Summoned

by Anne M. Pillsworth

  “The floating things are called ghost-efts. Their niche seems to be interdimensional rifts. They’re always passing in and out of our plane—they’re as common as dust mites, only less harmful; I’ve never heard of anyone who was allergic to them.”

  “The other things? In the gates?”

  “They can’t get to our plane without powerful intervention from our side.”

  “Like Sean’s ritual?”

  “No, something much more difficult. Don’t worry. Sean won’t be summoning any of those beasts.”

  Helen smiled.

  “I do have to go now.”

  “All right. See you soon, Professor. Thank you.”

  The connection broke. For a few seconds, she kept the silent phone to her ear. Then she put it in her shirt pocket and swung her legs off the couch. Fresh pain jolted into her skull, not quite as horrific this time.

  Jeremy was still there. He’d been there the whole time. “O’Conaghan’s supposed to meet us at Cel’s.”

  “And take us to a hotel. Sounds like a plan.” Helen got to her feet and headed toward her desk, more or less steady. She had sunglasses somewhere. A scrabble through her drawers turned up everything but. A cell phone rang, Jeremy’s. “Gus,” she heard him say. “How’s it going?”

  Was O’Conaghan at the Litinski house already? Damn it. She’d probably left the sunglasses in her car, now at the garage.

  “What? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  The sudden tension in Jeremy’s voice made Helen almost slam her fingers in a drawer.

  “Well, when did he go?” Jeremy demanded. “What? Okay, we’re coming. Jesus.” A pause. “No, you stay there. He might come back. And, Gus, remember that Providence detective? We’ve heard from Marvell. He says O’Conaghan knows about Servitors, but I can’t go into it now. Ask O’Conaghan. He’s coming over to your house to be our bodyguard until Marvell flies in. Helen found the spell we need. Right.”

  He pocketed the phone and turned to her. “Sean’s gone. He left the shower upstairs running so Gus would think he was in it. After half an hour, and the water still running, Gus checked. No Sean. No Sean anywhere in the house. Nobody over at Eddy’s, either.”

  The shower-subterfuge ruled out an innocent walk, didn’t it? Helen straightened. No sunglasses? Too bad. Instead she grabbed a visor from the coatrack and jammed it on. “Let’s go, then,” she said.

  24

  All the way to Blackstone Boulevard, Sean walked submerged streets. Cars hurtled through the ghost aquascape like massive catfish; people wavered past like the drowned undead. Too quickly now the superimposed river, the Servitor’s input, was starting to obscure what was actually around him. Twice he bumbled into fireplugs. Once he stepped into traffic and an SUV catfish nearly splattered him across the weedy blacktop.

  He dashed across the boulevard, last of the car-gauntlets, to the gates of Swan Point Cemetery. Instantly the Servitor rose from the river bottom. With two equal surrounds in motion, Sean’s disorientation became unbearable. He sat on one of the boulders in the cemetery wall and closed his eyes, to see through the Servitor alone.

  It paddles to the shore. Draped in silver shadow, the riverbank is deserted, the smell of humans a distant titillation. Much closer now is the smell of the summoner. The Servitor must make a safe place on land, for the summoner can’t live underwater.

  It flops up the marble steps of the receiving tomb, tries the door, and finds it riveted shut. The leaded windows beside the door are too narrow for the summoner to squeeze through. Low in the façade are two iron grates a yard square, but these are too visible from the turnaround at the end of the road. Gnarled rhododendrons hug the curving tomb walls; the Servitor jostles through them to the place where marble facade turns to brick. Where the brick wall runs into the side of the bluff, the Servitor finds another ventilation grate.

  With a flex of its shoulders, it yanks the grate out of crumbling mortar to expose a bright square of night, dankly cool and redolent.

  Through the Servitor, Sean peered inside the receiving tomb. How many times had he and Eddy speculated about its contents? Good old practical Eddy had been right: The place was empty. No skeletons, not a bone. No disintegrated coffins, either, although there were three walls of coffin niches.

  The Servitor squeezed into the tomb and squatted, waiting.

  Now that the Servitor was still, its visual input stationary, Sean could walk again, and he did walk, down the main road of the cemetery. He passed gravestones and obelisks, flower beds and trees. He also passed down an endless corridor of coffin niches. Maybe this tomb overlay was too appropriate to cause disorientation, because before long he was able to run, and he did run, hunger driving him.

  The receiving tomb ran twenty feet into the hillside, twelve coffin niches left, twelve right, eight in the back wall. In the old days, thirty-two corpses could have wintered in comfort, waiting for a spring thaw to break up their silent party. Though the Servitor had hauled the grate back into place, leaving the slits in the ventilation chimneys the only source of light, Sean saw the tomb clearly. The thing was, eyes open or shut, he now saw only through the Servitor—its sensory input had overpowered his own. Dark was light. Heat had shape. The weird chromatics of life-auras flared off fungi and mildew, ants and spiders, fat-bodied moths. To a nose made Servitor-sensitive, decay steamed off the dripping walls. The stench should have driven Sean from the coffin niche in which he sat, but it didn’t bother him. Neither did the stench of the Servitor itself, or the way it crouched before him, its beard of tentacles clutching his left arm.

  The Servitor knew magic. It had slurred some kind of incantation over his arm, and a nipple—a witch’s teat—had sprouted from the inner fold of his elbow. In approved familiar fashion, the Servitor suckled blood from the teat. It didn’t seem to be taking a lot, but Sean’s blood was rich as cream to it, and their joined hungers diminished.

  As the Servitor fed on Sean, Sean fed on himself.

  He closed his eyes and sank deeper into the coffin niche. A new change came, soft, the bloom of the Servitor’s thought-bubbles into full amoebic life. They swarmed on Sean, engulfed him, dragged him from the surface of the Servitor’s senses down into the deeps of its mind.

  Three black suns rise into a sky of poison green, the largest bulging above half the horizon. Buildings jut from a shoreline of algae-slimed rock, crazy big buildings with impossible angles and curves. Maybe they aren’t buildings at all. Maybe they’re crystals, alive. Aware. The sea that laps the shore is definitely alive, because it evolves stalked eyes and mouths out of its tarry viscosity.

  It isn’t a water-sea. It’s a vast colony of shoggoths, a protoplasmic ocean. The buildings have a shoggoth-view, which must be a plus to a certain kind of real-estate investor, and why not? The permutations of the shoggoths are more varied than the roll and crash of waves, and the piping of temporary mouths is much more musical than gulls.

  Are they singing?

  A voice answers him from nowhere in particular, human, male, smooth and low: The shoggoths always sing.

  What do they sing about?

  About what they want. They always want. It never ceases with them.

  Isn’t that dangerous?

  It can be. But it does keep them singing.

  From far off over the sea of shoggoths comes the rasp of metal scraping across loose mortar. It’s not part of the shoggoths’ repertoire, because when Sean opens his eyes and drifts back into the receiving tomb the singing fades away and

  the grating persisted. A heavy thud followed, and a square of dark opened toward the front of the tomb, where the wall was nicheless. The Servitor released Sean and dropped to all fours. Its rage swamped him. Let it spring and he’d feed with it on blood and flesh not his own, on the one stupid enough to interrupt their communion.

  “Sean?”

  Eddy, calling from outside.

  Sean lurched to his feet. Dizziness hit, and he had to lean against the lip of the niche above his se
at.

  “Sean! Are you in there?”

  The Servitor inched forward. No, he willed.

  Yes.

  No, she’s my friend. You can’t hurt her.

  “Sean!”

  He rasped, “Eddy, don’t come in.”

  Of course she came. The dark square flushed with her aura as she ducked through and pushed herself upright with the aluminum bat she carried.

  The Servitor hissed but stayed beside Sean. He felt its rubbery hide under his palm—he’d put his hand on its head. Too bad it didn’t have a dog collar he could hang on to. Not that a collar would help. If the Servitor went for Eddy, it would carry him along as if he were as light as a tick.

  “Sean, I can’t see for shit. It’s in here, right? I can smell it.”

  Eddy’s courage shocked him. She knew the Servitor was in the tomb, and she’d still come inside. “It’s next to me,” he whispered. “But it’s not hurting me.”

  She lifted the bat waist high, close to her body. “God, Sean, what are you doing with it?”

  What did she think, they were making out? Let her—what they were doing was even more intimate. Sean flashed hot, then cold, like he might pass out. Had the Servitor taken that much blood?

  He slumped back into the lowest coffin niche.

  In what had to be total darkness to her, Eddy shuffled forward.

  Go back to the river.

  It will not.

  You have to.

  He’s not its master, for he never bound it.

  Eddy’s form was dark, her aura brilliant, the penumbra of an eclipsed sun. She was taut with life, and to the Servitor’s many-forked tongues her scent was sweet. This one was meat almost as rich as Sean’s blood.

  The Servitor tensed.

  Almost as rich, though, only almost. So long as Sean had a drop of blood left, the Servitor would prefer it.

  He thrust out his left arm to expose the seeping teat. At once the Servitor battened on to it and kneaded him like a kitten nursing. There was no pain, and it wasn’t so bad to feel protoplasmic thought wind around him. He

  isn’t afraid. Let him change

  “Sean! What are you doing?”

  Her shout slapped him awake. Say he was stranded in a blizzard and had to keep alert, had to keep moving, or else he’d freeze to death. He’d want Eddy to keep slapping him, wouldn’t he?

  He stared at the not quite blue and almost violet of her full-body halo. “I’ve got to feed it, or it’ll eat someone else.”

  Guided by his voice, Eddy shuffled toward him. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s drinking.”

  “Blood? Your blood?” Her foot struck Sean’s. She shifted the bat under one arm and groped for him. He felt her hands on his face, on his shoulders. From his shoulders they slid down his arms, and she couldn’t help but touch the Servitor, which reared back and shrilled a warning.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Don’t touch it. It’ll bite.” And it would bite with the shark-sized mouth in its head, because it stayed erect, rebattening on Sean with one of its palm-mouths.

  Eddy shrank away. She clutched the bat again. “You can’t stop it?”

  “I don’t know. No.” His eyelids weighed a ton each. It hurt to keep them up, so he could look at Eddy instead of the things the Servitor wanted to show him. He had to fight the seductive tug of its mental pseudopods; yielding loosened his grip on one reality and sucked him into another, and that couldn’t be right, could it? It would be easy. It would even be pleasant. But once you went fully under, would you ever resurface?

  Eddy stuttered, which she hadn’t done since, what, kindergarten? “S-s-sean. L-l-listen. Soon as me and Mom got back from class, your uncle came over. He was looking for you; he said you went off without telling anyone. I tried to text you; you didn’t answer. You don’t have your phone, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I figured. Then I’m like, where would you go? You’d go to the Servitor, because it was taking over, it could force you to go, right? I wanted to tell your uncle my theory, but this guy pulled up in a black Camry, and it had to be that cop that came around the other day, because your uncle obviously knew him and called him ‘Detective.’ They went in the house, and Mom wouldn’t let me go over, so I snuck out to look for you.”

  He let his eyelids fall; they were just too heavy. At once he drifted down to where the three black suns

  rise. The shoggoths are singing, and their songs are beautiful. Why hasn’t he known that before? He

  saw Eddy, through the Servitor’s eyes. It wanted her. What had that voice told him about the shoggoths, that they wanted without end? So did the Servitor; so

  do the things in the living crystal buildings. They are shadows barely glimpsed through the translucent walls, and they scream without sound but with a desire that tears him. He

  “Sean, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I’ll call your dad.”

  “No, it’ll hurt him if he comes. It’ll hurt you if you try to get help. Just talk. Keep talking. Don’t let me go.”

  Her voice rose to a stricken squeak. “God, talk about what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Don’t let me go.”

  Silence, but Eddy hunched down at his right side, opposite the Servitor, and she grabbed his hand. Hers was shaking big-time. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what it’s about. My story cloth I’m making. There’s this hunter in Cambodia. And he meets this tiger in the jungle. The tiger eats him and steals his clothes. I mean, obviously, it’s a folklore tiger, not a real one. It dresses up and goes to the village, pretending it’s the hunter.…”

  Her voice

  spins out like spider-silk, which is crazy strong, really, strong enough to cling to, no problem that the meaning of her words comes and goes. So long as he can hear her above the insidious singing of the shoggoths, he can keep one foot in his own world and not leave her alone with the Servitor, not sink, not drown himself.…

  25

  Jeremy sped through the traffic on Route 128 as if their mission would protect them from crashes and state troopers. Under her visor, Helen hid from both head-spearing sunlight and the sight of his stuntman maneuvers. She wasn’t too sanguine about divine intervention—the God of her upbringing seemed to take no interest in human heroics, and the Outer Gods, which seemed far more interactive, didn’t even pretend to be benevolent.

  As he and Helen neared the exit to I-95, Jeremy’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his windbreaker and handed it to her, thank God or gods. It was Celeste. “Where are you two?” she asked without preamble. “Is Jere all right?”

  “About to get off One Twenty-eight. Jeremy’s breaking all land-speed records; that’s why I’m answering. A second.” Helen tapped the phone to speaker mode and upped the volume, so Jeremy wouldn’t kill them trying to overhear the conversation. “Has Sean come back?”

  “Not yet. Eddy said he was still at our house around six, when she left for some class. He didn’t say anything to her about going out, and now she’s gone, too. Eddy, I mean. Rachel just called to ask if she was with us.”

  “You think Eddy’s looking for Sean?”

  “Maybe. And Detective O’Conaghan’s been here. He and Gus are out looking for the kids now.”

  “We’ll be there soon,” Jeremy said.

  “Take care, then.”

  Helen silently echoed Celeste’s sentiment as the Civic cut off a pickup and swerved onto the exit ramp to honks of outrage. Before she could tuck the phone into her pocket, it rang again. No speaker this time, not while Jeremy played chicken with eighteen-wheelers, trying to get to the far lane of the packed interstate. Helen pressed the phone to her ear, and someone whispered into it, frantic, unintelligible. “Hello?” Helen said. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Ms. Arkwright?” The whisper grew marginally louder. “It’s me, Eddy.”

  “Eddy?”

  “We’re in the tomb. Me and Sean.”
<
br />   “What—”

  “It’s right here, with us. The Servitor. It’s possessed Sean, I don’t know, it’s drinking his blood, and I’m trying to talk him back, but you’ve got to come, I think he’s losing it.”

  Tomb. “What tomb, Eddy?”

  “I can’t keep talking; it’s getting mad. The one by the river, Swan Point. Where they used to keep bodies in the winter. Shit—”

  Eddy cut off. The Civic jolted as Jeremy braked hard—listening to Helen’s end of the latest call, he’d practically ridden up the ass of the car in front of them. “Tell me,” he said, watching the road again, grim faced.

  “Eddy says she’s with Sean and the Servitor in some tomb. It’s feeding on Sean’s blood. It’s trying to possess him, she thinks. Swan Point, that’s what she said, a tomb where they kept bodies in the winter.”

  “The receiving tomb, I know it. Hit five.”

  “What?”

  “Five, Gus’s cell. Tell him to meet us at the entrance to Swan Point. And bring O’Conaghan with him.”

  Helen speed-dialed Gus and got through the call. The way Jeremy laid on the horn, floored the accelerator, jerked from lane to lane, she felt like she was on one of those obnoxious carnival rides that tried to make you lose your corndogs and cotton candy. “Gus will meet us at the cemetery. He’ll call O’Conaghan—they’re in separate cars. Damn. I’m even more scared for Eddy than I am for Sean. He’s still got some protection as summoner, but her—”

  “Yeah, what I was thinking.”

  Helen groped at her feet and found her backpack. She pulled it onto her lap and hugged it. The cobalt bottle was inside, Geldman’s gift, and the dismissing spell. But if Sean was possessed already—

  Shut the fuck up, Helen. She just held on, to the backpack, to the restraint strap across her chest. Maybe the Outer Gods were playing road angels for her and Jeremy. After all, the longer the good guys lived, the longer they could be toyed with.

  Eddy’s tiger walks on two legs, dressed in stolen hunters’ clothes. How it expects to pass for a man, with its striped face, its teeth and claws, Sean can’t make out. And how did it put on the clothes in the first place, and what shifts of skeletal structure let it walk upright? Okay, so it’s a folklore tiger, but Sean’s walking the shore of the shoggoth-sea again, and though they’re also folklore, the shoggoths look totally real. That means the tiger will have to be at least as convincing as them to keep Sean from drowning in the Servitor’s thought-stream.