Grimoire Diabolique

Barrows’ suit cost more than the average resident of Seattle earned in a month. As an investment banker for Jenkins, Harris, & Luce, he could afford it. He could afford the Aston Martin Zagato with the turbo’d 5.3-liter V8, he could afford the Movado gold watch, and he could afford the waterfront penthouse suite on Alaskan Avenue.

One thing he could not afford, however, was to allow anyone of import to see him—

Well…

Better to put it this way. If Barrows made $500,000 in one year—that was a bum year. Investment banking involved a certain alchemy of which Barrows possessed the cabalistic necromancer’s wand. Objectively, his profession entailed moving clients’ money from one bank to another, which sounded simple. In truth, though, knowing where and when to move the money, and for how long, was what made his clients and himself preposterously wealthy. In other words, William Barrows had a reputation to maintain, a reputation upon which his financial solvency depended.

Already out of place in the Armani suit, he walked slowly down the sidewalk past the county courthouse on Third Avenue, right alongside the bums and drug addicts wandering in their plight to a stinking nowhere. Yet Barrows scarcely saw them. He walked steadily onward, his eyes roving the sidewalk’s cement for…

His heart jumped when he heard the sound…

The sound of a man clearing his throat and expectorating loudly.

The ever-familiar splat on the sidewalk came next, and next after that came Barrows’ nearly full erection. Up ahead, he saw it. A derelict in filthy beard and rotten clothes had coughed up a wad of phlegm from his homeless-roughened lungs, and spat it on the sidewalk.

Oh, God, Barrows thought just as a normal man would think upon entering the bedroom of a beautiful woman for the first time, or watching that risky bond fund skyrocket and split.

Barrows caught the glint: a lumpen gem. It lay there waiting for him, freshly green, savory and mystical. Barrows’ Guccis clicked up and stopped, and now he was standing there, feet apart, over the treasure.

He was discreetly protecting it from haphazard trample.

For someone to walk on it would be vandalism. It would be yanking the needle from an addict’s vein and cruelly emptying the syringe out the window. Barrows was guarding it, in other words, while at the same time trying to appear normal.

He glanced at his watch, frowned like a Straussberg method actor waiting for a bus; he was Hitchcock in a phone booth. He had to be careful. He could not allow himself to be seen doing what he was about to do.

He waited, calmly tapping his foot. Eventually the pedestrian traffic broke: no one coming down the block from either side.

Oh, God…

Like magic, then, Barrows produced the two index cards from his suit pockets. He knelt very quickly, scooped up the lump of phlegm in the cards, then turned and walked briskly back up the sidewalk.

He ducked behind one of the courthouse’s high brick pillars. No one was there.

Thank you, God…

Then he licked the hock of phlegm off the card, sucked it around in his mouth like a delectable raw oyster, and swallowed it whole.

He closed his eyes, stood as if paralyzed. He felt the still-warm phlegm sink to his gut, and then he signed in bliss, similar to the bliss felt by a crack addict after the first hit of the day off the pipe.

This was Barrows’ rush—not cocaine, not heroin, not sex nor drink nor gambling.

It was phlegm.

Hence was his plight, the macabre curse which had held him captive for most of his adult life. Barrows was a phlegm-eater.

««—»»

He couldn’t help it, and he never knew why.

This is so wrong, he thought every time he scraped up a lump and ate it. What seemed even more wrong was what followed after he swallowed: a titan sexual surge. Most times he was able to contain himself until he got home, other times no. Other times he’d slink into a urine-fetid alley or between a high bank of bushes, to vigorously masturbate.

Seeing phlegm on the street lit a oracular fire in him. It nearly stripped him of all sanity, of everything that could be called healthy.

Barrows had to have it.

He had to eat it.

Picture a person stumbling across the desert. This person has not drunk water in days. Suddenly that person, close to death, happens upon a clear cold babbling brook…

To Barrows, the babbling brook was sputum. The dirtier the better. The more catastrophically disgusting, the more he’d need it. Homeless bums were best, the people literally rotting in the alleys, hacking up clumps of respiratory discharge from soiled and emphysematic lungs. Virtual wads of congestion. Sometimes the chunks were coppery with blood, or uniquely textured by bits of cancerous lung tissue. Sometimes the clumps contained mysterious grit.

All the better for Barrows.