The Mammoth Book of Dark Magic

by Mike Ashley

  And one section of the house seemed impossibly dark, even in the morning light, as if that section of the house had been fashioned of night itself.

  It had taken them two days’ journey to get there, and Clarence had wondered the entire time why it was worth the effort. Amanda complained about her father constantly: how he attempted to control her life, how he had adamant opinions on almost any subject, how he inflicted “silent rages” upon anyone who dared disagree with him.

  But when Clarence had questioned their going, Amanda had lashed out at him with unexpected viciousness. “Because he’s my father!” she had cried. “It’s for me to decide whether to visit him or not!”

  So they’d made the trip, through wastelands and mysterious, dream-like landscapes Clarence had never known existed. The wizard was indeed isolated; there seemed to be no other dwellings as far as the eye could see. Clarence couldn’t understand why anyone would even want to live out there.

  “You grew up in this place?” Clarence asked as they stood below the wizard’s cliff-dwelling.

  “I did. . . .” Amanda said quietly.

  “I don’t understand. Who were your friends? Who did you play with as a child?”

  She turned to him with a slight frown. “I didn’t have any friends,” she said flatly. “Any companions I had my father made for me out of dust and swampwater.”

  With that, she turned and guided him to the steep staircase climbing the cliffside to the wizard’s house.

  Four: That He Is Very Old

  The wizard sat behind an immense table piled high with books. He was difficult to see behind the dusty volumes: only a purple-sleeved arm at the side now and then, white and fish-like hands, or the top of his head, nearly bald and intricately veined.

  “Father . . .” Amanda said with a nervous edge to her voice.

  There was no answer.

  “Father, I’ve come home to visit. I’ve brought a friend.”

  Clarence heard a chair scrape, a dry cough, and then a small, wizened figure crept around from behind the table. Clarence relaxed a bit at the wizard’s appearance: he seemed to be only five feet tall or so, and quite frail. Who could fear a man like that?

  But the wizard suddenly straightened up, his back unbending, shoulders broadening, head pulling erect so that he was quickly over six feet in height and fixing Clarence with large, bloodshot eyes.

  Clarence stepped back and allowed Amanda to approach her father.

  “This is Clarence, father. My friend.”

  The wizard stepped forward out of the dim light so that Clarence was able to see his features more clearly. His skin was so white it appeared to be luminous, his bald head like an oval of light. What little hair he had was white and cropped closely, making a band above his ears. He also had a short white beard which covered his chin. His eyes seemed terribly mobile in contrast to the rest of his features. His mouth was a rigid line. Although his features did not in and of themselves seem ancient, his entire aspect was one of incredible age. Clarence sensed that the wizard was the oldest creature he had ever met.

  The wizard did not speak to Clarence.

  “It has been a long time between visits, Amanda,” the wizard said to his daughter.

  “I . . . I’ve been away.” For the first time, Clarence saw Amanda avert her eyes in embarrassment. He had never thought before that she could feel such a thing.

  There was an awkward silence during which Amanda seemed to be struggling to find something to say. Her father waited impatiently.

  “How has your health been?” she finally asked.

  “Well enough,” he said. Then, “You may spend a few days here, Amanda, but I have my work and will need solitude thereafter.” He turned and left.

  Amanda stood there quietly, and Clarence could not approach her.

  Five: That He Is a Shape-Shifter

  That first day in the wizard’s house proved to be a long one for Clarence. Amanda was sullen and irritable with him much of the time, and the wizard seemed to be ignoring them.

  But when he had questioned Amanda about her father’s absence, she had lashed out at him. “Open your eyes, can’t you! He’s watching us both constantly! He doesn’t even make an effort to hide it!”

  Clarence looked around uneasily. “I . . . don’t see . . .”

  “Look! There he is now!” she cried, pointing to a corner of the room.

  Clarence looked where she had pointed but saw nothing but an untidy pile of clutter. “Where? I don’t see him.”

  “The mouse! The mouse, you fool.”

  Clarence stared. There was a mouse there, a small gray one. It wrinkled its nose at the two of them, then scurried into a small hole in the debris

  “Your father?”

  “Of course . . .”

  Six: That He Is Not Really Bad, Just Arrogant

  Clarence saw many other animals, and one time a small dwarf with an immense red nose, all of whom seemed to observe him with a bit too much intensity, a bit too much interest for normal creatures of that type. He began to feel watched constantly. Amanda told him there were no pests or animals of any type in residence at the house normally – the wizard used a charm to keep them away – so any other creatures or personages found there were the wizard himself. Clarence encountered a cat, a dog, a small wren, a caterpillar, a spider, a cricket, and a moose (which he was startled to discover in his bedroom one evening) in just his first two days in the wizard’s home. He became particularly careful of his actions when he was around Amanda.

  This angered Amanda greatly, and twice she pulled Clarence close for an embrace when one of these creatures was in the room. Clarence sputtered and tried to pull away, a nervous eye on the creature.

  “Coward!” Amanda screamed. She began hitting Clarence across the chest. “Spineless idiot!”

  But the rest of the time she was distant, preoccupied. She seemed to want to have little to do with Clarence.

  The wizard did not do anything which might have been called bad; even Amanda’s many complaints about her father did not seem to add up to the evil man Clarence had first visualized. The wizard was merely headstrong and arrogant; he was daily exposed to the temptation of great power, and obviously he often gave in to it. He enjoyed using power, and used it extensively. Who could really blame him for that?

  “So many . . . like my father . . . they start thinking they’re gods in their old age,” Amanda had said to him. But as far as he could tell, the wizard had not gone that far.

  One of the wizard’s most disturbing amusements was his habit of producing ghosts from the past, either replicas of Amanda’s childhood companions he’d manufactured previously, or figures from Clarence’s own childhood. Clarence felt as if he were constantly dreaming, confronted daily by his long-dead parents, the pet lizards he’d once owned, his long-dead sister’s three-year-old self, and assorted young friends mostly long-forgotten.

  Amanda’s “ghosts” were a bit more exotic. A giant spider with bright red eyes and eighteen legs. A large, fat, jelly-like creature with one thick leg. Two sets of siamese twins. A large bird with a bell around its neck. And a few a bit more disturbing: a hideous, deformed head that talked, a small subhuman which bled from its ears constantly and impossibly, and a furry creature which screamed piteously in constant pain.

  Amanda was on edge, her eyes darting, her hands dry and raw from rubbing them together. Clarence could not understand why the wizard, whom neither had seen for more than a few minutes in his true form, would do this to his own daughter. What was he thinking of?

  Seven: That He Has a Separable Soul

  Clarence discovered that after several days he was growing increasingly angry with both Amanda and her father. The wizard was needling him almost constantly, sending all manner of apparitions into his room to disturb him. And the wizard’s presence was almost constant. Many times Clarence did not know whether a particular presence was the wizard in disguise or one of his manufactures.

  So, surprisingly,
he found himself talking back to Amanda with more fervor, not letting any of her small jibes past him.

  He had actually expected she would like him better that way, of course. But that wasn’t her reaction.

  “You’re getting to be just like him!” she screamed at Clarence. “You have an opinion about everything, and you think you’re the only one who knows the truth!”

  One day, Clarence and Amanda sneaked into the wizard’s study when they knew he was out in the woods. It was unusual for him to be away. He spent hours here, working long into the night with little or no sleep. The study was an immense, drafty chamber, filled with books, manuscripts, odd statues and carvings, jars full of substances, preserved animals, and all sorts of mechanical instruments. Clarence did not like the place and wanted to leave, but Amanda wouldn’t permit it.

  “I think he’s keeping some important secrets from us; I want to find them.”

  She began to rummage through all the strange articles. Clarence stood watching nervously. Then he heard a bird cackle, and jumped. He sought the source of the sound in the darkness.

  “It’s only Janalai,” she said, chuckling. When Clarence still looked puzzled, Amanda grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into one of the corners. She lit a small candle and a yellow glow illuminated the objects there.

  A bird sat in its nest atop several old barrels and large books. The column looked unstable, but the bird seemed content enough. It had a long neck and a bright green head. Ragged purple feathers protruded from its sides helter-skelter, looking as if the bird had been in a serious accident.

  Amanda walked over to the bird, clutched its neck, and pulled it roughly out of its nest. A silver egg lay within.

  “See,” Amanda gestured with her other hand, “Janalai guards my father’s soul.”

  “His soul?”

  “Many wizards are able to remove their souls,” Amanda said. “They hide it somewhere, as in this egg. You can’t destroy a wizard until you find the hiding place of his soul, actually. It makes them almost indestructible.”

  “But why does he leave it in such an open area? Someone could come in here and steal it!”

  “He moves it to another hiding place periodically, although there has been no need of late to do so. No one comes here anymore. My father is not an active enough opponent for anyone to want to kill.”

  Clarence looked again at the egg and shuddered, imagining it falling to the hard rock floor.

  Eight: That He Is in Complete Control

  On the fifth day, Clarence discovered he could not leave the wizard’s house. He’d simply wanted some fresh air, then found that there were no more doors to the outside, and that all the windows were bolted. When he went to Amanda to tell her about this, she shrugged. “So, what did you expect?” she said.

  As a child, Amanda had once told him, she’d thought her father could do anything. He’d always seemed to know what she was thinking. And when she’d misbehaved, she’d believed that he had paralyzed her because she’d been unable to move with the consequent fear. He knew what was right and wrong, and had the power of life and death over her. He was in complete control.

  There was no escaping him.

  Nine: That He Has a Test for Me

  On his last day at the wizard’s house, Clarence woke up on the floor of a great dark hallway, a place he had never seen before. He stood up and began to walk down the length of the hall when the walls started to shift, sending him scrambling madly to avoid being crushed by the moving stone.

  He found himself in a small room with the walls slowly closing in on him. He had to move the heavy table around quickly so as to wedge the walls apart.

  Suddenly the floor dropped out from under him and he found himself on the table and sliding down an immense stone ramp where the floor used to be. He had to leap off before the table smashed into a wall at the bottom of the ramp.

  Then all the creatures he’d met from Amanda’s past began chasing him, and no matter how fast he ran he seemed to get no farther away from them.

  Suddenly he was in the same long corridor he began in, but the walls were lined with pictures now, and as a floating ball of light descended by each one he was able to examine them. They seemed to be several pictures of Amanda, a picture of the wizard, and one of another woman whom Clarence had never seen before.

  Ten: That a Wizard’s Daughter Is Hard to Love

  The wizard was suddenly at his side, seeming impossibly tall. “My wife . . .” the wizard said, gesturing toward the picture of the unknown woman.

  “My mother . . .” he said, pointing toward one of the pictures Clarence had thought to be of Amanda. Clarence started to protest involuntarily, but was able to control himself.

  “Amanda . . .” the wizard said, pointing to the next picture, “. . . and her sisters. . . .” He swept his arm across the length of the hall, and the descending lights illuminated countless other portraits, all looking exactly like Amanda’s.

  The wizard turned to him. “I never knew my mother; my father was a great magician who took her away from me. But still she did not have to go; she did not have to leave me. Each time I have lost Amanda, one such as you has brought her back to me. I keep remaking her, her companions, and yet she is ungrateful . . . still she leaves me . . .”

  Clarence ran through the hallway, through the doors, up winding staircases. The wizard put nothing more in his way. Clarence did not slow down until he reached Amanda’s door.

  He heard her crying within. He opened the door slowly.

  Amanda was playing with her companions: the small subhuman bleeding, the little furry thing crying, the deformed bodiless head talking with maddening animation.

  Amanda was beginning to fade, as her companions were beginning to fade. Somehow she looked older even as she began to disappear but Clarence could not be sure. He remembered what she’d said so long ago: “He is of course responsible for my existence . . .”

  And then she was gone completely. A gray mouse scurried out from under the bed, staring at Clarence as it wiggled its nose. Then it became a ferocious-looking silver cat that ran out the door screeching.

  Clarence knew that Amanda would soon be appearing in the room again, a new and different Amanda for the wizard to love.

  But he did not wait.

  VILLAGGIO SOGNO

  Richard A. Lupoff

  Richard Lupoff (b. 1935) is always experimenting. His fascination with the works of the creator of Tarzan led to his first book Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965) but since then he has produced fiction in the mode of H.G. Wells with Nebogipfel at the End of Time (1979), Jules Verne with Into the Aether (1974), Conan Doyle with The Case of the Doctor who Had No Business (1966) and works that don’t really fit into any category such as Sacred Locomotive Flies (1971) and Sword of the Demon (1976) – that one was a Japanese fantasy. That’s what’s so great about his work, every one is a surprise. The following story, written specially for this anthology, struck me that it might have elements of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, but it has all the Lupoff style. With luck he is considering developing the idea presented here into a series of stories or a novel.

  “YOU’LL HAVE TO PAY the toll if you want me to drive into the city,” the driver said, “or you could walk across the bridge and save some coins.” His name was Signore Azzurro. His passengers were two girls, Margherita and Francesca. It was not clear which girl he addressed, and in fact he probably didn’t care. As long as he collected his fare and a nice tip – surely these two nice girls would give him a nice tip – they were pretty much interchangeable to him.

  They put their heads together and conferred, examined the contents of their purses, and decided to be extravagant.

  The driver whipped up the big bay horse and clicked his tongue. The beast moved forward in a cheerful trot, the carrozza’s wheels rattling noisily over the rough gravel roadway. The River Fiume roared beneath the stone bridge, its foam and spray reaching the bridge, an occasional splat
ter of icy water reaching even to the carrozza. When this happened the girls shrieked in mock horror and alarm.

  The city rose above white stone cliffs on the other side of the River Fiume. Buildings three and even four storeys tall, banners, noise, people speaking many languages, people whose skins were of many colours, wagons and carriages drawn by horses and horses ridden by handsome bravos and even a few actually ridden by women, barking dogs running among them – Villaggio Sogno was a place of marvels and of dreams.

  Villaggio Sogno was a city of whitewashed plaster and wood. The buildings were roofed in copper and turquoise. When the sun glinted off the walls and the roofs, as it did this day, Villaggio Sogno rose to the sky like a dream. Old Allegra Chiavolini, the teaching woman, spoke of such wonders and warned the children of un fascino, the glamour, the magical spell that could give a repulsive old man the appearance of a handsome young wrestler, a hovel the appearance of a lovely cottage, a pig the appearance of a beautiful roe.

  “You can sometimes defeat un fascino,” Signora Chiavolini taught them, “with this piece of music.” And she whistled a tune. The children of the town all learned to whistle the tune, and Margherita in time learned to play it as well. She had doubts about the old teacher’s story, she had doubts that there was such a thing as the glamour, but it was thrilling, on occasion, to awaken late at night when the whole household was in bed and asleep, and imagine that some frightening creature was at large, disguised as a harmless animal or person. Margherita whistled the tune then, that Allegra Chiavolini had taught her, and went back to sleep feeling safe.

  The two girls had been there before, brought for special treats by their respective families, but today was a special day. They were permitted to visit Villaggio Sogno without adult supervision. Their parents had fretted, Margherita’s mother in particular, but twelve years old was almost grown up, or at least beginning to be grown up, and before much longer they would be going to the higher school and having parties with boys at them.