by N. P. Martin
“Yes and no,” Sanaka said, resting his elbows on the chair and interlocking his fingers in front of him. “Neither of our magics could undo the spell. Rlothian magic is much too dark and powerful. In fact, I’m surprised that any mortal was able to channel such magic without having their soul obliterated in the process. One can only conclude that whoever did the ritual is not mortal at all, or they have found a way to counter the negative effects of the Rlothian magic, chiefly through the symbols used on the victim I would imagine. Most of the Glyphs are protective in nature.”
I shook my head. "So not much hope then?"
“There are always ways,” Sanaka said. “I must have taught you that, at least.”
“You did, yeah. So what’s the way?”
Sanaka shook his head like he expected me to have already discovered the answer. “To counter such dark magic, you need an entity that is just as dark to do it.”
“Like a demon, for instance?”
Sanaka nodded.
“Yeah, about that,” I said, getting up and standing over by the fireplace. “I don’t really do demon summonings.”
"You are a wizard, how could you not do summonings?"
"Oh, I do, but mostly low-level spirits, not demons."
Sanaka looked confused. “Why not? Are you afraid of them?” He laughed, the way a parent would laugh at their kid when the kid expressed his fear at the monster in the closet (which by the way, existed more than people realized).
“Look, long story short,” I told him. “I lost my entire family to a demon after my father summoned one and lost control. I’ve tended to avoid demons ever since.”
“Why did you survive then?”
I sighed and shook my head. “I’m still trying to work that out.”
"Well," Sanaka said, having about as much sympathy for me as he did the first time I told him about the incident from my past. "You must get over your fear if you want the world to remember you again." He stared at me a moment. "Why do you even want the world to remember you? It doesn't matter. All that matters is that you are here now. That should be enough."
“It matters to me.”
“Why?”
“Because unlike you, Sanaka, sometimes I’m a fucking human being underneath all the wizard shit. I have friends, relationships that I want back. I'm not even in any of my old family photographs anymore. You know what that feels like? It feels like you never even mattered and that you might as well have not have been born."
Sanaka took a deep breath then let it out. "Well," he said standing, holding his sword loosely by his side. "Confronting what scares you the most is the only thing that is going to get you out of this predicament you are in. There is no other way around it." He looked at me gravely then. "There is one more thing."
Great, I thought. “I know that voice, Sanaka. You only have that voice when you’re about to impart bad news. Like the time you told me I’d have to sleep with a corpse for three days straight to enhance my Necromancy skills.” I sighed. “What is it?”
He seemed amused for a second by that bit of information like it was proof that I really was his student for the last twenty years. His smile of amusement disappeared when he spoke, however. “There is another side effect of the spell that I didn’t tell you about.”
“Christ, am I going to die now?”
"Not quite. The power of the spell is such that I'm afraid even your own soul no longer recognizes you as it gets transformed into a blank slate that no longer holds the essential essence of who you are. Eventually, your soul will will leave your body and go off into the Astral Plane, where it will remain, lost forever. No doubt the killer protected themselves against this particular aspect of the spell."
I shook my head. “I knew there was something else wrong. I felt it after the spell hit, like a light dimming inside me, though I couldn’t explain it at the time. Fuck. How long?”
"Before your soul abandons you forever? Three days at most. Maybe four. It’s hard to know for certain."
“Bloody hell! Things just can’t get any worse, can they?”
Sanaka shrugged. "I don't make the rules." Another one of his frequent sayings, usually when I was being forced to do something horrible, like lying with a damn corpse. "I suggest you get moving. Find me if you need my help."
Sanaka gave Blaze a final pet, stared at me a moment and then vanished into thin air as he teleported out of the room.
I looked down at Blaze and sighed. “How the fuck do I always end up in these situations, Blaze?”
Blaze stared silently back at me, his yellow eyes seemingly indifferent to my pain.
10
Do Or Die
IF I'M HONEST, I knew there was something else wrong with me after I got blasted by that spell—the Memory Shredder as Sanaka had called it. I felt it soon after the spell hit, like something dying inside me, or a vital part of me that was slowly beginning to pull away and detach itself from the rest of me. Somewhere in my mind, I knew it was my soul pulling away, but I hadn't wanted to acknowledge that to myself (the rest was painful enough).
The thing is, if the light of my being departed, I would become a soulless ghoul that's literally dead on the inside and no longer capable of emotion or any real human contact. I'd end up wandering aimlessly around the city like the rest of the ghouls—like the walking fucking dead—only I wouldn't feast on flesh, not living flesh anyway. Dead meat is what my diet would soon consist off. If you need to find yourself a ghoul, check the graveyards, or the bins outside the back of a butcher’s shop, or an abattoir. Anywhere there was dead meat, you could find a ghoul nearby, dispassionately munching on maggot-infested flesh, its mouth moving as lazily as a cow chewing the cud, clothes ragged and dirty, face and body emaciated, flesh pale and waxy. That was going to be me in three days if I didn't find a way to counter the effects of that goddamn spell. And even my own magic wouldn't do much good without a soul or the proper mind to wield it. Most of my magic was based on the fact that I had a soul. Soulless magic is black magic, reserved only for monsters and psychopaths, of which I am neither.
Speaking of souls, I was on the roof of the building where I lived, drinking coffee this time instead of whiskey. Above me, the sky was clear and black, and the stars were out in force. As a chill wind surrounded me, I looked ahead, past the few blocks of buildings to the winding Gadsden River that cut a slow path through the middle of the city, effectively cutting Blackham City into two halves. You had the old town where I lived (known as Freetown), with its dark and winding streets that sometimes went nowhere and ended abruptly in odd places. Then you had the other side (known as Bankhurst) where Gadsden Park was, as well as all the financial and government buildings and streets that were arranged in perfectly symmetrical blocks. As I looked East toward Red Hill, I spotted an orb of bluish light rising into the night sky. Like a mini comet, the orb had a wispy trail behind it as it shot up higher into the sky. Another soul heading for the Astral Plane before making its way to the Realm of the Dead for sorting in the Afterlife. If it even made it through the Astral Plane first that is, which was full of predators who delighted in preying upon fresh souls, picking them off the way predators pick off newly emerged turtles on a beach. An innocent soul could soon enough be pulled into the Underworld, or devoured completely by one of the many malevolent entities that haunted the Astral Plane. As in life, death and the afterlife was never easy.
I could make out the silvery ephemeral edge of the Astral Plane, much like Earth's surrounding thin blue line, as the soul passed through both and then disappeared. You could stand up here most nights and see at least a few souls make their departure from the Earthly Plane. Watching them has seen me pondering my existential future with some sadness for those making the trip. But my own soul would eventually leave to do the same in as little as three days, despite my previous expectations about some far off future date.
"Shit," I said, shaking my head, trying to think of ways out of my situation and continually coming up empty on
ideas, or at least ideas that would work. It was becoming more apparent that Sanaka's suggestion of asking a demon for help was my only option. "Fucking demons. I hate them."
“Don’t we all,” said a voice behind me.
I didn’t turn around. “Hey, Arthur.”
Arthur's ghostly form saddled up beside me. The old man used to own the building we were standing on until he died of natural causes several years ago. He was so attached to the building, however, that he refused to move on from it, and now remained there like some ephemeral caretaker. He was a short but stout black man, with a thick white beard and a surprisingly dense white afro on his head. He was seventy-three when he died of a heart attack. His son-in-law now owned the building, which Arthur wasn't happy about, but there wasn't much he could do about that as a ghost. "August, my boy," Arthur said. "How's business going?"
“Not too good,” I replied, glancing at him. “An unexpected shitstorm has happened.”
Arthur chuckled. “Ain't that always the way with business.” He shook his head. “God, I miss doing business.”
Arthur was something of a property mogul in his time, owning several other properties besides the one I lived in. "Your soul is up there waiting for you somewhere. I could take you to it. You could move on somewhere else. Babylon maybe. With your acumen, you'd thrive there." I knew I was wasting my breath. I'd made the offer dozens of times over the years, and every time he turned me down, though I still wasn't sure why.
As expected he shook his head. “No thanks. My place is here.”
“But you’re dead, Arthur.”
"Don't you think I know that?" he snapped. "I can't let that good for nothing son-in-law fuck up my business. Not after all the work it took to build it up."
Whatever, I thought. If the old man wanted to stay a ghost, that was his prerogative. I had enough problems of my own. “Maybe you can help me then.”
“If I can. What’s the problem? Your magic get you in trouble again?”
“Not my magic. Someone else’s.”
“Shit. You can always rely on other people to fuck things up.” He shook his head, probably thinking of his son-in-law, who had recently managed to lose one of the buildings he was supposed to be looking after. Word is he lost it in a card game. The dude was an inveterate gambler, much to Arthur’s distaste. “Can you fix things?” He chuckled again. “What am I talking about, of course you can. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Fix problems.”
"Other people's usually. My own, not so much."
Arthur's ghost walked right through me to the other side, and I shivered. I wished he wouldn't do that. "I'll give you the advice my father gave to me when I was starting out," the old ghost said. "He said to me, Arthur, son, the hardest solution is usually the right one. You just have to bite the bullet and get it done. Are you prepared to bite the bullet, son?"
“At this point, I could probably take a bullet quicker.”
“That bad, huh?”
“That bad.”
“Well shit, son, I don’t know what to say to you. Sometimes its do or die, but that don’t mean you can’t still be smart about things.”
"Thanks, Arthur," I said, distractedly gazing at another soul rising nearby, his words not making me feel any better. "I'll bear that in mind."
“Why you so scared anyway? I’ve never known you to be this afraid of anything.”
I turned my head to look into his partly transparent face. “Because I’d be damn stupid not to be afraid, that’s why.”
He tried to pat me on the back, but his hand went right through me, emerging out of my chest. "What will be, will be, son. Now, that shithead son-in-law of mine is gambling with my money in some back alley card game over in Milford. I'm gonna go there now so I can go all poltergeist on his ass. I think he's starting to realize that I'm haunting him now. Hopefully, he'll soon take the hint and stop gambling my fucking legacy away."
"I could force him to see you, you know. You could speak directly to him."
"Nah," Arthur said, walking away. "I'm having way too much fun haunting his skinny ass. I'll see ya, August. And remember, do or die."
“Sure,” I muttered back. “Do or die.”
11
The Mccreedy Family Massacre
I COULDN'T HELP feeling that fate had a hand in all the bad shit that was happening to me. When you avoid something for so long like I did, it was inevitable that it would one day rear up and bite you in the ass when you least expected it. Some things you just couldn’t run from, like the massacre of your whole family.
It happened back in Ireland, at the old family home in County Fermanagh, in my late teens. My family lineage was steeped in magic and occult practices. Many of my ancient ancestors were Druids and wizard’s. My father was a master wizard, my mother, a witch (nothing to do with gender, only the specifics of their magic). My siblings and I, my brother and sister both, were all adepts at the time. It was the McCreedy family tradition. Magic was in our blood. My father, Christopher McCreedy, besides being a ruthless father, wizard and businessman, was also a member of various cabals and occult organizations, all of which helped him amass a large fortune. He often used the status and leverage of those groups to further his ends while having no emotional ties, as he was essentially a loner in life. Money was a form of power for my father, and he would do many morally dubious things to further his lust for power to assuage his often rampant ego. Summoning a high-level demon to gain more power was one of those morally dubious things.
He got us all involved in the summoning, the whole family. He said if we all stuck together, we would be able to force it to grant my father access to its power. In spite of my mother's reservations about the high level of risk involved, we all took part, having no real choice in the matter.
So the summoning took place in a windowless room for a safer containment environment, absent of any furniture that might get in the way if summonings went south, which had we known what the night would herald, then furniture would be the least important thing to get in the way. The only light was from the five candles involved in the ritual. In true summoning fashion there was one placed at each of the four cardinal points of the outer summoning circle, with the fifth and final candle aligned with the aether star point on the inner circle that encompassed the containment pentagram. When the demon appeared in its true form, our collective eyes beheld the impenetrable darkness of hell, an indescribably grotesque monster that could only have been born of the Underworld.
With the help of the rest of my family, all of whom were terrified of the truly most frightening thing we'd ever seen, my father was able to contain the demon at first.
But then something went wrong. To this day, I'm still not sure what. Somehow, my father lost his control over the demon, probably because the demon itself was too powerful to be contained by any Earthly adept, no matter how skilled that adept was. Some powers just cannot be contained, and to try would have been folly, not to mention supremely arrogant, which my father unfortunately was.
The demon—a huge black skinned thing with strange appendages all over its weirdly misshapen body and dozens of eyes on its nasty looking face—broke free from the demon trap and proceeded to fly around the room at terrific speed, a trail of thick darkness behind it as it went about massacring everyone in the room. My mother was killed first, followed by my dear brother and sister and then finally my father. As carnage so horrific that I could barely keep my eyes open to play witness to the preternatural theft of their lives did play out, the screams of my family were an unbearable litany of echoes that will haunt my dreams and nightmares to the end of my days. The demon ripped them each apart, spraying blood and guts all over the room, an unearthly roar never ending from its mouth as it went about its wanton destruction. In a matter of seconds (or at least that’s how it seemed to me) my entire family was dead. I was left sitting on the floor, cowering and shaking, hardly able to take in what was happening around me, the smell of blood causing me to vomit over myself.
>
Then the demon came hurtling toward me, its supremely terrifying face hovering right over me, so petrifying that I couldn’t even look at it without wanting to go insane. I shut my eyes and waited for the inevitable. And waited. When nothing appeared to be happening, I finally got the balls to crack open my eyes and saw that the demon was gone. All that was left was a room full of carnage, the remains of my family.
To this day, I have no idea why the demon left me alive. But whatever the reason, I left Ireland for good a short time later, after burying what was left of my family in the plot on the grounds of the house. I went to London first, changing my name from McCreedy to Creed, partly to try to forget that I ever had a family at all, partly because it was the seventies and the Troubles (the understated title for the civil war playing out in Northern Ireland at the time) were in full swing and Irish people in London were looked on with suspicion back then. A year later I left London and spent the next five years traveling the world before landing in America. And here I still am, thirty years later, the memory of my family’s massacre as fresh in my head as the night it happened. Even more so now that I had to consider summoning a demon myself.
I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of one of the bedrooms upstairs, surrounded by books on demonology when I got a call from Leona. “Hey,” she said when I answered. “Forensics came back on our victim.”
“Yeah?” I said, my voice distant. “You find anything?”
“You all right there, Creed? You sound strange. Something wrong?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“No need to be so sharp. I’ll call back if it's a bad time.”
I sighed. "No, don't. You want to meet for a drink? I know a quiet bar nearby if you're about."
“It’s barely noon, Creed.”
“So what? I’m Irish. There are no bad drinking times.”