by Adam Dark
“Stop it!” Peter cried, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Constantine gazed at the helpless boy kneeling by his side, smiling down on Ian as a proud father smiled down on his most accomplished son. Then his head jerked toward Ben, Peter, and April, and his gaze felt like a knife plunged into Ben’s gut. “You are birds with tiny wings, my dears, trying to bat away the storm when you should be darting off to seek shelter from it.”
A low hiss came from Ian’s open, distended mouth. His throat bulged, and some black thing pumped its way up from within his body to flicker along the edges of his lips.
Ben had to do something before whatever the old man now conjured from Ian finished what it was meant to do—which was most likely kill them and trap them here forever, if he had to guess. He clenched his fists and hoped his voice came out the first time with the strength he needed. “Ebra,” he shouted. “Servant of Pamersiel.”
The green-hued demon bound by the crystal at his feet turned from Constantine to stare at Ben with those hateful yellow eyes; then he grinned. Ian writhed where he kneeled on the floor, twitching and flailing, his head jerking side to side as if he’d found the will to fight what consumed him.
‘You can’t…’ The voices swarmed inside Ben’s head, rising into a deafening roar. ‘Not this one. He won’t obey. You have to—’
“As the one who summoned you,” Ben screamed, trying to drown out the voices with his own, “I command you to pro—”
He saw everything happen all at once, as if every possible angle were captured by unseen cameras and combined together on a giant screen, frozen in the smallest fraction of a second. April released his arm as if it had burned her. Peter’s head tilted upward toward the chandelier above them. Constantine’s eyebrow lifted in condescending amusement. Ebra raised a single, warning finger. Ian’s entire body trembled, then flickered as if projected onto a screen. The black, churning mass fighting its way up his throat froze entirely, and from the center of it rose the awful green glow of that other world—the same but so different—through which the demon Ben summoned had dragged him. This light lifted from Ian’s desecrated body, gathered itself into a churning mass in the air, and shot toward Ben like a bolt of lightning. It hit him square in the chest and blew him backward. Then there was nothing.
20
Ben’s eyelids fluttered when he tried to open them. The most agonizing pain he’d ever felt in his life when that green light shot through him had now vanished, though the memory of it left him gasping for a relief he’d already been given. Finally, he found control of himself and opened his eyes to see the same living room in the same terrible house on the hill. Only this time, all of it echoed that sickening green stain.
He gazed around him, everything still the same but not the same at all—some other place, some other realm. Most noticeably, the living room—maybe even the rest of the house—was entirely empty. Peter and April were gone, as were Constantine and Ian. Even the demon Ebra and the messenger bag with the crystal on the drawn symbols did not exist here. That made him even more wary of what the hell was going on right now, though he hadn’t thought he could distrust this place any more than he already had. When he took in the rest of the living room, the empty stairs, the darkened hallway above, he turned to glance down the hall beside him toward the kitchen and found the vase—which had fallen to shatter soundlessly on the floor when the demon Ebra had brought him here the first time—now sat on the side table, whole and untouched. Then he remembered to breathe.
A groan of annoyance rose from behind him, and he jumped before spinning around to see Ian picking himself up off the floor. “What—” Ben took a startled step backward. This was the Ian he’d seen in this green-tainted un-world, entirely himself, not chained and mangled by a massively evil spirit draped in some old man’s flesh.
The twelve-year-old’s brown eyes traveled up from Ben’s shoes to his face as Ian stood and straightened; though they were a little muted and gray just like the rest of him, they were definitely his eyes. Then Ian drew his head back and folded his arms across his chest. “Are you trying to get yourself killed, or are you really just that stupid?”
Ben just stared. That was all he could do; he didn’t know whether this was like his trip here with Ebra or if that green light had actually killed him. Was this the afterlife, then? That would really suck.
“Come on, Ben,” Ian said, shrugging with his arms still folded. “We have enough time to talk, at least. Wanna tell me why you thought it was a good idea to bring another demon here with you?” This kid looked like Ian—had his voice and even some of his mannerisms—but he didn’t talk like any seventh-grade boy Ben had ever met. He sounded like some bitter, jaded adult who had seen too much and wished he hadn’t and didn’t know how to deal with that except through sarcasm and more than a little spite. He sounded like Ben.
“I don’t…” Ben shook his head, trying to put all the pieces together, but there were just too many, and he had no idea which ones were missing. “Peter and I found that book,” he blurted, “and then I dreamed about you again. You told me I already had the key. So we thought you were talking about the book.” Stumbling over this ridiculous explanation felt like trying to explain to his mother why he’d come home in the dark two hours later than he said he would before she immediately pegged the entire sorry excuse for one big lie.
Ian frowned. “It is what I meant. But I didn’t tell you to summon a lesser demon and try to use it against the Guardian.”
“You didn’t tell me anything.” Ben’s anger cut through the words, because that was what it boiled down to; he had no idea what he was doing, and there wasn’t anyone he could go to for answers. Not even Ian, who had been so real in his dreams and so dreadfully real kneeling beside Constantine and now just as real standing in front of him, completely whole again.
Ian, still so young despite the passage of time, stared at him just like he had when they’d both been kids. Then his mouth twitched into a smirk, and he rolled his eyes. “You’re right. I know I didn’t give you much to go on, but I didn’t really have the time to write out complete instructions and mail them to you. And I thought you’d be smart enough to figure it out.”
A biting laugh of disbelief burst out of Ben. “I thought I did figure it out. I learned how to summon a frickin’ demon.” This was ridiculous. Why was he standing here arguing about this with the kid he’d thought had been dead for the last eleven years? Why did any of this matter?
“I’m gonna take a wild guess and say you just skimmed the opening part of the book and went with the first thing that looked like it might work.”
Ben opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again to just say, “Well, yeah.” Ian cocked his head, as if he knew Ben had more to say. “What else do you wanna hear? You kept telling me to hurry up and get to this… possessed deathtrap of a house. It’s not like I had the time to sit around and read an instruction manual from the 1600s. For fun.” He didn’t understand why he felt the need to explain himself—or why he was apparently so insulted.
With an apologetic smile, Ian rubbed the back of his neck and looked away. “That’s fair. It’s been a little hard to keep track of how many days it’s been for you.” He sighed. “I’ve been here a long time.”
Feeling a little guilty now for his outburst, Ben shrugged. “Yeah. Eleven years.”
Ian’s head slowly turned toward Ben again, and his wide eyes bored into him. “No, Ben,” he said, his voice heavy with an overwhelming remorse. There was fear there, too—the kind that waited silently beneath the surface, growing everywhere, but never once filtering away. “It’s been way longer than that.”
Ben swallowed. “What do you mean?”
“Okay,” Ian said. “This is gonna take a minute to explain. Lucky for us, we have plenty of minutes. I hope.”
“You hope?”
Ian’s eyes flickered back and forth across the ceiling, as if he calculated something or could find whatever signs he needed in
the crown molding at the top of the high walls. “Yeah, we’re fine.” He turned briefly to step sideways toward the living-room wall radiating green, then sat on the floor again and crossed his legs. “You can sit.”
Ben looked behind him at the empty house, the warped stairway, the silent glow everywhere with no sign of anyone but the two of them. “What about—”
“They’ll wait. Come on.”
So he did, coming to sit a few feet from Ian against the wall. He looked down at the boy who wasn’t really a boy anymore and felt both really old and way younger than he’d been the last time he’d seen Ian alive. The weirdness of it flopped around in his stomach; this was so unreal.
“This place,” Ian said, staring up at the sprawling, empty room, “is… an afterlife, kind of. Not this house. I mean the green world. Same thing as the real world, mostly. Just a little different.” Ben rolled his head against the wall to look at Ian. “Okay, pretty different. It looks the same, same buildings and roads and landscape. But… falling apart.”
“Yeah, I got that.” It was the only way that felt right to tell Ian he was listening.
“Right. There are two pretty big differences. Time doesn’t work here the way it does in real life.”
Ben snorted. “Sounds like we’re in an RPG.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Apparently, videogames hadn’t evolved while Ian had been here, if they even existed at all. Probably not.
Ian glanced at him from the corner of his eye but gave a dismissive smile. “I’ve been here long enough to have pretty much gotten down the difference. It changes a little, but not by much, and not very often. A minute out there is something like two days in this realm.”
“That’s… that’s insane.”
“Yep.”
“So you’ve been here…” Ben tried to run the numbers in his head, but he’d barely passed any of his math classes with a low-C average.
“Something like thirty thousand years, give or take a millennium.”
Ben laughed. “You’re kidding.”
Ian’s smile vanished, and the glare shooting up from his brown eyes was so intensely serious, Ben thought his heart had stopped. “I’m not.” It was more of a warning than anything else.
“Okay.”
Ian looked away again, apparently satisfied enough with Ben’s response that he didn’t feel the need to explain further. “So there’s the time thing, which took some getting used to. Then there’s the fact that this place, this different dimension, doesn’t really cross over into the real world, for the most part. Think of it as the spirit realm, if that makes it easier. People die, and who they were when they lived comes here. Either they leave when they wrap up what they came here to do. Resolve some unfinished business. Or they’re just… here. Forever.”
“This is Purgatory.” Ben didn’t know why that was the first connection he made; he didn’t even believe in Heaven or Hell or God.
A hesitant hum came from the boy sitting next to him. “Sort of. Except for there are things here that have never lived an actual life inside a human body. Things that… always have been and always will be. They try to get out. Some of them do. Then they have their fun and are always drawn back here.”
“Like demons and stuff,” Ben confirmed.
“Yeah. The one you brought with you into the house… I’ve seen him a lot. He doesn’t try that hard to leave this realm, but he never passes up an opportunity to screw with people.”
That was pretty obvious now, Ben thought.
“And there are others. Spirits, I guess, not so focused on torturing and killing people for fun. Some of them want to help. Some of them just… are. Honestly, I thought you would have brought one of those with you. They’re in that book too, you know. Not all of them, but at least a few that could have actually helped you more than Ebra.”
Ben clenched his eyes shut; he was an idiot not to have at least tried looking through the rest of the book to pick the best name listed there. “So Ebra wouldn’t have actually protected us from that—Constantine, I guess?”
It looked like Ian was trying to hold back some pretty wild laughter at Ben’s expense. “Definitely not. There are only a handful of spirits stronger than Ebra, but the Guardian’s one of them. You basically just tried to command a loyal servant to turn on his own master.”
“Okay,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “Mental note to read all the options for commanding spirits.”
Ian shook his head, but a silent chuckle escaped him. “If we’re breaking it down into good versus bad, it doesn’t really matter. They all come from right here. This realm.” Ian pointed to the floor beneath them. “And they always come back.” He looked up at Ben again and frowned. “But you’re the only person I’ve ever seen here who’s actually still alive on the other side.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” Ben wanted to ask why he had to be the special one—how he could even do this apparently impossible thing in the first place—but Ian beat him to it. “It took me a while to figure that one out. For a long time after… well, I guess after you and Peter got out and I came here, I saw you sometimes. Just glimpses of you and your life. All the crap you went through. And the voices.”
Ben’s heart leapt into his throat.
“You’re not crazy.”
“I know that.” Ben rubbed his hands down the sides of his face.
“They weren’t just random, Ben. Or demons getting inside your head and trying to actually make you crazy. You were hearing other spirits here wanting to get out.” Ben dropped his hands into his lap. “Like the spirits that need help to finish something. When they realized you could hear them, you kind of turned into a big deal.”
“Oh, I’m popular with dead people. Awesome.” He bobbed his head, trying not to completely freak out.
Ian laughed. “Yeah, kind of. That doesn’t happen very often. But they didn’t know what they were doing, and neither did you. It must have been pretty rough.” Ben just nodded; he couldn’t talk about that part right now. Not here. “I wanted to figure out what was going on. Maybe help you, if I could.”
Ben closed his eyes; he couldn’t have been more ashamed to hear that Ian had been trying to help him, from this place, when all Ben had wanted was to get as far away as he could and just forget about the whole thing.
“And I… uh… I guess I found myself a new teacher,” Ian added. The grimace twisting the boy’s mouth made Ben really hesitant to ask who that teacher was. “The Guardian’s probably the most powerful… thing I’ve seen. And it’s been in this house for a really long time.”
The hairs on the back of Ben’s neck prickled and stood on end. “Ebra called you the Acolyte.”
“I know.”
“So, what? You’re like an apprentice?” Ben leaned away, wanting to jump to his feet and run.
“No—”
“Next in line to start murdering people and ruining their lives?”
“Ben, stop.” Ian reached out to put a hand on Ben’s shoulder, and the flashes of alternating heat and cold in his touch almost made Ben black out. But it did what Ian wanted. “Just listen. The Guardian isn’t really something we can fight or defeat. Not directly. That would be like trying to boil an entire ocean over a campfire.” Ben’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and Ian finally let go of him. “It’s so used to being that powerful that it basically ignores everything else. It has no idea that I’ve been watching and listening. Learning. I’ve had a long time to learn, right? At this point, I might even know as much as it does. Maybe a little more, in some ways. And it definitely helped that I’ve been stuck in this house with it the whole time.”
“That’s not you,” Ben said, trying to reconcile the image of the kneeling, eyeless Ian—his jaw dislocated like a snake’s as he knelt beside Constantine—with the boy sitting next to him now, who had both his eyes and his tongue and looked completely normal except for the gray tinge shadowing him.
“It is me,” Ian replie
d. “And it isn’t me. I don’t really know how or why, only that that’s just the way it is. That Ian… he’s like a puppet. The part of me that matters came here.” Ben must have looked painfully confused—which would be accurate, to say the least. “You don’t need to understand it either, Ben. Just know that that Ian will be there for as long as it takes before the Guardian gets bored with him. That Ian’s never getting out.”
“But you can?” This was what he wanted to hear; this was the whole reason he’d dragged Peter and now April into this demonic beast’s lair. If he could get this Ian out—his spirit, at least—it would make everything worth it.
“I think so,” Ian said. “So just listen. We don’t have a lot of time left.”
“I thought you said we did.”
“Yeah, and it’s almost gone now.” Ian shrugged. “I figured out why the spirits here could talk to you. All the voices. The reason I could finally slip into your dreams and how Ebra was able to bring you to this other realm.” Ben felt like the world was tipping. “That night, Ben, when we were all here together, you almost made it out. You shouldn’t have been able to, but something slipped in the Guardian’s hold while we were in this house. You stepped halfway through the door, didn’t you?”
Ben had to clear his throat twice before he could speak, remembering that night and wondering what would have happened if he hadn’t decided to go back to his friends. “Yeah.”
“This house is like a portal, and the Guardian controls it. The spirits who want to leave—mostly the demons, I think—can get from this realm to the real world through the house. As long as the Guardian allows it. I don’t know how you managed to step through the wall that cuts this house off from normal time and the rest of the world, but you did. You literally had one foot in the real world and one foot in the spirit realm. And part of it… stuck to you.”
“You’re telling me I’m a portal…”
“A really tiny one.” Ian pinched his thumb and forefinger together to better illustrate his point.