The Mammoth Book of Sorceror's Tales

by Mike Ashley

  After a while, Father resumed speaking.

  “Sekenre, how old do you think I was when I married your mother?”

  “I – I—”

  “I was 349 years old, my son. I had been a sorcerer for a long time by then. I had wandered through many lands, fleeing death, consumed by the contagion of sorcery, slaughtering my enemies, raging in my madness against the gods, whom I considered to be at best my equals. But I had a lucid interval. I remembered what I had been, long before. I had been . . . a man. So I pretended I was one again. I married your mother. I saw in you . . . all my hopes for what I had once been. In you, that ordinary man lived again. If I could cling to that hope, I too, in a small way, would remain human. So you were special. I loved you.”

  “But Hamakina—”

  “– is mere baggage, a receptacle and nothing more. When I felt the weight of my death on me at last, when I could no longer hold off my enemies, I planted the seed of Hamakina in her mother’s womb, and I raised her as a prize specimen, for a specific purpose. I brought her here to contain my death. The seed of her was something wrought in my laboratory. I placed her inside her mother with a metal tube, while her mother lay in a drugged sleep. So, you see, her life did not come from the River, from the dreams of Surat-Kemad, but from me. I offered this new life to the Devouring God in exchange for my own. It is a bottle, filled with my own death. So I am still a sorcerer, and a great lord in the land of the dead, because I am neither truly living nor truly dead. I am not the slave of Surat-Kemad, but his ally. And so, my son, your father has outwitted all his enemies, evaded all dangers. He alone is not wholly consumed by sorcery. He continues. There is a certain beauty to the scheme, you must admit –”

  I rose to my feet, numb beyond all sorrow now. I picked up the sword.

  “Sekenre,” Father said, “now that I have explained everything – you were right; I did owe you an explanation – you must go away. Save yourself. Be what I wanted to be. You are a good boy. When I was your age, I too was good. I only wanted to do what was right. But I changed. If you go now, you can remain as you are—”

  “No, Father. I, too, have changed.”

  He screamed then, not out of fear, but despair. I stood before the door, sword under one arm while I folded my hands together, then opened them.

  Once more, it was as easy as breathing.

  The flames leapt from my hands, red and orange this time. They touched the door, spreading over it. I heard the metal bolt on the inside fall to the floor. The door swung open.

  At first my eyes could not focus. There was only darkness. Then faint stars appeared, then an endless black plain of swirling sand. I saw hundreds of naked men and women dangling from the sky on metal chains, turning slowly in the wind, mutilated, their faces contorted with the idiocy of hate.

  The darkness faded. The stars were gone. Father’s room was as it had been before the priests had cleaned it out. All the books were there, the bottles, the shelves of jars, the charts, the strange shapes muttering in jars.

  He lay on his couch dressed in his sorcerer’s robe, as I had last seen him, his eyes gouged out, sockets covered with golden coins. He sat up. The coins fell into his lap. Fire burned within his eye-sockets, white-hot, like molten iron.

  And he said to me, “This is your last warning, Sekenre. Your very last.”

  “If you are so powerful, Father, where is your power now? You have not resisted me, not really. You only give me . . . warnings.”

  “What would I have to do then, my son?” he said.

  “You would have to kill me. It is too late for anything else.”

  His voice began to fade, to become garbled, to disintegrate into a series of hisses and grunts. I could barely make out his words.

  “Now all my preparations are undone. You disobeyed me to the last. You did not heed my many warnings, sorcerer, son of sorcerer—”

  He slid off the couch onto the floor, wriggling toward me on all fours, his whole body swaying from side to side, his terrible eyes blazing.

  I almost called on the Sybil then. I wanted to ask simply, What do I do now? What now?

  But I didn’t. In the end, I alone had to decide what was right, the correct action. Anything I did would please the Sybil. She would weave it into the pattern. Surat-Kemad did not care –

  “My son . . .” The words seemed to come from deep within him, like a wind from out of a tunnel. “To the very end I have loved you, and it has not been enough.”

  He opened his huge, hideously elongated mouth. His teeth were like little knives.

  At that final moment, I did not fear him, nor hate him, nor did I sorrow. I felt only a hollow, grinding sense of duty.

  “No, it was not enough, Father.”

  I struck him with the sword. His head came off with a single blow. My arm completed the motion almost before I was aware of it.

  It was as easy as breathing.

  Blood like molten iron spread at my feet. I stepped back. The floorboards burned.

  “You are not my father.” I said softly. “You cannot have been my father.”

  But I knew that he had been, all the way to the end.

  I knelt beside him, then put my arms around his shoulders and lay with my head on his rough, malformed back. I wept long and hard and bitterly.

  And as I did, dreams came to me, thoughts, visions, flashes of memories which were not my own, and terrible understanding, the culmination of long study and of longer experience. My mind filled. I knew a thousand deaths and how they had been inflicted, how a single gem of knowledge or power was wrested from each. I knew what every instrument in this room was for, the contents of all the books and charts, and what was in each of those jars and how it could be compelled to speak.

  For I had killed a sorcerer, and if you kill a sorcerer you become all that he was.

  This was my inheritance from my father.

  In the dawn, Hamakina and I buried our father in the sand beneath the house. The black stars were gone. The sky was dark, but it was the familiar sky of Eshé, the Earth of the living. Yet the world was still empty, and we dug in the sand with our hands. When we had made a shallow grave, we rolled him into it, placing his head between his feet in the way a sorcerer must be buried. For a time, Mother was with us. She crawled into the grave with him and we covered them both up.

  The sky lightened into purple, then azure. Then water flowed beneath the dock and I watched the first birds rise from among the reeds. Hamakina stood among the reeds for a little while, gazing back at me. Then she was gone.

  Suddenly I began to shake almost uncontrollably, but merely from cold this time. Though it was early summer, the night’s chill lingered, and I was almost naked. I climbed up into the house by means of a rope ladder I’d dropped through the trapdoor and put on trousers, a heavy shirt, and a cloak.

  Later, when I came down again with a jug to get water for washing, I saw a man in a white robe and a silver mask walking toward me across the water. I stood up and waited. He stopped a distance off, but I could hear what he said clearly enough.

  At first he spoke with my father’s voice.

  “I wanted to tell you the rest of the story of the Heron Boy. There is no ending to it, I fear. It just . . . continues. He was not a heron and he was not a boy either, but he looked like a boy. So he dwelt among men pretending to be one of them, yet confiding his secret to those who loved him. Still, he did not belong. He never could. He lived out his days as an impostor. But he had help, because those he confided in did love him. Let me confide in you, then. Sekenre, when a boy becomes a man his father gives him a new name which is known only between the two of them, until the son gives it to his own son in turn. Therefore take the name your father had, which is Heron.”

  And he spoke with the voice of the Sybil.

  “Sekenre, you are marked with my mark because you are my instrument. All men know that out of the tangle of the world I divine the secrets of their lives. But do they also know that out of the tangle
of their lives I divine the secrets of the world? That I cast them about like bones, like marbles, and read the patterns as they fall? I think not.”

  And, finally, he spoke with the voice of Surat-Kemad, god of death and of the river, and the thunder was his voice; and he took off the mask and revealed his terrible face, and his jaws gaped wide; and the numberless, fading stars were his teeth; and the sky and the earth were his mouth; and the river disgorged itself from his belly; and his great ribs were the pillars of the world.

  He spoke to me in the language of the gods, of Akimshé, the burning holiness at the heart of the universe, and he named the gods yet unborn, and he spoke of kings and of nations and of worlds, of things past and things which are to come.

  Then he was gone. The city spread before me now. I saw the foreign ships at anchor in the river, and the bright banners waving in the morning breeze.

  I took off the robe and sat on the dock, washing. A boatman drifted by and waved, but then he realized who I was, made a sign against evil, and paddled away frantically.

  His fear was so trivial it was somehow incredibly funny.

  I fell back on the deck, hysterical with laughter, then lay there. Sunlight slanted under the house. The air was warm and felt good.

  And I heard my father whisper from his grave, gently, “My son, if you can become more than a sorcerer, I will not fear for you.”

  “Yes, Father. I shall.”

  Then I folded my hands, and slowly opened them, and the fire that I held cupped there was perfect and pale and still, like a candle’s flame on a breezeless summer night.

  Ralph Adams Cram

  Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942) was an architect, but an architect with style. He was a champion of the Gothic revival and from 1890 onwards, when he opened his first office in Boston, he helped design and oversee the construction of churches, cathedrals, and academic institutions and some of his greatest legacies are at West Point Military Academy and Princeton University. So what’s an architect doing in a book of sorcerers’ tales? Ah, that’s because Cram was an architect with imagination. In his early days he somehow found the time, when he wasn’t designing churches, to write stories. He only wrote a handful and these are collected in Black Spirits and White (1895), one of the undeniable classics of weird fiction. Every story – and there were only five – is a miniature gem. Take the following about a house in Paris once occupied by an ancient sorcerer.

  When in May, 1886, I found myself at last in Paris, I naturally determined to throw myself on the charity of an old chum of mine, Eugene Marie d’Ardeche, who had forsaken Boston a year or more ago on receiving word of the death of an aunt who had left him such property as she possessed. I fancy this windfall surprised him not a little, for the relations between the aunt and nephew had never been cordial, judging from Eugene’s remarks touching the lady, who was, it seems, a more or less wicked and witchlike old person, with a penchant for black magic, at least such was the common report.

  Why she should leave all her property to d’Ardeche, no one could tell, unless it was that she felt his rather hobbledehoy tendencies towards Buddhism and occultism might some day lead him to her own unhallowed height of questionable illumination. To be sure d’Ardeche reviled her as a bad old woman, being himself in that state of enthusiastic exaltation which sometimes accompanies a boyish fancy for occultism; but in spite of his distant and repellent attitude, Mlle. Blaye de Tartas made him her sole heir, to the violent wrath of a questionable old party known to infamy as the Sar Torrevieja, the “King of the Sorcerers.” This malevolent old portent, whose gray and crafty face was often seen in the Rue M. le Prince during the life of Mlle. de Tartas had, it seems, fully expected to enjoy her small wealth after her death; and when it appeared that she had left him only the contents of the gloomy old house in the Quartier Latin, giving the house itself and all else of which she died possessed to her nephew in America, the Sar proceeded to remove everything from the place, and then to curse it elaborately and comprehensively, together with all those who should ever dwell therein.

  Whereupon he disappeared.

  This final episode was the last word I received from Eugene, but I knew the number of the house, 252 Rue M. le Prince. So, after a day or two given to a first cursory survey of Paris, I started across the Seine to find Eugene and compel him to do the honors of the city.

  Every one who knows the Latin Quarter knows the Rue M. le Prince, running up the hill towards the Garden of the Luxembourg. It is full of queer houses and odd corners – or was in ’86 – and certainly No. 252 was, when I found it, quite as queer as any. It was nothing but a doorway, a black arch of old stone between and under two new houses painted yellow. The effect of this bit of seventeenth century masonry, with its dirty old doors, and rusty broken lantern sticking gaunt and grim out over the narrow sidewalk, was, in its frame of fresh plaster, sinister in the extreme.

  I wondered if I had made a mistake in the number; it was quite evident that no one lived behind those cobwebs. I went into the doorway of one of the new hotels and interviewed the concierge.

  No, M. d’Ardeche did not live there, though to be sure he owned the mansion; he himself resided in Meudon, in the country house of the late Mlle. de Tartas. Would Monsieur like the number and the street?

  Monsieur would like them extremely, so I took the card that the concierge wrote for me, and forthwith started for the river, in order that I might take a steamboat for Meudon. By one of those coincidences which happen so often, being quite inexplicable, I had not gone twenty paces down the street before I ran directly into the arms of Eugene d’Ardeche. In three minutes we were sitting in the queer little garden of the Chien Bleu, drinking vermouth and absinthe, and talking it all over.

  “You do not live in your aunt’s house?” I said at last, interrogatively.

  “No, but if this sort of thing keeps on I shall have to. I like Meudon much better, and the house is perfect, all furnished, and nothing in it newer than the last century. You must come out with me tonight and see it. I have got a jolly room fixed up for my Buddha. But there is something wrong with this house opposite. I can’t keep a tenant in it – not four days. I have had three, all within six months, but the stories have gone around and a man would as soon think of hiring the Cour des Comptes to live in as No. 252. It is notorious. The fact is, it is haunted the worst way.”

  I laughed and ordered more vermouth.

  “That is all right. It is haunted all the same, or enough to keep it empty, and the funny part is that no one knows how it is haunted. Nothing is ever seen, nothing heard. As far as I can find out, people just have the horrors there, and have them so bad they have to go to the hospital afterwards. I have one ex-tenant in the Bicêtre now. So the house stands empty, and as it covers considerable ground and is taxed for a lot, I don’t know what to do about it. I think I’ll either give it to that child of sin, Torrevieja, or else go and live in it myself. I shouldn’t mind the ghosts, I am sure.”

  “Did you ever stay there?”

  “No, but I have always intended to, and in fact I came up here today to see a couple of rake-hell fellows I know, Fargeau and Duchesne, doctors in the Clinical Hospital beyond here, up by the Parc Mont Souris. They promised that they would spend the night with me sometime in my aunt’s house – which is called around here, you must know, ‘la Bouche d’Enfer’ – and I thought perhaps they would make it this week, if they can get off duty. Come up with me while I see them, and then we can go across the river to Véfour’s and have some luncheon, you can get your things at the Chatham, and we will go out to Meudon, where of course you will spend the night with me.”

  The plan suited me perfectly, so we went up to the hospital, found Fargeau, who declared that he and Duchesne were ready for anything, the nearer the real “bouche d’ enfer” the better; that the following Thursday they would both be off duty for the night, and that on that day they would join in an attempt to outwit the devil and clear up the mystery of No. 252.

 
; “Does M. l’Américain go with us?” asked Fargeau.

  “Why of course,” I replied, “I intend to go, and you must not refuse me, d’Ardeche; I decline to be put off. Here is a chance for you to do the honors of your city in a manner which is faultless. Show me a real live ghost, and I will forgive Paris for having lost the Jardin Mabille.”

  So it was settled.

  Later we went down to Meudon and ate dinner in the terrace room of the villa, which was all that d’Ardeche had said, and more, so utterly was its atmosphere that of the seventeenth century. At dinner Eugene told me more about his late aunt, and the queer goings on in the old house.

  Mlle. Blaye lived, it seems, all alone, except for one female servant of her own age; a severe, taciturn creature, with massive Breton features and a Breton tongue, whenever she vouchsafed to use it. No one ever was seen to enter the door of No. 252 except Jeanne the servant and the Sar Torrevieja, the latter coming constantly from none knew whither, and always entering, never leaving. Indeed, the neighbors, who for eleven years had watched the old sorcerer sidle crabwise up to the bell almost every day, declared vociferously that never had he been seen to leave the house. Once, when they decided to keep absolute guard, the watcher, none other than Maître Garceau of the Chien Bleu, after keeping his eyes fixed on the door from ten o’clock one morning when the Sar arrived until four in the afternoon, during which time the door was unopened (he knew this, for had he not gummed a ten-centime stamp over the joint and was not the stamp unbroken?) nearly fell down when the sinister figure of Torrevieja slid wickedly by him with a dry “Pardon, Monsieur!” and disappeared again through the black doorway.