by Jason Arnopp
Sherilyn Chastain buzzes me up to the seventh floor. As she opens her apartment door, she wrinkles her nose and looks dubious. Understandably so, you might argue, given my reputation. Then she slowly thaws. Ironically, when it comes to sharing solid facts, she is virtually monosyllabic, but when discussing unprovable arcane babble, you can’t shut her up.
Her accent is Western Australian with a soupçon of Paris every once in a blue syllable. In her early fifties (my guess), she’s about five foot two in her bare feet. Messily spiked purple-dyed hair suggests she never shook a Siouxsie Sioux fixation. Since she’s surrounded by items straight out of Tolkien’s universe, it’s hard not to think of her as hobbitesque. She wears blue jeans and a plain T-shirt that matches the colour of her barnet – a shame, as I had really hoped for some kind of cloak adorned with mystic symbols.
I couldn’t begin to count the number of skulls on these shelves. Animal skulls mostly – a dog, a cat, what looks like an otter, many birds. No Count Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, disappointingly, although there is one human skull on display (‘Don’t worry,’ says Chastain, placing a cup of Chinese tea on a small table beside the sofa, which I’m daubing with back sweat. ‘I got her through totally legit means. The estate was fine with it’).
There are books, so many books, with titles including Higher Principles of the Seven Winds, Hell’s Sweet Cauldron, Man’s Eternal Downfall and – yes! – the already legendary Satan & I, by Father Primo Di Stefano. That last one surprises me: aren’t Catholics and combat magicians very different beasts? Di Stefano would probably want this apartment razed to the ground. Would Chastain, as a witch or whatever she is, feel the same about his places of worship? The short answer: no. The long answer will become implicit during our interview.
There are rows of jars and bowls and bottles and test tubes of murky liquid, some of which are colours I don’t believe I’ve seen in reality before. Some contain (presumably) dead creatures suspended in weird juice. Textbook witchery-pokery. The flat’s actual decor is unexpectedly neutral and non-goth, although Chastain admits this is because she might be looking to sell up at some point. ‘I like to move around.’
It has been surprisingly easy to gain an audience with Sherilyn Chastain: she replied to my email within a few hours. Of course, a spot in Jack Sparks’ latest book certainly won’t hurt her profile, and therefore her trade. Maybe the priorities of Catholics and combat magicians aren’t so mutually exclusive after all.
We relocate to deckchairs on her small but pleasantly leafy balcony. It overlooks Harbour Grand Kowloon, which is lined with everything from rag-tag junks to rich men’s playthings. A pale blue ribbon of sea lies beyond, tainted only by the darting shadow of a paraglider suspended beneath a wide yellow fabric wing. No, Chastain doesn’t mind if I smoke out here, and even provides an oddly curved ashtray, although she lights an incense stick ‘to neutralise the air’. She does exactly that kind of thing for a living, on a larger scale.
I wonder aloud whether female combat magicians are very common. ‘There’s a few of us dotted about,’ she says, slouching in her chair and propping her feet up on the balcony rail. ‘And most of us kick arse more than the guys. We got the advantage of a menstrual current, see. If something has blood, we’re even more able to fuck it up.’
I suppose the aggression here shouldn’t really surprise me, given that Chastain has ‘combat’ in her job description. When I try to nail the distinction between combat magicians and exorcists, she presents me with a suitably fight-based metaphor: ‘If exorcism is judo, then combat magic is ju-jitsu.’ This doesn’t help much, so Chastain spells it out: ‘Exorcism tends to be relatively formal and slow. Quite boring, if you wanna know the truth. And you already do know, because you posted about an exorcism, very disrespectfully.’
She pauses to gauge my reaction. When I don’t supply one, she persists: ‘How’s that girl now? The Italian girl?’
I explain that the whole thing was a set-up. Maria and her mum are no doubt doing very well, thanks to a Catholic cash injection. Chastain looks dubious and I lead her back on-topic. ‘Combat magic is the equivalent of street fighting: dirtier, faster. If you’re in a situation where you need combat magic, you need it fast. You need it strong and you need it crude.’
Chastain claims that she and her female partner (in a business sense, although who knows?) Fang regularly deal with people all over the world who ‘might have had a curse thrown at them, which we can usually break. Or a customer might feel that they or their house are being haunted. We do a hell of a lot of house clearings – ridding places of negative energy. Hey, can you please use the ashtray?’
I’ve flicked my ash willy-nilly. My heart’s been too busy sinking at words like ‘curse’ and ‘haunted’, then plummeting altogether on ‘negative energy’.
‘What do you mean,’ I say, sticking the ashtray on my lap, ‘when you say “negative energy”?’
Chastain believes the term needs no further explanation. ‘Energy,’ she says condescendingly, ‘which is negative. People have any number of names for the stuff that surrounds us. I happen to call it chi. The negative stuff creates bad feeling, bad vibes. It can do anything from tweaking people’s emotions to making them violently throw up.’
‘So what do you do to rid a house of . . . negative energy?’
She grabs the arms of her deckchair and pushes herself upright, making the wood creak. ‘How long you in town for? We’ve got a job on Friday, over on Lantau. I could see if the clients would let you tag along. Some stuff, you have to see for yourself. That’s what this book’s all about, right?’
I nod. ‘It’s about approaching the supernatural with an open mind.’
Her heavy-lidded eyes become pinprick squints, scanning me. ‘So why does your mind feel so very shut; such a bloody steel trap? You’ve already reached conclusions.’
‘If I were to see something . . . some kind of hard evidence—’
She cuts me off by holding up a flat palm. ‘It’s written all over you. The folded arms, the tension . . . you just wanna write me off and move on to the next deluded dickhead.’
‘Now who’s reached a conclusion?’ I counter. ‘I’ll write you off if you deserve it.’
‘Nah. This is the age of certainty, mate. Everything’s screwed and unpredictable, so people cling to these . . . these ice floes of opinion, holding on for dear life. They’re terrified to show any doubt, especially of themselves. It’s dangerous.’
I scoff at this. ‘Dangerous? People having opinions?’
‘People only speak certainty, fast as they fuckin’ can. When was the last time you saw someone online posting, “I don’t yet have an opinion on this subject, but I’ll come back to you when I do”?’
She says this with passion, then softens. ‘I’m just glad you came to see me early in this little process of yours.’
Sidestepping her literal belittling of my ‘process’, I ask what she means.
‘You’ve walked into this whole world with your eyes and mind shut. Sooner or later, something’s going to scare the crap out of you, whether you believe in it or not. So I’d strongly advise you to learn how to deal with fear. I can put it to one side for the sake of the job, but that comes down to practice and technique.’
I’m tempted to ask what I owe her for this amazing advice, but her sarcasm detection skills seem high. Instead, I solicit her opinion on the video. Does it ring any, er, psychic bells with her? Does it feel real?
Admitting that she hasn’t had time to view it, she dons shades to ward off the sun and cradles an iPad on her lap. She asks for the video’s title on YouTube, which is ‘Where Has This Alleged Ghost Video Come From?’. As she taps her way to the clip, I watch that paraglider zoom towards the shore, then land with an ungainly thump. Came down too fast. Way too cocksure.
By this point, I have absolutely no need to watch the video along with her. During the forty-eight hours since it returned to my life, it has burned itself on to my brain. I watched
the thing countless times during my sixteen-hour flight to Hong Kong on Erubis Books’ dollar. I know Camera Boy’s every single move. Every breath he takes, every camera bump he makes, I’ve been watching him.
Even if I wasn’t able to hear the opening ‘Adramelech’, the ‘Mephistopheles’ that marks the midway point or the closing ‘Baphomet’ – not to mention Camera Boy’s whispered ‘Oh God . . . this is it’ of course – I would still know exactly which part of the video Chastain is watching at any given time. I can picture those supposedly spectral feet slowly turning to face the camera and I know exactly how long they take to do so. One day, I’ll interview whoever created that subtly clever special effect of the in-out-fading spook. Whether they want me to or not.
Sherilyn Chastain – is it too soon to call her Shezza? Probably – says nothing while watching the video. Her expression is unreadable, although a couple of those wrinkles on her forehead deepen once Camera Boy turns the corner and beholds the macabre tableau.
After the climactic ‘Baphomet’ is spoken, she says nothing. Just inhales, as if she’s forgotten to do so for, oh, forty seconds. Then, as I expected, she hits ‘Replay’.
I chain-smoke while she chain-watches, saving Zippo fuel by igniting each new cigarette with the tip of the last. Why did I resume this filthy habit? Oh yeah: Bex.
Chastain finally puts the iPad aside. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘That video’s bad news.’
I cough, screw half a cigarette against the ashtray and arch an eyebrow. ‘So you think it’s real.’ What a surprise.
‘I can’t be certain,’ she notes, ‘and it wouldn’t be healthy for me to be certain, but at this moment in time . . . yeah, I do. Never saw anything quite like it.’
‘What makes you think it might be real?’ Even as I ask, I know the answer: she believes in this shit and/or it’s beneficial to her career for others to believe. Just like everyone else on this godless globe, she’s either lying or being lied to.
Chastain soothingly rubs the spot where her collarbones meet. ‘I get a bad feeling off it, Jack,’ she says, using my name for the first time instead of ‘mate’.
‘Can you be any more specific?’
She glances at the iPad by her side, disturbed. ‘I’ll need to study it some more.’
‘What about the three words spoken at the start, middle and end? Not the “Oh God . . .” stuff, but the “Adramelech”, the “Mephistopheles” . . .’
She gazes at me, then through me, then beyond me at who knows what, her mind ticking over.
‘What was that third one again?’ I get the impression she’s picking her words carefully.
‘Baphomet. What do you think they’re all about?’
Her focus returns to the balcony and she scribbles brief notes on a pad. ‘I’ll come back to you. But right off the bat – I’m advising you not to track down the makers of that video. Forget all about it.’
A mile away, the sea rolls in over the shore. Inevitable, unstoppable.
‘That video is central to the book,’ I tell her. ‘It’s the spine. Once I expose this one as a fake, everything less convincing collapses too.’
‘That’s important to you,’ she says gently, studying me again. ‘Pulling the curtain across to reveal all. You want your big Wizard of Oz moment. Why’s that, Toto? Why do you think that is?’
First Scooby-Doo, now Toto: what is it with women comparing me to fictional dogs? I actually laugh – no mean feat, given the extent of my jet lag. My brain drifts, then catches up on something she said earlier. ‘What’s wrong with being certain about things anyway?’
She pulls her legs up and crosses them beneath herself on the chair. She’s surprisingly limber, Ms Chastain, and not without sex appeal. ‘Ah,’ she says with troubling enthusiasm, as if settling down to tell an epic tale. ‘Ever heard of Robert Anton Wilson?’
‘Yeah. Big Satanist guy.’
‘No, Jack, he wasn’t. You’re thinking of Anton LaVey.’
‘And you’re running away from my question.’
She tuts. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Or maybe you’re right. Robert Anton Wilson, y’see, gifted multiple-model agnosticism to the world.’
I don’t know what multiple-model agnosticism is, but strongly suspect I’m not going to like it. Sure enough, Chastain outlines how Wilson proposed that it was unhealthy for anyone to cling to one belief system all their lives. According to him, we should be prepared to shift our beliefs and mindset at any time. Apparently, Wilson once described belief as ‘the death of intelligence’. I admit to Chastain that this makes me warm to him just a little, as that certainly applies to religion.
‘It applies to everything, including science,’ she says, enjoying my exasperation. ‘I’m paraphrasing Bob here: no model or map of the universe should be totally believed in or totally denied.’
‘Science,’ I tell her, ‘is rock solid, thanks. Flapping about, changing your belief system every five minutes? Wishy-washy. You have to believe in something, and it can only be science. Because science deals with tangible things that we can see and touch. As opposed to your . . .’ When I gesture dismissively at the knick-knacks that dominate Chastain’s apartment, I sense the birth of irritation in her.
‘The Higgs boson particle,’ she offers. ‘Can we see or touch that?’ When I’m forced to concede we can’t, she goes on: ‘Invisible to the human eye, right? And yet long, expensive investigation showed it was present. Quantum physics, as you must know, has posed vast questions about the role of consciousness in the universe. If we devoted as much effort to investigating the dead as we do to building the weapons that make them dead, we’d know a lot more about life after death.’
‘Dead is dead, Ms Chastain.’
‘You have no idea,’ she says, tugging off her shades. ‘And neither, as a multiple-model agnostic, do I.’ I light another cigarette; she lights more incense. ‘So that’s something we have in common, eh, Jack? Drink your tea, it’s getting cold.’
‘You do know science would dismiss your conception of “positive” and “negative” energy as utter bollocks, right?’
‘Oh, I adore science,’ she says, as if discussing a lovely old aunt with dementia. ‘But it’s just a generalisation of the laws of Greek grammar. The entire Enlightenment project was about rediscovering stuff the ancient Greeks knew. And because it’s coded so heavily on that Graeco-Roman knowledge, there’s whole gaps of things they didn’t have words for.’
‘There are always gaps,’ I say, ‘but when those gaps are filled, they’ll extend the pre-existing framework. They won’t suddenly serve up, I don’t know, ghouls and goblins from out of the clear blue sky.’
‘You have no way of knowing,’ she says, wrongly. ‘Science is science, philosophy is philosophy, and never the twain shall meet. Listen: science is really good at describing things in pieces.’
‘It’s really good at describing and connecting everything.’
‘Science is reductionism. You’re reducing things down. You can dissect a sheep all you fuckin’ like – it won’t let you make an actual sheep. You’re really good at comprehending the pieces, but you can’t see the whole picture.’
‘We have made an actual sheep,’ I say, wincing my way through a nicotine headache. ‘A clone of a sheep.’
‘Nah.’ A firm shake of her head. ‘Nah. That’s not making a sheep from scratch. Not an actual sheep. That’s literally replicating what was there, created by . . . whoever the creator was.’
‘There was no creator,’ I say, ‘besides a big bang and evolution.’
‘And yet again,’ she says, slapping both thighs simultaneously, a little red creeping up from her collar this time, ‘you have no way of knowing. There might be a God, there might not. Near-death experiences and end-of-life experiences point to some kind of afterlife. But you bloody atheists, you have to nail your colours to the mast . . . and we’re back to the age of certainty. You decide there’s no afterlife, because it doesn’t fit your current model. And you don�
��t realise you’re as mentally stagnant as a Jehovah’s Witness.’
‘We examine the evidence,’ I say, disliking the Jehovah’s Witness comparison a great deal. ‘And based on that, we—’
‘Just because it’s unfalsifiable,’ she interrupts, her frustration jagged, ‘doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It just means science can’t disprove it. It’s so arrogant to say that something science can’t disprove isn’t real. You guys think you know it all . . .’
‘No we don’t,’ I say, my own gall rising. ‘But neither are we about to set centuries of progress back by entertaining bullshit straight out of the Dark Ages.’
We spar this way until Chastain unleashes a wild shriek, throws her hands in the air and lets them flop limply by her sides. ‘Should be a hell of a book, this,’ she says, bringing Bex to mind. ‘You, flying around the planet, disbelieving everything. Still, I recently read a book about atheism written by a Christian. No reason why a non-believer shouldn’t tackle belief.’
‘Well, thanks for permission,’ I say, unable to keep the edge off it.
She laughs faintly, before the balcony falls silent and still. All the words we catapulted at each other now dead leaves piled around our ankles. The sea just keeps on coming, constant and clear. It’s fair to say Chastain isn’t quite the archaic witchy type I’d anticipated. Neither do I dislike her, exactly. She’s strong, no question, but flaky multiple models will never earn my respect.
‘So,’ says Sherilyn Chastain, eyeing me with amused contempt. ‘Toto. You coming to this job on Friday or what?’
I tell her I am.
Friday, incidentally, will be the day I see my first ghost.