Summoned (35 page)

Sean squeezed the soul-thread again.

It is coming. It is here.

Fearless Sean as he was inside his magical circle, his heart faltered when he looked toward the river and saw its lumpish, lashing form push through the reeds to the shore. Bloated with his blood, it had grown taller than any man. A ghost-movie of himself and the others, paralyzed, played over its approach. Sean closed his eyes and didn’t open them again. The double vision was too confusing—better to see through the Servitor alone.

It sees the fitful flare of human auras, smells human breath and sweat and blood. Through the air against skin and the earth under paw, it feels the pulses of its opponents accelerate. Why should it care about their weapons? They are the ones afraid, not it, and so the Servitor slouches toward them without hurry, clicking its claws on the blacktop. True, the summoner is stronger within the pentagram, but along the soul-thread their minds come together like magnets of opposing polarities, and which mind must be the stronger in that meeting?

The meeting came on too fast. Sean fell back along the soul-thread, yielding even as he commanded:
Come here, into the center!

The Servitor walks straight into the circle and crouches, its haunches obscuring the Elder Sign. Let the summoner cage it in space—it can still reach into his deepest sanctuary.

Eyes open, eyes closed, no difference.
Suddenly all is black, and in the blackness he and the Servitor are together as they were in the tomb, speeding through a void that either of them might shape, only Sean doesn’t know how.…

“Sean. Say it. Say the spell.”

That voice is far outside the void, which thickens and drowns the voice. The void is nothingness solidifying into nerve, coalescing into brain, the Servitor’s mind reaching up to envelop his and drag it down until Sean drops into green light in a three-sunned sky, under which the shoggoth-sea sings and the Black Man walks in his palace of living crystal, waiting.

29

In
Eddy’s aluminum bat, Helen had inherited a weapon proven against the Servitor; clutching it as if ready to swing for the fences, she joined the others around the pentagram. O’Conaghan stood, by choice or apt chance, at the angle of Earth, Stability. Ditto the aptness of Jeremy at Water, Emotion and Intuition. Of the two angles left for Helen, Air (Intelligence and Art) pointed toward the river, the direction from which the Servitor would come, and so she was forced to park at Fire, Courage and Daring. A good joke, when what would have suited her better was an angle of Fear and Trembling. Fire should have been Marvell’s, but Marvell was still miles high over the Atlantic. As for Spirit, Sean’s angle, the ritual prescribed it. Maybe that certainty of place comforted him, or maybe his composure had come from the empty bottle in her backpack.

No, it wasn’t from the bottle. Sean had simply calmed down when he’d drunk the last of Patience Orne’s #11. A qualitative change hadn’t come until he’d formally entered his magical circle. In that one step, he’d gone from desperate determination to precocious assurance. The new Sean stood as poised as the statue of a Greek hero, his face bleached in the moonlight, his lips relaxed into a smile. The longer he stood like that, arrogantly unbudging, the more Helen wanted to shake him back to normal. From the way Jeremy shifted his American Gothic pitchfork, he shared her uneasiness concerning the new Sean.

The crickets singing in the woods fell silent, and the mosquitoes that had whined around her head disappeared. Something wicked their way came, but she felt the pricking of dread in her nape, not in her thumbs. Helen watched the black flow of the river, heard the plash of stealthy swimming, smelled a now-familiar stink.

The Servitor rose from the water a giant, grown a couple heads taller than O’Conaghan. A roaring charge would have been less unnerving than the way it ambled, nonchalant, toward its destruction. Could it be stupid enough to go willingly to the center of the pentagram, or was the new Sean so masterful it couldn’t resist his mute command? Either, neither, the Servitor crossed the angle of Air and entered the trap. Atop the Elder Sign, it squatted, foreclaws dangling from knees, furnace eyes banked as if to conserve their fire, as still as Sean, silent, another statue.

And now? There was only the incantation left to do, but the Sean-statue didn’t stir or speak.

Prompt him—that was her job. “Sean,” she said. “Say it. Say the spell.”

In the space between two breaths, the first breath deep, the second a harsh gasp, dangerously mature Sean turned kid again. His eyes widened as if he’d never seen the Servitor before, or as if he was seeing it one time too many. His hands opened and closed like panicked starfish. Then they fell to his sides, slack like his head, which lolled back so that his unblinking stare fixed the moon-faded stars.

“Sean,” Helen whispered. Jeremy shouted it: “Sean! Do you remember what to say?”

No response, unless the flare of fire in the Servitor’s eyes was one.

Helen watched horror lengthen Jeremy’s face, grimness harden O’Conaghan’s. She looked back at the miraculously upright rag doll that was neither old nor new Sean. Sean had vacated the premises, leaving no forwarding address, and, after the silence of their contest, the Servitor hissed its triumph.

“What the hell’s going on?”

O’Conaghan answered Jeremy: “Sean’s possessed again. We’ve got to disrupt the connection.”

“How?”

O’Conaghan flicked on his flashlight and pointed it at the Camry and Celeste. A signal: The Camry’s high beams lanced the magical circle, crossing the white spear of the flashlight. Caught in the dual thrusts, the Servitor hunched and snarled, but Sean didn’t blink, or murmur, or twitch.

Helen dashed a wrist over her tearing eyes. “It’s not enough!” she called to O’Conaghan.

He hefted Gus’s walking stick. “So we give it all we’ve got, understand? Together, on three.”

Attack it? The Servitor had put on a lot of bulk since it had effortlessly swatted aside her lion-tamer chair. Eddy’s bat seemed to have bulked up, too. Helen doubted she could lift it, much less swing.

“Ready?”

Jeremy obviously was. Lips peeled back in a snarl to match the Servitor’s he aimed his pitchfork dead at its belly. He must have been longing for this chance since he’d realized his son’s tormentor was a solid threat. Unfortunately, its solidity was fluid and its life beyond their reach, and there had to be something they could do besides wear themselves out on its protean flesh.

“One,” O’Conaghan said.

There was nothing else
she
could do. She’d used up Geldman’s gift and blown her scanty Mythos lore. Marvell had tried to prepare her. He was flying to them. But she wasn’t ready, and he would come too late.

“Two.”

Though Jeremy stepped toward the Servitor, he was no longer looking at it. He was staring at Sean, his snarl erased by a grimace of grief.

Yes, Helen had to hurl herself at the Servitor. But Jeremy—

“Three,” O’Conaghan said, at the same moment Helen yelled, “Wait!”

The two men froze, their faces thrown into grotesque chiaroscuro by the glare of high beams and flash. “Jeremy,” she said. “You’ve got to talk Sean back, like Eddy was trying to do.”

“That didn’t work!”

“You’re his father. Call him back, and we—we’ll go for the Servitor.”

Before O’Conaghan could nod agreement, Jeremy had dropped the pitchfork and run to Sean.

Helen lifted the weighty bat. She from Fire, O’Conaghan from Earth, they moved in on the Servitor, which reared to full height to meet them.

The
three black suns float over the palace, suffusing it with strange radiance. Fundamentally, it’s a vast crystal pyramid budding off smaller crystals: blocks, and more pyramids, and weirder units like many-faced gamer dice, all of them skewed as if by extension into planes that Sean can’t fully perceive. In the palace, in everything here, there are tantalizing hints of
more
.

He runs along the obsidian shore. Enormous shoggoth-waves arch over his head without breaking. Pseudopod wavelets lap his feet. He should be afraid, but he isn’t. He should be fighting to burst the bubble of Servitor-will that keeps him in this alien place, but he can’t remember why. To dismiss the Servitor? To be free of it and its Master? Now that his struggle’s done, he realizes that the freedom to plod through a normal life is nothing to an invitation to the palace. The shoggoths are no threat. They’re an honor guard—their song tells him so, direct to his nerves.

He reaches the steps to the projecting terrace, each a yard high, steps for titans. No problem—he has little weight here, and he bounds up, eager. The terrace shivers. Then, tenderly, it folds around his feet and legs, body and head, and delivers him to the palace through an inward-spiraling chute, like a reverse birth.

They have gone, the shadows that were dancing the first time Sean saw the palace. He’s alone in their ballroom, an echoing emptiness with walls and ceiling too far off to see in the dim violet light seeping out of the floor. It’s glass, the floor, or colorless crystal, or unmelting ice, he can’t tell which. Through the smooth transparency, he can see what emits the light: spiky, prismatic spheres like diatoms puffed to the size of basketballs. The diatoms are aware of him, too. They swarm to the place where he stands until they pack themselves into an unbroken carpet of bioluminescence. Their concentrated glow is like a spotlight under his feet; Sean flinches, expecting a burn, but the glow carries no heat.

With the diatoms beneath him, the rest of the ballroom is impenetrable shadow. Far off, a foot falls on the glassy floor. Spotlighted for examination, encircled by the dark, Sean can only wait for whatever approaches, and that he can only wait is fair, right? The Black Man has waited a long time for him.

Diatoms stream from Sean to make a walkway for their Master. His sandaled feet are the first Sean sees of him. Next comes the white linen hem of his robe, next the fall of its pleats from an enameled harness, the swing of bare arms, the sheen of bare chest. Last to emerge from the shadows are the austere planes of a narrow face and the sleek gold of one of those tall Egyptian crowns. The man isn’t dark skinned like an African. He’s the impossible gleaming black of onyx. He’s the guy from Helen’s window, for sure, and the falcon-winged Angel of the Summoning, and the golden-eyed pursuer who saved Dad and Eddy in the cemetery hollow.

The Black Man steps into the spotlight and speaks in the smooth, low, absolutely reasonable voice that Sean remembers from his first foray into the three-sunned world:
I know you, Sean. Do you know me?

I think so.

Name me.

Though names have power, he has to say it:
Nyarlathotep.

That’s one of my names. What do you want from me?

The question throws Sean. He gives the first answer that comes to him, which should be true yet isn’t:
Nothing. I don’t even want what you’ve already sent.

The Black Man’s lips twist, wringing the softness from his smile.
You asked for the Servitor, Sean. You even gave your blood for it.

I didn’t know any better.

You did know. In the magical circle, you believed, you desired, or I wouldn’t have given.

He wanted the Servitor. Is that the truth he’s been running from? There may be a worse truth, though, and the worse truth is

You want more, Sean.

Under the Black Man’s gentle-again smile, Sean realizes the ugly futility of lying to him.
Yes,
he says, and then he smiles, too.

Though
the Elder Sign confined the Servitor to the center of the pentagram, it didn’t much hamper it. For one thing, Helen and O’Conaghan had to keep carrying the fight to it. For another, it remained elastically agile. O’Conaghan was agile, too, despite his height. He laid into the Servitor with walking stick and flashlight and parried its claws so skillfully Helen wondered whether the Providence police trained for staff fighting, and if she had time to wonder that, she wasn’t doing her share of the fighting. Her climb up the back stairs had been a fluke, not courage but ignorance. Enlightened now, afraid of her fear, everything in her screamed,
Run
.

One thing kept her at the angle of Fire, and that was the way Jeremy stood rocking Sean’s limp yet upright body, no hand-on-the-cradle rocking but a manic jerking that snapped the boy’s head from side to side. Then Jeremy seemed to realize what he was doing. He pulled Sean tight against him and whispered into his ear. What? What could Jeremy possibly say to drag his son back to them? It was none of her business. Her business was to help O’Conaghan, any and all the gods damn it.

Run then, but in!

Helen circled to the Servitor’s back and made a dash at it. Before she could lift Eddy’s bat, it wheeled. Raptor claws swung so close to her face that one nicked the tip of her nose. An inch closer and they’d have taken the whole nose off. That would have saved her from the sting of its heated stench, but she didn’t give it another shot. She backpedaled fast, out of range. When the Servitor rounded on O’Conaghan, she ran in low and slashed at the backs of its knees. No Achilles weakness there, but its counter swing did go over her this time.

Self-congratulations were premature. Before she could get away, it seized the back of her shirt and hoisted her into the air. Helen jammed the bat between its jaws and kicked at its midsection, but it didn’t let go until O’Conaghan redoubled the ferocity of his attack. She dropped and rolled out of the pentagram. The bat! In her fall she’d lost it, and now the Servitor snatched it up and hurled it at the Camry, shattering the windshield. If Celeste screamed, the blat of the horn drowned her out. She had to be all right, though, because the strobing of the headlights continued.

The headlights and O’Conaghan’s flash were a mixed blessing. They infuriated the Servitor. They also intermittently blinded Helen. Nor was O’Conaghan immune to the confusion—finally he dodged the wrong way. The Servitor struck the flashlight from his grip, then seized the walking stick, snapped it in two, and clubbed him with the pieces. O’Conaghan went down.