“In fact, that’s a better translation.” Helen corrected her printout. “‘—aether-newt, an excellent spy. However, for the seasoned wizard, the choicest familiar is the f’tragn-agl, which signifies a blood-spawn. It resembles those Servitors which surround the throne of Azathoth, though smaller. Nevertheless, it has the strength of a man when summoned, and should it grow to man-sized or beyond, its strength will be that of many men. Neither fire nor steel may destroy the f’tragn-agl; dismembered, it will flow together like the sundered wave. When properly bound it is well suited to be a guard or assassin. Unbound, it will raven on its own.’”
Helen paused. “This next part repeats Orne’s warning: ‘The wizard must heed the blood-spawn’s name. Blood secures it to the bubble of our world, and its lust for that incarnating blood is beyond all the lusts of men. Therefore, the wizard must never use his own blood to make it, for though the f’tragn-agl may not harm its summoner, yet it will desire his blood and grow the more fierce in deprivation.’”
Sean avoided Dad’s gaze. It came back too clear, how slashing his palm for blood during the ritual hadn’t hurt at all. In fact, his boner had only gotten harder, like he was some kind of S/M sicko. Who could blame Dad for looking like he wanted to puke?
Helen’s voice brought Sean back to the study: “The most important thing I get from these passages is that the Servitor can’t hurt Sean.”
“It bit him,” Dad said.
“Sean gave it explicit permission to bite, to drink. So, physically, he’s safe.”
Sean couldn’t stand that. “But the rest of you aren’t.”
“We’re all right,” Dad said. “And it won’t surprise us again.”
Gus shook his head. “It surprised me plenty when I shot it and it flowed ‘together like the sundered wave.’”
“Maybe we need bigger weapons,” Dad said. “An assault rifle or grenades. Splatter it into so many pieces it can’t put itself together again.”
“Or we could just call in the National Guard,” Gus said dryly.
“Well, maybe we should call someone. What about that detective who came over? He seemed all right.”
Dad hadn’t thought O’Conaghan was all right at the time.
“I have his card,” Gus said. “I saved it in case you changed your mind.”
“I don’t know, Gus.”
Dad’s nervous hair-habit was to grab at it like it was a possum he was trying to rip off his head. Helen was less violent. She worried one auburn lock, smoothing it straight, then curling it around two fingers. “None of us know exactly what to do,” she said. “But I don’t think we should involve anyone else if we can help it. It wouldn’t be fair.”
Dad and even Gus looked confused. Sean got her, though. “It’s like UFOs, and how people think the government’s covering them up because they’d cause a panic. But real UFOs would be minor-league compared to real Servitors.”
Helen nodded at him. “Right, because UFOs wouldn’t force you to accept the existence of something like the Outer Gods. Since yesterday, I’m starting to appreciate why the Archives are set up to keep people out.”
“If you measured a paradigm shift like an earthquake, this one would be off the Richter scale?” Gus suggested.
“Exactly.”
“All right,” Dad conceded. “I’m not dying to invite anyone into our club. But what’s our next move?”
“We’ve got a magical problem, we look for a magical solution,” Helen said. “Let’s assume Orne did get his rituals from the MU Necronomicon. We keep searching it for a summoning spell that matches Sean’s. The dismissing spell should be with the summoning one, Down paired with Up, as Alhazred puts it.”
Gus rose. “I wish I could help, but I have new grad students coming in for orientation.”
“That’s okay,” Sean said. “I’ll help Helen.” Wait, not that she’d asked. “I can, can’t I?”
She looked at Dad, passing the question to him. Dad hesitated, which was like worrying whether he should let Sean read the theory of explosives after he’d already blown up the house. Finally, though, he nodded.
“All right, Sean,” Helen said. “I’ll translate; you take notes.”
He took the pad and pen she handed him. Dad followed Gus outside.
Sean had wanted a look at the Necronomicon ever since he’d heard of it, and now the Tome of tomes was right in front of him. Okay, not the actual book, but still, a digital facsimile. The crabbed print and rusty discoloration made him squint, and the Latin owned him. Helen didn’t have a problem. She scrolled along as fast as if she were reading English in clean modern print, now and then telling him a page number and translating a few lines.
Dad returned and paced around until he had to be getting on Helen’s nerves. Instead of telling him to chill, which would have done zero good, she asked him to draw the Servitor as he remembered it. Smart move. He immediately hunted out Celeste’s easel and watercolor box, and after a few minutes he wore a scowl of concentration that told Sean he was as happy as he could be under the circumstances.
Sean looked back at the laptop screen. “I thought I did pretty good in Latin last year, but I can’t make out two words together of this stuff.”
“It’s a very idiosyncratic Medieval Latin,” Helen said. “Took me a while to get used to it, too.”
“I couldn’t ever find the dismissing spell on my own. Kind of smacks me upside the head. I was thinking I might go to MU for college, take the Arcane Studies course.”
“Why shouldn’t you, if you still want to?”
“You mean, if the Servitor doesn’t put me off it?” Sean caught himself scribbling spirals and quickly turned to a clean page. “Will it put you off working in the Archives?”
Helen punished that one lock of hair before answering. “If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said, ‘No way.’ It’s a great position for someone my age.” She grinned. “You won’t believe it, but I’m only, what, nine years older than you.”
“I believe it,” Sean said, and not just to be nice. When she smiled like that, Helen looked like she could still be an undergrad, easy. “But maybe the Archives don’t look so great now that you know magic’s real?”
“I know some of it is real. That makes things different, but I can’t try to deal with the big picture yet. My plan’s to focus on finding the dismissing ritual. That sound good enough?”
“Real good enough.” Sean meant it, but he glanced at the mantel clock, 10:30. Five or six more hours and the sun would hit its peak and start heading down. “Do you think we’ll find the dismissal before dark?”
Helen glanced out at the bright morning. “Could be. But here’s your first lesson in old-text scholarship—it’s slow-lane travel.”
Worrying about every approaching night hadn’t helped him yet. He had to learn to concentrate, like Helen and like Dad at the easel. Sean lifted his pen before it could swirl out another spiral. “I’m ready,” he said.
16
At Jeremy’s insistence, Helen took a nap after lunch. She felt much better when she returned to the study around three. Sean, though, was on the chaise longue, with Jeremy hovering, thermometer in hand. “Over a hundred,” he said.
Given the flush on Sean’s face, Helen wasn’t surprised. Nor was she surprised to see Sean bat his father’s hand off his forehead. “I’m okay, Dad. God. It’s the pain pills. They kick your butt.”
“I already called Celeste,” Jeremy said. “The wound might be inflamed. She might have to start him on antibiotics.”
Very broad-spectrum antibiotics to kill Servitor bugs, Helen assumed. It wouldn’t be a good thought to share with Jeremy. She went to the easel. She and Sean had described what they’d seen of the Servitor, and Jeremy had combined their impressions with his, only too effectively—the creature he sketched was coming alive. She went back to her laptop. “Rest some more,” she told Sean. “I can—”
The kitchen door banged open. Sean swung his legs off the chaise. Jeremy grabbed a
fireplace poker from the window seat where he must have laid it by for emergency use.
And Eddy ran into the study.
Helen sank into her chair. Jeremy tossed the poker back onto the window seat. “Edna. Can you knock next time?”
Edna? Ah, the way Eddy winced indicated that Jeremy had lashed her with a hated real name. “Sorry, Mr. Wyndham,” she said, plopping on the end of Sean’s chaise. “What’s with you crashing again?”
“Hey, I helped all morning.”
“I hope you don’t get sick from that bite. The Servitor left gunk all over our patio. Dad thinks a rabid skunk did it, and he’s hosing everything down, right? Then Mom says he might aerosolize the virus and breathe it in. Bang, rabies, you’re dead.”
“Viruses,” Jeremy said. “Thank you, Eddy.”
“I’m okay,” Sean snapped. “So how’d your research go?”
“Same as yesterday. Nothing about a Geldman’s Pharmacy in Arkham, and I still can’t find our Orne.”
Helen put in: “Last night I checked requests to view the Necronomicon as far back as they go online. No one who looked like he might be our Redemption Orne.”
Sean collapsed. “So we’re screwed.”
“No way,” Eddy said. “I think I’ve figured Orne out.”
Whatever Eddy had, she sounded close to bursting. “Let’s hear it,” Helen said.
“Say you come up with a screen name that’s really cool. You’ll use it everywhere. That’ll be you on the Internet.”
“With you so far.”
“The guy messing with us doesn’t use ‘Redemption Orne’ that way. Probably he’s got other screen names we don’t know about. But when he talked to Sean and me, he did use ‘Redemption Orne.’ Maybe because it’s his real name.”
“Hold on,” Jeremy said. “If Redemption Orne was his real name, there’d be real-world records for him and some would show up on the Internet.”
“There are real-world records. Like how he was born in 1669, how he was a minister at the Third Congregational Church, how he disappeared in 1692. See?”
Helen looked at Sean, who was nodding with atypical gravity. Eddy looked equally earnest. “You mean modern Orne and historical Orne are the same person?”
“Right,” Eddy said. “Like the Rev always claimed he was.”
Jeremy shook his head and kept shaking it, as if he couldn’t find words strong enough to refute Eddy’s insight. Helen’s impulse had also been to object. But if you admitted—had to admit—the existence of monstrous familiars …
She cleared her throat. “Why not, though? How are immortal wizards more fantastic than Servitors?”
“They’re not,” Sean said.
“Immortality?” Again Jeremy seemed to find no other words, but he loaded a ton of disbelief into that one.
“We don’t have to be talking immortality,” Helen said. “Just extended life. That’s always been one of the main goals of magic.”
Jeremy walked to the easel and stared at his sketches. Drawing the Servitor, reducing it to two dimensions, seemed to have made it comprehensible to him. How could he draw Orne’s three hundred plus years of life or understand how they had led Orne to Sean? “Say we go with our Orne being the Puritan Orne,” Jeremy said at last. “How’s that help us?”
Helen dug the rubber-banded stack of jewel cases from her backpack. “It could make these useful. They’re facsimiles of Orne’s journals.”
“That’s right!” Sean said. His pain pills might be kicking his butt, but he made it to the table ahead of Eddy. “I read in the Witch Panic book how MU had them.”
“The library put them on film and CDs not long ago. What with your hoaxer calling himself Redemption Orne, I brought the disks along.”
“Wicked!” Eddy said. “Maybe there’s clues about the dismissing ritual.”
“If you’ve got time, Eddy, why don’t you start looking?”
It was Sean who took the cases from her. “Eddy,” he said. “Go get your laptop so we can split these up.”
Eddy took off like a gazelle, if gazelles were inveterate slammers; this time, she banged out the front door.
Jeremy shrugged at Helen. “If you light the fuses on these kids, expect big explosions. Sean, you sure you’re up to reading?”
Sean had disappeared behind Gus’s PC monitor. “Yeah, Dad. I’m fine. What should we read first, Helen?”
“Start with the two labeled ‘Secret Journals.’ The story is Orne kept them in a hidden cabinet because of the occult references in them. But I’m afraid there’s no index yet and you can’t search the facsimile text.”
“That’s okay. We’ll just read straight through.”
Eddy bounded back into the study. Soon she and Sean were leaning into their screens, their faces bleached by the electronic glow. It didn’t look like the healthiest activity for a summer day, and Helen started to worry that she’d stepped on Jeremy’s parental toes. There were Eddy’s parents, too, who hadn’t signed a Consent for Minor to Peruse Wizard’s Private Papers form. Not that the Archives had such a form, at least not that Helen knew about.
And that was the rub, the fact that there was so little she did know, compared to the looming bulk of what she did not. She glanced at Jeremy, who’d started to apply watercolor to his sketches and who was as rapt as the kids. He’d shifted his easel to the windows facing the street, chasing the best light. Light, sun, the movement of it, the brightening and fading. It made time real.
Too real. Helen inserted another disk into her laptop and grimaced at the fresh pair of pages. Content aside, the Necronomicon was a horror to read, with a typeface so tortured the printers might have devised it to keep all but the most determined from studying the book. On the other hand, the illustrations were painfully exact. Here she had a series of woodcuts showing how to remove a heart. A beating heart, from a living (for an excruciating moment) human.
She scrolled to the next pair of pages, which were mercifully devoid of illustrations.
For a while the clink of Jeremy’s brushes against the side of his water jar was the only sound, that and the occasional murmur between Eddy and Sean. Then Jeremy went into the kitchen. Refrigerator and cabinet doors opening and closing, chopping. Soon the smells of browning beef and garlic, simmering tomatoes and basil. As Jeremy returned to the study, the aroma wafted before him, tantalizing. “Dinner?” Helen said.
He took the chair beside hers. “In an hour or so. Linguine and Bolognese sauce.”
“Great. I’m hungry enough to eat the whole city of Bologna.”
Sunlight had deserted the study windows, and Jeremy didn’t return to his painting. Instead he watched Sean and Eddy, who’d hardly come up for air since they’d dived into the Orne journals. Then, redirecting his gaze to Helen’s screen, he asked, “How are you coming?”
“Moving along. Nothing specific about the rituals yet.”
“Same here,” Eddy said. “But the journals are awesome. Patience and Enoch Bishop and the Nipmucs were totally witches. All kinds of weird stuff was happening around Dunwich, and Orne must’ve known his own wife and father-in-law were in the middle of it, except you can tell he’s in denial.”
Sean was silent, but his mouse clicked as steady as a metronome.
Jeremy kept watching Helen’s screen. After a few pages, he said, “What’s that about?”
He was pointing at a broad bar of black in the outer margin of the text, too neat to be accidental, too ragged to be computer generated. “From what I understand, that’s one of the big mysteries for Mythos scholars. An earlier owner of this Necronomicon wrote extensive notes in the book, marginalia. Then he or someone else blotted them all out. The Archives have tried everything to uncover the notes. No luck.”
“So that black stuff is ink?”
Before Helen could answer, the study table jolted toward her. Poltergeist? No, Sean, whose excitement had catapulted him out of his chair, just like in her office the day before. “Can I see them?” he said, voice cracking
.
“What, Sean?”
“Those things, the margin-whaties.” Sean came around the table. His face was definitely more flushed, and as he craned over her Helen felt the pulse of fever-heat. “That’s it, the black column?”
“That’s one of the blotted marginalia.”
Eddy looked over her laptop screen. “What’s the big deal?”
“It’s in the Orne journal I’m reading. Helen, you know who owned that Necronomicon just before MU?”
“The Enoch Bishop Eddy just mentioned, I think. The witchcraft court confiscated his books and gave them to the university.”
Sean went back to the PC. For a few seconds he mouse-clicked frantically. “Here’s what Orne writes: ‘Today in Dunwich Village, Mr. B. showed me the book of the Arab, which is called the Book of Dead Names. I read little, for I found it more ungodly than anything he has shown me before. The book is the more curious because Mr. B. has writ in the margins many annotations, and yet these cannot be read, for he has hidden them under a veil of ink so devised that none without the key can penetrate it.’”
That was an explanation of the marginalia that Helen hadn’t heard before. She hurried around the table. “Are there any more journal passages that mention Bishop’s Necronomicon?”
“I had one,” Eddy said. She’d caught Sean’s agitation—her ponytail bounced as she jittered in her chair. “I read it before you talked about the marginalia, so I didn’t know it was important. Wait. Okay. ‘Last night I found P. in the attic among her father’s effects. Beneath her was that vile book of the Arab, upon which she’d fallen in a swoon. This morning she lies in bed with the windows close-shuttered, for any light strikes a great pain into her eyes. She confessed she was trying to read Mr. B.’s annotations and so had brushed onto the blots a solvent meant to make the words clear for a time. However, its smell had overcome her before she could read what appeared. The solvent is all gone, she says—and I did find an empty vial beside her—so she will not be able to try the feat again. I brought her to promise she would leave the book—all her father’s books—untouched from now on. It seemed to relieve her to give her word.’”
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