WE drove straight to the Bishop’s Palace where, for the first time in my life, I rang the bell without a tremor. To my astonishment, the McGurk practically fell on my neck. ‘Thank heaven you’re here, Miss Cassandra! I’ve tried taking away the brandy and that heathen book, but he won’t hear of it.’
‘But how did he find the… heathen book?’ asked Oliver, as we followed Mrs McGurk to the library.
She shook her head. ‘All I know is, he spent yesterday turning the Palace upside down. Opened every cupboard and drawer in every room. Even took all my clean linen out of the press. “What are you looking for?” I asked him, but he wouldn’t say. Then he wouldn’t go to Evensong but shut himself up in his library instead. Up and down the ladder he was, pulling out books and looking in cupboards. Wouldn’t touch a morsel of food, though I’d done him a lovely shepherd’s pie. It was about ten o’clock last night, when he gave a great shout. I heard a thump, and when I went in, I found him with one of those ugly old wooden chests open on the floor and that evil black book in his hands. He’s been up all night with it and then this morning… he wouldn’t go to church!’ Mrs McGurk’s bosom heaved.
Bishop Stiles was at his desk, his head bent over a large volume, muttering to himself. As we entered he drank greedily from a glass. He looked haggard with his eyes all red and bleary and his skin like yellow parchment.
‘Visitors, your Lordship,’ announced Mrs McGurk.
He didn’t look up.
Oliver spoke firmly. ‘Hello, Bishop Stiles. We’ve come to take a look at the Grimoire.’
‘No.’ The Bishop slammed his fist down on the desk. ‘I musht… keep reading. Sho many spells. Sho much anch… ancient and powerful magic to torture and enslave and kill.’ He waggled a tipsy forefinger at me. ‘Why… I could bring the dead to life and the living to terrible death with just a shn… snap of my fingers.’ He tried ineffectually to suit the action to the words before reaching for the brandy decanter.
But Oliver was too quick and snatched it out of reach. ‘I think you’ve had enough, sir.’. He put the decanter back on the sideboard before gently easing the book from the Bishop’s grasp. ‘Why don’t you let us look after this for a while?’
Bishop Stiles eyed him blearily. ‘Have to… find the answer before Saint Snivel’s—Saint Sliver’s—Saint Swiffle’s—before July fifteenth.’ He waved his empty glass. ‘Or else…’
‘Or else, what, sir?’ Oliver pulled the Grimoire a little closer.
‘Or else, darkness, wickedness, CALAMITY!’ yelled the Bishop, laughing hysterically.
Jane sniffed disapprovingly ‘I collect the Bishop is odiously drunk, more shame for him.’
Conscious of Oliver’s presence, I shook my head slightly. ‘Could it be the Grimoire that’s made him like this, do you think, Oliver?’
‘That and half a bottle of brandy.’ Oliver lifted the book free.
‘Where did you find the Grimoire, Bishop?’ I asked, hoping to snap him out of it.
The Bishop looked cunning. ‘He came. He told me.’
‘Who told you?’
He put a finger to his lips. ‘Shhh, musht not say. I shore––saw him in the edge of the mirror. Jusht out of the corner of my… eye.’ He lowered his head and whispered, ‘He showed me.’ And, raising his arm, Bishop Stiles pointed tipsily at the row of carved wooden boxes that had stood for centuries on top of the enormous bookcase. At one end there was a chest-sized gap.
‘So it was in one of those mortuary chests,’ breathed Oliver.
‘This one,’ I agreed, bending down and picking up the ancient wooden box.
‘Cashandra Aushten knew. In her letter, she said it wash in the Palace. The blashted thing wash right here in this room!’ exclaimed Bishop Stiles drunkenly.
Oliver, Jane and I stared at the box. Like its companions it was about two feet square and painted in muted tones of red and green with gilt embellishments. In the centre of its lid was a carved shield with an angel on either side, each holding a book. Painted on the shield were the letters D.M.S. and below them an inscription: Dis Manibus Sacrum.
‘I don’t suppose you read Latin?’ I asked Oliver glibly.
He nodded. ‘And Ancient Greek.’
‘Of course you do.’
He ran his finger over the inscription. ‘Surely… it can’t be that obvious…’
‘What does it say?’
‘It says,’ replied Oliver, ‘“sacred to the ghost gods”.’
I stared. ‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. Though it was a conventional pagan inscription used by the Romans, it’s not what you’d expect to see on a mortuary chest containing the remains of a medieval Bishop. I don’t know how we never noticed it.’
‘Never noticed it!’ The Bishop giggled. ‘Found the curse!’
‘You did?’ Oliver laid the Grimoire on a side table. ‘On which page?’
We gazed at the great black book. It was an ugly thing with an aged leather cover embossed with two interlinked triangles inside a circle; above the circle an unlidded eye made me shudder. A heavy metal clasp shaped like talons held the book shut. It was exactly as Cassandra Austen had described in her letter to Bishop Sumner. Goose bumps prickled my skin.
Oliver forced the talons apart and opened the Grimoire.
I recoiled as if I’d been punched. I had a fleeting vision of something dark and hideous rising from the page, before a black shadow obscured my vision. I drew a choking breath and it vanished.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Oliver.
‘No––I guess––I saw something––only––’
‘What did you see?’
But now that that it was gone, I was oddly reluctant to talk about it. Instead I said, ‘There’s power in that book. Can you feel it?’
He looked at me in surprise. ‘No.’
I glanced at Jane. She was unusually pale and clearly uneasy. She spun slowly round as though she were looking for something. Or someone. I banished the thought and forced myself to examine the book. On the first page three words were written in ink so thick and dark they looked like writhing black snakes:
‘God is dead,’ translated Oliver in disapproving accents.
I saw the Bishop flinch.
‘Now that I see this pagan book I am no longer surprised that a man of such a repellent and cowardly aspect as Mr Clarke should have been seduced by it,’ said Jane, frowning.
Oliver began turning pages. On each was a spell: some written in couplets, some in four, five and six-line stanzas and some in jagged black prose. Most were in Latin, a few were in Ancient Greek, and several of the pages were stained with what, to my heightened imagination, looked like blood. But what made my skin crawl were the pictures: gruesome creatures cavorted around the ugly black words: naked devils, satyrs, dark angels and hideous, leering human figures with grossly enlarged genitals and maniacal grins. Further on were drawings of bodies scorched with flaming brands, of people chained and contorted, and of men and women stretched upon the rack with screaming mouths and bulging eyes. Nausea rose within me and I almost begged Oliver to throw the book away.
As though struck with a similar horror, Oliver began turning the pages faster. Here and there I could see pictures of women, naked and bound in cages or tied to a stake or chained to a man. It was at one of these pages that Oliver finally paused. ‘Here,’ he said, his voice thick with loathing, ‘I think this is the curse Clarke used.’
I leaned forward, reluctant, yet eager to see; Jane drifted nearer. Beneath Oliver’s finger the writing was black and slightly raised, the Latin words incomprehensible to me but the pictures around them hinting at their meaning. At first glance this drawing appeared less violent than the others. There was a picture of a woman kneeling with her head bowed before an altar. Beside her was a man with his hands clasped before him. Only when I looked closely did I see that he grasped a set of cords tied around her neck, waist, wrists and ankles. Between the lines someone had written an English translation:
Asmodai, King of Demons, Emperor of the Nine Hells
I look to the North and prostrate myself before thee
Beleth, Mighty King of Hell and Rider of the Pale Horse
I look to the East and prostrate myself before thee
Belial, Ruler of the Sons of Darkness
I look to the West and prostrate myself before thee
Gaap, Prince of Fiends and Knight of the Demon Hall
I look to the South and prostrate myself before thee
Emperor, Kings, Princes, Demons all
Hear me, I pray thee
Receive my sacrifice
My bone
My blood
My skin
My soul
Accept my gifts so I may bind her
Soul to soul, her Lord and Master
Hold her in the world between
So we may unite, my king to her queen
Once she is mine she will never be free
Bind her to me for eternity.
‘Impertinence!’ Jane’s voice throbbed with outrage. ‘And blasphemy, too. I am shocked. To think that Mr Clarke should have been such a heathen and a hypocrite. What a contemptible fellow he was, to be sure.’
‘We must find the counter-curse!’ I grasped Oliver’s arm urgently. ‘We need to undo this horrible spell.’
‘Agreed, but first let me write it down. In case the Bishop won’t let us take the Grimoire,’ he added softly, in response to my puzzled frown. He hastily scribbled the lines on a piece of paper. When he was done, he shoved the spell into his pocket and began turning pages again.
Each page was a new hope but none of the spells suggested anything resembling a counter-curse. With only a dozen pages left I grew increasingly anxious. There had to be something here to help us.
Oliver turned two more pages and paused.
‘Here. I think this is what we’re looking for.’
I gazed down at the page and at the odd words that ran across it in the same ugly black letters that had pronounced God’s death:
‘What does it mean?’
Oliver traced the first word. ‘Maledictum means “curse” in Latin and below it is Maledictum spelled backwards.’ He pointed.
‘So does that mean that what follows is the reverse of a curse?’ I asked.
‘I hope so.’ Oliver turned the page.
But it was blank.