by Adam Dark
“Wow.” Ben turned to see the animal guy standing at the bottom of the ramp, one brown hen tucked under each arm, staring at him with wide eyes. “Can’t thank you enough, man.”
“Sure.”
The guy nodded into the trailer. “Go ahead and tie him up to that bar there. He should be okay.”
Ben did as he was told, then petted the goat’s head before hopping down out of the trailer. He would have thought someone who drove around with a goat, two chickens, and two dogs would have been a little more prepared to round them all up, or at least a little less riled up than the guy clearly was. He watched the man gently usher the chickens back into one of the metal cages before closing the door and pulling at it with a brief little jerk. The door’s latch held.
“So weird,” the guy said. He stood again and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Never had a problem with these cages. They just popped open. And Tony doesn’t ever fight against the lead. Like it just untied itself or something.” The he finally looked at Ben and seemed to realize how crazy he sounded. Ben almost wanted to tell him it definitely wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d ever seen that had no explanation. “My sister lives here,” the guy added sheepishly, as if Ben had asked him to clarify. “Came to pick her up before we headed off to—” The rooster crowed again from the other side of the trailer. “Oh.” The guy started a little and hurried off around the trailer.
Two seconds later, a loud squawk preceded the huge black rooster jumping out from behind the trailer and heading almost straight for Ben. It flapped its useless wings and ruffled its feathers, picking up a burst of speed just before the man who owned it caught up and grabbed it from behind. The bird struggled furiously for maybe five seconds, then fell still enough to let itself be handled back into the second cage. This the man also closed again, double-checking the latch, before he tilted his head back and sighing at the sky. Then he let out a shrill whistle, and the two dogs that looked like some kind of shepherd mix barreled across the parking lot toward him. He opened the door to his yellow truck and pointed into the cab. Both dogs leapt up as they were commanded and sat there, tongues lolling.
Ben looked toward his building to see his downstairs neighbor seizing the black lab by the collar, who now appeared completely winded but satisfied and obedient again.
“Seriously. Thanks,” the guy said and held out his hand.
When they shook, Ben nodded. “No problem. You good?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” The man took out his phone and leaned against the driver’s side door of his truck. “Have a good one, man.”
“You too.”
The goat-man typed something into his phone, shaking his head in disbelief or humiliation or most likely both. Ben turned from the trailer to head back to his apartment before anything else could happen, amused by the fact that after what he’d been through with possessed kids and burning houses, a scared goat and a couple of riled dogs felt like a walk in the park. Then his gaze fell on the three small, fluffy black feathers that had fallen off the rooster in its failed struggle for freedom.
Well, it wasn’t blood, but it all came from the same place, right? As close as you can to the original ingredients—that was what Montgomery had told him yesterday. Close enough.
He snatched up the feathers without slowing down, then headed back to his apartment.
12
He had everything laid out on the less-than-ideally steady card table in his tiny kitchen by the time Peter showed up, including a bowl and a spoon. Yeah, he’d had to wash them first. He’d also pulled out the leather messenger bag his dad had given him as a graduation present. He’d never used it, and the bag had been buried in his closet under his empty suitcase and the stacks of notebooks he’d filled over the last three years—and no longer needed—but somehow couldn’t bring himself to toss. The strap was indeed three inches wide—he’d measured—and was definitely real leather. So it would probably work just as well as the rooster feathers, if at all, but he wanted to hear what Peter had to say before he ripped the strap off something he’d thought about selling for a few hundred bucks.
“All right.” It was the first thing Peter said when he stepped through the door and closed it behind him. He dropped his backpack on the ground, then reached into the pocket of his hoodie and pulled out what just looked like a smoky lump of rock. “Crystal.” He set it on the table next to the bowl and stared at all the things Ben had laid out.
“Yeah, hi,” Ben said. When he noticed Peter’s nose, already red from the short, brisk walk from the parking lot up to the apartment, he expected the ensuing sniff and wipe. “You good?”
“What? Yeah.” Peter reached into the pocket of his jeans, pulled out his emergency inhaler, and puffed on it once before putting it back. Then he looked up at Ben and shrugged. “It’s cold.”
Ben held back the witty remark he could have made about Peter’s inhaler and just looked back down at their spread. “So, I guess we still gotta make some ink. Mix it all up to draw those symbols.”
“You know those are way too small to write with, right?” Peter pointed to the black feathers.
“No, those go in the ink.”
“Huh?”
“They’re from a rooster.”
Peter looked up at him and smirked. “Was it a ‘Black Cock which never trode hen’?” he asked, directly quoting the book.
“Oh, sorry. I forgot to ask.” Ben snorted. Of course Peter would have already memorized the lines he enjoyed the most.
“So we just mix them in there?”
“Uh, burn ‘em. Probably. Mix the ashes in. I figured feathers were a workable substitute for blood.”
Peter’s head bobbed up and down, then he frowned. “Wait, how did you get feathers from a black rooster?”
Ben couldn’t help the disbelieving laugh that spilled out. “Dude, there was some weird stuff going on in the parking lot earlier.”
“I’m not sure I wanna know…”
“Some guy pulled up to pick up his sister or something. Had a bunch of animals in a trailer, and they all got out, I guess. I might be a goat-whisperer.”
Peter blinked at him, then sniffed again. “Whatever.”
They were both used to writing off the inexplicable—or at least acting like it. Ben figured it was just one of those things that had to be seen in person to get the humor of it. He shrugged and gestured to the messenger bag. “So, not lion’s skin, but it’s leather. I thought the strap would work for the belt, maybe—”
“Yeah, and we’re gonna need something to draw the Table of Solomon on. You know, for the crystal. We could just draw it on the bag.”
Ben wondered if the ink they were about to make was washable; he might still be able to sell the bag afterwards. “Sure.” He guessed a rough measurement of the charcoal powder and gum arabic, then splashed in a little vodka and picked up the spoon.
“Did you find, like, instructions for any of this?” Peter asked.
“Wasn’t in the book,” Ben offered. “I only found stuff like ‘one part to one part’ and a few drops of alcohol.”
With a shrug, Peter pulled a lighter out of his pocket and picked up one of the feathers. When he noticed the curiosity Ben shot his way, he shook his head like he didn’t understand what was so weird about it. “Rituals, dude. Like, dark magic and stuff.” He waved the lighter over the table. “Fire’s always a thing. I’m just prepared.” That clearly settled that. Peter touched the flame to the first feather, which fizzled out in a rather anticlimactic curl and maybe one or two reddish embers into the bowl. Then the others followed, and Ben started stirring. “Little more vodka,” Peter said. “It’s too thick.”
Shaking his head, Ben did as Peter the Expert commanded.
“Okay. Hold on.” Peter went to his backpack and pulled out a plastic drinking straw and a pair of scissors. When he brought them to the table, he very precisely cut the end of the straw at an angle so it ended at a sharp point. “Like a quill, yeah?” He looked ridiculously
proud of himself.
“You came prepared.” Ben could just imagine his friend sitting down on the couch and writing out an entire checklist of everything they’d need for this thing they were doing with literally no experience and a super old book as their only guide—then committing it to memory.
“I knew you wouldn’t be,” Peter quipped. It was only a little defensive but mostly sounded like an attempt to blow past the surrealism of what they were doing right now. He went back to his backpack to take out The Lesser Key of Solomon and an empty spiral notebook, which he used for a test run with his cheap and easy quill for beginner scribes. Seemingly satisfied with their homemade ink as well, he dipped the cut straw into it and held it up at the ready. “What’s first?”
“Uh…” The book didn’t say, but Ben grabbed the scissors and snipped through the stitching holding the leather strap to the sides of the messenger bag. “Okay, either one, I guess.”
Peter’s tongue curled up over his top lip as he concentrated on copying the complicated list of names the book said had to be written on the girdle. That took him almost an hour, and halfway through, Ben realized he didn’t have the patience to stand there and watch the whole time or the concentration to flip through more pages of the book just for curiosity’s sake. That also seemed like the perfect way to make sure he started regretting their decision.
He turned on the TV and flipped through a few channels, but Peter snapped at him to turn it off. “Hey, my house,” Ben called from the couch.
“You want me to screw this up?”
So he compromised and turned down the volume, but then he realized he couldn’t focus on watching anything. When Peter had finished scribbling ancient names and designs on the makeshift belt, he flipped to a farther page in the book and started the Table of Solomon on Ben’s expensive leather bag. Finally, Ben stood and rejoined him in the kitchen, watching his friend’s slow, precise strokes with the ink, as if Peter had been training for this for a very long time. In some ways, he didn’t think that was impossible. The guy had always had some interesting hobbies, and they hadn’t actually hung out in a while.
“I had another dream about Ian last night.” He was so tense and so wired without something to do, it just slipped out.
Peter paused, finished the line he was drawing, then lifted the straw carefully from the bag and looked up at him with a frown. “Maybe start with that next time.” Man, he was really in the zone.
“Sorry.” He clamped his mouth shut and stared at his friend.
Peter rolled his eyes. “Yeah, go ahead.”
“It was a little different,” Ben started. “He kept flickering on and off, and there was a lot of static. Like something was trying to block the signal.” That sounded freaky, but Peter didn’t say anything. “He basically asked why we didn’t do what he said already. You know, go back to the house.” Peter let out a wry laugh at that. “Yeah, right? And he said that we already had a key and something about it not opening every door. That part got interrupted. And something…” He tried to pull it back into his memory, which had seemed so incredibly easy when he was alone and not trying to explain what was in his head. “‘When you see the signs, don’t ignore them.’” He looked up at the ceiling. “It was like the last dream. Super real. Only he seemed almost angry this time. I don’t know what kind of key he was talking about.”
“You mean like this key,” Peter said without missing a beat.
Ben looked down at his friend’s finger pointing to the open book on the table. “Oh.” Why did he have to be the one who heard voices and got visits from their undead friend’s trapped spirit if he couldn’t even figure out what any of them were trying to tell him? Oh, yeah. Because that would take all the fun out of it.
“Well, we’re doing this today instead of Saturday, so I guess depending on how this goes, we can go back to the house that much faster.” Peter blinked, jerked his head back down toward his drawing, and muttered, “Never thought I’d say that.”
It did seem pretty convenient—for Ian, if it was really him somehow showing up in Ben’s dreams. But Peter was right; they’d find out soon enough.
When the ink was mostly dry, Peter put the crystal in the center of the drawing on the messenger bag, and Ben wrapped the belt around his waist. “Oh, crap,” Peter mumbled.
Ben froze. “Dude, that’s the worst thing to say right now.”
“We forgot the seal.” Peter flipped through the pages again, scanning quickly. “Ebra’s symbol. And the Pentagram of Solomon. You’re supposed to wear them around your neck.”
“You know, we never actually decided I was gonna be the one wearing all the stuff and doing the heavy lifting, here.” Ben hadn’t tied the strap yet; he wouldn’t mind taking it off and leaving it up to a sporting game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.
“You already have the belt on.” Peter dismissed him with a jerky gesture toward the belt. Then he looked up and said, almost as if he’d just realized it, “And you’re the one who hears voices and stuff.”
Oh, so that gave him special privileges—a chance to step up as the first in line. Awesome.
Peter read a little longer, then said, “Yeah, unless we want to add amateur jewelry-making to our list, I think we should just draw it on you.”
“What?”
“Your shirt.”
“Man…” But he gave in anyway; he really didn’t want to let all this anticipation fall flat with nothing to show for it, and he didn’t want to draw this out any longer. He had to tell Peter not to press so hard with the sharp point of the cut straw as his friend copied the sigil of Ebra from the book and onto Ben’s white t-shirt just below the collar. Thankfully, it wasn’t nearly as complicated as the others—basically a circle with a horizontal line through it and a squiggly M-shape in the middle. Then Peter had to draw the Pentagram, which he said should work if he just added the detailed symbol right below the seal. That took a while. “This is ridiculous,” Ben mumbled, feeling like some unwilling subject of living art.
“This?” Peter asked, waving the straw around in exaggerated circles. “This is the most ridiculous part to you?”
Ben gave a helpless shrug. “All right. I get it.” It was all just nerves. He had to keep telling himself that.
They double- and triple-checked the book’s instructions, then figured they had everything ready to go. The details of summoning Ebra or any “dukes of Pamersiel, the Chief Spirit in the East” called for doing this in either the most private room of one’s home or a secret grove outdoors—“the most occult and hidden place.”. They were not about to take all this crap to the park or something, and Ben’s apartment was pretty much all private, just him, with no one to interrupt them. They figured that was the last haphazard concession they could get away with making.
Peter lifted the book so they could both see it, and Ben wiped his hands on his pants. “So… we just read this part now, I guess.” He balanced the book in one hand and took his inhaler out for one more preemptive puff. “Ready?”
Ben’s head twitched in a way that wasn’t really shaking his head but definitely wasn’t a nod. A heavy breath puffed out through his lips when he couldn’t bring himself to just say yes, and he cleared his throat.
13
“‘We conjure thee, Oh Ebra, servant of Pamersiel, who rules as a chief spirit in the East. We invocate, command, and compel you, by the especial name of your God. We conjure thee, Ebra, that thou forthwith appeareth with thy attendance in this twelfth hour of the day here before us in this crystal stone, in a fair and comely shape, to do our will in all things that we shall desire or request of you.’”
Nothing, of course. Not even a shiver of anticipation, a flaring anxiety in his gut, a trick of his expectant mind to make him think something had happened. “Dude, I don’t think this is working,” Ben whispered.
“It says we have to keep chanting over and over until it shows up. That it will show up.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
To
gether, they began again, their voices rising a little louder and without the cautious cadence of uncertainty. Ben started to feel like he was reciting one of those positive affirmations his therapist had given him when he was thirteen—stand in front of a mirror, strike a powerful pose, repeat the affirmation, bash your head against the wall until you actually start to think you’re desperate enough to believe it. And again, nothing.
“Well, it’s a wash,” Ben said.
“Keep going.”
It came out through Peter’s gritted teeth, and Ben found it more hilarious than anything else that his friend was taking this so seriously. Peter was the one who’d drifted away from this stuff, who didn’t want to talk about it, who of the two of them had more potential to put the past behind him and bury this kind of horror forever. He didn’t hear voices and he hadn’t seen another demon and Ian didn’t yell at him in dreams and he hadn’t been stuffed with pills and carted off to psych wards and contacted for interviews on Paranormal Truth.
But okay. They started from the beginning, calling the spirit Ebra’s name, calling him to Ben’s kitchen and the unarguably half-assed job they’d made of DIY demon-summoning. Ben’s voice started to drone, and before they made it to the last two words of the first invocation, something changed.
He felt it on the back of his neck first, like someone whispering onto his skin through a block of ice. Then the open page of the notebook Peter had left out for a practice run with his straw-quill fluttered and flipped over. They glanced at each other. Ben felt like he probably looked angry, or some variant of resentful; his brows had drawn so close together that he had an instant headache. Peter looked like a kid about to jump off the high-dive, and he nodded for them to go again.
