My Babylon: Complete

By James L. Wilber

To celebrate its one year anniversary, My Babylon will be on sale for 99 cents through may 1st, 2014.

My Story

An obsessed magician will do anything it takes to satisfy his perverse needs.

My Myth

He turns to forbidden arts to manifest his will.

My Revelation

In doing so, he will bring about the end of everything.

My Babylon

A serial novel about the paranormal and dark desires. The story of a cursed young man who has an intimate view of the Apocalypse. My Babylon weaves elements of urban fantasy, erotic horror, and real-world occult practices to form a unique personal tale that thrills, terrifies, and even enlightens.

In My Babylon, the magus, consumed with longing, seeks to create a replacement for his lost love using a grisly ritual that requires the theft of a body. Through her creation, he learns that he has a much bigger role to play, and that she may be a form of salvation not only for him but for others.

The Complete edition contains all five books of the My Babylon story.

Reviews* for My Babylon:

"Captivating, interesting, dark, and at times even funny."

"Darkly horrific, Lovecraftian work. Parts of it make you squeamish, parts send chills down your spine. A deft illustration of the black side of the human soul."

"What I really loved about this work was what was left unsaid--telling a story with details rather than stating the obvious is becoming a lost art. What surprised me about this work was how much it drew me in despite my merely mild interest in the occult."

"James has put together a great story with great characters who feel authentic, even as they go about tasks that you'd be horrified to find out your neighbors were up to. And even though Mike, the magician who narrates this story, is involved in really heinous activities, I still like the guy. And that is an impressive feat."

"Not for the timid this book, but well worth it."

"An intriguing look at what drives us ..."

"It's the struggle to remain sane, keep discrete, and keep the emotional compulsions in control that structures the suspense of this thriller."

"In the end, you're left with the sense of a masterfully conceived protagonist who gives credence to the idea of the unsympathetic character. It also maintains an orbiting cluster of supporting characters who are interesting in their own right but also necessary to the development of the protagonist."

Find more great indie authors at Midworldarts.com.

*Reviews originate from those left for the individual novellas included in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James L. Wilber
• Release date: Oct 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301753642

James L. Wilber

James L. Wilber describes himself as Anne Rice and Chuck Palahniuk’s bastard love child. He’s a pretentious prick who claims to pen, “literary genre fiction.” Which means he writes smarmy shit about wizards and vampires doing a poor job at hiding his symbolism and metaphor. He’s turned to self-publishing on the correct assumption his stories are just too fucking weird for mass consumption.He has contributed to numerous books for roleplaying games from companies such as: Wizards of the Coast, Paizo Publishing, White Wolf Studios, Bastion Press, and Atlas Games. He was also a writer on the Origins Award nominated, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game by Eden Studios.Mr. Wilber also assumes the roles of husband, ceremonial magician, podcast host, and owner of a 100-lb Alaskan Malamute.He lives in Indianapolis, a dreary place built by masons obsessed with circles.Along with Stephan Loy and Dick Thomas, James is a member of Mid-World Arts, a collective of indie writers dedicated to helping each other produce quality works. Find out more at midworldarts.com.You can read his thoughts on politics, culture, and what he calls pagan chaos magick at scrollofthoth.com.He only uses social media that he enjoys, which means tumblr. Get to know him at scrollofthoth.tumblr.com, jameslwilber.tumblr.com, and geeksoutafterdark.tumblr.com.You can hear him on the podcasts Scroll of Thoth, and Geeks Out After Dark.Get more of his writing at jameslwilber.com.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

My Babylon Complete

BOOK ONE: BODY

Jesus said, If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. I am amazed at how great a wealth has made its home in this poverty.

- The Gospel of Thomas

Chapter 1

One of the hardest things to steal is a human body. By comparison, money can be taken easily, though the amounts make a big difference. You can grab a dollar out of a tip jar, or bash on a vending machine to liberate a buck without much fuss. If you ask the right person the right way, they might just hand you a dollar. They never give away bodies. Not here in the U.S. of A. Not in any civilized country.

A cadaver only costs about a grand. Anyone could whore themselves or offer manual labor for a couple of months and come up with a grand. You don't even need a real job or any skills. I had a job I could tolerate, as a dishwasher. The pure mechanical nature of it kept me in the profession. I rented out my body for nine dollars per hour, but my mind remained my own. Trust me, I could come up with a thousand dollars much easier than what it took to steal that corpse. But even if you had the cash, no one will give you a body without the backing of a medical license and a mighty institution--school, hospital, or laboratory.

Yeah, I suppose if you had a lot of money you could buy a body. Parts and whole corpses get sold on the black market all the time. One in good shape can reap tens of thousands of dollars under clandestine circumstances. Coming up with that kind of money takes years of hard work, or stealing from a bank, jewelry store, or some other repository of liquid assets. Just as hard as robbing a morgue. People get upset when you steal that much money. I went for the morgue.

You may ask that if freshness doesn't matter why not dig one up like old Dr. Frankenstein? I've buried enough family to rule out that course of action. Sure, graveyards have limited security; most don't even have cameras. Once you bypass the fence, you're in a secluded spot. You can take your time excavating your treasure. The only problem is, since the turn of the century, undertakers have been placing coffins in burial vaults. This means the casket sits nestled in a half-foot of concrete strong enough to prevent the weight of all that earth collapsing in when they drive across it with a back-hoe. The family may also opt for a liner made of plastic or metal to keep water out of the grave. Even the most determined re-animator and loyal hunchback lack the brute force necessary to pluck a body from a modern grave.

The other obvious method of obtaining a corpse--making one myself--never entered my realm of possibility. I abhor violence. Despite everything I've done. No matter how perverse my personal creed seems to most, I refuse to kill another human being. I know the theft of that girl's body caused grievous emotional harm to her family. For some reason we hold dear those lifeless tissues. Perhaps because they are a symbol of the spirit that left them. Honestly, it was because of its power as a symbol that it was worth so much to me. I still anguish over the trauma I caused the relatives and friends. They would never know, never believe, that my plan was designed to inflict the minimum amount of suffering on the planet. The corpse, of course, didn't mind. As Marla Singer so eloquently put it, They're dead, and I'm alive, and I'm suffering.

The longing came over me last fall; I suppose from watching all those college students return for the coming year. I live in an old neighborhood. The houses, some almost two-hundred years old, have been split into duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes, and those get shared by up to a half-dozen incoming college students who descend on the town every September. The district's old-growth trees, cracked sidewalks, and sagging faded homes attract bohemians and artists and loners like me. But when the nights turn cool, the residents brace themselves for the onslaught of keg parties, loud music, vomiting in the bushes, and other obnoxious late night behaviors. I'm a night person, so it doesn't bother me much. It's not like they're waking me up. I consider it a challenge to keep perfect concentration while the windows are rattling. The students also drive up the rent on Vine Street and the surrounding blocks well beyond my means, but my landlord and I get along well. She knows I won't wreck the place, and she doesn't need to go looking for new tenants in the summer.

The parade of young girls ready to experiment with their newfound freedom made me think of Rose. I thought she was different. She was different. I just don't know if it was in the ways I assumed. I still think about her every single day. I believed, still believe, that none of those tittering and nervous co-eds passing by my door could replace her. Even if they could, I couldn't do that to another human. I wouldn't be responsible for leading them down that path of self-consumption. I spiral alone now.

No, that's a lie. I'm not alone anymore.

Despite the burning ache, I took my time. The ache isn't the worst part anyway. The worst part comes when you wake up in the morning, get in the shower, and realize you'll never feel that again. You'll never be that alive again. The planning gave me purpose. I might not have made it out the door those days without it.

I thought at first to infiltrate a funeral home and obtain a body that way, but I knew I couldn't just go to work for one. The first suspects when a body goes missing from a funeral home are the employees. Although I lacked funds, I had copious amounts of free time and patience. This I used to stake out the local mortuaries.

I spent over a year on recon. During my intelligence gathering, I eschewed my nocturnal routine and actually left my home in the AM. I donned something dark and non-descript, which pretty much describes my entire wardrobe anyway, and walked down to the coffee house to get something large, black, and hot. After I meandered over to one of the local parlors, I found a nook or perch where I could watch the back entrance without being seen, and whiled away the hours until work. A grueling task when standing in place or sitting on cold concrete, subjected to the frigid November wind, huddling around a cup of coffee for warmth.

My original plan entailed somehow intercepting an incoming corpse during the receiving process. It took a few weeks to accept the futility of the endeavor. In every case, an ambulance would pull up to the loading dock, and not long after, one or more representatives of the funeral home would emerge. Without being able to get into the home itself, or even hear most of their conversations, I watched the expressions and body language of the participants in order to gain the gist of each transaction.

For a typical delivery, the ambulance pulled down the alley at a snail's pace. One of the crew would hop out and guide the driver as he backed the behemoth, reverse warning alarm screeching the whole time, as close to the raised platform as possible to ensure a smooth roll-off. During this process, one of the morticians would open the back door, grinning and waving. Considering the task at hand, they always seemed happy to see each other, that normal human reaction when getting to see someone only every so often at work. The drivers hung around long enough for pleasantries, but were gone before they became annoying. You have to make an effort to be hated in such a short period of time. Most people don't have it in them.

The key was that the intake crew always knew when the ambulance would arrive. Either the ambulance crew called ahead and made arrangements, or the funeral workers heard those ear-piercing klaxons of the back-up warning. In any case, no opportunity to grab the body presented itself, either through impersonation or neglect.

On my days off, I even watched at night. No deliveries came after normal business hours, reinforcing the theory that all were arranged.

My ray of hope came when I started watching my third home. It required skipping a few packages of ramen during those weeks because I needed to pay for two bus rides each day, but it was worth it. At this larger establishment, deliveries went the same. But on my first day I witnessed two instances of an unmarked van leaving the garage, and two morticians returning with a gurney laden with the object of my desire. This even happened at night, though that required the crew to rendezvous at the mortuary, drag-tail and sleepy-eyed from being called in, and then take the van out for the pick-up.

This led to the conclusion that a weak link may be found at the hospital. A good thing, because casing the funeral homes lasted well into December, and the onslaught of a Michigan winter could deter even me. I switched from suspicious alley lurker to distraught visiting family member. Even in a small city like Kalamazoo, it takes months to learn the layout of a hospital. Corridor upon corridor of identical nondescript rooms sow confusion. I needed to learn not only how to navigate quickly, but which halls, entrances, and exits were most likely to be watched, and when.

Entire nights were wasted noting the positions of cameras and when each desk would be un-manned. To develop a cover, I learned which waiting rooms were most often used by the families of cancer patients, and those suffering other illnesses that take long-term care. Not at all a cheerful endeavor, but I felt I deserved some pain. To make myself one of them, I sat too close to large groups, refusing to leave an empty seat between us as decorum dictates, even when the rest of the room was empty. Of course, they would never break the social contract by insisting that I move. The proximity made my skin crawl, and I could not help but wonder if it would be their relative stolen. If I would so happen to chance upon the corpse of Jake, or Margo, or Lloyd, the names I heard the families repeat over and over, I doubted I could go through with it. But because of my behavior, security and staff assumed I belonged with the grief stricken. Even when I took to wandering they marked me as a bored visitor, walking to keep awake. By February I was invisible.

The conspicuous largess of the American medical system worked to my advantage. Most hospitals maintain tight security, surveillance, platoons of guards, and required badges and codes to enter work areas. However, that security lapses in the ubiquitous construction zones. It seems no hospital can resist wasting wads of cash on bigger, newer, and more luxurious facilities. Visit your local medical temple sometime and witness for yourself the installation of enough marble and glass to rival palaces in Europe. Come the day of the heist, I could count on an unmonitored staging area. Discovering all this took over a month. Only after this initial infiltration did finding the morgue become a priority.

I assumed I could find it by following the intake. Exterior stake-outs of the hospital loading zones, however, required a reason to stand around in strange places. Despite the damage to my lung capacity, and thus my ability to project my voice during ritual, I took up smoking again. To my surprise, it took an entire carton of American Spirits to track down the white van. In that time, I internally debated what I knew about human nature. No doubt the hospital called the funeral home when they had a pick-up ready. Once again, the transaction was always expected, but having it work the other way around gave me some advantage. People at work take the path of least resistance. Morticians want to get corpses as soon as possible and hospitals want to get rid of them. Even if the timing is a bit off, the mortician shows up too early or too late, there's always another body that needs to go. Barring some flagrant behavior, no reason to be suspicious of a mortician.

My next hurdle was looking like I worked at a funeral home. The Evans Funeral Home used a limited uniform. The driver and partner wore black slacks, white button-down shirt, black windbreaker with logo patch, and baseball cap with logo. I had the shirt and pants covered. I found a similar windbreaker at the Salvation Army store for five bucks. I knew it could pass without the logo, especially if I had one on the hat. The design was nothing special. You can count on the funeral business to be sedate.

Considering my total lack of spending money, this took quite an investment. My paranoia kicked in, and I considered it wise to make my purchase as far away from the scene of the crime as possible. Someone would remember a guy buying a custom made hat for a funeral home. Even though I didn't intend to take the corpse for several months after, better safe than someone's prison bitch. People incarcerated for crimes against taboo seldom fare well behind bars. I wasted a day off and twenty-five dollars on a round-trip Greyhound from Kalamazoo to one of the big malls in Grand Rapids.

Funny, this part of the operation took more will than most of what came next. I fucking despise malls. They are ostentatious displays of wealth. New malls in rich areas are particularly loathsome. Once again, enough marble and glass to make a Bourbon monarch feel at home. That's not counting the windows full of astronomically priced merchandise made to appeal to the brand conscious. How do people do it? How do they enjoy doing that? Jamming themselves together to purchase status on the flimsiest of pretexts? As soon as I walk through the doors, the bright lights, shit music, and roar of banal dialogue overwhelms me. Who are these people talking about sports, and celebrities, and clothing designers like they matter? The smell of artificial food and perfume makes my stomach turn. It takes all my concentration to make sure I don't overhear any conversation and risk exploding into a tirade sure to lead to my arrest. When I go to my favorite café on the corner--no, not the coffee abattoir with the green mermaid--I can listen to street people with library card educations discuss theology, philosophy, and physics. At the mall, amongst those given all the advantages in the world, I hear about last night's reality TV show.

Before I even left my home I consulted a floor plan and charted the most direct course to the store I needed--a custom embroidery kiosk off the food court. Armored with my largest pair of over-ear headphones, hood up, eyes straight ahead, I pushed through the doors and fast-walked the thirty-five yards to the stool of a listless sales girl who was Facebooking from her phone. My sudden appearance gave her a start, and she neglected to hide her loathing and disgust for just a moment before switching to retail-robot cheerleader.

Hi, can I help you find something?

Yes. I would like to buy a full-cloth black baseball cap with custom embroidery. I provided all the information as succinctly as possible to keep contact to a minimum.

Sure, what style?

I missed the mark. Either she did not possess the processing power necessary to assign two characteristics to one object at the same time, or she was so lacking in give-a-shit, whatever a customer said passed through her mind like an eel in a fish tank.

The full-cloth, not the mesh back.

Great....

Why was my choice in hat subject to praise? Was it because making the choice quickly made her life more bearable?

Her head tilted to one side as if she had trouble keeping me in focus. Would you like to look through the font choices?

I looked through the typefaces online, I would like number eighteen, Book Antiqua.

The unusual lack of transaction banter made her uncomfortable. I wanted to blurt out what size lettering, and what it should say, but I reasoned that waiting for her to ask would help to normalize the situation.

She picked up her pen and blank order form, noted what I already told her, and retreated into deep concentration for an aeon. Someone nearby said, And oh God, she looked like such a skanky ho.... The sales girl must have noticed me wincing, which jarred her faculties back into motion.

She looked at me with a rictus grin. What would you like it to say?

No amount of preparation would make it any easier for her. "The top line should say Evans in forty-eight point bold all caps. The second line should say Funeral Home in twenty-eight point normal lettering with 'F' and 'H' capitalized.

She nodded as she wrote, and kept nodding as the meaning of the words sank in. Her head went up and down for what I would swear was a good twenty seconds.

I had prepared an explanation. Not a good one. I don't think a good one exists.

I lost my hat at work. My boss will charge me fifty dollars to replace it.

It gave her enough normalization to stop bobbing her head. Oh, you're a mortician.

Yes.

Another painful pause. I know that decorum dictates some kind of apology or excuse for having a job that until recently was performed only by untouchables. But it was better to leave as little memory behind as possible in case she gets questioned.

Putting my headphones back on, I took a seat on a nearby bench until she completed the cap. Her hands shook as she took the blank hat off the rack and fed it into the clever machine that did the stitching. If I had only known that working at a funeral home would cause people to recoil in terror, I would have made it my trade a long time ago. Or at least have worn the uniform. Alas, with my upcoming crime, I couldn't risk attracting attention to myself that way.

I tried not to watch. Looking too eager would only add to her suspicions. Instead, as I have practiced doing for the past decade, I closed my eyes, leaned back, and retreated into my own mind. It was time to plan the next phase.

The Magical Record of Soror Amasnex

Do all who seek go through this Dark Night of the Soul? Or, is it the trial that creates seekers?

Have you ever gotten up in the morning, done your routine, stood in the shower and thought to yourself, this is how it will be every day from now until I die, no joy, no pain, no feeling, just this numb existence? Could you face it? I think we all go through something like that, from time to time, but what if it never went away? What if it happened every day?

Would you have the courage to change it? What would it take? When you're an ant, all the other ants look different. But when you're looking down at them, they all look the same. Bend down, and you may see each ant as an individual, but stand up and all you can see is a line of dots, all moving in unison.

Imagine you've become untethered, your consciousness has gone floating away like a balloon, higher and higher. You look down and you see yourself as one of those insects marching along. How much will would it take to get out of line? You would have to be crazy.

Others may read these words and see meanness and madness. I read them and see strength and sorrow. But I can hardly be expected to be impartial on the subject.

Chapter 2

One would think the best place to study the medieval period would be somewhere it actually happened. To be fair, colleges in Cologne, Leeds, and Cambridge have excellent Medieval Studies programs. But, arguably, the two most well-known are Western Michigan University and the University of Toronto. I participated in both.

History does not repeat like a record skipping. We don't stop and go back over and over again. The past spirals, turning on itself at times and then looping forward. Things change as much as they remain the same, and everything builds on what came before. My first real theft, my first adult relationship, my first quantifiable success at magick, all led directly to my plan with the corpse.

People in my culture do not come predisposed to a belief in magick. Theorists argue that's why we're so bad at it. For magick to work you must believe in it without doubt. Magick always works and if it doesn't work for you then you're doing it wrong. I got lucky. I had an influence that created a crack in the rock solid certainty that most Westerners develop: the belief in science, nation, and what the TV tells you.

My grandmother comes from Haiti. She grew up in that great stew of African diasporic faith, European religiosity, and Native American influence most people call voodoo, or nowadays spelled vodou. Despite leaving the island in her early twenties with my grandfather and living decades in the US, vodou remained the basis of her world view. Before they met, my grandmother attended college in Port au Prince, and at night and on weekends trained to be a mambo, a vodou priestess.

In the West, we associate a belief in magick with ignorance and being primitive. My grandfather, as a graduate student in Comparative Religion at our dear old Alma mater, went to Haiti after the war to study what they called at the time the voodoo death cults. He always said that he married my grandmother because she was the smartest woman he ever met. After the move, she completed her degree in social work and then taught at Kalamazoo College. Not your typical dark savage.

Before you get the impression I'm claiming to be some sort of prodigy, my grandmother never said a word to me directly about her faith. My mother never showed an interest in any religion, and slipped into my father's lukewarm Catholicism without trouble. Yet during those visits as a child, which grew more and more infrequent as I got older, the mere proximity to my grandmother left me open in subtle ways. The brightly colored flags, painted offering bowls, and random bits of reliquary fascinated me. How could a child not be fascinated by images of the provocative vodou gods?

When my mother suffered a miscarriage, every adult I knew said the baby was with Jesus now. My grandmother said that Erzuile would protect her.

I remember vaguely a day my parents let my grandmother take care of me. I must have been no older than six. I had hit my head on the table, so the memories can only be trusted so far. She bandaged me and applied ice dutifully, as any person would do, but after first aid, she called for some unorthodox help. The details of the ritual escape me. I remember candles, and a yellow bottle, and my grandmother dancing ecstatically around the kitchen, holding a feather in her hand, limbs flailing, feet stomping. When the dance stopped, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she calmly walked up to me, looming over my six-year-old self. Somehow I knew, or just remember it this way, that she walked like a man would walk and not a woman. She looked down at me, her expression as grim as a man's as well. He seemed to pity me, be angry with me at the same time, and worried.

How could that not have an influence on a child? At that time, however, it made little sense, and my grandmother passed away before I developed any interest in vodou. That came much later.

I wonder if other people can pinpoint the traumas of their youth as the source of their persona with such pinpoint accuracy? Maybe it's because magick has so much to do with psychology. One of the best known modern magicians, Israel Regardie, recommended that a prospective practitioner should undergo at least a year of psychotherapy before learning magick. Though maybe he said that because he was a psychiatrist. To be honest, being a loner probably has more to do with my adult obsessions than my grandmother's religion. That, and being a person of mixed-race.

My first lesson in social ostracism came early. In kindergarten I made the mistake of introducing myself by my real name, Michel, pronounced MEE- Shell, a French form of Michael. Etymology not being a popular subject for the under sixes, I was immediately branded with having a girl's name. In later grades, ignorant teachers let the cat out of the bag, calling out on the first day of school Michelle? Michelle Grau? as if they had lost a dog. Mike, I would correct after the damage was done.

I didn't look white. I didn't act black. The Hispanic kids thought I was one of them until they found out I couldn't speak Spanish, something I remedied later since it came naturally after learning Latin. I can go to my local taqueria for lunch and pass for a Chicano without too much scrutiny. But my inability to fit in left me doomed to the retreat of fat kids, kids with glasses, and other loner kids in general--books. You learn quickly that every writer in every story creates reality with a word. Just like a magician.

Maybe none of this interests you, and I shouldn't be boring you with all of the details of my upbringing. But like I said, very few people in the West accept magick, and I feel compelled to give you a reason why I do. Because you must believe in magick without question for it to work. Only a crazy person goes through all the pain and risk of stealing a corpse with the idea they might be able to do magick. I knew I could.

I met Uncle Al at my local library at the ripe old age of fourteen. That's Aleister Crowley to the uninitiated, the most well-known magus of the modern age. Why my local library carried such esoteric tomes is still beyond my reasoning, yet there it was, amongst the books on UFOs and ghosts: Magick in Theory and Practice. My pubescent mind comprehended only a fraction of it, but that didn't deter me. Something about reading always affected me that way. It seemed to me that if a person knew the words they should be able to understand what the writer meant, and I would do whatever it took to figure it out. I must have checked out and read that book six or seven times in a year. Until it suffered the fate that most occult books in a public library suffer, theft by ignorant metal-heads. I should have stolen the damn thing myself. That never occurred to me then, as I was always a most reserved and law abiding youth. I've worked hard to get over that. By then I had amassed my own collection, my loving parents blissfully ignorant, ready to accept anything that entered my possession in innocent book form.

The combination of being precocious, inquisitive, and stubborn made me the perfect acolyte. I actually went through all of the exercises in meditation, yoga, and self-deprivation prescribed by Crowley and his ilk. I learned Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Latin to get a better grasp of the subject matter. I studied mythology, and learned to draw arcane symbols reasonably well, despite having no talent for it. All of the things necessary to do magick, the right way, which so few people have the willpower to actually do. There's a saying, If magick were easy, everyone would be doing it. If people knew how to change reality on a whim, the universe would collapse into disorder. Like everything else important in life, you have to work at it, and the bigger the pay off, the more work it takes.

When I started college I had a laser focus, meditating an hour a day, and spending another two on rituals designed to create magical consciousness. If I wasn't doing yoga or making astrological charts, I was studying. The first two years went by like a blur. In my third year, ingratiating myself with the faculty at the Medieval Institute became a priority. That summer, the Institute decided to exchange two students with the University of Toronto. The lucky selectees would be enrolled in the U of T's advanced course in Latin, and intern at the U of T Press. Sadly, I wanted it more than anything else before in my life.

Everyone knew that graduate students would fill the two slots. This did not deter me. For the first time I turned to magick to obtain something tangible. My schedule became more rigid. In the morning, meditation, then class. In between and after class was spent brown nosing with professors, running books back and forth, small pieces of translation, grading tests, anything to keep