Black City (The Lark Case Files)

by Christian Read

  'That's it.' Scarlet looks at me for a second, cool and weighing. Gets up and heads down the stairs.

  'Scarlet?'

  She turns and fixes me with her sniper green eyes.

  'Nice to see you again.'

  Hiding a smile, I'm sure, she turns and leaves.

  Three

  Magic: it works. You figured that out.

  If you want it. If you crave it. If you work for it. If you dedicate yourself to it. You can find it in books, if you open them. You can find it in the queer codes of computing or at the feet of a mad bruja grandmother, worked by stock-brokers obsessing and criminals with hanged-man's hands, some old hag in the barrens who all the children whisper about may have it too. You can find it in prayer, find it by a fire with some pagans looking to get laid, much to my surprise. You can find it at the end of a meth pipe, burning your fingers while chasing speedy revelations. But the only bar to it is want. Is work. Miracles make themselves available only to seekers, never to tourists. Hunt it out, demand it, refuse all obstacles and it will find you back.

  Then the world opens. You scent revelation. You make plans and you examine the limits of power. The world burns with a new fire, black and forbidden and unspeakable and everything is mystery.

  But you won't be alone.

  The city crawls with those who've sighted the same tricks you have. More and more each year, it seems.

  It used to be cool.

  Magicians, it seems, crave communities. Oh, there's a lot of lone wolf affectation, a lot of libertarian posturing about self-reliance and mystic destiny and shamans standing outside tribes but, in reality, you find others to work with. To learn from. To show-off to, to sleep with, to steal from and all the reasons anyone makes a scene. For security, for protection, for borrowing books or for teaming up on some other bastard whose magic you think is weird or heretic or foolish. And because your average magician is an overwhelming egomaniac, these become covens and cults and convocations. There's orthodoxies and schisms. There's prayers and hymns and fellowships. And there's magic. It's a very Modern proposition. Schools and academies and strong traditions. The city is rife with them.

  Mysterious anarchy is the order of the day. Seekers and the lost drift from creed to creed and charismatics fail their rites or sleep with the wrong boyfriend, or someone pinches the treasury and so most of these endeavours amount to nothing at all. But some...

  There's about a dozen major players in town. The House of Gallowglass. Endless Second. Church of Christ: Destroyer. Aenigma Regis. Order of Eternal Chill, Bilqis Sorority. And my former place of employment and worship, the Library.

  Let me tell you about the one I know best.

  The Library are old school ritualists who can trace their lineage back to mad old alchemists, churchmen and noblemen who printed up old books and preyed on village girls and got their mothers bricked up in walls. Ages back, the story goes, and, make no mistake, you'll hear a lot of self-mythologising, a number of these men pooled resources and created a library open only to their membership. Since then, the Library has collected books. More than books.

  In magic, symbol is everything. The idea of a book is more than just a book.

  Books aren't windows into wonderful words inside your head. They're the hilts and triggers to weapons, they're snares for secrets and whispered conspiracies. Books are the most dangerous things in the world and, when you open them, you must be wary of their intentions. You don't read a book. The right book bites you, seduces and tattoos you. I have learned to be fearful of them, but I'm afraid I took my toothmarks long ago. Books will never set me free.

  So, those first Librarians. Addicted to knowledge and addicted to secrets, they began to tell everyone else how to manage their own resources, sniffing in snobbery at any tradition that didn't fetishise the written word. And soon, the Library became piratical rather than acquisitive. If they wanted what you had, some old pamphlet or a genuine tome of occult worth, they'd find a way to take it. They didn't like how you handled your business, thought you looked at them wrong even, they might have a go.

  By the time they'd come to the city, those early Librarians decided to make their decisions stick. They had money and power. Better, they were organised like no one else. So, like any good group of crooks, they became cops.

  That's around where Scarlet and I joined.

  I got sick of it and she didn't.

  The Library did its share of the usual things rich elitists do. The suppression of dissent, the zealous and jealous guarding of privilege and run-of-the-mill arrogance. But we did some good work. We kicked out a lot of the supernatural creatures that flock around human lives like moths. We cut down on the number of murder-kick cults and the glass-eyed psychotics who swapped pain for tricks. Cleared out the worst of porno-rubicators and the sex-cults that drained people of juice and dignity and cash. We kept the morlock-sects under wraps and death-juicers and that.

  There were some we couldn't touch and some who we couldn't keep down. But for a while, the work was valuable and worth doing. Some of the books you'd never trust in the hands of the twitches we took them off. You can call that a value judgement if you like, but come back when you've stood in the basement of a domination cult who have a copy of the De Rais manuscript and some missing project girls, and you can have that conversation with me.

  Gallowglass was always a competitor to the Library, although their mania with the physical props of magic was of a different shade to the neurosis we had for books and language and knowledge. They recruited from a pool of the wealthy, people who had genius and passion for pricing. Learned the hard way, making and keeping money is skill to be admired. Where the Library kept our eyes on certain book stores, certain lending libraries, certain websites, waiting for patterns from particular readers.

  Sometimes, if it was useful, we did favours for other cults, guiding recruits if we couldn't use them. The low-res minds so common in hardcore autistics we delivered to the Anti-Zen Society. Christians, looking at the occult mysteries of their own religion, we'd hand over to the Regis.

  And we hunted monsters.

  Yeah, they're all real. Vampires? Bastards. We kill them when we can, but that isn't often. They're entirely too dangerous to be given the run of the city. And yeah, there's half a dozen or more groups who fancy themselves monster hunters or knights templars. First time they run into some fucking were-thing, most times it's game over for them. There's fay, too, if you want them, but they're not what you think. Zombies. Yeah, sure, why not? Hell, I know Frankenstein. You want to take them out, research them.

  But monsters weren't our concern. Imagine an astrophysicist, searching down in Planck Scale for leptons and like that. Some other geek finds life on other planets? Cool. But that's not going to help you in your work. Same with us and monsters. Curious to know they're out there but, most of the time, that's all.

  Besides, the real monsters come out of your head. Spirits, assuming the forms and functions every human heart gives them. Little gods with little respect and a tyrant's ambition. Demons and angels, higher forms and lower, meeting our every expectation, mirroring all the horror within.

  And others. And others.

  Dealing with those is a magician's work. Their interrogation, their knowledge, their conversation, that's my aspiration.

  When I'm not freelancing for my ex-girlfriend.

  Anyway. That's the Library. Other cults will have their own deal, but you can learn a lot from how they do things.

  I always thought I'd get bigger jobs when I started out. I'm a face. And I have experience you can't easily get elsewhere. I have a reputation amongst a certain class of cultist and sorcerer. I've been called in to help or police more than a few of them. Ten years with the Library, but that never seemed to count for much on the outside.

  Guess my luck is changing.

  Scarlet has left her coffee cup on my desk. I hold it, looking at the traces of her lipstick on cheap plastic. She's gotten lazy. A man could divine with thi
s sort of thing. A man could conjure. I place it on a shelf. No. Throw it out.

  Sleep now. Investigate tonight.

  Four

  Magic is not physics. Its transfigurations take place most easily within the skull. And, while it is possible that the world can change according to its desires, magic is at home in your head.

  So the ruined house of Gallowglass was not made invisible, or hidden behind forcefields or anything like that. It is simply ignored, made a background noise, unbeheld. Slowly, deeds would go missing, census takers taken sick would miss it on rounds and city hall would misfile records of ownership. That's how magic goes.

  There it lays, cold-shouldered by the city, still smoking from the spot fires that half-gutted it and passers-by frowning at the scent of smoke they half-perceive, ignoring the damage that mars the street. The blood on the sidewalk and the bruise in the world. Bad magic is at play here. Lots of bad magic, used in anger.

  Parktown is a well-to-do suburb in the northern midtown of the city. This is the first day of winter and the trees that line the streets are bare and leafless. Gaslamps. Gallowglass House is set back from the street, behind an iron gate. Three storeys high. Kind of place gives you an excuse to use a word like 'stately'. I carry my tools in a doctor's bag and I set it down to examine the wards on that brass entrance. Gallowglass operates in a broad Hermetic tradition. Pentagrams, enochian sigils, magic number grids, stuff any teenager would recognise from album covers and television shows, made effective by will and by rite.

  Protections spells have been wrought carefully on the gate, but there's paint all over them. A sick calligraphy that I don't recognise scrawled all over the original protections, damping the strength. Someone breaking through the ward. Western tradition, whoever cast the spell, so there's that at least. But not destroying them. Someone lacked time or skill. I push the gate and it swings, tilted on one side. Low metal shriek.

  Three bodies on the ground, one shot in the back, running from the house. I kneel down to examine, recoiling from the stink. I don't recognise the bullet-holed man. The second is a woman, who I jerk back from when I realise she bit her own tongue and seems to have drowned on the blood. Both of them left well-dressed corpses, and the woman bears the Celtic knot brooch of her order. Gallowglass, then. I could turn over the man who took the rounds, but I don't want to lift a body and the suit is enough of a giveaway. Both Gallowglass.

  Jesus, Scarlet, what have you gotten me in to?

  There are cult wars. It happens. But not like this. This is law-breaking and danger.

  The third man is a rather different case. He's in black and dressed for business. Two guns holstered and extra clips in his belt. Lace-up boots. Cause of death isn't apparent to regular eyes, so I stop and wait. Meditate my way into stillness, slipping into the no-mind Gnosis state that lets me work. First and hardest thing to learn. Suddenly black veins cobweb under his skin. Some spell, working at his essential self, convincing his mind to convince his spells to turn against him somehow. Some death spell, ugly and raw.

  The late afternoon is cold. Dark in a few minutes. I button my jacket.

  Over by the doors, wooden and smashed, bullets shells are spent. I collect a few, dropping them into my pockets, hoping to pick up some sympathy later. Three dead bodies in the main lobby, so that's five Gallowglass gone. I walk in and immediately feel the bile in the... I dunno ether. Spirits have loosed themselves here, bound-up entities given flesh and grosser matter to throw bodies from. Dust and atoms harvested into form.

  Upstairs is where I see three more bodies, one with a crushed throat, clearly a victim of the sentinel entities. One more Gallowglass, shot through the head execution style, slumped from a kneel. This is Warren, the lodge-leader, with a tunnel dug through temple. Someone's taken his fingers, three in a bite. Did he talk? I would.

  Up to the top floor and there's another body I recognise. Not Gallowglass. He's smashed a window in and done a butcher's job upon his arm. Some hunter-killer meme rewiring dendrites into suicide smashlock. Casting a spell like that, in conditions like these? No. At least not a Gallowglasser. You'd need all the wrong kind of training. Staring down at the body, I start. I know this guy.

  Peach. Simon Peach, an usual name for a man in his profession. He served in the army or marines or something in the 80s and he found something out in the jungle. Peach left the service and wound up in the city, hungry for visions. He hooked up with some cults and lodges, but it never really worked out for him. He was all discipline, a mind that ran on rails, that dealt in facts and logistics, and the supple symbols of magic never really made sense for him. He was too self-conscious to create shamanic moments, so that was out. But he found a way to feed his desires, hiring himself out as a gunman, a backstreet thug, even an advisor on violence and, in return, he remained close to the mystery.

  Fifty years old, will of stone and dead to some vicious breed of hypnotism. 'Fucking hell Peach,' I say to his corpse. 'You'd work for anyone. Be more useful.'

  I walk past blood stains on the wall and put my hand on a door as I pass. Fire behind, something smoking. The stink is a human one and my stomach has reached its tolerance, so that way is untaken. At the end a long corridor, I come at last to the holy of holies, once locked and now with heavy doors kicked in.

  Inside, the place is ransacked. Beautiful wooden shelves on which rested treasures are bare, with years of studious collections piled on the floor. I pick up a clay amulet on a leather thong. Someone's chipped it, defacing the ancient pattern upon it. A comic book, a small statue of a gorgon, a jar filled with something's eye, a handsome transistor radio, a small painting thrown down and torn. A singing bowl, a mummified dog's paw and two monkey skulls. Papyrus and an old fashioned gas cigarette-lighter. More like this, things with secrets to teach or gnomic purposes, mantic treasures. The House of Gallowglass' reason for fucking being, rummaged through like laundry. It's not just vandalism but it feels like it, standing there in a room raw with violation.

  They were after something ,but who can say what? I pocket the lighter and that's it. Until I hear the moan, low, from a cupboard.

  I reach into my doctor's bag and remove some antique spectacles, glass long since removed and replaced. Bronze and thin as wires, Ben Franklin style. I place them on, let my mind go, and stare at the cupboard. No spirit or creature within. I remove the specs and place them away.

  'Hello?'

  I knock on the door.

  Nothing.

  'I'm not going to open this up. I'm not looking to catch a bullet. But if you need help, tell me. No one is here but me. Whatever happened here, it's over.'

  There's a muffled gunshot and someone falls out of the cupboard. I snatch my gaze away, unwilling to look at the splintered skull or see the twitching fingers jerking as electricity leaves them.

  Scarlet. Did you know it was this bad?

  I blur my eyes and look down at the body. One of the attackers, judging by the clothes. Not Gallowglass. But this is different. Big .45 in his hand, just black jeans and a black overcoat, a belt with ammo clips hanging from it. If I could bring myself to look at his face...

  After a long time, the feet stop beating.

  I need to know who this man is and I need protection if I'm going to work this. There's only one way I know to get both.

  From my Doctor's bag, I remove a scalpel and a small mason jar. I pull up the man's jeans and slice a collop of his flesh. Surgical-grade blade makes it easier than I thought, but not easy enough.

  The long strip goes in the jar and it goes in the bag, along with the cleaned scalpel. There's no more need to stay in here. The currents and the information in this place will be deformed by violence. This is prime haunting territory now, and all the etheric parasites will be heading this way. I'll have to wait if I want to Work in this place.

  In time, the wards will fade now they are not up kept. Legends will grow and the city will hesitate to reclaim even real estate this fine. Children will not walk here, knowing thi
s is no place for them. In time, bad spirits will find their way here and the ghosts will turn cruel. A rotten tooth in the city's jaw. Black water.

  We'll worry about that when it comes. For now: graves.

  Five

  WARNING:

  THE FOLLOWING FILE IS CLASSIFIED CRIMSON GLOVE. IF YOU ARE NOT CLEARED FOR STATUS: CRIMSON GLOVE, REPLACE THE FILE NOW AND REPORT TO THE SECURITY CLEARANCE OFFICER.

  NOTE:

  THESE ARE A SET OF LETTERS WRITTEN BY CODENAME: WREN RETRIEVED BY AGENT COFFEE SOMETIME AFTER OUR INITIAL CONTACT WITH WREN. THEY WERE SIGNED BY HIM AND THE DATES WITHIN CONFIRM OUR TIMELINE REGARDING HIS MOVEMENT 2003-2010.

  (SEE CASEFILE #004)

  THEY WERE SOLD TO US BY CODENAME: BLUEFLY 2ND JULY 2012. QDE CONFIRMS AUTHENTICITY.

  TEXT BEGINS

  The other day, you asked me where to start, what to think about. Here's my first thought. I may write more shortly.

  Rule 1

  There's no rules. Don't be stupid.

  Well, that's not fair. There's a million rules. Each tradition has them and most traditions come out of religious ideas, so there's that to deal with. Each magician has their own style. Don't worship the devil. Let's take that. Tell it to a Gnostic, who sort of thinks God is insane and destructive. The devil gets real interesting then. Tell it to a Yezidi, who (sorta) worship the devil as an archangel. Makes no sense. Tell it to a Satanist or a Sethian. They'll laugh at you. Harm and heart-ripping are their stock in trade.

  Don't kill people: Tell it to an aboriginal clever man, with his pointing bone full of death. Tell it to some mad old witch, looking to prove a few stereotypes. Tell it to someone who makes healing their magic and then watch them laugh when you tell them euthanasia is off the table. DO NOT CALL UP WHAT YE CANNOT PUT DOWN. That's just sensible, that. I've called up a few things. Unless you're being stupid and hauling open the gates like a prick, you'll probably survive. Tell some crazy bastard, feels like he's a druid, about the Law of Three and then run before he winds your guts around a tree. Likewise, if you don't want to fill your head up with a hundred names of God, figure out what the hell a putandrum is, piss through a wedding ring, read in Aramaic or Nacaal or Latin, you don't have to.