Peter Clines - Ex-Heroes

Here’s the thing, though. Amidst all that bullshit there are grains of truth. Really, there are. If you put any serious effort into it and dig through all the shit, you’ll find the seeds of real magic. It’s like …It’s like if you want to be a successful writer, but you need to wade through a thousand books written by hacks and wannabes to glean a few useful hints and tips. And then you use those to improve your actual craft, which makes it easier to find the real stuff the next time you go digging. Crowley, Nostradamus, all those guys—-they were like the Internet idiots who manage to get one thing right for every ninety-nine things they get wrong.

No, not Edgar Cayce. He was a complete charlatan. Hell, Houdini proved him to be a fake twice while he was alive and once after he died—Houdini, not Cayce. Yeah, Cayce was such a predictable fraud Houdini exposed him from beyond the grave.

But I digress.

So, yeah, there’s real magic in the world. Just like you read about when you were little. Fireball-casting, demon-summoning, mysticwarding magic. Most of it isn’t that flashy computer game stuff, but it’s real. And it’s like any other art. You have to practice a lot, even if you’ve got some innate talent for it. You keep researching the craft and you keep digging for those seeds of wisdom. Eventually you feel good and give yourself a title, and then if you’re lucky someone who really knows how things are done beats you down and reminds you you’re still just a novice. If you’re unlucky, you end up dead. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

The other thing is, like any art, all the artists are being challenged to do something new. Yeah, you can learn all the basics and do the same things everyone before you did. Nothing wrong with that. But if you want to stand out, if you want to be remembered, you’ve got to do something new.

Jesus, doc, can’t I get something? At least an Advil or two? Some kind of anti-itch cream? No, antibiotics wouldn’t do a damn thing and we both know it. I’ve been fighting these things for five months, where the hell have you been? For that matter, why am I off in a trailer and not the field hospital? Where the hell is Regenerator? Isn’t he supposed to be dealing with all of us, to get us back in the field as quickly as possible?

Bitten? When? Jesus. Is he …I mean, hell, what did it do to him? I’d think if anyone was safe from all this beside the Dragon it would be—Seriously? A full-on coma, not just knocked out? Jesus.

Not that well. He’s sort of like any coworker, y’know? But you say it’s not spreading much past the actual bite? That must look creepy as hell.

Okay, fine. Where was I?

Still on magic, right. Doing something new. No, this is all going somewhere. If you’re not going to give me any good drugs you can at least humor me in my final days.

So, just like there’s real magic, there’s real evil. Not EnronExxon-Halliburton incidents that disgust you with their greed or callousness. I mean real evil. The stuff that burns your eyes to look at. The stuff that makes you taste metal and dog shit when you hear it speak. The kind of evil so many people have conditioned themselves to ignore at all costs. It can be standing right in front of you and you can’t acknowledge it, because it’d be like sticking a red-hot weed whacker in your brain.

Yeah, you can call it the Devil if you like. Satan. Chaos. Entropy. The Beast. There’s an infinite number of names and titles and personalities. No, seriously. Infinite.

Anyway, that’s the downside to magic, see? Once you start learning it, you have to go one way or another. With the evil or against it. And if you’re against it, well …real evil doesn’t know mercy or pity or gloating. It’ll just erase you. So learning magic is a real sink-or-swim situation.

And that brings me back to doing something new, see? Ever hear the phrase, fight fire with fire? Well that’s what I decided to do.

Y’see, there’s a ton of low-level control spells and enchantments and glamours. No, not low-level like Dungeons and Dragons , you dipshit. As in basic, introductory stuff. Mental nudges, persuasion, that sort of thing. The glamour lasts for maybe a day or two if you focus. If you’re good, you can make the edges blur and people won’t even notice they’re doing something they don’t want to. It’s good for making cash, getting girls in bed, that sort of stuff. Your targets do all the rationalizing for you.

Anyway, higher level stuff is farseeing, telepathy, possession. Yes, possession is very real. So is exorcism, for that matter. I’d done three before I was twenty-five. Second one almost killed me. No, trust me, you don’t want to know. No, it was so much worse than that. Look, seriously, I’d rather not talk about it, okay?

Is it getting hot in here or is it me? It is me? Shit, fever’s setting in already? Is it always this fast? I thought it took a day or two. No? Seven hours is the average? Holy shit, since when? That long?

Y’know, if you’d just let me put on my …okay, okay, I’m laying down again. Everyone stay calm.

So, yeah, possession is real, which got me thinking about demons. There are hundreds of types, dozens of magnitudes, but one thing they all have in common is trying to influence people.

So they can ruin your life, that’s why. Didn’t you ever go to Sunday School? Shit. If they can corrupt you, ruin someone else, fuck over somebody—that emotional chaos is like food to them. It’s the whole point of their existence.

Anyway, it struck me demons are so eager to jump in and influence us, but it’s kind of a two-way street. They can’t open that path without opening it both ways. And I decided to take advantage of that.

It took a bit of work. Combining summoning spells and possession spells. And they had to be damned specific. I’m talking ten times past space shuttle re-entry math specific. And then I had to forge a set of control glyphs around the enchantments.

Look at it this way. You know computers? RAM and ROM? That’s what I was doing. Taking flexible, mutable spells—-the random memory—-and, what would you call it, hard-wiring them into a solid, singlepurpose device—-the read-only-memory. Make sense?

That’s how I ended up just outside Novosibirsk, Russia, on the afternoon of August 1, 2008. I had a darkness lens I’d carved from volcanic obsidian with a piece of bone, and I used it to focus a total solar eclipse into the platinum medallion I’d spent three years preparing.

Yes, that one right there in the lockbox. No, not onto it. Into it. It contains the light of a black sun. When I put it on a very specific kind of portal called a Sativus opens to a realm those of us in the know call the Abyss, and that’s when I exchange bodies with a reaver—-a demon—that calls itself Cairax Murrain. It’s sort of a reverse-possession that links us through the medallion. Rather than the demon’s mind coming into our world and stealing control of my body, I’m transposing its body to our world through mine and possessing that.

Well then you explain it, dipstick. Did they call you a jarhead before you signed up or was that just a fortunate career choice for you? Well, if that’s so why don’t you give me the medallion and we’ll see just how fucked in the head I am?

Ahhh. You’ve seen him, then, doctor? Me, that is. Yeah, I know, it’s confusing. It’s such an odd perspective shift. I’d guess it’s kind of like role-playing. Well, I was thinking about all those online games my friends played in college, but I guess it would hold for that kind of roleplaying, too. When you’re pretending you’re someone else and getting absorbed in that world, but you’re still aware you’re you. That’s what being Cairax is like. It’s still me, I’m still making all the choices, but there’s this very thick filter over everything.