“He died?” I asked. “What happened to him?”
“The representative quite pointedly refused to elaborate,” Isaac said.
“Ten to one the Avalonian Collection made his death look like an accident,” Philip said.
Isaac sighed. “Regardless, we’re going to have to take a different approach if we want to track the gauntlet down. Philip, what did you find on the black market message boards?”
“Guy named Langstrom was mouthing off on one of the boards about something that sounds like it could be the gauntlet,” Philip said. “Langstrom’s a fence, he buys and sells stolen goods. I know him, we’ve crossed paths before, back when I knew some people in the black market. Though people might not be the right word for these scumbags.”
“See if you can set up a meeting with Langstrom this afternoon,” Isaac said. He opened his laptop and tapped the keys. “In the meantime, there’s something you need to see. All of you.”
The bank of monitors on the wall flickered to life with a single, mosaic image spread across all six screens. It was a photograph of ruins in a jungle. Broken columns and crumbling stone domes were hidden amid the tall, verdant trees, choked by vines and thick vegetation. To one side, a colorful bird was perched on the fallen statue of a warrior in a helmet and cloak.
“I’ve been researching Nahash-Dred,” Isaac said. “I found several instances in the past where the demon was summoned. Each resulted in the complete destruction of a civilization.”
More pictures appeared on the monitors. Ruins in the desert, ruins in the jungle, ruins by the sea. Ghost cities under leagues of water and ancient, blasted cityscapes on the sides of mountains.
“Lost civilizations all around the world can be traced back to the presence of Nahash-Dred,” he continued. “Mahendraparvata. Kuelanaku. Atlantis. Namib-Moremi. Korra-Zin. The Aksumite Empire. The Anasazi. The Olmec. It’s no wonder they call him the Destroyer of Worlds.”
“How does a demon destroy an entire civilization?” I asked. “It can’t just be brute force.”
“I wish I knew,” Isaac said. “My library is woefully lacking in information about demons. I know they come from another dimension, someplace outside our world. I know they can be summoned, bound, and banished with the proper spells. But that’s all I know. That’s all most people know. But I’d say in order to achieve devastation on this scale, Nahash-Dred has to be using magic.”
“But no spell can do that,” Bethany said, pointing at the screens.
“No spell we know of,” Isaac said. “Remember, demons aren’t from here. Their magic would be different from ours.” He tapped some keys on his laptop, and the monitors went black again. “There’s one more thing I wanted to show you. Images of Nahash-Dred are almost impossible to come by. What few illustrations I found all contradict each other, as if no one can agree on what the demon looks like. But I did find one thing. It’s a snippet of film an acquaintance of mine at the Pnakotic Archives in Montreal e-mailed me. It’s from an expedition in the 1950s to a previously unexplored plateau in the heart of Africa. The footage has been kept under lock and key at the archives ever since. No one else has seen it in half a century. It’s believed to contain the only existing photographic image of Nahash-Dred. You might want to brace yourselves.”
He hit a key, and the film began to play. The bank of monitors lit up with the black-and-white image of a lush vista of trees, vines, and shrubbery. No sound accompanied it. The image jostled and shook as the cameraman climbed up an incline. Machetes chopped silently through thick underbrush, revealing what appeared to be a walled city, its buildings clustered around a towering castle of stone and clay brick. The image changed again, and now the cameraman was within those walls. Everywhere, buildings had been smashed to rubble and the streets were cluttered with overturned carts and debris. The camera moved through the streets, poked into buildings, but all was deathly still. And empty. There was no one to be found. There was a sudden jump cut, as if they’d turned off the camera for a bit, then turned it on again. The cameraman was outside the city once more, surrounded by a thick forest. The camera panned up to the sky, where a flock of birds suddenly took wing out of the trees. There were so many of them they looked like a huge, dark, roiling cloud. The camera whipped from side to side confusingly, and I realized the cameraman was running. A huge wave of something wet splashed over the trees. The camera stopped moving. Suddenly, a rain of big, bulky objects came down. Arms, legs, torsos, guts. The remains of the people who’d disappeared from the city. The camera whipped up again and caught a fleeting glimpse of something moving through the trees—an enormous figure that towered over the canopy. I couldn’t make out any details, it all went by too fast, but something about that figure wormed its way under my skin and made me shiver. Then the screens went black.
I tried to swallow, but my throat was too tight and dry. “What was that thing?”
“Nahash-Dred,” Isaac said. “I wasn’t kidding when I told you to brace yourself.”
He hit a key and the film began to play backward. He paused it right at the moment when the camera caught a glimpse of the demon. It was just a grainy image through the trees, but I could make out a wreath of horns around the demon’s head, a dark, patterned hide, and a portion of the batlike wings that sprouted from his ridged spine. But it wasn’t just his enormous size that made him so frightening. Even through a simple, blurry film-still like this, I could sense something infinitely terrible about Nahash-Dred, and infinitely powerful.
I couldn’t help thinking again about the vision the cloaked man had given me. The city in ruins. Countless dead. Looking at the terrifying creature on the monitors, it could only have been about Nahash-Dred. We had to stop Arkwright from summoning the demon again, no matter what it took.
A familiar female voice from behind us said, “What the hell is that?”
I turned to see Gabrielle standing in the main room of Citadel as if no time had passed at all. She wore a red, ribbed sweater under her open black leather jacket, and a matching red silk scarf around her neck.
She stared at the demon on the monitors and tucked one long, braided dreadlock behind her ear. “Oh lord, what trouble have you gotten yourselves into now?”
We all got up from the table and hugged and kissed her, peppering her with questions about what she’d been up to and how she was feeling. She put up her hands in mock surrender.
“Whoa, whoa, one at a time.” She gestured at the table. “Mind if I sit?”
“Please do,” Isaac said. “You should have told us you were coming. We would have…” He turned off the computer. The monitors on the wall went black.
“You would have what, not shown the world’s scariest filmstrip?” Gabrielle sat down. “Sorry to barge in. I had to get out of the apartment. I was going stir-crazy. If I don’t keep busy, I’m going to lose my mind. I thought taking some time off after Thornton died would help, but there are reminders of him everywhere in that damn apartment. Don’t get me wrong—sometimes, most of the time, that’s a good thing, but other times…” She shook her head. “Other times it’s more than I can bear.”
She fiddled with something in her hands, a circular, brown object she turned over and over. It was Thornton’s leather bracelet. She’d given it to him a long time ago as a token of her love. He’d cherished it so much he never took it off. He never even let anyone else touch it.
Gabrielle caught me looking at the bracelet and laughed, embarrassed. “I know, right? Here I am talking about too many reminders of Thornton, and I can’t seem to leave this silly thing alone. I found it on my bedside table this morning. I must have taken it out of the drawer and put it there at some point, but I don’t remember doing it.” She smiled wistfully and shook her head. “See? Like I said, I’m going stir-crazy. If I don’t find something to occupy my mind, I’m going to lose it entirely.”
Isaac put his hand over hers. His pale skin looked like snow against hers. “It’s all right. You know you’re always welcome her
e.”
She nodded. “I do know that. But sometimes it’s good to hear it, too. Anyway, enough of this.” She waved her hands like frantic birds, as if to clear the emotions out of the air. “Whatever that thing on the monitors was, it looked pretty damn nasty. What can I do to help?”
We brought Gabrielle up to speed. It felt good to have all five of us together again. We pored over Calliope’s notebook, lifting out the phrases repeated throughout. Bethany brought out a whiteboard on a tripod and wrote them down in black marker. In the end, we had seven phrases in all:
Eternal voice and inward word
Arching towers kirk
Hidden mariner lost at sea
Beneath the three monuments
Look to the Trefoil pieces
The Angel of the Waters
Codex Goetia
“Arching towers kirk? What does that mean?” I asked. “Is it a place?”
Isaac studied the whiteboard. “I don’t know, but I’ve heard of that last one. The Codex Goetia. It’s a book for summoning demons. I’m guessing that’s what the cult used to summon Nahash-Dred all those years ago. I wish I knew more about demonology, but it was never part of my studies.”
Gabrielle leaned forward in her chair. “I may be able to help. I have a friend who’s studying demonology. Her name is Jordana Pike. Do you know her?”
Isaac shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t. Can you put us in touch?”
“For something this important? Please. I can do better than that.” Gabrielle pulled out her cell phone, scrolled to a number in her contacts, and put the phone to her ear. “I can get us a face-to-face with her today.”
Ten
I steered the Escalade across the Brooklyn Bridge toward Downtown Brooklyn, where Gabrielle’s friend, Jordana Pike, worked in an office building near Borough Hall. As I pulled off the bridge onto Cadman Plaza West, I began to feel on edge. I didn’t like being back in Brooklyn. The whole damn borough reminded me of the year I’d spent as Underwood’s collector, and those were memories I didn’t enjoy reliving. Funny, for a man with no past, I already had one I hated. I put it out of my mind by listening to Bethany and Gabrielle catching up with each other in the backseat.
“So you won’t return my calls, but a demonologist you’ll hang out with?” Bethany teased.
In the rearview mirror, I saw Gabrielle smile sheepishly. “Sorry about that. I met Jordana at the 92nd Street Y’s grief support group. She lost both her mother and her brother recently, poor thing. We’ve been hanging out a little after the meetings, just going for coffee or a quick drink. I accidentally let it slip early on that I know about magic, and it turned out she did, too. I guess we bonded over that and became friends. I haven’t been avoiding you, Bethany, I just haven’t been feeling all that social lately.”
“I remind you of him,” Bethany said. “Of Thornton.”
“You all do,” Gabrielle said. “That’s not a bad thing. It’s just … sometimes it’s overwhelming. It’s so easy to forget that not much time has passed since he died. Some days it feels like yesterday. Other days it feels like years without him. The weird thing is, I—I keep seeing him. In the support group they say it’s a perfectly natural form of wish fulfillment. ‘A common state of bereavement’ is how they put it. But sometimes it feels like something else to me. Like he’s always in the corner of my eye. It’s worse when I’m thinking about him, or thinking about all the plans we had. All the things we were still going to do. Then I see his face everywhere.”
“I’m sure it’ll pass in time,” Bethany said.
“That’s the thing,” Gabrielle said. “I’m not sure I want it to.”
Court Street was the major thoroughfare of Downtown Brooklyn, the artery of its business district, which made finding a parking space impossible. There were already cars, vans, and delivery trucks double- and triple-parked along the street. I turned onto a shaded, treelined side street. Court Street’s fast-food joints and chain drugstores abruptly gave way to organic greengrocers and meticulously restored carriage houses. If Brooklyn did one thing well, it was making your head spin with its sudden pockets of upscale gentrification. Parking was impossible to find here, too, so I wound up pulling into a garage in a repurposed old factory warehouse. A sign on the wall informed us we would be paying through the nose for just one hour. Stenciled on the cement wall beside the sign was the illustration of a man with a monocle and top hat sitting in an old Model T. The smoke from the car’s exhaust pipe spelled out WELCOME!
The attendant admired the car as we got out. “An Escalade, huh? Haven’t seen one of these in a while. She’s a beaut.” He handed me a ticket stamped with today’s date and time. “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of her while she’s with us.”
This was definitely not the part of Brooklyn I knew from my criminal days.
Jordana Pike worked on a high floor of a towering brick-and-limestone office building overlooking the plaza of courthouses that gave Court Street its name. We took an old, brass-detailed elevator up. When the doors opened, Gabrielle led us into a glassed-in reception area. On the wall behind the receptionist’s desk was one of those blandly nonspecific corporate names written in big, colorful, expensively designed letters—Gamma Solutions, LLC. The receptionist was also big, colorful, and expensively designed, a mannequin comprised of equal parts plastic surgery, hairspray, and too-tight clothing. She tore her eyes away from the open New York Post on her desk and looked up at us with undisguised disdain, annoyed that we’d interrupted her. The heavy black liner around her eyes made her look like an owl. Her sneering glare moved from Gabrielle to Bethany, and then to me, at which point the sneer left her face and was replaced by the look of someone who wished they were carrying a can of Mace.
“We’re here to see Jordana Pike,” Gabrielle told her. “She’s expecting us.”
The receptionist picked up the phone on her desk. She used one long, formidable nail to press a few buttons, and then spoke indifferently into the handset, “Visitors here to see you.” In her thick Brooklyn accent, she pronounced it visituhs. She hung up. “Down the hall. Third door on the left.” Do-wah. She blinked her owl eyes at us to tell us we weren’t clearing out fast enough.
Down the hall and three doors in, we came to a sleek black door with a plaque beside it that read JORDANA PIKE, SYSTEMS ANALYST.
Gabrielle knocked on the door. “Jordana?”
The door opened. Standing behind it with an expectant smile was a woman I guessed to be in her mid-thirties, just a few years younger than me. Or younger than I appeared to be, anyway. When you’ve lost your memories and can’t die, it’s hard to know for sure how old you are. Jordana Pike was pretty, with thick brown hair that reached just past her shoulders, deep brown eyes, and an olive, Mediterranean complexion. Gabrielle introduced her to Bethany, and then to me. When Jordana looked at me, something seemed to change in her. It was small—a subtle, knowing look in her eye, a slight knitting of her brow, and then it was gone, replaced with impeccable composure as she shook my hand.
“It’s nice to meet you … Trent, is it?”
“That’s right,” I said. “How’s it going?”
She invited us into her office and closed the door. Then she turned the lock.
“Sorry for the dramatics,” she said. “My boss already thinks I’m crazy because I actually do my job instead of hanging out on Facebook all day like everyone else here; he doesn’t need to hear me talking about demons, too. I take it you met our friendly receptionist? I call her the Bay Ridge Harpy. She’s the CEO’s niece—surprise, surprise. Anyway, I’m guessing she didn’t offer you anything to drink, so can I get you something? One of the vending machines in the break room actually still dispenses cans of soda and iced tea instead of just stealing your money.”
“We’re fine, thanks,” Gabrielle said. “And thanks for taking the time to see us, too. I know they keep you pretty busy around here.”
Jordana sat down in a black rolling chair behind her desk. “
You asked me about the Codex Goetia on the phone. First of all, even though the word codex technically means book, it’s not actually a book. I’ve never seen it myself, but according to what I’ve read it’s more like a metal tablet or a disc. Written on its face are the names of all nine hundred and ninety-nine greater demons.”
“What makes them so great?” I asked.
Jordana’s gaze lingered on me. For the brief moment our eyes met, the air felt charged, like she was trying to communicate something to me.
“Greater demons are basically the nobility of demonkind,” she said. “Lesser demons are their servants, their army. Most of the time, lesser demons aren’t even given names. Greater demons, on the other hand, have names and titles. Sometimes their name is their title. It’s fascinating, really. The pecking order is not all that different from the hierarchy of medieval nobility, and yet it’s a completely different kind of culture from what we know, one where the peasants—or serfs might be a closer analogy—are so far beneath them that they’re not even granted names.” She couldn’t hide her excitement as she spoke. Clearly, demonology was her passion and she didn’t get the chance to share it with others often. “As for the Codex, it was created by the magicians of a city called Tulemkust specifically for the purpose of summoning, binding, and banishing greater demons. Do you know the story of Tulemkust and Sevastumi?”
I nodded. “It’s come up.”
“Good,” Jordana said. “Then you know all about the two brothers who betrayed Tulemkust. There are a lot of scholars in my field who believe they were Sevastumi agents, and that the killings were only a distraction. Their real mission was to steal the Codex Goetia from Tulemkust’s Great Library.”
“Why do they think that?” Bethany asked.
Die and Stay Dead Page 10