--6--
As a child, Cyrus' only playmate was an imaginary friend named 'Fay. His father, a distinguished scholar with a self-professed expert knowledge of child psychology, found nothing unusual in this; he naturally assumed that it was a childhood phase and that Cyrus would eventually outgrow it, as was so often documented. And to some extent he was right - Cyrus did eventually stop playing with 'Fay. Their long afternoons in the clearing by the wood came to an end when Cyrus was nine years old.
But at night, when Cyrus and his brothers were supposed to be praying the rosary before bed, he talked to Fay. He held the rosary in his hand - the one his mother had given him for his twelfth birthday, just three weeks before she'd died - and instead of praying, he talked. He didn't believe that Fay talked back, so it wasn't like a conversation. But the point was that he talked to him, not that he expected a reply. It was only important that he talk.
He'd tell him about his day, about the kids at school, about his homework assignments, about his brothers. As the years went by, he'd tell him about the girls he liked, about his friends who he knew were only friends to his money. He told him about the night he lost his virginity - in fact, the rosary was there in his schoolbag sitting by the bed, and after they'd finished he went into the bathroom and whispered out he whole story. When the girl, a cute little thing with strawberry blonde hair and the most beautiful body Cyrus had ever seen, walked in and asked him coyly if he was coming back to bed, he threw her out. He literally pushed her out through the motel room door and threw her clothes out after her. He sat down on the bed and continued to talk after he was sure she was gone.
His roommate at Harvard once asked him whom he thought he was talking to. Cyrus smiled oddly and told him he was praying. It wasn't far from the truth, really; with the rosary in his hand, talking to someone who wasn't there, he guessed it was like praying.
His major was Theology, and he studied hard. He was top of his class, by virtue of his insightful papers and extensive knowledge of the subject; it seemed he spent every waking moment in the university or department libraries, or in his room with a book brought from his father's home library. He graduated at the top of his class, which surprised no one. What did surprise was the fact that Cyrus never officially furthered his education; his tutors all believed he could have gone on to become one of the foremost academics in the area, and perhaps that was true. However, Cyrus had other plans.
His brother William doubted that his travel and expenditure in Europe was simply in pursuit of rare books. He was wrong - that was exactly the point of Cyrus' visit. He visited rare book dealers all over the continent, buying up all the rare theological books that he could locate. And there were two particular areas of study within the general subject that interested him over all others - Demonology, and the study of Hell.
Cyrus made and maintained few friends over the years, but one of whose acquaintance he was particularly proud was billionaire industrialist Boris Balkan; he and Boris had been college roommates and had kept in touch since their graduation. Balkan had made a fortune in industry, but the money was not what made Cyrus so especially proud of their friendship. It was instead that fact that Balkan was an acknowledged authority in the area of the Christian religion and in Demonology in particular. And of course the extensive library which Balkan kept on the top floor of his New York offices - a library dedicated in its entirety to the devil - held for Cyrus a glorious allure.
Few people had the privilege of entrance to this library, but Cyrus was one of them. Both before and after his travels in Europe he spent countless hours ensconced in that library, reading from Balkan's unbelievably extensive collection. But, as Balkan himself often lamented, there was one text of extreme significance that was missing from his library.
During the fifteenth century, Venetian theologian Aristide Torchia wrote perhaps the most infamous of books ever known. Whilst studying in Prague, he came across a copy of the Delomelanicon, a book reputedly written by the devil himself; Torchia adapted this book, creating his own volume, The Book of the Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. This book contained a riddle whose solving would, it was said, open the ninth gate and bestow upon the solver all the powers of hell. It was this book that Boris Balkan coveted above all others, but there was one catch. Only three copies had survived - the rest were burned at the stake along with Aristide Torchia himself.
It was from Balkan that Cyrus learned of the Nine Gates, or at least of its physical existence. From what Cyrus had learned he believed that there were no remaining copies of the book, but Balkan set him straight; there were, in fact, three copies - the Telfer, the Fargas and the Kessler. Andrew Telfer, a New York resident of incredible fortune, owned the first, though in name only - it was actually the prized possession of his wife, Liana. Victor Fargas, head of an old noble Spanish family, had the second as the centrepiece of his now rather depleted yet still relatively extensive demonological library. And the third belonged to the Baroness Kessler, resident of Paris, and perhaps the most eminent figure in the study of the devil. Balkan stood very little chance of being able to buy a copy from any of their current owners, unless he pried it from their cold dead hands. Cyrus couldn't say he put it past him.
Cyrus himself was considered quite the demonological authority and the two frequently debated the subject, both in Balkan's library and over the telephone. Their friendly sparring in addition to their passion for the subject was part of what drove them, and also what separated them; both men knew that if the opportunity should arise, neither of them would hesitate a single second in screwing the other over for personal advancement. And that's exactly what Cyrus was attempting to do on his trip to Europe. He was attempting to acquire a copy of the Nine Gates.
Victor Fargas was accommodating enough, allowing him to view his copy and make notes whilst he himself drank cognac from a large crystal glass and played a little Saint-Saëns on his antique violin. Quinta Fargas, the ancestral home of the Fargas family, was in a sorry state of disrepair, filled with damp and dry rot. Fargas was selling off his once splendid library simply to pay for its upkeep - why he didn't just sell the place and have done with it Cyrus couldn't understand. He even made him an offer - both for the house and the Nine Gates - but both were refused and Cyrus moved on.
He talked with the Hermanos Ceniza in Toledo. The twins were in their seventies at the very least, and restorers of books of worldwide renown. They had owned the Telfer copy for more than forty years before they sold it on to Andrew and Liana Telfer. They smiled a lot and Cyrus found the way that they constantly finished each other's sentences rather irritating. They could tell him nothing, but sold him a few more common demonological works, which made mention of the Nine Gates. Cyrus thanked them with as much politeness as he could muster, then left for Paris.
Baroness Kessler and her secretary, who reminded him somewhat of a pitbull in human clothing, were slightly less then accommodating; ten minutes after walking through the door of the Fondation Kessler, he'd been unceremoniously ejected from the building. The visit was substantially less than satisfactory.
He spent three months in Paris, studying in various libraries. His idea was to study the life and works of Aristide Torchia, and that he did for the first two months, between his visits to the rare bookshop of the city. Then, however, he found a passage in a recent acquisition that turned his thoughts in another direction altogether.
The volume from which he was read was indeed primarily concerned with Aristide Torchia, though buried deep in one chapter, a parenthesis in the main body of the text, as an allusion to another work, not of Torchia. The work of a fifteenth century astrologer with whom Cyrus was wholly unfamiliar. The brief mention caught Cyrus' imagination, and he set to work wheedling out every last piece of information that he could lay his hands on. Something told him this could be exactly what he was looking for.
His search led him away from Paris, across the Alps and into Italy, into Venice, birthplace of Aristide Torchia. The astrologer in question was a Venetian named Basileus, a great scholar who had never until the writing of his great work shown the slightest of inclinations toward the black arts, at least not beyond astrology. The more Cyrus read, the clearer it seemed that Basileus had suffered some kind of demonic possession that inspired him to write the work, the Arcanum. Perhaps even possession of the devil himself.
Only seven copies of the book had ever been produced, and even those were widely believed to be mere myth. But Cyrus believed. The day that Franklin Moss called to tell him that he now owned the land beside his estate, Cyrus' belief had proved more fruitful than he could have expected. He'd been in Venice for two weeks when he walked into a bookshop just off the Piazza San Marco and picked up a perfectly intact, perfectly preserved copy of Basileus' Arcanum.
He knelt by his hotel bed that night with his rosary in his hands and told Belphegor that at last he knew what he had to do. His hand strayed as he talked and his fingertips brushed at the heavy leather cover of the book that lay on his bed, the book for which he had paid over fifty thousand dollars and for which he would have paid much, much more. He smiled.
It was November 1981 when Cyrus returned home. He had work to do.
***
As a child, Cyrus' only playmate was an imaginary friend named 'Fay. His father, a distinguished scholar with a self-professed expert knowledge of child psychology, found nothing unusual in this; he naturally assumed that it was a childhood phase and that Cyrus would eventually outgrow it, as was so often documented. And to some extent he was right - Cyrus did eventually stop playing with 'Fay. Their long afternoons in the clearing by the wood came to an end when Cyrus was nine years old.
But at night, when Cyrus and his brothers were supposed to be praying the rosary before bed, he talked to Fay. He held the rosary in his hand - the one his mother had given him for his twelfth birthday, just three weeks before she'd died - and instead of praying, he talked. He didn't believe that Fay talked back, so it wasn't like a conversation. But the point was that he talked to him, not that he expected a reply. It was only important that he talk.
He'd tell him about his day, about the kids at school, about his homework assignments, about his brothers. As the years went by, he'd tell him about the girls he liked, about his friends who he knew were only friends to his money. He told him about the night he lost his virginity - in fact, the rosary was there in his schoolbag sitting by the bed, and after they'd finished he went into the bathroom and whispered out he whole story. When the girl, a cute little thing with strawberry blonde hair and the most beautiful body Cyrus had ever seen, walked in and asked him coyly if he was coming back to bed, he threw her out. He literally pushed her out through the motel room door and threw her clothes out after her. He sat down on the bed and continued to talk after he was sure she was gone.
His roommate at Harvard once asked him whom he thought he was talking to. Cyrus smiled oddly and told him he was praying. It wasn't far from the truth, really; with the rosary in his hand, talking to someone who wasn't there, he guessed it was like praying.
His major was Theology, and he studied hard. He was top of his class, by virtue of his insightful papers and extensive knowledge of the subject; it seemed he spent every waking moment in the university or department libraries, or in his room with a book brought from his father's home library. He graduated at the top of his class, which surprised no one. What did surprise was the fact that Cyrus never officially furthered his education; his tutors all believed he could have gone on to become one of the foremost academics in the area, and perhaps that was true. However, Cyrus had other plans.
His brother William doubted that his travel and expenditure in Europe was simply in pursuit of rare books. He was wrong - that was exactly the point of Cyrus' visit. He visited rare book dealers all over the continent, buying up all the rare theological books that he could locate. And there were two particular areas of study within the general subject that interested him over all others - Demonology, and the study of Hell.
Cyrus made and maintained few friends over the years, but one of whose acquaintance he was particularly proud was billionaire industrialist Boris Balkan; he and Boris had been college roommates and had kept in touch since their graduation. Balkan had made a fortune in industry, but the money was not what made Cyrus so especially proud of their friendship. It was instead that fact that Balkan was an acknowledged authority in the area of the Christian religion and in Demonology in particular. And of course the extensive library which Balkan kept on the top floor of his New York offices - a library dedicated in its entirety to the devil - held for Cyrus a glorious allure.
Few people had the privilege of entrance to this library, but Cyrus was one of them. Both before and after his travels in Europe he spent countless hours ensconced in that library, reading from Balkan's unbelievably extensive collection. But, as Balkan himself often lamented, there was one text of extreme significance that was missing from his library.
During the fifteenth century, Venetian theologian Aristide Torchia wrote perhaps the most infamous of books ever known. Whilst studying in Prague, he came across a copy of the Delomelanicon, a book reputedly written by the devil himself; Torchia adapted this book, creating his own volume, The Book of the Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. This book contained a riddle whose solving would, it was said, open the ninth gate and bestow upon the solver all the powers of hell. It was this book that Boris Balkan coveted above all others, but there was one catch. Only three copies had survived - the rest were burned at the stake along with Aristide Torchia himself.
It was from Balkan that Cyrus learned of the Nine Gates, or at least of its physical existence. From what Cyrus had learned he believed that there were no remaining copies of the book, but Balkan set him straight; there were, in fact, three copies - the Telfer, the Fargas and the Kessler. Andrew Telfer, a New York resident of incredible fortune, owned the first, though in name only - it was actually the prized possession of his wife, Liana. Victor Fargas, head of an old noble Spanish family, had the second as the centrepiece of his now rather depleted yet still relatively extensive demonological library. And the third belonged to the Baroness Kessler, resident of Paris, and perhaps the most eminent figure in the study of the devil. Balkan stood very little chance of being able to buy a copy from any of their current owners, unless he pried it from their cold dead hands. Cyrus couldn't say he put it past him.
Cyrus himself was considered quite the demonological authority and the two frequently debated the subject, both in Balkan's library and over the telephone. Their friendly sparring in addition to their passion for the subject was part of what drove them, and also what separated them; both men knew that if the opportunity should arise, neither of them would hesitate a single second in screwing the other over for personal advancement. And that's exactly what Cyrus was attempting to do on his trip to Europe. He was attempting to acquire a copy of the Nine Gates.
Victor Fargas was accommodating enough, allowing him to view his copy and make notes whilst he himself drank cognac from a large crystal glass and played a little Saint-Saëns on his antique violin. Quinta Fargas, the ancestral home of the Fargas family, was in a sorry state of disrepair, filled with damp and dry rot. Fargas was selling off his once splendid library simply to pay for its upkeep - why he didn't just sell the place and have done with it Cyrus couldn't understand. He even made him an offer - both for the house and the Nine Gates - but both were refused and Cyrus moved on.
He talked with the Hermanos Ceniza in Toledo. The twins were in their seventies at the very least, and restorers of books of worldwide renown. They had owned the Telfer copy for more than forty years before they sold it on to Andrew and Liana Telfer. They smiled a lot and Cyrus found the way that they constantly finished each other's sentences rather irritating. They could tell him nothing, but sold him a few more common demonological works, which made mention of the Nine Gates. Cyrus thanked them with as much politeness as he could muster, then left for Paris.
Baroness Kessler and her secretary, who reminded him somewhat of a pitbull in human clothing, were slightly less then accommodating; ten minutes after walking through the door of the Fondation Kessler, he'd been unceremoniously ejected from the building. The visit was substantially less than satisfactory.
He spent three months in Paris, studying in various libraries. His idea was to study the life and works of Aristide Torchia, and that he did for the first two months, between his visits to the rare bookshop of the city. Then, however, he found a passage in a recent acquisition that turned his thoughts in another direction altogether.
The volume from which he was read was indeed primarily concerned with Aristide Torchia, though buried deep in one chapter, a parenthesis in the main body of the text, as an allusion to another work, not of Torchia. The work of a fifteenth century astrologer with whom Cyrus was wholly unfamiliar. The brief mention caught Cyrus' imagination, and he set to work wheedling out every last piece of information that he could lay his hands on. Something told him this could be exactly what he was looking for.
His search led him away from Paris, across the Alps and into Italy, into Venice, birthplace of Aristide Torchia. The astrologer in question was a Venetian named Basileus, a great scholar who had never until the writing of his great work shown the slightest of inclinations toward the black arts, at least not beyond astrology. The more Cyrus read, the clearer it seemed that Basileus had suffered some kind of demonic possession that inspired him to write the work, the Arcanum. Perhaps even possession of the devil himself.
Only seven copies of the book had ever been produced, and even those were widely believed to be mere myth. But Cyrus believed. The day that Franklin Moss called to tell him that he now owned the land beside his estate, Cyrus' belief had proved more fruitful than he could have expected. He'd been in Venice for two weeks when he walked into a bookshop just off the Piazza San Marco and picked up a perfectly intact, perfectly preserved copy of Basileus' Arcanum.
He knelt by his hotel bed that night with his rosary in his hands and told Belphegor that at last he knew what he had to do. His hand strayed as he talked and his fingertips brushed at the heavy leather cover of the book that lay on his bed, the book for which he had paid over fifty thousand dollars and for which he would have paid much, much more. He smiled.
It was November 1981 when Cyrus returned home. He had work to do.
***