Blood Hound

by James Osiris Baldwin

  My feet hit something fleshy and wet. More barbed tendrils shot out from the screeching mouth, ripping fabric and flesh and wringing a harsh scream from my throat. I swung up and stabbed frantically at the biting tentacles that were feeding me feet-first into the gaping toothy void. The blade struck home, and the monstrosity shrieked once, then louder as I drove the point in through another tentacle, an eye, a small fanged mouth. The wounds oozed and discolored in the moment before I was flung into the hallway, where only years of horse-riding and training for falls saved me from breaking my neck. I tucked and rolled, skittered out across the floor, and stopped just shy of the front door. My knee went out from under me when I struggled to rise, pitching me down.

  Framed by the doorway, Yuri’s limbs ruptured: the black fleshy thing, half-formed, went to the ground like a malformed reptile and charged, umbrella maw agape. It was going to eat me, and if it got me, it would get Binah, and then Vassily when he returned. I rolled up with a snarl and pushed off from my good leg, blade first. Fear turned to rage, then to bloodlust as I leaped on its back. We rolled, tangled across the floor, and I stabbed and stabbed as it tried to twist and skewer me in turn. We crashed into a wall, into the rack of shoes, up against the front door. The knife wounds wracked the black flesh, causing it to shrivel and wrinkle. Teeth and drilling mouthparts flashed in my face in the gloom. Wherever its blood touched me, my skin burned.

  The horror screamed and lashed, relenting as the mounting wounds caused it to weaken. I kicked it off with rage-fueled strength. The creature skidded back, the knife embedded in its back, and lurched against a wall as I scrambled up. It blocked the way to the bedroom. I backed into the den, throwing what I could at it as it stalked me into the room, towards the study. The radio. Books. Pillows. The case with my father’s hammer was still open. It was all I had at this end of the house. Tendrils of sick flesh flopped and writhed through the entry, smashing it all to the sides of the room as it careened forward.

  I pulled the hammer free and swung it down, straight into the distended snapping jaws that were lunging from the center of the fleshy-lobed flower of its face. The fifteen-pound head sunk straight into the creature's body; it made a gagging, sucking sound as the air around us throbbed. A wind that penetrated the remains of my clothing, my hair, and skin pulsed out from the haft, through my hands and teeth and spine, and then what had once been Yuri’s head exploded in a wet welter of milk-like slime that drenched me, the shelves, the walls, and the desk. The corpse stumbled forward another step, convulsing, and crashed to the floor.

  It began to break apart. The remains of Yuri’s corpse split and divided, evaporating as it frantically tried to cling to unlife. I jabbed the hammer towards it, and the matter flinched back from it.

  “How...” Heaving for breath, I answered my own question before I’d even really asked it. I knew how. I should have realized earlier. The hammer was forged in the 40s, taken from the Kolyma goldmines, and it had gone with my father across Siberia, slipped with him through the Iron Curtain in Germany, sailed across the Atlantic, and then become his constant companion in America. He had killed many people with this hammer. He had used it to terrorize his hits, his wife and his son, and the business end of this weapon was the last thing Grigori Sokolsky had ever seen. It was a sacrificial tool... it had built up some kind of charge that was anathema to this thing.

  I hefted it over my shoulder and stared coldly at the floor as the last of Yuri’s body disintegrated. Among the scraps of fabric and shriveling jelly lay a silver metal disk the size of a flattened bottle top, inscribed with another sigil I did not recognize. In terms of its workmanship, it was nearly identical to the one we’d found at Dock Number Four. I crouched and turned it over with the point of the slagged knife. On the other side were three familiar Hebrew letters. Amet.

  My mouth drew into a one-sided, sloping grimace. A golem. Yuri had been turned into a golem. Someone was having their little joke.

  I was in over my head. Vassily was right. There's a rule of boxing, which is that you never let the other guy push you around the ring in a match. You had to keep control, even if that meant faking out to lead the other guy into thinking he had the upper hand. I was the one being led around right now: my opponents were juiced up and experienced, and I was not keeping up with the blows. Yuri’s words had struck me low. I’d always known the things he was talking about in some part of myself, but it was the first time I’d ever heard anyone say them aloud. I thought back to the discussion in Lev’s living room. The way he had effortlessly induced shame.

  No, not shame. Guilt. Even an unrepentant killer could be controlled by guilt, if he had been raised in it, steeped in it, like a foal trained to the bit and bridle on its way to adulthood. But maybe it wasn’t just guilt that kept me here, working for Lev and Sergei, fighting for Vassily, striving in my own, small, dark way to serve the people I’d built my life around. My community. Maybe it was fear. They didn’t respect me, thought I was... deviant. But they were all I had.

  Wearily, I looked around at the mess of my study. Before whatever happened next, I had to destroy these sigils.

  The kitchen smelled sweet and sick, and my plants were dead. The oily black liquid had dried up and vanished, like the rest of Yuri. I double-checked the room uneasily, and only when I was certain nothing was left did I set up the gas burner and get my tools. I found Binah under the bed, the preferred refuge of any cat. I was going to have to pick her up an extra can of salmon or something, given that she’d just saved my life.

  I set up a crucible over the burner and drew a small circle around the stove with salt and chalk. The crucible was used to melt the seal I'd pulled from Yuri's remains, which I poured into a makeshift mold made from a jar lid. When I turned the small blackened metal ingot out, it was unremarkable, faceless. Nothing was left of its magic.

  The tin chalice with Frank’s seal was still in the freezer. I pursed my lips as I looked into the chalice and found the ice cracked and crumbly, the texture of a snow cone. It was brown, the water rimed with veins of corruption. I dried the unharmed sigil off before setting it on the crucible, where I watched it intently. It sat there and did not stir.

  So much for that. I rubbed my jaw, turned the heat to full blast, and when that failed, picked the caster up in a pair of tongs and held it directly over the flame. It didn’t even soften, in a wholly un-lead–like fashion.

  “Well.” I blinked, swallowing, and set it back in the cup. It entered the water with a hiss of spent heat. “That’s not good.”

  “The energy attached to it must be absorbed or banished,” Kutkha replied. “And either you must do it, or another Phitometrist.”

  I glared down at it, watching as air bubbles gathered around its surface. “I can assume a Phitometrist is someone capable of manipulating Phi. You’ve never explained to me what that is, Kutkha.”

  “You don’t have the language for me to describe it to you.”

  How many languages did a man need? I already spoke three. I sighed and lifted my eyes to the ceiling. “Can you give me a rough approximation?”

  An image flashed into my mind. I saw myself in a mirror that faced a long hallway of mirrors, each one reflecting my face back to infinity. I reached out to my reflection, and my hand entered the pane as if it were a fluid. Silver crept over my fingers, up my arm, and then plunged painlessly through my chest. All of them. It connected every mirror in the illusion, linking my many selves into a chain which drew forward and back as far as the eye could see.

  “Does that help?” Kutkha asked wryly.

  I jerked on my feet as the vision passed, rubbed my eyes, and paused to regain my sense of place. Irritably, I reached out and turned off the burner. “Not really. And unfortunately, I don’t know anyone who could do what you describe, except perhaps Lev, and Lev... Lev isn’t powerful enough, is he?”

  “No. His Mass is small and his Pressure is weak.”

  Mass, another familiar word in an unfamiliar context.


  I took a box of salt and sprinkled the mineral into a new flask of water. “I can’t just leave it like this. Whoever summoned this demon is using this artifact to spy on us. It has to be Carmine. He summoned those dogs, or possessed them, or whatever it was he did. He could do this.”

  “I don’t know. The Phitonic spoor has passed, and your foe already knows where we are,” Kutkha said. My Neshamah’s voice was as hazy as a silk shroud around my ears. “One more day will not make a difference. Study and learn. Rest and recover, and we will try to track the summoner when they reveal themselves.”

  He was right. I needed to find the symbol engraved on the caster and puzzle it out. Whatever it was, it would tell me something about the mage who enchanted it and how it could be used as an improvised tracking device.

  First things first, though. A quick cold shower, and then coffee. I poured the cold coffee from this morning’s pot back through the machine, added more coffee in a new filter, and set it to brew jet fuel. Binah rediscovered her courage and came out to join me, purring as she threw herself at my shins.

  “The feline enigma,” I mused aloud. She had broken the trance Yuri had worked over me and, maybe, saved my life. Was she a familiar? Did she have kitty Stockholm syndrome? “What defines a familiar, Kutkha? Versus a normal but precocious pet?”

  “As I told you, a soul has many branches, many Ruachim,” my Neshamah replied. “Not all of the branches are human.”

  Binah made several complex murring and mewing sounds, the language of the Siamese, as she drew a figure eight of shed fur around my damp legs.

  With coffee in hand, I gathered a few of my favorite old grimoires at my desk. I knew I’d seen the elements of the sigil design somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where. This told me it was probably in one of the ones I’d read and paid attention to, but not studied in depth.

  “So, let’s say there were two of these enchanted lead casters. The other eye was ripped open and the caster removed,” I said, sitting at my desk. “The question is, why the demonic seal AND the casters? Why not just the seal? And what do these things represent?”

  Some mythologies had the dead sent along with false eyes made out of metals and precious stones, the better to guide them to their destination in the higher spheres. Greek and Egyptian funerary rites, to name two, but there was nothing holy about Frank Nacari's death. I thought back: the other empty eye socket had foamy spittle in it. Carmine’s spirit hounds hadn’t slavered, but what about the dog in the alley? Dogs were Carmine’s creatures. If he used dogs as spies on the streets, he could have had one take the other caster: that would explain the gnawed face, and the car bomb. But why raid his own murder scene?

  “All right. Assuming Carmine’s torture didn’t induce latent schizophrenia and I am not actually talking to a traumatic hallucination, I’m going to suggest, Kutkha, that you know a lot more about the operation of magic than I do,” I said aloud. “So start from the beginning. I need to understand why Carmine is so good at what he does, and why I am not. I need to learn how to get better. Preferably without selling my soul for the bargain.”

  “Fortunately for you, I don’t come with a price tag.” Kutkha sniffed, as much as a disembodied voice could sniff. “There are many different kinds of Phitometrists, or mages, as you call them. Phitometry is just the ability to manipulate Phi under the pressure of your will. So the better question would be ‘what kind of mage do I want to be?’”

  Wonderful. My conscious soul really was some kind of wiseass. “What kinds of mages are there? I was under the impression that you follow the rules, draw your figures correctly and speak the right words, and do whatever you please.”

  “You will always be limited by the rules that you follow,” Kutkha said. “The correct figures have power of their own, but even the most dynamic is still a static object. The only things you find in ceremony are comfort and pride in how clever and learned you are relative to the common man, my Ruach.”

  I grimaced and pulled across the first book, De Nigromancia, a late Middle Ages tome dedicated to safety during demonic summoning. “So, tell me about these types of magi and how they work their magic, and I will summarily ignore five thousand years of Occult history to listen to a voice inside my head.”

  “An excellent idea,” Kutkha said cheerfully. In my mind, I saw him: the ghostly raven from the warehouse dungeon, perched on an arced span of gold in a darkened chamber. “There are mages like Carmine, obviously. Inotropists.”

  “Inotropy. That’s a medical term,” I said, turning to the table of contents. It was Middle English, and not terribly well organized. “An inotrope is an agent that alters the force or energy of muscular contractions.”

  “It is. And the Inotropist is an agent that increases or decreases the pressure of Phi in a local area, pumping it like a heart. They create fire, force and friction, manipulate gravity, and suchlike,” Kutkha said. “It causes inflammation and tends to harden the color of Phi in a given area to red.”

  “Phi has different colors?” I asked, absently.

  “All the colors of the prism, and then some. The basic spectrum is from violet to blue, then silver, white, glass. Red is a coarse energy, and common in this world. Violet is dirty Phi, used in Pravamancy. Demonic summoning, disease creation, corruption, leeching. Little better than pus from the skin of GOD, and just as likely to make me sick, if one was to imbibe too much of it.”

  I tapped my desktop with the end of a pen, bouncing it off the edge of the leather trim, while my eyes skimmed rows of neatly drawn circles, symbols, and spells in De Nigromancia. “I’ll take that as a hint. And the others?”

  “Orange is the color of deception and horror, the color of Illusionists and tricksters,” Kutkha said. “Yellow is the color of the mind and of time, which are both forms of mortal perception, and the mages who specialize in such things are called Mentalists and Temporalists.”

  “Like Lev,” I said.

  “Like Lev. Green is the color of life, and mages who use this subtle form of energy are called Biomancers. This includes the raising of the dead, the revival and reanimation of corpses,” Kutkha continued. “Which I might add is a practice that is neither good nor evil in the greater scheme of things, though HuMans as a rule fixate on it as the height of diablerie.”

  “I see. And anything else?” The book was not looking particularly promising. De Nigromancia was a good tome for information on summoning, more advanced than the Goetia, but the symbol was not to be found. I set it aside.

  “Blue is the color of Hierognosis, and the Hierognostic specialist is a Hierophant. Precognition, theurgy, the creation of wards and the rending of them. They guard the mystery. They create understanding.”

  “I see.” That sounded a little like my own magic, but for some reason, the thought made me uncomfortable. Wardbreaking, déjà vu, dreams so real I woke with the sensation of sand in my nose. Maybe it was the ease with which Kutkha categorized it. “And how does one… pick up a specialization? Say I wanted to change mine and take up another.”

  “Each works according to their nature. The substance of a thing will dissolve into its own roots. HuMans are unique, in that they may have a dual or tripartite nature, and they may have talent in more than one area of magic. But each requires time to master.”

  “Huh.” I picked up the next book on the stack, a thin volume with a pomegranate tree in bloom on the front cover. I opened it and flipped the pages until I finished the text, then skipped forward to flip through the pictures. “That seems simpler than I expected.”

  “Such matters are narrow, but very deep. Reality is often like that. Mortals feel the need to complicate things,” Kutkha replied. “Now look down.”

  “What?” I glanced at the page I’d just opened. It was a column of planetary tables, the familiar symbols of each of the seven classical planets used in Astrology. They were set against horizontal rows of squiggly sigils, twelve in each row. They seemed to move and shift on the page. For a moment, I wasn’t cer
tain what it was Kutkha was trying to point out to me—and then I saw it. The entire row of symbolic components for the Sun. They had been worked into one design.

  “Wait… no. These are angelic binding symbols. These have nothing to do with demons.” But there it was. Mesh them together, and you had the bell-and-spiral shape of the sigil I had found in Frank Nacari’s eye. “The mage that murdered Nacari… he wasn’t summoning Aamon at all.”

  “A red herring, as you might say,” Kutkha added.

  “So whoever did this made it look like an over-the-top Goetic rite to mislead… so they clearly expected to be dealing with another mage.” Me? Were they expecting to have to contend with me? I wasn’t nearly powerful enough to be worth that amount of effort. And if they’d been trying to summon some kind of angelic being, what about the smell? The unhallow, rotten strangeness? I mashed a hand through my hair and frowned down at the page. None of this made any sense.

  I glanced at the clock and froze. Ten a.m.? When had it become ten a.m.? And it was Monday. Vassily wasn’t home, and... he was supposed to meeting his parole officer at one.

  “Goddammit, Vassily.” I hesitated before marking the page and picking up the phone. Why did this sort of thing always fall on me to remember? He was an adult man, and I was almost exhausted beyond caring. Almost. Not enough to stop me from jamming the handset between shoulder and ear and dialing Mariya’s number.

  It rang several times before she picked up. “Maritka, it’s Alexi. I was wondering if Vassily had left already? He has an appointment to go to, and hasn’t arrived home yet.”

  “What?” Mariya sounded harried, like she had just rushed to speak to me. “Vassily isn't here, Alexi."