XV

On that penultimate morning, Theron Ware faced the final choice of which demons to call up, and for this he needed to repair to his laboratory, to check the book of pacts. Otherwise his preparations were all made. He had performed the blood sacrifices the previous evening, and then had completely rearranged the furniture in the workroom to accommodate the Grand Circle—the first time he had had need of it in twenty years—the Lesser Circles and the Gateway. There were even special preparations for Father Domenico—who had returned early and with a gratifyingly troubled countenance—should it become necessary to ask the monk to call for Divine intervention; but Ware was tolerably sure it would not be. Though he had never attempted anything of this magnitude before, he felt the work in his fingertips, like a well-practiced sonata.

He was, however, both astonished and disquieted to find Dr. Hess already in the laboratory—not only because of the potentialities for contamination, but at the inevitable conclusion that Hess had worked out how to placate the Guardian of the door. This man evidently was even more dangerous than Ware had guessed.

“Do you want to ruin us all?” Ware demanded.

Hess turned away from the circle he had been inspecting and looked at Ware frankly. He was pale and hollow-eyed; not only had the fasting been hard on his spare frame—that was a hazard every neophyte had to come to terms with—but apparently he had not been sleeping much either. He said at once:

“No indeed. My apologies, Dr. Ware. My curiosity overcame me, I’m afraid.”

“You didn’t touch anything, I hope?”

“Certainly not. I took your warnings about that with great seriousness, I assure you.”

“Well . . . probably no harm done then. I can sympathize with your interest, and even approve it, in part. But I’ll be instructing you all in detail a little later in the day, and then you’ll have ample time to inspect the arrangements. I do want you to know them intimately. But right now I still have some additional work to do, so if you don’t mind . . .”

“Quite.” Hess moved obediently toward the door. As he was about to touch the handle, Ware added:

“By the way, Dr. Hess, how did you deceive the Guardian?”

Hess made no pretense of being puzzled by the ques­tion. “With a white pigeon, and a pocket mirror I got from Jack.”

“Hmm. Do you know, that would never have occurred to me. These pagan survivals are mostly a waste of effort. Let’s talk about it more, later. You may have something to teach me.”

Hess made a small bow and finished his departure. Forgetting him instantly, Ware stared at the Grand Circle for a moment, and then walked around it clockwise to the lectern and unlocked the book of pacts. The stiff pages bent reassuringly in his hands. Each leaf was headed by the character or sign of a demon; below, in the special ink reserved for such high matters—gall, copperas, gum arabic—was the text of Theron Ware’s agreement with that entity, signed at the bottom by Ware in his own blood, and by the character of the demon repeated in its own hand. Leading all the rest was the seal, and also the characters, of LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, which also appeared on the book’s cover:

There then followed eighty-nine others. It was Ware’s sober belief, backed by infernal assurances he had reason to trust, that no previous magician had held so many spirits in thrall. After forty years, true, all the names would change, and Ware would have to force the re-execution of each pact, and so, again and again through the five hundred years of life he had bought from HAGITH in his salad days as a white magician. Nevertheless it could be said that, in the possession of this book, Ware was at least potentially the wealthiest mortal in all of history, though to anyone else in the world the book would be worth nothing except as a curiosum.

These spirits, not counting LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, comprised the seventeen infernal archangels of the Grand Grimoire, and the seventy-two demons of the Descending Hierarchy once confined in the brazen vessel of Solomon the King: a fabulous haul indeed, and each captive commanding troops and armies of lesser spirits, and damned souls by the thousands of millions, more of them every minute. (For these days, virtually everyone was damned; it had been this discovery that had first convinced Ware that the Rebellion was in fact going to succeed, probably by the year A.D. 2000; the many plain symptoms of chiliastic panic already being manifested amongst the laity were almost certainly due to be vindicated, for everyone was rushing incontinently into Hell-mouth without even the excuse of an Antichrist to mislead him. As matters stood now, Christ Himself would have to creep stealthily, hoping to be ignored, even into a cathedral to conduct a Mass, as in that panel of Hieronymus Bosch; the number of people who could not pronounce the Di­vine Name without a betraying stammer—or their own names, for that matter—had grown from a torrent to a deluge, and, ridiculously, hardly any of them were claiming any fraction of the possible profits in this world. They did not even know that they were on the winning side, or even that there was more than one side. No wonder that Ware had found so much fat in the cauldron, waiting to be skimmed.)

But as Ware had already warned Baines, not all of the spirits in the book were suitable for the experiment at hand. There were some, like MARCHOSIAS, who hoped after an interval to be returned to the Celestial choirs. In this hope, Ware was grimly certain, they were mistaken, and the only reward they would receive would be from the Emperor of the Pit, that kind of reward customarily given to fair-weather friends and summer soldiers. In the meantime, the evils they could be persuaded or compelled to do were minor and hardly worth the effort of invoking them. One, whom Ware had already mentioned to Baines, VASSAGO, was even said in the Lesser Key and elsewhere to be “good by nature”—not too trustworthy an ascription—and indeed was sometimes called upon by white magicians. Others in the hierarchy, like PHOENIX, controlled aspects of reality that were of little relevance to Baines’ commission.

Taking up the pen of the Art, Ware made a list. When he was finished, he had written down forty-eight names. Considering the number of the Fallen, that was not a large muster; but he thought it would serve the purpose. He closed and locked the book, and after a pause to rebuke and torment the Guardian of his door, went out into the Easter morning to rehearse his Tanists.

No day, it seemed, had ever gone so slowly for Baines as this Easter, despite the diversion of the rehearsal; but at last it was night and over, and Ware pronounced himself ready to begin.

The Grand Circle now on the parquetry of the refectory bore a generic resemblance to the circle Ware had composed on Christmas Eve, but it was a great deal bigger, and much different in detail. The circle proper was made of strips of the skin of the sacrificial kid, with the hair still on it, fastened to the floor at the cardinal points with four nails that, Ware explained, had been drawn from the coffin of a child. On the northeast arc, under the word BERKAIAL, there rested on the strips the body of a male bat that had been drowned in blood; on the northeast, under the word AMASARAC, the skull of a parricide; on the southwest, under the word ASARADEL, the horns of a goat; and on the southwest, under the word ARIBECL, sat Ware’s cat, to the secret of whose diet they were now all privy. (Indeed, there had not been much of moment to the rehearsal, and Baines had inferred that its chief object had been to impart to the rest of them such items of unpleasant knowledge as this.)

The triangle had been drawn inside the circle with a lump of haematite or lodestone. Under its base was drawn a figure consisting of a chi and a rho superimposed, resting on the line, with a cross to each side of it. Flanking the other two sides were the great candles of virgin wax, each stick sitting in the center of a crown of vervain. Three circles for the operators—Ware, Baines and Hess (Jack Ginsberg and Father Domenico would stand outside, in sepa­rate pentacles)—were inside the triangle, connected by a cross; the northern circle had horns drawn on it. At the pinnacle of the triangle sat a new brazier, loaded with newly consecrated charcoal. To the left side of the horned circle, which was to be Ware’s, of course, was the lectern and the book of pacts, within easy reach.

At the rear of the room, before the curtained door to the kitchen, was another circle, quite as big as the first, in the center of which was a covered altar. That had been empty this afternoon; but there now lay upon it the nude body of the girl Ware had used to address as Gretchen. Her skin was paper-white except for its markings, and to Baines gave every appearance of being dead. A small twist of violet silk, nearly transparent and with some crumpled thing like a wad of tissue or a broken matzoh inside it, rested upon her navel. Her body appeared to have been extensively written upon with red and yellow grease paint; some of the characters might have been astrological, others more like ideograms or cartouches. In default of knowing their meaning or even their provenance, they simply made her look more naked.

The main door closed. Everyone was now in place.

Ware lit the candles, and then the fire in the brazier. It was a task of Baines and Hess to feed the fire periodically, as the time wore on, the one with brandy, the other with camphor, taking care not to stumble over their swords or leave their circles in the process. As before, they had been enjoined to the strictest silence, especially should any spirit speak to them or threaten them.

Ware now reached out to the lectern and opened his book. This time there were no preliminary gestures, and no portents; he simply began to recite in a gravid voice:

“I conjure and command thee, LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, by all the names wherewith thou mayst be constrained and bound, SATAN, RANTAN, PALLANTRE, LUTIAS, CORICACOEM, SCIRCIGREUR, per sedem Baldarey et per gratiam et diligentiam tuam habuisti ab eo hanc nalatimanamilam, as I command thee, usor, dilapidatore, tentatore, seminatore, soignatore, devoratore, concitore, et seductore, where art thou? Thou who imposeth hatred and propagateth enmities, I conjure thee by Him who hath created thee for this ministry, to fulfill my work! I cite thee, COLRIZIANA, OFFINA, ALTA, NESTERA, FUARD, MENUET, LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, arise, arise, arise!”

There was no sound; but suddenly there was stand­ing in the other circle a dim, steaming figure, perhaps eight or nine feet tall. It was difficult to be sure what it looked like, partly because some of the altar could still be seen through it. To Baines it resembled a man with a shaven head bearing three long, twisted horns, eyes like a spectral tarsiers, a gaping mouth, a pointed chin. It was wearing a sort of jerkin, coppery in color, with a tattered ruff and a fringed skirt; below the skirt protruded two bandy, hooved legs, and a fat, hairy tail, which twitched restlessly.

“What now?” this creature said in an astonishingly pleasant voice. The words, however, were blurred. “I have not seen my son in many moons.” Unexpectedly, it giggled, as though pleased by the pun.

“I adjure thee, speak more clearly,” Ware said. “And what I wish, thou knowst full well.”

“Nothing may be known until it is spoken.” The voice seemed no less blurred to Baines, but Ware nodded.

“I desire then to release, as did the Babylonian from under the seal of the King of Israel, blessed be he, from Hell-mouth into the mortal world all those demons of the False Monarchy whose names I shall subsequently call, and whose characters and signs I shall exhibit in my book, providing only that they harm not me and mine, and that they shall return whence they came at dawn, as it is always decreed.”

“Providing no more than that?” the figure said. “No prescriptions? No desires? You were not always so easily satisfied.”

“None,” Ware said firmly. “They shall do as they will for this their period of freedom, except that they harm none here in my circles, and obey me when recalled, by rod and pact.”

The demon glanced over its transparent shoulder. “I see that you have the appropriate fumigant to cense so many great lords, and my servants and satraps will have their several rewards in their deeds. So interesting a com­mission is new to me. Well. What have you for my hostage, to fulfill the forms?”

Ware reached into his vestments. Baines half expected to see produced another tear vase, but instead Ware brought out by the tail a live mouse, which he threw over the brazier as he had the vase, except not so far. The mouse ran directly toward the demon, circled it frantically three times outside the markings, and disappeared in the direction of the door, cheeping like a sparrow. Baines looked toward Ahktoi, but the cat did not even lick its chops.

“You are skilled and punctilious, my son. Call then when I have left, and I will send my ministers. Let nothing remain undone, and much will be done before the black cock crows.”

“It is well. By and under this promise I discharge thee. OMGROMA, EPYN, SEYOK, SATANY, DEGONY, EPARYGON, GALLIGANON, ZOGOGEN, FERSTIGON, LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, begone, begone, begone!”

“I shall see you at dawn.” The prime minister of LUCIFER wavered like a flame, and, like a flame, went out.

Hess promptly cast camphor into the brazier. Recovering with a start from a near paralysis of fascination, Baines sprinkled brandy after it. The fire puffed. Without looking around, Ware brought out his lodestone, which he held in his left hand; with his right, he dipped the iron-headed point of his wand into the coals. Little licking points of blue light ran up it almost to his hand, as though the rod, too, had been coated with brandy.

Holding the tonguing wand out before him like a dowsing rod, Ware strode ceremoniously out of the Grand Circle toward the altar. As he walked, the air around him began to grumble, as though a storm were gathering about his shaven head, but he paid the noise no attention. He marched on directly to the locus spiritus, and into it.

Silence fell at once. Ware said clearly:

“I, Theron Ware, master of masters, Karcist of Karcists, hereby undertake to open the book, and the seals thereof, which were forbidden to be broken until the breaking of the Seven Seals before the Seventh Throne. I have beheld SATAN as a bolt falling from heaven. I have crushed the dragons of the pit beneath my heel. I have commanded angels and devils. I undertake and command that all shall be accomplished as I bid, and that from beginning to end, alpha to omega, world without end, none shall harm us who abide here in this temple of the Art of Arts. Aglam, TETRAGRAM, vaycheon stimulamaton ezphares retragrammaton olyaram irion esytion existion eryona onera orasym mozm messias soter EMANUEL SABAOTH ADONAY, te adoro, et te invoco. Amen.”

He took another step forward, and touched the flaming tip of the rod to the veil of silk on the belly of the still girl. A little curl of blue-gray smoke began to arise from it, like ignited incense.

Ware now retreated, walking backward, toward the Grand Circle. As he did so, the fire on the wand died; but in the mortuary silence there now intruded a faint hissing, much like the first ignition of a squib. And there were indeed fireworks in inception. As Baines stared in gluttonous hypnosis, a small fountain of many-colored sparks began to rise from the fuse-like tissue on the abdo­men of the body on the altar. More smoke poured forth. The air was becoming distinctly hazy.

The body itself seemed to be burning now, the skin peeling back like segments of an orange. Baines heard behind him an aborted retching noise in Jack Ginsberg’s voice, but could not himself understand what the occasion for nausea could be. The body—whatever it had once been—was now only like a simulacrum made of pith or papier-mâché, and charged with some equivalent of Greek fire. Indeed, there was already a strong taint of gunpowder overriding the previous odors of incense and camphor. Baines rather welcomed it—not that it was familiar, for it had been centuries since black powder had been used in his trade, but because he had begun to find the accu­mulation of less business-like perfumes a little cloying.

Gradually, everything melted away into the smoke except an underlay of architectural outline, against which stood a few statues lit more along one side than the other by one of the two sources of fire. Hess coughed briefly; otherwise there was silence except for the hissing of the pyre. Sparks continued to fly upward, and sometimes, for an instant, they seemed to form scribbled, incomprehensible words in the frame of the unreal wall.

Ware’s voice sounded remotely from one of the statues: “BAAL, great king and commander in the East, of the Order of the Fly, obey me!”

Something began to form in the distance. Baines had the clear impression that it was behind the altar, behind the curtained door, indeed outside the palazzo altogether, but he could see it nevertheless. It came forward, growing, until he could also see that it was a thing like a man, in a neat surcoat and snow-white linen, but with two supernumerary heads, the one on the left like a toad’s, the other like a cat’s. It swelled soundlessly until at some moment it was inarguably in the refectory; and then, still silently, had grown past them and was gone.

“AGARES, duke in the East, of the Order of the Virtues, obey me!”

Again, a distant transparency, and silent. It came on very slowly, manifesting like a comely old man carrying a goshawk upon his wrist. Its slowness was necessitous, for it was riding astride an ambling crocodile. Its eyes were closed and its lips moved incessantly. Gradually, it too swelled past.

“GAMYGYN, marquis and president in Cartagra, obey me!”

This grew to be something like a small horse, or perhaps an ass, modest and unassuming. It dragged behind it ten naked men in chains.

“VALEFOR, powerful duke, obey me!”

A black-maned lion, again with three heads, the other two human, one wearing the cap of a hunter, the other the wary smile of a thief. It passed in a rush, without even a wind to mark its going.

“BARBATOS, great count and minister of SATANACHIA, obey me!”

But this was not one figure; it was four, like four crowned kings. With it and past it poured three companies of soldiers, their heads bowed and their expressions shuttered and still under steel caps. When all this troop had vanished, it was impossible to guess which among them had been the demon, or if the demon had ever appeared.

“PAIMON, great king, of the Order of the Dominions, obey me!”

Suddenly after all the hissing silence there was a blast of sound, and the room was full of capering things carrying contorted tubes and bladders, which might have been intended as musical instruments. The noise, however, resembled most closely a drove of pigs being driven down the chute of a slaughterhouse. Among the bawling, squealing dancers a crowned man rode upon a drome­dary, bawling wordlessly in a great hoarse voice. The beast it rode on chewed grimly on some bitter cud, its eyes squeezed shut as if in pain.

“SYTRY!” Ware shouted. Instantly there was darkness and quiet, except for the hissing, which now had a faint overtone as of children’s voices. “Jussus secreta libenter detegit feminarum, eas ridens ludificansque ut se luxorise nudent, great prince, obey me!”

This sweet and lissome thing was no less monstrous than the rest; it had a glowing human body, but was winged, and had the ridiculously small, smirking head of a leopard. At the same time, it was beautiful, in some way that made Baines feel both sick and eager at the same time. As it passed, Ware seemed to be pressing a ring against his lips.

“LERAJIE, powerful marquis, ELIGOR, ZEPAR, great dukes, obey me!”

As they were called together, so these three appeared together: the first an archer clad in green, with quiver and a nocked bow whose arrow dripped venom; the second, a knight with a scepter and a pennon-bearing lance; the third, an armed soldier clad in red. In contrast to their predecessor, there was nothing in the least monstrous about their appearance, nor any clue as to their spheres and offices, but Baines found them no less alarming for all that.

“AYPOROS, mighty earl and prince, obey me!”

Baines felt himself turning sick even before this creature appeared, and from the sounds around him, so did the others, even including Ware. There was no special reason for this apparent in its aspect, which was so grotesque as to have been comic under other circumstances: it had the body of an angel, with a lion’s head, the webbed feet of a goose and the scut of a deer. “Transform, transform!” Ware cried, thrusting his wand into the brazier. The visi­tant promptly took on the total appearance of an angel, crown to toe, but the effect of the presence of something filthy and obscene remained.

“HABORYM, strong duke, obey me!”

This was another man-thing of the three-headed race—though the apparent relationship, Baines realized, must be pure accident—the human one bearing two stars on its forehead; the others were of a serpent and a cat. In its right hand it carried a blazing firebrand, which it shook at them as it passed.

“NABERIUS, valiant marquis, obey me!”

At first it seemed to Baines that there had been no response to this call. Then he saw movement near the floor. A black cock with bleeding, empty eye sockets was fluttering around the outside of the Grand Circle. Ware menaced it with the wand, and it crowed hoarsely and was gone.

“GLASYALABOLAS, mighty president, obey me!”

This appeared to be simply a winged man until it smiled, when it could be seen to have the teeth of a dog. There were flecks of foam at the corners of its mouth. It passed soundlessly.

In the silence, Baines could hear Ware turning a page in his book of pacts, and remembered to cast more brandy into the brazier. The body on the altar had apparently long since been consumed; Baines could not remember how long it had been since he had seen the last of the word-forming sparks. The thick gray haze persisted, however.

“BUNE, thou strong duke, obey me!”

This apparition was the most marvelous yet, for it approached them borne on a galleon, which sank into the floor as it came nearer until they were able to look down through the floor onto its deck. Coiled there was a dragon with the familiar three heads, these being of dog, griffin and man. Shadowy figures, vaguely human, toiled around it. It continued to sink until it was behind them, and presumably thereafter.

Its passage left Baines aware that he was trembling—not from fright, exactly, for he seemed to have passed beyond that, but from the very exhaustion of this and other emotions, and possibly also from the sheer weariness of having stood in one spot for so long. Inadvertently, he sighed.

“Silence,” Ware said in a low voice. “And let nobody weaken or falter at this point. We are but half done with our calling—and of those remaining to be invoked, many are far more powerful than any we’ve yet seen. I warned you before, this Art takes physical strength as well as courage.”

He turned another page. “ASTAROTH, grand treasurer, great and powerful duke, obey me!”

Even Baines had heard of this demon, though he could not remember where, and he watched it materialize with a stirring of curiosity. Yet it was nothing remarkable in the light of what he had seen already: an angelic figure, at once beautiful and foul, seated astride a dragon; it carried a viper in its right hand. He remembered belatedly that these spirits, never having been matter in the first place, had to borrow a body to make appearances like this, and would not necessarily pick the same one each time; the previous description of ASTAROTH that he had read, he now recalled, had been that of a piebald Negro woman riding on an ass. As the creature passed him, it smiled into his face, and the stench of its breath nearly knocked him down.

“ASMODAY, strong and powerful king, chief of the power of Amaymon, angel of chance, obey me!” As he called, Ware swept off his hat with his left hand, taking care, Baines noted, not to drop the lodestone as he did so.

This king also rode a dragon, and also had three heads—bull, man and ram. All three heads breathed fire. The creature’s feet were webbed, as were its hands, in which it carried a lance and pennon; and it had a serpent’s tail. Fearsome enough; but Baines was beginning to note a certain narrowness of invention among these infernal artisans. It also occurred to him to wonder, fortunately, whether this very repetitiveness was not deliberate, intended to tire him into inattentiveness, or lure him into the carelessness of contempt. This thing might kill me if I even closed my eyes, he reminded himself.

“FURFUR, great earl, obey me!”

This angel appeared as a hart and was past them in a single bound, its tail streaming fire like a comet.

“HALPAS, great earl, obey me!”

There was nothing to this apparition but a stock dove, also quickly gone. Ware was calling the names now as rapidly as he could manage to turn the pages, perhaps in recognition of the growing weariness of his Tanists, perhaps even of his own. The demons flashed by in nightmare parade: RAYM, earl of the Order of the Thrones, a man with a crow’s head; SEPAR, a mermaid wearing a ducal crown; SABURAC, a lion-headed soldier upon a pale horse; BIFRONS, a great earl in the shape of a gigantic flea; ZAGAN, a griffin-winged bull; ANDRAS, a raven-headed angel with a bright sword, astride a black wolf; ANDREALPHUS, a peacock appearing amid the noise of many unseen birds; AMDUSCIAS, a unicorn among many musicians; DANTALIAN, a mighty duke in the form of a man but showing many faces both of men and women, with a book in his right hand; and at long last, that mighty king created next after LUCIFER and first to fall in battle before MICHAEL, formerly of the Order of the Virtues, BELIAL himself, beautiful and deadly in a chariot of fire as he had been worshiped in Babylon.

“Now, great spirits,” Ware said, “because ye have diligently answered me and shown yourselves to my demands, I do hereby license ye to depart, without injury to any here. Depart, I say, yet be ye willing and ready to come at the appointed hour, when I shall duly exorcise and conjure you by your rites and seals. Until then, ye abide free. Amen.”

He snuffed out the fire in the brazier with a closely fitting lid on which was graven the Third or Secret Seal of Solomon. The murk in the refectory began to lift.

“All right,” Ware said in a matter-of-fact voice. Strangely, he seemed much less tired than he had after the conjuration of MARCHOSIAS. “It’s over—or rather, it’s begun. Mr. Ginsberg, you can safely leave your circle now, and turn on the lights.”

When Ginsberg had done so, Ware also snuffed the candles. In the light of the shaded electrics the hall seemed in the throes of a cheerless dawn, although in fact the time was not much past midnight. There was nothing on the altar now but a small heap of fine gray ash.

“Do we really have to wait it out in here?” Baines said, feeling himself sagging. “I should think we’d be a lot more comfortable in your office—and in a better posi­tion to find out what’s going on, too.”

“We must remain here,” Ware said firmly. “That, Mr. Baines, is why I asked you to bring in your transistor ra­dio—to keep track of both the world and the time. For approximately the next eight hours, the area inside these immediate walls will be the only safe place on all the Earth.”