Darconville's Cat (93 page)

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  It was all in the readiness now. Mistakes, misdates;
exaggerations, lies, distractions; all manner of misseeings and
misnotings—they were gone. Darconville went out for a walk. And as
he walked he thought and, in thinking, could not recall of Isabel a
single pleasure with her. It was as true as he’d been told: if
people found the recollection of her more pleasing than her
presence, something they remembered of her seemed always to be
missing when they encountered her again. He muttered various of her
phrases in her own voice yet found that language could but extol,
not reproduce, the beauties of the sense, if beauties ever there
were. He walked and walked, brooding, thinking a thought of wrath
and quickening his step, thinking a thought of kindness and fending
it aside with his hand. There was a luminous smear of starlit mist
over the Charles and the river lights along the banks reflected as
mysteriously in the dark water as in the depths of his mind, again,
were mirrored figures of every adjunct to the heavens and
characters of signs and evening stars by which the spirits are
enforced to rise. It had grown late when he returned under the
streetlights to Adams House, and, once in his rooms, he lost no
time in beginning his preparations. He moved some furniture to the
walls, secured the shades, and then assembled—nothing more—his
implements of ghostly justice: chalk, dish, bloodstone, and
candles. He finished well after midnight, but did not retire, and
instead went downstairs. It was Sunday now, but there would be no
rest.

  With twenty devils at each ear whispering their
approval, Darconville played the piano all night with a knife on
top of the Steinway.

  LXXXIX

  Malediction!

  There is a foule great cat sometimes in my barne
which I have no liking unto.

        —GEORGE
GIFFORD,

        
A Dialogue
of Witches and Witchcraft

  BEFORE DAWN, Darconville went out and at the exact
moment that the sun appeared on the horizon cut with his virgin
knife a wild-nut tree that had never borne fruit. Then he returned
to the seclusion of his rooms and chose a spot for the operation,
placing the photograph of Isabel in the brass dish in front of
which he set the bloodstone. He next traced a triangle with chalk
and arranged the two consecrated candles nearby, putting the sacred
name of Jesus in position to prevent the spirits from inflicting
harm on him. Finally, he stood in the middle of the triangle with
the mystic wand of twig in hand, spat thrice, and began to chant
the great clavicule.

  “I, Alaric Darconville, do desire, call upon, and
conjure thee, Lord of Evil, Suzerain of the scornful, Depository of
cherished hatreds, who dost whisper in my ears thoughts of
vengeance and sore retaliation, to appear before me and fulfill
what I command thee by spells whose unrecognized traces baffle
human reason and by the most dreadful names that shout you honor at
the Northern Gates of Hell: Asbeel, Jeqon, Belphegor, Forças, Gaap,
Gadreel, Dagon, Rimmon, Senciner, Zavebe, and Uraka-barameel. Fiat,
fiat, fiat.

  “Emperor Lucifer, Master of all the Rebellious
Spirits, I beg you to be favorable in the invocation that I make to
your exalted minister, Lucifuge Rofocale, as I wish to make a pact
with him. I beg you also, Prince Beelzebub, to protect me in my
enterprise. Come, lod, Eheieh, Gibor, Eloah Va-Daath, Esytion,
Samsaweel, and Atarculph.

  “I beseech thee, Evil Spirit, Cruel Spirit! I call
thee, who sittest in the cemetery and takest away healing from man!
Go and place a knot in Isabel Rawsthorne’s head, in her eyes, in
her mouth, in her throat, in her windpipe, and put poisonous water
in her belly. If you do not go and put water in her belly, I shall
send against you the evil angels Puziel, Guziel, Psdiel, Prsiel. I
call thee and those six knots that you go quickly to Isabel
Rawsthorne and kill Isabel Rawsthorne because I wish it. I conjure
thee within this circle. Come hither. Come hither. Come hither,
because I wish and will it. Amen. Amen. Selah,

  “O Count Astorath, Sataniel, Mastema, Angel of Edom,
be propitious and bring it to pass that this very day you include
me in your mysteries, wherefore I most earnestly adjure you and by
the four beasts before the throne come in this place without noise,
deformity, or murmuring and fulfill this pact, removing my sighing
and learning my supplication. Xilka, Xilka, Besa, Besa, Besa. Come
Aglon, Vaycheon, Stimulamaton, Ezphares, Retragrammaton, Olyaram,
Irion, Existion, Mazm.

  “Obey promptly or I shall torture thee with the
force of the words of power from the Key of Solomon; or I shall
constrain you by the power of the Twelve Tables, moon swells, and
threads. So come forth instanter! Or I shall denounce you endlessly
by the force of unparalleled Jehovam Sabaoth! Come from whichever
place in the world thou art and give answers to my questions:
answers that shall be true and reasonable. Come, Yomyael, Marut,
Gressil, Busasejal, Artaqifa, Moloch, Azaredal.

  “I do dance my wand left in the sigils to call thee
visibly before this circle to obey me utterly. Each impediment
remove thou, and the doorposts move asunder. Bend thou the
Creator’s castle. Come, come, why stay you? Blow knots upon her,
forward and backward, anagramma-tized: ENROHTSWAR LEBASI. Leap from
hell with hax, pax, max, Deus adimax! Come, Magots, Silphae,
Rabost, Salamandrad, Tabost, Gnomus, Esmony, and
Fabelleronthou.

  “Appear in black and yellow livery, Pentomorph! I
will be avenged! Come here, all of you who like the places and
times in which duplicity and trickery are done! Deceive those who
see things, that they may appear to see what they do not. Ascend
alive from hell, ye imprisoned in sheet flame, and scream me
promises! Come, Eparinesont, Oriet, Clam-eron, Casmiel, Sodirno,
Premy, and Peatham.

  “Rule her with fumigations. Turn her upsidedown and
bewilder her with hests of mine, pitchy breath! I propitiate you,
Demogorgon from blackest hell, to create ill-will, terror, and
sorrow. Oppress, torture, and harass her body, soul, and five
senses. Smite her with your left hand and escort her with cruel
ministrations beneath the earth and curse in her face with eternal
doom! Veer with me! Come, Peunt, Slevor, Dorsamot, Janva,
Zariatnctmik, Arios, and Yod.

  “You demons, born of black exudings, of black pores,
of black skin, of black flesh, blood, veins, sinews, and black
bones, howl out from the bottom of all damnation the cries of your
signal disobedience. Work for me, Night-Wraiths and Handmaids of
Phantom! Come, Tistator, Abac, Iat, Guthac, Derisor, Destator, and
Gomeh.

  “Ascend alive from hell to where she is and flash
out from your fingers jujus, spells, and wails! O Beelzebub, cause
her bones to crack and grate against one another, displace her
bowels, confuse her, cover her with botches and boils, bulges, and
blebs! Come, Agla, Tagla, Mathon, Oarios, Almouzin, Membrot,
Varvis, Pithona, and Anexhexeton.

  “Smooth Devils, Horned Devils, Sullen Devils, Arch
Devils, Shorn Devils, Hairy Devils, Foolish Devils, Devilesses, and
Young Devils, all the offspring of Devildom, come with your
devilish tricks, quicker than light, and sport with her. May she be
smitten down and given a bed beneath some lockjawed hell until the
end of time brings eternity upon it and in the doing thereof shall
I allow you my inthronization in fire for as long. Aliseon, Hone,
Vermios, Erin Catharines. Galbas, galbât, galdes, galdat, Earl
Astaroth—

        ”Venite, venite,
venite!

        Palas aron
azinomas.

        Bagahi laca
Bachabe.”

  He stood there for some time, watching, lost in a
fixed and prolonged gaze that seemed to track the smoke’s course to
his thoughts as the photograph in the dish curled up in fire, its
smiling face turning from the smooth color of lawsheep to dark red
murray and then to cancer in the accumulation of flames. It seemed,
as it burned, to burst forth in a torrent of abuse. Then there were
ashes. The room was suddenly strange and solemn and lonely, like an
empty but profaned sepulchre after an attempt to muster the
disaffected, and in the stink, heat, and cafard he who made that
attempt knew he now lived at the heart of cruelty, now lived where
the light goes when it is put out. He knew he must seek friends of
the darkness now and, with that terrible truth, watching his own
shadow sway on the floor with the flickering candles, snuffed them
and crept upstairs to Dr. Crucifer’s rooms in a stupor of—not of
confusion, nor of agitation. And it wasn’t remorse or cynicism or
fear. A blackness sucked at his heart. There was only one word for
it.

  XC

  Hate

  I study hatred with great diligence for that’s a
passion in my own control.

        —W. B. YEATS,
“Ribh Considers

        Christian Love
Insufficient”

  “HATE,” said Dr. Crucifer, “is love’s other face:
they are complements, not opposites. The emotion owes all its
meaning, as I’ve told you, to the demand for love, each expressing
an impulse which exists only by an antagonism to the fear that
oppresses it, for one can never be a hater without having had this
ideal, that one, always loving, will always be loved in return.
There lies not a grain of sand between the loved and the detested.
With everything right, wrong is always somehow involved, and, like
bifronted Janus, we love with the dread of hate in us. Buried in
every yes there is a no. It is a Manichean delight: all the time
you hate you steal it from love, its
sole
provocation, for
it does not precede the facts that call it forth; it nourishes
itself on them. Dichromatism always extends to the complementary
colors. You commit in one exactly everything you simultaneously
omit in the other. They exist side by side to kill each other, like
the heterosporous combination of cedar and chokecherry. What, after
all, is the precise morphological distinction between an embrace
and a strangulation?
L’amour, la mort
: every kiss muffles
a bite. Inside every lover is manacled Taras Bulba. The anagram of
‘The heart’s desire’ is ‘hate strides here’—the imperfection in the
transposition being the apostrophe you can’t cry out.

  “Hatred is the appetite which increases as you eat.
It is, nevertheless, always in a state of being, a substantial
definiteness unto itself. There are many passions which we are
condemned to feel only in a reduced form: never love or hate. Both
flirt with the impossible, the due practical conceding of each as
to inevitability, however, amounting to much, indeed to the sure
promise of all. Lovers are half-enemies in the first place, and
hatred between half-enemies, often deeper than between opposites,
aches for completion.

  “The thing confounds scrutinoids absolutely; no more
than love does it concern itself with reason but goes through life
fixed on delirious hope in order to pledge allegiance to an
inverted form of the same ideal. It is not shaped to common
recognita nor bounded by the cir-cumvallations of vulgar
experience, and the feeble and obvious piety which announces
indifference
to define the essential polarity to the
proposition of love I can only assign to the retarded virtuosity of
those unguentarians and barely audible paracoits-of-footwork who,
fearing to penetrate into other spheres, higher or lower, in ways
allowed or forbidden, must live life either on their knees or in a
crouch like a dog fucking a football! Hate wears a capital letter.
Its colors are as bright as poisonous reptiles. It quickens to
bolder action than diffidence or dumbness and chafes as motion
conquers cold to run full-tilt at an indifferent world screaming
that rather than be less one would rather not be at all! We have
long considered views on the subject so general as to be trite, so
idiosyncratic as to be useless. We overestimate it and
underestimate it. Do you ask why?

  “Men, in the mass, are amply content to take life as
they’re given it, finding the world to be so very comfortable they
have no inclination either for its stark ascents and descents. They
are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for
any length of time: ignoble mediocrities of the Rank and Vile! The
common wantwit, further, confines the spiritual world to the
supremely good. Mr, and Mrs. Bumb from Main St., America, and all
their little tits in mittens at Sunday-Go-To-Meeting? Oh yes, but
what of the supremely wicked? Mustn’t they necessarily have their
portion in it as well? And why not? Why should sanctity alone, and
not sorcery, be permitted the children of the earth? I tell you,
there are multitudes of us who, thrown headlong into the valley of
tears and sightless with rage at the mere premise of creation, eat
black pulses and drink wormwood with a joy infinitely sharper than
anything within the experience of an epicure! And why?
It is
the best way of allowing reality to live up to the
imagination
! Hatred, indeed,
is
rare! It is the
infernal miracle as love claims to be the supernal, a withdrawal
from the mediocrity of things as they’re theologically supposed to
be, an ecstasy of scorched devotion unavailable to the muddled,
second-rate masses with untenanted souls who have no comprehension
of the inner sense of things, a transcendental effort to surpass
the ordinary bounds and, by so doing, surpassing the common
understanding which, nevertheless, still foolishly hobbles after it
with notebook in hand to address, then adjudge it imagined.
Malevolence! Wrath! Hatred! I hereby muster all the Hierarchs of
Tophet to prove them real!