by Tim Wellman
"Since she disappeared," she said. "Over thirty years I've wandered this house during the day, searching, waiting for someone to see me and help."
"Okay, we can start by reading all the old papers on the floor," he said. "One thing..."
"What?"
"Don't do that scary hair-color changing shit anymore. I don't like spooky stuff."
"Can't help it. It's part of me."
He smiled. "Why only during the day?" he said. "I would think you could see and function perfectly well in total darkness."
"It's not the darkness," she said. "There are others, ancient and powerful others who exist only in darkness. They visit this house in search of the same thing I'm looking for, but they want to destroy it."
"How do you know they haven't already found the answer?"
"Because they still come," she said. "So, we must work quickly. I always hide in the woods, but they might be able to detect your human soul."
"And?"
"They'd shred your body and eat the strips like jerky," she said. "But, don't worry, your soul is pure; they can't touch that."
"That's not a lot of comfort," he said.
****
"These all seem to be old recipes and stuff," he said as he stooped down and grabbed another piece of paper off the front room floor. "Carrot Cake. I don't think any of this stuff is important. Does this house have a library?"
Izbet nodded. "In there." She pointed to a door behind the stairway. "The old woman seemed to amass thousands of books." Allan started toward the door and she followed him. He wasn't sure if she was just trying to be helpful or if she was carefully guiding him through the old house for some other reason. But through the door was the library. There were thousands of books, all old, mostly leather-bound, and had probably rested untouched for decades on the oak shelves that populated the walls. "I hate books."
"Because you can't read," he said calmly, almost playfully, then remembered he was talking to a demon, or angel, or something that was no longer human. "Sorry."
"You are right," she said.
"Demons lie, don't they?" he said. He pulled an old book off the shelf and as he opened the cover a silverfish disappeared into the binding. "Ick."
"Demons lie," she said.
"And angels tell the truth?"
"Yes."
"But if you are both, then what do you tell?" he said. "This is The House Of The Seven Gables. A novel."
"I tell novels," she said. "The truth told with lies."
He nodded. "That makes no fucking sense at all." He pushed the book back into its resting place and ran his finger along several spines on the shelf. "These are all classic fiction, probably not a lot of occult spells to be found in those. But her books might be categorized." He stepped to the next shelf. "Beyond Good And Evil, Thus Spake Zarathustra... philosophy section."
"Frederick Nietzsche," she said.
Allan turned and stared at her. "How did you know?"
"Just because I can't read doesn't mean I'm stupid or uneducated. I learn by hearing. Audiobooks, people reading to me."
"Right," he said. "I guess you like The Anti-Christ the best."
"Yes, it's very funny," she said.
He pulled another book off the shelf and opened it, and then shook several worms out of it, fitting for the horror section. The pages seemed to actually move with book lice. "Here's one that might have something in it," he said. "The Necronomicon."
"You know that's fake, right?" she said. "None of us actually respond to that 'opening of the gate' bullshit." She chuckled. "A mortal calling out a demon, as if they could gain some sort of power over us."
"Still, look, someone has marked on the page," he said. She walked over to him and he held the book down so she could see it. "She has also circled some of these names of gods or devils or whatever they are. Friends of yours, probably."
"Read them to me," she said.
"Marukka. Asaruludu. Namru. Asarualim," he said, reading only the circled names.
She grabbed the edge of the book and bent it down to her level. "Did you read these right?" she said. She seemed excited, if not a bit frightened.
He nodded. "Those were the four circled on that page."
"But she shouldn't have known," Izbet said. "The book is a novel."
He thought for a moment. "The truth told with lies?"
"Yes," she said. She backed away from him, and then flicked her fingers toward him. "Stand back." She closed her eyes and held out her arms. "Marukka Asaruludu Namru Asarualim!" Suddenly, she rose off the floor, her hair black as coal, but her whole body emanating tiny sparks. And then suddenly, with a floor-shaking explosion of light beaming through the solid building above her and enveloping her, she opened her eyes and every book, every object in the room, renewed itself. The smell of freshly printed pages filled the air; the fabric on the chairs was bright and saturated in color; the wallpaper looked brand new. The room was reborn. As the light faded, she floated back down to the floor, and as her hair changed back to blonde, the event was over. But the room remained rejuvenated and new.
"Holy fucking hell!" Allan yelled. "Holy..."
"Those names, in that order, is a rejuvenation spell that can only be used by those of us who have obtained a certain level."
He looked down at the book he was holding. The worms and lice were gone, but the marks and circles remained on the clean, crisp white pages. "Okay, bugs are gone," he said. "I have a long history with bugs, all bad..."
"Which I don't want to hear about," she said. "Search through the rest of the pages. Is that a number?" She pointed at a mark toward the top of the page, set apart from the rest.
"Yes, number three," he said. He smiled. "So, this is the third part of whatever she discovered to break her contract!"
Izbet nodded. "Perhaps," she said. "You are smarter than you look. Then again, you'd have to be." She smirked, trying not to laugh.
He looked at her and nodded his head. "There's nothing else in this book that I can see." He laid it on the big oak table, and then ran his finger back toward the left. "If that is three, then two should be on this side of it, right?" He cocked his head. "N."
"What?" she said.
"Necronomicon starts with an 'N'," he said. "So, do the others start with the same letter, or maybe follow the alphabet?"
"N, M, L?" she said. "Lydia?"
He smiled and nodded "That might just be it. He looked closely at the spines, reading the names to himself. "I need an 'M'," he said. "Ah! Malleus Maleficarum!" He thumbed through the pages, a very pleasant task now that the books were reborn. "Here, underlined. Kehr mir die Zung im Arss umb," he said. He looked at the girl, who was blushing. "I don't know what that means; it's Spanish or something."
"It's a filthy insult," she said. She thought for a moment with her head down. "Well, if that came before the four names, it would negate the spell, make it work in reverse. It would age... is that how she did it?" She looked back at Allan with a big grin which probably meant she was happy, but caused him to back away in fear.
"That smile?"
"Yes, I'm happy," she said.
"I thought you were going to eat me," he said. He moved further to his left. "'L', right?"
She nodded. "Then we need to go the other way," she said. "There might be many."
"We'll run out of letters eventually," he said. "Here, Lair Of The White Worm."
"Give me the book, I can search faster than you," she said. He didn't argue. She put her thumb on the edge, and flicked through without looking, then stopped about halfway through. "Here."
He took the book back. "You can't read, though."
"I can see the underline marks," she said. "I can taste the old woman's desperate actions."
The underlined passage was there on the page. "Lady Arabella took from her girdle another small key, which she inserted in a keyhole in the center of a massive lock."
They both looked at each other for a moment, and then shrugged. "We need a key for a big lock," she said. "I
know the lock, but I've never seen the key."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring of keys given to him to make his way through the house. "One of these?"
She smiled again and he flinched. "Oh, stop it!" she said. "I'm not going to eat you."
"Is it just these three clues?" he said. "Should we look for 'O'?"
She nodded. "Lydia," she said. "There are five letters, right? I've seen her name on papers."
"Yeah." He got to the end of the shelf without finding an 'O' and then dropped to his knees to get a better view of the lower shelf. "There might not be an... oh, here it is." He pulled the tome from the shelf. "Once Upon A Time: A Collection Of Fairy Stories."
Izbet grabbed it, but it was so heavy she couldn't hold it. It fell to the floor, and just happened to open to the page the old woman had marked. They both looked closer. "What does it say?"
"Snow-White and Rose-Red," he said. "I remember a bit of it... two girls and their mother... a bear who is really a prince... an evil dwarf who cursed the prince..."
"That!" she said, putting her little hand on his mouth. "A small curse on a large object."
He shrugged. "Makes sense, I guess. Maybe after we unlock the door it will fit into the spell?"
"We need the next letter," she said. "'T'?"
"'P'," he said.
"Yeah, okay, you can read," she said. "Big deal, I can lead a demon army and destroy your world."
"Can you really?" he said.
"Well, maybe the greater tri-state area."
He nodded. For some ridiculous and completely irrational reason, he was beginning to like Izbet. Maybe it was just the combination of child-like innocence and objective evil, but she was more tolerable than most of the human children he had been around. But there was still the thought, the hope even, that he was passed out from heat stroke in his car, imagining everything. But on a basic level, he knew that wasn't true. He knew it was all really happening and he was racing along on the edge of a very high cliff and could fall at any moment. "Here," he said, pulling another book off the shelf. "Pride And Prejudice?" He thumbed through it. "This isn't scary, though, it's in the wrong section."
"But one of the characters' names is Lydia," Izbet said. "I've heard it read several times."
"I found it before you!" he said.
She threw up her hands. "It's not a competition."
"I am not afraid; for though I am the youngest, I'm the tallest," he read.
"The youngest is the biggest?" she said. "The youngest controls the biggest?"
"Makes sense. So, what have we got?"
"There's one thing missing," she said. These five books and five letters have to have a magical element. There has to be an occult thread running through them to give them power." She thought for a moment. "Spell Lydia."
"'L'," he said.
"Twelve," she said. "The location in the alphabet."
"You know the alphabet?" he said. "Oh, I guess that's different than putting them together into words, though, huh?"
She nodded. "Next letter."
"'Y'."
"Twenty-five."
"'D'."
"Four."
"'I'."
"Nine."
"And 'A', which is one," he said. "So that equals..."
"Fifty-one," she said quickly. "That means nothing I know of. If you add five books, it becomes fifty-six."
"Does that mean anything to you?" he said, expecting the number fifty-six to have some profoundly evil purpose.
She shook her head. "Nope."
"Okay," he said. He turned to put the book on the table, but another book on the shelf caught his eye. "A."
"What?"
"There's a book by itself on the top shelf, just called A." He pulled it down and opened it. The pages were blank. "There's nothing in it. It's like a Diary or something that was never written in."
"Let me see," she said and grabbed the small book from his hand. She thumbed through it quickly. "I don't feel anything." She thumbed through again. "Oh!"
She folded the book open and handed it back to Allan. There, tucked close to the binding and written so small it was hardly a mark at all, was '-1'. "Minus one," he said.
"Now it works," she said. "Fifty-five. Five books, five letters. Written as '5' '5', is an occult number... five plus five is ten, fifty-five divided by five is ten. Five times fifty-five is two-hundred and seventy-five; if written as '2' '7' '5', two minus seven plus five is zero. Two times seven is fourteen, fourteen times 5 is seventy. Subtract fourteen and you have fifty-six. Minus one, fifty-five." She tossed up her hands. "See? Very simple numerology."
"I failed math," he said. "But, occult number, let's work at that." He smiled. "What about 'L' through 'P'."
"Seventy," she said. "Five times five times five, minus 55."
"So that verifies there are only five letters in the spell? Should I write this stuff down so we can remember it?"
"I can remember every heartbeat I've had for a hundred and forty years," she said.
"We're all set, then," he said. "Let's look at that big lock." He looked at his watch. "It's five o'clock."
****
He hadn't meant to visit the basement at all on this trip. Basements scared him, always had. There was another guy at work, someone hired just for the jobs he didn't want to do, and it was going to be his job to catalog the basement. But here he was, standing in front of an ancient wooden door made from oak planks, with a huge old brass lock securing it in its frame. The basement itself was dark: dark and scary. But Izbet had conjured or created several small floating balls of light and the main area where they were standing was well lit. The dark corners, well, he decided not to think about it.
He held up the keyring. "Any idea which..."
"That one," she said and touched a key with the tip of her finger.
He singled it out, approached the lock, and then paused. "Are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, what if there is something locked up in there?"
"You mean like a demon?" she said.
"Yeah... oh." He put the key in the lock and turned it. There was no blast of otherworldly fog or screams of torment, so he pulled the heavy door open.
Izbet made a few gestures with her hands and the balls of light went through the door. Izbet followed. Allan followed her.
It was an old root cellar, made originally for holding food before refrigeration was invented. Three walls were pressed against the clay ground outside which regulated the temperature, but also insulated it from outside forces.
"This room is special," she said as she walked around the small space. She was too short to find the cobwebs that hung from the ceiling slats.
"Great!" he said, wiping the webs off his face. He looked around. "What's special about it?"
"It..." she looked around. "It could actually hold a demon."
"So, the old horror movies were right?" he said. "I knew I should never go into basements!"
She shrugged. "Guess so." She held the palms of her hands toward each of the walls and seemed to be calculating their strength. "The thing is, it would keep a demon locked up because it would contain almost all of its magic. But, that also means any magic done in here would be incredibly more powerful because it's being compressed, held tightly in such a small, earth-clad room."
"Oh, so do you think that's why Lydia used the room for her spell?"
"Definitely," she said. "Even a mortal could use very effective magic in here."
"Well, cool, then, we know the first part of the riddle," he said. "It's after five, now, will you have enough time before dark?"
"I don't know," she said. "There is no handbook, you know? We have to learn everything on our own."
"Izbet?"
"Hmm?" She seemed to be thinking about something and not listening very closely to what he was saying.
"Are you sure about this?" he said. "Do you really want to die? You seem to be doing fine as you are."
"Why does it matter to you?" She look
ed up at him. He had her complete attention.
"My wife and I have been trying to have a kid, you know?" he said. "It may take her a little time to get used to you, but..."
"I have a soul someplace," Izbet said. "Not here, not inside me, but someplace. I can only release it by finding it again."
He smiled and nodded. A part of him was relieved, but a part, perhaps just a single blue stone of his soul, wanted her to accept the offer. "So, what do you want me to do?"
"We need something that will renew the marks on the floor," she said.
He hadn't noticed them before, but there was a faint outline of some sort of design, a double circle and a diamond shape. He looked around the small room. "Oh, wait, there's a workbench out in the basement, might be something there." He was gone only a few seconds and came back into the root cellar. "Carpenter's chalk."
"Okay, good," she said. "Now, just trace over the lines."
"What is this design?" he said. He finished one line and it became perfectly clear. It was the number '5'. The other side of the design was also a '5', but drawn as a mirror image, so that the two numbers, '55' came together to form the design. "Very clever, you demons."
"I prefer being called devious," she said with a smirk on her face.
"Okay, traced out," he said. "Do you just go through the numbers?"
"Yes," she said. "Lydia's plan was to spin time ahead so quickly that the contract would lose its magnetic hold," she said. "I pronounce the renewal spell, but then have to reverse the big to small section and make it small to big so it applies to my contract."
"And the last part, the 'youngest is the biggest' part?" he said. "What does that mean?"
She shrugged. "Not sure, it might not even be needed, or it might be something that will be obvious after the first part of the spell has opened the portals of time." She walked to the design and put one small bare foot in each circle. "Ready?"
He nodded. "If I don't get the chance to say goodbye..."
"Close the door," she said. And as he did, she began the ceremony. "Kehr mir die Zung im Arss umb!" she said. She held out her arms and closed her eyes and as she chanted Marukka Asaruludu Namru Asarualim, she rose off the floor and her hair turned black again. And as the tiny sparks appeared, she opened her eyes which had turned solid white and seemed to emanate light. The room began transforming itself, but not renewing itself, it was falling even more into decay. The wooden ceiling slats began falling, spider webs disintegrated to dust. "The small curse on the large one be reversed!"