Duane saw that the page and passage he'd opened to dealt with problems at work, a union foreman who was under suspicion of skimming union funds, and a dialogue reproducing a political argument between Art and his brother. Duane glanced at the passage, remembered the argument in question-the Old Man had been quite drank and calling for the violent overthrow of the government-and then he hurried on to the final entry: 11.6.60
Found the passage on the bell Duane's been hunting for! It was in the Apocrypha: Additions to the Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley. I should have realized that it would be Crowley, that self-appointed mage of our age, who would know something about all this.
Spent a couple of hours tonight out on the porch, thinking. At first I was going to keep this to myself, but little Duane's worked hard on researching this local mystery, and I decided that he has a right to know. Tomorrow I'll take the book over and share the whole section on 'familiars' with him. The Borgia section makes for weird reading.
A couple of the pertinent sections: "Where the Medicis favored the traditional animal familiars for their bridge to the World of Magick, it is said that the Borgia family during those most productive centuries of the Renaissance (from the point of view of practicing the Art) chose an inanimate object as their talisman.
"Legend had it that the great Stele of Revealing, the iron Egyptian obelisk in the Shrine of Osiris, had been stolen from its rightful place in the Fifth or Sixth Century (Christian Reckoning) and had long been the source of power for the Borja family of Valencia, Spain.
"In 1455, when a member of that ancient family of sorcerers became pope, a great irony since his political rise had occurred due to the Dark Powers in this pre-Christian symbol, his first act was to commission the construction of a great bell. There is little doubt that this bell – brought to Rome about the time of this Borja pope's death-was the Stele of Revealing, melted down and recast into a more palatable form for the masses of Christians awaiting its arrival.
"This bell was said to be much more than another magical object of the form found in almost every Moorish or Spanish royal household in those days: the Borjas looked upon it as the "All devourer, AH begetter." In the Egyptian, the Stele of Revealing was known as the 'crown of death' and its transmogrification had been foretold in the Book of the Abyss.
"And unlike organic familiars, which act merely as medium, the Stele, even in its incarnation as a bell, demanded its own sacrifice. Legend says that Don Alonso y Borja offered a newly born granddaughter to the bell before going to Rome for the Conclave of 1455 which-against all odds-elected him Pope. But Don Alonso, now known as Pope Calixtus III, either lacked the stomach to continue the schedule of sacrifices or believed that the Stele's power had been profitably spent by his mere accession to power. For whatever reason, the sacrifices were discontinued. Pope Calixtus died. The bell was installed in the palace tower of Don Alonso's nephew, Ro-drigo y Borja, Cardinal of Rome, successor to the Archbishopry of Valencia, and the first true heir to the Borgia dynasty.
"But, legend tells, the Stele, or bell as it was now disguised, had not finished with its own demands."
After his bath, Dale Stewart went up to his bedroom. Lawrence was in his own bed. Or rather, he was on it, sitting cross-legged in the center of the bed. There was something odd about his expression.
"What's the matter?" said Dale.
Lawrence was so pale that his freckles stood out. "I… I don't know. I came in to turn the light on and… well, I heard something."
Dale shook his head. He remembered the time a couple of years before when they'd been alone watching TV while, while mother went shopping. It was a winter afternoon and they'd watched The Mummy's Revenge on the Saturday afternoon Creature Feature. As soon as it was over, Lawrence had 'heard' something in the kitchen… the same slow, sliding step that the lame mummy had made in the movie. Dale had joined his little brother in panic then; they'd loosened the storm window and jumped into the front yard as the 'steps' came closer. Their mother had come home to find them standing on the front porch in their socks and t-shirts, shivering.
Well, Dale was eleven now, not eight. "What'd you hear?" he asked.
Lawrence looked around. "I dunno. I didn't exactly hear it… I sort of felt it. Like someone else was in the room."
Dale sighed. He tossed some dirty socks in the hamper and tugged off the overhead light.
The closet door was open a bit. Dale pushed it shut as he walked toward his own bed.
The door did not click shut.
Thinking a slipper or something was in the way, Dale paused and pushed harder.
The door pushed back. Something inside the closet was pushing to get out.
In his basement, Duane mopped his face with a bandanna. It was usually cool down here even on the hottest days of summer, but he found that he was sweating freely. The book lay open on his 'study desk' made out of a door on trestles. Duane had been copying pertinent information into his note book as quickly as he could, but now he laid aside his pencil and just read.
His uncle's backward script almost made sense without the mirror now, but Duane still held the book up to the glass: The Stele of Revealing, now cast in its disguise as a beil, had been partially activated by the sacrifice of the first Borgia pope's granddaughter. But according to the Book of Ottaviano, the Borgias feared the Stele's power and were not prepared for the Apocalypse which, according to legend and lore, went with the Stele's full awakening. As recorded in The Book of the Law, the Stele of Revealing offered great power to those who served it. But at the same time, when the proper sacrifices were completed, the talisman became the Knell of the Final Days: a harbinger of the final Apocalypse which would follow that Quickening of the Stele by sixty years, six months, and six days.
Rodrigo, the next pope of the Borgia dynasty, had the Bell taken to the tower he had added to the Vatican complex. There, in the Torre Borgia, Alexander-as Rodrigo Borgia called himself as pope-was said to have kept the Stele from its Quickening by the mystical murals of a half-deranged dwarf of an artist named Pinturicchio. These 'grotesques'-designs taken from the grottos beneath Rome-served to contain the Stele's evil while allowing the family to benefit from the talisman's power. Or so Pope Alexander thought. In both The Book of the Law and Ottaviano's secret books, there are hints that the Stele began to dominate the lives of the Borgias. Years later, Alexander had the Bell moved to the massive and impenetrable Castel Sant' Angelo, but even burying the artifact in that sepulcher of stone and bones did not lessen the thing's power over the human beings who had attempted to control it. Ottaviano's shortened account tells of the mad ness that gripped both the Borgias and Rome during those decades: the murders and intrigues terrible even by the brutal standards of the day, accounts of demons roving the catacombs beneath Rome, of things less than human moving through Castel Sant' Angelo and the streets of the city, and tales of the domination of the Stele of Revealing as it worked towards its own quickening.
From this point, after the terrible death of Ottaviano, the legend of the Stele moves into darkness. The destruction of the House of Borgia is record. It is said that a generation later, when the first Medici pope ascended to the Throne of Saint Peter's, his first papal command was to have the Bell removed from Rome, melted down, and the accursed metal buried in sanctified ground far from the Vatican.
Today, no clue to the whereabouts or fate of the Stele of Revealing has survived. The legend of the Stele's power as "AH devourer, all begetter' continues in necromancy to this day.
Duane set Uncle Art's book aside. He could hear the Old Man fumbling around upstairs in the kitchen. Then there was a mumbling, the slam of the screen door, and Duane heard the pickup start with a grind and move down the driveway. The Old Man's fast from booze was over. Duane hadn't heard whether the Old Man was heading toward Carl's or the Black Tree, but he knew that it would be hours before his father would return.
Duane sat in the circle of lamp light a few minutes, looking at the book and the notes he had
taken. Then he went up to lock the screen door.
The closet door was slowly opening.
Dale leaned into it, stopped the slow opening with a four-inch gap showing into darkness, and turned to look at Lawrence. His brother was staring at him with wide eyes.
"Help," whispered Dale. There was renewed effort from the other side and the door opened another inch as Dale's socks slid on the bare wood floor.
"Mom!" screamed Lawrence as he jumped from his bed and ran to Dale's side. Together the two boys put their shoulders against the door, forcing it two inches closer to being shut. "Mom!" They were shouting in unison now.
The door stopped, pressure built on the yellow-painted boards, and it began opening again.
Dale and Lawrence stared at each other, their cheeks against the rough boards, feeling the terrible force being transmitted through the wood.
The door opened another three inches. There was no noise of any sort from the interior of the closet; here on the outside, though, both boys were puffing and gasping, Dale's socks and Lawrence's bare feet scrabbling on the floor.
The door opened another few inches. There was a gap a foot wide now, and from it a cold breeze seemed to be blowing.
"Jesus… can't… hold it," gasped Dale. His left thigh was braced against their old dresser, but he couldn't get enough leverage to move the door back. Whatever was in there had at least the strength of a grown-up.
The door opened another two inches.
"Mom!" screamed Lawrence. "Mom, help! Mom!"
There was some sort of reply from the front porch, but Dale realized that they could never hold the door long enough for their mother to arrive. "Run!" he gasped.
Lawrence looked at him, his terrified face only inches away, and let go. He ran, but not out of the room. With two steps and a huge bound, Lawrence leaped for his bed.
Without Lawrence's help, Dale couldn't hold the door. The pressure was unrelenting. He went with it, jumping onto the top of the four-foot-high dresser, pulling his legs up. The dresser lamp and some books crashed to the floor.
The door smashed open against Dale's knees. Lawrence screamed.
Dale heard his mother's footsteps on the stairs, her voice calling a question, but before he could open his own mouth to shout back a response, there was a wave of cold air as if they had opened a door to a meat locker, and then something came out of the closet.
It was very low and long-at least four feet long-and as insubstantial as a shadow, but much darker. It was a black ness, sliding along the floor like some frenzied insect that had just been freed from a jar. Dale could see leglike filaments whipping wildly. He lifted his feet onto the dresser top. A framed photograph crashed to the floor.
"Mom!" He and Lawrence had screamed in unison again.
The black thing moved across the floor in a blur. Dale thought that it was like a cockroach, if cockroaches were four feet long, a few inches high, and made out of black smoke. Dark appendages whipped and scrabbled on floorboards.
"Mom!"
The thing rushed under Lawrence's bed.
Lawrence made no noise as he leaped to Dale's bed, on his feet now, bouncing like a trampoline acrobat.
Their mother stood in the doorway, looking from one screaming boy to another.
"It's a thing… from the closet… went under…"
"Under the bed… black thing… bigl'
Their mom ran to the hall closet, returned with a broom. "Out," she said. She tugged on the overhead light.
Dale hesitated only a second before hopping down, getting behind his mother, running to the doorway. Lawrence bounced from Dale's bed to his bed to the doorway. Both boys skidded into the hallway and went crashing into the banister. Dale peeked in the room.
His mom was down on all fours, lifting the dust ruffle under Lawrence's bed.
"Mom! No!" shouted Dale and rushed in to try to pull her back.
She dropped the broom and took her oldest son by the upper arms. "Dale… Dale… now stop. Stop. There's nothing there. Look."
Between gasps quickly turning to sobs, Dale peeked. There was nothing under the bed.
"It probably went under Dale's," said Lawrence from the doorway.
With Dale still clinging, their mom went around and lifted the dust ruffles from Dale's bed. Dale's heart almost stopped when she went down on all fours, the broom in front of her.
"See," she said, rising and brushing at her skirt and knees. "There's nothing there. Now what do you think you saw?"
Both boys gabbled at once. Dale listened to his own voice and realized what their description sounded like: something big, black, shadowy, low. It had pushed the closet door open and run under the bed like a giant bug.
Uh-huh.
"Maybe it's back in the closet," suggested Lawrence, barely holding back tears and gasping for breath.
Their mother looked at them a long second but went over and pushed the closet door wider. Dale cringed back toward the doorway to the hall as his mom shifted clothes on the rack, kicked tennis shoes aside, and glanced around the edges of the doorframe. The closet was not deep. It was empty.
She folded her arms and waited. The boys stayed in the doorway, glancing over their shoulders at the landing and the dark openings to their parents' room and the extra room as if the shadow would come scrabbling across the hardwood floors after them.
"You guys have been scaring each other, haven't you?" she asked.
Both boys denied it and began babbling, describing the thing again, Dale showing how they had tried to hold the closet door. shut.
"And this bug pushed it open?" Their mom had a slight smile.
Dale sighed. Lawrence looked up at him as if to say, Somehow it's still under my bed. We just can't see it.
"Mom," said Dale as calmly as he could, his voice conversational, reasonable,"can we sleep in your room tonight? In our sleeping bags?"
She hesitated a second. Dale guessed that she was remembering the time they locked themselves out because of the 'mummy"… or perhaps the time last summer when they'd sat out in the fields near the ball diamond at night trying to telepathically contact alien spaceships… and had come home terrified when a plane's lights had gone over.
"All right," she said. "You get your sleeping bags and the foldup cot. I have to go out and tell Mrs. Somerset that my big boys interrupted our conversation with screams because of a shadowy bug."
She went downstairs with both her sons within arm's length. They waited until she came back inside before they went upstairs again, having her wait at the doorway to the extra room while they scrounged around for the sleeping bags and the cot.
She refused to leave even the hall light on all night. Both boys held their breath when she went into their room to tug off the overhead light, but she returned all right, leaving the broom by the headboard like a weapon. Dale thought of the pump-action shotgun his father kept in the closet next to his own Savage over-and-under there. The shells were in the bottom drawer of the cedar chest.
Dale had his cot so close to the edge of the bed that there was no gap there at all. Long after their mother had fallen asleep, Dale could feel his brother's wakefulness, intense and watchful as his own.
When Lawrence's hand crept out from under the blankets onto Dale's cot, Dale didn't push it away. He made sure it was indeed his brother's hand and wrist… not something from the darkness below the bed… and then he held it tightly until he finally fell asleep.
SEVENTEEN
On Wednesday, June fifteenth, after he'd done his paper route and before he went to St. Malachy's to help Father C. say Mass, Mike went under the house.
The morning light was rich, the sun already high enough to build shadows under the elms and peach trees in the yard, when Mike pried off the metal access panel to the crawlspace. Everybody else he knew had basements. Well, he thought, everybody else I know has indoor plumbing, too.
He'd brought his Boy Scout flashlight and now he shone it into the low space. Cobwebs. Dirt floor. Pipes
, the dark wood two-by-fours under the floor. More cobwebs. The space was barely eighteen inches high and it smelled of old cat urine and fresh soil.
There were more spiderwebs than cobwebs. Mike tried to avoid the solid, massy, milky webs he knew meant black widows as he crawled and wiggled toward the front of the house. He had to pass under his parents' room and the short hall to get there. The darkness seemed to stretch on forever, the faint light from the opening behind him fading. In a sudden panic, Mike wriggled around until he could see the rectangle of sunlight, making sure that he could find his way out. The opening looked very far away. Mike continued forward.
When he figured that he had to be under the parlor-he could see the stone foundation three yards ahead-Mike stopped, turned on his side, and panted. His right arm was touching a wooden cross brace under the floor; his left hand was tangled in spiderwebs. Dust rose around him, getting in his hair and making him blink. The powdery stuff floated in the narrow flashlight beam.
Geez, I'm going to be in great shape to help Father C. serve Mass, he thought.
Mike wiggled left, the flashlight beam finding the north wall fifteen feet away. The stone looked black. What the hell-What the heck was he looking for? Mike squirmed and began moving in a circle, checking the dirt for signs of its being disturbed.
It was hard to tell. The stone and dirt floor had been gouged by weather and pawed by generations of the O'Rourke cats as well as other animals seeking shelter here. A few dried cat turds littered the area.
It was a cat or skunk, thought Mike with a mental sigh of relief. Then he saw the hole.
At first it was just another shadow, but its blackness did not diminish with the flashlight beam playing across it. Mike wondered if it was a circle of dark plastic, some tarp or something his dad had left down here. He wiggled four feet closer and stopped.
It was a hole, perfectly round, perhaps twenty inches across. Mike could have gone down it headfirst if he'd wanted to. He did not want to.