Death Before Facebook

marjoram, peppermint, rosemary—a special mixture for the things she needed; healing, especially.
    Afterward, she decided against the robe. Better to work sky-clad. But she wore her cord, from which hung charms that were still working, each tied in its own silk or leather bag, and around her neck she slipped a pendant, a silver pentacle hung on a black silk cord.
    She found the four candles she needed to call the quarters—yellow for east, red for south, blue for west, and green for north. She got ready some paper and matches—later there was something she would bum in her cauldron. (Some held that the cauldron was really a cup that should never hold anything but water. Lenore did not subscribe to that; she needed fire in hers.) She got the water and salt she needed, her altar pentacle; her chalice. And a bolline, a white-handled knife, for carving words in the candles, the black ones. And then another thing—dragon’s blood to anoint the candles.
    Was that all? She thought so.
    She was exhausted. But she had everything together and she had already written the incantation she would need.
    It was just past Samhain and the veil was still thin—she could feel the pull from the other side. She felt it often at this time of year, but more so now;
because of Geoff
, she thought. She couldn’t cope on her own; she thought she would never be rid of him, rid of this horrible weight on her shoulders, this knife in her heart. But what she was about to do would help.
    She picked up the black-handled knife.
    * * *
     
    Pearce Randolph poured himself a nice friendly little drink of bourbon before logging onto the TOWN. It was a nightly ritual, one he had come to love. To adore.
    Sometimes he would light a cigar, puff on it, rub his softening belly, and think smugly to himself,
I own this TOWN; I’m somebody here.
    Tongue firmly planted in cheek, of course. Pearce Randolph was in no way a stupid man, a fact of which he was well aware and reminded himself when he needed to. But yet, when the silly old thought came, he rather relished it. Especially if he was well into that friendly little ritual bourbon.
    He also had more serious thoughts, along the lines of
Get out of TOWN by sundown
.
    And
You’ll never eat lunch in this TOWN again.
    He had the power to make someone disappear. He was loved on the TOWN. You couldn’t do it by hate, by being nasty to someone—the TOWN didn’t work that way. What you had to do when one of these arrogant assholes came along, these goddamn know-it-alls, was simply outpost them. Outperform. Upstage.
    They were there partly because they thrived on competition, but mostly because they had to be at the top of the heap all the time. So Pearce had his work cut out for him. He was mayor of the goddamn TOWN, and that wasn’t easy to do, considering the vast majority of heavy users were concentrated in California and actually knew each other F2F.
    That he did pride himself on; that was the fun of it. Of course it helped that he was a professional writer and what you did on this thing, when you got right down to it, was you wrote.
    He could do what he had to do in thirty minutes, but he usually spent a leisurely hour, even an hour and a half, dropping witticisms here, bon mots there. First, the TOWN Hall, everybody’s favorite conference. If the TOWN had been the COMPANY, this would have been the virtual watercooler. As it was, in twentieth-century America there wasn’t an analogous meeting place in. a real town. Which was one of the things, in Pearce’s opinion, that made the virtual one superior. You dropped in, you said hello, you got the news, you bantered a bit, and you went on to your other favorite conferences. Pearce liked Writing, Movies, Books, Confession, Games, Weird Stuff, and Sex, but he never posted in the last, just lurked. It was amusing to match up the ingenuous disclosures here with the pomposity affected by the same users elsewhere.
    Pearce skipped Sex, Games, and Weird Stuff tonight. He was addicted to Writing for the companionship with other writers, and to Books and Movies because they provided lots of scope for what he did best—writing and thinking.
    But tonight Confession was the undisputed hot ticket. Poor old Geoff wasn’t even cold and the TOWN had turned him into a game. Still, Pearce had to admit, Geoff was its leading citizen right now, which might have pleased him. Geoff hadn’t been much of anything in life, except a nerd, much like everyone else on the