Rick Wayne's Blog, page 89

The Killing Field

24Sep

The package was addressed to me specifically. Not the NYPD. Not Homicide. Not “To Whom It May Concern.” To Detective Harriet Chase at the downtown office. The return address, tucked on a separate label underneath, said it was from White Plains.

There’s a checklist of things we’re supposed to look for to flag a package as “suspicious.” One of them is that the postmark doesn’t match the return address. This postmark was Brooklyn, which meant, following procedure, I was supposed to get the hazmat guys involved and fill out a bunch of paperwork. So I did exactly what any detective would do. I put on a pair of blue latex gloves and squeezed the darn thing from top to bottom like a kid at Christmas.

Since it was pretty clearly a VHS tape — it even sounded right when I shook it — and since VHS tapes are almost universally not explosive or toxic, I opened the package with my trusty pocket knife.

Very carefully.

Right away, as I worked the strip of clear plastic tape off the fold, I noticed fingerprints underneath, on the sticky side. I pulled out the cassette — which trailed all of its magnetic tape like streamers of confetti. Whoever sent it had pulled every last inch from the rollers and stuffed it into the bottom of the envelope. The cassette’s clear plastic window showed the interior wheels were pulled clean, although thankfully the tape was still attached at both ends.

There was also a trace blood spatter, about the size of a printed apostrophe. Now that was a reason to get other people involved.

I stood with my lieutenant in her office.

“Serial killer wanting an audience for his work?” she asked.

Lt. Miller bent over the cassette on her desk and squinted at the tiny splatter.

I had the envelope in my hand. I held it up. “Worth checking out the return address maybe?”

“Let’s make sure that’s blood first,” she said, slipping the tape into an evidence bag. “Human blood. And not the sloppy remains of someone’s chili dog.”

Lt. Shawna Miller was in her mid-40s with curly brown hair peeking sandy gray at the roots. She was husky but not fat and always dressed sharply. Everything I knew about her had been pieced together from odd bits and ends she dropped in conversation. In the few years we’d been working together, she’d made offhand comments once or twice with the subject ‘we’ in a way that led me to think she was married, probably with kids. But she didn’t wear a ring. And she didn’t talk about her family. She didn’t have pictures in her office. She didn’t come with her husband to work gatherings. I’m certain all of that was so the men in her unit would have no reason to see her as anything but their manager. Not a wife. Not a mother. Just the boss. It kept her a bit at arm’s length from everyone. But in a public bureaucracy the size of the NYPD, that was the best strategy, if you could keep it up over the long haul.

Shawna could.

“You think it’s a hoax?” I handed her the envelope, which went into a separate bag.

Lt. Miller and I were friendly but we weren’t friends.

“Probably not,” she said, “but stranger things have happened. I don’t want to put another one up until we’re sure.” She nodded toward the big white board in the common space outside her office. It was stuffed end-to-end in multi-colored columns summarizing all our active cases. The label at the top read “The Killing Field.”

She handed me the evidence bags in a way that made it clear they were my responsibility. “Since you’re here,” she said, nodding to a chair, “sit.”

My brain immediately wanted to start cataloging all the things she might want to talk about in that official way, not least what had happened at the apartment bloc the week before, but ultimately there were too many, so I complied without pause or comment.

She walked toward her office door. “I got an email this morning from Crowley, our erstwhile manager of the evidence locker.” She shut it.

I didn’t say anything. I knew where she was going.

She walked around and took her seat. “He tells me you’ve checked out the same evidence from the Sacchi case seven times in the last few months.” She looked to me for a response. “A pendant or something like that? Is that correct?”

“If he says so.” I was still wearing it.

Lieutenant Miller scowled. “Do I need to be worried?”

“About that? No.”

“I didn’t think so. But I told him I’d talk to you about it. So there.”

I nodded and went to get up.

“That’s not why I asked you to stay,” she said. Lieutenant Miller opened her desk drawer. “For the first three months, you wouldn’t say anything and I had to give an official reprimand.”

So that was it.

She produced a thick envelope, the kind that could be sealed with the red string and routed around the office. “Now, you apparently don’t know when to shut up.” She tossed it across to me.

I caught it awkwardly, one hand pressing it to my chest. I unwrapped the red string and took out the folder. I flipped through it. I caught the words “grand mal seizures” and “wolf with three eyes” and what appeared to be several verbatim excerpts from a transcript.

I closed the file.

“Nothing to say?” she asked.

I slipped the file back into the manila envelope. “Nope.” I wrapped the red string around the tab.

She looked at me with a mix of surprise and frustration.

I placed the envelope gently on her desk. “With respect, ma’am, I know what I said.”

“Since when do you call me ma’am?”

I shrugged. “It seemed like the right thing to say.”

“It seemed patronizing. You had an obligation to disclose this to the department.”

“I did. At the inquest.”

“You said you had a seizure. Not that you had a history.”

“It happened once,” I said.

She pointed to the folder. “According to that, you had to be hospitalized for the better part of a year. I’d hardly call that ‘once.’”

“That was thirty years ago.” I objected. “I was thirteen years old. No one could figure out why it happened and no one could figure out why it went away. It just stopped. And for three decades, it stayed stopped. I had no reason to think it would ever come back.”

She pointed to her desk. “You know what Cormack’s lawyer is going to say. That the department is liable. And you know what they’re going to say? That you’re liable. That you withheld vital medical history.”

“I was thirteen,” I repeated.

“Maybe. But by not talking for the better part of three months of mandatory therapy, you made it look like you had something to hide. Like you knew better.”

I shifted in my seat. “Is that why you want to wait on the blood analysis? You’d prefer I take an administrative vacay?”

“You’re like a dog with a new toy every time a new case comes across your desk. You clamp down and shake and shake and shake until I have to pry it away from you.”

“I’ll talk to Dr. More first. Fair enough?”

Lieutenant Miller sighed.

“I’m not going to intimidate him,” I explained calmly. “I just want to make sure he understands the damage his report is going to do.”

“You don’t think he did this on purpose?” She lifted the envelope by the corner and held it like it was a bag of dog poop.

I shrugged. “I’d like to give the man the benefit of the doubt. Life seems simpler sometimes from behind a desk.” Then I added quickly “no offense. It’s just, maybe he didn’t realize how that would be interpreted.”

It was clear she was skeptical, not just about what I said but also whether I even believed it myself. I didn’t.

She shoved the file in a drawer, and I stood with the evidence bags.

Lt. Shawna Miller watched me walk to the door. “You need to take this seriously, Detective. The Department will. A man’s life, his family, is at stake.”

I stopped with my hand on the shiny silver knob. I knew she felt trapped. On the one hand, I was one of her detectives and she wanted to help, and I appreciated that. On the other, she felt I should’ve known better and was frustrated with me for putting her in a bad spot.

I opened the door.

I didn’t make it back to my desk.

 

Third part of the third mystery in my forthcoming supernatural thriller FEAST OF SHADOWS.

Read the first here.

Read the second here.

art by Dofresh

I wanna tell you a story

23Sep

So. I wanna tell you a story.

A true story.

About a man named Will King, an NYPD detective, like me. King investigated the 1928 disappearance and presumed death of 10-year-old Grace Budd, who left her home to attend a birthday party and never returned.

There wasn’t much to go on. In fact, there was nothing at all. No body. No eyewitnesses. No physical evidence of any kind. Little Grace was just gone. And so no arrest was made for a full two years—until Charles Edward Pope was accused of the murder by his estranged wife. Mrs. Pope claimed her husband had confessed to her, but since there was nothing for a jury but her word, Charles was found not guilty in December, 1930, after 108 days in jail—after which he was a free man. I’m sure he went straight home and had a few words with his wife.

For a time, it seemed like that would be the end of it. But in 1934, four years after the trial and six years after the murder, Grace’s mother received an anonymous letter, purportedly from the killer, which described in bald tone how he had enticed the girl into his room on the pretense of needing help, how he had quickly removed his clothes on her way up the stairs so as not to get her blood on them, how he had strangled her and butchered her body, and how he had eaten it, roasted in the oven, over a period of nine days. The note ended with the “reassurance” that the girl had died a virgin.

But “I could’ve,” he said. “If I’d wanted to.”

Mrs. Budd was illiterate and had to have her eldest son read the letter to her, whereupon she handed it over to the police. Although there was nothing distinguishing about the page, it had been delivered in an envelope that was marred in one corner. Once dampened and viewed under a magnifying glass, the mark revealed an emblem containing the letters N.Y.P.C.B.A., for the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association. After interviewing the Association’s employees, Detective King discovered a janitor who admitted to stealing some stationary, although he claimed to have left it in an apartment he had rented on East 52nd. The landlady of the house provided King with the names of all her recent tenants, and there in the middle—much to his surprise—was one he recognized.

Albert Fish was a real grandfatherly type. He had a bit of a shamble to his walk. He was warm and soft-spoken. He was a father of six and visibly delighted in his youngest grandson. He read the Bible and could quote it prodigiously. By all accounts, he was a liked and respected man, and at 68 years old, with a head of gray hair and that sideways gait, he was the picture of harmlessness. Which is why, without a shred of physical evidence to link him to the murder, Fish had been quickly exonerated, despite that he had actually been the last to see Grace Budd alive—when he accompanied her to the birthday party with her mother’s blessing.

The landlady on East 52nd informed Detective King that while Fish had been living there, he’d been receiving money from his son and that he was due one more check, which had just arrived. King decided to wait outside the room until his quarry came to collect the letter, whereupon he intercepted the soft-spoken old man and asked him to come to the station for questioning. Fish agreed, but as soon as Detective King turned, the doting, Bible-reading, gray-haired father of six produced a razor blade and tried to slice King’s neck open. He failed and was subdued and arrested and ultimately brought to trial.

After the arrest, Albert Fish claimed to have committed close to a hundred murders in a number of different states, although he was only ever linked to nine and was only ever convicted of one—that of Grace Budd, for which he received the electric chair. Prior to the trial, he also admitted to experiencing a pair of involuntary ejaculations while he dismembered the body, but since it could never be proved whether he had eaten her or not, the motive was described as sexual and no account of the supposed cannibalism was given to the jury.

What is true beyond a shadow of a doubt, however, is that the kind and elderly Albert Fish, who spent all that time reading the Bible, regularly heard the voice of God commanding him to torture people “with implements of Hell.” What’s true is that he liked to beat himself with a nail-studded board and to stick wool soaked in lighter fluid in his anus and light it on fire. What’s true is that he liked to insert needles in his scrotum. And to leave them there. An X-ray revealed more than two dozen were present at the time of his arrest—so many, in fact, that the electric chair shorted in the middle of his execution and kind old Albert Fish had to wait in excruciating agony, half electrocuted, while they reset the switches and finished the job.

I imagine Detective King was changed by that case. I would’ve been. I bet he was changed by the knowledge that he’d had the killer from the start and had let him go. I bet he never again made the mistake of presuming innocence just because the alternative was inconceivable. I bet he was proud of the fact that he’d finally caught Grace Budd’s killer and had seen him punished. I bet it never made up for all the others who got away.

Why am I telling you this?

Because despite what you see on TV, or hear from the government, that’s hardly ever how it goes. And I don’t just mean about cannibalism and needles in scrotums, but that too. I mean about who gets caught and who gets away. If you believe the official statistics, just under 2/3 of all murders in this country are solved.

If you believe the official statistics.

But there’s some flexibility, you see, in what gets logged as “solved.” And the aggregate numbers hide a big difference between major metropolitan areas, like New York and Chicago, and the rest of the nation. If you live in a big city, a better rule of thumb is about half.

50/50.

One out of every two murderers is never caught—which means you probably know one, even though it’s inconceivable to contemplate.

The difference isn’t skill or perseverance or even luck, which is all that brought Albert Fish to justice. Lots of guys I know have all three of those, and in spades, too. No, catching the dark half requires more than that. Catching the dark half requires you to contemplate the otherwise inconceivable—that there really was a voice emanating from Albert Fish’s Bible, perverting its word and driving him to kill.

Or that some bodies want to be found.

Take the corpse of one John Doe, or as I called him, John T. Crisp. As with the Grace Budd case, there wasn’t much to go on. The body had been burned at high temperature and sealed in a drum, part of a shipment of radioactive hospital waste—nuclear medicine is a big producer these days—set to be buried for all eternity on a native reservation in the Great White North. On the way, it was spread over a highway in New Brunswick. The truck carrying the shipment was struck by another semi at high speed. Both drivers were killed. And there in the middle of the wreckage was the charred, faceless corpse of Mr. Crisp, resting in a puddle of toxic sludge and covered in KitKats, which had broken from their pallets inside the oncoming semi.

The body was shipped back to New York, its point of origin, where the forensics guys shat bricks. Mr. Crisp’s corpse was amess. His fingers were blackened, so there was no hope of prints, and his DNA didn’t match anything on record. All they could say for sure was that he was a male aged 45 to 60, although they added, based on certain genetic markers, he might have been Hispanic. Since the medical examiner couldn’t say whether the radioactive material had hastened his decay or delayed it, we couldn’t calculate a precise date of death. For all we knew, he’d been in there for months, or even years.

About all we had, in fact, was a reconstructed dental and skeletal profile. My job was to find a match, which meant scavenging the missing persons database for all possible hits on a conservative ten-year window, and getting dental records from legal next of kin—or at least the name of a dentist to pester. I had 17 matches, but that was assuming we were right about his ethnic background. If we weren’t, there were four times as many.

I was leaving a message for family number twelve, on the smaller list, when a package was plopped onto my desk. Plain manila envelope. Sealed with clear shipping tape. Machine-printed label. Unmarked VHS tape inside.

And that’s how everything started.

——————————————-

second chapter of the third mystery in my forthcoming supernatural thriller, FEAST OF SHADOWS

read the first here: https://rickwayneauthor.wordpress.com/2017/10/30/a-simple-exorcism/

art by flibberty jibbeth

A Simple Exorcism

He was making a proper nuisance of himself, whoever he was. I could hear the screams from the street.

I stepped out of the car and met the officer in charge, a woman named Ballantine, who I didn’t know but who I’d seen around once or twice.

“Thanks for coming,” she said, reaching a hand in greeting. “I know this isn’t really your thing, but I’ll be damned if we’ve had any luck talking him down. Word is, you speak this guy’s language. If you know what I mean.”

The yelling resumed and she led me in silence to the narrow, five-story building across the street. The fire escape zigzagged across the brick facade. Window-mounted AC units stuck out like bit tongues.

“Speaking of language,” I said, “any idea what that is?”

Ballantine shook her head as we walked up the stoop. “One of the patrolmen is Jewish. He said it sounded like Aramaic.”

“Do people speak Aramaic anymore?”

She shrugged.

Another bout of shouting filled the foyer as we entered. Mailboxes were on the left. Stairs were on the right. The super’s residence was at the back.

“Fifth floor,” Ballantine said, making it clear she wasn’t coming. The noise was louder inside, and she had to raise her voice. “The sarge is up there. Just be careful.” She leaned close. She was a full head shorter than me. “He’s not real good with female officers.”

“And the family?”

“Taken away by ambulance. Father, mother, adult daughter, unmarried.”

“Hurt?”

“No.” The sounds stopped again and her voice fell to a whisper. “Just really shaken up. The mother has some kind of illness, I gathered. Supposed to be serious. The ambulance was mostly for her. The other two went to make sure she was okay.”

I nodded. “And you were happy to get them off the scene.”

“Of course.”

“Anyone else in the unit?”

“Just the evil spirit.” Ballantine smiled.

I didn’t.

I started up the stairs, four flights to the top. The yelling came and went and got louder around each turn. Residents, who I’m sure had been directed to stay inside their homes, peered from behind cracked doors. I smelled dust and dried coriander.

I removed my firearm, holster and all, and handed it to the patrolman who was crouched against the wall on the last landing. He looked to be about half my age. “Hold this.”

He looked at it. “You know he’s armed, right?”

“That’s what they said on the radio.” I kept the weapon extended.

He looked at it. “Your funeral.” He took it with a shrug.

“Just follow your damned orders!” The uniformed sergeant at the top of the stairs barked down in an urgent whisper.

I walked up to him as the man in the room started screaming again. He was pissed about something and letting the whole world know. Language definitely sounded Semitic, like Arabic or Hebrew. Lots of soft consonants and recurrent syllables.

“How long’s he been in there?” I stood close to the sarge and kept my voice down.

“Not sure.”

His name tag said Rollins, and he was as haggard as you’d expect for a man who’d stayed sergeant into his 50s. His ruddy jowls had started to sag, along with his uniform, but he had hard eyes that I suspected had gotten harder every year. He used them to glance over me. It wasn’t sexual. I’m not his type, if you know what I mean. He was just checking me out, deciding if I was up to snuff.

“Few hours maybe,” he added. “Residents said they heard sounds of fighting a little after lunchtime. Walls here aren’t real thick. Family were frightened out of their wits when they left.”

“We have an ID?”

He shook his head. “Some kinda faith healer, I gathered. Family’s from Nigeria or Ghana or wherever. Wife had the flu and they brought this asshole in to take the evil spirit away. Then he went nuts. I dunno.” He squinted the side of his face.

“You been inside?” I motioned toward the half-open door just down the hall.

He nodded.

“Any mirrors?”

“Mirrors?”

“Yeah. You know, reflective glass. Shows you what you looks like.”

He scowled. “Didn’t notice. I was too worried about the raving asshole with the gun. And getting the family to safety.”

“What about a TV?”

He thought. “Yeah. Flat screen in the living area. Why?”

I took off my sport coat and tossed it over the balustrade. It would only constrict me if there was a tussle. I unwound the silver talisman on the chain around my wrist and fastened it around my neck, making it look like an ordinary necklace. The chain was visible but not the carved silver disc that dangled from it.

“You sure you’re gonna be okay in there? Patrolman Meyers is an ass,” the sergeant said, motioning to the kid holding my gun, “but he’s not wrong.”

I nodded as I rolled up my sleeves. “Just keep everyone back. No matter what you hear. No matter how crazy it sounds. Alright? Keep the trigger fingers out until you hear from me. You’ll only make things worse.”

“Whatever you say.”

He was sarcastic. I didn’t care. Sgt. Rollins had the demeanor of a man who knew how to keep control of his men, which is all that mattered. And I trusted him, in a way. I trusted that after 30-some years on the force, he would do everything he could to make it the last few years to retirement.

I stepped lightly to the door and peered in. The guy must have caught sight of me, because he started screaming again in that unusual tongue. Now it was the same phrase over and over, like he wanted me to do something — get back, maybe. Or let him out. He was on the floor in the living room surrounded by a wide ring of salt, kneeling near the inside edge. He definitely had a gun, but judging from how he held it, may or may not have known what it was for. I pushed the door open slowly, my body turned in profile to make myself less of a target — just in case I was wrong.

I took a step and waited for a reaction. There was a closet door to my right and a small enclosed kitchen to my left. There was a couch and a tall potted plant across from a worn Ikea bookcase and the TV. There was a slider door at the back, bolted shut. And no balcony. Only one way out.

The walls and shelves all had bright, colorful African decor. Just in front of me on the hardwood, a zigzag-patterned rug had been rolled up and put out of the way, probably to make room for the salt. An open thirty-pound sack of the stuff sat next to the TV stand, topped with an inverted steel funnel.

The guy inside the ring was clearly African as well. He wore a white kufi cap on his head and matching gown. There were dots of white pigment evenly spaced across his brow. He was clutching a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver in one hand and wooden figurine in the other.

He yelled again and the gun went up, properly this time.

There went that theory.

I opened my hands and arms wide. “I’m not armed.”

He uttered what I’m sure was an insult — terse and angry. His voice didn’t quite match his body. Too deep.

I pulled my eyes from the gun barrel pointed at my chest and stole a quick glance at the earth-stained figurine. It was about a foot tall and shaped like a fat peg or stake. He gripped it by the tapered end, which wasn’t needle-sharp, like a stake, but it definitely wasn’t dull either. The top and center of the piece had been carved with wavy lines to resemble a head and body. The face had a simple, snarling visage. There was a thin, angular chain wrapped five or six times around the torso. It was the color of cast iron and looked hand-made. No two links were identical. Dangling from one of them was an open padlock, also cast iron. I guessed it was a spirit totem of some kind. I hadn’t seen one like it, but the symbolism of lock and chain are darn-near universal.

“Who’m I talking to?” I asked as I slowly shut the door behind me. I reached backward and locked it without looking.

He laughed desperately. He had the kind of crosshatched wrinkles you get after a life in the sun. His eyes were crazy bloodshot.

“So what do I call you?”

He laughed again, longer and louder. He was letting me know he wasn’t that stupid.

I scowled. The easiest way to bind any entity is with its real name. That’s why all the old medieval texts had three or four names for every “demon.” It was a ruse to evade capture. Most of them weren’t true demons, of course, just plain ol’ malignant spirits, like this one. An “Old Scratch,” my grandpa used to say, right before he spit. Most were opportunists, no different than a wasp or scavenger, and just as skittish — easily frightened by guardian statues and sacred objects. They almost never jumped hosts, even when they had a chance. As long as you had the right tools, they’d flee and take their chances on an easier target.

This one hadn’t. There had to be a reason for that.

“What do you want?” I asked.

His bloodshot eyes glanced to the salt ring.

“Well, see, that’s a problem.” I took another step forward.

He cocked the revolver calmly and deliberately. I heard the click in the now-quiet room. I had the sense that everyone in the building was holding their breath, trying to hear our words, which I’m sure rumbled through the thin walls as an undecipherable baritone.

I looked at the gun barrel. I was very aware that at that range, there wasn’t much chance he’d miss.

It seemed clear that the witch doctor had managed to get the bastard out of the sick wife but had lost control after that. Something went wrong and he couldn’t lock the chain in time. Maybe his hands shook. Maybe he dropped the lock. Who knew? But at least he’d made a good-sized salt ring. Not just wide but thick as well. That, plus the protective dots over his eyes, suggested experience. Pouring a ring like that takes a lot of salt and a lot of time and is a bitch to clean up after. Folks who don’t know any better read some instructions in a book and think any old ring will do. They use half a box of Morton’s, make a thin circle barely big enough to move in, and call it a day. But all it takes is one misstep to scuff a ring like that and break the seal, and then it doesn’t matter how good you are. It’s game over.

This guy had played it safe. He knew not to take chances. But then, he also hadn’t been too worried. He’d used a salt ring rather than something durable, like a painted conjuring circle with binding runes. That said to me he’d probably done simple exorcisms all the time back home, wherever that was, and he hadn’t expected this one to be any different. It was a mistake, and now he was paying for it.

I needed to know what I was up against.

I kept my arms open and nonthreatening. “You can shoot me if you want. I can’t stop you. But if you do, my friends are gonna shoot back.” I nodded toward the hall. “I’ll be dead, and so will that man you’re in, which means this whole place will turn into a crime scene and no one will touch anything until the forensics guys get here, which could take a while, especially since we’re coming up on rush hour.”

I nodded to the round plastic clock on the wall, just over the TV. I didn’t need to. I knew what time it was. It was just an excuse to glance down at the blank screen and confirm, up close, my suspicion that the two of us were alone and that man’s reflection matched his appearance. Which it did. That ruled a few things out.

Easy things, unfortunately.

I took another careful step forward. I wasn’t more than ten feet from the ring by then. “You’ll be trapped in that circle,” I said. “For a few hours at least, unbound and without a host. How long do you think you can hold your breath?”

His hand clenched the gun in anger. He was sweating.

So was I. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat nonchalantly.

Exorcism is tricky. It’s not just a fight. It’s a process of elimination. You start by ruling things out.

I could’ve been facing a witch, I thought, possessing the old man from afar. But then, a person probably wouldn’t be speaking Aramaic — or whatever it was. More than that, salt rings don’t retard normal human beings, so he could’ve walked out at any time.

For the same reason, I was pretty sure it wasn’t a demonic possession either. True demons are powerful entities that aren’t trapped so easily. Besides, no one runs into real demons anymore. The saints locked them all up ages ago.

It also could’ve been a ghost, the free-floating spirit of a dead person, but they can’t possess the living — at least, not unless the host is a medium or other sensitive. And even then, ghosts aren’t rational. They don’t realize they’re dead, which is why they’re stuck here reliving the tragedies of their lives. And that’s why, no matter what you read, a ghost is always dangerous, like a wild animal. Even the friendly ones can turn violent, and without warning. Because they’re reliving a trauma, their actions are detached from their surroundings, which is creepy as fuck, lemme tell you. And they speak in strange non sequiturs. They don’t calmly point guns and ask to be set loose.

Given the mirror test, and Ballantine’s report that the wife was seriously ill, I was 99% certain this Old Scratch was a “carrion ghoul,” for lack of a common name. You find them in pretty much everywhere — opportunistic spirits that pray on the sick and sinful. In the Philippines, they’re called Aswang, and it’s said they appear as the living in daytime, but with a nervous tic and bloodshot eyes — like this guy. At night, they become intangible and wander the streets in search of the sick and dying so they can slurp their intestines.

Those kinds of details are usually exaggerated, but relevant. Intestinal disease is how most people get sick in the tropical parts of the world. In other climates, you hear different stories. What’s the same is the remedy. People all over the world, from Peru to Siberia, consult a witch doctor when a family member falls victim to a sudden, strange, and undiagnosable illness.

If I was right, that meant neither vinegar nor iron nor running water would have any effect — a fact confirmed by the totem he was clutching in his hand. The cast iron was having no effect. Which sucked. Carrion ghouls are the worst kind of infectious spirit. Because their hosts are sick, they can burrow deep and get a tight grip. You can’t just scare them out with talismans and holy water. It takes violence. You have to pry them away. From the inside.

That means two things. First, you have to know where the sickness is. That’s usually not a problem for a witch doctor, who’ll have the family share all the relevant detail.

I had no such luck.

Second, you absolutely, positively cannot be wrong. If you go sticking someone in the wrong place, or if it’s not a carrion ghoul after all, well . . . You get the idea.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that there’s a foolproof diagnosis, or so our ancestors have warned us. If you can get close enough to see it, the reflection of the world in the glisten of the eyes is always upside down.

I looked at the heavy salt ring. I didn’t have a choice. I was gonna have to get inside with it.

My adversary seemed to understand my thoughts, because he smiled an awful, knowing smile. He lowered the gun. Now he wanted me inside that ring.

“Alright,” I whispered. “You wanna fight, let’s fight.”

I happened to know, from experience, that it takes a lot out of a spirit to worm its way into a new host, especially a witch doctor, who would know how to resist. On top of that, this one had been yelling, on and off, for an hour or two at least. Already his breath was long and irregular. He looked tired. Thirsty, too. Like we all get after a hard workout.

All I needed was a distraction.

I showed him my empty hands, like a magician before a trick. He watched them intently with those horribly bloodshot eyes as I reached into the pocket of my slacks and pulled out my keys. A small pocket knife dangled. I showed it to him, as if to say “See? Nothing to worry about.” I opened the inch-long blade. It was sharp. It slit the skin of my forearm with no trouble.

I clenched my teeth and hissed. It stung. It wasn’t a big cut, but it was enough to draw blood. That was the point.

The old witch doctor licked his lips.

I slipped my keys back into my pocket and stepped toward the circle, arm bared. He stood and stepped back from the edge, making room for me, but his eyes didn’t move from the deep red liquid slowly growing into a bulge on my skin.

I lifted my foot to step inside the ring when he shouted and raised the revolver without warning.

I froze.

He sniffed the air once. Then twice. He was still clutching the totem in his left hand — no doubt to keep it away from me — and he lifted it and tapped his chest with the head.

I knew what he meant. He could smell the silver.

Fucker.

I scowled as I unhooked the talisman. But since my arm was still bleeding, a drop ran as soon as I moved. He watched it jump from my elbow and it hit the floor in a tiny splatter. It was only a moment.

But it was enough.

I ripped the talisman from my blouse and thrust it forward. It spun in the air, glimmering, and he flinched and turned with a growl. I sprang forward and the gun discharged the very second I knocked it away. The bullet hit the wall as I tackled my adversary to the floor.

See, kids. This is why you always, always, always make a big ring. His head landed right next to the far edge. If that circle had been any smaller, my tackle would’ve forced him across and broken the seal, and then who knew?

I had all my weight on him as I dangled the talisman in front of his eyes. I was sure I’d got the better of him.

But I was wrong.

He was strong. I could feel it immediately. That was why the old man had had so much trouble. I knew right away I couldn’t hold him. I leaned down quickly and caught my reflection in the glisten of his bloodshot eyes.

Definitely upside down.

He lifted me. Like I was nothing. He couldn’t approach the talisman, so he let go of the totem and lifted me, and with hardly any effort. That was unusual. That meant he was old — damned old, which made sense, I suppose, given his language of choice. I should have paid more attention to that. Lesson learned.

But now I was in trouble.

I sacrificed the talisman by throwing it in his face, which cause him to flinch and reach up to swat it away. He let go of me and I fell on my ass. I scrambled to the fallen gun and threw it into the open bathroom. It landed on the tile with a heavy thud just as I felt my adversary bite into my calf. In the scramble, my nice department store slacks had worked up my leg, revealing my skin. I felt teeth puncture my flesh.

Now, he didn’t bite me the way a child bites you, to inflict pain. He bit me the way you bite into a tough steak, the way you bite something you intend to tear loose with your canines and swallow. He was eating me.

I screamed. It hurt. It really hurt. And it took every last ounce of self control not to turn around and push and kick and fight him off, which is every creature’s natural response to being eaten alive. Instead, I whelped and whimpered as I used my flat palms to drag my torso in an arc across the hardwood. My quivering fingertips brushed against the wooden figurine, but I only knocked it further away.

“Fuck!”

That’s when he pulled with his head, teeth still clenched, and tore a flap of skin.

It’s the weirdest thing, lemme tell ya. It hurts like a motherfucker, of course, but it’s the raw sensation that gets you. Your dermis lifting. Air on your muscles.

I screamed again. And I meant this time, every last unintelligible syllable. It was primal — a completely irrational, uncontrollable wail. And I panicked. There had already been a gunshot. If my colleagues burst through the door and saw us like that, they would’ve opened fire. No questions. The old man would’ve been dead before he hit the floor. Only now I was wounded — not just the cut on my arm but a giant gash in my leg — which meant if his host died, the carrion ghoul would rush out of him and into me, which I’m pretty sure was the whole point of the attack in the first place. He had seen that I was some kind of authority figure. He’d been trapped before, and no one would let him out. If he could get into me, he’d walk free.

Normally I’d say “bring it” and go twelve rounds with the piece of shit. But normally I’m not going up against something three thousand years old, or whatever he was. Normally my mind isn’t spinning as it tries to process the sensation of being eaten. So if it came down to it, him versus me inside my own skull, I have no idea who would’ve won.

I kicked the old man with a heeled boot, right in the mouth. Once. Twice. Three times. But all I did was loosen some teeth and bloody the guy’s lip. Not that I’m weak or out of shape or anything. I was quite the kickboxer there for awhile. This ghoul simply didn’t care.

I went to kick again and he knocked my leg out of the way and lunged for my face. I got the old man’s dirty, salty, nicotine-stained fingers in my mouth and up my nose and I gagged. The ghoul forced my head back and down the floor. Hard. The old witch doctor opened his mouth over me, like he was going breath himself out. It stank like cigarette ash.

“Thanks,” I said.

I head-butted the guy. It didn’t do much, but it was enough for me to lunge for the totem. The ghoul’s powerful hands grabbed me immediately and pulled me back. But I didn’t fight. I just turned and rammed the wooden point right into the old guy’s chest.

The room dropped underneath me — as if the entire building, the entire city, had suddenly sunk four feet in space. I fell hard, along with everything else. The TV toppled and smashed on the hardwood. Books and pictures scattered. Water burst from the toilet.

The lock in my hand clicked shut from the force, and that was it. I collapsed, panting hard and in hella pain.

I heard banging on the front door. The handle jiggled and there were calls for the ram. I didn’t have long.

I struggled to my feet, where I immediately discovered that my right leg couldn’t take much weight, and I had to constantly shift to keep my balance. Blood ran down my skin into my shoe. I grabbed the old man by the arms and dragged him, unconscious, through the scattered salt to the bathroom. I pulled a heavy bath towel from the rack, wet it in the churning toilet, and wiped the blood off his mouth. I checked the hole in his gown from where I’d plunged the sharp end of the figurine. The skin underneath was clean and bare. And he was breathing.

The first swing of the battering ram cracked the frame but didn’t completely dislodge the bolt. I hobbled back to the living room and snatched the totem. When the door gave way and the patrolmen ran in, I was sitting on the toilet seat next to the moaning witch doctor.

“What took you so long?” I asked. I had the rolled towel pressed to the back of my bloody calf. I showed them the blood. “I’m gonna need a stretcher,” I explained and replaced it.

My colleagues swarmed around, Ballantine and Rollins and everyone, trying to make sense of the scene — the scattered salt, the shattered television, the blood on the hardwood. They tried to get me out of the apartment, but I absolutely refused to move from my porcelain throne until the paramedics came. Once I was on the stretcher, they asked to take the towel and I pointed across the room and demanded my amulet. I used some cuss words.

Ballantine took my statement at the hospital, where I watched a young resident stab my leg with a series of fat needles. I got a local anesthetic, a bunch of precautionary vaccines, and a shit-ton of stitches. He didn’t say out loud that he knew I’d been bitten, but he knew I’d been bitten.

Ballantine waited in the hall just past the hanging curtain. I told her the old guy was basically harmless, but that he might’ve had dementia or something, and that I’d tripped and fell over the TV, which was why it was broken, and that was how I’d gotten cut.

“What about the gunshot?” she asked.

“His hands were shaking. He didn’t understand why the cops were there. He was scared. He was sweating. His hands were shaking. I convinced him he wasn’t in danger, and when he went to lower the weapon, it slipped and discharged.”

She didn’t believe me. But she didn’t ask too many questions, either. As a cop, you’re afforded a certain amount of professional courtesy. Besides, it was my word against her suspicions, and since no one had died and I wasn’t pressing charges, there was no real incentive to push it.

That night, I treated myself to a Cuban from my secret stash. I sat on my balcony in my underwear with my bandaged leg on the railing and smoked that cigar to a nub while pulling swings from a bottle of fancy champagne. Just me and my drinking buddy: a foot-long wooden figurine, wrapped in a tarnished chain and locked tight. I had it swaddled in the towel. We had a nice chat. Pretty sure all he did was curse me in Aramaic.

The next day, I left the pain pills at home and walked with a pronounced limp into the office. I sat at my desk. I unlocked the bottom filing drawer and pulled it open with a grunt. It was getting heavy. And almost full. There was a painted mask, a goblet, a small collection of carved candles, some shiny bezoars, feathers, false talismans, a pygmy head, ampules of Komodo dragon spit, the teeth of a saint polished and laid into a tarnished silver cross, a broken wand, a rabbit’s foot, the taxidermied specimen of an extinct fish, a pair of eyeglasses made from the pupils of a martyr, and more. I tossed the wooden figurine onto the pile, rolled the drawer shut, and locked it.

I looked around the office. “The Killing Field” was stuffed. A few people were chatting. Lieutenant Miller was getting herself a coffee at the machine.

I turned on my computer and typed my password and a pleasant ding welcomed me. I wondered how many different ones the software company had tested before they settled on that specific ding.

I sat back and looked at the screen. I couldn’t prove it, but it sure seemed like there was a helluva lot more shit happening lately. And of the serious kind, too.

 

rough cut from my forthcoming occult mystery/supernatural thriller FEAST OF SHADOWS.

cover image by Faraz Shanyar

Do Popular Genres Map to the Seven Emotional Pathways of the Mammalian Brain?

The eminent neuroscientist, Jaak Panskepp, pioneered the study of emotion in mammals. He is famous for, among other things, tickling rats in the lab to make them laugh, but his work wasn’t a joke. He discovered that all mammals, including humans, share the same seven emotional pathways, commonly identified as: fear, care, lust, rage, panic/grief, seeking, and play. These are not vague “predispositions” teased from statistical analysis of animal behavior, though. Panskepp identified specific anatomical circuits for each system, complete with distinct hormones and neurotransmitters. Fear, for example, runs from the amygdala through the hypothalamus to the brainstem and down the spinal cord.

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In my industry, you often see another seven-item list, that of the “standard” genres. Of course, there’s no uniformity here. Wikipedia, for example, says they are: romance, western, inspirational, crime, fantasy, science fiction, and horror. (People don’t always realize it, but romance accounts for about half of all dollars spent on fiction, with inspirational taking up another quarter or so.) In terms of importance, I think it makes sense to swap western for mystery, which is far more prevalent, but there’s nothing magical about any of it. Ultimately any list is meant to cover the same market, just under a different hierarchy.

Reading about Panskepp’s discoveries yesterday, it struck me that his seven emotional pathways could be obliquely mapped to the popular genres (as measured by percentage of total dollar sales). For example:

Fear=>Horror

Care=>Inspirational/Melodrama

Lust=>Romance/Erotica

Rage=>Mystery

Panic/Grief=>Thriller/Crime

Seeking=>Science fiction

At first glance, there seems to be a disjoint between the final pathway, ‘play,’ and the final genre, fantasy, but this is where we need to be careful with our hierarchy. As Wikipedia points out, many critics consider the western novel formative, with my preference (mystery) being “too commercial” to be taken seriously. But unlike mystery or science fiction, both western and fantasy are established by their setting rather than their thematic or emotional content, so including them on our list here means mapping apples to oranges.

Science fiction is often lumped with fantasy under the cumbersome heading “speculative fiction,” and for good reason. We should add western. Indeed, in the early days, most science fiction was western, with the “sheriff” riding a rocket ship rather than a horse and slinging a blaster rather than a revolver to corral the unruly inhabitants of an alien, rather than a Great Plains, frontier.

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Thus, it’s probably more apt to say:

Seeking=>Adventure

where adventure includes sci-fi, fantasy, western, nautical fiction, jungle stories, and so on.

Of course, that still leaves the last pathway unassigned. Here I would propose:

Play=>Comedy

where comedy includes genres not on the “standard” list, such as the cozy mystery, the romcom, most children’s books, etc.

If the science is right, then the classic tragedy/comedy dichotomy is probably bunk — or at least too simplistic to be meaningful — and we should ditch it. I never liked it, to be honest. It implied a normative hierarchy. Tragedy is serious. Comedy is not. Note the lack of anything comedic on the critics’ list of “serious” genres. Note also how popular comedians — from Tom Hanks to Robin Williams to Bill Murray — turn to tragic acting, usually late in their careers, in order to be taken seriously, as if making people laugh was inferior to making them cry. It’s a disgusting standard invented by an aristocratic literati who were far enough removed from any real struggle not to need a little mirth from time to time. (Personally, I find making people laugh is both more difficult and more meaningful.)

Literature only accounts for a few percentage points’ worth of all dollars spent on fiction, just as arthouse films are perpetually dwarfed by blockbusters. I only mention it because literature’s relative unpopularity seems to support the hypothesis that Homo sapiens react most strongly — instinctively, even — to stories operating within one of the seven mammalian emotional systems, which could potentially be the biological basis of genre, leaving the sliver of modern lit as a historically-recent intellectual anomaly. In other words, in the future utopia predicted by Star Trek, Moby Dick is still unlikely to be as popular as something like Star Trek itself.

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To me, all of this is fascinating, and it completely derailed my work this week. I wanted to know, as a “genre author,” which emotional systems I primarily employ and whether or not the books I write were tickling the appropriate neural pathways. Of course, answering that question requires an accurate mapping. Some of the assignments are obvious. Horror activates the ‘fear’ pathway and romance/erotica ‘lust.’ We can also rule some assignments out. Crime/thriller probably doesn’t significantly activate ‘care.’ But it’s not obvious that mystery activates ‘rage.’

Here I think we need to be clear what we mean. A romance doesn’t have to make the reader horny, although it certainly can. Many light romances don’t feature sex of any kind. What’s more, humans feel many more emotions than the seven identified. But then, by ‘rage’ we don’t mean that specific emotion. It’s a label, not of the feeling itself but the physical, neuroanatomical system that mediates that class of feelings. In the case of the ‘lust’ circuit, that’s sex and reproduction, romantic relationships, and associated phenomena.

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It’s also important not to think that a genre has to operate exclusively in its primary system. There can be sad bits and sexy bits and adventurous bits in any story. The idea, though, is that there is a primary system for each genre that must be significantly activated for the book to resonate in that genre, and that this is a biological process independent of the label assigned by the retailer. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy might be marketed as science fiction, but “biologically” it’s a comedy. It activates the ‘play’ circuit. (And indeed, there’s very little “scientific” about it.)

It seems clear to me that thrillers — works by John Grisham, Dan Brown, or Tom Clancy, for example — activate the ‘panic/grief’ circuit. These books usually start with some calamitous trigger that sets the protagonists running. Indeed, the classic thriller novel cover art features a desperate figure running from a shadowy threat. And in as much as the antagonists tend to be Muslim terrorists or secret agents or corrupt politicians, thrillers are often fueled by in-group sympathies (like patriotism) and out-group hatred of the kind we’d expect to be mediated by a panic/flight response, where there’s an immediate threat to the herd that must be dealt with by its capable guardians. No wonder this is the most popular genre for military authors and readers.

That leaves mystery assigned to the ‘rage’ pathway more or less by process of elimination. But remember, ‘rage’ is just a label. It stands for the full range of associated emotions: madness, violence, obsession, enmity, and so on. Indeed, the word madness comes from the classic belief that one can get so angry, so mad, as to lose one’s mind. Also recall that a mystery doesn’t need to make the reader feel angry (but it can). It just has to operate in or activate that neuropathway, and I think it does.

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The classic mystery starts with a horrible crime of passion — usually a murder, of course — where the detective must uncover not only the identity of the killer but the reason why they did it — the source of the rage that led to the terrible crime. Often we’re invited to sympathize with the killer, where what made them angry also makes us angry. (It’s just that they went too far.) Many of Agatha Christie’s victims, for example, were despicable people who “deserved” to die, often because of how they mistreated others, which all of us can relate to. It’s worth noting here that Mrs. Christie isn’t just the most popular mystery writer but the single best-selling author of all time!

By contrast, in Seicho Matsumoto’s award-winning Inspector Imanishi Investigates, the reader is invited not to sympathize with the killer’s rage but to feel angry at him. Japanese society is highly communitarian after all. Its people value personal commitment and teamwork above all else. But it’s also very class-based. For a lower-class man to cheat his way into wealth and then kill to cover that up is a horrible transgression, especially in the aftermath of the war, when everyone was struggling. The eponymous inspector satiates our anger, as the detective is always meant to do, by catching the offender and bringing him to justice. And indeed the theme of justice — fulfilled or betrayed — is central to the genre, even in its hard-boiled guises.

However, I recognize all of that is speculative. There’s nothing that says the mapping has to be globally neat. Mystery might best be lumped with thriller/crime/suspense as it often is at the bookstore, leaving ‘rage’ unassigned. But given that the neuroscience is well established, and given that the sales data confirm the perennial popularity of those key genres, and given the near-perfect fit for all categories but the last, the model works for me, at least as a place to start.

And if so, it’s important, and for several reasons. First, it explains why these genres and not others are perennially the most beloved of readers: because we’re hardwired to enjoy them. It also suggests we’re unlikely to see any new phyla of literary genre since we’ve tapped all our innate pathways — although I suppose some might shift over the centuries. And we should be careful with blending too liberally. An author can do that, but the theory suggests one genre must remain master of the others if the story is ever to resonate with a wide audience.

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The hypothesis also explains the common wisdom you often hear in storytelling circles that the whole point of any work of narrative fiction is to give the reader a “satisfactory emotional experience.” In other words, to function effectively, your book has to trigger the appropriate emotional pathway — and to provide a release — else you risk leaving the reader in confusion or unease.

Finally, in as much as the seven pathways are evolved survival responses highly conserved across mammalian species, the hypothesis suggests that intelligent life on other planets might tell similar stories, or at least similar enough to be thematically recognizable (although probably not enjoyable) to us. I find that comforting, that stable behavioral responses to disparate worlds yet made of the same chemistry and physics might mean we can find a common narrative — if not with aliens, then at least with each other.

But then, anyone who’s a reader already knew that.

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”                                        -Ursula K. Le Guin

Here is the final model:

Fear=>Horror

Care=>Inspirational/Melodrama

Lust=>Romance/Erotica

Rage=>Mystery

Panic/Grief=>Thriller/Crime

Seeking=>Adventure

Play=>Comedy

What do you think?

Released this week: THE MINUS FACTION Complete Omnibus Edition

99 cents for a limited time!

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The Minus Faction Omnibus is finally here!

What the fr@^k is a ‘soft launch’ anyway?

Research into purchasing behavior confirms my personal experience that in a market filled with many alternatives, readers tend to choose books with a demonstrated readership over those without. And since they don’t have a perfect window into that, they use the number of reviews as a proxy measure. Not so much the aggregate star rating, mind you — the raw number of reviews other people bothered to leave.

A ‘soft launch’ makes a new book available to the author’s network — especially existing fans — at a steeply discounted price in order to encourage reviews ahead of the ‘hard launch,’ which is usually a marketing campaign aimed at new readers. I need around 20-30 to make that worthwhile.

In short… this omnibus edition ain’t gonna stay 99 cents for long, which means two things:

1) If you’ve already left a review on one of the individual episodes, or if you were contemplating it, please port it to the new edition as soon as you can. Also, please purchase the book first. It’s not that I need that 35-cent royalty. It’s that Amazon sort reviews by “verified purchases,” which is actually a great way to combat fake reviews. (In fact, that’s the only reason it’s on such a steep sale.)

2) If you haven’t read the book, get it soon. After the soft launch, it goes back to $8.99.

(Paperback is on it’s way. I hope to approve the proof this week.)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076BLK7D3/

[image error]Capt. John Regent returns a paraplegic after months of captivity and torture—only no one knows who took him or how he escaped.

Xana Jace strives only to be reunited with her son. She keeps her head down and stays out of trouble, which isn’t easy when you stand seven feet eight inches tall.

Ian Tendo’s sensible life has fallen apart. After losing his girlfriend and being arrested for terrorism, he doesn’t imagine things could get any worse—until he’s beset by an eleven-year-old prodigy with a foul mouth and an ambulance full of high explosives.

One by one, all four are recruited by an enigmatic mastermind, known only as Prophet, who offers them everything they want in exchange for the impossible.

But team is a four-letter word.

After a botched mission reveals a plot to hack the human race, they discover a betrayal by one of their own—and realize that not all of them will survive.

THE MINUS FACTION is a super-powered speculative thriller about extraordinary abilities and how not to use them. Collected here for the first time in its entirety, this special omnibus edition includes all seven episodes as well as bonus material not previously available.

AI and the future of humanity

The question posed to me was whether there’s cause to be optimistic about AI. My answer is that that’s an oversimplification almost to the point of farce.

To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. Also to be clear, I am talking about AI in the classic sense, rather than the kinds of algorithmic “intelligence” that get so-labeled today. I am referring to a genuinely creative machine consciousness, or a whole class of them really.

First, much like genetic modification (of both food and humans), I don’t think you could stop the development of artificial intelligence even if you wanted to. But more than that, it really does have the potential to make life better for everybody.

The issue, really, is that there’s not going to be a straight line from here to there, and history suggests things will probably get worse — potentially, A LOT worse — before that end state, if it even comes.

I’m not a pessimist. I believe problems are both inevitable and solvable. But we do need to understand the typical course:

~A new invention or discovery

~Optimists (typical liberals) foresee what we CAN do with it and assume therefore we will

~We do, but we also do lots more shit than anything else — often completely unanticipated shit. For example, the internet facilitates commentary like this, but it’s mostly porn. By far, it’s mostly porn. After that, it’s gambling, cat pictures, selfies, scams, misinformation, and organized crime, both private and public (i.e., governments).

~Things get better for some people but typically a little worse overall and the novelty is soberly re-examined for what it really is versus what we wanted it to be. We’re at this stage now with social media/big data.

~Bans and prohibitions are enacted, addressing symptom rather than cause

~The wealthy quickly claim beneficial exceptions, often in isolated systems separate from the rest of us

~Generations of inequality and/or outright suffering follow, such as after the invention of the steam engine, which ripped limbs from children for decades before anyone did anything about it

~Some time later, people start to contemplate the responsible governance they should have been considering at the point of irrational exuberance

~Changes are introduced gradually, through trial and error and over the objection of political conservatives, which improve life gradually for everyone but the poor, who are pretty much ignored by the mainstream Right and Left alike

For me, the problem with AI isn’t just that it introduces another asymmetry, such like what we’ve seen (going all the way back to the invention of agriculture), but that it introduces the ULTIMATE asymmetry. In the past, the wealthy and powerful were always — at some point, once you got far enough down — dependent on the poor and working classes: to grow food, to staff factories, to fill armies, to clean house, etc. That meant there was a floor to human suffering. Things could only get so bad before workers went on strike en masse or the population rebelled, and so introduced a correction. This is the fodder of history, the dates and conflicts you were forced to memorize in school.

Side Note: For those who want a really great overview of those kinds of forcesacross the span of human history, read William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples,where he talks about the two kinds of parasitism on society’s producers: microparasitism (disease) and macroparasitism (the ruling class).

True AI has the genuine potential to render the great mass of people not just superfluous but an outright burden. There will be no reason, in a politico-economic sense, for most of them to exist since neither their labor nor their vote will empower the ruling class. There will no longer be anything to stop the powers-that-be from reproducing and extending the “solutions” that have repeatedly occurred throughout human history across many times and circumstances: from Stalinist Russia to the pogroms of medieval Europe to the Khmer Rouge to the Rwandan genocide and on and on right up to what’s going on in Myanmar right now.

Wherever we go, there we are. With whatever tools we invent, the hand that holds them is still a human one.

Now, AI might eventually reach such ubiquity that all (or most) humans alive will benefit. That’s definitely possible. But as I said, there’s not a straight line from here to there. It’s like traveling back in time to the year 1900 and telling a group of people:

“Okay, look… I gotta be honest. Things are gonna be bad. Really bad. There’s gonna be a horrible global war in a few years that will kill unprecedented numbers of people, not just through violence but also famine and disease. After that, a massive economic depression will put huge chunks of you out of work and force you to move from your homes. Many will get sick and die. That will only end because of another world war, this one even larger and more devastating than the first and which will see the invention and use of weapons capable of wiping out the entire planet. In the aftermath, the European colonial empires will retract, which sounds great, but they’ll leave a power vacuum, and the developing world, from South America to Africa to Asia, will experience repeated waves of civil war, ethnic cleansing, and famine — often with a great deal of external meddling. The end result of all that is: many of you will die, and even if not, your family lines probably will. BUT… there’s a silver lining! For those who survive, things will actually get better than they are now. Democracy will spread. Basic social safety nets will be introduced. There’ll be a minimum wage. Women will get the vote and racial integration will be the law of the land, if not always the practice. Health care will improve as well as opportunities for education and home ownership. So chin up! Smile on your faces! And back to work!”

Those who made it through all that — us — look back and say “gee, that must’ve sucked,” but we didn’t have to live through any of it. We’re the beneficiaries. It’s just something bad that happened, like the Inquisition.

The question before us is, is there reason to be optimistic about AI? I dunno. Do those people in 1900, knowing what you told them, have reason to be optimistic?

It’s great to say “We’re gonna have universal basic income,” except no we’re not. Maybe one day, who knows? But right now there’s ZERO political will. We couldn’t even get universal health care coverage in this country under a nominally Democratic administration. The tax bill under consideration in Congress at this very moment tilts the complete opposite way.

So good luck with that. Maybe eventually, after we go through all the pain, people will realize something like UBI is a good idea and enact it. It’s even possible it becomes necessary as a means of reintroducing consumption. If so, that will be great for the people alive then. But as a practical solution, it doesn’t really address what’s coming.

Do you know how they did it?

“Do you know how they did it? How The Masters won? No? I’ll tell you.

“They cheated.

“They couldn’t beat the dark, or at least that was the lesson they took from history. So they locked up all the magic. All of it. All sides. Light, dark, gray, didn’t matter. For six hundred years, from the fall of the Templars, whence they received the Great Eye, to the start of the war, they searched for and imprisoned every artifact. They sealed every portal they could find, cutting us off from friend and foe alike. Ancient treatises were taken and buried. New ones were forbidden, or else had to be written in approved codes and cyphers. Anyone who resisted, or even just refused—woodfolk and the old practitioners of wildcraft—were labeled witches and burned alive.

“This was their great enterprise, their solution to the problem of evil. This was the ‘peace’ the High Arcane bought with their power. And slowly but surely, bit by bit, over six centuries, magic went out of the world.

“Not all of it of course. They kept the good bits for themselves. Oh, I’m sure the theory was that they’d hold onto it just in case. But safety or greed, the end was the same. The only ones with any real power were themselves—and anyone they deemed worthy.

“Couldn’t have done it without the Eye, though. That’s how they found it all. As word got round, folks took to hiding things, of course. But the Eye sees all. A huge crystal it is—spiked and radiant—forged by the first robed priests for Naram-Sin of Akkad, the first god-emperor of civilization.

“Eventually, when things got desperate, the dark ones rebelled. They managed to find their holy book, the Necronomicon, lost since the fall of Babylon, and with it, they pursued a hundred-year war to destroy The Masters.

“Good people had to make a bad choice.

“It wasn’t until the middle of the last century that the seekers of the dark were finally defeated. And only at great cost. Their book was destroyed. And that was that. The end of the story. So everyone thought.

“Until . . . out of the jungle, out of nowhere, a man appeared—a man from a tribe spared the ravages of history, a man who could make magic. Not the repetition of some crusty old spell, mind you, but real magic. New magic.”

“Étranger . . .” I breathed.

“Here was a threat. A genuine threat. For the Eye cannot see what hasn’t been made.

“There was a battle, if you believe the rumors. All seven Masters versus the bald shaman of the forest. In the melee, the Eye of Akkad, the source of the High Arcane’s power, was cracked.” She smiled at first. But then her face turned angry. “Thirty years on, The Masters are no more. And the dark ones have returned. It seems they’ve won after all.”

“Is that why you’re doing this?”

She shrugged quickly. “Sure. If it makes you feel better. But I’ll say this . . . I’ve read the tea leaves. I’ve seen the entrails. There’s no dawn. Do you understand? The clock stops at midnight. Not even the great heretic himself can stop it. Not anymore.”

——————————————-

rough cut of dialogue illustrating how a scene starts in my head, taken from the revisions to the third course of my forthcoming occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS.

art by Alexander Gorbunov

I will set you free!

People.

That was the difference.

If they had a mission, they would have put him somewhere secret, somewhere no one would see. Given him orders.

When they put him in the middle of a crowd, he knew they wanted chaos.

Bryson Beatty sat on the bench looking at all the happy families. It was a zoo. They woke him up in a fucking zoo.

Children had ice creams and popcorn and colorful stuffed versions of the animals in the enclosures. So many animals. So many smells. So many voices. Americans, it sounded like. The last thing he remembered was . . .

People. Animals. Smells. Voices.

Vibrations.

The market in Somalia.

Bryson put his head down and tried not to cry. “All those people,” he whispered.

He clutched his head with his gloved hands. His masters had covered his arms in a long coat, even though it was summer. He rubbed his head and tried not to think what he must look like, sitting alone in a heavy jacket and gloves.

“You’re missing all the fun.”

Bryson raised his head. A man. Thin. Tanned. Print shirt. Khaki shorts. Salt-and-pepper hair.

“Stay away from me.”

“Okay. I hear you.” The man took a step back.

“Go!”

He reached into his pocket. “Look, I’m a counselor, okay?” He pulled out a card and held it out. “My daughter saw you sleeping over here. I just thou — ”

Brickbat turned. “Go away. Save your family.”

“Save them?” That got the man’s attention. He looked at the foreigner’s long coat and gloves. “Are . . . are you planning on hurting anyone?”

“Naw, mate. Not planning. But that don’t mean it won’t happen.”

The interloper was clearly suspicious. “Can I get you some help?”

“No. Now bugger off and leave me the fuck alone.” Bryson shut his eyes. They were bloodshot and wrapped in tears. He probably looked like a nightmare. How long before the security men came? How long before it started?

The counselor looked around at all the families. He looked to his own, waiting. “Where are you from? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“What’s it fuckin’ sound like? Germany?” Bryson immediately felt bad. He wanted the man to leave, for his own sake, but he didn’t have to be an asshole.

The counselor took it in stride. “I can’t always tell English from Australian. Sorry.” He took a step back toward his family waiting at the railing of the great ape den across the tree-lined walkway. The animals milled on a short lawn. People passed, laughing, or stood and watched from under the shade of trees poking through the new brick path.

“Right.” Bryson rubbed his short hair. It hadn’t grown much. How long had he been under? He didn’t even know. Jesus, he didn’t even know what month it was.

The man turned to leave.

“Hey. Mate. Sorry. It’s just . . . what month is it?”

“Month?” The man stopped. “June.” He was skeptical.

“Shit . . .” Bryson realized he had asked the wrong question. His voice was soft. “And the year?” That would give it away. No way the man would leave now.

The counselor looked grim. He walked closer and showed Bryson the date on his phone as if to prove he wasn’t lying. The man with the metal arms lowered his head again.

Almost two years.

He’d lost nearly two whole years of his life. It was the longest he’d ever been under.

His lip quivered. “Jesus . . .”

The counselor sat on the far end of the bench slowly. “I’m Jacob. I’ll understand if you want me to leave. But, you know, this is what I do. I think we both know this isn’t where you should be. If you need something . . .”

Bryson was teary. “My pills.”

Jacob nodded. “What kind?”

Beatty shook his head. “I dunno the name. I — I can’t remember. Epraxis? Ephestor? They help. My head. You know, keep calm.”

“I don’t know those names. I’m sorry. Do you have a regular physician? Is there someone I can call?”

Beatty shook his head. “They control everything.”

Jacob stiffened at the word ‘they.’ “I see.”

Bryson shook his head in disgust. “Naw, you sodding prig, you don’t see a goddamned thing. You dunno who the fuck I’m even talking about. So why don’t you go back to your effing family and leave me the fuck alone?”

“And what if I said I wanted to stay?”

“Free fuckin’ country, as far as they let it. You wanna stay and get yourself killed, be my fuckin’ guest.”

Jacob the counselor sat in silence. Beatty could see him give his wife and daughter reassuring glances.

“Do you know where you are?”

Bryson shook his head. “Place looks brand new.”

“It is. You’re just outside Jacksonville. Florida.”

“Florida.” Beatty tried to remember if he’d ever been to Florida.

“Do you remember how you got here?”

Bryson shook his head.

“Do you know who brought you?”

Beatty nodded. “They don’t have a name. All right? If they had a name, then they’d be real. These people, they aren’t real.”

“I see.” Jacob swallowed. “Well . . . Can you tell me what they want?”

Bryson had to think. He’d never asked. He’d never had the opportunity. “If you don’t get outta here soon, you’re gonna fucking regret it.”

“I thought you said you weren’t planning on hurting people?” Jacob gripped his phone.

Bryson saw it. Good ol’ Jacob was wondering if he should call 911, and whether that would send Bryson over. “I told you. Not planning. Don’t mean it’s not gonna happen. They’re gonna push.”

“Why would someone want to do that?”

Beatty turned his eyes from Jacob’s phone. “Because you’re a fucking Samaritan. Because you’re trying to help. Because you’re talking to me. And if you think I’m a fucking loon, keep an eye on your phone, ’cuz right about when they’re ready to fuck you up, your signal’s gonna go dead. Scrambler. No bars so nobody can call for help. And look at this place. A zoo. Fenced on all sides. Nowhere for people to run.”

Jacob looked at his phone. He didn’t turn back. He stared at it, confused.

Beatty could tell by the look on his face.

It had started.

“Shit.” He started rocking back and forth. He rubbed his hands together. He pulled off his gloves. “Shit,” he repeated.

Jacob’s eyes went wide. Metal hands. The man in the coat had metal hands. He looked around. Everything seemed so normal. People laughing. No one else noticed. No one had any idea. Jacob suddenly got a very bad feeling. He waved to his daughter out of instinct. She waved back, enthusiastically. She was so proud of her daddy for helping a stranger, a sick man.

Jacob shifted uncomfortably. “So what happens now?”

Bryson Beatty was rocking. It moved the whole bench. “Something bad,” he whispered.

Jacob stood. “Let’s get you out of here.”

“Go!” Beatty yelled. People turned to look. “Stop talking to me! Run! If I don’t do what they want, people get hurt. That’s how it works. That’s how it always fucking works.”

“So let’s get you — ”

“You’re not listening!” Beatty stood. Jacob took several steps back toward his family. “There’s a reason but it never looks like there’s a reason. Okay? So just ’cuz you can’t think of a reason doesn’t mean there’s not one. They think you’re all cattle. Anyone normal. Regular p-people. They think you’re like, like, standing in the way of something. Something epic. They’re trying to get the world to evolve. To force it. To be better. For the others. It’s all part of some plan.

“There’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to take me. There’s nowhere to run. No one can stop them. People have tried!” Beatty screamed. “And you know what happens to those people? ME. And people like me. Guys with voices that can talk you into just about anything, even shooting yourself. Guys who can electrocute you just by shaking your goddamned hand. There’s a girl, doc. A girl you can’t even see. No one can. She could be standing next to you right now, getting ready to inject a little air into your carotid, give you a fucking stroke.”

Jacob wasn’t sure what to do. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He looked at his phone again. No bars. Better to be safe. “I’m going to go now, but I’ll send some people — ”

“There’s no people to send! It’s too late. You’re phone’s dead. You’re dead. This is like . . . a test. Or something. They want to see how long I can hold it together.” He lowered his head and wrapped both hands around it. His metal skin was cool on his scalp. “I can keep it together.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “I can keep it together. Fuckin’ keep it together, Beatty, you fuckin’ coward.”

There was a soft THWIT. Jacob’s head twisted violently in a puff of pink and he went down. His wife, wide-eyed, twitched in shock before her head erupted with a THWACK, leaving her daughter screaming on the ground.

Someone yelled the word “sniper.” People screamed. They started running.

Bryson Beatty clutched his head. “Nonononononono . . .” It was happening again. “No, please,” he whispered. He could feel himself slipping, like over an edge. His mind held on with greasy fingers. Gravity was taking him. He needed his medicine. He needed his pills. He could feel his grip slide toward his fingertips. Any moment now. Any moment he’d have to let go.

And all he could do was shiver and watch it happen.

“Please, no,” he breathed. “Not again.” He needed his pills. He needed a drink. He needed some nice music and a couple old mates. He needed the last two years of his life back.

But all he had were screams. And a memory of explosions. Then his arms were gone. Then they were metal, scratching everything. Clinking on glass. No feeling. He couldn’t feel. He couldn’t feel the warmth of a lover’s skin or the damp label of a cool beer on a summer’s day.

And then came the vibrations. Shaking everything. Rattling his teeth. His bones. His soul. Shaking it loose. His mind. Like a high-mileage car, full of leaks. Running loose at the seams. It didn’t take much . . .

This is what they wanted. They wanted him unstable.

“Run!” he screamed at the panicking crowd. He was so mad at them. Why weren’t they moving faster? Didn’t they know what happening? Couldn’t they see? “Run! You stupid fucking cows! I hate you! I hate the lot of ya! Why do you make me hurt you? Why don’t ya run?”

Bryson Beatty triggered the engines in his arms. He felt the reassuring shiver move across his joints, his heart. Thump. Thump. Thump. Faster and faster until his arms hummed and his sleeves tore and then shredded from the force of ten million shocks.

Brickbat turned and struck the tree that had been shading him and it splintered at the impact site. Several hundred pounds of wood and leaves flew through the air and crashed through the curved fence of the great ape den.

The male silverback beat his chest as his harem grabbed their children and rushed for the den. The big ape charged the fence, roaring. It clambered over the fallen tree, which bridged the gap to the new hole.

Bryson roared back and ran at the beast as the crowd screamed and cowered and ran in all directions. The engines in his arms accelerated, like a thousand speeding trains, turning his arms into a barely visible blur.

Brickbat struck the ape and cracked it open. Blood flew as the carcass flipped end-over-end and struck the faux stone at the back of the enclosure. The man turned and screamed and ran through the zoo and raved and yelled and smashed everything. Brick. Metal. Stone. Animals.

People.

“Which one of you is them? Which one of you has the disease? Huh? Who gets orders in the night? Who gets orders from the night? Who gets orders? I have orders. I have so many orders. I have more orders than any of you. My orders are my orders and yours are yours, but who knows them all? What if the puppet has no strings? What do we do then? Because it makes sense, see? It makes sense why things are the way they are. Everybody says, how come things aren’t better? I want things to be better. Everyone I know wants things to be better. How come they never get any better? It’s because of them. That’s what they do. They’re the shadow. They’re the unreality. They’re the thing you can’t believe but you know is out there still. They’re the reason. And you can’t stop it! No one can stop it. I know. People have tried. Then they go all Lee Harvey. Then everyone says they’re crazy. Everyone says I’m crazy. But I know what every crazy person knows. You can’t argue your way out of a lie. You can’t untie a knot that don’t exist. And when you see what I see. Do you know what I’ve seen? Space dragons. Chicks who can throw fire. Twin boys who can make you see things that aren’t there. I’ve seen dead bodies get gassed and rise like machines. Limbs twisted. Fucking laser beams out of their eyes! That’s what I’ve seen. It’s in the water supply. It’s in the head. There’s no way around it. There’s no way but through. You got to go through it. You’re all like animals in cages. Do you hear me? You got to go through! You’re all diseased. You’re all animals! You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. You don’t know. But I do. You live in their shadow. In their cage. You’re in their zoo. All of you. And there’s no way out. No way out but one. Just one. But don’t worry.

“I will set you free.”

Brickbat’s blurry, thumping fists shattered all. He dashed them, everyone, screaming the same words over and over.

“I will set you free!

“ALL OF YOU!

“I WILL SET YOU FREE!”

 — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

selection from THE MINUS FACTION, soon available in a collected omnibus edition.

cover image by scabrouspencil is from the comic “Killing Machine”

The Disappearance of Alexa Sacchi

Alexandra Sacchi—Alexa to her friends—was the adopted daughter of Dominic Sacchi, a professional stage magician, and Elia Kukuc, a palmist and tarot card reader whom he had met when the couple worked for a touring sideshow and freak act called The Dani Rose Circus. It was by all accounts a pretty toxic relationship from the start. Dominic, well-groomed and handsome, had been involved with Dani Rose, fifteen years his senior, right up until a week before his marriage to Ms. Kukuc. Witnesses reported it wasn’t long before the couple started arguing, usually over Alexa, who had both Down’s Syndrome and a severe form of autism. Police were called on two occasions—once in Atlanta and once outside Zanesville, Ohio—although none of the officers involved had much to say. Run-of-the-mill “he said/she said” domestic disturbances, I was told, as if two sets of cops from two jurisdictions were reading from the same script.

Then, about seven years ago, on the night of October 24th, Dominic Sacchi called 911 and claimed he’d been attacked by his wife, but when officers arrived—this was in Fresno—he recanted and said there’d been a misunderstanding and that the sliver cuts on his hands and face were the result of an accident with a new act he was developing for his show. He showed the officers a collection of kitchen knives and said his wife wasn’t even home, that she was with their daughter in the city and had been all night, and that Alexa would corroborate his story.

Four weeks later, The Dani Rose Circus was in the middle of a four-night stretch in Brooklyn when both Dominic Sacchi and Elia Kukuc didn’t show up for work. Dani Rose checked their rooms, where she found all of their belongings, including dirty clothes on the floor and a hair dryer still plugged into the wall, but no family.

Dominic was traced by his cell phone to a weekly apartment in Flushing, where he was discovered alone. Neither his wife nor his 15-year-old daughter were anywhere to be found. Clearly distraught, he claimed Elia had left him and took the girl, and the shock and embarrassment drove him to flee the circus. He just couldn’t face his friends and colleagues, he said—especially the domineering and vindictive Ms. Rose, who was “as jealous as a polecat.”

The responding officers weren’t convinced, and the case was remanded to me and my then-partner, Craig Hammond. Thing is, it’s hard to prove a murder when you don’t have a body, or even evidence of one. But when one day turned to two, and two days turned to a week, and a week turned to a month and there was still no sign of either Ms. Kukuc or the girl, everyone suspected the worst.

Certainly, the more Hammond and I dug, the more we got the sense that there was definitely something very wrong. To start, “Elia Kukuc” didn’t exist. She was the stage persona of one Palmer Bell from River City, Iowa. Palmer’s parents hadn’t heard from her in years, ever since she—quite literally—ran away to join the circus. That is, until she miraculously showed up at their house the week before. She was still there, they said, although she predictably contradicted her husband, whom she claimed was the one who had left, taking Alexa with him.

“She wasn’t even mine,” she said.

I’d say I was surprised by Palmer Bell’s apparent lack of concern for the missing girl, but I’ve had to deal with too many people, especially from a certain segment of society.

For his part, Dominic Sacchi—who turned out to have been raised right here on Staten Island—appeared to be a tattooed choir boy. Before his marriage to Ms. Bell, he was actively involved in the Unitarian/Universalist Church and a frequent campaigner for animal rights, which was the ultimate cause of his only prior arrest. Before turning his hobby into a career, at the apparent urging of Dani Rose, with whom he’d maintained a long-term affair, Dominic had been a carpenter and general construction laborer and something of a local Lothario.

The most distinguishing feature of the case, however—the thing I remember most vividly—is how there were no witnesses. To anything. No one would talk to us. They would never say that, of course. They would just say there was nothing to tell. But in my experience, everyone has something to tell. Even when they don’t know anything at all, people will fill your ears with gossip and speculation. But not here. Hammond and I got the distinct impression they’d been intimidated—at first we thought by Dominic. But the more we pressed, the more we realized the person they really feared was Palmer Bell.

I did find one acquaintance, a sword-swallower turned dog groomer named Bea Wimbly, who’d had a falling out with the couple over their treatment of Alexa and who subsequently quit the circus. Bea agreed to talk to us, but only off the record. She wouldn’t testify to anything, she cautioned, and only indirectly hinted that the cuts on Alexa’s arms were indeed self-inflicted, as her doctor had suspected, and that on one occasion young Alexa had mentioned to Bea that the deep scarring that disfigured her skin was a result of her mother rubbing de-icing salt and the girl’s own feces in the wounds as a means of discouraging her from further self-harm. Bea claimed to have confronted Ms. Bell, who first said it was an idiot’s fantasy but eventually declared it was in the girl’s best interests, that she couldn’t understand anything else, and that Alexa’s business was hers and Dominic’s and no one else’s.

Bea said she was given a very vague threat, something about her needing to stop worrying about other people’s families and pay more attention to her own lest anything bad happen. She said she thought it was odd given that she was childless and single. Two days later, Bea’s best friend, an eight-year-old black lab named Betty, who minded her every word, bolted out the door of their apartment as if in fear and was struck by a car and killed.

As if things weren’t complicated enough, birth records indicated that Elia Kukuc, AKA Palmer Bell, wasn’t the only fiction. Alexa Sacchi was also an invention. She’d been born Megan Green and didn’t become Alexandra Sacchi until first spending seven months as Julie Bell, with no indication as to why. All we know is that Dominic—under Palmer’s direction—changed her name. Twice.

Nothing was any clearer after I spoke with the case worker who oversaw the adoption. She said it had been welcome, that institutionalized kids with a severe mental handicap were very hard to place, especially as they got older. Someone like Alexa required plenty of patience and care. The only real oddity was Ms. Bell’s insistence that her name be left off all the documents and that Dominic should be listed as the girl’s sole legal guardian.

When I asked the case worker why she would approve the transition without digging into that, I got a defensive, roundabout reply and that same feeling that she’d been another victim of intimidation. Whatever her initial reservations, it seems the woman justified it to herself after the fact on the grounds that no couple was perfect and that the alternative for Megan (as she knew her) was life in an institution as a ward of the state.

“Megan wanted it,” I was told. “She wanted a home, same as any other child. I didn’t want to be the one to take that away from her.”

Everyone knew the girl was the key to the case. But she’d vanished without a trace.

Detective Hammond and I instructed Dominic Sacchi not to leave the state. When he did anyway, a warrant was issued, which was executed several days later by a Maine state trooper. Dominic was brought back to New York, along with his now-ex-wife, and both were charged with the second-degree murder of Alexandra Sacchi. But without any physical evidence and nothing but the scant testimony of some of the circus performers—especially the leather-clad Dani Rose, whom the defense easily painted as a jilted lover—both Dominic Sacchi and Palmer Bell were found not guilty and released.

Dominic fled immediately. Eighteen months later, he was found stabbed to death in a motel in South Bend, Indiana.

It was around then that Palmer Bell was arrested on a second charge—felony child endangerment. But without the testimony of Bea Wimbly, who staunchly refused every request, Palmer was acquitted a second time. I think it helped her case, however indirectly, that she was never Alexa’s legal guardian. And that she was a woman. Juries still tend to think of us as the weaker sex. It’s easy to paint the husband as the perpetrator, especially when he isn’t around to defend himself. Or show what a pussy he was.

Palmer was so smug through the trial. Like a mafia don. She was sure she’d walk.

The Dani Rose Circus sold Dominic’s props as soon as they were released from the evidence locker, including the only one of any interest: a tall box, like a standing coffin almost, except a bit larger, with a single door. All four walls were mirrors, as well as both the ceiling and the floor. When found, it was lying prone and open in the circus storage. Dominic and Palmer’s fingerprints were all over it, but Alexa’s were only found in one place—her full palm print was on the back mirror, the one that had been smashed, presumably by a blunt object. Cracks radiated out from a single impact point.

Hammond said it was nothing, but that impact point was the exact center of the palm print. I wanted to talk to some people who might know about that kind of thing. Magic was just too prominent in the case, from Dominic’s day job to the strange voices her fellow inmate’s heard emanating from Palmer’s cell in the middle of the night. But Hammond laughed it off. “Buncha crystal-worshiping nut jobs” he said. I got mad, some some things I shouldn’t have.

A few months later, I requested a transfer, which was approved, and I moved downtown. Craig and I still keep in touch, but it’s never been the same. I’ve had a couple new partners since, but none of them lasted very long. And there’s always a long gap between. Like now. I’ve been awaiting reassignment for the better part of the year. In fact, the difficulty of finding someone is what triggered the mandatory psych eval, which is why I’m required to visit the good Dr. More every two weeks.

To this day, the disappearance and presumed death of Alexa Sacchi remains officially unsolved.

—————————————————-

rough cut from my forthcoming occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS.

cover image by Leilani Bustamente

Babylon Eternal

“The Bible tells us that after the kingdom of Solomon was divided and so fell to the Babylonians, the author of the prophetic Book of Daniel was taken captive, along with a number of other Hebrew youths from many notable families — hostages you might say, to insure against future revolt. They were sent to study the Babylonian sciences — what the Hebrews called ‘the black arts’ — under King Nebuchadnezzar himself in the hopes that the young men, a whole generation, would be converted and that they would return to the land of their ancestors, marry, multiply, and so erase — without bloodshed — the famously fanatical cult of Yahweh.

“The young Daniel was said to excel at his studies above all the others — not just his fellow countrymen but the Babylonian scribes as well. Such was his talent, he was allowed to interpret the king’s dreams, an honor normally reserved for the High Priest of the Temple of Marduk. But so impressed was Nebuchadnezzar that he dismissed his minister’s objections and kept the young Hebrew’s counsel, walking with him day and night through the castle.

“I’m not sure he like what he heard. For Daniel referred to the king as ‘the destroyer of nations’ and said Nebuchadnezzar’s own kingdom would be the first to fall.

“The Book of Daniel is full of that — cryptic statements about the end of days. Since ever it was penned, it’s been used to validate every crackpot theory about the end of the world. Most of its ‘predictions’ are as open to interpretation as your average fortune cookie. But not so the fate of the king, for the rule of Nebuchadnezzar was documented in a number of historical sources. There is little doubt that he went insane, and no doubt at all that his successors sputtered only briefly before Babylon fell to the mighty Persian conquerer Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, which the Greeks would famously resist a century later at the battle of Thermopylae.

“You can either believe Daniel got lucky, where he missed with all the rest, or you can believe that he had inside information. You can believe that he was a fool, or you can believe that his vagary was intentional, that he had witnessed something so terrible, he dared not say it outright — the sign of an end he knew would come, just not how and just not when.

“For in truth, Nebuchadnezzar was so impressed by the sterling youth and so vexed by his prophecy that he did the unthinkable. But not at first. First, he prayed to his gods, to the sky god Marduk, who had slain the many-headed dragon, Tiamat, and so ‘created’ the world — which is to say, taken it out of darkness and chaos.

“But Marduk didn’t answer, and so, under the weight of prophecy, the ailing king instructed his priests to call upon the dark lords of the underworld.

“And they answered.

“And a deal was struck.

“The Dark Ones, the ancient lords of the earth, who had sent Tiamat as their emissary and governor, promised the king that Babylon would never die. But their aid had a price. Nebuchadnezzar, the once-wise ruler and master of the magical arts and sciences, had to record a tome, which would be whispered to him, once chapter at a time, over a period of six days and six hours and six minutes — a gift to all humankind from the lords of night.

“They call us ‘dusk walkers,’ you see — half in light, half in darkness. I suppose the idea was that if they gave us a big enough sword, we’d use it to cut ourselves down. If anything, the 20th century would suggest it was a wise strategy.

“The king agreed to the terms. And so it was the Necronomicon, the Book of Shadows, was born.

“But Nebuchadnezzar was no fool. He knew that which was whispered to him was nothing less than the architecture of the eternal night, a return to ancient bondage. And so he tricked the tricksters. He honored his word but recorded the tome in the alphabet of a language that had never been spoken — a language of his own devising, a language of deep allegory and intractable complexity, a language so recursive and arcane that he had hope it would never be deciphered.

“But the old ones are patient. And not so easily fooled. Had he kept his wits, Nebuchadnezzar would reign yet today. But even a king is mortal, and the old man couldn’t so easily forget the murmurings in the dark, nor the strange and abominable recipes he had transcribed into a stillborn tongue.

“In the end, history tells us that King Nebuchadnezzar went mad and took his own life. There is no mention, by Daniel or any others, of the book he had composed while locked in his bedchambers, feverishly scratching until his quill ran dry and his fingers cracked and his own blood flowed as ink. But I think they knew of it. I think that’s what Daniel saw in his visions. That’s why he called the king ‘the destroyer of nations.’ That’s why he filled his eponymous chronicle with cryptic warnings about the end of days. For he dared not speak the truth. He dared not reveal such a book as that existed. For in the king’s madness, it had disappeared…

“And as for Babylon, she is the name long given to decadence, which rules everywhere.”

 

rough cut from the revisions to my forthcoming occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS

cover image by Nekro