The Altar of Hate Read online

  He left early, while I stuck around for another round or two of warm Indian beer before turning in. Unlike the night before, I had no trouble falling asleep, and was sleeping the sleep of the reasonably drunk when my dreams were interrupted by an unpleasant commotion. It sounded nearby, but it wasn't until I heard the distinctive crunch of glass being ground underfoot that I realized something was going on in the laboratory.

  I burst through the canvas flaps of the tent, and my breath caught in my throat as I saw the destruction that had been wrought there. Everything was smashed, tables were turned over, the laptop screen was shattered, and notepaper lay scattered all about like a thin covering of snow. The light was dim, and so it took me several minutes to notice Dr. Jhala lying partially hidden by an overturned chair. He was dead, his chest crushed by a powerful blow from a blunt instrument. I choked back a scream, and forced myself to look more closely.

  The poor doctor's face was scored deeply by four parallel lines, and it occurred to me that the massive wound in his chest could have been caused by a large paw. A tiger's paw? It seemed possible. But we'd already determined that the wolf had been the killer, that there never had been a tiger in the first place! Then I noticed something strange beside the doctor's body. Not far from his right hand, lying there as if he'd dropped it, was a revolver. In checking to see if it was loaded, which it was, I saw that the unjacketed bullets in the chambers were shiny, not dark. They were silver.

  I rose to my feet, turned around, and froze. Not twenty feet away was the tiger, a big one, perhaps fifteen feet in length. Its eyes were yellow, and startlingly intelligent. It growled threateningly, but fell silent as I snapped the cylinder shut and pointed the weapon at its face.

  “I don't know what's going on here, but if you can understand me, then I expect you understand what it means that this gun is loaded with silver bullets.”

  The great beast simply stared at me, unblinking.

  “Okay, so maybe my imagination is running away with me. I guess if you're just an animal, then that won't mean anything to you.”

  I cocked the hammer with my thumb.

  The tiger blinked once. Then it was gone, like a shadow in the darkness. It left me there, alone and shaking, with the doctor's mutilated corpse.

  It was too late to do anything for Dr. Jhala. But if nothing else, I had to solve the mystery of his death. Still holding the gun in my hand, fearing the tiger's return, I flicked on a stationary flashlight and began to gather the doctor's notes, quickly perusing them as I did so. I had stacked perhaps twenty pieces of paper in a little pile when I found it, three short lines written in Dr. Jhala's precise hand. It proved nothing, except that I wasn't the only one with an imagination.

  two bullets

  1 – pierced and broke shoulder 2 – penetrated heart, lethal shot

  both silver!!!! why?????

  The word 'why' was underlined three times. So that was what was bothering the poor doctor. Ram Singh's rifle, the one with which he killed the wolf, had been loaded with silver. If my dreadful suspicions were correct, he had done so in the full knowledge that what he hunted was not a normal wolf. But that necessarily didn't make him, what, a weretiger? I'd never heard of such a thing, not even in the movies!

  But there was no denying two things. Dr. Jhala was dead, and something had killed him. Something that understood silver to be a particular danger to it.

  I heard footsteps rapidly approaching, someone running towards the tent. Ram Singh pushed his way inside, dressed as if he'd come from his bed and holding his thirty ought six.

  “I heard a noise. What the hell happened here?”

  His eyes, a dark, but very human shade of brown, were open wide with surprise as he glanced around the disheveled interior of the tent. Then he froze, and his mouth dropped open when he saw the blood, and the body of the unfortunate doctor. A look of horror filled his face.

  Or so he thought. He was a terrible actor. I'd seen more genuine shock and astonishment in my high school acting class.

  I lifted the revolver with both hands, pointing it at his chest.

  “Drop it!”

  He obeyed quickly, laying his rifle upon the ground, still affecting surprise.

  “What's the matter with you? What happened to him?”

  “I imagine you know more about that than I do. There really is silver in this thing, by the way. Dr. Jhala must have been on to you, which is probably why you killed him.”

  “Nonsense!” The powerfully-built hunter scoffed, but his eyes were hard, and calculating. “Don't you think you'll have a hard time explaining why you shot me, old chap? This ridiculous notion of silver bullets and, I presume, werewolves, aside, I can't imagine you'd relish the notion of spending time in an Indian prison.”

  I kept a straight face, but shuddered inside. He had a point. I wasn't after justice or revenge, I just wanted to get out of there, leave that dark and terrible country.

  “Dr. Jhala was my friend,” I answered. “I know you killed him. But I can't prove anything, so now I just want to get out of this stinking place. In one piece.”

  “Then go.” He smiled, his teeth white against his dark face, and gestured towards the tent flap. “By all means.”

  “I want to know why. Why you killed him.”

  “I can't tell you that. I didn't kill him.”

  “Then tell me why your gun was loaded with silver.”

  “It's an affectation.”

  “Like the mustache?”

  He glared at me.

  We were getting nowhere with this, I decided. Maybe my suspicions were wrong, or maybe not, but he clearly wasn't about to confess his sins to me. So be it. I wanted answers, but not enough to risk my life chasing them. I ordered him to kick the rifle towards me, and then carefully picked it up. Keeping both weapons trained on him, I forced him to move away from the entrance and towards the rear of the tent as I backed out of it.

  Once outside, I sprinted towards the closest jeep. I wasted no time fetching my belongings, and my wallet, with the meager funds it contained, was already in my pocket. I tossed Singh's rifle in the back of the jeep and kept the revolver in my hand, nervously looking about as the ancient engine coughed its way to life. As I shifted into reverse, the headlights caught a pair of yellow eyes staring at me from the darkness, some distance away. Was it the tiger? Was it Ram Singh? Or was it the two in one? I didn't wait to find out.

  I caught the first flight from New Dehli, not the least bit concerned about the ruinous expense of a last-minute ticket. Like the Empire, I am gone, never to return to that frightening and perilous land. Werewolves, weretigers, I want no part of their unseen war, and one glance beyond the veil was one more than I wanted. But my eyes have been opened, and even here, ensconced in the comfortable environment that is everyday life in America, I have seen things that I, as a man of science, cannot properly explain.

  A glimpse of an oversized dog in Atlanta. A catfight in Los Angeles, hair-raising yowls interspersed with the clash of metal on metal. A tall, slender girl in San Francisco, her eyes gleaming too-brightly in the shadows of the moonlight, and her smile, the anticipatory grin of the predator.

  I have kept my silence, though, and with it, my career. There is no Animal Channel, but I am paid reasonably well to work the night shift, caring for the great cats that spend their languid days at the Minnesota Zoo. And if the bullets in the revolver which I carry at all times are made of silver, well, what of it? It is an affectation, nothing more.

  The Lesser Evil

  The master sat before us, clenching his gnarled hand into a fist as he banished the last of the magical visions he had created for our edification. His dark hood slipped down to reveal a head that was hairless, and the parchment-like skin stretched delicately across his rounded skull as he leaned back slowly. He exhaled once, deeply. His robes of sumptuous black velvet rustled softly as he turned to face us, and his ancient eyes gleamed like emeralds.

  “Power,” he whispered harshly, “is t
he unholiest of grails. Men seek it nonetheless. For some the quest is simply blind instinct, whereas for others it is the dedication of a lifetime.”

  He paused for a moment to consider the eager face of young Aeris and nodded approvingly.

  “You are here because you have the desire, and the talent too. But you must never forget that the pursuit of the grail can kill you, and as the knights of old discovered, even the successful quest may prove fatal.”

  He fell silent for a moment and examined his wizened fingers, which ended in long, claw-like nails, seemingly forgetting our presence. After a time he looked up at us, his students, holding each of us in turn in that eerie serpentine gaze. Then he spoke again.

  “You have heard of the wizard Tetradates,” he stated. We surely had.

  “Tetradates!" Ganelos, the senior apprentice, was the first to speak, expressing the delight that filled us all. “The Darkmage who summoned the demon Ravana! Did you know him?”

  The old one was amused at our excitement.

  “He did not actually… summon Baal-Ravana, but yes, I knew him well. I had him killed, you see.”

  His bloodless lips twisted into a thin smile of dark humor, and he pointed a dessicated finger at the four of us.

  “I will tell you the story, and perhaps it will provide you with some small enlightenment.”

  Aeris leaned back to rest against my knees and we listened as the master's dry voice wove a spell that took us back to a time long past, a time before the Desecration.

  A large man sits hulking in front of a television screen, his piggy eyes encased in sagging folds of flesh. He stares intently at the monochromatic images moving silently before him. He waves his hand in an obscure motion that could be an arcane gesture, and he grunts with satisfaction as the voices of the tiny figures become audible. As he eases his bulk into an overloaded leather chair and searches the greasy bottom of a bargain-brand potato-chip bag for edible remnants, a casual observer might easily miss the fact that the end of the old TV's power cord lies nearly a hands-length away from the nearest electrical outlet.

  “I've broken oath to come here!” a young man stated icily, as he glared at the men surrounding him. “This is an emergency!”

  The speaker was a tall Nordic-looking youth, dressed casually in a tight white t-shirt and torn blue jeans. He was handsome despite the two parallel scars that marred his left cheekbone. He stood in a small room with hardwood floors in front of eight older men, all of whom were clad in flowing white robes and demonstrating varying degrees of interest. A tall grey-bearded man who'd been surveying the young man with a skeptical eye glanced down to examine his exquisitely manicured fingernails.

  “So? What is a broken oath among Discordians to us?" he said dismissively, spreading his long white hands palms-upward in an elegant gesture of dismissal. “If you intend to mend your ways, well and good, I suppose, but I don't think the repentance of a minor black-robe calls for the assembly of these august personages.”

  He sniffed daintily and turned his haughty face towards a man with a shaven head.

  “I should say it's been interesting, Gorean, but it hasn't. So I won't.”

  The bald man smiled slightly. He was a patient man, but even he found the other's arrogant lack of manners difficult to tolerate.

  “Ill-spoken as ever, Alexi,” he rebuked his colleague, without noticeable effect. “Regardless, I think you will all be interested to hear what the boy has to say, that is, if you will only take the time to listen.”

  His green-eyed gaze swept across the haughty faces of the others, Masters all, secure in their knowledge and proud in their power.

  “Speak on, Dag,” he urged the scar-faced youth.

  The young man nodded gratefully to his benefactor and turned to face the assembled adepts, his eyes narrowing.

  “My news is this. My master, the archmage Tetradates, has made compact with a Duke of the Sixth Hell. The compact was sealed with the great binding Words of Fire and Blood!”

  The fat man tosses aside the empty potato-chip bag and smashes a fist against the chair in anger as he lurches ponderously to his feet. The black-and-white image on the screen shows a room full of robed men erupting in consternation around a slender young man, then fades to a spark and disappears. Dozens of dusty, leather-bound books fall to the floor with a thunderous crash as the man sweeps his fleshy arm across the shelves of an old oaken bookcase. His rage swelling by the moment, the man picks up one ancient volume and hurls it straight at the television set. Bellowing powerful curses that would cause a demon to shrink in dismay, he pays no attention as the book reduces the unlucky screen to twisted wires hanging amid smoked glass shards.

  “Devil-blasted sodomites will be here any minute!” he growls at an alchohol-soaked fetus sitting in a jar on an untouched wooden ledge as he rushes past it.

  The dead homunculus offers no reply, but the obese man would not likely have noticed had it suddenly begun turning somersaults while reciting the Lord's Prayer. Bending over a black iron table marked with rusty stains that hint at its past use as a sacrificial altar, the man flips rapidly through the cracked yellow pages of an ancient book of spells. Meaty fingers run over faded spiderish writing, as his lips silently form the words of a language long since dead.

  Momentarily appeased, he reaches into voluminous silk robes to find a black velvet bag suspended from a cord. From this he extracts six gold coins, each embossed with Oriental ideograms and with square holes punched through their centers. He tosses them en masse upon the table with a flick of the wrist and studies the result, then hastily scrawls a trigram upon a loose sheet of paper. Once more he repeats the process, then returns the antique coins to their pouch and tucks them away inside his robes as he examines the completed hexagram.

  Finishing his consultation, the man utters a single word, and the dry wood lying in the fireplace bursts into sudden flames. The fire burns with a greenish tint that betrays its unnatural origin. Crumpling the paper in his left hand, the sorceror turns as he tosses the wad towards the fire, failing to observe that it falls to the floor just centimeters short of its intended destination.

  He lumbers into a musty, rank-smelling chamber, then turns to secure the door behind him and speaks a Word of Power to seal it magically as well. Quickly, he lights the ritual candles and bends down to chalk a rough pentagram upon the floor. Stepping into its center, he drops heavily to his knees and raises pudgy hands to the ceiling.

  “Dagon! Serpent Frog! Lord of the Primal Deep and King of all that dwell within your Ocean, hear now your servant! I call you by your dread true name and invoke your Presence here!Akh uhll, ghol nakh ghol, akh gwarrh, D'thla-Shoggi!

  He shouts the invocation and the candle on the west side of the pentagram flickers and goes out, filling the room with an insensible feeling of tentacles and murky darkness.

  The sorceror swallows hard and continues, shouting "Ereshkigal! Cthonic Mother! Queen of Death and Desert, come to your servant now! Kurnugia, evartigul, erwadahul Ninanna!”

  He feels the slow approach of a dry, dusty Presence, and the murk eases somewhat as the candle to the south sputters and dies. He inhales sharply, and as he does so his parched lungs burn with the hot air of the desert. Nodding with satisfaction, he proceeds with the third step of the ritual by facing east and crying out once more.

  “Mahishara! Bull-prince of demons, I summon you, in the name of the eighteen-armed one! Durga-ma ke naam se, eakdhum yahan ao!” To the east, the candle's flame disappears instantly and a rage-filled Presence fills the room with silent howls of anger.

  The hateful power of the Rakshasa nearly penetrates the chalked shield and its binder sways on his knees before it, but manages to recover his balance. Sweating profusely now, the Darkmage closes his eyes and runs a pudgy hand across his brow before calling upon the final and most powerful link in the chain of power he is assembling. Slowly, cautiously, he turns to face the last candle burning to the north.

  “Mighty King! Hear me no
w! Show yourself, Master of the Death Hunt! Tyruun ap ioloithas! Come, Eternal Lord of Annuwyn!”

  Thunder booms and a wild north wind storms shrieking into the room, extinguishing the last candle as green and blue lightnings crackle explosively outside the magical boundaries of the pentagram. The fat mage's body rocks back and forth as he chants the words of his great spell, his voice unheard over the raging fury of the elemental Presences.

  His working finished, the wizard bows his head and with a gesture causes the wards to fall. Greenish bolts of electricity arc over the chalked boundaries and slam into his body, hurling him to the floor in the center of the pentagram. Unconscious, he convulses like one possessed, then disappears in a flash of blinding blue light.

  “Eris's Apples, he's gone!” cursed the Darkmage's treacherous apprentice, wringing his hands with dismay. “We're too late.”

  Dag turned towards Gorean, the shaven-headed Master of the Assembly.

  “Didn't you bloody well shield me?”

  The bald man shook his head ruefully as the bearded Alexi snorted with disgust.

  “I set a few basic wards, but nothing that would have prevented a determined scrying from a sorceror of his power.”

  The Master gestured around the ransacked penthouse, watching as his fellow masters paged excitedly through rare manuals of the darkest magic while others examined mysterious paraphernalia and engaged in spirited discussions of possible applications.

  “It appears he observed us and prudently took flight.”

  “Well, you can hardly expect him to wait around for you!” Dag laughed bitterly. “I hope you've got contacts with Unipol, because he could be anywhere. And by anywhere, I mean literally anywhere.”