Summoned (10 page)

He faced east again, toward the pinnacle of the chalked pentagram, raised his arms, and began the first incantation: “To you, Lord Azathoth, springhead of all that is. To you, I offer obeisance, and to your Soul, Nyarlathotep. Here I stand, in Fire and Earth, before Air and Water. To Spirit I call!”

He repeated the incantation three times, thrice. His voice sounded far-off. That was because of the rushing in his ears, the torrent of wind or river, Air or Water, the ceaseless roar of Fire or the slow grinding of Earth upon itself. He tossed the second pinches of Zeph and Aghar. Sweet tiger smoke enveloped him as he straightened to chant the second incantation: “Send to me—”

Sean choked into silence. It wasn’t the powders. Those drove his exhilaration higher. It was the figure condensing out of their smoke, clad in gold vestments, with gold eyes in a black face and black wings scythe pointed like a falcon’s: a vaporous angel that hovered between him and the Summer Triangle. It didn’t speak, but the forefinger of its right hand inscribed the air with a spidery silver script, spelling out the words of the incantation that would summon an ethereal Servitor, the aether-newt.

“Send to me,” Sean whispered. His voice failed again. Under the rushing in his ears, Eddy scoffed: Aether-newt, Ethernet. Proves it’s all fake, doesn’t it? Proves it’s all bullshit.

How could an angel be bullshit?

As if it read his thought, the angel smiled. It was a gentle smile, reassuring. Its eyes, tilted ovals without pupils, should have scared him, but they were reassuring, too. It raised its right hand, and the silver script rose with it, to hang above its head. The air between them was a blank slate once more.

Speechless, Sean waited. Somehow he knew he had to.

With its left forefinger, the angel scratched red script into the night, words like lava welling through the cracked crust of a flow.
I give you blood to make a Servitor in the likeness of your own attendants,
the lava words began. It had to be the variant incantation, then, the one that the Reverend wouldn’t write out, the one that would summon the blood-spawn. Sean didn’t want that familiar. The Reverend had told him it was too dangerous. Sean wanted the other, the harmless one.

Aether-newt, Ethernet, lame lame lame.

The angel nodded as if it agreed. The Reverend didn’t know Sean as the angel did. The angel appreciated Sean’s ability and strength of will. To summon the aether-newt wouldn’t be test enough.

There was sense in that. If you were going to do something, do it right.

The angel swept its right arm skyward. The silver script swirled away, thinned, vanished. Then the angel thrust its left arm earthward. The lava script descended until Sean could read it easily. Only how could he call a blood-spawn when he hadn’t brought any blood?

Like the smoke that had birthed it, the angel expanded. Now Sean could see through its serpent-crowned head and falcon wings to the Summer Triangle. The Milky Way slashed the Triangle; the Great Rift slashed the Milky Way; a silver blade slashed them both. It was the blade of his athame, which he still held aloft.

He did have blood with him, after all. He could feel it pulsing under his skin.

He couldn’t use his own blood, though. The Reverend had written it had to be the blood of an enemy.

But then, as the angel knew, the Reverend had underestimated Sean. Sean wasn’t afraid. Inside the magical circle, he never could be.

He read the lava script, and he chanted: “I give you blood to make a Servitor in the likeness of your own attendants, substantial and potent. Send it to serve me in all things, and through me to serve you, Lord Azathoth, and your Soul, Nyarlathotep.”

Sean chanted the incantation thrice. The last pinches of Zeph and Aghar went into the brazier and bathed him like incense. Pulling the blessing deep into his lungs, he watched fresh smoke waft the angel into treetops that shredded it until nothing was left but the gleam of its eyes, two gold stars within a leafy nebula. The lava script remained above the brazier, for his use.

He stripped off the stupid latex gloves and without hesitation drew the sharp edge of the athame across the palm of his left hand. There was pain, but it was unimportant. What mattered was the swift flow of blood. He clenched a fist over the brazier; he watched blood drip onto the charcoal, heard its hiss, smelled it burn. The more he squeezed out, the more intense grew a new exhilaration, a gut-deep physical excitement. In fact, he was getting a hard-on. It didn’t seem perverted, though. It seemed the rightest thing that had ever happened to him.

The lava script was fading, but he only had to chant the close of the incantation once: “Blood speed my petition. Blood make the promise. Blood seal the bargain. By your wills, so be it!”

The “so be it!” burst out of him so loud that people sleeping in the houses across the river had to start awake, so loud that cops on Post Road had to roar into the industrial park to check it out. Sean didn’t care. With the last words, he yearned and beat, not just his pounding heart, not just his aching root of a boner. His whole body shook. The lava script jittered in his vision until it had cooled to black crust. In the black of the treetops, the gold eye-stars still glowed.

Sean waited, ecstatic. The eyes waited.

Lightning flared. Real lightning. It forked through his rapture, making him stagger from the magical circle. A second flare hit him, a third, before he realized it was the flash of the camera going off as programmed. He’d been shaken awake at the best part of a dream, or at the worst part of a nightmare. Reaction shivers hit him fast, and that boner? Gone and come to nothing.

When he dropped his arms, the letter opener stabbed his thigh. He let it fall to the blacktop and looked at his left hand, which throbbed like a bitch now that he’d snapped out of—what? What had happened in the magical circle to let him slash his palm from the base of his forefinger to the crease of his wrist and barely feel it?

Sean smeared blood on his jeans getting a handkerchief out of his pocket. No great loss—his clothes already reeked of burned metal and sulphur.
He
reeked of it; the whole damn site reeked. The Powders of Zeph and Aghar, yeah, he’d be getting his money back on those. Before the camera flashes had driven him from the circle, he’d finished everything except the binding incantation, and, obviously, there was no familiar to bind. The magical circle was empty. The parking lot was empty. Not a stray cat. Not a mosquito. Not even a cicada singing, and they’d been going at it before.

Smoke still rose from the brazier, formless.

It had always been formless.

His disappointment was crazy, but so had been the way he’d felt in the circle, and craziest of all had been that vision of an angel. Angel? More like the Devil in the Arkwright House windows, the Black Man. That was where Sean had seen it before. And the Reverend had said the Black Man was Nyarlathotep. So, when Sean called him, old Nyarlathotep had shown up, Pharaoh getup and all.

As Sean wrapped the handkerchief around his palm, he hiccoughed out a laugh that sounded more or less normal. Plain old psychology could explain everything that had happened. He’d gotten himself worked up preparing for the ritual. Geldman’s Pharmacy had been gasoline on a banked fire, and tonight, boom! He’d exploded right into a hallucination. Damn, blood was already seeping through his makeshift bandage. He’d be lucky if he didn’t need stitches.

Sean fumbled Dad’s camera gear back into his pack. The time-delay photos would be a wash—they had to show him gaping like the world’s biggest dork. He’d delete them before anyone got a look, even Eddy. The grill wouldn’t be so easy to deal with, because the charcoal still burned high. Well, he’d have to leave the whole mess to cool. Maybe he’d come back for the grill, maybe not. It was half rusted out, and Dad never used it anymore.

Armed with the grill lid, Sean eased a foot back into the magical circle. No jolt, thank God. He clapped the lid over the stinking embers. Then his heel came down on something—the athame, the letter opener. The blood edging its blade made his stomach lurch, but he couldn’t leave the opener behind; Dad
would
miss that. Mom had given it to him, after all.

And what would Mom have thought of how Sean had just used the opener? Crazy to wonder that now. He bent to pick it up, and that was when he heard the stealthy slither, like a snake gliding through dry leaves.

It came from inside the grill.

Slowly, he straightened. The slithering continued, augmented by a low rattle of lid against rim, as if the whole grill was vibrating. Earthquake? Idiot. The ground under his feet was quiet. A delayed chemical reaction of the powders? That made more sense.

What would make even more sense would be to get away before the grill blew up.

He stuck the letter opener through his belt and took a step backward. If he took a couple more, then a few more after that, he could grab his pack and get on the bike. Instead he stood still, eyes locked on the grill.

The rattling stopped, replaced by a sound like briquettes tossed aside, so that they pinged against the inner wall of the grill. The lid rose an inch, releasing a swath of smoky red light. The lid fell back.

Something was moving in the grill.

Which couldn’t happen.

The lid rose, higher. Fell again.

It had to be snakes. Not live ones but those ash-snakes that grew out of tablets touched by a match, the kind they sold in fireworks stores. Ignited by the charcoal, the Powders of Zeph and Aghar were expanding into ash-cobras. Ash-pythons. Hell, ash-
anacondas
. Mystery solved. He could walk over, raise the lid, and the ash-snakes would crumble and blow away.

The lid rose and stayed up, a phenomenon to be expected under the ash-snake theory. Sean squatted to peer through the opening. He saw something white and writhing and grimaced at a new stench. Cute trick that Zeph and Aghar combined to make not only the ash-snakes but also a smell like the reptile house at the zoo. Fire-Serpents Deluxe, with Improved Olfactory Component! Maybe he wouldn’t ask Geldman for a refund, after all.

Still squatting, holding his breath, Sean reached for the lid handle. It happened then, had waited to happen, the burgeoning outward of whiteness too solid to be ash, of whiteness split by maw and lit by two flat disks of fire.

Sean backpedaled so fast he propelled himself onto his butt. Before ass and blacktop had a chance to fully connect, he rolled onto his feet and ran, too busy sucking in air to scream when his one backward glance showed him the grill tipping over and something white flailing out of it in an avalanche of sparks. He had summoned it. Unless the Elder Sign confined it to the magical circle, it would come after him.

On the service road a few of the old streetlamps put out feeble light. Sean grabbed a post to break his momentum. He spun and collapsed against flaking metal. Behind him loomed the impenetrable shadow of the abandoned factory. Beyond that was the puddle of light cast by his camp lantern, with the overturned grill in its center.

There was nothing else. Nothing moved within his magical circle.

Sean pushed back from the post. If he’d really seen the white thing (with mouth and molten metal eyes), it had escaped. He’d used the wrong Elder Sign. Worse, he hadn’t said the binding incantation. Whatever had answered the ritual was free. It might be crouching in the shadow of the factory, or it might be at shadow’s edge, ready to hurl itself across the last few yards between them, and, if Sean was lucky, all he’d see would be a blur before it clambered up his body to his throat. His eyes felt bugged out to the stalks, trying to penetrate the blackness. His ears ached to catch the click of claws. Cicadas were what he heard, and mosquitoes whining close to his head. Across the river, the dog barked again.

The barking grounded him. Sean closed his eyes, listening to the ordinary night noises, dog and insects, cars, nearer now: hum and thud of tires on asphalt, fragmented bursts of rock and rap. He opened his eyes. The only movement was in the air in front of his face, where mosquitoes bobbed.

He batted at them with his right hand. His throbbing left hand he nursed against his chest. His head was starting to throb, too, just when he most needed to think clearly. All right. He had hallucinated the angelic Black Man. He must have hallucinated the thing in the grill.

Why?

Psychology, because he had been overexcited. Or drugs.

The Powders of Zeph and Aghar.

What if they’d been laced with drugs? As soon as he’d breathed their smoke, he’d felt superstrong, he’d seen things, he’d cut himself without feeling it. Angel dust could do all that, couldn’t it? The white thing had been the last special effect of the high, and now he had a wicked headache, the hangover.

Jesus, what was with Geldman, selling crap like that? Was it a sick joke? Or a way to give customers the illusion they’d done magic? Either way, it had to be illegal. And what about the Reverend, sending Sean to Geldman?

God, Dad would implode if he found out Sean had been stupid enough to contact the Reverend, then stupider enough to buy drugs from a weird old dude who thought he was running a wizard pharmacy. Yeah, the Rev and Geldman probably did hang together, snorting Zeph and Aghar in their secret drug den behind the frosted glass. That was why they were so fucked up.

What he had to do right now was dump the powders left in his bean pots. He had to get rid of the pots, too. They were contaminated, and so were the tubes the powders had come in. To get them, though, he’d have to return to the magical circle. Sean looked up the service road to the line of modern streetlights that marched along Old Post Road. Safe under their sodium glare, he could walk home in half an hour. Come back tomorrow.

That wouldn’t work. Someone might steal Dad’s bike and camera. Plus there were the spilled briquettes. If the wind picked up, they could spit sparks and start a fire. As for the powders, a bum could come along and try snorting them, and overdose, and die, and his death would be on Sean’s pounding head.

Big deal, going back for his stuff. He remembered now. Even if a Servitor was unbound, it couldn’t hurt the summoner. The Reverend had said so.