A man who could make magic

13Oct

“I want everyone to behave themselves,” Anson Verhoeven warned from behind the counter. His white Amish beard quivered when he spoke. He looked to be pushing 90. He breathed through his mouth and stared worriedly over the rim of his glasses at the three of us in his shop.

There were two men at the register. Verhoeven had wrapped something for them in gray paper, like blank newsprint — a book or a box of some kind. The one on the left took it without taking his eyes from me.

“Is this a real Mexican standoff or are we just measuring dicks?” I let the door close behind me and stood in the center of the room, between the neat bookshelves.

Spellman’s Rare Books & Antiquities was always so tidy. And there was always a slight floral scent hanging over the smell of candle wax and the vanilla of old books.

I didn’t know the two men glaring at me, but I knew the look: hollow behind the eyes. They were zombies. In the old sense. Men whose souls had been ripped from them and sealed in urns. Living slaves.

Granny’s boys.

They walked toward the door, one passing on either side of me. I got my weekly quota of menacing glances. But that was it. The door closed behind them with a jingle and Anson and I were alone.

“Well,” he sighed with some relief. “Look what the cat dragged in. Word around town is that you’re causing lots of trouble.”

“Is that what those two said?”

“Not just them. You’re causing quite a stir in our little community.” There was fountain pen, inkwell, and old pad of paper on the counter, and he started putting them away underneath. I couldn’t tell if he was just being tidy or if he didn’t want me to see any hint of what he’d just sold. “Do you have any idea what you imprisoned the other day?”

I glanced around the shop at all the old books neatly arranged by category and size and locked securely behind glass. “Not sure what the proper name is. I call them carrion ghouls. Pretty old one, too, from the looks of it.”

“Pretty old?” he scoffed. “From what I heard, the only human language it spoke was Aramaic, which suggests the last time it walked among us, that was a common tongue.”

“Am I supposed to know when that was?”

“A really, really long time ago.”

“So who let it out?”

“Something tells me you already know.” Verhoeven tilted his head back as if to get a good look at me. “How did you get it out? Or is that a trade secret?”

I held up the talisman dangling from the chain wrapped around my wrist.

He whistled. “May I?”

I unwrapped it and handed it him.

He examined it closely. He ran his thumb over the polished black stone at the center.

“Obsidian?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Blood of the earth,” he corrected.

“I thought that was oil.”

“No . . .” He made a face like that was the dumbest thing ever. “Oil is organic matter, the liquefied dead, plants and animals that grew from the earth but are not of it, the way we all grow from our mothers’ wombs. This is tektite, a clot of blood from the mother herself.” He handed the amulet back to me. “Forged by the heavens.”

“Heavens?”

He sighed. “When a meteor strikes the earth, it flash-melts the surrounding rock, casting off a molten splatter. Just like the blood at a crime scene.” He eyed the talisman. “It’s quite valuable. Are you sure you won’t part with it?”

“It’s not mine to sell,” I said.

“What about the wand?”

“You know about that?”

“I told you. You’re causing quite a stir.”

“I only have the one piece,” I explained.

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. There are some who would buy it on the mere hope that it might be repaired.”

“I’ll think about it.” I held up the talisman. “What about the carvings on the silver?”

He made a noncommittal shrug. “Arabic, maybe. Difficult to tell. They’re quite worn.”

“I noticed that.” I wrapped the chain around my wrist again.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “the Arab world was overrun with evil spirits from Central Asia. Djinn they called them. Out of necessity, their alchemists became experts at crafting wards and prisons. Where do you think the tale of Aladdin and the lamp comes from?” He looked around the shop. “There’s a book around here somewhere with the original story. Quite a bit darker.”

“You mean Disney got it wrong? I’m shocked.”

“Oh, you can’t blame them. It was Scheherezade who bastardized the old tales, just as the Brothers Grimm did in Europe. Those greedy fools have caused more — ”

“If you have a minute,” I interrupted, “I was hoping you could identify someone for me.”

“Identify? I don’t know anyone. And if I did, I still don’t.”

I had the printout from the Massey case, the still image from the security footage, folded in my jacket pocket. “You recognize this man?”

“I told you — ” He stopped. He fixed his glasses and tilted his head to look down longways at the paper I had handed him. His expression dropped like a rock.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

He stared blankly. He pulled off his glasses and let his hands fall to his side.

“Anson?”

He raised the printout. “I’d heard the rumors these past few months but . . .” He looked at the printout again and raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t want to believe them. For all our sakes.”

“You have a name?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be doing you any favors by telling you.”

I waited. I thought he might ask for the wand in trade. Or the talisman. I was contemplating how much they were worth to me.

But he didn’t. “Etude Étranger,” he said with perfect enunciation. “He’s a chef. Or at least, that’s how the rest of the world knows him. He has a little bistro over in Brooklyn. Easy to find. He’s not hiding. Not that you’ll ever get your hands on him.”

“That sounds like a challenge,” I said.

“HA!” he scoffed again. “He has a sanctum above his restaurant — the most heavily warded chamber on the planet. Impenetrable, for all practical purposes. Trust me. People have tried. That man has more enemies even than you.”

“Impenetrable, huh? So if I go down there and fire a bazooka at it, it would what? Bounce off the windows?”

He leaned closer. “No. It would probably misfire in the tube and kill whoever launched it in the process, leaving Étranger’s sanctum perfectly intact.”

“So who is he?”

He put his hands on the antique oak counter. “Does this look like a help desk?” He pointed to the sign above a nearby bookshelf.

THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY

“I’d recommend Massius Crane’s seven-volume history for that.”

“And how much does that run?”

“Seeing as how there are only four known copies, and I have the complete set, nine thousand four hundred and thirty-six dollars and twenty-seven cents. Plus tax.”

“That’s very precise.” I leaned over the oak so that the talisman clinked on it. “Come on, Anson. I’d hate for Granny to hear a rumor that you sold this to me.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“If you’re gonna be a dick, trust me, I got no problems being a dick back.”

“Sell me the wand,” he said.

I tapped the printout. “Who is he?”

He moved his shriveled lips like he had a bad taste in his mouth. It made his beard shake. Then he leaned back and thought for a moment, as if that were not an easy thing to explain. “Tell me something, Detective. Have you ever wondered why there isn’t more magic in the world?”

“What do you mean?” It seemed like there was already plenty to me. I was having a hard time keeping up.

Verhoeven scowled at me like I was a child. “You think it’s an accident that every ancient civilization on the planet, even those never in contact with each other, from the Incas to the Chinese, believed in sorcery and demons and witchcraft? As if that’s just some fluke?”

I shrugged.

He got up and walked to the bookshelf against the far wall. He lifted the keys from his belt, unlocked the glass case, and pulled down a large text, one of a series of seven large volumes with old-style cloth binding. The spines had the title, “The Reign of The Masters,” in block letters over the name of the author, Massius Crane. The final volume was quite a bit smaller than the others.

Verhoeven brought the tall book to the counter and flipped through the pages. “The Masters. Also known as the High Arcane. Fodder for conspiracy theorists all over the world. You can even find them on the internet, or so I hear.” He glanced up at me.

“You use the internet?” I asked sarcastically.

He looked disgusted again. He spun the book and pointed to a black-and-white illustration, like something from the Victorian era. It was a grand stone chamber. Great columns ran along the sides and held up the roof. At the end was an impressive stone edifice, like a tall judge’s bench, behind which sat seven robed elders. The one at the center sat a little higher than the others. High above them on the back wall, an eye-shaped cavity had been cut into the otherwise smooth stone. The spikes of the giant crystal inside radiated out, just a bit off-center.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the top of the image.

“That is the Great Eye. The Eye of Annemundu, forged at the dawn of civilization, two-and-a-half millennia before Christ, by the high priests of Sumer for the first god-emperor in history.”

I looked closer. “What is it? What are these rays coming out?” I traced a finger along one.

“The Eye is — or was, rather, a seeing stone, a great crystal whose gaze pierced minds and mountains. Annemundu, who is said to have reigned for 90 years, used it to find and destroy those who plotted against him — or even contemplated it. He despised deliberation and enforced a uniform order, an orthodoxy without argument or dissent, where everyone agreed on everything and the unorthodox were put to death. He called it peace, for there were none left to oppose him.”

“What does this have to do with the chef?”

He ignored me. “No one is quite sure what happened to it. But stone carvings that survive from the time suggest that Annemundu’s rule was lengthy, brutal, and absolute, but that in the end, he died, as all men do. The reigning theory is that the Eye was smuggled out of Mesopotamia by parties near the emperor who feared another absolute despot. What we know for certain is that it disappeared from history — completely — for the better part of three thousand years, until it was discovered in the thirteenth century inside the sacred keep of the Knights Templar, who seem to have stumbled upon its hidden resting place while on holy crusade and taken it as plunder without realizing its purpose or power.

“After the Templars were betrayed to their deaths by Philip IV of France, the Iron King called a group of wise men, masters of the occult, from all around the Mediterranean world and sent them to the Templars’ island in the Adriatic to catalog and organize the knights’ vast collection, gathered over two centuries of conquest in the Holy Land, and it was then that the Eye of Annemundu was recognized. The wise men, whom the king had granted only the nondescript title of ‘master,’ wasted no time.

“Mr. Crane suspects their aims were modest at first. But as their power grew, so did their intentions. For six hundred years, from the fall of the Templars the start of the great war, ‘The Masters,’ as they became known, used the Eye to scour the earth. Every magical artifact that fell into their gaze was taken and imprisoned — locked away in a place that erased all memory of it. They sent agents to follow the ley lines that circle the globe and to seal the portals at their intersection, cutting us off from the other realms, friend and foe alike. Ancient treatises were taken and buried. New ones were forbidden — or else had to be written in codes and cyphers approved by The Masters, who began modestly referring to themselves as the High Arcane.

“By the sixteenth century, the seven elders of the order included representatives from all the major civilizations, from the Far East to the New World, and any man who sought power on any continent had first to earn their favor. Those who resisted, or even simply opted out — the woodfolk and the free practitioners of wildcraft — were labeled witches and burned alive.” He looked to me for a reaction.

I shook my head. “Why? Why go to all that trouble?”

“Power,” he said flatly. “It’s no accident that the men who built the modern world were all members of secret societies steeped in the occult. Many of the Founding Fathers of this very country were inducted into the secret order of the Masons, vassals of The Masters.

“A machine is predictable, you see. It can be controlled — measured and changed — just as a wristwatch parses and dissects time. But magicks defy all of that. They’re immeasurable, uncontrollable. And accessible. Remember, Merlin was a peasant boy.”

He closed the book and retrieved another from the shelf, an earlier volume in the same series. He flipped to another page. “Here.”

It was like a scene from an old epic, the Iliad or the Ramayana or something. I saw an army of men carrying round shields and snub swords, a line of archers, flying monsters, an army of skeletons erupting from the earth, a giant bull raging through the clouds, a mounted king, a lighting bolt from the sky striking a giant three-tailed scorpion, a magic hammer, a blind priestess, a bearded wizard and his seven acolytes, and on and on, all locked in a great conflagration.

“Once the world was in chaos,” he said as I studied the page. “Monsters raged and dragons flew. Small groups of men armed with magical weapons took down entire empires and raised up new ones. How do you think Alexander conquered the world? Only to lose it all at his death?

“The Masters’ great enterprise, their solution to the Problem of Evil, was to use the Eye to buy the very same peace as its creator. And slowly but surely, bit by bit, over six long centuries, magic all but went out of the world.

“There were skirmishes, of course, with outlaws mostly. But it wasn’t until the seekers of the dark found their holy book that there was outright war.”

“Holy book?” I looked up.

He shut the volume in front of me.

“The Necronomicon,” he said, “penned by Nebuchadnezzar and lost since the fall of Babylon. Written in blood on its pages were spells to cast darkness, not just over the human heart but the world itself. Suddenly, artifacts and people could be hidden from the Great Eye. Agents of the dark walked unhindered and unseen. Armed with the mad whispers of their gods, the warlocks pursued a hundred-year war to destroy the High Arcane and all who followed them.

“So it was good folks everywhere had to make a terrible choice: stand idle, or join their own oppressors in the fight against something even worse — the eternal night. It wasn’t until the second half of the last century that they were finally defeated. And only at great cost.” He shook his head. “I was a boy at the time, but I heard the stories. How The Masters’ spies had tracked the Necronomicon to Siberia, where Rasputin had hidden it. How, in an act of incredible daring, they smuggled it to the Caucuses, where it was destroyed by a bastard magician from a tribe whose name is not spoken. It was the end of history, we were told. And so it seemed, for a time.” He nodded to himself.

“Until?”

“Until . . . in the aftermath of the war, driven by greed, men penetrated the last soft places of the world, and out of the clear-cut jungle — out of nowhere — a young man appeared, half naked, eyes painted in blue dye, born of a people spared the ravages of history. A man who could make magic. Not the repetition of some crusty old spell. Real magic. New magic.”

He slid the creased printout over the book. “It was around then that a new book appeared. And another battle, if you believe the rumors, where the Great Eye cracked. Without the source of their power, the High Arcane fell. And, well . . .” He motioned out the windows. “The world is as you found it, stumbling back toward chaos.”

“So this guy’s a wizard or something?”

“NO!” Verhoeven shook his head. “He’s not a wizard! He doesn’t build flying contraptions and anoint kings with magic swords. He’s a shamanic sorcerer! An agent of chaos. A practitioner of the oldest magic in the cosmos. Which is why everyone has been happy to leave him locked away in his sanctum all these years.”

I squinted at the photo. “So why make an appearance now? Why kill a random security guard and an art student and a doctor at a free clinic? What does someone like that have to fear from them? What does he want?”

Anson simply shook his head. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Who would?”

He thought for a moment. He looked at me gravely. “There is someone.”

“Who?”

“You know her, actually.” He nodded toward the front door. “She’s a big fan.”

I scowled. “Fuck . . .”

rough cut from the third course of my forthcoming supernatural mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS. If you liked it, leave a buck in the Tip Jar!

art by Matt Taylor