Summoned (29 page)

“No supervision?”

Pages 548 and 549: The outer margins were solid columns of black. Helen adjusted a table lamp over the book. “Not yet. Did you ever see this old horror movie with Ray Milland?”

“
The Man with X-ray Eyes
?”

“Right. He saw so much he gouged his eyes out, didn’t he?”

Jeremy laughed, but he moved his chair beside hers and he took charge of the pencils.

“I was kidding,” Helen said.

“I know. But if you find something, you can dictate. Save time.”

Fine. She didn’t mind him sitting closer. That made it easier for her to study the fabric of his T-shirt. She hadn’t noticed how complex its color was, blue and yellow, both fully present despite their simultaneous merging into green. There were even more colors in the skin of his forearm, tans and browns, creams and reds and venous blues. As for his gloves, and hers, they were rainbows. Naturally. White light contained all the wave lengths.

“I think the potion’s working,” she said. “It’s not like X-ray. More like I can see a wider range of light.” The
Necronomicon,
too. Its pages vibrated with colors separating and shimmering back together, not only the rainbow spectrum but what she supposed were the normally invisible wavelengths, ultraviolet, infrared. The blotted Bishop marginalia stayed black, but there was a subsurface pulse to them, as if beetles were tunneling up through the smothering obscurity.

She bent closer to the musty pages. The pulsing points were paler than the ink, as if they were not so much bugs as goldfish rising to the surface of dark water. The points were in groups. The groups looked like words, sentences, paragraphs. Helen laughed. “Yeah. It’s definitely doing something.”

“I’m ready,” Jeremy said. His voice sounded the same, so the potion must only be affecting her eyes. Helen fixed them on the marginalia.

That the words floated upward was an illusion. Instead her vision grew more piercing, like a double-pointed stake that penetrated both the marginal ink and her own head. She felt pressure at temples and brow, above both ears, at the back and the top of her skull. So that made the penetrating sensation less like one stake and more like she was wearing a cap lined with many dull spikes. The cap slowly shrank, and every time it contracted, the spikes sank a little deeper into her skin.

She had to ignore the discomfort. Words in an archaic hand wavered white in the first blot, and yes, she could read them.
About the airy and the fleshly Servitors, I have took Counsell with the Blacke Man, who has given me words in plaine English better than any of the Arab. For Summoning, it were best to wait until the Triangle of August is high and the Moone is darke. Prepare then the Powders of Zeph and Agaar.…

“I’ve got the summoning ritual.”

“Great job! What about the dismissing?”

“I’m hoping Bishop wrote them together.” She skimmed onward; her still-sharpening vision made it easy, and the constriction of the spiked cap didn’t deter her.
To You, Lord Azathoth, Springheade of All that is. To You I offer Obeisance, and to your Soule, Nyarlathotep.
Yes! That was the incantation Sean had used.

She skipped to the next block of lucid black:
To dismiss Servitors, it can be done under any Starres, but beste to return to the same Summoning Ground.

She put a gloved fingertip under the words. Her hand was shaking, but she wasn’t afraid. The tremor came from excitement. “Here,” she said.

“Okay, I’m ready. Dictate away.”

Helen read the start of the dismissing ritual. Then she paused, flush with her new perceptions. The world radiated a perfect, a crystalline reality. Jeremy’s right hand moved as he wrote, yet the movement was as gradual as the turning of a plant toward light. Was she seeing
quicker
than he could move? When he told her to continue, his lips formed the words much more slowly than she heard them. Her own hand, reaching toward the microspatula,
looked
like it reached forever even though she
felt
the cool handle in her fingers seconds later.

“I’ve got that, Helen. Keep going.”

She read on, while Jeremy wrote with vegetable lethargy. “‘Make the pentacle, but now the banishing one, so that Spirit points to the wizard. Then let him send the Servitor to the center, to be constrained by the Elder Sign as before.’”

She paused again. The cap of spikes grew too tight—the dull points dug into her scalp, breaking her concentration. Her eyes roamed the gaudy-glorious room. Was she getting dizzy? Was that why the crystalline world began flaking away in places? The air distorted, distended, cracked into rifts in which vigorous life stirred. And there, not three feet from the table, an air-rift gave birth to a lean translucence with dozens of appendages, some of which seemed to be limbs, because it crawled on them up the air, then down the air, then onto the table. On the more bulbous end that seemed to be its head, feathery stalks behaved like antennae, stretching toward her with avid curiosity.

“What’s next?” Jeremy said.

The creature on the table wasn’t the only one in the room. More wriggled out of rifts to coil in the air. More crawled over the ceiling and floor, the cabinets and shelves. Had they all burst into her dimension at once, or worse, had they always come and gone, unseen?

“Helen?”

Oh holy God, one was on her back—she glimpsed the filmy substance of its feelers over her shoulder. Helen jumped out of her chair, which fell in slow motion until, immediately, she heard it crash. Gossamer creatures scuttled out from under it. She backed away from the table, which receded at a glacial pace. Jeremy, too, moved like a glacier, though his hand was on her arm before her yell trailed into silence.

A wall was at her back. She ground into it, to crush the gossamer. But it didn’t crush. Instead it oozed whole through her chest and relaunched itself unharmed.

It had been inside her! In sick horror, she clutched at the spiky pain in her temples. In addition to the gossamer-bleeding rifts, other openings began to trouble the air, irregular patches of an ethereal fabric that separated the room from some very other place.

“Helen, what’s going on?”

The ethereal fabric stretched. Behind it were entities much larger than the gossamers that passed freely from plane to plane. Through a patch that thinned alarmingly, she caught the gelatinous heave of an enormous haunch and then the glint of clustered eyes.

She covered her face. “Jeremy. I’m seeing creatures. All over the room. I don’t know what they are.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“You can’t. I can.”

“Can they hurt you?”

“I don’t know!” Helen pressed her palms against her closed eyelids. It didn’t help—she saw through both lids and hands. A gossamer drifted through Jeremy’s shoulder. It brushed intangibly across her face. “I’m sorry,” she moaned. “I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s all right. I’ll help you. I’m here.”

His arm was around her shoulders, his palm on her forehead, warm through the glove. Warm. Cybele’s palm had been cool when it had pressed a calmer fear into Helen, fear that didn’t fear itself. She remembered the scent of flowering grasses. She remembered Geldman saying that what didn’t hurt her when it was invisible couldn’t hurt her when she saw it.

“Helen, can you finish reading the spell?”

Fear that didn’t fear itself. “I’ve got to,” she said. “Get me back to the table.”

Interminably, quickly, he led her through the swarming gossamers. Had they sensed her awareness and flocked to it? Their long, limber bodies slid over the pages of the
Necronomicon
. Their appendages clung to her hands. But she could see right through them, to Bishop’s pale script lolling in the ink.

The ethereal patches, strained from within, she didn’t look at. “Where did I stop?”

Jeremy fumbled paper. “‘To be constrained by the Elder Sign as before.’”

Helen clamped her hands to her temples. She read more instructions, an incantation. They weren’t long, thank God, and she finished before her swelling bladder of a head burst. It didn’t matter then that she slipped sideways from her chair. It didn’t matter that she dropped; the gossamers cushioned her fall like a mattress of strange life, like the thick thatch of flowering grass that she smelled again for one unending instant.

22

Celeste
called around four. Sean told her he had no fever, no headache, no problem. That was two-thirds true. As the Servitor’s hunger grew, Sean’s stomach threatened to implode with empathic emptiness. He crashed on the chaise, where he didn’t sleep; aside from the rumbling in his gut, he’d never felt more awake.

Now, whether he opened or closed his eyes, he lay both in Gus’s study and in the cool brilliance of the Seekonk River. The soul-thread had started two-way transmission. When his eyes were open, Sean was the main “sensor” and the study had the greater solidity—the river bottom was a transparent overlay, a watery ghost come to haunt the house. When they were closed, Sean surrendered “sensorship”—the river bottom became the reality, the study a queer distortion like an infrared image the Servitor picked up right through Sean’s eyelids. One big difference: The river overlay Sean received was constant, while the study image the Servitor received and then cycled back to Sean was sporadic, an occasional flash in the mesh of shared sensation. The best Sean could figure was that the Servitor only looked through his eyes when it felt like it. It seemed to have much more control of the soul-thread than he did. What if it got to the point where it could read his mind and found out he was going to dismiss the hell out of it?

The frigid stream of its consciousness had morphed since their dream-contact. It was now more like bubbles of alien intention percolating inside Sean’s skull and putting out slow probing pseudopods. To battle the bubbles, he had to keep his eyes open and concentrate on the study. Trouble was, he also had to pay attention to the river, to make sure the Servitor stayed put. Maybe the Servitor could deal with simultaneous inputs, but Sean’s mere human brain was boggled. To really watch it, he had to close his eyes and exchange river ghost for river reality.

And the Servitor needed watching. It was not happy.

Sean closed his eyes.

Water muffles the sounds of the air-world, but the Servitor’s hearing is keen. It listens to the purr of boats, the calls of birds, the high hum of airplanes. Nearer and louder is the growl of a motorcycle.

Boats, birds, planes, the motorcycle. This morning the Servitor hadn’t known that web-footed paddlers were swans and small human vessels were kayaks. This afternoon it knew the names of everything. How could it have learned them except through Sean? More proof it was getting deeper into his mind.

The motorcycle roar stutters and stops. Staccato laughter replaces it. Humans. Very close. The Servitor rolls off its back and starts to swim up the shoreward slope.

Sean arrowed thought at it:
No.

In return, he felt the minute taps of bubble pseudopods.
It is starving, and the summoner hasn’t come.

No. Stay put.

It will only look.

The water darkens as the Servitor strokes toward sunlight. In the gloom, fleeing minnows are streaks of life-radiance. Faint, failing radiance outlines the trunk of a tree fallen into the river. The still-leafy aerial boughs will conceal the Servitor when it looks at the humans. Just looks. It insinuates itself into the sunken branches, bunches small, stretches lean, until its head breaks the surface.

The reek of gasoline fumes and pot smoke burn the sensitive forks of its tongue, but they can’t mask the odor of human blood in human flesh. On the steps of the tomb recessed into the bluff, twin auras pulse, a man and a woman, passing a joint. Their motorcycle is plastered with mud.

They must have plowed through every bog on the riverside path instead of just taking the paved road down. Jesus, people were stupid to go off by themselves like this, first the guy with the schnauzer, now these bikers. They thought they were immune to muggers and pervs and psycho killers. Inhuman monsters didn’t even cross their minds, because inhuman monsters weren’t real.

Too bad this particular inhuman monster didn’t know it couldn’t exist. The Servitor began splashing and snapping twigs, getting clear of the fallen tree. If the bikers would stop blowing smoke at each other and cracking up over it, they’d hear. If they’d pay attention to the shadowy spots around them, like you had to in a world monsters could invade, they’d see.

It drifts toward shore behind the tree trunk. It won’t just look, after all. It needs to eat.

Sure, monsters ate, and why not eat people? People weren’t the monster’s own kind, so it wasn’t cannibalism, wasn’t wrong for the monster. Sean, though, was human. Last night, in their dream-connection, he’d called the Servitor off so he wouldn’t have to endure the nightmare of its attack. Today, in their waking connection, he knew what was about to happen was real, no nightmare, and so his obligation to stop the attack was that much greater. If he stopped fighting for control, he’d see the man and woman impaled on talons; he’d hear their screams, he’d smell their blood, taste it, feel the give of bone under needle-teeth. He’d become an accidental murderer.

The Servitor’s claws touch bottom. It sinks to its belly in the mud of the shallows. Overhanging trees cast bright shade around it. Soon it will be in the reeds at the water’s edge, through which it can start its final stalk.

An accidental murderer or worse. What if he wanted to let it happen, so he could fill the emptiness inside him, inside them?

He will like the killing, because the Servitor likes killing and Sean is becoming it.

He forced his eyes open. On the high ceiling of the study, the transparency of the riverside and the clueless bikers played like a washed-out movie. Okay. He could stand a movie massacre, and maybe distance would get him off the hook for complicity—