by Paff, M B
“Shut the fuck up, fatboy,” Tae quipped, “How’d you think I’d just run away, huh? I’m nobody’s bitch, that’s for sure.”
“For sure,” agreed Sawyer, “but I’d rather you brought back a tanker truck of Raid with you.”
“Fuck this place! Let’s get that fat nerd and get the fuck outta here.”
From the parlor, billowing like a school of black fish, a mass of hornets surged to fill the foyer.
The two men, cursing, flung themselves to the floor and rolled, as if on fire, attempting to keep the stingers from finding flesh. Their curses soon turned to cries of agony.
***
With the chalk, Truman finished the broken circle. He recognized the script as an ancient Persian cuneiform used by demonologists. The language was archaic, but often used by occultists. Between the symbols of protection and strength he inscribed the ruin for deflection. Quietly, audible to his ears only, a visceral hum began to grow in strength.
Truman joined the cadence with his voice,
Quid agendum vires ad me
Perfidus ego semino in dilectione Dei servate
Et fructum iustitae
Outside the circle, the inky cloud spread to encompass the room, above and surrounding Truman’s protective barrier. Try as it might, it could not breach the wards.
“Oh the tortures I will inflict upon you, Truman Cadmusson, the pain I will unleash on your flesh,” the whispers were reduced, but not wholly deafened. The demon continued its threats while Truman consolidated his thoughts. He could call to mind a dozen spells of banishment, but none were focused enough, or sufficient enough to combat an entity of this strength. To defeat it, he would need the black book.
“Come out, little man, come out! Look what I have found.”
Beneath the whirling vapors of its being, a teeming mass of black beetles swarmed from the floor, engorging in an almost liquid mass of chitinous bodies. The bubble separated to reveal the bulky form of Sawyer and beside him, the smaller body of Tae. Within seconds, the beetles retreated. Sawyer and Tae lay with their eyes open. Neither moved.
“Banish your circle, Truman Cadmusson, or I will devour their flesh.” Eldonna had returned. She stood above his prone friends, naked and luscious. The desire in her eyes, however, was gone. “Banish your circle and take up the book. I will guide you in the transference.”
A shriek of horror and pain wracked Sawyer’s body and corded every muscle in stark relief. At his side, Tae howled and tore at his own flesh as if to lay bare his bones.
Truman stretched out a foot and erased an arc of the chalk circle. The black book was only yards away. “Release my friends, bitch,” He said, “so they may hand me the book.”
Eldonna smiled, hands on her delicious hips, “You are so unlike any mortal I have encountered. None have used such wit and none have resisted the succubae so thoroughly. I think I will take you to my home.
“Get on with it, slut.”
Sawyer gasped and swiveled his head. He saw Truman standing only a few feet away. “Truman! Goddamnit!” He rose, but then stilled upon seeing Eldonna’s naked body. “Well how do you like that shit,” the big man whispered.
“Sawyer,” spoke Truman, “Sawyer, look at me. Don’t look at that bitch.”
The hefty carpenter jerked his eyes from the demoness and back to his friend. “Yeah buddy, what the fuck?” Sawyer clambered to his feet, “Do I got some shit to tell you.”
“Later, buddy. First I need that book over there, can you bring it to me?”
Sawyer turned to the book and then back to Truman. His eyes took in the eerie glow radiating from the demonic essence and the chalk circle inscribed upon the floor. “What the fuck is happenin’ here, man?”
With a shriek, Tae began to tear at his skin again.
“I need you to bring me that book, Sawyer. Please!”
The book was heavy and cold in Sawyer’s big hand. He plucked it from the floor and released it into Truman’s hands.
A flash of light preceded a stomach twisting wrenching and Truman’s vision lurched. The library, Eldonna’s nude, glowing body, Sawyer on hands and knees outside the circle, and Tae lying inert, all vanished with such force it took the breath from Truman’s chest.
***
Inhale.
Truman drew a stuttering gasp and his vision returned. The library was gone. His friends were gone. The demon bitch and the book were gone. He stood alone.
A wind, carrying an abrasive texture like sand, scoured his cheek. It brought with it a sour rankness – a vinegar-like scent that did little to calm his nausea. Truman heard the wind and nothing else. Beneath his feet was course black gravel, dull and unremarkable. Beyond that, stretching in every direction, was a flat plain of rock. The sky mirrored the ground, a dappled gray in a multitude of shades, with wispy clouds that swirled and twisted in impossible and contradictory motion.
Truman did not stand on the rock of his world and he knew it, not from the clues embedded in ground or sky, but from the taste of the air and the feel of it upon his skin. Every nerve ending in his body responded to an unfamiliarity – a strangeness that was more intestinal than intellectual.
There was no variation upon any horizon. If one could envisage the most featureless, dull, flat, and despairing landscape then it would be but a pale image to the reality of this dark and deserted plain. To Truman, it looked and felt like the surface of a dead world – a planet or moon that had succumbed to misery and desolation.
This could be hell, Truman surmised, turning in a circle and examining every direction. No pits of fire or torture devices, but a world of gray, unrelieved emptiness and a loneliness that would grate any soul into shredded madness. The book had brought him here, though he no longer held it – he knew this beyond doubt. An impulse had propelled him here as soon as his hand touched its surface. If the book was the key to this place then there was some purpose to his presence upon the abysmal plain. The black book could be as sentient as the demon that hunted it, though in as different a scope as a tree to a tiger.
He chose a direction at random and walked. The fractured stone crunched below each step. That and the wind were the only sounds. The wind shifted, as random as the chaotic clouds above, first it blew into his eyes, then across his shoulders, and then against his back. The temperature hovered at room temperature, as Truman felt neither heat nor cold. The sour aroma persisted.
Minutes gathered into a quarter of an hour then added to a half, then a full hour. Truman kept the time on his watch. The light shone omnipresent across the sky. There were no shadows.
Truman began to despair. It was natural, of course, when presented with obstacles neither earned nor understood, coupled with a sense of helplessness. He was being manipulated by an unrecognized force and the chubby scholar was loath to be the toady of anyone.
He cast his mind into the knowledge he had gained from years of occult study. For the first time he withheld his skeptical regard and attempted to examine it as a manual of truth – an encyclopedia of reality. Perhaps there was some notation that could cast light upon the powers of the book and the demon that desired it. While Truman’s feet crunched on black gravel and sand gathered on the lenses of his glasses, his mind sought and examined the books and manuscripts lodged in the library of his consciousness.
Truman halted at the edge of a crater. He could not remember the past handful of minutes of walking that had led him to the black, yawning hole, so deeply had his thoughts scurried among the pages of his memory. Either he had approached it, or it had opened without a sound or signal suddenly before him.
The crater was large, though not immense, perhaps thirty feet in diameter and ten feet in depth to its center. It was symmetrical, as even and smooth as an ice cream scoop. The walls and floor were of black and mottled gray stone. A monster stood in the center.
At first, Truman’s eyes had skipped over the nexus of the depression, as if nothing had been there, and then, with instantaneous examination, he noted the presence of a
gigantic beast, a huge creature of folklore, a fearsome minotaur that regarded him with black eyes, where, in the moment before, had been only empty space.
The minotaur was nude. While the head was that of a great bull, crowned by a pair of ivory horns at least a yard in length, the shoulder and chest were humanoid, though covered in a bristling black pelt. The torso was massively muscled, as huge and thick as a competitive strongman in peak physical perfection. From the chest down, the bovine features diminished to a more human appearance. Its belly was as hairy as a normal man’s, as were its pubic area and huge, trunk like legs. The minotaur displayed a human penis though on a scale and dimension much more bull-like than man. Its arms were more powerful than was humanly possible and each was encircled by a circular torque of black metal. Either could have been as easily used as the wheel within the tire of Truman’s truck. In all, the creature was perhaps eight feet tall or more, and weighed as much as two NFL linemen.
Truman’s impression of the monster was first of simmering violence and then, below and deeper than its projected ferocity, a pure masculinity that exulted in its own nature. It was animal, certainly, a force of mindless appetite and liquid emotion, but fickle as well, as if it knew things not revealed to a ravening beast.
It spoke. “Hello, Truman. You may call me Asterion. I am here to help you.” The minotaur’s mouth did not move and no sound emanated from it, for the words formed directly into Truman’s thoughts. There was a feral aspect to them that was easily identified as foreign and alien.
“Asterion”, answered Truman, aloud, “the son of Pasiphae and Posideon’s bull? You are the minotaur of the labyrinth?”
There was amusement in Asterion’s reply, wrapped around something that felt like hunger, “Oh yes, the mating of a bull and a human woman. Delicious. Intense. Nothing like it.”
“This, then, must be my labyrinth. A maze of emptiness and nothingness.”
“Perceptive, Truman, very perceptive. What they say about you must be true.”
“They?”
The minotaur shrugged its mighty shoulders in a perversely human gesture, “Oh you know, those little creatures that like to spy on great men.”
“You flatter me, sir.”
“Oh I’d rather flatten you, beautiful Truman, flatten you beneath me while I rut with you on a field of mud and flowers.”
Now the intrusion into his mind was colored with breathless lust and need – a heated, gasping crescendo of desire that shocked Truman for a moment. With a surge of will he stilled those chaotic emotions, “Thanks for the invitation, Asterion, but you’re not my type.”
The great beast spread its arms to either side, as if requesting that its might and majesty be admired, “Type, Truman? Really? Don’t degrade yourself by lying to me, for I know all there is to you, every bit and piece of your soul is bare. Its so very human to lie to oneself, but why deny that which you desire so much? Loyalty to God, perhaps? But you and I both know there is no such a person, at least not as is known among mortals. You cast off those petty chains years ago, why draw them to you now?”
“Did you bring me to this place so we could discuss my hidden nature, Asterion? I somehow doubt that.”
The minotaur relaxed its massive limbs. The heady aroma of vinegar was suddenly replaced by the muskiness of sweating flesh – a markedly masculine smell that enveloped the pudgy professor like a cloud. “My mate will strip the skin from your bones, Truman, she will kill you and your friends as quickly and without thought as you would a housefly.”
As Truman stood upon the lip of the crater, the wind rose in strength, pushing against his back as if to propel him into the creature’s strong arms. Truman was no frail creature, however, and he resisted. “Your mate. Interesting. Fascinating, really. You lie to me as quickly as the bitch demon would take my life, it seems. You are no mythological monster, no Minotaur of the labyrinth, you are a manifestation of the book.”
Was the sky beginning to darken?
“It doesn’t matter,” answered Asterion, showing teeth that were decidedly un-bovine in length and sharpness, “I am one of a duality, an alpha to the omega, one side of a single coin, there is no separating me from my mate. Already one has died in horrific fashion, dear Truman, screaming and bloody attempting to sever the tie that binds us. You will meet the same fate unless we are returned to our world. What loss is there to you?”
Truman was shaking his head, even while the creature planted its threat in his mind. “You must think me a fool, not-Asterion, if you expect me to believe that. The door was opened, a hole was punched from this world through and into your own. Once opened, as you and I well know, it can never be fully closed. You will re-join your other half and gather the hordes of your realm. Your kind is always seeking a path into this world and now you have one.”
“Oh Truman,” Asterion’s thought-words grew breathless and wistful, as if sharing a dream, “If only you could realize the deliciousness of your world, the scope of its wonders, the extremes of its pleasures. I could show you so many things. Don’t deny yourself the experience.”
In a flash, Truman’s mind was assaulted by images of decadence – thrusting, venial sex and gorging, rapacious gluttony. The intrusion was so forceful and sudden that the scholar’s defenses faltered and his flesh responded. “Exsilium,” he gasped, crushed beneath the weight of desire, but still faintly conscious of his purpose.
Suddenly, the intrusion into his mind was gone, the window closed, and the demon was repelled.
The sky faded into darkness and the wind stilled to immobility. Asterion, however, was still visible, bathed in a cone of white light that seemed to have no source. It etched every powerful muscle in bright detail. Its penis was fully aroused, pointing toward Truman like a spear. “Fool! Poor dumb, blind fool! You deny yourself everything for the sake of nothing!”
The light about the minotaur winked out and Truman felt the same wrenching he had experienced upon entering the labyrinth.
***
Truman was back within the library, standing resolutely within the circle, while Sawyer slumped on the floor, and Tae lay motionless. The naked demon, Eldonna, stood resplendent and proud. It seemed only a moment had passed since his departure, and no one but he had noted it.
Eldonna crooned in triumph. “Redraw your circle, Truman Cadmusson, use the words within the frontispiece.”
Truman still held the book. He released the pair of iron latches and opened it. The black cover was soft and wrinkled, like an old man’s skin. Inside, drawn onto the first page in exquisite detail, was the head of a bull. Below it were written words that twisted and crawled like a spider’s legs. The majority of the text was in Latin. He was only able to read a few lines, perhaps three sentences or a paragraph, as the dialect was archaic, the light was dim, and the circumstances dire.
“Sawyer,” he called, “bring Tae into the circle, quickly!”
“What is this?” Demanded the demoness, “Do as I say!”
“Sawyer!”
The big carpenter knew that tone. With one arm he hauled the supine body of his friend while crawling into the break of Truman’s circle. The husky academic redrew the arc behind them.
Quickly, but with painstaking accuracy, Truman spoke a command, “Separatione dividet.” He then shut the book and dropped it to the floor.
Outside the circle, the lovely body of Eldonna morphed into a hideous shadow. Within, barely discernable, the men could see the vague movement of wings and the wicked points of black horns. Faintly, they could hear the protestations of an angry bull.
A hush fell upon the library and then, with a shriek, a blinding light exploded outside the circle.
Truman, clutching the black book to his chest, Sawyer, one big arm around his gasping friend, and Tae, awake and wincing in pain, blinked back tears as their vision returned. They stood in a dusty library, beside a pile of desecrated books and within a circle of white chalk. They were alone.
***
“Now ar
e you gonna tell me what you did back there?” Sawyer asked. The big man sat on the front porch step, beside Truman. Tae was at the truck, applying hand sanitizer to the scratches on his hands and arms.
The sun had risen. Soft orange sunlight reflected off the white clapboard as if the house burned with an inner fire.
Truman wore his coat. In his lap was the black book and his worn journal. “I studied the occult when I was a kid because it seemed cool, different, and kinda scary. It was just a hobby, really, and I never really believed in any of it. I’ve never seen a demon, before today – I mean – and I’ve never seen magic work either. It was all just stories, I never took it seriously. But I guess there was some part of me, some small voice way back in the corner of my brain, which believed it. Why else would I continue to collect and study and research?”
“OK, hotshot,” grinned Sawyer within this bristling beard, “but what the fuck happened back in there?”
“I’m getting there, you big ox. Now listen. There is a duality in nature and, I discovered, a duality in the supernatural as well.”
“And duality is –.”
“Two. Two things that are connected in some way – like matter and anti-matter, chaos and order, or protons and electrons.”
“So opposites?”
“Not exactly. Are love and empathy opposites? No, but they always occur together and neither can truly function alone. There’s more: knowledge and memory, choice and consequence, cause and effect, a tool and the hand that uses it. All are indivisible. This book is the same. It is alive, or possessed, which one I don’t yet know, but there is a force inside it that requires a user.” Truman briefly described his encounter with the minotaur, inside the desolate labyrinth.
Sawyer was staring at the black book with suspicion and disquiet. “And the book’s other half was that naked woman demon-thing?”
“For the moment, yes. But I suspect that this book has had many wielders over its lifetime. All I did was force a separation between the two, a separation that was, partially, already there. As soon as the book and the demon entered our world they were bound by its laws; they couldn’t bind to one another as they had within their home. Without its connection to the book, Eldonna couldn’t remain within this world, for it had not been summoned, and so it was sucked back into whatever pit is its home.”