You know how this goes.
A man vanishes for a while. Where does a man vanish into? Not a beach. Not a monastery… nothing so mundane. He doesn’t take a tasteful silent retreat.
No. Some men (the right kind of man) have already been where the towels smell of eucalyptus and pretense. These are the choices of boring men, men who have credit scores or 401Ks.
No.
THE RIGHT KIND OF MAN GOES TO THE TEETH CIRCUS, LADIES.
And, sure. While he’s away wrangling clowns and unrepentant dentists, maybe the fiction-factory goes dark. Maybe no one blathers in the Face-Books about killing the sun or Tik-Toks their way into the apocalypse.
That’s when the respectable people say, Ah, tut, tut. He’s finished. FINALLY.
The respectable people always say that garbage. Those words give them something to fondle with their tiny little baby mouths.
The disrespectable people, (my favorites, my darlings, my sacred vermin), said nothing at all. No.
Because here I am. Standing on a crate outside the still-smoldering dream-factory, hat singed, coat smoking, dignity somewhere in a ditch outside Kansas City, sending up the old flare.
From Alaska to Albania. From Wyoming to the back booth at the Waffle House. From the sacred city of Katmandu to your mom’s house. From every mailbox, mirror, payphone, and raccoon-haunted alley where the Cabal still keeps a key.
I say the words you knew were coming before I opened my mouth.
I know.
I know.
One more and I’m out, he mutters, for the ninth time, while the Government sends Thugs and the Church takes notes.
But this one matters.
This is the real one.
We pull this off, we never work again. The book launches. Reality files a complaint. The old doors remember our names. Every one of us walks away rich in the only currencies that matter: legend, dread, favorable rumors, black-market wonder, and premium-grade unreality, none of which can legally cross state lines.
But I can’t do it alone. Never could.
The barker is nothing without the crew behind the curtain. The voice is nothing without the hands that rig the lights, drug the lions, bribe the saints, switch the labels on the poison, and teach the exit door to pretend it was always an entrance.
I need the one who knows a guy. Who always knows a guy. Who knows a guy in every city, in several cities that closed, and in one city that hasn’t opened yet. Ask him for a forger, a fixer, a woman who can disappoint a dead king into surrendering his crown, a man who can hold his breath for a decade, and he makes a call. You don’t hear the call. You just hear it’s handled.
I need the Van Guy. There’s always a van guy. The van has a wizard on the side. I don’t even know everything they do, but there’s gotta be a van guy.
I need the priest defrocked by three churches, one aquarium, and the municipal transit authority.
I need the hymn-thief. The rat-king of unpaid invoices. The false widow who attends funerals professionally. You know the type.
You are the type. This is who we’ve always been.
The Secret Cabal… (OUR Cult) was never a table in a candlelit room. That insults us all. A table in a candlelit room is what nervous rich men build when they want to feel mythic without getting mud on their shoes.
The Cabal is the woman selling SIM cards on the corner next to the payphone ringing in a city with no payphones left to ring.
The Cabal is a note under your windshield wiper, written in your own hand, warning you not to trust your own hand.
The Cabal is a raccoon with a cigarette and a municipal badge, and it stares you down in an alley at 2:17 a.m. like you both know what you did.
We have no headquarters. Headquarters can be raided.
We have back rooms. Borrowed kitchens. Tunnels behind respectable theaters. Laundromats where the third dryer leads somewhere with better laws. We have folding chairs, unpaid parking tickets, a sacred stapler, and a woman named Julie, who runs more of the occult economy than any of you feel ready to hear about.
We have signals.
A red balloon, tied to a parking meter. Three pennies, pressed into the mouth of a vending machine. The phrase: no, officer, I have never seen that goat before.
We have traditions.
Never take the last match. Never count the clowns until you’re outside. Never accept tea from a man whose reflection arrives before he does.
And finally —
Which brings us to the thing we’ve been not-saying.
Yeah.
Mistakes happened there. I won’t stand here pretending otherwise — you were there, you haven’t forgotten, and neither have I.
So before the ask. Before one more word about the job. Before the envelopes go around, before the maps start whispering and the old thrill crawls up our spines like a knife learning to sing — I owe you the thing a man like me only says once the hour’s gone crooked and the debt’s come due.
I’m sorry about Prague. Hat off. Knees in the ash.
I should have told you what I knew. I should have told you what I only guessed.
I didn’t.
So here I am. Out of the cold. Hat in hand, which, for a man of my reputation, counts as a religious act.
I can’t promise clean hands.
I can’t promise safe roads.
I can’t promise the plan won’t change the moment the plan notices we’re looking at it.
But I promise this:
No one gets left in the mirror.
No one feeds the clock alone.
No one gets traded to the thing under the bridge unless they volunteer for it, in writing, with two witnesses and a notary who has never once been a bird.
We go in together. We come out together. Or we make such a noise on the way down that the respectable people wake sweating in their beds, clutching their pearls, whispering impossible, impossible, impossible.
Friends.
Darlings.
Sacred vermin.
My beautiful, disastrous Cabal —
I’ve got a job.
You know what I need to hear.
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