“I can show you the text,” Marmiadon chattered, “you can read for yourself. It’s not among the forbidden chapters.”
“Okay.” I agreed.
He lit his candle and opened the book. I’d glanced at Johannine Bibles but never gotten up the steam to get through one. They replaced the Old Testament with something that even a gentile like me considered blasphemous, and followed the standard parts of the New with a lot of the Apocrypha, plus other stuff whose source never has been identified by reputable scholars. Marmiadon’s shaky finger touched a passage in that last section. I squinted, trying to make out the fine print. The Greek was paralleled with an English translation, and itself purported to render the meaning of a string of words like those in the canticles upstairs.
Holy, holy, holy. In the name of the seven thunders. O Mabon of righteousness, exceeding great, angel of the Spirit, who watcheth over the vials of wrath and the mystery of the bottomless pit, come thou to mine aid, wreak sorrow upon them that have done evil to me, that they may know contrition and afflict no longer the servants of the hidden truth and the Reign that is to come. By these words be thou summoned, Heliphomar Mabon Saruth Gefutha Enunnas Sacinos. Amen. Amen. Amen.
I closed the book. “I don’t go for that kind of invocation,” I said slowly.
“Oh, you could recite it aloud,” Marmiadon blurted. “In fact, an ordinary communicant of the Church could, and get no response. But I’m a toiler. A summoner, you’d call it. Not too high‑ranking or skillful; nevertheless, certain masteries have been conferred.”
“Ah, s‑s‑so!” The sickening explanation grew upon me. “You raise and control demons in your regular line of work?”
“Not demons. No, no, no. Ordinary paranatural beings for the most part. Occasionally a minor angel.”
“You mean a thing that tells you it’s an angel.”
“But it is!”
“Never mind. Here’s what happened. You say you got mad and spoke this curse, a black prayer, against us. I say that knowingly or not, you were casting a spell. Since nothing registered on detectors, it must’ve been a kind of spell unknown to science. A summons to something from out of this universe. Well, you Johnnies do seem to ‘ve acquired a pipeline to another world. You believe, most of you, that world is Heaven. I’m convinced you’re fooled; it’s actually hell.”
“No,” he groaned.
“I’ve got reason, remember. That’s where my kid was taken.”
“She couldn’t have been.”
“The demon answered your call. It happened that of the Nornwell people around, my wife and I had the?one household exposed that night to his action. So the revenge was worked on us.”
Marmiadon squared his puny shoulders. “Sir, I don’t deny your child is missing. But if she was taken . . . as an unintended result of my action . . . well, you needn’t fear.”
“When she’s in hell? Supposing I got her back this minute, what’ll that place have done to her?”
“No, honestly, don’t be afraid.” Marmiadon ventured to pat my hand where it clenched white‑knuckled around the knife. “If she were in the Low Continuum, retrieval operations would involve temporal phasing. Do you know what I mean? I’m not learned in such matters myself, but our adepts are, and a portion of their findings is taught to initiates, beginning at the fourth degree. The mathematics is beyond me. But as I recall, the hell universe has a peculiar, complex space‑time geometry. It would be as easy to recover your daughter from the exact instant when she arrived; there as from any other moment.”
The weapon clattered out of my grasp. A roar went through my head. “Is that the truth?”
“Yes. More than I’m canonically allowed to tell you?”
I covered my face. The tears ran out between my fingers.
“?but I want to help you, Mr. Matuchek. I repent my anger.” Looking up, I saw him cry too.
After a while we were able to get to business. “Of course, I must not mislead you,” he declared. “When I said it would be as easy to enter hell at one point of time as another, I did not mean it would not be difficult. Insuperably so, indeed, except for our highest adepts. No geometers are alive with the genius to find their way independently through those dimensions.