 
MY BABYLON

A NOVEL IN FIVE PARTS

BOOK ONE: BODY

BY JAMES L. WILBER

Copyright © 2013 by James L. Wilber. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Published by James L. Wilber at Smashwords

Dedication

For Marianne. For accepting this. For tolerating me. For dragging me back from my own Abyss.

We create no myths.

There will be no new holy books written. There will be no new great revelations.

We only have stories.

We are jaded by excess. The great sea of information, capable of connecting us all, only serves to divide us by faith, culture, counterculture, and ideology. It makes us incapable of seeing the great works around us. At least for now.

I have done my best to be honest. To reveal these events as they happened, to put myself in the same mind as when they occurred.

I am the magus Ego Sum Legio. This is:

My story,

My myth,

My revelation,

Liber 589 – The Book of Eschaton

My Babylon

Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. I am amazed at how great a wealth has made its home in this poverty."

- The Gospel of Thomas

Chapter 1

One of the hardest things to steal is a human body. By comparison, money can be taken easily, though the amounts make a big difference. You can grab a dollar out of a tip jar, or bash on a vending machine to liberate a buck without much fuss. If you ask the right person the right way, they might just hand you a dollar. They never give away bodies. Not here in the U.S. of A. Not in any "civilized" country.

A cadaver only costs about a grand. Anyone could whore themselves or offer manual labor for a couple of months and come up with a grand. You don't even need a real job or any skills. I had a job I could tolerate, as a dishwasher. The pure mechanical nature of it kept me in the profession. I rented out my body for nine dollars per hour, but my mind remained my own. Trust me, I could come up with a thousand dollars much easier than what it took to steal that corpse. But even if you had the cash, no one will give you a body without the backing of a medical license and a mighty institution—school, hospital, or laboratory.

Yeah, I suppose if you had a lot of money you could buy a body. Parts and whole corpses get sold on the black market all the time. One in good shape can reap tens of thousands of dollars under clandestine circumstances. Coming up with that kind of money takes years of hard work, or stealing from a bank, jewelry store, or some other repository of liquid assets. Just as hard as robbing a morgue. People get upset when you steal that much money. I went for the morgue.

You may ask that if freshness doesn't matter why not dig one up like old Dr. Frankenstein? I've buried enough family to rule out that course of action. Sure, graveyards have limited security; most don't even have cameras. Once you bypass the fence, you're in a secluded spot. You can take your time excavating your treasure. The only problem is, since the turn of the century, undertakers have been placing coffins in burial vaults. This means the casket sits nestled in a half-foot of concrete strong enough to prevent the weight of all that earth collapsing in when they drive across it with a back-hoe. The family may also opt for a liner made of plastic or metal to keep water out of the grave. Even the most determined re-animator and loyal hunchback lack the brute force necessary to pluck a body from a modern grave.

The other obvious method of obtaining a corpse--making one myself--never entered my realm of possibility. I abhor violence. Despite everything I've done. No matter how perverse my personal creed seems to most, I refuse to kill another human being. I know the theft of that girl's body caused grievous emotional harm to her family. For some reason we hold dear those lifeless tissues. Perhaps because they are a symbol of the spirit that left them. Honestly, it was because of its power as a symbol that it was worth so much to me. I still anguish over the trauma I caused the relatives and friends. They would never know, never believe, that my plan was designed to inflict the minimum amount of suffering on the planet. The corpse, of course, didn't mind. As Marla Singer so eloquently put it, "They're dead, and I'm alive, and I'm suffering."

The longing came over me last fall; I suppose from watching all those college students return for the coming year. I live in an old neighborhood. The houses, some almost two-hundred years old, have been split into duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes, and those get shared by up to a half-dozen incoming college students who descend on the town every September. The district's old-growth trees, cracked sidewalks, and sagging faded homes attract bohemians and artists and loners like me. But when the nights turn cool, the residents brace themselves for the onslaught of keg parties, loud music, vomiting in the bushes, and other obnoxious late night behaviors. I'm a night person, so it doesn't bother me much. It's not like they're waking me up. I consider it a challenge to keep perfect concentration while the windows are rattling. The students also drive up the rent on Vine Street and the surrounding blocks well beyond my means, but my landlord and I get along well. She knows I won't wreck the place, and she doesn't need to go looking for new tenants in the summer.

The parade of young girls ready to experiment with their newfound freedom made me think of Rose. I thought she was different. She was different. I just don't know if it was in the ways I assumed. I still think about her every single day. I believed, still believe, that none of those tittering and nervous co-eds passing by my door could replace her. Even if they could, I couldn't do that to another human. I wouldn't be responsible for leading them down that path of self-consumption. I spiral alone now.

No, that's a lie. I'm not alone anymore.

Despite the burning ache, I took my time. The ache isn't the worst part anyway. The worst part comes when you wake up in the morning, get in the shower, and realize you'll never feel that again. You'll never be that alive again. The planning gave me purpose. I might not have made it out the door those days without it.

I thought at first to infiltrate a funeral home and obtain a body that way, but I knew I couldn't just go to work for one. The first suspects when a body goes missing from a funeral home are the employees. Although I lacked funds, I had copious amounts of free time and patience. This I used to stake out the local mortuaries.

I spent over a year on recon. During my intelligence gathering, I eschewed my nocturnal routine and actually left my home in the AM. I donned something dark and non-descript, which pretty much describes my entire wardrobe anyway, and walked down to the coffee house to get something large, black, and hot. After I meandered over to one of the local parlors, I found a nook or perch where I could watch the back entrance without being seen, and whiled away the hours until work. A grueling task when standing in place or sitting on cold concrete, subjected to the frigid November wind, huddling around a cup of coffee for warmth.

My original plan entailed somehow intercepting an incoming corpse during the receiving process. It took a few weeks to accept the futility of the endeavor. In every case, an ambulance would pull up to the loading dock, and not long after, one or more representatives of the funeral home would emerge. Without being able to get into the home itself, or even hear most of their conversations, I watched the expressions and body language of the participants in order to gain the gist of each transaction.

For a typical delivery, the ambulance pulled down the alley at a snail's pace. One of the crew would hop out and guide the driver as he backed the behemoth, reverse warning alarm screeching the whole time, as close to the raised platform as possible to ensure a smooth roll-off. During this process, one of the morticians would open the back door, grinning and waving. Considering the task at hand, they always seemed happy to see each other, that normal human reaction when getting to see someone only every so often at work. The drivers hung around long enough for pleasantries, but were gone before they became annoying. You have to make an effort to be hated in such a short period of time. Most people don't have it in them.

The key was that the intake crew always knew when the ambulance would arrive. Either the ambulance crew called ahead and made arrangements, or the funeral workers heard those ear-piercing klaxons of the back-up warning. In any case, no opportunity to grab the body presented itself, either through impersonation or neglect.

On my days off, I even watched at night. No deliveries came after normal business hours, reinforcing the theory that all were arranged.

My ray of hope came when I started watching my third home. It required skipping a few packages of ramen during those weeks because I needed to pay for two bus rides each day, but it was worth it. At this larger establishment, deliveries went the same. But on my first day I witnessed two instances of an unmarked van leaving the garage, and two morticians returning with a gurney laden with the object of my desire. This even happened at night, though that required the crew to rendezvous at the mortuary, drag-tail and sleepy-eyed from being called in, and then take the van out for the pick-up.

This led to the conclusion that a weak link may be found at the hospital. A good thing, because casing the funeral homes lasted well into December, and the onslaught of a Michigan winter could deter even me. I switched from suspicious alley lurker to distraught visiting family member. Even in a small city like Kalamazoo, it takes months to learn the layout of a hospital. Corridor upon corridor of identical nondescript rooms sow confusion. I needed to learn not only how to navigate quickly, but which halls, entrances, and exits were most likely to be watched, and when.

Entire nights were wasted noting the positions of cameras and when each desk would be un-manned. To develop a cover, I learned which waiting rooms were most often used by the families of cancer patients, and those suffering other illnesses that take long-term care. Not at all a cheerful endeavor, but I felt I deserved some pain. To make myself one of them, I sat too close to large groups, refusing to leave an empty seat between us as decorum dictates, even when the rest of the room was empty. Of course, they would never break the social contract by insisting that I move. The proximity made my skin crawl, and I could not help but wonder if it would be their relative stolen. If I would so happen to chance upon the corpse of Jake, or Margo, or Lloyd, the names I heard the families repeat over and over, I doubted I could go through with it. But because of my behavior, security and staff assumed I belonged with the grief stricken. Even when I took to wandering they marked me as a bored visitor, walking to keep awake. By February I was invisible.

The conspicuous largess of the American medical system worked to my advantage. Most hospitals maintain tight security, surveillance, platoons of guards, and required badges and codes to enter work areas. However, that security lapses in the ubiquitous construction zones. It seems no hospital can resist wasting wads of cash on bigger, newer, and more luxurious facilities. Visit your local medical temple sometime and witness for yourself the installation of enough marble and glass to rival palaces in Europe. Come the day of the heist, I could count on an unmonitored staging area. Discovering all this took over a month. Only after this initial infiltration did finding the morgue become a priority.

I assumed I could find it by following the intake. Exterior stake-outs of the hospital loading zones, however, required a reason to stand around in strange places. Despite the damage to my lung capacity, and thus my ability to project my voice during ritual, I took up smoking again. To my surprise, it took an entire carton of American Spirits to track down the white van. In that time, I internally debated what I knew about human nature. No doubt the hospital called the funeral home when they had a pick-up ready. Once again, the transaction was always expected, but having it work the other way around gave me some advantage. People at work take the path of least resistance. Morticians want to get corpses as soon as possible and hospitals want to get rid of them. Even if the timing is a bit off, the mortician shows up too early or too late, there's always another body that needs to go. Barring some flagrant behavior, no reason to be suspicious of a mortician.

My next hurdle was looking like I worked at a funeral home. The Evans Funeral Home used a limited uniform. The driver and partner wore black slacks, white button-down shirt, black windbreaker with logo patch, and baseball cap with logo. I had the shirt and pants covered. I found a similar windbreaker at the Salvation Army store for five bucks. I knew it could pass without the logo, especially if I had one on the hat. The design was nothing special. You can count on the funeral business to be sedate.

Considering my total lack of spending money, this took quite an investment. My paranoia kicked in, and I considered it wise to make my purchase as far away from the scene of the crime as possible. Someone would remember a guy buying a custom made hat for a funeral home. Even though I didn't intend to take the corpse for several months after, better safe than someone's prison bitch. People incarcerated for crimes against taboo seldom fare well behind bars. I wasted a day off and twenty-five dollars on a round-trip Greyhound from Kalamazoo to one of the big malls in Grand Rapids.

Funny, this part of the operation took more will than most of what came next. I fucking despise malls. They are ostentatious displays of wealth. New malls in rich areas are particularly loathsome. Once again, enough marble and glass to make a Bourbon monarch feel at home. That's not counting the windows full of astronomically priced merchandise made to appeal to the brand conscious. How do people do it? How do they enjoy doing that? Jamming themselves together to purchase status on the flimsiest of pretexts? As soon as I walk through the doors, the bright lights, shit music, and roar of banal dialogue overwhelms me. Who are these people talking about sports, and celebrities, and clothing designers like they matter? The smell of artificial food and perfume makes my stomach turn. It takes all my concentration to make sure I don't overhear any conversation and risk exploding into a tirade sure to lead to my arrest. When I go to my favorite café on the corner--no, not the coffee abattoir with the green mermaid--I can listen to street people with library card educations discuss theology, philosophy, and physics. At the mall, amongst those given all the advantages in the world, I hear about last night's reality TV show.

Before I even left my home I consulted a floor plan and charted the most direct course to the store I needed--a custom embroidery kiosk off the food court. Armored with my largest pair of over-ear headphones, hood up, eyes straight ahead, I pushed through the doors and fast-walked the thirty-five yards to the stool of a listless sales girl who was Facebooking from her phone. My sudden appearance gave her a start, and she neglected to hide her loathing and disgust for just a moment before switching to retail-robot cheerleader.

"Hi, can I help you find something?"

"Yes. I would like to buy a full-cloth black baseball cap with custom embroidery." I provided all the information as succinctly as possible to keep contact to a minimum.

"Sure, what style?"

I missed the mark. Either she did not possess the processing power necessary to assign two characteristics to one object at the same time, or she was so lacking in give-a-shit, whatever a customer said passed through her mind like an eel in a fish tank.

"The full-cloth, not the mesh back."

"Great...."

Why was my choice in hat subject to praise? Was it because making the choice quickly made her life more bearable?

Her head tilted to one side as if she had trouble keeping me in focus. "Would you like to look through the font choices?"

"I looked through the typefaces online, I would like number eighteen, Book Antiqua."

The unusual lack of transaction banter made her uncomfortable. I wanted to blurt out what size lettering, and what it should say, but I reasoned that waiting for her to ask would help to normalize the situation.

She picked up her pen and blank order form, noted what I already told her, and retreated into deep concentration for an aeon. Someone nearby said, "And oh God, she looked like such a skanky ho...." The sales girl must have noticed me wincing, which jarred her faculties back into motion.

She looked at me with a rictus grin. "What would you like it to say?"

No amount of preparation would make it any easier for her. "The top line should say Evans in forty-eight point bold all caps. The second line should say Funeral Home in twenty-eight point normal lettering with 'F' and 'H' capitalized.

She nodded as she wrote, and kept nodding as the meaning of the words sank in. Her head went up and down for what I would swear was a good twenty seconds.

I had prepared an explanation. Not a good one. I don't think a good one exists.

"I lost my hat at work. My boss will charge me fifty dollars to replace it."

It gave her enough normalization to stop bobbing her head. "Oh, you're a mortician."

"Yes."

Another painful pause. I know that decorum dictates some kind of apology or excuse for having a job that until recently was performed only by untouchables. But it was better to leave as little memory behind as possible in case she gets questioned.

Putting my headphones back on, I took a seat on a nearby bench until she completed the cap. Her hands shook as she took the blank hat off the rack and fed it into the clever machine that did the stitching. If I had only known that working at a funeral home would cause people to recoil in terror, I would have made it my trade a long time ago. Or at least have worn the uniform. Alas, with my upcoming crime, I couldn't risk attracting attention to myself that way.

I tried not to watch. Looking too eager would only add to her suspicions. Instead, as I have practiced doing for the past decade, I closed my eyes, leaned back, and retreated into my own mind. It was time to plan the next phase.

The Magical Record of Soror Amasnex

Do all who seek go through this Dark Night of the Soul? Or, is it the trial that creates seekers?

Have you ever gotten up in the morning, done your routine, stood in the shower and thought to yourself, "this is how it will be every day from now until I die, no joy, no pain, no feeling, just this numb existence?" Could you face it? I think we all go through something like that, from time to time, but what if it never went away? What if it happened every day?

Would you have the courage to change it? What would it take? When you're an ant, all the other ants look different. But when you're looking down at them, they all look the same. Bend down, and you may see each ant as an individual, but stand up and all you can see is a line of dots, all moving in unison.

Imagine you've become untethered, your consciousness has gone floating away like a balloon, higher and higher. You look down and you see yourself as one of those insects marching along. How much will would it take to get out of line? You would have to be crazy.

Others may read these words and see meanness and madness. I read them and see strength and sorrow. But I can hardly be expected to be impartial on the subject.

Chapter 2

One would think the best place to study the medieval period would be somewhere it actually happened. To be fair, colleges in Cologne, Leeds, and Cambridge have excellent Medieval Studies programs. But, arguably, the two most well-known are Western Michigan University and the University of Toronto. I participated in both.

History does not repeat like a record skipping. We don't stop and go back over and over again. The past spirals, turning on itself at times and then looping forward. Things change as much as they remain the same, and everything builds on what came before. My first real theft, my first adult relationship, my first quantifiable success at magick, all led directly to my plan with the corpse.

People in my culture do not come predisposed to a belief in magick. Theorists argue that's why we're so bad at it. For magick to work you must believe in it without doubt. Magick always works and if it doesn't work for you then you're doing it wrong. I got lucky. I had an influence that created a crack in the rock solid certainty that most Westerners develop: the belief in science, nation, and what the TV tells you.

My grandmother comes from Haiti. She grew up in that great stew of African diasporic faith, European religiosity, and Native American influence most people call voodoo, or nowadays spelled vodou. Despite leaving the island in her early twenties with my grandfather and living decades in the US, vodou remained the basis of her world view. Before they met, my grandmother attended college in Port au Prince, and at night and on weekends trained to be a mambo, a vodou priestess.

In the West, we associate a belief in magick with ignorance and being "primitive." My grandfather, as a graduate student in Comparative Religion at our dear old Alma mater, went to Haiti after the war to study what they called at the time the voodoo death cults. He always said that he married my grandmother because she was the smartest woman he ever met. After the move, she completed her degree in social work and then taught at Kalamazoo College. Not your typical dark savage.

Before you get the impression I'm claiming to be some sort of prodigy, my grandmother never said a word to me directly about her faith. My mother never showed an interest in any religion, and slipped into my father's lukewarm Catholicism without trouble. Yet during those visits as a child, which grew more and more infrequent as I got older, the mere proximity to my grandmother left me open in subtle ways. The brightly colored flags, painted offering bowls, and random bits of reliquary fascinated me. How could a child not be fascinated by images of the provocative vodou gods?

When my mother suffered a miscarriage, every adult I knew said the baby was with Jesus now. My grandmother said that Erzuile would protect her.

I remember vaguely a day my parents let my grandmother take care of me. I must have been no older than six. I had hit my head on the table, so the memories can only be trusted so far. She bandaged me and applied ice dutifully, as any person would do, but after first aid, she called for some unorthodox help. The details of the ritual escape me. I remember candles, and a yellow bottle, and my grandmother dancing ecstatically around the kitchen, holding a feather in her hand, limbs flailing, feet stomping. When the dance stopped, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she calmly walked up to me, looming over my six-year-old self. Somehow I knew, or just remember it this way, that she walked like a man would walk and not a woman. She looked down at me, her expression as grim as a man's as well. He seemed to pity me, be angry with me at the same time, and worried.

How could that not have an influence on a child? At that time, however, it made little sense, and my grandmother passed away before I developed any interest in vodou. That came much later.

I wonder if other people can pinpoint the traumas of their youth as the source of their persona with such pinpoint accuracy? Maybe it's because magick has so much to do with psychology. One of the best known modern magicians, Israel Regardie, recommended that a prospective practitioner should undergo at least a year of psychotherapy before learning magick. Though maybe he said that because he was a psychiatrist. To be honest, being a loner probably has more to do with my adult obsessions than my grandmother's religion. That, and being a person of mixed-race.

My first lesson in social ostracism came early. In kindergarten I made the mistake of introducing myself by my real name, Michel, pronounced MEE- Shell, a French form of Michael. Etymology not being a popular subject for the under sixes, I was immediately branded with having a girl's name. In later grades, ignorant teachers let the cat out of the bag, calling out on the first day of school "Michelle? Michelle Grau?" as if they had lost a dog. "Mike," I would correct after the damage was done.

I didn't look white. I didn't act black. The Hispanic kids thought I was one of them until they found out I couldn't speak Spanish, something I remedied later since it came naturally after learning Latin. I can go to my local taqueria for lunch and pass for a Chicano without too much scrutiny. But my inability to fit in left me doomed to the retreat of fat kids, kids with glasses, and other loner kids in general—books. You learn quickly that every writer in every story creates reality with a word. Just like a magician.

Maybe none of this interests you, and I shouldn't be boring you with all of the details of my upbringing. But like I said, very few people in the West accept magick, and I feel compelled to give you a reason why I do. Because you must believe in magick without question for it to work. Only a crazy person goes through all the pain and risk of stealing a corpse with the idea they might be able to do magick. I knew I could.

I met Uncle Al at my local library at the ripe old age of fourteen. That's Aleister Crowley to the uninitiated, the most well-known magus of the modern age. Why my local library carried such esoteric tomes is still beyond my reasoning, yet there it was, amongst the books on UFOs and ghosts: Magick in Theory and Practice. My pubescent mind comprehended only a fraction of it, but that didn't deter me. Something about reading always affected me that way. It seemed to me that if a person knew the words they should be able to understand what the writer meant, and I would do whatever it took to figure it out. I must have checked out and read that book six or seven times in a year. Until it suffered the fate that most occult books in a public library suffer, theft by ignorant metal-heads. I should have stolen the damn thing myself. That never occurred to me then, as I was always a most reserved and law abiding youth. I've worked hard to get over that. By then I had amassed my own collection, my loving parents blissfully ignorant, ready to accept anything that entered my possession in innocent book form.

The combination of being precocious, inquisitive, and stubborn made me the perfect acolyte. I actually went through all of the exercises in meditation, yoga, and self-deprivation prescribed by Crowley and his ilk. I learned Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Latin to get a better grasp of the subject matter. I studied mythology, and learned to draw arcane symbols reasonably well, despite having no talent for it. All of the things necessary to do magick, the right way, which so few people have the willpower to actually do. There's a saying, "If magick were easy, everyone would be doing it." If people knew how to change reality on a whim, the universe would collapse into disorder. Like everything else important in life, you have to work at it, and the bigger the pay off, the more work it takes.

When I started college I had a laser focus, meditating an hour a day, and spending another two on rituals designed to create magical consciousness. If I wasn't doing yoga or making astrological charts, I was studying. The first two years went by like a blur. In my third year, ingratiating myself with the faculty at the Medieval Institute became a priority. That summer, the Institute decided to exchange two students with the University of Toronto. The lucky selectees would be enrolled in the U of T's advanced course in Latin, and intern at the U of T Press. Sadly, I wanted it more than anything else before in my life.

Everyone knew that graduate students would fill the two slots. This did not deter me. For the first time I turned to magick to obtain something tangible. My schedule became more rigid. In the morning, meditation, then class. In between and after class was spent brown nosing with professors, running books back and forth, small pieces of translation, grading tests, anything to keep my name on their lips.

Nights were spent in adoration of Thoth.

My liberal parents respected a child's need for privacy. At age fourteen they turned over the old storage shed in their sprawling, wooded backyard to my devices. It became a place to read uninterrupted at first, and then after I became serious about magick, it became my temple. If they ever noticed the flickering candlelight, the pungent incense, or the chanting in strange languages in the middle of the night, they never talked about it. Magicians through the ages have used the tried and true method of beseeching a higher power for favor. Since I sought a position as a scholar, I turned to one of my favorite deities, the ibis-headed Egyptian god of knowledge, writing, and magick.

In my temple, from sundown to sunup, I chanted the invocations, made sacrifices of great clouds of incense, wrote scrolls worth of prayers, collected and kept sacred beetles, and subjugated myself before Thoth's image. After a week of this, things began to happen.

A dozen graduate students were eligible for the exchange. Half never expressed an interest, planning to use their summer break for more intense binging. The first real competitor to drop out got caught plagiarizing a paper. The second lost his chance by failing all of his non-medieval classes and needing to use that summer to retake them. In the third week of my enchantment, I used India ink to tattoo the name of Thoth on my arms in hieroglyphics seventeen times. A third student failed his Latin final, disqualifying himself. In the fourth week, I sustained myself on raw fish, frogs, and worms, the diet of the African Sacred Ibis. One of the graduate students managed to get arrested for possession of marijuana, and would be spending the summer on house arrest.

I firmly believe in the principle that you must do everything possible physically before resorting to magick. If you want money, get a fucking job. If you want love, work on your appearance and your social graces. Magick should be the last resort, or that little extra push to make your endeavors succeed. Failing to do everything you can to achieve your goals is an offense to magick. By its nature, little determines the difference between the effects of sorcery and chance. Yet despite my rational nature, I can only chock-up so much to coincidence.

You run into another problem when working magick of this type. The devotion required to the spell itself undermines the mental and physical requirements of the work on the physical plane. Sleep deprivation, bloodletting, and constant ritual memorization and repetition engendered fits of mania and paranoia. When offering to drive down to Notre Dame to pick up a book for my faculty advisor, I couldn't tell if I sounded helpful or sycophantic. I gave myself limits to the number of questions I could ask or answer during lectures, fearful of being labeled an annoying kiss-ass. I imagined every fellow student's eyes burning with hatred. Every small yawn or sigh from a professor denoted displeasure for my eagerness.

On top of all this, I experienced the auditory and visual hallucinations normal to fasting, lack of REM, and constant forays into my own subconscious. Pages on the internet changed to indecipherable hieroglyphs before my eyes. I smelled incense every time I entered a library. As I walked past the pond on campus, the gaggle of geese transformed into a flock of praying ibis, "I am thy writing palette oh Thoth, and I have brought unto thee thine ink jar...."

While in the midst of this mental and emotional fog, the last hammer fell. Professor Budge called me in the middle of the day and asked me to come to his office. I almost got hit crossing Stadium Drive to East Campus. Things only got worse as I walked the cracked sidewalks and passed buildings made of ancient Chicago red brick. This was the original campus, where my grandfather went to school, well before they built all the soulless concrete monstrosities for the influx of baby boomers. At least the administration had the good graces to house the Institute in venerable Wallwood Hall. Any other day I enjoyed the setting, but that day the gothic ambiance set me further on edge.

The student and the professor watched my entrance with puzzlement and concern. No doubt my profuse sweating, shaking, and stuttering gave away my mental state. Little did I know, I had an excuse.

Plump Dr. Budge extracted himself from his chair for a half-ass stand while he motioned me to sit. "Mike, you know Ezra, don't you?"

Yeah, I knew Ezra. Ezra who every professor adored. Ezra who made it all look easy. Ezra who carefully constructed an aura of detachment yet still knew all the answers. He leaned back in his chair, in faded jeans, a wrinkled blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his long unkempt hair matching an impressive beard for a man his age. Yeah, Ezra.

I shook his hand. "H... he... he... hey."

Ezra withdrew his from my moist palm and resisted the urge to wipe it on his pants.

I took my seat. Mesmerized by my twitching, the professor took a few seconds to begin. "Mike, do you know Rachel?"

Everybody liked Rachel. Poor Rachel volunteered for the onerous task of teaching Medieval 101. Made popular only by virtue of being held in the afternoon. A lecture hall full of obnoxious freshmen packed the class to fulfill a lit or history requirement. Rachel suffered their sleeping and texting admirably. She could often be seen on her antique red bike speeding between the offices at Wallwood over to the cavernous auditoriums in Friedman. I usually despise anyone who keeps a constant cheerful disposition, but on Rachel it seemed genuine.

I nodded to the professor.

"I'm afraid she's been in an accident."

It took all my willpower to freeze in place both physically and mentally. If this intruded too far into my reality I would crack. Everything would come pouring out of me. His voice became faint and distant.

"She was struck by a car yesterday afternoon. The whole department is in shock."

I did this. A shadow thing lives in everyone's psyche. Mine swelled, threatened to take over. My jaw clenched until my teeth hurt, holding back my mouth from showing any signs of emotion. For if the shadow thing took over I would cackle like madman. I did this. With the power of my will I had done this.

"Her parents told us she's going to be okay, but she'll take time to recover. She'll probably miss the fall term."

The other half, the part that feels empathy, the part in everyone that can't resist smiling at a happy baby, dived head first into the toilet of my brain and threw the fuck up. Then got up and stumbled through the halls of my thoughts, muttering. I did this.

"Some of us from the Institute will be going down to the hospital tomorrow night to visit."

Both aspects came to an agreement on one thing. Nod, motherfucker, nod, show some acknowledgment before he realizes you're a freak!

I nodded.

"Which brings me to another matter we need to take care of. We've decided to offer you and Ezra the summer fellowship with the University of Toronto this year."

The dark ego swelled larger and threatened domination again. Stuffing him back down took all my concentration and kept me from answering. While struggling with my sanity, my eyes tracked over to my fellow student to judge his reaction to my behavior. He regarded me with bemusement. He knew the professor had all his attention on me, so he took the opportunity to flash a shit-eating grin and raise an eyebrow. It was like he knew. Did he know? How the fuck could he possibly know?

The delay set the professor into worry. "Can you accept it? Do you have other commitments for the summer?"

The elder student's amusement did do one thing: my dark ego, a bestial creature, saw it as an affront to its dominance and it snapped into action. I could be as smarmy and detached as the next motherfucker.

"Not anymore," I said.

"Excellent, I'll get you all the papers. The university has some micro-loan programs in place to help with the costs...."

As the professor droned, I almost retreated back into my swirl of insanity, but Ezra's voice broke through.

He leaned in and whispered in my ear. "This is going to be fun."

I blushed with guilt. I knew it would be.

Chapter 3

The fun got started early. We made only a few brief planning phone calls. Ezra had been to Toronto before, so I let him make the arrangements. Not wanting to be caught without transport while at U of T, he volunteered to drive us. Still reeling from my intense magical exercises and unexpected results, I made no arguments.

He arrived at my house an hour late in a vintage BMW roadster. Adamant that he knew the trick to packing the trunk, he grabbed my bags and insisted I take my seat and relax. Relax being the key word there. Being long-limbed and six-three, I wondered how I would fold myself into that death trap for seven hours. While I adjusted the seat, my eyes locked onto three perfectly rolled joints sitting in the ashtray. Drugs were never a big thing for me. I could take them or leave them. Some magi swear by them as an easy means to reach transcendental states. I never take the easy way.

Ezra startled me as he flopped into his seat and slammed the door at the same time. "Ready to take a rocket ride, Jack Parsons?"

He laughed at my bugged-out eyes as he started the car.

Could it have been just another Jungian synchronicity? I had suffered many strange coincidences during the times leading up to and right after major magical undertakings. Par for the course. Later, I realized almost everything Ezra did was carefully calculated to break down my defenses. At the time, I brushed it off. Plenty of people knew about Jack Parsons, one of the founders of modern rocketry. He helped form the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and invented the solid rocket fuel that made the American space program possible. Less well known, Parsons was also a celebrated magician and devotee of Aleister Crowley. Parsons' obsession with summoning the goddess Babalon landed him all sorts of trouble. Something that happens to most magicians who play around with her, as we shall learn. No reason to be suspicious, I thought, Ezra could just be well versed in scientific history.

He started the car. "Don't worry, I never start smoking until I'm on the highway. Once you're past the stop-and-go, you don't have to worry so much about reaction time."

Reassuring.

It became one of those trips that felt more like sailing than driving. With the top down, the rushing wind kept conversation to a minimum. True to his word, he lit the first joint by the second mile marker. Ready to do anything to relieve my nerves, my willpower collapsed like an asthmatic marathoner from the slightest nudge of peer pressure. The warm May sun and the rhythm of the highway made a pleasant accompaniment to my swimming thoughts. Ezra insisted that we finish the weed before reaching the Canadian border to prevent any problems with customs. This seemed perfectly sensible after tossing the roach from the first one.

Near Detroit, in an attempt to sober up, we pulled into a truck stop, and grabbed some food and absurdly sized soft drinks. He put up the top to help block the prying eyes of the border agents. All pointless precaution, as they waved us past with only the most cursory look at our passports.

With only dead air between us we had no more excuses. In his casual way, Ezra started the conversation.

"You get much chance to read the primary documents at the Institute?"

He referred to the impressive collection of actual medieval manuscripts in care at our library. "A few. My Church Latin is pretty good, so I stick mainly to those."

"You ever read the Greifswald folios?"

I shook my head. "Never heard of them."

"Not surprised, they're in the vernacular."

"Really? That's unusual."

"Yeah, I have this theory." He waited until I looked at him. "The monks that wrote it had to make a record for the courts, but they didn't want anyone from the Vatican learning about their colossal cock-up." He changed lanes before continuing. "There was this former brother, a monk named Jacobus Stoyan. It all started with him retreating to his own hermitage after absconding with some of the monastery's racier titles. Books on demon summoning, and some pornography."

With the fortress of my inhibitions breeched, I chimed in. "The Devil and porn will always get you in trouble."

He snickered. "Exactly. Not long after, villagers caught him in congress with a demon-woman and some of the usual nonsense. But the weird part is, at his trial, some of them actually admitted to paying Stoyan for sex with his demon. Tons of people came forward to say they witnessed her. Some of the shop keepers even said she came in to purchase supplies for the bastard."

"That's pretty domestic for a medieval hysteria. I mean, it's usually all about flying imps and shit, not popping into town for flour and blowjobs." I laughed at my own hyperbole. "What did this Stoyan guy have to say about it?"

"Oh, he came out and admitted everything. Invited everyone to meet her. Said they should give up all of this Christian nonsense."

"Bet that made him popular." I slurped on my empty soda. "So the monks didn't want any of the higher-ups to find out they lost the books?"

"No, they got the books back."

"He actually converted some of them?"

"Not exactly."

He waited almost to the point of exasperation, and despite hurtling down the road at seventy, looked straight at me. "This is where shit gets really weird."

Taking a second to enjoy my obvious distress from his lack of attention to driving, he turned his head back. "So, of course, they decide to burn him at the stake. Day comes, he's all tied up, fires are lit, town turns out for the festivities."

Another pause, he knew how to tell a story. "And the demoness shows up, walks right through the fire and rescues him." He turned to me again to get a reaction.

I had nothing. "That's fucked up."

"Lucky for us, they vamoosed straight out of town and didn't have time to go back to their hideout."

"What do you mean lucky for us?"

"U of T has his grimoire."

1 5 6

As I had not progressed that far on the Ezra learning curve by then. I didn't know everything he does has an ulterior motive. Otherwise, I would have been on my guard. After his fun story about the necromancer, he let me talk and made me believe he was interested in my words.

We checked in at the university, and they gave us a dorm room. Since I lived in the same town as my own college, I had never suffered dorm life. How they expected two adults to live in a closet astounded me. Ezra immediately declared there was no use spending any more time in it than necessary. We hit the bars.

With no perceptible effort, Ezra navigated the bus system to a bohemian neighborhood called Kensington and we took our place at a bar called Thirsty & Miserable. I appreciate snark. Tossing back pint after pint, we talked about philosophy, politics, and art. Pop culture only crept in at the edges when we discussed our favorite music.

Damn Canada and their liberal reasonableness. Being only twenty, I had yet to sufficiently inure myself to excess alcohol. On the way out, I wobbled and stumbled, leaning on Ezra as the bus swayed back and forth. Every time the bus turned I flopped against him, and he found it outrageously funny. Upon learning my antics entertained him, I exaggerated my lack of control. Then came the greatest shock of my young life. As my head lingered on his shoulder, he turned to face me, leaned in, and kissed.

Up until then, I would have described myself as asexual. Being a social pariah in high school meant missing those early exploratory gropes and melodramatic relationships. Sure, I masturbated, and I thought about girls when I did, but it was a perfunctory act. In college, no one tried to pull me out of my comfort zone. All that wild promiscuity seemed like something other people did, the ones who enjoyed sporting events and shopping at the mall. So I had no defenses when Ezra came at me.

To my complete surprise, I absolutely adored the feeling. Even with the beard. Later, I learned that anyone giving me that kind of attention could provoke the same reaction. Something in me never got used the idea that another human being could find me attractive.

We shared warm, rolling kisses all the way back to our cell. Without words, we took off our clothes and kept going, giving each other's cocks quick, teasing strokes, laughing and kissing as we did, reveling in our abandon. He dodged my third grab, flopping back onto one of the sparse bunks. Both his eyes and his erection dared me to come after him. I knew what he wanted. That much about gay relationships was true, at least for me, you always know what another man wants. So I got down on my knees and sucked. I don't know how to describe this without sounding like cheap erotica. I wouldn't, except it is important, you have to trust me on that.

At first, I just licked at it. I didn't think I would enjoy having it in my mouth. Then I took the tip in, wrapping my tongue around it and applying suction. He moaned. I took in a little more. The throbbing power of it thrilled me. The weight of a man's cock goes so much beyond the physical. You can't feel it holding your own, familiarity dulls the finer senses. Yet something in my subconscious recognized all the attention and care I paid mine and therefore acknowledged the gravity of touching someone else's. Especially when giving pleasure. After my oral explorations, not yet knowing the power of teasing, I went full bore. It didn't take long for me to overcome the gag reflex and get a rhythm going. Once again yoga and meditation served me well, with experience holding uncomfortable positions I could ignore the pain in my jaw and the numbness of neck muscles, carrying on for that beautiful eternity until....

Ezra gave a throaty, "fuck yeah," as he came, a little louder than would seem natural, a deliberate message to me that he enjoyed himself. Anyone who tells you they enjoy the taste of semen is a liar, but I didn't mind it, and the symbol, the show I would take his seed inside me, gave me a sense of pride.

He took me by my chin and beamed down at me, then lifted me gently by the shoulders to straddle him. He took my cock in hand and pulled roughly, grabbing on like he owned the thing. In moments I sprayed on his belly and he pulled me down next to him and we slept it off.

I don't know if I was made this way, or if he did it to me, or brought it out. Some say people like me are just hardwired for it, like being gay, or in my case, being bisexual. I am also wired to enter into any sex act in terms of dominance and submission. So what may seem like a normal gay-curious indiscretion to others was a precedent for me. Ezra controlled and I submitted. In fantasy land, these roles only apply in the bedroom. In fact, a lot of people take on the opposite demeanor they use in other social situations. It always seems like it's the high-powered exec or politician that needs to lick a domme's boots. For me, there's the danger of bleed-over, the desire to fulfill such roles outside of sex. Any actor can tell you the freedom and joy that comes from totally losing yourself in the part.

I also saw it as a challenge. Something in the back of my head whispered, take your time, wait. One day, the roles will reverse. One day, you'll take control.

1 5 6

I awoke with a start to the sound of shouting in Greek.

Ezra's voice, strong and clear without a hint of self-consciousness, echoed off the walls. "Apo pandos kakodaimonos!"

The sounds were familiar but their purpose eluded me under the shroud of waking.

"Soi."

"O Phalle."

I turned and saw his hand move with slow grace to touch his left shoulder, and then his right, intoning, "Ischuros. Eucharistos." He clasped his hands in front of him in a sudden clap and shouted, "Iao!"

He was naked. In perfect posture, back straight, his muscles taunt but not trembling, he looked amazing in the morning sunlight. The clarity and power he put into the words invoked admiration. I knew those words. This was the Star Ruby ritual. An exercise magicians practice, a form of meditation designed to increase concentration and open the spirit. Besides a few Youtube videos, I had never seen magick performed by another. Despite years of solitary practice, I never found the need to seek out others. The majesty of it floored me. Pangs of jealousy crept up, as I believed my own stumbling rituals could never inspire such awe. He seemed perfectly in the moment of it, in ecstasy.

Ezra lifted his arms shoulder height and formed a triangle with his outstretched hands. Once again with grace, he pulled his arms back and rested the triangle on his forehead, closing his eyes. For a long pause his hands rested there and a shadow of serenity fell across his face. Then he thrust himself forward, arms outstretched, palms flat, as if about to dive into a pool. "Therion!" Like a ballerina he came back to the balls of his feet, raising his right hand, one finger up, and rested it on his chin and lips like when a librarian scolds noisy patrons.

Turning to each cardinal direction he did this again, shouting out the names of the gods of the magi old and new. "Nuit! Babalon! Hadit!" Once more facing east, "Iao Pan! Iao Pan! Iao Pan!"

I sat up as he spoke the last of the incantations. As the ending words reverberated in my skull, he turned towards me, a gratified smugness in his countenance.

"You practice magick." Loathing when people state the obvious, I mentally kicked myself as soon as I said it.

He nodded, grabbed his shower kit, and strolled out into the hall still naked, leaving the door open. My modesty demanded I put on a pair of shorts in order to scuttle after him. A pointless gesture, as the dorms were mostly abandoned during the summer term. We had the showers to ourselves, creating more sexual tension. But without the alcoholic lubrication, I abstained, being only a bit more interested in his magical practices.

As I got myself wet in the steaming water, I asked, "So you're a follower of Crowley?"

"Whatever works."

"You know I...."

"Yeah, I know." He stopped rinsing long enough for a patronizing grin. "I saw you walking around with a copy of Peter Carroll's Apophenion. I always meant to strike up a conversation with you about it but, you know, people can be weird. The whole, to know, to dare, to will, to keep silent, crap."

I shrugged. "Seems kind of pointless in the information age."

"Exactly, but fuck, you know, to be into it, to believe in it, you have to be a little weird. The deeper some people go the weirder they get. You never know who's going to take that shit seriously and freak out. Anyway, I was hoping you would be the one joining me on this trip."

When I look back and think about the fact we both wanted the same thing at the same time, I try not to make guesses. When I do, my conclusions usually depend on how guilty I feel at the time.

1 5 6

Get up at eight. Shower. Advanced Latin studies until one. Work at the Center for Medieval Studies Press, proofreading, cataloging, fulfilling orders, stacking books. Dinner, drink. Fuck half the night. Repeat.

This went on for three weeks with nary a deviation from the routine. Ezra and I could not be separated. We even went to the bathroom together half the time. I'm not ashamed to say I loved him. I'm even positive he felt towards me what he calls love, though I learned that for him love lacked empathy, compassion, and attachment. As I'm sure happens for everyone their first time, he became the brightest object in my sky, and his light obscured everything else for me.

Any free time we spent at the Center's library. I thought he just shared every magician's bibliomania. This obsession was more specific. On our first visit he walked straight up to the case in back and locked eyes on one of the manuscripts. I tried to discern what he saw in it, a thick tome with a stamped leather cover and no spine, the folios lying bare, tied together. It had been rebound at one time but not recently. My eyes adjusted to the patterns worn on the cover. They appeared to be snakes or dragons. The writing on front was too far gone to read.

"That's it, Stoyan's grimoire." He said without taking his eyes off of it.

"Looks like it's in pretty good shape."

He licked his lips. "Think they'll let us take it home with us?"

"Probably not."

At that, he grabbed a book from one of the open shelves and planted himself at a table. He didn't so much as glance at the grimoire again until the time came.

It took a week and three more trips to the library for him to reveal his intentions. "We're going to steal the grimoire," he said without looking up from the journal in front of him.

"Fuck you," I said with a nervous laugh.

"Later, my apprentice. We need to make some plans first. This room's actually pretty small, and only two cameras."

I craned around to find them.

"Not so obvious," he said low and deadpan. "The librarian has already left us alone in here twice. Not many people in here between semesters."

"Someone will need to distract her?" I asked, deciding to play along with the fantasy.

"Yeah, but we also need to disable the cameras."

"How do we do that, oh wise one?"

"Old building, old wiring, this room probably all runs on one breaker. Overload the circuit and disable the cameras. That should give us a window of opportunity of at least a couple of days. Chances are no one will even notice the cameras are out until then, and even if they do, admin's on vacation. No one's coming out to repair them in a timely manner. Yeah, at least two days."

"Okay, fine. But even if you do all that, and you manage to be in the library alone long enough to grab the book, you still don't have the fucking key to the case."

"That will require distracting the librarian." He got up abruptly and strolled over to her desk. In no time, the plump and bookish grad student fell under his sway. Even my untrained eyes could tell she didn't stand a chance.

1 5 6

I'm a fool, but I can learn. The casual way in which he seduced the librarian planted seeds producing huge fruits of doubt. Despite my jealousy, I soldiered on with the plan. During each subsequent trip, Ezra spent his time chatting up the librarian. He learned the key to the preservation case was a magnetic card that she took home with her every night. From that he devised a scheme worthy of a sitcom.

After our sixth reconnaissance trip, Ezra took the BMW out looking for a store. As we stumbled into a local megamart called Super Canada, he explained our next move.

"So the next time she leaves us alone in the library, we cut the power and kill the cameras."

"And how the fuck are we supposed to do that?"Since he began chatting up the librarian, I found annoyance in just about everything he said, but if he even detected my irritation, he ignored it.

"Those cameras are not serious security devices, just deterrents. We can easily reach them with the shelf-ladders and snip the wires."

That explained him leading us to the hardware section. "And the power?"

"Leave that to me." He picked up two wire cutters from the shelf.

"And the key?"

"Yeah, I've been mulling that over. It seems silly, a little too obvious, but I guess I'll just have to take one for the team."

"What?"

"Which means you are going to have to be the one to grab the book." He selected a cheap extension cord. "You ever try invisibility, frater?"

"You really are obsessed with bullshit medieval magick aren't you?" One of the phases most magicians go through is to deride flamboyant effects. They convince themselves that's not how real magick works. I went through it, and can still catch myself thinking that way from time to time. You expect spells for things like flying and invisibility in low-rent medieval spell books. Not anything serious magicians took seriously.

"Crowley had a ritual for invisibility in The Equinox." He said.

"Yeah, Crowley wrote a lot of shit to make dumbasses look dumb."

"What happened to: Nothing is true. Everything is permitted?"

He had me there. The modern magicians' credo. You have to believe that anything is possible before you do the impossible. "What do you have in mind?"

"One problem at a time."

Despite my resistance we were in this together. I had molded to him. His goals became my goals. Even my resentment of him wooing the librarian seemed only an annoyance, like an old married couple arguing over housework.

Fortune favored us on our next trip to the library. The librarian came over and half-sat on the table next to Ezra, practically opening her skirt for him. I noticed she always wore skirts now. "You boys gonna be okay in here alone? I'll be back in a minute."

We nodded, Ezra adding a wink, and waited for the sound of the door closing behind her. On cue, Ezra got up and pulled the extension cord out of his bag. He had stripped off the receptacle end, twisted the wires together, and wrapped it in electrical tape. When he plugged it in the lights went out without flicker or fanfare. As one, we lit up our phones and walked to our respective ladders. We had watched a couple of videos the night before on how to disassemble cameras, so we came armed with screwdrivers and allen wrenches. Sweat dripping off my face, I nervously poked at my camera's covering, trying to get a grip on which tool I needed to use. After I figured out I should free up a hand by setting my phone on the top rung, everything went smoothly. The casing came off and I snipped all the exposed wires and replaced it. Ezra was stuffing the extension cord back in his bag by the time I came down. We walked out into the hall where the lights were still on, and waited.

Sally, the librarian, came around the corner three minutes later. "You fellas leaving already, aye?"

"The power went out," Ezra said.

She peeked past us, saw the darkened room, and wrinkled her brow. "I'll have to call building services."

Ezra hovered closer to her. "We can always hang out in the dark."

His flirting solicited an obnoxious chortle. "That could be interesting. But I better have this checked out."

It took the maintenance guy twenty minutes to scratch his head and go flip the breaker. In that time, Ezra arranged dinner and a movie with his prey.

As we emerged out into the afternoon sunlight he gave our next move. "No time like the present right? We'll prep your invisibility and you stay by the phone. After I get the keys from her, I'll text you where to come pick them up. You go in, grab the book. No problem."

"So I get to do the dirty work?"

"Oh trust me, my work will be plenty dirty."

"Do you go to jail if you get caught doing yours?"

He stopped walking and turned towards me. "Fuck you with that attitude. That's what's gonna fuck us over. If you get caught, and that's a big fucking if, you just say she gave you the key so you can go in and study your geeky little heart out. Lie and stick to your lie. No one's going to jail. We're young, white, middle class, foreign nationals in college. People expect us to be fuck-ups and always give us a pass. The worst thing they'll do is send you home."

"And get blackballed by this college and my own, and never get to do something like this again."

"Cry me a fucking river. Either you're going to do it or not. I can't force you. Me, I'm planning on having that book tonight."

1 5 6

I despised myself for being bullied by his will. Despite its quiet voice, the sycophant in me that wanted to please him won out. All the medieval rituals for invisibility required rendered baby fat, so we went with Crowley's. That only necessitated another trip to Super Canada for a dowel rod and paint to construct a wand.

I watched him get dressed while I sat lotus-style on the unused bed. His clothes were always painfully normal as opposed to my ubiquitous black.

"You got this?"

I nodded and, to my disbelief, he kissed me before he walked out the door.

"Wish me luck."

He had arranged to meet her at the library right after her shift to ensure she would still be wearing the lanyard with the precious key attached. This meant I was in for a long night. I performed the short ritual and then meditated, clearing my head so I could perform my duties when called upon.

The first text came at nine. "Movie over. We're going for drinks."

I kept my post, figuring I had at least another hour before he had anything.

At nine-forty-five, "She lives off campus. The keys to the BMW are in the dresser."

Fuck. I had a license, but had never owned a car, and never did much driving. Even worse, I knew the thing was a stick. Lucky me, my dad owned an old MG Midget and had let me use it to take my driving test. If I could do it while navigating a strange city remained to be seen.

"Apartment nearby." He texted.

Driving around the block to get used to the car seemed like a good idea, but my lack of coordination meant pulling over every time he sent another text.

"Heading north on Bedford."

One of the little known side effects of being a ceremonial magician, all those rituals requiring you to face east or west gives you an innate sense of direction. Pulling away again to the sound of gnashing metal on metal, I secretly hoped his gears would be ground down to nubs.

"Bedford ends at Dupont. Take a left."

"Left on Howland."

Fuck. I passed it. It took five minutes and three texts later to find a place to park.

"Apartments are on the left."

"Howland Court Apartments."

"156 Howland Court."

Thank Hermes for GPS.

By the time I pulled into the apartments, I had more intel.

"Center building, 3rd window from the right, 2nd floor."

What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?

No other message came for fifteen minutes. Rolling down the window to let the night breeze in, I slipped back into meditation mode.

"Wait under the window."

I couldn't believe this was his plan. Being a Friday night, people came and went as I loitered like a rapist-peeping-tom-flasher-child molester. No one so much as glanced my way. The ritual had worked. Nothing to do with refracting light or moving shadows, it simply put you on everyone's pay-no-mind list. Sure enough, thirty minutes later his hand emerged and dropped the key into the bushes below.

"Text me when you get back. Good luck."

I was in the BMW and moving before I even realized what my next move would be. Toronto's Center for Medieval Studies was located downtown. It made more sense to go back and park at the dorms and walk it. Once again, I passed unnoticed. I almost stopped to marvel how people's eyes glossed over me.

Slipping in the side entrance and up the stairs to the library, I saw no one. I stopped at the doors to the library. This was too easy. Surely we had missed something, some kind of alarm system that went off without entering the right code, or a camera that we failed to notice. We knew about the night security guard, but he never came by. I took a deep breath and internalized the truth, that Canadians are just not as paranoid as we are. That even though they are valuable, no thief wants to go through the pain of fencing medieval manuscripts. The cock-sure young magician in me reasoned that if I believed it was this easy, then it was.

While walking up to the case, I took a tote bag from my pocket and unfolded it. In one swipe of her key card the light went green. I reached in and took the book in a solid grip. It was lighter than I thought it would be, desiccated by age. Turning it side to side in the dim light, I examined the cover and the stitching. I had handled manuscripts before and knew the procedure. This one was about to go on a rough ride but it seemed able to handle a little stress.

Stepping out into the corridor, I listened for the security guard. Nothing. I waited. No way this invisibility thing would withstand a one-on-one encounter in an empty building. It took a few moments to psyche myself up for the last dash. On the way down the stairs every echo of my footsteps made me cringe. If I could make it out the door and around the corner, I would be home free. No one could point me out as an intruder ambling down a busy downtown sidewalk.

My sweat turned to ice when the night air hit. The few feet from the exit to the corner became the long mile. I kept control, walk don't run. With each step down Bloor St. my pace slowed. Immediate repercussions were not coming. Reason dictated that if we were caught, it would be after an investigation. As I flopped down into the driver's seat of the BMW, all my air came out like an untied balloon.

1 5 6

"I'm here."

Ezra emerged from the apartment building sans shoes and shirt, lit a cigarette, and scanned the parking lot for the car. He walked over in an uncharacteristic rush. The window open, without a word he reached into the passenger side and pulled out the tote bag. Placing the smoke in his mouth so he could use both hands, he lovingly extracted the book and fondled it.

I could chalk up this behavior as either total assholishness--now that he had what he wanted he would give me the immediate brush off--or, this invisibility thing worked better than I thought. Surprisingly, in hindsight it was the invisibility. Ezra never takes his claws out of someone he may find useful later.

I gave my best annoyed cough. "Yes, everything went as planned."

"Oh, hey, fuck yeah, you rock."

"It was pretty easy." I half expected him to start calling it his precious. "Let's go home and read it. Get in."

"I'm supposed to be out here having a smoke. I gotta go back." He finally looked up at me and noted the expression on my face. "There's no use leaving her angry. It will just make her more likely to finger us. And I need to return the key."

Hard logic sided with him again. I tossed the key but he let it fall to the ground. After a few more strokes of the tome he set it back in the car like a newborn babe and retrieved the key card. "I'll wrap this up as soon as I can. We only get one night with the thing now, we need to FedEx it the fuck out of the country in the morning."

1 5 6

I could get into the inevitable crash and burn of our relationship, but it's predictable. Maybe another time. In the years that followed, I've never been able to extricate Ezra totally from of my life. The important part is, after he got back still reeking of her, we climbed into bed together and perused the book. The first thing we looked for, of course, was how he summoned the servitor, the beautiful demoness that saved Stoyan from the fire. As befitting its results, the ritual contained many parts and required several components. The most interesting being a body.

The Magical Record of Soror Amasnex

More than the book, more than anything else, all Ezra really wanted was someone to share his desires and discoveries with. Legio never figured that out. Ezra fell ten times harder. How couldn't he? When presented with this intense young man who had all the self-discipline and determination that Ezra lacked?

Legio makes light of their relationship afterward, but it was no small thing. The two of them constantly orbited each other, whether things were on or off. Ezra couldn't stand being away from him for long, always intensely curious as to what Legio would do. Waiting to see his star ascend.

Legio went back to Ezra again and again. Ezra was the only person he could share with, the only person who could understand, at least until Rose. Ezra never could understand that. Even after Rose died, Legio returned to him from time to time, just to see how real living people acted, to at least witness some happiness.

Chapter 4

The sales girl handed over the bag as if it contained a specimen for testing. Mumbling my thanks while pulling my headphones back on, I spun on my heels and beelined for the exit. That distasteful task complete, it was time for another one.

The passing years, and our on-and-off relationship, did not endear Ezra to me. I guess it tells how much I loathed dealing with him again, that I would make sure my plan for stealing the corpse was in place before getting the book. The latter would require going to him, hat in hand. Ezra would take advantage of this, but I had no other choice. It took three days to work up the courage and make the long walk up Main Street to Ezra's place. Like me, Ezra had remained in Kalamazoo and became something of a townie, but he still took classes. No way he would give up such fertile grounds. Too many young co-eds were ripe for his machinations.

Up the hill from downtown sits two of Kalamazoo's well-known landmarks: the Henderson Castle, a sprawling mansion built on the cusp of America's Industrial Age, and the oldest graveyard in the city, Mountain Home Cemetery. Just inside the cemetery you can see an impressive stone "cottage." Many people mistakenly assume it belongs to the caretaker. I'm sure that's why the home was originally built, but even graveyards have profit margins these days, and no one's going to pay a person to live on site. They will, however, rent out the home to someone who doesn't mind having neighbors that always keep to themselves. Ezra adores the place, and I'm not ashamed to say I'm a little jealous. But whilst I would appreciate the solitude and the ambiance, Ezra prizes its ability to impress his underlings.

Half the reason I loathed visiting him was because it necessitated being in proximity to his cult. Sure enough, my knocks called forth a bleary-eyed barefoot girl in a white robe, obviously high. Ezra's place was where the worst aspects of the '60s occult movement came to die.

"Hey...." Her voice and her smile trailed off. Used to opening the portal for an endless stream of smelly hippies, I'm sure the specter in black that now darkened her door was a cause for consternation.

I had a choice. I could play along, pretend to be one of them. That would be the path of least resistance. I could throw out a well-known greeting, a call and response programmed into these cult types that would mark me as one of their own, and she would probably fetch Ezra in a blink. But it would leave a bad taste in my mouth. I'm a fucking magus and a magus knows the power of words. If I used their little secret passwords it would have an effect on me. Repeating a mantra, even if you put no thought behind it, seeps into your brain and plants a seed. That was the whole point of the ridiculous greetings in the first place. So I took a second to remind myself that I bent these words to my uses.

I made a slight bow for dramatic effect, and curled up my lip into something I hoped passed for a smile. "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."

On cue, as she had been programmed, she responded, "Love is the Law, love under will. What can I do for you, brother?"

Mission accomplished.

"I need to see Ezra."

"He's finishing up a class right now."

A cocked ear picked up Ezra's powerful voice, "Ve-Geburah...."

"You can wait inside. Here's a place to hang your coat." She pointed towards a rack already plastered with thrift-store jackets, chosen carefully to portray poverty-chic. I kept mine on.

My boots left small puddles of melting snow on the hardwood floors as we passed under archways to the central chamber. The few pieces of ratty furniture were pushed against the wall, leaving a large open space for ceremony. A half-dozen men and women sat on the floor in a semi-circle as Ezra completed his ritual.

"Before me Raph-a-el."

He called on angels. Taking care to project and elongate their names, making his voice echo around the chamber. Something we magicians call "vibrating" the names. If you have ever heard a Catholic halleluiah you know what I mean.

"Behind me Gab-ri-el."

Both priests and magicians do it that way for a variety of reasons. One, it makes you concentrate on what you are saying, lending weight to your words.

"On my right hand Mich-a-el."

Second, it makes a person's voice an impressive force without the bother of singing lessons. When done right, it evokes a sense of awe in those who don't know the trick. It worked on me at one time.

"On my left hand Ur-i-el."

In case you're wondering why a bunch of pagan magick-cult post-hippies were calling on angels, it's complicated. Suffice to say the hypocrisy of it has not escaped my notice. I don't call on angels anymore.

"For about me flames the pentagram, and in the column shines the six-rayed star!"

Ezra spread out his arms and lifted his face to the heavens as he shouted this last line. Always give them a big ending. Public occult rituals always feel incomplete to me. Probably because it's a show, but no one claps in the end. It could be on purpose, keeping all that energy pent up for later use when you're servicing the high priest.

"Hey Mike, what's up."

The acolytes turned with puzzled stares, wondering why their teacher would be on such familiar terms with the grim figure before them. The extra years had only helped perfect Ezra's late career Jim Morrison look.

"Can I talk with you when you get a chance?"

"Sure thing. I'm about to wrap up here."

I moved into the corner as he gave the attendees some final words and sent them on their way, noting how they all stopped at a small earthenware bowl on the altar and dropped in some cash. Ezra earned his bread by giving "classes" and tarot readings. I had considered it myself at one time, but it smacked too much of magical prostitution. I can sleep after washing dishes.

After guiding the last doe-eyed initiate out the door, he came back to me.

"Haven't seen you in a while."

"I've been busy." Despite everything, we still ran in the same circles, meaning we would see each other on occasion. Except the last few months that I'd been working on the heist, I was even more of a recluse.

"Interesting project?"

"Personal."

He looked dejected from my lack of sharing."You'd progress further in a group."

The sales pitch already. "Probably."

"You need a book?" He knew me too well. This was not the first time I had come to him for research. Many an occult book remains out of print and hard to come by. Ezra possessed volumes that fetched thousands on ebay due to their scarcity.

"Yeah, actually..." I tried to make it sound casual. "I'd like to borrow Stoyan's grimoire."

The look of delight on his face made me want to punch him. "Oh Mikey, what would you want with that thing? That was a big mistake." In the end, Ezra had done nothing with the knowledge he gained from that book. The magick in it was either too archaic for him or, more likely, he lacked the self-discipline to carry it out.

I let the Mikey bullshit go. "You know, I never got more than a glance at it. You insisted on shipping it home right after."

"There were suspicions. I didn't want to take the chance of our room being searched or us being stopped at the border with the thing in the car."

"I just want to read it. See where it might give insights on how modern magick developed."

"It doesn't. Are you that lonely?"

Any response would tell more than saying nothing, so I just shoved my hands in my pockets and waited for him to get over it.

"Okay, on one condition."

Here we go.

"We're having an initiation Friday night. I want you to come."

"What? I'm not even a member? Why would you want me at one of your oh-so-secret initiations?"

"Please, I know you're far more advanced than anyone in my lodge. I'm not revealing anything you don't already know."

I couldn't quite grasp his angle. If I asked, I knew he'd lie, but at least he might hint. "Why?"

"I just want you to see what it's like working with a group. Get the vibe. I think you'll be impressed."

The worst part was that he was right. Working with a group could help. Even working with others that were bad at it would show what not to do. I might have imagined myself as a great wizard, alone in his tower gathering lore and power, but it was a fantasy. I'm human, no matter how hard I try to be better than that. That's why I kept coming back to Ezra. At least I had the semblance of social contact with someone who shared my views. I would be a liar if I didn't admit to longing for group practice from time to time.

"When?"

"Come on over around ten. We'll have a meet and greet."

"And the book?"

"Oh yeah." He motioned for me to follow him upstairs. In his darkened bedroom he had a case with regulated temperature and humidity, not unlike a humidor, meant to preserve books. He took out the Stoyan manuscript, examined it for damage, and then wrapped it in a wine-red cloth. He handed it over with no reservations. We both knew I wouldn't break an oath to a fellow magician.

"Have fun with that. See you Friday."

I forced myself not to do my own Gollum impression. "Yeah, I'll be there."

1 5 6

I arrived promptly, took a seat in the corner, and waited. Others arrived in groups, cheerfully stamping snow off their shoes and throwing off their coats to reveal ceremonial garb. They all wore white robes with different styles and trim. The look impressed me, as no one treated the event so casual as to wear jeans and a t-shirt, but their robes did not have that lock-step uniformity that makes some occult rituals look like Triumph of the Will. Mine were black, marking me as an outsider. They brought drinks and plastic containers of food, but all of this was set aside. There would be no party until after ritual.

Ezra, wearing the red robes of a priest, came downstairs with a couple of the others. He launched into a series of greeting hugs and chit-chat with the men and women assembled, increasing the love-in atmosphere. My stomach turned. I watched his eyes scan the room until they locked on me. His grin grew wider and he approached my seat. I stood. We didn't hug.

"I'm glad you could make it."

"What degree are you initiating?"

"First degree."

"You know someone filmed a Minerval initiation with a smart phone and posted it on Youtube?"

"No shit."

We both laughed. The elders still hold on to the myth of secrecy. We are of an age that understands nothing can be hidden for long. For a moment this bonded us, made our friendship seem genuine. We were young turks again, scoffing at the established order.

He winked at me. "We'll just have to switch things up some more."

More laughter. Ezra's group was ostensibly part of a larger organization called the Ordo Templi Orientis--a church/Masonic lodge/magick sewing circle--depending on who you ask. The higher ups in the OTO hated him, as he flagrantly broke their rules, but could never seem to get him removed. College towns bring a lot of young people looking for a mystical experience, which means a lot of dues-paying members. Ezra knew how to recruit, and though the bosses despised his lax approach to protocol, he always paid his ten points, give or take a point or two.

The others threw daggers at me with their eyes. Jealousy swept over the room as they witnessed their beloved leader yuk it up with a nefarious stranger.

He ignored them. "Better get the thing started, the initiate is getting cold."

Another wink, more laughs. He meant this literally. Somewhere nearby a young graduate-to-be would be standing by, naked and blindfolded, hands tied behind their back. All in good fun.

Ezra gave the order to prepare. All obstructions were removed from the central living area, giving them a grand chamber with hardwood floors. They set up an altar at the far end, and then hung a large white sheet from a hook in the ceiling. The corners of the sheet were then secured to the floor, making a conical white tent, about the area of a king-sized bed at its base. Ezra entered the tent, and the lights were turned out. The red glowing embers in the stone fireplace provided dim illumination. Someone lit a candle inside the tent, making it glow and seem to hover in the darkness.

The details aren't important. All initiation rituals go through the same series of events. The impact on the initiate is the important part. They brought in a young woman with an athletic build, her small breasts erect to the cold, but her entire body covered in sweat. A red silk blindfold covered her eyes and red silk rope bound her hands. An acolyte made some opening statements and led a few chants. Ezra emerged from the tent and added his strong voice to the mix. With a flourish, he produced a small knife from his dagged sleeve and pressed it to the initiate's throat.

This was the central experience of all initiations: to be confronted, to be challenged, to suffer fear. Even if you know what's going to happen, there's always a voice in your head that says danger. I've gone through my own self-initiations before. I've made oaths and cut my body and deprived myself for days to reach states of ecstasy. But none of that can compare to a group initiation. When you add the human element you add chance. You always know what you're going to do, but you never know for certain how another might act. You never know for absolute certain they won't cut your throat with that knife and let you bleed out. This is essential for the aspiring magus. To break down your psyche and accept that anything is possible you must know true uncertainty. The bastard was right. I wanted this.

Then came the oaths, another primary ingredient. They used the same pattern of call and response that oath givers have used for centuries. They use it because it works. The repetition re-wires our brains and cements the words in the subconscious.

"I Frater Apiarius..." his name within the order, his magician's name, "in the presence of the powers of birth, visible and invisible, and of this camp of free men and women, do hereby and hereon most solemnly promise and swear."

She repeated with trembling voice.

"What I learn beneath the seal..."

"Within the guarded border..."

"Of this most holy order..."

"Unless it be to a true brother or sister..."

This made me suppress a chuckle. They were technically breaking this oath right now by having me there.

"That he may be duly..."

"Tested truly..."

Aleister Crowley must have written this one himself. He was such a shitty poet. The rhyming served that same mnemonic purpose of the call and response, but it could have been a bit less corny. Once again, it's not the words that are important, it's that you're making an oath to a living, breathing, human. I've made my oaths to myself and my gods, and believe they have the power to enforce them, but they're not going to ostracize me or run me down with their car if I break them. More than likely, an oath breaker in this day and age would suffer no consequences if they revealed the secrets of their order. But you never know who takes those things too seriously.

"I stand, aspiring to the Holy Order..."

"Which I do know..."

"By the letters OTO...."

Ezra gently pulled off the blindfold and the girl beamed up at him with relief in her eyes. More oaths were taken and ceremony performed. Only one thing unexpected happened. At the end, Ezra and the initiate went into the tent, the lights were turned on and the candle snuffed out, making the sheet an opaque barrier again. Everyone relaxed and brought out the booze and food, setting it up on tables placed along the walls. No one gave the tent so much as a glance. I knew Ezra dallied with his congregation, but this kind of public display was obscene. The OTO likes to pretend that they're the purveyors of illicit sex, magick and everything your mother warned you about. But those things are always kept to a symbolic level.

I admit, it made me jealous. Seeing him again, falling back into our usual ways, finding the same relaxed humor between us, gave me false hope. A part of me argued that Ezra could be my salvation, that I didn't have to go through with this insane plan. I could submit to his will, give myself over to him totally. Subsume forever that beast inside of me that wanted to consume people. Let him take over my life. It would be so easy.

Even worse, another part argued that I could join this cabal and use it to my purposes. I could become like Ezra. In fact, I'm sure it would please him to have me as his partner in crime. I could pick out some tender novice to be the victim of my lusts, and change it up every few months to mitigate the damage.

As the party carried on, a foul mood brewed in me and bubbled to the surface. The others made social advances. I snapped at anyone who tried, and after just a few exchanges they circled me like I was a dog on a short leash.

"How do you know Ezra?"

"We used to fuck."

"What lodge are you from?"

"The Lodge of Sheep Licking Crowley's Ass out of Poughkeepsie."

This would never work. Never mind I couldn't stand to be around these people. In order to submit myself to Ezra, he would have to give me his full attention. Every minute he spent in the tent provided proof that would never happen. And if I turned my attention on one of these unsuspecting flowers, I wouldn't be like the bee, taking a little from each one. I would latch on and suck them dry. It would end just like it did with Rose. No matter what kind of a monster you think I am, carrying on with my obscene plan would spare another human being that pain.

Before he could emerge with his blushing young initiate, and without making any announcement, I grabbed my coat, slipped a few bits of food into my pockets, and headed out the door.

Looking over the serene field of snow-covered tombstones, I worked simple magick. The cemetery en-trance would be my portal to another dimension. Some quantum theorists believe that every time we make a decision, we make a new time line. All of these alternate time lines exist. Somewhere there's a world where you turned left instead of right. You said no instead of yes. You never failed that test. You never fell in love. Through magick I could enter a world where I never came to this party. Never entertained the notion I could be part of a tribe. Never considered getting back with Ezra.

I gathered my will, took out the small wand I kept with me at all times, traced symbols in the air before me, took a long breath, and stepped through. All of the nonsense flowed out of my mind as if I pulled the plug on a drain. It left me empty and focused, so on the long, cold walk home, I planned.

Chapter 5

I set the date, Devil's Night, October thirtieth. It required several months of no extras whatsoever to save enough money for a 130-gallon professional storage bin. Killing two birds, the home improvement store rents a truck by the hour to haul your large purchases home. Step one included picking up the bin and taking it over to the hospital. Getting the truck before sunset, about six, gave me a window of three hours to get it back before the store closed. Pulling over into an abandoned parking lot, I performed the exact same invisibility ritual as I had in Toronto. No use messing with success.

The short trip pumped me full of adrenaline. I rarely drive and had never driven anything so big. At every turn I feared side-swiping the vehicles around me or running up on the curbs. A few turns around the block for practice seemed prudent. No use getting into an accident with a body cooling in the back. Being careful to pull into the drive marked, "for construction vehicle use," I parked next to a section of framed-up new expansion covered in plastic sheeting. Leaving the truck sitting there, I went in for some reconnaissance, taking only my universal key--a three-foot long bolt cutter. Things were pretty much as I expected, a well-organized construction site abandoned for the day. To my relief, the most important aspect remained the same as my last trip. The doors leading from the new construction into the working hospital were secured with a chain and padlock. With a snip-snip, I had easy ingress and egress.

I changed into my uniform shirt and EMT hat. Those I had the luxury of buying pre-printed at a uniform store. I took a deep breath, and peeked around corners to make sure no one was coming. Pulling the hat low and hunching over, I slipped through the doors and into the next level of danger. Getting caught in a restricted area could get me ejected at best and arrested at worst. Either way, it meant never acquiring a body in this hospital or probably any other.

Step two, acquire a gurney. No one comes to pick up a body empty-handed. The funeral home drivers used a special gurney, but I would have to settle for the ones used by EMTs. Cruising past the emergency room, I grabbed one and kept moving. With every step I expected shouts of, "Hey you! Bring that back!" but they never came. The gurney was essential camouflage, especially since I lacked a vital piece of the disguise, a second mortician to help me move the corpse. That admitted weak point in the plan scratched at my paranoia.

The point had been eating at me for some time. The operation would have been made so much simpler if any body would have suited. But the corpse needed to fit certain parameters. The only task that bothered me was transferring the body. The vehicle had no lift, and the gurney would not raise up high enough to slide the body into the truck bed. At some point I would have to physically lift the body. Years of walking and yoga stretches had made me fit, but I held no illusions about my strength. This required being choosey. The body would have to be female and probably young. I was also constrained by how low I was willing to go. Even after coming this far, I would not steal a child's corpse. My sanity was fragile enough, thank you.

These thoughts betrayed me and invoked paranoia. It took all my will not to sprint towards the elevator. My muscles tensed and my hands turned clammy on the cold metal push bar. Fight and Flight waged their epic eternal struggle, using my endocrine system as their battlefield. Any casual examination of my face would reveal my distress and raise the alarm. The deep reptilian brain in any observer would recognize my gait and assume I was being pursued. My heart threatened to explode during the eternity between pushing the button, just once, and the ding of the car reaching the landing. I pushed forward, not bothering to turn around, and let my eyes close with the doors.

Breathe in six count, hold six count, breathe out six count. My hands stopped shaking. Breathe in six count, hold six count, breathe out six count. The muscles in my legs relaxed and my shoulders sagged down. Breathe in six count, hold six count, breathe out six count. The sweat on my brow turned cold and evaporated as I meditated. Calm washed over me. With even, unhurried movements I changed jackets, put on my mortician's hat and pushed on towards the morgue.

The halls were comfortingly familiar. Someone had decorated the doors and windows with cartoonish skeletons, bats, and pumpkins for Halloween. I had to stop for a minute and breathe again, as the ridiculousness of it almost brought on a hysterical laughing fit. A few more hall turns brought me to the doors of the morgue, where one big thing had changed. On the wall next to the metal double-doors hung a brand new 12-digit keypad with accompanying card swipe.

The thing loomed up and took over my vision, freezing me in place. I had nothing. No idea whatsoever how to overcome this boulder in my path. It was well past time I could seduce some young coroner and steal his key. My rational side kept screaming at me, telling me to abandon all hope, leave the gurney, walk out. A stubborn thing refused to yield. Some magicians subscribe to a theory that we all possess multiple selves. That the person you are when you go to work and the person you are at home are actual distinct personalities. These personalities can be cultivated and multiplied. A man who can be anyone can do anything, so the theory goes. We are undefeatable because we are legion. That works all fine and good until they start warring for control. I stood frozen in place waiting for the battle between my selves to have a victor.

"Did you forget your key again?" The words were frosted with anger.

That's when I learned what a small heart attack feels like. It threatened to pound its way out of my chest and flop out bloody on the floor, still beating. The last thing I would see was the reaction of my accuser as the ball of muscle bounced on the tile, leaving red splotches as it went. It would almost have been worth it.

"This shit has got to stop. Do you expect someone to make a new key for you every time you come here?"

Actually sir, this is my first time stealing a body.

A disheveled man wearing scrubs and a sweater came around to face me. His short graying hair marked him as a little too old to be this low on the ladder of the medical profession and he meant to take it out on everyone.

"I ought to make you go back and get it. Where is it? In the van? At the funeral home? On your dresser at home?"

He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. As if looking at me caused a headache. "Well?"

That snapped me back to reality. He actually wanted an answer to his question. My mind fumbled and stumbled, then a feeling of glee came over me. If he hadn't had his eyes closed at that moment he would have been further irritated by my Cheshire expression.

"My partner has it."

"Where the fuck is he?"

I had this answer prepared. "In the bathroom."

He sighed with all the exaggeration he could muster. "Fine."

He jammed his card through the reader, stabbed in his pin number and opened the door for me, waving a hand over to the corner. "She's over there."

The gods are good to those who please them. A black body bag lay on the table, packaged and ready to go. The angry coroner stomped off to another room, leaving me to my devices. Taking in the brightly lit tiled room, I waited a few seconds to make sure he was gone. Several other stainless steel tables lay in wait for their grim occupants, the wall behind them lined with matching steel doors to the body coolers. Pretty much as I expected. Keeping an ear out, I unzipped the bag half-way to inspect my prize.

A round, middle-aged woman with stringy hair and a flat spot on the front of her skull. That would not do. She must have been over three-hundred pounds. No way I could lift her by myself. And the head trauma ruled her out as well—too noticeable. I went for the coolers. The first one revealed a match for the set, a hairy man with his face caved in. Second and third were both men between the ages of prostate cancer and stroke. Fourth one held the prize, a woman in her early twenties, average height, dyed blond hair, in pristine condition. I locked down the wheels, slid her over to one side so I could get behind her head, reached up under her armpits and dragged her over to my gurney.

It wasn't that bad. I could do the lift. The hard part was trying to arrange her in a semi-natural way. Dead flesh does not cooperate. Struggling with her arms and legs, I wondered if she had been attractive. No matter how young you die, no one leaves a pretty corpse. It didn't really matter at the time, as I believed what I would get had nothing to do with how the body looked. What did matter was her passing casual inspection. Next time you're at a hospital, keep a look out for unusually tall gurneys with a curtain underneath. To protect our delicate Western sensibilities from being disturbed by the mere sight of a body, morticians tuck the deceased underneath and appear to be pushing an empty bed. This goes on even though the morticians never take the body through patient and guest populated areas. What prudes we have in the medical industry. Lacking the special gurney, I had to pass my corpse off as a live patient.

Mumbling prayers to Hekate and Hermes, I stuffed the empty body bag into vacant cooler and wheeled her out. She looked dead as dead to me, but my faith in my fellow Americans' propensity to mind their own business was strong. Quick change in the elevator from funeral home outfit back to uniform shirt and EMT hat. As I rolled back into the hospital proper my mood had changed totally. This is working. All according to plan.

A few looked, but never a second glance. The entrance to the construction zone lay off a corridor not usually traveled by patients, but I passed only visitors who did not know the protocol. My paranoia came back for a brief visit as I struggled with the awkward operation of keeping the loose doors open while bringing the gurney through. Once in, I grabbed one of the many plastic tarps and spent the next twenty minutes struggling to wrap the present to myself. Manhandling her cold flesh repulsed me for a few moments, her nakedness being the most unsettling part, but at a certain point it made me feel more frustration than anxiety, cursing her lack of mobility and annoying habit to flop her arms and legs around every time I rolled her over. Part of my job as dishwasher was cleaning out the coolers, disposing of outdated product. In a way, she was just old meat.

For a time during my planning I had toyed with the idea of covering my steps. Maybe make it look like the construction site had been robbed. But reason made all of it out to be pointless. The cameras would tell the story no matter what. Few places have cameras at eye level. I could reasonably assume my hats would cover my face from an overhead POV, but they still had my trail. They would watch me wheel the body out of the morgue, take it through the doors to the construction site, and the cameras in the parking lot would watch my truck depart with my ill-gotten booty. My only defense was renting the truck with a stolen ID, and paying for it using a pre-paid credit card purchased with cash.

Getting her home required rolling the gurney up to the back of the truck and lifting it up as high as it would go. After climbing in the back, I reached out and down to lift her up into the vehicle. The angle made me feel as if I would pitch forward and land on top of her, but that didn't happen, and I managed to get her aboard with one determined pull. Getting the body in to the container proved the more difficult operation, as her weight made the light plastic bin flip and scoot around the truck bed every time I tried to put her half-way in. Another moment of fear came as I realized this would require lifting her entire weight for the first time. Sliding my arms under her and trying to use my legs instead of my back, I lifted the package, set it down as gently as I could into the makeshift coffin, and locked her in.

No lights, no sirens, as the truck pulled down the drive. I counted every click of the turn signal waiting for the traffic to clear so I could turn out into the road. Still no pursuit. Taking as many side streets as possible to avoid traffic cameras, it still only took a few minutes to get home.

Knowing I possessed the physical capability removed much of the anxiety from the next part of my plan. Park on the street. Push the container partway out the back. Get down to the street. Gently lower the container to the ground. The body made a rumbling noise as it slid down to one end of its plastic coffin. Put it on the lift-truck. Wheel it around back to the convenient outside entrance to the basement.

Research for this last consisted of watching videos of furniture movers. You tip the dolly back, grab it by the axle, lift it down to the next step, repeat. It made a house-shaking thump every time it went down a stair, but it could not be helped. I almost cried with delight as I lowered the container down into the magick circle painted on the floor. I had no time for celebration, however, so I filled the bin with my waiting bags of ice and locked her back in.

Giddy with relief and anticipation, I headed back for the truck.

I almost made it to the sidewalk before the voice called out to me.

"Hey, Mike."

It froze me in place. I couldn't move, no matter how hard I tried.

"Can you give me a hand for a sec?"

Recognizing the voice thawed me enough to turn ever so slowly and see Morgan, sitting in her wheelchair on the front porch. She held a wreath of black roses and raven feathers with a skull where the bow should be.

She waved it in the air to illustrate her point. "I want to get this up a little higher."

She heard. She had to have heard me slamming the thing down the stairs. She had seen the truck and wondered what the fuck I was hauling into the basement of her house. I had assumed that Morgan would be no impediment. She lives on the first floor, I live on the second, and due to her being bound to a wheelchair, I get the basement as well.

"Are you busy?"

My voice cracked. "No."

She held up a hammer in the other hand, and I shuffled forward like a Romero zombie. Yes, my rent is cheap, but there are other forms of payment. Morgan lost the lower half of both her legs as a child. I never asked how. She had lived in this house with her parents until they passed away five years ago. Now she rents the upper half to me for a song, but I'm obligated to help her with a few things she can't do. Which honestly isn't much, she's amazingly self-sufficient. In the two years as her tenant, I couldn't recall more than a couple dozen requests for aid. The worst was the two times she had fallen out of her chair, requiring me to be uncomfortably close as I lifted her off the floor. I should have remembered that; it would have eased my fears about lifting the body, though picking-up Morgan was still infinitely easier. She could at least use her arms.

"I want to hang it on the door."

I took the hammer and nail, lined it up against the door, and looked back for approval.

"A little higher."

"Here?"

"Good"

It took seven whacks of the hammer held in my shaking hands. As I straightened the wreath on its new perch, she asked the question. "What's the truck for?"

The few extra minutes to prepare this answer didn't help much. "I was helping some friends and they asked me to return the truck." It came out too fast.

"There's no more buses tonight. You were gonna walk home?"

"Yes."

"No way. I'm gonna go grab my keys."

"That's not necessary. It's not that far."

This set off her disbelief. "The one over in Portage, on Westnedge? That's almost ten miles. Don't worry about it. I need to get out a little anyway. Don't wait for me, I'll meet you there."

The seconds were ticking until the damn store closed and massive late penalties applied. Still, I waited for her to come back out, switch to her motorized chair, and use the lift to get into her van before starting the truck and pulling away.

When I came out of the store, she waited in the loading zone, brushing her long dark hair and looking in the mirror. She stopped when I opened the door and climbed inside. We sat in silence as she pulled away, until we made it onto the street.

"What did your friends get?"

I had worked this out while completing the paperwork. "A washing machine."

"Oh."

The puzzled look on her face said she had heard me going down the stairs. I had prepared for this as well. "They let me keep the old one. It doesn't work but I thought I might try to fix it."

She nodded with approval. "You know you can always use mine if you want."

Another long silence fell. Saying nothing hopefully did a better job at conveying my discomfort in taking her up on her offer.

"I hope it doesn't mess things up for you down there," she said.

This I did not plan for. What the hell could she mean?

She abruptly turned the wheel, pulling into a Wendy's. "I'm starving. You want anything?"

The question floated around me without penetration. My mind still reeled from her allusions to what I may be doing in the basement. It was my temple now. I couldn't stomach going home all the time and dealing with my father just to use the old shed, so I had moved everything down there. Morgan never said anything. I assumed she either never heard, or respected my privacy. The basement had no ramp, so I never feared her going down there and seeing my things, getting the wrong impression. It seemed so fortress-like it never occurred to me I couldn't keep a body down there without her knowing.

"Mike? Do you want something? My treat?"

My poverty but not my will consents. "Chicken sandwich."

We sat and chewed our food and our thoughts without a word. She seemed comfortable with the silence. Only after finishing did she speak again.

"I'm a witch, you know."

Here we go. Another impressionable girl who had seen too many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer believes she's a witch. Maybe she's gone whole hog, converted to Wicca or one of the other knock-off New Age religions. Who was worse, the Wiccans or Ezra's cult, I couldn't say. They both had their heads up their collective asses. You may notice I rarely refer to my magick in terms of "spells." People who claim to be witches seem to believe you can add a dash of this, a sprinkle of that, say some bad poetry, and change the universe. Real magick doesn't work that way. It takes years of training to enter trance-states and gain the ability to touch the collective unconscious, before you ever try to bend it to something specific.

"So I understand what you're doing."

Oh really? You understand a paradigm based on quantum entanglement and changing quantum states with will? You understand how to deep-level program your subconscious? You know how I burn on the inside to feel anything as much as I felt when....

"I can smell the incense. And every once in a while I can hear you chanting down there."

Did you listen when I called on the things that do not fear the dark? That come from the dark? Did you listen when I called forth the things lurking in the pit of my mind and gave them form? Those things that you call demons, that even ones who claim to have thrown off the didactic shackles of their Christian upbringing still call anathema, did you hear me speaking with them?

She looked at me. I looked at the floor. "I guess... what I'm trying to say is... I guess I don't really know what you're in to, but if you want to talk about it...."

You want me to talk about the dead body that is right now on ice in your basement? You want to hear about my insane plan? What I have to do, because I can't stand feeling this empty anymore?

"You can talk to me."

That was the whole point. I couldn't talk to her because a thing inside me insisted I had the anti-Midas touch. Everything I touched turned to shit. My sickness ran deep and it was contagious. The things I did to Rose, and what I drove her to, I couldn't bring myself to do that to any other human being, much less someone who showed compassion towards me.

I nodded. "Sure."

The trip home we talked about things that needed to get done around the house and goings on in the neighborhood. I let her carry the conversation, my mind on the work ahead. After we pulled into the drive, I again watched her use the lift to disembark and thanked her as she rolled up the ramp and switched back to her smaller wheelchair.

Secure in the knowledge she couldn't follow me downstairs, I returned to my catch. Pulling up a chair, I unlocked the lid, and unwrapped the tarp so I could look on her once again. Subconsciously, I judged her features, trying to apply them to a living person. The rest of the night, I watched the body and made my plans.

To be continued in  Book Two: Rose

Or purchase the  Complete edition containing all five books of My Babylon

Get exclusive stories, release information, and words from the author by signing up for the James L. Wilber mailing list at jameslwilber.com

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Last Words

Oh the demon monkeys that live in my hair will have their message heard!

—  Patton Oswalt

If you've made it this far you can blame Stephan Michael Loy. Steve, my friend, my fellow writer, my best critic, said something that shocked me to the core last November.

"I'm going to self-publish my books from now on."

Understand, this is a man who gets up at 4 am every morning like clock-work, weekends included, so he can write. He mows the lawn, bakes his own bread, and lives clean. He lives firm by the principle that money flows to the author, not away. He is not apt to be swayed by fads. He's not the kind of guy who wants to spend hours promoting a book. Yet even he had seen the writing on the wall.

The publishing industry is changing, has changed. Amazon has blown everything up, and the pieces have yet to land. I'm not going to prognosticate about what's going to happen. I don't see the big publishing houses fading away anytime soon. But the small guys, the weird guys, guys like me, now have a chance, even if it's a tiny one. Fuck, it's always been a chance in Hell.

Steve turned me on to the SelfPublishing Podcast, and things snowballed from there. My fellow self-publishers have struck out on their own for lots of reasons. Some appreciate the royalty scheme, a lot more goes to the author because you cut out the middlemen. Some people just don't like being told when and how to publish. I fit in that category. And, let's face it, a whole lot of self-publishers suck. They refuse to learn and hone their craft. They're never going to make it past the gauntlet of agents and editors because their stuff is just not that good. I may fit in that category as well, you'll have to be the judge of that.

While I considered the virtues of self-publishing, I wrestled with another problem. I wanted to tell a certain story. I had a theme I wanted to conquer, but after two false starts, it seemed a no-go. Then the light bulb went off. Self-publishing not only meant I didn't have to beg and scrape to the gatekeepers, it meant I could write the kind of stories I wanted to write. I didn't have to care if they were commercial. I didn't have to tone them down so fourteen-year-old girls could read them. I could write about the things I cared about without layer upon layer of allegory.

That's how we got to Michel. Every author puts some of themselves in their characters. I hope he doesn't come off as some kind of adolescent wish fulfillment. I would never want to be Mike. He's horribly flawed. So am I, but I have my own, I don't need his as well. In a way, this book is all about my horrible flaws. Things I can never be forgiven for. I think all good fiction should be about themes which are that important. The publishers have lost sight of that in their rush to find the next Stephanie Meyers.

My beta-readers have panned my main character, especially how he was presented in the first chapter. They're probably right. I should have listened to them. But I share more than a couple of traits with Mike. I live in my head all the time. I detest malls. I also identify with his long dark night of the soul, when everything turns off, and you become an automaton. As my guru Trent Reznor says, "The me that you know is now made up of wires...." You live for a glimmer of hope. A chance in Hell. Killing the Mike in the first chapter felt too much like killing myself, like lying. Once again, you'll have to be the judge. Maybe I should have had the courage to kill my darlings. Or maybe you've been there. Maybe you've had your own dark night of the soul.

Ave Babalon

James L. Wilber

04/22/2013

I/III/I

About the Author

James L. Wilber describes himself as Anne Rice and Chuck Palahniuk's bastard love child. He's a pretentious prick who claims to pen, "literary genre fiction." Which means he writes smarmy shit about wizards and vampires doing a poor job at hiding his symbolism and metaphor. He's turned to self-publishing on the correct assumption his stories are just too fucking weird for mass consumption.

He has contributed to numerous books for roleplaying games from companies such as: Wizards of the Coast, Paizo Publishing, White Wolf Studios, Bastion Press, and Atlas Games. He was also a writer on the Origins Award nominated, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game by Eden Studios.

Mr. Wilber also assumes the roles of husband, ceremonial magician, podcast host, and owner of a 100-lb Alaskan Malamute.

He lives in Indianapolis, a dreary place built by masons obsessed with circles.

You can read his thoughts on politics, culture, and what he calls pagan chaos magick at scrollofthoth.com.

Along with Stephan Loy and Dick Thomas, James is a member of Mid-World Arts, a collective of indie writers dedicated to helping each other produce quality works.

He only uses social media that he enjoys, which means tumblr. Get to know him at scrollofthoth.tumblr.com, jameslwilber.tumblr.com, and geeksoutafterdark.tumblr.com.

You can hear him on the podcasts  Scroll of Thoth, and  Geeks Out After Dark.

Get more of his writing at jameslwilber.com.

Check where James will be at the James L. Wilber Meetup.
Books by James L. Wilber

My Babylon

My Story

An obsessed magician will do anything it takes to satiate his perverse needs.

My Myth

He turns to forbidden arts to manifest his will.

My Revelation

In doing so, he will bring about the end of everything.

My Babylon

A serial novel about the paranormal and dark desires. The story of a cursed young man who has an intimate view of the end of the world as we know it. My Babylon weaves elements of urban fantasy, erotic horror, and real-world occult practices, to form a unique personal tale that thrills, terrifies, and even enlightens.

In My Babylon, the magus, consumed with longing, seeks to create a replacement for his lost love using a grisly ritual that requires the theft of a body. Through her creation, he learns that he has a much bigger role to play, and that she may be a form of salvation not only for him but for others.

My Babylon is told in a series of five novellas. Get Book One: Body for free by signing up for the mailing list at jameslwilber.com.

You can also purchase the Complete edition containing all five books both as an ebook and in print.

Book One: Body

Where we learn of the magus and his desire.

Book Two: Rose

In book two the magus reveals the source of his longing and depths to which he has fallen. Both his strength and his weakness come from a girl named Rose.

Book Three: Risen

In Book Three: Risen, the magus gains the object of his desire. Her presence not only changes him and his life forever, but attracts the notice of enemies he never knew he had.

Book Four: Host

In Book Four: Host, the magus learns about the powers that are arrayed against him, and that which he has carried all along.

Book Five: Beast

In the final episode, the magus unleashes the power that lurks within him and is consumed by it. Through the flames he is reborn to his destiny.

Book Six: Commentary

A book only for the serious fan of My Babylon. Book Six contains several essays on the magical symbolism in the books, and the writing process. There's no hidden chapters or additional story. It's for those who are curious about the influences and motivations behind My Babylon.

Book Six: Commentary, is only available by signing up for the mailing list at jameslwilber.com.

Of Little Faith - A Short Story

The old gods are returning, or have they always been here?

Odin wakes to the call of a dying warrior, crying out to be taken to Valhalla. Roused from his centuries of slumber, he wanders the Earth until he finds gods old and new. Do they have the answers he seeks? How does an ancient god of war find his place in the modern world?

A musing on the nature of religion and spirituality. We may no longer need a patriarch, but do we need to rediscover our divinities?

Get it for free by signing up for the mailing list at jameslwilber.com.

Matchmaker: A Short Story

I make people. I make your perfect match, your best friend, your true love. I make them alluring, breathtaking, hard as hell to resist. All the data that goes into a human being, memories, genetics, biochemistry, I collect and process that information. I put it together, mix and match to taste, and spit out the person you're going to fall in love with.

They're 100% real, and 100% virtual.

But is that enough? Where's the spark? What's the thing that makes love true?

\---

Matchmaker is a short story set fifteen minutes into the future where the rich buy online people to call their own.

Chasing the Wyrm: Christopher Yan, Agent of the OAA

To protect its interests, the U.S. government projects its power militarily, economically, and magically. It leaves the last to the Office of Arcane Affairs.

Christopher Yan didn't ask for the job. A wizard, born with the power to warp reality, the OAA calls on him to neutralize all arcane threats. Part spy, part fixer, part assassin, Topher searches for a way to make his unique gift serve both his country and his principles. When he makes an enemy of a rogue wizard serving a dying insurgency, he learns what limits his conscience can bear.

Coming August 2013.
Books by Stephan Michael Loy

Last Days and Times

On March 13, 2013, the Catholic Church elected its final pope. An obscure and contested document in the Vatican archives asserts that this pope will see the burning of Rome and the Judgment of the world. There are always apocalyptic predictions, of which this is the latest. Y2K didn't pan out, neither did the Mayan Apocalypse. Now doomsayers latch onto the so-called Pope Prophecies. A mysterious evangelist gone terrorist with supernatural origins latches onto this latest end of the world prediction as a sign that Judgment Day is upon us. He hopes to usher in a biblical apocalypse using stolen atomic warheads. Three stand against him, a seer of good and evil, her academic beau, and a disaffected FBI agent. They and their enemy claim to be soldiers of God, but who, in these times, does God truly favor? An urban fantasy thriller, Last Days and Times delivers an engrossing plot, compelling characters, and a challenging theme.

Harmonic RES: A Short Fiction Collection

Nine stories in various genres that explore the small truths of who we are as human beings, of why we are here and why we matter. From science fiction to satire, from military fiction to romantic comedy, from very short stories to long novellas, Harmonic RES speaks with a varied, but unified, voice. Entertaining and enlightening.

Isis Wept

Egypt, 8000 years ago. The gods walk among men as titans, powerful beings with passions that move mountains, fix stars in the heavens, and master the forces of life and death. Within this world, the evil god Set betrays his brother, king of rich and respected Abydos. Set kills his kin, then steals all that was his, including the queen, Isis, the goddess of life and beauty. Isis survives defilement by her monstrous conqueror to escape and bend her powers toward finding her love and bringing him back from the blackness of death. In the course of this quest, kingdoms fall, armies clash, and the balance of power between gods and men is altered forever. Who holds the high ground in such a cataclysmic struggle? Is it those who define power, or those who define themselves?

Shining Star

We killed Earth. Thousands of years later, the survivors, having fled their dead planet in great generation ships, eak out a tenuous existence among the local group of stars. This could have been the end for the last dregs of humanity, but for the rise of a dictatorial church that draws humankind under its wing and flogs it to prosperity. Now, Miranda St. Billiart, a soldier for the Community of God, seeks to escape the power that made her in the first place. With her sister Ilyanya, she uncovers the corruption that made the Church possible. The two of them fight to expose the truth, to redress the evils heaped upon their people, and to discover within the wreckage of their universe who they are and why they matter.

Conqueror's Realm

The year is 2058. Still no flying cars, still no jetpacks. But we do have demographics, statistics that show white people becoming a minority in America for the first time. Will the founders of the United States lose power gracefully, or will they fight back, threatening the very democracy they created? Steve Tallman produces See It Now, a TV investigative journalism show that unearths a frightening plot to hijack a nation and subjugate its people beneath a paranoid and violent right wing conspiracy. He will risk his life and those of his friends to build a world-wide coalition that combats that conspiracy. Civil war, twenty-first century style, waged over TV and the social media. What will it cost, in blood and spirit, when opponents care nothing for the lives of their enemies? Where is the heart of patriotism? Does it lie in the people who dreamed of freedom, or in those who finally achieve it?

Conqueror's Realm is a warning, a demonstration of the fragility of democracy. It is a lesson in social order, a sure demonstration that democracy extracts a price for its gifts, for there can be no justice unless justice is for all.

Books by Dick Thomas

Ghostvision

Autumn Faust has been tormented all her life with visions of ghosts.

Ike Isaacs, a mysterious man she met online, claims he can rid her of her curse.

Cristina Fuentes, a paranormal investigator with psychic abilities of her own, arrives in Autumn's hometown to investigate the local legend of a dangerous ghost rumored to kill hapless victims on snowy nights.

As a blizzard looms over the rural community of Howardton, Indiana, Autumn seeks to uncover the truth about the Ice Bitch, a ghost of local legend. But can the Ice Bitch be stopped before she kills again? Is the Ice Bitch actually the ghost of a teenage girl? Or is it something even more terrifying, and much more dangerous?

In Ghostvision, Autumn must decide whether to shun or embrace the special ability that separates her from the rest of the world.

But in making her choice, will she find her salvation or her doom?

Books by Shade OfRoses

Paul Vs. The Vampire

Meet Paul. He works at a hardware store, has a pimp for a roommate, and writes fantasy books in his spare time.

Meet Eric. Eric is your average wealthy playboy vampire.

They hook-up. Hilarity, death, and ice cream ensues.

There may or may not be any ice cream.

A snarky, titillating tale that will leave you craving more. Paul Vs. The Vampire knows it's treading well-worn territory, but you can't help but love the tour guide.

