by Tom Slemen
Myrk lifted his arms, and stretched. It felt good to be above ground and alive again. He recited an antediluvian spell and soared upwards into the sky. He circled low cumulus clouds gilded with the quicksilver of the moon, and beheld the winking yellow glow-worm lights of distant Blackmere Village, surrounded by whalebacked hills two thousand feet below. Myrk sensed Jode’s auric presence somewhere below in that sleeping village, and so the ancient warlock flew in circles over Blackmere trying to pinpoint his old enemy’s location with his seventh sense, which was dowsing, but he could not isolate his rival’s exact position. Myrk grew impatient with the farcical aerial search and decided to simply fly down into the centre of the village – into the market square. In an amplified voice that startled people from their slumbers, Myrk roared, ‘Come forth Jode! I know you are here! This is Myrk! Come forth and face me!’
Lights blinked on in windows throughout the village and doors inched open as people peered out into the night, wondering who was making such a loud racket and why. A bedroom window in the Glazenby cottage opened, and little Christopher looked out at the full moon and rubbed his tired right eye. He wasn’t sure whether the voice had mentioned Mr Jode or whether he had dreamt it.
Jode had dreaded this hour of reckoning for centuries. He listened to the echoing voice of Myrk in the distance somewhere, and realised that one of the Lords of Darkness had somehow been accidentally resurrected, but none of the old good wizards were around to put Myrk under that special containing-stone. Jode calmly opened his secret wardrobe upstairs and looked at his old vestments hanging there. The black satin robes of a real magician, decorated with purple, silver and gold occult symbols. But now the nostalgic attire was practical armour. Jode put on the garments and took his old embroidered conical hat from a tall cylindrical container. It felt strange, and slightly demeaning wearing vestments tailored for a younger, slimmer Jode. He adjusted his hat as he stood before the cruelly-truthful wardrobe mirror. The last time he had been dressed for a confrontation of this sort had been with that trinity of rogue magicians Bladud, Vandermast and Abiris in 1588 when they tried to aid the Spanish Armada by creating hundreds of tulpa warships out of thin air to sail against England. Jode had teamed up with master magician Majistor – better known to us as Sir Francis Drake. The two supreme sorcerers caused a shower of fiery meteors to rain down on the Spanish fleet, and they also shattered the illusionary tulpa ships with the terrifying Cone of Power spell, releasing megatons of blasting power that would not be seen until Hiroshima, 357 years into the future. The Armada was defeated, and in 1806, Jode and his lover - the Celtic sorceress Aislynn - used a long-distance spell which shrunk Napoleon’s manhood and inflicted a fortnight of acute insomnia upon him. The tyrant was so distracted by his strange ‘illness’, that he abandoned the planned invasion of England. The rest, as they say, is history – but enough of the past – Jode snapped out of his reminiscences and returned to the present crisis. A Lord of Darkness was on the loose, and the Powers of Darkness still had a grip on this war-torn world, from Germany to Japan. Most thought that the warlord Hitler was just a lucky man who had solely risen to power through political struggles and astounding military bravado – but the truth was quite sinister. Hitler was the puppet of the Evil Genius, an obscure immortal who had been behind every major conflict since the Crimean War. The agenda of this shadowy mastermind was to turn nation against nation, and behind the scenes, be it in Berlin, London, Paris, Rome or Tokyo, the Evil Genius exercised his unshakeable hypnotic influence upon the dealers in armaments and the gullible egotistical men who aspired to dominate the world. At this moment, the undying puppeteer was facing defeat in Europe, and with the Third Reich facing the greatest invasion in the history of mankind, the eternal trouble-stirrer was already contemplating an escape route from Berlin to India, where he could lay low until another world war could be arranged. But if Myrk managed to resurrect the six Lords of Darkness, they would undoubtedly join forces with the Evil Genius and a true Dark Ages of unprecedented cruelty and terror would commence with the entire world enslaved. In the remote past, the Lords of Darkness had even tried to topple the Earth off its axis so the Pacific side of the planet would always face the sun, and the side of eternal night would throw most of the world’s continents into everlasting darkness. Just as the Moon always presents one side to the Earth, the same could be done with the world in its orbital relationship to the sun, and a lot of energy would be needed to tilt the Earth off its axis, but seven Lords of Darkness, and the Evil Genius could easily combine the sheer willpower of their twisted minds to accomplish that. Millions would die of course, from the cataclysmic hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, as the planet suddenly tilted and the world’s oceans, atmosphere and tectonic plates tried to catch up with the rolling earth.
‘And you’re supposed to stop all those catastrophes,’ Trevalyon Jode told his reflection in the wardrobe mirror. ‘You’re getting a little too long in the tooth for all this old man,’ he sighed, facing reality. He thought of his little friend Christopher. ‘Time to pass the knowledge on to someone younger.’
The Magin of the Right-Hand Path then closed the wardrobe and sealed it by placing his index and middle fingers over the eyes of the Green Man face carved into the walnut door. The wizard walked downstairs and left his humble abode. On the short path to his gate he lifted his arms to the starry skies and whispered, ‘Pelico tremlim-ho.’
He rocketed skywards to confront Myrk Tramorgon.
At first the large curious crowd in the village market square laughed at Myrk’s appearance and behaviour. In the little mundane minds of the villagers he had to be some sort of robed religious fanatic – an eccentric self-styled Druid perhaps – or simply someone unhinged maybe. The Magin of the Left-Hand Path was standing perfectly straight with his eyes shut and his arms besides him, shaking with violent spasms as he charged up his body and mind from the ancient forgotten power grid of the megalithic standing stones that criss-crossed the British Isles and Brittany. Cosmic energies only dimly suspected by dowsers pulsated and beamed through leylines that ranged from the sinister standing stones of the Outer Hebrides to the sunken ten-ton monolith which St Paul’s Cathedral was purposely built upon. Powerful lines of concentrated power lit up Stonehenge that night with a strange crimson aura, and the Northern Lights were spectacularly bright over Scotland at that fateful evening.
Jode, a thousand feet over the village, diverted half of the power that Myrk was siphoning off from the standing stones, and he began to glow like the evening star. Myrk was furious, and when he opened his eyes, the crowd drew back, because the wizard’s eyes shone like two suns. Rays of dazzling light also emerged from his mouth, and then from his fingernails. In a deep thunderous voice he uttered words no human had heard for many millennia. An irresponsible teenager fired a pebble at Myrk, more out of fear than devilment, and the stone hit the transfigured wizard on his forehead, distracting him from his magical rite. Myrk pointed his index finger at the teen, and most of the crowd, fearing some terrible repercussion, threw themselves out of the way, with many falling onto the cobbles. A pencil-thin beam of sizzling orange light shot out of Myrk’s pointed finger and hit the youth with the catapult. The teen’s eyes widened in pure terror as the beam struck his chest and sent incandescent ripples radiating from the point of contact. Amidst hysterical screams from the female folk, the boy was transformed almost instantly into a dead grey statue – and then Myrk turned his attention to the rest of the villagers in the square. A luminous exhalation of vapour issued from his glowing mouth as he murmured a hex. A flash of blue light lit up the square, and every man woman and child who was now fleeing from the ancient sorcerer was turned into a rat. The metamorphosised crowd squealed and scattered in different directions, and as Myrk scanned the fleeing rodents, he smirked, but that was suddenly wiped off his face in a stunning way.
An indigo beam of light, mottled with shimmering stars, radiated down out of the night sky and blas
ted Myrk into the floor of the village square. A supernova of sparks and droplets of molten cobblestones flew upwards into the night air like a volcanic eruption, and the force of the blast sent Myrk Tramorgon somersaulting twenty feet upwards with flames and smoke trailing his scorched robe. He landed on the old stocks, cracking his spine on the oak framework. As Jode came to a sudden inertia-less halt in mid-air, about six feet off the ground, Myrk lay on his back, stunned for a moment, then sat up, patting out the flames on his arms and legs. His eyes met the eyes of his ancient adversary, and before Jode could discharge another deadly beam of kundalini energy, Myrk quickly crossed his forearms into an X and shouted, ‘Loki Tontus talontus epthaptha!’
A semi-transparent disc of blue light opened at the centre of the X – forming a shield for Myrk. Jode had to hold back, for the deadly kundalini beam would have bounced off the shield, perhaps killing or injuring the good wizard, maybe even destroying half of the village. Myrk levitated into the air as the shimmering blue shield slowly expanded until it covered him. Two fiery beams of orange light shone from Myrk’s eyes and raked Jode’s body like the military lasers of the future. Jode yelled out in agony as one of the beams sliced off his left hand. Myrk laughed hysterically, temporarily halting the beams, so he could see what he was inflicting with better clarity. Jode crashed to the ground, scarred by the beams, and grasped his severed hand. As he tried to place the hand against the wrist stump, Myrk hurled a sparkling incandescent purple globe from his palm, and it flew at Jode, then exploded, revealing an ominous black disc. Myrk backed away, and then flew off to a safe distance, just beyond the perimeter of the market square. Jode reunited his hand with his wrist, and then saw the black vortex disc spinning in the air, a few feet away. It was a miniature black hole, and it was ready to expand to the size of a football for a nanosecond. In that brief time period, Jode would be sucked into a world from which there was no escape. Not even light itself could escape, and it was such a weapon that had sucked Jode’s beloved Aislynn into oblivion when she had been assassinated by the Welsh witch Gormraith in 1910. Jode had tried every spell in the Hexanomicon to contact Aislynn, and every medium of power had told the magician that there was an impenetrable dimension preventing any communication with his lost love. Jode flew up into the sky, away from the black hole, faster than the speed of sound. A sonic boom thundered through the sky, and at 18,000 feet the magician hit something that almost knocked him unconscious. It was an Avro Lancaster Bomber, about to embark on a top-secret reconnaissance mission over Berlin, but now Jode had accidentally smashed through the fuselage of the plane and the severed tail was falling through the night with a young tail-gunner, staring through the Perspex bubble of his shooting nest with a surprisingly calm expression behind his leaking oxygen mask. The Lancaster dived down through the night, out of control, falling in a spiral towards a wood on the outskirts of Chelmsford. The parachutes of the crew blossomed one after the other, but the poor tail-gunner, flight sergeant Alan Wilson, had had no room to store his chute in the crowded turret, just four Browning machine guns and rounds of ammunition. He knew he was as good as dead and such was his stiff upper-lip nature, he mentally calculated how, plummeting from 18,000 feet, he had just under a minute and a half before he hit the ground, which, from this height, resembled a rumpled moonlit patchwork counterpane. Then he saw Jode, in his outlandish flapping robes, appear at the Perspex bubble. Flight Sergeant Wilson recoiled in shock, and Jode carried the Perspex bubble and the remains of the turret safely down to earth. ‘I’m sorry about your plane,’ he told Wilson, and then rocketed into the night sky. He came down in the market square and saw the hole in the ground where Myrk’s miniature black hole had imploded and sucked up the cobblestones into a vortex the size of a pea. Myrk was nowhere to be seen, and for a while, Jode thought the revived Lord of Darkness had gone to resurrect the six other lords who had been bound in chains of meteoric iron and buried deep beneath the megaliths of Arjinfort (which we know as Stonehenge) many thousands of years ago. Just as Jode readied himself to fly through the night to Arjinfort, he felt two successive tremors shake the ground, and his third eye urged him to turn around to an impending danger. Myrk had enlarged his entire body and the robes he wore, so he was now fifty feet in height. ‘Loki, Lord of Malice,’ boomed Myrk’s voice, ‘I thank thee for investing thy power in me!’
The giant then pointed a huge forefinger at Jode. A glowing green and violet aura blazed from Jode’s body and coalesced into a beam which radiated to Myrk’s pointed finger. Jode collapsed, exhausted as his very life force was drawn out of his body by Myrk, whose eyes now shone with an unearthly red fire. Myrk was much more advanced then Jode had bargained for, for the life-force siphoning hex was known only to several of the higher wizards, and once the spell was initiated it killed within seconds. Jode knew no way to counteract the hex either. He thought of little Christopher Glazenby, and muttered, ‘I’ve let you down,’ as his life ebbed away. Jode fell to his knees, too weak to move a limb, and Myrk stopped drawing power, because he wanted to end Jode’s life in a most satisfying way. He placed his giant foot over the old man’s body. ‘I’ll crush you like an insect Jode!’ Myrk promised, with crimson rays shining from his hate-filled eyes. ‘You’re going to Avalon now!’ said Myrk, and he raised his foot, ready to stomp the body of Jode into the ground, when a voice screamed, ‘Stop it you coward!’ somewhere in the market square. Myrk stomped his foot down next to Jode’s inert body. He had decided to postpone the crushing until he had dealt with the impudent human. He turned and saw a clergyman standing there in his black attire and white collar. It was the 35-year-old Reverend Frost of nearby St Mary’s Church.
‘What are you?’ Myrk asked, gritting his teeth, outraged at the puny human’s audacity.
Jode, meanwhile, was reaching out in his mind for his long-dead mentor, Merlin, who now existed in Summerland, one of the many planes of the Afterlife. Jode saw the old bearded face of his teacher slowly appear in his mind’s eye. The legendary magician slowly recited a complex spell to his old pupil.
‘Well, I’m a Reverend by day,’ Frost told the giant, confidently standing his ground with folded arms, ‘but by night I’m a warlock.’
Myrk let out a growl of impatience and was about to zap the cleric to atoms, when Frost suddenly thrust his arms forward. Two brilliant flares of blue light flew from the Reverend’s hands and struck each of Myrk’s eyes, blinding him for a moment. The gargantuan wizard stumbled backwards, crying in agony as he held his hands over his stinging eyes. His foot narrowly missed Jode.
‘I am Luminatis!’ the Reverend’s short mousy hair became darker, and longer, until it was shoulder length. His dog collar vanished, and he was suddenly clad in dark blue robes and a long black satin cape. He flew into the air and circled Myrk once, raking his body with a bright amber ray that issued from the middle finger of his right hand. The colossal wizard screamed. Luminatis swooped down and picked up Jode, then flew off towards the north, towards the cover of woodland. Myrk recovered and returned to his normal size. His body bristled and crackled with vril energy. He raised his arms and ascended vertically like a sky-rocket, then halted in the sky, thousands of feet above the sleepy English county. Myrk squinted, and through telescopic vision he eventually saw Luminatis fleeing at treetop level far below. Myrk created a sonic boom across the star-speckled heavens as he flew down to his prey at twice the speed of sound. Jode was slowly recovering from having most of his life-force sucked out of his body, and as he saw Myrk descending, he struggled free from the arms of Luminatis, intending to protect the warlock, but instead he found he was unable to even levitate, and he fell into the dark wood below. Myrk slammed into Luminatis, and the two wizards landed in a clearing. Myrk was now enveloped with a brilliant red aura, and he foamed at the mouth, such was the anger he felt at the upstart wizard who had tried to blind him. As Luminatis awoke in a daze, Myrk seized him by the ankles, and began to swing him round at an incredible speed. The woodland whistled from the re
sulting vortex. With expert timing, Myrk released Luminatis, and the unfortunate wizard was launched up into the sky at a velocity of over 280,000 miles per hour. The atmospheric friction turned the good warlock into a meteoric fireball, and just over an hour after he was thrown into space, his lifeless body smashed into the moon, creating a minor lunar crater. In the meantime, Jode hid in the wood as he recovered his powers, and Myrk searched for his ancient foe, using magic to scan the woodland through the eyes of owls and other nocturnal creatures. At last, Jode had recovered, and he unleashed beams laden with the destructive power of an atomic bomb. Myrk was taken by surprise and fell smoking out of the sky, trailing sparks. He soon recovered and the two warlocks engaged in a dog fight in the skies over the countryside. The high-magic duel came full circle when the Myrk and Jode fell from the sky with their hands around each other’s throat, and crashed through a windmill on the outskirts of Blackmere. The terrified villagers saw multicoloured flashes light up the interior of the wrecked windmill. The sails of the mill caught fire, and there was an explosion of splintered wood and sparks as the millstone burst out of the wooden structure and rolled down the hill towards a crowd of terror-stricken onlookers. Jode ran from the windmill after the huge millstone. The people of the crowd fell over one another in blind panic, and when the millstone was almost upon them, it suddenly halted – then reversed. It struck Jode, knocking him to the ground, and it rolled over his left arm, crushing it flat. Myrk laughed, traced a circle in the air with his forefinger, and the millstone correspondingly spun around and headed back towards Jode, who was now sitting up, clutching his mashed arm with a look of intense agony on his face. He raised his intact arm and sizzling bolts of blue fire issued from his fingers and blasted the millstone until it cracked and fell apart. Myrk was obscured by the thick smoke from the burning windmill, which was now fully ablaze, and Jode uttered a recuperative spell through gritted teeth. His arm was gradually regenerated.
