by Ramy Vance
“I think I got something,” he muttered.
José clapped his hands as he smiled, his shining teeth beaming out from behind his grisly beard. “Fuck, yeah,” he exclaimed. “That’s what I’m talking about. What do you have for us, kid?”
“Uh…I’ll possess my familiar and pass through the Dark One’s defenses as one of their own.”
José’s smile instantly faded. “You want to switch places with your familiar?” he asked.
“Yeah. Fred’s an eldritch demon. He’d easily be able to pass for one of the Dark One’s lackeys.”
José shook his head. “Exactly. He’s an eldritch demon, and you want to give up control of your body and get in his head.”
“Uh, if it gets Beth back, yeah. I don’t see what the big deal is. We just switch places for a while.”
Diana stepped forward, waving her hand. Her face looked as if she were contemplating life and death. “Hold on, it is a big deal,” she interrupted. “The only reason that Fred exists as he does within you is because of a shit ton of magical defenses and safeguards. He can’t completely possess your body without risking severing his tie to you. Fred is dependent on you to maintain his own existence outside of the Garden of Familiars. If you step into Fred’s mind, you’re going to sever those safeguards. You won’t have any control over him. He’ll have free reign. If he wanted, he could lock you in his mind for the rest of eternity, and you wouldn’t be anything other than an afterthought, a ghost of a feeling that he could repress. He could erase you from existence. That’s what you’re giving him the power to do.”
“What do you mean, erase me from existence?”
Diana took a deep breath and pushed her glasses back. “We had a MERC try something similar years and years ago with an eldritch creature. At first, it seemed like a good idea. They were almost chummy. Once the mission was over, though, the eldritch creature pushed the MERC back to the furthest recesses of his unconscious mind. He, in essence, wiped the MERC from the face of the earth. No body. The little bit of his mind buried under a fucking demon. And that was that. There was nothing we could do about it. He literally ceased to exist. That’s what you’re talking about risking.”
This was all information that Fred had managed to leave out of his casual suggestion. Suzuki searched for Fred through their connection but felt nothing. Either the imp had no feelings about what was being said, or he was doing everything in his power to conceal it from Suzuki.
“The god that the vampires were trying to resurrect, that god was an eldritch creature. Do you know exactly what an eldritch being is? Or did you get suckered into picking one up as your familiar without having the possibilities explained to you?”
Suzuki flushed with embarrassment. He had never thought to ask. He’d heard the term from reading different books and playing different campaigns, but he’d just assumed that Fred couldn’t be as bad as any of those fictional depictions. He had been a familiar in a garden, just like all the rest. But maybe someone had mentioned something…
“An eldritch creature is an ancient,” Diana said, breaking into Suzuki’s train of thought. “They used to be gods. They existed before dragons, before worlds. They floated on the outskirts of reality, fighting their petty wars in delusions of grandeur. They believed themselves to be something great. But just like anything else, they eventually fell. The only difference is that they have a chip on their shoulder about it. And they’re all waiting for a chance to make themselves glorious again. Eldritch creatures were the first to give themselves over to the Dark One. They practically lined up to serve him. That’s the kind of creature that you’re suggesting that you give your body over to. Is that what you want to do?”
Suzuki didn’t know what to say. He’d wondered why Fred always spoke to him with such disdain. He’d assumed that it was due to a superiority complex. Nothing had prepared him to find out his body was host to an ancient creature that might betray him as easily as one would sit down for breakfast. “Is there another option?” Suzuki finally asked.
No one answered.
“I’m getting Beth back,” Suzuki said. “I don’t care what I have to do. I’m getting her back.”
Suzuki felt José’s eyes digging into him. He couldn’t meet them. He looked at the ground and balled his fingers into a fist so tight that it drew blood in his palm. “She’s…important,” Suzuki whimpered. “The most important. I don’t care what I have to do.”
José nodded. “Guess that solves that. Suzuki will let Fred out, and the demon will pose as part of the Dark One’s forces. We’ll all do recon on the outskirts until Suzuki finds out where Beth is. Once he lets us know, we move in hard and fast. We get Beth and her friends out and then we get out. Sound good?”
The silence of the MERCs was almost deafening. “So how do I do this?” Suzuki asked.
Diana shrugged her shoulders as she turned to regard the trees behind her. “That is between your imp and you,” she spat.
Suzuki turned his thoughts inward and directed them at Fred. You heard all of that, right? he asked.
Fred slithered out to meet him. They connected through time and space as if they were staring each other in the eye. Yes, Fred hissed. I heard their doubts.
So how do we make this happen?
Just allow me.
Suzuki wasn’t sure about that. That’s it?
Fred nodded. Yes. That’s it. Submit.
Suzuki imagined himself sitting in a tree, his hands wrapped tightly around a branch. Beneath him was a darkness that he had never seen. He stared down into it. A sickly, warm air floated up from the darkness. It felt as if there were something foul and evil slinking about in the dark, wrapping itself around anything and everything it could get its body near.
One finger relaxed, then the next. Suzuki let go. He imagined himself falling into the dark chasm that was Fred.
Suzuki did not know how long he fell. He lost track of everything. He felt his body dissolving, each and every atom individually exploding and disappearing. There was a song, somewhere in the distance. He thought it might be Beth singing, or it could have been him screaming. Whatever it was, he felt himself fading away.
As Suzuki’s body drifted away, the air in the clearing changed. It fumed with the scent of sulfur and a gray cloud of smoke floated above Suzuki’s body as it broke into a billion pieces and drifted away. A scaled leg stretched out of the black smoke. An arm quickly followed, then there was a pop and a gelatinous mass of pus and cracked lizard skin fell from the cloud onto the clearing’s grass. It shook and gyrated until it hardened.
Then it shattered, Fred’s whole body spilling out onto the ground.
The imp stood.
He was about five feet tall, with ram’s horns that curled around the back of his head. His whole body was an unnatural red. Each scale on his body moved individually, as if a wave rocked through his skin. His eyes were deep and menacing, older than the dragon’s and more devious. A snarling smile rested on his face as he stood to his full height and let out a small plume of fire from his writhing lips.
“Ah.” He sighed. “The realm of flesh and blood. How long it has been since I have smelled the sweet scent of life?”
Fred took a step forward. His eyes widened as he lost his balance and fell flat on his face. He tried to lift himself, but his arms were too weak. Instead, he lay there, shifting his head to his side, coughing a small spit of flame. “It humbles me, but…could someone help me up?”
The MERCs stared for a moment in surprise. Finally, Sandy leaned forward and helped prop Fred up. It was hard to tell whether Fred was grateful.
“This…this is new to me. It has been some time since I’ve had a true body. I don’t remember being so wobbly.”
Diana knelt next to Fred. She whipped out her wand and pointed it at him. “Where is he?” she asked.
“The boy?”
“He has a fucking name, imp,” Diana snarled.
“As do I.”
“What is his?” Diana
demanded.
“Suzuki.”
“All right, Fred. Where is he?”
“Orienting himself. I will not let him get lost. Please, give me a moment, and I will retrieve him. Then we will find his precious Beth.”
It was dark. There was nothing ahead or behind. No top or bottom. Suzuki could not see his body. Nor could he feel it. He stared ahead, only remotely aware that he needed to see to stare. He wasn’t certain where he was. If such a place could even be called “being.” The closest thing that he could remember was floating, like maybe down a stream.
A river, perhaps. He tried to bring the memory forward.
There was a river. It had been cold when he first entered, but after a few seconds, his body got used to the feeling. He wondered how he could ever have thought it was cold before. There were people all around him. The river wasn’t too wide. When he looked ahead, he knew he could swim to the other side of the riverbed. To his left, past the large group, there was a steel tower that people had climbed on. They were taking turns jumping off while the ones in the river cheered and laughed.
A man was floating beside him. He recognized the man, but he did not know why. There was some meaning that this man held in his gaze as he stroked his beard and sipped his beer, smoking a cigarette and lazily watching the sunrise.
Suzuki could taste the water on his lips and smell the barbeque from a few feet away. There were dogs everywhere, barking and playing. Suzuki looked down at his hands.
They were smaller.
Unarmored.
If someone were to attack him right now, he’d be defenseless, but he felt like that was okay. No one would pull such a stunt in a place like this. There was too much relaxing to be done.
The man sitting across from Suzuki threw a rope from his rubber innertube to the shore. It slipped over a tree branch, and the man used the rope to pull himself closer to the shore as he grabbed Suzuki’s innertube and brought the boy along with him. And that was what Suzuki was; he could tell now. He was a child, much like the other children running and playing in the bed of the river or near the volleyball courts. Why wasn’t he playing with the other kids? The children seemed to having so much fun.
Once they had gotten to the shore, the man rose and tossed his beer can into the trash. He came back to Suzuki, wading through the knee-deep water. “You should go play with them,” the man encouraged. “They’re having a lot of fun, aren’t they?”
Suzuki looked at the kids near the volleyball court. They didn’t look real. The more he stared at them, the more they quivered and waved like a heat illusion. One of the children looked at him with bright red eyes. The child’s lips were curled in a snarl. “I don’t like those kids,” Suzuki whimpered.
“You gotta start getting out there, Suzuki. You can’t just hide back here with me all the time.”
“I’m not hiding. I don’t like them.”
“Why not?”
The children at the volleyball court were screeching at each other. They had sprouted wings and they were flapping them violently, tossing up dirt while they hissed and snapped at each other.
“They don’t look nice.”
“Not everyone looks nice all the time.”
“But what if they aren’t? What if they really aren’t nice?”
“Well, you won’t know until you go and talk to them, will you?”
Suzuki thought he had an answer for the man, but his mouth wasn’t working. He reached up and touched his teeth. They were still in his mouth. As well as his tongue, though no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get words to come out.
“Just go say hi. It’s not like they’re ogres or something.”
The man pushed Suzuki forward and he stumbled toward the children on the volleyball court. As he walked, the ground beneath him trembled. Bits of rock broke apart from the rest of the earth. A massive chasm opened up like some gaping jaw of a creature freshly woken and starving. The children at the volleyball court fell into the chasm. Suzuki whirled around to see where the man was. All he was able to see was the faintest glimpse of the man’s hands as he sank into the earth’s gash, the water of the river flowing behind him, drowning whatever may have been—and the earth kept shaking. Suzuki looked down. The earth beneath him was opening, and his mouth mimed a scream as his feet lost their footing and he fell into the darkness.
The boy sat alone in a space which was neither full nor empty. He stared at the cosmos around him, unaware of his place, of time, or of existence itself. There was light, yet it was not light.
It was almost like a noise, something loud and exploding in the distance.
This light cast no heat. Instead, a rush of cold poured from wherever the light stemmed from. The boy looked down at his feet, at his hands. They did not seem to be attached to any one place specifically. He called out to the dark void, but there was no answer.
He was uncertain of how long he had been sitting.
The cold light in the distance grew larger and brighter. The boy covered his eyes as his body was awash with white light that made his skin feel as if it were peeling back. He found himself curled in a ball, staring at the light through narrow, winking eyes. Once the waves of light passed, the boy was sitting alone. There was darkness, but it was different somehow. It was a darkness that has known light. The boy watched where the light came from, hoping for answers.
He did not know how long he sat there, but by the time he felt his eyes become sleepy, he could see that change was afoot. The light had grown large and bold. It was beginning to take shape—an elegant process. It blossomed stars which grew and fell apart until they were sucked into the light as it carved its body out of the black stardust that swirled in that void of life. And life came from this void. The boy did not know what grew within the void, but he could not avert his eyes.
Days passed. Months. Eons. Time itself was created anew, and worlds died around the bright light as it took its own form. The boy recognized something about the light and its growing body. He did not know what. He assumed that he would understand in more time. There seemed to be enough time, no need to rush. The boy stayed silent and watched while time stretched ahead of him, and one of the first lives was born to the universe. One of the first eldritch ones.
The boy felt something on his rock. A presence. He turned back to see what it was that could have pulled his attention away from the growing, breathing light ahead of him.
It was an imp. Small and red with delicate scales and wings as if it had been hatched only hours ago. The imp’s fiery eyes watched the boy. “I am surprised to have found you here,” the imp hissed as it slunk forward.
The boy did not understand. “Why would it be odd that I am here?”
“Most humans are only concerned with their own memories in this place. They dive into themselves and forget everything else around them. Yet, here you are. Watching my memories as I have watched yours, without nearly the amount of work, though. You just stumbled into them.”
“These are your memories? What are you remembering?”
“Being born.”
The boy looked at the light. He felt the cold burn from the billions of stars pouring fuel into the eldritch soul birthing itself. “Who am I?” the boy asked.
“A human. A very determined human. Perhaps the dumbest, most stubborn, determined human I have ever met.”
“What am I doing here?”
“You are floating within my subconscious. We are rescuing your friend Beth. Simple enough?”
“Beth?” the boy asked, the corners of his memory sparking.
“Yes, you’ve been yammering on about her for the last month. Have you already forgotten?”
The boy was quiet for a moment. He closed his eyes and thought hard. Beth. He didn’t have much of an idea of what the word meant. Yet still, the stars warmed around him as if they were calling her name. “Beth,” Suzuki said. “I love her, don’t I?”
“Deeply.”
“And I’m looking for her?” he asked
.
“You’ve found her. Now we are rescuing her.”
“Good. What do I have to do?”
“Remember and be present. I understand that it is confusing within me. But remember who you are, Suzuki. If you do that, we will both come out of this alive.”
The boy nodded. There were things that he had forgotten. He knew that now. Somewhere beneath all of the stars, he could see himself, staring back up at himself, two eyes perfectly mirroring each other. He was Suzuki. This was his familiar’s confusing mind. Beth was close by. The plan was going to work.
Fred opened his eyes. He slowly forced himself to sit up. He was laying in the middle of the MERC camp, all of their eyes on him. He moved slowly, the way that one moves when they’ve forgotten the language of their own body. As he tried to use his arms to prop himself up, his wings flapped manically.
Sandy knelt down in front of Fred and reached out to push him over with a dainty finger.
Fred collapsed onto the ground, hissing fire as he tried to climb back to his feet, his tail whisking back and forth spasmodically. “Human, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.
Sandy shrugged as she stood up. “He can hardly walk.” She sighed. “This isn’t going to work. No one is going to believe that an imp that can hardly even move is part of the Dark One’s army. He’s going to get us caught.”
“MERCs don’t even believe that I’m capable of not serving the Dark One. Why would any of the Dark One’s forces think otherwise.”
José nodded as he stroked his beard. “That’s true,” he said. “Honestly, he might not even be questioned. He is an imp. An eldritch imp at that.”
“Exactly. I don’t have to act evil. I am one of the oldest evils in the history of the cosmos. Now where am I going?”
“We still don’t know where Suzuki is. You could have just traded places with him. How the hell do we know you aren’t conning us?”