1 - David J. Schow - Visitation

ANGUS BOND CHECKED INTO THE HERMITAGE ALONE, Under an assumed name. He had been recognised in consort with too many fanatics to risk a travelling companion, though having Nicholas along would have been comforting. Nicholas was dead.

“Room 713,” said the deskman, handing over a bronze key. “One of our suites, mister

ah, Orion, yes. Heh.” The man’s smile looked like a mortician’s joke on a corpse, and Angus restrained himself from looking to see if the natty, three-piece clerk’s suit was split up the back. The deskman was no zombie.

Close, Angus thought as he hefted his bags. But no.

The Hermitage was as Gothically overstated as Angus had expected it to be. Nothing he saw really surprised him - the ornamental iron gargoyles guarding the lobby doors, the unsettling, Bosch-like grotesques hanging in gilt frames beneath low-wattage display lamps, the Marie Antoinette chandeliers, their hexagonal prisms suggesting the imprisonment of lost souls like dragonflies stuck in amber. None of it moved Angus one way or the other. It was all rather standard haunted house crap; occult chintz to get a rise out of the turistas.

The wine-red carpeting absorbed his footfalls (greedily, he thought). The Hermitage seemed to be the place. At the door to 713, Angus held his key to the feeble light. He knew how to tilt it so the embossed metal threw down the shadow impression of a death’s-head.

Satisfied, he unlocked the door and moved his baggage inside, in order that he might unpack and await the coming of the monsters.

The knock on the door jolted him to instant wariness. Angus took a bite out of a hard roll and left it behind on the leather-topped table with the sausage and cheese he had brought.

It was the zombie clerk, carrying a tarnished salver bearing a brilliantly white calling card, face down. Angus noted that the clerk seemed to smell like the sachets tucked into wardrobes by grandmothers to fend off mildew. The stark whiteness of the card cast deathly shadows on the man’s pale features. It seemed to light up the hallway much more efficiently than the guttering yellow bulbs in the brass sconces.

“A gentleman to see you, sir,” he said, with all the verve of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Angus picked up the card. It bore two words:

IMPERATIVE.

BRAY.

The clerk stood fast. When Angus realised why, he decided to test the water a little.

“Just a minute.” He hurried off to fumble briefly through the depths of his greatcoat. There was the telltale clink of change, and he returned to the door with a silver dollar. Instead of placing it on the salver, he contrived to drop it, apparently accidentally, so that the clerk caught it, smoothly interrupting its fall with his free hand.

He wore dusty butler’s gloves that were going threadbare at the fingertips. He weighed the coin in the palm of his hand.

The air in the draftless hallway seemed to darken and roil thickly, like cream in hot coffee, for just a second. The clerk’s features darkened, too, making his eyes appear to glow, the way a lightbulb flares just before it burns out. He sucked a quick gulp of air, as though dizzied by an abrupt stab of nausea. His features fought to remain whole, shifting like lard in a skillet, and Angus heard a distant, mad wail. It all took less than a second.

The clerk let the tip slide from the palm of his hand to rattle in the bowl of the metal dish. The queasy, death-rictus smile split across his face again, and he said “Thank you. Sir.”

He left. Angus closed his door and nodded to himself in affirmation.

The stranger was swaddled in fog-dampened tweeds, and crowned with a road-weary homburg that had seen better days a few decades earlier. The initial impression left by the bearing of the man was that he was very old - not withered, or incapacitated in the way of those who wore years gracelessly, but old in the sense of worldly experience. An old man. Angus felt a stab of kinship here, deep in the midst of hazardous and alien territory.

“You are Angus Bond?” said the old man, arching a snow-white eyebrow. “I am Turquine Bray.”

“Nicholas Bray’s father?” said Angus, ignoring that no one at the Hermitage knew his real name. The stranger had obviously just arrived.

“Grandfather. Paternal. His father was a null spiritual quantity, neither evil, nor good, like most in the world. He lived out his merchant’s life and desired nothing but material things. He led a life of tawdriness and despair; but for seeding Nicholas, no residue of his passage, save the grief he caused others, endures. His fate was a well-deserved insignificance. Nicholas superseded him. Blotted him out. Nicholas once told me you were his closest friend.”

The words bit Angus lightly, and the way Bray pulled off his glove advised that the late Nicholas had not dispensed his friendship or loyalty frivolously. The two men shook hands in the dank lobby of the Hermitage, the understanding already shared by them in no need of further words concerning Nicholas.

“I cannot say I am pleased to meet you at last, sir, under such circumstances,” said Bray. “But I am relieved. Shall we walk outside? The atmosphere in here could make a vulture’s eyes water

as it is no doubt intended to do.”

The basilisk gaze of the clerk tracked them until they passed through the cataracted glass of the lobby’s imposing double doors. Outside, the slate grey bulk of the Hermitage’s castellated architecture monitored them dispassionately. It diminished behind them as they walked into the dense southern Kentucky woodland that made up the grounds.

“Gloomy,” said Bray. “All this place needs is a tarn.”

“Notice how the foliage grows together in tangles?” said Angus. “It meshes, with no nutritional support from the earth. The soil is nearly pure alkaline; I checked it. The stuff grows, and yet is dead. It laces together to keep out the sunlight - see? It’s always overcast here.”

“The appointments of that hotel are certainly Grand Guignolish. Like a Hollywood set for a horror film.”

“Rather like the supposed ‘ambience’ one gains by patronizing a more expensive restaurant,” said Angus. “I suspect you hit it on the head when you mentioned ‘atmosphere.’ That seems to be the purpose of all this theatrical embroidery - supernatural furniture. Atmosphere.”

“Hm.” Bray stepped laboriously over a rotting tree trunk. “Sinister chic.”

The iron-coloured mud stole dark footprints from them as they walked, their breath condensing whitely in the late January chill. Frost still rimed the dead vegetation, even in late afternoon. Angus was glad he had trotted out his muffler. If Poe could have seen this place, he mused, he would have been scared into a writing diet of musical comedy.

“Have you a room?” said Angus, after both men had stood in contemplative silence for a moment.

“I wanted to assure myself of your presence here, first.”

“You followed me, then?” said Angus. “For whatever purpose? You certainly know of Nicholas’ death already.”

“I need you, Mr Bond, to tell me the manner in which he died.”

Angus sighed with resignation. “Mr Bray,” he said in a tone often rehearsed, “do you know just who I am?”

Bray’s steely, chrome-coloured eyes shot up to meet with Angus’ watery blue ones, and he smiled a cursory smile. “You are Angus Gwyllm Orion Bond. Until roughly two years ago your profession was that of occult debunker - exposer of supernatural hoaxes. Absolute bane of fraudulent mediums, scamming astrologers, warlocks who were more con-men than sorcerers, and all the pop salesmen of lizard’s tooth and owlet’s wing. Until two years ago.”

Bray’s breath plumed out as he spoke. His speech was almost a recitation; Angus was impressed with the research.

“Two years ago, you vanished from the considerable media time and space you commanded. You evaporated from the airwaves, the talk shows. Rumour had you seeking the counsel of spiritualists and dabbling in magic yourself. Though you wound up debunking yourself, your books and other franchised items sold better than ever. I presume you’ve been supporting your now-private life with royalties?”

“Something like that.”

“It was at precisely that time that you met up with my grandson. Nicholas was the antithesis of his father - a fantastic intellect and capacity for change. You know how he died.”

“It ties together. The change in my life. Nick’s death. I’m not sure you’d-“

“I am prepared for the outrageous, Mr Bond. But I’m only interested in the truth. If the truth is merely outrageous, fire away.”

“Nicholas came to my estate one night. He was frantic, pounding on the door, sweating, panicked. He couldn’t tell me why. He had just moved into his new home at the time - do you recall it?”

“It was next to your estate. The Spilsbury mansion. Where all those actors were slaughtered by the religious cultists in the mid-1960s.”

“Yes,” said Angus. “Of course, by the time Nick moved in, that was ancient history. That place’s allotted fifteen minutes of pop fame had been used up years before.”

Bray smiled again.

“He was unnerved. When a horse ‘smells’ a tornado, it gets skittish; the closest Nicholas could speculate was that the house ‘felt wrong,’ and skittish was the word to describe him. I returned with him, to sit and drink by the fireplace. About forty-five minutes later

” Angus regretted his dramatic tone. But what occurred had been bloody dramatic.

“It was the first time I ever witnessed an interface,” he said simply. “Mr Bray, are you aware how supernatural agencies function physically? What enables the paranormal to coexist with the normal universe - yours and mine?”

“Assuming its reality,” said Bray, “I’d speculate that it would be like an alternate dimension.”

“Good. But not a physical dimension, not like a parallel world just staggered out of sync with our own. The supernatural is a matter of power potentials. It accumulates, in degrees, like a nuclear pile approaching critical mass. When there’s too much, it blows off steam, venting into the real world, our world, becoming a temporary reality, sometimes only for a second or two.”

“Accumulates? Like dust?” Bray said incredulously. “How?”

“It happens every time someone knocks on wood. Or crosses their fingers for luck, or says gesundheit. Every time one avoids walking under a ladder or lighting three on a match. Every time someone makes a joke about ghosts and doesn’t disbelieve what he’s saying one hundred percent; every time somebody uses a superstitious expression as a reflex cliche - let the sandman come and take you away; don’t let the boogeyman get you. Every time some idiot in a church mentions the Devil. Anytime anyone seriously considers any of millions of minor-league bad-luck totems. It compounds itself exactly like dust, Mr Bray - each of those things is a conscious, willful act that requires a minute portion of physical energy in some way. The paranormal energy simultaneously prompted by such action remains unperceived, but it is there, and it stacks up, one imperceptible degree at a time. Just like dust. And when you get an extra infusion of high potency metaphysical force -“

“Like that Jim Jones thing?” said Bray. “Or the Spilsbury murders?”

“Precisely. You boost the backlog of power that much more. Whenever it reaches its own critical mass, it discharges into our reality. The house that Nicholas had moved into was a metaphysical stress point; it was still weak, thanks to the Spilsbury thing. A break point that had not completely healed.”

“And during this - this interface, all that accumulated power blew through into my grandson’s living room?” Bray shook his head. “I find that difficult to believe.”

“Too outrageous?” said Angus, stopping suddenly.

Bray’s expression dissolved to neutral. “Go on.”

“That night, the ‘weakness’ was not only at the juncture point of that house, but elsewhere. Temporally, it was a ‘weak’ time period. Nick was in an agitated fear state - a ‘weak’, receptive mental condition. But this phenomenon has no regular characteristic save that of overload - you can’t count on it venting itself at any regular time, or place, or under any regular conditions. It vented somewhere else that night, and because of the weakened conditions we caught a squirt of it - bam! Two or three seconds; a drop of water from a flood. The flood went somewhere else.”

Now Bray was frankly interested. “What was it like?”

“I got an impression of tremendous motive force,” said Angus. “Blinding black light; a contradictory thing, I know, but there. The air felt pushed out of my lungs by a giant hand. Everything loose in the living room was blown like summer chaff in a hurricane. Overpowering nausea. Vertigo. Disorientation. I was afraid, but it was a vague unfocused kind of terror. It was much worse for Nicholas.

“You see, he - like most people - held latent beliefs in supernatural things. I did not. Too many years debunking special effects led to an utter scepticism for things that go bump in the night - for me. I saw raw, turbulent energy. Nicholas saw whatever he did not totally disbelieve. You might see demons, ghouls, vampire lycan-thropes, the Old Ones all hungering for your flesh and soul, dragons gobbling you up and farting brimstone, Satan browsing through your body with a hot fondue fork. Or the Christian God, for that matter.”

Bray was taken aback, obviously considering what such an experience would mean for him, given his life’s collection of myth and superstition, of fairytale monsters and real-life guilts. All of it would manifest to his eyes. All of it, at once. He said “You mean that every superstitious fear I’ve ever had is waiting to eat me, on the other side of a paranormal power overload?”

“Not as such,” said Angus. “Your belief is what makes it real. True disbelief renders it unreal, back into energy - which is what I saw. But that energy, filtered through Nick’s mind, made a monster. He said he was trying to hold the doorway to Hell shut, and something horrifying was pulling from the other side. It gave a good yank and the doorway cracked open for a split instant before the briefness of the squirt closed it for good - but Nick, in that instant, saw what was trying to get him. It scared him white.”

Bray was quiet for a long moment. Then: “He moved in with you shortly afterward?”

“Yes.”

“You could not debunk the supernatural after that?”

“Not and do it with anything like conviction. Investigating the nature of the phenomenon became paramount.”

“Nicholas helped you?”

“He was just the ally I needed. He had a propensity for pure research and a keen mind for deduction. We collected data and he indexed it. Using a computer, we were able to produce flowcharts. One of the first things we discovered was the presence of ‘pressure points’ in the time flow - specific dates that were receptive to the power burst, as the Spilsbury house had been. Lammas, Beltane, Candlemas, Halloween. Almost all holidays. There are short bursts, long bursts, multidirectional bursts, weak and strong ones. Sometimes the proximity of a weak date will magnetize the power, attracting it to a particular time. But most of it concentrates at one physical place. Of course, there might be a dozen such outbursts in a day. Consider Jack the Ripper’s reign over Spitalfields, or World War II - the phenomenon would damn near become cyclical, feeding on itself.”

“I see,” said Bray. “But what about-“

“Nicholas?” Angus interrupted his meandering walk, hands in pockets. “I think the road is just above us, there. Shall we climb up out of this muck and make our way back? I have a flask of arrack in my room, to help cut the chill.”

“Thank you,” Bray said as Angus helped him through a web of creepers.

“Nicholas was very good at charts,” said Angus. “He cross-matched all the power bursts - he was the one who called them ‘squirts,’ by the way - to ebb and flow grids, and to longitudes and latitudes. He calculated in ‘weak spots’ and compensated for them. He synthesized a means whereby he could predict, with reasonable accuracy, the location and date of a future ‘squirt’. Sometimes he was wrong.”

“But he was right for at least one,” said Bray.

“In Manhattan,” said Angus, “in a dilapidated, condemned office complex called the Dixon Building, he and I faced a full-power blast, alone.”

“Oh my god-“

“God is right. Nicholas was eaten alive by the demon on the other side of the door. He still believed.”

The two old men scrambled up onto the road facing the Hermitage, in the distance. It loomed darkly against the overcast sky, in silhouette, like a dinosaur waiting for dinner.

“In that hotel, tonight, at precisely 1:30 am, there will be an interface such as I’ve described. On paper, at least, it’s one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. There are a lot of superstitious people out there in the world. I can show you the graphs, in my room.”

Together, Angus and Bray entered the maw of the Hermitage.

“Have you taken stock of the clientele here yet?” said Bray as Angus shucked his heavy coat. Since Angus had not been able to coax the room’s antediluvian steam coil into boosted output and since the fireplace still held cold tinder, both men kept their sweaters on. The arrack was forestalled when Bray produced a travel decanter of cognac from the depths of his overcoat.

“There is a word for this supernatural power,” Angus said. “Some call it mana. It’s like electricity - neither good nor evil in itself, but available to those who know how to harness it. Devoid of context, there is no ‘good’ or ‘evil’. I am not the only one who has discovered that the interfaces can be charted. Others will be swift to use such power potentials for selfish or harmful ends. They would embrace the iconography of what the unenlightened blanket with the term evil. That desk clerk, for example. I never saw anyone who wanted to be a vampire more, yet to exist as a true vampire would be a pitiable state indeed. I slipped him a silver dollar earlier, one I had charged in accordance with legend as a protective talisman.” He dragged a ponderous Victorian chair over to the table where Bray sat nursing his cognac and staring abstractedly through the parted drapes, into the courtyard below them.

Bray saw three men in black awkwardly bearing an enormous foot-locker into the lobby. “You mean like a witchcraft amulet?”

Sipping, Angus said “Amulets are no good if they’re not in your possession. This was a talisman - charged by the book, in this case, the original text of a grimoire called the Liber Daemonorum, published in 1328 by a fellow named Protassus. I have a first edition.”

“And the clerk?”

“Since he was behaving by such rigid rules, it was almost boringly simple to anticipate him. He reacted as though he was about to burst at the seams. If not for the gloves he wore, I think that talisman might’ve burned right through his hand to drop on the floor. But the predictability of a phenomenon or movement does not necessarily decrease its potential threat or danger. Don’t kid yourself about the uses some intend for such power. It’s backed up like sewage on the other side of the veil, waiting to be tapped, ever-increasing. A lot of bad could be created. Power corrupts.” He killed his glass and Bray moved to refill it.

“Why expose yourself to something like that?” said Bray, now concerned. “Surely you’ve had a bellyful of baring your psyche to the tempest - or can you build some kind of tolerance?”

“To a degree, yes. It’s still an ordeal, a mental and physical drain. But I can stand, where others would bend.” Angus leaned closer; spoke confidentially: “You’ve missed a more obvious reason for doing so.”

“Nicholas?” Bray said finally, “Vengeance?”

Angus swallowed another firebolt of liquor. “Not as an eye-for-an-eye thing. Nicholas’ death convinced me that the phenomenon itself must be interrupted. Each outburst is more powerful. Each comes closer on the heels of the last. It is as though it is creating a bigger and bigger space in our reality in which to exist. The ‘valve’ must be closed before the continuous escalation makes preventive action impossible.”

“By god!” said Bray, his eyes lighting up. “The talisman!”

“I hope that wasn’t too ostentatious - announcing my presence in the Hermitage with that stunt. As far as the rest of the congregation here is concerned, I’m just another acolyte.”

“I haven’t seen too many people since I arrived.”

“Well, they’d shun the daylight by nature, anyway,” said Angus. “Or what passes for daylight around here.” He let his eyes drift into infinity focus, regarding the courtyard below. “You know, the Hermitage is quite an achievement, for what it is. But it isn’t ‘evil’. The power I spoke of, the mana, is what keeps the sunlight from this place and makes dead trees root in dead ground. Channelled and controlled, the mana could be used to build a perfect womb for something that would be evil by anybody’s definition. Something designed by people of ill intent to fit every preconception. Tonight’s surge is a big one. Maybe it’s going to fuel a birth.”

“I don’t even want to think about that possibility,” said Bray.

“I must.” Angus dumped one of his satchels onto the bed “During that 1:30 juncture tonight, I must try to put a bogey in the paranormal plumbing.”

“How?” said Bray, now visibly unnerved and looking about fruitlessly for a clock. “How does one stop that much power, barrelling right at you?”

“One doesn’t. You turn it against itself, like holding a mirror up to a gorgon’s face. It takes, in this special case, not only protective talismans against the sheer forces themselves, but also my anti-belief in the various physical manifestations - the monsters. The power will exhaust itself through an infinite, echo effect, crashing back and forth like a violently bouncing ball inside a tiny box.” He drained his glass again. “In theory, that is.”

“Plausible,” Bray said. “But then, you’re the expert on this sort of thing. I suppose we’ll see the truth early this morning

“

“No!” Angus, face flushed with sudden panic. “You must leave this place, before-“

“Leave you here alone, to fight such a fight alone? I admit that two old men may not present much of a threat to the powers you describe, but where in hell am I going to go, knowing that such things transpire?” Bray’s hand grew white knuckled around his glass.

“Your own dormant fears might destroy you,” Angus said. “Another death on my conscience.”

“What am I to do, then?” Bray stiffened. “You may not believe in revenge, but I do. I insist! I side with you or I am less than a man

and that is my final word on the matter, sir.” As punctuation, he finished his cognac.

The expression on Angus’ face was neutrally sober, but within, he was smiling.

Midnight should have been anticlimactic. It was not.

In the funeral quiet of the lobby, an ebony clock boomed out twelve brass tones that resounded through like strikes on a huge dinner gong. A straggler, dressed in tatters, fell to the wine red carpeting in convulsions, thrashing madly about. The stalwart desk clerk had watched the man inscribe three sixes on his forehead earlier, using hot ashes from the lobby fireplace. The ornamental andirons hissed their pleasure, hotly.

An almost sub-aural dirge, like a deep, constant synthesizer note, emanated from the ground floor and gradually possessed the entire structure. A chilling undercurrent of voices seemed to seep through the building’s pipe work and the hidden, dead spaces between walls.

In the Grand Ballroom the chandeliers began to move by themselves. Below their ghostly tinkling, a quartet of figures in hooded tabards raised their arms in supplication. Candles of sheep tallow were ignited. Mass was enjoined.

Somewhere near the top of the hotel, someone screamed for nearly a whole minute. Unearthly, lowering noises issued from the grounds, now heavily misted in night fog. There were the sounds of strange beasts in pain, and vague echoes of something large and massy, moving sluggishly as though trapped in a tar pit. It was starlessly dark outside.

“Are you positive you wish to stay?” said Angus, opening the flask of arrack. Bray’s private stock was long gone.

“Yes. Just pour me another glass, please.” Each new, alien sound made Bray wince a little, inside the folds of his coat, but he maintained bravely.

From within his shirt, Angus fished out a key on a thin chain of silver links. He twiddled it in each of his satchel’s two locks. The first thing he produced from the case was a book lashed together with stained violet ribbons.

“Good God, “Bray choked. “Is that the-“

“The Liber Daemonorum. Pity this must be destroyed tonight. By burning. Damn shame. This is a collector’s item.” He heaved the volume onto the bed and the rank smell of foxed and mildewed age-old paper washed toward Bray. Brittle pieces of the ragged hide binding flaked to the floor.

Nearby, probably in the hall outside 713, someone howled like a dog until his voice gave out with an adenoidal squeak.

Bray’s attention was drawn from the ancient witchcraft tome to the disk of burnished gold Angus removed from the satchel. It was an unbroken ring, big as a salad plate, with free-cast template characters clinging to its inner borders. It caught the feeble light in the room and threw it around in sharp flashes.

“Gold?” said Bray, awestruck.

“Solid, refined twenty-four karat, pure to the fifth decimal point,” said Angus, tossing it to the bed. The heavy chain necklace attached to it jingled; the disk bounced a hard crescent of light off the ceiling directly above. “The purity of the metal used in the talisman has protective value. I won’t put it on until a few seconds before deadline - keep it as potent as possible, you understand.”

From the satchel came more protective fetishes, mojo bags of donkey teeth, copper thread and travertine, hex stones with glyptic symbols, inked spells on parchment bound with hide thongs, tiny corked vials of opaque liquids. Angus tucked these into his clothing.

Something thumped heavily and repeatedly on the floor above them. Drum chants could be faintly heard.

“Any doubts now about there not being a full house here tonight?” Angus said. Bray’s hand quivered in betrayal as he drank. Angus regretted that the academic portion of his mind regarded Bray simply as a handicap; his sense of honour could not refuse the older man. He hoped he would survive what was to follow, but would allow no compromising of his own task. Silence hung between them awhile longer.

“Does it matter where we are when it hits?”

“No. This hotel is the place. The psychos surrounding us are like the creepy trappings - more supernatural furniture. Pay them no heed. What we’re dealing with has no form. You can be tricked by illusions; if you even consider for a second that something monstrous before your eyes might possibly be real, you’re lost - you must remember that. The demon Nicholas saw was not real, until he thought it might be, making him afraid. Then it ate him up.”

“Angus!” Bray stood from his chair. “I can - I can feel something strange

palpable, a swelling

like a balloon about to burst

” He looked around, agitated now.

Angus hauled out his railroad watch. “1:27 am. I set this by the time service in Willoughby late yesterday. Hmm - I suppose no time service is strictly accurate.” He slipped quickly into the talisman.

“Exactly like the atmospheric build-up Nicholas sensed, before the squirt at his house,” Angus said. “I have no extra power objects, friend Bray. You’ll have to stick close behind me. That’s about the only aid I can offer you. And something else-” He hurriedly dug a dented tin of Ronson lighter fluid out of the satchel and doused the Liber Daemonorum. The pungent liquid soaked slowly into the comforter on the bed and saturated the book of sorcery. Angus then came up with several disposable plastic cigarette lighters, each gimmicked with electrical tape. “Take one of these, and listen to me. During the confrontation, I may become momentarily transfixed. If that happens, I want you to light the book. It must be burned during the interface if my other, lesser shielding spells are to function. The lighter is modified to produce a long jet of flame when you thumb the wheel. Understand that the book is rare, and dangerous, and the supplicants booked into this place would gladly murder us to get it. If I hesitate, destroy it!”

Bray clutched the lighter tightly, like a crucifix against a vampire.

As though in the grip of an earthquake tremor, the Hermitage shuddered. A chunk of the whorled plaster ceiling disengaged and smashed into chalky crumbles at Angus’ feet.

“Remember, Bray!” he shouted. “It’s not real-“

The rest of his words were obliterated by a thunderclap concussion of moving air as the oak door to 713 blew off its hinges and slapped the floor like a huge, wooden playing card. The French windows past Bray splintered outward in a shrieking hail of needle like glass bits. The bottles and rickrack on the table scattered toward the window. The cognac flask pegged Bray’s temple and brought blood. The vacuum force of the moving air seemed to suck the breath from him. He screamed Angus’ name, soundlessly.

Angus laboured toward the door, walking ponderously, like a trapper in a snow bank, one hand holding the outthrust talisman, the other readying the lighter for the Liber Daemonorum crooked against his chest. Outside, the corridor was awash in stunning yellow light. A high-frequency keen knifed into his ears and numbed his brain. He heard his name being called over and over, coupled with a maniacal laugh that kept shifting speeds, accelerating and slowing, a warped record in the hands of a lunatic disc jockey. Through the shimmer and glare Angus thought he could see stunted, writhing shapes - various monsters struggling to be born of his mind. He stared them down and one by one they were absorbed back into the light that produced them, dissolving as though beaten progressively thinner with a mallet until the light shone through and disintegrated them. The talisman began to radiate heat against his chest. The first echo had been achieved.

The maniac sounds were definitely caused by something in terrific pain, fighting him. In the hallway mirror, Angus saw himself vaporise - hair popping aflame, shearing away, skin peeling back as though sandblasted off, skull rushing backward as sugary powder, blood and brains vanishing in a quick cloud of colour and stink.

It was an illusion, and he ignored it.

He tried to ignore the dim, background sound of Bray’s screaming.

A grey lizard demon, scales caked in glistening slime, breached the outside window to 713 and pounced on Bray’s back, ripping and tearing. More rushed in like a floodtide, their alligator snouts rending his clothing, their flying spittle frying through his skin like brown acid. Curved black talons laid open his chest and they began to devour him organ by organ. His lighter went spinning uselessly across the floor.

Angus caught a glimpse of the carnage taking place behind him. Bray was lost.

Angus stopped his advance. Bray was dead.

Bray was dead, and the typhoon of yellow force petered to nothingness in a second. Standing ridiculously alone in the quiet of the cathedral-like hallway, Angus realised, with a plummeting kind of bright, orange horror in his stomach, that he had lost.

He looked up and down the hallway. Nothing.

Then, distant, indecipherable sounds. Hungry sounds.

The book! The book! his mind screamed. His thumb automatically worked the lighter, and a jet of blue propane fire at least half a foot long spurted up, caressing the Liber Daemonorun. It billowed into flame along with his soaked coat sleeve.

But the two iron gargoyles from the lobby were already winging toward Angus with metal-muscled strokes. He heard the grating of their black, iron flesh pumping and looked up to see their diamond eyes fix on him. They peeled to either side of him as the book touched off; one swooped past in a blur, hooking the book away to smother it against its bellows chest, the other jack knifing upward in midair to strafe Angus. He felt cold, sharp pain. His feet left the floor and he crashed onto his back, rolling clumsily, blood daubing into one eye from the gashes the gargoyle’s iron, butcher cleaver claws had carved in his forehead.

His name was still being called, fast and slow and fast and-

“Angus.” The tone was first disapproving, then pitying. “Angus, you poor old sod.”

Turquine Bray stood over him holding the still-smoking Liber Daemonorum. The violet ribbons were charred.

The iron gargoyles circled high in the corridor, lighting behind Bray. They cringed and fidgeted, like greyhounds, grinding their javelin teeth and snorting mist through cast iron nostrils with impatience.

“Since you’ve delivered this book to us,” Bray said “I think you’re owed a few words.” His hands slithered proudly around the tome and his chromium eyes glittered at Angus.

“The gargoyles-” Angus gasped from the floor.

“Oh, yes, they’re real enough. They’re a bit piqued because I haven’t given you to them yet.” Angus could see that Bray spoke around a mouthful of needled fangs like the dental work of a rattlesnake. “Your disbelief in monsters posed an intriguing problem. How to chink such metal armour? How to trick you, the expert on all the tricks? You wouldn’t believe in the patently unreal, so we made you believe in something else you’d accept with less question. The gargoyles are now real, thanks to your mind. Turquine Bray, however, died in 1974. On Valentine’s Day.” The Bray thing, its hair gone jet black, eyes sunken to mad ball bearings in seductive, dark pits, grinned wolfishly.

“Impossible!” Breathing was becoming difficult for Angus, as though his lungs were filling with hot candle wax. “Impossible

the power burst

you existed before the interface took place

“

“My dear Angus,” the creature rasped in a phlegmatic voice, “you’re not paying attention. This power burst was the biggest of all so far. People are more superstitious than ever. They go right on stacking it up. This surge was preceded by what young Nicholas characterised as a ‘squirt,’ a considerable leakage that primed the paranormal pump, you might say.” It pretended to inspect its elongated, spiked nails. “How do you think something as melodramatic as the Hermitage got here in the first place? It came out of your mind. It was what you expected; know-nothing cultists and pop Satanists and horror-movie props - supernatural furniture. It was all an illusion, as was I. But it’s real now. The Liber Daemonorum will help to keep our family corporeal.”

Two shuffling corpses battered down the stairway door leading into the hallway. Their sightless, maggoty eye sockets sought Angus’ prone form. They made for him with inexorable slowness, rotting flesh dropping off their frames in clots. They hungered.

“Your H.P. Lovecraft might be pleased to know that his Old Ones are finally coming home,” the monster growled. It stretched cavernously, bursting from its human clothes, revealing a wide body of insectile armor plating with double-jointed, birdlike legs whose hooked toes gathered the carpet up in bunches. “It’s all quite real now, friend Angus.” The steely, silver eyes transfixed Angus from a nine foot height. “As are my other friends. Here. Now.”

The gargoyles jumped into the air and hovered like carrion birds. From 713 the reptilian scavengers continued to swarm, champing their oversized jaws, streamers of drool webbing the carpeting. Beyond the steaming, toothy thing that had been Bray, Angus saw a translucent horde of ghostly, humanoid leeches. The scuttling things advanced, worrying their bloodless, watchmaker’s claws together in anticipation of a dark, burgundy-hued snack.

He recognised them now, all of the monsters, all of his lifetime’s research into the occult, echoing back upon him. If he could be made to believe Bray had been real, then anything could follow

Zaebos, a demon with a human head and the body of a crocodile, entreated him from the end of the corridor. Near the ceiling floated the Keres, the Greek vampire entities who appear before death. Windigos - cannibalistic Indian ghosts - crowded past the living-dead corpses to get to Angus’s position. They licked their lips. Now Angus knew the name of the monster before him, the spirit who had assumed Bray’s form to trick him. It was the Master of Ceremonies to the Infernal Court.

“Verdelet!” he croaked, holding the talisman forward. “Swallow this!”

“Now, now,” the demon said. “Too late for that hocus-pocus, Angus. You believe now.” It waved an ebony claw carelessly, and the talisman melted, sizzling through Angus’ clothing, scalding and eating into his chest with a geyser of golden steam.

He managed a howling scream.

“I have nought but gratitude for you, friend Angus,” Verdelet said. “Thanks to you, as of this night, the Hermitage is open for business.”

The last thing Angus heard was the wet sounds of jaws, opening.

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