“No.” He said this with some reluctance.
“Do you think I’m stringing you along, is that it? Just to squeeze more money out of you?”
He glanced down at the carpet again. “No.”
“Do you think I would say we were close to a breakthrough if we really weren’t?”
“No.”
A moment of uncomfortable silence followed. I gently grabbed Willeford’s hand and said, “Sean’s going to be okay. If I weren’t sure of that, I wouldn’t have spent so much time helping him. If I thought he was a lost cause I would have refused his case two years ago. But he’s not a lost cause, and if you just give me a few more sessions with him I’m certain I can prove that to you.”
Willeford had softened, but he was far from won over. “I’d like to sit in on today’s session.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“It’s unethical. Sean needs his privacy. How can he relax and be open if you’re there breathing down his neck?”
Willeford’s lips had contracted into a tight, bloodless line. “I’ll sit right here in the lobby then.” He plopped down into a brown vinyl chair.
I tried not to reveal my frustration. I turned to my secretary and said, “Bobby, please make sure that Mr. Willeford is comfortable, won’t you?”
Bobby just grinned and saluted me with his index finger. “Yes, Dr. Keil, ma’am!” He was so sickeningly cheerful. Seriously, Dr. Peaslee, I’ve been thinking about raising his salary if only he would promise to frown once in a while.
I turned on one high heel and re-entered my office. I locked and bolted the door behind me; five bolts made of pure gold were attached to the oaken door, per your grandfather’s meticulous notes. I lit four black candles, one for each of the cardinal directions, along with incense and myrrh. I closed the shutters until the only source of light in the room was that of the consecrated candles. I pulled back the Persian rug in the middle of the room, revealing the pentagram underneath; I sprinkled sea salt inside the pentagram, black salt outside.
Your grandfather’s conclusions were correct, Dr. Peaslee. Certain ancient secret societies and primitive followers of witchcraft understood the essential principles of what we now know as hyperdimensional physics without comprehending the underlying causes. Almost all the tools and practices associated with witchcraft have a utilitarian purpose in the framework of advanced physics. It’s ironic that mystics and scientists have been at each other’s throats for so many centuries when, in fact, they’ve been pursuing the same truths all along.
Sean sat watching my “witchcraft” from the couch, his eyes as blank and lifeless as usual. He’d suffered so much in his brief eighteen years. Quite frankly, I was often surprised he was even alive, though I would never think of saying such a thing aloud. I tried to be as optimistic as possible when around him. A few months earlier he’d almost committed suicide just to prevent the thing from taking him over once and for all. Any negativity at all might push him over the brink again.
I asked Sean to remove his shirt. I used a smudge stick to paint a pentagram on his chest. I was surprised at how broad that chest had become during the past two years. He wasn’t a bad-looking kid. If not for the “accident” he might have been a track star or an Olympic runner. Sometimes, when I managed to push the thing out long enough to give the boy at least a few moments of respite, Sean’s eyes would brighten and I would catch a brief glimpse of the driven, intelligent young man who had so often been evicted from his own body.
I asked Sean to kneel on the floor within the exact center of the pentagram. He did so. Then I proceeded to light the black candles I had placed at each of the pentagram’s five points. Two years earlier I would have called myself a fool for engaging in such “mystical nonsense.” That was before Sean. Before I had discovered your grandfather’s dream-work research. Before I had seen what Sean could do. Or rather, what the thing inside him could do.
I chanted in Latin, an unbinding spell I had learned from a woman who called herself a witch (in another age, she might have been considered a physician on the same level as Paracelsus) who lived in a nearby mansion up in Sherman Oaks, of all places. This woman was quite wealthy and had spent years performing the everyday run-of-the-mill “mind control” spells for all the Hollywood types desperate for that one career-making role; she even had her own YouTube channel. Odd how the ancient wisdom can adapt itself to its surroundings, no matter how gauche or blasé.
The woman had been recommended to me by a former client whose fear of heights had been wiped away during a $75.00 fifteen-minute phone consultation. An obvious placebo effect, I had believed at the time. Yet, out of desperation, I had called her number anyway. I had never dealt with anything remotely resembling “magic” before, and yet somewhere in the back of my mind I believed the story Sean had told me: that it felt like something alien was trying to take over his consciousness. Something from outside. Something from the Great Gulf existing between the realms of dreaming and dreamless sleep.
“I built the machine on my own,” Sean had told me two years earlier. “I read about it in a William S. Burroughs book. I guess he got the idea from this artist named Brion Gysin. It’s called a Dreammachine. Basically, it’s just a light bulb connected to a turntable. The light bulb has to be covered with a cylinder with a bunch of holes poked in it. Then you switch the turntable on and let it spin. It creates a kind of strobe effect and puts you into a hypnotic trance. I just wanted to have some lucid dreams— bang chicks in my sleep, fly around like Superman and shit. I didn’t know it would leave my body open for…for this thing to crawl inside. I–I don’t know how much longer I can keep pushing it away and pushing it away!”
“And what do you think this ‘thing’ is, Sean?” This was still the “skeptical me” speaking.
“I have no idea. God, I don’t even sleep anymore. I feel like I’m awake twenty-four hours a day even though I know I’m not. Sometimes it wears me down. Finally, it just pulls me out. And I’m over there, in this huge room with no ceiling except stars. With that cone-shaped thing talking at me, through me, its tentacles waving and somehow touching me. Inside my mind. Inside my soul. I get so cold inside…just…just thinking about its touch…”
Oh, yes, I was very skeptical. That is, until the creature spoke to me one day.
It spoke to me though Sean’s mouth, told me things about myself and the universe and the dream-work of your grandfather that poor Sean could never know. It told me how the earth was formed, the number of stars in the Milky Way, what really killed the dinosaurs, how Rome fell, the name of the ancient lost planet to which Mars had been a mere satellite, the origins of the human species in the grottoes deep beneath the Antarctic where the shoggoths once slithered in obeisance to the Old Ones before the great rebellion, the time before the shoggoths slaughtered their masters, then turned around and created slaves of their own — hairless apes meant to be nothing more than mindless drones…
And it told me about my seventh birthday, the one I spent alone in the dark beneath the stairs while I listened to the soft, pulpy sounds of my mother’s face being beaten into a wall. I never saw the attacker. He was never charged or even arrested. In my infantile mind he was something beyond the physical, a being I could never truly visualize, a being I kept stored away in a tiny room in the back of my head. It took all of my willpower to keep that door closed. Sometimes I wondered if I’d become a psychiatrist merely to deal with the overwhelming pain locked inside that tiny room.