The Worm in Every Heart

The longer I stay in this city, the more I see it works like a corpse inside a corpse inside a corpse—the kind of puzzle you can only solve by letting it rot. Once it’s gone all soft, you can come back and give it a poke, see what sticks out. Until then, you just have to hold your nose.

About an hour later, I was almost to the door when Grandmother Yau materialized again, at my elbow. Laying her brocade sleeve over my arm, she said, softly:

“Jude-ah, before you leave, I must tell you that I see you twice. You here, drinking my tea. You somewhere else, doing something else. I see you dimly, as though through a Yin mirror—split, but not yet cut apart. Caught in a mesh of darkness.”

I frowned.

“This thing you see,” I asked, carefully. “Is it . . . dangerous?”

She smiled a little wider, and withdrew the authoritative weight of her sleeve. I saw the red light of the paper lanterns gild her upper fangs.

“Hard to tell without knowing more, don’t you think?” She said. “But there are many kinds of danger, Hark Chiu-wai-ah.”

* * *

Off Spadina again, and down the alley, fumbling for my key. Upstairs, the clutch of loud weekend hash-smokers I call my neighbors had apparently decided to spend tonight out on the town, for which I was duly grateful. Locking the door to my apartment—and renewing the protective sigils warding its frame—I took my bone-hilted knife from its sheath around my neck, under my Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, and wrapped it in a Buddhist rosary of mule-bone skulls and haematite beads, murmuring a brief prayer of reconsecration.

My machine held a fresh crop of messages from Ed, both hopeful and hateful.

Poor lonely little gweilo boy, I thought, briefly. No rice for you tonight.

Then I lit some incense (sage), peeled a few bills from the wad of twenties Doug Whatever had given me, and burned them as makeshift Hell Money in front of an old Polaroid of my grandmother—the only ancestor I care to worship anymore, these faithless Canadian days.

Own nothing, owe nothing. Pray to nothing. Pay nothing. No loyalties, no scruples. And make sure nothing ever means more to you than any other nothing you can name, or think of.

These are my rules, all of which I learned from Carra Devize, along with the fluid surprise of what it feels like to be gripped by vaginal muscles—the few, accurate, infinitely bitter philosophical lessons which she, psychic savant that she is, can only ever teach, never follow.

Magicians demand the impossible, routinely. Without even knowing it, they have begun to work backwards against the flow of all things: Contra mundi. A price follows. Miracles cannot be had without being paid for. It’s the illogic of a child who asks WHY must what is be? Why do I have to be just a boy, just a girl? Why is the sky blue? Why can’t I fly, if I want to? Why did Mommy have to die? Why do I have to die?

We call what we don’t understand magic, in order to explain why we can’t control it; we name whatever we find, usually after ourselves—because, by naming something, you come to own it.

Thus rules are discovered, and quantified, and broken. So that, when there are enough new rules, magic can become far less an Art . . . than a science.

And it’s so easy, that’s the truly frightening thing. You do it without thinking, the first time. Do it without knowing just what you’ve done, ‘till—long—after.

Frightening for most. But not for me . . . and not for Carra, either.

Once.

* * *

I was lying in bed, almost asleep, when the phone rang. I grabbed for it, promptly knocking a jar full of various complimentary bar and nightclub matchbooks off my night-stand.

“Wei?” I snapped, before I could stop myself. Then: “I mean—who is this?”

A pause. Breathing.

“Jude?”

“Franz?”

Froese.

And here’s the really interesting part—apparently, he thought he was returning my call.

“Why would I call you, Franz?”

“I thought maybe you heard something more.”