“You ever hear the four great tenets of hierarchical magic?” I asked her, absently. “’To know, to dare, to will, to be silent.’“
Then, pulling the mouth’s corners up into a derisive, toothless grin, and conjuring a big smil
e of my own: “So why don’t you just consider yourself Dr. Faustus for a day, and shut the fuck up?”
She gasped. Doug caught himself starting to snicker, and toned that way down, way fast.
“Hey, guy,” he said, slipping into Neanderthal “protective” mode. “Remember who’s footin’ the tab here.”
“This is a ritual,” I pointed out. “Not a conversation.”
“Long as I’m payin’, buddy, it’s whatever I say it is,” Doug snapped back.
Thus proving himself exactly the type of typical three “c” client I’d already assumed him to be—callow, classist and cheap. Kind of loser wants McDonald’s-level asslicking along with his well-protected probe into the Abyss, plus an itemized list of everything his Daddy’s trust-fund money was paying for, and special instructions on how to make the whole venture look like a tax-deductible educational expense.
“To Sumer’s carrion lord of the pit, He Who Holds The Sceptre Of Ereshkigal, one dog’s soul, for services rendered,“ I thought, shooting Doug a glance, as I finished laying the foundations of Humbaba’s features. And: Try writing that one off, you spoiled, Gapified snakefucker.
Well, I wax virulent. But these rich boys do get my goat, especially when they want something for nothing, and it just happens to be my something. Though my contempt for them as a breed may well stem from a certain lingering sense-memory of what I used to be like, back when I was one.
In the seven years since my rich old Baba Hark first paid my eventually prodigal way from downtown Hong Kong to RTA at Ryerson, I’ve dealt with elementals, demons, angels and ghosts, all of whom soon proved to be their own particular brand of pain in the ass. The angels I called on spoke a really obscure form of Hebrew; the demons decided my interest in them meant I was automatically laid open to twenty-four-hour-a-day Temptation, which didn’t slack off until I had a sigilic declaration of complete neutrality tattooed on either palm. Elementals are surly and uncooperative. Ghosts cling—literally, in some cases. I remember coming to see Carraclough Devize one time (in hospital, as increasingly ever), only to have her stare fixedly over my left shoulder where the spectre of a dead man I’d recently helped to report his own murder still drifted—hand on the gap between the base of my skull and the top of my spine, through which most possessive spirits first enter. And ask, dryly: “So who’s your new friend?”
She dabbled in magic too, ex-child medium that she is, just like the rest of us—helped me raise my share of demons, in some vain attempt to exorcize her own. Before the rest of the Black Magic Posse dropped off, that is, and I turned professional. And she decided it was easier acting like she was crazy all the time than it ever was trying to pretend she was entirely sane.
Now I make my living calling on obsolete gods like Our Lord of Entrails here: They’re far more cost-effective, in terms of customer service, since they don’t demand reverence, just simple recognition. The chance to move, however briefly, back from the Wide World into the Narrow one.
Because the Wide World, as Carra herself first told me, is simply where things happen; the Narrow World, hub of all influences, is where things are made to happen. Where, if you cast your wards and research your incantations well enough, you can actually grab hold of the intersecting wheels of various dimensions, and spin them—however briefly—in the direction your client wants them to go.
Meanwhile, however—
“Way it strikes me,” Doug Whatever went on, “in terms of parts and labor alone, I must be givin’ you a thousand bucks every fifteen minutes. And aside from the dead dog, I still don’t see anything worth talkin’ about.”
And: Oh no?
Well . . .
I closed my eyes. Felt cold purple inch down my fingers, nails suddenly alight. My hands gloving themselves with the bleak and shadeless flame of Power. That singing, searing rush—a kindled spark flaring up all at once, straight from my cortex to my groin, leaving nothing in between but the spell still on my lips.
Doug and his girlfriend saw it lap up over my elbows, and stepped back. As they did, a sidelong glance showed me what I wanted to see: Doug transfixed, bull-in-a-stall still and dumb, while Mrs. Doug’s little blue eyes got even rounder. But she wasn’t staring at my sigil-incised palms, or the flickering purple haze connecting them—no, she was seeing what Doug’s testosterone-drunk brain would have skipped right over, even if he’d been looking in the right direction: The twilit bridge’s nearest support girder, just behind me, lapped and drowned in one big shadow that drew every other nearby object’s shadow to it . . .
. . . except for where I stood.
Snarky Chinese faggot, bloody knife still in hand, smiling up at her under the non-existent brim of that un-holy hat. With my whole body—burning hands included—suddenly rimmed in a kind of missing halo, a thin edge of blank-bright nothingness. The empty spot where my own shadow should be.
Noticing. Noticing me notice her noticing. Trying desperately to put two and two together and just plain getting five, over and over and over.
She wrinkled her brows at me—helpless, clueless. I just pursed my lips, gave her a sassy little wink. Telling them both, one last time:
“I said, watch.”
And shut my eyes again.
* * *
February 14, 1987. For the gweilo rubes of Toronto, it was time to hand out the chocolate hearts, exchange cards that could make a Diabetic go into shock, buy each other gift-bags full of underwear made from atrophied cotton candy. For us, it was just another night out with the Black Magic Posse.
Carra Devize, her pale braids stiff against the light, stray strands outflung in a crackling blue halo. Bruisy words crawling up and down her body as she spun a web of ectoplasm around herself, reel on reel of it, knotted like dirty string in the whitening air. Jen Cudahy, crying. Franz Froese, sweat-slick and deep in full chant trance, puking up names of Power, ecstatic with fear. And me, laughing, so drunk I could barely kneel.
With my left hand, with my bone-hilted hierarchical magician’s knife, I cut my shadow from me—one crooked swipe, downward and sideways, pressing so hard I almost took part of my heel off along with it. I heard it give that sigh.