Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

He stared into space and thought for a moment, recalling the words of the tall bassist. “He was reading Aleister Crowley, especially.”

Garrett turned back to the box and lifted out the books, separating out the volumes written by Aleister Crowley. He sat with them and turned to the index of the first, Confessions, looking in the C’s for Choronzon and Current 333, and flipped to an inner page to read:

The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon… The Abyss is empty of being; it is filled with all possible forms, each equally inane, each therefore evil in the only true sense of the word—that is, meaningless but malignant, in so far as it craves to become real. These forms swirl senselessly into haphazard heaps like dust devils, and each such chance aggregation asserts itself to be an individual and shrieks, “I am I!”

Garrett shook his head. Disturbing… but incoherent. He took another book from the pile, The Vision and the Voice, used the index again, to find:

And whoso passeth into the outermost Abyss—except he be of them that understand—holdeth out his hands, and boweth his neck, unto the chains of Choronzon. And as a devil he walketh about the earth, immortal, and he blasteth the flowers of the earth, and he corrupteth the fresh air, and he maketh poisonous the water; and the fire that is the friend of man, and the pledge of his aspiration, seeing that it mounteth ever upward as a Pyramid, and seeing that man stole it in a hollow tube from Heaven—even that fire he turneth into ruin, and madness, and fever, and destruction.

Garrett pushed the book away from him, feeling a churning in his gut. That sentence: “He blasteth the flowers of the earth.”

The burned footprints and scorched flowers.

“And as a devil he walketh about the earth, immortal…”

Garrett immediately stood to shake off the thought, and walked the floor of the room. We don’t need to get caught up in any of this demon stuff.

“Sacrifice to thy will…”

He turned and looked back toward the pile of books on the table. But what if it goes to motive? Did Jason kill Erin as a sacrifice to this “demon,” Choronzon? Just as the three boys in Frazer’s psychological profile who killed their classmate as a sacrifice to Satan?

Garrett circled the table, tensely. He was no closer to understanding what Choronzon was; if anything he was more confused.

And it seemed to him that there was more than a little mental illness going on with this Crowley.

I need an interpreter, he thought, and immediately Tanith Cabarrus was in his mind.

He leaned across the table to pick up the last Crowley book again… then he froze, looking down.

There was a silver bookstore label on the back of the book, with an address:

Book of Shadows

411 Essex St., West

Salem, MA

978-555-0728

Book of Shadows. Garrett heard a feminine voice saying it. He turned to the table and grabbed the murder book on Erin Carmody. He turned to the police reports section and looked down at the page for his initial interview with Tanith Cabarrus. The address and phone number were the same as on the label.

Jason had gotten those books at Tanith’s shop.

She knew him.

The wind was high that evening, frantic and gusting, and the moon fat and nearly full over the waving branches and rustling leaves, as Garrett drove into Salem Town.

Landauer had not picked up when Garrett called him, and Garrett had debated with himself less than ten minutes before he headed up to Salem on his own. For the first half of the drive he had wrestled with half a dozen ways to justify himself: it was their night off; Landauer had made it cheerfully clear that if Garrett called him for any reason whatsoever he was a dead man; Malloy would never approve of consulting with a professed witch so Garrett was forced to hide his activity; he didn’t want to rope Landauer into a wild goose chase, he didn’t want Land to catch shit from Malloy if he found out they were considering information given to them by a witch…

Then he gave up and admitted to himself that every one of his excuses was bullshit. He simply wanted to see the witch alone.

Miraculously he found a parking spot on Essex, and started off through the rippling wind, trees and bushes stirred into green frenzies around him, and onto the cobbled street of the pedestrian mall, the center of town. Entering the warren of narrow streets was like stepping back through time; the tight rows of colonial buildings were carefully preserved, with wrought-iron lampposts lining the walkways and antique signage hanging from hooks and chains above the shops. The town’s theme was inescapable: Essex Street and the town square were crowded with witch supply shops, psychics and tarot readers, and witch history museums, complete with soundtracks of howling winds and creaking doors piped out onto the sidewalks, enhancing the naturally atmospheric colonial storefronts and autumn wind rustling through the trees.

Garrett had learned the story in sixth grade, and it all was coming back to him now: the witch trials of 1692 that started with the “possession” and accusations of a handful of supposedly bewitched teenage and preteen girls and ended in the execution of twenty accused witches, and the imprisonment of 150 accused, five more of whom died in Salem Town’s wretched jail. It was a chapter in American history that had left a lasting impression on him, laced as it was with repressed sexuality, voodoo, magic, torture, execution, and the strong possibility of hallucinogens: Garrett remembered one theory that the witch hysteria was the result of the whole town being high on ergot, a psychedelic mold that grows on rye. And then with a ripple of unease he recalled that lurking in the shadows of the tale, documented in the court transcriptions, was the devil himself, to whom the accused witches had supposedly promised their souls.

The story hit every hippie, punk, Goth, Dionysian, counterculture pleasure center that humans possessed, and modern Salem’s tourist board took advantage of every creepy, erotic, haunting, bloody detail of it.

Already Halloween decorations were everywhere. Women in black clothing walked the streets around Garrett; he even passed some people in full costumes: zombies, pirates, and the ever-present vampires. The whole place had always given him an unsettled feeling. Tonight it didn’t help that he had the dissonant sounds of the Current 333 CD and the strange descriptions of Choronzon working on his ganglia. And even as he thought it, his heart gave a sick lurch… as he spotted a statue of a decapitated man holding his own bloody head in front of the Salem Wax Museum. Garrett walked quickly by, turning his face from the sight; it was too grim a reminder of Erin’s real-life fate. And he felt a flash of anger as well. He himself had fallen away from Catholicism long ago, but this deliberate courting of the dark side still felt to him dangerous and wrong. He was far out of his comfort level in every way. Going to see a witch about a satanic killing.

He had reached the 400 block of Essex, the heart of downtown: rows of walk-in shops with the worst of touristy excess. He began checking the addresses for 411. He had not called ahead, so that he could see Cabarrus in her element but without any warning.

Now he realized even though he’d been watching the numbers above the shops, he must have missed it; he was already at 413 Essex. He walked back to the last shop he’d passed, and found himself staring up at the number 409.

There was no 411 Essex.

Garrett turned in the street, frowning, as he tried to push down an uneasy feeling. Across the street two women… witches … in capes and long black skirts turned to look at him as they passed, and Garrett had a sudden sense of reality wobbling. Get a grip, he told himself.