Sciomancy Nights
evenings with the eminent and the imminent dead
1. An Evening With Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) “Who told you I was dead?,” said Ambrose Bierce with more than practiced ire in his voice. “You'd not believe how much this tryst annoys my spirit! I’m a cloud that must disperse.” “You’ll find that taking leave is not a choice you’ll have this evening. Sorry, Mr. Bierce — we merely seek the pleasure of the Void’s great cynic’s presence, not enjoyed for years.” The spirit raved, “You brought me here for answers, not for sport — to erase the question marks in books and heads by catching truth in weirs of sciomancy. But beware of sharks like black holes filled with teeth: a ghost remembers injustice, and harrows its tormentors.” We banished Bierce with our apologies, and vowed we wouldn’t seize the night for days. 2. An Evening With Archimedes (287?-212 B.C.) “Screw it, man, we can’t go back that far! Isn’t there a ceiling on the powers we bought, a catch to every gain? We’d better stick to the last two centuries, or hatch a man of worms our tricks may fail to bury.” “Said with feeling, but don’t be so perverse. We’ve lost our souls already, what’s to stop us?” So Archimedes, dripping from the bath, appeared and grabbed a towel from the rack. “What’s this?,” he asked, regarding the toilet. We flushed it, then explained. He raised his eyebrows, then the porcelain lid of the tank. “Ah, my principle of buoyancy at work! The float’s the key. Eureka!” Then he ran around the room, as jubilant as a young gazelle. But what the Hell — we flushed him back to early days. 3. An Evening With Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) As water from a spring dispels the murk of darker waters, our sciomancy pushed away the night. Its turbid, frantic fingers failed at last, their pointless interlacing clench withdrawn to corners of the room, and Aldous Huxley stood there large as life. Aphasic with a cancer- clotted throat, poor Aldous held his jaw with wincing pain. At once we took the spirit back in time, and spongy darkness withered from his face. But younger Aldous hadn’t seen the light, or heard the whine of bardo dogs who hunger for the soul. We wanted more than anything to see his pupils dilate from the final shot, the gift of acid from his loving wife who knew as he that dying’s just a glitch, a transitory bummer in the now of being. He’d asked for LSD by intramuscular injection just before he died, and the doctor’s nod was all that Laura needed. No other man had ever died like that, embracing naked truth and ripping off the mask of ego, second-guessing God. Courage like that is worth a sciomancer’s soul, and ours for arts forgotten had been sold. We wanted knowledge in the bargain, lore Aldous could provide abundantly if properly studied. We folded time and Aldous died again, his pupils gulping light we couldn’t see, a light beyond the boundaries of the room. In every corner angry darkness writhed and twisted like Ulysses at the mast, its throes eclipsing secrets of the soul as Aldous’ pupils failed to pinpoints once again, and nothing we could do could make him speak. We played his death perhaps a thousand times, and tried in vain to see what dead men saw. The corners of the room were closing in, the clear zone shrinking by degrees, and frantic fingers played with Aldous now. We watched his tattered specter slowly fade, reduced at last to nothing but the eyes, the twin black holes we couldn’t seem to plumb. Expanding impossibly, their humors filled the room with sudden darkness, and then the lamplight shone once more, but only on the walls and floor and ceiling of our days. 4. An Evening With Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) We hated most the middlemen from Hell who coarse-controlled the sciomantic rites and took requests like butlers at a wake. They always seemed delighted to oblige. Though each was different, all were ugly wights, their faces blue or green with bottle flies. “Honest Abe it is,” the lamia buzzed. “Fine tune him as you please, and have some fun!” She nictitated, laughed and disappeared, and Mr. Lincoln filled her space instead. As waxen as a dummy from Toussaud’s, he stood there frozen, statuesque in time, with something small just inches from his head. “Booth’s bullet! I’ll be damned. Let’s deflect it from its course and see what happens.” We interposed a brick and held it there, releasing for the nonce our hold on time, and Honest Abe shook brick dust from his hair — and disappeared. A whining dog appeared. “You’re dead,” it said. “The bullet ricocheted improbably, and all of Hell’s amazed. The night has come to dun you for the days.”
Sciomancy Nights originally appeared in Intermix, v. 1, n. 5.
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