Seduction: A Novel of Suspense (7 page)

They were Malachai’s holy grail. Jac knew he lusted after finding one the way some men lust after money and power.

“Bribery will not change my mind. Your well-being is more important,” he said.

“I’m surprised to hear you say that. I didn’t think there was anything you wanted more than finding a memory tool.”

“You wound me, Jac. Do you really think I’d sacrifice your safety for some object?”

She studied his face in the firelight. Until that moment, if she’d been asked that question she might have said she wasn’t sure. Malachai didn’t just study reincarnation. He believed in it deeply. It was the reason he’d been at Blixer Rath in the 1990s.

Like Jung, Malachai theorized that many people suffering from what traditional therapists think are personality disorders are in fact suffering from past-life issues. Memories of other incarnations that are bubbling to the surface and causing fears, phobias, anxiety, even alternate personalities. They believed many issues could be tracked back to unresolved past-life conflicts demanding attention in this life.

Malachai had been at the clinic because regression therapy was part of their protocol. Using hypnosis, he explored patients’ recent and more buried pasts. Jac hadn’t been a good subject, though. Under hypnosis, she hadn’t been able to regress any further back than her own recent childhood.

Reincarnation was not Malachai’s passion, it was his lifeblood. Jac admired him for his zeal and for believing in something so profoundly. Envied his certainty. She questioned everything and yearned for a code, a creed. Jac had always wanted to be one of those people who know exactly who they are and operate from a position of unquestionable loyalty to their core.

Instead she was fascinated by all beliefs, myths and legends but had faith in none. If pressed, the only thing in the world she was sure of was that no matter how deeply you care about someone—friend, family or lover—sooner or later, one way or another, you will be hurt or disappointed. She had come to believe in the instability of the known. Time and experience had made her a cynic.

Mythfinders,
both the book and TV show, was a cynic’s look at mythology. The stories had value as metaphor, of course. But she thought it was important to expose the fragile ground fables stood on. Jac hoped by tracing a myth back to the actual person or event whence it had sprung, and showing how that small moment had been
exaggerated and romanticized into a fantasy, she’d help people manage expectations. Trying to live up to grandiose ideals made life more difficult. Yearning to be who we cannot be, for what we cannot accomplish, engenders discontent.

Hadn’t she seen it firsthand? Her father had exhausted himself trying to live up to the family legends and lost most of what he’d cared about in the process. Her mother’s ambition to achieve literary goals beyond her talent had so destroyed her self-esteem she’d turned to ruinous affairs.

But the opposite of what Jac had imagined had happened with
Mythfinders
. People found it inspiring. The kernel of proof she tried to show was so small backfired. To know the legends had sprung from reality—even a kernel of reality—was empowering and encouraging. Her followers had found hope in her deconstructions.

“Well, if that’s your best shot, you’ve failed,” Jac said, folding up Theo’s letter and putting it back in the envelope Malachai had left on the desk. “You haven’t given me a good enough reason to refuse the invitation.”

“Your safety isn’t a good enough reason?” he asked.

“It would be if I believed my safety were actually at stake. But what you’re saying is vague. All you can tell me is that when we were both teenagers, Theo and I were potentially—what? Partners in crime? I know that. I remember the rules we broke that summer.”

“You didn’t just break rules. You fell under his spell. You were attracted to his need to seek out and put himself in danger. You hiked on unexplored trails that were off-limits. Stayed out past curfew. He offered you wine and you drank it. Marijuana and you smoked it—”

“I was a fourteen-year-old and had a crush on him.”

“It was more serious than that. You were susceptible to him in a profound way.”

“Maybe I was but I was just a kid.”

“What if I told you that you still could be susceptible to him? We had to send him home, Jac. We couldn’t treat him. He still might be untreated.”

“It was seventeen years ago. He was a sixteen-year-old kid in some
kind of distress. Do you realize, even for you, how illogical and farfetched this all sounds?”

“No matter what I say, you’re determined to go, aren’t you?”

“Stop talking in riddles. What else could you say?”

“He could seduce you, Jac. And I don’t just mean sexually. I mean emotionally. At your core. He could use you to achieve his goals.”

“Malachai, you’re talking about it as if you think he’s some kind of evil sorcerer.”

“As far as you are concerned, I think he is.”

For the last two years, it had become the habit of our household and closest friends to hold séances often, if not every night. We turned off the gas lamps and lit candles, two on the mantel and two on the sideboard. We sat around our card table, with one of us placing his or her fingers on the small stool in its center, and took turns asking questions while my son François-Victor kept track of the responses. Often the spirits who visited spoke so much, the sessions lasted long past midnight, but no one seemed to mind.

Whether we returned time and again to the table out of boredom or fascination, I cannot speak for anyone but myself. For me it became an obsession to talk to my Didine again. I wanted her to reassure me of her place in the light and of her peace. She rarely visited us. Only twice since the initial stop had she returned, and then only briefly.

I was bereft. Her teasing appearances had increased my sense of loss. She’d left us once in the flesh, and now as a spirit again. Instead of my mourning lessening, it had become sharper. My grief seemed rawer for the fleeting glimpses of her soul.

Apart from my desire to communicate with Didine, the séances were a huge success. More than that, they were shocking. Our little group had become the conduit for attracting the most amazing minds
of all civilization, who all arrived in order to speak to me and impart their wisdom: Shakespeare, Dante, Mozart, Hannibal, Walter Scott, Joan of Arc, Moses, Judas, Galileo, Napoleon, and yes, as blasphemous as it sounds, even Jesus Christ visited with us. Over one hundred and fifteen different souls, some not even figures but abstract concepts with names like India, Metempsychosis, and Ocean.

But this journal is not about the talks we had with those great sages; I’ve done other writings regarding them. The purpose of this journal is to write of the one who snaked his way into my soul and almost destroyed me. And, my dearest friend, Fantine, almost destroyed you too.

On the night of the eighth, we were seated around our table trying to raise a spirit when I heard a barking dog. This wasn’t the sound of a typical country hound howling at a chicken. This was a ferocious and yet forlorn noise. After a few moments, other dogs joined in. An unholy cacophony befitting mythology’s hellhounds. You have heard of these creatures, have you not? They are described as supernaturally fast dogs with malevolent glowing red or yellow eyes. Their duties are said to include guarding the entrance to the world of the dead, hunting lost souls and protecting supernatural treasures. It is written that if you look into their eyes three times you most surely will die. To hear them howl is an omen of death or even worse.

We were all distracted and discussed the jarring howling, conjecturing what might have happened to set the dogs off. In the midst of our conversation, my wife rose from her chair. “This situation with the dogs has unnerved me,” she said, and told us she was retiring for the evening.

I was not eager to abandon the séance and asked the rest of our party if they would like to remain and see if we could indeed summon a spirit. They agreed, and Charles returned his fingers to the stool.

“I have the sense someone is waiting to speak with us,” he said. “Spirit, are you there?”

I hoped it was Didine. I always hoped it was Didine. In those moments before the spirit announced himself, I yearned for it to be my lovely daughter. But that night, it was not she who answered our pleas. Instead came a spirit very much unwanted.

The first sign was that the air in the room became colder. My daughter Adele left the table and added a log to the fire. But it did nothing to chase away the damp chill that had invaded the room. Outside the wind picked up and blew in through the open windows, extinguishing the candles on the mantel and sideboard. The only light left to illuminate our sad group came from the blazing fireplace. The black spaniel Ponto, who did not belong to us but had adopted us, began to growl, low and deep in her throat. Our cat Grise hissed and scampered up the stairs.

“Who is there?” Charles asked.

Finally the tapping began, and with it so did the voice I heard inside my head during the séances, the otherworldly voice whose words corresponded perfectly to the translations François-Victor would later provide.

A friend who can help.

“Help with what?” I asked.

Find Leopoldine.

The chill in the room entered into me. My blood’s temperature lowered. I felt as if I were being frozen from inside and my heart were turning to ice.

“You mean bring her to us here in these sessions?”

If that is all you wish.

“What else could I wish for?”

No answer.

“Is there another way you can bring her to me?”

Perhaps.

“What do I have to do?”

Prove you are worthy.

“Is it a quest? Are you giving me a test?”

Yes.

“Who are you to demand such a thing?”

We have met before. I’m insulted you do not recognize me.

“You play games with me, sir. Reveal yourself.”

You want your daughter. I can return her to you.

“In spirit?”

Your daughter again by your side.

“What does that mean?”

You will understand in time.

“Why not explain more?”

I cannot reveal more until you have proven.

“Who are you?”

You haven’t guessed?

“No, damn it. Who are you?”

Do you believe in evil?

“Yes.”

You have seen proof?

“Yes, of course. I have seen evil. I have seen men hanged at the gallows. I have seen innocent children beaten. I have seen women starve to death.”

And you believe in independence and intellectual freedom?

“Of course. For all men. For all time.”

Of all the archangels, who represents those?

I was almost afraid to say his name. In awe of the idea that was forming in my mind.

Who?

“Lucifer.”

Yes, he who is feared and revered. Like you, Hugo. Your intellect and insights both revered and feared, yet you are no devil, are you?

“No.”

For a man of letters you are quite monosyllabic.

I could not help myself, I laughed. The tapping did not abate, the voice in my mind did not pause.

Here is your test. I request a great poem, bard. To resurrect me and show me for what I am. To the spirit that is mine and that is yours. The spirit of man soaring, achieving, creating, not being beaten down by the hypocrisy of small-minded, power-hungry men. The title is up to you—but I think The End of Lucifer. Or perhaps you might use my other name. The one I prefer.

I did not have to ask. I knew the name he preferred and whispered it.

“The Shadow of the Sepulcher?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. In fact he chose that moment
to leave. I knew because the room was no longer cold. My blood warmed too. I didn’t realize I had been shivering until I stopped.

Making my excuses, I went upstairs posthaste. I had developed the habit of transcribing the evening’s conversations immediately afterward, while they were still fresh in my mind.

Our house, as you know, Fantine, faces the ocean. Upstairs in my room, it is as if I am perched on the very tip of a precipice with the great foaming waves beneath my window. I wrote in a letter to Franz Stephens that “I inhabit this immense dream of the ocean; slowly I become a sleepwalker of the sea. Faced with these prodigious sights and that enormous living thought in which I lose myself, there is soon nothing left of me but a sort of witness to God.”

That night, as I usually do in these
après-séance
writing sessions, I flung open the windows and took in great gulps of the sea-washed air. I had smoked a bit of hashish before the event. Now I relit my pipe, stood at my desk and transcribed the words the Shadow had spoken to me.

With nothing to distract me but the ink flowing onto the paper, the walls of my resistance crumbled in these sessions. The rules of logic relaxed. I opened my mind to the possibilities of the night, to the magic of the dark, to unfathomable ideas that had been presented to me.

I am blind to everything but the scrawls of black moving across the paper when I write. I didn’t hear the house hum around me, or my own heart beat, or the waves pound on the rocks. I only hear the words that I set down. Though not my words, no. During those
après-séance
writing sessions I was no different from a scribe recording the words spoken by another. The spirits revisited me in my aerie, elaborating and elucidating to me as if the séances were but rehearsals and these communions the true ones.

After I transcribed the exchange above from the spirit who identified himself as the Shadow of the Sepulcher, I was bathed in sweat. My large room, even with the windows open, was suffocating. I needed to escape. To breathe the night air and find some comfort in the corporeal world. I would go to Juliette’s, I decided. The walk to my mistress’s
home would revive me, and then I could climb into her bed and she would soothe me.