“Andromeda, right?” he said, just as Jesus Truck had said before him. He lit a cigarette, but he held it in a kind of girly way, which might have been part of the style too, for all she knew. He said his name was Byron, and then seemed to wait expectantly, as though the revelation were worthy of comment.
But Andromeda Klein couldn’t think of anything to say.
She was staring at his T-shirt, because beneath the tie it looked like it said CHORONZON. The raving, terrifying Dweller in the Abyss known as 333, denizen of the Tenth Aethyr referred to as ZAX? “Yes,” Altiverse AK’s thought waves vibrated back to Andromeda, “that’s the one.” Dr. Dee associated him with the serpent in the Garden of Eden; Crowley had evoked, wrestled, and finally vanquished him in the desert. “Meaningless but malignant,” in Crowley’s words, “first and deadliest of all the powers of Evil.” The scene was almost a perfect mirrored reversal of the Jesus Truck drama, with the Big Ch standing in for the Big J.
“Choronzon,” she said, aspirating the “ch.”
“Johnson,” he said, though what he clearly meant to say was an inaccurate correction of her own pronunciation. “Do you know them?”
Them?
“They kind of rule.”
“It’s the name of one of those rock bands,” said Altiverse AK, but Andromeda had already figured it out. So the shirt was from a rock band that had named themselves Choronzon, which was either kind of interesting or rather stupid, depending on how you chose to look at it.
“They’re coyotes,” he continued. “You know? I hear you’re interested in my geek.”
“What?” She pulled her hair back from her ear. “No. Wait, did you just say ‘mageek’?” Magic?
He said that yes, that is how “mageekians” say magic-with-a-k, to distinguish it from what is done in stage magic tricks. Either that or “may-jick.”
Of course, she was very familiar with Crowley’s reasons for adopting the archaic spelling of magic, but those pronunciations were asinine. “Coyotes” must have been Chaotes, though in fairness, it had to be admitted she had no idea how this word, which Chaos Magick people sometimes used to describe themselves, was actually pronounced. As a Hermeticist and as an Agrippan and as an A.E.-ian—that is, as a traditionalist—she tended to be skeptical about the coyotes’ shortcuts, though she had adopted some of their texts and practices, particularly the sigilization techniques, though there was, of course, solid ground in Agrippa for sigil reduction.
But: mageekians! Please. He went on to mention Chaos “mageek,” Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, wicca, Crowley, and even Thelema, demonstrating a familiarity with the terms but a lack of real understanding of the subjects. Andromeda could not remember the last time she had heard so many wrongly pronounced words in a single sentence.
She reached three conclusions in that moment: one, she could not possibly date this idiot, if there had ever been any doubt, not even in theory; two, she was from that point forward never, ever, going to spell magic with a k again.
Altiverse AK articulated the third, and it was totally right: the Chaos current was dead.
Self-professed experts and loudmouths claiming to have cornered the market on the truth are plentiful in every science. But as the occult sciences deal primarily in secrets and hidden truths concerning realms beyond the senses, and in meanings within meanings, often protected by multiple layers of blinds, it can be difficult to know whether a given occultist, whatever his credentials, really has any idea what he’s talking about. Yet for what it’s worth, it is a pretty safe assumption that anyone who mispronounces Crowley’s name probably does not. Andromeda, whose knowledge of most everything proceeded entirely from silent reading and whose defective hearing had made her acutely aware of the importance of correct pronunciation and of the implications of getting it wrong, was grateful that the mage himself had provided a clear, definitive answer in a bit of wry verse: the name rhymes with holy rather than foully. Opinions on the Master Therion might well vary widely, but anyone who did not know this had clearly not bothered to read very far into the material, and had never spoken to anyone who had.
Girls’ Jeans, the emo mageekian in Rosalie van Genuchten’s kitchen, in fact rhymed the first name with keester and the surname with Rand McNally. He was clearly trying to impress her with his knowledge and familiarity with this and other random bits of ouijanesse, but practically everything he said was mistaken in some respect. Apparently, a man named Jamie, the singer of a rock group who knew his dad, had lived in Aleester Crally’s mansion in Ireland, where Crally’s coven, the Golden Dawn, used to do Satanic rituals and record rock-and-roll albums…. It was as though he had studied for a quiz and somehow managed to hit the main points but get all the answers just a bit wrong. She awarded it a generous D-minus with a See me after class.
Andromeda didn’t know anything about rock music, and couldn’t tell a black sabbath from a green day or a red hot chili pepper, but she was of course reasonably well informed when it came to the vagaries of occultism and she did know this: that the Golden Dawn was not a “coven;” that Crowley certainly was not a Satanist; and that the name of the singer who had briefly owned Boleskine House in Scotland, not Ireland, was Led Zeppelin. And it was a pretty safe bet that Girls’ Jeans’s dad didn’t really know him.
“Amy said you were bacon. You are bacon, at least, right?”
“What?” It sounded sexy, maybe a bit rude. But no, he meant to say “pagan,” another perfectly good term muddied up and drained of meaning by all the wicker people. In truth, she was not. She was, rather, anything that she judged to be useful at any given time for the required task. She was a scientist. She was an Agrippan. She was, like her father, Nothing. Or she could even strobe between Jewish and Spinach U-turn. She was a teenage occultist, rather than a “teenage witch,” as Rosalie had sarcastically described her. And she was, above all, a girl in need of another swallow of Christmas trees. Or maybe she was bacon after all.
“Mr. Crowley,” sang Byron the emogeekian in an unearthly, unpleasant voice, wiggling his fingers in front of his face, immortalizing the mispronunciation in song.
“Die Goldene Dämmerung …,” she began, taking a swallow. Then, giving up, she said: “It’s Crowley. Crowley. Rhymes with holy.”
If Andromeda had ever wondered whether it was possible for a short person to look down on a taller person, she had her answer. The emo Chaos mageekian’s look was pure condescension.
“Okay, Crowley, I got it,” he said, exaggerating the “oh” sound and raising his eyebrows, as though she had said something ridiculously petty and he didn’t want to set her off so it was better just to humor her. She got that from the mom constantly, and it was one of her four most hated mom things. She felt that he might have patted her on the head, had he been able to reach it from his slouching, inferior position.
He touched her shoulder. She jumped back like she had been shocked. It was only maybe the fourth or fifth time ever that anyone had touched her in some form of the “Come on, baby” spirit, and that was something you were generally supposed to like. She looked at him with the face you make after you drop a piece of expensive glassware that belongs to somebody else.
“Don’t be that way,” said the mageekian. “Come on, I’ve never met a chick who knew anything about Shub-Niggurath.”
This was because earlier in the conversation, they had been discussing H. P. Lovecraft and the Necronomicon and the Cthulhu mythos and the Deep Old Ones. The band on the T-shirt, Choronzon, had a song about Shub-Niggurath, he claimed, and they conjured Cthulhu at their performances. Well, she very much doubted that. Waking Cthulhu was something you could pretty much do only once, and afterward those in attendance wouldn’t be in any condition to stand around in kitchens clumsily hitting on ectomorphs.
“The Goat with a Thousand Young,” she said. That was Shub-Niggurath’s well-known epithet.
“Yeah, that’s right, that’s the song.” He sang “The Goat with a Thousand Young” a couple of times, looking a
t her like he expected her to join in. It was, as far she could tell, a single note, and she didn’t find it too pleasant.
Andromeda Klein had never, that she knew of, been called a “chick” by anyone ever in her life. Under other circumstances she might have enjoyed it. She had been known to fantasize, idly, about an alternate world where anyone, anywhere, would put her in such a category. If St. Steve had ever allowed his choice of words to communicate this level of appreciation of her attractiveness or broad acceptability as a female, her spirit would have quickly risen to a point just shy of over the moon.
But as for Byron the Emo Mageekian: he was too short, wore girls’ pants, and couldn’t pronounce Crowley. In addition, he seemed to have acquired most of his esoteric knowledge from rock bands, comic books, computer games, and the Internet, and yet somehow he was still very full of himself. Maybe it was wrong, but she doubted she could ever be attracted to someone dumber than her.
Never ever would I ever, she said to herself. He had his arm around her shoulder now, which had to be a bit uncomfortable for him, as he had to stretch up as if he were holding on to the upper bar of a bus. Okay, maybe not quite that much.
He was babbling about how his band was going to get a manager and perhaps do some recording in a studio.
“My dad works in a recording—” She blurted it out, realizing at around the word works that she shouldn’t say anything about the dad’s being a sound engineer if she ever wanted to get rid of this guy, and managed to stop herself three words later. But the emogeekian was only pretending to listen to her anyway, and it didn’t register. He was describing his band’s “sound” and “influences,” not a one of which was at all familiar to her.
She noticed he had a pretty unappealing smell. He also had a scraggly, wispy growth of adolescent near-beard on the underside of his chin. Yet another thing he had was a surprisingly Shub-Niggurath-focused worldview, considering the fact—nearly as nauseating as the “beard”—that he appeared to be completely unfamiliar with the actual text of Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.”
Rosalie van Genuchten strikes again. At least Jesus Truck read the real Bible.
“The thing you should say,” said Altiverse AK, popping in suddenly, eager to help out, “is: ‘I’m sorry, but I am in love with someone who you could never possibly measure up to. It is a long and tragic story that I’d rather not get into.’” But she couldn’t say that, true as it was. She twisted away and sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and he looked hurt.
“I have a question for you,” she said.
He said he was all ears. That? AAK pointed out, was more or less true—those ugly stretched lobes, right? To be honest, though, they weren’t all that bad.
She looked at him intently.
“Do you have a library card?”
“That wasn’t what I expected you to say,” said the emogeekian. “Oh, right, because you’re Library Girl. You’re carding me! Library police …” But he pulled out his wallet and dug out a Santa Carla County library card. “All correct and legal, see? I am a solid citizen. The joys of bleeding.” Reading, he had meant to say.
“If you come by the Clearview Park library tomorrow after four,” she said, “I can show you some books you might like to check out. On Shub-Niggurath, and, uh, mageek and such.” There was a nice copy of Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” and Others still on the shelves waiting to be stolen by the “Friends” of the Library that would be just perfect for him. And maybe even something about Mr. Zeppelin—she could maybe look that up too.
Ask him if he can read, said AAK in a stage whisper, but Andromeda mentally shushed it.
The emogeekian smiled broadly, though, and made his finger into a gun and shot her with it.
“It’s a date,” he said, putting on what looked like a little painter’s cap and flipping his skateboard up from the floor into his hand.
Oh, gods. But it was the perfect opportunity for a less-than-totally awkward exit.
She was on her way back downstairs, and she could just barely hear the wheels of a skateboard clattering on the walkway, and then she heard a car start up—he skateboarded to his car?
Then she remembered the ice and returned to the kitchen for it before heading back down to the basement. She realized that, with the exception of “bacon” and “bleeding,” she hadn’t misheard much in the conversation, which was quite unusual. In part, AAK pointed out, it was because most of what he had to say was completely predictable. But also, he took up the slack by mispronouncing things to begin with, eliminating the middleman, in effect, skipping the disorganized collagen entirely. It saved quite a bit of time, and she didn’t have to say “What?” nearly as often as she usually did. In other words, he had his good point.
The lexicon now included mageek and emogeekian as well as bacon, that was certain.
x.
Rosalie van Genuchten pressed Pause on the remote when Andromeda walked in, ignoring a couple of overlapping groans from the basketball boy and one of the Thing’s heads.
The door had been unlocked for her as they’d heard her coming down the stairs. The zombie-killing video-game tournament had come to an end. The lights were all out, and it was nearly dark in the room. They had moved the coffee table out of the way of the television. The Thing with Two Heads, Amy the Wicker Girl, and the basketball boy were squeezed onto the couch, and everyone else was sitting on the floor, watching a movie on the TV, passing around Rosalie’s bong. Rosalie herself was seated on the floor with her back against the Thing’s legs, her open laptop on her lap facing outward toward the TV screen.
Rosalie swiveled to face her. Charles Iskiw’s face was still in the video chat window of the laptop; his voice, coming from the laptop’s tinny speakers, said “Yo,” and he winked. It was the first time Andromeda had ever seen anyone watch a movie from a computer. It was like two machines watching each other. This was the future.
“Where’s Brian?” said Rosalie.
“It’s Byron,” said Andromeda.
“Yeah, Rosalie, it’s Byron!” said Amy the Wicker Girl. Charles Iskiw snickered from the screen.
“Brian, Byron,” said Rosalie. “Okay, Byron, then. Cute-she’s defending his honor.”
“You be good to my boy Byron,” said Charles’s voice, crackling through the laptop speakers. “He’s good people.”
“Mkay …,” said Andromeda tentatively. Man, it was weird talking to a flat-screen head in someone else’s lap facing out; far weirder, for some reason, than talking to someone’s flat-screen head in your own lap facing inward. “He had to go.”
Charles, Rosalie, and Amy the Wicker Girl were the ones who groaned, indicating, possibly, that they, and only they, had been the coconspirators.
“Scared another one away,” said Rosalie, shaking her head and making a sad, lower-lip pout face, but motioning Andromeda over to sit next to her in front of the couch. “I’m just kidding.” She pushed Play and turned back to the movie. “It’s Chisel Two,” she whispered to Andromeda. “Are you excited?”
Andromeda was, perhaps, just a bit excited. Chisel II had just come out on DVD.
Charles’s whispered voice buzzed from the laptop, and Rosalie pulled Andromeda’s head down near the speakers so she could hear what he was saying, and she caught quite a bit of it because it was all treble tones.
“Tommy just closed the store,” whispered Charles’s buzzy voice, explaining the plot of the film so far, “and he’s following this kid’s family to the zoo….”
Chisel II was one of a series of horror movies Rosalie’s crowd had been following for years, about a slow-witted psycho killer named Tommy Frederic who works in a hardware store and kills the customers with their own tools when they buy them from the store. Before Chisel II there had been Hammer and Screwdriver, and Wrench I, Wrench II, and Wrench III, though the entire Wrench trilogy had all gone straight to DVD and wasn’t up to the standard of the others. Chisel, the first in the series, was g
enerally regarded as the best one.
Andromeda waved the bong away each time it reached her. Weed gave her headaches.
“Pussy,” whispered Rosalie, the consummate hostess, through the bubbles. “You’re breathing my exhaust anyway.” And it was true. Andromeda was starting to feel some pain in the approximate location of her pineal gland. The Thing’s two heads were loudly making out with each other. Thank Horus Andromeda still had her ice-watered mug of Christmas trees resting between her feet, there if she needed it.
Chisel had been Daisy’s favorite movie, which made it a little sad that she wasn’t around to see Chisel II. Or maybe, she was? Andromeda could smell Daisy, all right, despite the weed and the gin and all the other people in the room, but that could be explained, possibly, by all of Daisy’s old things she had brought in with her. She could smell the damp wig all the way from the corner, and the vinyl coat was also hanging where she’d left it. Andromeda thought about Daisy’s old Gnome School Little One in her book bag, imagined it being inhabited by the gathering Daisy spirit and scrambling up over all the books and other things in the bag, pulling open the zipper from the inside just enough to pop its head through, and watching the movie that way. Why not, if Charles could watch the movie through the computer’s camera eye?
Andromeda looked over and saw that her book bag wasn’t against the wall where she had left it. The others must have moved it when they’d rearranged the furniture for the home theater setup, she thought. She couldn’t very well paw around for it in the dark, and she felt stupid asking about it, but there were important things in there, not even counting Daisy’s Little One. She worried about her bag all through the movie, to the degree that she wasn’t able to enjoy it all that much, even though there was a clever twist near the end where one of Tommy Frederic’s victims used copper wire from the hardware store to fashion a crude chisel-deflecting suit of armor under her clothes. You could tell, though, that it wasn’t going to work. The girl had too many curves and too much surface area, and Tommy Frederic was very handy with a chisel. If she had been slight and aerodynamic like Andromeda, complete copper wire coverage would have been much less of a problem.
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