“This is pure shit,” Ian had said to his mother. More than ever he found himself at the mercy of his rages, which grew worse in the gloom of his cell.
Margaret didn’t intend to give up on her son. As a boy he had loved to catch eels in the fens, but he’d always let them go. Margaret had known there was hope for him then, for he’d always freed anything he’d trapped, watching the eels whirl away into the deep water as if he were contemplating the clouds in the sky.
“When you’re ready for real magic, let me know,” Margaret had told him, resolute when it came to matching a cure to the person in need, leaving the book behind despite his complaints.
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.