Stalking the Nightmare (5 page)

“He won’t harm you. He serves only one purpose: he opens all locks. Take a hair from my head … don’t argue with me, Chris, do it… please…” And because her voice was now barely a whisper, he did it. And she said, “He’ll demand a hair of your head. Don’t give it to him. Make him take mine. And this is what you say to invoke his presence …”

In her last minutes she went over it with him till he realized she was serious, that she was not delirious, that he ought to write it down. So he transcribed her words exactly.

“Once you get the bahut opened, all the rest will be clear. Just be careful, Chris. It’s all I have to give you, so make the best of it.” Her eyes were half-closed and now she opened them completely, with effort, and looked at him. “Why are you angry with me?”

He looked away.

“I can’t help it that I’m dying, dear. I’m sorry, but that’s what’s happening. You’ll just have to forgive me and do the best you can.”

Then she closed her eyes and her hand opened and the cloisonne herb container fell to the carpet; and he was alone.

He spoke to her, though he was alone. “I didn’t love you enough. If I’d loved you more it wouldn’t have happened.”

It’s easy to be smart, later.

By the time he was twenty-five, Chris had read everything he could find on the arcane subject of love. He had read Virgil and Rabelais, Ovid and Liu Hsiao-Wei, Plato’s
Symposium
and all the Neoplatonists, Montaigne and Johannes Secundus; he had read everything by the English poets from the anonymous lyrics of the 13th to 15th centuries through Rolle, Lydgate, Wyatt, Sidney, Campion, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, Blake, Burns, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Robert Browning and Emily Bronte; he had read as many translations as existed of the Sanskrit
Kama Sutra
and the
Anangaranga,
which led him to the Persians; he read
The Perfumed Garden
of the Sheik Nefzawi, the
Beharistan
of Jami and the
Gulistan
of Sa-Di, the anonymously-written
Trtdib ul-Niszvan
and the
Zenan-Nahmeh
of Fazil Bey, which led him to seven Arabic handbooks of sex, which he quickly put aside: sex was not the issue, he understood that as well as anyone need to. Understood it well enough to write in his journal:

I was making love to Connie Halban when her husband Paul came back unexpectedly from a business trip. When he saw us he began crying. It was the most awful thing I’d ever stood witness to. I was reminded of Ixion, tied to a turning wheel in Hades as punishment for making love to Zeus’s wife, Hera. I’ll never touch another married woman. It simply isn’t worth the torture and guilt.

And so he was able to avoid all the texts that dealt solely with physical love in its seemingly endless permutations. He made no value judgments; he understood early on that everyone sought True Love in often inarticulate ways they often did not, themselves, understand; but his was an idealized, traditional concept of what True Love was, and his search for the grail need not be sidetracked or slowed by excursions into those special places.

He read Waley’s translation of
The Chin P-ing Mei
and everything even remotely pertinent by Freud; he sought out
La Fleur Lascivie Orientale
and the even rarer English translation of
Contes Licencieux de Constantinople et de I’Asie Mineure;
he dipped into the memoirs of Clara Bow, Charles II, Charlie Chaplin, Isadora Duncan, Marie Duplessis, Lola Montez and George Sand; he read novelists—Moravia, Gorky, Maupassant, Roth, Cheever and Brossard—but found they knew even less than he.

He absorbed the thoughts of the aphorists, and believed every utterance; Balzac: “True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.”; Moliere: “Reason is not what directs love.”; Terence: “It is possible that a man can be so-changed by love as hardly to be recognized as the same person.”; Voltaire: “Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.”; La Rochefoucauld: “When we are in love, we often doubt what we most believe.”

Yet even nodding his agreement with every contradictory image and representation of love—seen as Nature, God, a bird on the wing, sex, vanity—he knew they had perceived only the barest edge of what True Love was. Not Kierkegaard or Bacon or Goethe or Nietzsche, for all their insight, for all their wisdom, had any better idea of what True Love looked like than the commonest day-laborer.

The
Song of Solomon
spurred him on, but did not indicate the proper route to discovery.

He found the main path on that night in February of 1968. But once found, he was too frightened to set foot upon it.

Surgat, a subordinate spirit to Sargatanas who, in the Descending Hierarchy from Lucifer to Lucifuge Rofacale, opens all locks, came when Chris Caperton summoned him. He was too insignificant a demon to refuse, no matter how ineptly couched the invocation. But he was less than cooperative.

Chris used Siri’s blood to draw the pentagram of Solomon on the floor. He didn’t think about what he was doing … that he was dipping his finger in the blood of the woman who lay covered with a sheet on the sofa … that he had to do it repeatedly because it was getting thick … that he had been warned all ten sides of the five-pointed star enclosed in a circle must be without break … he just did it. He did not cry. He just did it.

Then he set candles at the five points and lighted them. Every apartment in Saigon in those days had a supply of candles.

Then he stood in the exact center of the runes and lines and read from the dictation he had taken. Siri had assured him if he stayed within the pentagram he would be safe, that Surgat only opened locks and was not really powerful enough to cause him trouble … if he kept his wits about him.

The words were contained in the
Grimorium Verum
and Siri had said they need not be spoken precisely, nor need Chris worry about having done the special cleansing necessary when summoning the more powerful Field Marshals of Lucifer’s Infernal Legions.

He read the words. “I conjure thee, Surgat, by the great living God, the Sovereign Creator of all things, to appear under a comely human form, without noise and without terror, to answer truly unto all questions that I shall ask thee. Hereunto I conjure thee by the virtue of these Holy and Sacred Names. O Surmy
†
 Delmusan
†
Atalsloym
†
Charusihoa
†
Melany
†
Liamintho
†
Colehon
†
Paron
†
Madoin
†
Merloy
†
Bulerator
†
Donmeo
†
Hone
†
Peloym
†
Ibasil
†
Meon…” And on and on, eighteen more names, concluding with, “Come, therefore, quickly and peaceably, by the Names Adonai, Elohim, Tetragrammaton!
Come!”

From across the Saigon River he could hear the sound of the city’s rockets, flattening Charlie’s supposed emplacements. But in the little apartment on Nguyen Cong Tru Street everything began to shimmer and wash down like the aurora borealis.

It was an apartment no longer. He stood on the polished wood floor, inside the pentagram of Solomon, but the polished wood floor came to an end at the edges of Siri’s dried blood. Beyond lay a fallen temple. Great gray stones, enormous and bearing the marks of claws that had ripped them loose from mountains, tumbled and thrown carelessly, rose up around Chris. And out of the shadows something came toward him.

It slouched and dragged its arms behind as it came out of the darkness. When the flickering illumination from the candles struck it, Chris felt sick to his stomach. He clutched the paper with Siri’s words as if it would save him.

Surgat came and stood with the point of one goat-hoof almost touching Siri’s blood. Chris could smell where it had been and what it had been doing when he had interrupted its dining. He felt faint and could not breathe deeply because of the smell Surgat had carried from its mess hall.

The head of the demon changed. Toad to goat to worm to spider to dog to ape to man to a thing that had no name.

“Open the lock of the casket,” Chris yelled. He had to yell: the sound of wind was overpowering, deafening, insane.

Surgat kicked the bahut. Chris had left it, as Siri had instructed, outside the pentagram. Surgat kicked it again. No mark was put on the coffer, but where the demon’s foot had rested in the dust of the fallen temple’s floor, a cloven footprint burned and smoked.

“Open the lock!”

Surgat leaned forward and shrieked. Words poured forth. They made no sense to Chris. They were from a throat that was not human. If a hyena had been given the ability to speak with the tongue of a man, it would have sounded less guttural, less deranged, less terrifying.

Siri had said the demon would be troublesome, but would finally do as bidden. It had no choice. It was not that important or powerful a spirit. When Chris remembered that assurance, and perceived just how staggering was the sight before him, he trembled at the thought of one of Surgat’s masters. “Open it, you goddam ugly sonofabitch! Open it right now!”

Surgat vomited maggots that hit an invisible plane at the edge of the pentagram. And babbled more words. And reached out a lobster-claw that stopped just outside the invisible plane. It wanted something.

Then Chris remembered the hair from Siri’s head. It will want the hair of a fox, she had said. Forget that. It will try to get a hair from
your
head. Whatever you do, don’t let it have one. All of you is contained in each hair; you can be reconstructed from a hair; then it has you. Give it mine.

He extended her long, thick strand of hair.

Surgat screamed, would not take it. Chris extended it through the invisible plane. Surgat pointed to Chris’s head and pulled long strips of bleeding flesh from its body and threw them against the fallen stones where they plopped with the sickening sound of meat against concrete. Chris did not move. The hair hung down outside the invisible plane.

Surgat screamed and capered and tore at itself.

“Take it, you disgusting sonofabitch!” Chris yelled. “Take it and be damned, she
died
to give it to you, puking garbage dump! Take it or get nothing! Nothing’s worth this, not even that thing she looked for all her life! So
take it,
you crummy piece of shit!
Take it
or go back where you came from and let me alone!”

The words Surgat spoke became very clear, then. The voice modulated, became almost refined. It spoke in a language Chris had never heard. He could not have known that it was a tongue unspoken for a thousand years before the birth of Christ: Surgat spoke in Chaldean.

And having spoken, having acknowledged obedience at the threat of being dismissed without the proper license to depart, the threat of being trapped here in this halfway place of fallen stones, and the wrath of Asmoday or Beelzebuth, the lock-picking demon ran its tentacle forward and took Siri’s hair. The hair burst into flame, the flame shot up toward the shadowed ceiling of the fallen temple, Surgat turned the flame on the casket … and the flame washed over the wood … and the casket opened.

Quickly, Chris read the final words on the paper he held. “O Spirit Surgat, because thou hast diligently answered my demands, I do hereby license thee to depart, without injury to man or beast. Depart, I say, and be thou willing and ready to come, whensoever duly exorcised and conjured by the Sacred Rites of Magic. I conjure thee to withdraw peaceably and quietly, and may the peace of God continue for ever between me and thee. Amen.”

And Surgat looked across the pentagram’s protective plane and said, in perfectly understandable English, “I do not go empty-handed.”

Then the demon slouched away into the shadows, the aurora borealis effect began again, rippling and sliding and flowing down till he was in his own apartment again. Even then he waited an hour before leaving the charmed circle.

To discover that as Siri had promised, everything had its price. Surgat had not gone empty-handed.

The body of his lover was gone. He could not look at what had been left in its place.

He began to cry, hoping it
had
been an exchange; hoping that what lay on the sofa was not Siri.

The bahut contained more items than its outside dimensions would have indicated. It held grimoires and many notebooks filled with Siri’s handwriting. It held talismans and runic symbols in stone and silver and wood. It held vials of powders and hair and bird-claws and bits of matter, each vial labeled clearly. It held conjurations and phials and philtres and maps and directions and exorcising spells. It held the key to finding True Love.

But it also held Siri’s observations of what had happened to her when she had summoned the entity she called “the supreme hideousness, the most evil of the ten Sephiroths, the vile Adrammelech.” He read the ledgers until his eyes burned, and when his fingers left the pages, the paper was smudged with his sweat. He began to tremble, there in the room where the smell of Surgat’s dining table lingered, and knew he could not summon the strength to summon this most powerful of dark beings.