Dad’s opinion about any project: Make your work clean and accurate, like a good draftsman. Sean wasn’t sure you had to be so fussy about neat circles and straight lines when you were doing magic; from all his reading, he was getting the impression that the thought behind the symbols mattered more than their execution. Still, he had to admit Dad’s pentagram looked great. Check off the magical circle as doable.
For the next couple of weeks, Sean studied the more subtle parts of the ritual. His pentagram had to be “invoking” to call in energies. If you were drawing it in the air, you’d point your arm straight forward and sweep it from forehead to left foot. Left foot to right shoulder. Right shoulder to left shoulder. Left shoulder to right foot. Back to forehead. Pentagrams could also be either upright or inverted. Upright ones stood on the “legs” of the star, the two lower angles. Inverted ones balanced on the “head” of the star, the single apex angle. Some sources said the inverted pentagram was a symbol of black magic. Infinity Unimaginable said no, it was just a question of whether you wanted to attract or dispel energies. Since the Reverend’s ritual had the summoner standing between the “leg” angles (called Earth and Fire), facing the “head” angle (called Spirit), Sean decided his pentagram must be an upright one. It all depended on your point of view, though. To Mrs. Ferreira next door, the pentagram had to look inverted. Pretty much every day he practiced, Sean heard her muttering in her yard about hex signs or glimpsed her peering through curtains and wagging her fingers to ward off curses.
Unlike Mrs. Ferreira, Zoe and Ethan from across the street thought the ritual was awesome. They especially liked it when Sean practiced throwing the Powders of Zeph and Aghar (salt and pepper for now) into the old tailgater grill he used for a brazier. But Zoe and Ethan were just little kids, and their approval couldn’t outweigh the wrath of Mrs. Ferreira. Toward the end of the second week, when Sean had been shouting incantations for an hour, Mrs. Ferreira stalked up the driveway to Dad’s studio. A few minutes later, she stalked back home, silent as death, with Dad on her heels. “I think you’ve done enough summoning,” he told Sean.
“For today?”
“For permanently. Look at it this way: You can write in your project paper how a city neighborhood is no place for a wizard.”
Sean would have flipped Mrs. Ferreira’s bungalow the bird, except she was sure to be spying. Besides, he wasn’t that pissed. He’d practiced enough. Now he needed to get over the last hurdle in the ritual. In the center of the pentagram, he had to draw something called the Elder Sign. Okay, but which Elder Sign?
There were two: the Star, which looked like a pentagram with a single flaming eye in the middle; and the Branch, which looked like a spruce twig sprouting five smaller twigs. The problem was, the Reverend hadn’t specified which one to use.
Sean nagged Eddy into helping him research the Sign. She’d come to only one of his practice sessions, and that had been to bust on him for not driving to the beach the day before with her and Gina and Keiko and Marc. Oh, and for pulling a no-show on Saturday, when Sean was supposed to meet her and Phil at the movies. Sean had honestly forgotten about the movies, and he’d gone to the beach every other time the crowd went. Well, except for those two times the week before, but come on—for once he was throwing himself into a project, and all she could do was try to lure him away? He countered with that accusation, blah blah blah, guilt guilt guilt, until she gave in, not because he’d made her feel guilty (like that would ever happen) but just to shut him up. She scoured the Internet, then voted for the Branch Elder Sign, which most sources said governed limiting or confining magic. She reasoned that the Sign was only there to keep the familiar from escaping before Sean bound it as his servant. That kind of made sense, but on the other hand, the Star Elder Sign governed creation and calling magic. Summoning a Servitor was both of those, right? Besides, the Star looked way sharper than the Branch.
Behind Eddy’s back, Sean wrote to the Reverend and asked about the Sign. Three times.
The Reverend didn’t answer. And he didn’t answer. And he didn’t answer.
“He’s probably been hauled off to the nuthouse,” Eddy said, after Sean confessed to the e-mails. She grabbed Infinity from him. “Besides, it doesn’t matter which Elder Sign you use. Listen: ‘The human mind requires symbolism to convert magical intention into magical action. Hence we associate abstract concepts of energy with the elements of Air, Fire, Water, Earth and Spirit. Then we create symbols like the pentagram to further concretize the abstract concepts.’”
“What’s that have to do with anything?”
“You said it just the other day, when you were griping about your dad having to draw the pentagram perfectly. Symbols are props. So if you think you’ve got the right symbol, you’ve got the right symbol.”
Yeah, Sean had read that part of the book a million times, and a million times he hadn’t 100 percent gotten it. “Like I can use a smiley face for the ritual, as long as I believe in it? I don’t think so.”
Eddy slapped the book closed “You know what? You’re obsessed.”
“Bullshit.”
“For one thing, you weren’t going to contact the Rev again.”
“Big deal. He’s ignoring my e-mails.”
“Talk about your dad having to do stuff just right. You keep practicing and practicing this ritual like it was actually possible to screw it up. Like your Ethernet thingie could get stuck halfway through the interdimensional whozit, ew, gross. It’s a joke, okay?”
Funny. This was the first time he’d gotten excited about something without Eddy coming along for the ride and ending up at the steering wheel. He’d freak if he thought about it too much. The aroma of Rachel’s latest batch of pies wafted into Eddy’s office, still tart and sweet strawberry, like summer breathing. “It’s not a joke,” he said. “I’m doing my project on it.”
“You think Mr. Boyd’s going to know it if you pick the wrong Elder Sign?”
“He’ll know it if I’m just screwing around. What about your Panda quilt?”
“Pa Ndau!”
“It’s supposed to tell a Cambodian folk story, right? What if you took a story and goofed on it? It’d be like dissing Cambodians.”
“You’re worried about dissing wizards?”
“Not wizards. I don’t know. Magic. Mythology and stuff.”
Eddy rubbed her chin with Infinity’s spine. “All right,” she finally said. “I guess you have to find out as much as you can.” She rubbed some more. “You still going to Arkham tomorrow?”
“Yeah, Dad and Joe-Jack are taking out the Arkwright House windows. I’m going to look for that Geldman’s Pharmacy afterwards, where the powders are supposed to be?”
“Yeah, the powders, great. Well, Helen Arkwright works at the MU Library. I bet she knows the Marvell guy who wrote this.” Eddy chucked him Infinity Unimaginable. “Maybe she knows about the Elder Sign. Couldn’t hurt to ask.”
This was why you wanted Eddy on your side—she always came up with a plan. It could hurt to ask Ms. Arkwright about the sign, if she laughed at Sean. But he’d risk it. Otherwise he might as well make a Panda quilt for his project, and no way he was doing that.
Jeremy Wyndham was scheduled to return on July 21, rain or shine. He was getting the shine. By mid-morning, the garden thermometer had already swung its scrolled pointer past eighty-five; even in the usually airy library, Helen felt stifled. She stood in the center of the long room and looked up at The Founding of Arkham. It was her last chance to look before Jeremy took away the stained-glass windows for who knew how long. A couple months, he’d said, but renovating the rest of Uncle John’s house had taught Helen that in contractor jargon a couple rarely meant two, more like five or six.
The center window showed five Puritans on a hilltop. Three soldiers in helmets and breastplates brandished muskets. A minister in austere black knelt and bowed his forehead to tented fingertips. Behind him, a more elaborately dressed gentleman seemed to scour the sky for the trumpetin
g angels the occasion merited. The angels hadn’t shown up. In the background, with the softness of distance suggested by opalescent glass, was a curve of cliffs and spread of water: the mouth of the Miskatonic, as accurate as a photograph. Three ships floated in the river, sails furled.
The soldiers weren’t as rapt as the minister and gentleman—they stared toward the right-hand window, in which Indians climbed the seaward slope. The Indians carried bows, but the leader had both hands raised, empty. Another Indian shouldered a slain buck, another strings of fish. They looked more interested in a barbecue than a massacre.
The left-hand window showed the landward slope, which was heavily wooded. At the forest’s edge, a crow took wing against the pearly sky, cast off by a figure almost hidden in the trees. Helen stepped closer and studied him for the thousandth time. The figure didn’t fit. Even as a little girl she’d known it. He was an allegorical figure in an otherwise historically accurate design, a man dressed in Pharaoh-chic, with skin the color of onyx and eyes all-over amber, no irises, no pupils. Uncle John had called him the Black Man, the Devil, a monster lurking in the wilderness, always ready to torment the righteous and to harvest unwary souls. The Black Man used to give her nightmares.
He still did. Well, not the Black Man per se, but the whole complex of gorgeous and precarious glass. Every morning of the three months since she’d inherited the house, she’d expected to come into the library and find the windows strewn across the floor. They were sagging, and some of the glass had cracked, and there was an ominous powdery corrosion on the lead cames. In many places, light oozed between lead and glass. Around the minister’s head and the Black Man’s upraised hand, it created accidental haloes that looked like clever design. But light leaks meant the putty had deteriorated, and where light could leak so could water, and water was the great destroyer. Another lesson she’d learned from ruined ceilings and rotted floor joists.
The windows had made it through one last night, which was all they had to do. Their savior was coming today to remove and restore, to reinforce and reinstall, all to the tune of thirty thousand dollars. Helen winced. The money would come out of her inheritance, and thirty thousand out of a million was, if not a drop from the bucket, no more than a ladleful. Even so, it was more than a year’s earnings for many people, including her, this time last year.
She gave the tender flesh below her elbow crease a little chastising pinch. The library had been Uncle John’s sanctum. It had been her own sanctuary even before she could read the books she hauled off its shelves. Of course she had to restore the windows: They were the library’s heart. Wrong. They were its inward-looking eyes, and that was a perfect metaphor for her uncle’s life, wasn’t it? If not for her own.
The sun dashed gouts of color onto her sandaled feet. Her left looked jaundiced yellow, her right a necrotic green. She backed away from the chromatic contagion, toward the library doors. The Black Man watched her go, smiling his perpetual slight smile, evidently unworried about his approaching dissolution. No, he fully expected to be resurrected shinier than ever.
Helen bumped the doors open with her pack and traversed the hall as quickly as she could without knocking over stepladders or slipping on drop cloths. Plaster dust rose around her. She held her breath until she got outside. The house faced north, not good feng shui; but at this time of day, that meant the front steps were in the shade. She settled herself on cool stone, knees to chin, like the Helen who’d spent so much time here after school in the fall and winter and spring, after day camp in the summer, waiting for her father to leave work at the bank and come drive her home to their sensible ranch in the suburbs.
Uncle John’s house had been a sort of remedy to the ranch, an echoing castle that went on forever when measured by her little-girl steps. In the castle library, John Arkwright had lived like a sorcerer surrounded by his grimoires, and scattered through the warren of rooms had been curios from all the impractical places he’d visited. Helen remembered lying in front of the library fireplace, devouring a folio of medieval woodcuts while snowy twilight drew in outside. She remembered climbing to the attic and wiping a spy-hole in a cobwebbed window so she could look out over the rooftops and the blurry lights of the city, all the way down to a wall of mist that made the harbor the edge of the world. The Arkwright House! When her parents and John had debated to whom he’d leave the place, nobody had voted to make it a bequest to the university. Though her father had always considered the house a white elephant, it had been in the family for too long to let it go. Besides, if John also left enough money to restore it, and Helen really loved it enough to take on the responsibility …
Helen had always loved the Arkwright House. God help her, she still loved it, but she’d assumed she wouldn’t become the Arkwright in residence until she was, oh, a comfortable forty-something with a comfortable forty-something husband and two or three kids old enough to know that lead-paint chips weren’t a good snack choice. Instead she was twenty-five, with a master’s degree in her pocket, but her archives and record management Ph.D. abandoned for the moment. There’d be no way she could turn down the job she’d be starting in less than two months.
So, yes, to be honest with herself, it wasn’t merely the geriatric ailments of the house that were making her cat nervous. John had carried through on another vision of her future they’d concocted when she was a kid: that Helen would join the dynasty of Arkwright archivists at MU. He’d retired shortly before his death, leaving Theophilus Marvell head of the Arcane Studies Archives; and, on John’s strong recommendation, Marvell had recruited Helen as his assistant. Her parents had recently moved, to North Carolina; she’d been looking for opportunities closer to them, but even they had said the MU position was a plum she shouldn’t refuse. She’d accepted, planning to stay with John until she found an apartment, during which time she’d pick his brain on the Archives. She had come and stayed, but John hadn’t had the time or energy to pass on the torch of his scholarship. Typical of him, hater of fusses and long good-byes, he hadn’t told the family about his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer until three weeks before it killed him.
She swallowed pain that still tasted raw and shrugged off her backpack. It bulged with books about the Cthulhu Mythos, handpicked by Marvell as her formal introduction to the treasures she’d help him guard, as Uncle John had guarded them, and great-grandfather Henry before him, right, that Arkwright dynasty. She had some basic knowledge of the Mythos from college courses in comparative mythology, but she’d worried Marvell would expect her to know a lot more, given it had been John’s obsession. She’d worried for nothing. Their first meeting that spring, Marvell had said he knew John had never shared with her the details of his work. Mythos scholars were notoriously secretive and even—Marvell would admit it—a bit paranoid about the public learning the cosmic implications of their studies. He and Helen had shared a laugh, but now that she was deep into her Mythos books she couldn’t pretend they were cozy reading. Fascinating, compelling, yes. Cozy, no, not at night in the vast old house, not at noon in her MU office, not now, in the open air of morning.
Helen looked down College Street. There was little traffic; July plus Friday meant a weekend exodus of summering staff and students. Through the gates opposite the house, she could see only one boy perched on the marble lip of the Pickman fountain. Beyond the fountain, a parrot-gaudy cluster of tourists crossed the University Green.
A van turned the corner: Clegg’s Landscaping. Helen glanced at her watch. Nine twenty. Jeremy wasn’t due until ten, but she had Marvell’s latest letter to fill the time.
It was in the outer pocket of her backpack. Helen twitched the letter from its envelope and smoothed it on her knees, enjoying the roughness of the honey-colored sheets. They were lokta paper, handmade in Nepal. Buddhist texts had survived two thousand years on paper like this—talk about something an archivist could love. Marvell used it for all his correspondence.
Dear Helen:
Write and tell me how hard you’re
working. I’m having too good a time here in London and need some guilt to keep me sober. Days in the bookshops, nights at the theater. Going to Scotland on the first of August—the enclosed card has my number there. But before I get lost in the mountains, I want to bring up something we’ll need to discuss when I get back to Arkham. Lately I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided to break the ice in writing.
When she’d first read this paragraph, Helen had felt suddenly cold, catastrophizing: Now they’d worked together for a couple months, Marvell was sorry he’d hired her. She couldn’t blame him. He was fairly new to the Chief Archivist position himself, and he’d still be teaching—he didn’t need an assistant barely out of graduate school. But firing her wasn’t the ice he’d broken. Another van turned the corner, a florist this time. Helen blotted her upper lip with the back of her wrist. Then, fanning herself with the first sheet of the letter, she focused on the second.
When your uncle John became ill, he asked me to safeguard some personal papers that you’d otherwise have found among his effects at the Arkwright House. At this point, John and I had agreed you’d be a good candidate for my assistant. Your uncle was eager for you to follow him at MU, but he was also concerned that you be properly prepared.
He turned to me not only because we were friends, but because I’m head of Arcane Studies. Your Latin and Greek would be powerful tools for tackling the Mythos, but still, you’d need help. I was to oversee your education in his place. I was also to decide when you should read John’s papers.
Most are letters and journals written by himself and by Henry Arkwright, recounting experiences known only to a select circle of their associates. You need to know about these experiences and associates. But the papers are disturbing in a way that you’ll understand now that you’ve started studying the Mythos.
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