by Emby Press
“Vovin,” he said.
“Give me his vestments,” Letifer ordered. She helped Hardknott raise Harold to his feet and pull his robes over his head. “Now take him out of here,” she said as she bundled up the cloth. While Hardknott pulled the stumbling man toward the exit, Letifer took one of the vials of holy water from her bag and poured it onto the circle, smudging the chalk. She used the robes to wipe away the portion of the circle where she had completed the signs. The ritual was broken now. What remained on the floor were simply two incomplete rings.
When she joined Hardknott outside, he looked confused. “I’ve never seen you do that before.”
“The circle would not have protected us. It increased the danger a hundredfold.”
Agnes was waiting for them at the door to the vicarage when they arrived. The house was close to the south side of the church. Like the cemetery, its back garden was slowly falling into the ocean. Agnes did not ask whether Letifer had succeeded. Her face was strained with hearing the voice. But her eyes were pleading with news of some hope.
“I have learned more about the nature of our enemy,” Letifer said after they had brought the shuffling Harold to the bedroom and had him lie down. He was still moving his lips, but with less purpose. He wasn’t speaking any longer, to Letifer’s relief. There might be time yet to stop the full horror from running its course.
“Will you be able to free us?” Agnes asked.
“I intend to,” said Letifer. To Hardknott she said, “There are some materials I shall need.” She wrote them down in a notebook, then tore out the page and handed it to Hardknott. “They are not on hand at my residence.”
His eyebrows shot up as he read the list. “I should say not.”
“But you have the means to acquire them.”
He nodded. “I know a man in Amesbury for some. The rest will be in London.”
“Go now.” When she saw the uncertainty on his face, she said, “I do not do this lightly. There is no choice in the matter.”
He nodded and left.
“What is happening?” Agnes asked softly.
“Before he entered my service,” Letifer said, “Hardknott was far more familiar with Limehouse and Whitechapel than Belgravia. He was… enterprising. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“He has maintained a number of useful contacts.”
Agnes sat down in a worn armchair. The furnishings of the vicarage were simple and showing their age. The house had an air of a flat continuity of history. It had seen many residents, and few had left a mark.
“What do we do now?”
“We wait though the night,” Letifer said. “Cancel Evensong. We stay out of the church. That will not arrest the process that has taken hold of you and your husband.” And some of the congregation, she thought. She wondered how many others were succumbing. She would have to assume that Reverend St John was the most advanced case. “Avoiding the site of the danger will, I believe, slow things down a little. I’m sorry that is small comfort. It is the best we can do until Hardknott returns.”
“I will pray,” say Agnes.
“No,” Letifer snapped. Agnes flinched. “Do not pray. Under any circumstances. Do I make myself clear?”
“But why?” The younger woman turned pale as her last fragile refuge was taken from her.
“You will be making yourself dangerously vulnerable. If you can already hear the voice, you are at a stage where prayer could be fatal.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s better that you don’t, at least for now.”
There was no sleep in the house that night. Letifer paced between living room and bedroom, keeping watch on both her charges. Harold thrashed in semi-conscious delirium. Sometimes he muttered, but he said nothing coherent, and nothing like the word he had spoken in the church. Agnes sat in her chair and stared at the clock. Her fingers beat a rhythm on the arms. It was, Letifer knew, the pulse of the discordant song that was tightening its grip around Agnes’s soul. Having opened herself up to the force’s awareness earlier, Letifer could feel it closing in on her too, now. At the back of her mind, something scratched. It was a crack in all things harmonious, and it would begin to sing for her too unless she put a stop to it.
By the only means possible.
As she paced, she rehearsed the steps she would take the next day. Shut in a warded safe in her Chester Square residence was the Grimoire of Alexander. Its original author was unknown. It had belonged to Pope Alexander VI, and though many speculated the tome had played an important role in maintaining the Borgia pontiff’s hold on power, Letifer doubted that even he had dared used it. She had the sole copy known to exist, and she had read it once. That was enough. It had taken her an entire year to recover. The rites she needed were in its pages. She had not asked Hardknott to retrieve the book for her, though. The simple act of removing it from the safe would be dangerous. And she had no need to refresh her memory. Every word and sigil of the Grimoire had been seared into her brain. She had not forgotten anything of the text. Though she had, over the years, tried.
Hardknott looked troubled when he returned carrying a large carpet bag. “Some of this material…” he began.
“I know,” Letifer said. She spoke softly. Agnes had fallen into a fitful doze. “This is a last resort. I will do everything in my power to ensure we never have to use these methods again. But,” she gave a helpless shrug, “we don’t always have a choice. You know that.”
He did. He gave her the bag and went to fetch the vicar. Agnes opened her eyes as the three were about to head outside. “What shall I do?” she asked.
“Stay here,” said Letifer. “You will know soon enough if we succeed or not. And do not pray.”
Dark clouds had rolled in from the Atlantic, and the air was thick with the threat of storm as Letifer led the way back to the church. When she reached the door, she looked up at the steeple, a cold grey dagger stabbing at darker grey of the sky. The rumble of approaching thunder answered the beat of the waves. Elements were converging. She was running out of time.
“Vovin!” the vicar shrieked as they entered the church.
“What—” Hardknott began.
“Not now,” Letifer hissed. “Hurry. Place him in the transept crossing.”
Harold kept screaming the word as Hardknott laid him on the floor. Letifer opened the carpet bag and paused before its contents. She had never thought to use such tools. She reached in before horror paralyzed her. She drew out a long piece of black chalk. She began a spiral radiating out from the Reverend St John. She continued until she had covered the entire crossing. “Stay near the exit,” she told Hardknott. “Do not come within these lines.” He hesitated for a moment before he obeyed. His pause was understandable. Everything she was doing went contrary to all of his previous experience with her.
She began to write names within the coils. Bael. Agares. Vassago. Names it was dangerous to whisper, and she was scrawling them on a church floor using chalk made from burnt human bone. Eligos. Asmoday. Haagenti. On and on, the aristocracy of Hell. Shax. Balam. Orobas. Every line she drew risked catastrophe. But she kept going, until seventy-two names blackened the flagstones.
Harold began to hum and gibber. He was making a kind of music, but there was no tune to it. Rather, it was the denial of all harmony. Letifer winced in pain, but there was worse to come. She was going to summon the singer.
She removed jars from the bag. She opened them, and threaded the spiral with innocent blood corrupted beyond description. Deep crimson flecked with black clots spattered to the floor. The stench made her eyes water. She was sorry for the errand she had given Hardknott. She hoped she had not done him too great a spiritual injury.
Then she was done, and she stepped back into the nave. She faced the spiral, her eyes locked on the vicar, and began to chant. One after another, she recited the names she had written. “They challenge you,” she said. “Come forth and face them. In all their names, you are compelled.” And then,
in the language she had heard Harold speak, “Geh ivmd!”
It came. The vicar was the soul who was most attuned to the being’s anguish and rage. Called by the sympathy of madness, and by the summons of the spiral, it burst into existence in the air over the stricken man. It arrived with a monstrous fanfare, a sound so twisted from the sublime that the pillars of the church cracked, the windows shattered, and Letifer felt her mouth fill with blood. The being was enormous, its heads almost touching the vault. Its four vast, dark wings beat the air into a storm, and outside, as if in answer, there was the violent crack of thunder and rain poured through the broken windows. From the horror’s shoulders sprouted the heads of a lion, an ox, an eagle and a man. Together they formed their own choir. They snarled, shrieked, chanted and lowed. Their song was unified, and it was an end to unity. It was madness, and Letifer felt all that was real begin to slip from her grasp. She could see nothing but the whirling of black wings and the raging madness of the faces.
Against this being, there could be no defence. There was only an attack. Letifer made it now, speaking words never meant to be uttered by a human being. In the name of the seventy-two demons invoked by the unholy chalk, she shouted the Great Curse of Hell.
The spiral flashed a blinding blood-red. Letifer shrank back from the heat. A coiling wall of flame shot up from the church floor and enveloped the being. Its four heads screamed in unison, cutting off their lethal song. The shriek knocked Letifer to the ground. Her soul cried out to look away, but she did not. She stared at what she had wrought. She faced the full consequences of her act.
The fire vanished, and with it the entity. A few black feathers, as long as a man’s arm, floated to the ground. Outside, the storm raged, but in the church, there was something very like peace for the first time in months.
Letifer knelt beside Harold St John. He was unconscious, but breathing.
Hardknott joined her. He picked up the vicar and they began to walk towards the entrance.
“What was that?” Hardknott whispered.
“A cherub,” said Letifer.
Hardknott stumbled. His mouth hung open in shock.
Letifer continued. “I realized what sort of being we were dealing with when Reverend St John said, ‘Vovin.’ The word means ‘dragon’ in Enochian, the language of angels.”
“Have we just killed an angel?” Hardknott asked. Letifer had never seen him so pale.
“It had gone mad. It had fallen from the heavenly choir. Quite recently, it would appear.”
“What would drive a cherub mad?”
“If we knew, what chance would we have of retaining our own sanity? I think the vicar was very close to learning the answer. Mrs. St John and some members of the congregation would have followed shortly.”
She paused as they reached the door. “The word vovin bothers me. Why dragon? It cannot refer to the usual Adversary. That would not rob an angel of its reason.” She felt that she was brushing close to an answer in the darkness. Then she realized what she was doing, and shook the temptation away. She pushed the doors open.
Outside, Agnes St John stood under the torrential rain. Letifer wondered how long she had been there. Long enough to be drenched, but to judge by the joy on her face, not long enough to have heard anything of the battle in the church. She ran forward now, and Hardknott kneeled so she could embrace her husband.
“The song has ended,” she said to Letifer. She was weeping with relief.
Harold stirred. “Is that you, Agnes?” he asked. He opened his eyes, and they were a blank white.
She kissed him. “Yes, Harold. Can’t you see me?” And after a moment: “Can’t you hear me?”
No. He could not.
Perhaps, Letifer thought, this was a mercy that had befallen him. He would not be troubled by the keening of maddened angels again.
As they made their way back to the vicarage, Letifer looked back once more at the church. Dragon, she thought. And she thought, too, of the physical situation of the church. Of how instead of eternity, it symbolized decay.
The need to know circled back to her, more insidious than any song.
THE VORPAL TOMAHAWK
Joel Jenkins
The tavern was typical of those that sprang up in rail camps laying lines throughout the United States, little more than a high-ceilinged canvas tent with a placard out front, and crates and planks that formed tables and a bar in the corner. The stained walls of the tent could scarcely contain the melange of races and creeds that swelled its confines.
Former slaves elbowed at the bar next to Chinese coolies with wide-brimmed straw hats, which protected them from the harsh Oklahoma sun, and English and Irishmen set aside their age old animosities to share a pint or two of watered ale or shots of poorly brewed whiskey.
Despite the diversity of complexions few of them were comfortable with the two Indian men who inhabited the dim corner of the tent, conversing earnestly over the slats of a table which consisted to two stacked crates and three nailed planks. One of these Indians was dressed in the clothing of a cowboy, complete with a Colt Peacemaker, bearing the insignia of an eagle carved into ivory on the jutting grip. It was only Lone Crow’s reputation as a fearsome gunfighter that kept the bartenders and patrons from ejecting the two of them from the tent, for none of them wanted to taste the lead from his pistol.
The other was dressed in the garb of the Shawnee, red cloth leggings rising from his moccasins, a band of red and yellow feathers around the right sleeve of his blue shirt, and a hoop and pendant hanging from his right ear. He spoke to Crow in the Algonquin language. “I am looking for a man who makes weapons.”
Crow grunted. “Why do you come to me? If you want rifles for your tribe you’ve come to the wrong place. I don’t deal in weapons. You’re of the Shawnee, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” replied the Indian, “but it is not rifles I seek. I wish to find a maker of tomahawks.”
Crow lowered his brow. “Many Indians make tomahawks. Why not go to one of your own tribe?”
“It is the maker of a specific tomahawk, which I seek.” The Shawnee Indian lifted the blue-striped blanket which lay over his left shoulder and pulled loose a tomahawk and laid it on the planks between them. “Do you know who made this tomahawk?”
Crow picked it up and examined the haft which was carved from cherry wood and stained with the juice of its berries so that it took on a reddish hue. Also it was stained with brown blood which had seeped into the grain. The steel blade was notched where it had struck something hard. “I pray to God that this is not the tomahawk I think it is, for that tomahawk should never have been removed from its resting place.”
“It’s resting place?” asked the Shawnee. “Where was that?”
Crow’s face took on a dark cast. “You’re a fool and an imposter, and you have no idea what you’ve unleashed …”
“A fool … unlikely,” replied the Indian. “Now tell me what you know of this tomahawk.”
“Did you think that coming to me in the guise of an Indian would make me more kindly disposed to divulging secrets which only a few treading upon this earth are privy?” asked Crow, his voice growing harsh. “You are no Shawnee, nor are you even an Indian.”
The imposter was not yet ready to give up the charade. “Tell me why you think I am not what I claim, Lone Crow.”
“The Shawnee split the lobe of their ears and you were not committed enough to your part to slice your own flesh,” said Crow.
“Very good,” said the brave. “What else?”
“You speak Algonquian admirably well. Like a native … but like a native of the Kickapoo Tribe, not a native of the Shawnee.”
“So my dialect was inaccurate,” said the brave. “Is there any other error that you might have detected?”
“Your skin is the correct hue, but I can see spatters of dye upon the sleeves of your shirt. Now tell me who you really are and why you were fool enough to remove this tomahawk from the place you found it!”
; The brave abandoned his efforts at speaking Algonquian and spoke in English heavy with a British accent. “My name is Sherlock Holmes, and you, Lone Crow, are a murderer, for I found this axe in the heart of a dismembered Lord Kinsey of Cornwall, buried thirteen feet deep beneath a pile of seven stones.”
“He was buried deep for a reason,” spat Crow. “So that no well-meaning English grave robbers might loose the horror again.”
“You made a grave error in leaving the murder weapon behind,” said Holmes, “for it was that which gave me the clues I needed to track you down.”
“It was no error,” said Crow. “Steel in that creature’s heart was the only thing keeping it in its grave. With the steel removed, the limbs will rejoin the body and people will die.”
“Balderdash,” said Holmes. “Now, I must insist that you relinquish yourself into my custody until I can turn you over to the proper authorities.”
“It is you that has made a grave error if you think that I will turn myself over to you,” said Crow. He lifted the tomahawk and began to stand. “Thanks to you, I must track down Lord Kinsey before he is made whole and kills many more.”
“Clearly, you are suffering from some sort of derangement,” said Holmes. “And you are deluded if you did not think that I would anticipate an attempt to flee justice.”
Crow heard the hammer of a pistol being pulled back and felt the presence of somebody standing behind him. He glanced back and saw a stolid man, with an impressive mustache, pointing a five-shot .442 Beaumont-Adams British service revolver at his back.
“Meet my associate, Dr. John Watson,” said Holmes. “Now we would appreciate it if you would relinquish your weapons.”
“You don’t understand,” said Crow. “If I let you take me in people will die.”
“No, I understand completely,” replied Holmes. “You will do or say any cockamamie thing that might possibly persuade us to let you go free. You’re not the first murderer that we’ve apprehended.”
“We’ve heard many, many outlandish stories,” agreed Watson. “Yours is not the first.”