“How many are there?” Colin asked.
“One as of right now.”
“Gertrude, can you tell if they are afflicted?”
“He is,” Calidum affirmed, reappearing abruptly.
“Are you sure? Can’t rightly tell from here,” Gertrude said while peeking through the curtain.
“Do you recognize who it is Gertrude?” I asked.
“It’s the stranger I saw earlier with overalls on.”
“Why do you suppose he is coming here now?” Colin asked.
“Probably to check up on the ghost,” I suggested.
I glared at the ghost, but he remained reticent. Was he bait? I looked once again at the locked doors, regretted we hadn’t had the chance to open them yet and then said, “Let’s stay to the darker corners of the room to wait this one out.”
We went and hid behind one of the few display cases that had not been overturned near the back of the room, next to the locked door on the left side of the room. This display had cracks in the glass, but not enough to impede the view through it. Colin turned the lantern light off, cracked the back door of the display case open, and then we crouched down to wait for the man to come in through the door.
“We should know in about thirty of your world’s seconds if his intention was to come here,” Calidum whispered from behind me. He was right.
Not more than ten went by and then the door opened. He must have been more in a hurry than Calidum had thought. If there had been any doubt of his intentions to check on the ghost, it was quickly dispelled. He strode right up to him, carrying a lantern, and I was not surprised to find that it was Lucas from Pastor Bob’s house, the Tomb Talker.
He asked the ghost, “Where are they?”
The ghost glared at him, but admirably kept from glancing our direction.
“Pippa saw them come in here, so where are they?” Lucas asked more forcefully.
The ghost still said nothing.
“I can make your time here very painful.”
Gertrude lifted her gun and shot it high. I imagined its sound echoing out across the streets to the Hotel Château Cyprès. Lucas pulled out his own gun and then leveled it at where we were hiding. Gertrude stood and rounded the case while she kept her hands up in the air. She slowly set the gun down on the display case, but it wasn’t the Peacemaker that I had seen her take back at the constable office. She must have taken two guns.
I moved to stand with her, but Colin clamped his hand around my arm and refused to let me go.
“Gertrude Basquiat,” Lucas said. She walked around the display and slowly approached him. I watched, transfixed by what was about to unfold.
“Lucas, I am prepared to meet my maker.”
“That’s good, because I am prepared to make that happen. But first, where is the Summoner?”
She was dangerously close to him now. Her hands remained up in the air, just as he kept the aim of his gun leveled on her. We heard the hammer cock in anticipation.
“I’m prepared to meet my maker, but only after I make sure you go to Hell before me,” she said before pulling out her Peacemaker from a deep pocket in her coat.
A split second before she got her shot off, he fired his pistol. Her aim went wide and got him in the arm, while his aim proved true, and I saw blood splash out of her back. The she stumbled forward and fell onto him.
At that moment, Colin leapt over the display case. In two hops, he landed on them, flattening him to the ground. To my amazement, Gertrude managed to squeeze her way out from between them, apparently not dead yet. Then she shoved salt and bullets into his mouth whilst Colin held him down.
I went to Lucas’s side, and even though he tried to say something, I couldn’t understand a word he said, because his mouth was full bullets and salt.
“You better circle him! He’s afflicted all right!” Gertrude shrieked over her shoulder at me.
I needed to know the truth. I needed to know the future. I squinted my good eye, and I was jerked out of the present into the future in hyper drive. Oh no! She was right! She was going to die and Colin would try and save her, and then he would die also. In addition, I saw what was trying to come out of Lucas, and it was not a sweet little puppy dog.
I screamed, “Let him go Colin!”
The only way we were getting out of this pickle was for me to release the ghost. It was always tricky business working other people’s sigils, but chances had to be taken. I made it to him with my stick out, and then collapsed onto the floor. I was wiping away particular sigils while adding my own, and before I knew it, the ghost was free.
After precious moments spent freeing him, I turned back to Colin, Gertrude, and Lucas. Gertrude was bleeding out through the shot in her gut, and Lucas and Colin were fighting hand to hand. Lucas’s gun had been thrown several feet from the fray. We needed to get away from Lucas and soon.
I looked hard at Lucas in the dim light and saw his back was bleeding from a lateral wound. Colin seemed to be holding his own, but I had to get Lucas into the ghost’s old circle before that thing that was inside him burst free. We just had to get him to follow Colin into it, so I could then trap Lucas within it, while allowing Colin to escape.
“Colin! Don’t kill him yet!” I knew that whatever was inside of Lucas was stronger than any human ever was and was even possibly immortal. “Try and get him over to where the ghost was!”
They tussled for a few more minutes, and then Colin grabbed Lucas’s knee out from under him. Lucas pulled Colin down on top of him. It was tit for tat like that for a spell, and I felt futile. I couldn’t shoot Lucas, for fear of hitting Colin. There was nothing I could do, or was there?
I took out my newly acquired magchain and made a lasso with it. Then I slowly approached the men, before setting the loop down on the floor.
I stood back and waited. It would take the careful flick of the wrist in order to lift it at just the precise moment. Just like flicking a silk scarf delicately in order to flirt with a handsome beau at the Fall Ball at Mr. Cranchet’s house. I was good at flirting and flattering, just inexperienced at anything else that was supposed to follow it.
A foot shifted there, an arm flung there, and then my time came. I lifted, pulled, and twisted the chain. I was almost too afraid to look when I heard the thud and felt the floor shake through my shoes with the impact of his fall. Lucas was on the floor and struggling to get the chain off his ankle. He didn’t know it yet, but there was no way he was getting out of this.
I saw him take a second gun from his boot, and with sudden acuity, I knew what his intentions were. He lifted the gun to his ankle and before I could raise my own to shoot the gun out of his hand, he got two shots off. I wasn’t worried about the chain, it could withstand more than a couple of shots, but what did worry me was the fact he was trying to shoot his own foot off to escape the lasso.
I leveled my shot, but before I could get a shot off, Lucas’s gun went off one more time before Colin wrenched the pistol from his hands. Colin threw it away from him to join the first one. Then he threw a punch that leveled Lucas to the ground. He didn’t get back up, since he had been knocked out cold.
“Colin! Help me drag him into the ghost’s circle now, but don’t touch him!” He wrapped the chain around his hand and dragged Lucas across the remaining distance to the circle.
I then went and checked on Gertrude. The last shot fired must have gotten her instead of Lucas’s foot, as the bullet had gone her right between her eyes. She was dead. I mourned her loss, even if she had tried to kill me yesterday. In the end, she had tried to make things right.
“Well done,” the guardian ghost said next to me. I jumped in surprise, as I was rudely reminded that he was off his tether now. Well, we were about to see whose side he really was on.
“What are you going to do now? Leave this place and haunt some poor unsuspecting family in a farmhouse?” My focus was clearly set on the man in the circle, as I added the last marks necessary to seal him up.
Once the dra
wing was done, I told Colin to yank hard on the chain, and because his foot was only attached by a couple of tendons and ligaments, he was able to separate the foot from the man, but the chain broke in many pieces in the process. I tried to ignore my agitation at its loss as I activated the circle; but finally, the deed was done, and Lucas was trapped with whatever was inside of him.
“Well, he is in there,” Calidum said. “You went about it differently than I would have, but the effect appears to be the same.”
“Thanks. Some people don’t have the power of fire at their disposal, but a little help on your part might have saved Gertrude’s life.”
He didn’t have time to respond before Lucas split open from pelvis to head. Maybe it was for the best Calidum hadn’t roasted him alive, as I watched the spectacle unfold before us. I couldn’t help but notice that it was rather like hearing and seeing a cow’s bladder being split open from the inside out. Thank goodness for the triple helix halo mark, since this time the odor was trapped inside of the circle.
“I think I’m going to stay here with you until you make it out of this town,” the ghost told me.
“Thanks, I think.”
Meanwhile, Lucas was as dead as a doornail. What was left of his skin was bubbling and turning black, which only further accentuated the point. I watched whatever was inside him gather its strength to leave the shell of his body.
“On second thought, I don’t need another tag along friend.” I told the ghost. I didn’t need another Calidum who only decided to help me only when the occasion suited him.
“Is that how you look at me?” Colin asked me. I observed Calidum climb a wall to slip into the ceiling, crawling away from any situation he deemed to be too uncomfortable to interfere with, which only further proved my point.
“Of course not. I was talking strictly to the ghost.”
He seemed to want to ask exactly what my intentions were towards him, but in the end, he held his tongue. If he wasn’t prepared to talk about it, I certainly wasn’t. I wasn’t a Bayou Princess for nothing. Avoiding uncomfortable conversations was par for the course.
So I asked instead, “So can you still see him?”
“If you mean the ghost, yes I can, but I still can’t hear him.”
“You know I am the ghost of a demon,” the ghost informed me.
Oh. This was new for me. “I have never met a guardian ghost who was once a demon.”
“That’s because there aren’t many of us in this plane, but times seem to be changing fast.” He then pointed at Lucas, who didn’t look very much like himself anymore. Instead, he looked rather like the molted skin of a cicada, with a black rolling creature surging out from inside him. Even though his skin had already split open, there was an amniotic looking sac surrounding whatever was trapped within him, preventing the monster inside him from being birthed outright. It was going to burst out soon, whether we were ready for it or not.
“You don’t look much like a demon,” I commented.
“Doppelgänger.” Lord knew how I had had enough of them, but at least that explained why he looked and acted human. The last doppelgänger I was in contact with had disappeared when Wendy remade Neverland. I tried summoning it on several locations using the blood connection that we shared, but the bonding must have broken, as she never came when called. I guess it was just example demons not being there when you needed them.
“You better add a Nostrum’s branch on the eastern mark, or he’s going to break free,” the ghost told me.
“I don’t know what you are talking about. That is a perfectly good circle,” I countered.
“What is he saying?” Colin asked.
I repeated it, and then he said, “He’s right.” Then he added a mark that I had never seen before, but admittedly, it did resemble the branch of a tree.
I touched the circle again, and pulled more electromagnetic resonances from the earth to fuel the new mark until it glowed in my mind’s eye. I felt static electricity spark from my fingertips and my scalp tingled. I was surprised at how much more power it required than my usual marks. After studying the branch more closely, so I could memorize it, I realized that I really did need to further my education.
Then what remained of Lucas’s body exploded; a violent birth it would be. What I didn’t expect were the identical twins that came forth from it. This was turning bizarre. Even if a demon could figure out how to possess a person, there shouldn’t have been two of them sharing one body, unless they were cloning themselves.
“They are reproducing, using humans for living incubators,” the ghost told me.
I looked carefully at the newborns, whose heads had a taken on a bird shape.
Colin bent down and examined the newborns even more closely. “Those heads are shaped like an ibis’s head. Are there ibis birds in Louisiana?” Colin asked.
“Yes, there are some in the deltas.”
“They have been made into the image of Thoth” he said, clearly fascinated by the newborn pair. “Those Sobek creatures definitely had the heads of alligators, rather than crocodiles. These might not be demons at all, but are the products of a bioengineer. I don’t recall any corporations employing anyone of those qualifications here. Do you?”
“Those are demons Colin, or they couldn’t be contained by the circle,” I told him.
“I will have to agree that there are demons within them. Maybe they have been genetically modified to create a body that is more homogenous for the demons to thrive in while they are in this plane.”
The two of them started snapping at each other and the ghost said, “They don’t seem happy, do they? Look, one is attempting to eat the other.”
“Has their DNA make-up been modified to make them hold a desired form?” I asked the ghost.
“I can’t say for certain, but if it was, I don’t think it was people from this plane who taught them how to do it.” If what he said were true, then that would be terrible news. It meant that they really were trying to summon an Isis demon to this world, and the demons had made first contact. They wanted to return.
As I watched the twins peck each other with their softened bills, I asked, “Do you have a name? I don’t want to keep referring to you as the ghost any longer.”
“What name agrees with you? Stephen per chance?”
I turned around and glared at him. Why did he pick that name? Then before my eyes, his bland visage changed and he took on the countenance of a semi-transparent Captain Carlisle.
“I do not find this amusing.”
“I’m only doing what he is telling me to do.” Lies. All lies. Typical demon behavior. He probably pulled the image from my mind somehow.
“Fine, tell him to go on now. I’ve got everything under control in this plane.”
“He can hear you, and he believes quite the contrary. He said that he helped you back at your house by opening a book to an important page.” I frowned. Delia had told me pretty much the same thing.
“Basil, something is happening,” Colin said and urged me to look back at the circle with the newly birthed demons.
Before my eyes, one of the newborns split apart along its sides to produce two arms and legs. Then the other one followed in swift order. They appeared androgynous for now, as they grew to the size of a full grown man right before us in a matter of seconds.
“They have a plague inside of them,” the Stephen imposter said. I imparted to Colin what he had said.
“What kind of a plague?” Colin asked as the ibis twins stumbled to stand on their own for the first time.
“One that will put an end to all those unable to channel this plane’s energies.” All the Ordinaries must be what he meant.
“They won’t stop there. Look at Lucas, he was a User,” Colin added.
“His followers think that they can transform Earth into a world where only Users live. But what is going to happen is that the demons are going to transform it another demon plane,” the ghost said.
“One that is h
ospitable for them and not us,” I added. Then I chuckled darkly and said, “Frightening to think of Neverland being a potential life boat for the human race.”
“Their only goal now is to reproduce,” the ghost said and I relayed his words to Colin.
“Eternal life,” Colin muttered quietly to himself.
“What did you say?” I asked him.
“They are trying to gain eternal life. Isis brought Osiris back to life after being torn apart by Set.”
“Pastor Bob and Mayor Morlock think they can live forever if she is brought back to Earth? They intend to barter for it?” I asked.
“They dooooo,” the ghost whispered eerily in my ear, which fell flat in a cliché ghost howl. Great I released a ghost who had a juvenile sense of humor that only I could hear. It would be my luck if he decided to haunt me for the rest of my life.
“The ghost confirmed your theory?” Colin asked.
“Yes,” I replied, although my attention was riveted to the demons trapped within the circle, who were finally able to walk around and test their boundaries.
“How long will such a circle hold them?” Colin asked.
“That circle ought to last through next week, which means it will only hold until tomorrow if we are lucky. But that should be just long enough to do what needs to be done.”
“I hope you have a plan, because I do research for a living,” Colin told me.
“That is what I am counting on.” He looked at me quizzically and then I added, “Open that door,” I told him as I pointed to the locked door on the left. “I am going to cast the biggest circle of my career, but in order to do it, I need what is in there.”
“What is in that room?”
“You’ll see.”
···•Ͽ Ѡ Ͼ•···
“What is this room?”
Courtesy of Colin and a piece of rebar, we liberated the door’s locking mechanism and found ourselves in a room filled with document tubes lining three walls. It looked like a miniature Post Office.
I told him, “Look for one of the cubbies with the name Hotel Château Cyprès written along the bottom of it. If you stumble upon one with the mayor’s name, grab that one too.”
The Summoner's Sigil Page 24