The Worm in Every Heart

“More than what?”

With a slight edge of impatience: “About Jen.”

The Jen in question being Jen Cudahy, fellow Black Magic Posse member, of lachrymose memory—a languid, funereal calla lily of a girl with purple hair and black vinyl underwear, who spent her spare periods writing execrable sestinas with titles like “My Despair, Mon Espoir” and “When Shadows Creep.” She’d worked her way through RTA as a dominatrix, pulling down about $500 per session to let judges and vice cops clean her bathroom floor with their tongues. The last time I’d seen her, over eighteen months prior, she was running a lucrative new dodge built around what she called “vampire sex shows”—a rotating roster of nude, bored teenage Goths jacking open their veins, pumping out a couple of cc’s for the drones, and then fingerpainting each other. Frottage optional. She asked me what I thought, and I told her it struck me as wasteful. But she assured me it was the quickest way she currently knew to invoke the not-so-dead god Moolah.

Franz had loved Jen for what probably only seemed like forever to outside observers, mostly from afar—interspersed, here and there, with a few painful passages of actual physical intimacy. They’d met while both attending the same Alternative high school, where they’d barricade themselves into the students’ lounge,

drop acid and have long conversations about which of them was de-evolving faster.

“Okay,” I said, carefully. “I’ll bite. What about Jen?”

“She says she’s possessed.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And this is different . . . how?”

Way back in 1987, shortly before I cut my shadow away—or maybe shortly after (I’m not sure, since I was pretty well continuously intoxicated at that point)—Jen petitioned for entrance to the Black Magic Posse. She’d been hanging around on the fringes, watching and listening quietly as Carra, Franz and I first planned, then dissected, our weekly adventures in the various Mantic Sciences. I was all for it; the more the merrier, not to mention the drunker. Franz was violently opposed. And Carra didn’t care too much, one way or the other—her dominating attitude then, regarding almost any subject you could name, being remarkably similar to the way mine is, now.

Jen quickly showed a certain flair for the little stuff. She tranced out easily, far more so than Franz, who usually had to chant himself incoherent in order to gain access to his own unconscious. This made her an almost perfect scryer, able to map our possible future difficulties through careful study of either the palpable (the way a wax candle split and fell as it melted—Carromancy) or impalpable (the way that shadows scattered and reknit when exposed to a moving source of light—Sciomancy.)

But when it came to anything a bit more concrete, it would be time to call in the founding generation: Franz, with his painstaking research and gift for dead languages; Carra, with her post-electroshock halo of rampant energy, her untold years of channelling experience, her barely-controlled psychometric Gift; me, the devout amateur, with my gleeful willingness to do whatever it took. My big mouth and my total lack of fear, artificial though it might have been—at that point—

—and my bone-hilted knife.

“It’s bad, Jude. She needs an exorcism.”

“Try therapy,” I suggested, idly slipping my earrings back in. “It’s cheaper.”

There was a tiny, accusatory pause.

“I would’ve thought you’d feel just a little responsible,” he said, at last. “Considering she’s been this way ever since you and Carra let her help raise that demon of yours . . . ”

“Fleer? He’s a mosquito with horns. Barely a postal clerk, in Hell’s hierarchy.”

“ . . . without drawing a proper circle first.”

I bridled. “The circle was fine; my wards held. They always hold. Carra even threw her the wand, when she saw Jen’d stepped over the outer rim—Jen was just too shit-scared to use it. So whatever trauma she may have talked herself into getting is her business.”

“It’s pretty hard to use a wand when you’re rolling around on the floor, barking!”

“So? She stopped.”

Another pause. “Well, she’s started again,” Franz said, quietly.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and retrieved my watch from the night-stand, squinting at it. Not even three; most of my favorite hangouts would still be open, once I’d disposed of this conversation.

Which—knowing Franz—might well be easier said than done.

“Gee, Franz,” I said, lightly, “when you told me you never wanted to see me again, I kind of thought you meant all of me. Up to and including the able-to-exorcise-your-crazy-ex-girlfriend part.”

“Cut the shit, you Cantonese voodoo faggot,” he snapped.

“Kiss my crack, Mennonite Man,” I snapped back. “For ten years, you cross the street every time you see me coming—but now I’ve suddenly got something you want, that makes me your new best friend? We partied, Franz. We hung around. The drugs were good, but I’m not sure how that qualifies you to guilt me into mowing your lawn, let alone into doing an expensive and elaborate ritual on behalf of someone I barely even liked, just because she happens to get your nuts in an uproar.”

“But . . . you . . . ” His voice trailed away for a minute. Then, accusingly again: “You already said if I found out what was wrong with her, what it was going to take to make her better—you’d do it. I didn’t even know about any of this, until you called and told me!”

I snorted. “Oh, uh huh.”

“Why would I lie?”