The Scarlet Gospels (8 page)

Mr. Carston Goode apparently had more to hide than his extensive collection of toys, and absurdly satisfied at the discovery, Harry stepped inside the small room to find out what. Like its predecessors, this tiny room had but a single bare bulb to illuminate it, but whereas there had been nothing in the previous rooms that was of any great interest to Harry, this narrow passage was another story entirely.

One wall was given over to books, the scent of their antiquity powerful. It was a smell that Harry's six years as a pupil at St. Dominic's All Boys Catholic School had taught him to abhor. It brought back too many unwelcome memories of the casual brutalities of the place. There were the usual rulers across the knuckles and canes on bare buttocks, of course, but many of St. Dominic's staff had other appetites that a beating wouldn't placate. The Fathers all had their favorites. But Harry had been spared the private lessons, as they were commonly called. He'd had more kick in him than any of the Fathers were willing to handle.

But as they say, hurt people hurt people, and the pupils themselves played their own version of the game. Harry had been their victim on several occasions, and the library was their location of choice. Father Edgar, the library's overlord, was often absent from his desk, dealing a harsh hand to boys who were lax about returning books. It was there between the stacks that the strong took the lesser, and it was there that Harry, his head pressed to the floor while he was used, learned to loathe the smell of old books.

Waving away the scent and its unbidden memories, Harry scanned Goode's secret library speedily, pausing only when he came upon titles of particular interest. Goode's limited but nonetheless impressive library included the Carapace Derivations, a series of books that had undoubtedly driven more inept practitioners to self-slaughter than anything else on these well-stocked shelves; two thin volumes, their author unnamed, that seemed to be illustrated guides to suicide; a few books on Sex Magick (the
K
used, he guessed, as a nod to Crowley's explorations in this territory); and
The Frey-Kistiandt Dialogues,
a grimoire that reputedly only existed in an edition of one (which he was now holding in his hand), which was rumored to have been found in the ashes of the Yedlin—the child genius of Florence who had been burned in one of the Savonarola purges. Harry's insatiable curiosity could not lessen the temptation to put its legend to the test. He raised the open book to his face and breathed deep. It smelled of fire.

Harry suddenly saw Scummy's face, with his eyes spilling from their sockets as they burned, and he quickly closed the book. He'd seen more than enough of Goode's collection, he decided.

He turned his attentions from the shelf of books and looked to the other wall. There he found a few more rows of shelves. These were given over to the kind of stuff Goode had probably used to get his young, impressionable guests in the mood: candles of red and black wax in the form of phalluses; a row of bottles intricately decorated with multicolored beads that were filled with, when Harry uncorked them, eye-stinging liquor, some of it vaguely smelling like brandy or whisky but clearly adulterated with Goode's secret ingredients, whatever they were. Some were herbal, Harry's nose told him; much else was not. God knows what prescription medications Goode had ground up and dissolved in this”sacred potion”: tranquilizers, most likely, and perhaps a few magic pills designed to cure erectile dysfunction.

All of this would have to go, of course, as would most of the other contents on these shelves: the phials of white powder, which he presumed was cocaine; the row of little fetish dolls with the faces of young men snipped from photographs and attached to the heads of the dolls with safety pins, along with a second set, this one of their genitals, similarly clipped and pinned, but between their legs. Harry counted them. There were twenty-six dolls there in what he took to be Carston Goode's harem. Harry would have to take some advice from a local expert in these dolls before he committed them to the flames, just to make sure that it wouldn't cause all twenty-six young men they represented to ignite where they stood.

Having explored the upper shelves, Harry now went down on his haunches, knees popping as he took a closer look at the middle rows. There were a number of large jars with vacuum-sealed lids used for homemade preserves. But the contents of these jars weren't as benign as blackberry jam and pickled onions. They contained dead things in a solution of what was probably formaldehyde: some freakish (a two-headed rat, an albino toad, its eyes bright red) some decidedly sexual (a human penis, a jar entirely filled with testicles, like pinkish eggs, a fetus with an endowment long enough to wrap around its own throat), and some that had simply rotted or disintegrated in the preserving fluid, leaving pieces of unrecognizable gristle in the murk. These, like the dolls, he would need the experience of some local expert to safely dispose of.

Taken in their entirety, the items suggested that Goode's interest in magic went a long way beyond the theatrics required to get a bunch of guests naked. Sure, a few of the freak-show items might have been used as props to lend veracity to a faked ceremony, but that didn't explain the library or the row of dolls with their pinned-on portraits.

He went down on his knees to search the shadowy recesses of the bottom shelves. There were more jars lined up there, but behind them his blind hand came to rest on something very different. A small box, perhaps four inches square, which when he brought it out into the light proved to be intricately carved on all six sides with golden-etched designs.

Harry knew what it was the instant he had it in the light. It was a puzzle box, a piece more valuable and more dangerous than all of the rest of Goode's collection put together.

 

7

Harry's fingers moved over the box without need of his instruction, eager to familiarize themselves with the feel of the thing. The box released a host of stimuli through his inquiring fingers that made Harry feel good all the way down to his guts, and then, having proffered this taste of bliss, suddenly withdrew it, leaving Harry feeling empty. He tried to duplicate the motions he'd made when he'd first picked the box up, but the bit of bliss was not to be had a second time. If he wanted more of the same, Harry knew from the stories, he would have to solve the puzzle that the box presented.

Harry stood up and leaned on the bookshelves to take a better look at the glittering device. He'd never laid eyes on one until now. Named after their French designer, the devices were known simply as Lemarchand's Boxes. In more knowing circles, however, they were also branded with a more truthful name: Lament Configurations. They existed in unknown numbers all around the world. Some, like this one, were in hiding, but many were out in the tide of human affairs and appetites, where they made terrible mischief. To solve the puzzle box was to open a door to Hell, or so the stories said. The fact that most of the people who solved the puzzles were innocents who'd chanced upon them was apparently a matter of indifference to Hell and its infernal agents. A soul, it would seem, was a soul.

Even though he knew all too well the danger a Lament Configuration presented, Harry could not quite persuade himself to put it back behind the specimen jars. Harry let the twitching pleasure in his fingertips slide over the box once more. That briefest of contacts the Configuration had teased him with had been rapturous, and his fingers couldn't forget the feeling, and, without even his instructing, his hands were investigating the box as if reacquainting themselves with an old friend.

Harry watched them, feeling oddly remote from their frenetic motion and remoter still from the possibility of consequence. He could stop this at any moment, he told himself; but why stop so quickly when he could feel little trills of pleasure moving up through his fingers to his hands, to his arms, to his whole weary system? He had plenty of time to call a halt to this before it got hazardous. But in the meantime why not enjoy the panacea that the box provided as it eased the aches in his joints and his back and sent a rush of blood to his groin?

In this moment, the not-so-distant memory of Scummy, the humiliations at St. Dominic's, and the countless other ghosts of far too many pasts caused Harry no pain at all. They were all part of a pattern, like the sides of a Lemarchand's Box; with time, it would all come to fit in some grand design, or so his untethered thoughts persuaded him. There was suddenly a subtle vibration from the box, and Harry struggled to focus more clearly on the nature of the power in his hand. It was veiling itself from him, he knew—hiding its darker purpose behind the gifts of pleasure and reassurance.

Put it down,
he told himself. But his body had been unpleasured for so long (some Calvinistic streak in him denying anything that smacked of self-indulgence as though it might weaken him when the battle began in earnest, as one day he knew it would) that this finger-marrow joy was enough to seduce him momentarily from the narrow road he had been so obsessively walking.

In short, he did not put down the box but continued to investigate it with something very close to tenderness. The puzzle was succumbing to him with an ease that inspired suspicion at the rim of his thoughts. It was showing its innards to him, their surfaces as intricately inscribed as the six external walls. His fingers could do no wrong now. They slid, they pressed, they stroked; and to each stimulus the box responded with its own flourish: sliding open to reveal an interior maze work of mechanisms that blossomed and seeded.

Harry would have been lost to its beguilements had a sudden rush of purposeful arctic air not enveloped him, turning the sweat of excitement on his back and brow to a suit of ice water. The spell was broken instantaneously, and his fingers—this time moved by his own instruction—dropped the open box at his feet. It made an uncanny sound in the narrow passage, as though something much larger had struck the ground. The String Yart had returned.

“Oh, for God's sake,” Harry said.

To Harry's astonishment, he got a reply. Two of the small jars on the upper shelf flipped and fled to the floor, shattering. The phantom's presence had put such a chill on Harry that his teeth were chattering.

“No. Go. Yart,” Harry said, his voice laced with irritation.

The cold air dissipated. No sooner had the Yart heeded Harry's command than a banal tinkling tune rose from the ground, its source the Lament Configuration that lay gleaming among the scattered jars and their withered contents.

“The hell…?” said Harry.

This was what Goode was attracting Harry's attention to. Though he'd let go of the box, the damn thing had made its solving its own responsibility. This was a new kink in the lore of the box for Harry. Whenever he'd found reference to the Configuration the victim had signed his own death warrant by solving the box's puzzle himself.

“These things don't solve themselves, right?” Harry asked the air.

Several of the smaller bottles knocked against one another.

“Now that reply I'm not so sure about?” Harry said.

The ghost passed behind the books, knocking every third or fourth volume onto the floor.

“Whatever you're trying to tell me—”

Harry stopped, unfinished, because his question was in the process of being answered. And the answer was yes. The box was indeed solving itself; pieces of its internal anatomy slid into view and were lifting the box up. The parts coming into view were asymmetrical, causing the box to topple sideways. Now it had room to instigate the next stage in its self-solving: a three-way separation of its top surface, which caused the unleashing of a discernible ripple of energy that carried the subtle but distinct odor of curdled milk.

The box's maneuvers gathered speed and, staring down at it, watching the device perform, Harry decided it was time for this game to end. He raised his foot and brought it down on the box, intending to break it. He failed. Not because his weight wasn't sufficient to do the job, but because the box had a defense mechanism for which he had not accounted, somehow forcing his foot aside as it came within less than an inch of its target so that it slid around the box like a rubber sole on wet rock. He tried again, and again he failed.

“That's fucked,” he remarked, sounding a damn sight less nonchalant than he felt.

The only option remaining was to get out of the place before the fishermen who'd cast this glittering bait came for their catch. He stepped over the box, which continued to resolve its own conundrums. That, Harry reasoned, was a good sign indicating that the door to Hell was not yet open. But he'd no sooner taken comfort in this thought than the walls of the passage proceeded to shake. Minor tremors escalated in seconds to what felt like blows being delivered against the narrow space from all sides. All the items on the shelves that had not already been knocked off by Goode's ghost now came down: the rest of the books, large and small; the specimen jars; and all the other bizarrities in the dead man's collection.

The walls on which the shelves had been secured were fracturing from floor to ceiling and beams of cold light pierced the cracks. Harry knew from experience the nature of that light, and the company it kept. A casual observer might have called it blue, but that missed all its nuances. This was a plague pallor, the color of grieving and despair.

Harry didn't need to rely on his Unscratchable Itch, because Caz's handiwork was going crazy, warning him with every twitch and thrum that this was not a good place for him to be. He was in the process of taking the tattoos' advice, kicking aside all that had been cleared from the shelves so as to get back to the exit. But as he did so, curiosity got the better of him and for a moment he paused to look through the widening crack behind the shelves to his right.

The gap in the wall was at least a foot and a half wide and getting wider. There would be, he guessed, some unforeseeable horror coming through the passage between here and there; a glimpse was all he needed, enough to be able to report something even juicier than he'd anticipated to Norma.