1

The Scarlet
Gospels

Final Draft

© Clive Barker
April 26th, 2005

1
 2

For David and Justin.

2
 3

Abyssus est altissimus aura , quod aura altissimus Abyssus.

3
 4

BOOK ONE

4
 5

Part One

Dying to the World

5
 6

One

After the long quiet of the grave, Joseph Ragowski gave voice, and it was not

pleasant, either in sound or sentiment.

“Look at you all,” he said, scrutinizing the five who’d woken him. “You look

terrible, every one of you.”

“You don’t look so good yourself, Joe.” Lili Saffro snapped back, “Your

embalmer was a little too enthusiastic with the rouge and the eye-liner.”

Ragowski snarled, his hand going up to his cheek and wiping off some of the

make-up that had been used to conceal the ghastly pallor his violent death had left on

him. “You didn’t go to all this trouble just to bitch at me,” he said, surveying the

paraphernalia which littered the floor around him. Necromancy demanded an

obsessive’s eye for detail. It had to be the eggs of pure white doves that were pierced

6
 7

and injected with the blood of a girl’s first menstruation, then cracked into alabaster

bowls surrounding the raising place. The birds couldn’t be speckled, the blood

couldn’t be that of a second period, or the bowls anything but pure alabaster. And the

two thousand, seven hundred and nine numerals that were inscribed in black chalk

starting beneath the ring of bowls and spiraling inward to the spot which the corpse

of the resurrectee was hung, had to be in precisely the right order, with no erasing or

corrections.

“This is Kottlove’s work, isn’t it?” Ragowski said.

The oldest of the five, Elizabeth Kottlove, her skills in some of the most

complex and volatile of magical workings unable to keep from her face the gaunt look

of a woman who’d lost both her appetite and her ability to sleep for more than a few

snatched, uneasy minutes, admitted to the work being hers.

“We need your help, Joey.”

7
 8

“Oh it’s Joey again, is it?” Ragowski said. “It’s a long time since you called me

that. It was usually when I’d given you a good long fuck wasn’t it?” He looked over

at Theodore Felixson, his rigid face cracking into a smile that paraded his nicotine

stained teeth. “Oh didn’t you know, Ted? You were married to her, for God’s sake.

You must have known somebody was satisfying her. And it obviously wasn’t you.

She said you were hung like this.”

Ragowski wiggled his little finger. Felixson threw an embarrassed glance at

his fellow magicians, Lili Saffro, Yashar Hedayat and Arnold Poltash.

“Nobody gives a damn, Ragowski. Whatever we did or didn’t do, whatever we

had or didn’t have, none of it matters anymore. It’s all gone to shit!” He shook his

head. “The time we wasted, fighting to outdo one another. Time we should have

been taking pleasure in what we had.”

8
 9

“Spare us your regrets, Arnold.” Lili said. She was the only one of the five

summoners sitting, for the simple reason that she was missing her left leg. “I’m sure

we all wish we could change things —”

“I can’t let another moment go by, Lili dear.” Ragowski said, “Without

remarking that you’re not quite the woman you were. What happened?”

“I was very lucky, believe it or not. He nearly had me.”

“He being — ”

“Yes. The same. He’s gone through the list very thoroughly.”

“How thoroughly?” Ragowski wanted to know. “Be specific. Who’s he taken?

Besides me and what, the seven or eight before me.”

There was a silence, as the five exchanged little looks. It was Kottlove who

finally spoke up.

“We’re all that’s left.” She said quietly, staring at one of the alabaster bowls

and its blood-stained contents.

9
 10

“You…five? Five? No.” All the sarcasm and petty game-playing had gone

from Ragowski’s voice manner. Even the embalmer’s bright paints could not

moderate the horror on his face. “How’s that possible? There were a hundred and

what —?”

“A hundred and seventy-one in the High Circle. That’s obviously only those

who chose to be counted amongst us. There’s no telling how many he took from

outside the Circle. Hundreds? Thousands?”

“And no telling what they owned either.” Lili Saffro pointed out. “We had a

reasonably thorough list of grimoires and stratagem sheets owned by the members of

the Circle —”

“Even that wasn’t complete.” Poltash said. “Everybody kept something to

themselves.”

“That’s right.” said Felixson. “We only know what people owned-up to. We’ll

never know how much he really got his hands on.”

10
 11

“Five of you.” Ragowski said, still having difficulty believing what he’d been

told. “Why didn’t you put your heads together and work out some way to trap him?

He wasn’t working with any other members of his Order.”

“Ah now, you see that’s why we go to the trouble of bringing you back.”

Heyadat said, “Believe me, none of us do it happily. It is a great trouble we go to,

getting your corpse out of the mausoleum, and then all this Nether Testament stuff –

doves and numbers and having to fast for five days – ” He rubbed his ample belly.

“I’m starving, I tell you. I can eat now, yes Kottlove?”

“Yes, yes. Go on, stuff yourself.”

“Thank Christ for that.” Heyadat rummaged in his over-tight jacket and

pulled out two candy bars which he speedily stripped of paper and bit into side by

side. Then as he ate he continued to talk, flecks of chocolate and spittle

accompanying every vociferous point. “You think we never try to catch this bastard.

But he is one smart demon, let me tell you that —”

11
 12

“And getting smarter all the time.” Kottlove added. “Every library he

ransacked, every brain he takes. Every—”

“Wait, what? You said he takes brains? Literally? Like some demented brain

surgeon?”

“No, Joseph.” Ted Felixson said. “He just takes the thoughts and leaves the

meat. It’s probably a working he learned from Kobin’s St. Amant Grimoire. You’ll

remember how Kobin used to boast about the things it contained; how he could turn

us all into mindless zombies if the notion seized him?”

“I remember.” Ragowski said. “Was Kobin taken early then?”

“You were third,” Felixson said, “He was sixth.”

“I suppose in a way you should be flattered,” Lili Saffro said, “He took you

early because he’d done his homework. He knew you had the force of personality

that might have brought us all together against him.”

“But that didn’t happen.”

12
 13

“No, of course not,” Poltash sighed, “We argued and pointed fingers like

squabbling schoolchildren. It was thoroughly self-defeating. And of course the

demon knew there was no love lost between us. That all the Cabals and Orders, and

Cuiles had come unglued over the years because we were so damn suspicious of one

another. He just picked us off, one by one, jumping all over the globe so we never

knew where he was going to strike next. A lot of our colleagues were taken without

anybody knowing a thing about it. We’d hear months later, even a year or two. Just

by chance. One of us would try to make contact with somebody and discover their

houses had been sold, or simply left to rot with nobody to take care of them. I visited

a couple of places myself. Remember Brander’s house in Bali? I went there. And

Doctor Biganzoli’s place outside Rome? I went there too. There was no sign of any

looting. The locals were far too afraid of what they’d heard about the occupants to

take a step inside either house, despite the fact that it must have become very obvious

after a time that nobody was home.”

13
 14

“What did you find?” Ragowski said.

Poltash took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one as he went on. His hands were

trembling, and it took some help from Lili to steady the hand that held his lighter.

“Well everything of nay value was gone, of course, from the Ur-texts down to

the most trivial Blasphematic pamphlet. The shelves were bare. Brander had

obviouslt put up a struggle – there was a lot of blood in the kitchen, of all places,

where he’d plainly been tortured. There were a few dried slices of flesh that might

well have been cut from Brander.”

“Do we really have to go back over all this?” Heyadat said. He was

unwrapping two more candy bars. “We all know the details.”

“Eat and shut up, will you?” Ragowski said to Heyadat. “If you drag me out of

a very welcome death so I can help save your wretched souls then the least you can

do is let me hear the facts.”

“It’s a waste, that’s all.” Heyadat said. “Who knows when he will come?”

14
 15

“Well he won’t come here,” Felixson said. “He wouldn’t take on five of us at

the same time. Six, including Joseph.”

“Keep me out of this. I died my death. I don’t need another, thank you. You

were telling us about Brander’s house, Arnold. You said there was blood in the

kitchen.”

“Old blood. A lot of it, but dried many months before.”

“And where was Brander?”

“What was left of him was out in the shrubbery behind his house. Mostly

bones, picked clean by local dogs.”

“Same with Dr. Biganzoli?” Ragowski said.

“No. Biganzoli’s place was still sealed up when I visited. Shutters closed, doors

locked. As if he’d gone on a very long vacation. But he was inside – lord, it was hot

in there – hanging in his study. He’d been dead in that dry heat for a couple of years

I’d guess. His body was withered up. But the expression on his face – well, maybe it

15
 16

was just the way the flesh had retreated from around his mouth as it dried up, you

know, exposing his gums – but by Christ he looked as though he’d died screaming,

the mouth was so wide open.”

“Did you say he’d hanged himself?” Lili asked Ragowski.

“No, I said he was hanging, which is quite a different story isn’t it?”

“Hanging how?”

“By chains attached to hooks which had been put through his flesh in a lot of

tender places.”

“That’s always been his method.” Heyadat said. “The hooks, the chains, the

box.”

“Except none of us would ever have been tempted by his silly little puzzle

box.” Elizabeth said.

“Not so silly.” Felixson said. “That box – what does he call it?”

16
 17

“The Lament Configuration.” Heyadat said. He was heading for the door. “I

need sustenance. There’s got to be food in this place somewhere.”

“It’s a mausoleum, Yashar.” Poltash said.

“A gravedigger’s forgotten lunch could do in a pinch.” he said, and headed off

hunting.

“You were saying, Theodore. About the Configuration.”

“Well I did want to add that I cut him down, which was the most I could do

under the circumstances. And while I was doing it, black ashes poured out of several

holes that had been burned in his skull. So I think the Cenobite had found early on

some way of taking what he wanted – the knowledge in our heads – and burning up

whatever was left. It must have been something he found after killing Joseph.

Perhaps even in one of your own books?”

Ragowski didn’t comment on the suggestion, so Felixson continued:

17
 18

“Anyway, your thoughts were left unplundered, Joseph, which is some small

mercy I suppose. At some point in their thefts they found the knowledge to steal

from our heads as well as our shelves. The sum of information the Order of the Gash

now possesses is vast. Between us all they’ve harvested most of the major workings in

every magical system in the Western World, and a good proportion of information

from Russia, China, India…the list goes on.”

“What do they want it for?” Ragowski wondered aloud.

“The same reason we wanted it. The shaping of matter by will. And of course

the stuff we don’t own up to. The getting and keeping of power. These creatures

haven’t just taken our treaties, scrolls, and grimmies. They’ve cleared out all the

vestments, all the talismans, and annulets —”

“ —staffs, flags, bowls, compounds, drums, horns, incense burners — ” Poltash

went on.

“ —in short, every damn thing our dead friends— ”

18
 19

“Oh please, Lizzie. It’s a little late to be calling them friends.”

“It’s never too late for regrets,” Elizabeth said bitterly. “I for one mourn the

loss of these friends. Maybe we can be kinder to one another in death than we were

in life.”

“I will not hear talk of death,” Felixson said, “We’re not going to die. At least

not for many years. We have power to accrue. Pleasures to indulge. And no minor

demon is going to —”

“Hush.” Said Ragowski.

“Don’t hush me. You’re here by the conspiracy of our wits, and don’t —”

“I said hush. Listen to that.”

“It’s a bell.” said Lili. “Sounds like a funeral.”

“At one-nineteen in the morning?” Poltash murmured.

19
 20

“That’s no ordinary bell, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the Bell in the Tower of

the Burning Wood and its tolling precedes his arrival. I’m sorry to have to be the

bearer of bad news, but he’s found you.”

Two

The assembled company, excepting Ragowski, let out a confusing babble of

prayers, protectorates and entreaties, no two of them in the same language. The

company brought Yashar Heyadat rushing back in gasping for breath.

“What’s…what’s the…panic about?”

“The bell.” Arnold Poltash said. “The Ragman tells us it means we’re in

trouble.”

“This we didn’t know?” Heyadat replied.

20
 21

“The Ragman?” Ragowski said to Poltash. “How dare you? When did you

start calling me that?”

“All of us did it, behind your back.” Lili Saffro said, “I mean, look at yourself,

Joseph. You’re not exactly well-dressed.”

“I’ve been dead five years, woman!” Ragowski yelled, his voice raw.

“But you were buried in your Sunday best, Joseph. The rest of your wardrobe

wasn’t exactly befitting of a man of your intellectual sophistication. You dressed like

a derelict most of the time.”

“Derelict now, am I? Well fuck you, fuck you all. Whatever you thought I

could do for you, I can’t, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. There’s for your

resurrection, Elizabeth!”

He started to kick over the alabaster bowls, working his way around the

necromantic circle in a counter clock-wise direction. The broken eggs and the

menstrual blood, along with the other ingredients of the bowls, each one different,

21
 22

but all a vital part of the Lazarine Waking, were spilled across the floor. A couple of

bowls rolled off on their ruins, weaving like drunks before hitting a wall.

“That’s your return ticket,” Kottlove warned him.

“Believe it or not I can die again without any help from you. But I think I’ll

wait to watch what he does with you.”

“Wait, Joey. I didn’t mean any offense. And yes, I do look back on our times

together with gratitude.”

“As in: thank you for the fuck, Joey?”

“It wasn’t just the sex, you know that. We learned together. All that Tantric

work —”

“More sex.”

“Listen to you both!” Poltash growled. “Blowing kisses at one another, while

that thing, that Pinhead monstrosity approaches the threshold. We made peace,

finally, to share our knowledge, protect ourselves —”

22
 23

“No, they’re right Arnold.” Ragowski said with uncharacteristic gentility.

“You made your peace too late. Maybe if there’d been fifty of you, sharing your

knowledge, you might have a hope in Hell. But, let’s be honest here, you’re

outnumbered. Sure, there’s only one assassin but he’s imbibed the wisdom of a lot of

very powerful minds, and no doubt passed it all on to his Order. It’s not just the

books, but the minds, all those secretive minds. That’s where the real power was

hidden away: in all the brains they’ve had access to. I’m assuming he got

Poggenpogl, Allman, Turgeon, Merle Northurp?”

“Yes. All of them.”

“Right there you’ve got four brilliant thinkers. I wouldn’t have admitted it

when I was still alive and kicking, but death has a way of humbling you. Can you

imagine the problems a mind as powerful as Turgeon’s was tussling with? And the

solutions he must have found? And knowing what a paranoid prick he was, he

probably never put any of that on paper, in case of theft.”

23
 24

“Can we please stop wasting time extolling the virtues of the dead?” Felixson

said. “That bell’s getting louder. Give us some help Ragowski.”

“Listen, Ted. It’s too late. Anything you try he’s seen before. He caught me in

Philadelphia —”

“The Temple of the Athacrine.” Elizabeth Kottlove said. “Behind the altar.”

“How’d you know?”

“The Chief of Police in Philadelphia was a lover, thirty, no, almost forty years

ago. He sniffed the magic in what his people had found and called me in.”

“How did I look?”

“Less than dignified. For some reason he’d left you there, wedged in that space

between the altar and the wall. Hooks in your face, in your hands and of course —”

“Did you tell him where all your manuscripts were?” Poltash asked him.

“With a hook and chain up through my asshole pulling my stomach down into

my bowels, yes, Arnold, I did. I squealed like a rat in a trap. And he left me there,

24
 25

with that chain slowly disemboweling me, until he’d sent one of his acolytes —one of

the damned, at a guess — to go to my house and bring back all he found there. By the

time the man got back I’d confessed to nine other hiding places where I kept various

very rare materials. I didn’t hide anything from him. I just wanted the pain to stop. I

wanted death. Which I got, finally. And I was never more grateful in my life.”

“Jesus wept!” Felixson yelled. “Look at you all, listening to his babble! We

raised him to get some answers —”

“And I’m giving them to you, if you’d only listen!” Ragowski snapped sharply.

“Get five pieces of paper, five pens, and write down the whereabouts of every last

pamphlet and article of power you own. Do it! He’s going to get the information

anyway, sooner or later. You, Lili, have the only known copy of Cruelties, yes? By

Whitebear?”

“Maybe…”

“Oh for fuck’s sake woman,” Poltash says, “He’s trying to save our lives here.”

25
 26

“Yes. I own it.” Lili Saffro said. “It’s in a safe buried below my mother’s

coffin.”

“Write it down. The address of the cemetery. The position of the plot. Make

it easy for him.”

“I have no pen nor paper,” Heyadat said, his voice suddenly shrill.

Poltash was writing on an envelope which he had up against the marble wall

of the mausoleum. “I don’t see how this saves us from his tampering with our brains.”

he said.

“It’s a gesture of utter humility, Arnold. Something none of us have been

familiar with in our lives. But the only thing that may perhaps save you now. Ah! I

see light between the cracks.” Kottlove and Felixson glanced up from their scrawlings

to see what the dead man was talking about. “There,” he said, pointing to one of the

walls, where through the finest of cracks between the marble blocks a cold blue light

was coming. “The door is about to open, I think. Release me, Elizabeth, will you?”

26
 27

“In a minute. I’m still writing.”

“Release me, damn it! I don’t want to be here when he comes. I don’t ever

want to see that face of his again. Send me back, Elizabeth!”

“Just be patient!”

“Christ, I’ve told you all I know. Give me my death back. Now!” Kottlove

ignored him. “You bitch. You utter selfish bitch!”

There was a grinding growl from the mausoleum wall, and one of the

enormous marble blocks, at about head height, was slowly pushed out from behind.

When it was about eighteen inches clear of the wall a second block, below it and to

its left began to move, and a matter of seconds later another, this time to the right and

above the first also began shifting. The light that found its way between the blocks

grew stronger making the mausoleum chillier than ever.

Ragowski, meanwhile, had picked up the destruction of Kottlove’s

necromantic labors where he’d left off, kicking at the remaining alabaster bowls, and

27
 28

then getting down on his knees, pulling off the jacket he’d been buried in and using it

as a very expensive cleaning cloth, scrubbing out the numbers Kottlove had written

out in that immaculate spiral. Even though he was dead he felt beads of fluid on his

brow, which became rivulets and trickled down his face. He knew better than to

think he was working up a healthy sweat. It was a dark liquid that fell from his face

and spattered on the ground, a mingling of embalming fluid and some remnants of his

own corrupted juices. But his effort began to pay off after a minute or two. A

welcome numbness spread from his fingers and toes up into his limbs, and a lolling

weight gathered behind his eyes, as though the semi-liquefied contents of his skull

were responding to the demands of gravity.

He glanced up from his work and saw the five magicians scrawling madly like

students racing to finish an examination paper before the final bell. Except, of course,

the price of failure was rather worse than a D minus. His gaze went from the

magicians to the wall, where now six blocks were on the move. He watched the first

28
 29

of six that had responded to the infernal pressure from the other side slide clear of the

wall and drop to the ground, where it broke into several large pieces and a mass of

smaller fragments. A shaft of frigid light, lent solidity by the marble dust that hung in

the air from the unseated block, spilled from the hole and crossed the mausoleum,

striking the opposite wall. The second block came mere seconds later.

Theodore began a prayer, the divinity at its destination usefully ambiguous:

“Thine the power,

Thine the judgment.

Take my soul, Lord,

Shape and use it.

I am not the sword

Or shield, Lord – ”

Elizabeth Kottlove interrupted him.

29
 30

“It’s not another Lord we need here,” she said, “It’s a goddess.” And she began

her own entreaty while Felixson picked up the thread of his own prayer.”

“Honey-breasted art thou, Neetha,

Call me daughter, I will suckle –

I am but the earth,

On which you walk, Lord –

Take your face, your voice, your nature,

Wipe all other names but yours –

And soak your blood, Lord

Into my unworthy dirt –

Oh Neetha, fountain, river, sea;

I am nothing. You are me —”

It was Heyadat who bellowed loud enough to stop the din of supplications.

30
 31

“Shut up! Shut up! I never heard such hypocrites in my life. When did you

make your last prayers, huh? Long years ago, I know it —”

“I still have faith.” Elizabeth protested.

“Oh goody-goody for you and your faith. You think the demon cares two bits?

No. Of course not. He is hearing your prayers and he is laughing. Laughing.”

“There you are wrong, Yahshar Heyadat.” said a voice from the place out of

which the cold light came. The words, though in themselves unremarkable, seemed

to speed the process of the wall’s collapse. Another three blocks began to grind their

way forward, while another two dropped out of the wall and joined the debris

accruing on the mausoleum floor.

Meanwhile, the unseen speaker continued to address the magicians, his voice

as cold as the light which accompanied it.

31
 32

“I smell menstrual blood and dead flesh.” he said, “But with a certain

quickening in it. Somebody’s been raising the dead. I’d imagine that’s Kottlove’s

doing. You had a way with the dead, I heard.”

Two more of the blocks came crashing down and a moment later three more.

There was now a hole in the wall large enough to allow the entrance of a man of

some stature, except for the fact that rubble blocked the lower third of it. For the

entity about to make its entrance however, such matters were easily resolved.

“Clear my way.” he said, as if issuing an order to some invisible. The response

was instantaneous. The rubble divided, offering the approaching demon a path

cleared of even the finest particle of marble dust.

And thus, his way unhindered, the Cenobite entered. He was tall, and looked

much as he did in several of the books of notable demons that the five had pored over,

looking vainly for some mention of a frailty in the creature. His flesh was virtually

white, and his hairless head ritualistically scarred with deep grooves that ran both

32
 33

horizontally and vertically. At every intersection a nail had been hammered through

his flesh and into the bone. Perhaps once they’d been polished silver, but there was

no gleam to them now. It was from this bizarre arrangement his nickname, Pinhead,

had come. In every text about him the name was mentioned, and so too was his

repugnance for it. Whatever torments he had planned for his victim — and this

demon had a knowledge of torture that would have made the Inquisition look like

dilettantes – its viciousness was certain to be cranked up to new heights if a subject, in

his agonized delirium, let the nickname slip out.

The rest of his appearance was just as he’d been pictured in the old books of

demonic hierarchies: the black vestments, the hem of which brushed the floor, the

patches of skinned flesh on his chest, which exposed patches of blood-beaded muscle,

the personal collection of surgical instruments that hung from his belt —amongst an

amputation saw, a trepanning device, a dental file, skull chisel and silver syringe.

33
 34

They brushed against the chain-nail apron he wore, a garment common to any

abaltair worker.

He brought flies with him, in their many hundreds. They crawled on the

scraps of human meat in the teeth of the saw hanging from the Cenobite’s belt, and

blackened with their profusion the fresh blood on his apron. They were four or five

times the size of terrestrial flies, and their excited buzzing echoed around the

mausoleum.

“Joseph Ragowski, as I live and breathe,” the Cenobite said. “You went early,

didn’t you? Before I’d learned to take the most important book in anyone’s library.

Their mind. Oh don’t panic, Joseph. I have no intention of pilfering your thoughts; I

can’t imagine your brain carries anything of any significance.

“No, it’s these five I came to catch, more for neatness sake than in the hope of

some great revelation. I’ve been to magic’s length and breadth, to its outermost

limits, and occasionally —very occasionally — I’ve added the thoughts of a truly

34
 35

original thinker to the library. But they’re rare. Just as somebody said, all philosophy

is footnotes to Plato, at magic is footnotes to the Nineteen Volumes of Zurzolo, which

I am pleased to say I own in two complete editions, and a third missing the eleventh

book, which an old lover of yours, Elizabeth — and my, my, my weren’t you

profligate with your affections in your youth? —told me you owned.”

“Who told you?”

“Does it really matter anymore? I mean, really? If you must know it was

Nathaniel McGhee, whose testicles, by the way, are of such prodigious size that I’ve

kept them for my other collection: The Noteworthy Anatomical Remains of the

Western World’s Great Thaumaturgists.”

Lili Saffro had started to hyperventilate a little way into this speech, and now

reached into her purse, digging frantically through its chaotic contents.

“What are you doing Lili?” Poltash said. “The man’s talking.”

35
 36

“My pills. Oh Jesus, Jesus —where are my pills?” In her jittery state she’d lost

her grip on one end of her purse, and its contents were spread across the floor. She

snatched up her pills, oblivious to everything but getting them into her mouth, where

she chewed and swallowed the large white tablets with very little saliva to ease them

down. Then, without bothering to collect up her scattered belongings, she stood up

again. Felixson was talking.

“ —any of it, all of it, it’s yours. I have four safes. You can have the codes

right now. Look, look, I’ll write them down for you. Or if that’s too much bother we

can go to my house —oh Lord, you’d like my house, I know you would. Huge. Cost

me eighteen million dollars. It’s yours. You and your brethren are welcome to it.”

“My brethren?” the Cenobite said.

“Oh, there are sisters in your order too, I was forgetting that. Well I’m sure

I’ve got plenty to go around. Nothing inconsequential, believe me. First editions of

everything. Pristine.”

36
 37

“Your lordship —” said Heyadat. “ —or your Grace is it? Your Holiness?

Your Unholiness, perhaps?”

“Master is perfectly acceptable. You stand to me as a dog to man.”

“Dog am I?” Heyadat said, his notorious temper surfacing for a moment.

Poltash struck Heyadat’s arm a light back-handed blow. “If he says we’re dogs,

then dogs we are.”

“Well said, magician. But words are easy, aren’t they? I think you should be

down on the ground barking like a dog, don’t you?”

Poltash waited for a moment, hoping it was just a throw away remark. But no.

“Down, dog.” the Cenobite said. Poltash began to kneel. “Wait. Dogs go

naked, surely.”

“Oh…yes. Of course. Naked.”

He proceeded to undress.

“And you, the profligate Elizabeth. Be his bitch.”

37
 38

“You mean —?”

“Naked, on your hands and knees.” He took one long stride towards her. She

flinched. But he merely reached out and lay his hand on her lower belly.

“This is a truly perverse piece of magic I picked up from the marginalia in

Flaunt’s Diversions.” He rubbed his hand on Elizabeth’s belly. “How many abortions

did you have, Elizabeth? Eleven, I counted.”

“Thirteen.” she said.

“Most wombs would not survive such unkindness.” He clenched his fist.

Elizabeth let out a little gasp. “But even at your advanced age – how old are you,

truthfully now?”

“Seventy-eight.”

“ — so even at seventy-eight I can give your abused womb the capacity to do

what it was made to do— ”

“No.” Elizabeth said, more in disbelief than denial. “You couldn’t.”

38
 39

“It’s done. The child will be here in a matter of minutes. Now weren’t you

about to play the bitch for me?”

Elizabeth was out of words. She simply stared at the demon as though she

could somehow make him take pity on her.

“Naked, woman.” he said. “Go on. Help her Felixson! That’s it. Put some

work into it! Rip the stuff off her. She’s never going to be putting it on again.”

“Can I speak?” Poltash said quietly.

“Be my guest.”

“I could be very useful to you. I mean, you know my circle of influence. It

reaches to Washington. To Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“That’s right, you used to tell fortunes for the Reagans.”

“He never made a move without consulting me.”

“Are you offering me the same service?”

39
 40

“Oh God no, I wouldn’t presume. But there are still a lot of people there that

owe me their positions. Now there’s power, if you want it. And I could bring it to

you.”

“And for this service you would require…?”

“Only my life. Everything else is yours. I don’t think there’s much in my

collection that your Order hasn’t already gathered from other libraries, but you’re

welcome to it anyway. And then you just name the names in Washington you need

at your feet. I’ll make it happen.”

“That’s a very intriguing offer, Poltash.”

“He’s a lie,” Heyadat said, “Maybe three, four times he talks with the Reagans,

but that was all. They preferred that woman Sidikaro.”

“Yes, I have her reminisces,” the demon said. “In fact I have every

conversation about magic she ever engaged in.”

“She wrote journals?”

40
 41

“No. I have it all in here.” He tapped his temple. “So you won’t be alone.”

“But you pass it all on, no?” Heyadat said. “To your Order.”

The Cenobite didn’t reply. His attention had been claimed by Lili Saffro,

whose panic attack had peaked and was now subsiding. She stood in the corner of the

mausoleum, ashen and shivering in the coat of sweat her panic had put on her.

“I knew your father, Lili.” he said, approaching her. Felixson was still standing

in his underwear, with Elizabeth beside him. “Everything!” he said to them. “Both of

you. Look at that belly of yours, Elizabeth. How it swells! And your breasts too!

Let’s see them.” He pulled on the middle of her brassiere. It snapped and fell away.

The dry purses of her breasts were indeed growing fuller. The Cenobite gave them a

cursory glance. “You’ll do for one more breeding, eh? Only this time you won’t be

dragging it out of you with a piece of wire.” He returned his attention to Lili. “We

were speaking of your father.” he said.

“Yes?”

41
 42

“I owe him a great deal. He was the first one to point out how vulnerable you

all were. ‘They’re so possessive of their own little rocks they don’t realize they could

be a mountain if they joined together. They’re like my little Lili Hi Lo –”

“Lili Hi Lo?”

“That’s what he called you.”

Lili nodded, her eyes swelling with tears. “That was his private name for me.

Nobody else was allowed to use it. Even my mother. Where was this?”

“In Switzerland.”

“The house by the lake?”

The Cenobite nodded. “You were three, perhaps four. Chasing one of the cats

outside in the sun. And us inside, the curtains drawn, talking about magic.”

“He was friends with you?”

“Don’t sound so appalled. If I were to leave you alive tonight it would be for

his sake.”

42
 43

“They hanged him.”

“I know. I visited him in his cell, the last night. Your mother had already

been and gone. The priest was waiting. He never saw him. But I had twenty

minutes or so with him.”

“Was he afraid?”

“Of course not. He had his plans made for the next part of the journey.”

“That’s what he called it?”

“His only regret was you. He asked me to guide you now and again. But

never let you have sight of me.”

Lili’s tears had brimmed and fallen. Now she looked at him clear-eyed.

“The books…” she said. “…the box of books that came for me when I was still

at school. My first books of magic…”

“I sent them. And I got Doctor Straszheim onto the staff, to start your real

education. Your father would be ashamed of you, to see you like this.” He trod on

43
 44

the plastic pill bottles, grinding the medications to dust. “He had such ambition for

you.”

“I know, I know.” she said, “And I had the plan. I worked it all out with

Straszheim. But after his death…” she sighed, “I lost the appetite for power, once I

saw how little joy it had brought to him.”

“So see how it ends? I picked them off one by one. All the greatest workers of

the Influence West of Cairo, taken in three years and two months.”

“You had help.” Ragowski said.

“Did I?”

“Must have.”

“Must I?”

“The other members of your Order…”

“Are not with me.”

“I don’t understand,” said Ragowski, “Are you suggesting —”

44
 45

He was interrupted by a moan from Elizabeth Kottlove, who was now on all

fours beside the Cenobite’s other dog, Felixson.

“Silence!” the Cenobite said, directing a sharp kick at Kottlove’s bony behind.

By contrast her belly and breasts were now round and ripe, the Cenobite’s influence

powerful enough to already have her nipples leaking milk.

“Don’t let that go to waste.” the Cenobite said to Felixson. “Get your face to

the floor and lick it up, dog! Go on! Don’t make me ask twice.”

As Felixson bent to his task, Poltash made a dash for the door. He was two

strides short of the threshold when the Cenobite threw a look into the passageway

from which he’d come. Something glittering and serpentine sped from the other side

of the wall, and caught Poltash in the back of his neck. A beat later three more came

after it; chains, all of them, ending in what looked like large fish hooks.

Poltash shrieked with pain. The sound brought an appreciative smile to the

face of the pain’s connoisseur.

45
 46

“Not bad. Not bad at all. But we can do better than that, don’t you think,

ladies and gentlemen?”

Three

46
 47

A tiny gesture from the magician, and the chains tightened, reeling Poltash in.

“We’ll have no more of that.” the Cenobite said. Another chain snaked across

the floor and out to hook the handle of the door. Then, tightening like its comrades,

it pulled the door closed.

“Some things are better done in private, don’t you think, Joseph? Do you

remember how it was for you? How you offered to be my assassin, if I’d just take the

hooks out of you? And how you shat yourself in terror, like a child?”

“Aren’t you just a little tired of all this by now?” Ragowski replied. “How

much suffering can you cause before it fails to give you – whatever sad, sick thing it

gives you?”

“Each to their own, Joseph. You went through a phase when you wouldn’t

touch a girl over thirteen. Lili has never once let a man into her bed. Pussy or

nothing for little Lili.”

47
 48

“Will you do it if you’re going to?” Yashar said. “If you will kill me, then get it

over.”

“Soon, Heyadat, soon. You must remember, you are the last. After you

there’ll be no more games. Only war.”

“War?” said Lili, “Who with? You’re not going to try for Heaven, surely?”

“Well now listen to that,” the Cenobite said, “Is it possible that you’re actually

concerned for my welfare, Lili?”

The old lady looked into the shiny darkness of the Cenobite’s eyes. “Is that so

hard to believe?” she said. “What little pleasure this wretched life afforded me came

of magic. And now I realize you were there behind my progress from the beginning.

So why shouldn’t I squeeze my heart for a few drops of gratitude. If not to you then

who?”

“That was good, Lili.” said Heyadat. “You get an Oscar-prize for that.”

48
 49

The Cenobite spat a word in the direction of the open wall, and a flight of

twenty or more hooks and chains came at Heyadat and caught him everywhere —

mouth, throat, breasts, belly, groin, legs, feet, hands — the hooks large and brutal.

Whatever information Yashar Heyadat might have been able to provide was of no

interest to the Cenobite. He was going to bypass the torture and interrogation and go

straight to the execution. Heyadat babbled anyway, as the hooks worked themselves

steadily deeper into his three hundred pound body. It was hard to make much sense

of what he was saying through the snot and the tears, but he seemed to be listing the

rarities in his collection.

“…the Zvia-Kisor Dialogues, immaculate condition…and the only copy of

Ghaffari’s Nullity, with the Doctor’s annotations…”

The Cenobite called seven more chains into play, which came weaving

through the air out of the passagway and presented themselves to their summoner

like obedient cobras. They raised up their massive and elaborate hooks to attend to a

49
 50

few murmured orders. Then they did as they’d been instructed, sweeping around

behind Heyadat’s convulsing body, and hooked themselves into his back, legs and

arms, securing themselves by wrapping lengths of chain around the handles on the

front of each place of internment.

Lili retreated into her corner and covered her face with her hands. The

others, even Kottlove, who was suffering agonies of her own, watched as Heyadat

struggled. The Cenobite watched the last of the three cobra chains secure itself.

Then he murmured another order, and the chains that had pierced the magician’s

body from the front took up any slack that was in them and then proceeded to pull on

his three hundred pound body, which was securely anchored from behind. Even

now, as the chains pulling him from the front took up their own slack and began to

pull on him, he continued to list the treasures in his library.

“…Eshaghzadeh’s Fourth Symphony, the Death Symphony, the only known

recording…Romeo Refra’s…Romeo Refra’s – what is it called? That damn book?”

50
 51

“Yellow night.” Ragowski prompted. He was watching Heyadat’s torment

with a dispassion perhaps only the dead, or those whose souls had died leaving their

bodies to continue their work as tortures or potentates, could have worn.

“…yes, ‘Yellow…” Heyadat started to say. There the list stopped as Heyadat,

only now comprehending what was happening to him, unleashed a stream of sobs,

pleadings, cries, prayers, all rising in volume as his body was pulled back towards the

door to the Pit, against the demands of the three master hooks that held him close to

the opposite wall. His body could not long withstand the contrary claims made upon

it. His skin began to tear, adding fresh rivulets to those coursing down his body from

the wounds made by the hooks. He began to thrash wildly, his last coherent words,

his entreaties, erased by the ragged howls of agony that he now unleashed.

His belly flesh succumbed first, the hook, which was huge, and had gone deep,

stripping off a sizeable patch of skin along with a layer of bright yellow fat. Blood ran

streaming from the wound. His breasts came next, skin and fat, followed by blood.

51
 52

Even Lili watched now, through her fingers, as the spectacle escalated. The

hook in his left leg, which had entered behind his shin bone, broke it with a crack

that was loud enough to be audible above Heyadat’s screams. His ears came off with

scraps of scalp attached, his shoulder blades were both broken as the hooks there

pulled themselves free.

But despite the thrashing, the screams, and the blood pool now so large it

lapped against the hem of the Cenobite’s vestments, the demon was not satisfied. He

issued new instructions, using one of the oldest tricks in magic, farspake, his

whispered instruction finding their destination despite Heyadat’s unrelenting shrieks.

His instructions were instantly obeyed: three new hooks, as large as those that had

secured Heyadat’s back, their outer edges sharp as scalpels, flew at the exposed fat and

flesh of his chest and stomach, and sliced its way into his interior. Only then, once

they had cut their way deep into him did their hooks sink deep into him.

52
 53

The effect of one of the three was immediate: it pierced his left lung. His

screaming stopped and he began to gasp for air, his thrashing becoming convulsions.

“Finish him, in mercy’s name.” Ragowski said.

The Cenobite turned his back on his victim.

“Did you address me?”

“You know I did, you fuckhead. No, that’s not what they call you. Pinhead!

That’s it! That’s what they say, isn’t it?”

The Cenobite’s lip curled and he reached out for Ragowski, seizing the man’s

scrawny throat and pulling him close.

“There is no refuge in death, Ragowski. Trust me on this.” Without his taking

his black gaze off Ragowski for an instant he lifted his trephine from his belt and

pressed it against the middle of Ragowski’s upper brow. He activated the device with

his thumb, and a bolt was fired through Ragowski’s skull, and then retracted.

“Am I supposed to be pleading for mercy, Pinhead?” Ragowski crowed.

53
 54

The Cenobite made no reply. He simply hooked the trephine back on his belt

and put his fingers into his mouth, seeking out something that was lodging there.

Finding it, he returned his fingers to the trepanning, and a second or two later

removed them, letting go of Ragowski’s throat in the same moment.

“What the fuck did you do?” Ragowski growled.

But the Cenobite had already turned his back on one victim, just in time to

catch the final moments of another. The hooks had clearly waited for their master to

turn back to them before they performed the coup de grace. And now, blessed with

his gaze, they showed their skills. The hook through the roof of his mouth, the

Fisherman’s hook the Cenobite was to call it, was attached to a chain which had

found purchase in the ceiling, lifting Heyadat’s entire body clear of the ground. Now

as eruption following eruption, his hands split in two, the feet the same, the huge

bulk of thighs gouged from groin to knees, his face stripped of skin, his ears torn off,

54
 55

and finally the three deeply embedded hooks in his chest and stomach pulling out

heart and lungs above and uncoiling his entrails below.

The hooks now dragged what parts of him they’d claimed through the pool of

blood and towards whence they’d come. Only one remained: the Fisherman’s Hook,

from which the empty carcass of Yashar Heyadat hung, slowly swinging back and

forth, the drooping doors of his stomach, bright with fat, flapping open and closed.

“All the fireworks were red again tonight.” the Cenobite said. “Is it any

wonder I’ve grown tired of this?”

Felixson, who had retreated from the spreading blood, but remained on all

fours, dared to speak.

“Poltash…” was all he said.

The sight of Heyadat’s slaughter had been too much for Arnold. He was

slumped dead against the door where the Cenobite’s hooks had caught him. There

was a stricken expression on his face. Whether a heart-attack had brought him down

55
 56

or he’d taken poison to avoid Heyadat’s fate it didn’t matter to the Cenobite. He was

weary of seeing the same descent played out, with variations, over and over. From

the confident men and women he found in their mansions and penthouses; or later, as

news of the Cenobite’s vendetta spread, in their hiding places, to the clammy-palmed

deal-makers, listing their hidden possessions in the hope that one might be rare

enough to buy them their lives. And then of course, when the hooks started to fly,

the descent quickened. The magician’s voices, schooled in precision for the accurate

recitation of spells, falling from pleas and entreaties to sobs and blubberings . And

always the same tired spectacle of death.

“Well then,” he said, turning to face the living survivors, and to Ragowski,

“Let’s be done with this, quickly. Felixson?” The man’s face was all snot and tears.

“Wait for me in the passagery. I have work for you; work that calls for what little

gifts you have. Go on.”

“May I take my clothes?”

56
 57

“At least my cigarettes?”

The Cenobite could not keep a smile from his face. “Where would we be

without our little addictions? Take your cigarettes, Felixson, and your matches too.

Quickly.”

Felixson rummaged through the pockets of his jacket, and secured both

cigarettes and matches, pitifully happy with his lot at the moment, though he was

going naked into Hell on the heels of the creature that had slaughtered almost every

friend he’d ever had.

Nor did he look back as he scurried through the ragged door in the mausoleum

wall to wait for his Master to come to him. He went far enough down the passagery

to be reasonably certain he would not hear the women screaming, then he squatted

against the encrusted wall, and counted his cigarettes. He had fourteen. Well, it

wasn’t twenty, but then it wasn’t two either.

57
 58

“Small mercies.” he muttered to himself. “That’s it, Theodore. Be thankful for

small mercies.”

Then he lit up and waited.

Four

58
 59

Elizabeth Kottlove was not a screamer, except in the throes of the sexual act,

which pleasures she had put behind her on the morning, many years ago, when the

face she’d met in the mirror unquestionably resembled that of her mother. Even

now, with whatever the demon had done to her womb close to being born, and the

pains of its convulsions inside her withered body excruciating, she refused to give her

tormentor the pleasure of her pain. She remained on her hands and knees, the bitch

he had demanded she play at being, while the thing she carried and brought to

imminent delivery in fewer minutes than a natural birth would have counted off in

months. She could not control the gasps that escaped her now, though she turned her

face away from her tormentor so as not to draw his attention. Even so, it seemed he

was about to come her way, but Ragowski stopped him.

“What’s wrong with me?” he said.

“You’re dead, Joseph. And in a natural world you would have been devoured

by worm and rot. But you relinquished your claim to oblivion when you took up

59
 60

your rod and book and empowered your will to rewrite the laws of nature and of

men. There’s no recourse here to cold compassion of rot. You must take what you

are given, Joseph.”

“Less metaphysics, if you please, and more particulars. What exactly have I

been given?”

“It’s a tiny sibling of mine. A worm, made from a piece of me. One of the

countless experiments inspired by the books of your fellow manumitties. A worm

homunecilus. They have no intelligence to speak of, but they possess two noteworthy

attributes.”

Ragowski did his best to match the Cenobite’s restrained tone, as though they

were speaking of a matter inconsequential to both.

“Is intelligence difficult to forge in homunecilus? It was never a path that

called me to it. So I have no knowledge of the craft at all.”

60
 61

“It is not a craft, Ragowski. It is an art. It takes technique and patience, yes, but

it also takes passion.”

“Ah.”

“You could not imagine passion as in me. That’s good. It means I’ve buried it

well.”

Ragoswki looked mystified.

“What’s your question?” the Cenobite said. “Spit it out. Time is shorter than

you think, and time to think still shorter.”

“I was just wondering what this passion of yours was for?”

The Cenobites’ benighted gaze flipped briefly to the women: Lili in the corner

mumbling to herself behind her hands, Elizabeth on the ground, her waters breaking.

Neither was listening to the exchange between demon and man.

61
 62

‘To stand, as it were, upon a great height, and survey my will unmaking all

that lies below, to the horizon and beyond, all unmade at my yes, and in the Heavens

Forward.

“The rock upon which I stand. Even that. For what need would I have of rocks

when I could walk the air?”

It was not only his words which carried a freight of new meaning, this voice

rose to seize the epiphany and lift it up.

“Two noteworthy attributes.” Ragowski remembered allowed.

“Ah yes, your worm.”

“Mine?”

“I passed it from its crib beside my cheek, and into a hole in your skull.”

“Why?”

“It has two noteworthy attributes, as I have said. The first, it does need a mate

to reproduce. It’s body is filled with tiny eggs that needs only the presence of

62
 63

nourishment to be born. Their growth is amateur manifestation of the unnatural.

Their skins are their stomachs. Assuming they can feed, in sixteen seconds they are

fully grown, an in the seventh second they are extruding eggs. The defiance of nature

is a thing of beauty.”

Ragowski was not a stupid man. He understood completely the significance of

what he’d just been told. It explained the unwelcome fullness in his head; the

churning motion behind his eyes; the ting of bitter fluid running down his nose and

down the back of his throat.

“As I told you—”

“There’s no refuge in death.”

“Exactly so.”

Ragowski hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat at the Cenobite, who deflected

it with a tiny motion of his hand.

63
 64

When it hit the floor, back at Ragowski’s feet, he saw the truth of the matter.

It wasn’t phlegm he’d brought up, it was a little knot of worms.

“It’s appropriate, I suppose,” Ragowski smiled, “that the single thing that

comes of you that might be a child would be a worm.

“Oh bitter, Joseph, bitter.”

“I know your history, master. Minor temptations, many of which were

laughable failure.”

“I will rewrite that history, when the time comes. But you will neither

see my future no read my revisions to history past. You are getting wormier by the

moment, Ragowski. And your spirit is tied to whatever the worms shit out. That was

your first mistake, you and all your miracle-workers. Locking your souls to your

bodies in perpetuity.”

“I was young…” Ragoski said.

His voice was weakening, as the worms invaded his voice –box.

64
 65

‘…I thought I’d have found some way to ship the contract by the time by

death was imminent. Either that, or the means to preserve my youth.’

“Error upon error, Joseph. You can at least take comfort in the knowledge that

all your comrades made the same mistake in their pursuit of the Great Wakings. I

have all the master contracts. Every one. And I will hold them forever, so that your

soul is never free.”

“Why? Ragowski said, struggling to make the syllable.

“Because I can.”

Ragowski coughed, and in the midst of the hacking lost his breath. He tried to

recover it but his throat was blocked. HE dropped to his knees, and the impact was

sufficient to burst the fragile panel of his skin so that veins of worms fell from his

anatomy, listtering the ground around him. Mustering the last of his will, he lifted his

head to defy his destroyer with his stare, but before he could do so his eyes dropped

back into his sockets, his nose and mouth following quickly after, so that in seconds

65
 66

his face had gone entirely, leaving only the bone brimming with the Cenobite’s

descendants.

There was a shrill shriek behind him, and he turned pleased he’d finally got a

cry out of that Kottlove, only to find that in preoccupation with Ragowski’s

demolition he had missed the only pregnancy she’d ever taken to its full term. The

shriek had not come from her however. She was dead, slumped on her back, killed by

the trauma of the infants’ birth. As for the thing he had caused to be made in her, it

lay in a puddle of its own gretid? fluids making the shriek he’d taken to be its

mothers’ voice. No, not it. The thing was female, and virtually human, at a glance.

“Deal with it Lili,”

“That?” She said, glaring at the infant with a mixture of superstition and

revulsion….”I couldn’t.”

“You can and you will. Make yourself useful, Lili. Give me a reason to let you

live.”

66
 67

She overcame her revulsion with impressive speed and knelt in between

Elizabeth’s legs to attend to the child. It fell uncannily silent as soon as it was

touched.

“It’s a girl.” Lili said. “I need a knife for the cord.”

The Cenobite selected a blade from his belt and handed it down to Lili. Then

he surveyed the mausoleum.

“Very Jacobean,” he murmured to himself appreciatively. It was indeed a

comprehensive spectacle. The Potash sprawled gaping at the door. Heyadat’s head and

mutilated carcass still swaying slightly as it hung from the Fisherman’s hook, the

blood that spread from one wall of the mausoleum to the threshold of the open door

on the other littered with what the hocks had let slip as they departed, two of his

beringed fingers and the pitiful scrap of his penis the only pieces recognizable.

Ragowski had collapsed into little more than mess of bones and worms by now, and

the worms, disrespectful guests that they were, had already begun to desert his

67
 68

remains in search of another feast. The first of the departees had already found pieces

of Heyadat in one direction, and the corpse of Elizabeth Kottlove in the other.

All of which brought his gaze back to Lili Soffia, who had severed his

daughters umbilical cord and tied it off, then found her mother’s blouse, mercifully

unstained, and wrapped her in it. But she contained to make a noise like an angry

bired.

“She’s hungry, Lili.”

“Well I can’t…”

“Milk is milk. The child doesn’t care about the state of its supplies.”

“But look—“

The Cenobite stepped towards Lili and snatched his daughter out of her arms,

holding onto one end of silk swaddling and letting the child unroll high above

Elizabeth’s corpse.

68
 69

Lili let out a little cry of concern for the infant’s safety, but she needn’t have

concerned herself. The baby had dug her claws deep into the blouse, and clung there,

looking straight up her Father, issuing a reptilian hiss as she did so.

“Drink and eat,” he instructed her. “But first. The woman behind you…’

The infant turned and looked directly back at Lili, her cornea were as black as

her fathers’ entire eyes.

“Will take care of you for a while. At least until you’re fully grown. Her name

is Lily Saffro. Respect her, or be prepared for the consequence when I see you again.

Do you understand me?”

The infant returned its gaze to its father, mewling as it did so.

“Does she have a name?” Lili said.

“She can take her mother’s middle name: Marianna.”

He shook the fabric to which the creature clung, and Marianna fell upon her

mother’s corpse, lying for less than half a second where she’d fallen and then getting

69
 70

up onto all fours and making her erring way to her Elizabeth’s left breast. She

kneaded her hands, which already uncommonly long fingers for an infant so young,

against the cooling flesh, to get the flow started. Then she began to suckle.

“She will be fully grown within a year, and impossible to control if you have

not beaten some real fear into her while she’s still vulnerable. Beat her bloody

without reason. Break her bones. They’ll mend. My lawyer Mr. Yazdani will make a

contract with you and promise a secure house, and people to help you with her. He’ll

also take care of money. Break her fingers, by all means, but also educate her. Yadzani

will arrange tutors. Give her access to your library, and the libraries of Pattash,

Heyadat, Felixson and her mother.”

“I thought your Order would want those.”

“We have collected tens of thousands of books already. I doubt there’s

anything of any significance on the shelves of these friends of yours.”

“They weren’t friends. Magicians are too competitive.”

70
 71

“So there’s none you mourn?”

“I’m not much for mourning,” she said. “Magic was my bliss, and I went where

it lead. And here am I, a midwife.”

She looked up from Marianna’s gluttony.

“You’ll have your hands in me as soon as I give her back to you, won’t you?”

“No. I will shed no more magicians’ blood. When I take Marianna from you,

you’ll never see me again. The massacre is over. Now if I were you I’d go look in

Pottaski’s car, see if he doesn’t keep some g bondage tools there. He was a passionate

follower of de Sade’s.”

“He was?”

“Oh yes. Strict as a nun with his devotions.. Ate only excrement through

Lent.”

“Stop! You’ll make me puke!”

71
 72

“She stands in a charmed-house and begs me not to speak of a bowl of hot shit

and a spoon.”

“Please,” she said.

The Cenobite smiled.

“Strange flower, the Lili,” he said. “Are you going to search for something to

bind the child or will trust to its benign nature to keep it from harming you?”

Lili looked down at the baby. The breast Marianna had first drunk from was a

withered purse, and she was feeding noisily from the other.

“You have perhaps five minutes, until she empties this breast, and another five

while she digs into the body looking for more. And finding none, will eat what she

finds.”

“She’ll eat her own mother?”

“The soft pieces at least. The stuff that goes down easily. Oh you don’t have to

worry, she won’t be eating her turds.”

72
 73

Lili backed away from the child, who was already growing. Her body was

easily twice as large as it had been at birth, and there was black hair sprouting on her

scalp, getting longer and lusher by the second. LIli went through Pottaski’s pockets

and found his keys. By the time she’d located them, and stood up again, Marianna was

doing exactly as her father had predicted. With the second breast emptied she was

tearing Elizabeth’s torso open, the cracking of her breast-bone echoing around the

mausoleum.

“I’d be quick if I were you,” the Cenobite said, not looking at Lili but staring

down as the blood-spattered child with something vaguely akin to fatherly pride.

Out in clean cool air, Pottaski’s keys jingling in her hands, her mind raced

through the options available to her. She could simply take Pottaski’s car, or her own,

and drive away, make some account of the night’s horrors so that the authorities

would be prepared for the Cenobite and his Order, if they attempted to appear in the

human world and wield the massive powers they now possessed., But who were those

73
 74

authorities, now that every wielder of magical power that she had met or heard of

was dead? Would they hear her respectfully if she went to the civil authorities? No

they let her into St. Peters’ to tell all she knew to the Pope? No. They would put her

in a mad-house, most likely, where the Cenobite or his worshippers amongst the mad

would finish her. Perhaps it was best to simply do the job for them, right now.

Get in the car and drive and drive until she found a high road that fell away a

few hundred feet, to be certain there was no chance of her survival. But no. She’d

raise her, as Felixson had raised Ragowski; soul and flesh locked together in a ghastly

vision of what the damn-fool Christians thought a happy vision of Resurrection; spirit

and body raised as one form the overburdened earth. Where was the joy in that? The

solace? To have this flesh again, for all eternity? Oh no, no no. She wanted to be free

of the aching panel of meat in which she woke every morning. Nor was there any

version of herself along the way that she would have happily lived in. They were all

just different cells in the same unforgiving prison.

74
 75

Her only hope lay with the Cenobite, bitter though it was to admit it. If she

did as he instructed her, and delivered his daughter to him disciplined and respectful,

then perhaps he would cut the Gordian knot that tied spirit to Flesh, and she could go

on her way, wherever.

She opened the trunk of Pottaski’s car, and was not surprised to discover that

the Cenobite had been correct. There was not one but two suitcases in the trunk. She

unlocked them, and found a trove of Sadean artifacts. A dildo, meticulously wrapped

with barbed wire, an array of surgical equipment from which she took a couple of the

heftier blades, an electric cattle prod which would be a useful teaching device, a

leather head mask with only two holes in it, for the nostrils, which she took, and

another made of hammered iron, this with a narrow slit at the mouth, to secure its

bolts, which she also took. Much of the rest of it was not useful. She found one whip

that looked as though it might be effective if wielded by an expert, which she most

assuredly was not. She tipped the redundant stuff out of the layer of two suitcases,

75
 76

and was in the process of loading her chosen implements into when she heard the

first tentative chirping of a bird, somewhere in the renewable year tree which stood

close by. Seconds later, another bird ventured a few notes of cautious music; and then

a third and fourth. The first of morning was not far off.

As she headed back to the mausoleum with the rattling suitcase, carrying the

two marks for the Cenobites’ assessment, she heard other voices, even less welcome

than the dawn chimes, the chatter of the cemetery’s staff come to clear its paths and

neaten its lawns before the first of the day’s interments began.

“There are people here already.” She said to the Cenobite when she got back,

gasping for breath, into the slaughterhouse, which was not as an orchid-house with

the heat that the magicians had relinquished in death.

“And my fingerprints, all over Pottaski’s car, and my footprints in the blood-“

76
 77

“Calm, Lili. The men are here to erase every last sign of our meeting.

Hand=picked by Yazdani. When you left, go by the West gate. There will be a car

waiting for you and Marianna. Do as you are bidden, without question.”

“How will I—?”

“Patience. Every one of Mother’s Hell’s children who recognize me as their

Patriarch wear a ring on their left hand.”

“A marriage ring?”

“Of course. Just as the high sons of Rome wear rings to signify their (?) to their

church. Here is yours.

She set down the suitcase and offered him her open palm.

“No no,” he said, turning her hand over and slipping the ring onto her finger.

“It belonged to Little Boots, Caesar Coligalen, a man reprehensively sinned

against by the invention of history. Men need their villains, you see, as I know to my

cost. But there will come a time when history is rewritten by those it hushed with

77
 78

execution and it will tell a very different tale. Think of that, if it pleases you, in the

coming months. It will be a living hell controlling my daughter as she grows to

adulthood. To tell you otherwise would be an unforgivable lie. But when it seems she

will drive you insane with her protean ways remember you are enduring the agonies

of a new world in the making.”

“The ring…”

“Gives you absolutely authority over the many who will make themselves

available to you. The control and education will not fall to you. Only the choices.”

“Yes but the ring…”

“What about it?”

“Why does it fit so well?”

“Why would it not? I had it adjusted to fit your finger.”

“But everything was so chaotic. You can’t tell me you knew you’d put a demon

child in Elizabeth, and made me it’s keeper?”

78
 79

Well I can, but it seems you would not be predisposed to believe me. So I will

let it lie. Sufficient that the ring fits.”

“And the others. The ones who’ll help me?”

“They were copies of the same ring. I could only ask that even in demanding

times you treat them courteously. However unpleasant the labour, we should never

stoop to incivility.”

He took the metal mask from Lili’s hand.

“Throw the other one away. She’d have it in shreds in a heart-beat.” Then, in a

harsher tone. “Get up Marianna. Your father has a present for you.”

79
 80

Five

It was a little after dawn when they left the mausoleum, the naked girl, who

by then looked about six or so, seven by the time they reached the West Gate and got

into the black sedan car with the darkened windows that awaited them there. The

driver introduced himself as Polk. He wore one of the rings, and he treated Lili in a

gentlemanly manner that was the first sign since this terrible night had begun of some

reminder of more civil world. He did not ask her anything about the girl, or the metal

mask her father had put on her telling her as he had done so that whoever put it on

she should think of it being his desire that she wear it, his hands that placed it over

her head, his fingers that secured the padlock and pocketed the key. And most

importantly of all, his will, and his alone, that dictated how long she would stay in it.

In response to these questions, the Cenobite had instructed her in the simplest rules

of language: if she understood, she should say yes, if not, then no.

80
 81

She said:

“Yes,” And then, after a moment, “Of course I understand.”

The Cenobite had taken a scalpel from his belt and slashed her cheek open

from ear to chin, being sure to catch her mouth, both upper and lower lips. She did

not weep or cry out.

“Again,” he said, “I ask for a yes or a no. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you further understand why you will wear that scar for the rest of your

life?”

She paused. Blood ran down her body, which was full of tremors and tics as

the unnatural speed of her growth continued. Perhaps it was for that reason that the

scalpel cut, though long and deep, did not blood as copiously as it would have done

had been a natural child.

Finally, she said:

81
 82

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, turn round. Face Mama Lili.”

She took a chance and turned her head just an inch or two, back towards her

father.

“You have a question?”

“Yes.”

“Speak.”

“She’s not my Mama.”

“No. You ate your Mama’s heart. And kidneys, and much else besides.”

“Yes.”

“So Mama Lili will be to you what your true mother would have been. And

understand me Marianna, though you are my only child, and when you are grown, I

will teach you many things, if you ever touch this woman-the merest flick of your

82
 83

hand, the tiniest scratch-I will take up my scalpel again and I will cut your throat

with it and never think of you again.”

“Yes?”

“What’s the question in your voice?”

“You could do that to me?”

“Could and will.”

“Yes.”

“Now look at Mama Lili, as I asked you.”

Now the girl sat beside Lili at the back of the car, and it seemed every time

Lili glanced over at her the girls’ body had undergone new development. It was

painful, she supposed, for now and then, while her anatomy was undergoing a

particularly violent growth spasm Lili would hear her make a sound of pain muted

because it came through gritted teeth.

83
 84

“Would you do me the kindness of having a copy made of this key?” Lili said

to Polk, passing the key to the padlock over to him. The child had suddenly grown

very still at her side.

“Of course,” Polk said. How soon do you need them back?”

“Her father said she’s to wear this for twenty-four hours. So, perhaps if I could

have the original by the end of the day that way I can unlock her a little after dawn

tomorrow.”

“And the copy?”

“You keep it, Polk. I have a terrible way of losing things.”

By the time they reached the house where she and the girl would live until

her father came for her, Marianna had breasts.

84
 85

Part Two

One

85
 86

Twenty years earlier, Harry D’Amour had turned twenty-three in New

Orleans. No here he was in the same city, which had taken terrible wounds from

hurricanes and human greed…but celebrating his had somehow survived them all,

drinking in the same bar on Bourbon Street, twenty-four years later. There was music

being played by a jazz quintet led by the same trumpet-player, vocalist and all-round

good time guy, Mississippi Moses, and there were one-night love affairs happening on

the little dance floor just as there had been almost a quarter of a century before. He’d

danced then, with a beautiful girl who claimed to be one of Mississippi Moses’

daughters, and that if they wanted to do something bad tonight-Harry remembered

perfectly the way she’d smiled as she said bad, the promise in it, that had made him

crazy to have her. And have her he had, tasted the h’or d’ouevres, up in a little room

above the bar, where her Papa’s music could be heard loud and clear coming up from

below. That should have warned him right there that this was a family affair, and that

men who have daughters also have sons. But all the blood had gone South once he

86
 87

had his hand up her dress, and his tongue in her mouth, and then, oh the moist heat

of her as he slid a finger into her pussy— two of her brothers had come in at that

moment, opening the door she made a pantomime of looking, and played out a scene

they probably performed a dozen times nightly, telling him their lovely little sister

was a virgin, and that there wasn’t a man in the place who would testify they’d ever

seen him if they dragged his Yankee carcass to a certain tree hid behind a wall in a

certain garden, where the noose was already waiting, ‘cause it got to use so often

nobody ever troubled themselves to take it down!

“That’s the last dance you’ll ever do in New Orleans,” the shorter of the two,

who was wearing a silver vest over his white shirt, the effect of which was to make

his skin look even darker.

Harry had paid up, of course. Emptied his wallet and his pockets and almost

lost his best Sunday shoes to the taller brother, except that they were two big for him.

In some unspoken way the size of Harry’s feet had saved him from the thrashing

87
 88

they’d promised to finish up with, just so he’d remember never to hit on any more

black virgins. They’d tossed his shoe back at him and left the door open so he could

make his escape, the lighter for a few hundred bucks but otherwise unharmed.

Now he was back at the same spot at the bar where he’d sat half a lifetime

before and set his eyes on Mississippi Moses’ daughter. There was a mirror behind the

bar, and despite the number of glasses of bourbon he’d downed, his reflection refused

to blur. He’d never been handsome, his features littered with little assymetricalities

that gave him a lop-sided charm, as Caz, his tattooist back in New York had once

remarked. But lately his eyes had taken on a distrustful cast, even when, as now, he

was looking at his own reflection, and there was a downward tug at either end of his

mouth, that was the consequence of too many unwelcome messages delivered by

unlovely messengers.

Notes from the dead, subpoena from infernal courts, invoices for the services

of a furnace keeper who would burn anything for a price, no questions asked, and a

88
 89

Brooklyn exterminator who did a lucrative side-line in the cleaning of houses infested

with white flea, which lived parasitically on the ectoplasmic sheddings of ghosts.

God knows he’d never wanted a life in which such occurrences were

unremarkable. But that was what had happened in the years since he’d last sat here.

He’d tried to begin an ordinary life, a life without the mysteries and secret terrors

he’d encountered as a boy. The law seemed to offer a solid bastion against such

unwelcome presences, and so—lacking the smarts of the verbal dexterity required of a

good lawyer—he’d become a member of New York’s finest. At first the trick seemed

to work. Once he was out on the streets, his days filled with problems that reared

from the banal to the brutal and back again in every minute of every hour, he found it

relatively easy to put to the back of his mind the itching presence-the itch, he called

it-of things that stood beyond the reach of cops and laws and the guns that enforced

those laws. But to be willfully blind, as he had chosen to be, inevitably took its toll.

There wasn’t a day in his working life which didn’t call for a quick lie or two or three

89
 90

from his partner, a amicable family man affectionately known as ‘Scummy’

Schomburg. The name was well-earned.

Besotted as he was by his five children (“the last four were accidents”)

Scummy’s mind was never out of the gutter, and it meant they spent a lot of night-

work circling the same squalid streets were the hookers plied their trade until

Scummy had found someone to arrest and let go again once he’d had a nice long

blow-job in an alley or a door-way.

“Another tequila?” the bartender asked Harry.

“No, I’m good.” He said. He’s been thinking of that night, that last night with

Scummy. He needed to get out of here and put the memory behind him.

But the bartender was filling two shot glasses for him anyway.

“These are paid for?” he said.

“Who by?”

He shrugged. “I pour. You drink.”

90
 91

Harry glanced around the short bar looking for his benefactor. Most of the

tables were occupied but he could see nobody looking his way. Several couples were

up and dancing to Moses’ moody rendition of “Dancing in the Dark,” which Harry

had always thought of as a love-song about death.

“Till this time ends,

We’re dancing in the dark,

And it soon ends,

And we will face the music together,

Dancing in the dark,

Dancing in the dark…”

He downed the first of the shots, and as the sting of it hit his throat he was

back in the car down on 11th street waiting for Scummy to get his rocks off down the

91
 92

steps into the shadows below street level where his catch for the night, resigned to

the price of her liberty, had taken him.

And then the itch, damn it, stronger than usual. He watched from the car

scanning the almost deserted street for some clue to the whereabouts of whatever was

inspiring the Itch. Was there something under the flickering lamp on the other side

of the street; something that moved with serpentine grace, like a cross between a

panther and an anaconda. No. It turned away, rippling as it slid off between the

buildings in pursuit of other prey. Then what about the thing that looked uncannily

like a goat, tethered to a fire hydrant body way down the block behind him. It was

misdemeanor, interfering with access to a New York Fire Department Hydrant,

should he want an excuse to announce his uncharitable presence?

Yeah, why not? Besides what kind of fucked up whacko left a goat tied on a

frigging fire hydrant at two in the morning.

He took out his gun and got out of the vehicle as noisily as possible.

92
 93

“All right, Scummy, buckle up. We’re outta here.”

“I ain’t…I ain’t…oh Lord that’s good…”

“Did you hear me, officer? Move.”

“One minute Harry…just one…oh yeah…oh yeah baby, all the way…all the

way…”

Harry kept his eyes on the goat, which was standing across the street at a door

that had not been open one minute before. Lights burned within, like blue candle

flames, rising and falling. Harry’s Itch became unbearable. He went to the corner of

the alley where he could vaguely make sense of Scummy leaning against the wall, his

head back, while the hooker showed him all the tricks she’d learned between her

Daddy’s legs. She wanted the guy to shoot his load so she could spit and go. There was

something about this she didn’t like, and it wasn’t the cop’s lack of hygiene.

“Scummy?!”

“I heard you…”

93
 94

“Now, man!”

“Just one more minute.”

“Fuck you, Scummy. Now!”

Harry had glanced back at the goat, then at the open door. The blue flames

were out in the air hovering like fire-flies. They were lighting the way for something,

his gut told him; he didn’t know what, but it gave him the Itch something fierce, and

he didn’t want to still be here when it finally did show itself.

“You’ve had your minute Scummy…”

“You put me off your stride!”

‘Then put it back in your pants, partner, right now, I said right now and you

on the floor get up. He moved down the stairs as he spoke, uplifting his gaze between

the doorway and that fucking goat, and the two figures at the bottom of the stairs.

“I said zip up, Scummy.”

94
 95

“She’s so good,” he said. “She’s better than my brother-in-law.” He chuckled to

himself and somehow the chuckle just got Harry crazy. He went down the remaining

stairs, losing sight of both the light attended doorway and the goat in the process and

caught hold of the shoulder of Scummy’s jacket. He pulled Scummy away, the girl

dropping forward onto her hands as he was hauled away.

“What’s going on?” she demanded loudly. “Does this mean you’re booking

me?”

“Shut the fuck up and keep your head down,” Harry whispered. “You’re not

getting booked. But if I ever see you on this block again.”

There was a wretched shrieking from the goat at that moment, which was

silenced suddenly.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” Harry said.

“What was that?”

“A goat.”

95
 96

“You’re kidding. I didn’t see no goat. What’s a goat—”

“Scummy?”

“Yeah?”

“On three we’re going to make a run for the car, okay?”

“O….kay. But—”

“There is no but, Scummy. You look at the car and you keep looking at the car’

til you’re in and we’re away. Anything else and we’re dead men.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so. Now come on.”

“The zipper’s stuck.”

“Forget the fucking zipper. Nobody’s going to be looking at your dick, I

promise you that. Now move.”

Harry smelt the taste of blood; his nose taking in the metallic tang of it that

went straight to the back of his throat. The goat had been only partially slaughtered;

96
 97

its murderer a man in a chain mail apron who held the terrified animal between his

legs, its head pulled back to make the partial throat cut gape. Blood came out of it in

spurts, like water from a faulty faucet. And standing with his back to Harry, the fire-

fly lights that still sauced attendance upon him, was the man Harry hadn’t wanted to

see.

He had the sleeves of his black shirt rolled up to above the elbow, and he was

vigorously washing his hands in the goat’s sporadic spurts of blood. Harry glanced at

Scummy, who stood now reached the top of the stairs, and contrary to Harry’s

instruction was staring with incredulity at the little domestic tableau half a block

away.

Harry transferred his gun from right hand to his left, and used the right to aim

a harmless blow at the side of Scummy’s head. It was an error. The man stopped

washing instantly, and pulling the clean white towel over the slaughterers’ shoulder

began to wipe the blood off his hands. The slaughterer put the goat out its misery

97
 98

with one twist of its head, and let the corpse drop into the gutter. Then the man, done

with drying his hands, threw the bloodied towel down on the goats’ corpse and

turned to face the two officers.

Scummy shat his pants, noisily. Then he did what Harry had asked him to do

in the first place, which was make a dash for the car. Harry should have done the

same, but he’d always had more curiosity that was good for him. He looked at his

adversary. The creatures’ face was a smear of grey matter, from which some crude

sculpture had thumbed and pinched the rudiments of a face. But it wasn’t that which

had terrified Scummy into soiling himself. It was the way his mouth opened, as it did

now, for Harry’s benefit, gaping impossibly wide, and dark, as though it might

swallow the world whole if it was given the opportunity.

It had come at Harry the next moment, racing at him with his mouth already

wide enough to swallow his head. Harry fired at him, and every bullet struck the

bastard’s body, but it did nothing to slow the beast. He stood his ground, destined to

98
 99

put a hole in the middle of the creature’s brow, but as he fired the beast veered to its

left, off the sidewalk into the street.

Scummy was in the patrol car and taking off, leaving Harry to his own devices.

“Scummy! Watch out!” Harry yelled.

His warning went unheeded above the squeal of the car as Scummy took off

down the street. The beast raced in reckless pursuit, raising its blood stained hands

above its head as it did so.

They grew brighter as he gathered speed, like embers stirred into a blaze by a

high wind. Sparks flew off them as their temperature rose, their red heat turning

white. Scummy had put the siren on, hoping perhaps to dissuade the beast from

continuing its pursuit, but the trick seemed to work the other way, inspiring the

creature to pick up its speed in the hope of catching up with the siren’s song. Scummy

drove at suicide speed, and might have escaped his pursuer had he not side-swiped a

pile of garbage heaped head-high in the gutter and onto the sidewalk. The garbage

99
 100

toppled onto the car, and more disastrously into Scummy’s path. He tried to weave

around it, but there was too much of it blocking his way. There was only one solution

left to him. Seeing the beast coming at him from behind he put the car with reverse,

gunned it with his foot on the brake ‘til the tired smoked, then took his foot off the

brake and backed up at speed, slamming straight into the beast. It was thrown over

the top of the car, but its blazing hands caught hold of the roof, its fingers curling into

the metal.

It took the creature six seconds to get to Scummy. Five to tear a hole open in

the roof, and one to reach in and grab him. Harry had already sent the whore on her

way, telling her not to look back. Then he’d given chase, coming round the corner in

time to see the beast reach in and grab hold of Scummy. He caught fire instantly. But

he’d opened the door in the seconds that the roof was being opened and now, his

shoulders, where the beast had touched him were burning, and the flames licking at

his neck, he threw himself out of the car.

100
 101

“Harry?” he yelled.

“Here!” Harry yelled, running across the deserted street towards Scummy as he

stumbled away from the vehicle.

The creature was still besotted by the siren, it seemed, because it made no

attempt to follow Scummy. It had slipped down into the drivers’ seat, its cries of

inhuman delight loud enough to be audible above the sirens. Harry had already called

for police back up, and-guessing there’d be somebody hurt in the chase-for an

ambulance too. As long as the demon stayed in the car he had a chance of bringing

both him and Scummy out of this. Back up was four minutes away, the dispatcher

told him as he threw Scummy down on the wet street, pulled of his jacket and beat

the flames down with it. They had burned through to his skin-Harry could smell it

cooking. His senses instantly mistook the smell for that of the Sunday joint at home,

and his shameful mouth salivated. But the flames went out more quickly than he’d

feared.

101
 102

“I hear help coming, Scummy.”

“Then get me the fuck off the floor.”

“You’re burned. Stay down.”

“Oh yeah you’d love that fucking picture wouldn’t you . Harry D’Amour

stands proud, and Scummy is down in the dirt. No it’s not happening that way. Help

me up or I’ll do it myself.”

He meant it. In the moment of Harry’s indecision he rolled onto his side,

cursing ripely and would have tried to rise had Harry not said:

“I got you,” and pulled him to his feet.

“What are we going to tell ‘em?” Scummy asked as Harry stepped back from

him. His shoulders were smoking, and bright dots of fire still crawled around the

edges of his burned shirt.

“Well Inspector it was like this: I didn’t want Scummy to have to rush through

his blow-job, so—”

102
 103

“Fuck off, D’Amour. What are we going to say?”

“I was checking some suspicious activity, and you saw someone running, that

thing—”He stabbed his finger in the direction of the patrol car where the beast was

still working out how to get the vehicle to move—“came out of nowhere and chased

you down.”

“Crazy fucking thing. What is it, Harry? It’s not human, right?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Harry said. “Anyway, it’s their problem now.”

Three patrol cars, sirens wailing, came round the corner and spewed a

reassuring roster of familiar faces.

“Where’s the fucking ambulance?” Harry wanted to know.

“Walking wounded are you, Scummy?” Kassovitz said.

“He’s a fucking hero is what he is.” Harry snapped. “ He’s getting a medal for

what he’s just done.”

“Which was?”

103
 104

Before Harry could reply he felt a bloom of warmth against his back, and then

there were pieces of burning car flying past him, and all the men were throwing

themselves to the ground. Harry did the same, dropping down onto the wet asphalt as

shards peppered his shirt. One of them fell on the back of his hand, branding him,

and as he swatted it off he caught sight of Scummy, the only man still standing in the

midst of all this chaos.

“Get down Schomburg!” Harry yelled.

Scummy didn’t move. He was staring at the blaze, a little smile on his face as if

he was taking pleasure in the destruction of his wonder.

“There’s a time and a place, Scummy!” Harry yelled to him. “And this isn’t it!”

He got to his feet and started to run towards Scummy, who was still staring at

the fire as though it had him hypnotized. He’d taken a couple of strides when there

was another eruption of flame behind him, and more pieces of the car flew. He

ducked, but he didn’t stop moving towards Scummy, who was hit in the belly by a

104
 105

small piece of burning car, but didn’t so much as blink. Harry’s curiosity was too

strong to be denied. What the hell was so fascinating about a burning car? He looked

over his shoulder, and had his answer.

There, sitting in the burning front seat, only fleetingly visible through the

black smoke and dark orange flame that rose around it, was the demon. It was naked

now, having lost its clothes to the fire, but otherwise it appeared to be unharmed.

“Scummy?” Harry said, looking back at his partner. “I don’t think you should

be looking at him.”

It was always in the looking, he knew; he’d learned that back in St. Dominic’s.

The bad stuff started the moment you looked and didn’t look away, no, couldn’t look

away. And that was Scummy’s problem right now. He did the only thing under the

circumstances, he veered to his left and interrupted Scummy’s line of vision. Scummy

blinked, and for a second or two looked completely disoriented. Then his eyes focused

on Harry.

105
 106

“Jesus wept,” he said.

Harry didn’t get a chance to reply. Something cold and sharp stabbed the back

of his neck, and the instant it did so the strength went out of his legs. He leaned

forward and put his hands on his knees, drawing a deep breath as he did so. The ice-

pick in his neck had already melted away, and his legs recovered from their weakness

by the time he took his third breath. He knew from where and whom the sting had

come. He stood up, his legs still shaky but reliable enough, and turned, gun in hand,

to do his best to take the sonofabitch out. What chance a man with a badge and a gun

had against a demon sitting contentedly in a burning car was probably not a question

with a happy answer, of course. But he’d find out quickly enough.

The demon was hidden by the smoke, but its hand was in view, palm out. It

was not the hand of a normal human being. It had two thumbs, one on either side,

and in the centre of this unsettling symmetry was a triangle that threw out a pulsing

brightness, tinged with the subtlest blue. The brightness intensified with each throb,

106
 107

Harry saw, until the triangle spat forth a needle of light. Harry knew at the instant

that this was a sibling to the thing that had struck him in the back of the neck. But he

had not been its target, he now realized. The target been Scummy. And now here

came another, aiming for the same target. Luckily it was no bullet; now a bolt shot

from a bolt. It came at a leisurely pace, as though it was taking in the sights as it

approached.

Harry started to move towards Scummy, with the intention of knocking him

out of the way. But as he did so he realized that he had misunderstood the sloth of the

spat needle. It was moving at such an indulgent speed because for the length of it’s

flight everything in its vicinity was slowed to the same dreamy pace. The smoke and

flames rising from the car did so with luxuriant sloth, and from it his hand, palm still

partially lifted, and the triangle upon it pulsing again in case another needle was

needed-came the demon, its massive penis unsheathing itself as it ticked to full

erection, the hair around its base burning, so that the rod seemed to rise up out of a

107
 108

tangled shrubbery of flame. The demon was happy; there could little doubt of that. If

his erection wasn’t proof of that then the smile on his face was: a wide, movie-star

smile on its pock-marked and pie-bald face.

A thought, slow and slick as an eel in molasses, moved through Harry’s head.

He chased it down, determined to have hold of it. This was an important thought, he

knew, if he could only get a hold of the damned thing. He reached, closed his hands

on the muscle of it, and made it confess itself.

“The first needle wasn’t for you, dummy,” the thought said, “You just got in its

way. It was for Scummy.”

He let the eel drop back into the filth of his mind, and started to move at

dream speed to intercept the second needle. On heart-beat quicker, and he might

have done it, but the needle flew past his eyes, mocking him with its proximity, and

all he could do was watch it slide past him and head towards Scummy. He also saw it

coming, and stared at it with that same half-smile of welcome Harry had seen on his

108
 109

face from the beginning. It struck him in the middle of his forehead, and broke on

impact, its pieces not dropping directly down off its targets’ face as Harry would have

assumed it would do, but breaking to left and right of his brow and dropping instead

on his burned shoulders. The message(?) the fragments sent were not for Scummy’s

burns however, they were for the smoking remains of hair. Or most precisely for the

tiny bright dots that crawled along the ragged edges of its weave. They heard their

order, and acted upon instantly, leaping up like fleas of fire from the collar to

Scummy’s daft-happy face. As they struck him his head caught fire, from his Adam’s

apple to the bald spot he’d been forever been combing the surrounding hair over,

presenting the results to Harry with the same question:

“Does it show Harry? Does it show? Well does it?”

Even now with the second shot fired from the demon’s hand having found its

target and the flames enveloping Scummy’s head-time did not return to its proper

speed. It continued to unravel at the same lazy rhythm, obliging Harry to watch the

109
 110

flames at work on his partner’s flesh. His skin grew redder and redder in the blaze,

shiny beads of fat appearing from the pores and basting it as they ran down over his

face. It rapidly became unrecognizable, his scalp burned bald, his cheeks and brow

swelling up until his eyes were slits, his mouth gaping until his tongue a torch

lighting the cave of his throat.

Harry half-turned to throw a plea back towards the demon.

“Please don’t do this to him!” he meant to say, and more besides, but the words

came out as an idiot slur.

He could see that the demon had got out of the vehicle however, and was

walking towards him. Again, Harry tried to shape an entreaty, but the words ran

together as they had before incomprehensible. Even so, the demon knew what he was

trying to express, he knew. How could he not? It was playing a monstrous game. It

was almost beside him now, Harry didn’t move, though God knows the soles of his

feet were twitching with readiness.

110
 111

“Spit.” The demon said, putting the cup of his palm six inches from his mouth.

Harry did his best to summon up a wad of spittle, but it wasn’t much.

“You can do better than that,” the demon said.

It was true. The list of the things he couldn’t do could fill a Bible twice over,

but when it came to spitting, he was golden. And he was damned if he couldn’t

summon a good wad right here and now, especially if it gave him some leverage with

the demon. He went deep, and summoned up the good ripe stuff from every pocket of

his throat and mouth; gathered it, rolled it, and then went back and pulled in another

round of sweet wet glory from the places only a real expert would have thought to

look. And then he spat it with into the demon’s palm. It was a nice piece of work, no

question. Thick, but not gross; moist, but not watery. A few bubbles; nothing

excessive but enough to catch the light and give it a hint of showmanship. The demon

was well pleased, to judge by the smile on his face. Harry tried to talk again, but the

same pathetic noise came out. He got the demon’s attention however, and as soon as

111
 112

the sonofabitch looked at him Harry pointed to his throat. The demon made a tiny

motion with his free hand, Harry didn’t waste a breath. He just started talking, the

words making sense now.

“Okay, you got your spit. And there’s plenty more where that came from. Put

the fire out. Come on, I’m begging you. Scummy never did a thing to you. Please.

Jesus, what do I need to say? Tell me what I need to say, or sign, or promise.

Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”

“Here’s what you do,” the demon said.

“What? What?”

“You watch.” The creature said, putting the hand into which Harry had spat

his geniles(?) on his erection. He did so with loving care, skinning back the copious

folds of his foreskin to be sure the purple head was entirely wetted.

“Not me,” he said, “Him. Scummy. You and me, we watch him burn.”

112
 113

As he spoke he began to work the vein coursed rod, with long leisurely

strokes.

“Go on. Watch him. Oh my God in Heaven but that is good.”

His eyes rolled up beneath his lids as his pleasure mounted. Harry tried to

reach for his gun, but the curse of sloth was upon him again, even worse now that the

demon was in no hurry to be done with this bliss. Reluctantly Harry turned his slow

gaze back towards Scummy. The basted meat of his face was starting to blacken now,

the swelled skin cracking open, and curling back from the fire-dried muscle beneath.

His eyes had boiled in their sockets and spilled out as a white froth, bubbling as it ran

down the sides of his face.

“Oh God forgive me, Scummy. God fucking forgive me.”

“Oh yeah’-the demon gasped, ‘That’s it, say it again—”

“Say what? God forgive me?”

“Ohh yeah you dirty mouthed fuuuck!”

113
 114

The demon unloaded his copious load so that it landed several feet beyond

Scummy, where it struck the head of an officer with his nose to the dirt. He looked

up, and he saw the perpetrator standing proud. Harry watched the man’s face, waiting

for the guy to push himself up off the dirt in a righteous fury. But no. There was a line

in everybody’s head which if crossed, erased everything that lay on the far side of it.

And the demon was standing over that line, safe from harm. He knew it too, the

bastard.

“See I don’t exist for most of these poor witless slobs,” he said in a matter-of-

fact. “And frankly, D’Amour, it’s better for you and the slobs both that it stays that

way.”

“Oh yeah, why’s that?”

“Because I got lots of friends and relations on the other side and the moment

they miss and come looking for me they’re going to realize that they cross over too,

and it’ll be a bad time, Harry, when they figure that out because me in, all kinds of

114
 115

other shit sees me crossing over and they think we’re going to follow, yeah, we’re

going to pick up every last weapon need and we’re just going to go over after him and

cause as much chaos as we can, and believe me when I tell you what’s a whole lot of

chaos. Even though right now you think I’m the worst, most sick-minded fuck in

hell, I am nothing beside your man Pinhead or the fucking Fortuners in his Order.

Now they are bad.”

“Oh and you’re an angel, are you, besides your little obsession with fire?”

“Now you’re getting it,” the demon replied.

“So put him out.”

“Not yet.”

“Why in Christ’s name not?”

“Because you haven’t done as I asked you to, Officer D’Amour.”

“Oh fuck. And what was that?”

“You really don’t remember, do you?”

115
 116

Harry shook his head.

“Stand beside me and watch him burn. That’s all I asked. It’s not much when it

comes down to it, is it? Just the two of us, watching.”

“All right,” Harry replied, “I’m here. Beside you, like you wanted. And I’m

watching, okay?”

“Are you really watching?”

“Yes. Christ Almighty,” Harry said, “You want me to prove it? Right now his

left ear is pretty much gone, except for the hole in his skull and a few curls of gristle.

He can’t see us, because his eyes have gone, and he can’t hear us because his ears have

gone, and he won’t be making any more crude remarks about women because his

tongue’s been burned up.”

“But he doesn’t know any of that, Harry,” the demon said. “In what’s left of his

brain he’s dreaming of fucking some girl.”

“Oh yeah?”

116
 117

“For sure. Look.” The demon pointed down at the front of Scummy’s pants

where the evidence for it’s claim was plain to see.

“Any more Doubting Thomas’s in the vicinity?” the demon demanded.

He took his eyes of Scummy and D’Amour and he walked amongst the

officers, all of whom still lay with their faces to the ground.

“You men stink,” he said, “Some of you have been shitting in your pants,

haven’t you? Well, haven’t you?”

There were murmurs of admission here and there.

“That’s good. I’d do the same thing if I were in your underwear. Watching

your friend Scummy burn.”

He stood beside one of the men.

“You, darkie. What’s your name?”

“I’m nobody’s darkie.”

117
 118

“You want to stand up and say that, darkie? You might just have time before

the fire makes you real black.”

Harry and Tom knew one another only a little, and yet uncannily well. They

both had fierce tempers, and weren’t always good at controlling them. Bur right now

he closed his eyes for a moment and willed Tom to let this one go, however angry he

felt. It’s not worth it, he said in his mind, hoping against hope that somehow the

message would bridge the space between them, and Tom would let the bastard demon

have his worthless moment of insults and intimidation. He started hard at Tom as he

repeated the mantra. It’s not worth it. Let it go. It’s not worth it. Let it go. It’s not—

“You fucking stop that!” Tom yelled. He raised his head from the street and

pointed up at the demon. “You hear me?”

“What we wailing about, Nigger Tom?”

“Oh fuck you.” Tom said, pressing himself up off the street.

“Don’t,” Harry thought. “It’s not him, Tom. It’s not him!”

118
 119

Tom paused in his ascent to shake his head violently, like a swimmer with

water in his ears. Then he paused, bent over to listening for any further voices in his

head. Harry paused too, afraid that one more word in Tom’s head would have him up

and confronting the enemy, but that his silence was potentially just as dangerous.

Before he chose between lousy options, Tom’s rage chose for him. He had his gun out

and he was telling the demon to pull his hands behind his head.

“Going to do a full body search?” the demon said, swinging his penis, which

was still half hard, back and forth so it slapped him against his flesh, left and right.

“And you can fucking stop that too.” Tom said.

Then to the others, “Get your noses out of the shit, for fuck’s sake. It’s just one

guy. Get up I said!”

“Don’t!” Harry yelled.

“What’s your problem, D’Amour?”

“He’ll kill you, Tom.”

119
 120

“Oh yeah. Well maybe I’m not going to kneel down and let him choke me. Is

that what you were doing, Harry?”

“Oh Christ—”

“I said right from the start you were a fucking perv.”

Harry wasn’t listening now. He was watching the demon’s eyes. It wasn’t

looking at Tom. It was looking at Scummy’s head. The fire had eaten all was edible,

leaving a black smoking skull where Scummy’s face had hung, and round the collar of

his shirt those motes of fire, still crawling, still crawling—

—then, flying.

“Throw down your gun and run, Tom!” Harry yelled.

“You fuckin’ crazy”

“You want to die like Scummy?”

120
 121

“What’s he talkin’ about?” Tom said. The demon said nothing, though Tom

was pointing his gun at the creature’s head. Then he asked the question again, with

the demon’s other head as his target.

“He’ right and he’s wrong,” the demon said.

“Just fucking run, Tom.”

“Shut up, D’Amour.”

“He’s right, you’re going to burn. But not like Scummy. He felt nothing.

Whereas you’ll…’He paused, watching as a mote of flame grazed the side of the

officer’s neck… “…feel everything.”

Two bright lines of fire raced around the officer’s neck, left and right, and met

at his Adam’s apple. As they met the air around Tom’s head began to shiver and

shimmer as a wave of heat rose up around it. In the instant before the heat reached

his eyes Tom fired and the demon’s pride and joy blew apart like a long balloon filled

with blood. By the time the ragged plum of its head hit the street Tom Benedict had

121
 122

started to scream. It would last, for a little short of nineteen minutes, while the

firefighters exhausted every tool in their arsenal to put out the flames. The medics

who pumped pain-killers into him were no more successful at extinguishing his

agencies. All they could do, along with Harry, was watch the man burn.

Four

Harry woke towards noon. The streets were gratifyingly quiet. All he heard

was a bell, calling the faithful to a Sunday Mass. He ordered up some coffee and juice,

which came while he was showering. The day was already humid, and by the time

he’d dried himself he’d already started work on a new sweat. As he sipped his coffee,

122
 123

strong and sweet, he watched the people in the street two floors below. The only pair

in any hurry were a couple of tourists with a map; everyone else was going about

their business at a nice mellow speed, pacing themselves for the long hot day and the

long hot night that would follow it.

The phone rang. It was Norma.

“Are you checking up on me?” he said, smiling.

“Much good that would do me. You’re too good a liar these days, Harry.”

“You taught me everything I know.”

“I daresay I did. How was your birthday celebration?”

“I got drunk…”

“Big surprise.”

“…and I got to thinking about Tom.”

“Oh Lord, Harry. What did I tell you about leaving that shit alone?”

“I can’t remember.”

123
 124

“Well it’ll do you no good, chewin’ over the past. What’s done is done. The

good and the bad both. So leave it alone.”

“I try, Norma, God knows…but it keeps coming back. Not just Tom and

Scummy, but stuff from my school days.”

“What stuff?”

“The usual stuff.”

“While you were at school?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you went to St. Dominic’s.”

“I did. I was there for five years.”

“And what happened to you? Was it really the usual stuff?”

“With twists, yeah.”

“You amaze me, Harry.”

124
 125

“I doubt that somehow. Look, I’ve got to get going. I want to deal with this bit

of business and get out of this city.”

“After all these years, you’re still keeping secrets from me.”

“They’re not important, Norma.”

“You swear.”

“I swear.”

“You lie like a rug, Harry D’Amour.”

“And don’t forget you got me into this one, so if I come up missing in the next

twenty-four hours…”

“It’ll be my fault. Yeah, I know. What happened at Saint Dominic’s, Harry?”

“Got to go, Norma.”

“Harry—”

125
 126

One of these days, he thought later as he walked to the house, he thought on

the convention again. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to tell the whole sad fucked-

up story of him and Jack Mobley, and the oak, (?), and that damn box, that Lament

Configuration, which opened doors to Hell. Maybe. Right now he had simpler

business, all begun, as he’d said on the phone, by Norma.

Norma Paine, black, blind, and seventy-three, fond of expensive brandy and

cheap cigars, had sat in her favorite chair by the window of her Ninth floor apartment

and talked to the dead, twelve hours a day. She was like a social service for the

recently deceased: somehow if someone was dead and lost in New York, the found

their way, sooner or later, to Norma. Some nights there were phantoms lined up half

a block or more, sometimes just a dozen or so. And now and then, for no particular

reason, she would be inundated with needy phantoms, and she would have to turn all

hundred and three televisions in her apartment on, all playing relatively low, but

tuned to different channels, a new Babel of cooking shows, game shows, soap operas,

126
 127

news reports, weather reports, scandal, tragedy and banality which had the useful

effect of driving them away.

It wasn’t often Norma’s counseling of the recently dead overlapped with

Harry’s life as a private investigator. But there were always exceptions. Nathan Good

had been one such case. Good by name, good by nature; that was how he’d styled his

life. A family man with five kids to raise and more than enough money to do so,

thanks to his fees as a lawyer, good investments, and a deep-seated faith in the

generosity of the Lord God, who took best care of those who cared best about Him. At

least, so he had thought, until in the middle of the day a week ago somebody has

snatched his brief-case from him, and run. Nathan made a second religion out of he’s

and his family’s health. He didn’t smoke or drink, he only ate steak once a month,

when the company principals lunched together, and worked out for an hour four days

a week after work. None of which stopped him from being felled by a massive heart

attack just as he came within snatching distance of the felon.

127
 128

Good was dead, and death was bad. Not just because he’d left Phyllis alone to

raise five kids in their seven million dollar mansion or that he wouldn’t get to write

his book about life and the law which he’d been resolving to for every New Year’s

Eve for the past decade. No the really bad thing about Good being dead was Dupont

Street. Sooner or later, though he’d been obsessively careful, somebody— either his

wife going through the drawers in his desk, which she’d have to force open, or one of

his partners dutifully tidying up the work he’d left unfinished, could find reference to

number sixty-eight, Dupont Street in New Orleans, and recently tracking down the

owner of the house at this address, discover it was him. And then, oh God in Heaven,

please don’t let this happen to me, I don’t deserve this, you know I don’t, and then

they would go down to Louisiana to find out what the big mystery was, and they’d

find out. And everything Nathan had hoped to come to pass upon his death (this

forty years later than the death he’d been erroneously given) —the tears and laughter

memorial service, the handing out of lavish regrets that assured his name would be on

128
 129

several law libraries and scholarships. And most important, the reverence with which

his unsullied name would be mentioned for generations to come —all these would be

lost.

Well, Nathan Good wasn’t about to take this lying down. Once he figured out

the way the system worked on the Other Side he began to do just that: Work it. And

very soon he’d had jumped a very long line and in the presence of the woman he had

been assured would solve his problems.

“You’re Norma Paine?” He said. “Why do you have so many televisions?

You’re blind?”

“And you’re rude. So if you don’t want to find out why I have so many damn

televisions, as if it is any of your business, Mister Coming in here like he’s got money

in his pocket, when he don’t even have pockets no more.”

“You see me?”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

129
 130

“Naked?”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“There’s no need to be offensive. I was only

shitchristfuckingbitchHellasndGodalmighty—”

“There’s no need to be offensive.”

“Goodbye, now. Send in the next—”

“No wait! Wait! Fuckingshitchristshitshitshitshit! I’m sorry! All right? Please.

Don’t send me away. I’m just…”

“Dead.”

“What?”

“That’s what you are. Dead. And nothing your money used to buy can change

that. If you want to join the end of the line again—”

“It was actually you I strictly need to speak to.”

130
 131

“Well what the fuck are you doing wastin’ my damn time?” Norma got up

from her chair and walked straight at Good. “There’s a trick my momma taught me,

once she knew I had the gift. It’s called Ghost Pushing.” She shoved Nathan in the

middle of the chest. He stumbled backwards. “Two more of those and you’re gone.”

She shoved again. “Make that one. And if you ever—”

“D’Amour.”

“What about him?”

“You know him.”

“I might.”

“I need him to do a job for me. Money is no consequence.”

“That, I believe, is your problem.”

“I have a house in New Orleans.”

“Go on.”

“I did a lot of entertaining for a very select group of…”

131
 132

“Of?”

“Ladies.”

“Who did not come with their husbands?”

“No.”

“But left with more money than they came with?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll see what they can do. No promises. But he’s a man of great many talents,

my Harry, and I love him dearly. So you’d better not cheat him in any way shape or

form because if you do I will push you so damn hard.”

“I won’t. I wouldn’t. I was a nice human being. I really was.”

“God save one nice human being. Come back tomorrow. I’ll see what I can

do.”

132
 133

Five

All of which had brought Harry, on this brutally humid afternoon, to what he

had dubbed Nathan Good’s House of Sin. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside.

Just a wrought iron door in a twelve foot wall with the number in blue and white

ceramic tile with the plaster beside it. Nathan had been in no condition to supply the

keys, but Harry had never had any trouble with locks. He had the gate open in under

ten seconds and walking up the uneven paving path that was bordered on either side

by pots of various shapes and sizes, the mingled fragrance of blossoms as intense as a

dozen shattered perfume bottles. Nobody had been there to take care of the Good’s

little garden in a long time, Harry noticed. The ground was shiny with decayed petals,

and many of the species in the pots had perished for want of attention. That was

133
 134

strange, a man as organized as Nathan Good would surely have made arrangements to

keep his garden looking nice and neat, even when he wasn’t there to view it. So what

had happened to the gardener?

Four strides further, to the front door, and he had his answer. There were

thirty or forty fetishes nailed there, and a thick line of dried blood across the

threshold. No doubt what message that was sending out. It was sealing up whatever

was in the house, locking in away where it could do no harm. Harry cursed quietly,

and turned his back on the prison door, wandering back down the path a little way as

he took out his mobile phone and dialed Norma. She picked up after one ring, which

Harry had never known her to do in the forty-five years they’d known each other.

“I had a funny feeling it was going to be you,” she said.

“I’m at the house. Somebody sealed the door.”

“You mean you can’t get in?”

“No, I can get in. But they locked something in there, Norma.”

134
 135

“Oh, I see.”

“He didn’t make any mention of anything like that, I presume?”

“Come on Harry, I would have told you.”

“Weird. Unless it got in after he left.”

“You should stay away, Harry, until I get to talk to him again.”

“No, I’ll put my head in: See what Caz’s tattoos tell me.”

“You be careful.”

“Always.”

He lingered in the garden for another couple of minutes, firing up a cheap

cigar he’d bought the night before, then went back to the door. Another easy lock. As

he stepped over the ragged line of blood, a shudder rose through his body, jumping

like a frog between lily-pads from one tattoo to another, zig-zagging up Harry’s body

in a warning game that went off like a firework on the design Caz had just finished

putting on Harry’s chest, the light blazing outwards through the design.

135
 136

“Okay, Harry.” He said quietly, “You got your warning. What now? You’re

going to have to come back here sometime and get the damn job done. Might as well

be now as tomorrow.” He thought on this a while, as the firework continued to

explode on his chest, its light beginning to dwindle.

“Nice work, Caz.” he said, and stepped inside.

It wasn’t a big place. They’d been built as slave quarters, these sorry French

quarter houses, or so he’d read in the hotel guide book. And places with that deep old

misery in their bones were bound to attract the wrong kind of tenant; the kind that

put the fear of the devil in its people and you’ve got them making up fetishes. He’d

encountered household spirits like that plenty of times over the year, and they were

all bark and no bite, usually. Hopefully this would be one of them.

“All bark, no bite.” Harry said as he closed the fetish laden door behind him.

He took it as a kind of mantra as he started through the house: “All bark, no bite. All

bark, no bite. All bark, no bite. All bark—”

136
 137

There was a cold patch over the bottom of the stairs, a sure sign of a presence

from the Other Side. He didn’t attempt to outrun it, or spit (?)one a dozen versions

“Get thee the fuck out of my way.” Listening, he stood still in the cold air, his breath

forming a cloud at his lips, while the entity circled him and circled him again, until

on the third circuit it stopped with impressive ease beneath the surface of Harry’s

skin, contorting its motion, which was not, as he’d first thought, describing a circle,

but rather a spiral, which finally found its way to his heart, which is grazed with cool

enquiry. Harry had grown by experience not to be intimidated by such encounters.

He had defenses against such spirits if one were to turn nasty on him, but it rarely

happened. Usually the spirit did as this one now did, returning via the spirally route

that it had entered, and leaving.

He waited a few seconds, to see if there were other curious presences here,

who would also want to inspect him. But nobody came, so after a minute or so he

started up the narrow stairs. There had been nothing on the few below which had

137
 138

indicated what the house had been used for, but as he reached the top of the stairs, he

quickly realized that the upper was a whole different story. There was a marble statue

on the floor beside the first of the three bedrooms of a satyr in a state of extreme

arousal, the lewd mischief of his intent wonderfully caught be the sculptor. Mr. Good,

it turned out, had quite an eye for erotic antiques. On one wall of the first bedroom

was an arrangement of Chinese fans spread to display the elaborately choreographed

orgies that decorated each one. The lamps beside the four pictures on the walls,

whether in the bedroom or in the hallway between were all words of erotica, none

even faintly discreet. It was all heterosexual, but there were fetishes of all kinds on

view. Harry wasn’t much for art, especially this antique stuff. It was too old to be

sexy, somehow; he could never put far from his heart the knowledge that whoever

had posed for, or at least inspired, these artists were dead.

138
 139

He took a quick look in the middle bedroom, which had a sling hanging from

the ceiling with a wall covered from to ceiling with whips, canes, oversized dildos,

and other Sadean bric-a-brac.

“I can see your point, my friend.” Harry muttered to an imaginary Nathan

Good. “This isn’t something you’d want your wife to be finding. But Christ, man,

there’s a lot of it. I’m going to need a truck to cart this away.”

He turned on the light to illuminate the third bedroom, expecting it be the

most decadently appointed of all three, but it was a model of decorum. No Persian

carpets here, the boards polished, but bare. Nor were there drapes at the windows.

The glass had simply been blackened out. The walls were painted a uniform dark

grey, and were undecorated. Harry’s tattoos gave off a warning twitch as he stepped

over the threshold. He’d come to be able to interpret the subtle differences in the

signals over the years. This warning was a blinking amber light. Magic’s been done

139
 140

here, the twitches told him, but nothing recently, nothing that should make Harry

turn around and head for the street.

Was this some error of ceremonies performed here by the spirit who’d

investigated him at the bottom of the stairs? Harry didn’t think so. The room was set

up for magic with its bare boards and it’s blanked out windows. It was a stage on

which Nathan Good had apparently been playing some very private pieces of theater.

There was one oddity in the rooms construction which Harry had noticed the

moment he stepped over the threshold; the right hand window was placed too close

to the corner of the room, which either meant that the architect had done a lousy job,

or the room had been truncated at a later stage. The offending wall put up to create a

very narrow fourth room. He ran his hands over the wall, looking for some way in.

The shade of grey that Good had painted the room in was misleading, especially in

the light from the naked bulbs. Harry had difficulty focusing his eyes on the wall, the

grey simply receded and receded, denying his eyes purchase. But he knew he was

140
 141

onto something. The tattoo on the wrist of his left hand, the Sigil of the Journeyman,

was throbbing. He took his right hand off the wall, and let his left do the work, trying

his best to get out of its way with any conscious intention.

He got down on his haunches to let it slide to floor level running along the

wall until it found a place where there was a quarter inch gap between the base of the

wall and the floor. A second later it was climbing the wall again, like a bloodhound

closing in on its target, gathering speed. Harry still couldn’t see any sign of a door in

the ambiguities of the grey, but he trusted the sigil and his hand more than he did his

eyes right now; they knew their business. The mark in the sigil was getting steadily

quicker, until at a place about two thirds of the way up the wall it became an

unbroken signal.

Harry pressed his hand against the spot. There was a barely audible click, then

he was obliged to step back as the door in the wall swung open, it’s well hidden, and

well oiled hinges, virtually silent.

141
 142

Mr. Nathan Good had apparently got more to hide than the extensive

collection of toys in the sling room. The owner of The Good Christian had been

dabbling where Christian good or bad, are ill-advised to go.

The fourth room had a single bare bulb to illuminate it, like the third. But

whereas the light in the third had illuminated a bare room, here the light fell on all

manner of secret things. One wall was given over to books, the scent of their

antiquity one of two perfumes that hung in the narrow space, the other being that of

incense. Harry’s years at St. Dominic’s had taught him to abominate that smell. He

had only to get a whiff of the stuff and old bad things came out of hiding at the bank

of his head: The fathers each with their own little fortunes and temptations, and the

boys who learned from them, hard to participate and punish with the same ineffable

smile.

“All bark, no bite.” He said to himself, memories back into the darkness, and

concentrating on assessing the contents of the shelves. First, the books. He scanned

142
 143

them quickly. Most of them were familiar to him: They were necessary volumes in

any practicing The Twelve Volumes of Ernst, paperbacks magician’s library, Magic in

Theory and Practice, The Collected Griep, several facsimile editions of the teachings

of Gerard Carravasco. Then there were some very rare things. Two thin volumes,

then other unnamed, describing Thelemic markings, the so-called Carapace

Derivations, which had undoubtedly driven more inept practitioners to self-slaughter

than anything else on these well stocked shelves. And there were the real jewels of

the collection. Books many had heard of but never seen, much less plucked off a shelf

and leafed through. The Frey-Kistiandt Dialogues, with their notorious descent into

the language of the Knotted Crown, a grimoire that reputedly only existed in an

edition of one (which he was holding in his hand), which was found in the ashes of

the Yedlin, the child genius of Florence, burned on one of the Savannah’s purges.

Harry’s insatiable curiosity could not lessen the temptation to put the legend to the

143
 144

test. He raised the open book to his face and breathed deep. Yes, it smelled of old, old

fire.

He saw Sammy’s face, with his eyes spilling from their sockets as they burned,

and closed the book quickly. He’d seen more than enough of Good’s collection; now

what he had to do was figure out a way to get the house cleaned out, as the dead man

had requested. But the contents of the fourth room had put a twist on things. He

needed to talk to Norma about Good’s secret library, and get advice on how best to

handle such a volatile collection. And there was also the question of whether his

employer had expected him even to find these books. The sense that Harry had taken

from the conversation with Norma was that Good was simply a man with a secret sex-

life that he didn’t want his wife to find out about. But the secret room was a

revelation of a different kind; and it needed pondering. For one thing the books on

these shelves were priceless. Did Good want them all put in a heap and burned? Even

if that was his instructions Harry was already sheafing(?) through the volumes in his

144
 145

head, making a rough list of the five or six titles he’d save from the conflagration and

quietly sell in a few months. He’d split the proceeds with Norma and nobody ever

need know.

He was scanning the shelves again, looking for anything special he’d left off

his list of money-makers. As he did so something sitting behind a row of pamphlets

caught his eye. Secrets within secrets within secrets, Harry thought. This guy was a

puzzle box. It was a puzzle box, hidden away behind the pamphlets. Not just any kind

of puzzle box either. This was one he knew. He remembered instantly, without even

thinking how it felt to have it in his hand. The way the etched surface responded to

his fingertips, putting out little changes that made you feel warm all the way down in

your gut, so warm and so full of good feelings that all you wanted to do was to go to

some show of pleasure again. Except that touching the surface wouldn’t supply your

needs a second time, so you had to start to solve the puzzle in the hope that there’d be

more instant bliss to be had inside.

145
 146

Harry went down on his haunches to take a better look at the thing. He knew

there were many versions of the box, the lament configuration around the mold.

Some, like this one, lay dormant on collector’s shelves, waiting for some curious

innocent to pick it up and discover its seductions; but most were quickly back in the

flow of life again, sitting innocently in a thrift store or neighing down loose papers on

a desk, waiting for the right inquisitive fingers to pick it up. The fact that many of the

puzzle-solvers were innocents was of no interest to the demons who came once the

box had been opened. A soul was a soul; the more innocent the better.

And still— knowing all this—Harry could not quite bring himself to leave the

box there on the shelf untouched. The last time he’d had a configuration in his hand

he’d been twelve. All he wanted to do now, he reasoned to himself, was hold this

identical box and see how different it felt in a man’s hand; see, perhaps, how effective

the little pleasure jolts were after thirty five years. They’d been a revelation to the

repressed little Catholic boy he’d been thirty five years ago. But it would probably

146
 147

feel like nothing now, he told himself. That was worth putting to the test, wasn’t it?

One little thrill ride for old time’s sake, then he’d put it right back on the shelf —in

fact he’d time himself. Yes, that’s what he’d do. Ten seconds, no, that wasn’t long

enough, twenty, yes, twenty seconds would be fine. Then it would go back on the

shelf whether it had permitted a thrill or not.

“Twenty seconds.” He said aloud. “That’s all you’re getting, just so we

understand one another.”

Then he reached out and picked the box off the shelf.

The instant he held it, time contracted, closing up years between Harry the

Boy, and Harry the Man. He turned the box over with the same fascination as ever;

the same curiosity, the same need to understand what the real mysteries of the world

looked like. The hidden things that held sway over people’s souls when all the

pontificating was over, and the Amens said.

147
 148

There it was, that first little spark of pleasure running up through his fingers

and into his system. For a few tantalizing moments all was well with the world; he

was perfectly content in his imperfect body, though his knees ached and his back

ached and he hadn’t woken with a morning woodie in three, four years. Right now,

none of that mattered. Even the past, even St. Dominic and its horrors seemed

inconsequential now. It was all part of a huge pattern, the good and the bad both.

Like the sides of a puzzle box, once you looked on it for a while, and you got the sides

properly aligned. Suddenly the pattern made miraculous sense and—and what? His

thoughts faltered. He tried to grab hold of it again, and while he vainly tried to grasp

it his fingers moved over the side of the box, seeking out another fix of bliss and

understanding. He knew the mechanism well, despite the decades since he’d last

touched one of the boxes. The many times had he woken from his dreams in which

he’d been doing exactly what he was doing now, feeling his way around the box with

a strange kind of tenderness. And then, just as his fingers were about to reach the

148
 149

pressure point that began the solving to the puzzle, he felt a brushing of cold air

against his face, which woke him from his reverie of remembrance. He threw the box

down as he got to his feet. The spirit was there again, moving around him, warning

him about this place and its secrets.

“I know,” he said. “I know.” Though he had no idea whether the spirit

understood what he was saying.

But there was no doubting the energy that possessed it; the way it swept

around and around him, sometimes threading its gentle soul through his hands and

arms, as if to pull him away, if it only had the strength.

“Nothing’s going to happen.” He said, looking down at the box on the floor.

“I’d only just begun the puzzle.”

He had barely finished speaking when his words were proved wrong. The

narrow room began to crack, and somewhere, far off, a bell began to sound.

“Oh, Jesus,” Harry murmured, “What have I done?”

149
 150

Despite the silent entreaties of the spirit, and his own common sense, he could

never bring himself to retreat. Not yet, at least. There was a dangerous current in his

nature, always had been, that needed to see things with his own eyes, witness them,

whatever the danger involved with doing so. Back at St. Dominic’s he’d handled the

puzzle box, and later, in the company of his co-conspirator in the watching game,

Danny Loft, he met for a short indelible time the demon Danny had called Pinhead.

But what he had never seen, and never truly understood, was how the demon came

from Hell and walked in the human world. He’d thought of that a lot over the years,

trying to figure out the way it worked.

Now, perhaps, he was going to get a chance to see for himself, and he wasn’t

about to turn his back on the opportunity. After all, the house was no maze. All he

had to do, once he’d seen how the process worked, was to do as the spirit was urging

him: turn around, and head back along the passageway, down the stairs and out into

150
 151

the open air. He could be in the street in less than a minute, once he’d paid his debt

to his curiosity.

Just to reassure the invisible companion that he wasn’t planning to throw

himself at the feet of the creature that could be awaiting his cue step onto the human

stage, he took two backward steps, until he was one step away from exiting the fourth

room entirely. He knew from his research, after the trauma of St. Dominic’s, what

kind of entity this was: A member of an Order, dedicated to the harvesting of human

souls, who were put to every kind of torment in pursuit of nothing other than the

cold pleasure to be had in the giving of torment. He was a Cenobite.

On the ground where he’d dropped it, the box continued to solve itself,

independent of any human manipulation, its motions reassuringly elegant, as it

systematically aligned the intricate golden designs, making images that consistently

seemed about to take a finished form only to pursue some other verifications of its

151
 152

symmetry and its beauty. Still the spirit did not give up on Harry, however reluctant

he showed himself to be.

“I just want to see how the demons get from over there to over here.” He said

to his guardian, knowing even as he spoke that it wasn’t the complete truth. Just as

the box had called up his memories, so did the imminent arrival of the Cenobite.

“I’m a demon to some, an angel to others,” he’d told Harry those many years

ago, and though almost everything Harry had witnessed of the creature at work had

been bloody, demonic stuff, he’d seen in the eyes of the man who’d brought the

Cenobite through from the other side, the passion of the man who had more than

pain as a god to his devotions. Was there really an angel hidden behind the Cenobite’s

mutilated face? He’d never stopped wondering.

The creaking and cracking in the walls of the room were escalating. Books

toppled from the shelves, and littered the floor around the puzzle-box, which now, in

one final proof of it’s maker’s genius, opened like a golden flower, unleashing a

152
 153

column of light which looked half-solid in the dusty air. All the noise in the walls

ceased, instantly. Harry waited, ready to make a hasty departure once he’d had a

glimpse, a tiny glimpse, of the world on the other side. A single sharp sound, like a

hammer blow, came from the far end of the room, and a narrow line of cold blue light

appeared there, stretching from ceiling to floor. In a world where the rules of reason

applied, any crack in this end of the room would open onto empty air; it was the

missing portion of the same wall that carried the blanked out windows. But any such

rules were irrelevant now. A new book of possibilities had been opened.

Caz’s handiwork was going crazy, both the tattoos designed to alert Harry to

the presence of the enemy, as Caz referred to all of Harry’s adversaries, and those that

Caz had created himself, knitting together sigils and talismans from every kind of

culture to help ward off attacks, were throbbing and twitching and telling him to turn

around and head for the stairs. But Harry had his eyes on the opening door, or rather

it was what was in view beyond it. There was no sign of the Cenobite, just an

153
 154

oppressive layer of grey-brown cloud. Mystified, Harry did the stupid thing, the thing

he’d howl at someone for doing if he was watching them in a movie. But it didn’t

seem stupid to him at that moment; indeed it seemed a clear, logical choice. The

demon wasn’t in sight, so Harry wasn’t in any immediate danger. And there was

something to be learned here; a glimpse of the world from which this enemy came.

He stepped over the box, which no longer sent up its signal beam, and through the

fallen books to the end of the narrow room.

There was a wasteland in front of him, over which the oppressive sky lay like

a filthy blanket, a rotted mattress. It looked like a war zone; patterns of old streets still

visible in between heaps of rubble. And here and there entire buildings miraculously

saved from the general destruction everywhere, tires burned, the smoke that rose

from them emitted black or sickly yellow. Some of the tires burned in the interior of

blackened buildings, others were not at ground level but beneath it rising from places

in the landscape that resembled huge cankers, the earth around them separating,

154
 155

rivulets of sluggish black fluid, some of it carrying a freight of burning debris,

emerging from the mounds and winding away across the landscape, until they were

carried by a crack in the wounded ground, or fed into a distant pool, where many

burning forms floated.

Harry was no good at self-deception. He knew damn well what was there,

floating in the rivulets and pools. He knew because they were moving, they were

alive. They were human. And watching them, even from this great distance, brought

back with horrible clarity the image of Sammy’s face wrapped in fire, his mouth wide

open as he inhaled the cremating air, and Harry’s curiosity lost its edge. He’s seen

enough, more than enough, to know that this was a place he would be glad never to

see again. After this glimpse, Hell would no longer be a collage of chaotic pictures

he’d seen in medieval manuscripts, or etchings to accompany Dante’s Inferno: It

would be that plague-infested landscape where the burning damned floated on rivers

of putrescence, and there was neither comfort nor safety nor hope in any direction.

155
 156

He took a step back from the edge, and as he did so dropped his gaze. In his

entire stupefied appetite to take in the entire landscape of Hell he had missed a very

important particular. He was standing on the top step of a step flight, and climbing it,

his lightless eyes fixed upon the idiot sight-seer at the top was the Cenobite. He was

not alone. A naked thing that had once been a man, but was in the process of losing

his humanity to some kind of infernal hybrid was ascending the flight ahead of the

Cenobite, its face entirely reconfigured, having been bisected and the two halves

hammered apart by a wedge of what looked like rusting iron, what had been a man’s

head with something vaguely reptilian. His eyes bulged as though the presence of the

crude surgery was pushing them out from behind; the only continuity between the

two halves a hole cut roughly in the wedge, that made a mouth of grotesque width,

the metal teased up with hooks at either end of the opening, which held the bisected

mouth so that it was permanently gaped. How any human being’s anatomy, much less

his sanity, could have survived such vicious reconstruction was beyond

156
 157

comprehension. But survive he had, and with his entire body also sliced and shaved

and hammered and threaded, he loped up the stairs with distressing ease, as though

this was a condition for which he had been born.

Harry took a hurried backward step, as the Cenobite unleashed his beast. The

things sprang up the steps, as Harry stumbled backwards through the books that had

fallen from the shelves. He leaned up and reached around the back of the bookcase,

offering up a quick prayer that they were not screwed to the wall. He was in luck, the

two bookcases were free standing. As the bisected beast reached the top of the flight,

turning its ghastly head to the right as to fix Harry in its gaze, Harry hauled the laden

bookcase away from the wall. Unfortunately, it had been intelligently stacked, the

largest heaviest books on the bottom shelves, anchoring it. It rocked, but didn’t fall.

“Take him, Felixson!” The Cenobite commanded from below.

The detective in Harry’s besieged brain clutched at the name, and filed it away

for later examination. Assuming, of course, there would be a later. By rights the beast

157
 158

should have thrown Harry to the ground by now, and be tearing out his throat, but a

curious delicacy had overcome him at the sight of the books scattered underfoot, and

it peered at them with the unalleged delight of a bibliophile shining his chameleon

eyes. He looked at them first with his left eye, then with his right, while a hand,

reconfigured by the same bellows furnace and blacksmith surgeon who’d marked his

head, reached down and lovingly picked over the fallen books.

The creatures pause gave Harry the time he needed. He put all his strength he

had into trying to topple the bookshelf a second time, and it began to go, the books

starting to slide forward as he pushed it away from the wall adding their own shifted

weight to his sweat. The bookshelf teetered, and then fell. Felix was still too

engrossed with the books on the floor that he wasn’t aware of what was happening

until the shelves began to drop a rain of books on him. Then, with surprising speed,

he pushed himself back, and if he’d been a couple of seconds faster he would have

avoided it completely. But it caught him, head and shoulders at least, trapping him

158
 159

beneath a heap of books shelves that had carried them, blocking the Cenobite’s way,

at least for a short while.

Harry didn’t kid himself that he’d done more than gain himself a few seconds,

however. Felixson was already thrashing furiously beneath the weight of the

bookshelves and their contents, unleashing a wholly inhuman noise from his

patchwork mouth as he did so. Harry backed up until he was on the other side of the

bookshelf, and quickly began to pull the larger volumes off the bottom two shelves,

tossing them on top of the shelf which held Felixson, adding to the weight the

creature had to shift to free himself. Then, once the bottom shelves were cleared, he

pulled on the remaining bookshelf, and as it began to topple made a dash through the

door.

As he did so he saw a familiar figure rising into view. The head with its scars

and nails and soul-piercing eyes; the torso with its metal and leather chest plate,

159
 160

intertwined with its flayed flesh, the belt and its vicious collection of instruments and

the long black skirts of its vestments.

“Don’t bother to run, D’Amour. There’s no where to go,” he said, at the sound

of his voice with its acutely precise and effortless condescension in every syllable—

Harry was twelve again, and standing in front of the Cenobite for the first time in his

life, hot urine running down his legs and darkening his grey pants, his first long

pants, that he’d been proud to wear because they signified that he wasn’t a kid

anymore. Except that he was; then and now. In the presence of this thing he would

always be reduced to an infantile state, his body graceless, his mind chaotic.

Even now, hearing the Cenobite speak he lost the clarity of mind he’d

possessed seconds before, and sacrificed some of the precious time he’d gained pulling

down the shelves lingering on the threshold between the fourth room and third. It

was his ally in the cold air who woke him from his stupefied state, pressing its icy

presence against his face.

160
 161

“I’m going,” he said.

It was a mistake, speaking to it aloud, even two or three little syllables. The

Cenobite was too clever to let signs like that go unnoticed.

“You have an ally,” he said, “I’m ashamed of you, D’Amour, mixing with

niggers, alive or dead. Don’t you know they’re the filth of the earth?”

Harry knew it was an idiot’s game to get into any kind of exchange with the

enemy, but he couldn’t let this detestable filth go unchallenged.

“You’re so fucking old, aren’t you? Old and slow and stupid—”

Somewhere in the middle of the list he was making —old, slow and stupid—

the Cenobite spat a hook in his direction, with a rattling chain coming after it. Here,

finally, his history did him some good. He remembered all too well how they moved,

and he was out through the door and slamming it before the hook could reach him.

The third room was bigger than it had seemed minutes before; the door to the

passageway, though open, was not open wide enough for him to be able to slip

161
 162

through it without wasting time. And once he had a hook in you —just some

miserable little hook— it was over; you were lost.

He heard it coming, the hook whining as it flew in his direction. But he wasn’t

the hook’s target, it was the door it wanted, and the hook and chain threw themselves

against it with considerable force. The door slammed shut, and the hook snaked down

to the handle, wrapping the chain around it several times. As it was doing so, Harry

attempted to pull the door open, and succeeded in getting it open a few, maybe

eighteen inches, before he felt a sharp pain in his neck, and a rush of wet heat which

divided at his shoulder, running down over his back, the rest over his chest. Even

with the hook in him, he continued to try and haul the door open, gritting his teeth

against the pain that would come when he tore himself free of the hook.

But he first the two chains had already outwitted him. Harry wrapped its

length around the handle it threw its barbed hook out towards the right of the door,

slamming the door in the process, and then burying itself in the plaster. Loosing a

162
 163

stream of profanities, Harry pulled on the door, but the hook in his shoulder dug in a

little deeper, and then the chain to which it was attached tightened, and he was

hauled away from the door and any hope of escape.

Behind him, he heard the sound of the bookshelves cracking and splintering in

the fourth room as some powerful force moved them aside. The, the Cenobite,

speaking to Felixson: “Take anything we don’t have. Though that can’t be much. And

hurry. I won’t be long with Mr. D’Amour.”

Harry turned, and waited, the blood still running hot from his pierced

shoulder. He could smell the air of the other world as it came in through the door

he’d opened. Damn his curiosity. When would he ever learn? In his head he heard

Norma answer that question in her two and a half packs a day and a bottle of brandy

voice: “If you haven’t learned by now, then I’m guessing you never will.”

There was a din of splintering wood as some force in the fourth room shoved

the book-shelves aside. Harry did his best to wipe the pain off his face, but it was

163
 164

pretty much a lost cause, the hook just hurt too much. His body was shaking and

clammy—sweaty. In short, this was not the way he wanted to face the Cenobite after

all these years, but he didn’t have any choice in the matter. The noise of the way

being cleared died away and then ceased. Harry held his pained breath for a moment

and listened. He could hear the Cenobite’s foot fall as he approached the door,

punctuated now and then by the creak of the old boards where an ago the slaves had

curled up and slept weeping, all this accompanied by the soft hiss of the Cenobite’s

vestments as the hem grazed the floor.

So much had been done here over the years by overseers, then many years

later by the hypocritical Nathan Good, with his Christian participations and his secret

sacraments to the Fallen One; and now by the agent of that same Fallen One, coming

to catch the soul of a careless, curious man.

He began to speak before he entered the room.

164
 165

“Do yourself a favor, D’Amour.” He said, “Get down on your knees and be

ready to abase yourself. There is only one way out of this, D’Amour.”

Finally, he stepped into view. “And it’s with me, isn’t that what you were so

curious about?”

He crossed the threshold between the fourth room and the third. “I told you to

kneel.”

The Cenobite made a tiny gesture with its left hand and another hook and

chain came through the door, this one weaving over the boards like a snake, then

suddenly leaping at D’Amour’s chest. Harry felt the design of interwoven talismans

Caz had inked on his chest convulse and the hook was thrown back with such force

that it slammed against the wall beside the door between rooms, the hook buried in

the plaster.

“Impressive.” The Cenobite said, “What have you been learning?”

“Just enough to stay ignorant and stubborn.”

165
 166

“That’s not how I remember you at all, D’Amour. I thought I was going to be

able to make a good apprentice out of you, I really did. You were very promising

material, with all your rage against the Fathers. I would have educated you a lot more

carefully than they did, believe me.”

“And how would I have ended up?” Harry said, “Like that poor shit collecting

up books for you, so messed up his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.”

“Felixson is quite content with his condition, believe me. It’s much preferable

to the fate of some of his associates.”

“What was he? A lawyer?”

“No, D’Amour. He was a magician. And, in the world’s eyes at least, a very

powerful one. But he had no strength where it counts.”

“And where’s that?”

“As if you didn’t know.” The Cenobite raised his fist and laid it against his

chest. “In his soul, in the secret place we keep the ineffable portion of ourselves.”

166
 167

“You talk like you still have yours.”

“What makes you think I don’t?” The Cenobite said. He took two steps in

Harry’s direction. Harry prepared himself for the worst. But if the Cenobite had an

execution planned, the conversation had apparently granted Harry a temporary

reprieve, because the demon walked towards the blanked out windows, still talking.

And despite the agony of the hook in his shoulder, Harry did his best to keep up the

illusion of a casual exchange.

“Is it so hard for you to see the past the marks my Order put upon me, to the

thing I am beneath?”

“And what’s that?” Harry said.

“A man, D’Amour. A man not too very different from yourself in many ways.

Drawn to the darkness, which had been waiting for me, I think, since the day I was

conceived. Patiently lying across my path, knowing that sooner or later I would find

it.”

167
 168

Here was a tone he’d never heard from The Cenobite before; this curious claim

to innocence. He, who had tempted and taken victims in their thousands over the

years, presenting himself as a simple traveler caught by a trap laid for him lifetimes

ago.

“So what’s your point?” Harry said. “If we’re both just people who had an

appointment with darkness, and there was no way we could avoid it, why is it you

work for Hell, and I don’t?”

“In other words, why am I an unholy thing that any loving Christ-e-an would

want put down like a rabid dog, while you are very personification of the good man

who walks in dark places offering his help to the tempted and tortured?”

“If you want to put it that way.” Harry said, cautiously.

“Is that how you think of us?”

168
 169

“How I think?” I thought you were talking about what loving Christ-e-ans

thought. That’s how you said it, isn’t it? Christ-e-ans? I thought it was what they

thought we were.”

“It’s one and the same surely. Aren’t you a loving Christ-e-an? After all that

schooling in the testaments…”

“No,” Harry said. “I’m not a loving anything, any longer. Especially one of you

fucking Christ-e-ans. That place was a second Hell. All those kindly fathers teaching

their boys how to get down and suck their fucking cocks. Believe me, that and worse,

and the gentle stuff. It got a lot worse than that.” Harry’s voice had dropped to a slow

crawl over gravel. “Everything I ever learned about injustice, and hated, and the need

to take our revenge sometimes, and not be ashamed of liking it when new do, I

learned in that hope-forsaken, love-forgotten, God-kissing, shit-hole. If there’s any

decency left in heaven then that place should have been fallen into a very large hole

and covered up.”

169
 170

“I’m sorry to disappoint you…”

“Still standing, huh? Lessel? Tell me he hanged himself.”

“He’s the principal there now. I was with him only last week, assessing the

new pupils. There’s some very promising boys. So much more anger in them now,

than in your day.”

“Oh we were angry. We just didn’t show it. We didn’t dare. They had so many

ways to hurt us.”

“Is there any wonder I always felt so comfortable there?” The Cenobite

replied. He had pulled away a little of the painted board which covered the windows

and was looking out. “I must come back here, when I have time to watch. Hedonists

are such easy prey. I just need to leave a few of the configurations lying around, and

wait for the fish to come circling.”

“Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. Matthew. Four

nineteen.”

170
 171

“So the righteous father Lessel left his mark on you in more ways than one.”

“I guess he did. Remember me to him, will you?”

“Oh you’ll see him soon enough. I’ve ordered a grave dug for him, which will

fill with diarrhea from the shite house every hour or so. So he’ll drown ; not a

pleasant death. And then the shite will drain off with the ground, eating away some

ground beneath him as it goes. When he takes a breath again, as he will because he’s

marked for the wheel—”

“What do you mean, marked for the wheel?”

“He can die ten thousand times, ten times ten thousand –and he’ll still wake

up, to suffer and die again only for him there’ll be one difference. The grave he’s in

will be deeper, and his hopes of climbing out of it, up those shite—slimy walls, even

more remote. He’ll still try. He’ll pray down there in that grave. Pray in a loud voice

in the hope that Heaven will hear him, and he’ll confess every sin he ever sinned, and

beg the Lord God to have mercy on him and pluck him out of this place so he can

171
 172

make amends to those he sinned against. And while he’s begging and bargaining the

diarrhea will start to flow again, and flow and flow, until it fills his creaming mouth

and drowns him.”

“And so on—”

“And so on, world without an end. So you see, that’s one piece of business that

you’ll leave unfinished.”

“There are plenty of others.”

“Oh, I’m sure. But I won’t be letting you finish them.”

“Why not? What use am I to you?”

“You don’t know?” The Cenobite said, looking back at Harry from the

window. The bare bulb cast but a single shadow of each of the nails hammered into

his head. The rigor of the arrangement was strangely calming.

“I guess I got in Hell’s way a lot over the years. They probably don’t like that

very much.”

172
 173

“What ‘They’ would you be talking about?”

“You tell me. I just hear rumors about whose in charge down there.” He was

beginning to feel light headed from the steady loss of blood from the wound, but he

didn’t want the Cenobite to start thinking he was weakening. The longer he talked,

he reasoned, the more likely the Cenobite would come to see how irrelevant Harry

was; just a minor player in a game which he had never truly understood.

“I’ve heard a lot of talk of The Regime,” he said. “So I guess they’re the one’s

I’ve pissed off.”

“The Regime is virtually dead. What little authority it had is being eaten away,

day by day, hour by hour. There’s some who say the leader of my order will offer us a

form of spiritual government, at least until all the wars between the factions have

been extinguished and their leaders publicly executed tom dissuade anyone from

repeating the error. But that won’t happen.”

“Why not?”

173
 174

“I just know it won’t. Now, I think it’s time we went, don’t you? Felixson, are

you finished?” The creature in the doorway had a little panel of books under his arm.

“Done,” the creature somehow managed to say.

“Then we shall depart. This room stinks.”

“Yeah?” said Harry, “What of?”

“Women, bad magic and stupidity.” He turned to the door back into the fourth

room. “You look after him, Felixson, he’s all yours.”

“I take care,” Felixson said.

He moved into the room, so as to let his master pass. And as he did so he stood

up, and Harry finally had some sense of the human being Felixson had been. His

sloping shoulders, his pigeon chest, his shriveled cock, his stick-thin legs. The little

collection of books under his arm fitted him well. Despite the labors of Hell’s

dungeons, he was still recognizably a bibliophile, stooped over from pouring over his

books.

174
 175

“No trouble.” He said to D’Amour. “I bite.”

He made what was very possibly the most grotesque attempt to smile that

Harry had ever witnessed. The Cenobite was at the door now, and paused there for a

moment to glance back at Harry.

“Don’t let the librarian act fool you, D’Amour. He’ll take your arm off if you

resist him.”

As if to lend weight to the observation Felixson opened his mouth, and

watching it Harry realized he’d underestimated the sophistication of the surgeon-

blacksmith who toyed with Felixson’s anatomy. As his mouth gaped wider and wider,

the metal portion drew back its rusted lips, and showed an array of metal gleaming

teeth, not one of which showed a hair of rust. They were pointed razors, every one,

and their exposure made librarian’s stoop seem like a disguise for the creature it had

revealed itself to be.

“I get it.” Harry said.

175
 176

“Chain,” Felixson said, reaching out and grabbing the chain to which Harry

was attached. The Cenobite made another of those tiny gestures, and then stepped out

of sight. The tension had instantly gone out of the chain, relinquishing control of it to

Felixson. He closed his mouth, very slowly, the rusted metal sliding back over his

pristine teeth. Then he jerked the chain. The pain was sudden and brutal. Harry let

out a shout which echoed strangely around the little room.

“Knees!” Felixson said.

“Are we going—”

“Knees!”

He pulled again, much harder than the first time. Harry heard his flesh

tearing. And the scream came out of him before he had a chance to hold it in.

176
 177

The Cenobite hadn’t lied. However bookish Felixson might have looked, he’d

spent enough time in the company of his inquisitional master to know how to dole

out pain; and more unfortunately, how to take pleasure in the doing.

With the Cenobite gone —away down the steps by now, most likely—

Felixson wanted to have himself some fun, and nothing sets fire to the finder of

human cruelty than the helplessness of the victim. Felixson began by doing what all

torturers do who know the craft. He got mileage out of simply telling Harry, in his

crude, broken matted fashion, arranged, as though some vital connection in his head

had been severed during his reconfiguring.

“Don’t, can kill. Use but plenty. Ha? Ha!” It seemed to like the sound of its

own misbegotten laugh, because it repeated the sound over and over. “Ha! Ha! Ha!

Ha!” And as it barked the noise it swung Harry around on the hook. Harry could not

keep silent.

“Stop! God, please, just fucking stop!”

177
 178

“Ha!”

“I’m begging you!”

“Ha! Ha!”

Suddenly Felixson let the chain go and Harry stumbled back and slammed

against the wall. His legs gave out beneath him, and he slid down the wall, vaguely

aware from the slick feeling of his shirt against the plaster that he was leaving a

bloody stain to mark his collapse. He was in danger of passing out, he knew, and that

could be inviting Felixson to do something a damn sight more serious than swinging

Harry around on the end of a chain. Harry let his body slump forward, feigning a loss

of consciousness while he got blood back up into his skull to feed his stoned brain.

But after blissful seconds of respite Felixson jerked on the chain again.

“Oh no, D’Amour. Not fool me, not ever. I been right there where you lying.

And I not fool. Get to you up, uh? He gave me my own to hurt you.”

178
 179

Harry heard nothing, and raised his head to see that Felixson was not making

empty boasts. The Cenobite had indeed given him his own means of torment. They

were emerging from the fourth room even now, serpent chains with hooks for hands

weaving over the uneven boards with vile intentionality in their motion, as though

they had brains in their curved steely heads.

“You don’t need to—” Harry began to say, giving the wall a second coat of

blood as he repeated the motion in the opposite direction. “I’ll go with you. There’s

no need for any of this.”

“Oh no need no. But good to do. Good to witness!”

The word had a strange resonance; as though Felixson seeing Harry’s pain had

some religious significance.

The first of the hook headed chains rose up beside Felixson, its head at the

level of the middle of his thigh, apparently waiting for instructions. The others came

seconds later, rising up with the same readiness to do harm. Harry had not stopped

179
 180

attempting to get Felixson to understand that there was no need for this, but the

Cenobite’s creature had no more use for the appeals of mercy than its owner. It was

here to do hurt for no better reason than it could. It has the oldest reason in the world

to do harm, Harry suspected, and it was hard-wired into the circuitry of his species,

and into the derivatives of the species, like the Cenobite and this monstrous thing. To

have power over another to the point of being able to arbitrarily cause suffering and

anguish was a kind of bliss that surfaced whenever the right circumstances arose. And

no amount of education or love or lessons in empathy could ever make it go away.

Felixson pointed towards Harry, speaking incomprehensibly first, to the hook.

It came at Harry an instant later and dug into his groin, cutting through tender flesh

and pressing its point out in a second spot: two wounds for the price of one.

Harry yelled, “Please, you got me—”

Another hook came at him, and caught his groin in the opposite.

180
 181

“Good now.” Felixson said. “Only one need more hook hook and you never

make baby.”

As the sense of what Felixson said had just said sank in, Harry’s attention was

drawn to the door out into the passageway. It was shaking violently, as though several

members of a football team were taking turns to shake it or throw themselves at it.

“What noise is this?”

“I don’t…have a fucking….clue.” Harry gasped. His head was getting light

again; the image of the shaking door eaten away at the corners by

The door wasn’t going to hold much longer against the battering it was taking.

The wood around the hinges and the lock were cracking now, throwing off flakes of

paint and pieces of splintered wood.

“Who is there?” Felixson said, for once putting the words in the right order. “I

kill De Mour, if you come in. Will certain do.” He gave a murmured instruction to a

181
 182

third of his attendant hooks, this one considerably larger than its predecessors. “Tell

so, D’Amour.”

“Tell so what?”

“They try come one more minute this—” He ran an affectionate palm down

over the lethal curve of the hook. “Tell them stop.”

It was Harry’s best guess that whatever was on the other side of the door was

not about to stop because of anything he said, so he did as his tormentor requested.

“He doesn’t want you in here!” He said, his voice shockingly weak. He

sounded like an exhausted child. “He says you should go away. Oh

JesusfuckingChrist, Felixson.” This last exclamation came because the butcher’s hook

was coming at him like a slothful cobra, its head held high as it wove towards Harry’s

crotch. A panicky collage of sexual images broke through his terror —masturbating

behind the gym at St. Dominic’s with Piper and Freddie; the girl, was it Janet or

Janice, he’d fucked with on the overnight bus to New York, that first visit; the demon

182
 183

smith Jago, with his harem in New Jersey, jail-bait every one of them, and all

somebody’s daughter, even when they were on their knees rimming Jago as he talked,

bargaining with Harry for the price of some information; and the widows who’d come

to his office, and the weeping adulteresses who were happy to sin a little more if

Harry could drop his hourly rate. All of this and a hundred other memories ran

through his head as the instrument of his unmanning idled its weaving way towards

him.

And then, without warning, it ceased it leisurely approach, and struck. Harry

wasn’t about to let it unman him without a fight. He waited until the hook was a

couple of inches from the front of his pants, betting everything he had on the chance

that it would pause there a moment, to figure out how to tear D’Amour open most

painfully. In that moment of hesitation, Harry reached down and grabbed the hook

with his right hand, and the chain just behind the hook with his left. The chain

instantly started to thrash wildly to free itself of Harry’s grip.

183
 184

“Stupid!” Felixson yelled. “You make worse all it does you!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Harry yelled at Felixson. “Fucking ass-licking cretin!”

“Kill him!” Felixson yelled to the serpent chains. “Beg make him! Go on!” He

took a pause to prepare his words. “I. Want. To. Hear. Him. Beg!”

Harry continued to struggle with the chain; his sweaty hands steadily losing

their grip on the blood-encrusted metal. A few seconds more and it would be in him,

curling through his shit-hole to plough a wound like a monstrous woman(?) where

his fear shrunk cock and balls had been.

In desperation he let out a stream-of-consciousness prayer:

“Mothergoddessjesus—or anybody out there listening right now. I’ve fucked so many

times I can’t count. But I’ll make good, I swear, whatever put in front of me I’ll eat it,

I’ll lick the plate only please don’t let this hook tear me open and leave me with a

pussy filled with shit. Please FUCK will somebody give me…”

184
 185

It was still borrowing(?) on the opposite wall when the door finally succumbed

to those who wanted to be inside. The lock flew off, and the door was thrown aside,

slamming so hard against the wall that large cobs of plaster were coming down. He

felt a blast of icy air break against his face. The ghost he’d encountered at the bottom

of the stairs was with him again. But his time she wasn’t alone, Harry thought. The

cold was much more intense than it had been before.

Unfortunately, the opening of the door had not distracted the butcher’s hook

from its ambitions. It still intended to gorge out Harry’s groin, and even Harry’s

white-knuckled grip could not prevent the chain from pushing closer to him by

increments. Harry felt the cold presence of a spirit moving around his hand, its

coolness welcome. The room had become a sweat-box since he’d first entered, though

it wasn’t until now, as the spirit entered him again, as tenderly as before; spiraling

downstairs through his system as it had done before. The cooling presence refreshed

his weary body, and put strength back into his sinews. He pushed the serpent chain

185
 186

away from his groin a good six inches, and then made a very risky move. He threw

the thing to the ground, and put hook beneath his heel.

It was far from happy with this new arrangement. Even trapped beneath

Harry’s weight it still tried to slide itself out. It was only a matter of seconds before it

succeeded. The hooks on his groin were now bleeding copiously, and whatever was

left of his strength would be gone very soon. But the ghost’s presence calmed and

comforted him. He was no longer alone in this battle. He had allies; he just couldn’t

see them. Felixson’s eyes, however, had swelled up, and had swelled up, and he lay

his head first on his left shoulder, then on his right, moving around on the spot as

attempted to assess the strength of the enemy.

As he did so he talked to them. “Out now all. I get bad. You think not so?

Wrong! Wrong! I catch you. Like worms!”

He reeled around, snatching up at the spirits, muttering curses or incantations,

or both, as he tried to catch hold of just one of the phantoms swirling around the

186
 187

room. With the summoner’s will redirected, the chains lost their will to act. The

chain that had brought the butcher’s hook so close to desexing Harry now dropped to

the ground, and very cautiously, Harry let the hook go. It slipped out of his hand and

dropped amongst the coils of chain. The other three chains had also lost their will to

harm —at least until Felixson was finished with his ghost hunting- and they hung

loosely against his body, their sheer weight enough to open Harry’s wounds still

further.

The light headedness has returned, and this time he was sickeningly afraid

that he wouldn’t be able to hold onto consciousness. He had help inside, however; the

spirit wove through his body like balm, and though the pain—was not diminished,

the spirit coaxed him away from it, into some chamber of his soul where he had never

been before. It was numinous, this place, and filled with little games to enchant his

pain-wearied eyes. The Frompe L’oeil painting on one of the walls was of number

seventy-nine, Sousa street, the house in New Jersey where he’d been born, a month

187
 188

and a half premature, his mother knocked to the ground with a backward swipe from

the man she’d made the damn fool mistake of marrying. And there he was now, in

the painting, waving from the upstairs window. And his mother, God bless her loving

heart, coming out onto the front step of number seventy-nine and smiling, making a

tentative little wave before running back into the house.

“Mom…” he murmured, wishing she could just stay a moment longer, but the

ghost was showing him something else now: an image that had come into his dreams

every night of his life that he could remember. A red balloon, shinier and bigger than

any balloon he’d ever seen before, floating in front of him. It didn’t have a string

attached for him to grab a hold of, but that had never stopped him, night after night,

dream after dream, of trying to catch hold of it. Just once, he’d tell the balloon in his

dreams, just once let me catch up with you. But it never happened; and it wasn’t

going to happen now.

188
 189

The presence inside him seemed to speak. He heard it say: “Be ready. This will

be bad.”

And as he felt that final syllable reverberating in him, the balmy dream was

gone, and he was back in the room with Felixson, who seemed to have gone half

crazy. He had some invisible thing pinned against the opposite wall, and was tearing

at it. In its agony the victim was releasing a high-pitched shrieking.

“Now, tell you then,” Felixson said. “Tell you all dead here how you feels to

have my magician’s fingers in your eyes. Tell you them! And tell you them, I,

Felixson order they out of this home. Never be again in hell’s business! Hear? Tell you

then!” He twisted his fingers in the empty air and the rose an octave.

“I no hear tell you them!” Felixson said.

Though Harry couldn’t see the phantoms, he could feel them, and their

agitation. The whole room seemed to be vibrating, the old boards threw themselves

189
 190

back and forth across the room in their fury, opening new cracks in the plaster every

time they struck the wall.

Harry couldn’t keep count of them, they moved too quickly, too chaotically,

but there was no doubt that their plaster breaking was more than incidental. They

were working to pull the room. There were more of them in the passageway he saw,

throwing themselves back and forth like the ghosts in the room, but with much more

speed and violence in the narrow passageway.

As he watched they dislodged several pieces of ceiling plaster, and in the

clouds of dust that rose from the floor when they fell he seemed to see the ghosts, or

at least creaking as the ethereal forces here tested the limits of the room’s structure.

Cracks appeared in the ceiling, zig-zaging across the plaster. The bare bulb swung

back and forth, making Felixson’s shadow cavort. Still, there were other shadows,

those of the phantoms, moving around the room, and their hunger to destroy this

190
 191

place was palpable. Then the trail of their motion, as they used their will, their rage,

their hunger to see this place of anguish and agony brought down.

Felixson was still torturing the phantom he had against the wall, apparently

obsessed with getting the thing to obey him. He didn’t even seem to notice —or if he

noticed he didn’t care—that the place was being steadily demolished around him.

Harry had meanwhile taken the business of freeing himself into his own

hands, tearing a hole in his pants so that he could gingerly remove one of the two

hooks in his groin. The barbs were designed to make any attempt at extraction likely

only to worsen the wound, slicing through hitherto unharmed tissue on its way out.

It was sticky, sickly work, and Harry’s shaking hands didn’t make it any easier, but

after three or four minutes he had the hook, with its trophies of muscle strands, out of

his groin. He let it drop from his fingers and threw back his reeling head, hoping to

draw a breath of clean air. But there was none to be had. Plaster dust was filling the

room like a white fog. It could not, however, conceal him from Felixson, who had

191
 192

grown bored with his tormenting of the phantom and had turned his gaze back at

Harry.

“What fuck you think you do now, huh? What fuck you think?”

As he crossed the room he stooped to pick up the chains attached to the hooks

still in Harry.

“Make you hurt, yes! Ha! The first chain went to his groin, and he pulled so

hard on it, Harry screamed.

“Hurt! Hurt! Hurt!”

He reached for the second chain, but as he did so the plaster dust was swept

aside by a phantom, its descent mirrored by a second phantom coming from the

opposite direction, and intersecting at the chain. Clearly in the world of phantoms,

one and one made more than two. The chain, struck at the precise spot where the

ghosts crossed, blew apart, leaving a length of perhaps eighteen inches of chain still

dangling from the hook. Felixson was unprepared for this eventuality. He cursed

192
 193

brutally, then wiping from his right eye the blow that had now formed a wound in

his brow opened up by a chain—he struggled to catch hold of the second chain, the

one that Harry had just put Harry on the hook. Two more phantoms converged not

only on the chain but on the hand that held it. This time it was Felixson’s hand that

emptied first, fragments of flesh, bone and metal blowing outwards, the chain it held

exploding into shards at the same time. Harry was free.

Whether Harry’s liberation was the signal for a sudden escalation in the

assault upon the house or whether it would have happened anyway, and Harry had

been left chained up, the destruction of the slave quarters now began. The whole

place rocked as the phantoms working on the floor below shook its foundations. The

bulb in the middle of the room flared with unnatural brightness, and went out.

Harry had no idea of where the door to the passageway led, nor indeed if the

passageway was still standing. If he hadn’t given his soul over to the ghost inside him

he would have perished, and quickly. But the phantom knew the way out. It led

193
 194

Harry over the rippling floorboards, until the welcome sights of the door’s framework

appeared in the blinding dust.

He was perhaps two strides from the door when the first tattoo Caz has given

him, a warning sigil in the middle of his back sent out a pulse that spread throughout

Harry’s body. He swung round, in time to throw himself out of the way of Felixson,

whose metal lips were drawn back to expose his flesh-shredding teeth, his eyes

protruding more than ever, fat with hunger and blood. It was the ghost that flung

Harry aside, and saved his life. Felixson’s jaws snapped in the air where Harry’s head

had been two seconds before, and the momentum of the lunge carried him forward,

slamming into the wall beside the door.

Harry didn’t give Felixson an opportunity to go after him a second time. He

was out through the door and into the passageway. The ghosts were in a crazed state,

tossing themselves back and forth in the narrow space. They slammed into the walls

like invisible hammers. The plaster had been cleared off by now, exposing wooden

194
 195

slats beneath. There was a din of destruction from the other end of passageway,

which suggested the stairs were being taken apart with the same gust as the walls, but

the dust and the darkness conspired to limit Harry’s sight to a foot in front of his face,

no more. He had no choice but to risk it. Meanwhile, the floorboards groaned and

twisted, spitting out the nails that had held them in place. Harry ventured over them

as fast as he dared, past the sling room, which was now a solid wall of choking dust,

and on over the cavorting boards. The wooden slats were succumbing to the strikes of

the hammer-bodied spirits even more quickly than the plaster. Harry crossed his arms

in front of his face to protect it from the splinters that pierced the air, so that he was

walking blind.

Again, the presence he was hosting saved his skin, speaking in the blood that

thundered in Harry’s ears

“Back! Back!”

195
 196

Harry responded instantly, retreating two steps, then three, until he was back

at the doorway of the first bedroom.

“Back!” The blood thundered again.

He obeyed it, retreating into the gray haze of the room. Seconds later Felixson

charged past him, his mouth vast, and from it a solid howl emerging, which suddenly

dropped away.

“Stairs gone.” Harry said. “Fuck. Now what?”

There was no question what ambition the ghosts had for the house. They

intended to demolish it. He had no idea of how many were actually at work on the

demolition, but the noise seemed to be coming from all directions, suggesting they

intended to do this quickly, then depart. No doubt they wanted as few witnesses to

what was going on as possible, No doubt the destruction had already drawn a crowd,

though hopefully the violence with which the house was coming apart would

dissuade any foolhardy adventurers to step inside. So whatever reasons were

196
 197

eventually proffered for why the place came apart in such a fashion, nobody would be

able to claim they witnessed what Harry was witnessing.

The question that remained was this: Would he live to tell the tale? The stairs

were gone, and something about the way Felixson’s howl had diminished told Harry’s

instincts that the hole that had opened up where the stairs had been let on to a simple

foundation. There was a void beneath the house, into which the Cenobite’s familiar(?)

had been dispatched. And it was deep, very deep. And there was no way they would

ever be able to climb out of it, or rather when, the house folded up and fell, with him

in it.

He had to get out. Never mind how many knees he broke in the process; never

mind that it might put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his natural span. Anything

was preferable to that long, long fall into the darkness on which Nathan Good’s house

of Sin was built. Anything, anything.

197
 198

The fear gave him something that would have looked like courage from the

outside. He left the bedroom, and returned along the passageway leaping with a kind

of faith he had not known he possessed until now that said:

“You will not die here. This is not the time. This is not the place. Jump. Your

feet know where they are going. Turn your body, get your mind out of its way.”

He obeyed the instruction by the most banal of means: He tried to imagine all

possible configurations of bodies and acts the sling in the second bedroom would have

facilitated. The trick worked. In his mind’s eye he played out a little speeded up film

which three women and a man, himself, twenty years ago, ran through the pages of

D’Amour’s Kama Sutra, and while the more he distracted his consciousness, his body

and his instinct did their work, carrying him along the passageway even as it

collapsed beneath him, the boards digging away into the blackness over which he was

leaping.

198
 199

By the time he reached the third room, the plaster dust almost cleared, sucked

away by emptiness below. The room which had once existed beneath the boards, had

been entirely demolished. There was only a single unreliable patchwork of boards left

between Harry and the hole. But at least now he had a clear view of his target: The

window. Trusting his feel to know their business he crossed the room without

incident. There was a ledge perhaps four floorboards inside in front of the window,

but it didn’t look as though it was going to be there for long. The boards had already

lost most of their nails. Harry started to pull at the black out fabric which had been

secured to the window. It had been nailed to the frame by an obsessive, but had been

done several years before, Harry guessed, because the fabric, though thick, had begun

to rot through after several summers of extreme humidity, and when he pulled at it,

the material tore like paper. The light of the outside would come flooding into the

room. It wasn’t direct sunlight, but it was bright nonetheless, and welcome.

199
 200

Harry peered out of the window. It was a long way down, and there was

nothing on either side of the window, a drain pipe would have been adequate, a fire

escape that would have made a climb down plausible. But no, he was going to have to.

He pulled on it hoping to raise it, but it was sealed shut, so he turned around and tore

up one of the floorboards, making his ledge even narrower. As he turned back

towards the window with his weapon, he caught sight of something from the corner

of his eye, and glanced back to see that he was no longer alone in the room.

Battered, bloody and covered in dust, his metal teeth bared, his eyes narrowed

to slits of fury, the Cenobite’s rabid dog Felixson started to pick a solid route across

the room towards him. Far though Felixson had surely fallen, he had climbed his way

back up, to finish the bloody business between them.

Six

200
 201

Harry stood to the left of the window, the boards beneath his feet rattling, and

smashed the glass with one blow, following it up with several smaller blows to clear

the broken glass around the window so that he could climb through without slashing

a major artery. The whole house was in its last stages of its’ life now, announcing its

imminent collapse with a series of shudderings, accompanied by creaks, crackings and

guttural growls from whatever was left of the wall’s foundations. Harry, who’d

worked alone for so long that he had a crazy man’s propensity for talking to himself,

kept up a quiet running conversation as the situation steadily worsened:

“You’ve done some dumb things, you know, but this? This is the fucking

dumbest—”

He felt the cold, reassuring presence of at least one, and perhaps many

phantoms around him, cooling the sweat from his face.

201
 202

“Any help you can offer…” He said as he started to clamor out the window,

“would be greatly appreciated.” He was keeping his eyes on Felixson as he climbed,

but he’d failed to take account of Felixson’s reconfigured anatomy. The creature came

at him suddenly, the boards it had sprung from, splintering as he leapt. Harry dropped

the wood he’d used to break the window with and put all his effort into getting out.

There were people down there now, coming from the front of the house. Harry

caught a few fragments of the things they were yelling; something about him

breaking his neck, something about getting a ladder, something about getting a

mattress, and despite the suggestions, nobody moving to help in case they missed the

moment when Harry jumped. It wasn’t just around his head he felt the nearness of

the phantom. He felt the presence of the one inside too, wrapping around his heart,

comforting him, strengthening him.

“Jump,” He seemed to hear it telling him. “Nothing to fear. Jump.”

202
 203

“Nothing to fear?” He muttered to himself. “If there was only time. Fuck! If

there was only fucking time!” And so saying, he pulled up his other leg over the

window. Two seconds later he could have jumped, had he been free to do so. But

Felixson wasn’t about to lose his prey. With one last bound he cleared the chasm

between them, and caught hold of Harry’s leg, digging his fingers, their strength

enhanced by more of the merciless fusing of metal and flesh, deep into Harry’s thigh.

He didn’t waste the pain by voicing it. He turned into action, shaking his leg

violently in the hope of dislodging his attacker. But Felixson wasn’t going to let go.

“All right then, fuckhead.” Harry said. “You can damn well come with me.”

And with that he threw himself out of the window.

Felixson held onto Harry as far as the window ledge, then he lost his nerve,

and let go. Harry felt cold air wrap around him as he fell, and though it didn’t stop his

descent, still it was slowed. And as his fall unwrapped him from the embrace of the

203
 204

first ghost a second was already wrapping him up again, and after the second a third,

and a fourth and fifth.

The spectators were astonished at what they were witnessing. One of them

called for a camera, another started to pray, begging for some sign that this was the

work of heaven.And still Harry fell, and still the phantoms wrapped him around,

slowing his descent. So much that for a few seconds, when he was perhaps seven or

eight feet of the ground, his fall ceased completely, and he hung in the air, held in the

cold embrace of the dead. Then gravity took hold of him again; and his descent began

afresh until he was finally gently deposited on the glass-littered ground.

None of the spectators approached him. They formed a ragged circle around

him, watching him with a mingling of fascination and fear.

“How you do that, mister?” A young girl asked him. “Are you some kinda

magician?”

204
 205

“No.” Harry said as he got up off the ground. The circle widened; nobody

wanted to get too close to him. “I was being helped by some friends of mine.”

“I didn’t see nobody.” The girl replied.

“That’s because they’re ghosts.”

The circle suddenly got wider and looser, only the girl stood her ground. “You

best come with me,” she said.

“I need to go to a hospital. I’m all banged up.”

“No. I suppose to bring you.”

“Bring me where?”

The girl gave furtive looks to the right and left. “I can’t say with folks

listening. I’m Cecilia. And you’re Harry, right?”

“Yeah.”

205
 206

“See? I knew you was the right one. You gotta come. It ain’t safe around here.

And don’t worry about your cuts and shit. My auntie’s got medicine for that. Come

on, I swear I ain’t no devil’s child.”

“I didn’t say you were—”

“You was looking at me real strange.”

“I’m just cautious, that’s all. You can’t be too careful.”

“Ain’t the truth, though. My Auntie has been saying over and over that you’d

be coming.”

“Me?”

“Harry De More.”

“D’Amour. Like French for love.”

“Mister,” Cecilia said. “Now is you coming or not? Cause if you got to give me

a good reason or I’ll get whupped.”

206
 207

Before Harry could reply the house gave up a long growl of surrender, and

then collapsed, folding up and dropping down through what was left of the structure,

the walls flying apart in places, in others entire sections of wedded brick toppling in

mounds.

It happened with astonishing speed, the entire structure dropping away into the earth

in less than a minute, its collapse releasing a dense grey-brown cloud of dust.

“Come on, Harry.” Cecilia said, tugging on his arm. “Let’s go before people

start asking stupid questions.”

The cloud gave them the ideal cover. “Just don’t go too fast.” Harry told

Cecilia. “My fucking leg’s killing me.”

“Auntie will fix that real quick.”

“Oh wait.” Harry stopped, his head going up to his chest. His guardian

phantom, its protection work done, was sliding out of him, and he felt a subtle sense

of loss.

207
 208

“You okay?” said Cecilia.

“I was wrong about ghosts.” He said as they picked up his hobbling pace. “I

never liked them, ‘til today.”

“They saved your ass?”

“Big time.”

“So you have to figure out a way to thank ‘em.”

“I guess I do.”

“Auntie says that’s the only way the world works properly: If you say please

and thank you.”

“Is that right? Well, this is going to have to be one hell of a big thank you,

because I should either have broken every bone in my body or be in Hell.”

“In Hell?”

“Yeah…” Harry said, glancing back at the cloud of dust as it continued to rise

up from the hole into which the house had disappeared. It seemed the doorway the

208
 209

box had opened onto the infernal landscape had disappeared, closed by the Cenobite

most probably, leaving Felixson on this side somewhere. He would have to remember

that. Felixson was unfinished business.

“Boy, you sure are a mess.” Cecilia said, once she’d used her knowledge of the

city to put as much distance as possible between them and the hole where Nathan

Good’s house had stood. “Auntie said you’d look like one of them saints in her books,

all covered in wounds and blood and she wasn’t kidding.”

“This auntie of yours seems to know a lot.”

“That’s what I always say to her, but she says what she knows will keep her

out of Hell, but it won’t get her into Heaven.”

“Well what will get her into Heaven?”

“I ain’t suppose to say.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Promise you won’t tell her?”

209
 210

“I promise.”

“Helping you.”

“Helping me—”

“—is what’s going to get Auntie into Heaven. But you don’t say nothing or I’ll

get whupped.”

“You got it,” Harry said. Was it just a delirium brought on by pain and fatigue

or was his world(?), which had always acted a little stranger in his vicinity that it

seemed to others, getting significantly weirder.

“Damn right.” The girl beside him said, though he hadn’t uttered a word.

210
 211

PART THREE:

211
 212

A GATHERING OF FORCES

One

Without Cecilia for company Harry wouldn’t have made it very far, the pain

in his three wounds was thankfully remote —he knew he did it, he just didn’t care—

but he’d lost a great deal of blood, and his legs were so weak he was astonished they

212
 213

were even working. Dimly, through the chaos of unedited thoughts that played

through his head, he realized the twelve year old at his side was giving him some help

with his diminished strength. Every now and again, when the fatigue threatened to

overtake him completely, she would casually reach up to him and catch hold of his

hand for a little while, and what had seemed impossible a few moments before, such

as taking another step became a little easier.

“Much… further…?” He asked her, when they’d left the Quarter and crossed a

wide highway with a very different neighborhood. Here the houses were elegantly

aged, like those in the quarter, they were simply old, the paint on their boards peeled

away to uneven wood grey with age beneath.

Was it a game his exhausted consciousness was inventing, or was it really ten

minutes since he’d asked her that she finally replied that no, they were very near?

One more turned corner brought them onto a street of larger houses than those they

213
 214

had passed just minutes before, with generous verandas running all the way round the

houses. Even here, however, the houses were in pitiful decay, many uninhabitable.

“That’s my Auntie’s house,” Cecilia said, pointing to a house that was by no

means in the best of shape, but was clearly occupied. There were children’s toys on

the steps, which Cecilia moved out of Harry’s path as he climbed, and the smell of

baking coming from the kitchen.

The front door was open.

“Go on in.” Cecilia said. Then shouting into the house as she followed after

D’amour.

“We’re here, Auntie!”

The television was on in one of the downstairs rooms, a Spanish language soap

opera playing loudly, while two women, also speaking Spanish, argued with

escalating furor.

214
 215

Upstairs, a baby was crying. Cecilia put her head near the door and brought

the argument to a halt.

“Solomon’s crying,” she said. You’d better figure out which of you is gonna get

him quiet, because I got someone here for Auntie, and he needs rest. “No, no. You

stay right there, I ain’t having you stare at him. I mean it. “Where’s Auntie.”

“Don’t know. I think maybe—”

“I was upstairs,” said a soft, warm voice from behind them. Harry turned, his

giddiness almost overwhelming him, but again Cecilia’s hand briefly caught hold of

his hand and this time he definitely felt the change of strength and clarity. She passed

to him. His grateful eyes focused on the middle-aged black woman, pale blue dressing

gown, a cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“Oh my stars,” she said. “You’re a mess. Cecilia, why don’t you take Mr.

D’Amour up to the little bedroom at the back? We’ll get you fix up don’t you worry.

Angela? Will you stop watching that damn television and fetch me my fixing kit?

215
 216

Right now, Angela!” One woman emerged from the room with the television. She

was very clearly Cecilia’s older sister, by no more than five years, and judging by the

size of her she was very close to being a mother.

“Its twins.” Cecilia said, answering Harry’s unspoken question, “That’s why

she’s so big. Both girls, which is a mercy. Angela, wait a minute. What you got in

your hand?”

“Nothing, Bessie. Leave me alone.”

“You got my cigarettes.”

“I wasn’t going to smoke none.”

“Well then you won’t mind giving them back to me, will you?”

“Just one, come on, Auntie. One miserable cigarette.”

“Mr. D’Amour?” Bessie said.

Harry, who’d been watching all this in a dreamy state, looked back at the

woman on the stairs.

216
 217

“You go upstairs and lie down. Angela, give Mr. D’Amour the cigarettes.”

Angela scowled, but did not protest any further. She handed the pack of

cigarettes over to Harry, and headed off as Bessie had instructed her. Harry and

Cecilia waited at the bottom of the stairs until Bessie came down. She took a minute

to assess Harry’s state.

“Are you sure I shouldn’t go to a hospital?”

“And what are you going to tell them? And tell the police when they come

knocking, asking if you’re the same man who was seen at Nathan Good’s house?

You’ll mend just fine, Mr. D’Amour. I’ll make sure of that. And I won’t be asking you

any damn fool questions because I already know the answers.”

“You’re like Norma.”

“Oh, the high and mighty Miss Paine? We talk, but usually through

intermediaries, being as she thinks I once stole her man, she’s refused to speak to me

directly ever since.”

217
 218

“When was this?”

“Early Jurassic,” Bessie said. “Now are you still thinking you want to call a cab

and drive to the hospital?”

“No.” Harry said.

“Good decision. Take him up, Ceci. Make him comfortable.”

For Harry to ascend the stairs was very much like being put under by an

anesthesiologist, and told to count back from ten. You get to eight, perhaps even

seven, and then you’re out. With Ceci leading, Harry began to climb the stairs,

determined to reach the top without passing out. After the fourth step, he

remembered nothing.

218
 219

There were no dreams in the beginning. He slept, pacified by scents and songs,

and in a comfortable darkness, began to heal. About thirty-six hours after arriving at

Bessie’s house he woke and took some nourishment.

“This is Bessie’s special soup,” Cecilia had told him, with a smile. “You’ll have

sweet dreams now.”

Later Harry remembered nothing about being fed the soup by Ceci, nor their

one-sided conversation. But the promise Ceci had made about the dreams was

entirely true. Once he dreamt he woke in the room, and got out of bed to find that he

was completely naked. His body was still bruised and raw, but the two hooks had

been taken out and the wounds, including the place where his third hook had pierced

him, were covered in some gummy dark stuff. His bladder was full, and he needed to

go to the bathroom as a matter of some urgency. He looked around the room for a

door, but there was none, so he just started to piss where he stood.

219
 220

The moment his urine hit the floor it darkened, the spreading over the floor in

all directions, and when it reached the wall climbing them carrying the stain of

darkness up to the ceiling, which it then invaded with some appetite. He could still

see the corners of the room, and the faint presence of the floor-boards, but stars were

now being born in the darkness. He’d emptied his bladder by now, but it seemed that

he’d pissed out the universe, or a good portion thereof, because he was standing on an

immensity filled with life making stuff.

Clouds of starry brightness passed under him, and over, shedding pin-prick

suns as they moved. And what seemed to be empty darkness between those vast pools

and spirals of light his eyes, my witnesses, he thought as he watched—saw more than

empty space. They saw flecks and motes and seeds drifting through the darkness, like

plankton floating in the soup of a vast blank ocean. Some of them transformed as they

went, swelling, cracking, blossoming as the tides carried them on towards an ordained

220
 221

but unknown collision with the blessed mysterious dirt that was waiting for them,

somewhere.

“All this from a full bladder,” he murmured.

“What did he say?” came another voice, Bessie’s voice, and in a heart-beat the

cosmic room where he been standing folded up around him and was in bed again,

looking out through his barely opened eyes at Bessie, who was standing by the door,

smoking.

“It was something about his bladder.”

“What’s he doing talking about his bladder?”

“I guess I wasn’t attending to him as I should have been. It looked like he was

out cold, so I went down to get a piece of peach cobbler—”

“The last piece,” said somebody else in the hallway. “Bessie, can I have a

word?”

221
 222

Bessie stepped out of the room, leaving Ceci with Harry. “Can you hear me,

Harry. Are you awake?”

Harry made a tiny shake of his head.

“Very funny,” Ceci said. “Well do you remember getting up and out of bed and

peeing on the floor?”

It was hard to speak with his throat so dry, but he kept it short: “Pissing stars.”

“What?”

“He was pissing stars,” Bessie said, as she came back in. “Which is perfectly

possible for all I know.”

“Well it sure ain’t stars I just mopped up.” Ceci remarked.

“That’s quite enough, Ceci. You can go now and fetch me a little gin and

water.”

“You don’t drink gin.”

222
 223

“No, but Harry’s visitor does. Now hurry girl. You ain’t got all day. Oh, and

bring up my cigarettes. I counted ‘em, so don’t be stealin’ none.”

“Harry watched Ceci as she went to the door, pausing before stepping through,

as if preparing for what she was going to encounter on the other side. Harry caught a

glimpse of something through the half-open door, but it wasn’t his visitor. It was

something he only saw in his dreams, his red balloon, floating in the air out there, as

shiny-wet and amorphous as ever.

“Am I dreaming this?” He said to Bessie.

“That’s entirely your decision,” She said in a wholly practical manner, as

though the choice was between soup and salad. “Do you feel like you could sit up a

little while? You have a visitor.”

“Sure.” Harry said.

The small action of pulling himself up into a sitting position hurt more than he

had anticipated. By the time he was half sitting, supported by pillows, he was sweaty

223
 224

with pain. He distracted himself from it by looking again for the red balloon, but it

had gone.

There was somebody in the doorway, however. What little light there was out there

ran over and around the figure as through attempting to make up for its lack of

brightness with speed. Up and around a soft, feminine face, down over the mass of

jewelry that hung at the visitor’s neck, and down further, to the lush folds of her

dress.

“Is she coming in?”

“Do you invite her?” Bessie asked him.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I invite her.”

“Then I accept.” Said the voice of his visitor. It wasn’t as softy feminine as he’d

expected. But then neither was the owner of the voice. Yes, it was a beautiful face, as

224
 225

the glimpse the light had afforded Harry had suggested: high cheek bones, huge, dark

eyes, lips that looked carved, they were perfect. But there was something about the

height of the visitor, who stood fully a foot and a half taller than Bessie, and the

clothes, which were brightly colored and voluminous, concealing the fine shape of

her body. She didn’t look or sound like a man in drag: Nothing so crude. But there

was an inexplicable ambiguity about her.

“This is Coanthagnita, Harry,” Bessie said, she’s been a friend of mine and my

father since… well, I don’t rightly know it’s rude to talk about a lady’s age.’

“I’m no lady.” Coanthagnita said. “As I’m sure your patient is very aware. Yes?”

Harry shrugged. “It’s not important.”

Coanthagnita, smiled, an abundant smile, which felt like a benediction. “Very

smooth, Mr. D’Amour. I’m impressed. And it makes me all the more eager to help

you.”

“Okay,” Harry said.

225
 226

“May I sit?”

“Help yourself.”

Bessie, who wore the anxious look of a hostess who was afraid she hadn’t made

enough food for the guests, hurried to pick up a chair and set it at the bottom of the

bed.

“Closer than that, if you please.” Coanthagita, said, with a little chill in her

voice. “I’m not going to bite him. If he weren’t your guest, well than that would be an

entirely different matter. I would be surely tempted to eat the eyes out of your head.”

She smiled, her eyes gleaming with mischief. “But I’m not here to talk about treats.”

She stopped, and without turning, said: “I believe I would also take a little rum in a

cup.” Bessie had just silently been handed her rum by Cecilia. “And Mr. D’Amour will

also partake.”

“Thanks, but—”

226
 227

“You will partake, Mr. D’Amour, not for the nourishment offered by the

liquor, but for some helpful herbs that I will add to it. Please take that look of doubt

off your face, Mr. D’Amour, I have no intention of poisoning you. My only wish is to

get you back up and out of my city as quickly as possible. New Orleans has endured a

great deal in its time, and I don’t want to add your continued presence to its list of

woes.”

“That’s harsh.” Harry remarked.

“It’s not you who’s a problem, Mr. D’Amour, it’s those who come after you.

The tail of your camel, as it were. They’re a bad lot, and they stir up trouble. The

home you were exploring—”

“I was actually investigating. I’m a private investigator.”

“If you were that and only that, Mr. D’Amour, I doubt we would be sitting

here.”

“Which would have been my loss.” Harry said.

227
 228

The compliment seemed to catch Coanthagnita off guard. She looked down at

her immaculately manicured hands for a moment. “Where is that rum?” she said,

with feigned irritation.

“Ceci, the liquor!” Bessie called.

“I’m coming. What a fuss for a few shots of rum. Here they are.”

“Well take them in.” Bessie said.

Ceci dropped her voice to a whisper, which was answered in whispers by

Bessie.

Coanthagnita raised her voice and there was more of a masculine severity in it now.

“Cecilia! You bring those cups in here right now or so help me girl you will wake up

tomorrow morning with something growing between your legs you don’t want. I can

do that. Ask your Auntie.”

Apparently Bessie confirmed the threat, because Ceci came in a few seconds

later, her eyes downcast. She was shaking with fear.

228
 229

“You can set my cup down on the bedside table, if you’d be so kind,”

Coanthagnita said. Her voice had lost every trace of its masculinity, and as if in

compensation for showing one extreme of her nature, she had gone to the opposite

pole, sounding now like a breathy southern belle, the voice of a woman with much

weaker constitution than Coanthagnita. That was all a performance, Harry saw, both

male and female. The creature called Coanthagnita was playing a game of hide and

seek with its gender, having no other purpose, it seemed, but to have some fun.

“You give me a nice, civilized kiss.” It said to Ceci, “and I’ll forget you thinking

all those bad thoughts about me. And don’t try to deny it girl, you’re an open book to

me.”

“I’m sorry. I just…”

“Spit it out.”

“I don’t know what you are.”

229
 230

“I’m a spirit, just like you girl. No more nor less. And it don’t matter to spirits

whether they got little cunt-holes and titties, or balls and a pee-pee. A spirit is a spirit.

The rest is just masks, honey, like at Mardi Gras. You put one on, you take it off, you

put on another. It’s no big mystery, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Kisses.”

Coanthagnita offered her cheeks, delicately, and Ceci lay a little kiss on each.

Then the creature’s voice coarsened and darkened.

“You missed one.”

This time it offered up its lips and as Ceci put her mouth on Coanthagnita’s

mouth, the creature’s tongue darted between Ceci’s lips and took a long moment to

enjoy the violation.

“My, you are sweet.” It said, when it had let Ceci go. “I am going to have to

find myself a love-child like you, to introduce into the ways of the flesh.”

230
 231

“You look a little judgmental, Mr. D’Amour. If I were you I’d lose that look

real quick, ‘cause I know too much about your business to have you taking the high

moral ground.”

“I wasn’t being judgmental. I was just surprised.”

“Should I take that as an apology?”

“If you’d like.”

“Well thank you. I shall. Here, hold this.”

It passed the cup to Harry and reached in the folds of the robe it was wearing

and brought out a small pouch that looked to be made of very old suede, entirely

painted with symbols. Harry was familiar with some of them; they were sigils of the

voodoo religion.

“Now will you just raise that cup of mine, for me? Yes, just like that, in both

hands, like you were offering it up. I can see you have a feel for these things. But then

of course you made an early start, didn’t you?”

231
 232

“Did I?”

“The way I heard it, you met the Hell-Priest when you were twelve. Or have I

been misinformed?” As she spoke she loosened the draw-string if the pouch, and

emptied its contents, which was an ochre powder, into the rum.

“You call him a Hell-Priest.” Harry said.

“Well that’s what he is. He’s got his religion, which doesn’t suit us, and you’ve

got yours, which doesn’t suit him. Angels and devils, always at each other’s throats.

Like men and women. Warring one moment, loving the next.”

“I don’t think angels and devils ever do any loving.”

“I beg to differ, Mr. D’Amour. I myself officiated at a marriage between one of

Heaven’s legion, and one of Hell’s, and believe me, there was a great passion there. It

ended badly, but that’s nothing new. Now just mix that up with your finger, Mr.

D’Amour. I’d do it myself but I’m never be sure where my hands have been.” The

creature caught Harry’s eye as it spoke, and they both smiled. He put his finger into

232
 233

the cup, which had a very generous measure of spirits in it, and mixed the liquor with

Coanthagnita’s powder.

“May I ask what it is you’re giving me to drink?”

“Certainly you may, but I’d only lie to you, so why bother? Just have faith in

the mystery, and drink.”

“You could be poisoning me.”

“That would be a very stupid move on my part.”

“Why?”

“Because you have journeys to take. Sights to see. And if I were to poison you,

which would be very easy, I agree, and have Bessie’s butcher cut you up and fed you

to the alligators, there’d be no consequences. You’d just have disappeared. But there

would be absences, Mr. D’Amour, you would not be on certain roads, journeying.

You would not be standing before certain sights, witnessing. And that would change

the way things are intended to be, however badly many of those things will end.”

233
 234

“Are you reading my future now?”

“No, no. I don’t believe in prophecy. Anyone who tells you they can read your

future is talking bullshit. But it seems to me death follows very close on your heels.

Where you go, there’s a mess to clean up when you leave. Well, that’s not happening

in my city. I just want to get you well and send you on your way. So, drink up!”

Harry lifted his cup to his lips. It smelled like freshly turned earth and

molasses, with a remote undercurrent of rum. He tried to get it down in one swallow,

but it took two.”

“Disgusting,” he said.

“Here.” Coanthagnita replied, passing the other cup of rum over to him, “wash

it down with this.”

Harry was happy to oblige.

“You sleep for a few hours. That and the medicine will quicken the healing.

You’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

234
 235

“And then—” Harry said, “I’ll be on my way, out of your city. Don’t worry. I’ll

be… I’ll be…” The words to finish the sentence wouldn’t come. His tongue was

suddenly immobile.

“No need to talk.” Coanthagnita said. “We had nothing more to say anyhow.”

The creature rose with a regal dignity. “Goodnight and good bye, Mr. D’Amour.

Travel safely.”

Seven

She had not even turned away from the bed, and his eyes closed. The world

passed out of sight, and he slept. He had no sense of how long he was asleep; only that

when he woke it was suddenly, and that the room was completely dark.

235
 236

He carefully tested the truth of Coanthagnita’s boasts, and found that she’d been quite

right: The drug had indeed done wonders for his injuries. They didn’t hurt at all,

which was miraculous given how deep they’d been. He sat up, and climbed into bed.

He was completely naked. What had happened to his clothes? They’d been torn,

filthy and blood-stained, but they were all he had. He stumbled towards the place

where he remembered the door had been, and having found it searched the wall for

the light switch. There was none, however; at least none he could find. He located the

door handle, however, and opened the door. There was a low cool light out in the

passage, though it seemed it had no clear source. It seemed to simply be in the air.

“Bessie?” he called. “Are you there? I just want to know where my clothes are.

Bessie? My clothes?”

He walked a little way down the passage, and saw ahead of him what looked

to be a toy theater, no more than eighteen inches tall, set on the floor. Had Ceci been

playing here, and left it? Somehow he couldn’t imagine Cecilia being much interested

236
 237

in a cardboard cut theater, but then there were probably other kids here he hadn’t

heard or seen.

He called out again for Bessie, but the house was quiet and still all around him.

No, not entirely still. Now that he looked down at the theater again he saw that a

draft from somewhere had blown the small two-dimensional actors on the stage

away, and it was denuding the theater of its paper curtains, and of the painted

proscenium and with its baroque filigree, and its little orchestra. All of it, blown off

into the darkness leaving only the naked structure of the stage itself: A rectangular

box without walls, and on the stage, now that the rest of it had blown away, a single

actor still in place.

Was it a trick of the light or was this one different from the others? It was

more like a human doll than the rest of the cast. Was this a piece of Coanthagnita’s

voodoo handiwork, he wondered. A doll that could have been standing in the middle

of an empty stage? And if so, what the hell did it mean? There were no pins in the

237
 238

doll, at least that he could see. He went down on his haunches and looked over the

toy more closely.

Oh wait. The figure, roughly hewn from wood, with some grey hair stuck on its head

was no longer standing. It was crouching, as he was crouching, its head lowered, as

his was lowered, in order to see, yes, a tiny naked box of a theater, on the stage of

which Harry could just make out the miniscule figure of a crouching man, his head

lowered.

“Huh,” he said, very quietly.

His tattoos were getting itchy. He reached over his shoulder to the ink-work

on the back of his neck. His action emulated in its crude way by the little him on the

stage. What would happen, he wondered, if he were to reach in and pick himself up

out of the theater? Would some vast hand reach down and—

No. Ridiculous. Even so, he glanced up at the ceiling, just in case there was

indeed a larger him up there looking back and up, at a still larger version, also looking

238
 239

up and back. But there was nothing above him but darkness. He returned his gaze to

the toy. Something had changed in the little time he’d had his eyes elsewhere. The

same draft that had taken away the other actors had blown several pieces of stuff into

the vicinity of the stage. They looked like the kind of cobs of hair and detritus that

he’d pulled out of the plug-hole in his shower when the dirty water started to back

up, but they didn’t lie on the floor. They were up, high up, on limbs as thin as hairs,

and moving around the stage with predatory grace, coming closer as they circled.

There were three of them. One, the largest, was directly in front of him.

He stood up, not bothering to confirm that his carved self had done the same

thing, and he looked out into the darkness beyond the limits of the stage. Something

was there, just beyond the reach of his vision. And if there was one, there were

probably three. As below, so above.

A barrage of questions came into his head at the same time: was he dreaming?

Or, more likely, having some fever-vision brought by his wounded state and the

239
 240

medicine he’d been fed to heal it? And if this was simply a dream-vision, did he have

anything to fear from the presences that stalked him?

It was Caz’s work that gave him the answer to this last question. If there was

no jeopardy here then why were his tattoos spasming so wildly?

No doubt about it: He was in trouble. The dream state was no less perilous than the

waking state; in many ways more so. With all the gaudy distractions of the world

stripped away, the players had nothing but one another to fix their attentions upon.

There was a terrible clarity in dreams like this; the clarity of a primal condition.

There was no hope of subterfuge, of hiding from the enemy amongst the masks of

daily life. There was only the soul and its stalkers.

He had learned a trick many years before that was perhaps applicable now. A

friend of his, one Father Hess, had owned a parrot called Fredrica, to which he had

been devoted, despite the fact that his hands were always scarred with the bird’s

proof of her possession. “The trick,” Hess once said to Harry, “is if I really think she’s

240
 241

going to do some damage is to not to try and pull away. That only makes her bite

down more. No, I push my finger —if its my finger she’s got— deeper into her grip.

She lets go immediately.”

Harry put an image of Hess’ parrot, her vivid colors a glorious antidote to the

darkness and all it concealed, in his mind’s eye. And then he walked off the stage to

meet his adversary face to face.

Eight

A stench came to meet him from the darkness, unmistakable, that of human

remains. A common trick, but not without its power, even against a seasoned warrior

like Harry. The smell wasn’t just repugnant, it was also a distracting reminder of

rooms he’d stood in, trenches he’d uncovered, where the dead lay in corruption, their

skins barely containing the maggot motion they were home to now.

241
 242

He would not be turned from his course, however. He kept walking towards

the clot of filth, comforted, in his naked, weaponless state, by the energy that leapt

from one of Caz’s tattoos to another and another, lines of protective power that

reminded him of the skin in which he walked, which marked the dangerous

perimeter between the tender meat of him and the hard, sharp world. Sometimes it

was better to go naked than not; and this was one of those times. He had no idea why

he felt so certain this was the case, but it didn’t matter. The certainty was all.

“Where are you?” he said to the enemy. “Come on. Show yourself.”

He sensed motion in the darkness, but he couldn’t find the form of the thing.

“What’s the problem?” he said. “Have you got something to be ashamed of?”

That did it. There was a flash of light in the ground beneath the beast, then a

few seconds of darkness, followed by a series of brighter flashes, their stinging light

showing Harry just enough of the enemy to see that the clot of shower-drain crap had

not been too poor a sketch of the thing itself. It was nothing remotely human; its

242
 243

body, an emaciated length of yellow-white flesh infected with clusters of black sores.

Its numerous legs were many jointed, and as fine as needles. It turned one end of its

sickly body towards Harry, and there was a large man there, entirely surrounded by

white pustules the size of fists. One burst as it turned to Harry and another wave of

stench came at him, stronger than ever, now that he was so close to the beast. A mass

of long hairs appeared from its throat, and cohesing to form a primitive tongue they

started cleaning the fluid from the remains of the pustule and took it back into its

mouth. As it closed its jaws to swallow the filth, Harry caught a glimpse of a long

narrow eye amongst the crop of pustules, its black slit was presently fixed upon him.

He didn’t look to see if there was a second eye, or a third. He returned the beast’s

unblinking stare with one of his own. While he stared he kept the image of Hess’

parrot in the forefront of his mind, its verdant green, it’s rejoicing yellows and reds

defending his mind from any attempt at invasion.

243
 244

But none came. The beast continued it’s meticulous consumption of the pus,

sending two or three hairs up to take any dregs. At no point did it take it’s eyes off

Harry, however, and after perhaps a minute and a half of exchanging stares with the

thing, the tattoos on his back and left and right shoulders alerted him to the reason.

The other two were closing in. He smelled a new foulness from one of them, this time

more feral than fleshy, and as he willed himself not to puke he caught a sudden

motion from the corner of his eye.

He tore his gaze away from the shit in the long eye of the first beast in time to

throw himself forward and out of the path of a second. He had only a brief blurred

vision of the thing, but there was no doubting its intentions. Its mouth was open

wide, with its tongue hairs extended, and long enough to brush Harry’s shoulders as

he got out of the beast’s way. In his mind’s eye he saw Hess’ parrot start into flight,

but unable to rise up on its clipped wings, and failing, her colors a muddled blur. And

then he was hitting the ground hard, and for the first time since waking into this

244
 245

vision, he felt the wounds from the Hell Priest’s hooks, and his healed skin broke

open.

He rolled onto his back, his hand going up to the deep wound in his shoulder,

the blood spilling against the side of his face and running into his ear. He had fallen,

of course, in front of the beast he’d been locking eyes with. Now its head, which was

larger than Harry had guessed it to be, three or four times the size of his own head,

the long filthy hair that had sprouted from behind the pustules falling forward, a few

of the longer of them scratching his body like tiny claws. Its eye was no longer

meeting Harry’s. It was scanning his sprawled, wounded body. And as it did so it

lifted one of its thin legs and with a sudden burst of speed brought it down,

puncturing the skin in the middle of Harry’s forehead, and pressing hard enough to

warn him that it could, should it chose, pierce his skull with ease. He took the

warning, and ceased moving, except to slowly offer up his open palms to signal his

surrender.

245
 246

The other two beasts came into view now, inching their grotesquely large

heads in to study him. The third was less infected with pustules than the others, and

its lashless eyes were visible, the spikes of their cornea roving over Caz’s talismans. If

there was anything remotely like a human expression on its misbegotten face, it was

puzzlement. It seemed to look at Harry like a fisherman who’d trawled up something

he was not familiar with, and was trying to make sense of what he saw. And felt too,

for even though Harry had registered his surrender, Caz’s designs were not cowed.

When the third beast ventured to touch the first of sigils protecting Harry’s heart

with one of its legs, the ink flickered an air of energy at it. A minor retort to be sure,

but enough to make the third beast intensify its scrutiny.

And then, apparently more irritated by the response than its crude features

betrayed, it pressed its needle foot on the lower portion of Harry’s abdomen and

proceeded to press. His skin broke, the sting of which was inconsequential compared

to the pain from his loosening wounds. But the beast had only just begun to work its

246
 247

leg around, making the hole larger, and studying Harry’s face, watching to see how he

would respond to his work. Through a deep-seated and long-matured resistance to

giving the enemy any satisfaction in its hurting work, Harry couldn’t help the sweat

that beaded on his skin, nor bite back his grunts of pain.

He closed his eyes, willing Hess’ parrot back into his mind’s eye, but there was

something else there, which demanded his attention, an iron sky moved over a

wilderness of ochre dust and barbed trees, from the black limbs of which sprung

blossoms as bright as little fires, the mind lifting veils of dust from the ground, and

through them somebody approached. Harry studied the dust cloud, looking for some

sign as to the identity of the approaching figure, but the pain in his abdomen

demanded his reluctant return into the company of his tormentors. The third beast

was working its piercing limb in ever greater circles. Though Harry couldn’t see the

wound, he knew his blood was running down the sides of his body. In desperation he

247
 248

began to bargain, though he had only one thing to offer them ion his present

condition, and that was the promise that he’d already made to Coanthagnita.

“I get it,” he said. “You don’t want me here. I’m meddling in voodoo business,

right? And I don’t belong. But just… please… give me a break and let me go. You will

never see my sorry ass again. I swear.”

It was an empty gesture, he knew. What did it matter if he promised to make

himself scarce when they could simply put him out of the game right here and now?

But it seemed to give them pause for thought. Or at least something did. The third

beast stopped making a hole in his abdomen, and raised its head, no longer interested

in studying his agony. And now the other two followed suit, their bodies stiffening,

their heads all turned in the same direction, like animals alerted to the scent of

something threatening in the wind. Harry closed his eyes again, and to his

astonishment found Hess’ parrot returned to her perch in his mind’s eye. Only this

time he didn’t have her entire body in view, just her round, yellow eye, its pupil

248
 249

dilating as it came into view. And then, he voice, the clarion cry that Hess had

unwittingly taught her by spitting it out in frustration behind closed doors.

“Jesus wept. Jesus wept! Jesus wept!”

And her pupil opened wide again, and the expanse of yellow dissolved into the

dusty landscape. He was back in the wilderness, the wind blowing harder than ever,

the dust clouds obscuring the sky. He looked for the figure he’d seen striding towards

him when he’d last been there. He studied the billowing dust, and saw him, a dark

smudge in the yellow cloud, almost erased on occasion, but always coming back into

view. And Harry saw his error now. It wasn’t a man, it was a young woman, dressed

in jeans and a baggy t-shirt, and at her side a dog, a large black and red-gold mongrel,

who glanced up at her mistress as they advanced over the desiccated earth. As they

passed by one of the black barbed shrubs several blossoms tore themselves free of the

branches and came to illuminate their way, three of them swooping close to the

ground, another four or five circling just above the young human’s head. Their

249
 250

brightness threw her eyes into shadow, but now and then she would glance up at

them, and he saw how blue her eyes were, and how black her lashes. He saw too, the

determined line of her mouth, which had no patience for sensuality. She was perhaps

twenty, perhaps less, but there was something in her stride, and in the absence of any

trace of joy, or room for it, in her face, that made Harry think she had seen more than

joy could live remembering, and prosper. The dog barked now, sounding an alarm,

and the young woman quickened her pace. The fire blossoms weaving around her,

those close to the ground rising up, those above swooping down, igniting brightness

through the dust.

Pain called Harry back into the company of his tormentors, the third beast

driving its limb deep into the wound it had opened. It had murderous intentions, no

doubt of that, and it was hurrying to get it done, glancing down at Harry for a

moment then looking up again. Though the same urgency had seized the other two

they weren’t certain apparently what direction their enemies were coming from. In

250
 251

its agitation the first had forgotten Harry completely, and had accidentally shifted the

leg with which had pierced the skin of his forehead. It still rested on his brow, but

lightly, and when Harry cautiously moved his head the piercing limb slid off onto the

ground. The beast didn’t even look down to see what had happened. It was too

concerned with the imminence of its enemies.

Harry raised his head and reached down to grab hold of the limb in his

abdomen with both hands. Its owner was also distracted at that moment, allowing

Harry the little mercy of pulling the needle out of his stomach before it pierced his

innards. But the beast wasn’t so negligent in its lethal duties as its sibling. It looked

down at Harry, its cornea speeding back and forth along the length of its eyes, a sign

perhaps of its disturbed state. But it wasn’t so distracted as not to want the job it had

begun on Harry finished, and it began to push the needle back towards the sizable

wound it had worked open, pushing hard to get the job finished quickly. Its limb was

scaly and dry above the blood-line, which gave Harry some traction. And for all its

251
 252

size the creature had poor equilibrium, balanced as it was like a hair-clot ballerina on

its many points. It moved around in an ungainly attempt to put fresh force behind the

killing limb, and found a position that allowed it to counter Harry’s attempt to get out

form under it, pressing down towards the wound with such power that if Harry were

to lose grip of it now, the point would pin him to the ground.

He closed his eyes, looking for a bright benediction from Hess’ parrot, but its

brilliant eye with its distant iris had gone. So too had the girl and her dog. There was

only blind dust now, filling his vision. He had been abandoned, it seemed. Left to the

beasts. He opened his eyes again, to find that all three of his tormentors were looking

in the same direction, up into the darkness. And into Harry’s view came the subject of

their scrutiny. A burning blossom; plucked from the same bushes he’d seen in his

vision within a vision, and now here, not pressed by any wind but moving under its

own volition. What better prey of that than what they did next, circling above the

heads of the beasts, tempting two of them to rise up on all but two or three of their

252
 253

legs, which they used to attempt to stab it, and bring it down. It danced around their

jabs, however, confounding them with its delicate maneuvers; even shedding a

tempting petal for them to stab at, which promptly evaporated in a shimmer of

yellow-white flame.

A moment of stillness and silence. Then the dog began to bark. Harry was

forgotten; all the beasts’ attention was fixed upon the sound of the dog. The girls voice

came soon after, calling to her companion.

“Wait up, Sienna! Wait! Good girl. Good girl!”

There was an eerie slow motion panic amongst the beasts, as thought they

were moving in water, their long hair lifting, their bodies twisting upon themselves

like unearthed worms, their legs seeming to have contradictory instructions. It would

have been funny if Harry had never set eyes upon them before; never smelled the

stench of their pus, or felt the insistence of their cruelty. He got to his feet, his body

running with sweat and blood, while Caz’s tattoos all pulsed as one, their drumming

253
 254

reminding his disordered anatomy of calmer, kinder times. He might survive this

with a little luck, he dared to think.

“You!” the woman shouted from the darkness, “Tattoos!”

Harry declined to answer shout with shout, for fear of reawakening the

interest of the beasts. He simply nodded in the direction from which the woman’s

voice had come, to signal that he’d heard her.

“Run! Run away from my voice! Run ‘til you wake!”

Harry needed no second instruction. He turned his back on the voice, ducking

low to avoid one of the three whose panicky motion brought its gaze in his direction,

and ran. He had not ducked low enough. He felt a sharp pain in his back, and glanced

over his shoulder to see that the third beast had shaken off the lethargy of fear that

had caught it, and was coming in pursuit of him. There were several soft, popping

sounds, and seconds later another pull of the death-pit stench overtook him, turning

the air through which he ran into a choking soup. It stung his eyes and his sinuses, so

254
 255

that tears ran down his cheeks. But worse, it put the pictures back in his head. The

mortuary of failures he had filed away, and without his inviting it his mind threw its

own pierced carcass down amongst the rest. He saw himself with terrible clarity,

dropping down into the dirt, his mouth slack, his eyes wide and blind saw circles of

black rot spread over him, with slit yolks of maggots, spilling out.

The vision was so vivid that it was all he could see: The dead and him amongst

them, corrupted into commonality. No faces now, just the same grinning lipless bone,

and here there patches of dried skin to which snags of hair adhered. Why run, the pit

buzzed, when this is waiting in all directions? And look, you don’t even know which

of these is you. It’s as if you never liver, D’Amour, the pit said. The words were like

weights on his exhausted body. What little hope he’d had now flickered out.

And then, the dog began to bark. The sound was like a loving blow to Harry’s

failing spirit. It shook the pit from his mind’s eye, and he rose up out of the miasma,

or at least seemed to, and seeming was enough right now. The barking grew louder,

255
 256

and the volume took him up and up, not just out of the pit and the stench but out of

his body, so that when he looked down he seemed to see the bare box theater where

all this had begun, and the tiny actor, dotted in ink and wounds, running out of the

darkness into the silvery light of the stage. He didn’t waste time watching to see how

close the enemy was behind him. He lifted his dream-sight away from the little box to

see what he could see from this new elevation.

A landscape spread in all directions, dark in places, lit in others by some

source-less luminescence that he’d met in the hall. Other dream-scapes, were they,

conjured by other dreamers, or more of his own visions, separated by great expanses

of uncharted territory? No sooner had he shaped the question than the vision

proffered a reply. Trails of light began to dart from one place of light to another,

connecting the dots in some grand design that spread from a half a hundred hubs,

their speed and their beauty, but most of all their purposefulness, an abstracted

antidote to the vile particulars of the death-pit.

256
 257

If there was some revelation to come when the grand design was completed,

Harry was denied sight of it. While the trails of light were still proliferating, he felt

the energy that had carried him up here retreating, and all too quickly he was back in

his body. But he came back strengthened by his glimpse of the landscape, which he

held in his head as he ran, refusing to give the death-pit entry. The dog continued to

bark, somewhere behind him, an angry barking now. There were shrill noises from

the beasts too, suggesting that the mongrel had made it her business to attack them.

“Be careful.” He muttered to her as he ran. “They were more lethal than they

looked.”

Even though he had nothing in pursuit of him now he still pushed his legs to

their limits, and just as he was beginning to think he’s somehow missed his

destination, he fell, and reaching out to break his fall, his hands found something

solid in the darkness, to which he clung as his legs gave way under him. There was a

confusing moment when he tried to push himself up again so as to continue the run

257
 258

and instead felt a light come in through almost closed eyes. He opened them. He was

clinging to the board at the bottom of the bed. There was light, sunlight, coming

through a crack in the drapes, just enough to show him the room where he’d been

visited by Coanthagnita.

He pulled himself up off the carpet, and turned to look back down the

passageway. The air there still carried its freight of subtle silver light, and by it he saw

the box without sides, where his little drama had begun to play out.

As he stared at it he heard Bessie’s voice as she climbed the stairs.

“Mr. D’Amour? Are you all right, Mr. D’Amour?”

She came into view now, as she gained the top of the stairs, and the last

vestiges of his dream-vision went out like blown candle flames, leaving him looking

down a passageway at the figure of Bessie.

258
 259

“I thought I heard you fall.” She said, making a very determined attempt to

keep her gaze fixed on her face. He reached over the bed-board and uprooted a sheet,

which he draped around his waist.

“Sorry.” He said.

“No harm done.” Bessie said. “I was getting a little concerned about you to be

honest. I was thinking about calling on Coanthagnita and finding out whether it was

right that you were so agitated in your sleep. Thrashing around the way you were and

crying out.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Not very long. Five and a half hours. Maybe six. It looks as though you lost

your old wounds and gained a new one.” Her hand went up to her forehead, and

Harry touched his. There was a small wound where the first beast had pinned his

head down.

259
 260

“Huh.” He said. “If I’ve got that then I’ve probably also got…” he looked

down. He didn’t need to touch his belly to confirm that he also had the second

wound. A sizeable patch of blood had already soaked through from the other side.

“You’ve got some more mending to do, apparently.” Bessie said. “Maybe I

should get Coanthagnita to send over some more of her powder.”

“No offense, Bessie, but I’ll be fine with some peroxide and some gauze to put a

patch over the hole in my belly.”

“Is it a big hole?”

“It’ll mend.” Harry said. “I’m sure I’ve got enough of Coanthagnita’s medicine

in my system to fix me up real quick.” He touched the place where the Hell Priest’s

hook had punctured his shoulder. There was a crust of dried blood, which came off

with just a quick rub. Underneath was a scar, but the wound itself had healed

completely.

“She’s good.” Harry said. “Thank you for everything, Bessie.”

260
 261

“You’re not going to tell me how you came by those wounds?”

“Nah. It’s over and done with. If I could just get peroxide and my clothes, I’ll

get out of your house and out of this city.”

Nine

261
 262

His system did indeed contain a measure of Coanthagnita’s medicine. When,

perhaps twenty minutes later he sat at the edge of the bath, his feet inside, and

poured peroxide over his belly wound (while cupping his dick and balls with his

other hand to keep them out of the way from the stinging fluid), he discerned that the

hole in his lower abdomen was already half-healed, and the two wounds in his groin

were pale scar tissue.

“Powerful medicine,” he said to his reflection as he appraised the mark on his

forehead. There was nothing to do with that but clean it up a little and let it finish

closing. There’d be a scar there too, but he didn’t mind. He knew already what a few

people who knowledgeable in the business of visions could say: That the scar marked

the spot where his third eye, seer of spirit and revelation, was positioned. They’d say

the scar was prophetic. As for the rest of his face, that was a testament all his own.

Every day the battle for his scalp belonged more clearly to the grey, while the thin

furrows of his frown deepened and the leaden sacks beneath his eyes grew heavier.

262
 263

His long war was taking its toll. It was difficult to remember the face he’d had twenty

years before, when he could still make an entrance into a room and garner some

appreciative glances from the women. Now he was going grey on grey; a state of near

invisibility which left his ego shredded, even though it probably made his job as a

detective a little easier. It was a damn high price to pay, and he was sick of it. He was

never again going to be the good looking guy with the mysterious smile that certain

ladies had found so easy to fall for, but at least he could slow his free-fall.

The war could go on without him, probably forever. The struggle between the

forces of light and life and those of death and chaos and darkness build into the

patterns of their eternal presence the foundations upon which the most powerful

systems of human control were raised. As long as there were sun and shadow, joy and

despair, there would be Christs and Anti-Christs, and men like him, marked for

reasons beyond his comprehension for the clammy business of walking between

worlds. In the world, but not of it, at least not entirely. Drawn over and over to the

263
 264

borderlands where the walls of banality people built against their fears fell into

disrepair, and damn fool folks like Harry stumbled over the rubble. Why? To answer

questions about the meaning of things that he had never properly formulated? There

was some of that. But mainly it was because his life had no purpose if he didn’t go;

that in those dark, unmapped places where the things that fear had conjured to

conjure fear went about the unholy business of feeding appetites only hurt could

satisfy.

It wasn’t a surprise to him to find that his face was a grim sight. But it was a

surprise that he was alive to be looking at it, given how often circumstances or

stubbornness had induced him to face the adversaries. It had started ambitiously,

though it had not been his choice to do so, facing the Hell-Priest and his puzzle box,

in the company of Jack Weeks, the closest he’d had to a friend in St. Dominic’s. After

school there’d been a respite of a few years, when he’d willfully ignored the attempts

of forces on both sides of the divide to number him amongst their ranks. Then there’d

264
 265

been his time as a cop, and the horror show that had brought it to an end, and after

that however hard he tried to stay within the throw of humanity’s fire he was never

quite clever enough to read the signs in the air or the dirt at his feet that would have

warned him to turn around, turn around, and in a heart beat he’d be back on the

wrong side of the rubble, facing limitless dark.

“You know what?” he said to his reflection, “Fuck this. Enough. No. I mean it.

Enough. I can’t do this anymore. Can’t. Won’t. This is it. Game over.”

“Are you all right in there?” Bessie said.

“Yeah. I’m fine. I’m just talking to myself.”

“I found an old shirt and a pair of pants that my brother left here when I

kicked him out.”

“What about mine?”

“I burned them, Harry. They were a filthy mess. And before you ask the

change and the keys and the matchbook are on top of the clothes which are right

265
 266

outside the door. I don’t want to be unsociable or nothing, but I got to kick you out in

a few minutes. It’s not that I don’t trust you. I think you’re probably a good man. But

these days you can’t be too careful. So I’d like to have you on your way before I

leave.”

“Give me five minutes.”

“Oh, no need to rush. Ten’s fine.”

He tried to offer Bessie some money for her many kindnesses, but of course

she wouldn’t take a cent, and Harry knew that to press her would only cause

discomfort, so he made his thanks, gave Bessie his card, and one for Coanthagnita, just

in case they were ever in need of a detective.

“I thought I heard you sayin’ you were giving it all up.” Bessie said.

266
 267

“And I am. But if you ever needed help, I’d be happy to come out of

retirement.”

“I think it’s a good idea, Mr. D’Amour. I can see you’ve been hit hard over the

years. But I should tell you Coanthagnita seemed to think you weren’t quite done.”

“No?”

“Or more likely something wasn’t quite done with you.”

“Oh shit.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Is she ever wrong?”

“I wish I could say yes.”

“But no.”

“No. Tread carefully, Mr. D’Amour. A man like you moves a step, things

listen.”

267
 268

Harry glanced down at his feet. In the instant it took him to look down and up

again, Bessie closed the door.

268
 269

Ten

The Monastery of Cenobitical Order was a large walled compound built seven

hundred years ago and more on a damned-made hill of stone and cement, which

could only be entered by one route, a narrow stairway that was carefully watched by

the monastery guards. It had been built during a time of imminent civil war, with

factions of demons in constant skirmishes. The head of the Cenobitical Order, his

identity known only to the eight who had raised him from their number into that

High Office, had decided that for the greater good of the Order, he would use a tiny

part of the vast wealth they had accrued to build a fortress-sanctuary, where his

269
 270

priests would be safe from the volatile politics of Hell. The fortress had been built to

the most rigorous of standards, its polished grey walls unscaleable. And as the years

had passed, and the Cenobites were less and less in the streets of the city Lucifer had

designed and built, called by some, Pandemonium, but named Pyratha by its

architect, the stories about what went on behind the sleek black walls of the fortress

proliferated, and the countless demons and damned alike who glanced its way every

hour all had favorite stories about the excesses of its occupants. In the vast

shantytown called Fike’s Trench, where the damned who did service in the mansions,

temples and streets of Pyratha retired to sleep and eat awhile (and yes, copulate, and

if they were lucky, produce an infant or two that could be sold at the abattoir or

worse), the stories of the fortress and the monstrous things that went on there were

exchanged like currency, growing ever more elaborate. It was an understandable

comfort to the damned, who lived with so much terror and atrocity in their daily

lives that there be a place where things were even worse; where they could look and

270
 271

tell themselves they had reason to be thankful; reason, even, to hope to silently repeat

whatever they could remember of prayers; to scratch on rocks, or draw with shit and

ash scenes, even faces, that they had once taken joy in.

“Once you forget, you’re forgotten.” Was the common wisdom amongst the

damned. So each man, woman and child nurtured thanks that they were not amongst

the victims of the fortress, where the unspeakable devices of the Order would scour

even the most treasured of memories. And in this fashion, living in excrement and

exhaustion, their bodies barely nourished, their spirits unfed, but holding onto a

touchstone memory and to the almost happy thought that others suffered more than

they, the damned something approximating a life.

271
 272

All this had come as a shock to Felixson. In life he’d spent much of the fortune

his workings in magic had earned him (what he’d liked to refer to as his will-gotten

gains) on art, always buying privately because the paintings he collected moved,

when they moved at all, outside the sniffing range of the museum hounds. All the

pictures he’d owned had related in some way to Hell. A Tintoretto of Lucifer falling,

his wings torn off him and falling after him. A sheaf of preparatory studies by Lucca

Signorelli for his fresca of The Damned in Hell, a book of horrors which he’d

purchased because its unknown creator had found a way to make the meditations of

each hour turn on sin and punishment. None of the works he’s owned, nor indeed the

masterpieces by Bosch, Menling and Fra Angelica or the remnants of the old, which

in turn were built in and upon the remnants of what the architect himself had put

there, so that no two hills, nor two streets, nor two houses looked the same. Weaving

through the city ran its Tiber, the river Mashad, crossed six places by the bridges that

had been built with the city, and in which he’d tried several times to steal from their

272
 273

museums using magic, only to find that somebody wise to such possibilities had

protected them with blood markings of their own, had failed to create anything that

even remotely resembled the truth. He stood now at the bottom of the steps that lead

up to the fortress gate, the ground behind him and ahead of him another five hundred

yards the last resting place of numberless bodies used to breaking point by the Order,

then thrown over the walls to be eaten, stripped of their fleshy parts and excreted by

the vast white-skinned, pink-eyed snakes called mattanats that nested in the death-

ripe earth around the fortress.

Beyond the bodies, through the swarms of flies and mosquitoes that were

everywhere in Hell, Felixson could see the elegant symmetry of Pyratha, with its

eight hills—One better than Rome, the architect boasted—the shapes of which were

crammed with buildings of countless styles and sizes, the new built in and permanent

structures, built and used by the damned. Columns of smoke rose from the numerous

locations around the city, where fires raged, their commonest cause the current craze

273
 274

amongst the demonic citizens of the City of the Eight Hills, soul-burning. Felixson

knew nothing of its rules, if it had any, or why the game was even played. The Hell-

Priest had referred to it in passing on one occasion, and spoke of it with the profound

contempt of a creature who thought of every occupant of Pyratha as a sub-species,

their mindless hedonism matched only by their lavish stupidity. The city that Lucifer

had built to outdo Rome had fallen, as Rome had fallen, into decadence and self-

indulgence, the regime too concerned with its own internal struggles to cleanse the

city of its filth, and return it to the state in which Lucifer had left it upon his passing.

That had been another shock to Felixson, finding that the angel cast down

form Heaven for his rebellious ways, no longer ruled in Hell. He had died the only

way angels, whether fallen or not, can ever die: by his own hand. Felixson had heard

several versions of how Lucifer had killed himself, all of them designed, it seemed, to

make something grand and tragic of the great architect’s death; to make him mythic.

But Felixson wasn’t fooled. That the Fallen Star of Morning, the Apostate, the Prince

274
 275

of the Pit had stooped to suicide was proof of his fundamental weakness, as far as

Felixson was concerned. He kept this opinion, as he did with all his opinions, to

himself. He was lucky to be alive, he knew, and still able to think for himself. Sooner

or later an escape route would present itself, and when it did he’d take it, and be

gone. Return to earth, change his name and his face, and renounce magic for the rest

of his days.

Until he found that living without power wasn’t the nightmare he’d expected

it to be. He had been amongst the accomplished and ambitious magicians in the

world, but holding onto that position had used up great resources of energy, will and

time. The integration of his soul, which complex business had first drawn him into

the mysteries of his craft, had been neglected entirely. It was only now, as a slave to a

demon, that he was free again, free to begin the long journey of self within self the

getting of magic had distracted him from. The terror-stricken state in which he’d

275
 276

lived at the start had passed; he knew that he was shit, and that the tiniest infraction

of the Hell-Priest’s rules would be the end of him.

So he listened and he obeyed, dropping down onto his hands and knees at his

lord’s word, and never, even while standing, looking at the Cenobite’s face or even at

the back of his head. He had twice been given over to the other Hell-Priests to do

some minor service and on both occasions, even though he had done as he was told,

he had brutally been abused, on the second occasion to the point of collapse. He’d lain

bleeding on the dusty ground outside his abuser’s cell, barely holding onto

consciousness, until his lord had come to find him, and head heard the two Hell-

Priests arguing in several languages: Latin on occasion, then switching into French,

and with Spanish and Portuguese. He understood none of what they said, but he

knew he was the subject of the conversation.

276
 277

On the way back to his lord’s cell, following two strides behind him, head bowed,

blood dripping from his nose onto his Hessian clout which was all he wore, he heard

the Cenobite speak quietly to himself. He spoke in what sounded to Felixson like a

polyglot language: Latin or French mixed with something that might have been

Arabic. But there was no mistakening the cold fury in his tone, nor, though Felixson

would have been hard pressed to explain why he felt this, did he leave any doubt that

his lord had a cure for his rage.

Now, many days later— though there was no day or night here, no moon, sun

or stars- most of Felixson’s wounds had healed, and he waited at the bottom of the

steps, where he always waited when his lord left the fortress, for his lord’s return. He

glimpsed the long procession now, as it slowly made its way through the city, heard

277
 278

the wailing of the pipe-children, and the funeral beat of the drummers; saw the

totems—four of them nine feet tall, and the fifth being born by hook-backed damned,

and striding behind a hundred Hell-Priests, each of them reconfigured by the Order’s

genius with flesh and bone. The front of the procession had emerged from the city

limits now, and was on the straight road that would bring them to the place where

Felixson waited.

Overhead, a constant presence, but one that went unremarked upon or even

glanced up at, was what Felixson after much thought had decided was a stone the size

of a small moon, its motion only detectable if as now he had time to fix his eyes on a

particular fissure mistrop, and then track its progress over the City of the Eight Hills.

His moods seemed to change, Felixson had observed, depending on what part of vast

surface was above them. At times, when what appeared to be mountains of black rock

moved into view and slowly passed, inverted, over the city it seemed to Felixson a

man on the tallest tower of the highest hills could have reached up and touched the

278
 279

summit with his fingertips. Scree made of shed black rock regularly accrued on the

slopes of these mountains, and fell in lethal rains which crept across the landscape

from the fog shrouded wilderness that lay beyond what Felixson had arbitrarily

decided was the eastern edge of the city. It was only when the magic was directly

above Pyratha that the landscape overhead, the stone rains came in their full fury,

beating into dust and rubble many of the newer buildings on the south and

southeastern fringes of the city, which Felixson was able to watch from the roof of

the block of cells where his lord slept and meditated. By contrast with this wholesale

demolition the buildings there had been part of the architect’s grand design, seemed

inviolate whether they were the grandiose mansions and palaces in the heart of the

city or the immense structures, some spare and classical, some elaborately gothic, that

crowned each of the hills. The devil had protected his visionary city, it seemed, using

whatever powers he’d been allowed to keep when he was thrown from the presence

of his creator.

279
 280

Felixson took his eyes off the slow rolling of the moon, and returned his gaze

to the approaching procession. A wind had sprung up, or rather the wind, for there

was only one, and blew from Felixson’s North-North-West always cold and smelling

of the only thing welcome than the smells of rot and burnt blood that were

perpetually in the air: a void, stripped of all absence, vast and lonely and dark. It was

the raw stuff of insanity, that empty wind, at least to Felixson, terrifying, than the

tools of slaughter, however crazed and cruel their designer. Now, as the wind grew in

strength gust by gust, it caught the black ceremonial robes of the Hell-Priests, and

unfurled the thirty foot flags of oiled human skin so that they snaked and snapped

high above the heads of the Cenobites, the holes where their eyes and mouths had

been looking to Felixson as though they were still staring wide-eyed with disbelief at

the sight of the flying knives, still screaming as the skin was expertly stripped from

the muscle. It caught the scent of the incense too, smoking the censers set in the

lower halves of the heads of the damned women, so that the smoke exited their

280
 281

mouths, nostrils and scooped out eye-sockets, but left them with their brains intact,

fully comprehending their condition. There living censers came into the monastery

on occasion, their breasts cut off, their vulvas closed with fire. Felixson had enjoyed

countless women in his life, bringing them to bed with charm if he could, with

money if charisma failed him, and with magic as a last resort. He had loved the

laughter of women, the complexity of women, and always, of course, their beauty. So

far of the sights Hell had shown him so far it was the incense burners —when they

were finished with their duties in this procession would retire to a round house built

on stilts above the mud and the nest of maltanats, where they lived some

unimaginable life.

It was one of Hell’s favorite desires, to turn what had once been a self-willed man or

woman into an object, or part of one. The Cenobitical way of adhering such

functionality was surgical, others in the city used fire, wheels and liquid lead to marry

their victims to the objects they used during their daily lives. The damned were

281
 282

crucified as if a St. Andrew’s cross to the wheels of demon’s chariots, as evidence of

their rider’s wealth. They were the object of sport with machetes, the rules of which

were commonly designed to keep the damned from dying too quickly. Felixson didn’t

know what death in hell meant, nor would he have risked his blessed condition by

opening his mouth and asking the question. Whatever questions he might have had,

he kept to himself, assuming that if he served his lord well, and showed no interest in

anything but his lord’s welfare, then he might one day get answers. But there was no

urgency. Felixson had been a patient man in the world, and applied now all the tricks

he learned over the years to preserve him his calm. So far, it had served him well.

He’d been told by another of his lowly caste, a white southern called Archie Dial who

was enslaved to one of the many black Hell-Priests, that in the years he had served

his lord in the fortress he had witnessed many damned attempt to serve that

motherfucker Pinhead, as Archie had called him, and having failed after a matter of

hours, perhaps sometimes a day, had been punished for their mistakes. They would be

282
 283

slaughtered slowly, Archie had said, with the hooks and the chains which were the

motherfucker pinhead’s unique methodology.

“He’d never go far to do it, either.” Dial had told Felixson. “I’d go by the

pinhead’s cell just to see if there was something new to look at. He’d have ‘em on the

roof of that little cell house of his, their pussies or their dick and balls cut out for

some reason.”

“That’s a little mystery I can solve for you.” Felixson had replied. “He keeps

them in huge jars in the cell next door to his.”

“Pickled in formaldehyde?”

“Nothing so crude. He has them in some fluid that preserves them perfectly. I

was always a great admirer of the vulva, in all its countless configurations. I’d be

beside those jars and make up a different story for each one.”

“He lets you do that?”

“I sleep there, amongst the jars. I make up stories instead of counting sheep.”

283
 284

“Jesus Christ!” Dial had said, throwing his gaze at the stone sky. “Thank you!

Thank you!”

“What are you thanking Jesus for? I was telling you, not him.”

Dial grinned, his eyes gleaming. “No, you don’t understand. Thinking about all

those pussies has given me my first erection since I died.” He had kissed Felixson on

the lips. “I’ve got to go somewhere private and look at it. I owe you one, Felixson.”

The conversation, though cut short by Archie Dial’s abrupt departure, had made

Felixson even more fastidious in his dealing with his lord, never letting any remark,

however off-hand, go by without being scoured for some concealed instruction,

284
 285

determined not to give his owner even the smallest of reasons to dispatch him. As

long as there were books to be studied, and judgments made as to the originality of

their contents—most books were plagiarized from older volumes, which were in turn

stolen from still older books or manuscripts—Felixson knew he showed some

practical use. And as long as that held true he was relatively immune from the kind of

experiments on living tissue that delivered its subjects back into the narrow streets of

the fortress with their hair turned white in half a hundred days, their dreams, their

prayers, their memories scrubbed from their skulls by the obsessive cleanliness of

their Cenobite surgeon.

But his defense against the scalpels and their wielders would not protect him

forever, he knew. He had meticulously catalogued the collection of books that had

been piled in the three large rooms, hidden beneath the Hell-Priest’s cell and the

unoccupied cell beside it. There were a lot of editions of the same book, some clearly

preferable because of their condition, or better still because of the pithy margin notes

285
 286

that had been made by a previous owner. He had known many of these men and

women, at least well enough to exchange a respectful nod. All dead now, of course,

victims of the Hell-Priest’s machinations. Then, in very much smaller numbers, were

books that had belonged to the defining personalities of magic. Aleister Crowley, of

course, his notations on Casablanca’s Book of the Fallen as witty and anarchic Wilde.

A journal describing his Golden Dawn workings written in scratchy hand by W.B.

Yeats, and two others belonging to Lillian Caramalis, spiced up with careful drawings

of the sex magic rituals she’d persuaded nine of her many lovers into, two of them

men, the rest women. The veil these markings had drawn aside had shown them

scenes so overwhelming that every one of the nine was dead by their own hand or in

a mad house within a year.

There were stories like this attached to many of the valuable books in the

lord’s secret library. But there was also a great deal of dross.

286
 287

“When you’re finished we’ll have a book burning.” His lord had said to

Felixson. “Invite my brethren to swell the numbers of books to want burned, no

questions asked.”

“May I speak?” Felixson asked.

“One question.”

“Are you forbidden to possess any books at all?”

“There are three books we are allowed to keep for our meditations. Two are

manuals on torture which I’ve read from cover to cover so many times I could recite

them for you. The other is a comprehensive, but banal, listing of our Order.”

“What would happen to you if they knew about the secret library?”

“One question.” The Hell-Priest replied. “But as you asked; it would not go

well for me. Nor, indeed, for you, who facilitated organization. So don’t try and

blackmail with what little you know. I would murder you in a heart beat and find

myself somebody who was loyal and learned.”

287
 288

“I’m loyal, lord. I swear. And I’ll ask no more questions. I’m—”

“Enough. Just be careful to never give me room to doubt you, because I will act

upon my doubt so swiftly you won’t have time to beg or pray. Do you understand? A

single yes or no will suffice.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

So the books were burned, three miles from the southeastern limits of Pyratha.

As he’d consigned each volume to the flames Felixson had made a severely

conservative calculation of what the collection they were burning would have earned

288
 289

if they’d offered them for sale in the clandestine market for specialty volumes as

these, the twin hubs of which were London and New York. The figure he came up

with was a little shy of three billion dollars.

A lot of the books were works of charlatans like Caliosto, the Mantle Twins,

the Count of Saint German, Pico dell Miradula, Woodcrast of Sicily and Yeas DeRopp,

men who had been very successful in their time, and fooled many of Europe’s most

beautiful women out of their fortunes and their silks with the promise of miracles,

but whose books were, often copies that had belonged to the defrauders themselves,

were pitched into the flames. On occasion the destruction of a book liberated some

creature the owner had left to guard its pages, and who emerged briefly now, as

moaning blurs of faces that shimmered in the heat as they rose and fled away into the

darkness.

This culling of the works of cheats and charlatans left the Hell-Priest with a

library of formidable power. One hundred and twenty three volumes (one, two,

289
 290

three, surely no accident) which taken together represented a repository on the

subject of magic without parallel. To what purpose his lord would put the knowledge

to be gleaned from these books was of course not a subject he cared to share. But

there was a streak of pure destructiveness in Felixson that wanted to be there to

witness the event. It would be like the end of the world.

The bell in the fortress tower, which was called Summoner (that same bell

that these had opened Lemonhand’s configuration heard tolling far off), was now

ringing to welcome back the brothers and sisters of the Order to the fortress. Felixson

knelt in the mud, his head bowed so that it touched the ground, as the procession

290
 291

started up the steps to the fortress gate. Nor did he lift his head from the dirt, but

extended his arm, with the missive he was carrying, in front of him.

He remained in that position for a long time, making a litany of his bruises and

scrapes as he did so, reminding himself in the midst of his list-making how badly his

fellow magicians had suffered that day in the mausoleum. Yes, he suffered. But at

least he was alive to do so, and still nurturing the hope that one day he would escape

his enslavement.

“What is this?” his lord said. “You may raise your head out of the dirt,

magician.”

Gratefully, Felixson did so, pushing himself up with his right hand and

proffering the missive in his left. His lord had stepped out of the procession to speak

to Felixson, and the Cenobites continued to make their way past him, their various

states of reconfigured flesh still an astonishment to Felixson. He did not allow his gaze

to wander from his lord’s face for more than an instant, however. His lord was the

291
 292

center of his life; everything else—his own comfort, the fullness of his belly—was

irrelevant.

“I am called to the Chamber of the Unconsumed.” The Cenobite said, staring

down at the letter in his hand with what Felixson thought was an expression of subtle

bewilderment on his face. “Now.”

He glanced at Felixson.

“Follow,” he said, and turning to his right, strode back the way he’d come,

against the direction of the other members of his Order, towards the city.

292
 293

Part Three

293
 294

One

Harry came back to a rainy grey New York. The way he liked it. His

apartment was chaotic, the kitchen littered with beer cans and boxes of Chinese food

that had turned into little eco-systems of mold; but he left it all for another day. All

he wanted was sleep, but this time without the dreams. He dropped his suitcase

outside his bedroom door, took off his jacket and shoes as he staggered to the bed, and

dropped down onto it. He was in the process of pulling up the cover when sleep

overwhelmed him, and he sank into its depths unresisting. He got only once in the

next twenty-four hours, and that was to empty his bladder.

On occasion the sound of the telephone would bring him to the surface of

sleep, trailing dreams of streets he did not know, with a sky the color of stone

looming above them, but for all their emptiness there was something almost that

294
 295

intrigued him, because he would sink back into his dream-state to find them still

waiting. Finally, he done all the sleeping he would need to do for a while. He dragged

himself out of bed, and into the bathroom.

“Guano.” He said to himself when he’d shown himself his tongue. Then:

“Coffee kills guano.”

It was one of the few essentials in his refrigerator, the others being sugar and

beer. There were more eco-systems flourishing on various leftovers on the lower

shelves, but he’d do something about that later. For now he just needed the sugar and

coffee. He washed out the coffee jug, filled it with clean water, poured it in the coffee

maker, which he’d already loaded with coffee, and while he waited washed out his

bigger mug.

It was while he was waiting for sufficient coffee to fill his mug to drip through that he

thought about his wounds. He unbuttoned his rumpled shirt. The scar on his lower

belly was like a little crater, but it didn’t hurt, and when he went back into the

295
 296

bathroom to shower he realized his third eye scar had closed up so well that he’d not

even noticed it during his assessment of his figure.

An hour later—coffeed, showered, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes—he

was out on the street, heading towards his office on 43rd street. The city rain-storm

had gone, and the city sparkled. His mood was good, even optimistic, which was rare.

With luck, there’d be some thoroughly undemanding cases awaiting him, something

that could earn him a little quick cash. It was all very well being led into the

mysteries of supernatural, but when a case literally went to Hell it usually left with

the bills unpaid. What he needed right now was a couple of quick, lucrative adultery

cases, maybe a bit of insurance fraud, just to stop the bank sending him demanding

letters.

Still, there was pleasure to be had in knowing what he knew about the city’s

secret life, things that the expensive beauties who gave him vain looks if they caught

his admiring gaze—or the high-octane executives with their three hundred dollar

296
 297

haircuts—would live and die, never knowing. There were other cities around the

world. —Rome, certainly, London and Paris, of course, Moscow and Bangkok—

where the rites and places where they were performed, were more ancient than

Harry’s New York could boast. But there was no where in the world that had such a

concentration of supernatural activity. It was everywhere, this unending war between

those who made it their business to sow discord and despair. They were at work in

billionaire penthouses, overlooking Central Park, and basement sex clubs in the meat

packing district. Some of them labored with obsessive energy behind the sober

facades of brownstones on the East Side while others wove through the crowds on

Fifth Avenue, the demention of reason so powerful it blinded all but the small

children and the mad to their presence.

Born under an unkinder star Harry might well have been numbered amongst

the mad, the dark he knew, his knowledge of the dark side of the world taken for

proof of his insanity. But he’d learned back in St. Dominic’s, at the tender age of

297
 298

twelve, of speaking too loudly about what they rest of humanity had no wish to

concede that they knew. Better to shut up, however tempting it was to try and push

people past their denial; to make them share the vision.

It helped, of course, to have a circle, of like minded friends. Harry had Norma

and Caz. There’d been others along the way, staring with Tom Osbourne at St. Dom’s,

but some had skipped out of sight; like Father Hess, who had died at the hands of the

adversary (that had been Hess’ catch-all term for those he stood against); some had

simply given up the exhausting work of seeing and had surrendered to the blind

consensus.

He thought of them as he walked. There were a few names he couldn’t recall

any longer. No big surprise. He’s always been lousy with names. But he’d still have

them on his old rolodex at the office or in his two overfilled address books in the—

In mid thought he was struck by a man who came at him from the opposite

direction, pausing for the briefest of moments to grunt something, before dodging

298
 299

around Harry and heading off down the street. It was only when he’d gone from sight

that Harry made sense of the grunt.

“Not here,” he’d said, and felt against his palm the scrap of paper the man had

pushed into his hand.

He took the advice and walked on, curiosity speeding his step. He turned a

corner onto a quieter street, not planning a particular route, just wondering where he

was being watched from, and who by, that the messenger should warn him the way

he had. He checked the reflection in the windows on the opposite side of the street,

to see if anyone had followed him, but he saw nobody. He kept walking, the paper

crumpled up in his left fist. About two thirds of the way down the block was a florist’s

store called Eden & Co. He went in, taking the opportunity to glance back down the

street. If he was being followed it was not, his ink and his instinct told him, by any of

the half dozen people who were walking in his direction.

299
 300

It was a long time since he’d had any occasion to step into a flower store. The

air was cool, moist and heavy with the mingled perfumes of dozens of blossoms. A

middle-aged man with a immaculately trimmed moustache that followed the line of

his mouth like a third lip, appeared from the back of the store and asked Harry if he

was looking for anything in particular.

No, just looking.” Harry said.

“Do you need some guidance?”

“No. Its okay, I’ll just—”

“Look.”

“Yes.”

“Call me when you’ve decided.”

“I’ll do that.”

The man with the perfect moustache stepped through a beaded curtain at the

back of the shop and immediately started up a conversation in Portuguese which

300
 301

Harry’s arrival had apparently disrupted, because no sooner had the man begun that a

woman came back at him speaking twice as fast and in an obvious rage. The man

shushed her in Portuguese: “We have a customer out there! Keep your voice down!

You open your mouth, and I lose money!” He changed over to English to press home

his point, “Just be quiet! I won’t have you scaring away any more customers!”

“You see,” the woman said. “Always you say the same. I scare them. I scare

them. If I’m so bad, why you stay with me? Huh? Maybe you wish I was dead

instead—”

“No. Please.” In Portuguese: “I wouldn’t want that. Lord God in Heaven, how

many times do I have to tell you that I love you?”

“Not enough.” She said, her voice thick with the threat of tears. In Portuguese:

“You never tell me enough.”

While this heated conversation went on Harry wandered around the store,

looking up now and again to see if there was anyone watching from the street.

301
 302

Finally, having convinced himself that he was not being spied upon, he opened his

fist and smoothed out the piece of paper. Whatever was scrawled on it was a blur

without his reading spectacles. He could usually get through a day without any need

of them, but this was not one of those days. Whatever distance he held the paper

from his eyes, at arm’s length, or virtually touching his nose, he could not get the

words to focus. He patted his jacket and found that for once he had the damn things

on him. He pulled them out of his inside pocket and put them on. Even then he had

to move the paper back and forth until its scrawled message came clear.

“This is from Norma,” It said. “Don’t go to my apartment. It’s bad. I’m in the

basement of the old place. Come at 3am. If you itch, walk away.”

“A message?” a woman said.

Harry looked up. The woman had come from the back of the store while he’d

been reading and re-reading the note supposedly dictated by Norma. He barely had

time to bite back the “Christ!” he almost muttered at the sight of her. Three fourths of

302
 303

her face was a rigid mass of smeared and indented scar tissue, the remaining quarter—

her left eye and brow above it—plus the elaborately coiffed wig, which was a mass of

curls —only seeming to make the erasure of the left of her face, seem even crueler.

Her nose was reduced to two round holes, her right eye and mouth were shorn of

lashes and lips. Harry fixed his attention on her left eye and stumbled over his reply,

which was simply a repeating of her question.

“Yes,” she said glancing down at the scrap of paper in his hand. “You want this

with the flowers?”

“Oh no, no.” He quickly pocketed the message, and glanced around the store.

Maybe he’d take something to Norma tonight, why not?

“What smells really good?”

“Smells good?”

“Yeah, not real strong, just, you know, good.”

“For a lady you’re bringing?”

303
 304

“For a lady, yes.”

“I think maybe tuber rose.” She went to one of the vases and selected a broom.

“You smell?”

“Oh. Oh sure. Yeah. That’s good. So give me a dozen of those.”

The woman was pleased, and Harry was happy to have pleased her, though it

was a small thing set beside the life she had been handed. But there was power “in a

little kindness and courtesies” he knew. Inconsequential of themselves, their sum was

significant. And so what of he felt a little odd walking away from the store ten

minutes later with a bunch of flowers in his hand? There were many worse ways to

feel out of place, as the woman he’d left smiling in the store could have testified.

304
 305

Two

Harry took the note, and his puzzlement over its contents, along with a fierce

hunger to Cherrington’s, a bar which he’d found the first day he’d come to New York,

and had eaten at practically every day he was in the city since. It was old-fashioned

305
 306

food served with a minimum of fuss, and they knew him so well that he only had to

slide into his corner and give a little nod to Phyllis and there’d be a large bourbon, no

ice, on his table within sixty seconds, usually half that.

“You’re looking good, Phyllis.”

“I’m retiring.”

“What? When?”

“End of next week. I’m going to have a little party on Friday evening, just for

the staff and a few regulars. You in town?”

“If I am, I’ll be here.”

“It’s a tuna on rye, right?”

“Right. Where are you retiring to?”

“Home to Sacramento…”

She seemed to want to say more than this, but then decide against it. Harry

studied her in the moment of indecision, her eyes downcast. She was probably in her

306
 307

mid-sixties, which meant she’d been edging towards forty when Harry first found the

place, and her in it. Forty-something to sixty-something was a lot of life, a lot of

chances come, gone and never coming round again.

“Are you okay?” Harry said.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m not going home to die or nothing. I just can’t take this city

any longer. I don’t sleep nights. I’m weary.”

“You don’t look it.”

“I thought guys like you had to be good liars.” She headed away from the table,

saving Harry from fumbling for a reply. “I’ll be right back with your tuna melt.”

Then, over her shoulder, “Them flowers sure smell sweet.”

Harry settled back into the corner of the booth and pulled out the note again.

It wasn’t like Norma to be melodramatic, he knew. Up there, in what was

unequivocally the most haunted apartment in the city she’d held advice sessions for

the recently dead for three decades and more, hearing stories of violent death by

307
 308

those who’d just experienced them, murder victims, suicides, people killed crossing

the street or dropped in their tracks by something dropped from a window. If anyone

could have honestly claimed to have heard it all before, it was Norma. So what was it

that had made her leave her ghosts and televisions and her kitchen where she knew

the location of everything, down to the last teaspoon?

He looked at the clock above the bar. It was six-thirty-two. Another eight

hours. He couldn’t wait that long. He downed his bourbon, called over to Phyllis that

he’d be taking his sandwich with him, and waited just another minute or two for her

to bring it to him, in an old-fashioned paper bag the way he liked it instead of those

damn-fool Styrofoam boxes.

“Will you put his on my tab?”

“Where’s the fire?”

“I’ve got to get someplace faster than I thought.” He tucked a hundred dollar

bill in her hand.

308
 309

“What’s this for?”

“It’s for you.” Harry said, already turning towards the door. “In case I don’t

make it next Friday.”

“You said you would.”

“And I will, if I’m here. But if I’m not, get drunk on that for me, will you?”

“Fuck this three in the morning crap.” Harry muttered to himself as he waved

down a cab. He got in, gave the cross-streets to the driver, and settled back to eat his

tuna on rye. He took out half of the over-filed sandwich and got one good bite. Then

the driver said:

“You no eat in my cab.”

309
 310

“Since when?”

“Since sign.” The man said, his attention too galvanized by the thrill of

weaving to hit every pot-hole in the street to look around. “You see sign?”

“Yes, I see sign.” Harry said, taking a second bite while digging in the bag for a

napkin to wipe mayonnaise from around his mouth.

“You no eat! Cab smell of bad American food.” The driver insisted. “Make

everybody fat.”

“Oh, so it’s for the good of my health, is it?” Harry said, taking a third bite.

“What do you mean? Good of health?”

“I mean, you don’t want me to eat because I’ll get fat.”

“Yes, fat. Fat! All Americans are fat!”

“It’s different in your country, is it?”

My country, my country, what do you say my country? I live here. I am

American.”

310
 311

“But not fat.”

“No. Not fat. I not eat bad food.”

Harry finished the sandwich as the cab hit a succession of pot-holes. “Okay.

Let’s make peace.”

“Make piss? No make piss in car. See sign.”

“No piss. Peace. Make peace. Be friends. I finish my sandwich later. You get us

to 13th and 9th alive. How’s that?”

“No piss?”

“No piss. No fart. No nothing. Okay?”

“Okay.”

There was a short silence. Then the driver said: “It say no fart on sign? I never

knew that. Huh.”

311
 312

The corner of 13th and 9th was not Harry’s true destination. That lay two and a

half blocks further down in what had been a well-kept building which had housed

lawyers, doctors and psychiatrists. It was in the waiting room of one of the latter, one

Dr. Krackomberger, that Harry had met Norma Paine. He’d been taken off active duty

after the events at ——————. His version of things was radically different from

everybody else’s, and Krackomberger, in a courteous but insistent fashion, kept

pressing Harry on the details of what he imagined he’d seen. And Harry would go

through it all again, moment by moment, foiling Krackomberger’s attempt to catch

Harry out with some inconsistency from telling to telling.

By the time the number of repetitions was in double figures Harry was out of

patience with the game.

“This getting us nowhere.” He said.

“I would agree.”

312
 313

“You just make me go over the same horrible stuff, time after time. If I had my

way I wouldn’t be here, but I guess until you sign me off as fit, they’re not going to

put me on active duty again.”

“And is that what you want?”

“Of course it’s what I want!” The volume of his voice rising. Dr.

Krackomberger looked over at his small collection of china figurines, all arranged on a

shelf to his left. They seemed to be a source of comfort for him. Whenever the scenes

Harry was describing were exceptionally violent—though he’d heard it all before,

many times—his eyes went to the figurines with their pretty pastel dresses and their

permanent carefree smiles. “You love those things, don’t you?”

“My Dresden figurines? Well they’re certainly lovely. But that doesn’t mean

that I… love them.”

“Well for something you don’t love you sure do spend a hell of a lot of time

staring at the fucking things.”

313
 314

Krackomberger reddened a little.

“At times of anxiety one goes to things that please the eye. That perhaps

comfort us with their familiarity.”

“And you’re anxious when I’m talking about what happened because…?”

The doctor paused for several seconds before answering, staring at the two

figurines in the center of his collection, a young man playing a violin to a young lady

sitting on a sofa. They were ugly to Harry’s eye: prettified to the point of banality.

Finally the doctor said: “It comes down to this, in the end. Your version of

what happened that day is preposterous. In less serious circumstances I’d call it

laughable.”

“Oh you would, would you?”

“Yes, Mr. D’Amour. I would.”

“So all this time I’ve been pouring my fucking heart out to you—”

“Sit down, Mr. D’Amour.”

314
 315

“Don’t interrupt me. I don’t interrupt you. All this time, when you’ve just

made me go over and over it, you were having a quiet giggle inside, were you?”

“I didn’t say- Please, Mr. D’Amour, sit down, or I shall be obliged to have you

forcibly—”

“All right. I’m sitting. Okay? Is that okay?”

“That’s certainly better. But if you feel the need to get up again, then I suggest

you simply leave my office.”

“And if I do, what will you put on my papers?”

“Unfit for service due to extreme delusional states, almost certainly brought on

by the trauma of the incident. Nobody is calling you crazy, Mr. D’Amour. I just need

to give your superiors an honest assessment of your condition.”

“Extreme delusional states…” Harry said softly.

315
 316

“People respond to the kind of pressure you’ve had to endure in very different

ways. You seem to have created a kind of personal mythology to contain the whole

terrible experience, to make sense of it, even those—”

He was interrupted by a series of crashes from the next room, where

Krackomberger’s secretary sat.

“It’s not me!” a woman’s voice—not that of the secretary—said. “I’m just

sitting here.”

The doctor got up, making a mumbled apology to Harry, and opened the door.

As he did so several magazines came sailing past him and landed on the Persian carpet

in the doctor’s office where they flapped around like birds. Now the hairs on the back

of Harry’s neck were standing on end. Whatever was wrong next door it wasn’t just

an irate patient, his gut told him. This was something altogether stranger. He took a

deep breath, and got up and followed Krackomberger through to the waiting room.

Even as he did so the doctor retreated, stumbling over his own feet in his haste.

316
 317

“What’s going on?” Harry said.

Krackomberger looked at him, his face drained of blood, his expression crazed.

“Did you do this?” he said to Harry.

“Is it some kind of practical joke?”

“No.” said the woman in the waiting room. She had the high cheek bones and

the lavish mouth of a woman who had once been a classic beauty. But life had marked

her deeply, etching her black skin with frown marks and grooves around her down-

turned mouth. Her eyes were milky white. She plainly couldn’t see Harry, but as soon

as he emerged from the doctor’s office, he felt her gaze upon him, like the softest of

winds blowing against his face, his face, his hands, then back to his face again. All the

while something in the room was having a fine time of it, overturning chairs,

sweeping half the contents of the secretary’s desk onto the floor. “No, it isn’t his

fault.” The woman said. She pickled up her stick and doing her best to conceal the

pain this simple act gave her, she got up.

317
 318

“I’m Norma Paine,” she said.

“I’m Harry D’Amour.”

“Not the same D’Amour who was involved in that mess in New Jersey?”

“Yeah. That’s me.”

“Well, whatever he tried to tell you about what you saw or didn’t see, just

agree with him.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because people like him have a vested interest in silencing people like us. We

rock the boat, you see?”

“Is that what you’re doing right now?” Harry said.

The pictures were coming off the walls, one by one. Not simply falling but

being lifted off by their hooks, as if by invisible hands, then thrown down so violently

the glass shattered.

“I’m not doing this.” Norma said. “One of my clients is here—”

318
 319

“Clients.”

“I talk to the dead, Mr. D’Amour. And this particular fellow doesn’t feel as

though I’m paying enough attention.”

“So why are you seeing the doctor?”

“I’m not. The guy who’s doing all the damage—”

She was interrupted by Krackomberger. His face was beet red. “Stop this right

now,” He said to Norma. “You’re destroying—”

“I’m not the unruly element here, doctor. That’s your brother.”

“Impossible.”

“Milton Karckomberger, yes?”

“Milton is dead.”

“Well of course he’s dead.” Norma snapped, “Would I be talking to him if he

was alive?”

The doctor looked utterly bewildered by this piece of logic.

319
 320

“I think she talks to the dead is what she’s saying,” Harry put in.

“I’m not speaking Swahili, “Norma said. “I don’t need an interpreter.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“Well, don’t. I’ve already got an imbecile on my hands, I don’t need another.

You men! So damn certain of yourselves. Listen Shelly—”

“My name is Martin,” the doctor said.

“But your brother told me to call you Shelly, because that’s your middle name

and not many people know that. Is it true?”

“Yes, but you could have found that out any number of ways.”

“All right,” said Norma. Then seemingly addressing somebody in the doctor’s

office. “I tried my best, Walter. If he doesn’t want to hear—”

“Hear what?” said Krackomberger.

“Forget it.” Said Norma, turning her back on the doctor. “I need a brandy. Mr.

D’Amour, would you like to join me in a little toast to the idiocy of psychiatrists?”

320
 321

“Oh yes. I would happily drink to that.”

“Walter.” Norma said, “I think you should leave your brother alone. You’re

frightening innocent people.”

She was speaking, Harry supposed, of the receptionist, who had taken refuge

under the desk when the pictures started to drop, and hadn’t emerged since.

“Wait,” Krackomberger said as they headed for the door. “You’re blind, aren’t

you?”

“You noticed.”

“So how can you possibly see my brother?”

“I don’t have any idea. I only know I can. The dead are invisible to you but

perfectly clear to me.”

“You can see my brother right now?”

Norma turned back and stared into the office. “Yes, he’s lying on your couch.”

“What’s he doing?”

321
 322

“You really want to know?”

“I asked you, didn’t I?”

“He’s masturbating vigorously.”

“Jesus, it’s him. The dirty minded little scumbag!”

“He says he wants to know how many of your patients you’ve fucked on your

couch?”

“Not me!” the doctor replied, with a tone of high righteousness.

“Your brother seems to disagree.” Norma said, “but he promises to keep his

mouth shut if…” she paused, listening, “if you’d give the Dresden to Lizzie, the way

your mother intended.”

The beet red face of just two or three minutes before, had drained of all color.

Indeed Krackomberger looked as though he might pass out.

“I think you should sit down.” Harry said, pulling the receptionist’s chair from

behind the desk. “Breathe slowly. Deep inhalation. What’s the young lady’s name?”

322
 323

“Sharon.” Krackomberger said, his voice barely audible.

“Sharon, will you get some water for the doctor? You can come out from

under there. Nothing’s going to happen.”

Sharon wasn’t moving, however.

“There’s bottled water in the little fridge in the doctor’s office.”

“You don’t happen to keep any brandy on the premises, do you?”

“No.” Sharon said.

“Yes.” Said Krackomberger. “There’s a small bottle of brandy behind the third

and fourth volumes of Whitehead’s “Disorders of the Modern Mind” to the left of the

fridge, four shelves up.

“Well this is getting more civilized by the moment.”

“Mrs. Musser will be here in five minutes for her appointment.”

“Oh god, oh god. This is crazy!”

“Sharon.” Harry said. “Please get out from under that damn desk.”

323
 324

“Has the thing gone?”

“That thing,” said Harry, “is actually Doctor Krackonberger’s brother and he’s

still here. But he’s no danger to you or anyone, is he Norma?” He glanced over at

Norma, who had her head slightly cocked. Harry knew from past experience what the

posture meant: She was listening to the fifth person there, the one invisible to all eyes

but hers.

“What’s he saying?”

“That he’ll behave himself. He just needs to discuss some things with his

brother.”

“But first, Mrs. Musser,” Dr. Krackomberger said. “Sharon, call down to

Chapple at the front door. Tell him to apologize to Mrs. Musser, but I’m very, very

sick and it’s very, very contagious. Tell her you’ll call her tomorrow to set a new

appointment. Profuse apologies, etc.”

324
 325

Sharon picked up the phone. As she dialed, Harry said: “Have you got some

kind of sign for the door?”

Sharon opened the top drawer of her desk. “Office closed?” She said.

“Perfect.”

Harry hung the sign on the door, then closed and locked it. Sharon put down

the phone.

“Just in time.” She said to the doctor. “Mrs. Musser was just getting out of her

limo.”

“Enough of the damn chit-chat,” Norma said. “I have a line of needy souls

waiting to talk to me—”

“That’s not my problem.” Doctor Krankomberger remarked.

“No. You just have one. And if I leave, and he stays here, then he’s going to

turn your life upside-down. Believe me, I’ve seen in happen. Death makes anarchists

of the strangest people.

325
 326

“Walter isn’t an anarchist.”

“Well go and tell him.”

“Is he still jerking off on my beautiful sofa?”

“No. He’s sitting on that old leather chair in the corner. So, go on, open the

conversation. When he answers, I’ll tell you what he says—”

“Word for word?”

“Word for word.”

From that chance encounter the friendship of Harry and Norma had begun.

And like much that happens by chance, this collision of souls could not have seemed

more to the purpose of both. Harry had been doubting his sanity in recent weeks, the

fuel for that fire supplied by Doctor Krackomberger. Now Norma came into his life,

326
 327

talking to the supernatural as if it was the most commonplace phenomena, something

that was happening across the city every moment of everyday. It was she who had

first said—when he unburdened himself of what he’s seen the day of the deaths—that

she believed every word of it, and that she knew men and women around the city

who could tell stories of their own that were evidence of the same otherness, present

in the daily and indeed rightly, life of New York.

“Most people here had the ability to see these things knocked out of their

heads by the time they’re five. You have to say goodbye to your secret friends, and

the people who walk down the street without their feet touching the ground—that

was something I saw a lot of as a little girl. I called them the Floatin’ Folks. But my

mama would whup me so hard whenever I talked about them that I learned to shut

up.”

“So you weren’t born blind?”

327
 328

“Oh no, I had the use of my eyes until around the time I started my monthlies.

And I got sick, real sick, and nobody could figure it out. Maybe if mama could have

afforded a fancy doctor, I would have been fixed up. But I got such a fever on me it

felt like I was roasting on a spit. It lasted a good long while too, so that I think my

mama figured I’d die. Still she was a woman of several faiths. She’d go to mass on a

Sunday morning and that night cut off a liver of a chicken, for the old gods. Didn’t see

no contradiction in it, either.”

“Smart woman.”

“Norma smiled. “You think so?”

“Sure. You want as many gods on your side as possible, don’t you?”

“Something tells me you were born for this, Harry.”

“This, being—”

“Walking between worlds. Between the seen and the unseen. The demonic

and the angelic. The living and the dead.”

328
 329

“I don’t want to get mixed up with all that.” Harry said. “I just want a regular

life.”

“Oh, I think you’ll get bored with that very quickly. Anyway at this point it’s

not your decision. All you can do is go with the flow.”

“And where’s it going to take me?”

“Believe me, some damn strange places, to meet some damn strange people,”

She smiled, mischievously. “You can’t even imagine, Harry. What most people see?

It’s nothing. Shadows on the wall of a cave, like the Greek guy said.”

“Plato.”

“You read his stuff?”

“Christ, No. I got told this story about the shadows on the wall by this

philosopher from Yale. He’d just been killed by his wife, who he’d found him in bed

with one of the young men he taught.”

“Plato would have approved.”

329
 330

“Was he a… you know…?”

“He was queer, yeah. At least I think so. Anyway, the fire.”

“Well that’s pretty much all I remember. We were standing with out backs to

the fire looking at the shadows dancing on the wall, and we think—at the least most

people think—that the shadows are real. Because it never occurs to them to look

behind them.”

“Well I’d hate to argue with a smarty-pants like Plato, but if all of I get to see

when I look over my shoulder is more of what I saw the day that ————— died,

I’ll stick with the shadows, thank you very much.”

“I don’t think it’s a question of choice, Harry. It’s what you were born to do.”

“Is that really how you think about your life? You were born and it had

already been written in some fucking huge book that on a particular day in one

particular year little Norma Paine would catch a fever and go blind?”

330
 331

“I don’t know if it’s in a book or written on some angel’s ass, I just know it’s

part of a plan and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

It was an argument they would visit and revisit over the years, Harry’s

certainty that he was a self-willed creature seldom wavering, and Norma’s faith in

their predestined places in some grand design equally solid. There was a day when the

two of them didn’t talk, often to seek out one another’s help on something that was

happening in their corner of the world; Harry needing the wisdom of one of Norma’s

phantom visitors to help him solve a case; Norma sending Harry out as her eyes and

ears, to check on the truth of some pieces of information one of the dead had shared

with her. It was a partnership, and like all partnerships it had its good days and its

bad, its skirmishes and its battles, when hard words were often said on both sides,

then there’d be twenty-four hours that they didn’t talk, but it was very seldom more

than that. One or other of them would always break the silence before it got bitter,

and they’d make peace, for all the world like a couple of unlikely lovers.

331
 332

He was in sight of the building now. Lord, but it had changed! The windows

were either boarded up or broken, the doors chained and padlocked. There’d been a

fire at some point, which had gutted a good third of the place, and scorch marks

blackening the façade above the burned out windows. It was a sad sight. But more

significantly, it was a troubling one. Why would Norma leave the comfort of her

apartment for this god forsaken corner of nowhere?

All the doors were severely locked and bolted, but Harry’s solution to such a

problem was always old-fashioned brute strength. He chose one of the boarded up

doors, and pulling out his trusty crowbar, he levered off several of the boards. It was a

noisy, messy business, and if there’d been any kind of security guarding the building,

as several prominently placed signs announced that there were, men and dogs would

have certainly come running. But he was left to his own devices; and within five

minutes of beginning his sweaty labor he had denuded the door of its boards, and

forced the lock.

332
 333

“Nice work.” He told the crowbar, and stepped inside.

333
 334

Three

The chief power of decency is its erasing of particulars. Everything that had

distinguished the modestly elegant lobby in which Harry now stood—the deco sweep

of the design on the mirrors, which had been etched in the tile underfoot, and the

shape of the lighting fixtures—had been destroyed. Whether the destruction had

resulted from a crude attempt to take up the tiles for resale, and bring down the

mirror and light fixtures intact for the same purpose, or whether the place simply had

been smashed by a bunch of drugged up vandals with nothing better to do, the result

was the same: chaos and debris in place of order and purpose. A representation, in

short, of the war that raged above and below Harry’s existence, the defining conflict

of life itself, at least as he understood it: do you prosper and love in a world of order

and beauty, or slaughter and perish in rubble and shit?

334
 335

Norma had told him countless times not to try and interpret every sign he

stumbled on as being a clue to the great mystery in which he had become embroiled,

but he couldn’t help himself. If she was right and everything was indeed part of some

grand design then the smallest thing had significance.

He walked through the litter and glass shards and tile shards to the stairs. Then

he began to ascend. Apparently there were easier ways into the building than

breaking down one of the doors as he had, because the sharp smell of human urine

and the duller stink of feces grew stronger as he climbed. People used this place, as a

toilet yes, but probably to sleep in too. He brought the crowbar out again, just in case

he came face to face with a bad-tempered tenants. The good news was how very

unaroused his tattoos were. Not an itch, not a spasm. Apparently Norma had made a

smart choice for a bolt hole. Not the most salubrious of surroundings, but if it kept

her hidden from the adversary and its agents, then it at least had that to recommend

it.

335
 336

The offices of Dr. Krackomberger had been suite 212, he thought, though his

memory was hazy on the subject. Unlike the tiles down below the plush beige

carpeting that had covered the passageway had been rolled up and removed, leaving

just the bare boards. With every second or third step Harry took one of them creaked;

and no one was as sharp eared as Norma. She knew he was coming, he didn’t have the

slightest doubt of that. He got to the door of Doctor Krackomberger’s office, and tried

the handle, expecting it to be locked. But no. The door opened and he was faced with

yet another spectacle of vandalism. Somebody had taken a sledgehammer to the walls,

it seemed.

He chanced a word. “Norma?”

Then several words. “Norma? It’s Harry. I got your message. I know I’m early,

but… are you here?”

He went through into Krackomberger’s office. The books that had lined the

walls had not been taken, though they’d all been stripped from the shelves, and a pile

336
 337

of them used to make a fire in the middle of the room. Harry squatted beside the fire

and tested the ashes. They were completely cold. Mystified, Harry took a peek inside

Kracomberger’s private bathroom, but it was completely trashed as everywhere else.

Norma was not here. Nor, his instincts told him, had she been here. He caught sight

of himself in the mirror above the sink and was reassured to see that the gaunt, sickly

D’Amour who’d been ministered to by Coanthagnita had been replaced by a healthier

version. He wasn’t quite his old self: his hair was starting to recede and what was left

was looking a lot greyer, but given how close he’d come to losing his life in New

Orleans he didn’t look too damn bad. It was only when he was about to turn away

from his reflection when he saw the arrow, painting down, which was scrawled on

the glass. It was made with white paint, and recently. One of the droplets that had

run down the mirror had pooled on the tile behind the faucets. He pressed through

the acrylic skin and found liquid paint beneath.

337
 338

So what does the arrow mean? Harry asked his reflection. Go down? But

where to? Oh wait… I know what’s down there.

The Members only club that had once occupied the basement of the building

had been designed for New Yorkers with more outré tastes than they could satisfy at

the sex-emporiums which had once run along 8th avenue and 42nd street. Harry had

glimpsed it in operation many years before because he’d been hired by the owner, one

Howard Torregrossa, to do some detective work regarding his wife. Despite the fact

Torregrossa ran an establishment dedicated to hedonism of every stripe, he was a

deeply conservative man in his personal life, and was genuinely distressed when he

began to suspect his wife’s infidelities.

338
 339

Harry had done his investigations, and about three weeks later had brought

the incriminating photographs of Mrs. Torregrossa to the grieving spouse in a large

manila envelope. As Torregrossa had requested, he’d sent his assistant J.J. Fingerman,

to take Harry down into the club and get him a drink and give him a quick tour of the

premises. It was quite an eye opener, bondage, whipping, caning, water sports, the

club offered a smorgasboard of perversities, practiced by men and women, most of

them dressed in costumes that announced their particular proclivities. A fifty year old

man whom Harry knew as the mayor’s right-hand-man was tottering around on

stiletto heals in a frilly French maid’s outfit; a woman who organized celebrity fund

raisers for the homeless and the destitute, was crawling around naked with a dildo

impaled in her behind, from which hung a tail of black horse hair. On the main stage

one of the most successful writers of Broadway musicals was tied to a chair having the

flesh of his scrotum spread out and nailed to a piece of wood by a young woman

339
 340

dressed as a nun. To judge by the state of his arousal the procedure was bliss. Harry

returned with J.J. Fingerman and ordered a double bourbon.

“Got you a little hot and bothered, did we?” J.J. remarked.

Harry drank the double bourbon and asked for another. The bartender glanced

at Fingerman.

“Whatever the man wants,” Fingerman said. “It’s all on the boss’ tab.”

Eventually they had to go back to speak with Mr. Torregrossa but his office

door was locked from the inside. Harry had a very bad feeling now, and rather than

wait for the keys to be located. He and Fingerman kicked the door open. The

cuckolded husband lay sprawled over his desk, where the photographs Harry had

taken of Mrs. Torregrossa in her various liaisons were spread, splattered with the

blood, bone fragments and brain matter that had emptied in all directions when he’d

put his gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

340
 341

The party was over. The pleasure seekers below were hurriedly told to stop

their whipping and their binding and their games with candle wax and nails, and

leave in an orderly fashion, unless they wanted to be interviewed by the police. Harry

was watching from the stairs as they picked up their coats, briefcases and purses, and

prepared to head out into the night. The division between the rich, powerful players

and those who had neither influence or affluence had instantly reasserted itself.

Filthy rich women who had been gratefully licking the toe-jam from the feet of a

brutish masters now pushed them, their coat collars raised, to get out to their

chauffeured limousines, while men who’d been weeping with anger and gratitude at

the flogging they were receiving from young women, now looked through their

mistresses as though they were invisible.

Harry had learned a lot that night, a matter seen graphically played out, things

he’s always known about, what fantasy and desire could drive people to do, and how

close, in certain circumstances, pain and pleasure were. But that had been last time

341
 342

those games were played in that particular place. Through there wasn’t a great deal of

publicity about the death of Torregrossa, the very fact that the club’s patrons had

been ushered out of the private theater frustrated, the last act of their personal dramas

unplayed, and worse, with the imminent arrival of the authorities and all the

recognition that would have accompanied their presence, meant that few of that

night’s customers would have come again, and Torregrossa’s manager knew it. He had

to shut the place down after Torregrossa’s death, ‘out of respect’ he’d said. The place

had never reopened.

Harry found a cluster of light switched at the top of the stairs and flicked them

on. Only two of them worked, one turning on a light directly over Harry’s head,

which spilled down the black-painted stairs, the other turning on a light in the booth

where guests had paid their entrance fee and got themselves a key for a little

changing room where they could shed their public skins and unpack their collars or

their whips.

342
 343

Harry cautiously headed down the stairs. There were small twitches and a

flutter of activity in one of Harry’s tattoos: the loose ritual necklace that Caz had

dubbed his Scrimshaw Ring, which didn’t hang close to his neck but was arranged so

that its twenty-seven pieces of intricately carved and decorated whale-bone seemed

to sit halfway between his shoulder and the curve of his neck, and kept that same

distance at front and back. While many of Caz’s tattoos were talismans, and made no

pretense to solidity, the Scrimshaw Ring had been so meticulously rendered in the

troupe l’oeil style, the shadow beneath it so dense that it made the necklace appear to

stand proud of Harry’s skin.

Its function was relatively simple: It alerted Harry to the presence of ghosts.

But given that the spirits of the dead were everywhere, some in states of panic or

agitation, others simply taking the air after the suffocations of death, the Scrimshaw

ring discriminated nicely, and did not alert Harry’s presence to any revenant except

those that posed some possible threat.

343
 344

Apparently there was one such ghost—at least one—in Harry’s immediate

vicinity now. He paused at the bottom of the stairs, contemplating the very real

possibility that this was a trap; a ghost hired by the powers he’d confronted and

embarrassed in New Orleans. But if they wanted revenge why send a few phantoms?

They could frighten the unwitting, to be sure, but Harry was scarcely that. A little

spook show wasn’t going to leave him trembling. He took out his flash-light and

turned the beam on the room in front of him. The club seemed to have been left in

the very state it had been in when Torregrossa put a bullet through his brain. The bar

was still intact, the bottles of hard liquor still lined up, waiting for a thirsty customer.

Harry heard the glasses stacked underneath the bar start to tinkle, as one of the ghosts

started its performance. When he ignored the noise and continued his advance the

spirit threw several of the short glasses into the air. They were then pitched down

onto the bar with such violence that a few of the flying shards hit Harry. He didn’t

respond to the display. He just made his way on past the bar and into the big room

344
 345

with the St. Andrew’s cross set on the stage, where whip-wielders could show off

their expertise. Harry ran his light around the room, looking for some sign of the

presence here. He stepped up onto the stage, and as he did there was a noise off to the

right. He swung his flash light in the direction of the sound. The wall had an array of

canes, paddles and whips hung on it, maybe fifty instruments in all. One of the

paddles had just been unhooked and taken down, and now another followed it, and

then a cane, then several canes, then the whips, then several ships, a few of the

lighter items simply dropped to the floor the heavier ones pitched in Harry’s

direction. One of the heavy wooden paddles hit his knee, hard.

“Ah, fuck this!” he said, and instead of backing off from the haunted objects he

walked straight into their assault.

“I’m not remotely intimidated by whoever you are, but if you go on throwing

around more fucking things I will spit out a cyllogizic that’ll make you wish you

never died.”

345
 346

He’d no sooner voiced this threat than one of the biggest whips on display was

pulled down off the wall and drawn back, in preparation for a strike.

“Don’t.” Harry said.

His warning went disregarded. The phantom wielding the whip was either

very lucky or new its business. With the first strike it caught Harry’s cheek, a sharp

sting that made his eye water.

“You stupid dick-head,” he muttered. “You asked for it.” He started to speak

the cyllogizic which was one of the first he’d ever learned:

“’E vutta quathakai,

Nom-not, nom-netha,

E, vuttu quathaakai,

Antibethis—”

He was barely two thirds through the utterance, but it was already revealing

the presences here. They looked like shadows thrown up on steam, their edges

346
 347

evaporating, their features scrawled on the air like a sideway artist working on the

rain. There were three of them: All men.

“Stop please now the cyllogizic,” one of them said.

“Give me one reason why I should.”

“We were only following orders.”

“That angle hasn’t worked since Nuremberg.” Harry said. “But since you

brought it up, who’s orders?”

The phantoms exchanged panicky looks.

“Mine, Harry.” Said a leathery voice from the darkness of the next room.

“Norma?”

“Don’t torment them. They were only trying to protect me.”

“All right,” Harry said to the phantasms. “I guess you get a reprieve.”

“Stay at your posts.” Norma said, “He could have been followed.”

“I wasn’t followed.” Harry said as he walked into the back room.

347
 348

“But you could have been. And better safer than sorry.”

Harry tried the light switch, and the wall mounted lights, the bulbs red so as

to flatter the nakedness of the customers of those skins of leather or rubber they’d put

on for the night.

Norma was standing in the middle of the room, leaning on a stick, her hair,

grey going to white, unpinned for the first time in all the years Harry had known her,

her face, though still possessed of the elegant beauty and power of her bones, was

slack with exhaustion. Only her eyes had motion in them, the colorless pupils

appearing to watch a tennis match between two absolutely equal players, left to right,

right to left, left to right, right to left, the ball never once fumbled.

“What in God’s name are you doing down here, Norma?”

“I’ll tell you if you sit and listen for a moment. Give me your arm. My legs

aren’t as good anymore.”

348
 349

“They’re not being helped by the damp down here, Norma. You should be

more careful at your age.”

“We’re neither of us is as young as we used to be,” Norma said as she led Harry

through to what had been the room where the players only went when they were in

the mood for some extreme games. “I can’t do this much longer, Harry. I’m too damn

tired.”

“You wouldn’t be too damn tired if you were sleeping in your own bed.” Harry

said, looking at the old mattress laid on the floor, with a few blankets to keep her

warm.

“If it was in my own bed now I’d be dead, Harry. If not today then tomorrow

or the day after.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I had a vision from Louie Fast.”

“I thought he mover to Bangkok.”

349
 350

“He moved back. Took up his old business.”

“Prophetics?”

“Don’t seem so contemptuous.”

“You’re not hiding yourself down here because of something Louis Fast told

you, are you?”

Norma tapped her cane ahead of her until she located one of the

establishment’s chairs, with their scarlet and glitter plastic seats. She sat down, letting

out a long sigh.

“If it had just been Louie telling me I had some bad times coming I wouldn’t

have listened, Harry. But it wasn’t. I’ve had warnings from some of my clients, and

they all say the same kind of purge is underway. First the magicians, now—”

“Wait. Back up. What happened to the magicians?”

“Dead. Or disappeared. Every serious practitioner, anyone with any real

credibility—”

350
 351

Which is how many?”

“I doubt it’s more than a hundred, once you picked out the phonies and the

fakers. But that left a lot of powerful people—”

“Who must have put up a fight.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt that they did that, according to my sources.”

“Who are?”

“I can’t tell you, Harry. I assured these people that I’d preserve their

anonymity. But they’re unimpeachable, believe me. And frankly there’s another

reason why I’m holed up in this filthy place. I’m afraid that if some agent of the

adversary caught up with me, and put my feet to the fire, I’d end up naming names.”

Her face drew itself into a knot of anguish. “I’d never forgive myself if I got

murdered, because I couldn’t hold my tongue.” Tears escaped from the corners of her

eyes. It was the first time he’d ever see Norma weep and it was immensely distressing.

Harry’s stomach convulsed, and he was about to put his arms around her when she

351
 352

said: “In case you’re thinking it, don’t get sentimental on me, because I don’t need any

of that nonsense. Never did. Never will.”

She wiped away the tears with the heels of her hands. “I’m not very proud of

myself right now.”

“Because of a few tears?”

“Christ no,” she said, her mouth down-turned. “Because I ran. Because I’m

hiding away in this damn place. I just couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. And I

couldn’t get a hold of you—”

“I was having some problems in New Orleans.”

“Problems with what?”

“Nothing important.” Harry said. “I’m here. I’m alive and kicking, so lets deal

with getting you out of this place. Who helped you get in, by the way?”

“That kid from the liquor store who delivers my brandy.”

“What made you trust him?”

352
 353

“I don’t know. Just a feeling. That’s all there is in the end, isn’t it?”

“Less talk of The End, if you don’t mind.” D’Amour said.

“Oh come on, Harry. You’re a lot more sensitive to this stuff than you own up

to. I know.” She fixed him with her sightless eyes, and wagged her finger like a school

ma’am. “You think I’m fooled by all your imitation of a private investigator?”

“It’s not an imitation.’

“It’s not what you are.”

“Oh? And what’s that?”

“How the hell should I know? Whatever it is, Harry, it’s going to become clear

very soon.”

“Another of your feelings?”

“You can work them.”

“I’m not working anything. I’m just fed up with signs, talismans and things I

can’t quite make sense of.’

353
 354

“Go on.”

“That’s it.”

“No. There’s more.”

“Just some stuff in New Orleans. Voodoo medicine and dreams that didn’t

seem like dreams.”

“What of?”

“There was a girl and a dog—”

“Wait—” Norma said, “You know, maybe I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“Nobody’s going to be putting your feet to the fire, Norma. I’ll take care of

you.”

“I know you will, Harry. I know. Even so, better not to tell me. It’s safer for

everyone.”

“Louie Fast has a lot to answer for.” Harry muttered.

354
 355

“It was a bunch of people beside Louie. Dead folks. Some of them, why? I just

trust them more, I guess.”

“Death isn’t sainthood, Harry. The dead lie when it suits them, like everybody

else. But not about this. For one thing, it was the same message, more or less, from

everybody, whether they were living or dead.”

“And what was the message?”

“Well… it came down to this: that there’s roads open that should be closed

and there’s something coming down one of those roads, or perhaps all of them, there

was some vagueness there, that means me and a whole lot of other people harm. So

I’d better not be anywhere these things can find me when they arrive.”

There was a long silence and Harry finally said: “That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

355
 356

“What did you say? There was some vagueness?” Harry let out a long irritated

breath. “Some fucking vagueness? It’s like the prophecies of frigging Nostradomus: It

could mean a thousand things, or, if you want my guess, Sweet Fuck All!”

“Well, yes, it’s open to a lot of interpretations, and if that if I heard it from

Louis Fast alone, I’d be just as cynical as you. But there’s others who say the same

thing. And then there’s me.”

“What about you?”

“You know how I never dream? I just turn on the televisions really loud to tell

the ghosts that the store is closed for a while, and I get into my grandmother’s bed,

the one with the brass knobs on it, and I just fall asleep where I fall. I used to sleep

naked but I gave that up. Not enough flesh left on my bones to keep me warm. I just

black out for a few hours, and if I’m dreaming I certainly never remember it. Until

the nightmare I had. Fuck. I swear that straightened every hair on my head.”

“Oh, come on, Norma. You’re hair looks fine.”

356
 357

“That’s because it isn’t mine, dummy!” Norma said, and grabbed a hold of

fistful of her miniature curls and pulled the wig off her head. Her hair was grey and

white and barely longer than a marine’s first cut. “Not a pretty sight, is it?” She said.

“No.” Harry had to admit. “No, it isn’t”

“Every hair on my head. Straight. Not a kink, not a curl. And all because of

this fucking dream.”

“So tell me.”

“Why bother?” Norma said with a certain calmness. “You think I’m just a

crazy old bitch who doesn’t know hell from her ass hole! Well, you know what,

Maurice Harold D’Amour—”

“How did you know my name is Maurice?”

“Shut up, I’m venting-“

“Sorry.”

357
 358

“If you don’t fucking believe me there’s nothing much I can do, is there?” She

threw the wig at Harry, who caught it. “Here. Keep this in memory of me.”

“The dream, Norma—”

“I’m not telling you. You’re just another imbecile.”

“Oh come on now, Norma. I may be a prick—”

“You are!”

“I may be a bit on the arrogant side-“

“A bit?”

“—but never once, never once, have I ever doubted something you were

telling me. When you had that plague of an albino salamander coming up through the

sinks and out of the floorboards, who came to exterminate them?”

“You did.”

“And that damned doll you sent that talked in tongues, remember? Who

stopped it raping your little Georgie?”

358
 359

“Poor dog was never the same after that. I swear to this day he jumped over

the balcony of his own free will, not knowing what he was doing. Poor Georgie.

Maybe that’s what I need, another dog.”

“My point is—”

“I know, Harry. You cleaned up every piece of him, and organized the

cremation.”

“Actually I have a confession to make. It wasn’t Georgie in that little coffin

that went to the furnace. Remember how I insisted on going to watch it burn? That’s

because—”

“The doll was in it.”