Dunwich: A Novel

PROLOGUE

October 12, 2014

Providence, Rhode Island

Home of Gloria Tibbi

IT WAS HAPPENING AGAIN.

Yes, okay, life would go on as usual. Waking up in the morning. Getting the boys ready for school. Making breakfast. Walking the dog. Going to work at the supermarket. Busy days, endless little details, the distractions of modern life. But it was modern life itself that seemed like a fantasy, a vacation on some tropical isle, compared to the rest of her secret existence: the part she couldn't tell anyone, or they would take her kids away from her for sure. Child Services. It had almost happened before. Before she learned how to keep the door closed between the real world and her world. As if she was an unfit mother. As if she was crazy or a druggie or something. If she talked ... wow. It would ruin her life. All their lives. She was a hostage to the demands of the things that came in the night and spirited her away for their nocturnal ... ministrations. Spirited her away, was as good a description as any for it appealed to her religious nature. Somehow they turned her into a spirit and made her walk through walls and float into the air above her home, her town, her planet.

And it was happening again.

She felt like some kind of call-girl, or a nurse on duty during the night shift at some horror show hospital in Hell. They wrenched her from her bed—her two kids asleep in the next room—and transported her to some other place while she remained frozen, paralyzed, and unable to move or speak. Unable to refuse.

She looked it up. Night terrors, it was called, or sleep paralysis. Very common. Nothing to worry about. Move along.

And then she was nude. Naked, shivering—not with cold, but with anticipation—and flat on her back on a metal table or slab. It was so like how she got pregnant the first time. And the second time. Flat on her back on a slab in the middle of the night as something poked her, prodded her, penetrated her.

That something, though—whatever it was—wasn't remotely human.

Sometimes they would show her a foetus in a jar, being fed nutrients through a transparent tube that pulsed with different colors. And they would indicate it was her foetus. From her egg.

But how ... she tried to ask, with a mouth that could not form words. How was it fertilized? She would get no response. Blank stares, if those eyes could be said to do anything but stare.

She would try again.

"How did this happen? Who fertilized my eggs?"

And then screaming.

Who is the father?

It always ended that way, with her screaming. She would wake up in bed, drenched in perspiration, hands clutching the sheets, only to find herself still naked and trembling and with no idea of where she'd been or how she got back home. She could hear the dog barking somewhere—had she let him out? She never let him out at night—and the kids' room was silent. The kids!

She threw a sheet around herself and—like every other time this happened—raced to her kids' bedroom and looked through the open door. They were sound asleep, twisted in their covers, oblivious to everything, even to the barking dog.

Not for the first time, she wondered at her kids. She knew their father—a useless drunk, now living in another state with another woman, God help her—but still could not help wondering.

I mean, who was their father? Really? Was it my ex-husband? Or ...?

And not for the first time, she let that thought sit where it lay. She turned back to her room, exhausted, and examined herself for the marks.

There they were. In the old days, they would have been called witches' marks and her disappearance into the night air over Providence a witch's flight to the Sabbat. The beings that messed with her body, using it as a kind of incubator for their evil seed, would have been called demons. Incubi. It would have been enough to have her hanged at Salem. No matter that she had a crucifix hanging over her bed and holy water in a bowl near the front door.

She was sore, down there. She stepped into the bathroom and relieved herself, feeling the burning sensation that she knew would dissipate in a few hours. As she sat there, she felt the need for a cigarette even though she had stopped smoking when she became pregnant with her first child, her son Mikey. That had been seven years ago, and little Bobby had followed ten months later. But her nerves were shot. That would go away, too, in a few hours. Or days. That part was never the same.

Then there was the thing that she could never admit, not even to herself. It was the part of the whole experience she pushed furthest from her mind, even as it was happening. She knew if she said it aloud, or thought it straight through, she would be damned. She would go to hell while still alive, no matter that her children needed her. She would surely go to hell.

The part. That part. She knew that even rape victims experienced it, but if they admitted to it in the old days the cops would figure they weren't really raped.

That part. The part about her reaction to the penetration, to the whole experience beginning with the abduction from her home. The fear mingled with sexual feelings she tried to suppress. She knew it was biological, neurological, whatever. She shouldn't blame herself for those feelings. It was natural, even if the circumstances were sickening and vile. And she didn't want to give those ... those things ... the satisfaction of seeing her orgasm so shamelessly in front of them. She didn't want to give them the idea that what they were doing was somehow okay, because it wasn't. No way. And it wasn't like Stockholm Syndrome. Not really. She was a captive, in a sense, sure. They could pick her up and rape her anytime they wanted, so she might as well be their prisoner. She even tried moving, once when Mikey was only two and Bobby was only fourteen months old, but they came for her anyway.

But was it rape? They didn't actually sit on top of her and plow away. It was all very clinical, if obscene. And it seemed as if getting her off was not the actual purpose of the process, only a kind of side effect. It's just that she was so sensitive down there, very orgasm-prone as her ex used to say. She couldn't help it.

She stood up, flushed, and looked at her face in the mirror as she washed her hands. Eyes bloodshot. Cheeks flushed. She looked tired, bedraggled. Older than her thirty-five years.

Maybe it was all in her head. Maybe she was a little psychotic or neurotic or whatever they called it. She couldn't prove anything. She wasn't a danger to her kids.

Her kids.

It was at the back of her mind. She almost forgot about it.

She had sent away for some of those genetic testing kits, the kind they advertise on TV all the time. She got one each for her kids and one for herself. They had to spit into some little tubes and then send them back to the lab. It was expensive on her supermarket salary but she was curious. She only had the briefest ideas about her own ethnic background and almost nothing for sure about her ex. She was some kind of Scot-Irish mixture, she was sure. Maybe a little Portuguese or Italian mixed in. The neighborhood she grew up in was like that, and her parents had died when she was little so she didn't really have a lot of data to work with. The genetic test would help clear up some of that confusion. When it finally turned up.

Why was she thinking about it now? She made a conscious effort to block the idea from her mind. She shook her head as if to clear the information away. She didn't want them to hear what she was thinking about her kids, learn what she was doing. She slapped her hands over her ears as if to keep her thoughts from leaking out of her brain. The thought came to her, unbidden, from that place deep inside her where her most desperate fears were buried:

She didn't want their father to know.

She heard the dog barking again, its unmistakably unique squeaky yelp, and got up to go and let him in. She padded down the hallway to the front door when the barking suddenly stopped.

That was when she realized, with a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach, that their dog had died a year ago and was buried in the back yard.

She dropped to her knees, her arms wrapped around her abdomen, and wept softly so her kids wouldn't hear her. What is happening to me? she asked herself.

And why is it happening again?

Same day

Somewhere in Inner Mongolia

The evening meal was simplicity itself.

In the open air in front of the tent a large brass bowl was set over a charcoal flame. Inside the bowl, a hearty broth made from animal bones and scavenged vegetables into which fistfuls of dried chilies had been boiling. Arrayed around the bowl were paper-thin slices of mutton on chipped and cracked porcelain plates, various offal of the sheep similarly sliced, cakes of lamb's blood, and mountains of lettuce leaves, bean sprouts, and bai cai, what Cantonese speakers call bok choy. The diners would pick up pieces of mutton or vegetables or the blood pudding cakes and dip them into the broth, allowing them to cook briefly before lifting them out again with their chopsticks, dipping the cooked ingredient into a small personal bowl of paste made from sesame and other condiments. Each diner was responsible for his own meal this way, cooked the way he liked it. At the end of the meal, the small bowl of sesame paste had become a kind of soup in its own right due to all the dipping of boiled ingredients, and was slurped appreciatively.

Gregory Angell, one-time tenured professor of Asian languages and religious studies at Columbia University, was indistinguishable from the other nomads sitting around the large brass bowl of broth and Szechuan chilies. He was dressed as they were, in a padded cotton coat and a round, fur-lined hat. His cheeks were red from the cold blowing in across the dunes on its way to Beijing where the grains of Gobi Desert sand would dust the streets of the Chinese capital with a fine grit, mixing with the clouds of soot sent up by the belching, coal-fired power stations and the open-air cook stoves on the balconies of a thousand apartment blocks in the city. He was in Mongolia, in a tribal encampment outside Hohhot, and was briefly at peace.

The events that had propelled him to this station in life had been intense and excruciating. Angell was not by nature a man of action, but a man of books and languages and academic study. But he had been sent to a Kurdish refugee camp in Turkey and from there to Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and eventually to Nepal in search of a sacred (or blasphemous) book around which an entire underground cult had been organized. He had risked his life, running from ISIL, the Taliban, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Pakistan's ISI, and God only knew who else, all with elements loyal to a cult named variously after Dagon—a Mesopotamian deity of frightful appetites—or after the great high priest of the cult since ancient times, dread Cthulhu or Kutulu himself, of whom Dagon was a pale avatar. In the process he had been involved with the Yezidi (who were even now in danger of being wiped out by Daesh at Mount Sinjar), the kafiris of Kafiristan or Nuristan, and the Kalashas of Pakistan. Most people in the west didn't even know these groups—and many more like them—existed, even though they hold many secrets necessary for human survival.

He thought back on Fahim, who worked at the Baghdad Museum and who was a Yezidi and in charge of keeping the Book away from the cult, and the young and beautiful Jamila who very nearly channeled the forces of Cthulhu in a dramatic ritual in a secret chamber beneath the Himalayas until Angell himself aborted the rite. Was Jamila even alive? Were any of them alive?

He knew that most of those who had helped him get to that chamber were dead. He had watched them die. Even fabled Jason Miller, the US government's own remote viewer who had used Angell as a stalking horse all over Central Asia in a desperate effort to find and destroy the Book, had died in that miserable cavern.

Miller wanted the Book destroyed. This was a reasonable and logical goal for someone who wanted to see the human race spared the hideous depravities the Book seemed to promise. The Book should have been destroyed.

But Angell could not bring himself to do it.

The first usage of the term holocaust in modern times was employed by the Nazis and it wasn't for what you might think. The first Nazi holocaust was the burning of books, books considered incompatible with the political and racist agenda of the regime. The destruction of a book, any book, was not something Angell could accept regardless of the book's contents. After all, the Great Library of Alexandria had been destroyed by fire, caused by Caesar's troops in 48 BCE. This ancient holocaust had robbed the world of a great many important texts and classical works, and remained an open wound in the literary history of the period. Could Angell do the same, even if it was only one book, and a book so evil that hordes of terrorists and cultists were ready to kill in its name?

In a knapsack made of blue-dyed sheep's wool and dirty white cotton, and wrapped in layers of black silk, Angell guarded the Book that had caused so much misery and so many lives. He had waited as long as he could in the beautiful yet desolate wastes of Mongolia, hoping he could blend in with the tribes and forget all about the Book and its contents and his own tortured history.

But it was seeing the rock, the grey carven stone with its mysterious couplet, revealed by a wind in the dunes of the Singing Sands of the Badain Jaran desert west of Hohhot, that decided his fate for him. He had seen the rock paintings on Mount Mandela in the Yinshan, and the strange temples that were half-Tibetan and half-Mongol, but this rock was far from the mountains and the temples. The singing of the sands had captivated him, and he listened to the booming and droning for a long while, as if in a trance, before realizing that the sliding sands that caused the eerie sounds had revealed a kind of monolith that had been buried beneath them for centuries.

The words were arcane and strange, written in the Mongolian script, the rock older than Genghis Khan. But once translated they were an exact match for the couplet he had seen written on a Baghdad Museum inventory list in a Kurdish language known as Kurmanji when he first began this mission months ago:

That is not dead which can eternal lie

And with strange aeons even death may die.

Fucking Monroe, thought Angell, thinking back on the mysterious, unseen puppet master who had sent him to Turkey because of Angell's ancestry and his knowledge of the Central Asian languages, religions, and peoples. The spy master of all spy masters. A man so old he could have retired twice by now. A man who was still hunting him from one end of the Earth to the other.

Fucking Aubrey, who was his chaperone as far as the Iraq-Iran border and who then cut him loose among the Zoroastrians and the Revolutionary Guard. The man who had seduced him into this plot by appealing to his better nature and to his need for a God. Any God.

And Howard Phillips fucking Lovecraft, who started this whole mess almost a hundred years ago with his damned story about the Angell family and the Cthulhu Cult.

Him, and that book of his nestled safely if sinisterly in Angell's knapsack:

The fucking Necronomicon.

Same day

Lasserre, Ariège

France

At the same moment, but halfway between Providence and Angell's location in Mongolia, Alexander Grothendieck—the undisputed greatest mathematician in the world, now a recluse—was sitting at his home in the Pyrénées in the south of France. He was only eighty kilometers west of Montségur, the famous enclave of the Cathars and site of much speculation concerning the Knights Templar, their mysterious treasure, and the Holy Grail itself. Otto Rahn had been through the region in the 1930s looking for just that artifact. Later, the dreamy-eyed philosopher of alternate history would find himself in the SS, a member of Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. Grothendieck, however, was not a Nazi.

His father had been murdered at one of the camps during the war. Grothendieck and his mother survived the conflict, the young Alexander often living hand to mouth and hiding in the woods. Alexander would come to find solace in mathematics and particularly in algebra: that form of mathematics named after its Persian incarnation: al-Jabr. Al-Khwarizmi and even Omar Khayyam were its main exponents in the eighth and eleventh centuries, respectively. However, algebra really had its roots in ancient Babylon, just as geometry had its roots in ancient Egypt. This difference in approach to the mathematical structure of the world—the algebraic and the geometric—resembles the worldviews of their respective originators, with the Egyptians (the builders of the pyramids) focused on geometry and the Babylonians (focused on the manipulation of numbers and their magical properties) on algebra. It was Grothendieck who created a form of algebraic geometry, a combination of both, that constituted a paradigm shift in the world of mathematics.

It was early afternoon in the Languedoc, and Grothendieck was in the midst of a trance. Years earlier, he had abandoned traditional mathematics—and all of academic society for that matter—for a pursuit of the spiritual, He had filled thousands of pages with complex and virtually incomprehensible theories describing the nature of the universe, the interpretation of dreams, and the characteristics of God. He had a flirtation with Buddhism, with free love, and with theosophies of various types. He was mad, driven, and obsessed. But with what, exactly, no one could tell. The man who had single-handedly revolutionized algebraic theory—again and again over the years—was so deep within the algebra of consciousness that he found himself unable to communicate his thought to anyone else on the planet. Still, he wrote and scribbled manically, creating huge manuscripts that would not see the light of day in his lifetime.

A lifetime that was coming to a close, for he would be dead the following month: the tuberculosis that would kill him already sneaking around the edges of his organs looking for an opening, an unlocked door, a virtual Gate.

It all started for him—this journey away from algebra to alchemy—in April of 1974.

In his notes, he wrote:

1-7 avril 1974: moment de verité, entrée dans la voie spirituelle

April 1-7, 1974: Moment of truth. Entering the spiritual path.

On April 1, 1974 the Ayatollah Khomeini called for the creation of an Islamic Republic of Iran.

On April 5, 1974 the World Trade Center in New York City was officially opened.

On April 7, 1974, Grothendieck wrote that he entered the divine with his introduction to Nichiren Buddhism.

Forty years later, he is isolated in a small house in a tiny village in the south of France, only ninety minutes from both Montségur to the east and the Spanish border to the south. In that time Iran has become an Islamic republic, and the World Trade Center is no more. Along the way, Grothendieck abandoned traditional Buddhism as well. But not spirituality. Or his version of it, anyway.

Beneath his hand, on a small round table next to his chair, is his study of what he calls mutants.

There are, he insists, exceptional people on the planet who are so unique, so advanced in their thinking, that they can only be considered mutant forms of human life. He includes in this list Freud, Darwin, Walt Whitman, Rudolf Steiner (the founder of Anthroposophy), Gandhi, Teilhard de Chardin, and Krishnamurti, among others. What he does not say—even though the thought haunts him, day and night and especially in his sleep—is the obverse of that theory: that there are exceptional people on the planet who are so unique, so debased in their thinking and depraved in their actions, that they also can be considered mutant forms of human life. He has met some of them. His father died at their hands, certainly, and he himself suffered under the Nazi regime. But there were others, more recent, who frightened him even more.

Like the man who came to see him that day.

Grothendieck was careful not to let people know where he lived. He valued his privacy, and the blessed silence that was his environment. He valued his train of thought, a train that went on for days at a time, and any disturbance of that thought was unbearable. He had his writings, his manuscripts, his blend of philosophy, religion and mathematics, and they represented thoughts at once delicate and robust. Any interference could be disastrous, and leave him annoyed and in a foul mood for days as he desperately tried to recoup what thoughts he had lost.

This time, though, someone had found him. A man who was pleasant enough in appearance but to Grothendieck's inner eye—his psychic sense honed to a needle's sharpness over the decades since his embrace of Buddhist meditation and even earlier, beginning in his escape from the Nazis and his life living rough in the woods—the man harbored within himself a core of darkness that seemed to swallow any residual light emanating from Grothendieck's own heart. It wasn't life that was being sucked away from the mad mathematician, but joy.

Professor Grothendieck? It was a question for politeness, one that masked an impolite certainty.

I was not expecting visitors, Monsieur ...?

You may call me Aubrey.

Grothendieck smiled.

Is this some sort of joke?

Pardon?

Aubrey. It's not your real name, is it?

It was Aubrey's turn to smile.

Whatever do you mean, sir?

Aubrey. The name is a venerable Anglo-Saxon one. From Alberic. It means ‘King of the Elves.’ Are you such a king, my lord?

"Your command of languages is well-known, to be sure. In fact, I do command the allegiance of a number of individuals, Professeur. But I work for another, one even more ... venerable."

I thought as much. There have been others, before you. They have tried to ... what is the word? ... ‘weaponize’ mathematics. They failed.

We do not wish to weaponize mathematics, Professor. We believe that, hidden within your equations, is a profound secret. Something to do with the arrangement of space and time, the identification of a flaw in the arithmetic of consciousness perhaps, and that evil persons may already be aware of this flaw and may be attempting to exploit it.

If you were to repeat that statement to most of my colleagues you would be laughed out of the country. You realize that, don't you?

Of course. But your colleagues have not dabbled in the psychic sciences as you have. They have not received Buddhist initiations or studied Theosophy.

True.

And you alone of all others have abandoned academia and devoted yourself full-time to the study of subjects that would be considered an affront to scientists and mathematicians everywhere. Like the American helicopter engineer, Arthur Young, you abandoned your chosen field in favor of a life spent examining the spiritual. And the paranormal.

You are making me uncomfortable, King of the Elves.

That is not my intention. But the rumor is that you have been covering thousands of pages of manuscript with writings that can only be considered the ravings of a lunatic. Yet we both know that you are no lunatic, and that your manuscripts are not the ravings of one. As the most distinguished and brilliant mathematician on the planet, moreover one who has understood the inner workings of the psyche, your work these past twenty years or more has been to discover and to elucidate a truth far more profound than even pure mathematics can provide.

More profound, yes. But also more frightening. I cannot explain these things to you. You are not a mathematician. You don't have the tools. This is far more complicated than a high school algebra conundrum like the square root of minus one. This goes to the very heart of algebra and geometry, of time and space and the flaws in our measurements of both.

And of the possibility that we humans may exploit these flaws, to travel to distant stars or even other dimensions?

No.

No?

No. Not humans. No.

Same day

Dharamsala

India

The young woman with the penetrating blue eyes sat at the feet of the old monk. Outside the temple the headquarters of the Dalai Lama could be seen: a hive of activity as dignitaries and religious leaders of all faiths scurried in and out, looking for an audience with the head of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile: a title the Dalai Lama had relinquished a few years earlier in order to concentrate more deeply on his religious mission.

The Dalai Lama's role was not without its opposition from other Tibetans, particularly those who reverenced the patron protector deity of the Gelugpa school: Dorje Shugden. The Dalai Lama proclaimed Dorje Shugden to be a demonic spirit, a violent protector who attacked those who mixed Nyingmapa practices with Gelugpa practices. To an outsider, this type of conflict seemed almost supernaturally (if not theologically) obscure, but to those who made offerings to Dorje Shugden their whole lives, the sudden ban on his worship was nothing less than an assault.

The young woman had approached this old monk specifically to learn more about Dorje Shugden. She had a reason for doing so, and since Dharamsala was near enough to Kembalung—the beyul or hidden country she had just left—nearer, anyway, than her lost country, the land around Mosul in Iraq, she decided that learning more about this peculiar deity would enable her to gain more insight into what was happening to her and to her people.

She had made the two thousand kilometer journey partially on foot from the Khembalung Valley of Tibet, heading west, and then managed to hitch a ride on a flatbed truck making its way to the Indo-Nepalese border. It had taken a few weeks, and she was heading in the right direction back towards her home in the refugee camp in Kurdish-controlled Turkey, but she still had many thousands of klicks to go before she could rest.

If ever she could rest.

The images of the secret tomb beneath the mountains—and her fractured memory of spirit possession and violence—haunted her nights and hollowed out her days. She would fall asleep, lulled by the rhythm of the truck's motion, only to jerk awake when she felt the hands of some unspeakable being wrapping itself around her soul.

Someone had told her about Dharamsala. And about the Dalai Lama. And about the peaceful religion of Buddhism. So she decided to make her way there after learning that an army calling itself the Islamic State had amassed troops around her sacred mountain, Sinjar, and was threatening to execute her entire race. After seeing what she had seen at Kembalung, she knew that she needed more than the answers politicians and generals would give her. If a spirit could possess a young woman like herself, what about an entire country?

India was the land of peacocks she saw. This gave her hope, and made her emotions swell with anticipation. After all, her god—Melek Taus—was a peacock. The word melek meant king in the language of the Arabs. He was the Peacock King, although he also was called the Peacock Angel, and some even called him Shaitan or Satan. Melek Taus would be the first being to be welcomed back to Heaven after the Last Days, to be followed immediately by her people, the ones they called Yezidi. This she knew, as surely as she knew her own name.

Jamila.

She made her way to the first temple she saw, a building resplendent in reds and golds and replete with statues of smiling, benevolent beings. She found a monk who could understand her broken English but more importantly could communicate with his mind. The way she did. He seemed to understand her in a way that even Fahim could not, although Fahim did his best when he was around her.

From the Tibetan monk she learned of Dorje Shugden. He was a gyalpo, a fierce warrior god of South Tibet who was the being who possessed the Nechung Oracle, the State Oracle of Tibet. The Dalai Lama had forbidden anyone to worship this being, who was considered demonic and difficult to control except by the Oracle. Something about this situation resonated with her: a strong, powerful, even violent supernatural being who was considered evil but at the same time was prized for its ability to see the future. Dorje Shugden possessed the State Oracle the same way another Being—a High Priest of an ancient race—possessed her. Except the Being she knew as Kutulu did not possess her to predict the future but to use her as a Gate into this dimension, into this World.

But if the Dalai Lama could control Dorje Shugden, then maybe she could learn how to control Kutulu.

For his part, the old monk recognized that the young woman before him was a kuten: what the Tibetans call a material basis for the possessing spirit. A kuten for Kutulu, then. He understood that her barbaric pronunciation probably was meant in the Tibetan language to be kusulu: the spirit of a dead shaman. He was therefore afraid for her, fearful that such a malicious and malevolent demon, a refugee from one of the Bön hells certainly, would use such a pure vessel as this girl as a way of wreaking destruction all around her and of eventually destroying her mind.

He had no idea.

Same day

New Orleans

NOPD

Cuneo, the homicide detective of African-Italian ancestry, sat at his desk and stared at the photos in front of him. It was a case that unofficially was considered closed, not because they had found the perp but because the circumstances were so weird that no one was willing to proceed any further with it. A subterranean vault in the Ninth Ward with two corpses tied to a metal pole in the middle: the centerpiece of what appeared to be a Faraday Cage. Strange diagrams painted on the walls. A psychotic old lady with a library full of grimoires and a pedigree in a generational secret society. Photographs of a man from a hundred years ago: the same man who showed up looking not a day older than his photo warning him off the investigation.

There was no way to solve a case like this using normal police procedures. You had to know other stuff. You had to piece together bits and pieces of voodoo, spirit possession, sick rituals, and old money. He was out of his depth, and almost out of his mind. He had fallen in love with New Orleans after his career in NYPD, and now he was wondering if the honeymoon was over. This wasn't the New Orleans of the French Quarter and Mardi Gras. This was the New Orleans of Hurricane Katrina, dead neighborhoods, and ancient families hiding behind the moss-covered elms on their vast estates and the gator-infested bayous that served as their moats. This wasn't the New Orleans of The Big Easy, but the New Orleans of friggin' Angel Heart.

And he didn't want what happened to Mickey Rourke's face to happen to his.

From beneath the pile of photos—some of them dating back to 1907—and the inspector's files from the investigation of the cult that performed human sacrifice out in the bayous, he withdrew the book he purchased at one of the last actual bookstores in New Orleans that didn't smell like sandalwood incense and John the Conqueror Root. It was a fancy new edition of The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, all hardcover and academically-footnoted. He had seen the same book, in poorly-printed pamphlet form, in every botanica and voodoo supply shop in the Quarter and that didn't help him much. He couldn't make heads or tails out of it. The Latin and Hebrew were bowdlerized messes, and the instructions made no sense. This version cost a lot more, but he trusted that the footnotes and the introductory material would enable him to penetrate the mysteries of just what the hell was taking place behind closed doors and open swamps in the Big Uneasy.

He knew he shouldn't be wasting time on a case no one wanted solved. NOPD was notoriously under-staffed. But every cop had one case that wouldn't go away, no matter how hard he or she tried. This one was Cuneo's, for better or for worse.

He opened the book at a random page and began to read.

Same day

Fort Meade

Monroe had been hitting the bottle a lot lately. He had been abstemious for most of the past few months as the chatter surrounding the Book increased and he was compelled to enlist the aid of Gregory Angell in his attempt to obtain it before the others did. He was sorry to hear of the death of Jason Miller, his prized remote viewer who had gone rogue once he divined the existence of the Book, and of the deaths of the other agents who had made the ultimate sacrifice both in Iran and in Nepal.

And he was especially sorry to have lost Angell himself, a man he had exploited in the most shameful manner and then lost somewhere in the Himalayas. Along with the Book.

So Monroe—ordinarily dapper in dark blue or charcoal grey pinstripe suits, thin, urbane, and with a head of shocking white hair—began to drink. Single malts, it was true, and only after sundown. But it was a steady ritual that dulled his senses. His operation had averted a global catastrophe and vindicated everything he had been working on for decades. He should have been proud. But there was a bad taste in his mouth at the way it had ended.

In his drawer he had the Glock that Angell had surrendered to Aubrey before the trip to Turkey had begun. In a glassine evidence bag he had the bullet that had killed a man known as Adnan, the spook who had accompanied Angell as far as Nepal before he lost his life in a shootout at a hidden tomb. The bullet did not match the Glock, but that was not a problem for Monroe.

In another glassine envelope he had a bullet that was test-fired from the Glock. It would be a simple matter to replace one bullet with the other and thereby pin Adnan's death on Angell. It was a fall-back option, in case they needed Angell again. Something to hold over him.

Because, really, Angell still had the Book. The one that had started this whole mess so long ago. Monroe knew that Angell had not destroyed the Book. Angell was a scholar. A reader. A lover of books. He could no more destroy a book—any book—than a drunk could empty a bottle of whiskey down the kitchen sink.

That was the reason no one had heard from Angell since those events in Nepal. He had become the next Keeper of the Book. Find Angell, and you find the Book.

Find Angell, and you find the Necronomicon.

So, Monroe said aloud, to himself. Let's find Angell.

BOOK ONE

The classical method of making the homunculus is to take the fertilized ova of a woman and to reproduce as closely as may be, without the uterus, the normal conditions of gestation therein.

—Aleister Crowley, Of the Homunculus: A Secret

Instruction of the Ninth Degree

But know this: that which is received in the matrix through unnatural works tends towards becoming a monster and a freakish growth. Also, though it may go inside again, that which has contact with the air is no longer a seed, but a materia homunculi.

—Paracelsus, Liber de Homunculis

She turned away, not wanting to see.

Those eyes! Like an animal's, a tiger's, not like a human being's!

He wasn't a human being, of course. He was—some kind of a half-breed.

—Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby

CHAPTER ONE

MOST PEOPLE THOUGHT HARRY had the worst possible job at NSA. He sat in a small room—his own office, at least—in a sub-basement at Fort Meade with a powerful computer that was protected by multiple layers of security and a door that had three different locks: one was a keypad lock, one used fingerprint recognition and the other was iris recognition. All three had to be employed in a precise order which changed every day. You would think he had the nuclear launch codes in there. He didn't. All he had was porn.

Harry's job involved porn analysis. And not just any porn. There were other analysts who did that type of grunt work, using specialized algorithms to go through millions of digitized images to detect embedded code in the odd pixel. It was called steganography, after the father of modern cryptography—the occultist and priest Abbot Trithemius—and his seminal work, Steganographia. There were indications that Al-Qaeda used this method to communicate secretly with its members worldwide. That was probably an urban legend, but considering how much porn was discovered at Osama bin Laden's bunker in Abbottabad it was not that far-fetched.

Harry, though, was not examining just any kind of porn. His specialty was kiddie porn.

There was a booming industry in images of young girls (mostly girls) under the age of 15. While the most heinous of the images involved nude girls and girls performing sexual acts with grown men, there was a secondary market in the distribution of images of young girls dressed in swimsuits as well as in school uniforms and sleepwear: images that could not be considered x-rated, but which many countries had declared pornographic nonetheless. The girls were posed provocatively, as if they knew precisely what they were doing and the type of reaction they wanted to provoke. Girls as young as nine or ten—and many even younger—were exploited this way, with professional production quality lighting, sets, clothing, props, etc. These girls originated from Eastern Europe and Russia for the most part, with a large Japanese contingent as well (these images were not considered illegal in Japan until recently, and even then the ban has not been strictly enforced).

Harry was involved in the analysis of images and video captured from sites specializing in kawaii (cute) and imouto (little sister): Japanese versions of borderline child porn. The girls who pose in these photos and video display no other talents than sitting, standing, walking, and laying down in a variety of costumes with innocent and not-so-innocent expressions. They would age out of this industry by the time they were sixteen or seventeen. For that reason, the websites advertised them as U15, or under 15. In Japan, the industry was above-ground and huge, with devoted fan bases, multimedia packages, collectible DVDs, and the like. In Eastern Europe, the industry was just as large but mostly underground, accessible only through the dark web but occasionally leaking out into easily available websites that advertised child models: sites that were shut down almost as quickly as they went up.

Harry was looking for embedded code in these images, like his counterparts upstairs, but he had another agenda as well. Some of the girls used in these sites were products of a human trafficking ring that had tentacles within several organized crime families as well as with some kind of macabre cult of devil worshippers. Or something. That there was a Yakuza connection to the Japanese sites was beyond doubt, but there were hints at a Chechen Mafia link to the Eastern European sites and that is what made his superiors nervous. The possibility of a link to jihadist terror groups could not be ignored.

Harry himself was something of a womanizer. Everyone seemed to know that about him. It was as if he went overboard trying to prove that he wasn't stimulated by the images he trolled and deliberately went after women who were older than he was. This was getting more difficult every year, since Harry was already over forty and showing every minute of his age. The last thing Harry wanted to hear, though, was that he was robbing the cradle. That phrase had very different implications for someone in his line of work.

The images he was working with that day had already been analyzed by the experts in terms of embedded code. What he was looking for was something quite different, something that would be overlooked by your garden-variety pervert.

He paid close attention to electrical faceplates, for instance. These were dead give-aways as to the geographic location where the photos were taken. Every country seemed to have its own version of electrical outlet, and Harry knew them all. Some countries, like China, often had two or three different types of outlets in the same room. He could tell at a glance if a photo was taken in Japan or Ukraine, England or somewhere in the United States. The grounded three-prong outlets were usually the easiest to identify.

Then there were the magazines, books, etc. Some of them were too easy. If they had Cyrillic lettering, Harry would analyze them and determine if he was looking at Russian, Ukrainian, perhaps something from Central Asia, etc. There were French, Italian, Polish, Czech publications in some of the photos. This enabled some cross-checking with known child trafficking and international pedophile rings, always keeping in mind that another task of his was to determine when a given photo was taken. Sometimes he only got them when they were already two or three years old, and his job was made that much more difficult.

Today, however, he had noticed something else and this is what he was concentrating on. He lost track of time as he raced through image after image, sometimes loading a video file and going through it frame by frame. The pictures of young girls in swimsuits had ceased to distract him long ago. He had gotten over his disgust at how they were being exploited because it didn't do them, or him, any good. His brief was to isolate the traffickers and their channels, and this he was very good at doing. Today, though, he spotted an anomaly that nagged at him. Something else was going on here.

There it was again. Harry stopped and enlarged the image in front of him. It was of a young blond girl, probably Russian or Ukrainian, maybe Czech. She was pretty well-known on the dark web and went by a variety of names, such as Amber or Danielle. She could not have been more than thirteen when her most famous photos were taken, but her eyes told a story that was much older. She was wearing a two-piece swimsuit and was posed provocatively resting on her stomach on a beach towel, her eyes looking at you over her shoulder in what would have been an unmistakable invitation from an older woman.

The bottom half of her suit was pulled down just enough to reveal part of a tattoo. This is what had grabbed Harry's attention.

He printed out the photo and put it with a few others he had been collecting the past week. All of different girls, but all of the same tattoo.

The girls in this file ranged in age from about ten to about fifteen, according to Harry's practiced eye. Some were Asian, one or two were Latina, and at least three were Eastern European. This kind of multi-ethnicity is what raised red flags for Harry, for they all sported what had to be the same sort of gang or organized crime symbol. If they were branded by the same group, that meant he was looking at an international gang of child abusers that stretched across continents.

The websites that specialized in this material usually kept to a single race. The Japanese had their own kawaii and imouto sites and boasted much higher production values than those from Eastern Europe. There was virtually no similarity of style in the final media—but the identical tattoo was evidence that the girls were being trafficked by a single source.

Porn stars had a lot of tattoos, generally. Some were the inevitable Chinese characters, others were phrases in Latin or Spanish. There were bear paw tattoos, tiger paw tattoos, scorpions, barbed wire, infinity symbols, cartoon characters ... some of the Asian porn stars even had full color dragons, usually on their backs, but now increasingly on the rest of their bodies. Tattoos were becoming highly visible throughout the pornographic world, in inverse proportion to disappearing pubic hair it seemed.

But not where the kids were concerned. For the most part, the material Harry was looking at stopped short of out-and-out porn. This was the area that some sites called child erotica: images of children that did not involve adults and which did not include any overt sexual contact or display. Some jurisdictions did not prosecute possession of child erotica, although that was changing as the laws began to catch up to the possibilities offered by high-speed internet, virtual private networks or VPN, and anonymous browsers like Tor. There was a rage of controversy over what constituted child porn versus child erotica, but the general attitude among law enforcement was that any image that focused on the bodies of young girls (or boys) constituted exploitation and abuse regardless of whether or not the bodies were naked. It wasn't hard to understand: why were the children being photographed that way, in seductive positions that imitated those of adult women, if the photographers were not going for sexual stimulation? And who knew if the children in the photographs were not being trafficked or subject to much greater abuse off-camera?

This tattoo, however, was like nothing he had ever seen in child erotica before.

Normally, those girls were not tattooed or otherwise marked. The pedophiles that went in for this sort of thing were usually turned off by anything that suggested the girls were not pure or virginal. A tramp stamp would be a definite turn off. But in these cases the tattoo was small and innocent-looking, about the size of a quarter, like those temporary markings little kids used to get on wax paper from cereal boxes.

It was in two colors. The most prominent color was a dark shade of pink and it was used for a floral image, like pink roses—feminine and childish—an overlay on the base image which was in a darker color ink, a shade of blue, and which was much more sinister.

Harry had seen something like it before, in an intelligence briefing that had been conducted by that old guy a few months back. What was his name? Madison ... Moriarty ... no, Monroe. That was it. Monroe.