An Apple for the Creature Read online

  I looked at Sabrina and smiled. “Well, you’re right. We did our best with our own gifts. Now we’ve got to put them under wraps again. Someday, maybe, we’ll get to be what we are.”

  There was so much we didn’t know in this world. But looking at the children, some of them playing at the back of the room, some of them obviously distressed and ready to reunite with their parents, I could see that there was a future, that what kids were learning in classrooms all over America was not going to stop because sometimes kids experienced terrifying or simply unfamiliar stuff. . . .

  Hunter’s little friend, the boy in the cowboy boots, ran up to grab one of Ms. Yarnell’s apples and threw it squarely at another little boy, just as he’d seen her do.

  Yells of anger. Tears.

  Yeah, some things about school would never change.

  Spellcaster 2.0

  JONATHAN MABERRY

  Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. He’s the author of a dozen novels in several genres and many nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to supernatural folklore. Since 1978 he has sold more than twelve hundred magazine feature articles, three thousand columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and cofounded the Liars Club, and is a frequent keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers and genre conferences. Visit him online at jonathanmaberry.com and on Twitter (@jonathanmaberry) and Facebook.

  --1--

  “Username?”

  “You’re going to laugh at me.”

  Trey LaSalle turned to her but said nothing. He wore very hip, very expensive tortoiseshell glasses and he let them and his two-hundred-dollar haircut do his talking for him. The girl withered.

  “It’s . . . obvious?” she said awkwardly, posing it as a question.

  “Let me guess. It’s going to be a famous magician, right? Which one, I wonder? Won’t be Merlin because even you’re not that obvious, and it won’t be Nostradamus because I doubt you could spell it.”

  “I can spell,” she said, but there was no emphasis to it.

  “Hmm. StGermaine? No? Dumbledore? Gandalf?”

  “It’s—”

  He pursed his lips. “Girl, please don’t tell me it really is Merlin.”

  Anthem blushed herself mute.

  “Jesus save me.” Trey rubbed his eyes and typed in MERLIN with slow sarcasm, each keystroke separate and very sharp. By the fourth letter Anthem’s eyes were jumping.

  Her name was really Anthem. Her parents were right-wing second gens of left-wing Boomers from the Village, a confusion of genetics and ideologies that resulted in a girl who was bait fish for everyone at the University of Pennsylvania with an IQ higher than their belt size. Though barely a palate cleanser for a shark like Trey. He sipped his pumpkin spice latte and sighed.

  “Password?” he prompted.

  “You’re going to make fun of me again.”

  “There’s that chance,” he admitted. “Is it too cute, too personal or too stupid?” He carved off slices of each word and spread them out thin and cold. He was good at that. Back in high school his snarky tone would have earned him a beating—had, in fact, earned him several beatings; but then he conquered the cool crowd. Thereafter they kept him well-protected, well-appeased and well-stocked with a willing audience of masochists who had already begun to learn that anyone with a truly lethal wit was never—ever—to be mocked or harmed. In that environment, Trey LaSalle had flourished into the self-satisfied diva he now enjoyed being. Now, in his junior year at U of P, Trey owned the in-crowd and their hangers-on because he was able to work the sassy gay BFF role as if the trope were built for him. At the same time he could also play the get-it-done team leader when the chips were down.

  Those chips were certainly down right now. Trey figured that Jonesy and Bird had gotten Anthem to call Trey for a bailout because she was so thoroughly a Bambi in the brights that even he wouldn’t actually slaughter her.

  “Password?” He drew it into a hiss.

  Anthem chewed a fingernail. Despite the fact that she painted her nails, they were all nibbled down to nubs. A couple of them even had blood caked along the sides from where she’d cannibalized herself a bit too aggressively, and there were faint chocolate-colored smears of it on the keyboard. Trey made a mental note to bathe in Purell when he got back to his room.

  “Come on, girl,” he coaxed.

  She blurted it. “Abracadabra.”

  Trey stared at the screen and tried very hard not to close the laptop and club her to death with it. He typed it in. The display changed from the bland log-in screen to the landing page for The Spellcaster Project.

  The project.

  It sounded simple, but wasn’t. Over the course of the last eighteen months the group had collected, organized and committed to computer memory every evocation and conjuring spell known to the various beliefs of human culture, from phonetic interpretations of guttural verbal chants by remote Brazilian tribes to complex rituals in Latin and Greek. On the surface the project was a searchable database so thorough that it would be the go-to resource. A resource for which access could be leased, opening a cash flow for the folklore department. And, people would definitely pay. This database—nicknamed Spellcaster—was a researcher’s dream.

  Trey found it all fascinating but considered it immensely silly at the same time. He was a scientist, or becoming one, and yet his field of study involved nothing that he believed in. Doctors at least believed in healing, but folklorists were a notoriously atheistic lot. Demons and gods, spells and sacred rituals. None of it was remotely real. All of it was an attempt to make sense of a world that could not be truly understood or defined, and certainly not controlled. Things just happened. Nobody was at the controls, and nobody was taking calls from the human race.

  And yet with all that, it was fascinating, like watching a car wreck. You don’t want to be a part of it but you can’t look away. He even went to church sometimes, just to study the people, to mentally catalog the individual ways in which they interpreted the religion to which they ascribed. There was infinite variation within a species, just as within flowers in a field. And soon he would be making money from it, and that was something he could believe in.

  The second aspect of the project was Spellcaster 2.0, which began as Trey’s idea but along the way had somehow become Professor Davidoff’s. In essence, once the thousands of spells were entered, a program would run through all of them to look for common elements. Developmental goals included a determination of how many common themes appeared in spells and what themes appeared in a majority, or at least a significant number of them. The end goal was to create a perfect generic spell. A spell that established that there were some aspects to magical conjuring that linked the disparate tribes and cultures of mankind.

  Trey’s hypothesis was that anthropologists would be able to use that information, along with related linguistic models, to more accurately track the spread of humankind from its African origins. It might effectively prove that the spread of religion in all of its many forms stemmed from the same central source. Or—as he privately thought of it—mankind’s first big stupid mistake. In other words, the birth of prayer and organized religion.

  Finding that would be a watershed moment in anthropology, folklore, sociology and history. It would be a Nobel Prize no-brainer, and it didn’t matter to Trey if he shared that prize, and all of the fame and—no doubt—fortune that went with it. Spellcaster was going to make them all rich.

  “Okay,” Trey said, “why are we here?”

  Anthem chewed her lip. She did it prettily, and even though she was the wrong cut of meat for Trey’s personal tastes, he had to admit that she was all that. She was an East Coast blonde with ice-pale skin, luminous green eyes, a figure that could make any kind of clothes look good and Scarlett Johansson lips. Shame that she was dumber than a cruller. He was considering bringing her into hi
s circle; not the circle-jerk of grad students to which they both currently belonged, but the more elite group he went clubbing with. Arm candy like that worked for everyone, straight or gay. It was better than a puppy and it didn’t pee on the carpet. Though, with Anthem there was no real guarantee that she was housebroken.

  The lip-chewing had no real effect on him, and Trey studied her to see how long it would take her to realize it. Seven Mississippis.

  “I’ve been hacked,” she said.

  “Get right out of town.”

  “And they’ve been in my laptop messing with my stuff.”

  “The spells?”

  “Some of them, yes.”

  Trey felt the first little flutter of panic.

  “I’ve been inputting the evocation spells for the last couple of weeks,” Anthem explained. “One group at a time. Last week it was Gypsy stuff from Serbia, before that it was the preindustrial Celtic stuff. It’s hard to do. None of it was translated and Professor Davidoff didn’t want us to use Babelfish or any of the other online translators because they don’t give cultural or—What’s the word?”

  “Contextual?”

  “Right. They don’t give cultural or contextual translations, and that’s supposed to be important for spells.”

  “Crucial is a better word,” Trey murmured, “but I take your point.”

  “I had to compare what I typed with photocopies from old spell books. After I finish this stuff Kidd will add the binding spells, then Jonesy will do the English translations. Bird’s doing the footnotes, and I guess you’ll be working on the annotations.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “At first Jonesy dictated the spells while I typed, but that only really worked with Latin and the Romance languages because we kind of knew the spellings. More and more, though, I had to look at it myself to make sure it was exact. Everything had to match or the professor would freak. And there are all those weird little symbol thingies on some of the letters.”

  “Diacritical marks.”

  “Yeah, those.” She began nibbling at her thumbnail, talking around it as she chewed. “Without everything just so, the spells won’t work.”

  Trey smiled a tolerant smile. “Sweetie, the spells won’t work because they’re spells. None of this crap works, you know that.”

  She stared at him for a moment, still working on the thumb. “They used to work, though, didn’t they?”

  “This is science, honey. The only magic here is the way you’re working that sweater and the supernatural way I’m working these jeans.”

  She said, “Okay.” But she didn’t sound convinced, and it occurred to Trey that he didn’t know where Anthem landed on the question of faith. If she was a believer, then that was a tick against her becoming part of his circle.

  “You were saying about the data entry?” he prompted, steering her back to safer ground.

  Anthem blinked. “Oh, sure. It’s hard. It’s all brain work.”

  Trey said nothing to that. It would be too easy; it would be like kicking a sleepy kitten. Instead he asked, “So what happened?”

  Anthem suddenly stopped biting her thumb and they both looked at the bead of blood that welled from where she’d bitten too deeply. Without saying a word, Anthem tore a piece of Scotch tape from a dispenser and wrapped it around the wound.

  “Every day I start by checking the previous day’s entries to make sure they’re all good.”

  “And—?”

  “The stuff I entered last night was different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Let me show you.” Anthem leaned past him and her fingers began flying over the keys. Whatever else she was or wasn’t, she could type like a demon. Very fast and very accurate. The world lost a great typist when she decided to pursue higher education, mused Trey.

  Anthem pulled up a file marked 18CenFraEvoc, scrolled down to one of the spells, then tapped the screen with a bright green fingernail. “There, see? I found the first changes in the ritual the professor is going to use for the debut thingy.”

  Trey’s French was passable and he bent closer and studied the lines, frowning as he did so. Anthem was correct in that this ritual—the faux summoning of Azeziz, demon of knowledge and faith—was a key element in Professor Davidoff’s plans to announce their project to the academic world. Even a slight error would embarrass the professor, and he was not a forgiving man. Less so than, say, Hitler.

  Anthem opened a file folder that held a thick sheaf of high-res scans of pages from a variety of sources. She selected a page and held it up next to the screen. “This is how it should read.”

  Trey clicked his eyes back and forth between the source and target materials and then he did see it. In one of the spells the wording had been changed. The second sentence read: With the Power of the Eternal I Conjure Thee to My Service.

  It should have read: With the Power of My Faith in the Eternal I Conjure and Bind Thee to My Service.

  “You see?” Anthem asked again. “It’s different. There’s nothing about the conjurer believing. That throws it all off, right?”

  “In theory,” he said dryly. “This could have been a mistype.”

  “No way,” she said. “I always check my previous day’s stuff before I start anything new. I don’t make those kinds of mistakes.”

  The pride in her voice was palpable, and in truth Trey could not recall ever making a correction in any of her work before. The team had been hammering away at the project for eighteen months. They’d created hundreds of pages of original work, and entered thousands of pages of collected data. After a few mishaps with other team members handling data entry, the bulk of it had been shifted to Anthem.

  “It’s weird, right?” she asked.

  He sat back and folded his arms. “It’s weird. And, yes, you’ve been hacked.”

  “By who? I mean, it has to be one of the team, right? But Jonesy doesn’t know French. I don’t think Bird does, either.”

  Jonesy was a harmless mouse of a kid. Bird was sharper, but he was an idealist and adventurer. Bird wanted to chew peyote with the Native American Church and go on spirit walks. He wanted to whirl with the Dervishes and trance out with the Charismatics. Unlike Trey and every other anthropologist Trey knew, Bird was in the field for the actual beliefs. Bird apparently believed that everyone was right, that every religion, no matter how batty, had a clue to the Great Big Picture as he called it. Trey liked him, but except for the project they had nothing in common.

  Would Bird do this, though? Trey doubted it, partly because it was mean—and Bird didn’t have fangs at all—and mostly because it was disrespectful to the belief systems. As if anyone would really care. Except the thesis committee.

  “What about Kidd?” asked Anthem. “It would be like him to do something mean like this.”

  That much was true. Michael Kidd was a snotty, self-important little snob from Philly’s Main Line. Good-looking in a verminous sort of way. Kidd was cruising through college on family money and never pretended otherwise. Even Davidoff walked softly around him.

  But, would Kidd sabotage the project? Yeah, he really might. Just for shits and giggles.

  “The slimy little rat-sucking weasel,” said Trey.

  “So it is Kidd?”

  Trey did not commit. He would have bet twenty bucks on it, but that wasn’t the same as saying it out loud. Especially to someone like Anthem. He cut a covert look at her and for a moment his inner bitch softened. She was really a sweet kid. Clueless in a way that did no one any harm, not even herself. Anthem wasn’t actually stupid, just not sharp and would probably never be sharp. Not unless something broke her and left jagged edges; and wouldn’t that be sad?

  “Is this only with the French evocation spell?” he asked.

  “No.” She pulled up the Serbian Gypsy spells. Neither of them could read the language, but a comparison of source and target showed definite differences. Small, but there. “I went back as far as the Egyptian burial symbols. Ten separate files,
ten languages, which is crazy ’cause none of us can speak all of those languages.”

  “What about the Aramaic and Babylonian?”

  “I haven’t entered them yet.”

  Trey thought about it, then nodded. “Okay, let’s do this. Go in and make the corrections. Before you do, though, I’m going to set you up with a new username and new password.”

  “Okay.” She looked relieved.

  “How much do you have to do on this?” Trey asked. “Are we going to make the deadline?”

  The deadline was critical. Professor Davidoff was planning to make an official announcement in less than a month. He had a big event planned for it, and warned them all every chance he could that departmental grant money was riding on this. Big-time money. He never actually threatened them, but they could all see the vultures circling.

  Anthem nibbled as she considered the stacks of folders on her desk. “I can finish in three weeks.”

  “That’s cutting it close.”

  Anthem’s nibbling increased.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ll spot-check you and do all the transfers to the mainframe. Don’t let anyone else touch your laptop for any reason. No one, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, relieved but still dubious. “Will that keep whoever’s doing this out of the system?”

  “Sure,” said Trey. “This should be the end of it.”

  --2--

  It wasn’t.

  --3--

  “Tell me exactly what’s been happening,” demanded Professor Davidoff.

  Trey and the others sat in uncomfortable metal folding chairs that were arranged in a half circle around the acre of polished hardwood that was the professor’s desk. The walls were heavy with books and framed certificates, each nook and corner filled with oddments. There were juju sticks and human skulls, bottles of ingredients for casting spells—actual eye of newt and bat’s wing—and ornate reliquaries filled with select bits of important dead people.