by Greg M. Hall
istake
By: Greg M. Hall
Copyright 2011 by Greg M. Hall
This book may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided this book remains in its complete original form and proper attribution is given the author.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.
Traffic Control (Action)
Closure (Fantasy)
City of Light (Fantasy)
Stunted (Fantasy)
Easy Money (Fantasy)
Rick’s Hostage (Horror)
The Gig (Horror)
My Pal The Bug #1: For They Know Not… (Sci-Fi)
My Pal The Bug #2: The Haunted Drug Lab (Sci-Fi)
The Water Peddlers (Sci-Fi)
That Stupid Kid (Literary)
Harry Barker didn’t look in a lot of mirrors. There was nothing there to even hold his own attention. He’s the guy who can sit next to you for a three hour flight and escape your notice in the terminal ten minutes after you landed. Medium height, a little chunky, some gray sneaking into his thin hair in places. The same square wire-frame glasses he’d been wearing since sixth grade. Taste in clothes leaning toward beiges and grays. If you met him, it’d take half a minute for something more interesting to get a ‘nice to meet you’ out of your mouth and send you on your way.
So Harry would be the last guy you’d expect to summon a demon.
This was on one of his numerous business trips. The city doesn’t matter, but it was probably Dallas. He found himself in the Residence Inn just off 35E not too far from Love Field quite a bit at the time. But the city didn’t matter since Harry was never into sightseeing or touristy stuff, despite leaving the satellite office at five every afternoon and often staying through weekends. Stepping out, even to go someplace that might interest him like the Sixth Floor at the old Schoolbook Depository meant he'd have to find parking, be on constant lookout for muggers or any other suspicious types, have just enough cash to be prepared for the unexpected but not enough to get him into trouble if he lost it... It just wasn't worth the effort to him.
So he once again found himself on the bed, watching TV, with nothing good on, unable to bring himself to shut it off. Tonight he’d settled for a rerun of America's Funniest Home Videos, almost so dull he considered changing the channel, a feat requiring the gargantuan effort of moving his right hand two feet to the night stand to retrieve the remote. Instead, he opted for the simpler task of drumming his fingers on his knee, in an odd rhythmic pattern.
If the next few seconds had happened to you or I, we’d wonder if some unseen force had a hand in it. The trigger was the phone ringing right as a spider lowered itself from the ceiling on a thin strand of silk.
A hidden camera, had one been planted in the room, would have recorded a guaranteed winner for Tom Bergeron. Harry's legs flailed out at the sudden trilling, a muffled oop escaping his mouth. The phone rang a second time, and as he put it to his ear, the spider landed. Like he’d been poked with a red-hot fork, Harry did a whole-body recoil with an unmuffled OHGAAW!
He swatted at the tickle on his forehead, erupting a clammy, gooey sensation of liquid arachnid on his skin. He grunted something like huah before remembering someone was hearing all this. He managed a somewhat shrill "Hello?"
An attractive female voice: “Oh, I’m sorry—wrong number.”
From the other end, you’re not supposed to hear a phone get hung up like it had barf smeared on it, but somehow that’s what it sounded like to Harry.
He let out a sigh and swung his leg off the bed. He needed to get to the sink and wash off the spider, and if he scrubbed hard enough he might also make a dent in the embarrassment that clung to him.
"What do you want?"
He whirled around, jumping off the bed, bumping into the wall. A creature, not more than a foot tall, slouched on the little round table in the corner of his room. Its skin had the bluish tint of suffocation; blue-black hair stood in a shock on the top of its head, while more covered its body from the stomach down. Its features were sharp, with nose, chin, and ears that looked capable of puncturing steel. Several needle-like teeth poked haphazardly from its mouth, as dangerously capable of tearing flesh as the claws at the end of each of his eight fingers and the two talons on each foot. It glared at him with a pair of coppery, slit-wide eyes.
Harry's bladder, which had been doing so well at the whole continence thing since he was three years old, let the evening's mineral water go with a buzzing numbness from his knees to his gut. Pictures of the creature leaping with the speed of a grasshopper to lay open his throat danced through his head.
"You summoned me, didn't you? Whaddaya want? Man, it’d better be good, because I was right in the middle of something with my old lady, and if I don't get some soon, I'm gonna get blue"—he glanced down at himself—"ah, bad example. But you get the picture, doncha, slugger?"
Harry's jaw, located somewhere around the middle of his chest, slowly rose as his wits returned. After all, a person can only be in shock for so long, and the thing was talking, not eviscerating.
The impish blue thing tilted its head. "OK, buddy", it croaked with a voice that was a demented cross between Porky Pig and Patrick Stewart. "I can see you didn't exactly expect the incantation to work. Or hell, maybe someone played a fun little joke on you by saying it was a campfire-lighting spell. But, whatever: you've summoned me, and the Universe has its rules, so, intentional or not, here I am.” He plopped to his rump on the table and folded its legs into themselves like a pair of switchblades. “What you’ve got to do is think of a boon you wish me to grant. Then I'm gone, you're rid of me, and I can get back to what I was doing. And, buddy, I’d better get back to what I was doing while there’s still a chance to salvage the mood."
Harry began participating in the conversation with the same smooth delivery he had with attractive women. "Uh... I... Whut?"
Had the creature’s eyes not been metallic, they would have rolled to the back of its head. "Ooh, Boy." He dejectedly propped his head in his hands.
It only took five minutes—which, in the grand scheme of things, turns out to be nothing to a 40,000-year-old demon—for Harry to piece together his first intelligible question. "How did you get here?"
"You summoned me, brainiac. You did recite the words OOP-OH-GAWW-uhuhgguhUH!, while enacting the mystic movements with the arms and legs, like so?" It flailed around for a couple of seconds, concluding with a hearty slap to its head and a subsequent wrist-flail.
Harry's head bobbed slowly up and down. “Well, yeah, I had this bug or something land—”
"So," continued the demon, "You've just cast what we demons know as a Class IV summoning incantation. But I don’t want to bore you with the techie stuff. You want more proof?"
Harry again bobbed his head.
"Sit down here, buddy, and learn a spell. It's okay; I haven't eaten human flesh in hundreds of years." He guffawed and hopped off the table with a grasshopper leg-snap. After a flawless triple somersault in midair, the creature landed on the television and clambered to let his legs dangle over the screen. Harry noticed that although some commercial was showing on the lower half, the upper half of the picture tube was now snow. The demon rolled his neck and held his hands out.
"Now, repeat after me." He began making odd swaying motions with his shoulders and, wiggling his thumbs, he made rhythmic sniffling noises. Within ten seconds, a glowing sphere grew between his thumbs. As soon as the sphere was roughly half a foot in diameter, and as bright as a 100-watt light bulb, it burst, and a frog jumped out
and smacked on the floor. It hopped around twice, and disappeared in a puff of pink smoke. "There, now you try it."
For some reason, maybe because he was already seeing a blue-skinned demon sitting on his television, Harry did not really care if the frog ruined the carpet or not.
"Okay," he said, "but don't laugh at me."
He began repeating what the demon had done, albeit much more jerkily and with a great deal less enthusiasm. Just when thoughts that this little creature was pulling a real good one on him started to surface, a small glow began to form between his hands. It increased to the size of a marble, then imploded on itself and quickly disappeared.
The demon said: "Hey, that's not too bad, for a beginner." Harry almost smiled. "Now you have the general idea. Magic exists, but it's far too complex for most people to stumble across. You humans at one time had a better handle on the whole process, when you were more in tune with nature and less into yourselves. All of the knowledge was pretty much wiped out in the dark ages, because The Church, the all-time ultimate racist organization if you ask me, convinced everybody that we were the bad guys."
"You mean you're not, uh, from Hell or anything like that?"
The demon flung a wild cackle into the air. "No... Not at all..." he managed between guffaws. After regaining his composure somewhat, he