Let’s stop here for a moment, I need a little breather an it’s not like an apartment filled with an elaborately spelled out occult symbology, hell, practically a full unraveling codec, surrounding me.

There are some questions I’m sure you could ask right now. Like how I know so much about occult symbols, and about why I tend to avoid sharing that kind of education, that kind of information, and sharing that I know much more about occult symbols to associates, friends, people on the street, police officers and the like.

All right.

Now for number one, I am a child of the age. What's can I say. We’re exposed to all this from an early age, on television, on the radio, on the Internet. Even at school, although mostly as warnings about what not to touch, what not to draw what not to say.

Well, it was a Catholic school after all..

How did it go?

This was the world after the war, this is everything they came out of it, some early, most later, the monsters came out from under our beds the insides of our closets the Black Lagoon, Transylvania, Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. And if you know little something you are ignorant and happy but if you know too much things are definitely not so good for you.

And to a kid, all these things hold a fascination that adults either avoid or exploit. It doesn’t matter that the grand mass of esoteric knowledge and lore is unreliable, too put it kindly, that so called real magic doesn’t ever work the same way twice, that it completely defies the principles of science and empirical study..

You want something, someone says this is how you can get it. You try it. See exactly how bad things can go, because there are whispers that say maybe you can get away with it.

So yeah I have experienced and knowledge of always hanging around and I had a bit of an idea about what was scrawled all over the walls of his apartment.

I tried something a long time ago. It didn’t work the way me and a dozen college associates planned. And, terrified of the consequences, I tried a whole lot of things to make the results go away. Some of them worked, some didn’t. Some of them worked in ways that were unpredictable, to say the least. Such as the fact that no one can spell my name, even if it was the simplest one in the book, a concealment.

Oh, sorry. That one worked to perfection. Had worked to perfection, anyway. I was the only John Smith in the world people asked, “how do you spell that?”

Go figure.

It’s not as though I was really committed to bringing the devil into the world. Like any kid in high school who wasn’t obsessed over pleasing my parents or getting into the most prestigious college or killing at the sport of your choice I was interested in fame and money and girls.

And one in particular.

Just so you know, I did score.

And yeah, just so you know, things went really bad after that, 80s horror film bad. Remember that dream I described to you?

I remembered very clearly the look on her face as things went, as far as I could remember, went to hell and hellfire.

I remembered I needed to renew some of the protections I placed on my apartment that had been there the longest.

After those events my subconscious reminded me this morning, I became what I wanted, at least popular anyways. Too popular. One of my new hot girlfriends got jealous and stabbed me. Yeah popular as hell, I was.

And unfortunately a few coats of paint, to hell with bats, new drywall, new flooring, new kitchen, and God knows probably a new bedroom in the new bathroom as well, was not going to erase the things I saw in the symbology sprayed and scrawled all around me..

This was one hell of a memory jogger. And I couldn’t help but take it in. And understand what it all meant.

They were referring to someone 13th. The number 13 was not a particularly happy number for me. Not a particularly safe number. Not a number I wanted to be associated with.

Not at all. Not ever again.

So yeah, I didn't say anything about any of that to Fingers, I didn't say anything to anybody else within shouting distance. I figured, it shouldn't have anything to do with me, this just had to do with some crazy lunatic, who could interview well, but miss the full moon, by a good sixty hours.

And hopefully this was a last I needed to see or know about anything that happened in apartment 213.

But you can, of course guess that what I wanted didn’t really figure in the equation. What was going to happen had been set in motion years ago, I could feel it.

So maybe I had two weeks left, until whatever happened... happened.