Chapter Eight
Were cops only hot in movies? I was certain I’d never met a policeman who hadn’t looked like an NPC. Perhaps it was more comforting this way. Bland, unremarkable faces. Forgettable, business-casual slacks and shirts. One even had a mustache so cliché that it felt like it had to be a joke. They were kinder qualities than being forced to speak with a runway model when being asked to give a statement.
Two detectives interviewed me on my couch while investigators bustled about my unit as if it were an active crime scene. I was told it was standard, but I knew it wasn’t. Perhaps if I hadn’t drowned myself in crime shows during my depressive episodes, I would have believed their easy lies. Still, I gave them free rein of my apartment without a warrant.
What could I possibly tell them? What could they possibly find?
Oh, yes, the man you’re looking for? The one who murdered our receptionist? It’s a man named Richard. He tried to kill me. How do I know him? Please put it on the records that he was a former client from when I was an escort in a country where sex work remains criminalized. Oh, yes, my blood pooled everywhere near the demolished table. There was a bloodied knife, injuries, a corpse… Who took his body? Well, a black pulse of shadow did. How did I beat him? I didn’t. I’m meant to believe he choked on his own tonguethanks to a sparkly stranger who came from nowhere. How am I not injured? I was. Never fear, it’s gone. Something about sigils. Don’t worry about it.
Aside from my shattered coffee table—a clumsy accident—my apartment was spotless. They’d frowned at the crystalline shards, but after I’d allowed them a sweep of the unit, they were satisfied that the only victim in Apartment 12 had been my furniture. I promised to clean it up but had little to offer them by way of statement.
Someone had put the security cameras on a harmless loop, repeating hours of mundane nothingness everywhere save for the parking garage. If it hadn’t been for the footage of me pulling into the lot, I might have lacked an alibi for the window when the receptionist had gone missing. Given the horror on my face and genuine sorrow that I would never again see the wide-eyed girl who loved Fire and Swords, the police left me alone to process. They told me that security detail would be put on the building while they continued to investigate the case and left a card on my island, should I think of any other details.
The detectives did not contact me again.
But as the police left, I knew one thing for certain.
I had not imagined this. No fabrication of my daydreams or nightmares would have brought the boys in blue to my doorstep. No detective would have taken my statement if I had just been crazy. They were investigating a murder. My coffee table was shattered. I may not have a wound on my hand or a dead man in my living room, but this was real.
And if this was real…
I had to speak to Caliban. Urgency flooded me every bit as intensely as the fight-or-flight that had kept me clawing to life the night prior. A murder had happened in my building. A golden stranger had come from nowhere to make the man choke on his tongue. My bruised larynx was fine. My body was whole. But my head was full of memories that cast a new light entirely, and only one person had the answers I needed.
I did little more than gnaw on baby carrots, shuffle listlessly from bed to the living room, and stare at the empty space above my door for three days, day and night. I bought a tacky black light from a gift shop to examine the frame as if I were a forensic scientist looking for fingerprints. With a flair for the dramatic, I waited until midnight, held a candle to the outline, and searched for any sign of a sigil. An intrusive thought tempted me to cut open my veins and smear the evidence of my life over the threshold just to try something.
He would return. He had to. And when he came back this time, I would know he was real. I’d have so much to ask. So much to say. So much to apologize for.
Days bled into weeks.
Tiny green buds revealed themselves on the trees as the coldest season abandoned the city.
The clouds broke apart; blue and warmth leeched into the city as spring turned into the first hints of summer.
I wrote no new pages. I rarely answered emails. I’d ghosted Nia and Kirby, save for double tapping the videos they sent, giving the message a little heart so they knew I’d seen it. To avoid being alone with my thoughts, I let my laptop roll from episode to episode until I’d finished all eight seasons of a medical drama. When I wasn’t mindlessly watching television, I was googling “imaginary friends,” from the zanna of Romanian folklore and the hidden people of Icelandic lore to the tulpa created through one’s concentrated belief. My search engine was inundated with fairy tales and folklore.
With each day that passed, my anxiety grew thicker until it felt as real as any living thing. It was a flowering vine as physical and tangible as the summer gardens that lined the riverbanks. The supernatural vine’s tendrils spread out, filling my apartment, releasing its poisonous mist from its blossoms into every nook and crevice of my home. I inhaled the wounds, the confusion, the loss the moment I awoke and suckled on it like I was nursing a wound until I fell asleep. I couldn’t keep living like this. Insanity or not, I had to do something. If I couldn’t get any work done, then I could at least put my skills to work and do some research.
I’d gone weeks without seeing Caliban before. I could do it again, even though my skin itched, my legs bounced, and my toes tapped against every surface. I’d figure out how to bring him back before too much time passed. I’d fix this. Soon it would be a horrible memory.
The conviction of my wishful thinking did not sway reality.
After a month, I was so irritable I couldn’t write a single word. Spring waxed into summer. The notifications on my inbox surpassed ninety-nine, then added a little plus sign to let me know that they would no longer be informing me of my negligence.
On the second month, I buried myself in library books, first from the public library, then from the university’s archives. I shouldn’t have had access, but I was connected. I’d brushed in, unannounced, to visit a very flustered dean of admissions, who’d ushered me to the librarian who oversaw the delicate texts covered in plastic and kept in air-tight rooms with low lighting so as not to damage ancient acquisitions. The librarian was excited for a chance to dissect lore for a bestselling author on fictional mythology. She chatted my ear off while I paged through text after text, then offered me her private number so I could come back day in and day out.
Figuring out where to begin was a true stab in the dark.
I began my needle-in-the-haystack research with shadow people, which yielded no results. The term was a descriptor for another phenomenon altogether and could be psychological, malevolent, friendly, or benign. I scrunched my face against what I knew of mythology and launched into North American lore, opting for geographical anchors. Combing through online ledgers and digitized texts in my evenings yielded little results, particularly as I didn’t know what I was looking for.
The librarian confessed that she’d read my novels and was very hopeful that my localized research on North America meant that the subsequent installment might be on indigenous lore. I’d given a canned nonanswer, ever the politician. I hadn’t decided what the fourth book would entail. I’d been given a sizable advance on the promise that there would be several more in the series. But as it stood, I could barely get through book three.
Her guesses on my reason for invading the archives ceased after I’d shown up a fourth, then a fifth, then a sixth day.
I’d frowned up at her after she’d spent an hour quietly overseeing my studies of her sacred texts. They’d made me wear gloves before delicately handling the loose parchments, but I continued to find nothing of interest. I tried to make the most of having someone breathe down my neck. Looking up over the aged, fragile piece of paper in the basement archives, I asked, “If I say sigil, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?”
The librarian mirrored my curious expression. She sank into her chair, eyes moving up and to the side as she scanned her memories. “You’re looking for resources on sigils? Have you spoken to any practitioners?”
I gave her a quizzical look.
“Sigils could be about anything. Wards, deities, angels, demons.”
I shuddered at a few of the words in her list. My religious upbringing triggered an unintentional flinch at the thought of fire-and-brimstone sermons on angels and demons. I wondered if she could count the creases in my forehead as my confusion intensified.
Unbothered, she said, “You should be looking within the witch community. They might have more resources than our library.”
“Witches?” I repeated, struggling not to make a smartass comment about Halloween. At least she hadn’t suggested I speak to a priest.
The librarian nodded. She pulled out her phone and sent me the contact information of her friend who performed guided psychic meditations, as well as the usernames of three of her favorite witches on social media. She implied that, given my reputation in the mythological community, I might be able to swing for the fences and speak with someone high in the echelon.
I looked at her skeptically. Images of pointed hats and cauldrons and crows peeled my mouth into an apologetic half-smile. “I generally prefer to keep my research…academic.”
Disappointment flickered through her. She weighed me before saying, “You can’t study something while looking down your nose at it.”
She had a point, and I was desperate. That said, I’d done so much to distance myself from religion and belief that the idea of dipping my toes into spirituality made me cringe. Still, if imaginary friends were real, maybe witches were, too. So, off I set.
The librarian’s initial contact proved useless, which did little to earn my confidence in the witch-identifying community. The woman gave me a tarot reading over a video chat, assessed my aura, and informed me that I was destined for greatness. I offered a deadpan thanks and sent payment via the site she’d listed on the bottom of the screen.
A second self-proclaimed practitioner consulted the Prime Creator, rang a few bells for a sound cleansing, then cleared my chakras before asking for fifty dollars. I wasn’t religious, per se, but I also wasn’t entirely convinced that a white woman from Nebraska was qualified to be the authority on chakras.
They were making it hard to keep an open mind.
I stared at my phone for a long while before calling the third contact on my list. I looked at my reflection in the dark, blank screen, sighing before I set off on what would surely be another fifty bucks wasted. I hadn’t been given a number for the final contact, only a Skype username. The mindlessly upbeat chimes rang for five seconds, then ten, then fifteen. A rather frazzled woman with the outgrown roots of blue-green hair in a hooded sweatshirt and with a toddler on her hip bloomed into view as she answered the phone.
“Hi, yes, what is it?”
I was caught entirely off guard. It wasn’t the metaphysical stars, curtains, and incense I’d been expecting. She made no attempt at a calm, soothing voice. I blinked through my disorientation, rallying as I got down to business.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Before we get started, I’m not sure how to pronounce your name. I got your information from—”
“It’s Xuan, more or less pronounced like the bird: swan. I used to go by an Americanized name but then thought: Fuck it. If they can learn to say Joaquin Phoenix, then they can figure it out. And you? Are you calling from Pearl’s school? I left a message with the secretary that she wasn’t feeling well.”
“Does your kid’s school video-call you?” I asked. It was a symptom of rarely thinking before I spoke. I kicked myself for sounding snarky.
“Yes,” she said to my surprise. “I didn’t like people being able to get a hold of me all hours of the day, so I got rid of my phone. If someone wants me, they can send an email, or look me in the eye when they talk to me. Welcome to my computer. Now, what do you want?”
I struggled to remember why I’d thought calling her had seemed like a good idea. “I’m reaching out because I need advice on…how to see something. I was told to ask a practitioner. Your information was—”
Without waiting for me to finish, she asked, “Have you meditated yet?”
I nodded. “I did a guided meditation—”
“Pearl! Stop it!” she scolded the off-screen child. Xuan continued to bounce the baby on her hip as she said, “No, not a guided session. Use your clairs. Try to look through the veil.”
When I looked startled, she gave me a tired expression and approached the screen. My phone pinged as she forwarded a guided meditation called Piercing the Veil for Beginners.
“Here’s what you’re going to do.” Xuan cleared her throat. I was quite certain that she was keeping her child off-screen by holding out her foot while the baby continued to vie for her attention. “Light a candle and picture a dial. Like, a radio dial. You’re going to watch that volume knob turn all the way up in your mind’s eye as if you’re making music blast, okay?”
“What does that do?”
“It should help in turning up your clairabilities. Give it a shot, and call me back if you fuck it up.” Xuan disconnected before I could ask further questions.
The religion-resistant parts of me revolted as I lit candles, played relaxing music, and sat cross-legged in front of my door, looking directly at the spot Silas had glanced at so many nights ago. I told myself that this was nothing like praying. This was different. This was meditation.
But it didn’t feel different.
I did my best to relax. I closed my eyes and pictured a dial.
Nothing happened. The sigil became another god to pray to, something that neither existed nor answered when I called, no matter how badly I needed it. It was childhood all over again. And just like when I was a kid, no matter how ignored I felt, I didn’t give up.
May became June, July, then August. Time faded into the final days of summer.
“Come on, fucking come on,” I’d pleaded, frustration obliterating any hope I had at peaceful meditation. If I had conjured him from my imagination, then I would have been able to poof him into existence now. The longer he stayed away, the more convinced of his reality I became and the more desperately I needed to speak with him.
A man had vanished. There were multiple invisible things out there. I’d spent years with him. And the answers were at my fingertips—or, they should have been, had I not commanded him to stay away. But if I could get him back, I could fix this. And then together we could cast everything—every odd comment, every coincidental bout of good luck, every curious childhood memory, every odd piece of my life—under a new lens.
I cleared my mind. I stared. I meditated. I read. I researched. I reached out. I texted. I scanned. I watched documentaries. I cannibalized books on ghosts and fae and curses and witches. I pored over texts. I video-chatted. I scoured forums. I filled notebooks with deranged excerpts and sketches and theories. I developed deep, purple smudges from sleeplessness. I lost four pounds in my reluctance to eat. I sobbed.
But no matter how hard I cried, Caliban did not return.