Do it. One more spell.
I ignored the voice and swallowed the pills with the water on my desk. I'd cast three spells the previous night, three spells I probably shouldn't have cast.
I put my hands on the back of my head and tried to massage the headache away. My entire body hurt, like I'd spent the entirety of the previous night at the gym, at least it felt how I assumed spending at an entire night at a gym would feel like. Admittedly, I'd never done it but it seemed right.
Anyway, the human body is not built to channel the dark powers of the Eldrich through them, especially for what I did. Most practicing wizards and whatnot, without the aid of a Necronomicon or other dark entities fueling their magic, usually can only manifest things like curses and at best mild telekenesis on their own, at least to the mortal world. I had super heated a dagger and turned a solid to a liquid and back. That was some serious power.
And now I was paying for it.
One more spell. Just a quick one to make the pain go away.
I jerked my head up and opened my laptop. The template for a police report I had started the previous night was there. A few more details and it would be ready to send in. I focused on getting the details of Mrs. Jensen's bonds right. Someone in the little group had known how to tie people down, and that was not good news.
I think that's what pissed me off the most about the previous evening. It was the seventh "cult" I'd busted up in a month, but this one was the most threatening to a person's life. The worst the others had done was noise obstruction, scaring the neighbors and that one mutilated cat I'd had to deal with (That kid's going to jail). This is the first one that had tried a human sacrifice, and that had set me off.
A knock came at my door. It was well past my time to open shop so I shouted "Come in" to the figure on the other side of the semi-transparent glass. Detective Holmes (Seriously that's his name) walked, or rather, waddled in and took a seat on the other side of my desk.
Detective Holmes (Don't make jokes about it he hates that) looked a lot like how I would imagine Scruff the Crime Dog would look in human form, and if the owner fed him table scraps. He had massive jowls connected by a bushy blond mustache flaked with white. His hair, nearly gone, had been a striking blond when he had started. The man looked more like Wilford Brimley than he did Sherlock Holmes, or even a cop for that matter. The chair creaked as he adjusted himself to get comfortable and I half expected it to collapse beneath his weight.
"Heard you had some fun last night," he said by way of greeting.
"Yeah, fun. Just what I need at 9:00 at night, a scared husband ranting about how his wife has been abducted by a cult."
"Yeah well thank God it wasn't a real one!" he said throwing a newspaper on my desk.
My first thought was wondering why on earth Holmes bought a newspaper, then I saw the headline:
"CULT ACTIVITY ON THE RISE, POLICE BAFFLED"
"Baffled? Is that still even a word?" I said sliding the paper back.
"It is when your industry is dying, you want to sell headlines" he said back with a laugh in his throat.
"Thing is though, we do have a puzzle with the new cults"
"Tom, these are hardly cults. They're mostly just kids trying to have some fun. I mean, yeah, we've seen a lot more lately and last nights got kinda intense but it's a phase"
"Got kinda intense? Harvey, they had to saw that kid out from the floor last night. What did that cost you?"
I winced at that. The only reason the Department of Extra Dimensional Activities (DEDA) let me do what I do was under the condition that I kept my magic under control. Half the cops in the department wanted to disassociate with me, the other half wanted me locked up in Arkham. Tom Holmes was the only man to give me the time of day.
"I'm fine" I lied, trying to sound nonchalant.
One quick spell and he'll believe every word you say
"Harvey," Detective Holmes said as he pulled something from his coat. "Have you ever seen this?"
On top of the paper he flopped a giant three ringed binder covered in hand drawn pentagrams in red ink. I must've really been out of it to not have noticed him carry this thing in. I stood up and flipped the binder open to read "The Necronomicon" typed out on the page. I flipped through the book finding pictures and diagrams all neatly compiled into the binder, like someone's elaborate homework assignment.
"I... Tom, what is this?" I asked as I stopped on a page where a man with a goat's head was dancing in a circle with three women.
"That's what we're hoping you can tell us" he answered. "Harv, do you think it's..."
"No," I said firmly. "No it's not real. The spells, the images... No, this is not a real Necronomicon."
"We figured as much," Tom said, letting loose a breath he'd apparently been holding. "We cross referenced parts of it with the sanitized version we have, but I wanted you to look at it for sure."
"Yeah, Tom. This isn't it." I said sitting back down. I'd only seen a real Necronomicon a handful of times, and only studied it once. The thought made me want to reach for my chest where the black tendrils sprung from. I sipped my water instead. "Where did you get this?" I asked.
"In the floor kid's house" he said. "As soon as he was booked we went to his house on a standard sweep for any dangerous contraband and found this thing. His mom said she thought it was for one of his classes. If you look on the back page, you can see where each member of his little club signed it in what looks like blood."
I didn't want to see it. Of course they had though, it was only the most cliche'd thing to do when in a satanic cult next to the pentagrams and someone calling themselves Lucifer.
"Did he tell you what website he got it on?" I asked. For over 30 years knowledge of the Eldrich had been public knowledge, but with the advent of the internet misinformation had spread faster than mono in a freshman dorm.
"That's the really weird part. Harvey look again at the front page," he said as he opened the book back up and pointed to the title. "See how the wording is kinda fuzzy? He photocopied this. He photocopied the whole damn book!"
I raised an eyebrow. The binder held what had to be at least 300 pages. That would be a pain to photocopy. Plus why do that instead of just finding it online?
"So you think this thing is getting passed around? Like a Playboy some kid finds in his dad's study?" I asked.
"Apparently. We're going through the names of the other members of both his and the other cults we've messed with lately and see if any of them know about this book."
"And the floor kid?"
"He clammed up about it. Won't answer any questions about it, won't even look at it when we brought it in. Now mind you, he talked from the time we find him all the way till then, saying how lord this and lord that was going to curse us and how dare we get his mugshot and bla bla bla..." Tom made talking gestures with his hands. I chuckled at it.
"I can ask around, see what I can dig up on this book." I said, looking at it again. "Don't know what I'll find, most of the people who are serious about this stuff don't need counterfeit books, and would for sure not use a photocopier to obtain said books"
Tom picked up the binder and newspaper as he stood. I suspected my guest chair was breathing a sigh of relief to be freed from Tom's round shape. When I first met him, I had to suppress my impulse to make Sherlock Holmes jokes, but now I had to try not to look at him and say "I'm Wilford Brimley and I have diabetes".
"Let me know what you find, Harvey" he said and extended his hand. I took it and we shook. I noticed as we did the tattoo on his wrist glowed faintly, informing him that he was touching a person with magic. Tom of course didn't need the reminder, but I still thought it was a neat little trick.
As he walked out of the room I sat down again at my desk, my headache starting to dissipate and my limbs beginning to loosen up. The first rule of being a private detective was to ask a lot of questions and several immediately came to mind: Who would want to make a fake Necronomicon? Why would they pass it freely to college kids? What's to gain from it?
Cast a spell to find out. Scry into the origins of the book.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Another side effect from using magic was the temptation to use it again, especially the type I could do. In general magic came in three forms: inherited, meaning that someone along your family tree had encountered an Eldrich creature or had got ahold of a real copy of the Necronomicon. Then there was learned, which meant YOU had a copy of the Necronomicon or one of the less powerful spell books that shifted around the black market and was teaching yourself magic. Then last but not least directly from the source itself. You'd made a bargain with something beyond time and space to get power and they had granted it to you, which was the boat I was currently in. Most people did magic immediately after they got it, very quickly either killing themselves or driving themselves mad.
I was a.... special case...
The fact was though, the temptation was strong today. Plus I had questions I needed to answer.
Looks like tonight was a good time to hit up my support group.
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