Black Easter

by James Blish

  Outside the circles, at the other compass points, were drawn four pentagrams, in the chords of which were written TE TRA GRAM MA TON, and at the centres of which stood the candles. Farthest away from all this – about two feet outside the circle and three feet over it to the north – was a circle enclosed by a triangle, also much lettered inside and out; Baines could just see that the characters in the angles of the triangle read NI CH EL.

  ‘Tanists,’ Ware whispered, pointing into the circle, ‘take your places.’

  He went towards the long table Hess had described and vanished in the gloom. As instructed, Baines walked into the circle and stood in the western star; Hess followed, taking the eastern; and Ginsberg, very slowly, crept into the southern. To the north, the puddle of fur revolved once widdershins and resettled itself with an unsettling sigh, making Jack Ginsberg jump. Baines inspected it belatedly. Probably it was only a cat, as was supposed to be traditional, but in this light it looked more like a badger. Whatever it was, it was obscenely fat.

  Ware reappeared, carrying a sword. He entered the circle, closed it with the point of the sword, and proceeded to the central square, where he laid the sword across the toes of his white shoes; then he drew the wand from his belt and unwrapped it, laying the red-silk cloth across his shoulders.

  ‘From now on,’ he said, in a normal, even voice, ‘no one is to move.’

  From somewhere inside his vestments he produced a small crucible, which he set at his feet before the recumbent sword. Small blue flames promptly began to rise from the bowl, and Ware cast incense into it. He said:

  ‘Holocaust. Holocaust. Holocaust.’

  The flames in the brazier rose slightly.

  ‘We are to call upon MARCHOSIAS, a great marquis of the Descending Hierarchy,’ Ware said in the same conversational voice. ‘Before he fell, he belonged to the Order of Dominations among the angels, and thinks to return to the Seven Thrones after twelve hundred years. His virtue is that he gives true answers. Stand fast, all.’

  With a sudden motion, Ware thrust the end of his rod into the surging flames of the brazier. At once the air of the hall rang with a long, frightful chain of woeful howls. Above the bestial clamour. Ware shouted:

  ‘I adjure thee, great MARCHOSIAS, as the agent of Emperor LUCIFER, and of his beloved son LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, by the power of the pact I have with thee, and by the Names ADONAY, ELOIM, JEHOVAM, TAGLA, MATHON, ALMOUZIN, ARIOS, PITHONA, MAGOTS, SYLPHAE, TABOTS, SALAMANDRAE, GNOMUS, TERRAE, COELIS, GODENS, AQUA, and by the whole hierarchy of superior intelligences who shall constrain thee against thy will, venite, venite, submiritillor MARCHOSIAS!’

  The noise rose higher, and a green steam began to come off the brazier. It smelt like someone was burning hart’s horn and fish gall. But there was no other answer. His face white and cruel, Ware rasped over the tumult:

  ‘I adjure thee, MARCHOSIAS, by the pact, and by the names, appear instanter!’ He plunged the rod a second time into the flames. The room screamed; but still there was no apparition.

  ‘Now I adjure thee, LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, whom I command, as the agent of the Lord and Emperor of Lords, send me thy messenger MARCHOSIAS, forcing him to forsake his hiding place, wheresoever it may be, and warning thee –’

  The rod went back into the fire. Instantly, the palazzo rocked as though the earth had moved under it.

  ‘Stand fast!’ Ware said hoarsely.

  Something Else said:

  HUSH, I AM HERE. WHAT DOST THOU SEEK OF ME? WHY DOST THOU DISTURB MY REPOSE? LET MY FATHER REST, AND HOLD THY ROD.

  Never had Baines heard a voice like that before. It seemed to speak in syllables of burning ashes.

  ‘Hadst thou appeared when first I invoked thee, I had by no means smitten thee, nor called thy father,’ Ware said. ‘Remember, if the request I make of thee be refused, I shall thrust again my rod into the fire.’

  THINK AND SEE!

  The palazzo shuddered again. Then, from the middle of the triangle to the northwest, a slow cloud of yellow fumes went up towards the ceiling, making them all cough, even Ware. As it spread and thinned, Baines could see a shape forming under it; but he found it impossible to believe. It was – it was something like a she-wolf, grey and immense, with green and glistening eyes. A wave of coldness was coming from it.

  The cloud continued to dissipate. The she-wolf glared at them, slowly spreading her griffin’s wings. Her serpent’s tail lashed gently, scalily.

  In the northern pentacle, the great Abyssinian cat sat up and stared back. The demon-wolf showed her teeth and emitted a disgusting belch of fire. The cat settled its front feet indifferently.

  ‘Stand, by the Seal,’ Ware said. ‘Stand and transform, else I shall plunge thee back whence thou camest. I command thee.’

  The she-wolf vanished, leaving behind in the triangle a plump, modest-looking young man wearing a decorous necktie, a dildo almost as long and nothing else. ‘Sorry, boss’ he said in a sugary voice ‘I had to try, you know. What’s up?’

  ‘Don’t try to wheedle me, vision of stupidity,’ Ware said harshly. Transform, I demand of thee, thou’rt wasting thy father’s time, and mine! Transform!’

  The young man stuck out his tongue which was copper-green. A moment later, the triangle was occupied by a black bearded man apparently twice his age, wearing a forest-green robe rimmed in ermine and a glittering crown. It hurt Baines’s eyes to look at it. An odour of sandalwood began slowly to diffuse through the room.

  ‘That’s better,’ Ware said. ‘Now I charge thee, by those Names I have named and on pain of those torments thou hast known, to regard the likeness and demesne of that mortal whose eidolon I hold in my hand, and that when I release thee, thou shalt straightaway go unto him, not making thyself known unto him, but revealing, as it were to come from his own intellectual soul, a vision and understanding of that great and ultimate Nothingness which lurks behind those signs he calls matter and energy, as thou wilt see it in his private forebodings, and that thou remainest with him and deepen his despair without remittal, until such time as he shall despise his soul for its endeavours, and destroy the life of his body.’

  ‘I cannot give thee,’ the crowned figure said, in a voice deep but somehow lacking all resonance, ‘what thou requirest.’

  ‘Refusal will not avail thee,’ Ware said, ‘for either shalt thou go incontinently and perform what I comand, or I shall in no wise dismiss thee, but shall keep thee here unto my life’s end, and torment thee daily, as thy father permitteth.’

  ‘Thy life itself, though it last seven hundred years, is but a day to me,’ said the crowned figure. Sparks issued from its nostrils as it spoke. ‘And thy torments but a farthing of those I have endured since ere the cosmic egg was hatched, and Eve invented.’

  For answer, Ware again stabbed the rod into the fire, which, Baines noted numbly, failed even to scorch it. But the crowned figure threw back its bearded head and howled desolately. Ware withdrew the rod, but only by a hand’s breadth.

  ‘I shall go as thou commandest,’ the creature said sullenly. Hatred oozed from it like lava.

  ‘Be it not performed exactly, I shall call thee up again,’ Ware said. ‘But be it executed, for thy pay thou shalt carry off the immortal part of the subject thou shalt tempt, which is as yet spotless in the sight of Heaven, and a great prize.’

  ‘But not yet enough,’ said the demon. ‘For thou must give me also somewhat of thine hoard, as it is written in the pact.’

  ‘Thou art slow to remember the pact,’ Ware said. ‘But I would deal fairly with thee, knowing marquis. Here.’

  He reached into his robe and drew out something minute and colourless, which flashed in the candlelight. At first, Baines took it to be a diamond, but as Ware held it out, he recognized it as an opalescent, crystal tear vase, the smallest he had ever seen, stopper, contents and all. This Ware tossed, underhand, out of the circle to the fuming figure, which to Baines’s new astonishment – for he had forgotten that what he was really looking at
had first exhibited as a beast – caught it skilfully in its mouth and swallowed it.

  ‘Thou dost only tantalize MARCHOSIAS,’ the Presence said. ‘When I have thee in Hell, magician, then shall I drink thee dry, though thy tears flow never so copiously.’

  Thy threats are empty. I am not marked for thee, shouldst thou see me in Hell forever,’ Ware said. ‘Enough, ungrateful monster. Cease thy witless plaudering and discharge thine errand. I dismiss thee.’

  The crowned figure snarled, and then, suddenly, reverted to the form in which it had first showed itself. It vomited a great gout of fire, but the surge failed to pass the wall of the triangle; instead, it collected in a ball around the demon itself. Nevertheless, Baines could feel the heat against his face. Ware raised his wand.

  The floor inside the small circle vanished. The apparition clashed its brazen wings and dropped like a stone. With a rending thunderclap, the floor healed seamlessly.

  Then there was silence. As the ringing in Baines’s ears died away, he became aware of a distant thrumming sound as though someone had left a car idling in the street in front of the palazzo. Then he realized what it was: the great cat was purring. It had watched the entire proceedings with nothing more than grave interest. So, apparently, had Hess. Ginsberg seemed to be jittering, but he was standing his ground. Although he had never seen Jack rattled before, Baines could hardly blame him; he himself felt sick and giddy, as though just the effort of looking at MARCHOSIAS had been equivalent to having scrambled for days up some Himalayan glacier.

  ‘It is over,’ Ware said in a grey whisper. He looked very old. Taking up his sword, he cut the diagram with it, ‘Now we must wait. I will be in seclusion for two weeks. Then we will consult again. The circle is open. You may leave.’

  Father Domenico heard the thunderclap, distant and muffled, and knew that the sending had been made – and that he was forbidden, now as before, even to pray for the soul of the victim (or the patient, in Ware’s antiseptic Aristotelian terminology). Sitting up and swinging his feet over the edge of the bed, breathing with difficulty in the musky, detumescent air, he walked unsteadily to his satchel and opened it.

  Why – that was the question – did God so tie his hands, why did He allow such a compromise as the Covenant at all? It suggested, at least, some limitation in His power unallowable by the firm dogma of Omnipotence, which it was a sin even to question; or, at worst, some ambiguity in His relationship with Hell, one quite outside the revealed answers to the Problem of Evil.

  That last was a concept too terrible to bear thinking about. Probably it was attributable purely to the atmosphere here; in any event, Father Domenico knew that he was in no spiritual or emotional condition to examine it now.

  He could, however, examine with possible profit a minor but related question: Was the evil just done the evil Father Domenico had been sent to oversee? There was every immediate reason to suppose that it was – and if it was, then Father Domenico could go home tomorrow, ravaged but convalescent.

  On the other hand it was possible – dreadful but in a way also hopeful – that Father Domenico had been commanded to Hell-mouth to await the emission of something worse. That would resolve the puzzling anomaly that Ware’s latest undertaking, abominable though they all were, was for Ware not unusual. Much more important, it would explain at least in part, why the Covenant existed at all: in Tolstoy’s words, ‘God sees the truth, but waits.’

  And this question, at least, Father Domenico need not simply ponder, but could actively submit to the Divine guidance, even here, even now, provided that he call upon no Presences. That restriction was not prohibitive; what was he a magician for, if not to be as subtle in his works as in his praise?

  Inkhorn, quill, straightedge, three different discs of different sizes cut from virgin cardboard – not an easy thing to come by – and the wrapped burin came out of the satchel and were arranged on top of his dresser, which would serve well enough for a desk. On the cardboard discs he carefully inscribed three different scales: the A camerae of sixteen divine attributes, from bonitas to patientia; the T camerae of thirty attributes of things, from temporis to negatio; and the E camerae of the nine questions, from whether to how great. He centrepunched all three discs with the burin, pinned them together with a cuff link and finally asperged the assembled Lull Engine with holy water from the satchel. Over it he said:

  ‘I conjure thee, O form of this instrument, by the authority of God the Father Almighty, by the virtue of Heaven and the stars, by that of the elements, by that of stones and herbs, and in like manner by the virtue of snowstorms, thunder and winds, and belike also by the virtue of the Ars magna in whose figure thou art drawn, that thou receive all power unto the performance of those things in the perfection of which we are concerned, the whole without trickery, falsehood or deception, by the command of God, Creator of the Angels and Emperor of the Ages. DAMAHII, LUMECH, GADAL, PANCIA, VELOAS, MEOROD, LAMIDOCH, BALDACH, ANERETHON, MITRATON, most holy angels, be ye wardens of this instrument. Domine, Deusmeus, in te speravi. … Confitebor tibi, Domine, in toto corde meo. … Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum. … Amen.’

  This said, Father Domenico took up the engine and turned the circles against each other. Lull’s great art was not easy to use; most of the possible combinations of any group of wheels were trivial, and it took reason to see which were important, and faith to see which were inspired. Nevertheless, it had one advantage over all other forms of scrying: it was not in any strict sense, a form of magic.

  He turned the wheels at random the required number of times, and then, taking the outermost by its edge, shook it to the four quarters of the sky. He was almost afraid to look at the result.

  But on that very first essay, the engine had generated:

  PATIENCE/BECOMING/REALITY

  It was the answer he had both feared and hoped for. And it was, he realized with a subdued shock, the only answer he could have expected on Christmas Eve.

  He put the engine and the tools back in his satchel, and crept away into the bed. In his state of over-exhaustion and alarm, he did not expect to sleep … but within two turns of the glass he was no longer in the phenomenal world, but was dreaming instead that, like Gerbert the magician-Pope, he was fleeing the Holy Office down the wind astride a devil.

  Ware’s period of recovery did not last quite as long as he had prophesied. He was visibly up and about by Twelfth Night. By that time, Baines – though only Jack Ginsberg could see and read the signs – was chafing at the inaction. Jack had to remind him that in any event at least two months were supposed to pass before the suicide of Dr Stockhausen could even be expected, and suggested that in the interim they all go back to Rome and to work.

  Baines shrugged the suggestion off. Whatever else was on his mind, it did not seem to involve Consolidated Warfare Service’s interests more than marginally … or, at least, the thought of business could not distract him beyond the making of a small number of daily telephone calls.

  The priest or monk or whatever he was, Father Domenico, was still in attendance too. Evidently he had not been taken in by the show. Well, that was Ware’s problem, presumably. All the same, Jack stayed out of sight of the cleric as much as possible; having him around, Jack recalled in a rare burst of association with his Bronx childhood, was a little like being visited by a lunatic Orthodox relative during a crucial marriage brokerage.

  Not so lunatic at that, though; for if magic really worked – as Jack had had to see that it did – then the whole tissue of metaphysical assumptions Father Domenico stood for, from Moses through the Kabbalah to the New Testament, had to follow, as a matter of logic. After this occurred to Jack, he not only hated to see Father Domenico, but had nightmares in which he felt that Father Domenico was looking back at him.

  Ware himself, however, did not emerge officially, to be talked to, until his predicted fourteenth day. Then, to Jack’s several-sides disquietude, the first person he called into his office was Jack Ginsberg.
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br />   Jack wanted to talk to Ware only slightly more than he wanted to talk to the barefooted, silently courteous Father Domenico; and the effect upon Baines of Ware’s singling Jack out for the first post-conjuration interview, though under ordinary circumstances it could have been discounted as minor, could not even be conjectured in Baines’s present odd state of mind. After a troubled hour, Jack took the problem to Baines, not even sure any more of his own delicacy in juggling such an egg.

  ‘Go ahead,’ was all Baines said. He continued to give Jack the impression of a man whose mind was not to be turned more than momentarily from some all-important thought. That was alarming, too, but there seemed to be nothing to be done about it. Setting his face into its business mould of pleasant attentiveness, over slightly clenched teeth, Jack marched up to Ware’s office.

  The sunlight there was just as bright and innocent as ever, pouring directly in from the sea-sky on top of the cliff. Jack felt slightly more in contact with what he had used to think of as real life. In some hope of taking the initiative away from Ware and keeping it, he asked the magician, even before sitting down, ‘Is there some news already?’

  ‘None at all,’ Ware said. ‘Sitdown, please. Dr Stockhausen is a tough patient, as I warned you all at the beginning. It’s possible that he won’t fall at all, in which case a far more strenuous endeavour will be required. But in the meantime I’m assuming that he will, and that I therefore ought to be preparing for Dr Baines’s next commission. That’s why I wanted to see you first.’

  ‘I haven’t any idea what Dr Baines’s next commission is,’ Jack said, ‘and if I did I wouldn’t tell you before he did.’