The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - By Laird Barron Page 0,54
loath to touch me. “You are unwell. Come inside away from the heat and the noise.”
“Hands off. I asked a question.”
“My destruction is their motivation and ultimate goal. Each for his or her personal reason. The sorcerer desires the secrets within my vault: the cases of photographic plates, the reels, a life’s work. Father’s store of esoteric theory. Helios Augustus can practically taste the wickedness that broods there, black as a tanner’s chimney. Eadweard’s macabre films caused quite a stir in certain circles. They suggest great depths of depravity, of a dehumanizing element inherent in photography. A property of anti-life.”
“You’re pulling my leg. That’s—”
“Preposterous? Absurd? Any loonier than swearing your life upon a book that preaches of virgin births and wandering Jews risen from the grave to spare the world from blood and thunder and annihilation?”
“I’ve lapsed,” I said.
“The magician once speculated to me that he had a plan to create moving images that would wipe minds clean and imprint upon them all manner of base, un-sublimated desires. The desire to bow and scrape, to lick the boots of an overlord. It was madness, yet appealing. How his face animated when he mused on the spectacle of thousands of common folk streaming from theatres, faces slack with lust and carnal hunger. For the magician, Eadweard’s lost work is paramount. My enemies want the specimens as yet hidden from the academic community, the plates and reels whispered of in darkened council chambers.”
“That what the crones want too? To see a black pope in the debauched Vatican, and Old Scratch on the throne?”
“No, no, those lovelies have simpler tastes. They wish to devour the souls my father supposedly trapped in his pictures. So delightfully primitive to entertain the notion that film can steal our animating force. Not much more sophisticated than the tribals who believe you mustn’t point at another person, else they’ll die. Eadweard was many, many things, and many of them repugnant. He was not, however, a soul taker. Soul taking is a myth with a single exception. There is but One and that worthy needs no aperture, no lens, no box.
“Look here, John: thaumaturgy, geomancy, black magic, all that is stuff and nonsense, hooey, claptrap, if you will. Certainly, I serve the master and attend Black Mass. Not a thing to do with the supernatural, I’m not barmy. It’s a matter of philosophy, of acclimating oneself to the natural forces of the world and the universe. Right thinking, as it were. Ask me if Satan exists, I’ll say yes and slice a virgin’s throat in the Dark Lord’s honor. Ask me if I believe He manipulates and rewards, again yes. Directly? Does He imbue his acolytes with the power of miracles as Helios Augustus surely believes, as the crones believe their old gods do? I will laugh in your face. Satan no more interferes in any meaningful way than God does. Which is to say, by no discernible measure.”
“Color me relieved. Got to admit, the old magician almost had my goat. I thought there might be something to all this horseshit mumbo-jumbo.”
“Of course, mysticism was invented for the peasantry. You are far out of your depth. You are being turned like a card between masters. The Ace of Clubs. In all of this you are but a blunt instrument. If anyone murdered your father, it was Helios Augustus. Likely by poison. Poison and lies are the sorcerer’s best friends.”
I took the blackened cocoon from my shirt pocket. So trivial a thing, so withered a husk, yet even as I brandished it between thumb and forefinger, my host shrank farther away until he’d stepped into the house proper and regarded me from the sweep of a velvet curtain, drawn across his face like a cowl or a cape, and for an instant the ice in my heart suggested that it was a trick, that he was indeed the creature of a forsaken angel, that he meant to lull me into complacency and would then laugh and devour me, skin, bones, and soul. Beneath the balcony the music changed; it sizzled and snapped and strange guttural cries and glottal croaks resounded here and there.
A quick glance, no more, but plenty for me to take it in—the guests were all pairing now, and many had already removed their clothes. The shorn and scorched patches of bare earth farther out hadn’t suffered from the ravages of ponies or cleats. Servants were not reapplying chalk lines; it must’ve been pitch in their buckets, for