The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) (8 page)

Oak ran a hand over his hair and tried to look nonchalant, but Grey saw the shock in his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re smoking. I picked this ring up at a pawnshop, liked the way it looked. I’m sorry Matty’s dead, but I don’t know what else I can tell you.” He shook the bat at them. “And don’t you dare come back here and tell me I’m not grieving enough for my friend.”

Viktor dismissed him with a thin smile. “We’ll be in touch.”

T
hrough a split in the shades, Oak watched his two visitors walk towards the center of Haight-Ashbury. Oak was intelligent, but he was also larger and angrier than most people, and after he graduated from Cal Poly he decided he would rather deal drugs and join a biker gang than waste away behind a desk. It was California in the sixties, and his decision had seemed almost normal, an alternative career path. He met Matthias a few years later, and it was a natural fit.

The House of Lucifer stood for anarchy and personal freedom, two things Oak valued above all else. Most of the public thought the members of the House bit off the heads of chickens and sacrificed babies, and that suited him just fine, even though the sacrifice of living creatures was taboo under House doctrine.

Oak prided himself on being a badass, and he had wanted to swing his baseball bat at that skinny asshole’s head. But something in the guy’s hard green eyes told Oak that taking a swing would have been a very bad idea, and that was a feeling Oak hated above all else. He was the one who made
other
people feel that way.

That was fine. He had something special for those two. Some
one
, that was.

He grabbed a Coors Light and a shot of Jäger, working up his courage for the phone call, still on edge after the craziness of the last few weeks. As the alcohol loosened his mind, he thought about how it had all come to this.

To most of the members, the House of Lucifer was a fad, an alternative lifestyle, a way to protest anaesthetized suburban living and conformist religion and politics.

To others, the House of Lucifer was a gateway drug.

As the years went by, Oak yearned for something real, something other than intellectual back-patting and Dungeons & Dragons occult bullshit. He searched the Internet for organizations more in alignment with his true desires, tried a few things here and there, found a few cults that went a step or two further down the Left-Hand Path. But none had the ring of authenticity.

Then, just last year, he found the Church of the Beast. No, that wasn’t true. The Church found
him
. He had heard about the Church and was intrigued, but he knew membership was by invite only, and there was zero information out there. He hadn’t even realized the Church had a presence in the United States. Now, of course, he knew they had a chapter in every major American city.

Oak’s invite had been a letter slipped under his door, sealed with a symbol he hadn’t recognized. The same symbol that was on the ring the giant dude had noticed. That had stunned Oak; no one outside the Church of the Beast was supposed to know about that symbol.

The letter contained a date, a time, and an address. At midnight on the date in the letter, Oak had approached a Russian Hill mansion set behind an ivy-covered wall. He was terrified by what he might find, but feverish with curiosity. He wanted what he assumed everyone wanted: evidence of something secret, something real, something
else
.

He had not been disappointed. The San Francisco chapter of the Church of the Beast, fifty members strong, had heard his plea, knew his background, and extended a rare invitation. At that first ceremony, he had participated in the Black Mass as it was meant to be done, not symbolically like in the House of Lucifer. He had watched the sacrifice of the goat and drunk its blood and cavorted, naked and unrestrained, around the basement of the mansion. It had been a bacchanal worthy of the true Dark Prince, ending with an orgy that left Oak giddy with sated desire, trembling for more.

He had found his church.

Was he evil? he briefly wondered. Yet how could satisfying his natural desires, even taken to the extremes offered by the Church of the Beast, be evil? And how was the worship of Satan worse than the veneration of a God who allowed the Holocaust and who, if most Christians were to be believed, condemned billions of His own creation to eternal damnation? Who didn’t feel some affinity with Satan, the rebellious teenager kicked out of his parents’ basement, doomed forever?

Oak enjoyed the notoriety that came with his position in the House of Lucifer, and saw no reason to give it up. Matty, the old fool, had no idea anything had changed.

Then
everything
changed.

Oak was asked to attend a different kind of ceremony, an initiation for a woman who had been attending the Church of the Beast a few weeks longer than Oak. Oak knew what this meant; he knew the requirement for membership was to make the final cut on the throat of the sacrifice. He also knew why they had brought him along slowly, because he was familiar with fringe-group psychology: Like any perversion, sexual or violent or otherwise, acceptance and addiction required a gradual approach.

Only it wasn’t an addiction, he told himself, and it wasn’t a perversion. Satan reflected the true nature of humanity, and it was intellectually dishonest to believe otherwise. It was weak.

He wanted to be part of the Church of the Beast more than he wanted to be in alignment with his artificial, socialized Western morality. He would see for himself what the real Prince of Darkness was about.

Oak didn’t remember much from that night, due to both intoxication and denial. They had brought in a homeless man, a drain on society, and performed the Black Mass while the homeless man hung upside down from the cross. Then the new initiate had completed her task. There was no torture, just a swift kill. A simple offering. The ultimate act of love and devotion to his new Prince, Oak told himself, far cleaner than the wholesale slaughter in which organized religion had engaged over the centuries.

Oak had almost vomited when they passed around the cup filled with warm blood, but he managed to let the liquid trickle into his mouth. After the sacrifice, there was an orgy that helped Oak forget what he had just seen and done, and when it was finished Oak stumbled out of the basement and into the moonlit night, gibbering with spent emotion, his frail humanity conquered.

After that night, Oak stopped wondering whether he was evil. Not because he had come to any conclusion, but because he no longer cared.

The next night, the same night on which Matty received the letter, a man named Dante approached Oak in the shadows on the street outside Oak’s house. He shuddered as he formed a mental picture of Dante: lean and hard as redwood bark, swathed in black clothing, nose and lips and ears filled with piercings, incisors filed to points, and that awful and powerful tattoo covering his shaved head, a red pentagram stuffed with the severed head of a goat.

Oak knew the rumors: that Dante was a master with his hidden knives, the right-hand man to the Black Cleric himself, enforcer of an already terrifying organization. He couldn’t wait to see Dante slice Dominic Grey into little pieces and offer his lifeblood in ritual to the Beast.

Yet even Dante no longer struck the most fear into Oak’s charred heart. That night, Dante had told him of someone else, a man who had transcended his human shell and become something more, a man who would one day lead his followers into the mainstream and finally allow their religion to take its rightful place in the world. Oak loved the idea of a revolution, but he had not really believed what Dante had said about the man’s powers.

Oak wanted to be part of this new thing, and he was petrified of saying no to Dante. Dante outlined the plan, telling Oak the Magus would appear at midnight six days later, just as the letter had read.

This
would be his initiation, Dante had said, not just into the Church of the Beast, but into the new organization that would subsume both the House of Lucifer and the Church of the Beast. And Oak would be at the vanguard, might even be invited into the Inner Council.

Oak had played his part, still not expecting anything to happen. Then the clock struck midnight and the Magus appeared just as Dante said he
would, materializing in front of hundreds of witnesses, burning poor Matty alive with a whisper.

After that, Oak didn’t just have a church.

He had faith.

Oak held the phone in his hand before he dialed, remembering for a moment his bland Sacramento childhood, his poor pious mother, who, were she alive, would be devastated by his choices in life. He loved her still, but she was weak and had understood nothing.

Dante answered the phone with his throaty, heavily accented English. Oak felt a shiver of fear sweep through his body. He composed himself, then spoke in the gruffest voice he could muster. “I just had some visitors.”

T
he taxi dropped Grey and Viktor in Pacific Heights, on the street outside the home of the next witness, John Sebastian Reynolds III, Esquire. A foghorn moaned, and lights from the Marina District twinkled below.

Grey shoved his hands in his pockets, the air thin and cool, seeping through his ripped coat. “Oak’s a liar, though not sure I make him for a murderer. Doesn’t have the nerve. I could see him paying someone else, but that’s about it. And that still doesn’t explain what happened.”

“No,” Viktor said.

“What’s your theory?”

Viktor paused on the sidewalk, oblivious to the chill. “I believe there’s a power struggle happening, and Matthias and Xavier were on the wrong side. I’m just not sure who’s behind it or why. Given the involvement of both the House and L’église de la Bête, it would seem that someone’s trying to win the hearts and minds of Satanists.”

“What a prize.”

They approached the house, a fancy Georgian with a lamp-lit walkway. Grey pressed the doorbell twice before a dead bolt clicked. The door opened a few inches, stopped by a chain.

A man’s ruddy, clean-shaven face appeared in the crack. Grey thought him to be in his forties, once handsome, now saddled by the mushy skin and bulging veins of an alcoholic.

His voice was slurred but under control. “Do I know you?”

Viktor produced his identification. “John Sebastian? We’re investigating the death of Matthias Gregory. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

He looked at the ID and then up at Viktor. “Interpol?”

“We’re assigned to local police,” Viktor said, handing him a card.

John released a deep, resigned sigh, then unhooked the chain. “Come in. Anything I can get you officers, or detectives, or I suppose you call yourself agents?”

Grey and Viktor exchanged a look. A far cry, Grey thought, from the greeting they had received from Oak and his hellhound.

John led them into a study filled with creamy leather furniture. A bay window overlooked the city. Both Grey and Viktor refused his offer of a drink, and he refilled the tumbler in his hand with a generous pour of Scotch, his trim haircut and tidy fingernails marking him as a professional even without the esquire.

“What can I tell you?”