Shadows Out of Time

Your grandfather’s conclusions were correct, Dr. Peaslee. Certain ancient secret societies and primitive followers of witchcraft understood the essential principles of what we now know as hyperdimensional physics without comprehending the underlying causes. Almost all the tools and practices associated with witchcraft have a utilitarian purpose in the framework of advanced physics. It’s ironic that mystics and scientists have been at each other’s throats for so many centuries when, in fact, they’ve been pursuing the same truths all along.

Sean sat watching my “witchcraft” from the couch, his eyes as blank and lifeless as usual. He’d suffered so much in his brief eighteen years. Quite frankly, I was often surprised he was even alive, though I would never think of saying such a thing aloud. I tried to be as optimistic as possible when around him. A few months earlier he’d almost committed suicide just to prevent the thing from taking him over once and for all. Any negativity at all might push him over the brink again.

I asked Sean to remove his shirt. I used a smudge stick to paint a pentagram on his chest. I was surprised at how broad that chest had become during the past two years. He wasn’t a bad-looking kid. If not for the “accident” he might have been a track star or an Olympic runner. Sometimes, when I managed to push the thing out long enough to give the boy at least a few moments of respite, Sean’s eyes would brighten and I would catch a brief glimpse of the driven, intelligent young man who had so often been evicted from his own body.

I asked Sean to kneel on the floor within the exact center of the pentagram. He did so. Then I proceeded to light the black candles I had placed at each of the pentagram’s five points. Two years earlier I would have called myself a fool for engaging in such “mystical nonsense.” That was before Sean. Before I had discovered your grandfather’s dream-work research. Before I had seen what Sean could do. Or rather, what the thing inside him could do.

I chanted in Latin, an unbinding spell I had learned from a woman who called herself a witch (in another age, she might have been considered a physician on the same level as Paracelsus) who lived in a nearby mansion up in Sherman Oaks, of all places. This woman was quite wealthy and had spent years performing the everyday run-of-the-mill “mind control” spells for all the Hollywood types desperate for that one career-making role; she even had her own YouTube channel. Odd how the ancient wisdom can adapt itself to its surroundings, no matter how gauche or blasé.

The woman had been recommended to me by a former client whose fear of heights had been wiped away during a $75.00 fifteen-minute phone consultation. An obvious placebo effect, I had believed at the time. Yet, out of desperation, I had called her number anyway. I had never dealt with anything remotely resembling “magic” before, and yet somewhere in the back of my mind I believed the story Sean had told me: that it felt like something alien was trying to take over his consciousness. Something from outside. Something from the Great Gulf existing between the realms of dreaming and dreamless sleep.

“I built the machine on my own,” Sean had told me two years earlier. “I read about it in a William S. Burroughs book. I guess he got the idea from this artist named Brion Gysin. It’s called a Dreammachine. Basically, it’s just a light bulb connected to a turntable. The light bulb has to be covered with a cylinder with a bunch of holes poked in it. Then you switch the turntable on and let it spin. It creates a kind of strobe effect and puts you into a hypnotic trance. I just wanted to have some lucid dreams— bang chicks in my sleep, fly around like Superman and shit. I didn’t know it would leave my body open for…for this thing to crawl inside. I–I don’t know how much longer I can keep pushing it away and pushing it away!”

“And what do you think this ‘thing’ is, Sean?” This was still the “skeptical me” speaking.

“I have no idea. God, I don’t even sleep anymore. I feel like I’m awake twenty-four hours a day even though I know I’m not. Sometimes it wears me down. Finally, it just pulls me out. And I’m over there, in this huge room with no ceiling except stars. With that cone-shaped thing talking at me, through me, its tentacles waving and somehow touching me. Inside my mind. Inside my soul. I get so cold inside…just…just thinking about its touch…”

Oh, yes, I was very skeptical. That is, until the creature spoke to me one day.