The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1)

by M. A. Wisniewski

  The Great Phantasmo led the rest of the class, and demonstrated more feats of “spiritual power.” He told people to pick a number at random and then told them what number it was—correctly. He brought out a “seance table,” had volunteers link hands around it, and made it jump and “levitate.” Some of the tricks he explained, (like the table trick—which was a matter of leverage, pushing on certain points on the surface of the table, sometimes sneaking his foot beneath the table leg to make it jump) others he didn't. The point to that was to demonstrate that, no matter how smart they were, they could be fooled by a trick they weren’t familiar with. Extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence to back them up, and should never be accepted uncritically.

  In the Q and A that followed, the Great Phantasmo told them about how he’d gotten involved in debunking aetherology and related frauds. His wife had died suddenly a few years back—taken ill in Dodona during a rough portion of the war, and supply shortages left her unable to get enough of the medication they needed. After her funeral, he’d gone to the aetheric mediums seeking solace, only to be outraged when he found nothing but charlatans doing tricks that a trainee magician would scoff at.

  Someone asked Phantasmo if maybe the mediums might be doing some good, if they gave grieving people some kind of closure. He admitted that was a difficult question, but all too often the aetherics wouldn’t stop there—they’d use the emotional connection they’d forged with their victims to bilk them out of as much money as they could. And he’d found cases even worse than that: one family had gone to a medium to confirm that their daughter, a gunner for an Iron Crawler platoon who’d gone MIA, had definitely died. The medium said she had, and the family went into mourning, only to have their daughter interrupt her own funeral, still very much alive, after surviving a harrowing experience at a remote holdout POW camp. This was the danger of lying to people “for their own good”— though he felt that was giving these scammers too much credit. And besides which, wasn’t pretending to speak for a deceased loved one the worst form of slander? We all hate it when people who don’t know us make things up about us. We hate it worse when that gossip spreads and becomes confused with the truth. Now imagine how you’d feel, if you’d passed on, and some stranger began telling all your loved ones that you’d said and done things that you’d never had. It was awful. There were better, healthier ways to deal with grief.

  The Great Phantasmo ended the class to a standing ovation, and Professor Gelfland had a terrific follow-up class the next week, talking about how a lot of what the Great Phantasmo told them applied to journalism, of how those same principles applied to investigating non-supernatural claims, or of dealing with vague, dubious claims from politicians.

  So she hadn’t been surprised that Madame Zenovia had accurately told her that she’d been stuck in her personal life. That was a typical starting point for most aetherics: like Phantasmo’s crystal reading, it was broad enough that it could apply to everybody.

  Joy followed the medium into her home. That was clearly what this was—a townhouse where the main living room had been converted into an aetheric studio. Black curtains covered the windows, shutting out the bright mid-day sun. The only light came from various candles set around the edges of the room, scattered about among all sorts of mystic-looking bric-a-brac: shelves full of mandalas and statuettes next to wall-scrolls covered with arcane-looking symbols from many different cultures and belief systems, mashed together with no apparent rhyme or reason.

  The center of the room held a circular, three-legged table, covered by a deep red cloth, with an actual crystal ball on the center of the table. Joy sat across from Madame Zenovia, who instructed her to put her hands on the crystal ball, so the “aura cleansing” could begin. Joy started to comply, but something occurred to her.

  “Wait, is this a service you charge money for? Because that’s actually not why I’m here. I was interested in your story from three nights ago—”

  Well, that didn’t go over well at all. They went back and forth a few times, with Madame Zenovia claiming that her aura was “so green-shifted it was disturbing the spiritual field of the whole room.” It was so bad that it was “blocking her connection to the aether.” Joy found it awfully suspicious that Madame Zenovia needed an aetherial connection just to use her normal memory, but Madame Zenovia said this was the burden of being gifted as she was—you became sensitive to such things. Oh, and Joy’s aura was getting worse by the minute, darkening to a putrid olive. This was clear signs of a curse. Madame Zenovia must fix it, or dire consequences awaited her.

  Joy breathed in and massaged her temples. Maybe her life really had been cursed. It would explain so much, though she doubted that Madame Zenovia could actually do anything about it. Never mind that she didn’t have any money to spare on aetheric services, this was starting to sound like pay-for-play, and as a journalist, that would be a breach of ethics…

  Ethics? Had she forgotten who she was working for? Journalistic ethics? Oh, that was hilarious. She cracked herself up—pretending like she was still a real journalist, even now. If she was going to dive into the gutter for pay, better go all in. Wasn’t that the whole point of this assignment?

  Joy wrote out the address to the Gazette office in her notepad, tore the sheet off, and handed it to Madame Zenovia. She could bill the paper—send it to the desk of editor-in-chief Garai Sekibo. Madame Zenovia didn’t seem too happy with that and started going on a tangent about the mystic connection created by the exchange of coin, a bond of great significance to the spirits, but relented when Joy explained that she didn’t have any cash on her. It turned out the spirits could live with billing instead of coin. Joy got a small amount of amusement picturing Garai receiving a bill for an aetheric cleansing. Hey, it was a business expense, right?

  Joy and Madame Zenovia both put their hands on the crystal ball, and Madame Zenovia began to guide her through the “aura-cleansing process.” Joy was instructed to visualize her aura, a color surrounding her, a projection of her larger aetheric self, and to describe it to her. Joy did as she asked and was a bit surprised when something came to mind.

  “I see it—it’s this dark, splotchy bluish-purple, like a bruise. But there’s something beneath it—it’s a wide pattern of hairline fractures like in a cracked glass window. They’re this angry, deep red—And they’re pulsing, throbbing like blood through a vein, and—”

  “No, no, no—that’s wrong,” snapped Madame Zenovia. “You’re not looking correctly. I can see it, and it’s dark green. It’s the curse, fouling the vision of your third eye. Listen to Madame Zenovia, or you’ll never get through this.”

  Joy swallowed her irritation and played along, forcing her visualization to turn green so she could get this nonsense over with. She remembered one question directed to the Great Phantasmo during his presentation: while he’d shown that some aetherics were definitely frauds, that didn’t prove that every single one of them was. Could it be possible that a few might really have true spiritual powers? The magician admitted that he couldn’t prove the total nonexistence of aetheric powers, but no medium he’d investigated showed any ability that couldn’t be explained by either psychology or trickery. He had found a few mediums who seemed to genuinely believe their powers were real—and they tended to be terrible at their jobs, going off on their own delusional tangents, instead of cultivating and exploiting the delusions of their clients. Joy was starting to suspect that Madam Zenovia was this second type of aetheric.

  The rest of the aura cleansing went smoothly enough, as Madame Zenovia filled the crystal ball with her own aetheric energy of clean light blue, like a cloudless summer sky. Joy was instructed to pull that energy into herself, feel it happen with every breath. There were other bits of business along with that, but Joy recognized what was going on here—a simple type of meditation, very similar to exercises she’d been led through at her Kovidhian temple growing up, only with more bells and whistles thrown on top.

  At the end of t
he “cleansing,” she really did feel better, and she thought maybe Madame Zenovia might not be so bad, though she still didn’t approve of the fact that the medium was charging money for something anyone could get for free at a temple.

  Joy wanted to get onto the interview, but Madame Zenovia wasn’t done yet. Joy’s aura was clean, but they still hadn’t dealt with Joy’s curse. That was still mucking things up. They needed to contact the spirit world to solve that. They held hands, Madame Zenovia began her reading, and said she could feel “three names coming to me: Wong, Tan, and Zhang. There’s a strong aetheric connection there.”

  Well, of course—the medium had taken one look at Joy and picked three of the most common Xiaish names out there. The odds of her knowing someone with one of those names was pretty high. On a whim, she mentioned her “Yehyeh Zhang, the scientist and inventor who’d taken her in after she’d been orphaned at the age of eleven, and spent the rest of her reading by substituting the life story of Lilla Lemko from the Red Specter comics for her own. The spirits of the aether didn’t notice. Joy struggled to keep a straight face, it was so ridiculous. But then Madame Zenovia went into a trance and began to talk to her “dead” father, never mind that he was still alive. And, was it her imagination, or did the phrasing of Zenovia’s quotes from her dad sound a bit off? Just a bit sing-song-y, with some occasional broken grammar? Her dad didn’t talk like that! The whole thing was so insulting. Then Madame Zenovia began to relate all these things from her “father;” vague warnings and predictions, nonsense instructions for removing her “curse,” and then personal stuff—about how she was his only precious daughter, and he was so proud of her.

  This was disgusting. As Phantasmo said, the worst form of slander. It wasn’t fooling Joy—but only because she’d been lucky enough to have met the Great Phantasmo, and come forewarned. What would this be doing to someone who really believed it? Joy had to tune out the medium’s nonsense in order to remain calm.

  She let Zenovia drone on in her fake non-accent while she let her attention wander to the mystical decorations about the room. Some of the symbols were Xiaish characters: earth, water, fire, metal, wood, spirit, and so on. Most were posted up in isolation, but she did notice one small sign that had an entire phrase. It stood out because it formed the centerpiece of its own little altar, surrounded by red candles and flanked by a pair of holy temple lion statuettes. The script itself was striking, the characters weren’t so much written as sculpted—embossed to the point of bas-relief. They shone with metallic gold paint against a bright red background, surrounded by a border of more intricate patterns of embossed gold. The sign said, “Service Entrance to the Rear.”

  Joy snorted, and had to bury her face in her hands to hide her hysterical laughter. She wasn’t sure why that was the thing that got her, or that it was really all that funny, but she was cracking up and couldn’t stop.

  “There, there,” said Madame Zenovia, rather woodenly, while patting her on the shoulder. “Contact with the other side can be painful, but know that your parents are always with you.”

  Joy nodded, grateful that sobbing and laughing could look so similar from the outside. She made a special effort to sound like she really was sobbing, but her own fake laugh-crying, and the fact that Madame Zenovia was totally buying it, only elevated the ridiculousness of the whole situation, making her crack up worse, so it was a while before she could regain her composure.

  Joy wiped her tears from her eyes, blew her nose, and tried to get down to business finally, only to have her witness try to insist she needed to do past-life regression to get past her obvious trauma. Oh, come on! It was obvious that Zenovia was just trying to run up the bill. They went around in circles for a few times, until Joy insisted that she was too emotionally drained from talking to Yehyeh to do something as intense as visiting a past life, and maybe she could do that another time. Finally, Joy got Madam Zenovia to focus on what she’d come here for: the story of how she’d seen the Red Specter.

  Chapter 19

  Spirit Walk

  Three nights ago, Madame Zenovia had been performing aura-balancing and past-life regression for some "very important client, very confidential." The way she’d said it made it clear that Joy should find this impressive, but she’d clammed up when Joy asked for more details, citing “client confidentiality.” That was a thing with aetheric mediums? She did mention they’d met in a “very ritzy, very impressive conference room in one of the hotels in the downtown theater district on Chontos Blvd.

  Anyway, she'd finished up her work for Mr. Big Mysterious Client, but she wasn't quite done. She'd still been sensitized and attuned to the flows of the aether, wandered into a special "harmonic convergence of ley lines," and proceeded on a "linked aetheric spirit walk." She was particularly proud of this, declaring that she was the only person she knew of who could do it. All other aetheric mediums had to sit still in order to send their spirits into the aether, but she could leave her body while still maintaining control of it, walking it around like a dog on a leash.

  That’s what she was doing three nights ago, when she sensed a negative energy nexus down by the docks—a black vortex that threatened to disrupt the harmonic balance of the entire city, and it was up to her to put a stop to it. Her spirit flew across the city skyline, confronting the demons of Mara who scuttled across the rooftops. They were popping out of the energy vortex, a few at a time, but the portal was growing, and more and more of the demons slunk their way into the human world as it did. They trailed lines of darkness out of the vortex--not darkness as a mere absence of black, but a foul anti-light that stuck to everything it touched. The demons darted back and forth across the docks, not randomly, but in pre-determined patterns that traced out a mystic web that, when completed, would multiply the anti-energy of the vortex tenfold, creating a permanent rift for the demons to pour through forever.

  Even as she watched, a great Demon Queen began to push its way through the black portal, though it didn’t yet have room to make it all the way through, just two of its gargantuan arms—spindly, yet powerful, like an insect’s, with wicked three-fingered claws at the end of each—and its bulbous head, which was mostly covered by a single compound eye. With every breath it took, it expelled a black miasma, and its pure malevolence was so intense that it hit Madame Zenovia like a punch, like a gale-force blast of wind, pounding at her through the aether.

  So Madame Zenovia fought them, not directly, for that was not wise, but in a battle of weaving. She gathered to herself all the energy of the aether, aided by the native energy contained in the ley lines of The Great Wheel. They formed a new net of shining gold, and whenever it contacted the anti-light web, the darkness evaporated like shadows before a lantern. The demons were many, but she had power they didn't, and she felt it grow as her real body approached the docks.

  She'd remained linked to it the whole time by a silver cord tethered to her navel, and as the cord shortened, her power grew. She'd reached the point where she'd covered most of the warehouse district in golden light, and the vortex's expansion had ceased, its evil energy pent up by the borders of her web, and the demons howled and gnashed their teeth, but they couldn't approach her mystic net, for its powerful positive aetheric charge would sear their otherworldly forms like a hot poker.

  But then one demon, far more clever than the rest—it must have been a demon prince—it figured out a way to bypass her net. It flew down to the ground and into the body of a human, a man working at the docks, an innocent bystander whose limited senses did not even perceive the mighty spiritual battle raging over his head.

  Clad in human flesh, he was able to approach her frail corporeal form without fear. The other demons saw the prince's gambit work and followed suit. The demons wearing human skin surrounded her real body, and she was powerless to stop them. They seized her and shook her, and she felt her astral body waver as her concentration did. A serious enough trauma to her real body in this state could sever the silver cord, and then her spirit
would be forever lost, unable to return to her real body, wandering between the boundary of life and death forever. Such a fate was worse than death, and she fought down the instinctive, primal panic to end her spirit jaunt. If she did that, the whole city would be overrun. She had to finish the web first, but her concentration was shot. She felt the silver tether pull at her painfully, stretch to the point of snapping….

  And then a presence flew into the midst of the possessed and scattered them. Madame Zenovia let her body slump against the wall of the alleyway, as her spirit-self poured a final surge of energy into her net, choking off the vortex until it was just a mere trickle, but closing that would require care, not brute force.

  She wove the threads of light in a slowly narrowing circle, for the pressure behind the geyser of anti-light grew stronger as it was forced to pass through a tighter hole. She spared a glance back at the interloper who saved her, and nearly mis-wove her bindings, so surprised was she by what she saw. The human-riding demons scrambled about, trying to fight a new figure, even stranger than they. His head was a red skull with glass disks for eyes, he wore a long coat, wielded a short sword and shield, and most bizarre of all, he had no aura at all.

  Here Madame Zenovia had to stop and give Joy an impromptu lecture about the universal nature of aetheric auras and how exceedingly strange it was for any being to not have one. Joy nodded, did her best to look impressed, and tried to prompt the medium to get back to the story. The last thing she needed was for Zenovia to lose her train of thought now, when she was finally describing something that actually sounded relevant to her Red Specter story. Joy had sat through so much bullshit that it was straining her to the breaking point. If she had to listen to a repeat version of Zenovia’s aether-weaving battle she was going to tear her own hair out.