The Dark Rites of Cthulhu (27 page)

“Alright,” I said, though I wanted to shake him, remind of all the blessings he was neglecting with this insanity. “Alright, Paul. But again, if this is true, then nobody has successfully used this thing. What chance do you have?”

“I have a resource my unfortunate predecessors didn’t. You.”

“Me?”

“Who knows more about the alphabet of Mu and Tsath-Yo than you? You studied your uncle’s work. I don’t believe there was a more accomplished linguist alive than Dr. Warren Rice. You’re his scion.”

“Paul,” I snickered nervously. “It’s been years since I studied that stuff. I haven’t read a word of Hyperborean in...”

“Let me tell you what I believe,” Paul interrupted, touching my shoulder and fixing me with those drilling eyes. “The key to the Old Ones, to the forgotten powers, was left to us in these languages. These aren’t just dead tongues. These are, in their own right, mystic formulas. God evoked Creation through the use of words of power. I think very few men can truly understand them, and those that do, once they do, cannot hope to forget them.”

He turned to the book between us on the island, opened it to a certain page, and spun it to show me the archaic letters of one of the headings.

“Read.”

I looked down at the page, doubtful.  I would humbly say my mastery of the classical, Oriental, Germanic, and Semitic languages is considerable. But what I remembered of these supposedly antediluvian scripts, they had an internal consistency, but nothing in common with any other spoken word.

I’d studied them only a little. That one summer when Paul had told me fantastic stories about the beings that supposedly existed somewhere in the outer dark beyond empirical creation, the things whose power, he said, made the angels and demons of western magic look like Saturday morning cartoons. It was the summer I’d first read my uncle’s books, and Paul had remarked admiringly that if there was an inheritable gene for language, I had it.

As I squinted at the ancient page, a haze descended over my eyes, and it was as if the twisted letters moved and the knotted meanings untied, revealing their truth.

“The Making of The Black Tallow,” I read, surprised at how quickly the letters came back to me.

He snapped the book shut.

“You see?” he said. “I knew you could do it.”

I admit I felt a wave of excitement come over me, and a little fear, too.

“Now what?”

“I’m no slouch when it comes to ancient alphabets,” Paul said. “But translation and reading aloud are two different things. There’s a key passage at the end of the ritual. An invocation. The pronunciation must be precise. There, I need your help.”

“You want me to read it?” I asked, unsure.

“No of course not. As the evoker, I have to be the one to read it aloud. I want you to transcribe a phonetic pronunciation for me.”

“A crib sheet?” I said, smiling.

“Essentially,” he said, smiling back. “Raymond, I can’t stress the importance of this step. I really believe the correct invocation may have been where my predecessors have all failed. I need you to do this for me, but I also need you to tell me truthfully if you’re unable to.”

“This is crazy…”

“Raymond, I’m rich enough to be crazy. I’m also prepared to pay you for your service. Handsomely.”

I shook my head, “We’re old friends, Paul.”

“Please don’t take it as an insult,” Paul said holding up a hand. “It would be my pleasure. I’d pay Abraham’s bounty for this. A seven figure remuneration for an old friend is almost a relief.”

I coughed.

“
Seven
figures?”

“Seven for the seven books of the
Infernalius
. Magicians like synchronicity. Will seven million dollars secure your expertise?”

“
Seven
million
?” I shook my head. “You’re joking.”

“Look at this place, Raymond,” he insisted. “It cost me more to build this house, and I have four more around the world. I’m not boasting, just trying to put it into perspective for you.”

“It’s above and beyond my usual fees,” I said.

“This is my life’s work, Raymond. I only wish I could grant you some greater portion of the joy I’ll feel once it’s done.”

Seven million dollars buys a lot of joy, I thought.

I had come in sight of this place with a stab in my heart thinking of what I would have to return to. Now, Paul was saying, to simply render some ancient text into a phonetic key, I wouldn’t have to. It would be real work, and he was right, I was probably the most qualified expert he knew. I shouldn’t feel guilty about the money.

I didn’t. I wouldn’t.

“Alright, Paul,” I said.

“Let me show you to my Oratory,” he said.

Paul led me through the house to a basement stair, and down into a surprisingly large sub-level, somewhat labyrinthine in design. There were passages that led off into rooms where I saw workspaces with assorted tools, some for carpentry, others for electrical work, and a pottery room with a wheel and kiln. We passed a strangely sweet smelling room where I saw a large vat of bubbling liquid.

“What’s that?” I asked, craning my neck as we walked past.

“One of my wife’s hobbies. She runs a candle making business out of our home,” he said.

I looked at him askance.

“Idle housewife. She’s picked up a lot of hobbies since she quit modelling,” Paul said. “Anyway, that’s for making tallow,” he said, reaching in the doorway and slapping off the light switch. “She’s always leaving it going.”

He led me to a locked door and produced a ring of keys from his pocket and opened it. Beyond was a narrow concrete stairway, incongruously leading up.

We climbed the stair to the top of the house, and so came up through the floor of Paul’s ritual lodge, a custom built single room Oratory on the roof of the house with shuttered windows covered in thick red drapery in every direction, and a terrace surrounding, like the top of a lighthouse. The structure was cleverly hidden from street level.

Paul lit a series of seven brass oil lanterns suspended from the ceiling by chains, illuminating the room, which was paneled with white pine wood. In the center of the chamber was a large uncut stone altar with a ritual silver censer atop it, and in a hollow space beneath, various linens and silks, phials of oil, a scarlet miter and wand of Almond-tree wood. A marble lectern, engraved to resemble a baroque pillar rising from the back of a reclining dragon, stood before the altar. The room smelled of myrrh and olive oil.

The floor around the altar was already inscribed with white chalk. A large circular device had been drawn there, a summoning or protection circle. I didn’t know which, because it had been so long since I’d concerned myself with such things. It certainly wasn’t any Solomonic ward I’d ever seen. There was a kind of many-pointed star design in the center, constructed of what appeared to be seven heptagrams overlaid. The fantastic geometric pattern managed to suggest both dizzying chaos and meticulous precision. On the outer edge of the circle, corresponding to each of the star-points, there sat a black candle, forty nine in all.

The candles were also of peculiar design. They were shining black in color, and molded in such a way that they tapered upwards. Each was flanged into six wicked outreaching points, like a spearhead, or the topper on some gothic iron fence.

I approached the circle and crouched down to peer at one of the candles. The wicks were of some braided, silken substance. Not cotton.

“Did Cherie make these for you?”

“I used her resources,” Paul smiled thinly. “But I built the molds. The book called for specific design and placement.”

“Are they wax or….?”

“Tallow. Calf suet,” he said.

“From the veal takeout place?” I asked, grinning.

Paul smiled.

“I intend to start the ritual tonight, Raymond. Do you think you can provide me the pronunciation in time?”

“That soon? I don’t even have any of my reference books.”

“I’m paying for expediency. My own library has copies of every book your uncle had.”

“Show me to the library,” I shrugged.

The downstairs library was as well outfitted and aesthetically pleasing as the Oratory. The reading table was already piled with the books I needed.

He set
The Infernalius
down and opened it. He unfolded a sort of brass plate and laid it across the open book. The plate had an adjustable window which Paul centered on a certain paragraph. Effectively, the rest of the two pages were hidden.

“Confine your work to this passage,” Paul said.  “I’ll be in the Oratory, preparing. When it’s finished, ring this,” he said, placing a small bell on the table. “I’ll hear you.”

I slid into the chair at the desk and glanced at the stack of reference books.

“Raymond,” said Paul, laying a hand on my shoulder. “Thank you.”

Then he left me to it.

I call it work, but really, I was surprised how easily and quickly the transcription went. It was a short, though expressive passage, which required only a few glances at Casterwell and Copeland to suss out. I was surprised Paul couldn’t do it himself. But of course, he was burdened with his own neurosis. He believed this would actually attain for him the driving need of his life. I merely thought it would make me rich.

Oh, I checked and double-checked it, to be sure. Both for Paul’s sake, and for my own. Really this work would forever alter my life, if Paul actually paid me what he’d promised. But then, I thought, what if, once the whole affair is over and nothing happens, and he pushes over his marble lectern and breaks his wand over his knee, he decides not to pay me? Maybe, I thought, I should ask for the money in advance.

Was I being unscrupulous taking advantage of an old friend’s eccentricity? Maybe. But I was tired of the book shop, tired of reading of places I would never visit. A million dollars would buy a year of exotic travel, a year or two of absolute freedom. But with seven, I knew I could live the rest of my life free of care.

I glanced down at my own reflection in the brass plate.  It had only taken me an hour to transcribe the passage into a phonetic key. It was just a lot of pseudo-mystic babble, heaping praise and swearing loyalty to something called Yog-Sothoh and Azathoth, and offering sustenance to a thing called Krefth Daal Zuur, That Which Strains Against Its Chains.

Bullshit.

I grinned at the plate, picked veal from my teeth with my fingernail. I hesitated to ring the bell and tell Paul I was finished. Seven million dollars for an hour’s work didn’t seem kosher. Maybe I should wait a bit, make Paul think I was really breaking a sweat over the thing? Maybe he wouldn’t trust the key if it was completed too quickly?

I flipped through the reference books a bit, but soon grew bored. I’d read these, after all. I touched the edge of
The Infernalius
, and noticed something poking out from beneath the brass. It looked like a bit of illumination.

I shifted the brass plate to the side and saw, with a flush of excitement, that there was a painting visible on the edges of the partially fanned book pages.

I turned the book on the desk and moved the pages to arrange the painting, which was not visible when the book was closed. I’d seen disappearing fore-edge fan paintings before in the shop, on sacred works. They often depicted pastorals, or religious figures.

I considered the mad genius of the book. According to him, it was comprised of pages from seven separate books (each from different locations and time periods), pages which only made sense when compiled with their scattered brethren. What kind of mind came up with such a thing? And what kind of mind could conceive of a piece of fore-edge art on those disparate pages which again, only appeared when the book was compiled and fanned out in such a way?

No, it was impossible.

The painting was strange in the extreme.  It was actually a panorama that extended across three edges. It depicted a multitude of naked human figures surrounding a jutting black stone and cowering beneath a starry night sky that would put Van Gogh to shame in terms of its roiling expressionism. The entire painting, or rather the sky, was bordered with rows of jagged teeth, as if the sky itself were a gaping mouth. Further, the stars within the mouth were actually more like iridescent globes of sickly light. At the base of the altar, a man in the red and black robes of a magician stood within a circle of lit candles. Looking closer, I saw that strewn and broken over the altar, were the bodies of two female figures, a mother and child.

An inexplicable dread came over me, and I glanced up at that instant to see a family photograph hanging on the wall. Paul, looking grim as usual with only the hint of a smile, his hands on the shoulders of his lovely wife Cherie, statuesque, blonde, shining blue eyes. His twelve year old daughter, already reflecting the beauty of her mother.

I stood up, the chair groaning back. I don’t know why, but things started to fire in my brain. Connections. That weird fore-edge painting. Paul’s offhand joke about his willingness to pay ‘Abraham’s bounty.’ The heading, The Making of The Black Tallow. I couldn’t bring myself to find that heading again.