The Ninth Circle

by Alex Bell

  ‘What?’ I said blankly.

  ‘A spaceship. If you’ve got one then perhaps we could pack some Kendal Mint Cake, go to another galaxy and leave the angels to squabble over this one. What do you think?’

  I scowled my annoyance at him, irritated that he was mocking me at such a time. ‘What were you doing on Margaret’s Island?’ I asked.

  ‘I could not sleep either,’ Stephomi said lightly, turning back in his chair.

  The metro stations re-opened for the day at 4:30 a.m. so I was able to get one of the underground trains back to my apartment, stopping to pick up the morning paper from an early vendor outside. I’d had less than three hours’ sleep but I didn’t feel tired as I let myself into my dark apartment.

  I was not at all happy about what I had learned from Stephomi that night. The burning man that I had thought a product of my imagination was, in fact, real. And tonight he had tried to kill the one friend I had in the world - if I could continue to call Stephomi a friend, for he had been less than truthful with me from the very beginning. But I was not afraid of angels or devils, for I had nothing they’d be able to take from me. Except my memories, I suppose . . . but that is why I have this journal.

  What Stephomi had said about Keats disturbed me greatly. I don’t know why I found the idea so intolerable. Perhaps because I respected Keats for his ability to recognise beauty; an ability that allowed him to see something beautiful, something of value, in misery itself. But to associate any kind of beauty with Hell disgusted me beyond words, and it seemed the most dreadful contradiction that Keats could have seen such a thing. For Stephomi was right. I found the poem the next day in one of the collections on my shelves. Keats did indeed dream of visiting the Second Circle after time spent reading about it in the fifth canto of Dante’s Divina Commedia. The Second Circle: where the lustful are punished for their sins by being blown and driven about by fierce eternal winds of misery.

  I was reminded forcibly of Giuseppe Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata and his claim that it was a poor reflection of the beauty the Devil had been able to wring from the violin in his dream, for Keats too maintained that the inspired poem really was no comparison to the delight of the dream itself. Nothing but a pale reflection of the beauty the Devil had brought with him to the sleeping minds of artistic geniuses. . .

  I don’t know why the poem upsets me so much. It’s true that Keats described the dream as one of the most ‘delightful enjoyments’ of his life, and expressed the desire to return there every night . . . Every night, oh God, the grotesqueness of such a desire! At the end of Canto IV, Dante himself faints (the only occasion he does so during his whole journey through the Circles) out of horror and fear at the things he sees within the Second Circle. That anyone, much less a poet of the most astounding ability, would wish to visit this place . . . I can’t think about it, for it disturbs me too greatly and I feel that there must have been something, after all, quite flawed and twisted within Keats’ soul.

  But all this nonsense about angels fighting each other . . . that can’t be right. Surely Stephomi isn’t still lying to me? Am I being paranoid now? Truth be told, I think I am predisposed towards paranoia. But as the saying goes, even the paranoid man has enemies.

  I did not like the idea that a demon had invaded my home and my dreams. Stephomi had said that dreams themselves were a place of the In Between, neither truly one reality nor the other, a merging of the possible and the impossible. And I had seen the demon in mirrors too, I remembered. I had seen him and the mystery woman in the mirror of the bathroom, both of them in flames . . . I started, appalled as I thought back on it. At the time I had dismissed it as a semi-waking dream, a nightmare, a hallucination. But now . . . I realised what this must mean. The woman, the lost woman of Budapest had indeed been found. By a devil! A devil who had taken her straight to Hell! Fuck!

  Horrified, I picked up the telephone and dialled Stephomi’s number, very much relieved when he answered. I proceeded to tell him what I had surmised. And then noticed that he was very quiet on the other end of the phone and another truth burst savagely into my mind. ‘You already know, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Gabriel, I know. I’ve seen her too.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  Stephomi sighed down the phone. ‘We can do nothing, Gabriel. You must get this into your head. You can’t fight angels and devils. It’s not a question of taking kung fu classes - this isn’t Buffy, you know. Look, lost souls have always been rich pickings for hunting demons, that’s just the way it is. Have you seen the morning paper?’

  I replied that I hadn’t had the chance yet.

  ‘Then I suggest you go and look at it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I really must go—’

  ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it and that day I came to see you in the morning at the hotel . . . Your room was a mess and so were you. You’d had a demon in there, hadn’t you?’

  Stephomi hesitated. ‘A demon, yes.’

  ‘Well? What happened? Did you kill it?’

  ‘No, Gabriel, I didn’t kill it,’ he said, patiently. ‘That would have been a very foolish thing to do indeed’

  ‘But . . . why the hell did you have a demon in your hotel room anyway?’ I demanded.

  ‘Look, as I’ve already said, there aren’t many people who can see them. Demons and angels know who we are and I think it unnerves them to have humans who can see into their own worlds. They don’t like it. They preferred it when people like us were burned at the stake. But sometimes they need a human agent here on Earth, and that’s when they come to us.’

  I paused for a moment, a grimace of distaste twisting my mouth. ‘You’ve served the whims of demons?’

  ‘Angels too, Gabriel,’ Stephomi said, an amused tone in his voice. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve done nothing I should be ashamed of.’

  ‘But . . . but, they’re devils! They’ll have ulterior motives!’

  ‘Everyone has those, my friend. Even angels. Anyway, sometimes we mortal men have little choice in the matter. The world belongs to them, really. God gave it to them to squabble and fight over. That’s why everything’s such a mess. Anyway, I really have to go. I suggest you go and read the paper. Page six. And I assure you I had nothing to do with it.’

  Nothing to do with it? Those ominous words still ringing in my ears, I hung up the phone, walked back to the kitchen table, sat down and spread the newspaper out at page six. And then my heart missed a beat and my breath caught in my throat as I looked at the photo and the caption on top of the small article. As I sat and stared, growing more horrified by the moment, there was a soft, slicing sound from just behind me and the page was suddenly covered with splattered drops of blood, blotting and soaking into the page, mixing and swirling with the black ink used to print the dreadful story.

  In horror, I leaped from my chair and whipped round to stare behind me, half expecting to see some devil with a dripping carving knife. But there was nothing. The kitchen was completely deserted. I raised a hand to my face, wondering if a spontaneous nosebleed had caused the newspaper to become spotted with blood. But it wasn’t me who was bleeding. At a loss, I turned back to gaze at the newspaper but, to my astonishment, the page was quite unmarked. There were no longer any swollen beads of blood staining the article. Cautiously, I picked up the paper and ran my hand over the surface. It was bone dry. Once again, I felt that terrible tugging sensation from within - as if laughing, mocking devils were tugging at my sanity, madly determined to have it from me.

  With an effort, I sat back down at the table and re-read the article. The mystery woman now had a name. And she was also now dead. Her body had been found yesterday morning in a seaweed- and barnacle-covered crate left beneath the Holocaust Memorial during the night . . . ‘Neville Chamberlain’s Weeping Willow is weeping still ’ . . .

  When people had noticed the box yesterday, bomb diffusers had been called for in the fear that the box contained explosives. But as soon as the crate had been prised op
en, a mass of water had rushed out and with it, the body of a woman. Her name was Anna Sovànak and she was a scientist working on developing new medicines in Budapest. She had disappeared a few months ago, back in June, while holidaying with her family in Italy. There had simply been no trace of her, not a single clue for the authorities to build a case upon. She had just gone for a walk on the coast after storming out of the villa, having argued with her husband, and had not been seen again. Eventually, it was assumed that she must have decided to go swimming and had been overcome by savage currents that had swept her out to sea.

  The paper confirmed that the water from the crate had indeed been salt water and that the unfortunate woman had most likely been in this crate at the bottom of the ocean since her death, which was estimated to have taken place in June soon after her disappearance. She had died from a precisely applied stab wound to the neck, which would have killed her virtually instantly. Anna Sovànak was from a long line of Jews and, together with the fact that her body had been left beneath the Holocaust Memorial, police had officially concluded that this was a simple anti-Semitism inspired killing. An isolated incident of prejudice and hatred. They were following several leads and were sure to catch those responsible soon . . . very soon . . . How very comforting . . .

  I gazed at the article incredulously for some time. Why would anyone go to the trouble of concealing the body in the Mediterranean, only to bring it up months later and somehow transport it to Hungary, without anybody noticing, to leave it beneath the Holocaust Memorial? How could this even remotely be classed as a straightforward, isolated incident? Were the police utterly incompetent? And what of the journalists? Why was such a story toiling away on page six with no more than three or four paragraphs? Surely this was front-page news? Was I in the middle of some huge conspiracy that everyone else was in on?

  And it was horrifying that she had been dead since June, for I had seen her just last month in Budapest. Was I truly losing my mind? I thought back over it all and realised triumphantly that I was not the only one to have seen her. We had both been attacked by muggers that night . . . But had they seen her or had they just seen a man running through the streets on his own? I had seen men step out behind her. But I had not seen them touch her, or speak to her, or step towards her, or acknowledge her presence in any way. When it was all over, she had been gone, faded softly from the alley like some wandering ghost.

  But, no, there had been one other. The boy at the Basilica. The dying boy, I realised with a sinking heart. The child whose body was disease-ridden, causing his hair to fall out and his skin to turn grey. A pale shadow like me, not even really here. A person of the In Between himself.

  I took her photograph out of my pocket. The photo that had been stitched into the lining of the antique Italian volume of Hell and its devils with the reference to the Holocaust Memorial on its back. And now this Jewish scientist had turned up, stuffed into a box, beneath the Weeping Willow memorial created in memory of all those who had gone before. Had the reference to a weeping willow been a clue? A premonition? A warning? Who was it who was playing these games with me? Who tormented me in such a fashion? Sending me the smallest snippets of information with maddeningly cryptic quotations that could not be unravelled until it was too late.

  I pulled out the second photograph - the one that had been hidden in the case of wine from France; the one that showed Stephomi and me facing each other across the hotel room, the vast, stunning cityscape of Paris spread out through the window behind us. And the quote from Robert Kennedy on the back: ‘Forgive your enemies, but do not forget their names.’. . . Do not forget their names . . . The implication was clear - that Zadkiel Stephomi was an enemy and not to be trusted. That he must be kept at arm’s length and closely watched. But whatever Stephomi was to me, he had been more forthcoming and open than this cursed letter-sender, and in those moments I felt a powerful, unreasoning hatred against that person. That unknown person, out there somewhere, deliberately taunting me, pushing me to the edge of madness itself. God, how I hated them!

  And, whoever they were, they were now here in Budapest. They had pushed the last note under the door with their own hands rather than sending it disguised in the mail. They knew where I lived. They knew that I could read and understand Latin. I took this note out too and lay it on the table beside the photos and the newspaper article to re-read it:

  The gates of Hell are open night and day;

  Smooth the descent and easy is the way.

  And then, added beneath:

  The Ninth Circle will not hide you much longer.

  Yes. Someone was surely trying to drive me insane. The Weeping Willow reference on the back of Anna Sovànak’s picture strongly suggested that this was the same person who had deposited the Jewish woman’s body beneath the Holocaust Memorial. Which meant that I did indeed have a most dangerous enemy: a ruthless and twisted killer; a clever lunatic. But I wouldn’t let him beat me. I’d set a trap for him - catch him like the rat he was.

  I went into Budapest today and purchased a very expensive, top of the range video camera, so tiny as to be hardly noticeable to the casual glance, which I fixed over my doorway. If anybody puts anything else under my door, I will know about it. I will see, once and for all, who is behind these dreadful games.

  I have always been a fervent and devout Christian. I know this because of the worn out, heavily annotated Bible by my bed, but I can also feel my faith burning inside me. I accept God in my soul. I know that the Bible speaks the truth and I need no miracles to persuade me of this. I have always known that angels and demons are real. But I didn’t realise that they were so close to us before.

  The knowledge alarmed me, for Stephomi had said that angels and demons didn’t like us - we few who could see them - but nonetheless, when there was something that they wanted, they might come and ask things of us. I knew that I needed to be protected against such an event. If an angel asked something of me, I knew I would gladly comply; but I vowed that I would not follow in Stephomi’s footsteps and acquiesce to any demonic request that might be put to me - even if the decision cost me my life. I meant it, too. A person has to have something of heroism in them to be prepared to die for what they think is right, don’t they? I can be proud of my convictions. It’s more than Stephomi is willing to do. Not that I can really blame him. I realise that there can’t be many of us who have such an inner selflessness.

  In order to prepare myself, I reluctantly took out my many books on demonology once more and read up on the fallen angels, from the Watchers to Lucifer himself and his seven Princes of Darkness. I read of Beezlebub, so called ‘Lord of the Flies’ because of the insect swarms that lingered around his bloodstained altar. I read of Belphegor - the champion of lust - and Moloch, who demanded the sacrificing of children in his honour. And so the list went on: Mephistopheles, Belial, Samael, Asmodeus, Mastema, Nisroch . . . each demon with their own despicable tale of sin and wickedness. I learned as much about each of them as I could so that I might recognise them if they came to me.

  I studied the repulsive paintings in the antique Italian book, noting with distaste the lunatic expressions on the faces of these demons. But there was one painting in particular that disturbed me more than all the others. It was a picture of Mephistopheles by an unknown artist. The book explained that the painting had been discovered in Italy in the 1500s and the precise age of the picture was difficult to estimate. What so unnerved me about it was the distinct lack of any madness in the demon’s intelligent gaze. His thin, twisted form was undoubtedly that of a demon, but something of the angel hung about him still. The large, bedraggled wings that were curved round him like a bat had not quite lost all their white feathers. He was perched on the edge of a mountain, his feet gripping the boulder like claws as he stared down hungrily at the world spread beneath him.

  It was thought that Lucifer had bitterly missed God and longed horribly for Heaven for many centuries after falling from grace. But not Mephistopheles, who ha
d promptly followed Satan from the Heavenly realms, revelling in his newfound freedom without even the slightest twinge of doubt or regret or uncertainty.

  I thought back to the way Mephisto had so cleverly turned Faust’s thirst for knowledge and self-improvement against him, and felt disgusted by the demon and his methods - to twist something good and admirable in such a way that, in the end, it completely undoes the man who once entertained notions of nobility and integrity.

  I closed the book then and moved on to another, finding of all the demons it was Mephistopheles I feared meeting the most. With the other demons, even Lucifer himself, I felt that as long as I was firm in my adherence to Christianity and Godly values, they would not be able to touch me. But with Mephistopheles, it was those Godly values themselves that turned into weapons in his masterly hands to be used against the helpless men who became so inextricably entwined in his grasp.

  The other thing that disturbed me was the idea that some demons are the ‘dark twins’ of angels. Two brothers on opposite sides of the bloody War. I dislike anything that connects angels with such vile creatures. Of all the angels, I like Michael the best. Head angel after Lucifer’s fall, Michael is often portrayed with sword and armour and is said to have led the heavenly army against the rebel angels and is destined to do so again in the battle that will take place at the end of time. It’s also said that Michael fought Satan for Moses’ body after his death. So I suppose Stephomi was right - angels do fight, after all. With such an infestation of demons, what other choice do they have?