Magus

by R H Frye

  Maraydel turned the body of the slave to crawl from under the altar just as Carol began to scream for help once more. He had to admire her spirit, but she must be silenced, and quickly. He had waited too long for this opportunity to lose it, so he snatched the rope beneath the altar that circled her throat and pulled gently until her screams were choked off. He maintained the pressure on the rope for a few more seconds before releasing it. Carol was still coughing and gasping for air as Maraydel caused Danny to crawl out from beneath the altar.

  Still using Danny as the vessel of his consciousness, Maraydel turned and strode rapidly to where the couple's belongings lay in a pile. He picked up Carol's tee shirt from the previous day and hurried back to the altar. Without a word, he grabbed her chin and forced her mouth open wide, then stuffed a large portion of the shirt in her mouth, stifling the protest she had just begun. Her terrified eyes stared up at the possessed body of her lover, pleading for her release. Briefly, Maraydel considered punishing her, but decided to waste no more time. He was eager to feel his own flesh living and breathing again. Also, as unlikely as it seemed, her cries could have been heard, and he was in no mood for a confrontation, at least until he was up and about once more. There would be plenty of time to punish the woman then.

  It was time to complete the ritual.

  Maraydel grasped the hunting knife firmly in Danny's hands and used Danny's voice to chant in a language that predated all the languages known to modern historians. Tears rolled from Carol's eyes and her chest heaved as she panted in terror. Slowly, the knife descended to the skin between her breasts. As the tip of the knife pierced her pale skin, the spell settled into her body. Though her eyes were alive and terrified, her body relaxed, and her breathing became slow and steady.

  As blood began to flow, Maraydel's manipulations of Danny's body became quick and precise, and the chanting increased in tempo. With shallow cuts and the skill of a surgeon, he reproduced the arcane inscriptions from the altar on the smooth, warm skin over her sternum, then on the flesh of her wrists and shins. As the first droplets of blood fell into each inscription on the altar, those inscriptions began to glow with a hellish red light. When the inscriptions were all completed on Carol's skin, he drove the knife completely through each wrist, then sliced deeply into the flesh along both her calves. Blood poured from these wounds and began to collect beneath her in the pentagram. Maraydel paused until the pentagram was filled, then completed the ritual by ending the incantation as he severed her carotid artery.

  Maraydel caused Danny's body to step away from the altar in order to see the beginning of his own restoration. As the first drops of Carol's blood fell from the funnel in the pentagram to land on Maraydel's medallion, the gems on the serpent began to pulse with an eerie light. The blood seemed to be absorbed somehow into the medallion, and the light pulsed brighter. In seconds, the bracelets about his wrists and ankles began to pulse with the same bright light. And as the girl’s heart pumped one last time, the black and shriveled remains of his own heart swelled and took on the shape, form, and function of a healthy, human heart. With the first beat of his own heart, Maraydel's presence left Danny's body, which collapsed beside the altar.

  Danny awakened to a world of pain. Every muscle in his body ached. His feet and hands felt raw. His head throbbed with an ache that was worse than any pain he had ever experienced. On top of everything else, he seemed to be lying naked on freshly turned earth.

  What the hell is going on? The last thing he could remember was the feel of Carol's body in his hands. She had been lying naked beside him with her long brown hair spread over her pillow and her hazel eyes staring lovingly into his own eyes. He had been just about to (finally!) roll over between her long, tanned legs when he had been…invaded, for lack of a better word.

  The feeling had been horrible, although he knew he would never be able to adequately describe it. It had been something like driving a car, having a stranger somehow materialize inside the car, forcing you to pull over, locking you in the trunk, and then stealing the car. Only the car was his body. He had still had some awareness that his body was doing things, but he had no idea what, no matter how he had fought to escape and regain control.

  Danny opened his eyes, but immediately wished he had not. The sight before his eyes was horrible, yet somehow fascinating, and decidedly unbelievable. It was strangely like the movie Hollow Man, with Kevin Bacon, when the ape became visible again. Before his eyes, arteries and veins were growing on a skeleton. As he scrambled backwards up the raw earth slope that he had been lying on, muscle and sinew began to appear. However, he missed the rest of the transformation as his eye fell upon the altar and the shape lying on it.

  Initially Danny's brain refused to accept what his eyes were seeing. Then the awful truth hit home. "Carol…?" he whispered as he stumbled to his feet and raced to the altar. "Oh God, Carol, no!" he wailed as he bent to clutch her still form. As his hand reached to caress her cheek, Danny noticed the blood on his hands for the first time.

  He reeled backwards, then stumbled on the raw earth slope and sat down hard. He stared at the blood on his hands. Was it possible? Had he truly done this horrible, horrible thing? As he looked up slowly towards the altar again, his eyes passed his hunting knife where it had fallen before settling on the shape beneath the altar.

  Suddenly Danny understood at least a little of what had happened. That…that monster had somehow used him to butcher the only girl he had ever loved. And he knew no one would ever believe that. If he were lucky, the courts would execute him. He did not want to live with this grief and guilt anyway. But since his life was effectively over, the least he could do was kill the bastard that had murdered his beautiful Carol. Danny bent to grab the knife and crawled forward towards the man under the altar.

  Maraydel snapped back into his own form and was instantly immersed in an ecstasy of pain. He could feel each vessel, each cell, and each nerve as they were restored. The feeling was an itching, burning agony that he reveled in, since the pain was much to be preferred to the long years of his imprisonment. And as the agony passed through him, it was followed immediately by a blessed sense of cool relief.

  As soon as his lungs reformed, he gasped in his first, sweet breath in ages. He felt his chest expand as he began to breathe. The sensation was so sweet that he barely noticed the pain as his skin grew and his hair followed. His eyelids felt a bit strange until his eyes rapidly grew in to fill the sockets.

  Finally, the process was complete. He took a deep breath and smiled a cruel and satisfied smile. He had done it. He was alive! After all the years, he was alive and free to walk the world once more!

  His exultation was short-lived, for suddenly he heard a snarled word, "Murderer!” in the language he had just learned. Maraydel had forgotten the young man whose body he had enslaved! He snapped his eyes open to see a knife descending towards his chest. He barked one sharp word in the language of power that the world had forgotten for so long. The knife stopped its descent a hair's breadth from his chest. The young man crouched frozen above him, trembling in his fury and desperate, unsatisfied thirst for revenge.

  Maraydel's cruel, satisfied smile returned. He reached up and shoved the slave roughly to his back, then crawled from beneath the altar and stood to tower over the helpless figure on the ground at his feet.

  He considered briefly what to do with the young man. He could simply kill him, but perhaps he would be more useful alive. Maraydel had learned much from the link they had shared, but he still found the ways of this era to be strange. Perhaps, if an understanding could be reached and the proper bindings fashioned, he could have his first servant in ages. His decision made, he altered the spell to allow the young man to speak.

  "You've done me a service, and I offer you something in return, slave."

  "Fuck you, you murdering bastard! If you want to do something for me, cut your own throat!" Danny spat at him. "Or let me go and I'll do it myself."

  "Surely you can at lea
st hear me out. If you'd have your girl alive and breathing once more, you should definitely listen. You must know by now that I have some power over life and death."

  Danny bit back a hot reply. What if the murdering shit was telling the truth? What if he could bring Carol back? Didn't he owe it to her to at least listen? Besides, he was fresh out of other options. And maybe, just maybe, the bastard would make a mistake and give him a chance to get his revenge. "What's your offer?" he growled.

  "Agree to serve me. Teach me about this 'modern' world. Willingly undergo the rituals to bind you to my service, and I will bring your Carol back to life. You will both serve me, but you will both live. Serve me well, and in time you may even become my apprentices. But refuse this offer, and you will certainly die. What will it be, slave? Make your decision quickly, for I am eager to be about in this age."

  Danny thought it over. His decision did not take long. What other choice did he have? He had everything to gain and nothing more to lose. And if the fucker really did manage to bring Carol back, well then, all bets were off. He'd better be watching his ass, because I'll be looking for payback, Danny thought.

  "I guess I'm in," Danny told the monster standing over him.

  "Excellent." Maraydel smiled. "But before I free you, I'll need just a bit of your blood."

  Chapter 1

  John Raintree had not had a good day.

  The plumbing contractor, Ron Williams, who was already a week late roughing in the pipes on the Martin house, had the nerve to call and ask for another week. John had let him know in no uncertain terms that the plumbing would be finished by the end of the following week or Williams would lose his contract. Until the rough plumbing was finished, John's drywall team did not have a thing to do, and his best man was threatening to quit if John could not keep him busy.

  As soon as John finished the call to Williams, the phone rang again. Richard Martin (John preferred to think of him as Dick, since the name pretty much summed up the man's character) was calling to complain about the delays in finishing his "dream house," as if John could control the fact that a rainy El Nino winter had delayed his masons for over a month. Of course, "Dick" did not want to hear about the weather. The man made a habit of calling at least once a week to harass John about the delays.

  With all the problems of the long day, John figured he deserved a good night's sleep, so he came home, peeled off his dirty work clothes, pitched the clothes in a corner, and collapsed onto his bed. He was asleep almost before his head hit the pillow, but then the dreams had started.

  John had always been a very lucid dreamer, a fact that his crazy old grandfather had taken to mean that John was destined to one day become a great medicine man. John had quit believing in all that silly mumbo jumbo after his father drank himself into an early grave when his son was only 12 years old. The Cherokee Tribal Council sent John to live with his grandfather after his father died, but after years of arguing with the old man about John's refusal to learn the old ways and take up the family's responsibilities, he hit the road at age 16. He had made his way to Charlotte and landed a job as a carpenter's helper.

  Within a few years, John had worked his way up to a position as the foreman of his own crew. Only a year later, he used his savings to start his own construction company, Raintree Contracting. Now, over a decade later, Raintree Contracting was one of the most sought-after construction companies in the Charlotte and Lake Norman areas. At 30 years old, John Raintree was easily one of the most prosperous sole proprietors in western North Carolina.

  John had only returned to the reservation twice in the last 14 years, and both times his grandfather had begged him to come home and take up the work of his forefathers. John had refused. He had offered to build a new house for the old man, but his grandfather would not hear of it, saying he had all he needed other than someone to follow in his footsteps. At the end of both return trips, John and his grandfather had parted with harsh words between them. After the seconds trip back, over 5 years before, John had given up on the crazy old man and vowed never to return again. He considered that portion of his life closed.

  But sometimes John still had odd, and often disturbing, dreams. For the most part he ignored these dreams, but occasionally they would haunt him for days on end. And this night's dreams promised to be hard to shake.

  The first dream was one that John had dreamt periodically for as long as he could remember.

  He was soaring above a range of mountains. Below him, he could see a forest that spread over all the peaks and valleys of this mountain range with one exception. On one ridge, rings of standing stones surrounded a huge slab of rock that was carved with strange symbols. The slab was the color of dried blood. A stream flowed from a spring in a draw to one side of the ridge.

  A man, cloaked sometimes in fire and sometimes in blood, stood by the blood red altar. On the ridges surrounding the peak with the standing stones, John could make out shapes moving in the trees. Some of the shapes were animals, some were human, and others seemed to shift back and forth from human to animal and back again.

  A great chanting began in the forest surrounding the lone peak. Suddenly, a great wave of birds and beasts broke from the forest and rushed for the fiery figure standing alone beside the stone slab. The figure raised a staff in his hands and huge orbs of flame rocketed from the staff to crash into the animals rushing towards him.

  The birds, great flocks of eagles, hawks, crows, and owls, made it to the rings of stones, only to crash headlong into some unseen barrier in the air. A sudden gale seemed to radiate outward from the lone man, and the birds that were still in the air were flung outwards, flapping furiously and screeching their outrage into the teeth of the traitorous winds.

  On the ground, great packs of wolves rushed towards the man, growling and barking. Lumbering bears, wild boars with evil tusks, and sleek foxes joined the wolves. The lone man shouted words in some unknown tongue, gestured with his staff, and suddenly great black clouds formed overhead. Lightning fell from the sky to kill the animals rushing up the slope towards the standing stones.

  Amidst the forest, John could now see braves with war paint nocking arrows to loose at the horrible figure standing alone on the hill. Beside a few of these braves he could see shapes that kept shifting between animal and man. As men, the shifting figures reached glowing hands towards the arrows of the nearby braves. The arrows began to glow with a brilliant white light, and the braves bent their bows and released these few arrows towards the figure surrounded by the stones.

  The host of arrows that were not glowing bounced harmlessly from the same barrier that had spoiled the attack of the birds. Several of the glowing arrows slipped through the barrier, but only two were true in their aim. These two crashed into the fiery figure with devastating effect. One pierced the left lung. The other sliced the figure's thigh, and blood began to fountain from the wound.

  The stricken man managed to gasp a few words in a strange language before falling to the earth beside the slab of rock. As the words passed his lips, a raging wall of fire exploded outward from the stones. Many of the beasts rushing towards the man died instantly. Only a relative few that had not yet left the forest managed to escape the flaming death rushing towards them.

  Many of the braves were also slain, and only one of the strange figures that had lent their power to the arrows managed to escape the worst of the fire. Even the one that escaped was burned severely in places. Despite his injuries, he called out, and an uninjured brave came to help him. The pair slowly picked their way through the charred animal corpses littering the hillside outside the stones. At last, they reached the figure lying by the slab. The burnt man handed his enemy’s staff to the brave while whispering instructions, then pulled a flint knife and stabbed the fiery figure through the throat.

  Like many times before, John snapped awake at this point in the dream. As always, he was trembling from the sheer horror of the dream, and for a moment he could smell the stench of burned flesh. He rolle
d out of bed, staggered to the bathroom, and turned on the cold water in the sink. He doused his face with cold water and ran his damp hands through his hair.

  John looked in the mirror above the sink and saw the same lean features there as always, although he looked a bit pale under his naturally tanned skin. The face looking back at him was one that women found attractive in spite of the crow's feet he had gained around the eyes from a life spent squinting in the bright sun as he worked outdoors. His black hair was cropped short to keep it out of his way while he worked. His body was lean and strong from many long days of hard work.

  "God I'm tired of that fucking dream," he sighed as he turned from the mirror and grabbed a hand towel to dry his face and hands. He draped the towel back over the towel rack before wearily making his way back to bed. As he returned to bed, he thought of the time as a child when he had related the dream to his grandfather. His grandfather had grown excited and started to babble some nonsense about the dream being more than a dream.

  "What you saw really happened, Johnny. Long ago, our people were little more than toys to amuse a very powerful man. This man had terrible powers. He could control the elements. Worse, it is said that he could control men from inside their own minds. He could bend the will of the strongest warriors to his task. He was a creature driven by lust and power. Directly, and through others, this man did terrible things. He was not alone in his powers, but he was the last and the worst. Many people died to stop him, and that victory was costly."

  "What do you mean, Grandfather?"

  "Back then, our people had their own magic, different from that man's, but very strong. During the battle in your vision, do you remember the shapes that flowed between man and beast?"

  A much younger John had nodded.

  "Those shapes were our medicine men. They had the magic of the beasts and of the land. They knew the secrets of the plants and animals of the forests. They could heal with the aid of the spirits and certain plants and herbs. They were friends with the forest creatures and could call those animals to do their bidding. The most wise and powerful among them knew how to take the shapes of certain animals to take advantage of their strengths."