They want control. They want control of us. Help us. Help us. They want the Grinning Man awake.
I looked at Jennifer. She had her eyes shut.
“And now, the last one.” I couldn’t help but notice that Reg’s hands, steady up to that point, had begun to tremble.
My blood opened the gate. The magician murdered me. Aidan, find him. Save them. Stop him or the Grinning Man will come. I love you. I love you. I wish you could hear me.
I put my head down. Silence crept over the room as I looked down at the table. I could feel everyone’s eyes boring into my head, but I didn’t want to look up. I didn’t need anyone to tell me whose voice that was. I knew it from the moment she spoke.
Amanda.
Her voice assaulted the tightly constructed wall I’d built around my heart. I searched wildly for explanations. Whatever comfort I had found in my unbelief left me the moment I heard Amanda’s voice. I couldn’t persuade myself into thinking it was my depression or willful delusion. I wanted to crawl back into the comfort of not believing in a spiritual reality. I never grasped until now how disturbing it would be to confront the fact something other than this physical world existed.
I rubbed my face, trying to cover up my unsteady hands.
“Aidan? Are you okay?” Father Neal asked from across the table.
“I … I guess I am. I don’t know.” I tried to keep my voice steady.
“What does all this mean?” Jennifer asked, the tone of her voice unreadable.
“We don’t really know,” Father Neal said. “There are a lot of things in here we don’t understand.”
“Excuse me, Father Neal, but this is the craziest pile of shit I have seen since I’ve been on this team,” Darrin said, twirling another unlit cigarette in his hand.
“Someone has obviously committed murder with the belief that it will give them control over the dead,” Zoe chimed in. “Why, how, or what their purpose is, we don’t know. And forgive me, but it looks as if Amanda was his or her first victim.”
I rubbed my head. “I know you’re right. But what about the Bone Masters? And the Grinning Man? What’s that about? And the gates? All that has to fit together somehow.” I got up from the table.
“I think we have had enough for one night, everyone,” Father Neal broke in.
Everyone’s eyes widened. They looked as surprised as I felt.
“I would like to talk with Aidan and Jennifer by themselves.”
Everyone had too much respect for Father Neal to question him. As they left the room, Father Neal shook every hand, gave them hugs and offered them each little words of encouragement. When the last person left, Father Neal shut the door and turned to us.
I tried not to gasp at the change in his expression. He looked old, weak … and afraid.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Father Neal led us into his office, and he sat down behind his desk. He motioned for us to sit and didn’t speak for a while.
“Are you okay, Father?” Jennifer asked.
“Yes, just feeling a little spent. There are things I need to tell you and Aidan. Things I’ve told very few others. Things I’m not sure you’ll believe even when I tell you. However, you were with me in the cemetery, so maybe what you saw will help you believe.”
“Try us,” Jennifer said.
“I will. I must, it seems. But it will take some time.”
“It’s okay, Bishop can wait.” I sat on the couch across from him.
He smiled, smoothing out some of the grooves in his face. “To understand what I’m going to say, I must tell you a story of my early life.” He took a deep breath. “I arrived at Oxford at the tender age of seventeen. I knew pretty much nothing about the world around me, so I was ripe for anything. Of course, like all good Englishmen, I went to the local parish church. But when I got to Oxford, my childlike faith was challenged, and it crumpled pretty quickly. I cast it off willingly and was ready to jump into whatever took my fancy.”
No wonder he understood my doubt so well.
“You might think that given the times, I would become a confirmed scientific materialist, but I guess I was too much of a romantic to go that far. I wanted to hold on to some sort of spirituality. So, I looked for alternatives, and I found a group known as the Golden Dawn.”
“Who is the Golden Dawn?” I asked.
He leaned back in his chair. “You might call them modern day magicians, or rather, what they would prefer, scientists of the Newtonian stripe.”
“I don’t think Newton would appreciate the comparison.”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “How much do you know about the history of science?”
“The basics, I suppose. Enough to know that Newton was the first scientist.”
He nodded. “And the last magician … or so people think. Newton’s life obsession was alchemy. He considered his scientific achievements as products of that pursuit. Just about everyone during that early period practiced alchemy in one form or another. Tried, I daresay. Science owes its very existence to the magical impulse, and, in fact, the impulse that drives both is the same.”
“I’m sorry, Father Neal, that just sounds contradictory,” Jennifer said. “There’s no logic to it. Magic has to do with stuff like Harry Potter and all that. Science is based on rationality, observation, and experimentation.”
I nodded in agreement.
Father Neal smiled. “All are used in magic as well, my dear. And keep in mind that I’m not talking about magic like Houdini or someone like that. I’m talking about the desire to control nature, to have power over the elements and unlock the secrets of the universe. Each follows a ritual or experiment. Each wants observable results. Each, depending on the person, wants the power that might be unleashed. To be gods, you might say.”
A silence hung over the room. Father Neal reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He poured himself a glass and took a sip.
“I think Dawkins might disagree with that,” I responded.
Father Neal smiled. “Ah, Richard. Yes, he would try. But even he speaks in mystical tones when he describes the process of evolution. It makes you wonder.”
“So, the Golden Dawn,” Jennifer broke in.
He nodded and took another sip of whisky. “There was a fierce war of words between the two strongest personalities in the Golden Dawn at the time, Samuel Maters and Aleister Crowley.”
“Wait, Aleister Crowley? The same guy Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin was into?” Jennifer asked.
“The very same, my dear. I met Aleister in 1936 and was drawn to him. He radiated a sense of power over everyone, and, excuse me my dear, his sexual pull on the women was profound. I saw him seduce married women after only five-minute conversations. I’m ashamed to admit it, but as an awkward young man, I wanted that, to have that sort of power and control over women. I fell into Aleister’s orbit and sat at his feet.”
I tried to picture it. Father Neal, one of the holiest guys I had ever met, sitting at the feet of the man who proudly called himself The Beast. I couldn’t do it. This gentle old man across from me, who seemed like personal holiness incarnate, had dabbled in magic, seduction, and from the sound of it, illicit sex. I couldn’t even begin to bring those two pieces together.
“So, Aleister taught me magic or ‘magick’ as he called it. He taught me spells that he believed were more like scientific formulas that hadn’t been discovered yet. I threw myself into the practice. I’m ashamed to say, I began to participate in many dark rituals. At the time, I wrote them off as experiments, just as any person interested in science might participate in for curiosity’s sake.”
He bowed his head, cheeks coloring. Now I understood why everyone, including myself, trusted him so much. Father Neal didn’t back down from presenting himself as he had really been and didn’t hide the truth. No matter what people might think of him. I’d been taught to present one face to the world while hiding my real one, the sinful face, the cynical dark face. The hiding had eate
n me alive, and the honesty had turned Father Neal into something different. Something gentle, holy, loving.
“There was a branch of magick that was merely discussed but never practiced. It was darker than anything we ever practiced, the magick known as Bone Mastering or using the dead for magickal purposes. Crowley claimed he never practiced this branch of the art, and I believed him then. After I bowed the knee to Christ, I found out a different story. I saw first-hand what he tried to teach his disciples as well as their goal.”
At the mention of Bone Mastering, I began to shake and goose bumps covered my arms. “What’s their goal, Father?” I asked.
He frowned. “As for the group, I don’t know. I never got far enough. I left them before I got further up and further in. Aleister never told me all of his secrets.”
“So how do they control the dead?” Jennifer asked.
“There are a number of different spells, incantations, experiments as they liked to say. Some more powerful and hideous than others.”
“How does this relate to Amanda and the cemetery?” I asked.
He paused as he swirled his whisky. “I believe that whoever killed her wanted to start one of the most powerful of spells of control. It’s called the Three Gates of the Dead. Until Aidan took me to the cemetery, I thought it might have just been a magician urban legend. I’m sorry to say, it’s not.”
Jennifer took out her notebook and began to scribble notes. “Can you describe this ritual to me, Father?”
“It’s brutally simple but effective. The goal is to harness the power of the dead through the use of three sites of power.”
“Sites of power? In Ohio?” I asked
“There are plenty of sites here, more than most states in the Midwest. Maybe more than anywhere in North America. For one, the earthen mound complexes in this state are mysterious. No one knows their true purposes, although most of them are one vast graveyard. No one knows for sure, but the American ancients who made the mounds most likely believed these complexes to be thin spaces between the living and the dead. From what I’ve studied in magick, they were right. You don’t even need to go that far, however. Any place of the dead will work. The Confederate Cemetery seems to be one of those.”
Jennifer tapped her pen on her notebook. “So, a magician finds the sites, then what?”
“You murder a ‘defiled woman,’ as it were, someone who had sinned sexually. You spill her blood and, as you’ve seen, carve directions into her forehead. Pardon me, dear, for being so graphic.”
Jennifer gave a small smile. She had probably seen too many gruesome sights and heard enough dirty talk from the guys she worked with not to even be remotely offended.
“Thank you, Father,” she said. “You are a gentleman. I had forgotten what you all looked like.” She winked at me. “But, I have another question. Why three sites?”
“Three has always been a powerful, magickal number. It’s a number of completeness. In this case, it is meant to summon the dead in each area for more power, more control for whatever the Master’s purpose might be. Such concentrations of power are meant for a purpose beyond the normal, everyday magick.”
“What is their purpose?” I asked.
Father Neal gulped the rest of his whiskey. “From what we heard tonight, they are trying to awaken the Grinning Man.”
Jennifer and I looked at each other.
“Who is the Grinning Man?”
“His history is long and complicated. I won’t go into too much detail, now, other than to say, the rumor is that he is buried somewhere in Ohio, trapped here. I’ve not been able to find out how or why or even when. That story might be more interesting than my own encounter with him out West. He was, or is, a man who makes Aleister look like a cartoon character.”
“How do you know this?” Jennifer asked.
Father Neal leaned forward. “He’s the reason I’m in Ohio. I’m here to find him and finish his destruction. I daresay he wouldn’t mind finding me either, but for different reasons.”
My eyes widened. “How long have you been searching for him?”
“Too many years to count. I’ve probably overstayed my welcome at St. Patrick’s. I’ve only been able to find traces, enough to make me realize I’m on the right trail. Just when I think I get close, something or someone blocks my view. Maybe whoever is responsible for this ritual might be behind that, who knows?”
“But why have you been searching for him?” Jennifer pressed.
“If someone were to awaken him in this time and place, I shudder to think what he would do. Plus, it’s my duty, given to me. I won’t back away. I swore an oath. He cannot be allowed to reawaken, or many will suffer.”
I frowned. “So, you think Amanda was killed to begin a ritual that will end in resurrecting this Grinning Man?”
Father Neal poured more whiskey for all of us. “I don’t think, I know. Everything fits. The unusual power of the dead, the ritualistic nature of Amanda’s murder and, more important, the sound of ripping cloth at the cemetery.”
“Yeah, what was that?” Jennifer asked.
“I told you before. It’s the ripping of the veil between the seen and the unseen worlds. The dead are being drawn through that tear and being used by the magician that began the ritual. Or magicians, I should say. There is more than one, as the ritual needs two or more.”
I couldn’t wrap my brain around anything he was telling us. “It would seem so,” I said. “But it might be a copycat killer of some type, you know. Maybe he read about the ritual in a book and decided to try it out.”
Father Neal shook his head. “No, this ritual is not written in any available book I know of. And believe me, I know nearly all of them. If it was written down, it is in an obscure book that has never been found. It is always passed from master to apprentice, thus preserving the secret.”
“So how did Crowley know of it?”
“Research into various branches of magick, I would guess. He never taught it to me because he kept saying I was not ready for it. Now, I wonder if it was because he knew that murder was a line I would not cross.”
“So, how did you get out from under his influence?” I asked.
He smiled. “By the grace of God and through a man named Charles Williams.”
I scratched my chin. “Charles Williams. I’ve had heard that name before, but where?”
“He is one of the lesser known Inklings.”
“Inklings?” Jennifer asked.
“Yes,” Father Neal said. “The writer’s group of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their friends. In fact, Charles was one of the more influential members of the group and wrote quite a few books.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“Charles pried me loose and led me back to God. Crowley was angry, cursed Charles and me. But nothing ever came of that, of course.”
“Why not?” Jennifer asked.
“Because I belonged to Christ, my dear.” He smiled and looked over at a painting of a huge man with a dark beard, sitting in a boat, carrying a wooden cup. “Yes, I belong to Him.”
I wondered what Jennifer thought about that comment. I didn’t want to think about Jesus. It made me uncomfortable. Silence filled the room, and I looked at the painting. “Father, what is that picture?”
“That is the legend of the Fisher King.”
“The Robin Williams movie?” Jennifer asked.
Father Neal gave her a half smile. “No, my dear. The legend is way more ancient than that. The Fisher King is the guardian of the Holy Grail in the Arthurian legends of my country. It’s a story I’ve always liked, so my wife painted that for me before she passed.”
I tried to tear myself away from staring at the Fisher King.
Father Neal seemed to study us both and Jennifer cleared her throat. “At least we have an excellent lead, Father. Would you mind coming to the station to make an official statement?”
“No, I don’t think that is a good idea for you or for me. It’s all speculation at th
is point, and your superiors might think less of you if you come with this theory and no proof.”
Jennifer exhaled. “But if you are right about this being the ritual, then we can expect two more deaths. I’ve got to stop them somehow. That’s my job.”
Father Neal nodded, his face haggard and pale. “Yes, and I’ll help you anyway that I can. But I don’t think coming into the station would be that wise. What if you told your superiors you were trying to stop a magick ritual?”
Jennifer deflated. “I see your point.”
“So that would mean the next murder would be at a place called Nebo, according to the ritual,” I said.
Father Neal nodded. “It would seem so.”
Jennifer scratched her scar. “Where would that be?”
“More than likely, it will be some place the Grinning Man has been associated with throughout his long, terrible history. Trust me when I tell you, he’s interfered with your country many times.” He furrowed his brow. “I’ll do my own research and ask around. I may have friends who know.”
“Good idea,” I said. “We can do some on our own as well. Given that it’s from the Bible, there have to be dozens of towns in the US with that name. What else should we look for?”
“You don’t even have to look that broadly,” Father Neal said in a flat tone. “The ritual must be done within certain boundaries to focus on the control of ‘local’ spirits. Look for some sort of triangular pattern.”
“Yeah, but even if we figure out the location, can we stop the murder?” I asked.
Jennifer looked at me. “We can have the local PD camp out in the area. Or do drive-bys at least. Believe me, we’ve done that on flimsier evidence than we have here.”
Father Neal leaned over his desk. “You must be quick, Jennifer. The ritual will be completed by the next full moon. The magicians want the Grinning Man. But surely, they don’t think they can control him,” he said almost to himself before looking back at Jennifer. “If he gains the benefits of these ghastly deaths, his power will be breathtaking in its scope.”
“I’ll get right on it.”
Father Neal turned to me. “Before you go, Aidan, may I speak with you?”
3 Gates of the Dead (The 3 Gates of the Dead Series) Page 20