The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

  “Easy, Adrian,” I said out loud.

  The sound of my own voice eased my panic. I knelt by the bed and slid the hard case out from underneath it. I set the case on the bed and opened it. I surveyed the contents. I picked out a piece of chalk that a bemused Buddhist monk blessed for me and a small pendant on a fine silver chain. Anyone who looked closely at the pendant would see that it didn’t contain a stone or a picture, but a tiny mirror. I’d cast a mirror spell on the pendant, which ought to reflect back most minor harm spells. The chalk was for the heavy lifting. There were other things in the case, more dangerous things that I might need later, but I hoped not. I’d lifted most of them off the corpses of malicious entities or made them myself. Very few of them were meant to do nice things.

  I pocketed the chalk and the pendant, along with the other half of the painkiller, and went outside. It was midmorning and the heat I expected later hadn’t arrived. The sun filtered down through a healthy canopy of leaves, which left the cabin in a soft glow. A cool breeze wafted lazily by and I tried to imagine how such evil arrived at a place that seemed so peaceful. My burn throbbed then, as if to remind me that the evil was there and I had better remember that. I cast a hateful thought at the burn and locked the cabin behind me.

  The Neon was not designed to be driven by someone with a burned back. I was grateful to climb out of it in the hospital’s visitor lot. I glanced around and saw a lot of unhappiness. Hospitals weren’t really joyous places, except maybe in the maternity ward. Most visitors arrived at hospitals because something that had been fine was suddenly going wrong. I did my best not to notice the woman crying hysterically into her husband’s shirt, or his look of shellshock. I tried not to notice the grim acceptance on the face of the middle-aged man coming out the front door as I went inside. He had, no doubt, gotten the long face from his doctor.

  I jumped into the first elevator I saw and made eye contact with no one. The potent antiseptic smell that marks all hospitals permeated that elevator. I hated that smell, because it made me think of Marcy in her awful, final hours. The doors slid open and a couple stepped off, looking apprehensive. Someone stood behind me, but I didn’t look back. The doors slid shut again and a prickling feeling on the back of my neck took hold as cold washed over me. I turned to look behind me.

  Doctor Sumner stood there. He looked fit for his age, save for a small potbelly that protruded over his belt. He had a hooked nose, large ears, and thin lips. He stared at me or, more accurately, something stared at me through him. I could feel its alien presence and its acidic anger. I knew that this thing, whatever it was, was here to threaten me. I also knew, through some basic intuition or simple experience, that it was not the real power at work. Underlings were sent to issue threats, while the boss did the important work.

  “It’s time for you to leave, conjurer,” said the possessed Sumner.

  “Oh, is it now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or what? Pain? Dismemberment? Endless cable news?”

  Whatever it was, the underling seemed to have expected a bit more awe on my part. I guess no one told it that possession was a cheap trick and only frightened the uninitiated. The doctor’s lips curled back to reveal age-yellowed teeth.

  “You have been warned. Leave. Now!”

  “Honestly, Toto, has that worked on anyone since the Enlightenment? I mean, seriously, anyone at all?”

  Fury contorted Sumner’s face. I think the underling might have taken a swing at me, but the elevator dinged. The alien presence melted away and the doctor gave me a confused look.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, blinking rapidly. “Guess I had a senior moment. Did you ask me something?”

  “I asked if you have the time,” I said, reaching out a hand to hold the doors.

  The no-longer-possessed Sumner blinked a few more times. “Mr. Hartworth, how are you feeling?”

  “Better than I was. It’s just a waiting game.”

  “Not your first rodeo?”

  “Nope.”

  Sumner shook his head and seemed to come back into focus. He checked his wrist. “You asked the time. Eleven o’clock.”

  “Thanks, doc. Guess I’m right on time, after all.”

  I stepped off the elevator and made my way down the hall. I’d made light of the underling to its face, but such a blatant appearance worried me. Demons generally trucked in secrecy and shadow. Open confrontation and warnings weren’t really their speed. I stopped outside Abby’s room and put on a friendly face. I reached into my pocket to grab the pendant and my hand brushed against the chalk. It was hot. Not the kind of ambient warmth that anything in a pocket picks up from your body, but almost too hot to touch.

  I shoved my way into the room and felt the dark magic before I registered anything else. I looked around. Paul was unconscious, lurched sideways in a chair by Abby’s bed. There was a moment when I thought he was dead, but I saw his chest move as he took in shallow breaths. I looked to Abby. She was rigid, her arms locked straight out down either side of her body, and her eyes were open as wide as they could go. Her skin was ghostly white and I couldn’t see it if she was breathing.

  As a rule, anger isn’t a good place to start from when you work magic. Anger makes you volatile, reckless, and prone to mistakes. Anger also makes you commit to things you shouldn’t and wouldn’t commit to under rational conditions. Anger, more often than not, serves as a fuel for evil, rather than good. That is why, as a rule, magic is the domain of the calm, disciplined mind. Every once in a blue moon, though, you’re compelled to chuck the rules. When some malevolent shit is using magic to murder an innocent teenager, I consider it blue moon time.

  “The hell you will,” I growled.

  I grabbed the chalk, almost hot enough to burn my hand, and ripped it free from my pocket. Even in full daylight, it glowed bright enough to see. I dove for the floor beneath Abby’s bed and then things got interesting.

  Chapter 11

  As my body fell through the open space, time slowed and twisted. Reality warped like overheated plastic and then splintered. My body continued to fall toward the floor. I stood in an empty white expanse and Marcy faced me, dressed for a funeral. I stood next to a younger version of Paul, who stared down at the graves of his son and daughter-in-law. Abby sat in a picture window and I had my feet propped up next to her. I sat at a park table and stared across a chessboard at myself. I needed to hurry. I had all the time in the world.

  The other me yawned, took a sip of coffee, and moved a pawn. “Don’t tell me you’re surprised by this. Haven’t you figured out by now that linear conceptions of time and mono-plane experiences of reality are cheap, convenient fictions?”

  I blinked at myself as I tried to make sense of the multifaceted reality. I wondered if that was how it felt to be a fly, seeing everything like pieces of some fractured mosaic.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Come on,” said the other me. “I’m you. Try to keep up.”

  I hit the floor hard and slid. I wrapped a hand around the railing on Abby’s bed and dragged myself underneath it. I looked up at the underside of the bed, searching for a flat space large enough to do what I needed to do. I raised up the chalk, pressed it against the molded gray plastic, and drew a line.

  Paul’s eyes remained fixed on the graves as he spoke. “It isn’t right. It’s not right to stand over your child’s grave.”

  I didn’t understand his pain. I couldn’t. I had no children and probably never would. It’s a lifetime commitment. Over the last few years, my commitments rarely lasted more than a week or two. Every once in a while, they lasted a month. The notion of having another human life depending on me every waking minute of every single day frightened me, not because I didn’t want it, but because I knew I would fail. I slipped my hands into my pockets and said nothing.

  Beneath the bed, I shifted my hand and started to draw another line. I felt pressure building around me, pressing against my hand and my body. It felt like something ratcheted
up the gravity to twice its normal pull. I started to sweat and my hand trembled a little. I gritted my teeth hard and forced my muscles to keep moving the chalk.

  “You should have gone,” said Marcy. “Why didn’t you go?”

  “Abby. She needed help. Who else was going to help her?”

  Marcy looked down for a moment. She lifted her face to me again and shook her head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t think you’ll survive this. I don’t think you can. I think we’ll be together again, very soon.”

  A part of me rejoiced at those words and I felt a little stab of guilt. You’re not supposed to want to die. If you want to die, it means you’ve given up on something essential to being a human being. Around the edges of the whiteness, I saw black, creeping tendrils.

  I blinked the sweat out of my eyes and finished the line. My arm was trembling. I grabbed my right wrist with my left hand, steadying it. I shifted my hand again and began the third line to complete the triangle. In the periphery of my vision, I saw the room grow darker.

  “I don’t remember my parents,” said Abby.

  She looked healthy, as if the chemo had never happened. I thought that my original assessment had been right. She wasn’t a beauty queen, but there was a wholesomeness to her that trumped those considerations. Her vibrancy, the sheer aliveness she exuded, was almost overwhelming.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Abby shrugged. “It’s hard to be sad. I know I missed something, am missing something, but it’s fuzzy. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be sad about.”

  “Family is hard,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  “Do you have family?”

  “Everyone has family somewhere.”

  I hated myself a little. I couldn’t even give the kid a straight answer on another plane of existence that might not even be real.

  It was everything I could do to keep the chalk against the bottom of the bed. Both of my arms were shaking. The gravity had intensified again to at least three or four or twenty times normal. I could barely breathe. Even so, I still found the air to be pissed.

  “Fuck you,” I gasped.

  I dragged the chalk a few more centimeters.

  “Come on,” I got out through clenched teeth.

  The chalk flared briefly and the pressure lifted enough for me to suck in a few quick breaths that gave me the spins. Damn smoke inhalation, I thought.

  The other me moved a knight out onto the board, though I suspected he was as disinterested in the game as I was.

  I frowned at the board. “Is this the whole linear versus circular argument again?”

  “It’s not that, not specifically. You’re just a bit too fond of this idea of time as rigidly linear, even though you know better. Minimally speaking, time is more flexible than you credit. I have a notion that time is actually fractal and that your current condition is a nice demonstration of how you can unpack it.”

  I stopped frowning at the board and began frowning at the other me. “So, you’re saying that I have the idea that time is fractal?”

  Other me tapped the tip of his nose. “And that it unpacks across planes of existence.”

  I closed my eyes. “My head hurts.”

  “Price of multi-planar consciousness,” said other me.

  I finished the second line of the second triangle and the pressure overpowered me. The chalk dropped away from the underside of the bed an inch, then another. I tried not to think of Abby directly above me, unable to breathe, unable to move, watching death circle like a vulture. I tried not to think of Paul, maybe sensate, maybe not. I hoped not. What could be worse than helplessly watching someone you love die a mere two or three feet away? I tried not to think of them, but I did. I found anger deep beneath the pressure and muscle fatigue. I drove the chalk back up to bed, inch by trembling inch.

  Paul turned away from the graves and started to walk. I kept pace with him.

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” muttered Paul, hate making his voice ragged. “He takes too much.”

  “Sometimes,” I agreed and thought of Marcy.

  “He’s going to take Abby from me, too.”

  I stopped and reached out. I turned him to face me.

  “No,” I said. “He isn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  I didn’t know. No one ever really knows, but I also did know. I knew something that Paul didn’t. Time is fractal. I had all the time I needed. I needed to hurry. I knew something else that Paul didn’t know.

  “I won’t let him take her,” I said.

  It should have sounded arrogant beyond all reason. For all I knew, it did sound that way. It also sounded true. The younger version of Paul looked at me with eyes far less rheumy than they would be one day. He believed me. Then again, maybe he just wanted to believe me. Maybe there wasn’t a difference.

  The room was pitch black. The only light came from the chalk, which cast just enough to illuminate the symbol I was constructing through, I was confident, nothing but unadulterated hatred and willpower. I closed the second triangle, which left a passable Star of David etched in chalk. The completion of the star seemed to push the darkness back a little and the pressure lifted enough that my hand only shook violently, rather than spastically. I pressed the chalk hard against one of the points and started to draw a circle.

  The empty whiteness that surrounded Marcy and me vanished in a howling explosion. We faced each other on a blasted desert plain. Craggy spires of obsidian speared into the amber sky like skeletal fingers. Marcy gave me a terrified look as a figure made of liquid shadow materialized behind her. I felt its hatred and fury like cloth against my body. It wrapped fingers of liquid shadow around Marcy’s throat.

  “You will withdraw your protection of the she-child, conjurer.”

  Its voice was like lava rolling over a home. It was like hail the size of softballs pummeling unprotected cattle in a field. It was like the primordial jungle in the heat of a killing frenzy. This was no half-pint messenger boy. That thing was the mind behind all the suffering of a teenage girl. I felt its power crashing around us. I was a flea screaming impotently at the descending foot of a woolly mammoth. I knew it and so did the demon; the demon that had wrapped its vile hand around Marcy’s throat. Around. Her. Throat.

  “You will withdraw or I will end this one forever.”

  The demon wasn’t issuing idle threats. It had the power to do it. If it chose to, it could shred her living soul. For Marcy, there would be no afterlife or rebirth, just literal soul-rending pain and then nothing. She would cease to be and I’d have to watch it happen.

  Five versions of me screamed the same thing at the same time. “No!”

  “Help her, dammit!” Other Me bellowed.

  “You can’t let it do this,” said Paul.

  “You know how,” said Abby.

  I dropped my feet from the picture window and leaned toward the girl. “What do you mean?”

  Abby looked at me then and her eyes were angelic fire. “Enochian.”

  I closed the circle around the star and completed the Seal of Solomon, one of the most potent protective symbols known to lay practitioners. The Seal ignited in silver light and I heard Abby start breathing frantically in the bed above me. The me under the bed sucked in a breath as the pressure vanished. The danger wasn’t gone, though. The room was still pitch black.

  On a blasted desert plane, a silver Seal of Solomon ignited in the sky above us, spinning like a pinwheel. The demon screeched in pain. It started to lose some substance. The light from the pinwheel symbol boiled away the liquid shadow bit by bit, but not enough. Marcy jerked in pain and let out a garbled cry of pain as the shadow thing’s hand clamped down hard around her throat.

  I had to act. The fire-eyed Abby was right. I did know how, but it was beyond dangerous. The Enochian alphabet granted the practitioner access to divine might. It was also approached with extreme caution by master sorcerers who were way beyon
d my skills. Angels possessed as little patience with dabbling mortals as demons. They were equally quick to punish the foolhardy. If I did nothing, though, the outcome was unthinkable. I prayed to whatever deity watched over fools and wayward warlocks and started scrawling on the underside of the bed again, left to right around the Seal of Solomon in angelic script. The script ignited in golden fire.

  On the blasted plain, I heard a sound like wings the size of creation itself beating behind me. Great clouds of sand whirled past, each grain burning like a tiny ember. The blazing sand ripped through the liquid shadow. It screamed and the noise was something so obscene that my mind refused to register it, instead telling me that everything had gone silent. Something landed behind me with the force of a boulder falling from a clifftop. The blasted landscape fell away and once again I faced Marcy in white emptiness. A hand large enough to wrap itself around my head and glowing pure, divine white settled on my shoulder.

  “You’re insane,” said Marcy, but with a little smile. “You need to call Helena.”

  “You know about,” I started to say, more than a touch guilty, but she cut me off.

  “You’ll need her,” insisted Marcy.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Go now,” said a voice made of aching perfection.

  Fractal time repacked itself and reality collapsed down to one plane. For a single moment, the room remained in darkness and then light pierced it. The darkness imploded and I heard dozens of car alarms screaming bloody murder in the parking lot outside. I couldn’t swear to it, but I had the impression that the too-perfect-for-sanity voice said one more thing.