I looked toward the door, and as if reading my mind, James added, “Annabelle should be getting up soon. She gives me my breakfast around seven-thirty or eight. Then Norma comes after that. I like Norma. You’ll like her too. She reminds me of the girls we hung with at Ohio State. Smarter than shit, but not overly intellectual, and cute as a button. She gets me all clean, helps me onto the can—well, I can’t be expected to make it there myself. Best of all, she brings a morphine shot. Mother’s milk, baby.”
I winced at the word mother, while another wave of nausea wracked my body.
“Are you in a lot of pain?” I asked him, changing the subject.
He became still. “You say that as though you wish it.”
Maybe I do, you invalid son of a bitch.
“I am in a lot of pain,” he said. “And I have to live with a perpetual migraine at this point. Some nights the pain is unbearable and I wake up screaming, yanking at my hair, battering my skull, thinking to myself Get it out, get it out! Have you ever had a headache like that, where it feels like a tiny rodent is trapped in your brain?”
His analogy struck me. Anger left my limbs in thick hot waves and I felt less irritable. It’s only James, I thought. A jerk, an asshole sometimes, but once my best friend. Now he’s sick and dying in agonizing pain. I could show him some compassion.
But I wondered, as I took the chair beside the bed, about the thing behind reality, if it had possessed James and taken him over. Was it still James? He seemed enough of his old self at the moment that I could suspend my disbelief. But this troubling idea lingered at the back of my mind.
The faint smell of death flowed from him. I imagined black wavy lines rising off his body, like the ones artists used to illustrate body odor in comic books.
“You look like shit,” I said.
Darkness fled his face and he laughed. “I feel like shit. Don’t let ’em tell you dying is easy. All that romance in movies about dying the hero’s death, going out in a blaze of glory, that’s all crap. Pissing yourself at two in the morning ’cause you can’t make it to the bathroom, that’s what dying is.”
“Why can’t you make it to the bathroom? You seem mobile.”
“Sometimes I make it—most times, actually. Other times the pain is so severe that I get disoriented, or I’m too doped up to move, or my body’s too fatigued. The closer it gets to the cutoff date, the less strength I have.”
His eyes grew fierce. He leaned toward me, recapturing his old enthusiasm. “That’s the worst part, you know? Turning into a baby again. Not being able to take care of myself. Feeling powerless wears me down. Honestly, I like Norma, I do. But sometimes when I’m leaning on her to get into the bathroom, and she’s helping me into my pants, Christ I hate her more than anything.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Why?”
He shrugged. “It’s like when you’re a baby. You’re in your crib wailing your guts out, then comes big towering Mamma to lift you up, comfort you, and make it all better. But you soon start to realize that you can’t lift yourself out of the crib, can’t make yourself all better. Then you start to hate Mamma. Why? Well, because she made you feel powerless. Not intentionally, wasn’t her fault, it’s just the way it is. This all occurs in the unconscious.”
Something Jenny might say, I almost replied. That jolted me back to the events of the previous night: the terror, the strangeness, the morbid sex. Enough of this small talk shit. “Cut the crap, James,” I said, “what the hell’s going on? Have we both gone completely insane?”
The question startled him. But I knew—I absolutely knew—that he’d been sitting there waiting for me to ask it. He wanted to discuss this as much as I did. The only evidence I needed was right there in his eager eyes.
“There’s a joy in madness that only madmen know,” he replied. “This… thing that we drew attention to all those years ago, it exists in infinity, it feeds on time. The one true immortal, whose indifference is fierce, and, well…” He laughed sourly. “We had the stupid inclination to summon it out of its deathless sleep.”
“It was a joint decision,” I said, feeling the need to defend myself. “You stood inside that red circle same as me. Nobody twisted your arm.”
He was silent; then: “Yes, I know. But let me speak frankly, Roger. It’s hard not to blame you. After all, it was your obsession with… your insane attraction to the occult, those ridiculous books you picked up at yard sales, secondhand stores—”
“Give me a break, James, I was twenty years old. And I hadn’t even gotten laid yet. What else can a kid in that position be expected to do? I hid from the world in my fantasies, so what? I can’t remember much from those books now.”
He guffawed. “Oh, you remember. You couldn’t have forgotten the metaphysics section at the campus library. And what about Mitch Headrick, hmm? Forgotten about him?”
It felt as if a hand suddenly reached up and grasped my throat. “Mitch Headrick.” I hadn’t thought of that name in forever. Fragments started coming back. I knew I was disconnected from my feelings and emotions; I wasn’t that ignorant, and besides, Jenny had pointed this out so often I eventually stopped trying to deny it.
But when James mentioned that name—Mitch Headrick—I realized that I truly was disconnected from my past. Instantly I saw images of the library, myself sitting at one of the empty tables, an array of books spread around me. I appeared frantic, my fingers agonizing over every page. I had a wild look in my eyes, as though I were peering into a magic crystal ball.
I recalled some of the obscure subjects: books on demonology, witchcraft, medieval grimoire magic, even ancient necromancy. I snuck away to the library every evening to read them, studying them with the enthusiasm of a monk transcribing the Gospels. I could recall moments when the librarians would come over and ask me to leave because the library was closing. I’d snap at them, tell them to leave me alone, to go fuck themselves, all sorts of colorful assholery.
“I remember…” I said.
“Keep going,” he replied. “You’ll get there. Listen to his name. Mitch Headrick.”
For some reason, that did it. As soon as he said the words again, a face popped into my mind: small, round, plump, pimply, and wearing thick glasses. The face had freckles and shaggy red hair and a large front tooth that jutted out past his upper lip.
Mitch Headrick—the local egghead, the campus doofus, the butt of so many jokes among the Greek life crowd. A smart kid. An honor student. Professors liked him, but his fellow students felt threatened by his intellect. And they detested his ungroomed, androgynous appearance. He got picked on, abused, harassed on a daily basis.
The most infamous Mitch Headrick abuse was the biology class pantsing. Mitch was giving his presentation in biology class on trophic levels and their impact on natural ecosystems, when Tom Simmons—a third-string receiver for the Ohio State Buckeyes—crept behind Mitch and yanked his pants down in front of the class, the professor, and two TAs.
The great humiliation wasn’t so much the pantsing itself (under normal circumstances, the victim would pull their pants back up, hide their boxer shorts or tighty whities or whatever, and end of story). But for some reason Mitch hadn’t worn any underwear to school that day. He later claimed it was because he hadn’t done laundry in over a month.
The result was that the entire classroom was suddenly presented with Mitch’s short, shriveled, uncircumcised penis. Even Tom Simmons looked surprised, crouching behind Mitch’s kneecaps, a bare ass in his face.
The prank failed to yield the intended outburst of laughter; rather, there was an excruciating silence. Mitch threw down his notes, hiked up his jeans, and fled from the campus in tears. Tom Simmons was put on suspension the next day.
I remembered that Mitch used to hang around the library, same as me. His interests were math and science, whereas I orbited around the philosophy and religion sections. I never took much notice of him.
Then one day he sat down at my table, thumping a big black book about witchc
raft down by my elbow.
Irritated, I tried to ignore him. When he wouldn’t go away, I asked, “What’s this?”
“You’re that guy I always see reading books on the occult and metaphysics,” he said. To my silence, he added: “I have a proposition for you.”
As he spoke, I studied his appearance up close for the first time. He looked sad, and he had adopted that haughty intellectual air used by the downtrodden and bullied to make up for their feelings of inadequacy. I recognized it right away because, to some extent, I had done exactly the same thing.
“Could you help me with that?” he inquired.
I sat brooding, my wont in those days; if not in the library, in one of the campus’s many bars, nursing a gin and soda with James by my side talking to some cute girl. James was always talking to cute girls. He had a way with women I could only dream after. I really only ever succeeded in picking up one girl. She, I decided to marry.
Mitch had been having trouble with a frat boy, a guy named Jerry or Jim, who was in the biochemistry class with him. Heaven knows what this frat boy was doing there. Mitch suspected he was there solely to torture him. Frat boys had stooped so low before.
Each day before class, this guy would corner Mitch in the lab and force him to hand over his notes. The guy barely ever went to class, and when he did go, it was only to space out or chat with female students. On the few occasions Mitch refused him, the exchange became violent and humiliating. He didn’t beat Mitch, but he did something far more repulsive and twisted. He’d reach out and fondle Mitch’s prick through his jeans. It was the lowest form of psychological abuse. The worst part was that Mitch had gotten aroused during these altercations.
Mitch was deeply distressed by the situation and seeking a way out. For some reason, Roger seemed like that way out.
Mitch wanted to stop the frat boy, but he also wanted to get even. I listened carefully to everything he said, for I could commiserate with his plight. I hated the frat boys, jocks, and campus rich-boy thugs, and I had experienced a few humiliations of my own on their account. So this idea of revenge I liked.
With our mutual interest in mind, we pored over Mitch’s witchcraft book there in the library, with the afternoon sun streaming through the windows. I offered the extent of what I knew about metaphysics and the occult, and he put forward his entire knowledge of science, particularly geometry, and mathematics. The study of witchcraft was a rabbit’s hole, so we tackled the subject as partners, developing something of a shared friendship based on our disdain for the world.
We met in the library every day and devised a method for revenge. It would be my first true magical operation. Mitch’s, too. So we went to considerable trouble to ensure the safest accommodations. By the middle of the following week, the rites had been performed and I waited to hear back from Mitch on the results.
But I heard about it on the evening news, instead. Mitch was in the hospital, the frat kid too. Both had been assaulted by some unknown assailant. Police call-lines were open to anybody with information, as the report claimed neither Mitch nor the frat kid got a good look at the perpetrator, so there were no leads.
But I knew. I knew everything, sitting there in the dorm room watching the television and eating a pizza with James, who was my roommate. I acted dumb when James asked me about it.
Something had obviously gone wrong. Perhaps the frat guy had sensed trouble, called in a buddy for backup, and then a major fight had ensued. Or perhaps it was just some random act of violence, the kind the news reporters lived for. Or maybe… just maybe, the demon we had summoned that was supposed to attack only the frat guy decided to go after Mitch as well.
The incident was all over town for several days, but eventually it died down and everyone seemed to forget it. Mitch must have been totally freaked out, because he didn’t return to school and I never spoke to him again. I heard he went back to live with his folks in Nebraska.
That incident was a turning point in my life. It forced me to come to terms with the fact that magic might actually work. All the stuff I’d been studying in those occult books clearly had some basis in universal truth, which hinted at a world beyond material existence.
“Good. Now you’re remembering,” James said.
I nodded, and as I did they all started coming back to me, all the people I had helped, all the ones for whom I had performed first white, then gray magic. People I read occult books to, talked with, counseled on their problems. People I interviewed and helped to devise solutions for their predicaments.
There were so many. I could hardly believe I had forgotten. A girl named Sally and her alcoholic boyfriend, to whom we had given a special herb to make him stop drinking. There was Marganita, the Peruvian girl, who had been raped by a boy named Teddy at a frat party; thanks to my magic, Teddy woke up one morning with genital herpes.
I remembered Kevin Bechar who wanted so desperately to pass his final exam in organic chemistry, but couldn’t seem to retain the material; with him, we concocted a special meal made of certain etheric plant substances, which were transformed into knowledge about biochemistry.
I even assisted one of my professors: Dr. Reynold Mathews of the English department. It was his lovemaking prowess that needed help, given his age. I performed the ritual in his office and he reported back the following day, grinning ear-to-ear that it had worked.
“How could I forget?” I said, shaking my head in the darkness of James’s room. “Did I find it all too traumatic? Did I block it out? Repress it? I mean, I always remembered I was into the occult during my youth, but I remembered it like a passing interest, a phase I’d grown out of. The rest of it… I totally forgot. Does that sound crazy?”
James chuckled. “No crazier than anyone. You know, it’s funny. You used to be the authority on all this, the one who knew so much. Now the tables have turned, because I’m dying and that thing is inside of me. I have access to its consciousness. It has access to mine.”
My hands clenched at my sides in the chair. “I knew it,” I said. “I fucking knew that thing had a hold of you. What the hell does it want?”
He sighed dramatically. “It wanted you to forget about your past. That’s what all this is about. Getting swallowed by the past. Human beings have a heck of a time living in the present.”
“I know that,” I said, relishing the renewed access to my storehouse of occult knowledge, so recently returned to me.
“Right now you’re stuck in the ‘you’ of fifteen or sixteen years ago,” he said. “The way you were during your marriage to Jenny. You haven’t moved on. Neither have I. I’m stuck in my relationship with Celeste. I haven’t moved on, even after all I’ve been through—even now, lying within an inch of my life.
“After we drew the attention of the thing behind reality, it tried to wipe clean the memory of our experience. In a way, it drove us both into marriages that, well, maybe we thought we wanted at the time, but only because it triggered our panic, our mental flight buttons.”
“Forced us into fight or flight,” I added.
“Exactly. Now that I’m dying, it’s returned to finish the job, to swallow up the past and wipe our memories clean.”
“Why does it want to do that?”
He shrugged. “That’s what it does. The strangest thing is that it doesn’t even realize it’s doing it. It doesn’t work that way. The thing just is; it doesn’t think about stuff. It’s like space, or time, or gravity: phenomena that exists and nobody knows why, or why they work the way they do. You wanna know something—” he leaned forward, giving me an intense gaze “—that, my friend, is the scariest part.”
Just then the door opened. Annabelle stood at the threshold framed in wood and sunlight. “Good to see you catching up,” she said.
“We decided to cruise down memory lane,” James said.
She looked at me with a certain intimacy, a certain expectancy. No woman had looked at me that way in a long time.
“What time did you get up, Roger?�
�� she asked. “It must’ve been early.”
“Very,” I said. “In fact I couldn’t sleep, and when I came out here I saw James’s light on.”
She hummed disinterestedly. “Well it’s about time for breakfast, eh boys? Would you like to give me a hand in the kitchen, Roger?”
“Sure thing.” I stood for the first time in what seemed like hours. I glanced at James as I headed for the door, and he gave me a sinister, all-knowing smile. I realized it wasn’t James who was looking at me. The thing behind reality was using him like a telescope, peering into the room from its great abyss through James’s eyes. It made me shiver.
“I’ll bring you up breakfast when it’s done—” Annabelle said.
“When’s Norma coming,” he interrupted harshly. “I’ve got pain.”
“Ten o’clock.”
Silently he nodded, then curled up on the bed. The rustling of his sheets sounded like a rodent nuzzling in trash. He faced the wall, his back to us. Darkness settled over him.
Chapter Seven
As we made our way downstairs, Annabelle said, “Tell me honestly, how does he seem?”
I spoke without thinking. “Morbidly ill, insane. I think he’s addicted to morphine.”
I feared I’d spoken too bluntly, but her posture suddenly relaxed and she breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God you see it too. I can’t tell you how much better that makes me feel.”
She cornered me at the bottom of the steps, pressing against me and leaning her head on my chest. It seemed she couldn’t get enough of this cuddling and affection business—not that I minded. “Last night was… nice,” she said, hugging me. I put my arms around her and stroked her long black hair.
“Is something going on between us?” I asked.
She laughed. “What’s that supposed to mean? We’ll let whatever happens happen and enjoy it. Why ruin everything by analyzing? Do you think you can do that—enjoy this? It’s asking a lot from a bitter man.”
She jabbed me playfully in the ribs. She’d said it as a joke, but it was one of those jokes that hit so close to home it came with a smack. Was I noticeably so bitter? Christ, I never wanted to be like that.
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