Simon shuddered slightly at the name and drew the car rug more closely about his shoulders. ‘I met him in Paris,’ he said, ‘at the house of a French banker with whom I’ve sometimes done business.’
Castelnau!’ exclaimed the Duke. ‘The man with the jagged ear. I knew last night that I had seen that ear somewhere before, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall where.’
Simon nodded quickly. ‘That’s rightCastelnau. Well, I met Mocata at his place, and I don’t quite know how it started, but the conversation drifted round to the Quabalah and, as I had been soaking myself in it at the time, I was naturally interested. He said he had a lot of books upon it and suggested that I might like to visit the house where he was staying and have a look through them. Of course I did. Then he told me that he was conducting an experiment in Magic the following night, and asked if I would care to be present.’
‘I see. That’s how the trouble started.’
‘Yes. The experiment was quite a harmless affair. He made certain ritual conjurations with the four elements, Fire, Air, Water and Earth, then told me to look into a mirror with him. It was an old Venetian piece, a bit spotted at the back but otherwise quite ordinary you know. As I watched, it clouded over with a sort of mist, then when it cleared again I could no longer see my reflection in it, but a sheet of newspaper instead. It was the financial page of Le Temps giving all the quotations of the Paris Bourse, which sounds pretty prosaic I suppose, but the queer part is that this issue was dated three days ahead.’
De Richleau stroked his lean face with his slender fingers. I saw a similar demonstration in Cairo once,’ he commented gravely. ‘But on that occasion it was the name of the new Commander-in-Chief, who had only been appointed by the War Office in London that afternoon, which appeared in the mirror. You took a note of some of the Bourse quotations I suppose?’
‘Um. The list wasn’t visible for more than ten seconds then the mirror clouded over again and went back to its normal state, but that was quite long enough for me to memorise the stocks I was interested in, and when I checked up afterwards they were right to a fraction.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Mocata offered to instruct me in the attainment of the knowledge and conversation of my Holy Guardian Angel as the first step on the road to obtaining similar powers myself.’
‘My poor Simon!’ The Duke made an unhappy grimace. ‘You are not the first to be trapped by a Brother of the Left Hand Path who is recruiting for the Devil by such a promise. If you had known more of Magic you would have realised that it is proper to pass through the six stages of Probationer, Neophyte, Zelator, Practicus, Philosophus and Dominus Liminis before, as an Adept Inferior after many years of study and experience, you would be qualified to take the risk of attempting to pass the Abyss.
Besides, there are no precise rules for attaining the knowledge and conversation of one’s Holy Guardian Angel. It is a thing which each man must work out for himself and no other can help one to it. Mocata invoked your Evil Angel, of course, to act a blasphemous impersonation while your Holy Guardian wept impotent tears to see the terrible danger into which you were being drawn.’
‘I suppose so, although, of course, I couldn’t know that at the time. Anyhow, I had to go back to London a few days later, and I was so impressed by that time that I asked Mocata to let me know directly he arrived, because he spoke of coming over. He turned up a fortnight later and rang me up at once to urge me to unload a lot of stock that he knew I was carrying. I had faith in it myself but in view of what I’d seen in his mirror I took his tip and saved myself quite a packet, because the market broke almost immediately after.’
‘Was that when you asked him to go and live with you?’ inquired the Duke.
‘Yes. I suggested that he should stay with me while he was in London because he had no suitable place in which to practise his evocations at his hotel. He moved over to St. John’s Wood then and after that we used to sit up together in the observatory pretty well every night. That’s why I saw so little of you during that time. But the results were extraordinaryutterly amazing.’
‘He gave you more information which governed your financial transactions, I suppose.’
‘Yes, but more than that. He foretold the whole of the Stravinsky scandal. I’m not a poor man as you know, but if I hadn’t been forewarned about that, it would have darn nearly broken me. As it was, I cleared every single share in the dud companies before the storm broke and got out with an immense profit.’
‘By that time you had begun to dabble in Black Magic I imagine?’
Simon’s dark eyes flickered away from the Duke’s for a moment, then he nodded. ‘Just a bit. He asked me to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards one night, and I was a bit unhappy about it but… well, I did. He said that since I wasn’t a Christian anyhow, no harm could come to me from it.’
‘It is horribly potent all the same,’ the Duke commented.
‘Perhaps,’ agreed Simon miserably. ‘But Mocata is so devilish glib and according to him there is no such thing as Black Magic anyhow. The harnessing of supernatural powers to one’s will is just Magicneither black nor white, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘Tell me about this man.’
‘Oh, he’s about fifty, I suppose, bald-headed, with curious light blue eyes and a paunch that would rival Dom Gorenflot’s.’
‘I know,’ agreed the Duke impatiently. ‘I’ve seen him. But I mean his personality, not his appearance.’
‘Of course, I forgot,’ Simon apologised. ‘You know for weeks now I hardly know what I’ve been doing. It’s almost as though I had been dreaming the whole time. But about Mocata: he possesses extraordinary force of character, and he can be the most charming person when he likes. He’s clever of course amazingly so, and seems to have read pretty well every book that one can think of. It’s extraordinary, too, what a fascination he can exercise over women. I know half a dozen who are simply “bats” about him.’
‘What can you tell me of his history?
‘Not much, I’m afraid. His Christian name is Damien and he is a Frenchman by nationality, but his mother was Irish. He was educated for the Church. In fact, he actually took Orders, but finding the life of a priest did not suit him, he chucked it up.’
De Richleau nodded. ‘I thought as much. Only an ordained priest can practise the Black Mass, and since he is so powerful an adept of the Left Hand Path, it was pretty certain that he was a renegade priest of the Roman Church. But what more can you tell me? Every scrap of information which you have may help us in our fight, because you must remember, Simon, that you have only achieved a very temporary security. The battle will begin again when he exercises his dominance over you to call you back.’
Simon shifted his position on the stones and then replied thoughtfully. ‘He does the most lovely needlework, petit point and that sort of thing you know, and he’s terribly fastidious about keeping his plump little hands scrupulously clean. As a companion he is delightful to be with except that he will smother himself in expensive perfumes and is as greedy as a schoolboy about sweets. He had huge boxes of fondants, crystallised fruits and marzipan sent over from Paris twice a week when he was at St. John’s Wood.
‘Ordinarily he was perfectly normal and his manners were charming, but now and again he used to get irritable fits. They came on about once a month and after he had been boiling up for twenty-four hours, he used to clear out for a couple of days and nights. I don’t know where he used to go to at those times, but I ran into him one morning early, when he had just returned from one of these bouts, and he was in a shocking state : filthy dirty, a two days’ growth of beard on his chin, his clothes all torn and absolutely stinking of drink. It looked to me as if he hadn’t been to bed at all the whole time but had been wallowing in every sort of debauchery down in the slums of the East End.