Story 5, or: The Last Words of Ahcter Kull

Eruta, Ero, Evolvo

Eruta, Ero, Evolvo

Eruta, Ero, Evolvo

Those words comprised the cursed chant that reentered my mind as I would be cleaning the house, or reaching for a book, or performing an action I would have otherwise classified as wholly mundane.

Eruta, Ero, Evolvo

I stopped, one day, to write the first word down, thinking it was important to record it as soon as possible before it exited my memory. The other two I had discerned once I sat down and began my labors of trying to conjure up a meaning for the first.

Since then, I found the three entering my memory, and causing such havoc within my mind, that I stopped and wrote whatever came to me.

Eruta, Ero, Evolvo!

I was a college professor, once.

I had been tenured faculty at Harpsdale Community College, formerly County College of Morris, when I came under the influence of a colleague who insisted she come to my lectures involving pre-Socratic philosophy.

She was an attractive woman, and we saw a little of each other, many years ago, during our summer sessions. I could firmly point to her as the cause of ruination of my second marriage; Sandra claimed that woman had bent my mind to her will. Sandra was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, so it became easy to secure my matrimonial release from her through the ease of an attorney and a mental competency examination.

I never felt freer in my life.

Eruta, Ero, Evolvo!

Sandra would have been surprised to discover that my association with my colleague had fizzled following our return to work that fall.

She saw nothing of me, nor I of her.

Soon, my estimation of the campus at which I worked plummeted following a scandal I'd rather not mention here, and I sought employment elsewhere.

I then realized professing was not what I wanted to do to begin with, so I resigned my post, sold my house, and moved westward in a little car I had purchased for the one-way trip.

It was important for me, somehow, to start over.

I brought only a journal, some audio tapes for my recorder, and a map. I was determined to go cross-country, and reinvigorate my life.

That was when the voice first began to speak to me.

Eruta, Ero, Evolvo!

The westward highways became my welcomed friends when the voice, an entity by the name of Malko, had reached to me from my inward chanting of the curse. I thought it was a lark, being that my own birth name was very similar, and the name was but merely an invention of my wayward imagination.

I will prove to you my power, it said. Take the nearest exit and heed my commands. You will find a treasure exactly where I have buried it, millennia ago, when the gods played before the men arrived. I was one of those who chanted the words you happened by, and I reach out to you via my will over the ages to make concord.

My first thoughts went to Sandra, who told me she had occasionally heard voices who motivated her to go on “treasure hunts”.

When I passed the first exit Malko insisted I take, I heard a scream, and then urged I turn around immediately.

I'm hungry, I told him, I want a cheeseburger.

I heard nothing more from him until I reached the western part of the state.

I have something for you here, his voice, more than a mere growl, but presently demonic, insisted. What will it take for your obedience?

“A million dollars, right here next to me on top of my garbage,” I demanded, my passenger seat being a temporary repository for all the fast food wrappers I had collected. “If you can make that happen I'll follow anything you say.”

“Not much of an imaginative soul, are you?” I heard another voice, outside of me, state. I freaked out and swerved the car, knowing that someone, a kid by the sound of her, must’ve snuck into the backseat while I was at a rest stop, and then knew exactly,somehow, what I had been thinking.

When I looked backwards, I veered onto oncoming traffic and corrected myself immediately.

The car was otherwise empty.

Then, pulling over, I witnessed a green, fluttering mass begin to blossom atop of the passenger's seat, out of the corner of my eye.

Ironically, I passed a billboard for a casino. Bundles of cash now spilled from a mountain formed on the seat; there were denominations of a thousand dollars flying out the window. The demon had manifested.

When I ran outside I hyperventilated, and threw up. There were many, many times when I felt way in over my head in life, and that moment was no exception.

The money had spilled into my footwell. The car reeked of it, reminding me of New York City's noxious aroma of cash and vomit upon once exiting Penn Station.

The traffic streamed many yards from me – I had taken the exit and pulled into a pumpkin farm. I was scared. I didn't know where I was.

After I had investigated the cash – all the serial numbers, material, and design, seemed as they should've been – a pickup started to approach me from the farm house. Oh shit, I thought. Then I realized if my new found invisible friends could stop people as easily as they could materialize treasury notes, then what prevented me from asking?

Stop that car, I said. The pickup stopped immediately. Who's in it? A farmer and his hand, came a reply. Make them turn around and forget about me. You drive hard bargains, spoke Malko, I've won over lesser with less. Then use them. Silence.

Do it, I commanded.

I heard the sound of, and felt, surf in my mind.

I, then, heard chanting – not Eruta, Ero, Evolvo – but of a child's caroling.

A lethargy loosened in my mental space – as if by virtue of an awakened will I had instructed the men in the pickup to turn about and return to their farm house. After a space of several minutes, it was done.

When I laughed, and smacked the roof of my red car, Malko returned, speaking as if from amongst the reeds, and the thick branches of the copse nearby.

I will not be playing any more of these games with you. If you exit this scene without honoring our arrangement, you will fall under the jurisdiction of my superior, Willow Piper, and he will not be kind.

Back off, man. I'm a scholar, I teased.

Though the idea of “meeting” a “spiritual superior” impressed me, and I was tempted to follow-up, I pushed all the excess cash back into my footwell, walked to the boot of the car to see if I had any handbags or valises I had thrown in without realizing, and, starving, hustled to the passenger's side and opened the door. As I was stashing the wads away, I conceded. You win, I said to the spirit, where's the next stash?

Eruta, Ero, Evolvo!

The next trips were amongst the most amazing adventures of my life, as I became a legitimate, honest-to-goodness (in a manner of speaking) treasure hunter. Malko entranced me from one spot to another, teasing I should check a bush once again, or sneak into a backyard somewhere in the dead of night, perhaps with a flashlight, or a semi-automatic weapon. I was never caught in any of my trespasses onto private property, and exited vastly wealthier than I had ever thought personally possible.

Many of the treasures were previously buried jewels, lingering in their abodes for millennia, and hoary with age. Nothing a little scrub with a polishing cloth, or a trip to a sympathetic jeweler, couldn't fix, however. Then, came the masks. Masks of bejeweled and atrocious design, with massive tusks that emitted from swollen cheeks or gaping jowls, and then horns, where they were placed on intricately filigreed temples.

When Malko informed me to surrender these treasures to the University of Illinois, I became recalcitrant. They belonged to me, and I should do what I wished with them. While this was true, Malko noted, they were required for a more estimable purpose, and that I would be rewarded in-kind. Humans, after all, remain thus, he surmised.

When I approached Dr. Peekhoffer of the Pre-Colonial Antiquities Department, he was expecting me. He referred to me directly by name. I was unsure whether he knew of my academic reputation or of the mutual acquaintance we shared. He laughed and waved me off, stating he was in contact with forces similar to my own, and that if we were to conduct business, he would handsomely reward me for my efforts. Sure, enough. We went back to his little country house, did the deed, and was given bonds and titles to territories all over the nation. When I expressed astonishment, he admitted, “Our allies from the other side are in possession of all sorts of secrets. They pay handsomely, but not in the ways you expect. It's best to follow their lead and play the games they play.” He then asked me if I attended the meetings. I said I didn't, that I was passing through the country, and I supposed that was what made me the “right man for the job.” “I see,” said Dr. Peekhoffer, “I often wonder why they don't use other emissaries, vagrants and the like, to do their package handling. I suppose it's vastly easier for them, and us, that we step up and enter into their own erratic world. After all, nobody suspects us of wayward designs, of following the beat of occult drummers. We are to pursue the light, aren't we? And we veil it, the light of truth, the light of Scientific Discovery, etc. In truth we're just Joseph Smiths following our Moronis. We go in faith and receive in faith.” He chuckled. “We're just like the priests we're encouraged to hate.”

“Hail to sophistry,” I joked.

“Hail to sophos!” he rejoined.

We cursed the names of many gods and downed brandy.

And with that, I made the first of a long line of occult connections, and started attending the Stairway Society meetings across the country – these were academically led (and academic-only) gatherings of the other package handlers Peekhoffer referred to. There were many in number, but discretionary in temperament. Many of them were divorcés like myself, or widows. Some were married, others kept silent. They all were located in small, liberal towns, often near multiple universities. When they heard of me, they often stated they looked at my tiny college from whence I sprang with envy, for that was the location of their powerful master, Arthur Strouh.

“I haven't heard of the guy,” I'd say to them.

But, it was on Valentine's Day (of all days) when a wise woman, beyond her years, a botanist from the University of Calgary, had been in town for a meeting and heard this espousal. She leaned toward me mischievously and informed me that “Arthur Strouh” was a hermaphrodite, or at the very least a crossdresser. He worked at the Harpsdale Community College as a female art professor named Meredith Spring, or Meg Whitman, depending on his whims.

This sank heavily into me, as it was with Meg Whitman who I had shared a brief tryst that previous summer, and I could have assured anyone she was not a man.

My expression must have caused merriment to Ms. Calgary, whose name I couldn't remember, because she then teased – “He's really very powerful. The most powerful of all of us. He would make you believe what you saw.”

Christ, goodness.

I then backtracked east to New Jersey. I wanted to intercept Meg and alert her to this dubious rumor that had floated about her all the way west, and had warped with the telling or retelling that she was indeed someone who she wasn't at all. I found out Arthur Strouh was in his late sixties, or seventies, and Meg was merely, it seemed, in her late fifties, but incredibly fit and youthful for her age. She teased she still had her period, and showed me her bloody underwear one afternoon. No matter. When I called her she didn't pick up, and when I arrived, many months after I had left her, I found out she had disappeared.

By now the devilry that had been in my life had begun to really tighten its hold on me. I wanted to leave west again, but was declared a person of interest in Meg's disappearance and couldn't immediately depart. The police slugged me with questions I couldn't honestly answer, lest I met their institutional incredulity. They would have locked me up, and almost did, were it not for my old attorney who had arrived, and managed to instantly dismiss the police's interest in me. It turned out he was a local politician who was deeply revered in the precinct where I had landed, and he escorted me to my car one foggy evening after the hound dogs were satiated. He had a kindly demeanor, but the aura of the other – the quizzical feeling I would have when I met those of the Stairway Society, permeated through him. He was a high-ranking Freemason, he told me, and he was instructed to retrieve me.

“My boy, you've sure went up in the world since we've last met.” I had hired him during my divorce from Sandra. “You've rubbed someone – something – the right way. Many of us try to win this thing's approval, and many of us fail.” He paused to clear his throat, then added: “I don't know where I, myself, stand in all this. I hope rightly, but you're in it.” He padded my back paternally.

“I'm not sure what to do next,” I confessed. “I want to go home, but have none to go back to.”

“You'll be cared for,” he advised. “In the meantime, dream, and let the others speak to you. You're becoming renown, for what it's worth. You'll have enemies, but you'll also have friends. It's best to keep your wits about you, now.”

I stopped him. It was worth asking. “Do you know what happened to Meg Whitman?”

“Why, of course, I do.” He seemed startled I hadn't even asked him. “Don't you?” When I said I didn’t, he told me. “Anyone who knows, knows. She joined the world.”

I wanted to burn my insides out.

When I asked him what that meant, he waved me off and said “You'll know soon enough.”

Eruta, Ero, Evolvo!

I became an occultist, over time.

Anyone who looked at me would never guess that, just as they would never guess I had taken part in the planning — or execution — of spectacles that would rival God’s sanctity on Earth.

I had spit in His face several times, and hung others out to dry who were deemed true believers.

Yet, a strange thing happens to those who fall on this path — they lose themselves.

One builds charisma, it is true, but they lose themselves.

Some people state I got that wrong, that with charisma you increase your personal power, and, to a degree, that's true — that's the spark needed to get the rest of the engine going… only the engine has been supplied by the dwellers on the threshold, the ones who sing and want us to hear their dark songs.

They're there, they've always been there, and I heard them.

Sometimes I sang a chorus, other times I led the whole goddamned band.

It's what my people thought of me when they pointed and said, “He's the bandleader.”

Toodle-fucking-oo.

That old life is, thereby, gone.

I haven't been much of an academic, so I was anonymous, which made me the perfectmark for their deeds.

I simply listened, like the old man suggested I do.

He's over a hundred years old now, and he's outlived everyone except his grand- and great-grandchildren.

Old Joe is his name.

He’s talked to Sam Shandy.

In my circles, that's important.

I suppose I should tell you what happened to me since those early days, but I don't want to. It's good to have mystery, because it keeps people talking.

But too much of it, and you end up imprisoned in a wicker man, awaiting death.

I linger there, along with a few others of the Stairway Society, writing our last stories.

Some, the stubborn ones, my old friends, have refused to write a word, and have swallowed their papers and broken their pens.

Others are panicked, and writing everything down furiously. They're pissed at the eaters of the group because they've wasted valuable pages with which to write down their life stories, their greatest discoveries, their last wills and testaments.

Not I.

I know the rest are going to take our last words, the last words of Ahcter Kull, and the others, and use it as kindle for the bonfire to incinerate us.

It’s building a tremendous charge.

The scribbling.

Our last words, our last stories, whittled, compressed, and focused by fear.

This is justified.

This is their world correcting itself, as they'd say.

They will spread those ashes everywhere, use them in their ceremonies, their rituals, to get themselves psychically horny with a charge.

I know — I’ve done it.

I've snuffed up the grounded bones of dead boys to just transcend and meet Willow Piper, that dubious bastard, and even his old surrogate, Malko.

I haven't heard from Malko in a long time.

I suppose I could use this space to write down something they'll scramble to seize from the flames.

So, I’ll try being human, for old time’s sake.

I miss my parents, I miss my old border collie named Alfie, I miss my wives, and I miss my lovers – my real lovers, not the hedonists or sex magicians I have encountered on the way.

I miss Meg Whitman, whoever she happened to be, because she initiated me when she lustfully whispered those three words in my ear, so I could experience the world as she experienced it.

Should I repeat them now?

No, I shouldn’t.

I should, instead, repeat my own name.

Or, perhaps, another’s.

Juan Carlos González Junior is the author of the The Lost Dreams .