The Initiate

by James L. Cambias

  At a meeting of Theosophists in Brooklyn he was the youngest person in the room by twenty years, and the entire session was devoted to obscure political maneuverings among the club officers. At an Umbanda service not far from his apartment he was the only non-Brazilian present, and nobody spoke to him the whole time. In a grand apartment overlooking Central Park he listened to a very erudite lecture on the worship of the Peacock Angel. In a slightly seedier apartment in Hell’s Kitchen two weeks later he attended a Satanic Mass. He greeted the dawn on the autumn equinox with a group of “sky-clad” worshippers on the beach at Sandy Hook.

  Some were so blatantly fake they made him angry. One “psychic sensitive” did such a clumsy cold reading he stopped her halfway through and told her to stop embarrassing them both. A seminar on “personal alchemy” attracted some visitors in very expensive suits who listened very attentively when the speaker told them that a sufficiently advanced soul could indeed transmute lead into gold, and afterward all of them placed crisp new twenty-dollar bills into the donation basket. Sam dropped in a nickel.

  In a rented hall in the Hotel New Yorker a self-proclaimed “spirit talker” charged fifty dollars a head to let the audience watch her talk to the air. Sam stood patiently in line until he reached the front of the room. The spirit talker, an overweight middle-aged woman with glittery eye shadow, looked him over. “I sense great sadness,” she said. “You’ve lost someone close to you.”

  “My sister,” he said. He had no brother or sister that he knew of.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m getting an image. A woman, possibly younger or…”

  “We were twins,” he said.

  “Yes! Twins. You were very close. I’m getting a name, it could start with M, or possibly a vowel…”

  “Sarah,” he said, just to be mean.

  “Yes, Sarah,” said the medium without batting an eye. “I can feel her presence near you.”

  “Can she hear me?”

  “The spirits watch over us all the time,” she said, and he heard satisfied murmurs from the audience.

  “Sarah!” he called out. “Forgive me!” With no idea how to end this charade, he covered his face and sobbed, and let himself be politely shoved out of the way so the woman behind him could get her turn.

  * * *

  That December he tried his first magical operation. It was a fairly simple one: calling up a spirit of protection. The actual working was adapted from one in the Clavicula Solomonis, which Mr. Lucas had identified as holding a nugget of truth, modified by elements from the Picatrix and the Occult Philosophy of Agrippa. Preparations took most of the month, but on the night of the winter solstice Sam had everything ready in his room.

  The air was scented by aloe resin and cedarwood burning in a couple of jade bowls—the smoke detector, batteries removed, was in the refrigerator. The Third Pentacle of Jupiter drawn in cobalt ink covered most of the floor. Sam himself wore a linen tunic he had laboriously hand sewn, and held a wand cut from an oak branch as he chanted the formula invoking the power of Mendial, ruler of the thirty-third decan. The whole thing began at four in the morning, just as Jupiter rose behind the rooftops of the Bronx to the east.

  The hardest part of the whole ritual was overcoming the lurking sense that Sam was making a complete fool of himself. He read the phonetic transcription of the Hebrew formula aloud, but it just seemed like meaningless gabble. All his careful preparation and ritual materials suddenly looked like a lot of foolishness.

  Sam stopped, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. He focused on his memories. Of the ghost Mr. Lucas had called forth from a ring. Of the crow-headed Anzu. Of Alice and Tommy.

  He opened his eyes again, clear and intent. When he spoke it was loud and commanding. He willed the spirit to appear as he repeated the words, again and again.

  And then it did appear.

  Unlike the ghost of Willis Dean this was a vague shape, little more than a ripple in the air, but Sam could make out a head, eyes, arms—and nothing more. Below where its waist should be the thing trailed away into nothingness.

  Sam’s heart pounded with fear and excitement. He took another deep breath and spoke to it. “I command you, by Mendial, Lord of Power, to accompany me and guard my body from all harm. I bind you to this task by the Name Yiai for a year and a day. By Enlil I command you to obey.”

  Its voice was as vague and blurry as its appearance, and Sam realized it was a distorted version of his own. “By the Names I obey.”

  The thing moved toward Sam, who tensed, ready to fight or flee, but aside from a slight static-electricity feeling all over his skin, there was nothing. Was the spirit encasing him? He hadn’t expected that. He had imagined leading the thing around like a supernatural guard dog, not wearing it. It was disturbingly intimate, and Sam fought the urge to banish the spirit from his presence forever.

  Once it was all done, his body rebelled. He was exhausted and needed sleep. Cleaning up could wait until morning. He did dig out his spare anonymous burner phone and send a text message to the number Lucas had given him.

  “Did it! What now?”

  * * *

  His answer came four days later as he sat in the grand reading room of the New York Public Library, taking notes on a copy of Father Sinistrari’s Demoniality. Someone took the seat next to him, and after a moment Sam heard a raspy, cigarette-scented whisper. “You aren’t alone.”

  Sam looked over, keeping his face blank. A short, heavyset woman occupied the next seat. She might have been anywhere from forty to eighty, and the unnatural orange of her hair didn’t match the slight salt-and-pepper mustache at the corners of her mouth. But the eyes, watching Sam from behind rhinestone-studded avocado cat’s-eye glasses, were sharp and wise looking.

  “You’re here,” he said quietly.

  “You’ve got a friend around you,” she whispered back. “Most people can’t see it but I can. Who are you?”

  He hesitated. One thing Lucas had drilled into him was not to reveal his name. But if he told her the false name he was using, that would make him look like a naive poser. He needed another layer of alias. “Ace,” he said.

  She regarded him skeptically for a moment. “You look more like a deuce to me. I’m Sylvia. You’re interested in magic. How come?”

  “I’ve had some…experiences,” he said. “I’m looking for answers.”

  He closed his notebook, and as he did he noticed something odd. When he looked directly at Sylvia she seemed to be just a dumpy woman like fifty thousand others in Manhattan. But when he looked away, in his peripheral vision she wasn’t alone. There were vague shapes looming behind her, and small flitting presences around her.

  She glanced at the books on the table in front of him. “Most of this is crap, you know.”

  “Yes. I’m trying to pick out the bits that aren’t. I’ve been looking for a teacher, but all the ones I’ve met are fakes or crazies.”

  Sylvia almost smiled, then rummaged in her enormous mustard-yellow handbag and handed him a business card. He took it. Under a smudgy graphic of a rainbow and a cartoon cat wearing a mortarboard were the words:

  POST ACADEMY INSTRUCTION

  Private Tutoring

  There was no address or contact information.

  “How do I find you?” he asked.

  “You look like a smart guy. Figure it out.” She stood up—she wasn’t much taller standing than sitting—and headed for the stairs.

  Sam stared at the card. Was it some kind of magical guide? He closed his eyes and tried to feel any supernatural pull, but there was nothing. He looked at it again, then his eyes narrowed and he smiled.

  Chapter 3

  Four hours after meeting Sylvia, Sam arrived on foot at the corner of Post Avenue and Academy Street, at the far north end of Manhattan. Five- and six-story apartment buildings stretched away in every direction. He wandered around the intersection for a few minutes, then finally noticed a small sign on a steel gate at the top of some steps leading down t
o a basement door: “Tutoring,” it said, in faded purple Comic Sans lettering. He pressed the doorbell button under the sign, and after a brief wait the gate unlocked.

  Sam went down the first couple of steps, pulled the gate shut behind him and made sure it locked, then went the rest of the way down to a steel door with no external knob at all. It buzzed and popped open as he reached it, and he went inside.

  Past the metal door was a short corridor lit by buzzing fluorescent tubes, with worn linoleum on the floor and peeling images of clowns and balloons on the walls. Was this the right place? Probably not. Definitely not. Coming here had been a huge mistake. He felt like a fool. And what if someone found him here, unable to explain himself? He might get arrested, or worse.

  He was just about to turn around when he stopped and closed his eyes. Though he could see nothing, he could feel that he was not alone in the corridor. Something was in front of him, and the powerful feeling of anxiety was radiating from it like warmth from a bonfire.

  “Let me pass,” he said in a voice as steady and commanding as he could manage. “I was invited here. You have no power over me.”

  As soon as he spoke, the fear and doubt vanished, along with the sense of another presence. Sam was alone in an unattractive little corridor. He walked without hesitation to the green door at the end and opened it.

  “Not bad,” said Sylvia, sitting at a desk reading the Daily News. The room reeked of cigarettes and perfume. “But don’t start thinking you’re Mandrake the Magician yet. I’ve had six-year-olds here who could boss around the guardian in the hallway better than you.”

  “I’m ready to learn,” said Sam. “I don’t know what you charge, but—”

  “No charge,” she said. “I got demons on speed dial, what do I want money for? No, all I want is a promise: that you’ll do one thing I ask.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You owe me a favor, get it? All my students owe me one—or their parents do, which is better, really. Are you in?”

  “Yes. I’ll do one thing for you, whenever you ask.”

  She smiled. “Good. That’s one thing you’re gonna learn: It’s all about making deals. And you need to get a lot better at it, dummy! You just gave me a blank check. Not so smart.”

  Sylvia’s class for beginners had three other students: a pigtailed girl called Isabella who looked about ten, an intense boy in his early teens named Shimon, and a sullen girl of sixteen who said her name was MoonCat. Sam realized with some amusement that he was older than all his fellow students combined.

  Their studies typically began around ten in the morning. Sylvia didn’t insist on punctuality, but she didn’t wait for laggards, either. The four students sat in a dingy windowless classroom while Sylvia lectured without notes for two or three hours. She kept a cigarette in the corner of her mouth the whole time, so that by the time the morning session was finished everyone reeked of smoke. It reminded Sam of his Anchorage bar-going days as an Air Force E-4 at Elmendorf.

  In the afternoons they studied separately. Shimon went off back to Great Neck to be homeschooled in normal academic subjects, and MoonCat was picked up promptly at two by a silent man in sunglasses and a dark suit, who drove an armored Mercedes SUV. Sam alternated staying with Sylvia for extra instruction, or afternoons of study at the Columbia library. Isabella came and went as she pleased.

  Sylvia had to help Sam catch up with what the kids already knew. Mr. Lucas had already taught him some of it, but Sam didn’t want to let Sylvia know he had another source. Besides, the review was useful, and it was interesting to get a different perspective on the material.

  “It’s all about spirits,” she told him one afternoon as he sat by himself in the haze-filled classroom. “You’ll never shoot lightning from your hands, or any of that movie crapola. But you can command a spirit to call down lightning on someone, or make the wind elementals carry you through the air. They’ll even show you the way to hidden realms.”

  “How do you know which spirits do what?”

  “You just gotta know. Everybody collects names and formulas, and you can trade ’em around. I’ll give you a couple in a month or two. When you finally get good enough to call up one of the big-league demons, you can ask it for the names of lesser spirits.”

  “But there’s a price.”

  She grinned at that. “Yep. There’s always a price. The simple ones—like your invisible bodyguard—aren’t really smart enough to make bargains. They just do what you tell ’em. But the more powerful ones want something in return. You’ve gotta be real careful about what you offer, and what you agree to. And half the time you’re gonna be doing all this in Sumerian or Egyptian or some ancient language nobody speaks anymore.”

  “Why can’t we just use English?”

  Sylvia shrugged. “Some of them, you can. Some only speak French, or Tibetan, or whatever. It’s the same with the signs and materials—for some spirits you need a bronze dagger with Norse runes on it, for others you need a gold ankh and the blood of a white dove.” She looked at Samuel with her unsettlingly wise eyes, and pointed one coral-pink fingernail. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  He kept his face still and fought the sense of panic. “What am I thinking?” he asked her, croaking a bit because his throat was suddenly dry.

  “You’re thinking that you’re gonna use your modern, scientific mind to figure out the logical rules behind all this ancient crapola. I got news for you: Everybody tries that, and it never works. Isaac Newton couldn’t figure it out, and neither could Eliphas Levi. The spirits aren’t machines; they’re alive and they’ve got their own ways of doing things. Learn their ways and you can make ’em obey you. Try to get cute and they’ll mess you up good.”

  She lit a fresh cigarette and pointed at the astrological symbols on the whiteboard behind her. “Look at this stuff. You and I know that Mars is a big ball of gas and iron in space, right? There’s some kind of robot there right now, I think, driving around and picking up rocks. But for the spirits Mars is the source of masculine power, conflict, and courage. I could get all hippy-dippy and say their reality is just as true as ours, but that’s a lot of BS. Mars may not be the sign of blood and fire, but the spirits think it is, so you have to act like it’s the real deal if you want to make them do what you want.”

  * * *

  About a month after he began his studies with Sylvia, Sam arrived at the basement classroom to find a pair of visitors sitting at the back of the room. Both were grown men—one about Sam’s own age, slender and dark haired, the other a little older, shorter and thickset with a neatly trimmed gray beard. The bearded man wore a very expensive suit. Sam could sense spirits hovering about both men.

  Sylvia was lecturing about auspicious and inauspicious days for various operations, based on the combination of lunar phase, astrological sign, and day of the week. She merely nodded to Sam when he came in and took his seat, but the two men at the back of the room were suddenly more alert.

  After a few minutes the gray-bearded man spoke up. “Sylvia, I’d like to talk to your new student.”

  “Save it for after class,” she said, and continued with her lecture.

  “I didn’t come here just to—” began the older man, but his companion bent close and murmured something. The bearded man glared at his companion, but fell silent. For the rest of the class he alternated glaring at Sylvia and glaring at Sam. By a curious coincidence, Sylvia went on much longer than usual that day, so that it was well past two when she finally put down her dry-erase markers and drained the bottle of Fanta she’d been sipping from.

  Shimon hurried out with a nervous backward glance. MoonCat stayed in her seat and began checking her phone. Isabella also stayed in her seat, watching everyone like a spectator at a play.

  “All right, who are you?” asked the bearded man, looming over Sam, who was still sitting at his desk.

  “My friends call me Ace,” Sam answered. That brought a wry chuckle from Sylvia. “Who are you?”


  “I am Hei Feng,” he answered. “And I want someone to explain to me what this outsider is doing here, learning our secrets.” He turned to face Sylvia. “Why wasn’t I informed?”

  She shrugged and gestured at the slim dark-haired man with her cigarette. “I cleared it with Moreno.”

  “You should have consulted me first. Now I have to decide what to do with him.”

  “He’s got the gift,” said Sylvia. “He’s one of us.”

  “Being someone’s bastard grandson doesn’t make him anything except a curiosity. Teaching him how to use the talent makes him a problem.” Hei Feng turned to Moreno. “Why did you permit this?”

  “When Sylvia spotted him he’d already called up and bound one of the lesser hafaza spirits for protection. I thought it would be dangerous to have a practitioner outside our control.”

  “You could have solved the problem permanently by dropping him into the Hudson.”

  “Uh, excuse me,” said Sam. “Would one of you explain why this guy wants to kill me?”

  The man named Moreno turned to Sam. “You can do magic. That makes you dangerous. Sylvia and I think the wisest course is to bring you into the society of people who know about magic. Mr. Feng thinks it would be simpler to get rid of you.”

  “Don’t I get a vote?”

  Moreno shook his head, then turned back to Hei Feng. “We can’t afford to waste him. He’s healthy, sane—just expanding the gene pool is a good reason to keep him around. Do you have any children?” he asked Sam.

  His nervousness vanished, completely annihilated by the stab of cold fury Sam felt at Moreno’s question. “Not that I’m aware of,” he said, keeping it light. “I’m waiting for Sylvia to teach me how to make love potions.”

  “I think he’s nice,” said Isabella, the little girl in pigtails who had been watching the whole conversation. “I think you should let him join.”