Excerpt: Black Magic

The den was always much colder than the rest of the house. He’d forgotten these little things, things that now mattered. There was a fireplace at the back of the room, but he hadn’t taken the effort to look for firewood in the basement. He hadn’t even taken the effort to the burn the last few logs in the room, still sitting where his father had put them before he’d doused himself with champagne and Triazolam.

It was nearly midnight, and Christopher Krantz was sitting at his father’s desk, staring blankly at his father’s papers. This whole house, of course, had belonged to his father, just as he, himself (he supposed), had once, as well. Now it was his. The sitting room with its stuffed green sofas, the little hallway coming in from the front door, the front door itself, the den, the attic, the ladder of dark, indeterminable wood that led up to the attic, the basement, the racks of firewood in the basement. He supposed he’d rent out one or more of the rooms—probably the basement ones—to get some return. Living here wasn’t cheap. But everything from ground up was now his. The thought was not particularly comforting. The house was too cold—cold like a coffin, a morgue.

It’d only been little more than a month ago that he’d never touched a dead human body. He’d never even before been to a funeral. He had been, he supposed, a virgin to death. The comparison was morbid, certainly not dinner-table-friendly, but it was somewhat funny—almost. He’d touched death twice now, and it was like the first time he’d had sex: nothing discernable had changed. He’d not felt his mortality more heavily; nor had he felt any less like an eager, fumbling boy. In the last few years, his father had been only a vague, almost negligible presence. He could close his eyes and, forgetting the funeral, forgetting the fact that he was alone in this cold, crooked house, almost imagine that his father was away, traveling, and would soon be back in a week. (That was ridiculous, of course; his father never left for more than a few grumpy days at a time.) If Christopher Krantz was any closer to some greater thing, such as life, death, or creation, he didn’t feel it.

And yet—as it was with this night—everything was changed. All of it. Pascal Cadmus hadn't died because he’d gulped down his fish too fast. His death had come from a different quarter. Pascal Cadmus, celebrated physicist and renowned composer of string quartets, had choked and expired on the floor of the Faculty Lounge because Christopher Krantz’s father had cursed him with black magic before he’d died.