April is the _____est Month April is the _____est Month
my head in class. None of that happens after eighth grade.We just passed through each other’s
lives, like most people who go to high school together, and when we happened to meet up
again later on and I saved him from a succubus who was planning on devouring his soul after
the wedding, he gave me a good deal on subletting his basement. I find small amounts of blood. Really, none.That catches me up short before I get my bearings.
What I really find is a tax attorney’s office quite unlike any tax attorneys’ office I’ve ever seen
(to be fair, I haven’t seen many). In the first place, there’s a vague scent of lilacs in the air, such
as doesn’t come from the oil and chemical fakery of most candles. In the second place, all the
desks are on their sides, arranged in a circle. In the third place, there’s a woman lying in the
center, limbs splayed out, sensible business clothes rumpled, one shoe on and one shoe off.
Her eyes are blank and staring at the ceiling. And when I say blank, I mean all-white.
Long story. His name is Dave.
Anyway, it’s advantageous for a number of reasons. One, people don’t like to think about taxes
or lawyers if they can avoid it, so there isn’t a lot of window-shoppers to disturb me digging
through arcane books and sharpening axe-blades and getting smashed on witches brew and
vampire blood-liqueur. Second, I get a really good deal on having my taxes done. The IRS
thinks I’m a private investigator.Which is more or less true, but I see way less adultery.
But the other side of this deal is he has a button in his office when he sees madness beyond his
ken, he has a button he hits, like a silent alarm, to send a warning to me, who would otherwise
be drunk or hung-over in his basement, that the status of feces has passed from the nouminal
to the phenomenal.When he hits said button, a red light goes off, above my desk. It’s kind of
impossible to ignore.
“Huh,” I say.
Dave, my landlord/acquaintance, looks at me like he might have looked at me in high school
if either of us had actually paid attention to the other. A kind of “what the fuck kind of
statement is that?” vibe.
“Do you… know what this is?” he says, slightly annoyed.
I am scanning the horizon past the windows. I see nothing, which worries me.
Let me pause and explain myself.
All thoughts of breakfast vanish as I consider how best to arm myself. Likely the full panoply
is called for - enemies physical and metaphysical. I leap to the call, ignoring the level of pain
that velocity required (or finding it surprisingly easy to ignore, which amounts to the same
thing), and focus my energies on grabbing this and preparing that. I feel queerly numb inside,
which is usually a sign that I’m proper prepared on an existential level. Death is but a doorway,
and all that cal.
But before I charge full into the madness, I do check myself. I have a responsibility to Dave,
and whoever else is up there staring the irruption of truly demonic madness in the
manifestation of the face, to charge into it like a hero, not like an also-dead. So I take a
moment, on the greypaint stairs, to really be sure that I have the gear and the mind and the kill
ready. Because I hunt supernatural hunters for a living.That’s who I am.
I cup my ears to cast awareness above me into … silence. Not necessarily bad, but not
necessarily good, either. It required consummate care in your entrance.
Or I could just throw open the door and rush right in.
You remember above, the whole deletion of words? Removal of things, that you notice the
lack? Let’s consider Miss Havisham here. Right, you get the reference. One shoe on, one shoe
off.The missing thing is a calling card of a particular cult. Cults, generally speaking, are out of
my wheelhouse, in that I’m usually pretty pleased when one of my investigations leads to one
of them. Most of the time, they’re your Manson Family Standard: a collection of losers and
ennuites strung together by the home-brew mysticism of a charismatic sigma-type. When
someone comes to my office looking for a missing loved one, and I find them in a cult, I just
alert my client/the authorities and let the deprogramming begin.
My wheelhouse is when I get to hunt and kill bad guys, you see. I don’t hunt and kill humans.
That’s a rule that spares me existential agita and jury summons. So normal cults are not my
wheelhouse.
But every now and again, you get Weird Ones.The ones that are built on some bizarre idea,
and not a single individual’s hypnotic personality. The ideological ones are always worse,
because they carry on after the founder.They’re not as virulent as the Standard, but they’re a
lot harder to crush.