The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) (26 page)

The taxi descended towards the harbor. Port of call to both Captain Cook and Bram Stoker’s fictional count, Viktor understood why Stoker, student of the occult himself, chose this setting for the arrival of his undead liege. The ruined archways of an abandoned abbey, set on a cliff high above the harbor, loomed over the town with subtle menace as waves crashed on the rocks below. From a distance, the gulls circling the darkening sky above the abbey looked suspiciously like bats.

The driver let Viktor off at the entrance to the pedestrian-only old town. Though an atmospheric collection of quaint pubs and historic buildings, Whitby had become a caricature, Goths flitting about in vampire costumes, entire shops devoted to Dracula curios, tourists and haggard local fisherman sitting side by side in the bars, swigging Captain Cook’s namesake ale.

Viktor made his way to the Circle’s combination magic shop and museum, a narrow facade of black-painted wood situated at the base of the long stone stairway leading to the abbey. Pushing through a velvet curtain, he regarded the contents of the shop with amusement.

An array of potted herbs sat in the windowsills, warding off everything from halitosis to leprechauns. Painted sigils covered the door and ceiling, and the walls were lined with shelves overflowing with an impressive collection of magical arcana: One shelf contained jars of animal parts, rare plants, and fungi; another sparkled with an array of exotic crystals; yet another was stacked with more versions of tarot decks than Viktor had known existed. Goblets and staves, daggers and animal skulls, rings and amulets, books on everything from magical theory to rune systems: It was a treasure trove of occult esoterica.

Viktor strode to the counter, manned by a tall man with a sharp chin, a ponytail, and a receding hairline. He wore black leather pants and a frilly white dress shirt, unbuttoned low enough to showcase a ruby-studded Celtic cross hanging from a chain. A different ring adorned each finger, and black disk earrings elongated his earlobes. Viktor made sure the distinctive ring of L’église de la Bête was not part of the costume.

The attendant peered at Viktor’s nearly seven-foot frame and black trench coat with arched eyebrows.

“I’m Viktor Radek.”

“Ah, right, Gareth said you’d be calling.” He spoke briskly and with an educated British accent. He called over a pimply girl in fishnet stockings to watch the counter, and led Viktor through a beaded doorway in the rear, up a flight of stairs and through a locked door at the end of the hallway. “This is where we house our private Crowley collection. Invitation only. The Mags in this town would start a siege if they knew this stuff was back here.”

“Mags?” Viktor said.

“Street magicians. Magpies.”

“Ah.”

“You know, the wannabes who start with
Harry Potter
and D&D, revere Crowley as a god, and think that dressing in black and owning the Necronomicon will get them shagged. Which it might, but it won’t make them magicians.”

Viktor didn’t reply.

“I’m rather guessing you’re not a Mag,” the clerk said.

“Correct.”

“They should be prancing about in York instead of Whitby, if they knew any better. York has an amazing psychogeography, though I’m sure you know that. The Masons have been there since the Dark Ages. I’d be there myself if it weren’t for the shop.”

The clerk started flipping through a thin ledger. “What level are you? Third Order? Fourth?”

Viktor snorted.

“Higher, aren’t you? You have the look. Can’t fake true magical wisdom. Did you study with Gareth? I’ve never actually met him. What’s he like? Are any of the rumors true?”

“All of them,” Viktor said. “The book, please?”

“Right, right. Apologies.”

The attendant unlocked a cabinet and extracted a familiar thin volume, though Crowley’s copy of
The Ahriman Heresy
was even more worn than the one in Zador’s shop, the edges yellowed, a water stain splotched across half the cover. He laid the book on a desk.

“What’s your opinion of Crowley? Brilliant bloke and a master magician, but a bit of a cad if you ask me. Can’t deny his contributions, but he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He was sort of like Jesus: Either you believe Crowley’s mumbo jumbo about Aiwass speaking to him, or he was a liar or insane. None of that chuckle chuckle, he’s-just-a-misguided-bloke middle ground for those kinds of claims. By the way, you ever read his fiction? It’s rather undervalued.”

Viktor’s lips compressed. “No.”

The clerk put his hands up. “Hey, I get it. The room’s all yours. Just pull the cord by the door if you need to ring me.”

He started to leave the room, and Viktor called out to him. “There is one thing. Do you know where Aleister acquired this book?”

“Not for certain, no, but he had it when he returned from the East.”

“I see,” Viktor said. “Thank you.”

The clerk gave his chin a thoughtful tug. “You don’t know Scarlet Alexander, do you?”

“Who?” Viktor said.

“Magister Templi of the Thelema Lodge in Cefalù. Scary good magician. If it’s information on Crowley you’re after, I’d look her up.”

“Thank you,” Viktor said.

“Gareth knows her, I believe.”

“
Thank
you.”

He left the room, and Viktor sat at the desk, his nose twitching not from the musty smell of aging parchment but from the enigma surrounding Crowley’s copy of
The Ahriman Heresy
. Cad he might have been, but Crowley had spent his life in pursuit of hidden knowledge.

Viktor felt a flutter of excitement as he opened the book. He turned the pages slowly, searching for variations in the text. There were a few notes in the margins, circled words and phrases, but nothing of importance. As far as Viktor could tell, the copy was identical.

His hopes dwindled the longer he read. He would have to conduct more research he didn’t have time for, try to retrace Crowley’s steps and decipher which ones, if any, were related to
The Ahriman Heresy
.

On the last page something caught his eye. Just beneath the text, written in the same tightened scrawl he recognized from past experience as Crowley’s handwriting, was a word, circled and underlined.

Viktor rubbed at his chin and copied the word into his notepad. In both Latin and Italian, the phrase meant roughly “the guardians,” or “the defenders.” The emphases signified importance, though what that might be, Viktor had no idea. Since as far as he could tell it was the only difference in the two copies, it was worth noting.

He could hear the rain starting to clack against the building as he flipped through the final pages of blank parchment, included in ancient texts just like
in today’s books, and then a series of chills coursed through him when he turned the last page, leaving him clutching the book in trembling hands.

A short note had been taped to the inside of the back cover. The note was penned in a different hand than Crowley’s, a neater and loopier handwriting that Viktor also thought he recognized, a thought confirmed by the note itself.

Dearest Viktor,

I never doubted you would come.

Darius

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND

G
rey watched from the platform as the train carrying Anka back to London rumbled to life. She was small in her seat, staring out the window, arms crossed and hugging her chest.

He stepped off the platform in a fog, the skin on his arm still tingling from where she had touched him, his mind enwrapped in the mysteries hovering around her. Why claim she needed his help if it wasn’t true? What possible motive lay beneath that striking veneer?

He approached the pretty center of Cambridge, feeling the pang of being on the other side of the glass in this town of grassy lawns and bourgeois charm, surrounded by laughing students and families strolling arm in arm, the graceful spires of the university rising in the distance.

The Zoroastrian scholar lived outside town, and Grey decided to walk, tired of being cooped up on planes and trains. He skirted the university, pausing when he saw a sign for the Cambridge University Library.

He had to know. If he was going to help Anka, if he had even the hope of trusting her, he had to verify some part of her story.

He entered the intimidating building, and a shy librarian with a Scottish accent led him to the area housing the collection on paranormal research. Grey couldn’t believe the size of the stacks.

Three hours later he had his answers, and he felt a little bit lighter than when he had entered. Astral projection, he learned, was a fancy name for an out-of-body experience, and human beings had been claiming to have them
since the beginning of time. Recent studies in the United States evidenced that at least 8 percent of people, and perhaps more than 20, believed they had undergone an out-of-body experience at one time or another. The conventional wisdom, at least among those who accepted the phenomenon, was that the spiritual or “astral” body was separate from the physical body—the concept of the soul—and, at least with certain people and at certain times, was capable of traveling outside it. No one claimed to understand it, except for the mystics and the quacks. The phenomenon had been called by many names in many different cultures, appeared to occur both in conscious and unconscious states, and was associated with near-death experiences, dream and meditative states, hallucinations, religious experience, and a plethora of other phenomena.

Most often, Grey learned, the astral traveler had no control over the event, and found him- or herself floating above or away from the corporeal self, or rising in a tunnel of light after heart failure. There were occasional reports of people who could control the phenomenon, though these were unverified and largely ignored by the scientific community, or at least the Western one.

However, and Grey’s pulse increased when he read this part, out-of-body cases existed where people appeared to observers in physical form far from their actual locations, sometimes thousands of miles away. This phenomenon was known as bilocation, and there was ample literature documenting purported cases over the years, across a multitude of cultures and belief systems. There were even a few extremely rare cases of a reported doppelgänger—the actual corporeal appearance of the same person in two different locations, at the same time. Though such reports had been scoffed at in the past, and attributed to the Devil in earlier times, recent developments in quantum physics had scientists rethinking astral projection and bilocation, and even the appearance of a doppelgänger, as within the realm of possibility and perhaps even—according to some theoretical physicists—probability.

Grey left the library deep in thought. He was far from convinced, but at least the phenomenon existed, or was thought to exist.

Powers of the mind, Viktor always preached. Grey had worked with Viktor long enough to know there were plenty of things in this world that no one understood.

Plenty.

Grey went a step further. He contacted Rick Laskin, an old acquaintance in Diplomatic Security, now posted at the Romanian embassy in Bucharest. Rick had been a Navy SEAL before joining DS, and when he and Grey had undergone DS training together they had bonded over their respective stints in Special Forces. Grey wasn’t sure if Rick could dig up the information Grey sought, but Rick was a solid all-American kind of guy and would do his best.

It was worth a shot.