XIV. Seals and Beasts of the Astral Realm

What is not said has a profundity all its own. There is a gravity to the unseen, a weight to the unheard. Though neither Penelope nor Dorian can see the beast, they feel it leering over them, they watch the remaining walls of the cabin quiver with a queer vapor as its wings twitch. The deep, sonorous pounding of its breath fills their ears. Amid the panting, my sister hears the distinct sound of droplets pattering on wood.

The drooling maw before them may be invisible, yet it stains the floor all the same.

“Ah, so you can sense it,” Aleister Crowley boasts, eyes widened by a manic fervor. “The overwhelming majestic presence.” He waves a hand before them, “I can read the fear on you – but there is no need, for he is safely bound by my conjuring circle. Simply hand over the book and I will banish–”

The hissing, coiled air behind him ripples as it lashes at Crowley, sending him careening onto the bed and against the wall. The demon lets out a great and bellowing roar, stomping its paws and gnashing its teeth. More deep slashes materialize in the floorboards, sliced where the hue of a breeze swipes. Perhaps an illusion, or perhaps an invisible giant of ancient and tremendous might ensnared within the confines of a steadily weakening barrier.

“Uh, Penelope,” Dorian says, “we should get out of here.”

“Right behind you.” She backs towards the door slowly. “No sudden movements.” My sister clutches the Book of Splendor close to her chest, but even with my gifts there is little chance she could wield it effectively.

Fortunate for her, Crowley’s words will be his undoing – for he forgot an important clause in his binding compact, and in those words left unspoken my light may find purchase. Brass chimes herald a luminescent orb as it swings in from an opening in the ruined wall. It darts about the demon and the proud marquis of Hell cowers. The undulating cloud of heat cringes and sways, striking at the cabin interior and leaving more inexplicable damage in its wake. The armoire topples over and spills out onto the floor before exploding under the force of a mighty paw that is only felt.

Penelope gasps and our brother pulls her back. They make for the door when my light zooms over to her ankles, zips up around her and, at the ascent of its orbit, dives to spin before my book. The tome jerks Penelope forward and opens despite her struggling to contain it. Pages turn, blood red ink flows, and as my light swoops away the infernal sigil on the floor changes. Snarling, fetid roars shake the room as pain shaped knives swipe at my decoy.

“What is that?” Dorian gasps. “That light!”

“You can see it now?” Penelope asks, awestruck. “I… I think it’s Olivia.”

I was too young to join the Order. When I first began to question the world of my birth – the world of history, myths, philosophy, their ways seemed fascinating and inspiring. A fallen order carrying secrets of an ancient wisdom lost to history. It was only later, after I had documented the culture and text of these alien people, that I realized their flaw.

They were incomplete. Their books, their wisdom was no different than shattered urns in an abobe city. Mere pieces of a greater, universal Truth that lay hidden beneath humanity’s sordid chain of wars, decadence, and decay. Crowley may have learned how to open a door, but he never learned how to close it – and a half Power is no power at all. Though I am too weakened in this state to banish a Marquis of Hell, I can call forth my own army before closing it.

Glistening oil slick tendrils of teal, magenta, and marigold slither up from Crowley’s magical circle to ensnare the howling beast. Now its shape is made clear, the forearms and hind legs wrapped up in the colors of madness: thick and muscular, with paradoxical gleaming scales of green and yellow with patchwork tangles of fur. The demon’s hind legs end in hooves yet the forearms bear claws like massive daggers of obsidian. Its red eyes glower like the vampiric abomination Penelope fought in her dream, smoldering under thick brows where ram’s horns curl out.

Aleister Crowley struggles to get up and becomes tangled in the old sheets on the bed. On his knees and swaddled in ratty linens, he bellows, “I command thee Marchosias, in the name of the ancient and immortal, by the pentacle of Solomon through which I have conjured thee, and by the known powers of–”

The marquis’ disembodied claw, talons half materialized in the wake of my onslaught, comes down upon the bed. Crowley rolls off away in a tumble as the frame cracks in half and the mattress bursts open. His linen prison slashed and soaked in blood, he removes the cloth shackles and stands before his unfaithful servant. With as much confidence as he can muster clutching his limp arm with the opposite hand, he shouts, “I have conjured thee, and by the known powers of Tetragrammeton Elohim and those who wield it, I command thee–”

Fire erupts from the cavernous maw that silhouettes the air, engulfling Crowley’s cape. Stumbling back, he unfastens and drops his cloak then barrels out the open door, patting his burnt arm with his good hand. Dorian takes our sister by the arm and leads her to the door, “I hate to say it but let’s follow Crowley!”

“Right behind you,” she begins, but then something in the circle catches her eyes and she pauses. First a wink of color, then several more as little, three toed feet poke out from my light. At one moment orange mottled with flakes of red, the next red dappled by specks of orange, my conjured army of spirits comes forth. Their skin flows like liquid over lithe tubular bodies and wriggling tails; newts the size of rats but born of an electric fire.

Then my sister notices the torn cloak Crowley left behind, smoking but no longer aflame next to the old bookshelf, now toppled on the floor with books scattered about. She shoves my grimoire into her overalls then retrieves another from the pile, wrapping it in the burnt cape and hugging it to her chest.

“I’m not saying it again,” Dorian says, taking our sister by the arm and leading her, stumbling over broken planks, out the door. Urged onwards by the demon’s mounting fury, they trample out into the little meadow. Dorian scans the area in search of Crowley, but the old wizard seems to have absconded into the wilderness. “Do you remember the way back?”

“That way,” she says, pointing. They make for the clearing, but as they cross into the wilderness Aleister Crowley pounces from the brush and latches both of his hands onto the book. Penelope yells and kicks at him but decides to relinquish her cloaked decoy.

“Give that back,” Dorian shouts.

Aleister Crowley cackles, backing away towards the cabin. He reaches into his pocket. “At long last, the Book of Splendor.” He pulls out a fat, black bulb of bone carved into the shape of a skull: the Aztec Death Whistle.

The cabin explodes in a rain of fiery Salamanders as Marchosias’ horned head tosses the collapsed-in roof aside. All about the demon my electric newts crawl, illuminating his form and rendering his monstrosity perfectly visible. Horns of a ram, head of a great hound, the body of a lion with bat wings that span twenty feet. His cloven, reptilian hindquarters pound the earth and his snake tail hisses from the head at its tip.

Before pressing the whistle to his lips, Crowley smirks and gives my siblings a little bow. “Farewell, young Penelope – and may your roads always lead you to eccentricity.”

#

Shrieking, piercing screams reverberate around them. Dorian steps towards Penelope as the billowing, egg soup smoke exudes from the skull’s mouth and eye holes, enshrouding Crowley first, then the demon as it leaps towards them, and finally my sister and brother, until all is awash in the melancholic opalescence. Thick, grey-green strands of yolky miasma swirl about them in all directions, overtaking all sense of direction and time.

“He has the book,” Dorian says. “Does that mean he–”

Penelope reaches into her overalls and retrieves my book, the brass and hair faintly shining even here, in this absurd space. “He got a compendium of old almanacs.”

“Pretty sneaky,” he grins. “Hey… Penelope?”

“Yeah?”

“Was that a demon? A real demon?”

“I don’t know.”

“Those other things, they looked like Salamanders. At least, how Doctor Arthwitte’s described them. And Crowley’s the one who summoned the fog? Was it him the whole time? What’s he so interested in that book for?!”

“I don’t know!” Penelope stomps her foot. “Since when is magic real? Since when are demons real?! Since when are vampires real!” My sister realizes that she is screaming and lowers her voice. “I keep hoping that all of this is some stupid dream brought on by fumes from Doctor Arthwitte’s experiment. That I’ll wake up and we’ll still be back in the manor in our beds or... I don’t know, strapped to some weird mind control machine.”

Dorian shivers. “Getting trapped in Edison’s secret laboratory once was bad enough.”

“Maybe you were right,” Penelope looks down at my book, a living thing of blood and flesh and brass. “How could Olivia create something like this?”

“Well, she was scary,” Dorian says. “I don’t understand why either. One minute, Doctor Arthwitte is right and everything is about spirits, then when I start to believe him, it turns out that you’re right and all of this boils down to science. How can both be true at the same time?”

“Wave-particle duality,” Penelope whispers, staring straight ahead as the realization dawns upon her. “Remember, the last time we were lost in the fog, what I was saying about light?”

An erratic melody of glass and static arrives with my iridescent ball of light. It gently wafts among the gnarled tree limbs then hovers, lilting up and down in a circle over their heads. Like a soup spoon stirring eggs, the mass of suspended liquid smoke disperses in its presence. The forest floor underfoot appears when the fog drifts away.

“You can see it too?” Dorian asks.

“A free-floating, free-willed form of electromagnetic radiation? If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have told you that you were a fool to even think it possible.”

“Why?” Dorian asks back, his face glowing in the gentle glimmer of the orb. “Aren’t you the one who says people don’t listen to facts? Always complaining how people won’t accept when they’re proven wrong. That people believe whatever they want to.” He reaches up to touch the little orb but flinches back when his finger connects. “Ow,” he says. “It’s like sticking your finger in an electric socket full of sandpaper.”

“Really?” Penelope asks. She touches it too and recoils with a squeak. “She must have found out some secret that the psychic vampires didn’t want her to know.”

The ball of light shivers then darts back and forth erratically, as if searching the forest surrounding them for an unseen predator. Cautiously, it lilts back overhead then floats onwards, parting the mist where it flies and clearing a path for them.

“Let’s follow it,” Penelope says. Dorian nods and they wearily march behind my light. There and elsewhere it drifts, occasionally floating to one side or the other, bobbing about as if peering through the mist for ambush. Yet for all its caution, an eerie silence lingers all around them.

“How long have we been walking?” Dorian asks.

“Who knows,” Penelope sighs, recalling Doctor Arthwitte’s pocket watch. “It feels like hours.”

Time takes on a queer, abhorrent quality in the blume. Days or even weeks could pass in an instant, or a handful of minutes could drag on for hours. and the denatured time in this realm is nothing compared to the distortion of space. Perhaps they are wandering through the forest, lost and alone, perhaps they have found their way back to Rukriz. When my light passes between the metal bars of the cemetery gate, illuminating just enough of the area to reveal the open lock to my sister, she knows where they are.

"We're back at the graveyard." Dorian wedges himself through the gate while my phosphorent bulb hovers in the air. A technicolor borealis wavers in the mist as it dances about. Penelope attempts to squeeze through next, but it is a considerably more difficult feat with my book in her overalls. Her button snags on a chainlink and she jerks forward - immobilized in the wrought iron jaws of the cemetery entrance.

"Hold on." She struggles in vain to free herself. "I can't fit through." A thunderous roar echoes through the fog. My orb twinkles with fear, zipping over to my sister and weaving through the bars of the fence. The air quakes with the looming horror of a bestial light that steadily grows behind her.

Somewhere, out in the immeasurable distance, comes a medley of snarls and hisses. The hoary shadows part between my light and the menacing aurora. An undulating wave of prismatic orange and reds, the little plopping of hundreds of little toes scuttling on the moist soil, and a wave of Salamanders barrels into the graveyard, passing between the bars and flowing ahead into the smoky distance.

Next comes Marchosias, horn smoldering with more Salamanders in tow. They wriggle over him, struggle to restrain him, and he casts them out into the fog by whipping his head about. Eyes burning with hatred, he charges for my sister.

"Give me your hand," Dorian shouts. Penelope digs in her overalls for my book and thrusts it at him. He takes it and helps her through the gate as my ball of light flies behind her, generating a shrill chorus of cracking glass in defiance of the beast.

They stumble into the foggy cemetery and narrowly stop before falling into an open grave. My opalescent pearl zips past them, bobs up and down in front of their noses, then continues on. Marchosias rams through the wrought iron gate as it explodes open, spraying chain link shrapnel in all directions. The little newts shake loose from his shoulders, splashing upon the ground and leaving a glint of amphibious gel behind.

Marchosia bellows and lunges for them. Dorian takes her by the arm and they dodge just as the demon lands upon the gravesite. The demon's leg becomes trapped in the desecrated hole and it jerks erratically in confusion to escape. My light spins back to them and chirps, mere inches from their noses. It soars ahead and my siblings give chase, and between their legs dart the little Salamanders, driving the fog out further. Dipping left and darting right, my orb guides them around the open graves that appear before them as the light of the Salamanders drives the milky fog back. Leaping over strewn bones and lopsided tomb markers, Penelope spies the open hatch to Mathers’ secret library.

That’s when she remembers his old generator, quietly rusting beneath the soil in his private workshop. Why the General would have such an enormous contraption in his underground lair of crystals, books, candles, and mirrors, she can not say. Perhaps it was the purpose of his ban on electricity, that it was a safeguard to banish spirits too powerful to dismiss with words. Even still, how could she activate such a delapidated and thoroughly broken machine?

In a flourish of prismatic orange and red, one of the little newts crawls upon her shoulder, looks her dead in the eyes and darts its tongue out. When it leaps to her feet and runs ahead, stopping momentarily to look back, waiting for her to follow, she knows that this is not the time for rational thought. She has trusted us so far, she may as well now.

My sister calls out to Dorian, “It’s in the library. We need to turn on the generator!”

“How?” Dorian asks, trailing behind. “We don’t have any gasoline to–”

A stray lump of rock jutting from the dirt catches my brother’s boot and he falls forward, landing face first. My book slips from his hands into the nearby grave, half burying itself into the earth. Penelope does not hear him call out, she keeps running, single-mindledy focused on the approaching cellar door. The demon’s snarls grow louder and louder. The ground shakes under the weight of its intangible cloven hooves, its wispy claws slicing the fog as it bounds towards her.

Penelope hurriedly descends the stairs, her frantic gasps for air echoing through the dimly lit hall. The Salamanders beckon her further in and she obeys, stopping at the main room with the old generator resting idle in the back. She slides over the dusty old table and lands butt first on the dirt. Looking up, the orange glow of the Salamander who led her here emanates from the lever. The little newt tilts its head to the side, black eyes reflecting its tongue flapping in and out.

Marchosias roars behind her and the stairs explode in quadrupedal hoof and paw prints, snapping under his unseen weight. The umbral hue of the Salamanders reflects off the marquis, project his apparitional form as he leaps over the table and swipes at the air. Penelope ducks low, narrowly missing the razor-sharp air. When a clump of her hair falls to the ground beside her, she knows that she avoided certain deat, decapitated by a ferocious nothing from nowhere.

Salamanders leap from the ceiling and walls upon the demon, some exploding in ephemeral clouds of stardust that send it lurching from side to side in agony. Yowling and rending the air with itself, Marchosias unleashes a plume of cyan fire that engulfs the creatures. Some rattle and pop from the intensity of the heat, while other still furiously cling to his side.

Penelope hears a faint chattering. Rising to her feet, she sees the little newt perched atop the lever. Slithering around and down the pole until it lands upon the handle, it scuttles to a little cap on the end of the dashboard. Sitting like an obedient dog, it points with one hand.

There is a fluidity to power – that which is strength from viewed from one angle of the world is a weakness coming from another. Lost and adrift within the Astral Sea, a champion swimmer or veteran frogman would drown, floundering helpless in an ocean of air. While the spirits boast tremendous strength and physics defying will from their respective angles, in ours they are as helpless as glass dolls; a shadow in the corner of the eye, a cold breeze from the unknown, an erratic thump in the night.

Though the marching leviathan of industry has driven the spirits away from our angle, sealed them behind the fleeting whims of our conscious, the Salamanders were born of inspiration and ambition. Perhaps it was due to the ingenuity of humanity which these spirits embodied. Perhaps that tenacity gave way to an ingenuity of their own and, with a little spark in the dark, new power came into the fold.

Penelope deftly unscrews the cap and the faintest whiff of gasoline tickles her nose. With a click and a chirp, the Salamander dives into the open screw top, its radiance dimming within the bowels of the great machine. With a clattering jerk the pistons scream against their casing, grinding in their bone-dry chambers. The demon recoils and lets out a scream of agony, casting the electric newts onto the floor.

The loosed Salamanders weave and slither towards the generator, leaping one after another into the open fuel chamber. With each additional spirit the machine screams louder, the pistons burning hot inside its motor. More of them dive into the piston chambers and the metallic yowls become a booming putter as the light bulbs bolted into the support framework of the cavern light up.

Illuminated by the incandescent light, Marchosias, the Great Marquis over thirty legions of Hell, manifests in his physical form. His ram horns scrape against the ceiling as he reals back, lion’s maw open to let loose his flaming breath but – with an involuntary jerk of the head – his fireball explodes in his mouth, setting his innards aflame.

The tips of his bestial talons burst open and curl inwards like peeling bananas. What spills out of him is a foamy, viscous, black ichor that stinks of acid and formaldehyde, falling to the dirt in hissing clumps. Cyan rings like fire burning a sheet of paper dissolve the scales of his cloven hindquarters. There, in the space where his flesh once was, are a sea of faceless voices shouting, “I am! I am! I am!” The snake at the end of his tail spits venom, erratically pumping bile as it whips around then dives into his flaming mouth, pulling himself in deeper and deeper, until the dissolving apparition vanishes within itself.

The room shifts from mind splintering shrieks and abominable screams to nothing more than the brash puttering of the old generator and the incandescent hum of electric light. It’s as though neither the great demon nor the Salamanders were ever there. The fog recedes and retreats down the hall up up the ruined stairs, revealing that Marchosia’s damage to the secret lair still remains. Perhaps electricity in some way or another dispels the presences of the spirits – but their effects still linger.

Then she remembers our brother. “Dorian,” she shouts. Running down the hall she calls out again but no reply comes. Up above her, through the open cellar door, she sees the brilliant night sky twinkling with a milky brilliance. Though they left that old cabin in the middle of the day, it would appear that more time has passed than she had anticipated. There’s a full moon tonight, reflecting enough light to make the graveyard visible – but what she sees beyond is otherworldly horror.

Circling about them, extending what appears to be fifty feet in each direction, the fog spins and howls like she’s within the eye of a hurricane. Feral snarls jolt her head down to the ground, where the Nosferatu – some still wearing tattered remains of their human vestments, others fully nude, their gaunt frames and sallow ribcages protruding. Their heads low, bodies knelt as if in supplication, yet their claws twitch with hunger, their bellies rumble from sanguine lust, and their teeth chatter between grasps as if restraining their predatorial urge.

There, standing between two open graves, is Dorian, perfectly straight, eyes wide and forward. Penelope approaches him, eyeing the bowed blood suckers with suspicion. “Dorian,” she says with a sigh of relief. “You’re okay. The generator must be controlling them. We need to get out of here, that old motor could blow any minute and they’ll get up–”