“I’m sorry, an energy what?” Gus says, as incredulously as a human being can muster.
I pull the emails I’d printed at the office from my bag, “Uh, hmm, vortex, an energy vortex.”
“What does that even mean?” Gus says, grabbing the pages. “Sedona? Aleister Crowley? Was this woman on something?”
“I don’t know Gus, she just seemed like your average new ager, but she also has several history degrees. My best guess is whatever happened a year ago that got her fired—happened in Sedona. Still, I was able to go online and see Crowley was indeed in the Golden Dawn, at least briefly before he went off to do his, er, well you know.”
Gus and I have never had any type of romance between us, not even close. The idea of bringing up Crowley’s flavor of sex magic in conversation was about appealing as doing so with your parents. So I left it at that. Gus, as is typical of him, didn’t even notice.
“Can I see the book again, I want to see if the idea that it’s some type of key and not maps gets me anywhere.”
“Of course,” Gus says, pulling the book up from behind the counter. A man and his daughter walk up to the counter with a Harry Potter book. Gus smiles and turns to help and a short line forms behind them.
I pull up a stool and take a seat. The book’s pages feel old in my hands, like they’ve been sitting in a desert cabin for decades. It doesn’t feel magical in my hands, but I get a weird sense of power when I hold it. Absurd, I know, and certainly not a real feeling, but I can’t help myself.
I pull Margo Linet’s witchcraft book out of my bag too. There’s nothing on Owl in here, but it does include some graphs and images of different rituals. I haven’t had any luck getting a hold of her personally, but the only way I could even think to do so was pose as a journalist and call her publisher. I left a message yesterday, but I don’t have high hopes of hearing anything back.
Most of Linet’s book is about the after effect of magic—or at least events she suggests were caused by magic—big stuff, too, ranging from World War II to the earthquake that leveled San Francisco. It’s the type of fringe book that’s so absurd you’re impressed the type of person who’d write the book was able to keep it together long enough to finish it.
I don’t think anything in here is real, nor do I think anything Owl did amounted to more than a bunch of bored dandies coming up with new excuses to travel the world and hide their wealth. But stupid or not, I’m still curious. Plus, the silly mystery behind this absurd book is pretty much a culmination of everything Gus and I talk about.
I’m caught by a crude drawing of a ceremony in Linet’s chapter about California wildfires. It depicts ten people performing a ritual standing on ten points in the world, which when connected form a sort of makeshift crossed-star—the sort of thing you lazily write on a kid’s third grade essay about penguins—with the five points on the inside of the star opening up the portals that apparently caused the fires.
The idea of a portal opened by witches to start the California wildfires of 1987 is goofy, but the shape of the ritual is familiar. If you connect each of the made-up cities in the Owl’s first map, you get the same star.
Gus finally clears out his line as the store abruptly empties out, “Any big discoveries?” he says, with no tone of mockery.
“Actually,” I pause, “Maybe? Look at this, if you connect each of these cities, you form a star,” I trace over the cities without writing on the paper, but I can see Gus stops breathing for a second when my pencil gets close, “Melinda suggested maybe this wasn’t a map, but a key, so what if it’s a key to their rituals?”
“Okay, but where does that leave us?”
“I don’t know, but it’s cool, right?”
Gus flips the Owl book back to the first page, the only page with actual words. He reads part of the text aloud, “Perhaps there is a day where someone can take these maps and the work we’ve put into them and use it to open up doors to new worlds.” He looks up to the sky before adding, “I initially read this as a sort of metaphor, like, you know, ‘we’ll open your mind with our vast well of secret knowledge and that will open doors’ but now, I almost think it’s literal.”
“As in, unlock the rituals in this book and you’ll open doors to another world?
Gus laughs, “Exactly. I’m not saying it works, I’m just suggesting that’s perhaps what the intent is.”
