Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (2 page)

This obsession with authority showed clearly in Mowler’s maltreatment of his “boy.” Despite Heraclix’s gargantuan frame,
he couldn’t muster the attitude to fight back against his master’s abuses. Whenever he thought he might lash out, a heavy sense of self-loathing held him back. He felt that he deserved the beatings as penance for some un-remembered sin he had committed before he was even aware of himself. Self-deprecation was endemic to his being. Mowler rained cane blows down on Heraclix’s broad back, screamed epithets into his deformed ears, and committed shameful acts to the rest of his gigantic body. Heraclix suffered willingly those things he did not understand, like a child, all in a spirit of meek obedience for what must have been months.

Then the tiny girl came, and the abject humility began to cave into other, more base, more powerful emotions.

She had arrived like some specimen collected from the fields outside of Vienna. Heraclix had, in fact, mistaken her, at first, for an insect. One day, Mowler brought in a large jar containing something unseen—or unseeable—within it, something that weighed more than the mere jar itself. When Mowler stepped out on some errand, Heraclix plodded over to the jar and shook it, listening for what might rattle about inside, what gave it such mass.

“Eep!” the jar shouted in protest.

Heraclix dropped the jar, then caught it before it hit the ground. The fear of the beating he would have suffered had he broken the jar overcame his shock at the voice.

“Hello?” he asked.

Nothing.

He shook the jar again.

“Ow!” it shouted in a little voice.

This was a strange jar.

“I hear you, but I don’t see you.”

A light began to glow within the jar, brightening enough to reveal a pair of slowly flapping lacey wings.

“Are you a lightning bug? I have heard of such things existing far, far away.” He could not recall where he had heard this, but he knew it to be true, like many thoughts and feelings that came to him unbidden.

“I am Pomp,” a tiny voice said as the light grew, illuminating a female figure whose back was, indeed, surmounted with wings.
The voice was difficult to hear, but it was confident, even overconfident. “And you are going to free me.”

The golem, for Heraclix knew he was a golem by the stitches that sutured his flesh and through his study of Mowler’s books, stared down at the little fairy. “I am not going to free you,” he said in a rattling, graveyard voice. “My master will decide your fate.”

“You will free me!” she said.

“No, I won’t,” he said.

She put her hands on her hips and glared up at him. Her grass-green eyes glowed from beneath her black bob-cut hair.

“You should stand up for yourself,” she said. “Don’t let that old man push you around. Push back!”

“Oh, I don’t have the heart for that,” he said.

“You have a heart inside your chest. I can see its place.”

Heraclix looked down at his chest where a massive capital X-shaped scar showed, quite clearly, that she was right.

“How do you know it wasn’t just removed, that Mowler hasn’t already carved it out of me?”

“Because of your eyes. I know one of them.”

“You are an odd creature,” he said.

“Not odd like your eyes are odd. And one of them unique!”

He looked at her quizzically, trying, unsuccessfully, to narrow both eyes. The right cooperated, the left did not. He hoped that she wouldn’t think he was winking at her.

“That red right eye, him I do not know. That big blue left eye, him I know.”

Heraclix brought his fingers to his face. His left eye, the one Pomp claimed was blue (he couldn’t see it, after all, and had to take her word for it), was obviously an interpolation to this head, stitched to his face by the sorcerer, he guessed. It was gargantuan, out of all proportion to the socket, or what must have been the original orbital. It was nearly twice the size of the red right eye, as evinced by the raised ridge of scar tissue that gave the eye the appearance of a rictus rather than an eyelid. He found that he could not fully close the lid, only scrunch it down into a tighter circle, like a malfunctioning sphincter.

“How do you know my eye?” Heraclix asked, both intrigued and irritated by her recollection of a part of him that he could not himself recall.

A set of keys jangled outside the door. Heraclix ran to set the jar back into its place, and Pomp faded quickly into invisibility. Heraclix did his best to follow suit, tucking his bulk back into a closet. The look of fear and pleading on Pomp’s little face was burned into his vision, even as he hid.

Mowler shambled into the room. The magician carried several bags of goods, which he emptied onto the floor after clearing away the sparse furniture: a rough-hewn wooden table and chair. From the bags he pulled a jar of chalk, a bag of silver shavings, several small candles in the form of little tentacles, and, most threateningly, a long, very fine, curved dagger like those the Ottoman merchants at the central market wore. Mowler looked over the collection and said aloud “Now, my buzzing friend, my buzzing fiend, we will talk. I have learned your true name since last we met. There will be no negotiations. This time, I will dictate the terms of our agreement.”

Mowler spread the chalk liberally on the floor, then used a straight razor to painstakingly gather it into carefully cut piles and lines that formed two circles: one smaller, one larger; the former inside the latter, equidistant at all points. Within the ring this created, he arranged a series of occult sigils, signs of power meant to keep harm at bay, physical or otherworldly. Mowler hummed while building the magic circle. His humming was reminiscent of a funeral dirge. The magician was very much not like a maid doing her chores. But the methodological way in which he did his work called to Heraclix’s mind a dim memory of someone, somewhen, making careful preparations for an event far more joyful than what he thought might take place next. But the harder the golem tried to capture the memory, the further it seemed to slip away from him.

Opposite the protective circle, Mowler carved another chalk ring, this one with an equilateral triangle touching the inside edge of the inner circle. Outside the ring, he gathered other eldritch symbols—these vaguely familiar to Heraclix—then sprinkled the whole of the area with the silver shavings he had brought in earlier.
He meticulously cleared the shavings out of the triangle, picking the remainders out with a pair of tweezers under a magnifying glass. He then placed a twisted candle at each of the three chalk line junctures of angle and arc and lit the wicks. The pungent odor of burning hair and fat bloomed into the air with thin ropes of black smoke that reached the ceiling. Mowler closed the apartment window’s shutters and tacked black cloth over them. Only the light cast by the candles remained.

The old wizard gathered up the jar containing the fairy. He also took up the stinger-like dagger, and a large black tome encrypted with another magical symbol—this one in silver, composed of superimposed five-pointed stars slightly adrift from one another, each with extra flourishes and interpolations of other seemingly mystical signs, all wrapped up, as one would expect, in a perfect circle. He took these instruments with him into the protective circle where he sat himself down cross-legged on the floor with a pained grunt, jar to his left, dagger to his right, with the silver and black grimoire open on his lap. Heraclix could feel a certain intensity fill the air, as if a fire were beginning to blaze therein, a fire of cold, rather than heat. The room became decidedly more chilly as Mowler began to chant:

“Ia! Ia! Sussilient k’klee!”

This he repeated many times—so many, in fact, that Heraclix grew bored of counting. Heraclix felt certain that day had turned to night outside as the wizard continued the mantra. A loud snap seized the golem’s attention. This was quickly followed by a crackling sound that filled the room. The temperature in the room plummeted—both Heraclix’s and the old man’s breath became visible, and frost shot through the room, veining the walls, ceiling, and floor with ice, causing some of the glass instruments in the room to crack or shatter. Heraclix’s skin tightened in the cold, causing his stitches to strain against his flesh.

At this the man, with a deftness and speed that Heraclix had not seen before, set down the book, opened the jar, and grabbed the shivering fairy (whose brittle wings showed laced frost despite her natural invisibility), swept up the dagger, and stood to his full height in the circle. Heraclix could not recall ever having seen Mowler stand so tall and confident. It frightened him.

Mowler lifted the dagger in his right hand—the barely-visible fairy in his left—then brought the two together, sliding the fang of the blade into Pomp. Her yelp was not drowned out by the magician’s change of chants.

“Kek kek agl agl nathrak,” he said in slowly increasing volume as a form took shape from the candle smoke. A memory started to take shape in Heraclix’s mind, passed into the present, then dissipated before he could fully grasp it. Still, he knew that he had seen something like this before. Somewhere. Somewhen.

Mowler removed the dagger and cast Pomp to the floor between the magic circles. A sparkling mist formed in the circle opposite the wizard. Each drop of blood that escaped from Pomp’s body added to the concrescence of the apparition. A bulbous pair of multifaceted eyes appeared beneath a tall golden crown. Heraclix had seen this manifestation before in one of Mowler’s books: Beelzebub, Lord of Flies. Below the neck, it was dressed sharply—all frills and gaudy lace under a dark purple riding coat. Its claws showed from under the sleeves, needle-like and dripping green venom. The insectile demonic eyes confused the onlookers, so that everyone in the room—Heraclix, Pomp, and the sorcerer—thought that the demon was looking his, her, and his way, respectively. The demon’s proboscis, however, pointed directly at the sorcerer.

It spoke, like the buzzing of a thousand flies, in a tongue Heraclix had not before heard, nor could he comprehend it now. Mowler spoke, but his words were equally meaningless to the golem. The only thing that Heraclix understood at this point was that the magician’s sacrifice of this entirely innocent creature had pushed his fear beyond horror, into rage. He did not have the heart to stand up for himself, he admitted, but his heart couldn’t contain the anger that drove him to stand up for the girl. Enough was enough!

He stepped out of the shadows, determined to kill the old man once and for all. His left eye twitched of its own accord, eager to do the deed. One of his hands clenched open, shut, open, shut, curling into a tight fist then relaxing, slack, as if deciding whether to gently caress or to pummel the sorcerer. Mowler was oblivious, preoccupied with his shouted negotiations with the devil, Beelzebub, who was beginning to show signs of acquiescence: a
tilt of the golden-crowned head, the wringing of clawed hands, a tone of measured restraint—even respect—in the buzzing voice. The old man seemed emboldened. His greedy eyes widened in triumph. A maniacal smile scarred his face. His eyes focused in condescension for the Lord of Flies.

Heraclix leaped, propelling his powerful frame at the old man’s back with all the brute strength he could muster.

He might as well have tried to jump through a stone pillar.

A lightning aura around the magician’s circle momentarily flashed as Heraclix hit the barrier. He vaulted backwards almost as far as he had lunged, his body shot through with hot pain that forced him, writhing, to the ground.

Mowler turned, only for a moment, to see what had happened, a mixed expression of curiosity and wicked humor on his face.

And in that split second, streams of flies, each accented with tiny licks of flame, poured into the corners of the room through the eight vertices where the walls, floor, and ceiling met. They shot out like burning black tentacles, a flaming insectoid octopus converging on the sorcerer within his circle, feeling their way to their master’s nemesis. Each of the eight swarms struck at the barrier around the circle, and each was immediately repelled. Mowler, agitated by the flies and the lapse in concentration that Heraclix had caused him, turned with renewed energy and focus toward the demon, chanting again in that unknown tongue, which caused Beelzebub to cringe and cower, dropping to one knee with a weight that shook the floor.

Heraclix was surrounded by flies. His body smoked and portions of him smelled like cooked meat. The wracking pain in his body and head subsided, but the insects persisted. He noticed a few of the flaming insects burrowing between the seams of his flesh, having abandoned the wizard for easier game. The golem swatted wildly, killing dozens of the black fiends at a swing, and showers of sparks spattered across the floor. The swarm left him alone long enough for him to sweep the dead carcasses away, in preparation for the next onslaught.

But the next onslaught did not come.