Demons (43 page)

Bald Peak Observatory

“This time, Stephen, you must believe in what you see,” Winderson was saying, his voice reverberating from the observatory’s walls, its metal ceiling. “You won’t be able to go where we want you to go unless you
know
it’s all real. Your will won’t be forceful enough; it’ll be compromised. It’s all about
will
, in that place.”

Stephen shook his head. “I can’t believe in it, not that way. . . .”

They were sitting together on the metal steps that led up to the telescope. Part of the room was brightly lit, part in deep shadow. They were drinking coffee. Stephen was only pretending to drink his; he was afraid it might be drugged. If they drugged him, he’d lose all judgment of what was real.

But what Winderson wanted him to believe in . . . no. It was as outrageous as believing that Christ had been resurrected, that “the Buddhas are everywhere, trying to help us, though they are long dead.”

Because if the world Winderson wanted him to visit was real, was more than a sort of psychic shadow, then the demons might’ve been real.

“He must be shown,” Latilla said, crossing the big, echoing room.

She must’ve opened the door,
Stephen thought, but he hadn’t seen her come in.

“I don’t want to ruin him—” Winderson glanced at Stephen, modified the demurral “—pile on too much too soon. He’s got the gift, but he’s fragile.”

“The alignment is tonight. The sacrifice has been made. We have only till exactly ten P.M. He is our only retriever.”

As Latilla came toward them, crossing the canvas tarp that someone had laid over the floor, Stephen saw she was strangely dressed. She wore a robe of some kind—black, with white symbols sewn on it. Runes, maybe. And she was barefoot. She wore a silver circlet, like a metallic headband with a pentagram, pointing downward at the front. Within the pentagram was that familiar rune.

Then another figure came from the shadows—a man in the uniform of a U.S. Army general. But he, too, wore a circlet like Latilla’s around his head. He was barefoot, too. A military uniform, with braid and brass—but he was barefoot. It looked ludicrous, really.

These people,
Stephen decided,
are a little crazy. Definitely, don’t drink the coffee.

“Stephen, this is General Maseck,” Winderson said, taking off his shoes. “General, Stephen Isquerat.”

The general nodded brusquely. He was a gangly man, with a neck slightly too long, a pronounced Adam’s apple, a red mouth so pinched it seemed buttoned shut, a sharp nose, and angry blue eyes that stared at Stephen as if to challenge him to laugh at his bare feet. Stephen noticed they were pale, bony feet.

“We lost touch with Dickinham,” Maseck said, going to a coffee urn set up on a table near the bottom of the stairs.

“He’s dead,” Latilla said blandly. She went to the coffee urn but didn’t take a cup. Instead she took a handful of sugar packets, tore them open with her teeth, and dumped the sugar in her mouth.

Stephen watched her, fascinated. She looked back, he thought, like a snake watching a mouse.

What had she said about Dickinham? He’s dead? She hadn’t said, He was killed in a car accident. Or whatever. She just said that he was dead. As if it weren’t particularly unexpected.

Stephen glanced at the door, wondering if he was so caught up in this thing now that he couldn’t get out.

But there was Jonquil to think of. She was counting on him.

Barefoot now, Winderson stood up, looking at Latilla. “Are you sure Dickinham is dead, mistress?”

“Yes. I have been so informed. He rather carelessly fell afoul of some of the general’s pets. You must all work harder on internal communication.”

Mistress?
Stephen thought. Her whole manner of speaking had changed. The odd, affected character she’d played earlier seemed to have vanished. She seemed imperious now—despite eating handfuls of sugar—and very much in charge, as if she had dropped some kind of pretense. She was a sorceress and a queen.

Maseck’s scowl deepened. “They are not my pets. . . .” He hesitated, seemed to realize he was speaking out of turn. “Mistress, they are a valid experiment.”

“General,” Winderson said. He caught Maseck’s eye.

Maseck glanced at Stephen and shrugged, then sipped his coffee. “What is it, then, we’re going to attempt tonight?”

“There will be no attempt,” Latilla said, swallowing sugar. “There will be a
doing
. This will be accomplished.”

“Yes,” Winderson said.

“Yes,” the general said.

“Uh . . . is—is my assistant around?” Stephen asked. “Glyneth?” He craved someone he could relate to.

“Why do you ask about her?” Latilla said, her tone very careful, as she watched him.

She was still an old woman in an unflattering hairdo, but Stephen found he couldn’t think of her as an old woman anymore. “Um—well she
is
, after all, my assistant,” Stephen said, not understanding why he had to defend his question.

“Yes, so she is,” Winderson said, smiling at him. “But, uh . . . we’re all the assistant you’ll need tonight, Stephen. And remember—Jonquil is counting on you. Now, if you’ll come over here.”

“Has the circle been consecrated properly?” Latilla asked, her voice harsh.

“Yes, mistress,” Maseck said gruffly, as he drew the tarp back, exposing a huge pentagram recently inlaid into the floor in copper strips. The figure was about forty feet across. There were black runes within each point, and in the center was the hook-bottomed cross Stephen had seen before.

“Oh, Jesus,” Stephen murmured under his breath.

Latilla shot him a look that made him think of a reptile spitting poison. “Say no names, for whatever reason, that will interfere with the summoning.” Her voice had become almost a croak.

Stephen found himself staring at the door. Winderson noticed and, all avuncular, took Stephen’s arm. “Right over here . . . stand at this point, Stevie. Oh, and take off your shoes. Helps the energies pass through.”

Stephen hesitated. He
felt
Latilla looking at him. It was as if she were leaning against him with all her physical weight, though she was thirty feet away. “Take them off,” she echoed. Her voice had changed again; lower now, more guttural.

Stephen felt weak in the knees and sank to the floor, began taking off his shoes, though he hadn’t made up his mind to do it.

There was a pressure in his head, a
squeezing
.

H. D. came in, then, taking off his shoes at the door. He was wearing a business suit; and he stripped off the gray jacket as he came, tossing it to one side. Barefoot in an Armani suit, he crossed to one of the points.

Five people for five points.

Stephen felt a
wrongness
that couldn’t be defined or quantified.

“He’s not in the proper state,” Latilla said, glowering at him. Her voice was an inhuman squawk now—the sound of a hinge being torn off with a crowbar.

“Stephen,” Winderson said gently, “just relax. We’re here to help humanity. To set an example—make everyone stronger, more efficient. Open up the world to a new kind of power. It’s just the latest innovation, that’s all it is.”

Looking at the pentagram, Stephen thought:
No—this has to be something ancient.

“You’re going to feel terrific in a moment. You’re going to feel right. You’ll
know
you’re right! Remember, Stephen—the big picture. Something you see from the top of the ladder. It may seem a strange ladder, but this really is the secret of climbing it. Trust me, Stephen. And don’t forget—it’s going to save Jonquil.”

Stephen took a deep breath.

See the big picture.

Help Jonquil.

He nodded. “Let’s do it. I’ll do what I need to do, to help Jonquil. Whatever you need me to do.”

Though Latilla was evidently some kind of priestess, seeming more than ever in charge, it was Winderson who began to chant in some language Stephen had never heard before. It had a strangely familiar ring to it, though. As if he’d heard it sometime, and had forgotten it. And yet . . .

Latilla seemed to be
doing
something. Something he’d never seen anyone do before. She was standing within her point of the pentagram, her arms crossed over her chest, and her head was rolling in a slow circle on her neck. Her whole body was going rigid, veins standing out on her forehead, her neck. The others were watching her, but not Winderson. She shuddered and made a long slow hissing sound.

Then something began to form in the air over the pentagram. Something tenebrous, agitated within itself like a swarm of flies. Something that looked hungrily out at them.

Rostov, Russia

On the other side of the world . . .

Nine of them: holding hands at each point of the nine-pointed figure in the floor of the chamber, the grotto carved into naked rock, under the unknowing city. The smell of burning incense cloyed the room; candles guttered and blew in the niches; a charged breeze stirred Ira’s hair, though there should have been no wind here.

Ira felt as if he were only now waking up from the nightmare. The humiliation, the beatings in a cold cubicle under a searing lightbulb, had been the culmination of a dark journey he’d been on without knowing it. Now in this dim, rocky chamber, in meditative communion with the others, he felt a connection to something that set him above all doubts, all misgivings. He had opened, inside himself, in a way he had never opened before, opened a door he hadn’t known was there, because he had nothing to lose. He’d already lost everything in the torture chamber. He didn’t care what he risked, now, by opening himself utterly to this higher vibration. He understood what had happened to Marcus, and it was all right.

Now, he realized, they were all once more
in place
; he was where he should be. He was doing the appropriate step in the dance of life, and the music was sweet within him. He felt the bottled-up rage clearing away, like something dank and noisome drying under a sudden ray of sunlight.

This cell of the circle had tried more than once; Marcus had had some trouble connecting, even though he was more than Marcus now. Melissa, too, had been distracted, her anger and uncertainty tormenting her: inner torturers. But Marcus had gone into a deep trance of some kind. Now, he had really connected with the higher, and with the white-bearded old priest and Araha and Yanan, as if to help them cross some gap, some interval.

With Melissa and Marcus and Ira at last just where they should be, the darkness lifted.

The walls began to shine. And something began to appear over the figure on the floor. Summoned, sustained there, by all of them. A living community of light: the Gold in the Urn. And then a man—conveyed by the Gold from the far side of Death.

Bald Peak Observatory

Stephen felt a tugging from Latilla. She stood opposite him, and she was looking at him, her head skewed so far to one side it looked as if she had broken her neck. She made a come-here gesture, and he found himself walking toward her, into the face in the center of the pentagram.

Into ecstasy.

A dark ecstasy, a nightmarish glory that seemed to lift him into the air with sheer rushing delight. It was sexual, and more than sexual: rapture and a thundering cascade of megalomania. He felt as if the rush were lifting him off the floor. It was like his charged blood was itself straining toward the ceiling and carrying him up with it.

“Ahhhh. . . .
Jonquilll
,” he heard himself say quite uncontrollably.

He saw her then—Jonquil floating before him, naked, arms open, lips parted, labia parted, breasts in a slow-motion weightless dance. “Stephen!”

The two of them were floating—and he realized with a cracked joy that he was staring down at the others, that he was levitating ten feet above the center of the pentagram. Some part of his mind registered distantly that not one of those watching him seemed in the least surprised.

He reached for her, but the swarming in the air around him thickened and he could see nothing but a tornado of black dots, each one embodying some intense earthly desire squeezed into a throbbing mote.

He was hoisted to an unknown center point, felt himself locked to some kind of axis through the engine of energies lifting him. He could feel that axis—almost as an axle, a long rod connected to the infinite fires of all chaos—going right through him, penetrating him under the sternum, pinning him in space. He could feel it rotating inside him, a spike of energy that burned as bright and hot as an acetylene torch.