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.