Mom always said I was a voracious reader. I think she hoped it was more true than it was, but eventually, after repeating it enough, she was right. That’s the funny thing with kids; you tell them they are something enough times, and they really do become that. Works with adults sometimes, too; you just have to try a little harder.

  Even I, the kind of man who can chew through a paperback in one night, don’t have the stomach to push through Grimaldius’s drivel. The first few dozen pages just read like a textbook written by a scholarly zealot selling snake oils scribbled out in the form of occult ideas. It’s all a bunch of nonsense.

  So, I end up doing what I should have done to begin with: going to the table of contents to look for clues. I was approaching the Hermetic Key in good faith like any other book, but when you’re dealing with a grift, as all religious, spiritual, and magical texts are, you have to be a little more surgical. If you eat the whole hog, you’ll make yourself sick. You pick out the choicest cuts and go from there.

  But: maybe I’m too disparaging. Maybe I shouldn’t say all. There’s a lot of wisdom and good advice condensed into some spiritual literature, and even I have to admit they laid the foundation for most of my ideals, values, virtues, and ethics. It’s right for a man to give credit where it’s due.

  I go to the table of contents and start looking for the choicest cuts, avoiding all the gristle. Ah. Chapter thirty-six: ‘Concerning Sacrifices for Consortion with Spirits.’ Let’s see if there’s anything about chickens in there.

  I think I’ll skip the part about the magic circles and triangles. I don’t need a geometry lesson from a grifter, and I didn’t see anything at the cabin that’d make that relevant.

  Doves. Eagles. Hawks. Crows. Ravens. Vultures. Sparrows. Nothing about chickens so far, but I imagine the kids made do with what they could get their hands on.

  Tells you here how you should sprinkle the blood. Looks like you flick it all over the ritual site and on the faces of the magicians. This part: ‘holdeth fast the attentions of thy contact.’ Reminds me of some Old Testament religiosity: flick the blood on the altar to get God’s attention. Not unusual to see overlaps between these so-called sacred practices. Whoever wrote this is just drawing from Western traditions to create a Western subversion.

  No circle was drawn at the cabin. Wrong animal, if Clara’s account is correct. I think these guys were playing at the idea of being magicians more than anything. Just a bunch of teenagers being rebellious. I’ll get a better picture of the situation when I visit the church this weekend and ask around. I hope.

  What is this? My stomach sinks and churns. Greater and Lesser Rituals of the Yog? I get that feeling in the back of my head again, the feeling I’m being watched, but I’m steadfast in ignoring it this time.

  I remember my tea. Hopefully, it’s cooled enough to drink. I take a slurp to check. Almost cold. How long have I been reading? I look through the curtains and out the window. It’s completely dark now. I look at my watch. It’s a little over half past six. Boy, how much more reading can I put in tonight? It might not be worth it to even drink the tea.

  No. I need to go until I find something, anything close to what I’m looking for. I can’t hold back. This is work. This is my job. My duty to society. Clara’s justice is dependent on Joe and me right now. Jack Wolfgang’s life is probably dependent on us, too. No… He’s probably dead. All the more reason to work. I’ve got to keep going. I won’t take it easy.

  Maybe some exercise would be good for my mind. Keep me going. I really feel like this text is wearing on me.

  I go over to the living room shelf and pull out my two fifty-pound dumbbells. I begin my routine with shoulder presses.

  1… 2… 3…

  Even under the strain of the dumbbells, the weight demanding my focus or surrender, my mind can’t forget the grimoire and its ludicrous assertions.

  It’s like talking to that right kind of insane person, the one you know is full of crap, but you can’t stop asking them questions and hearing them out. You want to know how far down the hole of their specific mad rabbit they’ve gone.

  I wonder if I’m thinking of Clara.

  Kind of a cruel idea. She doesn’t deserve that. I don’t think so, at least. Innocent until proven guilty. I’m a detective, not a judge, not a jury, and sure as hell not an executioner … until I have to be. I suppose every man is a little of each of those in his daily life.

  I do a few more reps of shoulder presses, trying to drive the fascination out of my head. Then put the weights down. I stare at the brown grimoire lying on the side table next to my reading armchair.

  So. How far am I going down this rabbit hole tonight?

  [ I READ ]

  It’s been hours, and I’m still reading, only stopping to scrawl out notes and connect ideas. The book is a mess of information; details are spread out in different chapters between ritual instructions.

  Generally, the book seems focused on being a practical guide to the exercises within, though there are enough details about its perspective on the so-called spiritual realm for it to read like a compendium of lore. The details mostly strike me as a mix of Christian and Gnostic beliefs with a few other ideas thrown in; as the introduction mentioned drawing from many near Western sources, I’m sure their influence amounts to more than I can measure with my limited knowledge. I doubt any of it is unique; I’m as certain as I can be, based on conjecture, that the whole thing is copying bits and pieces of different grimoires to create a feeling of authenticity.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  What happened to Clara, the thought of finding Jack Wolfgang: they’re as far from my mind as Pluto is from the Earth, cold, dark, distant memories, while my brain lights up with the fluttering, warm light of morbid curiosity. Now, I’m only motivated by an insatiable curiosity, a grumbling hunger in my brain for more details.

  I stop only to reflect on my reading.

  An endless war with Hell in the Heavens. The book refers to that as the struggle between Evil and Good. Seems to make it sound less like a life-or-death battle and more like a group of resistance fighters taking on the status quo. And for this, they wield Chaos to disrupt the Heavenly Order.

  But, it’s clear things aren’t so simple. The angels battling demons are just what’s on the surface.

  Beneath all that, Chaos itself strives to meet its own ends. It’s like some kind of natural law made up of sentient beings. The Yog. What a stupid name. That’s how you know it’s all made up. It’s fascinating nonetheless.

  Amongst the Yog are the Greater and Lesser. The Lesser Yog are mindless monstrosities. Grimaldius doesn’t have too many other details about them except a few of these different kinds, but he even says these aren’t really useful categorizations. How can you categorize incarnated Chaos?

  The Lesser Yog are mostly, he says, like wild animals. Beasts. They’re not much to be interested in. You can’t really name most of them or categorize them. They tend to devour everything with a physical body and spiritual presence. According to the text, that means humans and animals mostly. They’re drawn to stronger spiritual presences like dogs drawn to fresh meat. As they eat, they grow. As they grow, they change. But one thing is unchanging: that hunger. It never ceases.

  The Greater Yog, though; those are like the gods of old. Really old. They’re kind of like Greek Titans, but more monstrous and unknowable. And there are two kinds of them at least: the Ascendants and the Elder Yogs.

  The Ascendants are worth getting the attention of; they’re what happens when a man, angel, or demon decides he wants to unite with Chaos. The name is ironic to some; many believe that while trading your nature for that of Chaos might grant you power in this world, you’ll lose your place in existence at the End of Time when the True New World is ushered in.

  So, in other words, the Ascendants seem to have, in some sense, descended into lesser natures, abandoning their place in the Cosmic Conflict. Both angels and demons tend to hate them, seeing them as betrayers with a sort of ‘kill on sight’ attitude, but the Ascendants themselves find the ignorant, weak-minded humans to be especially fitting tools to serve their ends.

  And, what are their ends? A good question, Marlowe. Each Ascendant has their own personal goals. They’re individuals, and they’re untrustworthy, so the prudent take what they say with a grain of salt. No one really knows what an Ascendant is up to, but you can surely say they don’t have your best interests at heart. Man is only a means to the Ascendants' end. The Ascendant doesn’t care for rules or order. He doesn’t care for ethics or morality. Societies only matter to him inasmuch as they serve him. An entire cosmic race of Ubermensch. That is their ascension: they have risen above the “petty” cosmic war, and now serve no master but their own fancy. All that to ultimately say they’re agents of Chaos. Whatever it is they want, it will ultimately produce more chaos, though it seems Grimaldius believes Order will always eventually spring from this, and thus the game goes on.

  Then, there are the Elder Yogs. They’ve apparently always existed as fixtures in the cosmos. They have their own strange and unknowable interests, and they communicate to men only in vague and mystical ways, like through dreams, visions, or obsessions.

  Hah. If I believed any of this, I’d start to think an obsession was forming in my own mind.

  Anyway, the Elder Things are far more powerful than the Ascendants. Usually. They’ll cause all sorts of trouble for you. They sweep up entire cults and drive them to perform maddening acts of human sacrifice and other ‘sacrileges.’ They love to twist and torture ‘creation,’ as Grimaldius calls it. They’re perfectly willing to pretend to serve demons, each seeing the other as slaves and always struggling for dominance in their agreements.

  This is the craziest worldview I’ve ever looked into. I guess it only seems so crazy because it’s so foreign and new to me. But you can tell he’s not doing much more than mocking the traditional Christian worldview, adding new esoteric layers to make his book seem wiser and more mysterious.

  He, of course, goes into all the ways you can contact angels, demons, and Ascendants, and he describes many of those and their planetary offices.

  He doesn’t say much about contacting the Elder Yog, though, other than to give you grave warnings not to seek them. “Shouldst thou incur the ire or fancy of such eldritch beings, thou must get thee to a sanctuary and repent: burn thine each and every tome of secrets, every scrap with note or detail of thine endeavors, and bury far from home thy conductive instruments, then settle thee elsewhere even. Forget thine all thy memories of such hidden things, and never speak thee again of consortion with anyone but the Divine. Forever live out thy days with the Pater Noster and Ave Maria on thy tongue, lest thee find thyself devoured by the swirling maw of eternal, abyssal madness.”

  Quite interesting for a man to teach people how to, allegedly, conjure and deal with angels and demons, only to tell them to give up the whole game and return to established religion if they go too far. Perhaps he himself made too many steps in one direction on his journey.

  No! See, now I’m looking at the matter like this whole thing is real, like it isn’t a forgery made up to sell books. Hah! What a fickle thing a man’s mind can be, willing to go wherever it’s pulled like a dog on a leash.

  “Well, that’s enough of that,” I tell myself as I stand and stretch my back. I look into my mug just to make sure it’s actually empty, then I go and set it in the sink, filling it with hot water to sit.

  Boy, would you look at the time, I think as I stare at my watch. It’s almost midnight. I need to get to bed; I’ve got work in the morning.

  I shower, brush my teeth, do the dishes in the sink, and then realize I’m starving.

  “How could I forget to eat?”

  I never forget to eat. It’s already too late, so I guess I’ll just fast until morning.

  That book really had me captivated, didn’t it? I think I can forget about it now. I’ve learned all I’m going to learn from it that’ll be useful in this case. I’ll talk to Joe about it tomorrow, then we’ll probably turn it in as evidence and wash our hands of the thing.

  There’s enough in there to validate the real parts of Clara’s story. I think she really believes she’s telling the truth; I just also believe she’s coming to the wrong conclusion about what she was experiencing.

  There are no angels, demons, purple ooze monsters, or gods. It’s all made up to help people cope with a complex, tragic, and largely random reality, and sometimes all the made-up stuff is misused to control people. These kids were just trying to break free of the controls and find their own coping mechanisms. I’ll bet that’s really what they were after in their own twisted way.

  At least Clara made it out safely. She’s mentally scarred, but maybe that scar will be a decent lesson.

  I’m tired. It’s past time to let my mind rest. I need it after all that nonsense. What can I say, though? It was kind of fun.