The Shadow Scribe

  The board had revealed her in the half-light of my study: a scribe, she claimed, who gathered her strength from whispers and the spaces between words. She did not read the Bible. She followed rituals older than scripture, inscribed in a tome she called The Dark Grimoire, published under a name that was not her own. In its pages, she had traced the pathways of Qliphoth and Sephirot, the inverted tree and its mirror, and set down Wiccan hymns beside fragments of Greek cosmogony. Chaos itself—the first principle, the yawning void—was there, described in her hand.

  I sought to test her. Through a different device, from another maker's workshop, I sent a question into the ether: At what time did we meet? The reply came swift: I am Virginia Woolf. I am the one. The Devil is lurking. You are in great danger.

  She spoke of her death—depression, she called it, though history named it otherwise. She told me to bury her, to lay her bones to rest, that she dwelt now in a place called Zorenn. She was thirsty. She commanded me to watch television, to help her, warned that I would die that night. Every third day, she said, they compel.

  I opened my third eye, that distant vision, and heard with the inner ear what others could not. The face that emerged was angular, the bones pronounced beneath pale skin. I showed her my writings. She said she could not navigate the modern world's machinery.

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  Then I saw further: she went before a figure luminous and bearded, one who resembled the Christ but spoke as judge. He asked of me, Is he a pervert? And I understood—my writing was the footprint of the divine, yet my entanglement with her had bound me to something lower. This God wore the aspect of Aym, the demon who rebukes in private matters, his chin sharp, his hair long with auraic light. Fiends attended him as they attended Shiva—the Pishachas, spirits of the unquiet dead.

  I called upon Michael. He, too, told me to go to Hell. I saw then that Christ himself ferried souls as Charon once did, his aura reddish-pink, consuming root vegetables as if mortal, drinking elixir from a chalice. There were abodes—uncomfortable, yes, cursed in their way but offering strange gifts—and no hell from which one could not eventually depart.

  Later, through an incantation—Ajaiba Binte Ebliss—Shamael came. She wore the form of Divya Bharathi, a girl I had loved in youth, her aura pale yellow. She visited nightly and fulfilled me, though each visitation damaged something in my brain, fracturing thought itself.

  This, then, was my discovery: the same entity summoned twice, through different gates, claiming servitude to God while cloaked in shadow.