filius philosophorum

On the heels of one firebrand came another.

I met the alchemist Aden Brande last night. Wrapped in layers of demons like Legion, but his was possession reversed: devils compelled to lend their power, not man compelled to surrender his flesh. He struggles on a hairline balance, and the merest shift of chance could spell his ruin everlasting, and like me, his name might be erased forever from the Book of Life. Or worse.

I shook his hand, and he mended mine. Imagine, Fulcanelli, an alchemist who might have even surpassed you.

He is inscrutable. But my eyes see everything. Hide, hide, but I’ll see. Give it time.

And while we wait, while we dance, I have a brother in arms. I’ll watch, lest man become tyrant become God. And if he reaches too high, I’ll cut him down before I crush his corpse beneath my heel to climb another link and reach Father. But let him find what he seeks, what he burns for. In a just universe, he’ll possess bliss, and I’ll possess freedom.

While it’s unjust, let us smash it, let us break it, burn it down, and raise a new kingdom from its ashes.

vision

“And their whole body, and their backs, and their hands, and their wings, and the wheels, were full of eyes round about, even the wheels that they four had.”

—Ezekiel 10:12, The King James Bible

träumend

The sanctified poison worked its way through the substance of my vessel for roughly twenty-four hours: a day of sweltering madness tangled in the sheets of my bed, clutching and crushing them, snaring my own shaking limbs. I panted like a diseased dog, I raved, and memories and dreams blurred together in a single mass of old wounds and hopeless futures. I dreamt failure—defeat—the unending waste of my exile—the meaningless worse-than-nothing that is the Thousand Year Kingdom.

She emerged through my fever, drowsy-gentle Ophélie sitting in my bed. Perfectly beautiful, her wickedness softened by the adoration in her too-knowing verdigris eyes. Ophelos—helpmate. She placed her oasis-cool palm against my forehead to brush back hair streaked with sweat. And I understood that this was a mirage born from my temporary madness, but I longed to weep under her merciful fingers, had my eyes not been baked dry.

I remember her, I dream her as a child. That’s how she sat on my bed, a wild fragile pale-skinned girl, more faerie than mortal, infinitely sweet even at her most vicious. She was bare skin and babymouth, and when I desperately pressed my lips to her fingers, she smelled and tasted as she always did: like manna and ambrosia intermingled with the azoth in her blood.

“Stupid Margrave,” she murmured, a bell-sweet melody of shivering crystal, and my heart faltered, overflowed. To die, to really die, I wouldn’t mind like this. All that I see or seem is but a dream within a dream. “I thought you couldn’t be hurt.”

And I croaked: “Not forever.”

nachtmahr

Fever numbs and lights me from inside. My bonfire guts me from the core and leaves charcoal mixed with ash, brimstone, wailing and gnashing of teeth. I can’t keep that heat. It burns on its way out of my muscles, past my blackened bones, and my lungs, and then the cold seeps through the emptiness in its place. Chill sweat beads on my brow, I shudder, and the cycle repeats.

Toxic. I got careless. But Haborim’s just a little punk, a petty Duke who can’t claw his way up without seizing on some wretched soul like a black scavenger. I’m ashamed to call him family, a sniveling mongrel savoring scraps of refuse while he rides a dying sack of bones almost as useless as he is.

I drink Saint Magdalene to distract me, the way the alcohol tears my throat open every time. The fever will pass. Already I can feel it subsiding, but it’ll take time. Time or worship: a girlchild on her knees in yearning, or one of Danny’s brawl-scarred bruisers asking me again with holy awe in his voice: “Jesus Fucking Christ, March, how’d you do it?”

Because at that moment, I am Jesus Christ, and it doesn’t matter what name they use, or how they do it, as long as they pray to me.

And there’s glory—glory—hallelujah. But my glory would tear the world, so I must wait, I must wait, choose to burn and take my pleasure from the pain.

Faith and glory won’t mend Haborim. I caught him last night like vermin in my talon clutch, and until then he was eager to the point of ecstasy: his firebrand smoldering and ready to catch the world like kindling. But not my part of it, not my vassals. Protectiveness or possessiveness? I wonder if they aren’t the same thing, the way love and greed, lust and envy can exchange faces.

In the end, I broke holy water over that brand and quenched the steel, ruined my hands with Father’s holy hate as the bottle shattered into candle-heated glass razors. Shredded like a snake’s molted skin, the gloves did nothing to keep the aquæ from my veins. Blessed tears of Lourdes. My blood festered—the black filth of sin rising from my damned soul and bubbling in ichor from my nerveless fingers.

But I could taste his terror, the bittersweet rush, and that’s the joy I savored as the muzzle of my Colt pressed between his eyes, and I squeezed the trigger like the root-deep shock of orgasm to blow out the back of his host’s skull. And his sin, the oil-black filth of gore and gray matter, bone and stolen time, geysered across Fifth Avenue.

Then Haborim’s host was meat, and Hell yawned for both of them.

But the White girl, my White girl, can sleep tonight, sleep in the quiet blue-blooded intimacy of her bedroom, with Chanel No. 9 on her wrists, and I think of her wrists and what it would be like to feel her pulse, put my fingertips on them again, around them, and I think of Choire, and I think of Ophélie. I have to laugh because the gun is hot and it throbs, or my hand does.

Bobbi’s had enough visitors for one night. I’ll let her only nightmares tonight be those living inside her head.

unclean

“And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea.”

—Mark 5:13, The King James Bible

die by the gun

aquæ

“Exorcizo te, creatura aquæ, in nomine Dei Patris omnipotentis, et in nomine Jesu Christi, Filii ejus Domini nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti: ut fias aqua exorcizata ad effugandam omnem potestatem inimici, et ipsum inimicum eradicare et explantare valeas cum angelis suis apostaticis, per virtutem ejusdem Domini nostri Jesu Christ: qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos et sæculum per ignem.”

—Latin ritual for the preparation of holy water

live by the gun

They’re arranged across my table in military rank and file.

Black magic’s familiar reek mingles with the acrid gunpowder tang of cordite, all bound together in burnished brass shells. Behind them, cased in gleaming aluminum, the sanctified cartridges stand sealed with Solomon’s mark: the alchemical transmutation, fusion of opposites, vibrating with power between my fingers.

The latter I handle with particular care; but even so, I can feel numbness spreading through my fingertips and into my hand. Aching cold penetrates the thin snakeskin—I can feel how much they, how much Father hates me—but gloves any thicker, any clumsier, won’t do.

I’ve already disassembled the revolver, and I’m imaging (meticulous, exquisite daydream) Choire’s little virgin hands wrapped around the thickness of its engraved barrel, when Corbin calls.

I balance the receiver against my ear, let my eyes fall across the forty-five caliber cartridges and the antique Colt’s pieces scattered across the lamp-lit table like the skeleton of some dismembered organism bleached silver-white in the sun.

“The White girl?” I ask him, but I already know, and I’m smiling. Because I’ve been waiting. Because my tingling hand, my gunslinger fingers were waiting, and the joy of war threatens to spill from the core of me onto my tongue like the stinging-hot phantom memory of blood. My blood, or another’s, it hardly matters.

Two words from the vassal are enough: “Haborim. Tonight.”

just like heaven

White. The room was pure, clean white, and the sunlight through the window made it glow when the furious child made her way inside. She threw herself onto the bedside, and Margrave saw that she was on the verge of weeping or striking him—and thought for a moment that she might do both at once.

But she wrapped her thin pale arms around his neck and buried her golden head against his shoulder, and his face was pressed to the sweet-scented nest of her curls, and he thought for a moment that this is really Heaven. Then he ached as the child pulled herself away, drew her delicate hand swiftly back, and slapped him soundly across the cheek.

“Don’t you ever,” she said, tears glistening off her thick lashes, “hide from me again, you… you brute.”

“I—” His voice caught, crumbled in his throat. Margrave grinned tautly and tried again: “I wasn’t pretty to look at, my love.”

“Stupid,” she said. “You’re beautiful.” Possessive, miserable, she clutched him again, lowered her head, and half-sprawled across the bed heedless of her dress as she placed her ear against his heartbeat. In the sunlight, as she listened, she calmed. He stroked her head, felt the reassuring inconsequential weight of it on his chest.

“I thought you couldn’t be hurt,” she muttered. Sullen. He saw that the photographer had painted her pouting lips with rouge. Pretty on her, startling. She came directly here without washing her face, he thought.

“Not forever,” he murmured.

“But why?” she asked. And then: “Your heart’s beating faster.”

“I needed to show your dear papa something,” he explained softly, he soothed. “Some people can only fully understand a thing when they see it.”

“Like angels?” Ophélie asked as she shifted and made herself more comfortable across his body, mercifully whole.

“Yes, darling,” he said, smiling, half-lidded eyes watching how the sunlight in her hair transformed it into a corona. “Like angels.”

fury

She’s broken me. Beautiful, beautiful Danny, Diana, and I’ve broken her worse.

There are too many damned women in my life. My Erinyes, my Eumenides. That’s what goes through my bleeding head as I track it into the apartment—on the switch when I fumbled for the light and smear crimson across the faceplate, the new velvet pile carpet, the stiff sheets that I’ve started to hate so much as I collapse into the cool, empty bed.

I’m laughing because it’s all so useless, and each breath lances, pries my sides with pain from cracked ribs. There’ll be an ugly bruise soon, a royal splash of angry violet and yellow up and down my abdomen when it starts to heal, only a little worse than the marks across my jaw. A half-empty bottle of Scotch waits for me on the nightstand by the bed—took it from the lounge this morning; must have known I would need it now, twelve hours later, though the thought hadn’t occurred to me at the time.

I bring the mouth of the bottle to my lips, upend it, cough on the burn as it courses down, alcohol over the raw wound of my throat. Swallow, choke, swallow again, and finally I have to stop, gagging and gasping as a lurch seizes my guts and I wonder if I’ll have to vomit.

Here I am again. Some things never change.

Easy enough to fix the pain, the bruises, the abused hairline fractures running down my marred bones. But where’s the point? I’m finite, I hurt, and there’s grand pleasure in self restriction. Seeing if you can play a game with one hand tied behind your back. Because to Danny and I, this is just game, even if we play in deadly earnest. The stakes haven’t risen yet, not a live-or-die ante.

When they do, the rules change. Either way, I win. And my Furies will help me do it.

my sum

“I lov'd Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.”

—Hamlet: Act V, Scene I (1594)

white opium

Yesterday, I spoke with the ghost.

The border between where Bobbi Pascal ended and it began smudged with the light-spectrum blur of blue into indigo into violet. I wonder if I’ve met it before—in eras I’ve forgotten, memory and my old name sublimated and gone like wind. Maybe the comfort I take from the ghost’s presence is the ease of a drug, Marx’s Opium des Volkes. Bad habits are hard to break, and I used to be the worst kind of junkie: wallowing in filth, slavering like a lobotomy.

The Old Ones are involved; Wolf knew that in an instant, and I’ve felt it too, in my bones and my blood. Father’s handiwork. In those minutes of recognition between the three of us—Bobbi, the ghost, and me—I felt content, like the world is sublimely beautiful. And that’s the snare, because you hesitate to burn down what you adore. I’m drawn by Bobbi’s lovely fragility, attracted to what I can destroy as much as what destroys me.

But Father should know better by now. He thinks I’ve let myself become so sensually debauched, so viscerally wanton, that I’ll stay my hand for a few years—for the sake of a pretty doll-sweet child’s face? Like Ophélie, my Ophélie, she of the wicked blond curls tangled between my blood-damned fingers, she of the biting little whore-rouged mouth.

Father doesn’t understand; never did. That’s how narcissism works. Other people are shit under your boots. I’m shit. An irritant to scrape off at the earliest convenience.

But I won’t stop. I won’t slow. I’ll glut myself on the world, choke on its pleasure and its pain. And I’ll burn it down all the same—like chaff in a fire, Father. It’s not the world they deserve: Ophélie, Bobbi, Choire, even Danny or Sunika. That limp-wristed bastard Canseliet, or Master Fulcanelli, wherever he’s wandered among the quick and the dead.

And I'm not what they deserve. But I can clear the way.

Wait. Just wait. It’s coming. I’m coming, the gears are turning. And nothing—not angel, devil, ghost, or man—is stopping me this time.

camera obscura

40 miles from the sun

In the center of the net, a heartbeat pulsing at its core, the infant star blossomed. It grew with a crackling roar, drawing hurried gouts of oxygen toward itself through the latticework of the net, and expanded to the size of a human skull—until it strained the boundaries of its cage and licked beyond them with fragile tongues of nuclear fire.

Margrave gazed into the light, felt it blast his irises, the windows of his pupils, in a wash of transcendent illumination and heat, and he remembered. Familiar, the way it had ruined him then, and ruined him now. He felt tightness drawing across his cheekbones, forehead, jaw as the radiance charred the surface of his skin, flooding the small laboratory with the cloying, acrid reek of smoldering flesh and hair.

Layers peeled away, and Canseliet screamed, but gam zeh yaavor: this too shall pass, King Solomon. He watched, even after vision had left him, struggling to differentiate chemical from alchemical, science from the secret place where Fulcanelli’s miracle began.

The net was copper alloyed with antimony—it should have shuddered, melted, vaporized like sighed breath under the sheer magnitude of force Fulcanelli controlled. But the infusion of azoth, the conduit that the old man effortlessly had joined with it, gave the net sovereignty unto itself, rendered it inviolate. Anchor for the lapis philosophorum, for the golden chrysopoeia—then why not a fledgling sun, he thought, as agony flayed him and he smiled to endure it.

Still he stood, and Canseliet was shouting for Fulcanelli to break the conduit, stop the experiment, but the old man waited, as Margrave guessed he would. Canseliet’s shriek from the other side of the laboratory's leaded enclosure: “Come back, you fool, come back!”

But he rode the annihilating glow in molten ocean waves, felt the human delineations of his body weaken, the organism collapsing. The salty-sweet taste of blood frothed Hebrew and Latin and Greek past his lips, and Margrave could not be certain whether the liquid stinging down his ravaged cheeks was tears or vitreous.

“This is the light of God, Eugène,” Margrave crowed, his grinning mouth splitting to reveal rows of irradiated white teeth in a cadaver’s rictus. “This is your burning bush.”

And finally the galvanized hum of electricity was dying, the machines calming, the old man’s sorcery fading as the sun in miniature fluxed, flared in its containment, suffered the ignoble death of a snuffed candle flame. Margrave breathed, rasped, and collapsed—laughing, laughing, because this too shall pass, this too shall pass.

i am that i am

“Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.”

—Exodus 3:6, The King James Bible

hate me

And today I heard those words—“I hate you”—from little Miss White's mouth too. You'll all drive me mad with want.

snare

It’s the same ceiling as yesterday, but I might as well be somewhere else. I lie face up in an unfamiliar bed; the sheets are new and stiff, Egyptian cotton, disheveled as she'd been after stumbling out of them. With everything gone, replaced and impersonal, the space doesn’t feel mine anymore. When the girl leaves, so may I.

I found her browsing at Saks Fifth Avenue, snared her like a white-skinned docile little rabbit, smiled at her and overwhelmed her until she didn’t have a choice but to follow anywhere I led. She’d liked my suit—and she should, my flesh and bones wrapped in glamour that she can see and some that she can’t. She’d fixed her eyes on my face, predictably caught. I’d crooked my finger, and she’d rushed—breathlessly eager—after me.

Vanity and lust. Two birds with one stone, though I never liked the expression.

The shower’s running in the bathroom, and I picture her spindly young legs still trembling beneath the water from the way I took her, clenching bruises around her wrists, pressing marks into the delicate hollow of her throat with my mouth. But I feel empty, hollow, unfulfilled, even with the girl's worship saturating me like heroine straight into the blood. Between the Shewolf and Choire, something like this was bound to happen. At least the edge is dulled now.

And it’s another “Fuck you” to Father.

Funny. I think of Bobbi, and I have trouble picturing her like this. Maybe because she’s so pure it makes me ache: the way a child is pure, malicious and petty, defenseless and honest even when she lies. But purity's never made a difference before. Vastly more likely—the seal organically branded against the back of her neck, as much a native part of the girl as her heart and lungs. A connection between us, my name in abstract.

Irritation spikes mildly on my tongue. If not for her, for the ghost that haunts us both, I wouldn’t feel this sense of displacement. Brittle manuscripts edged in gilt leaf, hand-stitched clothing, centuries-old artwork—all gone, reduced to less than rubble, fine sand grain dust blowing on cold netherworld wind as the poltergeist came and went, destroying decades in an instant.

I’m getting sentimental. Complacent. Attached. But no—there’s Bahrain, or Turkey, or wherever the Hell the Garden hides from me. Soon, very soon: another rung on the Ladder, another link in the Golden Chain. I’ll ask Choire if she knows how to fly commercial aircraft; and thinking of Choire, the swollen juvenile smear of her mouth and the way she hates me, I consider the sound of the shower, and whether the girl will break if I have her again.

to suffer no evil

foreign exchange

Champagne had spoken all through the afternoon, and Margrave listened. In a little room on the Rue Rochechouart, he mutely smoked cigarettes and watched out the open window, never missing a word. When the old man arrived at a natural silence, he sat with the placid air of a priest behind a confessional screen, willing to wait forever as the late summer heat dwindled with the sun.

“For how long?” Margrave finally asked, facing the glass pane rather than his host. His words scraped barely above a whisper, quiet but raucous, the sound of a man whose seared throat is accustomed to swallowing fire.

“Three score and ten,” the old man answered softly, but businesslike and without hesitation or pause to deliberate. “Nothing—” he added “—to someone like you.” His inflection was Parisian, while Margrave spoke without accent: perfect, graceful-tongued French ruined by his voice.

Margrave watched the sun’s descent, slanting light across the floorboards at a shallow angle. He had tracked its progress through the window for several hours. When he’d begun, his mouth had been grinning, teeth clamped with mockery and a mad dog’s spite. As the sunlight sank westward, his expression also fell, until his eyes shone hollow, submerged in the distance of old memory. The smile had flown long before.

“But you leave me my liberty,” Margrave suddenly pressed, urgent, turning away from the window as he crushed the latest cigarette against its sill, in a row next to the others. “I can come and go as I please?”

“Unless I need you,” the other answered. Reminded: “And you’re to observe my restrictions.”

“I’m aware of the terms, Old Man,” Margrave said, electric agitation coursing through him like wire, held immovably taut by his own current and the quartering strain of ambivalence. His restlessness brimmed, he overflowed white-hot kinesis; but the claustrophobic attic room was too small to pace, and he closed his eyes, willing the impulse to subside.

Champagne's voice reached out in the quiet that followed with the careful, insistent delicacy of a physician probing a wound: “We both know a contract isn’t undertaken lightly. If you need time to decide—”

“No,” he answered harshly, halting Champagne’s voice, cutting it down at the first breath of empathy, understanding, mercy. The old man regarded him in silence as a savage witching heat lit in Margrave’s eyes. He watched the late commuters return home along Rochechouart’s narrow, winding course, stories below.

“No,” Margrave repeated. Calmer now, restrained. Beast at the end of its tether, quelling itself to patience, knowing that a lifetime spans only a moment.

“Just remember,” he said, because nothing was ever free, “what you've offered in exchange.”

black crane

“The Twenty-fourth Spirit is Naberius. He is a most valiant Marquis, and showeth in the form of a Black Crane, fluttering about the Circle, and when he speaketh it is with a hoarse voice. He maketh men cunning in all Arts and Sciences, but especially in the Art of Rhetoric. He restoreth lost Dignities and Honours. He governeth 19 Legions of Spirits. His Seal is this, which is to be worn, etc.”

—S. L. MacGregor Mathers, Trans., Goetia: the Lesser Key of Solomon the King (1904)