Mistress of the Mortal Realm, Book One

Chapter One-2

A thrill went through Lucy’s body. Ripley was clearly another pilgrim in search of the book. She skimmed through the thin pages. Near the end, she found an entry dated 5 April, 1961:

“I’ve found it! At last! After all these years! The Golden Grimoire! I can’t believe it! Tomorrow I will begin the effort to retrieve it. The trip will be hazardous. An old man, a refugee from Georgia in the Soviet Union, told me all about it. He saw it, not knowing what it was, but he described it perfectly right down to the inscription on its cover. It belongs to an old woman in his village, Zestura, outside the town of Mestia, deep in the Caucasus Mountains. Somehow I’ll convince the regime to let me in the country. The woman is a gypsy who goes by the name of Ulana.”

The next, and last, entry, for July 22, 1961, was as follows:

“I’ve done it. The Soviet Embassy has issued me a visa to enter Georgia and travel through the Caucasus region. I applied under the guise of a collector of folk songs. I’m to be given an official Soviet guide, but I’m sure with the persuasion of a few rubles I’ll be able to convince him to let me go to Zestura. The Golden Grimoire! Within a week or so, it will be mine!”

Lucy closed the little booklet. Her heart was pounding. Did Ripley recover the grimoire? It was doubtful, otherwise his diary would not be here. He would have never let it out of his possession. Something must have happened to him. The grimoire must still be in Georgia. It had to be! But was Ripley’s diary a fraud? She would have to investigate. If all boded well, she could leave for Georgia within a few days. She had time coming from her job. Georgia was no longer a forbidden land behind the Iron Curtain. It was independent and anyone could go there as a tourist any time.

She took the nun’s diary up to the front of the shop, with the notebook placed back into it. She tried not to look too excited. She would have put the diary in her purse, but she didn’t want to get caught stealing it. She would have to explain why and the secret of the Golden Grimoire would become public property.

“I see you’ve found something that caught your interest,” the old man said with a sardonic smile. Lucy handed him the volume.

“Ahh, the diary of Sister Maria Theresa Delacourt. A good selection.” He paused and scoured Lucy’s face with his eyes. “But you don’t look like the type who would need to entice a demon to her bed. Was there something else about the work that captured your fancy?”

“It’s a gift for a friend of mine,” Lucy stammered.

“Ohhh, I see,” the old man returned, flipping through the book. “And are you interested in Mr. Ripley’s diary as well?” He slipped the pamphlet from the back of the book.

“I-it seemed to be of some interest,” Lucy stuttered. She should have known that the man knew all about it.

“Have you an interest in the Golden Grimoire?”

“Only an academic one,” Lucy responded quickly. “Is the diary authentic?”

“It’s as right as rain,” the old man replied. “That is, it is the diary of the unfortunate Mr. Ripley. That I can assure you. The rest of it, well, who knows?”

Lucy hesitated to ask the old man more about it, but he obviously had information about what happened to Ripley. All the commentators spoke about how dangerous the ceremony of the Golden Grimoire was. Had he tried it and been consumed by demons? If so, where was the grimoire now? She just had to know more.

“What happened to Ripley? Did he ever go to Georgia to retrieve the book?” Lucy’s heart was pounding fiercely. He palms were sweating. Her stomach was twisting into a knot.

“It’s said that only the worthy may take possession of the Golden Grimoire,” the man replied. “The story as I heard it was that he fell overboard as he was crossing the Channel. His body was never found. I was called in to assess his collection of antique books. I bought the whole lot. I have the rest of the diary here somewhere if you want to see it. But I think you have the important part right here.”

Lucy realized that the man knew all about the Golden Grimoire. Then why hadn’t he gone to get it?

As if he had been reading her thoughts, the man said, “I’m afraid that I don’t possess the ambition to rule the material realm or for eternal life. I like to leave my sins more venial. And while I don’t mind extorting a bit of fluff like the girl you saw to serve my bestial needs, I don’t possess the necessary qualifications for the book’s ownership. You need to have a heart of stone and be capable of almost unfathomable cruelty.” He gave Lucy a sly look. “Are you?”

That was the question Lucy had asked herself at the beginning of her quest. The demon who was enslaved to the Golden Grimoire was said to be ferocious and demanding. The chronicles spoke of dark practices, evil deeds that the demon exacted as the price for his services.

The old man’s question felt to Lucy as if she was facing a moment of truth, a test. She was sure that this shop had not been here when she last visited London. It was impossible for her not to have heard of it. Was some demon power now at work? Was the man an agent of perdition, just as the old refugee who had told Ripley of the location of the grimoire undoubtedly was?

Six months before, needing to know once and for all whether she possessed the hardness and callousness demanded of an owner of the grimoire, she had tested herself. She drove to a part of the country she had never been in before. She picked up a drunken, slovenly w***e in a honky-tonk bar just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She drove her to a rundown motel far outside of town. She made the w***e go into the office to rent the room.

When they entered it, before the woman even had time to pull down the sheets, she pulled a knotted, silken cord out of her pocket and wrapped it around the woman’s neck. The woman struggled, kicking and wailing, mewing and sobbing. But Lucy relentlessly pulled at the cord until the woman’s body slumped and her resistance waned. She laid the unknown woman’s body on the bed and, after securing several locks from her hair, the hair of a strangled woman was an essential element in a number of powerful charms, she fled.

By ten o’clock the next morning, she was 300 miles away. When she got home, she pulled up the Tulsa Examiner’s web site on her computer. The police said they had no clues as to the identity of the person who strangled Ida Mae Thornton, 35, mother of three, but several men, known s*x offenders, were being questioned.

“Yes,” Lucy answered the old man, recalling that night and the thrill she had experienced as she felt the woman’s life ebbing away. “Yes, I am.”

He smiled. “I thought that you might be,” he said. “But I must give you this warning. The demon of the book is crafty, a devourer of souls. You must be strong and crafty as well to keep him enslaved. One slip, and he will drag you down to the depths of hell. Are you prepared to take that risk?”

“Yes,” Lucy said with as much fortitude as she could muster. “I am.”

The man leaned back as if he had completed a task. “Enjoy the book, miss,” he said. “That’ll be £1,250 for the diary of Sister Maria Therese. Mr. Ripley’s diary is no charge.”

Lucy counted out the crisp bills. The man wrapped the two books up in brown paper and tied them off with string. He handed the package to Lucy. “Good luck, miss,” he said grimly. “You will need it.”

***

Lucy recalled the old man’s wish of good luck to her as she dragged Penelope’s unconscious body along the elegantly tiled floor of her sumptuous kitchen. There had been some luck involved in her meeting with the voluptuous college freshman.

It had been at a wild sorority party she had wormed her way into. The beautiful but shy girl was nursing a glass of white wine. She was wearing blue jeans and a rust colored t-shirt that advertised a breast cancer march that had been held several weeks before. On her feet were a pair of worn, white athletic shoes. Her straw blond hair was drawn behind her head in a ponytail.

Two of the sorority sisters had decided to let it all hang out and were kissing feverishly on a couch, their hands wandering each other’s bodies. Most of the other women attending were looking on with disdain, but Lucy could detect the lust that was arising in Penelope’s eyes. She edged her way over to the girl nonchalantly.

“Your eyes are popping out of your head,” she told the young girl.

Penelope gave a start and a flustered look crossed her face. “I-I…” she started to say.

“It makes me hot too,” Lucy told her. Lucy looked younger than her age. There was not a spot of grey in her hair and she had dressed as youthfully as her age would allow.

“I’m sorry, I can’t do this,” Penelope blurted out. She placed her wineglass down on a side table and ran out the door. Lucy followed her, keeping back. The young girl seemed to be just what she had been hunting for. She didn’t want to lose her. She came across her at the edge of some bushes a block or so from the sorority party. She was crying inconsolably.

“What’s wrong?” Lucy asked her. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

Penelope looked up and her crying intensified. Lucy, emboldened by the girl’s helplessness, drew nearer. She curled an arm around her hunched shoulders. The girl moved closer to her and placed her head on Lucy’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” the girl sobbed. “It’s so wrong, but I can’t help myself. What’s wrong with me? I don’t want to be like this! I want to be normal!”

“There, there,” Lucy comforted her. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just different, that’s all. Not everyone is the same.”

“I want to believe that,” the girl sniffled, her sobbing having abated. “But I can’t!”

Lucy invited her to have a cup of coffee. They talked for three hours. Penny was from a strict fundamentalist Christian family. If her father and mother ever got a hint of her inclinations, they would curse her name and ban her from their lives. She talked of frustrating efforts to become friendly with boys, the few, fumbling attempts at s*x with them, going no farther than a rough, masculine hand on her unresponsive pudenda. She spoke about her girl friends, how even when she was a little girl she felt drawn to them, their softness and their musical voices, the smell of their bodies, their lips and, as she got older, their breasts.

High school had been a torment for her. She was pretty and had developed early. All the boys watched her with hungry, lustful eyes. In the girls’ locker room, she burned with desire as she watched, as surreptitiously as she could, the bodies of the other girls.

There had been one friend, a girl called Nancy, who she had become very close to in her junior year. One night, when Nancy was staying over, she snuck two glasses of whiskey from her father’s liquor cabinet. He was a raging fundamentalist, but had developed a taste for demon alcohol all the same. They mixed the whiskey with 7 Up and they both drank it quickly.

They were in her bed, watching a movie on TV. Suddenly, she became overwhelmed with need to be comforted by Nancy’s arms, became feverish to drink at her lips. She placed her hand on Nancy’s chin, turned her head and kissed her. Nancy kissed her back. That night they explored each other’s bodies with their hands and lips until they both reached apotheosis several times and fell asleep in each other’s arms. The next morning, Nancy couldn’t wait to have her mother pick her up and she steadfastly avoided any further contact with Penny. It broke her heart.

Lucy, although her preferences really lay in the other direction, carefully explained that she was that way too. She invented adolescent fumblings and college trysts. She told Penny that there was nothing wrong with her, that loving another woman was, for some, as natural as breathing. By the end, Penny was smiling and laughing as they exchanged stories of their disastrous episodes with boys. Penny had a wonderful, innocent face. Her skin was pale and lustrous. Her blue eyes sparkled.