We Will All Go Down Together (19 page)

Thinking—projecting—even as my flared nostrils stung in sympathy:
Oh, baby, don’t. Please, do
not.
Do
not
do this to
me
 . . . 

Carra’s heels hooked the seat of her chair, knocking it backwards with the force of their upswing; she gasped, blood-tinted mucus-drip already stretching into hair-fine tendrils that streamed out wide on either side, wreathing her like impromptu mummy-wrap. The chair fell, skipping once, like a badly thrown beach-rock.

Rising to stick and hang there in the centre of the room, her heels holding five steady inches above the floor. Head flung back. Ectoplasm pouring from her nose and mouth. While, all around, a psychically charged dust devil scraped the walls like some cartoon tornado-in-a-can, its tightening funnel composed equally of frustrated alien willpower and whatever small inanimate objects happened to be closest by: plastic cutlery, scraps of paper. Hair and thread and crumbs. Garbage of every description.

A babble of ghostly voices filling her throat, making her jaw’s underside bulge like a frog’s. Messages scrawling up and down her exposed limbs as the restless dead took fresh delight in making her their unwilling megaphone, their stiff and uncooperative human notepad.

She looked down at me, cushioned behind my pad of defensive Power, and let the corners of her mouth give an awful rictus-twitch. And as her glasses lifted free—apparently unnoticed—to join the rest of the swirl, I saw ectoplasmic lenses slide across her eyes like cataracts, blindness taking hold in a milky, tidal, unstoppable ebb and flow.

Forcing her lips further apart, as the tendons in her neck grated and popped. Wrenching a word here and there from the torrent inside her and forcing herself to observe:

“Not . . . ever . . . ything. Is . . . ab . . . out. YOU. Jude.”

Believe it—

—or not.

And I, as usual, chose to choose . . . 
not
.

The primary aim of magicians is to gather knowledge, because knowledge—as everyone finds out fairly early, from
Schoolhouse Rock
on—is power. To that end, we often conjure demons, who we use and dismiss in the same offhand way most people grab the right implement from their kitchen drawer: fork, cheese-knife, slotted spoon; salt, pepper, sulphur. Keep to the recipe, clean your plate, then walk away quickly once the meal is done.

But even if we pursue this culinary analogy to its most pedantic conclusion, cooking with demons is a bit like trying to run a restaurant specializing in dishes as likely to kill you as they are to nourish you: deathcap mushroom pasta with a side of ergot-infested rye bread, followed by the all-fugu special. They’re cruel and unpredictable, mysterious and restless, icily malignant—far less potent than the actual Fallen who spawned them, yet far more fearful than simple elementals of fire, air, water, earth, or the mysterious realms which lie beneath it. Like the dead, demons come when called—or even when not—and envy us our flesh; like the dead, you must feed them blood before they consent to give their names or do your bidding.

Psellus called them
lucifugum
, those who Fly the Light. I call them a pain in the ass, especially when you’re not entirely sure what else to call them.

On the streetcar-ride from College/Yonge to Bathurst/College, I chewed my lip and flipped through my copy of the
Grimoire Lemegeton
, which lists the names and powers of seventy-two different demons, along with their various functions.

Eleven lesser demons procure the love of women or (if your time is tight) make lust-objects of either sex show themselves naked. Four can transport people safely from place to place, or change them into other shapes, or gift them with high worldly position, cunning, courage, wit, and eloquence. Three produce illusions: of running water, of musical instruments playing, of birds in flight. One can make you invisible, another turn base metals into gold. Two torment their victims with running sores. One, surprisingly, teaches ethics; I don’t get a whole lot of requests for him, strangely enough.

Glasyalabolas, who teaches all arts and sciences, yet incites to murder and bloodshed. Raum, who reconciles enemies, when he’s not destroying cities. Flauros, who can either burn your foes alive, or discourse on divinity. Or Fleer himself, indifferently good or bad, who “will do the work of the operator.”

If it actually was Fleer inside Jen, that is. If, if, if.

Practising the usual injunctions under my breath, while simultaneously trying to decide between potential protective sigils:
Verbum Caro Factum Est,
your basic Quadrangelic conjuration, maybe even the ultimate old-school reliability of Solomon’s Triangle—upper point to the north, Anexhexeton to the east, Tetragrammaton to the west, Primematum anchoring. Telling your nameless quarry, as you etch the lines around yourself:

“I conjure and command thee, O spirit N., by Him who spake and it was done; Asar Un-Nefer, Myself Made Perfect, the Bornless One, Ineffable. Come peaceably, visibly, and without delay. Come, fulfill my desires and persist unto the end in accordance to my will. Zazas, Zazas, Nasatanada, Zazas: exit this vessel as and when I command, or be thrown through the Gate from whence ye came.”

The streetcar slid to a halt, Franz visible on the platform ahead—looking worried, as ever. A shopping bag in either hand testified to his having already filled out my list. Which was good; proved he wanted Jen “cured” enough to throw in from his own pocket, at least.

And:
I’ve done this,
I thought.
Lots of times. I can do it again, Carra or not—
and what the fuck had I really thought I needed Carra for, anyway? As she’d (sort of) pointed out, herself.

Easy. Peasy. Easy-peasy.

But none of the above turned out to matter very much at all, really. In the end.

Stepped off the streetcar at six or so. By midnight I was back at Grandmother Yau’s, sucking back a plate of Glass Noodle Cashew Chicken and washing it back with lots and lots of tea, so much I could practically feel my bladder tensing yet another notch with each additional swig. Starting to itch, and twinge, and . . . ache.

(
Ache.
)

“So, Jude-ah,” came a soft, Mandarin-accented voice from just behind my shoulder. “Seeing you seem sad, I wonder: how does your liver feel? Is the general of your body’s army sickening, tonight?”

And:
Tonight, tonight,
I found myself musing. What
was
tonight, at the Khyber? Oh, right . . . open bar. No bullshit restrictions. I could wear that tank-top I’d been saving, the really low-cut one.

Wick-ed.

Grandmother Yau reached in, touching her gilded middle claw to my ear, brief and deft; I jumped at its sting, collecting myself, as she reminded me—

“I am not used to being ignored, little brother.”

Automatically: “Ten thousand pardons, big sister.”

She slit her green-tinged eyes, shrewdly. “One will do.” Then, waving the nearest ghost over to top up my teapot: “My spies tell me you had business, further east. Is it completed?”

And
waaah
, but there were so very many ways to answer that particular question, weren’t there? Though I, typically, chose the easiest.

“
Wei
,” I said, nodding. “Very complete.”

“The possessed girl, ah? Your friend.”

That’s right.

My
friend
Jen, lying there on the tatty green carpet of her basement apartment; my other friend Franz, leaning over her. Shaking her—a few times, gently at first, then harder. Slapping her face once. Doing it again.

Watching her continue to lie there, impassively limp. Then looking back at me, a growing disbelief writ plain across his too-pale, freckled face—me, standing still inside my circle, with no expression at all on mine. Watching him watch.

She’s not breathing, Jude.

Well, no.

Jude. I think . . . I think she’s dead.

Well—
yes
.

“Turns out,” I told Grandmother Yau, “she wasn’t actually possessed, after all.”

“No?”

“No.”

Ai-yaaah.

Because: I’d taken Franz’s word, and Franz had taken Jen’s—but she’d lied to us both, obviously, or been so screwed up that even she hadn’t really known where those voices in her skull were coming from. So I’d come running, prepared to kick some non-corporeal butt, and funnelled the whole charge of my Power into her at once, cranked up to demon-expelling level.

But if there’s no demon to be
put
to flight, that kind of full-bore metaphysical shock attack can’t help but turn out somewhat like sticking a fork in a light socket, or vice versa. If that’s even possible.

Franz again, in Jen’s apartment, turning on me with his eyes all aburn. Reminding me, shakily: Y
ou said you could
help.

If she was possessed, yes.

Then why is she dead, Jude?

Because . . . she wasn’t.

You—said—

I shrugged.
Whoopsie.

He lunged for me. I let off a force-burst that threw him backwards five feet, cracking his spine like a whip.

You don’t
ever
lay hands on me,
I said, quietly.
Not ever. Unless I want you to.

He sat there, hugging his beloved corpse with charred-white palms, crying in at least two kinds of pain. And snarled back:
Like I’d want to touch you with some other guy’s dick and some third fucker pushing, you son of a fucking bitch.

(Yeah, whatever.)

Fact was, though, if Franz hadn’t been so cowardly and credulous in the first place—if he hadn’t wanted an instant black magic miracle, instead of having the guts to just take her to a mental hospital, the way most normal people do when their girlfriends start telling them they hear voices—then Jen might still be alive.

Emphasis on the might.

I can call demons. I can bind angels. I can raise the dead, for a while. But just like Franz himself had observed, more than once, I can’t actually cure anybody—can’t heal them of cancer, leprosy, MS, old age, mental illness, or colour-blindness to save my fucking life. Not unless they
want
me to. Not unless they let me.

The other way? That’s called a miracle, and my last name ain’t Christ.

Franz, crying out, tears thick as blood in his strangled voice:
You
promised
me, you fuck! You fucking
promised
me!

Followed, in my memory, by a quick mental hit of Carra, half the city away: still floating, still wreathed. And thinking:
If I could do something for people like that, you moron, don’t you think I
would
?

She
wants
to be nuts, though. Long and the short of it. Just like, on some level, Jen
wanted
to die.

But hell, what was Franz going to do about it, one way or another? Shun me?

I took a fresh bite of noodle while the ancient Chinese spectre I’d come to think of as Grandmother’s right-hand ghost flitted by, pausing to murmur in her ear for a moment before fading away through the nearest lacquer screen. And when she looked at me, she had something I’d never seen before lurking in the corners of her impenetrable gaze. If I’d had to hazard a guess, I might even have said it looked a lot like—well—

—surprise.

“Someone,” she said, at last, “is at the Maitre D’s station. Asking for you, Jude-ah.”

Glancing sidelong, so I’d be forced to follow the path of her gaze over to where . . . he waited: He, it. Me.

My shadow.

My shadow, highlighted against the Empress Noodle’s thick, red velvet drapes like a sliver of lambent bronze—head down, shyly, with its hair in its eyes and its hands in its pockets. My shadow, come at last after all my fruitless seeking, just waiting for its better half to take control, wrap it tight, gather it in and make it—finally—whole again.

Waiting, patiently. Quiet and acquiescent. Waiting, waiting . . . 

 . . . for me.

I met Grandmother Yau’s gaze again, and found her normally impassive face gone somehow far more rigid than usual: green-veined porcelain, a funerary mask trimmed in milky jade.

“The Yin mirror reflects only one way, Chiu-wai-ah,” she said, at last. “It is a dark path, always. And slippery.”

I nodded, suddenly possessed by a weird spurt of glee. Replying, off-hand: “
Mei shi
, big sister; not to worry, never mind. Do you think I don’t know enough to be careful?”

To which she merely bowed her head, slightly. Asking—

“What will you do, then?”

And I—couldn’t stop myself from smiling, as the answer came sliding synapse-fast to the very tip of my tongue, kept restrained only by a lifetime’s residual weight of “social graces.” Thinking:
Oh, I? Go home, naturally. Go home, dim the lights, light some incense—

—and
fuck
myself.

So soft in my arms, not that I’d ever thought of myself as soft. I pushed it back against the apartment door with its wrists pinned above its head, nuzzling and nipping, quizzing it in Cantonese, Mandarin, ineffectual Vietnamese—only to have it offer exactly nothing in reply, while simultaneously maintaining an unbroken stare of pure, dumb adoration from beneath its artfully lowered lashes.

Which was okay by me; more than okay, really. Seeing I’d already had it pretty much up to here with guys who talked.

Feeling the shadow’s proximity, its very presence, prickle the hairs on the back of my neck like a presentiment of oncoming sheet lightning against empty black sky: All plus to my mostly minus, yang to my yin, nice guy to my toxic shit. And wanting it back, right here and now; feeling the core-deep urge to penetrate, to own, to repossess those long-missing parts of me in one hard push, come what fucking might.

Groin to groin and breath to breath, two half-hearts beating as one, two severances sealing fast. Unbreakable.

Down on the bed then, with its heels on my shoulders: key sliding home, lock springing open. Rearing erect, burning bright with flickering purple flame, allll over. And seeing myself abruptly outlined in black against the wall above my headboard at that ecstatic moment of (re)joining, like some Polaroid flash’s bruisy after-image: my inverse reflection. My missing shadow, slipping inside me as I slipped inside it, enshadowing me once more.