by Frank Hurt
“Snot?” The squid scoffed. “Ectoplasm. Not snot.”
“Ectoplasm. Brilliant.”
“It’s stalling,” the cephalopod pointed with a tentacle. “If it will not teach us a game, we will rip it apart.”
“Easy, big guy.” Ember held a palm out toward the squid. She had indeed been stalling, forming a plan. That the creature called her out on this was unnerving. “You could do with a sense of humor, you know. I know so many games. I’m just trying to think of the best one to teach you.”
“The best game,” the squid’s mantle moved as though it were nodding. “Yes, the best game. It will teach us the best game.”
“Oh I don’t know, though,” Ember attempted to play coy. “The best game I know might be too challenging for you, Sentry.”
The squid hissed, “it will teach us the best game! It will teach us the best game, now!”
“Easy! Humor, remember? Bloody hell, you must’ve been a handful for the babysitters growing up. I’m starting to understand the stitches now.”
Mercifully, her ill-advised jest was lost on the confused giant squid.
“Moving right along,” Ember said. “I’ve got a game to teach you, but I’m not sure if the game will work.”
“The game will not work?”
“I’m saying it might not. Let’s find out. You stay there, and I will see if I can swim toward you.”
The squid sounded incredulous. “This is a boring game.”
“No,” Ember exhaled as she began moving her arms and legs. She was pleased to find that she was indeed able to swim through Snot Sea, albeit clumsily. “That’s not the game. Here, just wait a moment. I’ll show you.”
When she was within arm’s reach of the squid’s blinded eyes, she flipped her phone shut and tucked it into her jacket pocket. She would need both hands for this. Ember breathed in the malodorous scent of the squid and focused her attention. She called on her mana and directed it to either hand. Her hands clapped together once and before placing her palms on the squid’s mantle, she uttered a single word, “sleep.”
Mana traveled up her chest and shoulders, down her arms and hands, and into the beast’s face. The Sleep Spell departed its creator to enter the squid’s slimy flesh.
Precisely nothing happened.
“Bugger all,” Ember grumbled.
“Sleep?” The squid was unamused. “Sleep isn’t a game. It doesn’t know any games. We will rip it apart now.”
“No, no,” Ember back-stroked away from the squid as casually as she could appear, which wasn’t probably as convincing as she hoped. “‘We will rip it apart.’ I mean, really! A teensy bit of patience goes the distance. Just cool it, right? I know plenty of games. I told you, that one might not work. I had to check. It’s…it’s just part of the real game. The best game. Which, naturally, I am about to teach you.”
“No more stalling,” the squid hissed. “It will teach us a game, now.”
“Now, yes.” Ember chewed her lip again, but ceased when she tasted mucous. “Right, this game is amazing. You’ll be so glad you learned this one. I invented it myself, in fact.”
“It invented a game?”
“Yes. Yes, I sure did. It’s…um…it’s called ‘Hide and Seek.’ Yes, Hide and Seek. It’s brilliant.”
“Hide and Seek it’s called?” The squid’s tentacles danced into the darkness, beyond the reach of her phone’s dim light.
“Correct. And I can see you’re intrigued. As right you should be. Today is your lucky day, Sentry. So here are the rules: I’ll stay right here, and I’ll count to…to 90, right? No, let’s make it 190. While I’m counting, you’ll go swim as far away as you can, and hide. You’ll stay hidden while I try to find you. If I find you, I win. If I cannot find you, well, you—”
“We get your eyes.”
Ember grimaced. “Right, you…you get my eyes—”
“And we get to rip it apart and play with its pieces.”
“You’re quite helpful, thanks for the reminder.” Ember kept the phone’s dim light toward the squid so she could continue using it to orient her position in the spirit world. “Now, for you to win this game, you’ll need to swim quite far, and be well away from me by the time I hit the number 190, yeah? If you’re too nearby, I’ll find you. Your goal is to hide really, really well so it takes me hours—days, even—to find you. Do you think you can do that?”
“We can,” the squid boasted. “It will never find us.”
“Oh Sentry, I have a feeling you’re going to be very good at Hide and Seek. Are you ready? I hope you’re ready, because I’m going to start counting. Here I go: One Piccadilly. Two Piccadilly. Three Piccadilly…”
The cephalopod ballooned its body, darted one way, then changed course and shot across her field of vision in the opposite direction. By the fourth Piccadilly, she lost sight of its longest pair of tentacles. By the sixth, she could no longer hear the swishing wake the monster left behind in the slimy atmosphere.
Ember breathed a sigh of relief between counts. She used the rest of her time to locate the egg containing the soul of one Douglas Demorrett. She found it around the 175 Piccadilly mark. This time, she didn’t give voice to her thoughts. Now to get us out of here.
She oriented herself in the direction she thought the door was: up. Ember wrapped an arm around the ectoplasm-coated soul-egg, gripping it tight against her chest. The egg dislodged from whatever was keeping it suspended, which made the spirit within express his displeasure in various obnoxious terms.
Ignoring the spirit’s rude comments, she kicked her feet and scooped her arm wide, swimming through the thick atmosphere in what she hoped was the correct direction.
When she heard it, her skin crawled: it was the distant hissing scream of the Sentry. “It. Cannot. Leave!”
“Bloody hell,” Ember grunted. She kicked harder, swimming at an excruciatingly slow rate upward through the thick mucus atmosphere. The hissing scream repeated itself, this time frighteningly closer. When the third scream rang out, Ember realized she was out of time.
I hope this works better than the Sleep Spell. She handed the phone to the hand which clutched the football-size egg. Ember called on her mana once more, pulling it quickly from within her chest. As the golden ball of energy traveled through her arm, her transparent form changed from blue to yellow and then blue again. She twisted and aimed her fist, using the illumination of magic to reveal the creature propelling itself through the darkness at her.
When the squid’s giant cone-shaped mantle appeared, She flung open her fingers, releasing the gold Containment Net. The net moved in slow motion—much slower here in the Spirit World than it did on the physical plane. Hope began to fade when she realized she had timed the net’s release too soon; the Sentry would easily be able to evade her trap.
Though the giant squid was blind, it knew its world intimately. Like a spider feeling strands of its web when a fly became snared, the cephalopod felt the Containment Net’s widening presence. Never experiencing such an object before, the squid slowed its ascent, confused by what approached it.
The magic net slammed into the squid’s slick body, immediately wrapping itself around the mantle and fins. The squid hissed and squirmed, inflating its body against the net. The Containment Net kept closing around the monster, tightening unforgivingly.
Ember shouted with elation, watching the giant squid struggle against the trap. Her excitement would evaporate as quickly as it had arrived, though.
The cephalopod twisted and inflated its body, its tentacles turning in onto itself nearly inside-out to pluck at the net. Suckers grabbed hold of mesh grids and—to her horror—began tearing the Containment Net apart.
She didn’t wait to watch. Ember kicked and swam desperately, all the way praying that she would find the doorway. Her lungs burned. Her heart raced. The nausea that she managed to quell returned with a vengeance. The air tasted wormy and earthy again.
Vertigo. Worm shit. Just like when I arrived here. Ember grabbed the
phone between strokes and flipped its light back on. She searched frantically, desperate to find the rusted steel pickup door that would be her escape.
The giant squid was faster than the mage. So much faster. The cephalopod’s mantle slammed into her, sending her careening through the atmosphere. A tentacle slapped at her leg but didn’t latch on.
Ember’s shoulder tagged another floating soul-egg. She pushed off against the egg, giving it a kick. The gesture sent egg and mage in opposite directions.
The squid hissed angrily, rescuing the dislodged egg with one of its two long feeding tentacles. With the other, it lunged at Ember.
Reflexively, she flung the Tracfone at the Sentry. The dim light of the phone’s screen flickered farewell before disappearing, leaving her again in complete darkness.
A tentacle brushed against her leg. She screamed, twisting as she kicked. Her hand clawed in the dark and found something solid. Ember looked up and saw at her fingertips a faint, grey glow nearly square in shape. Within the subdued light was a wide steering wheel. She could make out the contours of her little red Ranger pickup on the other side.
The frame of the rusty, old International’s cab was covered in slime. She wrapped her fingers around the slippery surface and started to pull herself in. She didn’t get far before what felt like a barbed rope latched onto her right foot.
The squid hissed, “it cannot leave! It can never leave.” Its tentacle suckers dug into her calf and ankle, pulling her away, denying her escape.
For the briefest moment, Ember thought about tossing the soul-egg of Douglas Demorrett at the squid. Maybe it would buy her a second. She only needed a second. It wasn’t as if keeping the thing would do her any good if she couldn’t break free.
Instead, she flung the football-sized egg over her head, through the cab of the old International pickup and past the door to the other side.
The squid’s reaction was immediate and violent. “What has it done? It cannot do that! It cannot understand what it’s done!”
Ember didn’t wait for the lecture. With her other hand free, she reached into the cab and found the heavy steel steering wheel. With both hands gripping tightly, she initiated the most critical chin-up she had ever executed in her life. With her left foot she kicked at the tentacle preventing her escape.
Something slipped free. She launched herself up through the cab and out the doorway.
She landed on solid ground, her face meeting dry dirt and grass. A pool of slimy ectoplasm pooled around her, forming an unholy type of mud.
A high, thin whistle called out to her. “Ember, my god, Ember!”
Ember rolled onto her side, spitting mucus-laden mud from her mouth. She blinked against the bright sunlight, searching and finding Doug’s slimy soul-egg laying on its side against her Ranger’s front tire. “Don’t worry, Nancy. I’m fine. Nothing’s broken.”
“No, Ember,” Nancy Shaw’s high voice whistled. “It’s that…that thing! It’s coming through the door!”
Ember rolled over just in time to avoid being smothered by a slimy tentacle. The long arm crashed into the ground, its suckers shredding sod like it was tissue paper.
She rolled again, then brought both feet up against the junked-out pickup’s door. As hard as she could, she kicked the door. Once. Twice. The third time, the tentacle broke loose, severed as the rusty pickup door slammed shut.
The dismembered tentacle danced around the ground, slapping and writhing until it ceased. A sizzling noise preceded the whole appendage melting into a puddle of ectoplasm.
Ember’s chest rose and fell as she sputtered and breathed in real air again. Her eyes strained against bright sunlight. It was a good sort of pain. The kind of pain that let her know she was still alive.
The ghost of Nancy Shaw floated over to her side. Her voice was all sorts of concern when she asked, “Ember, you lost your shoe. What happened in there? What was that thing?”
The mage glanced at her feet. In addition to the absent shoe, the right leg of her pants was shredded, revealing a calf swollen and purple with round sucker-marks. Her body was no longer transparent, no longer ghostly. She ran her fingers through slime-coated hair, sticky ectoplasm dripping down her back. “Oh that little thing? That’s my new best chap from the Snot Sea. We were just playing a game of Hide and Seek.”
“Hide and seek? Ember, I don’t understand.”
Ember laid in the tall grass and laughed maniacally at the bright, clear North Dakota sky. As loud as she could, she shouted the traditional phrase one calls out at the end of a game of Hide and Seek, but with the sort of exuberance relegated to those who just barely cheated Death. She shouted, “olly, olly, oxen free!”
24
What a Rude Boy
Ember felt like a handkerchief used by an elephant with a head cold.
She looked the part, too. She was coated in sticky ectoplasm from her soles to her matted hair. The mucus substance proved ideal for attracting dirt and dried grass which now clung to her hair, skin, and clothes. Whenever she coughed, a smattering of thick, green gel found its way from her throat and into her mouth. She spat the vile substance onto the ground, where it would hiss and sizzle as the afternoon sun burned it off.
The right leg of her pants was shredded above her shoeless sock. Sucker bruises formed a pattern of purple circles around her calf. More such bruises were visible through a tear in her leather jacket’s right arm.
Nancy kneeled beside the mage. “Are you…are you going to be alright?”
Ember wiped her face with the back of a mucous-coated hand. She smelled of pond scum and dead fish. She looked over at the ghost and grinned mirthlessly. The grin became a hysterical laugh until it became a series of phlegmy coughs.
Finally, she rolled onto her hands and knees, spitting the last of the sticky goo from her mouth. She used a side mirror of the old International pickup as a hand-hold to stand up. A glance at the cab confirmed that the black ink was gone. The door to the spirit world had been closed.
She limped awkwardly to the Ranger where she emptied the last of the plastic water bottle’s contents into her mouth and swallowed. Ember’s gaze shifted to the football-sized egg, which rested on the ground against her pickup’s front tire.
She bent over and picked it up. The surface of the egg was gummy, its coat of ectoplasm sizzling in the sun. Ember absently wondered if the whole damn thing would burn up and disappear if she left it alone long enough.
“I need to get him out of this thing,” Ember said. She could hear Doug’s raucous voice emanating from the pod.
“How are we going to do that?” Nancy kept watching Ember, as though she expected a demon’s voice to emerge from the mage at any moment.
Ember pondered the question. She felt giddy, lightheaded. The adrenaline dump she experienced during the harrowing escape from the spirit world was fast becoming a crash. Her head was stuffy and throbbing, and her chest felt overly warm. She was in desperate need of a shower, but knew that was still hours away.
“I guess I’ll do what you do with eggs: break it.” Not giving it a second thought, Ember raised the egg above her head, then slammed it down onto the ground.
Doug’s scream ripped through her head.
She held her hands against her ears. “Bloody hell!”
The egg remained whole, unbroken on the ground. Splatters of ectoplasm sprinkled the grass, but the pod itself was sealed.
She next found a hard surface, then selected an iron spindle from an old riding lawn mower. Ember proceeded to hammer at the egg. Each time she landed a blow, Doug screamed. She stubbornly ignored the pain in her head and continued pounding the pod.
“I…don’t think that’s working,” Nancy said.
Ember grunted, flinging the spindle away toward the junk pile. She was sweating heavily, which had some benefit to washing a minute quantity of ectoplasm from her skin at the cost to her already unpleasant odor.
Her chest heaved as she caught her breath. She kicked the pod,
forgetting too late that she had lost her shoe on that foot. “Bloody fucking hell,” she hissed as she dropped to the ground to massage her stubbed toe.
Nancy winced at Ember. She crouched beside her, studying the pod. “Maybe you can talk to him without getting him out of the egg?”
Ember got to her knees and touched the pod. “Doug, can you hear me?”
“Cunt!”
“Right. He can hear me,” she said. “Doug Demorrett, I want you to tell me how to find the farmstead with your meth lab.”
This time, the trapped spirit added “Go to Hell” to his response.
“What a rude boy,” Nancy said. “You’re a rude little boy, Doug.”
Doug’s response to Nancy was no more eloquent.
“Maybe I should just leave him in the sun to dry up. To burn off,” Ember said, loudly.
The spirit in the egg had nothing clever to say to that.
She knew it was a hollow threat. She hadn’t gone to such lengths only to bring the miscreant back to be killed again. She frowned. “What happens when someone who died once gets killed off again? When an annoying little bastard of a crow gets his spirit-egg abandoned in a junk heap, left to dry up in the sun?”
“That doesn’t sound like anything pleasant,” Nancy admitted.
“No it doesn’t,” Ember said. She nudged the pod with her foot. “What say you, crow?”
The squawking caw of a crow answered. This time, no curse accompanied the voice.
“Sounds like maybe Doug agrees, yeah?” Ember attempted to comb fingers through her hair, but found a mat of unworkable dried ectoplasm binding her ponytail into a stiffening mass. The sooner I find this meth lab, the sooner I get to go home and drown myself in a hot shower.
She leaned forward, placing both hands on the pod. Ember channeled a wisp of mana into the egg. She was surprised to find her energy flowed easily past the tough outer shell, as if it wasn’t an obstacle at all. She knew it would sound theatrical, but it felt right to say it: “Doug Demerrott, come forth.”
The tough surface melted between her fingers, transforming into a pool of slime on the ground. She looked around, searching for the spirit once held within the egg.