Whispers from the Deep: Book of Death Series Book 2

Chapter 5

The July morning was dark with clouds, and a few rain spots fell as Lynn went for her jog. Mortlake was in the cellar of St. Ananias, an area used for storage. He had asked the caretaker to close it off to all but the two professors. The college staff was used to his eccentric ways and glad to accommodate them. In return, they received generous gifts for birthdays and Christmas. Normally, these bribes were to overlook the antics of Mortlake’s cats, but sometimes they related to stranger things. Today was one of those occasions.

It’ll be fine, she told herself, he knows what he’s doing. He’s done it before.

A couple of pigeons flew up in front of her, getting out of her way at the last moment.

“Lazy little bastards,” she muttered.

A second later, she saw a couple of students standing in the shadows of a chapel cloister a few feet away. She smiled and waved, hoping they hadn’t heard her. They looked but didn’t respond in any way. This meant, to Lynn, that they were probably British.

She felt the raindrops on her skin.

At least the rain’s nice and warm, she thought. That’s what Marcus would say.

The summer rain was dwindling now, and toward the east, she saw a hint of golden dawn. When she got back to St. Ananias, there were still few signs of life. One of the caretakers nodded to her and gave a knowing wink as she headed down to the cellar. She resisted the temptation to wink back but gave him what she hoped was a cheery wave.

What do they think we’re going to do down there? Lynn wondered. Best not to speculate.

The college staff had shifted some of the junk, so Mortlake had a space roughly ten feet wide. The clutter stored in the basement had been carefully restacked, so it screened the space from the stairwell. Mortlake was using hurricane lamps to light the area. They were, he’d explained, less likely to fail than electricity. He’d already finished drawing a pattern on the freshly swept floor. There was a circle in red chalk, within which he had carefully formed a five-pointed star in yellow. At the vertices of the pentagram were small bowls, each made from a different substance.

“Can I help?” she asked.

“Of course!” he said, handing her a list and gesturing at a row of small bottles. “Dried herbs in bowls.”

He returned to the circle, drawing symbols and letters at various points within the pattern. While Mortlake had played down the dangers, summonings like this could go wrong. When they’d first gotten together, he’d told her a few horror stories about unwise magicians, most of them amateurs. One, in particular, she recalled. The man had ended up strangled with his own intestines, dangling from a pub sign in Edinburgh.

“I guess,” she said, picking up a jar marked Hyssop, “there are astrological reasons for all this?”

“Yes,” he said, checking his notebook. “We’ve got gold for the sun, copper for Venus, iron for Mars, and so on. So chamomile goes into the golden bowl. It’s just using several different forms of language, really. Plants, symbols, materials—all intended to convey a message.”

“You couldn’t just use words and shout really loud?” she remarked, half seriously, as she replaced one jar and found another.

“Oh, I’ve got plenty of words,” he said, gesturing at a grimoire that lay on a small folding table. “Incantations are the final ingredient. It’s like sending someone an email, a text, and a postcard. Then phoning them. Repeatedly. You pester the little bugger into turning up.”

Lynn tried to find the image funny, but she was too nervous. She completed the distribution of the herbs, then stood back to watch Mortlake add an outer circle of salt. She recognized astrological symbols, some Hebrew letters, and what appeared to be runes. As an archaeologist, she had spent decades studying civilizations that believed in magic and supernatural beings. But it still felt bizarre to see this in modern England.

“Why Latin?” she asked.

Mortlake, who had been studying his handiwork, looked up, smiling in slight puzzlement.

“I mean, why a language dating back a few thousand years to talk to beings who have been around forever, in human terms?”

“Ah,” he said, “yes, I see. Why not just use English for the whole ceremony? Well, several reasons, but the main one is precision. Whatever you think of the Romans, they didn’t go in for ambiguity. Whereas English is riddled with it.”

“Ah, I get it. You ask for a long life but don’t specify your state of health, so you live to one hundred and fifty as a vegetable.”

“That sort of thing, yes,” he said, picking up the grimoire. “There was one case of an elderly French priest who resorted to magic to become irresistible to the nuns in a particular convent.”