Clay? he had to wonder.

But he didn"t have time to wonder about the strange, wet squiggles on her chest because at that same moment the skull fell out of his hand when he recognized the woman.

It was Helene, his dead wife.

"H-Helene?" the impossible word ground from his throat.

She was beautiful in spite of what sullied her. The luxurious contours he remembered so well, the erect bosom and jutting nipples...and the smile. It was all there, even though he knew he"d buried her two years ago. Then the cryptic message from the funeral director replayed in his head.

What ever wet substance covered her, it caked her hair as well, and her pubic thatch. Her eyes gleamed at the skull on the ground, then back up to him.

"You have no idea how important that is," came her exuberant whisper.

"You"re dead!" he screamed. "This is impossible!"

One bare foot took a step closer, then another. "Are you sure it"s not a dream, Seth?"

The question stilled him. A dream? "No, it can"t be..."

"Then how can I be standing here now?" Another step. "Because you"re right. I"m dead."

The switchgra.s.s hissed. Seth couldn"t move as she came right up to him and stroked his face with cool, moist fingers. He was paralyzed by the impossibility. When she kissed him her dead tongue twirled in his mouth. Then- He was instantly on his knees.

She"d shoved him down with uncanny strength. Now he was eye-level with her clay-mucked pubis.

"You always were my favorite lover, Seth," her voice eddied as her fingers laced behind his head. She pulled his mouth to her groin.

Seth performed the act she yearned for, revolted as he was. When his tongue laved upward, her darkened thighs clenched.

"I don"t know why I ever cheated on you..."

His efforts stopped. "Wh-"

"My greatest regret, sweetheart. But you were so obsessed about developing that stupid game, you never made time for me." She pushed his face back, digging fingers so hard into the back of his neck, he was forced to continue. "The night I died, I wasn"t driving back from the mall. I lied to you."

Seth tensed, but then the fingers bit back in.

"I was driving back from my lover"s apartment. And G.o.dd.a.m.n you for asking me to turn around for f.u.c.king cigarettes." She pulled his face so close he could scarcely breathe. "Good, good, like that, like you used to," she cooed. "And I don"t resent you for finding a new lover, honey. This...Judy. I look forward to pulling all of her organs out through her mouth with my bare hands..."

Seth was appalled but forced to carry on, his mind now a swamp of despair and heartsickness. When the abomination climaxed, Helene sighed, rising up on tiptoes.

She stroked his hair, leaving dainty streaks of clay. "That was lovely, darling. And soon we"ll be together again forever." And then her hand smacked Seth hard across the temple. His vision snapped to a blur; the last thing he saw before he pa.s.sed out was the cryptic word fingered across her bosom: S"MOL.

IV.

"Step into the Circle of Ten Circles and see how the flame brightens as you near..."

The words sounded so distant, Seth could barely hear them as his consciousness slowly reformed. Where am- His blurred vision detected the flicker of torches and shadows of figures. Then, Oh, G.o.d. Helene... It couldn"t be true, just an evil dream, but when he lifted his head from where he lay, he could see her, her body still somehow robust but smeared with wet clay. That word-S"MOL-seemed to quiver across her bosom. Her dead eyes stared off as the other figures seemed to shift.

The echoic voice returned. "Only faith can save us now, my holiest melech. Empower this night, as you so empowered my great ancestor." And then the figure raised the skull into the air.

Seth, even in his aching daze, recognized the voice. Asher Lowen, and the other two... He squinted. Ahron and Eli, the rabbis he"d met at Asher"s house.

Seth lolled his head to both sides, realizing now that his ankles and wrists had been tied, and he"d been lain in a circular clearing walled around by switchgra.s.s. The fields, he presumed. That clearing Judy saw from the bedroom window. He tried to focus closer, and found himself lying within an odd circular configuration-ten feet wide or so-yet the circle"s border was composed of a ring of smaller circles made of stones. Did the stones glimmer red? Seth counted ten such circles just as Asher"s ethereal voice proclaimed, "Ten circles for the Ten h.e.l.ls, and the eleventh for the Eleventh Sefer-the glorious Sefer Met." Now Asher seemed to touch a strange pendant about his neck, two triangles sitting atop one another, in each a dark face. "Here we now pray for the vigor of the Zemu"im, the Secret Discipline from the time of Adam..."

A ritual, Seth realized, for he also realized that just beneath his back where he lay was an eleventh circle of b.l.o.o.d.y stones. And I"m part of it. So was the skull, it seemed, for it was set down beside his head.

"Worthy Ahron-"

"Yes, Gaon!"

"Kill this fodder so that it may have unlife in S"mol"s great glory."

Seth had no time to react when a knife was plunged into his chest. His scream bolted up into the night, and suddenly each frantic beat of his heart expelled blood. The wound left him shuddering in a chill even as his surroundings seemed to grow hotter. I"m dying, his fading thoughts murmured. For what? The expanding dampness spread across his shirt.

"We see now no longer with our human eyes but with the eyes of our Neptesh, our black souls..."

"S"mol be praised."

"Evil for evil, just as was written so long ago. The Zemu"im and the Calling of the Seals make it so."

Seth hacked blood, gasping.

"Now we will close our eyes and, embodied in faith, we step together into the Eleventh Circle. In reverence and glory we hold our eyes fast to the ground..."

The madness sucked down on top of Seth, heartbeat slowing, less and less blood staying in his body. I"ll be dead soon, he knew, but what happens before then?

And what was that other sound he thought he heard? Footsteps?

"And now we look up again," Asher"s fading voice declared, "in grace from the power of S"mol and the Secrets G.o.d has whispered of but once..."

Ahron and Eli gasped, and so did Seth even in his death throes. The torches lit about the great circle now appeared to be hundreds of feet away. The round walls of switchgra.s.s were no longer in evidence but replaced by walls of smoky murk. Shrieks and scuffling came to Seth"s ears, and, yes, he was certain now: footsteps.

Then the light of the distant torches turned blue. "Great S"mol," someone whispered.

More heat poured over Seth"s quivering body-an unnatural heat that couldn"t possibly exist even on a night hot as this. When Seth"s dimming eyes could look again, the circle of torches seemed half a mile in diameter now, such that they could barely be seen.

Seth"s r.e.t.a.r.ding breaths began to rattle, for he saw something else now: the source of the footsteps.

They were figures, but they seemed scarlet-skinned and heinous-faced-inhuman. Then they all stopped, all but one, who kept approaching as a gaunt form with a mouth that took up most of its angular face and black orbs for eyes. The thing was smiling.

"Gaon!" whispered Eli in a sudden urgency. "The fodder for the rite-he isn"t yet dead."

"It matters not, friend Eli. He will be once we cut his head off." Meanwhile, the most prominent of the macabre figures continued to approach.

"Great melech," Asher breathed in awe, falling to his knees. "I bow down to you...and I beseech you, with this humble offering." His hands reached out, in them what looked like a loaf of bread. The spidery, three-fingered hands of the scarlet figure took the bread and brought it to its hole-punch nostrils. It breathed the scent of the bread, then smiled with black-crystal teeth.

The thing took a bite of the bread, then began to laugh, a sound more like a jackal than a man.

"Anoint this lowly sacrifant, great S"mol," Asher begged, still on his knees, "and this skull of your worthy servant, so that we may do your bidding." Asher glanced to Eli with a nod, and Eli knelt before Seth, raising a hatchet over his neck...

V.

Judy drove back home through the black night, nervous tears dampening her cheeks. He must not"ve gotten my message. Which could only mean that he"d left the airport immediately after deboarding the plane. She kept trying to call him on the way back but now she couldn"t even get his voice mail; the storm rolling in told her why. Each mile back brought more frets. What am I going to tell him? And what if he goes into the bas.e.m.e.nt?

Relief surged when she parked the c.u.mbersome step van and saw the Tahoe in front of the house. But the relief was false. She searched high and low but Seth was not inside. What now? Where would he have gone? She paced the front yard, thinking, but when thunder rumbled, she glanced aside and saw the bas.e.m.e.nt door lying open. Oh, my G.o.d, no...

She crept down, calling his name but knowing she"d get no answer. The flashlight was still there but in a different place. She roved its beam above the pieces of the dismantled golem, then grimly noted that the hidden door was open when she knew she"d closed it earlier. He"s been here. Who else could it have been? The mezuzah remained where she"d left it, but...

More thunder rumbled when she pointed the light into the hole in the northwest corner. The skull was gone.

Blind impulse took over. She left the bas.e.m.e.nt, then got D-Man"s pistol from the van. What else could she do? The keys remained in the Tahoe, so she got in and took off. She turned it right onto the ser vice path that cut through the switchgra.s.s field. They need the skull for a ritual, she reasoned, and the rituals take place at the clearing. The Circle of Ten Circles...

She stopped well before the side trail and cut off the engine. I was right. Even from here she could see the torchlight filtering back through the high stalks. When she walked to the trail itself she noticed the black sedan she"d seen leaving here last night. Asher Lowen"s car.

She soft-stepped all the way to the clearing, careful. She heard voices, and thought she made out the words, "...in grace from the power of S"mol and the Secrets G.o.d has whispered of but once..."

A Kischuph rite, she knew. G.o.d"s secret overheard by S"mol before his ejection from Heaven. The Sefer Met, the eleventh book of G.o.d"s emanations, whose secrets would be exploited by G.o.d"s enemies...

Then she heard, "Great S"mol," and saw the sputtering lamplight turn blue. Judy peeked through the stalks and saw: The clearing and its newly wetted circles. A figure lay still in the circle"s center, next to a skull. Judy couldn"t see the p.r.o.ne man, for her view was blocked by someone dressed in black. But she could see Asher, dressed similarly, on the other side of the circle, and next to him, Ahron, his adjutant. Asher"s face looked hot, his eyes keen in a vision. But then she saw...

What in the h.e.l.l is... Standing off was a nude woman-nude yet smeared with what could only be clay. She glistened, and so did the word inscribed on her chest, S"MOL. Another golem, Judy admitted. And the more she looked at the thing, the sicker she felt until she fully realized who it was.

Helene. They dug her up and-and turned her into THAT...

But then her worst fear yet was realized, when the man blocking her view-Eli-lowered himself to the p.r.o.ne figure: Seth.

Eli raised an ax, clearly meaning to decapitate Seth.

VI.

Seth"s blood loss left him with no strength at all. His dim eyes watched the hatchet rise, while Asher and the scarlet-slimed thing looked on. Seth contemplated his death, hoping he"d be forgiven for his sins but could only feel outrage and wrath. Why? What have I done to deserve this?

Beyond him now, the h.e.l.lish perimeter of walled smoke looked a mile deep. Seth thought of Judy, his love for her, and smiled, just as the hatchet reached the top of its arc and began to descend.

He thought he heard a loud snap which he didn"t understand, nor did he understand why the hatchet dropped and Eli collapsed, howling with his hands to his head.

"No!" Asher bellowed.

Another sharp snap! like an echoic plip of water, and then Ahron fell as well, blood shooting from his Adam"s apple as he convulsed in the mist.

"Tear her apart!" Asher yelled, and that"s when Helene broke from her stance and rushed outward. Seth chugged in a great breath and blinked, only to reopen his eyes and find himself back in the clearing lit by the closely set torches. The last burst of his adrenalin gave him the strength to lean up, to look over...

Helene had dragged Judy out of the gra.s.s and was straddling her. Judy kicked and flailed her arms but all attempts to defend herself were meaningless. "When Seth becomes a goilem," Helene said in a black chuckle, "I"m going to watch him f.u.c.k your headless corpse." And then she grabbed Judy"s head and began to twist.

Seth groaned, summoned one last fit of energy and grabbed the hatchet. He flung it at Helene.

But all it did was glance harmlessly off her shoulder. Helene released Judy"s head long enough to glance over at Seth and smile.

Then she flopped over and lay still.

What happened? Seth wondered. He crawled over to where Judy lay hacking and shaking off her daze. When he collapsed in her lap, she hugged him.

"My G.o.d, what did they do to you!"

"Knifed me," he sputtered. He stared over to where Helene lay surprisingly still. "How did you-" He saw that the word S"MOL had been wiped off her chest. Judy had replaced it with another incomprehensible word: MAETH.

"It means *death," " she told him. "When you distracted her with the hatchet, I changed the charging word of the spell."

Seth looked up at her. He didn"t understand and didn"t care. All that mattered was he was with Judy now.

"Don"t move, I"m going to drag you back to the car," Judy hurried, "get you to the hospital-"

"No, no point..."

"Yes!" she yelled, and began to drag him down the trail.

"Did you see?" his voice grated. "They took me to a place-it wasn"t the clearing, it was a place a mile wide and walled around by smoke."

"Seth, you were in the clearing the whole time. They were using you and that d.a.m.n skull for a Kischuph ritual. Asher and his people aren"t really Kabbalists, they"re sorcerers. They practice the Judaic equivalent of black magic." She dragged him onward, her cross glittering.

"No, no, it changed. It was like a pit, a mile wide and these-these things came out of the smoke. I think they were demons. And one of them-" Seth coughed a faint trace of smoke. "One of them they called S"mol..."

Judy paused a moment, then kept dragging him. "Don"t talk, honey, save your strength." She kept dragging him, her hands clenched to his shirt at the shoulders. Seth gazed upward, watching black clouds. He raised his hands to hers at his shoulder and said, "Judy?"

"Don"t talk! Save your strength, we"re almost to the car-"

"I love you," he whispered.

She kept dragging, ignoring exhaustion. When she got back to the Tahoe in the ser vice path, she didn"t realize he was dead.

"Seth?" She thumped to her knees. "Seth!" She moaned at the great stain of blood on his shirt. She felt for a pulse, then tried CPR for several minutes.

"Oh, Seth," she wept and let her face drop to his chest. She cried for a while, then sat up with a sigh. "Too late for the hospital," she croaked. She regained her breath, then got his body into the Tahoe.

Thunder rumbled overhead.

She pulled a rough U-turn in the path, crunching down a wedge of switchgra.s.s. She didn"t drive back to the house, nor did she turn right to go to the hospital in Somner"s Cove. Instead, she turned left, to Lowensport.

CHAPTER TEN.

September 1880 I.