The Scarlet Gospels (2 page)

“You made your peace too late,” Ragowski said, bringing his foot down and grinding the broken bowls into a powder. “Maybe if there'd been fifty of you, all sharing your knowledge, you might have had a hope. But, as it stands, you're outnumbered.”

“Outnumbered? You mean he has functionaries?” Heyadat said.

“Good God. Is it the fog of death, or the years that have passed? I honestly don't remember you people being this stupid. The demon has imbibed the knowledge of countless minds. He doesn't need backup. There's not an incantation in existence that can stop him.”

“It can't be true!” screamed Felixson.

“I'm sure I would have said the same hopeless thing three years ago, but that was before my untimely demise, Brother Theodore.”

“We should disperse!” Heyadat said. “All in different directions. I'll head to Paris—”

“You're not listening, Yashar. It's too late,” Ragowski said. “You can't hide from him. I am proof.”

“You're right,” said Heyadat. “Paris is too obvious. Somewhere more remote, then—”

While Heyadat laid his panicked plans Elizabeth Kottlove, apparently resigned to the reality of her circumstances, took the time to speak conversationally with Ragowski.

“They said they found your body in the Temple of Phemestrion. It seemed an odd place for you to be, Joseph. Did he bring you there?”

Ragowski stopped and looked at her for a moment before saying, “No. It was my own hiding place, actually. There was a room behind the altar. Tiny. Dark. I … I thought I was safe.”

“And he found you anyway.”

Ragowski nodded. Then, trying to keep his tone offhand and failing, he said, “How did I look?”

“I wasn't there, but by all accounts appalling. He'd left you in your little hidey-hole with his hooks still in you.”

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

“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 then he left me there, with that chain slowly disemboweling me, until he'd gone to my house and brought back everything I'd hidden. I wanted so badly to die by that time I remember that I literally begged him to kill me. I gave him information he didn't even ask for. All I wanted was death. Which I got, finally. And I was never more grateful for anything in my life.”

“Jesus wept!” Felixson yelled. “Look at you all, listening to his babble! We raised the sonofabitch to get some answers, not recount his fucking horror stories.”

“You want answers!” Ragowski snapped. “Here then. Get yourself some paper, and write down the whereabouts of every last grimoire, pamphlet, and article of power you own. Everything. He's going to get the information anyway, sooner or later. You, Lili—you have the only known copy of Sanderegger's
Cruelties,
yes?”

“Maybe—”

“For fuck's sake, woman!” Poltash said. “He's trying to help.”

“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. Draw a goddamn blueprint, if you have to. Just make it easy for him. Hopefully he'll return the favor.”

“I have no paper,” Heyadat said, his voice suddenly shrill and boyish with fear. “Somebody give me a piece of paper!”

“Here,” said Elizabeth, tearing a sheet from an address book she pulled out of her pocket.

Poltash was writing on an envelope, which he had pressed up against the marble wall of the mausoleum. “I don't see how this saves us from his tampering with our brains,” he said, scribbling furiously.

“It doesn't, Arnold. It's merely a gesture of humility. Something none of us have been very familiar with in our lives. But it may—and I make no guarantees—it may hold sway.”

“Oh Christ!” said Heyadat. “I see light between the cracks.”

The magicians glanced up from their scrawling to see what he was talking about.

At the far end of the mausoleum, a cold blue light was piercing the fine cracks between the marble blocks.

“Our visitor is imminent,” said Ragowski. “Elizabeth, dear?”

“Joseph?” she said, failing to glance up from her fevered scribbling.

“Release me, will you, please?”

“In a minute. Let me finish writing.”

“Release me, god damn you!” he said. “I don't want to be here when he comes. I don't ever want to see that horrible face of his again!”

“Patience, Joseph,” Poltash said. “We're only heeding your advice.”

“Someone give me back my death! I can't go through this again! Nobody should have to!”

The swelling light from beyond the mausoleum wall was now accompanied by a grinding sound as one of the enormous marble blocks, at about head height, slowly pushed itself out of the wall. When it was roughly ten inches clear of the wall, a second block, below and to the left of the first one, began to move. Seconds later a third, this time to the right and above the first, also began shifting. The glittering silver-blue shafts of light that had begun this unknitting came in wherever there was a crack for them to steal through.

Ragowski, enraged at the indifference of his resurrectors, resumed the destruction of Kottlove's necromantic labors where he'd left off. He grabbed the alabaster bowls and hurled them against the moving wall. Then, pulling off the jacket he'd been buried in, he got down on his knees and used it to scrub out the numbers Kottlove had scrawled in the immaculate spiral. Dead though he was, beads of fluid appeared on his brow as he scrubbed. It was a dark, thick liquid that collected at his forehead and finally 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 to undo the resurrection began to pay off. A welcome numbness started spreading from his fingers and toes up into his limbs, and a lolling weight gathered behind his eyes and sinuses, as the semi-liquefied contents of his skull responded to the demands of gravity.

Glancing up from his work, he saw the five magicians scrawling madly like students racing to finish a vital examination paper before the tolling of the bell. Except, of course, the price of failure was rather worse than a bad mark. Ragowski's gaze went from their toil to the wall, where six blocks were now on the move. The first of the six marble blocks that had responded to the pressure from the other side finally slid clear of the wall and dropped to the ground. A shaft of frigid light, lent solidity by the marble cement dust that hung in the air from the unseated block, spilled from the hole and crossed the length of the mausoleum, striking the opposite wall. The second block dropped only moments later.

Theodore Felixson began to pray aloud as he wrote, the divinity at his prayer's destination usefully ambiguous:

“Thine the power,

Thine the judgment.

Take my soul, Lord.

Shape and use it.

I am weak, Lord.

I am fearful—”

“It's not another ‘Lord' we need in here,” Elizabeth said. “It's a goddess.” And so saying, she began her own entreaty:

“Honey-breasted art thou, Neetha,

Call me daughter, I will suckle—”

while Felixson continued the thread of his own prayer:

“Save me, Lord,

From fear and darkness.

Hold me fast

Against your heart, Lord—”

Heyadat interrupted this battle of supplications with a bellow that only a man of his considerable proportions could have unleashed.

“I never heard such naked hypocrisy in my life. When did you two ever have faith in anything besides your own covetousness? If the demon can hear you, he's laughing.”

“You are wrong,” said a voice from the place out of which the cold light came. The words, though in themselves unremarkable, seemed to escalate the wall's capitulation. Three more blocks began to grind their way forward while another two dropped out of the wall and joined the debris accruing on the mausoleum floor.

The unseen speaker continued to address the magicians. His voice, with its glacial severity, made the harsh light seem tropical by contrast.

“I smell decaying flesh,” the demon said. “But with a quickening perfume. Someone has been raising the dead.”

Yet more of the blocks toppled to the ground, so that now there would have been 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 the space. For the entity about to make its entrance, however, such matters were easily resolved.

“Ovat Porak,” it said. The order was obeyed instantly. The rubble, listening intently, divided in a heartbeat. Even the air itself was cleansed for him, for as he spoke every particle of cement dust was snatched from his path.

And thus, his way unhindered, the Cenobite entered into the presence of the six magicians. He was tall, looking very much as he did in those volumes of notable demons that the magicians had pored over in recent months and weeks, vainly looking for some hint of frailty in the creature. They had found none, of course. But now, as he appeared in the flesh, there was a distinct sense of humanity in his being, of the man he had been once, before the monstrous labors of his Order had been performed. His flesh was virtually white, his hairless head ritualistically scarred with deep grooves that ran both horizontally and vertically, at every intersection of which a nail had been hammered through the bloodless flesh and into his bone. Perhaps, at one time, the nails had gleamed, but the years had tarnished them. No matter, for the nails possessed a certain elegance, enhanced by the way the demon held his head, as though regarding the world with an air of weary condescension. Whatever torments he had planned for these last victims—and his knowledge of pain and its mechanisms would have made the Inquisitors look like school-yard bullies—it would be worsened by orders of magnitude if any one of them dared utter that irreverent nickname Pinhead, the origins of which were long lost in claim and counterclaim.

As for the rest of his appearance, it was much as it had been depicted in the etchings and woodcuts of demonic listings for millennia: the black vestments, the hem of which brushed the floor; the patches of skinned flesh exposing blood-beaded muscle; and the skin tightly interwoven with the fabric of his robes. There had always been debates as to whether the damned soul who wore this mask of pain and its accompanying vestments was a single man who'd lived many human lifetimes or whether the Order of the Gash passed the scars and nails on to another soul after the labors of temptation had exhausted their present possessor. There was certainly evidence for either belief in the state of the demon before them.

He looked like a creature that had lived too long, his eyes set in bruised pools, his gait steady but slow. But the tools that hung from his belt—an amputation saw, a trepanning drill, a small chisel, and three silver syringes—were, like the abattoir worker's chain-mail apron he wore, wet with blood: confirmation that his weariness did not apparently keep him from taking a personal hand in the practicalities of agony.

He brought flies with him too, fat, blue-black flies in their thousands. Many buzzed around his waist, alighting on the instruments to take their share of wet human meat. They were four or five times the size of terrestrial flies, and their busy noise echoed around the mausoleum.

The demon stopped, regarding Ragowski with something resembling curiosity.

“Joseph Ragowski,” the Cenobite said. “Your suffering was sweet. But you died too soon. It pleases me to see you standing here.”

Ragowski tensed. “Do your worst, demon.”

“I have no need to pillage your mind a second time.” He turned and faced the five quivering magicians. “It's these five I came to catch, more for closure than the hope of revelation. I've been to magic's length and breadth. I've explored its outermost limits, and rarely—very rarely—I've mined the thoughts of a truly original thinker. If as Whitehead said, all philosophy is footnotes to Plato, then all magic is footnotes to twelve great texts. Texts I now possess.”

Lili Saffro had started to hyperventilate a little way into the demon's speech and now reached into her purse, digging frantically through its chaotic contents.

“My pills. Oh Jesus, Jesus—where are my pills?”

In her jittery state she lost her grip on one end of her purse, and its contents fell out, spreading across the floor. She went to her knee, found the bottle, and snatched up her pills, oblivious to everything but getting them into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed the large white tablets like candies, staying on the ground, clutching her chest, and taking deep breaths. Felixson spoke, ignoring her panicked outburst.

“I have four safes,” he told the demon. “I've written down their whereabouts and their codes. If that's too much trouble for you I'll fetch them myself. Or you could accompany me. It's a big house. You might like it. Cost me eighteen million dollars. It's yours. You and your brethren are welcome to it.”

“My brethren?” the Cenobite said.

“Apologies. There are sisters in your Order too. I was forgetting that. Well, I'm sure I own enough works for you to pass around. I know you said you've got all the magic texts. But I do have a few very fine first editions. Nearly perfect, most of them.”

Before the demon could respond to this, Heyadat said, “Your Lordship. Or is it ‘Your Grace'? Your Holiness—”

“Master.”

“Like … like a dog?” Heyadat said.

“Surely,” Felixson said, wanting desperately to please the demon. “If he says we're dogs, then dogs we are.”

“Well stated,” the demon said. “But words are easy. Down, dog.”

Felixson waited for a moment, hoping this had just been a throwaway remark. But it was not.