Black City (The Lark Case Files)

by Christian Read

  It's stupid to say there are rules. One set of ideas that guide magic everywhere. Kinda short-sighted.

  Here's what there is.

  No matter the tradition or the discipline, there's commonalities to magic. Things a human has to go through to make it work. But they aren't rules, just a blueprint to what works, what doesn't.

  Nothing is true, everything is permitted: my arse.

  I like books. Say I get a book. I'm curious about the rites and traditions within. Curious about what's come before me. When I was younger, especially, I'd go out of my way to try and recreate what the great magicians of the years before had done. But try and buy seven fish livers and quicksilver and do things under the sign of Saturn enough times and you'll realise that the rites aren't as important as you think.

  It's the belief. It's the intent. More than anything, it's intent. You're inside a room chanting like a dickhead or you're a magician plumbing the depths. That's what matters. It isn't a physics we forgot. It's a pataphysic. It's a critique of the laws we live in. Magic is a way of thinking, a way of feeling, a way of doing. That's it. You can no more make rules up for it than you can invent and police art rules. Science rules. (Maybe a bad example.) There's no true way, no false way. No Left or Right hand, no dark or light side. What moves underneath magic is a different thing altogether. What powers it, what laws it has, that's all beyond us.

  But if you try, if you work, if you sit down and actually try to do it, then you're a magician. Not if you say you are. Not if you buy a robe and a wand. Not if you study a million books or swear allegiance to the devil. Not if your mother was half-Welsh and that makes you a druid.

  You're a magician when you sit down work with magic. Only then. And that's a goddamned rule.

  The initiation has begun.

  TEXT ENDS

  Six

  Ten years ago, a woman was killed in a small park by the eastside docks. Once, long ago, the wise city fathers had considered it a place where families would picnic and watch the tall ships dock. By day, it still sometimes sees this purpose. By night, cries of dope, dope! ring out in the air and you can hear abuses and tears under brushes and in dirt. Police don't come here unless they're looking to roll a score. It's a central location for the sets that run this part of town come nightfall. Citizens stay out and, by the light of the moon, you can see junkies on the nod, backs to trees so that no one can sneak up and snatch their gear.

  And so it was, Bettina Sage came here, looking to shoot the man who shot her older sister. She was nineteen. She snuck up behind him, good and professional while the murderer smoked a joint and waited on his date to get dressed. But the gun was some plastic piece of zip-tat she bought because her ex-boyfriend told her it was cool.

  When she fired, the gun jammed up and jerked from her hand. Her victim turned and in a panic shot at Bettina's heart. It took her twenty seconds to die and she did it with such hate in her heart. Failure. Rage. Crushing disappointment. Such hate. A sad enough story and the end for most people.

  Bettina's story did not end there. Her grandmother was from the old country, wherever that was. Lark never learnt the story properly. At night, she prayed to Jesucristo like all the other old ladies but, when Bettina listened in, other gods enjoyed her clientele. She muttered of serpent ladies and a place called Mictlan. She kept an altar above her closet in the room she shared with Bettina and her sisters and, when their grandmother was at Mass, the girls snuck in a chair to look at it. The Mary had a skeleton's face and a yellow dog barked in the manger. A man, daubed in red ink, splattered to look like he was sprayed in arterial blood, watched it all with a kind of ironic amusement. It had scared the girls, of course, although they had recognised the iron in their grandmother's deities. The old woman had died before Bettina had a chance to ask after them and her father had cleared out the altar with a peasant catholic's determination and piety.

  As she lay dying, feeling the bullet in her heart and needing so badly to finish her murder, Bettina cried out in the prison of her skull. She prayed to her grandmother's saviours then, offering anything, soul or flesh or hope of Paradise, if they aided her. Bettina died with blood in her throat and the curses of her killer ringing in her ears.

  Until she rose. No magician, Bettina but still, she worked a rite, fuelling it with her own death, magic and need working dark wonder. She awoke on a slab, the autopsy knives just beginning their work upon her nudity. Bettina escaped with the usual hullaballoo and began the hunt for her killer that night. But killer though he was, fool he was not. He'd taken the midnight train out of town, knowing Bettina's allies, the chola girls who hungout downtown, would find and extract justice from his skin. She prepared to follow, eager to dole out punishments, but that wasn't on the cards for Bettina. She was bound to her murder site, anchored to her poor and dusty grave. Within ten miles of it, she was as potent as a fury, but any further, she weakened, felt her lethal rebirth fade. In time, discovered a potency in the ground where her blood was spilled and so took to sleeping there. Finally, she buried herself there, soaking in potency from mud. Often, she brooded on her killer while she rested, watching him in her dreams, seeing him stretch out into surreality, making her grit her iron jaw in such seething hate.

  Six or seven months in the ground and she could walk the earth again, returned to strength. Dead, she grew to prefer it that way, dreaming marl dreams, taking visions of afterlives denied her. The only thing that could quicken her, she felt, was human meat, the rawer the better. Preferable, then, the lie in the earth to the hunt for meat. Ethics for a monster was a rare trait and it bought her to certain people's attention. Lark himself became quite interested in the case, pleased to see the actions of a grandmother's weird old gods, if nothing else.

  Until Lark found her the night she awoke and knew she couldn't hold out expressing that hunger and hate for longer. Lark was there, in the park, smoking and utterly unafraid, surrounding her grave in petrol and fire. Giving her a chance to be something other than just another predator out in the dark.

  Later, he had a deal for her, desperate for her assistance. He had bought a gift of meat and a payment. An address of a man who killed two sisters.

  They had worked together, off and on, since that night.

  Seven

  Necromancy is bastard creepy.

  It's not the death symbolism. One quick trip to a certain church in Eastern Europe will cure you of a fear of bones for life. Take a walk through a house full of corpses is another quick study. Hell, sit at a dying relative's side and you'll get yourself an immunity quick enough, if you're tough. Other hand, you can make all the candles of human tallow you like and I doubt you'll get used to that smell. No, the De La Muerte stuff is cool, not scary, so it's not the trappings and props that make necromancy creepy. It's the death that slides into you.

  If you've ever come close to dying, really close, you'll have felt it. A car accident you couldn't walk away from. A heart attack pounding up your arm. Fall on a wet subway platform. Something that brings you whisker-close to the grave. A cell-deep vertigo. The restless claims death has over life. The panic your corpus has at the thought of cessation. Think about this, right now. You're going to die. You really, really are. On that day, all that you love will be carried away. If you can think on that and not be dismayed, I'd call you a liar.

  Then, feel that actual stillness of death creep into you. Because that's what it is. Flatline perfection. Death is too perfect for mortal hearts to contemplate and it is too large, too long.

  Let that in. Breathe it in. Feel it. Let it swallow thought and mood and feeling. One endless point of stillness.

  That's why necromancy will fuck with your head.

  But death is a powerful symbol for magicians. A mystery we all must solve. A place we can peer in that no one who does not practice our disciplines will understand. The gateway into the final initiation. We must make death an ally. Say that out loud, knowing you mean it. You'll sound cool and remember your power.

&n
bsp; First rule of magic. It's all about the mood.

  Well, context would be more descriptive a term.

  Magic isn't power. You don't mutter some cod Latin words and watch it go to work. If I could shoot lightning bolts from my hands, I'd be on TV, raking in cash. No, magic is a state of mind, an artistic process, a mood. Our minds are Simian things, poor at processing data, worse at recollection, primed only to recognise patterns and co-operate. We track the details of our day, we recognise faces and we redo our hairstyles and consider our minds sharp. With such faulty wiring, no wonder such fine strangeness is so hard to aspire to.

  But there is a tool we have to circumvent the chattering of our banal mind. We call this ritual. We call this rite. And that's the key to magic. The performance of it changes our word. Something inside us craves the performance, the participation and the bounded limits of a sacred space. Churchgoer or cultist, Loa-ridden dancers or snake handler, hand-trembler or Trappist, ask them all and they'll tell you about the immanent properties of the communion with something outside themselves.

  Details don't matter. You think magic is that cod Latin, that'll work for you. You think magic is leaping around a forest in tights, it is. But you have to shape each working to a mood. Hence the speech on death.

  Candomble veve drawn in white sand on the dusty patch of ground she sleeps beneath. Two black candles. Her name backwards, chanted and made into a spell. Egas Anitteb. In a t-shirt, shivering against the cold night, looking out for some gangster prick looking to kick a head, or some junkie looking to knife his way to a wallet.

  Use it all. Feel it all. Cloud the mind with it all until death connects me to death. Bettina feels me, like an intruder in her reverie. She swims up to half life slowly, and I can feel her push against the earth. I slow down the chanting, let myself return to the world as well.

  I offer no help to her, knowing that she takes long moments to let sanity settle in her head. I light a smoke and wait. Then, finally, she pulls her torso free. Clothed only in dirt, she stares at me long moments and I stub out the cigarette, light two and hand her one. She takes it. Drags.

  'What's up?'

  'Evening Bettina. I have a job for you.'

  'It's too soon. I ain't ready to work. How long since last time?'

  'I have a job for you.'

  'Seriously, man, how long.'

  Shrug. 'Three weeks.'

  'Too soon.'

  'Yeah, I know. But I have a job.'

  'I don't... I'm not as strong as I should be.'

  'A job is a job.'

  We smoke in silence a while.

  'I'm hungry.'

  I reach into the doctor's bag. 'I have a bite for you. But I need you to concentrate on it.'

  She rises up. She's strong. She worked out like a fiend when she turned fourteen and got sexy. Too many boys in her neighbourhood had bad habits.

  'Let me jump in the bath.'

  Naked but for dust, she walks across the park, ignoring whatever scum dares look at her. She jumps into the filthy water, undead flesh not heir to shock or cold. I follow after. She paddles in the water to her neck.

  'You bring clothes?'

  'I brought clothes.'

  She laughs. 'You're learning, man.'

  I toss down the mason jar with the collop of dead man in it. 'There's your snack. Eat it, tell me all you learn about whoever had it last.'

  Not watching her, I hear her smack it down.

  She climbs up the stone wall, hands strong enough to gouge the old stone masonry. Drop the plastic bag full of the stuff she stashes at mine. I turn my back as she dresses. Latina gangster cool. Tan jeans, workboots, suspenders, a white singlet. She looks double-tough, hips wide, shoulders wider, working woman's muscle under the skin of her arms. Her skin is bronze again after her taste of flesh.

  'Come on, I'll buy you a drink.'

  'What's a Bleak Elector?'

  What the fuck?

  Eight

  The Elected Lady is one of those weird figures in the Bible who turn up like the Man in White and all that. Tradition links her to Madonna, but it's not explicit. That's how I understand it. Have to find a believer who's read the damn book to really get more out of it. Theologians might be able to tell you more, but they'd probably want to argue with you first. But if there's one thing a good cult likes to do, it's is steal its mythology like a magpie.

  The Bleak Electorate is... nothing. A dozen or so weirdos who reimagine the Feminine Mystique or the Divine Sacred Principle or whatever you want to call it as something dark and grasping. Theirs is a philosophy of half-arsed misogyny and old fashioned millenarianism with a bit of the traditional mortification of the flesh. They have some idea that Christ came to damn mankind, opposed only by his holy Mother, who was the true champion of the God. Or maybe God is evil and she was cursed by him to produce his evil scion. Christ, I can't remember. Even when I was kicking heads for the Library, I didn't know much about their dogma. They were too obscure to worry about. Guys and robes in one-room apartments, muttering dire threats at the Unsaved, telling women how precious they were while telling them what to do with all that preciousness.

  We're back at my place and I'm in the office, looking at my files. Well, they're a whole bunch of folders, boxes, binders and books I managed to steal from the Library. That was two years ago or more, and I've still not sorted the damn things out. Nothing in B or E. They'll be here somewhere.

  'I'm bored!' yells Bettina at me from my kitchen. I've been here twenty minutes.

  'Keep eating.'

  'I'm finished!'

  I gave her all the meat in my freezer, which to be fair wasn't much. It'll take the edge of her hunger until she can get at something fresher.

  I can't find anything on the Bleak Elect so I give it up. We just never really had much to do with them, me and Jon.

  At the kitchen table, a sadly underused room, Bettina's found my beers and we take one each. We sit in uncomfortable silence for a while. I can't small talk. Even drinking good Mexican beer with an undead woman, I feel strange. I play it safe and stick to work.

  'Do you know who the Bleak Elect are?'

  'You know I don't know anything. I just look menacing.'

  Her hair dried and slicked back, her strong jaw set, damn straight she looks menacing.

  'Religious freaks. But not killers. They're just weird guys who... I don't even know what they do. They're just little fish.'

  She drains her beer, takes another. 'So what's the job even?'

  'I have no idea.'

  'So why call me?'

  'Guns. Shooting. Hex-slinging people to death. Serious black magic. Someone raided the Gallowglass and the only lead I have is the Bleak Elect who were there. Which is another reason I need you and your talents. Maybe it was an accident and he was just visiting. Not sure. Even if it was, when did the Elect learn how to cast killing spells in the middle of a fight?'

  She nods, takes another of my beers and starts downing again. 'Oh no, he was there to fight. This guy was an Elector. The Bleak Electorate came looking to finish up the Gallowglass.'

  'OK. Clear now?'

  'Yeah. Much clearer. His name was Johansen and he was there to fight.'

  Drum my fingers. '

  'Anything else you can tell me?'

  'He was real excited. He was winning. Then they... broke into a vault?'

  'A door.'

  Bettina nods. 'Yeah. He was excited and then something got him. Some... dunno. After that, he just lost it. I'm not looking further because he died real recent and seeing when they die is... I dunno. Hard? You got any more questions, ask now, it's fading fast.'

  Shake my head.

  'There hasn't been a cult war like this in years.'

  'You guys have sets?'

  'Yeah. One crew moved on another last night. But the last I heard, one set was much smaller than the other. Don't know what the reason was they moved at all.'

  Bettina nods her head. 'Desperate. Timetable. Paid for it.'

/>   'Not paid for it. These guys hate everyone, think the whole world is damned. Think other magicians are damned especially, using holy powers given by God and God is bad. Except for their own magic which, of course, is prayer and holy so ok. Dispensation is awesome.'

  'Maybe they thought the Gallowglass crew were weak.'

  'They were wrong. Surprised they even know who Gallowglass are. Were. Did they even get what they want? I think so. Whatever they were after, it cost them.'

  Bettina shrugs. 'How long you been out of the game?'

  'The politics? Two years since I left. Bit longer.'

  'Long time, man. Long time.'

  She gets up, puts her hands in her pockets, stares at me.

  'Let's eat.'

  And that gives me an idea.

  Nine

  Lionel's mother was the last Myal-worker in the West Indies, he would tell me one night. She scorned Obeah as black magic. The witches of her neighbourhood laughed at her, considered her magic to be antique and bad kind of old-school. The equivalent, he said, smiling, of listening to an eight-track. Not simply an affectation but something you'd have to be perversely willful to indulge in.

  On her sixteenth birthday, she left her Island and moved to England, where she haunted the dance halls, enjoying the raga and the dub step and the reggae, moving wild to music and working hard in a hotel. But she was legal, she found a job. In time, she became a cook, even, working for some breakfast cafe, working in Birmingham.

  Lionel's mother was really great at cooking, it turned out, and that was where her own magic found its expression. She brewed up potions famous amongst the immigrant streets. She knew the secret ingredients to turn on your husband so he panted after you or sweat out some devil or end an unwanted baby easy and smooth. She was a respected woman and Lionel later said she gave him three gifts in his life. The first was his good looks. His second was showing him there were secrets in the world. But the third was she showed him how to cook.