I’m not a wizard. Wizards are generalists. They like to straddle a number of different disciplines, showing off thaumaturgy out of one hand and meditative feats out of the other. Sorcerors are even worse, usually because they talk a lot more. Sorcery takes a lot of discussion, feeding bits of the aetherworld gossip in exchange for favours on the more material dimension. Me? I’m a specialist. A wizard cures a lot of ills. I’m the plumber you call in to fix your drains.

They call me the Portal Doctor. Portal Dr. E.

The E stands for something east European that’s kind of hard to pronounce. I was teased a lot about it as a kid, until I just told them to call me “E.” Fifth letter of the alphabet, a pretty common vowel, bad time to pass the last gas station. Just call me “E.”

Oh, “Portal Doctor” you say? I’m a closer. There’s a lot of open windows in this world. Let me explain.

Any time you hear something that starts, “There’s two kinds of people in this world,” or anything so binary as that, it’s a joke. But I can still use it as an example. There’s two kinds of people in this world: people who go around closing cabinet doors in kitchens because it really bugs them, and people who just leave them open. It’s not a value judgment; you probably turn the light off to save electricity, after all, but to you, it’s no big deal. You’ll close the cabinets in a minute. They’re not letting out energy or anything, it’s just an aesthetic thing. Asymmetrical.

I call it “sloppy,” and it is. See, that’s just the kind of thinking that lets them in. Literally.

Them? Oh, they’d be the wee beasties wot bump in the night, of course. Rarely anything to worry about. It’s like the plumber metaphor I was alluding to a while back. Most of the jobs a plumber gets called on are pretty quick fixes and if you knew the right place to tap, you wouldn’t be out the hundred bucks, right? My quick fixes are usually goblin nests or the like. I know where to tap, you see.

And sometimes plumbers have the big jobs. The ones where they need to call the city. (Or in my case, I try to keep tabs on wizards. There’s one up in Chicago who is usually willing to lend a hand, or send one of his fellows. There’s also some under-the-radar practitioners who I generally try to stay on the right side of favors with, just in case.)

Like last night.

I tell you, college towns are the worst. I know I sound like some kind of cranky geezer when I say it, but the truth is, it’s a twice a year occurrence that some drunken coeds are going to play with a ouija board or prance around in little, “I want a vampire to eat me,” undies without knowing what kinds of steps to take to protect themselves. I don’t recommend you flush rock salt down your toilet, but if you’ve got a septic tank (or a haunted campus [most of them are, these days]) there are regular precautions you’d expect to make.

sigh.

Take a quick poll around your office or classroom or whatever. We love ghost stories. It’s just that while everyone has a little mystery of some sort, no one wants to actually believe them. While our culture thinks of them as entertainment, it’s not so long ago that they were told as warnings. Don’t scratch the surface of the mirror in the dark and invite something nasty into your house. Maybe I’ve lived in places where they don’t lock their doors, but there’s the other side of it – in those places, we knew our neighbors. And in both cases, sometimes something goes terribly wrong.

There are times I am glad that kosher salt has made it big. Thanks, wizard Brown. It means I find it in more and more kitchens and don’t have to order it by the truckload. It doesn’t actually have to be kosher, but most times I need the rock more than the fine grain. Of course, sometimes the thin dust is nice, and then I have some fast food packets in the car. I’ve been adopted by the local Wendy’s. Their BBQ sauce is nice, too.

Water and salt and will. Tools of the trade. Yeah, there’s a mystical component to boot, and while everyone has something of it, that’s what makes a magician a little bit different from mortal man: not just the ability to manipulate it, but the training, too. It’s this ubiquity that makes it dangerous, though. Vampires attracted to energy more than blood, wonder opening doors to mischief. That kind of thing. The question asked that makes the opportunity. Actually, that’s part of what it says on my business card. “Doors closed, curiosity satisfied.”

But I don’t bring cats back. I’m smarter than that.

Just like I should have been smarter last night. The fact that I’m telling you this means I survived. Score one for the good guys. But I’ve been doing this for a while, and that means I trust my gut. My gut says, it’s going to come back.

I’ll skip the plumber metaphors when it comes to talking about what someone’s guts say. And all the puns that come from such toilet humour.

So, because this is important, let me focus for a moment. Set the scene. Denver, Colorado. Kind of East of the city, actually, in a suburb that ate Denver’s face that we call Aurora…