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jack_babalonContinued from here:
The instructions were simple enough.
First Skinhead Ronnie was told to cut his finger open and smear a line of blood over all the doors to the house. Which were three in counting - the front, the one to the porch out back and the side basement door they never used (narrow, crooked, descending treacherously down slippery stone steps into a darkened doorway laced with cobwebs). He performed this operation with the help of a buck knife stashed in the glove compartment. It was not the first time the blade had tasted Ronnie’s blood and the weapon was kept as a memento of an after show stabbing he took back in the day.
Next up he had to lay his fingers on the biggest, nastiest piece of metal he could find. It didn’t matter what so long as it did some damage. Ronnie recalled a rusting crowbar buried in the foot high grass of his unkempt lawn. It took a few minutes but he finally found it but not before discovering the skeleton tri-pod of a grill and the carcass of a bicycle. A few practice swings off the bar proved satisfactory and left little doubt of its potential for inflicting cracked skulls with ease. Now all he had to do was wrap the bar in a bundle of flowers.
This proved to be a little more problematic since Ronnie and Joan’s lawn barely had enough life to support the English Ivy climbing the walls and the kudzu swallowing the chain link fence in a suspended wave. Finally Joan got an idea and took off. When she came back minutes later it was with an armful of buttercups, gardenia blooms and withering roses – all plundered from various neighbors, still asleep in the sluggish morning.
The third step now was to wait there until Adam arrived.
Which was supposed to be twenty minutes ago. In the meantime, deciding to spare any prying neighborhood the spectacle of a boxers and boots only Ronnie pacing impatiently outside the front door, the couple decided to wait it out in the backyard. There they snuck up to the the house slipping nervous peeps through the living room window. There they saw the Guest, with its drooling baby face emerging from the frozen scream of the adult face that bore it. The eyeballs of the host, still clenched in tiny hands whose arms emerged from the socket, joined the baby’s face in mute fascination of the television’s incessant info-barrage.
As far as they could tell he… it hadn’t moved since they escaped the apartment.
“What’s it doin’ ya think?” Ronnie whispers. Only the top half of his face was visible over the window’s still.
“Dunno…” Joan counter-whispers with her chin stacked totem pole style over Ronnie’s stubbled dome, “… why don’t you go in there and ask him?”
“Woman, I swear…”
“S’up guys?” a voice stage whispers from behind them.
Joan spins around startled and strikes blind.
Her fist crashes dead center of Adam’s face, releasing a shudder inducing crack off the snout before sending the mage staggering back.
“Jebus K’wiste, layh-dee!” Adam wobbles on his feet, trying without success to staunch the flow of blood gushing from his nose, “Y’twyin’ to k’ll mee ov’r here?”
“What the fuck, Ronnie!” Joan’s shout shatters the conspiratorial hush the couple previously maintained. It had been building up in her since roughly an hour ago when the Guest started croak-wailing and pulling a Night-of-the-Living-Dead on her and her man.
“Chill, Baby.” Ronnie tries to drape reassuring arms across her shoulders.
“Don’t ‘chill baby’ me, Ronnie.” Joan shrugs out of her man’s arms with the disgust of touch being remarkably pissed off with a lover brings to the skin, “Who is this asshole? A friend of yours?”
“Y’h, ac’shully I’m…” Adam interrupts, proffering a blood soaked handshake towards furious Joan.
“No, he’s not.” Ronnie cuts the introduction short. Both he and Joan ignore the awkwardly lonely handshake thrust between them.
“Well who is he then?” Joan demands.
“One of my people.”
“Really? ‘One of your people’?” Joan shakes her head in disbelief and pointing, without looking at Adam, “So what’s he doing coming up on us outta the blue like some crackhead?”
“He’s a magician, Baby… I dunno, it’s just how they do. Fer some reason or ‘nother they think it’s cool to pop out of nowhere and come sneakin’ up on folks.”
“N’t ‘kewl’… miss-teary-us!” Adam offers the correction upon deaf ears and extends the unseen handshake towards Joan some.
“Wait you mean he’s… him? You said this guys an ‘asshole’.”
“M’standing righ’ here y’know!” Adam sniffles back the damage and withdraws the handshake before wiping the blood from it off on the side of his jeans. Oblivious, the couple continued to fight as if he wasn’t there. ‘Typical!’, Adam shrugs to himself philosophically, lighting a much needed cigarette. What could he do? It came with the territory. The best magicians and drug dealers, though not invisible per say, usually registered on the spectrum of a room’s attention as somewhere between ghosts and ambient music. This is why they often appear in even the sharpest of memories as little more than flickering blurs or distant shadows. Perhaps this is because the roles of magician and drug dealer both share a common ancestor in the shaman, those ferrymen to distant realms waiting patiently beyond the eye’s veil. The shaman who, though being a vital member of the tribe they served, was often made to live on the outer perimeter of the social circle. Adam, who had the unique perspective of being both dealer and mage, theorized that there was an atavistic instinct in ‘normies’ to zone-out what they were seeing when confronted with either open use of either narcotics or magick. Both, after all, had the bad habit of taking you on a very one-way trip to the wrong side of wonderful.
The best magicians however can also will themselves to be seen. Their presence can go electric, their voices swell with thunderous rage as their stare sucks in all who cross it with a terrible gravity. This was the part Adam never quite got the hang of.
So he did the only thing he could do… waited it out. Around him the mourning doves cooed and the first few stray cars began to roar off of nearby Charles Foster Greer Blvd. Ronnie and Joan traded words sharp as slaps while through the window behind them the twin-faced Guest stared obliviously into the television set.
Adam finally came to a decision. He decided it wasn’t being consistently called an ‘asshole’ that bugged him. By his reckoning no one got into either magick or drug dealing (much less both) thinking they’re going to make lasting friends. Allies. Co-conspirators. Clients. Connections. Drinking buddies. Roll buddies. Fuck buddies. Sure.
Friends, real friends?
Rarely so. Experience revealed a long gray gallery, stretching from the covens to the night clubs, offering an endless row of patient cut-throats waiting beneath trapdoor smiles.
So what if they called him an ‘asshole’. So long as they had his money when they did so.
What pissed him off however was their almost disrespectful lack of appreciation for the ‘Art’.
It wasn’t like he could just ‘pop out of nowhere’ effortlessly.
A metromancer, not unlike anyone else in the city, travels by the use of maps. The difference is that in the hands of a metromancer the map is both guide and vehicle, opening before them arcane ‘shortcuts’ through which they can travel vast distances in only moments. Public maps – those posted on rail station walls and bus stop kiosks – were the most effective (charged with a collective psychic energy from the frequency of their consultation). This was good for quick jumps, leaping from station to station, as they disappeared and reappeared in a crowd. Unfortunately the stations and bus routes (as any Terminus commuter will tell you) rarely take you to where you exactly need to be. For exact ‘pops’ every metromancer possessed their own map, a homemade one representing the unique symbiosis achieved between both magician and the city they inhabited. As the wand and grimorie stand in dire importance to the initiates of other orders, so the map is ranked equally to the adept metromancer.
Adam’s was a massive roadmap. One that sprawled when unfolded into a two-dimensional wall. This he magic-markered over with a grid, designating a unique sigil to each cell. Then he pasted over certain key locations with images culled from local magazines, Polaroid snapshots taken around town, club flyers, newspaper articles and torn pages from abandoned text books discovered on the curb alongside the trash. This collage was then measured and cut into 72 ‘cards’ that he pasted on cardboard backing. These he kept in the inside jacket of his leather jacket wrapped in a the tattered remains of a red bandanna. Sometimes, when Adam’s nervous, he’ll withdraw the cards without meaning to and involuntarily shuffle them – inadvertently appearing randomly in some part of town days later.
Which was an example of one of two possible problems with map popping.
First was the vaguely understood magical law of conservation that dictated that every time a metromancer ‘popped’ between distances, then in return a randomly selected object would then vanish forever from the universe. The greater the distance skipped the more noticeable the forfeited object.
So if you ever laid a pen down and a moment later it was inexplicably gone or are still baffled by the disappearance of a beloved from a childhood afternoon, if you ever found yourself flummoxed looking for the keys that aren’t there or struggling to find the word that just evaporated at the tip of your tongue… well you can probably blame a metromancer.
The second problem, which was the bitch really, was that with a slip of the will or a fraction of a distraction a magician could find themselves folded perpetually into the psycho-space of the map. This wiped a mage from reality for good. Not vanishing so much but instead becoming un-remembered. Time, like Nature, abhors a vacuum and acts quickly to evaporate any lingering memories so that reality may operate without any discrepancies.
Which is just one of the many reasons you probably haven’t met many metromancers before.
Thankfully for Adam he had a way around getting lost in the Map Space. Possessing a remarkable default wisdom, one that eluded him outside of any event in his life that didn’t directly threaten it, he was able to construct a device that allowed him to safely access the shortcuts in a map no matter how fucked-up he got. It was a compass. One discovered ages ago in his parents attic (he thinks it might’ve belonged to his dad or his granddad when they were kids). It was the only part of ‘that life’ he still carried with him and he of course tricked it out magically. The rim was given a copper band and soon engraved with a series of symbols that escape the ranks of all known languages. The cardinal directions were replaced with single letters spelling – BABALON! - with the ‘!’ designating true north. It was mantra charged, ritual tested and Chi fueled.
But the real secret of the Compass, the one Adam guarded jealously with his life, was that…
“Can we not talk about this right now?” Ronnie’s plea comes by way of capitulation in the hopes that doing so will end the fight. Give him ten mother fuckers coming for him with bats down a dark alley with no way out but past them and he will. Give him thirty-six hours handcuffed in the questioning room and he won’t breathe so much as a ‘fuck you’. Give him Joan in the wrong mood and he’s beaten before he began.
“Fine.” Joan concedes and turns to the mage, taking him in with folded arms and arched brows, for what seems the first time.
She’s not terribly impressed.
In theory Adam has all the individual parts to a handsome man. Lithe of build, narrow but crooked in frame. The dirty blond hair, the matching scraggly beard and pastel blue eyes that flashed from the darkened recesses of his brow not without an odd charm. All sabotaged however when combined with his habitual slouch, the smirk in smile’s clothing, the disheveled blond locks in bad need of a wash and the lingering bitter musk of something sad, like sex sweat mixed with dried tears, that he positively oozed. Outfit wise a ragged Addicts t-shirt, a cracked leather motorcycle jacket with sleeves painted in various magick circles and alchemical symbols with what appeared to be white-out. Underneath, despite the heat of a humid morning, a black hoodie.
Not quite what she was expecting and this despite the fact that she really didn’t know what to expect: “So what exactly are you goin’ to do?”
“Me?” Adam spins around in mock surprise now that he’s finally gotten their attention. The blood flow has damned behind his nostrils and though a throbbing pain remains he can at least speak normal again.
“Yeah you, asshole…” Ronnie growls with eyes widening in barely checked rage, “… just answer the lady’s question, willya?”
“Well… to put it in layman’s terms: I ain’t doin’ a damn thing!”
The couple stare at Adam and forget to blink. A moment passes in the time it takes a slug to crawl through honey. They both turn to each other and then back to the mage.
“Come again?” Ronnie sucks in a gust of wind through flared nostrils.
“Can’t do nothing for you, man… well, I mean I can keep it from leaving the house and I could stop it from getting in… or back in as the case may be, but getting that fucker out. Shit, you’re on your own.”
“You haven’t even seen it!” Joan protests.
“Yeah… the fuck’s up with that?” Ronnie adds.
“I don’t have to.” Adam extinguishes his cigarette, an orange comet lost in the dawn shadow wilds of the lawn, “From what you described you got yourself a demon in there…”
“Wait… what?” Joan and Ronnie ask in unison.
“A demon… but no worries, probably not a major one.”
“’Probably’?” Joan asks.
“Well the only way to know for sure is to ask it really… ”
“So how the fuck did it get into my place…” Ronnie feels the heat of Joan’s glare on him and corrects, “I mean, our place?”
“How should I know?” Adam shrugs and glances through the window, taking in the Guest at a safe distance, “You never invite me to any of your after parties.”
“You’re really gonna pull this shit now?” Ronnie huffs.
Adam sighs heavy and turns back to the couple: “The point is, that once you get a demon up in your pad the only person who can get rid of it is the home owner… or owners as the case may be.”
“So what you’re basically saying is that you’re not going to do anything.” Joan shakes her head disgusted and begins to turn away.
“On the contrary, if something goes wrong, if one or both of you go in there and don’t come back out. Then, and only then, can I go in and banish it.”
“Why?”
“Rules.”
“What rules?” Ronnie thrusts the bouquet with the crowbar center at Adam.
“The rules to a game you two don’t really believe in. Sorry man, but the only other option we got is to just say fuck it and walk away. We could burn the place down, which would take care of it for awhile…”
“Whaddya mean ‘awhile’?” Joan says without really wanting to know the answer.
“There’s a good chance it will find you again.” Adam then thinks to himself, conducting a series of calculations in his head, “More than a good chance actually.”
Ronnie and Joan exchange frustrated looks. For a moment it seems as if they might instead pounce as one upon the mage. Then just as Adam is about to flinch, Ronnie steps forward.
“A’ight… how do I get rid of it?”
Adam nods to the bouquet.
“So I just…?” Ronnie holds up his weapon before him.
“… do what you do best, Ronnie.” Adam says swinging down an invisible bat into an open palm.
“Well… second best at least.” Joan offers Ronnie an encouraging smile with a much needed wink.
“This is some fucked up bullshit right here…” Ronnie mutters to himself, walking towards the porch swinging the bouquet to his side. He pauses only once. To give Joan a small peck on the cheek, the same one he uses before going on tour with his band (First Date Anal by the way) or working an event.
Then he quietly opens the back door, closing the screen quietly behind him and disappears.
Inside the Guest continues to watch the television. The infomercials have become cartoons now and he responds to the comically gruesome amounts of cat on mouse violence with little parrot cocks of its outer head.
Through the window Adam and Joan watch Ronnie as he comes tip-toeing into the room with the demon. It doesn’t even notice him. Ronnie walks paces around the furniture and tube, holding the bouquet up like it was a club. On his third pass he pauses behind it, looks out over its shoulder towards Joan.
Joan gives a small nod…
… just as the small baby face nestled between the pried open scream of its host opens eyes of pure luminescent green and begins to release a hideous chthonic shriek…
… which is cut short a split-second later when Skinhead Ronnie brings the crowbar bouquet down across the Guest’s skull.
The thing goes down and Ronnie dives after it in a feral rage.
Long, wet minutes of blood and petals pass through the view of the window.
Then silence and a clear glimpse of nothing in the window.
Adam burns through two more cigarettes before the back door opens with a kick and a gore splattered Ronnie comes out dragging the broken remains of the Guest behind him by the hair. The tiny baby face a pink-gray mouthful of uncooked hamburger meat, the tiny stalks of arms protruding from the sockets dangling limply to the sides of the face but still clutching the eyeballs of the host.
Ronnie doesn’t look upset or pissed or even in shock. In fact he looks barely human. Joan goes to say something but Ronnie cuts her short with a shake of the head ‘no’.
Adam gets to work quick. He kneels over the body of the Guest and with the ember of his cigarette brushes a makeshift symbol above the forehead of the host. He then mumbles an incantation, gestures with the cigarette to create an orange trail of light and steps back.
At first nothing happens. The body just lays there in the lawn. Then there is a groan of a very heavy door opening somewhere for what seems an eternity. An outline of smoke rises from the grass around the dormant Guest. A blue flame ignites in the bruised mass that was once the face within the scream. In a blink the body is engulfed in a crystal fire and just as quickly as it came it dwindles out leaving only a soot outline of where the body was laying.
“That it?” Ronnie asks, the words coming from a bad place recently opened inside him.
“Yeah.” Adam nods.
Ronnie then turns and looks at Joan. Again they nod. They seem to communicate primarily through jabs of chin and shrugs of the brow. They both take each other’s hands and without a word of farewell to the mage walk calmly back into the house.
Adam stands there for a minute and stares expectantly at the back porch. One by one the window shades are pulled down by Joan and he listens to Ronnie slide the last bolt shut. Then he stands there for another moment or two debating whether he should have told them or not.
The demon’s presence was no accident. Someone must’ve known that Ronnie and Adam were, well not close, sure... but allies. Ronnie had saved Adam's ass plenty of times in the past. Enough so to warrant someone's wanting his removal.
Deep down inside Adam knows a first move has been made. Not against him this time but someone close. Or at least, as close as anyone can get to the man.
More than that he knows, even if not consciously, that Ronnie and Joan were aware of this as well. Besides, who knows what the demon told Ronnie in their scuffle? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Either way he’ll never know for sure.
With a deep breath, Adam withdraws his deck and compass from the folds of his jacket. He pivots in a circle until the arrow on the compass points ‘!’ and with a one-handed shuffle of the deck withdraws a card with the address to the abandoned hotel. Church bells begin to peal in the distance and on cue Adam goes transparent, becoming a glass outline of himself before vanishing back into the map.
The instructions were simple enough.
First Skinhead Ronnie was told to cut his finger open and smear a line of blood over all the doors to the house. Which were three in counting - the front, the one to the porch out back and the side basement door they never used (narrow, crooked, descending treacherously down slippery stone steps into a darkened doorway laced with cobwebs). He performed this operation with the help of a buck knife stashed in the glove compartment. It was not the first time the blade had tasted Ronnie’s blood and the weapon was kept as a memento of an after show stabbing he took back in the day.
Next up he had to lay his fingers on the biggest, nastiest piece of metal he could find. It didn’t matter what so long as it did some damage. Ronnie recalled a rusting crowbar buried in the foot high grass of his unkempt lawn. It took a few minutes but he finally found it but not before discovering the skeleton tri-pod of a grill and the carcass of a bicycle. A few practice swings off the bar proved satisfactory and left little doubt of its potential for inflicting cracked skulls with ease. Now all he had to do was wrap the bar in a bundle of flowers.
This proved to be a little more problematic since Ronnie and Joan’s lawn barely had enough life to support the English Ivy climbing the walls and the kudzu swallowing the chain link fence in a suspended wave. Finally Joan got an idea and took off. When she came back minutes later it was with an armful of buttercups, gardenia blooms and withering roses – all plundered from various neighbors, still asleep in the sluggish morning.
The third step now was to wait there until Adam arrived.
Which was supposed to be twenty minutes ago. In the meantime, deciding to spare any prying neighborhood the spectacle of a boxers and boots only Ronnie pacing impatiently outside the front door, the couple decided to wait it out in the backyard. There they snuck up to the the house slipping nervous peeps through the living room window. There they saw the Guest, with its drooling baby face emerging from the frozen scream of the adult face that bore it. The eyeballs of the host, still clenched in tiny hands whose arms emerged from the socket, joined the baby’s face in mute fascination of the television’s incessant info-barrage.
As far as they could tell he… it hadn’t moved since they escaped the apartment.
“What’s it doin’ ya think?” Ronnie whispers. Only the top half of his face was visible over the window’s still.
“Dunno…” Joan counter-whispers with her chin stacked totem pole style over Ronnie’s stubbled dome, “… why don’t you go in there and ask him?”
“Woman, I swear…”
“S’up guys?” a voice stage whispers from behind them.
Joan spins around startled and strikes blind.
Her fist crashes dead center of Adam’s face, releasing a shudder inducing crack off the snout before sending the mage staggering back.
“Jebus K’wiste, layh-dee!” Adam wobbles on his feet, trying without success to staunch the flow of blood gushing from his nose, “Y’twyin’ to k’ll mee ov’r here?”
“What the fuck, Ronnie!” Joan’s shout shatters the conspiratorial hush the couple previously maintained. It had been building up in her since roughly an hour ago when the Guest started croak-wailing and pulling a Night-of-the-Living-Dead on her and her man.
“Chill, Baby.” Ronnie tries to drape reassuring arms across her shoulders.
“Don’t ‘chill baby’ me, Ronnie.” Joan shrugs out of her man’s arms with the disgust of touch being remarkably pissed off with a lover brings to the skin, “Who is this asshole? A friend of yours?”
“Y’h, ac’shully I’m…” Adam interrupts, proffering a blood soaked handshake towards furious Joan.
“No, he’s not.” Ronnie cuts the introduction short. Both he and Joan ignore the awkwardly lonely handshake thrust between them.
“Well who is he then?” Joan demands.
“One of my people.”
“Really? ‘One of your people’?” Joan shakes her head in disbelief and pointing, without looking at Adam, “So what’s he doing coming up on us outta the blue like some crackhead?”
“He’s a magician, Baby… I dunno, it’s just how they do. Fer some reason or ‘nother they think it’s cool to pop out of nowhere and come sneakin’ up on folks.”
“N’t ‘kewl’… miss-teary-us!” Adam offers the correction upon deaf ears and extends the unseen handshake towards Joan some.
“Wait you mean he’s… him? You said this guys an ‘asshole’.”
“M’standing righ’ here y’know!” Adam sniffles back the damage and withdraws the handshake before wiping the blood from it off on the side of his jeans. Oblivious, the couple continued to fight as if he wasn’t there. ‘Typical!’, Adam shrugs to himself philosophically, lighting a much needed cigarette. What could he do? It came with the territory. The best magicians and drug dealers, though not invisible per say, usually registered on the spectrum of a room’s attention as somewhere between ghosts and ambient music. This is why they often appear in even the sharpest of memories as little more than flickering blurs or distant shadows. Perhaps this is because the roles of magician and drug dealer both share a common ancestor in the shaman, those ferrymen to distant realms waiting patiently beyond the eye’s veil. The shaman who, though being a vital member of the tribe they served, was often made to live on the outer perimeter of the social circle. Adam, who had the unique perspective of being both dealer and mage, theorized that there was an atavistic instinct in ‘normies’ to zone-out what they were seeing when confronted with either open use of either narcotics or magick. Both, after all, had the bad habit of taking you on a very one-way trip to the wrong side of wonderful.
The best magicians however can also will themselves to be seen. Their presence can go electric, their voices swell with thunderous rage as their stare sucks in all who cross it with a terrible gravity. This was the part Adam never quite got the hang of.
So he did the only thing he could do… waited it out. Around him the mourning doves cooed and the first few stray cars began to roar off of nearby Charles Foster Greer Blvd. Ronnie and Joan traded words sharp as slaps while through the window behind them the twin-faced Guest stared obliviously into the television set.
Adam finally came to a decision. He decided it wasn’t being consistently called an ‘asshole’ that bugged him. By his reckoning no one got into either magick or drug dealing (much less both) thinking they’re going to make lasting friends. Allies. Co-conspirators. Clients. Connections. Drinking buddies. Roll buddies. Fuck buddies. Sure.
Friends, real friends?
Rarely so. Experience revealed a long gray gallery, stretching from the covens to the night clubs, offering an endless row of patient cut-throats waiting beneath trapdoor smiles.
So what if they called him an ‘asshole’. So long as they had his money when they did so.
What pissed him off however was their almost disrespectful lack of appreciation for the ‘Art’.
It wasn’t like he could just ‘pop out of nowhere’ effortlessly.
A metromancer, not unlike anyone else in the city, travels by the use of maps. The difference is that in the hands of a metromancer the map is both guide and vehicle, opening before them arcane ‘shortcuts’ through which they can travel vast distances in only moments. Public maps – those posted on rail station walls and bus stop kiosks – were the most effective (charged with a collective psychic energy from the frequency of their consultation). This was good for quick jumps, leaping from station to station, as they disappeared and reappeared in a crowd. Unfortunately the stations and bus routes (as any Terminus commuter will tell you) rarely take you to where you exactly need to be. For exact ‘pops’ every metromancer possessed their own map, a homemade one representing the unique symbiosis achieved between both magician and the city they inhabited. As the wand and grimorie stand in dire importance to the initiates of other orders, so the map is ranked equally to the adept metromancer.
Adam’s was a massive roadmap. One that sprawled when unfolded into a two-dimensional wall. This he magic-markered over with a grid, designating a unique sigil to each cell. Then he pasted over certain key locations with images culled from local magazines, Polaroid snapshots taken around town, club flyers, newspaper articles and torn pages from abandoned text books discovered on the curb alongside the trash. This collage was then measured and cut into 72 ‘cards’ that he pasted on cardboard backing. These he kept in the inside jacket of his leather jacket wrapped in a the tattered remains of a red bandanna. Sometimes, when Adam’s nervous, he’ll withdraw the cards without meaning to and involuntarily shuffle them – inadvertently appearing randomly in some part of town days later.
Which was an example of one of two possible problems with map popping.
First was the vaguely understood magical law of conservation that dictated that every time a metromancer ‘popped’ between distances, then in return a randomly selected object would then vanish forever from the universe. The greater the distance skipped the more noticeable the forfeited object.
So if you ever laid a pen down and a moment later it was inexplicably gone or are still baffled by the disappearance of a beloved from a childhood afternoon, if you ever found yourself flummoxed looking for the keys that aren’t there or struggling to find the word that just evaporated at the tip of your tongue… well you can probably blame a metromancer.
The second problem, which was the bitch really, was that with a slip of the will or a fraction of a distraction a magician could find themselves folded perpetually into the psycho-space of the map. This wiped a mage from reality for good. Not vanishing so much but instead becoming un-remembered. Time, like Nature, abhors a vacuum and acts quickly to evaporate any lingering memories so that reality may operate without any discrepancies.
Which is just one of the many reasons you probably haven’t met many metromancers before.
Thankfully for Adam he had a way around getting lost in the Map Space. Possessing a remarkable default wisdom, one that eluded him outside of any event in his life that didn’t directly threaten it, he was able to construct a device that allowed him to safely access the shortcuts in a map no matter how fucked-up he got. It was a compass. One discovered ages ago in his parents attic (he thinks it might’ve belonged to his dad or his granddad when they were kids). It was the only part of ‘that life’ he still carried with him and he of course tricked it out magically. The rim was given a copper band and soon engraved with a series of symbols that escape the ranks of all known languages. The cardinal directions were replaced with single letters spelling – BABALON! - with the ‘!’ designating true north. It was mantra charged, ritual tested and Chi fueled.
But the real secret of the Compass, the one Adam guarded jealously with his life, was that…
“Can we not talk about this right now?” Ronnie’s plea comes by way of capitulation in the hopes that doing so will end the fight. Give him ten mother fuckers coming for him with bats down a dark alley with no way out but past them and he will. Give him thirty-six hours handcuffed in the questioning room and he won’t breathe so much as a ‘fuck you’. Give him Joan in the wrong mood and he’s beaten before he began.
“Fine.” Joan concedes and turns to the mage, taking him in with folded arms and arched brows, for what seems the first time.
She’s not terribly impressed.
In theory Adam has all the individual parts to a handsome man. Lithe of build, narrow but crooked in frame. The dirty blond hair, the matching scraggly beard and pastel blue eyes that flashed from the darkened recesses of his brow not without an odd charm. All sabotaged however when combined with his habitual slouch, the smirk in smile’s clothing, the disheveled blond locks in bad need of a wash and the lingering bitter musk of something sad, like sex sweat mixed with dried tears, that he positively oozed. Outfit wise a ragged Addicts t-shirt, a cracked leather motorcycle jacket with sleeves painted in various magick circles and alchemical symbols with what appeared to be white-out. Underneath, despite the heat of a humid morning, a black hoodie.
Not quite what she was expecting and this despite the fact that she really didn’t know what to expect: “So what exactly are you goin’ to do?”
“Me?” Adam spins around in mock surprise now that he’s finally gotten their attention. The blood flow has damned behind his nostrils and though a throbbing pain remains he can at least speak normal again.
“Yeah you, asshole…” Ronnie growls with eyes widening in barely checked rage, “… just answer the lady’s question, willya?”
“Well… to put it in layman’s terms: I ain’t doin’ a damn thing!”
The couple stare at Adam and forget to blink. A moment passes in the time it takes a slug to crawl through honey. They both turn to each other and then back to the mage.
“Come again?” Ronnie sucks in a gust of wind through flared nostrils.
“Can’t do nothing for you, man… well, I mean I can keep it from leaving the house and I could stop it from getting in… or back in as the case may be, but getting that fucker out. Shit, you’re on your own.”
“You haven’t even seen it!” Joan protests.
“Yeah… the fuck’s up with that?” Ronnie adds.
“I don’t have to.” Adam extinguishes his cigarette, an orange comet lost in the dawn shadow wilds of the lawn, “From what you described you got yourself a demon in there…”
“Wait… what?” Joan and Ronnie ask in unison.
“A demon… but no worries, probably not a major one.”
“’Probably’?” Joan asks.
“Well the only way to know for sure is to ask it really… ”
“So how the fuck did it get into my place…” Ronnie feels the heat of Joan’s glare on him and corrects, “I mean, our place?”
“How should I know?” Adam shrugs and glances through the window, taking in the Guest at a safe distance, “You never invite me to any of your after parties.”
“You’re really gonna pull this shit now?” Ronnie huffs.
Adam sighs heavy and turns back to the couple: “The point is, that once you get a demon up in your pad the only person who can get rid of it is the home owner… or owners as the case may be.”
“So what you’re basically saying is that you’re not going to do anything.” Joan shakes her head disgusted and begins to turn away.
“On the contrary, if something goes wrong, if one or both of you go in there and don’t come back out. Then, and only then, can I go in and banish it.”
“Why?”
“Rules.”
“What rules?” Ronnie thrusts the bouquet with the crowbar center at Adam.
“The rules to a game you two don’t really believe in. Sorry man, but the only other option we got is to just say fuck it and walk away. We could burn the place down, which would take care of it for awhile…”
“Whaddya mean ‘awhile’?” Joan says without really wanting to know the answer.
“There’s a good chance it will find you again.” Adam then thinks to himself, conducting a series of calculations in his head, “More than a good chance actually.”
Ronnie and Joan exchange frustrated looks. For a moment it seems as if they might instead pounce as one upon the mage. Then just as Adam is about to flinch, Ronnie steps forward.
“A’ight… how do I get rid of it?”
Adam nods to the bouquet.
“So I just…?” Ronnie holds up his weapon before him.
“… do what you do best, Ronnie.” Adam says swinging down an invisible bat into an open palm.
“Well… second best at least.” Joan offers Ronnie an encouraging smile with a much needed wink.
“This is some fucked up bullshit right here…” Ronnie mutters to himself, walking towards the porch swinging the bouquet to his side. He pauses only once. To give Joan a small peck on the cheek, the same one he uses before going on tour with his band (First Date Anal by the way) or working an event.
Then he quietly opens the back door, closing the screen quietly behind him and disappears.
Inside the Guest continues to watch the television. The infomercials have become cartoons now and he responds to the comically gruesome amounts of cat on mouse violence with little parrot cocks of its outer head.
Through the window Adam and Joan watch Ronnie as he comes tip-toeing into the room with the demon. It doesn’t even notice him. Ronnie walks paces around the furniture and tube, holding the bouquet up like it was a club. On his third pass he pauses behind it, looks out over its shoulder towards Joan.
Joan gives a small nod…
… just as the small baby face nestled between the pried open scream of its host opens eyes of pure luminescent green and begins to release a hideous chthonic shriek…
… which is cut short a split-second later when Skinhead Ronnie brings the crowbar bouquet down across the Guest’s skull.
The thing goes down and Ronnie dives after it in a feral rage.
Long, wet minutes of blood and petals pass through the view of the window.
Then silence and a clear glimpse of nothing in the window.
Adam burns through two more cigarettes before the back door opens with a kick and a gore splattered Ronnie comes out dragging the broken remains of the Guest behind him by the hair. The tiny baby face a pink-gray mouthful of uncooked hamburger meat, the tiny stalks of arms protruding from the sockets dangling limply to the sides of the face but still clutching the eyeballs of the host.
Ronnie doesn’t look upset or pissed or even in shock. In fact he looks barely human. Joan goes to say something but Ronnie cuts her short with a shake of the head ‘no’.
Adam gets to work quick. He kneels over the body of the Guest and with the ember of his cigarette brushes a makeshift symbol above the forehead of the host. He then mumbles an incantation, gestures with the cigarette to create an orange trail of light and steps back.
At first nothing happens. The body just lays there in the lawn. Then there is a groan of a very heavy door opening somewhere for what seems an eternity. An outline of smoke rises from the grass around the dormant Guest. A blue flame ignites in the bruised mass that was once the face within the scream. In a blink the body is engulfed in a crystal fire and just as quickly as it came it dwindles out leaving only a soot outline of where the body was laying.
“That it?” Ronnie asks, the words coming from a bad place recently opened inside him.
“Yeah.” Adam nods.
Ronnie then turns and looks at Joan. Again they nod. They seem to communicate primarily through jabs of chin and shrugs of the brow. They both take each other’s hands and without a word of farewell to the mage walk calmly back into the house.
Adam stands there for a minute and stares expectantly at the back porch. One by one the window shades are pulled down by Joan and he listens to Ronnie slide the last bolt shut. Then he stands there for another moment or two debating whether he should have told them or not.
The demon’s presence was no accident. Someone must’ve known that Ronnie and Adam were, well not close, sure... but allies. Ronnie had saved Adam's ass plenty of times in the past. Enough so to warrant someone's wanting his removal.
Deep down inside Adam knows a first move has been made. Not against him this time but someone close. Or at least, as close as anyone can get to the man.
More than that he knows, even if not consciously, that Ronnie and Joan were aware of this as well. Besides, who knows what the demon told Ronnie in their scuffle? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Either way he’ll never know for sure.
With a deep breath, Adam withdraws his deck and compass from the folds of his jacket. He pivots in a circle until the arrow on the compass points ‘!’ and with a one-handed shuffle of the deck withdraws a card with the address to the abandoned hotel. Church bells begin to peal in the distance and on cue Adam goes transparent, becoming a glass outline of himself before vanishing back into the map.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2010-05-28 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-05-28 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-05-28 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-05-28 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-05-28 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-05-28 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-05-28 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-05-28 10:12 pm (UTC)Also at some point I will finish the magical gang war story line I started last year but abandoned to work on the novel. I've also considered collecting a lot of the Adam stuff and rewriting them for my third book.
no subject
on 2010-05-29 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-05-30 07:49 am (UTC)Where as most macicians seem to have four elemental weapsons, with a cup being one for the power of water, I wanted to give Adam something similar but different... hence a compass.
Glad you liked them, M_... they were (along with the deomon) the part of the story where I get to play with the 'toys' so to speak.