Camp Arcanum

by Josef Matulich

  Eleazar freed a hand to blow a kiss to the sobbing girl sequestered under a workbench.

  “Remember to applaud if I die well.”

  * * * * *

  Eleazar set his weapons point-first into the earth just outside the barn door.

  “All right, then,” he asked himself. “What am I supposed to be throwing at?”

  Marc was in the center of the camp, trying to avoid being swatted like a fly by a flying lamppost. Presumably, the invisible monster was swinging it. It alternately struck to his left and right, driving him from side to side like a target in a shooting gallery. Marc broke the pattern and dashed straight back into the tree line. The lamppost switched to poking itself into the brush endwise.

  Eleazar shrugged

  “When all else fails, improvise.”

  Eleazar picked up a throwing knife and threw at the most likely spot for an invisible monster. It seemed to glance off the top of the creature and careen into the bush at the far side. Extrapolating where the thing must be, Eleazar fired off the remaining five. They stuck in the air in various places above the pole. The invisible thing still probed the bushes for Marc, ignoring Eleazar’s Lilliputian attacks.

  There was nothing like an unresponsive audience to make Eleazar redouble his efforts.

  Eleazar wound up with the ax behind his head held in both hands and let fly. The ax spun through the air and lodged heavily in the midst of the knives with a satisfying squishy sound. A monstrous squeal rang out through the camp and the pole dropped to the ground. The knives and ax swiveled full circle and moved towards Eleazar rather quickly.

  “I should have expected that,” Eleazar murmured.

  He picked up the bush hook and retreated around the corner of barn. The invisible creature rammed headlong into the building with a resounding crash. Broken bits of wood planking rose up in the air to menace Eleazar. He raised his bush hook to defending against the five or six planks wielded by nothing in particular.

  Marc came screaming out of the woods at that moment. Though Eleazar could not see him around the corner of the barn, he was sure Marc was harrying the attacker from behind.

  “Get back over here, you rat’s ass bastard!” Marc bellowed at the top of his lungs.

  Eleazar came back around the corner to reconnoiter. He could see Marc backpedal to draw the invisible thing away from the barn.

  The battle had spattered a lot of mud and some odd forms that must have been the creature’s appendages were visible from a fine gray coating dirt. Eleazar lunged forward and attacked a limb with the bush hook.

  “Eat vanadium steel, you fiend from Hell!”

  There was another squeal as Eleazar connected with some part of the creature. It lashed back and knocked Eleazar across the clearing. He rolled back to his feet without pause and brought his weapon back up to ready.

  “Huzzah!” Eleazar cried triumphantly. “You will have to do better than that, Foul Beast!”

  “Eleazar!” Marc yelled. “Stop playing around! My ass is on the line here!”

  Marc rushed in to goad the invisible creature again, slashing the air with the blade of his shovel. A fine spray of fluid caught Eleazar across the face. He wiped it out of his eyes and checked his fingers to find them coated with a white gritty substance. It certainly made no sense that an invisible monster would have white blood, but as Eleazar tried to puzzle out what the fluid might be, he heard something fly over his head. A plastic bag of white paint struck the creature high on its torso. Two patches of the invisible creature were now painted white and much of the tentacles were misted over.

  “Bullseye!” Eleazar heard Michael call out from somewhere behind him. “Gotcha, you ugly son of a bitch!”

  Eleazar looked over his shoulder to see Michael filling another plastic bag from a ten-gallon bucket. The white-spattered ghost of another tentacle reached past Eleazar to squash Michael. Eleazar lopped off its tip with a sweep of his brush hook before Michael even had a chance to cower.

  Marc struck at the ugly tentacled thing from behind to pull it away from Michael and Eleazar. Michael shivered and then spun the current bag shut.

  “White paint?” Eleazar asked.

  “Gesso,” Michael replied matter-of-factly. “You paint invisible monsters a color you can see.”

  Michael took the bag of gesso and lobbed it underhand. Even though he threw like a little girl, the paint bomb covered another large swathe of invisible. Eleazar was flabbergasted at Michael’s performance.

  “What,” Michael asked, “you never watched Jonny Quest when you were a kid?”

  Eleazar would have loved to debate the value of Saturday Morning cartoons as survival guides for Arcanum, but there was the more pressing problem of a half-painted monster. He danced away sideways to give the monster another thing to focus its attentions upon.

  Michael took the opportunity to lob another paint bomb, which caught the thing right between the eyes. Once it shook the excess paint from its ugly face, the creature turned upon Michael. He wisely ran away as Marc and Eleazar slashed at it from different angles.

  Michael was fumbling with a final bag of gesso when Brenwyn arrived.

  Brenwyn’s Impala careened up the gravel drive like a bat out of Hell. Smoke and steam spewed from under its hood, adding to the image. The poor machine clattered as if its engine parts were moments from shooting straight up through the hood. It came to a sloppy, sidewise stop that looked to be permanent.

  * * * * *

  Brenwyn pushed every last bit of life out of her car, physically and magickally, in her short wild trip to Camp Arcanum. The Impala made a horrible, steaming gasp as it died. Taking no time for apologies, she rolled out of her door, clutching her cloak and tool roll to her chest. She stopped dead when she sensed the thing in the middle of the camp. It was bigger than the barn, older than the earth, and intent only on murder. And, somehow, the men had managed to paint most of it white, so that even she could see it.

  The atmosphere was thick with fear and the primordial power she remembered from Jeremiah’s circle. Here and now, that power felt a thousand times stronger.

  “Is everyone still all right?” Brenwyn asked. The pall of negative energy and the ceaseless whistle made it impossible for her to sense anything besides overwhelming fear.

  “As well as could be expected, milady!” Eleazar replied.

  Marc said nothing. Instead, he grunted and made another slashing attack at the painted demon’s limbs. He backed away towards the barn even as Eleazar stepped in to draw it the other way.

  “Just swat this thing fast,” Marc yelled, “before it kills one of us!”

  Brenwyn dropped her magick kit at her feet and drew a circle around herself on the ground with chalk dust. She considered for a millisecond the possibility of shedding her clothes to work magick at her highest potential, but decided nobody had the time for that. She quickly took up her black-handled athame and began a hurried invocation of the four watchtowers. As the wards rose around her, the space apart gave her a moment to breathe.

  The demon or Qliphotic element or whatever Jeremiah had summoned took notice of her then. It advanced towards her with its painted legs and tentacles raised for mayhem.

  Marc laid into it heavily, large chunks of its trunk and limbs sheared off with each shovel blow. The severed bits dissipated like smoke and the white paint that covered them settled to the ground in a mist. The demon turned its attention on Marc, but this time he held his position instead of backpedaling away. The demon seemed to forget all about Brenwyn.

  “Do it, Bren,” Marc commanded.

  Trusting that Marc could hold his own for a moment, Brenwyn launched into her ritual. She drew the power up from the earth, channeling it up her spine. As she felt it gather at the crown of her head, she began her invocation.

  “Sekhmet, Lioness of the Eastern Desert,” Brenwyn said, “the One before Whom Evil Trembles, I invoke your power.”

  The demon froze as she finished the first part of her spell,
though the whistling grew even louder. It seemed to be focusing its attention solely on her, though it was hard to be sure when it had eyes on all sides of it. Brenwyn continued her spell before the thing had a chance to charge.

  “Inanna, Bringer of Sword, Plow, and Fire, I call for your gifts to smite my enemies.” The tingle of power running up and down her spine now felt like lightning bolts. The presence of Marc’s noumena was enhancing her own abilities. Unfortunately, it was also amplifying the demon’s.

  It again advanced slowly towards Brenwyn. Marc, no doubt feeling a chivalrous protective impulse, attacked it from behind once more. He seemed to have gone a little mad, slashing with his shovel like a windmill. The demon ripped off a treetop and slammed it down upon Marc like a fly swatter.

  With no sign of movement under the branches, the demon turned back to Brenwyn. She continued her spell, knowing it was her only way to save Marc.

  “Andrasta, War’s Raven, Scourge of Invaders, Patron of Queen Boudicca, guide my hand.” The Goddesses were close: it felt as if their hands were upon her back, their breath flowing through her and setting fire to her insides.

  Eleazar came to Marc’s and Brenwyn’s rescue by attacking the painted half of the demon. As he lopped off parts, the white paint fell to the ground in puddles. It picked the treetop back off of Marc and hurled it at Eleazar, but the jongleur dove to safety through the barn door before it was even close.

  Brenwyn was momentarily relieved to see Marc get back on his feet, levering himself to standing with his shovel. Then she saw him limp back into battle; he limped very quickly when angered. He attacked the myriad limbs and tentacles even more savagely.

  “Durga, Born of the Light of the Triple Godhead,” Brenwyn intoned, “Ten-Armed Slayer of Demons, I invoke your power.”

  The invocation was nearly complete; she had become a channel for the higher powers. Now, all that was left was the delicate operation of guiding and releasing that power before it consumed her.

  The demon was still focused on Marc as he slashed away at it like some rabid terrier chewing at its lowermost limbs. It finally picked Marc up by the ankles and lifted him to a height of twenty or thirty feet, shaking him like a rag doll. Marc continued to flail and slash and scream obscenities.

  Brenwyn nearly broke off her spell at that moment, but a quiet voice inside warned her to stand fast. The Qliphotic elements were ancient and clever and cruel; this thing knew exactly what it was doing. She held onto the searing power, held onto herself as help came from another quarter.

  Eleazar burst out of the barn with an armful of machetes.

  “You will put my friend down! Now!” he shouted.

  He started throwing the blades, sinking them into the demon’s painted middle one after another after another. It discarded Marc to turn on Eleazar. Marc landed with a crunch near the trailers.

  Brenwyn burned with rage now. She could see everything, the webs of power in this little valley, the demon like a black smudge on Creation, the flares of terror and rage that were Michael and Eleazar, the dimming light of Marc’s life on the ground beside the silver trailer. She needed just one more thing.

  She barely registered Eleazar dashing for the barn as the demon pursued him. It slammed into the building and began pulling it down board by board. Fixated as it was, she knew it had no more chance to strike at her.

  Brenwyn bent down to pick up the silver mirror from her kit. Golden sparks flowed off her fingertips to dance across the metal. She raised it high and finished her spell.

  “Goddesses All—return this filth to he who summoned it,” she shouted. “As I will it, so mote it be!”

  The demon turned back to Brenwyn as the mirror in her hand glowed like a white-hot star. All the power that burned through her now streamed out of it for her purpose. The black-spirited thing advanced upon her, but slowly, like a fish swimming upstream against a cataract. It finally stopped, still out of tentacles’ reach of her.

  “I turn you on your wielder,” she spat. “Do your worst.”

  The mirror’s light filled the clearing and the hateful thing was blown away before it. The white paint that covered it fell to ground like rain.

  Silence reigned over the broken remnants of Camp Arcanum.

  The power had all left her, now. After the Goddesses were done with her, she was just a small woman: singed and frail and . . . empty.

  Brenwyn dropped her mirror and blade and went to one knee. Anything that had been holding her up was totally gone. It felt like the only thing that kept her place in this world was skin and hair and clothes.

  She reached out her left hand and brushed away some of the chalk that formed the circle around her. At the same time, she wished away the wards. The space apart was gone and reality slowly seeped into her circle. That was when she heard Michael screaming Marc’s name.

  He was still where he had been thrown by the demon and his body was twisted like a disjointed doll. Michael knelt beside him, quiet now, and covered Marc with his bathrobe. Eleazar stood beside them, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  Brenwyn somehow found the strength to stand and then to run. She crossed the camp, through the wreckage and the psychic stain left behind by the demon. If she made any noise herself, she did not know.

  Eleazar stepped in between her and Marc as Michael shouted something. It was a sound with no meaning to her.

  “Don’t touch him!” Michael repeated.

  “What?” she said. Though she understood each of the words this time, she still did not grasp his message.

  “He’s right,” Marc groaned. “I’m broke up bad.”

  Brenwyn knelt beside Marc; close enough to touch but refraining.

  “It will be all right, Marc,” she whispered. “The doctors and I will have you back on your feet in no time.”

  “Best be fast,” Marc replied, his voice weaker than before. “I can feel my blood pressure dropping . . . I’m doing a slow bleed out. Same as . . .”

  Brenwyn glanced over to Michael. He had stepped away to make a call to 911. In an urgent voice he was giving detailed instructions on how to get to Camp Arcanum.

  “Your motorcycle accident, I know,” Brenwyn said. He had nearly killed himself once before. He knew exactly what it felt like to be laying at Death’s Door. “Your boys are already on it. You trained them well.”

  “I’m sorry, Bren. This is bad.” His eyes fluttered for a moment as he took a quick inventory, a catalog of how truly bad things were. “I can’t feel my legs.”

  Brenwyn curled up beside him, close but still not touching, and threw her traveling cloak over them both.

  “I will take care of you,” she whispered. “I will always take care of you.”

  Marc smiled, though looked as if that hurt him.

  “I guess this means we’re on speaking terms again?”

  “Of course, it does, beloved,” she answered.

  “Good. I missed you.” His words came out one at a time with what sounded like great effort. “I love you, you know.”

  “Keep saying that, beloved. You have a lot to make up to me.” She knew that was as much sentiment as he could stomach, even now.

  Marc closed his eyes and went limp. Brenwyn could still feel him inside, though he clung to life by the slimmest thread. Spent as she was, there was nothing she could do for him but share what warmth she still had in her body and wait for help.

  Chapter 23

  Life Flight from Arcanum

  DR. PRAKESH HAD DRAWN THE SHORT STRAW for the graveyard shift again, which left him in the ER when the call from Arcanum came. Now it was four thirty-six a.m. and he, Williams, and Quinones were freezing in the breezeway waiting for the incoming life flight chopper. Both of the nurses still smoked, which he found ridiculous for women sworn to maintain health in others, and they took the opportunity to light up. There being no such place as downwind in the breezeway, Prakesh wheezed and coughed while he froze.

  A distant buzz from above announced the approach of t
he helicopter. A wavering light in the sky pinpointed its location. The chopper’s searchlight washed across the pad and for a moment it was bright as day. It descended quickly to land on the concrete square marked off by searchlights and a low chain fence.

  The buzz grew to a throbbing roar and the props’ downdraft buffeted Prakesh, nearly pulling the white coat from his body. The wind chill dropped the temperature to well below freezing.

  Prakesh made a mad dash for the pad, keeping bent low to avoid the chopper’s blades. The nurses discarded their cigarettes and scurried along after him. The two paramedics, Cooper and Strawser, came out of the side door to crack open the back hatch as soon as the chopper touched down.

  Prakesh crept into the tight space beside the gurney and backboard to make his examination. As Strawser gave report, Cooper and the nurses readied the patient for transport.

  “White male, aged thirty-eight: multiple blunt force trauma,” the grey-haired paramedic started. “Possible C-Eight fracture, indications of internal bleeding.”

  Dr. Prakesh looked the patient over. Contusions, abrasions, and swelling were evident over his entire face and close-cropped scalp. It looked like the man had been dropped into a rock crusher.

  “How’d this happen?” asked Prakesh. “Car crash?”

  “They’re still trying to figure that out,” Strawser replied. “The people there think it was a tornado.”

  “This late in the year?” It was cold and clear without a cloud in the sky. Prakesh didn’t know meteorology, but he didn’t see how a tornado could have formed tonight.

  The pilot looked up from her post flight paperwork.

  “It was Arcanum,” she called back from the cockpit. “Every freaking transport from that town is another freak accident. I wouldn’t live there if it was a season of ‘Survivor.’”

  Cooper settled the portable oxygen tank between the patient’s legs and unclamped the gurney from the chopper’s floor.

  “We’re good to go, Doctor!” he said.

  The nurses and paramedics smoothly slid the gurney out of the chopper’s transport bay and snapped the legs into the full upright position. Still bending low, they rushed back across the drive to the ER with Dr. Prakesh close behind them.