The Book of the Beast Read Online Free

the bizarre truth would do. He reluctantly rendered it. “—And when I told her d’Uscaret—”
    ” D’Uscaret!” exclaimed the woman. Her face had altered. She did not look afraid, but a wily sort of blankness was stealing over her, the appearance she would put on for the confessional.
    Raoulin took heart. He said boldly, “This isn’t what I called here for.”
    “No, no doubt not. There’s some superstition, concerning that house. An old curse. I’m surprised my girl knows of it.”
    Abruptly the blonde harlot raised her raw voice in another spewing of screams.
    “Be silent!” cried the Mother. And the screams went to weeping again.
    “Let him be,” she added to her roughs. And to Raoulin himself, with all the casualness of cunning unease, “And you, sieur, had best get off.”
    As the slabby hands released him, Raoulin caught in the doorway now the wink of Joseph’s humiliated and resentful spectacles.
    Crossing the bridge in the torchlight, between one dark bank and the other, Joseph lamented, “I can never go back there now.”
    “Do you want to? We find it’s a hospital for lunatics not a bawdy,” said Raoulin, obscurely embarrassed.
    “Frightening a silly trollop with your foul story—’
    “I told no story. I said that name—d’Uscaret—and all the hordes of Hell broke loose. I can tell you, any fun I had wasn’t worth that .”
    They parted unaffectionately on the upper bank. Laude was ringing softly from Our Lady of Ashes. The river flexed its gleaming muscles. Raoulin was sorry to have lost Joseph’s regard. Probably tomorrow, or in a few days, they would laugh about the affair.
    Yet somewhere inside his head as he climbed the hills, the awful screams of the harlot rang on and on.
    One believed she might have seen and heard and done a thing or two. Whatever had made her afraid was something proportionally horrible.
    Going under the Sacrifice, beneath the winged cliffs of its buttresses, he considered his lodging. He considered the ghost he might only have dreamed. Was it that?
    Some late revellers from a tavern roiled by with lanterns. They seemed to have come from another world than the darkness in which he moved, through which he climbed, and to which he went.
    And then, as he entered the twisting alley that led up to the back walls of the house, he saw the black tower-tops, and the one black turreted tower with a faint greenish firefly-light flickering in it.
    Raoulin stopped as if he had met the Medusa’s petrifying head. For a moment he could not breathe.
    The tower was that which looked north, towards the Temple-Church—the tower into which he had penetrated the first day, trying its one door that would not open. The tower whose stair gave on the weedy garden and the tomb.
    How ominous the light looked there, dim and shifting behind its pane of corrupt glass. Did someone move in the room, up and down?
    Had he the spirit now to go in and seek the chamber, to push wide the door and maybe find there a young woman in a chair, her hand upon a skull…
    Raoulin broke into a chill sweat. To his dismay he realised he too was frightened. He remembered the porcelain face of his dream and the cat’s-eyes of perfect emerald hovering above him—and marked himself with the sign of the cross. “The Lord is my keeper. The sun shall not smite me by day, nor the moon by night—’ And, at the side door, unlocking it, whispered: “Be not afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth…’
    To the kitchen he went, and lit there two of the candles and stuck them on the spikes of a branch. This he carried before him. Somewhere the hag and the groom snored in aged sleep. They were not juicy enough for demons to chew—
    He crowded such ideas from him, and crept like a scared child up through thick night to his apartment.
    And there he locked the door, and there, by the shine of many extravagant wicks, he opened the reliquary his pious mother had sent with him, and took out the