The Worm in Every Heart

. . . these foolish things . . . remind me of you.

“Yes,” I say. “You may.”

The Narrow World

And then I did a strange thing, but what I did matters not.

—Oscar Wilde

IT’S ALWAYS THE SAME, always different. The moment you make that first cut, even before you open the—item—in question up, there’s this faint, red-tinged exhalation: Cotton-soft, indefinite, almost indefinable. Even more than the shudder or the jerk, the last stifled attempt at drawn breath, this is what marks a severance—what proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that something which once considered itself alive has been physically deleted from this tangle of contradictory image and sensation we choose to call “reality.”

Cut away from, cut loose. Or maybe—cut free.

And this is the first operating rule of magic, whether black, white or red all over: For every incision, an excision. No question without its answer. No action without its price.

Some people fast before a ritual. I don’t. Some people wear all white. I wear all black, except for the purple fun-fur trim on my winter coat (which I took so long to find in the first place that I really just couldn’t bear to part with it.) Some people still say you have to be a psychopath to be able to draw a perfect circle—so I hedge my bets, and carry a surveyor’s compass. But I also don’t drink, don’t smoke, haven’t done any drugs but Tylenol since I was a Ryerson undergraduate, getting so bent out of shape I could barely talk straight and practicing Crowleyan “sex magick” with a similarly inclined posse of curricular acquaintances every other weekend.

Effective hierarchical magicians like me are the Flauberts of the Narrow World—neat and orderly in our lives, comme un bourgeois, so that we may be violent and creative in our work. We’re not fanatics. There’s no particular principle involved, except maybe the principle of Free Enterprise. So we can afford to stay safe . . . and for what they’re paying us to do so, our customers kind of prefer it that way.

$3,000 down, tax-free, for a simple supernatural Q & A session, from U of T Business pregrad Doug Whatever to me, Hark Chiu-Wai—Jude Hark, as I’m known down here in Toronto the Good-for-nothing. That’s what brought me where I was when all this began: Under the vaulted cathedral arch of the St Clair Ravine Bridge, shivering against the Indian Winter air of early September as I gutted a sedated German Shepherd, in preparation for invoking the obsolete Sumerian god of divination by entrails.

The dog was a bit on the small side, but it was a definite improvement on Doug and his girlfriend’s first try—a week back, when they’d actually tried to fob me off with some store-bought puppy. Through long and clever argument, however, I’d finally gotten them to cave in: If you’re looking to evoke a deity who speaks through a face made of guts—one who goes by the slightly risible name of Humbaba, to be exact—you’d probably better make sure his mouth is big enough to tell you what you want to hear.

Since I hate dogs anyway—tongue-wagging little affection junkies—treating one like a Christmas chicken was not exactly a traumatic prospect. So I completed the down-stroke, shearing straight through its breastbone, and pushed down hard on either side of its ribcage ‘til I heard something crack.

Behind me, the no-doubt-soon-to-be-Mrs. Doug made a hacking noise, and shifted her attention to a patch of graffiti on the nearest wall. Doug just kept on staring, maintaining the kind of physical fixity that probably passed for thought in his circles.

“So what, those the . . . innards?” He asked, delicately.

“Those are they,” I said, not looking up. Flaying away the membrane between heart and lungs, lifting and separating the subsections of fat between abdomen and bowels . . .

He nodded. “What’cha gonna do with ’em?”

“Watch.”

I twisted, cut, twisted again, cut again. Heart on one side, lungs (a riven grey tissue butterfly, torn wing from wing) on the other. Pulled forth the gall bladder and squeezed it empty, using it to smear binding sigils at my north, south, east, west. Shook out another cleansing handful of rock salt, and wrung the bile from my palms.

Doug’s girlfriend, having exhausted the wall’s literary possibilities, had turned back toward the real action. Hand over mouth, she ventured:

“Um—is that like a hat you can buy, or is that a religion?”

“What?”

“Your hat. Is it, like, religious?”

(The headgear in question being a black brocade cap, close-fitting, topped with a round, greyish satin applique of a Chinese embroidery pattern: Bats and dragons entwined, signifying long life and good luck. The kind of thing my Ma might’ve picked out for me, were she inclined to do so.)

“Oh, yes,” I replied, keeping my eyes firmly on the prize, as I started to unreel the dog’s intestines. “Very religious. Has its own church, actually. All hail Jude’s hat—bow down, bow down. Happy holiness to the headgear.”

She sniffed, mildly aggrieved at my lack of interest in her respect for my fashion sense.

Said: “Well, excuse me for trying to be polite.”

I shot her a small, amused glance. Thinking: Oh, was that what you were trying to do?

Ai-yaaa.

The dog had more guts than I’d originally given him credit for. Scooping out the last of them, I started to shape them into a rough, pink face, its features equally blurred with blood and seeping digestive juices.