‘Good morning, one and all,’ he says in a low, musical voice. ‘Many of you know me already, but for the benefit of those who don’t, my name is King and I’m the curriculum director here at Hexpoort. And before any of you newbies freak out, let us cut to the chase: I look like a cat.’
He picks up a piece of chalk and scrawls the letters CAT on the board.
‘What I am, however, is a Nunda, an ancient race with its roots in Central Africa.’ He opens his desk and pulls out several sheaves of paper and holds them up. ‘Lolcats, Garfield or Grumpy Cat pinned on my office door may seem like juvenile hijinks, but it’s seriously uncool, people.’
There are sniggers from the class.
‘I take offence at this specific brand of humour as it only serves to further entrench human privilege.’
He clears his throat. ‘Now that we’ve got that unpleasantness out of the way, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the new members of Hexpoort. In today’s class I’ll be assessing the abilities of our new recruits. When I call your name, please come through to my office and I’ll administer the tests. The rest of you start reading John Lilly’s The Center of the Cyclone and think about how it relates to Timothy Leary’s ideas about the eight-circuit model of consciousness.’
King calls a kid’s name and ushers him to the office adjoining the classroom. I start reading the book.
‘Hey, asshole.’
I don’t turn around.
‘Asshole!’
Something hits me on the back of the head and I swing around.
‘You settling in?’ Hekka says. He and a bunch of his dumb jock friends are sitting at the back of the classroom. Hekka has his feet up on the desk and his hands interlaced behind his head. ‘What abilities do you think the kitteh will find in you? The ability to suck dick?’
I turn back to the book but I feel Hekka come up behind me and lean over my desk.
‘I’m the Chosen One, fated by birth to save the world. You know what you are?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Please enlighten me.’
‘You’re fucking nothing.’
Time slows down. I feel the Hulk rage build. I could twist him around, squash him like a fly. Destroy him completely and entirely. But I don’t. I am Zen. I am a calm pool reflecting the moon. I am gouging out his eyes with a rusty spoon. No. I’m not. I am Zen. I am a calm pool reflecting the moon.
I just nod and continue to flick through my textbook.
‘Like I said,’ Hekka says, slapping the back of my head so hard that my glasses fall off. ‘Nothing.’
‘Baxter Zevcenko?’ King sticks his large head round the door.
I get up and follow him through, dodging another projectile that comes sailing from the back of the class.
The office smells of incense and cat. There’s a large desk made of dark wood, and a sprawling red Persian rug carpets the floor. I brush hairs from the seat in front of the desk and sit down. Several Egyptian-style paintings of cats being worshipped hang on the granite walls.
‘Bastet, the cat goddess,’ King says with a smile when he sees me looking at them. ‘Among the Nunda it’s a symbol of empowerment, similar to the black fist.’
‘Is it really so bad out there for them? The Hidden, I mean,’ I say.
‘“Them”? I’m going to stop you there, compadre. Exoticising the other is primary in the discourse around the Hidden Ones. The community is so fragmented and there is a lot of interspecies conflict. I’m considered by many to be a traitor. Working for the Man, quite literally in my case.’
He sits back, places his hands on his generous belly and contemplates me with his strange yellow eyes. ‘Besides, your unique history means that speaking of “them” is not really accurate. I know you’ve got both Crow and Siener blood and that it’s not exactly a happy mix. Am I right so far?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘So what?’
‘Well, it’s a very interesting combination, and I am eager to test what abilities you may have as a result.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Knock yourself out.’
He fits a series of electrodes to my head and connects them to a laptop. ‘Now I want you to clear your mind and just look at the pictures I show you.’ He flashes me a series of images: a phrenologist’s diagram of a human head, a scarab beetle, the Dark Side of the Moon album cover, sugar skulls, ice cream covered with ants, a sword dripping with honey, a samurai committing hara-kiri, a collection of teen boy-band posters.
‘Hmmm,’ he says as he taps at the laptop keyboard. ‘Very interesting.’
He puts a series of cards face down on the desk and asks me to draw what I think they hold. I quickly sketch the first things that come into my head: interlocking triangles, a house, a sailboat, a smiley face.
‘Ah.’ He taps the keyboard again. ‘And now we’re going to play a story-telling game. I’m going to give you prompts and I want you to flesh out the story. Just let your mind go and use your imagination.’
He clears his throat. ‘There is a man named …’ I stare at him blankly. ‘Whatever comes into your head, Baxter,’ he says.
‘His name is Herbert,’ I begin. ‘He goes on a yacht and gets into a breakdance battle with penguins …’
We continue like this, and as we talk, his voice begins to lull me.
‘You’re walking down a passageway,’ he says. ‘You’re looking for a man called Whitey Valke. That’s right, Baxter, deeper and deeper …’
And there go my eyes, flickering like dragonfly wings.
‘What do you see, Baxter?’
‘A child …’ I murmur. ‘Very scared, in a red room.’ It’s true. I can see the faint hazy outline of a child in a room.
‘Good,’ King says. ‘Deeper and deeper, Baxter.’
The vision spins out of control and cleaves through my skull. I see a horrible dark figure approaching the child and attacking him.
‘Stop!’ I scream. ‘Stop.’
My eyes jerk open and King is standing over me with his hands on my shoulders. ‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘You’re safe. It was just a vision.’
He pours me a glass of water and I gulp it down gratefully.
‘Whitey Valke was a serial killer in the eighties. I took a chance on you, Baxter. What you saw was probably his infamous red-room abduction. The last child he took.’
‘I probably heard about it somewhere,’ I say. ‘Read it online or something.’
‘I seriously doubt it.’ King smiles, making his whiskers twitch. ‘It was never released. Whitey Valke was a goblin.’
‘So I got a small glimpse of something,’ I say. ‘I’ve seen things before …’
‘What it means is that I believe you have skill in both Seeing and Dreaming. Remarkable.’
‘Well that’s good, right? I thought I was here to learn about this shit.’
He taps one of his claws thoughtfully on the desk. ‘Well, yes. But it may cause … problems for you. Dreamwalking is an ancient skill that not many have the aptitude for any more. You have a high degree of potential for it. But your other magical abilities seem … blocked.’
‘Blocked?’ I say.
‘From what I can gather, you’ll have difficulty performing even the most basic spells.’
‘Great.’ I sit back in the chair.
‘Don’t be despondent. Dreamwalking is a powerful skill. You’re a wildcard, Baxter, and if there’s anything I’ve learnt, it’s that the MK6 establishment does not like wildcards.’
‘Story of my life,’ I say.
‘I will instruct you as far as I can. But further than that we have to approach a specialised teacher.’
‘You have a specialised teacher for this stuff? Well that’s great.’
He shakes his head, which gives the impression that he’s chasing a laser pointer. ‘Not exactly. She herself is a bit of a … wildcard.’ He scratches his chin. ‘I’ll speak to her. In the meantime …’
He reaches into his desk and hands me a black hard drive with a fraying smiley face sticker on
it. ‘The entire school info dump is on there, our “library” for want of a better word. That’s everything we have clearance to give to students. It’s not organised in any meaningful way so you’re going to have to sift through it on your own to find mention of Dreamwalking.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘I can do that.’
He chuckles. ‘Easier said than done. There may be a few mentions of Dreamwalking. It may also be referred to as “surfing mercury” or “aethernautics” or simply “exploring”. Most often these things are talked about obliquely.’
I sigh.
‘Enjoy,’ he says with a smile. ‘I’ll let you know when I’ve spoken to your potential mentor.’
5
A GAME OF SANITY
I TRUDGE BACK through the courtyard from an extra remedial class with King. He’s right: I have absolutely no aptitude for magic. He says he’s spoken to this ‘specialised teacher’ but she has yet to give him an answer. It probably won’t make a difference. No matter how hard I practise the exercises I’m given, I just can’t make it work, and I’m starting to have massive performance anxiety. Failure to produce a flame on your palm in front of the whole class is embarrassing, and there’s no Viagra for magic.
I look up and see the Red Witch standing silhouetted against the setting sun on top of the Hexpoort ramparts. A bird, a huge grey and white falcon, watches me from its perch on her thick leather glove. It launches off and swoops across the barren canyon. The Witch turns her eyes on me with the same penetrating gaze as the bird. I hurry away.
My new life has not been going so great. If Westridge was an exercise in attempting to control the raging sea of hormones, chemicals and body parts of delinquent teenagers, then Hexpoort is that plus kids with the ability to bend the fundamental laws of physics. Within my first week I’ve witnessed a fight using knives of corrosive green fire, an overdose on Stevo’s product, and the aftermath of an orgy where a kid from Pondscum broke his penis attempting a reverse cowboy with a girl from Broken Teeth. While they were magically hovering in the air.
I’m just trying to keep my head down and stay the hell out of school politics. Which isn’t easy. Hekka struts around with this faux inner conflict showing on his face: the tortured hero trying to come to terms with his fate. It’s fucking ridiculous. He engineers all these little situations where he comes across as the noble underdog in class. I saw him fucking plotting them out on an Excel document.
Thankfully Nom lent me an old cell phone and I managed to get hold of Esmé to apologise. She was cool and distant, which made me push harder, which made her angry, which made me angry, which made her angrier which … It didn’t exactly go well.
I feel my old life slipping further and further away from me and I can’t seem to stop it. So I’ve developed coping strategies. I play insane amounts of chess on Nom’s crappy phone. It’s a bit like manipulator methadone, but I admit it’s a cheap substitute. My project to send Kyle emails about magical things has also become a ritual. The sheer amount of information on the Hexpoort hard drive is astounding, and I dive into it nightly. I’ve gone through scans of diary entries, newspaper clippings, old documents and napkins with whisky stains and formulas written on them. I find obscure people of esoterica and tell him about them, trying to unravel the insanely bizarre shit that the magical community has done over the years. I find a couple of articles about magic and dreamwalking scanned from an old magazine called The Journal of Occult Practices that are helpful. Kyle’s loving it.
I reach the Malpit stairs and make the long climb up to the dorm. I’m starving, and when Nom brings in a huge pot of stew, I’m pathetically grateful, even though it’s cold so we’re forced to wait in a line and heat it up in the microwave.
I sit on the couch next to Stevo to eat. The stew is not bad: thick and spicy and filled with vegetables and chunks of stringy meat.
‘What is this?’ I ask through a mouthful.
‘Dassie,’ Stevo says as he chews. ‘The Witch has had a good hawking day.’ He reaches up to give Timothy and Hunter a chunk each. They sit on his head and eat contentedly. Then he produces a bottle of home-made whisky from a brown paper packet at his feet and passes it around.
‘Not hallucinogenic, I promise,’ Nom says as he hands me the bottle.
‘Not unless you drink too much,’ Stevo adds with a grin.
I take a grateful swig and feel the liquor burn my throat. My first week at the Poort has been rough and I’m glad to take the edge off. I’m having another swig when Faith and Chastity appear. Chastity grabs the bottle from my hand and takes a long gulp. ‘Right, Sanity time, you little bitches,’ she says, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.
‘All right!’ Stevo claps his hands together. ‘I’ve got some new material.’
Chastity laughs. ‘Your shit is going to be Disneyland compared to what I’ve concocted,’ she says.
‘It’s true.’ Faith shakes her head. ‘She tried it on me.’
We clear the floor and sit down on pillows in a small circle.
‘So,’ Chastity says. ‘Rules for the newbie. Sanity is the official game of Hexpoort and it’s simple. We use illusion magic to create the sickest, grossest, most disturbing images we can imagine to freak people out. Call “Sanity!” and the images stop but you lose the round. The one who can last the longest wins.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘But my magic is not that, you know, great.’
‘Oooh.’ Chastity puts on a baby voice. ‘I forgot the poor little man can’t get it up.’
‘Ignore her.’ Faith turns her head so she’s glaring at the side of her twin’s face. ‘It happens to a lot of people. It’s fine. You can just be the victim this time around.’
‘Fine,’ Chastity says with a cruel smile. ‘And I’m the conjuror.’
‘No problem,’ I say. ‘I’m good at games.’
Chastity and Faith sit directly across from me and Chastity begins chanting in Xhosa and making gestures with her hand. My vision starts to shift and images appear in the air in front of me. They become more vivid, like I’m watching something in high definition. It’s not pretty. The porno stuff I can manage. I’ve seen enough creature porn in my young life to be able to run with the big dogs. Then comes the wave of snuff. Some of it is your rudimentary serial-killer schtick. Clowns with butcher knives, dolls coming alive. It’s like watching an eighties horror marathon on TV.
I smile and yawn. Chastity looks at me with raised eyebrows and I know I’ve made a mistake. Truly bizarre stuff starts happening. Monsters and ghouls seem to latch on to my face and shriek with schizophrenic voices, screaming so close to me that I think my eardrums are going to burst.
‘Sanity!’ I shout, before I know what’s happening. ‘SANITY, SANITY, SANITY!’
The images and sounds disappear abruptly to reveal Chastity blowing the end of her index finger like it’s a smoking six-gun. ‘Works every time,’ she says.
‘Don’t worry, man.’ Nom puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘Not many people can beat her at Sanity. She’s the queen.’
That night I lie awake on my mattress listening to the stone around me. I experience a deep, tingling sensation that takes loneliness and puts it through a wah-wah pedal so that it peaks and dips unpredictably in my chest. I’ve never been suicidal, but for the first time in my life I consider it. I want out. I want out of this goddamn place.
My dreams are thankfully nondescript. Teeth falling out, being late for buses and the occasional feeling of falling – the stuff that counts as banal for me these days. The next day reality is far, far worse than any dream. We’re digging pits under the fiery eye of the sun. Sweat drips into my eyes and I blink furiously to stop the stinging. Today’s lesson at Hexpoort is hard manual labour. The Shadow Boer walks up and down next to the pit like a drill sergeant.
‘This is some insane Mr Miyagi shit,’ the kid next to me says, sweat dripping down his dirt-smeared face. ‘Why the hell do we have to do this?’
‘I’d rather be waxing a car or painting a fen
ce,’ I agree as my spade bites into the dry earth.
‘I’m going to ask him.’
‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘Really, don’t.’
He ignores me. ‘When do we learn magic?’
The Shadow Boer looks at him. ‘Magic? Oh, so you are fokken wanting to be learning magic then, mah sunshine?’ He claps the kid on the shoulder. ‘Jussus, man, you should have just asked.’
The kid smiles, the Boer smiles back. And then knees him in the groin.
‘You are like the clay and I’m going to be moulding you,’ he says, making it sound almost sexual. A bearded man in khaki shorts and socks lasciviously showing how he will mould your soul is an awkward moment of note. Everyone looks down. ‘You want to learn magic, mah sunshines?’ he says. ‘Then you must be strong.’
The days in Hexpoort blend into a blur of hard labour, magic lessons, and drinking and drugs at Malpit. I don’t seem to be making progress with the magic, but my alcohol and drug tolerance has improved, and my body aches from hard physical exercise.
The carpal tunnel syndrome in my mouse hand has been replaced by calluses. Wiry muscle is beginning to build. My hunched keyboard shoulders are straightening out. My screen eyes are refocusing. It feels like I’m starting to live more in the physical world and less in my mind. I’m hating every second of it.
My finely tuned skills are atrophying. I’ve worked for years for the stamina and multitasking ability to watch two seasons of a series in one night while following the public destruction of a celebrity on social media and crowd-solving a terrorist attack on Reddit. I was a perfect interface between man and machine. Now I’m just becoming buff.
The nights are filled with deep feelings of emptiness. I grit my teeth and bear it, presumably out of the same insanely masochistic impulse that has me stopping myself from interfering in the politics of the school.
It’s five weeks after I first stepped through the Hexpoort gates when the Shadow Boer takes us to a field within the school boundaries. In it is a paintball-splotched fake town complete with junked cars with what look like real bullet holes in them. A metal frame on the side of the field holds dozens of black punching bags swaying in the breeze.
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