A look at the future.

Today I got the letter from dad’s solicitor. Uncle Gordon came for the opening, but there was nothing in there for him and now he’s gone. Back down South for another god knows how long.

Everything has been left to me, to be held in trust with the solicitor for the next six months. So Gordon’s mumblings about being my only family went south with him.

It specifically mentions the study. The study and all its contents are the exclusive property of me, and not to be removed from the house until I reach eighteen. I guess it means the contents aren’t to be removed, not the room itself. No other part of the estate is mentioned in detail. I thought about that for a good while before I called for Angela.

The first thing she did was throw out the dead rat – which might have been what I could smell from the front door, and I’ve been unfair to Norman. She said she didn’t know what we were thinking of, keeping it.
“We thought it might be important,” said Norman, who’s been feeding the others in their cage.
“It was important while it was dying. Now it’s just dead, so it’s dead.”

The blank books are spell books, Angela tells us. The leather bindings are colour coded to a common rule: red covers are demonology spells, for locating, summoning and binding; black books are necromancy, for returning the dead to differing levels of life; blue books are astral magic, for contacting other planes of existence; green covers contain spells on natural magic, to manipulate living creatures or plants; purple books hold inspirational spells, also known as royal magic, dealing in the creation of matter and energy out of nothing. She doesn’t know what the white covers signify.

Nor does she know much about the other objects in the room. The curios and artefacts she’ll guess at, she says. Similar objects have been described to her. The bottles and jars are unidentifiable, so she can’t help there, except in their general nature.

Magic is a corruption of the proper order, and accordingly requires a deal of power. All the objects and liquids are vessels for that power. The objects are vessels that are tools for specific tasks, while the liquids (Angela calls them potions, of course) are spells already cast with a delay in the result. Demons work the same way, she says. People like her use demons as vessels for magic, because they have no power of their own.

She walked up to the study’s vast mirror and said,
“Your father drew him out of here, and bound him to my shadow.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Tomlin. The demon.”
“I thought he was your boyf-” said Norman, but I cut him off.
“Why are the books blank?”
“Well that’s a worry. Because your father didn’t write those books, did he – they conform to the codes, so he must have acquired them. They're probably older than him. And if they’re blank it’s because they were written in magic, and the magic has failed. Do you see?”
“No. But what about the books that aren’t blank, the ones full of gibberish?”
“They don’t matter. They’re just more spells, but lesser spells. It’s the blank pages that are the worry – because if the magic in those pages died too, then it wasn’t just your father’s power that stopped working, and maybe that means Tomlin is lost forever.”

Angela is beautiful, but quite mad. I've met girls like her before.