Vicious Circle

I stopped because he was waving his hand backward and forward in an impatient “stop right there” gesture. “I told you you didn’t know shit,” he said, thickly. “The court case, that was another scam. Mel was still with Fanke, and Fanke was a big wheel by this time. Fucking multimillionaire. He’d set up the First Satanist Church of the Americas—become a guru, like the Maharishi, with tax breaks and limos and all that garbage. And there’s him and Mel living together like husband and wife, and bringing up Abbie like she’s theirs. I bumped into an old crony somewhere in Rio and got the whole story, and I thought it had to be worth trying to shake them down for some hard cash. That’s all she was to me, Castor: a fucking lottery ticket.”

“Until you met her.”

“Until I met her. Yeah. I didn’t realize, but taking out the lawsuit let me in for all kinds of stuff that I couldn’t get out of. Depositions, procedural submissions, Christ knows. If I’d seen how much time it was going to eat up I’d never have started it.

“But anyway, as part of all that there had to be meetings. Documented meetings, because you’ve got to go through the conciliation shit before you can go to court. And there she was, you know? Mel did all the talking, just like always, and Abbie was just sitting there, looking so sad and lost. Looking like she was waiting for a bus on a dark street, and that was where she’d been all her fucking life.”

He was staring at me with haunted eyes. No wonder he’d been so flip about the sins of his youth: this was what he really had on his conscience, and it must have almost eaten him alive.

“I started talking to her. Partly because I wanted to see if I could cheer her up, partly because it seemed to piss Mel off. I bought her the locket, and a couple of other things, and I told her some bullshit stories about what I did for a living.

“And I started to wonder—if Mel was so fucking cold to her, and if she wasn’t even Fanke’s kid, then why did they keep her around? Was it just that whole transgression thing? That Mel had managed to turn making a baby into something obscene and sick? Was Abbie a—a trophy? It didn’t make any sense.

“And there I was in a strange city, stuck there because of this stupid court case that I didn’t even want to win—that I’d only sworn out in the first place so that Fanke would pay me to make me go away. And I had all the time in the world, and fuck all to do with it. So I started to do some digging.

“The Satanist Church is huge over there. They’ve got their own Web site, their own bookshops, sodding T-shirts, car stickers, the works. HONK IF YOU’VE SEEN THE LIGHTBRINGER. Fucking morons. There was a lot there, but none of it was hard to find.

“The Web site had links to articles that Fanke had written. Speeches he’d made. It was all in public domain—he wasn’t hiding it. He was still going on about sacrifice farms, and the grimoire tradition, and why the medieval alchemists got it all wrong. Oh sure, he said, they’d managed to open up some lines of communication with demons, and the demons were giving them everything they needed to turn that first contact into serious, regular trade. Only they kept getting all the details wrong. It was a communication breakdown, according to Fanke. Demons can speak all the languages that human beings ever spoke, or ever will speak, but not—you know—fluently. So they were giving out all this sales talk: you can bring the big boys up from hell, you can be top dogs in a new world order, and all the rest of it. They were giving fucking dictation, for God’s sake. But these medieval badasses—these Fausts—they were mostly managing to miss the point.

“They got it all wrong, Fanke said. All the stuff that really mattered, anyway. And the thing they fucked up worst of all—the most important thing, the engine that the whole thing ran on—was the sacrifice. Albertus Magnus raved on about rams being without blemish, and Bruno’s got a whole goddamn chapter on whether you carry the beast in or lead it on a rope, and what color its fleece should be, and what it should have eaten and what you do with its shit if it shits during the ceremony, and on and on like some kind of instruction manual translated from Japanese into Latin by a fucking Dutchman. And all the sense of it—all the meat—that just got lost in translation.

“So this is the gospel according to Fanke, which he posted on the Internet because Mt. Ararat’s a fucking long way away. To raise a major demon, you need a sacrifice that’s been dedicated from birth to the powers of darkness. From before birth. It—she—it’s—got to be linked to hell even in the way it was conceived. Spiritually, and physically—prepared—designed—” He groped for words.

“Abbie.”