Black Cat Weekly #81

Chapter 5-4

The door was still open, the brass plate on the door flashing in my light. I burst into the room only to find it completely unchanged. I couldn’t say what I’d been expecting to find, but whatever it was, I didn’t find it. In frustration and desperation, I flung back the covers on the bed, ripped open the drawers, clawed through the piles of second-hand clothes shoved beneath the tiny bed. No g*n, no knife, no nothing. I dumped a stack of books from a box in the closet, swept the desk clear, then, for no reason I could articulate, tried to power up the twenty-year-old com rig I found hanging from the headboard. Nothing. Of course not. In frustration, I tossed it on the pile of books.

Books. What teenager of that generation in this part of the country had books?

.booksI picked up one book at random, then another. The first couple were cheap fantasy paperbacks. One was a hardcover with foxed pages so thin they tore as I flipped them. Most of the books, however, were worn, moleskin journals.

Tucking my flashlight under my armpit, I clawed open the first journal with clumsy fingers. The band that held it closed snapped in my hand. The book was filled cover to cover with lines of text so narrow they looked like computer code. I stared at it. Each letter was clear and legible and as familiar as…well, as the letters of the alphabet. They spelled out words that I knew and sentences beyond that. Try as I might, though, I could not grasp what they meant. I’d start reading a line and by the end I couldn’t remember what the first word had been. I brushed through the pages looking for anything that made sense.

And then I found it.

It was a careful, almost beautiful design. A year ago, I would have dismissed it as abstract art or a reproduction of something from a neural-net game, but one of the first things the Collective had taught me was how to recognize a summoning circle.

The story of the doomed house came together in that moment. Terrified of the beast that was his father and powerless to do anything about it, the young man had tried to pull a demon through from the other side, something powerful enough to fight his battles. He’d made an imperfect binding, which was almost a forgone conclusion, apparently. Dr. Whitlock had not failed to impress upon me how much preparation was needed to bind a demon.

My mind raced. The diagram in the book was just a sketch. I needed to find the real circle, the one the kid had used. It had to be in the room. There was nowhere else in the house where he’d have enough privacy to cast a summoning. It would be big, though, big enough for a man to stand on.

I grabbed the edge of the rug and yanked. The books I’d just dumped on it kept me from gracefully sweeping it back like a tablecloth. I stumbled and dropped my flashlight.

“Son of a—” I yelled as I flailed in the darkness. I keyed the screen light on my com rig and looked down. There it was, carved into the floor planks with a soldering iron or something similar: a true summoning circle.

A plan formed in my head, a simple one. I had neither the time, the education, nor the power for anything fancy. I ran from the room, retrieving my errant flashlight on the way and bouncing off the doorframe. I winced and cradled my shoulder. There’d be a hell of a bruise if I made it to the next morning.

I found Roth face down in his own binding circle. Frothy vomit pooled around him. I tried to breathe through my mouth as I leapt over him. There was no time to see if he was okay. That would come later. Maybe.

The kitchen felt like a blast freezer. Or a furnace. My skin went brittle, and my eyes instantly dried out. I snatched up the copper pan and, before I could think too much about what I was doing, ran back to the boy’s bedroom. A wave of pressure rolled behind me so closely I was afraid it would knock me off my feet.

I reached the edge of the summoning circle just as the red haze began to overtake my peripheral vision. Too close. If I’d had time to think about it, I might have panicked, but I had a goal. I needed bait.

I ripped my hand across the jagged tear in the copper pan. Hot blood ran down my wrist. A grunt of pain escaped through my clenched teeth. I dropped the pan into the circle and dove to the side.

My light rolled from my hands. The room, windowless as it was, should have gone pitch black, but a shape in red burned in the center of the circle. For a second, I mistook it for an aura centered around the old copper skillet. Then it unfolded, rising and swelling until I could see the demon for what it really was. Webbed wings unfurled, clawed fingers peeled back from fists in unsettling angles, and long eyes, like vertical gashes in the thing’s face, turned towards me. As alien as the demon was, there was no mistaking its look of hunger.

I slapped my torn palm down and blood poured into the gouged pattern in the floor, breaking the circle.

The demon shrieked so loud I thought my eyes would burst from the pressure. I turned away, covering my ears and curling into the fetal position against the wall.

When I awoke, the room was dark. Dark and still. The tinny taste in my mouth told me I was bleeding from somewhere inside. I tried to sit up, but a migraine-level headache hit me like a tidal wave, and I sank back down into the darkness.

The next time I opened my eyes, I was laying in the snow. The clouds were gone, as was the day, but a fat yellow moon threw out so much bright light that I had to squint.

“Easy,” Timur said as he helped lean me up against the car. He collapsed beside me. Somehow, he’d managed to drag me out of the house.

“You’re full of surprises, Tim,” I said. My voice sounded like I’d been gargling sand.

“Me?” he laughed. “Without a single drop of arcane aptitude, you managed to banish a third-order demon with a bridgehead on this plane. You’re old enough to be my grandmother—no offense. I thought you said you weren’t anything special?”

I wasn’t. Or at least I hadn’t been. In all my years as a cop, then as a detective, I’d never had such a clarity of thought and purpose. Kendal had been like that while working cases. Anyone who knew him, really knew him like I did, said he was made for the work. Maybe Dr. Whitlock and Mousy June and all the educated idiots in the Collective had been right. More than half a century into this life, maybe I’d finally found what I was supposed to be doing.

really

H.K. Slade is a writer specializing in police procedurals set in eastern North Carolina, though he has recently ventured into horror/supernatural fiction starting with “A New Evil,” published in Black Cat Weekly #61. You can find some of his previously works in Mystery Weekly, Everyday Fiction, The Yard, and Black Cat Mystery Magazine as well as on his own website: hkslade.com.

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