Summoned (24 page)

Only Dad didn’t lie down. He stood over Sean’s bed. You don’t have to babysit, Sean said. Or thought. He wasn’t sure which. He saw a last ray of sunlight streak the wall, then closed his eyes and saw the last sunlight shimmer on the surface of the water that blanketed him.…

But it’s strange. The darkness of the water seems light, and the sunlight seems dark. He’s in the bright water, many feet under, which means he should be drowning. Or has he already drowned? He’s not breathing. He lies naked in soft, cool mulm. Tentacles mingle with the weeds that wave around him; fish pluck at them curiously, and colors radiate from fish and weeds and tentacles alike, colors he can’t name. The fish pluck, and he feels it. The tentacles are part of himself. They seize a fish and taste its alien salt and sweetness. The fish wriggles in his throat as he swallows.

He lies quiet again, unbreathing but alive, until the darkness above grows light. Then, with one fierce kick, he rises to the surface and breathes. Breathing draws air through his tentacles, which tingle and smart with a thousand new scents. Most he’s never noticed before, secret smells of river and earth, yet one scent is more compelling than the rest. It’s the scent of men, of Sean himself, asleep in his bed. Yet he, Sean, is also in the twilight river, swimming toward the paleness of rising land.

He has
become
the Servitor. Somehow that’s not scary. In fact, it’s reassuring. As long as
he
is
it,
it can’t do any harm.

What’s more, he knows where he is. Glaring white, a road dives down a steep bluff to the shore of the river. A wall made of boulders dives parallel to it: the wall that separates Swan Point Cemetery from St. Joseph’s Cemetery, as if the two populations of the dead have to be kept apart. That means the river is the Seekonk, and so he’s still on the East Side of Providence, not far from Celeste and Gus’s, where his primary body sleeps and dreams him into this one.

He crawls onto a muddy path that leads to the receiving tomb sunk into the bluff. On its marble steps, he waits for nightfall, flicking out tongues even more sensitive than his tentacles. Sounds bounce off the taut drumheads in the sides and back of his head. There is another sensation he doesn’t understand, a not-quite sound as if water is rushing under his thoughts.

What he does recognize, no problem, is hunger. He clicks long talons over the tongues that flicker from his palm-mouths. As his emptiness grows, he shambles away from the tomb, easily finding his way to the trail that climbs the bluff. Night hides nothing from him. Is it something other than light that his Servitor-eyes perceive, some obscure atomic vibration that light waves actually mask? What are the unnamed colors that pulse around plants and insects, around himself? Rocks, water, and earth don’t pulse. Do the colors only come from what’s alive?

Beyond the crest of the bluff is the cemetery. He gallops past monuments, ducks under the canopies of weeping cedars where the shadow-brilliance makes it like hiding inside the shade of a lamp. Westward is the electric gloom of the city; westward, too, the human scent sings stronger in the olfactory clamor.

It occurs to him then that he’s headed to Celeste’s, to feed on himself. Definitely not a good idea. He’d better go back into the river and eat fish.

However, he gallops in the wrong direction, up the avenue of pin oaks, ginkgos, and hollies that leads to the gates. Lights (darks?) are on in the cemetery offices. A security van mutters outside. Sean skirts the building and van, running north to the boulder wall, then following the wall into the brushy wood that separates this quarter of Swan Point from Blackstone Boulevard.

Still unable to turn back toward the river, he hurtles onward. On this warm evening, under a nearly full moon, people will be out on the boulevard. He’ll be able to watch them unseen, because the cemetery stands six feet above the street, buttressed by another boulder wall. He halts behind a rhododendron thicket. Through the screen of leathery leaves, he sees the grassy path nearest the wall, and the northbound lane of the boulevard, and the central parkway. Path and parkway swarm with walkers.

Under cover though he is, the black glare of the streetlights bothers him. The shafts from headlights are worse, and the thumping of car stereos makes him hunch pulpy shoulders over his drumhead ears. A pack of girls cruises close to the cemetery wall. It’s gross how slime drips from his mouths at the smell of them. His emptiness expands. No, not
his
emptiness. He, Sean, wants to run back to the river. It, the Servitor, refuses to move from its ambush. It’s the one making the decisions, which means Sean hasn’t possessed its body after all; he’s just riding around in its skull, a parasite plugged into its senses. That watery rush beneath his thoughts? That must be the Servitor’s thoughts.

He—
it
—squats motionless. Mosquitoes don’t trouble it—what runs in its veins doesn’t interest them. An owl flies by, another silent piece of the night. Crickets and cicadas, which hushed at the Servitor’s intrusion, sing again, and a fox pads close enough to peer at it through the spindly trunks of the maple saplings. The immediate scent of human blood fades—pedestrians are getting scarce.

Good. Let it go back to the river.
Go back.

The blood scent fades, then sharpens again. The Servitor’s tentacles twitch. A man with a dog, a mini schnauzer, crosses the boulevard to walk beside the cemetery wall. He passes the clump of rhododendrons. He’ll soon be safely away. Except the man stops, lifts the schnauzer onto the wall, and clambers up after her. Is he nuts? Sure, people walk dogs in the cemetery woods. But at night?

Not twenty feet from man and dog, the Servitor sinks to all fours. Saliva spills from its mouths.

The schnauzer has been frisking around the man’s feet. Now she growls, snout pointed at the thicket. The man jerks her, bristling, onto one of the paths that ramble through the trees.

In the concealing brightness of the thicket, which must be pitch-black to the man, the Servitor is a shapeless shadow. Besides, the man’s busy dragging the dog, who sees with her nose and bursts into maddened barks. “Christ, you’ll wake the dead,” the man says, and laughs at his own lame joke.

The Servitor eases onto the path the man follows. Hunger is a universe of void inside it. The man and dog are a few leaps away, hidden from the slowing life of the street by the trees. No one will help them. One talon-slash will end the frantic barking. Another will cut short any scream from the man.

He, Sean Wyndham, is asleep at his aunt Cel’s house on Keene Street.

He, Sean Wyndham, moves with the Servitor in dream, and in dream he will feed with it.

No. Stop.

“What the fuck’s that smell?” the man mutters.

It—Sean,
they
—crouches to spring.

No. Back off!

The Servitor doesn’t spring. Instead the rushing stream of its consciousness rises toward the parasite-Sean. He shrinks from its frigid touch, but if he wants to speak to the Servitor, he has to endure the probing cold. He knows that as sure as he knows his name, which is Sean, Sean.
Back off. I’m the one that summoned you, so do what I say.

The Servitor listens. It also takes a step after the man and dog. The schnauzer yelps and rips the leash from the man’s hand. She runs deeper into the wood, with the man in cursing pursuit.

Dropping low, the Servitor gives insectile chase.

I gave you my blood. I’ll give you more. Mine!

It pauses. It listens again. Its mindstream is inarticulate, but it coils around parasite Sean like a python of ice and constricts until thought is pressed to thought in such crushing intimacy that Sean knows the Servitor’s intention.
If he promises the blood, it will come to him.

No! Go back into the river. Stay there until I come.

It is hungry.

I’ll come. Wait in the river. Just wait there.

Back at Celeste and Gus’s, Sean is asleep, but sleep shreds, and the bright night wavers. The Servitor moves, but where? After the man and dog? No, God, please. No, it’s away; it’s galloping down another path—

“Sean.”

Cool smoothness under his hands. Wood, a window frame. Sean stared out into a night that was dark, not light. Arms were locked around his chest, Dad, holding him.

Sean squirmed free. Helen stood in the open door of his room, Gus and Celeste behind her.

“It’s all right,” Dad said. “I think he was sleepwalking.”

Celeste led Sean to his bed. He was shaking like crazy, and he felt sticky cold all over. The pillow under his hand was damp. With river water?

Celeste palmed his forehead. “The fever’s broken. I guess you sweated it out, Sean.”

Sweat, that was all right. He had never really been in the river. He, it, they.

“How do you feel?”

He rubbed his belly (his own belly). “My head doesn’t hurt. I’m hungry.” Hungry? That was an understatement. He was empty. Not like the dream-Servitor was empty, though. He’d have to starve for weeks to get as savagely famished as it was.

“That’s good,” Dad said. “Come on. We can both get something to eat.”

Helen squatted in front of Sean. “We can make it a mass refrigerator raid. But, Sean, were you dreaming just now?”

It was no casual question—her gaze was uncomfortably intense. “Well, yeah.”

“What about?”

He didn’t want to tell her. But that couldn’t be right. She was here to help him. “It was about the Servitor.”

“Big surprise,” Dad said.

Helen shook her head. “It might not be that simple. What was the dream like?”

“It was freaky, superreal, but not normal real. It was real like things would be for the Servitor, you know? Dark things looked light, and I could smell and taste things people can’t.”

“You mean you experienced things as if you
were
the Servitor?”

He had to tell the truth. “I was, like, a part of it, out there in the river and the cemetery. I stopped it from killing this guy. I’m scared—what if I was really in its head, not just dreaming?”

Nobody spoke. Dad scuffed his bare feet on the carpet. Then Helen said, “I was afraid this might happen.”

18

Five
A.M.
came minus the rosy fingers of dawn. Outside in the persistent dark, wind strafed the porch screens with rain, and the gusts made restless music under the eaves. To be moving, doing, Helen started clearing the debris from Sean’s midnight feast. He’d put away two plates of linguine, then bedded down on the living-room couch. Jeremy stood beside the kitchen door, an ear obviously cocked for sleepwalking. At the table Gus and Celeste pored over Helen’s latest translations.

“I’m not sure I understand this,” Celeste said.

Gus riffled through the pages he held. “It’s a little clearer here: ‘If the sorcerer desires communion with his daemon-familiar, he must put its ichor or saliva into his own veins. Such inoculation will weave a soul-thread between the two, so the sorcerer may, even at great distance, know the familiar’s mind, see through its eyes and command it. Inoculation is simplest with those familiars made from the blood or bones of men, the f’tragn-agl or the hlaast.’”

Helen scraped strands of linguine from the plate she held, red and white, blood and bone. The plate shook in her hand.

Celeste sighed. “The way that thing mangled Sean’s wrist, we can assume he was inoculated.”

“I’m assuming the same thing,” Helen said. She scraped another plate. It shook like the first and made a telltale clatter as she slotted it into the dishwasher. “He had the symptoms Alhazred describes, fever, headache, tiredness.”

“And this says the psychic connection starts with dreams,” Gus said. “Then progresses to a waking connection, telepathy, I guess.”

“That’s when the shit hits the fan, right?” Jeremy said, sudden and sharp. Helen dropped a fork. Good timing: a little more noise to ramp up the tension.

Celeste, at least, was unrattled. “Jere, let’s not wake Sean up. What else, Gus?”

Helen slotted the offending fork, more cutlery, glasses. She heard paper rustle. Then Gus read:“‘It is perilous for a sorcerer to maintain the soul-thread indefinitely. Unless his mind is as adamantine and cold as the daemon’s, such union must end in his madness.’”

“So how does a sorcerer switch off the modem?” Jeremy said.

Gus shrugged. Celeste excused herself to get ready for work. Passing the sink, she gave Helen’s arm a light squeeze. Celeste meant to reassure, but she might as well have squeezed Helen’s throat, the way it tightened. She hadn’t come to Providence to wash dishes or to translate ominous passages and then run away from them. Her place was at the table, however useless she felt there.

Helen closed the dishwasher. She didn’t make it to the table, but she did turn to face Jeremy. “Alhazred writes that to break the connection, a sorcerer ‘sunders the soul-thread and holds both ends in his hands, to knot together again when he pleases.’ How he does that I don’t know yet. The only other way to break the psychic connection is to dismiss the familiar.”

“Which puts us back to square one. Worse. The connection could start driving Sean crazy. And, if what Sean dreamed was real, the thing could start killing people.”

Helen nodded.

“Sean ordered the Servitor off that dog walker,” Gus said. “The connection turned out to be a good thing there.”

He was offering her a baton. Helen took it and tried to run. “Right. Sean seems to have some control over the Servitor, even though he didn’t bind it.”

“Sean called it off by promising it his blood,” Jeremy said. “Same way he called it off me. It’ll come to collect before long—am I the only one that feels like we’ve got a clock ticking?”

Jeremy didn’t wait for Helen’s response. He disappeared into the living room. An armchair creaked as he sat, probably the one by the couch, next to Sean. Gus looked after him, shaking his head. Then he began collating the printouts.

Should she help? Pretend to be accomplishing something? Helen felt her throat squeeze closed again. She turned to the window over the sink. Night had paled to an aqueous gray—this dawn was all water, dank wind, barrages of rain, the prickling at the corners of her eyes. It was hard to remember the sun-drenched park where she and Jeremy had sat the day before.