we plunged into darkness.
The room was huge, and seemed larger with the lights off. An oval pool of light marked the center twenty meters up ahead, where robed figures stood in a circle filled with a shifting, auroral glow.
'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…'
Twelve men with raised hands continued the eerie chant. That could only mean that the thirteenth figure, robed and hooded and standing at the circle's center, hadn't yet managed to establish the astral gate.
I hesitated, unsure, now, as to what to do.
The chant faltered as we stepped into the room. 'Keep going!' the central figure shouted. 'Keep the chant going!'
'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…'
The guy in the center had to be Zayid, and he seemed flustered. Good, because that gave me my chance to take control of the situation. 'Good evening,' I said, and I walked forward, keeping my Predator aimed at Zayid. 'Hope you'll excuse the interruption. Don't move-and don't try any magic on us-and no one gets hurt.'
Sure, it was trite. But I wasn't thinking real clearly at the moment.
'What are you doing here!' Zayid snapped. 'You have no business here!'
'On the contrary. I have some very important business here.'
Zayid was a big man, hooded and robed like the others, but I saw his eyes glaring at me from beneath the cowl. Behind him was an altar, with a sword, a chalice, a bell, and a clutter of less readily identifiable stuff. A couple of six-foot candle stands to either side cast most of the physical light… but that weird aurora shifted and danced in the air around them.
'You do not understand what you're dealing with here,' Zayid said. 'You have no possible conception! I recommend that you and your people turn around and quietly leave. Now.'
'Thanks, but I think we'll hang for a while. This looks interesting.'
I was taking in the chalked-out marks on the floor surrounding the thirteen magicians. They'd drawn your standard nine-foot circle-a double circle, actually, filled with your standard arcane occult sigils, signs, and squiggles. Just outside the circle, touching it at one point, was a chalk triangle three feet across.
'How about it, Scoot?' I asked.
Scooter had his hands up, facing the circle and the chanters in a kind of magical stand-off. They outnumbered us, but they were penned inside their protective circle. I hoped that meant they couldn't flame us from in there, or worse. And Scoot was working some protective spells, just in case.
'Looks like an ordinary Hermetic ritual,' Scooter said, his brow furrowed with concentration. He was using The Voice. 'Complete with a triangle of evocation. The circle protects the magicians inside. The triangle is where whatever you're summoning is supposed to appear. Now don't break my concentration!'
I stepped closer, keeping my Predator aimed at the black-robed bunch inside the circle. I was pretty sure that whatever protection those chalks marks conferred on the chanters, they were more effective against spirits and beings and forces coming out of the astral than they were against copper-jacketed slugs with a muzzle velocity of 400 meters per second.
'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…'
That droning chant was getting inside my head. I felt a bit dizzy, though I was putting that down to the adrenaline rush of combat.
'Careful!' Scoot warned. 'Don't break the triangle!'
'I'm not.' I peered inside.
And… Dunkelzahn! There was something in there!
It was tough to see clearly. There was something… wrong about the space above and inside that triangle, something that made my eyes ache as I tried to follow the shifting blur of fog and cold light moving inside. But I could make out one solid shape within the haze-a book. A very large book.
And it was speaking to me.
'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…'
Okay. I'm not a magician, but I'm not stupid. I know a little about the astral.
Part of the Awakening, you see, was the opening of channels between what we were always so smugly pleased to call the 'real world,' and the astral, a kind of parallel universe 'on the other side' whatever the hell that might mean. The astral is the realm of spirits, demons, elementals, and other occult entities, and it may be generated by all life here on Earth. Magicians go up onto the astral all the time to read auras or taste the emotional or magical imprints lingering on material items.
Beyond the astral are the metaplanes, other worlds, other realities accessible only to highly trained initiated magicians… and even the best mages have limits to where they can pass.
This was not the astral I was looking into within the triangle… nor was it one of the more usual or accessible metaplanes. This was something decidedly else…
The Necronomicon.
It was fiction, damn it, a myth, a literary gimmick created by a hack pulp-writer to spice up his story submissions to Weird Tales a century and a half ago.
And yet I had no doubt whatsoever that what I was seeing within that luminous aether was the fabled tome of dark magic itself-bigger and thicker than an encyclopedia, bound with iron hasps, with a binding of some brown, leathery material heavily wrinkled and cracked. As I stared at it, one of the puckers in the leather opened, revealing a still-living eye, an eye staring up at me with what might have been a keen and analyzing intelligence… or stark, shrieking madness.
'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…'
According to the mythos, the thing had started out as the Kitab Al-Azif, written in Arabic by the Mad Arab with the impossible name somewhere around 730 A.D. Two centuries later, a Byzantine scholar, Theodorus Philetas, translated it into Greek, and called it the Necronomicon-the Book of Dead Names…
I holstered my Predator, and took another step toward the triangle. The air was bitingly cold.
'Fixer!' Dee-Dee screamed. 'No!' Cammie was lunging at me and Scooter was just starting to turn, trying to block me… but I reached into that ethereal light with both hands, grasped the Book, and pulled it out.
No, I didn't know what I was doing, so don't ask! It felt like a dream, really, distant and insubstantial, like I was watching something happening to someone else. I saw the chanting magicians relax, though, and I saw Zayid throw back his head and give a wild and shocking laugh.
'Thank you, my impetuous friend!' he said, and he sounded almost relieved. The auroral light was gone, now, the chamber illuminated solely by the flicker of the candles.
'Fixer!' Thud's voice was bellowing in my ear over the commlink. 'Fixer! It's a trap!' Over the link I could hear the whop-whop-whop of a helicopter, the stuttering crackle of automatic weapons. 'Fixer!' Thud bellowed again from the roof. 'It's-'
And the channel went dead.
At the same instant, Dee-Dee and Cammie both raised their weapons, aiming at Zayid… but there was a crack and a flash of lightning, and both women were tossed backward in a sharp, actinic glare of magical light. Scooter was screaming, clawing at his eyes, dropping to his knees…
'You may place the book on the floor outside of the triangle,' Zayid told me, 'then step away with your hands high above your head.'
I was aware of doors opening, of light spilling through from outside. M amp;M security people were spilling in, and I heard the click-clack of their weapons as they took aim. They killed poor Dee first, shooting her down as she tried to rise. Gunfire echoed through the chamber, cutting down Scooter and Cammie both.
My whole team, wiped out in the space of three seconds…
Cammie…
She was curled up in a bloody fetal curl, whimpering. Scooter was dead on his back, arms outflung, blood pooling beneath his body.
'Place the book on the floor outside of the triangle, Mr. Michaels,' Zayid said. 'Slowly and carefully.'
I met his eyes. How in hell had he known my birth name?
I looked at the others, all watching me expectantly from the depths of their hoods. One of them, I knew, must be the one called Shifter, our informant. But if they knew my name, Zayid and those working for him must have done a hell of a lot of digging to find out about me. This whole miserable op had been a freaking set-up, for
