The Last Days of Jack Sparks (10 page)

. . . which is a hacking threat from some dildo called Oscar, who bravely uses an untraceable email account. His mustard gas vitriol wafts from the screen. ‘Only an idiot would write a book about something they don’t believe in. You think the Devil’s so funny? You should ask yourself, Mr Jack Sparks, what the Devil thinks of
you
.’ No doubt shortly before his mummy tells him it’s time for bed, Oscar signs off with, ‘You have displeased many in the hacking community, Mr Sparks. We will SHUT YOU DOWN.’

Amusingly impotent rattle-throwing trolls aside, none of the other invitations entice. It’s all blah, blah, blah. ‘Read my blog’ this; ‘I have a doctorate in the paranormal’ that. After hours of carpet-bombing from spiritual snake-oil salesmen and people with Kindle books to promote, indirect recommendations hold far more sway with me. So I start to pay more attention to those.

One name pops up in my feed more than any other.

Sherilyn Chastain’s Hong Kong Island apartment is hard to find, even when you have her address and the use of Google Maps. This is no doubt deliberate, given that her profession must attract even more lunatics than Dawkins or myself. Twice, I’m forced to phone her for directions. Each time, she provides the information in a clipped, businesslike manner, uttering the bare minimum of words.

Just as the video impressed me by underselling itself, Sherilyn Chastain attracted me by letting others do all the shouting from rooftops. ‘You should totally talk to SChastainReal,’ advised MightieAtom6 from New Jersey, among so many others. ‘She’ll point you in the right direction and make sure you don’t screw this book up.’ Thanks for the advice, MightieAtom6, although I’m not in the habit of making mistakes (give or take the odd ounce of pre-rehab cocaine).

Chastain’s website is low-key. A brief bio describes her Perth upbringing as the daughter of a local lawyer and a French artist. The rest focuses on her various paid services as a combat magician. Yes, you read that right: combat magician. Combat magic is new to me, but it sounds so very dramatic that I must know more.

Hong Kong’s summer heatwave has long gone, leaving the air relatively cool but still more humid than I’m used to. I’m soon cloaked in sweat from traipsing these hectic and riotously colourful streets, whose market stalls sell everything you can imagine. Each street has a theme: you turn from one selling goldfish into the next selling shoes, then into another selling electronic goods. I’m assailed by that wonderwall of unique aromas that only China and various global Chinatown outposts can build. It’s hard to believe open-air food stalls (
dai pai dongs
) are on the decline locally, because they’re glorious. Like most sky-scraping cities, Hong Kong transforms you into a mouse running around an unfathomably tall maze, but the sights, smells and tastes are worth it.

Every other minute, my phone vibrates in my hand, signifying a new email in my inbox dedicated to information on the video. So far, four in every ten messages has been from someone claiming to have filmed it themselves. Unless they were all on the same crew, this is patently impossible. Of these emails, I’m replying to the ones that sound fundamentally plausible and don’t make their confession with fuckwit text-speak. I tread carefully and remain non-committal, asking them to tell me just a little more, a little more . . . and waiting for them to trip up or just not get back to me. There’s no way I want to throw any babies out with the bathwater here, but I’ve also come to understand how frustrating it must be for murder detectives when fruit loops confess to homicides they didn’t commit.

The video has captured people’s imaginations, bagging me over twelve thousand new followers as a result. Those who have blogged and posted about it tend to either present it as the first genuine supernatural event ever captured on film, or rip it apart as nonsense. I see very little middle ground. Some lazily and stupidly imply I’ve engineered the whole thing. I suppose the video having appeared on my own YouTube channel has played a big part there, but there’s no call for the likes of
CrazyHotBuzz.com
to write, ‘This dumb and clearly fabricated video surely has to be attention-starved junkie Sparks’ last roll of the dice. We sure hope so.’ As if I care what a bunch of inconsequential hipsters think. Let them keep quacking into the void. (
Eleanor: I did email you and Murray about this but received no response
–
please have our legal guys remove their libel ASAP!
)

While becoming legally high simply by passing incense stalls, I skip an incoming call that ends up as a new voicemail message. It’s the third I’ve received from Astral Way of the Hollywood Paranormals since I turned them down. The man does not comprehend the word ‘no’. How did he even get my number? He non-stop invites me to hook up on social media, and his voicemails become more passive-aggressive each time. The first message introduced me to his soft Californian hippy accent: ‘I would advise you to take a little more time to think about this decision. Believe me, Jack, when I say that our experiment cannot be ignored.’ I smirk my way through his latest recording, as he asks, ‘Please do me the courtesy of calling me back, provided you’re not too busy, of course. And since you’re visiting Sherilyn Chastain, perhaps you might want to ask her about our group’s highly respected status in the paranormal community. Thank you.’

Is anything more cringe-worthy than someone being curtly formal?

When a text springs up from Bex (‘Looks like I might be shacking up with lover boy sooner than expected – will next week be okay?’), I’m very relieved to turn a corner and finally clock Sherilyn Chastain’s street sign.

I once again consider what I’m trying to achieve here. Given that Chastain is a noted and respected member of what Astral Way calls the paranormal community, I’d like her thoughts on the video’s authenticity or otherwise. Can’t hurt. I also want to see if speaking to her, and perhaps learning more about what she does, can add a new hypothesis to my SPOOKS List. After hanging out with one of the world’s foremost combat magicians, will I decide there’s actually a third explanation for people seeing ghosts, besides them lying or being lied to by others?

Sherilyn Chastain buzzes me up to the seventh floor. As she opens her apartment door, she wrinkles her nose and looks dubious. Understandably so, you might argue, given my reputation. Then she slowly thaws. Ironically, when it comes to sharing solid facts, she is virtually monosyllabic, but when discussing unprovable arcane babble, you can’t shut her up.

Her accent is Western Australian with a soupçon of Paris every once in a blue syllable. In her early fifties (my guess), she’s about five foot two in her bare feet. Messily spiked purple-dyed hair suggests she never shook a Siouxsie Sioux fixation. Since she’s surrounded by items straight out of Tolkien’s universe, it’s hard not to think of her as hobbitesque. She wears blue jeans and a plain T-shirt that matches the colour of her barnet – a shame, as I had really hoped for some kind of cloak adorned with mystic symbols.

I couldn’t begin to count the number of skulls on these shelves. Animal skulls mostly – a dog, a cat, what looks like an otter, many birds. No Count Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, disappointingly, although there is one human skull on display (‘Don’t worry,’ says Chastain, placing a cup of Chinese tea on a small table beside the sofa, which I’m daubing with back sweat. ‘I got her through totally legit means. The estate was fine with it’).

There are books, so many books, with titles including
Higher Principles of the Seven Winds
,
Hell’s Sweet Cauldron
,
Man’s Eternal Downfall
and – yes! – the already legendary
Satan & I
, by Father Primo Di Stefano. That last one surprises me: aren’t Catholics and combat magicians very different beasts? Di Stefano would probably want this apartment razed to the ground. Would Chastain, as a witch or whatever she is, feel the same about his places of worship? The short answer: no. The long answer will become implicit during our interview.

There are rows of jars and bowls and bottles and test tubes of murky liquid, some of which are colours I don’t believe I’ve seen in reality before. Some contain (presumably) dead creatures suspended in weird juice. Textbook witchery-pokery. The flat’s actual decor is unexpectedly neutral and non-goth, although Chastain admits this is because she might be looking to sell up at some point. ‘I like to move around.’

It has been surprisingly easy to gain an audience with Sherilyn Chastain: she replied to my email within a few hours. Of course, a spot in Jack Sparks’ latest book certainly won’t hurt her profile, and therefore her trade. Maybe the priorities of Catholics and combat magicians aren’t so mutually exclusive after all.

We relocate to deckchairs on her small but pleasantly leafy balcony. It overlooks Harbour Grand Kowloon, which is lined with everything from rag-tag junks to rich men’s playthings. A pale blue ribbon of sea lies beyond, tainted only by the darting shadow of a paraglider suspended beneath a wide yellow fabric wing. No, Chastain doesn’t mind if I smoke out here, and even provides an oddly curved ashtray, although she lights an incense stick ‘to neutralise the air’. She does exactly that kind of thing for a living, on a larger scale.

I wonder aloud whether female combat magicians are very common. ‘There’s a few of us dotted about,’ she says, slouching in her chair and propping her feet up on the balcony rail. ‘And most of us kick arse more than the guys. We got the advantage of a menstrual current, see. If something has blood, we’re even more able to fuck it up.’

I suppose the aggression here shouldn’t really surprise me, given that Chastain has ‘combat’ in her job description. When I try to nail the distinction between combat magicians and exorcists, she presents me with a suitably fight-based metaphor: ‘If exorcism is judo, then combat magic is ju-jitsu.’ This doesn’t help much, so Chastain spells it out: ‘Exorcism tends to be relatively formal and slow. Quite boring, if you wanna know the truth. And you already do know, because you posted about an exorcism, very disrespectfully.’

She pauses to gauge my reaction. When I don’t supply one, she persists: ‘How’s that girl now? The Italian girl?’

I explain that the whole thing was a set-up. Maria and her mum are no doubt doing very well, thanks to a Catholic cash injection. Chastain looks dubious and I lead her back on-topic. ‘Combat magic is the equivalent of street fighting: dirtier, faster. If you’re in a situation where you need combat magic, you need it fast. You need it strong and you need it crude.’

Chastain claims that she and her female partner (in a business sense, although who knows?) Fang regularly deal with people all over the world who ‘might have had a curse thrown at them, which we can usually break. Or a customer might feel that they or their house are being haunted. We do a hell of a lot of house clearings – ridding places of negative energy. Hey, can you please use the ashtray?’

I’ve flicked my ash willy-nilly. My heart’s been too busy sinking at words like ‘curse’ and ‘haunted’, then plummeting altogether on ‘negative energy’.

‘What do you mean,’ I say, sticking the ashtray on my lap, ‘when you say “negative energy”?’

Chastain believes the term needs no further explanation. ‘Energy,’ she says condescendingly, ‘which is negative. People have any number of names for the stuff that surrounds us. I happen to call it chi. The negative stuff creates bad feeling, bad vibes. It can do anything from tweaking people’s emotions to making them violently throw up.’

‘So what do you do to rid a house of . . . negative energy?’

She grabs the arms of her deckchair and pushes herself upright, making the wood creak. ‘How long you in town for? We’ve got a job on Friday, over on Lantau. I could see if the clients would let you tag along. Some stuff, you have to see for yourself. That’s what this book’s all about, right?’

I nod. ‘It’s about approaching the supernatural with an open mind.’

Her heavy-lidded eyes become pinprick squints, scanning me. ‘So why does your mind feel so very shut; such a bloody steel trap? You’ve already reached conclusions.’

‘If I were to see something . . . some kind of hard evidence—’

She cuts me off by holding up a flat palm. ‘It’s written all over you. The folded arms, the tension . . . you just wanna write me off and move on to the next deluded dickhead.’

‘
Now
who’s reached a conclusion?’ I counter. ‘I’ll write you off if you deserve it.’

‘Nah. This is the age of certainty, mate. Everything’s screwed and unpredictable, so people cling to these . . . these
ice floes
of opinion, holding on for dear life. They’re terrified to show any doubt, especially of themselves. It’s dangerous.’

I scoff at this. ‘
Dangerous?
People having opinions?’

‘People only speak certainty, fast as they fuckin’ can. When was the last time you saw someone online posting, “I don’t yet have an opinion on this subject, but I’ll come back to you when I do”?’

She says this with passion, then softens. ‘I’m just glad you came to see me early in this little process of yours.’

Sidestepping her literal belittling of my ‘process’, I ask what she means.

‘You’ve walked into this whole world with your eyes and mind shut. Sooner or later, something’s going to scare the crap out of you, whether you believe in it or not. So I’d strongly advise you to learn how to deal with fear. I can put it to one side for the sake of the job, but that comes down to practice and technique.’

I’m tempted to ask what I owe her for this amazing advice, but her sarcasm detection skills seem high. Instead, I solicit her opinion on the video. Does it ring any, er, psychic bells with her? Does it feel real?

Admitting that she hasn’t had time to view it, she dons shades to ward off the sun and cradles an iPad on her lap. She asks for the video’s title on YouTube, which is ‘Where Has This Alleged Ghost Video Come From?’. As she taps her way to the clip, I watch that paraglider zoom towards the shore, then land with an ungainly thump. Came down too fast. Way too cocksure.