To Sir, with Love: An Unofficial Legend of The Secret World (Unofficial Legends of The Secret World Book 1)

by Blodwedd Mallory

  I could see all the possible courses of action that could or might or had already occurred in the Multiverse. To look at the Multiverse was to become aware there was a cosmic projector. The possibilities were mirrored in my Reality by using a different filter on the metaphorical lens. The tricky part, of course, was finding the right one. Where was the reality where I pulled the Surgical Specimen toward me successfully, and the rest of the action went as planned? I narrowed my focus further, sorting through the streamers.

  Oh, gods. Out of all possibilities, there was a limited number where my intention generated an approximation of success and any number that ended in disaster or my partial maiming. It was super important to find the right probability.

  In one such future, I pulled the specimen successfully but did not get out of the way of Gypcie’s fireball. Eww. My hair went up like a mushroom cloud. In another I tripped on the ward and which gave it access to attack my legs, peeling my calf muscles like it was eating chicken wings. Gross. I stopped watching before that probable future played out any further. In still another, I ran into the door frame in a panic and knocked myself out, but Gypcie was able to drag me through into the office.

  In the worst probable future, I pulled the specimen toward me too vigorously and was not able to move out of the way fast enough. Wow, up close those things could do a lot of damage in a short period of time. I shuddered as I watched it deglove my future hand and reach for my face, blood spurting everywhere while possible Me screamed. I stopped the spool on that reality. Not pretty. I definitely didn’t want to tug on that probability by accident. As it was, I might not ever stop seeing it in my dreams.

  Finally, I spotted the streamer I wanted. I could see that it generated some enigmas when I activated evulsion, but they looked pretty mild. One of them would increase the familiar’s ability to attack, but not if I could purge it in time. The others would damage it and heal us. That probability was the one I wanted and gave us the best chance of success.

  I selected that streamer and brought myself back into my Time.

  I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the Electromagnet Stabilizer gadget that I carried around to purge singularities while I practiced chaos magic and flipped the power switch on. I was ready. I took one last look at Gypcie and nodded, then took a deep breath and… yanked.

  Bright green and purple energy exploded in the passageway, and the Surgical Specimen flew toward me, landing just a few inches out of arm’s reach. Three chaos enigmas blossomed on the floor beneath it. I targeted the stabilizer and activated it to purge any positive effects on the specimen, as it scrambled up from the floor where it had landed. I felt a flood of wellbeing as the wellness enigma activated bolstering my health, and dove back through the doorway to the office, staying low.

  Gypcie, with an overhand throw that would have made any Little League coach proud, fired off a ball of flame the size of a Major League baseball. It hit the Surgical Specimen squarely on the left shoulder, and the stitches holding its arm to its body ignited, glowing red and orange as they caught fire, thin wisps of smoke rolling up from the seam.

  We cheered and hugged each other. I had successfully used a spell that I had practiced endlessly in classes on a real-life problem. Yippee! I was elated by that and the fact that the plan had worked. No one was dead and nothing unexpected was on fire. Success!

  I turned to look again at the Igor, smoldering on the other side of the ward.

  Or not.

  The stitches of the left arm burned through in a matter of seconds, but the fire was not hot enough to coax the body to ignite. The arm dropped to the floor, flopping and squirming, its fingers opening and closing. Apparently, the loss of its body was not a deterrent to its function as an arm, only its ability to get around.

  The Surgical Specimen looked down at the detached arm, then bent over, placed its right hand on its stomach over the bullet hole, and laughed. The new hole where its arm used to be attached glistened with bits of blood, bone, and ligaments.

  “For the love of Danu’s paps!” Gypcie growled. “This plotter has more lives than a black cat.”

  As we watched, the specimen reached across its body and began poking at the sagging flesh of its shoulder socket, pulling at the worm-like tendons that had once attached to the arm that was still flopping on the floor.

  “I think I’m going to barf if it keeps doing that,” Gypcie said. “Let’s move out of its line of sight.”

  We moved further into the office side area. The whole administration office was “L”-shaped and this section was reserved for staff lockers, a few desks with desktop computers in various states of functionality, and a notice board. Cans of meat and fish pie—you thought I was kidding, I’ll bet—lined the top of a long thin desk pushed against the outside wall, which glowed blue with an active reinforcement ward. Dirty five-gallon water jugs contained most of what was left of our potable water supply, and a cardboard box of still more industrial-sized cans of meat pie was tucked underneath. It didn’t bear overthinking what precisely the meat was in those pies. I only hoped they weren’t rations left over from the Great War.

  “There’s got to be another way around,” Gypcie said. “Provided the plotter doesn’t stay there outside of the door. I don’t want to ask for help to deal with it.”

  I didn’t either. Dealing with familiars was supposed to be first-year stuff, and the fact we were having so much trouble with one ugly Igor was not something I wanted to bring to the attention of Ms. Usher or Headmaster Montag.

  “What we need is a map,” I said.

  “But we’ve been here for ages,” Gypcie said. “Tell me you don’t know the layout of this place like the back of your hand.”

  “I know, but looking at it objectively might give us some ideas.” I responded. “I don’t know about you, but that sucker has me rattled. We can’t afford to make any mistakes.”

  “There’s a framed emergency evacuation plan on the wall in the foyer,” she said. “But we can’t get to that at the moment.”

  “I think there might be one in the front office,” I remembered. “We pulled down a lot of stuff on the walls to block up the front counter. I’ll go look.”

  I ran back into the front section of the office and spied the plan laying on an unused desk near some papers and a half-empty bottle of Kingsmouth Springs water.

  “Don’t mind me!” I said as I grabbed it and jogged past.

  “No running in the halls!” Montag shouted after me.

  “Maybe we should just run in there hot. The wards might hold,” Gypcie said, as she peered over the evacuation plan now laying on a pair of desks we’d pushed together in the back part of the administration office, shoving the monitors and keyboards to the side.

  “This is the least helpful plan I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Listen to this: ‘In case of a zombie attack, if you are on the ground floor, please do the following: 1. Run to the main floor. 2. Find the closest window. 3. Jump down. 4. With your head first.’ Who writes this stuff? Better yet, why did my mother ever let me come here?”

  “Probably because you nagged her ceaselessly until she let you. Or, at least that’s what I did to Gran Rose,” Gypcie smirked. “Still, it’s a physical layout of the building like you wanted.”

  She was right on both counts. It was a physical layout, and I had nagged my mother. Despite the less than helpful instructions for a zombie attack—and the ones for a fire made even less sense: “Run out with your hands above your head.” What?—it was good to see things on paper.

  “Look at this. There aren’t even instructions on what to do if you’re upstairs,” Gypcie said. “Maybe there’s a different version for the second floor.”

  “Second floor?” I said. “That’s it!” We had been so focused on heading around the corner on the ground floor to get in, we hadn’t even considered the possibility of going up and around. The second floor was accessible from the staircase right outside the door of the Administration Office. If we could ge
t past the plotter to the stairs, we could sneak down the hallway on the second floor with the open atrium balcony into the library.

  “And what do we know about familiars?” I asked. “They’ll follow you almost everywhere, but…”

  “They can’t jump!” we said in unison. Suddenly the evac plan of jumping out the window made a lot more sense. Well, other than that part about head first. If we were able to successfully sneak up to the second floor and get to the atrium, we could jump down into the library and avoid any familiars who spotted us along the way.

  Gypcie and I inched our way up to the Administration Office doorway and peered out at the main foyer. The plotter was gone. Frankly, I was mildly alarmed by that at first, but some brave reconnoitering around the corner revealed our one-armed plotter menace to be loitering back at the Bingo cola machine. Three more Anatomical Specimens had appeared and were once again chittering and squeaking away with the plotter. Where the heck did they come from? Was there some kind of familiar Cola Klatch Club?

  In front of us beyond the ward, the plotter’s detached arm still stretched and grabbed at the air. But without its host, it was a minor nuisance.

  Time to implement the backup plan.

  Gypcie stepped out and kicked the arm further into the foyer to have it out of the way. I watched closely to see if the plotter would have any reaction, but it seemed unaffected by its former arm skidding across the glossy wood floor into the center of the walkway. Once I was sure there had been no reaction, I motioned to Gypcie to head up the stairs.

  She scrambled up the first half-flight, crouching over, before motioning me to join her, squatting down to stay low. From that vantage point on the landing, we could see the ghostly remains of a member of the faculty sauntering across the first floor entresol overlooking the foyer. The remains of the Samhain celebration banner for the Halloween Prom stretched across the banister hung in tatters—it read, “Happy Halloween, Innsmouth Academy Class of…” A big nasty red stain blotted out the rest. The specter wandered by, unmoved by any pep club tragedy revealed in the banner’s message, its white limbs and the hem of its tattered, turn-of-the-century gown floating a foot above the floor. The specter’s face was frozen in a rictus of horror, with deep black pools where it once had eyes, it’s jaw distended in a macabre smile, revealing razor-sharp teeth.

  Phantasms certainly looked scary but were relatively easy to avoid if you stayed out of their line of sight. They also had an unfortunate tendency to phase in and out of reality. If you happened to encounter them phasing into existence, you could fight them on the physical plane with physical means. If they were phasing out, then only magical means would incapacitate them. Unfortunately, it was never clear what you were getting until you were already engaged in the fight. I couldn’t afford to engage them as they were phasing into reality, as I hadn’t been to the gym in weeks and therefore my offensive attacks were primarily magical. Luckily, Gypcie had her pistols. Still, the most straightforward approach was just to avoid.

  We stayed crouched on the landing. I kept one eye on the floor below checking for signs of our tricky little plotter, and the other on the Phantasmal Magus drifting slowly from north to south, before reversing course and drifting away from us again.

  “Hurry up already, slowpoke,” I muttered under my breath. My foot was falling asleep in the crouch, but there was no hurrying the specter of the dead mage, who floated by as if she had all day. I supposed she did.

  Finally, she moved far enough up the landing we had a clear shot at the double-steel door threshold into the hallway to the left of the library.

  “Let’s move,” said Gypcie, and she scampered up the second set of stairs onto the second floor.

  I followed close on her heels, trying to make as little noise as possible. Luckily I had on my worn black high-tops, which didn’t have enough tread left on them to squeak on the once-glossy wooden floors. The smell of chalk and books became more prominent on this floor—several classrooms were located on the south end of the main building, including Defensive Magic, where we’d been scrounging for supplies in the first place. It wouldn’t do to call attention to ourselves here if we could avoid it. The last thing we wanted was to avoid Igor only to meet our friend the wraith.

  We ran-walked as quietly as we could, given the mixture of urgency and adrenalin we had going.

  As we approached the threshold, a pale, but shiny, white arm reached from behind the leftmost steel door, which was propped partially open, and out slid another familiar, this one with the markings of a Hexbound. Bad news.

  Hexbound familiars were the hall monitors of the familiar cast and crew. Pre-disaster, the Academy used them to recover overdue library books and unpaid lunch tabs. Hexbound were created to be significantly smarter and stronger, and have more autonomy than the average familiar. As a result, they were trouble even back when things were “normal,” before their handlers were dismembered and eaten by zombies. I had cause to know since I was not always the best at returning my library books when they were due. Or at least I wasn’t until the first Hexbound visited my dorm room at midnight demanding the book and late fee. On the first day it was overdue.

  “Run for it!” Gypcie hissed at me. Maybe we could still make it to the atrium and jump down to the library.

  I broke into a sprint, running through the right side of the steel-framed doorway, jogging about 10 meters before making a sharp right into the Atrium overlooking the library. The high domed glass ceiling allowed a frivolous amount of sunlight and energy into the room, and a fresh looking American flag hung on a pole on the west side, both a stark contrast to our urgency and fear. It was a room that begged for time to reflect on knowledge and enjoy its beauty.

  Yeah, no time for that.

  I grabbed the railing of the south banister and vaulted over, turning toward the banister so I could hang on long enough to take some of the beating out of the drop. I landed in a crouch, my knees absorbing the initial shock, then rolled backward into a reverse somersault to bleed off the rest of the force of the fall.

  I looked up as Gypcie gripped the railing with both hands and swung both legs over the banister, catapulting her body forward into the air. She dropped like a stone and landed badly, her right ankle twisting as she hit.

  “FECK ME!” she mouthed as she grabbed her ankle and rolled around in agony. Gypcie knew we could not afford for Igor and its friends, a mere 25 yards or so away through the south door, to hear us after all this effort, particularly if she was down.

  I threw both hands up in a defensive position and tried to watch the three open doorways into the library simultaneously to cover her.

  “Are you OK?” I asked in a concerned whisper.

  Gypcie grimaced at me and shook her head no.

  Shit.

  Then I became aware of another sound. I heard something running. Running down the stairs. Running towards us. Big sloppy steps.

  Oh, shit on a shingle.

  The Hexbound was smart enough to figure out where we had gone and follow us.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Monday, Bloody Monday

  When I enrolled in Innsmouth Academy four years ago, I was overwhelmed by the picturesque beauty of the five-acre campus. The twelve-foot tall red brick walls that enclosed it all contained not only the Main Hall, full of the Academy offices and classrooms, but the boys’ and girls’ dorms on the north and west sides of the campus, a Rec Center for indoor sports events like basketball, outdoor tennis courts and a soccer field, and various other open spaces and walkways, picnic tables and benches strewn in among the lawns and greenery. The campus stood on the southwest corner of Solomon Island’s savage coastline. To the north, it looked out over the Miskatonic River, which wound its way past the Academy’s boathouse down to join the Atlantic Ocean.

  Four years later, I was sure of one thing. Innsmouth Academy was picturesque all right. Picturesque and deadly.

  What wasn’t in the student prospectus were the magical blueprints: the corpse
s that had been laid into the foundations with blood magic rituals to fuel anima; the convergence of lay lines on the site, powering the thaumaturgical utility built into the very bones of the buildings; the library full of rare and dangerous tomes of arcane and occult knowledge, available upon request to anyone with a student or faculty ID; and classroom after classroom staffed with magically elite instructors prepared to help their charges delve deeper into those mysteries should they reveal an aptitude or interest.

  Parents armed with that information might not have been surprised to learn of the sheer number of unexplained student and faculty deaths and disappearances over Innsmouth Academy’s 200-or-so-year history. Or, indeed, of the Academy’s real purpose as a farm team for the Illuminati—while technically a multidenominational prep school to prepare its gifted denizens for future membership in a secret cabal, the Eye was in ascendance here.

  My favorite part of the Academy, hands down, was the library. Although it was not gigantic, perched in the center of the ground floor of the Main Hall with entrances in each of the cardinal directions, on its shelves it contained a wealth of written knowledge on every occult topic imaginable. The kind you could have expected to be burned at the stake for possessing. Only the library in Templar Club in London surpassed our library in the sheer power and quantity of its volumes.

  As a result, the most powerful of the wards in the building were located here. The most powerful and the ones requiring the most active effort to renew; challenges came daily from inside the library’s doors as well as out. Not every volume on those shelves liked being part of a collection. Some of them took active umbrage and required the Hexbound to keep them in line.