Book of Shadows

CHAPTER Nineteen

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.