These people dared to challenge the devil: Duke de Richlieu—a banished French royalist, who encountered such strange things in his life that he almost stopped believing in the reality of what was happening; Rex Van Ryn—an anxious, loud American who staked something more than life to save a beautiful but doomed young lady; Simon Aron—someone who has tasted madness by peering into the depths of the Secret Art; Richard Eaton—a man who denied the existence of Black Magic until, on a bloody sacrificial altar, his own child ended up there.