The Summoning

by Bentley Little

  The undirected beam of his flashlight shone upon the nearest wall, and as he righted himself and stepped out of the way to let Sue through behind him, he saw not dirt, as he would have expected, not rock, but colors, shapes. Paintings.

  His flashlight beam played over the wall, joined by Robert's, then Sue's, then Buford's.

  "Mother of shit," Buford breathed.

  The walls of the chamber were decorated with an unearthly mural, a pictographic rendering of horrors and atrocities so overwhelmingly evil that he was grateful the flashlights revealed only a small portion of it. He moved closer, tentatively touched the wall. His beam revealed the visages of beings that had either never existed or had lived so long ago that their existence remained unrecorded. There were bodies flayed, souls in torment, every perversity imaginable and many unimaginable depicted in the unholy picture.

  He had assumed that the vampire was a creature operating on instinct, not intelligence--a being that existed only to feed. But the mural proved that they were dealing with something much more complex, a creature that was not acting simply on impulses, but a being that was actively and sophisticatedly evil. Whether the mural was a recorded history, depicting scenes that had actually occurred, or whether it was merely an example of artistic expression, it was the product of a profoundly corrupt mind, and Rich grew cold as he tried to imagine the cup hugirngsi sitting alone in this underground darkness, painting these painstakingly detailed horrors.

  Only his mind did not see that overly tall baby-faced thing from the videotape.

  F He saw in his. mind the Laughing Man.

  The idea of the Laughing Man chuckling to himself, alone in the darkness, frightened Rich more than any thing else could have.

  There was the sound of wind or water, an indeterminate whooshing rush, and all flashlights turned toward the noise. Against the far wall, the beams revealed a throne, an oversize throne made of bones and skulls and animal heads.

  Upon the throne sat the Pastor Mr. Wheeler.

  Rich looked at the pastor, saw the wildness in his eyes, the bloody Bible on his lap, and for a brief second he thought they'd all been wrong, they'd all been fooled, there was no cup hugrngsi, there was only this human fanatic and his cult of human followers who'd been terrorizing the town.

  And C, or and Anna were safe.

  Then he heard the laughing, saw the shadow loom next to the throne, felt the temperature drop.

  The cup hugirngsi.

  He backed up, bumped into Sue, and only that contact kept him from running out through that narrow doorway the way he'd come in. He could feel the scream building in his throat. The shadowy figure moved into one of the flashlight beams, and it was the Laughing Man. He saw that grinning, characterless face, heard that horrible throaty chuckle.

  Then the figure turned toward them, and he saw the faint traces of other faces as well. The structure of the head seemed to shift as the creature moved. Did the monster now have Elvis's lips?. Dracula's widow's peak? Oriental eyes? Skin fashioned from sand? Was that Jesus Christ hiding underneath there? He had been right, he realized, but he took no comfort from that fact. The cup hugirngsi did indeed draw from mythologies for its appearance, for its form, tapping those deep and primal images that spoke so personally and so eloquently to the holder of the mythology.

  "What do we do?" Robert asked Sue.

  "Die," the cup hugirngsi answered in a whisper like thunder.

  And laughed.

  Sue wet her pants.

  She did not notice it until she moved closer to her grandmother and felt the warmth spreading outward from her crotch. Under any other circumstances she would have been mortified, would not have been able to think of anything else but the failure of her bladder, but she was so terrified now that the knowledge was simply registered by her brain and then instantly forgotten.

  There were other things to think about.

  And, under the circumstances, she was not ashamed. The cup hugirngsi looked exactly the same to her as it had on the videotape, and she knew that, unlike the others, her vision was not being filtered through her perceptions. Her grandmother grabbed her hand. She expected some sort of electricity to pass between them, expected to experience a sharing of some kind of power or insight, but there was only the physical contact of that familiar old hand, those bony fingers clutching tightly to her own. Sue's other hand hurt from clutching the spear. "What do we do?" she asked her grandmother. "The baht gwa. "

  Their whispers were loud in the cavelike chamber, and she wondered if the cup hugirngsi understood what they were saying. It had spoken in English. Did it understand

  Cantonese? Or did it even need to hear them at all? Could it read their minds?

  "The bat gaa, "Sue repeated. "We need the mirror." "Right here,"

  Rossiter said. The FBI agent pushed the reflective glass toward her across the hard-packed floor.

  The cup hugirngsi was gone now. Sue could no longer see it. The tall chamber was nearly smothered in darkness, their own pitiful lights little more than narrow yellow lines in the blackness. It could be anywhere, she knew. It could be way on the other side of the chamber, it could be standing right next to them.

  Did there need to be light for it to see itself in the baht

  There were so many things she should have asked her grandmother before they started.

  She reached for the baht g'wa, fingers curving over the top of the cold mirror. She pulled it next to her, faced it outward, hid behind it as though it was a shield.

  Someone's flashlight was trained on the throne, on Wheeler. The preacher was bending forward, licking the blood off his Bible.

  "Is he a cup hugimgsi*." Sue asked her grandmother. "No," the old woman said "He to be, but he is not. He has just been too close. He has been influenced."

  Influenced.

  "But isn't it trying to turn him into one? ........ "The cup hugirngsi is vain. It wants people to know of its deeds. That's why it has kept him alive, to spread the word of its actions.

  "And that is its downfall." She reached for the mirror and tried to lift it, but the glass was too large and too heavy. Sue saw whfit she was trying to do, and she lifted one end of the mirror. Rich helped her, and among the three of them, they managed to raise the baht g'wa to face level.

  "Move it slowly," her grandmother said, and Sue trans lated. She swiveled her body to the left, and Rich did the same, the face of the mirror panning across the darkened room. There was a flash of light at the far end of the chamber, almost an explosion, and a scream of agony that was loud enough to cause Sue's ears to ring.

  "Don't stop!" her grandmother yelled. "You got it! It saw itself."

  "What's happening?" Buford asked. His voice was high, too high, close to panic.

  Sue did not answer but kept turning slowly, moving the baht gwa.

  Another explosion. In the bright light of this one, a brief powder-keg flash against a side wall, she saw swirling red and a naggingly familiar shape, not the cup hugirngsi but something else, something she'd seen before and almost recognized.

  The creature's voice came out of the shadows. "Clan." It was horrifying but not ugly, a strong, powerful, and undeniably charismatic voice. Sue stared into the darkness. Underneath the fear, underneath the anger and the terror, she felt a weak stirring in her blood, a faint desire to cast off her jade necklace and join Wheeler on the throne of the cup hugirngsi. Despite everything, something in the creature's voice spoke to her. She wondered if the others felt it too.

  She hoped they didn't.

  The creature spoke again in its dulcet tones and strange cadences:

  "Kill them. Kill the chinks and their fucking friends," The attraction was gone now, if it had ever been there at all, and only the terror remained. She and Rich continued to turn slowly with the baht gwa.

  On the throne, Wheeler placed the bloody Bible on the armrest and slid off the raised seat. He looked almost comical as he got off the grotesquely oversize chair, but that impression was as fleeting
as it was incorrect. The preacher stood, and there was not merely fanaticism in his face, but a dangerous determination. "Jesus said to kill the fucking chinks. They are evil. They are disciples of the Adversary, and you must smite them in the name of the Lord."

  "How come He can't smite us himself?." Robert stepped forward, spear thrust out in front of him, flashlight beam roaming the chamber. He faced Wheeler, shone his light into the preacher's eyes. Wheeler blinked, flinched, drew back "How come He's so afraid of us? How come He can't touch us himself? Doesn't He like the jade? Huh? Is He afraid of our little sticks? I never heard that Jesus was afraid of jade. I never knew He had a fear of willow branches. I never read that in the Bible."

  Wheeler looked from Robert into the darkness to his left. There was confusion on his face, and for a brief moment the mask of fanaticism slipped.

  Sue and Rich continued to pan the chamber with that mirror. Stop, she thought. Don't say anything else. Don' ruin it.

  "Your followers ran away," Robert continued. "The didn't defend your church at all." He stared at that preacher.

  "Nol" Wheeler yelled.

  "Yes!"

  "They must be here for Jesus' rebirthl .... "They decided to skip it."

  Someone else's beam, maybe Woods's, maybe siter's, lit upon two dark crumpled forms half hidden b hind the irregular" bone legs of the throne. Sue knew instinctively what the flashlights had discovered even before her mind recognized the figures. Corrie. And Anna.

  No, she thought, willing the beams to move on. That's what it wants.

  That's why it brought them here.

  But the lights remained in place, trained on the hunched and blackened forms. Another beam, Buford's, joined the other two. It was obvious now that the figures were dead and nude and female. The woman's face was shoved obscenely into the girl's crotch.

  "Your wife. Your daughter." The whisper came from nowhere, came from everywhere. Rich stopped swiveling the mirror.

  "NoI" Sue said. "Don't listen to it!"

  "Pastor Wheeler sucked out their blood and drank it. He fucked them first. He really liked the girl."

  Rich screamed. It was supposed to be a word, suppos to be "No," but was far more powerful, a loud primal negation, a full-throated denial that came straight from the depths of his soul The bahtgwa slipped from his grasp, and the up hugirngsi loomed out of the blackness, step ping into the flashlight beams as the mirror shattered on the ground. As hard as he could, Rich threw his spear at the monster, but it flew sideways and clattered impotently on the floor.

  Wheeler was already upon him. He leaped at Rich's head, and the two of them fell hard on the floor at Sue's feet while Robert, Woods, Rossiter, and Buford rushed for ward to help. The two of them rolled in the broken mirror glass. Wheeler was attempting to pull the jade ring from

  Rich's finger, yanking back the finger itself, breaking it.

  One of us will die.

  Don't let it be Rich, Sue thought, but she was not sure it was a thoughL She was not sure of anything. It was all too confusing, was happening too fast. As if in a drug scene from a sixties movie, everything seemed to be crazily off center, seen through the strobe of the flashlights and the weird angles of the shattered baht gwa. She was dimly aware that her grandmother was speaking to her, yelling at her, but amidst the other screaming she could not hear what her grandmother was saying.

  The cup hugirngsi stood before them, looking just as it had in the videotape, its horridly ancient baby face twisted with hate and a sickening sort of glee. The whiteness of its skin seemed suddenly phosphorescent, lit from the matetial of its substance and not from the weak beams of the flashlights.

  Rich's scream spiraled upward in intensity, shifting from anger to agony, and was cut off suddenly as Sue's flashlight hand was hit with an unexpected wash of liquid warmth. The preacher had bitten into Rich's neck, into the artery, and was vainly trying to drink the spurting blood.

  Rossiter and Buford pulled the screaming Wheeler off Rich's spastically convulsing body, and without a word, without a sound, without a second's hesitation, Robert stabbed the preacher through the chest, ramming in his spear as far as it would go, pushing it in farther with the weight of his body as he leaned on it. Wheeler stopped screaming, his eyes bulged, and blood pumped from the skin around the spear and from his still open lips. : This wasn't tight. This was not what was supposed to happen.

  Sue faced the cup hugirngsi, spear thrust outward, dimly aware that her grandmother was doing the same. It was chaos in here, no one knew what they were doing. They were all going to die. Rossiter was shooting.

  He had brought a gun, against her grandmother's specific instructions, and he was firing it at the cup hugirgsi, the reports echoing painfully in the chamber and blocking out all screams, all other sounds. The first slug tipped a hole through the monster's stomach, and for a brief millisecond there was a glimpse of red, a liquid swirling within the hole, and then the opening was gone, skin covering it up as if it had never existed. The slug immediately after it went through the monster's eye. There was a red hole, and then the eye returned. The other bullets, through the forehead and chest, created equally short-lived wounds that disap

  Woods was on one knee, bending over Rich, pressing down on his convulsively jerking body.

  Sue pointed her flashlight at the cp hugirngsi. Perhaps it had been playing with them. Perhaps, as her grand mother had suggested, it wanted to make its presence known to the world. Perhaps it had merely been bored and wanted a challenge. Whatever the impetus behind its decision to lure them here, it was not playing now. There was demonic purpose in its eyes, determination in its malevolent expression.

  And yetw i : wit was afraid.

  She knew it, knew it instantly, clearly, perfectly. It was not an insight or a revelation, not something that she discovered or that blossomed within her mind, it was simply there, in her brain, as though it was something she had always known.

  D/Lo Ling Gum.

  She was aware now, also, of the streams on the surface above them. She could feel the power in the twin flows of water even through the layers of dirt and rock above their heads. The streams were weak; beginning to drift at this point, but they were still there and still flowing east.

  And they ran in converging paths on either side of the

  The monster could move neither to the left nor to the right. It could only move toward them or away from them. It was trapped. :: Her grandmother was aware of it, too. Neither of them had spoken, but each was aware of what the other thought and felt, and it was as if they were one mind with two bodies as, willow spears extended, they stepped forward.

  Sue sensed that something had been planned, that something big had been about to happen, and that they had stopped it before it started. They had thwarted the

  But it was even more frightened.

  The cup hug/rngs/hissed. All pretensions of humanity had fled. There was no charismatic dulcet-toned voice, no face or form borrowed from human minds, there was only this spitting, hissing thing, this ancient monster with its hate-twisted baby face and strange skinny body with its long growths of unnatural hair. Inside the terrible mouth, double rows of too many teeth chattered and clicked.

  Sue felt pressure in her mind, as though her thoughts were surrounded by a wall, and something huge and powerful was butting against that wall, but it seemed surprisingly easy to keep that pressure at bay. She shoved her spear forward, tried to stab the cup hug/rgs/.

  It backed away, hissed again, a sound like wind, like water.

  This close, she could feel the coldness radiating from the monster, waves of increasingly arctic air that felt painful on her skin and made her want to flee, get away.

  It was afraid of them.

  Her grandmother stepped forward, tried to spear the cup hugirngsi, but her weapon swung on a slight arc to the left, and before she had a chance to adjust, to pull back, the creature's long, thin hand swiped toward the old woman's head.

  A spear embedded itself in the c
up hugirngs's upper arm, causing it to yank the arm back with a tortured scream. '

  Another spear flew through the air, hit it in the face.

  Rossiter,

  Buord

  Sue rushed forward, through the cold, the screaming wind water sound so loud that it hurt her ears, and with all of her might she shoved her sharpened branch of willow into the monster's stomach.

  Blood exploded, flying outward, splashing everything, everyone. The monster's body crumpled, its form instantly losing shape, skin flapping like a deflated balloon as the crimson tide sloshed onto the ground in a truly amazing flood. There were no bones inside the body, no organs, only the blood, an astounding amount of it that continued to flow out of the sinking figure in a seemingly endless stream. It bubbled on the hard floor, boiling, percolating downward through the rock, but on Sue's body it felt cool and flat and dead, and as she glanced quickly around the chamber, she saw that the blood was not hurting or affecting anyone else either.

  "He's dead," Woods announced behind her, and for a second she thought he meant the cup hugirngsi, but then she realized he was talking about Rich. A twisting hurt ripped through her, and she wished the cup hugirngsi was alive so she could kill it again.

  Had it ever been alive?

  She turned toward her grandmother, threw her arms around the old woman.

  She felt exhausted all of a sudden, and she needed someone to hold on to. She was dimly aware that the moment's connection the two of them had shared was gone, but she didn't really care. Tears were streaming from her eyes, coursing down her cheeks, but she was not crying. Not yet.

  There was movement around her, but she seemed not to know what it was and not to care, the actions of her companions now trivial and irrelevant to her. Her grand mother pulled away from her, touched her cheek, then bent down to pick up her spear.

  There was nothing left of the cup hugrngsi now but the empty formless hull of its body, and her grandmother began speaking quietly to herself in that unfamiliar dialect as she moved next to it. Pushing up the sleeves of her blouse, the old woman wrapped the leathery skin and its irregular tufts of blood-soaked albino hair around her spear until it resembled a bulging, soggy, rolled-up carpet. She held the wrapped skin in front of her, lifting it as though it weighed nothing, and Sue followed her through the chamber's narrow doorway and down the rounded runnel the way they'd come.