Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

“I don’t like him,” Billy says.

“That’s good,” Lucifer says.

Lucifer clicks again and a name appears over the image in, like, 48-point font:

TIMOTHY OLLARD

“So what’s his deal?” Billy says.

“Timothy Ollard is a warlock,” Lucifer says. “In my estimation he is the key warlock on the eastern seaboard.”

“A warlock?” Billy says. “Like, a wizard?”

“A warlock isn’t a wizard,” Lucifer says. “A warlock is a male witch.”

“Okay …?” Billy says. He frowns. “So, this guy is a witch?”

“A warlock,” says Lucifer.

“This is a real thing?” says Billy. “People go around calling themselves warlocks?”

“You never met anyone who called themselves a witch?” Lucifer says.

Billy thinks. “Well, sure,” he concedes, “but they were mostly chubby girls who liked herbal tea and burning incense in their dorm rooms. I thought it was kind of a thing that most people would give up by senior year. I didn’t think it was exactly a career path .”

“You’re more correct than you know,” Lucifer says. “Most American witches don’t get very far. And most American warlocks get even less far — there are fewer of them to begin with. There are, however, a few witches and warlocks who excel, who remain active for a longer period than most, and at some point they begin to become a problem.”

“So how long has this guy — Ollard — how long has he been, what would you call it, warlocking ?”

“I cannot say precisely when he began. But I have known Timothy Ollard to be practicing high-level black arts in New York City for the last eighty years.”

“Eighty years ?” Billy says.

“Take a look,” Lucifer says. New slide. An old photo. People at some sort of Jazz Age party: a crowd reveling among streamers and glittering curtains. Lucifer clicks for the caption: 1924. He clicks again and a red circle pops up around the face of a guy standing way off to the edge of the photo, a dour face among the partygoers.

“Is that supposed to be the same guy?” Billy says. He can’t tell for certain: there are shadows on the guy’s face and the hair is differently styled. It could be the guy’s grandfather or even just a random guy with a similar facial structure. The ascot is the same.

“It is him,” Lucifer says. “As near as I can tell, the last time he aged was a single afternoon in 1945, during which he went from age thirty-three to thirty-six.”

“Good trick,” Billy says.

“His current base of operations is here,” Lucifer says.

Slide. A stone tower. Dank, rotting, covered in creepy crenellations and greeble. It’s got these scary bits hanging off it that look like they might be made out of long chains of human ribcages, like something you might dream up after a tour of Cambodian genocide sites. Every available surface has shit spanged onto it: wires or pipes or crumbling gargoyles drooling black autumnal slime.

“Yeesh,” Billy says.

“Don’t be too impressed,” Lucifer says. “The edifice you see is mostly illusory.”

“What even …,” Billy says. “What part of the planet is this on?”

“It’s here,” Lucifer says. “It’s in Manhattan.”

Slide. A Google Maps screenshot with one of those little red bulbs pointing at a corner that looks like it’s somewhere in Chelsea.

“Huh,” Billy says. “You’d think I’d have heard about some freaky-ass black tower being in the middle of Manhattan.”

“People can’t see it,” Lucifer says. “Ollard has cloaked it. Wrapped it in a perceptual blind spot.”

“So, what, eight million people walk past this building and nobody notices it?”

“No cloak is perfect,” Lucifer says. “So it is likely that people notice it all the time. Hence Ollard’s choice to make what lies behind the cloak appear fearsome. When people get a glimpse of something that troubles them, that disturbs, their minds turn off toward it. They unnotice it. Their defensive human psychologies effectively partner with the cloak. In the end, people see what they want to see: a Manhattan without a — how did you put it — a freaky-ass black tower in it.”

Lucifer clicks through to the next slide. It’s a picture of one of those cat statues that Billy has seen in every sushi bar he’s ever been in.

“This is the Neko of Infinite Equilibrium,” Lucifer says.

“That’s a lucky cat statue,” Billy says.

“Neko means cat,” Lucifer says. “And don’t be confused. This particular lucky cat statue is unique.”

“What does it do?”

“It waves.”

“Well,” Billy says, “sure.”

“Technically the gesture is supposed to represent a form of beckoning.”

“Huh,” Billy says.

“Ideally, it does not do anything else. Ideally, the Neko sits on a shelf in Hell, doing nothing. Beckoning. This was the state of affairs until two weeks ago, when Ollard saw fit to divest me of it.”

“He … divested you of it?”

“He stole it. He stole the Neko and placed it in his tower. It is crucial that it be retrieved. Part of my function is to retain possession of certain items that would have unfortunate effects if they were used by human beings.”

“Uh. Define unfortunate effects .”

“The Neko beckons,” Lucifer says. “It beckons endlessly. It does not require a source of energy. This makes it”—he pauses to contemplate—“abhorrent to this world’s thermodynamic laws. Once fully in this world the Neko’s surplus energy will be given off as heat. Since the Neko has, effectively, an infinite amount of surplus energy, it has the potential to produce an infinite amount of heat.”

“Infinite heat is bad?” Billy asks.

“Infinite heat means that you are starting a fire which can be neither extinguished nor contained.”

“That sounds bad.”

“Nothing could stop such a fire,” Lucifer says. “It will burn until it has consumed the entire atmosphere. It will burn until it has consumed the combustible matter that constitutes this planet and the life on it.”

“Oh,” Billy says.

He takes a moment and tries to let this sink in. He momentarily reviews all the things in the world that qualify as combustible matter, tries to think about them vanishing into fire. Vietnamese spring rolls. The Black Flag T-shirt he bought fifteen years ago, which is now the most comfortable item of clothing he owns. Anil’s Xbox. Anil himself. Denver. Everyone. And at that point his capacity to imagine the annihilation of all earthly endeavor fails.

“Why would somebody want to do that?” he asks, quietly. “Torch the world?”

“I do not know what he hopes to gain,” Lucifer says. “It could be some sort of necromantic rite, a bid to attain godlike supremacy. The thanatotic power released by murdering a world would be substantial; Ollard may be able to put it to some use. But his ultimate aim is obscure to me.”

“So, wait, why aren’t we dead right now? Like — is Chelsea on fire right this second, or will it take a while to really get going?” Billy asks, hoping that maybe he can add supernatural fire to the list of things that might kill him at some point in the future but that are out of the range of his direct control, like global warming, or the world’s collective failure to develop a superpowered laser to blow up giant earth-threatening asteroids.

“The Neko has a set of protective defenses. When taken out of Hell, a set of six seals sprang into place around it. Until those seals are dispelled the Neko technically has not entered this world; it exists effectively in a sort of limbo. Over the last two weeks Ollard has dispelled four of these six seals.”