Banquet for the Damned (25 page)

'The head inquisitor, a fiend called Kolosvar, called Kazparek a "devil" and a "whore", amongst other things, at her trial. In fact, he didn't consider her to be human. Nor did he ever cease to be amazed at her resistance to torture. It was only when the astonishing beauty of her face was threatened with a hot poker that she cracked.

'And it was from her confession that so wide a range of diabolical crimes has been recorded. It's why I can remember the case so well. Her testimony, and it's all in the Blackwood, detailed the seizure and consumption of, I recall, some fifty infants and youths over a period of six years. Including her own son, would you believe.

'The other eight in the coven were burned alive in a mass pyre, but Anna Kazparek survived the flames. On account of her title. But she was banished from Hungary. I think her lands and wealth was confiscated too, but one can't help but think she got off lightly.'

Rhodes takes a breath and rocks back on his heels. Hart sits still, increasingly distressed at the thought of what Eliot has been meddling with. He wants a drink, and feels utterly humbled by Rhodes Hodgson's encyclopaedic knowledge.

'Blackwood, however, pursued her to Germany, where a similar group surfaced. This would have been fifty years later.' Rhodes begins to smile. 'Impossible, I know. But she allegedly recruited a new coven made up of rebellious nobles. And again they acted according to the will of their familiar. Their emissary.

'The coven was known as a Wahrwolf society. Something Blackwood attributes, like other scholars, to the Werewolf legend. This time their notoriety arose from their wearing of human skins, usually those of abducted youths, in the form of raiment. There was the same pattern of forbidden rite and unholy mass as in Hungary, preceding all manner of social ills again. Though this time they seem to have added to their dark talents. The Warhwolfs had mastered the ability, while in a trance, to provide a new mobility for their deity. It allowed the spirit to move at night and wreak a rather grisly fate upon a chosen victim.

'A bishop, I seem to recall, became their nemesis in Germany, and once more the coven was ruthlessly exterminated. The leaders too this time.

'Blackwood's story then leads to the 1500s, in Poland, and yet another emergence of a similar cult. In Poland they called them the
Upyr
, which Blackwood believes to have evolved into the vampire myths. The
Upyr
's blasphemous and murderous activities were so widespread and of such a magnitude they were described as a plague.'

Hart runs his fingers across the smooth surface of the table; a coincidence?

'Anyone visited by the
Upyr
at night would succumb to fevers and what have you, sometimes with terminal results. Once again, there was a plague of blood-letting, the disappearance of infants, and cannibalism. Their goal: the absorption of their victims' souls into their god's corporeal body. A blasphemous inversion of taking Christ's body and blood into the body, by devouring parts of the victim. In order, you see, for their deity to exist and for their powers to continue. The church believed the
Upyr
to be a direct inversion of Christian sainthood.

'And this was the crux of Eliot's argument. He believed the witch, werewolf, and vampire traditions were one and the same thing. Different places and times afforded them different names, but the familiars became crucial. A hangover from pre-Christian times. There seemed to be some pretty compelling evidence too, that these things actually existed.'

Rhodes pauses to look at Hart. 'Oh, I am sorry. I must be detaining you.'

Hart clears his throat. 'No. It's very good of you. Please go on – really.'

Rhodes refolds his hands and resumes his pacing, unaware of how painful some of the material is to Hart. 'The
Upyr
, it was discovered, entered their trances after taking opium or datura. The drug enhanced their professed abilities to direct the familiar and allow it to attain corporeality elsewhere, so it could perform its foul business. Either at the home of the bewitched or at a more convenient location, where the victim would be transported and devoured. Once an opening had been attained in one household, it was said the relatives of the initial victim also became susceptible to attack.'

Hart's eyes feel like they are burning in their sockets from the strain of watching the steadily pacing and relaxed bibliophile, while he struggles simultaneously to maintain his composure. Rhodes moves behind Hart, leans across him and begins leafing through the Blackwood tome. His eyes light up, brighter than ever. 'Ah, right here, chapter seven. It gives details of how Cardinal Kossa rescued the large Polish town of Lublo with his pitiless persecution of the
Upyr
. The plague ended with large-scale burning, beheading, and skewering, I believe you'll find, over a two-year period. Nearly three hundred people died. Mercenary soldiers were even employed to execute the church's decree. In each case, the heart of a
Upyr
was removed and burned, after the removal of the limbs from the torso.'

Hart rubs at his face – these are echoes from Guatemala and the Amazon Basin.

Rhodes pauses to glance at his watch. 'Oh, I say, I really must be getting back to my work, but I still have the copy of the Wilkins. Must think about sending it back to its home in Massachusetts. Been waiting for Eliot's say-so. I'll mark the relevant section. You really must read it. The story emerges right here, on our doorstep in St Andrews.'

'Thanks,' Hart says. 'Thanks for the information, Mr Hodgson. It clears up some of the more difficult things that Eliot has been telling me.'

'Quite all right. I really miss working on the project. You can see why it stuck in my mind. And do please tell Eliot to get in touch. I have given up calling his office. He never seems to be there. And then I heard he was ill for some time. One doesn't really know what to do in these situations.'

'No,' Hart agrees. 'But . . . Did Eliot actually believe these things – the familiars – existed?'

Rhodes laughs, cheerfully, before answering, 'I shouldn't think so.'

'But why did he research them particularly?'

The librarian raises an eyebrow. 'You have me there. Mythical figures perhaps? And he was an expert on Agrippa of course, and something of an authority on Crowley. Both men allegedly summoned a familiar that never left them.'

Hart swallows. 'Did he ever mention his paranormal group?'

Rhodes appears pensive for the first time. 'He referred to it once or twice, and I know there was a bit of a stink over it. Never went myself, but his assistants did. They came here with him sometimes.'

Hart leans forward. 'You remember them?'

'Oh yes. There was a very pretty girl, who came at the end of last year, I believe. Or was it earlier this year? I can't remember when, but I believe she was helping on the project, with his regular research assistant, Ben.' Rhodes pauses, looking almost guilty. 'That poor lad, Ben Carter.'

'I heard about that,' Hart says. 'He died on the beach.'

'On the sands, the West Sands,' Rhodes answers, obviously reluctant to continue with the story, but Hart presses on. 'But the girl. She all right?'

'I presume so. Never really knew her. Beth was her name. Eliot was very fond of her.'

'Was she really tall? With bones like a supermodel? Dresses all in black?'

'That's a fair description. You don't know her?'

'No. But I've seen her around.'

After Rhodes Hodgson leaves the reading room to potter in a distant confine of the vaults, Hart remains in the basement, with a copy of the Wilkins volume,
A Geography of the Black Arts
, open on the table before him. And, as Rhodes warned, Wilkins's passion was for Scotland.

The first marked chapter begins with comments about the Scots' ability for second sight. Even as late as the eighteenth century, Boswell and Johnson were documenting the phenomenon amongst ordinary people. Not to mention the reverence attributed to those in possession of an extra sense. And psychic abilities, thought to belong to the region between death and resurrection, had been highly prized and cultivated by the witch covens of Scotland since the dark ages. Hart begins to enter familiar ground.

Oblivious to the passage of time, Hart settles into the warmth in the basement, his eyes soothed by the clear yellow light. Stretching out his legs, he resumes reading about the proliferation of the Brown Man myths. Legends that draw him further into Eliot Coldwell's world and to a remarkable set of coincidences. Parallels to what he has so far uncovered in the town.

When Wilkins writes of St Andrews's birth in 870 as an ecclesiastical centre, he mentions the uneasy alliance of the barbaric Pictish religion and Christianity. Wilkins guesses that the strange fusion of Christian belief and Pictish myth, occurring at this time, created a subversive undercurrent of pagan belief. But one fused with Christian superstition that fostered witchcraft. More importantly, it led to the continuation of a profane worship of the 'Brown Man'.

Historians placed the figure as a strange amalgam of the Greek god Dionysus, the deity of Athens called Melanaigis, or the 'Black One', and Pan, the leader of satyrs. Elsewhere in Europe, the Gallic stag-god Cernunnous was cited as an influence for the 'Brown Man', while the Romans, busily building Hadrian's Wall to keep 'it' and the Picts out of England, wrote of it as Dispaster, god of the underworld. And by the time the Papal Bulls were brought to the town, the Roman Catholic belief in good and evil associated the deity and the worship of it with the devil.

Wilkins detailed the survival of the 'Brown Man' cult with a plethora of quotes from bishops and officials, defaming its dreadful rites. In the seventh and eighth centuries attempts to suppress the 'mumming' dances only succeeded in forcing the cult underground. The 'mumming' ceremonies involved the ancient ritual of dressing like the figure in order to rejoice and exult in its honour. The witches, as Wilkins referred to them, would drape themselves in the skins of cattle or the cerements of the dead and literally become wild animals. Others would dance naked, but daub themselves in darkly coloured clay. The feverish dances and ecstatic worship would become orgiastic, in the hope that a union with the god could be achieved. At the Sabbaths, it was believed every conceivable perversion was performed, including cannibalism. Sacrifice of the young was particularly popular and was always preceded by a strange backward dance. Back to back, hand in hand, the witches would skip backward and shake their heads in a frenzy until an animal madness was induced to prepare the coven for the arrival of the Brown Man.

Wilkins's next chapter takes Hart to the Reformation and the height of the Scottish witch persecutions. In 1643, both John Kincaid of Tranent and John Balfour of Corhouse, master prickers and witch finders, were summoned to St Andrews. Their business: the celebrated interrogation and trial of one Lady Anne Muir for her 'wickedness, impietie and hyneous abominations'. In Anstruther, Dysart, Culros, St Andrews, and other regions on the Fife Coast, her name was associated with chaos, fear, and every expression of black magic. Barley and oats had rotted for successive harvests; cattle were said to have been cursed and calves were stillborn; ships were wrecked and their crews perished; people in the towns became inexplicably ill with fevers. Anne Muir and her malignant carline, or dark familiar, were believed to be responsible. In due course she was, therefore, cleansed of impurity by pain and fire.

It seems that Anne Muir, in Wilkins's version, was a gentlewoman of great beauty, and had masqueraded as an epitome of nobility and grace. And only when her titled rivals at court began to protest against the nocturnal visitations of 'a misshapen thing in rags', was she charged with witchcraft. The investigation soon discovered a coven of 'persounes, aucht wemene and three men', all in her service and allegedly responsible for the devilry in St Andrews. Hart knows ordinarily he would find the reported hysteria and language in the text vaguely amusing, but he finds it difficult to even read parts of the story. Those passages detailing her suffering at the hands of her inquisitors are particularly distasteful.

After an immersion with her followers in the Witch's Pool, Muir suffered an inexorable agony under the implements called the
Turkas
and the
Bootes
. Her fingernails were removed with pliers, and pins were inserted to their heads in her fingers. Soon after the
Bootes
were put in place on her legs, crushing and bruising them until they were deemed 'unserviceable'.

In Wilkins's summary, it was claimed that the devil had entered her heart so deeply that even her blood was unclean and black. And yet, no confession was forthcoming, even after the
Pilliwinkes
were attached to her already tortured fingers. It was, however, the binding and wrenching of her head that destroyed 'her excellent beauty' and broke the resolve of Muir.

Apparently dead from her injuries, she was partially torched and then buried in consecrated ground. Her coven were 'burnt at a steake till they be dead' and their ashes were scattered to the winds. After their demise, the Brown Man, who had been known to drag the sleeping town youths from bed by their hair, was not seen again.

It sounds like a typical reaction from zealots, ridding themselves of guilt, confusion and fear at the expense of an innocent woman. An example of the town's puritanical malice. But the information is frighteningly coincidental and matches his night-terror research at a fundamental level. What's more, Eliot wanted him to see the material. And Ben Carter killed himself as a result of studying it.