by Gabi Moore
His uncle, who wore a black trench coat, stepped back on the little hill and glared at Dion. Next, he closed his eyes and concentrated. Dion could feel the energy in the atmosphere. His uncle was bringing up something from the aether. He could summon some kind of element from the aether realm and had no hesitation doing it.
Dion concentrated as well. He put out orders to all the elementals in earth, air, water and fire round him. He could feel their interests in the atmosphere about him. Even the Naiad sisters let go of their boyfriends and turned to look at Dion. The chess club realized something was wrong and looked in the same direction.
Dion could see a form shimmering in the air next to the creek. His uncle smiled as something began to take form out of the aether and pull itself into the material world. His uncle had brought something down from the abyss, which contained the basic building blocks of matter. He could feel it happen in front of him.
The shimmering form slowly congealed into a solid mass. The mass became a thing of horror as it took shape in front of the crowd around the bonfire. It grew to the size of a bear. It didn’t stop growing until it reached ten feet in height. The Naiads stepped back and formed a protective barrier between themselves and their boyfriends as they had some idea of what it was about. The chess club found themselves pushed back, up toward the top of the embankment as they saw the light strike the beast down on the shore.
“What the hell is that?” Ken finally said.
“I have no idea,” said Sean, who stood next to him.
Sean watched it with curiosity. When he was much younger, his mother made him go outside and dig up some creeping vines, which were growing over her flower garden. Sean went and got the shovel to dig the roots out of the ground. The roots ran back from all parts of the vine to a central point, and then sent runners to other points in the yard where more vines grew. Sean unearthed a root ball at one place, pulled it out of the ground and looked at it. When he saw it up close, the root ball looked disgusting. It was a mass of roots, which grew from a central point. Up close, it appeared to be a mass of worms or small snakes. He tossed the first root ball in the trashcan and burned the next ones he found. It didn’t matter; the disgusting vines returned the next year and in greater quantity.
Right now, he starred at an animated root ball. At least, it’s what it appeared to be from where he stood. But this root ball twisted and turned as it found itself in an unfamiliar territory. It fell over sidewise and tried to right itself as the root ball sent out masses of vines from the center of a body that grabbed any spot they could hang onto. The first twelve of them locked onto a tree to one side, hauled the center section up, and righted it as it grew bigger again.
Dion hadn’t done an extensive amount of research on the fiends which dwelt in the abyss, so he didn’t have a clue what it was. All he knew was that it had to be a dweller of the threshold, one of the primal creatures which controlled the gate to the abyss. There were many of them beyond the gate, but few people knew about them as they never left their home.
Every so often one might gain entrance to this circle of time. Stories would spread about some kind of demon loose on the land. They usually didn’t last long in the corrosive atmosphere of the planet and would break down quickly since the things were made from ectoplasm. Dion felt a certain pulp writer had glimpsed one and it served as the basis for his horror stores. These were cosmic monsters of a terrible appearence.
As it righted itself, the beast sent out more tentacles, which meandered their way toward the light from the bonfire. The creature fed off vibrant energy and the fire was a source of it in which to feed. Dion couldn’t remember what the counter was to those things; he never had the opportunity to talk with Edward about them. He did know they were elementals, which meant there would be a way to stop it; he only had to remember what would do it. The censer he carried in the bag would be useless, so he sat it on the ground.
Two of the Naiad sisters tried to block it as the thing crawled along the ground toward the fire. Both were sent flying into the creek when the tentacles grabbed and tossed them into the air.
“Stay back!” Cynae yelled to the rest of them. “It wants the fire. Stay out of its way because there’s nothing we have here that can stop it.”
“You know about these things?” Dion yelled at her. “What do you need to stop it?”
“A black diamond works best,” she shouted out to them. “Anyone got a black diamond?” One look on the blank faces told her all she needed to know.
“I guess that’s a no,” she yelled back at the rest of them, just loud enough so Dion could hear her.
“Jeweler’s been closed for hours,” Dion shouted back. “Wish I’d know about this thing in advance.”
“Hindsight is no good now,” Sean said. “Anything else can stop it?”
Dion halted as he watched the mass of tentacles slowly work its way to the fire. He worried it would begin to grow enormously if it reached the fire. The beast had an insane demand for energy, if what he remembered was right. There had to be one other way to stop it. He just couldn’t remember what bound it in place beside the black diamond Cynae mentioned. He continued to think as the Naiad sisters moved the boys back and out of its path.
And then he remembered.
Chapter 16
Dion wasn’t sure if they had what was needed. He glanced around and saw a table unfolded next to the bonfire, which was what the chess club brought out to the party. On it were a few chessboards with half-finished games, some hotdogs, buns and mustard. Then he had a thought and ran ahead of the beast to the table. Dion scattered the condiments across the table as the mass began quivering toward the fire. He needed to be quick since the table was in its way.
In the distance, his uncle stood in place with his arms folded and a smile on his face.
Dion grabbed a saltshaker and dumped the contents over a hot dog bun. He rubbed a few more hot dog buns with salt to make sure they were ground into the loaves. The next thing he did was to grab up all the buns and walk into the direction of the tentacles, but he made sure to stay out of their range.
“What’s he doing?” one of the chess club guys asked Emily as Dion slowly made his way to the mass of tentacles. The creature didn’t have any sensory organs. It had no way of seeing or smelling where it was, but it could feel its way about with the scores of pseudopods which spread from the center of it.
“Don’t worry about Dion,” Emily said. “He knows what he’s doing, just let him do it. Or at least I think I he knows what he’s doing.” As Emily watched Dion walk into the path of the monster with a handful of hotdog buns, she wasn’t so sure.
Dion was just out of range of the monster when he hurled the first bun at the creature. The tentacles grasped and then released the bun. The tentacles it used to grab them shook violently when it released the bread. It appeared the creature was in pain, but there was no way to know because it couldn’t make any kind of noise, other than the oozing sound it made as it pulled itself along on the ground.
Dion began to throw more buns at it and the monster retracted its tentacles. It seemed to shrink every time a bun stuck it. Dion waited to throw another one and the creature seemed to wail, even without a mouth to scream. It continued to shrink in scale under it was no more than two feet high. When it had shrunk to the small stump of no more than six inches, Dion walked over to the monster, dropped the final bun on it, and rubbed it into the ground. He lifted the bun and checked underneath it.
“Gone,” Dion announced to the crowd. “Back to where it came. Just don’t eat any of the buns I threw.” There was a muted laughter from the crowd.
Dion went back to the table and grabbed a trash bag. As the rest of them watched, he picked up each bun and placed them in the bag. Then he tied the top of the bag and took it to Ken.
“Make sure you burn this later,” he instructed Ken. His friend nodded and put the bag to one side.
There was a clapping sound from the embankment. Dion turned to see
his uncle with a smile on his face again. “Very good, nephew. How did you send it back?”
Dion walked up to him. “I remembered what instrument was the counter against it. Bread and salt. We had the bread in the form of hot dog buns; all I had to do was get the salt on them and hurl the buns back at the monster.”
“You are your father’s son, I have to admit. You do know who your father really is, don’t you?”
“He’s your brother.”
“Not exactly. He never did tell you why the older woman tried to have your nursemaids kill you, did he?”
“What are you talking about?” Dion demanded.
“Your real father is Jupiter Olympus, didn’t he ever tell you? No, I guess he didn’t. My brother wouldn’t want it known his wife had an affair with her employer. It didn’t matter that he paid off your parent’s mortgage when Jupiter’s wife found out. She was furious over what happened. It’s why you have the potential for five elemental powers, Dion. You’re half-Olympian yourself. Your parents never told you, but I guessed it a long time ago.”
“You are just saying that to keep me out of the tower,” Dion snarled at him.
“Go ask around. I guess this makes me your half-uncle. I don’t care. Jupiter’s wife found out and tried to have you killed. She can control water elementals too because she is an Olympian. It almost worked, but Jupiter thought she might try to hurt you someday, so he paid one of the men to follow you. He acted as protection until you were big enough to take care of yourself. Even wonder why that truck just happened to be there at the right time? It’s because the man driving it worked for your real father who didn’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Get out of here, uncle!” Dion thundered at him. “You can forget about my allowing you to keep the mall after I rescue my parents and the grandmaster. I will see you are stripped of everything you have!”
“All you have to do is ask around,” Seth Bach laughed as he vanished.
Dion stood in place and swore at the empty space where his uncle had stood. This could be a trick to make him stay away from the tower. But if his uncle was lying, why had he done it in such a way that would allow Dion to check up on what he said? It would be very easy to look into it. His uncle had to know this and had to know that Dion would check up on him. Which meant he had to know that he was right.
If it was true, why had none of his parents told him what happened? Why did they let him go through life and assume he was his father’s son? Were they eventually planning to tell him the truth? He could understand if they hadn’t wanted to talk about such shame on the family. However, he was eighteen. Couldn’t they could have broken the truth to him years ago and prepared him for this? Why did they force him to hear it from his uncle, the man who had imprisoned his parents and forced him to come here in the first place? Dion stood in place and felt the anger inside him.
“Dion!” Sean yelled. “Lilly’s hurt!”
Dion turned around and saw Emily and Sean holding Lilly between the two of them. She was bleeding from a gash to the head and blood was all over her clothes. Horrified, Dion ran to her and tried to stop the blood flow. He could see it wasn’t as bad as he thought, but she still would need stitches to get the wound closed.
“What happened?” he asked them.
“I don’t know,” Emily said. “When you got rid of that thing, we couldn’t find her. Sean and I looked everywhere and found her lying on the bank.”
Lilly’s eyes opened up and she looked at Sean. “Is everyone alright?” she asked him. “The last thing I remember was that monster sending its arms everywhere. It hit me and I went flying. Guess I hit my head on something. Ow, everything hurts.” She looked down at her clothes in the firelight. “Oh, my parents will not be happy.” She blinked again. Dion realized they needed to get her to the hospital because something was wrong with her head.
“We’ll take my van,” Dion said and placed one of her arms around his shoulder. He turned to the partygoers. “You’ll have to break things up. Lilly needs to get to the hospital. The police may come around here and snoop around because I’ll have to tell them she slipped and fell. I suggest you tell your girls good night and get home as soon as you can.”
“Sure thing,” Ken said. “Call my house and let me know how everything went.” He turned back to the assembled Naiad sisters and their boys. As Dion walked away, he could see they were sad to hear the news, but understood the party would have to end.
Dion had Lilly in his van and out on the road ten minutes later. Right then, all he could think about was the hospital and making sure he got Lilly there without any problems. Emily sat in the back with her and kept a towel on her head. She constantly talked to her to keep Lilly awake. Dion tried hard not to roar past any of the cars on the highway, but he was concerned about getting her to the hospital. The nearest one was five miles away.
He planned to call her parents as soon as she’d been admitted. He hoped they wouldn’t be too mad at him, but wouldn’t blame them if they were. What a way to announce an engagement: in a hospital bed. This was a fine thing to happen on the day before he needed to go into the clock tower in the middle of the mall and rescue his parents and the grandmaster. His uncle hadn’t planned this to happen, but he’d created the events by unleashing the monster from the abyss. Dion’s blood boiled when the thought about what happened.
They had all rehearsed their story before leaving. Dion and friends had left the mall later and noticed some people they knew by the creek. They went down to see who it was and Lilly slipped on the mud. When she fell, Lilly had struck a rock and they left immediately to get her to the hospital. Thank God, none of them had anything alcoholic to drink at the bonfire because it would make the cops suspicious if they did. Dion assumed the cops would get involved. They always did in these kinds of cases. He hoped they would merely announce the creek as off limits and leave it at that. If they decided to question each of them separately, the story might fall apart. He wasn’t even sure how much Lilly remembered what she was supposed to say. She was still somewhat delirious when they talked it over.
“How’s she doing back there?” Dion called to Emily.
“I’m fine,” Lilly said to him. “My head hurts, but do you really have to go to the hospital?”
“Your parents will take you there even if I drop you off at your house. At least this way, they’ll realize I’m responsible. At least I hope they do.”
Dion gave the van some gas and it lunged forward. He glanced back and saw the bleeding hadn’t stopped. He couldn’t tell how much blood she’d lost, but it didn’t seem to be that much. He swore and wished his elemental powers extended to healing. For all the forces he controlled, there was nothing he could do to cure a sick person. The powers of elemental manipulation didn’t include an ability to stop injuries or disease. It was a sick joke that he was the master of four elements, but still had to take his injured girlfriend in a van himself when she’d been hurt.
Soon he could see the lights of the hospital off the highway. Dion made the exit slowly as he didn’t want to topple the van on his way to the hospital. Vans were notoriously top heavy and could turn over with ease if the driver didn’t know how to handle them right. Snow and ice was a terror when it came to vans.
The van spun into the parking lot for the emergency room. Dion could see the lights of a few other cars in the emergency room parking lot. He pulled his van into the nearest parking lane to the glass doors of the emergency room clinic. He killed the engine, opened the driver’s door and ran around to slide open the door to the rear passenger side so Emily could help Lilly climb out of the van.
Two attendants at the hospital ran out with a wheelchair the moment they saw Lilly bleeding. Dion let them take over her care and they wheeled her into the clinic as the rest of them followed along. The attendants fired off scores of questions about Lilly as they took her into the hospital.
The doors flew open as Dion left Lilly with the doctors on duty. He went right to th
e pay phone situated next to the entrance to the emergency room and made a quick call to her parents.
“Hello,” her father announced when he picked up the phone. “Who is this?”
“It’s Dion sir, he said. “I need to tell you something. I will get straight to the point. Your daughter in the county hospital. She fell and hurt herself, but I think she’s going to be all right.”
Her father swore on the other side of the line and wanted a detailed report on what happened. Dion told him the rehearsed story and hoped her father would accept it. He seemed to believe him, but it was hard to tell over the phone. Her father told him he was leaving right away and to stay there until he arrived. Dion assured him he had no intention of leaving until he was certain Lilly would be safe. He heard her father slam down the receiver and worried he would drive too fast on the way over.
Finally, he called his aunt and uncle. His uncle answered the phone and he gave him the rehearsed story of what happened. He uncle was silent for a few seconds after he finished.
“That’s not what really happened, is it?” his Uncle Rich asked. “This is what everyone is supposed to think happened, but you can tell me the truth. After all, I’m family.”
“You want to know the truth?” Dion asked him. “You really want to know the truth?”
“Of course.”
“Lilly was attacked by a primordial monster your brother Seth summoned from the abyss to stop me from rescuing my parents and the Aether Element Grandmaster. She was knocked to the ground before I had a chance to send it back to where it came with hot dog buns rubbed in salt. Tomorrow I have to go into the tower and get the final power I don’t have, which your brother does possess.”
“So you did get the fire elemental power today?”
“Yes, but only after using all the other elementals to keep from getting immolated by some fire elemental salamanders who didn’t like me. It’s all good, they work for me now. But the best part is what my Uncle Seth told me tonight. He claims my real father is Jupiter Olympus and that is why the crazy lady tried to get my nursemaids to kill me.”
