gold, the highest degree of intelligence. Gin’s own natural aura, a soft orange, shimmered close to her body, followed by the blue and then the gold emanations. I had psychically sealed the outer gold so that no other psychic force could penetrate it to harm her or attach itself to her psyche again.
I was less concerned about Bael. Wary as I was, my gut feeling insisted he would never hurt me or mine. But his brothers—at least my dream portrayed them as his brothers—concerned me greatly, especially the cocky snide Azmodeus. Someone, if only for scant minutes, had invaded Gin’s psyche, using her sudden anger as an entrance point. The entity had shown a sharp resemblance to the 14-year-old in my dream, but his words, his tone on delivering them through Ginnie, had been menacingly adult.
My sharp shout to her had brought Ginnie back to herself. She had no memory of the intrusion.
I knew Ginnie well enough. She wouldn’t believe any of this, if only in defense against what she obviously feared. She had always been psychologically resilient and resourceful. Had her own mind shaken off the psychic intruder, or had something or someone else . . . possibly Bael . . . forced it from her? Or had it left on its own, using her as a temporary conduit to deliver its nasty message?
I didn’t know. I only knew Ginnie’s sanity, strong and healthy now, might not survive another attack.
I picked up the baby and mentally sent a prayer that the forces of good protect my family beyond my own efforts. I felt my skin prickle and my own aura grow, blazing golden around me. The baby giggled. He, too, was bathed in gold, and I knew instantly that the rest of my family had been similarly armored. —Bael,— I thought.
—No. My name is Quatama. Come to me when you sleep tonight. —
— Qua-ta-ma?— I repeated, putting the accent on the second syllable, trying to pronounce it as he had. —Who are you?— I received no answer, only a feeling of well-being, of being guarded by Quatama beyond the simple definition of good and evil. A shiver ran through me, not of fear but of awe, knowing somehow that his was an intellect that understood both good and evil and sought to balance these opposing forces of the universe for the stability of the universe.
All fear left me, replaced by curiosity, a desire to remedy my own lack of understanding. I picked up the baby, heading upstairs as Ginnie, hastily dressed, her schoolbooks in hand, waved on her way out the door.
I eased Daniel onto my bed and took down the small box from the top of Ginnie’s closet. The box contained a dozen or so books on mythology and religion. The Old Testament crowned it.
The Black Arts was wedged face down at the bottom. I removed it, put the box back, sat down beside Daniel, and began to read.
CHAPTER 6
I had about an hour before Mother got up. If Daniel cooperated, I could possibly come up with some leads on the unsettling occurrences my family and I had experienced over the last three weeks.
If Mother rose sooner, I’d stash Ginnie’s books back in her closet. It felt strange hiding this from her, beyond honoring Ginnie’s request. But Mother, in all my training by her, had never accepted the existence of a dark side, of Hell. She bluntly refused to consider a netherworld of lost souls governed by fallen angels demoted to devils and demons. Her saying that Bael could be demonic confused me. She believed existence was composed of layered dimensions, our own physical universe only one of the layers. And each soul itself, according to Mother, created its own Heaven or Hell, depending on the lessons learned and the work done or shirked upon completion of its sojourn on Earth.
I still preferred Mother’s views, but wondered if some of those dimensions could be in ideological conflict with each other. The concept of demonology baffled me. My being involved in it, even marginally, startled me even more. I wondered about the role of the mysterious Quatama in all of this, but had instinctively trusted him during our brief moment of telepathic contact.
I paged through the book, glancing at random paragraphs in each chapter, until I came to the one entitled Lucifer’s Minions. It compared the histories of pre-Christian gods and goddesses with biblical histories describing demons and devils listed as members of the Satanic Hierarchy. The names were often the same or very similar, but their descriptions varied.
The name Bael had another variation beyond the three-headed king of Hell and the monstrous Canaanite Baal. Baalzebub was a Philistine god, the last two syllables of that name meaning “of the flies.” King Ahaziah implored their Baal to rid Ekron of an infestation of flies. When the flies flew away, the Philistines rewarded Baal, making him their supreme deity: Baalzebub. Lord of the Flies. Jewish tribes later drove his worshippers from their lands, corrupting him into Beelzebub, the Prince of Demons.
The chapter never indicated whether the Phoenician Baal and the Canaanite Baal were one and the same. It did say that the name Baal had meant Lord or God in Syria and Palestine.
In the British Isles, the Celtic sun god Belenus, his name latinized from the original Bel, was worshipped during Beltane with crackling bonfires and ribald abandon.
What relation did these early gods have, if any, to the handsome young man in my dream, the protective spirit, Bael?
Skimming through a chapter on Satan, I found that satan in early Hebrew had once meant the adversary or judge in legal disputes. Later, Lucifer became the supreme Satan: God’s adversary, sternly judging God’s own creation: mankind.
Again I wondered how this fit the quiet pleasant Lucifer of my dream. And Azmodeus had been his son, not the offspring of Adam and his first wife, Lilith.
I rummaged through the remaining books and pulled out a hardcover called Man, Myth, and Satanism. One section showed crude drawings of Bael and Ashtoreth. Ashtoreth, looking like a handicapped angel, his rubbery limbs bent over under the weight of enormous batlike wings, sat astride a dragon of Hell that more resembled a deformed dog. The sketch of Bael did have three heads: the center head was a swarthy, thin-faced man wearing a crown, his left head, a frog’s, and his right head, a cat’s. A spider’s body squatted beneath the heads.
I couldn’t recall Ashtoreth in my dream, although my dream self apparently knew him well. In the sketch of Bael, the human head did have pointed ears, but as I read the text, I found that these drawings had been created by Louis Breton, a French engraver in 1863. Mr. Breton had admittedly used his ample imagination in interpreting the royalty of Hell.
The sound of movement down the hall, the creak of a bed, alerted me to Mother’s awakening. I stashed the two books back into the box and returned it to the top shelf of Ginnie’s closet.
Daniel still lay on the bed, watching me with a quiet fascination. “You’re such a good boy, Danny,” I told him. He smiled back broadly.
“Leigh Ann?”
“In the bedroom, Mother.” I picked Daniel up and met her in the hallway. “Morning.”
“Good morning.” She tied the belt around her pink terrycloth house-coat. “Have you eaten yet?”
“Yes, but we’ll keep you company.”
“Fine,” she said, “and afterwards, we’ll get dressed and go out to find that new crib.”
“Sounds good.”
While she ate, I told her part of my dream, not admitting to knowing the names of Bael’s family members, and leaving out the story of Adam and Eve and their self-imposed exile on Earth. I did describe
