Book of Shadows

Chapter Fifteen

For the third time in twenty-four hours Garrett found himself driving out of town on a dark and largely deserted highway, through eerily drifting fog. The book was on the backseat, in a briefcase, wrapped in plastic. Above the trees the moon was high and bright, with Venus glimmering beside it, and Garrett felt wide awake, impatient, and adrenalized. An old rhyme ran through his head that he hadn’t even remembered knowing:

To silence the taunting rhyme he reached for the stereo dial and flipped around to talk radio, trying to catch up on how the case was being played in the media. He hit a weird kind of jackpot with a call-in talk show about youth and satanism. There were the requisite holy rollers and career Catholics claiming the devil’s work and the corruption of the younger generation. One nut job was really starting to foam at the mouth, quoting in an increasingly psychotic whine: “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God, and this is that spirit of Antichrist, and even now already it is in the world—”

Garrett had had enough of the Bible in his youth to last a lifetime. He was reaching to switch stations when a new caller came on and a familiar word caught his attention. “Do you know what Halloween really is? All Hallows Eve, All Souls Day? It’s a Sabbat, a pagan festival. It was held to honor the Samhain, the “Lord of Death.”

Garrett leaned forward and turned up the volume. “Samhain is the day when Satan himself comes to fellowship with his followers.”

Despite himself, Garrett felt a chill. Thirty-six days to go… a voice whispered in his head.

On the radio, the caller had worked himself into a high dudgeon. “And this is what we’re helping our children celebrate. Oh, we do it in the name of fun, but what is the real meaning? Is it still the same as in the old days? I say the answer is YES—”

The talk-show host had had enough and abruptly moved on to the next caller, who was irate. “You people don’t even know the difference between Wicca and satanism. It’s ignorance like yours that led to real witch hunts. Witches don’t even believe in the devil. That’s a Christian superstition. That one’s all yours…”

The devil, Garrett thought. Jesus Christ. The whole world’s gone batshit.

He punched off the radio and made the turn off the highway into Lynn.

The Lamplighter was exactly as Cabarrus had said, right off 1A, in the warren of streets that was downtown Lynn: an old-fashioned inn in the style of a hunting lodge, with beams and stonework and wide windows and a broad porch. The moon was high and silvery white above. Garrett got out of his Explorer and looked around at the half-full lot. He had no idea what kind of car she would have driven, and thought briefly of Landauer’s broomstick joke.

He walked up the steps and pushed through the doors.

Beyond a lobby with gleaming oak floors, a few stairs led down into a spacious lounge, with low tables around a towering river-rock hearth with a crackling fire.

He saw her instantly; she sat alone at a table near the fire, the flames flushing her face. She wore a silver blouse and black skirt, and her dark riot of hair was for the moment pulled severely back. His memory had not exaggerated—she was heart-stoppingly beautiful.

He was unable to do more than register a too-brief glance; she looked up almost immediately, directly at him. He moved down the stairs to cross to her table. Strangely, though half a dozen businessmen were scattered at the tables and at the bar, no one else in the room seemed to be looking at her. Garrett would have thought that no one would be able to look at anything else.

He took the chair across from her, though he disliked having his back to the door, and edged a little sideways to give himself more of a vantage of the rest of the room. “I appreciate your meeting me. I’m sorry to disturb you so late.”

“It’s not so late,” she said, without smiling.

A waitress appeared by Garrett’s side with a coffeepot and he nodded for her to fill his cup. “Have you eaten?” he asked Cabarrus.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Another tonic,” she told the waitress.

So no drinking, he thought, and felt an unprofessional stab of disappointment.

Tanith looked at him, narrowing her eyes, and he had a sudden sense she had read his thought. He cleared his throat and reached down to remove the original bloodred leather book from the briefcase, carefully unwrapped the plastic. “I can’t give this to you—I brought it so you could look at it.”

She was staring across the table with a completely unreadable expression. He opened the book, using the plastic wrapping as a glove, so she could see the odd writing. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

She focused down on the writing for a moment, then glanced up at him as if suddenly realizing he was there, and frowned. “Of course. It’s a grimoire. A spell book. Of ritual magic. Where did you get it?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

She looked at him knowingly, and he had to shift his gaze. “The point is, it’s in some kind of code, and I—we need to break it, as soon as possible.” He put the book back in the plastic and handed over a few photocopied pages he’d selected before he left home. None of them had the number 333, the three triangles, or the sketch of the severed hand. He only hoped there was nothing sensitive in what he was giving her that could compromise the case.

She glanced down at the pages, and an amused look flickered over her face. He sat forward. “What? Do you know what it is?”

“The root of all evil.” He tensed, and she shook her head. “It’s a money spell. Get rich quick.” She held the pages between her fingers dismissively. “This really is amateur hour.”

“But you can break the code?”

She shrugged. “There’s nothing to break. It’s a straight-ahead substitution.”

“What alphabet is it?”

“They’re runes,” she answered.

Runes. The name, as the letters, was vaguely, maddeningly familiar. “Isn’t that—some kind of a game?”

“It’s a Viking alphabet. Rune stones are thrown for divination—to tell fortunes.”

“Can you give me an index?”

She turned over a photocopied page and took a silver pen from her bag, then swiftly wrote the alphabet from A to Z in a column on the left side of the page.

Then she started again from the top and began to fill in the corresponding letters in the twiglike alphabet, which was obviously something she knew well, because she did it unhesitatingly, without having to stop and think. He watched her as she wrote it out. The silver chain glimmered in the V of her neckline and he thought of the dagger between her breasts…

He pulled his eyes away, cleared his throat. “So you see this kind of book a lot?”

She continued writing without looking up. “Any practicing magician keeps a grimoire.”

“In code?”

“It’s always preferable. The more effort you put into a spell, the more effective it will be. The extra concentration and work of writing in code focuses intent, and makes manifestation more likely.”

At the bottom of the page she added six double letters: NG, GH, EA, AE, OE, TH—and wrote the corresponding symbols beside them, then handed the sheet across the table.

“That’s it?” he said, staring down at the simple index with a sense of unreality.

“That’s it. Oh, and most of these letters can be reversed, so anytime you see a mirror image of one of these symbols, it’s really just the same letter.”

He looked up from the page, across the table at her. “Thank you. I—this is incredibly helpful.”

She looked down at the remaining pages in front of her. “I have to say, all of this is strictly Ritual Magick 101. That’s not the book of an accomplished magician; it clearly belongs to an acolyte. A dabbler. Anyone can get this stuff off the Internet.” She looked up at him. “It’s his book, isn’t it? Jason Moncrief.”

“I’m sorry, that’s confidential.”

She looked at him, then suddenly leaned across the table and slid her hand into the plastic sheathing the grimoire so that her palm lay flat on the leather cover. Garrett was so startled he didn’t have time to react. Her eyes were black and unfocused. Then her face cleared and she sat back, withdrawing her hand, before he could do or say anything.

She pushed back her chair and stood, pointing down at the book with one finger. “This one has killed no one. Others have died. More will die. And you have the wrong man. And you know it.”

She turned without another word, and walked across the gleaming wood floor, up the stairs, and out.