After the filtered air in Tindra’s bunker, the corridor smelled musty and neglected. The LED floor lights and CCTV cameras made me feel as though I was fleeing a downed plane. I slowed when I saw the rickety metal bookcase, shoved against the wall like a discarded dorm relic, and glanced at the books it held.
Computational and Mathematical Modeling of Neural Systems. Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power. The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. Transient Global Amnesia. Anglo-Saxon Runes and Magic. Trauma and Memory: A Neurological Approach.
I pulled out a cheaply produced hardback. The boards had pulled away from the spine, and the pages were loose. The cover had no title or author listed, just a color photograph of a naked man. Tattoos covered his arms and torso: swastikas and runes, stylized dragons and hammers and crosses. In his hands he held a horned animal’s skull that obscured his face.
A clichéd image of masculine defiance, except for the rust-colored ribbons of dried skin and strands of what looked like human hair that clung to the skull. The tips of the man’s fingers were bloodied. I turned to the frontispiece and title page, careful to keep the pages from falling out:
Skalltrolleri: Fotografier producerad av Big Delusory Whim
The photographer had a sense of humor, anyway. The book consisted of photos depicting skulls in various stages of decay: mostly color, a few black-and-white. The latter were more interesting, the interplay of light and shadow canceling out the lurid subject matter. Another time, I would have kept it, but I didn’t want Tindra’s CCTV to capture me stealing a book, especially one with a white supremacist on its cover. I stuck it back on the shelf and continued on.
The garage was empty save for the SUV and that lonely bicycle. A slant of security light illuminated a figure sitting cross-legged on the floor. Tindra, her face glowing green from the laptop on her knees. Her blue dreadlock coiled around her fingers, its stray hairs like bits of frayed rope. The dog Bunny lay beside her. He growled as I approached, falling silent when she covered his muzzle with her hand.
I glanced at the computer, its screen filled with lines of code as incomprehensible as the symbols in The Book of Lamps and Banners. Tindra quickly closed it and set it on the floor beside her mobile.
“Your app?” I asked. She said nothing. “Lyla said that’s why you want the book.”
Her expression grew blank as a sleepwalker’s. I set down my bag, squatting so we were closer to eye level, and got a whiff of the dreadlock. It smelled like a long-dead animal. I gazed at her warily, trying to determine if that decay went deeper.
I can sense damage. It’s a toxic chemical that radiates from some people, their sweat and skin and saliva and sex. Whatever neurochemical alchemy creates it, I have the receptors to pick up on it, the way a dog can sense fear, or attacking bees home in on the person who kills their queen. I can read it in photographs, embedded in the emulsion or superimposed on an image, a blurred outline like the fake ectoplasm in nineteenth-century spirit photography. I wonder sometimes if that’s what I am: an analog ghost haunting the digital world, invisible to anyone born after the millennium.
Tindra saw me. She returned my gaze—not challengingly, but with the resigned patience of a sober person being subjected to a Breathalyzer, as though she knew what I was looking for and knew I wouldn’t find it.
I didn’t. No acrid taint rose from her. I felt no dark energy like a pent-up electrical charge waiting to be released if I were to brush against her bare skin.
Instead I felt something stranger and more disturbing: a kind of emptiness, the psychic rift caused by the profound disassociation I connected to my own rape on my twenty-third birthday. For me, it had been a sense of myself splitting into three distinct selves: one being assaulted on the rubble-strewn ground; one floating above the scene and watching with calm detachment; the third embodying a silent scream sucked into the void.
It was the last of these that still gave me night terrors. It was what I sensed in Tindra: a profound absence, the human equivalent of the hole on a piece of emulsion that has been exposed to direct sunlight.
Yet she sat less than two feet away from me, quiet and alert. Her pale brown eyes regarded me with detached curiosity that gradually became recognition. Her eyes widened and she nodded, as though I’d answered a question.
She said, “That’s why I need the book.”
“How’d you hear about it?” My voice came out in a parched whisper.
“It’s the kind of thing I know.”
I waited for her to go on, but she just stared at me with that preternatural calm. I tried a different tack. “Did you know Harold Vertigan before this?”
“I’ve bought a few things from him.”
“Was there anyone else who knew about this book? Another dealer, someone who might want to rip him off?” I pointed at the laptop. “Your app—it has something to do with magic, too? You can’t seriously believe in that shit.”
Anger flared in her tawny eyes. “It’s not ‘magic.’ It’s an ancient language, using symbols and images. A kind of code. We’re returning to that mode of communication. Everything is code. No more words.”
“Yeah? Then how come I can hear you now?”
“That’s changing.” She held up her mobile as though displaying a piece of evidence to a jury. “‘They drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either.’ Sartre.”
I laughed. “Props for that. But Sartre was talking about photographs, not words.”
“Who cares?” A smile flickered at the edges of her mouth. “Who cares what it even means. See this?”
Without warning, she thrust the mobile toward my face. Its screen was a molten whirlpool of insignia: horned circles and crescents, wheels and crosses and swastikas, teeth and birds that seemed to spell out a message I couldn’t decipher. I recoiled, hands in front of my face, and shut my eyes.
Yet I still saw those symbols, a pinwheel galaxy of blue and green and crimson, the poisonous yellow of a liqueur you know you’ll regret tasting but can’t resist. Pain exploded inside my skull as the symbols spun, fragmented into brilliant pixels that rearranged themselves into a series of freeze-frames, and began to move.
Horrified, I stared at the image of my younger self on a dark downtown alley, the black silhouette of a car pulling alongside me.
“No,” I whispered.
A knife glittered, a voice hissed my name.
Cass, Cass…
The car door opened. Something moved, someone moved, a man, two men. A running girl. Someone else screamed: not someone else. Me.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Stop it…”
I had seen this before; I had been here before. I had never left this place.
On the ground in front of me, light bounced from a spar of jagged glass as long as my hand. My fingers dug into the cracked cement as I dragged myself forward, summoning all my strength to grab it.
“No! Don’t touch it—”
Knife, car, glass, all vanished. Tindra knelt in front of me. As my hand closed around her mobile, the dog leaped at my face.
“Bunny, drop!”
The dog fell back. Phantom images reeled across my vision, green and violet, that terrifying molten yellow. A curve of glass like a displaced grin. I fought to catch my breath, stammered, “What the fuck was that?”
Tindra watched me, one hand tight on her dog’s collar. “A new language,” she said. “I invented it for my app, Ludus Mentis. It’s from ludus mentis, ‘play’ and ‘mind.’ So, Ludus Mentis—like a mind game.
“I got the idea from the Orphic mysteries,” she went on breathlessly. “And some other stories. When the Titans wanted to destroy Dionysus, they gave him toys. A ball, a wheel, a top. A mirror. Dionysus had never seen one before. When he looked into it, he couldn’t look away. He didn’t realize it was a trap. The Titans tore him limb from limb and ate him.”
She thrust the mobile at me again, and now its screen reflected my own face. “You see how it all ties in? The way we’re all sucked in by this? We can’t look away, none of us, no matter how hard we try…”
Her voice trailed off as she lowered the mobile. “But no one’s even trying. And that’s how Ludus Mentis is going to change everything.”