The Language of Bees (46 page)

“In any event, if one insists on a magical element to religion, one cannot then be surprised when magic is taken seriously. The Black Mass developed originally from the Feast of Fools, when idiots ruled the day and strong drink and carnality flowed unchecked. Harmless parody helps relieve pressure, and by keeping it under the auspices of the Church, one might say that licentiousness was kept licensed.

“However, with a work of magic at its core, the Mass was vulnerable to the most crass of interpretations: that the Host itself was where the power lay. If it all comes down to the Host, then equally it all flows back from that same place, so that, by using that scrap of unleavened bread as the point of the wedge, the authority of the Mass, and of the Church, and of God himself, could be turned on its head.

“The Black Mass was originally intended to profane the Host so as to turn its power to profane uses. From that beginning, the Black Mass grew like lichen on a rock, until one finds, say, the mass performed by Étienne Guibourg in the Seventeenth Century, in which the mistress of Louis Quatorze was stretched out on the altar with the chalice between her bare breasts”—a bespectacled undergraduate walking the path along Christchurch meadow dropped his book of poetry, bent to pick it up while looking over his shoulder at us, and fell on his face—“while the priest chanted his Latin to the devil.

“Sexuality, of course, is the central element in many of these Black
celebrations, doubtless because the Church has aligned itself so definitively against free sexual expression. You’ve read the Marquis de Sade?”

“Er,” I replied. I felt a bit like the bespectacled undergraduate.

“Well, then you’ll remember how often his corrupt sexuality contains reference to elements of the Church—the Host, the Mass, monks, priests.”

“What about blood?” I asked, a bit desperately.

Professor Ledger’s bright eyes came to rest on my face. “My dear, why don’t you tell me what you’re after? Is this academic? Or one of your little investigations?”

I took the boat to the side opposite the footpath and worked the pole into the muck below, trapping us against the tree-lined bank. Once secure, I stepped over to the centre and settled onto cushions, retrieving the champagne and topping up our glasses.

“It’s a case,” I answered, and told her about it, my voice just loud enough for her aged ears. I did not tell her all: not Holmes’ personal stake in it, nor the identity of the dead woman found ten miles from my home. I think she guessed that I was leaving out a large part of it, but she did not comment.

“So,” I concluded some quarter hour later, “when there were objects that resemble quill trimmings at the murder sites, stained by what appears to be dried blood, and bits of black candle-wax as well, we had to wonder.”

“Necromancy,” she pronounced, her old voice quivering with distaste. “From
nekros
and
manteid:
‘dead divination.’ Blood spells and invocations. Sealing a covenant. The darkest of the dark arts. And to use fresh blood,
in situ …”
She shook her head. “You must stop this person, Mary.”

I forbore to make reference to her deprecating “little investigations” comment, but dug the rucksack I had brought from London out from under half a dozen rugs, and handed her the Adlers’ copy of
Testimony
. “It might help, if you were to look at this and tell me what you see.”

“Of course,” she said, although her hand hesitated, just a moment, before closing on the book’s cover.

“I have to take it back to London with me,” I said in apology.

She patted her pockets until she found a pair of reading glasses, and opened the book.

I extricated the pole from the sucking mud without swamping the boat, and continued idly downstream to the Isis proper, then looped back up the Cherwell. We passed under Magdalen Bridge and were nearly to Mesopotamia when the aged academic closed the book and removed her spectacles.

I continued to punt in silence, though my muscles burned and my back ached.

“He writes as if in conversation with himself,” she mused. “No explanation, no attempt at a reasoned argument, no
discursus
at all, except to enjoy the sound of his own voice. And yes, it is a he, most definitely.”

“Yet this is not a journal, it is a printed book, of which there are at least two in existence,” I said.

“If there are two, there will be more. This is an esoteric document to be presented only to True Believers. I should imagine he may have another, either in existence or in preparation, to set his beliefs before the outer world.”

“The
Text of Lights
,” I said. “That was what one of his disciples called it.”

“Light indeed seems to be the basis of his cosmology—or rather, as you say, lights of various sorts: sun, moon, comets. Which reminds me, which comet do you imagine he was born under?”

“We think that of September 1882. There were no meteors then, as far as I can find, but he seems more than a little flexible when it comes to chronology. And to astronomy and geography, for that matter.”

“Hare-brained thinking at its best,” she said in disapproval.

“Madness being no excuse for sloppy ratiocination?” I asked, half joking.

She was not amused. “When one encounters a mystical system based upon the physical universe, it is generally manifested by a tight, even obsessive internal logic.”

“However,” I replied, “internal logic is not the same as rationality. ‘The desperation to support an untenable position to which one is nonetheless committed has caused centuries of extreme mental gymnastics.’”

The statement was a direct quote, levelled at me some years before during the defence of a paper by none other than Professor Clarissa Ledger.

She remembered, and laughed. “I believe that was the only time I heard you apply volume over logic.”

“Around you, only the once. But I think the author of
Testimony
never had you as a teacher.”

“Pray God, no.” The idea was, clearly, repugnant.

“Does the book suggest anything else about the man?” I asked her.

“He has a particular fascination for Scandinavian mythology, which I should suppose ties in with his interest in light—how the soul craves sunlight in the depths of a northern winter! I don’t suppose you found any of the bodies hanging from trees?”

I glanced involuntarily around, but for once, there were no innocents in earshot. “Sorry, no.”

“So he is not specifically fixed on Woden.”

“No, but Norse myth, yes. He served a gathering of his closest followers a drink based on mead, which I think of as very Norse.”

“Just mead?”

“It was drugged as well, with hashish and some kind of toadstool.”

“Oh! Oh dear, that is not at all good.”

“Er, why?”

She looked up, surprise battling the fatigue in her wrinkled features. “Ragnarok, of course. The final battle between chaos and order, the end of times and the beginning of a new age. I should say that, considering the impetus towards synthesis evinced by
Testimony’s
author, the deluded soul that wrote these words sincerely believes that by committing sacrifice under the influence of the ‘Lights,’ he can bring about the end of the world.”

Great Work (2):
The thrice-born man shapes the world
by learning to focus his will and the will of his community
.
He uses the Tool to cut through empty pretence and loose
the contents of a vessel. He calculates the hour and
place to align the Universe with his act. This together
makes his Great Work
.
Testimony, IV:1

A
RMAGEDDON?” HOLMES STARED AS IF I WERE THE one about to initiate the events of Ragnarok.

“Not precisely, but essentially, yes.”

He had been at Mycroft’s flat when I returned at five-thirty and found him disgruntled at failing to locate a seller of illicit drugs on a Sunday afternoon. My own return—glowing with sun, exercise, and information—did not make matters smoother.

“We’re not after a gibbering idiot ripe for Bedlam, Russell.”

“No, we’re after a very clever fanatic obsessed with dark religion. A man practical enough to use Millicent Dunworthy as a keystone to his church, and at the same time, mad enough to believe in human
sacrifice. Holmes, the man makes careful annotations in his books with blood, he doesn’t splash it across people in his meeting hall.”

“Not yet,” he retorted grimly.

Mycroft came in then from his daily perambulation, jauntily tipping his cane into the stand and tossing his hat onto the table. He rubbed his hands together, an anticipatory gesture, and went to survey the bottles of wine awaiting his attention.

Holmes glowered at the broad back of this second self-satisfied member of his immediate family, and demanded, “I don’t suppose you made any progress in locating the so-called Reverend?”

Mycroft spoke over his shoulder, his hands pulling out one bottle, pushing it back, then sliding out the next. “My dear Sherlock, it is Sunday; my men may work, but the rest of the world is, I fear, enjoying what may be the last sunshine of the summer.”

With an oath, Holmes seized his hat and flung himself down the hallway towards the study’s hidden exit. Mycroft looked around, then raised his eyebrows at me. “What did I say?”

Holmes returned late, radiating failure. The next morning found him staring gloomily into his coffee; when I left, he was heaping an armful of cushions into a corner of Mycroft’s study, making himself a nest in which to smoke and think. I was just as happy to make my escape before the reek of tobacco settled in.

Yesterday’s warmth was indeed looking to be the last of the summer, and the dull sky suggested the rain would return, in earnest, before long. I took an umbrella with me as I set off with my copy of
Testimony
and my photograph of the Shanghai Reverend, to explore the possibilities of the book-binding trade.

I had a list—Mycroft might not be much for active footwork, but he was a magnificent source of lists—and started with the printers and binders nearest the meeting hall. There were a lot of names on the page, five of them in a circle around the Museum of Natural History. The morning wore on, one printer after another taking
Testimony
in
his ink-stained hand, paging through it with a professional eye, then shaking his head and handing it back to me. I drank a cup of tea in the Cromwell Road, a glass of lemonade with a sliver of rapidly melting ice near the Brompton Hospital, and a cup of coffee on Sloane Street. The photograph grew worn. My right heel developed a blister. At two o’clock I had covered less than a third of Mycroft’s list, and I was sick of the smell of paper and ink.

The bell in my next shop tinkled, and I had to stifle an impulse to rip it from its bracket. The shopkeeper was finishing with a customer, a woman with a particularly irritating whine in her voice and an even more irritating inability to make up her mind. I squelched the urge to elbow her to the side, and eventually she dithered her way into an order and left. I marched up to the man and thrust the book out at him.

“Do you know who printed this?”

He raised an eyebrow at the book under his nose, then turned the raised eyebrow on me. I shut my eyes for a moment. “I beg your pardon. It’s been a hot and tiresome morning, but that’s no excuse. Do you by any chance know who might have printed this book?”

Mollified, he took the thing and opened it, as twenty-one men already had that day. He, too, ran an interested professional eye across it; he, as the other twenty had, paused to study the illustrations; then he, as they had, swung his heavy head to one side.

“I can’t be certain, but it might be Marcus Tolliver’s work.”

I stood motionless, my hand half-extended to receive the book. “What? Where?”

“Tolliver? Not sure. Somewhere up near Lord’s.”

“St John’s Wood?”

“Or Maida Vale, perhaps.”