“Not now, I am about to have supper soon. My maid will put them away for later.” Madame rang a bell and a small dark woman hurried into the room. Madame indicated the box and the servant plucked it from the seat, silently scuttling back out. I had the passing feeling that she looked familiar, but I could not be sure. Their faces all seemed like one to me and I could not tell them apart. I found myself staring at the door for a few moments after the servant departed.
When I turned my attention back to Madame, she was watching me with a curious light in her eyes. My own eyes widened as she began to unbutton the high neck of her blouse.
“Madame! What are you doing?” My heart bounded with shock and excitement. Had I misjudged her station? She was a widow and perhaps used to exposing her flesh to a man. I had never known a woman so eager and my own flesh strained in response.
“Loosening my collar, Mister Patterson. It makes it easier to eat and I’m afraid I can no longer ignore your intoxicating scent.”
As I watched, her neck thickened, purplish veins in high relief against her white neck. Her delicate mouth grew wider, opening further and further until the edges of her grotesque smile reached her ears. My bladder released, the instant of warmth quickly turning to chills against my flesh.
Her tongue flickered out at me like a snake’s. “Your smell...is lovely.”
***
Lillian
I’d locked the door to the sitting room long before Patterson screamed. He’d been so fierce at first that I hated to hear his pitiful pleas now. Almost. I leaned back against the door as it shook and rattled. It was reinforced and would hold against whatever Patterson or the creature threw at it.
“Ling,” I called. My partner came into the hall from the library, a ledger under her arm and her spectacles pushed atop her sleek hair.
“Patterson’s family has paid,” she said, taking a piece of the fudge from the waxed paper box. “I thought you usually told them pralines.” She bit deeply anyway.
“I did tell him, but he didn’t listen. Typical, really.” I wiped my hands on my costume and gave the box to Ling. “Take these before I eat all of them. I’m going to rest until she’s done.”
In about an hour or so the cracking and sucking sounds would stop and I could reenter the room. Our deal completed, the demon would be gone and I would pick the largest remaining pieces of bone to take to my workshop.
I needed a new necklace.
A Fitter Subject for Study
Sarah Joy Adams
June 22, 1894
To the Rev. Dr. Pearsall,
Director, Whitmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum
Yorkshire England
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your recent submission, “Some Notes on the Finer Points of the Term ‘Offspring’ as it Relates to the Moloch Cult of the Late Canaanite Period.” The committee has received you work with great interest, but, if I may, also with some controversy. Your conclusions are, needless to say, startling, especially in your suggestions for contemporary application. It falls to me to ask if you might supply a more firm citation or explanation of your methods. There are some on the committee who, if you will forgive me, doubt that the text to which you refer exists. We are unable to obtain any other record or mention of the particular manuscript you cite. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept your work for publication.
Sincerely Yours,
J. Donwald
Under-Secretary to the Editor,
Journal of Occultic and Mythological Studies
Magdalene College, Oxford England
June 25, 1894
Mr. Donwald,
If the committee does not find my information adequate then I suggest that they undertake the necessary research themselves. I sincerely doubt they have the wit or stomach for the encounter.
Pearsall
June 30, 1894
Dear Dr. Pearsall,
Forgive me for having given offense in my last letter, if only as the mouthpiece for other men. On my own behalf, I read your submission with great excitement. It grieves me that work such as yours, which might revolutionize our understanding, should be kept in obscurity.
You speak of this field needing wit and stomach. If only others in positions of authority agreed. I, myself, have seen my bolder efforts at research thwarted by the pedantic objections of timid men. Dare I hope that in your work I have found a fellow practitioner, one who recognizes that our subject may be pursued through methods that might be called empirical?
Sincerely and in Trepidation Yours,
J. Donwald
July 2, 1894
Mr. Donwald,
I was perhaps overly curt with you in my last missive. Your letter arrived after a particularly trying night which taxed my powers to the utmost and a morning in which I suffered great impertinence from those of less wit than yourself. I was in no mood for foolery.
The details of my methodology may not with safety be set down on paper or sent through the common post. “There are more things in heaven and in earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Though our author would have been more precise to add, “and under the earth and beyond it.” Suffice it to say that I obtain my information through a combination of rigorous testing, careful study of those who have gone before me, and, most difficult, through direct contact with the sources in question. The particular manuscript that has caused the committee some consternation does not exist—in this plane. Nonetheless, I have seen it with my own eyes and read, at great peril to myself, the words written therein.
I doubt very much that the committee is aware, but even as I strive to expand our knowledge of what it pleases the ignorant to think of as the occult, I have been forced to include certain, shall we say, vaguenesses at key points, saying less than I know. Those who swim in waters such as these must recognize and respect the powers with which we deal. There are cases in which to write is to enact. Just as the words “I do” spoken in a sacred place may bind a man forever, so may the writing of certain words and characters summon powers and perils few casual readers of the dictionary are prepared to encounter.
Yours,
Arthur A. Pearsall
July 12, 1894
Dear Dr. Pearsall,
“What fire is in mine ears.” Your latest moves me with great terror and yet excitement. To meet another like myself, one for whom the “occult” is no matter of dry mythology, but a living practice—I thought it almost beyond hope. In these days it seems that spiritists and mediums, phsyiognomists and theosophists litter the popular scene—all claiming to make contact with the soul of one’s dead grandmother’s cat. But no true practitioners can I find. Please, if you can and are willing, tell me how you began on this study of ours and how I may proceed.
Yours in great excitement,
J. D.
July 16, 1894
My dear Mr. Pearsall,
You flatter me with your excitement. I imagine that my beginnings were much like your own—a curious mind that roved far beyond the narrow strictures of the school master’s curriculum, an ear for those bits and shreds of half-forgotten truth that still linger in what we call fairytales, theology, and folklore.
I also had the advantage of access to my grand-uncle’s extensive library and, for a time, to my grand-uncle himself. Indeed, it was his unfortunate condition in later life that led me to recognize the close bonds between the madman and the visionary, between the seen and the unseen. While other members of my family perceived his discourses as incoherent ranting, I saw them as a window, however clouded, through which one might peer into realities unglimpsed by saner folk. Most, including his doctors, sought only to suppress his behaviors. I sought to record them. The deciphering of his words and actions has taken up a great portion of my study over the years.
It was he who first hinted to me the secret name of Molo
ch. It has taken me thirty years since and much personal sacrifice to ferret out the information that your committee was pleased to call doubtful. A man must have a stomach of iron, a will of adamant, if he is to study with dispassion the darker shadows of the human mind, and through them to glimpse the greater eminences beyond. You must take the writings of ancients at their word and ponder the things that the sane dons of Oxford would dismiss as primitive superstition. If you would proceed in a true study of these matters, if you wish to do more than scribble notes about Akkadian irregular verbs, then you must come down from your lofty perch among the “dreaming spires” of Oxford to put those verbs in action. You must marry words to deeds. I will say no more for the present.
Yours, cordially,
Pearsall
July 28, 1894
My dear Dr. Pearsall,
I have read your letter over half a dozen times since its arrival. I might almost have thought you were baiting me with false hopes, and so I took the liberty of seeking more information about you. Forgive my impertinence, but in the process I discovered the name and public history of your grand-uncle and his tragic death in the fire that took your ancestral home. His was a formidable temperament, both before and after his madness, was it not? The news reports say little of substance, but am I right in thinking that the burning of Shrovesbury Hall was not entirely an accident? Your own escape from the flames, was it also not entirely accidental? You see I am already being daring—at least I dare so far as to ask impertinent questions of my mentor.
But I will be bolder. You say that a man must come away from Oxford to grapple with these realities, but how are you better situated than I? True, I chafe in a clerk’s position, subordinate to lesser minds, unable to obtain even the lectureship to which my work should entitle me. Yet at least I have the marvels of Oxford’s several libraries at my fingertips. I may, with a little effort, lay my hands on cuneiform tablets housed nowhere else in the British Empire, while you are exiled to the empty moorlands, bereft of intellectual company, your days burdened with the care of madmen. How can you manage to conduct your research, I cannot imagine.
Yours, in curiosity,
J. Donwald
Aug 3, 1894
My dear Mr. Donwald,
You are mistaken. Whitmoor is precisely where I most wish to be. Here among the empty moorlands a man may speak to the whistling winds, and the voices they carry. As the Egyptian mystics of the second century sought the desert in order to wrestle with unseen spirits they called demons, or as the Arabian stargazer might seek the djinn in a sandstorm, so the Englishman must seek out our island’s own desert spaces, its fens and moors.
Too, there are practical considerations. Nowhere else would afford me such scope and freedom to practice. The empty moors offer no audience, no whispering neighbors or officious constabulary. If the attendants under my control lack the vigor of wit to be my peers, so too they lack the curiosity to ask troublesome questions.
But I have access to more primary material. Shall I be more clear? Very well then, I shall risk much by disclosing to you. Whitmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane is my library, my laboratory, and my field. I could not ask for a better.
Some years ago I took my current position here because of a single patient, one Mary Dunway. She was incarcerated here for infanticide. You are likely too young to recall the sensation that the papers made of it. She claimed at trial that her child rightly belonged to the devil and had therefore to be returned to him. The more religious of the populace cried for her death. The more sympathetic saw her as mad. But I perceived in her testimony hints of those same truths spoken by my uncle many years ago. For this was central to her testimony—she had chosen to drown her child because he was “not fit to pass through the fire.”
Both prosecutors and defense discounted this as irrelevant detail, but in it I saw the crux of the matter. I once was thought “fit to pass through the fire” by my uncle, and, as you have divined, only narrowly escaped doing so. The fire that consumed Shrovesbury Hall was meant to be my funeral pyre. Or my gateway to another world. Fortunately, I was vigorous in my youth and he enervated by long study.
But you see why Mary Dunway’s case aroused my interest? Moloch is a god of fire, one whose sacrifices “passed through the fire” to reach him. If Yahweh and his son demand that their followers undergo drowning—for what is baptism, especially as practiced by our more fanatical religious enthusiasts, but a ritual of drowning—Moloch is the god of the opposite element. Moloch’s children therefore must attain communion with him through the medium of fire.
Since becoming director of this Asylum, I have made it my particular goal to seek out other women like Mary Dunway, women who, in their primitive instincts, also seek to send their child through the fire. Observation of their ravings has offered much empirical light on matters only hinted at in the theories of ancient texts.
Perhaps I have said too much. Yet it is a relief to more fully share the character of my research with another, to speak of the unspeakable with one who shares my curiosity.
Yours,
Pearsall
August 8, 1894
Dear Dr. Pearsall,
Your story puzzles me—how might an ignorant street girl such as Mary Dunway and a solid, if eccentric, country gentleman have stumbled upon hidden truths such as baffle researchers like ourselves? How would the name of Moloch have ever come to their ears except as a passing murmur in Holy Writ, droned by a sexton at vespers?
Yours, in wonder,
J.Donwald
August 13, 1894
My Dear Mr. Donwald,
I laugh at your questions, for, like the best of students, you have almost answered yourself. For certain, the servants of Yahweh keep alive the memory of his rival power, however unwittingly. Leviticus18:21 warns the Israelites, “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Moloch, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God.” He is mentioned again in the books of Kings and the prophets Jeremiah and Amos. Even in the book of Acts, Moloch’s name is rehearsed and warned against. As the vicars of our island drone through the assigned texts of the Prayer Book, they speak of him, unaware of whom they conjure. Might not the most illiterate of women, one who had no reason to praise Jehovah’s providence, respond with some inner instinct to the name of his rival?
For that which forbids, also reminds and entices. Solomon himself, that chief necromancer, built an altar to Moloch on the high places. Need we doubt that some of his many offspring were found fit to pass through the fire, to seek another god in times when Yahweh’s protection seemed to falter? So too did Mary Dunway. And others in their turn.
But there is another way that he has come to our shores, or rather, that we have come and found him here. Have you not seen Schernheim’s woodcuts, depicting Moloch always as a bullheaded man, his thighs spread astride the fire? Moloch with his horns reaching outward to balance the fiery sphere of the sun. Scholars are pleased to picture him ever in the near Orient, but horned gods are no strangers to these shores. The Picts and Britons, the Cymry and those nameless tribes who carve the Ogham stones would have recognized Moloch in the horns and face of the aurochs, the wild cattle that once roamed these hills.
Ignorant of his true history and power, they nevertheless remembered some echo of it in their old wives’ tales that tell of the white cattle of the faerie king, the sight of which brings great fortune, for good or ill. In the days which gave us these tales in their true, original form, the truly mad were considered touched by the fae, their ravings an attempt to relate a sublimity of experience beyond the skill of human tongue to tell or mind to contain. Thus we come full circle and I, whose mind has been trained to its highest capacity of rational thought, seek these truths in the ranting of lunatics.
Mary Dunway did not long survive her incarceration, but she bore another child before her decease. It too proved unfit to pass th
rough the fire. But I learned much, much indeed, from the process. Since then Whitmoor has been host to no fewer than five other such women, all tried for the crime of infanticide and sent hither. Alas, their children too have been unfit to fully pass through the fire and there my researches have stalled.
I have been condemned in the stricter papers as advocating too much leniency toward these women. But how might I conduct my research if the courts, blind to the greater questions in their concern for a few beggars’ brats, sentence these women to hang? Scientists such as ourselves must have subjects upon which to work, even if such debased subjects as these.
Your fellow in research,
Pearsall
August 18, 1894
My Dear Dr. Pearsall,
If I may offer a thought, as a student offering it to his tutor, perhaps the fault lies in the parentage? If the mold, which carries the form, is cracked, how can a perfect vessel be formed? My own researches upon these matters suggest a higher need necessitates a higher quality of offering. Thus when power was needed against a great enemy, for instance, the ancient Canaanites thought the offspring of a commoner insufficient and demanded the offspring of a king.
And now I must beg your discretion as I share my thoughts. I trust that you will keep confidential what I am about to say so boldly, as I will, of course, keep close your own correspondence. You mention that the subjects upon whom you have had occasion to practice were beggars. Though touched by a divine madness, they remain members of the common folk and not the best of that. What new discoveries might be yielded if fitter subjects might be found? Madness touches not only the lower classes.
Yours,
Donwald
August 23, 1894
My Friend, if I may call you so,
I heartily agree with your conclusions. Indeed, if I may trust your confidence as you trust mine, I venture to tell you that I have made some efforts in that direction. Reasoning that if the seed be good, then poorer ground might be nurtured into productivity, I have planted, if you understand me, where I found occasion. But these too have failed. Perhaps your metaphor is the more apt—a poor vessel will spoil the best wine. What must be done if we are to further our research is to find a happy confluence of wit and fitness. Offspring fit to pass through the fire to Moloch cannot be created of unequal parts. Though my own contribution of intelligence and parentage is of the best, it is not equal to overcome the defects of those who bear the offering to fruition. “The son of a king,” you said—if only kings’ sons grew under hedges, what wonders might we discover!
The Big Bad II Page 15