The Mammoth Book of Dark Magic

by Mike Ashley

  In this infinite continuum with its complex multiplicity of universes and dimensions all things are possible. This is one of those things.

  THE DAY WAS CLEAR and cold, as it often is in early March in San Francisco. A muckle of fog was rolling in from the ocean, squatting like a vast, misshapen troll on the hills to the west, and flicking its many tongues at me as I walked down Polk Street toward the old Victorian where Jonathan Stryk lived and worked.

  A box hedge stirred with the breeze as I passed, and further along the street some wind chimes above a doorway jingled melodically at my approach. But the air around me was still. I paused. A newspaper in the street ahead of me ruffled its pages, and the branches stirred on the California Pine at the curb. Was I being followed by a wind elemental? Such things were not random. Was someone interested in my comings and goings? I am Inspector Peter Frey, a detective in the Impossible Crimes Division of the San Francisco Police Department, and it is neither desirable nor safe for my comings and goings to be monitored by an outside agency.

  I turned the corner on to California Street, where the square brownstone monastery of the Brothers of Eternal Damnation stands cater-corner from the black concrete structure of the Brothers of Perpetual Torment. A line of men stood patiently outside the Damned Brothers’ wicket gate, a few cringing under the glare of the great stone head of T. Leseaux peering over the wall by the gate. They were awaiting the three o’clock bell, when the gate would be opened long enough to admit them, and have the men sorted out according to their abilities and their desires. The great majority of them would leave tomorrow morning sorely disappointed, but one or two perhaps would be told that they had some trace of Power that might be cultivated. They would then have to decide whether the prize, a highly-developed ability to use some possibly arcane mantic skill, was worth the price: ten years of poverty, shaven head, strict obedience to some rather arbitrary rules, a ridiculous-looking monks’ get-up, a diet of corn meal mush and termites (so I have been told), and praying to some gods, the names of which most of us would rather not say aloud.

  When, back in the 1860s, T. Leseaux discovered the principles upon which magic worked, he could have had no idea of the great changes he – or his discovery – would have on our society. The great Polish mathematician Thomasoni believes that the reason nobody discovered how magic works before T. Leseaux is because magic didn’t work before sometime in the middle of the Nineteenth Century – or perhaps it did only somewhat and sporadically. He believes that some basic physical constants of our universe have changed, or the sun has moved into a sector of the universe with slightly different rules, or something. And he has the equations to prove it.

  It’s interesting how many people still refuse to believe in magic, with the evidence of it all around them. A magician transports himself from here to there, clearly unsupported by anything. “It’s a trick,” they exclaim. A sorceress turns a man into a pig. “Mirrors,” they insist. A necromancer predicts the future with eighty percent accuracy. “Why not a hundred?” they ask. But are they any worse than those who believe that sorcery will solve all their problems? “My brother had his leg taken off at the knee by a threshing machine,” one says. “Witch it back.” Sure. Although I have heard of some theoretical sorcerers in Germany – but I digress.

  I hurried down the street to Stryk’s building. He had recently had it painted a deep forest green with a sombre brown trim, and it now fit in better with the other buildings along the block. But somehow, even in its new coat, it still spoke of mysterious comings and goings and secrets that were better not said. The brass plaque on the door had been recently polished:

  I pushed the button and heard nothing from within, but shortly the heavy oak door swung open on silent hinges, revealing an ill-lit corridor of some dark wood. There was no one in sight.

  “I hate that!” I said. “Show yourself!”

  The sound of girlish laughter filled the doorway, and Melisa appeared before me. Without even a poof or a clap of thunder – just appeared. One second empty corridor, the next, the slender, dark-skinned, white-haired waif was standing there in a green dress, barefoot, arms akimbo, laughing at me. “Greetings, Peter my love,” she said, “Himself will see you shortly, he’s finishing up an incantation, or possibly a breakfast muffin, at the moment.”

  “Ah, Melisa,” I said, following her into the house. “I wish you meant that.” I took off my hat and coat and hung them on the coat-rack just inside the door.

  She looked up at me quizzically. “The incantation or the breakfast muffin?” she asked.

  “I meant the ‘Peter my love’ part,” I told her.

  “You’re forgetting the Seventh Law of Magic,” she told me, dancing ahead of me down the corridor.

  “Not being a magician,” I reminded her, “I’ve never learned the Seventh Law of Magic.”

  “Be very careful what you wish for,” she said, “is the Seventh Law.”

  “What are the other six?”

  “There are well over a hundred by now,” she told me, a serious expression on her pixie face. “And they keep changing places.”

  We went into the parlour, which is the first room on the left, and she pointed at the couch. “Sit,” she said. “Help yourself to coffee, Jonathan will be down directly; he’s been expecting you.”

  “But I told no one I was coming,” I said.

  “Nonetheless he’s been expecting you. The coffee’s on the sideboard. I have a task, and will return when it is done.” She crossed to the door to what had once been a sitting-room or perhaps a music room, but was now hung with dark drapes and lit with red candles. “No more than twenty minutes,” she said. “Perhaps, if I am not fortunate, much less.”

  I poured myself a demi-flagon of the thick, black, sweet liquid that Stryk calls coffee and settled down to wait. A copy of last month’s Genii, the magazine about magic and magicians was on the table and I picked it up. This was the issue that had an article by Har Janif, an East Coast magus, blasting forensic magic and calling all its practitioners gulls or frauds; and saving special scorn for Jonathan Stryk. His credentials, according to Janif, were suspect, and his accomplishments merely smoke and mirrors. “This sort of magic on demand,” said Janif, “violates the very rules of magic, and is best left to charlatans and humbugs like Stryk.”

  I had asked Stryk about the article when it appeared, and he had merely smiled and said, “Who knows, he may be right.” It was like Stryk, with his colossal ego and his even larger sense of humour, to leave that very issue of Genii on the table in his parlour.

  After a while, attracted by the melodic murmurings that I could hear from the next room, I put the magazine aside and approached the door, which Melisa had left open.

  The elfin waif was settled cross-legged on the deep strangely-figured rug that covered the floor, holding an oversized crystal of some milky-white substance in the air in front of her with her right hand. In her left hand she held what appeared to be a child’s jumper, made of light brown corduroy, and was running it through her fingers, twisting it this way and that. She was chanting something something softly to herself; the sound was melodious, but I couldn’t make out the words, or even tell what language they were in.

  As I watched, the crystal seemed to clear, and then to glow with an inner light. I could discern figures moving about inside it, and once a hand, or claw, seemed to reach toward me and then be yanked back sharply. For which, I admit, I was grateful. Through all this Melisa remained frozen, except for her left hand, which continued worrying the bit of fabric. After perhaps five minutes she let out a little cry, perhaps of pain. Her arm dropped, and the crystal fell from her hand and rolled away on the carpet, its inner light extinguished. For a few seconds she was motionless and mute, then she folded in on herself, arms and legs and bowed head, and began rocking back and forth and whimpering softly.

  “What is it?” I approached, but hesitated touching her, since I didn’t know whether I would help or harm.

  Melisa
looked up. “Why can the crystal never show pleasant, attractive scenes of happiness and light?” She began shuddering as one might if caught naked in a snowstorm, and I wondered what it was that she had seen.

  “Because that is not what we ask of it,” said a deep, sombre voice. I turned and saw the tall, gaunt, red-robed form of Jonathan Stryk striding into the room from an inner door. He gathered Melisa up in his arms and held her until the shuddering had passed.

  “But you were in your studio,” she said.

  “I heard you and so I came,” he told her, carrying her back into the parlour and setting her down softly on the couch that I had just vacated.

  “Through three floors, furniture and all?” she asked with a tentative smile.

  “Through ten miles of solid granite of the Mount of Sorrow, if need be,” he said, smiling gently back at her.

  I sighed, or was it a grimace? Why couldn’t I talk to women like that? For that matter, why didn’t I have a woman to talk to like that? And could he really have heard her through ten miles of solid granite? And where was the Mount of Sorrow anyway? Perhaps it would be wise not to demand an answer to the last question.

  Stryk looked at the crystal and the balled up garment where they lay on the floor. “What did you find?” he asked her.

  “It’s the jumper from the Langford child,” she said. “I was skrying using the incantation you devised.”

  “The Langford kidnaping?” I interrupted. “You’re working on that now?”

  My astonishment must have shown in my voice. Stryk nodded at me. “Senator Langford asked for my help. He did not want it known publicly.”

  “You mean he didn’t want the police to know,” I said bitterly. “Is it any wonder that we can’t solve crimes when nobody trusts us to solve crimes?”

  “Come now,” Stryk said. “It happened in far-off Chicago, and is of little concern to the San Francisco Police. And I believe the Chicago department is cooperating with Senator Langford’s desires in the matter. It is, after all, his daughter.”

  “And what can you be doing from here that the Chicago Police can not do better?” I asked. “Wave your magic wand and make the child reappear?”

  Stryk smiled grimly. “I’m a sorcerer,” he said, “not a miracle worker. The senator sent me a telegram asking for my assistance in locating the child, or at least ascertaining whether she is still alive. I replied that he should send some clothing that little Deborah had worn, or a favourite toy. He sent both, putting the package on the Sandusky and Western yesterday. We received it this morning.”

  “Ah!” I said. “And?”

  “I devised an incantation for Melisa to use in skrying for the child with the lesser crystal,” Stryk said. “I do not yet know the result.” He turned to Melisa, who was sitting up on the couch.

  “I saw the child,” she said softly. “I was on the third recitation and had skryed only restless spirits and an angry djinn, when all at once the mist turned silver-white and Deborah’s jumper felt ice cold under my hand. And I saw her. Several – beings – interposed themselves between me and her, as though they were aware of my seeking, but I saw her. She was in Hell.”

  “Dead?” asked Stryk. “What a pity. But why would one so young and innocent be condemned . . .”

  “No, no,” said Melisa. “She is not dead. I could see that clearly. Nonetheless she was in Hell.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  She looked at me, her brown eyes wide. “I do not know,” she said. “The images I see are not reality, but a warped vision occluded by mists and distorted by the minds of unearthly beings.”

  I made the sign of protection with my left hand; always a good idea when such things are spoken of. “And what do you do next?” I asked Stryk.

  “Use the great crystal to verify and perhaps amplify Melisa’s skrying, and then report to Senator Langford,” Stryk said. “Our brief goes no further.”

  “Actually . . .” I began.

  “And you, Peter,” Stryk said, without noticing that he was interrupting. “What can we do for you?”

  “I thought you knew that I was coming,” I said.

  “Yes,” Stryk agreed, “but not why.”

  “Ah!” I said, shaking my finger at him. “Then it was yours!”

  “It what?”

  “The wind elemental that’s been following me about town.”

  “Ridiculous,” said Stryk.

  “Silly,” said Melisa.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “but it’s there. Probably right outside this building at this very moment. I assume you have protective spells to prevent its entering.”

  “Sometimes,” said Stryk, “a wind is just a wind.”

  “ ‘Just winds’ don’t follow one about,” I told him.

  “Interesting,” said Stryk. “Let us see.” He retreated to the inner room for a moment and returned with a small, lacquered box. Wrapping his deep red robe even more firmly around him, he stalked toward the front door. I followed at a reasonable distance, not wishing to come between Stryk and whatever he was about to do. Melisa was behind me.

  Stryk opened the door and muttered several short phrases which may have included the phrase “Umjum Gumball,” or may not, and opened the lacquered box. Holding it carefully at arm’s length by the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he gently shook it. A red powder wafted out like smoke from a lazy fire. It headed down the stoop away from the house, spreading as it went. In a short while it was – how to say it – taken up by this unseen creature made of the very air, until it permeated its windy body and made visible the twenty-foot tall wind elemental.

  “See?” I said. “Sometimes a wind is – that!” I pointed to the puffy insubstantial monster whirling and throbbing and assuming new and ever more grotesque shapes before us.

  Stryk pulled a small pointed wand from his sleeve and gestured toward the airy beast. He muttered a couple of words under his breath and then said “Explain yourself!” to the air in front of him in a deep, commanding voice.

  “I am what I am,” came the faint whisper in reply.

  “Why are you following Inspector Frey?” Stryk demanded.

  After a while came, “Because . . . Yes.”

  “Because yes?” I asked. I know one can’t expect much from a bundle of air, but . . .

  Melisa frowned and pursed her lips. After a few seconds a wide smile spread across her pixie face and she suppressed a giggle.

  “Funny?” I growled.

  She stood on tiptoe and murmured “It was a two-part answer,” in my ear.

  “Two part?”

  She nodded. “ ‘Why?’ – ‘Because.’ ‘Are you following Inspector Frey?’ – ‘Yes.’ ”

  Stryk sketched a figure in the air with his wand. Blue sparks inhabited the creature and somehow pulled it together until it was smaller than it had been and seemingly more dense. “Who energized you?” he demanded.

  “I,” the creature began, stretching the sound out and out in a windy sort of way, “am a registered elemental of the Daily Call-Bulletin.”

  “Damn!” I said. “A newsy snoop!” I advanced toward the thing shaking my fist, an admittedly useless gesture against this bagless bag of wind. “Begone!” I said firmly.

  “I can’t,” the thing complained in its whiney windy voice. “I’m tied to you by a spell cast by the city editor.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Stryk said. He thrust the small wand before him like a midget épée and intoned, “I sever whatever ties hold this elemental force of nature and invoke the geas of Paracelsus!”

  A red bolt of lightning emerged from the tip, looked around for a place to go, and zapped into the streetlight standard some twenty yards away.

  The air creature pulsed with an internal light. “Free?” it asked. “Free,” it decided. “Free!” And it sped away down the street, blowing leaves, bushes, and the lids off a couple of garbage cans along the way.

  “It worked!” said Stryk, sounding a little surprised.
>
  “Shouldn’t it have?” I asked.

  Stryk shrugged. “A strange being,” he said. “Too airy to be held by a spell, but with too little intellect to know that it isn’t. So it does what it’s told.”

  “So that ‘Paracelsus’ business?”

  “One of the Names of Power. Pen name of a Swiss alchemist from half a millennium ago,” Stryk said. “Should mean nothing to a wind elemental. But yon windy beast didn’t know that.”

  “And if it hadn’t worked?”

  Stryk smiled. “I held Paracelsus’s real name in reserve.”

  “His real name?”

  “Phillippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.”

  I nodded. “That would have done it,” I agreed.

  “Especially,” said Melisa, “the ‘Bombastus’ part.”

  “Now,” said Stryk, “come back inside and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  I complied. “It’s odd,” I said when I was settled once more comfortably on the drawing room couch. “I didn’t know you were working on the Langford kidnaping.”

  “What’s odd about it?” Stryk asked.

  “I came here to ask you to work on the Langford kidnaping.”

  Stryk leaned back in his chair. I had surprised him. I cherished the moment. “What have the San Francisco police to do with a Chicago kidnaping?” he asked.

  “The kidnappers got in touch with Senator Langford late last night,” I told him. “They instructed him to take the Midnight Express to San Francisco, check into the St. Barnabas, and wait for their call. The Chicago police telegraphed us, and my boss sent me to you.”

  “I’m honoured,” Stryk said.