1.1

Jonah the waffle jockey is on fire.

Or at least, he claims to be. My eyes detect no flames, and my outstretched palms detect no heat. I cock an inquisitive eyebrow in his employer's direction, and Candy, the proprietor of the all night diner, replies only with a shrug and a shake of her head. She's got her black hair bunned up beneath a hairnet and her matronly contours still ensconced within her apron, because as soon as this little episode is over, she's going right back to work.

“It burns!” says Jonah, but what exactly is burning is unclear. His clothing is intact. His skin is flushed but otherwise unmarked. Aside from the hyperventilation and the dilated pupils, he seems fine. “Stop, drop, and roll!” he says, already two-thirds of the way there. “Stop, drop, and roll!” he says again, and again, and again, repeating it like a protective mantra as he rolls back and forth across the basement floor. Sobbing now, Jonah tugs at the fringes of his big viking beard, his septum piercing a-glisten with a trickle of panic-snot. “I'm smokin',” he declares, examining the back of his hand. “I need a smoke.”

“Not in the building,” says Candy, plopping down atop a box of canned goods and rolling up a little something for her own self.

“Uh, actually... do you mind if I...?” I ask her, pulling my dream steamer vape pen from my utility belt. “Dream steam helps me see whatever wakened eyes cannot.”

She rolls her eyes, but I don't hear a 'no'. So I clear my auric field with a quick lavender-eucalyptus spritz, and trace a warding sigil in the air with the butt of the steamer pen. Feeling the ground beneath my bare hooves, I take a deep breath, and then I put the dream steamer to my lips. It tastes of springtime and stuffy closets, and the mist I exhale tumbles across my warding sigil, giving perceptible form to what had only been implied merely a moment ago. Now my entire field of vision fills with color, and detail, and extraplanar surfaces, as the plain rectangular boxes before me bounce-transform into tetrahedral harlequins. The fire that Jonah was complaining of is now quite apparent, as the tearful panic-sweating waiter becomes before my eyes a wicker man ignited. Though what interests me now is not Jonah, but the flock of antagonists gathered about him.

Haranguing him now are an ethereal host of the usual suspects, an ugly cross-section of the ghoulish zoology of the realms in-between. Most urgent are the fear eaters, the mood monkeys, the hairy shadows with more maw than face. A flock of them have gathered about poor Jonah, throwing fuel onto his personal fire and sucking the black smoke that rolls off of him into their wide open mouths. I call them mood monkeys, because they sustain themselves upon the emotional off-gassings of unsuspecting higher life forms. I call them fear eaters, because even though the full emotional spectrum is available for their harvest, fear is their favorite meal. Whether their preference is a matter of flavor, ethereo-caloric density, or ease of extraction is anybody's guess, but I favor the latter supposition.

While the fear eaters feed, the rest of the menagerie gather on the sidelines, much like the vultures and hyenas that stalk a lion's feast upon the savannah, waiting patiently for whatever scraps might be left behind. There are, of course, a pack of killyourselves – the worst kind of elves – whose blank glassy eyes bear only the thinnest sliver of intelligence. “Kill yourself,” they prompt from the sidelines, knowing full well that every now and then some poor unfortunate soul becomes so overwhelmed by the mood monkeys's feeding frenzy that suicide appears, even if for only one bleak and terrible moment, like the appropriate solution. “Kill yourself,” they whisper, for when a mortal being departs this mortal plane for the next, a great many energies are let loose in that alchemical transmutation, and it is upon these that the killyourselves have adapted to sustain themselves.

With them float the ghosts, those byproducts of the death transformation too unwholesome to transcend, too insistent to dissipate, and too devoid of nutrition for the killyourselves to bother with. These are the embodied traumas and lingering addictions of those that once lived: the blockage of that which could not be endured, and that habits that perpetuated that blockage. A ghost is a pattern, a wheel of sorts, an entity that exists only to sustain a cycle that has long since ceased to serve any kind of meaningful purpose. Ghosts always gather around situations like this one because its the only available satiation in their otherwise hollow existences, offering them just enough sustenance to remain demi-incarnate for another few miserable years.

With so many unappealing critters gathered around him looking for an appetizer, I can only think of one thing that will keep Jonah safe. “Got any salt?” I ask Candy.

“Salt?” she replies.

“Salt,” I repeat, tracing the contours of a box of salt with my empty hands. “Like a box of it?” I clarify. We're in the storage area beneath a restaurant, there has to be salt.

And there is, a nice big canister of iodized table salt. I promptly set about pouring it on the basement floor, drawing a slender white granular circle around Jonah's margins. Candy glares at me, but says nothing. Salt is cheap, a disposable commodity, much easier to replace than staff, especially at three in the morning.

“I do like a good circle,” I explain. “It's the most comfortin' of shapes, what with the lack of corners and all. When I close the circle, the outside world disappears and I can focus entirely on what's inside. Within the circle, I don't have to worry much about the unexpected. Any impertinent variables will kindly wait at the gate, thank you very much. And once we're safe in the circle, we can get down to brass tacks at last. Which, in this case, seems to be a question of exorcism.”

Jonah leaps up from his rocking and rolling fetal position, as I finish the circle of salt without a moment to spare. The tormented waiter paces frantically now, turning around and around like a caged tornado, panicking even as his pursuers are pushed away by the ward of protection I have drawn around him. Thankfully, Jonah blindly respects the sodium chloride perimeter that keeps him from fleeing. The basement we're in is a big one, stacked to the ceiling with anonymous boxes of napkins and condiments and unmentionable secrets. Because of these obstacles, Jonah does not have a clear path to the stairs, though he keeps glancing in their general direction. If he hops the salt and runs, could I tackle him before he makes it to the diner upstairs? Probably not, but that's alright. Cotton Candy's Chokehouse is no stranger to late-night freakouts. This particular eatery averages about nine wild-eyed panic attacks, twelve manic episodes, and seven messianic apostasies a month. The dining room patrons would barely bat an eyelash if sweet young Jonah here were to come screaming and sprinting by, and the law (or what passes for it in this town) knows better than to entangle themselves with the goings-on at Candy's. The only real danger here is that to Jonah's welfare, and to my own professional reputation.

Or perhaps I'm being a bit too cavalier. For even as the troop of mood monkeys brachiate away, and the disappointed killyourselves wander off muttering, there remains a straggler in the circle of salt, a man whose feet do not quite touch the ground. The floating man appears neither old nor young, but a superposition of the two, the towheaded corona of his youth juxtaposed against the symmetrical radiata of his crow's feet. He is cloaked in a trenchcoat the grey of rain on concrete, but he appears shirtless beneath it, his sternum exposed – or would be, if not for the elaborate inkwork that sprawls across it. These tattooed tendrils climb up and over his collarbones, wrapping around his throat and reaching for his mandibles: an enticing lattice I cannot help but trace with my gaze. But I've lingered too long, and the floater has caught me staring. His raptor eyes lock in on me, and when he smiles, I feel like prey.

“Hey there,” says the floater, waving the box of matches in his hand. With a flick of the wrist, he lights one, then tosses it onto poor Jonah's personal inferno. The creature before me must be a tickler – similar to the fear eaters in many ways, but of a more advanced class, much smarter than their peers and substantially more difficult to get rid of. Vampire-like, they delight in stirring up trouble, tickling their prey until the inevitable emotional conflagration summons forth their fellow mood monkeys, and all the other undesirables of the realms in-between. “Welcome to the party,” says the tickler.

“Very festive,” I say, gesturing to the somnambulant ghosts lurking in the corner.

“Well, we have to go all out. This is the End of the World party,” the tickler explains.

“Ah. World's endin', is it?” I remark.

The tickler's eyes sparkle with mischief. “That it is, Mujo. That it is.”

“I didn't tell ya my name,” I say.

“You didn't need to,” the tickler replies. “I was listening. I was listening when you and the boss lady came in, but I was listening before that, too. You see, Mujo Morell, I'm always listening. And that's how I know so many things. For example: that's how I know that the world's coming to an end. Well, your world, anyway. Oh, but you don't believe me yet. That's fine. What good is believing when you can know? I want you to know, Mujo. I want to show you,” he says, flicking another phantom match. “Everybody's hungry.”

“And they just keep on eatin',” Jonah murmurs.

“Everybody's sick,” says the tickler, flicking another match.

“And they just keep on takin' their medicine,” says Jonah.

“Everybody's angry,” says the tickler, flicking another match.

“And they just keep on fightin',” Jonah agrees.

“Everybody believes,” says the tickler, as he flicks another match, as if another match was necessary, as if that fire weren't already lit.

“And they just keep on chasin' the dream,” Jonah weeps.

“No one is safe,” the tickler warns.

But this time, I am quick on the draw, pulling out my eucalyptus-lavender and spritzing the match in mid-flight.

“And anythin' can happen at any time,” says Jonah. “Did you just spray me with water?”

“I dunno. Is it helpin'?” I ask.

“Naw... but if you're sprayin' the fire, does that mean you can see the fire?” Jonah asks me, holding out his hand. “I'm tellin' you, the fire is real.”

I shrug. “It exists, sure. But real's not the word I'd use for it.”

“Whaddaya mean?” asks Jonah. “Real, exists – those words mean the same thing.”

“They do and they don't,” I reply. “Is red the same as vermillion? Is teal the same as green? Let me put it to you a different way. If a thing is real, then it exists. But there's a lot of things that exist that aren't real. That bonfire on yer booty, for example. Jonah, when I say real, I mean...” And here, I rap my knuckles on the basement floor. “When I say real, I mean...” And here, I reach out and grab his outstretched hand. “Ya feel that, right?”

He nods.

“Jonah, I got reason to believe that you are in the clutches of some kind of spook, some species of demon, some sinister entity that feeds upon the ethereal fear-sweat that seeps from your extra-sensory pores, seepin' even now, seepin' as we speak,” I say. When he glances down at my damp hand holding his, I clarify: “No, I'm not talkin' about me. Your culprit is incorporeal, devoid of a real body... and yet existin' all the same.”

Jonah scans the room. “I don't see anybody.”

“And Miss Candy can't see the conflagration of yer location, but that don't mean ya ain't aflame,' I explain. “The material plane is but one of many, my good man. It just happens to be the one you're most familiar with. It takes a real galaxy brain to properly grok the multi-dimensional metaphysics of the situation, ya see, and that's why folks like you need people like me... The Cosmic Detective, at yer service.”

The waffle jockey is unconvinced. “Yeah, we've all seen yer business cards, Mujo.” But the flames burning up and down his spine are dying down – even if only a little – and that's what really matters.

“What I'm sayin' is, no word spoke by spectres is worth settin' yerself on fire over. Ya got a tickler on top of ya, friend, and he's the one that's really hungry. Hence all them scary stories he keeps whisperin' in yer ear. He's pourin' more fuel on the fire 'cause he wants to make brisket outta yer soul. But don't you worry. If you and me put out that flame, the jerk goes hungry.”

“Okay?” says Jonah. “And how do I that?”

“So stop strugglin' and stop resistin',” I explain. “Just sit still, I mean perfectly still, not even a twitch. If some ugly thought pops into ya, just let it be. It's only a thought. Ya don't need to do one single thing about it. If some feelin' feels off, just let it be. It's only a feelin'. Ya don't need to do one single thing about it. And here, if you absolutely must do somethin' with your mind, try countin' to ten. Or twenty. Or thirty. Or a hundred.”

Jonah the waffle jockey sits down quietly on the basement floor, and within a minute, the fire has more or less subsided. “Okay, weird. I genuinely did not expect that to work.” He takes in a much needed deep breath, and when he exhales, he blows out the last of the faerie fire. “So, the world's not endin'?” Jonah asks me.

I shrug. As much as it pains me to equivocate mid-inflection point, I can't lie, not now. If I did that, I'd be no better than the fear eater. “Well, from a technical standpoint, everythin' ends sooner or later. How does that sayin' go? The only constant is change? Mortality's the nature of the material plane, and that's somethin' all of us gotta come to grips with.”

“Huh,” says Jonah, teasing the ends of his beard between forefinger and thumb. “So, you're sayin' the fear eater only has power over me 'cause I'm refusin' to acknowledge that I gotta die someday?”

I smile. “Bullseye, my friend.”

“Oh, it's so much more complicated than that,” the fear eater interrupts, lighting another match. “Don't forget, there are many misfortunes worse than death.”

“But it's not just about dyin',” Jonah says, smoking a little. “There's a lot I can lose while I'm still alive.”

“Yes indeedy. Those are the little deaths that lead up to the big death. But big or small, every death is just a transformation,” I assure Jonah. “And anyway, that's just the tickler tryin' to get the stove lit again. Best thing you can do now is ignore him and get back to livin' yer life. There's really no point in engagin' with a mind that's pure agenda. So instead of arguin' with him, check in with you. Check in with the part of ya that's afraid to lose, the part of ya that's afraid to die, the part of ya that's afraid of all it does not yet understand. In the murkiness of all these mortal mysteries, maybe the only certain thing you can do is be there for yourself.”

Another long slow exhalation from Jonah the waffle jockey, and then he stands up and steps over the circle of salt on the floor. “Um, I, uh... I'm sorry I raided your pantry,” he says to Candy.

“I bet you are,” says Candy, tucking her freshly rolled spliff behind her ear.

Jonah's dilated pupils linger on that skinny white cylinder. “I really need a smoke,” he says.

“Do what you gotta do,” says patient Candy. “But be back in fifteen minutes and mind your odors. You're still on shift for one more hour, so make it a good one.”

“You got it, boss,” says Jonah, meekly departing.

As he leaves, Candy turns to me. “If I sent home every employee who freaked out on shift, there'd be nobody left in this diner but me.”

“No judgement here, Candy,” I say. “I'm Mujo Morell, the Cosmic Detective. I've expanded past small-mindedness. I've evolved beyond hypocrisy. I see the big picture now, and that picture gets bigger every day...”

“Yeah. Yeah,” she says, waving me off. “I'd thank you, Mujo, but I don't want to feed your fat-ass ego.”

“Okay. That's understandable. But... how about feedin' the part of me that's skinny?” I ask, pointing to my hungry little belly.

“That depends,” says Candy. With a broom and a dustpan, she gestures to the circle of salt. “You gonna clean up that mess?”