Read Stalking the Nightmare for Free Online

of the Third Hour.”
    He could not help her. She was dying, he felt the stiffness in his throat, he loved her so much, and she was raving.
    “An Angel of the Night, Chris.”
    Bewildered and suffering, nonetheless he went to the bedroom and fetched the brass-and-silver bound chest she called a bahut. He brought it back to her and she said, “Look at it. Do you see how it opens?”
    He studied it but could find no lock or clasp that would open the coffer. “It is made of agalloch, lign aloes, the wood of the aloe, according to the directions of Abramelin. The cross-spines are of almond-tree wood. Are you beg innin g to understand, do you believe me?”
    “Siri …”
    “You’ll need Surgat to open it. Look.”
    And she touched a symbol, a character cut into the rounded top of the chest:

    “He won’t harm you. He serves only one purpose: he opens all locks. Take a hair from my head … don’t argue with me, Chris, do it… please…” And because her voice was now barely a whisper, he did it. And she said, “He’ll demand a hair of your head. Don’t give it to him. Make him take mine. And this is what you say to invoke his presence …”
    In her last minutes she went over it with him till he realized she was serious, that she was not delirious, that he ought to write it down. So he transcribed her words exactly.
    “Once you get the bahut opened, all the rest will be clear. Just be careful, Chris. It’s all I have to give you, so make the best of it.” Her eyes were half-closed and now she opened them completely, with effort, and looked at him. “Why are you angry with me?”
    He looked away.
    “I can’t help it that I’m dying, dear. I’m sorry, but that’s what’s happening. You’ll just have to forgive me and do the best you can.”
    Then she closed her eyes and her hand opened and the cloisonne herb container fell to the carpet; and he was alone.
    He spoke to her, though he was alone. “I didn’t love you enough. If I’d loved you more it wouldn’t have happened.”
    It’s easy to be smart, later.

    By the time he was twenty-five, Chris had read everything he could find on the arcane subject of love. He had read Virgil and Rabelais, Ovid and Liu Hsiao-Wei, Plato’s Symposium and all the Neoplatonists, Montaigne and Johannes Secundus; he had read everything by the English poets from the anonymous lyrics of the 13th to 15th centuries through Rolle, Lydgate, Wyatt, Sidney, Campion, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, Blake, Burns, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Robert Browning and Emily Bronte; he had read as many translations as existed of the Sanskrit Kama Sutra and the Anangaranga, which led him to the Persians; he read The Perfumed Garden of the Sheik Nefzawi, the Beharistan of Jami and the Gulistan of Sa-Di, the anonymously-written Trtdib ul-Niszvan and the Zenan-Nahmeh of Fazil Bey, which led him to seven Arabic handbooks of sex, which he quickly put aside: sex was not the issue, he understood that as well as anyone need to. Understood it well enough to write in his journal:
    I was making love to Connie Halban when her husband Paul came back unexpectedly from a business trip. When he saw us he began crying. It was the most awful thing I’d ever stood witness to. I was reminded of Ixion, tied to a turning wheel in Hades as punishment for making love to Zeus’s wife, Hera. I’ll never touch another married woman. It simply isn’t worth the torture and guilt.
    And so he was able to avoid all the texts that dealt solely with physical love in its seemingly endless permutations. He made no value judgments; he understood early on that everyone sought True Love in often inarticulate ways they often did not, themselves, understand; but his was an idealized, traditional concept of what True Love was, and his search for the grail need not be sidetracked or slowed by excursions into those special places.
    He read Waley’s translation of The Chin P-ing Mei