by J. P. Sloan
After roughly fifteen minutes of sucking in car exhaust, Ricky finally turned to me and said, “I’m going to get a coke. You want anything?”
I shook my head.
“You still think there’s something here?” he nudged.
“Just not willing to give up yet. I don’t know. I’m probably being stupid.”
He gave me a non-committal lift of his hands and trotted across the nearest crosswalk for the Plaza shops across the way.
I turned back to the center of the roundabout. Circle. Circles are key to geomantic theory, and I surmised doubly so when it came to city planning. I knew the Presidium was about as old as the nation itself, but I wasn’t sure exactly how much of the lore regarding the planning of the District of Columbia was in fact due to their machinations, and how much was sterile conspiracy theory spun by those who failed to recognize that some important things in the world were simply incidental.
Why did Deirdre send me here?
A voice called out from behind me, “Sight-seeing, Lake?”
I turned to find a dark town car eased onto the side of the roundabout. A few cars whizzed around it, one laying on the horn. The rear window of the town car had rolled down, and a face leered at me from the space beyond.
Wexler.
I took careful steps toward the car.
“I suppose so,” I answered her. “Not doing much for my mood, I have to admit.”
“You’re a strange man, Mister Lake,” she snickered. “I’ll assume you’ve come to speak with us?”
I tightened my jaw, and searched the inside of my skull for the answer least likely to end up with my corpse floating in the Anacostia River.
“Just sight-seeing. Like you said.”
She sneered. “You made a special trip into Washington just to glare at a traffic circle? Let’s not embarrass either of our intelligences, if you please.”
I took a few more steps closer. “What I’m doing in D.C. is my business.”
“Which makes it our business,” she snapped.
“What, you just happened to drive by and see me standing here with my dick in hand? Metaphorically speaking.”
She lifted a brow.
“Right,” I grumbled. “Embarrassing intelligences, et cetera. So, how long have you been watching me?”
“Since you left Baltimore. We’ve had our eye on you since that disaster with Durning.”
“Yeah. That wasn’t on me. Totally caught me off guard. Like yourselves, I imagine?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
I squinted. “I suppose I don’t.”
Wexler leaned toward the window, a playful lift to her lips easing its way into her high cheekbones.
“Would you like to?”
A chill swept up my stomach.
“Like to what?”
She cleared her throat as another car gave her driver a what-for as it slung around the circle.
“The Ipsissimus has given permission for a face-to-face.”
I stepped away out of instinct.
The Ipsissimus? Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I froze, mouth struggling for a response.
Wexler added, “Clearly you’re occupied with other concerns, so we understand that we must wait for a more convenient time. But I don’t think I should tell you, if the Ipsissimus has dedicated enough consideration to arrange for a meeting with you, Mister Lake… he shouldn’t be kept waiting long.”
I nodded slowly. “All right.”
A smile snapped onto her face as her eyes brightened. She seemed almost gleeful.
“Outstanding news. Can you be made available tomorrow at noontime?”
I nodded again.
Wexler cocked her head. “Are you well?”
“I am not well.” The words dribbled from my lips like a drunken slobber.
She grinned. “Bring your mind into focus, then. The Presidium requires your best, Mister Lake. We shouldn’t be left wanting.”
Her window slid to a close, and with a few seconds of turn signal, the town car slipped into traffic, and rounded the circle back into the heart of the District.
My fingers trembled.
My head throbbed.
I had just been summoned by the Ipsissimus, the head of the Presidium. This individual was by all accounting the most important person on the planet. Apparently, the Ipsissimus was a man. And he wanted me to meet him.
Ricky returned some time later, sucking back a fountain drink.
“Hey,” he chirped. “Had enough, yet?”
I pulled in a breath, and checked my watch.
“Better get back,” I whispered.
He paused and reached out to touch my arm.
I jerked away out of reflex, and he frowned.
“The Hell’s gotten into you, boss?” he grumbled. “Did… did something happen? Did you find what you were looking for?”
“No,” I answered with a few coughs to clear the terror from my throat. “It found me.”
We returned to Baltimore through some particularly haggard traffic, to find Ches waiting on my stoop.
I waved as we hopped up my front walk.
“Where were you?” she demanded.
I answered, “Out.”
Ricky waved his empty cup. “I wanted a Coke, and all he has is Pepsi.”
She shook her head. “You two ready, or what?”
Ricky froze next to me. “Ready for what?”
I gripped his arm and dragged him up to the door. “We’re clearing your curse.”
He squinted. “Um, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Shouldn’t I, like, do something to get ready for this?” he asked.
I replied, “Yep. I have a list all the crap you’re going to have to do.”
Inside, Ricky and Ches hugged briefly before Ricky rounded on me.
“Seriously, though,” he grumbled. “Maybe a heads-up next time?”
I shrugged. “Hey. This is what you get for shitting on Pepsi, bub.”
“Where’s this list?” he asked.
I strolled to my desk, pulled out a sheet of blank paper and a pen, and started jotting down notes. After seven line items, I decided to call it even and handed it over.
Ricky reviewed the notes as his eyebrows slowly lifted. “I have to take a bath? Are you for real with this?”
I shook my head. “You sound so much like your sister.”
Ches elbowed me in the side.
“Yes,” I explained. “It’s a ritual cleansing.”
“What’s this stuff I have to put in the bath?” he asked.
“Ches will bring them up―” She elbowed me again. “I’ll bring them up for you. They’re herbs and resins that isolate and strip away coincidental ambient energetic resonance. That’s vital if we’re going to isolate the curse energy that’s anchored you to the caster.”
He gave me two slow blinks, and shrugged. “Yeah, I’m just going to assume you know what you’re doing then.”
He disappeared upstairs, and in a few minutes, I heard the water running.
Ches turned to me. “So, do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Know what you’re doing?” she asked.
“In theory.”
“Care to share the theory?”
I gestured for the basement stairs. Once we had descended and I switched on the light, I answered, “I’m going to treat this like a hex. It’s like I said the other day. Curses are a lot like hexes in their architecture. They impose a consequence on the victim which the victim neither agrees to, nor participates in. Where a hex keeps from turning into Netherwork, however, is the fact that there are limits. A hex has a time frame. An out clause. And it only ever really takes if the victim deserves the damn thing to begin with.”
“Just your hexes,” she corrected. “Mister karma police, over here.”
I nodded. “That’s right.”
“But a curse doesn’t care about karma,” Ches added.
“That’s why it
takes a stronger power source than a hex. All esoteric workings require a power source. That’s basic one-oh-one stuff.”
She nodded. “I gotcha.”
“Like, Wiccans tie their workings to natural energy. I tie all of my legitimate workings into the subject’s karma. It’s my safety valve. Netherwork doesn’t play with safety valves. Curses are straight perversions of the natural order. They require serious, intelligent governance.”
Ches leaned against her desk. “The little bit Quinn taught me was all about powering workings through fragments of our own soul.”
“Yeah. That’s―barbarism, basically. Crude, painful, but effective. More elaborate curses, like the curses the Dead Dragons would cast, are powered through the Dark Choir.”
She scowled. “That’s getting a little too, what? Christian for me?”
“Nothing Christian about it.”
“You’re talking about demons and the Devil.”
“Horseshit.”
“No,” she retorted with a waggle of her finger. “This whole Dark Choir spiel smacks a little too close to Abrahamic religion, Dorian. I mean, I know you’re a functioning atheist.”
“Who said I was an atheist?”
“But… you’re dressing up the power of destructive magic in the robes of the Bogeyman, and it just doesn’t come off as genuine. Seriously. Quinn outlined this way simpler cosmology.”
“Okay, lay it on me.”
She paced a circle around me and my worktable.
“Power is a form of energy, she says. You can’t define it as good or evil. You use gunpowder in a nail gun to build a house. You use it in a bullet to commit murder. Same energy. Same source. The combination of intent and result is where someone calls it good or bad. And that’s a total bullshit thing to begin with. You kill a guy with a bullet. Okay. Say you’re some psycho on a tear. You’re evil. Say you’re a soldier oversees? You have an entire country calling you a hero. You can hold a gun up to an animal and feed a starving family. You can hold a nail gun up to someone’s head and kill his ass, too. Same energy. Same gunpowder. Two weapons. Four outcomes. An infinite number of interpretations. Good and evil, Dorian? It’s what people use to make themselves feel better about how bad they screwed up.”
I watched as Ches gestured and plead her case. For the first time in weeks, I found that practitioner’s flame burning behind her eyes, and wondered if it didn’t simply take me treating her like an equal to ignite it once again.
With a smile, I countered, “But we have references to several distinct entities weaving back through written history, which account for various impartations of diabolical power. References that cross cultures, even continents.”
“Shared mythology.”
“How do the Aztecs share mythology with hills peoples of ancient Thailand?”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter how they came to the words. It’s the human experience. The way our brains are shaped, wired, whatever. We come to the same conclusions.”
“And you call me the functional atheist?”
“What I’m saying is that you keep relying on some chorus of ancient evil to color in as your villains. Maybe reality isn’t quite so elaborate.”
I crossed my arms, and gave her words some thought.
“I’m not going to stop believing in the Dark Choir. I’ve―met one.”
“Come again?”
“Well, an agent of the Dark Choir anyway. I’m sure you can write him off as some shared mythology, Ches. But until you sit across a café table with one of these fuckers, you really don’t understand how very specifically screwed we all are.”
She peered at me with a sharp, enticing stare. “So what about Ricky?”
“We isolate the energetic hard-wires that link him to whatever the source is. We can assume it’s nothing minor. Nothing innocent. Nothing that won’t decide to jump up and bite our faces off if we let it.”
“Okay.”
“And just like a hex, we sever it.”
She wiggled her head. “Can’t be that simple.”
“No, it isn’t. Break the source of a hex, and you deal with a light slap of energy. Like slapping a rubber band against the wrist. Sever the trunk line for a full-bore curse? It’ll be less like a rubber band, more like a big-ole drooling monster stampeding through your subconscious, devouring your soul bite-by-bite while it fills your mind with nightmares and, perhaps, actually kill you.”
She paled. “I do hope you have a plan for that.”
“I do, as it turns out. Because, every now and then, I actually do my homework.”
I turned to my rack of reagents and started grabbing jars.
With a raspy growl, I added, “We’re going to send the source back to its owner.”
set the desired herbs for Ricky’s ritual cleansing along my workbench.
“So what do I do?” she whispered.
“You remember the hex coin?”
“Yeah. You salted it. Cleared all of the energy from it. I don’t suppose that’ll work with Ricky.”
“It was an exercise in isolation and severing. We isolate the curse energy in Ricky’s mainline, make sure it hasn’t tangled itself into any secondary or tertiary chakras. Then we disentangle. What do you think happens when the knots are untied?”
“They snap back to the caster, I’m assuming.”
“Nope,” I said, hanging the clipboard back on the nail. “It’s here, staring back at us with a heaping helping of go-fuck-yourself. It’ll be hungry, angry, probably desperate. And most frightening, it’ll be without directions.”
Her face soured. “Make it sound like some kind of panther.”
“Best thing we can do is to re-direct it. It won’t go home on its own. We have to sic it on its master once it’s off the chain.”
I rummaged through one of my bookshelves and found a broad gray-bound spine with dark ink calligraphy. ON THE PRACTISSE AND RENDRING OF MAGICKS.
I laid the book on my workbench and thumbed through this primer.
Ches leaned in and read the title out loud, adding, “Robert Argyle. Who’s he?”
“Robert the Heretic. Charming fellow from Scotland. Thrived during the late reign of James the First. You know the King James Bible?”
Ches nodded.
I continued, “Daemonologie?”
Her mouth wilted into a deeper scowl than she was sporting. “The witch-hunting treatise? Yeah. I know that one.”
“Well, old Jimmy was a wee bit obsessed with the occult. Hence Shakespeare writing Macbeth as a love letter to the king. Robert of Argyle came up in the new fervor, a student of an unnamed cabalist who schooled him in near Eastern traditions. Robert took those traditions and melded them with old Pictish fair-magics.” I gave Ches a wink. “He was one crazy son of a bitch.”
“This I see.”
“Argyle’s questionable ethics aside, this is a fairly decent primer book for hex crafting.” I tossed a thumb toward Emil’s Library. “I’ll bet you a bag of doughnuts that Emil has one of Argyle’s next-level Netherwork treatises in that cabinet.”
I paused near a section with odd, hybridized Anglo-Saxon futhorc runes assembled in what could be best described as an Egyptian Gnostic pyramid.
With a snicker, I shook my head. “Jesus. Never thought you’d see Bythos written in Pictish runes, eh?”
“Here’s where I tell you I never really studied runes. Or Bythos. Or whatever else happened before 1960.”
I squinted at her with a smirk. “Gillette’s not a reader, I take it.”
“She’s mostly a hex-from-the-hip type.”
“It’s Egyptian Gnosticism. Valentian, by the looks of it. Yeah, lots of Greek here. I suppose the word ‘syzygy’ didn’t exactly fit in a Pict’s mouth with any kind of comfort.”
“This is all very interesting, but how does it break the curse?”
I slid the book over to her. “Bottom of the page.”
She squinted as her eyes ran over the lines of florid English scrawling hugging
the bottom of the parchment.
“A monk wrote this?” she asked. “This is blasphemous as fuck.”
“In fairness to the monk,” I replied as I gathered up the book, “he was taking dictation from a Netherworker.”
I moved for the shelves of reagents. The rush of plumbing overhead had come to a halt minutes ago, and Ricky was likely standing naked in my hall bathroom wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into. After snatching three mason jars of cleansing herbs, I gave Ches a smile.
“Can I talk you into taking these to Ricky?”
“Hey, I’m not your lackey anymore. Remember?”
“Yeah, but I’m not comfortable enough in my masculinity to barge in on a man in a bathtub and sprinkle course-cut agrimony over his bait-and-tackle.”
She rolled her eyes and strode up to me, swiping the jars from my hands.
“What,” she muttered with a lift of a brow. “You never experimented with your friends when you were in middle school?”
“I didn’t have friends in middle school.”
Another eye-roll, and she moved for the stairs.
“Wait… did you?” I mumbled.
She cocked her head, gave me a mysterious curl of her lip, then trotted up the steps without an answer.
I returned my focus to the task at hand. Everything I had laid out for Ches was accurate. I had to isolate the strands of curse energy that had wound its way into Ricky’s chakra lines. That was the delicate, high-precision part. It would take time and patience. But it had to be done, or irreversible damage could be done to him physically. Then, the sever. Of all of the processes I’d concocted for this ritual, that would be the simplest. One slice of the darquelle, and it’d be over. It was fitting that my darquelle had belonged to Robert of Argyle… a present from Edgar.
Robert the Heretic would give me another boon that night, karma willing. His liner notes on the Pict-cum-Egyptian Gnostic pyramid. “Horos at agony sum Mixis.” It was a bastardized, mangled, horribly inelegant connection between the Gnostic Aeons of separation and comingling, respectively. But the liner notes proceeded to equate the decad of Egyptian Gnosticism with Robert’s personal rogue’s gallery of “antagonies,” which were his polar opposites of the Aeons.