were likely in bed already and an introduction was unlikely.
Kevin looked at the computer screen again, then at us. “I have the video cued up. Do you want to see it first? Or look at the temple first?”
Mike pulled out a chair next to him. “I want to see the video.”
Alyssa nodded wordlessly and stepped up behind Mike. I did the same.
Kevin turned the computer screen toward us and clicked the play button. Then he sat back and watched our reaction.
When I heard the invocation the operator intoned, my hair stood on end. I watched, my eyes transfixed to the screen. The seeress stood up and stepped into the full length black scrying mirror, disappearing, just like something out of a science fiction movie. Then we saw a man step forward and touch the mirror, hitting a black surface.
“What the fuck,” he said.
“This is a joke, right,” said one of the participants.
“Oh my God!” It was Kim in the video. She ran around to the back of the mirror. “She’s gone. Lynn’s gone.”
Then there was chaos, the lights turned on and people ran around the room looking in bizarre places for the missing seer with no luck. It appeared no one had closed the circle.
Mike regarded the video with that look he got when he was trying to figure something out, and he started to bite his lip. “Can I get a copy of this video?”
“Yeah, I have it uploaded to an online drive. I can share it with you and you can download it if you want. Or move it to your online drive,” Kevin said.
Mike agreed and gave Kevin his email address. Thank the gods for modern tech. I could only imagine how a mystery like this would have been solved before video cameras and the internet. Then Kim led us through the kitchen, toward the back door, and down a flight of stairs into the basement.
At the bottom of the stairs she slipped a key into the lock, and with a twist and click, opened the locked door, and flicked on a light. I couldn’t help but feel relieved to know they kept a lock on the temple, especially with kids running around. I stepped into the bright room. The entire finished basement had been turned into an enviable temple.
“Nice,” Alyssa commented. It was the only thing my usually perky blonde Satanic friend had said since we arrived.
I immediately got a chill and stepped into what was obviously a holy place, noticing Enochian tablets, carefully painted, stood aloft on pedestals in their appropriate quadrants. The scrying mirror, a full length piece of glass painted black on the back, stood slightly right of center, near the tablet of union. On the floor was painted a carefully crafted circle that could be changed with chalk. Basically, the temple looked the same way it had in the video.
“You guys haven’t changed it since she disappeared? And did anyone close the circle after it happened?”
Neither Kim nor Kevin answered.
Mike went over to the mirror and investigated it, while Alyssa spent time looking over the walls. Maybe for trap doors or something, I wasn’t sure. When I started to move through the room, both of them stopped and looked at me, knowing I would likely see things they wouldn’t. Being a medium, a genuine medium, isn’t nearly as romantic as television and movies make it seem. Sometimes it’s downright terrifying, no matter how used to seeing things you think you are. And whatever was in that temple wasn’t good. There was something there that scared the shit out of me. To be honest, I wanted to turn tail and run, but I forced myself to walk forward, toward the mirror.
“Elizabeth…” the voice whispered.
My blood ran cold. Son-of-a-bitch, I hated that. The spirits on the other side always knew more about me than I knew about them. At first. But I knew from experience that they’d eventually let me in on who they were and what they wanted – whether I wanted to know or not.
“Who are you?” I asked. I could feel Kim and Kevin’s eyes on me from the doorway, and Mike and Alyssa watching me.
“Bataivah,” the voice hissed. Then a cold wind blasted through the room from the East wall.
Son-of-a-bitch. Enochian spirits. Well, in all fairness they weren’t just any spirits. They were, technically, angels, and not necessarily the benevolent kind. Of course most angels had a dark side, but there was something about Enochian angels that terrified a lot of magicians, myself included. Then I reminded myself that the only reason I was terrified was because the angels vibrated at a higher, more uncomfortable, for humans anyway, frequency. Didn’t they? That’s what created the scared feeling. Even as I thought it, doubt crept in. No, this was different. This wasn’t just a vibration. These spirits had actually taken a human woman into their realm, but why?
I focused my attention on the mirror. “Bataivah, where is Lynn?”
The mirror began to fog and an image began to appear. Something compelled me to move forward, toward it.
Inside the mirror I saw a face without a nose and a mouth without lips. The eyes blazed yellow. “With us. Join us.”
Against my will, my legs began moving toward the mirror. I couldn’t look away from the face – those eyes.
Then I felt a strong arm around my waist, pulling me backward and I snapped out of the trance. The image of the face faded to nothing.
“Liz, stop,” Mike whispered in my ear. “Breathe.”
He sounded scared and I took a deep breath. “What the hell?”
“You were talking in some weird language.”
“I got it on my phone,” Kevin said from behind us. He stepped into the room and turned the screen toward us, tapping the play icon.
There, on the small screen I saw myself walking toward the mirror, saying something in what sounded like Enochian, the language of the angels.
“Write it down phonetically,” Alyssa said, pulling a pad of paper and a pen from her inner jacket.
“No need,” said Kevin. “That’s a standard invocation of Bataivah without the signs and pentagrams.”
“Are you sure?” Mike asked, giving me a strange look.
Kevin nodded. “I’ve done the same invocation at least once a month for the last five years. First you vibrate EXARP, Air of Spirit. Then you vibrate OROIBAHAOZPI, which is the secret holy name of air, then begin vibrating BATAIVAH, who is the King of air. It’s always in that order.”
The thing was, I hadn’t worked enough Enochian magick to know this by heart, but I couldn’t prove that I didn’t know it.
“Did you do this invocation when Lynn disappeared?”
“Well, yeah. But I completed the entire evocation of the watchtowers, all of the elements, before we did the scrying session.” Kevin seemed as perplexed as Mike was.
Me, I was too busy shaking off the foggy, surreal feeling overwhelming me.
“Can you send me that video, too?” Mike proceeded to give Kevin his cell phone number so he could just send it by text.
“We should go,” I said. I turned to Kim. “I need some time to think about this and decide the next course of action and I’ll call you.”
I started back up the stairs, Mike close at my heels and Alyssa behind him. Kevin and Kim were the last to ascend the stairs after locking the door to the temple, and both looked a bit upset.
“These things take time to solve,” I said apologetically. “That’s… I… You…”
I wasn’t sure what to say. They had something definitely freaky going on in their temple and I was still chilled to the bone by it.
Leading the way, I made a b-line for the door. As I left the house I said, “Don’t let anyone in that temple. Keep it locked for now. I have a feeling one person wasn’t enough.”
“What do you mean?” Kim started after us.
“We’ll call you,” Mike said, the concern still clear in his voice.
I made my way out to the car, feeling on the verge of emotional collapse. I usually only had a negative reaction like this if I encountered something really bad. Yeah, it was bad. I blinked back some tears, got in the car, and closed the door.
Alyssa jumped in the back and put her hand on my arm. “Liz, what’s going on? Are you okay?”
I wiped the tears away. “Enochian spirits have a different kind of energy, you know?”
“Bullshit.” Alyssa knew me better than that.
Mike got into the car, closed the door, put the key into the ignition and looked at me with those beautiful dark eyes I fell in love with. “We’re leaving.”
Alyssa sat back into the back seat with a huff, knowing she wasn’t going to get a straight answer from me, and buckled her seatbelt.
We were a few blocks away before I felt well enough to say anything. “Well that was awful.”
“What happened back there?” Mike asked
“Enochian angels.”
“That’s not an answer,” he said.
From the backseat Alyssa said, “Actually, it is. Enochian spirits are well known for being nasty. But isn’t it something about vibration, Liz? In one of your books you said…”
“Not this time.” I cut her off. “There’s something bigger going on here. I just don’t know what yet.”
We were silent all the way home. Alyssa left after bidding Mike and I goodnight, and we soon found ourselves sitting in front of the television, watching both videos, which Mike had downloaded to his tablet and connected to the TV.
Over and over again we watched Lynn walk into the mirror, and then over and over again we watched me almost do the same thing. Finally, around midnight, Mike yawned. “I’ll see if Max, at the lab, will look at the video of Lynn disappearing. As for you, Miss Medium, you need to stop going into these