Chapter 12. Temple #2
“No need,” I said. “I always used to prefer working alone. But I’ve come to appreciate good company. Just don’t follow me into the bathroom or anything.”
“I’ve been haunting a teenaged boy for two years. I know all about the importance of boundaries.”
I couldn’t see her, but I felt her presence move closer. “I don’t know what Nabu-rihtu-usur conjured with this spell, but it was no marsh slug.”
“Do you think he did it deliberately? Or did he accidentally call up more than he expected?”
“He was an amateur. Arrogant, ignorant, and powerful. That combination leads to dangerous mistakes.”
I skimmed the rest of the spellbook but found nothing to help me positively identify Nabu-rihtu-usur’s creature. I did come across a different spell whose symbols were familiar, matching what I had seen etched onto the pills. “Strange.”
“What is it?”
“The spell on those pills wasn’t intended to contain anything dangerous or powerful.
According to Nabu-rihtu-usur, you etch those symbols around the neck of a jar or pot to protect the contents from insects, mold, rot, and so on.
It’s the magical equivalent of Tupperware.
I suppose it would work to keep things from getting out, but I can think of dozens of better, safer spells to use.
This is like locking your front door with a bit of string and tape and hoping for the best.”
“Sounds like whoever’s making those pills might be limited to what they can find in this one particular spellbook.”
I nodded. “A scavenger rather than a proper student of magic.”
“A wannabe can cause as much damage as anyone else if they get hold of the right book or gizmo.”
She sounded like she spoke from experience. “They can cause more. They don’t understand or respect the power they’re playing with, so they’re more likely to do something unpredictable and stupid.”
“Like children.” She chuckled, a melancholy sound that brought feelings of love and fondness. “Ronnie was the same way when he first discovered magic was real. Always getting into our things and causing mischief.”
“Me too,” I admitted. “My father warded half the house, trying to keep me out of trouble.”
“I suspect you found it anyway.” Her gentle teasing brushed over me like a warm breeze at sunset.
I pushed the book aside. “How old were you when you died, Margaret?”
“Thirty-eight.”
I told myself not to be a fool. Margaret Wentworth was less than half my age. Not to mention dead. On the other hand, Annette’s first husband had been centuries older than her, and dead too, so there was precedent.
“I’m glad we found you.”
“So am I.”
I smiled and leaned back in my chair. There was a crack in the ceiling. Nothing as bad as the damage to the basement, but it was another sign of my failing strength. The crack extended about two feet from the edge of the south wall.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing.” I could accept getting old. I hated that I was taking this place with me.
I pulled my attention from the damaged plaster and took one of the pills from the bag. “When I was young, I would have swallowed one of these by now to learn what it did. Or, if I was feeling really cautious, I would have fed it to a rat or whatever else was available.”
“I agree with your friend Annette. Don’t put the strange magic pill in your mouth.”
“I suppose we can do it the slow way.” From my shelves, I gathered a glass Mason jar, a puck-sized tobacco tin, and a bottle of distilled water.
“My grandfather used these jars for canning a century ago. He gave them a magical boost so they wouldn’t break or come unsealed until he was ready.
They should hold whatever’s in those pills. ”
“Hopefully better than a bit of string and tape.”
“I used to run around catching will-o’-the-wisps in them. The glass is tougher than steel.” I filled the jar with water, then opened the tobacco tin while the pill began to dissolve. Inside the tin was a layer of fine black powder.
“Every spell goes better with a dash of pepper.”
“It’s sand from the Desert of Time. Colloquially known as slowsand.” I was showing off like a young fool.
The pill capsule began to wrinkle and deform. I used a tiny gold spoon to scoop the powder and hold it over the open jar, waiting. I wanted to see what emerged before I used the powder, but my hand trembled slightly, and a few grains spilled free.
The ripples on the water’s surface went still, but it wasn’t enough to affect the entire jar. I swore under my breath and did my best to keep the spoon from shaking.
A tiny gash formed on the top of the capsule. An oily black thread crept upward.
“There we go.” I dumped in the rest of the sand, tapped the spoon against the rim to make sure nothing was left, and screwed the jar’s lid on tight. “Time inside that jar is now moving at about one second per month.”
“I could have used that stuff when I was alive. There was this fellow in the middle of Florida who called himself the Undying Necromancer. He was doing the typical army-of-the-undead thing. As you could guess from the name, he was hard to kill. I tried blessed bullets, acid, poison, fire . . . nothing stuck. If I’d had a packet of this, I could have snuck it into his pepper shaker.
Let him try to conquer the world when his insides are frozen in time. ”
I closed the tin and set it aside. “How did you end him?”
“I had to feed him to the gators. Hard to resurrect yourself from that. Gruesome, but I was out of options. This was eleven years ago. Have you ever tried to fight zombies and their master with a six-year-old in tow? I don’t recommend it.”
I chuckled, but my attention was caught by movement in the Mason jar. The blackness had completely escaped its capsule and was darting back and forth like a tiny fish made of ink. “It shouldn’t be moving that fast.”
“Maybe your time pepper expired?”
I picked up the Mason jar and turned it sideways.
The pocket of air at the top didn’t move.
Neither did the ripples on the surface of the water.
The slowsand was working as it should. “Maybe this is its slowed-down state? No, that would mean this stuff normally moves so fast, it would shred and burn your insides between one breath and the next.”
“Sage took them without dying.”
“Which means it’s just ignoring the effects of the slowsand.
” It shouldn’t have been able to do that.
I was both intrigued and offended by its blatant disregard for the laws of magic.
It was swimming in circles at the top now, extending threadlike tendrils to poke the lid. “Does this thing look alive to you?”
“Alive and purposeful. It’s trying to escape.”
I gave the jar a good shake. The water didn’t respond, but the blackness jerked back and forth. When I set down the jar, it resumed swimming and testing its confines. “I’m not sure what it is yet, but it’s safe to say those pills are not FDA-approved.”
· · ·
For the most part, dreams were not a window into other universes. Nor were they the whispers of the gods or glimpses into future possibilities or a map of the unconscious mind showing the winding path of your psychosexual development from birth to death.
Most dreams were born of simple mental static, random voltage jolting the neural pathways to create a storm of sights and sounds.
Dreaming was when we spun order from that mental chaos and wove it into a story.
All of which was to say, my dream of working on Margaret’s van—sliding underneath the body and getting my hands up into her engine, checking her fluids, working on her exhaust—meant absolutely nothing.
The needles-to-the-eardrums sensation of my protective spells coming to life, on the other hand? That meant trouble.
I tried to wake up, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. So in my dream, I crawled free of the van and flew to the roof of my house. I perched like a starling on the peak, where I could survey the entire grounds to see where the danger was coming from.
Lucid dreaming was a useful skill if you planned to go into the magic business. It prepared you to fight off creatures that could attack you through dreams, and it let you work magic without having to go through all that nasty waking-up business.
I saw nothing outside that shouldn’t be there. Margaret was resting in the parking lot. A skunk waddled across the street. The roses out front needed water—I planted a thought in my mind for the morning so I’d remember to take care of them, then turned my attention to the inside of the house.
I sank through the roof into the second floor. I didn’t want to peek, but I could feel Ronnie sleeping in the guest room. Jenny was asleep as well. Annette was awake but resting.
I floated into my library. I found myself asleep in my La-Z-Boy. My book was still in my lap.
I hated seeing my body from the outside.
My self-image was that of a younger man.
Not young, but certainly not this frail, loose-skinned body sprawled in the recliner.
My face looked especially alien without my dentures to fill out the mouth.
My old brown newsboy cap with the spell that helped my cholesterol had slipped down over the left side of my face.
A shoggoth was sitting on my desk.
Its body covered the entire surface of the desk and spilled over the edges.
Blotches of greenish light rippled through the thing’s flesh like bioluminescent jellyfish swimming in a giant slug with skin formed from an oil spill.
Bright spots floated around the surface like bubbles: hundreds of eyeballs of different sizes.
When it moved, it sounded like a toddler slurping runny Jell-O.
Many of the eyeballs were watching my sleeping body. Others swiveled toward my dream form.
“Hello,” I said cautiously. I wasn’t sure how one was supposed to address an otherworldly horror who predated the universe itself.
It didn’t answer. I felt relief, sensing instinctively that if we were to communicate, the connection would snap my mind like raw spaghetti. Even the mere sight of a creature so different, so other, stressed my grasp of reality to the breaking point.
The shoggoth sat exactly where I had left the Mason jar. If I shifted my senses, I could see the jar within its body. The glass and lid were intact. The physical goop I’d trapped inside remained trapped. This was a projection, an aura.
The good news was that I now had a very good idea what was in the pills Annette brought back from Sage Parker’s house.
The bad news was that Grandpa Finn’s canning spells were perhaps not quite as strong as I’d hoped, and the dream-shoggoth was now stretching tentacles of unworldly, evil phlegm toward my physical body.
This was the part where I went mad.
“You’ve lost your edge, Jenny. In the old days, you would have busted through my door by now with your sword and your quips. I’ve spent months preparing for you, and you never had a clue what was happening right under your nose.
“It’s too late now. R’gngyk’s power is growing. I’m becoming stronger than you ever were. Strong enough to do what you should—
“Oh, crap. Is that the time? I’m gonna be late for work.”