An Affair of Sorcerers Page 16

  “They’re running more tests on Kathy this morning,” April said softly. “I told Dr. Greene I’d be here, so he knows where to reach me. I did want to get out of the hospital for a little while. I thought I’d come over and make you something to eat, and here I find you on your way out. At least you can let me take you out to breakfast.”

  The fact of the matter was that there was nothing I’d have liked better than to spend a leisurely hour or two with April Marlowe; but it was also a fact that the depth of my feeling toward her was beginning to frighten me. I was, when all was said and done, a dwarf. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. It wasn’t that I lacked self-confidence: I didn’t lack for female company, platonic or otherwise. But April was different; she was creating an emotional climate in me that I feared was blowing out of control. I didn’t want to do or say anything that might jeopardize our relationship—whatever that relationship might be.

  April was a woman I wanted badly—and could love.

  “Uh—I can’t hold anything down, April. And I have to keep moving; I have to find somebody.”

  “It has something to do with Kathy, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe; I’m not sure. I feel like I’m chasing a ghost, if you’ll pardon the outrageous analogy, but I have to keep after this Esobus. At the moment, I’m trying to get more information on John Krowl. I’m on my way to talk to a man by the name of Bobby Weiss. You may have heard of him as Harley Davidson.”

  “The singer?”

  “He used to be a singer. Right now he’s on the skids.”

  “Robert, may I go with you? I … really don’t want to be alone today.”

  “Where I’m going isn’t exactly Park Avenue, April. It’s ugly; very ugly.”

  She shook her head. “I’d still like to go—as long as you don’t think I’ll be in the way. I’ll wait in the car; just as long as there’s a phone nearby so I can check in with the hospital.”

  Against my better judgment, very conscious of Krowl’s reading of the tarot cards, I nodded my assent.

  I drove across town on 72nd Street, turned south on the East River Drive and exited in lower Manhattan on Houston Street. The pain in my stomach persisted, as though Joshua Greene had left part of the needle there; but my weariness had vanished, chased by the excitement of being near April Marlowe. The late morning and afternoon no longer loomed as a nightmare of forced endurance; the woman beside me made everything all right, and I had to remind myself of the seriousness of the errand I was on.

  Cars were jammed up in the left lane, waiting to get onto the entrance ramp for the Manhattan Bridge. Krowl, of course, lived just across the river, and it occurred to me as I pulled into the right lane to pass that I was driving at a right angle to the problem. Looking up Bobby Weiss in order to get information on the palmist and tarot reader might well be a waste of precious time. I felt a surge of rage at Krowl for holding out on me—if he was holding out on me.

  April must have had similar thoughts. “How did your reading with John Krowl go?” she asked.

  “Ummm.”

  “What does ‘ummm’ mean?”

  “It means you were right: I was impressed.”

  “How did the two of you get along?”

  “Not too well.” I glanced over at her. “I think he knows something about Esobus, but he isn’t likely to tell me what it is. The man I’m going to see had his hand cast on Krowl’s wall; I want to find out what it takes to get into the Inner Sanctum, and what it means once you get there. By the way, your former husband’s cast was there too.”

  April half-turned in her seat, touched my arm. “Frank went to see Krowl?”

  “As Bart Stone; at least that’s the way the cast is identified. Krowl may not have known his real name when the cast was made.”

  “Perhaps not,” April said distantly. “On the other hand, ‘Bart Stone’ was far more famous than Frank Marlowe; that was one of the things that bothered Frank. He wanted to produce something he could be proud to put his own name on.” She paused, shook her head. “If you knew Frank, you’d realize that a tarot reader would be the last person he’d have gone to see.”

  “You also said he was the last person you’d have expected to be involved in witchcraft,” I reminded her gently. “And the person I’m going to see is the last person I’d expect to become a junkie, but that’s what he is. I don’t think I’ll recommend this occult business to any of my friends.”

  She looked away. “It’s not all like that, Robert,” she said sadly. “You’ve seen so much … evil. I guess you can’t be expected to understand.”

  “I’ve met you,” I said, brushing the back of my hand across her forearm. “And that makes me think wicca can’t be all bad.”

  I stopped for a traffic light, and two bleary-eyed members of The Bowery’s vanguard looking for the day’s first bottle of Thunderbird or cheap rotgut whiskey stumbled off the divider and proceeded to “clean” the lights and windshield of the car with the filthy rags they carried. I rolled down the window and managed to slip a dollar to the man nearer me before he’d smeared the entire windshield.

  “Thank you,” the man said. His smile was vacant, but his voice was surprisingly clear, with precise diction. “You’re probably curious about me. I used to be an engineer. It’s not that people haven’t tried to help me. Don’t you believe it. I’m here because I’m a loser. I want to be here; I’m a bum because I want to be a bum.”

  I glanced into his face and was startled to see that he was a fairly young man who only looked old. I always gave money to the street-working winos when I passed through this section, but I rarely looked at them. Now, when I did, I was shaken, not only by the wasted human being who lived from one bottle to the next, but by the research which seemed to indicate that there was no solution. As the man had said, he was on The Bowery because he wanted to be, and all the king’s psychiatrists probably couldn’t keep him away. Put him in the hospital, dry him out, buy him clean clothes, get him a job … he’d be back in a week, just like the shopping-bag ladies in midtown.

  I wondered if the man thanked all his “customers” with his confession.

  April had rolled down her window and given the other man a dollar. The light changed, and I stepped on the accelerator.

  “What do you hear from your brother?” I asked.

  April, who’d been looking back, sighed and turned around to the front. “Nothing. I think he’s spoken to Dr. Greene on the phone to ask after Kathy, but I haven’t seen or spoken to him since you saw the two of us together at the hospital.” She pointed out the window to the dirty summer streets. “I know he hasn’t gone home. He’s somewhere out … there.”

  “Oh, you bet he is. My brother tells me Daniel’s scaring hell out of every warlock in the city. What’s he doing out there, April? What does he think he can accomplish?”

  “The same thing you’re doing,” she said softly. “He’s trying to help Kathy.”

  “Then why won’t he cooperate with the police? Or with me?”

  “I told you: he has to do things his own way.”

  “Membership,” I said quietly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. I was just talking to myself.”

  I turned left on The Bowery, the quintessential “skid row”—a thoroughfare of dead dreams, drunks and wholesale appliance and lighting stores. The Bowery is the catch basin for the city’s human dregs. This street is as far into the spiritual sewer as the drunks can flow. Having resisted the best ministrations of everyone from the toughest troops of the Salvation Army to flying squadrons of social workers, they are tended to in soup kitchens and flophouses, but, for the most part, left alone in their special circle of hell, like bits of human garbage moldering in the wind, snow, sun and rain, apathetically waiting for death. Those men who’d begun cleaning windows early—or who’d had some coins left from the day before—were already sprawled on the sidewalk, or huddled in doorways drinking death disguised as bottles in brown-paper bags. Of lat
e, they’d been joined by a new breed of derelict: hopeless, wild-eyed crazies dumped on the streets under New York State’s new “enlightened” program of releasing the mentally ill from the hospitals and returning them to “neighborhood care.”

  It was a bad place to be looking for a friend.

  Farrell Street was narrow and litter-strewn, bounded on both sides by gutted, decaying buildings. I parked in front of the address Garth had given me; it was a rotting hulk that looked a month or so away from disintegration. April asked if she could come along, but I insisted that she stay in the car. I locked the car doors, then went up to the entrance.

  The front door of the building was half off its hinges. I pushed it to one side, stepped over an unconscious drunk and walked down a hallway that reeked of urine and garbage. The door to Bobby Weiss’s apartment was locked, but a terrible stench emanated from the room on the other side. I knew what I was going to find even before I went in. The lock broke easily; I pushed open the door and entered.

  The floor of the room was littered with glassine envelopes and needle-works. Bobby Weiss/Harley Davidson was out, and he wouldn’t be back. He’d left his half-naked body behind, a dirty needle stuck in its thigh, on the filthy bathroom floor. From the smell, I judged that he’d been dead at least two days.

  The odor wasn’t helping my stomach any. I put a handkerchief over my mouth and nose and began looking around the apartment. There wasn’t much to look at; Bobby had apparently hocked most of his possessions during the course of his addiction, or had simply left them behind in the string of places where he’d flopped.

  There was one thing he hadn’t been able to pawn, and it occupied a place on top of a stained orange crate next to a bed with grease-stained sheets.

  The book had been put together with skill and great care, with inscribed metal covers and leather thongs for binding.

  My stomach muscles fluttered as I opened the metal cover and began to leaf through the book. There were about thirty pages; the writing at the beginning was neat and concise—the handwriting of the Bobby Weiss who’d been one of my students. The last twenty pages were almost totally illegible, obviously scrawled under the influence of heavy drugs. But there was more than enough in the first few pages to tell me that I’d stumbled over much more than I’d expected to find.

  I felt wounded and very tired as I put the heavy book under my arm and walked from the room. I was leaving behind the wasted body of a boy who, to judge by the strange manuscript he’d authored, had been shot by invisible bullets of superstition; Bobby had exploded under their impact, plunged from the rarefied atmosphere of celebrity to end as a cold, gray hulk, like a falling star.

  My thumb throbbed painfully, a not-so-gentle reminder that the same gunsights were undoubtedly being lined up on me.

  Chapter 12

  “Is that a book of shadows?”

  April nodded, closed the book and handed it back to me. “Yes,” she said softly. “But it’s a very simple one. That’s the work of a beginner.” She paused, put her hand on her forehead. “It’s so evil; the sex orgies and drugs, the … animal sacrifices.”

  “You describe Bobby as a beginner; yet Esobus is mentioned in there a number of times—twice as leading a ceremony. Bobby was obviously a member of Esobus’ coven. No mythological figure there: Esobus himself.” I hesitated, then added, “I’m sure Frank was a member of the same coven.”

  April looked away, and her shoulders began to tremble. I thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t. The trembling stopped. She turned back to me, sighed deeply. “No, Robert. I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t make sense. You’re right when you say that Esobus must exist: Frank mentioned the name, and it’s in this boy’s book of shadows. But the Esobus you hear stories about would never share a coven with beginners like Frank or the boy who wrote this book.”

  “Don’t covens accept novices?”

  She shook her head emphatically. “Any coven that Esobus headed would have only thirteen members, and every one of those members would be a sophisticated and highly skilled adept. By rights, neither Frank nor this boy should even have been able to meet a ceremonial magician, much less participate in a ritual with one.”

  I absently traced my index finger along one of the symbols inscribed on the book’s cover. The metal felt greasy and warm. “What’s ‘scrying’?” I asked. “It’s mentioned in here a number of times.”

  April smiled wanly. “Scrying is a method of divination—looking into the future. It usually involves crystal gazing, but flame or water can also be used. The person who kept this book would have been nowhere near a point where he could even begin trying to scry.”

  April’s matter-of-fact tone surprised me. “You’re saying you believe there are people who can divine the future?”

  She took a long time to answer. “Yes,” she said at last. “I believe Daniel may be able to. I scry, but I use it for meditation. You’d be surprised how deep into your mind flame or water can take you.” She blinked, added distantly; “Maybe that’s where the future is anyway—inside ourselves.” Suddenly she shuddered and gripped my arm tightly. “Robert, can we find a telephone? I want to call the hospital.”

  “Right. And I have to call the police about the body.”

  I put Bobby Weiss’s book of shadows on the floor of the car and drove out on Houston, where we found a pay phone. When April got out to make her call I leafed through the book again, thinking of amateur witches in a supposedly top-secret supercoven of ceremonial magicians. From the notes in the book, it was clear that the corruption and decline leading to Bobby’s death had begun with his admittance to the coven.

  Suddenly I was startled by a banging sound at the side of the car; April was pounding on the window, struggling frantically to open the unlocked car door. The concern and grief that had been etched in her face had turned to panic, as though she had just passed from one nightmare into another even worse. In her panic, she couldn’t even operate the door latch. I quickly reached across the seat and opened the door. April fell into the car, bumping her head on the frame.

  “Robert!” she gasped in a strangled, breathless voice. “My daughter’s dying!”

  Daniel—gaunt, disheveled and hollow-eyed—was already at the hospital when we arrived. I had no idea how he’d learned about the emergency, and he wouldn’t even look at me when I spoke to him. He put his arms around his stunned sister, and they both sat down on a small, worn sofa in a corner of the waiting room outside the Intensive Care Unit. April sobbed on his shoulder while he stared vacantly at the floor. This particular ceremonial magician had lost at least twenty pounds since I’d seen him last.

  A half hour later, Joshua Greene emerged from the room where he and his team of specialists had been working on Kathy. Greene’s face was haggard, and his surgical smock was stained with sweat. He motioned us into a smaller, more private anteroom. Daniel, walking very stiffly, led the way, with April leaning on his arm. I hesitated, feeling like a stranger now, but Greene indicated with a nod of his head that he wanted me to join them.

  “We understand and accept, Doctor,” Daniel said evenly as I entered the room and closed the door behind me. “Kathy’s dying, and there’s nothing you can do to save her.”

  Greene slowly shook his head. “We—”

  “It’s not necessary for you to say anything, Doctor,” Daniel said abruptly. “We don’t need your comfort.”

  “What’s happened, Joshua?” I asked quietly.

  Greene shifted his gaze to me. “We don’t know,” he said, his voice almost cracking. “A few hours ago Kathy’s heart began beating arhythmically. There doesn’t seem to be anything we can do to control it. We’ve tried drugs, but they don’t sustain her. She gets weaker after each episode.”

  “You can’t help her?” I asked tightly.

  Greene slowly shook his head. “The problem is systemic. Whatever was given to her has worn down her resistance to the point where her body is giving up. We’re doing all we can to save h
er, but in all likelihood …” He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. His black flesh was chalky. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Marlowe,” he continued in a choked whisper. “In all honesty, we don’t think Kathy will … survive much longer. I feel you … should prepare yourself for the worst.”

  “We are prepared,” Daniel said evenly.

  “How long?” I asked.

  Greene thought about it for a long time, then said, “Perhaps twelve hours, if Kathy continues at her present rate of decline.”

  “What—” My voice caught, and I swallowed, trying to work up some moisture in my mouth. “What would Kathy’s chances be if we could still somehow find out what’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know, Mongo,” Greene said hoarsely. “I just don’t know.”

  Daniel came across the room and reached out for me. I instinctively shied away, but his hand gripped my shoulder and held. “Frederickson,” he said softly, “I thank you for all you’ve done—and tried to do—for my niece. I’d offer you money, but I know you wouldn’t accept. I hope you will accept my friendship; April will tell you that my friendship is the most precious thing I can offer you.” He released my arm, stepped back and smiled almost gently. “This matter is finished. April and I are a part of wicca; we can accept death as a part of life. You accept it. Leave us in peace.”

  “We’ve still got twelve hours, Crandall.”

  The ceremonial magician shook his head. His smile was gone. “No. The battle is over; I feel it. Now I wish you’d leave us alone.”

  “April?” I said, turning to the woman.

  She’d been softly crying. Now she looked at me, tried to smile but couldn’t. “It is over, Robert,” she sobbed. “Daniel knows these things.” She moved closer, kissed me, pressed her wet cheek against mine. “Thank you, Robert. You must go now. Leave Daniel and me alone; we know how to console each other.”