5. A Circle of Ash
Chapter 5
A Circle of Ash
I had no dream that night that I remembered; I saw no apparition in the morning shadows.
And I did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
Convening at ten o’clock sharp in Hargrave’s parlor, the general Novice class of the Esoteric Order of Magisophists was nothing particularly esoteric in appearance: Doctor Karvonen, in his spectacles and well-groomed mustache, lectured to a table of gentlemen in conventional grey day-clothes and two women in rather plain frocks. Though they varied in age and somewhat in attitude, they were by all outward indications within the bounds of polite society, and none were particularly memorable—nor did any appear to be younger than perhaps thirty years, marking me as something of an anomaly.
Indeed, the class was much like the library: informative without being expansive, intriguing and yet somehow restrained; morally instructive, I suspected, with copious answers to too few questions: a place to receive knowledge rather than to seek it. I found that it became my part to listen attentively, sifting words, gleaning such hints of magic as I could—more and more I began to desire such glimpses of an unseen world, all the more tantalizing for their rarity—and setting aside most of the rest. Perhaps I was perverse, or reckless, to cling so closely to my private tyranny over my own mind and presume myself its sole rightful ruler: a long and seemingly pointed lecture on the superiority of seeking higher truth as opposed to the dangers of sorcery made little impression on me, save for Karvonen’s passing mention of something he called the Banishing Circle of the First Degree, to be introduced once one exceeded the rank of Novice—and that mention of a banishing circle inflamed my mind, holding me in such fascination that I heard nothing else until class was adjourned.
I did not wait to learn whether my fellow Novice classmates stayed to enjoy one another’s society, or to take a meal, or whether they went their separate ways. Already I had politely excused myself and hurried to the stairway, the skirts of my black dress in my sweat-damp hands as I ascended the groaning stairs that led to the next floor, past the fading portraits in the hallway and into my chamber, locking the door behind me.
Dust motes swirled in the dim afternoon sunbeam that stretched from the window, stirred by the change in the air with my entrance; I lighted a candle by which to read and grabbed my Coleridge book from the nightstand. It fell open in my lap as I sat down on my mattress, the bookmark guiding it to reveal that very poem I meant now to read again.
Kubla Khan.
Weave a circle round him thrice , I repeated to myself again, again, reading it silently, then reading it aloud in a whisper to allow my lips to form the words.
A circle round him thrice.
A circle.
It reminded me of something I could not place, something from my youth nearly forgotten: some strange play or puppet show about the sorcerer Faust and his familiar demon Mephisto, only I could not remember whether the circle was for summoning or banishing, nor whether it encompassed the magician or the devil.
Again I tried Hargrave’s library, this time seeking anything at all on the casting of circles, and again I was foiled in my quest. Nothing there was of use to me. Night was falling.
I took my last meal of the day alone, resolving to myself as I ate that if the black ghost were to appear tonight, or by the shadows of morning, I would venture to cast some manner of circle this time—one way or another.
That night I lay in bed watching, listening, my eyes fixed on the darkest corner of my cold little room. And I fell asleep waiting for a phantom that never came.
So passed all of the next days as they grew into a week, and then into a fortnight: meals alone when I could arrange for them to be, Novice class in the late morning, and in my free time my own surreptitious studies at a far less fevered pace. Having nearly given up on that shadowy apparition after so long with no sign, I no longer felt as pressing a need to learn to banish it, and had fallen into a manner of routine which I assured myself ought to comfort and please me.
I cannot say what sense of exploration stirred in me on the morning of the day before the Midwinter Gathering of the Order, unless it was the clinging miasma of some dark dream I had forgotten by the dawn: it was as if I did not realize until then that my complacent resignation had bound me, because not until then did the bonds begin to rankle. In the hours before class the fog lay heavy on Hargrave’s grounds, the pale sun powerless to warm the chill of a long December night from the frosty dew. With my shawl pulled close I wandered nearer to the mighty trees before his house—winter-bare oak, funereal yew—and then I stopped with a subtle shudder.
A faint sense of the uncanny pricked at the small of my back, rising up slowly through my spine.
Whatever I had felt from Victor—from the apparition—I felt it now again.
And whether wisely or foolishly I ran back to the house, up the creaking stairway, and endeavored to settle myself in my room, waiting for ten o’clock as I watched the fog and the trees from my window, waiting for the hammering of my blood to fade from my head.
I cannot say that I remember what took place in Novice class: so fixed was my mind upon the morning’s encounter, so restless were my nerves in the memory of the twinge of that eldritch thrill that I could scarcely bear to endure another lecture on the moral and spiritual necessity of the hierarchy of Magisophists. I know only that every time I remembered what I felt among the trees, a shadow of the same sensation seemed to return to me—or to awaken, if it had never truly left me—and it was almost as if I felt it anew.
And when class ended and I returned to my chamber, for the first time in a week I read Coleridge again.
Outside of my window the sun sank slowly from its noon apex as I pored over that book, and I lighted both a candle and my small hearth as the daylight began to dim. I read every line and verse of every poem with the kind of rapt attention that had proven impossible for me in class, my mind gripped in a monomania on the sense that the key to all I sought was occulted within its pages somewhere, somehow, and I trusted desperately in myself to discover it before night fell.
Yes, there was some manner of magic in the world—I had sensed it again; I could not bear to think I was mistaken—and now there was a reckless defiance growing in my heart to prove it to myself: to experience, to feel something yet once more, however strange or fleeting, for which the Novice class and the library could not account.
Before the Midwinter Gathering of the Order, I wished to see the apparition again.
The light from the window was fading—had I spent so long in my contemplation and my solitary study, or had clouds crossed the sun?—and after all the other poems I turned to Kubla Khan again, reading slowly, closely, searchingly. Again I read of the River Alph and its seething, bursting course; the woman wailing for her demon-lover ; the pleasure-dome and the voices out of time; the Abyssinian maid with her dulcimer, and the poet’s yearning to revive her song within him and create thus all that he imagined— here , I told myself— here was the prize I sought! And with my fingers trembling in my mad exultation I lighted a second candle, just before the first burnt down to liquid wax and curling smoke.
Night had come. I had missed meals. I ought to have been hungry.
Could I revive within me , I read once more, her symphony and song.
And could I revive within myself the feeling of that sinking, tremulous sense of uncanny darkness that had unsettled me so—could the memory of the sensation stir me again, as it had already in class—what then?
A circle first, I told myself, so resolved upon this terrible experiment that I did not stop to question my course.
I took the poker from the rack at the side of the hearth, dripped its end with water from the washstand ewer, and rolled the wet tip through the black ash under the fire. It smoked lightly in the heat, and watching a rising wisp of steam, I paused. The fine hairs that escaped my bun pricked up on the nape of my neck.
Could I feel him? Could I sense his apparition forming in the darkness?
A sense of disquiet rose in me. My stomach sank.
I did not have time to wonder whether I was awake this time, or asleep and in a dream, or how precisely to go about what I now meant to do: I pulled back the rug and touched the poker to the wood beneath, silently tracing a faint ash circle on the floor around me.
And then I waited, listening to my heartbeat and my quickening breath.
And I waited. But there was only firelight and darkness. I realized I still held the poker in my right hand, the sweat of my palm slick against the brass handle.
“Show yourself,” I whispered, staring into the black shadows in the darkest corner of the room. “Show yourself, if you’re here.”
In the back of my mind I thought that I heard a deep-voiced man’s grim chuckle, low and ominous.
“This is always the question,” I thought I heard the voice murmur, so faintly I could scarcely discern the words, “isn’t it: should the circle go around me, or around you?”
“Victor…?” By the time I finished the second syllable, my own faint, broken gasp was the only sound: I began to remember, to revive within me that uncanny thrill—and my very sense of the world shifted, my head grew light, and I staggered for the rush of vertigo as the shadows from the corner seemed to melt and flood the room like water, coursing over the floor and breaking around the ash line of my circle as if I stood upon a rock in the black tide.
I thought I saw the flash of his mask near the corner of the room, the vast dark shape of him standing before me, but it was indistinct, uncertain.
“You summoned me.” The rumble of that voice was so deep it quivered in the air, in my bones.
“I was instructed to dispel you.”
“Then you did a particularly poor job of it.”
I wondered whether he had extended his hand to me, that scarred hand with its strong warm grip, and despite the shiver in my nerves, the deathly unquiet in my marrow, I knew that I no longer meant to dispel him at all—but I should not have looked down to watch myself give in to the inexplicable, inexorable sense of being drawn to feel him again, to watch my small hand clasp his across the boundary of the circle: when I turned my gaze up again to see what I could of his face, I saw to my frozen horror only a white skull, as pale and lurid as the full moon, licked by the flames that erupted around us from the ash on the floor?—
I found myself lying on the twisted sheets of my bed, my hand on the open Coleridge book.
The poker was in the tool rack by the fire. The rug was in place. A faint smear of ash near its fringe was all that I could see remained of my circle.
I shivered once, not so much for cold as for the memory, and for the feeling that I thought lingered in my right hand. Could it all be no more than imagination? Or did some aspect of his magic persist in me?
Is this how it felt to be under a spell?
As I undressed and put on my nightclothes, put out the hearth and the candle and laid down in my bed, I wondered whether I would dream so terrible a scene again tonight.
And whether I had ever dreamt it at all.