The Gates of Sleep

“We might as well salvage what we can,” Arachne said, with grudging resignation. “Tomorrow I’ll find replacements. I’ll try, at any rate.”

“We’re using up the available talent, Mater,” Reggie pointed out. “It’s going to be hard to find orphans who can paint who are also potential magicians—”

She felt a headache coming on, and gritted her teeth. She couldn’t afford weakness, not at this moment. “Don’t you think I know that?” she snarled. “Of all the times for this to happen—it could take days to find replacements, they probably won’t be ideal and—” She stopped, took a deep breath, and exerted control over herself. “And we can burn some of the magic we salvage off these three to help us find others. We might as well; it’ll fade if we don’t use it.”

“True enough.” Reggie led the way this time, but not out the door. Instead, a hidden catch released the door concealed in the paneling at the back of the office, revealing a set of stairs faced with rock, and very, very old, leading down. “After you, Mater.”

They each took a candle from a niche just inside the door, lit it at the gas-mantle, and went inside, closing the door behind them. The stairs led in their turn to a small underground room, which, if anyone had been checking, would prove by careful measuring to lie directly beneath the infirmary.

At the bottom of the stairs was a landing, and another door. Arachne took one of the two black robes hanging on pegs outside the door to this room, and pulled it on over her street clothing. Only when Reggie was similarly garbed did she open this final door onto a room so dark it seemed to swallow up the light of their candles.

She went inside first, and by feel alone, lit the waiting black candles, each as thick as her wrist, that stood in floor-sconces on either side of the door. Light slowly oozed into the room.

It was a small, rectangular room, draped in black, with a small altar at the end opposite the door; it had in fact been a chapel, a hidden Roman Catholic chapel that dated back to the time of the eighth Henry, before it became what it was now.

It communicated with an escape tunnel to the river—the doorway now walled off, behind the drapery on the right—and its existence was the reason why Arachne had built this factory here in the first place. It wasn’t often that one could find a hidden chapel that was both accessible and had never been deconsecrated.

It still was a chapel—but the crucifix above the altar was reversed, of course. This place belonged to another form of worship, now.

Arachne went to the wall where a black-painted cupboard waited that held the black wine and the special wafers, while Reggie readied the altar itself. She smiled to herself, in spite of their difficulties; if it was rare to find a chapel of the sort needed for a proper Black Mass, it was even rarer to find someone who was willing to go through the seminary and ordination with the express purpose of being defrocked just so he could celebrate it.

Clever Reggie had been the one to think of going to the Continent and lying about his age, entering a Catholic seminary at the age of fifteen, being ordained at eighteen—and being defrocked in plenty of time to pass his entrance examinations and be accepted at Cambridge with the rest of the young men his age. It had taken an extraordinary amount of work and effort. But then again, Reggie had enjoyed the action that had gotten him defrocked quite a bit. Enough that he hadn’t minded a bit when it had taken him several tries to actually be caught in the act by the senior priest of his little Provence parish.

He had made quite certain there could be no forgiveness involved. Bad enough to be caught inflagmnte delicto with a young woman of the parish. Worse, that the act took place in the sacristy, with her drunk and insensible. But when the young woman was barely pubescent—and feeble-minded—and especially put in his charge by her trusting parents—and to cap it all with defiance of the priest, saying boldly that it was no sin, since the girl wasn’t even human—well.

The old man had excommunicated him there and then, and had gone the extraordinary step of reporting his behavior to Rome to have his judgment reinforced with a papal decree.

Had all this happened by accident, it would have been impossible to hush up, and would have ruined Reggie.

But he and Arachne had been planning it from the moment he was old enough to understand just what it was that his mother was doing in her little “private bower.” He had gone to France under an assumed name. No one ever knew he had even left England.

As for Arachne, she had been planning to somehow find a true partner from the moment she found those old books at the sale of the contents of a Plymouth townhouse.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and savored the memory of that moment. Those books—they might have been waiting for her. It had only been chance that led her to be in Plymouth that day, to go down that street to encounter a sale in progress. Had her parents known what she’d brought home, hidden among the poetry books, they’d have died from horror. Or else, they’d never have believed, magicians though they were, that anything like the Black Mass truly had existed, far less that their daughter, their pitied magicless daughter, was learning how to steal what she had not been born with.

That Reggie was only too happy to fall in with her plans had been the keystone that had allowed her to realize her plans in a way that fulfilled all her hopes and the wildest dreams she had dared to imagine.

And this had brought them both prosperity built from the beginning on the power drained from her poisoned and dying paintresses; power that no Elemental Mage would ever detect, for it was so far outside the scope of their experience.

She had gone beyond anything described in those books, in no small part because the Satanists who had written them had been so lacking in imagination. Yes, the potential power gained by sacrificing children was great—but their souls were lost to the Opposition, which was a loss as great as the gain. Why sacrifice infants, when the power generated by girls just at adolescence was so much stronger? Why sacrifice those whose souls were clean when one could engineer the corruption of potential victims, and gain not only the power from the death, but from the fall, and the despair when, at the last, they realized their damnation?

And why “sacrifice” them by knife or garrote or sword, when one could still be the author of their deaths by means of the way in which they earned their livings, and do so with no fear of the law? It was the slow, dull blade of lead that killed these sacrifices, making them briefly beautiful and proud (another sin!) and then stealing strength, intelligence, will, even sanity. And no one, not the police, not her social peers who gathered at her parties, not the government, not even the other workers, guessed that she was slowly and deliberately murdering them. In fact, no one thought of her as anything but a shrewd businesswoman.

Sometimes, now and again, she wondered if other, equally successful industrialists, were pursuing the same path as she. Certainly the potential was there. So many children, working such long hours, among so much dangerous machinery—the potential sacrifices were enormous. Weaving mills, steel mills, mines—all were fed on blood as much as on sweat. She wondered now and again if she ought not to expand her own interests.

No, I think I will leave that to Reggie. This is what I know. She decanted the black wine into the chalice; arranged the black wafers on their plate.

But her ways were so much more—efficient—than the hurried slaughter of the unbaptized infants purchased from their uncaring, gin- or opium-sodden mothers in some slum.

Not that she hadn’t done all that in the beginning. It was all she had been able to do, until she had married Chamberten, seen his pottery firsthand, and realized the other uses that could be made of it. And now and again, at the Great Sabbats, she had gone back to the traditional ways. But it was always better to be on the right side of the law whenever possible; it made life so much less complicated.

“Ready?” Reggie asked. She smiled again. And turned to face her priest and son, with the instruments of their power in her hands, ready and waiting, for him.

Chapter Fourteen

ANDREW Pike arrived back at Briareley in a moderately better mood than when he had parted from the Roeswood girl and her insufferable fiance. He assumed the man was her fiance. He couldn’t imagine any man acting so—proprietary—if he didn’t have a firm hold over a woman.

He’d been so angry at the blighter—Reginald. Reginald Chamberten. What does she call him? “Reggie, dear?” He looks like a Reggie—money, looks and arrogance enough for five—that he had just driven poor little Pansy at a trot most of the way on the long way around to Briareley’s front gate. He couldn’t have turned her, of course; there wasn’t enough room on that lane to turn a cart. But the bright sun, the cold wind in his face, his own good sense, and the unexpectedly positive outcome of his anxious chase after poor Ellen put him back