Perhaps, Moreno thought, the treatment had been sufficiently prolonged. He could repeat it if necessary. Emerging once more from his magic shelter, he turned off the switch and reversed the lever that had served to manipulate the forceps. Once again he went back to the circle.
After an interval of silence there issued from the clouded globe a voice which had no resemblance to that of Bifrons. It was both thunderous and mellow. To Moreno’s inexperienced ear, it sounded like the Voice that spoke to Moses on the mountain.
‘I am cured,’ it announced. ‘You have restored Me to My Divinity, O wise and beneficent doctor. Pronounce the formula of release and let Me go. Hell is henceforth abolished, together with all evil, sin and disease. The Devil is dead. God alone exists. And God is good.’
Moreno was enraptured, believing that he had realized so quickly his fondest professional hope. Scarcely knowing what he did, he uttered the formula that served to release an imprisoned spirit.
Afterwards he asked, ‘Now will You reveal Yourself to me? I would behold You in all Your glory.’
‘It cannot be,’ the Voice thundered. ‘My glory would blast your eyes forever. Therefore the cloud with which I have surrounded myself.’
A moment later the globe burst asunder in flying fragments, like some gigantic bottle of new champagne. The released cloud, billowing vastly and voluminously, seemed to overspread the whole laboratory in an instant. Bifrons, raging behind it but still invisible, proceeded to wreck all of Moreno’s equipment like a dozen baboons gone berserk. Tray-laden tables were overturned and smashed into splinters, shelves were pulled down with a crashing of countless vials and carboys. Coiled tubings were twisted and bent and ripped apart, heavily insulated wires snapped like twine. The old volumes of magic, piled in a corner sprang into flame and burned to ashes in a few seconds. A violent wind, coming as if from nowhere, took up the ashes and scattered them throughout the room.
Moreno, protected by the circle, alone escaped the demon’s wrath. He crouched at the circle’s center, cowering and gibbering, while the cloud passed away through windows from which every pane had been broken.
Several of his colleagues, coming to consult him that evening, found him still crouching on the wreckage-littered floor. He did not seem to recognize them and had obviously become deranged. His mouthings appeared to indicate a sort of theological mania.
The colleagues held an impromptu consultation of their own. As a result, Moreno was removed gently but forcibly to the same type of institution as that to which he had committed so many of his patients. His friends and fellow-psychiatrists deplored the interruption, perhaps the ending, of an illustrious career.
The wrecking of the laboratory remained a mystery. Had there been an explosion caused by one of Moreno’s experiments? Had the doctor himself destroyed his equipment in a state of violent mania? Or – should the occurrence be classified as an act of God?
Fuming at the interruption of his tryst with Foti, Bifrons nevertheless thought it incumbent upon himself to report at once to Satan when he returned to the nether realms.
He found that Master of that picturesque region occupied in caressing a half-flayed girl. The flaying had been done to render the caresses more intimate and more exquisitely agonizing.
Satan listened gravely to the demon’s account of Dr. Moreno. His tapering artistic fingers, with long-pointed nails of polished jet, ceased their occupation; and a furrow appeared like a black triangle between his luminous marble brows.
‘This is all very interesting – and rather unfortunate,’ he said. ‘However, you have acted with admirable aplomb and presence of mind. The situation should be well under control as long as Moreno remains in the madhouse where you and his colleagues have landed him.’
He paused, and his fingers resumed in an absent-minded fashion their gentle raking of his victim’s lumbar regions.
‘Of course, as you understand, Moreno was quite mad from the start. But lunatics with a speculative bent can sometimes stumble overly close to certain guarded cosmic secrets and there are spells which even I must answer and obey – not to mention the Unspeakable Name, the Shem-hamphorash, which coerces and compels Jehovah. After he recovers from his present state of shock, Moreno might be adjudged sane – and released to continue his researches and experiments.’
‘Such an eventuation must be forestalled permanently. My good Bifrons, you must return immediately to earth and watch over him. I have full trust in your abilities, and I confer upon you plenipotentiary powers. All I ask is, that you keep this doctor well bedeviled and legally insane until the hour of his death.’
When Bifrons departed, Satan summoned his chief lieutenants before him in the halls of Pandemonium.
‘I am going away for a while,’ he told them. ‘There are certain obligations of a pressing nature that call me – and I must not neglect them too long. In my absence, I consign the management of Hell to your competent hands.’
Bowing reversely, Gorson, Goap, Zimimar and Amaimon, lords of the four quarters, went out one after one, leaving their prince alone. When they had gone, he descended from his globed throne and passed through many corridors and by upward-winding stairs to the small postern door of Hell.
The door swung open without touch of any visible hand. A long white robe seemed to weave itself swiftly from the air about Satan’s form. His infernal attributes withered and dropped away. And the long white beard of the Elohim sprouted and flowed down over his bosom as he stepped across the sill into Heaven.