Blood Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 2)

by Stephen Penner

  “You’ll never finish in time.”

  Maggie looked up to cast an angry eye at her mother. She stood just a few feet away, just in front of the large, boxy teacher’s desk. Her flowered dress was now accompanied by a simple white cardigan sweater and she held her hands casually folded in front of her. “Why bother?”

  Maggie glanced at the clock again. 3:59. “There’s still time,” she insisted.

  “No, Maggie.” Her mother took a step forward. “It’s too late.”

  Maggie’s brow furrowed, sending a deep crease up her young forehead. She gazed down again at the textbook. Its words seemed even smaller, each page a collection of four columns of illegible fine print. She was ready to turn the page, but she couldn’t move her arms; they were pinned beneath the small desk, jammed between her legs and the underside of the wooden writing surface. Fully trapped, she looked up again at her mother.

  “There’s still time,” she repeated, but her voice belied even her own doubts. “I just need a little more time.”

  Her mother stepped forward and lifted Maggie’s chin with her hand. “No,” she whispered. “It’s too late.”

  Maggie’s face crimped again as her eyes looked first to the textbook then again to her mother. “There’s so much to learn,” she lamented. “I just need a little more time.”

  Maggie’s mother smiled and nodded, then opened her mouth to reply. But rather than words, thick red-black blood oozed from her parted lips. She dropped her hand from Maggie’s chin and her eyes rolled up into her skull even as her body stiffened with an upward jerk and a faint, gurgled squeak. Maggie could hear the skin split and the flesh tear as her mother’s face and neck were ripped down the middle, spilling blood and bile onto her desk and textbook. The fissure tore down the length of her mother’s body, staining the sweater crimson and blotting out the flowers with pitch. Blood sprayed from the resultant cavity and Maggie, trapped in the school desk, could only watch in helpless horror as the dress followed its owner in shredded bifurcation—and from within the gory husk emerged a scarlet skinned demon, long ragged horns curling evilly from its forehead, uneven yellow fangs pushing from its mouth, and rippling steel-cable muscles exploding from its gore-soaked chest and arms.

  “NO!” it shouted into Maggie’s face and soul, its breath caustic with her mother’s blood. “IT’S TOO LATE!!”

  Maggie wanted to scream but she could find no wind to do so. Instead she fought for breath as she sat upright, sweat-soaked, in her hotel bed.

  “Ho— Holy hell,” she finally managed to say, one hand clawing at her chest for air, the other covering her mouth in horror.

  She knew it had only been a dream, but the vividness of the nightmare lingered despite the onset of consciousness. She could still smell the blood. Her mother’s blood.

  She threw back the covers and stumbled weakly to the window, quickly parting the shades and opening the pane. The fresh air cooled her sweaty body as she looked out over Cardigan Bay. The morning sun was shining off the water and she could hear birds in the distance. The air was sweet with the scent of saltwater and breakfast.

  “I think I’m gonna be sick,” she managed to say and ran to the bathroom.

  27. Xqrjl h’Gyuxvwwlyi Qxq

  Climbing the hill from her hotel to the library, the summer sun caressing her back and neck, Maggie questioned the wisdom of having skipped breakfast. Normally a ‘breakfast-is-the-most-important-meal-of-the-day’ sort of person, Maggie had nevertheless passed on any food that morning, the stench of the nightmare still fresh in her nostrils. But now that her body was being asked to actually do something, the dull, easily enough ignored void which had filled her stomach had been replaced with a sharp nausea which both punished her for having not eaten and dared her to try now without vomiting. She halted her ascent to catch her breath—and to let the nausea subside.

  Looking around she noticed that she was standing across the street from Bronglais Hospital. She also noticed that the clinic appeared to be roughly halfway up the steep hill from the Old College by the harbor to the Penglais campus, where stood the residence halls. She wondered how many of the hospitals patients were exhausted students who had stupidly skipped breakfast that morning.

  She then turned back whence she’d come and caught a glimpse of the sun’s glimmer off the waves of the harbor. A grin escaped onto her face and she inhaled deeply. Aberystwyth was undeniably beautiful from this vantage point. And the nausea had finally passed, leaving behind a decidedly more polite request for food. Or at least coffee. Maggie looked up the hill and considered the near certainty that Prof. Hamilton had in fact not faxed any permission letter to the library. That should only take a minute or so to confirm. Then she could grab a bite to eat, maybe at the library’s café, while she considered what her next step would be.

  And speaking of next steps, she thought with a pained smirk, then lifted her foot and renewed her assault on Mount Aberystwyth.

  The confines of the library were a cool and welcome relief after the sunny climb. Maggie eyed the computer terminals suspiciously as she crossed the lobby to the circulation desk. Just a minute to confirm no letter from Edinburgh, then off to breakfast. She wondered whether the Dragon Rampant served eggs.

  “Good morning, miss.” It was the same woman as yesterday.

  “Good morning.” Maggie smiled, still somewhat hopeful, but undeniably realistic about her chances. “I was here yesterday afternoon and I wanted to look at the historical manuscripts. You said, that is, um, I’m a student at the University of Aberdeen and you said if I could get a letter from a professor…?” Not terribly coherent, but adequate.

  “Right, right.” The librarian remembered their conversation. “You were going to call someone, I believe?”

  “Er, yeah.” An embarrassed frown cramped Maggie’s lips. “I ended up having to leave a message. So I don’t know if anything got sent. But I asked them to fax it here.”

  The librarian nodded understandingly. “Well, then, let’s take a look, shall we?”

  She crossed over to a fax machine half-hidden behind a file cabinet and cubicle partition and began sifting through the pages which had recently been spat out by the apparatus.

  “University of Aberdeen, you said?”

  “Yes, but—” She didn’t get the chance to explain about Hamilton and Edinburgh.

  “Here we are,” the woman announced and returned with a single sheet. Maggie was stunned. “From a Professor MacKenzie?”

  Maggie was stunned. MacKenzie? she thought, thoroughly puzzled. “But I don’t know any—” But she stopped herself just in time to avoid endangering her access to the manuscripts. She didn’t know who Prof. MacKenzie was, but he had just given her the key to the manuscript room. “That is, I don’t know how to thank you.” Pretty good save, she thought.

  “Not at all,” the woman replied, but Maggie was already examining the page in her hand. It was on University of Aberdeen letterhead and addressed, as she had asked, to the ‘National Library of Wales, Circulation Desk.’

  Dear Sir or Madam:

  This letter is meant to confirm that Margaret C. Devereaux is a doctoral student in good standing at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Accordingly, we would respectfully request that she be given full access to any and all materials which such status entitles her.

  Sincerely,

  Prof. S. MacKenzie, Ph.D.

  Department of Celtic

  Well, I’ll be damned. A bemused smile lit Maggie’s face. But who the hell is S. MacKenzie?

  “Miss?” The librarian’s voice pulled Maggie back to her surroundings. “Is everything in order?”

  “Er, yes,” Maggie replied. “Yes. Quite in order.”

  “Well, then,” the woman opened a drawer in the counter and extracted a key. “Here is the key to the manuscript collection. It’s on the fourth floor, up the lift then around the bend and at the end of the hallway.”

  “Thank you.” Maggie took the key gladly. Then she glanced down
at the fax from the mysterious Prof. MacKenzie. “Can I get a copy of this? You know, just for my records?”

  “I don’t see why not,” replied the librarian, and within a few moments, Maggie was strolling down the hall, key in one hand and eyes perusing the surprising letter. She had forgotten entirely about breakfast.

  At the far end of the hallway stood a rather nicely painted burgundy door with a rather nice black and white sign that read, simply enough, ‘Manuscripts.’ Maggie inserted the key into the doorknob and popped the door open.

  Inside was a pristine and very comfortable modern chamber, some twenty feet wide and twice as deep. An institutionally patterned beige carpet blanketed the floor beneath a score of extremely solid looking black metal bookcases, all spaced well apart from one another. Several tables and chairs, all in a lightly stained pine, spread out ahead of her in front of the windows and across a sort of lobby formed between the nearest end of the bookshelves and the door. To her right was a row of half a dozen microfiche machines and an equal number of computer terminals. To her left were study carrels next to a wall of windows, all sporting a microfiber shade which filtered the potentially damaging sunlight without blocking it out altogether. Additional lighting was provided by attractively modern chandeliers, gold and wood half-spheres spaced evenly across the whitewashed ceiling. A central air system hummed quietly overhead and kept the room at a comfortable coolness. Almost too cool for Maggie who had worn another light summer dress and sandals for another sunny late July day. But her joy at her unexpected access to the manuscript collection more than warmed her inquisitive little self. She swung off her backpack, heavy with the Dark Book, and set it on the table nearest the door, then she pulled from a zippered pocket the slip of paper from yesterday—the one with the manuscript’s call number—and dove between the shelves.

  Her first order of business was not locating the manuscript. Rather it was to ascertain whether anyone else was in the room. She followed the hum of the central air down the length of the middle of three long corridors formed by the rows of bookcases. Then she doubled back around, circling and crisscrossing where possible to confirm she was alone. Having worked her way back to her backpack, she was satisfied she had the room to herself. The coast was clear.

  Now to fetch the manuscript. According to the neat plastic signs at the end of each row of bookshelves, her quarry awaited her down the far right aisle. Call number temporarily memorized, and eyes scanning the texts on the shelves, she walked slowly, but purposefully toward the Welsh Book of Souls. When she reached the location where the manuscript should have been, she looked up on the shelf and shook her head in disbelief. It was actually there.

  She pulled the manuscript from the shelf, or more correctly stated, she pulled form the shelf the protective box which housed the manuscript. A sturdy cardboard, it had affixed to it blue plastic tape with white letters spelling out ‘Y Llyfr Cymraeg Gwyffyn / The Welsh Book of Souls.’ Maggie pulled open the box and peered inside, both seeing and smelling the ancient text. Jackpot, she thought.

  She hurried back to her table. She wasn’t thrilled about sitting so close to the door where anyone, or almost anyone, could just walk in while she was doing what she was about to do. But it was the best place to sit, and she too would be able to see if someone came in. And stop.

  She carefully extracted the bound manuscript from its protective shell and set the box neatly at the far corner of the large table. Then she set the true goal of her search before her and smiled—a happy, relieved, nervous smile.

  The book itself was beautiful. Its cover was red and simple; no raised latticework to speak of. The leather had peeled away slightly from the lower right corner, exposing the thin wood beneath. Not surprising for a book nearly a thousand years old. Upon the cover stood the title, ornately worked into the leather, almost all of its gold-leafing lost over the centuries: Y Llyfr Cymraeg Gwyffyn.

  Maggie was delighted because she simply adored the smell and feel and wonder of old books. She was relieved because she’d actually gained access to the book that morning despite her certainty that she would not. And she was nervous because she knew it would come to this. She turned the cover and stared down at the first, ornately scripted page, filled with the ancient Welsh words.

  And Maggie had absolutely no idea what they meant.

  If she couldn’t understand Modern Welsh—and she couldn’t—then there was no way in hell she was going to understand Old Welsh.

  Well, almost no way in hell.

  The modified levitation spell on the ballpoint pen hadn’t been the only new spell she’d crafted from the building blocks of the already memorized catalogue of black magic hidden within her Dark Book. It was simply the only one she’d actually tried. But there was more than enough raw material in the black ink scrawlings of the spellbook to cobble together a second spell. A spell of understanding. Of translation.

  She had been struck, when she’d first completed her translation of the Dark Book, by how similar its spells were to feats accomplished routinely by modern science. Levitation, like floating magnetic monorails above the crowded streets of Tokyo. Divination, not unlike the work of DNA experts in murder investigations, identifying who was where by clues left behind. And transmutation, the dream of the alchemists, realized the conversion of hydrogen to helium, and a whole lot of energy, in the yet to be perfected nuclear fusion fuel-cells. Indeed it was this last example that had seized her imagination.

  Cold fusion was probably still several decades off, but it was today’s dream, and if the last fifty years or so had proved anything, it was that the gulf between science fiction and household appliances was simply one of time. Talking computers, orbiting space stations, and of course, that most vital of interstellar necessities—from Captain Kirk to Ford Prefect—the universal translator.

  Not really a huge science fiction fan, still Maggie had seen and read her share. And it had always irritated her to a nearly irrational degree, how easily people from different nations, planets and galaxies were always able to communicate, as if English, not even the most spoken language on Earth, were somehow the accepted lingua franca of the entire universe, save the planet Klingon. She knew that it would be nearly impossible to craft a compelling story if none of the characters could communicate, but as someone who had spent literally years of her life in libraries and classrooms memorizing vocabulary lists, verb conjugations, noun declensions and adjectival inflections, it had always angered her that no spaceship ever seemed to have a ‘Languages Officer’ who could beam down to the planet with the away team, standing proudly next to her captain, ready to perform the most essential function of any sentient species: communication. But apparently that wouldn’t be interesting enough. Instead the solution of cheap gadgetry had been adopted, with some cheezy-looking device or other, dutifully labeled ‘universal translator,’ forever replacing the scintillating adventures of Star Linguist Commander Margaret Devereaux.

  But what really bothered her was that, despite the easy out such a device would provide those wishing to avoid the issue of language differences, it was nevertheless based at least somewhat on reality—a hallmark of good science fiction—and might therefore, someday, actually work. So she had had to admit, with begrudging irritation, that this dream of speculative fiction, this ‘universal translator,’ might actually prove to be the solution to the very real language barrier which she knew would lay, concrete like, between her and her comprehension of the Welsh Book of Souls.

  Languages are not word-for-word translations of each other. ‘It’s a language,’ her high school German teacher had always said, ‘not a code system.’ Indeed, the United States military had successfully used the Navajo language as an uncrackable ‘code’ during World War II precisely because it was not a code. Concepts and ideas and thoughts and wants and emotions can be expressed in any number of ways, so a simple word-for-word translation system could never work. But all languages, spoken or written or signed, function on the same basic princip
le: some external stimuli—a series of spoken sounds, letters or characters on a page, a flurry of gestures—being received by one or more of the sensory organs and passed onto the language recognition center of the brain, where the stimuli is converted from what it is to what is meant by it. From sounds to ideas, from letters to concepts, from gestures to emotions. From the communicative convention to the idea that convention symbolizes.

  ‘Smoonyakh’ is nonsense to an English speaker because her brain has never learned—through immersion or study—that that particular combination of sounds holds any meaning beyond the mere sound of it. But the brain of a Gaelic speaker from Scotland’s Western Isles would immediately recognize it as the concept the English speaker labels as ‘think.’ And when the Gaelic speaker hears the question, ‘Dè a tha thu a’ smaoineachadh?’ the same synapses fire in his brain as those in the German speaker’s when he hears, ‘Was meinst Du?’ or the English speaker hears, ‘What do you think?’

  Learning a language—really learning it—is the effort, sometimes Herculean, to get one’s brain to fire its synapses in response to the sounds and sights of the target language in the same way it already does to the sounds and sights of the native one. The tools include study, repetition, grammar, memorization, and immersion, to name just a few.

  Not ‘universal translators.’

  But what if a device really could be constructed which artificially stimulated the appropriate synapses in the appropriate order? Not unlike the stereo speaker that mimics the sounds of the actual orchestra?