I went to the desk and rifled its drawers, came up cold. I turned to stare at the bookshelves. They must have held hundreds of volumes. I crossed to one, lifting its glass front.
Inside was a miniature of Harold Vertigan’s library. Elizabethan ephemera, plays, and broadsheets devoted to the rise and fall of Dr. Lambe, rumored to be a sorcerer. An early English translation of The Hammer of the Witches. I ran my fingers across their spines, pulling out books and pamphlets as I searched for The Book of Lamps and Banners. Nothing.
I turned to the other bookcase. A black-and-white poster had been taped to the front glass, obscuring whatever was behind it. Not a poster: a black-and-white digital negative image, scanned into a computer and painstakingly manipulated, the file printed on high-grade white transparency film. An intricate and time-consuming process, almost as much so as its analog equivalent; something that only artists with serious money can afford to do now.
It was a night shot of a human rib cage, on a shoreline that I recognized as the one by Solstrålens Stugby. The rib cage looked as though it had just washed up. The bone arches glistened as though they’d been dipped in silver, dark strands of kelp wrapped around them like hair. The photo had the texture and tonal range that you’d find in the best analog shot, a breathtaking array of gray tones, a black so deep you could fall into it and drown.
I drew closer, mesmerized, The Book of Lamps and Banners momentarily forgotten. How had Birdhouse gotten that shot? I knew it was his: I recognized the eye behind the viewfinder, the stance of the man who held the camera: the way he’d angled himself to capture a sea darker than that endless expanse of sky. No stars, no moon. Black ribbons of seaweed woven in and out of the rib cage.
It was only when I got closer that I saw that the black ribbons weren’t seaweed. They really were hair, long and tangled, attached to what looked like a piece of black shoe leather.
A thump echoed from somewhere above me. I froze. When no one appeared, I stepped silently into the living room—another paean to Scandinavian modern, with a black leather sofa covered with gray and white sheepskins. There were more photographic prints on the walls, all of them framed, all of them Gwilym Birdhouse’s work. Rams’ skulls, cairns. A very young woman, long blond hair veiling her face but not the sun wheel tattooed on her exposed breast.
At the far end of the room, a set of stairs led to the second floor. It all smelled of beeswax and lemon polish, and, faintly, of gingerbread.
I walked to the foot of the steps and gazed up at a landing dark as an attic. I heard no voices or other signs of life. Clutching the mallet, I padded upstairs. I halted a few steps from the top, let my eyes adjust to the shadows, then took the last few steps onto the landing.
In front of me stretched an empty hallway, with a door on each side. Heavy black curtains obscured two windows, allowing slivers of light to escape. Several large frames hung on the walls, but it was too dark to see what they contained. The air smelled of unopened windows and spoiled fruit.
At the end of the hall, Tindra stood beside another closed door, face illuminated by her mobile as she tapped at its screen. As I walked toward her, she glanced up, shielding the mobile with her hand.
“You don’t want to be here,” she whispered, her voice calm. “Go.”
A glance at her mobile proved she was right. Poisonous yellow light escaped from beneath her fingers like gas. Instantly, I was overcome by nausea.
“Don’t,” I gasped.
She slid the mobile into her pocket and slipped into the room.
A few days ago, I might have been capable of fighting off a berserker, or running, but not now. I closed my eyes and pictured Quinn: not the boy I’d obsessed over and lost long ago, but the man I’d found all these years later, wearing his grim history on his scarred skin; as damaged as I had been but somehow able to transcend that, content with the life he eked out from ancient vinyl. Content with me, broken as I was. I’m sorry, baby, I thought, and went after Tindra.
Chapter 68
Inside the room, the scent of damage wasn’t metaphorical but an animal stink of blood and sex and excrement and fear. The room was even darker than the corridor, heavily curtained windows visible only by seams of gray light. The blue eye of a computer monitor winked from a desk.
A large bed took up most of the room. I heard deep breathing, also a gargling snore. At least two people slept here. As I took a step forward, my boot fell on something soft. I kicked at it—a mound of clothing, not a body.
I stiffened as something moved beside me: Tindra, her face a rainbow mask where the light from Ludus Mentis leaked onto it. She crept to the side of the bed and stood there, holding the mobile as though it were a candle. Again I found myself entranced by that malevolent carnival light as I heard an echo of my name.
Cass, Cass…
I wrenched my gaze away, kept my eyes shut until the voice died away. When I opened my eyes, I saw Tindra leaning over the bed. She moved the mobile slowly back and forth, its glow illuminating one of the sleeping figures: Freya.
“Freya,” murmured Tindra, her voice a sleepwalker’s. “Freya, vakna.”
The shadow in the bed stirred, turning so that her arm flopped onto the mattress.
“Freya. Freya, vakna. Titta pa mige.”
Freya’s eyes fluttered open. The light from Ludus Mentis took on a scarlet tinge. “Vad är det?” she asked thickly.
Tindra whispered something I couldn’t hear. Freya bolted upright, flailing at the tangled bedclothes. Her hair hung loosely to her shoulders, and she wore a long shift, sleeveless. In the coruscating light I could clearly see the valknut tattoo and circle of abraded skin I realized must have come from a restraint. The bruises on her arms extended to the base of her throat. Tindra’s implacable calm gave way to pity.
“Du också?” she asked.
Freya nodded, tears spilling down her cheeks. There was terror in her eyes, and pleading. Tindra met her gaze, then turned to me.
“I said you should go.”
I didn’t move. Tindra shrugged and raised her hand higher. The mobile’s glowing screen began to pulse, releasing a cascade of light: crimson, toxic yellow, acid green. I heard a gasp as Freya gazed transfixed at the screen, trying to shade her eyes with one hand.
As though a prism had been shattered, the light exploded into a fountain of sun wheels and tridents, crosses and arrows, numerals and runes and crowns, horned circles and ideograms, hashtags and swastikas: a thousand lost alphabets flowing across Freya’s face like rain over a darkened window. She stared uncomprehending at Tindra, as though she’d awakened from a bad dream to a worse one.
In the bed beside her, the other figure moved. I heard Erik’s voice ask sleepily, “Freya?”
When she didn’t respond, he pushed himself up, crying out in confusion, “Freya, vad fan gör du!”
Freya remained mesmerized as Ludus Mentis scattered symbols like an out-of-control projector. I could no more look away than I could stop breathing: I felt myself sucked into it, too, heard that sibilant voice hissing my name.
Cass. Cass. Cass.
At the edges of my vision flickered my younger self, like a phantom figure captured by CCTV. A car drove up slowly behind her, its headlights joining the galaxy spinning from Tindra’s hand. My boots echoed down the deserted alley, I saw the girl squinting, dazzled by the headlights as a hand reached for her from the car window.
“Cass—look at me, Cass!” a voice urged.
My head snapped back. The hand was Tindra’s, grasping my wrist. My fingers loosened and the mallet I’d been holding hit the floor. I scrambled away, saw Tindra gesture at the mallet, then at Freya.
Erik shouted, struggling to climb from the bed as his wife bent to pick up the mallet. She straightened and with nightmarish slowness turned to her husband. He fell, hitting the floor with a loud thud. I heard him scrabbling to crawl away as Freya stepped closer and one of her bare feet came down on his back, pinning him. She was a big woman, with muscular arms: as s
he grasped the mallet with both hands and lifted it, it seemed insubstantial as a broom. Erik screamed.
“Sluta! Freya, sluta! Jag är ledsen, jag är ledsen…”
Freya raised the mallet higher, iridescent letters and symbols flickering around her like moths. I watched, my horror building as I felt myself falling back into my own loop of terror and helplessness, the dark room now a dark street, Erik’s cries my own as I tried to run. That spectral hand reached for me again, and I saw the knife it held, knew what happened next as it had happened a thousand times before, in dreams and night terrors and the moments before a blackout. The hand was within inches of my face, its blade engraved with letters and symbols that I couldn’t read, that made no sense, that had never been there before.
Light blinded me, incandescent white. The world divided into before and after, with me posed between, seeing it all at once: the barefoot young woman dancing along the Bowery and the ravaged woman observing her from a lifetime away. My footsteps continued to echo through the deserted alley as the car drove up alongside me and a hand extended from its open window. But I no longer felt fear but rage, a pure cold fire that burned through me as I halted, turned toward the car, and, instead of running away, grabbed the hand with the knife.
My fingers closed around a wrist, the knife flashed and spun into the shadows. Someone screamed: not me but Tindra as her mobile flew from her hand. In the dark room Freya grunted, counterpoint to a rhythmic, muffled sound as she lifted and lowered the mallet repeatedly.
Erik’s cries had ceased. The mobile struck the wall and dropped to the ground. Tindra stumbled toward it, but I still had hold of her. I yanked her so she faced me and saw in her eyes terror and fury, anguish and guilt, and the inexorable longing for annihilation and revenge that had consumed her.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
I pushed her away and strode to where the mobile lay screen up. With all my strength I brought my boot down on it, grinding with my heel until I felt the screen shatter. I ignored Tindra’s shrieks, shoving her to the floor as she tried to stop me.
Tindra had said she didn’t need the mobile except as a talisman—from her screams, a talisman she couldn’t bear to lose—but I wasn’t taking any chances. I stomped on the mobile until it went dark and kicked its fragments across the floor. Maybe someone with military-grade forensics at their disposal could trace the data from it, but that wouldn’t be my problem. No one here would be able to use it. Tindra flung herself at me again, screaming in Swedish. I sent her careening against the wall. She dropped to her knees and crouched there as I yanked the door open and stalked into the hall.
Chapter 69
Only minutes had passed since I’d come upstairs. Rage had burned away my fear: I felt as though that pure white light ran through my veins. I pulled the scissors from my pocket, clutching them like a zip knife, checked to make sure the remaining dart was where I could easily grab it. I took a few steps down the hall and stopped.
To either side was a door. Neither betrayed any trace of light or sound. I looked from one to the other, chose the one on my left, and walked inside.
Immediately I was assaulted by a smell. Not the hot fetor of the bedroom but a strong chemical odor like that I’d detected in the shed. I ran a hand across the wall until I found a light switch. I gave my eyes a few seconds to adjust and tightened my hand around the scissors.
There was no one in the room. Black plastic sheeting had been nailed over the windows. Metal shelving held camera equipment and a digital printer, big enough to reproduce photos the size of the one in the studio downstairs. Work lights were clamped to the shelves, aimed toward the far wall.
But this wasn’t a darkroom. There was no sink, no trays for chemical baths, no clothesline to hold drying negs or prints. The shelves were filled with large jars, and for a moment I thought I’d stumbled on a cold room designed to store pickles and jams put up by Freya. I edged closer to the shelves, pulled one of the jars toward me, and almost dropped it.
The jar was filled with human teeth, some still attached to a jawbone. They floated in a cloudy liquid, along with flakes of white particulate. I shoved the jar back onto the shelf, averting my eyes from the others, but not before I glimpsed what looked like a distorted, doll-sized face pressed against the glass.
I turned, the edge of the scissors biting into my palm. Beneath the blacked-out windows was a bed, covered with the same plastic sheeting. A delicate array of white objects was arranged across it—bones, small ones, disarticulated so I couldn’t tell what kind of animal they’d come from. The image of the dead fox popped into my head, disappearing when I saw a human rib cage at the head of the bed, small enough that it could have encircled a basketball, with strands of dark hair woven between the ribs.
I backed away and stepped out into the hall, whirled, and found myself staring at Gwilym Birdhouse. He wore a bathrobe, his hair tousled and face creased from sleep, and held a gun with an almost cartoonishly long barrel, pointed at me. A tranquilizer gun. He raised it, the mouth inches from my right eye.
Before I could move, someone struck me from behind. I heard a pneumatic hiss as I fell, catching myself before I hit the floor.
I looked up and saw Tindra. She stared at Birdhouse with the same fathomless gaze as when she’d first recounted her abuse, her eyes dead-black. Birdhouse looked at her, stunned.
“Tindra?”
She didn’t move. I saw the dart he’d fired embedded in the wall beside her. As Birdhouse took a step backward, I grabbed the dart from my pocket and lunged at him, burying the tip in his neck and squeezing it.
Birdhouse flailed at me, arms pinwheeling. His gaze fixed on Tindra as he gave a hoarse cry and sank to his knees. I watched, ready to kick if he made any move. But he slowly dropped to the floor, as though lowering himself into bed. His eyes never left Tindra. After a minute, his expression relaxed, and he grew still.
Tindra stared at him, walked over, and nudged his face with her foot. From the room at the end of the hall came the same rhythmic sound, like someone pounding a tom-tom. I ran toward the stairs. I didn’t need to see what happened next.
Chapter 70
I raced into the small studio and tore the black-and-white photo of a human rib cage from the bookcase. I began to ransack its shelves, tossing aside self-published tracts on the Zionist conspiracy, eugenics, the occult roots of Nazism, the collected works of Savitri Devi and Julius Evola and Miguel Serrano, books about the Kali Yuga, Asatru, and the Wild Hunt, until the shelves were empty. The Book of Lamps and Banners wasn’t there.
I surveyed the mess, trying desperately to think of where else the book might be. The kitchen? Upstairs? One of the sheds or outbuildings?
I rummaged through the desk again, crawled on the floor to look under the bookcases, tossed the rug aside to see if there was anything beneath. There wasn’t.
I looked at the window. Gold tinged the sky. It was almost sunrise. The infernal drumming from upstairs had ceased. I couldn’t hear Tindra or Birdhouse. I wondered if he was dead.
I returned to the living room, lifting up the striped rugs and Kalkö sheepskins, moving furniture, running my fingers over walls and floorboards in search of some secret panel. Still nothing. I went into the kitchen and flung open cabinets and drawers, the refrigerator, the stove. I had just stepped into the mudroom when I heard someone behind me.
“Don’t bother.”
It was Tindra. She held a clamshell, with a title stamped in gilt letters:
Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, by Joseph Conrad
She opened it and withdrew a book the size of a trade paperback, its fragile, half-bound covers crisscrossed with twine to keep the whole thing from falling apart. A book bound in human skin; a book that left a trail of bodies in its wake.
If it did exist, it would be priceless, because it could change everything, Gryffin had told me, just as Tindra had described her app. Ludus Mentis is going to change everything.
Now she tossed aside
the clamshell and said, “I told you, I knew where he’d put it.”
My shoulders slumped. “What will you do with it? Your mobile’s dead.”
“Mobile?” Her face twisted into a triumphant smile. “I don’t need that mobile—it was just a good luck charm. Maybe you did me a favor, smashing it. Like I told you, the encrypted code’s uploaded into the cloud. All I need is this.”
Her hands tightened around the book as she lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the floor, raptly staring at the cover. I flashed to her on the garage floor back in Brixton, bent over her laptop with Bunny at her side. She looked as she had then, intently focused, yet also younger, a girl perusing a text before a big exam.
She opened the volume and stared at a page, tracing a finger across the lines of indecipherable writing and jewel-tinted images, nodding to herself. She didn’t handle the volume carelessly, but her face held none of the reverence that Harold’s had and displayed none of the wonder I had felt when I touched it. To her, the book wasn’t an advanced philosophical artifact. She was reading it as code. I felt as though something sharp had lodged in my breast.
He that doth professe such dessire as to see the Devvill must seek Him yre and no further.
I went back into the mudroom and picked up my bag. Nestled alongside the photo CD was the missing papyrus leaf.
I found the cigarette lighter and held the page in front of me for one last time, not letting my gaze fall on the seductive images there. I turned it over to stare at the runes I couldn’t read.
Beware, this is power…
I thumbed the lighter and drew a corner of the page to it. A bright thread crept across the papyrus, flickered into a blaze. The papyrus began to curl, sending flecks of black spiraling into the air. Greasy smoke filled the room, releasing a faint scent of incense and scorched hair. For an instant, a ghostly panorama hung before me: towers and trees with eyes, red-capped waves, a sky with two suns. The moon, its craters and dunes as clear as if I gazed at it through a powerful telescope. A world within our own, a world now lost forever.
The Book of Lamps and Banners Page 29