The vestibule was deserted. Miniature statues of saints, mostly ladies, one bearded non-Jesus man, and a little child in a crown and a dress stood against the walls surrounded by what appeared at first glance to be tiny, flickering candles but turned out on closer inspection to be tiny electric lights. Byron had a point: all the female saints did look like they were wearing hoodies in a way, and they were all thin and frail-looking, too. Maybe their hair underneath was just as awful as Andromeda’s. In fact, that was pretty much guaranteed, pre-blow-dryer era.
“These all used to be bacon gods,” she whispered, trying to explain how the early Christian church had replaced local deities with its own saints in popular worship. They’re still pagan gods! stage-whispered Huggy. And of course It was right: changing their names changed little; that was just something humans did on account of their own vanity. A good magician, of course, would know to learn all their names if he wanted to make proper use of them.
Andromeda had expected these incidental shrines, and had been prepared to give this mini-lecture on their origins. She had researched it and even practiced it in the bath that day. Half-whispered, half-thought, it had sounded impressive and weedgie. But as usual, out in the air, the words—from the yet-to-be-written volume XX of Liber K—came out garbled and nonsensical, and Byron just stared at her.
“No, I’m pretty sure this has always been the mother-o-saurus,” said Byron, pointing to the sign that said MOTHER OF SORROWS.
She couldn’t tell which he had meant to say, so Andromeda half smiled in case it was a joke, then added: “Well, the mother-o-saurus looks a lot like Isis.” She pulled Sexual Response in the Human Female from her bag, found the High Priestess, and held it up against the picture of the mother-o-saurus, whose halo and rays looked, maybe, a little like the High Priestess’s headdress (though not quite as much as Andromeda had expected it to). “So this crown is the crown of Hathor, the sun with cow horns around it. And Isis was a virgin and the mother of Horus. She’s also the Statue of Liberty, too.” And Wonder Woman. The crowns weren’t looking similar enough to make her point the way she thought they would, but she knew she was right. It was in lots of books. “She was called the Popess in the Middle Ages,” she added lamely. An anchoress with a special hat, she thought, remembering the King of Sacramento.
Byron said “Holy shit” to indicate that he was impressed, but it didn’t seem like his heart was in it. She would have to consult Mrs. John King van Rensselaer so she could describe it better, how the emblems of ancient cults got updated and passed down to future civilizations over and over, how gods and goddesses got recycled.
The mother-o-saurus in the picture had a heart stabbed with swords floating above her chest, just like the King of Sacramento.
Not just like, said Huggy, surging in. Do I have to count them for you? There were seven little swords puncturing the mother-o-saurus’s heart, rather than the three in Pixie’s Three of Swords card that the King of Sacramento had had on his chest beneath his robe. The Seven of Swords is … Andromeda couldn’t remember the Golden Dawn motto. Futility, said Huggy. You of all people should know: it’s futility.
“Futility, of course,” said Andromeda, loudly enough that Byron shot her an “Are you feeling all right?” look.
To make an offering, you had to put a coin in a slot, and then you could flip a switch, turning on the little flame-shaped Christmas-tree light on top of one of the fake candles. This Andromeda did. The sound of the switch echoed throughout the room as the light came on, and there was also a little buzz sound, like a mosquito being zapped by a bug light. Huggy said: Well, now you’ve done it, and laughed, if that faint rushing sound was indeed intended as laughter.
“How come they don’t use real candles?” Andromeda asked, thinking that at least they had a good echo in there.
“It would cost more to insure with real ones,” said Byron, “according to my dad.”
That makes a pathetic kind of sense, said Huggy, but Andromeda shushed her.
Real candles were used in the actual service, at least, but Byron had had a point: there was nothing even remotely weedgie about anything to do with what went on in St. Brendan’s Church that day, outside of a slight echo and the mother-o-saurus’s swords. The church itself was brightly lit, rather than shadowy and dazzling and smoky and terrifying, as she had imagined it would be. The main thing it reminded her of was a school assembly, if you had happened to go to a school with only a couple of dozen elderly students; a lot of them looked like International House of Bookcakes patrons as well. It certainly had not been what she had expected.
There was even one point in the proceedings where everybody shook hands with each other. Byron shook her hand solemnly, with a “What did I tell you?” look on his face.
“You win, sir,” she whispered. Even her own cobbled-together Daisy-less ceremonies in makeshift temples blew this one out of the water.
Just as they had finished their handshake, Andromeda’s phone vibrated in with a new message from St. Steve. “Do u want me?” it said.
Now, there was magic. No matter how many times it happened it was always a shock, the effect a few texted words could have on her when they came from the right person. Her skin tingled; she felt almost unable to breathe. It was a worried, scared, but totally wonderful feeling of anxiety and uncertainty. “Of course,” she texted back, and stared at the phone in her hand as though trying to will it to receive another message, rechecking as fast as the display would clear. “How much?” came the eventual response.
Despite the obvious proof of her body’s physical reaction, and the fact that there was no other possible answer to that question, she had to wonder as she was entering the text whether it was even really true anymore. But she sent it regardless: “more than anything else in the world” with a “<3.” Even if it wasn’t quite the same as it was before, she was making a case, now that she had a chance, and she wanted to make the strongest possible argument. Also, to seem positive and surprisingly low-maintenance. No matter how many times she checked, however, no response to this message arrived.
Andromeda had forgotten where she was, and looked up to see Byron staring at her. Texting in church was probably some horrible faux pas, if not a sin, especially if you did it with the intensity of a madwoman.
“You were squeaking,” he said, after they were back in the car.
“I was not,” Andromeda snapped, but Huggy said, You most totally were.
The Choronzon on the dad’s CD wasn’t the same Choronzon as the one on Byron’s CD. Byron’s Choronzon was from Sweden and had broken up in 1989. Byron’s verdict on the Clearview Choronzon was: “Hecka lame.” He had quite a few supporting arguments for this, most of which involved different types of “rock” that it was or wasn’t similar to. Andromeda couldn’t tell the difference between them, and also couldn’t understand why, if there was such a thing as Cthulhu rock, both groups weren’t both it. In fact, the hecka lame Clearview Choronzon appeared to be the more knowledgeable about the Cthulhu mythos, and they seemed to know a bit about real magic as well, to judge from the song titles “Io Pan” and “I Will Endure.” Byron seemed to deem it a real possibility that the defunct Swedish Choronzon might come over to the United States and sue the Clearview Choronzon’s asses for being name-stealers. That seemed highly unlikely to Andromeda.
“But I don’t know anything about music,” she admitted. “Is there such a thing as Igneous rock?”
Byron ejected the CD and passed it to her on one finger. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Hey, are you okay?”
He said this because Andromeda was staring at the track listing written in Sharpie on the CD. She had never looked at it before, and hadn’t realized that it contained a major, major synch.
“Play number five,” she said, removing the CD from his finger and shoving it back into the slot. Byron winced, but pressed a button till the number five appeared on the display.
The song title was “Toad Bone Ritual.” Now,
what were the odds of that? A rock band with the same name as the favorite band of her disciple, recording, at her own dad’s studio, a song on the subject of, and with the same title as, a spell found copied out in the notebook of her dead weedgie friend, which had surfaced in a random posthumous sweep of her effects.
“I wouldn’t say they’re my favorite band,” said Byron, after she had explained.
“Not the point,” said Andromeda, waving him to be quiet and listen.
The lyrics of the song, spoken rather than sung in a reverberating computer-sounding voice, turned out, even more remarkably, to consist solely of instructions on how to conduct the ritual, and they tracked Daisy’s notes, as Andromeda remembered them, very closely.
Same source, said Huggy. Guaranteed. Too close to be accidental. That was what Andromeda had been thinking too.
Byron was listening to the lyrics, an expression of distaste on his face that was so clearly heartfelt that it almost made Andromeda love him just a little.
“Really?” he said. “They put the toad in a box with holes and let it get eaten alive by ants? That’s psycho.”
Andromeda nodded. “And then they would dig up the box and float the bones down the river, and use the one that floated upstream as a talisman to tame horses. They used to call the operation ‘going down to the river,’ and the people who did it were referred to as Toadmen. Weird, old folk magic.”
“We’re not going to be, um, going to any rivers, are we?”
“We most certainly are not,” said Andromeda. “I don’t doubt it can be powerful, but it’s also a very negative kind of magic, and that can really backfire on you.”
Byron smiled wanly and gave her a relieved “The animals are our friends” look.
“God, this song is bad,” he said.
“So when does the actual Satan worship begin?” said Byron, after a pause to regain his composure.
Andromeda rolled her eyes. At least he had said it in a jokey way.
“Just do your reading,” she said. He had a stack of new books from the Sylvester Mouse list on the backseat, alongside the previous batch to be returned, including a translation of the Greek Magical Papyri and The Golden Bough.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, saluting. “How about Lucifer?”
“See, magic is not like that,” she said, in a “You have so much to learn, my child” tone, refusing to elaborate. “Anyway, Lucifer just means ‘the morning light,’ so if you want to worship that, be my guest.”
A truer name for that spiritual creature, according to Dr. Dee’s angels, was in fact Coronzon. It was hard to explain to someone with no education how that was both wrong and right at the same time. She retrieved the rescued True and Faithful from Byron’s backseat and flipped to the primary Coronzon passage to try to show him.
“Wow, it’s right before page ninety-three,” he said. At least he had retained that much. And of course, it was indeed quite a synch that four hundred years before Crowley such a significant page numbering would occur, and it was fairly gratifying to Andromeda as a teacher that Byron had appreciated the fact without prompting.
“See now, they’re all misspelling it,” she said. “Crowley replaced the C with a Ch so it would add up to three-three-three in his system, but the C is more correct.” What it really added up to was a complicated question she couldn’t really begin to explain, so she continued: “But they’re talking about the same Coronzon, the Dweller in the Tenth Aethyr called ZAX.” She pulled out The Vision and the Voice and read aloud Crowley’s description of the babbling, meaningless, malignant, formless entity against whom the only weapon is silence; a thing to be endured and vanquished, certainly not worshipped. Finally she pulled out her Moleskine notebook and drew a diagram of the Tree of Life, pointing to the area below the supernal triad, the area that symbolized the Abyss.
“That’s where he is. He’s there to destroy your ego, if you ever get far enough for your ego to need destroying. It has to happen if you want to become adept, but it’s something you work with and operate, not something you worship.”
She must have sounded uncharacteristically confident, because Byron said: “So nobody’s destroyed your ego, then.”
“Not yet,” Andromeda replied. “Anyway, we’re not going to be Coronzonists, either. We’re not going to worship anybody. Worship is very old aeon.”
“So what are we going to do?”
The incorporeal equivalent of an elbow in the ribs from Huggy drew attention to the we in both of their sentences. You’re going to have to make some sacrifices if you want this we to work for you, It said, and though Andromeda pretended not to know what It was talking about she knew she was promising something by choosing to participate in the we. There are things you can’t do properly alone.
Andromeda imagined things she would like to have said and done to her had she herself ever been lucky enough to find an instructor in magic. She felt a little lost, but Huggy came to the rescue and fed her the words, and they were pretty good. They were the sorts of things Daisy would say and had said, and Andromeda said them now.
“If you really want to learn about magic,” she said slowly, following word by word the pattern Huggy laid out for her, “you have to do everything I say. You can ask questions if you don’t understand something—it’s good to ask questions—but you still have to follow your instructions, even when you don’t understand them.” Rather amazingly, he was nodding. She had never spoken this well or impressively in her life, but she was a little uncomfortable. It would have felt far better if someone had been saying it to her, but someone had to be in charge and it sure wasn’t going to be him. When she started thinking of it as Huggy directing both of them, but without Byron’s being aware of that fact, it started to feel a little easier, so that was what she did. Huggy was leading them both. Andromeda was just the mouthpiece, the oracle, the sybil.
“We’ll have to get you a ring,” she said, thinking maybe she could even design a little ceremony to go along with it, once he had acquired it. Andromeda hadn’t had the opportunity to design a ritual that would be observed by anyone other than Dave in quite some time. She liked to think she had a bit of a talent for it—and she knew Byron would probably be impressed with the least little thing. She explained the dual-identity ring system. “When my ring is on my right hand, I am a vegetarian, and a socialist, and a Giants fan, and I like jazz, and I dislike my mom. When it is on the other hand, like now, I’m the exact opposite. And if I make a mistake and act the wrong way according to the Ring Day, I have to punish myself.”
“There’s no way you’d ever like your mom,” said Byron, “no matter what finger your ring’s on.” He had picked up that much.
“You’re right,” said Andromeda. She took the kitten pin from her bag strap and quickly poked herself in the knee with it, through her tights. A tiny dark bead of blood formed where she pulled the pin out.
“Holy fuck!” said Byron, staring.
“I punish myself,” she said, simply, enjoying the look of bewilderment on his face. But he was still clearly on board. He wasn’t kicking her out of the car, anyway. This guy will love you forever now, said Huggy, so watch out.
“And this is magic?” he said, turning the volume knob all the way down.
“It will be,” she said. Huggy said, Pinch him, so she did, not quite knowing why, hard, just above his knee.
“Ow.”
“You were questioning,” she said, following Huggy’s lead, and as she said it she realized it was probably true. “Weren’t you?”
Byron admitted he had been.
“First lesson,” she said. “Don’t.” Wow. She had never been so … effective. “Now,” she said, getting a little caught up in the feeling and remembering an old story about Mr. Crowley. “Shall I give you the serpent’s kiss?” Then, when Byron looked puzzled: “Say yes.”
“Yes.”
Andromeda grasped Byron’s wrist and bit it as hard as she could.
“Ow! Jesus. Magic hurts!
”
It most certainly does, she thought.
What in the Universe, said Huggy, when Andromeda was in the bathroom at the Burger King afterward, was that “serpent’s kiss” nonsense? You really almost lost him there. You need to stay well to one side of freakishness.
“Something I learned from Uncle Al,” replied Andromeda defensively.
The Beast, said Huggy with a kind of sniff, has his place, but he is not one to emulate in social situations. Stick to the plan.
“And what is this plan?”
But Huggy was silent once again.
“I don’t know nothing about no plan,” Andromeda said to her reflection, and instantly regretted looking in the mirror at all—she had deteriorated since the morning, and the harsh Burger King vacuum lights were no help.
“So I have to be a vegetarian every other day,” said Byron, when she returned, “and I have to dislike my dad, and then like him, and I’m either a Democrat or a Republican.” He sounded dubious, as one might if one were forced to be the disciple of someone with such flyaway curly-outy hair. Andromeda felt so much less confident now that she realized exactly what she looked like. Calm down, said Huggy, popping up. You’re not trying to seduce him. You just want him for his library card and assorted services. Assorted services. Gods.
But then Byron said: “Okay. What else?” So they were still in business, curly-outy hair notwithstanding. “Shall I give you the turban skins?”
Andromeda shook her head. He had meant to say “serpent’s kiss.”
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