More Fantasy in the City

The Trouble with Trifles

There was a demon in the custard.

It was hard to tell but it was certainly there. The congealing liquid swirled and churned as something beneath the surface moved with increasing urgency. Every now and again the congealing yellow skin would bulge out and a grotesque face could be glimpsed trying to push through, a face that Terry had only ever seen in his copy of the Necronomicon. Terry knew he had a problem. He had a trifle to finish preparing and he had a horde of guests arriving in twenty minutes. Possessed desserts were not something he had time for right now.

Why he kept that book in the kitchen, God alone knew. The dread, hide cover bulged ominously between two unwanted Christmas presents, Jamie Oliver's Mockney Dinners and Nigel Slater's Crackers. It was as if the tome squatted on that bookshelf like a sentient thing. Creepy. It was one of the reasons why he never took it down.

He had heard about that infamous book for years in forums and threads across the internet devoted to his particular interests in the occult. Terry had read references to it in the spell books and bestiaries that he had collected. Club meets across the city for devotees of arcana had buzzed with news of original copies sold at auction for terrible sums. Money, children, shares of your soul, the recently interred, all had changed hands as payment for this book down the years. On one particular occasion, while working as a volunteer at the local old people's home, he had even spent an incredible afternoon chatting with a retired wizard who had actually read it.

“Of course, you must have cuneiform if you really want to appreciate the poetry of it. A translation simply won't do and they are frequently incorrect,” the old man had said, poking Terry in the chest with a withered finger. “Be careful of those! They can cause a few problems, you know. You never know what you could be summoning if the spell has been mistranslated. An Archduke of Hell is a tricky character to explain your error to if all you wanted was a toad demon to tackle the slugs.”

Naturally the day he had spotted the book in a car boot sale he had been consumed with lust to possess it. Translations of the Necronomicon abounded and, by law, the spells were usually abridged to avoid the sort of unpleasantness that Mr Morris had described. They were cheap, leather bound knock-offs of the real thing and tended to clutter up the house of the average magic enthusiast. At some point these all ended up in car boot sales – sad things traded on to eager newbies as if some latent power still resided in their eviscerated spells.

But Terry's sixth sense had lit up like a Christmas tree when he had glimpsed a battered brass-bolstered corner of an aged cover out of the corner of his eye at one stall, whose owner seemed more interested in getting Terry to look over her collection of knitted faeries.

It had been lying, neglected and forgotten, at the bottom of a cardboard box full of cheap paperbacks and direct to DVD martial arts movies. Rooting through the box, Terry had realised he was on to something as the titles of the movies grew increasingly bizarre the closer the proximity of the DVDs to the book. The Way of the Demon,Fist of Furcas, The Thirty Six Chambers of Hell, and Enter the Dagon were the last few movies that he pulled from the box to reveal a cover that was reputedly bound with human skin. This was not a translation. This was the real deal. It was just totally awesome!

After securing an incredible deal with the stallholder - “That old thing? You can have it if you give me twenty quid for the DVDs.” - Terry returned home on a euphoric high. What a turn up! Would there ever be a better deal in the history of demonology? There could be if he could master cuneiform. The Legions and Lords of Hell would soon be his to command!

The ambitions of men are often dashed for banal reasons. A chauffeur taking a wrong turn, putting the heir to the Austrian throne in the path of an assassin's bullet, started the First World War. Someone forgetting to close a gate doomed Constantinople, sealing the fate of the Byzantine Empire. Terry realised that possessing the Necronomicon was an altogether different proposition than actually mastering it. Cuneiform was just so damned hard to learn!