The Arcanum (25 page)

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THE ARCHBISHOP OF New York strode quickly down the aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the full regalia of his office: red robes, vestments, and skullcap. His hurry was precipitated by an early-morning telephone call from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle regarding an urgent matter of the gravest consequence.

The archbishop’s brow furrowed as Doyle and Marie entered the cathedral, each holding one of Abigail’s hands. Behind them came Bess Houdini, on the arm of Sebastian Aloysius.

Hayes frowned slightly as he saw the charms around Marie’s neck: a mix of Christian, Neo-Pagan, and Voodoo talismans. He turned to Doyle, questioning.

“Your Eminence, I thank you for this audience,” was all Doyle said.

“Yes. This is most unorthodox. Normally I do morning Mass, but I was quite alarmed by your call, Sir Arthur. Though I must say it was rather vague.”

Doyle gestured to Marie. “This is Marie Laveau, of New Orleans.”

Hayes blanched. “The Voodoo Queen?”

Marie bowed respectfully. “
Bonjour,
Monsieur Archbishop.”

“The one and only,” Doyle said, then introduced the others. “Mrs. Bess Houdini, and Sebastian Aloysius, acting chairman of the American Society of Magicians.”

Hayes smiled broadly at Bess. “Yes, Mrs. Houdini. Welcome.”

“Your Eminence.” She shook his hand gravely.

Hayes then shook Sebastian’s hand, still looking confused. “This is quite an unexpected group, I must say.”

Doyle took Hayes’s elbow and Abigail’s hand, and led them away from the others.

“We’ve much ground to cover and very little time, Your Eminence, so please, forgive me if I’m abrupt. But this morning I place in your hands perhaps the gravest responsibility ever conferred upon a man of your office.”

“No need to overstate your case, Arthur. I’m listening,” Hayes reminded him.

“Excuse my bluntness, but I may even be understating the case.”

Hayes scowled. “What exactly is going on here?”

“Your Eminence, do you recall our last discussion?”

“What? About Spiritualism?”

“I’m referring to the Book of Enoch.”

“Ah, yes, the Apocrypha. What of it?”

“That day, we talked about the Fall—and both the literal and figurative consequences of Lucifer’s banishment from the spiritual plane.”

“Yes. And?”

“I asked you if you believed in angels.”

“And I said I did.”

“And I asked you who protects them.”

“And I answered they don’t need protecting. Now, it’s a very busy day for me, and I don’t—”

“Your Eminence, we have nowhere else to turn.” And Doyle pulled Abigail from behind him and presented her to the Archbishop. “This is Abigail.”

Hayes smiled, eyes creased with confusion. “Welcome, child.”

Abigail’s gaze questioned Doyle, and he gave a slight nod in reply.

With that, Abigail turned and walked slowly down the aisle of the near-empty cathedral, toward the altar and the choir stalls. Her eyes were fixed on the enormous iron and gold crucifix looming above her. She let her coat fall from her shoulders as she stopped at the altar steps.

“What is happening?” Hayes demanded. Doyle just brought a finger to his lips, then directed the archbishop’s eyes back to Abigail.

Abigail stood at the foot of the stairs, her back to them, slowly undoing the buttons of her collarless man’s dress shirt. She pulled the shirt open, then let it fall to the floor.

Hayes clapped a hand over his mouth and backed away, but Doyle held him, making him look.

Abigail turned shyly to the others as she knelt before the steps, cupping her breasts. Her long, feathered wings unfolded from her slender back, trembling, reaching and testing the air like silken fingers.

“Dear God,” Hayes whispered, his hands at his lips, pressed together in prayer.

“She is the only survivor of the Lost Tribe of Enoch. She and her kind have been hunted down and murdered as part of a conspiracy that threatens the very heavens. We beg you for sanctuary.”

DARIAN DEMARCUS, NAKED and smeared in his own blood, lay sprawled on the stone floor of the private meditation temple concealed beneath his bedroom floor. The glass of the blue eye monocle was cool on his chest. The wounds were self-inflicted, carved with a straight razor on the undersides of both arms. There were more cuts on his calves and stomach. He used pain as a tool for focus, for discipline, yet for all the cutting, he could not chase off the rising anxiety. He was not in control; things were slipping away. It was as though he’d played host to leeches who sucked his blood while feeding him the illusion of nourishment.

The Arcanum had regained the Book of Enoch. Yet, infuriating as that was, it was not the killing blow they had assumed it would be. Darian had sucked its secrets clean, and set his plan in motion long before the Arcanum blundered onto the scene. And Darian was not without his revenge. Framing the Arcanum for the Occult Murders was both elegant and cruel. It ensured Darian’s position as the unchallenged player in the game. Even Crowley would soon be forced into submission. And if not, he, too, would be devoured.

These thoughts reassured him, and he felt his doubts recede. So what if he had miscalculated just a touch, and confused his priorities. So what if ambition had clouded his judgment. Certainly, vanquishing Duvall and the Arcanum and uncovering the secrets of Enoch were sufficient accomplishments to claim victory. The world was his for the taking. The secrets of the Hall of Relics, the legacy of Konstantin Duvall, belonged to him now. He would determine the fates of kings; he would dictate the flow of history. With such power at his fingertips, nothing could be denied him, no mystical association could challenge him.

Hunting down the last member of the Lost Tribe, however, was proving troublesome. If he wanted, he could have her—but perhaps this was not the time. Yet if it wasn’t Darian’s decision to make, then whose was it? Beyond that final cut, beyond harvesting the last pair of wings, the future became very uncertain. Look at what he had achieved to date. So why give it up to an uncertain future?

Suddenly, his doubts crashed back. It was true that he’d heard The Voice from the start, but so what? Surely it was only a manifestation of his desires, not some entity unto itself.

Then why had The Voice left him?

Why, unless The Voice had gotten what it wished and no longer needed him?

But that was absurd, impossible.

IT IS TWO years earlier. Darian’s skin is slick with cold sweat de
spite the roaring fire. He sucks on the reed of his hookah and feels
the smoke caress his mouth. He pours cognac down his throat.
But his heart won’t quit racing, and the anxiety has made his life
unbearable.

Erica’s eyes dart nervously at him as her high heels click on the
hardwood floors. Her perfume is pungent, like an oil slick on the
air. Her disgust for him is masked only by her fear; but he is losing
even her. If she leaves him he will die. He tells her this to make
her cry and she begs him not to torture her. But still, he’s losing
control of her, of his body, of everything.

Erica shuts the door behind her. Darian hears her carriage roll
down the drive. His eyes flick to the portrait of his father looming
above the fireplace. A gnawing rage rises in his throat as he studies his father’s stern features: the wide-set jaw with its bristling
black beard; the long nose and its flaring nostrils; the wrinkles
like knife gashes; the squinting black eyes.

“Konstantin.”

Even in his drugged haze, Darian is shocked enough to scramble off the sofa as he searches for The Voice.

“Who’s there?” he cries.

There is a hum in the air, a sizzle of electric whispers.

“Find it.”

The Voice is crisp and sexless. It is in the room.

Darian laughs, then cups his mouth. He muses on a life in
straitjackets, chewing cockroaches in some cell.

“Avenge him.”

Darian screams and falls to the floor. He stares again at his father’s portrait. “Go away!”

“Avenge him,” The Voice commands again.

“Avenge . . .” Darian crawls across the floor, shivering as he realizes that The Voice is not in his head.

“Find the Book,” it orders.

“Which book?” Darian gasps.

“The Book of Enoch,” The Voice answers.

NOW THE THOUGHT that he might have been deceived was too much for him. He doubled over and wretched clear bile onto the floor. He stared at the symbols drawn on the ceiling in his own excrement. Was it The Voice who filled him with false promises? Had he become so obsessed that he could not see some other agenda at work? Now Darian could almost feel the hook in the soft tissue of his cheek.

His hours of ritual chanting had borne no fruit, no communion with The Voice that only days ago had whispered sweet encouragement. This new emptiness filled him with dread. Darian DeMarcus was no child’s puppet.

He repeated this to himself as cold perspiration trailed across his cheeks and back. It was a sweat toxic with drugs: ether, peyote, heroin, cocaine, and hashish—a methodology straight from the syllabus of Aleister Crowley. But the harder Darian pushed to regain The Voice, the more damning the silence became.

Things were breaking down, his logical mind giving way to drug-induced visions and his deepest, unspoken fears. His thoughts splintered into fractals and trapezoids. Language dissipated. A flood of bloody images swept away the clinging vestiges of his identity, the cardboard desires and smiling dolls of his personality. His shattering mind visualized magic symbols of protection to ward off the madness of Hell, and he glued his concentration to those images like a shipwreck survivor to his life preserver.

Just then, a tremendous crash, like an explosion, shook the house, and wrenched Darian back to the moment. He sat up with a gasp, waving away the twisting leviathans of the ink-black ocean of his mind. Candles flickered, but the bulb in the electric lamp was dead. The room was dark. The effort to summon his thoughts was akin to sculpting statues from wet spaghetti, but somehow Darian managed to struggle to his feet.

Something had just happened in his father’s house.

Darian snatched his silk robe off the floor, put it on, and tied it around his waist. He ran a shaking hand through his hair, then climbed the spiral staircase to the hidden door in his closet and reentered his bedroom. The lights were out there, too.

A furious scratching on the ceiling directed his attention upward. It sounded like there was an animal on the roof. A large animal.

Darian wiped the sweat from his neck as he staggered into the corridor. “Morris?” he shouted.

More skittering sounded above his head. There were animals scrabbling on the roof or wriggling inside the walls. His heart drummed too fast, and he willed it to slow down. But still his breathing grew faster and more labored.

Thunder ripped across the sky, along with a sudden rain that pounded the windows and pelted the roof. Lightning filtered through the corridor, illuminating yet another portrait of Thorton DeMarcus, his fiery gaze locked on his trembling son.

“Papa?”

At this, lightning turned the house into a carnival of shadows and another crack of thunder shook the walls.

The portrait of Thorton DeMarcus seemed to grow and swell, his downturned lips curled in a sneer.

“Murderer . . .”
said a hollow voice.

“I didn’t,” Darian babbled like a child, backing away.

“Sister . . .”

“It was her fault,” Darian cried. “You always take her side!”

Then a blood-choked shriek ripped up the stairwell.

Erica.

The silence that followed was chilling. Darian froze, then licked his dry lips with a drier tongue.

“M-Morris?” he whispered.

A door slammed downstairs. More lightning flared, then more, thunder shaking the chandeliers. “Morris?” Darian’s voice was hoarse with panic. The rain drummed around him like a thousand fists. A thousand demons, waiting to get in. He lunged into a bedroom and ran to the window, ripping the curtains back. The rain and darkness made it impossible to see, but as a splintering fork of lightning turned the world briefly into day, Darian saw a lone figure standing at the edge of the field. A figure in robes.

Then another sound rattled the house that was neither rain nor thunder.

Darian leaped back from the window. What in the Devil’s name? It sounded like the beating of . . .

Darian’s fingers dug into his temples.

“Stay away!” he barked.

Something moved in the attic, something with sharp claws. Darian ran back into the corridor. More creatures scratched the walls and skittered over the roof.

Darian roared with defiance, and was answered in kind.

Windows banged of their own accord. Doors slammed. Darian raced toward the stairwell, spun around the banister, and collided with Morris. The blow knocked him flat on his back.

Morris loomed over him, wet with rain. The hand with its missing fingers was heavily bandaged; in the other he clutched his Winchester shotgun. “Miss Erica is in the house,” he said thickly, as if his tongue was too big for his mouth.

“Don’t say that,” Darian moaned, but in answer, Erica’s voice lilted from the east wing.

“Darian?”

Morris looked befuddled. He turned to Darian, questioning. “Don’t you want to see Miss Erica?” he asked.

Darian climbed to his feet and shoved past Morris, continuing down the stairs. On one of the landings, he stole a wide cutlass off a set of Arabian armor.

MORRIS WAS ABOUT to follow, when door hinges squeaked open behind him. A pair of emerald green eyes blinked in the darkness, like a cat’s. Morris stumbled toward the door instead.

AS DARIAN REACHED the ground floor, he found that the front doors of the DeMarcus Manor had been blown off their hinges and lay on the ground, still smoking. Wind and rain blew into the foyer, making the floors treacherously slick. Still, it offered an escape, and Darian was about to flee into the yard, when some fifty yards away something that glowed began lurching toward the house.