The rest of the evening passed in a blur. Whatever revelations the Spirit Guide offered, they made no impression upon Roger. His mind was already buzzing off on tangents far beyond his initial revelation. For once Roger accepted the fact that the occult existed and could be contacted, it opened an entire Pandora’s box of possibilities to be explored. A man with unlimited ambition and ambiguous morality could achieve great things if he dared. And Roger dared.

Within a few days, he assembled an occult library consisting of some of the greatest and most frightening volumes of black magic lore ever written. Many of the books were readily available in cheap paperback format, thus leading to Roger’s second great revelation. Over the centuries, many thousands of people had access to these same works and the spells they contained. But little evidence existed to show that any of those other seekers successfully mastered the powers described.

It was obvious that the spells as written were not enough to summon the forces of darkness. Ever the computer hacker, Roger guessed the solution in an instant. No magician willingly shared secrets with his fellows. All of the spells in the forbidden books were complete. But they each contained minor mistakes and glitches that only the original user knew to be false. It was as if they had been published in code, without the necessary key to unlock their power.

Fortunately, Roger owned the greatest code-breaker of all time, a home computer. He had been using it for cracking access codes and breaking into secret files for years. The magic tomes were just another hacker challenge—one that he accepted eagerly. For a change, the payoff would be worth the trouble.