by Dante King
Fate, or whatever the hell you wanted to call it, had led me to Portland. Had led me to find a great friend in the stunning Cherie. Truthfully though, I thought that I was more interested in entertaining her beliefs than in bolstering any of my own.
When Cherie cleared her throat next to me just before two, I actually happened to be busy sketching out key scenes to my favorite movies on the back of my notebook.
“Hard at work again I see,” she said drily.
“You know me,” I replied. “Nose always to the grindstone.”
“You coming, then?” Cherie asked me.
A felt a sudden surge of warmth course through my body, which I did not reckon I could have attributed to the current atmospheric conditions taking inside the comfortable, edgy cafe.
“Where are - where are we going?” I asked, my attempt at playing it cool hampered by the fact that my vocal cords decided at that minute to tangle themselves up in my back teeth.
“I want you to come with me into the back room,” Cherie said.
Well polish my nuts and serve me a milkshake! This actually might be happening, my brain thrilled within the confines of my skull.
I cleared my throat. Twice.
“You okay?” Cherie asked.
“Just a bit of, ah, pie crust,” I said, my brain applauding sardonically and shaking its head even as my mouth spoke the words.
“You had that pie like four hours ago,” Cherie pointed out.
“Really?”
“You sure you’re all right?” Cherie asked, as she led me across the expanse of polished cement floor toward the back of the cafe. The place was emptying out now, the few staff that Cherie employed slowly tidying the Bean Me Up Cafe up for when it officially closed at three.
“Oh yeah, sure,” I said, striding along behind the foxy French Canadian and fiddling with my notepad and pen. “Yeah, fine. The back room. Sure. Lead the way.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’d been with girls. There’d been a few of them through college, in fact, but that didn’t mean I was some sort of Lothario. I was just a normal guy: that is to say, a male who was more than a little easily bamboozled and thrown off his stride by the thought that I was being led into the back room of a coffeehouse by a super cute brunette to, maybe, turn the office into the set of some sort of cosplay porno shoot.
Take you into the back office… If those weren’t six words loaded with more innuendo than you could poke a stick at then I didn’t know what was. To my mind, she may as well have asked me whether I wanted to pop out back for a little Netflix and chill.
The cafe was an open affair, whose industrial, former warehouse heritage was openly celebrated. It was quite surprising to me then, when Cherie opened the nondescript door set into the back wall of the place and we stepped into a dimly lit, low-ceilinged corridor that stretched back into the guts of the renovated warehouse.
“Whoa,” I said.
“Yeah, I think the plan was to gentrify the whole building and sell off apartments,” Cherie said. “The area as a whole isn’t ready yet though, but I managed to convince the developers I brought the cafe space from to let me buy a couple of floors back here as part of the deal.
“And they let you?” I asked.
“I can be persuasive when I have to be, Matt,” Cherie said over her shoulder. “Don’t let this geeky, cute exterior fool you. I know how to get what I want when I need to.”
I felt my mouth go a little dry at that, even though I was only half listening. I was trying to remember whether or not I still had that condom in my wallet. When had I put that in? It’d become more of a lucky rabbit’s-foot than anything else, albeit one that didn’t really work. Did condoms expire?
While my brain was grappling with these important questions, my feet led me onward, following in the wake of the very cute cafe owner.
Cherie led the way through a couple of twisting corridors until we came to another door, this one equipped with a heavy double lock.
“You live here too?” I asked.
“Yeah, in the building, but not here. This room is one that I use for… other purposes,” Cherie replied, as she unlocked the first lock with a significantly heavy clunk.
“Like pottery?” I asked, remembering some movie from the nineties that I’d caught part of while channel surfing. It’d been about a ghost with incredible hair who had had a girlfriend that did pottery and had, I was fairly certain, been imaginatively titled Ghost. They sure knew how to market a movie in the nineties.
“Not exactly,” Cherie said, as the second deadbolt slid free.
She kicked the door open and pulled me inside, then locked the door behind me.
I was already fishing in my pocket for my wallet and antique rubber, when I actually realized what I was looking at.
“What d’you think?” Cherie asked me nervously.
“Uuuuuh…” I said. “It’s… Well, I’d be lying to you if I said it was what I’d been expecting to see.”
I looked around at the tall beeswax candles dribbling wax down themselves, the assorted herbs and incense burning in their bowls and holders and sending fingers of rippling smoke up toward the shadowy ceiling, and the intricate chalk lines that had been drawn across the rough wooden floorboards.
The walls were covered by ivy that was climbing out of tubs set around the room, and there were portable flower beds filled with herbs, flowers, and vegetables of all kinds. Diluted sunlight just permeated the grimy panels of glass above us.
“Okay, it might be a little like what I might have been expecting to see,” I admitted. “Apart from the vegetables.”
“Really?” Cherie asked, her eyebrows raising in surprise.
I colored a little. “I suppose vegetables might have played a part in things if—”
“Oh my god, you thought I was taking you out back to some sex dungeon or something, didn’t you?” the French Canadian asked me incredulously.
“Look, I think we’re getting a bit off track here,” I said brusquely. “How about telling me what the hell all these pentacles and wiggly lines and shit mean?”
Instantly, Cherie’s attention snapped back to the intricate chalk lines that festooned the bare boards of the floor. As far as I could make out, there were a trio of circles with points and lines coming off them surrounded by flowing script that wasn’t English. It might have been French, of course, but somehow I doubted it.
“It’s a summoning circle,” Cherie said.
“Of course, it is,” I said.
“It is.”
“Sure. Absolutely. Why wouldn’ it be?” I said. “I’ve got one similar at my AirBnB, only a little smaller.”
“Really?”
“No.”
Cherie punched me on the arm.
“You think I’m delusional, right?” she asked.
“Not delusional,” I said, stifling a smile at the abashed look on her face, and reaching out to touch her arm affectionately. “Just nuttier than a porta potty at a peanut festival.”
“Matt!”
“I’m kidding!” I laughed good-naturedly. “Hell, what would I know about anything? Maybe, you’re just overly keen on cosplay, maybe you’re about to rustle up a celestial being that will save this article and stop me being disemboweled by my editor, Frank.”
Cherie’s half-smile brightened. “Ah, I forgot, you’re a believer deep down, aren’t you?”
“That’s right,” I said, deciding that there could be no harm in humouring my friend.
Unless she decided to use me as a human sacrifice and paint the walls with my blood, of course.
“Well, look, you just wait and see, eh?” Cherie said to me. “There’s a reason I brought you here. There’s something I’ve been gearing up to try for months now, but it’s only been this week that I’ve thought I’ve really been ready and prepared enough.”
“Demon summoning?” I asked casually. “Djinni, maybe?”
Although I might have been somewhat skeptical as to just how dee
p or wide the paranormal world extended into our own—if it existed at all—I was fairly up to date with the denizens that were said to inhabit it. Perks of the occupation, I supposed.
“Don’t be dumb,” Cherie said, stepping into the larger of the three circles and motoning for me to step inside with her.
“Sorry,” I replied, doing as I was told.
“You can’t go in for something like that first crack out of the box,” Cherie said. “Those entities are way too unpredictable. They’ll be wearing an amateur's head as a hat before you know it.”
“‘Course. Nothing ruins a day more than having your head turned into a fashion accessory. Then, we’re hoping to summon a…?”
“Just a low level forest nymph,” Cherie said in a blasé voice. “I like gardening, you know. I like growing stuff for the cafe, so I thought a forest nymph would help me with that.”
I nodded, deciding that no words of mine could be of any use here. Better to just get this over with so that I’d be ready to catch my lift to my mystery location.
“All right, I’m ready when you are,” I said encouragingly.
Cherie grabbed a suitably dusty, leather bound tome, which looked like it must weigh about twenty-five pounds, from a shelf. I wondered where she’d picked that up from, but restrained myself from asking. She found her page thanks to the placement of a goblin-headed bookmark and cleared her throat.
“Stay in the circle if you value your skin, American,” she told me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Cherie began to recite words from the giant book, her finger moving across the page from bottom to top instead of left to right.
The words rolled out of her like electricity, like molten metal from underground. The language was impossible to follow, complete gibberish to my ears, and yet was somehow fair and foul at the same time.
I couldn’t help but get the impression that every syllable was helping to weave an intricate pattern in the air, a pattern that was beyond my sight.
Once more, the hairs on my neck prickled and stood to attention. Soon, they were joined by what felt like every other hair on my body. My skin rose in gooseflesh, despite the fact that the room was warm.
And yet, for all this, there was nothing tangible that I could attribute any of these sensations to. Nothing except the words coming out of Cherie’s mouth.
Looking over at the bowls of burning herbs, I noticed that the trails of smoke, which had been drifting and waving in the minute air currents of the large room, were now rising straight up. Straight as a ruler. Without any flicker of deviation.
What herbs has she got in those bowls? I thought to myself suspiciously. Is that her trick? Am I just bent as a banana right now? This is Portland after all. Who knows what they put in their incense sticks.
These musings of mine were abruptly cut off. Cherie’s voice jarred to a halt. It might have been my imagination, but I almost fancied that the last few words rolled out into the air even after her mouth had snapped shut. I looked over at the pretty brunette and saw that her jade eyes were rolling slowly up into her head.
Bit creepy, my brain said, before I could stop it.
And that’s when every one of the at least two dozen beeswax tapers in the place snuffed out simultaneously.
“No, no,” I said out loud to the gloom of the room, “now that is creepy.”
In the sudden twilight cast by the candles all going out, I could only make out Cherie’s body standing rigid as a mannequin next to me. I could hear her breath coming slow and steady through her pursed lips. Her eyes were unblinking.
The smoke emitted from the burning herbs was swirling gently around the room now, in flagrant denial of the fact that there was not a breath of air that I could discern.
“Holy snap, crackle, and pop,” I said softly to the room at large, invoking an exclamation I hadn’t used since I was about nine years-old, “is this magic? Are we fucking magicking right now?”
My eyes scanned the drifting smoke, unsure of what exactly I should do next. Cherie’s words buzzed like a neon bar sign in my brain.
“Stay in the circle if you value your skin, American.”
I mean, what really could be the harm of stepping outside of some chalk circle, really?
I raised my foot.
Then again, my ever-helpful mind elbowed in, there isn’t anyone who can throw a tantrum like a French Canadian, Matty boy. Might be more judicious to see how this pans out.
I had a point. No point risking the wrath of a Québécois if it could be helped. Sometimes, in weird-ass situations such as the one I was currently in, it didn’t take much for someone to reveal that their roof was nailed down as tight as you thought it was.
Unexpectedly and incongruously, my nose was suddenly full of the scent of pine needles, sap and leaf mold. On the very edge of my hearing I caught the sound of laughter, although, on second thoughts, it might have been the chattering of a distant river.
I shook my head. Neither of those sounds made a bit of sense. I was standing in a practically empty warehouse in the Northwest Industrial area of Portland for God’s sake, with only a catatonic cafe worker for company.
I replaced my foot carefully to the deck. Then, my eyes focused on something; a flash of emerald green in the middle of a collection of enormous pot plants in one corner of the room.
There was a suggestion of a humanoid form sliding between two towering terracotta pots before disappearing into the shadows.
“Please be a cat,” I said to the thing.
I peered into the swirling smoke, leaning as far forward as the chalk outline of the circle would allow.
“Or please be the weed incense,” I added. “I swear I won’t even be mad that I’ve unintentionally got baked right before a crucial business meeting…”
There was rustle amongst the plants.
And then, a face appeared through the drifting, pungent smoke. I caught a flash of lime green eyes that somehow looked capable of biting me, pale green skin, and wild hair that reminded me of a fern of some kind. Sharp teeth grinned out at me, as one of the bright green eyes closed in a lightning wink.
“What the—” I started to say.
The lights came up with a suddenness that almost left me with a chocolate flapjack in my boxers. The candles flared like miniature suns, the smoke seemed to dissipate from the thick fog of a second before back into the little steady streams.
I slammed my eyelids shut.
“—fuck!” I finished.
I opened my eyes as quickly as the sudden glare would allow, only to find the room exactly as it had been when Cherie and I had walked in.
The humanoid—but definitely not human—face, if it had ever existed outside of some bizarre drug-fueled hallucination, was gone.
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