E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre d'Artois: Occult Detective & Associates MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Stories by E. Hoffmann Price

Author:E. Hoffmann Price [Price, E. Hoffmann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Occult, Mystery, Detective, Horror, Supernatural
ISBN: 9781479424696
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2017-01-06T07:00:00+00:00

They sat at the vertices of a pentacle inscribed in cinnabar, whose orange streak glowed fiery-golden in the violet light. Each squatted in a small circle whose center coincided with the vertex which he commanded; and in the center of the pentacle was another circle, this one scarcely more than a yard in diameter.

“It’s there…always there, now,” muttered Graf Erich, as he stared somberly at the phosphorescent haze that throbbed and pulsed with rhythmical beat in the center of the cabalistic pentacle. “I’ll never get rid of her. It’s too late…”

He shook his head wearily, and sighed. Then he stepped from the alcove into which the staircase opened, and passed along the wall until he came to a station marked on the periphery that was circumscribed about the interlaced triangles of the pentacle. He halted there, facing the prime vertex; then, extending his arms, he bowed his head for a moment.

At first he spoke in low, hurried syllables, his voice scarcely more than a murmur, but as he warmed up to his recital, he assumed a more commanding tone until at last he was intoning a resonant mantra that rolled and thundered as though, besides reverberating through the vault, it also surged through caverns and passages that reached into the uttermost depths of the earth.

In response to Graf Erich’s chanting came the low, sweet voice of a woman who basks in a perfumed garden and purrs contentedly as a cat before the luxury of a fire. It was an amorous, caressing voice in whose suave, mellow murmur was the quintessential sweetness of all women who had ever been, and who ever would be: it was the voice of not any one woman, but rather a hierarchy of women, from dusky slave-girls to diademed queens.

“Baali,” said that sighing, luminous mist, “Lord and Master, I warned you, but you would not heed. I have failed four times, now, but the Power is increasing. Baali—”

The voice addressed Graf Erich by that Semitic word which signified lord and implied husband.

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