How to Disappear Completely

by Melody Ann Ross

  And as Cyrus neared the house, he realized that there was no one about whatsoever. Wherever Owen had gone, it had not been to the house. The front door was still slightly open, and Cyrus called Hello?, but no one answered. He’d been the last to leave the night before and had been impressed with how quickly the party guests and even the hired staff dissipated into the night. Many of them must have crammed indecorously into one another’s carriages to manage it. Cyrus could still see the piles of horse droppings littering the paths and wondered why none of the staff had made an effort to clear them.

  He hesitated, looking around once more before entering the still old house. The expansive foyer was exactly as it had been the night before, with card tables set up against the walls and expensive glassware set upon them in small colonies. The floors were littered with crumbs and fallen handkerchiefs, carpets scuffed and marked by the panicked tread of hundreds of feet. The clock in the grand hallway ticked quietly, but there was no other sound to be heard in the house.

  Cyrus walked carefully to the ballroom doors, stood quietly at the threshold and looked into the gloom. The curtains were still drawn, but small holes of light flitted through the dust, reminding Cyrus of the spray of bullet holes through his comrades in his awful dream. That the details were still so freshly remembered unnerved him.

  He glanced at the spot on the floor where he’d spoken with the trickster spirit the night before, trying to capture it in his memory.

  “Hello?” He called again. But only silence answered him.

  Disappointed, unnerved, and feeling suddenly very claustrophobic, Cyrus turned and walked out of the house and started back for the village.

  The sun had still not made any headway against the cloudy barricades, but Cyrus’ pocketwatch and stomach told him that it was late into the afternoon. It was Monday, so the village should have been operating as usual. When he arrived, he called in at the post office and bought a newspaper. The post master was terse. Then he called on the baker for a sweet fruit mince pasty and a thick, chewy bread roll. The baker, too, looked summarily defeated by the gloomy day and was disinclined to chat to Cyrus.

  He sat down on a bench at the village green to eat his fill and read over the daily rag, wondering if the entire town had slept badly the night before.

  After some time, Cyrus heard the train in the distance off to the west. No one had spoken to him as he’d sat and enjoyed his treats. He wasn’t sure he’d heard another human voice in hours, actually. He made his way to the inn to collect his luggage, suddenly eager to return to the noise and life of London.

  He arrived quickly on the platform and saw that there were very few other passengers waiting to board.

  Where did all the people go? He wondered. There had to have been nearly 200 last night. Did they all catch the early train? He hadn’t even seen John Amon Boldreness in the inn, nor the village.

  The emptiness and coldness and strangeness of the last few days finally caught up to him and he shuddered.

  He felt a pair of eyes on him and turned to see Owen striding toward him purposefully on the platform. Cyrus wasn’t sure if he should be pleased or worried.

  “Owen!” he called, “I’m glad to see you. I had hoped to say goodbye and to thank you for your company these last days.”

  “Aye, you’re welcome,” answered Owen, “I wanted to fare you well as well. This cursed day I’ve been out to see about most of the village. It’s luck I saw you striding in here when I did. I’m glad to see you’re well.”

  Owen handed Cyrus a paper and string parcel with a holly twig tied tightly in the knot and continued.

  “I don’t know what you fools conjured up last night, or what was listening to you from the between, but some evil has got these people in its grip. I’ve an idea of what it is, truth be told, but whether it’s a spirit of the between or of this earth I cannot say. Those of you at the big house last night have the worst of it from what I’ve seen. You seem well enough.”

  The train was arriving on the platform, but Owen did not raise his voice to compete with the roar of the engine.

  Instead he leaned closer and told Cyrus, “You drink a bit of this every night before you even think of sleep,” indicating the small parcel.

  “Keep your wits about you. You seem a good man. Remember, every night. It’s only just first quarter moon tonight, you drink that every night until the new moon. And do what you know to protect yourself beyond.”

  The station master was blowing his whistle and looking irritably at Cyrus. Everyone else had already boarded.

  “Thank you,” Cyrus breathed as he turned to go.

  “Every night!” called Owen, and then tried to say something else.

  The station master’s whistle blew and a column of steam from the engines drowned out his voice, but Cyrus was sure he could make out the word ‘dreams’.

  Chapter 9

  The Flame

  Cyrus had made a good living out of fooling people into believing that he alone could confirm what they had always wanted to be true. It may have begun as seances and tarot and divination, but Cyrus’ innate love for the inner workings of things had naturally led him toward a more mechanical, and eventually, computational path. Along the way, he figured out a way to combine fear of technological advancement with faith in the old ways in order to draw in more clients. It had proved surprisingly easy, coming of age as he had in the penny dreadful era.

  Selling the dreadful came naturally to him, and as long as he sold it to the right person, he could remain anonymous. This, too, was easily done, as London at the time was swarmed with unscrupulous writers and newsies, ever trying to outdo one another and shock the public into buying more newspapers. Nearly as soon as some moral, religious, or psychic crisis was reported, there was Cyrus, ready to sell you the solution. After that fateful evening in Wales, he had realized that it was in his best interest to figure out how his particular gift worked.

  That first night, it had been difficult getting answers out of Trickster, as Cyrus had begun to call the spirit. But he had learned some of the steps to the summoning from watching the Lady Lamia, and Trickster had provided some insights into the Otherworld, the void that encircled the living world.

  He’d learned that there was a brilliant plane of the glittering living souls, upon which Cyrus now existed, and in which his soul had begun to outshine his peers. Surrounding that plane was the Void, where the spirits watched, mourned, hungered, rejoiced, and plotted. The liminal space separating the two was held in place only by the pesky and inconstant realities of death, but the wraiths and spirits of the void were not themselves dead.

  Cyrus has asked Trickster about the spirits of the dead, but it had grown cagey and irritable at Cyrus’ binary perceptions of living and dead.

  “Too simple, so simple,” the spirit had wailed, thrashing, "I am not alive, and therefore I cannot be dead. Your lights blink in and out so quickly, only for a moment for us to savor, a morsel of sustenance. Do you call this life? How would you know? I claim you, I claim your light, I have watched from the darkness, and I will watch you forever.”

  Cyrus had heard a menacing undertone to Trickster’s words, but continued to ask questions. “Are there others like me? Someone to help me?”

  “Yesss,” Trickster had responded, its voice lingering on the end of the word, hissing and popping like a log fire, “But beware the sparks, and attach yourself only to the flame. He who burns brightest burns fastest. False, bitter food. I spit upon it! It sickens us!”

  At this point Trickster seemed to have grown bored and the flickering blue flame of its essence began to spread thin across the floor into a mist that filled the room and sieved out through the windows and door frames. The room began to grow darker, quieter, colder as the spirit departed.

  “Wait!” cried Cyrus, “Where are you going?”

  A low, husky voice whispered an answer in Cyrus’ ear, making him gasp and clutch his chest, “To feed.”

  For the next two de
cades, Cyrus experimented with the qualities of belief. What sorts of people were prone to believing a liar? What made that liar believable in their eyes? And what were the most powerful forms of belief?

  And how could Cyrus, who considered himself a moral man, harness this belief and turn it into something more?

  Cyrus decided to focus on the small questions before moving on to the larger ones. What had Trickster meant by the sparks and the flames?

  He summoned Trickster from time to time, but never too often, for fear of discovery or of scaring it off. He summoned a few other spirits as well, but found that they left him distraught and befuddled afterwards. He’d first summoned Anger by accident, and its power had turned him into a raving madman for a time. He’d summoned Fear deliberately, but it was an experience that left him trembling and queasy with uncertainty for months. Similarly, Love left him vaguely nauseous, catatonic with euphoria.

  Eventually he realized that he was simply incompatible with certain spirits and instead summoned the ones that were more aligned to his own personality. He preferred the sweet strength of Curiosity, the imaginative energy of Invention, and the warm comfort of Hope to the cloying stubbornness of spirits like Justice, Certainty, or Creation.

  After the turn of the century, Cyrus began to feel uneasy waves pulsing through the political climate of Europe. People were more unhappy than they’d been in a long time, and the wealthy and powerful people of the world were only making it worse with their imperialist demands on their foreign holdings.

  Cyrus saw the coming world wars before most, and already had a plan in place to take advantage of them without inflicting harm on his fellow men. He spent both wars wading through the unspeakably macabre medical units on the front lines of the various conflicts, wearing the uniform of a chaplain. He laid his hands on countless dying men, comforting them in their final moments with his calm voice and steady conviction of their future peace. He poured lovely nonsense into their ears about the warmth and quiet and softness and dryness of death, the opposite of every reality they had lately known. He promised that their mothers and sisters and wives and children would receive a generous pension and would never want for anything in their lives. He spoke about the future and the end of the war, the incredible achievements that mankind was capable of during peace time, and how far and fast we would travel in the universe.

  He gave the men a death they could look forward to, and a hopeful future for the families and friends they left behind. And they believed him.

  Cyrus was not entirely wrong about the technological advancements that would come as a result of the wars, but this was not because of any unnatural foresight. He was only in the first few decades of his supernaturally prolonged lifespan, but it had already been enough time for him to begin to understand the cyclical and systemic nature of human behavior.

  Conflict was not the driving force behind human ingenuity, but wartime provided the funds and overlooked the morality behind the world’s great inventions. And the resulting comfortable lifestyles of the winning side provided the intellectual security to then question and redesign those inventions. With his extra decades, Cyrus had made a study of the nature of humanity and how this nature interacted with his own.

  He watched carefully as steam gave way to combustion, and combustion gave way to nuclear; as the analog storage of information moved through the various, precarious states. Scratching a pen against paper became punching holes in cards, magnetizing tape reels, or scratchings onto discs with a laser. Cyrus watched and worked through all of this, and knew that his best chance for eternity came at the moment when the transfer of information could no longer be solely accomplished with human eyes. When the first calculators, record players, tape players, CD readers finally made their zenith, and the knowledge of humanity was entrusted to these arcane devices, he knew in his bones that if he could harness human fear of these changes, he would never die.

  He eventually moved across the Atlantic, traveling around as a machine and electronics repairman. People let them into their homes, listened to him when he explained the dangers of their various devices. They trusted him, and they believed him. When the 1960s began and everyone was afraid of outsiders, he found that he had to settle in an area and open a physical shop in order to get the same results. This proved a bit more labor-intensive, and he still found it necessary to re-establish himself in a new location every so often to keep his secret intact. The towns he always chose were becoming cities without realizing it both for their safe size and their particularly backwards populations. A big city was full of cynics, but a middling town was full of trusting hopefuls.

  In England, he’d been the man responsible for convincing members of a certain religion that the telephone would overheat the core of the earth. He’d then invented a safer telephone to sell specifically to those worried people. This had been so easy that in America he perfected it to an art form. He would write to the small town newspapers under a false and scientific-sounding identity, decrying the dangers of not properly maintaining one’s radio, television, microwave, convection oven, vacuum cleaner, or lawn mower.

  He’d then been perfectly poised to provide this maintenance when he moved into town and opened up his shop. He had already become richer and been kept alive far longer than he’d expected, and he’d mostly figured out the mechanics of it by this point.

  From Trickster and from his own experiments, he’d figured out that it wasn’t enough to just create the ruse, he had to gain the trust of the world by actually solving the problem. This was why he relied on someone else to incite the panic, to publicize the problem, to declare the doom and gloom of the world.

  When the digital age had finally rolled around in the 90s, Cyrus was more than prepared. Wicca had also been making strong inroads among American women, and Cyrus was delighted to finally have a chance to blend his two areas of expertise, the technological and the magical.

  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Arthur C. Clarke had written, and Cyrus lived his life according to this mantra. Why simply remove viruses from a computer when he could purify it with magic? Why simply repair a device when he could exorcise its demons?

  In the days before search engines, he created a professional web page and convinced other pages to add his link to their sidebars. He popped into chat rooms in search of potential clients and began traveling around the country to perform his rituals and repairs. Years of wandering across the US had convinced him of the need for a home base, and finally he bought a property in a sleepy corner of suburban LA.

  His service menu became more and more complex, and he could recite it off over the phone mechanically, despite having a printout hanging in his office.

  Preventative/Blessing (30 minutes min.)

  Environmental/incidental/residual hexes, grumpy factory workers transferring negative intentions to machines/software, causes huge, must be cleansed via smudging/directed energy work.

  Minor hexes/Cleansing (45 minutes min. + 15 minutes follow-up)

  Directed curses from outside influence, investigate source of curse, bind the intention- must schedule follow-up, banish the intentions

  ​​Special offer: retaliatory cursing

  Major curses/Binding (90 minutes min.)

  Individual machines, whole buildings/projects, software updates/launches

  Demonic Activity/Exorcising (120 minutes min. + follow-ups)

  Summoned accidentally or otherwise (does owner have a cat?), differing tiers for demon type (most expensive: elemental demons [weather/temperature, etc.], medium: behavioral demons [hunger, anger, greed, aggression, chaos, etc.], cheap: former human souls, now demons)

  ​​Special: retaliatory summoning

  Demons must be ID’d, bound, and then banished. Follow-ups required to check the health of the gateway closure.

  *NB* Clients must be present, must be purified before and after, must be willing to participate in interactive process, submit to follow-up purity
check.

  However, Cyrus’ greatest moment and proudest achievement was the Y2K panic. He’d been observing with disdain the general fear that humans had toward technology for many generations, and when another moral panic seemed to swell in the late 1990s, Cyrus had leapt on the opportunity.

  “Computers won’t be able to comprehend their instructions! You need to install this critical program to save it,” he cried.

  “They’ll fall into a feedback loop and self-destruct! Do you own a fire-proof safe?” he peddled.

  “The world’s financial markets will crash and society will crumble! It’s better to hold your assets in your hand—you need to convert your cash to gold!” he prophesied.

  “Nuclear reactors will overheat, and missiles around the world will launch themselves indiscriminately! You need this radiation suit, this fallout shelter, these rations, this water purification system,” and on and on.

  And then, just as quickly as the panic had risen, it faded away into nothing. The believers were satisfied with their preventative measures, and the non-believers were satisfied that their inaction hadn’t cost them anything. Cyrus happily returned to his regular technomancy duties, bolstered by an intense wave of life-giving energy.

  He enjoyed his work immensely, and as time went on, he saw very little difference between the occult practices of computer programmers and the magical arts. Both relied on mastery of an impossibly complex and convoluted code that was employed by an eccentric expert and that yielded extraordinary results. Both required an ordinary person to take an extraordinary leap of faith with a stranger. Both were rewarded with glittering, happy outcomes.