Casting the Runes

The CampfireThe openingFree

There was a man named Karswell. He lived in a big house in the English countryside, and he was rich, and he was cruel, and he studied magic. Real magic. Old, ugly magic out of forbidden books.

He wanted to be taken seriously as a scholar, so he wrote a paper about alchemy and the occult and sent it to a learned society to publish. The society sent it to an expert to read, a quiet man named Dunning. Dunning read it and said it was garbage, and the society rejected it.

Karswell found out who had rejected him.

People who crossed Karswell had a habit of dying. A few years earlier, a man named Harrington had written a nasty review of one of Karswell's books. Three months later, Harrington was out walking one evening and seemed to run from something in terror, climbed a tree, fell out of it, and broke his neck.

Nobody could explain what he had been running from.

A few days after the rejection, odd things started happening to Dunning.

On the tram home, he saw an advertisement in the window, among the usual ads for soap and medicine, that said:

In memory of John Harrington, F.S.A., of The Laurels, Ashbrooke. Died September 18th, 1889. Three months were allowed.

The next day it was gone. The tram company said there had never been any such sign.

Then, in a library, a man he'd never met dropped some papers. Dunning picked them up and handed them back. A smiling, heavy man with a soft voice.

Karswell.

When Dunning got home, he found a slip of paper in among his own notes. A thin strip of paper with strange symbols written on it in red and black.

Runes.

As he looked at it, a gust from the window lifted it out of his hand, and it flew into the fireplace, and burned.