by Gemma Files
She let her voice trail away, carefully, before she might have to assign an actual gender-specific pronoun to this mythical “good Chinese”—person.
“I don’t think I could afford your mei-po’s fees,” I pointed out, tucking into my freshly-arrived plate of Sticky Rice With Shrimp And Seasonal Green. To which she just smiled, thinly—patted my wrist with one clawed hand—and went back to her game, leaving me to the rest of my meal.
A fresh ghost brought me tea more, bowing. I bowed back, and sipped it, thinking about Toronto.
Hong Kong was everything my Ryerson fuck-buddies ever thought it would be—loud, bright, fast, unforgiving. When I was five years old, my au pair took me out without calling the bodyguards first; a quarter-hour later, I buried my face in her skirt as some low-level Triad thug beat a man to pulp right in front of us, armed only with a big, spiky, stinky fruit called a dhurrian. Believe me, the experience left an impression.
In Toronto, the streets are level, the use of firearms strictly controlled, and swearing aloud is enough to draw stares. Abusive maniacs camp out on every corner, and passersby step right over them—quickly, quietly, without rancor or interest. It’s a place so clean that U.S. movie crews have to import or manufacture enough garbage to make it pass for New York; it’s also North America’s largest centre for consensual S & M activity. But if you stop any person on the street, they’ll tell you they think living here is nothing special—nice, though a little boring.
The truth is, Toronto is a crossroads where the dead congregate. The city goes about its seasonal business, bland and blind, politely ignoring the hungry skins of dead people stalking up and down its frozen main arteries: Vampires, ghouls, revenants, ghosts, wraiths, zombies, even a select few mage’s golems cobbled haphazardly together from whatever inanimate objects came to hand. There’s enough excess appetite here to power a world-eating competition. And you don’t have to be a magician or a medium to recognize it, either.
“Dead want more time,” Carra told me, long after yet another drunken midnight, back in her mother’s house—both of us too sloshed to even remember what a definite article was, let alone try using it correctly. “’S what they always say. Time, recognition, remembrance . . . ”
Trailing off, taking another slug. Then fixing me, with one blood-threaded eye. And half-growling, half-projecting—so soundlessly loud she made my temples throb with phantom pain—
“Want blood, too. Our blood. Yours . . . mine . . . ”
. . . but don’t mean we gotta give it to ’em, just ‘cause they ASK.
The longer I stay in this city, the more I see it works like a corpse inside a corpse inside a corpse—the kind of puzzle you can only solve by letting it rot. Once it’s gone all soft, you can come back and give it a poke, see what sticks out. Until then, you just have to hold your nose.
About an hour later, I was almost to the door when Grandmother Yau materialized again, at my elbow. Laying her brocade sleeve over my arm, she said, softly:
“Jude-ah, before you leave, I must tell you that I see you twice. You here, drinking my tea. You somewhere else, doing something else. I see you dimly, as though through a Yin mirror—split, but not yet cut apart. Caught in a mesh of darkness.”
I frowned.
“This thing you see,” I asked, carefully. “Is it . . . dangerous?”
She smiled a little wider, and withdrew the authoritative weight of her sleeve. I saw the red light of the paper lanterns gild her upper fangs.
“Hard to tell without knowing more, don’t you think?” She said. “But there are many kinds of danger, Hark Chiu-wai-ah.”
* * *
Off Spadina again, and down the alley, fumbling for my key. Upstairs, the clutch of loud weekend hash-smokers I call my neighbors had apparently decided to spend tonight out on the town, for which I was duly grateful. Locking the door to my apartment—and renewing the protective sigils warding its frame—I took my bone-hilted knife from its sheath around my neck, under my Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, and wrapped it in a Buddhist rosary of mule-bone skulls and haematite beads, murmuring a brief prayer of reconsecration.
My machine held a fresh crop of messages from Ed, both hopeful and hateful.
Poor lonely little gweilo boy, I thought, briefly. No rice for you tonight.
Then I lit some incense (sage), peeled a few bills from the wad of twenties Doug Whatever had given me, and burned them as makeshift Hell Money in front of an old Polaroid of my grandmother—the only ancestor I care to worship anymore, these faithless Canadian days.
Own nothing, owe nothing. Pray to nothing. Pay nothing. No loyalties, no scruples. And make sure nothing ever means more to you than any other nothing you can name, or think of.
These are my rules, all of which I learned from Carra Devize, along with the fluid surprise of what it feels like to be gripped by vaginal muscles—the few, accurate, infinitely bitter philosophical lessons which she, psychic savant that she is, can only ever teach, never follow.
Magicians demand the impossible, routinely. Without even knowing it, they have begun to work backwards against the flow of all things: Contra mundi. A price follows. Miracles cannot be had without being paid for. It’s the illogic of a child who asks WHY must what is be? Why do I have to be just a boy, just a girl? Why is the sky blue? Why can’t I fly, if I want to? Why did Mommy have to die? Why do I have to die?
We call what we don’t understand magic, in order to explain why we can’t control it; we name whatever we find, usually after ourselves—because, by naming something, you come to own it.
Thus rules are discovered, and quantified, and broken. So that, when there are enough new rules, magic can become far less an Art . . . than a science.
And it’s so easy, that’s the truly frightening thing. You do it without thinking, the first time. Do it without knowing just what you’ve done, ‘till—long—after.
Frightening for most. But not for me . . . and not for Carra, either.
Once.
* * *
I was lying in bed, almost asleep, when the phone rang. I grabbed for it, promptly knocking a jar full of various complimentary bar and nightclub matchbooks off my night-stand.
“Wei?” I snapped, before I could stop myself. Then: “I mean—who is this?”
A pause. Breathing.
“Jude?”
“Franz?”
Froese.
And here’s the really interesting part—apparently, he thought he was returning my call.
“Why would I call you, Franz?”
“I thought maybe you heard something more.”
“More than what?”
With a slight edge of impatience: “About Jen.”
The Jen in question being Jen Cudahy, fellow Black Magic Posse member, of lachrymose memory—a languid, funereal calla lily of a girl with purple hair and black vinyl underwear, who spent her spare periods writing execrable sestinas with titles like “My Despair, Mon Espoir” and “When Shadows Creep.” She’d worked her way through RTA as a dominatrix, pulling down about $500 per session to let judges and vice cops clean her bathroom floor with their tongues. The last time I’d seen her, over eighteen months prior, she was running a lucrative new dodge built around what she called “vampire sex shows”—a rotating roster of nude, bored teenage Goths jacking open their veins, pumping out a couple of cc’s for the drones, and then fingerpainting each other. Frottage optional. She asked me what I thought, and I told her it struck me as wasteful. But she assured me it was the quickest way she currently knew to invoke the not-so-dead god Moolah.
Franz had loved Jen for what probably only seemed like forever to outside observers, mostly from afar—interspersed, here and there, with a few painful passages of actual physical intimacy. They’d met while both attending the same Alternative high school, where they’d barricade themselves into the students’ lounge,
drop acid and have long conversations about which of them was de-evolving faster.
“Okay,” I said, carefully. “I’ll bite. What about Jen?”
“She says she’s possessed.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And this is different . . . how?”
Way back in 1987, shortly before I cut my shadow away—or maybe shortly after (I’m not sure, since I was pretty well continuously intoxicated at that point)—Jen petitioned for entrance to the Black Magic Posse. She’d been hanging around on the fringes, watching and listening quietly as Carra, Franz and I first planned, then dissected, our weekly adventures in the various Mantic Sciences. I was all for it; the more the merrier, not to mention the drunker. Franz was violently opposed. And Carra didn’t care too much, one way or the other—her dominating attitude then, regarding almost any subject you could name, being remarkably similar to the way mine is, now.
Jen quickly showed a certain flair for the little stuff. She tranced out easily, far more so than Franz, who usually had to chant himself incoherent in order to gain access to his own unconscious. This made her an almost perfect scryer, able to map our possible future difficulties through careful study of either the palpable (the way a wax candle split and fell as it melted—Carromancy) or impalpable (the way that shadows scattered and reknit when exposed to a moving source of light—Sciomancy.)
But when it came to anything a bit more concrete, it would be time to call in the founding generation: Franz, with his painstaking research and gift for dead languages; Carra, with her post-electroshock halo of rampant energy, her untold years of channelling experience, her barely-controlled psychometric Gift; me, the devout amateur, with my gleeful willingness to do whatever it took. My big mouth and my total lack of fear, artificial though it might have been—at that point—
—and my bone-hilted knife.
“It’s bad, Jude. She needs an exorcism.”
“Try therapy,” I suggested, idly slipping my earrings back in. “It’s cheaper.”
There was a tiny, accusatory pause.
“I would’ve thought you’d feel just a little responsible,” he said, at last. “Considering she’s been this way ever since you and Carra let her help raise that demon of yours . . . ”
“Fleer? He’s a mosquito with horns. Barely a postal clerk, in Hell’s hierarchy.”
“ . . . without drawing a proper circle first.”
I bridled. “The circle was fine; my wards held. They always hold. Carra even threw her the wand, when she saw Jen’d stepped over the outer rim—Jen was just too shit-scared to use it. So whatever trauma she may have talked herself into getting is her business.”
“It’s pretty hard to use a wand when you’re rolling around on the floor, barking!”
“So? She stopped.”
Another pause. “Well, she’s started again,” Franz said, quietly.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and retrieved my watch from the night-stand, squinting at it. Not even three; most of my favorite hangouts would still be open, once I’d disposed of this conversation.
Which—knowing Franz—might well be easier said than done.
“Gee, Franz,” I said, lightly, “when you told me you never wanted to see me again, I kind of thought you meant all of me. Up to and including the able-to-exorcise-your-crazy-ex-girlfriend part.”
“Cut the shit, you Cantonese voodoo faggot,” he snapped.
“Kiss my crack, Mennonite Man,” I snapped back. “For ten years, you cross the street every time you see me coming—but now I’ve suddenly got something you want, that makes me your new best friend? We partied, Franz. We hung around. The drugs were good, but I’m not sure how that qualifies you to guilt me into mowing your lawn, let alone into doing an expensive and elaborate ritual on behalf of someone I barely even liked, just because she happens to get your nuts in an uproar.”
“But . . . you . . . ” His voice trailed away for a minute. Then, accusingly again: “You already said if I found out what was wrong with her, what it was going to take to make her better—you’d do it. I didn’t even know about any of this, until you called and told me!”
I snorted. “Oh, uh huh.”
“Why would I lie?”
I shrugged. “Why wouldn’t you?”
Obviously, we had reached some kind of impasse. I studied my nails, and listened while Franz tried—not too successfully—to control his breathing long enough to have the last word.
“If you change your mind again,” he said, finally, “I’m at my mother’s. You know the number.”
Then he hung up.
* * *
Inevitably, talking to Franz sent my mind skittering back to the aftermath of Valentine’s Day, 1987: A five a.m. Golden Griddle “breakfast” with the Black Magic Posse, Carra sipping her coffee and watching—with some slight amusement—while Franz blurted out: “But it was your soul, Jude.”
“Metaphorically, maybe. So?”
“So now you’re just half a person. And not the good half, either.”
At which I really just had to laugh out loud, right in his morose, lapsed-Mennonite face. Such Goddamn drama, all because I’d made the same basic sacrifice a thousand other magicians have made to gain control over their Art: nothing more serious than cutting off the top joint of your finger, or putting out an eye, except for not being nearly as aesthetically repugnant or physically impractical.
“And that’s why you’ll always be a mediocre magician, Franz,” I replied. “Because you can’t do what it takes to go the distance.”
“I have never been ‘mediocre’. I’m better than you ever were—”
“You used to be. Back when Carra first introduced us. But now I’m better, and I’m getting better, all the time. While you, my friend . . . are exactly as good . . . as you’re ever going to get.”
Simple, really. My fear held me back, so I got rid of it. My so-called “friends” wanted to hold me back—the ones still human enough to be jealous of my growing Power, at least. So . . .
. . . thanks for the advice, Franz, old pal. And fuck you very much.
* * *
Sleep no longer an option, I hauled my ass out of bed, ready to pull my pants up and hit the street (so I could find myself a nicely hard-bodied reason to pull them down again, no doubt.) That guy from the theatre, maybe; hot clutch of something at my sternum at the very thought, moving from throat to belly to zipper beneath. Itching. Twisting.
If only I knew his name, that was. Or could even remember more than the barest bright impression of his shadowed face . . .
But just as I grabbed for my coat, a thought suddenly struck me: How hard could it really be to find my nameless number-one crush of the moment, if I put some—effort—into it?
The idea itself becoming a kind of beginning, potent and portentious, lazy flick of a match over mental sandpaper. Synaptic sizzle.
Beneath my bathroom sink is a cupboard full of cleaning products and extra toilet paper; behind these objects, well-hidden from any prying eyes, is a KISS lunchbox Carra gave me for my twenty-fourth birthday. Made In Taiwan stamp, cheap clasp, augmented with a length of bicycle lock chain.
And behind that—
A glass key made by a friend of mine, who usually specializes in custom-blown bongs. A letter from the Seventh Circle, written with a dead girl’s hand. The ringing brass quill from a seraph’s pin-feather. A small, green bottle full of saffron. A box of red chalk.
If you want to raise a little Hell—or Heaven—then you’re going to need just the right tools. Luckily, I’ve spent years of my life learning exactly which ones are right for my particular purposes. And paying, subtly, for the privilege of ownership, once I finally found them.
I took my little tin box of tricks back into the living room, where I gathered up a few more select items, and arranged them around me one by one: TV remote on my l
eft, small hand-mirror on my right, box at Due North. Chalk and compass in one hand, bone-hilted knife in the other. I flipped on the TV—already cued up to my favorite spot on one of my favorite porno tapes—sat back, and drew yet another perfect circle around myself. Made a few extra notations, here and there, just inside the circle’s rim: The signs of Venus, Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite. As many of the ancient significators of desire personified as I could remember, off the top of my increasingly aroused head. Words and images to help me focus—names of power to lend me their strength.
More magician’s rules: As long as you’re not looking to change anything irrevocably—cause real hate or true love, make somebody die, bring somebody back to life—you can do it all on your own. For minor glamours, for self-protection, willpower is enough.
For larger stuff, however, you need help.
Going by these standards, it’s always tricky doing a negative spell—unless you make sure it’s on someone else’s behalf, so you have no direct stake in its outcome. Making the rebound factor fall entirely back on them.
Obviously, it takes a special kind of detachment to pull this off. But ever since I cut my shadow away, I truly do seem to have a knack for not caring enough . . . about anything . . . to get hurt.
Besides, love—true or otherwise—was the last thing on my mind.
As I wrote, a red dusting of chalk spread out across my hand, grinding itself into the lines of my palm. Shrugging off my shirt, I brushed the excess off down my chest, onto my abdomen. Five scarlet fingers, pointing towards my groin.
Up onscreen, an explicit flesh-toned tangle was busily pixilating itself into soft focus through sheer force of back-and-forth action. I turned the mirror to catch it, then zapped the TV quickly off, wrapping my chosen lust-icon up tight in a black silk scarf I keep handy for such occasions. Then I leant the mirror against my forehead and repeated the time-honored formula to myself, aloud:
