Such knowledge was worth more than all of the gold and jewels that the devils could offer. Quitting his job, Roger went into business as a consultant. Using what he learned through his spies, he built his new firm into a major force in the manufacturing community. Knowledge was power, and the demons provided all the knowledge he needed. However, in the rare instances when insider information wasn’t enough to make Roger millions, he used his evil helpers in other ways.
The demons, agents of destruction and chaos, were astonishingly adept at small acts of sabotage. One tiny mistake was usually enough to doom most complex industrial operations. In all cases, the imps cleverly disguised their interference to look like accidents or employee blunders. Again, no one ever suspected supernatural intervention. They all knew better.
Except Roger, who was too busy using his silent, invisible army to get rich. Very, very rich.
Tonight, he planned to try his most ambitious summoning spell ever. It came from the final chapter of The Lemegeton, a rare magical text known as The Lesser Key of Solomon. According to the book, the conjuration raised one of the High Lords of Hell, a being of immeasurably greater power than any Roger had thus summoned. It sounded risky, but he felt it was worth the gamble. Despite all his newfound wealth, Roger was greedy for more.
One small detail puzzled him. His computer printout emphasized a much different pronunciation of the demon’s name from the one commonly accepted. According to the machine, the variation was the correct title of the beast. That explained why most sorcerers had never been able to raise the creature from the pit. For a spell to work, every word and syllable had to be exactly correct.
Roger knew better than to doubt the computer’s offering. The machine never lied. Like himself, it was exact in every detail. After all, he had programmed it. Silently, he mouthed the demon’s name several times, making sure he had the syllables just right.
One last time, Roger checked the lines on the floor. It paid to be careful. As long as his pentagram and magic circle remained intact, the creatures he summoned could not harm him. Three years of dealing with the powers of darkness had made Roger fearless. Nothing frightened him anymore. Or at least, that was what he told himself.
Taking a deep breath, he began the chanting. Three times he repeated the great spell from The Lemegeton. As he spoke, the air trembled with the force of the words pouring from his mouth. There was a feeling of electricity in the air that Roger had never noticed in any of his previous rituals. Though the lights remained unchanged, somehow the room appeared to grow darker. And then the spell was complete.
Roger stared at the being in the center of the pentagram and shook his head in disbelief. This thing did not look anything like the demon prince described in his books of magic. All of his previous summonings had been hideous abominations, warped twisted hideous mockings of life. The being inside the circle appeared human.
It resembled a short, elderly man, crippled and bent with age. The creature stood perhaps five feet tall but was so badly crouched over, like a hunchback, that its hands almost touched the floor. Completely hairless, with skin the color and texture of aged parchment, the being wore a dark blue tunic and wood sandals. A large hook nose and pointed chin gave the creature a vulturelike appearance. Not until it turned and stared at him across the circle did Roger know he had not made a mistake.
Monstrous eyes burned with an inner yellow fire, harsh and unblinking, in the light. Seen directly, the being’s face faintly resembled that of a monstrous jungle cat. “Where am I?” the demon whispered, looking around the room. It even sounded human. “When am I?”
Roger saw no harm in answering the question. “1997,” he said, “just outside San Francisco, California.”
Then, remembering the correct procedure, he named the demon and demanded its service.
The creature laughed. “You know my earthly name, mortal. Few dare pronounce it. No matter. Such puny binding spells mean nothing to me. Nations quail at my fury. I am not yours to command.”
Roger grimaced in annoyance. He should have realized that someday he would run into this problem. Many demonic titles in the Bible originated in other sources. They were corruptions of names drawn from older civilizations’ religions. Instead of raising a devil from the pits of Hell, by using the correct pronunciation of its name he had summoned forth a demigod from ancient history.
All of Roger’s magic depended on Christian tradition. None of it meant anything to his captive. It came from a time before Christ walked the Earth. The creature was not subject to the rules of sorcery Roger practiced. Only the magic circle and pentagram, whose origins were lost in ancient prehistory, kept the creature imprisoned.
“Release me,” said the crouching man, as if sensing his captor’s plight. “Or suffer my wrath. The Lord of the Lions is not yours to command.”
The thing waved one gnarled hand in the air. Blue sparks crackled between its fingers. Roger gulped and tried to think of a banishing spell. Sometimes being exact had its drawbacks. He was not very good at improvising.
A minute passed. Roger stood motionless, his thoughts racing through all the mystic lore he had studied in the past few years, trying to come up with a way out of this fix. Meanwhile, the crouching man paced back and forth in the pentagram, softly muttering threats that Roger tried to ignore. It was a stalemate of sorts. Roger couldn’t send the demigod back to the outermost dark, but neither could the being escape from the prison in which it was trapped.
Being eminently practical and depressingly materialistic, Roger finally settled on the only possible course of action. He would leave the room and then seal it closed forever. Maybe even fill the outer chamber with concrete for additional security. The creature he summoned would remain trapped inside the pentagram for the foreseeable future, unable to cause any harm. Roger could continue his work elsewhere, exercising a good deal more caution in his selection of demons.
He was turning to leave when the earthquake struck.
It wasn’t much of a quake, barely registering on the Richter scale. Dishes rattled, dogs howled, and a few VCRs clicked on for no reason. Other than that, most people looked up from whatever they were doing, hesitated for an instant waiting for worse, then settled back to their normal activities.
In Roger Quinn’s subbasement, a little more than a mile from the center of the quake, the concrete floor growled and shifted. It moved less than a hundredth of an inch. Barely enough to send a hairline crack running directly through the center of the magic circle.
Roger blinked in astonishment. The threatening presence no longer stood in the pentagram. Rather, it crouched at Roger’s side. Fingers cold as ice clenched him by the elbow.
“Come, my young friend,” said the Lord of the Lions, a ruthless edge to his voice. “We have much to discuss.”
Unblinking eyes, bright yellow like a cat’s, glowed with inner fire. “I want to hear all about this modern world. You have much to tell me—concerning war, plague, pestilence, death, and destruction. And… especially… about the gods you worship.”
1
Standing alone in the elevator, Jack Collins pulled the classified ads from his back pocket. For the tenth time that day, he studied the black-bordered notice he had circled the night before. As the lift silently headed upward to the thirty-fourth floor, Jack carefully searched for the hidden catch in the wording, trying to find a loophole he knew had to exist. There had been too many other ads, too many other disappointments for him not to be suspicious.