He gave Sean the blood-spawn incantation. Why?
He thought that Servitor would provide a more rigorous test for Sean. The choice itself—blood-spawn or aether-newt—was a test. That Sean had the pluck to try the blood-spawn was impressive. In a way, I’m pleased with him.
Then why won’t you help him? He’s in danger. So are the people around him.
I know there’s danger, and I feel it as acutely as you do. When I first heard of the blood-spawn, I was going to give Sean the dismissing ritual at once.
During the second chat you had with him?
Yes.
Your master interfered again?
Yes. Pause. The Black Man said I must hold to my original plan and let Sean manage the Servitor he’d summoned. Pause. Don’t think that you lash me, Helen, when you call Nyarlathotep my master. To earn allegiance to him is a matter of pride, not shame. Pause. Besides, the original plan has worked this far: Sean came to you. You have consulted the Necronomicon, perhaps my old journals as well?
Damn, and she’d been about to needle Orne about how his secrets had fallen into enemy hands. He’d anticipated that circumstance. Intended it, probably. We’ve read them, she typed. Leave it at that.
You don’t disappoint me, Helen. So, the one misstep is that Sean substantiated the Servitor with his own blood, then failed to bind it properly. But it still can’t harm him or take his blood against his will.
Did she have some news for Orne after all? But Sean’s given it his blood to save others. He’ll give it his blood again if he has to.
Geldman, who’d been reading over her shoulder, let out a gust of the guttural-sibilant language Boaz had used earlier. It sounded like a curse. As her last words faded, the typewriter stayed still. Helen turned to Geldman. “What is it?”
He was frowning, clearly troubled. As if in sympathy, Boaz flew in tight circles around the room. Cybele sat and rocked on the stairs, knees cradled in the thin circle of her arms.
“What?” Helen demanded. “Is it very bad, him letting the Servitor take his blood?” Then she remembered. It wasn’t what the Servitor had taken but what it had given. “I read a little about inoculation and soul-threads. Is that it?”
“You didn’t tell me Sean had been inoculated, Ms. Arkwright.”
“I thought you and Orne must know. You said Orne’s been watching Sean.”
“Orne didn’t tell me this. I can’t believe he knew of it, or he’d have taken some action.”
“He’s known everything else.” But had he? “Wait,” Helen said. “You could be right. If Orne was able to watch Sean all the time, wouldn’t he have watched him do the ritual?”
“I would imagine so.”
“But he couldn’t have watched the ritual, because when Sean told him he’d summoned the blood-spawn instead of the aether-newt Orne was surprised.”
Geldman’s frown deepened. “Someone must be keeping Orne’s spies away from Sean. That would require placing a powerful ward around the boy and his immediate surroundings, which is a task beyond most magicians.”
“But not beyond the Master of Magic?”
“No. Not beyond him.”
The typewriter rattled back to life. Helen swiveled to it. How did the Servitor take Sean’s blood? Orne had typed.
It bit his wrist and drank.
Then he’s been inoculated. Tell me how it happened.
Fingers shaking, typos multiplying, Helen banged out the story. Geldman drew closer to read. “Sean has great courage,” he said. “To step between the Servitor and his father.”
Clatter. She read Orne’s response: Sean hasn’t been trained to endure a psychic bond with the Servitor. There will be complications. Has he been ill?
He was yesterday. Last night the fever broke, he seemed better.
He’s passed the first danger. The greater danger remains, how his growing bond with the Servitor will affect him mentally. Has he dreamed that he was in its mind?
Last night.
Awake, has he a sense of connection to it?
He didn’t this morning.
That connection will come and progress until it fills his waking mind. Then psychological trauma may occur.
Oh God. What sort of trauma?
Psychiatrists would call it psychosis, schizophrenia. A distortion of the senses, thoughts, and emotions. A warping of the self from what’s native to what’s alien. If the mind is overwhelmed by these changes, catatonia may result.
Psychosis, schizophrenia, catatonia. Would complications persist after dismissal?
If the trauma was severe enough. And there’s a third stage, the most dangerous, when the Servitor begins to see through the summoner, as the summoner has been seeing through it. Even the most powerful wizard avoids such intimacy, lest the daemon possess him.
And if possession occurred?
Normally the daemon would destroy the summoner. Alhazred himself was torn to shreds by possessing daemons. Once the summoner dies, the daemon returns to its own plane. Self-dismissed, you might say.
“You bastard,” Helen said. She typed: That’s not a solution I’ll accept.
Nor I, believe me. I told Sean to seek the dismissal in a very dark place in the Necronomicon. What do you make of the riddle?
The dismissal’s not in the text of the book, it’s in Enoch Bishop’s blotted-out marginalia. The blotting ink’s magical. You can see through it with the right counter magic. Some kind of solvent, like your wife used?
Patience lied to me about the solvent. It’s another magic that defeats the ink. You needn’t try the Voorish Sign or any other simple measure. And you needn’t look further in my journals. They contain no magic. I wasn’t a wizard when I wrote them.
Damn it, they didn’t have time for sparring. If we dismiss the Servitor soon, will Sean recover?
The sooner you dismiss it, the better the prognosis.
How long do we have?
Since he’s learned no defenses, as little as a few hours. It depends on his strength of will.
Helen was suddenly tired to dropping. What was real in this mess she’d stumbled into? Why was she the one who had to save Sean, without even Marvell to consult? Who’d given her the assignment? Not Fate or Chance. Not God, unless you counted Nyarlathotep. Redemption Orne was the one who’d set her up for the job, and what did he want from her, even if she was paramagical?
Something touched her forearm. It wasn’t Geldman’s hand: too slim and soft. Helen lifted her tons-heavy head. Cybele. The girl had come down the stairs to her side.
Helen didn’t push the small hand from her. It was a cool point of sanity. Sanity? Yes, looking into Cybele’s eyes, Helen was sure of the word. Sanity, sanitas. Health, cleanliness. She had never seen anything as clean as those flax-flower eyes.
Cybele lifted her hand. She pressed her palm to Helen’s forehead: Coolness bloomed from it, penetrating skin and bone and brain, but gently, like balm. Time dissolved, or at least Helen’s sense of it. A second or an hour could have passed before Geldman drew Cybele away. As the girl moved, Helen breathed the air that had passed over her, and it held the scent of rain on flowering grass.
Geldman’s tea had calmed her. This cool blooming was different. It left her no longer afraid of her fear or angry at her anger. The emotions weren’t blunted, though. In fact, they were sharper, but sharp like tools, or weapons.
She put her fingers back on the typewriter keys. We’ve worked out your riddle, Reverend. Tell me how to see through Bishop’s ink.
Orne responded at once: If Sean hadn’t been inoculated, I might have let you search further. Now his danger’s too great for delay. Ask Mr. Geldman for Bishop’s #5. It’s very dear, but he may charge it to my account.
Is it a drug?
It’s a vision-enhancing potion. Its effects are not altogether pleasant. But if you come through, you’ll have proven yourself as a paramagician.
To hell with that. But Helen typed: What do I do?
You must access the true Necr
onomicon, not your digital copy. When you’ve got the book ready, drink the potion.
And I’ll be able to see the dismissal?
Let my word be a lamp unto thy feet, and a light unto thy path. Don’t delay, Helen.
The typewriter platen whirled the cylinder of paper through the machine, leaving it blank. Helen turned to Geldman and Cybele. “I guess that’s the end of the conversation?”
“Yes, Ms. Arkwright,” Geldman said. “I’ll go prepare Bishop’s Number Five for you.”
After sending Cybele back upstairs, he left the parlor. Helen returned to her armchair and ate the tiny scones. Chatting with wizards was hungry work, and besides, it probably wasn’t a good idea to take potions on an empty stomach.
Geldman called her out into the pharmacy, which had gone whole and bright again, at least for them. Beside the cash register were two bottles with waxed corks and hand-lettered labels. Bishop’s #5 was tiny, like a single-injection vial, brown glass, pentagonal. “A few minutes after you’ve drunk the Seeing Draught, your vision will begin to change,” Geldman said. “You’ll see more things than what’s under Bishop’s ink. Don’t be alarmed. What didn’t harm you when invisible won’t harm you when it’s no longer so.”
Helen didn’t like the sound of that, but she tucked Bishop’s #5 into her shirt pocket.
Geldman continued. “The gross effects will wear off in an hour. You’ll have a headache and light sensitivity afterwards; that’s expected. But tell Mr. Wyndham that if your eyes bleed or you experience blindness he must bring you back here at once. No physicians or emergency rooms. They won’t know how to treat you.”
Better and better. She nodded.
Geldman handed her the other bottle, cobalt glass, flat and long necked. “This is a gift, Ms. Arkwright. It’s the best assistance I can give Sean.”
She read the label: “Patience Orne’s #11. For the strengthening of the will.” She looked up at Geldman.
“The Reverend’s wife, yes,” Geldman said.
“I should trust something of hers?”
“I dispense many of her compounds. This one will help Sean withstand possession. Give it by the teaspoonful, as often as needed.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Geldman.” Helen slipped the cobalt bottle into a candy-striped bag he gave her. She pushed open the counter door but hesitated to step through. Whatever other new worlds waited for her, she doubted they’d be as cozy as the one that Geldman ruled.
He handed her an odd umbrella, yellow with black skulls and crossbones. Oh, right, Sean’s. “Thank you,” she said again.
Geldman took her elbow and led her to the street door. “You’d better go. Time moves fast outside, and Sean’s caught in it.”
Taking a deep breath, Helen stepped out of the pharmacy. She left the shelter of the awning and unfurled Sean’s umbrella. Inside, Geldman walked away over shining tiles. In a second-floor window, Cybele stood stroking the arched back of a cat as sooty dark as she was pale.
Jeremy’s shout spun Helen around. He pelted toward her from Tumblebee’s, windbreaker half-off, coffee sloshing from the cup he clutched. “What happened?” he said. “Did he kick you out?”
“No, why?”
“He couldn’t have said much.”
She asked the question of herself, as well as of Jeremy: “How long was I in there?”
“Not even fifteen minutes. I came like you said, five minutes after you. I saw you with Geldman in the pharmacy. Then the place … died. Like now.”
She looked. In the few moments her attention had been broken, the pharmacy had turned deserted, decayed, and in the second-floor window the curtains hung in dirty shreds over the yellowed skull of a cat.
Only Cybele remained, one white palm pressed to the glass. Then, like mist, she shimmered, attenuated, and was gone.
20
It was a dirty trick, Dad and Helen sneaking off to Arkham while Sean was asleep—as poster boy for the whole Servitor mess, he should have gone with them. Besides, Gus and Eddy were the ones hunkered down over the Necronomicon and Orne’s journals. Sean couldn’t sit still long enough to help.
He prowled the house, rereading Helen’s translations. The new ones were about psychic links between summoners and familiars. He’d messed up big-time, letting the Servitor drink straight from the vein. Yeah, he should have cut his wrist, bled into a paper cup, and handed the Servitor that, avoiding inoculation. But with no knife or cup on hand and no idea of the risk he was taking, he’d done the best he could. Dad was alive. They were all alive.
All alive, but now Sean had a “soul-thread” linking him to the Servitor. Alhazred wrote: “A sorcerer sunders the soul-thread and holds both ends in his hands, to knot them together when he pleases.” What good was poetic crap like that? Sean needed plain instructions, Soul-Thread Maintenance for Dummies.
Gus looked up as Sean circled through the study. “I’m ready for lunch,” he said. “What about you, Eddy?”
“Sure, Professor Litinski. How about omelets?”
“Sounds good. Sean?”
He put a hand on his food-distended belly. “I’ve kind of been eating all morning.”
“No kidding,” Eddy said. “Every time you go through the kitchen, I hear the toaster pop.”
He’d had two bagels, three corn muffins, and a piece of Rachel’s blueberry pie. On top of breakfast. His stomach groaned with the overload, but he was still hungry. Nerves? Whatever, he’d better lay off before he hurled.
“You guys go,” he said. “I’ll read where you left off, Eddy.”
“Top of the screen. I was just getting to a good part.”
Sean sat in front of her laptop. Orne’s handwriting was funky, with those Ss that looked like Fs, but he’d gotten used to it yesterday. He started with an entry dated “29th October 1690.”
On Saturday last, Peter Kokokoho and I walked in Cold Spring Glen, where there is ever a rushing air, and so the Nipmucks have named their village Noden, “it is windy” in their tongue.
Peter asked if I could hear voices in the air. I told him I heard what might be voices, but I could not make out what they said. He said the voices speak in the language of the old ones, who were gods before my God was born, and principal among these gods is Hobbamock, though that is not the name he gives himself, which Peter said is Nyarlatotepp. This name I have seen in Mr. B.’s book. I suppose he taught it to poor Peter. It is a shame Mr. B. confounds the Nipmucks with his dubious learning. Patience maintains that he does no harm, but he is her father, and she cannot speak ill of him.
Nyarlatotepp is Hobbamock, Peter said, and Hobbamock is the Black Man of the woods, whom we call the Devil. Men may speak to the Black Man in the Glen or on the hilltops, for the Black Man walks in these places at certain times. But Peter will not speak to him, or so he assures me, and, indeed, I hope he would not relapse so.
Oh sure, Peter knew all about the Black Man, but he’d never talked to him. Orne was doing some wishful thinking there, like Dad trying to believe in the hoax theory long after it had stopped making sense. Wishful thinking was a kind of hope. It was a bitch when you lost it. Maybe that was why Orne had given up on religion and become a wizard. A minister could preach his head off, but his people would still go out and sin. He could pray himself blue, but bad things would still happen. At least when you knew the right spells, your magic worked. You got results.
Sean pushed back from the table. The dismissing ritual was under the marginal blots in the Necronomicon, so unless Geldman told Helen how to read through them they were screwed. It was a waste of time to keep reading, and so it was crazy for Eddy to be laughing in the kitchen, like things could still go right. Jesus, from the smell of it, she was putting kielbasa in her omelet.
Nausea wasn’t even the word for the way Sean’s stomach turned. He made a stumbling dash to the second-floor bathroom, where the morning’s foodfest rocketed out of him.
Even as he heaved dry, he was hungry again. God, for what? Kielbasa omele
t? Sean flushed the toilet and got up to rinse his mouth. A wave of dizziness forced him to sit on the edge of the tub. Was he getting sick again? His forehead felt damp but cool. He’d sit for a couple minutes, then go down and read even though it was useless. Dad and Helen were going to Geldman’s, and Geldman wasn’t a bad guy. He’d help. Sean closed his eyes. Weird, what the Nipmucs called their village. Noden, it is windy.…
The deep water around the Servitor runs bright; it stares up through the brightness at the blazing black of day and the surface-paddler that’s blackest of all.
Black equaled white. Sean knew the paddler was a swan, though the Servitor couldn’t name it—
He jerked but not awake, because he hadn’t been asleep. Sean goggled at the actually white tiles on the floor and walls. Actually white, too, were the curtains at the window, and actually blue the wedge of sky he saw when the curtains fluttered apart.
He stood and looked into the mirror over the sink. His face was white (actually white, scared.) After a few seconds, he closed his eyes again.
The black paddler is right above. The Servitor can swim up and grab the webbed feet, drag the paddler under, and devour it, as it has devoured other paddlers since it found the abundance of this greater river. But its hunger is not for paddler flesh.
Sean opened his eyes. He must have been developing a waking connection to the Servitor all morning, and he’d been too stupid to realize it. He’d been starving because the Servitor was starving, and bagels and muffins were like swans, not the right food for their hunger.
For its hunger. He was Sean in the bathroom. He was not the thing in the river. Keep that straight and he’d be okay. The connection could even help. The Servitor was his camera and microphone, while he was the spy, following everything from a secure location.
He closed his eyes.
Other paddlers float by. These are not alive. They are vessels used by humans to traverse the water; humans dip in false feet to propel themselves along. There are long vessels with many feet. There are short vessels with two feet, like the one that approaches. A false foot dips in on one side. It rises, and a false foot dips in on the other side.
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