by Andrew Peed
“Hey!” Waylon said, pointing at her.
“Yes, I’m a witch,” the old woman said in a deadpan voice.
“We caught an orc in the park, and we need to hand him over,” Kaylie said, motioning toward Ingalk.
Waylon let Kaylie handle the prisoner transfer and looked around the room some more. Over the check-in window there was a plaque that read Magic is a privilege, not a right.
What have I gotten myself into? thought Waylon.
~//~
Two Mystical officers came out from the back of the building. One of them took Ingalk away. The other took Kaylie back to answer some questions while Waylon was asked to wait in the lobby. Kaylie gave Alonzo to Waylon to hold while she was in the back.
Kaylie followed the officer back to an interrogation room. She was led inside and sat down. This wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last time that she had to sit in one of these rooms. The officer left her for a moment and came back with a file that was about two inches thick. She always recognized her file.
“Hello, Mrs. Aruamt,” the officer said, sitting down across from her. Mystical Authority officers always wore a nice suit as a uniform. They were also given glasses that allowed them to see more magical information about what they were looking at.
“Hello,” Kaylie said with a smile.
“I’ve taken a moment to look over your file,” the officer said, opening it to a random page.
“Yes, sir,” Kaylie said with an understanding nod.
“Bit of bad business about your husband and daughter,” the officer said as he turned the pages slowly.
“Is there a point to this?” Kaylie asked.
“Actually, there is. Do you know what happened to this city’s last reaper?” he asked.
“No.” Kaylie shook her head. “But from what I’ve gathered, it wasn’t good.”
“See, that’s the thing. None of the other magical departments in the city know. He vanished. The other reapers are refusing to talk about it,” he said as he leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. “It makes the other departments nervous.”
“Look, I’m the lowest of the low when it comes to the reapers. Just look at my file. I don’t even know the last guy’s name.” Kaylie said with a sigh.
“Luthar Grymm,” the officer said. “From what I’ve been told, he was appointed a grandmaster reaper just before whatever happened, happened.”
“I promise, if I knew anything, I would tell you,” Kaylie said, and it was a lie, but he didn’t need to know that. The sweet smell of her lie oozed from her own mouth, but if that orc was being controlled by a grandmaster reaper, lying to the cops was the least of her problems. There were only two levels above grandmaster: supreme reaper and supreme-master reaper.
The officer sat in silence and contemplated Kaylie for a moment. He leaned forward a few times and examined some of the pages of her file. Every piece of information about her was in that file because of what had happened with her family.
“You’re free to go, but it would be in your best interest to stay in touch.” The officer held out a card. When Kaylie took it, there was nothing on it but a silver line of ink. She palmed the card and put it in her pocket.
“Thank you,” she said with a nod and left the room.
Kaylie found Waylon sitting in the lobby petting the hellhound as if it were any old puppy. As she walked by, she grabbed his wrist and pulled him toward the exit.
“What are they going to do with Ingalk?” Waylon asked, stumbling to keep up and hold on to the puppy.
“I don’t know,” Kaylie said in frustration.
“Well, what was all that about, then?” Waylon asked with concern.
“I don’t want to talk about it right now. Let’s just go home,” she said when they were outside of the station standing on the street. Ice began to fall from the thick clouds.
“All right. Let’s get back to the car and we can go,” Waylon said, not pushing.
“Do you remember clearly in your mind where you parked the car?” Kaylie asked.
“Sure, why?” he asked with a shrug.
“Picture it,” Kaylie said. She put her hands on his shoulders and closed her eyes. There was a loud whooshing sound, and the air pressure around them changed. When Waylon opened his eyes, they were standing outside of his car.
“This is insane,” mumbled Waylon.
They both got into the car. Waylon put Alonzo in the back seat. For a few minutes, the cute hellhound circled like any other dog and found a comfortable spot to lie down.
Waylon started the car and drove away from the hospital’s employee parking area, heading toward the house.
Kaylie pulled her legs up onto the seat with her. Resting her chin on her knees, she said nothing, a mixture of anger, frustration, and sadness swirling through her. Waylon seemed to be struggling with whether to ask her what was wrong, but in the end, he left her alone.
He reached over and turned the radio on. A loud Christmas song filled the car, and they elected not to talk as he drove.
Chapter 11: A Book Named Erwin
Waylon sat in his living room with his head in his hands. Three feet from him, playing like any normal puppy, was an actual hellhound. His eyes had adjusted, and he could see the animal’s true form in its shadow.
After returning to Dalton Place, Kaylie had politely dismissed herself so that she could retire to be alone in her room. Waylon was still very interested in why she was so upset after the meeting with the Mystical Authorities. But having only known her for a couple of days, Waylon did not need to pry into things that were not his business.
Waylon was still trying with all his brain power to wrap his mind around the fact that he was a warlock. What did that even mean? Was he supposed to call upon demons for power? He did know that he could do magic, and powerful magic at that. He had seen himself do it—he just hadn’t known what it was. There was no doubt in his mind that it was all as real as the nose on his face.
With a deep sigh, he resolved that he was not going to get anywhere just sitting on the couch staring at his hands. He stood up and turned to leave the living room.
“Be good, please,” he asked of Alonzo, who could do lord knew what to the house while unsupervised.
Walking upstairs, he didn’t go to his room. Instead he went to a room of the house that he had only been inside of twice in his life and had actively avoided for the last two years.
His grandfather’s bedroom.
When his grandfather had died it was so sudden that Waylon didn’t know what had happened. He was in his eighties, so everyone told him that it was to be expected. But Waylon knew his grandfather; he’d lived with him for years. He may have been in his eighties, but he looked like he was in his fifties and acted like he was in his twenties. The paramedics had taken him from the house, and within a blurry few days, they were burying him.
The door to his grandfather’s room hadn’t even been opened since the night the paramedics had taken him away. Standing before it now, Waylon felt energy literally coming from the walls. He held up his hand and moved it over the door. He could feel pulsing coming from inside of the room.
When he swung the door open, Waylon half expected to see his grandfather lying in the bed. That obviously was not the case. The door hit the stopper on the wall at the height of the swing and rebounded back slowly with a subtle vibrating noise.
Particles of dust floated around in the air when he turned the light on, which instantly made him want to cough. His grandfather’s room was the largest of any of the rooms in the house, mostly because it was constructed of three rooms, where most only had a bathroom. The sleeping area was large enough to easily house four king-size beds laid out in a grid. Straight across the room in the opposite wall there was another door that led into a short hallway. On one end of the hallway was a personal master bathroom and on the other end was his grandfather’s personal study and library.
Inside the room, the energies wer
e loud in Waylon’s ears. They pulsed like a heartbeat, but it wasn’t coming from the bedroom. No, the energy was coming from the office. For his entire life, he had been instructed to stay out of the office—it was for his grandfather only. He had heeded that instruction even after his grandfather’s death, and he had never seen what was behind the large oaken door.
Waylon walked across the room and into the small hallway. The energy was pulling at him, calling to him, and there was nothing or no one to stop him from going inside. Yet he stood at the door with his hand on the knob and just stared blankly at the wood for a long moment. The unwelcoming feeling that had been drilled into his head for so many years was trying to dictate his actions, but it was losing to the pull of the energy. He had to know what was inside more than anything in that moment.
When he turned the doorknob, no one slapped his hand or yelled at him like when he had spent the summer in the house as a boy. The door swung open easily, but it was heavy, so it only made it about two thirds of the way open before it stopped. The room was filled with overwhelming energy. The back wall was covered from floor to ceiling in books that were so old that many of the spines were faded. In the center was a glass desk with an old computer, and for its day it had probably nice, probably expensive, but now it was nothing more than a paperweight compared to Waylon’s phone in his pocket. On the right side of the room, under the window, was a small bar that had a few dozen bottles of spirits.
With a long sigh, he looked around the room and ran his fingers through his hair. He had no clue what he was doing, and his mind was exploding with questions and frustration. The energy was pulsating from the bookshelf. Following the feelings, with his hand out, he tried to figure out what he was looking for. He didn’t know what he was going to find, but he was just about willing to accept anything. The energy reached its peak when his hand touched a book that was at the exact center of everything.
When Waylon’s fingers closed around the book, the energy vanished with a breathtaking final wave of static pulsing outward. He pulled it down and opened it to the front page. It was a journal written by his grandfather. The whole shelf that he had removed the book from was lined with a couple dozen journals that his grandfather had written.
Waylon was truly disappointed as he read, for he found nothing more than mundane entries from some normal guy. There wasn’t anything special in the words that he read. He flipped through the pages with a huff of frustration. Things where a little different when he got to the last page of the book, which made little to no sense.
The last sentence read: Waylon, if you finally know what you should have already known, please say that it is so.
Waylon scratched his head. He didn’t really know of his grandfather being a poet or any kind of wordsmith. He read the words a few times.
“Grandfather, I know what I am,” Waylon said out loud, feeling like a fool with every word that came out of his mouth. He looked around the room, waiting for some kind of special effects show to start around him.
The ink on the page started to blur. The lines turned into ink blots. Waylon jumped and dropped the book. It bounced on the ground and rebounded off the side of the desk.
“Ouch!” the book yelled from where it landed. “What the hell?”
“Who’s there?” Waylon demanded, not wanting to accept that a book was talking.
“Down here, big guy,” the book said. It sounded just how he remembered his grandfather sounding.
Waylon knelt down and grabbed the book. He put it down on the desk as if it were about to explode in his hands. Dropping down in the desk chair, he rubbed his eyes.
“So how did it finally happen?” the book asked slowly, wiggling to turn itself around to face him.
“What? How did what happen?” Waylon asked as he finished rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“How did you finally find out that you were a warlock? I’ve been sitting in this room forever, hoping that you would finally put two and two together,” the book said. When it spoke, the book opened and closed in the shape of a mouth. Waylon wanted to think that it was the weirdest thing that he had ever seen, but after the night that he had had, he wasn’t sure if that was even true anymore.
“What are you?” Waylon asked the book.
“I am a figment of your grandfather’s personality. He split me out about sixty years ago to help him with his work,” the book explained.
“So, you are my grandfather?” Waylon asked.
“No, no, I was a piece of his personality. Once we split, I became my own. Your grandfather called me Erwin,” he said.
“All right, Erwin,” Waylon said with a deep sigh and looked around the room. “I am having just a little bit of a mental breakdown at the moment. If you could bear with me.” He held up his hand.
“You’re not. You’re fine, and you never answered my question,” Erwin said.
“Oh, well. I was working in a little girl’s room at the hospital,” Waylon explained. “This orc broke through the wall. I used magic to freeze time and stop him from hurting her.”
“Noble. Nice.” Erwin smiled.
Waylon thought it was creepy looking to see the pages of a book smile.
“Yeah.” Waylon shrugged. “Noble or self-preservation.”
“You know that there is a reaper living in the house, right?” Erwin asked.
“Yes, why?” Waylon nodded.
“Reapers can be nasty individuals,” Erwin said.
“That sounds pretty biased. I think I’ll be the judge of that. So far, she has given me no reason to doubt her,” Waylon said as he shook his head. Kaylie had been nothing if not upstanding since she had arrived.
“You never asked the house if she could live here,” Erwin said. He moved from side to side as if he were shaking a head. Waylon watched incredulously as the book hovered and imitated a human head.
“What does that even mean?” Waylon demanded as he threw up his hands in frustration. “I’ve never heard of anyone having to ask a house if someone could live in it.”
“Well, you’ve only known about magic for a few hours. This isn’t something that concerns the mortal world,” Erwin explained. “Most people get away with the lease signing. For some reason, it accepts that.”
“How exactly do I ask the house for permission to allow someone to live here?” Waylon asked. He scratched his forehead and stared blankly at the floor.
Erwin scoffed and flew up from the desk. It was like a magnetic force was lifting him and guiding him across the room. He went from book to book, searching for a moment. The whole time, Waylon stared at him in disbelief.
“Here it is,” he said as he motioned toward a book.
“Here what is?” Waylon asked, standing up. He slumped over to the bookshelf.
“Your grandfather was a mystical researcher. If there is something in the mystical world, there is a good chance that he wrote about it. Even if he didn’t understand it, he wrote down what he knew. Or, well, I recorded what he knew. That’s why I was created. I’m his research assistant,” Erwin said. He turned and looked at Waylon with a smile across his pages.
Waylon grabbed the volume that Erwin had indicated. It was a thick brown book as heavy as a brick. He opened it to the first page. Household Demons and Entities was written in bold calligraphy lines.
“I think the section that you need to read starts on page three hundred and eighty-seven,” Erwin said. He flew back over to the desk and landed in front of the chair.
Waylon turned the pages thick chunks at a time. The book pages had to number in the thousands, so it took him a moment to find the right page.
The Mayer Linger
Originally identified by a warlock in 1894 named Klaus Mayer. The Linger is an entity that is spawned almost entirely of remainder magic. See: Remainder Magic. The entity occupies a home and assumes traits of the residents of the house. Lingers do not occupy any other type of establishment or building. The building that they occupy must be a home.
>
This type of entity is not banishable, or at the time of this writing, a banishment process has not been discovered. They take residence in the heart of the home. These entities can take on a spectral form of anything from a person to an animal. They have also been known to take possession of objects in the home. It is important to note that there have been no recorded cases of a Linger possessing a person or animal, however, research indicates that this may be possible. Further testing is required. —August Dalton
Waylon looked at his grandfather’s signature. He couldn’t believe that he had not known about his grandfather’s work. He had done so much of it, whole bookshelves’ worth. Waylon looked at the pages where there were several drawings and illustrations that made little to no sense to him.
“What is remainder magic?” Waylon asked Erwin, who had taken to floating around the room aimlessly.
“Remainder magic. Pretty basic stuff. Let’s say that a spell that you want to cast is a cup,” Erwin explained. “When you cast the spell, you are basically filling the cup with a certain amount of energy. Well, most of the time, a little bit of this energy spills over the top. It usually spills out because if you don’t use enough energy, then the spell won’t work at all. Remainder magic is that little bit of overfill that occurs.”
“So, the Linger is made up of these little bits of magic?” Waylon asked, referring back to the passage in the large book.
“Yes, sir. Yours here at the house is a little bit of a trickster. His sense of humor is a little twisted, but it doesn’t mean any harm per se,” Erwin said as he flew over and hovered above the desk to look at Waylon.
“There is no way to get rid of it?” Waylon asked.
“Nope, and you didn’t get his permission for that young reaper to move in here,” Erwin said while he shook like he was shaking a head in disappointment.
“But it’s my house,” Waylon huffed.
“Is it?” Erwin asked.
“My grandfather left it to me when he died,” Waylon said, crossing his arms sternly.
“You haven’t so much as set foot into the master bedroom since your grandfather passed away,” Erwin said with a deep frown. “I know this because I have been sitting in here waiting on you for years. The Linger responds to actions, not intentions.”
