I helped Rachel Proctor set up for the ritual of necromancy, which was supposed to reach its climax at midnight. My help had mostly consisted of performing vital tasks such as "hold this" or "bring that."
As she laid out her materials, Rachel said, "I'm going to follow the Sepulchre Path of necromancy. It's the easiest, but it should allow us to get the information you need. If I do it right, it will temporarily grant me the power of Insight, which is the ability to see what the deceased saw in the last moments of his life."
"Could be pretty ugly, considering how he died," I said. "Can't you just call up his ghost and ask him who the killer was? I've heard of that being done."
"Yes, it can be done." She carefully opened a packet containing a dark blue powder and poured some into a bowl. "But probably not by me. That would require the Ash Path, which is far more difficult. You'd need a real adept to have a chance of pulling that one off. And when it comes to this stuff, an adept I ain't."
A little later I asked, "How many, uh, necromantic rituals have you been involved in, so far?"
Without looking up from what she was doing, she said, "Including tonight?"
"Sure."
"One."
"Oh."
She had made three concentric circles on the ground near Kulick's grave. The outer ring, I could see, was made of salt. The two inner circles were laid down using powders that I didn't recognize. The one making up the middle circle was red. The innermost circle was in white. "This is where you'll stand when it starts," Rachel had said. "Whatever happens, do not leave the inner circle until I have given the spirit leave to depart and I explicitly tell you it's safe. Always assuming I'm able to summon his spirit in the first place."
"What's so special about the inner circle?" I asked.
"The white circle is the strongest, kind of like the innermost ring of a rampart," she said. "It is your place of refuge, and mine, too, if things get hairy. Kind of like a shark cage when Jaws is in town."
I didn't remind her how relying on the shark cage had worked out in the movie, let alone the book.
"Why don't you just stay in the white circle the whole time, if it's safest?"
"Because I need access to the altar, which cannot itself be within the circle. Did you bring a personal object of Kulick's, as I asked you – something he had a lot of physical contact with?"
I produced a silver Montblanc pen. "Here. This was found on his desk blotter. Looks like he used it quite a bit."
"Good. Then we can begin."
Just outside thee, er ring, Rachel had set up the small portable altar we'd brought with us. On it burned three candles – red, white, and black. They sat at the points of a triangle drawn on the altar; the lines were red at the sides, but black across the bottom. She had also placed there several other objects, including bowls, small bottles, and a variety of instruments – some of which I recognized, others whose function I could only guess.
I was glad it wasn't windy, otherwise those candle flames wouldn't have lasted long. Then it occurred to me to wonder whether Rachel had anything to do with that.
Using a long handmade match that she sparked into life with a thumbnail, she lit two sticks of incense, placing each one in a container at opposite ends of the altar. It didn't take long for the smoke to make my eyes water.
"What the hell is that?" I asked.
"One is wormwood, the other is horehound," she said. "And I'd be careful about using the 'h' word right now – you never know what it might summon by accident. In fact, it would be better if you didn't talk at all, Stan."
I've been told to "shut up" before, but never so politely.
Facing the altar, Rachel stood with her hands spread wide. Then she began what I later learned is known as a "Quarter Call":
Spirits of Air,
We call to you.
The Breath of life the Knowledge of life, the Wind of life, it blows from thee to me, be with us now.
Then she turned forty-five degrees to her left, and continued:
Spirits of Fire,
We call to you.
The Heat of life, the Will of life, the Fire of life, it burns from thee to me, be with us now.
She made another quarter turn. She was facing me now, but I don't think she even saw me.
Spirits of Fire,
We call to you.
The Heat of life, the Will of life, the Fire of life, it burns from thee to me, be with us now.
Another turn, and she chanted:
Spirits of Earth,
We call to you.
The Flesh of life, the Strength of life, the Earth of life, it moves from thee to us, be with us now.
Then she faced the altar again.
I call upon Hecate, goddess of the crossroads.
Bless my work, and my endeavors.
Protect and keep me safe from harm.
From every place that harm is wrought.
From every evil that walks.
Protect me, wise one, guard me now.
O great Hecate, I beseech thee:
Watch over me this night that I might do this work both faithfully and well.
In thanks for your protection
I make this offering now.
There was a small wooden box on the altar. Rachel raised the lid and quickly reached in. Her hand came out holding something that moved in her grasp.
I looked closer. She was holding a brown-andwhite mouse, its tail twitching like a hooked worm. I wondered whether she'd trapped it herself or bought it at a local pet store. Either way, things weren't looking too good for Mr Mouse right about now.
Black magic requires a sacrifice – a blood sacrifice. It has its roots in the ancient religions, and their gods always required blood. In the case of some, like the Aztecs, the blood had to be human.
I guessed the mouse was the smallest offering that Rachel thought would allow the ritual to work. Or maybe it was the biggest thing she could bring herself to kill.
She closed the box again, and held the mouse down on its lid with her lift hand. With her right, she picked up a knife with an ornately carved handle.
" Spiritus! " she said loudly, held the knife up to shoulder height, then lowered it. She did this twice more. Then, with the mouse still pinned against the top of the wooden box, she cut off its head with one quick, economical movement. I expect the little guy was dead before he even knew he was dying.
I noticed that a breeze had sprung up, but the candle flames didn't flicker. The smoke from the incense rose straight up, as if the air was perfectly still. Maybe over there, it was.
Rachel seemed to hesitate before beginning the next part of the ritual, but when she spoke, her voice was clear and strong.
Colpriziana, offina alta nestra fuaro menut,
I name George Harmon the dead which I seek.
Spirit of George Harmon you may now approach this gate and answer truly to my calling.
Berald, Beroald, Balbin,
Gab, Gabor, Agaba!
Arise, I charge and call thee!
She repeated this twice more, a little louder each time. The smoke from the incense sticks had thickened and come together into one mass that grew as I watched. According to the laws of physics, what I was seeing was impossible. But I had a feeling that the laws of physics didn't count for much right now.
Using a sharp stick of polished wood that I knew was her wand, Rachel made a big X in the air above the altar. A few moments later, she repeated the movement. Then a third time.
I don't know how long it was – a minute, maybe two – before I noticed that an outline was appearing in the gathered smoke. An outline in the form of a man.
Rachel must have seen it about the same time I did, because she started chanting, over and over: " Allay fortission fortissio allynsen roa! "
I don't know how many times she repeated that phrase before she decided it was enough. But when she stopped, the quiet was almost oppressive. It wasn't just the absence of sound. The silence was like a force, press
ing against my eardrums. The outline of the man in the smoke was clear and distinct, like a silhouette you'd see through the blinds of a lighted room at night.
Then Rachel spoke, her voice only a little louder than normal. "I bid you welcome, spirit of George Kulick. I charge and bind thee now, to answer what I ask of thee, to harm none present, and to depart when thou hast been dismissed. I do this in the terrible names of Baal, of Beelzebub, and of Asmodeus."
I once asked a warlock why spells contain all those "thee"s and "thou"s, ad other stuff that nobody says anymore.
"When it comes to theory, no one is more conservative or fundamentalist as a magician," he'd told me. "It would make Southern Baptists look wild, by comparison. Lots of the spells in use today were first translated into English in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when people did talk like that. The belief is, if a spell works, you don't mess with it, even to update the language. You'd never know what effect even the smallest change would have – until it was too late."
Rachel took some powder from a jar and sprinkled a generous amount into one of the bowls. It immediately burst into flame, even though the bowl was nowhere near the candles, or any other heat source. "Speak to me now, George Kulick. Give to me the sight of thy death, and of he who did bring it upon thee. Let me see as thou hast seen, know as thou hast known, and learn as thou didst learn. Grant unto me the Insight into thy departure from this life, George Kulick, that I might take vengeance against thy tormentor."
Things began happening very fast, then. The candles on the altar went out, all in the same instant. The incense stopped burning as if it had been doused with water. The small cloud of smoke that had borne the outline of a man dissipated into nothing.
Then Rachel Proctor collapsed to the ground. A few seconds later, she started writhing and screaming – screaming like one of the damned.
I stood outside Room 8 of Mercy Hospital's Intensive Care Unit and looked through the window at the still form on the bed. Rachel lay there, mercifully quiet, surrounded by machines that hummed and beeped as they kept track of every biological process of her body.
"At least she doesn't seem to be in pain now," I said to Charlie Mulderig, who's been a doctor at Mercy for as long as I can remember.
"No, she's not," Charlie said softly. "It wasn't easy. She's under very heavy sedation. For a while, I was afraid we were going to anesthetize her."
"You mean, like in surgery?"
"Exactly like in surgery. The pain centers of her brain were going crazy. And, apart from the humanitarian concerns, there was a real danger that she'd have a stroke if it continued."
"Jesus."
"Problem is," Charlie continued, "you can't keep someone under surgical anesthesia indefinitely without a substantial risk of brain damage. Fortunately, we found a combination of painkillers that worked, at least for the time being."
"What the fuck was causing it, Charlie? Far as I could tell before the EMTs got there, there wasn't a mark on her."
"There isn't a mark, in the sense you mean it. No evidence of trauma, anywhere on her body. And we found no evidence of anything internal that might have caused it, like a ruptured appendix or a kidney stone."
"It must have been the magic, then." I ran down for him what Rachel had been doing just before her collapse.
Charlie shook his head. "When it comes to magic, you're talking to the wrong guy. I don't pretend to understand that stuff. In fact, according to everything I learned in med school, magic ought to be impossible."
"Except that it isn't."
"No, I've seen too much evidence to the contrary."
"Yeah, me, too."
"I can imagine," he said. "Oh, yeah, that reminds me: I did find out something that may be of interest to you. As she was finally going under, Ms Proctor stopped screaming and started muttering intelligible words. Well, more or less intelligible."
Charlie produced a folded sheet of paper from a pocklligible." his white doctor coat. "One of the nurses wrote some of it down, after they'd got her stabilized."
He unfolded the sheet and peered at it over the top of his glasses. "Apparently, she was saying something like I'll never tell you, you sick fuck. You'll never get the book, never. I gather it went on like that for a while, repeating the same stuff, over and over."
He refolded the paper and handed it to me. "Here, for whatever use it is. I wonder who she thought she was talking to?"
After a few seconds I said, in a voice that I barely kept from breaking, "She was talking to whoever tortured and killed George Kulick."
"The necromancy worked too fuckin' well," I told Karl the next night. "Not only did she raise the spirit of the late George Kulick, but he was able to get inside her head, somehow. That's gotta be what happened."
"I thought you said she'd set up protections against that stuff," Karl said.
"That's what she told me. But she'd never done one of these rituals before. Maybe she messed up somehow. If she did, it's my fault. I'm the stupid sonovabitch who pressured her into it."
"Or maybe Kulick was just stronger than she expected. The dude was a wizard, after all."
"Could be either one, could be both," I said. "She was trying to plug into Kulick's last moments, and it looks like she succeeded, big time. All of a sudden, she was right where Kulick had been, at the end."
"And Kulick was being tortured. Which means that Rachel-"
"Was going through the same thing – at a nerve level, anyway. Not so much as a bruise on her, but she still felt all the stuff that had been done to Kulick. I didn't think even magic could do that."
"Why not?" Karl said. "They do it with hypnosis."
I looked at him. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"My cousin Cheryl's a therapist. You know, like a shrink. I guess she uses hypnotism in her job. Helping people recover memories, stuff like that. She told me once that when she was in school, they had 'em watch movies of some of the experiments in hypnosis. From like thirty years ago. Stuff that you couldn't get away with today. One guy in this film was put into a real deep trance, right? Then the hypnotist told him he was on fire."
"Bet I can guess what happened then," I said.
"Fuckin' A. Cheryl said the guy was on the floor, screaming like he was being burned alive."
"Just like Rachel, who thought she was being tortured to death."
"Cheryl said it took days to get that guy's screams out of her head."
"I've got a feeling," I said, "that it's gonna take me a hell of a lot longer than that."
"It's Charlie Mulderig, Stan. I'm calling about Rachel Proctor."
"Hey, Charlie. How is she?"
There was a brief silence, then: "She's gone, Stan."
I felt an icy fist reach into my stomach, grab my guts, and twist them.
"Stan? Are you there? Stan?"
"Yeah, Charlie, I'm here." I cleared my throat, then did it again. "What happened? Heart failure?"
"No, Stan, I'm sorry for… Rachel isn't dead, as far as I know. She's just – gone. Missing. Her bed in the ICU is empty."
The icy fist loosened its grip, but only a little. "Did she regain consciousness, Charlie?"
"Not according to the nurses, and they were checking on her every hour or so. And if something had gone bad at any time – iegular heartbeat, sudden drop in blood pressure, something like that, the alarms built into the monitors would have gone off at the nurses' station. Those were still functioning, by the way. We checked."
"Could some nurse have missed something? Maybe forgot one of the hourly checks?"
"No way, no how. The ICU nurses are the best in the hospital, Stan. They do not fuck up, and that would constitute a major fuck-up."
I closed my eyes and tried to make my miserable excuse for a brain work. "You've got surveillance cameras over there, Charlie. I've seen 'em."
"Yeah, we do, and I know what you're thinking. There's one trained on the hallway right outside the ICU. Our security guy is reviewing the disc now."
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"There's no other way out of there, except for the windows, is there? And the ICU's on the fifth floor."
"Exactly. However she left, conscious or not, on a gurney, in a wheelchair, or walking, she had to go along that corridor. We'll find her – well, find her image, anyway."
"Give me a call when you do."
I put down the phone and sat at my desk, staring at nothing. I was thinking about magic – and about disappearing acts.
I didn't hear back from Charlie until the next night. He called right after I came on shift.
"So, how did she leave the ICU, Charlie? Was it under her own power, or was she taken?"
There was a long pause before Charlie said, "We'd like to discuss that with you face-to-face, Stan. Can you drop by Mercy sometime tonight?"
"Who's we?"
"The head of security. And me."
"All right, Charlie, I'll come over now, if the boss doesn't need me. But give me the short version now – how did she get out of there?"
"There actually isn't a short version, Stan. That's why we'd like to discuss this with you in person."
Arguing with him was just going to waste time I could better spend driving to Mercy Hospital. "I'll be there in twenty minutes," I said. I asked Karl to stay at the squad and call me if anything urgent came in. Then I got moving.
The head of security at Mercy was an ex-cop named Sam Rostock. He'd let himself go to seed after leaving the force, to the point where his belly now hung over the belt of his Wal-Mart grade slacks – but I guess muscle tone isn't too important when your toughest job is getting people to leave the hospital after visiting hours are over.
I sat down after the introductions – which were unnecessary, but Charlie didn't know that. I was looking at Rostock but speaking to Charlie when I said, "So what was so important that you couldn't tell me about it over the phone?"
"I checked the video feed from the camera that's aimed at that hallway," Rostock said. "The one outside the ICU. Checked it twice, for the period when what's-her-name, Proctor, was brought in until an hour after she was declared missing."
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