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Superstition

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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The strangest gig I ever had was fetish destruction. In July of 1995 I answered an ad in a newspaper asking for a reliable messenger and administrative assistant. My interview took place in a minuscule office above a deli, with the smell of burnt toast wafting through the window. Even though there was a fan spinning above our heads, it felt as hot as an oven in there.

The interviewer was a middle-aged man dressed in a black suit and tie who was sweating buckets and periodically dabbed a handkerchief across his forehead.

His name was Mr. Gaffey and the name of the business I’d walked into was the rather generic Useful Endings. Mr. Gaffey began by asking me the typical battery of questions: work experience, education, and the like, before moving into more esoteric territory.

“Are you superstitious?”

“I’m not particularly afraid of black cats,” I said, wondering if this was part of a personality test. Or maybe it was one of those logic puzzles, like how’d you’d get a bag of corn, a chicken, and a fox across a river while paddling a canoe. I’d scored high on those, even if my résumé was a patchwork of unfulfilled potential and dashed expectations.

“Do you believe in magic?”

“Do I need to pull white rabbits out of hats or something?”

“You need to pull cursed objects out of boxes.”

I stared at the man and laughed. Either this was the right reaction, or he was tired of talking to people. It was damn hot in the room. Maybe he wanted out of there quick. The man dabbed the handkerchief against his neck, then lit a cigarette. He waved the smoke away with a hand.

“Do you know what a fetish is? I don’t mean an erotic predilection; I’m talking about magical fetishes.” I stared at him, and he kept talking, looking pleased that he was schooling me. “A fetish is any object that is believed to possess magical powers. Rabbit’s foot? A fetish. Lucky coin? A fetish. Spirit dolls, medicine bags, spirit boxes, talismans, and charms: fetishes. That’s our business here: fetishes.”

“You make magic charms?”

“We handle their safe, proper decommission. In the old days, people would make a charm, cast a spell, then dispose of its remnants by tossing it in a river, burying at a crossroads, or burning it in a pyre. There were also pieces that needed even more complex processes, like scooping dirt from under the hangman’s noose and… Well, you get the point.”

“Then it’s like eco-friendly recycling?”

“Or toxic waste services.”

“People pay for this?”

“Oh, yes. We have many individual clients, a few big companies. Have you heard of Madame Antoniette?”

“The lady with the psychic hotline,” I said. I’d seen her ads half a dozen times while dozing off in front of the TV late at night.

“She has a standing contract with us. Now, the disposal of fetishes is easy enough. There’s a color-coded manual you follow, it’s all been standardized. But one crucial element is this: you must not believe in magic. That’s the only way this works. For unbelievers, the fetishes are simply things. Musty old dolls, scraps of clothing, moth-eaten books. For believers, these are dangerous weapons. The best antidote against magic is indifference. You must be honest with me—do you believe in the supernatural? Are you superstitious? Any lucky numbers, or a passion for astrology?”

“Nah,” I said. “My mom was a raging atheist and I take after her, so I don’t have a religion and she didn’t believe in lying to me, so there was never even any talk of Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.”

“Then this kind of job, it wouldn’t frighten you?”

“What’s frightening is mold remediation,” I said. I was overqualified and underqualified for nearly every job, with half a degree in cinema studies under my arm and a series of patchy temp jobs to show for all my efforts. “Quite honestly, if I don’t get this job, I’m going to have to go into business with my cousin Alejandro spraying black mold with bleach, and let me tell you, that’s a lot more of a drag than any crystal ball or voodoo doll.”

We shook on it. I started the next day.

---

Useful Endings was an ordinary, dull business. Every morning, I walked to the basement and retrieved the items that arrived in the mail. I collated them by size, copied the information written in a form tucked inside the box or the envelope, then proceeded to browse through a three-ring binder labeled identification guide.

Aside from Mr. Gaffey, who tended to spend the day in his tiny office typing on the computer, the only other two people I ever saw regularly were Marsha, the secretary and receptionist who sat outside Mr. Gaffey’s office going through invoices, and Dennis Duncan, the other Disposal Technician on staff. Dennis was about my age and smoked so much his teeth had passed stained-yellow and had arrived at a murky, algae green. Occasionally a Special Curator in expensive alligator shoes came in with a briefcase under his arm to discuss business with Mr. Gaffey, but the person I worked with every day was Dennis. I never interacted with any clients. The materials were mailed, and I carted them up to the room with a long green table where Dennis and I decommissioned fetishes.

When I was in high school, I’d worked at a fried chicken franchise. Useful Endings was just like the fast-food business. The manual told us everything we had to do. First, we weighed and measured the fetish, took a Polaroid of it, then looked up the type of fetish using the Identification Guide, and finally we followed the steps for the disposal of the object indicated at the back of the three-ring binder. We filled out more paperwork, stamped a pink sheet of paper with the word decommissioned, and the accompanying carbon copy was stapled to a second Polaroid showing the object after its destruction. Then we moved on to the next fetish.

At the chicken joint it had been the same, a mindless loop of premeasured and prearranged steps.

The most interesting part of the job was leafing through the Identification Guide and determining the type of fetish I was dealing with. “Dolls” could mean a decapitated Barbie doll from the 1970s or a fourth-century clay Louvre Doll impaled by thirteen bronze needles. Easy enough, right? Not so fast. Sometimes the doll might come with other items. The Louvre Doll was found with a katadesmos, which is a Greco-Roman curse tablet. So, should, that be filed under “Dolls”, or did I place it under “Books and Writing”?

There were many tiny details to consider. Voces magicae referred to writing that had no translation. Gibberish, basically, or someone’s special shorthand. But you couldn’t assume that because you couldn’t read something it was not a real language. You’d have to pull out one of the many dictionaries lining the shelves and check if it looked like this was actually Aramaic or gobbledygook.

Some of the items were brand new. Bottles of Pepsi wrapped with yellow string and filled with dead beetles. Others were antiques, like a bronze whistle with the words Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad carved on its side.

There were erotic-binding spells on papyrus, bitter curses to shrivel a rival’s testicles in clay, charms for wealth and health, bottles filled with the scent of faded perfume to obtain beauty. They were made of gold, of feathers, of shreds of newspaper. Some were expensive, others were silly. Some were true works of art, like an ivory idol the size of my pinkie, which despite its tiny size had been painted with the finest details.

Once the object was identified in its proper category and sub-category—brown for written materials, purple for dolls, blue for bottles and containers, and so on and so forth—I turned to the back of the binder for the instructions on how to disassemble and dispose of the spell. Eventually I got so good at identifying objects that I was able to tell from the moment I removed a fetish from its box whether I should soak it in brine and then burn it in the basement furnace that was especially conditioned for our use, or seal it with a layer of wax before smashing it with a hammer.

At times, I felt melancholic as I handled tiny cameos and bits of porcelain, thinking of how I’d imagined I’d work at a museum, restoring films from crumbling negatives. Live in Paris. Wear a beret. Eat baguettes. I don’t know, something else.

I spent most of my shift listening to one of the CDs tucked in my Discman, and my lunch hour reading one or another beaten paperback I’d traded at the used bookstore around the corner. When I walked by Marsha’s desk and she wasn’t busy, I’d look over her shoulder and help with her newspaper crossword puzzle. She liked to crochet and gossip about the other tenants in the building. Mr. Gaffey did not gossip, and Mr. Ridley, the curator, looked so posh every time he walked in with his briefcase that I thought if I got close to him he’d use his silver-tipped cane to shoo me away.

Dennis was the kind of guy who seemed ready and eager to make friends. I’d imagined him inviting me to weekend BBQs and bowling nights, but when I told him I didn’t like comic books he grew a bit sullen. We chatted, but I hurt his feelings with my indifference to X-Men. No BBQs or bowling nights for us.

Still, we worked at the long green table and traded the occasional joke, made the trek downstairs to the deli or across the street to the Golden Dragon for lunch, and on one occasion when I was a few dollars short he lent me a bit of cash. He called me Nugget. I can’t remember how the nickname got started, but it stuck.

Even though he’d been working there for three years, Dennis often relied on me for some of the more complex fetishes. When he was stumped, he’d say, “Nugget, please. You gotta!” and stare at me pleadingly.

A year passed. When July 1996 arrived, it was sweltering in the office. I played my music—Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Garbage humming in my ears—and sipped water from a thermos while I color-coded fetishes.

One afternoon, a lady walked into the office. She was dressed in black, her peroxide-blonde hair styled in the Rachel cut that every chick south of thirty seemed to have. I, not one for trends, had attempted Bettie Page rockabilly bangs that summer and concluded I looked like a clown, so I wore a rather stupid-looking, scalp-hugging toque with the Leafs logo for a week before I simply shaved the whole mess off.

Visitors were an oddity, so I could be forgiven for staring at the woman as she waltzed into the boss’s office in her stiletto heels. Dennis, however, did not stare. He looked, shook and practically foamed at the mouth.

When the woman walked out of the office, slammed the door shut, and turned a furious glare in the direction of our table, I was smart enough to pretend I was checking a label. Dennis, poor idiot, grinned his crooked smile at the woman. She stormed off, her high heels clacking with telegraphed contempt. In a minute she was gone.

I slid by Marsha’s desk. “Hey, do we have a new curator or something?” I asked, thinking of the guy in alligator shoes with the briefcase who was the only person in the building who looked like he earned real dough.

“God, no. That’s Jennifer Powers,” Marsha said, in a low voice that indicated someone of importance, but I shrugged.

“Don’t know her. Is she on TV?”

She might be. She was pretty; her pale skin, slimness, and the dark circles under the eyes all combined to create the perfect heroin-chic look. I am not one for waifs or bony boys, but I saw similar, beautifully emaciated faces plastered on the covers of magazines and the sides of buses.

“Really, sometimes I wonder what you do in your spare time,” Marsha said. I read James Bond novels and Doc Savage, caught black-and-white movies over at Kino Theater, collected travel brochures for places I’d never visit, but I let her talk. “She’s a socialite. The daughter of Henry Powers. They make that jam. Tildbury Farms.”

“Not Powers Farm?”

“No. Anyway, she’s worth a fortune. Check the papers, she’s always in the social pages. She was in a bad accident three years ago; her car went down a ravine. It was in the news, front page. You don’t remember?”

Now that she mentioned it, I had a vague memory of the incident, of having seen that face before. Drunk driving, maybe? She’d recovered nicely enough by the looks of her.

“Okay, yeah. What’s she doing here?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure. On Friday I got multiple phone calls for Gaffey from some woman. Mr. Gaffey wasn’t too pleased and told me to say he was away if they called again. Then this morning Ridley phoned and said a young lady needed to see Mr. Gaffey, and couldn’t she be squeezed into the boss’s calendar? It was Ridley, so I had to do it. Ridley’s the founder’s brother, you know? Anyhow, he said ‘Jenny’ would be stopping around lunch time, and who walks into the office? Jennifer Powers.”

“Hmm,” I said, and slid my headphones over my ears again.

The next morning, I bought a newspaper. I didn’t find Jennifer in the social pages; her picture was in the business section, with another one of a white-haired man and a fellow who looked like the youthful version of the white-haired gentleman. The headline was: family feud! Mr. Powers had recently experienced a heart attack and was recovering at the family estate. He’d been ill for a while, and the article wondered if Jennifer would gain control of the company, or if her stepbrother Jeremy would step in.

Lives of the rich and famous, I thought, and gave the paper to Marsha so she could solve the crossword.

On Wednesday, Jennifer came in again. This time she was the lady in red. Red dress, red shoes, red lips, and a ruby nestled against the hollow of her pale neck. Gold bangles adorned her arms. She walked into their boss’s office and exited a few minutes later. This time, rather than slamming the door and looking aggrieved, she turned her blue, almost colorless eyes in our direction.

Marsha was out to lunch and Jennifer circled her desk and went toward the green table where we were working. I wiped the sweat beading on my forehead with the back of my hand while Dennis bobbed his head in greeting.

“Are you the Disposal Technicians?”

“Yeah, yeah, that we are,” Dennis said with another ungraceful bob of the head.

“Only the two of you?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you ever do any freelance work?” she asked.

“We’d be fired if we did,” I said, but the blonde kept staring at Dennis, as though she hadn’t heard me. Finally, he cleared his throat.

“Yeah, we’d be fired.”

“That’s a pity,” she declared, her gaze still fixed on Dennis. Her lips stretched into a smile. The contrast of her red lipstick and her pale face was startling, like when Rita Hayworth flipped her hair in Gilda, and I feared Dennis was going to swoon.

She turned around and walked out of the office with a strut that would have given Naomi Campbell a run for her money.

---

Something was brewing. Dennis was distracted and oddly quiet. On Friday, he invited me to lunch at the Golden Dragon. No sooner had our spring rolls been served, he leaned across the table.

“Jennifer Powers talked to me,” he said.

“Lady Marmalade? She didn’t talk to you, she stormed off.”

“After that! She came back yesterday, waited outside, and tapped me on the shoulder before I got on my bike.”

“What’d she want?”

“Her old man is sick. Apparently, there’s a clause in a legal document that indicated if this happened, if he was terminally ill, they had to destroy a fetish. So, the fetish was mailed to the office a few days ago, but now she’s placed an injunction. Her brother is countersuing her. It’s a mess.”

“Over a fetish?”

“That’s what she says.”

I dipped my spring roll in sweet and sour sauce. “Why’s she telling you this?”

“Well, there’s all this complicated legalese stuff and the company won’t do anything until it’s sorted out. She doesn’t want it destroyed. Her brother is into some weird magic shit and she’s afraid the destruction of the fetish would harm her dad. She’ll pay me to take a picture of it and send her identifying information.”

“You mean she doesn’t know what fetish it is?”

“No idea, and she wants to know. Her dad told her it was custom-made by a warlock from Florence.”

“Then the brother is not the only one into weird magic shit.”

“She suspects it’s something to keep a person in a state between life and death.”

“That narrows it down. Necromancy.” The foulest magic, that’s what our manual said. It was color-coded black. We didn’t get too many of those fetishes, but when we did inevitably the manual had a spooky story to reveal. Examples of bone magic used to create a revenant. Sticks tied in bundles to force the dead to speak. Corpses trailing black fluid and walking down a road, pestilent bodies that must be burnt after their heart was torn out. Or else, a draugr who looked like a dead loved one, and spoke with their voice, but their skin was terribly pale and cold as ice. They ate human carcasses. Tales from the Crypt tropes.

“No. It could be a protective charm. A health amulet. Even a crepundium.”

I snorted. “No way.”

The server came back with our order of Kung Pao Chicken. I spooned some onto my plate.

“We’d know if we looked at it.”

“Dennis, this is none of our business.”

“She’s offering us thirty-thousand dollars. We can split it down the middle. The boss is keeping the fetish in limbo. You have the combination; just go into the morgue, get a picture, fill an identification sheet, and hand them to me. I’ll slip the file to her tonight. No one will ever know it.”

The morgue was a gigantic room of metal cabinets that housed the fetish paperwork. In some cases, even the remains of the fetishes were there, if the instructions in the binder indicated that the fetish needed to be “bagged and tagged” rather than completely obliterated. There was a small, adjoining room we called “limbo.” That was where Ridley dropped off the top-notch fetishes that were not transported via mail or regular messenger. The Powers’s fetish must be there, tucked in a safety box until the legalese around it was sorted.

“We’ll be fired.”

“Who’s gonna tell? When you’re signing off for the day, take a peek.”

“And you’ll get me a new job when they kick my ass out?”

“It’s a dead-end job. Look, we both know it. It pays the bills, but that’s about it. You want more of life. I’ve seen you eyeing the posters at the travel agency down the street, and there’s that French dictionary that you sometimes pull off the shelf during our break. You’re sitting there, practicing your vocabulary. This isn’t what you imagined life would be.”

No shit. A botched cinema degree and the weekly scraping-by weren’t what I’d pictured as a youngster. I scrutinized the chicken on my plate, like a haruspex divining the future.

“Nugget, please. You gotta!” he said in that pleading tone that worked so well.

“Why don’t you do it?”

Dennis seemed shocked at my response, but I’ve never been one to take a penny from the till or fuck around in the office. I’m all about clean references and steady paychecks. In the end, I’m also not much of a rule-breaker.

Dennis didn’t explain, was sullen the rest of the evening. Could it be that he believed in the supernatural? What a joke! By the time we clocked out it had started to rain, but the rain was light, and the day was still warm. It felt like vapor. I hurried back to my apartment, opened a window, turned on a fan, and dozed off on the couch.

Around midnight I woke up, feeling like I was sticking to the fabric of the furniture, and poked my head out the window. I thought about giving Dennis a call. Telling him not to go through with it, because I knew he was going to get in touch with Miss Powers, and then I figured he knew thirty grand could get you places. I considered phoning our boss.

In the end, I may be a rule-follower, but I’m not a tattletale. I went back to sleep.

---

On Monday, the faces of Jennifer and Henry Powers stared at me from a newspaper stand. I palmed my jacket for change, bought the paper, headed to a coffee at a shop a few blocks from the office, and sat down to read. My hands were sweaty as I unfolded the broadsheet.

They were dead. Jennifer and Henry had perished in a fire the previous night. There was a statement from a Tildbury spokesperson and few details. I read the story twice. My coffee had grown cold. I drank it in quick gulps and proceeded to the office.

Marsha intercepted me as soon as I walked in. “Gaffey is in a foul mood,” she told me. “Dennis opened the morgue and stole the Powers’s fetish. They found it in a fireproof box at the Powers’s house.”

“Where’s Dennis?”

“Nowhere. Ridley sent someone to his apartment, but he’s not there. They’re bringing in the fetish. Gaffey says you need to decommission it.”

The fetish arrived that same afternoon and I stayed late working under the watchful eye of Ridley and Gaffey. It was a Valdemar: a small wooden coffin that had been stained black. A charm to control the dead. The lining of the coffin was stitched with the spell and the name carved on the back of it was Jennifer Millicent Powers. It had been made to keep her, not her father, in a state between life and death. It must have been commissioned after her accident.

The fetish, however, was not meant to outlast her dad. If something happened to Henry, it would be destroyed, and she would die. Why? Insurance, maybe. Or a rule of magic.

Since Jennifer survived the accident, she must have believed the fetish worked. When Henry fell ill, it triggered the destruction of the fetish, which she sought to prevent. That’s why Jennifer bribed Dennis to retrieve the object.

According to the papers, Jennifer murdered her father and then set the house on fire. A twisted mercy killing since Henry was deadly ill. At the office, Marsha told me it must have been the other way around: Henry turned against Jennifer, set her on fire, then shot himself. Or maybe the stepbrother killed both of them. Or one of them? Marsha was full of ideas. After all, if you believe in magic, Jennifer was already dead, and the fetish was inside the fireproof box. That meant there might have been a charred corpse dragging itself through the hills that simply crumbled to dust the moment I decommissioned the Valdemar.

Anyway, that story concludes neatly enough with death.

Dennis’s story doesn’t have a clear ending. I’m unsure whether Jennifer asked him to steal the fetish from the start, or if the plan later changed, but he did take it from the office and deliver it to her. What happened next, who knows? Investigators did not find anything important missing from Dennis’s apartment, although there was a bit of blood in the bathtub and the place was in disarray. But Dennis was not the most organized person at the best of times, so the chaos might have been him simply not bothering to tidy up.

Marsha and I traded theories. Had Dennis tried to ask Jennifer for more money, so she’d killed him and disposed of the body? Stepbrother Jeremy might have had a hand in the disappearance, killing Dennis in a fury because he believed his meddling had cost the lives of his father and his sister. Or else Dennis, fearing the repercussions of his actions, fled. This seemed the most likely outcome, as ten days later, a man resembling Dennis was spotted in New Orleans.

“At least he’s alive,” I told Marsha.

“Is he?” she replied.

“What do you mean?”

Marsha shrugged and returned to her crossword.

---

I left Useful Endings six months later. It felt too depressing, handling people’s fears and dreams and desires.

Dennis has never resurfaced, and his face doesn’t adorn any missing, or wanted, posters these days. He wasn’t seen after that one glimpse in New Orleans.

You might think I have bad dreams, nightmares where a strange figure shuffles by my apartment complex, dripping a dark, viscous fluid. Or else that a perfectly preserved Dennis, looking like he’s not aged a day since 1996, will knock at my door. You might imagine that I fear one day I’ll receive a box that says “Please disarm, Nugget. Please. You gotta.” A fetish will be tucked inside, a black coffin with Dennis’s name inscribed on the back.

But like Mr. Gaffey told me at that interview, the best antidote against magic is indifference. I do not carry amulets against the evil eye, or a red string tied around my wrist. I leave that to others, those with money, desperation, and faith enough for the services of Useful Endings.

Author’s Note: I told Nick Mamatas, when he asked if I’d be interested in contributing a story for this anthology, that I was going to turn in something inspired by Garbage’s “I Think I’m Paranoid.” Over a period of three months, I wrote and rewrote over 5,000 solid words of a story. Then I went into the hospital for major surgery.

My first night home, after taking a large dose of painkillers, I woke up from a dream where someone retrieved odd objects out of P.O. boxes. A doll, a bottle, a knife. I wondered why anyone would do that and wanted to write a story immediately.

Since I was trapped in bed, unable to shuffle close to the computer, I had to type most of it on my cellphone. I listened to Garbage while working, with no plot at first, only the image of strange objects lingering in my mind and the sound of “I Think I’m Paranoid” hurling me back to the rock of the 1990s.

I was groggy with the painkillers, and I thought at one point Shirley Manson belted the lyrics “I’m superstitious.” She doesn’t, but I typed the word “superstition” at the top of the document and glanced at the amulet against the evil eye my mother had left on my night table.

The writing distracted me from the pain, and even though it was a completely unplanned story I think it made more sense, in the end, than the work I’d been carefully conceptualizing. Then again, improvisation is one of the crucial tools in a musician—and a writer’s—toolkit.

---

Host Commentary

He was always polite, the man in the parka. He’d come into the comic store, nose around for a bit and finally ask about paranormal stuff. I remember one time he came in and asked whether there were any comics about remote viewing and it turns out we actually had a couple in! And I’d read a book about it not long previously so we had a good chat. When it finished, he smiled, tapped the side of his head and said ‘Lots to download.’.

 

He’d come in early in the week. The phantom de bagger would come in on release day. Lovely chap, very sweet, clearly a bit lonely and he never bought much. He’d always take a new release comic out of the bag, read it, and then carefully put the bag back in front of it. We weren’t even mad, just weirdly impressed.

 

Retail work makes you a shoreline. You’re paid to stand still for eight hours a day and watch people, deliveries and things wash ashore. It’s honestly, in the right business and with the right people pretty great. I ran a comic store for eight years in the late ‘90s early ‘00s and it was mostly a very happy time. Living my Clerks 1 dream.

 

But the one thing that it encourages is apathy. The world is happening to you and that means you don’t have to work too hard for something new to arrive. We always fought really hard against this, but working in fandom retail too meant gatekeepers were a thing of the present, and not the past where they belong. That, I realise now, equipped me very well to work in horror for almost twenty years and counting at this point.

 

Fandom is a fetish, and Moreno-Garcia plays with the double meaning of that word here DELICIOUSLY. ‘Fetish destruction’ is one of those phrases that knocks you on your heels and makes you blink twice to make sure you read it right and that’s just the start. The delightful M R James cameo made me laugh and when I realised why it was there that made me laugh even harder.

 

You can enjoy horror fiction without ever reading M R James. Or the racists. An author does not have to be dead to be venerable. You do not have to have seen The Godfather to like movies. There is no minimum height requirement on joy.

 

Where the horror sits in this story is in how Moreno-Garcia shows us there’s no minimum height requirement for apathy either. Feeling too much is awful. Feeling nothing is awful too, just in the other direction. One of the notes I made for this story was:

 

‘We are blind to the failings of all we love until it is too late.’

 

And what I now realise I should have added is:

 

But sometimes all we can see are the failings and not what we should love despite them. The grey area our fetish destructors (And yes that particular deep cut is deliberate, check the show notes) is flat and wide and infinite and no one has a good time there. We all spend time there but if we’re lucky, and we work hard, we get out. Work hard. Be lucky.