Everything Under the Moon

The day of the event was just before dawning. We knew George was going over the ridge right about now, and yes I said we. When George and I had gone out to the car that very early morning who do you think we found ? Did any of you need a second guess? Yeah, I didn't think so. Sleeping in the back seat was Bobbie. D@mn she was getting sneaky. What the hay, she caught me with a beautifully executed surprise attack. I could only surrender gracefully." BOBBIE!, WHAT IN TARNATION DO YOU THINK YOUR DOING HERE?" "Reading Sun-Tzu." It's a good thing George and I had become such good friends. I would have had a stripe off him. He laughed to the point he got the hic-cups! We drank coffee till we figured it was time to put on our part of the show. George would be the most active at the back of the cemetery pulling the traps together and it was later in the day, full camo or not. Bobbie and I would keep the attention on us. The Arts we had worked with the Craft were all in place to give Mr. Ugly his Medicine, It was not the type of medicine that would make him better. We did a contact with my medicine wheel to help the energy flow more evenly. We took it to the edge and maybe a bit past to be safe from having to hurt some of the toughs if they had shown up but we wanted to make sure Mr. Ugly was getting the message it was on. George made it okay and we were ready.

It was time to get to work. The feeling was right. That flow. The complex made simple and the mundane woven through with magical intent. The bundle of sticks that, separately can be broken easily, are bound into a unity stronger than the trunk of any oak. I could hear the music of the spheres singing it's sweet melody. Nature sang harmony and my heart beat was the counter point. I could focus intent to a pin-point. Bobbie wove hers with mine effortlessly as we had done so many times, for so many reasons. I got in the car and drove to Pinewoods with George riding Shot-gun. Bobbie would make sure everybody got off to the right places. About a mile from the cemetery I pulled over to let George get in the backseat so whoever was watching for Mr. Ugly would see me alone. I made a show of dropping the chain at the gate, driving my car over and replacing the chain. I drove my car behind the vaults to get it out of sight. I came out and started to put on a show of preparing some form of circle. Mine had been fixed into the soil with a little trick I had picked up with Calcium Carbonate and Magnisium for the better part of the week (it'll even hold up under rain if you put it down the right way). Cars of Coven members showed up and most of them got out to "sneak" into the cemetery. Just sneaky enough that Mr. Ugly would figure he could trap the trappers. Not so sneaky they wouldn't be seen by someone watching close to report what was going on. They moved along the fence line and went OUT the holes they were going to watch and settled in to wait. It did take some convincing that no traps would reach out and bite them while they were going through the cemetery. Maybe we over did it in Bobbies living room. The coven members in the cars stayed out on the roads. In a coffee shop here, a scenic stop there. Spotted around not to keep the more senior and less wood wise safe, but to give us eyes where I wanted them. I wanted to know what was going on out on the roads. Groups of young guys, especially if it was two or more cars of them, on the roads. George and I were ready to pull the plug on this and just make sure the coven made it out whole, even if the same was not going to be said about who ever messed with us. It was a good idea to know where the police where too. When it was full dark George got out of the car and came around to the front of the vaults. We went inside and sat on a couple of openings that had once held the dead. He was starting his education in the esoteric. We took out our flasks and he learned to pour out a libation to the honor of the dead. "What's with the rebar in the pockets?" "I was wondering how long you were gonna wonder about that. Iron has a way of breaking up the energy used to accomplish a spell. Spells are just electromotive energy as far as I can tell. That grounds them out or breaks up the pattern I think." "Not to sound picky, BUT YOU THINK!" " Yeah. That's something that a lot of teachers won't let on about. The fact that they don't know everything, but that it works. That's why the throwing knives I'm carrying are brass."" I figured that was for show. They really look snazzy." "Completely functional, that's why I've got moccasins on. I don't have any iron or steel on me at all." Just then the clicks started in on the talkies.(dot-dash so the noise couldn't be heard more than ten feet away, even on a still night) Everybody got it right enough that George and I knew what was what and who was where. I told them they did great. George and I had master sets so we could use whisper mode if we wanted or needed to.

We went out front to wait." George, this is going to be on the knives edge tonight. If I tell you to get out of Dodge, no pick-up on a man down." "You're the only one here." "Exactly." I'll give him this he waited to get everything in place before he moved. Maybe he pulled it off with kids walkie-talkies. We had better commo equipment than he did. We knew we had guessed wrong and that he was using a full encirclement (double pincer) movement, not just swinging through one side of the woods to meet at the vaults. Mr. Ugly was REAL serious about this. It was a joke to us -"That poor, sad rogue. He's got us surrounded!" That's how vertical envelopment-air mobile soldiers fight. It's our job." Give'em hell George!" "Give'em hell Dan!" And with that George drifted left and things started to happen pretty fast. I started hearing noise that was music to my ears. Crashing brush, swearing, cries of pain, assorted howls that I think were from George. Evil laughs that I knew were from George. I even heard broken incantations, and the happy sounds of general mayhem and his chief-of-staff major disturbance. I don't know how many people Mr. Ugly had. He must have thought he had enough. He didn't. He just never counted on coming across someone with George's training, guts and brains. The physical side of this battle was all his and he handled it superbly. Then, of course, there was the reason for all this general unpleasantness. Up the road he came, bold as can be, with four guys in robes. This nut-job HAD watched to many horror movies when he was a kid. It would have been funny if there hadn't been this "something" with them. It had a quality all it own. It was as if your sight did tricks going through it. A different piece of reality was moving through ours. They definitely knew I was there. Their pace picked up. It was time for the kill. You could just tell when that evil entity knew there where no protections around this human. He bore no jewelry. He had some prayers, blessings and best wishs layed upon him. The knives he had weren't even sacrificial. Here was a soul and it would be his. It would be his or he would know why. Mr. Ugly came BOLDLY with his pet. He and his helpers chanting in their Chaldean. Pronunciation be damned, it was intent that counted. The stench was obscene. Fetid and sulfurous, corruptions vapors assaulting anything they came in contact with. They were going to have what they wanted. A human soul to play with. All that power. They were coming up toe to toe. I don't know who taught Mr. Ugly. Might have been self taught . He might have been taught by someone else. He was mine now! He was about to get schooled! THERE ARE BOLD USERS OF THE ARTS. THERE ARE OLD USERS OF THE ARTS. THERE ARE NO OLD ,BOLD USERS OF THE ARTS! Here's your next lesson - any spell can be reversed. If it can keep you out, it can sure enough keep you in. All of a sudden the lunch can't be touched and its lashing us . Mr. Ugly , evil entities don't like to be made this unhappy. They don't like to be held against their will, and they WILL let you know when they are angry. We were in our own little universe. Mr. Ugly was getting pretty beat up. My power was swelling, my power was accomplishing things I could never have believed true, my power was an illusion because it wasn't my power.... I new the theories. I had put in the time to focus my thinking. Neurologists had even figured out that my corpus collosium is wired to cross co-ordinate the brain hemispheres, not just let them talk to each other. I had practiced. I had pushed results one way or another and to greater or lesser degree. But this, I had, had no comprehension of power. Raw, elemental power surged through every fiber of my body. It all jelled. I knew the theory. I understood things I never had before. Mr. Ugly was utterly beneath my contempt, but this evil energy, this thing that would attack me, this thing that would attack my FRIENDS!!! I lost my mind. This entity had committed the worst, the only sin, it would seek to attack those who I was sworn to protect. It was up to me to punish it. I would eradicate it. I began to take apart the facets of its personality as a gem cutter splits a diamond. I spread those facets all over the multiverse. Just at the end I tried to drag parts back. I saw the line I had crossed but I could not pull it back. I killed it with magic - necromancy.

I never knew what happened after that. I got the story of it during the last few hours of the victory celebration -Sunday night. They had carried me into a side bedroom at Bobbie's and just checked on me every now and again. George told me "Darndest thing I ever saw! Foggy bowl that was flashing like a welder's arc. Smell of a two day old battlefield with all kinda cracking noises and then a pop like a champagne cork that was maybe a foot long. Mr. Ugly was layin' there bleedin' from the ears. You were standin' , making hand signals I had never seen. You were using the scaryest voice I have EVER heard sayin' I don't know what. I didn't think it was worth it to chase the guys in the fancy bathrobes. They were hauling butt to parts unknown. I figured they could get Mr. Ugly if they ever thought to come back for him. I policed the battle space for intelligence. You were just standing there. You looked like you where off a Three-day pass you hadn't bothered to sleep on, so I just got you in the car and split. Bobbie told me about passing over the Civil War dead. It was uneventful and they told her to let me know they were passing over on Full Dress Parade and giving Bobbie the Salute as my second in command since I had been incapacitated by the action. The party was payed for by part of the battle field intelligence, there was a wallet in Mr. Ugly's pocket. Rules of war - spoil of war. We sent the wallet back to a rather prominant local political/business family. It contained a note stating that we'd forget the name in the wallet if they would forget that Pinewood Cemetery existed. We also let them know the energy had been drained. We further stated that we didn't care what means they used to run there family or pubic affairs since we found it utterly distasteful to be the arbiter of someone else's morals or actions. They put the five parchments George had policed up into a laundry bag full of rocks and dropped them of a bridge into the middle of the Hudson River. I would have said the things that I think went on in that bowl of fog was some weird dream/hallucination except I paid the law of three for killing an entity with magic. Maybe because I caught myself at the end and at least fought against being power "drunk", I was allowed a chance to be back here after dying 3 times. I know the way I was killed left me little doubt. Desert Storm - Yeah, still nuts! Insertion teams of one sort or another. Had ended up at the north end of the "Highway of Death" covering a team that controlled air strikes. (Not that many Iraqies got killed. If motor vehicles are getting blown up are you going to sit in a car or are you going to run like he!!.) There's a city up that way-Basra. Watching the No-Fly Zone is a good way to get bitten by a little swamp creature a mosquito carrying an obscure bacterium that I hadn't been vaccinated for}. Real easy way to die. You'll have to read "Dead and Back Again" in Rants and Ramblings if you want to know more. Bobbie and George - Well, they (being the calm, retiring and reserved people that they both are) had an on again, off again relationship that livened the lives of MP's at a couple of the finer military camps in the US. Bobbie, often decided to visit for different periods of time even when George had to change base to enhance his career. When I want to live dangerously these days, I just tell Bobbie she has a Common Law marriage with George. My wife just rolls her eyes and says "They're at it again". George still hic-cups when he laughs to much. You know, I wonder if they can get Christian Bale to play the young me in the summer Block Buster?

I thought it was still here. Now it's tagged at the top. Enjoy!

Beautifully written#

Thank you.