Spirits and Spells

by Bruce Coville

  “You fool!” hissed Jenny. She raised her hands, but Derek grabbed her wrist, swung her around, then pinned both hands behind her. He looked to the others for help as Jenny struggled against him.

  “Your spell, Derek!” shouted Denise. “Use your spell of binding!”

  “I don’t know how!”

  “Travis, help him,” said Matt.

  Travis stood unmoving, as if too stunned by the chain of events to do anything. Matt shoved him aside and grabbed the game book. He paused. The book seemed somehow larger than it had before. The pages were yellowed, the old-fashioned lettering hard to decipher.

  There was no time to worry about that. Jenny was fighting, and Derek was having a hard time holding her. Matt flipped through the pages.

  “Here it is!” he yelled. “‘By the power of my staff, I conjure you to cease all motion.’ Those are the words, Derek. Use them!”

  Derek repeated the spell. Nothing happened.

  “You have to be holding this, you fool,” said the creature, snatching the stave from the table with one of its tentacles. “Here, take it!”

  Derek had to take one hand off Jenny’s wrists to grab the stave. The instant he did, she tried to wrench herself away from him. But as his hand closed over the stave, he repeated the spell.

  Instantly Jenny went still, her face stolid and unmoving, her body rigid as death.

  Derek stepped away from her, his hand up, ready to reach out if she should move.

  She was like a statue.

  Travis shook his head as if he were coming out of a trance himself. Looking at Tansy, he said, “You have the power to compel truth. Let’s find out what’s going on here.”

  Tansy nodded. The others gathered about her in a tense knot. She stepped forward and stood face to face with Jenny.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “My name is Gwynhafra,” answered a voice that was not really Jenny’s. It was strange, mournful, distant. Hearing it, the others knew beyond all doubt that Jenny’s body was inhabited by someone else.

  Tansy hesitated. Fearing the answer, she asked, “Where is Jenny?”

  “In here, with me.”

  “May I talk to her?”

  “No! This is my body now, and will be until we make the final crossing. Then she can have it back.”

  “Is she all right?” asked Tansy.

  Gwynhafra didn’t answer.

  “I said, ‘Is she all right?’” repeated Tansy fiercely. Then she added, “I compel you to answer me.”

  “She is frightened,” said Gwynhafra reluctantly.

  Uncertain what to ask next, Tansy finally settled on, “Where are you from?”

  “Earth.”

  Acting on an impulse, she asked, “And where else?”

  Gwynhafra paused. “Quarmix,” she said, after a moment. Her voice was tinged with a note of loathing.

  “Ask her where Quarmix is,” said Denise.

  Tansy repeated the question.

  “Far away,” said Gwynhafra mournfully. “Very far away, yet very near. It is one of Earth’s twins. There are dozens of them, lying side by side, in dimension after dimension. Each is like all the others. Yet each is different, in little ways … or big ones. Quarmix is like Earth gone bad. All things there are bitter and twisted—including its people, such as they are.”

  “How did you get there?” asked Tansy.

  Gwynhafra hesitated a third time. Just as Tansy was about to insist on an answer, she began to speak. Eyes glittering feverishly, she poured out the strange story of Erik Karno.

  16

  COVEN KARNO

  “Erik Karno was a scholar,” said Jenny/Gwynhafra. “It was his nature, and he never tried to fight it. From as early as he could remember, he had preferred the pursuit of knowledge to all other activities. When he was very young and the other boys played in the street, laughing and yelling, Erik could be found crouched at the feet of the old men, listening to their stories, asking them questions. The elders of the village liked Erik. They were pleased by his intensity. Yet he frightened them with his quickness and his probing questions.”

  As Gwynhafra spoke, the players felt themselves caught up in the web of her storytelling, her words painting pictures in their minds of a dark time when learning was not easy to come by.

  And as they listened, they began to understand Erik Karno’s quest for forbidden knowledge.

  When he was old enough, Erik entered a monastery—one of the few places in Europe where learning was still given some honor.

  He chose this particular monastery for a specific reason. According to rumor, it had once been home to a collection of books that had been outlawed as too dangerous for the world at large. The books had been placed in the care of the monastery, and there were supposed to have been burned. But it had long been whispered that they had actually been preserved by a monk who, like Karno, could not stand to see any book destroyed.

  So Karno joined the order, where he spent many years crouched over a tall wooden desk, copying out manuscripts in beautiful flowing script, decorating the pages with his own strange designs and insignia. Often the abbot would reprimand him for his innovations. Yet Erik continued to make them, secure in the knowledge that the reprimands would never amount to more than a scolding, because no other monk worked with such speed and precision, or created such beautiful pages.

  The abbey was ancient, dating back to the first thrust of Christianity into Erik’s homeland. A place of cold comfort, it was built of stone on a rocky prominence. In winter a demonic wind howled about the walls and towers, and the slate floors were like ice.

  Many of the monks died young.

  But not Erik Karno. He thrived, because he was able to do what he loved most: dig into the past and learn things better left forgotten.

  His learning took two forms.

  The first was a slow learning of special beauty that came from copying manuscripts. Erik would dwell on the texts he copied, savoring every word, examining the connections between them, exalting in the intricacies of sentence and paragraph that unveiled themselves more fully every time he put them onto parchment. Crouched in his lonely cell he brooded over the ideas the manuscripts contained, finding depths of meaning most readers would never have guessed were hidden there.

  More secret, and thus even more thrilling, was what he discovered in the catacombs beneath the abbey on the night of his twenty-first birthday.

  He had spent the day huddled over his desk, copying an ancient text. When evening came and services were over, he found himself strangely restless. Against the rules, he left his cold stone room and padded down the hallway, past cell after cell, where murmuring monks knelt in self-abasement. He had no destination in mind; he simply knew that he could stay in his own cubicle no longer.

  His wandering led him to a stairwell that stretched downward into darkness. Backtracking, he took a torch from one of the pillars in a more traveled area. Then he returned to the stair.

  By the flickering light of the torch, he descended into the gloom.

  Outside a cold wind howled unmercifully.

  Above him a hundred monks settled down to sleep and dream.

  Before him a whole new world lay waiting.

  At the end of a long stone corridor, he came to another stairway. He followed it down, found another hall, and another stair, and then was enmeshed in the catacombs beneath the abbey. Far older than the abbey itself, the winding passages dated back to a time when pagan tribes had made blood sacrifices in homage to dark powers.

  For hours Erik Karno wandered the catacombs. It was well past midnight when he came upon the treasure, a store of wealth that was not beyond his wildest dreams, but was, indeed, an exact match for them. For he had found not gold or silver, but a room filled with books.

  His heart leaped at the sight. After finding a rack for his torch, he picked up a dusty, leather-bound volume. Fingers trembling, he turned its pages. His heart leaped with wonder. He snatched up another, and another, and f
elt himself break into a cold sweat as he knew for certain that he had found the abbey’s fabled collection of forbidden lore.

  Karno stayed in the chamber until evening of the next day, poring over the banished volumes. Here were answers to questions that had plagued him since the first night he had looked at a dark and starry sky and wondered at the mysteries behind it. Here were the ancients’ visions of the world and how it came to be. And here were formulas for power, and methods for calling up dark creatures.

  Although he was severely reprimanded for his absence the following day, Karno returned frequently to the secret trove of books until he had learned all he could. Then, carrying several of the most arcane volumes with him, he left the abbey and began to travel darkened Europe.

  Though his powers could have made him a wealthy man, he was not interested in money, and used his learning simply to earn a living. In truth, he wanted only two things: to increase his knowledge and to find companionship. So everywhere that Erik Karno went, he looked for others of his kind—others who burned to know the secrets of the universe, no matter how fearsome they might be.

  And he found them, in villages and cities, even in the hovels of peasants. It took more than a hundred years, but time had become irrelevant to Erik Karno; death was one of the first barriers his learning had breached. From all across Europe he gathered his disciples. In France he found Niana; in Spain, Diaz. Theoni he took from a Gypsy tribe; she was only three, but a fire in her eyes spoke of what she was, and what she might become.

  Extending his search to the borders of Asia, he found Wathek in a mountain village. And last of all, back in his own northern lands, he came upon Gwynhafra.

  Gwynhafra was young and beautiful, attributes about which she didn’t care, almost didn’t notice. Like the others, she was consumed by a passion for learning that had dominated everything else in her life. At least it had until Karno appeared with his band of followers. After that, she had two loves: learning, and Erik Karno.

  The band continued to roam Europe. They sought out reputed wise men (who often proved to be frauds) and followed up rumors about other caches of ancient books (which usually proved to be unfounded). They dug through ruins and explored catacombs. They burrowed into the bowels of ancient crumbling castles. And every now and then they found a treasure that made the search worthwhile. This might happen only once in a decade. For Karno and his followers, that was enough.

  To pay their way they exorcised ghosts and removed curses.

  Yet something strange, something unfortunate, was happening to the group. The more they tampered with power, the more satisfaction they found in using it. What had begun as a quest for knowledge gradually became a quest for strength and mastery, too.

  After a time they began to accept money for casting spells. They were amused to find that it paid much better than removing them. No matter where they went, there was someone who wished someone else evil.

  Finally Europe began to pale for them. Following the waves of exploration, breaking new paths themselves, they wound their way into the Orient and sought the ancient knowledge of the East. From India to Tibet they wandered, in search of lore and power.

  Gwynhafra paused.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” cried Derek. He grabbed her shoulders and furrowed his brow in concentration. For a moment his entire body trembled with the effort he was making.

  “There,” he said at last. “That will do it for a while. But she’s strong—much stronger than I am. I don’t know how long I can keep the spell of binding in place.”

  Tansy nodded. She was aware that the creature seemed to be disturbed. Its tentacles were rippling, its body swelling and contracting. She wondered what was bothering it.

  Other than that, all her attention was on Gwynhafra. She didn’t see the strange expression on Travis’s face.

  “What happened next?” she asked.

  “It was in the mountains of India that we met our doom,” said Gwynhafra, “though we were half a world away before we knew it.

  “In the Himalayas there lives a Council of the Wise, chosen to monitor the world and guard it from too much magic. In search of knowledge as always, we visited them, which was not wise, for we already had too much magic. The council saw what we had not yet realized ourselves: that while we had barely used that magic in all the centuries we had been gathering it, had scarcely begun to tap the power that was ours, we were growing restless.

  “The power, and the knowledge of that power, had begun to gnaw within us. The council knew, even before we did ourselves, that we would soon be making greater and greater magic—not for gain, but simply because we could.

  “And when our magic finally threatened to disturb the Great Balance, the Council of the Wise sent Mormekull to stop us. He was our nemesis, and our doom. He tracked us halfway across the world. And with the help of one who should have known better, he brought disaster upon us.”

  17

  ARTHUR GRIMSBY

  Gwynhafra’s voice was bitter.

  “What happened next was not Karno’s fault. The rest of us were responsible. We were too anxious to use our power. For Karno himself, the knowing was always enough.

  “We heard of the New World and decided to journey here. We did not expect to find great secrets. It was simply someplace new to learn about.

  “We left Asia, unaware that Mormekull was on our trail. Our passage was slow because we continued our search for knowledge and power as we traveled westward.

  “When we reached England, we stopped for several years to record our journeys. It was there that we first learned of Mormekull and his mission. But our circle was tight, and he could not touch us.

  “There, too, we took on a servant.

  “His name was Arthur Grimsby.”

  The creature began thrashing its tentacles, as if greatly agitated. Gwynhafra kept talking.

  “That was our greatest mistake, and the source of our downfall. Arthur Grimsby was not one of us. He shared our thirst for knowledge, but not our ability. That made him bitter.”

  “That’s not so!” cried the creature. “You’re lying!”

  It dropped its voice, and when it spoke again, the tone was indeed bitter. “Or else you never understood.”

  “Silence!” cried Gwynhafra. “This tale is mine to tell!”

  As the gamesters exchanged serious glances, the creature continued to pulsate with agitation. They felt reluctant to look it straight on. Though Gwynhafra was, for the moment, in their power, they sensed she did not want them to look at the creature, and this seemed to restrain their stares—and their questions.

  “We had been considering the matter of a servant for some years,” she continued. “But we had never found the right person. We needed someone who could stand the traveling, which was often rigorous; someone who could face the mysterious, often terrifying, things that went on around us. We needed someone who could remain silent about what he saw. Most of all, we needed someone we could trust with our very lives.

  “Arthur Grimsby seemed to be that man.

  “I found him in London, running a used-book store. He had a section of volumes on the occult, and though I did not expect to find anything of interest, I stopped to examine it, as was my habit. Sometimes such places surprise you.

  “I knew instantly that Grimsby was different. He had a certain … intensity. We talked as he showed me the books and it became clear that he had studied them carefully. He was filled with false knowledge, alas, for the books were mostly nonsense and fakery. But he was intent on learning.

  “I spoke to Karno about him, and Karno went to the shop to see for himself what this Arthur Grimsby was like. In time each of us visited him, and examined him in our own way.

  “We discussed the matter for months. Finally Karno went back to the shop to make Grimsby an offer.

  “The man was thrilled. He joined us immediately.

  “For a time all went well. Arthur removed many unnecessary burdens from our shoulders. When it was time
to leave for America, he made all the arrangements. His planning was perfect.

  “We came to trust him completely. We discussed our secrets in front of him. He had interesting insights, and sometimes his lack of knowledge would help us find a focus for our own questing.

  “We were fond of him, so it was terribly painful when he finally betrayed us.”

  “I did not betray you!” cried the creature. “I was trying to save you! I would have given my life for any of you—especially you, Gwynhafra. You know it’s true.”

  Its voice broke, and Tansy was amazed to see tears seeping from the great misshapen eyes.

  Gwynhafra turned toward the creature, and her eyes were cold. “You betrayed us, Arthur. You led Mormekull to our home!”

  “But tell them why!” the creature shrieked. “Tell them what you were going to do!”

  Gwynhafra said nothing.

  “What were you going to do?” asked Tansy. “I compel you to answer!”

  “We had decided to make the New World our world; to take it over completely. It would have been easy, for we had the knowledge and the power to do it.”

  “Yes,” cried Arthur, “you did! But it would have cost you your very souls, and you know it. You know it!”

  Gwynhafra ignored him and went on.

  “When we took ship for America, the idea was just beginning to form in our minds. But when we arrived and saw how crude everything was, how unsettled, we knew we could easily do it.”

  She sighed.

  “It would have been wonderful. We could have made it a place of peace and plenty.”

  “With everyone else here your slaves!” muttered Arthur. “Don’t forget that part.”

  “A great many of the people here were slaves already,” said Gwynhafra sharply. “The country had decided that slavery was an acceptable institution.”

  She paused, as if gathering her thoughts, then said, “We found a house in New England—a large place, much like this one—where we established ourselves and began to plan.” Her voice was sharp now. “But even as we made our plans, we were being betrayed.

  “As I said, Mormekull had followed us. But we were well protected by our own spells, and he could not touch us until he found the weak link in our chain—Arthur Grimsby.