by J. P. Sloan
“In the package.”
Al-Syriani squinted at Edgar, then nodded, pulling a brown leather checkbook from his jacket pocket. He took his time writing a check to Edgar in immaculate cursive, detaching it with several short controlled jerks of his fingers. He folded the check and slid it along the glass of the display case.
“A pleasure, Mister Swain. I will be in touch.” He replaced his checkbook, and produced in its place a silver card holder. He popped it open and placed two business cards onto the counter, one for Edgar and one for me.
“Gentlemen, peace be with you.”
He cradled the package in his arm and backed away with a stately bow, sliding through the store and slipping through the mahogany doors with grace.
I snatched his business card and examined it.
Hassam al-Syriani. A phone number with a D.C. area code.
And a symbol as a watermark. The sextant and a pyramid.
I exhaled and gave Edgar a withering glare.
“Seriously, Edgar?”
“What?”
“I can’t believe for a second you’d be stupid enough to sell cursed objects to members of the Presidium. Even when you’re drunk, you’re smarter than this.”
Edgar gave me a squint and turned away to face the wall.
I tossed al-Syriani’s card into the trash can beneath the display case and paced over to a faded mauve divan sitting on its end.
“Please tell me you’ve vetted this asshole,” I grunted, rubbing my face.
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“What do I want? I want you and Wren and Elle and Eddie to keep living normal lives. I want you to keep your shop and not get suddenly audited by the IRS. I want all of your skeletons to remain in your closet, and not dragged out in the front page of the News Post for public consumption.”
Edgar shot me a squint brimming with disdain.
“Give me some credit, Dorian.”
“Credit? He’s Presidium, Edgar! And now I’m on his radar. Thanks for that, by the way.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I screwed your thing, man. Didn’t realize I was the one keeping you from flushing your life down the toilet!”
I took a step back.
“The hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You, Dorian. You’re the one fucking the pig. The rest of the world, we’re just holding its legs, aren’t we?”
“Fucking the pig?”
“You screwed Carmen over good and royal. Almost cost her that job at the club, right? Like, your friend was going to shitcan her ass. But you were decent enough to bow out, exile yourself or whatever, so she could keep her job. Not that it wasn’t probably her idea to begin with.”
“She’s not like that.”
He snorted. “Right. So now, all of a sudden, you’re having a moment of clarity or something, and you’re going back to the club, you’re driving out here like nothing ever happened, and you got your shopping list of whatever and whatever, and now you’re preaching at me for keeping food on the table? Well, screw you.”
I held my breath, and closed my eyes. The headache was back.
“Edgar. I know. I’ve been a shit. To Carmen. To you, I guess.”
“Damn straight. I mean, I called you like a dozen times.”
“The hell you did.”
His face took a red tint, and he started to pace in a tight circle.
“Dorian, man, seriously,” he continued in a scary-calm voice. “Pull your head out of your ass.”
“Can we just take a moment, here? This argument isn’t about me. It’s about you, the Presidium, and everything you’re keeping behind that door.”
Edgar marched over to the door, and twisted the gray yarn back onto the knob with a huff.
I shook my head.
“And seriously, whoever told you that was a magic lock needs a good kick to the balls.”
“It works, I told you.”
“It’s a piece of yarn, Edgar. You got sold snake oil, and you won’t admit it.”
“No, it totally works.”
“Then let me test it.”
“It only works if you don’t know it’s a magic lock.”
“So anyone interested in stealing your collection can open the door anyway?”
“That’s why I have an alarm system, asshole.”
I stared at Edgar for a moment, and a smile crept into my lips. I tried not to snicker, but the harder I tried, the more impossible a task it proved to be. I laughed. I blurted it out and laughed.
Funny thing about laughter is how contagious it can be.
Edgar started chuckling silently to himself, his top teeth bared in mirth.
“Oh, Jesus, Edgar. Really. Get a padlock.”
He laughed out loud, leaning against the case.
“I have three. Never got around to installing it.”
“Don’t make me get Wren involved. She’ll make you do it. You know she will.”
Edgar’s smile dimmed, and he rested against the case.
“I know he’s Presidium, Dorian. Yeah. I’m not stupid. And yeah, I made my calls. He’s not going to bust me.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because he’s buying my collection. I told you, if you wanted to unload Emil’s books, I could get a buyer.”
“Al-Syriani?”
“He sent me a message a couple months ago. With the switch in administration, they lost a lot of manpower and they’re not exactly recruiting or anything, but they’re looking for friendly faces. You know?”
“The Presidium is courting you?”
Edgar winced a little.
“No, not exactly. But they’re talking. They’re not happy about my collection, obviously. So they’re―”
“Buying you out?” I shook my head. “I can’t believe you’re letting them strong-arm you like that.”
“No strong-arm about it, man. You know what I have in that room. I can only sell half of it because the other half carries serious darkness. Tools used by the old Dark Age Cabals. Summoning devices. Things that can’t be used without damning your soul. Hell, half the reason I collect them is to keep them from being used.”
I had never looked at Edgar quite that way. I had always seen him as something of an old school merchant, willing to buy anything as long as he could sell it for a profit. I had never thought of his collection as a kind of service to mankind.
But he was making sense.
He continued, “But I have kids, you know. I’m responsible for their future. I just don’t want this crap around my kids anymore. What would happen if Eddie grabs a Lesser Key and starts reading from a book?”
“It would have to be a hell of a book.”
“You joke. But just touching a Lesser Key will put you on a demon’s short list. I’m tired of worrying about it.”
I held up my hands.
“Edgar, I get it. And for what it’s worth, I apologize. Okay? I apologize for everything. Not sure what, really. Just, I feel like I did something wrong, and I screwed us up somehow.” I stepped forward, trying to keep him from retreating. “Can I get a do over? I miss our thing.”
He smiled weakly.
“Can I ask you a straight question, Dorian?”
“You know you can.”
“Are you clean?”
“What do you mean?”
He looked at me over his spectacles.
“Drugs, man.”
“Jesus Christ, Edgar. Yes, I’m clean. Where’s this coming from?”
“You swear?”
“Yes. I swear. I haven’t even so much as smoked a joint my entire life. I thought you knew that.” I rubbed my temples, trying to abate the scything pain. “Who have you been talking to?”
Edgar glared at me for a long minute. I could feel his scrutiny on a deep level.
“Okay. Cool. We’re cool.”
“You thought I was strung out?”
“You haven’t been yourself. Not for a long time. I’ve seen this kind of thing before, an
d I wasn’t really ready to deal with it. Lost a couple friends in my time.”
“Edgar, I swear on my parents’ graves I’m clean, never did drugs of any kind, and I’m just having a really bad year.”
He slapped my shoulder, and the force of it seemed to drive the headache out of my skull. I blinked and sucked in a hard breath.
“Groovy.”
“Seriously though, you called me?”
He nodded wearily.
I smiled at him and tried not to think too hard. I shoved the bag of lodestone across the counter.
“What do I owe you?”
He shoved it back.
“Get out of here.”
He extended his hand, and I gripped it hard. I felt a delicate kind of desperation as I shook his hand. I was afraid to let him go.
“Hey,” I coughed, finally releasing my grip. “Why don’t you come to Druid Hill next weekend? I owe you at least a drink for this. Think you can talk Wren into giving you a hall pass?”
He bobbled his head back and forth, then nodded.
“Uh, okay. Sure. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good.” I tucked the bag under my arm and nodded at him. “Call me.”
I left Edgar’s shop before Wren came back. I knew I would catch hell for it later, but as I drove back down I-70, I couldn’t help but feel uncommonly lighthearted. Something had broken loose, something that was blocking me from the one friendship I had. I was finally starting to make good on the damage I had managed to inflict upon myself.
The lightheartedness didn’t last long when I remembered that he thought I was strung out on drugs. What a raging jackass I must have been to the Swains! And if Edgar was moving himself out of the business, I would need to develop a whole new network.
I couldn’t believe Edgar was selling his collection to the Presidium. The thought of having to watch my ass around Edgar filled me with grief. Well, it was his choice. I didn’t have a family anymore. I had no way of understanding Edgar’s world. And I didn’t really feel like passing judgment on anyone at that point in my life.
My life. For what it was worth.
By the time I reached the Baltimore beltway, I resolved to resurrect myself. Reinvent myself. I would become the man I thought I had been. And it would begin with the hex I would craft that night. All I had to do was to find a piece of crap used computer, a copy of the game that had sucked my client into its clutches, and the simple application of the craft I had trained in for two decades.
It was a craft that had served me well until that point. It was the fine line between darkness and light, the hex craft and charm workings that even the most deeply spiritual Western mind would dismiss as innocuous. A cottage industry, so to speak.
It was time to rebuild the damn cottage.
he computer wasn’t a problem. I acquired what was considered by the teenage fashion victim working at the pawn shop to be a dinosaur of a laptop, and returned to my work space in the mini-storage in Catonsville to craft the hex.
I typically refuse to train novices in the Craft. On one hand, proper training requires years of study in order to safeguard against significant and permanent metaphysical damage to oneself, and I’ve never been eager to facilitate anyone’s downfall. Besides, group energy may be stronger than an individual’s, but solitary practice affords so much more control. I’d been called a control freak on more than one occasion.
I actually managed to hex myself once when I lived with Emil in London. I had trouble staying awake for Classical language studies, so I gave myself insomnia. Talk about control issues.
I moved a few boxes to find a power outlet, and ran an extension cord to my worktable. I loaded the game onto the computer and took advantage of the time to prepare the sigil text. I much prefer dead languages to ones and zeroes. My clients regularly request email correspondence from me. I refuse. It may seem obtuse, but the power of my craft is largely contingent on the power of language, on individual words endowed with power. I locked Emil’s Library in a cage for that very reason. I’d never been comfortable with the notion that every word of every email I could type would be saved somewhere, and never be truly erased. From a hermetic standpoint, that would be inexcusably irresponsible.
I chose my usual sigil set. Linear B. The marriage of Mycenean passion and Greek logic made a compelling argument for the choice of the proto-Greek syllabary. I spread out my working parchment and began the inscriptions. Karmic anchoring requires a connection to the greater human experience. The Akasha. The safest way I had found, the way Emil taught me, was to stitch myself into several points of human history. Dead languages, ancient mantras, words that had been used for thousands of years.
The sigil scribing took half an hour of tight, energy-focused calligraphy, but once I set aside the quill, I had a circular hex platform of Linear B ready for the anchor. I set a cheap flash drive in the center of the hex platform and spoke the hex aloud.
Then I pulled my next tool, the athame. My athame is my father’s old pocket knife. He’d ordered it from a television shopping network. It was cheap as hell, but he’d carried it for years in his pocket. Objects carry mystical power when they are endowed with meaning. For my part, there was no other knife in the world that would work better as my athame.
I made several shallow cuts alongside parallel scars on the inside of my forearm, and sopped up the tiny beads of blood with a cotton ball. I painted one final firing sigil around the flash drive with the cotton ball, heaping my personal energy onto the sigils.
I spoke the firing syllable, and the hex was anchored.
After I rubbed alcohol onto my arm and athame, I collected the flash drive, burned the parchment, and opened up a document on the computer. I typed a simple message for my client: “Shouldn’t you be studying?”
With his game loaded up in the background, I plugged in the flash drive and saved my message. The screen flickered, then popped into darkness. The smell of ozone filled the storage unit, and I waited for several minutes to be sure the computer didn’t combust.
Fire extinguishers are vital hermetic tools, after all.
It was freshly midnight when I managed to return home. My head was pounding and my energy had been depleted from my working, so I staggered upstairs and fell into bed.
My phone woke me up the following morning. My client was eager to hear the status of my service, I was certain. I fumbled through the clothes on the floor for my latest pair of pants, and found my phone just in time to catch the call before it shunted to voice mail.
Unfortunately, I didn’t check the caller ID before I blabbered, “I have good news for you.”
Rather than my college-age client, a deeper, polished voice replied, “I’m glad to hear it, Mister Lake.”
I shook my head and leaned back against my bed, trying to muster some measure of dignity.
“Who is this again?”
After a chuckle, he responded, “My name is Julian Bright. We met Saturday night at the club.”
Deputy Mayor. Right.
“How can I help you, Mister Bright?”
“Big Ben gave me your number. I apologize if I’m calling too early.”
I checked the clock on my nightstand. It was embarrassingly late in the morning, to be honest.
“No, not at all. What’s up?”
“Well, I was wondering if you were available to meet today? I wanted to discuss a business arrangement with you.”
The cobwebs from deep slumber still fogged my brain, and I had to clear my throat as I pored over the migraine-dulled events of that evening. I remembered that he drank my Scotch and pretended to like it. He had an entourage of the late-blooming wingtip set. He knew Ben enough to call him Big Ben.
Oh, and he was Deputy Mayor of Baltimore.
Mondays were never kind to me.
“Perhaps I wasn’t clear, Mister Bright, regarding my line of work.”
“If I recall correctly, Mister Lake, you provide hexes and charms for select clientele.”
“I guess I was clear, then.”
“Your line of work is precisely what I wanted to discuss with you. I have certain personal projects which require your peculiar talents, and, well… if the office of the Mayor doesn’t qualify as ‘select clientele,’ then I should really reconsider my career path.”
I hated to admit it, but the man was growing on me.
“I’m meeting a client on Charles Street at noon. I can see you after my meeting.”
“Outstanding. There’s a steakhouse where Charles Street reaches the Inner Harbor. I’ll have a room reserved for us. Two o’clock work for you?”
“Make it one. My meeting won’t take long.”
“See you then.”
I hung up and sat staring at my wall. If I had plans to reinvent myself, the Deputy Mayor definitely qualified as a new client base. Most of my work lingered along the fringes of society, somewhere between soccer moms and swing shift spot welders. My success was a bit of a fluke, perhaps due to my personal skills. My tastes in whiskey and social surroundings were inherited from my parents. Maybe it was time to put those tastes to good use?
I contacted the college boy and made arrangements for the handoff of my hex anchor. Every charm or hex required some contact with its intended target. This wasn’t an industry that could be supported over the phone or the Internet. The hex was bound into an anchor, a small talisman that held its energies like a spring trap. When my client made contact with the anchor, the hex would execute, and that would be that. In this case, I literally saved the hex on a flash drive. I would tell him the instructions for receiving my “charm” would be on the drive. It didn’t matter whether he plugged it in; the hex would execute the moment he touched it. And until he found a way to win the affection of whichever gender he preferred, his computer game would crash if he tried to play it.
I made sure he was available and that he had the five hundred cash to pay. By the time I showered and shaved, I was practically late. I rushed through the center of the city, making my way up Charles Street to the Loyola campus. The landscaping was beautiful with large oaks defying the fall air with its greenery, stately stone buildings with exposed chalet-style timbers, and walkways that seemed to take every scenic route from class to class. I met my client in the center of one of these walkways. He was barely twenty years old, wearing khakis and a light blue button-up. His head was set at an arrogant angle that screamed middle class entitlement. It reminded me of myself at his age. So much so, in fact, that I found the sight of him entirely unnerving.