Traumaturgy
TW::: Suicide. Rape. Mental Health Issues:::
How are you supposed to tell when a witch is off her meds? What separates the ghosts from the hallucinations, the telepathy from the schizophrenia, the ritual from the pathological? How are we to weed the creeping delusions from reality, when in reality they converse freely with Goddesses of Moon, Flame, and War?
More importantly how, for fuck's sakes, is anyone supposed to know, until it's much too late, that the end of the world sits ready on the lips of a psychotic breakdown?
These were the questions Paul had to ask himself about his woman - Anne Nihilate - and, after finding my number in her phone, was
now asking me in a barrage of texts.
As for me? I only had one question: What was I supposed to do about it?
Don't get me wrong I had zero beef with either him nor Anne. Far from it. Anne was an Agent, an 'outside consultant' for Hex, the occult app for freelance mages looking for a side hustle in the gig economy. As such we got partnered up on a few assignments. Prior to that I knew her peripherally from the old Chamber/688 Goth Scene. We befriended each other on social media without ever interacting beyond liking stray memes.
Sensing I was being roped into something I texted Paul that we worked together and sure I know Anne, but I didn't 'know' Anne.
Certainly not well enough to RSVP to a psychotic breakdown jacked up on ancient curses and urban thaumaturgy. Besides, I'm still in limbo pending my psych eval and until then my agent status with Hex has been revoked. Just like in the cop movies - I've had to turn in my pentacle and wand to the Secret Chief.
Silence. No reply. I start to feel bad. Unwilling to help I do the opposite - give advice unasked. I tell Paul to call one of her friends, or family, or coven sisters.
Nada, after a car wreck in the 80s, Anne's family consists strictly of a father scraping by on a disability check, Fox News, and a decades old pain killer habit. She hasn't had contact with him since enlisting in the Corps at 18. As far as he was concerned she died in the crash with mom and her older sister. As for her social circle they comprised normies exclusive (including Paul). Three of her closest friends knew she was a witch (albeit they figured it meant crystals and sage and little else). Paul didn't have to ask for their help. Each reached out to her on their own. For their efforts each became complicit, in Anne's mind, of participating in a grand conspiracy to steal her magick. Each were branded as traitors and deep-cover agents of a vague and unnamed enemy lurking on the edge of reality. She blew up their phones, from dusk to dawn, with accusations that segued into rambling manifestos. She posted all their secrets on social media. She hid in her room and deleted every picture of them in her phone and tore up any photographs she had framed. Still her friends reached out to her, persistent, with love for her and Paul both.
So Anne turned it up a notch.
The first of Anne's friends found herself unable to sleep longer than an hour before waking in the middle of the night screaming. This friend had suggested to Anne that she try getting some rest, so Anne gave her some fucking 'empathy' instead. Now that she knew what dreams visit witches, she wouldn't be so quick in the future to make suggestions about getting some shut-eye.
The second of Anne's friends, in a moment of exhausted honesty, told her she was scaring her. Anne said nothing and instead disappeared into the basement to begin chanting. An hour later she was still at it and her friend went home fed up. When she woke up the next morning and looked in the mirror what she saw was the underbelly of a giant furry spider where her face should be.
She's seen it every morning when she wakes for the last three days.
Now she knew what it was like to be scary.
As for the third friend - she disappeared after committing the sin of not returning a text message after a long day and a sick child.
Fuck, I light a cigarette between pounding words into the Messenger App, that's bad. Really bad. I tell Paul he's going to have to break down and call the Terminus Mental Health Crisis Services line. Tell them you need a CSU stat. Tell them you need an on-site evaluation yesterday, and are ready to fill out a 1013 on your lady love. You'll feel like shit doing it but get enough Clonzapine in her and she won't be able to cast a spell much less spell her name.
Paul replies with a been there, done that. Anne had the CSU team bedazzled with her glamourflage within five minutes of their arrival. She looked well rested and vibed coherent to Paul's stammering exhaustion. Paul hadn't slept either. Paul was on the verge of losing his job. He was trying to take care of Anne and ended up only failing to take care of himself. Paul was fighting his own bouts with depression and pandemic ennui as it was. Meanwhile she had the CSU laughing like they were old buds from back in the day. Twenty minutes later they were convinced the whole situation was a false alarm, a couple's spat. Paul was warned about not doing it a second time. When they left she destroyed the kitchen in a poltergeist whirlwind before casting a spell on Paul that rendered him blind and deaf to her for the rest of the night.
It was only because she loved him still, Anne told him the next morning, that it wasn't worse.
The noose of fate is tightening around my neck but I'm still going to squirm free last second. I tell Paul I feel for him, sincerely, but like I said, I'm not working for Hex anymore. But maybe reach out to them. If he was able to find me on her phone then he should be able to reach out to Control. They'll have trained operatives who can handle her spells.
Silence. A good minute's worth before the ping of a reply: You know what would happen next.
Shit. I nod, and flick out the cigarette. I'm sitting on the hood of my Toyota at the Kroger just off the Fall of Rome. I'm looking up at the clouds for proof otherwise but Hex is a no go. If Paul here reaches out to them then the first thing they're going to do is alert Control. Control, in return, will do what it does best. Respond tactically to a diplomatic situation. A thirteen man Gallows Men kills squad. Ex-Special Ops with their souls traded to infernal powers that render them immune to most spells and with protection runes tattooed on them to cover the rest. They won't show up to provide a mental health assessment or give you a lift to Ridgeview or Grady for a mandated 24 hour observation period.
What they'll be there to do is one thing and one thing only: Terminate with extreme prejudice.
Don't matter if you're Aleister Crowley or Harry Fucking Potter - a bullet to the third eye shuts a mage down just as quick as it does anyone else.
Okay, I text Paul, I still don't know what you want me to do here.
Isn't it obvious, he responds, stop trying to sound cool, stop pretending to have all the answers, and actually maybe try helping her because right now you're the only one who can.
Fuck you, I mutter, ready to block his number when his next text appears.
It's just a number with a dollar sign in front of it. One with just enough zeroes on the end of it to cover the last few months of work I missed along with a sizable Christmas bonus.
***
Call Paul. Voice to voice and I can hear the raw fatigue crackling through the line. I've dialed Ground Zero direct. No patience for formalities I press him for details. I get them out of order. Disjointed. They trail off into memories of better times or the doomsday visions she's promised. Still, from these scarce fragments of narrative, I reconstruct the gist of the situation enough to assemble a mental TARDIS.
It takes me to about six weeks ago shortly after Anne got fired from Hex.
SitRep: She was working solo on a standard haunting op. Some trustafarian douche in Buckhead was being haunted by a Level 5 apparition. Blood dripped from the ceiling. Voices whispering suicide creeping out of the faucets and electrical sockets. A close up of a scream playing on the TV on every channel even when unplugged. Same with the laptop. Same with his phone. But only when he was alone. Anne took the assignment to banish the ghost, disperse it across the astral frequencies or, failing that, push it off into the Light.
Instead Anne played a hunch and summoned the ghost for a conversation.
When she heard the ghost's story she came at the Buckhead douche. Hard.
She didn't use magick. Not at first. What she did first was shatter his knee cap with a precision stomp and broke his nose after grabbing him by the back of the head to drive a knee into his face.
Later that night, after driving home in a fugue state, after ignoring Paul's waiting dinner to rush to the basement temple, she reached into a bad place to call up some rage magick.
The therapy, the meds, her support network, all of these together kept Anne from reaching to the bad place, where the magick was stronger but at a cost to her own health - mental and otherwise.
Still it was always there. That bad place. Waiting for each of us. A bad day at the right time can fuck you up for life. That or you just didn't score the same dosages brain chemistry as the rest of us at birth. A little of both. Either way it's there. And in that bad place Anne can access a terrible power, swift and merciless.
Anne reached place by chanting the names of infernal powers for the first time in ten years, she recalled the ghost's story. Her name was Lynne. She went to Georgia Tech on a scholarship and was in a class with the douche. Never said a word to her. Gave no indication that she existed at all. Not until one night, drunk, when he followed her to the parking lot of an after-party. He slur barked her name, hollered how she looked pretty, then cursed her out when she ignored him. She shot him the bird in reply and kept walking. Next thing she knows he's forcing her into his car. That was three years ago. Three months ago, unable to process the experience a moment longer, she took her life with a bottle of pills and a fifth of gin. What was left after her suicide was wrath personified and what Anne was going to do was bind her spirit to the man who created it. He would, for the rest of his life, dream of Lynne, and relive every moment that led to her suicide until he would be driven to his own. Rather than banish the spirit she ensured that it would be visible to him and him alone from now on. She made it so that whenever he closed his eyes he would her face screaming.
Anne was shit-canned three days later. She pleaded her case. She told them all about what the client did to Lynne. Hex didn't care.
They weren't an instrument of justice, they were a business. The clerk at the hardware store doesn't need to know the shovel they sell is to bury a body in the yard or the Uber driver mandated to know if you're getting a lift to score a brick of heroin, and Hex doesn't particularly care how the ghosts were made. Just that the money is there.
How long after that did Anne stop taking her meds?
Paul wasn't sure. He suspects that she had been glamouring him into thinking she had been shortly after that. She kept mumbling about needing more 'power' and started bitching again how they were keeping her from tapping her true power. That was when she began ranting about how that's what THEY wanted. For women like her and Lynne to be cut off from the source, be rendered powerless, docile.
Paul watched a cold despondency thaw into burning mania. Meals skipped. Sleep deferred. She was fueled on a strict diet of coffee and nicotine and candy bars. She stopped talking to Paul and started talking at him. Even the most innocuous of casual chitchat became a minefield of rants and conspiracy theories. She was fixated on Lynne's ghost. She wanted to stalk the Buckhead apartment but Hex had placed a protective barrier that kept her away physically and astrally. Paul, tried to follow her train of thought as best he could, but his inability to comprehend her anger only served to fuel it. Anne vented nonstop. Told him it wasn't just Lynne. It was all of them. Every woman on the damn planet. They were all ghosts chained forever to the beasts that devoured their spirit.
No more.
She couldn't save the ghosts from the world that made them but maybe she could make the world see what it had created. No more specters caught only in glimpses from the corner of the eye or cloaked in shadows on the edge of dream. No more tepid hauntings, no more sixth sense twitches. From now on the dead would be seen, heard, felt by the living who abandoned them.
The meds she could barely afford only served one purpose and one purpose only: to dampen her magick. Without them dulling her potential she would be able to cast the spells she needed. She would do better than raise the dead from the earth. She would lift them from the graves of our memories to walk alongside us forevermore as a reminder of life's cost.
Only when the world confronted its dead would it stop being so eager to make more of them. After that she locked herself away down in the basement of the two bedroom they rented. She sealed herself off behind a binding spell that could stop a wrecking ball much less Paul's best efforts to kick it down. After that the chanting began. That was two days ago. She hasn't stopped since.
It was at this point that Paul realized that she needed help and he needed help giving it to her.
He heard enough stories about rogue agents to not reach out to Hex. But he remembered her talking about working with an agent who used to be a DJ in the Scene. A narromancer like she.
Recollected her talking about him losing his job after failing a psych eval following an especially harrowing assignment. Jack Babalon. Social media took care of the rest and now...
***
... now here I am in the parking lot of a shuttered strip mall discussing strategy with Anne's man.
Paul's a good foot shorter than I am but stands with a confidence that adds a few inches. We're both masked up Mortal Kombat style for the COVID. Cold as balls. I got my hoodie up and black watch cap donned but still shiver. He's in suit and tie and seems just fine. Professional Paul here doesn't mind the weather. He gives my Escape Pod a once over, notes it's 15 years old, unwashed, and dinged up. Compared to his BMW it looks like a wreck. Next he takes in the scuffed Chucks and the mustard stain on the black jeans. The leather jacket fitting snug on the pandemic gut. The fingerless gloves out of some Dickens novel. The reek of a pinner smoked on the way to our little confab and the stoner red eyes.
Impressed he's not.
"So let's say I can get past the protection spell she's got on the cellar?," I pull down my mask to take a whiskey glug off the flask,
"which is a big 'if' by the way. What next?"
"Is there a way to turn-off her magic?"
"Yeah," I mask up then screw the lid on the flask, "knock her out."
"She'd just kick your ass," Paul doesn't say this with spite or mockery, it's a simple fact. Anne Nihilate did four years in the Corps and was an avid kick-boxing enthusiast.
"Like I said before," I shrug, "drug her up. Seroquil. Trazodone. Most of your serotonin inhibitors or enough pharmacy grade opiates will do the trick. Only problem is I don't have a tranquilizer gun or any of that James Bond shit and I don't picture your girl letting me come at her with a needle."
"All I need is the door open," Paul says, "if you can do that I can handle the rest."
My face is covered enough that he can't see me roll my eyes. White Knight Paul here thinks he's going to use the power of Love to save the day. I'm not here to disillusion him. "Yeah, the problem with that is I'm not going to be able to open that door..."
"Yeah, okay, you're not exactly wowing me for my money."
"Let me finish," I shake my head, "I can't open it from the outside.
But what I can do is slip through the frequencies past protection wards to unlock it from the otherside."
"What?"
"I can," I search for the words, "disappear and reappear on the other side of the door."
"How?"
"Magic," I wink, "remember?"
"Jesus, then why don't you use that to... I don't know... walk in and out of a bank vault."
"It doesn't work that way."
"Yeah okay," Paul shakes his head, "so then you open the door from the inside..."
"... which she's going to just let me do because?"
Paul's retort is choked up on reflection: "Yeah, okay, I see what you're saying... but I don't see another option do you?"
I do but no need to share details with a man living with a literal mind-reader.
"Nope," I take another flask swig, "but I'm going to need your help getting in there."
"Here we go," Paul shakes his head, "what more money?"
"Naw man," this fucking guy over here, "all I need you to do is play us a song."
"That's it?"
"That's it... but make sure you crank that fucker loud enough for the neighbors to complain."
***
Curled up on the floor, the child vomited up tentacles that writhed in a pool around her. The tentacles varied in thickness, but each had suction-cupped pink underbellies that ran autopsy pink to the purple of a junky's vein. The tips of the appendages sprouted into eyeballs. Invisible to the gawk of normies, this swarm of Seeing-Eye Hentai could infest half the city before dawn, and lead to an outbreak of supernatural mass hysteria.
I managed to contain them by drawing a chalk circle around the spectacle and marking it with sealing runes. Anne Nihilate tranquilized the child, psychically shutting down her body while cordoning off her consciousness from the creature inhabiting her mind.
Okay. Backup. So this was the spring before last. Late May. The occult infestation that was unleashed with the pandemic is seven months away. We're in College Park, a small bedroom that the girl shares with her three sisters. Phantom Vision scans confirmed the rest of the family were uninfected. Thank Eris, the mom was savvy enough to recognize the reek of burnt orgone and sour Vrill to seek out a witch instead of a priest or an ambulance (one useless and one too expensive). Anne had the mom take the other two girls with her to stay with family and that they'd text when the job was done. She did most of the talking as I'm shit for customer service. We got to work immediately. We identified the thing 'possessing' the girl as an ultraterrestial life form inhabiting her brain telepathically. Phantom Vision scans confirm it was in her to incubate future swarms of Mothmen or Sasquatches or some new cryptid. Traditional exorcisms wouldn't do shit. We'd have to enter the little girl's head and telepathically kick the fucker out ourselves.
"They're sealed up," I say rising from the crouch I was in to finish the last sigils around the circle chalked around the little girl. "it ain't going anywhere any time soon."
"Same," Anne chuckled mirthlessly. "you ready?"
"Make any difference if I wasn't."
"Probably not," she scopes out the little girl regurgitating tentacles across the wood floor, "we got time for a cigarette first?"
"Oh yeah," I'm already reaching for my pack.
We're sitting in her Lexus parked outside the apartment. We're lit up. American Spirit Gold for me, a Kool for her. We make with the small talk.
Still DJing?
Nope, still doing the burlesque thing?
No.
Whatever happened to so and so?
Dead. Married. Normal.
Ah.
Whatever happened to what's their face?
Rehab. Moved. Drama fucked.
Ah.
We laugh. We sigh. We go silent as we've exhausted our mutual acquaintances and former stomping grounds. I'm almost through with my cigarette when she gets down to business: "I've been thinking. If we're going to synchronize telepathically we'll need something to tether our connection before we go into her head."
"Wha'cha got in mind?"
"A song."
I nod impressed with the logic. Our mutual history is predicated solely on an Allure of the Dead soundtrack from a Goth Scene that exists now only in the dwindling memory of those there.
"Do you remember the song you played for our show at the Secret Room that one night?"
"Which night?"
"Uniform Fetish...,"
"Fuck, I don't know. As drunk as I was those nights and as I high as I was after..."
"The Great Annihilator," she puffs into the air, "the Swans. Remember?"
Holy shit! Yeah. It was one of the better shows I caught. This was at the Chamber for Sinn's Military Night in '01. Anne was part of an industrial-burlesque troupe, the leader of which was this red-headed Valhalla Back Girl I had my eye on. She requested something like the Cure that wasn't the Cure for some reason. I think because another troupe did a show to the same song they were going to do so needed a last minute change-up. Such was life on Fascination Street back in the Day. Anyway I recommended Swamp Thing by the Chameleons when Anne said 'Fuck That," and went to her car. She came back with the Swans "The Great Annihilator."
"Second to last track," she hands me the cardboard CD case.
Weighing the CD in my hand I shoot her a smirk: "Aren't the Swans a noise band?"
"Early Swans sure," Anne smirks back, "but this one is pure Goth-Pop-Death-Country-Lounge. You'll love it. Trust me."
"Fucking A," I shot her a salute with the CD and prime it for the midnight show. The troupe's leader gives her girl a what-the-fuck glare. Anne folds hands in prayer mouthing 'please'. Look at us up there in the DJ booth. Anne in knee high platform boots and vintage bomber jacket. Me in a grey Russian military trench coat the Magpie stole for me from the wardrobe of a show he was working on. We're all vinyl, kohl, and attitude. Now look at us. She's dressed business casual as it makes the client feel at ease knowing there's a professional on the job. I'm dressed in jeans and punk tee as it makes the client feel at ease knowing they make more money than me.
"Fucking A," I chuckled, "You're the one who got me into the Swans. I went and bought The Great Annihilator down at Criminal the next day. Hang on. I got it right here on my Spotify..."
She pulls out her iPhone and we dialed up the song on our apps.
We both had our headphones as headphones are what narromancers frequently use in place of the traditional cups found in the magical arsenal.
We finished our cigarettes. Walked back inside. The girl was still on the floor. The tentacles were writhing around her in the circle. We had the track primed and ready.
"On three," she tells me.
"One, two,..."
PLAY: Ten seconds of electronic feedback filtered sinister. Ecstatic burst of a revelatory Ahhh joined by a droning banshee wail and a dance-floor quick percussion roll. You are immersed into a sonic death-cult revival and just when you're ready to drown under the rhythm's crashing waves, Michael Gira's haunting vocals swoop down into the skull to pluck you above them: "One second burns for a billion years."
Stagger back spin dizzy as I feel my mind expanding to accommodate room for another consciousness within it. Anne and I's POVs superimpose and clash. Then there's the gut lurch of being in an elevator that's falling, the rollercoaster panic, only the motion felt registers as sideways rather than down.
"And time is relative," Gira croons over the drums and drone, "and light is physical."
"We feel your body," I hear her/us think.
"We feel your feelings," I reply to Anne/Jack.
We open my eyes.
We're on a Wasteland Frequency. No color except for shades of red and pink and open surgery. There's a hill of baby skulls on which sprouts a lone flower. It's huge. The petals spread out as wide as a VW bug easy. It's got these quivering Georgia O'Keefe petals made of peeled and screaming human faces sprouting from a black hole on spider legs. In the center of the black hole a pair of red phosphorescent eyes light up and pink-purple eyeball tentacles begin squirming out of it towards us. The spider-flower begins to skirt down the hill of skulls, crushing some into powder, it scream-laughs across howling astral winds.
"We see the eye of god shine through the citadel," we say in Anne's voice.
"And space is empty behind the universe...," we reply in my voice as we will a blade of white flame into our hand.
***
"The past and future were simultaneous," I'm singing along 19 months and change later, I'm in lotus position on my bed a few miles away with the headphones looping 'our' song.
It's midnight, and if Paul followed my instructions, he avoided going home until five minutes before the hour, to avoid risking having her poke around his head until stumbling on our plan.
Given the magnitude of the invocation attempted chances are she wouldn't notice he was gone. Still, better safe than sorry. Once he came home he was to put on the track on 10 and blast it on a loop. After that he was to leave the house stat and hole up in his BMW. If the basement door wasn't open in a half hour after that I was either dead or had my astral body torn from my physical form leaving me a vegetable.
I didn't tell Paul the actual plan. Of course I didn't tell Paul a lot of things about Anne and I.
Unfortunately I lack the telepathic gift a lot of agents possess. Control's Psych Eval chalks it up to being a side effect of my dissociative PTSD that keeps me from reaching out physically or psychically. But, with effort and imagination, I can feel the thread of telepathic union, faint though it may be, and along it ride the song that once tethered us together in combat.
"Inside your body we feel your emptiness," miles away Anne Nihilate doesn't realize she's slipped the lyrics of the song blasting through the basement ceiling into her chant. Ritual candle light casts liquid shadows that move on their own accord around the cellar. She catches herself when she utters - "The light you breathe in, is your unconsciousness."
"And your body disappears," I sing the words feeling myself dematerialize into the last wisps of the psychic link tethering us still, "Burning backwards through the years."
Anne feels something nagging at the back of her head, a stove range flame left unattended, an item missing from the grocery list as you check out, an unlocked door remembered. She searches for it but the music becomes louder and she can't help but sway to the rhythm.
She recognizes the song and for the life of her can't see why Paul would play it (he was strictly Animal Collective and Soul Coughing). Was this some desperate attempt to lure her out (most likely to ambush her)? Was he trying to placate her with something he remembered she loved?
"And we can see forever before love and hate," she whispers contemplating the ceiling, it was there. The answer. She was on the verge of it. She kept singing: "and we will fall right through/The wall of the place where we were made/ Right into the open mouth of... the Great... Anni... hilator..."
I'm raven wheeling around the roof of a modest ranch house, lost in the vortex of wailing spirits forming around it. They're in agony. The spell was on the verge of completion when she slipped out of the head space.
Borrowed or bought I got some time. Now all I need is for her to say...
"Come on in," Annie sings mechanically then, with bulging eyes, fails to clamp hands over her mouth in time before singing - "Come inside."
Black out flash as the power flickers killing the music. The world shifts. I'm no longer outside queued up with the wraiths and other lost soul assholes. Now I'm inside Anne and Paul's pad. The basement. There's an altar propped up on cinder blocks and overturned milk crates. There's Enochian graffiti on damps walls and jars stuffed with alchemical ingredients. There's a magick circle drawn in what the candle light is revealing to be blood. Inside, sitting with arms wrapped around knees is Anne. I register the scabbed up wrists that tells me where she got the blood for the circle. Ritual self-harm, as if there were any other kind. There's a cloud of unkempt black hair haloing the gaunt face. There's a savage paranoia burning from sleepless eyes through the gloom.
They're trained on me.
"Hey Anne," I wave awkwardly just outside her circle, "long time no see."
"Jack?," she chews the name in the air and the way she's squinting me up I can tell she's making sure I'm not some glamourflaged fuck seeking to infiltrate. "What are you doing here?"
"Oh, you know," I tap the air with the tip of my finger. Blue flames crackle. She's sealed off in there pretty tight. No getting in. So I see about getting out and turn to survey Anne's subterranean temple for that door I need to open, "I was just in the neighborhood. Thought I'd pop in and say 'hi'."
There it is. Three O'clock. Up a bunch of rickety steps with a 2x4 serving as the bolt. Easy enough to remove. Donnie Darko was right - 'cellar door' is indeed the most beautiful word in the English language. This could be the easiest job I've ever milked. I'm braced to dash for it, ready, if need be, to kick it down, when...
... a finger taps my shoulder.
I turn around.
"Hi," Anne smiles and right then I remember that just because I can't get into a magick circle doesn't mean what's inside it can't get out.
"Fuck," I whisper before I'm throat checked Wu-Tang style.
***
"Hey Anne," I gasp as she decouples the psychic link sending us back into our bodies. Images of the gargantuan spider-flower burning in the wasteland frequencies overlap the interior of Anne's Lexus. The first pangs of claustrophobia hit, as not having her in my head makes the interior of my head feel too small. Like stepping outside a coffin you've been buried in since birth and finding yourself suddenly plunged back in. It'll pass in a few minutes, if experience is any measure, and by the end of an hour I won't even be able to recall what I'm missing.
"Hi," Anne gasps rematerializing her consciousness within the boundaries of her skull.
We just sit there staring out the car window. We're sweat drenched and shivering. Adrenaline pounds the heart savage. Euphoria, confusion, and nervous energy.
"She going to be okay?," I ask not knowing what else to say.
"Yeah," Anne nods reaching for a cigarette.
I pull out a lighter.
We both stare at the flame.
Then each other.
Then fuck the cigarette as we collapse into a kiss.
We shouldn't be doing this. Anne's got a man and I just started dating this really cool hashisheen two weeks ago, but once you've survived a psychic demon together all bets are off.
The need is beyond physical, the flesh addict eager to crawl in simulation of how the mind soared in our state of telepathic union.
She pushes me off her kiss. She kicks back the seat and drops it flat. She slips hands under her dress and wiggles red panties down the thighs. Mouth watering I hawk dive into the valley of her depths. My beard's soaked on contact and she tastes like electrified whiskey.
"Mother-fucker," she growls and pushes my face deeper into the hunger.
I breathe in her magick...
... then bolt my eyes open some 19 months and change later.
It hurts but I'm breathing.
The air is a trickle down the gasp but enough to pump life into me.
"So what was the plan?," Anne towers over me in stance akimbo like some comic book villain and honestly it's the right fantasy just with the wrong woman. "Sneak in here on a memory and make a bolt for the door?"
Talking is an effort so I reply with a 'pretty-much' nod.
"Then what?"
"Sh... sh... ... shit," each word a rasp pushed through bruised larynx, "you're... you're the mind... reader... you tell me."
"Don't need to be," she gestures towards the door, "Paul, darling fucking Paul who no doubt had a hand in this, will come swooping in here, ever eager to be the white knight, while he pleads with me to take my meds. All so I can be docile. Be smiling. Be pretty. Be the kindly fucking haus frau again for him and his buddies when they come by. Failing that he'll try to force me to, maybe thinking if he catches me by surprise I won't break every bone in his wrist. How am I doing so far? Getting warmer?"
"On fire," I whisper instead of speaking and get up off the floor. I prop myself up with my right arm while crooking my elbow by my chin with the left. My left knee is pulled in and my right leg, still straightened, swoops backward as I pop up standing into fighting position.
With Cobra quickness Anne clocks me straight in the eye and sends me reeling back.
"I thought you were smarter than this Jack," she plants the heel of her foot in my gut and slams me into a water pipe. The back of my skull clangs against iron. I barely block the jab and more trip out of the way than dodge the hook. I fire a one-two combo for her jaw hoping to get lucky.
I don't.
What I get is smacked down instead.
Open palm to the chops.
And I almost go down for a second time but stagger upward.
"You were always a shitty bouncer, Jack... and truth be told... a second rate DJ."
"I wasn't a bouncer..."
"No, what you were was a scared little boy hiding behind the reputation of his friends. Scared to fight. Scared to fuck. Scared to live. You forget I was in your head and unlike you remember exactly what I saw when I was in there. Just be thankful all I'm going to do is kick your ass. Because it would be real, real easy to remind you I'm a narromancer too..."
"Hence the monologue," I wink at Anne and fake a punch. She goes to block. Just what I planned. When she steps back to counter I'm already turned around and sprinting up the stairs for the basement door. She might be all Five Deadly Venoms but Snake and Centipede are no match for a weasel in the wild.
Damn if I don't make it up those steps in bolts of three. Damn if I don't get my hands on that 2x4. Damn if she don't grab me by the collar and toss my ass back down the steps.
Only thing that saves me is Pit instincts. I've staged dive to a parting in the crowd before and after the third time you learn to crash proper. Still hurts like a bitch but at least nothing's broken.
"I was going to be nice about this," Anne's already down the stairs,
"just give you the kind of ass-kicking you've been asking for so you wouldn't be scared of getting them anymore. But no. I see why you're really here. You're just like the rest of them. Think I need fixing and you're the one to do it. You think you can use your magic fucking words and re-write me magically into what?
Something you can fuck again, something you don't have to deal with, something you can say was yours? You think you're so different from them but you're not. Think you can just come in here and re-write my story, MY STORY. As if mine wasn't a story already filled with wonder and redemption and betrayal."
"Anne," I try to get up again but the damage keeps me on my back,
"I don't even know you."
"When has that ever stopped you from turning a real person into a caricature?"
"You don't understand..."
"Well, let's see how you like being rewritten, edited, condensed into a narrative that you have no control over. Let's see what happens when the big, bad narromancer with his punk-goth credentials turns out to be just another fat, old man hiding in a fantasy in his head?"
That's when my phone's alarm goes off.
I reach inside my hoodie and pull it out. I had it set for eleven minutes and six seconds when I started the Swans track.
"Too late," I smile at Anne.
"What are you talking about?"
"See, Anne," my voice is a little stronger, "I was trying to tell you. I was never a bouncer. I was a doorman. And being a doorman isn't just about who you keep out... but who you let in."
Anne can smell the Vrill and orgone reek in the basement. A portal is being opened. She looks for the where being as the place is sealed. Nothing can get in. Except me that is... and whatever I had hidden inside me.
Anne squints again at me - "So what? You tucked away some minor demon or angel inside you the way a coward hides a knife in their boot before a fist fight? Fine. One more ass for me to kick tonight before I rewrite your memores away from you and leave you a middle aged office manager with daydreams of word-spells and street cred."
"Not a demon," I manage to shamble back upright, "not an angel either. Neither could beat you. I know that. So I bought the only person who can beat you."
There's a tap on her shoulder.
Anne turns around and see's...
... Anne.
A very different Anne. This one is from a parallel universe. One of the next-door dimensions, the ones with only minor differences - no Confederate or Nazi victories, no ape overlords or robot enslavers - just simple every day decisions made different. A left turn instead of a right when lost. A whim indulged rather than denied. A woman, having a bad day, finds the strength to take her fucking meds and deal with the world without threatening to end it.
This Anne also has longer hair, but it's as close as I could reach out to and the only one who agreed to be summoned inside me.
The original Anne goes to say something... but gets a Wu-Tang to the throat by new Anne.
Original Anne goes staggering back and new Anne steps in to deliver a knock-out haymaker to the bottom of the jaw. Original
Anne collapses to the floor.
New Anne turns to me.
"You okay?," she asks.
"Make any difference if I wasn't?," I smirk through the pain fighting for attention along every coordinate of my nervous system.
"Probably not," she smiles.
"So... you got it from here?," I rub the back of my head relieved to see no blood.
"It won't be an easy conversation, but yeah, you can tell Paul help's arrived and your world is no longer going to end. At least not from her."
"Cool," I pull out my smokes. "I'll text the beau and leave you two to catch-up."
"Hey," Anne, new that is, speaks up as I old-man ambulate up the stairs, "Thank you. I was in you for awhile there. I know it wasn't just the money that bought you here."
"It didn't hurt," I say in a way that lets her know it was the only thing that didn't.
Once outside, I text Paul the details. Let him know the only person who can help Anne is on the scene - I just leave out the part where it's actually Anne. Let him find out the hard way.
I'm ready to split but pause. Her words resonate. Old Anne. Our Anne. You know what I mean.
"... let's see how you like being rewritten, edited, condensed into a narrative that you have no control over."
That's not what I do is it?
I reach out my phone.
Text the hashisheen an SOS.
Requesting an emergency evac out of a rough assignment.
It takes less than five minutes before she replies that she can give me a ride home.
I reply back that the home I need is hers.
She asks if I'm okay?
I reply I am but we need to talk.
Okay.
Belay that last message. I need her to talk.
Me? I need to listen.