His office on the mews was composed of two small rooms, one more cluttered than the other. The first chamber held his desk, which he sometimes used as a dining table, along with a hot plate, a small refrigerator and a closet that had been made into a pantry, which mostly stocked whiskey, rice, and tinned food. In the second, smaller room there was a single bed. His mother, Margaret, who had always doted on him, had made the coverlet, hemming the cotton sheets with blue thread. Ian was fairly certain she’d folded some lavender and sage inside the blanket’s batting that caused him to dream of home. When it came to magic, his mother was always elusive, unwilling to share her secrets regarding the Nameless Art. What you learn yourself will suit you best, she had told him. Be a man who knows how important books are.
In fact, he’d become a collector and there were books in a jumble everywhere, crammed onto shelves and stacked wherever there was space, a table, a chair, a bureau. A person could hardly see the good Persian carpet anymore. Some of the books were quite valuable. He’d had several break-ins lately, and he’d taken to padlocking his door when he went out for the evening.
It was Ian’s goal to one day wrestle his library into proper order, arranged and shelved by author and subject, but that day had yet to come and he relied on his memory when looking for a reference. He had books so dangerous they needed to be kept under lock and key in a dusty cabinet, including a rare copy of The Key to Hell by Cyprianus, composed at a school for the Dark Art in Germany in the eighteenth century, and Agrippa’s Third Book of Occult Philosophy, written in 1510, and the famous Icelandic book Raueskinna, or Red Skin, which contained some of the darkest magic imaginable, the name taken from the color of the cover.
Many people believed black to be the color of magic, in fact it was red. A red moon, a red mark on the skin, red boots, a red heart, red love, all added up to red magic, the strongest there was. It was said that when Red Skin’s author, Gottskálk, died in 1520, his book was buried with him, but if that was true, then there had been grave robbers, or perhaps the book itself refused to be destroyed and crawled out from the earth. Ian had gotten hold of the book on a trip to Reykjavík, exchanging an immense amount of cash, his savings as a matter of fact, to a man who refused to speak except to tell him Eg vorkenni tér. I pity you. That pronouncement didn’t frighten Ian one bit. It was better for him to lay claim to the text than to let it serve the purposes of someone who wished to do evil in the world. That was why he was on this wavering line that had become his life. He walked the left to protect others from it, all the while knowing that when you walk a path for too long it can easily become the direction you have taken. He worried about that, but didn’t every man occasionally have dark thoughts? Weren’t all souls finely calibrated mysteries?
Sometimes the cupboard holding the most lethal of the texts rattled, the books inside raging against being locked up and kept in the dark, though it was for their own good and the good of others. Ian hushed them, and when he was exhausted and had been working and drinking too hard, he called out for them to shut the hell up or be shredded, not that he’d ever do such a thing. Books were everything to him. They had saved his life. And yes, he supposed his mother had something to do with that as well, for she’d been the one who had opened that world to him. Don’t think you know everything, when you know so little. Stop wasting your time and read this.
Fortunately, most of the volumes in his collection were more well behaved then the ones in the dark cabinet. Little Albert, which contained homey spells that would catch fish and rabbits, along with healing charms and ways to render oneself invisible. The Dragon Rouge, a French Grimoire that listed enchantments and ways to keep evil at bay. And of course, The Magus, written by the British occultist Francis Barrett, which at the time of its publication in 1801 was a comprehensive compilation of magic of all kinds, the copies coveted, covered with black cloths in bookshops, the very text Vincent Owens had found when he was a boy who broke his mother’s rule that he must never go downtown.
Control and removal of black magic was Ian’s day job; he was quite good at it and was often called in to old estates, haunted houses, homes in which hexes were prevalent. On a high shelf, he kept a collection of small glass bottles that glowed green and blue and inky black, all containing the evil he had collected on these outings. He’d been in the department of religion and philosophy once upon a time, but hadn’t much cared when he was released from both prestigious universities where he’d taught. There had been too many department meetings, too much responsibility, and too many reprimands—he needed to make a living beyond the occasional lecture given in drafty halls.