A N O T H E R   T R I C K Y   D A Y
                                
     You ever have one of those days when everything you say comes out at exactly the wrong
  time? When every joke you make just gets in the way? When every effort you make towards causing a
  trivial aspect of your life to move more smoothly turns out to only make things that much more
  difficult? You know, the kind of day that starts out in the shower, when pouring shampoo becomes an
  exercise because it all gets sucked out of your hand by the vacuum you left in the bottle? I'm convinced
  that the universe will end on such a day.
     This is no idle speculation. Granted, I did no numerological matrices with which to synthesize
  the predication of the ultimate End. I divined no patterns from randomly-strewn symbols. I teased no
  forbidden lore from the perfidious tongues of coerced spirits. I didn't even read the weather report.
  Rather, it was on a day like this that I came that close.
     The morning started off with an everyman mortal war in the shower, fighting to keep the
  temperature of the water between its freezing and boiling points. The shampoo was a two-squeeze job.
  Before the cold air hit me through the towel-drying, I knew I'd be stuck in traffic at least twice. 
     I squealed my tires before leaving my street--and I own a Datsun, for chrissake. Work went as
  usual, keeping me late for a change. The afore-mentioned conversational grievances occurred
  consistently until I retired to my cubicle in silent, steadfast tedium.
     Coffee joined my dinner in a glimmering anticipation of the evening; the second cup actually
  cooled before I finished it, choosing an inopportune moment to clue me in to the impending arrival of
  winter. The whole time I had no phone calls, no interruptions; there was no mail to read, and my
  doorstep had a newspaper-sized void for the first time in months. Must have been a good issue.
     After dinner I tried to relax--itself a very simple task, since I was working on forgetting the
  day already. I breathed slowly and deeply, maybe ten times a minute. The exhalations were formed by
  my barely-parted lips into a mantra that I had in the past found to be soothing. This shall pass. I
  pictured silvery energy arcing up my body with every breath in, sparking from my fingers in streams of
  liquid fire with every breath out. This shall pass. My bones locked into place, relieving strain from my
  muscles, until my body was as a tentative, malleable statue. This shall pass. The moon was full, cancer
  was high, and I was ready.
     Midnight approached slowly, like a bubble of air working its way up through a tar pit. I
  dressed in a light grey robe, the lightest terrycloth I could find, and stood briefly in the darkness of my
  room, curling my bare toes in the short brown carpet. When my eyes adjusted, I took a deep breath and
  lit twelve tall, thin dripless white candles to cut through the gloom. Willow joined sandalwood in the
  brazier, smoldering quietly on the grey coals. With powdered chalk I spread the circle across the floor,
  drew a rather clumsy sign in the middle. I repeated the sign on my chest with white grease-paint,
  cramping it into the V formed by my robe. Then I stopped.
     For a long time I was still, just standing there in my room, moonlight bathing my face through
  the drawn curtains, the candles flickering a rather inappropriate light around the room. Perhaps
  magnesium would be more fitting. My eyes flitted fractionally open; through the slits of opaque flesh I
  studied the jerking, angular pattern on the ground before me, commanding it, immersing in it,
  transcending it. The lines burned themself in bas-relief upon my fixed eyes, penetrated to the buried
  animal mind as my higher faculties elevated above the constraints of physical awareness. Sensations left
  me; the awareness of no color, no breeze, no boundaries nor dimensions reached me, and I became the
  fixed point around which the universe pivots, my autonomic functions carrying on their affairs like
  relatives in a foreign land.
     Unaware of the breath being exhaled, I exuded the power word, the word of focus, my lips and
  throat and entire body quivering with the emanations. Hhhrrruuuuu, my being vibrated slowly.
  Sandalwood creeped through my senses, clouding my perception, creating an impenetrable haze through
  which I called. The syllable racked my frame again, and I felt a brief thrill, an exhilaration that
  breached contact through indescribable barriers.
     I began to call. The words I spoke were not words, but patterns hidden within words, a verbal
  tapestry of intricate complexity with which I wove, through a tongue practiced and tireless, the
  invocation which was my lure. The pattern twisted and turned, touching briefly upon symbol and
  allegory before convoluting upon itself to ravel a captivating, domineering thread in amongst the
  scintillating entwined strands. Pattern became power, rhythm became modulation, tone became control.
     My feet sank into the carpet with only a vague realization of the transition. The snap back to
  reality was a notification of arrival, the bringing of the conscious mind into a position with which to
  encounter its objective. I paused, my pupils alighted on the glyph once, briefly, then I closed my eyes in
  expectation. And felt nothing. 
     Startled, I sought further, but only heard the echoes of my empty house, only reached the dark
  extents of my own skull. My lids shot open, I looked around, expectantly for some physical
  manifestation. The ritual had to have worked; I felt the contact, worked the trap expertly--surely some
  intelligence or spirit had been confined to my plane. But the room was as normal. I had certainly slurred
  parts of the incantation in my anxious haste, and the sigil was a bit crude, but the results should not
  have been so drastically affected...
     Dejected, more than a little distraught, I was on the brink of scraping the chalk enclosure with
  the toe of my foot when I caught movement on the walls, near my looming shadow. Pausing I looked,
  but could find nothing out of the ordinary; merely my extended bluish shadow dancing in the flickering
  light of the candles.
     There--in the mirror! I turned, looked in time to see a black something shoot across the face
  ofthe mirror, running across the face of the reflected reality from the inside. It made a quick circuit of
  the room, a black angle of much more monstrous proportions than I had originally guessed, flitting from
  mirror to mirror, leaving little more than an impression of a blued-charcoal bone here, a pale star-like
  eye there. I stepped into the hall, saw it flicking through the bathroom and hall closet mirrors, the
  refrigerator handles, even the glittering tines of the fork I had just washed after dinner.
     Legs unsteady, heart beating perhaps a trifle unhealthily, I stepped back into my room, stood
  before the circle, uncertain of what to do next. Luckily, it was done for me. A hot wind, searing like a
  thousand suns, tore through my room, scorching papers and singling my hair, followed a fractional
  second later by a similar wind of the biting cold of the void between stars. The two fronts chased each
  other in ferocity about my room, throwing my possessions into disarray and reducing my metabolism to
  a palpitating chaos. The winds cycled in a frenzy to close to that of a hurricane, then ceased abruptly
  and sharply, without the expected noise of a thunderclap. The silence of the apartment seemed
  thunderous, and my ears popped helplessly. All I was aware of was a presence, a weight in the very air,
  an occurence both incomprehensibly vast and undeniably powerful.
     What plane is this?
     I paused. That wasn't normal. Not that any of this was. I reached out tentatively with my mind,
  felt a palpable sense of cosmic indifference. The next words that thundered through my mind like
  distant explosions caused some inner fiber of my being to strive to obey.
     Answer me, mortal.
     This was no mere genie or intelligence, no spirit to bend to my will. This was a being used to
  command, a fearless archdaemon which held my living frame in contempt rather than awe. The old trick
  of inspiring through creation, demonstrating mastery of the principle quality of living creatures, would
  have no effect here.
     Do you not value your sanity?
     Something had gone wrong. Very wrong. How does one coerce a jaded spirit? "Do not attempt
  to threaten me," I conveyed in my most casual, most self-assured voice. Always pretend to have the
  upper hand, especially when faced with unruly daemons. "You have no power in this realm beyond that
  which I have alloted you." Which was all true, of course; the circle charged with psychic force restricted
  its movement until it signed a contract with me, upon which I would free it to perform its service and
  depart.
     You cannot possibly think a mere diagram can contain me, the creature boomed amusedly.
  Things were starting to look bad. You must be accustomed to the lower spirits; they are bound by
  their superstitious fear, their ethno-centric view of Reality. The very fact that you exist leads them
  to believe that you retain power over them. True, I thought, but hardly common knowledge.
  Especially in the nether realms...They have not roamed the dimensions, not spanned the cosmos;
  they have not seen the things I have seen. They are limited by their naive view of what is possible,
  even what is probable. 
     I sighed. As frightening as this was, it was getting old.
     I have no such limitations. It paused to let that sink in. Great, I thought. Not only have I
  unwittingly attracted the attention of a Thing From Beyond which undoubtedly had come to gnaw on
  my soul, but it was a melodramatic Thing as well. How do you tell a pan-dimensional being that it talks
  like a B-rate horror actor?
     The daemon materialized in the chalk circle before me, a hulking black cloud that could not
  possibly fit in my small one-bedroom apartment.  I was starting to get nervous. A daemon materializing
  is bad news; they usually are things that are not meant to be seen, especially by creatures used to only
  three dimensions. This one was no exception; my head ached and reeled at the confusing, pulsating
  vision. It gleamed, smirked smugly, blew symbolically. The chalk dust flew up in a thunderclap, leaving
  me with no circle on my floor and grey dust on my front. Crap, I thought. This is the big one.
     I needed time to think. "How can a black cow eat green grass and give out white milk which
  turns into yellow butter?" I asked, hoping to gain time through its pondering.
     Bother me not with your petty pigmentation concerns.
     Okay. "Did Adam and Eve have navels?" I shot out, meanwhile back-pedalling for a plan. 
     It's hard to describe a derisive snort from a being older than your sun, so I won't try. Why the
  Hell should they? Bad. Really bad. Most spirits are paralyzed by fear at the mere mention of the nether
  dimensions; this one tossed references around like a drunken truck driver.
     I gave it one more try. "If a train is leaving Chicago," I began, backing out of the room. "At 11
  am in the morning, with five thousand pounds of--"
     I was in the bathroom when it cut me off. Six, it replied, rattling off one of the holy perfect
  numbers like it was an article. I returned quickly. The bottle of shampoo was in my right hand, just in
  case it showed me an eye. Supra-cosmic being or not, I know what hurts.
     There it was, filling up my room and more, lurking expansively. I reached behind my dresser,
  pulled out my black magic mirror with my left hand, placed it where the circle used to be, an ebony
  circle on brown carpet, like a causal drain in the center of my room. Nice color, the daemon said,
  showing no fear at all. Kinda like that.The walls of my room were black. Suddenly. I almost didn't
  notice. Then my floor, my robe, all my stuff...
     This was it, I was pulling out all stops. Quick, while it was toying with me, smug in its pure
  superiority. Time to do to it what animals always do to the surprise of us humans: use pure cunning. I
  closed my eyes, hummed at the bare reaches of audibility, slowing my heart to the beat of the mantra I
  was pounding through my chest, my throat, through every inch of my body, muscles tense and
  quivering.
     What are you doing?I ignored him and concentrated harder, envisioning the change in reality I
  wanted to make. This was no mere calling, no summons; it was spiritual architecture, forcing a physical
  manifestation through sheer willpower upon the fundamental mutability of the universe. You know, the
  stuff quantum physics is working towards.
     It's not easy, even without the time pressure and the threat of the immolation of my soul
  hanging imminently over my head like the blade of a guillotine that has stuck momentarily in its gritty
  downward track. Still, it was working. Not that the change was that much different: a mirror is a gate of
  sorts, to a parallel yet reversed dimension, existing purely in the visual spectrum. The gate I was
  transforming it to led to a dimension that existed primarily in other sensory areas, most of them
  unavailable to the human form. Slowly, uncertainly, spurred on only by the aggravated mental strain that
  forces perspiration from my brow as if by sheer prssure, the nightly glass changes, loses surface gloss,
  gains shadowy depth, an inert promise of transposition.
     You know I'll never go in there.
     Cool air floated up from the mirror, scented with the phermones of creatures I'd never want to
  see. I clenched my left fist, held out to True North as a reference, and pointed the first two fingers of
  my right hand at the mirror; with the rest of my hand I emptied the bottle of shampoo on the floor,
  creating a runny, greasy pile that would perfume my room for weeks to come with a sweetened
  chemical rank.
     I jerked my head up to where the daemon stood with a bemused expression, met its ethereal
  eyes, locked both of my fists straight out towards it.
     It smirked. This is getting you nowhere it began, then stopped suddenly as I released my grip
  on the shampoo bottle with a vindictive grin. 12 fluid ounces of air rushed into the bottle, together with
  the immaterial substance of the spirit, its position in space suddenly relocated. In a moment it would be
  free, its ethereal ties entwining with fresh air, but in that moment I dropped the shampoo bottle into the
  gate where it disappeared in the black depths of my once-mirror. I raised my arms in preparation, spat
  after the bottle with a twisted smile, then swung my elbows down with all of my psychic might,
  slamming the dimensional door shut.
     I paused. Something needed to be said, but "...And don't come back!" was a little overused. I
  decided to ignore the dramtic instinct nurtured within me by decades of poorly-written popular media,
  blew out my candles instead, spilling little drops of wax along my carpet. Time to vacuum up the
  remains of my magic circle.
     Perhaps time for a stiff drink as well....