by J. P. Sloan
Lake of fire? No. Spiritual slavery to the things which are older than Man, the Earth, and God Himself? Quite possible.
And now I was aware of certain immediate conditions of soul mongering. Moving shadows, as Brandt put it. He was haunted by them, always reminding him of his impending fate.
And they were haunting Carmen, now. In one week her soul contract would mature, and her fate would fall into the hands of whatever market existed for human souls. Perhaps it was a better fate than Brandt’s. He had sent his soul into the hereafter while it was still in escrow. Osterhaus had warned me about improper termination of contracts. His soul was likely lost to the Void, drifting in the unknowable depths between the world of the living, and the world of the dead.
The realm of the Dark Choir.
Mercy would dictate that something would prey upon his soul sooner than later. Centuries of hopeless, formless drifting would be as close to the Christian Hell as I care to admit to believing in.
I slept in Wednesday morning longer than I had intended. I had barely managed to heat up a bagel when a white van pulled up in front of the house. I watched as a large Greek man consulted a clipboard and stepped up to the stoop.
I opened the door, balancing a bagel on top of my coffee mug, and watched as he pulled his hat off of a colossal mop of curly black hair. I didn’t recognize his face, but the moment he spoke, I recognized his voice.
“Mister Lake, sir? Andreas Tatopoulis.”
I stuffed my bagel into my mouth and held out my hand.
“Hi, how are you?” I muffled around the bagel.
“Very well, sir.” He snapped his clipboard out in front of him and ran a hand down a column of figures. “I have the materials prepared, and my first crew is already at the unit. All I need is your signature for the work order, and we can begin.”
I blinked at him for a moment, chewing the bagel.
“I don’t remember scheduling―”
“Oh, I am sorry. I received a deposit, and understood the city inspection would be Friday.”
I looked down at his clipboard at the deposit amount. “Who paid you a deposit?”
He cocked his head and lifted a thick Greek eyebrow. “It was not you?”
“No. At least, I don’t think it was.”
He rifled through his stack of papers clipped to the board, his face pinched in confusion. “Ah,” he coughed, pulling out a photocopy of a check. I had to give it to Tatopoulis, he was organized. “Here is the check. Julian Bright.”
I coughed on my bagel and took a long sip of coffee.
“No shit,” I mumbled.
“None, sir.”
I grinned and set my coffee and bagel down on the end table in the foyer, and reached for the clipboard. I signed the work order and gave Tatopoulis a chuck to the shoulder.
“Okay, you’re good to go, Andreas.”
He smiled broadly and gathered himself.
“How’s the wife and kids,” I called out from the door as he reached his van.
“They are trying to kill me,” he shouted with a grin. “I think I’ll let them!”
I waved as Tatopoulis drove down Amity toward the rental units. Abe would be happy to have his porch fixed, to be sure. Hell, I’d be happy to get beyond this.
All of this.
And now I owed Bright. I had the feeling he would be calling me soon with another job for Sullivan.
Before I could devote any energy to my legitimate work, I had to get back to the bastardy I was committed to on behalf of Osterhaus.
Brandt was a lost cause. I had to find someone else. I had to get analytical about this. If Brandt did, in fact, teach me anything, it was that I wouldn’t accept a person’s situation at face value. I also couldn’t afford myself a great deal of time to vetting a client. I had to rapidly become better at this than Osterhaus if I was going to save Carmen’s soul.
I sat down to my writing desk and reviewed the list of souls. The mother of the bullied girl was at the top of my list, but I wasn’t feeling it. I skimmed down to the next name.
Sarah Camp.
I had written a note next to her name that said, Sounds young? Her voice message was very brief, not leaving any real details about her situation. But I seemed to remember that she sounded troubled. That of itself was nothing new, but at this point, I was willing to grasp at anything.
I dialed her phone number.
“Hello?” her husky, young voice answered.
“Sarah Camp?”
“Yeah?”
“My name is Dorian Lake.”
“Oh, thank God!”
“Uh…”
“I can’t believe you called me back. I thought maybe I pissed you off or something.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I hear you’re serious.”
I looked over at my entertainment center, and the line of Woody Allen DVD’s resting just beneath the player.
“Well, I don’t know if serious is the term I would use to describe―”
“I’m sorry. I mean that, like, you’re for real.”
I honestly couldn’t get a good read on this girl.
“Well, I’m real, and I’m interested in your situation. How can I help you?”
She released a dramatic sigh and answered, “It’s my coven.”
Oh, Jesus kissing Mary, she was a Wiccan.
“Coven, huh?”
“See, I thought you’d look down on me for that.”
After a pause, I realized she was waiting for some kind of answer. “I’m not here to judge, Miss Camp.”
“So, our coven meets outside of Easton, right? And we have a strict thirteen member limit.”
Of course they did.
“Then comes Aradia,” she continued with a snarl. “She’s all ‘I’m a Third Degree Temple of Isis Acolyte’ and starts talking to the High Priestess like she’s been in the coven since it started.”
“This Aradia inserted herself into your group?”
“Yeah. Everyone thought she was the second coming of the Lady. But we had a full count, so they took a vote on who they were going to kick out.”
“I’m guessing you came out on the losing side of this vote?”
“It’s not fair, Mister Lake. I always bring my own candles and incense. I always loan everyone my books. Most of them never get returned. I was Coven before more than half of those bitches.”
As she whined to me, I mulled over the situation.
“So you want me to help you get even?”
“Well, I mean, I wasn’t sure if you would even return my call. But, yeah. I mean, yeah.”
“Out of curiosity, who referred you to me?”
“An old friend of mine from a study group. She said you helped her with her boyfriend.”
“That’s more than half of my client base.”
“Jeanette Moran?”
I tried to remember Jeanette Moran, but nothing came to me.
Sarah continued, “He was hitting her. But she couldn’t do anything. I mean, the cops couldn’t do anything. You took care of it.”
“Probably a binding hex.”
“See? You’re the real thing.”
Here it was. The salient issue between people in my line of study and people like Sarah Camp. They romanticized what they called magic, which was little more than the façade of Judeo-Christian morality with black lace window dressing. Everything they knew, or wanted to know, was found in a half-century’s worth of bookstore paperbacks and half a million Internet sites.
Everything I knew was only one tiny fraction of the corpus of human mysticism gathered by those who dared to stand in the breach between the worlds and force it to conform to their will. If any of my trade mechanics were found in a book, you sure as hell wouldn’t find it at the mall.
Which told me everything I needed to know about Sarah Camp.
And how to pitch Osterhaus to her.
“You say ‘real thing’ like you’ve never done magic, Sarah.”
She answ
ered with silence.
I continued, “What tradition is your coven, if I might ask?”
“The Cypress Way.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Well, uh, we kind of do what we feel like. I mean, we research everything, of course.”
“You mean ‘they’.”
“Right.”
“How old is your tradition?”
“The coven is about six years old.”
“I meant the trad, Sarah.”
“The trad… we invented it. I mean they invented it.”
“Oh.”
I let the “oh” sit on the line for a while as she squirmed. I needed her to feel inadequate. Hopelessly inadequate.
“Tell me about binding hexes,” she muttered.
“Simple. Elementary, actually. I create a karmic restriction from activity.”
“How?”
“A combination of correspondence actualization and certain claviculae of the new Roman period. It’s a matter of weakening the barriers between the physical plane of existence and the central infraluminous plane of the spirit.”
It was all bullshit, but damn, it sounded convincing. It was my experience that Wiccans get off on SAT words.
“Would a binding hex work for me?”
“What do you want to bind, Sarah?”
“Those bitches.”
“Bind them from what? A binding hex places restrictions on their benefits from their relationships and affinities, not on their lives.”
“What would you recommend, then?”
“What is it you’re wanting?”
“I want to―”
“Get even?”
She didn’t respond. Wiccans hate revenge. They have the same sense of dread a pacifist would have about doing harm, thanks to the Wiccan Rede. “An ye harm none, do what ye will.” It was their greatest myth, and their heaviest shackle.
“I don’t―”
“Please, Sarah. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve had my hands in the destinies of the greatest practitioners on the Eastern seaboard. They all come to me.”
“Okay.”
“So don’t jerk me around. You want revenge. Right? You want them to regret letting you go.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”
“First of all, you have to believe it.”
“What?”
“You want them to suffer.”
“No, I don’t. I just want them to want me back.”
“God damn it, Sarah!” I bellowed, hoping I wasn’t pushing her too hard. “Don’t waste my time, here. Do you want them to take you back? Or do you want to show them what real magic is?”
“Real magic?”
“Imagine that, right? You lay them out with a real curse. Not a hex. Not a charm. But something hard core, and inescapably supernatural. How often have they sat around in a circle trying to light a candle with their brains? Don’t answer that question. I know. It’s embarrassing, isn’t it?”
I heard a sniffle, and felt a twinge in my gut. I didn’t want to make her cry. But I was running out of time, and I was either pushing her as far as possible from Netherwork, or I was about to end this business with Osterhaus for good.
“They’re posers,” she spat. “They don’t do anything but hate people.”
“Sounds pathetic.”
“They are.”
We sat in silence for a moment. She was on the verge.
“Can you teach me, Mister Lake?”
“No. I can’t. Either you have it or you don’t.”
She released some kind of impatient whimper. I knew I had her at that point.
“But,” I continued, “there are other options.”
“What? Tell me?”
“There are shortcuts. No one in those New Age bookstore rags wants to admit it, but there are ways to grab the brass ring. There’s a cost, but it is possible.”
“I want to know.”
“I know you do. But that’s not the question. The question is, are you prepared to pay the price?”
“Well, what’s the price? I can get money.”
“God, Sarah. No. Just, no. I’m not talking money. I don’t want your money. You think you can buy true power? You can’t. If you could, history would be written by the practitioners.”
“So, what then?”
Here it was.
“Your soul, Sarah. The price is your soul.”
I leaned back in my chair and watched a young woman walk her terrier down Amity while Sarah soaked in the gravity of the statement.
“What does that mean, exactly?”
I had her. If she had any compunction at all, she would have hung up on me. No. She was desperate to accomplish one thing in her life: ruin these girls.
“It means you have to sell your soul to the source of true power.”
“What’s the source?”
“I think you know.”
“The Devil?”
I let myself laugh. It was a little more earnest than I intended, but it seemed to work.
“Sarah, there is no Devil. There is, however, an entire universe of beings older than our feeble explanation of Reality. They have no respect for the greatest things we have accomplished, but they are interested in our souls. They know what exists beyond death, and they seem to want our souls for their purposes. They have involved themselves in the affairs of mankind since our inception, and from time to time, man has negotiated with them.”
“Oh my God, that is so cool.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s deadly serious, Sarah. If you want to go down this path, I can lead you to the gate. But I cannot take you there. It’s a journey you will have to take alone.”
“Please!”
“What?”
“I want it. Please, oh God, you have no idea!”
I took a deep breath and stood up. Something about her tone alarmed me. There was an uncomfortable desperation to her words. Not like Brandt’s. Something more fragile. I knew what I was doing, and I thought I had reconciled myself to it. But I felt a pang as I walked past a mirror and spotted my reflection.
“Mister Lake?”
“I can’t do it, but I know someone who can. His name is Neil Osterhaus.”
“Okay?”
“Can you get to Baltimore?”
“Yeah, I have a car.”
Thank God.
“When can you make the trip?”
“Well, I have to get to work in, like, two hours.”
“Do you work tomorrow?”
“Yeah. Don’t think I can get across the Bay Bridge before noon. Can we do this on the weekend?”
No good. My time was running low, and I couldn’t wait.
“What do you do for a living, Sarah?”
“Uh… I work at Penney’s.”
“Retail?”
“Yeah.”
“You stand on your feet and sell clothes.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just, you have an opportunity to make a bargain with the underlying forces of death and life, and you’re worrying about cardigans and underwires. That’s fine. In fact, I needed to know that.”
“Wait,” she sputtered in a panic.
“Thank you for your time.”
“Mister Lake, wait!”
“Yes?”
“Where do I go? I’ll be there tomorrow morning. Where do I go?”
I closed my eyes. I truly felt like a piece of shit, but I couldn’t stop now. I gave her a time to meet me at the café on the corner, and I would deliver her to Osterhaus personally. This was a young girl who barely had a chance to experience life. And I was ready to deliver her into the hands of a predator of souls.
Damnation. Eternal. Absolute.
I needed a God damned drink.
was tempted to move inside the café as a stiff, chilly breeze gusted down Fayette Street. But I didn’t want to miss Sarah Camp was she pulled up, and I wasn’t feeling a hundred perc
ent. I had a crappy night’s sleep. My stomach churned as I nursed my cappuccino. My entire phone conversation with Sarah seemed to flow so easily. Too easily, perhaps. I had summoned up some seriously dark aggression to get what I wanted, and by the light of day, I wasn’t at all comfortable with the turn I had taken.
I flipped up the collar of my jacket as I watched a Honda Civic pull into an illegal parking space across the street. A young woman stepped out of the car. She wore a pair of khaki cargo pants and a smart button-up shirt that was obviously a couple sizes smaller than any sensible taste of fashion would dictate. Her hair was black, and her skin was pasty white. Eyeliner pulled the corners of her eyes up at angles, just enough to be noticeable, but subtle enough not to get fired from JCPenney.
This had to be Sarah.
I lifted my mug as she wandered toward the café with her head slung low over her broad shoulders. Her eyes centered on me, and she stopped in the middle of the street. Thankfully, she hustled forward before a Chevy truck had to deal with her. She wound her way around the wrought-iron balusters separating the seating from the sidewalk, and stood in front of me with her hands clasped in front of her.
“Mister Lake?”
“Hi, Sarah.”
She stood silently waiting for some kind of signal from me. It was unspeakably awkward. I finally motioned at the seat across the table, and she sat down with a snappy verve.
“Want some coffee?” I asked, hoping to diffuse the mix of anxiety and self-hatred filling my chest.
She shook her head and sat with crossed legs and hands.
“Listen,” I stated, through a heavy breath, “yesterday I was kind of hard on you on the phone. That’s not really me, so I wanted to set things square before we continue.”
She tilted her head, eyes wide and receptive. Trusting.
That was it. The reason I felt so much heartburn over this. She trusted me.
“I want you to know there are options. Study. Long, hard, boring-ass study. It’s not impossible, especially with the right teacher.”
Her eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips.
I continued, “You know, they say the best revenge is to live well. Maybe you could keep working. Put yourself through school. Land your dream job, and by the time you’re forty, you’ll be running some company and those bitches in your coven will be trailer park divorcees still trying to catch fairies in a cage.”
