Littered about the room were books with titles like Black Magic/White Magic; The Arcane Art; Witches, Voodoo; Essays on the Dark Arts; Third World Religions; A History of Magic; Magicians of the Bible; Gray’s Index to the Bizarre and the Unusual; Demon Lore. It was in one of these volumes that he found the key, and he had spent weeks checking and double-checking, cross-referencing, correlating, compiling his facts and perfecting the perfect spell. To him this room was not a high-school lad’s bedroom in an old farmhouse on a dirt road in the backwoods, but the secluded and mysterious lair of an apprentice sorcerer about to step into the realm of a true mystic. The walls were not wood; they were ancient and chipped stone. The books were not paperbacks and library loans; they were parched scrolls and musty tomes.