The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) (19 page)

      
If there is one thing to expect from Simon Azar’s burgeoning new religious movement, it is the unexpected. Though the baseline humanistic message is a familiar one, everything else
about the Order of New Enlightenment feels as fresh and necessary as the Arab Spring. A religion a thinking person can grasp on to, it is a backlash against needless ritual, as well as against the watery agenda and vague promises of the New Age movement.

      
Mr. Azar’s theology embraces, rather than denies, the human condition. It is an admission that we do not have all the answers and should conduct our search with science, reason, and self-awareness, rather than with fantastical claims and anachronistic ideals that serve only to retard the progress of the human race.

      
Exhibiting a rare adeptness with social media for a religious leader, he attracts followers from a cross-section of humanity. From Christians to Jews, agnostics to atheists, biker gangs to boardrooms, scientists to Scientologists, it seems half the world is listening to Mr. Azar and shaking their heads in agreement. Human nature is not evil, but complicated and evolutionary? Sexuality should be glorified rather than vilified? A church should have no puerile, dogmatic requirements of ritual?
       
More, please.

      
The only flaw is the all-too-familiar condition in cults—and Ponzi schemes—that adherents pass through certain “stages”
before reaching the “inner circle” of “enlightenment.” Yet Mr. Azar even has a clever explanation for this: Like any other form of knowledge, he says, religious or scientific or otherwise, comprehension comes in stages. A medical student would never perform brain surgery on day one, just as an attorney would never argue before the Supreme Court without years of training. Though it brings to mind unfortunate comparisons with the sort of veiled, cloak-and-dagger elitism found in Mormon hierarchy, the occluded halls of Scientology, or even the Catholic Church, Mr. Azar’s gifted rhetoric softens the comparisons. Whether he is sincere remains to be seen.

      
His detractors have called him a greedy demagogue, a charlatan, even the Antichrist. Yet the exodus in recent years from traditional Western religions, combined with the unprecedented growth of the Order of New Enlightenment, is a wake-up call to religious leaders.

      
No longer are we cavemen huddled beneath the stars, peering in awe at the passage of the moon through the night sky. Nor are we medieval peasants purchasing indulgences for salvation, or New World pilgrims imposing puritanical mores on a delicate village ecosystem. The existential questions of mankind have not changed, and they likely never will. What has changed is our perspective.
       
As Mr. Azar preaches, we need a new religion for a new age, and at least for the moment, the Order of New Enlightenment is
doing a better job than its more venerable counterparts at plugging that gaping and inexplicable hole in the human psyche—the one that must ask why.

Darius browsed the comments, then scanned a recent mention of the murders on a weird-crime news blog called
Shep’s 911
.

Has anyone else noticed that major Satanists are being offed like deer in Alabama? I don’t know about you people, but this is the sort of thing that gives me the cold sweats at night. Either we’ve got Captain America of the fundamentalist world on our hands, or else we’ve got a power struggle going on that makes the Mafia wars seem like a game of blind dodgeball.
       
What’s worse is no one’s talking about it. Every time the Feds or the po-po get real quiet, you can bet something nasty’s going down. Anyone out there have any 411 for the Shepster on the murders of Matthias Gregory and the Black Cleric? What’re we dealing with here? Do I need to keep my children locked in a Swiss bank vault at night? Brush their teeth with holy water? I’m counting on all you freaks to help me on this one. Tell the Shepster!

He closed the laptop in amusement, not failing to see the irony that the ridiculous blog entry was much closer to the truth than the
New Yorker
piece. The beauty of the Order of New Enlightenment’s system was that the identity of the inner circle would always be kept secret, and no one would ever know what they were missing. They would study, they would strive, they would yearn, but unless they were ready for the truth, and very few would be, then they would swim in ignorance. Moreover, unwittingly and by their very membership, they would serve to further his secondary goal: the disintegration of traditional religion.

Once the Unveiling occurred, that disintegration would accelerate, the world would look to Simon Azar for answers, and the secondary goal would open the door to the primary.

It would open the door to
Him
.

An unveiling: to remove a veil or covering. To expose what lies underneath. Darius’s job was easy, because the reputation of the greatest religion the world had ever known had been in decline for some time, twitching on its bed of geriatric rituals and employee scandal.

And he was about to deliver the death blow.

T
he tunnel led right to the street, just underneath a sewer grate. Stone workman steps had been cut into the wall below the grate, and Grey climbed out. The night air had never tasted so sweet. He replaced the grate and melted into the darkness.

Grey was always a careful man, but as he returned to his hotel in the deep of night, twisting and turning through back alleys until stumbling into a cab on a more crowded street, he found himself looking over his shoulder with every step, heart still thumping.

He walked into his hotel room, taking the time only to bandage his wound with the small medical kit in his pack. The knife wound turned out to be not that deep, the hospital a risk he couldn’t take. Then he grabbed his backpack and slipped through a side door, walked a few streets over, and jumped into a taxi. He had paid for two nights in advance, and didn’t want anyone to know he had checked out.

He didn’t know what was more disturbing: being helped by a beautiful girl who kept disappearing into thin air, being chased by a pack of bloodthirsty Satanists who knew his name, or taking a plane to London in pursuit of a mysterious figure who terrified both the bloodthirsty Satanists and the girl.

Grey breathed a sigh of relief once he entered Charles de Gaulle Airport, but part of him, still shaking with horror and rage, wanted to stay in Paris and hunt down every last one of those bastards.

Damn
them. The image of that girl, hanging upside down and bleeding into a bowl like a slaughtered animal, wouldn’t leave his head. Preying on the weak and helpless, performing their ghastly rituals while their victims quivered in fear… he put a hand on the wall and breathed through his nose.

Four a.m.

Two hours to go before he could buy a one-way ticket to London. He slumped in a corner and devoured an energy bar from his backpack. The first call he made was to Jacques. Grey kept him on the phone for an hour, providing every last detail of his descent into the catacombs, knowing the French police would find nothing but empty, bloodstained tunnels.