Have you come to kill me?

29Oct

I waited another two hours after the lights went off before entering through the sewer. I cut the city padlock on the gate and looped the chain around a hook. I hung the broken lock through one of the links. Down a short arched passage was a four-foot-high concrete slab. Atop and at the back was a bolt-studded iron door with no handle. There were no lights down there, especially at that hour, so everything had to be illuminated by the beam emanating from the LED lamp at the crown of my forehead. I adjusted it upward before attempting the jump.

The iron door took some tugging. I eventually got it open, but only by dragging it hard across the concrete, which made a loud grinding noise that could’ve woken the entire block. The vertical shaft on the other side enclosed a mechanical lift, the kind that used to be common in the days before electric motors. A pair of long chain loops dangled. Pulling them turned a crank connected to gears that lifted the metal grate vertically along the pitted track to the top—albeit very slowly, and only with the assistance of counterweights.

I looked up the shaft, but not before moving the beam of my headlamp oblique to it, just in case there was anyone at the top. The bolted, crisscrossing metal braces that secured the vertical track were all covered with a thin layer of dark brown rust, but they otherwise seemed as sturdy as the day they were installed. They didn’t so much as budge when I shook them. But rather than risk the noise of the rattling chains, I turned off my head lamp and used the gear holes of the track like a ladder. I slipped my gloved hands inside and lifted myself up one step at a time.

I’d like to say that, as I ascended that shaft, I was as confident as I’d been walking into that fifth floor apartment several weeks before with only my wits and a necklace to save me. But that would’ve been a lie. Down in that dark hole, my heart was pounding so loudly in my ears that I had to stop several times to make sure I wasn’t making noise that I just couldn’t hear. I had absolutely no idea what I would encounter at the top, nor even the category of fates that awaited me if I failed in my mission.

But climb I did, past the ground floor exit—which had been walled off decades ago, by the looks of it—up, up, and up, one careful pull at a time, arms stuck into over-sized gear holes, until at last I emerged through a false brick wall, which slid effortlessly and appeared to be a very recent addition. I got the impression that shaft had once been the primary means of moving things up and down the building and that it was only the later occupants, having no use for such a clunky device, who walled it off in lieu of tearing it down. Doing so would surely have taken a good chunk of the building with it, given how sturdily it was built. The crisscrossing girders were affixed solidly to the walls and never even jiggled even as they bore my full weight. But then, it was built to carry loads an order of magnitude heavier than me.

The room into which I stepped was completely dark but had the open stillness that suggested great size. I risked using the headlamp again but kept the beam pointed toward the ground on the lowest setting.

“Whoa . . .”

There was a full fucking tree in there. Alive.

I looked up at it. And then saw in shadow what covered the wall behind.

I cursed under my breath.

To start, I had severely underestimated the size of the man’s library. But more than that, it was completely empty. Shelf after shelf was completely barren.

Was he expecting me?

I drew my gun. The room was big and dark and filled with so many odd things, if a man were hiding in there, I’d never have known it. I could feel my heart beating and hear my breath in my ears. I adjusted my fingers around my gun, which felt a bit slippery in my wet palms.

Under the empty shelves was a row of arched brick nooks that looked like they had been erected around the same time as the mechanical lift. Each was sealed with a gate, but not, it seemed, to keep people from stealing the objects inside. It seemed more like it was a prison—keeping the objects in. The central arch was covered by a folding screen, and I stepped toward it slowly, moving around the tree in a wide arc. I felt the talisman around my neck, just to make sure I hadn’t accidentally dropped it on the climb.

The screen had a peaceful scene, some kind of Asian design. A little bird sat on a branch sprouting tiny pink blossoms. I moved it out of the way with the barrel of my gun. I raised my lamp.

The beam illuminated a skull. But it wasn’t a skeleton. It was a chair. A bone chair. It was locked behind the gate, chained crosswise, and bolted to the floor.

I stared into the hollow sockets of the single skull in the back, nestled between the undulating rows of vertebrae. Human vertebrae. The empty sockets stared right back.

“Have you come to kill me?”

That voice!

It resounded through the darkness like an alpine horn. I spun with gun raised as the lights rose slowly, soft and warm—glowing panels behind the shelves—and Etude Étranger appeared from the shadows wearing the craziest outfit I’ve ever seen. His face was covered in a wooden tribal mask, similar to what I’d seen at Dr. Caldwell’s, but unpainted and in an entirely different style. Draped over his shoulders was a brightly feathered garb, like a heavy parka. He grasped a drum in one hand. His other was clenched into a fist, which he threw toward the floor before I could set my feet.

The room shook violently and I stumbled. The building rocked back and forth as from an earthquake and I was jostled about. My feet shuffled as I tried to keep my balance. My sweaty hand clenched. It was automatic, a subconscious desire to hold onto something steady. And I pulled the trigger. Since I wasn’t aiming at anything, the shot went wide and pierced one of the large windows behind the chef. His arm went up and the room dropped four feet, just like in the apartment with the witch doctor, and I fell to my ass. My gun bounced free.

I looked to it several feet away. I looked to my adversary. But he had his back to me then. He had turned for the window.

That was then I realized nothing in the room had been disturbed. None of the artifacts in the glass cases had fallen. The leaves of the tree were silent. The half-finished glass of water on the counter was as still as an alpine lake. And yet, I had definitely felt the room shaking. It hadn’t been me. Nothing had gripped me. I had been free to move and had even stutter-stepped back and forth as I tried to keep my balance.

The chef lifted his mask halfway off his head and shuffled to the window in his parka to peer through the tiny hole in the glass. He had plush house slippers on his feet, as if he’d just retired for his evening pipe.

With his attention momentarily distracted, I drew the wand with the splinter-frayed end. I thrust it toward him and one of the sinks in the circular counter behind me exploded in water, as if a pipe burst. I immediately dropped the wand and held up the talisman, hoping whatever magic it contained was enough to keep his spells at bay, for a moment at least, while I attempted a retreat. I pulled it free from my neck and thrust it before me with such force that the pendant swung hard back and forth, knocking against my fingers.

“So,” he said with his back to me. “You have not come to kill me.” He dropped his drum and pulled his mask off his head and touched the hole in the glass with one finger.

My heart was pounding in my chest. My skin felt cold. For a moment I thought it was shock, but then I saw my breath billow from my mouth.

“Nonononono.”

I was only halfway to my feet. I scrambled back until my back hit the gate that held the chair. I tried to shake the vision from my head, but it was too late. To my left, where the stacked-stone doors had stood, there was now a line of birch trees, the entrance to a thick grove, branches capped in snow. Snow was everywhere. I was sitting in it. The chef was standing in it. It appeared as if he and I and the big tree and few random furnishings from his sanctum had been suddenly transported to the wilds of Alaska. I could see mountains in the deep distance, little more than a jagged gray horizon.

I heard the wasps before I saw them. A faint but insistent hum, somewhere between a buzz and a rattle, rose from the shadows of the grove. There were thousands, maybe more, infesting the trees. I saw paper nests in the branches and winged insects crawling from holes they’d burrowed in the trunks. Green leaves were falling to the snow, one every few moments, as if chewed off at the stem.

To my right was a long, sloping embankment that ended at a distant rise. Perched at the top of it, so far away that I could’ve blocked the sight of him with half my thumb, was the giant wolf. His tail was up and one paw was raised, as if he had stopped in mid-flight to see if he were being followed. I could see the trail of his footprints in the snow as they dashed from the grove and up the shallow slope. He just stood there, watching me.

“He calls to you,” the chef said.

The bright colors of his parka seemed to glow against the pale bleakness of the snow. His gaze fell on the distant rise, on the wolf.

“You can see that?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, turning to me. “My eyes have been opened, as yours must be.”

I heard the rustle of the wasps in the trees. Two more leaves fell. I looked back to the wolf. It was waiting.

The chef took a few steps through the snow in his house slippers. I could hear it crunch under his feet. He lifted the heavy parka over his head. The bright feathers rustled loudly and he dropped it to the ground. I could see his breath. And my own.

“He calls to you,” he said again, “but you do not answer.”

I felt warmth behind me which quickly turned to heat. And not the pleasant kind. I turned and what I saw made me scramble back toward the chef in the slushy, melting snow.

A horizon of fire—mirrored above and below as if one burning lake hung inverted over another. Something was in the gap beyond it. Something . . . terrible. Not terrible like the acts of a serial killer. Terrible like the voice that drives him to do it. And laughs.

And then it was over, as if the visions of ice and fire canceled each other out, and once again I was on the floor in the chef’s sanctum.

A green leaf fell. But not in my vision. It broke free from the big tree and landed on the floor several feet from me. It was weak and wilted like three-day-old lettuce.

Man, there was so much to see when that place was lit. Not just the wall of books or those big stacked-stone doors but the vaulted ceiling and the stained glass and the gilding and all of it. I was facing the chair, and I saw where the chains that ran through the metal loops in the stone slab glowed a faint red, as if the chair had been rocking back and forth with such speed and friction that they were heated like an oven coil.

I looked at the yellowed bones studded with irregular nails. “What is it?” I asked

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like a throne.”

It was awful. And magnificent.

“And so it is. That is the throne of Bolochai,also known as Amaimon, prince of devils. Say the name.”

“Bolochai,” I answered without thought. I turned to him. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

He had moved behind the circular counter. His feathered parks was on the floor. I had been staring at the chair long enough that he’d wiped up most of the water from the exploding sink. I saw the wet kitchen towel crumbled on the counter top. He was grinding fresh spices with a mortar and pestle. I could smell them. Like the earth. He didn’t look up. Fucker was so calm. Like we hadn’t just been trying to kill each other moments before.

“No,” he said, almost pleasantly. “But I wanted him to hear you say that.” He turned to the chair. “He is very arrogant. Hence the throne.”

The chef dumped the powdered spice into a stainless steel bowl as I rose on shaky legs and stood, perfectly still, like I was standing on a landmine. He sprinkled multicolored peppercorns into the ceramic mortar. They clinked as they fell.

“The chains that hold the chair,” he explained as he worked, “are bolted to the ground in six places, which form the hexagram. Two chains, each forming a triangle, facing each other. One to summon and one to bind.”

I heard the crunch, crunch, crunch of his grinding.

“How did you manage that?”

I stepped to the gate. It was electric. Standing so close to it. I could feel the heat coming off the chains, which were dark again but still smoking hot.

“I didn’t. In the sixteenth century, Amaimon possessed the niece of the king of Poland. A spoiled girl with a wicked heart. After the death of her husband, she made easy prey. For decades, he lived in her castle slaughtering her maids and bathing in their blood, or drinking it outright.”

“The Bathory legend.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“It was popular with some girls at my school.”

He frowned. “That’s unfortunate. There was unimaginable depravity. The draining of children until their eyes were hollow and their hearts stopped beating in their chests. Amaimon preferred a warm bath.”

He mixed the freshly ground pepper with some cut mushrooms and lit a second burner. I haven’t ever seen mushrooms like that before, dark and shriveled, almost like prunes.

“With his family and thence his own throne under threat, the king ordered the demon removed, but inside his keep, Amaimon was too powerful. He needed to be lured away under his own will.

“History records that the Polish saint Stanislaus Kostka, whose father was Lord Zakroczym, senator under the king, died at the age of eighteen in a monastery in Italy. He was canonized merely for being a pious youth. A bit odd, wouldn’t you say?” He glanced to me for the briefest of moments before turning to his work. He seemed like he was having fun.

I shrugged.

“In truth, Saint Kostka’s death was faked and he was inducted into a secret order. In 1607, after a long career battling the occult forces set loose by overzealous Protestant Reformers—who often failed to realize that gold-crusted altars often hid dark secrets inside—Kostka led a team of warrior-monks onto a lower plane, what you might call a hell, and stole Amaimon’s throne. Kostka himself died in the raid, a sacrifice so that his acolytes might escape.”

“Did they?”

“Oh, yes. The remaining paladins used the stolen throne and a young nun—exceptionally beautiful, of course, and a holy virgin—to lure the narcissistic demon from his keep. They dressed her as a peasant girl and tore open her breast. But the paladins were wise. They were a diversion only. They knew the demon would not expect an attack at the hands of young girl. And it was she who rose up when his back was turned, with training and courage and faith. She imprisoned him, sacrificing herself to lock him inside. She asked nothing in return.”

I looked at it again. I swear it looked back. Right at me. To my soul. It was watching us. It almost seemed pleased. I think it liked being talked about.

“So why do you have it? If he’s that dangerous?”

“He is sometimes useful. He shows me things. Retrieves them. Like a dog.”

I glanced between them, the demon and the sorcerer. “You’re antagonizing him.”

“Impossible. Demons are always angry. It is the defining characteristic of a sentient malevolence, born of cataclysm.” He added a bowl of stock to his cooking mixture and then dry rice, a little at a time. Every few moments he would stir. He was so patient. “But my use of the chair comes at great cost. A single misstep would free him. After centuries of confinement at the hands of those he refused to serve, I cannot imagine the suffering he would wreak in recompense.”

“Couldn’t you just trap him again?”

The chef kept stirring, slowly, and he kept a steady voice.

“Only a saint can perform a miracle, like the young nun whose thankless sacrifice history has not even bothered to record. Someone with proper training in the rites. Someone whose heart is armored by a pure love—such as faith, which is love of the divine. Someone ready to sacrifice themselves without hesitation, as she did, in order that people she’d never met and who would never know her name might be free from evil.” The chef held up his tattooed hand with all five fingers spread. He lowered them one at a time as he spoke. “Knowledge. Love. Courage. Wisdom. And above all, Compassion. These are the characteristics of the saint, who alone accomplishes the impossible. They can overthrow empires without shedding a drop of blood, or ascend to the moon and bring pieces of it back again.”

I stood close to the counter and watched him work. He was so calm. So patient. So completely, utterly not threatening.

“You’re not the Lord of Shadows,” I said softly.

He laughed. It sounded almost like a wheeze.

“Is that what you were told? Of course. For each characteristic of the saint, there is an opposite, of which the Lord of Shadows is master. Opposing courage is not timidity but false righteousness, just as the opposite of knowledge is not falsehood but—”

“Deception,” I said

I lowered my head.

Two more leaves fell. They were coming faster now.

He poured liquid from a bowl into a pot on a burner. “Most servants of the dark believe they are superior. But their leaders know the truth: that the darkness is the absence of light and just vulnerable, that it only takes one act of sacrifice to expel this evil. They’ve tried, many times they’ve tried, to cover this world in their shroud. And each time a saint has stood to oppose them, often defeating them with the simplest of kindnesses.

“But the enemy is neither silly nor stupid. They have learned from past mistakes. This time they did not wait for battle. This time they prepared the way. In secret. It is their hope that without a saint to guide us, all will fall into darkness.

“I know not what lies led you here,” my host told me, “but I would guess the answers you seek lie in the demise of the saints. And that is where you should look.”

He was stirring the liquid and adding whitish-brown grains—rice or maybe pasta.

“I hope you are hungry,” he said.

I snorted at the ridiculousness of it. I broke into his home to find his book and take his power, to destroy him if I had to, and now he was making me dinner.

I sat down on the stool. There was a metal disk, like a manhole cover, in the floor of the circular work area. It was half-covered in fallen leaves. I’m certain it opened to the big hearth in the kitchen of the restaurant. If he stoked a bonfire below, the tips of it would just reach that opening. I looked up at the stained glass dome in the ceiling directly above it. The segments around the circle, like the divisions of an astrological calendar, depicted seemingly mythological scenes I didn’t recognize.

Fire below. Heavens above. Mirrored glass facing out to the world, covered in powerful wards. Books to the rear, holding knowledge, holding down the chair. If you sat on it, the inward-facing mirror at the front would be completely obscured by the trunk of the tree, which was in the center of everything. Stone doors to the east. Secret door to the west.

I was inside a veritable magico-spiritual fortress.

I turned to the small round hole I’d made in the window. A feathering of small cracks surrounded it. A larger one, shaped like a hook, had already grown from one side.

“I’m famished,” I said.

I watched him work as another pair of leaves fell from the tree.

“Why are you doing this?”

“You are hungry.”

“No.” I shut my eyes at the ridiculousness. “Why are you helping me? Now?”

“Ah.” He nodded. Then he contemplated his words. “Tell me, Detective. If you were being pursued by your enemies, and you came upon an accident on the side of the road where people were badly injured, would you turn and keep running?”

He added more grains and some of the spice mixture and kept stirring. It smelled really good.

“Are you saying I’m hurt?”

“No, it is not a wound. It is a calling. Quite literally. It usually begins around puberty, occasionally later. And only very occasionally earlier.”

“A calling?”

He nodded.

I thought about the video of me, the seizures. I thought about my year in the hospital and the effect it had on my family. On my life.

“That makes it sound so benign,” I said under my breath. “I had a complete psychotic break. My parents barely talked to me after that. They still don’t.”

“The trauma is necessary.”

“Necessary?“ I stood. “I was thirteen! Do you have any idea—” I stopped.

I looked at his bald head. At his tattooed palms. At the garb of feathers and the mask and drum on the floor.

“It is necessary,” he said, “to sever the connections to your first life so that you may be born into your second. Had the call not been suppressed, you would have been led through. You would have been led home.”

“Led? By who?”

“An elder. A guru or guide. Had the sickness been allowed to progress, ripples would have been cast and someone would have come, the same way the sound of a car crash brings people from their homes. It never happens otherwise. But I understand your skepticism. Your case in particular is quite difficult.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“In general, there are three types of calling. Healer is most common—a witch doctor or medicine man, someone sent to salve the physical and spiritual insults to the community. After that are the mediums, or conjurers, who can barter with the spirits, or move them by force, and who can contact the ancestors to enlist their advice and aid. It is not unusual, however, for a single individual to serve both functions.

“But nature always seeks a balance,” he said, “the way a rock always falls. There is no guiding intelligence for this—at least not as you would think of it. It’s rather like a pendulum or gyroscope righting itself after a perturbation. It is the natural flow of energy toward the center.

“Humans are a species, a social species. And we are part of nature, whether we admit that or not. When we are perturbed, when a catastrophe—a war or a famine or a plague—leaves the community especially vulnerable, when they are wounded and beset, a third calling emerges, not to heal the sick but the village itself, not to barter with the spirits but to battle them, as immune cells rush to the site of an infection. A defender. A spirit-warrior whose purpose is to confront the dark in times of spiritual sickness, and to beat it back, not for any individual but so the whole community may heal.”

He looked up from his stove then. He looked squarely at me. But his hand never stopped stirring.

“You think it’s an accident that you became a police officer? Or that you were drawn to matters occult? You think that’s happenstance, that it’s simply how things worked out and that if your life were rewound to do over, things could have been otherwise?”

He stared at me from under his bare head for the longest time, waiting for an answer.

I didn’t have one.

“But all balances can be upset,” he warned, eyes turning back to his pot. “Even mine.”

Another leaf broke from its branch and fell twisting to the floor.

“You are called down a path you cannot see. A new being struggles to be. The flesh over your eyes must be torn away, and too the hair from your head, and you must be born again. Nothing less can save you.”

I watched the mixture thicken as he stirred. He added crumbles of hard cheese and dried green flakes and little brown ones and kept stirring. It was hypnotic.

“Last year,” I said. Then I stopped.

He waited a cool minute.

“Last year, it happened again. First time in thirty years.”

“I see.” He frowned. “They gave you pills.”

I reached into my bag and took them out to show him, but he snatched them from me before I could object and tore off the cap and dumped them down the disposal.

“Hey! That was $300 worth of medicine.”

He resumed his stirring. “For some, probably so.”

I looked at the rubber-lined drain in the sink.

“Last year, you say? In autumn?”

“Yeah. Why?”

He nodded weakly as if all made sense.

“A portal was opened then. To a dark place. The call would have been louder then. Like a shriek.”

“A man was hurt because of it,” I said softly. “His family ruined.”

He began scooping the thick mixture into a flap-topped box he pulled from under the counter. I was pretty sure it was a take-out container from his restaurant.

“The burden you carry is larger than you know. Don’t add to it that which is not yours. Do not blame yourself for the darkness born that day.” He sealed the container and handed it to me. “For that burden is mine.”

I took it.

“Everything you seek, all your answers, can be found within.”

The box was warm. Steam escaped from the gap between the interlocking lids. The Bistro Indigenes logo was printed on the side.

“In a mushroom risotto?”

I heard a faint clink then, as if someone had blown on a wind chime just enough to make one bell brush its neighbor. I turned and saw the crack in the window had opened into a wide C. It was no more than a foot tall, but it cut through one of the handwritten symbols cleanly. I looked at the others, stretching the full length of the space and around to the far wall.

The chef walked around the counter to get a closer look at the glass. He saw my face.

“Do not blame yourself,” he said softly. “An attack was always bound to come.”

Then he raised his hands to the stacked-stone doors, which swung outward silently as if heeding his gesture.

I stood from my stool as he retrieved my gun and handed it to me. Two more leaves fell from the big tree.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked.

“I do not know,” was all he said.

And that was it.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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