1It was a foggy, cold night, where blades of grass were made crisp with small frozen crystals, so crisp they could shatter into a million pieces if an unwary foot were to tread on them, or perhaps so stiffened as to be sharp like a nail, with worse repercussions for the same, unwary foot. It was also Halloween, but most everybody was in bed by now, gorged with candies and feeling nauseated mixed with a sense of accomplishment. The waxing moon’s huge pumpkin face looked around the town with a sense of purpose as well, because it would seem, fate was not done with this seemingly so safe and normal Halloween night.

The Glooms were an ordinary family, or so it appeared—nobody suspected that Elric Gloom wasn’t really an accountant, or that Margaret Keppler-Gloom wasn’t really a librarian, nor did they suspect that Merlyn and Faust Gloom weren’t ordinary children with ordinary minds and no greater troubles than homework being due tomorrow morning. Nobody even seemed to notice that the cat was actually a malkin.

Elric Gloom and his wife had just gotten back from a cocktail party, where Elric had dressed as the pope and his wife as a large flirtatious bumblebee, while Merlyn had handed out candy at their house all night and his baby brother Faust stuffed his face and started having a tantrum in which he kicked at the walls and rolled around on the ground screaming. Merlyn ignored his bother and started watching horror movies with who was undoubtably his girlfriend, although Elric and Margaret seemed to think eleven was too young to have a girlfriend, and insisted the two sit on opposite sides of the sofa. They had just gotten into the first ten minutes when all at once the power began to flicker, on and off, just twice, and very slowly.

“Was there supposed to be a storm tonight?” Elric asked his wife cautiously, as if by storm he meant something else entirely.

“I’ll just check the news,” Margaret said, heading upstairs despite the fact that the Gloom home had only one television, just like most homes did back in then. Merlyn’s girlfriend gave her an odd look as she passed.

“Do you—“ she started to ask.

“Oh, I suspect she wants to look at the radio,” Merlyn laughed nervously. “I mean, listen to the radio.” He looked around cautiously before squashing himself into the recliner as if he wanted it to swallow him whole to save him from embarrassment.

The Glooms were, in fact, descended from a long line of sorcerers, elves, fairies, magicians, and phantoms, and together the compilation resulted in a gigantic mess. Elric Gloom could stretch his fingers, hands, and any other limbs whenever he liked, and sometimes when he didn’t, as well as being able to fly, float, and disappear. Margaret was from a different family, but she had unusual powers of her own, including flying, floating, and the usual disappearing, as well as the ability to turn most anything into most anything else, commonly called alchemy. Merlyn had a rare talent called Spooky Doppler Hex, but luckily his was weak and could easily be controlled. It was Faust who they were concerned about, because Faust did not have any powers yet at all, but, being aged five and a half, the typical age when powers manifested, he was about to.

“Well according to the uh, scanner, I mean radio, there’s high electrical concentration about,” Margaret laughed nervously, sitting down on the cat, which being a malkin began cursing and clawing at her round rump. Merlyn’s girlfriend didn’t notice the cat attack, nor did she notice when Margaret sailed it clawing out of the room in a giant bubble. Margaret twisted her fingers about in anxiety and motioned to her husband to join her in the dining room.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Elric started to say, when suddenly there was a loud and tremendous boom. All the windows in the house shook like an earthquake, and that was when they noticed that it was in fact caused by Faust kicking the wall. Margaret and Elric’s eyes went wide as the chandelier swayed over their heads and the angled skylights near the ceiling threatened to shatter.

“Baby, stop it!” Margaret cried in fear.

“My god, he’s got The Foot of Zeus. Marvelous!” Elric commented absentmindedly, seemingly unaware of the damage their son was threatening to the house.

“No!” Faust shouted. “I don’t want it!”

“What the heck is going on?!” Merlyn’s girlfriend demanded to know.

“Merlyn get her out of here!” Margaret called angrily. “Now I’ve got to erase her memory!”

“What?” the girlfriend asked stupidly as Merlyn pulled her along by her arm. He was just about to open the door when the entire house got deathly still and quiet, and then, they all looked up. Everyone in the house that night now had open mouths and wide eyes, because this is what they saw.

All about the ceiling floated glowing green lights which might have been spirit orbs or might have been something else entirely, and they had caught Faust in a net of thin glowing webbing and were pulling him up, making him seem to float about in the air if you hadn’t already noticed the thin lines of coming from phantom to phantom to lift him. Faust’s eyes were aglow with white light and he was thrashing about in a hyper-tantrum, which unfortunately was caused by the candy, and then his whole body began to glow as he fought against the lines holding him suspended in the air like a bug in a spider’s web. All at once tendrils of light began to writhe of their own will out of his hands, while sharp ferocious and vicious-looking teeth began to grow in his mouth like a monster.

“Is that . . .”

“My God. That’s the strongest Spooky Doppler I’ve ever seen,” Elric said lowly in fear. “Everyone get outside! Quickly! I don’t think he can control it!”

“Mommy!” Faust sobbed as they ran quickly to the alcove in which the front door sat.

“Baby, I’m right here!” Margaret cried. “Elric, I can’t leave him!”

“Margaret we don’t have any choice!” Suddenly a tendril slashed right past them, making a giant burned slash in the floor at least a foot wide and a foot deep. “He can’t control it! And the energy is building!”

“His energy is not building! He’ll be fine!”

“Then why is the hair standing up on the back of everyone’s neck in this entire damn room! It’s static electricity Margaret!” Suddenly two more tendrils shot past, one breaking apart an expensive Chinese vase before slashing Merlyn’s girlfriend across her arm deep enough to cut to the bone, the other tendril bouncing off the windows as if they were the walls of a rubber bounce-house (Margaret’s own protection spell).

“Agh! Mom, the door is locked!” Merlyn shouted.

“From the inside?!”

“It won’t open!” Faust had begun screaming again.

“Faustie!” Margaret sobbed.

“Don’t worry about him, worry about us!” Elric shouted. “He’s fine, we’re in danger!”

“We are not in danger!” she shouted. And then, her head rolled neatly to the floor in a stream of blood.

“Mom!” Merlyn screamed over the noise of his wailing brother, the freaked-out caterwauling of his girlfriend, and the smacking-banging-smashing-pounding of the tendrils.

“Faust—you’ve got to calm down,” Elric shouted as calmly as somebody can shout. But it wasn’t helping, and Faust seemed incapable of calming down in the least. “Merlyn, break the door!”

“I can’t! It’s frozen shut, there’s even ice!”

“Then take my hand, both of you! If we fly upstairs quickly enough we might avoid the tendrils,” he instructed as a tendril smashed into the wall above their heads and knocked rubble down among them. Each of the children took a hand. “Ready? One, two, three!” Quickly Elric leapt off the ground in a powerful spring and into the air, seeming to run atop it even though there was nothing to run on as he headed for the upwards spiral of the staircase, the three of them landing on the railing like mockingbirds on a power line, breathing a sigh of relief—and then a tendril reached farther than all the rest had, seemingly impossibly, upwards, and backwards, and at an angle, and just so happened to smack them at their ankles, knocking them off the railing forwards and down one and a half storeys to their deaths below. Elric tried to grab his son and his girlfriend and pull them back up by stretching his arms after them, but a maelstrom of whipping tentacles let up then, cutting off his left arm—the girlfriend fell to her death—slashing Merlyn in his side—making more rubble of the rest of the house—Elric and Merlyn landed bleeding on the ground, ran for the kitchen door under and past raging electric searing tentacles, and then with a final blow the last two members of Faust’s family were gone.

It was two hours before the chaos had died down, even the malkin was dead, scorched whole with the burning electric fire of Spooky Doppler Hex. Only Faust remained alive, hanging exhausted and miserable by the webbing from the ceiling, unable to move, unable to even turn his head enough to look and see what had happened, if they were alright of if they had just left him, but frightened, very hideously frightened, and feeling horrible guilt. At last the threads released him, neatly suspending downwards and severing one at a time to drop him gently to the ground below, looking like a spiderweb version of chutes and ladders. He landed in a pile of energy-less weary, then he looked up and saw his mother’s decapitated body; the bodies of his father and brother, impaled at once by one of his tentacles, things he had created; the body of Merlyn’s girlfriend, seemingly unharmed but for the blood coming out of her mouth; and the malkin fried to a crisp, and he let out a horrible scream and sank to his knees in sobbing horror. Apparently the neighbors had called the police, because they were banging to get into the door, which finally gave way after continual assault from five policemen with night-sticks. A flood of people came in, paramedics, firefighters, police, almost all looking shocked, a few looking like they would be sick, and all Faust could say was, “I didn’t mean to . . . I didn’t mean to.” In the end he was the only one who went in the ambulance, because everybody else went directly to the morgue, although a thorough examination revealed that there was not a mark on Faust.

Repeated attempts to find relatives proved unsuccessful, it seemed they were all dead or missing or could simply not be found, so Faust spent the rest of Halloween night in an orphanage, with nobody to talk to because everyone was asleep, so he just laid awake all night on his cot with his eyes staring wide and unblinking and unable to cry but feeling a horrid churning of emotions inside, all of them painful and inescapable and sad. He would stay at that orphanage for the next three years, quiet and sullen and alone, in spite of the fact that the orphanage was packed, because after that day his powers would not leave. Everyone thought he was some sort of a freak and were afraid of him, with reason, because he accidently broke one kid’s arm when a new power manifested, telekinesis, around a year later. Two years later he developed the power to see dead spirits, and he ran away from the orphanage because he discovered that it used to be a burial ground, and that most of the spirits would not leave him alone. When the police caught him and brought him back he was attacked by the spirits for deserting them. Fed up with being treated like dirt by everyone including himself, Faust, at an age of eight years old, decided to use his powers to his own advantage.

When everyone was asleep he bound them with a spell and when he ran away he floated, so that not a footprint was left in the muddy earth as he hovered away like a ghost. Then he flew (his first time flying and he was at first scared and then exuberant) to the city, where he wandered around to seek his fortune.

It came in the form of a miller who agreed to make him an apprentice and give him a third of the profits, but when they got back to the miller’s dirty broken-down mill in the swamp region of Bleu and he started forcing Faust to do hard labor to repair the mill and clean mud off of everything while the miller himself sat there getting drunk, Faust started to feel doubtful. Then the miller maliciously informed him that he was going to lock him in the basement, not pay him, and beat him if he didn’t work, and that he’d been lying about the apprenticeship and really wanted a servant. Faust got severely pissed off and purposefully killed the man and his one-eyed cat with Spooky Doppler. He had felt bad beyond words at his parents deaths, but Faust was a boy of harsh justice now, and felt this man deserved it. He was only ten years old. Practical-minded, Faust took all the miller’s money and his silver spoons and fled from the swamp, using his powers to escape its entangling vines, alligators, and murky waters. Faust had the idea to get himself an education in magic so that he could better control and manifest his powers and get a little money besides.

Faust went to a boarding school called Blacklock and Grimgour, where he didn’t fit in very well despite his intelligence and manufactured wealth. He had also lied about his age and said he was twelve to get in (which he looked but didn’t act), told them his family were incredibly wealthy foreign investors, and used his brainpower as a means of winning over teachers, the result of which was a boastful, immature, know-it-all rich kid. When he actually turned twelve, Faust got kicked out because orphanage documents surfaced explaining that he was lying, but by now Faust had taken a lot of advanced classes and gotten a good education in magic, mathematics, and science—good enough to apply for testing to get his Magic, Sorcery, or Wizarding licence. (Magicians deal with entertaining magic, Sorcerers deal with obscure or dark magic, and Wizards deal with practical, everyday magic. Faust picked Sorcery and passed with top scores.) In addition Faust also had secured a small following of cut-throat rich kids who liked his exceptional powers and serious demeanor, so he started a business as a sorcerer, doing such feats as biological transformations, necromancy (with dubious results but that’s really the best it gets), possessions, exorcisms, and potion and poison making. He’d even learned to control Spooky Doppler enough to use the tentacles as helping hands when performing magic, and used telekinesis to similar ends. While he gained an even larger following, he had a reputation for being somewhat evil, and lots of people didn’t like him bringing the dead to life because they basically just became sickening zombies. Faust was unrepentant though, and began to work with the church itself, even getting his own sect called the Deathlords. He was now eighteen, when he performed his most controversial feat—to poison the pope and bring him back to life before an audience, explaining that if his body was not given time to undergo entropy, that he would not become a zombie, thus proving that death does not damage the soul and is but a part of life. It seemed to succeed, until the pope started to undergo entropy while still alive, turning into a mindless zombie.

A mob formed against Faust, and stormed the church, soon to break in and kill him, so Faust did the only thing he could think of—he prayed—to Satan. Seeing death as but a part of life and evil as but a part of good, he reasoned that Satan had come originally of God and was thus still a part of him, so it was okay to call upon his powers. Seized by green glowing demons surging out of the well over which he was stooped, Faust’s soul at his request was ripped from his body in exchange for the power to rule all, only his mind remaining and all that was immortal gone and now in the hands of Satan. Without regrets feelings or remorse, Faust entirely obliterated his pursuers, crowning himself pope and taking over the entire country of Gromit in a single night. Satan also made him and his line rulers of Deathworld, formerly known as Limbo, formerly known as Bruce’s Tax Agency. Anyone opposed to Faust was captured and killed, including King Alexandre and Queen Nichole and the entire royal family of Mars. Only one person in line for the throne survived, Prince Radstab, mostly because Faust let him. Draining all the wealth and spoils to himself and his cohorts, Faust caused the people of Gromit incredible hardships and an underground resistance formed of Gromitians and Canadians (yeah I know, Canadians) and under the leadership of Radstab they overthrew Faust and reclaimed the throne for the line of Mars, although the country of Gromit would never be the same again. Radstab was a terrible king with sketchy morals and a lack of intelligence.

Before Faust’s death, he had created two heirs for the throne—first a boy transformed from a scarecrow, who appeared to have no magical powers at all after several attempts at speeding up their formation. Then he made a girl from his own black heart—in fact, he made her on the evening he was captured and executed by Radstab. Now down in the bowels of Hell as a slave, Faust considers making his comeback, because he’s still really pissed off—the only thing he needs is his soul back, and a body. In an ancient tome hidden in the back of a soggy basement library, downstairs from the very academy he had attended in his youth (Blacklock and Grimgour), Faust wrote a spell with a fate hex assigned to it, that one day his daughter would come to Blacklock and Grimgour and find it. While the spell looks like a summoning of Faust to grant ruling power, it is actually a spell which summons Faust and gives him ruling power, so that he is incarnate in this world and can take over the body of the spellcaster and turn it into his own.

Beatrix is now twelve, soon to be thirteen, and Faust has been dead for that many years. Beatrix found the spell three nights ago in the library, and is about to try it out . . .