by J. L. Doty
Paul rubbed at his eyes groggily, learned that was not a wise move since it just ground the reddish-brown grit in deeper. He noticed Katherine no longer occupied the pew where she’d slept. His bladder was uncomfortably full, and he assumed she’d probably awakened in the same condition and hunted down a place to relieve herself. He struggled to his feet, felt like an old man, and while every little movement reminded him of a cut or bruise or wound of some kind, he ignored the aches and walked carefully to the back of the church. He stepped through a hole in the wall there, relieved himself against the outside back wall of the church, tucked his tattered and cut-jeans back in place turned around to survey the back of their sanctuary.
The back yard of the church contained a small cemetery, and near the very back he saw Katherine standing at its edge with her back to him, probably taking stock of the surrounding buildings. He recalled she’d said cemeteries were also hallowed ground, so he walked down the back steps and threaded his way between old gravestones toward her. He was a dozen paces behind her when he called her name.
She jumped, turned toward him with wide, frightened eyes, saw it was him and put a hand on her chest. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Oh,” she gasped breathlessly. “It’s you.”
He felt like an idiot, stalking up behind her without warning. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“That’s ok,” she said breathlessly. “I think we’re both going to be jumpy as long as we’re in this predicament.”
She raised a hand to her torn blouse, modestly tried to rearrange the material to cover her breasts. Without the coat the tear exposed even more skin and she failed miserably. But in the process she’d accidentally drawn his attention to her half-exposed chest, unwillingly displaying far more cleavage than would be polite or fashionable in any venue. He tried not to stare, but for some reason he couldn’t look away. And as he watched her chest rise and fall with each breath, he realized he was strongly attracted to her. Only a few paces separated them and he had a sudden fantasy of crossing that distance, of tearing her blouse open completely, cupping her breasts in his hands and licking the reddish-brown grit from her nipples. And he could see in her eyes she shared the attraction, that she wanted him to come to her and take her in his arms. They were alone, with no one to disturb them, and no one to stop them from enjoying each other’s bodies.
He took one step, his eyes focused on her heaving chest, watched longingly as it rose and fell. Her breathing came now in deep, longing sighs, and with each breath her breasts grew, swelled and spilled more flesh out of her torn blouse. He took another step, feeling a need rise up in him that he hadn’t felt in a long time. And now she reached up again to her torn blouse, but this time she opened it further, exposing her heaving breasts completely and inviting him to fulfill his desire, to yield to the need that blossomed within him, a demanding obsession he could no longer deny.
“Paul,” she shouted from far behind him. “Don’t. It’s the demon.”
Behind him! She was behind him. But she was standing in front of him. Her breasts had spilled out of her blouse, had grown to massive heavy globes with dark brown areolas. And it was that more than anything that made him hesitate, for the heavy, swollen breasts in front of him did not belong to Katherine. And in another place and time he could easily be attracted to Katherine, the real Katherine, not this rounded, voluptuous, porn-star queen of a Katherine standing in front of him.
He took a step back. The porn-star’s pupils glowed red and she glared at him with goat-slitted eyes. He heard the real Katherine’s footsteps as she approached behind him. She put a hand on his shoulder and spoke softly, “That’s the demon.”
He backed up another step and drew even with Katherine, turned his head to look at her carefully and glanced momentarily at the skin exposed by her blouse. Until the demon had drawn his attention to it, he hadn’t realized he was attracted to her, that he found the extra skin exposed by her torn blouse sexually exciting, like a small boy catching a boob-shot when an attractive woman across the room bends over without realizing how much skin is exposed by her billowing blouse.
She blushed, so he took his eyes off her chest and raised them to meet hers, though he noticed her right hand lifted almost involuntarily to her torn blouse in a wasted effort to smooth the tear back in place. The hand gave up the effort and she lowered it to her side in a gesture that seemed almost defiant.
“I know it’s the demon,” he said, thinking she had nice eyes, brown eyes set in an oval face with a strong jaw. “But I thought you said it couldn’t go in a graveyard.”
She kept her eyes locked to his, clearly appraising him as he was appraising her. She tilted her head slightly to one side, a kind of apologetic shrug. “Sometimes they bury a suicide, or some other outcast, at the edge of a graveyard without religious ceremony and without sanctifying the ground. Another step or two and it would’ve had you.”
“And can it read my thoughts?” he asked, thinking that was the only way it would have known to use her as bait.
She looked at the demon. No longer the porn-star queen, it now looked more like her. She looked at Paul, at the demon, then back at Paul, and he could see in her eyes she suddenly understood why her image had been such effective bait. She blushed again.
“How trite!” the demon said. It was odd to hear such a deep rumbling voice coming from a small woman. “Why don’t the two of you just rip your clothes off right here and fuck your brains out? I might enjoy the show.”
Paul turned his back on the demon and said, “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
Katherine took his arm and walked beside him back to the church. Inside they sat down on the pews they’d slept on. Katherine tore off a small piece of cloth from her coat, dabbed a little spit on it and tried to clean the cut on her cheek. Paul yanked off his tattered shirt—he was wearing an equally sliced up T-shirt beneath it—handed it to her and said, “Here, use this. It’s not too sweaty. And hell’s a warm place anyway, definitely T-shirt weather.”
While Katherine dabbed at her face he asked, “How did we get here? How do we get back?”
She looked at him and frowned. “Are you sure it wasn’t you who dragged us here?”
He threw up his hands in frustration. “How could I? I don’t know any of this sorcery mumbo-jumbo.”
She mirrored his frustration. “Well it can’t have been the Tertius caste that came here with us. I told you, demons can’t effect a crossing like that one way or another. It has to be done by a mortal or a Sidhe with power, and always after a rather drawn out ceremony that involves a lot of ritual. And it wasn’t me. Even if I tried, I’m not that strong a sorceress.”
“So that leaves me?”
She shook her head. “That doesn’t add up either. You clearly don’t know how, and probably aren’t that strong.”
She seemed satisfied that, with the aid of Paul’s shirt and some carefully applied saliva, she’d cleaned her face reasonably well. She rolled the shirt up and put it on the pew next to her. Paul didn’t have the heart to tell her that her makeup was smeared all over her face. A bright red smudge of lipstick radiated out from the right corner of her mouth. Mascara from her left eye had run down her cheek, and her right eye now appeared almost devoid of makeup. The contrast between her two eyes gave her an odd, clownish, evil-eye sort of look.
Paul needed to know more about demons, if for no other reason than that his ignorance might get them killed, though here in hell there apparently was a fate worse than death. “When I was out in front of the church here, facing that big, bad hoodoo with the snake legs, you said don’t look in its eyes, and don’t make any deals. What’s with that?”
She frowned and looked at him oddly. “Snake legs! What snake legs?”
“The demon,” Paul said. “The one with the chicken head and snake legs. The one in front of the church yesterday.”
Her eyes narrowed, and he thought he saw distrust there. “I don’t know what you’re talki
ng about.”
“You saw the demon, right?”
She spoke carefully. “Yes . . . I did.”
“And it had a chicken head and snake legs?”
She shook her head. “No, it looked like my father.”
Paul tried to describe the monster he’d faced and she listened carefully, then said, “Apparently it was showing us each a different glamour. I don’t know a lot about demons, but I suppose that’s possible.”
“And why not look in its eyes? Why no deals?”
She considered his question for a moment as if she wasn’t sure where to begin, then said, “Primus and Secundus caste demons are patient and calculating. They’d rather gain control over you than merely devour your soul, and there’re many ways to do that. If your eyes meet theirs directly, and you haven’t prepared the proper spells to protect yourself, they can enthrall you, and then you’ll happily do anything they want. In the early stages, if you break eye contact you break the enthrallment. But if they have you captive in some way so they can repeatedly enthrall you over a long period of time, then eventually they can maintain the control, even without eye contact. That’s what they usually prefer to do with a mortal wizard or witch. They then have a powerful slave that can bring them other souls to devour, a thrall. And if their thrall is adept at sorcery, and they’re resident on the Mortal Plane, they can use it to bring minor demons over from the Netherworld as servants and slaves. I still don’t understand why the Secundus out front broke eye-contact with you.”
She waited for him to enlighten her in some way, but Paul didn’t recall being enthralled. He remembered everything up to the moment he’d looked into the demon’s eyes, and after its control had shattered he had a hazy memory of lying on top of Katherine on the steps of the church. But it was not until she’d made her witty remark about first dates that he’d truly returned to conscious thought. And then, embarrassed, he’d scrambled off her clumsily. He even remembered a little bit about the moment of the shattering, but the time during which he’d been enthralled was all a blank. He told her that now, and finished by saying, “But I have a fleeting memory it had something to do with a name.”
She closed her eyes, grimaced and shook her head. “Oh, I hope you didn’t give it your name.”
“No,” he said. “No, not my name. Its name. Something to do with the demon’s name.”
Her head shot up and her eyes opened expectantly. “Did you get its name?”
He closed his eyes and tried to recall the moment. “No. No, I didn’t . . . Well . . . maybe something that starts with an A . . . Ah . . . something . . . I just don’t remember.”
She waved a hand impatiently. “I don’t see how you could’ve gotten its name, not without a lot of negotiation, and certainly not while you’re enthralled. And not without something to offer it in return, something a lot more valuable than your name.”
“So names are important?”
“Oh, very much so! If it possesses even a portion of your name, it has some control over you, and the more of your name it has, the more control it has.”
He suddenly thought they might’ve betrayed each other, and he tried to recall every word they’d spoken here in hell. “But certainly it heard me call you Katherine, and you call me Paul.”
“No, no, no,” she said. “It doesn’t do it any good to just know your name. It gains no power over you unless you agree to give it all or part of your name. It has to be part of some sort of bargain.”
“Why would I do that?”
“As I said, they’re patient and calculating. If it has something you want bad enough, then you might negotiate some sort of agreement to get that something, and it’ll always seek to bind you in some way, probably with a portion of your name. And they’re tricky; their agreements are fraught with loopholes and pitfalls that play in their favor. By the way, that may be the only way we can get out of this mess. If my father can’t reach us, we may have to cut a deal with that Secundus out there to get back to the Mortal Plane.”
“So I have to learn demon contract law?” he asked sarcastically. “Do they give courses at Berkeley? Probably only graduate level, right?”
She ignored his sarcasm. “Learn it, Conklin, or get caught in a fate worse than death.”
Paul leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He tried to avoid rubbing at the grit in his eyes. “I can’t believe I’m believing this crap.” He opened his eyes and scanned the inside of the roofless church. The reddish brown dirt caked everything, including him and Katherine, a reddish brown world with a dirty brown sky, illuminated by dim, unclean light. “I sometimes think I’m really lying in a coma in some hospital somewhere dreaming a really bad dream. Or maybe I’m in a straightjacket in some nuthouse hallucinating my brains out.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Paul. I guess the best advice I can offer is that if it feels real, then go with it. If you’re hallucinating it won’t hurt to do so, but if it’s real and you ignore the dangers, you might end up very dead, or worse.”
That was the crux of the matter. In this strange new reality he’d stumbled upon, there were quite a number of fates worse than death. “So if we can get this demon to agree to give us some of its name, we can get some control over it?”
She ran her fingers through her frazzled hair and scratched at her scalp. The grit clearly irritated her as much as him. “Actually, no. With demon names it’s both easer and harder than that. It’s easier because if you can learn its name in any way, you gain control. It doesn’t have to be part of an agreement. But it’s harder because a demon’s true name is a highly kept secret. Names are one way in which we’re quite different from them.”
Paul thought of snake-legs, and bat-thing, and had an urge to snarl angrily that there were many ways in which they were different. But he swallowed his sarcasm and asked the final question. “So how do we get the hell out of hell?”
She shrugged, looked him in the eyes and said, “For the time being we wait and hope my father can do something. And if he can’t, then we’ll have to cut some sort of deal with that Secundus out there.”
Accompanied by Colleen and the two leprechauns, McGowan closed the workshop door and locked it, sealing them in. He carried a small cage containing a live chicken, Colleen carried a small paper bag, and they all wore floor-length, white, linen robes and thick slippers knitted from heavy cotton thread. Beneath the robes they each wore white cotton trousers held up by a belt of hemp rope, and a white cotton tunic with no buttons or opening in the front, forcing one to don it by pulling it over one’s head. Everything they wore had been woven from plant fibers of some sort, nothing made of metal or plastic, nothing artificial, and nothing made from animal tissue. McGowan had commissioned several such outfits long ago from a seamstress who was also a minor practitioner of the arcane, though for the leprechauns he’d simply cut two robes short with a pair of scissors.
Earlier that morning each of them had personally hand-washed their own outfit using crude, unscented soap, then hung them to dry through the afternoon. In the early afternoon they’d rested and slept, then in late afternoon bathed with unscented soap, and were careful afterward to apply no perfumes, oils, deodorants or after-shave, nothing that might contaminate the cleansing of their bodies and clothing. In the early evening a priest, a friend of McGowan’s and also a practitioner, came by and blessed the two humans, and anointed them with holy water. The leprechauns, having no souls, remained hidden while the priest was present. Then they’d spent the next several hours meditating and clearing their thoughts.
Colleen had dropped her shadows. “I’m frightened, old man. I don’t like the black arts, and I must confess I’ve never participated in a major summons before. I’m not terribly knowledgeable in sorcery.”
“Never?” he asked dubiously.
“No. I’ve avoided it. I’ve banished a few demons, but never summoned one.”
Jim’Jiminie said, “It’s going to be fun.”
Boo’Diddle added, “Exactly.”
McGowan strode across his workshop, put the chicken cage onto a workbench and turned to a tall storage cabinet. “As a rule I don’t like trafficking in demons either. But circumstances occasionally force my hand. All you need to do in this is guard my back, actually my soul. I’ll walk you through it.”
McGowan lifted a small copper dish out of the storage cabinet. He also retrieved a knife and four wax candles, each about six inches long, and a large, flat cardboard box. He opened the box, and from it he pulled a mirror about three by two feet mounted in an ornate wooden frame. He handed the mirror to Colleen and she noticed it did a poor job of reflecting her image. “That’s a dark mirror,” he said. “Essentially a piece of glass painted black on the back side. We’re going to use it to look into the darkness of the Netherworld.”
McGowan placed the four candles at four of the five points of the silver pentagram embedded in the floor, saying, “The point without a candle is the principal point of the pentagram, where I’ll be seated controlling the entire summons. When I light the candles I’ll do so with my power, not matches or any other physical means. And I myself will be the fifth candle, completing the symmetry of the pentagram, and defining the principal point with my power.”
McGowan then cut a few strands of his own hair and placed them in the copper dish. Colleen handed him the sack, and from it he withdrew two hairbrushes. That morning they’d returned to Paul’s apartment and stolen a hairbrush, then they’d stopped at Katherine’s home and stolen one of hers. He plucked a few hairs from each brush and dropped them into the copper dish, then placed the copper dish and the dark mirror in the center of the circle, arranging them so that when he sat down at the principal point of the pentagram, he could see his own faint reflection in the mirror, with the copper dish resting just in front of it. He sat down in front of the copper dish, lifted the knife in his left hand and cut into the flesh of his right hand. As blood flowed freely he held the hand above the dish and let the blood drip into it, saying, “The knife is made of cold iron, not steel. It’s rather soft and doesn’t hold an edge well, but it does the job.”
