Summoned

by Anne M. Pillsworth

  Good old tiger. It sheds its disguise and drops to all fours. Now it’s sleek and tawny, like Eddy, and like Eddy it clings to his right side, freaked straight through, yet holding its ground.

  Together they pace the shoreline. Ahead is the largest of the living crystal buildings. Inside this palace the courtiers are dancing, giant shadows that weave past irregular apertures in its walls. It’s not shoggoth-song they move to, but some interior riot of sound that sets crystal and air and earth vibrating.

  The tiger presses against his thigh. It growls. Sean grasps it by the scruff of the neck.

  The smooth, low voice speaks again. She can’t come with you.

  But—

  It’s not possible. Let her go.

  He has to obey the voice, doesn’t he? Sean breathes on the tiger, and his fingers sink through its hide as it thins to striped smoke. It cringes and coughs out a roar.

  He blows lung-bottom breath at it, and the tiger-smoke shreds to nothing. Eddy is gone. He is alone.

  There will be reward.

  Come, the voice says. I’m waiting.

  Outside Swan Point, Gus told Helen and Jeremy that O’Conaghan was coming to meet them. Though Helen would have been glad to wait for him, she didn’t blame Jeremy for insisting they move. Sean had been missing for more than two hours, Eddy for not much less.

  The iron gates of the cemetery were locked, so they left the cars outside and hiked in through an adjacent patch of woods. Helen had worried that her hypersensitive eyes would cripple her, but while the deeper dusk under the trees slowed Jeremy and Gus, she threaded the narrow paths without hesitation. Bishop’s #5 was still partially affecting her, minus the ghost-efts, which she didn’t miss one bit.

  When the woods gave way to a groomed necropolis, Jeremy took the lead. They struck a road that paralleled a stone-and-boulder wall. “The receiving tomb’s this way,” Jeremy said.

  Headlights stabbed the darkness at their heels. They ducked into a dense clump of cedars. A white sedan marked SWAN POINT SECURITY cruised by and made Helen flash on teenage drinking excursions to the big new cemetery outside Arkham. The Old Burying Ground in the city proper would have been more atmospheric, and it had no patrols. But they’d never gone there, because fear would have turned the beer sour in their mouths.

  That sour tang spread through her mouth as they broke cover and trotted deeper into a labyrinth of the new and ancient, the rational and grotesque. In her gut, hadn’t she always known the world was like this place? Now, courtesy of Bishop’s #5, she’d see the lurking monsters with no shadows to soften them, in terrible detail down to the tiniest scales. She noticed that Gus carried an unlit flashlight in his left hand. His right he kept tucked inside his jacket. A jacket in this heat? He had to be wearing it to hide his pistol, was probably resting his hand on the butt, in case the monsters came out to play.

  Abruptly their road plunged to an expanse of moon-spangled water. Running no longer required energy, but braking did. Helen’s backpack thumped on her spine. Her heart lurched as a winged figure rushed up on her left. An angel, but in stone, no help. She rocketed past it, onto the gravelly flat at the end of the road. Someone grabbed one of her pack straps—Jeremy—and kept her from pelting straight into the river. Gus pinwheeled to a halt beside them. They stood, panting, then froze into silence—Helen cutting a gasp in two—when a girl screamed nearby.

  Or was it near? It seemed muffled. Helen stared back up the road, but a lance of moonlight struck white out of the shadows to her left; potion-keen, she made out the façade of a marble tomb under the hillside.

  Another muffled scream. From inside the tomb.

  “Eddy,” Jeremy snarled.

  He sprinted, Gus a stride behind. They’d reached marble steps before a third scream tore the open air. A slim figure burst out of rhododendrons clustered at the far side of the tomb: Eddy, for sure, trailing blond hair and running like a deer up the nearly vertical hill. A second form burst from the bushes, loping on all fours. It shot a flat, burning glare at Jeremy and Gus, but it didn’t swerve from its pursuit.

  Eddy leaped a tree trunk and crashed down in a brushy hollow. The Servitor took the obstacle like a steeplechaser. Jeremy was over next. Gone. Gus turned, waving frantically at Helen with his lit flash. “Look for Sean!” he yelled.

  Then he climbed over the trunk and slid out of sight into the hollow.

  Alone, she clutched the straps of her pack as if they were ropes keeping her from plummeting down the face of a cliff. Inching closer to the tomb, she picked out muddy footprints on the worn steps. Boots and sneakers had climbed this way, and the webbed paws of an enormous, a Servitor-sized, toad.

  The door of the tomb was bolted shut. But Eddy hadn’t come out the door. She’d come out of the rhododendrons.

  Helen crossed the porch and jumped back to earth. She sidled between clutching branches and curved wall until her foot hit a metal grate. It had been yanked from the wall of the tomb, leaving a jagged square.

  The tomb exhaled rot like diseased breath, along with a slurred moaning. In his right mind, would Sean ever moan like that?

  Remember, the trick was to not fear her fear. Geldman and Cybele had armed her with that realization, and Marvell was coming, and to her heightened vision the odorous blackness wasn’t impenetrable. She bent and made out a niche-lined chamber and there, opposite the grate hole, the scuffed soles of Sean’s sneakers, with Sean in them, whole.

  Helen ducked into the tomb.

  A whole Sean in body, yes, but he was slumped inside the lowest of three coffin niches, his eyes fixed like a blind man’s. His lips twisted with strange sound, hisses and clicks and an eerie high whistle that raised every hair on her head. Did she hear words? If so, they were words in the mythical language of aliens so not mythical that the smell of this one choked her.

  As she approached Sean, the stench grew. Servitor saliva gleamed on his arm like a network of slug trails. There were smears of blood, too, though she couldn’t see any new wound.

  “Sean,” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  In response, he hissed alien syllables and snapped at her, a rabid dog, or an infuriated Servitor.

  Helen fell back from the boy. She didn’t need Geldman or Marvell to diagnose Sean’s condition; after all they’d been through, she and Jeremy had arrived too late. The Servitor had freed itself from Sean’s imperfect control, and what she was hearing was its voice, mangled by his human tongue. Did that make the possession final?

  If so, Eddy would die, Jeremy and Gus would die. Then the Servitor would return to feed on its summoner and on the idiot crouched in front of him, wringing the straps of her backpack until the buckles cut her palms.

  Her pack.

  Helen shrugged it off her shoulders and groped inside. Notes, pens, Marvell’s letter. Where was Patience Orne’s #11? She couldn’t have lost it. She hadn’t: Geldman’s cobalt bottle had slipped between the pages of a notebook. She pulled it out of the pack and dug at the wax seal with a fingernail. Why hadn’t she thought to pop the seal earlier, before she was standing in a tomb with an emergency on her shaking hands? She hadn’t thought one damn thing through—

  Her nail broke, but the wax yielded. She pulled the cork. Instantly the bracing smell of clean wind welled from the bottle. Wind? Did it even have a scent?

  Remembering Geldman’s tea, Helen held the mouth of the bottle under her nose. She inhaled, and her hands steadied. Just like that. Patience or Cybele, clean wind or flowering grass. Her mind was clear. She knew what to do. Geldman had told her.

  She took two long last steps toward Sean. As she pushed him upright in his niche, he growled and spit. She grabbed his jaw and forced his mouth open. With one hand left to administer the potion, she couldn’t do anything about his flailing arms, so before he could bat the bottle to the floor she waved it under his nostrils. One, two, three times, and the clean wind did its job. Sean’s arms dropped. He went limp, and she was able to pour potion into his mouth and lever
shut his jaws, praying he wouldn’t gag the stuff out. He didn’t. He swallowed. Seconds later, a convulsive spasm went through him.

  Helen scuttled back to cork the bottle and stow it in her pack. Sean’s staring eyes had closed. He rocked out of the coffin niche and dropped to his hands and knees, head hanging. For a few seconds the words he muttered remained unintelligible; then plain English crept in: “Stop it, help them!”

  Her eyes saw without light, but they couldn’t pierce whatever darkness the Servitor had poured into Sean’s mind. Helen crouched with nothing left for her to do but wait, and the waiting suffocated her more thoroughly than the tons-heavy air of the tomb.

  26

  Sean’s passage through the Servitor’s mind is the drift of a leaf to ground. Back in the three-sunned world, himself leaf light, Sean drifts toward the palace of living crystal. It thrusts a terrace over the shoggoth-sea, and the Black Man appears on the precariously tilted surface to watch his approach. They will talk at last. Sean will begin to learn.

  But wind rises in a torrent that sucks him up (no more than a leaf) and whirls him away from the palace. The Black Man spreads falcon wings and rides the wind after him.…

  His return to the Servitor’s mind was no leaf dance but a terrible caesarean birth, as abrupt as the stroke of the surgeon’s scalpel and torn by screams.

  The screams were Eddy’s.

  She was out of the tomb. It—they, Servitor and Sean—was out, too, bounding after her up an oblique slash in the face of the bluff, a path treacherous with deadfalls and the slithering layers of last year’s leaves. Yet Eddy in her blazing aura, aluminum bat gripped like a balance pole in front of her, was sure-footed prey and kept one leap ahead of it. Its own pursuers (Dad and Gus, from the shouts) were clumsier. One went down with a snapping of rotten boughs. The Servitor shot a rubber-necked glare at Dad, who didn’t stop for fallen Gus; instead, he pumped arms, pumped legs, as if he raced the nightmare memory of what he’d found after his last run through the woods.

  The Servitor savored Sean’s own memory of Hrothgar, along with its anticipation of shredding Eddy to similar bits.

  Near the bluff top, the path flung itself into a steep incline. Eddy pelted up it, with the Servitor—with them both—still a leap behind. But Sean knew the Servitor wanted to trail, wanted the hunt to end a little farther on, in the hollow that cemetery landscapers had tricked out with slate steps and masses of rhododendron, azalea, and mountain laurel. It was beautiful in early summer, a place for visitors to take a break from thinking about death, but even in bare midwinter it shouldn’t have witnessed Eddy screaming like that, as if death was exactly what she saw barreling at her.

  No no no! But yelling his psychic throat raw did no good. Drunk with Eddy’s scent, vast eardrums quivering to the pumping of her blood and heaving of her lungs, the Servitor ignored Sean.

  In the center of the hollow, a natural arena, Eddy wheeled and brandished her bat like a broadsword. The Servitor circled her on claw tips, spider quick. Eddy pivoted to keep her face to it, gasping defiance: “Oh no. No fucking way. No you don’t, asshole.”

  Eddy, the tiger. I can’t let us, you can’t make me watch it—

  The Servitor could do whatever the hell it wanted. It sprang, to a burst of pain for both of them as Eddy swung the bat into its shoulder. No deterrent, though—even as she cocked the bat for another swing, the welt swelled outward, healing. The Servitor blocked her second blow. Eddy swung a third time, and it seized the bat and hurled it, Eddy still attached, halfway across the hollow. She landed on her back and sprawled, still. The Servitor crouched to spring again.

  Something else sprang, heralded by a scent-blast of blood tantalizingly similar to Sean’s. The something, the someone, Dad, crashed down on the Servitor’s back and locked his arms around its neck. Like a sack of living jelly, it burgeoned against his choke hold. It bucked. It spun. At the kick Dad gave its hind legs, it heaved over backward—no collapse, though, because it meant to fall and to trap its attacker beneath it. Breath whooshed out of Dad, a gust of heat on the back of the Servitor’s head. It ground sharp-knobbed vertebrae into his chest until his grip on its neck loosened, until it could squirm around, bringing them belly to belly.

  Dad’s aura flared with the terror that Sean should never have brought on him. But Sean had no limbs to grapple the Servitor. He had no mouth to scream. He was nothing but mind, imprisoned, impotent.

  The Servitor’s mouth gaped— Sean felt its stretch and the gnash of its needle-teeth. He felt Dad’s hands grab its shoulders to hold it off. The Servitor churned its hind legs, shredding the mossy ground, trying to scrabble its raptor claws into play and slice Dad open. Like Hrothgar. One claw caught cloth, then skin, ripped downward. Dad yelled.

  Pain again, not Dad’s but the Servitor’s. Eddy (yes, tiger) was back up and flailing her bat, sinking aluminum into the Servitor’s gelatinous flesh. It keened with hatred and hunger, but Dad had clamped his legs around its hips to keep it out of evisceration mode, Dad would not let it have Eddy, and Eddy would not let it have Dad, and Sean yearned toward them both, still trapped.

  Dad’s arms started giving way to the Servitor’s lunges. Where were Gus, Helen? Where were the goddamn security guards? They’d shown up quick enough that time Sean and Phil had snuck in to see what hung around Lovecraft’s grave at night. No guards now, no Gus, no Helen, but even so, Sean wasn’t alone. The Black Man had defied the gravity of the three-sunned world to slip with Sean into the Servitor’s mind. He, too, was bodiless, yet Sean knew his chosen form, knew his falcon hover, his golden eyes, the tilt of his mouth corners into the mildest of smiles.

  “Eddy!” Dad shouted. “Get out of here! Get out!”

  Eddy stayed put. She sank the bat into the Servitor’s back, inches deep, and it whipped its head, spraying ropes of drool into Dad’s face. Sean watched his eyes close as the Servitor pressed closer to his throat. The forks of its tongue already lashed his skin, already tasted blood. Sean tasted it, too, God, he did, and the horror was so great that even bodiless, he thrashed.

  Then fingers clutched his jaw, fingers with nails long enough to dig in. They levered his mouth open, so he had to take the in-thrust of cool glass, had to choke on bitter sweetness like the sarsaparilla from Geldman’s but a thousand times more intense.…

  The Servitor tasting Dad …

  Fingers, levering Sean’s mouth shut, making him swallow …

  Knees and palms, his own, coming down on a gritty concrete floor. He had slipped into his body again, but he couldn’t stay there. He clamped his eyes shut and shot his mind back into the Servitor’s. He came of his own will this time, no prisoner. That made a difference. It made the thing hear him and stop its gnashing the moment before its needles tore into Dad: No you can’t. Gave you my blood. You can’t have his.

  It would have it. The summoner’s command wasn’t enough to stop it this close to the kill.

  No, the Black Man agreed. You’re not its master yet.

  Sean knew the beat of his wings. You stop it, then!

  Golden eyes narrowed. Mild smile remained the same.

  Stop it, help them! Want me to come to you? Help them.

  The Black Man spoke without haste, in syllables no human tongue could ever twist out of itself. They did the trick. The Servitor vaulted off Dad to land on the slate steps above the arena. Sean saw Eddy’s last swing miss, saw Dad sit.

  Then Sean saw nothing as heat scorched the Servitor like a branding iron stamped into its nape. As if uninterested in sharing their agony, the Black Man folded his falcon wings and stooped. In a second he was gone, probably a universe away. In another the Servitor spotted the wielder of the heat: a tall man on the lip of the hollow, casting black light from a thick wand-tube-rod in his hand. A fresh shaft lashed the Servitor’s face. It howled—Sean howled with it—then plunged into a thicket of mountain laurels.

  The rake and gouge of branches was nothing to the black light. The Servitor floundered through the bushes
until it emerged on the path from the river, nearly plowing into a limping Gus. He jerked up his pistol, but the Servitor had already abandoned the path for the sheer slope of the bluff. It slid out of control. Sean slid with it, scrabbling.…

  Scrabbling at the filthy floor of the receiving tomb, because that was where he ended up, that was where he was Sean and no one else, with only his own mind and senses. Between the natural mustiness of the tomb and the lingering reek of Servitor, smell was the sense working hardest for him. Or against him. Desperate for clean air, he crawled toward the only hint of it, a dim square of light.

  “Sean.”

  It was Helen’s voice this time, not Eddy’s. He made it to the square and crawled through it. Helen crawled out after him and helped him to the marble porch facing the river. He sucked down air that tasted bitter and sweet, like the stuff someone had forced him to swallow. “It was you? You gave me something?”

  “A potion,” Helen said. “From Mr. Geldman.”

  The potion that would strengthen his will. Helen had told him she was bringing it back from Arkham.

  She grabbed his arm. Why? Oh, he was kind of swaying. “Sean, listen. What’s happening? Where’s the Servitor?”

  The potion had worked, and so well that his souped-up will had popped him right out of the thing’s mind. That was great. That was bad. “I don’t know,” he whispered. His throat was too dry to manage more volume than that. “We’re not each other anymore. It possessed me, right, like it said in the Necronomicon?”