Page 27 of The Book of Magic

He was ready by the time the following visit came around. “I could read a bit more,” he told her.

She next brought The Magus.

“Looks like crap,” he’d said, scowling.

“Maybe it’s too complicated for you,” Margaret had said to get a reaction. Ian had accepted the challenge and had been reading ever since.

“Do your time and learn what you can,” Margaret had told her boy and for once in his life he’d listened. That was the good luck. That was what saved him, those books. He celebrated each text he completed by getting a tattoo from a pal who used ink from broken pens and straight pins held over a match to sanitize them, more or less. Luckily, the fellow was a true artist who did quite good work. At the end of his time served, Ian was covered with ink, nineteen tattoos in all, and every one told a story. His chest was inked with a series of images, and his arms were sleeves of magic. On his left forearm there was a lion, there for courage, and on the other forearm was a serpent biting its own tail, the symbol of the universe. On his right arm a glass bottle had been inked, so delicate and shimmering it seemed real enough to break. Inside the glass, a man and a woman wrapped around one another, the marriage of opposites, love eternal, love of my life. The sleeve of tattoos on his left arm began with the hand of alchemy; above each finger floated a sun, a star, a key, a crown, and a bell. In the palm of the hand there was a fish. On his torso, a dragon, a magic circle from The Book of Solomon, the triangle of elemental fire, a demon trap with a scorpion in the center with Hebrew letters surrounding it, skulls and pentacles, intricate images that twisted around each other in a single shade of blue. On his back, between his shoulder blades, there was a crow with its wings spread, each feather carefully wrought, each taking an hour of pain to perfect. Ian sometimes imagined the crow to be his other self, the person he’d become in his cell, the creature who flew above the building when he closed his eyes. He wanted freedom so badly he couldn’t even feel the sensation of a hot needle pricking through his skin. There were times when he thought of himself as a book that was being written with blue ink printed on his flesh. The images could not be removed or reversed, and he was glad of that. They heralded who he was, a tribute to the books he’d read that had set out the path for the rest of his life.

Since that time, he had stayed on the right-handed path, straying occasionally when his work demanded it, and paying a penance when he did. He was single-minded and he knew what he wanted. At university he wasn’t daunted by the fact that he’d started ten years later than everyone else and was often the oldest person in his class. He’d gotten his degree in history at Oxford, then did his doctoral work in Eastern religions, failing to mention on his applications that he’d never completed secondary school. Perhaps a bit of forgery was involved, but who could blame him for wanting to make up for his past misdeeds? That was so long ago anyway, a life that had belonged to a boy who would have gone to the left side if the old policeman hadn’t stopped him, the reason why Ian always visited Harold Jenner’s grave when he went home to Essex and why he’d never called the police when his place was robbed. Whoever it was had only taken books, and it would have been unbearable for Ian to be the cause for someone to spend time in prison.

In recent years, he’d become the sort of man who phoned home every Sunday and visited at least once a month. He liked to sit in the kitchen when his mother’s clients came to see her, and he felt a rising pride over the fact that the family’s business had been magic for more than three hundred years. They were what was called cunning people, healers above all else. Perhaps because of his troubled early days, Ian remained interested in left-handed magic, not as a practitioner, but as an investigator of the Dark Art. His academic work had led him to do strange and improbable things and he had loved every minute of it. He’d had trysts with secret societies and with sorcerers, searched bookshops and barns for magical volumes, paid off informants in third-rate cafés, encountered sources who were either too talkative or strangely reticent, considering they’d agreed to tell all. All is not everything, he’d discovered, and the left was a path of secrets. There were huge gaps in his knowledge. Those who walked to the left kept their own counsel and trusted few, not unlike himself.

Last night he had been at The Café in the Crypt beneath St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square, one of the hidden meeting places beneath the crowded first floor for those who practiced left-handed magic and were on the prowl. He’d stayed for nearly an hour, making himself scarce in a discreet corner, eavesdropping until he felt as though he might have been noticed as an outsider. He spied ashes on the floor, there to trap anyone who wasn’t on the path. The ashes could put you in a foul mood so that you’d pick a fight and you’d find yourself tossed out on the street having been beaten and bruised at your own expense for a laugh. Fool that he was he’d stepped right in the ash and as soon as he did he could feel his strength draining. He’d had too much to drink, as well, enough to become woozy, which was a drastic mistake when walking the Crooked Path. In his younger days he’d known weeks of debauchery, but now he rarely drank and three whiskeys did him in completely. He did his best to slip out unseen and unmolested, making sure to keep his mouth shut. Ian still had his robber’s ways and usually went unnoticed, dressed in black, his hair pulled back, yet all the same he’d had the sense he’d been followed when he departed the Crypt. He looked into the sky to see a cloud of crows, well aware that such birds never flew at night unless there was an emergency. He heeded the warning and took a taxi rather than the tube. His heart was pounding, the way it used to when he was attempting a robbery, but back then it had been a thrill to outsmart everyone, and he always thought he’d be the victor. On this particular night, however, he felt he might not win.

“Can you dodge around a bit?” he asked the driver once they’d headed away from Trafalgar Square.

“Wife following you?” the taxi driver guessed.

“I’m a bad boy,” Ian admitted, failing to mention there was no wife and likely would never be one given his inability to commit or emotionally connect with anything other than a book. He liked women, it was true, he simply botched up romance. You keep yourself hidden, his mother had told him. As do you, he’d shot back. He was still angry at not having known his father. And I’m alone, Margaret Wright responded. And don’t mind being so. The implication was, he was not.

“I don’t mind helping out a bad boy once in a while,” the driver said.

They’d rode around aimlessly for twenty minutes, then Ian had directed the driver to Westbourne Grove. He got let out at the corner by the pub. On most nights he would have gone in for a nightcap, but he still felt a shadow behind him, a pool of darkness spreading over the cement as if ink had spilled. Indecipherable rustlings came from the alley where dustbins were stored. Ian was over six feet tall and didn’t scare easily but he’d had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, the same feeling he’d had when old Harold caught him and sent him off to prison. Fear was fear and it came on its own like a fox.

Ian went down the lane whistling, for it was no use to hide himself and perhaps best to simply appear casual, an ordinary man not worth noticing. He let himself into the house and stood with his back to the door, clammy all over. He should have felt secure, surrounded by amulets, talismans, good-luck charms, blue beads, sacred thread, pentacles, books of great power, yet he didn’t feel in the least bit safe. Ian went to get himself a drink, and as soon as he turned to the cupboard for a glass he heard the bells above his door, that wrinkly metallic cough. After that he remembered nothing. A pool of darkness, a groan, a flutter behind his eyelids.

When he woke today in his own bed, it was already past noon, and he knew he had been hexed. Despite his expertise in the field of magic, he was frozen, unable to take even a shallow breath, suffocating in his own bed, and there was no one to call out for help.

Sally carried lavender and sage in her coat pockets and before leaving the pub, she’d taken a shaker from the table and sprinkled salt on the soles of her shoes. She was purposeful and yet despite all of her intended protection, including a dress hemmed with blue thread, she grew unmoored by the time she reached the door on Rosehart Mews. As it turned out, puddles had washed the salt from the soles of her shoes and the lavender and sage had mostly fallen out to sprinkle the road when she darted across. As for the thread she had used, it was poorly dyed and already unraveling. She wasn’t quite as protected as she’d hoped to be.

There was no answer when she knocked, but when she leaned against the door it slipped open, and she was surprised to find it unlatched. The bells made a small rough sound that announced her presence. Sally called hello and received no answer. She could feel that something had gone wrong. The atmosphere seemed to be shrinking inward, as it does during a storm, and a charge of something resembling sheer, blue electricity raced through her. She passed the piles of books stacked on the carpet, the small refrigerator and hot plate, a sink, a teacup washed and set out to dry on a wooden rack, a glass of whiskey, seemingly untouched. She opened a door into a second smaller space that functioned as a bedroom. The room was dark, but she could see a handsome man lying prone on the bed, naked, although at first glance he didn’t appear to be so; due to his blue tattoos he seemed a painting as much as a man. His eyes met hers, and held her stare, but he failed to object or tell her to get the hell out, though he appeared to be trying to move his mouth.

In a moment, Sally realized that in fact he was gasping for air. It was as if he were drowning, and he spat out water, nearly choking as he did. He could not move or speak and was clearly panicked, both by his sudden malady and by the fact that he was making a fool of himself, uttering gargling noises when he meant only to speak. The palms of his hands were covered with red powder. The glare of that shade of red was so intense it forced Sally to take several steps back. She marveled at her sudden ability to see that color again when for so long it had registered in shades of gray. Red was all she could see now. The ceiling was streaked with the same dye that was on the man’s hands and feet, so that it appeared as if a profusion of blood-hued flowers had bloomed on the plaster, then fallen down upon him. On the floor, beside the bed, bird bones that had been dyed scarlet were tied into a bundle with red string. It was as if only one color in the world existed here. Red heart, red hands, red magic.

The room was steamy, so hot and damp it was impossible to see through the windows for the cold glass was covered with a damp film. Sally shrugged off her raincoat, overwhelmed by the heat and sweating through her clothes. She would have liked to take everything off, but instead only unbuttoned the top buttons of her shirt. On the cluttered bedside table there was a poppet, a hand-stitched doll dressed in a white shirt and black pants, its hair long and dark, its face featureless, clearly meant to represent the man in question. The entire chest of the doll had been marked with spots of ink, then cut open with a sharp knife. Beside it was a small, bloody bird’s heart. Blood blistered down onto the floor, forming into pools that scorched the wood. Sally had the urge to run from whatever masses of dark magic had been released here, but perhaps it had been no accident that she had been the one to choose the shortest straw. It seemed clear to her now, as clear as the branch-like blotches of red all around her, that she was meant to be here. Save a life and a life will be saved in return, Maria Owens had written in the family Grimoire. This was the bargain that would bring Kylie back. This was the person she was meant to rescue, a man made of flesh and blood and ink who stared at her with wild eyes. She found herself thinking, This is the one.

Not only was Ian unable to speak or move, but his chest was burning as if he were having a heart attack. He likely was; the pain ached deeply and spread out along his torso to the base of his abdomen. He needed an ambulance, clearly, he should be in a hospital, still he was rapt, unable to look away from the woman before him, as if he had fallen under her spell. Her dense black hair was loose, and she smelled like lavender, a calming scent that evoked his childhood, for in his home the sheets had always been pressed with the oil of that flower.

Sally tore down the threadbare curtains to let in some light, which flickered over the half-dazed victim. She spoke a healing spell in Latin, which eased the throbbing pain in his chest. The blur of the red world around him came into focus and his thoughts were less scattered. He gasped and took a breath. Ian knew a witch when he saw one, though he’d never expected such a person to arrive in a sopping black raincoat, her dark hair mussed from the wind, her eyes the color of silver. This most likely would not end well. He tried his best to rouse himself from bed, to no avail, and he wondered if he’d had a stroke.

“Don’t move,” Sally reproached him. It was evident that he was the sort of man who thought himself invulnerable, and it likely stung deeply to be in need of help. But a curse was a curse, and this one was strong. “The more you struggle, the more of a hold it has on you.”

The sight was coming back to her in a rush and Sally willingly accepted her gift. She would need it to find Kylie, so she might as well use it here and now. As she stood at the bedside she was flooded with images. She could see this man’s history. There it was, as if she’d opened a book, the sullen childhood, the fights, the day he went to jail, the dim path, his mother watching over him while he slept, worrying over what he would become.

“You’ve been bad, haven’t you,” she said. It was a statement not a question, not that it was any of her business. Still, she wondered what might have justified this attack. She thought he glared at her in response, but it didn’t matter. There was no time to lose. Luckily there was a space unmarked by ink in the middle of his chest. When she laid a hand upon his skin he was burning hot, and so was she. The heat traveled up her arm into her heart before she could withdraw from him. Quickly, she seized a pen from the desk and wrote out the charm for banishing evil and removing unknown fever and illnesses.

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