Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome

by John Helfers

  The room was huge, and seemed larger with the lights off. An oval pool of light marked the center twenty meters up ahead, where robed figures stood in a circle filled with a shifting, auroral glow.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn… .”

  Twelve men with raised hands continued the eerie chant. That could only mean that the thirteenth figure, robed and hooded and standing at the circle’s center, hadn’t yet managed to establish the astral gate.

  I hesitated, unsure, now, as to what to do.

  The chant faltered as we stepped into the room. “Keep going!” the central figure shouted. “Keep the chant going!”

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn… .”

  The guy in the center had to be Zayid, and he seemed flustered. Good, because that gave me my chance to take control of the situation. “Good evening,” I said, and I walked forward, keeping my Predator aimed at Zayid. “Hope you’ll excuse the interruption. Don’t move—and don’t try any magic on us—and no one gets hurt.”

  Sure, it was trite. But I wasn’t thinking real clearly at the moment.

  “What are you doing here!” Zayid snapped. “You have no business here!”

  “On the contrary. I have some very important business here.”

  Zayid was a big man, hooded and robed like the others, but I saw his eyes glaring at me from beneath the cowl. Behind him was an altar, with a sword, a chalice, a bell, and a clutter of less readily identifiable stuff. A couple of six-foot candle stands to either side cast most of the physical light … but that weird aurora shifted and danced in the air around them.

  “You do not understand what you’re dealing with here,” Zayid said. “You have no possible conception! I recommend that you and your people turn around and quietly leave. Now.”

  “Thanks, but I think we’ll hang for a while. This looks interesting.”

  I was taking in the chalked-out marks on the floor surrounding the thirteen magicians. They’d drawn your standard nine-foot circle—a double circle, actually, filled with your standard arcane occult sigils, signs, and squiggles. Just outside the circle, touching it at one point, was a chalk triangle three feet across.

  “How about it, Scoot?” I asked.

  Scooter had his hands up, facing the circle and the chanters in a kind of magical stand-off. They outnumbered us, but they were penned inside their protective circle. I hoped that meant they couldn’t flame us from in there, or worse. And Scoot was working some protective spells, just in case.

  “Looks like an ordinary Hermetic ritual,” Scooter said, his brow furrowed with concentration. He was using The Voice. “Complete with a triangle of evocation. The circle protects the magicians inside. The triangle is where whatever you’re summoning is supposed to appear. Now don’t break my concentration!”

  I stepped closer, keeping my Predator aimed at the black-robed bunch inside the circle. I was pretty sure that whatever protection those chalks marks conferred on the chanters, they were more effective against spirits and beings and forces coming out of the astral than they were against copper-jacketed slugs with a muzzle velocity of 400 meters per second.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn… .”

  That droning chant was getting inside my head. I felt a bit dizzy, though I was putting that down to the adrenaline rush of combat.

  “Careful!” Scoot warned. “Don’t break the triangle!”

  “I’m not.” I peered inside.

  And … Dunkelzahn! There was something in there!

  It was tough to see clearly. There was something … wrong about the space above and inside that triangle, something that made my eyes ache as I tried to follow the shifting blur of fog and cold light moving inside. But I could make out one solid shape within the haze—a book. A very large book.

  And it was speaking to me.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn… .”

  Okay. I’m not a magician, but I’m not stupid. I know a little about the astral.

  Part of the Awakening, you see, was the opening of channels between what we were always so smugly pleased to call the “real world,” and the astral, a kind of parallel universe “on the other side” whatever the hell that might mean. The astral is the realm of spirits, demons, elementals, and other occult entities, and it may be generated by all life here on Earth. Magicians go up onto the astral all the time to read auras or taste the emotional or magical imprints lingering on material items.

  Beyond the astral are the metaplanes, other worlds, other realities accessible only to highly trained initiated magicians … and even the best mages have limits to where they can pass.

  This was not the astral I was looking into within the triangle … nor was it one of the more usual or accessible metaplanes. This was something decidedly else… .

  The Necronomicon.

  It was fiction, damn it, a myth, a literary gimmick created by a hack pulp-writer to spice up his story submissions to Weird Tales a century and a half ago.

  And yet I had no doubt whatsoever that what I was seeing within that luminous aether was the fabled tome of dark magic itself—bigger and thicker than an encyclopedia, bound with iron hasps, with a binding of some brown, leathery material heavily wrinkled and cracked. As I stared at it, one of the puckers in the leather opened, revealing a still-living eye, an eye staring up at me with what might have been a keen and analyzing intelligence … or stark, shrieking madness.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn… .”

  According to the mythos, the thing had started out as the Kitab Al-Azif, written in Arabic by the Mad Arab with the impossible name somewhere around 730 A.D. Two centuries later, a Byzantine scholar, Theodorus Philetas, translated it into Greek, and called it the Necronomicon—the Book of Dead Names… .

  I holstered my Predator, and took another step toward the triangle. The air was bitingly cold.

  “Fixer!” Dee-Dee screamed. “No!” Cammie was lunging at me and Scooter was just starting to turn, trying to block me … but I reached into that ethereal light with both hands, grasped the Book, and pulled it out.

  No, I didn’t know what I was doing, so don’t ask! It felt like a dream, really, distant and insubstantial, like I was watching something happening to someone else. I saw the chanting magicians relax, though, and I saw Zayid throw back his head and give a wild and shocking laugh.

  “Thank you, my impetuous friend!” he said, and he sounded almost relieved. The auroral light was gone, now, the chamber illuminated solely by the flicker of the candles.

  “Fixer!” Thud’s voice was bellowing in my ear over the commlink. “Fixer! It’s a trap!” Over the link I could hear the whop-whop-whop of a helicopter, the stuttering crackle of automatic weapons. “Fixer!” Thud bellowed again from the roof. “It’s—”

  And the channel went dead.

  At the same instant, Dee-Dee and Cammie both raised their weapons, aiming at Zayid … but there was a crack and a flash of lightning, and both women were tossed backward in a sharp, actinic glare of magical light. Scooter was screaming, clawing at his eyes, dropping to his knees… .

  “You may place the book on the floor outside of the triangle,” Zayid told me, “then step away with your hands high above your head.”

  I was aware of doors opening, of light spilling through from outside. M&M security people were spilling in, and I heard the click-clack of their weapons as they took aim. They killed poor Dee first, shooting her down as she tried to rise. Gunfire echoed through the chamber, cutting down Scooter and Cammie both.

  My whole team, wiped out in the space of three seconds… .

  Cammie …

  She was curled up in a bloody fetal curl, whimpering. Scooter was dead on his back, arms outflung, blood pooling beneath his body.

  “Place the book on the floor outside of the triangle, Mr. Michaels,” Zayid said. “Slowly and carefully.”

&nb
sp; I met his eyes. How in hell had he known my birth name?

  I looked at the others, all watching me expectantly from the depths of their hoods. One of them, I knew, must be the one called Shifter, our informant. But if they knew my name, Zayid and those working for him must have done a hell of a lot of digging to find out about me. This whole miserable op had been a freaking set-up, for Christ’s sake. We’d been suckered here specifically to get this book.

  And maybe it made sense, in a weird, puppet-master kind of way. The protective circle was inviolable. Zayid couldn’t drop it or break it without risking some rather nasty metaphysical consequences. Someone outside the circle had to come in and actually lift the Necronomicon out of the triangle, out of the metaplane where it had manifested.

  I suppose they could have hired some poor schmuck to do the grabbing, some rent-a-cop or clueless middle-management corpie … or maybe the spell required an outsider, or even an enemy, someone with his own will, doing his own bidding, doing it voluntarily.

  For whatever reason, the bastards had sought out our Mr. Johnson and, through him, hired us to do the actual grab from the metaplane. And now they had what they wanted. I could feel all those guns aimed at me from around the room, feel the eyes and the sharp magical focus of the chanters, feel Zayid’s mad delight.

  I felt that single, nightmare eye peering out from the cover of the book in my hands, looking up at me with its glare of malevolent madness. It whispered to me, in my mind, whispering blasphemous things about God and power and life. Hideous things, things so terrible I can no longer remember the words.

  But I remember their feel. And the fire-charred and worm-eaten and ichor-slimed malevolence behind them.

  “Don’t be foolish, Mr. Michaels,” one of the chanters said. He brushed back the hood of his robe. I recognized the face—Roger Nakamura. “Put the book down. You will come to no harm, I promise you. Your friend there needs medical help. And you have no place to go.”

  “Maybe not.” My voice cracked. Cammie! I’m so sorry I got you into this! “But you can go straight to hell!”

  I dropped, falling into a knee-bend crouch, and as I did so, as a dozen fingers tightened on the triggers of those aimed weapons behind me, I snapped out with my right leg, the sole of my combat boot on the floor inside the now empty triangle, and swept in a sharp turn to the left, dragging my foot across the chalk marks, scuffing a gap between triangle and circle where they’d touched.

  Then I lost my balance and fell flat on my face, and that might have saved my life as full-auto gunfire cracked and reverberated through the conference room.

  A few of the bullets meant for me chewed through black robes and thrashing chanters. “Don’t shoot!” Nakamura was screaming. “Idiots! Don’t shoot!” One of the magicians sprawled back against the altar, knocking the table and both candle stands over. The flames flared, then winked out.

  But there was still light… .

  Flat on my belly, the Necronomicon clutched beneath me, I couldn’t see what was happening very well, but I could see that that cold and sickly illumination was back, all shifting blues and greens, and as I looked up I could see the look of sheer, brain-curdling terror on Zayid’s face as something like a sinuous shadow stretched past and over me, uncoiling to reach from the unplumbed depths of that hellish triangle to encircle and grasp the shrieking Arab mage.

  Gunfire continued to bark, but it wasn’t aimed at me. I rolled over onto my back, still clutching the evil book to my chest, and looked up into sheerest Nightmare… .

  People nowadays think they understand magic. They think they understand the Awakening. Orks. Trolls. Elves. Astral spirits. Elementals. Magic circles. Mystic incantations. It’s all frou-frou, man. Fluffy-bunny Halloween dress-up make-believe, robed in black and pretending to be all about power. I looked into the face of that … that thing emerging from the triangle of evocation and I knew that our magic-obsessed and technically adept modern reality was nothing, nothing compared to the eldritch Horror writhing and gibbering at Reality’s gates.

  Five of the chanters inside the circle were hanging in the air, now, shrieking and struggling as near-invisible tentacles slowly but inexorably squeezed. Nakamura was among them, his eyes bugging from his face in agonizing, mind-rending terror. The rent-a-cops were running, but the Thing had reached out from the triangle and grabbed two of them as well.

  And tentacles were reaching for me.

  “Here!” I screamed. “Take it!” And I hurled the heavy book at the monstrous chaos emerging from the triangle’s rift. The tentacles hovering above me snatched the book from the air, and by then I was scrambling to Cammie’s side, scooping her up in my arms, and running, running like Doomsday itself was descending upon us.

  And for all I knew, it was. The entire building was shaking and swaying, as though its century-old structure was barely containing the unimaginable force emerging from that alien plane. Ceiling panels and overhead lighting tubes burst and fell in a shower of glass and plastic. The floor danced and shivered, earthquake-wracked, and I heard shatterproof windows outside the room shattering, the crashes like gunshots.

  It sounded like the whole damned building was screaming… .

  I reached the nearest door, pausing just long enough for a quick glance back over my shoulder. Maybe the Thing had what it wanted. One by one, the shrieking, squirming men suspended in the air vanished, though I swear I could hear their fading screams long after they’d gone.

  I could still hear them as I descended the stairwell.

  • • •

  The surviving guards had rushed out ahead of us, mingling with the late-night crowds downstairs who wondered what the commotion was up in the penthouse. I was stopped a couple of times by white-faced security people, but got by each time by saying, “Special security, with Roger Nakamura! I’ve got wounded here! Get the hell out of my way!”

  Somewhere in all the confusion, I’d lost my nanny … and I’d peeled Cammie’s off her blood-splattered face. They wouldn’t track us. The humans wouldn’t, anyway.

  Gods of all the Metaverse … what did I see?

  It still haunts me.

  It wasn’t a mouth that got Zayid and Nakamura. I don’t think it was a mouth.

  Is it true that our thoughts create Reality? That imaginal beings and places and nightmare horrors all somehow take shape and form and mass and seething, malevolent will in some other dimension, some other metaphysical plane?

  Our myths may have more reality than we can credit. Beelzebub and Lucifer. Dark Hecate and Ammit, Eater of Souls. Yog-Sothoth, Keeper of the Gate, and Great Cthulhu, dreaming in the depths until the stars are right.

  Perhaps whatever can be imagined is real, somehow, solid and fully manifested, residing just beyond the insubstantial gauze veils of Reality rising around us. Perhaps evil, true evil, arises from the lightless corners of our own hearts and minds. Perhaps even our darkest nightmares take shape and will, gibbering at the gates.

  I have nightmares, now. Nightmares about Dee-Dee and Scooter and patient Thud. Dead names, now.

  The nightmares where I again see the Thing are the worst.

  And at night Cammie takes me in her arms and whispers soothing words in my ear and holds me close and tells me it’s all right.

  But it’s not.

  I can still hear the screams, the terror-maddened shrieks of souls dragged down into darkness. I still hear the despair. The wrenching agony of dying souls.

  And I can still hear the blasphemous whisperings of the Book.

  The Book of Dead Names.

  Oh, gods! Gods in whom I’ve never believed, help me!

  The Art of Diving in the Dark

  By Ilsa J. Bick

  Ilsa J. Bick is an award-winning, bestselling writer of short stories, ebooks and novels as well as a child psychiatrist, film scholar, surgeon wannabe and former Air Force major. (She is also fairly peripatetic and easily bored, but no fair diagnosing her until she’s left the room.) She has published extensively
in the Star Trek, BattleTech and MechWarrior: Dark Age universes, as well as original science fiction, fantasy and mystery. “The Key,” a supernatural murder-mystery about the Holocaust and reincarnation, was named “distinguished” in The Best American Mystery Stories, 2005 (edited by Joyce Carol Oates); a novelette-length sequel, “Second Sight,” has just been released in Crime Spells (eds. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman); Locus’s Rich Horton calls the novelette “ the best (in the anthology) … heady and involving.”

  Forthcoming are two young adult novels, in hardcover, from Carolrhoda Books: Draw the Dark, a paranormal mystery Publisher’s Weekly called “inventive” and “riveting,” which also made the semifinals of the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (as Stalag Winter); and The Sin Eater’s Confession, revolving around the murder of a gay high school student in rural Wisconsin.

  Currently, Ilsa and her family live in Wisconsin where theirs is the only mezuzah in town.

  —Küpau wau i ka manö ka manö nui ka manö nui küpau wau i ka manö:

  I am finished to the big shark, all consumed by the big shark, I am finished.

  (Old Hawaiian saying)

  I

  Somewhere off the Kohala Coast, Hawai’i

  May 9, 2070

  Something wrong.

  A beautiful day, a light breeze, the sea placid as blue glass, the auras of dolphins shimmering like comets screaming to earth.

  But something was definitely wrong. A distant hiss of evil whispering from the depths like a murder of crows muttering on a naked limb above a newly-turned grave. The water’s fingers stroked the hairs along his arms and neck into stiff hackles through his drysuit. Something snagged the meat of his brain like the set of a hook. Reeling him in …

  Knows we’re here. Maybe that’s what it wants. Beneath his vest—definitely not standard-issue—a cold sweat pearled his chest. A new and more troubling thought: Jesus, can its magic reach this far? Can it see what I think?