Dark Arts (6 page)

The smell of the earth and humid air
surrounded him, he listened to the sounds of birds and rustling
leaves for a while before beginning the next part of his visit. The
long shade allowed the grass to grow thick and richly green. With
the tall trees surrounding the small graveyard, it was difficult to
tell what time it was, but Max knew it was early afternoon. To him
it had already been a long day.

“Miss having you around, old man,” he said,
looking through the clearing in the trees to the scantly clouded
blue sky. “Don’t know what they want from me this time, but I’m
pretty sure it’s my fault for picking up the trail you were
following most of your life. Got what you were looking for, what
you didn’t even tell Allen about. I think they actually believe it
can resurrect the dead, change the world.” He never knew his father
as a young man, he was forty-five when Max was born, still vital,
but turning grey. Most of his memories of his father were of him
leaving and returning.

There were the lessons, which were
unavoidable. Max learned about different religions, their origins,
the laws of the magical universe, and the ‘old ways’ as Max’s
father and his friends referred to them. He enjoyed most of the
history, but the so-called practical side seemed pointless, as good
as well wishing and hand wringing while looking up at the stars for
a response.

In all the rituals and so-called magical
circles Max was forced to attend, the most magical sensation he had
was a case of the goose bumps. The most common feeling he endured
was having to go to the bathroom after the first forty minutes.
None of the high magic, incantations, prayers, invocations, charms,
or anything else seemed to do anything in the world. He could
recognize the comfort faith brought to some people, and that there
brand of paganism seemed to keep a large community together, but
that’s where the benefits ended for Maxwell.

When he fell asleep exactly, Maxwell didn’t
know, but he started awake when his head rolled onto his recently
healed ear. He opened his eyes in time to see the headstone begin
to move, and rolled out from under it. The granite fell forward
with enough weight to crush his head and shoulders. He got to his
feet and stared at the blank side of the stone, wide-eyed, a
rotten, churning feeling in his gut.

A chill wind pulled at his shirt and hair.
Looking up, he could see the church standing as upright as it was
when the congregation was in service, and the wrought iron fencing
standing around the small graveyard. At the end of the lane was an
arching tree with people hanging from nooses on three main
branches. The men and women slowly twisted in the wind, and Maxwell
recognized the scene from an old picture, but couldn’t quite
remember why they were killed.

A slender hand landed on his back, and he
turned. It was a young boy. The family he hung with was around him,
looking to Maxwell mournfully. “Free us. Take us to water. Give us
peace.”

A movement caught Max’s eye, and he looked
to the doorway of the church. The boards weren’t white the way a
whitewashed shingle building should be, they had the glisten and
yellow color of bone. The figure in the doorway was
square-shouldered, tall, his narrow face stern, and the clothing he
wore shifted as though it was made of shadow. It felt as though the
man’s steel grey gaze weighed Maxwell down. He took a step back and
tripped over his father’s downed gravestone.

The clear day had returned, the cool air
replaced with the thick, humid heat of the afternoon and the tree
at the crossroads by the end of the church’s drive was gone along
with the people who hung there.

Maxwell picked up his rings and tried to
pull the corner of his jacket free from the stone. “Fucking
geezer!” he shouted as he fought to retrieve his leathers. “I’m
either stoned or you were right, but it doesn’t matter now, because
I’ll never be back to clear your grave!” he freed his jacket and
put it on.

The thought of those sandwiches being
drugged seemed ridiculous, but less so than having waking visions
of dead families, so in a demonstration of distaste for everything
his father believed in, he bent over and shoved two fingers down
his throat. He gagged and vomited up less than half of what he ate,
mostly forcing bile up. By the third try, he was down with one knee
on the tombstone and one on the grass. He didn’t notice a car pull
in on the side of the road behind him.

The light touch of a hand on his shoulder
startled him out of the desperate act of trying to regurgitate the
quarter sandwiches he’d had possibly hours before. He spun around,
falling backwards.

It was Miranda, beautiful with the blue of
the sky behind her, wearing a summer dress so light he could see
the bathing suit she wore underneath. It was in a new style,
flashy, the sort of thing Farrah Fawcett would wear. She looked
almost as worried as Bernie, who was standing behind her. He
dropped to one knee to attend to Max. “What’d you take? What’s the
reaction? Was it the LSD?”

“Fucking sandwiches,” Maxwell replied, still
stunned enough to reply honestly, but not so out of his mind that
he couldn’t recognize how ludicrous the answer was. “They must’ve
drugged me with the sandwiches,” he explained. It still sounded
ridiculous aloud, and he surprised himself with an involuntary
snicker.

Miranda was frozen to the spot, confusion
slowly replacing her expression of alarm. Bernie checked Max’s
pupils then fixed him with an irritated look. “You’re fine and
clean. Wait, did you say sandwiches?”

The whole situation sunk in for Maxwell. The
likely possibility that everything he fought to disbelieve was
true, that he was nearly killed by his father’s downed headstone,
and that he just spent ten minutes trying to upchuck sandwiches
that he suspected may have been poisoned under the supervision of
Bernie’s father, a man he saw as more of a father than his actual
dad. It sunk in, and all he could do was laugh. It was a
high-pitched, raspy, unrestrained kind of heel-kicking laughter
that put him flat on his back when Bernie let him go.

“You asshole, I thought you’d taken
something and it was going wrong,” Bernie said. “It’s going around
today.”

“Does he do that?” Miranda asked, unable to
stop herself from smiling a little in reaction to Max’s
unrestrained laughter.

“He does magic mushrooms sometimes, some
weed, but chemicals,” Bernie said, shaking his head. “No, not for a
year, probably longer. The last time he did acid we couldn’t get
him out from under the bus until sunrise. You all right, mate?” the
last he asked with his own terrible impersonation of a British
accent.

“Is he okay?” Miranda asked, still looking
amused.

“No, I think he’s lost it this time. I don’t
even think he’s been into the weed, his pupils are fine,” Bernie
said.

“Okay,” Max said, taking a deep breath and
recalling the sobering scene he’d just witnessed in his vision, or
hallucination, he wasn’t sure. “Okay, I’m all right.” He turned
away from Miranda while he wiped his nose and mouth, then tried to
clean his hands in the grass. He put the pentagram on his left
middle finger, and the heavier Seal of Julius on his right middle
finger then pocketed his other rings. “It’s been a hell of a day,”
he said, standing up and turning around. “Everything’s gone strange
today, but not all bad,” he looked to Miranda then. “Glad to meet
you again after all the bad news this morning, then dark sprits and
murder attempts from beyond the grave. My head was under that a
second before this geezer turned his stone down,” he said, kicking
his father’s headstone.

“Bad omen,” Miranda said. “Lucky you got
out.”

“Bernie, you know I do everything I can to
step lightly around what you and your dad believe,” Maxwell said.
“I want to believe that these are just patches of dirt, with
people’s old bodies under ‘em like old clothes. All used up,
nothing hovering around or moving on.”

“You’re good at stepping around that, it’s
cool,” Bernie said.

“If that’s how you feel, I’ll tell my
Aunts,” Miranda said. “They’ll back off.”

“Right, well listen. I don’t want to say I’m
a believer, because I’m half way to checking myself in to the
special wing of the hospital, where they keep people in padded
rooms, and half way to cracking one of your dad’s books to find out
what I just saw here. Who I just saw here.”

“Why? What did you see?” Bernie asked.

Maxwell ran his hands through his long hair
and sighed. “All right, all right, let’s pretend for a minute that
I believe everything your Circle are into. Ceremonies are important
to the seasons, there are as many spirits as there are stars in the
sky, and the moon’s a big cheese wheel.”

Miranda sighed and rolled her eyes.

“Okay, not the last bit, of course,” Max
said. “So, I fall asleep there, and when I wake up I’m about to be
pancaked by my father’s gravestone. I narrowly avoid that, and when
I look around it feels a bit like fall, chilly, and the sky is
grey. I see a family, six, maybe seven men women and children
hanging from a great old tree there,” he pointed to the crossroads
at the end of the graveyard drive. “Just where the old fence post
is. That church is in fine condition, some old priest is standing
in front, glaring daggers at me, and one of the hanging kids turns
me around to tell me I have to free him over water.”

“Then you started throwing up?” Bernie
asked.

“Well, that’s all gone, the suns down over
the treetops, so I must have been asleep for a couple hours, at
least, and I’m thinking the only thing that could do that –
logically – are drugs, so I try to empty the tank.”

“Well, it makes sense, but you’re fine now,”
Miranda said. “If you were high enough to hallucinate that, well,
you’d still be tripping hard.”

“She’s right,” Maxwell sighed. “And I wasn’t
dreaming, I woke up first. So, let’s say all of it was real, face
value.”

“Then you saw spirits trapped in a terrible
event,” Bernie said. “They’re trapped here, maybe by the priest you
saw. It’s also doubtful that this is consecrated ground now, if
that’s what’s happening here. Something was done to desecrate the
area a long time ago, but that’s just a guess.”

Miranda closed her eyes for a moment,
visibly relaxing, then tensed as her eyes opened again. “We have to
leave,” Miranda said, looking across the aged tombstones as though
realizing where they were for the first time. “There is something
wrong here.”

“We can look it up later,” Bernie said. “Our
family library will have something about it, there are records
about the whole area.”

“Now, I’m just temporarily believing,
playing along, you understand,” Maxwell said.

Miranda fixed him with a patronizing smile
and kissed him on the cheek, her lips’ touch was feather light.
“Uh-huh, you cling to that as long as you can, sugar.”

“So, what you got from Panos is the real
thing?” Bernie asked, looking slightly worried. “That could be a
part of this.”

The trio began walking towards Max’s
motorcycle. The memory of the dark pastor in the church’s doorway
made him wary of the fallen structure. “Your father and her Aunt
tells me that what I’ve got on me will draw spirits from their
shadows and graves, then I pay my dad’s grave a visit and have a
full-on vision? Either that’s proof positive that the book and
stone I got from Panos is real, or nothing is. Don’t tell anyone I
said so. I’m still clinging to sanity here.”

“Would you rather be crazy or wrong?” Bernie
asked, hesitant. Max knew that his friend had always wanted him in
the fold, amongst the believers.

“Well, if I’m stoned, someone drugged me,
because, I haven’t taken or smoked anything today. I haven’t even
been smoking, not since this morning. I want a cigarette so bad I
could smoke my sleeve.”

“So, not drugs,” Miranda said.

“And I know you’re maybe a little off
center, but you’re not crazy,” Bernie said. “I’d testify to
it.”

“So I’ve got visions, a book that could
break the world, and a piece of petrified wood that could have come
from who knows what, maybe even the first Sun Prince,” Max
finished.

“Is that what it is?” Bernie asked, alarmed.
“You brought that here?”

“First Sun Prince?” Miranda asked.

“Great story, ancient history stuff. There
was a young man who claimed to be the son of a god sometime around
five thousand B.C. and he was murdered by a pharaoh because he was
afraid the boy would threaten his power. The boy rose from the dead
to prove to his followers that he was really god-like, or a god
himself, then retreated into the desert never to be seen again.
They say he was born again two thousand years later, named Amun,
and he struck down a corrupt slave master before he was killed, did
the same resurrection act as before, but then ascended into the
heavens, joining or merging with Ra, he Sun God, known as Amun-Ra
for a few centuries until the cult of Ra was eventually disbanded,
but temporarily, so Ra rose again later.” Maxwell said. “So, the
first Sun Prince had a staff, and there’s suggestions that this
petrified wood is a piece of it. I have a doubt, and I don’t care,
to be honest. If it really does what the Circle says it does, then
I’d rather drop it in a deep, dark hole and be done than carry it
around like an unlucky rabbit’s foot.”

“Wow,” Miranda said, wide-eyed.

“My Dad never stopped teaching, the whole
Sun Prince thing is the kind of bedtime story he’d put me to sleep
with. I had some strange dreams growing up,” Max said.

“I wonder how much of his lessons you
actually kept up there?” Bernie asked.

“Old geezer tested me on whatever I had to
read, whatever he told me. It was like coming home from school to
another school, you were there, mate,” Max said.