By Martin Pearson
“I must say, you disappoint me, O’Stoat.”
If Durosimi was surprised, you would have been hard-pressed to notice. This was despite the fact that he had been quietly sitting in his study, poring over a scholarly tome of some description, and feeling confident that he was quite alone.
“Well, I am indeed sorry to hear that,” he said, nonchalantly, turning to face the intruder. “And I am sure that you have your reasons.”
Durosimi had endured a frustrating and totally fruitless week. It had been his plan to conjure Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god, tasked with guiding souls into the afterlife. While this was certainly ambitious, the information that the old god had apparently visited Hopeless in recent centuries, in his role of Psychopomp, led Durosimi to suppose that enticing him back was not an impossibility.
The difficulties in achieving this ambition had been purely logistical. The only clue that Durosimi possessed for summoning Anubis was contained in The Egyptian Book of the Dead, a copy of which had been gathering dust on his bookshelf for years. Unfortunately, the process required a fresh corpse and a group of people with wonderfully strong stomachs to carry out the evisceration rites. After putting out a few feelers to find if a such band of hardy souls could be found on the island, Durosimi drew a blank. He was not squeamish by any means, but, with the best will in the world, felt that he could not be expected to single-handedly perform the whole ghastly business of evisceration, store the brain and internal organs in jars and mummify the body, while simultaneously reciting the various spells necessary to invoke Anubis. It was just too much for one person to do, even Durosimi. There had to be another way.
He was in the process of consulting his library of spell-books, epigraphs, cosmologies, bestiaries, grimoires and encyclopaedias, but so far, to no avail. That was when his investigations were interrupted by the scruffily dressed young stranger who had seemingly manifested in his study.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” said Durosimi conversationally. “I have no idea who you are, but, somehow, feel certain that have we met before.”
“Yes, our paths have crossed once or twice,” conceded the stranger. “And I have always considered you to be somewhat wiser than the other buffoons inhabiting this miserable rock.”
“I am flattered,” said Durosimi, dryly. “So, who are you?”
A green mist crept into the room and swirled around the body of the stranger, which began to flex and change alarmingly.
With a mixture of fear and fascination, Durosimi shrank back as he watched the metamorphosis. The whole room appeared to shift and grow in order to accommodate the terrifying form of the god, Anubis.
“You dare seek to summon me, mortal?” growled the jackal-headed deity, in dead and dreadful sepulchral tones.
“Then you will know no mercy. I will flay your skin and set your body alight.”
Towering over Durosimi, he reached down and laid a huge hand upon the sorcerer’s throat.
“Mercy, great lord. I did not wish to offend you,” whimpered Durosimi.
Anubis drew back and regarded Durosimi for what felt like an age. Then he laughed. He laughed until the tears rolled down his jackal’s face, which dissolved back into the young stranger, once more restored to human size.
“Oh, stop grizzling, for goodness sake,” he said. “Do you honestly think, even if you were able to raise him, that Anubis would bend to your will as easily as that quack of a doctor who seems to be inordinately fond of your whisky?”
“Then who the devil…?” Durosimi stopped in mid-sentence, suddenly aware of the identity of his visitor.
“You!” he snarled. “Trickster!”
“It took you long enough,” grinned Trickster, bowing with a flourish.
“The last news that I heard, was that you were chased over the edge of a cliff in the guise of a white hare. Running from a band of irate spoonwalkers, by all accounts.”
“Hmm, that was unfortunate, especially for the hare,” admitted Trickster, “but I’ve kept an eye on this place several times since then.”
Durosimi went to a cupboard and withdrew an unopened bottle of single-malt whisky, and two Waterford crystal glass tumblers.
“I’ll be honest, old friend, there have been odd times when I have really detested you,” he said. “And today, probably ranks highest among them.”
Trickster grinned.
“We are birds of a feather, Durosimi,” he said. “And that is why I won’t ask where your whisky comes from; it is best not to know. By the way, do you like my new meat-suit? I found it slumped on a bench outside ‘The Crow’.”
Several hours, and half a bottle of whisky, later, Durosimi and Trickster sat companionably in the glow of a dozen candles.
“So, those dog-headed Psychopomps turning up over the last three hundred years. They were all you?”
“Of course they were,” said Trickster. “And you, of all people, fell for it, hook, line and sinker.”
“But why?” asked Durosimi.
“Why not? It was fun. The clue is in my name.”
“I’m surprised you fooled Drury. That blasted dog is a lot more intelligent than most of the islanders.”
“That was easy,” laughed Trickster. “I told him that all dogs are sacred, and when he was sick of the island, he could come to me.”
“So, no one was sent to Purgatory?”
“I wouldn’t know how to get there.”
Durosimi grew suddenly serious.
“Are you not concerned that you might have offended those three deities?” he asked. “I imagine they can all be horribly wrathful when they want to.”
“Gula and Xolotl are pretty much forgotten,” said Trickster, “and no one has seen hide nor hair of Anubis for a couple of thousand years. When people stop believing in the old gods, they die. It is as simple as that.”
It was a typical fog-strewn Hopeless night when Trickster left Durosimi’s home. The waning crescent mood gave scant illumination as he wavered drunkenly through the trees.
If the visibility had been better, and his young meat-suit less infused with alcohol, Trickster may have spotted the huge and ominous shape of the decidedly less-than-amused jackal-headed creature who drifted silently behind him.
