Chapter 4: The Protégé

I: Blake. The Performance. In the Crowd.

Blake had clearly assumed I was coming to join him—one side of his tent had been cleared to make space for a second bunk. His assistant, the albino, met me at the Bòcan Pavilions’ entrance and escorted me to my new home. Without a contract, without a request, without a single word, I became part of the traveling carnival.

For the first three days after I arrived, Blake was not to be seen. The albino—whose name was Whitnail—told me that Blake was “bred for the metropolitan lifestyle,” which I interpreted generously to suggest that he was preoccupied with the illicit luxuries Edinburgh had to offer. At the age of fifteen, I was fairly certain I knew all there was to know about such matters.

I did note, however, that his spellbook was not in the tent.

Whitnail was my constant companion for those days; he would continue to be so even after Blake returned and the Pavilions packed up and moved north from Edinburgh later in the week. He escorted me from Blake’s tent to the meal tent and to the latrines that the carnival hands dumped daily in the Water of Leith, which would have us run out of town if the locals knew, Whitnail cautioned me.

“They should believe the filth in the river is all their own,” he said so calmly that I wasn’t sure if he was trying to make a joke.

I avoided the curious glances of the others who made the Pavilions their home and life. And at the same time, I tried not to stare. Not at the tiny people who were full-grown yet smaller than children. Not at the dog boy or the twins born without eye sockets. Not at the Magnetic Man, whose actual name was Hugh, who was covered in so many piercings that you could hardly see his skin anymore. In time, I would feel perfectly comfortable around them, but in those early days, my hands shook much of the time. I blinked tears and slept only after weeping.

To any who approached us, Whitnail introduced me as Blake’s protégé.

“They do not care about your name yet,” he told me. “They do not know if you will last.”

When my lip trembled, he added, “But I know your name is Abrams, son of Angel.”

I moaned. How I missed my mother. Hearing her name and the name only she called me reminded me how far away she was now, in another life. Maybe forever.

On the fourth morning, Blake appeared as if from nothingness. His bunk looked slept in, but that was its constant state, so as I woke to his humming, he seemed to have simply stepped out of the rising sun to begin the day. He was dressed in the same black clothing I’d seen him in earlier that week when I’d come with Mam, yet he looked fresh, as if both he and his attire were freshly laundered and pressed.

“Good morning, Arthur,” he said. “We leave Edinburgh tomorrow. So, tonight, I’ll show you your first magic, my young protégé.”

I said, “I don’t like it when you call me that.”

“Protégé?”

“Arthur.”

Blake smiled. “And would you object to calling me Merlin?”

“Look, I came, didn’t I? If you hadn’t told me your name was Blake, I’d have happily called you Upton Nogood. It doesn’t matter to me.” I caught myself. “I don’t want to be here, but I do. Don’t you want me here?”

“I need to refer back to your own sentiment then: I do, but I don’t. You and I are pilgrims in an unexplored desert, and we must count on each other to navigate it. But with care and caution, you could become a great caster. Perhaps the greatest.”

He waited for me to speak, but I didn’t for a long while. It sounded rehearsed to me, scripted, what he said about our union. I trust my mother’s wisdom, however, and whatever her relationship with Blake had been, she believed he could teach me about cryptids and what it meant that I could see them. My list of questions was already long—the midwife cryptid from my birth, the terrifying monstrosity on the card he had shown me, casters and mapping and essence and spellbooks. What I was. But I had to trust in my mam, and I had to remember my da’s last words to me: you are the least of us.

“I’ll be careful then,” I finally said.

“And I will as well.” He extended his hand. “Abraham.”

I shook his hand. “Merlin.”

***

That night, our last with an Edinburgh audience, I stood off to the side of a movable stage, close to the canvas wall that encircled the Pavilions’ grand tent, the “big top,” as it was called in America. When he came to escort me, Whitnail called it a chapiteau, and when I asked him if he were French, he just shook his head.

The tent’s interior was exceptionally warm—easily two hundred people, maybe more, filled the stools and the standing room at the back, and the poles around the perimeter suspended oil lamps that cast shadows longer than Whitnail. The body heat, the flames, and the nervous anticipation all contributed to a muggy summer night.

The stage was lined on three sides by thick red velvet curtains; across the front, holding them closed where they opened, was a sizable cloth banner emblazoned with stylized letters:

BLAKE THE BLACK

“Well, that explains a few things,” I said, looking up at Whitnail’s relaxed face. “‘Blake with the Black Wardrobe.’ I guess you’re Whitnail the White?”

The albino looked down at me, frowning. “The Pale. Why white?”

The banner suddenly flew up into the dark shadows of the tent’s ceiling, and the curtains parted to reveal Blake alone on the stage. The audience clapped enthusiastically—Blake’s reputation in Edinburgh had clearly preceded this final performance before the Bòcan Pavilions moved on.

A trio of lanterns was suspended above him, their light focused in beams that intersected where Blake stood, all in black—the gloves, a black fedora with a dark gray band around it, a black tuxedo with a black vest, shirt, and tie beneath it. His hair had been treated in some manner to make it expand around his head like a mane, and he had acquired a black circle in the center of his forehead that had deceptively discernible depth—it looked like a dark hole in his skull. He held the leatherbound book that I recognized from my first meeting with him: his spellbook. He slowly opened it and then looked out over his audience. When he grinned, his teeth were whiter than pearls. Some in the audience gasped; at least one child cried out. Blake the Black was a terrible sight to behold.

And that was even before he called forth his nightmare.

He slowly and meticulously stripped off one of his gloves, dropping it to the stage floor. The silence in the tent was so deep that it almost hummed with the absence of any sound at all. With his gloved hand, he opened his spellbook and lifted it as high as his chest. Then he raised his bare hand, fingers spread, palm toward the audience, and lowered it slowly until it touched the page tilted toward him.

A cryptid walked from the wings to join him on stage.

It was a man, middle-aged, in a pin-striped suit, tie, nondescript. A face you wouldn’t remember, an anonymous figure in a crowd who would return to his equally forgettable wife and ordinary children in a commonplace suburban flat. Blake jerked his chin toward the front center of the stage, and the man obliged, stopping within a few feet of the front row of the audience. A murmur and a muttering drifted across the tent. Someone at the back laughed and catcalled something about the terror of chartered accountants. All this while, Blake’s unnatural grin remained. I saw his lips move.

The plain accountant suddenly changed, shifted. The unassuming, unexceptional face vanished. The skin cracked and pulsed—expanding, changing colors, and becoming scale-like–to a sound like the shuffling of cards. The suit tore and shredded. Its hands became green claws, its face elongated to a snout with fangs, its eyes yellowing to a reptilian glow. It grew before our eyes, rapidly towering over Blake with a tongue that flicked out to taste the air. Its necktie tightened around its throat until I thought it would tear, but it held. A massive tail thunked onto the stage as if dropped from a great height.

It roared at the audience. And the screaming began.

I involuntarily withdrew a step before I realized that Whitnail was gone. When I looked back, he was ascending the steps to the stage like a white wraith, almost floating to stand beside the lizard man. For a moment, the audience reacted with comparable terror to him, but when Whitnail raised his hands in a calming gesture, the audience paused as one, and the lizard man cowered as if the albino were its master. Blake was like a mannequin, frozen in time behind the other two creatures on the stage.

“Blake the Black protects us from the demon,” Whitnail announced, his voice as serene as ever, if louder. The audience was entranced; they had clearly never seen the likes of him. “He is the master of many worlds. Observe his control.”

The albino stepped into the wings of the stage whence came the cryptid, and Blake began to speak.

“Bow,” he commanded the lizard man. “Collect your torn attire.”

The lizard man tipped its head to the audience—the front row fell backward into those behind them as if they were about to be attacked. When the cryptid began to gather the shredded pieces of the suit it had been wearing, someone among those front row audience members laughed. The lizard man’s head snapped around, and it snarled. The laughter choked into silence.

“Center stage,” Blake ordered. Like a lion in a macabre circus, the lizard man obeyed, moving back from the stage’s edge.

Blake shouted at the top of his voice, “On your head, beast. Blake the Black commands it.”
The lizard man’s tongue flickered furiously—I suspected in rage—but it lowered itself forward until the flat of its head was on the stage, and then it thrust its lower extremities skyward by the tail, balancing itself upside down. Its necktie flopped across its snout. The silliness of it all was meant to disarm the paying customers before us who were convinced a demon was about to shred their souls.

The audience was fooled; they applauded.

As I scanned their faces, taken aback by the ease with which Blake had first fooled them with the appearance of the essence of a cryptid he had mapped and then a second time with his supposed control of it, I saw someone in the crowd who stood apart. While everyone else clapped and shouted with surprise and relief, one middle-aged woman stood with her arms crossed. She wore thick-rimmed specs and a purplish felt beret that seemed more appropriate for a younger woman. Her demeanor was what caught my attention—she looked scornful, as if she knew exactly what she was seeing and was judging it harshly. When the audience settled and found their center again, she knelt, picked up a small leather bag, and excused herself from the tent. I watched her go; she was followed by three others, all men, none of whom so much as glanced back when Blake the Black ordered the lizard man to vanish—and it did.

I would see her two more times in the years to come: the next time would be when I talked to her, and the last time would be when she died.

II: Enemies. An Education.

“They want him to stop,” Whitnail said to me when I asked him about the woman and the men who had left with her.

I asked, “Who are ‘they’? And stop what?”  

“His shows. They want him to stop using the cryptids he has mapped as entertainment. Those people are casters.”

We were two days out of Edinburgh, first westward and then northbound, in a slow caravan of trucks and smaller moving vehicles, some of which pulled cages containing the more exotic animals. We were circumventing the city of Stirling—as I understood it, the Bòcan Pavilions might not be as welcome there as we had been in Edinburgh, and though I asked, Whitnail could not tell me the exact reasons. More significantly, Blake preceded us and went directly to Stirling anyway, promising to catch up with us north of the city.

I rode in the cab of an old Morris Commercial truck with a tarp over the back to protect the tents and disassembled booths we carried. Whitnail drove, and he was a sight to see: His head touched the cab’s roof, and his knees rose up on either side of the steering column, the gearshift between them. He leaned forward until his face almost touched the windscreen. The driver’s door would periodically pop open if we hit a big enough bump in the road; I half-expected him to roll right out and leave the truck in my incapable hands. And while I had discovered over the first four days that he was not prone to emotional speech of any sort, I was still amused to hear him say, when his door swung open for the fourth or fifth time, “We should use this truck as one of the Pavilions’ amusement rides.”

“Why does what he’s doing bother them anyway?” I asked.

Whitnail shook his head as if it were a yes-no question. “Casters are private. Blake is not. He tells their secrets when he shows cryptids to the everyman. They have warned him. Many times. Now they are his enemies, and they are in the audience in greater numbers. He won’t stop, so they will make him.”

“Your bum’s out the window,” I said (though it came out Yer bum’s oot the windae; my accent was very much still a work in progress), but what he was saying wasn’t nonsense. Based on the little I knew of Blake the Black, picking a fight seemed a natural part of his character.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked. Whitnail just shrugged, so I added, “Wait, you haven’t seen a German fellow out there, have you? My age? Dark hair?”

“Is he your friend?”

“No, no, not at all. He’s my erzfeind, to hear him tell it.”

“Your arch-enemy?”

“You speak German?” When he nodded, I said, “You’re German?”

“I have not seen this person,” he answered instead.

Had I been wiser—or at least smarter—I would have asked Whitnail if the presence of the enemy casters was a subject safe to broach with Blake. As it was, I was completely unaware that my mentor was drafting a manifesto in his head that he was eager to share. When he rejoined us in Crieff, the market town next on the Pavilions’ tour across Scotland, we sat for dinner in our tent—a beef stew that Whitnail had prepared for us. I’d spent the entire day putting up tents, assembling booths, stringing fencing, and digging holes to outfit as latrines. I knew I was supposedly with the Pavilions to learn the ways of a caster and the mysteries of cryptids, but all I was learning about was the mystery of dysentery—Lydia the Sword-Swallowing Bonnie Lass of London was sick, and everyone knew it. (The scuttlebutt around the camp was that she wasn’t properly cleaning her swords; the jokes were merciless.) Suffice to say that I was bone-weary, and Blake’s reappearance, as fresh as a daisy from whatever nonsense he was pursuing in Stirling, annoyed me a bit. I told him what Whitnail had explained about the casters in the audience at the last show in Edinburgh.

“Who’s to say what I do with my gift?” Blake said. He stabbed at his stew as if it offended. “I’m not a part of their little knitting circle. I don’t ask for permission, and I certainly don’t ask for forgiveness.”

“Why do they—?” I began.

“Because they’re arrogant but spineless.”

“What have they—?”

“Nothing yet. They simply show up and expect me to be intimidated. Take note that I am not.”

“Why don’t you—?”

“Because I won’t give them the satisfaction.” He chuckled. “I summon cryptids, not read minds. That’s Morgan the Mystic’s role. It’s simply that I’ve had this conversation with a dozen people a dozen times, young Arthur. I’ve heard all the rationales.”

“What are you—” I paused to be interrupted, and when I wasn’t, I finished, “—going to do about them?”

“We’ll just have to see about that.” Blake stroked his beard like a villain in a vaudevillian act and met my eye. “Tell me your thoughts. Would you rather be one of them or one of me? Before you answer, let me assure you: Me, I get all the girls. But we could share.”

He smiled with such self-assurance that I simply accepted that he knew what he was doing. And in fact, I would actually see his smile reproduced on the silver screen when we reached London a year later, where I saw my very first talkie, The Adventures of Robin Hood. When the Australian actor Errol Flynn smiled, I wondered briefly if he’d been coached by Blake the Black.

***

At the shows in Crieff, I saw more of Blake’s enemy casters in the audience. The woman again, she of the purple beret, came accompanied by another woman and two men. And then I spotted an older man in a red tartan kilt, though I didn’t know the clan. What gave him away was the military messenger bag he carried over his shoulder. I could see the shape of his spellbook in it.

“They are becoming bold,” Whitnail said.

“In a few months, they’ll become bored,” Blake said. “When we reach the Minch and catch our boat south, they’ll have to go back the way they came, while we simply drift away. Besides, they’ve no interest in taking me on. The women are quaintrelles and the men are fops.”

I didn’t know either word, but I was fairly sure they were insults. If they weren’t, he certainly meant them that way.

At my age, however, it took very little to distract me, and so I thought little more about the enemy casters once Blake at last began my education as a caster. As if inspired one afternoon after we’d moved on from Crieff heading in a northerly direction, he turned to me in the cab of the Morris truck. I was in the middle, squeezed between him and Whitnail as we moved along at nearly 50 kilometers per hour down the roadway. Whitnail kept slapping my knee out of the way whenever he wanted to shift gears.

“Tonight,” Blake said in the voice he used on stage, “we open my book and introduce you to the world. Tonight, I tell you of the black rooster Aitvaras and the dog called Black Shuck. And after I warn you about them, we might continue our journey after London to Italy so you can map the Sculptures.”

I said, “I almost mapped the monster in Loch Ness.”

“Almost. So Angel told me.”

Hearing my mother’s name came with a weight that settled between my shoulders, but it reminded me just the same. “What’s the midwife cryptid called?”

The look on Blake’s face—matching the one on Whitnail’s when I turned to glance at him—told me the mystery of the thing I remembered would remain a mystery a while longer. “I don’t know any midwives, cryptid or otherwise. Where did you see it?”

“At my birth.”

He barked a laugh. “A missed opportunity to map a unique monster! If you’d only been able to walk or talk or understand that you had opposable digits. Ah, the curse of the newborn caster.”

I crossed my arms and said nothing more. Whitnail elbowed me once as encouragement, but I was no longer excited to be mocked. I felt a flash of annoyance—I readily understand why those casters in the audience might want to slap Blake the Black until he was Blake the Black and Blue.

***

That night in the small town of Pitlochry, where we only stayed for two nights of shows, Blake kept his word: he began to tell me about cryptids, casters, and a world I’d had only the vaguest awareness of since the day I was born.

We sat at a small, rickety table in our tent, though in truth, I was the one who sat the most. Blake walked around the tent, waving with his arms, stroking his beard, tapping Whitnail’s chest for emphasis as if the albino were a piece of furniture. Had I not already become familiar with my mentor’s predilections, I would have guessed he’d slipped into Pitlochry for whatever intoxicants he pursued separately from the rest of us. But he was not drunk, at least not on alcohol.

“They’re out there. Cryptids. Behind the waterfalls, in the trees, in the darkness,” he said. “They slip unnoticed in a crowd. But when they are seen—well, the stories are what draw casters to the crossroads. The average idiot can’t comprehend what they’ve witnessed, and so they overlook the spellbooks that appear for them to take on the mantle of caster. They tell their fellow parishioners about the devil they encountered when their auto broke down on a country road after midnight. But they completely miss the spellbook right there in the rack of the pew in front of them. It’s the ones like you and me who are destined to see more cryptids when we take on our spellbooks.”

He was excited, and I felt his excitement pass to me like a fever. “And my mam.”

“Don’t say ‘mam.’ You’re not a Scotsman; you’re a citizen of the world now. Say ‘mother.’ Yes, her, too. But it isn’t that we just see those cryptids. We’re drawn to them. Our spellbooks are like compasses. Maps to mapping.”

The conversation became a minotaur’s maze of explanations and connections. Cards, created by select casters with a unique talent, served as a kind of photograph (Blake called them tintypes, which provided me a clue about his age) that mixed the nature of the caster with the nature of the cryptid being “mapped.” He used the term essence again to describe these natures, but I was immediately alarmed. I hadn’t thought the term through very well when my mother had first said it to me.

“You’re talking about the soul,” I said. “You have to give up part of your soul to map a cryptid?”

Whitnail chuckled—it was the first time I’d heard him do so. “Were that true, Blake the Black would never have mapped a single cryptid.”

Blake flashed a grin, always Errol Flynn the swashbuckler. “Abraham, have you ever met an albino you could trust? No, you’re becoming far too metaphysical. Think of it as a drop of water from the Atlantic Ocean mixed with a drop of water from the Pacific. There have never been and never will be enough cryptids to even draw a liter of your ocean.”

I was still skeptical, but I nodded so he would go on.

Mapping, as he described it, was something like a snare in the forest. It might be the right size to catch a hare, but if a red deer steps in it, your snare—not the deer—is done for. Your skill as a caster determines the size of the “gate” that comes from your card, and that gate, in turn, determines whether you can successfully map the cryptid. A successful mapping experience nets you that drop of the Atlantic Ocean, the cryptid’s essence, and it accepts a drop from the Pacific Ocean, your own essence, to give the card its magic-like qualities. An unsuccessful mapping experience, as Blake so eloquently put it, “shitters your card.”

Whitnail said, “He means ‘shattered.’”

“Don’t translate,” Blake said. “I know what I said.”

A shattered card was useless—it broke into pieces and was beyond repair. I’d experienced this already while trying to map the monster in Loch Ness. I’d assumed my card had shattered because of the interference from the German boy; now I thought it more likely happened because I wasn’t strong enough.

“Don’t you fret, my young protégé,” he said when I told him about the Loch Ness encounter, “I’m sure your newfound arch-enemy will show up in our audience one day, and when that happens, we’ll put him to the test. In the meantime, let’s walk through how you go about the act of mapping—and then we’ll be ready to put you to the test.”

III: The Magnetic Man. In the Mirror.

Only a very few enemy casters showed up while we were in Pitlochry; the town was quite small compared to Edinburgh, and we had set up the Pavilions on the other side of the River Tummel in the trees not far from the footbridge that spanned the water. I guessed Blake’s zealots were disinclined to rent rooms in a town where they’d be easily spotted. I wanted to believe they’d become bored and given up, but I knew better than that.

Hugh, known in the Bòcan Pavilions as the Magnetic Man, became my friend during this time. He was a bit older than me, as was most everyone in the Pavilions, but he was a generous soul with his time—he reminded me of my older brother Elijah, as he was witty and insightful. He taught me chess on a board that was faded and cracked and was missing two pawns on the black side. He had substituted a one-pence coin for each of them.

Up close, Hugh was still a vision to behold. When he moved, he clinked. With the exception of his bald head (which he shaved with a straight razor every few days), nearly every visible centimeter of his body was covered with metallic fasteners—buttons and brooches, clips and staples, safety pins and even a few zippers, which had just come into fashion on clothing. I didn’t own anything yet that had a zipper, in fact, so Hugh allowed me to zip and unzip those metallic teeth a few times. Beneath, there were jagged scars.

“Instead of surgery,” he explained. I found his French accent exceedingly charming.

When I asked why he’d done this to himself, he was gleeful in telling me. “You see this space between my thumb and finger, oui? The scar there? I cut myself open by mistake when I was a boy. My mother, she sewed it closed with the only thread she had, a thin metal wire.”

When I flinched, he laughed. “Oui, it hurt very much. But when I returned to school, it proved to be a wound worth capitalizing on, eh. The other boys were so keen to see it that they would pay up to ten francs just to look. And they would pay more to touch it.”

That was his beginning. He saw the metal pieces he sutured into his skin the way shipbuilders and Scots Guards—the Jocks from the Great War—saw their tattoos. He was proud. I didn’t ask him what he’d done to himself below the waist, and he didn’t volunteer it, either. And while I was hesitant, I did finally broach the subject of infection.

“There should be mysteries in the world, no? If I were to tell you all the means I have employed to avoid disease, you would be bored, but wondering if I take them all out to clean myself? That will keep you awake tonight, I believe.” He laughed again. “It is the same for you, I think. I will not ask you how Blake the Black performs his magic. But we all do wonder, of course.”

Now it was my turn to laugh, but in fact, he was asking.

“Well, a magician never reveals his tricks,” I said.

“I have heard the Handcuff King said much the same thing to Blake when Blake went to recruit him to join the Pavilions. One magician to another.” Hugh the Magnetic Man leaned closer to me, jingling as he did. “And now I will reveal a trick to you.”

I caught my breath and waited. He reached down between us and moved his queen.

He said, “Checkmate.”

***

We were in Aviemore, a bigger town than Pitlochry, and the woman with the purple beret was in the audience again on the third and final night. I was about to approach her from the sidelines, but Whitnail put one pale hand on my shoulder. By the time he climbed up onto the stage for his role in Blake the Blake’s magic trick (Blake brought forth something called a hodag; it was a nasty-looking beast, maybe four meters in length, with spikes on its back. It snarled like rabid dog at the audience, eliciting cries of fear), the enemy caster had already slipped away.

“He traveled to the United States to map it,” Whitnail told me later. “It had been proven to be a hoax there. But it was not.”

When the last show was over that night, the crew began taking down the tents and boxing up the carny games and booths. I was helping Whitnail with our tent when Blake approached me out of the darkness with a hooded lantern in hand. He had that devilish smile on his face, and I thought I heard Whitnail groan as he hovered over me.

“Whitnail the Pale can handle this,” Blake said with a wink. “Come along with me, young Arthur. It’s time.”

I glanced at Whitnail, who didn’t meet my stare of terror, and followed Blake out into the night.

He had both of our spellbooks in a canvas bag, along with a tarnished mirror meant to be used for the application of makeup. 

“Toby,” he said, referring to the Pavilions’ dog boy, “can do without it for tonight.”

By the light of his lantern, we moved beyond the Pavilions’ entrance, and Knute, our bearded door supervisor and ticket taker, locked the gate within the entry tent behind us. I could feel my heart beating in my throat. When I swallowed, it hurt.

Blake led us through a quiet part of Aviemore, avoiding anyone on the streets who might recognize us from the Pavilions—or ask questions about strangers in their town. I just followed. If I’d had to make my way back to the Pavilions on my own, I would have been hopelessly lost. At length, however, we stopped in a grassy field some distance from the nearest residence.

A semi-circle of large stones, most about knee high, lay before us. The summer grass was tall but seemed not to grow within a few inches of each of the stones.

“The ring cairn of Aviemore,” Blake said.

I knew what a cairn was—a burial site marked by stones. I was taken by a vision of corpses just beneath the soil, waiting for Blake to give them some signal to rise up and approach us so we could, in theory, map them before they tore us to pieces. My knees ached to let me sink to the ground, but there would be no running from the undead if I did.

Blake walked to the center of the circle and placed his lantern at his feet. Then he reached into the bag, took out my spellbook, and gestured me over. I knew I was walking toward him, but I was holding my breath and becoming light-headed.

“You stand here,” he said, and I stood there. He walked a few feet away, took a card from his own spellbook, and propped it up against one of the stones. He turned, assessed the distance and line of sight between me and the stone, and adjusted the card a few times. At length, he seemed satisfied.

I began to sag.

He somehow caught me underneath both arms and chuckled. “Not yet. Fear is for after the feat. Open your book and, by all that’s holy in the heavens, take a breath.”

I gulped air as I turned to the first page of my empty spellbook. Blake took one of my hands and placed it where a card might be added. He looked over at the card again and nodded. Then he knelt and brought up the mirror from his bag.

“Look at yourself,” he said. When I did, I could see the sheer terror in my features.

“Blake—” My voice came out as a whisper, thick with my accent. “—who is buried in this cairn?”

“I have no idea. Who cares?”

A flush rose in my face; I could see it in the stupid mirror. “What do you mean? Why the hell are we here, then?”

“It’s atmosphere, Abraham. It’s like the stage.” He gestured around him. “It sets the mood, don’t you think?”

I stood stunned, my eyes as wide as those of a Pavilion clown. I swallowed again—more easily now that I had rage burning in my throat to facilitate the swallowing—and considered all the swear words I’d learned from my brothers, looking for the vilest one.

Blake said, “Look in the mirror again. Now, I want you to say ‘Bloody Mary’ three times.”

I was of a mind to slug him. “What now? You want me to play a child’s game and see if I’m brave enough to call up the ghost of a queen of England from four hundred years ago?”

“There’s actually no evidence it’s her.” He jiggled the mirror. “Come on, then.”

“I was right the first time I met you. You’re daft.”

“Maybe, but I’m not the one afraid to say her name in the mirror. Three times. You want to map her or not? Your book is still empty, you know.”

“Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” I said, taking a breath. “Bloody Mary.”

In a rush, the terror threw itself over me like an icy blanket that twisted around my throat. My reflection disappeared from the mirror; the waviness in the glass buckled. And then she was there.

The white dress she wore had gone out of fashion when my mother was just a girl. Her hair was a tangled mess of long black locks that hung lifelessly across her shoulders. But her face was what froze me in place. Her eyes were so sunken that I couldn’t see anything but holes and a flicker of reflected life deep in those holes. Her skin was that of a corpse dragged from the grave. And a trickle of blood ran from the center of her scalp down her forehead and between her eyes as if someone had buried an axe in her skull. Her mouth dropped open in a scream. Her hands, with fingers shriveled and dry, reached for me. They emerged from the mirror with a stench of rot.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” she shrieked. One hand slapped down on my spellbook. “HOW DARE YOU—”

“Pull her through,” Blake commanded. Bloody Mary’s suddenly head thrust out of the mirror and cocked at an unnatural angle so she could see Blake. He was resting on his haunches a few feet away.

“YOU,” she screamed with the accusatory tone of someone confronting their killer. “I KNOW YOU.”

“Hello, Mary,” he said. He waved to her.

At last, I heard his order and returned from whatever circle of panic I’d been hiding in. I grabbed Bloody Mary’s wrist with one hand, juggling my open spellbook in the other, and pulled with all my might.

Her arm came off.

I held it up like a cadaverous flag, silently screaming, and caught a glimpse of Blake in my peripheral vision, slowly shaking his head.

“Too hard,” he said.

I whipped my head to look at the mirror just as she reached through with her other hand and snatched the dismembered arm from me.

“I WILL REMEMBER YOU,” she snarled, fading. “I WILL SEE YOU IN YOUR NIGHTMARES.”

Then she was gone. My own reflection, visibly horrified, returned in her place. Blake rose to his feet, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Well,” he said as he approached and took the mirror from my quivering hand, “maybe we should start with something easier. Maybe a snipe.”

“By all that’s holy in heaven,” I said, my voice higher pitched than I’d ever heard it before, “no snipes.”