Summoned

by Anne M. Pillsworth

  You should have this, Geldman says. He reaches over to the scale and pulls the tongue from its toothy mouth. It was written for you especially.

  Sean opens the doubled square of cardboard. The baby-blue fortune inside is folded tight and he keeps on unfolding and smoothing, but there are always more folds and he can’t get to the fortune, even though he can glimpse handwritten words through the thin paper.

  Well? Geldman says.

  I can’t read it.

  You’ll have to, you know. It’s your future.

  Can’t you unfold it for me?

  Geldman shakes his head regretfully and opens the pharmacy door, and that’s when Sean smells reptile-musk-sulfur. Some of the witches and wizards have blood-spawn Servitors as well as the aether-newts. Under the light of frosted-glass fixtures, the Servitors look strangely like Brutus the Hell Pug, if you were to swell Brutus double and flay him to the dead white flesh. The smell keeps Sean from following Geldman. Strange, though. The smell grows stronger now that the pharmacy door has swung shut, and the longer Sean struggles with the infinitely folded fortune the more his eyes sting in the noxious bloom …

  He woke in thick dark, but he was safe in his bedroom at Celeste’s house, not home alone like that other night. Geldman, the unreadable fortune, the magicians and familiars, they were neatly confined by the principal law of dreaming, that things in dreams had to stay in dreams. How, then, had the Servitor stink chased him out of sleep? No denying it had: It weighed down the already-heavy air, sinking into his nostrils and throat, where it burned like unclean bleach.

  The smell paralyzed him. He rolled his eyes to the right. Nothing loomed in either window, and the screens were intact. Could the Servitor be on the ground below?

  He rolled his eyes to the left, where a line of light marked the crack between door and jamb. Had he left the door ajar? He didn’t think so, but someone could have opened it, maybe Dad, to check on him. Dad was back in the house—Sean heard his voice downstairs, along with Gus’s and Helen’s, then Celeste’s. Helen was laughing.

  That was the answer to the smell. She’d gone to collect specimens of Servitor glop for analysis. Still, why would she have put the specimens in Sean’s room?

  He moved to sit up. His left hand came down in sticky warmth.

  Sean snatched back his hand and scrabbled to the other side of the bed. Enough streetlight filtered through the windows to show him gleaming wet on his fingers. It was the gleaming wet that stank.

  With heart and gorge fighting to be first up his throat, he swiped his hand on the sheets. His feet hit the floor the next second. The thing had been here, drooling on his bed. He had to warn the others—

  Only the thing hadn’t left. As Sean rounded the foot of his bed, he saw it, a pale lump sort of like a man and sort of like a toad, crouched in the armchair by the door. Long taloned paws twitched on its drawn-up knees. Its head hung between them, bald dome, beard of wormy tentacles; above the worms, like flattened embers, two disks burned sullen red.

  On the porch roof, the Servitor had been the size of a ten- or twelve-year-old kid. It was now at least as big as Sean, and it was guarding the door.

  Sean grabbed the nearer post of the footboard. He was screaming, mouth sprung wide, only nothing was coming out except an almost soundless “uh-uh-uh.” The bedpost in his hand existed. The thing in the chair was a nightmare. He could walk out the door if he wanted to.

  He took a step.

  As the Servitor mewled at him, its facial tentacles flared to either side of a toad-maw full of needles. The needles dripped stink.

  He froze, nose and mouth scorched by the gust of its breath. Okay. Okay. He couldn’t yell, but he could still move, and he had to move, because he would die if the Servitor came any closer. The smell alone would kill him. Already it seemed to have penetrated to the back of his nasal passages and burned through skull bone into his brain.

  One backward step at a time, that was the way. There was a closet on the window side of the room. All he had to do was get to that and put solid wood between himself and the Servitor. Solid wood had worked that other night, and though Sean couldn’t lock the closet from inside, he could damn well grab the knob and hold the door shut. One backward step every dozen heartbeats, until the bed was between him and the creature and he could sprint for the closet.

  The Servitor’s mewl turned to a guttural moaning. Was that some kind of language? Sean couldn’t make out syllables or words, just the continual rumble of complaint or anger or appetite.

  He turned to run too soon. His sudden move made the Servitor explode off the armchair. It leaped through ten feet of air and landed on the bed, mouth agape.

  Jesus. God. Jesus.

  Sean froze again. The thing could leap on him whichever door he headed for. Okay okay okay, it was inching closer across the rumpled sheets, but he was still alive. He would only die if it actually touched him. And remember: It couldn’t attack him. Even though he hadn’t bound it, he was the summoner, the master.

  The flat ember eyes had no pupils. Sean could see that now. Instead they had vertical striations of a more intense fire, white, pulsating. The webbed netherpaws were even more heavily clawed than the forepaws. They could rake downed prey wide open, disemboweling it, like Hrothgar had been disemboweled.

  It couldn’t attack him. Orne had said so. Orne had to know. Sean stayed motionless. To close his eyes was an act of courage beyond him, so he had to watch the way the Servitor’s flesh was never still. It bloated and shrank; it melted and ran and resolidified under its shuddering skin. In some places the skin thinned until it split and oozed. In other places it puckered thick. The Servitor stretched a forepaw toward him, talons flexing to display a mottled palm. No. Yes. The thick puckered skin there opened. It was a mouth. It was a tiny mouth, with tiny needles of its own, and the tiny mouth moaned like the great one, only shriller.

  The tiny mouth was hungry.

  Sean couldn’t close his eyes, but he couldn’t look at the mouth in the outthrust palm. The Servitor’s eyes were better to look at than that. Really, once you got used to them, they were amazing. If the vertical striations were pupils and there were three of them, did that mean it could see in three directions at once? Or did each striation pick up a different kind of radiation? One visible light, one infrared …

  This kind of thinking was insane. It was splitting him in two, into a body that yearned for the safety of the closet and a brain that pretended the thing in front of him was an innocuous new species, nothing worse than a beetle.…

  As the striations widened, they emitted light, the white glow of the superheated lava within the eyes. He could actually watch that interior lava heave and swirl, and something in him, something behind his own eyes, was drawn to the molten maelstrom, could yield to its grinding embrace. If he let it, if he surrendered. There’d be a few seconds of liquefying muscle before he was burned to the bone, but when his bones fell away in ash he’d turn phoenix. Would he spring back into life with falcon wings, like the ones on the Angel of the Summoning?

  Points, points of claws, touched the center of his chest. As if it was as mutable as the Servitor’s, Sean’s flesh shrank. He stumbled back. His throat worked. His throat was smarter than his brain; it was determined to rip through its own clenched terror to get out a saving sound.

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, Helen called: “Sean?”

  His eyes pulled away from the suction of the ember-disks. He looked over the Servitor’s heaving shoulder at the hall door.

  Someone stepped onto the back stairs. One step, uncertain.

  “Sean?”

  Something else touched his chest, over the heart, and it was wet and pricking, and when Sean looked down he saw a many-forked tongue lapping his skin, a tongue from the mouth in the Servitor’s palm, and seeing that broke the dam in his throat, all right, and he got off a scream like every wail from every horror movie he’d ever seen, stored up in his gut all these years for this one big nonfiction moment.
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  14

  Edgewood turned out to be a neighborhood of Victorian houses on a more human scale than the grand behemoths around MU. The pedestrians, too, were more varied: older people, young couples with strollers, kids on bikes, teenagers in self-conscious packs. Down side streets to the left, Helen spotted Narragansett Bay, a blue expanse dotted with sails and crisscrossed by motorboat wakes. Land hugged the water on both sides; it looked approachable, without the implicit threat of open ocean that confronted Arkham.

  The Wyndham house was a russet-shingled Craftsman. All business, Jeremy led Helen and Gus to the back porch, where they inspected a broken door latch and scratched screens. The screen from Sean’s bedroom leaned against an overturned garbage can. No dainty scratches here—something had rent the screen wide open. Under the garbage can was a black plastic bag; and under the bag, the dead cat. Helen bent for a closer look. The corpse was eviscerated, gnawed, nearly decapitated. Worse, it reeked a loathsome combination of skunk and rotten eggs. She backed off, holding her hand to her mouth. Inside the black bag were Sean’s pillows. The nastiness on their cases stank exactly like the cat.

  Jeremy got plastic knives and sandwich bags from the kitchen. Somehow he was able to hunker over the cat and pillows long enough to collect samples. Sean had called the gummy stuff ichor, but according to the ancient Greeks, ichor was a venous fluid, the blood of the gods. This substance was more analogous to saliva. That or it was a hoaxer’s concoction.

  While Jeremy and Gus bagged the cat, Helen retreated into the cleaner air of the backyard. In the failing light, delphiniums and hollyhocks stood impressively tall. She made out a vegetable plot, a circle of roses and daylilies centered on a sundial, two rows of raised rectangular beds like a monastic herb garden. One of the beds featured prostrate rosemary burgeoning from a terra-cotta urn; she stole a sprig and rolled it between her hands, releasing astringent perfume.

  Jeremy jogged down the flagstone path between the rows. “Gus is going to look over the house. I’m taking the garage and studio. We’d better stick together.”

  She glanced at the dense shade under a grape arbor, where much could hide. Sticking together sounded good.

  The garage took up the first floor of a carriage house at the end of the lot. Nothing assaulted them there except the comparatively wholesome odors of gasoline and dried manure. Jeremy’s studio was on the second floor. While he peered under tables, Helen took in a ceiling open to the ridgepole; four huge skylights, and clerestory windows running like a silvery ribbon around the exterior walls. On corkboards under the windows were pinned dozens of sketches. The three largest were same-size drawings of her library windows, with every bit of glass numbered and notes clustered thick around the margins.

  “Everything seems fine,” Jeremy said.

  “Fine over here, too.”

  He straightened from flashlight-probing the space behind cabinets. “Oh, the cartoons of the Founding.”

  “Is that what you call them? They make me realize how complex the windows are.”

  Jeremy joined her. “While I was down south, my intern took the windows apart. Like to see?”

  “Please.”

  Three long tables held trays of glass shards, each with a wax-penciled number that corresponded to the numbers on the cartoons. Some trays held already-cleaned glass, as brilliant as flattened gems. Others held glass in a cleaning solution. “I shouldn’t have to do much repainting,” Jeremy said. “All in all, we’re looking good.”

  “I know the windows will be beautiful.”

  “That’s the point,” Jeremy said in a matter-of-fact tone that made her smile. “We better get going.”

  They returned to the room in which the staircase rose. Now that the lights were on, Helen saw that it, too, was a studio, with glass-faced cabinets, drafting tables, and easels. Jeremy’s space had an exhilarating air of controlled chaos. This one was too dustless and polished and orderly to be in use. The one open easel supported a canvas that had turned its neatly stapled backside to the room. Propped against the canvas was a palette on which the paints had dried into a clumpy abstract of yellows surrounded by greens: Egg Yolks in the Meadow Grass. But the other thing she’d missed on her way in, the thing that made her stare, was a stained-glass triptych set high in the south wall. Though the sun had set, these windows glowed like noon, apparently backlit by spotlights under the carriage house eaves.

  The left window showed a knight on a parapet, battling a Saracen. The right showed the same knight, armor exchanged for a simple robe, bending over the bed of a sick woman. Both were astonishing, but the central window fascinated Helen. It had a medallion centered on a background at once entirely wrong and undeniably right: a mesh of virulent yellow glass streaked with red and flecked with black, violent, unsettling. The medallion itself was ethereal blues, greens, and violets. It featured a woman with sandy hair, the sick woman from the right window, now flushed with health. Like a young Madonna not yet encumbered by a halo and queenly robes, she wore a white gown with pale-blue girdle and sat in a walled garden, an easel before her, a paintbrush poised in her right hand. In her left, she held a spike of royal-blue delphinium, which she regarded with serene intensity.

  Oddly, it was the delphinium that wore haloes of a sort, globular auras of spectral blue that surrounded each floret. Wait, and the bristle-end of the brush had a similar aura, a subtle golden luminescence that you saw more clearly when you looked away from it slightly. Any last doubt she’d had that Jeremy would do justice to the Founding windows evaporated, gone for good.

  Helen stepped closer and saw that the plants in the glass garden were minutely rendered: apothecary rose, angelica, sage, foxglove, valerian, and elder. Plantains and violas studded the turf between beds. She looked for Jeremy and found him at her elbow. “What does it mean?”

  Jeremy stood silent so long Helen was afraid the question had offended him. But when he turned toward her, there was an unprecedented openness in his eyes. “It’s about the Knights Hospitallers. During the Crusades, they built a hospice at Rhodes.” He pointed at the medallion. “That’s my wife, Kate. She was a painter. This was her studio. She died about nine years ago. Ovarian cancer. Hospice helped us, me and Sean, so she could stay at home.”

  What could Helen say, beyond the standard Oh, I’m so sorry, and that too many years late? Helen didn’t want to go on automatic now, so she kept her mouth shut and thought of Sean’s sandy hair, of the profusion of delphiniums in the garden outside, of the rosemary in the urn, which like all the plants in the medallion was an herb of healing. She could still smell it on her fingers.

  Jeremy cleared his throat. “It was very hard. Sean was so close to Kate. I tried to protect him from her dying, but he wouldn’t put up with that. He stuck right by her the whole time. He didn’t seem scared of how sick she was, all the medical bullshit. He was only scared when she was out of his sight. I think he was stronger than me at the time, really. Now I wish I could make up for it, if that makes sense.”

  “It does,” Helen said.

  “Sean thinks he’s tough enough to deal with anything—I guess that’s how he got into this mess with Orne. He is tough, some ways. But he’s not hard; he’s not nearly as savvy as he pretends. If he’d come to me right off—”

  “Would you have blown up?”

  “Probably.” He shook his head, his smile a rueful twist. “But even if you can’t hold their hands, these kids, you’ve got to try.”

  Gus called from the bottom of the stairs: “You two all right?”

  Jeremy shot her a guilty look, like they were conspirators caught in a dangerous conversation. “Fine,” he called back. To Helen, he said, all action again, “I’ll get the lights. You go.”

  Though sorry to lose sight of the windows, Helen trotted down the stairs and out of the carriage house. Gus stood by his Volvo, passenger door open for her. She slid into the car fast. It was full dark, and full dark went darker still after the carriage house lights went out, including the
spots under the eaves that had illuminated Jeremy’s triptych.

  At the Litinskis’s house, Celeste had laid out a small feast: rye and French bread, cold cuts and potato salad, a bowl of peaches, a pitcher of iced tea. “Dinner’s ready,” Gus said. “And I am ready for it.”

  Helen seconded that sentiment. Between the excitement of Geldman’s and coming to Providence, she’d missed lunch. “It looks delicious,” she told Celeste.

  “Please, dig in.”

  “Where’s Sean?” Jeremy said.

  “Oh, he went to bed right after we ate.”

  “Went, or you sent him?”

  “Went.”

  Gus, Helen saw, had pulled out a chair for her. “Thanks,” she said. “But I’d like to wash up first.”

  “Of course,” Celeste said. “The bathroom’s off the kitchen.”

  Helen scrubbed her hands, then her face, then her hands again. A faint whiff of Servitor (everyone’s least favorite cologne) still clung to her. She sniffed her fingers and smelled only rose-scented soap. Was it on her clothes, then? If so, why hadn’t she noticed it during the car ride back?

  As she stepped out of the bathroom, the smell grew stronger. Jeremy must have brought in his samples to show Celeste. She looked around for the sandwich bags. What caught her eye instead, with a vengeance, was the back-door screen. It sagged open from eye level down. That couldn’t be a natural dilapidation in a house as neat as this one, and it suggested other torn screens.…

  Heart thudding, Helen walked to the door. The screen had been slit and forced inward. The smell came from grayish-green slime beaded into the mesh, and from drops on the floor that formed a broken line to the stairway.

  Sean had gone to bed. Bed was likely up those stairs.