I cut the city padlock and looped the chain around a hook on the heavy gate. I hung the broken lock through one of the links. There were no lights down there, especially at that hour, so everything had to be illuminated by the beam from the LED lamp at the crown of my forehead. I adjusted it upward before attempting the jump up the four-foot-high concrete slab, which was dry at the top but a little slippery at the sides. Down a short arched passage was a bolt-studded iron door with no handle. I eventually got it open, but it took some tugging. I had to drag it hard across the concrete in short bursts, each of which triggered a loud grinding noise that could’ve theoretically woken the entire block, even from the sewer. But I didn’t have a choice. I needed close to a foot before I could slip inside. Beyond was a vertical shaft that enclosed a mechanical lift, the kind that used to be common in the days before electric motors. A pair of long chain loops dangled. Pulling them turned a crank connected to gears that lifted the metal grate vertically along the pitted track to the top—albeit very slowly, and only with the assistance of counterweights that descended along a neighboring brace.
I looked up, but not before moving the beam of my headlamp to the side, just in case there was anyone at the top. The bolted, crisscrossing metal braces that secured the vertical track were all covered with a thin layer of dark brown rust, but they otherwise seemed as sturdy as the day they were installed. They didn’t budge when I shook them two-handed. Rather than risk the noise of the rattling chains, I turned off my head lamp and used the gear holes of the track like a ladder. I slipped my gloved hands inside and pulled myself up one step at a time. I’d like to say that, as I ascended that shaft, I was as confident as I’d been walking into that fifth-floor apartment several weeks before with only my wits and a necklace to save me. But that would’ve been a lie.
Down in that dark hole, my heart was pounding so loudly in my ears that I had to stop several times to make sure I wasn’t making noise I couldn’t hear over the sound of my own pulse. I had absolutely no idea what I would encounter at the top, nor even the category of fates that awaited me if I failed in my mission.
The room into which I stepped was completely dark but had the open stillness that suggested great size. I risked using the headlamp again but kept the beam pointed toward the ground on the lowest setting.
“Whoa . . .”
There was a full tree in there. Alive. The back wall was covered in shelving. At its base was a row of arched brick nooks that looked like they had been erected around the same time as the mechanical lift. Each was sealed with a gate, but not, it seemed, to keep people from stealing the objects inside. It seemed more like it was a prison—keeping the objects in. The arch at the very center was covered by a folding screen, as if whatever was in there was especially important, and I stepped toward it slowly, moving around the tree in a wide arc. I felt the talisman around my neck, just to make sure I hadn’t accidentally dropped it on the climb.
The screen had a peaceful scene, some kind of Asian design. A little bird sat on a branch sprouting tiny pink blossoms. I moved it out of the way with the barrel of my gun. I raised my lamp. The beam illuminated a skull. But it wasn’t a skeleton. It was a chair. A bone chair. It was locked behind the gate and chained crosswise. Tarnished copper hands held it to the floor as if the chains were lassos and the chair a bucking bronco. I stared into the hollow sockets of the single skull in the back, nestled between the undulating rows of vertebrae. Human vertebrae. The empty sockets stared right back. The eeriness of it captivated me for a moment. I felt like I was being hypnotized. But I didn’t realize my muscles were slowly relaxing until I had stooped enough to cause the heavy weight of my backpack to shift. I snapped to attention, stood straight, and removed the baby sledgehammer from the side strap. The tall windows were covered in all manner of arcane symbols. I stepped to the closest and raised my hand.
A voice resounded through the darkness like the hum of a didgeridoo.
“Have you come to kill me?”
I spun and drew my gun raised as the lights rose slowly, soft and warm—an entire wall of glowing panels behind the barren shelves. The baby sledge hit the ground as Etude Étranger appeared from the shadows wearing the craziest outfit I have ever seen. His face was covered in a wooden tribal mask, similar to what I’d seen on the walls at Dr. Caldwell’s, but unpainted and in a different style, as if from a different continent. Draped over his shoulders was a brightly feathered garment, like a heavy parka. He grasped a drum in one hand. His other was clenched into a fist, which he threw toward the floor before I could set my feet. The room shook violently and I stumbled.
Earthquake!
In New York??
The building rocked back to the tune of the drum, and I was jostled about. My feet shuffled on the heavy carpet as I tried to keep my balance. My hand clenched—it was automatic, a subconscious desire to hold on to something steady—and I pulled the trigger. But I wasn’t aiming and the shot went wide. It pierced one of the large windows behind the chef. His arm went up and the room dropped four feet, just like in the apartment with the witch doctor, and I fell to my ass. My gun bounced free from my gloves. I looked at it several feet away. I looked to my adversary, who had turned to face the window. With his back turned, I looked about frantically for anything I could use as a weapon. There was no shortage of objects in that place. I figured one of them had to be good for something.
I was about to get up when I realized nothing in the room had been disturbed. None of the artifacts in the glass cases had fallen. The leaves of the tree were silent. The half-finished glass of water on the counter was as still as ice. And yet, I had definitely felt the room shaking barely a moment before. It wasn’t me that shook. I knew that. Nothing had gripped me. I had been free to move and had even stutter-stepped back and forth as I tried to keep my balance. And yet, in that vast room, I was all that had tumbled.
The chef lifted his mask halfway off his head and shuffled to the tinted glass to peer through the tiny hole there. He had plush house slippers on his feet, as if he’d just retired for his evening pipe. He didn’t seem aware of me in the least, which gave me time to dig in my bag for the splintered wand. I thrust it toward him and one of the sinks in the circular counter behind me exploded in hot water. My hand seized and I dropped it, holding up the talisman instead, hoping whatever magic it contained was enough to keep his spells at bay while I attempted a retreat.
“So,” he said with his back to me. His voice was soft and resigned. “It has come.”
He set his drum on the floor, pulled off his mask, and touched the hole in the glass with the tip of one finger. Somehow, I could still hear the faint drum beat, like a whisper, calling to me. Or maybe it was just my heart, which pounded in my chest. My skin felt cold. For a moment I thought it was shock, but then I saw my breath billow from my mouth. The room had suddenly chilled.
“Nonononono.”
I was only halfway to my feet and scrambled back like a crab until my back hit the gate that held the chair. I saw the glass of water. It was no longer as still as ice. It was ice. I tried quickly to shake the vision from my head, but it was too late. The pain pinched my temple. I squinted. It felt like something was trying to squirm out of my forehead. I groaned. I couldn’t help it.
To my left, where the stacked-stone doors had stood, there was now a line of birch trees, the entrance to a thick grove. The tangled branches were capped in snow, which also covered the ground. I was sitting in it. The chef was standing in it up to his ankles. It seemed then as if he and I and the big tree and few random furnishings from his sanctum had been suddenly transported to the wilds of Alaska. I could see mountains in the deep distance, little more than a gray paper-tear at the horizon. I heard the wasps then, before I even saw them. A faint but insistent hum, somewhere between a buzz and a rattle, rose from the shadows of the grove. There were thousands, maybe more, infesting the trees. I saw paper nests in the branches and winged insects crawling from holes they’d burrowed in the trunks. Green leaves were falling to the snow, one every few moments, as if bitten cleanly at the stem.
To my right was a long, sloping embankment that ended at a distant rise. Perched at the top of it, so far away that I could’ve blocked the sight of him with half my thumb, was the giant wolf. His tail was up and one paw was raised, as if he had stopped in mid-flight to see if he were being followed. I could see the trail of footprints in the snow from where he’d dashed from the grove and up the shallow slope, where he stood watching me.
“He calls to you,” the chef said, his house slippers hidden under a drift. The bright colors of his parka seemed to glow against the pale bleakness of the snow, and I realized the sun was at the horizon, bright but still partially obscured by clouds. I had no idea whether it was dawn or dusk.
“You can see it?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said, turning to me. “My eyes have been opened, as yours must be.”
I heard the rustle of the wasps in the trees. More leaves fell. I looked back to the wolf. It was waiting.
The chef took a few steps through the snow in his slippers. I heard it crunch under his feet. He lifted the heavy parka over his head. The bright feathers rustled loudly and he dropped it to the ground. I could see his breath. And my own.
“He calls to you,” he said again. “Why do you not answer?”
I felt warmth behind me which quickly turned to heat. And not the pleasant kind. It was searing. I turned and scrambled away in fright through slushy, melting snow. Before me was a horizon of fire, mirrored above and below, as if one burning lake hung inverted over another. Something was in the gap beyond it. Something . . . terrible. Not terrible like the acts of a serial killer. Terrible like the voice that drives him to it.
And then it was over. The visions of fire and ice canceled each other. The distant drum stopped, and again I was on the heavy woven carpet of the chef’s sanctum. A green leaf fell. A real one. It broke free from the big tree and landed on the floor several feet from me. It was weak and wilted like three-day-old lettuce.
Man, when lit, there was so much to see in that place. I was facing the chair. I saw where the chains that ran through the metal loops in the stone slab glowed a faint red, as if the chair had been rocking back and forth with such speed and friction that the metal had heated like an oven coil.
I looked at the yellowed bones studded with irregular, handmade nails. “What is it?” I asked
“What does it look like?” he replied whimsically, as if amused.
“It . . . well, like a throne.”
It was awful. And magnificent.
“And so it is. That is the throne of Bolochai, also known as Amaimon, prince of devils. Say the name.”
“Bolochai,” I answered without thought. I turned to him. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”
He had moved behind the circular counter. His feathered parka was on the floor. I had been staring at the chair long enough that he’d wiped up most of the water from the exploded sink. I saw the wet kitchen towel crumpled on the counter top. He was grinding fresh spices with a mortar and pestle. I could smell them. Like the earth. He didn’t look up. Fucker was so calm. Like we hadn’t just been trying to kill each other moments before.
“No,” he said. “But I wanted him to hear you say that.” He turned to the chair. “He is very arrogant. Hence the throne.”
The chef dumped the powdered spice into a stainless-steel bowl as I rose on shaky legs and stood, perfectly still, like I was standing on a land mine. He sprinkled multicolored peppercorns into the ceramic mortar. They clinked as they fell.
“The chains that hold the chair,” he explained as he worked, “are bolted to the ground in six places, which form the hexagram. Two chains, each forming a triangle, facing each other. One to summon and one to bind.”
I thought about my meager battle with the carrion ghoul. “How did you manage that?”
“I didn’t.”
I stepped to the gate. It almost felt electrified. I could feel the heat coming off the chains, which were dark but still smoking hot.
“In the sixteenth century, Amaimon took the niece of the king of Poland, a spoiled girl with a wicked heart. She was easy prey, and well-placed to cause mischief. For decades, he lived in her castle slaughtering her maids and bathing in their blood, or drinking it outright.”
“The Bathory legend.”
“You’ve heard of it?”
“It was popular with some girls at my school.”
He frowned like he had never considered such a thing. “That’s unfortunate. There was unimaginable depravity. The draining of children until their eyes were hollow and their hearts stopped beating in their chests. Amaimon preferred a warm bath.”
He mixed the freshly ground pepper with some cut mushrooms and lit a second burner. I hadn’t seen mushrooms like that before, dark and shriveled, almost like prunes.
“The High Arcane ordered the king to remove the demon, but inside his keep, Amaimon was too powerful. He needed to be lured away under his own will.
“History records that the Polish saint Stanislaus Kostka, whose father was Lord Zakroczym, senator under the king, died at the age of 18 in a monastery in Italy. He was canonized merely for being a pious youth. A bit odd, don’t you think?” He glanced to me for the briefest of moments before turning to his work.
I shrugged.
“In truth, Saint Kostka’s death was faked and he was inducted into a secret order established by The Masters to battle occult forces set loose by overzealous Protestant Reformers—who often failed to realize that gold-crusted altars were more than simple ostentation. In 1607, after a long career, Kostka led a team of warrior-monks onto a lower plane, what you might call a hell, and stole Amaimon’s throne. Kostka himself died in the raid. The remaining paladins used the stolen throne and a young nun—exceptionally beautiful, of course, and a holy virgin—to lure the narcissistic demon from his keep. But the paladins were wise. They set themselves as a diversion only. They knew the demon would not expect an attack at the hands of the young girl. And it was she who rose up when his back was turned. With training and courage and faith, she struck the heart of the devil and imprisoned him, sacrificing herself to lock him in his own chair, in the bones of the innocents he had slaughtered.”
I looked at it again. I swear it looked back. Right at me. To my soul. It was watching us. It almost seemed pleased. I think it liked being talked about. I glanced between them, the demon and the sorcerer.
“Why keep it?”
“He is sometimes useful. He shows me things, things that cannot be seen any other way. I let him on a leash and he retrieves them. Like a dog.”
“You’re antagonizing him.”
“Impossible. Demons are always angry. It is their defining characteristic. A demon is a sentient malevolence, born of cataclysm.” He added a bowl of stock to his cooking mixture and then dry rice, a little at a time. Every few moments he would stir. He was so patient. “But my use of the chair comes at great cost. Demons are ancient and powerful. A single misstep would free him. After centuries of confinement at the hands of those he refused to serve, I cannot imagine the suffering he would wreak in recompense.”
“Couldn’t you just trap him again?”
The chef kept stirring, slowly, and he kept a steady voice. “A demon is far more powerful than any mortal.”
“Then how—”
“A miracle,” he said, anticipating my question. “An impossible feat. Only a saint can perform a miracle, like the young nun whose thankless sacrifice history has not even bothered to record. Someone with proper training in the rites. Someone whose heart is armored by love—in her case faith, which is love of the divine. Someone ready to sacrifice themselves without hesitation, as she did, in order that people she’d never met and who would never know her name might be free from evil.” The chef held up his tattooed hand with all five fingers spread. He lowered them one at a time as he spoke. “Knowledge. Love. Courage. Wisdom. And above all, Compassion. These are the characteristics of the saint, who alone accomplishes the miraculous—overthrowing empires without shedding a drop of blood, or ascending to the moon to bring pieces of it back again.”
I stood close to the counter and watched him work. He was so calm. So patient. I almost choked on my words.
“You’re not the Lord of Shadows,” I said softly.
He laughed, if you could call it that. He sounded like an asthmatic hyena. His broad smile stretched his odd-colored skin.
“Is that what you were told? Of course. For each characteristic of the saint, there is an opposite, of which the Lord of Shadows is master. The opposite of courage is not timidity but false righteousness, just as the opposite of knowledge is not falsehood but—”
“Deception,” I said, lowering my head.
Two more leaves fell. They were coming faster now.
“Do not blame yourself. He has become quite powerful.” He glanced to the window. “More powerful than either of us, it seems.”
He poured liquid from a bowl into a pot on a burner. The two of us were quiet a long time.
I didn’t know what to say.
He stirred the liquid and added whitish-brown grains—rice or maybe pasta. I sat down on the stool. There was a metal disk, like a manhole cover, in the floor of the circular work area. It was half-covered in fallen leaves. I’m certain it opened to the big hearth in the kitchen of the restaurant. If he stoked a bonfire below, the tips of it would just reach that opening. I looked up at the stained-glass dome in the ceiling directly above it. The segments around the circle, like the divisions of an astrological calendar, depicted seemingly mythological scenes—scenes I didn’t recognize.
Fire below. Heavens above. Mirrored glass facing out to the world, covered in powerful wards. Books to the rear, holding knowledge, holding down the chair. If you sat on it, the inward-facing mirror at the front would be completely obscured by the trunk of the tree, which was in the center of everything. Stone doors to the east. Secret door to the west. I was inside a veritable magico-spiritual fortress.
“Most servants of the dark believe that it is superior. That is why they seek it. But their leaders know the truth: Darkness is nothing. It is no-thing, merely the absence of a thing, the absence of light, and just as vulnerable. It takes only one powerful act to expel even a long-creeping evil. The seekers of the dark have tried, many times they’ve tried, to cover this world in their shroud. And each time a saint has stood to oppose them, often defeating them with the simplest of kindnesses. Unfortunately, it seems they have at last learned from past mistakes. This time they did not precipitate a battle. This time they prepared the way. In secret. I believe it is their hope that without a saint to guide us, we can but fall.”
I turned to the small round hole I’d made in the window. A feathering of tiny cracks surrounded it. A larger one, shaped like a hook, had already grown from one side.
“Are you hungry?” he blurted, as if the thought had just occurred to him.
My stomach growled on cue. Sitting close to the rich, earthy spice cooking with the stock had woken a deeper part of my brain that didn’t care of the emotional turmoil in which I was spinning.
“Famished,” I said.
I was utterly defeated.
Another pair of leaves fell from the tree.
“Why would you help me? After I came here to . . .”
He contemplated his words. “If you were being pursued by your enemies, if they were bearing down on you with ill intent and you came upon an accident on the side of the road where people were badly injured, would you keep running? Would you leave the wounded and save yourself? Or would you stop to help, regardless of the outcome?”
He added more grains and some of the spice mixture and kept stirring. It smelled really good.
“Are you saying I’m hurt?”
“It is a trauma. A calling. Quite literally. It usually begins around puberty, occasionally later. And only very occasionally earlier.”
“A calling?”
He nodded.
I thought about the video of me, the seizures. I thought about my year in the hospital and the effect it had on my family. On my life.
“That makes it sound so benign. I had a complete psychotic break, you know. My parents barely talked to me after that. They still don’t.”
“It is necessary.”
“Necessary? I was 13! Do you have any idea—” I stopped.
I looked at his bald head. At his tattooed palms. At the garment of feathers and the mask and drum on the floor.
“It is necessary,” he said, “to sever the connections to your first life so that you may be born into your second. Had the call not been suppressed, you would have been led through. Led home.”
“Led? By who?”
“An elder. A guru or guide. Had the sickness been allowed to progress, ripples would have been cast and someone would have come, the same way the sound of a car crash or a gunshot eventually brings the brave from their homes. It never happens otherwise. But I understand your skepticism. Your case in particular was quite difficult.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are three types of calling. Healer is most common, someone sent to salve the physical and spiritual insults to the community. After this, there are mediums, or conjurers, who can barter with the spirits or move them by force, who can contact the ancestors to enlist their advice and aid.
“But nature always finds a balance, you see, the way a rock always falls. There is no guiding intelligence for this—at least not as you would think of it. It’s rather like a pendulum or gyroscope righting itself after a perturbation. It is the natural flow of energy toward the center, like a river to the ocean.
“Humans are a species of animal, a social animal. We are part of nature, whether we admit it or not. When we are perturbed, when a catastrophe—a war or a famine or a plague—leaves the community askew, vulnerable, when they are wounded and beset, a third calling emerges, not to heal the sick but the village itself, not to barter with the spirits but to battle them. A defender. A spirit-warrior whose purpose is to confront the dark in times of spiritual sickness, and to beat it back, not for the sake of any one but so that the whole community may heal.”
He looked up from his stove then. He looked squarely at me. But his hand never stopped stirring. “Do you think it’s an accident that you became a police officer? Or that you were drawn to matters occult? Do you think that’s simply how things worked out and that if your life were rewound to do over, they could have been otherwise?”
He stared at me from under his bare scalp for the longest time, waiting for an answer.
I didn’t have one.
“But all balances can be upset,” he warned, eyes turning back to his pot. “Even mine.”
Another leaf broke from its branch and fell twisting to the floor.
“You are called down a path you cannot see,” he breathed. “A new being struggles to be. The flesh over your eyes must be torn away, and too the hair from your head, and you must be born again. Nothing less can save you.”
I watched the mixture thicken as he stirred. He added crumbles of hard cheese and dried green flakes and little brown ones and kept stirring. It was hypnotic. Like the throb of a heart in the womb.
“They gave you pills,” he accused.
I reached into my bag and took out the bottle. I turned it over in my hand. I popped the lid and looked at the yellow-white caplets inside. I looked at the sink. I leaned over the counter and dumped them in. They bounced and slid into the drain.
“Last week,” I said, “you put flowers on a memorial.”
He nodded.
“The night that man died,” I explained, “I had a seizure. First time in 30 years.”
He nodded weakly. “That night, a portal was opened. To a dark place. The call would have been louder then. Like a shriek.”
“A man was hurt because of it,” I said softly. “His family ruined.”
He began scooping the thick mixture into a flap-topped box he pulled from under the counter. I was pretty sure it was a take-out container from his restaurant.
“The burden you carry is already larger than you know. Don’t add to it that which is not yours. Do not blame yourself for the darkness born that day.” He sealed the container and handed it to me. “That burden is mine,” he said. “And mine alone.”
I took it.
“Everything you seek, Detective, all your answers, can be found within.”
The box was warm. Steam escaped from the gap between the interlocking lids. The Bistro Indigenes logo was printed on the side.
“In a mushroom risotto?”
I heard a faint clink then, as if someone had blown on a wind chime just enough to make one bell brush its neighbor. I turned and saw the crack in the window had opened into a wide C. It was no more than a foot tall, but it cut through one of the handwritten symbols cleanly.
The chef walked around the counter to get a closer look at the glass. He saw my face.
“An attack was always bound to come,” he said softly. Then he raised his hands to the stacked-stone doors, which swung outward silently as if heeding his gesture.
“That’s it?”
“Do you require more?” he asked.
I looked at the warm meal in my hand. “No . . . It’s just . . . Shouldn’t we do something?”
“What is there to do?”
“I dunno!” I stood from my stool. “You’re the wizard. Shouldn’t we fight?”
He retrieved my gun and handed it to me. “You must do what you think is best, of course. If that is to fight, I will not stop you.”
Two more leaves fell from the big tree.
“So . . . what happens now?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Then he said it again. “I don’t know.”
And that was it.