The North Valley Grimoire

by Blake Northcott

  “No idea, but I’m paranoid, in case you haven’t noticed. If you dumb asses were able to follow the breadcrumbs to my front door, someone else might pick up the trail. Which means I need to know what Jackson was into—besides the Satanic cult shit.”

  Calista nodded tentatively, but wasn’t sure what The Cobbler was asking. What could she say that she hadn’t already revealed?

  “Come on,” The Cobbler said. “Anything. If you two have been investigating Jackson’s death you must know more than this.”

  She wasn’t about to disclose that the tattoo on her back was actually a magick sigil, or the fun fact about how it had murdered her poli-sci teacher. And she definitely wasn’t going to tell him about Jackson’s grimoire.

  If there was another kernel of usable data in her corroded hard drive of a memory, she wasn’t able to extract it … until the two words her mother said in prison suddenly became relevant.

  “Wait,” Calista said, “does the term ‘Cleansing Protocol’ mean anything to you?”

  Wyatt rubbed his forehead, eyes clenched shut. “Really? You waited until now to bring this up?” He twirled back to his keyboard. Wyatt didn’t type so much as he composed, nimble fingers stroking each key with rhythmic precision. Before long he’d broken through the back door of a website Calista assumed he could get arrested for accessing, and opened a plain text document. It was a glossary; an alphabetized list of veiled government speak, with acronyms, and shorthand, and complex numerical codes to relay signals.

  “It’s all right here.” Wyatt poked the monitor so hard it tipped backward, nearly toppling off his desk. “Cleansing Protocol is what spooks use to destroy evidence. No prints, no fibers. Then the local PD and fire department are instructed to rule it an accident, so no one ever suspects a thing. It’s only for extreme situations.”

  She struggled to push her next words past the lump in her throat. “My mom mentioned ‘Cleansing Protocol’ when I visited her in prison. Right before they dragged her off.”

  “How did your mom know about Cleansing Protocol?” Wyatt asked.

  “She’s government. Well, was government. Not anymore.”

  “So Jackson planned to spring your mom, and at the same time, she thinks he was being targeted … maybe the feds caught wind of Jackson’s plan?” Wyatt took a beat to analyze his hypothesis. “No, that wouldn’t be enough. Rubbing out a whole family seems excessive for someone who hadn’t committed a crime yet. Did you find anything else of his?”

  Calista shook her head and mumbled ‘no,’ bleary eyes scanning the concrete floor. She could feel the heat of Wyatt’s glare. He knew she was holding back.

  Without explanation The Cobbler stood, shouldered his way past Kaz and searched through a water-stained cardboard box on a nearby table. He turned and extended his hands. In each palm was a disposable plastic phone.

  Calista crinkled her nose. “If I wanted a piece of garbage I’d go buy one from a dollar store.” Her tone came off snobbier than she intended, but despite everything she just learned, it still burnt her toast that The Cobbler had flattened her phone.

  “Not like these,” Wyatt explained. “These are untraceable, even from the NSA. You can talk and text openly, and my number is programmed into both. If you learn anything else, buzz me.”

  “So we’re sharing now?” Calista said flatly. “I thought you only worked for ‘paper’?”

  The Cobbler plopped back in his chair with a loud grunt, apparently exhausted from walking four paces. “Cash, information, secrets—it’s all currency. Keep me in the loop. If you tell me something I don’t already know, I might return the favor.”

  Calista and Kaz made their exit and Wyatt’s hulking metal door slammed behind them. They padded upstairs, slipped on their shoes and pushed open the battered screen door that led to the porch, all with a soundtrack of reggae music blaring in the background.

  The sky was starless, velvet black. They wandered towards the intersection while Calista texted a cab. “Still think I’m crazy?” she said absently. The gauzy blue glow from her new phone illuminated her face.

  Kaz ambled alongside her. “Wyatt was wrong. It wasn’t government tech. That poor old man turning to dust … that was magick, wasn’t it?”

  Calista nodded.

  “And the book Jackson left for you …”

  She doubled up on her nod. “Magick, too.”

  “I wonder if it’s too late to go back and pay The Cobbler for some fake IDs.” Kaz bent at the waist. He looked like he was about to throw up. “I suddenly need a drink.”

  Photocopying this handbook is strictly prohibited, but it is also impossible. Attempts to photograph or scan it will produce nothing more than blank white pages. Nothing is preventing you from reproducing it by hand, although that is also strictly prohibited. Digital copies of this book do not exist, and never will.

  This book has also been glamoured to prevent civilians from reading it; anyone without CIA L-clearance will see it as a microeconomics textbook written in Bulgarian.

  – FATHER Division Agent Handbook

  14. Brush Pass

  A SHRUNKEN MAN in a blue smock appeared at Malek’s side like an apparition, and he was nearly old enough to be one.

  “Ya need help with the blowers?” His rusty voice was bubbling over with the urge to be of assistance.

  “Just taking a look around,” Malek replied. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d visited a hardware shop. Back home they were small, intimate. This was a warehouse. A dozen snowblowers sat in a row, each sporting a canary-yellow price tag.

  The old man clapped Malek’s shoulder. “So you’re a Brit, are ya?”

  He absently flipped over one of the tags. “What gave it away?”

  “The accent! Ya here on vacation?”

  “Yes,” Malek said, pretending to scrutinize the two-year limited warranty on one of the pricier units. “I dressed in a three-piece suit, flew business class from Heathrow, and made haste to suburban Virginia so I could admire your fabulous selection of snow removal devices.”

  “Well, enjoy,” the man said cheerfully, as if he’d never been introduced to the concept of sarcasm. He tapped the friendly name badge pinned to his smock. “I’m Bob. Holler if ya need me.”

  The apparition faded out of view as another man strolled through the aisle. He was young and olive skinned, wrapped in a thick navy jacket with a fur-lined hood. A pencil-thin band of hair outlined his jaw, and a bright red baseball cap was pulled low, concealing his eyes. He ran his hand along one of the blowers.

  “Frederick,” Malek said with a smile, “you’re looking well. Healthy. And much younger than usual.”

  “You don’t know what I really look like,” Frederick mumbled.

  “True, but this new glamour you’ve crafted has a certain je ne sais quoi. The cheekbones are exquisite.”

  Frederick scanned the empty aisle, eyes swiveling rapidly from side to side. “You’re awfully comfortable strutting around without a face on. Not worried about being made?”

  “Recognized?” Malek said. “By whom, exactly? It’s midday, and we’re in the Outdoor Living section.” He would’ve rather met in more comfortable surroundings, but Frederick was twitchy, to say the least. A hardware shop was a step up from The Pit in terms of aesthetics, but that wasn’t much cause for celebration.

  Frederick shook his head. “You F-division cowboys sure have swagger. I’d be shitting bricks if I were doing business in public without a mask.”

  “Thank you for that lovely visual. Mind if we begin?”

  “It’s your dime,” Frederick said. “Shoot.” He pivoted to the adjacent aisle and pulled a snow shovel from a cardboard display.

  Malek snapped a yellow floppy disk from his inside pocket and held it aloft, making no effort at discretion. “I found this with a single file on it. A photograph of a map, covered in Ley Lines.”

  Frederick gave the disk a cursory glance. “Looks original. Back when surveillance was a lot more lax, age
nts snuck things out of The Pentagon and sold them on the black market. It happened so often they even had a name for it: we called them ‘lost socks.’ Disks, maps, schematics, some of the smaller DARPA weapons—anything pocket-sized that wasn’t nailed down had a habit of disappearing. Lost Socks fetch six figures on the market, even back in the day. Security is tight as a drum now, though. Especially in The Closet.”

  “The Closet?” Malek said. “You certainly have my attention now, Frederick.” He enjoyed the intriguing little nicknames that insiders gave everything at The Pentagon.

  “The CIA’s storage locker for non-digital assets. Back in my day you could get in with a key. Can you believe that? Now it’s practically Fort Knox. No one gets access without Q clearance.”

  Though FATHER Division allowed its agents a generous amount of leeway—up to and including a license to kill whenever it was deemed mission-critical—the elusive Q clearance wasn’t among their perks. That was a privilege bestowed only to the most senior directors.

  “I looked up the other thing you asked about.” Frederick reached into his jacket and produced his cell phone, pulling it out just enough for Malek to glimpse the screen. There it was: a hand-drawn sigil of interlocking stars inside a perfect circle, just as it had appeared on Jackson’s desk.

  “This is old.” Frederick tucked his phone away before continuing. “Last seen in Great Britain around 1820. Scriptocasting was used to transfer the written word from one place to another. The aristocrats used it to get quick messages out to the colonies, like Regency Era Email. Apparently King George the Third thought it was the work of the devil and had all the original texts burned. The spell has been lost ever since, so whoever you got this from was either a globe-trotting archeologist and hit the jackpot with a lucky find, or they recreated it from scratch.”

  Curious. By all accounts, Jackson Carter had never left the country, and certainly couldn’t have randomly stumbled across the spell for scriptocasting on the internet. If such a spell were floating around the dark web, The Agency would have surely flagged and deleted it by now. Jackson shouldn’t have the spell at all … unless he’d been in contact with an exceedingly powerful Magnus level Scrivener. Or perhaps he’d become one himself.

  Malek chuckled under his breath.

  Frederick seemed suddenly unnerved. “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing,” Malek said. “It just doesn’t seem possible. Could a seventeen-year-old American football player actually have become …”

  “What?” Frederick cut in. “The next Nolan Foxcroft? Stranger shit has happened, especially when you’re smack dab on top of a convergence point. Some people have a knack.”

  “Do you know Foxcroft?”

  “Everyone knows Foxy from back in the day.” Frederick began miming with the shovel, pretending to scoop snow from a driveway. He was still committed to the bit, despite Malek’s refusal to play along. “Best tech guy the Pentagon ever had. Hell of a shortstop, too. Probably could’ve gone pro if he wasn’t a computer geek.”

  “Any idea where he might be?” Malek asked. “I mean, if you had to venture a guess?”

  Frederick let out a chuckle of his own. “Why, you wanna ring the bell and cash in? Might as well start playing the lottery, bud—you’d have a better chance at winning the Powerball than catching up with Foxy.”

  “Is that so?”

  Frederick dropped the shovel back in the display and turned to his client, removing his baseball cap. His small round eyes met Malek’s for the first time. “Let me give you a nickel’s worth of free advice: unless you have access to the greatest spell of all time—and I’m talking about some reality-breaking, Earth-shattering number that Houdini himself couldn’t have come up with—no one is getting their hands on Foxy. People that smart don’t get made.”

  “If he’s so smart, why did he have to flee the country in the first place?”

  Frederick pulled his hat low and flipped his hood overtop. “I gotta run. If you need more, you have my number.”

  “Wait,” Malek said, “Houdini knew magick? Real magick?”

  “I overheard you boys chatting,” a rusty voice said. “You all work at the Pentagon? And what’s all this about magic?”

  The apparition had re-appeared.

  “No,” Malek said to the old man, “We don’t know anything about magick. As a matter of fact, we’re avid snowblower enthusiasts.” He gestured to Frederick, who instinctively turned his back. “My dear friend is writing a piece for the local paper.”

  “Is that so?” Bob said with genuine interest.

  “Indeed. And you never heard the words ‘Pentagon’, or ‘magick’ escape our lips.” Malek yanked back his sleeve and reached for his watch, twisting a dial around the face. It softly click, click, clicked as he spoke. “You never saw me,” he said evenly, “and you never saw my associate.”

  Bob’s milky eyes widened, pupils blown. “No,” he said, scratching at his temple. “No, I didn’t hear a thing. Good luck with the article, boys.” Bob stumbled away like he was two days into a bender, barely able to keep his legs beneath him.

  It was a quick compulsion charm, only effective against the feeble minded. Anything more substantial would require a hex, and those require time and energy to lock in place. But thanks to the esteemed Mr. Foxcroft’s technology, certain low-level spells can be unleashed on the fly should the situation arise.

  Frederick shook his head as he walked away. “F-Division. Goddamned cowboys.”

  Mentors don’t always teach. Sometimes they just remind you of what you already know at the moment you need it. These epiphanies can feel like magick, but more often than not it just means you’re paying attention.

  – Passage in The North Valley Grimoire

  15. Keeping Friends Close

  THE HAWTHORNE ACADEMY was blanketed with a crisp sheet of linen snow, wind whistling through the skeletons of trees that dotted the campus. The last history class before winter break was about to begin, if Mr. Beznik ever planned to show up.

  It was Thursday, and the room buzzed with the pre-weekend energy of students making plans; some revving their engines in anticipation of two weeks without school, others fretting over the impending mid-terms that loomed a few days before Christmas.

  Mr. Beznik was running five minutes late. Tardiness was a big no-no where students were concerned, and for teachers, it was all but unheard of. There was a rule—an urban legend of sorts—that allowed students to leave without penalty if fifteen minutes of a class elapsed and no one had shown up to teach it. This dream scenario had never presented itself during Calista’s academic career, but there’s a first time for everything.

  Beckett sat behind her, face pressed into an open textbook, glasses askew. He’d nodded off again. Cramming for mid-terms had exhausted him to the point of narcolepsy; earlier in the week, he’d hilariously fallen asleep in gym while stooping to tie his shoe. He teetered forward and curled into the fetal position while the game went on around him, running shoes squeaking on the hardwood as they raced by. A basketball dribbling off his forehead jolted him from his slumber. “Wakey wakey, princess,” coach Martinez shouted. “Catch up on your beauty sleep at home!”

  Calista had spent her share of late nights cramming as well, but not for mid-terms. Ever since her visit with The Cobbler, she’d become obsessed with the grimoire. Unfortunately, it read like the diary of a madman. Sure, it was more coherent now that she was reading Jackson’s notes in English and not the alien script that existed before, but the narrative didn’t flow any smoother. It was still a sketchbook of random images, spliced with a hodgepodge of magickal recipes requiring ingredients she couldn’t fathom how he’d collected (using a dealer or not, how does someone in Virginia get a petal from a corpse flower—a carrion plant found in the tropical rainforests of Indonesia?) And piled atop that jumbled mess was a lexicon of words that didn’t exist (like ‘vivescrivener’ and ‘scriptocasting’), other words she had to look up (like ‘astroplaning’) and refer
ences to arcane relics that were hidden in obscure parts of the world (such as the Invictum Amulet, last seen in a Bavarian forest circa seventeen-sixty-whatever).

  When did Jackson get the time to do all this stealthy recon work and detailed research? When did he sleep?

  Baffled as she was, her initial foray into the grimoire wasn’t a complete wash. After some investigation, a portion of Jackson’s back-story began to unfold, explaining his meteoric rise in athletic ability. Some of his earliest notes contained enchantments he described as ‘corpohancers’, infusing him with speed and strength, transforming him from a scrawny bookworm into a gridiron-dominating beast. He wrote about the changes as they overtook him: hawk-like vision; reflexes that allowed him to move in full-speed while those around him seemed to wade laboriously through a viscous gel; regeneration that painlessly healed cuts, bruises, and mended broken bones.

  From what Calista could deduce, magick worked in stages. On the ground floor were somatic gestures: complex hand movements that unleashed small doses of wizardry. These were tricks used to dazzle or confuse, like bending a spectrum around a small object, masking it from sight. Aside from showing off—or tossing some legit magick into a carnival-style magic show—they didn’t serve much of a purpose.

  Next-level magick was tougher to pull off. Elemental spells involved amulets or incantations, but their power source—the catalyst—often came from sigils. And how you drew a sigil was as important as the sigil itself. Inks and paints are organic, mixed from Earth’s natural components, lending balance and stability. It’s been that way for millennia: scribe the design, say the words, and things happened. Simple in theory, but impossible to conjure without acute self-awareness.

  Then there was another level; not a level above, but a shadowy reflection of its Elemental counterpart. While many of the designs shared similarities, a sigil drawn with blood produced a completely different effect—both in the spell and the caster. The result was an unbridled burst of energy, like a live wire snapping out of control, and the sensation was blissfully intoxicating. The nature of Elemental magick kept it out of reach from all but the most disciplined, but Blood magick was both easier to conjure, and infinitely more addictive. Jackson feared he could never quit dabbling once he’d begun.