But then, as the angel knew, the Reverend had underestimated Sean. Sean wasn’t afraid. Inside the magical circle, he never could be.
He read the lava script, and he chanted: “I give you blood to make a Servitor in the likeness of your own attendants, substantial and potent. Send it to serve me in all things, and through me to serve you, Lord Azathoth, and your Soul, Nyarlathotep.”
Sean chanted the incantation thrice. The last pinches of Zeph and Aghar went into the brazier and bathed him like incense. Pulling the blessing deep into his lungs, he watched fresh smoke waft the angel into treetops that shredded it until nothing was left but the gleam of its eyes, two gold stars within a leafy nebula. The lava script remained above the brazier, for his use.
He stripped off the stupid latex gloves and without hesitation drew the sharp edge of the athame across the palm of his left hand. There was pain, but it was unimportant. What mattered was the swift flow of blood. He clenched a fist over the brazier; he watched blood drip onto the charcoal, heard its hiss, smelled it burn. The more he squeezed out, the more intense grew a new exhilaration, a gut-deep physical excitement. In fact, he was getting a hard-on. It didn’t seem perverted, though. It seemed the rightest thing that had ever happened to him.
The lava script was fading, but he only had to chant the close of the incantation once: “Blood speed my petition. Blood make the promise. Blood seal the bargain. By your wills, so be it!”
The “so be it!” burst out of him so loud that people sleeping in the houses across the river had to start awake, so loud that cops on Post Road had to roar into the industrial park to check it out. Sean didn’t care. With the last words, he yearned and beat, not just his pounding heart, not just his aching root of a boner. His whole body shook. The lava script jittered in his vision until it had cooled to black crust. In the black of the treetops, the gold eye-stars still glowed.
Sean waited, ecstatic. The eyes waited.
Lightning flared. Real lightning. It forked through his rapture, making him stagger from the magical circle. A second flare hit him, a third, before he realized it was the flash of the camera going off as programmed. He’d been shaken awake at the best part of a dream, or at the worst part of a nightmare. Reaction shivers hit him fast, and that boner? Gone and come to nothing.
When he dropped his arms, the letter opener stabbed his thigh. He let it fall to the blacktop and looked at his left hand, which throbbed like a bitch now that he’d snapped out of—what? What had happened in the magical circle to let him slash his palm from the base of his forefinger to the crease of his wrist and barely feel it?
Sean smeared blood on his jeans getting a handkerchief out of his pocket. No great loss—his clothes already reeked of burned metal and sulphur. He reeked of it; the whole damn site reeked. The Powders of Zeph and Aghar, yeah, he’d be getting his money back on those. Before the camera flashes had driven him from the circle, he’d finished everything except the binding incantation, and, obviously, there was no familiar to bind. The magical circle was empty. The parking lot was empty. Not a stray cat. Not a mosquito. Not even a cicada singing, and they’d been going at it before.
Smoke still rose from the brazier, formless.
It had always been formless.
His disappointment was crazy, but so had been the way he’d felt in the circle, and craziest of all had been that vision of an angel. Angel? More like the Devil in the Arkwright House windows, the Black Man. That was where Sean had seen it before. And the Reverend had said the Black Man was Nyarlathotep. So, when Sean called him, old Nyarlathotep had shown up, Pharaoh getup and all.
As Sean wrapped the handkerchief around his palm, he hiccoughed out a laugh that sounded more or less normal. Plain old psychology could explain everything that had happened. He’d gotten himself worked up preparing for the ritual. Geldman’s Pharmacy had been gasoline on a banked fire, and tonight, boom! He’d exploded right into a hallucination. Damn, blood was already seeping through his makeshift bandage. He’d be lucky if he didn’t need stitches.
Sean fumbled Dad’s camera gear back into his pack. The time-delay photos would be a wash—they had to show him gaping like the world’s biggest dork. He’d delete them before anyone got a look, even Eddy. The grill wouldn’t be so easy to deal with, because the charcoal still burned high. Well, he’d have to leave the whole mess to cool. Maybe he’d come back for the grill, maybe not. It was half rusted out, and Dad never used it anymore.
Armed with the grill lid, Sean eased a foot back into the magical circle. No jolt, thank God. He clapped the lid over the stinking embers. Then his heel came down on something—the athame, the letter opener. The blood edging its blade made his stomach lurch, but he couldn’t leave the opener behind; Dad would miss that. Mom had given it to him, after all.
And what would Mom have thought of how Sean had just used the opener? Crazy to wonder that now. He bent to pick it up, and that was when he heard the stealthy slither, like a snake gliding through dry leaves.
It came from inside the grill.
Slowly, he straightened. The slithering continued, augmented by a low rattle of lid against rim, as if the whole grill was vibrating. Earthquake? Idiot. The ground under his feet was quiet. A delayed chemical reaction of the powders? That made more sense.
What would make even more sense would be to get away before the grill blew up.
He stuck the letter opener through his belt and took a step backward. If he took a couple more, then a few more after that, he could grab his pack and get on the bike. Instead he stood still, eyes locked on the grill.
The rattling stopped, replaced by a sound like briquettes tossed aside, so that they pinged against the inner wall of the grill. The lid rose an inch, releasing a swath of smoky red light. The lid fell back.
Something was moving in the grill.
Which couldn’t happen.
The lid rose, higher. Fell again.
It had to be snakes. Not live ones but those ash-snakes that grew out of tablets touched by a match, the kind they sold in fireworks stores. Ignited by the charcoal, the Powders of Zeph and Aghar were expanding into ash-cobras. Ash-pythons. Hell, ash-anacondas. Mystery solved. He could walk over, raise the lid, and the ash-snakes would crumble and blow away.
The lid rose and stayed up, a phenomenon to be expected under the ash-snake theory. Sean squatted to peer through the opening. He saw something white and writhing and grimaced at a new stench. Cute trick that Zeph and Aghar combined to make not only the ash-snakes but also a smell like the reptile house at the zoo. Fire-Serpents Deluxe, with Improved Olfactory Component! Maybe he wouldn’t ask Geldman for a refund, after all.
Still squatting, holding his breath, Sean reached for the lid handle. It happened then, had waited to happen, the burgeoning outward of whiteness too solid to be ash, of whiteness split by maw and lit by two flat disks of fire.
Sean backpedaled so fast he propelled himself onto his butt. Before ass and blacktop had a chance to fully connect, he rolled onto his feet and ran, too busy sucking in air to scream when his one backward glance showed him the grill tipping over and something white flailing out of it in an avalanche of sparks. He had summoned it. Unless the Elder Sign confined it to the magical circle, it would come after him.
On the service road a few of the old streetlamps put out feeble light. Sean grabbed a post to break his momentum. He spun and collapsed against flaking metal. Behind him loomed the impenetrable shadow of the abandoned factory. Beyond that was the puddle of light cast by his camp lantern, with the overturned grill in its center.
There was nothing else. Nothing moved within his magical circle.
Sean pushed back from the post. If he’d really seen the white thing (with mouth and molten metal eyes), it had escaped. He’d used the wrong Elder Sign. Worse, he hadn’t said the binding incantation. Whatever had answered the ritual was free. It might be crouching in the shadow of the factory, or it might be at shadow’s edge, ready to hurl itself across the last few yard
s between them, and, if Sean was lucky, all he’d see would be a blur before it clambered up his body to his throat. His eyes felt bugged out to the stalks, trying to penetrate the blackness. His ears ached to catch the click of claws. Cicadas were what he heard, and mosquitoes whining close to his head. Across the river, the dog barked again.
The barking grounded him. Sean closed his eyes, listening to the ordinary night noises, dog and insects, cars, nearer now: hum and thud of tires on asphalt, fragmented bursts of rock and rap. He opened his eyes. The only movement was in the air in front of his face, where mosquitoes bobbed.
He batted at them with his right hand. His throbbing left hand he nursed against his chest. His head was starting to throb, too, just when he most needed to think clearly. All right. He had hallucinated the angelic Black Man. He must have hallucinated the thing in the grill.
Why?
Psychology, because he had been overexcited. Or drugs.
The Powders of Zeph and Aghar.
What if they’d been laced with drugs? As soon as he’d breathed their smoke, he’d felt superstrong, he’d seen things, he’d cut himself without feeling it. Angel dust could do all that, couldn’t it? The white thing had been the last special effect of the high, and now he had a wicked headache, the hangover.
Jesus, what was with Geldman, selling crap like that? Was it a sick joke? Or a way to give customers the illusion they’d done magic? Either way, it had to be illegal. And what about the Reverend, sending Sean to Geldman?
God, Dad would implode if he found out Sean had been stupid enough to contact the Reverend, then stupider enough to buy drugs from a weird old dude who thought he was running a wizard pharmacy. Yeah, the Rev and Geldman probably did hang together, snorting Zeph and Aghar in their secret drug den behind the frosted glass. That was why they were so fucked up.
What he had to do right now was dump the powders left in his bean pots. He had to get rid of the pots, too. They were contaminated, and so were the tubes the powders had come in. To get them, though, he’d have to return to the magical circle. Sean looked up the service road to the line of modern streetlights that marched along Old Post Road. Safe under their sodium glare, he could walk home in half an hour. Come back tomorrow.
That wouldn’t work. Someone might steal Dad’s bike and camera. Plus there were the spilled briquettes. If the wind picked up, they could spit sparks and start a fire. As for the powders, a bum could come along and try snorting them, and overdose, and die, and his death would be on Sean’s pounding head.
Big deal, going back for his stuff. He remembered now. Even if a Servitor was unbound, it couldn’t hurt the summoner. The Reverend had said so.
God, the Reverend said so. Sean was the crazy one if he took any comfort from that.
He made it safely to the grill, which lay on its side, its lid ten feet off. When he’d fallen on his butt, he must have kicked the grill over. Again, end of mystery. He scraped the scattered briquettes together. They stank with the new stink, the melding of Zeph and Aghar. He held his breath until he could smother the embers under the lid.
The bean pots he dumped into a plastic grocery bag that still held Geldman’s glass tubes. He tied the bag shut with four hard-pulled knots. It would be safest to chuck it into the river, no matter how much Joe-Jack (Lord of the Pawtuxet Conservation Society) would kick if he could see. Sean had fished crap out of the water five annual cleanups in a row. He’d earned one supposedly nontoxic dump.
Reluctant to give up the light, he hung his camp lantern on the handlebars of Dad’s bike and struggled into his backpack, so he’d be ready to move. Then he crept to the edge of the parking lot.
A narrow path led into the brush between lot and river. Sean sidled along it with the grace of a drunken elephant. His racket spooked something in the reeds, and it beat a rustling retreat. Coon, maybe. Skunk, possum. Just a plain old animal, but it could be rabid. Sean stopped, whirled the loaded grocery bag like a slingshot, and hurled it as far as he could.
It splashed down mid-river and sank. Sean didn’t wait to say good-bye—the animal in the reeds was still rustling, and maybe it wasn’t retreating. Maybe it was moving toward him.
Stumbling into the parking lot, Sean saw something gleam in the leafy shadows of the woods to the east. Was it stray starlight on an onyx forehead or a golden eye? Back by the river, had something just splashed into the water?
In three strides, he made it to the bike and jumped on. Though he could only steer with his right hand, he pedaled hard, out of the lot, onto the service road, toward the safety of sodium streetlights and the company of late-cruising cars.
8
When Joe-Jack arrived the next morning, he took one look at the bloody gauze wadded around Sean’s hand and drove him straight to his aunt’s. Sean told Celeste he’d cut himself slicing a bagel. East Side Ph.D.’s were always butchering themselves that way, so she had no trouble believing her dumb-ass nephew had. She hustled him to her office, where her partner Dr. Goss sutured him up.
Celeste insisted he stay overnight at her house, which meant he couldn’t clean up at the industrial park. No worries. Anyone was welcome to the stinking grill, and as for the magical circle, Gus said there were going to be afternoon thunderstorms. The rain would wash away Sean’s pentagram, and that would be the end of the ritual.
Eddy came over in the afternoon. Sean told her the whole story, except for the hard-on part. She was cool and didn’t say, I told you so. Instead she tore into the Reverend and Geldman. “It’s no joke, angel dust. You could have brain damage.”
“I had a wicked headache, but I feel all right now.”
“We should call the police.”
Sean gave his bandaged palm a painful flex. “I threw the powders away. There’s no evidence.”
“We could place an anonymous tip.”
“Eddy, we don’t know it was drugs. Even before I burned any powder, I was feeling weird.”
“You probably inhaled some getting ready. I mean, how else do you explain the hallucinations?”
He didn’t want to say it, but he made himself: “Magic?”
“Real funny. You inhaled some when you poured the powders into the pots.”
Last night he would have agreed. Now he’d had time to think about everything that had happened, and drugs wouldn’t explain why he’d gone from jittery Sean to fearless Sean the very second he’d stepped into the magical circle. “I still don’t want to report Geldman. Plus I’d have to tell the police about the Reverend, too, right?”
Eddy paced, too indignant to sit down. “I’ve been thinking about the Rev. Know what I think? I bet he’s really Mr. Horrocke.”
Maybe Sean’s brain was damaged, because it sure wasn’t following Eddy there. “The old guy at the bookstore?”
“It makes total sense. Where’d you find the Witch Panic book? Horrocke’s. Who’s an expert on old books, probably knows all about forgeries, probably could make his own forged shit, like the ad? Horrocke.”
“Jeez, take a breath.”
If she did, it didn’t slow her down. “Horrocke puts the book and ad out for bait, and you take it. Then he pretends he doesn’t know anything about them and lets you have them for nothing. And—” Eddy suddenly turned and pointed at him, like she was the prosecutor and he was a crook on the stand. “And he tells you they’re your destiny. Then what’s the Rev tell you? He left the book and ad for you in particular. That’s the destiny thing again.”
Yeah, brain damage. His headache was even coming back. “I don’t know.”
“But it makes sense, right?”
“No, because why would Horrocke do all that?”
“All those books he’s around. They’ve cracked him. He thinks he’s a genuine wizard. He meets Geldman, who thinks he’s a genuine wizard. They, what d’you call it, they reinforce each other. Or if they don’t think they’re wizards, they just like screwing around with kids. Maybe they’re pedophiles.”
That was a nice thought, not! “I
’m not sure about Horrocke being the Reverend. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m done with both of them.”
Eddy finally let it go, though Sean could tell she was dying to spearhead a major police crackdown on magic pushers.
Over the next four days, while he was off work because of his bum hand, he worked on his project report. The pictures of his magical circle looked good, but as he’d expected, no amount of fiddling could save the three time-delay photos. He deleted them from Dad’s camera. If only it was that easy to get the stink out of his clothes. After the third wash, he buried his jeans and T-shirt in a chest of old sweaters, hoping mothballs would conquer the lingering foulness.
“By their foulness shall ye know them.” That was what the Necronomicon said about the Outer Gods and their minions. Too often now the line went through Sean’s head, worse than a trapped song-fragment. He’d stopped reading Lovecraft, and he hadn’t watched the movies he’d stockpiled for gorefests while Dad was away. The last thing Sean wanted to do these days was sit in the dark watching monsters kill teenagers.
Vague dread rode around in his chest. He hadn’t said the final incantation, the one that would have bound the Servitor to him. The Rev claimed a Servitor would be “deferential” to its summoner even without binding. How deferential? It would only eat part of him? Crazy to worry about something that had never existed, but he couldn’t shake a sense of being sought. Infinity mentioned that kind of feeling, also how performing rituals could cause euphoria, also how Nyarlathotep could appear in many forms, one of them a falcon-winged “angel.” It all jibed with Sean’s experience, though since he’d read the book before doing the ritual, those tidbits could have lodged in his brain as raw material for hallucinations.
Another thing. Zeph and Aghar were strong crap: He’d only “taken” them once, and yet he sometimes got a hankering for the high he’d felt, for the fearless Sean of the magical circle. Was he already hooked? Would he end up like the Reverend, with his own account at Geldman’s?
It didn’t help when Sean went back to work and Beowulf kept talking about a coyote pack roaming along the Pawtuxet River. “A lot of pets are missing,” he said. “The Gagnons’ poodle, and Alexa’s cat, and Sweetie Pie.”
Summoned Page 8
