Shadowmancer (The Circle Book 1)

by Lee Isserow

  London was still essentially new to him. When given the choice between staying in Trump's America or moving to Brexit Britain, Jules picked the smaller, less populated of the two. Both were brewing with increasing intolerance, whether that be for skin colour or sexual orientation or faith. He and his husband Akif ticked pretty much all the boxes for the various categories of hatred, and the country with fewer guns seemed like the safest option. It also didn't hurt that their son was still young enough for his accent to be malleable, and Jules was quite looking forward to him picking up an adorable received pronunciation.

  Crossing the Atlantic wasn't a massive shift, culturally speaking. Jules had found Britain to be nothing more than a mirror universe of America, one where they seemed to have more accents across the thirty three boroughs of London than they did across three point eight million square miles of United States. It only took a few days to get used to the mirror-world coins, a few weeks to decipher the glyphs and colour coding of the Underground, and a few months to remember which way to look when crossing a road. It had been the same for Akif when he moved to the U.S., except 'Kif got clipped by way more bike messengers in his first few months in New York, and was seemingly way less visible to taxi cab drivers over there.

  It had been six months since they uprooted and resettled, and he was acclimatising. Even if the climate he was currently residing in was a train carriage that was so hot, water could have probably boiled if left unattended. Not to mention the goth's questionable bathing habits, that were making him gag for breath. A thought crossed Jules's mind. One that he knew he shouldn't even begin to entertain. Because the goth was clad head to toe in black, and given that everyone on the train instinctively stared into middle distance, there would be no one to notice if he were to use his gift to make the journey just a little bit more pleasant.

  Acting on the thought, against his better judgement, he angled his wrist up, lifted his hand, fingers hanging below the palm. There were so many passengers, so many feet close to the floor. So many shadows just laying there, waiting to be borrowed... His fingers danced below his palm, like he was manipulating a marionette. The shadows under the feet of those around him began to move, slinking along the floor unseen by all, coming together, coalescing, and began to climb up the goth's legs. He kept their form loose, textureless, devoid of mass as they slipped under the corpulent man's shirt. The shadows spread out, coating the pungent passenger whilst he remained completely unaware. At Jules's command, the shadows thickened, sealing up the pores under his arms. A thin veil moulded itself so close to the cotton both inside and outside the guy's black shirt that it might easily be mistaken for the fabric itself, but this shroud was created with one purpose in mind, that cotton could never hope to contend with; keeping the odours locked tight to the large man's body.

  The mephitic stench continued to hang in the air for a minute or so, increasingly dissipating across the carriage until it was gone, and no further odours emerged from the goth. Jules knew it was wrong to misuse his gift for such trivialities, but convinced himself that it was all in the service of the greater good. Not only for him, but for all the commuters trapped in the vicinity of the shower-phobic traveller. He let a smile come to his lips. It was rare these days that he got to play.

  5

  Mirrored footsteps

  Jules was glad to be out of the train and back above ground. It felt close to euphoric, feeling the fresh air on his face after a half hour in what was essentially a clothing-mandatory sauna. Akif wouldn't mind that he still hadn't found a job. The ball and chain – as 'Kif often called himself, in an faux-cockney accent – was earning enough all by himself to support the three of them. But Jules wanted to be able to contribute. He didn't like the idea of being a kept man, let alone becoming a stay-at-home dad. Even the mere thought of it sent shivers down his spine, bringing forth images to his mind's eye of going stir crazy with nothing to do all day but watch inane daytime television and clean the house from top to bottom over and over and over again. He would get a job, for his own sanity if for no other reason. He just had to wait for the right gig to come along.

  As their house was in sight from across the road, Jules could see the door open, two figures in black suits standing on the front step. Akif under the door frame with Natan in his arms, the boy's weight mostly held on a hip that was cocked out to the side. Both of them were struggling with their son's insistence on being held and carried. It wasn't that he weighed that much, he was only three, but any prolonged period of holding him invariably led to the carrier complaining about joint and muscle pain the next day.

  Jules picked up pace, arcing around the men as he came up the steps, standing slightly in front of his husband in a protective fashion. There was something about these two men that didn't feel right. A baseless suspicion that tingled not only in the back of his mind, but under his skin too.

  “What's going on?”

  “These men were just asking about you,” Akif said, his big, dark eyes gleaming in the daylight. They seemed to have a constant sheen, Jules thought, somehow they were shinier than any other eyes he had ever seen.

  “We'd like to offer you a job,” said the man on the left in a deep, gravelly monotone. He was tall and stocky, with an almost grey skin tone that made it look like he had rarely seen the light of day. His hair was shaved into a crew cut, that made him look a little too military for Jules's liking, and it certainly didn't help his anxiety that the man to the right looked almost identical.

  “A job?” he asked. “Who offers someone a job on their doorstep?”

  “We do,” said the man on the right.

  “And you are...”

  “We work for an organisation that would like to employ you,” said the one on the left. “Because of your skills.”

  “Skills? What do you mean, 'skills'?”

  Right glanced at Left. His eyes shifted to Akif, then to Jules. “Yes, your very special skills.”

  “What special skills?” Akif asked, with a chuckle.

  “Perhaps we should just leave you a card,” said Right.

  “Yes,” said Left, “a card.” He produced a card from his pocket and held it out.

  Jules eyed it suspiciously, and took it from the man on the left. It was completely black on one side, and as he turned it over, discovered it was black on the other side too. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “We await your call,” said Right. The two of them did a one-eighty in unison, Left turning clockwise, Right turning counter-clockwise, taking mirrored footsteps down the stairs and along the path.

  “That was... weird.” said 'Kif, heading back into the house.

  “Hate to say it,” Jules said, leaning out and watching the men walk away. “But I've seen weirder...” As he blinked, the men completely disappeared from the street. He stepped back out on to the pavement and looked for a sign of them. There was none, just the glimmer of a heat ripple coming off the paving stones, dust blowing down the road on a gentle breeze. Jules looked at the black card in his hands as he walked back towards the front door. There was raised type on both sides of it, an address.

  “Still, pretty exciting,” Akif said, as Jules stepped back in, closing the door behind him. “Someone wanting you bad enough to come all the way to the house...”

  Jules ran his thumb across the card absent-mindedly and looked back down to it with suspicion. The raised type had vanished. “Yeah. I guess.” A pitter-patter of tiny feet came towards him, and he crouched down, scooping up the toddling mass of Natan, a big half-toothless smile on the boy's chubby cheeks.

  “I'm making tea, you want tea?” 'Kif shouted from the kitchen.

  “Sure,” Jules replied, carrying the giddy, squirmingly gleeful lump of their son through to the living room, and settling on the couch. He looked at the card again, the raised type had returned. Natan reached out his tiny, chubby hand to the ebony rectangle of card, and ran his tiny digits over the letters.

  “Bumpy!” he said, with a giggle.
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  A chill came over Jules. The type was there when he looked at the card, there when his son looked at it, but not when Akif was present. He had seen this kind of thing before, just as he had seen men like those that came to the door – not exactly the same – but similar. His grandmother had spent his formative years loosely educating him in all manner of magicks, and shrouding things from the many low-magicks and no-magicks (that were the majority of the population) had been amongst those lessons.

  A light breeze came through the room, kicking Jules alert. He got up, leaving the card in Natan's hands, and double checked that he closed the front door behind him. He had, and then checked the windows in the living room, the doors out to their small back yard. They were all closed, and yet the cool breeze seemed to loop back around, wafting around him. He could feel it, as if it had a physical presence. It came over his shoulders, sent a chill across his neck. “Go,” said a voice, a whisper on the wind.

  Without a thought, Jules raised his hand, palm upright, thumb and first two fingers erect. At that command, shadows leaped from behind the couch, from under the rug, from behind books on bookshelves. In barely a blink of an eye, they converged, formed thick, solid black spikes. Each had a hard, sharp tip that probed the air in search of whoever might have infiltrated their house, become the source of the voice on the breeze. The knives cast from shadow found no signs of anyone else in the room, and Jules glanced back to the card, which was now sodden and mangled in the jaws of his son.

  “Tea's ready,” said 'Kif, his footsteps coming towards the door.

  Jules let his hand fall back to his side, the shadows receding, returning to their natural state at the command.

  “Everything okay?” He set a tray down on the coffee table. At its exact centre was a pot, steam licking from the spout. It was flanked by two cups and saucers stacked atop one another, a small jug of milk and a sugar bowl.

  “Sure,” said Jules, as he poured the tea into the first cup. He didn't like lying to the man he loved, but at that moment, he was the diametric opposite of sure.

  6

  a bridge across the realms

  Putting Natan to bed was a nightly trial for Jules and Akif. Their original method of alternating which of them was to spend one to three hours by his bedside did not last long. Rock, paper, scissors was the most recent game of choice to decide who would lose a great portion of the night to convincing the boy to close his eyes and let sleep come. Not that he was any trouble when he finally gave in to slumber, but the child had a thirst for knowledge, wanted to be told stories and facts, although often when it came to stories, he desired for them to be repeated over and over and over again.

  This was one such night, with Jules finally finishing the picture book of Disney's Aladdin for the third time, to a gleeful shriek of “Again! Again!” from his supposedly exhausted son.

  Jules closed the book and turned back to the front cover, his eyes hanging on the montage of brightly coloured characters and settings from the movie. It was not only the third time he had read the book that night, but the tenth time that week, and it was only Tuesday. He rested the book on his lap and looked up at the child's wide aquamarine eyes, peeking out from under a mop of impossibly shiny dark hair that formed into curved waves across his forehead, like a frozen ebony tide.

  “How about I tell you a story my grandmother told me, about where genies really come from?”

  The child's eyes grew even wider, if that were possible. Natan adored the tales paraphrased from his grandmother. He had never met her, but her versions of fairy tales were always more exciting, not to mention darker and much more twisted than the Disneyfied versions that lay in the pages of books and glimmers of screens.

  “Lie down now,” Jules instructed, waiting for the child to obey. The gleaming sapphires continued to stare at him, and he cocked an eyebrow until Natan took the hint and closed his eyes. “The story starts outside of time. Our world, our reality, the dimension of man and woman, lives in a bubble. A protective shell that surrounds us, keeps us safe from all the creatures that live in the other realms. Whilst all the people in our world pretty much look the same, on the other side of the barrier, there is no one single way a thing looks. They're as different to one another as you are to an alligator or a moth.” A smile crept across the child's face, and Jules paused with his judgemental gaze fixed, in case the boy decided to take this opportunity to open his eyes again.

  He did not, and Jules continued. “All the things that live out there – and they are things, defying definition by words or language – most of them desire nothing more than to exist for eternity. But some of those things, particularly the younger ones, the upstarts, they lust for death and destruction. They hunger for it, it's the thing that keeps them going, fires the furnaces in their massive, many bellies.”

  He paused, momentarily to censor himself, as he was about to quote his grandmother verbatim, explaining how they survived in the outer realms, and how they procreated. A myriad tentacles penetrating a plethora of holes, often at times burrowing new holes into flesh, drilling through undulating vile sacs of skin and organs to reach all the way through to the star-sized reproductive organs that lay somewhere deep inside the beasts. That was, of course, not suitable for a young child's ears, and he knew that much better than his grandmother, who never saw fit to hold back on disgusting details.

  “The genie, the djinn was the most cunning of all the monsters that lived in the outer realms. He served a master, whose name comes from a time before language, with sounds that our tongues weren't designed for. His lord was a great, sprawling mass of tentacles, with a thousand eyes that watched all things at all times. He and the other creatures that lived in this outer realm considered themselves gods, for they had the powers of creation at their disposal, but cared little for using them. They were beings of cosmic proportions, all of them, and the djinn's master was the size of our sun, each of its eyes at least the size of our moon. They could not only see everything in their realm, but beyond their realm into ours, into all the other dimensions. Knowing this, the djinn bided his time, waited aeons and aeons, millions of years serving at the whim of his master and creator, until he had the opportunity to steal one of its many eyes.”

  “Eww!” screeched Natan, furrowing his tiny brow and screwing up his eyes as tight as they could go.

  “Hush,” Jules said. “Settle down, and I'll continue.”

  The boy shuffled about in the bed, and lay perfectly still as he waited for the story to resume.

  “It used that eye to peer into the other realms.” Jules decided once again that it was best to spare his son the details, because they were gory to say the least. The djinn had no eyes of its own, and gouged into its flesh to create an opening large enough for the stolen eye to fit into. Bearing in mind that the creature was much smaller than his creator, this was quite some feat.

  “When it saw our realm, the lush green forests and dazzling blue oceans, let alone all the tasty mammals walking along the ground, he was overcome with an insatiable desire to make the treacherous journey between dimensions, break through to our realm, find this place that lay beyond the barrier, and gorge himself upon all the tasty treats that resided there, here, on Earth.”

  Another point to censor, for the method of travel between realms was tasteless at best, involving burrowing into the flesh of another of the massive overlords of his reality, up what was essentially one of many anuses, believing that a bridge across the realms lay deep within the guts of the gargantuan beast. He was, it turned out, correct.

  “The djinn emerged into our realm, but something had got lost in the translation between realities. Not just his great size; remember, where he came from, he was the size of a small planet, whereas in this realm, things were much smaller, and traversing through the barrier had shed not only his mass, but his magicks too - he was nowhere near as powerful as he expected to be. But that was not all he lost. There was something greater shed in transition; his mind... It was as a
morphous as the rest of him, and became somehow deranged in transit. Sanity, what little he had somewhere amongst his insatiable lust for power, was undeclared lost luggage, misplaced somewhere in the infinite expanse of time and space that lies between dimensions. But, the insane rarely tend to know they're insane, all he was aware of was his weakened state. The djinn, as knowledgeable as he thought himself, was unaware that magick works differently on different planes of existence, and his had been thoroughly sapped by crossing realms. He needed to feed, and set about sucking the life from all the natural resources he could find. From trees and grass to oceans and atmosphere. As he grew in strength, he came to the realisation that this place he once deemed as a paradise was sorely lacking in the things that would truly make it a utopia.”

  This decision was, according to the original telling, reached after the djinn had his way with every orifice of every living creature he came across. It was, in the grimmest possible way, a Goldilocks problem, none quite fit his massive, amorphous genitalia just right. But, as with many of the details of the story he re-told, that information was not suitable for a child.

  “And so be began to enact a great magickal ritual of his own devising to take the world apart at the molecular level, breaking it down to its base elements and reconstituting it in his own image. It was a long and complicated collection of acts that made up this ritual. He had the people of the land build him temples, great pyramids, and used them as focal points for sacrifices, with massive sigils cast and sealed between each of them.”

  The timeline had been truncated for the sake of a brief re-telling. It took the djinn close to thirty thousand years to recover from breaching the realms and regain his strength.

  “It was at this point, when the people of Egypt were being massacred by a cruel and angry false god, that the Circle deemed an intervention was called for. And of course, who better to lead such an intervention but Shaman Kahgo, the greatest and post powerful of all the magickians in all the land?”