The Gospel of Sheba (2 page)

“It's absolutely no good, Mr. Lomax!” Mr. Theodore Grange piped shrilly this morning, reappearing after an absence of six days and dropping the magical texts I'd recommended upon a table from emphatic height. “This grimoire of Mr. Sebastian Scovil's is the genuine article. I have researched extensively along the lines which you suggested and am forced to conclude that a hitherto undiscovered demonic text of great power and possibly greater malevolence has been unearthed!”

Looking up while removing my set of half-spectacles, I took a moment to goggle at the poor fellow. He'd discovered me in the reading and periodicals room. I'd tucked myself out of immediate sight under one of the tall white pillars in a commodious leather armchair, subtly hiding from the Librarian as I studied ancient Celtic coins on behalf of a member. Mr. Grange landed in the chair opposite, the hearth's glow illuminating the unhealthy sweat upon his brow.

“Your friend Mr. Scovil is likewise interested in occult studies?” I hazarded, glad to see him again in spite of my preoccupation.

He waved an unsteady hand before his face. “All of us are, to a man—the Brotherhood of Solomon exists to study the supernatural. I am its newest member, as I told you, and thus less tutored than my fellows in what ignorant folk term the dark arts. The club is a small one, and consists of influential men of business, you understand. My firm invests in a wide variety of securities, and thus cultivating acquaintances with such people is essential to me—and really, what is the difference between forming friendships over whiskey and cigars at a horse race versus whiskey and cigars hunched over magical manuscripts?”

There seemed to me to be quite a bit of difference, but I neglected to point this out.

“I was a skeptic, I'll admit as much,” Mr. Grange said hoarsely, shuddering. “A grimoire which poisons all who dare to study it, save for those with the purest of intentions and keenest skills? Preposterous. And yet, I am convinced.
The Gospel of Sheba
is a text of extraordinary power, and a power Mr. Scovil alone can wield.”

Tapping my spectacles against my lip, I pondered. Grimoires are paradoxes after my own heart. They tend to contain explicit instructions as to the rituals necessary to summon demons and, having summoned them, bind them to the magician's will. Ceremonial magic to an enormous extent, however, is said to depend upon the virtue of the sorcerer—his altruism in calling upon angels or their fallen brethren to do his bidding—and by definition, to my mind, a chap whistling for Beelzebub is likely to be up to no good.

“A book which poisons those who study it?” I repeated, fascinated. “Surely that is impossible.”

Mr. Grange shook his head, pulling a small square of silk from his pocket and mopping the back of his neck. His appearance was, if anything, more unhealthy than the man I'd met six days previous. An ashen quality dulled the limp folds of his throat, and his eyes reflected steady pain.

“I am myself suffering from the effects of reading
The Gospel of Sheba
,” he assured me. “After reaching the conclusion, thanks to the volumes you lent me, that its provenance is undoubtedly genuine, I lost no time in returning the wretched thing to Mr. Scovil. He is a great scholar of the esoteric, the discoverer of the gospel, and the one man who suffers no ill effects from it.”

A numismatist, perhaps, would have absorbed this madness with aplomb and returned to the study of the lyrical golden images stamped upon the coinage of the Parisii. I am not a numismatist, however, and thus closed the volume on Celtic coinage and begged Mr. Grange to tell me more. The poor man seemed eager to unburden himself. He shifted in his chair, darting glances along the sparsely populated reading room as if he feared being overheard.

“It's been two months since I joined the Brotherhood of Solomon,” he murmured. “An acquaintance of mine, a Mr. Cornelius Pyatt, recommended it to me as a worthy hobby—one followed by men of intellect and character and means. I attended a meeting and found the company and the wine cellar both to my liking, and the subject to be of considerable interest. Are you familiar with the types of ceremonial magic? I confess I was not, and have since grown quite obsessed, sir.”

“Somewhat familiar,” I owned, wiping my half-spectacles upon my sleeve. “Spellcasting is divided in the broadest sense into white magic and black magic, which differ less in execution than in intention. White magic attempts to summon good spirits, and to a good purpose—black magic evil spirits, and to a wicked purpose. Other categorical distinctions are regional, of course. One would find different instructions in a text of Parisian diabolism than in the Hebrew Kabalah, but all are paths to mastery of the spirit realm. Or so they claim.”

“Just so!” he approved. “Just so, sir, and the Brotherhood of Solomon's express purpose is to explore the sacred mysteries recorded by the legendarily wise Biblical King Solomon.”

A less than comfortable thrill wormed its way through my belly. “You should study S. Liddell Mathers' eighteen eighty-eight English translation of
The Key of Solomon the King
, in that case. I read it with interest when I was at university.”

“Did you indeed? Wonderful! What drew you to it?”

“I felt I needed to see for myself what the fuss was about, probably because all types of knowledge interest me and that one seemed marvelously forbidden. I'm sorry to tell you I didn't find much sense in it.”

The Key of Solomon the King
is the monarch of all the grimoires, the eldest surviving copies dating from the Italian Renaissance, though its purported author was the great Hebrew ruler himself. The Latin codex translated by Mathers resides at the British Museum. It's full of orations, conjurations, invocations, and recitations, some of them for the purpose of summoning spirits and others for tricking one's enemies or for finding lost objects. I never went so far as to write anything out in bat's blood, but I do recall, as a more than half-humourous experiment, searching for a lost penknife by means of reciting:

O Almighty Father and Lord, Who regardest the Heavens, the Earth, and the Abyss, mercifully grant unto me by Thy Holy Name written with four letters, YOD, HE, VAU, HE, that by this exorcism I may obtain virtue, Thou Who art IAH, IAH, IAH, grant that by Thy power these Spirits may discover that which we require and which we hope to find, and may they show and declare unto us the persons who have committed the theft, and where they are to be found.

The penknife never turned up, but I felt suitably irreligious afterward that despite owning no very strong godly passions, I plunged myself into a study of the early Christian martyrs until I felt that some balance had been restored to my soul. And Lettie, upon being told the tale when we were courting, had a heartily fond laugh over my foolishness.

“The Brotherhood of Solomon revere his teachings above all others.” Mr. Grange loosened his necktie. He seemed feverish, a bright red flush adorning his cheeks. “We've all been thrown into
such
disarray since Mr. Scovil found the Sheba text. Our meetings generally consist of debate over particular ceremonies found in
The Key of Solomon the King
—whether incenses and perfumes are of any tangible efficacy when enacting spells, study of the Order of the Pentacles, the proper preparation of virgin parchment and whether blood sacrifice is truly evil if enacted for a noble purpose, that sort of thing.”

Fighting not to laugh, I gestured with the spectacles in my hand to continue.

“But then Mr. Scovil announced that a secret library had been found within his very own townhouse in Pall Mall, and that it was full of magical texts, and that one of them—
The Gospel of Sheba
—was an unprecedented find. Mr. Sebastian Scovil is from a very long line of esoteric scholars, Mr. Lomax, so we greeted his discovery with ardent interest. But the book itself is cursed, I assure you, sir! There is no other explanation.”

“A little slower,” I requested. “As a bibliophile, not to mention a lover of conundrums, your story is terribly interesting. Let me be certain I understand you?”

“By all means, Mr. Lomax.”

“First, speaking historically, King Solomon was renowned for his great wisdom, and for his closeness to God, and the hopes of those studying grimoires ascribed to him are that his words remain largely intact. The Queen of Sheba was the monarch of a lost African kingdom who appears in the Koran as well as the Bible and traveled to meet with King Solomon after tales of his great wealth and wisdom reached her people. Have I got the proper context?”

“As concise as any encyclopedia and as accurate, sir! The gospel purports to be written in her hand, revealing ceremonial rites more powerful than any King Solomon developed before meeting her. Apparently the King and the Queen were lovers, Mr. Lomax, and brought the study of ceremonial magic to new heights.”

“The text is in Hebrew?”

“The text is in Latin, sir, transcribed by a sixteenth century monk, we believe.”

“And you claim it has made you physically
ill
?” I demanded, awed.

Mr. Theodore Grange did, to give him credit, look very ill indeed. Even were his colour not similar to candle wax and his limbs not all a-quiver, he seemed to have shrunk somehow in the six days since I'd seen him, his skin shrugged on as if a child were wrapped in its father's coat. His navy blue suit was likewise too large, twiglike wrists obscenely thrusting out from gaping cuffs.

“Not just me!” he protested. “First my friend Cornelius Pyatt took the volume home to study, and he fell ill almost instantly. Then Huggins had a crack at it, and we're all three in the same sad straits. No, I tell you, that gospel is the genuine article and Mr. Sebastian Scovil is the single man worthy of its powers.”

“Oh, there you are, Mr. Lomax, at last I've found you.”

The gentle, rasping tones of the Librarian startled me out of my rapt attention. My head shifted upward to take in his bowed back, the genial tufts of hair about his ears, the air of absentminded benevolence that wafts about with him like the aroma of his sweet pipe smoke, and prayed that I would not be complimented.

“Apologies, sir, did you want me?” I asked.

“Oh, no, no, my boy, you appear engaged. But Mr. Sullivan, I should tell you, was
most
pleased by your assistance with his geological studies. He claimed that you identified a book which shed all manner of light upon his research into sedimentary facies. You are to be congratulated again, Mr. Lomax.”

There is a many-paned window at the end of the periodicals room, and reflected in its glass I could see Mr. Grange and the Librarian, my own slender seated figure with its mop of wildly curling brown hair, and the six or seven members who had perked up and were now eyeing me with interest, wondering what arcane knowledge I could gift them before tea time.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, rubbing at my eyes. “I did my best.”

“Quite right, quite right. Carry on, then! You do us credit, Mr. Lomax, and I don't care who knows it.”

Chuckling in resignation, my eyes drifted back to the volume I'd abandoned when Mr. Grange arrived. It was nearly lunch hour and time for a hastily procured sandwich or at least the apple in my greatcoat pocket. I didn't know nearly enough about Celtic coinage to assist Mr. McGraw yet, and he was due at the Library at one o'clock sharp. Outside, a thin patter of rain had commenced, darkening the paving stones of St. James's Square and quickening the steps of the shivering pedestrians below.

“Mr. Grange, I should love to hear more about
The Gospel of Sheba
, truly, but my mind is spoken for at the moment.” Rising, I gathered the magical volumes he'd returned, meaning to check them in. “When is the next meeting of the Brotherhood of Solomon? Might a stray bibliophile be welcome in your company?”

“Oh, undoubtedly, Mr. Lomax!” Mr. Theodore Grange cried, mirroring me. Grasping my hand in his palsied one, he shook it. “I was about to propose the very thing. Tuesday next is our regular gathering. We dine at the Savile Club in Picadilly. The works of scholarship you were kind enough to lend me introduced no doubts in my mind as to the authenticity of
The Gospel of Sheba
, but I would greatly value a fresh pair of eyes. We have been at each other's throats over this discovery, and two chaps have quit the club entirely, claiming outright Satanic influence at work regarding our sudden poor health. I shall look forward to seeing you at eight o'clock sharp, Mr. Lomax, and in the meanwhile wish you a very good week.”

Frowning as I watched Mr. Grange depart, I went to check in his returns, placing them upon a cart to be shelved. A book possessed of such occult power that it worked upon the reader like a disease? Impossible.

And yet, I had witnessed the decline of Mr. Grange myself. The man appeared to be shriveling before my very eyes into a grey husk.

Could poison be at work here? Something more pedestrian but no less sinister than demonic influence?

The very question is unnerving. I am not callow enough to suppose that books are not powerful—on the contrary, a book is the most delicious of paradoxes, an inert collection of symbols which are capable of changing the universe when once the cover is opened. Imagine what the world would look like had the Book of John never been written, or
On the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres
, or
Romeo and Juliet
? One day I attended the opera and was captivated by a beautiful blonde soprano with a mocking blue eye and a milk-white neck with the loveliest smooth hollows, but I fell in love with Colette when she admitted to me that she couldn't read Petrarch's poems to Laura without weeping and had never bothered over being ashamed of the fact.

I look forward to Tuesday with the greatest interest. Meanwhile, Celtic currency calls to me and I've a new set of picture-books to bring home to Grace this evening.

Excerpt from the private journal of Mr. A. Davenport Lomax, September 15th, 1902.