by Carol Wolf
“Madam Tamara,” I nodded back.
“Are you ready?”
“Are you?” I asked.
She smiled slightly, acknowledging the edge in my question. “It was necessary. It will keep people from panicking.”
“Do you think it’s enough?”
“How strong is your demon?”
“I guess that’s what we’re going to see.”
I went down the steps, hopped up on the stage and turned around to view the audience. Some of them clapped. They stopped when I looked at them. It seemed as though all of them had brought food and drink. I guess they were expecting quite a party. And I would bring the entertainment.
I nodded to them, and some of them clapped again. I’d seen most of these folks before. A half-dozen Goth kids in black magician robes occupied the first row of seats at my feet. Each held a wand in one hand, and passed bags of chips with the other. At least they weren’t wearing the pointy hats with the stars on them. In the next row three people sat as far apart from one another, and the rest of the crowd, as they could get, like touchy wizards choosing distant territories. The two women, one sylph-like, wrapped in ceremonial clothes from her head to her slippered feet, and the big woman with the round face in a medieval cloak with the hood pulled up, I hadn’t seen before. The heavy-set guy to my left wearing glasses, with straight black hair and a sheathed sword resting on his knees, I’d seen once before at Tamara’s.
Tamara’s friends grouped around her seat in the middle like a star cluster, passing each other food from baskets and a hamper, leaning over to whisper or make comments. Van sat beside Tamara. On her other side, the sister of Tamara’s soul, Kat McBride, held her singing bowl on her lap. The guy from the theater with the keys sat in a seat by himself above the little group, in a proprietary way, looking around at the other folks as though keeping an eye on them on behalf of the Festival Amphitheatre.
Three of the Thunder Mountain Boys sat with Marlin along the aisles about halfway up. I nodded to them, and they nodded warily back. Oliver was not among them. Marlin gazed around the place indifferently. He’d had a run-in with the Eater of Souls not long ago, and hadn’t been the same since. The Boys had probably brought him under the mistaken impression that Richard had something to do with it, and could put him back the way he was. As if he would.
I recognized Lady Fireheart, and some of the women from her Wicca group wearing their ceremonial robes, seated together high in the middle seats on the left. I nodded to her, and she nodded regally back. A scattering of other power raisers, in small groups or alone, dotted the back seats, but everyone had left a big circle of empty seats around the bears. And so it should be.
“I am going to call the demon that was once in my service,” I began, without preamble. It’s not like I needed an introduction, after all. They all knew why we were here. But I did need to make a few things absolutely clear. I didn’t raise my voice very much, but it was an amphitheater, so I didn’t have to. The tension in the theater rose as I started speaking. The attention of the power raisers, focused on me by people for whom concentration was an art form, set the residual energy of the place into a spin. I felt the gyre rising clockwise above me, slowly lifting out of the bowl of the theater.
“I am doing this,” I continued, “because a lot of people in this city don’t believe a couple of things that are true. One. The World Snake is not coming anymore.” I felt the audience’s reaction to my pronouncing the name in this place of power, a frisson in the air. Some of them jerked back. Idiots. I’d just said she wasn’t coming. Calling her name wasn’t going to make her come after all. “She has turned,” I told them, in case they weren’t listening. “She is not going to swallow Los Angeles, and she will not consume the cities of men again.” Some of them looked at each other. They still didn’t believe me. I felt the anger rise, where it sits above my heart. They had forced me to do this. And I did not want to do this. And by the gods, if my demon showed up, they were going to know why. The energy of the place was working on me too.
I went on, my voice rising. “My demon did this at my command when he was in my service. And in return for this great work that he did for me, and for all of us, I dismissed him, and gave him his freedom.
“But some people in this city are under the impression that he still belongs to me. He doesn’t. Just as some people still don’t believe that the World Snake—the World Snake—really isn’t coming. This needs to end. So, Madam Tamara told me if I call the demon one more time, and let him explain to you what he did, then everyone will be on the same page. He’s free of this world, and we’re free of the Great Snake. All right?”
I looked around in the fading daylight. The bright lights gleamed from above, making pools of sharp light on the stage, but I could still see the folks in the seats, staring at me. Some of them were nodding. Some of them spoke aside to one another.
“You are going to see me call the demon. Before I do this, I must have your word, your solemn oath, on whatever you hold sacred, that you will never call the demon for yourself. You will not attempt to command him, or take his freedom, or bring him into your own service. I will continue when everyone everyone here—” my eyes gleaming yellow, I raked them all “—has sworn.”
I sat down on the edge of the stage. I folded my arms. Tamara got up from her seat. She went from group to group, person to person, and spoke to each of them. The light faded from the sky. In the peaceful twilight, crickets began to call.
The stabbing bright lights seemed to grow stronger, but it was just the contrast of nightfall. Moths danced in the spears of light, seeking the source. At last Tamara came down the steps toward me. She nodded to me, almost a bow, and took her seat again.
I got to my feet. The air seemed to tighten, but it was just the energy of everyone’s attention gathering in anticipation, because I was going to call the demon. One of the Goth kids up front stood up. He was holding his phone up, using it as a camera. Well, that was all right. He’d get the preliminary stuff I did, but as soon as I did the summoning, something would happen. You can’t film a working. I looked up and saw that, nonetheless, a couple of other people in the seats were planning to try.
I opened my bag of stuff. I dug out a big fat piece of chalk, and drew a circle on the concrete stage, as round as I could get it at that scale, a little wider than my reach. Then I drew an even wider circle around it, with about four feet between the two. I felt the audience’s prick of interest at that; that wasn’t how it’s done. But this is what we’d worked out, Richard and I.
I was about to lose a bet. We’d been walking back up the hill toward my place, after dinner, not long before the end of his time with me, when Richard said to me, “You aren’t going to be able to let me go.”
“Watch me,” I’d replied. I thought he meant I wasn’t going to keep my word. It made me angry, because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to lose him, I wanted our love, our companionship, to go on like this forever, when I knew that four days from now he would be gone forever, and I had made it happen. I had set him free.
I climbed the hill as though charging an army. Richard kept pace. He always kept pace. “I mean,” he said quietly, “you will still know my name. And as long as you know my name, you will always possess me. Whether you call me or not, I am still yours to command.”
I stopped and turned to him. His pale hair gleamed in the reflected light from the streetlamp up the road, but his face was in shadow, and his eyes were dark. “I know,” I said. “I was planning to forget it.”
“Oh.” He didn’t move. After a moment he added, “Do you think that will work?”
“No,” I admitted. I started toward my place again, and then stopped. “Can you make me forget it?” I turned to him. This time his face was in the light. He nodded once, as though he was afraid to speak. “Then, that’s what we’ll do.” I headed for my steps.
“Amber…”
I turned.
“Do you mean it?”
I
came back to him. I took the edges of his worn leather jacket in my hands, and looked up at his face, not much above mine. A stray lock of his hair lay askew on his brow. I breathed in his scent, better than Christmas, and leaned up and kissed him on the lips. “When you go,” I said, “take your name with you. Right out of my head. Gone.”
In his eyes, hope flamed, like a glimpse of heaven. He closed them, leaned forward and gently kissed my forehead. “It shall be as you say.” He held me close then, and before he let me go he said softly in my ear, “We’ll think of another name, that you can call me by.”
“Why?” I straightened.
“Just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“In case you need me. Just once.”
We climbed the steps together. “How about DeNinny?” I suggested.
Richard aimed a punch at my head, and I ducked away, laughing.
Now, on the stage of the Festival Amphitheatre, I drew a pentagram centered in the inside circle, whose five points touched, but did not cross, the second, outer circle. When I had done this, I got out a box of cornmeal, and poured it in a circle around the center of the pentagram. I heard whispers in the audience. I hoped they were all taking notes.
Next, I got out my packs of candles, and the new set of little glass bowls I’d bought. I set a candle in a glass bowl at each point of the pentagram. Then I got out the small, colored chalk, and drew signs on either side of each point. There are runes of protection, deflection, guard and ward, but I don’t know them. I know a few signs that my kind use, so I drew the ones that said Safety, Friendship, Welcome, Good Food, Health, and Fair Dealing. I drew Watch Out for Traps a few extra times. If anyone in the audience knew the signs, they could figure out for themselves what they meant in this context. What they actually meant was that raising the demon needed to look complicated, it needed to look like an art that I had mastered with great effort and endless diligence. The fact was, this was all just distraction. When I knew the demon’s name, I could summon him by pronouncing it correctly, and he was compelled to come by the last breath of the last syllable. But most of my audience probably didn’t know that, and if they did, it was better to confuse the issue for them. In any case, I no longer knew the demon’s name. I was relying on the good will of a being that no longer actually existed in the form I had known. I hoped that the demon I was about to call would keep the bargain I had made with Richard, who was only a tiny construct of itself.
And then I did a few things just so that, if anyone else tried this, they’d look as silly as I did. I lit the candles. I got out a silver bell, and a golden whistle. It was brass, really, and I’d borrowed it from the music store, but it looked golden, and that was good enough. I walked around the outer ring of the circle, intoning nonsense syllables under my breath. Every five steps I stopped, held up the bell, rang it, and blew a blast on the whistle. I repeated this until I’d gone all the way around the circle. Then, I pocketed the instruments and stepped between the two circles. I raised my arms, intoning some more nonsense words. I turned in a circle, and clapped my hands three times. And then, in a clear voice, I pronounced the name that Richard and I had agreed on.
“Bellsandahisnlianamene!” I clapped three times. I turned around again. I raised my voice. “Bellsandahisnlianamene!” Not a word you’d ever say by accident, under any circumstances. I clapped, turned, wove a weird pattern in the air with my hands, turned, and clapped again. Who said this couldn’t be fun? I raised my voice once more. “Come to me! I summon you! Bellsandahisnlianamene!”
Silence. The people in the audience behind me seemed not to breathe. Then, just as a tiny, impatient rustle began among them, the air in the theater tightened. The space in the center of the pentagram darkened. Again I heard the audience breathe, this time in gasps. The darkness within the pentagram thickened, as though a different kind of density erupted there. Behind me, I heard exclamations, and a few swear words. The darkness took on shape, and then it took on size. The hair on my nape rose. The air tingled with energy. My eyes tried to figure out the shape of the darkness, even as it kept changing, even as my stomach tightened and my heart began to race. I’d seen that darkness within darkness before, and I knew to be afraid.
I stood between one circle and the other, not in the demon’s part, nor outside the circles, where the watchers sat. We’d agreed on that, too. I could hear a wind blowing. The candles at the points of the pentagram burned steadily, as though nothing touched them. But the lights above and behind me in the amphitheater danced, bouncing on the cable that held them, and the shadows trembled, but where I stood, there was no wind.
We hadn’t agreed that the demon wouldn’t eat me. We hadn’t agreed that it wouldn’t turn me inside out for the fun of seeing all the living colors blend. I hoped that my surviving this was implicit in our understanding. At that moment, I wished we’d talked about this just a little more.
And then the demon was there. He was enormous. It was impossible that he fit in the space defined by the center of the pentagram, but he was there, he didn’t cross those lines, and yet I could see that he was huge. I felt his will, his power, as my mind was drawn in to the layers of darkness that seethed, that emerged, fell away, and erupted again, as though another universe lay open before me, and I had only to step in to understand it all. I felt my panic rise, as every hair on my body stood on end and signaled that I should run, run now, run very fast away. I stiffened with fear, I let my panic show, because this, too, was for my audience.
Just when I thought he could grow no larger or he would somehow collapse the tiny space I stood in, and the whole theater, and perhaps the city as well upon himself, the form coalesced, and seemed to kneel before me.
“YOU SUMMONED ME!”
He roared, and the sound seemed to come as much from inside my head as from the being before me. It reverberated in the air as though sound itself could hold a shape in the darkness, drawing meaning and form out of my mind, and it was angry. Panic rose in my body. I braced myself against the assault of sound and fury, and held my ground.
“Yes—”
“YOU SWORE YOU WOULD NOT!”
“I did, but—”
The shape that whirled within the darkness within darkness, emanating from a deeper darkness beyond, coalesced into a form that seemed to suggest a head, which bent in my direction, the eyes flaring like distant red suns in the grip of a massive solar storm, his face in a rictus of fury.
“YOU GAVE ME YOUR WORD! YOU SAID I WAS FREE!”
I bent backwards, aware of the edges of the circles I stood between, knowing that it would be better not to find out what would happen if I was forced over either of the concentric lines. I looked him in the eyes, holding myself up even though my legs, like my voice, were shaking. “I did give you my word. You are free,” I managed to pronounce, just as the face coalesced for a brief moment in front of me, and one suggested eyelid dipped in a wink, and the eye flared a heavenly, remembered blue. I held on to my fear so that my overwhelming relief would not show, as the pandemonium of sound mounted, and the figure rose like a towering storm above me.
“THEN WHY AM I HERE?” it demanded, and the concrete floor beneath me, and the walls of the theater trembled in the torrent of sound.
“Shut up!” I shouted, and my voice broke as I raised it, “and I will tell you!”
A silence, as though the demon was transfixed by my effrontery. Behind me I felt as much as heard the terror, the attention, the heavy breathing of the amazed audience. “Oh, shit,” someone said, very softly.
The demon gathered itself in a whirlwind of gyrating darkness, and shaped itself into something suggesting human form, over which was imposed, spinning leisurely, a depthless hole into the darkness. The human form seemed to diminish in size, while the vast dark layers it emanated from grew, pulsing, collapsed, spinning, and grew again.
“SPEAK!”
“All right. These power raisers of this great city—”
“PAH!”
/>
For a thing that didn’t, couldn’t, spit, it sure could make the sound.
“Stop that!” The form stilled itself. “The power raisers of greater Los Angeles want to know from you what you did about the World Snake. They’re still worried that it might come here and destroy the city.” I glanced back as I said this, and caught a satisfying glimpse of the whole audience pressed back in their seats, agape, figuratively if not literally, at the stage. The wind might not be blowing where I stood, but it sure was blowing them around. So much for their wards. Ha. At the top of the theater, all four bears were on their feet, in their bear forms, braced against the gale. Yvette knelt between the legs of one of them, holding on to the back of the seat in front of her.
The darkness whirled again. I seemed to be staring out into layers of reality, a being of darkness, a greater, denser being of layers of darkness, a mouth of deeper darkness from which all of this emanated, and a view as wide as a new, lightless universe, all impressed itself upon my sight at once, dizzyingly. But more than that, the sense of the being’s consciousness, the power of its will, was like being pressed by huge stones.
“I DID AS YOU COMMANDED. I TURNED THE WORLD SNAKE. I ALTERED ITS PATH SO THAT IT WILL NOT DESTROY A HUMAN CITY IN ANY TIME TO COME. I DID THIS, AND YOU SET ME FREE.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know. But they don’t believe me.”
And now the shapes all exploded outwards, and the demon’s wrath blasted out in a storm of force, that flayed senses I didn’t know I had. “BELIEVE!” a wind of other worlds screamed. “BELIEVE!” And now I felt the wind, I felt the cyclone erupt in the amphitheater. The demon’s face rose huge, its eyes red, its jaws wide. “OR SHALL I BRING ALL NON-BELIEVERS TO THE PATH OF THE GREAT SNAKE, SO YOU CAN MARK IT FOR YOURSELVES FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL EONS?”
