by TJ Park
The rope ladder jerking wildly under him, Doug knocked against the shearing shed all the way down. Trusting it called for brave indifference and blind faith. Doug had precious little of either. He was managing the descent on sheer fright.
He found Scott collapsed in a heap at the foot of the rope ladder, weeping.
Doug risked a jump. He preferred chancing a sprained ankle than stay another moment on such a dodgy set-up. He just managed to dodge the boy and stay on his feet.
For some reason, nearly getting clouted by Doug made Scott speak up.
“It’s my secret place,” he said, crying, not looking up. “I go up there when I want to get away from mum …” He dropped his head lower, the tears coming harder. “… and dad.”
Doug couldn’t think what to say. He was saved by voices calling for Scott. The Clarkson women had not heeded his order to stay put, not that he expected it of Janet. He reached down and took Scott’s arm firmly. The boy raised his face so quickly Doug nearly flinched. His expression was wild with grief, a child imploring an adult to do something about it, to take it all back, to make everything right again.
“C’mon, Scott,” Doug said gently. “We’ve got to go get the others.”
That was as close as he could get to comforting the boy. No wonder he’d fled his own son. But then Scott’s face screwed up and he jerked his arm free, scrabbling away on all fours. He hated Doug showing him any sympathy.
Doug would have gone after him, but that was when he heard one of the faraway women scream.
***
She was outside and mortally afraid. She was searching for her mother, looking for any sign of her family. She never would have thought herself capable of leaving the house, afraid of being killed. But the fear of being left alone was greater.
It was small wonder she was confused by the sharp odour she blundered into. It was a smell she was familiar with and yet somehow associated with danger, but in her state couldn’t identify it. She knew it did not belong in the lush green yard, not in such a strong concentration.
She looked around for the source … and then became aware of the trespasser. It had not entered her orbit with a triumphant bound or charge. It came with a leisurely tread, tail twitching idly to show its inquisitiveness. Lauren was deceived by its lazy saunter. Her eyes were peeled for sharp, running movement, so it was only a few paces away by the time she saw it. By then, the vivid eyes with their bright avaricious gleam could not be missed – a crude Egyptian ankh for one, a swallow in flight for the other.
Lauren froze. Her mind was screaming at her to run away, but her legs were seized in place. The familiar picked up its pace as it closed in on her, becoming horribly eager. Lauren stood there waiting, urgency hammering at the door unanswered. Any sense of the person she once was had gone. All that remained was sheer, closeted fright.
If it had gone to bite her or to rake her with its claws she may never have moved.
She saw it meant to nuzzle her instead.
She tottered backward. In her revolted horror, she dimly took note of backing over a wet glossy track in the grass. Perhaps the monster had done it from an earlier pass, like a slug would leave a trail.
She heard a faint, ridiculous “Ya-hoo!” go off in her shocked, buzzing head.
The familiar was distracted by the same absurd cry, cocking its ponderous head in the direction it came from – somewhere behind it. Lauren was unable to look past the monster. She was still spellbound by the familiar’s proximity. She imagined that something like a flicker of irritation crossed its face.
Whatever the interruption was, the familiar seemed free to dismiss it. It turned its attention back to her again. It must have liked what it saw. Its tail began to wag.
***
It appeared the familiar had no end of tricks. Lines of fire raced from it, one on either side. The monster halted to watch their progress as they zeroed in on Lauren.
This new sight paralysed her again. When one fiery line was about to consume her – and she was letting it – it raced past instead. Only just. She had to pull her feet in to keep the tips of her boots from being singed. The flames closed up to form a large ring of fire. Other fiery trails split off and raced in toward the centre, intersecting each other, branching into more lines.
To Lauren they were barriers of flame. She did not think them created supernaturally, because she had finally identified that out-of-place smell as petrol. The fire was someone’s attempt to trap the familiar.
If Scott and Doug had lingered on top of the shearing shed, they would have seen the spilling of petrol was hardly slapdash. Scott would have merely seen a star inside a circle. Doug would have recognised the symbol.
Inside the burning circle, the familiar twisted round to look at the architect of this new distraction – Warlock. The punk stood at the far end of the conflagration, holding an ignited cane firelighter. He quickly dropped it, alarmed by the speed of the blaze he’d created as much as by gaining the familiar’s attention. He was ready to run.
The familiar appeared to dismiss him as something that could easily wait. The girl was closer – and getting away. She had stepped outside the circle of fire and was making for the house. The familiar skipped across the paltry lines of flame separating them. It leapt over the blaze that was the circle’s boundary, a tremendous jump that would see it land upon the girl.
But the monster never made it. In mid-leap it was sent flying backward, an invisible hand scooping it up in midair and flinging it back inside the circle.
The monster touched down, snagging its claws into the ground to stop it from tumbling. Chunks of turf tore free as it skidded round on its paws. Its sigils were thrown into disarray, but then recovered, a fanged spider and clock face thrown together for incredulous eyes, “death before dishonour” becoming teeth.
The familiar did not pause to question what had beset it. It charged again … this time not at Lauren, but at a patch of open ground beyond the burning configuration.
It leapt and dodged the blazing, intersecting lines in its way. They did not hinder it. But as the monster tried to clear the circle’s boundary … once again it was hauled up by the scruff of the neck and flung into the centre of Warlock’s brightly burning pentagram. The familiar gained its feet even faster than ever. It split wide its barbed-wire-and-roses mouth and tore the night with its roar. It wasn’t an animal’s roar. Not remotely. It was earth plates grinding together. It was cyclone wind forced into a whistling bore. It was the devil.
Even with his hands clamped over his ears, Warlock couldn’t help but whoop excitedly, but also warily, outside the burning ring. He’d started running each time the familiar tried to break the circle and edged back again every time it failed. Energised by a result more spectacular than he could have imagined, Warlock clumsily dug into his bumbag with both hands, removing his little black bible.
It had not come from the witches’ house like the dagger and the weed. This was his own possession – a small but very thick edition with cracked bindings he had lifted from the estate of a satanic band member before his folks could sell off, burn or exorcise what he’d left behind. Warlock had only used it to impress chicks or to recite quick whammies on his enemies. He had planned to plague Mick with boils after all this was over with. Inside the back cover was also a list of groupies’ phone numbers put there by its former owner. Truthfully, Warlock had mainly kept the book for those.
He hadn’t thought of a certain spell before now because he honestly didn’t think any would work. He knew he was a fake, so he assumed the book was fake, too.
He dropped the bent-spined tome, fumbled and dropped it a second time. Pinning it to the ground so it wouldn’t escape again, he flicked through to locate the dog-eared page containing the passage he wanted, tearing other pages on the way.
Meanwhile, the familiar was coming.
Seeing the monster approach, intent on him, Warlock lost his nerve. He broke into a run, but twisted round reading aloud the verse h
e’d searched for in the black bible, singsonging it in a high, cracked voice.
The familiar halted on hearing it, becoming visibly bewildered.
Warlock slowed to a trot as he continued to recite aloud, then halted.
For the longest time the monster seemed to just stand there, behind the snapping flames, twitching, as if bothered by some small irritant, like some itch or droning fly.
Then, without warning, it began to attack itself.
It spun around crazily, chasing its own tail. It spied its own forepaw and snapped at that, sigil eyes squeezed shut, bared sigil teeth gnashing. It did a flip seeking out its own hind legs at which to bite and tear.
Utterly amazed, Warlock started walking back to the fiery boundary of the pentagram. He moved on to the next verse, speaking the words louder, with a little more conviction. Inside the circle, the familiar was like a dervish, twisting in on itself to try and tear out its own belly.
Warlock could barely take his eyes off the spectacle, but he had to do so to keep track of his delivery, slanting the pages to see them better in the flickering firelight. His halting voice grew stronger, the words finding a rhythm. It gathered force, swelling into a chant. The familiar capered and leapt inside the circle.
Glancing up from the page, Warlock almost broke off the recitation. He stared harder, straining. Either the flames were rising higher … or the familiar was sinking into the earth. With dawning wonderment, he saw that neither impression was correct. Though confined to the circle, going nowhere except after itself, the monster was somehow receding into the distance.
It was going away.
Warlock kept reading aloud. He could barely keep from interjecting his delight and amazement in between the stanzas with small utterances of: “Shit!”, “Yeah!” and “Fuck me dead!” He had no need to add the wild, theatrical flourishes he had often done at stoned and drunken after-parties, just to give the illusion that something was really happening. He was finally executing a magic spell that worked.
He stepped as close as he dared to the flames, his voice racing to complete the incantation and, therefore, the spell. The total incantation covered one and a half pages in small, tight print. Spells of summoning were always short. The spells of removal were much more laborious.
The familiar, still trying to consume itself whole, was gathering speed as it dwindled. It was disappearing to a dot. Warlock fought not to trip up his words as he raced on toward the finish. Nearly there. Only two more verses.
Then another noise intruded on the concert of crackling flames, the familiar’s failing complaint, and Warlock’s leaping, jubilant speech. It was the persistent sound of everyone being told to shush.
Shush-shush-shush …
The sprinklers!
The book was almost slapped from Warlock’s grasp, then its pages were painted grey and plastered together. His chant was cut off, short-circuited. His back was doused with water, the shirt sticking to his skin, freezing cold. Yet the cold he felt on the outside did not compare to that within.
Before him, the flames shrank, briefly knocked out of alignment before springing up again, weaker than before. One section of fiery line was beaten down to a low flame before its light was snuffed out all at once. More lines were broken, the breached segments fighting back vainly to recoup lost ground. Several areas were blotted out at once.
Shush-shush-shush-shush-shush-shush-shush-shush-shush-shush-shush-shush …
Warlock blew water from his nose. He tried to pick up from where he’d been interrupted, trying to sort out the words of the incantation from the reversed text that showed through the soaked page. But he did not think the spell would work any more, not with the circle broken and being dismantled before his eyes.
The closest irrigation sprinkler came round again and slapped Warlock with another wave. He flicked his hair from his eyes and picked frantically at the page to turn it. It came away in fragments, stuck to his hand.
There was nothing recognisable of the pentagram now. There were only individual traces of extinguishing flame. Stream after stream of artesian water jetted over the yard. Gibbering, Warlock read the bits and pieces plastered to his fingers in whatever order he found them.
The last of the petering flames was snuffed out. In the clear dark slate left behind, the eyes of the familiar came to the fore. One was a fat spider with obscenely long fangs and twitching legs, a dissolving blob of Celtic cross made up the other. Its mouth was a bloody dagger, not dissimilar to Warlock’s athame, but unlike that symbolic blade, this one was meant to be used, as proved by the plump teardrop of blood oozing from the tip. Its features were farther away than could be explained in normal terms, but it was making up the distance fast, at a swift run, glimpsed through tattered veils of steam and smoke. Warlock was unable to move in the face of that much renewed vitality. He was an animal caught in the familiar’s headlights.
It appeared the familiar had come to the decision not to play any games with this one. This one alone had almost banished it, while no-one else had come close. The monster left the netherworld of the uncompleted spell and entered this one at a terrifying speed. It heralded its crossover with sprays of soot-blackened water slapped from its passage. Dissolved ash ran off its not-there hide like droplets of mercury.
Wholly in view now, its arachnoid eye and pious eye were large, its bloody-dagger mouth widened into a broad sword.
Warlock shut his eyes and tightened his sphincter.
***
What the familiar did to him, without breaking stride, was indescribable.
After that, it came back at a trot and ate the book.
***
There were some things about the familiar that Doug and his crew had guessed at, and guessed well, but there were others they could never know unless told.
In its making, the familiar had been given many charms, one being that it would never tire, never abandon its obligation. The monster was well-nigh unstoppable, but it could not be made invincible. Some laws were immutable and could not be broken … perhaps bent to breaking point, but not broken. The familiar was a thing of unnatural properties, but in order to interact with the natural world – to do what it was made to do – it had to abide by that world’s physical laws to some extent. Push and pull. Cause and effect. Such as the clout of a close gunshot.
But bullets themselves could not harm it. Its maker knew how essential such a charm would be. Yet there were other ways of vanquishing monsters, and more protections were added to the familiar’s armour to guard against them.
The familiar’s greatest charms were these: that it could not be harmed by fire, bullet or blade. Such gifts were double-edged. The monster could not be consumed by fire, but it couldn’t create or control it, either. If that was possible, it would have burned its prey out of their hiding place a long time before.
But that did not mean the familiar could not use tools if put in its way.
***
Doug couldn’t help himself. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said. “Just quit it, okay? Stop. Just stop it.”
Scott had run off. Doug chased after him, but unable to find him, saw Lauren and Janet making a dash for it, their arms around each other, amongst the confusion of spot fires and the water sprinklers. They appeared to make it back inside the house.
But now he watched as the familiar shoved the fiery wreckage of the smashed whirlybird toward the steps, its intention clearly to set fire to the veranda.
“C’mon, just stop it,” Doug insisted. “You’re pissing me off.”
The familiar did as bid, halting, and turning toward Doug. Flames licked briefly at its head before going out. The eyes – a reversed swastika and a yowling Bon Scott – quivered, like lips about to smile. A mouth of inked barbs did just that.
Doug wasn’t feeling as spry as the familiar. He limped on both legs. His clothes were stiff with blood, sweat and grime, and his body was lumpy with cuts and bruises. The only brightness about him were his eyes. Perhaps they were a
little crazed.
Doug approached the monster at an angle, looking like he wanted to lure it somewhere. But in truth, he didn’t know what he was doing. He’d found Rob’s Winchester outside the shed and picked it up, not bothering to check if it was loaded.
At least the rest of Rob’s family had gotten away. Doug would consider it a win if one of them managed to survive the night. Daybreak was now half an hour away. A very long half hour. Plenty of time for the familiar to find every last family member, unless it was distracted. He hated to hurry his death along, but the monster’s scrutiny was more than he could bear.
“What are you waiting for, dammit? Here I am!”
The familiar hooked its head down and began pacing a wide, unhurried circle around Doug.
“What is it? You want me to beg, fucker?”
Twisting on his heel, Doug kept facing the familiar as it circled, tracking it with the rifle nestled in the crook of his arm. If the familiar was to charge, and he was to fire, the recoil would most likely break his wrist. But he was too exhausted to lift the rifle to his shoulder.
The familiar kept circling. Doug began pacing the familiar too. They made a slow, steady orbit of each other. Despite his weariness, his limp melted away. His steps became more sure. This was the finale alright. The big finish.
The familiar suddenly and smoothly reversed direction, pacing the other way. Doug was startled into changing direction too. He wondered what the familiar had in mind. He was so astonished by the likely answer, he nearly burst out laughing.
The monster was being cautious. It was expecting some trick to be played, a trap. It did not know Doug had nothing left except his nerve and a rifle that may not be loaded. The familiar did not know he was only buying time for Janet and the kids.
But perhaps it started to suspect. The circle tightened up. Like a boat floating on water circling a drain, the familiar began to close in.