He set a plate of eggs and sausage down beside her. She took a sip of the coffee, hoping it would clear her groggy head. She needed to clarify what was going on here. Had the incense fumes and jet lagged sleep deprivation caused her to hallucinate last night? To twist smoke and shadow into a shape like the one on this drawing of a demonic goddess enswathed in a skirt of eels? Or had she witnessed a manifestation of some kind?
“What are these, Jack? Did you draw them?”
He laughed, sat down, and scratched his scalp through the cascade of black curls that hung over his high brow. “No. I’m not good for anything but engineering diagrams. These are Candy’s. She’s a real artist, which is fortunate because without her, the only documentation we’d have would be my poetic ramblings.”
“Documentation of what?”
“We did a working before she went away. Abdelmalek introduced us to the evocations. Ancient starry wisdom, he calls it. Now, I’ve tried all kinds of magic, had all kinds of revelations, but this was something else. He has a mirror we use to see the visions in. Pitch black obsidian. I would perform the ritual, and Marjorie—Candy—would draw what she saw in the glass. She’s sensitive, a seer. Modern humans don’t have the right kind of primordial vocal cords for the chants to fully manifest the old gods and goddesses, and Kamen says without those harmonics, we’ll never bring them through all the way to our plane, but we could bring them close. Call them up to the surface of the black glass.”
“Were you working with the mirror last night? I heard chanting. Could I see it?”
“Kamen wouldn’t approve. His family is charged with protecting it, a duty he takes very seriously. For him to let us use it at all was…risky. He said he saw raw talent in us that’s been rare among his congregation, so he let us experiment. Under his supervision only. Candy documented a whole pantheon before it got to be too much for her and she took off. First to Europe, then to Mexico.”
“Who was your visitor last night? Another medium?”
“I guess you could say that. Are you gonna eat your eggs? Did they come out all right?”
“Sorry. It’s just fascinating stuff. The food is delicious.” For a while, she ate in silence, studying the drawings. Then she wiped her hands on her napkin and touched the corner of a page. “This is a strange god. What’s his name?” It was the black man in the crown and glasses.
Jack shook his head. “Not a god. Maybe a prophet? I don’t know. That was a problem we ran into. Some of these are easy to identify from Abdelmalek’s grimoires, but others were probably…prophetic glimpses of apocalyptic events in the future. That’s the best theory we have so far, anyway. That’s part of the problem of using a psychic and a mirror. You don’t always get a pure evocation. She might see probabilities that the god is related to instead. Glimpses of the future or past.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
He smiled. “I’m not so sure I do, either. It might even be a blessing in disguise that Candy left. We were relying too much on her vision. Now that we’re using the incense instead of the mirror as a manifesting medium, the entities are possessing the physical body more, so it filters that other stuff out.”
“These images are incredible. Horrible…but also…beautiful. You saw these things?”
“Only through Candy’s eyes. I caught glimpses, but I’m not as sensitive.” He searched Catherine’s eyes. “I bet you’d see all kinds of things.”
“Maybe you should test me. You said Kamen is in Long Beach? He’ll probably be gone all day.” She swept her fingertips over the papers, stirring them like an inky pool from which something might surface. Jack didn’t seem to mind. He watched them roam. The eggs went cold. She plucked a sheet of verse. “What’s all this about the Antichrist?”
“You’re having breakfast with him.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re the son of the devil, Jack?”
“Maybe. My father’s name was Marvel. It’s my name, too. Marvel Whiteside Parsons. But my mother took to calling me John after she divorced him for running around on her. So that’s my real dad. But when I was a boy, I tried to summon the devil.”
“I don’t believe in the devil.”
“Then you aren’t a Christian?”
“My parents are. Did he show up? The devil.”
“If you don’t believe in him, why would you ask that?”
“Because I do believe in the power of the mind.”
“Did you see what we conjured last night?”
Catherine nodded.
“That was more than just the power of the mind. Wouldn’t you say?” He lit a cigarette and waved it over the pile of sketches. “What did you see?”
Catherine tapped the drawing of the eel enswathed goddess. “This. In the smoke around the woman.”
“Her name is Salome. She was channeling the goddess. Shabbat Cycloth.”
“People can see what they want to see in smoke or clouds.”
Jack leaned in. “Ah, but you didn’t know what we were conjuring, did you? How would your subconscious mind know to make eels out of ribbons of smoke? It wouldn’t, unless you know more about all of this than you’re letting on. Do you? You came here and drew the sigil of the goddess’ consort in the sand. What do you know, Catherine?”
She took the cigarette from him and drew a long drag off it, then exhaled the smoke at the ceiling, looking for something atavistic in the plume before it dissipated. “I’m just trying to understand my dreams. Are you trying to scare me away?”
“Why would I do that?”
She handed the cigarette back. “I don’t know. What kind of guy tells a girl he’s the Antichrist over breakfast? Are you trying to convince me you’re evil?”
“Good and evil are for children. I have a dark side; we all do. What I’m against is the repression of that darkness, the oppression of sexuality and personal liberty. The hypocrisy of the Christian epoch. Science was supposed to save us from that slavery. It was supposed to empower us to reach for the stars.” He scoffed. “Look where it’s led us instead. More oppression. A bomb that can wipe out all life on the planet. Hitler and Stalin and their repressive regimes empowered by the iron fist of technology. And now? After the war? The best minds in America too afraid to dream. Too afraid to aspire to anything loftier than security. An age of fear. Well, it’s coming to an end, and I am come to herald its demise. That’s what my pilgrimage in the desert revealed to me. Soon Babalon will be born, ushering in a new age. And through her sacred gate, the gods will spill forth into our world, and the oceans will be the amniotic fluid from which they rise to scream at the sky.”
“Is that why you live on the beach? In a sand castle? Front row seat for the apocalypse?”
Jack laughed. It made him look boyish. “I’m starting to think maybe it is. When I bought the place, I thought I just needed a change of scenery after so many years in the desert. At the time, I hadn’t even heard of the Great Old Ones. But you know how it is: your deep mind knows what you need. That’s what brought you here.”
Catherine took in the rooms around her for the first time in daylight. The house was dustier and more cluttered than she’d noticed at night. On the balcony, she spotted the potted palm she’d hidden behind. Did Abdelmalek tell Jack she’d rummaged through his briefcase? Did he even know?
“I’m not so sure about this dark side of yours, Jack. You welcomed me into your home, offered me a bed and a meal. And maybe you consider me a kindred spirit, but you’ve been very open about your interests, dark as they might seem to some. But I doubt that you have a dark heart.”
He stubbed his cigarette out. “It’s darker than you think, darling. Believe me.”
“Convince me.”
For the first time since she’d made his acquaintance, he seemed to consider his words carefully before speaking. But she didn’t know if he was deliberating what to tell, or how to tell it.
“I cursed my father.”
When she showed no reaction, he went on. “I don’t me
an I called him a no good son-of-a-bitch, I mean I cursed him, like put a hex on him.”
“And did it work?”
“Hell yes. And the damnedest thing is that to this day I don’t even know how I did it. It was that deep mind again, you know? Don’t mistake me; I’m not blaming my subconscious. I must have meant to do it or it wouldn’t have happened. But I didn’t do a proper spell to make it happen.”
“Tell me.”
He ran a hand through his hair and expelled a sigh through pursed lips. Then he played with his pack of cigarettes, contemplated lighting another, and ended up tossing the pack aside. “My mother wouldn’t let him see me when I was a kid, and then I guess he was traveling the world for some years. He was a marksman in the army. Chased Pancho Villa across Mexico, was stationed in the Philippines for a while. Even found time to have another family. Anyway, when I was at Cal Tech, working with the rocketry group, he shows up at my house with this half-brother of mine. Charles. Fourteen-year-old kid. I don’t harbor any resentment toward him. I was with my first wife at the time. So…this man who was never there for me when I needed him shows up at my door and wants to get to know me. Strangest goddamn thing. So, of course, Helen asks him to stay for dinner, and I guess he could see how awkward it was for me because he declined. I don’t even remember what we talked about. I showed him around my laboratory where I was working on the rocket engine prototypes, and eventually, he left with his boy. That was it.
“But what I learned years later is that shortly after that visit, he had a heart attack. The doctors told him he had twenty-four hours to live! But they were wrong. He lived another ten years after that, but he was never the same. He had to be committed to a mental hospital because he felt the shadow of death hanging over him for the rest of his life, always sure it was coming. He suffered a total breakdown—delusions, hallucinations about his soul leaking out of his chest. For ten years.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I saw him one more time, when I was on a business trip to D.C. Visited him at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital. He was a wreck of a man by then. I’m not sure he even knew me, but right after I saw him again, he died. It wasn’t even his heart that got him in the end but meningitis. Weird, huh? I hadn’t even started on a proper study of magic when he showed up at my house in Pasadena back in ’36. But I know… I know something in me triggered that long chain of suffering and clapped it on him like a shackle. Something in my dark heart. Can you believe that?”
Catherine thought about it. His eyes were glassy and distant. She touched his hand on the table. “You know what I can believe, Jack?”
“What?”
“That when you called up the devil as a boy, you were looking for a father.”
10
The Starry Wisdom chapter in Long Beach held their masses in a crumbling stucco building that had been a Pentecostal church until even the fringe branches of Christianity started losing congregants to the new religions sprouting up in the land of the eternal gold rush. Situated near the waterfront, the church could have been abandoned for all of the effort it made to identify the sect it served in 1949. The only sign to the faithful was a small iron emblem—a triangle in a circle—hanging from a nail where the shadow of an absent cross still stained the sunbaked facade.
Whittaker and LeBlanc had slept in shifts in the car, then trailed Kamenwati Abdelmalek’s second-hand Hudson coupe when he left the castle with Salome shortly after daybreak. Abdelmalek had found time to shave, even if he’d slept less than the pair of agents assigned to him. He carried his familiar black briefcase. Salome carried only her purse and a small paper bag.
Whittaker did the driving, hanging back a discrete distance, grateful for the winding coastal road. That the church was the couple’s destination didn’t come as a surprise to the agents—aside from an association with John Whiteside Parsons, religion was the only thing the mathematician and the cleaning lady had in common—though it was odd for congregants to visit this early in the morning. According to the SPEAR dossier on the cult, masses were reserved for midnight. Five minutes after the targets entered the church the agents debated getting out of the car to check the ground floor windows, but before they could make a move, the couple reemerged. The only observable change was that Salome no longer carried the paper bag.
“What do you think?” LeBlanc said. “Incense?”
Whittaker answered with a grunt and put the idling car into gear. “Bet you a deuce the next stop is the oracle.”
LeBlanc checked his watch. “Before noon? The parlor won’t be open.”
Whittaker looked away from the rusty black Hudson long enough to give his partner a pitying look. “It’s always open for Starry Wisdom. You want to put money on it?”
LeBlanc shook his head. “No. You’re right.”
“They head south, it’s the oracle; north it’s her house. I don’t see a third option this time of day.”
“He could take her out for breakfast.”
Whittaker laughed, but LeBlanc was serious. He was always funniest when he was being serious.
“What? Is it out of the question?”
The Hudson stopped at the intersection, then turned left. South. Whittaker pulled away from the curb and followed. “Today’s the day, LeBlanc. I can feel it. Time for the chair.”
Twenty minutes later, they stood in an empty unit of a three-story brick building on Pine Avenue, Whittaker smoking and pacing while LeBlanc held the bell of a stethoscope to the wall. SPEAR rented the room next to Madam Gamal’s Fortune Parlor under the name of a fake accountant. The previous tenant, a dentist, had taken most of his equipment with him when he moved out, but the chair, bolted to the floor, was left behind. The stethoscope didn’t come with the room; that was LeBlanc’s idea. The fortune-teller’s unit was wired for sound, but the microphones only worked when their subjects were talking in what had been the main parlor when the technicians drilled the holes. The old woman changed it up shortly after the installation and now did most of her predicting in a smaller, curtained off space the mics couldn’t reach. Whittaker and LeBlanc were still waiting on a tech to drill new holes, but Madam Gamal had taken to living in the shop full time after breaking off her engagement to the painter she’d been shacking up with. Whittaker wondered if she’d changed which room she gave readings in because her sixth sense told her someone was listening in or just because the convertible bed was in the big room.
LeBlanc shot Whittaker a scolding look and waved him away from the notepad he kept on a music stand. The stand provided enough support for him to scribble notes with one hand while holding the bell of the stethoscope to the wall with the other. And he could move it along the wall with minimal noise and effort while following the sound of a subject’s voice. Whittaker got the message: he was hovering again, distracting LeBlanc. He stopped trying to read the chicken scratch on the pad and wandered into the empty kitchenette. There was nothing in the fridge but a bottle of cola and some Chinese takeout containers from their last visit. He uncapped the cola. Flat as the Southern California station chief’s new secretary. He took a swig anyway and grimaced. LeBlanc appeared in the doorway looking like an intern straight out of med school—stethoscope around his neck, pad in hand, anxiety writ large on his pale face. “She’s wrapping it up,” he said. “They’ll be on the move soon.”
“You get anything?”
“Not much.”
“Told you today’s the day. Let’s nab him in the hall and drag him in here.”
“What about the girl?”
Whittaker produced a pair of black hoods from his jacket pocket, ever at the ready for such occasions. LeBlanc looked at the fistful of black fabric and his face contorted with…what? Horror? Little late in the game for that.
The thin man spluttered. “What…What about Madam Gamal? You grab two of her clients and drag them into the room next door, that’s the end of this. He waved a hand at the empty unit. “We can never use this place again once they know we’re ne
xt door. Are you nuts?”
“Come on, Jeremy. They already know we’re watching them. He has the briefcase on him now and we might not get another shot. The location has served its purpose.”
LeBlanc moved to a black phone on a short, round table.
“What are you doing?” Whittaker was already at the door, listening for voices in the hall.
“I’m calling station. We’re not blowing cover without authorization.”
Whittaker sucked his teeth in disdain, shook his head. “We’re not blowing cover. They’re gonna be hooded. Get your cuffs ready. You take the girl.”
LeBlanc shook his head. “This is not our assignment.”
“The assignment is to collect intelligence!” He lowered his voice. “We need to see what’s in that case and interrogate them about it. Two prime subjects in one place. You’re not gonna get a better opportunity.”
“I disagree.”
“Put the ameche down and get your cuffs out.”
“It’s too soon.”
“We saw a goddamn monster halfway through the veil last night. We need straight dope before it’s too late.”
LeBlanc set the handset back in its cradle.
“I’ll nab them both if you’re not helping, and damn the hoods.”
Whitaker opened the door a crack and set his ear to the gap. LeBlanc took the handcuffs from his jacket pocket. They had practiced the move in drills in an L.A. warehouse. The key was not getting hung up on the hood sweep. If you were doing a solo blackout grab, fiddling with the hood could delay seizing the arms and getting the wrists cuffed behind the target’s back. Every second that the target had free hands was an unacceptable risk. It was better to have two men per target, but with a girl and a bookworm, Whittaker was more worried about LeBlanc fumbling the move than the likelihood of a counter attack.
The fortune-teller’s apartment door creaked open. Pleasantries were exchanged. The door closed and latched. Footsteps on the hall tiles, the clacking of Salome’s heels. Whittaker opened the door. No other tenants or patrons in the corridor. About fifteen paces remained until the targets reached the elevator. He gave LeBlanc’s shoulder a shove to get him moving and fell in step behind, wanting to time his own attack in relation to his partner’s. LeBlanc took one of the hoods and shook it out. One thing you could say for the guy, he moved with a quiet step.
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