Spellbent

by Lucy A. Snyder

  “You can be sorry all you want; you’re still gonna dig that hole as deep as I tell you.”

  Corvus held up his blistered, bleeding hands. “For God’s sake, at least let me have some gloves!”

  “You’ll get gloves when I hear that handle grinding on bone. Not before.”

  I moved to the next window. Here the pit was finished, about six feet in diameter, twelve feet deep, and lined with fieldstones. I recognized it as the same pit I’d used to enter the hell. Corvus and Siobhan stood naked in the pit, staring up at Lake, who stood at the edge with a dark-haired baby in his arms. The baby looked healthy and well cared for, and didn’t seem aware of the peril his parents were in.

  “I wanna see you two fuck. Now,” Lake ordered, his voice low and even.

  “This is crazy.” Corvus was much thinner than he’d been before, his hipbones sticking out sharply, his arms and back scarred with fresh cuts.

  “Now, studmuffin. Your boy Cooper here needs a little brother to play with. Don’t oo, oo little bastard oo,” Lake cooed to the baby.

  “Honey, please.” Siobhan looked as if she’d been crying so much she’d run out of tears. “I’m sorry my friends came looking for me; I sent them away, just like you asked. They don’t suspect anything, and they won’t come here again.”

  Lake seemed to not even hear her. “I better see some baby-making down there real-soon, or lil’ Cooper’s going straight out the attic window onto the driveway. Think he’ll live? Think your boy can learn to fly all on his own?” Lake began to bounce the baby in his arms, singing “The window, the window, the third-story window! High-low, low-high, throw him Out the window!”

  Shuddering, I moved on. At the next window, a toddler in a diaper was playing with wooden blocks on the concrete floor in another part of the basement. A large Raggedy Andy doll lay near him. The floor had been chalked with complex signs and sigils; I recognized some of them from Cooper’s tattoos.

  Nearby, Lake knelt beside Cooper, who looked to be about three years old. The man handed Cooper a sharp stiletto blade.

  “Now, be careful, don’t cut yourself. Do you remember those words I taught you?” Lake asked.

  “Uh-huh.” Cooper turned the knife over in his hands, fascinated.

  “And what are you going to do while you say those words?”

  “Cut the doll’s neck and belly,” Cooper replied obediently. “And not myself.”

  “Very good!” Lake exclaimed, as if all this was a delightful game. “You’re such a good boy, and your big brother Benny will be so pleased that you’re practicing to help him be such a big man someday.”

  “How I make him big man?”

  “Blue has power; he was born with it, like you. But he doesn’t deserve it, so after practice today I’m going to put him down for a nice long nap so he doesn’t get any bigger than he is now. And someday, when you’re bigger—but not too big—and when Benny’s old enough to be a man, we’ll do all this for real. And the words you say will give you Blue’s power when you cut his neck. And then your job is to give the power to Benny. He can’t know what we’re up to—it has to be a surprise present. And then all that power you’ve saved up will help make him the biggest man in the whole wide world, and he won’t have had to hurt his soul to do it.”

  “Will he be giant big?”

  “Giant big, for sure!” Lake stood up and went over to a worktable on which a polished music box sat. He lifted the lid, and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” began to chime through the basement.

  “Benny fav’rite song!” Cooper hopped up and down, excited.

  “Yes it is! Now, go get Raggedy Andy and show me what a good little brother you are. .

  I stepped away from the window. Jesus H. Christ. Lake had hatched a plan to turn Cooper into some kind of living magic battery, training him to perform black magic death rituals to absorb his younger brothers’ magical powers. What kind of twisted freak would think up something like that?

  I went to the next window.

  Siobhan was weeping in the corner of one of the upstairs bedrooms, wailing “Oh baby Blue…“

  Lake came in with little Blue, now locked in an enchanted sleep, as still and beautiful as a china doll. “Stop your crying, woman, he’s not hurt, he’s just asleep. I’d never let anything bad happen to the little guy until it’s time to kill him!”

  I flinched and moved along.

  Corvus was in the bottom of the pit, staring up at Lake, his eyes red from weeping.

  “You crazy fuck,” Corvus sobbed.

  “Can’t have you trying to run away again.” Lake impassively threw down a hacksaw and two lengths of rubber hose. “I want those legs off above the knee. And trust me, you don’t want me to come down there and do it myself.”

  I fled the window and went to the next.

  Lake led his nearly catatonic wife into a bathroom and pulled off her filthy dress. Her emaciated body was covered in sores.

  “Hate to have to do things this way,” he told her cheerfully, “but I don’t have much choice now that Corvus up and died on us, do I? There’s got to be a seventh son, or the spell won’t work. So I’ve got to do my husbandly duty for a change.”

  I moved on again.

  Cooper was six or seven years old, sobbing into his pillow. He lay on a single bed inside an eight-by eight-foot chain-link dog pen in the corner of the basement. His cinder-block walls were bare.

  “It’s not right; I don’t want to hurt them,” the boy wept.

  “You’ll do as I tell you, or I’ll have to kill your mother,” Lake replied, standing somewhere in the shadows beyond the boy’s locked pen door. “And you don’t want that, do you?”

  “N-no.”

  “It’s bad enough I had to put you in here to keep you from running off.” Lake stepped into the light, shaking his head. “Like father, like son, I guess.”

  “I see him at night. My father. He’s mad about what you want me to do to my brothers.”

  “Well, of course he is, dumb-ass!”

  “Can’t we bury him proper? He don’t like the freezer.”

  “I don’t care what he likes or doesn’t like.” Lake was finally sounding angry, and I could feel Cooper’s fear intensify. “Shut up and do as you’re told. All this will be over soon.”

  This scene, unlike the others, did not go black; it simply looped, an unending scene of misery for the boy. After a few minutes of watching, feeling profoundly sad for the child and more and more furious he’d been put to such a monstrous task, I moved on to the final window.

  Cooper, just a bit older, was on the sacrifice floor. He was kneeling, staring down at the body of a baby who looked to be about nine months old. A sword-and-shield pendant—the one the Warlock had given me—was almost unrecognizable under the baby’s blood. The old music box tinkled the hateful Christmas carol. Lake stood nearby, arms crossed over his chest, looking satisfied. Siobhan lay dead at his feet; a short distance away four infant brothers lay still and beautiful in their enchanted sleep.

  Cooper’s eyes filled with tears, his jaw working wordlessly. Something was building inside him, something dark and far too strong for such a little body to hold.

  “Good work,” said Lake, who apparently couldn’t sense the growing danger I felt. “One down, four to go. Benny will be home tomorrow, and you’ll never have to do this again. When he gets here, you attack me like I told you, and Benny will save me. He’ll have to kill you to do it, but by now you’re okay with that, aren’t you, boy? The dead don’t have bad dreams.

  “And my son will be a big, brave hero doing good by saving his loving daddy from his crazy half brother, so he’ll inherit all the power you’ve saved for him without any of the ghosts. He’ll get the best birthday present a father could ever give a son.”

  Cooper dropped the knife, threw his head back, and howled. Lake clamped his hands over his ears and fell to his knees. A hot rose bloomed in Cooper’s chest, exploded outward with a storm force that blew the boards off
the floor above them. The blast threw Lake into the cinder-block wall; he fell in a broken heap onto the concrete.

  When the dust cleared, Cooper touched his little brother’s slashed neck, and the wound sealed. The baby’s eyes fluttered open. Looking stunned, Cooper carefully lifted him to his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Cooper whispered to him, awkwardly patting his back. “I didn’t mean it, I never wanted to hurt you, I’ll take good care of you always like Momma told me to.. .“

  The boy carried the baby up the smoking stairs toward the bright light of the open front door.

  A living shadow seeped out of the walls, touched the bodies of Lake and Siobhan and the four sleeping children, then drew them all into its darkness.

  The windows went black, all but the loop of young Cooper weeping in his bedroom. I went back to that window and blinked through several gemviews.

  In one, Cooper was an adult curled on the tiny bed, holding his head in his hands and shivering.

  I was elated. Cooper was really in there, and it looked like he was still alive. I banged on the glass with the palm of my hand.

  “Cooper! It’s me, Jessie… get up! I’m here for you!”

  He didn’t seem to hear me, or if he did, he was too far gone to respond.

  I beat the window with the pommel of my sword, hoping I could shatter the glass. It wouldn’t even crack. “Cooper, snap out of it! We’ve got to get out of here!”

  The hallway shuddered like a living thing. The bare bulbs flicked out for a moment, and when they came back on the ceiling was impossibly high, the candles distant stars, and a huge oak door that looked like the entrance to a giant’s castle had sprung up where the stairway had been.

  The door swung open, and King Lake stepped inside, monstrous and dark in leather armor and sable robes. He was twice my height, at least, as big to me as he’d surely seemed to toddler Blue. He carried an executioner’s ax, the rust-mottled head almost as big as my shield.

  “My hospitality not good enough for you?” Lake rumbled. “You’ve got some nerve snooping around where you don’t belong. Maybe your daddy couldn’t teach you proper manners, but I sure can.”

  Lake crossed the hall impossibly quickly for something of his size, and I barely had time to raise my shield as his ax came down. The clang of steel on bronze made my ears ring. The shield held, but the blow knocked me sideways into the wood-paneled wall.

  I leaped to my feet and stabbed Lake hard as I could through his leather trousers into his thigh, right where his femoral artery ought to be. But it was like sticking my sword in a sawdust-filled dummy. No blood, no pain, no reaction.

  My sword stuck fast in his leg, he pivoted sideways, jerking the weapon out of my hand. Another swing, the ax coming down at the back of my neck fast and hard. I ducked. His blow caught the rivets on the rear edge of my helmet and knocked it clattering across the stone floor.

  Immediately, the air felt cold and suffocating in my throat. I scrambled forward to retrieve my helmet, realizing there was almost no place for me to go, no way to escape. It was a mistake to fight Lake, but he’d come at me so fast. If I could get back to his polite version, would he stop his attack? Or was the refuge of that vision lost to me now that I’d fought back?

  I dodged another blow from Lake as I snatched up my helmet and slapped it back on my head. Relieved to be able to breathe again, I began to blink back through gemviews—and stopped on one of the strange, dark views that had made no sense to me before, but now that I looked around at Lake and the hallway through it, I realized I was seeing inside things, seeing the strange geometries that formed this place, and this place wasn’t a place at all, these walls weren’t made of wood, they weren’t made of anything, and giant King Lake with his ax was no more substantial than a doll made from dreams.

  The Lake-doll swung his filmy ax at me again. I took a. deep breath and blew at him as hard as I could. He flickered like a candle flame and puffed out, wisping away like a bad smell, but my sword fell solidly to the floor at my feet.

  I saw the sword now for what it was: an instrument of vengeance imbued with spilled magical energy from the Warlock’s death ritual and the power of a mother’s fear. My stone eye itched, and I blinked to the ghost-view. In the mirror of the blade, I saw Siobhan’s last rational act: She blessed the pendant and put it on Blue’s neck before he was taken to the basement, hoping it would save him, but her magic didn’t work as she’d hoped. Lake, to mock her and her failed spell, put it on the necks of the other babies he put into enchanted sleep, and then finally on the infant Warlock, perhaps intending to eventually give the pendant to his beloved firstborn son, if he intended anything at all.

  My mind turned over everything I’d seen in the basement, letting the scenes flash before me like facets in a cursed gemstone. Reggie’s strange transformation, Cooper’s unrelenting anguish, Lake’s monstrous acts… and here in the hell, Blue’s demon and the adults’ compulsion to repeat the horrors of the past. I’d thought at first that Lake’s hateful spirit was the driving force in this dimension, that he was the one compelling the others to relive their worst experiences over and over. But now I realized Lake’s spirit was so degraded there was practically nothing left of it. He was just a shadow puppet, empty of soul or will, and perhaps he’d been one long before he died.

  What, then, was the hand guiding Lake’s inhuman cruelty?

  I blinked back to the architecture view and looked around me, seeing through the illusion of the walls. Cooper lay nearby, curled in a fetal ball, shivering in the throes of whatever nightmare plagued his senses. He was tormented and insensible, but solid and quite real. In the background were four child-like shapes, just as solid as he was: the enchanted brothers shining brightly, still alive. In the distance I saw three other spirits, weak and flickery: Corvus, Siobhan, and Reggie, dead but still with hope of escaping to the great beyond.

  One of the child-shapes turned in my direction:

  “Do you see?” It was Blue’s soft, papery voice.

  I looked up past the hazy illusion of the house and saw the dark sponge-creatures swarming outside, solid and real.

  “Where’s your mother?” I whispered to them.

  Instinct told me to look down, and when I saw the grotesque monstrosity there, I almost jumped. A corpulent thing was lolling beneath the floor, a vast, flaccid version of the little monsters I’d seen at the window, a tooth-pored black sponge as big as the hell itself.

  My brain finally dredged up information from the diabology class I dropped my freshman year. The huge creature was an algophage, a Goad, a thing that fed on negative spiritual energy, a parasitic devil that drove other creatures into violence and sadism. If the hell was a kind of web, the Goad was the fat spider right in the middle of it.

  Siobhan’s wispy spirit flickered at me; she was trapped where she was, but it seemed that she was trying to get my attention. I blinked to the ghost-view. I saw Lake confront her over her lonely dalliance with Corvus, a lover’s argument simple and common as the hills. It should have just caused tears and angry words, a few resentful months the couple’s love could overcome. But the hungry Goad was in the woods nearby and felt their savory pain. It smelled the seed of darkness in Lake, tasted arrogance and a potential for hard violence he’d never acknowledged to himself, a potential the Goad could cultivate and exploit. I watched the Goad squeeze itself into a crack in the home’s foundation, creep up between the spaces in their walls, poisoning the air, damping their magic, infecting Lake’s brain with malignant madness.

  “I see you,” I told the Goad, blinking back to the architectural view. “And I see what you’ve done. You can’t fool me anymore.”

  The vast thing rippled, angry. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to let these souls go.”

  The Goad bucked beneath my feet as if it was trying to shake me off. “This is my hell. I made it! Get your own if you want one, mongrel!”

  I did not flinch at its rage, nor
wonder what it meant by its epithet. My mind, for once, was perfectly focused on what I knew I had to do. “Let them go, or I exterminate you and your children like the nasty little tapeworms you are.”

  The Goad let out a noise that might have been a laugh. “Destroy us? Impossible.”

  “Remember that I offered you mercy,” I said, snatching up Siobhan’s sword and slashing the point into the Goad’s body. It felt like cutting into greasy mud, and the Open wound steamed like a volcanic vent.

  The Goad shrieked, and from the corner of my eye I saw its larvae diving down to protect their mother.

  I pulled the sword from the gritty, oily flesh and swung it in a wide arc into the first wave of goadlets as I hammered others with my shield. The nasty little monsters popped like flies on a windshield. Slashing and swatting, I sidestepped through insubstantial walls across the bucking Goad to the spot where Cooper lay surrounded by his brothers. I’d killed enough of the larvae that the others were hanging back, hovering uncertainly. Apparently they weren’t quite as mindless as they’d first seemed.

  “Honey, wake up!” I yelled at Cooper, as loud as I could. “I know it hurts, but you’re not a child anymore! It’s not real anymore! I need your help to get us out of here!”

  His eyes opened slowly, glistening with tears. “I wanted them to live,” he whispered. “They’re still alive! Get up and hold on to me!” Cooper wasn’t immediately able to get up farther than onto his knees, but he reached out and grabbed my leg. I flung my shield into the thickest part of the larvae swarm and used both hands to drive the point of the sword deep into the Goad, carving the blade back and forth to try to get to the devil’s heart.

  And I saw it: a red-orange lump of pulsing magma, a burning lava auricle. I grabbed Cooper’s wrist with my right hand as I plunged my left deep into the Goad’s heart.

  The devil screamed as I plugged myself directly into the source of its dark power, and it hummed through me, stronger than a lightning strike. The monster had been feeding off human pain for thousands of years. I felt the spells the creature used to keep magic and the real world at bay, the spells that kept the hell running as a well-oiled agony factory. My stone eye showed me the devil’s machinations inside and out.