Jana’s mouth was still working, her eyes hooded and dark. Whatever magic she was trying to work, she couldn’t get the words past each wet, sucking breath. She was still looking at me when her head finally flopped lifelessly to the side. Blood welled across the carpet from under her weight, saturating the floor, her clothing, threatening to pool around my feet.
I barely made it into her en suite in time. I stumbled to my knees and threw up, retching until I garbled. That was it: the last straw. I couldn’t do this. I punched the wall ahead of me. There was no strength in it. I could feel the clothes floating on my naked skin, my hands squirming in the gloves, and there was a second’s pause before my heaving started again, every muscle in my body rebelling at the mingled, sickening smell of lilies and blood.
Through it all, I knew there was something I had to do, but I coughed and choked until nothing was left. Only once I stopped being sick did I remember, hazily, what’d I’d come here for in the first place. Vincent. And GOD help me, the police. The police would be here any minute.
Panic urged me to my feet. Vincent. My mouth was burning, a sensation barely relieved by cold water from the tap. Before I left the bathroom, I swilled and spat until I could no longer taste anything in my mouth.
“I did it,” I rasped. “Kutkha. Magic.”
The wraithlike weight of my Neshamah coiled around me in reply, a consoling and weighted presence. It didn’t help much. I felt… dirty. Touched by filth. Jana hadn’t gotten what she wanted, but I felt no triumph at having bested her. My stomach trembled again, but nothing was left to vomit up. I rubbed my hands on my thighs, composed what was left of me, and got back to my feet.
There was a stairwell down to a basement in the sparkling clean kitchen, a plain door with peeling magenta paint and a matte-black circle which contained the eye and cross symbol I had seen in my dream. The air inside the next room was fetid, tropically humid, and smelled powerfully of living plants and rotten meat. I fumbled at the wall inside for a light switch, and flipped it up. Three blue lights flickered on overhead, and then rows of grow lights illuminating a veritable jungle of plants. Marijuana, Angel’s Trumpets, swamp lilies. The scent of decay was powerful, and there were cages about: heavy, roughly welded iron cages big enough for a man. A goat bleated in alarm as my footsteps scuffled on the concrete.
“Let me out of here, you crazy bitch! Hey!” a reedy man’s voice cried out from somewhere deep inside.
I pushed on past the cage with the goat. The cage stacked on top of it had another one, dead, its tongue lolling from its rotting mouth. The pair of cages sat by a shoddily made door. I stopped in the entrance to assess the interior, my hair and clothing plastered to my body with sweat.
The small room beyond was lit by studio lamps, the floor almost wholly taken up with a Goetic summoning circle. The primary figure—the circle and triangle—were lovingly drawn on the whitewashed floor with thick permanent marker, half-filled in with chalk. A thin, unshaven, unkempt man was bound off to one side in a stress position, tied with ropes to a thick bamboo rods that held him like a rack. He was shorter than me, which is saying something—only around five feet tall.
“Who… The fuck are you?” Vincent was gray with shock, shaking, his hair a wet and bloodied mess. His skin had been carved with symbols from chest to beltline.
“Later.” I went to him, dropped to my knees, and sawed at the ropes with my knife. “I’ll get you out of here.”
“Oh. Wonderful.” Vincent grinned, and then his eyes glazed over and he fainted, sagging like a doll against his bondage.
I freed him, laid him out, and looked over his injuries. Other than some deep bruises and the carvings, he looked to be sound: just dehydrated, shocked, and exhausted. I left him on his side and searched around the room. There were no tools in here. Some instinct drove me back out into the greenhouse area. Somewhere in here, I would find answers. Somewhere in here was the heart.
In the farthest reaches of the basement was a plain wooden trapdoor set unobtrusively into the floor. It opened up into a small square cellar that smelled powerfully of incense and formaldehyde. My nose wrinkled as I dropped down the ladder leading in, looking from one thing to the next. The first thing I saw was her altar—or at least, what I supposed was an altar. It was a square black cube table with nothing on it. An eye and cross symbol had been painted on the wall overhead, and I was fairly certain it was rendered in old blood.
Two of the four walls had bookshelves. One actually did hold books: the other carried a collection of skulls. I counted several humans, three cats, a dog, rabbit, and a deer. They had been glazed with amber, a hazed crust of sap over the bone that stained it red.
The fourth wall was home to Jana’s desk. Unlike the altar, it was stacked with immaculately clean notebooks. Each one was bound in white leather. Aware that the cops were likely to turn up within minutes, I took an edgy seat and freed the oldest and newest books from the stack. Jana’s older book, dated five years ago, was full of strikingly beautiful cursive. It was mostly an herbal, interspersed with a variety of notes on summoning, conjuration, and tool creation. Her latest grimoire, by contrast, was a chaotic mess. The writing was quick and scratchy, frenetically rendered in block paragraphs which barely linked together. A number of pages had been dedicated to sigil design. The rest, as I turned each page, was full of increasingly bizarre, fractured drawings. An entire page full of mouths with rows and rows of fanged teeth. Bizarre, hulking creatures formed by negative space in otherwise solid pages of ink. There was a short list of what looked like book titles: Phitonis Harmonia, The Wayfarer’s Rite (Listen), and Ars Phitomatrica.
I re-read them, head swimming. As I had with the sigil used to summon… whatever had helped Jana do her dirty work, I felt I could, should know these things. Ars Phitomatrica. The title was powerfully familiar.
Towards the end of the notebook, I settled on the page which had the design of the solar sigil I’d entombed in my freezer. There was only one word of notation for the sigil itself: Puslicker. She had written below it: “To find the champion of the Fruit, we need the Puslickers. They say Manellis have it. Where where WHERE?”
The Fruit of Knowledge, the Fruit of the Tree? I frowned, skimming the rest of her notes. She had not written anything else about the Fruit, but I found the tipping point of her madness in an entry dated roughly eighteen months ago—December 23, 1989. The entry was full of photos that spilled out when I opened the page. Jana at her graduation, Jana with her friends. Everyone’s faces had been cut out, except for her own. I turned back a page, and then another, through lines of grief-stricken, guilt-ridden writing. She had experienced Shevirah when she and her best friend had been in a car accident. She had awoken in a cold white hospital with Hyperion—her Neshamah, I could guess—whispering in her ears. She had murdered her friend.
“She went crazy after she underwent Shevirah?” I spoke aloud, voice high and tight.
“It would seem so.” Kutkha was subdued.
“She lost her mind. This thing, Hyperion—that thing is insane. Are there things that can drive a Neshamah insane?”
For a moment, Kutkha did not reply. He rustled uncomfortably. “There are. But I do not wish to speak of it.”
“Wait, no. You don’t get to flake on me, you shit. Yuri said you were injured.” I had figured he was lying and hadn’t really given it much thought, but now? I opened another book which bulged slightly in the middle. A wave of crushed bees fell out of it onto the desktop, and I dropped it reflexively. “This could have happened to me.”