Vicious Circle

“Marmarauôth marmarachtha marmarachthaa amarda maribeôth,” Fanke said, in a singsong voice. The acolytes came in on the chorus. “Satana! Beelzebub! Asmode!” They threw out their hands, then drew them in and clasped them together in what was clearly a ritual gesture.

“Iattheoun iatreoun salbiouth aôth aôth sabathiouth iattherath Adônaiai isar suria bibibe bibiouth nattho Sabaoth aianapha amourachthę. Satana. Beelzebub. Asmode.” More hand-wringing. An acolyte at Fanke’s left hand held out a candle, and one on his right lit it with a taper. Fanke took it in his left hand without dropping a syllable. “Ablanathanalba, aeęiouô, iaeôbaphrenemoun. Aberamenthô oulerthexa n axethreluo ôthnemareba.” Even though most of the room was already steeped in darkness, the area around us seemed to be getting darker still. I made the mistake of looking up, as though the church had some internal sun that was being eclipsed. Something hung above us in the gloom—something like black smoke, except that it was shot through with branching filaments of deeper dark like veins and capillaries. It was spreading out from a point directly above Fanke’s head, and it was descending toward us. Or rather toward Abbie, who saw it coming and struggled like a fly in a web, her thrashing movements buying her no headway at all. “Please!” she whispered. “Oh please!”

He looks a lot smaller in the medieval woodcuts, but I knew who it was that we were looking at: Asmodeus, coalescing out of the stone in answer to Fanke’s summons. The cold came with him, concentrating around us with such suddenness and intensity that I felt the skin on my face stretch taut.

Fanke held the locket up in his right hand, on a level with the candle flame. “Phôkensepseu earektathou misonktaich,” he said. “Uesemmeigadôn Satana. Uesemmeigadôn Beelzebub. Uesemmeigadôn Asmode, Asmode atheresphilauô.”

He brought his hands together to let the locket meet the flame. Or at least he tried to, but it didn’t come. Abbie dug her heels into nothing and strained backward against him, and although his hand trembled like a struck lightning rod, for a moment it didn’t move. His right arm was the injured one—the one where Peace had shot him—and I’d seen before that his movements with that hand and arm were stiff and jerky. Maybe that gave the desperate ghost some hint of purchase. Whatever it was, Fanke was startled: he turned to glare at her, pulled harder. His wrist spasmed once, twice, and began to move again.

But before the locket and the flame could touch, I thrust out my own hand and put my ring finger into the candle’s corona. Rafi’s hair, which was still tied there in a tight loop knot, singed and sizzled.

“Amen,” I growled, gritting my teeth against the pain so it looked like I was enjoying a private joke.

The piano wire tightened around my throat, and the church exploded.

Twenty-two

THE NOISE WAS LIKE NOTHING I CAN DESCRIBE. IF YOU could imagine a full brass band had packed their instruments with TNT and blown themselves to hell on the final bar of “The Floral Dance,” then you’d be off to a good start. But that was just background noise: the film canisters being ripped into red-hot gobbets that ricocheted off the walls and scythed over our heads as the ignited film spools gushed out a geyser of flame and gas that expanded too fast for them to get out of its way.

It was Asmodeus’s scream that really made the moment special.

Dennis Peace had tried to describe it to me when he told me about what had gone down at the meeting house, but he didn’t do it justice. It was as though you were hearing it through every inch of your skin, on a pitch that made your internal organs vibrate and scream in sympathy: as though you’d become a taut membrane on which broken glass was showering down, playing notes by tearing random holes in you.

I held my hand in the flame for a second or so longer, until the pain became too great to bear. Then I lurched back, which should have been the end of me—but the woman with the piano wire had lost the plot, too, slamming her hands unavailingly to her ears. The wooden chocks on either end of the wire fell free, and their weight made the wire bite a little more deeply into my throat, but the sensation was drowned out in the all-over-body migraine effect of Asmodeus’s bellowed pain and rage.