Oh, desire. The ashes and the fire
Burn in this night inside
And the light from you.
     --Shriekback

Here in the grave, where all times run together, I float coccooned and chrysalized in dirt: Half-rotten on the outside, oh-so-ripe on the in. I split my astral body down the middle, leave a wisp of myself behind to haunt this place and drift simultaneously back to 1982, the desert, the Compound; Last Days, getting Last-er all the time. See myself breathing flame and juggling the result, absently, while I stare coldly out over my followers' ecstatic faces--upturned like row on row of adult-sized kindergarteners, crosslegged and restless, wringing their hands in happy anticipation:
     *Tell us the old, old story, Papa Nix. The one you know we all like so much--oh, please do. PLEASE.*
     Well...
     (...if you insist.)
     And then it's coming, coming, come and gone and over and fucking done with, yet again: That same meaningless loop of words, spilling from my parched throat--a mantric one-man "conversation" joined in midstream, dragged up whole from somewhere near the dead earth's core, without hint of preamble or explication. That growling rasp of a voice I can barely call my own anymore, dreamlogged and swollen dark with useless power. Repeating, and repeating, and rePEATing...
     "And the fire said to me, it *said* to me--'Nix,' it said...'from now on, you will be known as the Puritan...'"
     Puritan, meaning one who requires purity, always, in thought and act and deed: Doesn't really matter of what, long as it IS pure. Purity of practice, of intent; pure white, pure dark, with no grey area between. Pure craft. Pure Art. Pure--
     (nothing)
     "'...and you will cleanse the world.'"
     Stomach duly ignored but still rumbling, half-bald head ablaze with empty ache, mild film over my eyes coming and going like an intermittent irritant, a snake's nictating membrane-flicker. I forget to eat now, more days than not--
     (--so where's all that bulk come from, then, Nix? The barrel chest, the meaty thighs...pot-belly bulging vulgarly under a dirty white t-shirt two sizes too small...)
     Magic, obviously.
     But anyway: I fast, and they all go along with it out of some idiot mixture of love, fear, worship. Like they go along with everything ELSE I do, without me even asking--or needing to.
     Issuing the invitation slyly, sidelong, like a dare: *Going out into the desert, children; L.A.'s no place for magic, 'sides from the kind you make with a movie camera. Gonna live on a farm, let the electricity run out. No food, no water, no TV--*
     Play with snakes. Open up a chicken, read its guts. Paint the walls with skeleton graffiti. Take a kid, tie her up, throw her downstairs where the mandrill waits...
     And the chorus, rising almost immediately, infinitely pathetic: *Oh, us too, Papa Nix. Let US come too.*
     (Oh, *please*.)
     Grinning and weeping and hugging themselves. Kissing my grimy, long-nailed hands, my bare and dusty feet.
     Just sheep, the lot of them of them--sheep, bound for the sacrificial altar. Fit for nothing but to kiss my black-handled knife in gratitude, before it slits their soft, grass-eating throats. All but--
     (Swann)
     ...hmm, yes.
     In the past, I close my eyes, fingertips ablaze. And think, to myself:
***
Flesh, Swann--that's all you are, you know; all you ever were. Flesh, and rot, and shit, just like everybody else. Even me.
     But oh...such very *pretty* shit.
     Butterfield's moping sinuous over there in the corner, watching me, same as always: Mop of Clairol-red hair, eyebrowless Kabuki frown, Noh-play mask pout. Flipping his beloved butterfly knife back and forth, back and forth. He'd take your eyes, if I let him; do it anyway, even if I didn't, except that he's so very afraid of me. Of what I'd say--or NOT
say--later on.
     Poor lonely, angry little boy, eaten up from the inside out by his own conflicted urges. In a few years more, after I'm...gone, he'll ripen gladly into full-fledged faggotry: Prance around in a corset and gold rubber pants, resurrecting corpses for playmates because he'll still be far too *shy* to let any normal human being give him what he wants. Or because their dead flesh reminds him of me, maybe.
     I feed off his misplaced misery, just like I let him feed off the leavings from my own power's constant hum and crackle: Low-level magic like a static charge building, ebbing and flowing like an etheric cradle, a forming vortex. Making sure that every path I walk is still and hushed, blank and open, paved soft with the peeled, drained husks of fear, lust, hatred, worship. The eye of the psychic storm.
     But I don't WANT him, no. Never have. Never will. Not even when he helps me dig myself up from the grave you'll put me in.
     Little shit'd probably be disappointed, if I ever implied that I did.
     Oh, and *you*, Swann: Phillip, my one and only apprentice. My heir unapparent. Don't think I don't know how YOU look at me, either--how you wrinkle that mushroom-pale nose of your over the way I've let myself go to seed. Shuffling around in this glorified bathrobe, showing my body-hair; not much of a Messiah, exactly, for a would-be high-class thinking man like yourself.
     But then...
     ...that's the trick, isn't it?
     (One of 'em, anyway.)
***
Slipping back further, now. I resurface at the Cathedral, unhallowed church turned squat, on that oh-so-significant night when Phillip Swann first showed up at my "cult"'s meetings--lurking in the back and watching close, checking for wires, strings or tells. Deep-set eyes under a mop of stringy black hair, waxy brow furrowed with concentration, alert for any kind of tip-off that'd allow him to steal a self-declared true Magician's...
     (fire)
     Sidling up afterward and murmuring, without preamble: "That's not, uh, much of an ACT..."
     "No."
     (It's *not*.)
     "Because--" Questioningly: "--it's real?"
     At which point I turn, forcing him to lock gazes with me--smile, grimly, and draw a tentative lip-twist in return. Rumbling--
     "Wellllll...that *would* be the difference."
     Because: You already KNOW what I am, apprentice mine, if you'll just let yourself admit it--a god in training, ready and willing to train you just the same, if you'll pay the price. I'm no *illusionist*. I don't put on a SHOW. Simply say what I'm going to do, and then--I *do* it.
     I've made do with Butterfield, thus far, but he'll never be more than an adept. You and me, though, Swann...we're Artists. We have a gift. And *gifts* are meant--
     --for sharing.
     People spend their lives searching for miracles, for miracle-workers. But the real trick--the trick BENEATH the trick--is that as long as you make your sacrifices, you can do anything, know everything. But--
     (and here's the catch, Phillip)
     --it changes nothing. Human life's still cheap and brief, and you're still human, no matter *what* you do. So even if you bring yourself back from the dead, you'll still just be a dead man walking around. Like me.
     ...not that I'm actually WALKING around, right now...
     (not *yet*, anyway)
     When the fire spoke to me, it said: One day, Nix, you'll meet a man who shimmers and burns, whose magic might someday become just as strong as yours already is. And *then*, my Puritan, your martyred flesh will rise up against you yet again. A heart-shaped hole will open wide inside  your chest, preparing the path for that little slut downstairs' bullet.
     Every Messiah has to pick his own betrayer. Can't martyr yourself, after all--
     (--well, strictly speaking, I guess you can.)
     But not if you want to keep anyone's respect.
     Dead spots, missed connections, vectors of possibility. How do things fit together? Because here's me, going down into the earth, gagged and screaming; here's me again, coming back out, birthed from decay into yet more decay by Butterfield's loving hands and arcane tools. But why? How? And here's a person-shaped hole, a blank spot where possibilities converge and deviate--the window of infinite opportunity. It's someone I haven't met yet, someone powerless and infinitely powerful: D'Amour, the P.I., human hinge on which this whole door turns. The key that can open a universe wide, or slam it in my rotting face forever.
     I can know it all, you see, if I only want to--now, and then, and what's to come, and after. All of it, at once. If I only...
     ...WANT to.
     And what *do* I want, anyway? Really?
     (Hmmm.)
***
Words in darkness, splitting me down the middle once more--sending me forward, backward, forward. Swann, craning his head onto my unimpressed shoulder as the nightly orgy gets underway, whispering: "S'all you ever do, is--watch?"
     I snort. "Look around, Swann. See anything YOU like?"
     And then: Those eyes on mine, dark blue to even--darker.
     "...mmmaybe."
     "You just want my magic." He smirks, shrugs, doesn't bother to deny it; well, I sure don't want your "wisdom", fat man.
     And I--like that.
     (A bit *too* much, all told, for my own comfort.)
     We all give things up, you see, to get what we're after; with me, it wasn't such a very hard choice. The rebellious flesssh has always been my mocker, my tempter, my potential undoing. Not so for pretty Swann, and he can tell, just looking at me--but it's not like *that*'s much of a victory. Not the kind of thing you need MAGIC for, exactly.
     "So--what do *you* want, Nix?"
     "Not that."
     Craning further, hair brushing my chin--the scent of him rising up, like fresh sweat, old spice. His breath on my Adam's apple. The hot, stabbing-sweet lick of his words, as he murmurs again--
     "Oh--no?"
***
...no.
***
Not then, at least. Not--in the flesssh, itself. And you never could forgive me for that, could you? For letting you prostrate yourself, and then--not--
     --taking you up on it.
     *Such* an insult, I'm sure.
     So, no: Not then, not ever. But...
     ...now?
***
Forward, backward, forward in time. Forward to the present, to your palatial little...palace in the Hollywood hills--the one my magic paid for, after you let your little slut wife-to-be shoot me down like a dog: Beat me, bound me, buried me and ran away with the print of my Art still on you, my visionary hungers bone-deep in you forevermore, like some incurable contagion. Remember, Phillip?
     *I* remember.
     Drifting into the bedroom where you lie beside her, half-splayed and wholly snared in your own coccoon of sweaty satin sheets. Outside, your version of Butterfield drowses at his post, a cup of tea in his lap; Dorothea snuggles away from you, long silken curve of back and sleek, dark hair, desperate to escape you even in sleep. Doesn't know what she's missing, obviously.
     But I do. Or, at least--
     --I'm willing to find out.
     Slowly, I take shape above you like a storm-cloud, a lowering bank of shadow. Run my no-hands down along your lanky limbs and watch you shiver, pale nipples furling, peaking. I send feathery tendrils up through your nostrils, under your bruisy eyelids to hook, delicately, 'round the pleasure-centres of your half-conscious brain--then tweak your motor-reflexes, puppet your own hands down towards the most interesting areas of your body and watch them...*stroke*, tracing my ghostly touches with your own.
     Plum-dark cock jutting up fierce, just under that soft little belly you've developed; bit too much of the good life at work there, huh, Swann? And the almost pornographic contrast between that blood-rich shaft and pale, lax pelvis it springs from, that bed of
black curls dusting your inner thighs--that weeping nerve-knot rucking your foreskin back almost to ripping, leaving a smear of hot juice just to the left of your navel--
     You spread your legs, hike up to flick your own perineum, toy with your shifting velvet bag. Weigh your treasure and worry at your own lush lips, cock slapping helpless up once, twice, again and again and yet *again*....
     ..'till you arch and shriek silently, expell a plume of poisoned seed onto your abdomen, shoulder, chest--and snap awake, jerking, unclean. Horrified by what you've just done, with your *wife* still oblivious half the satin-slicked mattress over.
     Aaaah, yessss, my apprentice.
     No muss, no fuss. And no one to blame, in the end, but...
     (...yourself.)
***
Bodiless, I filter away through the various cracks and pores left open in your house's dignified walls. Watch, eyeless but amused, as you recoil and stumble upward, drawing your useless wards--as you flee with a sheet wrapped 'round your shame, taking refuge in that too-huge bathroom with its marble-lined jacuzzi and those walls full of mirrors, everywhere you turn. And when you find there's nowhere you can hide to escape  yourself...what you were, what you are, what you've become...
     ...I watch as you have yourself a good ol' cry, like we all need to, now and again. Even if our tear-ducts happen to be currently clogged with dust.
     I feel my silver cord tug, like a leash. Feel myself drawn back below the earth, where the worms welcome my return. But leave you with a last message, nonetheless--a voiceless voice, deep within your shell-shocked subconscious. Rumbling, the way you remember me best--
     Hey, Phillip: Long time no see. You want to know what the fire told me, really? It told me...it *told* me...
     It told me that you would come, and you would kill me. And what it TOLD me was--
     --that I should *let* you.
     Because that's how it is, for true magicians--how it always is, how it *has* to be. The height, then the fall. You have to go all the way down into the dark, right to the bottom, if you want to really be able to see. And if you want to live forever, well...
     ...you'll still have to die first.
     Lux, for light. And Nox, for night. And Nix, for...nothing.
     I never promised you anything, any of you. You come to me for answers, though, and I'll be only too happy to tell you what I know best: There ARE none. Peel it back in a certain way, and you can see it all at once--what's happened, what's happening, what will happen, and how, and why. But none of it matters, none of it *helps*. And it all ends the same way, every single time.
     *That*'s my "wisdom", children. The Light...
     ...that shows you the Night.
     And behind THAT--
     --nothing.
     Forever and ever, amen.
     But: This was just a warning, Phillip. A promise. A reminder that I'm coming, and a taste--brief, though enjoyable--
     (for ME, anyway)
     --of things to come.
     And when we're alone in the dark together, you and I, after I've unmade the world--then we'll do it again. Because if we're both just rot and shit--then the flessssh won't seem so bad, now, will it?
     Down in the dark--that's when I'll finally kiss you again, pretty Phillip Swann. For real. And that...is when...
     ...you'll *like* it.

THE END