Too bad Eddy hadn’t come, so Sean could have impressed her with his Sherlock Holmes imitation. Another brilliant deduction hit him: To be a frequent flyer at Geldman’s, the Reverend had to live in or near Arkham. Could Sean wheedle his address out of Geldman? Better not try. If Geldman found out Sean didn’t know where the Reverend lived, he might get mad and not give him the powders.
Speaking of mad. Wouldn’t the Reverend get pissed if Sean charged the powders to his account? Geldman didn’t know Sean’s name. Still, the Reverend wasn’t stupid. He’d figure out who had hit him up for Zeph and Aghar.
The glass panel over the counter slid back, and Geldman called: “Your order is ready, young man.”
He’d just have to own up and hope for the best. Oh, and hope he had enough money with him, too. He’d gotten so confused when the account thing had come up he’d forgotten to ask the price.
Sean marched himself over to the counter. Geldman stood at the antique cash register holding a red-and-white-striped paper bag. Before he could hand the bag over, Sean said, “Look, Mr. Geldman. Reverend Orne didn’t actually send me to get the powders. I mean, he told me to come here, but they’re not for him; they’re for me. So it wouldn’t be right to charge them to his account. I’ll pay for them.”
Geldman’s heavy eyelids fell to half-mast. “Very well,” he said. “How much money do you have with you?”
“Twenty-six dollars.”
“You may give me twenty.”
That was a funny way to put it. “Um. That’s what they cost?”
“Cost is relative, young man. Twenty will suffice in this case.”
Who was Sean to argue? He fished out his cash and gave Geldman the two tens.
With a pull of the much-creased bills between his fingers, Geldman smoothed them to crisp newness. He depressed a key on the register. Its drawer popped open with a pleasant ka-ching, like in a cartoon, and Geldman deposited the tens within. “Now,” he said, sliding the bag over the counter to Sean. “While these compounds aren’t toxic, they can be irritating. Be careful not to touch your eyes or nose after handling them, and try not to breathe the dust.”
Sean picked up the bag. Inside, glass tinkled against glass. “Yes, sir. I’ve got it.”
“Keep the compounds dry and they’ll last many years. Oh, and they’re guaranteed to work. A full refund if you find otherwise.”
Geldman’s face was solemn, so Sean didn’t crack a smile, either. “Right. Thanks, Mr. Geldman.”
“You’re welcome, young man.”
That seemed to be it. Sean headed for the door. He’d opened it, to the ringing of its invisible bell, when Geldman called after him: “Oh, by the way.”
Sean turned. Maybe since he hadn’t been disappointed about the powders after all, Geldman wanted him to pay for the sarsaparilla.
However, Geldman only said, “Please tell Reverend Orne that I admire his eye. As always.”
The Rev’s eye? Sean nodded, though, and escaped. Geldman couldn’t have meant an actual eye. Maybe the Rev’s taste for something, like materia. But what about that guarantee? Should Sean come back after the summoning ritual failed and get the refund? Eddy would so crack up when he told her about this place.
A check of his cell phone told him it was after four, which meant Dad would be looking for him. Sean took a minute to pull open the stapled bag. Small as it was, its contents were lost in it: two clear glass tubes stoppered with corks and red sealing wax. The one labeled “Zeph” contained fine gray dust; “Aghar,” fine yellow dust. He folded the bag into a compact square that fit inside his T-shirt pocket. Zeph gray, Aghar yellow, he chanted in his head as he ran down Gedney Street through the sticky heat of late afternoon, still sarsaparilla cool himself.
7
Sean had learned the ritual. He’d gotten the powders. Now Dad was going to blow the whole summoning project out of the water. “You’ve let me stay home by myself before,” Sean protested.
“For one or two days,” Dad said, not looking up from packing. “But I’ll be down south for two weeks.”
“There’s a million reasons I should stay home.”
Dad bore down on the lid of his suitcase. It was overstuffed—why didn’t he just pack a bigger one? “Give me the top ten.”
“I’m almost seventeen.”
“You’re seventeen in seven months. I wouldn’t call that almost.”
“Aunt Cel’s probably sick of me staying with her. And if I stay here, I can help your interns.”
“Patrick and Farzin are on vacation. Sarah will only be working mornings. As for Cel and Gus being sick of you—”
Sean groaned. “Dad, I know they love me, but once in a while they might want to throw wild parties.”
“Speaking of parties, you wouldn’t be planning any?”
“With Mrs. Ferreira next door?”
After bouncing the suitcase half off the bed, Dad gave up trying to latch it. He dug out a couple pairs of jeans. “Thank God for Mrs. Ferreira.”
“Dad, I don’t want to have parties. I just want you to trust me.”
“I do.”
“Not much.”
“Sean.” Dad drew his name out, edgy-exasperated. “Two weeks is a long time.”
A long time for Dad to be worrying about him. Sean knew that, he wished he could give in, but the ritual was too important. “After working all day, I’ll be too tired at night to do anything but crash.”
“Well. With the Arkwright windows here, I would like someone around to watch the studio.”
“That’s me, Dad.”
“I’d leave my cell number with Mrs. Ferreira. With the Mandells, too.”
Yes, he was so close now. “Cool, because nothing’s going to happen.”
Dad looked over at him. “I’d like to think you’re smart enough to be on your own.”
Sean was smart enough not to crack a smile. “I am.”
The smile Dad worked up was weak, but he said, “All right. You can stay.”
“Thanks, Dad!”
“You’ll call me or Cel and Gus if there’s any problem?”
“There won’t be any problem, but yeah, sure.”
So now he’d have the night of the twenty-fifth to himself, but he still didn’t know which Elder Sign to use and Eddy would hardly talk about the ritual anymore. His account of the pharmacy hadn’t cracked her up like he’d hoped. She said that Geldman sounded like the Reverend’s chief competition for World’s Biggest Wack Job and that Sean was rising in the amateur ranks. “Come on. It’s one thing to LARP or cosplay.”
“Says somebody with twenty Éowyn costumes in her closet.”
“So? Didn’t I just say there’s nothing wrong with it? But these guys take things way over the line. I think you’re right, they’re true believers. And that could get really weird. It could get dangerous.”
Sean had to laugh at the face—rictus of terror—that she pulled. No way he’d ever admit it, but since he’d gone to Geldman’s thinking about the summoning ritual made him jittery, as if maybe, somehow, he could actually pull it off. “Lots of people must believe in magic,” he countered. “The Rev can’t be the only one who shops at Geldman’s.”
“Just because there are plenty of freaks in the world doesn’t mean you have to buy into mumbo jumbo for dumbos.”
That was harsh, but Eddy hadn’t been to the pharmacy. She hadn’t met Geldman. “I don’t buy into it. It’s just for my project. Look, you’ve got to come help me. You could tell Rachel my dad’s back and stay over.”
“Right. Then she’d find out from your aunt he’s still gone and think we were at your house doing drugs and having sex. I’d be grounded until September.”
It was crazy how some images could be “oh wow” and “totally gross” at the same time. Sean hoped the flush rising up his neck would at least stop at his jawline. “Tell her we’re doing a pagan ritual,” he said fast. “She’ll want to come watch.”
Wait, maybe that didn’t sound right.
<
br /> Luckily, Eddy just said, “You are so ignorant.”
“But I want pictures of me doing the spell. It’ll be a lot easier if you take them.”
“Or maybe you’re scared to do it alone?”
Sean was about to deny it, but why layer on the testosterone? This was Eddy. “Kind of,” he said.
“Then don’t do it. I won’t tell anyone you backed out.”
She wouldn’t, either, but after all his practicing, after going to Geldman’s, he had to perform the ritual on the right night, under the right stars.
Dad left the next day, Sunday, the twenty-third. Tuesday afternoon, Celeste came over with Gus’s famous Polish lasagna. (It had kielbasa in it.) That his aunt didn’t sense he was about to perform unhallowed rites amazed Sean—he felt as if he was glowing with the intention, like with the first fever bout of a flu. Not that he felt sick. He felt the opposite, eager, almost hyper.
That night, after she left, he tanked up on lasagna, then packed his sorcerer’s gear.
Dad had taken the Civic to the airport and was paying almost a hundred bucks for it to sit in a lot for two weeks. Overkill, since he’d taken both sets of keys with him. Maybe he thought Sean had made his own set on the sly (not a bad idea) or had learned how to hot-wire cars from his criminal friends (who, Phil?). The next best option was to borrow Dad’s bike, which had a baggage rack to which Sean could bungee-cord his grill-brazier. It was a pain riding with the loaded grill at his butt. The charcoal kept shifting, and twice his backpack nearly knocked it off the bike. At the industrial park, he discovered that the parking lot by the river caught little light from streetlamps. Between the inadequate radius of his camp lantern and the unevenness of the worn blacktop, he had a hard time drawing his magical circle, but after smudging and rechalking, then fussing to light the charcoal, then fumbling with Dad’s camera and tripod, he was almost ready. He squatted to draw the Elder Sign. Mosquitoes buzzed around him, kept from lighting by repellent. Even so, he seemed to feel their feet on his damp skin.
Feet? No, what he felt was the minute vibration of their buzzing. The air was charged; it gave substance to sound. The inner passages of his ears tingled to the shrilling of cicadas, and the passage of trucks on Old Post Road rumbled under his soles.
In the center of the pentagram, he drew the five-pointed Star with the eye in it—he’d finally picked that Elder Sign over the lame-looking Branch. Helen Arkwright had told him none of the experts knew which was right, so why not go with the sharpness factor? The smoldering grill went right on top of the Sign.
Next he set out the powders, Zeph inside the right “arm” of the pentagram (which represented Water), Aghar inside the left arm (Air.) Lacking the recommended silver censers, he’d poured the powders into lidded bean pots. Zeph smelled bitter, metallic. Aghar smelled like rotten eggs. But he wasn’t going to eat them, and he’d hooked some latex gloves from Dad’s studio for when he handled the stuff.
Five minutes was all it took to photograph the magical circle. That brought him to eleven o’clock. Online, he’d looked up the transit of the Summer Triangle, the time when it would be highest in the sky, 11:08 tonight. When he switched off the lantern, Sean could see the Triangle clearly, Deneb and Altair and Vega glinting in the moonless sky. He couldn’t make out the section of the Milky Way that crossed the Triangle—there was too much light pollution. Seen or unseen, it was there. That would have to be enough.
Sean walked around the pentagram, peering, listening. A breeze stirred the willows leaning over the black water of the Pawtuxet. In a house across the river, lights went out. Somehow that made him feel much more alone.
Wasn’t alone exactly what he wanted to be? No bums, no partiers, no cops. He went to his backpack and pulled out his best approximation of a sacred Wiccan athame, which was the silver letter opener from Dad’s desk. Any old stick would work, according to Marvell’s book. A stick, a wand, a knife or sword, your own forefinger if that was all you had. All the athame did was symbolize the focused grasp of the soul as it channeled blind energy. Blind energy was everywhere in the universe, pouring out of Azathoth, the Source. It existed even in a parking lot behind a closed iron-casting factory.
Sean shut his eyes. Once you grabbed blind energy, you had to shape it or give it a direction, and the way you did that was through intention, through meaning for something to happen. He could handle an intention, if he concentrated. A dog barked across the river. He cringed like it was close enough to snap at him. Air lay heavy in his lungs. Maybe it really was charged, like air before a thunderstorm. Only there were no clouds and no forecast of rain.
He breathed deep, and the heavy air didn’t smother him. The opposite: It invigorated him, as if it held more oxygen than usual. He moved. He had to start the ritual on time, 11:08.
Sean set Dad’s camera to snap three photos after ten minutes, which was how long it should take to get to the climax of the ritual. He worked the latex gloves over his clammy palms. Then he walked to the magical circle and stepped between the pentagram’s legs, the angles of Earth and Fire.
The storm that wasn’t coming broke in that instant, not with external fireworks but with a blaze in his chest like lightning, a clap in his head like thunder. The electric jolt should have scared the crap out of him. It didn’t. By stepping between Earth and Fire, he seemed to have stepped out of one Sean, sweaty and anxious, into another Sean, fearless. He paused, not even surprised, because the fearless Sean would have expected this: Of course, what else? If you plugged in a lamp that had been disconnected, it lit up, the circuit reestablished. Tilting back his head, he gazed at—addressed—the Summer Triangle. Now he could see what he had missed before, the creamy rim of the galaxy and the swath of utter blackness that cut through it: the Great Rift, gaping like a crude door between realities. It wasn’t a door. It was a cloud of dust. Sean knew that, and he didn’t know it, didn’t believe it. The Rift was an aperture. It was a gateway.
He gathered the first pinches of Zeph and Aghar and threw them into the grill, his brazier. Mingled black and yellow smoke billowed from the charcoal, acrid and sulfurous. Mr. Geldman had warned him not to breathe in the powders. Sean hoped that breathing the smoke wasn’t a no-no, because without a gas mask he couldn’t help it. As he breathed it in he felt a tingling that started in his chest and spread outward to his head and limbs.
The ritual was working. He could go ahead.
Facing east, with the athame raised, he swept the invoking pentagram into the air. He didn’t mumble the order of the lines to himself like he had when practicing; the motion came naturally to him now. Three more times, facing each quarter of the compass, in turn he swept out the pentagram. With each slash, his right arm grew heavier, as if more blood were pumping into it. But the weight didn’t slow him. It seemed to give him added strength.
He faced east again, toward the pinnacle of the chalked pentagram, raised his arms, and began the first incantation: “To you, Lord Azathoth, springhead of all that is. To you, I offer obeisance, and to your Soul, Nyarlathotep. Here I stand, in Fire and Earth, before Air and Water. To Spirit I call!”
He repeated the incantation three times, thrice. His voice sounded far-off. That was because of the rushing in his ears, the torrent of wind or river, Air or Water, the ceaseless roar of Fire or the slow grinding of Earth upon itself. He tossed the second pinches of Zeph and Aghar. Sweet tiger smoke enveloped him as he straightened to chant the second incantation: “Send to me—”
Sean choked into silence. It wasn’t the powders. Those drove his exhilaration higher. It was the figure condensing out of their smoke, clad in gold vestments, with gold eyes in a black face and black wings scythe pointed like a falcon’s: a vaporous angel that hovered between him and the Summer Triangle. It didn’t speak, but the forefinger of its right hand inscribed the air with a spidery silver script, spelling out the words of the incantation that would summon an ethereal Servitor, the aether-newt.
“Send to me,” Sean whispered. His voice
failed again. Under the rushing in his ears, Eddy scoffed: Aether-newt, Ethernet. Proves it’s all fake, doesn’t it? Proves it’s all bullshit.
How could an angel be bullshit?
As if it read his thought, the angel smiled. It was a gentle smile, reassuring. Its eyes, tilted ovals without pupils, should have scared him, but they were reassuring, too. It raised its right hand, and the silver script rose with it, to hang above its head. The air between them was a blank slate once more.
Speechless, Sean waited. Somehow he knew he had to.
With its left forefinger, the angel scratched red script into the night, words like lava welling through the cracked crust of a flow. I give you blood to make a Servitor in the likeness of your own attendants, the lava words began. It had to be the variant incantation, then, the one that the Reverend wouldn’t write out, the one that would summon the blood-spawn. Sean didn’t want that familiar. The Reverend had told him it was too dangerous. Sean wanted the other, the harmless one.
Aether-newt, Ethernet, lame lame lame.
The angel nodded as if it agreed. The Reverend didn’t know Sean as the angel did. The angel appreciated Sean’s ability and strength of will. To summon the aether-newt wouldn’t be test enough.
There was sense in that. If you were going to do something, do it right.
The angel swept its right arm skyward. The silver script swirled away, thinned, vanished. Then the angel thrust its left arm earthward. The lava script descended until Sean could read it easily. Only how could he call a blood-spawn when he hadn’t brought any blood?
Like the smoke that had birthed it, the angel expanded. Now Sean could see through its serpent-crowned head and falcon wings to the Summer Triangle. The Milky Way slashed the Triangle; the Great Rift slashed the Milky Way; a silver blade slashed them both. It was the blade of his athame, which he still held aloft.
He did have blood with him, after all. He could feel it pulsing under his skin.
He couldn’t use his own blood, though. The Reverend had written it had to be the blood of an enemy.
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