Summoned (11 page)

God,
the Reverend said so
. Sean was the crazy one if he took any comfort from that.

He made it safely to the grill, which lay on its side, its lid ten feet off. When he’d fallen on his butt, he must have kicked the grill over. Again, end of mystery. He scraped the scattered briquettes together. They stank with the new stink, the melding of Zeph and Aghar. He held his breath until he could smother the embers under the lid.

The bean pots he dumped into a plastic grocery bag that still held Geldman’s glass tubes. He tied the bag shut with four hard-pulled knots. It would be safest to chuck it into the river, no matter how much Joe-Jack (Lord of the Pawtuxet Conservation Society) would kick if he could see. Sean had fished crap out of the water five annual cleanups in a row. He’d earned one supposedly nontoxic dump.

Reluctant to give up the light, he hung his camp lantern on the handlebars of Dad’s bike and struggled into his backpack, so he’d be ready to move. Then he crept to the edge of the parking lot.

A narrow path led into the brush between lot and river. Sean sidled along it with the grace of a drunken elephant. His racket spooked something in the reeds, and it beat a rustling retreat. Coon, maybe. Skunk, possum. Just a plain old animal, but it could be rabid. Sean stopped, whirled the loaded grocery bag like a slingshot, and hurled it as far as he could.

It splashed down mid-river and sank. Sean didn’t wait to say good-bye—the animal in the reeds was still rustling, and maybe it wasn’t retreating. Maybe it was moving toward him.

Stumbling into the parking lot, Sean saw something gleam in the leafy shadows of the woods to the east. Was it stray starlight on an onyx forehead or a golden eye? Back by the river, had something just splashed into the water?

In three strides, he made it to the bike and jumped on. Though he could only steer with his right hand, he pedaled hard, out of the lot, onto the service road, toward the safety of sodium streetlights and the company of late-cruising cars.

8

When
Joe-Jack arrived the next morning, he took one look at the bloody gauze wadded around Sean’s hand and drove him straight to his aunt’s. Sean told Celeste he’d cut himself slicing a bagel. East Side Ph.D.’s were always butchering themselves that way, so she had no trouble believing her dumb-ass nephew had. She hustled him to her office, where her partner Dr. Goss sutured him up.

Celeste insisted he stay overnight at her house, which meant he couldn’t clean up at the industrial park. No worries. Anyone was welcome to the stinking grill, and as for the magical circle, Gus said there were going to be afternoon thunderstorms. The rain would wash away Sean’s pentagram, and that would be the end of the ritual.

Eddy came over in the afternoon. Sean told her the whole story, except for the hard-on part. She was cool and didn’t say,
I told you so
. Instead she tore into the Reverend and Geldman. “It’s no joke, angel dust. You could have brain damage.”

“I had a wicked headache, but I feel all right now.”

“We should call the police.”

Sean gave his bandaged palm a painful flex. “I threw the powders away. There’s no evidence.”

“We could place an anonymous tip.”

“Eddy, we don’t know it was drugs. Even before I burned any powder, I was feeling weird.”

“You probably inhaled some getting ready. I mean, how else do you explain the hallucinations?”

He didn’t want to say it, but he made himself: “Magic?”

“Real funny. You inhaled some when you poured the powders into the pots.”

Last night he would have agreed. Now he’d had time to think about everything that had happened, and drugs wouldn’t explain why he’d gone from jittery Sean to fearless Sean the very second he’d stepped into the magical circle. “I still don’t want to report Geldman. Plus I’d have to tell the police about the Reverend, too, right?”

Eddy paced, too indignant to sit down. “I’ve been thinking about the Rev. Know what I think? I bet he’s really Mr. Horrocke.”

Maybe Sean’s brain
was
damaged, because it sure wasn’t following Eddy there. “The old guy at the bookstore?”

“It makes total sense. Where’d you find the
Witch Panic
book? Horrocke’s. Who’s an expert on old books, probably knows all about forgeries, probably could make his own forged shit, like the ad? Horrocke.”

“Jeez, take a breath.”

If she did, it didn’t slow her down. “Horrocke puts the book and ad out for bait, and you take it. Then he pretends he doesn’t know anything about them and lets you have them for nothing. And—” Eddy suddenly turned and pointed at him, like she was the prosecutor and he was a crook on the stand. “And he tells you they’re your destiny. Then what’s the Rev tell you? He left the book and ad for you in particular. That’s the destiny thing again.”

Yeah, brain damage. His headache was even coming back. “I don’t know.”

“But it makes sense, right?”

“No, because why would Horrocke do all that?”

“All those books he’s around. They’ve cracked him. He thinks he’s a genuine wizard. He meets Geldman, who thinks
he’s
a genuine wizard. They, what d’you call it, they reinforce each other. Or if they don’t think they’re wizards, they just like screwing around with kids. Maybe they’re pedophiles.”

That was a nice thought, not! “I’m not sure about Horrocke being the Reverend. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m done with both of them.”

Eddy finally let it go, though Sean could tell she was dying to spearhead a major police crackdown on magic pushers.

Over the next four days, while he was off work because of his bum hand, he worked on his project report. The pictures of his magical circle looked good, but as he’d expected, no amount of fiddling could save the three time-delay photos. He deleted them from Dad’s camera. If only it was that easy to get the stink out of his clothes. After the third wash, he buried his jeans and T-shirt in a chest of old sweaters, hoping mothballs would conquer the lingering foulness.

“By their foulness shall ye know them.” That was what the
Necronomicon
said about the Outer Gods and their minions. Too often now the line went through Sean’s head, worse than a trapped song-fragment. He’d stopped reading Lovecraft, and he hadn’t watched the movies he’d stockpiled for gorefests while Dad was away. The last thing Sean wanted to do these days was sit in the dark watching monsters kill teenagers.

Vague dread rode around in his chest. He hadn’t said the final incantation, the one that would have bound the Servitor to him. The Rev claimed a Servitor would be “deferential” to its summoner even without binding. How deferential? It would only eat part of him? Crazy to worry about something that had never existed, but he couldn’t shake a sense of being sought.
Infinity
mentioned that kind of feeling, also how performing rituals could cause euphoria, also how Nyarlathotep could appear in many forms, one of them a falcon-winged “angel.” It all jibed with Sean’s experience, though since he’d read the book before doing the ritual, those tidbits could have lodged in his brain as raw material for hallucinations.

Another thing. Zeph and Aghar were strong crap: He’d only “taken” them once, and yet he sometimes got a hankering for the high he’d felt, for the fearless Sean of the magical circle. Was he already hooked? Would he end up like the Reverend, with his own account at Geldman’s?

It didn’t help when Sean went back to work and Beowulf kept talking about a coyote pack roaming along the Pawtuxet River. “A lot of pets are missing,” he said. “The Gagnons’ poodle, and Alexa’s cat, and Sweetie Pie.”

“Who’s Sweetie Pie?” Sean asked.

Hrothgar jammed his head between the front seats of the van and huffed, like, who the hell didn’t know Sweetie Pie? “He’s Trudy’s dachshund,” Beo said. “Oh, plus me and Dad found this dead raccoon near the baseball fields. Good thing a girl didn’t find it. A girl would’ve freaked.”

“Sexist generalization,” Joe-Jack said severely.

“Well, maybe not Eddy,” Beo conceded. “But its head was ripped right off.”

Sean let Hrothgar scarf down his donut. The idea of animals getting killed along the river (near the industrial park) gave him a stomach-churning pang of guilt. Again, crazy. Hallucinations couldn’t hurt anything.

“I’m not sure it’s coyotes,” Joe-Jack said. “Could be feral dogs. Or something rabid. I called Animal Control, but they probably won’t do anything until some kid gets mauled. That’s how government works.”

“Right,” Sean said, dutiful.

“Listen, Sean. You better not walk on the river trail until this gets straightened out. I’m not letting Beo go alone. Plus we’re keeping Hrothgar on the leash, and we’re keeping the gate shut, so he doesn’t wander off. Right, Beo?”

Beo squirmed. “I never leave the gate open! Besides, know what I think it really is? I think somebody let loose a terrarium of giant Argentinean toads. Sean, you should’ve seen these humongous webbed prints near the coon.”

“Swan tracks,” Joe-Jack scoffed. “That’s all those were. But you stay off the trail, Sean.”

No worry—he hadn’t been near the river since the ritual. “I’ll stay off,” he promised.

Friday
the fourth of August, a week and three days post-ritual, Sean took the afternoon off and hung out at the Hope High tennis courts with Eddy and Phil. What with his still-sore left hand, Sean lost every set. He didn’t care. Playing made him feel normal again.

Though he was really sleepy after dinner with Celeste and Gus, Sean didn’t want to stay over at their house. Dad would be home Sunday, which left only Saturday for Sean to clean up. After Gus drove him to Edgewood, he took a shower and sat down to watch TV. Two hours later, he woke up and gimped to bed, where he fell asleep without any of his usual agonizing over the ritual, and the Reverend and Geldman, and web-footed coyotes by the Pawtuxet, and …

Eddy and Phil. In kayaks on the river, slamming a red tennis ball back and forth. They never miss a return: The ball is strung through a cord stretched tight from racket to racket. Slam. Sean can’t play because he is
in
the water. His kayak has already gone over the falls by the Broad Street bridge. Any minute, he’ll go over, too, because while the current flows upstream for Eddy and Phil, keeping them stationary, it sucks hungrily at Sean. He snatches at underwater weeds, but there are things in them that bite, and he has to let go. The foam of the falls catches him up. He yells for help. But Eddy and Phil just keep slamming that ball.
Slam.
Slam,
slam
—

With a choke, Sean jerked awake. Was he drowning? No, he couldn’t drown in his own bed. He sat up, and he was dry, and breath rushed back into his lungs. Outside the wind was slamming something around, probably one of the genuine working shutters Dad had installed on the carriage house. They worked, all right—worked at getting loose and banging themselves to death. Funny how the wind was ignoring the leaves of the maple outside Sean’s window. They hung still in the humid air.

Slam,
followed by the clink of metal falling, followed by a sound Sean had made often enough himself: the whack of the porch door flung open so hard it rebounded off the aluminum glider. Besides, there wasn’t any wind—it wasn’t just the leaves hanging limp, it was the gauze curtains in the open windows. All that slamming had been something pounding on the porch door, and at last the door had given way.

Instantly Sean’s heart tripped into high gear. He checked the clock radio on the bureau, as if it mattered what time it was: Two Fifteen in the morning, in the
night,
and that did matter.
Night
made it a million times worse to hear the intruder thumping around on the back porch. His first thought had to be right: It was a some
thing,
not a some
one.
A burglar would try to be quiet, unless he was a drug-crazed nut, like Geldman or the Rev. But they didn’t know where Sean lived. Well, he didn’t think they knew.

His cell phone was on the charger, on the bureau. He could call the police. That was the kind of advice he and Eddy always yelled at the TV when some idiot started down the stairs to the basement, at midnight, or 2:15.

Sean slid out of bed and padded to the bureau. What was he going to tell the police? An intruder. A trespasser. That was enough. He wasn’t falling into any macho traps—let the police think he was a coward for not looking into the details for himself. And hell, he was still just a kid, right? Technically. Sort of.

Wait, it was quiet now. Though maybe that was scarier than the noise?

He stood in the blue glow of his flipped-open phone, listening. His heartbeat still pounded in his ears. Why should the thumping stop? The intruder was tired after breaking in? It was considering its next move? Or it had gone away again.

Gone away would be good. Maybe he’d better peek out and at least see whether the porch door had been busted open. What if he’d dreamed the racket? What if he’d had a drug flashback? What if he was going crazy?

Damn.

He tucked the phone into the waistband of his boxers. He stuck his feet into his flip-flops, then kicked them off. Bare feet were the ticket for sneaking around your house, checking out bumps in the night.

Sean took a long listen at the top of the stairs, another on the landing halfway down, shorter ones in the living room and dining room, a last long one at the swinging door to the kitchen. Slowly he pushed it inward. The blissful silence was broken—he heard the porch glider squeak. One squeak, as if something had knocked into it, not the cacophony you got by sitting on the thing. Another squeak. Then a scratching at the screen of the kitchen storm door, down low, where a cat or dog would scratch it.

He let out the breath he’d been holding. Okay. It was a stray cat, or a raccoon come after some sandwich scraps or pizza crusts he’d left on the porch. Coons were strong enough to push the door open if it wasn’t on the latch. They’d done it before.

But he’d heard the latch break? A raccoon wasn’t strong enough to do that.