by Ian Young
I'm not one of the hardcases in the underground. I may be one of the
luckiest guys around, though — anyone who knows me can tell you that. Not
that I've ever won the lottery, or met the girl of my dreams, or anything
like that. It's just that nothing bad has ever happened to me. Ever.
Around me, yes, but not *to* me. I've stopped to tie my shoelaces at the
curb on a couple of occasions just as a car runs a red light through the
crosswalk. I've shown up at the airport too late to catch a flight that
ended up crashing. There have been countless other instances, too, most of
which have been so subtle I never noticed what happened — little things,
where I somehow managed to unconsciously make just the right decision and
turn a blind eye to bad luck. All I really know is that no matter what
I've been up to, I've always come through without a scrape. Well, mostly.
Not bullet-proof, just non-stick. Anyway, after 28 years of living with a
Teflon coating, you learn to trust your instincts and follow them, no
matter how strange they may seem.
I got involved with the occult underground entirely by accident about five
years back. I knew something truly strange was happening to my life the
day I saw a girl disappear right before my very eyes. Not "poof" in a puff
of smoke — she just faded till she was gone. That put a nasty crease in my
brain I'm still trying to smooth out. Then there was the evil book that
bled ink. And the night I got food poisoning from bad mushrooms and the
pixies came to dance with me. Or how about the French businessman who
showed me a family tree he claimed went back 32,000 years? Or the fat man
who could eat your identity like it was filet mignon? Yeah, it's an ugly
game and I'm wading knee deep in it now.
The adepts are your most obvious players. They're the true occult
hardcases, and the ones you really want to keep an eye open for. Real
nut-jobs, if you ask me. The first thing you have to take into account
with one of these guys is the whole obsession issue. You're not going to
find an adept who isn't obsessed with his little bag of tricks. It's that
kind of fixation and single-mindedness that drives the magick, that's fuel
to feed the supernatural fire. It's also what reduces them to a fragile
fingernail's clutch on their sanity, if they're left with even that. The
other thing to bear in mind is that these guys want this power and are
willing to accept all the baggage it entails. They're a lot like the
assholes you knew back in school who were always running for student body
office and eventually go on to become career politicians — these guys
honestly believe that it's important to play the game, that they're somehow
more clued-in and competent than anyone else, and they usually don't know
how to do anything else worth a damn. Nope. Assholes and basket cases,
pretty much down to a man. And, quite frankly, I recommend you avoid the
lot of them whenever possible. Besides, there's plenty of more interesting
company to keep out there.
There are other players in the game, you ask? Sure there are. You see,
the underground attracts oddballs with weird abilities, like me, like flies
to stink. Sort of an un-healthy magnetism that draws us into the
weirdness. And for those of us who have the ability, but not the taste for
the lifestyle? Tough shit — if they don't seek the lifestyle, it's just a
matter of time before it comes looking for them. Most of us are just
hangers-on at the edge, though. "Talents" they call us — and sometimes
none too kindly. People with an inexplicable knack for doing something
kind of amazing, but not too amazing. It's almost never anything flashy,
and often nothing too useful, so we're seldom accorded any real credibility
or status, which suits me fine, though I know a few knuckleheads who're
just jonesing to be considered real dukes. Whatever.
Anyway, let me give you a few examples of the sort of tricks you'll find
among us talents. Take my friend Ling-Yen, for instance, who's completely
unable to miss a target. I kid you not. She throws a dart, tosses a
hook-shot, fires a gun, doesn't matter what, and she hits her mark every
time…as long as she isn't really trying. Just point her in the general
direction, give her something to throw or shoot, and BAM! Bull's eye.
Dead-on. No need to aim. The moment she tries to take a fix on her
target, though, she's virtually guaranteed to miss. One of those spooky
zen things, maybe, though she's no Buddhist. Pity she doesn't have
the killer instinct, because there are times I'd be a lot more comfortable
with her at my side, a gun in her hand, and not a clue as to what's going
on.
While a good percentage of talents like Ling-Yen's and mine are kind of
eerie or uncanny, some of them are a lot more obscure and just plain weird.
Case in point: the phone channeler. I was doing a bit of freelance
investigation a couple of years back, when I was contacted by an hysterical
woman who was convinced her husband was possessed by ghosts. It seems that
after thirteen years of marriage, slumbering quietly through every night,
the man spontaneously began to talk in his sleep, carrying on conversations
between persons unknown. It had me stumped for the longest time — he
didn't show any of the typical signs of possession. I honestly don't think
I ever would have figured that one out if I hadn't received a call from my
partner on my cell phone while sitting watch over the guy one night. As it
turns out, he wasn't channeling the spirits of the dead at all — he was
receiving cellular phone calls while he slept, which he'd then unwittingly
repeat out loud. Don't ask me how. Maybe it was like how you used to hear
about people picking up radio on their dental work. Beats me — I still
haven't worked that part out. I suppose the real challenge was trying to
figure out how to put his talent to use, since he had to be unconscious
before he could go to work. I did, in fact, manage to pull it off, but
that's another story entirely.
The last example I'll give is one of the most trying cases I've stumbled
onto without crossing into the territory of the major players. I once ran
across this son of a bitch who knew how to swing instantaneous hypnosis,
which he used to his selfish advantage far too often for his own good — or
anyone else's for that matter. He left a trail of damaged lives in his
wake like a drunk driver playing bumper cars on his way home from an
all-night bender. This bastard may have been pretty vulgar in his method,
but his particular trick was strangely sublime in its actual execution.
He'd startle you, meeting your gaze, and then his eyes would bulge and
throb in their sockets, spinning ever so slightly while his eyelids
twitched and blinked in disorienting patterns. You'd be looking at these
freakish eyes for just a second or two, and before you knew it you'd just
stop thinking. Shake your head to clear the cobwebs and you'd find him
gone…and maybe your wallet, too. Or maybe, if you were a woman, you'd get
this ugly sensation that you'd just been felt up, probably because you had
been. And that sort of thing was just for starters. If you were
particularly susceptible to suggestion — and, believe me, it's more common
than you think — you might find yourself in his thrall for hours at a time
if he could keep the hypnotic spell going long enough. Anyway, I was out
after the shitheel as a favor for a friend of mine he'd done wrong, and I
had the whammy pulled on me a couple of pretty embarrassing times before an
irate and apparently nearsighted Rottweiler put the bite on him, saving me
from further indignation. Like I said earlier, I'm a pretty lucky guy.
You know, I still get the shakes thinking about how I helped put an end to
his shenanigans — one of the few times I've willingly put myself in the
debt of an adept. Again, another story for another time.
Anyway, I hope you begin to get the idea that there are more talents out
there than you can imagine. Some may be freakish and apparently useless,
like ectoplasmic projection or some crazy shit, while others may be weird
but kind of useful, like the "Doolittle Effect" of being able to talk to
animals. And the talents get subtler still, so subtle they fly right under
your radar. Talents like an uncanny capacity for languages, perfect
rhythmic timing, the ability to make yourself believe your own lies, you
name it. The main thing that sets us talents apart is the one or two
little tricks we can manage to parlay into some kind of advantage over your
average prole. Toward exactly what end the talent uses his trick is his
own business…unless it happens to be aimed at you.