--10--
Boris Balkan called to give Cyrus the good news in November 1999. Ordinarily Cyrus would have been green with envy, except these were not ordinary circumstances by any stretch of the imagination. Cyrus couldn't say that Balkan's acquisition of the Book of the Nine Gates was of any particular interest to him, except that he had at least a little hope in him that Balkan could correctly interpret the engravings and finally reach his goal. Of course, there was also a little hope in him that Balkan would fail miserably and that when Cyrus reached his own goal he could gloat for endless hours that he had reached it first.
The reason for Cyrus' disinterest in Balkan's new book - the very book that he himself had flown half way around the world searching for - was the Arcanum, and more specifically, his work with it. He knew that even if Balkan had indeed acquired a copy of the Nine Gates, there was no guarantee that it would work. There had to be a correct interpretation of the nine engravings before the reader could unlock the Ninth Gate, and whilst Cyrus knew that Balkan could do this if indeed anyone could, he still had his doubts. The Arcanum, however - all he had to do was follow the directions exactly as they were laid out. No interpretation was necessary.
Cyrus was not by nature a lazy man. He hadn't cut a single corner in his entire life - all his work was first rate and no expense or labour spared. He took pride in his work, from the very smallest thing to the grandeur of the Glass House. The simple fact that he spent the majority of his life in the study of demonology, coupled with his worldly travels in search of the Nine Gates, should have shown this. But when he'd come across the Arcanum he'd known that so much effort could be saved using this book. He wasn't against interpretation, but the work of Aristide Torchia seemed unnecessarily complicated. He'd jumped at the chance to cut out all that unnecessary complication, and for the first few years it had seemed simple.
Now he had run into a hurdle. But Cyrus of all people knew that such hurdles could be jumped, and if not jumped, at least bypassed. When he came across the problem of powering the machine, he knew he had to call in help.
Kalina Oretzia was not what he'd expected. She walked into his home that first night looking like some Greenpeace nut he'd expect to see riding around in motor dinghies waving placards about saving whales, not the occultist he remembered from Prague. He almost changed his mind right then and there, and might have had she not walked straight over to the Arcanum and quoted the first paragraph by heart. Cyrus was suitably impressed. Regardless of their past, he decided to hire her.
The book explained that the power for the machine came from thirteen ghosts. This made perfect sense to Cyrus, who had over his fifty-something years come to believe in such things; in many of the ancient texts there was described a 'tortured realm' in which dwelt the souls of those who died a violent death. He even believed he might have seen such ghosts himself, once or twice, shadowy images hovering at the corner of his vision at night in his big old house. He had to capture thirteen ghosts. Kalina was to help him in this.
The book was helpful to a degree; it described the exact types of ghost that he had to capture, and the manner in which they could be contained. He had already constructed their cages - thirteen cubes of etched glass and steel, which would be housed in the basement of the Glass House. That was all set out very clearly in the book. But what it failed to detail was how exactly he was to go about actually capturing the ghosts. And that was where Kalina came in.
Cyrus had had most of the ghosts picked out for six years by that point. Whilst the construction of the machine had been going on, he'd been busy researching the Black Zodiac, and deciding upon the most suitable candidates for inclusion. There must be thirteen - twelve to fulfil the Zodiac, the First Born Son, the Torso, the Bound Woman, the Withered Lover, the Torn Prince, the Angry Princess, the Pilgrimess, the Great Child, the Dire Mother, the Hammer, the Jackal and the Juggernaut. In order to fulfil the role of one of these Black Zodiac signs, the ghost had to possess certain special qualities, and it was this that consumed most of Cyrus' time. He wanted every aspect of his project to be entirely perfect, and the ghosts themselves were essential to this.
The first on his list was the Torn Prince; he had originally intended to tackle the ghosts in order of sign, and he realised that in the order of things this ghost should have been the fifth. However, he also realised that the reality of the situation called for a little reorganisation of his plans. Royce Clayton, his chosen candidate for the Torn Prince, haunted an area surprisingly close to Cyrus' home, just three towns and forty-five miles away; logistically, this was the most suitable of his candidates on which to test the efficacy of the equipment and capture techniques.
Kalina assured him that she had everything worked out. As Cyrus' car pulled up he could see that the ball field was prepped; the cube was stationed by third base and the spells were blaring from the speakers. Kalina stood by them with a small team of men, talking, and smiled as Cyrus walked toward them. He had to admit, everything seemed to be running smoothly. Except for the fact that there was no sign of the ghost.
Kalina remained enthusiastic throughout the night, whilst the rest of Cyrus' handpicked team grew ever more pessimistic. They ran out of coffee sometime around 3am and after that Kalina insisted on waking them all up at fifteen-minute intervals and regaling them with stories of occult practices in the Czech Republic and the Near East. Cyrus, though somewhat interested by Kalina's obvious expertise, found his disappointment grew with every passing moment. There was no ghost caught that night.
Nor was there a ghost caught the next day, or for the five days that the team remained camped out on the baseball field. Cyrus' impatience only grew, and Kalina anxiety became all the more obvious. She fluttered around Cyrus almost constantly, fluctuating wildly between profuse apology and assurances that everything would turn out fine. She seemed desperately eager to please, and this caused Cyrus endless perplexity. He couldn't seem to figure out exactly why she was so eager to stay on his good side. It wasn't even like he was paying well.
In fact, once he'd realised that she understood the purpose of the Glass House, he'd started to wonder why she was helping him at all. He would have fired her if not for the fact that she was his best hope of capturing the ghosts he so desperately needed.
First a week and then two passed. Fortunately no games were scheduled, the school having broken for summer, but slowly the people of the nearby town and students of the nearby high school were becoming curious. Twenty days of driving back and forth between his home and the field, twenty days of complete failure, and Cyrus was beyond impatient.
When he confronted and fired Kalina, she went silent, all the colour draining from her face. Then she threw down her glasses, saying they didn't work, saying she could do better if he gave her the chance, saying that if the glasses had worked she could have seen the ghost and would have captured it by now, that if the others had done their jobs then the operation would have been a success. She accused everyone save Cyrus of outright incompetence and stamped down hard on the glasses, breaking them at the bridge. She looked so panicked, so wild, and so utterly ruthless that Cyrus almost kept her on just for that. Except she'd failed. For that she lost her job. He sent her away. Cyrus had the team pack away the equipment and returned home.
Kneeling by his bed that evening, rosary in hand, Cyrus thought back over the past three weeks. He was certain that the glasses worked; three years of experimentation with the instructions of the Arcanum, three painstaking years of development and testing - he knew that they worked. He'd seen them in operation himself, with the ghosts in the local graveyards. Of course, none of those ghosts qualified for a place on his list.
He sighed. It wasn't the glasses. If the ghost had been there, they would have seen it. But obviously the ghost wasn't there. He needed someone to tell him where the ghost was. But who?
He pressed the rosary to his forehead, the beads cool against his skin.
A psychic, they told him. He needed a psychic.
Boris Balkan called to give Cyrus the good news in November 1999. Ordinarily Cyrus would have been green with envy, except these were not ordinary circumstances by any stretch of the imagination. Cyrus couldn't say that Balkan's acquisition of the Book of the Nine Gates was of any particular interest to him, except that he had at least a little hope in him that Balkan could correctly interpret the engravings and finally reach his goal. Of course, there was also a little hope in him that Balkan would fail miserably and that when Cyrus reached his own goal he could gloat for endless hours that he had reached it first.
The reason for Cyrus' disinterest in Balkan's new book - the very book that he himself had flown half way around the world searching for - was the Arcanum, and more specifically, his work with it. He knew that even if Balkan had indeed acquired a copy of the Nine Gates, there was no guarantee that it would work. There had to be a correct interpretation of the nine engravings before the reader could unlock the Ninth Gate, and whilst Cyrus knew that Balkan could do this if indeed anyone could, he still had his doubts. The Arcanum, however - all he had to do was follow the directions exactly as they were laid out. No interpretation was necessary.
Cyrus was not by nature a lazy man. He hadn't cut a single corner in his entire life - all his work was first rate and no expense or labour spared. He took pride in his work, from the very smallest thing to the grandeur of the Glass House. The simple fact that he spent the majority of his life in the study of demonology, coupled with his worldly travels in search of the Nine Gates, should have shown this. But when he'd come across the Arcanum he'd known that so much effort could be saved using this book. He wasn't against interpretation, but the work of Aristide Torchia seemed unnecessarily complicated. He'd jumped at the chance to cut out all that unnecessary complication, and for the first few years it had seemed simple.
Now he had run into a hurdle. But Cyrus of all people knew that such hurdles could be jumped, and if not jumped, at least bypassed. When he came across the problem of powering the machine, he knew he had to call in help.
Kalina Oretzia was not what he'd expected. She walked into his home that first night looking like some Greenpeace nut he'd expect to see riding around in motor dinghies waving placards about saving whales, not the occultist he remembered from Prague. He almost changed his mind right then and there, and might have had she not walked straight over to the Arcanum and quoted the first paragraph by heart. Cyrus was suitably impressed. Regardless of their past, he decided to hire her.
The book explained that the power for the machine came from thirteen ghosts. This made perfect sense to Cyrus, who had over his fifty-something years come to believe in such things; in many of the ancient texts there was described a 'tortured realm' in which dwelt the souls of those who died a violent death. He even believed he might have seen such ghosts himself, once or twice, shadowy images hovering at the corner of his vision at night in his big old house. He had to capture thirteen ghosts. Kalina was to help him in this.
The book was helpful to a degree; it described the exact types of ghost that he had to capture, and the manner in which they could be contained. He had already constructed their cages - thirteen cubes of etched glass and steel, which would be housed in the basement of the Glass House. That was all set out very clearly in the book. But what it failed to detail was how exactly he was to go about actually capturing the ghosts. And that was where Kalina came in.
Cyrus had had most of the ghosts picked out for six years by that point. Whilst the construction of the machine had been going on, he'd been busy researching the Black Zodiac, and deciding upon the most suitable candidates for inclusion. There must be thirteen - twelve to fulfil the Zodiac, the First Born Son, the Torso, the Bound Woman, the Withered Lover, the Torn Prince, the Angry Princess, the Pilgrimess, the Great Child, the Dire Mother, the Hammer, the Jackal and the Juggernaut. In order to fulfil the role of one of these Black Zodiac signs, the ghost had to possess certain special qualities, and it was this that consumed most of Cyrus' time. He wanted every aspect of his project to be entirely perfect, and the ghosts themselves were essential to this.
The first on his list was the Torn Prince; he had originally intended to tackle the ghosts in order of sign, and he realised that in the order of things this ghost should have been the fifth. However, he also realised that the reality of the situation called for a little reorganisation of his plans. Royce Clayton, his chosen candidate for the Torn Prince, haunted an area surprisingly close to Cyrus' home, just three towns and forty-five miles away; logistically, this was the most suitable of his candidates on which to test the efficacy of the equipment and capture techniques.
Kalina assured him that she had everything worked out. As Cyrus' car pulled up he could see that the ball field was prepped; the cube was stationed by third base and the spells were blaring from the speakers. Kalina stood by them with a small team of men, talking, and smiled as Cyrus walked toward them. He had to admit, everything seemed to be running smoothly. Except for the fact that there was no sign of the ghost.
Kalina remained enthusiastic throughout the night, whilst the rest of Cyrus' handpicked team grew ever more pessimistic. They ran out of coffee sometime around 3am and after that Kalina insisted on waking them all up at fifteen-minute intervals and regaling them with stories of occult practices in the Czech Republic and the Near East. Cyrus, though somewhat interested by Kalina's obvious expertise, found his disappointment grew with every passing moment. There was no ghost caught that night.
Nor was there a ghost caught the next day, or for the five days that the team remained camped out on the baseball field. Cyrus' impatience only grew, and Kalina anxiety became all the more obvious. She fluttered around Cyrus almost constantly, fluctuating wildly between profuse apology and assurances that everything would turn out fine. She seemed desperately eager to please, and this caused Cyrus endless perplexity. He couldn't seem to figure out exactly why she was so eager to stay on his good side. It wasn't even like he was paying well.
In fact, once he'd realised that she understood the purpose of the Glass House, he'd started to wonder why she was helping him at all. He would have fired her if not for the fact that she was his best hope of capturing the ghosts he so desperately needed.
First a week and then two passed. Fortunately no games were scheduled, the school having broken for summer, but slowly the people of the nearby town and students of the nearby high school were becoming curious. Twenty days of driving back and forth between his home and the field, twenty days of complete failure, and Cyrus was beyond impatient.
When he confronted and fired Kalina, she went silent, all the colour draining from her face. Then she threw down her glasses, saying they didn't work, saying she could do better if he gave her the chance, saying that if the glasses had worked she could have seen the ghost and would have captured it by now, that if the others had done their jobs then the operation would have been a success. She accused everyone save Cyrus of outright incompetence and stamped down hard on the glasses, breaking them at the bridge. She looked so panicked, so wild, and so utterly ruthless that Cyrus almost kept her on just for that. Except she'd failed. For that she lost her job. He sent her away. Cyrus had the team pack away the equipment and returned home.
Kneeling by his bed that evening, rosary in hand, Cyrus thought back over the past three weeks. He was certain that the glasses worked; three years of experimentation with the instructions of the Arcanum, three painstaking years of development and testing - he knew that they worked. He'd seen them in operation himself, with the ghosts in the local graveyards. Of course, none of those ghosts qualified for a place on his list.
He sighed. It wasn't the glasses. If the ghost had been there, they would have seen it. But obviously the ghost wasn't there. He needed someone to tell him where the ghost was. But who?
He pressed the rosary to his forehead, the beads cool against his skin.
A psychic, they told him. He needed a psychic.