by Adam Dark
“Yeah.” Ben unzipped his jacket. The room might have been just as freezing as the hill outside, if it weren’t for the wind. His skin felt like it was on fire when he lifted his long-sleeved shirt up over his head before tossing it beside him and standing there bare-chested in the worst place he could imagine.
“What are you doing?” April asked. It came out as just barely above a whisper; he understood why she felt the need to speak so softly.
Ben grabbed the t-shirt from Peter and fumbled for a few seconds in arranging it the right way before he yanked it over his head and jerked his arms through. Then he bent to pick up his jacket and put it on, but he left it unzipped. Probably better to leave the symbols visible and out in the open. Only when he caught Peter’s smirk did he realize he probably could have just pulled the white t-shirt over what he was already wearing, but he rationalized it with the fact that this was technically an undershirt and didn’t really have much room in it for anything else but him.
Then Peter pulled the makeshift belt from within the bag and handed it to him as well. Ben tied this quickly around his waist, wondering if the extra time they apparently had now was just a fluke or if the demon here had decided to taunt them with a generous dose of hope. And, of course, he expected that time would run out any second now. Peter set the messenger bag on the dusty floor in front of them, removed the crystal to place it on the Table of Solomon drawn on the leather, and stood with The Lesser Key of Solomon in hand. If he’d seen it anywhere else but here, Ben would have burst out laughing at the sight of the neon-orange sticky note protruding from the closed pages of the library book. No one ever said Peter didn’t think things through.
“Guys, seriously,” April said again, sounding both reluctant and hurried at the same time. “What is all this stuff?”
Ben and Peter glanced at each other. “Don’t worry,” Peter said. “We’ve done this before.”
“Done what?” April’s eyes widened when she caught the title of the book in Peter’s hands, then she glanced down at the messenger bag and crystal on the floor. “You brought tools.”
“Yeah.” Ben couldn’t bring himself to look at her; he didn’t want to feel like a complete idiot before they did this.
“Ben, you didn’t tell me you were going to summon a demon again. Like right here.”
It seemed just a little odd that she’d been so eager to come with them for this final thing and so willing to help when Ben hadn’t been able to provide any real specifics of what they planned to do—he hadn’t been able to during their brunch—and was now apparently alarmed by the fact that all the things he’d told her were about to become real before her eyes. “It’s okay,” he told her, shaking his arms and hands to loosen himself up a little. “We know what we’re doing.”
“Sort of,” Peter added.
April turned to stare at Peter with a raised eyebrow, as if he’d just insulted her and now she dared him to try it again. Ben rolled his eyes. “We’ll be fine.” Man, if he hadn’t said it himself, he might have believed his own lie. “Ready?” he asked Peter. They couldn’t waste any more time trying to explain anything else to April, even though they hadn’t, actually.
“Uh, yep.” Peter opened the book to the page he’d marked and held it up for them both to see clearly. April came up behind them to peer between their shoulders; apparently, her hesitation was no match for curiosity.
“‘We conjure thee, Oh Ebra, servant of Pamersiel, who rules as a chief spirit in the East.’”
Ben and Peter said it together, their voices sounding muffled and weak despite the openness of the main living room and the fact that there should have been at least a little bit of an echo. Maybe. Nothing happened when they finished the first part of the incantation, but that had happened the last time. So they started again. April added her voice to theirs, reading along with them, and the wind outside picked up with considerable force. It could have managed to creep inside the house through the poorly insulated slats to ruffle their hair and send an icy chill down Ben’s neck, but most likely this was an entirely different force—something that came from the summoning itself. Also like last time.
Before they’d finished the second round of the first incantation, Ben’s head exploded with voices he hadn’t endured in the same way for years.
‘Stop. Stop…’ they beckoned, thousands of them whispering and moaning at once. ‘Not this way. You can’t do this…’
The force of it made Ben pause in reading the book, and the others faltered briefly with him. Peter looked up and frowned, and Ben just shook his head before diving back into the words they picked up again together.
“‘…in a fair and comely human shape, to do our will in all things that we shall desire or request of you…’”
The gusting wind seemed to screech now against the lone house on the hill, buffeting the loose boards and sending a tremor through the floor.
‘Stop now, Ben,’ the voices demanded. ‘You’ll make it worse. You can’t… You can’t…’
Ben cleared his throat and pushed on, refusing to listen. When he raised his voice just to drown out the hundreds of whispers that sounded like a raging river in his own mind, Peter and April responded and did the same.
Before they’d finished with the third round of recitation, Ebra finally appeared. April jolted at the sight with a muffled gasp, and Peter and Ben stopped reading from the book to glare at the sickly, green-tinged spirit standing just a few feet away, the leather bag and crystal in the middle between them.
The malicious spirit grinned and folded his arms. “You’re very stupid.”
The strength of April’s terrified grip on his bicep would have probably been a lot more painful if it wasn’t dampened by the thickness of Ben’s jacket. “Before we do anything else, Ebra,” Ben started, making this up on the fly but realizing how important it was, “I command you not to harm any of us.”
The chief demon leered at him and cocked his head, the sourceless wind filtering through his long hair again that now looked to Ben like so many strands of dying seaweed.
“Or to let any other spirits harm us,” he added quickly, recognizing the loophole. “You’ll protect us.”
Ebra chuckled and delivered a mocking half-bow. “I’m flattered you hold such high expectations of me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Peter mumbled.
Ben could only shrug it off. “We’re here—” Something slammed upstairs; it could have been shutters over a window or branches tossed in the wind against the shingled roof. Then again, it could have been the thing they’d hoped never to see again. The gale outside doubled in force, sending more screaming wails barreling toward the house and through it. April’s grip on his arm tightened even more. “We’re here for our friend Ian.” Ben had to shout the words over the buffeting gusts. The house shook. Something clattered against its outer wall. “We know he’s here. And I know you’ve seen him.”
Ebra unfolded his arms and spread them just a little in front of his chest, as if in greeting. “Ah, yes.” His voice was somehow completely unaffected by the noise around them. “The Acolyte.”
“The what?” Peter shouted.
The demon’s yellow eyes flickered toward him before moving to April, where they almost slithered from her head to her feet and back again in a disgusting appraisal of her. She took in a sharp breath but didn’t say a thing, and Ben’s bicep started to ache; she hadn’t let off even just a little.
“He’s coming, you know.”
“Ian?” Ben asked. Something else inside the house rattled ceaselessly, tinny and monotonous and making Ben feel like he was losing his mind.
Ebra sucked in a hissing breath through his green-stained teeth. “The Guardian.” He lowered his head and glared at Ben from beneath a brow darkening with impossible shadows. The corners of his mouth turned up in an unsettling smirk. “You should release me before he consumes you. I’d rather not spend eternity bound to an idiot.”
“We summoned you to protect us,” Ben s
houted over the rising storm. The house groaned, filled with screams now that weren’t illusions from outside but real, terrified, coming from everywhere and nowhere. The dusty wooden floor trembled beneath their feet, and Ben fought to keep standing.. The cobweb-riddled chandelier above them swayed dangerously, tinkling like so many pieces of shattered glass falling forever. A deep pounding started, slow and rhythmic before building in speed, coming at them now like a rumbling train that stopped for nothing and no one.
The demon called Ebra threw his head back dangerously far, his shrieking cackle piercing through all the rocking, chaotic noise around them like a whistle in a crowded subway station. He spread his arms wide, the green hue of his entire body filtering outward like tendrils of coiling smoke. “Too late!”
Then the walls themselves moved. The first ripple came from the kitchen to their right, the wooden slats buckling under some unseen force and throwing sheets of dust outward onto the floor. Like a wave rolling across the ocean, the walls slithered and undulated, leaving behind a wake of fractured wood and long, jagged cracks in the plaster. Another swell came from the left, moving toward the first with impossible speed. Then they converged with a puff of sawdust and dirt, and Ben’s heart stopped when he realized the walls and ceiling were closing in on them. Not falling like a detonated building being torn down but closing—one giant mouth bringing its harrowing jaws closer and closer together until it crushed the unwitting morsels who’d entered so willingly.
The wriggling walls dimmed and brightened again, sending the ripples outward like a cannon blast. The huge stairway ahead of them lifted and fell like a massive, lolling tongue, and the writhing walls followed to disappear around the corner into the second-level hallway, moving like so many scurrying insects fleeing just beneath the surface.
When that last twisting shudder disappeared above them and they weren’t actually eaten by the house—not like Ian had been—everything went suddenly quiet. Way too quiet. Even the voices that had so recently flared into existence inside Ben’s head fell silent. Flames burst to life atop the chandelier’s hundred candles that hadn’t been there before. The cobwebs were gone; the shattered wood and fractured plaster looked as whole and new as if this house had just been built. A warm glow emanated from every surface, but it wasn’t actual warmth. Not really. It felt plastic and cheap, like the jack-o-lanterns that plugged into the wall and looked skillfully crafted until one got just close enough to see how unsatisfying the deception really was. It didn’t feel warm in this house suddenly brought back to some kind of un-life. Ben’s fingertips tingled with the first stage of numbness. None of them said a thing.
Something metallic rattled from the hallway upstairs—a rhythmic clink. 30’s swing music echoed from the kitchen on the other side of the front door, crackling a little, as if coming over a radio with only a passable signal. Then the upstairs hallway creaked, and a man emerged just in front of the staircase. He moved slowly, deliberately, his black shoes delivering a muted click on the wooden floor that now was polished spotless.
Ben’s heart nearly stopped, and he felt Peter stiffen at his side. It was him—the man who’d called himself Mr. Constantine, who’d ushered six boys into this very house eleven years ago and delivered the horrors that had tortured Ben every day of his life since then. His hair was gray and hung down to just above his shoulders. A layer of new stubble covered his cheeks, chin, and upper lip, but it only served to highlight the sharp lines of his impossibly angular jaw. When the man stopped at the top of the stairs, he turned only his head to look down at the three college students standing in the living room behind a smoking green spirit.
“Well, this is certainly unexpected,” he said, his icy-blue eyes flashing down at them. His voice slithered over the banister and washed across the room, bringing back the gut-wrenching memories of how desperately Ben had wanted the man to keep talking when he was just a boy, even though he knew at the same time that honeyed voice was poison. “How nice of you to bring another friend. I can only imagine you two returned after all this time with a particular goal in mind, hmm?”
His foot hovered above the first stair while he gazed down at them, and then he descended. The metallic clinking continued with each step, then Ben realized the old man grasped the end of a long, thick metal chain. The links slid across the wooden floor with a droning scratch, each of them knocking against the stair behind Constantine as he slowly stepped down onto the next. When he’d come halfway to the first floor, the demon Ebra, who had turned to gaze upon the newcomer when he’d appeared, now offered the man on the stairs a flourishing bow, bending almost completely in half at the waist. Constantine didn’t even look at him.
“We had hoped to see you again,” he continued. “Well, in a manner of speaking.” The man offered a disturbingly coy shrug and continued down the stairs. Above him in the hallway, the end of the chain came into view, attached to a pair of metal cuffs secured around a young boy’s wrists. Ian’s wrists.
“Jesus,” Peter muttered.
The demon Ebra let out a low, echoing chuckle in response to either Peter’s surprise or the horrendous scene playing out in front of them.
Twelve-year-old Ian—impossibly young and still alive, after all this time—shuffled forward with each minute tug on the chain binding him, despite the yards of slack between him and Constantine. His hair was matted and oily, its usually blond color darkened by dried flecks of some substance Ben didn’t even want to consider. His jeans with a hole in the knee, the red-and-white-striped shirt, and the white sneakers looked no different than the day he’d put them on eleven years ago—no different than what Ben had seen in his dreams. But something about Ian’s face was terribly wrong, and through the dancing shadows cast by the chandelier’s many candles and the distance from where Ben stood to the second-story hallway, he couldn’t immediately tell what it was.
Constantine finally arrived at the bottom of the stairs, Ian slumping down from one step to the next, and when the old man stopped, so did the boy. At halfway down the stairs now, he was much easier to see, and Ben couldn’t believe what he saw. He thought he was going to be sick.
The wrongness was in Ian’s eyes, both of which had been plucked from his head by what could only have been a cruel, unbearably painful instrument. Only empty black sockets remained, the flesh around where his eyes had once been now puckered and tight, shiny with the crudely formed scars left behind. His mop of shaggy blond hair fell down over these gaping holes, further darkening their shadows and making him look even emptier.
“What did you do to him?” The words fell from Ben’s mouth all on their own, rattling through his lips with a shameful horror he’d never felt before—not even on that night. This was what he and Peter had left Ian to endure. This was the hell their friend had lived and not lived for eleven years, and Ben had no idea how long it had really been for Ian himself.
At the sounds of Ben’s voice, Ian cocked his head and turned it until the black holes of his eyes seemed to stare directly at him. Constantine gave a tiny, insignificant jerk on the thick chain, and while the links attached to the manacles at Ian’s wrists didn’t move at all, Ian seemed to intuit the command. His white sneakers, stained with dirt and what looked like dried blood, slid to the edge of each stair with an unbearable slowness, as if each of his feet weighed more than the rest of his body. They clunked obediently onto the step below him, then the next, and the next, until he came to stand just beside Constantine, staring at Ben still with eyes he did not have. The long chain looped back over itself beside his feet.
“I’ve been teaching young Ian his place here,” the old man said, finally replying to Ben’s unintentional question. “He seems to have picked up on the rules rather quickly.” Ian opened his mouth to speak, but only a choked moan escaped him.
“Oh, my god,” April whispered. Ben couldn’t even feel her painfully strong grip on his arm anymore; he barely registered the room around them, or Peter at his side, or even the green, glowing demon they�
��d summoned, Ebra’s nauseous aura now seeping off him in billowing coils to dissipate into the frigid air. He only saw Ian, his childhood friend, and the young boy’s endless torment.
The thing that called itself Constantine and wore a man’s face had taken Ian’s eyes and apparently his tongue, too. And now the boy was completely defenseless, lost in darkness and without a voice to tie him to himself. Another desperate, broken moan released itself from Ian’s mouth, and the old man gave another tug on the chain, this one much subtler than the last.
“Oh, come now,” he said to Ian, turning his cold blue eyes upon his prisoner. “That’s hardly the warm welcome your friends deserve. They’re not yet accustomed to the way things are done around here, my dear.” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and leaned just his head slightly toward the eyeless, tongueless boy. “Show them.”
Ian might have cried out again, but it sounded no different than before. Ben’s heart lurched in his chest, and he found himself unable to breathe through the pain that squeezed him so tightly now, he thought he’d collapse. Then Ian lowered himself to his knees, his entire body trembling and his face now completely white, as if he were already dead and his body was nothing more than an animated shell. In some ways, that was entirely true already. He swayed from side to side, his rapid breath coming in jagged, terrified gasps, and then his body bucked against an unseen pressure. The boy’s head flew back until his eyeless sockets gaped up at the ceiling and the chandelier, and his mouth opened impossibly wide with a sickening crunch.
“Stop it!” Peter cried, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Constantine gazed at the helpless boy kneeling by his side, smiling down on Ian as a proud father smiled down on his most accomplished son. Then his head jerked toward Ben, Peter, and April, and his gaze felt like a knife plunged into Ben’s gut. “You are birds with tiny wings, my dears, trying to bat away the storm when you should be darting off to seek shelter from it.”
A low hiss came from Ian’s open, distended mouth. His throat bulged, and some black thing pumped its way up from within his body to flicker along the edges of his lips.
