Dante Magus and "The Historian's Debt"

Bewildering Stories has kindly published my story "The Historian's Debt"  which unplanned though it was, falls perfectly in the year of Dante's 7th centenniel celebrations! It was also selected for the quarter's Editor's Choice. For the story behind the story read on: 

Montague Rhodes James is a particular predilection of mine: how can I not love a Victorian /Edwardian scholar of matters apocryphal who amused his students with tales of horror and dread? I read his Ghost Stories of an Antiquarian so often that binding and pages quite literally fell apart in my hands. His stories of are redolent of old books and beeswax and pipe tobacco and I preach their gospel wherever I can. I had meant for long years to write a story in homage to him, in which dusty, fusty scholars get up to truck with the uncanny. 

                                            MR James. 

So I thought, after a run of dead ends and duds in my own efforts that perhaps the time had come to pay this literary tribute, for in fact, how hard could it be to follow in the master's footsteps? Famous last words, for in "deceptively simple" the key word here is "deceptively."

With a PhD in medieval history (well art history, sort of, but t'will serve) I wanted to anchor whatever was to be the crux issue firmly in reality. The Templar curse has been long trod over. I thought perhaps of the pet demon the Philip the Fair accused Pope Boniface VIII of keeping in his ring. That, however, presented other technical problems. Then I recalled a passing remark of my dissertation advisor that in 1319 Dante was considered one of three magicians powerful enough to assasinate the pope by occult means.

The idea was that John XXII was much hated - well by a vast quantity of people, but particularly so by the Visconti of Milan. Execrating his power grabs in their territories they decided they had had quite enough. And so they turned to a cleric-cum-magus by the name of Bartolomeo Cagnolati, not once but twice. Each time he refused, and in between even spent time in prison. The idea was that a small silver effigy of the pope (see the story for more precise details) was to undergo certain fumigations and chants that would spell the demise of the vicar of Christ on earth. And if Bartolomeo would not do it, they would simply turn to Dante Alighieri. 

Following up on this I found that the article (here if you can read French) making this discovery dated to 1909, a perfectly (M.R.) Jamesian year. Then I found that the author, a certain Robert Michel, died young, under enemy fire in 1914. He was also a member of the Ecole Francaise de Rome which twice over gave me a scholarship to study in Rome. 

At first I wanted to fictionalize Robert Michel and give him a sister (like Shakespeare's) who would pursue the avenue that he no longer could. That, however, seemed disrespectful to his memory, especially given the form the story was taking, and thus Aurélien Augustin and his twin sister Adrienne came leaping forth from my brain to seek out these paths into the abyss. This dovetails nicely with my feeling that all historians, or at least the finest, are ultimately necromancers.

What happens in the story is the story's to tell.