Pentacle - A Self Collection

by Tom Piccirilli

  "The music," Sarah said, grinning down at me hideously, like Panecraft. "Bugs in chorus. Can you hear them?"

  I heard them.

  I gripped her by the elbows and gazed into her eyes, trying to fight my way past the rising majiks. I watched them filling her, pouring over her mind and drowning her soul. Perhaps even a four millionth generation of a duke of Hell was too powerful an entity to claim as a familiar. Without knowledge of the witching way, Sarah's mind would be submerged by Maymon. Mammon's evil flooded the room like mustard gas.

  Her father pounded up the stairs into the hallway. I tried to get a restraining spell slapped across the door, but there were enough loosened majiks in the room now to deflect any simple sorcery.

  He burst in on a straight run, saw me lying on his half-naked, wildly thrashing daughter, and dove for my throat.

  "You son of a bitch!"

  "Grantham, wait . . . !"

  A thin, stereotypical accountant type maybe, but wiry and crazed with rage. Self enjoyed the forces coming apart in the room and frolicked madly with Maymon on the bed, everything happening at once. Grantham shot me a nice left hook that split my lip while Sarah tumbled across her torn sheets and giggled into the pillows. Grantham kept pummeling me and shouted, "Call the police!" His wife never came into the room, and I knew she would be rushing for the phone.

  Damn it, help me!

  You wanted this.

  "What are you trying to do to my daughter, you bastard?" he screamed. "What have you done with Rachel?" Grantham drew back and pounded my mouth again. My fists were already filled with killing hexes, one tap on his jaw would have torn off his head. Beneath Grantham's anger I could sense his relief—he had a solid object to battle now, an answer to his prayers. I'd become the substance of his nightmare, the man who'd taken his child. Spittle flecked his lips. "Where is she? Where's Rachel, damn you!"

  Sarah coughed loudly from the pit of her chest and began to vomit. In her gagging I heard the snorted words of a loosed demon-call; a rare Abra-Melin passage hidden within a list of ingredients for a harmless love potion. Rachel had been knowledgeable in her quest of the craft. No wonder Sarah was being swallowed from the inside with so many unrestrained talents being inherited at once from her sister.

  Grantham kept wrestling with me on the bed until we finally toppled over the nightstand and hit the floor. He slapped and smacked and punched and I couldn't lay a finger on him without blowing his brain out the back of his skull. Get him away from me! Don't hurt him!

  Perish the thought, Self said. From behind, one hand reached down over Grantham's face and foisted him off me. He gurgled and looked kittenish as he flew across the room and hit the radiator.

  Living, pleading words of enchantment from Sarah were broken up by her laughter. The wayward invocation reached down through the crust of purgatory directly into the upper circles, and firmly pulled back—first the distinguishing stench—and then another personage up from Hell for a breath of air.

  Let's get out of here! Self shouted.

  Who is it?

  Who cares? Come on!

  I shoved my hands out to him and said, Take off the killing strokes. I've got to get these people clear.

  You pain in the ass. He licked my fists until the hexes were removed. I wheeled, grabbed Sarah off the bed, and ran for the door. She was barely conscious, hands flailing weakly against my chest as I carried her into the hall. Behind me, the stench intensified. Whoever had been called was swimming up hard and fast to earth.

  Mrs. Grantham shrieked. I caught only a glimpse of her as she exploded from her bedroom and stabbed at me with a hat-pin. I didn't think anybody wore those anymore, either. She spoke calmly enough, aiming for my neck, ears, and going for my eyes. "Get out, I've called the police. They'll be here any moment. Leave my family alone." I held Sarah closer as I stumbled down the stairs, whispering charms in her ear; she seemed to grow coherent, large liquid brown eyes puzzled and frightened. It lasted only a second before that vicious, animal grin yanked her face apart again.

  At the bottom of the steps I wondered if I should take Sarah and make a run for the door. Mrs. Grantham continued jabbing at me with her hat-pin. Self came bouncing down the stairs followed by Maymon. Like a Marx Brothers skit they both ran into Mrs. Grantham, and the three of them tumbled into a coffee table. Mrs. Grantham fell on top of Self hard. I dropped Sarah on the couch and turned, started back up the stairs to help her father when I heard him yowl like a boy who'd just cut a finger. A thick stream of blood arched from Sarah's room and splashed the hallway carpet.

  Who is it?

  Oh, my head, Self said, rubbing his crown. That lady's got a pricking needle. Is everybody in this town a witch-killer?

  Who is it!

  He woke up, remembering where he was, what we were in the middle of. The betrayer!

  This was getting worse by the second.

  The demon Hakeldama: who sprang from the potter's field of blood where Judas Iscariot hanged himself, born from the foul meat of his body and sins. He stepped into the hallway wearing a mostly human guise: red-bearded, heavily muscled. An adonis with a half-gnawed face and a twisted, broken neck. The rope burns appeared black in the open-wound mire of his throat. His skin glittered gray, eye sockets stuffed with silver, shambling and dragging one of Grantham's legs behind him.

  "Why?" I shouted. "Why is it that the first thing you all have to do is kill someone!"

  But of all of them from Hell, I was asking—by far—the one least able to answer. Hakeldama, bones of Judas, had the distinction of being comprised of he who'd killed his own god, giving no thought to the entire world.

  Coins?

  Iscariot's betrayal pay, laid with him.

  Maymon's knees screamed. Mrs. Grantham didn't know where to look; up the dripping stairs, at me, or at her insanely smiling daughter. She clenched the hat-pin and held it in front of her like a crucifix, unaware of the irony. I shoved her hard towards the door and said, "Get out of the house."

  Lips pursed to give a kiss—forever obliged to indict his own god—Hakeldama started down the steps, chin resting almost in his armpit as the snapped bone protruded from his neck. Mrs. Grantham continued with the same sense of calm that, in the midst of this, I found to be the most terrifying thing of all. Perhaps she was the witch-killer. "The police are on their way."

  Hakeldama started down at us. Maymon's twin-beaks spit worms onto the floor as he tweeted and flapped to a perch atop Sarah's chest. She muttered and laughed, and stuck her fingers in his knees' noses.

  I drew back my arm and thrust a cone of power straight at the betrayer's face. The cone burned and spun like a drill, throwing blue sparks against the ceiling until it struck, igniting the nicely-trimmed red beard. Silver melted and dripped molten tears down the eaten side of his face.

  Mrs. Grantham met Hakledama at the foot of the stairs and jabbed at him with the hat-pin. I grabbed her by the arm and tried to shove her away, but she stood her ground. Hakeldama's hand shot out and he grabbed me by the throat, lifting me off the floor. Arcane phrases tumbled in my mind and I desperately threw a botched curse on Iscariot. It was enough to make him swat me across the room. I hit a window and went through head-first, glass shattering. Cold rain pounded over my face.

  By the time I pulled myself free, Hakeldama held the hat-pin, the hand, part of the esophagus, and most of the sternum. "Damn you, beast!" I backed towards the couch. Maymon buzzed Hakeldama, fluttering in his face, pecking at the coins, keeping him busy. Self rolled on the floor until he was covered in crimson, and returned to me holding Mrs. Grantham's foot. Here, drink the blood!

  No!

  You need the strength!

  He scooped up a clawful of flesh, jumped onto my shirt, grabbed me by the jaw and tried to force his food down my throat. The heat was upon him. I shoved my elbow hard against his neck, reached around and yanked him back off me until he hit the floor. I raised my fists up high and brought them down solidly on top of his skull.

>   He sat and looked up at me as though weighing fates. You call this vengeance? He stared at the bones and blood in his hand, the murdered people around him, and the pricking needle. Self slurped and licked his lips, said, I want a divorce, and leaped out the broken window.

  Come back here!

  Sarah held her arms up to Hakeldama, and he came to her, making a kissy face. The two of them chuckled, surrounded by dead parents and Horse paintings on the walls, and like Romeo and Juliet they were mad lovers who could no longer be held apart. I stepped between them. Sarah snarled.

  She was in love: the Abra-Melin love potion affected both the caller and the called. The loosed majiks had bonded, blending a demon rite with love spell. She crept off the couch and clawed for my face. I backhanded her, and Hakeldama roared and lunged, thunder throbbing against the house like loud baroque music. I tucked tight and dove across the floor, came up behind him and jumped onto his back.

  Shoving my fingers into what passed for his eyes, I got a grip on the silver coins that had created the new testament and yanked for my life; twenty centuries of human greed wouldn't let them go that easily, so much occult significance here in Iscariot's ghoul. I screamed as a backlash of energy swept up my arms. My hair stood on end, my shirt beginning to smoke. Money, the greatest religion. Even Jesus had allowed its kiss to finish him.

  Hakeldama roared, his silver existence founded on the coins themselves, representing the murder of God—the failure of a nailed Christ to reach one of his own disciples. Condemnation, repentance and suicide on the field of blood. I flapped across his shoulders, holding on, the silver bane burning. I kept digging my fingers deeper into the demon's brain pan, pulling and plucking eyes, until I finally held the coins.

  His body unwound and vanished. Fists raised above my head, silver crossing each palm, I brought up an incantation to return the payment. Black flames of majik flared in my hands, burning brightly until the coins were gone before sputtering and dying out. Spells faded in my own throat.

  The door burst open and a deputy slid in tight to the wall, his gun drawn. "You! Lace your fingers palms up on top of your head!" He got down on one knee into firing stance and leveled the gun at my chest.

  I froze and did what he said. It was a full three minutes before he could take in all the mayhem around him; the torn bodies, the girl on the couch, and my pale, wet face. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," he whimpered. "My Christ, look what you've done . . . ."

  "Oh shit," I said, "wait . . . ." The whole situation suddenly seemed incredibly funny to me, like some Shakespearean comedy of errors. I could swear the cop smiled. He cocked the hammer and squeezed the trigger almost lovingly; the bullet took me high in the shoulder. I grunted and floundered back two steps but managed to stay on my feet. I said, "No . . ." and thought, My god, if I don't die they'll take me to the hospital. They'll put me in Panecraft.

  Sarah giggled and wagged her finger at me. The world splintered into black and red fragments as the cop pulled the trigger again and blasted me backwards over the couch into oblivion.

  Came the whispers in a womb of darkness.

  Voices of the dead found me in the fog, pulling at every fiber. No peace, no end to the suffering after the fact. Like phantom limbs of an amputee, the dead still felt their bodies, and held onto their lives and loved ones just a fraction of a dimension away and yet forever out of reach.

  The whispers. Screams.

  I heard the hangings and scalding lime baths. The wedges of the bootikens being driven in. Impalings on iron-spiked stocks, and the unholy noise of shoulders tied, lifted back and bones sharply and almost musically breaking as the tortured were dropped in strappado. Slowly squeaking turns of the tightening vises. Skin blistering and crackling, burned with feathers dipped in sulfur. And the constant rhythmic windy whoosh and snapping of the thrawing—head bound with ropes and jerked side to side, swish swish, swish swish.

  They'd brought so much of their lives into death, and poured even more of their souls out to me now.

  To me of all people, who was about to become one of them. Cut in half, and not even awake yet.

  Lurking in a dimly lamp-lit corner of the room, he sat in his chair so complacently and impervious to the ghosts around us that I knew I faced the eye-biter.

  With a stiff right arm and most of my chest swathed in heavy bandages, left wrist held immobile by the rattling handcuffs chained to the arm rail of a wheelchair, our roles had already been firmly established. One lord of the manor. One condemned prisoner.

  A line from some grimoire floated back and forth through my thoughts, reciting carefully: "It is essential that the witch remains the master of all that he beholds, hears, or conceives; otherwise he will be the slave of illumination and the prey of madness." I sent up a mental signal flare, calling Self back to me, and pleading for his help.

  I got nothing back but my own lonely and tumbling fears.

  The witch-killer smoked a thin European cigarette, face animated by pleasure during each long drag. He exhaled heavily with his pursed lips, blowing the stream of smoke nearly into my eyes before it dissipated.

  Formality proved his forte, a mainstay in which to work—like the Gestapo who did not sweat and always kept their shoes shined even when walking through cinders. His legs were crossed almost daintily, pants creased to perfection, wearing a white shirt and sports jacket long out of style; he fit in with that lost sense of innocence pervasive in Summerfell, a throwback to gentler, more familial times.

  Rage was present but not in evidence—that deeply-rooted kind of fury never is, I found, because it's so fundamentally a part of character. His face was as perfectly creased as his pants. He was handsome in a small-town lawyer type of way, hair graying at the temples, an aquiline nose. He smiled so beatifically, tongue and teeth gleaming with rapture, that I had difficulty holding tears back. My hackles and gorge rose. Only a minute after meeting him and already I was making mistakes: his driving force was more than fury, insanity or religious fanaticism. Look at that smile: his fuel was unbeatable, unstoppable love.

  We knew who we were.

  Hopkins said, "To me, you're not quite human."

  His voice sounded a little rough from the smoking, but gentle and soothing. "An abortion of sorts. One that started on the path to reaching humanity and, failing to achieve it, willingly chose to live out the way of the Devil."

  He held up a hand to stifle an argument I hadn't offered.

  I wondered if he'd sung in his church's choir, his melodic voice like an overplayed song, sickening but still catchy. "You think yourself higher than the laws of God and man, but more than coveting possessions, even more than the taking of life itself, you prey on the souls of the weak and innocent, initiating more and more of them into your rule. Your kind is the greatest plague on humanity our world has ever known." All of this while puffing slowly and somberly on his cigarette, the syrupy voice so much like a lullaby that I wanted to nod off. "You willingly invite Satan into our lives, where he wreaks his destruction."

  Even his dialogue was outdated and puerile, a throwback to another time. Perhaps he was a reincarnate of Matthew Hopkins, perhaps someone who simply shared the name and calling. It was clear the concept of free choice played a large part in his reasoning. What had been his choices?

  Moonlight skirted through the windows, casting bars across his face. Like the shadows on the dog that had brought me here, these told the same story.

  "You're a mass murderer," Hopkins continued, "remanded here to Panecraft hospital for psychological observation and evaluation in order to decide if you're sane enough to stand trial for the murders of Paul, Ruth and Rachel Grantham."

  "Sarah?" With a start I realized this was the first thing I'd said so far.

  "In a severe state of shock. There's already talk that she's been driven out of her mind witnessing your crimes."

  My thoughts were slow and heavy. "The police will want to question me."

  "No. You died exactly ten minutes ago at 2:15 AM.
A murderer without an identity. Your fingerprints proved unmatchable. You'll be buried in Potter's Field, just south of the cherry orchard."

  He put out the dead cigarette, shifted and leaned forward in his seat. I noticed he had a nice set of protective fetishes: two silver chains, a wristlet, and a number of small pinkie rings. Most were of a Mesopotamian cast, and two I recognized from Southern Europe. He wasn't taking chances. Now it made sense why Rachel, who'd never been sheared from her familiar, still hadn't been able to do much to save herself when caught off guard.

  When I was whole, I could have toppled this bedlam into his heartless chest.

  Sticking out from his pocket, he had the pricking needle he used to probe for the witch's mark. I squinted and saw that inscribed along the handle was Soli Deo Gloria—Glory be only to God. He noticed me staring and said, "You'd be surprised what you can find if you look hard enough."

  "No, I wouldn't."

  He smiled. I expected something reptilian and repulsive, but here was only warmth and friendship. "I'm glad to hear you say that. Come," he said. "Let's meet a few of your damnable brethren, all right?"

  We took a tour of the mad and the mangled.

  He wheeled me through the eastern atrium into one of the secondary, smaller buildings; pressing me inwards, down brightly lit white corridors, into the heart of the beast.

  Panecraft.

  Hexenhaus.

  A witch-prison like the one of Bamberg, Germany, an estate ruled by Bishop Von Dornheim, where the cruelest witch persecutions took place. During the 1620s it was staffed by full-time torturers and executioners, and used informers in the same fashion the Gestapo would three centuries later. Not one of those imprisoned failed to confess to witchery. Anyone who showed sympathy or encouraged mercy became suspect. All of the Burgomasters of Bamberg fell victim to the efficient witch-burning Holocaust machine, including Mayor Johannes Junius, who managed to smuggle out an account of his ordeals under torture, a short note scrawled in a shaky script written over several days, with his hands crushed from thumbscrews.