Nemesis
Still Hex exiled from the gig economy but scored a little bloodhound work under the table. Assignment: Sniff out this Alt-Right Hate Mage using the astral frequencies to feed, and feed off of, the ethnonationalist chaos ravaging the nation. Standard Issue Psychic Vampire BullShit. Only instead of draining the victims outright this parasite makes his victims stronger (albeit stupider, angrier, and intention malleable). There's a lot more of these fucks than you think. Alt-Right magicians that is. The occult draws fascists the way anonymous bathroom sex draws evangelical congressmen. Honestly I blame the History Channel bombarding a generation with Hitler-Occult documentaries 24-7. Hate Mages are of course Left-Hand Path exclusive. A dangerous mix of White Power and Black Magick. They work remote, casting incantations to befuddle cops at rallies or telepathically implantng bouts of berserker rage in the Hate-Faithful. They negate curses cast on Proud Boy thugs or mesmerize crowds into thinking it was AntiFa instead of the Aryan Brotherhood terrorizing their community.
The specific Fuck I've been dispatched to locate though is special. This one is more than a few notches above your average Hate Geek whose managed to download some poorly translated pages of the Necronomicon. This one just popped on the radar of some very rich and very dangerous people immediately after the Capitol Riot. Intel is vague - a high level magician has mutated into a major league psychic vampire. Apparently the individual of interest was able to feed of the fury and delusion of January 6th. Since then this individual has been radiating psychic tremors that ripple across the astral frequencies. The results are obvious. All the worst in us is spiking. Casual bursts of road rage turning into Mad Max chase sequences. Fist fights devolving into gun play. Childhood enemies remembered and tracked online at first then in real life. Police violence cruelty and spontaneous lynch mobs performed with a manic zeal now before the camera phones. It needs to end. Stat.
Problem is, while the source of these psychic disturbances has been traced to somewhere in the vicinity of Northeast Georgia, they can't narrow it down beyond that.
A monster was needed to find a monster.
Failing that they settled for a former monster desperate for both cash and action.
Which is where I come in.
I'm being paid Big Money which is never Easy Money when you're born poor. I'm being paid to locate the Hate Mage and locate alone. The target is too powerful for me to confront and doing so will only serve to tip them off. Those cutting my check will take care of the target once an address has been given. All I have to do is make a simple phone call and there's one less asshole in this sad, beautiful world fucking it up for the rest of us.
So, here we go - Bloodhound Work.
Hate attracts Hate. Like a shark from flames, like a moth from, like an unwanted stranger buying you that last drink you want but can't afford.
Step one is a bitch. There's a price for finding a monster hidden deep in that neck of the woods where the souls of animals wear men's flesh. That price is a long hard look in YOUR dark for where you buried alive YOUR monster. It's exhuming YOUR monster's corpse with bloodied fingers. It's skinning its hide from rusted muscle and sulfur bones with nothing but your teeth. It's slipping inside its husk as if it were your Sunday best and realizing with horror and guilt that it still fits just fine.
For only after this price is paid will you be able to separate the monsters from the beasts.
My method for unburying MY monster is simple.
I unlock a bunch of old social media posts from the Dark Years after dad's death and print them out. Study the pages. Let it soak deep. The resentment at not getting what I was owed - respect, sex, and success. The mood swing manifestos, fueled by codependency issues kicking junk strong, denounce, with third grade grammar, all who wouldn't fuck me as shallow automatons. Denounce my friends as backstabbing traitors who both want to see me fail and can secretly see what a failure I am. Launch tirades from the gut of loneliness and listen to my calls for help echo in my skull with memories of my all failures the only response. Soak it in. This 30 something Goth-Industrial Holden Caulfield. Soak it in. The self-loathing at not being something impossible - loved perfectly for being perfect. Soak it in. Feel it. Own again what you had to denounce. The rage at the opportunities squandered on all who found what I could not give myself - courage, self-respect, happiness. I put these pages to the scissor. I cut out random sentences utilizing the Burroughs-Gysin technique (for Magick, like Art, hides in the power of random chances). Put them in my black watch cap. Draw them out blind. Then, with a red Magick Marker, I transcribe the plucked sentence across my flesh. I begin with the face. Then the arms. The legs. Shoulders. Between the forest of chest hair and the top of my feet. Every surface I can reach.
Then I kneel, stripped to my boxers before a mirror, in a room lit by a single black candle as my ear-goggles crank out old Oi tracks mixed with noise-core ambient. I watch my reflection until my face melts into something cruel, scared, and angry. Soon a stranger gazes back at me with Hate. I watch as the words I scrawled over my body squirm, then crawl, then bury into my skin. I watch as the astral frequencies open up before my third eye.
Welcome to the Golachab - an astral frequency of whirling gray flames that can never be extinguished and can never fully consume all they feed off. The perpetual dissatisfaction of the forever angry translated into psychic geography. This is the shadow of the Tree of Life, the realms designated as Qliphoth in some traditions. The Golachab is the rotting husk of the Sphere of Geburah. This is where betrayed magicians cast their harshest curses and where demons grant the calls of dying soldiers for the strength to take one more life before surrendering their own.
I am in a forest of burning souls twisted together into trees whose roots run deep into the lives they've crushed or been crushed under. Their frozen screams embedded in the bark vomit up fists that strangle themselves or each other. I'm on a road of broken bones and murder weapons. The words of my Old Self, the Monster, start to 'itch' (for lack of a better word). There is a wind of nine billion primal screams that cut through the forest. I can feel the words of my Old Self trying to burrow out of my form to greet it. The wind of nine billion primal screams pushes my astral form deeper into the depths of the Golachab.
When it subsides I'm on an empty field beneath a hurricane size vortex of black fire.
Intuition tells me the Hate Mage is somewhere on the other side of that vortex.
It doesn't take long before my intuition is proven correct.
Slithering from the flames towards me is what appears at first to be a massive serpent or worm. Not Godzilla big but definitely Jurassic Park sized.
Switch to Phantom Vision.
A translucent hide burns with red sigils. As it gets closer I realize that where its head should be there is only the rictus grin of a giant chimpanzee. Fangs the size of my forearm snap mindlessly. Then I realize it's not a snake or a worm. It's an intestinal tract.
I have to remind myself that this is the Hate Mage. He's sniffed the corpse of the Monster I'm cloaked up in and is ready to feed off some fresh Hate while fueling me on his. All I have to do is let him make contact and trace the line.
Of course my Intuition is also telling me that doing so is going to hurt like a mother-fucker.
Brace for it and will myself not to flinch as the giant monkey-grin begins to hover above me.
I don't flinch but rather scream as it swoops down and swallows me whole.
Everything goes Blood Red.
Ever want to kick someone's ass not because they deserved it but because you knew you could get away with it and no one, especially your victim, could stop you? Ever have a friend tell you you're talking too loud and all it does is make you talk even louder and even closer in their face? Ever drive around a car that cut you off and then drop to 25, wishing, just wishing this mother fucker would bump into you so you could pull over and pull him out of the window? Yeah, then you know the Blood Red. Some of you better than others, sure, but you've all been there. The Blood Red is feeding off my resentments. Fueling the bitterness into something violent, an impulse to find someone who's wronged me, whether recently or in the distant past, and come at them from behind with a crowbar.
But instead of fighting this urge, which I'm guessing would only serve to enhance its grip on me, I accept it. My consciousness slips into the currents on which I'm being drained. Flowing through the Blood Red, flashes of frozen traumas bombard the senses, explosions of childhood abuse seer the eyes as my fists ache with a million punched walls.
I ride through the veins of the Blood Red up into the vortex where at last I understand its true purpose. It's not a hole in the Golachab, it's a gateway, and right now only the person who opened it can cross through it. But soon, with enough Hate fed through it, that gateway will open up into our world, and the Burning Ones will be free at last to spread their flames across my minds until nothing remains of us but beasts with vendettas.
The words of resentment and fury that adorn my astral body burn off as I pass through the Gate of Golachab and I connect instantly with its source. I'm inside the Hate Mage's mind and it's ugly as you'd imagine. Rape camps for our minds and death squads for our dreams. I can't react to it or he'll realize I'm inside. Quick, quick, quick, before I'm spotted, I call forth the information needed and it flashes across my thoughts just as the connection between us is severed.
I'm collapsed in front of the mirror, blood pressure spiked, head throbbing, knuckles white, and I scramble across the room to write down the information.
An address.
OTP. Just a 45 minute drive south from here.
I pick up my phone. I dial the number I was provided. But hang-up before I can hit call.
There was something in there under the horror show when I popped into his brain.
Something hidden deep where the rest of us bury our Monsters.
Something brilliant, lonely, and hurt... but still alive.
For a moment I was jacked into another man's life and now, with a single call, I can have it ended. I wouldn't pull the trigger but the death would still be mine. It seemed abstract before. Just another ghost or tulpa or cryptid that needed dispatching. But this was a human being. One who lived a life that circumstances aside was not so different than my own.
I pick up the phone again.
Fuck this morbid introspection.
The fucker's bad news and about to use the astral frequencies to get a lot of people killed. I didn't ask this stranger to become a monster. They made that choice all on their own. Me? I'm just ending the problem before it ends us all.
So why can't I call the number?
"Because you owe it to yourself, and no one but yourself, to look a man in the eye and know they had it coming before you do what needs to be done," the ghost of a very old friend whispers.
Which is how we're here.
OTP. A 45 minute drive south down 85 into what I'm told is the real America. Broke America. Rusted Ford America. Boarded Up Main Street America. Standing on the porch of a shotgun home shithole complete with fast food trash and the Star and Bars draped in the front window. Behind me a front lawn of frozen mud with patches of dead grass from which sprout dissected engine parts and empty bourbon bottles.
Underneath the squalor though you can smell the magic - it's like trying to cover firework smoke with a dumpster fire and a gallon of cheap aftershave.
I raise my hand but don't need to knock as the door opens on its own. A flourish of the Dark Arts this, his way of saying not just 'come in' but that he knows it's another magician at the door. I roll my eyes. Theatrics, apparently, is as necessary to the Left Hand Path as it is to the Right.
Still, theatrics is a good sign. If this asshole was of a more practical disposition then he would've just opened up both barrels of a shotgun through the door and that'd be that.
No, he wants to impress me, like all fascists there's a touch of the operatic at play here.
As for me? I just need to make sure there's nothing left in this fucker worth saving.
Ignoring intuition, experience, and an accumulative wisdom earned through countless nights absorbed in horror films, I step through the front door...
***
... and watch my body collapse out of my 'soul' to crash flat on my face.
My astral form hovers one step within a shithole living room. Under my collapsed body there's a spray-painted magick circle on a white sheet tagged with Norse runes mixed with infernal sigils. A jerry-rigged soul trap. Effective too. Above me there's a Swastika flag pinned to the ceiling. Around me wood paneled walls sporting white Power hardcore band flyers and scotch taped bikini clad models with machine guns. Pizza boxes form an impromptu coffee table that sits before a couch rescued last minute from som eone else's dumpster. On that couch are planted the 'muscle' - two skinheads - gym pumped and beer gutted. One holds a mirror. The other a rolled up dollar bill. Next to them, on a beaten up recliner, sits a man in a black robe with muddied steel toes and a pulled up hood obscuring his face. This must be the guy. The target. The Big Bad Hate Mage turned Psychic Vampire. He leans forward towards a wide screen plasma TV and is hooked deep into some first person shooter.
I try to float down back into my body but find I can't move. I can move my legs, wave my arms, but otherwise it's as if I'm treading water because I've forgotten how to swim.
"We got company," observes the skinhead holding the mirror.
"Duh," replies the one with a dollar bill straw.
"Shut-the-fuck-up," the Hate Mage hisses annoyed, he's tapping the controller frantically, travelling virtual room to virtual room, killing anyone he sees. He reaches one door, kicks it open, and the room explodes. He hits pause after re-spawning, glugs Mountain Dew from a 2 liter, then turns the recliner to face at last his unconscious visitor.
"Can't lie," the Hate Mage chuckles addressing my astral form while the muscle look on baffled, "I seriously did not expect this Scooby Doo shit to actually trap you. I mean for real - you just thought I'd let you walk in? Bitch, you even stupider than I thought."
Unable to see me obviously, the two skinheads exchange confused glances before delivering the laugh their boss expects of them. The one with the straw is about to snort up a little clarity when his attention is diverted by the hooded man who rises from his chair to stand akimbo before my unconscious body. "So, I'm guessing you're the asshole who went poking round in my head last night? Why? What were you looking for? "
I give it some thought and then start moving my lips pretending to answer him. I gesticulate my hands as if what I was pretending to say was important. Then I end with an outstretched hands as if I had just pled my case.
The Hate Mage gives a shake of his hooded head and is clearly straining to hear me before shouting "What?"
I roll wide eyes annoyed and mime out a whole conversation again. The Hate Mage mutters an incantation as a corpse purple halo of flames flickers around the hood. Under the hood glow malicious stars that blaze through the veils between the astral frequencies.
It takes the Hate Mage a minute and a little mana to realize the 'connection' is fine and that I'm just fucking with him here. Furious the halo vanishes and he steps over to drive one of those steel toes into the side of my ribs.
"Don't clown me, mother-fucker!," he growls then stomps down between my shoulder blades.
Meh, I've been boot-checked while conscious, so the threat's not really registering while I can't feel anything. I mime a helpless shrug.
"What, bitch?," the Hate Mage snorts, "Say something? Go on say something before I have my boys here take your fat ass out back and cut new holes in you to stick their dicks in."
The two goons snicker and guffaw menacingly... until the Hate Mage plucks both the mirror as well as the rolled up dollar from their grasp. Now they look like chastised school children in the bodies of hardened convicts. The Hate Mage dips the straw into the shadows cloaking his face and Hoovers up one, two, three lines off the mirror before handing it back to the boys. He looks up at me and places a cupped hand to his hood.
I tap an invisible watch on my wrist. I point at the Hate Mage with my finger and flip it into a hook that I wiggle.
"Oh, really, that what you want?," he drops his hood - a prominent brow shades pale blue eyes and a blond crew cut dusts his scalp. He's my age judging by the wrinkles (but meth is a hell of a drug) and he's as skinny as I am thick. "Fine, bitch, I'll come over there then."
He snaps his fingers.
The couch and the two goons are engulfed in a wave of gray flames that fade into stick figure silhouettes before vanishing completely. The wide screen TV and the recliner are next. The flyers and the big titty gun posters go up in a monochrome blaze. Above me the flag burns around the swastika. Everything is colorless fire and a blizzard of orange embers.
The hollow nausea sensation of being in a plummeting elevator slams the senses - only that elevator is falling in the wrong direction. I can feel the Blood Red trying to worm into my skull. It's honing in on the buried damage and old grudges the way a spark hones in on an inferno.
Relax. I've been here before. An ambush is just an anxiety attack that doesn't come from your skull. Don't panic. Deep breath. Okay. Ignore the fact that your astral body can't breathe. Focus. Assess the situation thoroughly with a detached eye before proceeding mindfully.
Right. Got it. Here's the situation: I'm stuck, fucked, and trapped here in the Golachab Frequency with a Neo-Nazi Hate Mage magically roided up on a nation ready to kill each other.
"Hey," the Hate Mage's astral body appears, crackling with the power of the Blood Red before me with his robes fluttering on the incendiary winds, "something you wanted to say to my face."
***
At first it burns my eyes to look directly at him.
That's how the Hate hides itself. Behind the glow of a rage that blinds those who gaze upon it directly and forces them to search for its source by the shadow it casts. Sometimes that shadow is your own and if you do not enter it, it will enter you.
Then my eyes begin to adjust to his radiance of his aura.
And that's where the Hate grows, in the places where the mind must adapt to its presence. Until it sprouts between the cracks of Logic that fail to comprehend it. Its vines strangle the roots of the Heart, then blooms across the harvests and gardens of our thoughts, before at last plucked by our darker impulses into unforgivable deeds.
Blink. The Hate Mage is gone. Blink. He's back and all up in my face. Before I can react he presses his forehead into mine, throws his arms out, and starts pushing me backwards. "Got something to say to me? Huh? Huh? I'm standing right here, bitch. So say something. Say something before I do something."
I float backwards and throw my hands up. "I didn't come here to fight."
"Oh there ain't gonna be no fight... there's gonna be me whooping your ass up and down this inferno before I have my boys have their way with whatever's left of you."
Nice, still I have to try: "Listen. Please. I just came here to tell you that it's not too late..."
The Hate Mage saws out a laugh, shakes his damn head, and holds up a hand: "'Too late' for what?"
"... to save yourself."
"That right?," he nods with mock gratitude, "You came all this way to save me now did you?"
No one ever listens. With a shake of my head I repeat myself. "No, man, so you can save yourself. But we don't have long until..."
"... until what?," his words hiss with meth urgency, "You get your head stomped in."
"We're wasting time and you don't have a lot of it..."
"We finally agree on something."
"No, listen. Please. I was like you once..."
"That right?"
"Yeah, that's right," I keep my hands up but keep my eyes on his, "A scared little boy who found the only way he could survive was to be as cruel and as angry as those who picked on him. And it worked. I hurt all the other scared little boys until I forgot how it felt like to be scared. But like you I had the spark. The magick in the blood. And one day I learned how to use it to make myself happier instead of someone else more miserable and I realized my Hate was nothing but the ultimate codependency issue..."
"'Codependency issue', huh," the Hate Mage gives an involuntary rubbing of his nostrils in search of a drug specked booger, "there more to this little feel-good speech, Doctor Phil?"
"Just that it's not too late. You're not stupid. You know there's no difference between one man from the next save how they handle what they have or haven't been given. So be smart. Let me go. Give your goons the night off. Pack up your shit then find a new part of the country to live in before they find you. Get a new ID, a job, mainly some fucking therapy... "
""Whoah, back up a second... before who finds me?"
"That's what I've been trying to tell to you. We only have a few minutes..."
"Bullshit. You're just stalling..."
"Mossad," I say as if I had just gave him a terminal prognosis.
"'Moss-sad'?"
"Correct. As in Israeli Intelligence. Their occult division - Department Aleph - to be specific. Created to hunt rogue SS black magicians after that little war you're sorry America won. Apparently they've stayed in business seeking out the elimination of potential occult threats to the State of Israel. Of which, I should mention, you are considered to now be."
"Fuck out of here with that comic book bullshit," the Hate Mage snorts, "I would've heard..."
"You wouldn't have heard shit because until January 6th you were just another Q-Asshole with a grudge and a downloaded grimoire. Until then no one gave a shit what you knew or didn't know."
The Hate Mage studies my aura, my chakras, the shells of my Ruach (funny how they always hate the Jews but not enough to resist their magick). The look in his eye tells me he knows I'm not lying but it also tells me that he knows there's something I'm not telling him.
"Look, man. We only got a few minutes before a QBLH Kill Team waltzes into your place and shuts this shit show down for good. You can still get out of here..."
"Tell me something. Why ain't OCCULT SEAL TEAM 6 here already?"
"Because when I got swallowed up into your head I saw something. The same scared little boy I used to be. I saw him trapped in the dark looking for a way out... and... and I don't want to have blood, even your blood, on my hands... so I'm trying to give you a chance to change. Not escape. But change. To save yourself from living like an animal before you're put down like one."
The Hate Mage blinks - a fluttering of twin supernovas - then gets right up in my face.
"Know what I think?"
"What?"
"That you fucked up," and with that he spits a wad of black flames into my face.
My astral form bursts into a match of ebony flame and all I crumble into a fiery ball of screams.
"See I believe you. I believe you really pussed out because 'I dIDnT wANt bLOod oN mY hAnDs!' Ha. So you figured what? You'd come and scare me straight instead? Because you think all I need is a therapist and a group hug? Fuck you! Fuck you for projecting your 'scared little boy' bullshit on me. You think my Hate comes from Fear? Well that's because you're a fucking coward and think everything comes from Fear. Let me tell you something. My Hate comes from a Love more perfect than you or your kind will ever know. A Love of Self, a Love of Family, a Love of Tribe, and a Love of the Hard Work it takes to keep it together. To keep it safe from the Fear that's crippled you. It's a Love that gives me the balls to do what needs to be done while you're the 'scared little boy' too stupid to make the phone call that would save your life."
Well, shit, I think this might be my first supervillain monologue.
Shame I'm too busy having my soul incinerated to appreciate it properly.
After sufficiently watching me writhe in agony as the Hate burns through my memory until only it is left, my opponent gives a small chuckle. "Funny. For all your psychoanalyzing you miss the obvious part of you being here."
I'm in too much pain to ask so he obliges me with his insight: "You didn't come here to give me a second chance. Nuh-uh. You came here looking for one for yourself. Be honest. It ain't me you're trying to save now is it?"
My reply is to curl up into fetal ball of black fire and concentrate on keeping sane through the pain of the Hate eating my soul alive.
"It's not too late," he grins mocking my offer with an outstretched hand, "That pain you call Hate is the Truth burning inside you and it burns because you've been lying to yourself. Lying that you're not better than you settle on being. Because what you call Hate is only what a coward calls the War he's too scared to fight in. For there's been a War in all mankind's blood since the day we crawled out of the caves and mud and looked on each other's differences and knew there would be those in charge and those who served and no one could agree on who was who and at that moment the War began."
He watches my burning soul for another moment but keeps his hand outreached. "Only question left for you right now is which side are you on? Are you White Man or are you a Traitor? Make your choice."
"Okay," I grunt through the heat and madness devouring my mind.
"Sorry. I didn't hear you... want to say that a little louder for me please?"
"Okay... I did my best... I tried..."
"Yes, you did. And you lost. No shame in it."
"No, not anymore," I growl through the hurt and stop fighting the black fire consuming me. I drop my psychic defenses and let the flames engulf me. Soak it in. Accept the Hate as a part of me but not in charge of me.
And just like that the black fire is doused and I stand regenerated.
"You're right," I tell him, "I was too much of a pussy to have made that call..."
"Ha!," the Hate Mage grins impressed. There's a little fight in me after all and he's pumped up for the brawl that's about to go down.
Too bad for him there won't be one: "...which is why I had my girlfriend do it twenty minutes before I walked in your front door."
The Blood Red glow of the Hate Mage flickers. "No, that's bullshit, you're just..."
... and before he can finish that sentence his astral body pops out of existence.
I can feel the energies that kept my soul from my body evaporate a moment later.
I open my eyes to the smell of smoke and the Nazi flag on the ceiling burning.
I scramble off the floor. The two skinheads on the couch are still sitting there gawking at me slack-jawed despite the fact that the flames have reached the couch. It takes me a few blinks to notice that their throats have been slit. I look around. There's the Hate Mage. Leaning back in his recliner with a hole in his forehead wide enough to plug with a pinky. The house is flooding with smoke. I glance around for the QBLH Kill Team and nada. They moved in and out quicker than I expected. Apparently they decided to not wait around for me to wake back up in my body.
Nice. Still, so long as the check clears.
On the pizza box coffee table there's the mirror floating in a puddle of blood and on it are cut two fat rails that would give me the energy to drive home.
The urge is there.
It always will be.
I kick the pizza box table over, walk over to the Hate Mage's corpse all recliner sprawled, and lean down to stare into his eyes.
"Why the fuck couldn't you just listen to me?"
The corpse just stares at me. I switch to Phantom Vision and nada. They didn't even leave a ghost behind as a witness. That's what happens when you fuck with a QBLH Kill Team.
I walk out of the burning shotgun home in no rush. I was assured that this operation was met with, well not approval, but a diplomatic looking of the over way by the new Administration. Local law enforcement wouldn't be notified until the fire had burned everything down and any future investigation would be a dead end.
So I head down the road to where I parked. Get in. Buckle up. Crank the engine.
I sit there waiting for the Blood Red to fade from my skull.
Instead I start pounding the steering wheel with the balls of my fists and I suddenly realize I've been crying the whole time. "Why the fuck wouldn't you let me save you."
"He told you why," a dead friends speaks from the backseat. "Because you weren't there to save him you went there to save yourself."
The Blood Red is pounding in my skull. I tried. I really fucking tried. But yeah. The harshest truth of this world is we can't save those we need saving from.
After a few seconds I accept that it will always be there, the Blood Red, this shadow I cast that must be entered occasionally to prevent it from becoming me instead.
Nothing left to do but find my way back to Love.
Next stop, the Wolf Angel's.