Tales From the Black Chamber (10 page)

“Nope. Look, necromancy is like any other secret society. Initiates learn from other initiates, and the sources and methods are kept as hidden as possible from the public,” John explained.

“And the Catholic Church has been disseminating demonic magic for a thousand years?!” Anne asked incredulously. “Look, I'm not Catholic; I'm not even particularly religious, but that's a lurid slander.”

“You misunderstand me—and I'm Catholic. It's not the institutional Church, which as you'll remember, spent a lot of time and energy burning necromantic texts and imprisoning and executing necromancers. According to the theory, it would be a tiny subgroup of priests. God knows what their motivations may be, or if there are more than one or two of them, but the story goes that there are some corrupt priests who have passed down some sort of necromantic knowledge. I mean, okay, magic is an outré idea, but barring that, if I'd told you ten years ago that it was more likely that the Church contained some priests in an order—or freelancing—who were guarding some very old secret, historical rites or that there were groups of priests covering for each other's practicing pedophilia and homosexuality, which would you have thought more likely? Or a worse slander?”

“Point taken. So what do we do?”

“We hunt the bastard down,” said Agent Hunter.

“Wait, what, what's the ‘we'? The FBI hunts sorcerers?” Anne felt totally at sea, utterly unmoored by the surreal conversations they'd been having.

“Look, let's leave that for the morning, Anne. We'll go down to the Coolidge Foundation, and I'll try and explain.”

“Okay, fine. But I'm not going back in that bathroom.”

“I wouldn't ask you to,” said John.

As they said their good nights upstairs, Anne turned to John and said, “Um, it occurs to me that if this is all really some black-magic thing, they might have more of my hair. Could they do something to me with that?”

John looked thoughtful for a long moment that terrified Anne, then he said, “I doubt it. Because they would have already done it. I mean, they tried to kill you with guns, not voodoo, right? So I think we can assume they're trying to locate you in order to get the rest of the manuscript photos or, conceivably, to shoot you right this time. Fortunately, since you were in the bathroom, all they could have seen was the bathroom wall behind you. Not too many clues there. But we don't want to give them any more.”

“Hence the covered mirrors. Okay. Look, John, I've been trusting you with my life and now my sanity. If this is all some crazy con job or you're screwing with me, I will get you. I don't know how, but I'll come up with some crazy wronged-woman revenge, I promise. Seriously, someone or something will end up shot or on fire.”

John's face fell. “Anne, I couldn't be more sorry this happened to you. I like you very much, to tell the truth, and I would love to have kept you on the outside, if only because I could come to New York and have dinner with you and talk about things that aren't this and maybe we could be … um … friends … or.… What I'm trying to say is just, I'm sorry. I thought we could figure this book puzzle out quickly enough to keep something like this from happening. But now, we're still stuck with the book as our only significant clue, and you're suddenly in a very strange, scary world. I am just abjectly, profoundly sorry.”

“I used to like you, too, John,” Anne said flatly, walked into her room, and closed the door behind her.

6

When Anne got up, Agent Hunter was gone. She arrived in the kitchen in a new business suit to find John there with two travel mugs of coffee in hand. “Ready to go to work?” he asked.

She took a mug and headed to the garage. As he turned onto Saul Road, she said, “Okay, I'm a little more collected now, and honestly, I'm a little more inclined toward a brain tumor or psychosis. I just can't accept that here in the twenty-first century we're talking about
necromancy
. I mean, that's just ridiculous.”

“Okay, let's not call it necromancy,” John said reasonably. “A paranormal phenomenon?”

“Meaningless term.”

“Science is the way we moderns view the physical world,” John proposed. “Can we call it a phenomenon which science might be able to account for at some point but can't at the moment?”

“Well, if you want to,” Anne said, annoyed. “But parsimony demands that my mental state is
far
more likely to be the issue. Fatigue, stress, isolation. Who wouldn't start to crack up a little?”

“Well, you, for one. Your breathing is even, your affect appropriate, your emotions not abnormal given the circumstances and admirably under control, you're not drinking excessively or on medication, and you've been doing intellectual work at a very high level. With all due respect to William of Occam, I think we can rule out mental illness on your part.” He turned the car left onto Connecticut Avenue, heading towards the District. “You look very nice this morning, incidentally.”

Anne threw her hand without a coffee mug up in the air. “How can you be so low-key about this? Look, here's the thing. Pardon my bluntness, but necromancy is bullshit.”

“On what basis do you say that?” John asked.

“On the basis of being incredibly familiar with the stuff. I spent half my undergrad years, all of grad school, and much of my career and free time digging through old esoteric books. Grimoires, necromantic manuals, the whole deal. And it's all ridiculous. I mean, if it worked,
we'd know
. I mean, there'd be people conjuring illusory feasts and castles out of thin air. You'd think that would have shown up in the history books. The way to a woman's heart would be through a voodoo doll. People would be riding magical spirit horses from continent to continent in an hour. It's all crap! There's an enormous amount of academic literature which concludes that a lot of this stuff was written as
entertainment
. Hell, a bunch of my college friends and I actually tried a ritual to make two people whom we thought would make a great couple fall in love, sort of as a joke, and sort of curious as to what would happen. We did everything exactly as it was written—magic circles, effigies, etc.—and … nothing!
Of course!
”

“Okay, look, I'm really not arguing with you here,” John countered, “but, to borrow a couple terms from Catholic theology, what you're arguing is that magic works
ex opere operato
, by means of the ritual itself. It might work
ex opere operantis
, though, by means of the performers. You and your friends might have had to believe in it, or have some special power to get it to work.”

“I see the distinction, but it's meaningless. It can't ever work!” Anne objected.

“You're probably right. I'm not an expert, but I'm guessing ninety-nine percent of all the necromantic stuff was nonsense. Entertainment, fakery, wish-fulfillment, pseudo-religion. But what if some tiny fraction of it
did
work? It might be hidden in plain sight in those books with some secret never-written key which made it work. Maybe it required a specially initiated adept. I mean, again, to go back to the Catholic context, you have to become a priest before you can perform the sacraments. Who's to say whatever changed in you then, didn't change you in a way that made these things
work
?”

“But they don't! And nothing happens to Catholic priests when they take orders! Then or now! It's all just premodern mystagogy.”

“Well, as a Catholic, I'm required to politely disagree with you on that one,” said John, changing lanes. “But, look, let's get back to what happened to you. You saw a young boy's face appear in your mirror, interact with you, and then disappear. You're not mentally ill, and say it's not magic—whatever ‘magic' is. Then what was it?”

“I don't know,” Anne said quietly.

“Can we call it ‘magic,' if we definite ‘magic' as some mechanism not yet explained by science but which appears to affect the physical world?”

“So you're saying that bumblebees fly by magic?” Anne squinted as she took a drink of coffee.

“No, that's actually a myth, according to a physicist I know. It's some property called ‘dynamic stall.'” John looked like he was going to expound on the topic but thought better of it. “But, no, I don't just mean any unexplained phenomenon is magical, in that sense. I mean whatever happened to you used some sort of physical force or power or mechanism that we have no idea about, in order to be able to see you through a mirror from … well, from wherever he is.”

“And therefore it's necromancy?” Anne asked. “That's a big leap.”

“No, I think it's necromancy because it fits exactly with descriptions of necromantic scrying rituals,” John said, matter-of-factly. “And I'm drawing the conclusion that it's most likely some rogue Catholic priest based on what little we know of the medieval context of necromancy and the fragmentary reports of its survival. I could be wrong, though.”

“Wait, where do you get these reports on necromancy in the modern world?” Anne asked.

“Here we are,” John said, pulling into an underground Colonial Parking lot beneath a building on Farragut Square.

They took a dedicated elevator to the lobby, then switched to a different bank of elevators. As they rode up to the sixth floor, John said, “This is kind of an odd office.”

They got off at the sixth floor and walked down a hall to a door with a sign saying C
OOLIDGE
F
OUNDATION
. John took a key card out of his pocket and unlocked the door. Inside was a pleasant, if bland, reception area with the Foundation's name over a desk. At the desk, a black man in a security guard's uniform with a Coolidge Foundation shoulder patch looked up at them.

“Morning, Carl,” said John, signing them in on a piece of paper. “This is Anne Wilkinson. She's going to be joining the Foundation, so you'll probably be seeing a lot of her. Today's her first day.”

“Welcome to you,” said Carl with a smile. He stood up and offered his hand. As Anne took it and thanked him, she noticed he had a gun on his hip.

John walked to the sole door out of the reception area, unlocked it with a key on a ring, and ushered Anne through. As he locked it behind her, she looked around at the unexceptional hallway behind it. There were no side doors, merely a single elevator at the end.

“Are we in an episode of
Get Smart
?” asked Anne.

“Would you believe …
The X-Files
?” John said in a reasonably good Don Adams drone, typing a code on the keypad it had instead of buttons. The elevator opened and he held out an arm. “After you, 99.”

They stepped inside and Anne was surprised to see there were only two main buttons on the elevator panel, though there were a number of odd switches and smaller buttons arrayed behind a Lucite panel. John pressed the lower of the two control buttons, the door closed, and they went down. And down. And down. Anne was surprised. The elevator felt like it was moving fairly quickly, but it seemed to take them longer to reach the bottom than it had to come up to the sixth floor. As the chime sounded, she asked, “Basement?”

“Sub-sub-sub-basement. Actually we're about five stories below street level.” The doors opened on a concrete tunnel about ten feet wide. There was a wide double door across from them. John placed his hand on a plastic surface and his eye up to what looked like a keyhole.

“Scanners?” Anne asked.

“Yep. Can't be too careful these days.” John smiled. “We used to have a big raccoon problem.”

They walked through the door into another wide tunnel. There was a zippy-looking golf cart sitting against one wall. “Want to ride or walk?” asked John. “It's a little ways.”

“Let's ride,” said Anne, climbing into the passenger seat. “It'll minimize the amount of time I have to freak out that a strange man whom I barely know has me in some undetectable subterranean labyrinth.”

“Hey, you work here now!” John laughed as he unplugged the cart from a large wall outlet. He hopped in and soon they were speeding down the featureless tunnel. Around the time Anne could see a wall appear at the far end, she was surprised to see the tunnel's walls change from concrete to old, skillfully laid brick, and a few side tunnels open up. John parked the golf cart and Anne looked at the door at the end of the tunnel. It was not what she expected. Rather than some sort of missile-silo blast-shield door, it was an old-fashioned set of double doors, each door a six-panel door in heavy, dark oak. The fittings were all brass, as was the small plaque on the door that said N
O
A
DMITTANCE
.

John slid a large brass key with a complicated tooth out of his pocket and turned it in the door's keyhole. From the door came a number of surprisingly loud mechanical noises—bolts sliding, parts clicking. Then, rather anticlimactically, it opened about an inch. John held the door for Anne, who unconsciously held her breath. When she walked through and saw what lay beyond, she gasped.