Circle of standing stones. Murmur of incantation. Dead of night.
This was the crossroad of the Sussex leys, the dowser’s crossroad. Subterranean rivers intersected here. Power swirled and vibrated in the very air. Seven spirals of chthonic force were known to snake up from the earth into the tall grass, to coil round the seven mysterious boulders that stood in their ancient ring brimming with intensity.
It was Candlemas Eve, a witch’s sabbath, and the old man had brought a sacrifice.
The grass swished, the fallen leaves snickered as he came. Silver light and black shadow raced across the ground in turn. The man traveled with them quickly. He was alone. He was completely naked. His face was puffy, his white breasts pendulous, his belly domed. His phallus was shrunken by the cold.
He murmured to himself as he came:
“Arise, infernal. Hel, Hecate, Goddess of the Crossroad, Gorgo, Mormo, Moon …”
The canvas bag hanging from his right fist was writhing. A frightened whimpering could be heard coming from within. The old man’s lips were dry, his eyes were glassy. In his left hand he gripped the athame, the sacrificial knife.
Now he arrived at the prehistoric circle, the seven man-sized stones rising beneath the turbulent sky. They were said to be seven maidens who’d been cursed for dancing on a Sunday. Their shapes were undulant. The tortuous rock was animated by the running light from the unbroken passage of clouds over the full moon.
The old man stepped into the circle’s center. He could feel the cadence of occult energy, the broadcast of the waters converging underground. He could almost hear the throb of the maidens’ music. He knelt before the kindling he had piled up in a small pyramid. He felt pebbles and grit under his bare knee.
The air grew hushed. Leaves, trapped beneath the kindling, chattered softly. The wind haunted the perimeter of the place, seeking ingress, moaning.
“Thou who goest to and fro at night, torch in hand, enemy of the day, friend and lover of darkness. Thou who dost rejoice when the bitches are howling and warm blood is spilled …”
He set the bag on the hard earth before him, set the athame on the hard earth, beside the lighter he had left waiting there. He clasped the scruff of the wriggling mass inside the canvas sack. He spread the neck of the sack. Puffing, he worked the shivering animal out into the cold.
The puppy looked up at the old man hopefully. It lapped at his thumb—the thumb that held it fast.
The old man kept the puppy pinned with his left hand, took up the lighter in his right. He worked the strike-wheel, made the flame. Squinted at it, pupils zooming.
The puppy yipped, begging to be set free, to play. The old man leaned across it, held the lighter to the leaves.
“Thou who art walking amidst the phantoms in the place of tombs … Come on, come on, flame.”
A leaf took, burned. There was a low snigger as the fire spread. A red glow slowly leaked out of the pyramid, spread over the ground.
“Good. Good,” the old man said.
The puppy squeaked at him, thumped its tail against the earth.
The old man lifted the athame.
“Now.” He hoisted the knife up to the level of his thin, silvery hair. His voice grew louder.
“Thou whose thirst is blood, thou who dost strike chill fear into mortal hearts. Hel, Hecate, Gorgo, Mormo. Cast a propitious eye upon our sacrifice.”
With that, he made a heave of effort, his breasts jiggling. The knife went high, went up against the clouds, against the moon.
There was a sudden suction of fumy air. The pyramid of sticks exploded in a mushroom of sparks and fire. Amidst the stone maidens, behind the burgeoning flame, out of the frozen night, there arose a black figure.
The old man cried out in terror.
The figure spoke. It boomed: “Lay not thy hand upon the dog! Neither do thou anything unto it!”
The blade of the athame sang a single note as it slipped from the old man’s fingers and hit the stony dirt.
“Harper?” he said.
“Oh, let the poor creature go, Jervis, you stupid old goat.” She came humping round the bonfire on her stick. Lowered a demanding hand. “Now.”
The old man made a deep frown, mopey, his fun spoiled. But he handed the puppy over to her. Harper held it against the shoulder of her cape. It licked her jowls happily, skewing her specs and Borsalino.
“And snap on a pair of shorts, there’s a good fellow,” she said. “My virgin heart is all aflutter.”
She retreated back behind the fire. She averted her eyes from his nakedness, communing muzzle to muzzle with the little dog.
Jervis, grumbling, towed his wobbly buttocks out of the stone circle, back into the grass to find his clothes.
“Ha-ha!” Harper barked, pleased with the puppy’s enthusiasm. It was climbing right up her shoulder to lave the side of her head. “What is it?” she called. “Part retriever?”
Jervis reentered the circle, carrying a bundle of clothes. He held on to the Y-fronts, tossed the rest to the ground. Grumpily, he pulled the shorts on, cracked the elastic band into their groove beneath his overhanging flesh. “How should I know?” In a gruff croak. He unfolded a woolly jumper next. “It was some child’s, some girl’s.” He yanked the jumper over him, popped his head out. “The little idiot left it to wait for her when she went into the news agent. So I borrowed it.”
“Oh, Jervis, Jervis,” Harper intoned, “you make insult superfluous.” But she could only harpoon the old sinner with one eye: her other lens was foaming with puppy spittle. She was busy holding her hat on with her stick hand too. But she went on. “And what’s this? Alone on so high a holiday? Where’s Granny and Uncle Bob and all the kids? Shouldn’t they be gathered round the Black Sabbath tree, singing Black Sabbath carols? Or something.”
The fire snapped between them, sinking down. Jervis hawked and shot a gob of phlegm into it. Arched a shrewd eyebrow at her. “Bastards deserted me. All of ’em. I couldn’t figure why till now.” He plucked his trousers from the foot of a stone. Holding them, he laid a finger against the side of his nose. “You scared them off, didn’t you? You warned them you were coming.”
“I thought we should have a chat alone. And you can be difficult to find.”
He made an animal growl, deep in his throat. Even the puppy paused and glanced at him. “Arrogant, aren’t you? Sure of yourself. Aren’t you?” He smiled nastily. “Well, what I hear, your days are numbered. You’ve crossed the line, Harper. Got above yourself. You only walk the earth on his sufferance.”
“And you walk free on mine,” she said. The dog was growing sleepy, was making a bed of her cape collar, settling in with its chin. Readjusting her Borsalino, blinking behind her smeared spectacles, Harper paced thoughtfully from the fireside towards one of the standing stones. The old man, meanwhile, was jamming his spindly gray legs into the baggy pants. “Imagine my surprise, Jervis, when a charming boy at the Art Loss Register mentioned the name of a mysterious Dr. Mormo, who had been a major figure in the smuggling of wartime plunder. Until then, I had always thought you a harmless conjurer of evil spirits and murderer of children’s pets. By the same token, the ladies and gentlemen at Scotland Yard’s Bureau of Arts and Antiques have not got my interest in the arcane, and so they have thus far failed to connect you with your alias. But I have done so, haven’t I?”
He buckled his belt, battled with his zipper. “Haven’t you had enough, you old cow? How many warnings do you think you’re going to get?”
Harper moved out of the stone’s shadow into the dying firelight. One hand holding the pup at her shoulder, the other the dragon on her stick, her hat half crushed, her glasses lopsided, she was still formidable.
“Why did he want The Magi, Jervis?”
“Do you think I’m barmy? You’ll get nothing from me.”
But Harper smiled thinly. She knew her man. He was half mad, but he was all coward. “Look around you, Jervis,” she said. “Your coven’s blown. Gone without warning, without even a whispered word. How fast they forsook you when they knew I was coming. Why? I’ll hazard a guess. Perhaps it’s because daring the powers of Hell is one thing, but facing the inside of Her Majesty’s prisons is another and worse. You are old, father Jervis. A word from me, and you’ll die on the inside. Let us, therefore, hold high converse with one another. Why did he want The Magi!”
She waited, tense. The thrill of the hunt was in her. She had no doubt of it anymore: she was onto her beast. At last. She had him by only a tentacle perhaps, only the tip of a tentacle held between her fingernails, but after all this time it was a true beginning, and she wasn’t going to let it go. “It was him, wasn’t it?” she couldn’t help asking. “At the auction. It was him.”
He made no direct answer, but her breath hitched at his reaction. A fearful glance around him; the sign of the cross, the transverse down around his navel, the vertical up to about his chest.
“Come on, then,” she said hoarsely. “Out with it, you old fool. For twenty-five years, he lies low. Nothing but little black flashes of him: the body of a child beneath the bogs of northern Finland, another washing up out of the bay in Port-au-Prince; a suicide here and there, a symbol scrawled in blood. Then, suddenly, into the limelight, he steps full-blown before all the world. To buy a painting? Clearly, this was too important a matter to delegate.”
The warlock gave her a sullen, sidelong glare. “There are worse things than to die in prison, Harper.” But he was already folding, she could tell. Petulant, with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders up around his hairy ears. “Anyway, it isn’t just The Magi, is it,” he grumbled. “He wants all of it. Of course he does. It’s no good without the whole Nativity triptych. The Magi, The Madonna, The Christ Child. He wants them all.”
He had slunk away from her to the far side of the fire. The puppy stirred and shifted on her shoulder as she stepped after him.
“All right,” she said. “Why does he want the triptych, then?”
This brought some of the gleam of nastiness back into his eye. He managed a damp, spiteful smile at her.
“You really don’t know, do you? Eh? You’re just stumbling in the dark, aren’t you? You’re walking the same trail he discovered twenty years ago, and you don’t even know that it’s under your feet.”
“Perhaps you could enlighten me,” Harper drawled.
“There, that was always your problem,” he muttered back at her. “If you ask me, it’s the whole flaw in your worldview. You get mired in details. A dead child pops up here, a suicide there, a symbol, a cult in Argentina. You think each thing’s just another thing. But they’re all one thing, Harper. They were all always one thing.”
Harper kept silent, waited. Those who deal in the occult were forever spewing out these grandiose maunderings. She wasn’t interested. Little minds think great thoughts, but great minds proceed in the smallest stages. Harper wanted something specific, something she could go forward on.
Her imperturbability seemed to inflame the warlock. He grew insistent.
“Are you blind or just stupid?” he cried. “Do you think he would come out into the open for nothing? He’s onto it, Harper! He followed the trail and he’s onto it.”
“Onto what, for heaven’s sake?”
“Ach!” He tried again to escape her unbroken gaze. Turned his back on her, waved a hand over his shoulder, walked away. Then whirled on her, cried out angrily, “The secret, woman! The secret! Would he show himself at Sotheby’s for his health? It’s the very secret of the Templars, the secret of the Grail!”
“Oh, come now, Jervis. Really. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well … as for that …” he answered darkly. “I know only as much as I’m told.”
“And you’re told that an eighteenth-century religious triptych contains the secret of the Holy Grail? Really,” Harper said again.
“All right. All right. Don’t believe me, then. But if you only used your head for two minutes you’d see the sense of it. Do you think Sotheby’s puts stolen pictures up on auction? You talked to the Register. They must’ve run a check on the thing.”
Harper gave one of her Zeus-like nods. “They did. The painting had no listed owner. It vanished long before the war.”
The warlock clenched his hoary fists at her. “Not vanished, Harper. The coven had it. The Nazi coven.”
“Haushofer, you mean? That lot?”
“Yes, yes. Haushofer, of course. But witchcraft ran deep in the Third Reich. High and deep. Right to the top. Don’t forget that Haushofer taught Hess. And Hess was imprisoned with Hitler. And Haushofer visited the two men in Lansberg every day they were there.” He announced all this proudly. “Haushofer—he knew about the triptych, all right. They all knew there was power in it, anyway. But what? That was the thing. What power? They couldn’t crack the code because they didn’t know what they were looking for. And then, when the war ended, when the bombers came and the Allied armies and it all came tumbling down around them, Haushofer committed hara-kiri …” He opened his hands, spread them. “The triptych was lost.”
They were on opposite sides of the fire now. On opposite sides of the stone circle, the light and shadow falling on them from above, racing over them. Harper stood still, frowning, prodigious, the eight maiden, a boulder of disdain as hushed and hard as the others.
“And you’re saying that Iago knows what the Nazis didn’t,” she said. “He knows what the secret of the triptych is.”
“Has done for twenty years,” growled Dr. Mormo.
“Then why now? Why has he only come after them now?”
He rolled his eyes at her obtuseness. “Well, he came after them then, of course!” he cried. “He came to me even then. But they were lost behind the Iron Curtain, you see. If any of it had come over on the black market, who would have known it if not me? No, try as he might, he couldn’t find them then. It wasn’t until the Curtain came down that The Magi finally came to light.”
“The Magi,” Harper echoed him. “And the others?”
“The others,” said the old man with a shrug. “That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? That’s why he was at the auction, out in the open like that. Whoever has the others, he wanted them to see. To see who they were dealing with. A man who would pay enormous prices for their panels—or who would come and take them by other means.” He gave a particularly unpleasant little giggle. “And it’s worked, hasn’t it,” he said. “They’re already beginning to nose their way out of the woodwork. Oh yes, they are. They’ll all come to Dr. Mormo in the long run, you’ll see.”
Harper answered nothing, mulling this over. The puppy continued to fidget on her shoulder, started whimpering. It would mess on her cape soon, she thought distantly. And the little girl who’d lost it was probably still awake, still sobbing. No doubt the police would know who she was …
“And you say it’s all one thing,” she said. “Even the cult in Argentina was part of it. Are you suggesting that Iago was searching for these paintings even then?”
“No, no, no,” said the warlock sharply. “But it was all part of it, just the same. Part of the secret. Part of the Grail.”
The fire clicked and cackled. Jervis, unexpectedly, cackled too. Brought his knuckle to his forehead and rattled it against his skull. “Oh, if you could see your face, Harper. If you could only see your face. You don’t think. You don’t know. You don’t understand what you’re dealing with, still. It’s not the triptych, or Argentina, or this murder or that. It’s not even the Nazis or the war or the Iron Curtain. It’s none of it. It’s all of it.” He leaned towards her. The orange flame-glow washed up over his puffy features, his crazy eyes.
“It’s the whole clockwork of history,” he told her, whispered to her under the moaning of the wind. “That’s what you’re missing, you blind old woman. The clockwork of history. Tick-tick. Tick-tick!”