Modern Magic
Page 267
“Up here, you little shit.”
A dreamy smile spread across his features. “Sorry. What can I do for you?”
“Open the trunk.”
He reached for the release and there was a small pop, then the trunk lid rose. The sound of the rain pelting the metal altered at this new angle. Eve went to the rear of the limo and reached into the trunk to retrieve a parcel wrapped in soft leather. She unfolded the leather and folded her fingers around the stock of the sawed-off shotgun, and she smiled as she dropped the leather wrap into the trunk and slammed it shut.
Turning to Doyle she cocked the shotgun. “Too easy.”
“Perhaps,” he replied. Then he nodded toward the brick steps in front of the brownstone. “Would you like to get the door?”
Eve strode purposefully up the short walkway, not even bothering to check the windows of the surrounding homes for prying eyes. That sort of thing was Doyle’s problem, and he dealt with it often enough. She went up the four steps and paused on the landing, then shot a kick at the front door. The blow cracked it in half and tore it from its hinges. The bottom part of the door flew across the building’s foyer and shattered the legs of a small table; the top half swung like a guillotine from the security chain that still connected it to the door frame.
With preternatural swiftness she darted inside the brownstone, swinging the gaping double barrels of the shotgun around as she scanned the parlor on her left, and then the formal living room on her right. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
Doyle stepped in behind her. Eve glanced at him and saw the corona of pale blue light that encircled his eyes, the aura of that same glow surrounding his fingers. The illusion of the kindly, aging gentleman had disappeared. This was the magician. This was who Doyle was.
“Anything?” he asked.
Eve’s eyelids fluttered as she inhaled. She glanced at the stairs that led up into darkness. “Nothing that way.” Then she narrowed her eyes as she stared into the shadowed corridor that led toward the back of the brownstone. “But that way . . .”
“Magic. Yes. I feel it.”
Doyle went past her, heedless of any danger. The blue light around his fingers and leaking from his eyes grew brighter and he was a beacon in the darkened corridor. Eve tried to make sense of the layout of the place in her head. Living room and parlor in front. Probably a back staircase somewhere, a pantry, big kitchen, and the sort of sprawling dining room that had been popular in the first half of the twentieth century.
There were framed photographs on the walls that had obviously hung there for decades and wallpaper that had gone out of style before John F. Kennedy was President. Yet there was no dust. No cobwebs. No sign that time had continued to pass within that home while it went by on the outside.
The corridor ended at a door that was likely either a closet or bathroom, but there were rooms to either side, elegant woodwork framing their entrances. Doyle did not even glance to his left, but turned into the room on the right. Eve was right behind him and nearly jammed the shotgun into his spine when he came to a sudden stop.
She moved up beside him, staring into the dining room.
Six figures sat in a circle around the elegant dining room table, all of them clasping hands as if joining in prayer—or a séance. There were candlesticks on the table and several on a sideboard; Doyle waved his hand and each of the wicks flickered to life, those tiny flames illuminating the room. Perhaps the old magician needed the light to see by, but Eve did not. She saw better in the dark.
Of the six, five were very clearly dead, and had been so for a very long time. Though their skeletal fingers were still clasped they were withered, eyes sunken to dark sockets, only wisps of hair left upon their heads. In many places all that remained of their flesh were tattered bits clinging to bone, like parchment paper. Eve peered more closely. She had not smelled death in this place and so she wondered if it was some sort of illusion. But no. There was an earthy, rot odor that lingered in the air. It was simply that, like dust and other sediment of time, the stink of putrefying flesh seemed to have been suspended somehow.
The five withered corpses were of indeterminate age and race but at least one of them had been female. And then there was the sixth member of this chain, a woman in a blue dress, her brown hair up in a tight bun, with small-framed glasses resting on the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were closed and her face peaceful, as though she might well have been in the midst of a natural slumber rather than eternal repose.
“Yvette Darnall,” Doyle observed.
Eve glanced at him, saw the puzzlement on his face and knew that it matched her own. “You know her?”
“A mystic and psychic. She disappeared in 1943.”
“Or maybe she didn’t,” Eve said, her gaze once more surveying the hideous gathering, the sunken faces waxy and yellow in the candlelight. “Maybe it was just that nobody knew where to look.”
Doyle frowned thoughtfully and stepped further into the room. Eve followed but her nostrils flared and the hair rose on the back of her neck. Her fingers hooked into talons. She sensed something in the room and she knew that Doyle had felt it too.
Yvette Darnall opened her eyes.
Eve and Doyle froze. For just a moment there was a kind of terrible awareness in the psychic woman’s gaze and then her eyes rolled upward so that they seemed completely white. Her head lolled back and her jaw went slack, mouth falling open.
One by one, the five cadavers did the same. Some of their jawbones cracked. When the most desiccated among them lay his head back it simply tore off above the jaw with a sound like snapping kindling. Upon hitting the hardwood floor his skull shattered into dust and bone fragments.
Yvette Darnall began to moan, and so did the chorus of the dead.
She choked as a stream of milky, opalescent mist issued from her throat, and a moment later thinner tendrils of the same substance flowed from the gaping mouths of the dead. Eve recognized the material. Ectoplasm. Malleable spirit-flesh. But she did not think it was the ghosts of these dead summoners or even of the medium herself who was manipulating the ectoplasm here.
It coalesced in the midst of the table and as it did, Eve saw that Yvette Darnall had begun to decay. Whatever this power was, it was drawing on whatever essence remained in her; it had kept her here for more than sixty years as a spiritual battery, and now it was using her up.
The ectoplasm churned like thick, heavy storm clouds and began to take shape. In a moment Eve could see human features forming there, a face, a man with a long, hawk nose and thin lips, with wild unkempt hair and a shaggy beard.
The face in the pooling ectoplasm narrowed its eyes as though it had seen them and it sneered imperiously, gaze rife with disapproval. When it spoke, its lips moved without sound, yet its voice issued from the wide, gaping mouth of Yvette Darnall.
“Doyle,” the voice rasped scornfully. “You damned fool.”
Chapter Two
The ectoplasmic head of Sweetblood the Mage drifted in the air above the circular table. Tendrils of supernatural matter extended from the manifestation to anchor itself to the ceiling, the walls and the table below it. The ghost flesh moved, its lips forming words, but the voice of the world’s most powerful sorcerer growled at him not from the ectoplasm but from the grotesquely open maw of the withering spiritualist, Yvette Darnall.
“And to think I once called you ‘apprentice.’”
“I always respected you, Lorenzo,” Doyle said, attempting to conceal the exhilaration he felt at moving so much closer to actually locating the arch mage. “But I never understood your decision to retreat, to hide yourself away. The world has need of you.”
Doyle recalled his first meeting with Lorenzo Sanguedolce, in Prague, during the spring of 1891, and their immediate dislike for one another. Even after the relationship shifted to that of teacher and student, their animosity stood firm. There wasn’t anyone, on this plane of existence anyway, that he disliked as much, but the ways of the weird did not take into ac
count one’s personal feelings. Sweetblood was needed; it was as simple as that.
“Do you have any idea the risk you have taken in searching for me?” the undulating spiritual mass asked, the power of its voice causing the psychic’s body to visibly quake. “Do you think I have stayed away from the world all this time on a whim?”
Eve stood beside Doyle, tensed for a fight. He could feel the aggression emanating from her lithe form, millennia of experience having taught her always to expect a fight. “I could be wrong,” she said, “but I’m going to guess he isn’t all that pleased to see you.”
Doyle shot her a hard look. “Your enhanced senses are absolutely uncanny,” he said dryly. Then he turned his focus to Sweetblood again.
“You must listen, Lorenzo. Damn me if you will, but others are on your scent as well. One way or another, you’ve been found. But the others who track you have grave intentions.”
“And you, fool that you are, you think I need your help?” Sweetblood rasped. “You may have done their work for them, Arthur.”
The disembodied head gazed down upon the grotesque gathering at the table beneath him, at the rapidly degenerating form of Yvette Darnall and the circle of desiccated corpses clutching hands, with a look of utter disdain forming upon his spectral features.
“You’re no better than this damnable woman and her band of psychics. They too attempted to locate me. Their curiosity cost them their lives,” the spectral head went on, showing not the slightest hint of compassion. “Fortunately, I was able to use their folly for my own ends.”
Eve sniffed. “Nice guy.”
Doyle ignored her, focusing on Sweetblood, trying to gauge by the rate of Darnall’s deterioration how much longer their connection would remain active. “Obviously,” he said, gesturing toward the circle of cadavers. “You used them as an alarm to warn you when someone, or possibly something, was coming too close. The psychic residue of their search led us here, drawing us away from your true location.”
The acrid aroma of burning flesh permeated the room and Doyle frowned and glanced away from the ectoplasmic face to find that the body of Yvette Darnall had begun to smolder, the tight bun of her hair emitting a gray, oily smoke.
“Indeed. And in this pocket of frozen time, I might work my power through these decaying idiots and destroy the interloper, the next fool. I never expected the next fool to be you.”
Doyle could not help but smile. “You have always underestimated me, Lorenzo.”
The entity appeared to seethe. Flames burst from the bodies of the other mystics, as if the very fire of its anger, their clothes and parchment-dry flesh consumed by fire. “You’re a careless fool, Arthur, and this latest misstep only proves it.”
Eve stifled a laugh with a perfectly manicured hand, refusing to make eye contact with him. It was moments like this when he remembered why it was that he so often chose to work alone.
“Cast all the aspersions you like, but they will not alter the truth. Dark powers descend upon you,” Doyle declared, fingertips crackling with magickal energy leaking. “Better that I should find you than some malevolent—”
“Imbecile!” Sweetblood bellowed, enraged, his voice erupting from the gaping lips of the medium who had become his conduit. The ectoplasmic features that loomed above the fire-engulfed cadaver contorted, and the ghostly tendrils that connected it to the dead woman writhed and pulled away to flail whip like above them. “Persist, and you may doom the world.”
The burning corpse of Yvette Darnall stood up abruptly, knocking over the flaming chair in which it had sat for the last sixty-one years. Like some fiery marionette, embers of flesh falling from her form, the dead woman leaned across the table to point an accusatory finger at them.
“Go home, apprentice,” said Lorenzo Sanguedolce, through the charred and smoking remains of the medium. “You meddle in matters beyond your comprehension.”
And with those final words, the instrument of the mage’s admonition exploded, spewing fiery chunks of flesh and bone. Doyle and Eve watched as the room was consumed by fire, the ectoplasmic manifestation of the arch mage evaporating with a sizzling hiss. The spell that had kept the room in a timeless stasis had collapsed, age rushing forward, drying the wood, speeding the fire. Time and flame sapped the moisture from the dark mahogany, reducing it to kindling. The heat seared his face, yet Doyle stared into the flames until he felt Eve’s powerful grip close upon his arm.
“I wouldn’t count on the last word,” she snarled over the roar of the fire as she began to pull him toward the exit.
Doyle roughly removed her hand and ventured further into the room.
“Have you lost your mind?” she shouted after him.
“Go,” he told her. “There’s still a chance I can salvage what we came for.”
It was becoming ever more difficult to see, as well as breathe, and Doyle quickly scanned the floor for the precious item he sought. Silently he prayed to the Ancient Kings that it had remained intact.
“Arthur, let’s go!” Eve called from the doorway, as his tearing eyes fell upon his prize: Darnall’s blackened, jawless skull lying upon the smoking wood floor.
Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, Doyle folded the white silk and used it as a buffer to protect the soft flesh of his hand from the searing heat emanating from the charred skull. There was only the slimmest chance that what he was about to attempt would work, but there was far too much at stake not to at least try. He inserted his index and middle fingers into the hollow eye sockets of the medium’s skull, searching for the soft gray matter of the brain beyond the missing eyes. The tips of his fingers sank into the gelatinous muscle of thought. He let slip an exultant sigh; the flames had not yet melted the woman’s brain. There were still things to be learned from her.
The beams and walls of the burning room moaned and creaked. It would not be long before the ceiling caved in, the upper floors of the brownstone coming down as the entire building was consumed by the supernatural conflagration. Beneath his breath, Doyle uttered an incantation of retrieval, letting the ancient magick travel through his body, coursing down the length of his arm, through his fingers and into what remained of the dead psychic’s brain. Images of Yvette’s past—of heartbreak and ecstasy and quiet contentment—flooded his mind, making themselves at home, as if eager not to be forgotten with the passing of their host. The deluge of memories was overwhelming, and he nearly stumbled into the fire as he magickally ransacked the recollections of a lifetime.
Behind the remembrance of a torrid lesbian affair with a beautiful dark-haired girl nearly half her age, and beyond an exceptionally awful production of La Boheme, Doyle found the elusive bit of information that he had been searching for, and claimed it as his own.
He plucked his fingers from the skull, tossed the now-empty shell back into the flames, and wiped the viscous, hideously warm gray matter from his fingers upon his scorched handkerchief. The fire raged all around him, attempting to block his path and consume him, but the mage knew the language of fire, speaking to the conflagration politely and with respect, and it allowed him to pass unharmed through the doorway and into the smoke-filled hall.
In the corridor, where smoke billowed and flames had already begun to lick across the ceiling and ripple up the walls, Eve waited. Her face was covered in dark patches of soot that resembled war paint. Her eyes darted about like those of a desperate animal. Her kind did not do well with fire.
“I can’t believe you’re not burned to a crisp.”
Doyle moved past her silently on his way toward the exit.
“At least tell me that you got whatever it was you risked being burned alive for,” she said, following close on his heels.
“I did indeed,” he said as they hurried across the entryway and out into the damp night air. “Time is short, now. We must act swiftly. He’s far closer than I would have guessed.”
Squire awaited them on the sidewalk in front of the burning brownstone. The goblin held an open umbrella,
rain sluicing over the edges, and he wore a nervous expression upon his grotesque features.
“A real gentleman’s gentleman,” Eve muttered as she reached him.
Sirens wailed in the distance, but they would be far too late to save this building. As they moved toward the car, Eve cursed loudly. Doyle turned to face her, only to flinch as something wet and heavy struck his shoulder, slippery on his neck. Suddenly the pre-dawn was alive with the staccato thunder of one damp impact after another. In the midst of the rain, something else was falling from the sky.
“What the Hell?” Eve snapped, shielding her head as the toads continued to fall, bouncing off the brick steps, the streets, and the cars below them. Multiple car alarms wailed, partially drowning the rather offensive sound of soft flesh striking hard pavement.
Doyle stared about in alarm. Things are far worse than I thought. Squire scrambled up the steps to shield them both from the pummeling rain with the large, black umbrella.
“This can’t be good,” Eve snarled, pushing bloody, ruptured amphibian corpses out of her way with the tip of her designer boot.
“Be thankful it ain’t cats and dogs,” Squire said, as the rain of toads continued to fall all around them.
Far worse.
Julia Ferrick turned off the engine of her Volvo wagon in the underground parking garage on Boston’s Boylston Street and wondered, as she so often did, what had happened to her real son.
“I was listening to that,” the imposter growled from the passenger seat. He had insisted on listening to one of his homemade music mixes on the drive to their family appointment, and when she had turned off the engine, it cut off a headache-inducing grind in mid-verse.
“And you’ll hear the rest of it on the way home,” she said with exasperation, placing her keys and the parking garage receipt into her handbag. His name went unsaid. More and more, of late, she had trouble calling him Daniel, or even Dan. She didn’t know him anymore. Jesus, she craved a cigarette.
“I wanted to hear it now,” he said curtly, refusing to make eye contact with her.