by Rex Hurst
Kathy was in tears. Jon had put her in the backseat, tried comforting her with sips of Mountain Dew, but it was all in vain. She would not calm down. Jon couldn’t really blame her, but it still grated his nerves. They were all right, yet her whimpering increased.
They drove around the backroads of the hamlet, looking for Louis, but he was nowhere to be found. There was a lot of woods out there. Maybe he had tripped and was lying bleeding in the woods. Maybe he was hiding in a tree waiting for the safety of daylight to walk back to town. Any of that could be true.
They had no choice but to abandon him and head for home. A pang of guilt hit Jon over this, but what were they gonna do? Hang around all night? Besides, Louis had cut and run, left them to die. What kind of friend does that? Had he kept his nerve, he would’ve been all right.
They had dropped Kathy off at home. After an awkward hug with Jon, she left, disappearing into her prestigious home.
And now here they were.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened?” Jon said.
“Hmmm?”
He kept stirring the coffee.
Jon grabbed his arm. “That was no coincidence, our being there. You set that up, knowing it would happen.”
“Hoping.”
“Hoping it would happen. That the Cold Woman would—?”
“Appear? I didn’t expect that.”
“You’ve done the research like me. There have been reports of a ghostly woman haunting that cemetery for decades. It’s the most common story. You must have set it up, since she looked a lot like the miniature.”
“Not ‘a lot.’ Exactly.” Michael thumped the table, eyes sparkling. “Her essence, spirit, however you describe the phenomenon, it was funneled into this world via our belief, our mantric actions, and adopted the miniature as its base representation.”
“So, we created her.”
“No. We influenced the spirit’s form.”
“And you knew this was going to happen? You used us as guinea pigs.”
“There’s been some speculation as to the nature of paranormal manifestations. Some say it’s all ghosts. Others write about beings of pure spirit that never had a physical form. Angels. Demons. Valkyries. Mara. Aliens. What if it’s none and all? What if the manner of this manifestation is based upon what we expect to see, and the creature latches on?”
“Uh?”
“Our mindset, our mood defines this thing,” Michael said. “There has been so much talk about ghosts in that cemetery that I guessed it was our best chance to make an apparition happen. There’s something about that place which allows such manifestations to occur with greater ease. Our game created the right atmosphere to cause its occurrence. The time, the mood, the chill. I just thought the whole thing would be less dramatic.”
“Oh, it was fucking dramatic all right.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The visions. The monsters and magicians. Didn’t you see them?
“No,” Michael’s voice trailed off. Jon could see him bouncing around in his own head, trying to assemble the missing jigsaw pieces. “But then I was inside.”
“How did you stumble onto this? I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
“There’s all sorts of stories of magicians in the stupid ages conjuring up the devil. Some of the old Kabbalistic and Cathar traditions even have rituals for commanding angels. There are many, many legends of such conjurations and just as many different ‘spells’ or rituals for it.” Michael snorted in distaste. “If you strip away the superstition, it boils down to having the right people, the right emotional atmosphere, and the right place.”
“The place means something?”
“You can’t just do it anywhere. Certain areas, I don’t know why, are more pliable, are softer around the edges for contact with—”
“What? What are they?”
“I don’t know that either. The Beyond. There are plenty of labels, but we might not have a concept for what they actually are.”
“How did you get started on this?”
“I’ve been researching for a while. Just digging through old books and the like. Looking for this Beyond and I came across a lot of ideas. A lot of local stuff. I didn’t mean to use you guys, but I had to know if it was all lies.”
“If what was lies? You’re not being straight with me.”
Michael downed the coffee in a single gulp like a shot of booze, then waved the half-asleep waitress over for more. He repeated the creamer ritual and shook the story loose from his past.
“When I was eleven, I had an experience. It was during the summer. Remember back then, we used to play outside all day and the only thing our parents would say to us was ‘Come home when the streetlights turned on.’ My parents usually didn’t bother, so I just went home when everyone else did. Then one day I decided to stay out. It was my birthday and my parents had forgotten. They never really did much for it in any case. I think I got a couple of hostess cupcakes once, but nothing beyond that. I can’t complain, they never remembered my brother’s either.”
Jon suddenly realized that it was true about Michael’s birthday. He had never been to one celebration of the event. The date had never come up. Even Jon’s own parents would spring for a crappy gift and cheap cake.
“I was just walking around, throwing pebbles at streetlights, when I wandered down to the old grain elevators. Before you ask, yes, it’s same one we go to. I was used to old drunks and homeless prowling the area, but this time it was different. The area was filled with cars. Expensive, new ones. There was a smell of rotten eggs and burning rosemary coming from the building. A glow emanated from the ground floor, and I went to investigate.
“Inside, a low fire burned. Around it was a group of people, men and women, in red robes, holding hands, and chanting in a low murmur. Another one in black would occasionally toss something into the fire, then scuttle back watching them. It all came to some kind of climax, when they raised their hands together and began to shout. That’s when I saw it.
“It was by the corner of the building. A shape, encased in white, like a reverse shadow. It was dressed in old school buckskins and carried a flintlock rifle, reminded me of those old movies about Davy Crockett. It looked around, pointed, raised its gun and vanished. After that the people stopped. They threw a bucket of water and a few bottles of bleach over the fire.
“Bleach?”
“It was something white from bleach bottles, so I assumed it was. But that isn’t the point. I went back there several times at night and I never saw them again. They might’ve missed the ‘ghost’, we’ll call it that for lack of a better word, but I’ve never forgotten. That’s why I picked the place as our gaming spot. Hoping to see it again.”
“And did you?” Jon asked.
“Yes. Three weeks ago. When everyone had left, I saw the buckskin ghost again. It was in the same place, going through the same movements. I tried to communicate, but it was unable to. It was just a thing, a spiritual animal, given brief form.”
Three weeks ago, Jon mused. After we started the new game. Out loud he said, “What do you mean, animal?”
“If the forms they appear in are influenced by us, by our expectations, then what it actually might be is a fleeting wisp from a realm where life has no physical form. So trying to talk to it would be like attempting a dialogue with a mosquito or an eel. It just can’t be done.”
“It sounds like the ghost of an old frontiersman, not some wisp.”
“Not necessarily. Perhaps the robed people influenced its form, and my expectations of what it looked like caused it to manifest in the same manner.”
“A lot of perhaps.” And a lot still not said, Jon thought.
“I didn’t have much until today.”
“You, or we really, influenced the form of the Cold Woman.”
“Yes, but that was incidental. I made further contact beyond.”
“With?”
“With an intelligence.”
; ***
The next day was a Saturday. Normally a day of frolic and rest for the high schooler, but Jon found himself haunting the back of a rat’s nest that posed as an occult bookstore called The Wizard’s Zap. The married proprietors were a pair of leftover hippies who never bothered to mature out of their mid-twenties. Frequently, they’d pigeonhole a customer, boxing him in with banter and their foul body odor, and lament how so many of their generation had “sold out” by getting real jobs, having children, and taking responsibility for their lives. Often the entire store would empty when one of them uttered the preamble, “Back in the sixties.”
The place was a disaster. Scores of books were piled up every which way. The building had been a cheap knock-up, slapped together in the 1940s and it looked as if the shelves had been hammered in shortly thereafter. Most of them had rotted through, meaning tons of paperbacks were plopped on top of each other in a series of wobbly stacks. The stacks were so close together that removing any individual book placed several of them in peril of falling over and burying a customer in an avalanche of cheap pulp paper.
Jon had begun the day with the college libraries, then the public libraries, then the major bookstores, and was eventually reduced to this place. He searched every time worn text, every ancient grimoire, every scrap of mystical garbage scratched out by an old weirdo over the last five hundred years. All to find a single name.
Calach.
Michael had clammed up after revealing the name the intelligence had given him. He said he needed to check on a few things before going any further. Then he had downed two more scumdogs and dropped Jon off.
That weekend, Jon’s house was mainly empty. His mother and little Catherine were out competing in the Beauties of America pageant. If beauty were the major prerequisite then, to Jon’s mind, his six-year-old sister would lose by a wide margin. Father had informed the household that he had “business” to take care of at his office all weekend. And Michelle, she seemed content to spend a few days burning holes in her liver with booze-and-pills milkshakes. She was incoherent the entire time. Not that Jon had anything to say to her.
The day had been taken up by this seemingly fruitless search, until in the dingiest part of the store, in a crumbling red book published in 1900, he found the name. The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage was filled with weird double-talk, esoteric terms, confusing graphics, and yawn-inducing florid language, but the name was there—as was his invocation.
Calach, “the milky backed”, a minor legionnaire of the infernal forces. The creature was apparently connected to a larger entity in the form of Ariton, one of the eight Princes of Hell. This royalty was associated with dominion over water and took direction from the North, whatever that meant. Calach was used to invoke hexes on enemies and love charms on unwilling women.
Hexes and love charms. That had possibilities, if it wasn’t all crap.
The old man at the front, a bundle of wild whiskers and armpit hair long enough to braid, wiped his nose on his Grateful Dead shirt and thumbed through the book. The image on the shirt caught Jon’s eye. It was a skeleton in blue, carrying a bindle in one hand and a red rose in the other. Arms outstretched, head upwards, it was about to step off a cliff. There was something there. The red rose—
“This is kind of a collector’s item,” the old man said, distracting him.
The red coloring of its leather cover had faded almost entirely. The paper was stained with coffee and many pages had dog-eared corners. A few notes had been penciled in by previous owners. The stitching on the old fashioned binding was loose.
“Looks pretty beat up.”
“You know, back in the sixties,” Oh Jesus. “We got all into this sort of stuff. Everyone wanted to expand their horizons, man, beyond all the Bible stuff they’d been programming us with since like birth, or earlier even. So we did all this stuff, like with Crowley and those guys, to see the mystic side of life and take stuff to help us do it.”
The old hippie picked up the book and stared at the cover. An illustration had originally been embroidered on it with some imitation gold leaf which had long flaked off.
“Not that this is Crowley,” he continued. “I mean it is, but it’s Crowley before he was Crowley, you know? This is Mathers, well Mathers translated some like old French stuff, but . . . No, it was like older, Hebrew, I think.” Jon wished he had a watch he could check. “But this is Mathers in the Golden Dawn time, along with uh Fu Manchu?” What? “No, like who was it? Rohmer! He did Fu Manchu around then too and hung out with them.”
“Well, isn’t that something. How much?”
“Thirty-five.”
A complete rip off, but the proprietor’s hippy funk began to overpower Jon’s gag reflex. He threw down the cash and retreated with his prize. Mutterings by the old man about this “slacker generation” and kids who “had no respect” and were “dumb as shit” followed him out the door.
Next stop was the local hobby shop, Choo-Choo Junction, where they bought their gaming supplies. The place mostly catered to the more traditional hobbies of the Boomer generation: model trains, car, and boat sets, associated miniatures, RC kits, archery sets, and plenty of yarn for the female crafter. It always smelt of model glue.
Apart from a small rack at the back of a chain bookstore at the mall, this was the only place for his friends to buy role playing materials, and the selection here was even skimpier. Weird off-brand titles haunted the single shelf of games. Role Aids, Flying Buffalo, Judges Guild. While waiting for the owner to help a customer, he flicked through a flimsy softcover, bound like a spiral notebook, named Spawn of Fashan. Jon took in its ugly layout, with bad art and densely packed text. Hideous. He threw it back.
The owner was an old man, sporting skinny arms and a fat belly. Cotton white hair stuck out of his ears, and rainbow suspenders held up a ratty pair of britches. He looked at Jon without interest.
“I was wondering if you could order a game for me or if you knew the company that put it out. It’s called Dark Dungeons.”
“It’s one of them weird ones like Dungeons and Dragons.”
“Yeah.”
With a sigh, the old man pulled out a mammoth catalogue and flipped through it. “Got a card game called Dark Cults.”
“That’s not it.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
“You have no information on it?”
The old man stabbed at the catalogue with an irritated finger. “It’s not in the book!”
Jon left. The old man’s mutterings about these “pansy kids with no money” tagging at his heels. Strangely enough, the owner had been more helpful than the drones collecting minimum wage at the chain bookstore. They were incapable of telling him anything at all, even whether or not they could get a copy of the game.
This all was beside the point. If Michael hadn’t gotten Dark Dungeons from these two places, where did it come from? Same place as the van? A non-existent relative? It was just one more thing for Jon to look out for. One more puzzle piece that didn’t fit.
He churned it over in his head as he rode over to Kathy’s, but nothing connected. She answered her door, pale faced and red eyed, last night’s rank clothes still on. She let Jon into the foyer and slumped against the wall.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I close my eyes and hear the woman. It’s the worst thing ever.”
“Just wanted to—”
“I can’t get ahold of my parents in Mexico. They must be off at some dig. Will you stay the night? I don’t want to be alone.”
“Uh . . . ”
“Please?”
Baby blue pleading eyes. A desperate curl to her voice, one that was just about to drop off into tears. What man could resist?
His protective instincts kicked in and without thinking he uttered, “‘Course I will. As long as you want me to.”
They sat down awkwardly in the gigantic living room. Neither knew what to say and simply stared at their hands from opposite ends of the couch
. She tried to fill the air by turning on the TV, but the roar of game shows and the vapid diatribes of Phil Donahue sank into the void. If anything, the noise made things worse. Kathy brushed back a few tears.
“How about something to drink?” she said and ran off before he could reply.
He was cold again, but the frost was ingrained in the spirit of the household. He looked around at the furniture, the coffee table books, the pictures, and felt the chill of fraud. This wasn’t a place where a family lived. It was a waypoint for related strangers to catch up before they hurried on their way.
She brought back two cans of soda and sat a little closer to him. Her hands rubbed together in a fast pace, like she was trying to scrub blood out of them. Their thighs touched.
“It was all I could do to keep everything out of my mind,” Kathy blurted. “She was a force of evil. I know it. When she screamed, Hell screamed with her. Didn’t you hear?”
“Yeah, I did. I held you and your eyes were closed.”
“Didn’t keep out the screams.”
“Yes, but what did you see?”
“The Cold Woman?”
“No, no. When you shut your eyes, what did you see?”
She simply blinked at him, uncomprehending, and he let the matter dropped. If you hadn’t actually experienced the visions, it sounded insane. To hold back the stem of tears he saw swelling again Kathy’s eyes, he gave her a quick pat on the shoulder. Taking a mile to his inch, she latched onto his torso in a death grip and nuzzled up close to his chest.
“I can hear your heartbeat,” she said.
In for a penny, in for a pound. He put a comforting arm around her. Things stirred below. The uncontrollable hormones of a seventeen-year-old cascaded and filled his genitals, jamming it tight up against his jeans. Could he? Should he? Would this be the moment? The pivot point that would destroy his virginity and finally cast him as one of the have-nots and not haves.
He was pretty sure he could, but inexperience grabbed his throat. A lot of childish what ifs and maybes scared him from acting. She would probably be amenable, but that probability was not a certainty and that held him back. Fear. Irrational fear. Fear of looking a fool. Fear that he’d somehow misinterpreted all of her obvious gestures. Fear that she would laugh at him and he’d never be able to recover. Fear that she’d blab to everyone about how disgusting he was. Fear that he would be terrible at the act.
