by Randall Pine
“He was going to set me free,” Neil whispered, his lips quivering with rage. “What did you do to him?”
“We sent him home,” Simon replied. He was halfway up the stairs now. “You can relax, Neil. He’s out of the basement now. We sent him back to hell.”
Neil howled with rage. It was a startling sound, more animal than human. It stopped Simon on the stairwell, but Virgil kept going, and bumped into him with his broken arm.
“Ow!” Virgil cried.
Simon frowned. “Sorry.” He turned his attention back up to Neil, but the boy had disappeared. “Uhh…Virg?”
“What?”
“Where’d the psychopath go?”
They climbed the rest of the stairs. It was dark on the second floor, and they couldn’t quite tell how many doors there were leading off from the landing, or how many lined the hallway that led to the bathroom. “Well, this will be a fun game,” Virgil said. He nodded toward the first door on their left. “Should we see what’s behind Door Number One?”
Simon eased open the door and peeked inside. It was a closet, full of mundane cleaning supplies. “Nope.”
“Door Number Two, then,” Virgil said. They crept along to the next door. It, too, was unlocked, and Simon pulled open the door.
“Holy…” His voice trailed off as he gazed around the room.
“Okay,” Virgil said, looking in over Simon’s shoulder. “This must be Neil’s room.”
There was no bed inside, just a few blankets piled into a mound in the corner. The wooden floorboards had been painted black, and there was a huge pentagram drawn on the floor in white chalk. A podium stood in the center of the five-pointed star, with two thick, black candles flanking an old, dusty, leather-bound book. The flames from the candles threw long, quivering shadows across the floor and softly illuminated what appeared to be splotches of dried blood. There were some clothes scattered around the room, a few candy wrappers, and half a dozen empty Starbucks cups. But it was otherwise empty. Neil wasn’t inside.
“I think maybe Neil should talk to a therapist,” Virgil decided.
And then, even though there was no one else inside the room, the door knob turned, as if someone was twisting it on the other side. Then the open door began to push itself closed, with enough pressure behind it that Simon was nudged out of the doorway as it shut. Through the flickering candlelight coming through the slit beneath the door, they could see the shadows of two legs stretching across the floor.
“There’s someone on the other side,” Virgil whispered, his eyes wide with horror.
“No,” Simon replied, suddenly as white as a sheet. “There’s not.”
Virgil reached up and turned the knob, just to test it.
It was locked.
“I don’t like this, I don’t like this, I don’t like this,” he murmured in short, scared bursts.
Then there was the sound of a muffled woman’s scream from a room further down the hall.
Simon broke into a run, and Virgil hurried along behind him, babying his injured arm. They reached the room where the woman was screaming. Simon tried the knob, but of course, it was locked. He pressed his ear to the door. “Abby?” he called out. The screaming got louder.
“Stand back,” Simon said to Virgil, and loud enough for someone else on the other side of the door to hear. He took a step backward, then raised his leg and kicked at the door as hard as he could.
Simon’s foot slammed against the wood, which barely budged. A shockwave of pain shot through his knee, and he hobbled down the hall, cursing under his breath and hissing away the pain.
“Who are you, Steven Segal? You can’t break down a door!” Virgil chided him. “Use your key!”
“The key’s not going to open every single lock!” Simon shot back.
“It’s worth a try!”
Simon retrieved the key from his psychic vault and jammed it into the door’s lock. He turned it, and the door fell open.
Simon took a second to marvel at the magic key. “I take back all the bad things I said about you,” he whispered, giving the key a quick kiss before returning it to the vault. Then he sprang through the door, throwing up a shield with his right hand just in time to catch a blast of dark purple magic that shot at him from across the door. The force of the impact knocked him back, and he hit the corner of the door before tumbling to his knees.
Virgil dove in behind Simon, and he fired a shot blindly into the corner of the room where the blast had come from.
“Virgil! Don’t!” Simon cried.
Virgil’s shot sailed above Neil’s head and exploded through the wood paneled wall. It had missed Abby’s hand by only inches.
“Whoops,” Virgil said.
The whole tableau came into focus then. They were in a study, an oak-paneled room with bookshelves on two walls filled with old, leather-bound books, most of which were coated thickly with dust, as if they hadn’t been touched in decades. There was a massive wooden desk near the far end of the room; Neil was crouched behind it, using it for cover. Abby was shackled to the wall behind the desk, her wrists secured by two thick, iron cuffs that were attached to heavy chains that disappeared into the wall. Her feet were chained, too, and a piece of duct tape had been affixed over her mouth. Her eyes were wide with terror.
“You’re not supposed to be in the standing room!” Neil screamed. He reached up from behind the desk, and they could see that he was holding some sort of stick in his hand. He aimed it at Simon, and another bolt of purple lightning shot out of the end. Simon dove out of the way, and the lightning tore through the bookshelf behind him, burning a hole in one of the books.
“Neil! Stop!” Simon urged, throwing up his hands to show that they were empty of any weapon or magic. “You don’t have to do this! Asag is gone!”
“Do you have any idea what I went through to bring that demon into this plane of existence?” he demanded. “What I had to sacrifice?!”
Virgil looked over at the redheaded boy, confused. “Wait, you summoned Asag? On purpose?”
Neil didn’t respond. Instead, he threw a magic blast blindly back toward Virgil, and it missed him by almost a whole foot.
“I was going to sacrifice your friend to appease Asag, and to make him strong enough be unleashed on Templar,” Neil snarled from behind the desk. “He was the next step in the Great Plan, and you’ve ruined everything! So now I’m going to kill her as punishment!”
“Neil! Listen to me,” Simon pleaded, taking a step closer to the desk, his hands still held up. “You’re sick. But we can help you get better. Okay? Let Abby go, and put down the wand, and let’s leave here together.”
“I have to go to the hospital anyway...we can drop you at the psych ward,” Virgil suggested. Simon shot him a sharp look. Virgil tilted his head and mouthed, What?
“I’m not sick. I’m chosen,” Neil said. “He chose me! Out of all of them!”
Simon furrowed his brow. “Who chose you? Asag?”
Neil snorted. “No, not Asag. Asag was a tool. A puppet! But I was chosen, and now you’ve ruined it!” He leapt to his feet and fired three shots at Simon. Simon threw up shields with both hands, barely spreading them out in time. The shields absorbed the magic, pushing Simon back half a step.
Abby pleaded at Simon with her eyes. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Simon’s heart broke seeing her that way. He couldn’t imagine what she must have been feeling.
Feeling...
“That’s it,” he whispered.
Neil whirled around, pressing the wand to Abby’s throat. She flinched at the touch of it, and she squeezed her eyes shut. “Now you get to watch her die!” Neil shrieked.
“Virgil,” Simon instructed, “ball.” Virgil nodded and closed his eyes, reaching into his psychic vault. Simon shifted his attention to Abby. He called out her name, and she opened her eyes. “Abby,” he
said again, connecting with her eyes. “Pre-frontal cortex.”
Abby’s eyes grew large with understanding. She nodded, almost imperceptibly.
The tip of Neil’s wand began to glow purple. “You’ll watch, and you’ll always know that you were the one who was responsible for her death!” Neil screamed. “You, and your meddling, and your pathetic excuse for magic! I was the chosen one! I was chosen!”
“Virgil!” Simon shouted. “Now!”
Virgil gripped the Skee-Ball ball and rolled it on the floor. It spun forward, picking up speed as it rolled beneath the desk and rocketed upward, slamming into Neil’s shin. Neil screamed and doubled over in pain, hitting the floor and bringing the wand with him. Simon powered up his manacle and aimed it carefully at Abby’s wrist. He fired a beam of magic; it found its mark and melted through the chain links. Abby reached her newly-freed hand up to her lips and pulled off her glove with her teeth. Then she reached down with her bare hand just as Neil was rearing back up, preparing to fire his wand at Virgil. When he stood up, Abby touched his cheek, and she absorbed his feelings…and she sent them back into him, magnified, and then pulled them out again, and then sent them back again, magnified even more, back and forth in a closed loop of emotion that overloaded Neil’s prefrontal cortex. His eyes rolled up into his head, and he moaned as he fell over onto the floor, unconscious.
Virgil stood up. He let the wooden ball roll back into his hand. He glanced suspiciously down at Neil’s prostrate body and said, “So…what just happened, exactly?”
Abby reached up with her free hand and ripped the duct tape from her mouth. She winced at the pain of it, and pressed her lips together a few times to get them working again. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, giving Simon a grin, “but I think we just became heroes of Templar.”
Simon exhaled, and he allowed himself a smile. “Yeah,” he said. “I think we just did.”
Chapter 27
“So the standing room was a room where he chained people to the wall so they were forced to stand?” Llewyn asked.
They were sitting around a campfire in Llewyn’s forest room, the smoke from the flames curling up toward the ceiling and disappearing through a hole he’d opened in the roof with a wave of his hand. The ceiling was now black to match the night sky outside, and dotted with stars that twinkled like the real thing.
Virgil held his hands out over the fire and nodded. “Yep.”
The wizard frowned. He rubbed his chin. “Then do I want to know what the sleeping room was?”
“Actually, the sleeping room turned out to just be a bedroom,” Simon replied. “We found Mrs. Grunberg sleeping soundly. It looks like maybe Neil had her under a sleeping spell. She doesn’t remember a thing.”
“Hey, thanks for sending the manacles, by the way,” Virgil said. “And that iron arrow or whatever.”
“The Brimstone Spire,” Llewyn said, nodding. “A powerful weapon against black hearts.”
“We appreciate you using some of your magic to send it to us,” Simon said, almost guiltily.
But Llewyn waved him off. “It was what needed doing,” he said. Then he added, “You’re welcome.”
Abby frowned at the fire, lost in her memory of the evening. “She sure looked confused when the police took her grandson away,” she said.
“Who? Mrs. Grunberg?” Virgil asked. “Yeah. She did. But to be fair, so did the police. You’d think they’d never arrested a practitioner of the dark arts before or something.”
Llewyn snorted. “They had better get used to it. When the boy summoned Asag, he opened a door. Asag blocked that door, while he was in this realm. Now that he’s gone, the door is wide open.”
Simon looked up, alarmed. “Are you telling me we just left a door to hell wide open in Mrs. Grunberg’s basement?”
But Llewyn shook his head. “Not in the basement. And not a door to hell, exactly. But the impermeable wall between our reality and another, darker dimension has been breached. Asag was just the beginning. The first big incident. Demon Zero.” He pulled out his flask and drank deeply. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and added, “Many more will come.” He furrowed his brow, looking troubled. “Many, many more.”
“More demons?” Abby asked.
“Not just demons. More dark creatures of all sorts.” He looked up at the three of them, his blue eye blazing behind its patch. “You did good work casting Asag out. But make no mistake; our war against the darkness is just beginning.”
Simon squired a little in his seat. “Llewyn…we saw something strange inside the house, with Neil. It was…a shadow, I guess. The shadow of a man, but there was no man there. It was standing next to Neil’s shadow. And then at one point…it slammed a door on us.”
“It didn’t want us in Neil’s magic room,” Virgil said, nodding his agreement. “And it was strong. Strong enough to push us out when it closed the door.”
“I saw it too,” Abby confirmed. “More than once. It was almost always by his side. Or at least, by his shadow’s side.”
“And Neil kept saying he’d been ‘chosen,’” Virgil reminded them. “But not by Asag.”
Llewyn made a quiet grunting sound and took another drink from his flask as he considered this new piece of information. “Perhaps the first general in the evil’s army has already arrived,” he said cryptically. And he didn’t elaborate on what he meant when they pressed him.
Virgil took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, blowing the air out loudly through his lips. “Well. Guess it’s a good thing I’ve got Gladys, then.” He tossed the Skee-Ball ball a few times into the air.
“Gladys?” Abby said, raising an eyebrow.
“That’s what I named her,” Virgil said proudly. “Doesn’t she look like a Gladys?”
Simon glanced up at the silhouettes of the trees against the starry sky. The air was still, the fire was warm, and the sounds of crickets and owls willowed in the background. All in all, looking back at the last six years since Laura’s death, Simon couldn’t remember ever feeling so at peace.
Except for the whole “imminent evil rising” thing.
“So what do we do now?” he asked, watching the sparks from the fire pop in the crisp evening air.
“Personally, I’d like to get back to Skee-Ball,” Virgil said. He shook his head ruefully. “That Nerf gun…it mocks me.”
The rest of the group ignored him. “Your training will continue, if the experience with Asag and the boy hasn’t put you off,” Llewyn said.
Simon glanced over at Virgil. “I’m in if you are,” he said.
Virgil grinned. “I’ve actually been thinking about that,” he replied, suddenly jumping up to his feet. He began to pace excitedly around the fire. “You don’t have a job, and now that Papa Wizard over here keeps me in cash, I don’t need a real job, either.” Llewyn bristled at the new nickname, but Virgil pressed on: “Given that we’re the heroes of Templar now, and that our wizard powers are only going to get bigger and cooler, I think we should hang our own shingle.”
“What does that mean?” Simon asked warily.
“You know, start our own place! Our own…I don’t know…evil-fighting firm, or whatever! We’ll be like private investigators, but with magic powers, and who cast evil demons back to hell! I even have a name for us.” He held up his hands and moved them through the air, as if picturing the name in lights. “Dark Matter Investigations.”
“Huh. Simon Dark and Virgil Matter.” Abby adjusted her glasses on her nose. “It actually seems too convenient to not use it.”
“Hm. I like it,” Llewyn decided.
“And he’s our big investor, so now we have to do it,” Virgil teased. He sat back down, perched on the edge of his seat, and looked earnestly at Simon. “What do you think?” he asked.
Simon considered the question. They had cast away a serious evil when they defeated
Asag, there was no question about that. There was no telling how many lives the demon might have claimed. Or that Neil would have claimed, for that matter, if he had been allowed to keep at his dark work. Even if they had saved one life, it had been worth it.
He thought about all the lives they could save if they truly dedicated themselves to the craft of magic, and to protecting the people of Templar. He wondered how many Lauras there were in the city, how many innocent people who wouldn’t have to die or disappear because he and Virgil had taken up the watch. “What do I think,” he repeated, looking into the warmth of the flames. He sighed. “I’ll tell you what I think.”
Virgil tented his hands in front of his mouth and peered out nervously between his fingers. “Yeah?” he asked, practically bouncing with anticipation.
Simon let a wide grin spread across his face.
“I think Dark Matter Investigations is officially open for business.”
Simon and Virgil will return in:
Scorched Earth
Book 2 of the Dark Matter Series
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About the Author
Randall Pine is a Midwestern author who was raised on comic books, The Twilight Zone, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He lives with a very encouraging wife and with two cats who have not yet revealed any dormant magic powers they might possess. But hope springs eternal. Demon Zero is his first novel.
Visit him online at RandallPine.com