We Will All Go Down Together (13 page)

Ygerna hugs her brother close, feels Gaheris sob into her shoulder, and fights to ignore how sweet his tears smell. To not be the predator she knows herself becoming—to say not here, not now, not
him,
never. Not
ever.

Or simply, when all’s said and done. . . .

. . . not yet.

Locking the door behind her, Keck paused by the window to watch the odd little Scotswoman set slowly off along the road, gait hesitant-loping, as if she feared her ankles might turn with every step. Pausing on the corner, she raised one hand to wipe at her mouth, and he was surprised to glimpse something on the palm—a tattoo? A brand?

Young people,
Keck thought, with a disapproving sniff.
Their fault entirely, how this world is a deepening hole; best leave them to the mess they’ve made of it, just like them upstairs. Be all over soon enough, one way or t’other.

Thus settled, he pulled the blind, fading back into the Sidderstane house’s many shadows. And mere moments later, as he began to clear away the mess their guest had made in Old Master’s office, the bell from Miss Ygerna’s room began to ring.

In that uncertain area now known as Dourvale, Ontario—just outside of Overdeere, near the Lake of the North—they still tell the story of how, in 1968, a newlywed couple taking their eight-month-old baby camping passed by a woman squatting shoeless at the side of the road, her left hand pressed to the ground. She was bent nearly double, so far her disordered dark hair trailed in the dust, and smiled wide as she did so, whispering—

“Do ye hear me, Lady? I come tae the very edge of yuir domains so that ye maun know me once mair free, and remind ye of all that’s owing. So think on’t, ye great Fae harlot, and know the time is coming when I will rob ye of all ye threw my sisters an’ me Fire-wards tae gain: yuir home, yuir lands, yuir children,
all.
When I take from ye every thing ye love, e’en pitifully as such a thing can manage, and leave ye to weep in the ashes.”

The husband, unable to hear, pulled their vehicle up on the shoulder of the road to park beside her and leaned across his wife, to call out through the window: “Hey, man. You all right? Goin’ far?”

“Aye, I
ha’
travelled far, and farther still maun go.”

“Want a lift?”

“I thank ye for yuir kindness.” And she let him hand her up, climbing to perch in back, next to the baby’s basket. Inquiring of his wife, as they pulled away: “Be yuir baby baptized, mistress?”

The car the authorities found abandoned three days after, with the man’s hag-ridden body buried some feet distant, beneath a shallow coat of leaves; the mother was never found at all, though the search extended several miles in every direction. But a pile of rocks eventually disclosed the remains of their child’s corpse, which had been placed under an upturned pan to make a haphazard oven, then heaped in charcoal and ash. The infant, thus roasted, had been pulled apart at the joints and picked over efficiently, at least partially eaten—as meat-dense scat collected nearby proved.

Meanwhile, a farmer in his field saw a strange, lone cloud pass overhead the next day, heading east—towards the Maritimes, and the Atlantic Ocean. And when its shadow fell on him he suffered a stroke that left the side of his face paralyzed, contorted in terrible mirth for the rest of his natural days.

In Newfoundland, the
Edward Teach—
a trawler bound for Scotland, hauling as much fish as it could catch along the way to sell, before picking up freight for the journey home—took on an extra passenger off the books because she charmed both captain and first mate, promising to pay her way by splitting her favours equally between them. That vessel was found adrift six months later off the coast of Yell, one of the Shetland Islands, abandoned and forlorn, except for a few waterlogged corpses snagged in its nets.

A full year after her trip to Canada, meanwhile, a man named Hector Protheroe was happily surprised to discover the woman he’d fallen so hard for at university waiting for him on the stoop of his Edinburgh apartment. “My God, Dolores!” he was heard to exclaim, by passersby. “Wherever have you been, hen?”

Three months on, they were married, she pregnant. Her daughter was born, and Hector died. Dolores Trench Protheroe left town, after which a woman named Euwphaim Glouwer moved into a notoriously hard area of Glasgow along with her little girl, Eunice. This child would eventually grow into a mopey young woman, share drugs with an equally mopey young man named Joe, and enjoy them so much she neglected to do anything about her ensuing pregnancy until Euwphaim’s granddaughter, Jodice, slid out, already in withdrawal.

Their overdoses came quickly, with Euwphaim granted custody, after. And thus the seed of the Glouwers took hold again into a fine new century, with eyes on a finer one still, once the Millennium be achieved.

Revenge yourself or die, my bonny love,
Nana Euwphaim would sing over little Jo’s cot, when the ghosts she saw finally allowed the poor chit to sleep.
Two angels, foot and head . . . seven angels, less no more . . . revenge yourself, or die.

For thus it has been, thus it is, and thus it will be once more. An endless chain of misfortunes, coming three by three by three, for so long as one miserable soul yet bears a Maskim-sigil on their body, as sign of their mutual covenant to remake—or destroy—this sad and terrible world.

Which is why. . . .

 . . . Being that Heaven and Hell be each the reflection of each, and that above apes that which lies below—as the Grimoire of Pope Honorius does say—

—forbye, since history’s crust be thin, ye maun look ever careful where ye step.

It’s always the same, always different. The moment you make that first cut, even before you open the . . . item . . . in question up, there’s this faint, red-tinged exhalation: cotton-soft, indefinite, almost indefinable. Even more than the shudder or the jerk, the last stifled attempt at drawn breath, this is what marks a severance—what proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that something which once considered itself alive has been physically deleted from this tangle of contradictory image and sensation we choose to call “reality.”

Cut away from, cut loose. Or maybe—cut free.

And this is the first operating rule of magic, whether black, white, or red all over: for every incision, an excision. No question without its answer. No action without its price.

Some people fast before a ritual. I don’t. Some people wear all white. I wear all black, except for the purple fun-fur trim on my winter coat (which I took so long to find in the first place that I really just couldn’t bear to part with it). Some people still say you have to be a psychopath to be able to draw a perfect circle—so I hedge my bets, and carry a surveyor’s compass. But I also don’t drink, don’t smoke, haven’t done any drugs but Tylenol since I was a Ryerson undergraduate, getting so bent out of shape I could barely talk straight and practising Crowleyan “sex magick” with a similarly inclined posse of curricular acquaintances every other weekend.

Effective hierarchical magicians like me are the Flauberts of the Narrow World—neat and orderly in our lives,
comme un bourgeois
, so that we may be violent and creative in our work. We’re not fanatics. There’s no particular principle involved, except maybe the principle of Free Enterprise. So we can afford to stay safe . . . and for what they’re paying us to do so, our customers kind of prefer it that way.

Three thousand dollars down, tax-free, for a simple supernatural Q & A session, from U of T Business pregrad Doug Whatever to me, Hark Chiu-Wai—Jude Hark, as I’m known down here in Toronto the Good-for-nothing. That’s what brought me where I was when all this began: under the vaulted cathedral arch of the St. Clair Ravine Bridge, shivering against the cool air of early September as I gutted a sedated German Shepherd in preparation for invoking the obsolete Sumerian god of divination by entrails.

The dog was a bit on the small side, but it was a definite improvement on Doug and his girlfriend’s first try—a week back, when they’d actually tried to fob me off with some store-bought puppy. Through long and clever argument, however, I’d finally gotten them to cave in: if you’re looking to evoke a deity who speaks through a face made of guts—one who goes by the slightly risible name of Humbaba, to be exact—you’d probably better make sure his mouth is big enough to tell you what you want to hear.

Since I hate dogs anyway—tongue-wagging little affection-junkies—treating one like a Christmas chicken was not exactly a traumatic prospect. So I completed the down-stroke, shearing straight through its breastbone, and pushed down hard on either side of its ribcage ’til I heard something crack.

Behind me, the no-doubt-soon-to-be-Mrs. Doug made a hacking noise and shifted her attention to a patch of graffiti on the nearest wall. Doug just kept on staring, maintaining the kind of physical fixity that probably passed for thought in his circles.

“So what, those the . . . innards?” he asked, delicately.

“Those are they,” I said, not looking up. Flaying away the membrane between heart and lungs, lifting and separating the subsections of fat between abdomen and bowels. . . .

He nodded. “What’cha gonna do with ’em?”

“Watch.”

I twisted, cut, twisted again, cut again. Heart on one side, lungs (a riven grey tissue butterfly, torn wing from wing) on the other. Pulled forth the gall bladder and squeezed it empty, using it to smear binding sigils at my north, south, east, west. Shook out another cleansing handful of rock salt, and wrung the bile from my palms.

Doug’s girlfriend, having exhausted the wall’s literary possibilities, had turned back toward the real action. Hand over mouth, she ventured:

“Um—is that like a hat you can buy, or is that a religion?”

“What?”

“Your hat. Is it, like, religious?”

(The headgear in question being a black brocade cap, close-fitting, topped with a round, greyish satin appliqué of a Chinese embroidery pattern: bats and dragons entwined, signifying long life and good luck. The kind of thing my Ma might’ve picked out for me, were she inclined to do so.)

“Oh, yes,” I replied, keeping my eyes firmly on the prize, as I started to unreel the dog’s intestines. “Very religious. Has its own church, actually. All hail Jude’s hat—bow down, bow down. Happy holiness to the headgear.”

She sniffed, mildly aggrieved at my lack of interest in her respect for my fashion sense. Said: “Well, excuse
me
for trying to be polite.”

I shot her a small, amused glance. Thinking:
Oh, was
that
what you were trying to do?

Ai-yaaa.

The dog had more guts than I’d originally given him credit for. Scooping out the last of them, I started to shape them into a rough, pink face, its features equally blurred with blood and seeping digestive juices.

“You ever hear the four great tenets of hierarchical magic?” I asked her, absently. “‘To know, to dare, to will, to be silent.’” Then added, pulling the mouth’s corners up into a derisive, toothless grin, and conjuring a big smile of my own: “So why don’t you just consider yourself Dr. Faustus for a day, and shut the fuck up?”

She gasped. Doug caught himself starting to snicker, and toned that
way
down, way fast.

“Hey, guy,” he said, slipping into Neandertal “protective” mode. “Remember who’s footin’ the tab, here.”

“This is a ritual,” I pointed out. “Not a conversation.”

“Long as I’m payin’, buddy, it’s whatever I say it is,” Doug snapped back.

Thus proving himself exactly the type of typical three “c” client I’d already assumed him to be—callow, classist, and cheap. Kind of loser wants McDonald’s-level ass-licking along with his well-protected probe into the Abyss, plus an itemized list of everything his Daddy’s trust-fund money was paying for, and special instructions on how to make the whole venture look like a tax-deductible educational expense.

To Sumer’s carrion lord of the pit, He Who Holds the Sceptre of Ereshkigal, one dog’s soul, for services rendered,
I thought, shooting Doug a glance, as I finished laying the foundations of Humbaba’s features.
Try writing
that
one off, you spoiled, Gap-ified snakefucker.

Well, I wax virulent. But these rich boys do get my goat, especially when they want something for nothing, and it just happens to be my something. Though my contempt for them as a breed may well stem from a certain lingering sense-memory of what I used to be like, back when I was one.

In the seven years since my rich old Baba Hark first paid my eventually prodigal way from downtown Hong Kong to RTA at Ryerson, I’ve dealt with elementals, demons, angels, and ghosts, all of whom soon proved to be their own particular brand of pain in the ass. The angels I called on spoke a really obscure form of Hebrew; the demons decided my interest in them meant I was automatically laid open to twenty-four-hour-a-day Temptation, which didn’t slack off until I had a sigilic declaration of complete neutrality tattooed on either palm. Elementals are surly and uncooperative. Ghosts cling—literally, in some cases. I remember coming to see Carraclough Devize one time (in hospital, as increasingly ever), only to have her stare fixedly over my left shoulder where the spectre of a dead man I’d recently helped to report his own murder still drifted—hand on the gap between the base of my skull and the top of my spine, through which most possessive spirits first enter. And ask, dryly: “So who’s your new friend?”

She dabbled in magic too, ex-child medium that she is, just like the rest of us—helped me raise my share of demons, in some vain attempt to exorcize her own. Before the rest of the Black Magic Posse dropped off, that is, and I turned professional. And she decided it was easier acting like she was crazy all the time than it ever was trying to pretend she was entirely sane.

Now I make my living calling on obsolete gods like Our Lord of Entrails here: they’re far more cost-effective, in terms of customer service, since they don’t demand reverence, just simple recognition. The chance to move, however briefly, back from the Wide World into the Narrow one.

Because the Wide World, as Carra herself first told me, is simply where things happen; the Narrow World, hub of all influences, is where things are
made
to happen. Where, if you cast your wards and research your incantations well enough, you can actually grab hold of the intersecting wheels of various dimensions and spin them—however briefly—in the direction your client wants them to go.

Meanwhile, however—

“Way it strikes me,” Doug Whatever went on, “in terms of parts and labour alone, I must be givin’ you a thousand bucks every fifteen minutes. And aside from the dead dog, I still don’t see anything worth talkin’ about.”

Oh no?

Well. . . .

I closed my eyes. Felt cold purple inch down my fingers, nails suddenly alight. My hands gloving themselves with the bleak and shadeless flame of Power. That singing, searing rush—a kindled spark flaring up all at once, straight from my cortex to my groin, leaving nothing in between but the spell still on my lips.

Doug and his girlfriend saw it lap up over my elbows, and stepped back. As they did, a sidelong glance showed me what I wanted to see: Doug transfixed, bull-in-a-stall still and dumb, while Mrs. Doug’s little blue eyes got even rounder. But she wasn’t staring at my sigil-incised palms, or the flickering purple haze connecting them—no,
she
was seeing what Doug’s testosterone-drunk brain would have skipped right over, even if he’d been looking in the right direction: the twilit bridge’s nearest support girder, just behind me, lapped and drowned in one big shadow that drew every other nearby object’s shadow to it . . . except for where
I
stood.

Snarky Chinese faggot, bloody knife still in hand, smiling up at her under the non-existent brim of that un-holy hat. With my whole body—burning hands included—suddenly rimmed in a kind of missing halo, a thin edge of blank-bright nothingness. The empty spot where my own shadow should be.

Noticing. Noticing me notice her noticing. Trying desperately to put two and two together and just plain getting five, over and over and over.

She wrinkled her brows at me—helpless, clueless. I just pursed my lips, gave her a sassy little wink. Telling them both, one last time:

“I said,
watch
.”

And shut my eyes again.

February 14, 1997. For the
gweilo
rubes of Toronto, it was time to hand out the chocolate hearts, exchange cards that could make a diabetic go into shock, buy each other gift-bags full of underwear made from atrophied cotton candy. For us, it was just another night out with the Black Magic Posse.

Carra Devize, her pale braids stiff against the light, stray strands outflung in a crackling blue halo. Bruisy words crawling up and down her body as she spun a web of ectoplasm around herself, reel on reel of it, knotted like dirty string in the whitening air. Jen Cudahy, crying. Franz Froese, sweat-slick and deep in full chant trance, puking up names of Power, ecstatic with fear. And me, laughing, so drunk I could barely kneel.

With my left hand, with my bone-hilted hierarchical magician’s knife, I cut my shadow from me—one crooked swipe, downward and sideways, pressing so hard I almost took part of my heel off along with it. I heard it give that sigh.

I cut my shadow from me, without a second thought. And then. . . .

. . . I threw it away.

“One for Midnight Madness,” I told the girl behind the Bloor Cinema’s window, slipping her one of Doug Whatever’s crisp new twenties; she smiled, and ripped the ticket for me.

I smiled back. There’s no harm in it.

Hitting the candy bar, I stocked up on an extra-large popcorn, a box of chocolate almonds, and a cappuccino from the cafe upstairs. My Ma always used to tell us not to eat after 12:00, but the program promised a brand new Shinya Tsukamoto flesh-into-metal monster mosh-fest—and after tonight’s job, I was up for as much stimulation as I could stand.

Back down in the ravine, meanwhile, Doug and his girl still stood frozen above the remains of their mutual investment—their blood reverberate with a whispered loop of intimate-form Sumerian, heavily overlaid with mnemonic surtitles: Humbaba’s answer to their question. The same question I hadn’t wanted to know before they asked it, and certainly didn’t care to know now.

I didn’t exactly anticipate any repeat business from those two. But for what I’d made tonight, they could both disappear off the edge of the earth, for all I cared.

I took a big swallow of popcorn, licked the butter off my hands. A faint smell of Power still lingered under my nails—like dry ice, like old blood. Like burnt marigolds, seed and petal alike reduced to a fine, pungent ash.

Then the usher opened the doors, and I went in.

I used to be afraid of a lot of things, back when I was a nice, dutiful little Chinese boy. Dogs. Loud noises. Big, loud dogs that made big, loud noises. Certain concepts. Certain words used to communicate such concepts, like the worst, most unprovable word of all—“eternity.”

Secretly, late at night, I would feel the universe spinning loose around me: endless, nameless, a vortex of darkness within which my life became less than a speck of dust. The night sky would tilt toward me, yawning. And I would lie there breathless, waiting for the roof to peel away, waiting to lose my grip. To rise and rise forever into that great, inescapable Nothing, to drift until I disappeared—not only as though I no longer was, but as though I had never been.

So I read too much, and saw too many movies, and played too many video-games, and drank too much, and took too many pills, and made my poor Ma worried enough to burn way too much incense in front of way too many pictures of my various Hark ancestors. Anything to distract myself. I took my Baba’s
feng shui
advice and moved my bedroom furniture around religiously, hoping to deflect the cold current of my neuroses onto somebody else for a while. Why not? He was a professional, after all.