“Like many shamans, I am epileptic. The doctors try to keep me medicated, but the only drugs they know are poisons that taint the body and the mind. I preferred to risk the fits—in those days, I mean. Now that I have no one to look after me, I submit to the poisoning. On that day, the mandalas used my weakness to render me helpless. I don’t remember anything past the initial rapture of prodrome that came as I watched the whirling shape swallow my wife. I had never felt so powerless.
“Evangeline saw the seizure begin. She rushed to call an ambulance, and the next thing I knew, I was laid out on a couch with paramedics working over me. I was disoriented, but my first worry was that Evangeline had broken the magic circle without properly banishing the things we called. They had been… released.
“Several days later, she began to speak.
“There’s been a resurgence, in recent years, of so-called channeled, trance mediums, Ramtha and that lot. When I was young, there was a similar interest in automatic writing, Ouija boards—whole novels dictated by spirits, with humans as mere secretaries. Ruth Montgomery, Edgar Cayce, Seth. Some of these people are outright frauds, as you must know from your investigations. Others are earnest enough, but not in genuine contact with any force outside themselves; they speak from regions of their mind that are normally suppressed and allow submerged aspects of their personalities to surface for a time in trance. Only a very few, less than one-tenth of one percent of those who make claims or show evidence of spirit speech, are true gateways for the ones beyond.
“Evangeline was completely in possession of herself; there was no buried fear or neurosis, no guilt or unguarded pockets in her soul. Whatever means the mandalas used were forcible, unsubtle ones. Usually astral forces make their presence known to humans subtly, inducing thoughts, images, or voices. The nervous system is a network with many junctures, many synaptic points at which they may interfere and exert control. But for an astral organism actually to overtake a strong physical body is—or was—almost beyond my comprehension. Astrally, electrochemically, they began to work her like a puppet. My Evangeline, whom of all people I would have thought beyond their power. But then, I never understood what they were until too late; I never had a chance to underestimate them. That’s why I take responsibility for her death. I exposed her to something she would never have encountered on her own, a risk she should never have taken.
“We were sitting here in the evening, just like you and me, waiting for the news to come on TV. All of a sudden, very quietly, she began to speak. I turned off the television to listen, but I needn’t have, for her voice grew louder until it was no longer her voice at all, nothing recognizable. It told me things about myself that she couldn’t possibly have known, secrets I had never revealed in our years of marriage; things more personal than dreams. It spoke of mysteries I had discovered for myself while traveling astrally in the far, ancient reaches of the universe, out near the hot walls of creation, things I had never told anyone, and which are described nowhere on Earth.
“At first, not knowing who spoke, I was amazed. But then she began to frighten me. I switched the TV to a blank channel and turned off the other lights; this gives the perfect radiance for viewing astral forms. After a few moments I perceived something floating above her like a dark crown, its myriad arms forming a cage around her face, some of its tentacles piercing her skull, her throat.
“You know the Voudoun term ‘maître à tête‘—‘master of the head.’ Each of us has a master, a loa or ancestral god who guides and protects him; they are like guardian angels, yet more specific than that. Their character reflects the character of the person they guard.
“It is thus with the mandalas. Each of the thirty-seven suits a particular temperament. The one that held Evangeline was foul beyond description. It was in every way her antithesis. Sickly yet powerful, with grasping palps, spotted with livid stains that glowed in astral colors that have no physical parallel, thank God. And its words were equally alien. Even when she used human speech, it was accented in such a way that to hear it caused me profound fear and nausea.
“Get out of her,” I told it. I used the fiercest banishings I knew, dispatched it to the great black hole at the galactic core. I invoked the Shemhamphorasch. But it did not recognize power in any of the forms of human religions; it paid my banishings no more mind than a bacterium. When finally it did leave her, it left for its own reasons; and as soon as it departed, another arrived. The first had been her particular maître à tête; this second was one of its kin. They were hungry, you see. They all wished to take a turn at my wife.
“All thirty-seven came through in that first night. One after another, they paraded through her body. I threw all my spells at them, without effect. Sometimes, by coincidence, one seemed to leave when I wished it. But there was always another after it. And another.
“They nearly drove me to madness in one night. I had never felt so helpless, not in a lifetime of physical confinement. Even my astral abilities were worthless in such a situation, since I feared leaving my body. Feared to examine my own aura in that revealing light. Feared that one of them was waiting for me out there, my own evil maître à tête, waiting like a huge sea anemone to tangle me in its tendrils the moment I drifted into the astral. There was danger enough in the physical world.
“My only peace came from knowing that Evangeline’s awareness was extinguished while they controlled her. Apparently they could not tolerate any spark of humanity in their puppet while they were present. I didn’t know where her awareness had gone, but I feared it was not pleasant; the vague memories she eventually carried back were nightmarish. She thought they were only bad dreams she’d had in the course of a night’s sleep.
“Shortly after dawn, they left. They stayed on into the light as if to show me that the sun could not dispel them, then they let Evangeline collapse. Both of us slept most of that day right through and woke near evening, disoriented, but glad that it was over.
“And then, just after sunset, they returned. As they did the night after that, and the night after that. They ransomed her. Threatened me with the possibility of threat to her. Forced her to hold a knife at her own throat, while I sat here helpless to resist their instructions, which were simple enough, I suppose.
“I wrote, you see. They dictated through Evangeline, and I wrote down every word. It’s all there, in those ledgers beside you.
“They wished to make themselves known. They wanted to begin a new age of relations with humanity. They were tired of anonymity and wished to leave their signature on the things they touched. Imagine maggots leaving graffiti in a carcass. Their ruthless greed and hunger—if one can even attempt to anthropomorphize them—were beyond comprehension. They wished to canonize themselves and force us to worship in a temple of decay. I was to be only the first of their unwilling apostles.
“I took dictation all night long. In the day, I tried to ask Evangeline about our sessions, but I couldn’t make her understand what was happening. There was a wall in her now, one they had erected, one they hid behind when they weren’t using her.
“That period of my life seemed endless, and although those were my last days with my wife, I cannot treasure them in memory. I was exhausted nearly to the point of death, but Evangeline herself was in perfect health. In fact, she had never seemed stronger or more cheerful. The mandalas induced in her a painful mockery of bliss, tormenting me with a semblance of health and happiness.