Did you know that if I wanted to I could explain to you the mathematics of your recent Pandemic? This is but only one of the ridiculous little shrapnels that can embed itself. I wouldn’t even want to talk about it really, but you would. Of that I have no doubt. Not just something to wile away our short little jaunt, you would go on and on with endless goadings for more of this and that. Do you see? How much I know of everything I don’t even want to?

Let’s just drop it. Let’s pretend for a moment that we have an endless here and now to be sincere and meaningful. Tell me then about the ones you lost, the ones most closest to you. Your mother, your siblings. Better even, tell me did you lose someone that you really loved? I think I can relate to that believe it or not. But you really must begin Conjuring or else the image goes fleeting. Wait, oh yes then, here it comes, hold your thought because I have it just now coming back to me. But it’s running a bit backwards.

Oh the terrible fright! There’s the cup falling from his youthful hands, a solemn drivel lolling off the rim and soaking into the slate floor, already dank and grimy from all the shuffling of our long Dark Work. All backwards. He drinks with lips chapped from, from, from what? Canting. That’s right. Canting for hours on end. Now a hymn. Good Lord it’s beautiful. Something we wrote together in the Goddamn blasphemous vain notion that it would do that one thing for which there is no math to bridge the void.

Aargh, break it off! It is more than I can stomach right now that failure. What was it you were going to mutter. Oh, uh-huh. Yes, I see. By God that would have been right around the time I first met Garreth. Could you almost see it leave her like I saw it leave him? The Ghost exiting? The spirit just bursting right forth in total hopelessness and despair? Jesus Christ can we stop for moment and rest? I don’t like this euphoria at all. We have to find something different to talk about.

Okay fine, about that. Yes. We’re almost there anyhow. You have to promise me that you won’t find this sad or compulsive. These tomes, now scattered to the awful winds. I did not write them. All I did was read them is all. They came from strange corridors of used London bookshelves. Or crates tucked under makeshift street-vendor tables. One I remember finding in an absolute drunken rage flinging through the rot of a landfill -suddenly betwixt at it’s cyclopean stare. The Hurting Game. Yes that one indeed.

Here let me show you. Just up the stairs. It’s where we’re going now. Watch your step. Let me introduce you to a real Son of a Bitch.