Chapter 13: Reconsideration

Christine's mind raced. How had Khan known she'd been looking for him? He was a felon—assuming Erik hadn't lied to her. And although the investigator said Khan wasn't the Post's source, he still may have been involved. But even if he was dangerous, right now she preferred talking to him than to Raoul or Frank.

"Anyway," Khan continued, lowering his voice, "I didn't kill the reporter. I didn't even tip off the reporter. When I read that article, I just laughed. I didn't believe it was true." He dropped onto the seat beside her and studied her with his penetrating, pale green eyes. "I still have a hard time believing it."

"Because it isn't true! …Not all of it."

"Well, let's both agree to judge for ourselves, instead of believing the rumors, then. Shall we?"

He seemed calm and sociable, not at all like a crazy, desperate killer. If he was lying, she'd catch on eventually. The trick was to keep him talking. "Well, some rumors are true, aren't they?" She chewed her lower lip and glanced down between the grimy tracks, where a rat scurried by the third rail. "For example, did you know that Erik casts spells and summons demons?"

Khan burst out laughing. "No, Erik doesn't summon demons!" He lowered his voice again. "He summons the dead."

An icy current slid down the back of her neck.

"He's a necromancer," he explained. "Calls up dead spirits. Or, at least he used to. But the rumors in the paper —hypnotism and sorcery—he can't do any of that. His powers are very limited, you could say. And he's not a vampire, in case you were wondering."

I can't even control my own feelings, he'd told her. I never imagined controlling yours. She hadn't believed him. If what Khan said were true, then the only thing Erik controlled was a Ouija board. And she'd made a complete ass of herself last week, storming out of his house over nothing more than harmless Halloween decorations.

Khan noticed her troubled frown. "Please don't blame him, Miss Dale. He would never have… It's my fault. You see, we had this study group in college: me, him, a guy with a lame leg from Erik's physics class, and a dwarf he met in some other class. Classmates used to call us the Freak Show. We studied together, ate meals together—talked about girls. And we were Freemasons—that'd been Erik's idea. None of the fraternities on campus would accept the Freak Show, so the four of us were apprenticed to the Freemasons. We even offered to help clean up after their meetings and events. By our sophomore year, the Masons entrusted us with a set of keys for the temple and its basement, where they stored the chairs and props and folding tables—"

"But what does that have to do with necromancy?"

"Well, we quickly got bored of just being Freemasons. We were looking for something more fantastic. It's that age, you know? You want to do crazy shit, you're not yet old enough to know better, or you're too young to care about consequences. Our classmates committed some real reckless feats, back then. That's when Todd (the guy with the leg) found a very, very old German book on the occult. He showed it to Michael, our dwarf, whose parents were German. It turned out to be an instructional textbook on Necromancy. According to the book, we were in the perfect era for a successful summoning. Back then, the planet Saturn was in the constellation of Scorpio, which wouldn't happen again for another thirty years! Can you believe the coincidence? And we already had keys to the perfect place for casting a summons. We three decided to try a spell, and to have Erik be the one to do it—for a couple of reasons. First of all, Erik knows Latin. Also, the book said necromancers need a sharp mind and strong will, or else the spirits you summon can possess you. And we figured any spirits that appeared would be too terrified by Erik's face to harm us.

"But as much as Erik was the perfect candidate, he was also the staunchest objector. You could say he's the most Freemason of the four of us. He's also devotedly Catholic, the only one in our Freak Show practicing an organized religion. He'd enjoyed reading Michael's translation (I mean, it was packed with such strange detail, who could resist?), but he refused to try it out himself. So it fell on me, as his closest friend, to get him to play his part. Reasoning with him didn't work. I had to coerce him instead."

"What did you do?"

"I'd rather not recount what I did. Suffice to say I made his life hell for several weeks, and he finally agreed to perform the spell. On Halloween. He must have thought he was selling his soul."

She believed him. Khan took all the blame, furnished every detail while looking straight at her with his earnest, jade eyes. And it was easy to imagine Erik, principled as he ever was, resisting participation in their caper.

"The four of us gathered the ingredients: candles and salt and random crazy herbs and things. And we needed a name, so we would know whom to summon, so I chose a name from an old Persian text, one that'd fascinated me for the fact that it had no history behind it. With Erik's scholarly precision, he adhered to Michael's handwritten directions for chalking the circle on the basement floor in the Masonic Temple. His hand was shaking as he made the pentagram inside. We had to goad him a little to get him to finish. Then the four of us sat cross-legged inside the circle (Todd with his lame leg stuck out at a weird angle, Michael practically in my lap). We were laughing nervously and scolding each other to be quiet. Candlelight flickered on the cement block walls as Erik began the Latin incantations."

The fluorescent lights of the station flickered against the cement wall behind the train track. Khan painted such a vivid picture, she felt as though she was in the basement with them, thirty years in the past.

"Surely it didn't actually work…" she whispered.

"It did, to our shock and surprise. We never even imagined it would work. We were more like children playing make-believe; four college sophomores proving we were men, scaring ourselves with ghost stories while staying out in the woods. Even Erik, our reluctant practitioner, had been more concerned with being damned for just trying than with the consequences of actually managing to summon the dead. What followed was a night of horror.

"He'd told us to expect only some vague sensations, like mysterious knocking, or unusual smells, or wispy shadows. Odd cold spots. Instead, as soon as he began, we heard a loud, long shriek, like a woman in the throes of insanity, the most horrible noise for its terror and despair that turned our stomachs. In front of us, in the chalk triangle he'd drawn, materialized a ghostly, terrifying apparition with no eyes, still screaming, and we were all covering our ears except Erik. He simply watched the thing with a composure that bordered on insane—his now-infamous judge's persona. Seeing his disfigured face completely calm, his eyes half closed, I was as frightened of him as I was of the wraith."

He paused as their train pulled into the station, its breaks screaming like the wraith he described. At last the scream ceased, and the doors opened. The car was completely empty. They entered alone. The doors closed; the train rushed onwards.

Although there was no one to overhear, Khan sat beside her and continued in the same quiet tone as before: "My terror mounted when I next heard Erik speak. With a cold, commanding voice we'd never heard before, he directed the terrifying entity to cease its theatrics. (He would later use that same voice in court—but never with you.) Erik is the ideal judge, and he was the perfect necromancer. He had absolute authority over his person, and he was determined to control the apparition as well. He kept repeating his commands, until like a mesmerist he got the dead woman to reveal her true form. The shadows fell away, and we saw that she was naked, upside down—and flayed.

"Intoxicated with excitement and curiosity, we prompted Erik to order her to tell us how she died. He gave the instruction, and it was as though her flesh determined to show rather than tell. In a sudden flash of light, her skin was whole again, and the woman screamed in agony and injustice as she tried to explain. 'They're rending me! It burns! It burns!' We watched in revolted horror as her skin split from invisible knives, revealing bright red muscle and bleeding fat. Her narration was barely comprehensible. She was in too much pain. We never learned who had flayed her alive or why. We were never able to confirm if she was the person I'd chosen from my book. Her cries persisted long after she should have fainted (she couldn't faint, she was already dead). Erik took pity and dismissed her, and in the next second, she was gone."

The conductor announced the next stop, and Christine jumped in her seat. The train pulled into the station, opened its doors. No one entered their car. Soon they were moving once again.

Khan continued: "The silence that followed that ordeal was as awful as the terror we'd just witnessed. The candlelight still flickered against the concrete wall behind where the dead woman had been writhing. Erik moaned, 'God God oh my God,' and rubbed his forehead with a shaking hand. He looked like he'd aged twenty years. None of the rest of us could speak. I forced myself to leave the circle and turn on the lights. That helped a little. We quickly cleaned up our mess, swept away the circle, doused the candles. Everyone avoided the triangle where the spirit had appeared.

"This was only the beginning of what would be our Midnight Hours at the Masonic Temple. Erik swore he would never do it again, but that first night had whetted our appetite for the macabre. No one wanted to admit we were scared. Besides, Saturn would stay in Scorpio for another two years. Now we had a real Freak Show! We gathered names from the cemeteries and history books, and wrote them in a special ledger, along with all the instructions and chants and commands. We bullied Erik to cast the circle almost every week. We witnessed murders, suicides, fatal accidents, wasting illnesses. They must have died decades if not centuries ago. We watched each soul repeat its death, in gory detail, sometimes in slow motion, and always with the victims repeating their terrible cries. In effect, we tortured souls that had been otherwise left to rest. Erik stopped taking communion at church.

"The Freemasons never found out what we were doing. We kept it up until graduation, only allowing Erik a reprieve during exams. It took a few more years after that for us to mature enough to understand what incredible crimes we had committed. Guilt motivated our professions, we sought redemption in service: Todd returned to Detroit and eventually became a forensic anthropologist, Michael a DA in Massachusetts, and Erik and I stayed in New York to pursue law and order.

"But Erik has kept up some small practices for his own sake. He can conjure shadows (which are actually dead light) to cover his face, which doesn't do a whole lot to hide his ugliness."

Hadn't Erik told her as much when she'd found his circle? If I could master other's minds, do you think I'd let them see me as I am?

"And he can control other dead things, like cut flowers. He can keep them looking fresh. He can even manipulate the shadows to change the flower's color. Those roses he pins to his suit? He magicks them. These are minor spells, so he doesn't need the alignment of the stars for it to work. But it takes concentration. When he's tired, he can't summon shadows or keep up a flower, so it starts to lose its color and wilt.

"But he's in real trouble now. All those souls we made him summon thirty years ago? He says they never actually returned to rest. I don't know what happened; I heard him dismiss them every time. But now that the veil between worlds is thinner again, they've found him. He's haunted. He can't control so many of them at once. That blackout we had last week? That was them."

And she'd thought Erik had been the cause of that terrible darkness, when in fact he'd been its victim. "What… What will they do to him?"

"They'll drive him mad, or worse—they'll seize his soul and subject him to eternal suffering. Everything he did to them, but without end. He's at their mercy."

"Oh God!"

"But I don't think they want revenge. First and foremost, they want peace. They can't rest until he formally dismisses them."

"But you said he did that already."

"He did. He did. But something must have gone wrong. I don't think he can do it alone. He needs help. Your help."

"Me!? Why me? This is your fault."

"Successful necromancy depends on the practitioner's confidence. The spirits sense hesitancy. Maybe, at the end of each session, Erik… lapsed. His Catholic guilt caught up to him, and he didn't think he could do it anymore."

"But what's that got to do with me?"

He regarded her with his strange, green eyes. "Do you love him?"

Unit now, she'd believed she was under a spell. If what Khan said were true, then her passion for Erik—as incredible as it was—was real. Extraordinary, but still natural. As were the ways in which it had changed her character, such that she forgot propriety and even forgot her clients, her mind so eclipsed… She may not have had any power over its beginnings, but she was the only one to direct its destiny.

She stood from her seat. Only then did she realize that the train had stopped between stations. A delay, some type of signal malfunction. As if even the subway had paused to hear her answer.

"Think about it carefully, Miss Dale," Khan warned. "Time is running out. The anniversary of our first summons is mere weeks away. Halloween."