by J. L. Doty
Still, It wouldn’t seek him out personally, not yet. Better to use Its tame witch to help two minions cross over. Let a couple of ravenous emergents test this Lord. It was unlikely they were strong enough to actually consume him, though they need not know that. But they could test him, expose all his weaknesses so that Baalthelmass could triumph in the end.
Wearing the shape of a handsome, wealthy American aristocrat, It sat in the study of Its mansion, and with no more than a thought summoned Its most important thrall. She responded instantly, but the size of Its mansion was such that it took her several seconds to make her way to Its study. When the door opened a beautiful young woman stepped into the room. She had exotic eastern features, olive skin, luscious red lips, and when she lowered herself to her knees and bowed her head, a cascade of long, black tresses hid her face behind a curtain of untamed curls. She waited for Baalthelmass to speak.
“Belinda, my dear,” It said, gesturing casually with a hand. “Come. Join me.”
She rose, crossed the room and sat down on the floor at Its feet, placed her hands on Its knee and rested her chin there. She looked into Its eyes with unbridled desire.
“I have a task for you,” It said. “You must summon a couple of emergents to a certain young man’s apartment.”
“Yes, my lord,” she said happily.
“It should be an easy task,” It said. “He’s placed no Wards, is ignorant and completely unprotected.”
Yes, It would have this Lord. It would feed on him, though not consume him completely. Better to bend him to Its will, enslave him, for with a Lord-of-the-Unliving under Its dominion, nothing and no one could stop It. Ever!
Walter McGowan parked his car in the darkness between two streetlights more than a block away from Conklin’s apartment. As so often happened in San Francisco, a layer of cold mist had come in off the ocean, blanketing the city in a damp, hazy vapor, sucking all the warmth out of a September night.
He scanned the street carefully looking for the backup he’d called, glanced at his watch and mumbled, “Where is she?” He waited in his car for another ten minutes, but when he sensed the young man going into the early stages of his summons, he knew he had no choice but to go forward, alone if necessary.
He climbed out of the car, locked it and walked casually up the sidewalk. The mist that blanketed the city softened the shadows of the night, and while it wasn’t a heavy fog, the glow of the streetlights gave the impression that the world ended only a short distance up the street. He was only a few doors away from Conklin’s building when a voice out of the darkness stopped him in his tracks. “Valter,” it said in a thick Russian accent.
He cringed, turned toward the voice as Vasily Karpov, flanked by two of his thugs, emerged from the shadow of a nearby alley. Karpov was McGowan’s age, wore a coat and tie, a dark wool overcoat, and a cheap hat that looked like it belonged in some old private-eye movie. To either side of him stood Alexei and Vladimir, younger fellows dressed in cheap, black, heavy, wool business suits that looked like they’d started out as horse blankets. Both were large, physically-imposing men, Karpov’s muscle, always close at hand. Vladimir on the left had high, Slavic cheekbones pitted with acne scars, long, straight, greasy blond hair that hung lankly down to his shoulders. Alexei on the right had a square face, with bristly, dark hair and a heavy, black mustache. He reminded McGowan of a young Joseph Stalin, and had a reputation for being just as brutal.
McGowan asked, “What’re you doing here, Vasily?” Both thugs tensed at the apparent lack of respect in McGowan’s voice.
Karpov tilted his head to one side, smiled and said calmly, “Valter! I’m here for the same reason you are, to stop a rogue sorcerer, a dangerous undertaking for us both. The least you can do is accept my help graciously.”
When it came to manipulating the arcane they both knew McGowan was stronger than Karpov, could probably take the Russian in a fair fight, though he wouldn’t walk away from it unscathed. But while Alexei and Vladimir were both relatively weak practitioners, they were enough to tip the balance in Karpov’s favor. “Vasily, when you help, someone usually gets killed.”
Karpov’s smile disappeared. “He’s a rogue, summoning demons without the proper protections. If we don’t kill him first, many innocents could die.”
McGowan couldn’t hide his anger. “Since when do you care about innocents? And we don’t know what he is.”
Both thugs took a step forward, which, together with Karpov, now enclosed McGowan in a semicircle. They made no effort to hide the threat in their stances. “Valter, Valter, Valter! Why risk ourselves for some stupid, untried amateur? He’s a fool, dangerous, so we take no chances, kill him quickly and be done with it.”
McGowan looked carefully at Alexei, the more sociopathic of the two, gave him a hard angry look. Alexei didn’t back away, but his smug posture disappeared and he leaned slightly away from McGowan, an unconscious reaction to the older man’s superior arcane strength. McGowan turned slowly to Vladimir and gave him the same look. The ugly blond backed up a step, his right hand involuntarily lifting toward his coat. McGowan had no doubt he had a gun there, and narrowed his eyes in warning. Vladimir’s hand stopped well short of its goal.
To Karpov, McGowan said, “If we have to kill him, then we’ll kill him. But I won’t condone murder until I know it’s absolutely necessary.”
Karpov’s smile returned, but it was more of a challenge than a greeting between friends, and he was clearly ready to push this to the limit. He opened his mouth to say something, but a shadow stepped out of a shadow on McGowan’s left, and from the shadow a woman’s voice spoke in a thick Irish accent. “Well now, Vasily, I happen to agree with Walter.”
The Russians stiffened and turned carefully to look at the shadow that stood openly in the light of a streetlamp. Other than its slight stature, and the timbre of its voice, the shadow itself gave no hint as to its owner’s nature.
McGowan couldn’t hide his relief as he said, “Colleen!” His backup had just arrived and the odds had tipped heavily in his favor.
The shadow spoke again. “Vasily, please instruct your young men that should there be any uncalled-for violence, I will be most displeased.”
Karpov’s lips straightened into a thin line of displeasure, and he gave Colleen the smile of a man forced to chew on a lemon. “As you wish, Coleen.”
“Good,” she said. “Then we’ll let Walter call the shots.” It hadn’t been a question, but she waited for Karpov to acknowledge the statement.
He grimaced, the smile turned into a scowl and he grumbled an unhappy, “Of course.”
She said, “Then let’s go.”
Paul was content. Suzanna and Cloe were back, and the interviews were going well, and he was hoping to get a couple of offers next week. He sat at the dinner table, stomach full, watching his beautiful wife clean up the dishes while Cloe struggled over her homework in the living room. What more could a man want?
What more could a man want? And yet he knew full well what more he could want. He wanted Suzanna in his bed again. Not because he was horny, though he’d always loved the taste of her skin, the feel of her body pressed against his, and he certainly wouldn’t mind drowning in the passion they’d always shared. But his thoughts weren’t focused on a good roll-in-the-hay. He just wanted to hold her again, to have her lying beside him as he slept, to wake in the middle of the night and hear her soft, even breathing next to him, to wake in the morning and have her roll away from him, grumbling something unintelligible, frequently spiced with a bit of unconscious profanity, about not wanting to get up—she’d never been a morning person. And he wanted Cloe to bounce on his knee again, or to have her charge into the bedroom to wake him and Suzanna up on a Saturday morning. He wanted to lift her high over his head, hear her squeal with delight as he spun her around. He wanted to go for a Saturday walk in Golden Gate Park with the two of them, have a little picnic lunch in the shade of a tree. He wanted so many things, but he knew the only
way he could have them was to allow his hallucinations to grow so powerful and intense that he lost all contact with reality.
Whenever he thought of that he always put it out of his mind, but tonight it kept coming back and he couldn’t put the thought aside. It was frustrating, because a part of him knew there was something else, a part of him buried so deep he could usually squash it back down into that place in his soul where he’d hidden it. But tonight it wouldn’t stay squashed.
Suzanna turned and looked at him, and his heart climbed up into his throat with such longing. I want it too, Paulie-boy, she said. We’re not complete without it. But what if we find what we desire? Will it be wrong? Will we regret it? And can it really be that easy?
Yes, Paul thought, it could be that easy. She could be real again, not some figment of his fucked-up imagination. All he had to do was want it enough, wish for it enough, long for it enough. All he had to do—
Cloe walked into the kitchen, her beautiful little face marred by fear. Daddy, there’s something in the living room.
Without consciously considering it he stood, and his legs were trembling so much he had to lean on the table for a second. “What? What is it?”
I don’t know. But something’s wrong.
“Wait here, both of you,” he said, and walked quickly into the living room.
Earlier he’d been opening and paying bills, and the checkbook, pen, letter-opener and an unorganized pile of envelopes where still scattered on the couch. Cloe had spread her homework on the coffee table in front of the couch, but other than that, the living room was empty, no sign of any trouble, no sign of an intruder. He breathed a sigh of relief, realizing he’d probably been the victim of a child’s vivid imagination. But then he recalled she’d said there was something, not someone, in the living room. Something wrong, she’d said, and he too could sense the wrongness of it.
Paulie-boy, what is it?
“Nothing,” he called. “Just wait there.” He scanned the room a second time, spotted his reflection in the mirror hanging on the wall above a little knick-knack table Suzanna had purchased. He was reminded of his dream. But he wasn’t dreaming now, and a piece of framed, silvered glass just didn’t induce that kind of fear in anything but a dream. Nevertheless, he looked at his reflection cautiously, noticed that the mirror appeared to be damaged, or perhaps just poorly made, because the glass distorted his image, made his face appear wavy and slightly misshapen. He crossed the room to look closely into the mirror, and as he watched, the face staring back at him began to distort further, a circular swirling as if someone had dropped a pebble into a mirror-smooth pond. It churned, began to twist into a spiral, as if his image was nothing but wet paint on a canvas with a child smearing it around.
The image in the mirror so engrossed Paul that when someone started pounding on the front door, it barely registered on his consciousness. It was not a polite knock but loud, incessant pounding, and yet to Paul it was a distant, remote sound that couldn’t draw his attention away from the mirror. A man’s voice came from the same distant place, shouting, “Let us in.” The voice carried real desperation, almost hysteria. “Now, please.”
Paul’s image in the mirror distorted even further and took on an almost reptilian cast. His skin darkened to near black, his nose elongated into a flat snout with gaping nostrils, his ears morphed into tall, spiked, leathery things more on the front of his head than on the sides. The pupils in its eyes slowly elongated until they were slit horizontally like those of a goat, and they glowed an angry blood-red. The monster in the mirror looked at him greedily, and he sensed its hunger and hatred as if it welled up from his own soul, as if he was himself the monster in the mirror.
Suddenly a hand emerged from the depths of the mirror. It was the black, clawed thing from his dreams, with knobby joints and knuckles. And just like in his dream it reached forth and gripped his throat viciously, snapping him out of the stupor that had possessed him. He grabbed at the monster’s wrist, praying that it was a dream, that he’d snap awake suddenly, lying in bed and bathed in sweat. But as he tried to pull the claws away from his throat there was no dislodging the vice-like grip.
The pounding on the door changed suddenly to a wall-shaking thud, as if someone large had thrown a shoulder against it.
The hand protruding from the mirror emerged farther, pushing Paul back a step and revealing a spindly arm with a web-like, leathery flap attaching it to a bony torso. The head emerged and it screeched at Paul with a sound like fingernails on chalkboard. With its other hand it gripped the frame of the mirror, thrashed about as if the glass were a viscous puddle of some thick fluid sucking at it and resisting its efforts to struggle free. And with blood pounding in his ears, terror clutching at his heart, Paul could do nothing as it shook him about like a child’s doll.
Bit-by-bit a bat-like being out of hell emerged completely into the room and stood in the middle of the floor, holding Paul at arm’s length. He struggled uselessly as it craned its neck and screamed out a cry of triumph and hunger. It looked at Paul with the hungry eyes of a starving predator and its blood-red goat-slitted pupils flared blindingly, a stream of ichorous drool dripping from its chin. It stepped forward with an ungainly shuffle, pushing Paul back until the back of his legs hit the coffee table. He tumbled backwards, pulling the monster down on top of him. He landed on the couch in a flurry of envelopes and bills and was almost impaled on the letter opener. A horrid smell of rotting meat washed over him as he shouted, “Suzanna, run.”
The monster clamped down on his throat, digging its talons into his neck, cutting off his air and any possibility of shouting another warning. Behind it another monster emerged from the mirror, born of the same hell as the first. The monster atop Paul looked over its shoulder at its companion, turning its head about as no human could. “Get the necro,” it growled in a snake-like hiss. Its companion nodded and darted into the kitchen with ungodly speed.
The monster turned back to Paul, and as it opened its mouth to reveal a bony ridge of razor sharp teeth, he thought of the letter opener still jabbing him in the back. Paul beat at the side of the monster’s head with his left fist, searching behind him with his right hand. He wasn’t a weak man, and the monster did nothing to defend itself, nothing to block his blows, nothing to avoid them, and yet they had no effect other than to momentarily snap its reptilian head from side to side. But Paul didn’t care. He only cared about Suzanna and Cloe, and the monster that had run into the kitchen after them. Let this monster do what it would, he cared only to stop the monster in the kitchen from harming those he loved. He could sense it hunting them, stalking them. He could sense its hunger, ravenous, uncontrolled, a blinding desire to rip them limb from limb. And while the monster on top of him beat at him, tore at him, choked him senseless, he concentrated on the beast in the kitchen, focused on it, and wished for only one thing, prayed, hoped, demanded it be gone from the here and now. And then something went pop, like a cork pulled from a bottle of wine.
The monster atop him flinched, looked momentarily toward the kitchen, then turned back to Paul and they locked eyes.
It was as if he was a little child terrified of the dark of his bedroom, and suddenly one of his parents walked in and flicked on the lights. At that moment all fear and terror fled. He looked into the creature’s eyes and felt it pulling on him, not pulling physically, but pulling on something through the contact between its clawed hand and his throat. It felt as if the creature were reaching deep into his heart, into his soul, pulling on the core of his being. And Paul wanted to give it everything it desired, for suddenly he loved and trusted it as he’d never loved anything before. But a small spark within him knew he must resist that pull.
As if his mind had split into two separate beings Paul yielded to the pull and embraced the desire he saw in the monster’s eyes, while that spark within him found the letter opener and gripped its handle. But it and his right hand were now pinned beneath his back. He tried to look away from the monster
’s blood-red, goat-slitted eyes but couldn’t. The monster continued to pull through the physical contact with his throat and he was beginning to see sparkling motes of unconsciousness as he threw everything into resisting that pull. The monster snarled, cried out and reared its head back.
Paul got the letter opener free, swung it out in a roundhouse arc just as the monster’s claws tightened with crushing force about his throat, slammed the letter opener into the side of its head and buried it there.
The monster screamed, rolled off him in a snarling frenzy, its jaws snapping at empty air, hissing and spinning about like a maddened animal. Where the letter opener protruded from the side of its head the wound sputtered a greasy smoke as if the letter opener were a red-hot brand.
Paul staggered to his feet looking for another weapon, and then the door to his apartment exploded. The blast peppered Paul’s left side with splinters and knocked him to the floor. It blew the monster across the room and slammed it against the wall in a shower of splinters where it slumped to the floor.
Paul’s head reeled from the concussion of the explosion. He rolled onto his back, thinking he had to get to his feet no matter how much the room swayed. He got to his elbows but could go no further until the dizziness subsided. He was surprised to see the older fellow who’d knocked on his door last week stride purposefully across the room to the monster, a young version of Joseph Stalin a few steps behind him. The old fellow leaned over the monster, pulled a shiny, needle-shaped spike from his coat, plunged it into the monster’s chest, and held it there as the monster struggled and kicked. The old guy began chanting something in a language Paul didn’t recognize. Two more strangers, another old man and an ugly fellow with long, greasy blond hair, rushed past the old fellow into the kitchen.
Joe Stalin looked up from whatever the old man was doing to the monster, looked at Paul and frowned angrily, then reached into his coat and pulled out a revolver the size of a howitzer. He crossed the room to Paul and stood over him, carefully aimed the muzzle of the cannon between Paul’s eyes, grinned menacingly and slowly pulled the pistol’s hammer back with his thumb.
