Feast of Shadows, #1

by Rick Wayne

  He brought the image and tossed it on my desk. We sat and looked at them side by side. It sure looked like the same guy. Same bald head. Same awkward posture. Same kinda coat.

  “I know I just got the riot act,” I said, “but how about giving me a coupla days?”

  “Do I have a choice?” he asked, far calmer than he had reason to be.

  “You could turn me in.”

  We both glanced up to Miller’s office. Her door was closed.

  “Divide and conquer?” I suggested. “You talk to the employees at my vic’s place of work, see if any of them recognize this guy.” That was straight-up detective work, good for him.

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Just give me a couple days. Thirty-six hours at least. If I let you down, we go to Miller and lay everything on the table and I’m outta your hair. What’s left of it, anyway.” I looked at his block head.

  He snorted.

  “Deal?”

  He thought for a moment. He looked at the pictures. He looked at me.

  “Only cuz it’s you.”

  I want everyone to behave themselves,” Anson warned from behind the counter.

  His white Amish beard quivered when he spoke. He looked to be pushing 90. He breathed through his mouth and stared worriedly over the rim of his glasses at the three of us in his shop. There were two men at the register. Anson had wrapped something for them in gray paper, like blank newsprint—a book or a box of some kind. The one on the left took it without taking his eyes from me.

  “Is this a real Mexican standoff?” I let the door close behind me. “Or are we just measuring dicks?” I stood in the center of the room, between the neat bookshelves.

  The Barrows was always so tidy. And there was always a slight floral scent hanging over the must and vanilla of old books. I didn’t know the two men glaring at me, but I knew the look: hollow behind the eyes, like a long hall with no doors. Zombies. In the old sense, that is. Men whose souls had been taken and sealed in urns. Living slaves. Granny’s boys. Word on the street was she picked that trick up from a Haitian voodoo priestess who ran the rackets before her.

  The soulless goons walked toward the door, one passing on either side of me. I got my weekly quota of menacing glances. But that was it. The door closed behind them with a jingle and Anson and I were alone.

  “Is it Tuesday again?” he asked. “Already?”

  “You know, you’re in an odd business for a man who hates people.”

  “Not at all. Running this shop is an act of mercy for all mankind.”

  “Bookselling?”

  “Indeed. Books are the only thing that can possibly cure them. Now, what utter calamity brought you to my door?”

  There was a fountain pen, an inkwell, and an old pad of paper on the counter, and he started putting them away underneath. I couldn’t tell if he was just being tidy or if he didn’t want me to see any hint of what he’d just sold Granny Tuesday.

  “Does it have anything to do with the capture of a certain ghoul?” he asked.

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “I have a store full of books, Detective. Not all of them relate the past. So how did you manage it? From what I heard, it was speaking Aramaic. Couldn’t have been easy.”

  I held up the talisman and he leaned his head back to see it through his glasses, which had slipped to the end of his nose.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “From a dead man. He was strangled by it. Those carvings mean anything to you?”

  He leaned in. “Arabic, most likely. Difficult to tell. They’re quite worn.”

  “Then how do you know it’s Arabic?”

  I wrapped the chain around my wrist.

  “Once upon a time,” he began in a mocking tone, as if I were a small child and this was story time, “the Arab world was overrun with evil spirits from Central Asia fleeing the Taoist sorcerers. Jinn, they called them. Out of necessity, their alchemists became experts at crafting wards and prisons. Where do you think the tale of Aladdin and the lamp comes from?” He looked around the shop with a scowl. “There’s a book around here somewhere with the original story. Quite a bit darker. I believe Aladdin gets trapped in the lamp at the end and spends eternity as a kind of sexual toy.”

  “Sexual?” I asked, as if to question whether that were a genuinely relevant detail.

  He looked at the pendulum clock behind him. “Indeed. It seems that now is my lunchtime. The shop is closed. Thank you. Good day.”

  “Since you know so many things,” I went on, “maybe you could identify someone for me.”

  “Identify? I don’t know anyone who could possibly need identifying.”

  I had the printouts folded in my jacket pocket. I took them out and laid them flat on the counter.

  “I told you—” He stopped.

  He fixed his glasses higher up his nose and tilted his head to look down longways at the top paper. His expression dropped like a rock.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  He stared blankly. He pulled off his glasses and let his hands fall to his side.

  “What is it?”

  “I’d heard the rumors but . . .” He raised his bushy eyebrows like he’d just learned the stock market had crashed and he’d lost all his savings.

  “You know him then?”

  “No,” he said, pushing the papers back toward me.

  “Jesus, Anson, I’m not asking you to introduce me. All I need is a name.”

  “It wouldn’t mean anything to you and I wouldn’t be doing you any favors by speaking it.”

  “Cut the crap.”

  “Or what?” he asked indignantly. “You’ll lock me in a totem?”

  “As it happens, I’m out of totems. But I might mention to a few folks on the street that you sold me this talisman.”

  He studied me. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “If you’re gonna be a dick, I got no problems being a dick back. Whaddya think Granny will say when she finds out? Think she’ll make a personal trip out here? Maybe demand to see what else you got in the vault under the store?”

  He smacked his shriveled lips loosely like he had a bad taste in his mouth.

  “Didn’t think I knew about that, did ya?”

  “Joke all you like. You don’t know enough even to appreciate the gravity of your question, Detective.”

  “Looks like I came to the right place, then.”

  He put his hands on the antique oak counter. “This is a book shop. Not a help desk.” He pointed to the sign high on the wall behind him:

  THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY

  “I’d recommend Massius Crane’s seven-volume history,” he said. “At the end, you might begin to have some faint appreciation for just how immense a question—”

  “Fine,” I said, turning to leave. “Whatever. Say hi to Granny for me.”

  I’d made it halfway to the door.

  “Wait.”

  I turned.

  He had a very slight sneer of disgust. “You’re a devil whose name escapes me.”

  I waited.

  He moved his lips again like he had the same bad taste in his mouth. Then he walked around the counter and to the front, where he locked the door and hung the CLOSED sign. He stepped to the glass-encased bookshelf against the left wall, lifted the keys from his belt, and unlocked it. I watched him remove a large text from a set, the second in a series of seven oversized volumes with old-style cloth binding. The spines all had the title, The Reign of The Masters, printed in metallic gold letters over the name of the author, Massius Crane. The final volume was quite a bit thinner than the others, as if unexpectedly short.

  “When they showed up, in secret,” he said, “on a small island in the Adriatic, they would have been wearing heavy robes and John Knox caps. The local workers who lit their path with torches would have been told not to speak of their arrival, upon pain of death.”

  Anson brought the tall book to the counter and flipped through the p
ages slowly. “Mr. Crane suspects their aims were modest—at first. Just as Jesus did not set out to establish the Roman Catholic Church, neither did the five old men who wandered up the rocks that day seek to change the world. They were merely answering the call of the most powerful monarch in Europe at the time, Philip IV of France. The so-called Iron King.”

  “Iron?”

  “Philip had just executed the last members of what had once been the preeminent military force across the Mediterranean world, and a threat to him: the Knights Templar. The king’s men immediately descended on the Templars’ secret fortress, hidden on that small island, and emptied the treasury, but they were Christian men with Christian spirits and what they found in the lower crypts both perplexed and terrified them, and none dared enter.

  “So The Iron King sent for the wisest men from across Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Nine men. One refused due to ill health, two perished en route, and one turned back when he heard news of their deaths, which he took to be an ill omen. So it was that only five stepped from the rowboat that took them ashore, where the illiterate Italian peasants who greeted them felt obliged to show respect to their superiors, as was the custom of the day. But since they hadn’t been told a proper title, it all being a terrible secret, the peasants referred to the men with the simple honorific of their language, i maestri.”

  He spun the book and pointed to a black-and-white illustration, like something from the Victorian era. It was a grand stone chamber. Great columns ran along the sides and held up the heavy roof, all but a shadow overhead. At the end was an impressive stone edifice, like a freakishly tall judge’s bench, behind which sat seven robed elders, the one at the center a little higher than the others. Above them on the back wall, an eye-shaped cavity had been cut into the otherwise smooth stone. Inside it, just a bit off center, a giant crystal radiated spearlike shards in all directions.

  “What’s that?” I pointed to the top of the image.

  “The source of their power. The Great Eye, forged at the dawn of civilization, two and a half millennia before Christ, by the high priests of Sumer for their lord, Annemundu, the first god-emperor in history.”

  I looked closer. “What are these rays coming out?” I traced a finger along one.

  “The Eye is—or rather was—a seeing stone, a great crystal whose gaze pierced all.”

  “What do you mean was?”

  “Annemundu used it to discover and destroy all who plotted against him—or even maligned his name in secret. He despised deliberation and enforced a uniform order, a perfect orthodoxy without argument or dissent, where everyone agreed on everything. He called it peace, for there were none left to oppose him.

  “Stone carvings from the era suggest that Annemundu’s rule was lengthy and absolute, but that in the end, he died, as all men do. Mr. Crane believes that the Eye was smuggled out of Mesopotamia by wealthy families close to the emperor who feared another despot. Some say it was buried in the deep desert and that the men who buried it were buried themselves. But no one really knows. All we know is that it disappeared from history—completely—for the better part of three thousand years, until, in the thirteenth century, it was discovered in the Templars’ crypts. They seem to have stumbled upon its hidden resting place while on holy crusade and taken it as plunder without realizing its purpose or power.

  “It was the five maestri, diligently cataloging all the treasures—and terrors—the knights had accumulated over two centuries of conquest in the Holy Land, who finally saw the truth. Whether they feared what the Iron King would do with it, or whether they succumbed to its lure themselves—perhaps both—The Masters, as they were called, soon betrayed their lord. They sent false reports and provided him trinkets and stale relics in place of the mystic hoard they alone now possessed.

  “The five forged a brotherhood pledged to protect that hoard from all who would abuse it. And so they did. But . . . as generations passed, their successors grew increasingly restless with mere custodianship. They had learned much from its contents, that’s for sure. At some point, they began modestly referring to themselves as the High Arcane. Soon after, they took to using the Eye. Rarely at first, but with increasing rapacity.

  “By the seventeenth century, some four hundred years later, five elders had swelled to seven and included representatives from all the major civilizations on the earth, from the Far East to the New World. Any man who sought power on any continent—not political office, mind you, but real power—had first to earn their favor. The politicians of this world are, or were rather, princes only. The kings had no name. It’s no accident that the men who built the modern world were all members of secret societies steeped in the occult. As a matter of record, many of the Founding Fathers of this very country were inducted into the secret order of the Masons, pledged vassals of i maestri. Those who resisted, or simply opted out—the remaining woodfolk, the night maidens, the free practitioners of wildcraft—were labeled witches and burned alive.” He looked to me for a reaction.

  “Why?” I scowled. “Power?”

  “We all want what we don’t have,” Anson explained. “The Masters had power. What they wanted was order.”

  He closed the book and retrieved another from the shelf, a later volume in the same series. He flipped to another page. “Here.”

  It was like a scene from an old epic, the Iliad or the Ramayana or something. I saw an army of men carrying round shields and snub swords, a line of archers, flying monsters, an army of skeletons erupting from the earth, a giant bull raging through the clouds, a mounted king, a lightning bolt from the sky striking a giant three-tailed scorpion, a magic hammer, a blind priestess, a bearded wizard and his seven acolytes, and on and on, all locked in a great conflagration that filled a long swooping valley from mountain to mountain, while at the peaks, standing rings of fire—one white, one black.

  “The world as it was in the beginning,” he said as I studied the page. “You think it’s an accident that every ancient civilization, from the Greeks to the Japanese, told stories of ghosts and monsters and great heroes with magic spears? How do you think Alexander conquered the world? Or Genghis Khan? With the stirrup and a handful of sweaty barbarians? Magic is power. Real power. Over the self above all. It is a way to touch the divine, for whom magic is blood, to participate in something higher, something real, ineffable, transcendent.

  “And The Masters took it all. They used the Eye to discover objects of power, then sent their agents to collect. In place of magic, they gave mankind the Machine. Machines are predictable, you see. They can be controlled—measured and changed. But magicks defy periodicity. They’re immeasurable, uncontrollable. And accessible. Remember, Merlin was a peasant boy, and he crowned a king.”

  “So what happened?”

  “For a long time it seemed as though the High Arcane would rule forever. Until . . . in the aftermath of the war, driven by greed, men penetrated the last soft places of the world. Out of the clear-cut jungle—out of nowhere—a young man appeared, half naked, with ocher skin and eyes painted in blue dye, born of a people spared the ravages of history. A man who could make magic. Not the repetition of some crusty old spell, mind you. Real magic. New magic.”

  He slid the creased computer printout over the book.

  I looked at it, at the face hidden by a tree. “So . . . this guy’s a wizard?”

  “NO!” Anson slapped the counter. “Have you been listening? He’s not a wizard! He doesn’t build flying contraptions and anoint lusty fools with magic swords. He’s a shamanic sorcerer! A world-walker. A true agent of chaos. The very last, in fact. Which is why everyone has been happy to leave him locked away in his sanctum all these years.”

  I squinted at the photo. “Then why come out now?”

  Anson simply shook his head. “I’m sure I wouldn’t want to know.”

  “Someone does. Come on, Anson. Everybody’s got friends. Or at least enemies.”

  He made a face like he was going to object. Then he stoppe
d himself. He thought for a moment. He seemed confused. Then he looked at me gravely.

  “There is someone,” he said, “who might be able to help you.”

  Now he seemed genuinely pleased with himself, like the was the cleverest man in the world.

  “Oh?”

  “Oh, yes. You’ve already met her, in fact.” He nodded toward the front door. “And she’s a big fan.”

  I scowled. “Fuck . . .”

  “Yes.” He nodded solemnly. “See? Tuesday.”

  Lunch at the bistro, out in the hip part of Brooklyn, set me back a nice chunk of cash. Craziest menu I’ve ever seen, too. Shit like smoked quail eggs in cubes of maple gelatin speckled in elk bacon. Or fondue of pig’s blood reduction—whatever the fuck that is—served with maize fritters. Or a test tube set of chilled teas, arranged from light green to dark brown and filled with tapioca balls, each injected with a different essence: cinnamon, bergamot, chiles, lemongrass, etc. Bite down and the flavor erupts and mixes with the tea. But my favorite was the charcuterie plate—had to look that word up—with sausage “caramels” and this sweet, taffy-like cheese you have to cut with scissors and chew really slow. If you bit hard, it damn near cracked your teeth.

  The place was packed. And there were a ton of reviews on all the restaurant apps, everything from “Best meal I’ve ever had” to “A complete travesty of cuisine.” The Department of Health apparently shut him down over the summer. He had to go to court and everything, and for a while, there was some question of whether he’d reopen. But he did and was all the busier for it. Dude is like a magnet for controversy.

  I’d hoped to get a look at him while I was there, but he never showed. Everything’s made by his assistants, the ones in the dark bandannas and matching smocks. From what I read online, that’s usually how it is. Anson was right. The man was a recluse. No fancy black-and-white head shot on his website, no press releases, no interview in Gourmand magazine. Reams have been printed on his cooking, but everything there is to know about the man behind it could fit typed and double-spaced on a single sheet of paper.