And then the front gate clicked open, letting my first client in. Taking a deep breath, I got up and went to the door.
A Spell at the End of the World
Alexander James
His mission was this; to board the ocean liner on a three-month passage to Melbourne, on very short notice, with three packages. He was to guard them with his life. Someone would meet him at the hotel at the other end, and know what to do from there. The packages were given to him the night before the ship sailed, as was his ticket and boarding pass, along with an envelope filled with Australian money and another envelope with his accommodation details. They had told him that there might be incidents along the way. People or things might attempt to take the packages from him. Perhaps even kill him for them. He was to protect himself and the packages with his knowledge of the arts. Customs had been attended to.
Barker had taken their words with a nod, with the uneasy knowledge that choosing him had been a mistake.
He was a sorcerer, to be sure, and they had wanted a sorcerer for the mission. But there were greater in London than he, wiser, more powerful, better experienced. Certainly half a dozen he could name better versed in covert activities, less vulnerable to attack and more suited to fighting off assassins.
But he suspected, if not knew, that he had been chosen because he was not a ranking sorcerer. So far as mastery of the arts went, he was nondescript. He’d achieved reliable status amongst the occult underworld and as a white sorcerer had taken part in the fight against the darker elements. He had calmed restless spirits for troubled folk, and sent demons back from whence they’d been summoned. He’d brought those responsible to justice. He had even been part of portal creation not once but three times, and thus witnessed conversations with beings not of this Earthly dimension. But he’d never been asked by the Supernatural Council to do anything other than help with those portal spells, until the night they had summoned him and given him this mission.
The spells he knew and had mastered were all protective or benign, apart from the general spells of exorcism that every sorcerer knew. He had known at an early age, relative to the discovery of his heightened will, that he did not possess the stamina nor disposition to become a warrior sorcerer, that his niche was more likely within those ranks who chose to defend, correct and ease rather than seek out, advance and attack. He dealt with the consequences of what the practitioners of the black arts did, he did not seek them out before they could do it.
But he had shown bravery, more than once. A willingness to place himself and his will, his confidence in the mastery of the arts, between demons and those they sought to harm. Between evil men and their victims. And he had come through unscathed.
He was a good sorcerer. But not the best.
The best would have known what had saved his life twice on the ocean liner. He did not.
The first attack had come during the first week of the voyage, the first time he had vacated his cabin at length. Upon boarding, Barker had cast a protective spell on his cabin which would not allow anyone to enter without his permission. Such a spell was strong, but the more he used the door, the weaker the spell would become. So he remained in the cabin and read some of the books he’d brought with him. Although he had packed a broadly themed collection of novels in anticipation of a quiet, solitary cruise, he had quickly exhausted his patience with them. He was on a holiday ship after all, designed for comfort, if not luxury, and there were other diversions and entertainments he didn’t have the discipline to completely avoid, despite the covert nature of his mission. There was even a stage magician amongst the lounge singers and vaudevillian comedians, to entertain the shipbound travellers. This had piqued his curiosity enough to risk leaving the packages unattended.
Barker had quickly seen through the magician’s sleight of hand and diversionary tactics, even from the back of the packed audience. Occasionally a true sorcerer practised stage magic, but this one had been nothing more than a master of illusion.
Nothing more? Barker caught himself.
Could he perform magic?
Could he do anything the Great Majesto had done without the aid of sorcery? He doubted it. Majesto must have practised diligently for years to gain the level of skill he’d exhibited on stage. It was just that parallel, the one between illusion and sorcery, which brought about his mild snobbery toward stage magic. He imagined briefly that he might know how astronomers felt when compared to astrologers. Same subject, both skilled, but diametrically opposed.
It had been on that night, when he had decided to gauge whether or not he might have a comrade in arts for the long journey, that he’d first been attacked. Gazing out to sea after Majesto’s encore, watching the mothers assess him as they guided their virgin daughters past him in the hope he might be a potential suitor, he let his guard down. How, he wondered, might a young woman ‘see the world’, at least as it truly was, with her mother constantly at her side? Still, it was tradition. The world was made of that. He suspected that many of the young women would return to England unattached, then marry the first man they set eyes upon to get away from their omnipresent maternal shadow. Perhaps that was the idea?
The decks of the liner were crowded during the day, but at night after dinner and entertainment, the decks were all but empty. He had always enjoyed the sea, at least the feeling of gazing out at it from the safe vantage point of a stretch of British coastline. The ocean made some people feel small, insignificant, but it had always made him feel profoundly connected to life. Had he not answered the call of sorcery, he might have been one of those young men who set sail for a military life. But then again, he’d always been predominantly of artistic temperament. If he was being honest with himself, he would not have lasted long in the navy. A mere child during the war against the Nazis, he’d been evacuated to Coventry for the duration, where his gifts had started to reveal themselves and flourish. The children’s war stories he’d heard at the time, as opposed to the terrors that had surfaced and been told and retold long after, even to this day, might just as well have attracted him to the air force or conventional service. But as a child he’d always seen the military in whatever form as a kind of noble dream, a romantic fantasy that was meant for others. Of course, as a child he’d not seen the war in such terms, only now, fourteen years after the end of the war, did he reflect and gain clarity upon his childhood perspective.
He was made for something else. Another kind of war.
He supposed though, had he been born a decade earlier, or if the war had lasted a decade longer, that he would have stepped forward. Fought. The call to the art of sorcery had not stopped others of his kind signing up, had not stopped them being killed or even making careers. Sorcerers were in many ways just like other men. Other women. They answered many calls, individually or as a whole through their Supernatural Council, and had throughout the centuries. They had lives outside the calling; butchers, bakers, and particularly candlestick makers.
He was a bookseller.
Ordinary books, most of the time. Works of fiction. But he had dealt with grimoires and spell books and magical items on the side, and the combination made for a diverse and curious clientele. He wondered how the store was keeping in his absence, if he’d chosen correctly to leave it in the hands of his nephew. The store ran itself, if you knew how to let it, and he suspected his nephew, until then an apprentice projectionist at the local motion picture theatre, possessed the correct temperament for such work. A caretaker. A watcher and imaginer. A sorcerer, no, but one who might appreciate tales of such things.
Tales were becoming more popular these days, as it had been designed. The great work of fiction had been completed, released and embraced by the people of the United Kingdom, and would spawn many and varied writers to emulate the tale for better or worse. He’d been told this through the underworld rumour mill and had come to believe it.
‘Those books,’ they would say, ‘those three books are our cover as the world progresses. It will cement the
sorcerer’s art as fantasy, enter culture and divert ordinary people from our reality.’
Yes, be believed that the great tale of the elves and dwarves and other fanciful beings had been engineered as a cover for sorcerers in the age to come. But the rest of it … the other reason?
He wondered if it were true. Had there truly once been intelligent creatures other than men on the Earth? Had all record of their existence been systematically removed, in order to hide what remained of them?
‘It could be done,’ his friend had sworn, ‘it could be done easily within two generations, with the right people in the right places. Look at Hitler. They say he would have done it with the Jews, had he won the war. Simply wiped them off the face of the Earth and out of history books as though they never existed. Two generations. That’s all it takes to forget. The way the world is moving now, perhaps one generation is all it would take. Imagine how quickly information will travel in years to come, Barker. Why, important messages can cross the world in a minute … in fifty years who’s to say it won’t be a matter of seconds? For the really important messages, that is.’
Barker didn’t know. He only knew how long it took for the ocean liner to get to Melbourne, how long it took for his books to be sent to collectors in various parts of the world. Anything crossing the globe in less than three months seemed absurd.
The man had seemed to come out of the sea at him. He was shoved hard, backward across the deck into the long window that separated the shuffle board deck from the walkway. Not out of the sea, he realised. The man must have been hanging or perched somehow over the edge of the ship. Barker had been standing at the portside railing, watching the ocean and thinking about war for some time, so the assailant must have made his way across the portside edge of the ship somehow and crawled up to him, rather than hiding in wait for Barker to move toward him.
The man had whispered a guttural, ‘H’ro’shoh.’
Paralysing spell, Barker recognised. One of those prehistoric utterances that resided still within man’s collective unconscious. A series of harsh syllables that would stop a man in his tracks. The name of a beast, perhaps? That when uttered had frozen early homosapiens in primal fear? The title of a devilish totem?
‘H’karal,’ Barker hissed in return, before his throat seized up, drawing energy from his gut and repelling the man with a wave of white heat, simultaneously defrosting his own stiff frame. The man had a dagger and he rebounded before Barker could properly move to counter anything more and then, as the dagger’s tip was at his throat, the assailant flew backward over the edge of the ship and was gone. It had been like a strong wind, a freak gust, had caught and taken him.
Over the edge, gone.
Dead as soon as he hit the water, if not drowned … how long would it take a man alone to drown at sea? The dread thought hit Barker as he returned to the edge, looked down into the black night water and started to call, before he knew it, that there was a man overboard.
Conscience.
But then there was a hand … at least, he felt that it had fingers, skin and joint, gently over his mouth from behind, and a voice in his mind that spoke a language he didn’t recognise. But the words made sense. The words said:
‘He would have killed you, he would try again. My grip snapped his neck, he is no more …’
The hand was removed and Barker turned about but there was no one there. An empty deck, a darkened shuffle board enclosure behind broad glass.
But in the reflection of the glass … the moon was not full, but she and the stars cast a bright glow nevertheless, he saw something. And a scent, like cut grass. It took him back to his school days, of summer recesses on the school oval.
He thought he’d seen bark.
But how? Bark, in his mind …
Think, sorcerer.
What you saw made an association of bark in your mind, but that was because what you saw was something outside of your comprehension … outside of human comprehension?
Barker shivered for all sorts of reasons and hurried back to his cabin.
When the ocean liner had docked three months later and Barker had descended the gangplank, catching sight of the crane that dangled his luggage and his packages, twirling high above the ship, it was without a clue as to where he really was or who he was supposed to meet.
The voyage had concluded and here he was, alone on the dock surrounded by hundreds of tourists and the people who’d come out this morning to greet them. He did not linger.
He read the directions to the hotel, which had been written by hand and attached to his accommodation details, and decided to go directly there, which was in the middle of the city, via taxi cab. He paused only briefly, before making his way, to pay the dockside workers for their help in transferring his luggage and the packages into the cab.
Once at the hotel he had tried to pay the concierge in advance for his room, but discovered that everything was in order, indefinitely. He had to assume that the Australian dollars he’d been given were simply for getting by.
In the lobby, as he waited for the porter to show him to his room, he saw and sensed immediately that the hotel was large and plush, and that the well dressed and perfectly groomed occupants conducted themselves as though they deserved to be there. Wealth and status. Feeling almost directly at odds with this, he made an immediate decision to keep to himself, to get by with room service and the radio. He made a mental note to purchase a few more novels.
The three months on the liner had not been enjoyable. At the parts of the world where the ship had docked and the passengers disembarked, he’d seen only the limited view from portside each time. Parts of the world he’d never expected to see, nor weeks before ever believed he would. But just a glimpse.
And now, it appeared, he was stuck in one of them without a clue as to where he really was or who he was supposed to meet.
His visions had started on that night, and he wondered if they were connected at all to the incidents on the ship when he’d been attacked.
Three days later, Barker was reminded of his thoughts on the deck, the night of the first attempt on his life, as he crossed the hotel lobby and noticed the foliage. Very exotic, potted palms of that size, and clearly healthy. Someone’s pride. Not unlike one of his three mysterious packages, up in his room. The concierge watched him, as he did whenever Barker left his room, as he had briefly for the past three afternoons. The inspection had a hint of curiosity, with a hint of knowing that Barker, really, had no idea where he was or what he was doing there.
Barker made his way to the bar and drank what he had become used to calling beer. The beverage and the afternoon trips to the bar were concessions to boredom, the boredom an extension of the long ocean voyage, which had descended soon after the beginning of his self-imposed exile to the hotel room. It was principally because the beer was cold that made the beverage so unlike the lagers and ales he’d grown accustomed to at home. But it was definitely flavoursome, beneath the chill, and he suspected the hotel, being what it was, served the very best.
A vision came to him as he sat on a bar stool. It dizzied him and he steadied himself as he sat, leaning heavily against the grey and tan swirl of the marble counter.
‘Easy there, friend,’ came a soft voice, American. A strange man sat one vacant stool away, sporting a wide smile. He was slender, his thin and lightly balding grey hair slicked back, with kind eyes over a beaky nose. His mouth seemed too wide for his thin jaw and pointy chin. Barker suspected he would have been twenty years the man’s junior.
‘You’re sure a drink is what you need?’
There was an impish quality to the man as he smiled.
Barker shook his head and smiled politely. ‘I’m not drunk, thank you. Just a light turn, must be the climate …’
‘British, huh? I’ve heard of something called the Melbourne flu, maybe you’ve got that? Never had any trouble with it myself.’
True, the elfin man was not simply thin but lean and graceful. There was el
egance in the way he sipped his glass of lager, in his poise on the stool.
‘I don’t think I’m ill, actually.’
Barker wondered: was this his contact? Was this how it would work?
‘To be quite frank, I’ve been having visions,’ Barker confessed.
The elfin man shifted his gaze directly to him. He was dressed smartly; navy slacks, a white blazer and white shirt, with a stylish navy cravat about his wiry neck. Very good shape, Barker assessed, for a man in advance of fifty years.
‘Visions?’ he raised a thin eyebrow. He was not handsome, in fact he looked a bit like an old woman. His forehead was huge. But there was something in his eyes, and simply in his general demeanour, that made Barker like him almost instantly. ‘Is this an everyday thing for you?’
‘No, just the past three days. Since I arrived.’
‘And …’ there was a slight tone of scepticism, but it was playful. ‘How often do these visions …’ the elfin man flicked his hand gaily as he searched for the word—‘manifest?’
‘One or two a day,’ Barker shrugged, a little embarrassed.
The elfin man was now well and truly intrigued. ‘What do you see?’
Barker spoke unselfconsciously, simply relaying his feeling of the vision without mental edit. ‘This time I saw … a rush of energy, of youth. In the future, perhaps a decade away. Colour and … dreams. Smoke and music.’
The elfin man leaned back, assessing Barker, doubtfully, yet with sympathy in his eyes.
‘Perhaps a drink is exactly what you need, friend.’
He waved at the bartender and a glass of beer was poured and appeared quickly on the bar before Barker. He sipped. Frothy, bitter … cold. But he was getting used to it.
‘I’ve never experienced anything like it. It’s like … flourishes of energy conveyed over time. Quite extraordinary.’
‘I dare say, I dare say,’ the elfin man uttered.
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