CHAPTER TWELVE
As soon as Richard got close to the place, he knew that he had found the right spot. He felt a prickling all over his skin, and could faintly hear the murmuring whispers of the other world he had visited before only in his acid dreams. The warm breeze brought with it the faint tang of brimstone.
He walked along a path in Central Park after dark, an open duffel bag slung over his shoulder. A few lamps shone a meager light on the grass and the bushes, but most of the lighting had been broken by vandals or those who came here seeking darkness.
Few people were about, and yet no one was alone like he was. A hundred yards ahead, two men and a woman walked away from him. A group of teenagers lounged on the grass a little further on, sharing a bottle they were probably too young to legally drink. Otherwise, he didn’t see a soul.
He could sense the presence of others here, though. Oh, yes. Unseen eyes watched him. Bodies that were close and yet impossibly far, desired to reach out to touch his. He felt like he was standing both in Central Park and on that desolate plain of the demonic world. Here, as in the summoning room of his apartment, the two worlds all but overlapped. As he walked slowly down the path, peering about him, the demon world grew more present with each step.
Yet, it all looked so normal. Nothing here seemed any different than the rest of the park.
Wait, what was that? He spied a strange rock outcropping up ahead, a bit of bedrock sticking up out of the soil. It stood perhaps three feet above the path and the surrounding field of grass and bushes. If Richard had been back in Missouri, he wouldn’t have noticed it at all. Here, though, in this teeming metropolis, such a natural thing seemed strange, out of place. How could it have survived all this time?
He approached warily. He knew he was in the general vicinity of Seneca Village. Was this outcropping the concentric circles marked on the old map? He and Tyrone had studied that book and could find no reference to what the marking signified, but even in their brief delving into the occult they had discovered that the more serious writers hid as much as they revealed.
He came to the foot of the outcropping. To all appearances, it looked like a normal bit of granite bedrock, but it was strange to find it here. If this was the marking on the map, then it had stood in the center of Seneca Village for years without anyone touching it. Then when the city took the village over, forced the inhabitants to move, and created the park, it too had left the place untouched.
Richard looked around, noticing that the park had grown even quieter than before. The three people who had been walking ahead of him had turned a corner and passed out of sight. The teenage partiers were still in view, but they were far away and their words did not carry to him. The only sound was the breeze rustling the bushes that hugged most sides of the outcropping. Even the soft whispers had stopped, as if those on the other side were waiting for him. He felt very much alone.
Hitching the duffel bag up his shoulder, he climbed the stone. The sides were rough and he easily found footholds to get to the top.
As soon as he made it his head grew light and he felt as if the stone was swirling under his feet. He focused, trying to resist the sensation, and mentally steadied himself.
He found the top of the outcropping uneven and rough, with a natural circular depression in the center about the size of a bathtub.
Or a grave, Richard thought.
As he looked at it the sensation of the rock swirling under his feet grew stronger, as if he stood in a whirlpool that was spinning around the depression. While he knew that physically he was standing still, mentally he was being sucked into that cavity, pulled in to be shot out into another world.
The demon world. This is a portal, an even more powerful one than in my apartment.
Richard scrambled down the outcropping and back to the path. He had seen enough. This was a place of power, but was it the one the cult would choose? Slowly, he walked around the outcropping, peering into the bushes that surrounded it on three sides. Near the back, he found an area where the bushes had been pushed aside, the grass trampled to create a narrow path. He followed it far enough to see that it led to the outcropping.
Then something else caught his eye—a bit of cloth. Richard took it and returned to the path where he could examine it under the light.
Just as he suspected, the cloth was red, the same shade of red as the robes the cultists wore. Richard nodded. Now he had them. He knew where, but he still didn’t know when. What had the Knowledge Demon said? When the stars are right.
But when would that be? He needed to find out more.
“Don’t move, sucka. ” A shadow emerged from behind a tree a few steps away. The dim streetlamp gleamed on the blade of a knife. Richard froze.
A black man in jeans and a T-shirt sauntered towards him, all bravado and confidence.
“Hand over the money, honkey.”
“I-It’s in here,” Richard said, reaching into his duffel bag…
…and pulled out a shotgun.
“Drop the knife, buddy.”
“Shit!”The knife fell to the ground with a soft thump. The would-be mugger raised his hands over his head.
“Now be cool, man. I wasn’t gonna hurt you. Just take your bread, dig? Hey, you can have mine. I got five dollars and a bag of weed in my pocket. It’s yours. Just let me go.”
“I don’t want your money and I don’t want your weed. Just leave the knife so you don’t get into any more trouble tonight. Beat it.”
The mugger turned to run.
“Wait!” Richard called before he had taken three steps.
Nervously the man turned around, raising his hands in the air again.
“Are you gay?” Richard asked.
The man frowned at him. “What the fuck? I ain’t no faggot. Look, man, you can pull a gun on me, but you don’t have to—”
“I’m gay,” Richard admitted.
A look of disgust crossed the mugger’s face. Then the man remembered his situation and put on an expression of guarded neutrality.
“That’s right. I’m gay. I moved to this city to be able to live my life, and you know what happened? I got my first boyfriend, a black guy like you. He’s my first black friend, actually, but now he’s much more than that. I think I’m falling in love with him. Yeah, I do love him. I keep messing things up, though, because I don’t really know how to interact with black people. I came from a ‘whites only’ neighborhood. I hope I can make this work, though, because I really do love him.”
The mugger blinked, confused. His hands lowered a little. “What am I supposed to do about it?”
Richard shook his head. “Nothing. I just wanted to say it out loud. You can go.”
The mugger walked off, looking back over his shoulder every few steps to stare at Richard.
***
The next afternoon, Richard, Steve, and a man he didn’t know sat at a table in the back room of an occult bookshop looking at a complex set of astrological charts. Richard had remembered that Steve was into astrology, and while he himself didn’t believe in it, he was desperate to find out what the Knowledge Demon had meant about the stars being right.
So, Steve had introduced him to Laszlo, an Eastern European immigrant who specialized in astrology. Steve had assured him that this wasn’t the newspaper kind of astrology made up by hack writers who never even looked at the stars, but an old traditional method rooted in the occult sciences.
Laszlo didn’t look like an occultist, not that Richard really knew what an occultist was supposed to look like. The man was a portly, middle-aged fellow with wire-rimmed glasses and an academic air. He was quite obviously straight, but didn’t seem at all perturbed by Steve’s flaming mannerisms.
“There’s an interesting conjunction the day after tomorrow,” Laszlo said, pointing at the chart.
“What’s a conjunction?” Richard asked.
“When two planets are in alignment, meaning they appear together in the sky. In this case, Mars and Venus. That’s rare because Venus is an inferior planet and Mars is a superior one.”
“Don’t tell that to the lesbians!” Steve said, tittering.
Laszlo smiled at him. “It doesn’t mean that. Inferior planets are those closer to the Sun than Earth. Only Venus and Mercury are inferior planets. Superior planets are those further away from the Sun than Earth.”
“Mars is the male planet and Venus is the female planet. I bet that’s significant,” Richard said.
“It is,” the astrologer said with a nod. “It acts as a sort of magical balance, bringing together the masculine principle with the feminine principle.”
“Adam and I do that every night!” Steve said.
“In a sense, you’re right,” Laszlo said. “You do combine the masculine and feminine, Steve, which is why many magicians throughout history have been gay, bisexual, or transgender. Many shamans in the Siberian and Native American cultures are crossdressers. Any sort of magic done by or to your community during this conjunction would have extra power and effectiveness. But there’s more. This is happening in the constellation Scorpio, the scorpion. This adds a venomous aspect to it, making the day and any associated rituals much more hazardous and malignant.”
Richard looked at the chart dubiously. “Laszlo, with all due respect, I’m still having trouble swallowing the idea that planets millions of miles away in the vacuum of deep space can have any effect on our lives.”
The astrologer gave him a patient smile. “They do and they don’t. It’s not actually the planets affecting us, it’s our association with them that affects our connection with the spiritual world. Ever since the dawn of mankind, we’ve had rituals involving the stars and planets. We’ve prayed to them, feared them, tried to placate them, and studied their movements looking for hints of what will happen in the future. We are spiritually bonded to them. The signs of the zodiac, for example, are nothing in and of themselves. But we have given them so much attention, so much power in our own minds ever since the days of ancient Sumeria, that they affect our use of magic and interactions with the unseen world.”
“So because we give these things power, they have power?” Richard asked incredulously.
“In a word, yes. It’s a bit more complex than that, but that is basically how it works.”
Richard was silent for a moment. It seemed that with all this magic, human beings were always at the center. The demons were powerless without his consent, and yet brought out such deep fantasies from his subconscious that they were hard to resist. No, that wasn’t quite right. What was hard to resist were his own subconscious fantasies.
Something in his mind clicked. The demons had no form, no substance, no power without him or another human. He had banished them from his presence even when he had been on their own plane of existence. Even with the Hooded One, once he summoned enough willpower to say no, the demon had no choice but to leave.
He wasn’t fighting demons at all. He was fighting himself.
“So, if I don’t believe in astrology, none of this affects me, right?” Richard asked.
Laszlo shook his head. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. You see, most of the world does believe in the power of the planets. More importantly, there were hundreds of generations in the past who believed in this power. Human consciousness is all interconnected. You can scoff as much as you like, but the weight of their belief is against you.”
“It’s like all those weeping statues of the Virgin Mary in Ireland,” Steve said. “Even atheists have seen tears come out of their eyes.”
Richard rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re a Catholic as well as an astrology buff.”
“No, I’ll leave the Catholic Schoolgirl Syndrome to you, love. I do like the robes, though. Very swish.”
The astrologer spoke up. “Steve is correct about the weeping statues. Many non-believers have seen miracles in Ireland in recent years. And there are people who didn’t believe in ghosts and saw them, or who laughed at the idea of UFOs and were abducted. I’m not saying all these things are literally true, that aliens visit Earth or the spirits of the dead come back to haunt us, but that there are outside powers that manifest in different ways depending on the society or the individual. How they manifest can often be surprising.”
“So, wait, I can be affected by other people’s beliefs?”
“There was a case in New Guinea back in 1956 of a Baptist missionary who was trying to convert a tribe that had never had much contact with the outside world. They wanted trade, though, and had made contact with the settlers. The forest was being cut down and the people were going hungry. The church made a deal with them to open a market and a vocational school in exchange for permission to build a church and hold prayers and Bible study meetings on Sundays. The local witch doctor objected, and there was a big power struggle between him and the chief who supported the plan. At last the elders managed to create a compromise. No one had to go to the meetings, not even people in the Catholic work programs.
The witch doctor was satisfied with this because he assumed no one would go to the meetings. The missionary assumed, of course, that the power of God would prevail and readily agreed to this deal too. As it turned out, the tribesmen, most of whom had never met a Christian before and were impressed that this pale, weak stranger could bring so much plenty with him, began to go to church on Sundays and listen to the minister when he gave classes on the Bible’s teachings. Even more, within a few months the missionary had some of the younger men and women of the tribe helping out with services and memorizing prayers. Most still went to the traditional rituals too, but the witch doctor felt resentful. He believed his power was being usurped.”
“He was probably right,” Richard said.
“That was certainly what the missionary hoped. It didn’t work out that way, though. The witch doctor, seeing more and more people going to church on Sundays, decided to place a curse on the missionary. He summoned a powerful demon to get rid of him. I don’t know what sort of deal the witch doctor made to cast such dark magic, but it must have been steep.”
“I get the picture,” Richard said, trying to suppress a shudder.
“Indeed. The demon flew into the missionary’s hut one night and tore him apart. Several natives witnessed it. When the investigators came to find out what happened, they assumed he had been murdered by regular means. They were city men and didn’t believe in the old magic. When the witnesses swore that a demon had flown into the hut and killed the missionary, the city men became angry and treated the natives roughly. But no matter how heavy-handed they became, even to the point of threatening the natives’ lives, the people of the tribe didn’t change their story.”
“The story then took an even stranger turn. The missionary’s brother, a wealthy businessman who had never been outside the United States, came to New Guinea to retrieve his brother’s remains and bring them back home for burial. The witch doctor must have feared vengeance, because the businessman was found dead in his hotel room in the exact same manner as his late brother. He never even had a chance to leave the capital.”
“So the businessman got killed by something he didn’t believe in,” Richard said. “Something he had never even heard of.”
“Yes. I have the original police report here in the shop. I’m afraid I charge a reading fee for such rare material, but there are countless books you can read that contain stories such as these, and many stranger things besides.”
Richard bit his thumb. What Laszlo said seemed correct. He had never believed in demons until he suddenly found himself giving up his virginity to one. And the cult certainly believed in what they were doing. Richard had been feeling the effects even before he knew what was going on. But he still had some power to resist, didn’t he? Hadn’t he proven that on the barren plain in the middle of that horde of demons?
“So what can I do?” Richard asked.
The astrologer studied him. “It would help if I knew what all this was about.”
Steve and Richard exchanged glances. Could he trust this guy? Would he even believe what he had to say?
Laszlo was an acquaintance of Steve’s, which was why Richard was here in the first place. The astrologer had done a birth chart for his friend that Steve swore by. Plus, he was part owner of this occult shop, which everyone said was the oldest and most reputable in town.
Laszlo certainly seemed trustworthy. He was professional and polite, and hadn’t shown any hatred for an obviously gay man. But Richard had learned appearances could be deceiving. Anton Black had appeared to be a polite and professional artist at first, but later turned out to be a high priest in a sinister cult. If Laszlo ran one of the best occult shops in town, he was sure to have met all sorts of strange types. Who knew what his connections were or where his loyalties might lie? On the other hand, he knew more about this stuff than anyone Richard knew or was likely to meet.
He decided to compromise by telling half the truth.
“I had a dream about being sucked into another world inhabited by strange beings who were trying to get into our own. In this dream, I felt that they were getting closer and closer to our plane.”
Laszlo looked at him with growing interest. “What did these beings look like?”
“I … couldn’t see them. They seemed to be nice at first, attractive, but I got the sense that if they came here there would be a lot of trouble.”
Laszlo nodded. “Is there anymore you can remember?”
“No.”
The astrologer studied him.
He knows I’m lying.
After a minute, Laszlo sighed and threw up his hands. “Well, if that’s all you have for me, I’m afraid I can’t be of much help. There are many planes of existence, and many types of entities. Without more details, I can’t tell you what you’ve contacted, or what has contacted you. You are a homosexual like your friend, correct?”
“Yeah, why?” Richard asked. The words came out a bit defensive.
Laszlo raised a reassuring hand. “Don’t worry. I have nothing against people like you. Compared to some of the people I meet in my chosen career, you are refreshingly mundane.”
“I am not mundane,” Richard said in a level voice.
“He sure isn’t, honey,” Steve said. “He had this fundraiser—”
“Okay, Steve!” Richard turned to the astrologer. “You were saying?”
Laszlo gave him a paternal smile. “Please don’t be insulted by my choice of words. If you knew some of the people I knew, you’d think ‘mundane’ was a compliment. The reason I asked if you’re gay is because I see it hinted at in the star chart. You’re a Taurus, aren’t you?”
“I was born May 13th. That’s a Taurus, right?”
“Yes, it is. You see, a Taurus is a self-starter, someone who gets things done even if he has to do everything alone, although he isn’t usually alone because he’s a natural leader.”
“I’m not much of a leader,” Richard objected. “I was practically invisible in my high school.”
“That’s probably because you didn’t assert yourself. I suppose you were afraid of someone outing you? I guess that must be a problem for a young man with your inclinations.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I’m sure I don’t. My point is that this conjunction in Scorpio, this malignant power built up between Mars and Venus, has a weakness. There’s a disruption in the balance of celestial forces right now in the constellation Taurus due to a comet passing through it.”
“A comet?” Richard asked. “I haven’t heard of any comet.”
“It’s quite faint, invisible to the naked eye. Only the astronomers know about it, and those who make a study of such things like myself. Because comets are transitory celestial bodies, they bring disruption to any patterns throughout the whole sky.”
“But aren’t comets malignant?” Steve asked. “Like the man upstairs spraying a big wad of bukkake in your face while you’re trying to watch a porno?”
To his credit, Laszlo didn’t bat an eyelid. Richard figured he had spent enough time with Steve so nothing could shock him. “Well, I don’t know what bukkake is, but yes, comets are generally malignant. Of course, that depends on your point of view. This conjunction in Scorpio, this grand event that will affect the gay community, would certainly see any disruption as malignant.”
“So someone born in Taurus can destroy the power of this conjunction,” Steve said.
Laszlo looked at Richard. “That’s correct. Is this making sense to you, young man?”
Richard rubbed his chin and nodded. “It’s becoming a bit clearer, yeah.”
Laszlo met his gaze. “Whatever is coming, whatever you’re facing that you’re not telling me about, be very careful. It is powerful and it is dangerous, and the key to victory lies in Taurus.”
“And these creatures trying to come to our world?”
“There are many kinds of creatures beyond our material plane, but one thing I have found that they all have in common is that it is better to stop them on their plane of existence than our own. For once they get here, it is often too late.”
That gave Richard an idea. He stood up.“Thank you for your time, sir,” Richard said, shaking his hand.
“Come back any time.”
Richard saw Steve slipping the astrologer some money.
Damn, I hope this is true and not some bullshit, Richard worried. Everything rides on this.
After Laszlo ushered him and Steve out of the back room, Richard took a look around the shop. It was fairly large, a sprawling basement on the Lower West Side with closely packed bookshelves. There must have been thousands of volumes, including entire sections on subjects he had never heard of, like Hermetic Qabalah and lithomancy. The shelves contained books in all the modern languages, even Arabic and Hebrew, plus dead languages like Latin and ancient Greek, and languages he couldn’t even identify. Quiet, unobtrusive people, some in pairs but mostly alone, browsed the shelves. One wore an amulet in the shape of a pentagram with strange marks on it. Richard passed by him to take a closer look, and felt better when he saw that they did not match the shapes of the sigils on the robes of the Hooded One or his worshippers. Behind the counter he saw another bookcase, this one with glass doors and a lock. In it sat old tomes bound in leather, some with gold lettering bearing titles such as The Lesser Key of Solomon and the Papyrus of Ani and a slim volume called The Celaeno Fragments.
Steve came up to him as Laszlo went to answer a customer’s question. “Far out place, isn’t it? What do you think?”
Richard sighed and looked around again. “I think that this is just the tip of the iceberg.”