Cultic, Page 2

his neck and ears. The hairs on the top of his head felt like they were being brushed by a gentle hand. He swallowed a gulp of air, steeled himself and continued.

  "Are you still there?"

  yes

  "Someone, someone is going to try and kill me?"

  no

  "Someone --wait." He paused for a moment, considering. "Will someone kill me?"

  yes

  "Do I know this person?"

  no

  "Have I seen this person?"

  yes

  "Is it a man?"

  yes

  Nikolai pondered this. That older boy in the class.. I don't remember seeing him before. "Will this happen within the next month?"

  yes

  "Will this murder happen within the next week?"

  yes

  He felt the chill creep up the hairs on both his arms, and a slight tickling sensation on the back of his ears.

  "Will this murder happen tomorrow?"

  no

  "Will it happen... will it happen within three days?"

  yes

  His heart was pounding fast, slamming up against his chest as if it were trying to escape. "Is there anything I can do to stop it?"

  yes

  "If I find this person, I can stop them from killing me?"

  yes

  He sat there on the floor for hours, lost in thought. The candles burned down, the incense dissipated and the bright white rays of dawn slowly filtered into his room.

  He got up from his cross-legged position and stretched. He wiped the tears from his eyes and went to the next room to make coffee.

  As the locksmith drilled out the new deadlock bolt on the door Nikolai called up his good friend Simon who worked at one of the used bookstores over on 57th. He needed the name and a ride to a good botanica where he could get two prayer cards to St. Michael, a lodestone and some angelica, rosemary and rue. As he dialed he held three freshly-plucked hairs from his head and a small headshot from a Thelemite newsletter he had reluctantly contributed to years ago. He normally wouldn't stoop to this level but he felt he needed to try everything he could think of to stop this.

  Simon's answering machine picked up. He hung up without leaving a message.

  After the locksmith was finished he wrote a check for the man and bolted to the Div School Pub for the morning meeting. He was late, but no later than usual, and slunk silently into a chair at one of the tables in the back. Some of the busybodies were discussing the logistics of tomorrow's big book sale but he took no notice, choosing instead to study the most minute details of anyone who crossed through the pub door.

  Most of them were students, grad students from the nearby quads pursuing advanced degrees in fields only recently separated from his own academic pursuits, birthed less than a few hundred years ago from the womb of spirit and the occult. English. Physics. Mathematics. Musical Theory. Comparative Literature. Chemistry.

  Now of course the students think of his pursuits as 'quaint' or 'erudite.' Nikolai smiled to himself. A thousand years ago --heck, a hundred years ago-- these students would have screamed in orgiastic ecstasy as they watched him burn at the stake. His personal library, his writings, all in a code only he and a handful of other practitioners could decipher and understand. His work erased after his death, meaning posterity would have to re-learn the basics of his craft from scratch after his untimely demise at the hands of an errant wagon-wheel or plague-ridden flea.

  A young girl walked in dressed entirely in black, with the Incan symbol of greeting tattooed on her arm next to a Celtic cross and another symbol without a real linguistic history but understood well enough. Bats' wings emerging from a rather morose looking human skull with red ruby eyes and, inexplicably, eyebrows and an angry frown. She glanced over to the Divinity School professors passionately discussing the organizational details of the book sale, then lost interest in them forever, turning her attention to a medium cup of coffee, a bag of skittles and a raisin muffin. Nikolai had not seen this girl before but he had seen dozens of her clones before in his classes, with overly-romanticized visions of what heresy really was. She has no ideas of what dangers we true heretics put ourselves in every moment of our lives, and afterlives.

  The girl was followed shortly by a well-muscled male in his 20s, wearing an ill-fitting long-sleeved dress shirt and pleated dockers. The man looked his way, seemed embarassed and turned away. Bought a soda, refused the change, and left as quickly as he came. That's rather odd behavior. And only carrying one book, no backpack.

  A thin, pale male undergrad passed the awkward male on his way out, paying no attention to the professors loudly debating the placement of booths and looking longingly behind the pub's counter for someone. Probably a girl. The thin boy stood there for a while, not ordering anything, rocking from leg to leg until his curiosity was satisfied and he walked out. As he neared the pub door he glanced directly at Nikolai, past the loudmouthed talkers between them, and his gaze lingered for a fraction of a second before he disappeared into the hallway outside. What... what did he look at me like that for? Was he merely pretending to wait for someone behind the counter, to throw me off his trail? Why did he single me out of all these twenty-odd professors?

  Before a minute passed the early-lunch crowd streamed in, and Nikolai could not take it any longer. He politely mumbled an excuse and got up to the bewildered stares of the other faculty, and pushed past a young man in a black White Sox baseball cap and another with the name and insignia of his high school emblazoned on his bookbag. Nikolai walked out into the hallway and saw dozens of people but not a familiar face. I'm tired. I need to re-focus. My mind is not mine own right now.

  He ducked into the men's restroom twenty feet down the hall from the pub, picked the farthest stall from the door and bolted the latch. He hung his bag on the hook, pulled down his pants and sat down. A small amount of urine trickled into the bowl as he held his face in his hands and closed his eyes. Focus. You're becoming a paranoid. Someone else entered the restroom and turned on a faucet. No one is out to get you. If there were, they would have got you long ago. In an alley in Gdansk, or in that basement in Krakow. The faucet stopped, and the sounds of the paper towel dispenser echoed through the tiny bathroom. You've got many enemies, but.. no, no. No. You are not that important. No one would take that risk to eliminate you. Your articles have their critics, and the death threats from angry American southerners, French wiccans, former Soviet bloc dictactors... no, you're not that important. The center of the universe is not here in this last stall in a div school men's bathroom. You are not--

  Nikolai stopped. He held his breath. The person at the faucet was still there, standing, waiting. Less than ten feet away from him. He could not see his shoes, or which way they were pointing. Towards me? Was I thinking aloud? Does this person have special gifts, the ability to sense fear like a dog?

  He let out a false cough and waited for a response. The person at the faucet said nothing, did nothing. No paper towels, no running water, no squeak of the shoes on the filthy tiled floor. Nikolai waited for a short breath of eternity before he stood up, pulled up his pants and buckled his belt. He inhaled deeply, grabbed the bag from the hook on the inside of the door and opened it.

  "Professor!"

  The slouching young man staring at him was six and a half feet tall or taller, with short, curly black hair and glasses far too small for his angular face. It was Grisha, a Slovenian student who had taken several courses from him and always had the most interesting questions. Questions so radically different from the rest that he often thought Grisha had tapped in to some alien intelligence, acting as the oddly-shaped mouthpiece for some exotic spirit from Sirius or beyond.

  "Grisha, I, uh.."

  "I'm sorry, Professor." Grisha reached his huge hand into the pocket of his overcoat, with a sudden look of extreme sadness on his unshaven face. Nikolai flinched.

  "I'm so sorry," Grisha said as he removed a pack of tissues, took one out and blew his nose. "I was n
ot able to take your Comparative Religion class this semester due to my student-work schedule at the library."

  Nikolai exhaled, a broad grin covering his face.

  "Oh? That's too bad, Grisha. I have always look--"

  "Excuse me, Professor. The crucial functions of my biological form demand much of me this morning," he said as he hastily pushed past him and into the waiting stall. Nikolai watched him close the stall door, smiled to himself, then washed his hands and went out.

  She giggled. "Maybe it's the Knights Templar. Or the College of Cardinals. Rome has good reason to want you dead."

  He smiled at her, then looked down at his food. Ziti and salmon in a light lemon cream sauce, with a side of two California rolls and a small handmade ravioli salad. Forty-two dollars. He could get seven orders of burgers & beers with that at Bill's. Or two worthless New Age books on modern spirituality written by some upper-middle-class kayaking enthusiast from Santa Fe who gleefully mixes occult systems thousands of years in the making together like spirit soup just because they prominently feature the number 3.

  He didn't want to know what her entry cost. Still, if it really was the end of the world, they would eat overpriced luxury food and MasterCard would eat the bill. And like it.

  She must have noticed his lack of response. "Are you, you're not serious, are you? I mean, this isn't the first time."

  "No."

  "'No' you're not serious?"

  "No, I, I don't know. No, it's not the first