Three tales of Lovecraftian horror and humor
Copyright © 2007 Alfred D. Byrd
THE KEY TO OTHERWHEN
1
For as long as he could recall, Simon Mason had been fascinated with the old, abandoned house by Foxfire Creek. He would stand for hours, by sunlight or moonlight, and stare at the house's drunkenly leaning dormers and spires till even with his eyes closed he could clearly see every missing shingle and cracked windowpane. By day the house seemed just dilapidated, but by night it glowed at the edge of vision with an unhealthy greenness. The house filled Simon with dread, but also with desire to visit the place, partly for the sake of its own mystery, but mainly for the sake of a loved one whom he had never met.
The house was where his father had died.
Of his father, Simon knew little, but more than his mother wanted him to know. She herself never spoke willingly of her late husband, and when Simon asked her of him she would meet her son's questions with a cold silence that he had learned not to brook. She would, though, when Simon was abed, supposedly asleep, speak to her brother, Simon's uncle Agrippa, on the rare nights when he came by.
He had a house nearby, one that Simon's mother had forbidden her son to visit, but Agrippa Godwinson spent most of his time in a city beyond hills to the north. When he showed up, he and his sister would argue for hours in low voices while Simon, his ear pressed against a wall of his bedroom, strained to catch clues to his family's mystery. From overheard snatches of talk, Simon had learned that his father had gone to the house in search of what Agrippa called, "the key to our kind's past and future." There, Simon's father had been torn to pieces by --
By what, Simon could not say. When talk reached the cause of his father's death, voices either fell or began to speak unaccountably in a language that Simon's mother had never bothered to teach her son. In daydreams he tried to imagine, and in nightmares he glimpsed, all kinds of horrors that might have caused his father's death. None of them, though, seemed equal to the dread and loathing that Simon heard in his mother's and his uncle's voice.
It was not only of Simon's father that Agrippa and his sister spoke. Sometimes, to Simon's delight and dread, they spoke of the father's son. It was always Agrippa who raised the topic. "Tamar," he said, "you need to tell your son of Theophilus. Simon is his son as well as yours, and needs to understand what comes to him through both of his parents. You need to teach him to read, and to know the ways of the world in which he was born to live. You cannot bind him to Foxfire Valley forever."
The request to teach Simon to read puzzled him. His mother had taught him to read, and had given him free run of his home's extensive library, the shelves of which did hold, though, many gaps that she never let be filled. From the books in the library Simon had learned much of science and myth, and much of the history and culture of the world beyond the hills to the north. He longed to visit that world, but dared not ask to while his mother's cold silence reigned.
It was from a book of which she knew nothing that Simon had learned something more of his father. In a nook by a chimney in his home's attic, behind a chest filled with clothing past use from dry rot, Simon had found a cobwebbed, mildewy composition book. Its cover bore, in ink faded to brown and splotched with mold, the title, "Journal of Theophilus Mason -- Volume Seven."
The book was filled with spidery, angular writing in a dizzying array of languages. Some of them Simon recognized as Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Coptic, and Arabic. Other languages were in scripts of which his encyclopedias held no trace. Only an occasional sentence was in his mother tongue. Many such a sentence dealt with phases of the moon, positions of the stars, chemical formulae, or other such matters that made no sense to him. Only a few of the comprehensible sentences spoke of his father's purpose or personality. Of these sentences the one that haunted Simon was, "We are kin to the high ones who live in the depths."
The book held, too, drawings of the house in which Theophilus Mason would die. Simon memorized these drawings, as well as the house's floor plan, amid which his father had drawn an X and the words, "the key to here and elsewhere, to now and otherwhen."
These words drove Simon ever and again to stare at the house of drunkenly leaning dormers and spires. He stared at night while his mother slept, or by day while she brewed and bottled what neighbors came silently and furtively to buy, until with cold anger she called him home. Whenever he stared, he willed his feet to take him to the mysterious house, where he would find, at whatever risk to his sanity or life, the key for which his father had died. After walking awhile, though, Simon would find himself unaccountably back at the vantage from which he had been staring. There he would stay till his mother called him home.
He wondered endlessly why he could not reach the mysterious house. The only answer that he could find was his mother's singing. While she brewed her wares she sang softly to herself in the secret language that she and Agrippa sometimes spoke. The singing and the strange language worked themselves into Simon's dreams, where they intertwined with the strange scripts and symbols in his father's journals.
The language and symbols strained to make themselves clear to him, but ever failed to. Although he could not say why, he felt that it was the language and the symbols, manipulated by his mother's voice, that kept him from reaching the house where his father had died, or Agrippa's house, or the world beyond the hills to the north.
So Simon lived, desiring, but ever unable to fulfill his desire. So Simon lived till the day when his mother died.
2
Her final illness began suddenly with a dry, racking cough and high fever. As hour by hour she worsened, becoming bedridden and incommunicative, Simon grew fearful and went to the house of a nearby doctor for help.
The doctor was alarmed and amazed, both at Tamar Godwinson-Mason's being sick and at Simon's coming to him for help, but, medical kit in hand, he came with Simon to his mother's bedside. After briefly examining her, the doctor announced that he had no idea of her illness's cause, but held scant hope of her recovery. He volunteered to stay with her, though it was clear to Simon that the doctor would have fled the scene at the son's least word of dismissal.
He held his mother's feverish hand. With this for a time she gripped him strongly. For a time she held his gaze with ever more bloodshot eyes as she tried to speak to him in a papery voice. It was clear to him that she was urgently trying to communicate something to him, but, as she spoke in her unknown language, he could gather from her nothing but a sense of fear, of warning, and last of despair. At length she subsided into her bed, and, after asking for water in the common tongue, she grew silent. He kept holding her hand as its heat rose, then faded to a chill from which it would warm no more.
With the doctor's help Simon sought the service of local women to tend to his mother's body, but none of the women would come to Tamar Godwinson-Mason's side. Simon was near despair when, unforeseen, his uncle Agrippa arrived. With soothing words and the distribution of gold, Agrippa induced the women to prepare his sister's body for its long rest, a parson to mumble over the body words from a book, and a sexton and four strong men to convey the body to a portion of the valley's cemetery where no crosses marked the graves.
The local women did observe funeral custom in one respect: they brought food to the house of mourning. As Simon, bone weary, ate with his uncle in a suddenly strange house, he felt anger rise amid his grief. "Why did they fear my mother so? They treated her as if she were a" -- he sought a word that he had read in the encyclopedias --"witch."
Agrippa nodded. "Witch is a word that they use for those who live among them, but differ from them."
Simon recalled that the locals had always shunned him and kept their children from playing with him. "They act as if I am one, too."
Agrippa licked his lips. "What your mother was, and what your father was, you are."
Simon sighed. "What that is, Mother never would tell me, however much you begged her to."
Agrippa's eyes widened; then he laughed softly. "I often suspected that you were listening to Tamar and me, but I never told her so, for fear that she would bind you ever tighter to her will."
"Why did she bind me?" Simon cried out. "Why did she keep me from going to you, or to the house where my father died? Why did she keep me from knowing who I am?"
"Out of love, Simon, and out of fear. She feared losing all that she had left of her beloved Theophilus. In her fear and love she felt that it would be better to keep you stunted, but alive, at her side than to let you grow till you fled the nest to where a destroyer awaited you."
Simon nodded slowly. "So she sang her strange songs over her strange brews, to bind and stunt me. I see that she was a witch! I feel, though, that the power of her songs is fading. What now can keep me from going to the house by Foxfire Creek?"
Agrippa's eyes widened again, but this time his face took on a look of fear. "It would be unwise of you to go there. Your father was far more prepared to go there than you were, yet what lies there took him."
Simon said nothing. When he had spoken of going to the house of drunkenly leaning dormers and spires, he had briefly thought of showing Theophilus Mason's journal to his uncle and getting his advice on how to use it. Now, though, Simon saw that his uncle was no more willing for his nephew to go there than his mother had been.
Talk turned to the late Tamar's past. This talk, Simon enjoyed, for Agrippa told him what his mother never had. The Godwinsons had lived in the valley for time out of mind. There they had been proud landowners with three ancestral homes, of which the house by Foxfire Creek had been the largest. The Godwinsons had lived there till the family's head, delving into matters that men of ignorance called magic, had awoken what had taken him and made the house no home for flesh and blood.
The awakening had occurred in the childhood of Agrippa and Tamar's grandfather, and they as children had learned of the event from the dying man's lips. Agrippa, as heir to the Godwinsons' name, went for education to a university in the city beyond the hills to the north. There he had met and befriended Theophilus Mason, a child of a family that, like the Godwinsons, lived on the earth, but was unearthly. It had pleased Agrippa, when he brought his friend home to meet Tamar, that she and Theophilus had fallen in love.
Agrippa smiled wanly. "The rest, I believe, you can guess. When your father heard of my ancestor's work, Theophilus longed to learn more of it. He learned much, but not enough to save him when his test came."
Simon nodded slowly. Again, he thought of telling his uncle of the mildewed composition book; again, Simon held his peace. "What should I do now?"
Agrippa rubbed his chin. "For now, wait. I will stay here till I shall have arranged for your well-being. I mean for you to come to the university, where you can learn among your own kind what you need to know. You cannot come, though, till you are eighteen. Till then you must have servants to see to your needs, and the right books to prepare your mind."
Agrippa, glancing at a clock on a nearby mantel, shook his head. "Look at the time! I think that I should go home for the night and come back when you and I can talk with clear heads by daylight."
He rose to leave; then, turning back, he took from a pocket and thrust into Simon's hands something angular and metallic attached to a chain. "This," Agrippa said, "may aid you if you choose to go where you should not."
3
Simon stared at the object that his uncle had given him. A pentacle of silver, it was crossed with lines and inscribed with symbols that blurred before his eyes. This, too, he thought dully, needs a clear head by daylight.
Still grasping the pentacle, he staggered off to his bedroom. On the way there, he recalled that some of the pentacle's dimly glimpsed symbols, broken crescents and lopsided tridents, had appeared in his father's journal. This, Simon dug from under a dresser, but, as he sat down in an armchair to open the journal, the pentacle's chain looped itself over open pages. Simon gazed at symbols on the pentacle and on the pages as the symbols swelled, then faded…
He was standing on a ridge above a moonlit glade where a milk-white woman was weaving on a loom. As her pale arms flashed across its shed, a voice, high and sweet, but unearthly, sang of symbols. As the loom wove silver light as warp and golden light as weft, the song wove the symbols together with words of unearthly speech and words of common speech.
"You are a child of light and darkness," the woman was singing, "of hope and of despair. You stand between the heights and the depths, and the road that you will take leads at first downwards…"
When Simon opened his eyes, his gaze fell at first onto the pentacle, still draped across the open journal in his hands. The symbols still held unplumbed depths of mystery, but now Simon could read at least the symbols' surface meaning. Through his mind ran the words, "By the signs of the nine universal forces, I bind you, high ones who live in the depths, to guard from all dark powers this amulet's bearer."
Simon smiled grimly to himself. Truly something that may aid me if I choose to go where I should not. It came to him that he was reading the symbols by dawn's ashen light filtering through his bedroom's windows. In the distance roosters were crowing.
Rising, he put the amulet around his neck and lay the journal aside. He walked from his bedroom past the table where last night's dishes stood unwashed. As he passed the kitchen's sink and stove, tears stung his eyes as he thought of songs that would never again be sung there. He felt, though, that a song stronger than any of them was calling him onward.
His steps took him to the ridge above Foxfire Creek. There, as the sun's upper limb raised itself over the world's edge ahead of him, he looked down at the house of drunkenly leaning dormers and spires. Oddly enough, it glowed this morning with the unhealthy greenness that it usually bore only on moonless nights.
His steps took him down the ridge. This morning no song twisted his steps aside from his goal; this morning they bore him on till spires and dormers overhung him, and he stood before a glowing porch. Its handrails leaned askew, and its eaves sagged to the ground from the weight of a hundred autumns' leaves, but, bizarrely, a swing still hung from rafters as if it were ready for a lover's tryst. It came to Simon that the locals, however much they hated the Godwinsons, had never dared touch the old house, and their children had never dared explore it. He was the first to come there since his father had died.
From his new vantage he saw what he had not known, that the house's front door stood open, an entrance into a glowing cave. His heart pounded, and his mouth went dry, as he thought of passing through that door. What if Mother and Uncle Agrippa are right?
He knew, though, that, if he stayed where he was, he would ever be stunted, a boy tied to his mother's apron. He must grow, even if his steps took him to his destroyer.
The porch shook beneath him as he set foot on it, as if time had turned wood liquid. The hardwood floor of the house's vestibule, though, was firm. Standing there, he saw what he had known only from his father's floor plan.
To Simon's left a doorway opened into a dining room where place settings of a tarnished silver service stood on a sagging table. Amid this a salver held a bone jutting from a mass of dust. Recognizing this as a roast that time and vermin had claimed, he grasped how quickly his family had deserted the house when his ancestor awoke what took him.
Ahead of Simon were a pair of staircases. One of them led up into unhealthily glowing greenness; the other, down into darkness. He shuddered, recalling the dreamsinger's words that the road that he would take led at first downwards…
He felt, though, that he first wanted to seek the key for which his father had died. This, marked by an X on the floor plan, lay to the house's rear, in a study that opened off of a common room. Accordingly, Simon turned to the right.
The common room, though draped with cobwebs and overlain with dust, held traces of its onetime beauty. Velvet-covered armchairs and sofas stood artistically among bookcases, a massive fireplace, and a virginal by a bay window. Glowing, though, with unhealthy greenness, the furniture depressed Simon.
As he stepped into the common room, the house's silence ended. He heard skitterings and chitterings in the depths, and moaning in the heights. He heard the slow, incomprehensible speech of deep voices from he knew not where. He heard, too, as if from afar, high, sweet, unearthly singing.
This he traced to a mirror on the room's left-hand wall. The mirror was clouded, showing him nothing. On an impulse, though, that he could not have explained, he touched the amulet to the mirror and said, "By the first of the nine universal fires, I invoke you."
The mirror cleared, revealing to him the moonlit glade where the milk-white lady wove and sang. As he gazed at her, the scene around her spun and drew closer to him till her face was next to his own. He found his gaze held by enormous eyes of pale violet, and he noticed that the woman's hair, as colorless as straw, hung in braids to her waist.
"You have chosen to come," she said in her high, sweet voice, "where you should not."
"Who are you?"
"One who does not say her name, lest fools try to conjure with it." As Simon digested these words, the lady went on to say, "Go home, Simon Mason."
"I cannot, lest I never be what I can."
"Hm. I see that you have brought with you something that might aid you. It will not be enough for what you seek. I will give you a gift. Lean forward, Simon Mason, and touch your forehead to the mirror."
As if in a dream he did what the woman had bidden him do. He felt soft fingers on his temples, and soft lips on his forehead. This burned…
The fingers and lips withdrew. Stepping backwards, Simon saw that the mirror was again clouded. The kiss on his forehead burned, then throbbed, and at last grew cool. It did, though, keep tingling…
Armed with greater confidence, he went on. Although it seemed to him impossible that his quest could end so easily, only a few more steps brought him to the study's entrance. From there he saw the spot that his father had marked with an X on the floor plan. The spot was the mantel of a fireplace, and the key was a book.
It was a massive volume bound with metal clasps over black leather. The book's cover bore symbols in unearthly speech. This, Simon read as, "The Key to the Nine Universal Forces of Space and Time."
With feverish haste he opened the book. Its spine cracked, and a musty odor that rose from the book's pages made Simon cough, but he scanned the book's opening lines eagerly. With growing excitement he read:
"Those whose will is firm may learn the secrets of what underlies all things. Such persons may open the gates to worlds and times beyond their own. There, the strong of will may speak with, and even command the services of, the nine who control the universal fires. The nine are she whom men call the Moonweaver, Gaiaur Deathmaker--"
Something touched Simon on a shoulder! The touch was as light as a whisper of wind, but brought with it a sense of fear, of despair, and, horribly, of hope. With the touch came a gibbering and gurgling--
In terror Simon turned to see what could reach through the wards of the amulet and of the Moonweaver's kiss. Limned in unhealthy greenness, a horribly deformed man stood before Simon. The man's right eye was torn away, his throat lay open, and his heart, beating through a cleft in his chest, pumped no blood. His ravaged lips writhed, and a soft sibilance filled the air.
Simon screamed. The book clutched against his chest, he fled.
4
He ran through the common room, through the vestibule, across the porch, and up and down the ridge above Foxfire Creek while the glowing deformed man gibbered and gurgled behind him. Simon ran past the house where he had grown up to a house where he had never been allowed to go. In its doorway Agrippa Godwinson stood, staring at Simon with a look of amazement and grief. Reaching the house's porch, Simon collapsed at his uncle's feet.
Above Simon his uncle called out in commanding tones words in the unearthly language. To Simon's bewilderment these were, "Go back! He is not yet ready to meet you. I will send him to you when he is."
The deformed man's presence vanished. Simon looked up at his uncle. Tears streaked Agrippa's face.
"Why are you crying?"
"For my loss, and for one whom I recognized, and for you, because you did not recognize him."
Simon himself wept then, knowing who had been pursuing him. When he raised his head again, he caught his uncle's gaze on his forehead.
Agrippa smiled thinly. "I see that you have won Her favor. I see, too, that you have brought with you what your father sought.
"Let us study it together! It will teach you much that you need to know before you again meet your father."
DINING WITH THE DEAD
1
For a time after his mother's death, Simon Mason's life had gone well. At great risk to sanity and life, he had entered the ancestral mansion of his mother's family, the Godwinsons. To this house his father, Theophilus Mason, had gone in quest of dark forces that had torn him to pieces. Simon, though, had brought from the house a book of deep secrets, The Key to the Nine Universal Forces of Space and Time.
The book was a prize well worth the humiliation that Simon had felt in fleeing in abject fear from his father's ghost. With the book Simon's uncle, Agrippa Godwinson, had instructed him in the symbols and speech of the high ones who lived in the depths. He learned the names and qualities of the nine universal forces, and the names and attributes of the nine archons who controlled them.
What he had not learned, though, was patience. To this his uncle urged him endlessly. "Knowing names," Agrippa would say, "is not the same as being able to use them in works of power. To do so safely, you need years of practice under the instruction of masters of the work. You can get this instruction at the university when you turn eighteen."
Simon always nodded while his uncle spoke. It did no good, Simon had learned, to point out that he had already twice met the fist of the archons, the Moonweaver, a milk-white woman who wove on a loom in a moonlit glade. The first time, she had come to him in a dream to give him his first instruction in the high ones' speech and symbols. The second time, he had invoked her in a mirror in the house where his father had died. There the Moonweaver had given Simon a powerful shield against dark forces, her kiss on his forehead.
Simon had, too, a source of knowledge of the high ones of which his uncle Agrippa knew nothing. Simon's father had left behind him a journal filled with alchemical formulae for invoking the archons and their servants, and with astrological formulae for determining when alchemy would work best. When, after a day of instructing his pupil, Agrippa went home to his own house at the head of Foxfire Valley, Simon would stay up for hours to study his father's journal by candlelight.
Simon longed to try the spells in the journal, but dared not while his uncle was in residence. Agrippa's sister, Simon's mother, had, after all, used songs of power to keep her son ignorant of his heritage and unable to reach the house where his father had died. Simon had no doubt of his uncle's knowing powerful charms to keep an unruly pupil in line.
Thus, Simon played the part of a dutiful pupil while his uncle droned on. "Your own father's death," Agrippa said, "should be your first lesson in caution. Theophilus, an experienced worker in power though he was, made the fatal error of entering the Godwinsons' ancestral mansion alone to learn what your great-great-great-grandfather, Cornelius Godwinson, had called up, the thing that took him and made his house no home for flesh and blood. Your father died at that thing's hands, and to this day we do not know what it is."
No, we do not, Simon thought, and I never will as long as you are in charge.
2
One day Agrippa said to Simon, "It is time for me to go back to the university to resume my duties as an instructor. I shall be leaving you on your own for some time, but I will make sure of your being well provided for."
As heir to the Godwinsons' authority in Foxfire Valley, Agrippa summoned locals to his house and ordered them, in his absence, to look after his house, the house that Simon had inherited from his mother, and Simon himself. Glumly the locals nodded. It was clear to Simon that they bore no love for Agrippa, but dared not oppose his power as what they called a "wizard."
For that matter, Simon sensed that the locals were starting to fear him as a wizard. He was, after all, the son of one whom they had deemed a "witch"; he had gone into the Godwinsons' ancestral home, a domain of ghosts, and returned from it with a book of power; and he had been receiving instruction from a wizard. Simon smiled to himself, thinking that he might do as he willed in Foxfire Valley once his uncle was gone.
Hardly had the automobile that had come from the university for his uncle returned with him over the hills to the north when Simon began to make plans for a second trip to the Godwinsons' ancestral home. Scanning one of his books of lore for something that would aid him on his trip, he came across a recipe for a potion that would let ghosts communicate with him. The potions came in two potencies, the greater, containing blood of a human sacrificed in the dark of the moon; the lesser, blood of seven vermin so sacrificed.
"Know, however," the book said, "that, if thou attemptest to make the potion containing human blood, thou wilt draw the attention of Gaiaur Deathmaker, whose attention may not be favorable to thee."
Simon shuddered. Gaiaur Deathmaker, he had learned, was the most powerful of the nine archons, but also the most dangerous and least trustworthy. Maybe, Simon thought, I shall heed my uncle's advice to the extent of starting small.
Accordingly, on the day before the new moon, Simon summoned locals to his house and told them, "Bring me a bat, a rat, a mole, a vole, a mouse, a louse, and a lizard."
Glumly the locals nodded. It was clear to Simon that they knew well why he had asked for the unclean creatures. The alacrity, though, with which the locals returned with them told Simon that his authority in Foxfire Valley was secure.
That night he slew the vermin and mingled their blood with other potent substances. At the end of his work he held a vial of a liquid so black that it hurt his eyes.
He was now ready to meet his father again.
3
In dawn's first light Simon stood before the house of drunkenly leaning dormers and spires where his father had died. The house glowed with an unhealthy greenness brighter than Simon had seen. Today, though, he did not fear that greenness, for he was armed with an amulet of the nine forces that his uncle had given him, with the Moonweaver's kiss, and with that which makes ghosts speak.
Quickly he entered the glowing cave of the house's vestibule. To his left stood the entrance to a ruined dining room, where the bone of a long-vanished roast stood amid a sagging table; before him stood two staircases, one leading up into brilliant greenness, the other, down into darkness. Again, Simon shuddered, recalling the Moonweaver's saying to him, "The road that you will take leads at first downwards."
Again, though, Simon turned to the right into the house's once luxurious common room. Beyond this lay the study where his father had died, and Simon had once met his father's ghost.
Again, as Simon set foot into the common room, the house awoke from silence into chitterings, skitterings, moanings, and slow, deep speech. Amid this, high, sweet, unearthly signing came from a mirror on the room's left-hand wall. It occurred to Simon that she who dwelt in the mirror might have advice for him. Thus, he touched his amulet to the mirror and said, "By the first of the nine universal forces, I invoke you."
Again, the Moonweaver's milk-white face with its enormous eyes of palest violet appeared before Simon. "Your uncle has tried to teach you caution," the archon murmured, "yet here you are."
"I wish to speak with my father."
The violet eyes glanced at the vial in Simon's right hand. "Yes, I see that you have come prepared to. Do you truly think that you honor your father by offering him rat's blood? Still, he will be eager to talk with you."
"Do you have any advice on what I should say to him? Do you have more protection for me?"
The Moonweaver made low, soft laughter. "What advice can I give one who does whatever pleases him? As for protection, you may call on me for help twice, but the third time you will be on your own."
"How shall I call on you?"
The low, soft laughter repeated itself. "You will know when need comes." The milk-white face faded from the mirror.
Hardly knowing whether to feel comforted, Simon went on. A few steps brought him to the study. Glancing around it, Simon called out in a voice that cracked, "Father?"
Ahead of Simon the glowing greenness began to condense into human shape. It took all of his courage not to flee as the shape became a deformed human whose left eye was torn away, whose throat lay open, and whose heart, beating in a cleft in his chest, pumped no blood. Gibbering, gurgling sounds came from the ghost's ravaged mouth; then the ghost motioned with its right hand towards that mouth.
Fighting down fear, Simon unstoppered his vial and held it to the ravaged mouth. Some of the vial's blackness vanished into the mouth's greenness. The ravaged lips parted in a smile.
"Are you truly my son, Simon?" the ghost said in a voice disturbingly like Simon's own. "I kissed you on your forehead as you lay in your crib the night when I came here and died. Since then I have stood at this house's windows and watched you grow as you stared at this house by day and by night. I sensed that you wanted to come here, but were held back by your mother."
Simon spoke through a tightness in his throat. "Father, do you know--"
"--that Tamar is dead? Yes, I felt her spirit leave this world and pass into the plane where it sings of longing and loss. I wish that I could join her there, but as a ghost I am bound to where I died by violence with hopes unfulfilled. Still, not all of my hopes are unfulfilled. Here you stand before me a second time."
Simon felt grief mingled with horror. "Father, forgive me for running from you."
"Oh, you need not apologize! I, too, ran from the first ghost that I met, and I was already a student at the university. You bid fair to surpass your father! Already you can make that which lets ghosts speak."
"Father, what were you doing when you died?"
"Trying to make what you made. Unlike you, I did not have the sense to be content with vermin's blood. Instead, to make a ghost permanently solid, I tried to make the potion with human blood."
"You killed someone?"
"I killed no one! To avoid drawing Gaiaur's attention, I used my own blood, but he came nonetheless."
Simon was afire with eagerness for knowledge. "What was Gaiaur's appearance?"
The ghost chuckled. "I cannot say! I heard only the hiss of indrawn breath and the swish of claws; then I was what you see before you."
Simon felt awe of Gaiaur's power. "Father, if you were making that which lets ghosts speak, you must have been planning to talk with a ghost."
"Yes, with your great-great-great-grandfather. I wished to learn how he had died."
Simon shook his head. "How sad. To die with your goal unreached--"
"Ah, but death let me reach it. A ghost, you see, can talk with another ghost. Cornelius and I have had countless conversations in our long-shared ghosthood."
"Really? What have you learned from him?"
"Why not find out from him yourself? He meets me about this time each day in the dining room for breakfast. Bring along your potion, and he will tell you all that you want to know."
Simon blinked in astonishment at a bizarre word in his father's speech. "Breakfast? What do ghosts eat?"
Theophilus Mason grinned. "Come and see!"
4
Not without trepidation Simon followed his father to the dining room. There, it startled Simon to glimpse a carving knife and fork moving above the table as if they were held by human hands. After a moment he understood that the cutlery was being held by a horribly distorted outline of human hands attached to a like outline of body.
"Father," he said in a tight whisper, "is that Cornelius Godwinson? Why is his body so indistinct compared with yours?"
"Ah, it is no use whispering around ghosts, son. Yes, that is Cornelius. Gaiaur's sending that he met was rather more effective than the one that I met."
Simon frowned, watching the cutlery flash above the table. "What is he carving?"
"The roast, son! It has provided the inhabitants of this house with all of their sustenance since Cornelius' death." As Simon's frown deepened, his father went on to say, "To enjoy his hospitality fully, you may wish to offer him a drink."
Simon nodded, chagrined at having forgotten his vial of that which lets ghosts speak. Some of this he poured into a goblet, which he handed to his distant forebear's ghost. As this raised the goblet to its lips, blackness vanished into greenness.
A dry whisper of a voice reached Simon's ears. "Ah, thank you, boy! That was not the fine wine to which I was once used, but when one has not tasted drink in over a hundred years--"
Simon felt on him an intense gaze from his forebear's ghost. "But where are my manners?" Cornelius called out in his dry whisper. "Please sit, boy! Have some wine!"
The ghost tilted a bottle above a goblet. Simon saw no liquid pour from the bottle, and, when the ghost handed him the goblet, he glimpsed nothing but dust in its bottom.
"And some meat!"
Again the cutlery flashed above the bone of a long-vanished roast. The ghost made motions of placing a slice of meat onto a plate, which he handed to Simon. On the plate he glimpsed nothing but dust above a faded pattern of morning glories twining around a well.
The dry whisper of Cornelius' laughter blended with richer laughter from Simon's father. "Quite an epicure, your son is, Theo!" Cornelius said. "It is clear to me that our table does not meet his exacting standards." Cornelius turned his indistinct gaze onto Simon. "Well, the roast is good enough for immaterial persons like your father and me, but, for a man of substance like you, the meat is rather rare!"
Simon sulked through more ghostly laughter, after which Cornelius, quite courteously, asked him for news of the Godwinsons. It was clear that the ghosts were hungry for such news, as they hung on every word that Simon could tell them. He regretted having so few words. All that he knew of his family's recent history was his life with a silent mother and the bits of lore that his uncle Agrippa had shared with him.
At the end of his tale he felt that he had earned the right to ask the question that had set him on his quest. "Sir," he said to Cornelius, "most of our family's history follows from that which you called up, and which took you. I have heard that it was a sending of Gaiaur's. Would you tell me more of it?"
The ghost made motions of wiping his lips with a napkin. "I can do better than tell you. The gate through which I called the sending still stands open. I can show you it."
Simon felt dread of his forebear's offer. "Is not calling a sending of Gaiaur's dangerous?"
"Not to three such skilled workers of power as we are. Are we not three against one?"
We are, Simon thought, but the sending has already made two of the three into ghosts.
5
Curiosity vanquished caution as Simon followed the ghosts upstairs into the brightest part of the house's unhealthy greenish glow. As he passed the staircase leading down, he marveled at the ghosts' not taking him there. After all, the Moonweaver had told him that the road that he would take led at first downwards.
Perhaps ‘downwards,' he thought uneasily, has more than one meaning. He began to rack his brains to understand what the Moonweaver had meant when she told him that he would know how to call on her when need arose.
The staircase ended at a large open space bare but for a circle inscribed into the floor and marked out with gold wire inlaid into wood. Beyond the circle was a large window, still clear and uncracked. Simon trembled, looking at the window, for the view through it was not of Foxfire Valley's fields of grain, but of a desert where a sandstorm blew.
"As a calling is a new experience for Simon," Cornelius said, "he should have the best view. Let him stand facing the window. Theo, you stand at his right hand, and I shall stand across from you. May I take it that we all know the words for invoking the nine forces to close a circle?"
Simon's uncle had taught him the words, but had bidden him not test them. Just now, though, he had a concern more immediate than his uncle's ban. "Sir," Simon said to Cornelius, "you must have closed the circle before you called the sending, yet it took you anyway."
"It was, as I said, too much for one, but three should hold it easily."
Simon was skeptical of the tone of confidence in Cornelius' voice. For the third time Simon wondered how he could call on the Moonweaver's aid…
Cornelius and Simon's father had begun chanting. Ashamed to look cowardly in their eyes, and eager under his fear to see the sending, Simon joined the chant. The gold wires glowed, glowed brightly, and glowed more brightly still till they sent up a veil of light that reached the ceiling.
"That should hold anything," Simon's father said. "Son, do you want to do the honor?"
Simon licked his lips. Looking at Cornelius, he said, "I believe that I shall defer to one with more experience in these matters than I."
The greenish glow that vaguely resembled a head swirled in what might have been a nod. "By the second of the nine universal forces," Cornelius called out, "I command you, Shamiroth, sending of Gaiaur, to appear in the circle before me and be bound there."
The sandstorm erupted through the window, which Simon now knew was a gate into Gaiaur's realm. Within the circle the sandstorm swirled ever more quickly, condensing as it spun. Simon glimpsed within the swirl red eyes that glared at the workers of power with a malevolence that beat against the circle's walls. With a glow of comprehension and a thrill of fear, Simon recognized that Shamiroth was the sandstorm!
Shamiroth was also angry! Spinning ever more quickly, the sending fixed its glare on the worker of power who had called it. Shamiroth flung itself against the circle's wall next to Cornelius and pressed ever more tightly against it. The wall bulged outwards…
"Resume the chant!" Cornelius shouted.
Simon's father began to chant in a quick, high-pitched voice, but Cornelius stumbled over the chant, and Simon, his mouth suddenly dry again, found himself unable to form words. The wall bulged, bulged…It broke! Swirling sand swept through Cornelius and scattered green fog everywhere. In an instant the sand had crossed the circle and dispersed Simon's father. Now the sand was bearing down on Simon…
"Moonweaver, help!"
A glow of silver woven with gold began to fill the room. The sending, stopping in its tracks, gazed over Simon's right shoulder with a look that he took at first as wonder, then as fear.
Despite his own fear of the sending, Simon turned to look at the glow's source. It filled him at first with astonishment. Before him in the air there hung the glowing form of a sleeping woman that he at first took as the Moonweaver, for she had milk-white skin and colorless hair that hung to her waist. She seemed to Simon, though, too slight and young to be the archon…
When she opened her eyes they held the pale violet hue of the Moonweaver's. The voice that spoke, though, was that of a girl no older than Simon as she said in a sleepy tone, "Why are you awaking me? I was having a pretty dream--"
The violet eyes widened. "Shamiroth! Someone has called you forth again. Will no one ever learn?"
With a sigh the girl reached into a fold of the nightgown that she was wearing and pulled out a wand. Pointing it at the sending, she called out, "By the silver light of the warp and the golden light of the weft, I command you, Shamiroth, sending of Gaiaur, to return to your master's realm by the gate through which you were called."
Light of silver woven with gold shot from the wand. As the light struck Shamiroth, the sending struggled against it, but was driven swirl by ever slower swirl back through the gate. In a moment Shamiroth had merged with the storm beyond the window.
"Well, that is done," the girl murmured. "Now maybe I can get some sleep lest I nod off in Astronomy tonight."
As Simon turned back in bewilderment at the girl's strange words, she parted full lips in a grin and laughed silvery laughter. "Please, dear boy, do not let yourself be led astray by ghosts. They talk as if they know things, but they lost their brains with their bodies."
His mind teemed with questions that he wanted to ask her. Before he could choose one of them, the silver and gold glow faded, taking her with it. He felt an immeasurable sense of loss.
Ghosts, she had mentioned! With a pang of grief Simon recalled that his father and Cornelius had been destroyed before his eyes. Tearful, he turned to where the ghosts had stood--
Indistinct, but gathering form even as he stared at them, they stood there again. "One of the few advantages to being a ghost," Simon's father said, "is that one cannot die again."
"All in all, though," Cornelius said, "that was one of the least pleasant experiences that I have had. I doubt that I shall try to call that sending a third time."
"That girl!" Simon called out. "Who was she? Some strange manifestation of the Moonweaver?"
"One of her servants, I should say," Cornelius said. "Certainly she bore the Moonweaver's markings."
"You are fortunate, son," Simon's father said, "to have her protection."
I shall have it, Simon thought darkly, just once more.
With her protection, though, the Moonweaver had sent him frustration. His mind went back to the lovely girl in a nightgown, whose absence was a pain as great as Shamiroth's rending might have been. Simon laughed bitterly. Although he stood in the presence of two ghosts, he knew that what would haunt him from then on was the memory of a grin and silvery laughter.
WHAT THINGS THE EARTH MAY BEAR
1
Simon Mason felt growing excitement. He had just turned eighteen, and his uncle, Agrippa Godwinson, had secured his admission to the university in the city beyond the hills to the north of Foxfire Valley. At the university Simon would at last receive formal training in his ability to use the nine universal forces and communicate with the archons who controlled them.
Standing on the front porch of the house that he had inherited from his mother, Simon gazed at the south, whence one of the newfangled automobiles was coming for him. He sensed around him the locals also gazing at the south. They were, he grasped, as happy at his leaving the valley as he was. They were happy, though, because, once he was gone, none of the Godwinsons, whose arcane powers had led the locals to call them "witches" and "wizards," would be in residence. For once the locals could do what they wanted to in Foxfire Valley.
Simon smiled indulgently at them. He was in too good a mood to resent the locals' eagerness to see him gone.
A cloud of dust appeared in the road! As the cloud grew, nearing him, there appeared amid it a gigantic black automobile in the style that newspapers called "convertible." The locals cheered the automobile, then gasped in clear dread at the sight of its driver, a hulking, misshapen figure that no stretch of the imagination could call human.
Simon himself felt a pang of dread at the sight of the figure; then he laughed at his fears. Did he not wear a pentacle of power that his uncle had given him? Did he not bear on his forehead the protection of a kiss from the archon called the Moonweaver, a milk-white woman who spun on a loom in a moonlit glade? Had he not memorized two books of power, his father's journal of magic and The Key to the Nine Universal Forces of Space and Time?
Simon barely noticed in the automobile's back seat a slight figure completely mantled in an enormous white cloak.
The automobile stopped in front of the porch. Simon stared in awe at the hulking driver, which looked like a mass of animated clay. The driver bore on its forehead a single word in Hebrew letters. Simon knew from his books of power that, if he erased the rightmost letter, the driver would fall back into the earth from which it had been made. Of course, Simon would then have no driver…
"Good morning, sir," Simon said to the driver. "Have you come to take me to the university--"
"Why are you talking to the driver?" a girlish voice called out from the back seat. Simon thrilled at the sound of that voice, for he had heard it before. "You should know that a golem cannot speak," the voice went on to say. "Could I come in and get out of this cloak awhile?"
"Certainly, dear lady," Simon murmured. He was aflame with delight and desire, for he had wanted nothing more than to meet the voice's owner. He only wished that he had not disgraced himself before her again.
2
"I am Miranda, by the way," she said as she entered the house and shrugged her cloak into Simon's hands. It thrilled him to see that she was indeed the mysterious girl of a past vision who bore the Moonweaver's marks of milk-white skin, eyes of the palest violet, and straw-colored hair that fell to her waist. "May I take it that you are Simon Mason?"
"Er, y-yes." Had Miranda cast on him a spell to rob him of his voice? From times gone by he recalled the concept of manners. "Would you like some wine and fruitcake?"
She gave him an unreadable look, then murmured something that sounded suspiciously like, "A man living alone." "Yes, those would be fine, Simon."
He rushed about the kitchen to find her the promised food and drink. It heartened him that the locals, out of fear of him, had kept his silverware, china, and wineglasses spotless. He tried not to notice Miranda's wrinkling her nose at the wine's bouquet. Desperately seeking a topic of conversation, he said, "Why were you wearing a heavy cloak on a day like today?"
She gave him a wan smile. "Alas, those of us who bear the Moonweaver's mark are highly sensitive to sunlight. Have you not read of our condition?"
It would have shamed him to admit how little he knew of his kind's ways. Before he could speak, Miranda, glancing around, went on to say, "I notice that you have an extensive library."
Only two volumes of it, he thought sadly, are books of power. Mournfully, he said, "I noticed, at our first meeting, that you know far more of works of power than I."
Her full lips parted to reveal a brilliant grin. He had said the right thing! "Do you mean my driving that sending back through the gate? That was raw power, not skill. You, though, I noticed, can communicate with ghosts. That is a skill that I would like to learn."
Simon's eyes got big. He did have some of that which lets ghosts speak left. "A pair of ghosts haunts the next house down the valley. If you are in no hurry, I can take you to see them."
"I would love to!"
Simon had a second thought. "On the other hand, you did insult them when you and I first met."
Miranda chuckled. "In that case, I owe them an apology. Let us go see them!"
3
On the front porch, as Miranda donned the cloak, she was the object of stares from the locals. She snarled at them, then laughed gaily as they cringed. Simon adored her.
Soon he was riding beside her in the automobile's back seat. He felt uneasy at being driven around by a mass of animated dirt, but knew that as a worker of power he must learn to take novelty in stride.
Fortunately for his nerves, the ride to the Godwinsons' ancestral mansion was brief. Miranda was taken with the house's decayed splendor and asked him about the mysterious staircase that led downwards into darkness. Simon, uneasily recalling the Moonweaver's prophecy that his road would lead there, confessed that he had never taken the staircase. "Besides, my father's ghost awaits us in the study."
En route thither, Miranda recognized the mirror on the common room's left-hand wall as a gate to the Moonweaver's moonlit glade. Simon was eager to show Miranda that he could open the gate with his amulet, but she shook her head. "It is best not to disturb the Lady needlessly."
He sighed. "You are right, I guess. She has told me that I can call on her aid just once more."
Miranda's eyes got big. "How odd! Usually she grants her favored ones three wishes."
"Ah, but I used up my second wish the night when I met you."
"Yes, she did sent me to you and the ghosts. You were going to show me them, as I recall."
He led her on to the study. There, both of the ghosts were present, not only the clear, if ravaged, greenish outline of his father, Theophilus Mason, but also the misty outline of Simon's great-great-grandfather, Cornelius Godwinson. After each of the ghosts had taken a sip of that which lets ghosts speak, talk began.
"You, dear child," Cornelius said to Miranda, "look like the noble lady who came to our rescue the night when my companions and I called up Shamiroth. I thank you for saving us from the Deathmaker's sending."
"It was my duty as the warden on call to save you. I owe you an apology, though, for a remark that I made on that occasion."
Cornelius chuckled. "Do you mean, ‘Ghosts leave their brains behind with their bodies'? It is a principle of law, dear child, that one cannot commit slander with truth. Would you not say so, Theo?"
Simon's father nodded. "I was impressed, dear child, with the wand that you wielded. Is it an ancient artifact?"
Miranda shrugged. "It is just a little thing that wardens of the Lady's house carry around. Tell me, why did you call up Shamiroth?"
Theophilus looked at Cornelius, who laughed in an embarrassed tone. "Do you ever show off and regret your actions later?"
"Oh, continually!" Miranda said. "The matrons of the Lady's house were ever drubbing my backside to cure me of my adventurousness."
Simon's head swam at the thought of Miranda's backside. Before he could say something foolish, the ghosts asked her of the Moonweaver's house. It turned out that Miranda, because she bore the Moonweaver's mark, had been dedicated to the house as a child. There she had learned much lore.
"Now, though, I am on my way to the university to learn of the world at large."
"Ah, the university!" Cornelius said. "The four best years of my life! There, I gave free rein to my adventurousness, though I must confess that it led me, too, to many drubbings."
Simon felt alarm. His father smiled gently at him. "Fear not, son! Even when I was at the university, the practice of caning was dying out. By now it must surely be gone."
Cornelius shook his head. "Adventurousness without drubbing! Surely the definition of paradise!"
"Well, Simon and I had best be on our way."
"Oh, not before we feed you, surely! There is a fine roast in the dining room."
Simon ground his teeth. "Miranda and I can eat on the road. We will do well to reach the university by nightfall."
The ghosts exchanged glances. "Oh, it is a tradition," Simon's father said, "for travelers from this valley to spend the night at the House of Five Gables."
Miranda blinked. "Seven, surely."
"There once were seven. A sending, though, of Murramar Earthmover has shaken two of them down."
"The sending is quite a pleasant fellow," Cornelius said. "He will give you fine entertainment."
The ghosts, Simon noticed, were laughing.
Miranda, though, was grinning. "A sending of Murramar! Does that not sound like fun, Simon?"
Unwilling to contradict her, he nodded. He little trusted, though, the laughter of ghosts.
4
Simon had much on his mind as the golem drove the automobile northwards over hills. He was well aware of how little he knew of works of power compared with Miranda, and therefore how ill prepared he was to enter the university. He was also well aware of how awkward he was next to the graceful girl beside him. Too, he could not get over his dread of the hulking figure in the front seat. In a hopeful tone Simon said, "Miranda, was it you who made the golem?"
"What a compliment, Simon! I just wish that I could accept it. One must study Sefer Yetzirah three years day and night before one can even start to make a golem. Ours is a gift to the Moonweaver's house from a rabbi who lives nearby."
Simon blinked in confusion. "Why would a rabbi give the Moonweaver a gift?"
"Her house had protected his people from persecution. The golem is a token of his gratitude. An excellent driver, would you not say?"
Simon's mind teemed with questions. Before he could ask any of them, Miranda pointed ahead. "On that ridge! That must be the House of Five Gables."
From the looks of it, Simon thought that it was on the verge of becoming the House of Four Gables. Beside it, the Godwinsons' ancestral mansion would have been a model of new and solid construction. Certainly, Simon felt no desire to stay in the terminally sagging structure.
He conjured up some courtesy that he had once read in a book. "Miranda, a lady of your quality deserves finer accommodations--"
"Oh, come, Simon! Where is your sense of adventure?"
Ill at ease, he followed her indoors. There he noticed that, though boards were sagging and splintered, all was remarkably free of dust. There was just a single pile of this in a corner--
The dust began to stir! Swirling, it rose from the floor and took on a vaguely human form. Miranda's wand flashed into her hand. Simon, recalling that Murramar Earthmover controlled the fifth of the universal forces, frantically tried to think of spells that used it--
"Ah, a lovely young lady and a handsome young gentleman!" a dry whisper of a voice said. "Students, no doubt, on their way to the university. It is kind of you to visit a poor spirit in its loneliness."
"The ghosts of Godwinson Manor recommended your hospitality to us," Miranda said brightly. "I am Miranda Jacobi, this is Simon Mason, and you are?"
Even the spirit's laughter was dry. "A sending of Murramar's who knows better than to give his name to a pair of powerful conjurors. You, milady, bear the mark of the Moonweaver, who is far from my master's best friend. As for your friend, I know the name Mason well, as one Theophilus Mason once gave me much trouble. Simon, I guess, is his son. Simon's looks, though, also mark him as one of the Godwinsons, conjurors who have taken much from my master and given him little in return."
Simon's illness at ease had grown. "Miranda and I," he murmured, "are just here to spend the night."
"Of course! Why should I bear ill will to children of my enemies? You are welcome to whatever my poor abode may offer you. Surely, though, you did not walk here. If you have a driver to your conveyance, please invite him in."
"Oh, he is bound to stay with the automobile," Miranda said lightly.
Simon felt alarm at the mention of the driver. It seemed to him a bad idea to tell the Earthmover's sending of a figure of earth--
"What a strange remark!" the spirit said. "I had heard that the Moonweaver, for all of her faults, treated her servants well. To deny your driver shelter--"
"This driver has no need of shelter!" Miranda said in a tone of offended pride. "The driver is a golem!"
Simon winced. The spirit made a whispery yell of triumph. "A golem? Can it be possible that they have brought me a golem?"
Simon choked as dust swept over him and past him. When he could stop coughing, he gave his companion a look of reproach. "Miranda--"
She looked forlorn. "I know, Simon. My mouth spoke again before my brain thought. Oh, dear."
Outside, the whispery yell of triumph became an earthshaking roar. "They did bring me a golem! Now, I can trade my weak body of dust for a strong body of earth."
Simon ran to a window. From there he saw, in gathering dusk, the golem vault from the driver's seat and bound across a lawn towards the house. Surely, Simon thought, Miranda knows what to do.
"Golem!" she shrieked. "Get back into the car!"
"No, milady! The golem no longer obeys you. It answers to me, now."
Simon dragged Miranda away from the window as the golem slammed into the nearest side of the house. With a terrible roar a sagging gable crashed to the ground. Simon pulled Miranda from under a falling beam and swept her into a back room. He slammed its door and pulled a dresser across it. "Miranda, can you not blast that thing with your wand?"
"It is a golem! My wand will not work against it."
"I still have a wish from the Moonweaver--"
"You would waste it! I bear her power in my wand."
The house shook. The door splintered. The dresser wobbled--
Simon envisioned himself leaping at the golem to erase the rightmost letter on its forehead. He envisioned the golem's right fist catching him in mid-leap and pounding him through the floor--
He turned to the one hope that he had. "Miranda, what should we do?"
"Run!" she shrieked.
5
With remarkable grace she vaulted through the window. Simon scrambled after her. Behind him he heard crashing and tearing, and the sound of something heavy falling.
Miranda had hiked up her skirts to run freely. Simon's head swam at the sight of pale ankles flashing in moonlight. Behind him there was the loudest crashing yet. Turning, he glimpsed the golem bounding towards him from the House of Two Gables.
He caught up with Miranda. "Can we hide somewhere?" he gasped out.
"There!" She pointed ahead. "There we can find shelter."
Following the pointing finger, he blinked in dismay at a building of stained-glass windows surmounted by a cross. "I doubt that our kind is welcome there."
"The church will protect us. Just do not touch anything!"
Miranda and Simon raced across the church's threshold. At the front of the church's sanctuary, the Suffering Man, hanging amid candlelight, looked down at Simon sorrowfully. Simon had no time to contemplate the sacrilege that he was committing, for he heard footsteps pounding towards him. Turning, he saw the golem, with a cry of triumph, leap at him--
--and fall to the floor as clods of dirt as it crossed the threshold.
Murramar's sending made a whispery yell of rage. Miranda drew her wand. "Now, vile sending, I can banish thee--"
"Stop, daughter of Lilith!" an elderly man's voice called out. "Your craft will not work here."
Turning, Simon saw an old man in a black outfit hobbling towards him. "Begone, spirit of darkness," the priest called out, "in the name of--"
He called out a threefold name of terrifying power and flung water at the sending. As drops of water passed through it, they sizzled, and the sending wailed. It kept wailing as it fled into darkness.
The priest gave Miranda and Simon a look of reproach. "More pre-Adamites on their way to the university! I cannot recall how many of your kind I have rescued from Murramar's sending. Why do you keep falling for that old joke of telling you to spend the night with the hospitable spirit? I must say, though, that you were the first foolish enough to provide that thing with a golem. Did you not know better than to bring a golem around a sending of Murramar?"
Simon felt like sinking through the floor. Miranda, though, gave the priest a sickly grin. "The golem was our driver. We are stuck here till we can find a new driver."
The priest nodded. "I can find you one in the morning. Meanwhile you are welcome to sleep on the pews. Heaven knows that the parishioners find them comfortable! You may even share my supper once you have cleaned up that mess in the vestibule."
Simon brightened and clutched his amulet. "I know a spell--"
"Not one that will work here!" the priest said sharply. "You will find an appropriate instrument of power for your task in the closet over there."
Obediently, Simon went to the closet and opened it. He looked at its contents in bewilderment. Turning to the priest, he said, "Sir, the closet holds nothing but brooms."
The priest smiled thinly.
Laughing, Miranda reached past Simon, took out a broom, and began to sweep. He imitated her. He was starting to feel that he had learned more that night than he would ever learn at the university.