The Mammoth Book of Dark Magic

by Mike Ashley

  There had been something wrong with the ceremony. He had not dared to consider it at the time, but now the memory echoed in his mind like a recalled nightmare. On the surface, everything had gone well enough. The old First Magus’s soul had been gathered to the realm of Chaos and had made its last journey gladly; his successor had undergone trial and had not been found wanting. But there were anomalies. The emissary sent by the Chaos lords had been a demon of no great rank; Chaos was perverse, and its higher beings tended to favour less bizarre manifestations than their lower brethren. Though Savrinor had never been privileged to witness such an event, he had heard that Yandros himself took the form of an ordinary man on the rare occasions when he deigned to make himself known to his human worshippers. All well and good; the emissary had been of an order warranted by such an occasion as this. But there had been no shout of fanfares, no violent assault on the senses, none of the ceremonial that usually accompanied the arrival of the lesser demons. The emissary hadn’t spoken a single word, had demanded no praises or psalms in its turn. And Vordegh’s trial had been simplicity itself.

  It didn’t fit the accepted pattern. Despite its erratic nature, Chaos maintained a certain predictability in its dealings with the mortal world; without that stability its worshippers couldn’t hope to function. And by those rules, such anomalies as Savrinor had witnessed tonight simply shouldn’t have existed. They suggested, to his uneasy mind, an ambivalence on the part of Yandros and his six brothers. But ambivalence towards what? The old First Magus? The new? Or something that, as yet, he couldn’t even begin to guess at?

  Savrinor shook sand over the last of his parchments. He had no time for false modesty and knew that his work tonight had excelled even his usual high standard. Every detail of the ceremonial was there, and woven in among the facts was a sober tribute to the wisdom and nobility of the late First Magus, carefully balanced by several subtle paragraphs in respectful but emphatic praise of his successor. Even Vordegh couldn’t possibly find fault with this. And no one, Savrinor hoped and prayed, would ever know of the other document, the few brief but succinct notes in his own shorthand code that now lay secreted in an inner drawer, and which told a different story.

  Feeling faintly queasy with the relief of having shed an unpleasant burden, Savrinor set the completed document aside. Fastidiously he turned down the cover of his bed, then moved to extinguish the lamp by which he had been working. A gaunt shape moved in the gloom beyond the lamplight, and he started nervously before realising that it was nothing more than his own shadow disturbed by a flicker within the lamp’s chimney. Jinking at shadows. It was a trait he mocked in others, for twilight, literal or metaphorical, had always been his natural habitat. But suddenly he felt uneasy in its embrace. And the thoughts that had been troubling his mind were still there, and they would not let him alone.

  Forcing down the tension within him Savrinor sought refuge in his bed, for once not troubling to shed his clothes. It would be dawn soon enough, and the new day would see a good many changes if he and his bones were any judge. Better to be ready at a moment’s notice, in case of . . . what? He didn’t know. Perhaps nothing; perhaps not. He, like all of them, would have to wait and see.

  He reached out to extinguish the lamp – then let his hand fall away from it and instead left it burning, a small pool of brightness in the dim room. It was irrationally comforting, and there was no one else here to witness his small show of weakness.

  Savrinor did not sleep that night.

  THE ETERNAL ALTERCATION

  Peter Crowther

  If ever there is a present day British writer who succeeds in capturing the essence of American fantasy it’s Peter Crowther (b. 1949). I’d go so far as to say he is the modern-day British Ray Bradbury. He can create a believable everyday setting and imbue it with an unsettling sense of strangeness. You’ll find that in his novel Escardy Gap (1996), written with James Love-grove, and in his many stories, some of which are collected in The Longest Single Note (1999) and Lonesome Roads (1999). Crowther has also edited anthologies and runs PS Publishing, the small press with big ideas. The following story just had to be the final story in the collection because it reaches such a breathless pace that nothing can follow it. So, brace yourself.

  Q. “The railroads are doing pretty well are they not?”

  A. “Some of them are. The old ones are. Yes.”

  J. P. Morgan,

  at a Congressional Hearing in late 1912

  ABOUT 20 MINUTES AFTER abandoning the gas-dry hulk of his trusty Trans Am by the roadsign, Paul Abbott reasoned that he’d taken a wrong turn. Or maybe he’d just mis-read the route signs because they happened on the fold of his road atlas. Or maybe – and more than likely – he was just tired, completely fucked-in-the-head and road-weary after hundreds and hundreds of miles along shimmering gray ribbons stretched out between seemingly endless cornfields.

  But whatever the reason, Nashville had not appeared.

  Hell, maybe even Tennessee hadn’t appeared.

  What had appeared was a rusted sign explaining that Madrigal – and what the hell was that, pray tell? wasn’t it some kind of old-time dance? – lay four miles ahead, with a population of . . . how many? The number had either been chipped off or worn down by the elements.

  And now, here he was, gas can in hand, standing on the town’s edge, looking along its wind-blown Main Street at a clumsy array of buildings that owed more allegiance to an old black-and-white Randolph Scott western than to anything even vaguely reminiscent of the Brave New World promised by the turn of the millennium.

  And there was not a single person to be seen.

  And not a single car.

  At the first albeit casual glance – and Abbott suspected that the same impression would hold true for many more in-depth glances to come – Madrigal was a ghost town. And one that had surely never featured in the National Geographic or appeared even as a sideways reference in even the most offbeat travel book.

  Certainly, it was a far cry from any of the towns Larry McMurtry had encountered when he drove his beloved Interstates like a blacktop surfer in search of the perfect wave for his Roads book. And it was a world away from the smalltown eccentricities uncovered when Bill Bryson returned to his native America to rediscover his roots in The Lost Continent. Hell, it even made the backwoods shanty communities of William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways seem like bustling Metropolises by comparison.

  Down the street, an Esso sign creaked in the wind and a skeletal tumbleweed trundled across to lodge itself against the door of a barber’s shop, the shop’s candy-striped pole faded by many years’ sunshine . . . or simply many years’ disinterest.

  Abbott hoisted the can into his other hand and set off for the filling station.

  Every building he passed was empty.

  No, they were more than empty: they were dead. Was that right? Could a building actually be dead?

  He reached the filling station with less than optimism. The door of the little kiosk across from the pumps stood ajar so Abbott walked across and banged his can on the wood panelling.

  “Anybody there?” he yelled.

  There was no response.

  He walked over to one of the pumps and pulled the lever, praying for the tell-tale hum that promised gasoline.

  No hum. Just the wind.

  “Shit!”

  He stepped back into the street and looked further along.

  A little way down, on the boardwalk, was a wide sign pointing off to the right. He squinted into the sun, unsure of what to make of the sign: RAIL DEPOT, the letters read.

  “Rail depot? What the hell is a place like this doing with a rail depot?” he asked the wind. If it knew the answer, it was keeping quiet about it.

  Abbott looked around some more.

  For that matter, where were the rails? He didn’t recall seeing any back on the road . . . but then he had been more intent on watching the faltering needle on the fuel gauge than in checking for local amenities.<
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  Abbott tossed the can over to the pumps and set off for the sign. Hell, maybe he could catch a train to Nashville, pick the car up another time . . . call the Auto Club to come along and tow it away.

  He wasn’t surprised to find the rail station was deserted.

  He walked along banging doors loudly and shouting but the wind caught the sounds and took them up to wherever the wind takes sounds that it doesn’t want to linger . . . and doesn’t want anyone to hear.

  The silence was thick and inhospitable.

  The ticket window gave out his own reflection, staring at him in incredulity . . . presumably just as fascinated to see a living person in the town as he was to see a place so bereft of life.

  Abbott walked around the side of the building, stepped down on to the hard-packed ground and went in search of the tracks.

  He found them – or what was left of them – in a long ditch that stretched into the distance in each direction, curving into town from the west and curving back out, again to the west . . . which explained why he hadn’t seen them on the way in.

  As he stood on the bank of the ditch and followed the tracks – saw the sun on the distant horizon, a thick bruise shot through with gold and scarlet – he heard something that sounded for all the world like a throaty chuckle.

  Abbott span around and looked back at the station building. It was still deserted. Must have been the wind.

  When he turned around and faced north, straight across the ditch, he saw an old man sitting on the bank at the far side, a lopsided grin on his face. As Abbott watched, the man seemed to be mouthing something, his lips drifting from smirk to grimace, all the time peppered with muttered catechisms and oaths, as he rubbed the side of his face with the stump of his left arm, from which a thin and dirty streamer of bandage wafted in the hot breeze.

  “Hey,” Abbott shouted across the track. “Where is everybody?”

  The old man sniggered and nodded, then spat into the dust by his side. Even from here, Abbott could see that the spit was dark.

  The man held something in his right hand, something that looked like tiny breadsticks. Then, shielding his eyes against the late afternoon sun’s glare so that he might see with more clarity, Abbott realized that the breadsticks were in fact the last surviving fingers of the man’s other hand. As though reading Abbott’s thoughts, the man nodded and held up the grisly collection like an offering of straw-picking . . . short straw loses. He mouthed something more, sniggered and spat again, curling the fingers into his good hand and placing it between his belly and the two-fingered claw of his other.

  “Shit,” Abbott whispered, and the wind took the word and sent it scurrying across the track and the arroyo alongside it . . . where once water had surely run but where now only dust and dirt prevailed.

  The old man pulled his knees up to his belly and wrapped his arms around them, glaring off into the distance down or up the track – Abbott didn’t know which. He turned to face in the same direction.

  The breeze which ran along the shallow-sided arroyo cooled a little, as though perhaps remembering the water that once streamed there. The fall was maybe a drop of only a few degrees but it was noticeable. Abbott glanced across and saw the old man straining forward, his hands now resting at either side of his emaciated body as he affected the stance of an artist’s model.

  The man grunted and shook his head, lifting a hand to smooth down strands of wiry hair. It was a monosyllabic grunt, a single surprised word that could have been “rain”, though Abbott did not believe the drop in temperature heralded anything more than a temporary glitch in meteorological aerodynamics and the promise of more excesses in the days ahead. He looked up into the marbled sky and tried to imagine the sensation of rain falling on to his upturned face. It seemed like an old memory . . . something he had experienced in another life.

  The old man grunted again, this time even more anxiously.

  It could have been “pain” that he was saying, for the man’s face, Abbott now saw, had become a mask of seemingly exquisite agony. Perhaps he had suffered another loss – a toe, perhaps, or a foot . . . that even now lay sideways-on to the ankle to which it had so recently been attached.

  But no, it did not look like either of these, for the man hunched himself closer to the distance before him, anxiously straining towards it. The wind grew cooler, markedly cooler, and Abbott moved to the edge of the platform, glancing down at the littered corpses of small rodents before turning his full attention to the arid plains that stretched out from Madrigal like the pavements of Hell.

  The old man grunted a third time, and Abbott felt a sudden surge of cool wind against his face.

  “Train!” Abbott said. That was what the old man was saying: a train was coming. He didn’t know where it was coming from not where it was traveling to . . . nor even who might be riding it. None of these factors seemed to carry any consequence. The only thing that mattered was that a train was coming to Madrigal station.

  Abbott watched and saw a shape forming out of the heat haze in the far distance, over where the sky met the earth and the two of them plotted new and undreamed of mischief to amuse and frustrate mankind. The shape loomed as though out of a sea mist, like a fabled galleon of bulwark and figurehead, mast and sail, rigging and plank . . . only this was no schooner ploughing the waves, its boards creaking in the wind: this was an automotive monster of gleam and smoke, glass and metal, a steaming engine pulling behind it a string of carriages, the last one of which boasted bulbous sides that hung far out over the track on each side, like insect wings partly folded against the sunlight.

  His mouth open in something resembling astonishment, Abbott glanced across at the old man. The man nodded enthusiastically and then pointed down at the wide ditch that separated him from Abbott. The man chuckled to himself, almost folding over in mirth, and then pointed again, this time waving his hand over towards the approaching train, still pointing downwards.

  Abbott frowned and looked down into the ditch, his eyes searching for the cause of the old man’s amusement. But there was nothing, at least nothing obvious.

  “What?” Abbott shouted over the sound of escaping steam and revolving pistons, a mournful mechanical wail carried towards them by the breeze coursing the arroyo. “What’s so goddam funny?”

  The old man leaned back, his mouth wide in laughter that Abbott could not hear. And he pointed again, jabbing the bandaged stump violently at the ditch and again moving it to his left and towards the approaching train.

  A whistle blew . . . a shrill outpouring of pain and frustration – or was it anger? Then came the sound of collision, of massive impact and a high-pitched squeal like a giant’s fingernails being dragged across a monolithic blackboard. An explosion sounded and Abbott hunched forward.

  When he glanced across the ditch, he saw the old man trying to get to his feet.

  Abbott looked up and out to the train again, shaking his head.

  A thick plume of smoke-topped fire now filled the distance, and Abbott saw that the back carriage of the train had swung out, out over the side of the track and on to the concrete aprons which formed a goods yard where trucks had maybe once carried produce and equipment to towns and cities many miles away.

  The carriage had collided with a small filling station and then what must once have been a dispatching shed, carrying on, weaving madly, stretching the other carriages with it – Abbott counted seven in all. One of the middle ones was pushing before it an old car which itself was on fire. As he watched, the car impacted with a building side, hesitated for a second and then caromed backwards as the carriage compressed it further against the building before demolishing the wall and continuing onwards, swinging crazily back towards the track while the car turned top over tail several times and dropped over the rail of a highway overpass.

  The train was off the track!

  Abbott looked back into the ditch and stared in sudden realization at the twin lines of metal, sometimes in place and sometimes askance . .
. and still other times not there at all.

  He followed the pieces of metal, saw that in one section they were actually laid across themselves like a metallic tic tac toe board . . . and in another section they had been inserted into the uneven dirt of the ditch bottom like the flagpoles of an army long since departed from the field of battle, their pennants taken – or buried – with them.

  Abbott backed slowly away from the ditch.

  Across from him the old man had managed to get to his feet – or foot, as Abbott now observed . . . the man’s left leg ending just below his knee where a thick bandage which might once have been white trailed in the dust. He was shuffling across to the edge of the concrete block which clearly had once served as a platform.

  “Get back!” Abbott shouted.

  The man looked up and across at him.

  This time Abbott waved his arm at him. “Get back from the edge!”

  The old man laughed and nodded. He took another lopsided limp – he was actually walking on his shin stump, Abbott realized – and reached the very edge of the concrete where he stopped for a few seconds and swayed drunkenly.

  Abbott looked to his right and saw that the train’s engine was now approaching the small station at an angle, the cowcatcher bars on the front raking through dilapidated fencing and taking down the occasional telegraph pole it encountered. The poles fell some to the left of the track, away from it, and others to the right, lying temporarily across the ditch before being snapped like firewood as the train caught them and swept them up.

  A sound of scraping and complaining metal and distant explosions from somewhere out of sight filled the air. The train’s whistle screamed once more, and then again . . . this time a bovine bellow that rattled Abbott’s bones beneath his skin.

  When he glanced across the ditch that separated him from the old man he saw that the man was nowhere to be seen. And then he saw a frail figure pull itself to its full height – surely no more than five feet, and possibly much less – in the ditch. The old man had climbed down and was now staggering forward to meet the oncoming train.