The Darker Lord Read online

  Dedication

  To Heather, Carleigh, Taba and Isaac, and all the dogs and cats that love them

  Epigraph

  “[B]ut there is no doubt they intend to kill us as dead as possible in a short time,” the Wizard said.

  “As dead as poss’ble would be pretty dead, wouldn’t it?” asked Dorothy.

  —L. Frank Baum, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: A Cup of Ennui

  Chapter 2: Our House Is a Very, Very, Very Small House

  Chapter 3: Mr. Dark and Fanciful

  Chapter 4: This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record

  Chapter 5: Exit, Stage Right

  Chapter 6: My Other House Is a Very, Very, Very . . . Wait, What Other House?

  Chapter 7: Eldrin!

  Chapter 8: The Final Frontier

  Chapter 9: Time Bandits

  Chapter 10: Enter the Dean

  Chapter 11: A Really, Really Secret Council

  Chapter 12: Trust in Me

  Chapter 13: Rooked

  Chapter 14: Khaaaaan!

  Chapter 15: Hellp!

  Chapter 16: In Triplicate

  Chapter 17: Journey from the Center of Mysterium

  Chapter 18: Bleaker Street

  Chapter 19: The Secret of the Baristas

  Chapter 20: Conflict at the Coffee Shop

  Chapter 21: Hysteria in the Hypocube

  Chapter 22: When Monkeys Fly

  Chapter 23: Down the Rabbit Hole

  Chapter 24: Which Wardrobe?

  Chapter 25: Hanging by a Thread

  Chapter 26: It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Multiverse

  Chapter 27: A Party Line

  Chapter 28: The Return of the Company of the Fellowship

  Chapter 29: Revelations: Chapter 1

  Chapter 30: The Final Countdown

  Chapter 31: Lost in Space

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By Jack Heckel

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  A Cup of Ennui

  My name is Avery, and I am not the Dark Lord.

  At least, that is what I muttered to myself as I stared at my reflection in the coffee shop window. The green mermaid logo smiled back, but I suspected she was humoring me. It was probably sleep deprivation, but my reflected image had an unhealthy pallor, and in the window’s glass, the scarf wrapped around my neck might have been a hood. I looked like the Dark Lord.

  There was a roar of laughter. I turned with the startled embarrassment of a man who’s been caught talking to himself, or singing a really cheesy pop song. In keeping with my policy of total honesty, “Oops, I Did It Again” is my own personal demon. Actually, my personal demon is an imp named Harold, but I digress.

  A motley crew of costumed men and women were gathered in the back corner of the shop. In another place or in a different age, they might have been mistaken for an assembly of wizards and witches, but this was New York, and they were probably cosplay fanatics, or more likely partygoers at the end of a late night. Another round of laughter issued from the group. Whoever they were, they had no interest in me.

  I turned back to my coffee and picked up the book I’d been trying to ignore. The book was The Dark Lord, and it was my story. At least, it was my story as translated through the dimensions onto Earth. It was this novel that had left me sleepless, or as my friend Eldrin had taken to saying, “Obsessed with navel gazing.” Unfortunately, Eldrin was right.

  I sighed. I’d read it a dozen times hoping to glean some meaning, but apart from finding the picture it painted of me depressingly accurate, I hadn’t discovered any deeper understanding. Why was it here? I wasn’t that important a mage. Why now? Nearly four months had passed since I’d returned to Mysterium. And who was Jack Heckel? The dimensions can get Tolkien’s name right, if not his middle initials, but when the universe writes a story about me I don’t even get an acknowledgment.

  I was of two minds on the name issue. On the one hand, I don’t come out looking or smelling very good in the story, so it might be better that the multiverse not associate the Dark Lord or what happened in Trelari with me personally. On the other hand, I liked the idea of seeing my name immortalized in print. I took another sip of my coffee—grande, quad shot, nonfat, one pump mocha, no whip, extra hot—as I reread the marketing blurb on the back cover. Hilarious parody? Parody of what?

  The most troubling part of the book was the epilogue. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of reading the book—and there are many more of you that haven’t than there should be—The Dark Lord leaves me in Mysterium with Harold, my mentor Griswald’s old imp, holding the key to a new reality, having had some undisclosed revelation about how the Mysterium was “broken.” While I had inherited Griswald’s position, and his office, and his imp, and Griswald had given me a box with a rattle, none of the rest of it had happened—at least, not as far as I could recall. As far as I knew, the box was sitting, unopened, on my bedside table. Harold had never spoken a word. And I was certainly no wiser about why Griswald thought the Mysterium was broken. The place seemed all right, even if the students were going to be more annoying now that I was in control of their grades. Premeds may have a bad reputation as being grade-obsessed on Earth, but you’ve never seen anything to match the whining that students of magic can conjure.

  I had considered asking Harold if he would open the box for me, and had even gone so far as to purchase a large bag of butterscotch candies to bribe him, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to confirm the book’s version of reality. What would I do if I opened the box and there was a key? Would I be the version of me in the book? I wanted to be that guy, but I couldn’t imagine not trying to use the key to get back into Trelari. Why hadn’t the book version of me done that? And why was a fictional epilogue tacked on to the end when the rest of the book was so embarrassingly detailed and accurate? And if it were accurate, why didn’t I remember it?

  “Why?” I asked the mermaid logo.

  “Because it’s almost seven o’clock, and if we don’t leave soon you’ll be late to your first class of the new semester,” Eldrin said from behind me.

  I jumped and the stool I’d been perched on shot out from under me. I fell to the floor with a clatter and a shout, my coffee spraying across my sweater. “Huzzah!” the group in the corner cried out. I cursed them under my breath.

  Eldrin smiled in his irritatingly charming manner. “Maybe you should consider switching to decaf.”

  “Maybe I should reconsider the wisdom of having a roommate.” I pulled myself to my feet.

  “And what? Live with your parents? Having me as a roommate is the only reason you can pay the bills.”

  This was unfortunately true. Assistant professors, especially junior assistant professors, are paid only slightly better than graduate students. This, coupled with the fact that Eldrin and I had foolishly chosen to live in New York City, one of the most expensive cities on Earth, meant that I was still broke. Of course, I refused to concede the point and instead focused on trying to blot coffee stains out of my sweater.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” Eldrin asked as he passed me a handful of napkins.

  “Reading the . . .” I stopped myself short. I would never hear the end of it if Eldrin found out I’d been reading my own book again. “Nothing. Just catching up on some notes for class.”

  I briefly congratulated myself on my escape, but as I put my coat on, Eldrin reached behind me and snatched the book from the counter. “Aha!” he crowed, holding it above his head. “I had no idea that your st
ory merited an entire lecture.”

  A sudden rush of warmth came to my face. “That’s not the subject of my lecture, Eldrin. I was only . . .”

  He ignored me and flipped through the pages until he got near the end, and read the words I had been pondering moments earlier. “‘And that’s when I had my epiphany. I saw the flaw in Mysterium. The wrongness that hid in every crack and behind every shadow.’”

  I sighed. It was bad enough having him throw the words back in my face, but he was doing it in a very serious British accent that made me sound like a stuffed shirt. “Your point?”

  He snapped the paperback closed and shook it at me. “You’ve been reading this for months, and yet you still haven’t discovered the epiphany. You have a class today, and yet you are here. So, I’ll ask you the same question you were asking yourself: Why?”

  “Drop it, Eldrin.” I grabbed the book out of his hand and stuffed it into my coat pocket.

  “Answer the question and I will.” His eyes narrowed.

  He was in his serious Eldrin mood, which meant he wasn’t going to leave me alone until I answered. But I was in no state to deal with this at the moment. I pushed past him and walked outside, leaving behind the warmth and smell of coffee. The sun was beginning to brighten the sky and peek here and there between the buildings that lined the street. In the shadows, the fall air had a bite to it. I pulled my coat tighter around me and marched off in the direction of our apartment, my breath coming in little puffs of steam.

  Eldrin fell in step beside me. “Avery, you have to deal with this.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said, picking up my pace until I was nearly jogging.

  “Yes, you do.”

  I ignored him as we made our winding way through the narrow streets of Greenwich Village. People were beginning to emerge now and the metal gates and security doors that served to protect the shopkeepers from their fellow citizens were beginning to open. The city was funny like that, a bizarre mix of the modern and the medieval. Maybe that is why I wanted to live here, because it reminded me of Mysterium with its own tortured landscape. Speaking of torture, while the fast pace of our walk was making my breath catch, Eldrin kept up effortlessly. He let me run for another half block before mercifully stepping in front of me. I stopped. It was a good thing since my lungs were burning from the cold air.

  He tried the practical approach. “Why won’t you at least talk to Harold about opening Griswald’s box?”

  “Because . . .” I said between ragged breaths, but couldn’t find the courage to finish.

  He said nothing, just stared at me with those glittering eyes. I realized he was wearing a thin linen shirt, open to midchest. It was as irritating as it sounds, and something about it made me snap. “Because I’m afraid, Eldrin! I know you would have opened the thing straightaway, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid it means that my life is not as settled as I’d like it to be, and that there might be worse to come from what I did in Trelari . . . to Trelari.” I pulled at the edges of my thick coat in frustration. “I’m not like you. I get cold.”

  His expression settled into something gentle and understanding, and maybe a little sad. “You really don’t get me, do you? I’m terrified of that book. I haven’t been able to focus on my own work for weeks. I keep reading and rereading it, hoping the ending will change.”

  “Then why do you want me to open the box?”

  “Because I do understand you, Avery. I know that you are not so afraid of whatever it is that may come out of that box that you will refuse to ever open it. You will just do it someday and somewhere that you think will make it safe for everyone but you, and I’d rather be there than not.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I mumbled an apology. “Sorry, Eldrin, I didn’t want to drag you into my problems again.”

  “I hope you know that I don’t think of them as your problems.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this either, so I simply said, “Thanks.”

  And that was about as much of an emotional exchange as he and I could handle, so we continued—at a much slower pace—toward our apartment. However, this talk had raised one question I’d been meaning to ask him. “After the book came out I sort of expected you to try and open the box yourself. Why didn’t you?”

  He shrugged. “Because the book said I couldn’t.”

  “So, you think everything in the book is true, or will come true?”

  Eldrin shook his head. “Not exactly. I think it’s likely to be true about specific facts, if not specific moments. For instance, I think it’s true that Harold likes butterscotch candies, which you should start giving him by the way. On the other hand, I don’t think you will be sitting on a park bench, or that the dwarf will come jogging by at just the moment Harold opens the box. That part is probably more allegory than history. The book is drawing together pieces of your past and present from your subconscious.”

  “Do you think I will have an epiphany about Mysterium?” He nodded. I shivered. “What . . . what do you think I’ll figure out?”

  He knitted his brow. “I don’t know, but I think it’s something you already know.”

  “Then why . . . why wasn’t it revealed in the book?” I asked, my teeth now chattering noisily.

  He shrugged. “Maybe the universe wanted to save something for the sequel.”

  “S-s-sequel?”

  “Of course,” he said with the arched eyebrow he used when he thought I was being particularly dense. “You know these sorts of stories are always part of a trilogy.”

  “I thought it might be a one-off like . . . like . . .” I had to think hard before an example came to mind. “Like The Last Unicorn or The Princess Bride.”

  “With how unsettled you’ve been the last couple of months? No chance.”

  I wanted to argue, but had to admit that everything that had happened since my return to Mysterium pointed to a number of unfinished story lines. I wrapped my arms around my body trying to ward off the cold and grasped for something positive to say. “Well, I suppose the good news is that even in a worst-case scenario we are thirty-three percent through the narrative and no one important has died . . . yet.”

  We both fell silent. Eldrin put his arm around my shoulders. He was blessedly warm. “God . . . d-d-damn elves,” I managed.

  “I do get cold, you know,” he said. “When the weather merits.”

  Snow began to drift down from the haze above the tops of the buildings. He raised an eyebrow quizzically and we both laughed.

  Chapter 2

  Our House Is a Very, Very, Very Small House

  We walked for a few more blocks before arriving at the Tower Estates, where Eldrin and I lived with Dawn, her two cats, and my imp. The name Tower Estates references a weather-worn sign that had been painted on the side of the building in happier times. We had taken to calling it the Dark Tower Estates, because it was a dump, and no place else in the world does run-down and crappy quite the way New York does.

  Eldrin and I hurried through the front door. The moist warmth of the steam-heated lobby wrapped around us like a blanket. I sighed with relief and held my hands out to the hissing radiator. Eldrin gave me a minute to defrost before gesturing to the stairs. “Shall we?”

  I groaned at the thought of climbing the five floors to our apartment. I looked about furtively and made a rising motion with my hand. “Do you think we could . . . ?”

  He put a finger to his lips. We both paused and listened. The building was quiet. He raised an eyebrow at me, and we scurried into the well of the stairs, where a narrow opening rose in a tight rectangle up to a dirty skylight. In the center of the well of dirty light, one of the red floor tiles had been replaced with a square of light green linoleum. It clashed hideously with the rest of the floor, but as an identifiable marker it suited our purposes. We both stepped onto the tile and pulsed a little bit of mystical power into it. An outline of complex figures blazed bright blue, and like a pair of loosed corks, we shot into the air. The magic carried u
s to the fifth-floor landing, and we floated to a stop in front of our apartment.

  We opened the door to find Dawn sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper. She had one cat on her lap and another making tiny orbits around the top of the table. Harold sat in his high chair eating his standard breakfast—a bowlful of dead white mice. Both of the cats were keeping a careful watch to see if he would drop anything.

  Dawn looked up at us sharply. “I take it from the lack of panting that the two of you didn’t walk up the stairs. Have either of you considered how the neighbors would react if they saw you zipping up and down the stairwells in violation of all this world’s natural laws?”

  Eldrin and I shared a look. It was an excellent question actually, and one we’d discussed in great detail since moving to New York. Earth borders Mysterium, and at any time there are dozens of Mysterian-trained wizards roaming about. And yet, on Earth, Penn & Teller are considered the absolute height of magic. How is that possible? Mysterium magicians are not known for their discretion or discipline, as evidenced by the fact that Eldrin and I had installed an inverted gravity field in the stairwell of our building, something that had required no small amount of effort on our part and entailed no small amount of risk to the structural integrity of the building’s foundation.

  In other worlds around Mysterium, magic, and even Mysterium magic, was practiced quite openly. On Eldrin’s home plane of Hylar, magic was almost considered a religion. Of course, Hylars thought that Mysterium magic was vulgar, which it kind of is, but they could recognize it when it was being used. By contrast, here on Earth the populace goes to great lengths to dream up impossibly improbable explanations for it; where else in the multiverse could you find a people that accepted and dismissed obvious displays of what was, at its heart, magic, like disappearing socks, a cat’s preternatural ability to know exactly where to stand that is most annoying, and the inexplicable popularity of the Kardashians.

  Despite what I considered compelling arguments in our favor, I made no attempt to defend our literal flight up the stairs. Dawn, after all, was a trained magical ethicist. Arguing was like breathing to her. Eldrin on the other hand felt compelled to give it a go. While I flopped on the couch, he stood by the door and said with uncharacteristic petulance, “We did check to make sure no one was in sight. Besides, they would probably think we were performance artists or chimney sweeps or something.”