The Wizard of Lovecraft's Cafe

by Simon Hawke

  “A, it wasn’t my raid,” McGuire said “and B, he was commandeered by the Bureau agent in charge, who claimed to have received your personal okay.”

  “‘Well, he didn’t.”

  “I didn’t think so. Either way, he’s dead now; the local Bureau chief is telling me to keep my nose out of it; and you and I have both got a mess on our hands.”

  “What do you mean, ‘you and I both’? What have I to do with it?”

  “‘Well, Angelo was undercover with your task force, wasn’t he? I don’t know what the hell he was working on, presumably you do, but he’s out there somewhere, walking around, with God only knows what going through his brain. Do you know what he’s going to do?”

  “I see your point,” she said. “All right. What do you me to do?”

  “Release his files to me,” McGuire said. “I need his current address, to start with. Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and find him at home, having a beer and watching—”

  “This sounds absolutely crazy, you know that, don’t you?”

  “I know,” McGuire said. “Believe me, I know. But there is one possible explanation. Angelo might be a zombie.”

  “A what?”

  “‘A zombie. A body that’s being thaumaturgically animated and controlled by someone. Our adepts tell me that it’s possible. It would take some pretty advanced sorcery, and it’s highly illegal, of course, but they say it can be done, theoretically. This whole thing has got necromancy written all over it.”

  “Brother, that’s all we need,” she said. She sighed heavily. “All right, where are you calling from, your office?” “Yeah.”

  “Okay, I’ll pull the file and meet you there in twenty minutes. I want to go along on this personally, and the file doesn’t leave my hands.” “Fair enough. I’ll be here.” “This better be on the level, Steve.” “Come on, you know me better than that.” “Yes, I guess I do. If anybody else were telling me this, I’d say they had been drinking.”

  “Right about now, I could use a drink. A stiff one.” “I think I’ll join you. Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can.” “Thanks, Christine.” McGuire hung up the phone and put his head in his hands, rubbing his temples. He was starting to get a migraine. He picked up the phone again and dialed. “This is McGuire,” he said. “Any word on the Gypsy? No, huh? Damn that woman. All right, put out an A.P.B. on her. I want her picked up and booked on interfering with a homicide investigation and any other goddamn thing you can think of. I don’t care if she pulls in a dozen lawyers. I want her held until I can get a chance to talk to her personally.” He hung up the phone again.

  “Are you all right, sir?” asked the sergeant with concern. “No,” replied McGuire. “No, I’m not all right. I wish to God someone would tell me what the hell is going on here.” “Sir, I’ve got Channel Seven on the line.” “Terrific,” he said with a grimace. “Tell ‘em I died and went out for a walk.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “BELIEVE ME, IT would be far better for you if you did not become involved,” said Billy.

  “It’s a little late for that, I already am involved,” Natasha replied.

  They were sitting in the living room of Makepeace’s apartment, drinking coffee. Makepeace was in the bedroom, on the phone. Gonzago sat quietly, sipping from his mug and listening to their conversation. Wyrdrune had recovered fully from his injuries, though he still looked a little drawn and pale.

  “It would bring you nothing but trouble,” he said.

  “I’ve already got trouble. If I know McGuire, he’s probably got the whole department out looking for me by now,” said Natasha. “But I picked up enough in that penthouse of ours that it’s going to drive me crazy if I don’t learn all the answers.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” said Kira. “You took a pretty big risk coming here. The police think we killed those Bureau agents. How do you know we’ll even let you out of here alive?”

  “I’m psychic, remember?” said the Gypsy. “I trust my instincts. And they tell me you people aren’t murderers. But you’re mixed up with some powerful black magic, and I don’t understand why you won’t go to the authorities.”

  “Because it wouldn’t do any good. We’re mainly concerned with keeping the authorities out of it,” said Wyrdrune. “And you work for the police.”

  “I consult for the police,” she said. “That makes a big difference. I don’t carry a badge and I’m not on their payroll. They can’t tell me what to do.”

  “Maybe not, but they can arrest you for being an accessory,” said Kira. “Just sitting here with us makes you guilty of a felony. Aiding and abetting.”

  “I know the law,” Natasha replied. “What I don’t understand is why you won’t go to the police or the Bureau if you’re innocent.”

  “Neither the police nor the Bureau would be capable of handling this situation,” Billy said. “Even the Bureau’s top-ranking adepts would be no match for the forces we’re up against. Besides, there would still be the matter of convincing them.”

  “Well, you can start by trying to convince me,” Natasha said. “For openers, who’s Modred?”

  “You’re the psychic, you tell me.” said Wyrdrune.

  “I’m not a telepath,” she replied. “I pick up psychic impressions. Sometimes they come through real clear, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I just get feelings and I have to try to make sense out of them. And in this case, I can’t make much sense of anything.”

  “For instance?” Wyrdrune said.

  “Well, for one thing, you look about twenty-five, but you read like you’re positively ancient. I get the feeling that you’re centuries old.”

  “Try millenniums.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “I’m also twenty-five. Go on.”

  “What is this, a test?”

  “Humor me.”

  Natasha sighed. “All right. You don’t read like you’re one person, but a whole bunch of people. Kira, too. As for Billy, I simply can’t get anything out of him at all. He’s shielding.”

  “What else?” said Wyrdrune. “Exactly how much have you been able to pick up?”

  “You want me to go over the whole thing?”

  “Please.”

  She sighed. “I’m not sure where to start. It’s all a jumble. With the exception of Sebastian and Gonzago, here, the rest of you are putting out incredible amounts of energy. You’ve got the most powerful auras I’ve ever seen.”

  “You can actually see them?”

  “I don’t even have to try. The air around you seems to vibrate.”

  “Goon.”

  “Back in your penthouse, I got something about somebody ailed Morpheus. And Modred. I think they’re both the same person. And I got a lot of pain associated with him. I also picked up something about Merlin being there, but he’s supposed to have died when his house burned down in Boston several years ago. And there were some incredibly malevolent impressions associated with somebody or something called the Dark Ones. There’s more. Should I go on?”

  “No,” said Wyrdrune. “You already know more than enough to cause us a great deal of trouble.”

  “The question is, what are you going to do about it?” she asked.

  “The smart thing to do would be to make you forget everything you know,” he said.

  Billy shook his head. “We can’t do that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “She’s a psychic. A spell like that could easily destroy her gift. That’s not what we’re about.”

  “No,” Wyrdrune agreed glumly, “it’s not.”

  “You could actually do that?” Natasha asked with alarm.

  “Yes, but we won’t,” said Billy. “It would be a violation of the path. I’m afraid we don’t have any choice but to tell you everything. As you said, you already are involved. But you’re going to wish you weren’t.”

  “You want to tell her?” Wyrdrune asked.

  “Why don’t you start?” Billy said. “After all, it be
gan with you and Kira.”

  “It began a lot longer ago than that,” said Wyrdrune. “It’s a long story. I’ll try to make it brief. Being psychic, you can probably pick up a lot of it yourself as I go along. A long, long time ago, when humans were still walking on all fours, another race of beings lived on this planet. We call them the Old Ones. They looked a great deal like us, except that they had golden skin and they all apparently had fiery red hair. They were magic users. To them, humans seemed little more than animals, and they used us much the same way we use animals. That is, they didn’t eat us, but in a sense, they did consume us. Humans provided the life force for their rituals.”

  “Necromancers,” said Natasha.

  Wyrdrune nodded. “As humans evolved into more ntelligent creatures, the Old Ones gradually abandoned the practice of sacrificing them in their magical rituals, regarding it as being too cruel. For a long time, they simply didn’t think of humans as sentient, but as a sort of subrace. The way we might regard monkeys. They started to use their magic in a more conservative way; that is, they would still practice then-rituals, but they no longer killed. They would draw off only a portion of the subject’s life force, so that recovery was possible. This was the beginning of white magic, or thaumaturgy. However, there were those among them who refused to give up the old ways. These were the Dark Ones, the necromancers.”

  “The ones who wouldn’t give up killing,” said Natasha.

  “Right. They could get more power faster by absorbing all the life force of a subject instead of only part of it, and they insisted that it was our natural function to serve that purpose, and that killing humans in their rituals was necessary to keep their population in check. In that sense, I suppose, they had a point, because humans reproduced much more quickly than they did. Compared to them, we were like rabbits. The question created a rift between them that eventually led to war, a mage war that devastated their population. It’s probably where the human myths of the Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, came from. In fact, we can trace much of our mythology back to the Old Ones. Stories of sorcerers and shape-changers, vampires—in a sense, that’s what they were—the gods of the Greeks and Romans, the Norse pantheon, it all probably dates back to them.”

  “That’s amazing,” said Natasha. “Why didn’t any trace of them show up in the fossil record?”

  “We’re not really sure. It would probably be very difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate the remains of modern Homo sapiens from theirs, for one thing. For another, the Old Ones were immortal. If they were not killed, they lived forever. Their cells apparently had no limit to regeneration. In any case, when the Dark Ones were defeated by the Council of the White, the ruling body of the Old Ones, they were entombed in a subterranean cavern in the Euphrates Valley, held there in a sort of comatose state by a spell the Council had devised. It was the most powerful spell they had ever cast. The Living Triangle. By that point, the Council realized their time was past. The human population had been growing steadily and their own population had declined. The war had reduced them even further. So the Council cast their spell in such a way that they infused their own life energies into three enchanted runestones, the keys to the spell.”

  “Three stones, three keys to lock the spell, three jewels to guard the gates of Hell,” Natasha said. “So that’s where that came from!”

  Wyrdrune nodded. “Only one member of the Council was ¦eft alive to put the living runestones in place and seal the cavern. He was the youngest member of the Council, a mage named Gorlois, and when he was done, he cast off his sorcerer’s robes and went out into the world to live among the humans, passing as one of them. The rest of the surviving Old Ones had to go underground and pass as human, too, because the humans outnumbered them and they had started hunting them. It was the end of the First Thaumaturgic Age. Well, not quite the end. Gorlois eventually made his way to what are now the British Isles, where he married a De Dannan witch and had a child with her. That child was Merlin. But Gorlois was immortal, and when his wife grew old, he left her, became a warlord in Cornwall, and took a younger wife, a Welshwoman named Igraine. With her, he had three daughters—Elaine, Morgana, and Morgause. Kira and I are descended from them. And, being half-breeds, they all inherited the ability to do magic. Merlin never forgave his father for abandoning his mother, so he helped a rival warlord named Uther Pendragon to defeat him. By the time Gorlois realized that Uther was being aided by magic, it was too late and he had been dealt a mortal blow. At the last instant, he flung his astral spirit from his dying body and it entered the fire opal in the ring he wore. That ring then passed to his daughter Morgana, and it became the source of much of her power. She became known as the sorceress Morgan Le Fay. And to take revenge for her father’s murder, she seduced her half brother, Uther’s son, Arthur, and had a child by him named Modred.”

  “‘That’s who Modred is?” Natasha said with astonishment. “King Arthur’s son?”

  “The same,” said Wyrdrune. “You know the story from there on, or at least the mythic part of it. Modred exposed the affair between Arthur’s champion, Lancelot, and Queen Guinevere, and brought down Arthur’s kingdom. By that time, Morgan Le Fay had already taken her revenge on Merlin. She posed as his pupil to learn everything he knew, then arranged to have him seduced by a young De Dannan witch named Nimue, who slipped him a sleeping potion. While Merlin was asleep, Morgan Le Fay had him placed in the cleft of a large oak tree and sealed him up inside it, under a spell to sleep for the next two thousand years. A living death. According to the legend, Modred and Arthur killed each other on the field of battle, but Modred had the blood of the Old Ones flowing in his veins. He recovered and survived for the next two thousand years, mainly as a mercenary in one war after another, amassing an incredible fortune over the centuries. Although he was a sorcerer, he gave up magic. It had never brought him anything but pain, and as the years passed, he grew more embittered and more cynical, dying by inches on the inside, even though he was practically immortal. He didn’t know how much life he had, he was a half-breed and he knew he wouldn’t live forever, but his life span was many times the human norm. In time, he became known as Morpheus, a predator who preyed on other predators, but always for a price. The world’s top professional assassin. The law enforcement agencies of the world believe that it’s a family tradition, handed down from generation to generation, and that there have been many different men named Morpheus, when in fact, it’s been Modred all along. He had survived for all those years, up to the beginning of the Second Thaumaturgic Age, when Merlin awoke from his enchantment and brought back magic to the world.”

  “We first met him when he accepted a contract on us,” Kira said. “I was working as a cat burglar in Manhattan, and I read an article in the newspaper about the auction of the Euphrates artifacts, which had been unearthed in a dig. An Arab sorcerer who was one of Merlin’s pupils had detected magical trace emanations coming from a subterranean cavern. He found the runestones and removed them from the circle where the Dark Ones were confined. And they possessed him. But in the meantime, the runestones were placed with the other artifacts that were discovered and they were to be sold at auction in New York, to licensed adept bidders. I read about it, and for some reason, I knew I had to have those stones. It was crazy; it was not my sort of job at all. A robbery in broad daylight, in front of a roomful of adepts, I don’t know how I thought I’d pull it off. But I simply had to do it. I figured I’d steal the stones and fence them. Only it turned out Wyrdrune had the same idea.”

  “I was a graduate student of thaumaturgy in Cambridge,” Wyrdrune said, “and I’d just had my scholarship yanked for practicing magic without a license.” He grimaced. “I was low on money, and I was always looking for shortcuts back then. I came back home to New York, thinking to raise some money somehow so I could finish school, and I read that same article. And, like Kira, I was seized with an irresistible compulsion to get those stones. We both wound up hitting the auction at the same time
. Kira snagged the stones while I effected our escape with a teleportation spell—”

  “Which you couldn’t do worth beans,” Kira put in. “I almost wound up materializing inside the wall of his apartment building.”

  “Well, anyway, we were stuck with each other until we could fence the stones,” said Wyrdrune, not anxious to dwell on the subject. “At least, that’s what we thought. Only the stones wouldn’t stay fenced. We sold them to one fence, and they came back. We sold them again, to another fence, and they came back again. On top of that, the Dark Ones had sent their acolyte after us to get the stones back and destroy them. The police were after us; the B.O.T. was after us because magic had been used in the commission of the crime, and one of the fences that we sold the stones to was well connected. He couldn’t afford having it get around that he could be ripped off, so he was willing to spend the money to put out a contract. He wanted to get the best man in the business for the job, partly so he could say he’d gotten the best man in the business, and he got him.”

  “Modred,” said Natasha.

  “Exactly. Except when Modred finally caught up to us, something happened that nobody could have expected. By that time, I’d swallowed my pride and gone to Merlin for help. He was my old teacher, and I knew I was involved in something magical that was way over my head. It was Merlin who first figured out what the runestones were. But it looked as if Modred was going to take us out before Merlin could do anything to help. Of course, we didn’t know it was Modred at the time. We just knew there was a hit man on our trail. And when Modred found us and came to make the hit, the runestones worked their magic. The spirits of the Council had been manipulating things all along, because we three were the descendants of Gorlois—Modred through his mother, Morgan Le Fay, and Kira and I through his other daughters, Elaine and Morgause. They had chosen us for that reason as their avatars, the ones through whom they would manifest their power. When we came face-to-face with Modred, the runestones became spellbound with us.” He took off his headband, revealing the emerald stone. “Mine became magically embedded in my forehead. Kira’s became implanted in her palm. And Modred’s stone fused into the skin over the left side of his chest.”