I stopped at the side of the desk and waited for him to look up from his papers. “Yes, sir?” It was an announcer’s voice, deep, rich and well-modulated.
“Daniel?”
I looked for a reaction. There wasn’t any. The gray eyes remained impassive, almost blank, as though he were looking straight through me. I might have been speaking a foreign language. He waited a few seconds, then said: “Excuse me?”
“You are Daniel,” I said. “That’s your witch name. I want to talk to you.”
I watched his right hand drop below the desk for a moment, then resurface. I figured I had five to ten seconds, and I intended to use every one of them. “You listen good,” I said, leaning toward him until my face was only inches from his. “There’s a little girl dying a couple of hours away from here. If I even suspect you had anything to do with it, I’m going to come down on you. Hard. For starters, I’m going to make sure the stockholders of this bank find out about your hobbies. Then, if that doesn’t make me feel better, maybe I’ll kill you.”
Time was up. I could feel the bank guard’s hand pressing on my elbow. Daniel suddenly raised his hand. “It’s all right, John,” he said, looking at me. “I pressed the button by mistake. Dr. Frederickson is a customer.”
The hand came off my elbow, there was a murmured apology, then the sound of receding footsteps. I never took my eyes off Daniel. He rose and gestured toward an office behind him. “Follow me, please.”
I followed him into the softly lit, richly carpeted office. He closed the door and began to speak almost immediately. “You are to take this as a threat,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper. “I know who you are; your career is familiar to me. I do not know how you know of me; I know of no person who would have dared tell you about me. But no matter. There is absolutely nothing — nothing — you can do to me. But I can… inflict. You will discover that to your surprise and sorrow if you came to trifle with me.”
It was an impressive speech, delivered as it was in a soft monotone. I smiled. “I want to ask a couple of questions. You answer them right and you can go back to changing people into frogs, or whatever it is you do.”
“I will answer nothing.”
“Why did you steal Jim Marsten’s book of shadows?”
Daniel blinked. That was all, but from him I considered it a major concession. “You have a great deal of information, Dr. Frederickson. I’m impressed. Who have you been speaking to?”
“What do you know about the girl? Kathy Marsten?”
His eyes narrowed. “Why?” Suddenly he paled. “Is that the little girl you—”
“She’s dying,” I said bluntly. “Fast.”
His tongue darted out and touched his lips. “What are you talking about?”
I told him. His impassive, stony facade began to crack before my eyes. He ended standing across the room, staring out into the bank’s parking lot. Once I thought I saw his shoulders heave, but I couldn’t be sure. His reaction wasn’t exactly what I’d expected. He asked me about my role, and I told him that, too.
“I will need help,” he said distantly. Then he turned and looked directly at me. “I will need your help. There is no time to get anyone else. We must leave immediately. There are things I must get.”
“Daniel, or Bannon, or whatever you call yourself, what the hell is this all about?”
“Kathy Marsten is my neice,” he said after a long pause. “Becky Marsten is — was — my sister.”
“Then I’d say you have some explaining to do. Do you know why Kathy is dying?”
“I owe you no explanations,” he said evenly. He studied me for a moment, then added: “But I will explain anyway, because the time will come when I will ask you to do exactly as I say, when I say it, with no discussion and no questions.”
“You’re out of your mind. Why should I agree to do that?”
“Because you love Kathy and you want to save her life. In order to do that you and I must touch a dimension of existence the Christians call hell. To do that and survive you will have to do exactly as I say.”
I nodded. I hoped it looked non-commital. “I’m listening.”
Daniel’s words came rapidly now, in an almost mechanical voice. He was obviously a man in a hurry, and I could tell his mind was elsewhere.
“I don’t know the extent of your knowledge about witchcraft,” he said, “but witchcraft is undoubtedly not what you think it is. It is a religion: a very old religion — an Earth religion. The Marstens and the Bannons have practiced witchcraft for generations. You will find witches in every walk of life.”
For a moment I thought I saw him smile. He continued: “Some witches — some magicians, even become bank vice presidents. For most of the Blessed, witchcraft and magic are a means to higher wisdom, toward becoming a better person. But there is a dark side to it, as there is to every other religion. I’m not sure you’re familiar with the Inquisition, not to mention the Salem witch trials where human beings were burned alive.”
He paused, then went on: “In any case, Jim Marsten became interested in the black arts, in demonology, about two years ago. He was warned of the possible consequences to him and to his family. He chose to ignore these warnings. At a certain point I tried to get my sister to leave Jim, but she had already been corrupted by the dreams he had laid out for her. Then I discovered that they intended to try to summon the demon Baliel. That ceremony involves the spiritual sacrifice of a child, and I knew that child would be Kathy.
“I knew there was no way I could reason with them — they were beyond that. But I could stop them, and I did: or I thought I did. I knew there was one place, and only one place, where the ceremony would have been recorded.”
“The book of shadows,” I whispered.
“That’s right. A witch’s holiest book. I took it.”
“How?”
“How I do what I do is not important. Please remember that. What is important is that Jim and Becky apparently tried to proceed without the exact ritual in hand. They paid for it with their lives. Baliel was released into our dimension and he is sucking Kathy’s life away from her.”
It was crazy. Maybe I was going crazy. I heard myself asking: “How do you know you can succeed where the Marstens failed? What is your power? And where does it lie?”
“First, I know the ritual. That is absolutely essential for the exorcism.” Again, there was a fleeting grimace around his mouth that might have been a half smile. “I am a ceremonial magician, Dr. Frederickson. You come from an academic background, and you understand that to move up in your world requires study, perseverance… and talent. The same holds true in mine. If you wish, you may think of a ceremonial magician as a witch with a Ph. D.”
I tried to think of something to say and couldn’t. I’d run out of options: I’d called Dr. Rivera that morning and been told that Kathy was now perilously near death. So I was along for the ride with a ceremonial magician, straddling a nightmare train of terror that I couldn’t stop.
And I knew I was going to do anything the man called Daniel asked me to do.
At exactly twenty minutes of midnight, as instructed, I parked my car across from the hospital and got out. I lifted Bannon’s knapsack from the rear seat, strapped it on my back, then headed across the street. I went around to the back of the hospital and started climbing the fire escape that would take me to Kathy’s room, where I had left Bannon four hours before.