rectangular doors with bronze handles beckoned to him.
“Christ...” he muttered, kneeling down. As he did this, he imagined Adam Francis kneeling in the same spot, staring at himself in the mirror and digging at his skin with the long dagger. The image made him cringe.
He opened the cabinet. There was enough light from the windows that he could see more books inside, papers, and something else—something large and formless, in the shadows near the rear. His interest mounted. Setting his books aside, he reached into the dark and withdrew the first stack of papers.
The alcove seemed to reverberate, to hum like an airplane engine, as he went through the items; mostly pamphlets, and all from the same source: the Golden Rose Croix Order of Oriphiel.
Rosicrucians.
His fingers began to sweat as he went through these rather new-looking tracts. They were similar to the note Carl had received at his front door. Clearly they were intended only for official members of the Order, and not for public consumption. Almost like a private newsletter.
The covers showed various temple scenes, pillared entryways, pyramids, and crucifixes. As he flipped through he skimmed the text, recognizing a few occult symbols in the margins. Brief histories of famous occultists and famous scientists; information about the general outlook of modern science and the erroneous conclusions it had drawn about the natural world; a section on astronomy; also a focus on literature, philosophy, and medicine.
One pamphlet highlighted the steps of a neophyte—the Order’s term for an initiate. Rituals seemed to include water, a mirror, a crucifix, candles; some required human blood and strange herbs, even human femurs.
Carl tried to imagine a day in the life of this man, and couldn’t do it. Here was a person who actively engaged in the kinds of practices he had spent most of his life reading (and now writing) about. He experienced a pang of jealousy, but this receded as he recalled the culmination of Mr. Francis’s life. Anything was better than meeting death like that.
He replaced the pamphlets and perused some of the others. Tracts dealing with occultism, a great many focusing on the theory of Darwinism, seemingly hell-bent on refuting it.
He spotted one with Castle Heidelberg on the front.
There’s no getting away from this damned place.
He read through it for several minutes, his attention absorbed. His head started throbbing again and he wished for an aspirin, but instead he lit a fresh cigarette, retrieving the monkey dish from the dresser.
The beginning of the tract concerned itself with the background of the castle, mentioning Frederick V and Princess Elizabeth, as well as Charles de Graimberg (the man who did the engraving of the Hortus Palatinus, upon which the Jacques Fouquières painting was later based) and Salomon de Cause, the garden-architect. But the text quickly segued into the occult significance of the castle:
Castle Heidelberg was geometrically established that Our Spiritual Knowledge streamed through every angle and facet, through its turrets and ramparts, even among the smaller edifices that surround the castle. What is built into every inch of its design-work, thanks to the Mastery of Spiritual Knowledge of de Cause, is a portal to the Higher Spiritual Realms. But it is also a form of prison, a way station between the two planes, a slumbering ground for the future physical bodies of the Archangel Oriphiel.
For the time of Oriphiel is at hand, and Castle Heidelberg now lies in ruin which means the portal-field is unstable. Thus, if Oriphiel can be successfully brought across the threshold into the physical world, so can that divine being easily take up the physical incarnation and walk among Men. And so will the ruination of Man follow, and of the societies He has forged upon this Earth, and a New Age—a Next Age—will follow, in which everything will be undone and made whole again.
Carl whistled. “Son of a bitch.”
He flipped to the end of the pamphlet and was shocked to find more diagrams similar to the one from the Necronomicus book, detailing rituals intended to bring forth the Archangel Oriphiel. All involved using a dodecahedron (which they indicated as the “door”), a mirror (labeled as the “point of entry”), and a ritualistic suicide, using one of their special daggers, done of one’s free will, in the manner of the inverted crucifix of Saint Peter (who was labeled the “martyr”).
The pamphlet decreed that none of the rituals would be successful unless a vividly captured image of Castle Heidelberg was present during the ceremony. Something original from the castle’s time period—for instance, the engraving by Charles de Graimberg—though they admitted such a thing problematic to come by.
These chilling passages concluded the tract:
Once Oriphiel has been released from the way station of Castle Heidelberg it will enter the physical world slowly, arriving first and foremost in dreams and mystical visions, sinking into matter as a stone sinks to the bottom of a lake, until finally it can clothe itself in physical form and enter the influence of World Power, at which time only We, the Golden Rose Croix Order of Oriphiel, shall know its true identity.
Then the Wheels of Change will be set into Motion and the bedrock of the Old Atlantic, where the Old Soil of Atlantis still resides, shall fall asunder and the Old One who dwells slumbering in the Earth, the Herald of the Archangel Oriphiel, will arise to lay waste to everything which is frozen in material form. Then We, the Golden Rose Croix Order of Oriphiel, shall reclaim that which past world eons have prepared for us.
It was all there: everything Mr. Francis had wished to accomplish at the museum.
Carl gently placed the pamphlet on the stack of books, his hands shaking. What he’d just read thrummed in his mind, clouding it. He had experienced exactly what the tract described in last night’s dream when an imposing figure named Oriphiel showed him a vision of New York City being destroyed.
The whole thing made his skin crawl. Yet one last object in the cabinet snared his thoughts and demanded his investigation. It felt like grabbing a hunk of firewood or a tree stump. And when he brought it into the wan sunlight, his entire body rippled with gooseflesh. He’d never seen anything like it.
Swallowing, he turned the object over in his hands. It was wood, a foot-and-a-half of hewn block carved in the shape of a demonic beast. Carl did not need to read the pair of words gouged into the statuette’s base to know what they said.
OLD ONE
The demon squatted upon a pedestal or dais fashioned in a Grecian style, its hind legs bulging with veins and muscles. Although its skin was carved from reddish wood, it nevertheless possessed a greenish tint, as if to characterize the creature as amphibious. Clawed hands and fleshy webbing, like that of a turtle, spanned its underarms.
Its face was oblong and pineapple-shaped, with a wide yawning maw, eyes slitted and hollow, like a great white shark’s. A bouquet of coiled tentacl
es blossomed from its lower jaw, resting slightly against the chest. Should they ever unfurl, the tentacles looked able to reach well past the creature’s feet and even seemed applicable for motion, similar to the legs of a spider, or perhaps for navigating the sea.
Carl set the idol on the altar. He took out his cell phone and captured a few photos, for the sake of remembering. Not that it was necessary. It was the kind of image that haunted your dreams forever.
Satisfied, he replaced everything, including the idol, back in the cabinet. Then he secured the books he planned on taking under his arm and got up, smoking nervously, to take more pictures of the apartment. Then he closed things up and headed out front.
The officer glanced at Carl as he passed, looking like he wanted to say something, but only nodded. Carl could tell he was clueless as to what had gone on inside.
He tromped over the grass, ducking under the cordon, and made his way to the sidewalk. Walking, smoking, staring out at Jamaica Bay, his mind raced. All he could think about was the tentacled demonic idol—the Old One—dragging its foul body out of the ocean.
“Lorraine, I wish you were here,” he said.
Then he shook his head and flicked his cigarette into a trash-stuffed gutter. He passed a bus stop and decided it would be cheaper than hailing a cab. He read Adam Francis’s books while he waited. Shortly, a bus showed up and he left the alien environs of Canarsie, Brooklyn far behind him.
***
Armpitting the books, Carl stepped onto the curb at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and lit a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked on the bus, so now his nerves were killing him.
The New York Public Library loomed up ahead. Its high pillars, arches, and stone steps looked like something out of Ancient Greece. The watching lion statues regarded the passing crowd coolly, as if they might spring to life at any moment.
Carl smoked his Camel down, then buried it in one of the stone urns outside the entrance. Inside, the air-conditioning was a sharp contrast to the humid atmosphere of the City. He felt the sweat cool on his lower back.
He made his way to room 315, the library’s famous Rose Main Reading Room. The broad hall with high ceilings, arching windows, and rows of tables and chairs stretched before him. The hanging chandeliers cast the room in a regal glow. Rows of reference books lined the walls.
Shamballa for any bibliophile.
He settled into one of the tables, smiling to himself. The library was a familiar haunt of his. It might as well have been a second home.
He read, took notes, jotted down ideas, getting up to retrieve books when he needed to do a cross-reference. He made copies of pages from the Francis books that he deemed too valuable not to have in their entirety, including the photos from the Heidelberg pamphlet and diagrams of the Oriphiel ritual.
He kept it up for almost two hours.
When his head felt cloudy and his fingers, marked up by the pen, began to shake, he returned the reference books, satisfied he had gotten enough done for one day, and collected his own books and returned to the main hall.
Grab a quick smoke, then scan all this into the murder book—oops—I mean the case file…
He scoffed as he corrected himself.
There isn’t any murder here. Adam Francis committed suicide for his Rosicrucian ritual.
Now he felt sure of that. And besides, he’d never liked that term: “murder book.” Had to have been something carried over from the West Coast. To him it always sounded like an episode of Dragnet.
He stood in the humid Manhattan air, smoking and staring out toward the city scene. His mind, which had been busy crunching on the Francis case, now turned to Lorraine—as it always did.
He used to come to the Main Library with her all the time back when they were married. He would be working a seemingly unending case, while she perused the shelves and lounged in the leather armchairs, reading up on subjects she enjoyed. She read a lot on alternative teaching, which was her passion. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maria Montessori, the Waldorf educational method of teaching, and scholastic philosophy.
She sometimes wrote little notes to herself and as she passed silently by Carl’s place among the reference tables, where he’d be hard at work, she’d slip the note onto the tabletop and continue walking without speaking.
It was a fun little game they played. But the quotes were always profound and always gave him pause for thought—which is exactly what he needed: a break from the world of whatever case he was working on.
Carl sighed and finished his smoke to go back inside. He missed those little scraps of paper. He missed Lorraine, too.
He made his way to the computer room and plugged Denis’s thumb-drive into the USB slot. He accessed the Francis case file and spent several minutes reading the documents.
It seemed the museum in Heidelberg was still very upset over the disappearance of their painting. Without any evidence as to the means of this theft rumors abounded, including sensationalized reports of US espionage, international art trafficking, and government cover-up.
Luckily the Hortus Palatinus had now been fully documented, dusted for prints, and was on its way to Washington where CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) would take over. It would eventually find its way back to Europe, but the German folks were chomping at the bit. The whole thing was making international news.
He moved on to interview transcripts of employees at the Met—Metropolitan Museum of Art—where Adam Francis had worked. Detective Gawain had also conducted an interview with the curator, Paul Weinberg. He thought it might be a good idea if he talked to Paul again because he was basically the only person with any information on Adam Francis the person. There were no relatives in the City, and he seemingly had no friends.
None that aren’t shrouded in secrecy.
Apparently an aunt lived in Mississippi who, when told of her nephew’s death, remarked that she had not spoken to Adam since his parents died. The report said Mr. Francis’s mother had succumbed to a malignant tumor in 1985, and his father had then committed suicide not three months after; all before Adam Francis’s twentieth birthday. The father had shot himself in the Ohio home where Adam had grown up, leaving a suicide note that said only, “I cannot live in this world without my beloved wife.”
Carl didn’t find it at all strange that both father and son had, potentially, killed themselves. In this line of work, he’d often encountered people whose entire adult lives mimicked their parents’ experience in some way, a phenomenon that was now a basic tenet of psychology.
The last file in the case folder was an account of Detective Gawain’s own thoughts on the possibility of an international symbolist serial killer who struck with Adam and would, eventually, strike again, and how something (but what exactly? she wanted to know) had drawn this killer to Mr. Francis. She urged looking for that singularity, which in turn would lead to the identity of the killer.
But could she be serious? Detective Gawain was young and still green, so a margin of inaccuracy was forgivable. But international serial killer? Carl suspected she’d seen one too many CSI episodes.
He scanned all the pertinent documents from Adam Francis’s secret occult materials and saved them as PDFs. He hadn’t always done it this way; not having a physical case file still felt odd, but he had adapted with the times. He learned most of this stuff while metamorphosing into a writer. He had utilized the old methods throughout his law enforcement career and declined promotion right up to the end.
Because sometimes change is difficult.
On a Word document he wrote several paragraphs detailing his own view of the Rosicrucian ritual suicide, then saved it onto the thumb-drive, disconnected, and found his way to one of the leather armchairs among the bookshelves.
He was just five or six pages into the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz when his eyelids started to droop. Eventually, he dozed.
***
An angelic presence wearing a black business suit, white shirt, and gold cufflinks appears, standing
as one does before a podium, yet at the edge of a sheer, brittle ridge. He smiles, his face beaming, his patch of hair combed to one side.
Carl moves beside him, without feet, without legs, the mere ghost of himself. Endless gray sky and impenetrable layers of cloud hang overhead, as flecks of dim lightning go stab-stab.
The island of Manhattan, the Hudson, and the Sea of Atlantis all lay stretched out below. Buildings look like toys. This is a toy variation of New York City.
“Where are we?” Carl asks.
Oriphiel adjusts his sleeves and waves an arm. “This—all this—shall vanish. It will begin here… as I believe you know… from the bedrock of ancient Atlantean earth that has been plunged to the bottom of the sea, where the Old One slumbers, waits, dreams…”
“For what?
“For me, of course—to be brought out of the soil of Heidelberg and then guided down into the physical world. For me to enter into the political sphere of world power, too.”
Carl swallows hard. “Has that happened?”
The angel chuckles. “It is happening… but the time is not right. Events of this nature must not be rushed. Like fruit, they must ripen, then fall to the earth.”
A moment of silent pause. Carl feels the high mountain breeze moving through him. He is not really here.
“You haven’t left off the Francis case,” the angel says, “and I see in your soul that you have no intention of doing so. Ah, so be it. You are only entangling your own being in the web of fate. You cannot stop the future; you can only make things excruciating for yourself.”
Dreaming In Darkness Page 6