You believe that you know what reality is, don t you?

You, reader, know that the sun

will always rise, good will triumph over evil and maybe even that all humans ar
e basely good. You hold these truths is you're mind, and disregard anything that
doesn t fit into the nice and clean, black and white lines of the worldview you s
ociety has drawn. These lines of yours separate the explainable, commonsensical
things from the inexplainable and impossible. These lines would have you believe
that the inexplainable doesn't exist, that it doesn t happen. Your rigid and unbe
ndingly sensible worldview has got you denying the impossible and improbable at ev
ery turn. Don t think so? Try these lovely little phrases. It was my imagination , Ju
st the wind , He s crazy , No, honey, there aren t any monsters under the bed , and the e
popular denial phrase That s impossible/crazy. I could go on, but that would take u
p pages. You don t believe that the impossible can happen; save for in fairy tales
, cause, invariably, when you wish upon a star, your dreams don t come true. Anybo
dy past age 9 that dose believe in the impossible, you call crazy. Well, let me
tell you some thing. The nine year olds got it right.
Welcome to the beginning of the end of the world as you know it. Please hang you
r coats to the unicorn and take a seat by the ogre. I know, the whole end of the
world thing sounds a little apocalyptic, not to mention annoyingly trite, but h
ey, that s the gospel truth. The inexplicable is real, its here, and it is most ce
rtainly not going anywhere. It s dangerous, a threat not only to your misconceptio
ns and wrote learned realities , but to your physical self. It can rip, it can tear
, and it can kill if it is so incline, and there is little you can do about it,
to protect yourself, because you deny it s existence. You would sit there quite co
ntent to let an inexplainable eat your head because it all in your head . Your deni
al of the impossible is your greatest weakness, and the inexplainables greatest
asset in their hunt over you strait types. Very few people can or will accept th
e existence of the impossible. I am one of those people. My name is Miss St. Jim
my, just Jimmy to my friends. If you are reading this, I am a) dead or b) the en
d of the world beat me to the punch line. I hunt and destroy inexplicables, crea
tures that I once thought lurked only in the dark corners of the human psyche, b
ut I now know lurk in the dark corners of the physical world. I m talking about va
mpires, ghouls, and goblins, sphinxes and chimeras, sorcerers to slayers to slim
y snakes. Any mythical creature or person you can think off, they probably exist
. Creatures and people from myth, legend, and fantasy, things from your darkest
imaginings and dreams, things so dark and cruel you could never possibly imagine
or dream them. Not that all inexplicables are bad. Some are good, others ambigu
ous, much like humans. Good, bad, or ugly (and trust me some of em are pretty dan
ged ugly), they exist. They walk among you if they have the outer appearance of
humans; they are your ghosts and the goblins under the bed, your pets and your f
riends. Some of them hide in the dark abandoned places of the world, waiting unt
il their hunger drives them to hunt. And when they do come out to play with thei
r human prey, I hunt them. I protect you in your misconcepted ignorance, though
you deny my existence. It s mostly thankless, dangerous job. The pay certainly ai
n t anything to get excited about. I don't get vacations, heath benefits, and cer
tainly not insurance. I've been asked why I would do such a selfish job. Mostly,
cause it's danged fun.
I live and work in a bunt out old cathedral on the out skirts of New Yor
k. Me and my partners run a Paranormal Investigations Agency. Were like private
investigators, but with magic. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, magic is real to. Well
, kind of. It s complicated. Only some people can do it, and you have to be in a m
agical hot spot. Magic is ritual, like hoodoo or Wicca, so sorry, no throwing of
fire balls. Objects can be enchanted, but it s a dangerous, messy process. Appare
ntly, magic used to be universal, every body used to be able to do it any where
, but people stopped believing in it and it lost its power. People or creatures
that were of it faded into myth and legend. Nowadays, magic is a dangerous, hard
, and finicky process. But I digress.
Me and my partners are crime fighters. Toby is a strung out, string bean
drug addict that fights like a mad man. You wouldn t think that some body that sk
inny could kick serious butt, but he dose. He s a pale, chronically skinny (possib
ly anorexic or bulimic, I really couldn t tell you.) guy with bleached out blue e
yes. Toby s got some daemons in his past, but then, don t we all?
My other partner, Motley Crue, is a cat. Actually, he s a shape shifter wh
o generally takes the shape of a cat. Don t now why. Don t know why he took the name
of a nineties hair band either, but whatever.
About names. Every person (well almost every person) has two names, and
people who work in magic, like me and my partners, like to have three. Your name
is kind of like your identity. If a witch(or any person who can do magic) ha yo
u given name, the name your parents gave you, she can control you a little. She
can find you wherever you are on the globe, speak into your mind, mess with some
of your senses, give you pain, and a small host of other things. But unless she
has your true name, she can t control your feelings, your thoughts, your mind, or
you body. Your true name defines you, gives you shape, is everything that you a
re. It s a physical representation of your soul. Or lack of one, in some cases(jk,
every sentient, self aware being has a soul. Some are just as black as the pits
of hell itself). I someone who can do magic knows your true name, your basicall
y their meat puppet. They can make you do anything they want, and your free will
is null and void. So, with all the danger surrounding names, its always wise to
have a spare.
Our third name is a name that you chose for yourself. St. Jimmy is mine(
from a Green Day song). I don t have a given name, so woot for me. Motley chose hi
s. I don t really know about Toby s. He just said I m Toby when we met. I don t know anyt
ing about his past, and I mean nothing. More on that later. Anyway back to the s
tory. You know, the whole end of the world bit and all that mucky muck?
It was the 29th of October and the city was covered in a frosting of sno
w. Winter had come early that year and it looked like the kiddies were going to
be trick-or-treating in the snow. Motley was using the bathroom(the toilet, actu
ally, not the liter box. Don t ask me how that anatomically possible.), and Toby se
emed to be watching TV. We has fixed our little burnt out church up considerably
since I had chosen it for home base. No French doors, but hey. We were waiting
for our next case.
Isn t it surprising how little things can start wars?
The women that walked into our office and rang the bell for service look
ed like she had stepped out of a 1950 s movie. She was of an age some where betwee
n 20 and 40, and her black, sleek hair covered one electric blue eye (at least I
assumed it was blue, her other one was). She was thin and tall and carried her
self with a strange kind of grace. She could have been a movie star or a Broadwa
y actor, save for the fact that her tears were making her perfect makeup run.
I believe that I am in need of some assistance. Her voice was stoic and un
wavering. I wondered if she knew she was crying.
Mam, please, take a seat. I guided her to a chair, gave her a box of tissu
es, which she looked surprised at, and went to get Motley and Toby.
A side note on where we work and live. It s a big, old, catholic cathedral
that caught on fire in the 1990s. Twelve people, including the pastor, burned t
o death. Apparently, nobody has taken the time to fix the place up since then. I
t s owned by the state now, but I doubt they remember they own it, so were left pr
etty well alone. We ve remodeled it a bit(ok, a lot) since we moved in. The rector
y serves as our living quarters, and the pulpit has been replaced by a desk. We ve
had the whole place wired for electricity and water and cleaned out most of the
ash. The sun coming through the rose window at sunset is beautiful, even if one
or two of the panes are broken. We keep rather late hour here at Paranormal Inv
estigations, so we generally don t see the sunrise and are just getting up at sun
set. The best time to catch some one doing something bad tends to be at night. T
he church is really to big for two people and a cat , so we end up only using a sm
all portion of it. I guess that some people would say the it s sacrilege to run a
business, especially a business like our, in a House of God . Personally, I think t
hat if there is a God(or Goddess, or Gods, or whatever), we d be doing his work.
You know fighting evil, and whatnot. I could be wrong. Who really knows?