XIII. Occult Seals and Applied Car Battery Mechanics

The Black Beetle has served as the team’s iconic mode of transport for two years of field research, cryptic mysteries, and perilous adventures. Now it is broken down and bent in the middle with the top shorn off, a twisted metal heap of glass and rubber, its entrails strewn about. Penelope runs up to the exposed engine and begins fiddling with wires.

“Shouldn’t we get Doctor Arthwitte before we leave?” Dorian asks as a tire comes loose and car sags to the side. “Did you figure out a way to fix it?”

“No, you did.” Penelope heaves herself into the car and emerges with the battery, sets it on the ground, and then circles around to the other side of the car. “Can you carry that?”

“The battery?” Dorian asks. He bends down and lifts it with both hands. “Ugh, this thing is heavy; what do you even need it for?”

“No questions now; simply bask in the glory that you were right,” Penelope says as she unlatches the trunk and grabs the jumper cables from the scattered mess. Dangling them over her shoulder, she hurries back into the village. Dorian groans and follows behind her, battery in tow. “What do you need it for?” he asks once they reach the village gate.

“No questions until we’re at the cabin,” Penelope says followed up by an excited cackle. She dips to the side back towards the cemetery. “This way.”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

Penelope squeezes between two large bushes and tumbles into the thick of the forest. “This is the way Crowley led me before,” she says, recognizing the footprints they left behind on their first trip.

“We’re wandering into the middle of the woods,” Dorian says, wary. “How do we know this isn’t where Marcel is hiding?”

“I’m sure it was this way.”

“At least tell me your plan.”

“I’m going to electrocute the cabin.”

“Come again?”

“No more questions.”

A twinkling chime in the distance catches her ear and heralds the arrival of my shimmering orb. It barrels towards Penelope out of the wilderness, stops a few inches short of her nose, then hovers about her face as if studying her from all angles. After a few bobs, the ball bounces in mid air then zips away into the woods. This time, it is my sister who follows.

She spies the cabin up ahead and quickens her pace. The ball of light leads her right to where Crowley did before then slowly floats in the air, swaying from side to side as she looks up in awe. Penelope reaches out for it and the ball glides down to rest in her open palm. An alien warmth emanates from her hand and creeps into her shoulder.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asks.

“The cabin?” Dorian asks. “Beautiful is not one of the words I thought when I saw it.”

“No, I mean–” When Penelope looks back at her hand, the ball of light is gone. “No, of course you didn’t see it.”

Everything is exactly as she remembers it, the cabin that looks like its succumbing to dry rot, the door hanging off one hinge but somehow fastened to the frame. Goosebumps spread across her arms and the edge of her sight becomes hazy. Little bright lights seem to dance inside the cabin, by the window, in front of the door, and floating up out of the stone chimney.

“What did you need the battery for?” Dorian asks, setting it down on the grass.

She points towards the cabin. “Crowley says the book is in there, but it’s locked – with a spell.”

“So the spirits locked it?”

“Remember the General banned electricity, my guess is that it hinders magic in some way.”

“Why would it do that?”

“How should I know? What I do know is that no part of this cabin will budge. Observe.” She makes her way over towards the cabin then pivots and gestures as if presenting the door to her brother like a specimen at a symposium or sideshow carnival. “In the words of Aleister Crowley, ‘even if I had the key it would not turn the lock,’ because of the spell. My hypothesis is that even a spell has to manipulate the physical world. Which means something physical could potentially disrupot it.”

Dorian blinks three times. “I think I understand; magic doesn’t violate the laws of science, it just manipulates them?”

“Exactly, and if that’s true,” she lets out another sharp, giddy cackle, “we can break the spell with science!” Penelope sets the battery on the ground and attaches a clamp to each electrode. “If it works then it works, and if it doesn’t then we try something else. And then something else, and on and on until it does.”

She taps the other opposing jumper cable clamps together and a bright flash of electricity crackles then pops out of its copper teeth. Then more cackling from Penelope until she clears her throat.

“A lot of ‘if’s,” Dorian mutters.

Penelope turns towards the cabin door. When she connects the electrodes to the rusted iron knob, a bright flash momentarily blinds her. A loud crack followed by a sonic boom shakes the forest floor. Trees bend back from the force of the blast, their stray limbs scattering in the air. Little raised bumps the size of baseballs rise up from beneath the earth and scurry away from the cabin. They fan out in the same direction as the force of the explosion, which sends the the door flying off its hinges. It takes Penelope with it and they both collide with Dorian, then the ground.

It was not my intention to seal my book away. I was soaring in my plane over the ice when every dial became erratic. Altitude was dropping fast, and before I could attempt to correct course the nose plunged into the snow. Everything went dark after that. When I awoke, I was standing at the threshold of the World, but my book, my plane, all these were lost.

Luckily for all, the Light’s gifts have a certain will of their own, and the means to protect themselves once awakened. My book was no exception. Whatever manner of control or curse Mathers used to subdue it or if my book laid dormant until it escaped, I do not know, but no words penned in any book can match the pride I feel for my sister now. She has taken the first step – she has broken the spell.

Penelope slides the door off of them as a low rumbling boom echoes over the meadow. Rising to her feet, she hears the crack of timber and the crash of fallen trees, but the forest is still.

Rotating concentric rings of fiery light emerge from the little dirt mounds. As they rise, the outline of the forest, cabin, and ground tremble as squiggling outlines overlaying them begin to crumble and slink away. It’s as if the world she sees is a sheet covering some other place where unseen giants churn the gears of reality. Something unseen that ripples where the cabin lies wirrlges as its amorphous form drifts into the sky – and the spinning discs of fire rise with it.

The vibrational hum in the air goes still, the quaking earth settles, and the low, sonorous booming reverberates through the thick of the woods beyond. Slowly, Penelope approaches the cabin door.

“Wait,” Dorian says. “Did the outline of everything get up and walk away?”

Penelope freezes. Where the battery was lays a perfect rectangle of untouched soil, with a wide starburst of scorched char stretching out and around it. Where it went, my sister can’t be sure. Perhaps it exploded, perhaps it vanished. Or, perhaps, it vanishes to a different place altogether, the same world as our own, but observed from a different angle.

Dorian lets out a loud exhale and laughs. “You know, I think your version of science is even crazier than Doctor Arthwitte’s.”

“We’re not done yet.” She storms past him towards the cabin. “We can solve whatever problems that come up after that’s done.”

#

Motes of dust twinkle in the shafts of sunlight that pour in from all directions, transforming the dark and ominous shack into a mundane, one-room hovel. A bed with a two-drawer table beside it, a closet armoire, and an iron stove in one corner with a chimney craning up at odd angles and out through the ceiling. The far wall of the cabin is dominated by a wide wooden bookshelf, and Penelope begins her search there.

“What do you expect it to look like?” Dorian asks as he lifts the mattress. “Have you ever seen a magical tome before?”

“Heavy? Impractically large?” Penelope guesses as she removes old paperback and hardbound books from the shelves, rifles through a few pages, and then tosses each one over her shoulder. “Leather cover, colorful and intricate pictures that are impossible to reproduce? Maybe an astrology chart or something.”

Dorian takes in the mounting pile of books behind her. “Shouldn’t we be less conspicuous?”

Penelope tosses the last of the books over her back and her shoulders slump. “Most of these are old almanacs on farming. Dorian, maybe we should–”

Then she notices that one of the floorboards underneath the bed is a bit uneven. It’s barely noticeable, but with a little tug the uneven plank loosens and separates from the floor. In a tiny box buried in the dirt with no lid is something tightly bundled in white linen. Wrapped up inside the linens is my book.

Oppressively large, for its secrets are infinite, but the size is to confound the unworthy. A tome bound in brass and a sickly grey-pink leather kept shut by a hinged clasp at the middle. Thin fibers that shimmer like golden-red fire run down the spine, and seven brass bands cinch the fibers in place like a braid. The book is warm and gently pulses as if breathing.

Penelope runs her fingers along the cover and thin slits open up along the surface. Tears of blackish red blood ooze out then pool together into a collection of cuneiform letters. Three interlocking triangles forming a fourth in the center materialize on the cover. The letters begin to twist and warp until they form words.

“The Book of Splendor.”

“Is that… human skin?” Dorian asks.

“It’s… definitely skin,” Penelope says. She unlatches the tome’s locks and its pages flutter open as if caught up in a strong gust of wind. The book stops skimming itself and pulsing veins raise up to the surface of the exposed vellum, lending the appearance of bat wings. More blood spills out forming letters in an alien cuneiform.

Pictures appear in the empty space between words: Rings of fire and brass with countless feathers spinning out trails of ice and stone. Tri-horned reptilian giants devouring naked, flailing primates by the score. In the sky a titanous humanoid looms, wings draped over its body and four more spread out, a gyroscope of stars and ichor swirling about its forehead. Stars fall from their homes and careen to the earth as winged, chimeric abominations with the faces of wild cats for breasts dance like ball lightning.

Then, skulking at the feet of the giants, is a portrait of the vampires – the Nosferatus.

As if responding to her piqued interest in that specific image, the letters and images absorb back into the book. The pages go blank, turn again, and then new veins bleed fresh upon the page.

Great winged humanoids with glittering scales, feathered crowns and enormous wings materialize in a wide field of stars. A spiral like swirling clouds forms in the center of the sky. Below, a human figure rises up from the dirt, my book in his hand. More words in cuneiform appear, but she can not read any of them. Queer sigils of flat, straight lines that look like faces with antennae connect the stars to form constellations – constellations of a night sky that does not belong to the Earth. From the soil bursts forth a sea of the dead, twist and mutated in the Nosferatus, two, then four, then four hundred–

Penelope slams the book shut.

“How did you do that?” Dorian asks.

“I didn’t,” Penelope says. A curious yet maddening thought dawns upon her. Could it be that this book can read her thoughts? How did it know what her question was?

What she hears next is the sharp, short click of a firing pin drawn back. “Impressive,” Aleister Crowley says. “You truly are the Star Queen’s sister.”

“Mr. Crowley,” Dorian says. “Why do you have that gun?”

Penelope holds onto the grimoire with one hand and reaches for her revolver with the other. Her heart sinks to her ankles when she finds it missing, taking her breathe with it. She realizes, all to late, that her gun is still in her overalls, left by her in haste.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Aleister Crowley says. “I can read your mind as easily as your aura. ‘How did he steal my gun? Did he simply pick it up when I had misplaced it? Or was he capable of drawing forth my weapon from the astral realm using naught but his own magickal will?!’”

“I’m thinking that you took it out of my dirty clothes. Which means you only two bullets left,” Penelope says, with a sly grin. “Unless you can conjure bullets too.”

“You don’t believe me?” he asks, amused.

“I believe you’re reading my expression, not my aura.”

“Believe whatever you wish to believe,” Aleister Crowley says. He motions at them with her gun. “All that matters is you give me the book.”

“No,” Penelope says. “We need to use it.”

“Use it?” Aleister Crowley laughs. “Use it? Do you children have any idea what power you hold in your hands, the unfathomable secrets and untold horrors await the bearer of such antediluvian evil. How could you?! After unlocking its binds the two of you found nothing more than blank pages.”

“Why would we only see blank pages?” Dorian asks.

“It can only be read by the worthy,” Aleister Crowley says. “By those who possess the faithful eyes to see and the strength of soul to stand against the cleaving throws of oblivion!”

“We saw what was written in the book,” Penelope says. “We can translate the words later.”

“If we don’t use it, Doctor Arthwitte will stay turned into a Nosferatu,” Dorian says. “We might turn into them too.”

“Preposterous,” Aleister Crowley says. “The fool Arthwitte is lost to the curse and neither of you have been bitten by the… Nosferatus – my word, do you children have no vocabulary beyond insipid second-rate cinema?”

“We were bitten by the psychic vampires,” Dorian says. “Marcel left a little hole like a bug bite on my chest and Penelope was attacked in her dreams.”

“Is this true?” Aleister Crowley asks, astonished.

Penelope nods.

“Then it is a testament to Olivia’s protective magicks,” Aleister Crowley says. “There is no way an untrained neophyte could survive an assault by an Astral Being.”

“Well, I did,” Penelope says, matter-of-factly. “And I’ll find a way to read this book too.”

“It’s the only way to cure us,” Dorian yelps.

Aleister Crowley scoffs. “Naive children, you do not become a psychic vampire by being drained by one. They are astral beings who wear the bodies of humans the way humans wear clothing. There is no conceivable method by which a human could become one of them, or the other to become a true human.”

“We… we what?” Dorian asks.

“Of… of course we know that,” Penelope says. “This book belonged to our sister, the psychic vampires stole it from her, therefore it belongs to us.”

“That’s where you are wrong,” Aleister Crowley says. “There are dark forces set in motion now, here in Rukriz and across the entire world. Plots and schemes that span millennia. You are meddling beyond your pale, young Penelope.”

“I meddle where I please.”

“Very well.” Aleister Crowley pulls the trigger with the barrel aimed directly at my sister. She shrieks and holds the book up to protect herself. Dorian tackles her to the ground as the bullet meets the leather cover. Thick red blood spills out from under her chest and begins to cover the floor.

“Penelope?” Dorian asks. “Penelope!”

Aleister Crowley stands over them, wide-eyed horror written all over his face. She gasps for air, the wind knocked out of her, and then the stream of blood pouring from the book slows to a trickle. The bindings and pages, flesh and metal and brass linked hair all, writhe and twist as if palpating until the bullet pops out like a seed spit from a mouth. The hole in the book heals itself, the pages and cover regrowing like the flesh it resembles.

“I’ll have that book if I have to bind the both of you here and now,” Aleister Crowley shouts, but before he can fire another shot, Dorian lands a solid right hook to his jowls and knocks Crowley’s one-eyed pyramid hat across the room. The old wizard drops the gun and Dorian sends it sliding across the cabin floor with a swipe of his foot.

“Are you okay?” Dorian asks.

Crowley spots his opening and socks him in the jaw. “Impudent brats!”

Penelope cries out but stops short at the sound of tinkling glass chimes. An iridescent ball of light soars in through the hole in the window, swoops over my sister’s head, then orbits about the book in her hands.

Aleister Crowley makes a grab for the gun but Dorian is right behind him. Just as the old wizard has his hand on the grip, Dorian has his over Crowley’s and the two begin a tug-of-war. Penelope dodges the barrel as the last round volleys out, ricochets off the corner of the bed, and then flies out the window.

The pages in my grimoire cease turning. Blood pumps forth and fills the open sheets. Penelope says, “Dorian, be CAREFUL,” and her last word erupts as a sonic blast. Booming thunder forces Aleister Crowley and Dorian to cover their ears as they leap aside, narrowly avoiding the concussive wave that fires from of her mouth.

My sister’s voice rips a hole through the wall and the ceiling sags under its own weight. She coughs and waves one hand to clear the air. The other she uses to keep the book close to her chest. Once she can open her eyes, she sees a portrait of a human shouting a harmonic blast so powerful that it tears down a tree. Then, in a blink, the blooded ink disappears.

Aleister Crowley hoists a great piece of the fallen wall off of himself, kicking up splintered logs and chipped bark everywhere. “Give me that book, you impudent brat!” He lunges for her with both of his hands out.

As if rallying a defensive fanfare of ethereal trumpets, the ball of light arcs across the room at Aleister Crowley and darts back and forth in front of him. He scrunches up his face in a scowl and swats at it as the glistening orb dips and bobs away from his strikes.

“Begone, accursed gadfly,” he barks, spinning in place.

Penelope tries to tip toe past while hugging the book close. As she crosses him, Crowley spins on his heel and plants both of his hands on my grimoire. Penelope’s body jerks like a rag doll at first, but then she plants her heels down and counters.

The ball of light screeches like nails scraping against a chalkboard inside the piston chamber of an engine. It shoots towards them and spins about the book again, purring as it flies away. Crowley loses his grip when my grimoire opens and stumbles back, barely evading a conical vortex of fire that spews forth from the binding.

“Enough,” Aleister Crowley rasps out in an unearthly bellow. “You pestiferous imps have vexed my patience long enough! If you insist upon forcing my hand then I’ve no option but to evoke the infernal elements.” He throws his cape over his shoulders then rolls his wrists as if rubbing an invisible orb between his palms.

“I do invoke and conjure thee, oh Marchosias,” Crowley murmurs. “By the power of Supreme Majesty.” His eyes begin to spark with a glowing aura, but not the iridescent lights Penelope remembers. This is a glowing fire of cyan and orange that surges arcs of black lightning in its corona. It is the radiance of the infernal, the aura of inversion. “And by this ineffable name, I command thee: JEHOVAH TETRAGRAMMATON!”

Fissures of glowing cyan-orange fire split through the cabin floor. The planks shift underfoot as the ground shakes, shafts of negative light spring up from the fiery gaps in the earth, and unearthly writing appears beneath them. The demon’s name forms a ring around the room as the unholy light draws out the marquis’ sigil.