I first met Davey Hume when I started college. We were paired together as roommates by some arcane algorithm in the Goldwyn Smith University student registration database.

GSU was a small liberal arts school, nestled in the steep hills of Ithaca, NY, that catered to scions of the horrendously wealthy. This being the case, I wasn't overly surprised to find, as I shared his firm handshake and took note of his deep and dashing features, that he exuded the confidence and the subdued but elegant style which came naturally to the offspring of Old Money.

I was just as certain that my lack of these qualities could not have escaped his notice.

"Jason," he said by way of greeting, with a mischievous twinkle in his deep brown eyes. "I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize."

"For what?" I replied, a bit off-balance.
 
"It's far too early to tell," he answered. "But there's bound to be a good reason."
 
We shared a smile and I found myself taking an instant liking to him. I would come to find that this was the typical reaction.

The residence we occupied was a squat, single floor townhouse. Though far smaller than even my parents' summer home, it still boasted two separate bedrooms, along with a fairly spacious joint kitchen and living room. Our sires were certainly not paying GSU the rates they were to house us in some common, vulgar 'dorm'.

My original social fears proved groundless. Hume may have sensed that I came from lower class beginnings, but he was not the type to be so shallow as to hold that against me.

Unfortunately, the remainder of our class did not prove as cavalier or accepting. Nothing rude was ever said to me directly, but it was clear enough from the looks they lowered upon me from their lifted chins.

I have no doubt that my time at GSU would have been far worse, especially in those early days, had Hume had not spoken up on my behalf.

"Surely, you don't mind if my roommate joins us?" he would inquire of anyone who stopped by to pay him a visit. "He's a timid little boy from New England, and I'd appreciate your help in scaring the Puritan out of him."

I still received my share of hostile reactions from his friends, but Hume either ignored them or honestly remained oblivious. In either case, his peers were no more immune to the man’s dark but mirthful charm than I was myself, and they soon found they liked me because Hume was happy to have me around.
 
Since GSU was small and cliquish by nature, I was never faced with a class that didn't contain at least one or two attendees of Hume's increasingly infamous parties, though somehow I never quite seemed to end up in the same room with Hume himself. I quickly came to realize that his friendship, which I'd truthfully done little to deserve, had eased the way for me considerably.

In return, I was more than willing to accept the harrowing lifestyle pushed upon me in my position as Davey's flatmate.
 
Though I liked to think myself a reasonably adventurous and open-minded chap, there proved to be some truth to Hume's constant teasing assertions that my life was far too sheltered. I'd been raised by Catholic schooling, even if I now considered myself an atheist, and I just couldn't shake the lingering notion that Hume's daily routine was sinful.

Luckily, I was at an age where I found that more seductive and exciting than I did uncomfortable.
 
The first weekend at my new residence had seemed lawless and wild, our townhouse packed almost wall to wall with what I was nearly certain had to be more people than actually attended our school. Ever the lavish host, Hume had kept the alcohol and leisure-time narcotics flowing freely, his supply seemingly inexhaustible.

I'd passed the time chatting shyly in a corner, indulging in no more than a few sips of imported beer, and embarrassedly trying to reject the advances of a couple of women who grew more amorous as the hour, and their level of medication, increased. They'd eventually moved on to find other suitors with fewer reservations about returning their affections, but I had trouble getting into girls when I knew they were only interested in me because something stronger had confused their biochemistry. Hume would drift by periodically during his mingling, note these events as they happened, and laugh at my moral discomfort. Something in his manner made you laugh with him, and I found myself feeling better.

The first festival of decadence, as Hume later labeled it. It ended with a sea of bodies, ranging from stark naked to merely largely undressed, covering every couch, cushion, and speck of available floor space in our home. All of them entwined and unconscious.
 
Our lifestyle became increasingly radical from there.

By the end of the third week it was quite commonplace to see Hume emerging from his room, several hours late for his schedule, in the company of three of four adoring women.

Only half of them would bother dressing for my benefit. Believe it or not, you get used to such things quickly. Not long after, it began to feel odd if there weren't some couple or another splayed out in loving embrace across my kitchen table, when I rose to fix myself breakfast.

Around the second month, the morning procession of Hume's bedmates became a parade. It tended to number at least a dozen, usually including two or three other men by that point. Perhaps circus was a more apt description, considering some of the things I'd seen carried or led into his room on a black leather leash.

I was far from caring by then -- drunk on a newfound freedom, and high on a wave of popularity I never would have achieved on my own. I'd also loosened up a bit and given in to the allures of those few women who truly seemed to love me for myself, though I'm not sure I could have told you anymore who I really was.

The first semester was almost over before I got my first clue of that there was anything more going on.
 
As one Tuesday evening party wound down, I found myself in conversation with a redhead named June who frequented Hume's chambers. We were involved in a pleasant chat about some favorite authors whom we had in common, but truth be told, I was thinking more about how to steal her away to my own room for the evening.

My plans were abruptly foiled when Hume arrived at the head of his small army of debauchery.

"June," he said simply, in a silky voice of seductive command. "Come."

He gestured towards his bedroom door, and his air of good-natured, confident authority was irresistible. She stepped away but when she found I wasn't following, June hesitated, glancing back and forth between us.

"I assumed Jason would be joining us in the ceremonies this evening," she said, giving Hume a hopeful smile.

"Now is not yet his time," answered Hume with sage gravity, patting me on the shoulder to lessen the sting of my rejection -- though I only felt sadness at the loss of June's company. I retained a healthy fear of what went on behind that door.

I had made it a policy never to ask, and Davey indulged me by not telling.
 
When all was said and done, she had belonged to him first, and I couldn't hold that against him. I went off in search of easier prey. It didn't strike me until later, how odd her words had been when she'd spoken of 'ceremonies'. She hadn't sounded like someone voicing a clever euphemism; her tone had held a reverent respect.

It was partway through the second semester when I finally worked up the nerve to ask. Now that I was watching for it, if only in the back of my mind, I couldn't help but notice the religious overtones. People who entered his room would leave it with arcane symbols newly drawn or even carved upon their skin. Incense and candles had never struck me as out of place, but I'd occasionally find people walking about with crudely cut stone bowls of a dark substance that might have been blood. I had begun to realize that I'd never seen any of the animals that were led into Hume's chambers come back out.

His first reaction was to brush me off. He refused to give me a single serious answer, offering instead only smiles and jests.
 
I refused to let the matter drop, and there came an afternoon where Hume finally wore down. His mouth opened to form some light-hearted reply, but his eyes took in the resigned expression on my face, and I saw his lips set into a rare frown as he reconsidered his response.

"Very well," he answered after some time. "I had not meant to bring you into this yet, since your background left you unprepared. You must believe me, however, when I tell you that it was never my intention to shut you out entirely. To exclude you. Merely to wait for a time when you would find this less... distressing."

He leaned in close and clasped my hand. "You see, Jason, the others may treat me as their king, but I know what they are driven by, and it's the gain they get from me. I haven't missed the fact that you're the only one around here who actually thinks of me as a friend."
 
I loved him for those words.

He released me and straightened up in his chair.

"It's difficult to know where to begin," he admitted.

"How about this," I offered. "If your nighttime gatherings aren't about sex, then what's really going on?"

"Well, I'm not going to claim that sex isn't often involved," laughed Hume. "But it's true that it has become merely a means to an end."

A stray black curl worked its way free before his eyes, and he swept it from his face absently. "I guess you'd have to call me something of a wizard," he said quietly, sounding a bit embarrassed.
 
"A wizard? The sort that casts spells and summons demons?" I asked incredulously.

"Kind of," he shrugged. "More of the former than the latter, I suppose. You could consider me a priest performing miracles if you prefer, but I've always found it a bit pompous to regard myself that way." 

"So, your weird sexual rites are just necessary components for the working of magic?" I asked, only half-skeptically.

"To be entirely honest," he answered with a charming smile. "Almost any ceremony would do, all that matters is that you get the participants to believe in it. I just thought the sex would be more fun -- and I was right."

He grew less jovial. "The drugs and the alcohol are just to get people into the right state of mind. If their doubts are too great, everything is ruined. That's why I never included you, by the way. It will be a while before your lack of faith can be overcome by narcotics."

"I'm not quite sure I see where you're going with all this," I stated bluntly.

He sighed theatrically, then winked at me to show he didn't mean it.

"I wouldn't expect you to, it's too much of a shock for you right now. You really won't believe it until you see it, and I can't make you see it until you really believe it. Thus my dilemma." He considered me soberly. "No offense, my good friend, but let's face it -- you were a bit uptight when you first got here."
 
I nodded in agreement. Our friendship had done wonders for my worldview and through it, my personal happiness. I would not begrudge him that fact.

"You've loosened up a lot, but you've still got a ways to go before you'd be ready. I would have shown you when you were, but with things progressing as well as they are, I don't think you'll ever get the chance."

"Why not?" he was right, even his heady charisma was not enough to entirely convince me was telling the truth, though a part of my mind wanted badly to believe him. It didn't stop me from feeling a pang of jealousy that I had failed to pass some test of his that the others had all completed.

"Because, oddly enough," he said, his voice suddenly growing passionate with anger. "I hate what I can do. I loathe it."

"Why?" was all I could think to say in response.

He sighed, more seriously this time. "Did you ever play sports as a kid, Jason?"
 
His abrupt change of subject caught me off-guard. I managed to stammer out an affirmative.

"And did the coach ever tell you that all you had to be was confident? Because once you believe that you can do something, you really can do it?"

"Of course, who hasn’t been told that?" I responded, uncertain how this related to our discussion.

"Well, it's true," said Hume, his eyes alight with a fierce intensity I'd never seen in them before. "And not just about baseball, but about everything. If you can get yourself into a plane of thought where you truly, honestly believe that you can accomplish something entirely impossible, you'll be able to do it."
 
"Okay..." I started slowly, but he was excited now and he talked right over me.

"And if you can make a group of people certain, I mean drop dead, unshakably certain, that you can achieve a goal, then anything is within your reach. There's only one simple problem.

"Once you actually sit down and think about it, it sucks!" He threw his arms up in the air. "Oh, sure! It's great fun at first. You see a girl you like, and you make her fall in love with you. Why study for an exam when it's easier to just decide you'll pass it? You find you never lose a bet as long as you know that you'll win."

He covered his face in his hands, but continued. "But eventually, it eats away at you. You know you aren't really responsible for anything that you've done. And you begin to wonder about the other guy, the one who hasn't figured it all out.

"He might be more talented than you, might be smarter, but it isn't going to matter. He'll always be a loser. And the more things go wrong, the more certain he’ll become that he's just not good enough, and that only makes it true.

"Skill and aptitude become worthless, Ego conquers all."
 
He finally paused in his tirade, out of breath and exhausted. "It doesn't seem much like a world that I want to live in anymore."

"What do you intend to do?" I asked, feeling as if he needed me to speak, afraid of his heartfelt depression.

"I'm going to change it!" he said with a sudden maniacal grin. "All we have to do is believe hard enough that it isn't the case any longer. It wouldn't be the first time I've broken a law of nature. I just have to make certain to do it right the first time, because if I screw up and change things but change them the wrong way, I'll no longer know what can be done to fix it."

“Sounds rather complicated,” I told him, thinking it quite the understatement.

"I'm nearly there!" he crooned triumphantly. "Once I have a few more followers trained properly, I'll make the world work the way it should."

He sounded so energized and zealous, but it wasn't in my heart to believe him.

Magic and saving the world from it sounded fun, but I couldn't escape the notion that he was having a laugh at my expense. He'd never been cruel to me in that manner before, but I'd seen him act this serious during pranks he’d pulled on others.

I started questioning his inner circle, and found they all sang the same tune. Hume's resume of miracles was quite impressive. 

The parties wore on, but somehow I felt as if I was becoming jaded to them. My anti-social streak returned stronger than ever, I stuck to small groupings at first then often found myself standing alone.

It seemed I wasn't the only one losing interest. I noticed one night in passing that Hume's troupe was not swelling but shrinking. When I confronted him about this directly he still seemed upbeat.

"What can I say? I moved too fast and I made a mistake," he smiled, and it struck me as sincere. "But, in retrospect, I'm glad it happened. I'd rather separate the wheat from the chaff now than face what would happened later."

I couldn't get much more out of him than that.

"I was probably too concerned about growing larger anyways," was all he said. "Usually, if you want to increase the potency, you need to condense the mixture."

Vincent and Lilith, his fallen apostles, told a different story.

"I fear for your friend," the aristocratically high-boned Vincent told me gravely. "His power is vast, but his ambition exceeds it."
 
He stared sourly into his drink.

"It was one thing when he was working magic," explained the pale-skinned Lilith beside him, her yellow hair as dry and brittle as straw. "But now he is trying to break its rules."

"Some things need to be respected," added Vincent. "Magic does not take kindly to being toyed with."

This was the first time I had heard anyone speak out in dissent of Hume's opinions, and they seemed no less certain of his error than he was of his correctitude.

"And there are things..." began Lilith, her voice uncertain then tapering off.

"What?" I asked gently, prodding her for more.

"There are things, beings, I can sense during some of the stronger rites," she whispered, as if scared to admit these words aloud. "Hume says they're my own creation, and I can rule them. 'Bricks in the structure of my belief', he calls them. Says they're a tool my mind uses to help me become certain... but they're not. I keep telling him, they're greater than us. I can feel it!"

She was becoming quite distressed. Vincent took her by the elbow and led her away from me. Looking back over his shoulder, he left me with one final warning. "I beg you, find a way to talk him out of this."

Their sincere concern about a threat to his well-being unnerved me enough that I repeated the conversation to Hume the next morning, but my roommate only sneered it all aside.

"Trust me, I've heard that from him a hundred times," he shook his head in frustration. "Vincent thinks he's my equal, and I fear he's convinced Lilith that it's true. The both of them just don't get it, though. Confidence is what makes the magic -- gods, angels, demons, and what-have-you, they're all just crutches to make you believe. It doesn't matter what you have to think to trick yourself into being certain. All that matters is that you become certain. Once you reach the proper state of mind, there is nothing else that can stop you.

"Believe me, that's why these people follow me. Power -- they want it, but I'm the one who understands it, I'm the one who can control it."

He was so sure of himself that my doubts could not abide in his presence. He told me that he was growing impatient and had decided to speed up his schedule. He would attempt what he was calling the Final Ceremony in the very near future. I  simply wished him luck. Since I wasn't practicing magic, I didn't expect to miss it all that much if it ended up gone.

Over the next few weeks I could sense a greater tension settling over the festivities in our townhouse. There were no tangible signs, but the mood of the crowd felt anxious and emotional. Change was coming, and it was coming soon. I found I didn't like this more primal, bestial atmosphere. People were too on edge. I ceased observing things from a lonely place along the wall and commenced hiding in my room.

Soon after there came a morning when I awoke to total silence. The townhouse, for once, proved completely devoid of hangers-on. I thought this strange, but it was not unheard of, so I was more pleased than distressed by the occurrence. Until I spied that Hume's door lay ajar; he never left it open, whether he resided within or without.

I moved closer to peer in through the doorway, but there was nothing there to see.

This is not to imply that naught was amiss. His room lay completely barren, neither bed nor furniture remained. When I stepped inside I saw places where paint appeared to have been stripped from the walls. Whole slats of the hardwood floor were mysteriously missing. I noticed that all the surfaces felt faintly warm to the touch.

I stood frozen for a moment, uncertain of what to do, then ran immediately to the phone and began dialing the numbers of Hume's cohort.

June was the first to answer, although she was the fifth person I had tried. I demanded to know what had happened last night, but it was long minutes before I could get any more out of her than confused whimpers.

"He was wrong!" she finally hissed through her tears, with such sudden intensity that I nearly dropped the receiver in surprise. "And when he realized it, it broke him and he lost all of his power.

"It took him! It took all of them."

She broke into hysterical sobbing, ignoring my words, and I almost hung up on her then.

"I'm afraid, Jason," she said huskily, her voice electric with fear. "The ritual, I think we completed it. I think... the thing, it came because it was angry. Angry at what we had done. I may have gotten away, but its eyes! Its eyes... I think it will remember me, Jason. I think it will be waiting when I die."

The sobbing returned, and I could get no more out of her.

I failed to get hold of anyone else, so I called GSU campus security and explained that my roommate had disappeared. They advised me to go to class as if nothing had happened and wait a couple of days to see if he came back or contacted me through other means.

He never did. Neither did the six of the people who'd been in the circle with him.

I gave my statement to the police, deciding to be as honest as I could. Once they decided I wasn't their main suspect, they tried to convince me Hume had been some sort of con-man or practical joker.

June and the others gave their statements as well, but I have no idea what the cops must have made of them. The survivors all went into therapy for a while; some of them even got out again.

June tells me she still has nightmares, but figures an overactive fear of death isn't the worst thing you could suffer from.

I never hear from the others and I don't seek them out.

I live a pretty normal, white picket fence life now. It's kind of funny. Ever since that day things really have made more sense to me. If I prepare for something, it always goes well; if I work hard, then I get ahead. Sometimes I can't help wondering if maybe Davey got it right, no matter the price he paid.

On the other hand, even my modest success has made me a lot more confident, which makes it really hard to tell.