He came almost immediately. It left him weak, weaker than he’d thought possible. He crawled away, pulling his pants back up, sick and disgusted and exhausted.
The dead boy began to twitch.
Fortunato got to the wall, pulled himself onto his feet. He was dizzy and his head throbbed with pain. He saw something on the floor, something that had fallen out of the dead boy’s pants. It was a coin, an eighteenth-century penny, so fresh that it looked reddish in the harsh light of the loft. He put the penny in his pocket in case it meant something later.
“Look at me,” he said to the dead boy.
The dead boy’s hands clawed at the floor, gouging out bloody splinters. Slowly he pulled himself onto his hands and knees, and then lurched clumsily onto his feet. He turned and looked at Fortunato with empty eyes.
The eyes were horrible. They said that death was nothingness, that even a few seconds of it had been too much. “Talk to me,” Fortunato said. Not anger anymore, but the memory of anger, kept him going. “Goddamn your white ass, talk to me. Tell me what this means. Tell me why.”
The dead boy stared at Fortunato. For an instant something flickered there, and the dead boy said, “TIAMAT ” The word was whispered, but perfectly clear. Then the dead boy smiled. With both hands he reached up to his own throat and ripped it bloodily out through the skin of his neck and then, while Fortunato watched, tore it in half.
Lenore was asleep. Fortunato threw his clothes into the garbage and stood in the shower for thirty minutes, until the hot water ran out. Then he sat by candlelight in Lenore’s living room and read.
He found the name TIAMAT in a text on the Sumerian elements of Crowley’s magick. The serpent, Leviathan, KUTULU. Monstrous, evil.
He knew beyond question that he had found only a single tentacle of something that defied his comprehension. Eventually he slept.
He woke up to the sound of Lenore closing the latches on her suitcase.
“Don’t you see?” she tried to explain. “I’m just like a-a wall outlet that you come home to plug into to recharge. How can I live like that? You got what I always wanted, real power to do real magick. And you lucked into it, without even wanting it. And all the study and practice and work I did all my life doesn’t mean shit because I didn’t catch some fucking alien virus.”
“I love you,” Fortunato said. “Don’t go.”
She told him to keep the books, to keep the apartment too if he wanted. She told him she would write, but he didn’t need magick to know she was lying.
And then she was gone.
He slept for two days, and on the third Miranda found him and they made love until he was strong enough to tell her what happened.
“As long as he’s dead,” Miranda said. “The rest I don’t care about.”
When she left him that night for her client, he sat in the living room for over an hour, unable to move. Soon, he knew, he would have to start looking for the other being whose traces he’d seen in the dead boy’s loft. Even the thought of it paralyzed him with loathing.
Finally he reached for Crowley’s Magick and opened it to Chapter V “Sooner or later,” Crowley said, “the gentle, natural growth is succeeded by depression-the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work.”
But eventually would come a “new and superior condition, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death.” Fortunato closed the book. Crowley knew, but Crowley was dead. He felt like the last human on a barren rock of a planet.
But he wasn’t the last human. He was one of the first of something new, something that had the potential to be better than human.
That woman at the demonstration, C.C. She’d said you should take care of your own. What would it cost him to save hundreds of jokers from dying in the heat and rotting dampness of Vietnam? Not very much. Not very much at all.
He found the flyer in the pocket of his jacket. Slowly, with growing conviction, he dialed the numbers.