But Colby Stevens was not a lucky man. Not at all. Not even a little bit.
It’s not that there wasn’t any light in the world; Colby had seen plenty of light, plenty of goodness. But that was just one side of the coin. The dark of the world was so black that it was blinding, the crushing, lingering weight of everything that was wrong coalesced into creatures he dared not name aloud. They were what drove Colby into hiding; they were what made life so unbearable. And the creatures, the memory, the knowledge could not be gotten rid of, no matter how hard he wished. Some sins even a djinn could not wipe clean. Such was the lesson of his first wish.
Even the dark things seem shiny and new the first time around.
Once again, Colby had few friends and no prospects to speak of. He was a carrot-topped, scrawny excuse for a young man—a tangled mop of greasy red hair atop a gangly, frail, freckled frame that drooped and bowed when he walked. Puberty had been cruel. His eyes were sunken—deep, dark circles pooling beneath them—and his nose seemed a tad too cartoonish to be real. Had he often smiled, he might be laughable, but smiling was something he did rarely these days. Despite his comical appearance, his dour expression and grim countenance kept him from looking either goofy or creepy—leaving him merely awkward and gawky.
He was twitchy. Nervous. He looked around constantly, staring long and hard at the empty spaces in the room. There was an off-putting way about how he would stare over people’s shoulders when he talked to them, as if there was something looming behind them that they could not see. When he walked down the street, he muttered and mumbled to himself. This strangeness was not lost on those around him, and thus he rarely found himself with company.
At the age of twenty-two, Colby Stevens was a man who knew too much; who had seen too much; who understood too much. But no one would think that to look at him. Especially not when serving as the stock boy and acquisitions clerk for one Harold Puckett.
Puckett’s Stacks was not the sort of bookshop one happened upon; it was the sort of bookshop for which one looked deliberately. One of the few walk-down shops in all of the Austin metropolitan area, no sign announced its presence or map marked its location. You had to know it existed and know someone who knew how to find it, for once you were there it was likely to have exactly the sort of book you were looking for. First editions, rare editions, self-published masterpieces, scribbled notebooks of famed madmen, books of math, books of magic; this was where you found such things. And Colby Stevens had become Mr. Puckett’s prime acquisitions man.
How Colby came about applying was still something of a mystery to Harold Puckett. He’d simply turned up one day, announcing that he was there to fill the position. “I hear you need some help,” he’d said, a smile on his face and his hair neatly combed—the one occasion on which Harold would see him looking so professional.
Harold nodded, only moments before having muttered to himself how much he needed some help around the shop. He’d never placed an ad or mentioned to a single soul his need or desire for an apprentice, but there Colby was, fully aware of it, ready to start that very afternoon. Such was his relationship with Colby Stevens: he wanted something, and Colby anticipated his request. It was the sort of relationship one never questioned openly for fear it might one day vanish, so Puckett went along with it, and paid Colby a healthy wage—a wage Colby earned several times over with his nose for rare finds and his ability to sell the most unknown work to a customer who’d never known how badly he or she had always wanted it.
That was Colby’s real gift. While one could spend all day discussing the distinctive way in which he carried himself or how uncomfortable one felt around him, his strengths were unmistakable. He possessed an uncanny insight into human nature that bordered on mind reading. Of course, Colby couldn’t read minds, but sometimes he acted as though he could, which unsettled even those who knew him well. There were few things that surprised him and he always knew when someone was behind him, even when they were creeping up to catch him unawares. Colby Stevens was a strange, mysterious man. And Harold Puckett felt that this made him right at home in his bookshop.
“Excuse me, sir,” said a patron to Harold Puckett. “I’m looking for something a bit . . . exotic.”
“You mean like erotic?” asked Harold. He wasn’t kidding. The man was shifty, squirrely, speaking a few hairs under the volume you would normally ask such a question. That was the sort of man looking for antique porn.
“No, no, no,” said the man nervously. “I’m looking for something . . . occult.”
“Ah,” said Harold, understanding. “Did you have a particular title or author in mind?”
“Do you have any Grady?”
“Grady? Hmmm.” He thumbed his beard for a moment. “I think I ran across a couple of his somewhere. I sure don’t remember selling any recently. Let me check.” Harold leaned over the counter, looking past the stacks. As if summoned, Colby rounded a corner, arms overflowing with weathered old tomes. He craned his neck over the pile and made his best you rang boss face.
“Yeah, Harry?” Colby asked, anticipating the question.
“You see any Grady lying around the stacks?”
“Hans Grady? Yeah. Over in early American metaphysical.” He briefly sized up the customer. “I’ll show you where it’s at.” Colby set down the overwhelming mountain of books and beckoned the customer to join him, making his way back across the store. When the customer was close enough to hear a polite whisper, Colby lowered his voice, speaking with great care and discretion. “Now, I have to ask you, are you a collector or a practitioner?”
The customer anxiously fidgeted. “I really don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“Well, not meaning to pry, but it’s important to know if Grady’s really what you’re looking for. I mean, if I were a collector, Grady would be an interesting name to have on my shelf. But if I were actually trying to get some use out of the book, well, I’d end up using it to steady my wobbly couch.”
The customer coughed nervously. “Really? And why is that?”
Still in hushed tones, Colby spoke, occasionally looking around to ensure relative privacy. “Grady’s ideas are all flash and no substance. The rituals he uses are purely for show, and the effects he gained from them, if any, would have come from his natural talent and not his work. His theories are hogwash and his calculations are scrawled twaddle. Now if I were looking for something with substance . . .”
“Um, well, I am something of a practitioner, myself,” said the customer proudly, trying his hand at modesty.
“Of course you are, and that’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of, especially here. What are you looking to do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe something . . . tantric?”
“You looking merely to increase performance, or are you looking to touch an external or internal consciousness?”
The customer looked him square in the eye. “I want to see beyond.”
Colby gave him a knowing look and a stern nod. “I have just the thing for you over here.” He reached back without looking, running his fingers along a shelf before plucking a book from it. The volume was heavily worn, its edges dulled by time, the binding a tad loose. “Now this is Donaldson. Not very well known outside certain circles, but excellent nonetheless. Here, open it.”
The customer took the book, handling it as if he’d just been handed the Shroud of Turin, examining every scratch and spot of wear as if they contained clues to the book’s origin. Opening the cover, he paged through it as Colby leaned over pointing gently at the margins.
“See those notes?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Recognize that handwriting?”
“No, not right offhand. Should I?”
Colby was whispering very quietly now. “Now, Harry would kill me if I told you this, but I believe it’s none other than Crowley.”
“Alistai
r Crowley?” he asked, slightly louder than Colby.
“Sshh. Yes. There’s another sample later in the book that I believe belongs to Arthur Waite, but Harry hasn’t been able to get anyone to authenticate it. Now this text predates the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, so . . .”
“You think this is what inspired Crowley?”
“Might be. I promise nothing, except that the book is dead on. Its theories on celestial body alignment and its use in astral travel are the best found anywhere.”
“I’ll take it,” said the customer without hesitation.
“You also might want to check out Donaldson’s other works. We’ve got a few more behind the counter that we secured at a recent estate sale. Ask Harry, up front.”
“Thank you,” said the customer excitedly. “Thank you very much, sir.”
“Don’t mention it.” Colby winked. “Just be careful with that stuff. There are things over there that don’t like visitors.” The man smiled in return and made his way back up front.
Harold waited at the front counter, a proud smile on his face. He looked down at the book. “Donaldson, huh?”
“Yes. Your clerk said you might have some more up here?” The man peered eagerly around Harold, hoping to catch a glimpse of another volume.
“Donaldson’s a little pricey,” said Harold, slowly moving out of the way to allow the man to eye the stacks for himself. “But a few just came in this weekend. I can never keep this guy on the shelf for very long.”
“He sounds like he’s worth splurging on.”
“So I’m told.”
Though the man’s eyes bulged a bit when Harold handed him the total, he smiled as he wrote the check. He was no longer nervous, but elated. As he handed the check over to Harold and took his books, he glanced around and smiled. “I’ll be back.”
“We look forward to it,” said Harold.
The bell chimed on his way out, leaving Harold and Colby alone in an empty store. Harold smirked. “You know damn well that wasn’t Crowley’s handwriting.”
Colby poked his head from around a bookshelf. “Of course. It was McGreggor’s. But nobody knows who the hell that is—though they should.”
“Aren’t you the one who thinks Crowley was a cretin?”
“I . . . think those were my words, yes,” said Colby, playfully pretending he needed to remember.
“I’d hardly call the man a cretin.”
“The man sure knew how to write,” said Colby. “That’s why he’s famous. But he didn’t know dick about the other side.”
“Well, you just sold the guy a week’s sales’ worth of books with his name.”
Colby nodded, doing the mental math. “Yeah. That sounds about right.”
“Speaking of names,” said Harold, pointing a finger into the air like an exclamation point. “I’ve got something for you.” He fumbled beneath the battered wooden counter, rooting around and running his fingers up and down the broken spines of books until he managed to come upon just the tome he’d been looking for. Pulling it out, he spun it around, presenting it to Colby faceup. “I found a Ray at an estate auction this weekend, and I know of your fondness for his work.”
The book was very simple: a vanity-press printing with no art on the cover and the words The Everything You Cannot See by Dr. Thaddeus Ray in a nondescript, no-frills font. It had neither a dust jacket, nor any copy on the back cover. It was the literary equivalent of a brown paper bag. Colby politely took the book from Harold’s hands and nodded a thank-you. “I don’t know if fondness is the right word.”
“Well, every time a Ray comes up for auction, I spy you lingering over it for a few moments longer than the others. And since they’re so rare, and this woman clearly had no idea what her husband was dabbling in, I thought I’d get you one. This is his first, I believe.”
“Yes. First of four. Only twelve hundred and fifty copies were printed, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Well, now this one is yours,” said Harold.
“You know how much this would bring at auction? The sale of this would run the shop for months.”
“And I’m giving it to you. It wouldn’t be much of a gift if it were easy to part with, now would it?”
Colby nodded, smiling weakly, something of an achievement for Harold to have gotten out of him. “Thank you,” he said. “This means a lot to me.”
“You’re welcome. Now get out of here. I’m closing up. Go home.” Harold smiled.
THOUGH HE OWNED a car, on days like this Colby biked to work. Austin is a city swimming in trees. In the spring, every neighborhood is swollen with oak and pecan, branches arching over cracked suburban side streets; bushes bursting from the grass, threatening to swallow sidewalks whole. It is a green oasis surrounding a dammed-up river the locals prefer to call a lake. From the air it looks like a city devoured by a creeping green, its buildings like a series of tall, thin, Incan temples, destined to be overrun by jungle, left forgotten, to puzzle future civilizations. Of course, come summer, that shade is the only thing protecting residents from the harsh, bitter scalding of an unforgiving sun and its hundred-degree afternoons, when the green full beard of spring gives way to the brown withered stubble of drought.
It was spring once again: with its early-morning mistings, evening thundershowers, and temperate afternoons; a beautiful patch of green between the depressing yellow-brown of winter and the intolerable yellow-brown of August. This was the time of year Colby loved most. It was still early in the season, when the days could get well into the high seventies, but the nights were a brisk, wintery forty-five. Austin weather was like that this time of year: dysfunctionally bipolar. It was a time of year trapped perfectly between two very different worlds. And Colby Stevens felt a certain kinship with that.
Colby owned a small house on the east side of the city, squarely in the section of town teetering between hipster chic and too poor to live anywhere else. There was nothing special about it, a rather plain, unremarkable house on an ordinary, unexceptional street. He kept it in good repair, paying a neighborhood kid to keep the lawn up so as to not attract unwanted attention. It was a bar code of a property, generic, ordinary, and anonymous. Just as Colby wanted.
Colby opened his front door, breathing in deeply through his nose. There was nothing peculiar. He laid his keys down in the bowl sitting on an entry table just past the foyer, giving a good look around in all the nooks and crannies of the room. Closing his eyes, he concentrated deeply. There was nothing out of place and nothing present that shouldn’t be. Finally, he could relax.
He walked over to his bookcase, looked carefully at the shelf third from the top, and ran his fingers along four other copies of The Everything You Cannot See. The shelf was comprised almost entirely of books by Dr. Thaddeus Ray, filled in with a few other obscure reference manuals on the occult. Colby parted the four, splitting them right down the middle, sticking this new copy, his fifth, in between them. Then he sighed deeply, his only consolation being that Harold meant well.
“You have plans?” asked a voice from behind. Colby sniffed the air and immediately recognized the familiar scent of brimstone and gazelle musk. Yashar. He didn’t bother to turn around.
“What did you have in mind?” he asked.
“Drinks,” said Yashar. “Lots of them.”
Colby nodded. “I think I can squeeze you in.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SECOND STREET PREDATORS
Simon Sparks was an oozing slug of a man poured neatly into a three-piece suit. Well-dressed and impeccably coifed, he was like cheap scotch—just refined enough to seem classy to anyone who didn’t know better. Mid-thirties, condo, job in finance, a sleek car that could be started by remote, a band of pale flesh around his left ring finger, and a gold ring tucked neatly into his front-right pocket.
Simon had a theory about women, and if you knew him well e
nough that he both trusted and wanted to impress you, he would lay it all out. “They’re all broken,” he would say. “Every last one of them. Oh, it’s not their fault. It’s not biological either. I’m no sexist. It’s societal. We do it to them; we break them down, bit by bit, year by year. With magazines and commercials and movies starring big-breasted bimbos who can barely get a line out of their mouths before spilling out of their dresses. Women look around them, see a media full of undeniably—and unattainably—beautiful women, and then they look in the mirror and see a collection of flaws too numerous to name.” Then he would take a drink. He always drank right there to let it all sink in.
“ ‘My hips are too big, my ankles too fat, my nose is too long, my lips are too thin, my hair too stringy, my breasts a little lopsided, my nipples are too large or too small or too brown or too pink.’ And the worst ones, the very worst offenders of all, are the really, spectacularly beautiful ones. The ones who stop traffic.” He would take another drink right here, nodding, smiling, as if he were about to tell you one of life’s biggest secrets. “The ones the nice guys are terrified to talk to and who spend all of their time getting battered to pieces by the cocky assholes who do. Those girls are kicked to shit and left hungry for any kind of attention.
“Those are the girls that do the dirtiest stuff. They’ll let you do anything to them. They’ll drop down and give you twenty and beg you at the top of their lungs to give it to them harder, give it to them deeper, and give it to them in any place you want. As long as you give it to them. And don’t leave in the morning before getting their number. Because that’s what breaks them. That’s what they don’t understand. They think that if they were prettier, you’d call them back. That if they had done it right, you would call them back. That if they were only interesting enough, you would call them back. But you won’t. You will never call them back. Because pretty as they are, they are not worth the hassle with your wife.”
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