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"Enough?" he snorted. "I can barely survive on what you give me. A baby a week and an adolescent a month, and I have to slaughter them myself. Bah!"

"You enjoy slaughtering them," I reminded him. "You told me that yourself."

"They still hardly fill my stomach." He went off grumbling and came back with my essence of mandrake.

"Where’s my diplodocus blood? I’m sure I had a vial somewhere." I found the vial. "Damn, it’s fossilised."

"Big surprise, seeing it’s a hundred million years old."

In the end we managed to get together everything I needed. With the sputtering of thick smoke, my familiar lit the four black candles in the candelabrum that he had set in the bowl of the Water of Lethe. I took up the heavy book of ichthyosaur parchment bound in griffon leather, and as I turned the pages my familiar began drawing the pentagrams and other designs in chalk from the sacred cliffs of Edhan.

I found the appropriate page and the first passage. "Here goes," I said, and began reading. My accent was probably atrocious, but then who knows how to properly pronounce "Grsdsrlzwrk skwrdbsunawk" anyway?

The candles began to smoke and spit. I nodded and turned the page and my familiar dropped fragments of vampire tooth into the flames. They immediately shot up to twice their height and turned bright red in colour.

"Mskrfzl!" I said, and slapped the book shut. There was immediately a tremendous gout of black smoke and the room grew dark for a moment. When the smoke cleared, the candles were burning with bright white flames and there was someone sitting behind them.

At first it was difficult to see who it was. Then he leaned forwards and I saw it was a hooded figure, which drew back the hood with a skeletal hand. Underneath was a skull, the empty eye sockets pools of black shadow.

"Who are you?" I asked it. "I command you to answer in the name of the Evil Spirit."

"Clack!" the skull said. "Clatter!"

"Great," said the familiar. "How do you expect it to answer without a larynx, lungs and a tongue? Poor thing’s doing its best."

"I conjure you," I said, "to grow a voice apparatus."

Something happened to the air in front of the spectre, and a moment later it had developed a pulsing set of darkened and soot-streaked lungs and a set of cracked and fissured lips.

"Speak!" I commanded. "Who are you?"

In response the spectre coughed and heaved with the force of its coughs. "Give me a fag," it coughed out. "I need a fag."

"I don’t smoke," I told it. "And you shouldn’t either. Now who are you?"

"How the hell do I know? I don’t have a brain any more, do I? So how do you expect me to have a memory?"

"Told you it would be a mess," the familiar said.

"Shut up, you," I growled, and this time threw a Silencing Spell at him. It bounced harmlessly off all the fur and splattered against a mixing bowl in which I had been, for the past week and a day, creating a Symphony Spell for a composer who had lost his touch. The low music that always stirred there stopped.

"Carry on," the familiar said. "This is beginning to rise to my expectations."

I ignored him, as I should have from the beginning. I’ve wondered many times why I settled for a demon from the Thirteenth Hell for a familiar instead of using a black cat or dog like most of my profession. My ego, I suppose. Anyway, I was now stuck with him and there was nothing to be done about it.

"Grow a brain," I told the ghost. "After you’ve finished growing it, regenerate your memories." I slapped the book’s cover for emphasis.

The ghost simmered and sputtered for a while, and the candles burned brighter and whiter than ever. Then it opened its mouth and let out an ear-splitting howl.

"What the hell was that?" I gasped.

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