Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

With no soul, only moods, she knew not love that kissed her nor indifference that soon walked by: glad, but not flushed with gladness since joys go by; sad, but not bent with sadness since sorrows die. She could do nothing but in relation to herself. Gifts given to her never made one dearer, for the excess of love imparted absolved her of the obligation to love in return. Inconsistencies seldom bothered her. She did not ponder them, but merely denied. Her docility was cowardice. She was arrogant in prosperity and independence but once defeated came crawling to one’s feet like a dog, being kept to heel by choice in that faked humility that was only in fact the fear of herself. Determined to stay innocent, however, she who could love so easily because she had nowhere to love from would offer herself indefinitely in this hope, that her takers might know what to make of her and put her to use. Seeking her fortune rather than awaiting it, she had to take every possible chance — and this, of all her fears, became the worst. She had to be loved to acknowledge all she was not and so, winning lovers, was able to dismiss them for showing her so: a self-contained revenge.

Subtlety of thought always tainted her honesty and vanity her friendship. Naturalness she copied and she scorned. She who understood marriage not as the great absorbent of a heart’s love and life but as a feasible and orderly conventionality to be played with, bargained for, and finally to be accepted as a cover for her emptiness like the shifting makepiece of a stage scene was herself the model after whom she strove to shape her own life. She had no memory whatsoever. A lethal compound of the plodding and the hysterical, she guided herself by the simple expediency of one forgiving the other. Venal, cunning, constant in patterned deceit, she understood good and evil merely as failure or success. You could tramp as far as you liked into her and still only be marking time, for, though change seemed to characterize her, she never changed and was only capable of what she ever was. A vision, she did not know; a passion, she could not imagine. With no conception of the soul in its strength and fullness, she saw no lack of its demands. Joy was a name; sorrow was another. She exhausted mercy.

The Lowell House bells rang their carillon again, as if to appease, to calm, to pacify him. But poignancy is not so abiding or so cumulative as hate, and the day became cankerous life again. Was it wished for? Or if not wished for, was not the not-wishing wicked? The questions were of no significance now. Forgiveness? I will see her face in the pit of Eldon first, thought Darconville who, without a shred of pity, was only certain before the day was out to secure a stick of red chalk.

* * * * *

It was all in the readiness now. Mistakes, misdates; exaggerations, lies, distractions; all manner of misseeings and misnotings — they were gone. Darconville went out for a walk. And as he walked he thought and, in thinking, could not recall of Isabel a single pleasure with her. It was as true as he’d been told: if people found the recollection of her more pleasing than her presence, something they remembered of her seemed always to be missing when they encountered her again. He muttered various of her phrases in her own voice yet found that language could but extol, not reproduce, the beauties of the sense, if beauties ever there were. He walked and walked, brooding, thinking a thought of wrath and quickening his step, thinking a thought of kindness and fending it aside with his hand. There was a luminous smear of starlit mist over the Charles and the river lights along the banks reflected as mysteriously in the dark water as in the depths of his mind, again, were mirrored figures of every adjunct to the heavens and characters of signs and evening stars by which the spirits are enforced to rise. It had grown late when he returned under the streetlights to Adams House, and, once in his rooms, he lost no time in beginning his preparations. He moved some furniture to the walls, secured the shades, and then assembled — nothing more — his implements of ghostly justice: chalk, dish, bloodstone, and candles. He finished well after midnight, but did not retire, and instead went downstairs. It was Sunday now, but there would be no rest.

With twenty devils at each ear whispering their approval, Darconville played the piano all night with a knife on top of the Steinway.

BEFORE DAWN, Darconville went out and at the exact moment that the sun appeared on the horizon cut with his virgin knife a wild-nut tree that had never borne fruit. Then he returned to the seclusion of his rooms and chose a spot for the operation, placing the photograph of Isabel in the brass dish in front of which he set the bloodstone. He next traced a triangle with chalk and arranged the two consecrated candles nearby, putting the sacred name of Jesus in position to prevent the spirits from inflicting harm on him. Finally, he stood in the middle of the triangle with the mystic wand of twig in hand, spat thrice, and began to chant the great clavicule.

“I, Alaric Darconville, do desire, call upon, and conjure thee, Lord of Evil, Suzerain of the scornful, Depository of cherished hatreds, who dost whisper in my ears thoughts of vengeance and sore retaliation, to appear before me and fulfill what I command thee by spells whose unrecognized traces baffle human reason and by the most dreadful names that shout you honor at the Northern Gates of Hell: Asbeel, Jeqon, Belphegor, Forças, Gaap, Gadreel, Dagon, Rimmon, Senciner, Zavebe, and Uraka-barameel. Fiat, fiat, fiat.

“Emperor Lucifer, Master of all the Rebellious Spirits, I beg you to be favorable in the invocation that I make to your exalted minister, Lucifuge Rofocale, as I wish to make a pact with him. I beg you also, Prince Beelzebub, to protect me in my enterprise. Come, lod, Eheieh, Gibor, Eloah Va-Daath, Esytion, Samsaweel, and Atarculph.

“I beseech thee, Evil Spirit, Cruel Spirit! I call thee, who sittest in the cemetery and takest away healing from man! Go and place a knot in Isabel Rawsthorne’s head, in her eyes, in her mouth, in her throat, in her windpipe, and put poisonous water in her belly. If you do not go and put water in her belly, I shall send against you the evil angels Puziel, Guziel, Psdiel, Prsiel. I call thee and those six knots that you go quickly to Isabel Rawsthorne and kill Isabel Rawsthorne because I wish it. I conjure thee within this circle. Come hither. Come hither. Come hither, because I wish and will it. Amen. Amen. Selah,

“O Count Astorath, Sataniel, Mastema, Angel of Edom, be propitious and bring it to pass that this very day you include me in your mysteries, wherefore I most earnestly adjure you and by the four beasts before the throne come in this place without noise, deformity, or murmuring and fulfill this pact, removing my sighing and learning my supplication. Xilka, Xilka, Besa, Besa, Besa. Come Aglon, Vaycheon, Stimulamaton, Ezphares, Retragrammaton, Olyaram, Irion, Existion, Mazm.

“Obey promptly or I shall torture thee with the force of the words of power from the Key of Solomon; or I shall constrain you by the power of the Twelve Tables, moon swells, and threads. So come forth instanter! Or I shall denounce you endlessly by the force of unparalleled Jehovam Sabaoth! Come from whichever place in the world thou art and give answers to my questions: answers that shall be true and reasonable. Come, Yomyael, Marut, Gressil, Busasejal, Artaqifa, Moloch, Azaredal.

“I do dance my wand left in the sigils to call thee visibly before this circle to obey me utterly. Each impediment remove thou, and the doorposts move asunder. Bend thou the Creator’s castle. Come, come, why stay you? Blow knots upon her, forward and backward, anagramma-tized: ENROHTSWAR LEBASI. Leap from hell with hax, pax, max, Deus adimax! Come, Magots, Silphae, Rabost, Salamandrad, Tabost, Gnomus, Esmony, and Fabelleronthou.