A Lower Deep

Chapter Two

Somewhere between Mullen and Lincoln, Nebraska, tooling east into the dawn on the dark expanse of I-73, Brenda Hasselman pulled her eighteen-wheeler Blue Moon iron box sharply into a truck stop.

Six diesel islands lay as empty as the four hundred miles and half dozen weigh stations beforehand. She said, "Listen, if you don't start making a little conversation soon I'm gonna boot your ass out right here. And believe me, this coffeepot called Myra's Home Cookin' ain't the place to find yourself thumbing at five in the morning. Myra's real name is Freddy Calhoun and once he starts talkin' about Oswald you got to hear it all. The Mafia, Monroe, Ruby and the Mexicans, KGB, and how it was LBJ himself really up in the book depository. This is the last stop for me until I slide into Aurora and get my six hours' sleep. I'm not asking for a life story, y'understand, but I'm not especially fond of silence. Reminds me of my tight-lipped ex-husband. That man couldn't string a simple sentence together between two cans of beer."

With ratty sneakers and oily duck hunter neon jacket, Brenda Hasselman cut anything but an imposing figure even inside her own Kenworth cab. She drove wearing huge gloves that made her look like a little girl dressed in her father's clothes. She had a kind but aggressively high pitched voice that brought derisive comments from the night radio chatter every time she picked up the mike.

She had the mark of fire on her forehead, the touch of Iblees, king of the Djinn. Jebediah and the others took great pride in matters of detail and had already set my course. I either fought or followed, and the breath of God allowed me the advantage of already knowing what I would do. Brenda Hasselman was just another part of the fetch, a way to see me home again.

She shut off the engine. "You better be well versed in the magic bullet theory. You sure are the weirdest son of a bitch I've met in my last four runs. Not quite as fucked up as the honcho who wanted to sit naked on the roof of the cab and sing 'Hail Columbia' but you got a few knots. You and Freddy Calhoun'll get along just fine."

We were six days from the full moon. The next major sabbat wouldn't be until the Feast of Lights, Oimelc, on February 2, and the next minor not until the winter solstice of December 22. Bridgett was almost certainly the Maiden of the Coven, and she'd clearly been tutored in Jebediah's melodramatic style.

"So, you gonna talk or not?" she asked. "I'm not," I said.

She stared at me for a long time, the touch of djinn marring her otherwise pale and soft face. "I had that feeling. Okay, forget I asked. Good luck to you."

"You too."

I scanned the truck stop and spotted a middle-aged man coming out of the diner with two Styrofoam cups of coffee. He looked tired and I offered to drive and pay part of the gas. He didn't even bother to look me up and down. "Okay," he said. "Sounds good to me."

"I appreciate it."

His forehead burned with the scrawl of Iblees, who had been created out of fire, grown with the angels, and ruled the world before Adam. In refusing to bow before man he had been cast aside like Lucifer. "Where you headed?"

I started his car and said, "Church."

Power of God, murder, and death resisted time. At the edge of the covendom-a radius of three miles from the temple at the center of Jebediah's estate-sat the ruins of the church, half hidden in the snowbound, overgrown thickets.

The belfry appeared scarred by lightning, and two of the three bells lay in the dirt and ice, the third precariously balanced on the rotted cedar shingles of the peak. Birds, animals, and men had nested here in previous winters. Most of the pews and railings had been piled into the middle of the altar for a bonfire, but only been used little by little over the years. Several of the small, stained-glass windows were boarded over but the huge gaping holes in the ceiling remained, with snow wafting about in the shadows.

The crucifix hung by only its bottom bolt, the cross askew but not inverted, hanging sideways. People like the Rumsey's would have thought you'd need to pray to Satan bowing before a black altar, chanting scripture backward, stepping on the holy wafer, and committing sodomy in the pulpit in order to be a witch. That's why they had been used so easily, blind without any form of truth to follow except one based on ridicule of Catholicism; and so the power remained with Catholicism.

Cotton Mather had gotten it wrong again when he wrote, "The witches do say that they form themselves much after the manner of Congregational Churches." The mocked have the strength of the martyred.

Moonlight beat down, and the walls looked as though they'd sweated blood.

The pew where I'd held Dani while she died had been smashed for kindling. I scrawled fiery symbols in the air and the wood lit with the flaring, golden smudges of her murder. I dug through the debris and held the splintered section of stained wood to my chest and wept like a madman, as if she were still with me.

The dust and layers of years peeled back one after the other, down to the marrow of my life. Her blond hair splayed against my thigh, some of the curls torn out by the roots, other patches black and fried. Her broken nose and torn face ran red over my lap.

I'd had to fight back thoughts of resurrection. She coughed and gagged my name, and we whispered the prayers we'd learned in Sunday school together as shrieks echoed for miles across the covendom, the rest of our brethren dying. I kissed her gently, covered with the bite marks of my father, and even in those last moments she sought to soothe my sorrow. Her mouth moved, making plaintive, affectionate sounds. My second self kept his claws to her throat, feeling the pulse steadily fade. I would have relinquished every ounce of majik I'd possessed if only Archangels Michael and Gabriel and the other Cherubim would have held back Azreal from his course as the angel of death. Danielle sputtered blood and tried to smile while I begged forgiveness, and her broken fingers reached for my cheek.

Azreal sneaked beneath my hands and took my love from me.

Give it a rest, Self said. You're stuck in a rut, always living out this same moment.

Break free, leave her where she lies. Go with the penguin. You just need to get laid. Forget about her already.

Say that again.

What?

Say it again.

He blinked and licked his lips. He scurried forward, climbed my shirtfront, hugged me, and moaned.

The mocked have the strength of the martyred.

It was like Jebediah to leave the church standing, willfully disregarding it, repressing the reality of that last night in an attitude of dismissal. To raze it would have been an acknowledgment, and any acknowledgment would have been considered defeat.

He'd been slow in gathering the new coven, much more patient than I would have expected. Ten years making the careful correct choices, whatever he thought they might be. Bridgett proved to be a perfect underling for his consideration. There were many mad and sacrilegious nuns, but few were as beautiful.

I worked through the thickets on an uphill grade, past the pine and sage and several varieties of hazel. Snow burned with the witching moon. I fought through the brush until I broke into the open fields. I approached from the northeast, the symbolic dividing line between the cardinal point of hell's north and the righteous east, and I found a hundred-foot length of wrought-iron spike fencing unconnected to anything else, barring my way.

A gate swung wide a few yards farther on. Once it had been called the devil's door, traditionally opened after baptisms to let demons and original sins escape. Jebediah used it to force the conveners to walk the powerful northern path. It was merely another symbol of darkness, but one grounded in true faith. Jebediah and I had spent years quarreling over such tokens and trivia of belief. It's why I was still alive.

Instead of entering through the gateway I climbed the twelve-foot-high fence and kept heading northeast on as straight a trail as I could.

Until I finally came home to the House of DeLancre.

A stranger might think he'd stumbled on a cathedral built by the worshipers of a hundred different religions. There were signs and meanings nearly obliterated in their fusion of architectural design, but the latent forces remained incredibly powerful. Worlds within worlds, histories and mythologies merging and mating. Flying buttresses expanded out across neo-Roman ramparts. Three-tier elevation dropped off to two and hopped to castle-like cube stairways leading to four- and five-story towers. Basque and Romanesque styles melded with Gothic spires, and occasional dormers and gables faced into each other from across the open quad at the center.

Baroque stone and glass mounted the night surrounded by a canopy of gargoyles and other winged figures. Inside, rooms were shaped as hexagons, seals of Solomon, and pentacles, with many other chambers cut into the Sephiroth and Sephirah angelic symbols, other cabalistic sigils, ancient runes, and swastikas. Corridors dead-ended one day and opened into living quarters the next. Windows had been calculated to throw shadows on the fields spelling out ancient prayers to gods only half believed to be gone. Standing in those shadows on holy days could kill a man or drive him insane with a head full of barely heard whispers. Other secret areas could only be reached by climbing certain roofs and ascending ladders from the outside.

Solomon had commanded the djinn to complete David's temple, and according to the Bible there was neither hammer, nor axe, nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was building. Now that Jebediah had mastery over Iblees, the djinn had continued work on the estate.

Scars remained though, despite the years of rebuilding. Cracks in the foundation, rips across the stone buttresses as if massive talons had scraped and scrabbled for purchase, and tattered chunks of roofing where the House of DeLancre would never again heal.

Pierre answered the door.

The weight of centuries stooped his shoulders and smeared his features across his face like an insect wiped against a pane of glass. His lips nearly drooped off his chin, his Adam's apple nestled so deeply in his chest that it bulged far below his collar. His eyes were so empty that they appeared flat and black as shale.

Dust covered Pierre's bleached flesh, hair, and butler's suit almost as though he'd been laid aside in a closet and only recently brushed off and returned to the world. He would never play the lute again. Too many portions of his soul had been flung far and wide.

Here was the progenitor of the DeLancre family.

At first, a decade ago, I'd believed him to be a reincarnate-a soul trapped by the sins of his sadistic reign over the Basque. PierredeLancre presided as a witch-trial judge in France and sent six hundred people to the stake. He compiled accounts of alleged activities at sabbats.

As a lawyer he'd been obsessed with uncovering criminal activities, and in 1609 he was ordered by Henry VI to deal with witches supposedly plaguing Labourd. The Basques were a mysterious people, mostly sailors who spent months on journeys to Newfoundland, leaving their women to run the villages. Superstition ran high in such a people who upon the men's return would have unbridled feasts, drinking and dancing wildly according to their customs. DeLancre was fascinated with them, and like all witch-hunters his tortures caused mass confessions and implications. He relied primarily on the testimony of children, some of whom testified against their own parents. He played the lute while the faggots burned, and he ordered condemned girls to dance around the immense fires before their own executions.

He'd raped dozens of women and a number of them had survived. Those who were not witches made pacts with the Infernal and became so in order to have justice. His own children had bound him to their lineage and flayed his ghost, and he'd been passed on from generation to generation like the ashes he should have been.

My second self unfurled from around my neck and leaped. Pierre, my man, how things been? Self gave him a wet kiss on the cheek, then sauntered into the hallway. He stared back at me over his shoulder appraising my expression.

I couldn't read exactly what had gone on with his mother and Arioch, or just whose side he would be on when the taking of sides would again be in question. He fidgeted with ecstasy, all those fangs on view in his looming smile, as the cathedrals of the world opened before us. He ran down the corridor squealing. I wondered what I would be without him, if anything at all.

Pierre held his arm out to take my satchel and coat but I waved him off. Jebediah kept the dead like house pets. He enjoyed staring into their eyes and sending them off on meaningless tasks. He dressed them in jesters' costumes and French maid outfits, orangutans and conquistadors, and then invited the wealthy and affluent of the city to masques and costume balls. How he used to laugh when the witches and the murdered danced with the mayor and councilmen and the debutante sixteen-year-old daughters of celebrities.

There was a time Jebediah had sent my own father for me, my dad's shoes on the wrong feet.

Pierre stared at me without expression and said, "Welcome home, most gifted Master Summoner." Even Arioch's voice sounded more human. Pierre DeLancre's hatred of witches had been fanatical in life, and it had grown even worse in the impotence and despair of his resentful, feeble existence. Not many demons had eyes so virulent and ruthless as those of bitter men.

I brushed by him. "Never address me that way again."

"As you wish."

"Where is he?"

"Master DeLancre is in the library."

I walked for ten minutes before realizing that the djinn had moved the library intact to a different section of the manor. This proved to be another game, allowing me to wander lost in Jebediah's sanctum. It showed how much things had changed, and how substantially they remained fixed in a separate hell.

I passed arched and vaulted ceilings, immense stairwells, and open banquet tables where a century ago sovereign rulers licked the convulsing feet of their servants. Self said, This is getting a tad annoying. He licked my finger and drew his bottom teeth down against my wrist hard enough to draw a few drops of blood. I held my palm out and recited a passage from the Nis Kati. Suddenly there was a heavy charge in the air as a draft moved against my face. I looked at my hand and rivulets of my blood flowed upward into my palm in a series of lines, laying out a map for me to follow to the library.

Spirits walked at all hours down the gnarled passages and stairwells. Occasionally one of the Basque women tortured to death by Pierre would drift into the edge of my peripheral vision only to vanish when I glanced over. Other dead sat under furniture and wept or laughed as I moved against the wheels of the labyrinth, passing from one cathedral to the next. Various ancient gods stretched out on the walls. A short corpse dressed in the rags of a tuxedo clambered up the chains of a chandelier and peered down. It took me a moment to recognize him as a former governor who'd died without signing a proposed cut in Jebediah's tax bracket. The frivolity of necromancy.

Depending on which chamber we passed, Self grinned, frowned, or hugged my knee and trembled. We've forgotten too much about this place. There are more puzzles and enigmas now.

Yeah.

No music here the way it was, no real fun, not a hell of a lot left to make a good impression.

It was never any fun.

Black puddles and bone splinters ran beneath doors. Must be the reincarnate maid's day off. Not all hexes soothed. Some prayers could still carry weight long after the devoted had made their pacts. Above, distant shrieks echoed across time and place. Perhaps someone was being sacrificed at this hour or decades in the future or centuries ago, here or in another country where the brutalities of the world moved against anyone who went bare-chested or spread poultices on wounds instead of leeches.

Eventually we stood before the library door. Self tongued the doorknob, tasting the ages of arcane knowledge within. Filaments of protective spells had been woven across the portal, more like a bell than any Measure against intruders.

Self said, Luc-eee, I'm hooo-ome and snapped the charm. He kicked out and the door swung open.

I had to stamp down the old excitement. My breath hitched as I looked about the large room and saw just how much the DeLancres' collection of artifacts and lore had grown. The djinn had done a good job at expanding the library. It was three times its previous size and still didn't have quite enough room to fit all the occult tomes the family had amassed in nearly four hundred years.

Thousands of volumes and acquisitions filled the shelves and tables: talismans, amulets, fetishes, dolls, athames, and other blades, chalices, white, red, and black candles, bone carvings, instruments of torture, and devices I couldn't quite fathom. Pierre's lute rested on a hickory stand beside a fist-sized rock taken off the corpse of Giles Corey, who'd been crushed beneath stones by his Salem neighbors for refusing to plead innocent or guilty to witchery. When ordered to confess Corey had simply shouted, "Add another stone." He'd been a personal hero of both Jebediah and me, for different but not quite opposite reasons.

More souls had been sold in the procuring of this horde of arcane goods than there were words on all the pages.

Papyrus and codex from the great library of King Assurbanipal, emperor of Assyria, lined the walls in glass cases. Jebediah's strongest conjurings had gone into the guarding and defenses of these chambers. Mystic shields defended all this history, wisdom, and doctrine.

Locked in iron sheaths remained Babylonian books such as Maklu, the burning; UtukkiLimbuti, these evil spirits; Labartu, the hag demon; and Nis Kati, the raising of the hand. Resting side by side with flesh-bound grimoires were the original missing books of the Bible, including the War of the Lord and the 114 Sayings in the Gospel of Thomas. Here lay Solomon's Theurgia Goetica, which he'd used to annoy Arioch. In one corner rested a replica, or perhaps the original, copper cauldron in which King Solomon had imprisoned the djinn. And beside it was the Torah as it was meant to be read, the five books without breaks of paragraph, sentence, or even words-comprising the one true name of God.

The knowledge, pleasure, and power here could drive any man insane.

And in the center of it all sat Jebediah DeLancre.