Book of Shadows (17 page)

They had reached the Cavalier, and as Landauer stepped off the curb onto the street, Garrett suddenly spoke. “You catch that about the babbling voices?”

Landauer’s face tightened. “Kid is a musician. Sound technician,” he reminded Garrett.

“It was on our interview tape, Land.” Garrett put his hands on the top of the Cavalier and looked across at his partner as cars raced by behind him. “I played it back and I heard it.”

Landauer looked back at him for a minute. “The stereo was on, remember? Don’tcha think that might account for any—babbling?” He shook his head. “Don’t let all this freak you out, G. Kid’s in jail. What’s he gonna do?” He pulled open the passenger door and lowered himself into the car. After a moment, Garrett did the same.

Inside, as Garrett started the engine, Landauer leaned forward and switched on the radio.

“In our top local news, the district attorney’s office will seek charges of first-degree murder for Amherst sophomore Jason Moncrief in the killing of W. P. Carmody heiress Erin Carmody. Carmody’s mutilated body was found in the Pine Street landfill on Saturday morning. Both students were residents of Morris Pratt Hall on the Amherst campus; authorities are investigating rumors that Moncrief may have been stalking Carmody.”

“Sounds like Shelley’s been talking,” Landauer grunted. Garrett frowned; he’d been thinking the same thing.

The female anchor continued.
“Sources speculate that there were satanic aspects to the killing.”

“Look what you learn on the radio,” Landauer said with exaggerated delight. “There are satanic aspects to our killing.”

The radio anchor continued, in that oh-so-serious news voice.
“Assistant District Attorney Carolyn Carver announced the charges on the courthouse steps.”

Carolyn’s smooth, silky voice replaced the announcer’s. Garrett felt himself start to harden, even hearing her on the radio.
“The state is certain that the grand jury will hand down charges of murder in the first degree in this incomprehensible crime.”

Landauer glanced toward Garrett. “She’s a star.”

“Yes, she is,” Garrett agreed without inflection. In his mind he could see Tanith Cabarrus leaning across the table to put her hand on the grimoire, see her black eyes, hear her voice.

“You’re wrong. And you know it.”

He reached and turned up the radio, letting Carolyn drown out the voices in his head.
“We are confident that we will win justice for Erin Carmody and her family.”

Garrett made the turn downtown, hoping to God that she was right.

The grand jury hearing went off without a hitch.

Garrett and Landauer spent a day testifying in the stifling conference room at Three Pemberton Square, the high-rise courthouse. Jason did not appear; the defendant’s attorney does not put up a defense for grand jury hearings, and all the state had to show was probable cause. Carolyn smoothly and expertly led the detectives through their recounting of the witnesses’ testimony, and after just an hour of deliberation the grand jury had handed down a true bill of indictment: murder in the first degree.

The detectives decided to take a well-deserved night off, but Garrett pled exhaustion to Carolyn and took a rain check on her offer of a debauched celebration. The real truth was that his gut was gnawing at him. His grand jury testimony had been an honest presentation of the facts as he knew them, but all his doubts about the case were raging. Most people they arrested were so obviously, patently guilty that Garrett never had any qualms. Even in the highly unlikely circumstance that the suspect was not guilty of what they’d arrested him for, he was without a doubt guilty of
something
.

But this case—there was nothing that felt right about it.

Now as the sun set outside his dining-room window, Garrett sat
at the table that was never used for dining, surrounded by stacks of Jason’s belongings: the magic books, the bloodred leather grimoire, the file boxes containing the contents of Jason’s desk drawers and bookshelves.

Garrett pulled the grimoire toward him and opened the cover. The pages were dated, almost as if the book were a diary of sorts. Garrett stood and retrieved the substitution code Tanith had written for him from the desk drawer where he’d hidden it, then sat back down with it to translate the first date. Jason had begun the book in May, May 14. And according to his friends, his personality had changed radically over the summer, and not for the better. His behavior had become bizarre, he had violent outbursts, he was scaring people around him. Then on September 21, a girl he had known and likely dated, and had been with that night, was murdered.

How does that happen?

Garrett reached for a plastic evidence crate, the books and other items he had requested from Jason’s dorm room, and rooted around in it until he found the
Current 333
CD. He rose and put the disc in his sound system, then stood in his living room, listening. It was death metal but with some sophisticated musicality going on (undoubtedly coming from the bass player, and possibly Jason himself). Garrett could hear the influence of The Cure, U2, R.E.M. The word “Choronzon” stood out immediately.
“The Master of Hallucinations,”
Jason had said, and now, listening to the music, Garrett caught the words
“My Master”
and
“Mighty devil”
and something that sounded like
“Sacrifice to your will,”
but Jason’s voice was little more than a growl and Garrett couldn’t be sure what he was hearing. He checked the CD for liner notes, but there were no lyrics.

He stared into space and thought for a moment, recalling the words of the tall bassist.
“He was reading Aleister Crowley, especially.”

Garrett turned back to the box and lifted out the books, separating out the volumes written by Aleister Crowley. He sat with them and turned to the index of the first,
Confessions,
looking in the C’s for Choronzon and Current 333, and flipped to an inner page to read:

The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon . . . The Abyss is empty of being; it is filled with all possible forms, each equally inane, each therefore evil in the only true sense of the word—that is, meaningless but malignant, in so far as it craves to become real. These forms swirl senselessly into haphazard heaps like dust devils, and each such chance aggregation asserts itself to be an individual and shrieks, “I am I!”

Garrett shook his head. Disturbing . . . but incoherent. He took another book from the pile,
The Vision and the Voice,
used the index again, to find:

And whoso passeth into the outermost Abyss—except he be of them that understand—holdeth out his hands, and boweth his neck, unto the chains of Choronzon. And as a devil he walketh about the earth, immortal, and he blasteth the flowers of the earth, and he corrupteth the fresh air, and he maketh poisonous the water; and the fire that is the friend of man, and the pledge of his aspiration, seeing that it mounteth ever upward as a Pyramid, and seeing that man stole it in a hollow tube from Heaven—even that fire he turneth into ruin, and madness, and fever, and destruction.

Garrett pushed the book away from him, feeling a churning in his gut. That sentence:
“He blasteth the flowers of the earth.”

The burned footprints and scorched flowers.

“And as a devil he walketh about the earth, immortal . . .”

Garrett immediately stood to shake off the thought, and walked the floor of the room.
We don’t need to get caught up in any of this demon stuff.

“Sacrifice to thy will . . .”

He turned and looked back toward the pile of books on the table.
But what if it goes to motive?
Did Jason kill Erin as a sacrifice to this “demon,” Choronzon? Just as the three boys in Frazer’s psychological profile who killed their classmate as a sacrifice to Satan?

Garrett circled the table, tensely. He was no closer to understanding what Choronzon was; if anything he was more confused.

And it seemed to him that there was more than a little mental illness going on with this Crowley.

I need an interpreter,
he thought, and immediately Tanith Cabarrus was in his mind.

He leaned across the table to pick up the last Crowley book again . . . then he froze, looking down.

There was a silver bookstore label on the back of the book, with an address:

Book of Shadows
411 Essex St., West
Salem, MA
978-555-0728

Book of Shadows.
Garrett heard a feminine voice saying it. He turned to the table and grabbed the murder book on Erin Carmody. He turned to the police reports section and looked down at the page for his initial interview with Tanith Cabarrus. The address and phone number were the same as on the label.

Jason had gotten those books at Tanith’s shop.

She knew him.

The wind was high that evening, frantic and gusting, and the moon fat and nearly full over the waving branches and rustling leaves, as Garrett drove into Salem Town.

Landauer had not picked up when Garrett called him, and Garrett had debated with himself less than ten minutes before he headed up to Salem on his own. For the first half of the drive he had wrestled with half a dozen ways to justify himself: it was their night off; Landauer had made it cheerfully clear that if Garrett called him for any reason whatsoever he was a dead man; Malloy would never approve of consulting with a professed witch so Garrett was forced to hide his activity; he didn’t want to rope Landauer into a wild goose chase, he didn’t want Land to catch shit from Malloy if he found out they were considering information given to them by a witch . . .

Then he gave up and admitted to himself that every one of his excuses was bullshit. He simply wanted to see the witch alone.

Miraculously he found a parking spot on Essex, and started off through the rippling wind, trees and bushes stirred into green frenzies around him, and onto the cobbled street of the pedestrian mall, the center of town. Entering the warren of narrow streets was like
stepping back through time; the tight rows of colonial buildings were carefully preserved, with wrought-iron lampposts lining the walkways and antique signage hanging from hooks and chains above the shops. The town’s theme was inescapable: Essex Street and the town square were crowded with witch supply shops, psychics and tarot readers, and witch history museums, complete with soundtracks of howling winds and creaking doors piped out onto the sidewalks, enhancing the naturally atmospheric colonial storefronts and autumn wind rustling through the trees.

Garrett had learned the story in sixth grade, and it all was coming back to him now: the witch trials of 1692 that started with the “possession” and accusations of a handful of supposedly bewitched teenage and preteen girls and ended in the execution of twenty accused witches, and the imprisonment of 150 accused, five more of whom died in Salem Town’s wretched jail. It was a chapter in American history that had left a lasting impression on him, laced as it was with repressed sexuality, voodoo, magic, torture, execution, and the strong possibility of hallucinogens: Garrett remembered one theory that the witch hysteria was the result of the whole town being high on ergot, a psychedelic mold that grows on rye. And then with a ripple of unease he recalled that lurking in the shadows of the tale, documented in the court transcriptions, was the devil himself, to whom the accused witches had supposedly promised their souls.

The story hit every hippie, punk, Goth, Dionysian, counterculture pleasure center that humans possessed, and modern Salem’s tourist board took advantage of every creepy, erotic, haunting, bloody detail of it.

Already Halloween decorations were everywhere. Women in black clothing walked the streets around Garrett; he even passed some people in full costumes: zombies, pirates, and the ever-present vampires. The whole place had always given him an unsettled feeling. Tonight it didn’t help that he had the dissonant sounds of the
Current 333
CD and the strange descriptions of Choronzon working on his ganglia. And even as he thought it, his heart gave a sick lurch . . . as he spotted a statue of a decapitated man holding his
own bloody head in front of the Salem Wax Museum. Garrett walked quickly by, turning his face from the sight; it was too grim a reminder of Erin’s real-life fate. And he felt a flash of anger as well. He himself had fallen away from Catholicism long ago, but this deliberate courting of the dark side still felt to him dangerous and wrong. He was far out of his comfort level in every way.
Going to see a witch about a satanic killing.

He had reached the 400 block of Essex, the heart of downtown: rows of walk-in shops with the worst of touristy excess. He began checking the addresses for 411. He had not called ahead, so that he could see Cabarrus in her element but without any warning.

Now he realized even though he’d been watching the numbers above the shops, he must have missed it; he was already at 413 Essex. He walked back to the last shop he’d passed, and found himself staring up at the number 409.

There was no 411 Essex.