“I liked her too,” I said. I was almost done with the second key, my fingers were flying. If I hadn’t fucked it up this should get Brett’s attention. I couldn’t fuck this up. “I need you to think of your mamma right now, kid, see her, don’t close your eyes, don’t be afraid of the monster or the bad man. Think about all the good things about your mamma. See her.”
“Okay, this is too fucking sweet for words,” Glide said. “And you think I’m smarmy, please. Say night-night, old man.” He raised his hand to obliterate me with a channel of Muladhara energy. I completed the second key and my hands came together, steepled with a too-loud clap. A halo of violet light surrounded Garland and it slowly drifted away from him as it grew larger, shifted in shape, and began to take on substance. “What did you do?” Glide said, incredulous as he finally began to comprehend what I had been working at. Crimson energy flared like a bloody star from his hand straight toward my heart.
A slender, pale hand stopped it harmlessly, refracted it into a million shards of twinkling, jeweled light. The hand was connected to a wrist crisscrossed with old scars. Garland looked up into the fading lavender light and smiled into the face of his mother.
“It’s all right, Garland,” the tulpa of Caern Ankou said as she effortlessly pulled Crash Cart’s slippery steel cables away from Garland. “Mamma’s going to make the bad dream go away now.” The tiny little Fae girl shoved back the hulking stainless steel nightmare and Crash Cart smashed back into a wall, sending down a rain of plaster dust and debris.
“That’s not possible,” Glide said, as he slipped to the floor and assumed a Burmese position. His fingers linked and began to shift and move frantically. “It took my father years, me, decades, to master the formation formulas to build a tulpa. How could you…”
“Your granddad Chuck taught me in one day,” I said, “for a carton of smokes. I’ve always been a quick learner, at least as far as magic goes.” Glide was working to strengthen Crash Cart’s physicality in the waking world. He was working off stale formula and rote visualization. Caern’s projection was fueled by the dynamo of a child’s imagination and a son’s love. Crash Cart tried to roll back toward the boy and Caern stopped him cold with one hand on his boxlike chest. The nightmare began to become a little blurry at the edges.
“Leave my family alone,” she said. A fierceness set in her jaw. I saw Joey’s head come up, the look of amazement on his face.
I shouted to him even as I began a new combination of mudras, a riff off what Manson had taught me, an improvisation. It was something else I was actually kind of good at, one of the few things. “Joey! Think of Caern, remember her, all your love, all your memories, now!”
Caern became even more substantial, more solid. The detail of her face, her clothes, everything brightened and sharpened, even as Crash Cart was losing detail. I completed my new mudra just as the monstrous tulpa rolled away from Caern, who now was radiant in all her true Fae glory, beautiful, powerful, a goddess, protecting her child. At my direction, Crash Cart grabbed Brett off the floor, gathering him up in his viscous tendrils. The Dugpa screamed and struggled in shock and horror.
“No! No! What are you doing? Stop, you can’t do this! I’m your master!” Glide shouted as Crash Cart wrapped the black tantric wizard tighter in his inhuman embrace. The horrible, mangled head turned in my direction. Eyes, one leaking bloody jelly, the other a metal and glass lens embedded in meat, regarded me.
“Go back where you came from,” I said to Crash Cart. “Take him with you, he’s yours now.” The outline of a smile again under the stained, bloody mask. The wall behind the tulpa folded in upon itself, a toothed maw gnawing a hole into our world. The last of Charles Manson’s living nightmares rolled backward into the festering wound in space, one of its rubber wheels squeaking and shaking as it did. It dragged Brett Glide, aka Brett Winder, into its realm, the place behind our eyelids we thrash and struggle to flee in deepest sleep. Brett begged, and when begging did nothing, he cursed my name with the last shreds of sanity his charred soul possessed. The mouth closed and became just a wall again. The stench of rancid blood and engine oil faded. Caern’s tulpa became her mortal self again. She knelt down and pulled Garland tight.
“Mamma, you a ghost?” the boy asked. “Can you stay with us?”
“Oh baby, Mamma’s a memory now,” Caern said, “and I’ll be with you every day, all day. Anytime you need me, you remember. I’ll be there.”
“But I’ll miss you, Mamma.” Garland’s voice was quavering, “I miss your kisses and your hugs, and, and … it’s not fair.”
“It is fair,” she said. “I know it doesn’t make sense to you now, baby boy, but it will in time.” The child hugged the tulpa with all his might. Tears ran down son and mother’s faces. “It will in time, baby.”
I groaned as I made my way to my feet. I was really dizzy from losing blood. I managed to help Joey up, and we leaned on each other like two staggering drunks. Joey wrapped his arms around his son and his dead wife. They held each other, never wanting the next moment to come, never wanting this sliver of time to end. Caern kissed her little boy on the head and her husband on the lips. She looked over to me and
