The rise in Sean’s voice was slight, but it started Helen’s adrenaline flowing as effectively as a siren in the ear. She pulled out the cobalt bottle. “Take some more of this, Sean.”
Sean didn’t turn toward her. He shook his head. “Save it for the spell. So I can do it. Please.”
Helen subsided and tucked away the bottle. Sean was right, and God knew, he was strong, but the steel in him was stretching, and steel could only stretch so far. When it had reached its limit, a light touch, even a touch of comfort, could snap it.
Did Jeremy sense the same thing? He pulled back the arm he’d stretched toward Sean and locked both hands on the steering wheel. O’Conaghan’s Camry had stopped at a green light, waiting for them. Jeremy hit the gas, and both cars made it through before the red.
28
The Post Road entrance to the industrial park had an aluminum gate, chained and padlocked. Sean had been able to edge around it on his bike; a car trying that trick would slide into the drainage ditch. O’Conaghan got wire cutters out of his trunk and cut the lock. When their cars were through, he resecured the gate with a padlock of his own. They were lucky he’d brought the gear, or maybe it wasn’t luck. Probably Order of Alhazred members were always prepared to break into cult hideouts and ancient crypts. Sean was too scared right now to appreciate the coolness of it, but maybe a year from now he’d think tonight had rocked. That was, if they all survived it.
They parked in the lot by the river, where faint smears of chalk still marked his summoning site. “That pentagram’s what convinced me the animal killings might be Order business,” O’Conaghan told Helen. “I heard about it from a friend on the Warwick force. His theory was some kids had gotten their heads messed up by heavy metal.”
Which would have been a lot safer than a kid whose head was messed up by Redemption Orne. Sean stood at the broken apex of the pentagram and closed his eyes, so he could look through the Servitor’s without distraction. It had scaled the falls at the mouth of the Pawtuxet and climbed into the undertrussing of the Broad Street bridge. There it hunkered down, as if content to wait while he prepared.
“Sean.”
He opened his eyes. Helen stood next to him, holding out Patience Orne’s #11. Dad had a handful of pastels, O’Conaghan a length of string. They were ready. His turn. He took the blue bottle and sucked down every bittersweet drop. In seconds, the ghostly overlay of Servitor-sight was gone. His mind was all his own, and he had to use it fast, before he lost it again.
The moon had been dark the night of the summoning. Tonight it was full. Its brilliance bleached out the Summer Triangle, but according to the hidden notes Helen had read, you didn’t need a particular phase for the dismissing ritual. Besides, Sean welcomed the extra light. Between the moon and the head beams of O’Conaghan’s Camry, Sean had no problem inscribing a new circle. The banishing pentagram was inverted, which meant the angles of Earth and Fire had to point east and the angle of Spirit west, where Sean would stand. He crab-scuttled, drawing. Dad walked alongside, handing him fresh pastel sticks as he needed them. They weren’t as good for the job as sidewalk chalk—they broke easily, and the lines were thin. It wouldn’t matter. The important thing was the excitement the pentagram triggered in him. O’Conaghan and Helen, Dad and Celeste, they wouldn’t matter, either. He, Sean, would be alone with the gathering energy, the overflow from Azathoth the Source. He’d pull it in and then pour it out into the incantations Helen had taught him. He remembered every word: The Patience potion had made his mind clear to all horizons, north south east west, inside, out.
He straddled the downward point of Spirit and in the center of the pentagram drew the Elder Sign, a branch with five twigs, Hand of the Elder Ones who had known enough magic to control monsters worse than the Servitor. A tingling current crept upward from his fingertips. This was the right Sign. The tingle proved it.
He stood up.
“All set?” Helen said.
Celeste had ducked into the Camry, where she toggled the headlights from low beam to high as if practicing, then doused the lights altogether. Only the moon was left to gleam on Helen’s bat, the tines of Dad’s pitchfork, and the silver cap on Gus’s walking stick. O’Conaghan held the stick now, along with his flashlight.
Sean held nothing. The dismissing was much simpler than the summoning. No athame, no powders, just short incantations. As he brought his feet together in the angle of Spirit, lightning struck him again, without thunder, without pain, piercing him so that power could flow through him and from him, so that he knew he could do the ritual; of course he could—it was crazy he’d ever doubted it.
“All set,” he said.
“Is the Servitor coming?”
Helen couldn’t know. With the potion in him, could Sean?
He closed his eyes. Consciousness of the Servitor didn’t rush at him. But inside his circle, now the fearless Sean, he understood how to mentally grip the soul-thread that joined him to his familiar. It was like a supple umbilicus, spun out from his solar plexus into the night. To restore the numbed connection, he simply had to squeeze it.
He squeezed.
Black moon in the white sky and silver water rippling with black moonlight. The current tries to push the Servitor back over the falls, but the current is too weak to do that, too weak to slow its swim upstream.
Head back, eyes keen, Sean looked at a spread of stars undimmed by the full moon, in which the Summer Triangle lorded it over all the rest. “It’s coming up the river,” he said.
A wisp of double vision clouded his eyes, white river over the stars. Was the potion already starting to wear off? Seemed like it, but that was no reason to panic. In the angle of Spirit, Sean could rely instead on the thrum of power at his core and the answering thrum that vibrated through the soles of his sneakers from the Elder Sign.
The Servitor swims below the surface, only the ridged crown of its head cooled by air. It slithers over submerged branches.
The branches had to belong to the downed maple in the clearing where the Servitor had torn Hrothgar apart. The clearing was near the riverside lot, so it was almost time to pay the son of a bitch back for Hrothgar and for what it had tried to do to Eddy and Dad. Anger braided new force into the energies swelling Sean. Anger was good. With it, he was going to kick the Servitor right out of the world.
Sean squeezed the soul-thread again.
It is coming. It is here.
Fearless Sean as he was inside his magical circle, his heart faltered when he looked toward the river and saw its lumpish, lashing form push through the reeds to the shore. Bloated with his blood, it had grown taller than any man. A ghost-movie of himself and the others, paralyzed, played over its approach. Sean closed his eyes and didn’t open them again. The double vision was too confusing—better to see through the Servitor alone.
It sees the fitful flare of human auras, smells human breath and sweat and blood. Through the air against skin and the earth under paw, it feels the pulses of its opponents accelerate. Why should it care about their weapons? They are the ones afraid, not it, and so the Servitor slouches toward them without hurry, clicking its claws on the blacktop. True, the summoner is stronger within the pentagram, but along the soul-thread their minds come together like magnets of opposing polarities, and which mind must be the stronger in that meeting?
The meeting came on too fast. Sean fell back along the soul-thread, yielding even as he commanded: Come here, into the center!
The Servitor walks straight into the circle and crouches, its haunches obscuring the Elder Sign. Let the summoner cage it in space—it can still reach into his deepest sanctuary.
Eyes open, eyes closed, no difference. Suddenly all is black, and in the blackness he and the Servitor are together as they were in the tomb, speeding through a void that either of them might shape, only Sean doesn’t know how.…
“Sean. Say it. Say the spell.”
That voice is far outside the void, which thickens and drowns the voice. The void
is nothingness solidifying into nerve, coalescing into brain, the Servitor’s mind reaching up to envelop his and drag it down until Sean drops into green light in a three-sunned sky, under which the shoggoth-sea sings and the Black Man walks in his palace of living crystal, waiting.
29
In Eddy’s aluminum bat, Helen had inherited a weapon proven against the Servitor; clutching it as if ready to swing for the fences, she joined the others around the pentagram. O’Conaghan stood, by choice or apt chance, at the angle of Earth, Stability. Ditto the aptness of Jeremy at Water, Emotion and Intuition. Of the two angles left for Helen, Air (Intelligence and Art) pointed toward the river, the direction from which the Servitor would come, and so she was forced to park at Fire, Courage and Daring. A good joke, when what would have suited her better was an angle of Fear and Trembling. Fire should have been Marvell’s, but Marvell was still miles high over the Atlantic. As for Spirit, Sean’s angle, the ritual prescribed it. Maybe that certainty of place comforted him, or maybe his composure had come from the empty bottle in her backpack.
No, it wasn’t from the bottle. Sean had simply calmed down when he’d drunk the last of Patience Orne’s #11. A qualitative change hadn’t come until he’d formally entered his magical circle. In that one step, he’d gone from desperate determination to precocious assurance. The new Sean stood as poised as the statue of a Greek hero, his face bleached in the moonlight, his lips relaxed into a smile. The longer he stood like that, arrogantly unbudging, the more Helen wanted to shake him back to normal. From the way Jeremy shifted his American Gothic pitchfork, he shared her uneasiness concerning the new Sean.
The crickets singing in the woods fell silent, and the mosquitoes that had whined around her head disappeared. Something wicked their way came, but she felt the pricking of dread in her nape, not in her thumbs. Helen watched the black flow of the river, heard the plash of stealthy swimming, smelled a now-familiar stink.
The Servitor rose from the water a giant, grown a couple heads taller than O’Conaghan. A roaring charge would have been less unnerving than the way it ambled, nonchalant, toward its destruction. Could it be stupid enough to go willingly to the center of the pentagram, or was the new Sean so masterful it couldn’t resist his mute command? Either, neither, the Servitor crossed the angle of Air and entered the trap. Atop the Elder Sign, it squatted, foreclaws dangling from knees, furnace eyes banked as if to conserve their fire, as still as Sean, silent, another statue.
And now? There was only the incantation left to do, but the Sean-statue didn’t stir or speak.
Prompt him—that was her job. “Sean,” she said. “Say it. Say the spell.”
In the space between two breaths, the first breath deep, the second a harsh gasp, dangerously mature Sean turned kid again. His eyes widened as if he’d never seen the Servitor before, or as if he was seeing it one time too many. His hands opened and closed like panicked starfish. Then they fell to his sides, slack like his head, which lolled back so that his unblinking stare fixed the moon-faded stars.
“Sean,” Helen whispered. Jeremy shouted it: “Sean! Do you remember what to say?”
No response, unless the flare of fire in the Servitor’s eyes was one.
Helen watched horror lengthen Jeremy’s face, grimness harden O’Conaghan’s. She looked back at the miraculously upright rag doll that was neither old nor new Sean. Sean had vacated the premises, leaving no forwarding address, and, after the silence of their contest, the Servitor hissed its triumph.
“What the hell’s going on?”
O’Conaghan answered Jeremy: “Sean’s possessed again. We’ve got to disrupt the connection.”
“How?”
O’Conaghan flicked on his flashlight and pointed it at the Camry and Celeste. A signal: The Camry’s high beams lanced the magical circle, crossing the white spear of the flashlight. Caught in the dual thrusts, the Servitor hunched and snarled, but Sean didn’t blink, or murmur, or twitch.
Helen dashed a wrist over her tearing eyes. “It’s not enough!” she called to O’Conaghan.
He hefted Gus’s walking stick. “So we give it all we’ve got, understand? Together, on three.”
Attack it? The Servitor had put on a lot of bulk since it had effortlessly swatted aside her lion-tamer chair. Eddy’s bat seemed to have bulked up, too. Helen doubted she could lift it, much less swing.
“Ready?”
Jeremy obviously was. Lips peeled back in a snarl to match the Servitor’s he aimed his pitchfork dead at its belly. He must have been longing for this chance since he’d realized his son’s tormentor was a solid threat. Unfortunately, its solidity was fluid and its life beyond their reach, and there had to be something they could do besides wear themselves out on its protean flesh.
“One,” O’Conaghan said.
There was nothing else she could do. She’d used up Geldman’s gift and blown her scanty Mythos lore. Marvell had tried to prepare her. He was flying to them. But she wasn’t ready, and he would come too late.
“Two.”
Though Jeremy stepped toward the Servitor, he was no longer looking at it. He was staring at Sean, his snarl erased by a grimace of grief.
Yes, Helen had to hurl herself at the Servitor. But Jeremy—
“Three,” O’Conaghan said, at the same moment Helen yelled, “Wait!”
The two men froze, their faces thrown into grotesque chiaroscuro by the glare of high beams and flash. “Jeremy,” she said. “You’ve got to talk Sean back, like Eddy was trying to do.”
“That didn’t work!”
“You’re his father. Call him back, and we—we’ll go for the Servitor.”
Before O’Conaghan could nod agreement, Jeremy had dropped the pitchfork and run to Sean.
Helen lifted the weighty bat. She from Fire, O’Conaghan from Earth, they moved in on the Servitor, which reared to full height to meet them.
The three black suns float over the palace, suffusing it with strange radiance. Fundamentally, it’s a vast crystal pyramid budding off smaller crystals: blocks, and more pyramids, and weirder units like many-faced gamer dice, all of them skewed as if by extension into planes that Sean can’t fully perceive. In the palace, in everything here, there are tantalizing hints of more.
He runs along the obsidian shore. Enormous shoggoth-waves arch over his head without breaking. Pseudopod wavelets lap his feet. He should be afraid, but he isn’t. He should be fighting to burst the bubble of Servitor-will that keeps him in this alien place, but he can’t remember why. To dismiss the Servitor? To be free of it and its Master? Now that his struggle’s done, he realizes that the freedom to plod through a normal life is nothing to an invitation to the palace. The shoggoths are no threat. They’re an honor guard—their song tells him so, direct to his nerves.
He reaches the steps to the projecting terrace, each a yard high, steps for titans. No problem—he has little weight here, and he bounds up, eager. The terrace shivers. Then, tenderly, it folds around his feet and legs, body and head, and delivers him to the palace through an inward-spiraling chute, like a reverse birth.
They have gone, the shadows that were dancing the first time Sean saw the palace. He’s alone in their ballroom, an echoing emptiness with walls and ceiling too far off to see in the dim violet light seeping out of the floor. It’s glass, the floor, or colorless crystal, or unmelting ice, he can’t tell which. Through the smooth transparency, he can see what emits the light: spiky, prismatic spheres like diatoms puffed to the size of basketballs. The diatoms are aware of him, too. They swarm to the place where he stands until they pack themselves into an unbroken carpet of bioluminescence. Their concentrated glow is like a spotlight under his feet; Sean flinches, expecting a burn, but the glow carries no heat.
With the diatoms beneath him, the rest of the ballroom is impenetrable shadow. Far off, a foot falls on the glassy floor. Spotlighted for examination, encircled by the dark, Sean can only wait for whatever approaches, and that he can only wait is fair, right? The
Black Man has waited a long time for him.
Diatoms stream from Sean to make a walkway for their Master. His sandaled feet are the first Sean sees of him. Next comes the white linen hem of his robe, next the fall of its pleats from an enameled harness, the swing of bare arms, the sheen of bare chest. Last to emerge from the shadows are the austere planes of a narrow face and the sleek gold of one of those tall Egyptian crowns. The man isn’t dark skinned like an African. He’s the impossible gleaming black of onyx. He’s the guy from Helen’s window, for sure, and the falcon-winged Angel of the Summoning, and the golden-eyed pursuer who saved Dad and Eddy in the cemetery hollow.
The Black Man steps into the spotlight and speaks in the smooth, low, absolutely reasonable voice that Sean remembers from his first foray into the three-sunned world: I know you, Sean. Do you know me?
I think so.
Name me.
Though names have power, he has to say it: Nyarlathotep.
That’s one of my names. What do you want from me?
The question throws Sean. He gives the first answer that comes to him, which should be true yet isn’t: Nothing. I don’t even want what you’ve already sent.
The Black Man’s lips twist, wringing the softness from his smile. You asked for the Servitor, Sean. You even gave your blood for it.
I didn’t know any better.
You did know. In the magical circle, you believed, you desired, or I wouldn’t have given.
He wanted the Servitor. Is that the truth he’s been running from? There may be a worse truth, though, and the worse truth is
You want more, Sean.
Under the Black Man’s gentle-again smile, Sean realizes the ugly futility of lying to him. Yes, he says, and then he smiles, too.
Though the Elder Sign confined the Servitor to the center of the pentagram, it didn’t much hamper it. For one thing, Helen and O’Conaghan had to keep carrying the fight to it. For another, it remained elastically agile. O’Conaghan was agile, too, despite his height. He laid into the Servitor with walking stick and flashlight and parried its claws so skillfully Helen wondered whether the Providence police trained for staff fighting, and if she had time to wonder that, she wasn’t doing her share of the fighting. Her climb up the back stairs had been a fluke, not courage but ignorance. Enlightened now, afraid of her fear, everything in her screamed, Run.
Summoned Page 27
