Summoned Read online

  “Already?” Eddy said.

  “It’s after five.”

  No wonder Sean was so hungry, though he hadn’t felt it before now. He hadn’t even popped his iced tea, which stood in a puddle of condensation by the computer. “I guess I better call my dad.”

  “No, I called Jeremy and said you should stay for dinner. He’ll pick you up around nine.”

  “Great, Rachel, thanks!” Sean hunted down his flip-flop. Brutus had jammed it under the radiator.

  “Are we having anything besides strawberry pie?” Eddy groused.

  “Thai takeout. Michael just got home with it.”

  Brutus was the first one out the door. Sean and Eddy lagged behind Rachel long enough for Sean to whisper, “I wonder if the Rev will send that ritual tonight.”

  “We’ll check after dinner,” Eddy whispered back.

  4

  The Reverend came through: When they got back to the office, the summoning ritual had arrived. Five single-spaced pages, it lay on Sean’s Thai-and-pie-stuffed stomach, along with the printouts Eddy kept tossing over from the computer printer. Sean lolled farther back in his desk chair and stifled a belch.

  “I can’t believe I’m enabling you,” Eddy said.

  “You can’t stop yourself. You’re a research junkie.”

  “You’re not going to try out this stupid thing. Remember, that’s the deal.”

  “I just want to know what all this stuff means. Did you find out how to do an invoking pentagram?”

  She swiveled toward him holding a fresh printout. After peering at the diagrams on it, she swept a star into the air with her pencil. “Only you’d use an athame, ideally.”

  “What’s an athame?”

  “A sacred Wiccan knife. But the important thing is the order you draw the lines in. Like, here’s the banishing pentagram.” She did some more pencil-sweeps.

  To tell the truth, Sean didn’t see the difference. “Okay. That’s pentagrams. So, I get the part about summoning during the dark of the moon. But what about this Summer Triangle you’re supposed to do it under?” Summer Triangle sounded like a Thai appetizer. His stomach groaned at the thought.

  Eddy had resumed her Googlefest. A few minutes in, she said, “The Summer Triangle’s an asterism. That’s a star pattern that’s not a constellation. Around here, you see it best in July and August. Wait, here’s a cool part. ‘The Summer Triangle seems to frame the star fields of the Milky Way, and the Great Rift crosses it.’ The Rift’s this huge dust cloud.”

  Sean leaned forward, bringing his flip-flops to the floor with a slap of rubber on oak. “Hey, Eddy. The Rev’s e-mail says he found the ritual in the Necronomicon they’ve got at Miskatonic University. You think he did?”

  “Total bull. You have to be some kind of kick-butt Mythos scholar to get at their copy. It says so right in Infinity.”

  “Okay, maybe he got it out of another magic book.”

  Eddy couldn’t disprove that theory, so she attacked from another direction: “Why does the ritual have to be from any book? Ockham’s razor, the Rev made the whole thing up.”

  Ockham’s razor (or, according to Uncle Gus, “the simplest answer is likely right”) was an idea Eddy had stolen from her mom. Sean itched to call it Rachel’s razor, but he didn’t need to get stomped. “It doesn’t feel made up to me.”

  “You mean, like, it’s giving you shivers?”

  Not shivers, more like tiny cumulative jolts of excitement. “How’d he make up all these details?”

  “He Googled them, like I’m doing.”

  “What about the incantations?”

  “They’re the fakest of all. If they were straight out of the Necronomicon, they’d be in Latin, not English.”

  Sean gave a last pathetic wriggle in the grip of Eddy’s logic. “They’re in English because the Rev translated them for us.”

  “Or because he made them up in English. Besides. What’s he call the familiar you’re supposed to summon?”

  Sean flipped through the ritual printout. “An aether-newt.”

  “And it’s a familiar that carries messages, right?”

  “So?”

  “Aether-newt, Ethernet. It’s so fake, it’s a pun.”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Pun, pun, pun. Fake-ass pun.”

  Was she right? It would suck, the way that would cheapen the ritual, even if the Reverend was only playing around with them, which Sean wasn’t so sure he was. After reading the ritual, Sean was more willing to bet that the Rev was a nutcase who really believed in magic than that he was a joker. Yeah, he could be one of those nutcases who seemed rational, apart from their one little nutty habit. Like Hannibal Lecter. Or maybe that wouldn’t be a good comparison to share with Eddy. “Whatever. Look up that last thing, the powders you have to throw in the fire.”

  “All right, but that’s it. I have to research some stuff for my summer project. You know what you’re doing yet?”

  “No.” The worst thing about going to the Abraham Whipple School was how students had to do summer projects every year, starting in freaking kindergarten. Sean had been out of ideas since third grade. At least, ideas his teachers and dad would approve of. Sean tilted his desk chair into full recline and reread the section of the ritual with the aether-newt in it:

  By these devices, you may summon two types of familiars or SERVITORS. The first is an ethereal—it has no material substance as most understand material. At its most visible, the AETHER-NEWT appears to be made of molten glass, but more often it is no more than a brightness enclosed in a soap-bubble skin. The clever wizard can even render it invisible to all but himself.

  The aether-newt is harmless, though its ceaseless activity may make it an unnerving companion at first. Once it is bound to a master, it will patrol his home or go where he wishes and carry back intelligence. Material barriers are nothing to it—it passes through them as readily as through the void of space. Only strong magical wards can stop it.

  The second Servitor is granted material form through the sacrifice of blood, and blood and flesh nourish it in our sphere. This is the sort that Patience summoned. Well-grown, the BLOOD-SPAWN can defend its master and destroy his foes. It must be strongly bound to the summoner’s magical will, for though it may not harm the summoner whether bound or not, it will kill others for its food and sport. The blood-spawn is, in fact, one of the lesser minions of the Outer Gods themselves. Only a seasoned wizard should consider summoning it, and then only if he is favored by the Outer Gods, as they are jealous of their minions. (For these reasons, I don’t include the specific incantation for calling the blood-spawn, only the one for the aether-newt.)

  See, that was like really believing in magic, how the Rev worried that Sean couldn’t handle a blood-spawn or the Outer Gods. Eddy had Infinity Unimaginable by the computer now. Sean popped up, snagged it, and reclined again. He opened the book to the introduction and savored the weirdness:

  One might say it’s a doomed enterprise to describe what cannot be imagined, especially when the unimaginable is infinity itself. However, this is the task students of the Cthulhu Mythos have always faced. The boldest of them was the medieval Arab Abdul Alhazred. In the Necronomicon (Book of dead names), he even dares to name infinity, and the name he gives it is Azathoth.

  And what is Azathoth but Chaos, the primal mindless force at the center of the universe? We moderns envision Azathoth as the singularity that has been expanding since the first moment of time; to use the popular term, the Big Bang. Cosmologists might even imagine it as a force from which multiple universes are spawned, like exploding buds from its “skin.” Azathoth is the chief of the Outer Gods, and it is the Outer Gods and all they have wrought that the Cthulhu Mythos chronicle.

  Cthulhu, ironically, is not an Outer God but the chief of a Greater Race which colonized Earth before the advent of man. Mighty as he is in the mythology that bears his name, his magic is no different in kind from other magicians’, for all magic derives from the Outer Go
ds, who are its Masters. Azathoth is the Daemon Sultan, the ultimate source of energy. Nyarlathotep is Azathoth’s Soul and Messenger. Yog-Sothoth is the Key and the Gate, keeper of knowledge. Shub-Niggurath is the She-Goat of a Thousand Young who turns force into matter. Thus, while the Christian mythos posits a Trinity, at the core of the Cthulhu Mythos is a Tetrad: the Father, the Mind, the Memory, and the Mother.

  “All magic derives from the Outer Gods, who are its Masters.” That line was a perfect fit with the Rev’s ad: “Wanted, an apprentice in magic and in the service of its Masters.” However much Eddy dissed him, the Reverend knew his stuff.

  Sean stowed Infinity between his thigh and the chair arm. He went back to the beginning of the ritual and reread the whole thing. Those tiny jolts of excitement started again. There was stuff in the world you couldn’t even dream about if you were a guy like Dad. Mom had been different. Crazy shit? Bring it—she’d always had as great a time with weirdness as Sean did, only, you know, being a mom, she’d known when to say, “Enough, back to reality.”

  Directly over his face, the ceiling fan whirred at top speed, but it wasn’t the tepid downdraft that was giving him goose bumps. Their prickle wasn’t a bad feeling, like you’d get from a chill. It was more the aftermath of a great rush. Like you were rock climbing and got stuck under an overhang, then made a cat-scramble against gravity to the next safe spot, where you could rest and look at a bigger than ever view.

  Sean tilted to his feet. He squeezed around Eddy’s workstation into the tower bay; with its five windows, it was the perfect spot for surveillance. Left, he could look to the top of Keene Street. Right, he could look all the way down it. Straight ahead, across the street, he could spy on the house where the Partingtons had lived, empty now, FOR SALE. The dropping sun smeared fire across its curtainless windows. As the light faded off the glass, Sean thought he saw a ghost inside the house, gliding from window to window, but it was only the reflection of a guy skimming by on a bike.

  Sean was still holding his printouts. He tossed them on the workstation and sat on the cool radiator. It came out of him then, not really surprising him, because he must have been thinking about it for a while. Subconsciously and all. “Hey, Eddy. Don’t rip my head off, but I think I’m going to do the ritual.”

  Her eyebrows contracted dangerously.

  “Just for fun,” he added. “I’m not going to report back to the Reverend or anything.”

  “What could you even have to report? It’s not going to work. Tell me you get that, at least.”

  “Duh. I said ‘just for fun.’”

  “What’s so fun about fake magic from Internet weirdos?”

  If she didn’t feel it, there was no use trying to explain. Sean went over to check the calendar on her desk. “Maybe I can even do it this month. Little black circle’s the dark of the moon, right? That’s July 25.”

  “I so don’t know you.”

  “My dad will be away that whole week doing consultations. It’s perfect.”

  Eddy picked up her copy of the ritual and studied it with a funny frown pulling back her lips. After a couple of minutes, she said, “I told you I don’t like this Reverend thing. He skeeved me out, how he wouldn’t stop the bullshit about being Redemption Orne. And this skeeves me out, too.” She waved the ritual, then dropped it back on the desk. It landed askew. “And I know that’s stupid, so you don’t have to tell me.”

  What bothered Sean was how Eddy didn’t straighten up the ritual printout. Normally she’d knock the hell out of pages to get them in perfect alignment. “I’m not saying the guy isn’t a freak, staying in character all the time. But Phil does that, too, and he’s all right. Well, kind of. I mean, he’s harmless.”

  Eddy snickered before she got all serious again, which was progress. “Yeah, but Phil’s our friend. We know we can cut him some slack. The Reverend? Don’t know him, no slack.”

  Sean made another concession: “The ritual is a little skeevy where you throw the human blood in the fire.”

  “Yeah, that’s gross. Who’s going to hang around while you siphon blood out of him?”

  Sean moved to Eddy’s side of the workstation. Since Eddy had hit thirteen, Rachel had made her leave doors half-open when she was hanging with guy friends. Kind of an insulting precaution when Sean was the guy. Come on, he’d hung out with Eddy since they were babies. Messing with her would be like messing with his sister, so all the open doors did was make it hard to talk about Not-Mom-Safe stuff like blood sacrifices. And if you couldn’t talk about blood sacrifices with your BFF, who could you talk with about them? He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’d use my own blood.”

  Eddy, too, went into whisper mode. “The Reverend says you can’t. You’re supposed to use the blood of an enemy.”

  “Well, anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Blood’s only in the ritual for a material familiar, and I can’t do that one. The Rev left out the incantations for it.”

  “So you have to do the Ethernet thing?”

  “Aether-newt. The powders are the only hard part of that ritual. You find out anything about them?”

  “Powders of Zeph and Aghar, a big nothing. Rev made them up. Use salt and pepper.”

  “But he says where to get them.” Sean pulled the relevant page from Eddy’s discarded ritual. “‘For the Powders of Zeph and Aghar, you may apply to Mr. Geldman of Geldman’s Pharmacy in Arkham, an excellent compounder of complex materia.’”

  “I Googled the place. Nothing.”

  “It could be too old-fashioned to advertise on the Internet.”

  “Or else it’s a secret known only to witches.” Eddy was back to normal—she started humming the Twilight Zone theme.

  If any town would have a secret witch pharmacy, it would be Arkham. “Dad’s going to take out Ms. Arkwright’s windows pretty soon. I’ll go along and look for Geldman’s.”

  “Just don’t ask the Rev for directions,” Eddy said. “He finds out you’re doing his crazy spell, he’ll think you’re his soul mate.”

  “I told you I wasn’t talking to the Rev again. About anything.”

  Eddy shrugged. She dragged down her Favorites list and opened a site with pictures of quilts on it. “Whatever. I’ve got to work on my project. Which is what you should be doing, instead of playing wizard.”

  Sometimes Eddy sounded so much like Dad it was scary. Sean squinted up at the ceiling fan, and just like that, the Eternally Whirring Blades delivered the answer “Hey! I’m going to do the ritual and write it up for my project!”

  “Okay, you’ve officially cracked. The project’s to try something from another culture.”

  “Right, and magic’s from another culture. Lots of other cultures. I bet the Reverend stole crap from all kinds of real mythologies. Like the Outer Gods. They’re real mythology.”

  This time Eddy shrugged all the way up to her ears. “It’s your grade, not mine.”

  “I guess doing a ritual is as good as making Panda quilts.”

  “Pa Ndau, Cambodian story cloths. At least I’ll have something to show. What’ll you have, your familiar?”

  “I’ll paint Brutus green and tape a mop to his face. Or, since I’m doing the aether-newt and you can make them invisible, I’ll just point up in the air and say, ‘There it is.’”

  “Shut up, I’m working. Anyway, there’s a car outside. It’s probably your dad.”

  Sean slid back into the tower bay. The Civic idled in front of Aunt Celeste’s, and Dad stood on the sidewalk, talking to her and Gus. Sean grabbed his printouts. “Can I take the book?”

  “I guess, since you need it for your totally legit project. And don’t forget the pie Mom wants you to take home.”

  As if he could’ve forgotten it. Rachel waited at the front door, with two pies. Good thing he’d tucked printouts and Infinity Unimaginable into his backpack, along with The Witch Panic. He had a lot of reading to do. And he had to start memorizing the ritual incantations.

  A real sorcerer wouldn’t carry a
cheat sheet, would he?

  5

  There was no way Sean could avoid telling Dad about the summoning ritual, not if he wanted to practice it at home. When Dad looked at him cross-eyed (natch), Sean produced Eddy’s stack of printouts to prove the ritual was serious schoolwork. That helped. So did saying he’d found the ritual in Infinity Unimaginable, a book by a bona fide professor, published by a bona fide university press. It was an outright lie, but admit some freak on the Internet had sent it to him? As a wizard-apprentice test?

  Sometimes he had to keep Dad in the dark, the way they used to hood falcons to keep them calm.

  “If I go along with this,” Dad said, “will I have to torture you to get your project done?”

  “Not a chance,” Sean said, and that was the absolute truth. “I’d want to do it.”

  “That’s what worries me. You promise not to blow anything up or cause widespread havoc?”

  Sean promised. The Reverend would have mentioned it if the powders were explosive. As for widespread havoc, Sean would do the summoning in an isolated place, so any havoc would be strictly local.

  The isolated place was easy: the closed-down Pawtuxet Industrial Park. It was a short bike ride from his house, and the parking lot by the river commanded a clear expanse of eastern sky, where the Summer Triangle would rise. As long as no cops or partiers showed up, he’d have privacy.

  Site, check.

  Figuring out site prep was the next step. The ritual called for a pentagram in a circle twelve feet across, and the day after getting Dad’s permission on his project Sean tried to draw one on their driveway. His wobbly attempts brought Dad out to help. He hammered a nail into the blacktop and tied a six-foot string to it. On the other end of the string, he tied a piece of chalk. Then he walked around the nail, keeping the string taut as he dragged the chalk along the blacktop to make a perfect circle. Next Dad marked off five equal arcs on the circle and drove nails into the marks, which were where the points of the pentagram would go. By stretching a chalked line between two nails and snapping it from the center, he left a guideline on the blacktop. When he had all five guidelines, he chalked over them, and there: a pentagram.