"You're back soon," said Garcia in his usual slow voice.
"I'd like another," David said evenly.
"You can barely stand. I'm surprised you made it here," replied Garcia.
"I'm fine."
"Do you even have a place left to take it?" asked the Mexican dealer.
"I have a place," said David.
Garcia chuckled. "If you say so. What were you in the mood for this time? Maybe a little bit of a..."
"Something around ten years old," interrupted David.
"Now that," smiled Garcia, "is gonna cost you. You're not gonna have much left after our little transaction here."
David said nothing and just held out his arm.
Garcia shrugged. He stood up and rummaged around in his crate for a moment until he pulled out an old Gatorade bottle. It was half filled with a thick reddish-brown substance. The rusty scalpel was already in his right hand.
"Shit man, I still haven't sold off the rest of your essence from your last visit," sighed Garcia as he sliced into David's wrist.
David stood there impassively as his blood drained out into the filthy Gatorade bottle. He felt nothing as he watched it fill to the top: no pain, no sense of horror. He noticed his image waiver slightly as Garcia squeezed the last few drops from his veins and he knew that he had limited time left. David also knew he didn't care.
Garcia screwed the cap back on the bottle and put it back in his crate, the scalpel already hidden back in a pocket. He leaned over to the rickety table and grabbed a tiny jewelry box from the corner. It still looked in mint condition.
"Do you wanna know what it is?" asked Garcia.
"I'd rather be surprised," replied David as he walked from the tent, placing the small box in a secure pocket.
David knew that weakness would set in soon enough, so he moved quickly. Out through the section he had come and past the area of gamblers. Cutting around the part of the settlement that housed the brutal warmongers, David stepped out into the desert itself. A few outcroppings of rocks were scattered about the barren land and he headed towards a large jagged peak of stone.
Growing tired, he made it just in time to collapse against the flat side of the rock, a piece large enough to block him from view from the encampment. Granted, someone may have seen him come out here, but he only needed a few minutes. Those minutes would all be worth it. He had gladly shed his blood for this, and whoever had given it up had got something they wanted in return. True, soon there would be nothing left to him,--nothing at all--but that didn't matter in a place like this.
David pulled the jewelry box from his pocket, lifted it to his face and opened it.
He was ten years old again. He was riding a bike for the first time, his father pushing it from behind. He was laughing and yelling and almost crying because he was so excited. His mother cheered him on from the front yard, his dog "Pooches" tied up under the tree and barking. He felt the summer sun on his face and he was still alive.
David lurched back out of the memory that was not his and dry heaved. He had lived in the city and never knew how to ride a bike. His father had left the family when he was seven. He had never had a dog. This had been a memory from another, someone else's dream that he had bought and experienced. And it had been glorious.
As David lay weeping in the desert, he thought about all the dreams he had pillaged since his time here. So many, he had lost count. Anything to make him feel alive again. He grew weaker with every giving of his "blood," and soon he wouldn't exist anymore, not even here. Here, in the depths of Hell where dreams were harvested and sold like drugs to the damned.
"
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause." - Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Table of Contents
This Dark Magic
by
Chryse Wymer
Chapter 1
Even Good Toasters Go Bad
Maybe I should have cared about the bodies piling up around me. But I liked this business of living so I kept my distance from the crowds, and didn't drink the tap water.
It was the first cold day in the city, and I should have known better. The car had sat, warming up, for maybe five minutes. I walked a couple feet into my garage to grab the tire gauge, thinking the left passenger side looked low, when I heard the damn thing rev. Somebody was stealing my car.
I turned and jumped onto the old beater, a Studebaker, and shouted, "Get out of my fucking car!"
The woman didn't say anything, and I held on to the tiny rubbery place between the windshield and the frame as she drove down the road.
I reached into the window. "Get out of my fucking car!"
"Are you gonna hit me?" the woman asked.
I started moving my fingers across the steering wheel, toward the ignition, and she slapped my hand off.
The Studebaker sputtered and stopped. I found the handle with my right hand, and wrenched the door open. She tried to shut it. "Don't hit me. Please, don't hit me."
"Get…out…."
She got out and ran. I wanted to chase her, but the car vibrated and made coughing noises and took too long to start back up. Not like I was going to leave it in the middle of the road. Heart racing, too much adrenaline thrummed through my body. I made an illegal U-turn and went back home; that tire still seemed low on air.
This used to be such a nice city.
###
Once, I would have stopped for the bums panhandling downtown, plunked a couple bucks in their Styrofoam cups. Not anymore. I kept my head down and my shoulders hunched, not looking anyone in the eye, pretending to be even smaller than I am. Young men argued and I heard glass break as I lifted my legs high to step over the half-dead bodies lying naked in the streets. So much ugliness.
But sometimes I'd look up and see a kind smile, or bright red flowers blooming on someone's balcony. Things had to get better.
One afternoon, around two months ago, I sat in my backyard gazing at the rippling lines of air, buttercups and daffodils choking in the sun; and that's when I heard it. Silence.
I walked into the living room. The dusty oscillating fan that survived WW II should have
click-click-clicked with each movement. It didn't. The undetectable hum, which came from electrical appliances even when not in use, was strangely absent. My icebox normally wheezed like a heavy smoker. Now, silence.
Reggae music billowed from the kitchen: my cell phone. My boss had called. "Get your ass down here." A story, and I had to report it.
My car sputtered and shook all the way downtown, where I worked at the
Capital City Gazette. The skyscraper resembled a rectangular soup can, not brooding and cool but ugly and just-standing functional.
Fifth floor. The elevators were down so I took the stairs two at a time, wheezing by the time I hit the third floor. I slumped against the last door, and nudged it open. The room was airplane hangar-huge. Small workstations crowded against each other; some-the better paid-had desks and houseplants, and others-the underpaid-huddled together at tables stacked so high with journalistic junk we couldn't fit a framed photo on our "desks."
A whirlwind of candlelit activity passed in front of me.
"Hey Mac, watch where you're goin', will yuh?" Herbert was a blob-waisted old-timer who wore suspenders and pulled his pants under a voluminous belly, and liked to brag about still wearing the same pants size from high school.
"Oh, sorry. What's with all the candles? I thought we had backup generators."
"We do. They ain't workin' either."
Instead of standing around slack jaw with question marks in my eyes, I walked to my desk and found the sticky note buried in the bottom drawer: my contacts at Electrex, the power company. Not that it did much good. I talked to top dogs and head honchos, and while most agreed the mainframe nestled in the sleepy Ohio town of Cadiz had caused the problem, no one knew what created the blackout. Mumbling, muttering, and finger pointing were
the answers they gave me.
Someone lost his job at Electrex.
After several hours of turning up bupkiss, I made my way home. Most traffic lights flashed red or had gone black. Something like indigestion turned my stomach. Whatever had happened, whatever was happening, it was wrong,
very wrong.
Half the country went without power for twelve hours, some longer. Soon after the blackout ended, I heard the first scream.
###
Broken cigarettes blanketed the sidewalks in ashes. So many I crunched them underfoot like cockroaches. Maybe I wouldn't survive the year, but at least I had a lead. Someone had to break this story before we all took a dirt nap and had bugs crawling in our ears.
I managed to track the storeowner down to a joint a couple blocks from work. The convenience store smelled musty and ads papered the windows, and newspapers hung in a square around the counter. I laughed to myself. They probably kept me in business. After we exchanged pleasantries, Mr. Hosseini told his story:
"
A chubby-faced black boy walked into my store, slipped a candy bar in his jacket pocket, and began to walk out. 'Wait.'
"
The kid turned and looked at me. 'What…old…man?' The boy spit the words and smiled. He was an animal, this child, or at least made me think of one. You know sharks and how their teeth are jagged triangles and they have this total-pupil look? Their whole eyes black? He made me think of that, those shark-teeth sparkling under these lights when he smiled.
" '
The candy bar…' "
The storeowner went silent, dumbstruck. But by what? Fear shaped his eyes into watering saucers, and he had stopped breathing for a moment.
"Mr. Hosseini," I said after he told his story, "thank you for your time." I shook his hand.
My hand went slack as he held me in a crushing grip. Mr. Hosseini clenched his jaw, and then narrowed his eyes; as I met his steady gaze, he said, "He looked dead, this little boy, like he smashed a stick of chalk and covered his face with it."
I smiled, sheepish. What can you say to something like that?
A double-barreled shotgun sat behind the counter, and he didn't strike me as the kind of man who would be terrified of petty theft. "Why did you let him go?"
"Something about him…even though I knew the kid. I didn't want trouble, but now…after everything…find that little son of a bitch, Mr. Landers."
I pulled my hand away with an audible
snap. The chimes sounded as I pushed a shoulder against the door. Goosebumps went up my arm; this was where it all started. With some weirdo kid. Right then, cops and robbers, insurance salesmen, stockbrokers and extrusion operators--the most ordinary people-started killing, robbing, raping, and everything in-between.
###
Back at
The Gazette, I sat at a cafeteria table and tapped a pen against a legal pad, daydreaming about how to follow up the story. Then, his hot breath tickled the back of my neck, making me jump. "Jesus Jon, don't sneak up on me like that."
"Sorry about that, Mr. Landers. I came in to ask you something."
The cafeteria was made up of a few small tables pushed together, a fridge, a pop machine, and a counter complete with a coffeepot and microwave; it was divided from the rest of the office by one of those big cubicle walls.
"Please, I invite you to visit the farm. My wife Natasha will make you a lovely home-cooked meal so you can forget all this nonsense."
I grunted, uncertain, until my belly growled.
He wrote down directions and said, "We'll see you at eight."
The first time I had met Jonathon Crowley, he struck me as shy. Kind of an oddball. He liked to sit in the office lounge, and work word searches uninterrupted. Now when I looked at him, I did so out of the corner of my eye so the guy wouldn't notice my reporter's stare boring holes everywhere inside him. Such a dark and nonverbal man who had a tight-lipped smile and half a soul to go with it, someone who might start swinging an axe without a word, was something suspicious in our land of ordinary criminals.
I once might have said a chance encounter with a newbie photographer asking me to dinner was just that: chance. Coincidence. But my experiences taught me coincidences almost never happen.
Later that night, what I saw in his home prickled my reporter's intuition.
Chapter 2
Too Much Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing
The plain old farmhouse stood an hour from downtown but was easy to find, being close to the freeway. I stretched as I got out of my car, and wings fluttered towards me as a flock of peacocks shrieked and came at a full run, their bright plumage on display; only three thin lines of electrified fence separated us. Other animals oinked and brayed and clucked.
Nobody answered when I walked over and rapped a half-closed fist on the screen door. Farmers worked sweat-in-your-eyes hard so the couple could have been out in the fields doing the work of thirty city boys. The house was a tall A-frame with a cherry tree and a porch swing in the front lawn, and the property fenced in at the edge of the driveway so close a cow might have pushed his nose through my car window.
I strolled to the back of the house and into the dark barn, hands behind my back, observing. "Jonathon?"
I heard the sounds of tossed, jostled, and smothered objects--a mad search was taking place.
" What do you
want?" A growling voice emerged from the shadows.
"Jonathon? You need some help?"
"Nah. I'll be out in a minute, just looking for some flash bulbs and a camera I thought was out here."
"Well…this is a nice farm."
"We got horses, pigs, goats, and the cows of course…all kinds of animals. Have you met Ma yet?"
"No." I smiled, always fond of sweet farm couples who called each other Ma and Pa.
"She and my boy should be inside getting dinner ready."
I nodded, and followed him inside.
Jonathon spoke so slow and deliberate he often took long pauses in the middle of sentences.
Natasha didn't wear make-up or dress for company, but she had fire in her eyes. "Wash up for supper, Eliot."
"
Yes'm, Ma."
"He seems well-behaved," I said. His parents probably called him "Champ" and tousled his hair when he pulled straight-A's. A real All-American kid. Eliot had yellow-blonde hair, and kept his thumbs looped around his bib overalls' pockets. Had he started rolling a piece of straw in his mouth, I wouldn't have batted an eye.
"Around company anyway," she said with a little sideways smile.
"Better than I was."
"You don't strike me as an ornery kind of man."
I tried to concentrate on the conversation, but kept staring at the blue ribbons on the wall, prizes from past county fairs. Also hanging there were a large cow skull, a whitewashed Georgia O'Keefe-type painting of cow bones in the desert, and photographs of their children with the animals. This was a different world, and I smiled, glad to be welcomed into their home. My mind screeched to a halt when I noticed a book entitled
This Dark Magic . The black, leather bound book with gold-embossed title and lacking an author's name had not been collecting dust. As I scanned several bookshelves, I noticed stacks of occult texts, some quite old, all emphasizing some form of black magic.
A door squeaked open and slammed shut as Jonathon marched inside and sat beside Natasha at the dinner table.
"You know I don't get excited about much, and I'm not a religious woman, but I just want to say I'm thinking of those poor people in Africa today, so many suffering from A.I.D.S., and I hope they all find the help they need."
"Oh Mama, it's so sad," Eliot said.
"Right you are, m'boy. Now let's eat."
Natasha glared at her husband before passing him the green beans.
All was nice and normal…except for the books on black magic. I couldn't get that out of my head. Artists often have a penchant for unusual spiritual practices, but this man was obses
sed. The shelves were lined with the bizarre, the ancient, the comical, and the obscure, none of which had the slightest trace of dust.
When I looked up, Jonathon's stare disarmed me and I had the urge to run. "I'd like to take your picture…for your Pen in Journalism Award."
"Oh, yeah. Sure."
Jonathon immediately returned with his camera. He gave no instruction and didn't bother to ask me if I was ready. But I sat up as straight as I could, and tried not to frown. These sorts of awards didn't require smiles. As the camera flashed, the sinking feeling returned.
***
Midnight, My Place
Again, the silence came, its dark power washing over my home, over
me. I stared at the kitchen clock's loud secondhand, tick tock. That old cliché: the calm before the storm. Before anything happened, I realized that my heart had skipped the standard lub dub and went straight to thud thud.
Charred flesh. The smell nauseated me before any other sensation occurred. Then, I dropped to the linoleum floor, in agony. My shirt clung hot to my chest, ready to burst into flame at any moment, and I peeled it off. Bent over double and on my knees, eyes closed, I held my head in my hands and began to shiver. That gut-wrenching pain shot up from my pelvis to my mouth, and I began salivating as if I might puke. The pain...just...stopped. All that remained was that horrible barbeque smell. I took several panting breaths, trying to calm myself; I spider-walked my fingertips up from my knees towards my chest, and ran my hands over the wheals singed into my ribcage.
Still weak, I didn't stand up but crawled along the kitchen's black-and-white checkered linoleum floor, my thin trousers squeaking like nails-on-chalkboard as I struggled towards the bathroom, taking long pauses between each movement. What had happened? Soon, I regained strength enough to pull myself up with the pedestal sink.
I looked at my naked chest in the bathroom mirror.
Son of a bitch.
Sigils. Magical symbols, a language that could mean anything, and every writer had his or her own dialect. Translation can be sketchy, at best. But anyone who burns something into my body without asking…I doubt he has good intentions.
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