by Brian Harmon
Somehow, he made the turn without tripping himself and falling on his face, but the creature caught hold of his tee shirt and yanked him off his feet. In the space of a single, frantic heartbeat, he found himself airborne, hurled bodily through the air, his arms and legs flailing.
By some miracle, he didn’t bash his brains out on one of the dozens of granite headstones. He landed only on soft grass, but even that was brutal. He bounced once, and then skidded to a stop, his body racked with pain, his clothes savagely grass-stained.
He knew he had no time to lay there, waiting for the pain to subside, and yet, he couldn’t quite make his body move. He rolled onto his belly in a strange state of slow motion, and struggled to rise to his hands and feet.
He saw it coming from the corner of his eye, a great, hulking form. Having already demonstrated its impressive strength, he felt maddeningly sure that the thing was going to seize him in its massive hands and crush the life out of him. He could almost hear the sounds of his bones splintering inside him, the shards shredding his organs as they ground together.
In situations like these, his vivid imagination was rarely his friend. And yet, the abject terror of that thought was enough to jumpstart his body back to full speed and he began to simultaneously crawl forward and stagger to his feet.
But the thing grabbed his foot before he could fully stand and he was dragged backward through the grass and then lifted into the air.
Hanging there, upside down, the blood rushing to his head, he knew he was only seconds from a nasty demise. He had to think and he had to think fast.
His eyes washed over the creature. It was nasty, its skin blotchy and filthy, bloated and slimy with sweat, with that foul, black smoke pouring from the wounds the witches had left in its flesh. And the disgusting thing was naked, too. His racing mind flitted over the idea of reaching under the thing’s fat, sagging belly to find out if it had any genitals to damage, but a better and marginally less traumatizing idea struck him as his darting gaze fixed on the smoking hole Cierra’s spell left in the beast’s belly.
Grimacing at what he was about to do—a task only slightly less nauseating than grabbing the monster’s foul scrotum—he reached out and plunged his hand deep into the wound.
It was hot and greasy-feeling, and quickly made his belly flop, but it definitely did something. The beast let out a fearsome howl and gave him a violent shake.
Eric held on for dear life, forcing his fist even deeper into the monster and squeezing…something…
Oh dear lord!
He’d never vomited upside down before. This was going to be unspeakably unpleasant.
The monster pulled at him, trying to dislodge him from its body, and Eric barely managed to hold on.
The beast roared.
Eric roared right back at it, cursing the filthy thing.
Suddenly, it seized his other leg. All at once, his feet were moving in opposite directions. Apparently, if he wasn’t going to let go, the monster was just going to tear him in half.
Eric had no doubt that this was going to hurt like hell.
He felt the muscles in his groin stretch. One of his hips popped. Pain surged down both thighs.
Then he felt that warm breeze pass over him again.
The monster let go.
He fell.
Something in his fist gave a wet pop as his hand was dragged out of the thing’s filthy innards by his own falling weight.
He landed hard on his side, knocking the wind out of him.
All he wanted to do was lie there in the cool grass and wait for the pain and the sickness to go away, but fear kept him moving. Another five seconds and he would have performed the ultimate split. Next time, he wouldn’t get away.
He rose to his hands and knees, gasping for breath, and heaved as the hot lump in his belly gave another flop.
Tears streaming from his eyes, he looked up at the gravestone directly in front of him. Jackson Lippens, the moonlight revealed.
Eric forced himself to rise to his feet.
He had no idea who Jackson Lippens was. The man had died before Eric had graduated high school and was buried in a town he’d never even heard of before tonight. He was as much a stranger as anybody on the planet. But he would not vomit on someone’s grave. That was just wrong.
An awful, gurgling howl rose from behind him and he turned to see the monster staggering around, swinging its massive fists.
Its hideous face was now split wide open, its ghastly features wiped virtually away by a huge, smoking gash. Foul, steaming fluids oozed out.
Another of Holly’s vicious spells had struck it, this time with deadlier aim.
And yet the monster continued to thrash around! Even blind, its huge hands slashed at the air, still searching for its prey. Each time it pumped its powerful arms, a gory spray of foul, smoking bile erupted from the hole in its belly.
Eric had to redouble his efforts to keep from barfing on the late Mr. Lippens.
Someone called out to him.
He turned to find Holly looking back at him from several rows over. She was kneeling in the grass, clutching the side of a wide headstone as if too weak to stand.
Recalling what Cierra told him about her needing to recharge, he felt a renewed surge of energy at the thought that she had over-exerted herself. He ran to her and helped her up, careful not to touch her with his soiled hand.
“Come on,” she panted. “We have to hurry.”
The monster’s ears must have still remained intact, because it turned and rushed toward them. But it didn’t make it far. As they looked on, it tripped over a headstone and fell with a thud onto the ground.
As quickly as they could go, the two of them made their way back to the driveway, where Cierra was waiting behind the wheel of the minivan.
“What the hell were you doing out there?” she demanded as they climbed into the side door and collapsed onto the seat.
“Just screwing around,” replied Eric. “Can we please get the hell out of here?”
At the very least, the police were likely to be showing up soon. Even if Rob hadn’t raised an alarm by now, they’d likely made more than enough noise to concern the neighbors.
Cierra pulled out of the driveway and turned onto the street.
“And can we stop somewhere so I can wash my hands?” asked Eric, looking down at his gory hand. Black smoke was pouring off of it. He couldn’t seem to get the awful feel of the thing’s greasy guts out of his head.
The monster lurched out in front of them.
Cierra screamed and jerked the wheel.
The van swerved.
Holly let out a loud yip of a cry and Eric cursed as the van clipped the creature with a loud thump that reverberated throughout the vehicle.
As Cierra sped away, he turned and looked out the back window in time to see the creature collapse onto the side of the road.
He very much hoped that was the last he’d seen of that thing.
Chapter Eighteen
Delphinium listened to Eric’s description over the phone and then told him with grim certainty that what he’d just encountered sounded like an ogre.
“An ogre?” said Eric. “What, like Shrek?”
“Nothing quite so lovable,” she replied. “It’s not so different from an imp, really. It’s summoned by magic, controlled by the summoner and generally unstoppable in its determination to kill.”
“That last part definitely seemed true.”
“Is everyone all right?”
“We’re fine.”
“This is really bad,” Delphinium said.
“You’re telling me. You didn’t have your hand in its giblets.”
“Conjuring all those imps should have been nearly impossible. Conjuring an ogre…”
“Let me guess: Impossible-er.”
“For lack of a better word, I suppose.”
“What does it mean? Is this ‘magic man’ some kind of super wizard or something?”
“I don’
t know. But his powers are astounding.”
“Are they? How do you know so much about imps and ogres, anyway? How do you know they’re so hard to conjure? It doesn’t seem like it can be that hard, considering I just keep running into these things.”
“Grandpa told us,” said Holly, who’d been listening to his side of the conversation from the seat next to him. “He said there used to be very powerful magic users in the world, a long time ago, they could summon these things and use them for their own purposes.”
“Sounds like a fairy tale to me,” said Eric.
“It does,” agreed Delphinium. “And they might be. The history of such things is long lost. What little remains of them might have only survived as fairy tales, legends and myth.”
“Are you sure Grandpa wasn’t just watching too many movies?”
“Grandpa wasn’t crazy!” snapped Holly.
“Relax,” said Cierra. “He didn’t know him.” She didn’t look back at them. She kept her eyes on the road and her hands firmly on the wheel, ready to react in case something large and ugly lurched onto the highway in front of her. “Hell, I’ve wondered about it myself more than once. I mean, where did he get all his information? He never told us very much about who he was before he met Del. We know he was real because we all saw him do things, but we don’t know for certain that everything he told us was absolutely true.”
“That’s right,” said Delphinium. “Even I thought he exaggerated things. Above all, he was a father to us and he had to keep us safe.”
Eric nodded. “I’m just saying, maybe he did exaggerate about how hard it is to conjure these things. Or maybe he just didn’t know any different himself.”
“I loved him very much,” said Delphinium, “but I’m not so blinded by that love that I’m not prepared to accept that he could have been wrong about things.”
“That’s good,” said Eric. “It’s all I was asking.”
“Smartly so,” she told him. “And I’ll admit it, I don’t know. Grandpa told me he couldn’t do it, that it was way beyond his abilities…but there’s always that chance that he simply didn’t have that particular knowledge. Or even that he was lying.”
Eric looked down at his hand again. It was perfectly clean, except under his fingernails where he’d dug his fingers into the earth in a futile attempt to escape the monster’s grip. The ogre’s blood and bile had evaporated into that foul smoke and vanished completely. Yet it still felt soiled. He wasn’t sure he’d ever feel clean again.
Poppy had said back at the shelter that the imps were vanishing from this plane of existence. In death, all of these things apparently ceased to exist here, even the blood they left behind. But did they go somewhere else?
In the past, he’d encountered all sorts of monsters, one of which was a fearsome-looking thing that its creator had referred to as a “projection.” It had turned out to be mostly harmless, since the slightest impact tended to burst it like a water balloon. Instead of smoke, those things broke into a thick, black fluid, resembling used motor oil, which then evaporated completely away within seconds. One could practically miss the whole process just by blinking. These things took much longer to vanish, although still only a few minutes at most. These were apparently conjured by magic. The man who created the projections seemed to create them out of his own mind.
Were they essentially the same?
“Fortunately,” continued Delphinium, “these things seem to be easier to kill than I’d originally thought, too.”
“I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘easy,’” said Eric. “The imps are fast. They’re also a lot stronger than they look. And that ogre almost ripped me in half.”
“Yes, but you can kill them. Holly and Cierra’s spells can injure them.”
Eric nodded. “That’s definitely true. More so on the imps, though. They aren’t so tough.” He recalled the one he strangled to death in the motel parking lot and how it had actually appeared to be afraid after Holly cut down its friend.
“Grandpa said the ogre is all blind rage. Once it begins attacking, it doesn’t stop no matter how much abuse it takes. Not until it’s dead.”
“He seemed to be right about that.”
“Seems so,” agreed Delphinium.
“Okay, so we’ve got imps by the dozen and now we’ve got ogres. We’re in serious trouble if those start coming in packs.”
“It’s concerning,” she agreed.
“But at least I know what we’re up against. What concerns me is what else we’re likely to see. What other horrors did Grandpa describe to you? Goblins? Pixies? Gargoyles? Tell me what to expect so I’m at least a little more prepared next time.”
“Grandpa told us a lot of stories about a lot of amazing things, but as far as things that can be conjured… I’m not sure. I think those are the only ones. But there were other things he sometimes talked about, things that were out there, hidden. He talked about spirits occasionally.”
There was something that didn’t surprise him. Eric had run into a few of those himself.
“He mentioned gnomes a time or two.”
“Those stupid little statues people like to put in their gardens?”
“Again, nothing so charming. What else…?”
“Not clowns, I hope. Because if this guy starts summoning clowns, I’m going home.”
“I love clowns,” said Holly.
“They’re creepy,” insisted Eric.
“Seconded,” said Cierra.
Holly shook her head as if they were both being ridiculous.
“No clowns,” promised Delphinium. “The only other creature I remember him ever mentioning is…well…dragons.”
Eric felt stunned. “Dragons? Seriously?”
Cierra looked back over her shoulder at Holly, her eyes wide with surprise. “Did he just say ‘dragons?’”
“He might not have been serious,” Delphinium quickly added. “He also tried to convince me once that he’d trapped an incubus in one of the kitchen cabinets. He just wanted me to stay out of his snack cakes.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“He did love his Fudge Rounds.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“I think you should just be prepared for anything. For all we know, these things aren’t imps and ogres at all. They could just be some kind of physical manifestation that happen to resemble their mythical counterpart.”
“A more resilient kind of projection, maybe,” agreed Eric, returning to his train of thought from a moment ago.
“A what?”
“Nothing. Long story. We’ll be careful. And we’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“Good. We’ll be waiting.”
Eric disconnected the phone, but didn’t put it back in his pocket. He stared at the screen instead.
Isabelle texted him an answer to his question without waiting for him to speak it, as he knew she would.
IT WAS JUST LIKE THE IMPS. AS FAR AS I COULD TELL, IT WASN’T EVEN THERE
“I definitely wasn’t imagining it.”
I KNOW. I ALSO CAN’T FEEL REGULAR PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE AROUND, BUT I KNOW YOU’RE NOT IMAGINING THEM
‘That’s good.”
I JUST CAN’T GET ANY KIND OF READ OFF THEM
“And the magic man? Did you feel him back there?”
I DIDN’T. HE MUST BE ABLE TO SEND HIS GOONS AHEAD OF HIM WHEN HE CAN’T MAKE IT THERE ON TIME
“Maybe,” agreed Eric. “There also wasn’t a fire this time.”
YOU’RE RIGHT
But he couldn’t stop thinking about how the magic man had stood there in the second floor window of the Wordsley House as they drove away, just watching them go.
YOU THINK HE’S LETTING YOU GO INTENTIONALLY?
“I don’t know. Something just doesn’t make sense.”
“Who are you talking to?” asked Cierra, eyeing him in the rearview.
“He’s talking to Isabelle,” Holly told her.
“Who the hell is Isabelle?”
“She’s the little girl inside Eric’s head.”
Cierra stared at her for a second, then returned her eyes to the road again. “Oh. The little girl inside his head. Because that’s not fucking crazy or anything…”
HI CIERRA
“Isabelle says hi,” Eric told her.
“Oh good. Now she’s talking to me, too.”
Chapter Nineteen
There were times when Eric wondered if he hadn’t simply gone stark raving mad one day and all the insane things that kept happening to him were all nothing more than fantasies inside his head as he sat in some bleak room somewhere, bound snug in a straightjacket, drooling and muttering to himself.
Oddly enough, the rest of his life was perfectly mundane. He went to work in the mornings, ate dinner with his wife in the evenings and read a few chapters from a book every night before he went to sleep. He was no more awesome than the average high school English teacher, which he thought probably averaged out to not very awesome at all. Nor did he even care to be awesome. He was happy with his life just the way it was.
And yet for the third time in less than a year, he was living the life of a character in a book far stranger than any he typically cared to read, fighting monsters, risking his life, and all for reasons he still struggled to understand.
Why him? He wasn’t particularly talented, except in his knowledge of literature and his graduate-level writing skills. He wasn’t a soldier or a grizzled cop. He wasn’t trained in hand-to-hand combat. He wasn’t even all that smart. He was just an ordinary guy with an ordinary job. He wasn’t even still in his twenties. Why the universe chose him to deal with this insane nonsense was beyond him.
But here he was, stepping out of the minivan to converse with a coven of witches after narrowly escaping being dismembered by a pissed-off ogre.
Delphinium met them at the door with a warm hug for Cierra.
Then her eyes fell on Eric and she turned to face him. “Thank you so much!” she said, taking his hand in hers. “You really are the hero my spell told me you were.”
“I’m still not so sure,” Eric told her. “But I’m trying.”
