“I can’t go with you,” she said.
“Why the hell not? Knowing Garth, he’ll have an army of cops with him.”
“That’s not the point. I don’t want to answer questions. I don’t want anyone to know exactly what happened in that building tonight.”
“Peth will tell them.”
“No, he won’t. And none of the others will either. I must beg you not to speak, Mongo, for the sake of our friendship. When I called Garth I told him simply that I had a hunch about you and the warehouse. Garth has learned to trust my hunches.”
“This is no time for games,” I said impatiently. “How did you know where I was?”
She ignored my question. “There will be reporters out there, questions that I’m not prepared to answer. I would no longer be able to carry on my work at the university, and you know how important that is to me. It’s my link with the … rest of the world. Please, Mongo. Don’t take that away from me.”
She turned and ran off into the darkness without waiting for an answer. I walked slowly toward the flashing lights at the front of the building.
The proverbial mop-up of Peth and his crew was decidedly anticlimactic. When Garth and the other policemen broke down the secret door the members of the coven were waiting calmly. Their robes and, presumably, all of the records had been consigned to the gas-fed bonfire still roaring from the pit in the center of the floor. They offered no resistance.
As Uranus had predicted, no one mentioned her presence in the building earlier. For some reason I didn’t fully understand, I didn’t either.
I was exhausted, and my head felt as though it had been stuffed with rotting cotton. Still, I managed to drag myself down to the police station, where I turned over the papers I had taken and made some kind of statement. Then I went home and poured myself a tumbler of Scotch. I wanted desperately to sleep, but there were still a lot of things on my mind.
There was nothing that had happened which could not be explained by a few good guesses and a lot of abnormal psychology emanating from some very sick minds. I needed the Scotch because I realized that Uranus possessed one of those sick minds. A woman I loved was, in my opinion, desperately ill, and I had to find the courage to confront her with this opinion, to suggest that she see a psychiatrist.
Having resolved this, I slipped off my jacket and threw it toward the bed. Only at the last moment did I realize that it somehow seemed heavier than it should. The jacket slid across the smooth bedspread and fell to the floor on the opposite side with a heavy, metallic clunk. The sound shrieked in my ears, echoing down to the very roots of my soul.
Whatever was in the jacket, I didn’t want to know about it. I raced around the bed, picked up the jacket and in the same motion sent it hurtling toward the window. The weighted cloth shattered the glass and dropped from sight.
I stood, shaking uncontrollably and breathing hard as the cool wind whistled through the broken pane. Even as a tremendous surge of relief flowed through me, I knew that throwing away the jacket was no answer. If, indeed, there were the forces outside the “circle of light” Uranus had mentioned, it would do no good for me to deny it: I would merely remain ignorant of their existence. If the jacket was lost, I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what had been in the pocket—and how it had gotten there.
I drained off the Scotch, then went back into the night.
This story, also incorporated into An Affair of Sorcerers, is the one I would approach most differently if I were writing the piece now instead of this introduction to it. This is the closest I ever came to acceding to the possibility that there “might be something there,” when all that is there is our fear and ignorance. Today I would like to believe, and perhaps even argue, that the story is really about how fear alone can most definitely kill, and about the tendency of superstitious people who insist on “taking things on faith”—even when all objective evidence points to the contrary—to be their own executioners intellectually, spiritually, and often physically. The naked text is there, but I would still like to believe that I was writing about the terrible cost of the dues for membership in some belief systems.
Book of Shadows
It had been a long day with absolutely nothing accomplished. I’d spent most of it grading a depressing set of mid-term papers that led me to wonder what I’d been teaching all semester in my graduate criminology seminar. After that I’d needed a drink.
Instead of doing the perfectly sensible thing and repairing to the local pub, I’d made the mistake of calling my answering service, which informed me there was a real live client waiting for me in my downtown office. The Yellow Pages the man had picked my name out of didn’t mention the fact that this particular private detective was a dwarf: One look at me and the man decided he didn’t really need a private detective after all.
With my sensitive ego in psychic shreds, I headed home. I planned to quickly make up for my past sobriety and spend an electronically lobotomized evening in front of the television.
I perked up when I saw the little girl waiting for me outside my apartment. Kathy Marsten was a small friend of mine from 4D, down the hall. With her blond hair and blue eyes, dressed in a frilly white dress and holding a bright red patent leather purse, she looked positively beatific. I laughed to myself as I recalled that it had taken me two of her seven years to convince her that I wasn’t a potential playmate.
“Kathy, Kathy, Kathy!” I said, picking her up and setting her down in a manner usually guaranteed to produce Instant Giggle. “How’s my girl today?”
“Hello, Mr. Mongo,” she said very seriously.
“Why the good clothes? You look beautiful, but I’d think you’d be out playing with your friends by this time.”
“I came here right after school, Mr. Mongo. I’ve been waiting for you. I was getting afraid I wouldn’t see you before my daddy came home. I wanted to ask you something.”
Now the tears came. I reached down and brushed them away, suddenly realizing that this was no child’s game. “What did you want to ask me, Kathy?”
She sniffled, then regained control of herself in a manner that reminded me of someone much older. “My daddy says that you sometimes help people for money.”
“That’s right, Kathy. Can I help you?”
Her words came in a rush. “I want you to get my daddy’s book of shadows back from Daniel so Daddy will be happy again. But you mustn’t tell Daddy. He’d be awful mad at me if he knew I told anybody. But he just has to get it back or something terrible will happen. I just know it.”
“Kathy, slow down and tell me what a ‘book of shadows’ is. Who’s Daniel?”
But she wasn’t listening. Kathy was crying again, fumbling in her red purse. “I’ve got money for you,” she stammered. “I’ve been saving my allowance and milk money.”
Before I could say anything the little girl had taken out a handful of small change and pressed it into my palm. I started to give it back, then stopped when I heard footsteps come up behind me.
“Kathy!” a thin voice said. “There you are!”
The girl gave me one long, piercing look that was a plea to keep her secret. Then she quickly brushed away her tears and smiled at the person standing behind me. “Hi, Daddy! I fell and hurt myself. Mr. Mongo was making me feel better.”
I straightened up and turned to face Jim Marsten. He seemed much paler and thinner since I’d last seen him, but perhaps it was my imagination. The fact of the matter was that I knew Kathy much better than I knew either of her parents. We knew each other’s names, occasionally exchanged greetings in the hall, and that was it. Marsten was a tall man, the near side of thirty, prematurely balding. The high dome of his forehead accentuated the dark, sunken hollows of his eye sockets. He looked like a man who was caving in.
“Hello, Mongo,” Marsten said.
I absently slipped the money Kathy had given me into my pocket and shook the hand that was extended to me. “Hi, Jim. Good to see you.”
“Thanks f
or taking care of my daughter.” He looked at Kathy. “Are you all right now?”
Kathy nodded her head. Her money felt heavy in my pocket; I felt foolish. By the time I realized I probably had no right to help a seven-year-old child keep secrets from her father, Jim Marsten had taken the hand of his daughter and was leading her off down the hall. Kathy looked back at me once and her lips silently formed the word please.
When they were gone I took Kathy’s money out of my pocket and counted it. There was fifty-seven cents.
I must have looked shaky. My brother Garth poured me a second double Scotch and brought it over to where I was sitting. I took a pull at it, then set the glass aside and swore.
Garth shook his head. “It can all be explained, Mongo,” he said. “There’s a rational explanation for everything.”
“Is there?” I asked without any real feeling. “Let’s hear one.”
Someone was calling my name: a child’s voice, crying, afraid, a small wave from some dark, deep ocean lapping at the shore of my mind. Then I was running down a long tunnel, slipping and falling on the soft, oily surface, struggling to reach the small, frail figure at the other end. The figure of Kathy seemed to recede with each step I took, and still I ran. Kathy was dressed in a long, flowing white gown, buttoned to the neck, covered with strange, twisted shapes. Suddenly she was before me. As I reached out to take her in my arms she burst into flames.
I sat bolt upright in bed, drenched in sweat. My first reaction was relief when I realized I had only been dreaming. Then came terror: I smelled smoke.
Or thought I smelled smoke. Part of the dream? I started to reach for my cigarettes, then froze. There was smoke. I leaped out of bed, quickly checked the apartment. Nothing was burning. I threw open the door of the apartment and stepped out into the hall. Smoke was seeping from beneath the door of the Marstens’ apartment.
I sprinted to the end of the hall and broke the fire box there. Then I ran back and tried the door to 4D. It was locked. I didn’t waste time knocking. I braced against the opposite wall, ran two steps forward, kipped in the air and kicked out at the door just above the lock. The door rattled. I picked myself off the floor and repeated the process. This time the door sprung open wide.
The first thing that hit me was the stench. The inside of the apartment, filled with thick, greenish smoke, smelled like a sewer.
There was a bright, furnace glow to my right, coming from the bedroom. I started toward it, then stopped when I saw Kathy lying on the couch.
She was dressed in the same gown I had seen in the dream.
I bent over her. She seemed to be breathing regularly but was completely unconscious, not responding to either my voice or touch. I picked her up and carried her out into the hall, laid her down on the carpet and went back into the apartment.
There was nothing I could do there. I stood in the door of the bedroom and gazed in horror at the bed that had become a funeral pyre. The naked bodies of Jim and Becky Marsten were barely discernible inside the deadly ring of fire. The bodies, blackened and shriveling, were locked together in some terrible and final act of love. And death.
“They were using combustible chemicals as part of their ritual,” Garth said, lighting a cigarette and studying me. “They started fooling with candles and the room went up. It’s obvious.”
“Is it? The fire was out by the time the Fire Department got there. And there wasn’t that much damage to the floor.”
“Typical of some kinds of chemical fires, Mongo. You know that.”
“I saw the fire: it was too bright, too even. And I did hear Kathy’s voice calling me. She was crying for help.”
“In your dream?”
“In my dream.”
My brother Garth is a cop. He took a long time to answer, and I sensed that he was embarrassed. “The mind plays tricks, Mongo.”
I had a few thoughts on that subject: I washed them away with a mouthful of Scotch.
“Excuse me, Doctor. How’s the girl? Kathy Marsten?”
The doctor was Puerto Rican, frail, and walked with a limp. He had a full head of thick black hair and large, brown eyes that weren’t yet calloused over by the pain one encounters in a New York City hospital. He was a young man. The tag on his white smock said his name was Rivera. He looked somewhat surprised to find a dwarf standing in front of him.
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Frederickson.”
The eyes narrowed. “I’ve seen your picture. They call you Mongo. Ex-circus performer, college professor, private—”
“I asked you how the girl was.”
“Are you a relative?”
“No. Friend of the family. I brought her in.”
He hesitated, then led me to a small alcove at the end of the corridor. I didn’t like the look of the way he walked and held his head: too sad, a little desperate.
“My name is Rivera,” he said. “Juan Rivera.”
“I saw the name tag, Doctor.”
“Kathy is dying.”
Just like that. I passed my hand over my eyes. “Of what?”
Rivera shrugged his shoulders. It was an odd gesture, filled with helplessness and bitter irony. “We don’t know,” he said, his eyes clouding. “There’s no sign of smoke inhalation, which, of course, was the first thing we looked for. Since then we’ve run every conceivable test. Nothing. There’s no sign of physical injury. She’s just … dying. All the machines can tell us is that her vital signs are dropping at an alarming rate. If the drop continues at its present rate, Kathy Marsten will be dead in two to three days.”
“She hasn’t regained consciousness?”
“No. She’s in a deep coma.”
“Can’t you operate?”
Juan Rivera’s laugh was short, sharp, bitter, belied by the anguish in his eyes. “Operate on what? Don’t you understand? Modern medicine says there’s nothing wrong with that girl. She’s merely dying.”
Rivera swallowed hard. “There must be something in her background: an allergy, some obscure hereditary disease. That information is vital.” He suddenly reached into his hip pocket and drew out his wallet. “You’re a private detective. I want to hire you to find some relative of Kathy’s that knows something about her medical history.”
I held up my hand. “No thanks. I only take on one client at a time.”
Rivera looked puzzled. “You won’t help?”
“The girl hired me to find something for her. I figure that covers finding a way to save her life. Do you still have the gown she was wearing when I brought her in?”
“The one with the pictures?”
“Right. I wonder if you’d give it to me.”
“Why?”
“I’d rather not say right now, Dr. Rivera. I think the symbols on that gown mean something. They could provide a clue to what’s wrong with Kathy.”
“They’re designs,” he said somewhat impatiently. “A child’s nightgown. What can it have to do with Kathy’s illness?”
“Maybe nothing. But I won’t know for sure unless you give it to me.”
“Hypnosis.”
“Hypnosis?! C’mon, Garth. You’re reaching.”
“Trauma, then. After all, she did watch her parents burn to death.”
“Maybe. She was unconscious when I found her.”
“God knows what else she was forced to watch.”
“And take part in,” I added.
“Assuming she did see her parents die, don’t you think that—along with everything else—might not be enough to shock a girl to death?”
“I don’t know, Garth. You’re the one with all the explanations.”
“God, Mongo, you don’t believe that stuff Daniel told you?!”
“I believe the Marstens believed. And Daniel.”
“You’re right, Mongo. They are occult symbols.”
I watched Dr. Uranus Jones as she continued to finger the satin gown, examining every inch of it. Uranus was a handsome women in her early fifties—good-lo
oking enough to have carried on a string of affairs with a procession of lab assistants twenty years her junior, or so rumor had it. Her gray-streaked blond hair was drawn back into a ponytail, which made her look younger.
The walls of her university office were covered with astronomical charts, many of which she had designed herself. It was an appropriate decor for the office of one of the world’s most prominent astronomers. But I wasn’t there to discuss astronomy.
Uranus had a rather interesting dual career. As far as I knew, I was the only one of Uranus’ colleagues at the university who knew that Uranus was also a top astrologer and medium, with a near legendary reputation in the New York occult underground.
“What do they mean?”
“They look like symbols for the ascending order of demons,” she said quietly.
“What does it mean as far as the Marstens are concerned?”
Uranus took a long time to answer. “My guess is that the Marstens were witches practicing the black side of their craft. I’d say they were into demonology and Satanism, and they were trying to summon up a demon. Probably Belial, judging from the symbols on this gown. From what you’ve told me, I’d speculate that the Marstens were using a ritual that rebounded on them. The rebound killed them.”
“Rebound?”
“The evil. It rebounded and killed them. They weren’t able to control the power released by the ritual. That’s the inherent danger of ceremonial magic.”
“What ‘power’?”
“The power of Belial. I assume that’s who they were trying to summon. He killed them before they could exercise the necessary control.”
I studied Uranus in an attempt to see if she was joking. There wasn’t a trace of a smile on her face. “Do you believe that, Uranus?”
She avoided my eyes. “I’m not a ceremonial magician, Mongo.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It wasn’t meant to be. You asked about the symbols on the robe, and I’m responding in the context of ceremonial magic. I’m describing to you a system of belief. It’s up to you to decide whether that system could have anything to do with the fact that Kathy Marsten is dying. It’s your responsibility to choose what avenue to pursue, and, from what I understand, you don’t have much time.”
In the House of Secret Enemies Page 20