There are few sadder sights than seeing ones childhood home in ruins. One could, for example, find a dog clinging onto life, coughing out blood and trying to move its flattened body. A cherished (and deceased) member of the family could be discovered to have indulged themselves in a bit of pedophilia. Someone could have turned on the news to find that a school of children was shot up in a pizzeria because some nut job got it into his thick skull that there was a child trafficking ring in the (non-existent) basement based solely on the word of some conspiracy board. And that’s not even getting into the various, often times horrifying, stories that come out of the landmass once called Florida. A lot of sad things happen.
But seeing one’s childhood home replaced by something unrecognizable is a burden few will ever experience. A weightless sadness that feels like having one’s liver surgically removed without anesthesia. And it’s not even done by a bad surgeon. Indeed, it would be by one of the best surgeons in the world. Though that’s not the same as one of the best people in the world. For this surgeon cares not for people, merely sees them as a mechanic would a car with a busted muffler. When the patient looks at the doctor for some reassurances over them not being drugged, they find only the coldness of someone who has lost many a patient and knows what it is to suffer. He has hardened his heart to the suffering of others, which in some regards has improved his skills as a surgeon. But they have dulled his skills as a person. It is the pain of seeing those eyes as the knife begins to go into the flesh of the patient that Billy felt as he looked upon the remains of his home.
In truth, to call them “remains” is an inaccurate statement. It is true that Billy stood where his home once was and it is true that it is no longer hospitable. But to say that anything remained of the ruin he called a home would be wrong. What stood where his home once did was a monotonously dull grey cube, which contained a factory within it. There didn’t appear to be any doors within the building; only a hatch on the top where helicopters could dump more and more “human resources.” There weren’t even any windows in the building. One wondered how air got into that perfect cube. Must be some manufactured air that costs a lot more than it would to simply have a few windows in the buildings, Billy thought.
And yet, the building itself was covered in vines and foliage. Giant green fingers were slowly sliding around the humongous cube with the elegance of a fist tightening before the knock out punch. (Through the foliage, he could see some cracks just large enough to allow a person to barely squeeze out of. Indeed, it was recorded that nearly one in every four workers escaped through this means. The other three-fourths used the sewers.) There were murmurs on the street of plant life being capable of coming to life and slaughtering the living. Rumors that vines were seen strangling a group of children and roots upending roads, causing pursuers of what they called criminals to break their faces on concrete streets. I met “cynical” person once sometime after entering the City, and he thought it was a righteous act done solely because humanity deserved to die. Then again, that same person thought the only way to live was within the City and those who didn’t were “too cowardly to live in the real world instead of their safe space.” Not a pleasant person, to say the least.
But beyond the foliage, near the bottom of the building, Billy could see someone. He couldn’t quite make the shape of the person, but they appeared to be running away from the building. He could see more people running behind them. They appeared to be clumped together like a mob and following the lone runner as if he was the monster at the end of a black and white movie. As they moved closer, Billy could see the crowd was armed with batons of various thicknesses (though sadly, there was nary a torch or pitchfork in sight). A cruel sneer could be heard from the mob. The sneer of the powerless few who use what little power they have to beat up those even more powerless than them because the powerful said so. Unfortunately for Billy, the person being chased decided to run in his direction. Knowing full well what happens when one is in the path of an angry mob, Billy decided to join the fellow.
“Wonderful day for it, wouldn’t you say,” they said, though Billy wouldn’t say he’d agree. He tried to get a good look at them as they ran, but he could only get splashes at a time. They were dressed in a slick pair of leather pants that shouldn’t allow them the mobility they were currently enjoying. They had a rather unfortunate haircut that made it look like someone had shaven the word “facefuck” in the center and they were that desperate to shave it off without being bald. Or, at least, that’s what Billy hoped was the reasoning for such a dreadful haircut. No one could actually want to look like that. Then again, there was a sincerity to the design that implied otherwise. They were largely sunburnt with the exception of their left index finger, which had a pale ring around it. Upon closer examination, their pants weren’t so much leather as extremely dark and clean. They smelled like a magici-
But before Billy could make his next note, some asshole decided it would be a good idea to throw a fucking baton (which is a nice way of saying “not actually a baton”) at them.
“Wh- WHY,” said Billy in the tone of voice of someone discovering that people do in fact think it’s a good idea to hide a chainsaw down their pants.
“Must of run out of sticks,” said Billy’s running companion. “Alex, by the way.”
“Billy. Billy Bradshaw. Can’t imagine how they’d run out of them. Must be growing by the dozens given those vines.”
“Oh you saw them too,” said Alex in the droll tone of someone noting they’re breathing air, “why do you think that is?”
“What, the plants growing? Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s because the deer told the plants to do that.”
“Oh come now,” said Alex acting as if they hadn’t seen deer order a plant to rip off the limbs of an ornery ex-Spider who thought it was a good idea to kick a puppy in front of a deer. In his defense (as slim as that might be), it was because his date ran off on him. Then again, having actually talked to the woman in question (who has asked to remain anonymous), she dumped him on the grounds that he spiked her drink. He tried to explain that it wasn’t roofies or anything, not realizing the problem was the whole “not telling her what she was drinking and having to have a complete stranger named Alex tell what her date had done before she drunk the drink” part of the affair. She was almost saddened to see the deer rip him to shreds. “That’s absurd.”
“Oh, then what the fuck do you think is going on,” Billy didn’t so much ask this as shout it quickly.
“Well-“ but before they could finish that lie, another baton was thrown at the pair. This time, it was a much further shave as the crowd was starting to lose their anger at what Alex did. Alex’s actions that afternoon were, to be quite blunt, extremely dull up to that point, best described in sentences such as “And then, they took another left turn,” “They stopped to take a wiz for a good half hour or so,” and “They spent nearly an hour trying to get a pebble out of their shoe.” (This is why a majority of travelogues tend to cut out the exact details of the journey in favor of more thematically interesting things.)
That isn’t to say that Alex’s journey was a dull one, nor that their reasoning was unworthy of being chased. Indeed, many a storyteller has made great art out of “I’m off to see grandmother.” But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Coincidentally, one of the reasons for Alex being there concerned their grandmother. Alex’s grandmother had been dead for their entire life. They were informed, while looking for a friend of theirs, that she was buried a mile or so outside of City limits. When they arrived to the location of the graveyard to pay respects, they discovered, to their unsurprised horror, that the graveyard was paved over and replaced with a parking lot for a factory. (Said parking lot was there more for aesthetics than utility.) They could hear their grandmother’s soul screaming from beneath the concrete in a choir of pain and anger. Her song was an apocalyptic track about the cleansing powers of fire. WHAT IS THERE TO DO, the dead woman sang perfectly in tune, WHEN EVERYTHING WE DOCTOR, WHEN EVERYTHING WE BUILD, IS STAINED BY OUR TOUCH? WHEN EVERYWHERE WE GO IS SOMEWHERE VISITED BY SOMEONE? THE MADNESS HERE IS CIRCULAR.
“The madness here is us,” Alex said to themself. They knew the implications and invocations of those words. Most magicians knew the dead always spoke in an iconography they understood… after a fashion. Haunted language is perhaps a befitting one for ghosts. All stories, in their own way, are haunted. There are influences one does not appreciate or even realize are influences until looked upon in the wider tapestry of the world. Take, for example, the song the soul sang: The Tower Through the Trees. It’s an apocalyptic song by The Seeming about the necessity of burning everything down to the ground, including all of humanity. “A protest song as imagined by a nihilist,” as one critic put it. The album as a whole (and indeed, the band’s later work) was less, for lack of a better phrase, pessimistic about humanity than such a statement would imply, ultimately aligning itself with the shift into a new form of being. A rejection of what we once called human in favor of a brave new world with such people in it (“We secede from wholeness, wholesomeness, holiness, and humankind. Evolve and become unrecognizable. Demand gills, antlers, ink sacs, fangs, talons, udders, spores, quills, a proboscis, and a bioluminescent thorax,” as a later song put it). Though we have not evolved to being unrecognizable from the humanity of my childhood, to say we are what we were back then would be a lie. Then again, is that not true of all generational shifts?
With this cryptic reference in mind, Alex walked up to the factory and, at the exact center of each side, made a sigil out of the vines and other natural things growing on the building. It was as if they were a canvas waiting to be used for this exact purpose. The sigils were all of identical shape, that of akin to an extremely thin person with no arms, a wide open smile, and a single square eye filled with lines crossing over one another to look like an asterisk with some T’s dangling off of it. Once each sigil was completed, Alex would do the necessary hand movements to launch them into the world, both forwards and backwards in time.
Alex knew the eventual consequences of the action. Indeed, all magicians knew that magical rituals of such a scale as to murder a City had blow back that would, to some degree, counter the goal of the sigil. To use one of the more famous examples, were someone to use the Whitechapel murders of the late 1800’s as a magical ritual to solidify the power and dominance of the patriarchy over the 20th century, one must also contend with the rise of feminism as a prevailing force in the world. This is why the best magical spells are ones in the form of fictional texts as opposed to stereotypical rituals: with a book, the blow back is typically “people write angry reviews about the book and it’s message,” at best and “people scream about the ethics of video games journalism as a means to harass women off of the internet with pipe bombs” at worst. Rarely does a book bring about an entirely new school of thought to counter it (and even then, it’s not so much the book that’s being countered as the marginalized people reading it). But Alex performed the spell anyways. Unfortunately, what they hadn’t prepared for was for someone to notice and… let’s just say people who guard buildings for a living don’t take kindly to those who launch sigils on them and leave it at that. (In his defense, the factory had long since been abandoned once it stopped being cost effective. Those within were locked in, breaking apart and rebuilding products that would never see the light of day. They only thing keeping them going was the hope that someday, they would see the sun again. Even the ones who tried to escape from the cage didn’t know the outside world had forgotten them.)
When the pair were sure that they weren’t being chased anymore and, coincidentally, back in City limits, Alex asked, “So ]pant[ what were you ]pant[ doing there?”
“I…” said Billy with each pause containing a wheeze and cough, “was… seeing… my old home… town. You?”
“I ]pant[ wanted to see if my ]pant[ grandmother’s grave was still there.”
“Oh. Was it?”
“I don’t know. The building was covering up where ]pant[ the graves should be.”
“Ah.” There was a brief pause before Billy finally asked “So why were they chasing you?”
“Uhhhh…”
“Was it because of those shapes cut into the patchwork of vines that was eating the building?”
“Uuuuuuhhhhhhhh”
“Cause they looked kinda like sigils.”
“UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”
“And you did smell like a magician who just launched a sigil. Plus that would explain why you were pulling up-“
“OK! YES, IS WAS USING THE FUCKING BUILDING TO LAUNCH SOME FUCKING SIGILS ONTO THE FUCKING PSYCHIC LANDSCAPE OF THIS FUCKING WORLD AND THE FUCKING GUARDS TOOK EXCEPTION TO THAT! ARE YOU HAPPY?”
“Well, with that tone, I’m not.” At which point the pair broke into a burst of laughter. They fell down onto the slightly grassy, but mostly concrete, ground and looked at one another as if they were friends.
“So,” Alex said when the laughter cooled, “how did you know that was a sigil?”
“Firstly, I’m a professional liar. I’m what you might call a Con Artist. Liars are pretty good at telling when someone knows something they don’t want to talk about. Second, friend of a friend explained it to me,” Billy lied. (The truth was that he actually read a book on making sigils when he was a kid. He stole it from a library and had to lie to his parents about it once the police started buckling down on the area shortly after he stole it, as if the two events were correlated. The last he saw of it was in his room an hour before the parents told the kids to play outside for an hour or so while they talked about some grownup things.)
“So…” asked Alex, “do you have plans for tonight?” There was a pause in the universe at that moment, one that magicians are adept to notice solely because they’re looking for such moments of narrative coalescence and thematic congruity all the time. It is said that magic is simply a form of art. That all a magic spell/work of art does is project the subconscious of the world as interpreted by the magician into the conscious world. Perhaps the idea was already within Billy before he said the words. Perhaps they were within him when he realized he was no longer with Cate or the last time he said “I love you” to his mom and dad or maybe they were in him when he was born and his whole life was a teleological ordained; the authorless wave of History itself controlling how his life would end.
Indeed, many a magician will claim that the world is preordained, that all actions are plotted out to fit within the schema of some occult being for their own purposes. Alex themself told me that he was the one who brought the City down. I doubt their story to that they were the author of these events as they were quite plastered when they told me this. The truth is the world is far too rudderless to ever be authored and controlled like characters in a work of fiction. Even the most intricate of designs fails to control the structure of life. For all the other intricate designs bungle over one another, as life tends to. As some magicians know deep down, all attempts at pure control end in failure. So perhaps it was the sigil, launched in time and space, which made Billy say these words. Or maybe it was Billy who said them because of the life he lived. Or maybe the words were his own spell of intent and meaning, one only subconsciously known. To be honest, the cause of the words holds little importance in the grand scheme of things.
Finally, Billy said in the calmest possible tone required to express the anger implicit within his words, “I think I’m gonna kill the CEO of the Fuzon Corporation.”Support the blog on Patreon.
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