The Summoning

by Bentley Little

  Fredricks."

  "Anna!" Rich said.

  Sue laughed. Feeling better, she walked across the newsroom to her desk. She sat down, opened her notebook, took out a blank piece of paper, and started working on. her article.

  "There's a fax for you, Agent Rossiter."

  "Thanks." Gregory Rossiter looked up from the computer screen and forced himself to smile at the intern, a skinny, goofy kid with too-big teeth and too-big ears who would never make agent no matter how hard he tried or how many extra hours he put in.

  Some people just didn't have a clue.

  He turned back to the information on his screen, moved the cursor to the file number of the next batch of unsolveds, and called up the first case. He scanned the MOD, didn't see what he was looking for, scrolled to the next case.

  Three cases later, he found a match.

  He pressed the Print key and a hard copy of the information on the screen rolled out of the laser printer attached to his terminal.

  Five minutes later, the intern returned. "Agent Rossiter?" The kid shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot.

  "What is it now?

  " " Chief Engles told me to tell you to pick up your fax."

  The intern remained in place, unsure of what to do next.

  "Leave," Rossiter ordered.

  The kid beat a hasty retreat.

  Rossiter scowled at his screen. Not only had he been banished to this sinus-sufferers' retirement community that they dared to call a state, but he'd been placed under the command of Frederick Engles, perhaps the most inept administrator he had ever met.

  An FBI agent with the name of a Marxist.

  That should have said something right there.

  Rossiter leaned back in his chair, swiveled slightly to the left, and looked out of the tinted window at the skyline of Phoenix. Outside the federal building, the sky, as always, was blue, clear, and cloudless.

  Even the weather got on his nerves he. He rolled across his cubicle and tore the long sheet of paper from his printer, folding the continuous form along the perforations into pages. He scanned the information again. Six unsolved murders in Roswell, New Mexico, in June, 1984. Cause of death: exsanguination with unusual circumstances.

  Fifteen deaths in Denver, 1970. Exsanguination. Three murders in Broken Bow, Montana, 1969. Ten in Stewart, Wyoming, 1965. Eight in Cheyenne, 1953. Two in Reno, 1946. Waco, Plains, Mount Juliet; 1937,

  1922, 1919.

  The MOs and MODs were identical or nearly so in every case, and all were unsolved. The pattern was clear, obvious. Even a rookie could have spotted it. Rossiter looked up at his screen, at the details of the sixth Roswell murder. He shook his head slowly. This wasn't possible, was it? A connection between crimes that had not been noticed before? A pattern that had not been picked up by any computer program or agent-analyst? He stared at the amber display. Perhaps it had been noticed somewhere at some time by somebody, but the sheer amount of time involved had led them to discount any possible relationship.

  He was not so willing to write off any such possibility, no matter how farfetched.

  The question remained, was there a legitimate link between these murders, or were the similarities merely co incidental? It was highly unlikely that they had been committed by the same individual. Such a person, even if he had been a teenager at the time of the Mount Juliet killings, would have to be nearly a hundred years old now. Maybe the murders were the work of some sort of cult or coven that pased on its ritual practices from generation to generation.

  Or the work of a vampire............ That was the thought in the back of his mind, and it was hard even for him to keep completely away from it. The appearance of the victims, the fact that the Bureau's experts still had not been able to determine how the physical draining of bodily fluids had been accomplished, the complete lack of witnesses or clues---all of this had the feel of some cartoonish movie or pulp novel, and it was difficult not to think about the case in those terms.

  He didn't believe that there was anything supernatural here. But he did think that the Rio Verde murders and these other killings were connected.

  Rossiter glanced around the edge of his cubicle at Engles's office. The regs said that he was supposed to in form his supervisor at this point, present his facts and ideas in both oral and written form.

  But he was not sure he wanted to do that.

  Engies was a top-of-the-line, grade-A, number one peckerhead, a softheaded, fat-assed bureaucrat who wouldn't know a crime if it came up and bit him in the crotch. He hadn't left his office for anything more urgent than a trip to McDonald's since J. Edgar Hoover had hung it up, and he certainly didn't have enough ambition to actively pursue a course of action on this. Serial killings or not, Engles's tendency would be to sit, wait everything out, let the locals figure out a solution.

  Not him, though. Not Gregory Rossiter.

  He had ambition to spare, and if he played his cards right, if he solved this case and successfully tied it to other unsolved cases in other states, this could be his ticket to D.C." his ticket out of Phoenix.

  His ticket back to the real world. : The intern came back in, smiling nervously at Rossiter. "Chief Engles told me to tell you to pick up your fax nOW."

  Rossiter grinned, but there was no humor in it. "Tell him to..." He trailed off, shook his head. "Never mind. I'm coming." He placed the printout in the top drawer of his desk and turned down the intensity light on his screen.

  No, he wouldn't talk to Engles. :

  Regs or no regs, this one he would keep to himself for a while.

  Sue wanted to talk to her grandmother following dinaer, but immediately after eating the old woman silently left the table and disappeared into her bedroom.

  "Is Grandmother feeling all right?" Sue asked.

  John shrugged.

  Neither of her parents answered. " Sue finished her rice. "

  In the restaurant, both she and John cleared tables, cleaned, did dishes, but at home such chores were woman's work, and after dinner John followed his father out to the living room to watch TV while she stayed to help her mother. She would have objected to this sort of blatant sexism long ago, but this was really the only time she ever got a chance to talk to her mother one-on-one, and she acquiesced to this unfair division of labor for that reason alone. The truth was, she felt closer to her mother at these times than she did at any other. Doing dishes, working in the kitchen, they were no longer mother and daughter but coworkers, equals. Their roles here were clearly defined washer and dryer, alternating and they could talk more freely than they could otherwise, the animosity which sometimes marked their relationship in the presence of others absent.

  It was Sue's turn to wash and she grabbed a dishrag from the wooden rack on the side of the cupboard and squeezed Dove into the sink before turning on the water.

  Her mother seemed preoccupied, staring silently out the window at nothing, and Sue found herself wondering if her grandmother had said anything to her about the cup hugirngsi. She wanted to ask, and she started to say some thing, but then she looked at her mother and found her self unable to continue.

  The sink filled up, soap suds billowing upward like bubble clouds, and Sue dumped the chopsticks and forks in before pushing the faucet over to the other half of the sink for her mothers's rinse water.

  They worked in silence for a while.

  Sue found herself thinking about her mother, about her father, and she coughed politely. Her mother looked over at her, and she almost backed down, but then she forced herself to go on, to ask the question that she had so often tried to ask before. "Do you love Father?"

  Her mother's face registered no response, no surprise at the question.

  She rinsed a dish and began to towel it dry. ""We have a very good marriage."

  Sue gathered her courage, pressed on. "But do you love him?"

  "Yes, I do." Another dish. Rinse. Dry.

  Sue stopped washing, wiping her hands on her jeans, looking over
at her mother. "Did you.." always love him? Did you know when you first met him that you loved him?"

  Her mother was silent for a moment, her small hands continuing to towel a dish even though it was already dry.

  "I grew to love him," she said finally.

  "Do you--" "Wash," her mother said. "I am not in the mood to talk."

  Sue nodded. Her mother looked old to her all of a sudden, and that frightened her. She could see her grand mother's face in the patterns of wrinkles beginning to form around her mother's mouth and eyes, and at the same time she could see the bone structure of her own face beneath those wrinkles. Sue realized, in a way she hadn't as the birthdays had come and gone, that her mother was pushing the outer envelope of middle age and that she herself was no longer young.

  It was a depressing realization, and it left her feeling strange. She began washing the rice cooker, scraping the sticky rice off the metal side of the container with her fingernail. i Her mother picked up another plate, dried it, and there was something in the slow, deliberate nature of her movements that made her seem frail and vulnerable.

  It hit Sue then.

  The cup hugirngsi could kill her mother..

  Or her father. Or John. Or even her grandmother. None of them were immune.

  Sue looked again at her mother and, for the first time, she realized how much she loved her and cared about her. About both her parents.

  Her whole family.

  E If this were a scene in a movie or a TV show, this would be the point where she turned to her mother, said "I love you," and hugged, all problems solved, all past conflicts forgotten.

  But hers was not one of those fictional families, and Sue handed the rice cooker to her mother without speaking and started scrubbing the chopsticks.

  After the dishes were done, Sue sat for a few moments between her father and brother watching Entertainment Tonight, then excused herself and walked down the hallway to her grandmother's room.

  She opened the door slowly. Her grandmother was lying on the bed, left arm over her face, covering her eyes. The curtains and shades were drawn so that not even a hint of the dying daylight could sneak in, and both lamps were turned off, the only illumination coming from behind Sue in the hallway. The room smelled even more strongly than usual of herbs and Chinese medicine..

  "I am tired," her grandmother said, and the old woman's voice, quiet and weak, barely above a whisper, confirmed her words.

  A bolt of fear flashed through Sue, a sudden irrational feeling that her grandmother was seriously ill and dying, but she pushed that feeling aside and stepped into the room. She swallowed. "Do you want me to close the door?"

  Her grandmother shook her head, not taking the arm away from her face.

  "It is all right."

  "I need to know about the cup hugrngsi." l Now there was movement.

  From underneath the arm, Sue saw white eyes looking at her. With a soft grunt of exertion, her grandmother sat up, swinging her thin wrinlded legs over the side of the bed. She closed her eyes hard, squeezing them shut, then opened them and looked at Sue. "I am glad you are finally ready."

  Sue felt flustered. "I don't know what I'm supposed to be ready for. I don't know if I'm ready for anything. I just want to know about the cup hugirngsi. "'

  "You believe." Her grandmother studied her.

  She nodded. "I believe."

  "I am tired. I have been thinking on this today, trying to gather my strength, testing myself?" She paused, blinked, and Sue noticed for the first time how her grandmother's eyes looked like her own, truly almond shaped, wider than John's or her father's or even her mother's.

  "I am old, I am weak, and I do not know if I can right this tse m I think perhaps that we should leave."

  Sue knelt down on the floor in front of her grandmother. "I thought you said it was our responsibility to stop it ..... Her grandmother did not respond.

  "It is different this time, isn't it?" Sue's voice was a quiet as her grandmother's. She studied the old woman' face. "It is different than it was back in Cuangxun."

  Her graadmother sighed, nodded. "The cup hugirn is no longer afraid.

  People have forgotten it, people not believe, people do not know how to right it. The cu hugirngsi is wise or it is foolish or perhaps it is just vair but it is ready to make its presence known. After all thi

  -time, after all these centuries, it has decided that it is tire, of hiding in the shadows and. living on the outskirts c human society, behaving like a scavenger. It wants to come out in the open." ' "What does that mean?" Sue asked. There was a colic, tigh mess in the pit of her stomach.

  "It, no longer,ints to be fed. It wan

  Verde.

  I: Her grandmother..shtti?" Yes, she said, but Su could tell from her tone of voice that the old woman di not believe the monster's influence would stop at that. boundaries of the toma.

  Sue licked her lips. "I saw trees today that had bee killed by the cup hugimgsi. ""

  I Her grandmother sat up straighter. "The land? It is a ready' attacking the land?"

  "I... I guess."

  "Then it is strong already. We must move quickly."

  The knot of fear tightened in Sue's stomach. "Shou I get Mother and Father? And John?"

  "Your parents have asked me not to tell you and yo brother about this."

  "Why?" i "They do not want to frighten you."

  Sue nodded. That made sense. Her parents, her moth in particular, were always trying to protect her and her brother from the vicissitudes of life in the outside world

  They did not seem to realize that she and John were more familiar with the outside world, more conversant in its ways, than they themselves were. At home, her father ruled uncontested. He was the boss, the master of the house, and whatever he said was law. But outside of the house and the restaurant, out in the real world, their roles were reversed. The man who was so sure and strong when dealing with his family was meek, polite, and overly solicitous to strangers, and it was she, and to a lesser extent John, who steered her parents through the rough waters of American society.

  "What about John? Have you talked to John?" "John may have been .. . influenced." Influenced.

  "We must watch him. We must protect him. But we cannot trust him. He cannot help us."

  Sue switched positions, unbent her knee, and sat flat on the floor, stretching her legs out in front of her. "Can the cup hugirngsi be stopped?"

  "I do not know."

  "But there are ways to protect ourselves. The white jade .. ."

  "Yes. The jade will protect you. The tse m0r cannot bite a person wearing the jade. But .. ." Her grandmother grew thoughtful. "But the creature exerts a larger influence than that. It kills its victims, but it also affects others who see it, who are near it, even those who are not directly attacked. It twists their minds. The cup hugirngsi is not alive, but it is not dead. It is worse than dead, and it is like a magnet, attracting some people, repelling others, warping both. The jade will protect you from that. But the jade will not protect you from those other people, those who are changed by the cup hugirngsi.

  Sue understood. The monster could convince people to do its bidding, convert them. It was a defense mechanism for the cup hug/rngs/, a survival mechanism, a shield for its weak spot. "We can get people to wear white jade, then."

  "White jade? Do you know how rare that is?"

  "Is it the only jade that will work?"

  Her grandmother shook her head slowly. "It is the strongest, it is the most effective, but even green jade will offer some protection."

  "We'll make sure everyone wears some kind of jade, then."

  I "Not everyone will want to wear jade. Not everyone will believe. And those people will be as lights to a moth for the cup hugirngsi.

  Besides, I do not think that even in the jewelry stores there is much jade in this town."

  "What else can we do? What else is good? In American movies, vampires are afraid of crosses and garlic."

  "Willow,"
her grandmother said;

  "Willow?"

  The old woman nodded.

  Sue suddenly understood. "Is that why Father planted those willows in front of the house? For protection?"

  "Yes."

  "You told him to plant them, didn't you?"

  Her grandmother only smiled.

  "Father used to tell me about fung shui. He said that fung shui was harmony between building and land, and I could never understand how he could think that our yard and house were in harmony with this desert.

  "Tung shui means not only balance between buildings and nature but balance between the material and the spirit worlds. Bad lung shui can bring disaster." She shrugged. "Our home is not completely harmonious with the land, but it is harmonious in the most important way.

  I have made sure that it is safe."

  "What else?"

  "Running water. The cup hugirngsi cannot cross running water." "

  Sue was silent for a moment. "But those two teenagers were killed in the river. The cup hugirngsi killed them in running water."

  They were both silent now. For the first time, Sue saw doubt on her grandmother's face, and she realized that all of this was academic to her grandmother too. She had learned of these things secondhand--she had never tried them out herself.

  All of asudden, Sue felt much less confident.

  Maybe this wasn't a cup hugirngsi. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was something that none of them knew anything about, something that no one knew how to right.

  "It is the cup hugirngsi," her grandmother said as if reading h.e'Lind"

  Sue pulled her legs next aroind-h/lnes, and lobkel.

  -She felt vulnerable, helpless and that something had to be done but not knowing what it was or how to go about it. "So what are we going to do?" Her grandmother did not answer.

  "I write for the newspaper now. I can warn people. The editor's brother is the police chief. I'm sure he can help

  US."

  The old woman bent forward, reached down, and put her hand on Sue's.

  The movement was difficult for her, painful, but when she spoke there was renewed strength in her voice. "What do you want to do? What does your heart tell you to do?"