Some nights, when he knew from the drunken snores that his father was well and truly out until morning, Malachai would slip out through an open window and roam the woods and countryside around St. Osyth. When she looked into his heart in that special way that only the most enlightened spirits have, Lamiyah told us that the only time he truly felt free of his abusive father’s bullying was when he was exploring the world under the cover of darkness, with just the moon and stars to light his way.
It was on one of those nights that Malachai had stumbled on something that would change his life forever. Walking in the woods, long after midnight on a summer’s night, he saw an orange light ahead of him, flickering through the trees. Curious, the young man crept slowly towards it, doing his best not to snap a twig or break a branch along the way.
It was a bonfire, he realized when he was a lot closer: and dancing around it were three men and four women.
Oh, I should point out before I forget: they were naked men and women. All of them.
Young Malachai couldn’t believe what his eyes were showing him. He had heard stories of witches and warlocks before, of course, but never thought he would actually see one, let alone seven of them, all at the same time and without any clothes on.
Straining to get just that little bit closer without being discovered, that was when his luck finally ran out. A branch that he was trying to brush lightly aside snapped. Even over the crackling noise of the bonfire, they heard the loud crack of breaking wood.
The boy turned to run, but it was too late. He was a wiry kid and could probably have outrun them all, especially as they were barefoot and he was not, but one of the women made some kind of sign with her hands. Suddenly, Malachai couldn’t move a muscle. He was frozen, caught in the grip of some invisible force that he couldn’t understand and which scared him half to death.
Laughing, the woman twisted her fingers in an intricate pattern, bringing them closer in toward her body. To his astonishment, the trapped boy was drawn closer to her as well, dragged along through the air with his toes trailing along the ground. He was having a hard time breathing until the woman dumped him unceremoniously in a heap at her feet.
All seven gathered around him in a circle. They seemed really tall and intimidating, looking down on him from above like that; but Falconer had withstood beating after beating from his father, and it took a lot more to intimidate him than a bunch of naked people, even if some of them did seem to have almost-magical powers.
“Well, what have we here?” said the woman, in the style of every James Bond movie villain ever. She appeared to be their leader. The boy simply looked back at her silently, not wanting to make things any worse than they already were: that was the first rule of the victimized, he had learned, not to provoke anger if at all possible.
“He has seen us, Mildred,” said a grey-haired man quietly. “He cannot be allowed to take this knowledge back to his family. If the villagers knew—”
“I haven’t got a family.”
“That’s not true,” said a younger man, speaking from behind a scraggly brown beard. “You’re Tom Falconer’s boy, aint yer? I’ve seen yer and yer old man at the market in St. Osyth often enough.”
Now it was the woman’s turn to gaze silently back at Malachai. Even in the dancing firelight, she noticed that he had a black eye.
“He’s no father to me,” the boy answered quietly. “He beats me. Every night, he beats me.”
“Every boy gets beat,” the beard laughed. “That’s just what you do to boys when they gets out of hand.”
“Every night,” Malachai repeated stubbornly. “No matter what. If I’ve been good. If I’ve been bad. If I haven’t even been there. Doesn’t matter.” He lowered his eyes in a calculated attempt to get sympathy, then added in a small, quiet voice, “I still get beaten.”
Their leader had said nothing, just watching the pair going backward and forward talking about beatings. Then she seemed to come to a decision. “It sounds to me as though such a man hardly deserves to draw breath.” Her accent was very different from that of the two men: Lamiyah said that she sounded educated, which was a pretty rare thing for a woman in the 1500s.
Apparently not even the least bit embarrassed by her total lack of clothes, the woman squatted down in front of the boy and asked, “Would you kill him, if you could?”
The venom in the boy’s eyes when he looked back up at her was all the answer she needed.
“Yes,” the boy said anyway, just in case he hadn’t been understood. It was said so quietly that most of the adults could easily have missed hearing it, but the woman was evidently satisfied. Standing back up to her full height, she raised her arm sharply. The same invisible force propelled Malachai to his feet, and left him standing alone in the center of the circle.
There was no way out, he could see now. There was nothing to do but wait until the coven (for that had to be what they were) decided what was to be done with him.
“Do you know what we are, boy?” the woman asked, as though reading his mind.
He nodded slowly. “I think that you are users of the dark arts,” he said carefully. “Warlocks and witches.”
When they exchanged furtive but knowing glances, Malachai knew that he had called it right.
She smiled. “True enough, young Mister Falconer; we do serve the dark powers. And I ask you now: would you like to serve those same masters?”
Malachai opened his mouth to speak but she cut him off with a lightning-fast finger held up to his lips. “Think carefully before you answer, young man,” she warned. “This is a dangerous gift, and one which should not be accepted lightly.”
“It will bring me great power?” he asked eagerly, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Great strength?”
The woman simply nodded, offering him a wan, thin-lipped smile. “It will. But you should know that great power comes only at great cost.”
“What cost?” Malachai’s eyes narrowed, his mind whirling in an attempt to calculate all of the angles here. The answer, when she gave it, was a simple one.
“Your soul.”
Malachai blinked. He thought about it for all of half a second.
“Done.”
The boy spat on his palm and held it out. Looking at the grubby, spit-streaked palm with disdain, the woman instead reached into a leather bag which lay just at the edge of the circle of firelight. Calmly, she removed a small knife with a triangular silver blade that glinted as she raised it to her wrist and made a single, shallow cut.
She maneuvered her arm over the boy’s head and allowed three red drops to spatter onto his forehead and the bridge of his nose. Then she flipped the knife over with her fingertips, and offered it to the boy, blade-first. He took it without a word, simply offering her a questioning look. A nod was all the answer she seemed willing to return. Finally catching on, Malachai drew the blade across his own wrist, once again drawing blood just as the woman had.
Lamiyah wouldn’t give me any further details about the ritual ceremony that followed, muttering darkly that “blood magic is the oldest and most potent of the supernatural powers,” and flatly refused to be drawn into telling us anything else.
“So what happened next?” Jessica was every bit as into this story as I was, and we were both hanging on Lamiyah’s every word.
Malachai had made some kind of blood pact and become a part of the coven, sneaking out at night after his drunk of a father passed out following the hard work of beating his son for some infraction or other, whether real or imagined. Led by the tall woman, the members of the coven taught the boy low-level spells and hexes. He was an eager student, hungrily devouring every last scrap of knowledge that they would impart and then asking for more.
Much to the surprise of everybody, the young boy turned out to be a natural when it came to the dark arts. Before long, he had mastered the basics and was moving on to more advanced concepts such as necromancy – the art of raising the dead.
“Oh, come
on!” I said, ready to call BS on this part. “Necromancy isn’t a real thing! Not unless you’re reading fantasy books, at least.”
Lamiyah just looked at me and let the statement pass without comment. She tried to move on, but I just couldn’t let that drop.
“So you’re telling me that, what, Malachai Falconer is some kind of sorcerer that can bring people back from the dead?”
“Not a sorcerer, per se,” she sighed, exasperated at the term I’d chosen. “And just for your information, while what you would call necromancy is possible, it is neither common nor remotely easy. It also becomes commensurately more difficult the longer one’s body has been dead.”
“Go Frankenstein,” Jessica said admiringly, still trying to wrap her head around the concept. I thought about reminding her that ‘Frankenstein’ was the name of the doctor, not the monster, but my guide was already moving on.
“No, Daniel, Malachai Falconer is more accurately termed a lich. As were the other members of the coven that he happened to stumble upon.”
Lich? I’d heard that word before somewhere. I wracked my brains, trying to figure out where. Then it hit me. That was straight out of D&D. When I described the fantastical creature to Lamiyah, I was expecting her to find its source – a role-playing game, of all things – to be pretty amusing. Instead, she gave me a serious look.
“Your facts are essentially correct,” she admitted, which surprised the hell out of me. Score another one for Gygax and TSR. I always said they were ahead of their time. Lamiyah changed gears slightly and fell back into that way of speaking that I always thought of as ‘lecture mode.’ “A lich is a creature which, while not undead, is not truly alive either. Rather, it exists in a state somewhere in between. Liches can survive that way for hundreds of years, if they are careful about it.”
“That’s pretty awesome,” admitted Jessica. “Uh, how do they manage to…you know, keep going? They have to feed on something.” She thought for a moment and then asked whether they drank blood.
“That’s vampires,” I cut in before Lamiyah could answer. For such an enlightened soul, she sure did get annoyed at being interrupted.
“If we could please remain on topic,” my guide said, a little haughtily I thought, “Daniel, you are right: liches do not drink blood, or anything along those lines. They subsist purely upon human life energy itself, the etheric material of which our spirit forms are made…and that is what makes them so dangerous.”
“What do you mean?” I frowned, not quite getting it.
“I mean that once a lich has consumed its fill of etheric energy, they are more than capable of using it for their own ends. Sometimes this can be as simple as influencing objects through the means of manipulating invisible forces, as Falconers’ mentor did when she entrapped him in the woods.”
I snapped my fingers. “Or like he did himself when the villagers came to get him,” I realized, thinking back to the way that he had gone to town on the constable’s bunch of volunteers.
“Yes, precisely. But our energy, our life force if you will, is very potent, Daniel; far more so than most human beings realize. You mentioned vampires? Well, the parallel holds true only insofar as Falconer and those of his kind can sap the very life’s energy of their victims directly from them, simply by coming into direct physical contact with them.”
That would have explained the blinding light I saw when the constable’s party was attacked. Yeah, he was powerful. Look how quickly the hunters had become the hunted then.
“But what about this other guy?” Jessica wanted to know. “The…what did you call him? The Dark Man?”
“He is a tulpa,” Lamiyah said. I’d heard of them before, mainly because I’d read a book about Tibetan mysticism once, but when Jessica gave her a blank look, she explained, “Well, think of a tulpa as a thought-form, for want of a better term. Tulpas are semi-independent creations, creatures made up of etheric energy and then imbued with some degree of intelligence by those who raised them from nothingness.”
“So that’s why the Dark Man speaks English and reminds me so much of Falconer,” I guessed. It was all starting to make sense now. That was why Falconer and the Dark Man could appear together, and why the Dark Man came across as more of a spirit than a physical person. He looked like a warped, even more twisted version of his master. No, let’s call it what it is…of his father.
“You’re saying that Malachai Falconer, the dude who runs the Snare—” Jessica held out her arms to take in the lobby and the ER that branched off from it “—created his own freaking Mini-me?” She cracked up laughing. Then I caught the bug and lost it too. Lamiyah just stood there and watched the pair of us with her usual air of polite calmness, saying nothing while we laughed like a pair of hyenas at a comedy show.
“I must confess to not knowing what a…a ‘Mini-me’ is,” she said at last, just as I was starting to calm down.
“Don’t worry about it,” I snorted. “Movie reference.”
“Ah,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Anyway, as I was saying: think of the Dark Man as a thought-form, but one with a certain degree of autonomy. It is designed to do its master’s bidding, yes, and can even speak and perform relatively complex tasks, but the tulpa lacks any real level of intelligence.”
“So you’re saying that it’s pretty dumb?” Jessica asked.
“That is not a term that I would use. It is perhaps better to say that the tulpa has attained the developmental level of a four or a five year-old, at most. Do not be fooled by the fact that the creature speaks as though it is an adult, for it most certainly is not one.”
“So it’s a big kid,” Jessica shrugged, “but there has to be more to it than that. It knew how to scare us, without even trying.”
“The tulpa radiates raw fear, Jessica,” my spirit guide explained, using her hands for emphasis. “He – or rather it, because despite its appearance, this is no man – is also immensely strong, and completely impervious to pain. You would do well to avoid it, if at all possible.”
“That’s great,” I snapped, then bit back an angry snarl. It wasn’t fair of me to get angry with Lamiyah, of all people. Must be the stress. I took a deep, hopefully cleansing breath. “Except we all know that we can’t avoid it,” I went on, a little more reasonably this time. “Falconer and the Dark Man have Becky, though I have no idea why, and we’re going to get her back, no matter what.”
Jessica looked at me with her head cocked to one side. “That’s a great question. What does he want with my cousin?”
We both looked at Lamiyah expectantly.
“I have my suspicions,” she said quietly, “based upon what I saw in Falconer’s past.”
“Tell us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It turned out that the blood pact was only the beginning of it all: the ritual bought Falconer his way into the coven, but it wouldn’t truly make him one of them.
For that, he had to give up his human life and become a creature of the darkness.
He had to become a lich.
Lamiyah wouldn’t tell me where the child’s skull had come from, but I figured I could make a pretty shrewd guess. At that point, Malachai Falconer must have been willing to do pretty much anything in order to get what he wanted. I was pretty sure that murder wouldn’t have been beyond him.
There was another ceremony a few nights later, this one much longer and more complicated than the first ceremony had been. It lasted for most of the night, and involved a whole lot of blood, a bunch of potions, and a lot of physical activity that my guide flatly refused to talk about.
It ended when the sun came up the next morning, and with Malachai Falconer buried in a shallow grave in the middle of the woods.
For three days, the lich coven just left him there, all alone with only the child’s skull for company. It had been boiled and scraped clean, both inside and out.
“This is a phylactery,” the tall woman had told him, just before the ritual began. None of the c
oven members would entrust him with their names — not until he was truly one of their number. When Malachai looked blankly back at her, she sighed and explained that it was to be a vessel for his soul. “Over the next three moons, we shall transfer your living essence to this,” she said, before adding that this would be equal parts blessing and curse.
“What do you mean?” Falconer asked, confused.
“Part of the compact that you shall undertake with the dark powers involves the willing emplacement of your soul within the phylactery. Each of us has one,” she answered, indicating the six other members of the coven with a nod of her head, “and before you ask their locations, do not waste your breath. The phylactery of a lich is guarded with one’s very life, if for no other reason than that it is their very life…for so long as the phylactery is kept safe, it remains the repository of our soul. We do not age as mortal men and women age—”
“Do you mean to say that we live forever?” Falconer interrupted eagerly, but the woman shook her head.
“Not forever, for there is no power in all of creation capable of granting that particular request; but for every forty or fifty years which passes for an ordinary man, you shall age only one.” She regarded him levelly. “It may not be true immortality, yet it is a very close second. You may live for a thousand years, if you are willing to live…carefully.”
“How old are you?” the boy asked, causing her to laugh lightly.
“Old indeed,” was all she would say in return. He grinned. “There are other capabilities and benefits that you shall gain,” the woman went on, “but only once the ritual has been completed, and the proper forms obeyed. Now, come.”
She had hurried him to the center of the clearing, where the rest of the coven was obviously keen for the night’s festivities to begin.
When the sun finally went down at the ending of the third day, a pair of pale white hands punched their way free of the soil that enclosed them, their fingertips outstretched towards the first faint evening stars that were beginning to emerge in the purple sky above. The hands twisted, scrabbling at the earth to either side, finally finding purchase on harder ground and hauling Malachai’s body free.
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 16