by Jack Porter
The demon’s laughter in my head abruptly stopped. In its place, I could sense a simmering rage as the monster I’d conjured began to understand his plight. The runes on my chest had been painful to get, as well as expensive. A combination of tattoos and scarification, they had been infused with tinctures of silver and lead, and their purpose was simple. They allowed me to make one command of any demon whose essence I happened to absorb, and that demon would be compelled to answer.
I got the first of the runes as soon as I’d very verified the authenticity of the powdered demon horn. The last had yet to heal fully, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was there, and that it had been carved into my flesh by an expert.
The demon had no choice. It had to answer, and it knew it. Even so, it didn’t seem to want to make it easy.
“I am a demon from the deepest pit from Hell,” it began. “I have had many names over the millennia, but my true name has been spoken by no mortal tongue for thousands of years. My powers were once legion, and I commanded an army of demons and Hell beasts second to none. At my height, my power was second only to that of Lucifer himself, and even that was open for debate. Before me, you are no more than an insect. A mote of dust. A drop single drop of water in the face of an ocean. You are less than nothing to me, and at my peak, I could have obliterated you and everything you hold dear with the click of a finger. Why in all of Hell should I tell you my name?”
Despite myself, I couldn’t help but be impressed. When I’d gained my powdered demon horn, I had no clue what sort of demon it had come from. Neither had the guy who’d offered it to me.
I’d thought it most likely that it had been the remnants of a lower level demon. They were by far the more common. But from what the voice in my head said, it sounded like I had conjured a true Prince of Hell.
It was exciting and intimidating both at once. If I did this right, if I could bind him as I needed to do, then the world would truly be my oyster.
“Because you are a long way from your peak strength,” I answered. “Before I conjured you, you were nothing but a vial full of powdered demon horn, with no strength at all. And because you have no choice. Now, for the love of fuck, tell me your name!”
It was a battle of wills. The demon in my mind clearly didn’t want to comply, yet I’d given it no leeway. Even so, it maintained its silence for far longer than I wanted, and eventually it was me who spoke once again.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! Tell me your fucking name!”
I’d done everything right. The runes, the ritual, everything. The demon truly did have no choice. It was compelled to obey me. And it couldn’t even wriggle out through abuse of semantics.
In the stories where the hero struck a deal with the devil, there was always some clever verbal loophole for the devil to exploit. With my command, the demon in my mind could have pointed out that I hadn’t specified a time. It could have agreed to tell me its name but could have given itself an open time limit to do so.
If this was a fairy tale story of some sort, then perhaps that’s what would have happened. But this was the real world, and I knew of that loophole as well.
The runes on my chest didn’t just give me the power to compel the demon to obey. It compelled the demon to obey my intent as well as the actual words I said.
When I demanded that it tell me its name, my intent was clear. The demon had to tell me its name then and there.
At one point in its life, the demon in my mind might have been the second most powerful creature in Hell. If it still maintained such strength, then perhaps all my efforts would have been in vain. But it didn’t. It was diminished.
In the end, it had no choice.
“My name is Azrael,” the demon said.
With a sense of victory surging within me, I completed the binding. “Azrael, demon of Hell, I bind you to me from this moment on. You will do as I ask to the best of your abilities. You will use your power to serve me, in all things, and you will not, through action or inaction, allow me to come to harm any harm. You are mine from this moment on, until such time as I grant you your freedom. Do you understand me?”
After a long, resentful silence, Azrael spoke. “I do.”
With a growing sense of exaltation, I asked it one more question. “Azrael, who am I to you?”
With a tone full of resentment and something that might have been close to demonic despair, the monster in my mind gave me the answer I wanted.
“You are my master. I am bound to your will. We are as one.”
Chapter 7
All the trials I’d gone through to get to this point suddenly felt far less significant. The trauma of growing up as me. The continual disappointments of my adult life that seemed to multiply with everything I touched. Even Chad’s perpetual superior sneer seemed like so long ago, and his death, so stark and fresh just a few moments before, seemed much less consequential now. It had happened, but now it didn’t seem that important anymore.
At Azrael’s acceptance of my authority over him, I felt exultant. As if anything was possible. It was like I’d won the lottery in life, and it was only a matter of time before my status climbed all the way to one hundred. Legal, illegal, I didn’t care. It was enough that I’d found my shortcut and now had a far better plan of attack than just shut my eyes to the realities of the world and hope for the best.
Almost giddy with anticipation, I stood there in the bathroom with my shirt off, the face of the demon superimposed on my own but the rest of my body still looking its usual soft, pudgy self.
“Right,” I said. “Great. Now, let’s get started. I want it all. Everything you can do for me. I want riches, the face and body of a god, the ability to charm all the ladies, and power. Let’s not forget that. I want the power to do what I want, when I want, and how I want to do it. That’s it for the time being. Now, go to it. Do what you have to do.”
There was a long, vaguely uncomfortable silence.
“Azrael?” I said. Then I hardened my voice. “Azrael, I am your master–”
“Yes, yes, you are my master. We established that already,” Azrael said, and I have to say, I wasn’t entirely pleased with the flippancy in his voice. Yet before I could correct him on it and tell him to show me the proper respect, he continued. “But that isn’t how all this works.”
“Huh? Not how it works? What do you mean?” I asked.
“I am not some kind of all-powerful genie. I can’t snap my fingers or fold my arms across my chest and blink to change reality. Even at my peak, that wasn’t something I could ever do. Now, as you pointed out, I am far from my peak. I have existed for thousands of years as no more than a memory of what I once was. It will take time to recover much of my strength.”
My giddy enthusiasm turned into simmering disappointment. “Well, that’s just great, isn’t it? What fucking good are you then?”
I didn’t know if a demon could feel humiliation, but if so, Azrael showed it then. It was as if his current reality was shameful to him. He answered me anyway.
“There are still some significant things I can do. I can offer advice. And as my power grows, I will be able to do other things as well.”
“Great. Advice from a being who hasn’t walked the earth for thousands of years. What could you possibly advise me to do that would have any relevance to me in this modern world?”
I’d always had a gift for getting under the skin of others. Not ideal considering my chances in a fight were next to nil no matter who I was up against. It seemed that this talent extended to the demon as well. I could almost hear him wanting to gnash his teeth in irritation.
“Remember, while you were unconscious, I went through your mind. How is it, do you think, that I, a demon who last strode the Earth thousands of years ago, would know the language you speak? I know more than enough about you and this world to be of significant assistance.”
I thought about the demon’s answer and simmered in quiet fury. “So, what advice would you give me?”
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br /> “Well, for one, I can help you get rid of that mess in your bedroom.”
Chapter 8
As much as it galled me to admit it, I was already beginning to realize I’d never understood the mechanism of how those at the top had reached their lofty status, even with divine aid at their side.
I was like thousands of other Ascenders in the forums online, working as hard as I could to gain access to a divine power. As a group, we exchanged information on possible leads, as well as doing all we could to gain a deeper understanding of the rituals we would need to use. There was even a network of experts, like my tattoo artist, and relic hunters, engineers who dealt with some of the tools of the trade, and even a priest or two who didn’t mind lending their wisdom to those who might use it for selfish gain.
It was a thriving community, with many members like me who had been playing in the same sandpit for years. At the same time, there were those who would come and go, sometimes within a matter of weeks, and sometimes after having spent years in the game.
I’d often thought of those temporary sorts as people who couldn’t hack it. Pretenders, wannabe Ascenders who didn’t have the will to keep going when it just seemed so unlikely that they would ever see a result.
But as I stood looking at Chad’s corpse, another possibility came to mind. Perhaps some of those who disappeared were like me. They’d learned all they could in the Ascender forums and actually found the key to the door, only to realize that stepping through was just the first step.
Perhaps some of these vanishing Ascenders hadn’t given up as I’d thought. Perhaps they’d moved on to other forums, other sources of information, that would help them understand the next step on the path and enable them to walk upon it.
I understood that trusting my demon might not have been the smartest thing I could do. But my need for information was fairly immediate, and I didn’t have a lot of other options. Sure, the whole Ascender lifestyle was technically illegal, and I’d taken steps to hide my activities at online. But if I was to start googling things like ‘how to dispose of a body,’ I was pretty sure I would have someone knocking at my door in a very short time.
Dabbling in the arcane was one thing. Trying to get away with murder was a whole other level.
And besides, Azrael was bound to me more tightly than my own hair. If I couldn’t trust my own minion of Hell to do my bidding, then who could I trust?
Nor was he lying about the information he had access to. It turned out he was better at advising me how to get rid of Chad’s body than he had any right to be.
“First off, you need to make it look like a missing person rather than a murder. Given that the police have yet to pound on your door, I think it’s safe to say that Chad’s flailing about as he died went unnoticed. It will take a couple of days for his employer to grow suspicious, which means the main thing you have to worry about is the body being found.”
It made sense to me. Murders weren’t uncommon in El Diablo, but they always drew far more attention than something more innocent. As soon as Chad’s body was found, it would be hard to mistake it for anything but a murder.
But if it never was?
As Chad’s roommate, I could even spin a story about Chad wanting to get away from it all. I could sound surprised that he hadn’t called anyone he knew and suggest that he sounded a bit down when he left. None of that was true, but it would give the police reason to suspect that Chad might have had gone off the deep end somewhere or skipped town rather than being killed as part of a demon-binding ritual.
I doubted that the cops would put as much effort into solving a case like that when there were real crimes for them to deal with.
“So, what do you suggest?” I asked.
“Incinerate him,” Azrael said.
“What? How? Where?”
It turned out Azrael had cremation on his demonic mind. But not at a normal crematorium, the kind of thing you might find attached to a funeral parlor or in the bowels of a hospital morgue.
In a city like El Diablo where I lived, with the level of crime we had to endure, such places were typically guarded as well as any bank vault. Instead, my unseen companion guided me to a pet crematorium, used when wealthy pet owners wanted to say goodbye to Fluffy or Tex, or even Mr Dingles, their pet turtle or snake.
The only downside to that idea was that the crematorium catered to a much smaller casket. Which meant I had to hack poor old Chad up into bits before I did anything else.
It wasn’t a task I looked forward to. I stared at Chad with a sense of distaste and had never been more thankful for my cast iron stomach. But it had to be done if I wanted to keep living on the right side of the judicial system. So I gritted my teeth, and armed with a selection of knives from the kitchen, I got to work.
Once again, Azrael proved to be full of useful advice.
“Open up a few plastic bin liners and tape them together,” he said. “When you have a large enough area, put it on the floor and roll him onto it. It will make the cleanup much easier after.”
Once I’d done that, Azrael spoke again. “You might as well leave him in his clothes as you work. As long as you have a knife sharp enough to cut through it, it’ll make handling the pieces much easier, and it will soak up some of the fluids as well.”
I started at Chad’s legs. “Go for the joints. Knees, hips, shoulders. You don’t have a bone saw, or anything you can use as such. The joints, you don’t need one. Just work your way through the flesh all the way around, and you ought to be able to pull it apart.”
I did as the demon in my mind suggested, trying all the while not to think about what I was doing. In a surprisingly short time, I had a stack of Chad pieces piled up on my plastic. Lower legs had come first, then the thighs, but I hadn’t bothered to separate the arms from forearms from the rest, instead taking the entire arms off at the shoulder. I figured these bits were smaller than the legs, and I could fold them at the elbow as I needed.
By then, all that remained was Chad’s torso and head, which I studied with a morbid sense of curiosity. More than once, I resisted the urge to give him a kick for all the shit he’d pulled on me in the time I’d been his roommate. The demon in my mind saw nothing wrong with doing that, and actively encouraged me to do so.
“Go on,” he said. “Where is the harm? It’s not like you’re gonna hurt him anymore, is it? And it might be good for you. Cathartic, even.”
But even though I’d loathed Chad in person and rated him as no more than a living turd on two legs, I could not bring myself to do it. Despite how he had treated me, he was still human. He had family somewhere, friends and colleagues. Maybe to them he was more than just a huge prick, and that had to count for something.
So I treated him with a modicum of respect as I cut through his flesh, dismembering him like he was a cooked chicken ready to serve.
Thick droplets of half congealed blood dripped from his wounds onto the plastic, and I quietly thanked Azrael for the idea of putting it down on the floor.
“Now what?” I asked him.
“You know what’s next,” he said. “The whole idea is to be able to get him from here to the crematorium without attracting attention. That means putting him in your suitcase. Do you really want to walk around with a suitcase with his head sticking out from the top?”
I swear, I could hear Azrael’s sarcasm as he spoke in my mind. He didn’t seem to like the idea of being bound to me, and let his feelings show in that way.
“You know what you need to do,” he repeated.
I sighed out loud and looked at my knife. For some reason, cutting off his arms and legs hadn’t been that hard, but removing his head from his body? It wasn’t something I wanted to do.
Yet, it didn’t seem like I had much choice. With a heavy sigh, I got to work.
Chapter 9
It was easier than it should have been. Two taxi rides from my apartment to the pet crematorium and back with a single large suitcase. The taxi driver even helped me
lift Chad’s remains into the trunk, a courtesy for which I was grateful, because lifting about a hundred pounds at a time was too much for me to handle.
I asked the driver to take me not to the vet directly, but to the backpackers’ accommodation across the road and down half a block. From there, I walked the rest of the way, doing all I could to seem casual.
Even breaking into the crematorium itself was easy. One of the windows around the back had been left partially open, secured by the type of window stay that looked solid, but which proved vulnerable to a sharp tug on the window while forcing the mechanism sideways at the same time.
Once inside, I checked for cameras and, finding none, unlocked the front door to wheel in my suitcase.
Operating the cremator itself was a little tricky, but with Azrael’s advice, I soon figured it out.
And then, just like that, I was done and back in my apartment.
It was just after midnight. I’d woken just before noon and had spent the whole day disposing of Chad’s remains. I’d reached the crematorium by eight in the evening, several hours after the last worker had gone home, and I figured by the time they returned in the morning, the cremator would be cool and all evidence of Chad would be gone.
All in all, it was a very successful operation, and I was feeling surprisingly good about how it had gone. At the same time, I was a little wired, so I fixed myself a stiff drink from Chad’s supplies, a rum and coke, heavy on the rum and light on the coke, and sat down in Chad’s favorite armchair to enjoy it.
I had suffered one moment of panic during the entire adventure, and that was when I first reached the landing outside the apartment with Chad’s legs, arms, and head wrapped in plastic in my suitcase. I’d become suddenly self-conscious, believing the city’s eyes were focused my way, and thought for a frightening instant that everyone could see Azrael’s face instead of my own.
“They can’t see it,” the demon had assured me, “but someone is bound to take notice if you keep standing there like a junkie, all jittery and nervous. Get a hold of yourself.”
