The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3)

by Green, Layton

  He returned to bed and succumbed to the drone of late-night television, his pulse slowly returning to normal. The memory of the dream faded as the entropy of deepest night arrived, and he felt as if he were the only person awake on earth. Yet the one thing he failed to shake was the feeling of her cottony lips merging with his own, soft hair feathering his chest as he pulled her close.

  Viktor had been eager for Grey to leave, not because Viktor was tired but because two things called for his full attention: his absinthe and the past. Two things in which he never indulged too deeply while Grey, or anyone else, bore witness.

  First the absinthe. Loosening the collar of his dress shirt, he sank into the sofa, imbibing until the cool liquid fire stoked his mind and prepared the way for the coming journey. This particular cubbyhole of memory, dank and secret, was more personal than most.

  Grey had asked why a practitioner of magic might be involved with these murders, and Viktor had been less than forthcoming in his response. As Viktor had said, he did not yet understand the connection, but what he had withheld was that there was one area of magic that did indeed concern the study and invocation of the powers of darkness.

  It was not a likely scenario, but Viktor had to admit it was the only one that made sense at this point. Yet before Viktor drew this to Grey’s or anyone else’s attention, he had to be sure.

  Because Viktor himself had once dabbled in this type of magic, and he preferred that chapter of his life to remain buried.

  The absinthe swirled under Viktor’s practiced hand, rocking gently in the glass. When she stilled, drawing Viktor’s gaze into her murky depths, he began to remember.

  Viktor Radek had come of age under the long shadow of the Iron Curtain, and during his childhood he saw his beloved Czechoslovakia sink further and further into the stultified embrace of Communism. Minor Bohemian nobility under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Viktor’s family had transitioned to successful merchants and bankers when the Czechoslovak Republic was formed in 1918. The arrival of Communism reduced the Radeks from royalty to simply filthy rich.

  Viktor loved every single statue, castle, and Gothic cathedral in his country. He loved the beauty and culture of Prague, he loved the medieval villages tucked away like treasure chests in the forests, he loved the Czech Republic’s weird quirks, literary prowess, and strange fascination with death.

  But his countrymen were suffering. The Czechs took the occupation harder than most, as they did not even have religion to sustain them. It fascinated him to this day, that a country whose buildings and landscape dripped with mystique could remain one of the most secular cultures on earth.

  Viktor, on the other hand, had always questioned the why, had asked his parents about the nature of God when he was five years old. But the religious pessimism of his birth country influenced Viktor’s worldview from the beginning, making him who he was today: someone who yearned for answers, but for whom blind faith would never suffice.

  What Viktor sought was cold, haughty, adamantine-hard proof. He had witnessed enough seeming impossibilities and inexplicable occurrences in his profession to know that at least some of the answers were out there.

  Or had he? He wondered if it was even possible, from the tragically challenged vantage point of humanity, to do more than chip away at eternal truth and divine mystery, to discover if a puppet master cackled as he pulled the strings.

  But there was the rub, he thought with a languid draping of his arms over the sofa, the absinthe working its way into his marrow. The universe was a machine, beautiful and complex beyond imagining, but still a machine. And machines have builders, operators, repairers.

  They have designers.

  So he would search, and study, and bear witness, until he had overturned every secret-laden stone on earth, until he had done everything in his power to uncover the why. Dark or light, good or evil, right or wrong, it was knowledge that was paramount. Truth.

  Oh, he could hear them now, the philosophers and existentialists clamoring in their beer halls, shouting to the monks at the next table over that truth was a fable, a personal lens. Well, Viktor was also a philosopher, one of the best in the world, and he was here to tell them that truth existed somewhere, whether they liked it or not.

  It was just deep, deep in the cave.

  Viktor had trod the cobblestone streets of Prague as a young teen, exploring the remnants of the religious traditions that lay hidden in the nooks and crannies of Old Town, always looking over his shoulder for the Státní bezpečnost, the Communist party’s dreaded enforcers. Before he had entered high school, he’d studied with the underground Jews and Catholics, had sought the wisdom of the kabbalists, the Trappist monks, and the secret societies that littered the underbelly of Prague. His parents, worried that Viktor would draw the attention of the Státní, sent him to boarding school.

  Switzerland felt like a sterile compound compared to Prague, but Viktor had gained something very important: intellectual freedom. He devoured religious and philosophic books with a hunger that baffled his teachers.

  Viktor did exceedingly well in school, choosing Oxford because it had arguably the finest library in the world. Yet he soon discovered the library was no longer where he wished to be. Once Viktor decided to pursue religious phenomenology in graduate school he would return to the scrolls and dusty rooms he loved so well, but the cultural awakening of 1960s England spoke to his burgeoning youthful passions, and at Oxford he discovered something even more exciting than the riddles of the universe: He discovered how to live.

  The Oxford girls loved this enigmatic, cultured visitor from Bohemia, tall and darkly handsome. Viktor never dove into the deep end of the countercultural revolution, standing on the sidelines with a cool air and his brooding intelligence while hordes of his generation threw themselves into drugs, free love, and Beatlemania. That just made him even more intriguing to the fairer sex. He could barely believe the freedom at his fingertips on this strange, freewheeling little island, and he didn’t think life could get any better.

  Then he met Darius and Eve.

  He found a kindred mind in Darius Ghassomian, an Iranian-American Viktor had met in an introductory World Religions class. Darius and Viktor always received top marks in their classes, and were considered perhaps the two most intelligent students at an already elite university. Both were also wildly ambitious.

  Darius was similarly obsessed with religion and philosophy, yet he introduced Viktor to something far more interesting, something that was experiencing a revival in the universities and other mainstays of the countercultural revolution.

  He introduced Viktor to the occult, and together they plunged headfirst into those dark and seductive waters.

  During orientation Darius had met a girl named Eve, who had dabbled in witchcraft and the occult and was impressed by his knowledge. Eve’s shyness bordered on disability, yet she had an otherworldly beauty behind the thrift-store skirts and turtlenecks. When Viktor first met her Eve reminded him of the American actress Faye Dunaway, mysterious, withdrawn, her face possessed of a ghostly symmetry. Darius, awkward and thin as a javelin, knew Eve was drawn to him not out of attraction, but because she did not feel threatened.

  Viktor felt an instant connection to Eve and thought she felt the same. To Viktor’s chagrin, it was obvious that Darius was hopelessly in love with Eve. Viktor did not have great experience in such matters, so he decided to ignore the situation—a ridiculous idea, he soon realized—because Viktor thought he had everything of which he could dream: personal and intellectual freedom, a vibrant social life, and two very close friends with whom to share his experiences.

  Neither Viktor nor Darius was sure if Eve shared their obsession with life’s more esoteric questions, or just enjoyed having someplace she belonged. Neither bothered to ask. She seemed excited about the new adventure they had planned for next year, when they returned from summer break. They had sampled a wide variety of the occult; exploring witchcraft, ancient goddesses and fertility cult
s with Eve; the kabbalah, secret societies and Eastern mysticism with Viktor; and introduced by Darius to the rich and enigmatic world of magic.

  All of these things were interesting, but it was time to broaden their horizons. To journey to a place only the intrepid dared venture, Darius told them, to plunge into the darkness and rise back out with the keys to knowledge and power grasped firmly in hand. Eve and Viktor agreed at once to Darius’s plan, and Viktor spent the entire summer in anticipation of the coming year.

  For Viktor, Eve, and Darius had decided to become black magicians.

  Viktor didn’t know when he had drifted off, but he woke from his stupor just before four a.m. After drinking a glass of water, he tried to sleep, but his mind was too steeped in the past to relax. He went to his laptop and Googled the press conference for the Order of New Enlightenment.

  Earlier in the day Grey had asked Viktor if he had heard of a charismatic New Age preacher named Simon Azar. He had heard of him, but hadn’t had a chance to hear him speak. Cults and charismatic religious figures abounded, coming and going every day by the hundreds, around the world. Viktor became interested when they turned from populism to criminal behavior, or if there was another compelling reason.

  A link to Simon’s first press conference appeared, as well as to another broadcast that had aired earlier that night. Viktor clicked on the former. Seconds into the video, Viktor’s mouth fell open, shoulders hunching as his body coiled into a spring of tension.

  The face staring back at him from the screen was the face of the man who had just featured in Viktor’s absinthe-fueled journey to the past.

  A man who had once been his best friend.

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  Dante went deep, deep into the heart of London’s East End, to a neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification that housed the First Temple of New Enlightenment. Today it was a striking but modest building, a six-story cylindrical glass tower that would one day have sixty-six stories, and six hundred and sixty-six rooms. A house that would serve as the beating black heart of revitalized East London, a turning point in the religious history of the city that had long stood at the crossroads of the world.

  It just wasn’t going to be the religion everyone thought it was.

  Dante was impressed not just by the favor the Magus curried with their dark God, but also by his genius. Why shove something unpalatable down people’s throats in the beginning when you could introduce it gently, one doctrine at a time, building the new religion on the backs of the failed ones? Bait and switch was the essence of the phenomenal growth of many modern religious organizations, especially the ones that used pseudo-Christian ties as the bait.

  The Magus took this tactic to a whole new level. And when the time was right, when enough people were assimilated, when mind-sets and prejudices had gradually shifted, when the traditional conception of God had weakened beyond repair, then more and more of the truth could be revealed.

  As with the catacombs, Dante liked to pass through the dodgiest parts of East London on the way to the temple, absorbing the stares of the denizens of London’s worst neighborhoods. Even with his long black overcoat concealing his knives, street thugs had a sixth sense when someone higher in the hierarchy of the jungle entered their realm, and they almost always looked the other way when Dante passed.

  Almost. Before the First Temple broke ground, a crew of local toughs had challenged him on the street. Out came Dante’s knives, two of them flowing through the air and finding their victims’ hearts before anyone knew what was happening. And the last three Dante dispatched from close range, his blades spinning and striking so fast and with such skill that it must have looked to the bystanders like the neighborhood thugs had been gutted by a tornado.

  Dante delivered his message to the crowd while standing amid the bodies, flanked by three other members of L’église de la Bête. This is our territory now, and there will be no more questions.

  The message got through just fine.

  He skirted the edge of Hackney and walked past block after block of crumbling, soot-covered tenements, then entered an even rougher area of abandoned buildings and black-market warehouses. Faces peered out of broken windows, thieves and gang members slinked between the graffiti-covered buildings. He was deep inside the wilderness of East London, a place as far removed from Piccadilly and Buckingham Palace as were the farthest outposts of the once-mighty British Empire.

  He ducked through a hidden underpass, then came to a canal full of sludgy green water that would lead him to his destination.

  East London reminded Dante of his childhood in Montreal, not because the culture was similar but because the poverty looked the same. The same trash-strewn streets and dilapidated tenements, the same drawn faces passing by, bodies and souls forever dampened from eking out an existence on the edge of society.

  Despite his environs and a lifelong lisp, Dante had been a buoyant child, full of energy from his undersize feet to his long brown curls. His parents were kind and gentle, and that mattered far more than environment. When Dante told his father how the kids at school made fun of him for his lisp, his father had convinced Dante they were only jealous of Dante’s unique way of speaking. As Dante grew older and confronted his father with the truth, his father told Dante that in his mind, he had spoken the truth.

  But environment did matter, and it mattered most when Dante was thirteen, and a burglar, pistol in hand, entered Dante’s house the night of Christmas Eve. Dante’s father heard the noise and confronted the intruder. The intruder shot both his parents and disappeared, leaving Dante to deal with a screaming younger sister and two parents with their lifeblood pumping onto the frayed carpet.

  His parents died before the paramedics arrived, and Dante lost most of his soul that night. He couldn’t take the sight of a gun from that moment forward. The pain from his loss, unbearable, began its dominion over Dante, growing stronger when Dante and his sister were placed in an institution. Not only had Dante lost his beloved parents, he now had to endure a wretched shadow existence in a state-sponsored kennel.

  He preferred the institution to foster care, as he enjoyed the constant fighting that helped him expel his rage, but his sister, the only piece of himself he had left, was not faring so well. When she turned fifteen, Dante told the governess they were ready to move to a home. It was a choice Dante would forever regret.

  Late one night, six months after they were placed in foster care, Dante held his sister’s jaw and forced her to tell him about the bruises on her thighs, the ones he had glimpsed when she slipped into her bedclothes. It took her all night, but as the sun slipped above the horizon and she told him everything, Dante didn’t hesitate. With his foster parents still in bed, he went to the kitchen, grabbed the butcher knife, and counted the fifty-two slashes he made into the spongy middle-aged flesh of the bastard who was raping his sister. When the wife intervened, he murdered her, too.

  Dante went to juvenile prison without a shred of remorse, holding on to an even tinier piece of his soul for the visits from his sister. When his sister killed herself a year later, unable to cope with a life in foster care without Dante, the last sliver of Dante’s soul slipped away, and pain became his only emotion, his only master, his only desire.

  Dante padded through the underground entrance to the First Temple, making his way to the sixth floor. He stepped into the antechamber where the Inner Council met. The antechamber was an empty hexagonal room with ebony walls, as well as six armchairs crafted from the same dark wood. The rounded ceiling, painted by a master artist to resemble a star-filled galaxy, gave an illusion of depth to the room. A black-painted skylight allowed a splinter of light to slip through. It was a beautiful room and gave the effect of floating through the boundless void.

  The sigil-inscribed door to the inner sanctum loomed opposite Dante. As far as Dante knew, the inner sanctum was for the Magus and his consorts alone, to commune with the Beast.

  No, not the Beast, the Magus taught. Like the Old Testam
ent God, Dante’s newfound deity dealt out both life and death. The Magus called him by another name but allowed him to be addressed as the Beast or even Satan, the adversary. Lucifer was not appropriate, because the Magus’s dark deity was not an angel.

  He was a god.

  The door to the inner sanctum swung wide. The Magus stepped into the room in his silver-starred robe, his presence commanding yet wise. “Thank you for coming. We have much to cover.”

  “Before we begin,” Dante said, hating the sound of his lisp since his father had died, “I received a phone call from San Francisco.”

  “Dissension in the ranks?”

  Dante gave a raspy chuckle. “Oak would never dare. He received a visit from two men associated with Interpol. He found the visit troubling.”

  “In what manner?”

  “There was a tall one,” Dante said, “an expert on religion. He might become a problem. His name is—”

  “Viktor Radek.”

  The Magus’s eyes, the color of barely steeped tea, glowed with what Dante thought looked most akin to eagerness. It surprised Dante, because the Magus rarely showed emotion.

  “Then you know of him and the investigation,” Dante said.

  “Oh yes.”

  “And this doesn’t worry you?” Dante said. “Interpol’s channels of communication can be bothersome.”

  The Magus’s face regained its trademark equanimity, of someone in firm control of every situation. “I’ve anticipated his interest. You need not concern yourself with him.”

  “And the other?” Dante said. “His name is Dominic Grey.”

  “His partner.”

  “Oak seemed to find him formidable,” Dante said.

  “He’ll come to London or Paris, soon. I leave him to you.”

  Dante ran his thumbs along the edges of his knives.