“So maybe you kiss funny.” Theta smirked. She loved the way Henry always found some picky reason to send his beaus packing.
“I met you on the street in Ohio. We were married at the Kansas state fair. You left me lonely in Florida. Now I’m in a state of despair….” Henry sang.
“Someday, Henry DuBois, you’re gonna meet a fella who sends you, and you won’t know what to do,” Theta teased.
The stage manager reappeared, clapping for attention. “All right, everyone. The Ba’al number from the top. Places, please. Miss Knight, that means you, too.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Wally.” She smiled as sweetly as a show poster for the glorified, all-American Ziegfeld girl just before dumping her second cigarette into Wally’s fresh cup of coffee.
THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE
Evie and Jericho sat at a long table with stacks of books, police reports, drawings, and assorted papers before them. Jericho had lit a fire in the library’s massive stone fireplace. It crackled and spit as it bit into the dry wood. They’d been at it for an hour, searching through musty books for some clue that might shed light on the baffling occult nature of the murder. Evie was tired and irritable. She didn’t want to think about what she’d seen the day before, much less wallow in it. But Will showed no sign of stopping. As he spoke, he walked the perimeter of the room, trailing ash from his cigarette.
“Right. Let’s review: What do we know so far?” Will asked.
“The killer has a fascination with the occult and with religion, possibly the Book of Revelation,” Jericho answered from his perch at the head of the table.
“How do we know this?”
“His note mentions the Harlot, the Whore of Babylon, and the Beast, possibly a reference to the anti-Christ.”
“Indeed,” Will said. “But the passage is only partially from the Bible. They don’t correspond neatly.”
“They’re close,” Jericho said.
“Any librarian or scholar will tell you: Close is not the same as accurate. And don’t forget that there are sigils as well. That’s more indicative of some ceremonial magic or mysticism than of Christianity.” Will indicated the scribblings running around the edges of the note. To Evie they just looked like scribbles—stylized crosses, squiggles, fancy letters, and geometric patterns.
“Now…” Will stubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and immediately reached into his silver cigarette case for another without breaking his stride. “We have a symbol, do we not?”
“A pentacle,” Evie answered.
“Yes. I’ve no artistic skill. Evie, could you…?” Will handed her a nub of chalk fished from an old cigar box full of odds and ends. It took Evie a moment to understand that he expected her to draw the symbol on the slate. “No, you’ve drawn it right side up. Inverted, please.”
With a sigh, Evie erased her five-pointed star and drew it again with the two points up and the one down. “What’s the difference?” she grumbled.
“I’ve told you: Inverted means matter over God. Spirit becoming flesh rather than the other way ’round. And now the snake, if you would, please.”
Evie finished off the sketch. It was a rather nice likeness of a snake, if she did say so herself. Not that Will said thank you. Evie brushed the chalk dust from her hands. “What is the meaning of the snake?”
“Ah. That is a very old symbol, indeed. The snake devouring its tail, no beginning and no end. It exists across time and cultures. We see it in the Norse Jormungandr, the Greek Ouroboros, Gnosticism, the Ashanti, the Egyptian. It represents cycles, the idea that the universe is neither created nor destroyed but returns infinitely, to be played out again and again.”
“The eternal recurrence, Nietzsche calls it,” Jericho said.
“Does that mean I’ll be forced to live through this afternoon again?” Evie joked. No one laughed, and she occupied herself by chalking in a fashionable hat on the snake’s head.
Will grabbed a handful of mints from a dish and jiggled them in his palm as he resumed his pacing, the cigarette still in his other hand. “We may assume, then, that our killer has some passing knowledge of the occult, of magical and religious symbolism, most likely the Book of Revelation. But he references the Whore of Babylon as the ‘Harlot Adorned upon the Sea.’ ” Will paused for a second. “Strange phrase, that. Baffling. Possibly from a religion of the killer’s own making.”
“How do you invent a religion?” Evie asked.
Will looked over the top of his spectacles. “You say, ‘God told me the following,’ and then wait for people to sign up.”
Evie hadn’t given religion much thought before. Her parents were Catholics turned Episcopalian. They attended services on Sunday, but it was all pretty rote, like brushing your teeth and bathing. Just something you did because it was expected. Evie hadn’t always felt that way. For a year after James had died, she’d cupped his half-dollar pendant between her pressed palms and prayed fervently for a miracle, for a telegram that would say GOOD NEWS! IT WAS A TERRIBLE MISTAKE, AND PRIVATE JAMES XAVIER O’NEILL HAS BEEN FOUND, SAFE, IN A FARMHOUSE IN FRANCE. But no such telegram ever arrived, and whatever possible faith might have bloomed in Evie withered and died. Now she saw it as just another advertisement for a life that belonged to a previous generation and held no meaning for hers.
“We haven’t answered the most basic question of all: Why? What purpose is served by these murders?” Jericho asked, jolting Evie from her thoughts.
“He’s a monster,” Evie said. “Isn’t he?”
Will reached into a bowl of bridge mix. He juggled the candies in his hand without eating them. “Indeed. But that’s a what, not a why. Nothing is done without purpose, however twisted that purpose may be.”