Page 38 of The Devouring Time

“Oh!” Werner’s eyes light up. “Now that is interesting.”

Perhaps this hadn’t been a waste of time after all. “What is?”

Werner hops up and begins to go through one of his bookcases while he talks. “Aion was a god of time, first worshipped by the Greeks, then Romans. Now, you may have heard of Chronos as being the god of time, and he was—of linear time. The march of history and all that. But Aion was the god of cyclical time.”

Adrian and I exchange a look. “I’m not sure I follow,” he says.

“Aion had dominion over the wheel of the year and the zodiac—repeating patterns in time. He’s usually represented as standing in a circle, often with the signs of the zodiac on it.”

I recall the painting in Hart’s Leap, the nude youth holding a hoop, flanked by the rising sun and setting moon.

“As such, he became a god of renewal, the new year replacing the old, the crops sprouting and dying, only to sprout again. That sort of thing.” Werner finds the book he’s looking for and begins to flip through it. “In the late Classical Era, he became associated with other gods like Cronus—you might know him as Saturn, the titan who devoured his children—and Mithras.”

Adrian leans forward, like a hound on the scent. “And Mithras was…?”

“A god popular among Roman soldiers in the first century. He was born from a rock and slew a sacred bull, from which the world was created. Including day and night, and the cycle of the seasons—cyclical time, once again. His mysteries were revealed to worshippers gradually, as they moved up through the seven ranks of initiation. They gathered underground and sat by rank, much as you described happening in the ritual room you saw.”

He lays the book on the desk in front of us, displaying a photographic plate of a bas-relief of a young man in a cap cutting the throat of a bull. A dog, snake, and scorpion are also attacking the bull, which seems rather excessive.

“This is Mithras,” Werner says, then flips a few more pages. “And this sketch is a reconstruction of what we think the layout of a Mithraeum—an underground temple dedicated to Mithras—was like.”

I can see the resemblance to the room below the pharmacy, though it has an altar in place of the throne I’d sat in, and benches instead of tables.

Werner flips some more, then stops again, showing us photographs of a mosaic with different symbols on it. “These represent the seven levels of initiation, from the initial rank of Corax, symbolized by a raven, to Pater, symbolized by a shepherd’s staff.”

My blood goes cold. Davis had called me “Shepherd Caine” when talking to Gabrielli. Just more proof I’d somehow not only gotten mixed up with the cult, but was actually a high-ranking member.

“Given all of this,” Werner goes on, taking the book back to the shelf, “I’d guess your cult is obsessed with time, specifically repeating cycles.”

“Interesting,” I say, when it seems he’s done talking, “but what does it all mean?”

Werner shuts the book and gives me a smile. “Well now, that is your and Mr. Evans’s domain, not mine.” He glances at his watch. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment elsewhere and really must go.”

We thank him and take our leave. As we walk down the stairs, turning over everything Werner told us, I say, “There must be a reason they stole that particular painting. The book seems obvious, it holds some kind of knowledge they were looking for, but the painting…?”

Adrian slows, foot hovering over the next step down. “For the same reason. Could there be something hidden in it? A prophecy, a…shit, I don’t know, a spell, since magic seems to be real?” He shakes his head.

“We need to find out more about that painting.” An idea surfaces from my murky thoughts. “One of our customers at Forgotten Folios was a fiend for any books concerning Italian Renaissance art. She was a painter herself, I believe. At any rate, we’d set aside any books that came in on the subject, and three or four times a year she would come to New York and buy the whole lot, minus any duplicates already in her library. She lives in Salem, I remember that much. We should be able to look her up in the city directory if we go there.”

27

We catch the 2:10 am train for Salem. I spend the first hour looking out the window, watching the bright lights fall behind, then appear again as we reach another station. My mind wanders to the subject of magic. What is it? How does it work? When did I learn not only that it was real, but I could use it myself? Is my amnesia the result of the drug Myers injected me with, or a spell?

I have no answers, and I’m not sure how to get them. I refuse to believe most of the books on the occult that came through the shop are in any way genuine, but rather written by crackpots to ensnare the gullible. Perhaps some of them are real, but how can one tell?

Adrian sleeps in the seat beside me, his hat pulled down low. Eventually the long night catches up with me, and I lean my head back and close my eyes.

“Why did you shoot me?” Emerson asks.

I’m walking through a verdant jungle, the fifty-pound weight of my haversack on my back, my rifle heavy in my hands. The rest of our unit is gone, just the two of us making our way through this landscape that feels more familiar than it should.

I don’t look at him. If I do, I’ll have to see his lifeless and bloated face, uniform stiff with dried blood from the barbed wire. A brief flare of terror licks through me: where is the sniper? But no, that was another battlefield far away.

“Answer me,” he says in a hollow voice drained of all its warmth. “I came back for help, and you shot me.”

“It wasn’t real.” That’s what they told me, after I unloaded my rifle into the thing that looked like Emerson, with its eyes of burning marsh gas. “You weren’t actually there. It was my mind, cracking under the strain.”

“You know better than that.”