The Vanished Mr. Vazquez

When the typical man or woman sets out to make their fortune, there are things they agree they will do and things they will not.  Black magic is generally one most people will avoid in order to gain fame and fortune.  But one man claims that through this and other macabre rituals he was about to uncover a secret that would make him invisible forever.  This was the last time he was ever seen.

Bernardo Vazquez, according to an account written by Helen Torres was a man who would stop at nothing to acquire his fortune.  Generally a quiet young man, Bernardo kept to himself and rarely found any friends he could associate with aside from Helen and her mother.  The account suggests the man was a lanky and anemic looking person who looked sickly and had great difficulty with his life.  In 1934 the world was a place of broken dreams, lost businesses, and the fallout from a listing economy after the fall of the stock market.  As a result, many men such as Vazquez were put out of work and had to resort to performing whatever task they could in order to survive.  Bernardo was an occultist, and would recount his tales to a young Helen Torres daily even if the accounts often horrified her and her mother.

But according to the report by Torres, one day the man appeared with a considerable amount of excitement in his eyes.  He had been to the graveyard and gathered the ritual implements required to make himself invisible.  It’s still not clear where he learned this spell, and looking into the subject no similar spell (or even style of spell) can be discovered in any books on the subject.  In fact, the most horrifying aspect of it suggests it may have been told to Bernardo as a practical joke to get him to commit to cruelly killing a cat.  The details of exactly how the ritual was performed are unclear but what details do come out are ghastly.  But one thing that did come out was that the day after Bernardo claimed he was going to perform the ritual, his neighbors approached Helen’s mother and told her that a terrible sound could be heard from Bernardo’s apartment, and that they were unable to reach him that day.  The authorities were called and investigated the house, but the man was simply missing.  Interestingly enough, all of his clothes remained behind.  He couldn’t have simply disappeared into the night, so what happened to him?

As far as possibilities for this story go, it seems unlikely that Mr. Vazquez truly found a ritual that would endow him with the ability to become invisible.  But then again there he was, simply gone with no trace.  And furthermore he was never seen again.  Is it possible that the man was not rendered invisible, but completely outside of this dimension?  The unlikely ritual may have transported him eternally to a mysterious and possibly horrific alternate dimension where he was forced to live out the rest of his life.  Perhaps this is the warning associated with performing dark rituals, that something will drag you away.