David Liss - The Twelfth Enchantment - A Novel

She excused herself, not caring how she surprised Martha with her abruptness, and ran downstairs and out of the house. She ran down the street, pushing past and over and around whoever or whatever came across her path. She cared not how women stared or tradesmen shouted. It was nothing to her. She ran as fast as she could across the square to High Pavement.

When she arrived at Mary’s house, she knocked heavily upon the door, but received no reply. She knocked again and again, and finally she peered into the window.

What she found made her heart thunder in her chest. The house was all but cleared out. There was nothing upon the walls, no furniture upon the floors. The rugs were gone, and the curtains too. All was closed up and removed. Lucy saw but one thing, a single crate with a piece of paper attached to it, and upon the paper was written “Miss Lucy Derrick.”

Trying the door, Lucy found it unlocked. She rushed inside and unfolded the paper, but it contained no information. It merely denoted that the crate and its contents were hers. Lucy looked inside and saw it was a large collection of books upon the practice of magic.

Lucy remained frozen. Martha’s baby, dear little Emily, was gone, replaced with some goblin monster, and Martha did not know it. Mary was gone, and it seemed that she had played some terrible role in all this.

Lucy staggered backwards and felt tears coming on, but she fought them back. No, she thought. No more crying. Mr. Buckles and Mary Crawford and Uncle Lowell and Mr. Olson and even General Ludd—Lucy would discover who was set against her, and she would give them cause to regret it. She would take back what was hers, what had been robbed of her father—and she would find Martha’s baby. For so long she had been powerless, but not now. She would save her niece. She did not know how she would do it, but she would find a way. By force or by stealth, she would challenge those who had made themselves her enemies, and she would have victory over them, because Lucy understood that at the center of all these events was the Mutus Liber , a book whose authenticity she, and perhaps only she, could determine. They wanted it, and Lucy would have it, and once she did, she would be in a position to dictate terms, terms they would not like at all.

21

I T IS ONE THING TO BE DETERMINED TO ACT, AND QUITE ANOTHER to know precisely what needs doing, and so Lucy spent a long and sleepless night as she weighed her options and considered her alternatives. In several trips, so as to avoid the notice of anyone in her household, Lucy removed the books from Mary’s house to her own room. If Mary were her enemy, why would she give Lucy these books? And yet all evidence suggested that Mary had played some part in Emily’s being replaced by a monster. There was nothing to do now but study, learn what there was to be learned, what paths there were to explore. It all had to be done soon—very soon—for Lucy could not endure that Martha must live another day with that vile, grinning monster suckling at her.

She could find in Mary’s books nothing of use about changelings—only myth and folklore, stories that rang of falseness and ignorance. What Lucy needed was to learn how to banish a changeling and how to retrieve the stolen child. If there was little to be discovered about changelings, however, there was much written on other sorts of beings. In Lucy’s new library she read of the dark things that stalked the world, the spirits of Agrippa’s Fourth Book or the demons of the Lemegeton . Lucy had learned nothing of spirit summoning, and Mary had warned to stay away from such magic, but books teaching the methods of such summoning were among the books Mary had left her, and now those warnings fell flat. Mary had abandoned her, possibly betrayed her. Martha and Emily were in trouble, in terrible danger, and only Lucy knew that this was so. It fell upon her shoulders to do something.

With no one to guide her, with no hints to help her follow the right course, Lucy had no choice but to find her own way. She spent the day closeted away with her books, looking for what she ought not to look, and found what appeared to her promising. It was in a volume that Mary had given her, marking off certain sections as the only ones worthy of her attention, but there were other sections as well, including one dedicated to the Enochian magic closely associated with John Dee and Edward Kelley. This author had gone back to the source text, the Heptameron , and proposed a simplified method of calling down spirits, demons, and angels.

It felt dangerous to Lucy, but it also felt real , like something she could do, and yet the creatures in the book terrified her—foul, twisted, distorted things, drawn in broad, renaissance strokes, like the monsters who inhabit the lost islands of unknown seas. Attempting habitually to master beings of this sort would be foolish, but surely she could do so once. She needed only to call a creature of knowledge, command it to tell her how to banish a changeling and restore her niece, and then she would send it off. She would do it quickly and cleanly, and the danger would pass so swiftly it could hardly be accounted danger at all.

The book explained that the creature would attempt to deceive her, to punish her for the insult of summoning it to her realm. It would attempt to trick Lucy into setting it free, and it would then destroy her in one of a thousand painful ways that would appear to the outside world a natural death. Lucy was certain she was too clever for that, too focused. Men summoned these beings out of ambition and power, and these desires were their undoing. A woman who summoned a spirit for benevolent purposes would be more cautious.

Lucy would have thought she must roll up her rug and fashion a magic circle in chalk upon the floorboards, but that turned out not to be the case. The book said that it was best to limit the size of the manifestation of an otherworldly being, and that circles were best drawn on pieces of paper in ink—the smaller the better, but never so small as to compromise accuracy. Errors in the circle would allow the summoned creature to break free, and that was always fatal.

When she began the work, Lucy felt much as she did when copying out a talisman, not that she was drawing something, but more that she was reassembling an object that had been taken apart. The lines and circles and runes seemed to fit together like boards perfectly cut by a carpenter’s skilled hand. Or they did not feel that way, and so she twice destroyed her work because the circle simply felt badly constructed even if she could not find the error. When she was at last finished, she knew what she had done was perfect. She examined it over and over again in the rushlight, for it was now late at night, but her eyes only told her what she already knew—that her work could not be improved upon.

Lucy had put a great deal of effort into choosing a creature that might be most easily summoned and best controlled, and settled upon an angel whose name she could not pronounce (it was written out in Enochian runes, which looked like a strange combination of Hebrew and Latin letters), and whose particular virtues were said to be power, knowledge, and vengeance. Lucy wanted only one of those, and hoped the other two would not get in her way.

The summoning was simple. She would need to quiet herself, banish the world from her thoughts, and recite the simple sentence written in the Enochian tongue (helpfully transliterated by the author), while drawing forth a drop of her own blood. Very direct, very easy. With the circle written on so small a piece of paper, it made the whole affair curiously portable. She could bring her angel of destruction with her wherever she went, Lucy thought with the kind of crazed humor of the exhausted. It would make a pretty diversion at a ball.