“Forget it. Tonight, Daniel. It’s got to be tonight. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
Again, a stammering response, but eventually he agreed to meet her at the northwest entrance in an hour’s time, and from there he led her upstairs to his desk, around which they stand now in a pond of light thrown by his green-shaded lamp. He cracks open an oversize book and licks his fingers and turns pages delicately and says beneath his breath, “Now where was it?”
Her eyes scan the room. Book spines glimmer; the wood blushes. The air is spiced with the smell of old paper, a cross of grass and vanilla. Daniel might have a reader’s slouch and moley eyes and a frumpy suit that can’t hide the pooch of his belly, but nonetheless she feels comforted beside him. Nearby, Hemingway is curled up in a horseshoe shape, one ear perked, but his eyes closed, snoring softly. The place is the same, the hour is the same, the arrangement of books and the skull on the desk is the same—but right now the danger feels very far away and the bookstore sheltered and cozy once more. Her family is safe. Sarin and Juniper have agreed to help them. And she appears to be closing in on answers. There are a thousand reasons she should lock herself in a closet and wait for dawn, but for the moment, in her mind, she’s winning.
“Who buys from you, Daniel?”
He looks up from the book and readjusts the glasses sliding down his nose and says, “Oh, I generally deal with three different types of customers. Those who walk in and buy on a whim. Those who are decorators looking for something old to class up a living room, and they’re the absolute worst, I must say. And then there are the studious, serious buyers. They’re not collectors so much as they are antiquarian scholars. They come from all over. China, Germany, Brazil, England, New York, and right here in Portland.”
But in the case of every buyer, Daniel says, they decide to bring a book home because, whether they understand it or not, these titles hold stores of power between their covers. That’s what he believes. He really does. Books are like batteries, he says. And you grow a little stronger by reading them, surrounding yourself with them.
“Such is the case with this title,” he says, and closes it and pats the cover fondly. The leather appears branded more than stamped with the title and author, Lock and Key by Joseph Hilfin. “It doesn’t look like much at first. I would classify it as in very good condition, given its age of some two hundred years, with the rubbing and chipping and staining along the cover, the minor tears and cracks in the pages.” He runs a finger along the spine and says the hinges are tight with no separation from the binding. He describes foxing—the acidification of paper dating back to the nineteenth century that results in rust-like spotting—and the laid-in pages that are loose, complementary to the central text but not directly part of it, typically a map or ancillary material.
“This is interesting, isn’t it?” He flips to the front matter and shows off the torn bookplate there. Only half of it remains—discolored and faded—but she can make out enough. The border is a seething tangle of serpents fanging each other. And the name of the owner, in red script, is cut off. “Crowley” is all it says, a name she recognizes somehow. From her earlier conversation with Josh on the phone. “Crowley.” She says it aloud as if that will help spur the memory.
“Indeed,” Daniel says. “And though I can’t prove it as such, I find it very likely it belonged to none other than one Aleister Crowley, who during his time owned one of the world’s largest collections of occult writings. As an interesting side note, a man named Jimmy Page later purchased Crowley’s home and library and presently owns an occult bookshop in London.”
“Think I’ve heard of him,” Lela says absently, and pulls her notebook from her purse.
“Mr. Page? He belonged to a rock-and-roll band named Led Zeppelin that was apparently quite popular in the 1970s.”
“Thanks, Daniel. I got it. Okay—Crowley, Crowley, Crowley.” She flips through the notebook’s pages until she finds what she’s looking for. Crowley, the self-proclaimed wickedest man in the world. A practitioner of black magick, Tantra, Satanism. Samuel Fromm, the man who built the Rue, was a known associate of his. “What else can you tell me about him?”
Daniel says, “Crowley was interested in creating what is called a moonchild. A scarlet child. A child seeded and possessed by an ethereal being. A fetal avatar that would carry a superbeing into our world. Demonized. Possessed. This is accomplished by a series of magical and sexual rituals that call forth darkness. Oh, and another side note. The moonchild was the subject and title of a novel Crowley wrote in which a group of magicians attempts to impregnate a girl whose offspring will change the course of human history. Anyhow, I sold a pristine copy of it not long ago, and the buyer told me an anecdote about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, and Jack Parsons, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Apparently they were in touch with Crowley and attempting black magick rituals in order to birth their own moonchild, what they hoped would be the Antichrist.”
“What does this have to do with the skull?”
It sits in the center of the desk, facing them, watching them, and they are both lost for a moment in its gaze. Ciphers etch every inch of it. The warped, elongated shape makes it appear like some shadow of a man bent by the low angle of the sun.
Daniel clears his throat and turns the book’s thick pages. They don’t flip crisply but roll like fabric. She can’t read any of it—the text is in Latin—but she recognizes some of the drawings and feels repulsed by some of the illustrations, a man with a snake growing out of his groin, a woman with the head of a goat. A black beetle scuttles out of a fold and scurries across the desk and vanishes beneath the skull, and Daniel pauses only to say, “Oh my,” before continuing.
“Have you ever had a key made?” he says. “Have you ever seen a locksmith work on a car or a front door and try to get the cut exactly right? The teeth must be just so. Just so. Or the grooves won’t line up with the pins in the tumbler lock.
“This book is a kind of study guide in supernatural locksmithing. It teaches you how to open different kinds of doors for different kinds of darkness. Some allow people to go there, and others allow demons to come here. There are outright summons. Impregnations akin to the moonchild ceremonies. Solstice performances meant to channel power through sacrificial appeasement. And on and on. There are many different locks, many different keys. And these ciphers,” he says, “the ciphers on the page and the ciphers on the skull are like the cut of a key.”