Murder by magic: twenty tales of crime and the supernatural

by edited by Rosemary Edghill

  The light from the lamps strengthened, and with each word, she felt a warmth increasing inside her, a fierce strength pouring into her. Was it from her feathered companion, just as the words were? Or was it the words that brought this new power?

  No, it wasn’t the light behind her that was increasing! It was the light around her!

  Cor—

  A golden halo of light surrounded her, increasing in brightnesswith every word that spilled from her lips. And now Grey joined in the chanting, for chanting it was. She caught the pattern now, a repetition of some forty-two syllables that sounded like no language fragments Nan had ever heard. She knew what Italian, Hebrew, and Chinese all sounded like, even if she couldn’t speak or understand them, for folk of all those nationalities thronged the slums where she lived. She knew what Latin, Greek, and French sounded like, too, since those were taught at the school. This language definitely wasn’t any of those. But when Grey took over the chant, Nan stopped; she didn’t need to speak anymore. Now it was Grey who wove an armor of words about her—and a moment later, Sarah’s voice, shaking, faltering, but each syllable clear, if faint.

  Then she went all wobbly for a moment. As if something gave her a good cuff, she experienced a sort of internal lurch of vision and focus, a spirit earthquake. The room faded, thinned, became ghostly. The walls receded, or seemed to; everything became dim and grey, and a cold wind buffeted her, swirling around her.

  On the other side of that door, now appallingly transparent, bulked an enormous shadow; that was what was oozing under the door, reaching for them, held at bay by the golden light around her. The shadow wasn’t what filled her with horror and fear, however—it was what lay at the heart of it, something that could not be seen, even in this half-world, but that sent out waves of terror to strike devastating blows on the heart. And images of exactly what it intended to do to those who opposed it—and the one it wanted.

  Now the shadow was on their side of the door, and there was no getting past it. The shadow billowed and sent out fat, writhing tentacles toward her.

  But Nan was not going to break; not for this thing, whatever it was, not when her friend needed protecting from this horror that was going to devour her and take her body for its own!

  She brandished her club, and as the shining blade in her hand ripped through the thick grey tendrils of oily fog the thing sent toward her out of the shadow, she saw with a shock that she no longer held a crude wooden club. Not anymore—

  Now she held a shining sword, with a blade polished to a mirrorfinish, bronze-gold as the heart of the sun. And the arm that swung the blade was clad in bronze armor.

  She was taller, older, stronger; wearing a tunic of bright red wool that came to her knees, a belt of heavy leather, her long hair in a thick plait that fell over one shoulder. And Neville! Neville was no heavier than he had been, but now he was huge, surely the size of an eagle, and his outspread wings overshadowed her, as his eyes glowed the same bronze-gold as her sword and the golden aura that surrounded them both.

  But the form within the shadow was not impressed.

  The shadow drank in her light, swallowing it up, absorbing it completely. Then it began to grow…

  Even as it loomed over her, cresting above her like a wave frozen in time, she refused to let the fear it wanted her to feel overwhelm her, though she felt the weight of it threatening to close in on her spirit and crush it. Defiantly, she brandished her sword at it. “No!” she shouted at it. “You don’t get by!”

  It swelled again, and she thought she saw hints of something inside it… something with a smoldering eye, a suggestion of wings at the shoulders, and more limbs than any self-respecting creature ought to have.

  She knew then that this was nothing one single opponent, however brave, however strong, could ever defeat. And behind her, she heard Sarah sob once, a sound full of fear and hopelessness.

  Grey and Neville screamed—

  And the ghost door burst open behind the horror.

  In this strange half-world, what Nan saw was a trio of supernatural warriors. The first was a knight straight out of one of her beloved fairy books, broadsword in hand, clad head to toe in literally shining armor, visor closed—though a pair of fierce blue eyes burned in the darkness behind it. The second bore a scimitar and was wearing flowing, colorful silken garments and a turban centered with a diamond that burned like a fire, and could have stepped out of the pages of the Arabian Nights, an avenging jinn.

  And the third carried not a sword, but a spear, and was attired like nothing Nan had ever seen—in the merest scrap of a chemise, a bit ofdraped fabric that scandalized even Nan, for inside that little wisp of cloth was—

  Memsah’b?

  The shadow collapsed in on itself—not completely, but enough for the knight to slam it aside with one armored shoulder, enough for the jinn and Memsah’b to rush past it, and past Nan, to snatch up Sarah and make a dash with her for the now open door, with Grey flapping over their heads in their wake.

  Nan saw the shadow gather itself and knew it was going to strike them down.

  “Bloody hell!” she screamed—or at least, that was what the words that came out of her mouth meant, for she certainly didn’t recognize the shape of the syllables. And, desperate to keep it from striking, she charged at the thing, Neville dove at it, and the knight slashed upward frantically.

  Again it shrank back—not in defeat, oh no, but startled that they had dared to move against it.

  And that was enough—-just enough—for Memsah’b and the jinn to rush past bearing Sarah, for Nan and Neville and Grey to follow in their wake, and for the knight to slam the door shut and follow them down the stairs—

  Stairs that, with every footstep, became more and more solid, more and more real, until all of them tumbled out the front door of number 10, Berkeley Square, into the lamplit darkness, the perfectly ordinary shadows and smoke and night sounds of a london street.

  Sahib slammed the front door shut behind them and leaned against it, holding his side and panting. Gone were his armor, his sword—he was only ordinary Sahib again. Selim—and not the jinn—put Sarah down on the pavement, and Grey fluttered down to land on her shoulder. Neville looked up at Nan and quorked plaintively, while Memsah’b, clad in a proper suit, but with her skirt hiked up to scandalous shortness, did something that dropped her skirt from above her knees to street length again.

  “Are you two all right?” she asked anxiously, taking Sarah by the shoulders and peering into her face, then doing the same with Nan.

  “Yes’m,” Nan said, and Sarah nodded.

  “Faugh,” Sahib coughed as he straightened. “Lets not do that again anytime soon, shall we? I’m getting too old for last-minute rescues.”

  Last-minute rescues—’cause we went off alone! “Oh, Sahib, Memsah’b—” Nan felt her eyes fill with tears as it suddenly came home to her that her protectors and benefactors had just put themselves into deadly danger to save her. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “Nan, Nan, you aren’t to blame!” Sahib said immediately, putting one strong arm around her shoulders. “You did nothing that you shouldn’t have done, and if you hadn’t been so careful, we wouldn’t have known where you were until it was too late! No, it was our fault.”

  “It certainly was,” Memsah’b said grimly. “But it was someone else’s as well… and there is going to be a reckoning. But let’s get away from here first. I don’t altogether want to find out if the bindings keeping that thing confined to this house will hold under provocation.”

  Sahib took Sarah’s arm, giving her Grey to tuck inside her coat, and Selim lifted Neville onto Sarah’s shoulder. As they walked quickly away from the house, Memsah’b continued. “Someone came to me a few days ago with a story about this place, how some haunt was making it im­possible to rent out and he was in dire difficulty because of it. He wanted Sarah or me, or both of us together, to lay the spirit, but I have heard all of the stories about this address, and I knew b
etter than to try. Something came to dwell there, over a hundred years ago, and it is not a thing to be trifled with. Men have died here, and more than one, and many people have gone mad with fear. Whatever that thing was—”

  “Is old,” Nan put in with a shudder. “Real, real old. I dunno how it got ‘ere, but it ain’t no spook.”

  “Well, evidently this person decided to force our hand,” Sahib said thoughtfully, and as Nan looked up when they passed under a street-lamp, she saw that both his face and Selim’s were grim. “I believe that I will have a private word with him.”

  “As will I—although I am sorely tempted to tell him that his devil has been laid, and suggest he spend a night there himself,” Memsah’b said with deep anger in her voice. “And from now on, we will contrive a better way of bringing you girls if I should need you.”

  “Please,” Sarah said in a small voice. “What happened to Nan and Neville? And you and Sahib and Selim?”

  Sahib cleared his throat awkwardly; Selim just laughed, deep in his throat. “You saw us as we seem to be—”

  “Are,” Sahib corrected dryly.

  “Are, then—when we are warriors for the Light,” Selim concluded.

  “Though how Nan happened to slip over into a persona and power she should not have until she is older—much older—I cannot imagine,” Memsah’b added with a note in her voice that suggested that she and Nan would be having a long, a very long, talk at some point in the near future.

  But for now, Nan was beginning to feel the effect of being frightened nearly to death, fighting for the life of herself and her friends, and somehow being rescued in the nick of time. She stumbled and nearly fell, and Sahib sent Selim in search of a cab. In a good neighborhood like this one, they were not too difficult to find; shortly, both the girls were lifted in to nestle on either side of Memsah’b, birds tucked under their coats with the heads sticking out, for Nan had left Neville’s hatbox and was not at all inclined to go back after it. And in the shelter of the cab, Neville providing a solid oblong of warmth, and the drone of the adult voices above her head, safe at last, she found herself dropping off the sleep.

  But not before she heard Memsah’b saying, “I would still like to know how it was that the child came into her Aspect without any training—and where she found the Words of Power for the Holy Light.”

  And heard Grey answer.

  “Smart Neville,” she said in her sweetest voice. “Very smart Nan.”

  Afterword

  Now that you’ve taken your trip into the shadows, I suppose you have a few questions. Why these murders? Why murders at all, for that matter? Why mix murder and magic? It’s a long story.

  In one sense, every story is a mystery, even if it isn’t intended to be a mystery for the reader. How do you get the characters from here to there, and the story from “Chapter One” to “The End”? So I suppose an interest in unraveling that sort of puzzle leads naturally to an interest in mysteries, but in point of cold hard fact, I was a mystery reader long before I began the daunting process of becoming a writer. Writers like puzzles and mysteries because they spend so much of their professional life solving them. As for why occult mysteries, well… there’s a basic rule of fiction that I’ve always followed.

  If you want to keep a reader’s attention, keep raising the stakes.

  It’s like this.

  Murder is the most unnatural act, a crime that often requires the keenest and most insightful investigator, whether official or amateur, to solve it. The investigations, and the theories, are bounded by the laws of possibility, if not probability, and so the murderer is eventually identified and brought to justice.

  But what if, once you eliminated the impossible, what you had left were still impossible? What if a killer could be in two places at once, kill from a distance, or enter a locked room without a trace? What if, in a world where magic was a fact of everyday life, a killer were to commit a crime by purely mechanical means?

  I’m not the first person to have thought of this, of course. Crime and the supernatural have long been a popular mix. Nearly every detective worth the name has at least dabbled in a case touching on the occult at some point in his career—even Lord Peter Wimsey in “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey,” undertook to solve a case of supposed witchcraft and demonic possession.

  To do even the sketchiest history of the occult detectives would require a full book, not just a few pages. I’ll try to hit one or two of the high points here, but in order to even begin to winnow things out, I needed to stick to series where most of the detective’s adventures focused on the occult, and to leave out single-title works entirely. So Dracula isn’t here, or The Exorcist, although you could make a strong case for both Doctor Abraham Van Helsing and Friar Lancaster Merrin being occult detectives.

  Nor do I have the space to get into movies, comics, or television, though that means I have to leave out Ghostbusters; The Exorcist (the movie); Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts; The Sixth Sense; Kolchack: The Night Stalker; The X-Files; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Charmed; and many more that would certainly otherwise be worth mentioning for their influence on the field.

  The Occult Detective—often called a ghosthunter or Ghost Breaker—found his (almost always “his” in those early days) first true flowering in the world of the pulps and the proto-pulps, in an era when there were hundreds of magazines on the newsstands every month and thousands of stories published every year. And now, a few pages from our “angels gallery”…

  Doctor John Silence was the creation of Algernon Blackwood, perhaps best remembered today as a horror writer. Silence first appears in 1908, with a final adventure dated 1914, though the early adventures may only have appeared in book form. Silence is an archetypal O.D.: like many of his successors, he is independently wealthy, a member of the professions, and possesses psychic powers himself, gained through rigorous years of study.

  Jules de Grandin was the brainchild of pulp master Seabury Quinn, and appeared almost exclusively in the original incarnation of the magazine Weird Tales. Unlike Silence, de Grandin is all flamboyance and quirks, rather like a ramped-up Poirot. He’s referred to as “the Sherlock Holmes of the Supernatural,” and he makes his way with great verve and an immoderate body count through a host of zombies, vampires, and other ghoulies in the ninety-three adventures that appeared from 1925 through 1951. De Grandin is notable for having both connections to French Intelligence and a military background, both of which he exploits in his fight for good.

  Carnacki the Ghost-Finder is the O.D. of William Hope Hodgson, who is best remembered today for his classic dark fantasy The House on the Borderland. Carnacki’s first adventure appeared in 1912, and he flourished in various British and American magazines through 1947, his career overlapping those of both Doctor Silence and de Grandin. Like Doctor Silence, Carnacki is a psychic investigator, called in to investigate occult disturbances, but unlike other occult detectives, he always attempts to eliminate any mundane cause through the scientific method before turning to the “Black Arts” to solve the crime.

  Doctor Taverner, who appears in twelve stories originally published in Royal Magazine at unknown dates, and first collected in 1926 in The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, is the creation of Violet Mary Firth, who wrote under the pen name Dion Fortune, a pen name taken from her family motto, Dio et Fortuna. Possibly unique among the ranks of the creators of the O.D.’s, Fortune was herself a practicing occultist, a member of the Golden Dawn. She claimed to have based Taverner on her mentor, Doctor William Moriarty and said that her Taverner stories were “studies in little-known aspects of psychology put in the form of fiction because, if published as a serious contribution to science, they would have no chance of a hearing.”

  Beginning in the 1930s, Manly Wade Wellman gave us three classic O.D.s: Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant (1938-82), a retired judge who has devoted himself to a study of the occult; John Thunstone (1943-85), a renowned scholar of independent means whose passion is the occul
t (and who, oddly enough, possesses a blessed silver-bladed sword cane identical to Judge Pursuivant’s); and Silver John (1946-87), sometimes known as John the Balladeer. Of the three, Silver John, a soft-spoken countryman who plays a silver-strung guitar and whose adventures are drawn from the folklore and mysticism of the American South, is perhaps best known. All three characters shared the same universe and met each other at various times.

  Marion Zimmer Bradley was best known for her fantasy and science fiction novels, but she also authored quite a large body of occult and gothic novels and stories. Colin MacLaren is her occult detective, who appears with his psychic partner, Claire Moffat, in four books: Witch Hill, Dark Satanic, The Inheritor, and the collaboration Heartlight, which was written with yours truly.

  With the diminishing of the pulp market and the rise of the paperback novel at the end of World War II, the classic O.D. became less prevalent. But you certainly can’t keep a good man (or woman) down, and the O.D. quickly found a new home in the SF and Fantasy field, shedding much of his pulp-horror background in the process.

  A distinct subgenre of the O.D. is the tale set in an alternate universe where the ground rules are decidedly different, but the problems of detection and justice remain the same. Three examples:

  Lord Darcy, whose original adventures appeared from 1964 to 1980, is the creation of SF master Randall Garrett. Darcy is an investigator for Richard, Duke of Normandy, in an alternate universe where magic works and the Platagenet dynasty rules to this day over a low-tech Anglo-Norman Empire. Garrett gave us classic puzzle-based mysteries, sticking firmly to the rules of his “scientific” magic and filled with allusions to the classics of the mystery field.

  Glen Cook provides an archetypal hard-luck hard-boiled gumshoe, also (coincidentally) named Garrett. Garrett has appeared in ten novels since 1987 and doesn’t seem to have a first name as of this writing. The difference between Garrett and the classic mean-streets private eye is that Garrett hangs his hat in another world: the city of TunFaire, a decaying outpost of the Karentine Empire, a corrupt (in all senses of theword) city populated by elves, giants, centaurs, pixies, wizards, and just about anything else that ever escaped from a fairy tale. In a tip of the hat to Rex Stout, Garrett shares his lodgings with The Dead Man, a massive creature who isn’t a man but is certainly dead. And quite grumpy about it. Philip Marlow would certainly recognize Garrett’s problems, if not their packages.