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"I don’t knoe’re going to find anything interesting in here Mason always hinted that he had a hidden room where he kept all his important stuff, but none of us ever found it"

Much as I don’t want to, I lean against aVoices and faces shoot throughI can even feel echoes of the Circle, all of theer self, trapped in here I’ve heard of darkthis Sometime in the past, Mason hermetically sealed the room from the rest of the world with a kind of barrier hex He didn’t hat he was doing to leak out into the aether Itwith Hellions A lot of scary things passed through this rooed me Don Some I can see and feel, but others are just blurs that I can’t get a fix on The inside of their heads is all hunger and knives, like insects I’et any farther inside I’d been getting used to sensing other people’s thoughts and feelings, but the intensity of this place ain Suddenly I don’t want to be here anymore

"Ha!"

Vidocq is in the corner of the roo and the other pressed into a small divot in the wall The opposite corner of the roo on the junk that’s accumulated in the door mechanisood thief earns his keep!" Vidocq says happily With his bottled light, he leads the way into the hidden room

The hidden room is in a lot better shape than the other There’s a lot of power in the hidden room It’s protected by much more powerful spells than any of the rest of the house Every inch of the walls, floors, and ceiling is covered with elic and Hellion scripts

Vidocq is studying the place with griers over the wall and they come away black He sniffs the dust on his hand, touches a blackened finger to his tongue

"What is it?" I ask

"Ivory black," he says "Made from burned bones and animal horns"

"Is that bad?"

"It’s a traditional pight over the walls and holds it up to the ceiling "This symbol? Painted with cinnabar-a ether Cobalt and aluminum chloride, also heated, make this blue Here is anti the iron oxide found in blood All these hues, these colors, were reat heat" He holds up his light and turns three hundred and sixty degrees, taking in the whole rooht over here, will you?"

Vidocq carries the light to where I’ on the wall, but it’s not Hellion It’s so I’ve never seen before, like cuneiforashed into the ith a meat cleaver A symbol painted in bloody iron oxide covers the rest of the wall It’s a circle that wraps around and around its own interior, folding in on itself It’s a labyrinth, an ancient symbol of the deepest, darkest secrets and Final Jeopardy - hard knowledge Soernails into the soft plaster and pry out the treasure

It’s a Zippo lighter On the front is a kind of cigar-chons his nahter over and click open the top, looking for a ht point us to what Mason was doing down here There’s nothing I flick the Zippo closed It’s just a lighter

Vidocq takes it froht In a minute, he shakes his head and hands it back to me

"Maybe your friend Mason is a person who enjoys practical jokes?"

"He likes a good ’fuck you,’ but I don’t re so"

I toss the Zippo up and down in ht of it "What’s a lighter for?"

Vidocq scrapes his feet on the dusty floor "To give us fire"

I hold the lighter up, click the top open, and strike the flint once The rooht It leaks from the walls and the floor We have to wrap our ar brushes my aretting stronger by the second For a er’s ust, and I know this is all real

I ht It’s pure white and keepspool The walls look like stretched skin and soh them We can see the silhouettes of faces and ar at the thin wall flesh The bodies writhe and twist, unable to hold a shape very long as they press in on us

Ar packs of snakes Bodies like the skeletons of fish and birds Faces that see from the ends of arms, where the creatures’ hands should be

Vidocq shouts, "Can’t you take us out of here?" "We need a shadow, but the light’s everywhere" Vidocq flings open his coat Vials containing his potions, rows and rows of the He pulls out one after the other and hurls theer from my pocket and fire off a few rounds at the silhouettes They don’t even seerab Vidocq’s sleeve and pull hier until it’s e his vials Every now and then, an arm or a monstrous face contorts in pain fro back at us a second later

At the door, Vidocq shoves o!" he shouts, and tears his arm free He’s back inside the possessed room, with the walls just inches away fro and pulls out a bottle the size of his brandy flask Screa s and throws hi us both to the filthy floor

The secret roo to get at us, only they seem to be trapped behind an invisible barrier Unfortunately, the fire is not

The rotten wood in our rooets near it In a few seconds, the place is blazing like Nero’s Ro roo hie of the Circle We e, lungs burning with sh the Door of Memory and out onto the cool and silent streets of Beverly Hills The Porsche is at the other end of the block We run for it

By the ti open and flaet the car started and do a screahty, the whole lot has collapsed in on itself, shaking the street like an earthquake and blasting a fat orange fireball into the night sky I floor the Porsche, taking the first turn out of Beverly Hills on theels

THERE’S AN UNLIT parking lot behind an out-of-business movie multiplex between Hollywood Boulevard and Selma Avenue I park in a far corner so no one can see us fro I know it’s the s round When I kill the Porsche’s engine, we can hear the screas all the way across town

"Sounds like a lot of them"

Vidocq snorts "They always look after the rich It’s the same in all cities in all times, all over the world"

"What was in the last bottle you threw back there?"

"Spiritus Dei oil A venerable old catholicon, and poisonous to almost any Hellion or Lurker beast Very hard to find That was my last bottle"