by N. P. Martin
I shook my head. "So not much hope then?"
“There are always ways,” Sanaka said. “I must have taught you that, at least.”
“You did, yeah. So what’s the way?”
Sanaka shook his head like he expected me to have already discovered the answer. “To counter such dark magick, you need an entity that is just as dark to do it.”
“Like a demon, for instance?”
Sanaka nodded.
“Yeah, about that,” I said, getting up and standing over by the fireplace. “I don’t really do demon summonings.”
"You are a Mage, how could you not do summonings?"
"Oh, I do, but mostly low-level spirits, not demons."
Sanaka looked confused. “Why not? Are you afraid of them?” He laughed, the way a parent would laugh at their kid when the kid expressed his fear at the monster in the closet (which by the way, existed more than people realized).
“Look, long story short,” I told him. “I lost my entire family to a demon after my father summoned one and lost control. I’ve tended to avoid demons ever since.”
“Why did you survive then?”
I sighed and shook my head. “I’m still trying to work that out.”
"Well," Sanaka said, having about as much sympathy for me as he did the first time I told him about the incident from my past. "You must get over your fear if you want the world to remember you again." He stared at me a moment. "Why do you even want the world to remember you? It doesn't matter. All that matters is that you are here now. That should be enough."
“It matters to me.”
“Why?”
“Because unlike you, Sanaka, sometimes I’m a fucking human being underneath all the Mage shit. I have friends, relationships that I want back. I'm not even in any of my old family photographs anymore. You know what that feels like? It feels like you never even mattered and that you might as well have not have been born."
Sanaka took a deep breath then let it out. "Well," he said standing, holding his sword loosely by his side. "Confronting what scares you the most is the only thing that is going to get you out of this predicament you are in. There is no other way around it." He looked at me gravely then. "There is one more thing."
Great, I thought. “I know that voice, Sanaka. You only have that voice when you’re about to impart bad news. Like the time you told me I’d have to sleep with a corpse for three days straight to enhance my Necromancy skills.” I sighed. “What is it?”
He seemed amused for a second by that bit of information like it was proof that I really was his student for the last twenty years. His smile of amusement disappeared when he spoke, however. “There is another side effect of the spell that I didn’t tell you about.”
“Christ, am I going to die now?”
"Not quite. The power of the spell is such that I'm afraid even your own soul no longer recognizes you. Eventually, your soul will realize this, and it will leave your body and go off into the Astral Plane, where it will remain, lost forever. No doubt the killer protected themselves against this particular aspect of the spell."
I shook my head. “I knew there was something else wrong. I felt it after the spell hit, like a light dimming inside me, though I couldn’t explain it at the time. Fuck. How long?”
"Before your soul abandons you forever? Three days at most. Maybe four. It’s hard to know for certain."
“Bloody hell! Things just can’t get any worse, can they?”
Sanaka shrugged. "I don't make the rules." Another one of his frequent sayings, usually when I was being forced to do something horrible, like lying with a damn corpse. "I suggest you get moving. Find me if you need my help."
Sanaka gave Blaez a final pet, stared at me a moment and then vanished into thin air as he teleported out of the room.
I looked down at Blaez and sighed. “How the fuck do I always end up in these situations, Blaez?”
Blaez stared silently back at me, his yellow eyes indifferent to my pain.
10
Do Or Die
IF I'M HONEST, I knew there was something else wrong with me after I got blasted by that spell. The Memory Shredder as Sanaka had called it. I felt it soon after the spell hit, like something dying inside me, or a vital part of me that was slowly beginning to pull away and detach itself from the rest of me. Somewhere in my mind, I knew it was my soul pulling away, but I hadn't wanted to acknowledge that to myself (the rest was painful enough).
The thing was, though, if the light of my being departed then I would be left a soulless ghoul, literally dead inside, no longer capable of emotion or any real human contact. I'd end up wandering aimlessly around the city like the rest of the ghouls—like the walking fucking dead—only I wouldn't feast on flesh, not living flesh anyway. Dead meat is what my diet would soon consist off. If you need to find yourself a ghoul, check the graveyards, or the bins outside the back of a butchers shop, or an abattoir. Anywhere there was dead meat, you could find a ghoul nearby, dispassionately munching on maggot-infested flesh, its mouth moving as lazily as a cow chewing the cud, clothes ragged and dirty, face and body emaciated, flesh pale and waxy. That was going to be me in three days if I didn't find a way to counter the effects of that goddamn spell. And even my own magick wouldn't do much good without a soul or the proper mind to wield it. Most of my magick was based on the fact that I had a soul. Soulless magick is black magick, reserved only for monsters and psychopaths, of which I am neither.
Speaking of souls, I was on the roof of the building where I lived, drinking coffee this time instead of whiskey. Above me, the sky was clear and black, and the stars were out in force. As a chill wind surrounded me, I looked ahead, past the few blocks of buildings to the winding Gadsden River that cut a slow path through the middle of the city, effectively making Blackham a city of two halves. You had the old town where I lived (known as Freetown), with its dark and winding streets that sometimes went nowhere and ended abruptly in odd places. Then you had the other side (known as Bankhurst) where Gadsden Park was, as well as all the financial and government buildings and streets that were arranged in perfectly symmetrical blocks. As I looked East towards Red Hill, I spotted an orb of bluish light rising into the night sky. The orb left a wispy trail behind it as it floated up higher in the sky. Another soul heading for the Astral Plane before making its way to the Realm of the Dead for sorting in the Afterlife. If it even made it through the Astral Plane first that is, which was full of predators who delighted in preying upon fresh souls, picking them off the way predators pick off newly emerged turtles on a beach. An innocent soul could soon enough be pulled into the Underworld, or devoured completely by one of the many malevolent entities that haunted the Astral Plane. As in life, death and the afterlife was never easy.
As I watched, I could make out the ephemeral edge of the Astral Plane—like the thin blue line that surrounded the Earth, only silvery in color—as the soul entered it and then disappeared. You could stand up here most nights and see at least a few souls make their departure from the Earthly Plane. It was a little sad watching them, and it often made me wonder when my own soul would eventually leave my body and float away to the Realm Of The Dead. Up until then, I thought that wasn't going to happen for a long time yet, but now I knew that I might just get to watch my soul abandon my body in as little as three days time.
"Shit," I said, shaking my head, trying to think of ways out of my situation and continually coming up empty on ideas, or at least ideas that would work. It was becoming more apparent that Sanaka's suggestion of asking a demon for help was my only option. "Fucking demons. I hate them."
“Don’t we all,” said a voice behind me.
I didn’t turn around. “Hey, Arthur.”
Arthur's ghostly form saddled up beside me. The old man used to own the building we were standing on until he died of natural causes several years ago. He was so attached to the building, however, that he refused to move on from it and now remained there like some ghostly caretaker. He was a sh
ort, stout black man with a thick white beard and a surprisingly dense white afro on his head. He was seventy-three when he died of a heart attack. His son and law now owned the building, which Arthur wasn't happy about, but there wasn't much he could do about that as a ghost. "August, my boy," Arthur said. "How's business going?"
“Not too good,” I replied, glancing at him. “An unexpected shitstorm has happened.”
Arthur chuckled. “Ain't that always the way with business.” He shook his head. “God, I miss doing business.”
Arthur was something of a property mogul in his time, owning several other properties besides the one I lived in. "Your soul is up there waiting for you somewhere. I could take you to it. You could move on somewhere else. Babylon maybe. With your acumen, you'd thrive there." I knew I was wasting my breath. I'd made the offer dozens of times over the years, and every time he turned me down, though I still wasn't sure why.
As expected he shook his head. “No thanks. My place is here.”
“But you’re dead, Arthur.”
"Don't you think I know that?" he snapped. "I can't let that good for nothing son-in-law fuck up my business. Not after all the work it took to build it up."
Whatever, I thought. If the old man wanted to stay a ghost, that was his problem. I had enough problems of my own. “Maybe you can help me then.”
“If I can. What’s the problem? Your magick get you in trouble again?”
“Not my magick. Someone else’s.”
“Shit. You can always rely on other people to fuck things up.” He shook his head, probably thinking of his son in law, who had recently managed to lose one of the buildings he was supposed to be looking after. Word is he lost it in a card game. The dude was an inveterate gambler, much to Arthur’s chagrin. “Can you fix things?” He chuckled again. “What am I talking about, of course you can. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Fix problems.”
"Other people's usually. My own, not so much."
Arthur's ghost walked right through me to the other side, and I shivered. I wished he wouldn't do that. "I'll give you the advice my father gave to me when I was starting out," the old ghost said. "He said to me, Arthur, son, the hardest solution is usually the right one. You just have to bite the bullet and get it done. Are you prepared to bite the bullet, son?"
“At this point, I could probably take a bullet quicker.”
“That bad, huh?”
“That bad.”
“Well shit, son, I don’t know what to say to you. Sometimes its do or die, but that don’t mean you can’t still be smart about things.”
"Thanks, Arthur," I said, distractedly gazing at another soul rising nearby, his words not making me feel any better. "I'll bear that in mind."
“Why you so scared anyway? I’ve never known you to be this afraid of anything.”
I turned my head to look into his partly transparent face. “Because I’d be damn stupid not to be afraid, that’s why.”
He tried to pat me on the back, but his hand went right through me, emerging out of my chest. "What will be, will be, son. Now, that shithead son-in-law of mine is gambling with my money in some back alley card game over in Milford. I'm go gonna go there now so I can go all poltergeist on his ass. I think he's starting to realize that I'm haunting him now. Hopefully, he'll soon take the hint and stop gambling my fucking legacy away."
"I could force him to see you, you know. You could speak directly to him."
"Nah," Arthur said, walking away. "I'm having way too much fun haunting his skinny ass. I'll see ya, August. And remember, do or die."
“Sure,” I muttered back. “Do or die.”
11
The Mccreedy Family Massacre
I COULDN'T HELP feeling that fate had a hand in all the bad shit that was happening to me. When you avoid something for so long like I did, it was inevitable that it would one day rear up and bite you in the ass when you least expected it. Some things you just couldn’t run from, like the massacre of your whole family.
It happened back in Ireland, at the old family home in County Fermanagh, in the late 1970’s when I was eighteen years old. My family lineage was steeped in magick and occult practices. Many of my ancient ancestors were Druids and Mages. My father was a Master Mage, my mother, a Witch. My older brother and sister were both Adepts as well. So was I. It was the McCreedy family tradition. Magick was in our blood. My father, Christopher McCreedy, besides being a ruthless businessman, was also a member of various cabals and occult organizations, all of which helped him amass a large fortune as he often used the status and leverage of those groups to further his ends (having no emotional ties to any of them as he was essentially a loner in life) . Money was a form of power for my father, and he would do many morally dubious things to further his lust for power and assuage his often rampant ego. Summoning a high-level demon to gain more power was one of those morally dubious things.
He got us all involved in the summoning, the whole family. He said if we all stuck together, we would be able to contain the demon and force it to give over its power. Despite my mother's reservations about the high level of risk involved, we all took part, having no real choice in the matter.
So the summoning took place one night in the big family house, in the room reserved for magickal rituals, a room which was windowless and absent of any furniture. The only light was from the candles around the floor. When the demon appeared, it did so in its true form, which was a monster of indescribable grotesqueness, bringing with it the impenetrable darkness of the hell it came from in the Underworld.
At first, my father was able to contain the demon, with help from the rest of the family, all of whom were terrified, including me, as we had never seen such a truly frightening being in all our lives.
But then something went wrong. To this day, I'm still not sure what. Somehow, my father lost his control over the demon, probably because the demon itself was too powerful to be contained by any Earthly adept, no matter how skilled that adept was. Some powers just cannot be contained, and to try would have been folly, not to mention supremely arrogant, which my father unfortunately was.
The demon—a huge black skinned thing with strange appendages all over its weirdly misshapen body and dozens of eyes on its nasty looking face—broke free from the demon trap and proceeded to fly around the room at terrific speed, a trail of thick darkness behind it as it went about massacring everyone in the room. My mother was killed first, followed by my dear brother and sister and then finally my father. The screams were unbearable, the carnage so horrific I could barely look. The demon ripped them each apart, spraying blood and guts all over the room, an unearthly roar never ending from its mouth as it went about its wanton destruction. In a matter of seconds (or at least that’s how it seemed to me) my entire family was dead. I was left sitting on the floor, cowering and shaking, hardly able to take in what was happening around me, the smell of blood causing me to vomit over myself.
Then the demon came hurtling towards me, its supremely terrifying face hovering right over me, so petrifying that I couldn’t even look at it without wanting to go insane. I shut my eyes and waited for the inevitable. And waited. When nothing appeared to be happening, I finally got the balls to crack open my eyes and saw that the demon was gone. All that was left was a room full of carnage, the remains of my family.
To this day, I have no idea why the demon left me alive. But whatever the reason, I left Ireland for good a short time later, after burying what was left of my family in the plot on the grounds of the house. I went to London first, changing my name from McCreedy to Creed, partly to try and forget that I ever had a family at all, partly because it was the seventies and the Troubles were in full swing (Irish people in London were looked on with suspicion back then). A year later I left London and spent the next five years traveling the world before landing in America. And there I still was, thirty years later, the memory of my family’s massacre as fresh in my head as the night it happened. Even more so now that I had to consid
er summoning a demon myself.
I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of one of the bedrooms upstairs, surrounded by books on demonology when I got a call from Leona. “Hey,” she said when I answered. “Forensics came back on our victim.”
“Yeah?” I said, my voice distant. “You find anything?”
“You alright there, Creed? You sound strange. Something wrong?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“No need to be so sharp. I’ll call back if it's a bad time.”
I sighed. "No, don't. You want to meet for a drink? I know a quiet bar nearby if you're about."
“It’s barely noon, Creed.”
“So what? I’m Irish. There are no bad drinking times.”
“Fine. Where?”
I told her the name of the bar and she said she would be there soon. Closing up the book I was reading, I gladly left the bedroom, having had enough of demon lore and summoning practices. The more I read, the more of a bad idea a summoning seemed, but it was either that or eat rotten flesh for the rest of my days. Seeing Leona might things better, but I doubted it. When you're on death row, nothing makes you feel better unless you got off death row, and that wasn't likely to happen anytime soon, not without considerable personal risk anyhow.
Downstairs, I grabbed my coat and left the Sanctum, wondering as I went out the door if death by demon was going to hurt much.
12
Quick Drink
THE PUB I met Leona in was called Master McGrath's (named after a champion greyhound that became something of a racing legend in Ireland back in the day). Owned by a family of Druids, Master McGrath's had been my local since I came to Blackham. It was a small sized bar, adorned with aged dark wood paneling, the walls decorated with various sized Celtic crosses and old photos of green landscapes and people related to the MacCaffery's, the family who ran the pub. Gerard MacCaffrey, a tall, well-built man in his fifties with a lined face and a stare that would give any hardened werewolf biker a run for their money, was head of the family. Gerard was serving behind the bar when I went in, as he usually was. So was his daughter, the lovely Sinead, ringlets of fiery red hair dangling down past her slender shoulders, her magick blue eyes smiling at me even though she didn't know me from Adam. I did sleep with her once, though, a few years back. Luckily her father didn't find out, or he wouldn't have taken kindly to it. Gerard was very protective of his daughter. Even now, when he saw Sinead eying me up, he stepped in front of her and scowled at me. "What can I get you, friend?"