“I wouldn’t go inviting your enemies to your side. Not just yet,” said a man from behind me. I turned around with closed fists and swinging arms. It was probably the gayest sight on Earth, but damnit, I committed to those punches. Bryant caught my hands in his. Their coolness was shocking. I’d forgotten the sensation that our conflicting temperatures had on my heart.
“How are you here? How is there always someone here?” I cried.
“Because you need watching. Garth is not here for you. I’m stepping in,” he said, coolly.
“He asked you to?”
He shifted contrapposto and swiped an imaginary wisp of hair. “After he found out that I’d been doing it anyway, he asked me to continue.”
“Excuse me?”
“I have been observing you. Since that night.”
I wanted to be angry but the idea was too arousing. Finally, a stalker I was into. “Why?” I asked. “You said that you couldn’t. I already have a Guardian.”
“I know. And I’m not him,” he said as he advanced toward me. The expression he wore began to frighten me. Bryant was going to a dark place, a place I’d never accessed while I had his poison in me.
“Bryant, stop. You’re scaring me.”
“I’m older than I look Jeremy. I’ve seen many souls leave this world. I’ve been the reason they’ve left.”
His presence was paralyzing. Even though he hadn’t touched me yet, I felt like he was holding me down. My feet were stuck.
Then something funny happened. His eyes began to glimmer with tears. His jaw bobbed for words. “If you are really who they say you are, I am given hope that not everyone is truly lost,” he said. The tears escaped his eyes and began to drip down his face. “Many innocent lives were taken. Do you remember anything from before you came here? What was it was like there, in Heaven? Who was with you? Is it easy to come back?”
He was clutching me, desperate for answers.
“Bryant, I don’t…I don’t know anything.”
“Nothing? Would photographs help? Names? There are some people whose fates I need to know about. Maybe you can remember…Please, you have to remember.”
My heart splintered as I watched him break down.
“So many people died.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, beginning to cry myself. When others get emotional I tend to absorb their energy, even if I have no clue what they’re crying about. “I can’t help you. I don’t know anything. I can’t control this thing inside of me.”
He sniffed away the remaining tears and straightened. “Of course. Nothing about the Way makes sense. I don’t know how anyone can begin to understand it. It isn’t fair.”
“You’re right. It’s not fair. All I have are dreams about people I don’t know. I smell or hear things and have memories that aren’t mine. I can’t place half the things that my mind comes up with.”
“Sounds downright magical.”
I ignored his cynicism. “Garth was the only person I could talk to about it because…well, he knows. He knows what I know. What I think I know. Somewhere deep down I’m contented being with him.”
“You love that grotesque?” he asked. There was no repulsion in his words. He was genuinely wondering. Or accusing.
“Part of me might,” I said. “I wish Rita would help me figure this out, already.”
“Well you’re in luck.”
I peered at him curiously.
“That’s the other reason I’m here. She’s ready.”
*
Rita’s apartment was cleaner than the last time I’d visited. The mess of papers, bottles, keepsakes, and plain-old junk had been removed or simply stuffed into the periphery. Even a scented candle burned, masking the old air with a sugary stench. “I went through a phase in the seventies when I made them,” she said. “I’m sure it’s chock full ‘o lead or other toxic shit. Be careful breathing,” she coughed.
“What’s the occasion, Rita? I’ve never seen this place so orderly,” Bryant said. He did the obligatory index finger swipe across the table, looking for excess dust. The fragile man I’d just seen was replaced by the strong vampire I’d known.
“Don’t be smart with me. I don’t think you understand just who is coming tonight, do you?”
We shrugged.
“She is one of the oldest. When the world was new, she was there. She was my teacher’s teacher’s teacher. And if you know anything about witch life spans, that means she’s really goddamn old.” She went to a mirror and applied more lipstick. It was the definition of pink. She probably intended for a less severe look by changing from her usual red but it was an equal trade.
“So, she’s dead?” I asked, always the mortal fool.
“We witches aren’t Immortals but it takes us abnormally long to pass on. This broad has powers and knowledge beyond anybody else, so she’s taking her sweet time.”
My stomach turned thinking about what she’d look like. The witch in front of me wasn’t exactly the picture of beauty. I could barely imagine what façade such an ancient one could manage to put up.
Rita came to me and grabbed my arm. “She was there, chickadee.” She spoke with rancid breath that’d been sweetened by way of sugar-free gum. “She was the witch who lent counsel to Garth, and to you, so many moons ago. If anyone knows the Way of Things, it’s her.”
Garth entered quickly, carrying a bag over his shoulder. I flashed on what he must have looked like slinging Francis through the wilderness.
“Perfect timing,” sang Rita with hands over her head, bracelets rattling.
“He’s good at that,” I said, feigning disinterest. Really, I was never gladder to see him.
Garth gently put down his bag and walked to me. He took my chin in his hand, bringing my face to his. Our foreheads kissed. “I am sorry,” he whispered.
We didn’t need another argument over the things we couldn’t help. So I just smiled.
Rita harrumphed. Garth went to the bag and pulled out an ornate leather box. Gold lettering spelled out something in an unfamiliar alphabet.
“My stars,” said Rita.
“Where did you get that?” asked Bryant.
“The Institute. In Prague,” she rang.
“I thought the fires—”
“Only part of it. There are vaults below.”
Bryant looked at the box in awe.
“Bryant did a bang-up job destroying the place in the eighties,” she boasted. “He’s quite notorious for it.”
Garth brought the box over to the table. We gathered around it like participants in a séance. “I’m warning you, it isn’t a pretty sight,” Garth said with hands still protecting its contents.
“Will we need some snow orchid?” asked Rita.
“Yes, definitely. I’d almost forgot. She is near the end of her time here. I’m lucky to have found her when I did. Needless to say, she is quite groggy.”
“Wait, wait, wait…she’s in there?” I asked.
“Yes, dearie,” said Rita. She snapped her fingers and a small jar flew from the kitchen into her hand.
“Well, not entirely,” said Garth.
“Was she in the head collection?” wondered Bryant. “That’s repulsive.”
“Yes. And under sharp supervision. Apparently strange occurrences have taken place in recent years.”
“Stop it,” I demanded. “Stop assuming that I have even an inkling as to what you’re talking about. Is there a witch’s head in that box?” It sounded even more ridiculous actually coming out of my mouth.
“I told you, it takes us a long time to pass on. And some parts die before others,” Rita said to me. With a magic word, she unhinged the latch on the box. It creaked open. The smell was enough to kill a man. The sight was worse. An ancient, wrinkled, and bald head sat neatly on a velvet bed. Its eyes were closed so tightly, the creases were lost amongst the raisin-y skin folds covering the hag’s face. Rita opened the jar and sprinkled a white powder over the approximate location of eyes and lips, utteri
ng another incantation.
The old hag’s eyes peeled open and her lips un-stuck from one another. She crowed something in an extinct language. Everyone laughed.
“What? What?” I asked.
“She asked if she was dead yet,” said Garth. Rita spoke to the head again in the same dialect.
“Fine,” said the head. “It is not a pretty language, but I will oblige.”
“Thank you,” I said.
The head looked at me with clouded eyes. “It is true. You are an old soul. These eyes can see what you cannot. They can see what they cannot. Fetch me flora!” the head commanded.
“What kind?” asked Rita.
“Any kind. As long as it has grown form the earth.”
Rita ran into the kitchen and rummaged through the refrigerator. The head continued to examine me.
She returned with a ball of lettuce, brown and soggy. “I forgot about this one. Meant to make a salad last week. It’s organic, too.”
“Feed it to me!” barked the hag.
The head chewed on the sluggish leaf and moved the contents of its mouth from side to side. Its old eyes closed for a solid minute. Then it gasped. “There is a great upheaval. You,” it said, looking at me. “Your kind has done too much.”
“I sensed this,” whispered Garth to Bryant.
“Honey, I’ve been sensing it for a long time. Why else do you think I stay inside all day?” joked Rita.
“It is no laughing matter,” continued the head. “ Man’s progress, his disrespect for the Earth and disregard of the Way of Things, has thrown it off course. The seals between worlds are breaking. I know what haunts you, young Prince.”
“What? What is it?” I pleaded, answering to a title that I didn’t feel was mine.
“Your kin. Garth’s sacrifice brought down your father. The Demon devoured one cousin. But another remained. Through these centuries, he lurked in the darkest corners of the Underworld, avoiding his soul’s death. Finally, a light from above. A crack in the seal. He escaped. Many did.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” gasped Rita. “I thought that’d been remedied.”
“So there are legit evil spirits walking around?” I said, my tone droll.
“Put your brain in the real world and you will notice the rise of evil here. The damned seek out faint bodies to inhabit and complete the unfinished atrocities from days gone by. Some begin new ones, grander in scale, utilizing what did not exist in their time.” The head’s eyes continued to search me, like I had the answers written plainly on my face. “Your cousin has been searching for you for longer than you’ve even existed.”
“Then I’m not just a beacon for bad luck. The same soul has been trying to kill me for the past year, just in different forms?”
“Yes.”
“All because there is another soul inside of me? One that’s not really me?” I was stumbling over words, nearly crying.
“It is you. Souls can complete many life cycles, my dear. Yours has only lived once before,” said the head, trying to comfort me. Rita put a hand on my shoulder. “Sometimes a soul will tire of the other side and decide to begin a new journey. Sometimes it leaves to do work here on Earth. Only the soul knows for sure. All we are certain of is, twenty-two years ago, the Prince decided to try again. Here you are.”
“Judging from your visions, it seems like your soul is trying to make its former identity known, possibly in order to perform a particular task,” suggested Rita.
“Yes, witch,” said the head. “You are an astute one, you are.”
“Thank you,” Rita said, blushing. She turned back to me. “I suspect you wanted to find this one,” referring to Garth.
“Well, I picked a pretty shitty time to visit.” I said. “There’s a pissed off ghost trailing me.”
“I believe that is your plan,” the head said.
That decapitation was beginning to get on my nerves. “Why would I plan to be pursued by something that wants me dead? Sounds a bit redundant, no?”
“Because you knew it would bring me to you,” Garth piped up from next to me. “I’ve been avenging your death for centuries. You knew I’d come to the aid of someone like yourself.”
“A tragic gay kid getting beat up on Twenty-Sixth Street?” I said, hoping it would come off as self-deprecation instead of the sad fact it was.
“A person singled out for being himself,” he asserted.
My attempt at infecting sarcasm into the conversation had stopped it cold.
“But remember the chain. Remember a soul’s place in it,” spat the head. “From above, he looks down on the Immortals who looked over him in life. You’ve been watching Garth. You have been watching all of them battle the change in the Way. You are here for more than a visit.”
“You’re here to repair the balance,” said Bryant. “Because we Immortals aren’t enough. I know your legend, Garth. You could do nothing against the King until you had a mortal soul to offer.”
“That is the Sacred Magic,” confirmed Rita.
“I will be so bold to suggest,” said Bryant. He cleared his throat, “That the Prince intended to—”
“Sacrifice myself?” I asked. “I came here just to kill myself?”
“Sacrifice is the oldest magic. It has done miraculous things,” marveled Rita. “It saved you, it made Helena. You, more than most, are connected to it.”
“Garth, you said the Prince was a brave soul. This would be a brave act,” Bryant added.
Garth came to me, “No. You will not perform the task.”
“I can’t say that I’m really considering it,” I said.
“But you were. Up there, looking down, you were. That’s why you’ve come here. You might not be sure about it now, but when you are faced with the choice you will give yourself to the Way.”
“I don’t want to do it.”
“But the Way of Things,” murmured Rita.
“The old ways are dead! The humans have their own rules now. They do not need us to look after them and we do not need the souls to watch us,” exclaimed Garth. He pulled me into him. “He was already killed once. I will not have it happen again. This boy deserves to live.”
“I agree. There must be another way,” said Bryant.
“I thought the point of me coming here was to avoid dying. How did this conversation turn into the complete opposite?” I asked, on the verge of giving up and taking my chances with the evil cousin-ghost-person.
“Then find another pure soul,” said the head. “Jeremy, you may sacrifice another. The magic will work. But when your time comes to cross the bridge, I guarantee you will not make it to the other side.”
“But he’ll have had a chance to live,” Bryant said.
“A damned life. Murder doesn’t go away. The face of his victim will stay on the back of his eyes, forever. Nobody wants to live that life. You should know that, Night Creature,” said the head.
The room fell silent as the magic folk brewed in their thoughts. The cheap candle flickered in the breeze from the filthy air conditioner in the alley window. They were a sad lot, reduced to tenements, rooftops, and boxes. How could such powerful beings be pushed into such obscurity? Was it us, the mortals, who mistreated our gifts and ignored our protectors? If we were so bad, maybe it was best to let it all fall apart. Let the world be overrun with demons and become polluted with our wasted and deformed young. If I gave myself to death in order to exterminate one rogue soul, would the world really benefit?
“The Deep Magic must be used again. It will bring order to the Way of Things like it did in the beginning,” said the head.
“This one sacrifice will do all that? The seals will be fixed?” asked Garth.
The head rolled over from exhaustion. The lack of essential organs made all the explaining understandably taxing. “I cannot be sure.”
“What do you mean, you aren’t sure? I’m not jumping in front of a gun based on the hunch of that…that dead head-thing,” I said. The others looked at me like
I’d just stepped on the baby Jesus.
“He is right,” the head agreed. “The boy is right! The Old Magic, Original Magic, Deep Magic…it has those names for a reason. Millennia have passed since its inception. The world changes. So does magic. We cannot be positive about its outcome.” Again we sat around the head in our own thoughts.
Nobody had an answer.
Everyone wanted to disappear.
“But there is something to say about faith,” offered the head. “You may not always know for sure but you can hope for the best. Believe in the best. You cannot see the soul inside you, Jeremy, but you know it is in there. Don’t you?”
“You’re right. I can’t see it. But I know it’s there because it constantly gives me proof. Every time I close my eyes, round a corner, wake up in the morning, there’s proof.” I walked away from their huddle and looked out the window, even though it faced a dark alleyway containing absolutely nothing interesting to observe. “Life isn’t Sunday school, there’s no room for faith. Facts, that’s what I believe in. Show me something real. A live gargoyle, a talking head in a box; those are real. Killing myself for a magic that hasn’t been seen in my lifetime isn’t. Until you show me the instruction booklet or bring down whoever makes this Way of Things from their castle at the top of that staircase, I can’t. That’s asking too much of me. My life has already changed so much…”
I couldn’t. There wasn’t anything left to say. I needed either a drink or a smoke or a life transplant. I stomped over to a cabinet that, in a normal person’s home, would have contained the makings of a bar. Since I was in a witch’s den, this thing was stocked with mason jars filled with newts and bottles of oddly colored fluids with unreadable labels.
“I mean…what do you…?” I mumbled. Again, I couldn’t…
Then I spotted a package of long cigarettes on Rita’s end table. My hands trembled as I tried to pull one from the tightly packed container. Once I finally placed one between my lips, I couldn’t bother searching for a light. Who know what I’d have found. I just motioned at the cancer stick with my hand, hoping one of them would have the courtesy to help me out in my moment of need.
Rita was the first to approach. She held up her fist, presumably containing a lighter. But then she flicked her crooked index finger in the air and produced a flame at the end of her nail, no match or fluid necessary. Pure abracadabra. “Here, baby,” she offered.
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