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Summary
Summary
"A blood-pumping, nerve-shredding thriller--elegant, edgy, ingenious. Craig Russell conjures not one but two unforgettable settings: Prague between the wars, pulsing with menace, and a Gothic mental asylum, as exciting a house of horrors as I've ever visited. You'll enter both with dread. You'll dwell in them with relish."
--A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window
Prague, 1935: Viktor Kosárek, a psychiatrist newly trained by Carl Jung, arrives at the infamous Hrad Orlu Asylum for the Criminally Insane. The state-of-the-art facility is located in a medieval mountaintop castle outside of Prague, though the site is infamous for concealing dark secrets going back many generations. The asylum houses the country's six most treacherous killers--known to the staff as The Woodcutter, The Clown, The Glass Collector, The Vegetarian, The Sciomancer, and The Demon--and Viktor hopes to use a new medical technique to prove that these patients share a common archetype of evil, a phenomenon known as The Devil Aspect. As he begins to learn the stunning secrets of these patients, five men and one woman, Viktor must face the disturbing possibility that these six may share another dark truth.
Meanwhile, in Prague, fear grips the city as a phantom serial killer emerges in the dark alleys. Police investigator Lukas Smolak, desperate to locate the culprit (dubbed Leather Apron in the newspapers), realizes that the killer is imitating the most notorious serial killer from a century earlier--London's Jack the Ripper. Smolak turns to the doctors at Hrad Orlu for their expertise with the psychotic criminal mind, though he worries that Leather Apron might have some connection to the six inmates in the asylum.
Steeped in the folklore of Eastern Europe, and set in the shadow of Nazi darkness erupting just beyond the Czech border, this stylishly written, tightly coiled, richly imagined novel is propulsively entertaining, and impossible to put down.
Author Notes
Craig Russell was born in England and is also known as Christopher Galt. He is a short story writer and novelist. His special interest in post-war German history is reflected in his Fabel series, which includes historical themes. In 2007 he was awarded the Polizeistern (Police Star) by the Hamburg Police. He is the first non-German to ever receive this award. Russell also won the 2008 CWA Dagger in the Library Award. He was also a finalist for the 2013 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger for Dead Men and Broken Hearts. In 2015 his novel, The Ghosts of Altona won the Scottish Crime Novel of the Year at the Bloody Scotland Festival.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
What if a Jack the Ripper copycat was at work in 1935 Czechoslovakia? That's the premise of this sensational serial killer novel, Scottish author Russell's U.S. debut, in which twists are both jaw-dropping and logical. KapitA¡n LukA¡s SmolA¡k of the Prague Police is desperate to catch the fiend known as Leather Apron, who has been butchering prostitutes in ways that mimic the Ripper's methods. When a respectable, upper-class woman is slain, SmolA¡k fears the motive is related to the victims' Czech-German ethnicity. Meanwhile, psychiatrist Viktor KosA¡rek arrives at Hrad Orlu Asylum, situated in an isolated gothic castle that was supposedly constructed to block a literal gateway to hell. The asylum houses the Devil's Six, murderers who all claim that they were compelled to commit their crimes by a demonic figure. KosA¡rek hopes to employ new hypnotic drugs on the patients to validate his theories regarding archetypes. Russell integrates the period's political tensions into a mind-blowing story line that will appeal to fans of Caleb Carr and Thomas Harris. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth, Aevitas Creative Management (U.K.). (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Young psychiatrist Viktor Kosárek leaves Prague for a position at Hrad Orlo, an ancient castle that has had many uses over the centuries. The forbidding structure now houses the Devil's Six, Czechoslovakia's worst criminals a woman who is a strict vegetarian except when she's a cannibal, for example, and a serial killer who spent days torturing a family (gory violence is meticulously and calmly described by these patients, making it all the more frightening). Kosárek uses sedatives to coax from the six their innermost motivations, the causes of their awful deeds, which he calls the devil aspect. Evil prowls outside the walls, too, as Kosárek has left a city that is in the grip of a serial killer's terror, and Hitler is making his rise to power. Award-winning Scottish author Russell makes his American debut here, and it's not only one of the most memorable thrillers of the year; it's also unique: the premise is strikingly original, and the mood created by the juxtaposition of the patients' memories and the real-time horrors is utterly chilling. Readers will eagerly await other books by the author becoming available stateside.--Henrietta Verma Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Great horror writing is more than cheap scares and bloody fingerprints. When it's really good, horror can push you up against the hard questions of existence. Nothing clarifies your relationship to other people and the world around you, to your future and your past, quite like a chainsaw massacre. And yet physical pain is not the point. We're spectators, after all, experiencing fear without actual danger. What we get from horror is an appreciation for human resilience, and the gobsmacked realization that it is a miracle anyone survives in this cruel world at all. IF THERE'S a writer out there worth surviving for, it is Caitlin R. Kieman, whose trippy, groundbreaking collection THE VERY BEST OF CAITLIN R. KIERNAN (Tachyon, paper, $18.95) is pure genius. Paging through it, I found references to David Bowie, the fossil record, H. P. Lovecraft, the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the massacre of a unicorn, life on Mars, Gustave Doré, absinthe, South American jungles and King Kong - and that's just a cursory glance. There is simply nothing out there quite like her. Which may explain why Kieman, who has published over 250 short stories and 14 novels, is usually classified as a horror writer, that genre for all things weird and amorphous. In his introduction, Richard Kadrey suggests we call her a writer of "dark fantasy" or "weird tales" instead. I don't care where you shelve her books - good writing is good writing, however you classify it - as long as we call Kieman what she is: an underappreciated master whose vision expresses itself through vast geographic expanses, gender fluidity, geological upheaval, lingering forces of evil, the horror and beauty of the natural world and the mythic architecture of the human mind. Kieman is transformative. Read her and be changed. Take "La Peau Verte" ("The Green Skin"), for example, in which Hannah, who has been hired to entertain at a party, looks at herself in the mirror. "No - not her self any longer, but the new thing that the man and woman have made of her." Thanks to "airbrushes and latex prosthetics, grease paints and powders and spirit gum," Hannah has become a green sprite composed of "too many competing, complementary shades of green to possibly count, one shade bleeding into the next, an infinity of greens." The color opens a maze in Hannah's mind, inviting the reader in: "I could get lost in here," she thinks, gazing into the mirror. "Perhaps I am already." Such is the surreal beauty of Kieman. Her stories saturate the mind with color. In "The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4)," a collector lures a violinist to his home by offering her a priceless violin. The collector has two specialties. The first is his "vast collection of fossilized ammonites," and the second is "all the young women he has murdered by suffocation." Before he reveals his sinister motives to the violinist, he says, as if by way of apology: "The universe is a marvelously complex bit of craftsmanship. And sometimes one must look very closely to even begin to understand how a given thing connects with another." This sentiment is an apt description of Kiernan's stories. They are complex universes. The more you look, the more you connect. Occasionally, however, the complexity becomes overwhelming. In the layered and gorgeous "Andromeda Among the Stones," for example, the narrative moves between 1889 and 1914-15, and while the story left me with a powerful sense of doom, I read it three times before I finally found my bearings. Most story readers aren't used to reading as an act of exegesis, but with Kieman it is often necessary to take the extra time. Her imagination can also veer into the absurd, as it does in "The Maltese Unicorn" - a play on Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon," only this story turns on the theft of a black enameled dildo carved from a unicorn's horn. The dildo was so revered that it was placed in Solomon's Temple alongside the ark of the covenant. While that's the Indiana Jones sequel I'm waiting for, it may cause some readers to raise an eyebrow. Whatever feelings her stories raise for you, they are sure to be intense. If you haven't read her work before, these stories are a good place to begin. Like Hannah, you might find yourself getting lost in the mirror. The scary thing is, you'll want to stay there. While KIERNAN is all about complexity, other kinds of horror writing succeed because of their parable-like simplicity. The murderer and the victim are on opposite sides of the dark hallway, one cowering in fear, the other lifting a bloody hatchet. In such tales, ambiguity is stripped away, exposing the sick pleasure of the powerful psychopath and the terror of his innocent prey. The excellent collection a PEOPLE'S FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES (One World, paper, $17) plays with this dynamic, presenting narratives in which the powerless openly resist oppression. The editors, Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, asked 25 writers to create stories that challenge "the chokehold of history" and give readers "new futures to believe in." From this directive, you might expect a collection of dreamy political utopias. Instead, they created spaces of resistance that are often darker, and more frightening, than reality. "The Wall," by Lizz Huerta, was particularly haunting. It is a story about a barrier between Mexico and the "now defunct United States" that's "meant to keep the empire safe: strrrrrrong empire, empire with mightiest military in the world, empire made of blood and theft, human and land." There is a tangible sense of old feuds in this piece, the ancestral rising through the apocalypse to manifest in the present. Children are born without jaws; a food crisis has taken over. The narrator, Ivette, is part of a "sisterhood of equality," whose "Mamita was one of the tenders, one of countless brujas who made hard choices to ensure we would survive what was coming." Survival is uncertain. Ivette can do little but subvert the efforts of the powerful with her magic. Subversion comes in many forms, and one of the most effective is dark humor. Charles Yu's story "Good News Bad News," a collection of headlines from the future, demonstrates how insurmountable our problems feel when presented in the chill language of journalese. As Yu rolls through the headlines, we learn that refugee families are settling on the moon; climate change is still being debated a millennium from now; scientists have confirmed that we're living in a simulation; "delegates from Kingdom Plantae, the world's first nation-state of sentient trees," are going to the United Nations; and the 10-day forecast is: "Hot. "Hot. "Hot. "Hot. "Hot. "Really hot. "Dangerously hot. "What are we going to do about this hot. "Slightly less hot but still extremely troublingly hot. "Hot." Yu's future is as depressing as it is hot. The human race is still running on the hamster wheel toward doom. Except for the sentient trees, "Good News Bad News" seems like mostly bad news to me. Unbearable heat is also the central motif of Catherynne M. Valente's story "The Sun in Exile," a parable that illustrates the absurdity of climate change denial. The story opens in a scorched world, where everything is cooking down to its essence: "Tomatoes simmered on the vine ... and an entire city evaporated into steam like so much water in a copperbottomed pot." Yet even as people fry, a leader named Papa Ubu denies that it is hot at all. He wears winter gear and gives speeches about the terrible cold, while his daughter, who is "as beautiful and unmoving as carved ice," travels through the country handing out blankets to sweaty people who "shone like their skin was made of diamonds." Soon the word "hot" is banned so as to "not torment the suffering." Like "The Emperor's New Clothes," Valente's story is a study in how the powerful, through manipulation and the suppression of speech, create an alternate reality for the masses, one that contradicts both fact and lived experience. Such dystopian fairy tales reduce complexity to its lowest point, and can be frustrating to read, but Valente successfully lays bare the dangers of a leader who creates his own reality. One leaves "A People's Future of the United States" understanding that imaginary worlds can create a heaven or a hell, depending on your ideology. As N. K. Jemisin, whose work appears in this collection, is quoted in the publicity materials: "Imagination is where revolution begins. " While there is nothing particularly revolutionary about the devil aspect (Doubleday, $27.95), the beguiling and gruesome new horror thriller by the British novelist Craig Russell, it is a wildly entertaining story that grabs you on Page 1 and drags you into its dark world kicking and screaming. That's a good thing, as far as I'm concerned. Russell has created a truly frightening story, one that gets under your skin slowly, then goes deep, like the tip of a butcher knife. I read the novel one snowy night by the fire, unable to sleep until I finished, then unable to sleep once I had. Czechoslovakia, 1935: We follow Dr. Viktor Kosarek, a dashing, brilliant psychiatrist, as he takes his new position at the Hrad Orlu Asylum, a gloomy castle in the town of Mlada Boleslav. Kosarek, a former student of Carl Jung, has developed an experimental treatment he plans to try on the six criminally insane patients confined at Hrad Orlu, all notorious killers known as the Devil's Six. As Kosarek takes these killers back through their crimes via drug-induced hypnosis, a detective in Prague leads an investigation into a Jack the Ripper copycat killer. The hunt for the murderer merges with Dr. Kosarek's experiments on the Devil's Six, creating a suspenseful psychological mystery. Mládek, a clown whose alter ego Harlequin killed children, says at one point: "The truth is the Devil comes into our lives, at least once, at one time or another. Everyone encounters him, but most don't know he's there." While harlequin would have you meet the Devil in person, every witch worth her grimoire knows that evil is best carried out by a spirit companion, or familiar. Stacey Halls's debut novel, the familiars (Mira, $26.99), explores the power a group of witches wields over a small 17th-century English community. It is 1612 in the county of Lancashire, and the young and spunky Fleetwood Shuttleworth, wife of a rich country gentleman, desperately wants a child after three stillbirths. Pregnant and fearful, Fleetwood hires a midwife, Alice Gray, with connections to a group of women accused of witchcraft. For those acquainted with the history of English witch trials, and the famous conviction of the Pendle witches in Lancashire in 1612, Halls's novel offers a rich and atmospheric reimagining of a historical period rife with religious tensions, superstitions, misogyny and fear. We experience the story through 17-year-old Fleetwood's perspective, with all her insecurities and ambitions. There are moments when Fleetwood's many conflicts - with her mother, her servants, her less than lusty husband - feel a tad, well, familiar. That said, through Fleetwood's dilemma we are privy to the atmosphere of paranoia and fear that accompanies a veritable mass hysteria. Now, with so many high-profile men claiming to be victims of a witch hunt, it's good to understand what a real one looks like. In Pendle, 12 people were accused of witchcraft; 11 were tried. Nine were found guilty, one died awaiting trial and one went free. Not great odds, fellas. Odds are better you'll see a ghost, or at least find yourself spooked to the core by one of the chilling stories compiled by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger in ghost STORIES: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense (Pegasus, $25.95). Morton and Klinger write in their introduction that the Victorians were crazy about ghost stories. Spiritualism, "which ... held as its central tenet that the spirits of the dead continued to exist on another plane and could be contacted by human mediums," was huge, and inspired a resurgence of ghost stories. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a spokesman for the Spiritualist movement. His second wife, Jean Leckie, was a medium. Spiritualism may have gone the way of sniffing salts, but the ghost stories in this collection are as enjoyable now as they were for the Victorians. Some of my favorite 19 th- and early-20th-century writers - Edith Wharton, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins - are found in this collection, along with Charles Dickens, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Walter Scott and a slew of other wellknown authors. But the real fun of reading this book was in discovering writers I had not known before. My favorite: Johann August Apel, an early-19th-century German whose work inspired Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." Apel wrote gothic ghost stories about "aristocratic families enduring melodramatic plot twists in isolated, haunted castles." In Apel's "The Family Portraits," Ferdinand, the "only son, and last branch of the ancient family of Meltheim," is out traveling to investigate his marriage prospects when he is invited to join a group of ladies trading ghost stories. Soon, a tale unfolds about Juliana, a young woman living in an ancestral chateau who was terrified by a family portrait. Juliana claimed that the figure in the painting looked at her as if "the lips were about to open and speak." I won't spoil the fun, but I will say that Juliana's tale doesn't end well. When it's Ferdinand's turn to tell a ghost story, he too has a creepy ancestral portrait tale, a story "too horrible for so fine an evening." The ladies beg him to continue, and he complies, because has there ever been an evening too fine for a horrible tale? I think not. Danielle trussoni is the author of the Angelology series. Her new novel, "The Ancestor," will be published in 2020.
Kirkus Review
In 1935 Prague, vicious murders are linked to a medieval castle housing an insane asylum outside the city in this well-crafted gothic crime tale.Psychiatrist Viktor Kosrek tests his theory about the evil in humans on the six inmatesthe "most notorious cases in Central Europe"of the Hrad Orl? Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Prague Police Kapitn Luk Smolk, the vegetarian son of a butcher, hopes a glass bead at the latest gory crime scene will help identify the serial killer Leather Apron. As these two storylines converge, Russell (The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid, 2016, etc.), a Scottish author making his U.S. publishing debut, plants tantalizing parallels. Take the bead: One inmate's husband (whom she cooked and fed to his sister) sold glass beads like the one Luk found. The Kapitn heads to the asylum to consult one of the so-called Devil's Six, who is a glass expert and earlier mentions beads known as the Tears of Perun from Slavic mythology, part of a rich vein of lore and legend that Russell weaves into the narrative. The asylum cases have "odd commonalities," particularly a demonic figure who abets or is blamed for the violence. Plausible perps abound. Luk dreams of helping his father slaughter one of Leather Apron's victims. Luk' medical examiner is the twin of one of the six nasties. The head of the asylum mysteriously disappears into his office for days. In the background but never forgotten is the rising political threat from Germany, the "Madness of the Many." A seasoned writer, Russell keeps the police case moving at a good clip, more so than the clinical narrative and its unavoidable repetitions. Each has nice surprises but nothing to match the ending, which offers more twists than a Chubby Checker album.A smart, atmospheric, and entertaining read but not for the Jung and easily Freudened. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 In the late autumn of 1935, Dr. Viktor Kosárek was a tall, lean man in his twenty-ninth year. He was handsome, not the unexceptional handsomeness of most of the Bohemian race, but with a hint of ancient nobility about his long slender nose, high-angled cheekbones and hard, blue-green eyes beneath dark-arched eyebrows and raven-black hair. At an age where many men still looked boyish, Viktor Kosárek's rather severe features made him look older than he actually was: a guised maturity and accidental authority that aided him in his work. As a psychiatrist, it was Viktor's professional duty to unfold inner secrets, to shine a light into the most shadowed, most protected corners of his patients' minds, and those patients would not release their closest-held secrets, deliver their darkest despairs and desires, into the hands of a mere boy. It was night and it was raining--a chill rain that spoke of the seasons turning--when Viktor left his rented apartment for the last time. Because he had so much luggage and his provincial train was leaving from Masaryk Station on Hybernská Street rather than Prague main station, he had taken a taxi. Also because he had so much luggage--a large trunk and two heavy suitcases--and because he knew how difficult it could be to secure a porter, he had timed his arrival at the station with three-quarters of an hour to spare. It was just as well because, once paid, the dour taxi driver simply deposited the luggage on the pavement outside the station's main entrance and drove off. Viktor had hoped his friend Filip Starosta would have been there to see him off and to help with the luggage, but the increasingly unreliable Filip had called off at the last minute. It meant Viktor had no option but to leave his baggage where it was and go off in search of a porter, which took him a good ten minutes. He guessed that the absence of porting staff had something to do with the commotion inside the station--the urgent shouts and cries that Viktor could now hear but that were out of his sight. Eventually he secured a young station attendant of about sixteen in an oversized red kepi who, despite his slight build, swung the trunk and cases onto his porter's trolley with ease. They were heading into the station when a Praga Alfa in police colors pulled up into the rank that Viktor's taxi had just vacated. Two uniformed officers leaped from the car and ran across their path and into the station. "What's going on?" Viktor asked the boy porter, whose shoulders shrugged somewhere in his loosely fitted uniform jacket. "I heard a lot of shouting," the boy said. "Just before you called me over. Didn't see what was going on, though." Following the boy and his luggage into the station, Viktor could see right away that some significant drama was unfolding. Over in a far corner of the concourse, a large crowd was clustering like iron filings drawn to a magnet, leaving the main hall almost empty. Viktor noticed that the two newly arrived policemen had joined a number of other officers trying to disperse the crowd. Someone concealed by the cluster of people was shouting: a male voice. A woman, also hidden by the throng, screamed in terror. "She's a demon!" yelled the man, hidden by the curtain of onlookers. "She's a demon sent by the Devil. By Satan!" There was a pause, then, in an urgent tone of frightened warning, "He is here now--Satan is here! Satan is come among us!" "Stay here . . . ," Viktor ordered the porter. He walked briskly across the station hall and shouldered his way through to the front of the crowd, which had formed in a police-restrained semicircle. As he pushed through, he heard a woman whisper in dark excitement to her friend: "Do you think it's really him? Do you think he's Leather Apron?" Viktor could now see the source of the cries: a man and a woman. Both looked terrified: the woman because she was being held from behind by the man, who had a large kitchen knife to her throat; the man terrified for reasons known only to himself. "She's a demon!" the man yelled again. "A demon sent from Hell! See how she burns!" Viktor could see that the woman was well dressed and prosperous looking, while her captor wore a workingman's garb of battered cap, collarless shirt, coarse serge jacket and bagged corduroy trousers. At first glance it was obvious they were not a couple and he suspected the woman had been seized at random. The wild, darting, wide-eyed gaze of the young man indicated to Viktor the existential terror of some schizophrenic episode. A single police officer stood closer than his colleagues to the couple, his hand resting on his undrawn pistol. Keep it holstered, thought Viktor; don't add to his sense of threat. He pushed through the front rank of onlookers and was immediately restrained by two policemen, who seized him roughly. "Get back!" a Slovak accent commanded. "Why can't you ghouls--" "I'm Dr. Viktor Kosárek, of the Bohnice Asylum," protested Viktor, wriggling to wrest his arms free from the policemen's restraint. "I'm a clinical psychiatrist. I think I can be of help here." "Oh . . ." The Slovak nodded to the other officer and they both released their grip on Viktor. "Is he one of yours? An escapee?" "Not that I know of. Definitely not one of my patients. But wherever he's from, he's clearly in the midst of a psychotic episode. Paranoiac delusions. Schizophrenia." "Pavel!" the Slovak called over to the policeman who stood with his hand still resting on his gun holster. "There's a head-case doctor here . . ." "Send him over," said the officer without taking his eyes from captor and captive. "I need you to disperse this crowd," Viktor said quietly to the Slovak policeman as he stepped from the throng. "They're hemming him in. The more anxious he gets, the more threatened he feels, the greater danger the young lady is in." The Slovak nodded, and with renewed urgency and determination, he and his fellow officers pushed and cajoled the crowd into a retreat from the drama. Viktor went over to the policeman the Slovak had addressed as Pavel. "You the headshrinker?" asked the officer, without taking his eyes from the knifeman. "Dr. Viktor Kosárek. I'm an intern at the Bohnice Asylum . . . well, I was an intern at the Bohnice Asylum," he corrected himself. "I'm actually traveling to the Hrad Orlů Asylum for the Criminally Insane to take up a new post." "Thanks for the curriculum vitae, Doctor--but we do have a bit of an urgent situation on our hands here." The sarcasm dropped from his tone. "Wait a minute--Hrad Orlů? Isn't that where they've got the Devil's Six locked up? In that case, this should be right up your street. Can you help?" "I'll do my best," Viktor replied, "but if he's seriously delusional, I don't know if I'll get through to him." "If you don't get through to him, then I'm afraid I'll have to." The policeman gave his leather holster a tap. Kosárek nodded and placed himself squarely in front of the woman and her captor. He looked directly into the woman's eyes first. "Try not to be afraid." He spoke to her quietly and evenly. "I know this is very difficult, but, whatever you do, don't struggle or scream. I don't want him more emotionally aroused than he is at the moment. I need you to be brave for me. Do you understand?" The woman, her eyes wide with terror, gave a small nod. "Good," said Viktor. He noted that the sharp edge of the knife creased the skin of her neck right above the jugular. It wouldn't take much--the smallest of movements--for her deranged captor to sever the vein. And if he did, within seconds she would be so far from the shore of life that there would be nothing anyone could do to save her. He turned to her captor, looking over the woman's shoulder and again directly into his eyes. He was a young man, perhaps even a couple of years younger than Viktor. His eyes were no less wide and no less afraid than those of his captive, his gaze scanning the space around them, not focusing on, not even seeming to see, the police and agitated crowd that had now moved farther back. Instead he seemed to be watching horrors unfold that were invisible to everyone else. It was something Viktor Kosárek had already seen many times in his brief career: the mad inhabiting a different dimension mentally, while remaining in this one physically. "My name is Dr. Kosárek." Viktor's voice was again calm, even. "I'm here to help you. I know you're afraid, but I'm going to do everything I can to help you. What is your name?" "She is a demon!" cried the man. "What is your name?" Viktor repeated. "A fire demon. Can't you see? They are all around us. They feed off us. She's been sent here to feed off me. She's been sent by the Devil--" The young man broke off and looked as if he had suddenly heard a sound or smelled a strange odor. "He is here," he said in a forced, urgent whisper. "The Devil is here, now, in this place. I sense him--" "Your name," said Kosárek quietly, kindly. "Please tell me your name." The man with the knife looked confused, as if he couldn't understand why he was being distracted with such trifles. "Simon," he said eventually. "My name is Simon." "Simon, I need you to keep calm. Very calm." "Calm?" asked Simon incredulously. "You ask me to be calm? The Devil is among us. His demons are here. She is a demon. Don't you see them?" "No, I'm afraid I don't. Where are they?" Simon cast his gaze like a searchlight over the marble floor of the railway station. "Don't you see? Are you blind? They're everywhere." He suddenly looked more afraid, more agitated, again seeing something that only he was witness to. "The ground--the floor--it's sweating them. They ooze up out of the stone. Lava from the bowels of the Earth. Then they bubble and froth upward until they take form. Like this one." He tightened his grip on his captive, the hand with the knife twitching. "Simon," said Viktor, "don't you see you've got it all wrong? This woman is nothing but a woman. She's not a demon." "Are you mad? Can't you see? Don't you see the fire horns curling out from her head? The lava of her eyes? Her white-hot iron hooves? She is an elemental demon. A fire demon. I am so terribly burned from just touching her. I have to stop her. I have to stop them all. They are here to feed off us, to burn us all, to take us into the lake of fire where there will be no end to our torment." He thought about his own words, then spoke with a sudden but quiet and considered resolve. "I've got it: I have to cut her head off . . . That's it, I have to cut her head clean off. It's the only way to kill a demon. The only way." The woman, who had been doing her best to follow Viktor's command and remain quiet, let out a desperate cry. Kosárek held up a calming hand to both captive and captor. He realized he was dealing with a delusional schizophrenic paranoia of massive dimension; that there might be no way of reaching Simon's tortured mind before he killed his captive. He cast a meaningful look in the direction of the police officer, who gave a small nod and quietly unbuttoned the flap on his leather holster. "I assure you, Simon, this woman is no demon," said Viktor. "You are unwell. You're unwell in a way that makes your senses deceive you. Close your eyes and take a breath." "It's the Devil who deceives. The Great Deceiver has blinded everyone but me. I am God's instrument. If I close my eyes, the Devil will sneak up on me and drag me to Hell." He lowered his voice; sounded pained, afraid. "I have seen the Great Deceiver. I have seen the Devil and looked into his face." He gave a cry of terrible despair. "He burned me with his eyes!" "Simon, please listen to me. Please try to understand. There is no Devil. All there is, all you're experiencing, is your mind. Your mind--everybody's mind--is like a great sea, a deep ocean. We all live our lives, every day, every one of us, sailing on the surface of that ocean. Do you understand me, Simon?" The madman nodded, but his eyes remained manic, terrified. "But beneath each of us," continued Viktor, "are the great dark fathoms of our personal oceans. Sometimes frightening monsters live in those depths--great fears and terrible desires that can seem to take real form. I know these things because I work with them as a doctor all the time. What is happening to you, Simon, is that there is a great storm in your ocean; everything has been stirred up and swirled around. All of those dark monsters from the deeps of your mind have been awoken and have burst through the surface. I want you to think about it. I want you to understand that everything that is frightening you at this moment, everything you think you see, is being created by your mind." "I am being deceived?" Simon's voice became that of a frightened, lonely child. "You're being deceived," repeated Viktor. "The woman you hold is an ordinary woman. The demon you think you hold is a demon of your imagination. The Devil you fear is nothing but a hidden aspect of your own mind. Please, Simon, close your eyes--" "I am being deceived--" "Close them, Simon. Close them and imagine the storm passing, the waters calming." "Deceived . . ." He closed his eyes. "Let the lady go, Simon. Please." "Deceived . . ." He let his arm fall from around the woman's shoulders. The hand that held the knife eased away from her throat. "Move!" The policeman hissed the urgent command at the woman. "To me, now!" "Deceived . . ." The woman ran, sobbing, across to the policeman, who ushered her beyond the police line; a woman from the crowd folded comforting arms around her. "Please, Simon," Viktor Kosárek said to the young man, who now stood alone with his eyes still closed, "put the knife down." Simon opened his eyes. He looked at the knife in his hand and again repeated: "Deceived." He looked up, his eyes plaintive; his hands, the knife still in one, held out beseechingly. "It's all right," said Viktor, taking a step toward him. "I'll help you now." "I was deceived," said Simon, suddenly angry. "The Great Deceiver, the Guiser, the Dark One--he deceived me." He looked directly at Viktor and gave a small laugh. "I didn't recognize you. Why didn't I recognize you? But I know who you are now." Simon's eyes became suddenly hard and full of hate. "Now I know! Now I know who you are!" It happened too fast for Viktor to react. Simon launched himself at the young psychiatrist, the knife raised high and ready to strike. Viktor froze and two sounds filled the space around him, reverberating in the cavern of the station concourse: the deafening sound of the policeman's gunshot, and Simon's screaming, as he lunged at the young doctor, of a single word. "Devil!" Excerpted from The Devil Aspect: A Novel by Craig Russell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
