He moved the wand over his torso, focusing it upon his heart. The light thinned into a beam and connected into him, first at his heart, and then as he moved the wand over his body, his groin. He uttered, "Alkuth", his voice a monotone of prayerful song. He touched each shoulder, the beam of light following the end of the wand, igniting it slightly. Now, he could see its formed contour in the gloom: an ankh, softly aglow with the Lord Osiris's light. He held his hands together, keeping the wand tightly secured between his palms. The ankh at the end of the wand grew brighter. Benjamin uttered in monotone, "And here I am, standing at the cross of light that reaches deep into the astral plane where the Lord Osiris resides. Within me shines the five-point star, and with it I beseech Osiris to give the gift of eternal afterlife to the child Bryan Conroy on this, the first year of his birth."
The smoky fire burned brightly, despite a lack of kindling. Benjamin took small, shallow breaths, keeping his gaze upon the glowing beam of light, now wholly absorbed by the ankh at the end of the wand. He realized quite suddenly that he possessed no sense of any time passing, feeling only the stifling heat and thick, hazy smoke. His eyes began to burn, tears sprouting rapidly from his eyes.
The light from the wand fanned out like a spill of water, traveling slowly through the air, over the triangle where the fire still burned. It is time!
"Osiris is coming to bring his gift of afterlife!" he shouted. "Place the baby in the circle. Now." Holding the wand over the fire, Benjamin quickly stepped around to the pointed tip of the triangle and faced his family. Faith removed the blanket from around Bryan and moved forward into the circle. Her face, still framed in the black hood, was a deadly pale, nose running, eyes puffed-out and tearing. Both Elizabeth and Daniel were hunched forward, chests wrenching up and down in quick, shallow spasms. The baby, closer to the biting smoke, began to cough uncontrollably.
Faith placed baby Bryan down into the circle, then staggered back to her position outside its perimeter.
Using the wand, its die-cast end aglow with the heat of the fire, Benjamin stepped back to the forefront of the circle, and traced an ankh shape in the air over Bryan, all the while staring into the mirror.
Through the heaving cries and gags of baby Bryan, Benjamin stated the Conjuration of God, as memorized from the Grimoire of Honorious:
"I, Benjamin Conroy, do evoke thee, O Spirit of the God Osiris, by the living God, by the true God, by the holy and all-ruling God, who created from nothingness the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are therein, in virtue of the most holy sacrament of Jesus Christ, and by the power of this Almighty Son of God, who for us, and our redemption, was crucified, suffered death, and was buried; who rose again on the third day by the power of the spirit of the God Osiris, and is now seated on the right hand of the creator of the world, from whence he will bear consent for Osiris to judge the living and the dead."
Faith, Elizabeth, and Daniel all responded weakly: "Amen."
Benjamin placed the end of the wand back into the fire, then repeated thirteen times, "Before me, Osiris. Before me, Osiris. Before me…"
Upon completion of the summons, the surface of the mirror grew fluid in nature, moving inwardly in a spiral fashion and quickly forming a silver vortex. The vortex grew as large as the entire surface of the mirror, moving vigorously, generating a sound like that of a roaring ocean. Benjamin stared at it for a minute, maybe more. Watching. Listening. As the seconds escalated, it grew darker in nature, the outermost edges turning nearly black, glowing like onyx. In the center, a focal point of golden light formed, growing gradually larger as the vortex became more turbulent.
In Benjamin's mind: Before me, Osiris. Before me, Osiris. He felt his body begin to rise in the air, and yet, when he looked down, he could see that his feet were still touching the ground. He could no longer feel the wand in his hand, but its handle was still tightly clenched in his fist, the steel end glowing redly beneath the sparking flames. The energy of the Divine Providence is with me…I am floating…
He gazed back at the mirror, his eyes immediately glued to the widening pinpoint of light. From within the light, the sound of a ticking grandfather clock surfaced, seemingly muting all the existing sounds in the room: Bryan's persistent wails and coughs, the gags and nervous shuffling of feet behind him.
Benjamin shouted, "Before me, Osiris!"
The expanding pinpoint of golden light at once swallowed up the silver and black vortex, consuming the entire surface of the mirror. Benjamin was immediately blinded. He looked around wildly, then diverted his gaze downward, where he could see baby Bryan shutting his tear-filled eyes against the invasive glow.
Thunder struck harshly overhead, shaking the beams and prevailing over the loud ticking of the clock. Dust and straw blew off the rafters and rained down on the miraculous scene. Pilate was now howling outside.
From within the powerful golden glow, the spirit of the Lord Osiris appeared.
At first the spirit's form was just a shadow, distant but moving forward quickly until it ultimately obstructed much of the light. Once the spirit gathered its true form, it stepped forward, out of the light—out of the astral plane—into the barn, where it stood before the Conroy family in all its spiritual grandeur, framed by a golden aura.
Benjamin let out a sharp, sudden breath, and had to tighten his throat because of the gasp that wanted to come out. He felt terrified—such a menacing figure had never appeared during the four other summoning rituals, those pledging familial afterlife for himself, Faith, Elizabeth, and Daniel. No, in the past Osiris always appeared as a shimmer of light, and a voice! Why is he showing himself now?
Benjamin noticed that the spirit's entrance onto the physical plane had caused all the common environmental elements to be restored: the wind, whistling through the gaps, grabbing the smoke and spreading it throughout the barn; baby Bryan's panic-stricken gags; the hacking coughs of Faith, Elizabeth, and Daniel.
Plus, the heavy pounding of his own heart.
"It is you," Benjamin finally uttered, lips trembling with awe, all the nerves and pathways in his body frozen with fear.
Osiris's emergence was indeed wholly intimidating: he appeared as a tall bearded man, wearing a long black robe of watered silk that nearly touched the ground. He wore a black Egyptian nemyss on his head, with long drifts of dark hair pouring down over his shoulders. Around his neck was a chain that held an ankh-shaped amulet made of gold. He carried a dark rod in his right hand, this too fitted with a golden ankh upon its end. In his left hand was a glowing chalice, a portrait of a bull with a ring through its nose etched onto its surface. Without moving his body, the spirit at once spread out a pair of black feathered wings that appeared almost metallic in nature, their span perhaps ten feet from tip to tip.
The spirit pinned Benjamin with ringed eyes as black as fresh, hot tar, and Benjamin could see his own frightened face reflecting in them. "Perform your deed," the spirit of Osiris said, its voice many octaves lower than any human could possibly utter—to Benjamin, it sounded robotic.
Benjamin pulled the wand out of the fire; sparks flew up like a swarm of flies. Staring at the great black entity before him, he stated: "All-powerful Lord Osiris, who exists amongst the Gods in the astral plane, and governs the Realm of Resurrection and Everlasting Life, we have bestowed upon you the gifts of the earth so that Bryan Conroy may purely and honorably engage your powers of spiritual rebirth for the purpose of ancestral afterlife, with utmost earnestness and commitment."
The spirit stood motionless, then gently nodded, his moving face leaving shadowy trail that faded in seconds.
"Come, my family," Benjamin said. "Faith, Elizabeth, Daniel, join me in furnishing Bryan Conroy with the gift of the afterlife, so that we as a family unit may remain together for all of eternity…so that upon our deaths we may return to our bodies and advance together to the astral plane and exist together in the afterlife as venerated spirits. It is the judgment of Osiris that we hand our fates to."
As Benjamin called their names, each family member stepped into the circle and kneeled down before the bawling baby. They all had sallow faces, smoke-reddened eyes, and rings of soot around their lips. One by one, they grabbed onto the baby's limbs, Faith and Elizabeth holding Bryan's arms, Benjamin and Daniel his legs. The baby fidgeted hysterically beneath their commanding grips, bawling unrestrained, voice thick with phlegm, face green and contorted.
"It is now that I, Benjamin Conroy, conclude this life-long ritual by imparting upon Bryan Conroy the gift of everlasting life."
And then everything happened so fast…but to Benjamin it all seemed to unfold so slowly, like a movie running at quarter-speed. Daniel let go of Bryan, his arms falling away like lifeless tree limbs, slow and stiff. He yelled out, "No!" in a deep voice that was strangely not his, coughing thereafter in a series of uncontrollable fits. He turned his head and gagged up a hunk of ashy bile onto the wood, just beyond the perimeter of the magic circle.
My God, no! Benjamin thought in the next segment of film, as Daniel then leapt back into his place and tried to tear the baby away from his family members. Benjamin jerked his head up and saw that amidst the sudden disruption, the spirit of Osiris had vanished, leaving behind a very mundane looking mirror. No! Using the same hand that still held the wand, Benjamin shoved Daniel aside in a fluster, then raised the fiery end of the wand over the baby…
And in the next segment of slow-moving film, with his arm raised, intent on bringing it down upon Bryan's exposed flesh, the baby, blood-reddened eyes already wide open, looked at his father, pinning him with a gaze that was not that of a naïve and innocent babe, but of a highly intelligent being fully conscious of the act being perpetrated upon him, and that gaze told Benjamin that there would be hell to pay for his transgression, that his beliefs were inane and wholly unfounded, and that he'd been wrong all these years about Osiris having anything to do with Jesus' rise from the grave; that he'd been wrong about Osiris's ability to grant what he coined as ancestral afterlife; that his discovery of the code in the New Testament was unfounded—that the narrative in the bible was mere folklore, handed down over centuries of believers seeking self-serving comfort and orthodoxy, and that how could he be so damn stupid for believing this?
He hesitated, staring through the smokescreen, into Bryan's eyes. His heart sank like a lead weight against his ribs; his mind seemed to melt away, lost of its primary foundation.
He could hear Daniel crying and choking and babbling, "No dad, d-don't hurt the baby…" The boy's eyes were wide and staring, filled with terror, looking not at his father, but through him.
Faith released her grip, and Elizabeth immediately followed, pale faces drawn with consternation, staring up at their head of household.
Benjamin loosened his grip on the wand; its glowing end had begun to fade, its heat breaking up into the early morning air.
He stared at the mirror, at its utter normalcy, and thought of the spirit that had shown itself. Perform your deed…
Benjamin Conroy took a deep lungful of searing hot air, coughed, then brought the fiery hot wand down upon the baby's exposed sternum.
Chapter 12
September 7th, 2005
1:48 PM
The rain continued to pound the windows of the bus, its speed now reduced to the interstate minimum of 45 miles per hour. Thoughts of his mother and father fired back into his mind like shotgun blasts, stirring all of his emotions into a frenzied mess. The environment, muddied from the rain and his tear-filled eyes, took on an unreal look, as transient as a backdrop in some fleeting dream. The bus cut into a passage between a channeled cliff. He stared at the non-descript rock-face and the metal mesh fencing closing out the falling debris, and thought: bad memories may come and go, but what remains definite are the negative emotions that come with them. They stay with us like bad tattoos, and when you think of the events that trigger these emotions, you can see it all playing out frame-by-frame in your head as if they are permanently recorded in your brain.
The butterflies in his stomach that had come along for the ride metamorphosed into writhing worms eating at the tender, acid-coated walls. Tears filled his eyes, and he had to shift his body so no one else in the bus would witness his pain. It didn't have to be this way, he thought.
Or did it? Yesterday I got a letter from a lawyer, and I called him and we spoke for a while. He promised me the fortune of a man whom I'd never heard of before, and when I mentioned this man's name to my mother, she turned ashy-white like flour and nearly passed out—and this time her response wasn't psychosomatic, curable by the pill-of-the-moment, it was for real, and now I'm standing on the edge of a crumbling world just waiting for it to take me down.
It was all beginning to take its toll on him; his heart surged and pulled against his chest; his eyelids struggled to stay open as he watched the muted landscape break apart around the bus. He peered down at his watch and saw that given the weather and the bus's sluggish pace, it would take another three hours to get to Wellfield. Didn't matter, in spite of the delay. He wasn't expected to meet with Andrew Judson until tomorrow morning.
He leaned his head against the rain-streaked glass of the window, closed his eyes and thought of his mother, lying there in her hospital bed, mind drifting toward those mysterious places she'd spent her whole life avoiding. He shivered, wondering if she'd come to assume that he'd in fact left Manhattan for the mystery that awaited in New England. He imagined her with her sallow face pressed down against the thin Tempur-Pedic pillow, eyes glued to the door, waiting for her husband and son to come waltzing in with smiles on their faces and flowers in their hands, revealing to her that it had all been some cruel dream and that everything was going to be all right. And as he drifted off to sleep, he prayed that this wasn't the case, because here in Johnny's world there were no definitive truth-telling dreams. There were only memories, and the dreadful certainty that Mary Petrie would soon be discharged from the hospital, never to see her son or husband again...
September 6th, 2005
9:53 PM
Johnny sat in the hospital waiting room, staring at the cover of the Cosmopolitan magazine in the hand of an attractive woman seated across from him; the teenage girl on the cover had the whitest teeth Johnny had ever seen. There were two other people in the corral of orange vinyl seats, both of them idling around with absolutely nothing to do: an unsmiling elderly man with a herd of pock-marks on his face, and a balding man of about forty reading a Preston and Childs paperback.
A young nurse with a red-striped uniform bustled by, and all those waiting abandoned their mundane pursuits to look up at her in hope that she would take them in to visit with their loved ones. She passed by without incident, and everyone at once went back to their waiting-room routines. Johnny sipped at the stale coffee he’d bought for fifty cents at the cafeteria upon arriving at St Michael's Presbyterian Hospital (despite his initial concerns about Mary's condition, he did get to ride in the ambulance, and that was pretty darn neat), and had killed nearly three hours here, waiting for some word on Mary, keeping his eyes peeled on the main entrance with hope that his father had arrived home to see the note he'd left for him on the kitchen table.
Eventually a nurse did approach the corral (but kept a safe distance, as though those in the waiting-room had also come down with some horrific communicable illness) and called Johnny's name out, "John Petrie?" Johnny stood and followed her as she immediately darted across the lobby without him, the eyes of his waiting-room comrades pinned to him as he disappeared though a pair of swinging doors adorned with big red letters that said Inpatient.
"You are Mrs. Petrie's son?" she asked as he caught up with her. She was young and attractive, with shoulder-length blond hair and rather large breasts pushing out against her uniform. All his life, Mary had vehemently instilled upon Johnny the evils of sex, and how the strong arm of God would punish him should his mind stray from a life of wholesome decency, and he'd always done his damnedest to avoid lascivious
thoughts such as this. But now…he felt unexpectedly liberated of his mother's authoritative command. Feeling attracted to a woman—a woman as pretty as this—seemed more natural than dirty, and unquestionably sanctioned by whatever higher authority might be looking down upon him at the moment.
Eyes still on her breasts (her name tag said "Melanie"), he nodded. "Yes, I am."
Melanie was holding a clipboard with a number of papers attached to it. She lifted the first sheet, and read aloud, "Your mother seems to be fine. All the preliminary exams have been completed, blood tests, MRI's, nothing wrong was detected. No heart-attack, no stroke. Off course she'll remain on bedrest for a few days, which will give us enough time to find out what actually happened to her."
Johnny didn't know what to make of the news. Had he caused his mother some odd mental breakdown? Or, was it something altogether physical that had been lingering at the threshold, waiting for something to kick down the door? They turned left and went down another hall lined with glossy wooden doors that opened up into a large reception area with about eight nurses and doctors milling about, shuffling papers and gazing at computer screens. Down the hall, inside one of the rooms, Johnny heard a woman sobbing lightly; the sound of a television emerged from another: someone was watching the Ten O'clock News. An ceaseless intermittent beeping filled the room.
"Your mother is in room 107. Down the hall on your left."
"Thank you," Johnny said, watching Melanie as she scooted away at the request of another nurse seeking assistance behind the reception area. He paced slowly down the hall, to room 107. He peeked inside and saw his mother's bare feet jutting out from behind a cloth partition. He entered the room, circled around the partition, and stood at the foot of the bed.
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