The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Through the countless windows, I observed plains, deserts, mountains, rain-filled and impenetrable forests, and also the bottom of the sea where fish-headed men warred among the ruins of green-stone cities. I think I even glimpsed that empty expanse of white sand which was the entire world on the first day of creation, before ever the gods walked there and sowed living things.

  This was the first part of my understanding, of the unraveling of the geas: that Evoragdou’s house drifted through time as well as space. In sorcery, time is but an illusion or a convenience, depending on how you use it. All times are one. A million years are as an instant, an instant as a million years.

  Still I searched for my son and called his name, and dreamed of him, then wept when I awoke and did not find him. In my dreams I could hear his voice and feel the touch of his hand, and the weight of him on my shoulders as I carried him when he was small was so real, so intense, that it was a special torment to discover my shoulders empty and myself alone.

  Ricatepshe came to me in my dreams too, speaking of everyday things: crops and prices, what ships arrived on the river, children and washing, of quarrels with the neighbors and preparations for the spring fair. It was as if I still lived with her, in my own home, in my own country, and all that I experienced in the house, everything I saw through the countless windows, these, these were the phantasms, the insubstantial vapors of the mind.

  Nefasir appeared, with her husband Takim, whom I had never seen in waking life. Later, they brought their sons, the oldest of which reminded me so painfully of Khamire, the child I had failed to rescue.

  But in this place, what was an instant, a day, a year? Had it been any more than the count of ten since my boy had come into the sorcerer’s house? Had he even arrived yet?

  I learned to think like that, in paradoxes, in puzzles which the farmer Pankere would have thought merely the ravings a sun-struck madman. In my mind, I felt the sorcerer Evoragdou’s approval. It is like a lock you’re trying to pick, he told me. Now the first tumblers were beginning to fall.

  In a room of living automatons, of fantastic clockworks, I discovered a trapdoor beneath a carpet. I turned a key. A metal ape raised the trapdoor. I descended a ladder to the floor below. When I let go of the rung I was holding for just a second, I was unable to locate the ladder again.

  My eyes adjusted. Once more the floating, burning hands gathered around me, their flickering light revealing cubby-holes filled with scrolls, extending higher than I could reach, further in every direction than I could walk.

  I knew then, or at least dared to hope that I had found Evor~agdou’s study and library, the core and source of his magic. Here, he wove his vast enchantments. Here, all locks were opened, all hidden things revealed.

  Trembling with excitement, I sat down at Evoragdou’s desk. The hands gathered around me, providing enough light for me to see the pages of his books.

  At first any reading was a struggle, for my learning had been only what letters the priests gave me. Black, skeletal hands fetched volume after volume. At last I found something I could understand. This led me to another, and another. Click, click, click. The tumblers fell into place.

  I dwelt in that dark room for weeks or perhaps months, as the hands brought me food, fresh clothing, and more books. I found Evoragdou’s notes in a desk drawer and made annotations with his own brush, my handwriting at first crude and imperfectly formed, but gradually becoming so much like his own that I could not tell the two apart: the universal script of sorcery, an elegant labyrinth of swirls and dots and intricate angles.

  I wore his flowing white robe now. I slept on the floor by his desk, still clutching my useless sword as I lay there, dreaming of home, of the life of the imaginary Pankere who dwelt in a village a day south of Thadistaphon. He was a grandfather now. His daughter’s children had almost grown up. His son, Khamire, was still missing, having ventured into the sorcerer’s house when he was small. Khamire’s father, Pankere, followed him and was lost; and life became a dream and dreaming a kind of life, each enveloping the other, like a serpent endlessly swallowing its own tail.

  * * * *

  Now I set forth from the house through its many doors, on more adventures than may be told, enacting the legends of Evoragdou, both the ancient ones and those we villagers made up to get money from foreigners.

  But it was I who rode the winged sphinx through the stars, into the darkness, and confronted the masters of a world of living flame. It was I who caused the lands to tremble, who raised mountains and shaped them into hieroglyphs only the gods could read. I conversed with heads of black stone in a cavern at the Earth’s center. Beneath the hills of Bhakisiphidar, I slew the serpent that walked like a man.

  At a crossroads, at midnight, I cut down a hanged corpse from a gibbet, speaking the Voorish names as I carved the symbol tchod upon its forehead. At once the corpse sprang to ferocious life and wrestled with me until dawn, when, at the sun’s first touch, the dead thing’s vigor departed. Just before the rotted limbs broke apart and the spirit fled, the thing whispered to me of the College of Shadows, where all sorcerers must eventually attend to gain true and complete mastery of their arts and of themselves.

  In that college, you take a master, learning everything he has to teach and more, for the student must kill his master in order to graduate.

  These things I did, over months or years or perhaps in the blinking of an eye. When I closed my master in a room filled with fire and mirrors, and leaned expectantly against the door, my hands and cheek burning from the heat, he spoke to me in my own voice and said, “Do you understand? Do you remember?”

  When he was dead, I opened the door and waded ankle-deep in his ashes. A thousand like myself walked within the flawless mirrors.

  “Yes, I remember and I understand,” I said to them, and they to me.

  Did I? I was seduced and consumed by what I had seen, what I had learned, an ever more willing captive of what I had become. The sorcerer’s lust, Evoragdou had called it once, that madness which engorges the mind, which changes and erases everything the sorcerer might have once been.

  So, lustful, swollen with magic, I filed my former self away, like a book in a cubbyhole, in one of the uncountable rooms of my house.

  For my house is my memory, ever growing, ever changing, each object, each window, each key in a lock, turning, each sound of groaning wood, each mote of dust another mark or swirl or curve in that delicate yet indelible script which is sorcery, which is the sorcerer’s mind.

  Once, a peasant broke in, shouting for vengeance, waving a useless sword. My repartee with him was witty, then sad. He demanded that I reveal my secret to him, so he might slay me. Ah, if only it were that simple.

  I left him stumbling about in the dark on a mission of eventual self-discovery.

  I knew perfectly well who he was. It remained only for him to find out.

  This incident too aroused a mote, a speck of memory. My mind stirred. I sat up suddenly on a pallet of straw in a room filled with carven, marble trees. I felt the sudden and subtle pang of an old sorrow.

  “Khamire, my son,” I said aloud. “Come to me now.”

  Bare feet shuffled on the marble floor. I reached out, caught hold of a thin arm and drew the boy to me, weeping, embracing him.

  He struggled at first, but I spoke his name again and calmed him. Then we went out onto a porch, and looked out over the muddy flood-plain of the still receding Great River. The full moon shone overhead, and the spring stars.

  I dropped to my knees before the boy, holding his frail wrists in my hands. He was so gaunt, so dirty, his clothing no more than a few ragged scraps. I think he had already been on his journey a long time.

  “Why did you go into the sorcerer’s house?” I asked him. “Why did you begin all this?”

  “I came because you called me, Father,”
he said. “I didn’t begin anything.”

  “No,” I said slowly. “I do not think there even is a beginning. That is the greatest mystery of all, lives reflected again and again like something seen in a thousand mirrors, but without any initial cause, any solid thing to cast the first reflection.”

  “I don’t understand, Father.”

  I stood up. I ran my fingers slowly through his hair.

  “Nor do I.”

  We stood in silence for a time, looking out over the fertile earth. “I am not your father anymore,” I said after a while. “Pankere is one of many names meaning `tiller-of-the-field.’ How very appropriate for such a man as your father. But my name means `clutter’ or `forgetting’ or `accumulation’ or perhaps `many dreams.’ All these, too, fit. My name has many meanings, like hidden rooms. It changes like foaming water, utterly different and yet the same from one instant to the next. It contains everything and nothing. It is not so simple as `Pankere’.”

  He shook his head. His wide eyes gleamed in the moonlight. Tears streaked his muddy cheeks. “What shall I do…Father?”

  I lifted him up. He didn’t resist. I marveled at how light he was, like a bundle of sticks. Gently, I lowered him down over the porch railing, until his toes touched the newly deposited mud. He sank almost to his knees, clinging to the railing, gazing up at me.

  “I want you to go back home,” I said, “and tell everyone what you have seen.”

  “Yes, Father. I will.”

  “Khamire, do you know who I really am?”

  He did not answer me, but turned away and waded through the mud, his feet making sucking sounds as he struggled toward higher ground. I shouted my true name after him. I told him who I was, once, twice, three times, as loud as I could. The third time only, he looked back at me and screamed like a lunatic, then hurried on with renewed desperation. At last, I saw him in the distance, running in the moonlight, wheeling his arms.

  When he was gone, I went back into my house, climbed a spiral staircase I had never seen before, of beaten silver, then emerged onto an unfamiliar balcony, and surveyed what might have been almost the same landscape, but now a ploughed and planted field. Brilliant stars gleamed in a moonless night sky.

  Near at hand, a few reeds clustered along an irrigation channel. Someone was hiding there.

  “Pankere, I know you are out there,” I said, “for I am Evoragdou, and I remember.”

  SCREAMING IN SILENCE, by C.J. Henderson & Bruce Gehweiler

  Originally published in The Occult Detectives of C. J. Henderson (2002).

  “Hatred is the madness of the heart.”

  —Lord Byron

  OKEFENOKEE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, GA

  “I’m tellin’ you what I saw here last night,” Jeff Graham spoke with ripples of fear squirming through his voice. His finger stabbing the windshield of his Ford pickup, he insisted, “It walked right along the fence—there somewheres—I saw it in my headlights. Eight feet tall, at least. I swear—covered with red, brown hair, ’cept round its hands, maybe…and its face.” Jeff’s voice paused, excitement draining from it. What exactly was replacing it, his friend could not be certain.

  “That face—God, it turned, when my headlights hit it…turned and stared at me. Big eyes, dark, mean…set in these deep black sockets...”

  When Jeff went quiet, his best friend, Marshall McDermott asked him, “And that’s when it just turned off and walked back into the swamp?” When Jeff merely nodded absently, still staring into the dark tangle of reeds and hanging moss before them, Marshall suggested, “Maybe you just saw that crazy homeless guy…what’da they call him? Yeah—the Goat Man.”

  “Damnit, Marsh,” snarled the driver, “You think I can’t tell the difference between some ol’ alkie and an eight foot ape-thing?” With a turn of the wheel, Jeff pulled the Ford off the dirt road, gliding to a stop under the overhanging branches of a massive water oak. In a tense voice, the driver told his friend, “Right here, this is where it went back into the swamp.”

  “Then we’ll just sit here a while and see if it comes back,” responded Marshall. His hand outstretched, he said, “Pass me a Bud.”

  Jeff opened the small cooler next to him on the seat and pulled two beers out of the packed ice. The men popped the tabs of their cans in unison, then touched their brims together.

  “Here’s to beer and big boobs,” they chanted, laughing like schoolboys before taking huge gulps. Afterward, the pair sat quietly, listening to the familiar sounds of the swamp. Jeff’s eyes darted nervously, moving rapidly across the night darkened woods, lingering on the too-close edge of the swamp. When Marshall asked an innocent question, the driver’s hand crushed in the sides of his can in frightened reaction.

  “So, you ever gonna score with Betty Ann?”

  “Who says I ain’t? Maybe I’m just too much the gentleman to discuss such private matters.”

  “Yeah,” snorted Marshall. “You’re a gentleman. An’ I’m the pope.”

  Both men chuckled. Jeff even began to relax a bit. Then suddenly, Marshall sat forward, asking, “Damn, boy—what have you been eatin’? Smells like the Roadkill Cafe’s servin’ skunk pie.”

  “It ain’t me,” Jeff responded. Then, fear driven memory made him whisper, “Listen…”

  “I don’t hear nuthin’…”

  “That’s right,” agreed the frightened driver. “No bugs, no birds…they were all yappin’ a minute ago. What the hell’s goin’ on?”

  Then, both men were thrown forward as a loud thud slammed behind them shaking the truck as violently as if it had been struck by another vehicle. This time Jeff’s hand involuntarily crushed his Budweiser, spraying the inside of the cab with foaming beer. As a wet, snorting noise sounded from inside the truck bed, the two men turned to stare out the rear window. As they did, Jeff’s bladder emptied as Marshall screamed.

  “Key-rist! Get us outta here!”

  The Ford’s engine snarled to life at the same instant the roof of the cab crumpled inward as if from massive blows. Marshall howled in terror as the roof shook again, new dents sinking inches closer to the cab’s occupants. The gas pedal touched the floor and the engine howled, the truck bouncing forward wildly in response. As Marshall stared upward, he screamed anew as he saw fangs biting through the roof. A score of holes were created as the thick, brown incisors and canines chewed away at the battered metal.

  Then, suddenly a massive, hairy paw slammed through the rear window. Glass exploded throughout the cab. Upholstery ripped as broken, yellowed claws searched for flesh. Jeff twisted the truck hard, fishtailing and spitting gravel as he sped madly along the dirt road. Marshall forced himself down onto the floor to avoid the grasping paw. Jeff was not so lucky. Bones cracked within his arm as gnarled fingers tightened around his bicep.

  The driver howled, fighting to keep control of his vehicle. Blackness swam across his eyes. Blood splattered the inside of the windshield, soaked his shirt and pants.

  This is it, I’m dead…

  Jeff barely managed to stay on the road as it bent in a vicious curve. The crushing fingers released their grasp, digging for another just as a light appeared in the foreground. Jeff wondered at it for a moment, then realized—

  The ranger station…

  The Ford burst through the wooden fence defending the solitary cinder block building. Crunching the brakes, Jeff threw the truck into a wide, skidding turn, praying he could stop in time. He could not. The Ford crashed sideways against a parked ranger vehicle. Glass and metal cracked—the parked car’s horn jammed, its alarm howling. Marshall was thrown head-first into the door. Jeff was bounced off the steering wheel.

  His mind reeling, the driver’s eyes darted from mirror to mirror. Finding nothing, he turned to look out the rear window, but the results were the same. The foul-smelling thing th
at had nearly killed him had vanished. Its stench had disappeared as well, replaced by a thick, burning sulfuric mist. Jeff heard the sound of voices emerging from the ranger station. He saw his pale, distorted reflection in his bloody windshield. Looking at the fear etched in his eyes, he giggled in a tiny voice, then his eyes went black as he mercifully passed out.

  DUKE UNIVERSITY, DURHAM, NC

  Mr. Pimms, chancellor of the college, tried his best to maintain the proper decorum befitting his position. He managed the Herculean task for only a matter of seconds, then burst into a fit of laughter as the two professors he had summoned were ushered into his office. After making the appropriate apology and offering them seats, the rotund, balding man grabbed up a sheaf of papers from his desk.

  “You two are possibly the luckiest pair it will ever be my good fortune to meet,” the chancellor told the men. “Perhaps I’ll come ’round and rub your heads for luck, eh? Haha!”

  As the men sat bewildered, Pimms pulled the papers in his hand up toward his eyes. “I’ll read you only the pertinent parts of Mr. Kirowan’s will…yes, that would be best. Feel free to take notes, gentlemen. Or dance about if you prefer. I suppose either would be appropriate.”

  As the pair of professors moved uncomfortably in their seats, Pimms adjusted his glasses and then began to read.

  “And thus I am endowing the Zoology and Psychology departments with one hundred million dollars. The principal amount is to remain untouched always in trust. Interest earned from the principal will be used by Dr. William Boles, or any subsequent leader in the field of Para-Psychology and Dr. Hugh Blakley, or any subsequent leader in the field of Crypto-Zoology, for the field work described earlier, the on-going investigations of unexplained phenomenon as it coincides with unknown animals and supposed mythological, legendary or fictional beasts. The University must publish their case studies every two years in a manner that will reach beyond the confines of academia. The world has lived in fear and darkness too long. The unknown shall be made known, and this will be the means of its illumination.