Release day for The Going Down
Today’s the release day for The Going Down, an esoteric novel from occult author Duncan Barford.
“The Going Down is more than a novel: it is a necromantic spell, a feat of psychic surgery performed on a civilization, a bold affirmation of a world that enchantment never lost. Not “magic realism,” but the magic of the real, in prose as clear as ice, the better to see the depths beneath.”
When longtime friends Bailey and Steve perform a final ritual in a house they once shared, the dead and the underworld haunt their lives and challenge their friendship. And when Steve’s girlfriend is drawn in, a dark secret binding Bailey finally comes to light.
The Going Down by Duncan Barford is now available in paperback, epub, and kindle. Read an excerpt from the book below.
necromancy
The light was fading and the fire, which hadn’t been fed in a while, had lost its blaze. Holes and cracks in the burner exposed the molten-red interior, traversed by almost invisible licks of flame. The pizza and beer had relaxed them. The work was almost done. The removal van would arrive tomorrow and, once it had loaded and departed, a new phase would begin for Steve, without his childhood home, without the place in which he’d discovered and explored so much of what formed him.
Fuck identity, Bailey had said.
“How about one final magical working?” said Steve.
“There’s still so much stuff to sort out,” Bailey sighed.
“If we start early tomorrow, there’ll be time.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Ancestors,” said Steve. “Those that came before and have passed down what has become who we are.”
Every transition is a death in miniature, every transformation, and every change. The beginning of a new phase is a time crucial for reconnection with the dead, whether to seek their blessing, so that there can be continuity with the past, or to make an offering, strike a bargain, so that the dead may loosen any grip they have on the present, and allow a clean break.
“You’re sure you want to do that here?” Bailey said. Steve understood what he was getting at. Mum and Dad, his closest ancestors, had both died in the house and would not approve of him holding rituals there. It might be unwise to open a magical space that they could easily step through.
“Suppose you summoned the spirit of some arch atheist after they’d died,” said Steve, “they’d never show up, would they? Else they’d be admitting they were wrong.”
“Your logic is implacable,” Bailey laughed.
“Mum and Dad won’t show,” insisted Steve.
This didn’t seem unreasonable, but Bailey knew that it was always better in magick to rule out complications. Bailey had once extracted a promise from Steve that, if Bailey died first, Steve would never make him an object of necromantic magick. Bailey had met magicians who’d maintained magical links with dead partners or friends. It seemed presumptuous to suppose this wasn’t harmful to the dead, or that their consent wasn’t an issue. He couldn’t control what Steve, or anyone, might do after he was dead, but he hoped it were true (as Steve seemed to be suggesting) that the dead hold a power of veto on whether to appear before the living.
“What would be our intention in doing this?” Bailey asked.
“To ask the ancestors our best way forward.”
“What do they know? They were probably racist, sexist, and homophobic. How is their advice going to help us now?”
Steve had done a little research into his family tree. Since the Industrial Revolution, his forebears had spent their lives working in factories, focused mainly on avoiding destitution and trying not to get killed in wars. Before the factories, they’d worked on the land. This was probably the case for most people’s ancestors.
“Perhaps they learned a thing or two about how to survive, and how to avoid being fucked over,” said Steve.
They decided, for the first time ever, and the last, to perform the ritual in the lounge, the largest room at the front of the house, where everything had been cleared, apart from the curtains, which they drew closed to shield themselves from anyone passing along the street. They hauled in an old garden hose, and arranged it in a circle that extended close to the walls. This would offer a protective boundary against any malign spirits. A light bulb remained in the socket hanging overhead, casting a brownish light over the floorboards and stripped walls. The once homely room had an acoustic now of echoes and emptiness, an element of strangeness that induced a sense of skewed reality even before they’d started.
Steve retrieved his ghost box from a crate: a battery-powered transistor radio, a model long obsolete, formerly mass-produced by RadioShack, which, through considerable effort and cost, he’d sourced second-hand. This radio was vulnerable to a hack. Following directions from a video posted to a paranormal investigation forum, Steve had opened its casing and snipped off with pliers a specific component. The radio was no longer capable of locking onto a frequency; it could only cycle helplessly across the am or fm waveband. Useless now for listening to stations, it was usable instead as the audio equivalent of a black mirror, that ancient tool of magicians and witches, helpful for obtaining visions and talking with spirits.
The ritual was Steve’s idea, so Steve would lead it and Bailey would facilitate. Steve shut the door and they stood in the centre of their improvised hosepipe circle. First, they banished, executing a series of movements and chants to clear the surroundings of unwanted influences and to prime it for what followed. It was a sequence they’d performed so many times it was automatic, and therein lay the challenge of a thorough banishing: confidence balanced against sensitivity to the well-worn words and sounds, so that the meaning of their actions was clear and present to their minds; sharp, vivid, and alert.
Steve nodded at Bailey, the signal for Bailey to walk the inside perimeter of the circle, voicing an ad hoc enchantment: “Fortify this, our solid and sacred boundary, against all malign and interfering spirits …” Bailey’s words, as he traced the circle, weren’t a description, nor an entreaty, but the means by which what he spoke had already become the case and was already happening.
Bailey nodded back to Steve: the circle was secure. Steve readied himself with a moment of silence before his invocation of the dead. In imagination he sensed them at the circle’s outer edge, like a crowd approaching slowly through fog. He felt for the words to make it real, but if he’d already found the feeling, then it wouldn’t matter much what he said. One Halloween, they’d called in the ancestors with a football chant, simply repeated over and over until the ancestors came: “Come on, you dead! Come on, you dead!” Not an eloquent incantation, but it caught the mood. It half crossed his mind to use that now, but then: “From out of the earth I call the dead,” he said. “Come up from your graves, from your scattered ashes. I call to you, our ancestors, born of this land, and voyagers to this land. You, our forebears, we invite, to share this offering.”
Bailey poured beer into a glass and set it on the floor.
“We welcome you,” said Steve, “with respect and good will, to join us in conversation, so that we might benefit from your wisdom.”
Receiving a nod from Steve, Bailey switched on the ghost box. It gave out a stuttering whisper as it cycled in rapid intervals across its waveband: fragments of music, speech, white noise, an audio collage of whatever stations were broadcasting in that instant. This random melange of sound was the medium through which what had no voice would speak, because by what means other than coincidence could they interact with what doesn’t participate in causality, having no physical form.
Words from the ghost box: opening into … twice … above …
The atmosphere was changing, thickening, as when a storm gathers; a feeling that something, certainly, was going to happen. When the weather changes, there’s a sense of presence; even in an everyday gust of wind that sets swaying the tops of the trees. Something is doing that. It is windy. It is raining. Meaning is presence, and something was speaking.
Can be found … in talks today … just before half-time …
Steve and Bailey exchanged glances. They both could feel it: the dead were about to be heard.
“We sense your presence,” said Steve. “Thank you for joining us.”
Eighteen minutes past … completely inadequate … [the sound of laughter from an audience] …
“We called you to this house, where I’ve lived since a child, because tomorrow I leave forever.”
I can’t imagine … which he denies …
“My life is changing, and the whole world feels like it is changing too. Can you advise us on the best way to deal with what lies ahead?”
In the space of a week … [country and western music] … fifteen Palestinians killed … current forecast …
“Some kind of hurt or loss, in the short term?” Bailey suggested.
“What was that music?”
“I don’t know. ‘Stand By Your Man’? Sounded like Dolly Parton, or something.”
Steve addressed the dead: “Thank you for your answer.”
The ghost box continued stuttering out its fragments. Capturing all of them wasn’t the point, nor was objectivity the issue, but wherever timing and attention happened to fall — that was important.
“Harm in the short term,” said Steve. “Is that correct?”
Transexual athletes … really has no clue … hardness of a diamond … do I look bothered? …
“A struggle: difficult, because we’ll approach it in a clueless way,” interpreted Bailey. “Is that right?”
The ghost box fell quiet.
Steve and Bailey looked at one another, surprised.
There was a hiss of static and, faintly, classical music from a distant-sounding station.
“It’s stopped cycling,” said Bailey, picking up the ghost box and pressing the button marked scan, but with no effect. Turning the power switch off and on again made no difference.
“How?” said Steve. “I don’t understand. The physical component that enables it to tune in literally isn’t there.”
“It must’ve grown back,” Bailey joked.
The doorbell in the hallway chimed. They both froze and looked at one another. Steve shook his head in response to Bailey’s unasked question: no, he wasn’t expecting anyone.
“Hello?” Steve called towards the window. The doorstep to the porch was right outside. Whoever was there would hear him. But there was no response.
Neither was naive enough to imagine leaving the circle to answer the door. Stepping outside would forgo their protection. The most common way for spirits to lure a magician was to pretend the ritual hadn’t worked, and the second was what perhaps they were facing now: a decoy or distraction. If someone were really on the doorstep, then why hadn’t they answered Steve? In the long silence that followed, no footfalls were heard receding and, as they listened and waited, it felt as if something were listening and waiting too.
“Can you feel that?” said Steve.
Bailey could, but he hadn’t wanted to say so, because that might influence Steve’s perception, and besides, if Steve hadn’t put it into words, there seemed no benefit from drawing attention to something that felt so bad and was growing steadily worse.
From the ghost box: only the distant piano concerto, obscured by static. The locus of communication had shifted to the silence on the doorstep and the atmosphere in the room, a palpable and expanding cloud of emotion, as when, in a family situation, or at work, someone is offended, and they’re carrying an undisguisable grudge against another person who’s present, and the atmosphere is sour. Everyone feels it, until not only those directly involved but everyone in that space can barely think or function, so thoroughly has the animosity poisoned the air — that was how it felt to Bailey and Steve.
“They’re really pissed off,” said Bailey, aware that this didn’t even come close.
“Hatred,” said Steve. “My god, they really hate us.”
Neither had ever experienced anything like it, but the most concerning aspect wasn’t its palpable manifestation but the source: the ancestors. When the spirits of our nearest kin turn in hatred and fury, there’s no stronger possible signal of wrongness, and, lacking their good will, there seemed no means of continuation without offending them further. Steve and Bailey aborted the ritual and solemnly banished the room, ending with the traditional formula: “We thank you for your presence and give you license to depart. As you return now to your habitation, may there be peace between us.”
Free at last to leave the circle, Steve went to the door and searched for any trace of a caller, but shouted back to Bailey there was none. They stepped out into the garden for a break, hoping the atmosphere in the lounge would, in the meantime, dissipate.
The messages from the ghost box had seemed to indicate they might be ignorant of something important, and at risk of harm. “But surely, they’re not pissed off because I’m moving out,” said Steve. “I mean, why would they care?”
“It felt like hatred, anger, offence,” said Bailey, “as if they were disowning us, not our actions. It was personal.”
“Yes,” said Steve. “It felt like they were telling us we’re not worthy of association with them, as if the past were rejecting the present. That makes a change, doesn’t it?”
“Cancelled by our own ancestors,” said Bailey. “Ouch.”
Returning to the lounge, thankfully the atmosphere felt neutral again, but both understood that the results of magical workings are not synonymous with the immediate manifestations. Consequences had likely been set in train by the working, which, possibly, would unroll in unexpected ways. They’d asked for knowledge of things unseen, and things yet-to-be, and the ancestors had complied, but with every prophecy comes an obligation of making happen what has been foretold. Only by seeking the reasons for their ancestors’ rage could the prophecy fully unfold. They might choose to do nothing, but that would be a novice error. The message they’d received had answered what had driven them to seek it. To assume nothing was required in return would be a gross rejection of the ancestors’ favour.
They spent the night on the floor of the front bedroom, wrapped in sleeping bags. Tired by the work of shutting down the house, they slept more soundly than perhaps was justified by what had happened. Luckily, there was no rain that night. In the morning, they helped load the removal van. Steve was upbeat. Bailey was more withdrawn. Then it was all done, the house was empty, and it was time to hand in the keys, for Steve to leave his childhood home, and for them both to relegate to memory everything they’d done there.
“A new life and a new phase,” Steve declared, as if it lay in his power to steer how the consequences of the ritual would unfold.
(this is the print edition. for the epub, see this link and for kindle, use this link)
“a feat of psychic surgery performed on a civilization, a bold affirmation of a world that enchantment never lost.”
—J.F. Martel, of the Weird Studies podcast
From occult author Duncan Barford comes The Going Down, a compelling and haunting esoteric novel about friendship, relationships, and the power of the underworld to heal.
When longtime friends Bailey and Steve perform a final ritual in a house they once shared, the dead and the underworld haunt their lives and challenge their friendship. And when Steve’s girlfriend is drawn in, a dark secret binding Bailey finally comes to light.
Expertly written, The Going Down is not just a work of beautiful fiction but also a transformative work of magical dreaming.
The Going Down by Duncan Barford retails for 17.50 US (print) and 10.00 US (epub and kindle).
