The glass of the windshield reassembled, each piece flying silently, gracefully, back to meet its brothers, glinting in the sunlight. Behind them, the sky rolled back to its proper place above Musa.
The Jeep swung down out of the sky, kissed the cab of the truck, and moved forward onto the road. The trailer of the rig drew back and the cab settled down. Musa’s foot left the brake and landed on the gas.
Musa had never known what a gift the gentle movement of time was, the succession of each moment in its turn, each moment a wide open field of freedom and of choice. He felt his heart beat backwards, his breath move backwards through his lungs. He wanted to shout, to cry, to escape the cab, but he could not: his limbs moved in their predetermined course as the Jeep and the truck crept backwards up the hill. Slowly, time dragged its Musa puppet back through the seconds, until he was in his cab parked at the side of the road handing the amulet to Gil. Then it released him.
Gil gasped and spat into the sand. He was shaking. So was Musa. The King of the Jinn looked up at him with a wild, feral grin.
Musa gripped the wheel, his heart exploding in terror.
“You surprised me, Musa,” Gil said. “I’m amazed. It’s been a very long time since any of my collection surprised me.” He looked out over the desert horizon. “I think I’ve had you on too loose a leash. Your talents make you too hard to control.”
Musa watched this King of the Djinn in silent terror. This creature who played with time as a child plays with dolls. Was this Satan himself?
Gil glanced back and saw Musa’s face, and for a moment the chill, benign mask of the King of the Djinn slipped, and Musa saw what was under it: desperate rage. Then Gil smiled coolly again.
“You’re a fool, Musa. I’m not Time’s master. I’m its victim.”
He looked down at the amulet and stroked it once, gently. Then he slipped it into his pocket.
He threw the briefcase into the Jeep but did not get in. He stood and watched Musa. “Well,” he said finally, “There’s nothing you can do to save Jamal. And you won’t see me again. So all your earthly attachments are gone now, Musa. You’re free to find God.” Gil pointed out into the empty desert. “He’s that way.”
Musa looked in the direction the Djinn had pointed.
God’s presence was everywhere, in every grain of sand. It was the same huge, infinite, bountiful light.
But how could he have misjudged it before, to think it gentle? It was alien, inhuman, immense beyond reason. If every human was burned alive, if every creature on earth was swallowed in the fire, the Divine Presence would not blink.
Musa began to walk.
He walked until his throat was dry and his breathing shallow. Then, after a while, he was crawling. It was only a spiritual exercise.
The sand was hot against his cheek.
The Sahara was a vast white page, and Musa’s body one tiny, bent black letter written on it. Seen from above, seen from very far away.
Summon ,Bind ,Banish by Nick Mamatas
Alick, in Egypt, with his wife, Rose. Nineteen aught-four. White-kneed tourists. Rose, several days into their trip, starts acting oddly, imperiously. She has always wanted to travel, but Alick’s Egypt is not the one she cares for. She prefers the Sphinx from the outside, tea under tents, tourist guides who haggle on her behalf for dates and carpeting. She wanted to take a trip on a barge down the Nile, but there weren’t any. At night, she spreads for Alick, or sometimes takes to her belly, and lets him slam and grind till dawn. Mother was wrong. There is no need to think of the Empire, or the men in novels. There’s Alick’s wheezing in her ear, the thick musk of an animal inside the man, and waves of pleasure that stretch a moment into an aeon. But she doesn’t sleep well because the Egypt morning is too hot.
A ritual Alick performs fails. The ambience of Great Pyramid cannot help but inspire, but the shuffling travelers and their boorish gawking profanes the sacred. The sylphs he promised to show his wife-“This time, it will work, Rose. I can feel it,” Alick had said, his voice gravel-do not appear. But Rose enters a trance and stays there, smiling slightly and not sweating even under the brassy noon sky for the rest of the trip.
“They’re waiting for you!” she says. And under her direction Alick sits in the cramped room of his pension and experiences the presence of Aiwaz, the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat, Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angel, and the transmitter of Liber AL vel Legis, sub figura CCXX, The Book of the Law, as delivered by XCIII=418 to DCLXVI.
Alick doesn’t turn around. He never turns around over the course of those three days of hysterical dictation. But he feels Aiwaz, and has an idea of how the spirit manifests. A young man, slightly older than Alick, but dark, strong, and active. As ancient in aspect and confident in tone as Alick wishes he was. The voice, he’s sure, is coming from the corner of the room, over his left shoulder. He writes for an hour a day, for three days.
See, people, here’s the thing about Crowley. He was racist and sexist and sure hated the Jews. Real controversial stuff, sure, but you know what, he was actually in the dead center of polite opinion when it came to the Negroes and the swarthies and money-grubbing kikes and all those other lovely stereotypes. Crowley and the Queen could have had tea and, with pinkies raised, tittered over some joke about big black Zulu penises. Except. Except Crowley loved the penis. His sphincter squeaked like an old shoe as he performed the most sacred of his magickal rituals. That’s where it all comes from, really. The Book of the Law, Aiwaz, the whole deal with the HGA, it’s buggery. That dark voice over the left shoulder is a spirit, all right, but it’s the spirit of Herbert Charles Pollitt, who’d growl and bare his teeth and sink them into the back of Crowley ’s neck after bending the wizard over and penetrating him.
You ever get that feeling? The feeling of a presence, generally at night, alone, in a home that’s quiet except for the lurch and hum of an old fridge, or the clock radio mistuned to be half on your favorite radio station and half in the null region of frizzy static. It’s not all in your head, by definition, as you willed your anxieties and neuroses three feet back and to the left. And that’s a good thing. Because the last thing you want is for it to be in your skull with you. The last thing you want is for me to be in your skull with you. Crowley pushed it out, out into the world.
Alick in Berlin, fuming at being passed over for a position in British Intelligence. He may be a beast, a fornicator, a bugger, and ol’ 666 himself, but he had been a Cambridge man, bloody hell, and that used to mean something. He didn’t betray Great Britain, it was Great Britain that betrayed him. Rose did as well, the fat old cow of a whore. So he works for the Hun, in Germany, writing anti-British propaganda: “For some reason or other the Germans have decided to make the damage as widespread as possible, instead of concentrating on one quarter. A great deal of damage was done in Croydon where my aunt lives. Unfortunately her house was not hit. Count Zeppelin is respectfully requested to try again. The exact address is Eton Lodge, Outram Road.” But the old home still tugs at him, so he declares himself Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona, and all other Britons within the sanctuary of the Gnosis.
The winter is damp and the water stays in his lungs. The doctor gives him heroin and Alick dreams in his small bed that his teeth are falling out. Awake again, he files a few into points, so dosed on his medication that he sees not himself in the mirror, but another man both in and before the mirror. The real Alick, the young boy whose mother called him the Beast for masturbating, stands in the well of the doorway, watching and feeling only the slightest cracking pain, in sympathy with the actions of the Alick he’s watching. Those fangs will find a wrist one day.
I reached enlightenment in the way most people do these days; in my mother’s basement, which I converted into a mockery of an apartment thanks to a dorm fridge, a hot plate I never used, and a half-bath my father put in for me after I promised to go back to school and at least get my Associates degree. The only good thing about community college is that it gave me access to the library at the state college, and like any library of size, it had a fairly decent collection of occult materials. I’m from a pretty conservative area too, so the books had been left on the shelf, unmolested in their crumbling hardcovers, for years. Old-looking occult books are the most frequently stolen from libraries, after classic art books that could pass for porn, but out here in Bucks County even the metalheads couldn’t care less, so I was the one who got to swipe them.