Brett Petersen
THE SPIRIT CONJURING WORKSHOP
“Welcome all to our first Spirit-Conjuring Workshop!” The group chat app showed Leslie’s face, but the space around her, as with everyone else, was dimly lit. “It’s the night after Halloween which happened to fall on a full moon: the perfect climate for spirit activity.”
All the lights in my apartment were turned off except for a gooseneck lamp attached to the larger lamp that ordinarily lit my bedroom. Since the gooseneck’s cone had melted off years ago, all that remained was a white light bulb not quite the warm yellow I would’ve preferred. We were supposed to have purchased candles for the purposes of the ritual, but I had opted out due to the abundance of books and papers in my close-quarters apartment.
“Does everyone have their altars set up?”
I had decided to use my bookshelf as my altar since my father had built it for me out of pieces of his father’s old desk. Since my grandfather had died of ALS at a relatively young age, I liked to think his spirit inhabited the bookshelf. What would he think of me using his desk to summon demons? Would he have had an open mind or brushed it off as silly superstition? The only way to find out for sure would be to contact his spirit instead of the demon I had chosen. As tempting as it was, I didn’t think he’d appreciate being roused from his eternal rest to answer such an unimportant request.
I had placed an image of the demon Amon on one of the middle shelves. The image was actually a card from a deck of demonology-themed divination cards I had bought myself a few months back. On the shelf below that was the demon’s seal which I had crudely drawn in pen on a sheet of computer paper. I had also stuck an unwrapped vegan rice krispie treat next to the seal as an offering. I had considered procuring a diabetes tester and giving my demon a drop of my blood, but I just never got around to it.
“How about your seals and your black salt?”
Leslie had recommended drawing a seal on the floor and sprinkling black salt around its rim to ward off negative influences, but I had neglected to purchase the salt, black pepper and cinnamon to mix with ash, or even draw the seal in the proscribed way.
I nodded in the affirmative. There was no way anyone would notice that I had none of these things. To protect myself against any malicious forces that might try to break through the seal, I drew a card from my angel divination deck at random and stuck it next to Amon’s likeness. The angel I drew was Hahaiah, the angel of refuge, dreams and mysteries. Since we were tapping into the realm of dreams when summoning our spirits, I figured this angel would be a perfect guardian to the demonic counterpart.
“Now let us read the letters of intent we have written for our spirits as well as our incantations which will draw them into this world.”
After a few people read theirs, I cleared my throat and proudly read mine. If there was any aspect of the workshop I had taken seriously, it was these compositions.
“Dear Amon:
I recognize the fact that you brought Alison and I together under the guise of “Brad,” the
demon we came to “adopt” as a private joke between us. However, that relationship ended up not synchronizing with my will and, after much pushback on her end, we finally
parted ways. As much as I am ashamed to ask, I humbly request that you bring another woman into my life: a woman whom I will love with all my heart and want to stay with: possibly for the rest of my life. I was and still am grateful for your attempt last time, and I know you can do it again. I thank you for your time and energy, and hope this offering of sweets will show my gratitude for your services.
Sincerely, your friend from the mortal realm,
Palmer Bennington”
“Great!” said Leslie. “Now, let’s hear your incantation.”
“O, Amon,” I began: “my friend from the other side: help me find love in this dreary world. Use your tail to ensnare the heart of a woman. Forgive me for squandering the gift you gave before. I appreciate your effort, but she just wasn’t right. If your powers are focused enough, you can draw another to my heart. I’ve heard that love is your special talent; you did it once and you can do it again. You tried your best and though it didn’t work, I know you can help me if you look into my heart.
“I offer you a treat, and I abstain from junk food as a means of currying your favor. I hope this will be enough and that you will acknowledge my commitment. I hope to see your presence soon in the world around me as you weave your magic. You are my friend, and I hope you feel the same. Until we meet for real, I bid you farewell.”
Some of the women in the group chat looked confused and annoyed. Leslie asked if anyone else wanted to share. After a few more rounds of letters and incantations it was finally time to begin the ritual proper.
“Alright,” said Leslie, “now if you’ve got your black salt, you’re going to want to sprinkle it around the edge of your circle like this,”
She demonstrated and the others followed suit, but I only pretended to.
“Next, we’re going to walk around the edges of our circles twice clockwise, dispersing the salt.”
Since I didn’t have salt or a proper circle, the only thing I could think of to do was walk around my apartment twice. As I did so, I flipped on some lights. I forgot to walk through the bathroom the first time around, so I did it the second time. If my lack of salt and a circle were two nails ripped out of the coffin of a bloodthirsty beast, this was the third: the fourth could be forced up by its brute strength alone.
When we returned to our altars, Leslie began to recite a poem she had written as a means of guiding our spirits across the threshold of the mortal realm:
“Spirits from beyond.”
We repeated each line back to her as she read it.
“Join us tonight!
We call to you
To bring us the light.
Enter now
Our circles of salt.
Be here now
In you we exalt.
We offer our hands
At your command.
Use our eyes
To see firsthand.
Speak free now,
The time is right!”
I half expected my light bulb to start flickering, but of course it didn’t. Upon reading my letter and incantation and hearing everybody else’s and Leslie’s words of conjuring, I did feel as though I had entered into a state of mind similar to meditation but more spooky. It was as though I was actually standing in a candlelit room among a coven of witches with black robes circling around a salted pentagram with a goat skull at its center.
After freewriting in our journals for ten minutes, Leslie had us walk around our circles counter-clockwise as a closing ritual. As members of the group spoke parting words to each other, I was certain that nothing had gone wrong with my conjuring. Hahaiah was a qualified bodyguard, and when it all came down to it, this whole thing was just for fun. Leslie wasn’t a real witch and there was no actual conjuring going on here: just a bunch of smoke and mirrors with the trappings of magickal ritual designed to spark creativity and nothing more.
When the session was over, I turned off my phone and went to the kitchen to brush my teeth and take my meds. The air in my apartment was a bit chillier than usual, but that was to be expected in early November. I spat into the sink, and the glob of toothpaste foam sat at the rim of the drain like a slime creature hesitating at the lip of an abyss. Two bubbles had formed in the glob: they stared at me like frog eyes operated by a reptilian pseudo brain. I flipped on the hot water, but the glob clung tenaciously to the drain rim. I cupped my hand under the faucet and dumped handfuls of scalding water on it until it finally went down.
“The ritual must’ve spooked me,” I said to myself. “But the demon I summoned is a love demon. My imagination is getting the better of me. Leslie did say yesterday that we’d start seeing things in the real world after we performed the conjuring. Spirit worlds, especially those where demons live, might seem scary to us because we’re not used to dealing with extradimensional forces. But I’ve just got to remember, Amon wants to help me. From the research I did on him, he seems to be one of the more even-tempered demons in the Goetia.”
I filled a glass with cold water and downed my pills. I turned off the lights once again, crawled into bed and activated my bedtime melodies app which plays soothing music to help you get to sleep. My circadian rhythm had been thrown out of whack a long time ago, and sleep only came to me as soon as the sun rose. But this night, I actually felt tired enough to close my eyes and drift off: a moment as rare as a skittish and colorful bird caught on camera by an amateur photographer. I pulled the covers over myself and relished in the softness of the pillow which usually felt like rusty nails against my bearded cheek.
ɷ ɷ ɷ
My undiagnosed sleep disorder makes it so that there is never anything in between wakefulness and dreaming. One minute, I’m wide awake and the next, my thoughts stop making sense. When my thoughts become random and jumbled, that’s when I know I am entering a dream state.
The dream I was having was loads of fun: I was in a skate park, riding my BMX bicycle, doing jumps and tricks on half pipes. In the dream world, it made total sense for me to be doing this, but in real life, I knew I wasn’t in any shape to do crazy tricks with bikes. I could ride them in a straight line, but that was about it. I was pretty sure these dreams, which occurred frequently, symbolized my subconscious yearning to partake in youthful activities that I might be locked out of forever due to being out of shape and in my thirties. I often wondered upon waking if I could still learn to do tricks on a BMX, or if that opportunity had eclipsed a long time ago. These dream sequences were likely just unfulfilled desires left over from sixth grade when I played a lot of extreme sports video games. It would probably be best to let the dreams die and focus on hobbies more suited to people over thirty.
I positioned myself and my bike at the edge of a quarter pipe leading down to a massive ramp overlooking a pond. My goal was to jump the pond and land successfully on the other side. But so far, neither I nor any of the others had been able to do it. A guy holding a camera gave the word, I kicked off, and down the slope I went. The wind rushing through my beard and hitting my face reminded me of riding my bike as a child and doing wheelies off a curb in the housing development near my old neighborhood.
I had reached the bottom of the slope and was pedaling furiously to build up speed. I concentrated all my attention on popping the front wheel up at just the right moment to afford me enough air to clear the pond. As soon as the tire met the edge of the ramp, I kicked it up just as I had intended. My bike and I flew over the pond, and I couldn’t help thinking of E.T. It seemed as though my tires were aligned perfectly to connect with the ramp on the other side, but at the last second, something strange happened. I felt a sort of pressure in my left ear, like a worm or leech was attempting to crawl in.
I let go of the handlebars and the bike nosedived into the bank just shy of the ramp. My chest slammed into the handlebars and the bike and I slid backwards into the pond. As I sank into the cold, greasy water, my ear throbbed from the alien probe that had tried to penetrate my mind. The pond began to bubble, and suddenly I was pulled under as if the pond was a bathtub with the drain cap removed. The sensation of being sucked into the hole in the center of the pond was like being swallowed by a giant anus.
I tumbled through the squishy bowels of the world beneath the pond until I was shat out by yet another anus back onto my bed. I sat with a racing heartbeat clutching the covers like a scared child. I glanced frantically around the room. The shadows I was accustomed to seeing in my darkened bedroom were all different somehow. The noise of something falling reverberated throughout my apartment. I turned my head toward the door. Dare I go out and investigate? Was Amon responsible for this? Or what if, because I had performed the ritual completely wrong, another demon had followed Amon through the seal and was now wreaking havoc in my dreams and in my apartment? I had to go out there and find out for sure. Earlier in the day, I had placed a glass bottle haphazardly on top of the garbage already piled in the can. Perhaps natural air currents had made it fall? Either way, I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep until I surveyed my apartment for demon activity.
I opened my bedroom door and saw that the bottle on top of the garbage had indeed fallen. After picking it up and placing it back in the can, I turned toward the living room. My heart leapt when I noticed a strange shadow in the corner of the room near my guitars. Anxiety seized my throat as I reached for the light switch, and that anxiety was one hundred percent justified when light flooded the room and revealed the thing that was casting the shadow.
It was a nude, humanoid figure about three feet tall. Its head was human-shaped with no ears or other features save for two black pinprick eyes that shone like the bodies of bloated ticks. Its skin was pale with a network of veins sprawled across it. Its penis was a tiny nub dripping viscous yellow liquid onto the floor. Its arms terminated in eyeless snakes whose mouths were thankfully closed, and its feet had two toes each with a bloated tick eye in between them.
I took a couple of cautious steps toward it, but before I could get any closer, it began to speak.
“Sooo, you call the Great Amon to get you girlfriend?” it hissed.
“Uh … y-yeah.” I cursed my nervous stutter.
“Mortal fool!!! This beneath my magnitude. I not Reddit group!”
“What good are you then?” I ask, scared.
“Get job, clean apartment, then maybe girl come without dying from the stink!”
I rolled my eyes. “You sound like Jose, the groundskeeper of my building.”
“Jose get more pussy than you ever will!”
Amon made a clicking sound approximating laughter.
“Get out of my house, demon, before I plant my foot in your face!” I yell, shaking my fist at the damned thing.
“Gladly.” The ceiling began to pucker like a sphincter and Amon floated up into it and was swallowed as if he had never been there.
I stormed into my bedroom and pulled out my demon deck.
“Amon is not that great after all. What a loser. I’ll just summon another demon who will be able to find the girl for me.”
I shuffled the deck and drew a card. It was the Bael: a demon who grants invisibility. How was I supposed to find love if I was invisible? I considered drawing another demon card but then remembered one of the basic rules of cartomancy: you can’t just keep drawing cards until you get one that’s favorable to you. I sighed. Maybe next week.