Summoned (6 page)

“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.

Dad’s opinion about any project: Make your work clean and accurate, like a good draftsman. Sean wasn’t sure you had to be so fussy about neat circles and straight lines when you were doing magic; from all his reading, he was getting the impression that the thought behind the symbols mattered more than their execution. Still, he had to admit Dad’s pentagram looked great. Check off the magical circle as doable.

For the next couple of weeks, Sean studied the more subtle parts of the ritual. His pentagram had to be “invoking” to call in energies. If you were drawing it in the air, you’d point your arm straight forward and sweep it from forehead to left foot. Left foot to right shoulder. Right shoulder to left shoulder. Left shoulder to right foot. Back to forehead. Pentagrams could also be either upright or inverted. Upright ones stood on the “legs” of the star, the two lower angles. Inverted ones balanced on the “head” of the star, the single apex angle. Some sources said the inverted pentagram was a symbol of black magic.
Infinity Unimaginable
said no, it was just a question of whether you wanted to attract or dispel energies. Since the Reverend’s ritual had the summoner standing between the “leg” angles (called Earth and Fire), facing the “head” angle (called Spirit), Sean decided his pentagram must be an upright one. It all depended on your point of view, though. To Mrs. Ferreira next door, the pentagram had to look inverted. Pretty much every day he practiced, Sean heard her muttering in her yard about hex signs or glimpsed her peering through curtains and wagging her fingers to ward off curses.

Unlike Mrs. Ferreira, Zoe and Ethan from across the street thought the ritual was awesome. They especially liked it when Sean practiced throwing the Powders of Zeph and Aghar (salt and pepper for now) into the old tailgater grill he used for a brazier. But Zoe and Ethan were just little kids, and their approval couldn’t outweigh the wrath of Mrs. Ferreira. Toward the end of the second week, when Sean had been shouting incantations for an hour, Mrs. Ferreira stalked up the driveway to Dad’s studio. A few minutes later, she stalked back home, silent as death, with Dad on her heels. “I think you’ve done enough summoning,” he told Sean.

“For today?”

“For permanently. Look at it this way: You can write in your project paper how a city neighborhood is no place for a wizard.”

Sean would have flipped Mrs. Ferreira’s bungalow the bird, except she was sure to be spying. Besides, he wasn’t that pissed. He’d practiced enough. Now he needed to get over the last hurdle in the ritual. In the center of the pentagram, he had to draw something called the Elder Sign. Okay, but
which
Elder Sign?

There were two: the Star, which looked like a pentagram with a single flaming eye in the middle; and the Branch, which looked like a spruce twig sprouting five smaller twigs. The problem was, the Reverend hadn’t specified which one to use.

Sean nagged Eddy into helping him research the Sign. She’d come to only one of his practice sessions, and that had been to bust on him for not driving to the beach the day before with her and Gina and Keiko and Marc. Oh, and for pulling a no-show on Saturday, when Sean was supposed to meet her and Phil at the movies. Sean had honestly forgotten about the movies, and he’d gone to the beach every other time the crowd went. Well, except for those two times the week before, but come on—for once he was throwing himself into a project, and all she could do was try to lure him away? He countered with that accusation, blah blah blah, guilt guilt guilt, until she gave in, not because he’d made her feel guilty (like that would ever happen) but just to shut him up. She scoured the Internet, then voted for the Branch Elder Sign, which most sources said governed limiting or confining magic. She reasoned that the Sign was only there to keep the familiar from escaping before Sean bound it as his servant. That kind of made sense, but on the other hand, the
Star
Elder Sign governed creation and calling magic. Summoning a Servitor was both of those, right? Besides, the Star looked way sharper than the Branch.

Behind Eddy’s back, Sean wrote to the Reverend and asked about the Sign. Three times.

The Reverend didn’t answer. And he didn’t answer. And he didn’t answer.

“He’s probably been hauled off to the nuthouse,” Eddy said, after Sean confessed to the e-mails. She grabbed
Infinity
from him. “Besides, it doesn’t matter which Elder Sign you use. Listen: ‘The human mind requires symbolism to convert magical intention into magical action. Hence we associate abstract concepts of energy with the elements of Air, Fire, Water, Earth and Spirit. Then we create symbols like the pentagram to further concretize the abstract concepts.’”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“You said it just the other day, when you were griping about your dad having to draw the pentagram perfectly. Symbols are props. So if you
think
you’ve got the right symbol, you’ve got the right symbol.”

Yeah, Sean had read that part of the book a million times, and a million times he hadn’t 100 percent gotten it. “Like I can use a smiley face for the ritual, as long as I believe in it? I don’t think so.”

Eddy slapped the book closed “You know what? You’re obsessed.”

“Bullshit.”

“For one thing, you weren’t going to contact the Rev again.”

“Big deal. He’s ignoring my e-mails.”

“Talk about your dad having to do stuff just right. You keep practicing and practicing this ritual like it was actually possible to screw it up. Like your Ethernet thingie could get stuck halfway through the interdimensional whozit, ew, gross. It’s a
joke,
okay?”

Funny. This was the first time he’d gotten excited about something without Eddy coming along for the ride and ending up at the steering wheel. He’d freak if he thought about it too much. The aroma of Rachel’s latest batch of pies wafted into Eddy’s office, still tart and sweet strawberry, like summer breathing. “It’s not a joke,” he said. “I’m doing my project on it.”

“You think Mr. Boyd’s going to know it if you pick the wrong Elder Sign?”

“He’ll know it if I’m just screwing around. What about your Panda quilt?”

“Pa Ndau!”

“It’s supposed to tell a Cambodian folk story, right? What if you took a story and goofed on it? It’d be like dissing Cambodians.”

“You’re worried about dissing wizards?”

“Not wizards. I don’t know. Magic. Mythology and stuff.”

Eddy rubbed her chin with
Infinity
’s spine. “All right,” she finally said. “I guess you have to find out as much as you can.” She rubbed some more. “You still going to Arkham tomorrow?”

“Yeah, Dad and Joe-Jack are taking out the Arkwright House windows. I’m going to look for that Geldman’s Pharmacy afterwards, where the powders are supposed to be?”

“Yeah, the powders, great. Well, Helen Arkwright works at the MU Library. I bet she knows the Marvell guy who wrote this.” Eddy chucked him
Infinity Unimaginable.
“Maybe she knows about the Elder Sign. Couldn’t hurt to ask.”

This was why you wanted Eddy on your side—she always came up with a plan. It
could
hurt to ask Ms. Arkwright about the sign, if she laughed at Sean. But he’d risk it. Otherwise he might as well make a Panda quilt for his project, and no way he was doing that.

Jeremy Wyndham
was scheduled to return on July 21, rain or shine. He was getting the shine. By mid-morning, the garden thermometer had already swung its scrolled pointer past eighty-five; even in the usually airy library, Helen felt stifled. She stood in the center of the long room and looked up at
The Founding of Arkham.
It was her last chance to look before Jeremy took away the stained-glass windows for who knew how long. A couple months, he’d said, but renovating the rest of Uncle John’s house had taught Helen that in contractor jargon
a couple
rarely meant two, more like five or six.

The center window showed five Puritans on a hilltop. Three soldiers in helmets and breastplates brandished muskets. A minister in austere black knelt and bowed his forehead to tented fingertips. Behind him, a more elaborately dressed gentleman seemed to scour the sky for the trumpeting angels the occasion merited. The angels hadn’t shown up. In the background, with the softness of distance suggested by opalescent glass, was a curve of cliffs and spread of water: the mouth of the Miskatonic, as accurate as a photograph. Three ships floated in the river, sails furled.

The soldiers weren’t as rapt as the minister and gentleman—they stared toward the right-hand window, in which Indians climbed the seaward slope. The Indians carried bows, but the leader had both hands raised, empty. Another Indian shouldered a slain buck, another strings of fish. They looked more interested in a barbecue than a massacre.