Chapter 5: Erebus

The Grand Master’s boots squeaked on the polished floor as he made his way down the lavishly furnished hall towards the summoning chamber. The room was located in the Western wing of the lodge, and it was outfitted for use by Masonic wizards and summoners, ready to be used at all times of the day or night. One never knew when they might need the urgent help of a demon.

He pushed open the large, oak door as it creaked on its aged hinges and stepped through into an expansive room that was shrouded in darkness. Only the flickering of a thousand candles staved off the gloom, hanging from the tall ceiling in gilded chandeliers and stacked upon every available surface in ornate candelabras, their dancing flames casting shadows on the walls. The overpowering scent of incense hit him like a wall, the strong odor of frankincense and myrrh filling his lungs. There were tables scattered about the room, hewn from darkest ebony in ancient and elaborate styles, their legs tipped with carved claws and hooves. Upon them were grimoires, arcane tomes and pieces of faded parchment, all of the reference material that might be required for summoning.

In the center of the room was a nine-foot circle decorated with runes and sigils, the Hebrew and Aramaic incantations lovingly reproduced in flowing script, the graceful lines carved into the stone floor and then filled in with molten gold. It was beautiful to behold, shining as it caught the candlelight, a circle worthy of even the highest ranked Kings and Princes of Hell.

Around the circle a dozen Masonic wizards were already preparing their ritual, their hooded robes decorated in the purple and gold of their order. As the Grand Master walked towards one of the many protective triangles that were placed on the floor, one of the faceless men broke from the circle, approaching him and draping a pendant about his neck that had been inscribed with a protective ward.

This was all routine, of course, they had done this many times before.

“Is the ritual ready?” he asked.

“Yes, Grand Master. We can begin whenever you wish.”

The Master waved his gloved hand, indicating that they should get the ceremony underway. Now came the boring part, waiting for the wizards to conclude their incantations. He stood patiently as they went through the chants that they had memorized by rote, twelve voices speaking as one, echoing throughout the room like a Gregorian choir.

As their chanting and the waving of their wands continued, some of the candles began to sputter, as if a gust of wind had come in through an open window. There were no windows of course, not only was the room sealed but it was below ground. The temperature plummeted, his breath condensating as it left his mouth, but the Grand Master did not let it bother him.

He recalled the first time that he had seen a summoning. He couldn’t have been more than a Grand Pontiff of the Nineteenth degree at the time, a fresh-faced boy in comparison to his current appearance. He had been full of excitement and wonder, eager to learn the closely guarded secrets of the ancient order to which he belonged. Not only that, but he had been desperate to rid himself of a lingering doubt that had haunted him for so many years, wanting confirmation that it was all real and not just some kind of elaborate cult. If he could see magick with his own eyes, if he could see a real demon, then he would be able to devote himself to the cause completely.

After moving up through the ranks, his time had finally come. Excitement had turned to fear when the sweat on his brow had begun to freeze, when he had seen all of the shadows in the room coalesce into a single point within the circle. What had stepped out of that veil of shadows had not been human, had not been of this world. He hadn’t seen it, at least not in the traditional sense. The entity had projected itself into his mind like an intrusive thought, an idea as much as a physical presence. What he remembered best were its eyes, burning like a pair of hot coals, unwavering as they penetrated him to the soul.

It was on that day that he had truly understood. There were worlds beyond his own, metaphysical forces of incomprehensible power and influence that must be controlled and kept in check. The history of the human species was far longer and more complex than any historian or anthropologist could ever know, because that information had been robbed from them, hidden away in the dark recesses of arcane libraries and in the minds of a select few. Now the Grand Master was one of those elites, a tiny fraction of the human race who knew the true nature of reality, a sworn guardian of secrets that must be kept at all costs.

He was returned to the present by the ringing of a church bell, faint and eerie as if heard from far away. It was like the sound of a great cathedral summoning the faithful to prayer, mournful and hollow, growing steadily louder as the chanting of the wizards rose in tempo. Before long the tuneless ringing was loud enough that it almost seemed to be coming from inside the room, as if he was standing in the steeple of a church. The sound was tuneless and grating, but he knew that it would be over soon.

A distortion manifested in the center of the summoning circle, almost like a heat haze, barely perceptible at first but intensifying as he watched. It was like a mirage, confined entirely to the circle, roughly in the size and shape of a tall man. The ringing of the phantom bells did not abate, remaining steady as if they were announcing the arrival of this entity. The haze shifted and morphed, the atmosphere in the room almost seeming to vibrate in time with the cacophony, as though the very molecules in the air were resonating with it.

Swirling patterns appeared across the surface of the circle as if the glass-smooth stone had turned to liquid, concentric ripples and dancing splashes spreading like disturbances on a calm lake. It was a visualization of this baleful melody, spreading out from the center as the haze became opaque.

The tolling of the bells halted abruptly and the chanting along with it, the sound of a pair of shoes splashing in water ringing out in the dead silence. Standing in the circle was a human figure, seven feet tall and unnaturally thin, its body shrouded in a long robe made from what resembled burlap with a large hood. The shadow within concealed the entity’s face save for its mouth and chin. It looked stretched and unnatural, the skin pallid, the lips thin and discolored. Everything about it was wrong, out of place, giving the Grand Master a palpable sensation of disgust and fear. This thing should not be, it was wrong, an aberration.

He quickly suppressed the instinct, clearing his throat as the thing turned towards him, its pale lips curling into a smile.

“Welcome, Gaap,” he announced with a respectful bow. “It is a pleasure to have you with us again.”

This entity was the thirty-third demon of the Ars Goetia, Gaap, a mighty Prince of Hell who had numerous powers that were of great use to the Freemasons. This was not the first time that they had met, he had personally called up the creature several times in the past.

Gaap clasped its long, bony fingers together, like some kind of evil monk as it stood within the bounds of the circle. The Master couldn’t help but stare, that long hood imbuing him with a kind of morbid curiosity, the dark shadows teasing at what horrors might lie just out of view.

“Grand Master,” Gaap rasped, its voice course and breathy. It spoke like it had a mouth full of dust, as if a desiccated corpse had been reanimated and was using its vocal apparatus for the first time in centuries. “As ever, you honor me with your rituals. So precise and proper...”

It did not address the wizards who were standing around the summoning circle, knowing from experience who it was going to be treating with.

“Your contract has been prepared,” the Master replied, snapping his fingers and gesturing to a wizard who had been waiting behind a nearby table. The robed man stepped forward, a roll of yellowed parchment clasped in his hands, kneeling before the demon and bowing his head as he held it aloft.

Gaap reached down with its grotesquely elongated fingers, plucking the scroll from his hands, the wizard retreating slowly away from the circle. The demon unrolled it, examining it for a moment, then the aged paper burst into flames and fell to the ground as ash.

“Your terms are reasonable,” it stated in that dry and rattling voice. “I accept your contract.”

Excellent. Gaap was a high-ranked demon, and it had many abilities, several of which might be of use to the Masons today. The offering should provide adequate payment for the services that were required. A monument to Gaap was already being erected in a local park, disguised as a war memorial. The pedestal was secretly adorned with the demon’s sigil, and the monk depicted tending to a wounded soldier was, in fact, a representation of the demon. Its exaggerated features had been toned down a little so as not to be too obvious. It would be in full public view, accruing a generous amount of energy to fuel the entity.

“State your requests,” Gaap hissed, the Grand Master clearing his throat.

“Firstly, I would ask that you deliver a familiar out of the custody of one Ryan Cutter. He has a Seirim consort who has been causing significant trouble for us. The entity is reportedly bound to an onyx ring about his finger, and it is loyal to a fault. Can you do this?”

As written in the grimoires, one of Gaap’s powers was the ability to deliver familiars out of the custody of other magicians, a skill that would be of great use in their current predicament. If the Seirim could be unbound from Cutter, then taking him out should be a trivial affair, and it would be a far simpler prospect than trying to exorcise or contain the beast.

Gaap bowed its hooded head, seeming lost in thought for a moment. The oil-like substance that seemed to coat the surface of the summoning circle in a thin, mirror-like sheen began to ripple and bounce again as the entity performed its magick. The Grand Master waited for its reply with bated breath.

“This I cannot do,” Gaap replied, the Master’s face falling. “This familiar is bound by magick far more potent than my own. I see ... three burning eyes, the twisted horns of a ram, an ancient and terrible power...”

“Azazel,” the Grand Master muttered. “Very well. In place of that, can you tell me how this union came to be?”

Another of Gaap’s powers was clairvoyance, it was written in the Lesser Key of Solomon that he could answereth truly and perfectly of things past, present and to come.

Again Gaap bowed its hooded head, the energy that was accruing in the room making the hair on the Grand Master’s forearms stand on end, the candles fluttering as if caught in a gust of wind. The entity began to speak slowly and deliberately in its rasping voice.

“I see ... a heart broken, a love spurned. What was once secure is now lost, what was certain now unclear. A man at the end of his wits, at the brink of destitution and without the will to press on. There is conviction, reckless abandon, no concern for consequence. He believes that he has nothing left to lose and so he turns to the occult, reasoning that it will restore his life to its former state.”

So this Cutter fellow had been in a bad place and he had dipped his toes into summoning in order to turn his life around? They had already guessed as much. Not an uncommon story, but certainly a very unusual outcome. He waited silently as Gaap continued.

“He summons Orobas, his methods are amateurish and clumsy, but he succeeds. The demon treats with him fairly, and his requests are earnest. He wishes only for the means to earn an honest living, to restore his quality of life. Orobas assigns one of the many spirits under his command, a Seirim by the name of ... Nahash, to serve as his liaison and familiar.”

So that’s where the damned thing had come from. It had been a spirit under Orobas’ control, a member of one of his legions, entities and fallen Gods who could no longer subsist on their dwindling stores of energy and who were forced to enter into the service of greater demons to survive. But Cutter’s contract with Orobas must have been fulfilled, so why had the familiar remained?

“Nahash mends his broken heart, soothes his pain. He turns his affection towards her and over time she reciprocates. In an effort to free her from Orobas’ control, he spreads the sigil of Azazel, not understanding what it will mean to rouse the Watcher. Azazel binds the Seirim to Ryan Cutter as a token of gratitude, but beyond that, I cannot know the beast’s intentions. Its magick clouds my sight.”

“At least we now know what the relationship between all of the major players is,” the Master muttered. “What can you tell me about the future, Gaap?”

“The future is uncertain. Time flows in streams, branching paths that split and converge at the mercy of probability. Know that I cannot reply with absolute clarity. Each action that is taken changes the course of fate in subtle ways, but I can make a prediction.”

“Tell me whatever you can.”

“As you wish,” the demon replied, going quiet for a moment as it peered into the winding channels of fate. “I see a great convergence, an inexorable cataclysm to which all probable timelines are rushing. Like rivers pouring into an ocean, they are drawn to it. While their courses might diverge and their paths might change, their destination remains the same.”

“A cataclysm?” the Grand Master asked, “can you elaborate?”

“Your Ryan Cutter is set upon this path, as is Azazel. I see that your waters too are draining into this churning sea, Grand Master. There are many possible paths, but only a single outcome.”

“And what is that outcome?” he demanded, a touch of alarm creeping into his voice.

“Powers greater than my own roll in like a thick fog, I cannot see past it.”

“I understand, thank you,” the Grand Master sighed. He couldn’t expect much more from the demon, pressing it for details wouldn’t serve any purpose beyond angering it. At least he had gotten some warning, though of what, he wasn’t yet sure.

“There is one more thing, Gaap, if you would. I need to travel to the Holy of Holies, the Sanctum Sanctorum. I must convene with the Architects beneath Mount Erebus.”

This was another of the demon’s abilities, the power to transport a man anywhere in the world. Gaap nodded and extended its hand towards him, the loose sleeve falling away to expose bony fingers like the legs of a pale spider. The Grand Master took it reluctantly, feeling its cold flesh against his palm. It was like holding the hand of a dead body.

Traveling in this manner was regrettably not as simple as vanishing in one place and appearing in another. His consciousness, his soul would have to leave this body behind as it journeyed through the immaterium, the dimension of raw thought and emotion in which the demons dwelt. He would be dying in a very literal sense. This shell of flesh and bone that he presently inhabited would cease to function. Its organs would shut down, and it would become little more than dead meat, to be disposed of in an incinerator deep in the bowels of the lodge.

Much as the demons manifested a physical body when they appeared in the mortal realm, so too would Gaap create a new body for him at his destination. It would be an exact copy, down to the fingerprints and the individual wrinkles on his weather-beaten face. He would awake as if nothing had happened, yet still the concept disturbed him. He had done it before of course, this was his fifth or sixth body, but the prospect of even a temporary death filled him with dread. It was a large expenditure of energy, which was the reason for the elaborate offering that had been prepared.

The demon’s blue lips spread into a cruel grin, exposing a mouth full of rotted teeth, and the Grand Master felt his heart begin to beat erratically. No matter how much he told himself that he was safe, that this wasn’t death in the sense that his consciousness would cease to be, his body still reacted to what was happening to it.

The palpitations turned to pressure, it felt like a fist was crushing his heart, like someone had just parked a truck on his chest. His left arm became numb, pain radiating through his torso as he realized that he could no longer breathe. He gasped, trying to suck in air, his eyes bulging as he fell to his knees. He choked and sputtered, clawing at his chest with his free hand as Gaap held the other, his vision blurring.

The Grand Master found himself lying on his side, the demon kneeling beside him, watching intently from beneath its hood as the light left his eyes.

There was no self anymore, not as he had known it. Where once his thoughts had been confined to his skull, private and quiet, now they roiled and spread through the surging soup that was the demonic realm. It was like a kind of ego death, the most intense LSD trip imaginable, emotion and thought blending together like running paints on a canvas.

A person defines himself by his limitations, by what he is not. The boundary of his mind, the limits of his body, he separates himself from the world around him and becomes a self-contained being. There were no such boundaries here, ideas and feelings were broadcast across the aether, like a million screaming voices shouting in his head all at once. He drifted aimlessly, unmoored and with no frame of reference, merging with the personalities around him and feeling their emotions as if they were his own. Memories swarmed, intrusive thoughts of alien origin implanting themselves in his consciousness. He wanted to hunker down, to close his eyes and cover his ears, to do everything that he could to block this out. But he had no hands with which to block out the noise, he no longer had eyes to close. Hell was a fitting name for it.

The Grand Master opened his eyes, taking in a sharp gasp of air as he sat up straight. As his vision adjusted to the light, he realized that he was on the floor, climbing to his feet and leaning against a nearby wall as he got his bearings. He was in a whitewashed corridor, the ceiling above him dotted with fluorescent lights that were placed at intervals, the hallway snaking out of view as it rounded a corner. The décor was spartan and artificial, while the layout seemed more natural, almost organic.

Slowly his memories bubbled up to the surface, and he remembered where he was and what he was doing. He looked down at his hands and removed one of his white gloves, opening and closing his fingers, testing this new vessel that he had come to inhabit. It looked the same, felt the same, all of the wrinkles and callouses were still there. Yet it couldn’t have existed for more than a few minutes. His old body was lying on the floor of the Grand Lodge, eight thousand miles away, as dead as could be.

Unfortunately, immortality could not be achieved this way. A demon would not make a younger or healthier body to serve as the final destination for a metaphysical traveler, it would merely reproduce the original body exactly as it had been. Humans were not meant to live forever, and the entities seemed to find the idea somehow offensive or distasteful. His clothing too had been faithfully reproduced, along with all of his adornments and regalia.

As he looked up, he saw the tall frame of Gaap looming over him, the hooded figure waiting to be dismissed now that its task was complete.

“Thank you Gaap,” he gasped, still feeling a lingering tightness in his chest. He knew that it was entirely psychosomatic, but he couldn’t shake the sensation. He got the impression that the demon enjoyed this, its cruel smile suggesting that it sensed his fears and knew to what extent the travel rattled him. “I release you. Return to the lodge and complete your ritual.”

The demon bowed its hooded head once more, and then it was gone, leaving him standing alone in the empty corridor. He began to make his way towards the Sanctum, he had been here before, and he knew his way around the hidden base.

Mount Erebus was located in Antarctica, on a remote island towards the Southern tip of the continent. The secret tunnels beneath the remote mountain were formed by ancient lava tubes, completely sealed off from the surface, extending for miles beneath a blanket of rock and ice. The only way to reach the base was through teleportation, meaning that only high ranked Masons could hope to enter. This was their seat of power, where their best-kept secrets were stashed away and where the three Grand Architects resided.

Officially the Masonic order had no leaders. There was a council comprised of Grand Masters of the Thirty-Third Degree who met periodically to deliberate on matters that concerned the organization, each the head of their own Grand Lodge, which was in turn responsible for all of the lesser lodges in its jurisdiction.

One of the most closely guarded secrets of the order was that there were in fact leaders, three of them, the Grand Architects.

The Freemasons traced their origins back to the days of Solomon, the great King of ancient Israel and Judah who had built the First Temple, the most glorious edifice to the one true God that had ever been raised. Solomon had gathered the greatest stone cutters, architects and masons from all over the known world and had organized them into a society, tasking them with erecting this grand structure. It was to be their life’s work, their greatest achievement, a monument to the power and glory of Yahweh.

Within the innermost sanctum of the temple Solomon had placed the Ark of the Covenant, a gold-plated acacia chest that contained the Decalogue, two stone tablets given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai. The Ten Commandments were inscribed upon them, written with the very finger of the Lord.

For four hundred and ten years the structure had stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, until the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar the Second had laid siege to the city and had burned the structure to the ground.

The Masonic order, tasked with maintaining the temple, had managed to save the Ark before the destruction of the edifice. Using secret tunnels that they had built beneath the city, they had carried it to safety, and it had been in their custody ever since. Now the Ark resided deep beneath Mount Erebus, kept safe in a vault in the bowels of the base. With no temple left standing and the political situation in modern-day Jerusalem too volatile to risk building it anew, the Antarctic base had to serve as the seat of power for the order and the Sanctum Sanctorum for the Ark.

Along with keeping ancient secrets and controlling the spread of magick on Earth, the ultimate goal of the Masons was to rebuild the temple and to restore Yahweh to prominence, to give God an Earthly throne from which to rule the world.

Could that be the cataclysm to which Gaap had been referring? A massive shift to the status quo, a fundamental change to the nature of reality that would appear to the demon as a convergence of timelines? Perhaps he was being too optimistic, but either way, he had to relay the information to the Architects as soon as possible. They alone had a direct line to Yahweh.

He followed the winding, branching tunnels, occasionally coming across a sealed door behind which could be all manner of things. The arcane library was located somewhere in this maze, a repository for all of the order’s secret knowledge. There were also summoning chambers, information centers, storage warehouses that were stocked with enough supplies to survive any eventuality from a nuclear war to an asteroid strike. This knowledge, these artifacts, they must be preserved at any cost lest the human race fall into a state of ignorance and lose its link to the divine.

He would sometimes cross paths with other members of the order, security guards armed with rifles and scholars who were ferrying ancient scrolls or hard drives full of data from one end of the base to the other. Because of the natural nature of the caves in which the facility had been built, the layout followed no logical plan, and it could be quite a walk to get from point to point. Its remoteness meant that many of these people were permanent residents, fated to live out their entire lives beneath the ice in service to God.

The tunnel sloped downwards, letting the Grand Master know that he was on the right track. The room where the Architects resided was built inside a massive, ancient magma chamber, as if the volcano itself had erected a natural cathedral in their honor.

The corridor widened and expanded as it neared the two great doors to the chamber, built from the wood of acacia trees and gilded with gold leaf much as the Ark had been, beautiful reliefs of winged angels blowing trumpets decorating their varnished surfaces. They were huge, large enough that a man measuring twelve feet high would have been able to pass through them unhindered.

The two armed guards who were standing watch turned to push the doors open, straining to move the massive slabs of wood on their hinges. As they swung ajar, the Grand Master was greeted with a view of the chamber. It was massive, the domed ceiling extending far above his head. The walls of solid rock looked as if they had been carved out by a giant’s chisel, but it was in fact magma that had hollowed out this expansive room so many eons ago. Stalagnates the size of tree trunks were spaced throughout the chamber, like great stone pillars that held up the roof, formed over hundreds of thousands of years by the slow drip of mineral-rich water from the ice above. The floor had been cleared of stalagmites and flowstone, leveled out and overlaid with fitted blocks of granite to provide an even surface to walk upon, but the largest columns and much of the natural beauty of this place had been preserved.

From the pillars hung Masonic banners and standards adorned with the symbols and regalia of the order, sewn from silk in shades of purple and pure white with gold trim. At the far end of the chamber was a raised podium, similar to one that might be found in a courtroom, but far taller so that the three thrones that were perched atop it looked down on the room below from on high. Again the wood was sourced from sacred acacia trees, inlaid with golden reliefs and magnificent, intricate carvings that would have put the Statue of the Resurrection in the Vatican to shame.

To describe the seats of the Architects as mere thrones would do them a disservice. Each one was an ornate sculpture in its own right, held aloft by statues seated upon a marble base. They were adorned with reliefs of cherubs and angels in bronze and gold, fluffy clouds and rays of glorious light framing the Masonic patriarchs. Rising up behind them at the center of it all was a broken pillar that symbolized their grief at the destruction of the first temple.

Seated in those magnificent chairs were three aged men, the Grand Architects, leaders of the Masons. They were so named not just for their connections to the builders of the temple, but because they were also the architects of global events, guiding the planet towards enlightenment. Whether it be a military coup in a far off country or a merger between two monolithic corporations, the final decision had no doubt been made in this chamber. They ruled from the shadows, unknown even to the majority of the Masonic order, ordained by God himself to carry out his will on Earth.

“Most worshipful Grand Architects,” the Master said, taking a knee before their podium and bowing his head in reverence.

“Grand Master Carlisle,” the centermost Architect began, the acoustics of the chamber making his voice echo. He was clad in lavish, purple robes and adorned with all manner of jewelry and pendants, the many rings on his bony fingers clattering together as he made a steeple with them and leaned over the podium to peer at the visitor. Carlisle was no spring chicken, but these men were older still. Their faces were wrinkled and sallow, their flesh almost seeming to hang from their bones like leather on a tanning rack. “I trust that your journey was not too ... disconcerting?”

“No more than usual, your worship,” he replied as he rose to his feet. “I come bearing news, and to request your help concerning an urgent matter.”

“This no doubt concerns your rogue summoner,” the rightmost Architect added, adjusting the spectacles that were perched on the end of his hooked nose. “We have been made aware of the situation, and we are surprised that you have not been able to resolve the problem yourself, considering the ... substantial resources and personnel that are at your disposal.”

“I assure you that I do not come seeking your aid lightly,” Carlisle said with a deferential bow, “but first there is urgent news that I must relay to you.”

“Go on,” the leftmost Architect said with a wave of his liver-spotted hand.

“Before arriving I communed with Gaap, and the entity foresaw what it described as a cataclysm on the horizon.”

“A cataclysm?” the rightmost Architect asked, looking to his counterparts with a concerned frown. “Can you elaborate?”

“I was informed that all of our timelines are converging inexorably towards some manner of historic event, the details of which the demon could not foresee. It seems that its prescience was being intentionally clouded by greater powers. The rogue summoner too is set upon this path, as is Azazel.”