Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey Read online

  Praise for Forrest Aguirre

  “With imaginative vigor, Aguirre explores the fluctuating boundaries that separate human from inhuman, terrestrial from extraterrestrial, and natural from supernatural . . .”

  —Publishers Weekly [on Fugue XXIX]

  “Fugue XXIX is a selection of grotesque delicacies from the work of an enviable imagination.”

  —HorrorScope

  “I was happily surprised by this truly wonderful collection of riveting stories… I know that I will be thinking about these ideas again and again, often because of how Aguirre crafted his words more than the concept itself. Fugue XXIX is a fine collection from one of the great stylists of our age and another work that proves genre is literature.”

  —SFRevu.com

  “Forrest Aguirre’s beautiful stories are a set of portals that lead to the very quintessence of the ancient and noble art of the fantastic. His narrative is the contemporary prose equivalent of the wildly imaginative paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.”

  —Zoran Zivkovic, author of The Fourth Circle

  Also by Forrest Aguirre

  Fugue XXIX

  Swans Over The Moon

  Leviathan 3 (co-edited with Jeff Vandermeer)

  Leviathan 4 (edited by)

  To Stepan Chapman, Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Dave Trampier, and Ronnie James Dio for keeping this kid's dreams alive.

  “Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once . . . then you can apprehend God.”

  —Hermes Trismegistus, Hermetica

  The Golem:

  He walked with the perpetual forward lean of a man forever climbing stairs. Perhaps this was because he had been resurrected in pieces and was carried forward by an instinctive, unasked-for will to live when he had awakened and risen from the dead. Or, rather, the pieces of him had. In fact, it was difficult to call him “he” at all—though this wasn’t a question of gender, it was a question of pluralities. Wouldn’t “they” be more appropriate, seeing that the body his amnesiac conscience now inhabited was a stitched-up mosaic of several lives that had gone before the current incarnation? At the moment, he didn’t have time to think about anatomical philosophy. He had a sorcerer to kill—to murder, to be exact—for no better reason than the doddering old lich had been the one to create him. Oh, and there was the matter of the prim young lady dying on the floor—the girl with the wings.

  The Fairy:

  She has always been; she will always be. This is the way with her kind. Neither age, nor senescence, nor disease, nor slumber can take hold of her. Granted, there are dangers in the modernizing world, but they’re nothing that her innate abilities can’t handle. Instantaneous invisibility, dragonfly wings, and a quiver full of potent arrows—along with a charming personality—are her assurances of everlasting life. What did she have to fear from a kindly old man who wanted merely to engage her in conversation about the beauties of the meadow beyond the woods she calls home? Now, the answers seem more evident. Can she be both gullible and immortal? Not for long, she thinks as she lays dying on the floor. Then, she thinks, “What is long?”

  The Sorcerer:

  The artifices of magic couldn’t completely hide the sorcerer’s age and its effects, not even from the man himself. He had recently celebrated his 300th birthday, if one considers stopping in the street long enough for a hearty cackle between wheezes a true celebration. He didn’t have time for a full-blown party with all the niceties. He was rushing to meet a deadline, in the truest sense of the word. Three hundred years meant nothing if it was to end soon, and his falsely summoned charisma had barely held out long enough to entice the fairy out of the woods. The fairy was critical to his success, and if he continued to deteriorate, he would never get another chance to renew his contract, to hold off his creditors for another century or two, the length of the extension dependent on who or what he happened to dredge up from the underworld when he cast his bait into the depths. This time, he was lucky enough to call up Beelzebub himself, rather than the lesser fiends he had summoned before. This contract could be good for another millennium, enough time to gather the forces to carve out a comfortable place in Hell on his terms, rather than those of his devilish creditors. For most men, death was inevitable. For him, immortality, of a sort, was attainable, for the right price. Death was merely an obstacle.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  Heraclix’s view of his own creation as a birth was much more than idle Romanticism, though this was the zeitgeist that had then begun to take hold of Europe. The new Romantics would have exaggerated the pathos of the event, focusing on the dramatic, under-emphasizing the cold facts and looking for a deeper meaning beyond the banal. But even an enlightened observer would have been compelled to acknowledge that the coming forth of Heraclix-qua-Heraclix was indeed a birth.

  He remembered nothing of what came before the womb, though he felt intimations from that pre-existent time that he couldn’t quite form into full realizations. As the will to live slowly fused with his nascent consciousness, his heart, brain, and eyes awakened. Immediately, questions led to posits that led to more questions, and his awareness grew: Who am I? I am I. Where am I? I am here. What is here? It is where I am. What is where? And so forth.

  Red.

  He knew the color, but he didn’t know how or to what use the knowledge should be put, though he felt a need to act.

  Liquid.

  He floated in a sort of semisuspended animation, feet above the ground, head below the ceiling, but he knew he wasn’t flying. The weight he felt on his bones would not allow him to fly.

  Blood.

  He knew the word, knew that blood came from bodies, knew it was not a good thing to be surrounded by it on all sides, which he was.

  Air.

  He needed air.

  Now!

  He flailed his arms above his head, seeking purchase, and found it. Each hand grasped something hard, something rough, something that he could use to pull himself up. He stretched and pulled himself through the liquid.

  At first, he thought he might fly, after all. Then he found that he was falling out of whatever it was that had contained him into the open air and onto a stone floor. It was bitterly cold, and he dripped with blood, shivering like a newborn.

  A large apartment full of bookshelves, beakers, small cauldrons, and musty tomes swept into his vision as he lifted his dizzy head. Behind him was a gigantic cauldron, which must have been his womb. Above him, to one side, stood a thin, trembling old man who filled him with revulsion, despite Heraclix’s best efforts to withhold judgment.

  “Ah, my boy, you are ready. And you live!” the geriatric said. “I am your father, boy,
and your mother. You are my son, and I shall name you Heraclix.”

  But Heraclix, driven by an insatiable need to know all he could about the man who had named him, learned the old man’s name, in time: Mattatheus Mowler. Heraclix also learned much more about the old man. Much of it he learned while his master was away on errands. Reading came naturally to Heraclix, though, like many things about himself, he could not say whence the ability came. Nevertheless, the many books and frequent correspondences that Mowler received were too rich a temptation to pass up in those nervous moments between the time the door clicked shut behind Mowler and when the door handle rattled to signal the old man’s return. Heraclix was able, from the journals, letters, and ledgers that he read, to piece together a rough map of his master’s life.

  Mowler was very, very old. Unnaturally so. But records or notes or even hints between the lines of the man’s childhood simply did not exist.

  Heraclix drew his mental map of the old man, gaining finer and finer resolution the more he read and associated one letter with another. Certain themes emerged like topographical features: details of interest, emotion, and experience. Mowler was a touch insecure, but driven. Driven enough, in fact, that his ambitions and their execution were enough to bury those insecurities and mask them as strengths. His overconfidence veiled a lack of confidence. His sharp wit belied a fear of ridicule. His praise of youth obfuscated his fear of death.

  It was the last of these that drove him into a study of the arcane arts. He refused to succumb to the inevitability of aging and death. Mowler’s creation of Heraclix—as the golem learned from the magician’s notebooks—was only an experiment in reanimating dead tissue, another insurance against the grave, though Mowler’s notes made it clear that reanimation, with its attendant loss of memory, wouldn’t suffice for the sorcerer. His mind had to be clear in order to successfully maneuver the Byzantine contractual obligations that he had brought on himself through deals with various devils, demons, and necromancers. He couldn’t afford a legal faux pas.

  Heraclix read further and discovered that Mowler was well-connected from top to bottom in the material world, as well as the abyss. His list of contacts and those he referred to as “clients” ranged from a local beggar who provided him with street-level information to those who had access to the secret chambers of the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II himself. The golem noted that the designation “client” was clearly a misnomer for the relationship that Mowler kept with others. The sorcerer’s journals were filled with scorn enough for everyone mentioned, while his letters ranged between sarcastic ridicule and outright berating of the unfortunate addressee. There was ample evidence that the old man was manipulating some of his clients, pitting them against each other in a political and social chess game designed to produce one victor: Mowler. The magician’s tendrils reached outward to grasp at any opportunity to seize power. Heraclix could sense in the man’s writings an unquenchable desire for more, ever more.

  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: