Out of the Madhouse by Christopher Golden & Nancy Holder

Author:Christopher Golden & Nancy Holder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

Boston, October, 1666

Richard Regnier woke with a start.

The cottage was dark and very, very cold. His candle was out, the fire, dying embers. Those were natural enough, if one has slept a long time. It was not the chill nor the shadows that sent a frisson up his spine.

It was the sure sense, developed over a lifetime devoted to magick, that something was horribly wrong.

He flicked his wrist and produced a small ball of light that hovered an arm’s length in front of his chair. Cautiously he stood, his gaze traveling around the room, searching for an intruder. There was no one else in the room, at least that he could detect.

Still, he could not shake the feeling that he was in danger. He cursed himself for abandoning his habit of keeping his wand ever present at his side—with the death of Fulcanelli he had grown lax—and moved swiftly across the earthen floor to his traveling valise. He unclasped the fastener and grabbed up the wand. Regnier was capable of great magick without it, but the wand gave that magick focus.

There came a low rumbling, as if from deep within the earth. Regnier looked down at his feet. The rumbling grew louder. The cottage walls began to tremble and then to shake violently. Loud cracks ran up the walls of stone. The embers in the fireplace leaped out of the grate.

Regnier was thrown to the floor. He hit his head on the corner of his chair, and for a moment he was stunned.

As he sat up slowly on the rolling floor, something dark formed in the dirt. It was darker than the night shadows in the room, darker than any blackness he had ever seen. It absorbed the light around it, and yet he could still see it. Though he did not touch it, he sensed that it had form, substance.

The rumbling grew louder. He hunched over the puddle, if puddle it was, and held his wand over it, commanding it in Latin to do no harm.

Suddenly a high, frigid wind whistled through the cottage, so loud his ears throbbed. His belongings were flung against the wall. The pages of his books fluttered like panicked birds. Cold pierced him as if someone stabbed at him with a frozen sword. He cried out and repeated his incantation.

Unaffected by the gale, the puddle rose from the floor and hovered in a circle beneath his wand. Regnier examined it at the same time that he backed away, keeping a respectful distance until he could discern its nature.

There was a clap as if of thunder. The room exploded with light as brilliant as the sun. Regnier was thrown back hard. He slammed onto his back and immediately rolled to his side, covering his eyes.

Still the wind raged; he dared to pull down his hands and squint at the light.

It was gone.

The black circle had rotated so that it now hung vertically in the center of the room. The air around it seemed to shimmer as a pool of water broken by a stone or the movements of life beneath the surface.

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