Summoned (3 page)

Sean started reading:

Redemption Orne was born in Cambridgeshire, England, in 1669, the only surviving child of nonconformist minister Jonathan Orne and his wife, Susan Cooke. In 1681, the Ornes emigrated to Boston. There Redemption attended the Boston Latin School and Harvard College and earned a reputation for scholarship, eloquence and piety that attracted the notice of such influential figures as John Eliot, in whose Algonquin Bible Redemption took much interest.

In 1690, Redemption graduated from Harvard and published several well-received tracts. His uncle Richard Orne, an early settler in Arkham and one of its most prosperous merchants, invited him to become teacher at the new Third Congregational Church. Redemption accepted and soon won the approbation of pastor Nicholas Brattle and the congregation.

Redemption also took on the spiritual guidance of a village of Christianized Nipmucs near Dunwich, where he boarded at the house of Enoch Bishop and his daughter Patience. From the Sachem, Peter Kokokoho, he learned the topography, flora and fauna of the wild interior. Of the Nipmucs, Redemption would privately write: “While during the day the Indians pray to our Lord Jesus Christ, at night, when the hills speak, I fear they turn to other gods.”

Patience, too, knew other gods. Dunwich believed Enoch Bishop to be a wizard, but that lonely town knew better than to oppose him. Under Enoch, Patience had studied witchcraft since she’d been old enough to dance upon the stone-crowned hills. Though she used the craft to cure, hers remained a dark power.

It appears that Redemption was too smitten with Patience to perceive her true nature. In 1691, he married her. In 1692, following the sudden deaths of Richard Orne and his wife (deaths later ascribed to Patience’s magic), Redemption became sole heir to his uncle’s estate. During this prosperous period, Redemption’s fame spread through the colonies, and he wrote his natural and spiritual history,
The New Wildernesse
. Soon after, their daughter, Constance, was born.

As the Witch Panic intensified and spread to Arkham, suspicion fell on Patience. As noted in trial records, the Black Man had favored her with a monstrous familiar and it had devoured many domestic beasts and several people. Many testified to seeing this daemon kill soldiers sent to arrest its mistress. Patience was hanged on Orange Point.

Redemption fell under suspicion when his secret journal revealed he had known of Patience’s witchcraft. He was imprisoned but disappeared before trial. Some speculated that the Black Man had spirited him away. Others less fanciful believed he had escaped into the woods and there met some unknown but natural fate.

Much of Orne’s printed work was destroyed after his fall from public grace. A few volumes and tracts may be found in the collection of seventeenth-century literature at the Arkham Historical Society, while Orne’s journals have recently been removed to the Archives of Miskatonic University.

By the time Sean finished the mini-bio, the back of his neck was prickling, and not from heat rash. He had gotten the same prickle from H. P. Lovecraft’s stories, the ones so loaded with details that they’d momentarily convinced Sean that in his fiction Lovecraft was telling truths the government didn’t want told. The government couldn’t let people know about Elder Things and transdimensional monsters and giant blobs of protoplasm. Everyone would start jumping out windows. Well,
Sean
wouldn’t jump out a window—he’d be cool with it. But that wasn’t the point.

The point was, why should he get prickles from the Orne bio? It didn’t give any details. Like, how did Patience kill old Richard and his wife? What did Patience’s familiar look like? Did it swallow cows and passersby whole, or did it leave little bits behind, covered with slime to show how it wasn’t wolves or bears that had done it? To be fair, that stuff was probably in the actual book. The bio was only an appendix.

Sean skimmed it again. Some lines popped out at him. Dunwich was afraid to mess with Enoch Bishop, a wizard. Patience knew other gods and used her magic to heal people, but it was still a dark power. All that sounded like the writer believed in witchcraft. But in the end, he poked fun at the people who thought Redemption was grabbed by the Black Man. The writer said the “less fanciful” believed that Redemption escaped and died of natural causes.

It sounded like they never found Redemption’s body. What if it was because he didn’t die? He was alive in 1895. He was alive right now, because he had an e-mail address. And a time machine, for traveling back to 1895.

Man, he was giving himself a headache, trying to come up with a logical explanation. Good thing it was fun. Sean glanced at the clipping, which trembled in the breeze from the ceiling fan. Then he glanced across the backyard to the carriage house. All the second-floor windows were lit up, so Dad was still hard at it.

He carried book and clipping to the family-room computer and pulled up the e-mail account he used for online gaming. It would be safe to e-mail the Reverend from that, and, come on, it wasn’t any lamer to go by
Lord Grayfalcon
than it was to go by
Redemption Orne
. Sean clicked for a new message. He read the circled ad once more. He typed:
Hey Rev, I found your want ad that says you’re looking for an apprentice in magic. Me and my friend think it’s way cool how you faked the old newspaper clipping. How did you do it anyway? The old guy at Horrockes didn’t seem to know and if you can stump a guy like him you’re good. So you’re really into this Orne guy. I’m reading about him in the book where the ad was. Looks like he rocks.

Sean paused. It was always tricky to joke on the Internet, especially if you didn’t know the person. But he couldn’t chicken out now. He typed again:
Anyhow I was wondering if you’re still looking for an apprentice. I think I’d rock as one. Do you have to be out of high school or what? Lord G.

No use typing more when the message would probably bounce anyway. Sean added a blind cc to Eddy and hit send.

Five minutes later, when he was deep in the latest flame war on his Warcraft forum (Orcpwner versus U_All_Sukk), he got an e-mail alert. That would be from Eddy, chewing him a new one. Except it wasn’t. It was from “Reverend Orne,” and the subject was “The apprentice position.”

The prickles hit Sean’s neck again, big-time. He stared at the new e-mail. Okay, here was what was going to happen: He was going to open it, and it was going to be a picture of some gross sex act (apprentice position, ha-ha), and under that would be a giant
LMAO noob, you fell for it
.
Which would be fine; he could deal with that.

He opened the e-mail. There was no picture. There was one scant paragraph:
Thank you for your interest in the position of apprentice in magic. I would enjoy discussing it with you. If you remain interested, chat with me tomorrow at four o’clock p.m. My ID is rorne. Cordially, Redemption Orne.

While Sean was still cranking his jaw off the keyboard, Eddy texted him:
hey lord g get on NOW

Sean texted back:
u got my cc huh?

i cant believe u did that ur so DEAD if ur dad finds out

omg he already answered

????

orne

shut UP

rly—he said ty 4 yr interest, chat tomorrow 4 pm.

u going to???

hell yeah

idk i still think ur crazy can i sit in?

sure ill come over yr house after work

good bc mom is making strwbry pies gag >_<

Sean would get to eat Eddy’s share, since she had a freakish hatred of strawberries. He was about to type
no problem
when the porch door opened, then smacked shut. A quick
gtg
was all he could get in. Eddy would understand. Luckily, Dad made a stop at the refrigerator—bottles rattled in the door. That gave Sean time to pocket his phone and tuck
The Witch Panic
and the clipping under a couch cushion.

A bottle gasped open in the kitchen. “Sean? You’re not on the computer, are you?”

Sean shut it down. “No. Except to check my e-mail.”

“That sounds more like a ‘yes.’”

“I’m off now.”

“It’s almost eleven. Joe-Jack’s picking you up for work at six, right?”

“Right,” Sean said. Maybe it would rain. Hard. Joe-Jack couldn’t rebuild a porch in a downpour. That would give Sean a chance to hang out at Eddy’s and prep for his interview with the Reverend by reading the book she’d cruised with.

“Sean? Bed.”

“Right, Dad.” Before Dad could come into the family room, Sean retrieved
The Witch Panic
and hit the stairs running.

3

The
next morning was depressingly cloudless. Dad dragged Sean out of bed at five thirty, shoveled raisin bran down his throat, and packed him into the
J-J REMODELING
van five minutes short of six.

J-J
stood for
Joe-Jack
, and Joe-Jack was Joseph Jackman Douglass, who back in his hippy days had dropped out of law school to learn carpentry. Since then, he’d been restoring old houses to their original splendor, only with all the modern conveniences. Joe-Jack was skinny, and his ponytail and beard were streaky gray, but if the working guys in his favorite working-guy bars tried anything, they’d find out that every ounce on him was knotty muscle. Not that working guys messed with Joe-Jack. He got along great with them, being all for the rights of labor except where his own employees were concerned.

For the summer, Sean and Joe-Jack’s son, Beowulf, were his only employees. Beo was snoring in the back of the van, and he didn’t wake up even when Hrothgar started drooling on his face and hammering his kneecaps with his hairy club of a tail. The van smelled like Hrothgar, who was always wet from jumping into the Pawtuxet River. It smelled, too, like oiled tools and raw wood and Coffee Exchange coffee, which was the only elitist thing Joe-Jack went in for. Joe-Jack poured Sean a cup from his working-guy thermos. “That’s the Sumatra,” he said. “They finally got some that was Fair Trade.”

“Great,” Sean said. At this time of day, he would have drunk it if it had been produced by child slaves in shackles. Joe-Jack brewed his coffee strong; after a few sips, Sean felt alive enough to call Hrothgar over to him. The chocolate Lab scrabbled up and stuck his head into the cab. Sean scratched him behind his damp ears. “We’re on the East Side today, right?”

“Doyle Avenue. You have a good time in Arkham yesterday?”

“Yeah. I got this cool book about the witch trials.”

Joe-Jack scowled. “Witch trials. That was some steaming heap of crap.”

“Right. But it’s interesting what people used to believe.”

“The bosses never believed in witches,” Joe-Jack said. “The politicians and ministers. They just used the superstitions of the uneducated to get rid of their enemies.”

Just like now.
Sean waited for it.

Joe-Jack drank off his Sumatra. “Like now,” he said.

“Yeah. Hey, Joe. Will you drop me off at Eddy’s later?”

“So you can read about witches?”

“I don’t know. But she said her mom’s making strawberry pies.”

“Well, strawberry pies make sense. Save me a hunk.”

Except for lunch, Sean and Beowulf and Joe-Jack worked nonstop ripping apart the porch of the house they were renovating on Doyle Street. Hrothgar squeezed through loose latticework and lay on the cool dirt under the decking. For a dog named after a Danish King, he was pretty democratic about how the stirred-up bugs swarmed over him. A ginormous centipede went up Joe-Jack’s jeans. Sean and Beo about peed themselves when Joe-Jack hopped and dropped his pants and yelled,
Jesus-H-fucking-Christ!
—which he never said around them even though it was a perfectly good working-guy expression. He didn’t kill the centipede because of the oneness of being, and, shaken free, it went off to demonstrate oneness by exploring Hrothgar’s orifices.

Between the heat and the grunt labor, Sean was a dripping mess when Joe-Jack dropped him off on Keene Street. Eddy lived right next door to Sean’s aunt Celeste and uncle Gus; when he opened the arched gate between the houses, she vaulted like a maniac over her porch railing. “Where you going?” she demanded.

“Um, to take a shower?”

Eddy wrinkled up her nose. “I didn’t know Joe-Jack did sewers. But hurry up! We have to meet the Reverend in ten minutes.”

Damn, that was right. “Hold him,” Sean said. Then he ran around the house to the back porch, where he pulled off his dirt-caked work shoes and socks. The screen door was unlatched. Sean let himself into the kitchen and yelled that it was him, not a burglar. He didn’t wait for Gus to answer. He didn’t even grab a glass of milk. He pounded up the back stairs, snatched clean clothes from his stay-over bedroom, and dashed for the hall bath.

By five after four, he was in Eddy’s “office.” It had been her playroom until she hit ten and inherited her granddad’s rolltop desk. With that beast in one corner and a computer station in the tower bay, it did look official. Eddy was parked at the computer, Brutus the Hell Pug on her lap and chat window open. “About time,” she said. “I was just going to try his ID.”

Sean snagged the leather desk chair from the rolltop. Brutus hurled himself onto its seat, then dived for Sean’s left flip-flop. Sean let him have it and plopped down before Brutus could realize he was losing the high ground.

Eddy had already typed
rorne
in the contact search bar. She scooted over so Sean could get at the keyboard. He settled his fingertips on the keys and stared down at the dirt still lodged under his nails. He hadn’t taken time to scrub them, he’d been so frantic to be on time for the Reverend. Now, of course, he couldn’t think of anything to write.

“Backing out?” Eddy said.

After sending that e-mail, he’d look like a major wuss if he didn’t follow through and ace the joke. Besides, the Rev probably wasn’t even online. “No way. What should I say, though?”