by Adam Dark
He felt it on the back of his neck first, like someone whispering onto his skin through a block of ice. Then the open page of the notebook Peter had left out for a practice run with his straw-quill fluttered and flipped over. They glanced at each other. Ben felt like he probably looked angry, or some variant of resentful; his brows had drawn so close together that he had an instant headache. Peter looked like a kid about to jump off the high-dive, and he nodded for them to go again.
The words came faster this time, and a burst of piercing cold hit that spot on the back of Ben’s neck again. His hair lifted and ruffled, the bottom of his t-shirt blowing against his stomach. The crystal on the center of the messenger bag and the Table of Solomon drawn there rocked once, twice, then tilted impossibly upward until only its sharpest point remained on the leather, as if someone had suspended it between two magnets.
Something dark shimmered in the air above the table, and when they finished the invocation they’d repeated, Peter pointed to the next part of it laid out in The Lesser Key.
“‘I conjure and powerfully command of you, Ebra, by him who said the word and it was done. And by all the holy and powerful names of god and by the name of the only creator of heaven, Earth, and hell and what is contained in them. Adonay, El, Elohim—’”
The form darkened, stretching outward toward the floor and ceiling and coalescing again into a shape somewhat humanlike and definitely not.
“‘Elohe, Elion, Escerchie, Zebaoth, Jah—’”
“So many names.” The voice was like howling wind, raging fire, filling every space inside Ben’s apartment and his head with words no louder than casual conversation.
Peter nearly jumped backward, but he pointed to the place in the book where they’d left off, and Ben took the hint. “‘Tetragrammaton, Saday. The only lord god of the hosts, that you forthwith appeareth unto us here in this crystal stone in a fair and comely human shape, without doing any harm to us or any other creature—’”
“That is quite enough.” The words lashed out from the dark, wavering form like a whip, sounding remarkably as if this spirit they’d conjured—whether it was Ebra or not—had lost its patience with a child who’d been throwing tantrums all day.
Peter flipped the page in the book, then slammed his finger down on the next part. Ben glanced briefly down at his own shirt and the symbols drawn there, having forgotten for a minute which one was which. He pointed to the second one just below the first and read.
“‘Behold the Pentacle of Solomon, which I have brought before your presence—’”
The spirit hovering over the impossibly suspended crystal cackled, the sound grinding through Ben’s head like squealing tires. He flinched.
“Amateurs.”
Ben’s ears popped, and then The Lesser Key of Solomon went flying from Peter’s hands to thump against the front door and land in a heap beside his backpack. “What now?” he asked, but Peter just stared silently at the darkened form now taking on something more of a solid shape.
“You request of me what you desire, of course. Didn’t you read the book?” That awful laughter pounded again in Ben’s ears, like someone was trying to break into his head with a battering ram made of ice. A wave of change filtered over the human-shaped thing, almost like tipping dominoes spilling over from its head to its feet, which now touched the ground on the other side of the table.
“Are you Ebra?” Ben asked, amazed that his voice somehow didn’t resort back to its broken, fourteen-year-old squeaking.
The man standing before them grinned. “Sometimes.” The spirit looked like a normal guy—mostly. He wore a jacket and slacks that could have been from any era in the last two hundred years, his feet left bare. A green tinge colored everything—skin, hair, clothing, the air shimmering around this spirit. Some invisible breeze lifted his longish hair up and back, blowing ceaselessly without sound; Ben didn’t feel any of it anymore. But the thing’s eyes were the flat yellow of traffic control signs—the ones warning of a series of dangerous curves just ahead. Yeah, that felt about right. Those eyes stared at Ben above sometimes-Ebra’s grin, then they blinked vertically, like a reptile’s sliding membrane, and flickered toward Peter. “You two have no idea what you want, do you?”
For a minute, the guy really seemed to have called them out on it. Then Ben remembered why they’d picked this specific spirit from the book, and at the same time, Peter almost shouted, “We want protection from evil spirits.”
Ebra’s entire arm waved in an exaggerated flourish. “So naturally, you chose to summon one.”
Crap. There was that little catch. But the crystal still balanced impossibly on its sharpest point, and the demon or spirit or whatever didn’t come at them or attack them or try to destroy them—at least, not physically. Ben had a feeling this thing took a lot of pleasure in screwing with people’s heads. The Lesser Key had called the spirits under Pamersiel “very false and not to be trusted in secret things”. Yeah, good thing they didn’t have any of those.
“You’re bound by the crystal,” Ben said, feeling like he was trying to argue the finer points of how seemingly unfair the rules were when he’d lived with his parents.
As if just noticing the Table of Solomon drawn on the messenger bag and the crystal suspended upon it, Ebra glanced down and spread his arms wide. “So I am.” Then he looked up and grinned. “For now.”
Peter let out a strangled sigh at that not-so-subtle reminder of how much they didn’t know and how precarious this whole thing was. Ben silently willed his friend not to fall apart on him now.
“Can you tell us if there are malicious spirits here right now?” Ben asked, thinking this was the best direction to take the conversation that had suddenly started to feel like an exchange of threats—maybe empty, maybe not.
“No.”
Ben blinked, then turned slowly to meet Peter’s equally confused stare. “You can’t tell us—”
“There are no malicious spirits. Not here. Not at this moment.” Ebra folded his greenish arms and raised an eyebrow—a surreal doppelganger of a trickster genie.
“That’s a relief,” Peter whispered. It was only partially sarcastic.
Ben bit his lip, then figured what the hell. They’d already come this far; he might as well embrace his new role as a novice wielder of demonic magic. Even if he was pushing his luck more than a little. “I’m sorry that I can’t take your word for it without any proof.” He really took it over the top with a thick splatter of mock reverence, but it was the only way he could even keep going without calling off the whole thing, which he couldn’t do before they got any useful information out of this demon. Fake it ‘til you make it. Act like a stuck-up jerk until the confidence comes rushing in. Yeah, he’d take that any minute, now.
Ebra cocked his head to the side. “No need to apologize. I wouldn’t trust me, either.” The demon paused, then placed both green hands on the table—strategically without touching the drawn Table of Solomon and the crystal at its center—and leaned forward. His eyes moved in that awful, reptilian blink again, then he glared at Ben and took a long, deep sniff. Ben cringed, and he fought so hard not to turn away from the yellow gaze that felt far more like a personal violation than the voices in his head ever had. “If I didn’t know any better, Robin’s son, I would think you’ve done this before. I have told you the truth, and I can show you, if you like. There is another who wishes you to see.”
Ben clenched his fists. Now they were getting somewhere. “Show me what?”
“Ben…” Peter whispered.
Ebra dragged his green-hued tongue across perfectly straight teeth, drawing in a disgusting hiss. Then he straightened and pointed to the suspended crystal. “You are the one who has compelled me to do your bidding. You have but to say the word, and I will reveal these things to you.”
Peter must have tried to clear his throat, but it sounded only like a choked grunt. “We don’t know what he—”
“Okay,” Ben said.
All t
he air was sucked out of him, as if he’d been placed in a giant vacuum. His ears roared with something like his own heartbeat and something like a vicious sea of waves crashing right up into the sky. The walls, floor, and ceiling of his apartment fell toward him, shrinking into nothing until he was completely blind. But then he blinked, and everything was still there—but not at all how it was supposed to be.
The same noxious green that had tinged the summoned demon in his kitchen now covered everything, meaning Ben was now the only thing that looked remotely normal. His apartment was cracked, off-center, a skewed and ruined version of itself, like the building had been bombed and his one main room had barely survived. The veins of huge, jagged cracks running through the walls and ceiling burst with a disgusting kind of mold, maybe even mud. Ben knew he wasn’t the cleanest guy, but he’d never let it get this bad. A sickening green illumination spilled through the window at the other end of his living room, but it didn’t actually add any light to the place, which now had that cloyingly sweet smell of rotting flowers.
Ben’s heart pounded in his ears, and he took a deep breath. The blistering silence made it as loud as if he’d just screamed. He turned to look at Peter, but his friend didn’t stand beside him anymore. Peter didn’t stand anywhere. He was gone.
Whirling around, he realized he was completely alone in this ruined version of his apartment, except for the barefooted demon standing on the other side of the card table and smirking at him. “Where’s Peter?” His own voice sounded tinny and faraway, like he was talking into a metal tube.
“Your companion cannot come to this place,” Ebra replied, his own words having lost their visceral screech and now sounding way more normal than even Ben’s.
Ben glared at the spirit, then his eyes fell to the crystal still suspended above the drawing on his leather messenger bag. The crystal pulsed now with a muted green light, though it was still mostly white and not entirely tainted by the color of this place. And every stroke of the ink they’d made and that Peter had drawn on the leather now glowed a charred, fiery red—the only other color here and a glaring reminder for Ben that whatever was happening now still fell under some type of power provided by those symbols. He glanced down at the makeshift belt around his waist and Ebra’s seal above the Pentagram on his shirt. These also flared with what looked like fiery heat, but he felt none of it.
“Those bind me to you in your world,” Ebra said, letting out a mischievous chuckle that made the hair on Ben’s arms and the back of his neck stand on end. “Here, they bind you to me.” The demon turned his back to Ben and took one step toward the window.
Ben felt like he’d been punched in the sternum, but he flew forward, jerked by a force he’d never felt before. As if an invisible leash connected him to the demon he’d summoned, he was yanked out of his kitchen, across his living room, and out the window of his second-floor apartment that didn’t shatter or offer any resistance to his moving through it.
And at the same time, he remained exactly where he was. Nothing moved under his feet; nothing bumped against him. There was no lurch and tilt of gravity or his body flailing in movements completely out of control. Only the demon Ebra standing at the same few yards in front of him took one step after another, going nowhere and everywhere at once.
A world of green fog and garish light revealed itself, images flashing one after the other—like sitting in one of those tilting rooms at theme parks that didn’t actually move at all and watching a violently scattered 3D movie at the same time. They all closed in around him like trees bending to the ground in a storm. Then they scattered.
The parking lot of his apartment complex, the cars upturned and rusted, doors hanging off hinges. The intersection of Salem Street and Condon Circle before merging onto 95, normally so busy but now dead, deserted, the same cracks of moldy growth wrapping around the pole all the way up to the three shattered, gaping holes of the traffic lights behind it. A massive crater in the middle of Spring Street, the Shaw’s right there abandoned and empty, the huge orange-and-green sign splintered and hanging lopsided from its last remaining bolt in the wall. The church on Hardend Lane four blocks down from his high school, seemingly untouched but surrounded by the fragrant maple trees now stripped of all their leaves and uprooted from the earth to lay strewn on their sides across the yard. Tolly Road, where he’d grown up and where his parents still lived, the houses cracked and shifted into unlivable pieces, the sidewalks crumbled and smashed together in fractured mounds as if after an earthquake; he didn’t see his childhood home, but he didn’t really have the time to look.
Then came Main Street, the turn onto Wry Road, and the place he’d gone through great lengths to avoid over the last eleven years. The house from that night loomed right in front of him, the boarded shingles exactly as he remembered them and the rising, mansion-like expanse of so much terror and death as real and fresh in his memory as it had been then. Only here, this monstrous, decrepit house on the hill was in its natural state in various stages of ruin and with not another soul in sight. The front door hung wide open, nothing but darkness inside; not even the green hue of wherever Ebra had brought him punctured that blackness.
An overwhelming dread shook Ben’s bones as he moved and didn’t move toward the house; he could have screamed and struggled and clawed at the ground to get away, but he knew it would have done absolutely nothing. Ebra took one final, leisurely step, and then everything stopped.
Ben froze, staring at the back of Ebra’s nondescript jacket, knowing that if he glanced around from where he now stood in the decaying living room of the house that had ruined his life, it would undo him. His ragged breath filled the silence. Then Ebra’s head turned all the way around—at an angle impossible for people but not for bodiless spirits—and raised his eyebrows with a feral grin. The demon took one large, exaggerated step to the side, and revealed all the proof he needed.
“Ben.” It was a masked whisper of surprise, more like a final warning than a startled shock. Ian stood there just a few yards in front of him, wearing the same striped t-shirt, jeans, and untied sneakers from that night and the two dreams in which Ben had seen him again. His blond hair flopped over his eyes, which were surprisingly calm for something as unexpected and totally inexplicable as this. Where the moss-green tint of this place matched the hues of the demon who had brought him here—minus the creepy yellow eyes—Ian looked fairly normal in comparison. Only the colors were muted, grayed-out, like a photo that had been edited to dull the colors just before they didn’t exist at all. There he stood, twelve years old, looking far more ancient than he had the right to appear.
“Ian…” Ben breathed it out in a shallow sigh; this time, it wasn’t a dream. This time, he’d been taken right to his friend’s spirit, whether the kid had died that night or been trapped in this house like Ben seemed to be trapped in this eerie version of his own world. He couldn’t bring himself to say anything else, and he couldn’t look away.
Ian’s eyes flickered from Ben’s face and toward the trickster demon completing their standing triangle. His lips pressed together, and he tilted his head, glaring at Ebra as if reprimanding the creature for having brought his living friend into this dead place. Ebra let out a self-satisfied little chuckle and spread his arms wide, bending all the way down at the waist until his forehead nearly touched his demonic knees.
A massive groan shook the house, sending down a rain of dust and chipped wood from the ceiling; every particle shuddered and disappeared before it hit the ground. Ben flinched at the sound and the sudden pressurizing heat forcing itself into him from the outside. Ian’s gaze darted back toward him, and he shook his head just barely enough to be seen. “Not yet,” he whispered. The house rocked again, and the dust-thickened curtains over the large windows flapped in an unfelt gust of wind. A huge ceramic vase on a thin table against the wall rocked where it sat, then toppled over the side of the wooden stand; it shattered when it hit the floor, but there was no sound. “Two days.”
The instant the words left Ian’s mouth, the same breath-stealing thump knocked against Ben’s chest, and this time, he moved backward. Or at least everything around him moved forward, sucking him back along the path Ebra had taken him, rewinding his journey here with a muffled rush whirring in his ears. The green un-world of this place tore past him, completely unrecognizable, and in less time than it would have taken Ben to count the seconds, all of it was gone.
14
Ben choked the air back into his lungs, gasping like someone had forced and held his head underwater for too long. His legs gave out beneath him, and he crumpled right there onto the sticky linoleum floor of his kitchen.
“What the—” Peter dropped to his knees beside Ben. “Hey, what’s going on? What happened?”
Ben couldn’t even turn his head to look at his friend, gaping up at the ceiling and highly aware of how quickly and heavily his chest rose and fell around his burning lungs.
Ebra’s grating cackle came from the other side of the card table. The demon slammed his hands onto its black plastic covering and leaned over it, gleefully screeching down at Ben with wide yellow eyes, like whatever trick he’d just pulled had been exactly what Ben deserved for playing with demonic fire.
Peter’s head whipped around toward his backpack by the door and The Lesser Key of Solomon bent awkwardly where it had landed. “Shit!” He jumped up and lunged toward the card table, bringing his hands swiftly up under it to heave it over onto its side. The table hardly weighed anything, so the force behind his desperate gesture sent the thing flying upside-down, its cheap metal legs clattering against the corner of the kitchen wall. The second the crystal left its place on the drawn Table of Solomon and the leather messenger bag, Ebra’s treacherous form disappeared like that. The sound of his cruel delight cut off abruptly, leaving nothing behind but the overwhelming stench of burning hair.
Peter only stood there with his arms still raised, as if he’d just slapped someone and didn’t know either what he should do next or how the person might respond. Then he broke into a fit of wheezing coughs and fumbled in his pocket for the inhaler. Two urgent puffs later, he was back on the kitchen floor beside Ben, blinking furiously and rocking a little; Ben thought his friend just couldn’t decide if he wanted to reach out and steady himself or turn and bolt out the front door. “What was that?” Peter blurted.