Chapter 10: Return Fire

The candles that surrounded the summoning circle flickered, illuminating the dark living room in their orange glow, the pale skin of the Seirim reflecting the light as they stood nearby. It was the middle of the day, but the grime that covered the windows blocked out most of the sunlight. The deep shadows that were cast by the dancing flames gave the cabin an eerie vibe, and it was making Ryan feel like he was standing on the set of an Evil Dead movie. He eyed one of the mounted stag heads, its antlers draped in wispy cobwebs, then shook off his fear and opened his copy of the Lesser Key at the page that he had bookmarked.

He had showered again after his romp with Nahash, and he was now ready to perform the ritual. The absence of incense had been somewhat mitigated by the smell of flowers from the bedroom, the greenery spilling out through the doorway now and threatening to consume the rest of the house. The plants had only grown stronger and wilder the longer that he and Nahash had made love. Now his companion was charged up on energy, ready to travel to the hidden Mason base at his side and ready to fight if it became necessary.

The baleful Haures had not shown his face again so far. Rather than being unable to locate Ryan, he found it more likely that the demon was simply wary of the Seirim, even in their weakened state. It was just a matter of time before the beast evened the odds, however, and they had already been in the cabin for too long. It was time to set events in motion.

Ryan began to recite the Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia from the safety of his protective triangle. It was becoming so familiar to him now, this was the third time in so many days that he had read aloud the entire passage. There was a certain rhythm to the invocation when it was recited properly, more of a chant or a hymn than a simple recitation. At this rate, he was going to learn it by heart, despite its exhausting length and complexity.

This time he had a glass of water on standby, knowing that he was going to need it. During the last two summonings, it had taken him about twenty minutes to get from the beginning to the end.

The Seirim looked on as he made his way slowly through the invocation, struggling with the Hebrew and Aramaic passages. When he was done, he proceeded immediately to the next evocation in the sequence, commanding the demon to appear as he waved his wand at the circle.

“I Evoke and conjure you Gaap, and being with power armed from your supreme majesty, I thoroughly command you by Beralanensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachae and Apologiae-Sedes and your most powerful princes Genio Liachidi, ministers of your Tartarean seat, chief princes of your seat of Apologia, in your Ninth Region. I exorcise & powerfully command you Gaap in and by him that said your word, and it was done, and by all the holy and most glorious names of the most holy and true God...”

The surface of the summoning circle began to shift as if the wooden floor inside the boundaries of the chalk was melting, becoming liquid. He was not surprised by the environmental changes this time, he knew exactly what to expect. Summoning was a precise science, and he was slowly learning to anticipate at what stages the demon would begin to manifest itself.

“ ... I conjure you by the special and true name of your God that you owe obedience unto, and by the name of your king, which beareth rule over you, that forthwith you come without tarrying and fulfill my desires...”

The floorboards became less defined, until all that remained was a perfect circle of polished wood, like the varnished surface of a dining table. The effect did not stray beyond the chalk, it seemed to have been properly contained, there were no breaks in the circle or errors in his transcription. He had to be cautious here, as Gaap was a higher ranked Goetic demon than any that he had attempted to summon before. It was powerful, no doubt cunning, and there was a good chance it might be malevolent.

Now the surface began to ripple, as if it was a pond that someone had thrown a pebble into, the waves lapping at the edges of the chalk summoning circle. The candles flickered, the structure of the dilapidated cabin creaking as if it was being put under some kind of stress.

“Therefore come ye in the name Adonay, Saday, Zebeoth, Adonay, Amiorent, come, come, why delay? Hasten, Adonay, Saday, the king of kings commandeth you!”

He waited, his wand pointed at the center of the circle, the sound of his breathing the only thing breaking the eerie silence. He waited for the demon to manifest, wondering if he had done something wrong. Perhaps he had made a mistake during his incantation, or maybe the setup was just too amateurish for a demon of this rank to even deign to appear before him.

A sound reached his ears, faint and far away, and he strained to listen. It was a church bell, heard from a great distance. Was there a church near enough to the national park that it could be heard this deep inside the forest? It didn’t seem likely.

As it grew louder, he was able to make out individual bells. There was a whole choir of them, as if a cathedral was summoning the faithful to prayer. He was tempted to compare the sound to the tolling of wedding bells, but it was oddly mournful, more like a funeral than any celebration. It was tuneless, grating, he had to fight the urge to cover his ears. After a while it became unpleasantly loud, echoing as if the noise was coming from inside the very room, like he was standing in the bell tower of some Gothic basilica. It shook his bones, seeming to make the foundations of the cabin vibrate beneath his feet.

His attention was drawn to a haze in the center of the circle, a mirage, shimmering like the air above the baking asphalt on a hot summer’s day. It was formless at first, but then it began to change, taking on the rough shape of a man. The ringing of those blasted bells continued as if announcing the entity’s arrival, its body becoming more solid as he looked on.

Ryan blinked, and then it was there. It stood on the now mirror-like floor, seven feet tall and clad in what looked like a hooded, burlap robe. Its face was obscured in shadow, save for a set of yellowed and crooked teeth, its long and bony fingers clasped in front of it.

He was used to demons taking strange and frightening forms, but this one was different. It wasn’t just strange or alarming, it was repulsive, it looked like some kind of zombie monk. He was glad that the thing’s features were obscured beneath its long hood, as he feared that whatever might be lurking under there would give him night terrors for the rest of his life.

Ryan quickly composed himself, knowing that he had to keep his attention focused on the task at hand. This form may well be designed to perturb and distract him so that the demon might find an opening in his defenses that it could exploit. He considered commanding it to take a more appealing form, but it might take offense, and the situation was already precarious enough.

It stood there in silence, waiting for Ryan to address it, making no comment about the unorthodox surroundings or the slapdash nature of the summoning ritual.

“Oh Mighty Prince Gaap,” Ryan began, resisting the urge to clutch his protective pendant in his hand. He needed to appear confident, in control. Like dogs, demons would sense weakness and hesitation, and it might encourage them to act. “I have summoned you here because I am in dire need of your help. Please forgive the unorthodox nature of the ritual, my resources are severely limited, and my life is in immediate danger. Will you treat with me?”

Gaap turned its head slowly to peer around the room, examining the Seirim and the flickering candles. Ryan could hear the bones in its neck creaking. It turned back to stare at him, and while he couldn’t see its eyes beneath the veil of shadow, he could feel them piercing through him. It was the same sensation that one got when they were alone at night, the hairs on their neck standing on end as their instincts insisted that they were being watched by some unseen force. Gaap’s discolored lips pulled back in an ugly smile, revealing its rotting teeth.

“You are the boy...” it rasped, its voice hoarse and breathy. It sounded like it had a mouth full of dust, or perhaps it had been smoking ten packs of cigarettes a day for the last five thousand years.

“The ... boy?” Ryan asked. What was the demon talking about?

“I know you, Ryan Cutter,” it croaked.

Ryan was taken aback, glancing at Nahash for a moment, the Seirim seeming equally surprised by the demon’s statement.

“How do you know me? What do you mean by that?”

It ignored his queries, merely standing there and grinning at him. Information wasn’t free, it no doubt wanted some kind of payment.

“I will treat with you,” the demon hissed with a bow of its hooded head, “state your terms.”

Ryan cleared his throat, reading from the contract that he had prepared earlier. He had put a lot of thought into it, and this time he hadn’t had Nahash to help him. If they had worked on it together, she would no doubt have objected to his plan. Fortunately, she hadn’t been curious enough to press the issue.

“I would ask two things of you,” he began, the demon looking on silently. “First, I need to know the precise location of one Reginald Carlisle, his title is Grand Master. He’s somewhere in Antarctica, below the ice in a hidden base, that’s all I know for sure. I intend to kill him. My second request is that once you’ve located him, I am to be transported to the nearest safe area inside the installation, somewhere that I can reach him in a reasonable amount of time. I must arrive unseen. You may not teleport me into the direct view of any guards, into a room that I cannot escape from, or otherwise allow me to come to any kind of harm as a result of where you choose to send me. You may not alert anyone to my presence yourself, or otherwise cause others to become aware of me, nor may you put me into any situation where others would hurt me as an indirect result. When I have succeeded in killing Carlisle, you will return me to this cabin.”

Gaap contemplated for a moment, then spoke in its hoarse voice.

“And if you should fail to kill Reginald Carlisle?”

“I’m getting to that part,” Ryan said. “As for your payment, I have nothing on hand. I cannot offer you sexual energy, nor do I have anything to sacrifice. Instead, I offer you a wager...”

The demon perked up at that, its unnaturally long fingers twitching as it seemed to lean closer.

“Go on...”

“Ryan!” Nahash snapped, “do you know what you’re doing?”

“Trust me,” he whispered, then he turned his attention back to the demon. “Because I cannot offer you anything in exchange for your help right now, I propose the following arrangement. If I should succeed in killing Carlisle, then the demon that is currently hunting me will be called off, his contract rendered void. That done, I will be able to move more freely, as my chief concern will be evading my mortal pursuers. As soon as it is safe to do so, I will have a hundred tin plates inscribed with your sigil, and I will spread them around the city. It will be a deferred payment, so to speak, only to be carried out when my situation allows for it.”

“And what wager do you propose?” the demon asked.

“If I should fail to kill Carlisle and I meet my demise in the Antarctic base, then you may take possession of my soul.”

“Ryan!” Nahash exclaimed, her eyes wide. “You cannot do this! Do you have any idea what that would mean?”

“It’s the only way,” Ryan replied solemnly, “no demon would accept a contract from a client unless they were certain that they would be paid. This way Gaap will receive the energy that is owed regardless of the outcome.”

“But your immortal soul,” she pleaded. “Death is not the end, Ryan. But if you surrender your soul to a demon, it will be drained of energy and consumed. You will cease to exist!”

“If I fail, then I’ll die, and everything that I know and love will be lost. I don’t care about the afterlife. If there’s such a thing as Heaven, then I don’t want to go there if you can’t follow. The guy who calls himself God doesn’t seem to like Nephilim very much, I don’t think your name will be on the guest list.”

“Foolish romantic,” she brayed, her usually musical voice becoming more like that of a goat as her emotions got the better of her. “I won’t allow it, I won’t let you put your soul at risk out of some ... misplaced notion of loyalty! There are more important things at stake!”

Gaap glanced between them, seemingly amused by their exchange. Her sisters were visibly upset, clustering together and whispering worriedly to one another.

“Stop smiling like that!” Nahash snapped at him, balling her fists and stamping a cloven hoof on the floor of the cabin. “You think you’re being so noble, but you’re just being an idiot! How dare you hide this from me, how dare you make this decision behind my back! There’s more than this life, more than our romance. You’d risk the promise of an infinite existence for just a few more decades with me?”

“What did you tell me about your time in the demon realm, of your thousands of years drifting aimlessly in a soup of immaterial thought and emotion?” Ryan countered, Nahash looking on with tears welling in her ovine eyes. “You told me that an infinite existence in that state paled in comparison to a single second of life in the tangible world. You told me to savor every second of it, to value every gust of wind and every blade of grass, to appreciate every smell and sight and flavor while there was still time. Well, that’s the way I feel about you, Nahash. I know that our time is limited, the lifespan of a human is but a brief candle from your perspective, yet the fact that it’s so finite is what makes it infinitely valuable. That is why I’m going to fight tooth and nail, why I’m going to put everything at risk for one more second with you, because I won’t get another chance.”

“You have become wise,” she said as a solitary tear rolled down her cheek to wet her woolly ruff, her angry outburst now over. She sounded defeated, perhaps sensing that his mind was set and that he could not be swayed. “You understand the value of life, you are making your own decisions without my council, and you have become an experienced summoner. Yet I would have a living husband who is meek and ignorant over a wise one who is dead.”

“Then help me stay that way,” he said, “I know that we can succeed. Together.”

She wiped her eyes with her fluffy forearm, then nodded. Ryan turned back to Gaap, awaiting the demon’s decision.

“I accept your wager,” it croaked. “Prepare yourself for travel, Ryan Cutter.”

“Can I bring anything with me?” he asked.

“Within reason,” the creature replied.

“I’m bringing this weapon,” Ryan said as he pulled the handgun from his belt, “and this ring.”

Gaap recoiled like a vampire that had been exposed to sunlight as Ryan brandished the onyx wedding band, shrinking back as its crooked smile was replaced with a grimace.

“This, I cannot do,” it hissed.

“What? Why not?” he asked as he shared a concerned glance with Nahash.

“This artifact has been forged with magick that far exceeds my own. I cannot transport it, I cannot touch it. Please, put it away.”

He did as the demon requested, covering his hand with his sleeve, then he turned to Nahash. He wanted to say something to comfort her, but no words came to him.

“Ryan, the plan won’t work,” she said. She looked dejected, her sheep-like ears drooping. “I cannot go with you, without that ring I will have no way of knowing where you are! We have to try something else, come up with another plan!”

“The contract is sealed,” Gaap reminded them, “I will have my payment one way or another...”

Ryan gestured for the demon to be calm, leaving his protective triangle and walking over to Nahash. He plunged his face into her downy wool, and she closed her arms around him, pulling him tight against her bosom as if afraid that he would vanish once she let go of him. They shared a few moments of silence, and then he had to pull himself away from her. He considered that this might be the last time that he would smell her earthy scent, the last time that he would feel her warmth, but breaking down now wouldn’t do anyone any good. He steeled himself, putting on a confident front even as he choked back the tears that were threatening to overwhelm him. She probably sensed his emotions regardless.

“I can do this,” he insisted, trying to reassure himself as much as Nahash. “Just a quick in and out, I’ll be back before you’ve even noticed that I’m gone.” He removed the black ring from his finger and placed it in her palm, closing her hand over it. “Keep this safe for me, I’ll need it when I get back.”

“Be careful Ryan,” she whispered, “don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

He turned back to Gaap, cocking his weapon with a mechanical click.

“Let’s get this done.”

The demon grinned again, exposing its yellowed teeth, watching him intently with unseen eyes.

“You may experience some ... discomfort...”

Ryan winced, gripping his chest with his hand. His heart was beating erratically, aching, a numbness moving down his left arm. Nahash sensed his distress and moved towards him, but the demon put himself between them. Her eyes were wild, and she looked about ready to kick the creature across the room, but it raised a bony hand to stay her.

“This body must die,” it explained in its raspy voice, “only then can the soul be transported elsewhere. He is quite safe, I have not violated the terms of our agreement...”

“It’s f-fine Nahash,” Ryan stammered, coughing as the pain spread through him. “We have to t-trust Gaap.”

Darkness began to eat at the corners of his vision, primal panic overtaking him. Was this a heart attack? Oh God, he was really dying. What would that entail? What would it feel like? He dropped to his knees, then fell to his side, every muscle in his body burning. It felt like an elephant was standing on his chest. His heart stopped, and an odd euphoria came over him, his brain becoming starved of oxygen. He felt cold, so cold...

A kaleidoscope of vibrant colors swirled around Ryan, like some kind of trippy album cover from the sixties. All the hues of the rainbow seemed to flow into one another like running paints, mingling and swirling, creating new colors that he didn’t even have a name for. He wasn’t seeing it, however. He had no eyes, no senses of any kind. It was like a dream was being projected into his mind by some outside force.

There was no Ryan in fact, the boundaries of his body were absent, and the boundaries of his mind were becoming blurred and uncertain. He couldn’t wiggle his fingers or toes, he had no sense of himself. It was like someone had unplugged him from the physical world. There was just an odd sense of floating, tumbling, of being lost.

They hit him like a wall, all at once, hundreds of thousands of them. There were voices in his head that were not his own, like he had somehow developed a violent case of schizophrenia. He tried to cover his ears with his hands to block out the intolerable noise, but he had neither. There was no way to stop it, no volume control. He tried to scream, to beg the voices to stop, but he had no voice.

It wasn’t just voices, it was thoughts too, the memories and emotions of outsiders flooding his brain. He felt their sadness, their despair, he experienced their joy and their happiness as if it were his own. There was so much of it coming so fast, impossible to parse, and in a second he had experienced a lifetime’s worth of emotional highs and lows.

Their thoughts intruded into his mind, he could experience their memories, there was no boundary between him and them. Such terminology had lost all meaning, there was only us. His ego had ceased to exist, and he no longer saw himself as an individual. It was wonderful and horrifying, enlightening and crushing. A thousand lives flashed before his eyes, millions of accumulated years in a fraction of a moment, impossible to make any sense of. He was being overloaded, tortured.

Was this what Nahash had lived through for all those millennia? Was this the immaterium, where thoughts and emotions were as real and as tangible as a rock or a tree?

Ryan awoke on a cold floor, taking in a lungful of air. He opened his eyes and looked around, his panic slowly subsiding as he realized that he was no longer being assailed by thoughts made manifest. He was in some kind of confined space, a storage closet? There were boxes stacked against the wall behind him, and there was a mop and bucket to his right.

He slowly rose to his feet, his legs shaky and his body oddly awkward. His chest now felt fine, but he was uncoordinated, like he was wearing shoes that were the wrong size or something. He turned to examine his surroundings and then nearly had a second heart attack as he noticed Gaap. The demon was uncomfortably close in the small closet, there was barely enough room for the both of them.

“It is done,” Gaap hissed, “you have reached your destination.”

The demon then reached out with a bony, discolored finger, too long and with too many joints. It looked more like a spider’s leg than a human appendage. He recoiled from it, but there was nowhere to go, and he balled his fists as he felt the tip of that ghastly digit brush his forehead.

A vision flashed before his eyes like a waking dream. His perspective shifted, shooting out of the door and down the corridor, as if footage from a drone was being played back at great speed. He wound through snaking tunnels, past guards armed with rifles, over the heads of robed men carrying books and tablet computers. He entered a room and came to a stop, hovering before an older man with a salt and pepper beard. He was hunched over a table, reading from ancient manuscripts.

Ryan recognized his face from Gamori’s sand sculpture, it was Carlisle.

He snapped back to the present, gasping as the sudden change in perspective dizzied him, and he had to lean against the wall for a moment while he got his bearings. He knew where the man was, he knew how to get to him, like a roadmap of the facility had been burned into his brain.

“You have all that you need, Ryan Cutter,” Gaap croaked. “Now go, and if you should accomplish your task, I will return you to the company of your Nephilim companions. I would wish you good luck in your venture, but that would not be in my best interests...”

The creature began to laugh, hacking and coarse, the sound slowly fading as the demon vanished into a fuzzy haze. Ryan drew his weapon and checked the magazine, moving to the door and preparing to open it.

There had been eight armed guards between him and Carlisle, along with a dozen other Masons who weren’t armed but who may still try to stop him or attempt to raise the alarm. There was no way that he could reach Carlisle’s chamber in secret, there was no cover, only bare corridors lit with fluorescent lamps. There wasn’t so much as a shadow that might help to conceal his presence. He would have to fight his way through. At least he had the element of surprise, they would not be expecting an attack here, they probably thought themselves untouchable.

He had to move quickly, or his mental map of where the threats were located wouldn’t count for much. He opened the door to the closet and stepped out into the whitewashed hallway. There didn’t seem to be any security cameras, and the guards were patrolling on routes rather than protecting specific locations. He missed Nahash, he had counted on having her here to watch his back, but he would have to make do.

He set off down the corridor, already knowing where he was supposed to go, every fork and turn that he should take was already planned out. As he rounded a corner in the oddly organic corridor, he came across a man wearing ornate robes who was engrossed in the readout of a tablet computer. The stranger looked up from his task, then froze, the blood draining from his face as he saw the gun.

Ryan moved past him, knowing that he wasn’t going to try to stop him. Two more robed men parted to let him pass, looking on in surprise and confusion as Ryan’s shoes squeaked on the stone floor. He increased his pace to a jog, his heart pounding in his chest, and not because he was exerting himself. He had done this before, he knew to let his reflexes do the work, but the adrenaline that was flooding his veins was impossible to ignore.

He arrived at a junction and then took a left. Everything looked the same here, all of the corridors were white and featureless save for the occasional locked door. He would have been completely lost if he had neglected to ask for Gaap’s help in locating Carlisle. He should be coming up on the first pair of guards soon, and so he readied his weapon, willing his hands to stop shaking.

It all happened so quickly. He turned another corner and there they were, two men walking side by side with automatic rifles draped across their chests on slings. They wore long-sleeved shirts with pants that were tucked into their boots, dressed like policeman or security guards, but in regal purple instead of black or blue. They had Masonic insignias on their upper arms and on the baseball caps that they wore, and they had belts from which zip ties, walkie-talkies, and sidearms were hanging. They had been chatting, but as Ryan came into view and raised his weapon, he saw their smiles falter.

Ryan fired twice, the noise making his ears ring in the confines of the corridor, and both men dropped. He moved forward, keeping his handgun trained on them, and put another round into the one who was still moving. Dark blood pooled beneath their prone bodies on the pristine floor, staining their purple shirts, reflecting the fluorescent lights that shone from above. They hadn’t been wearing body armor or bulletproof vests.

He stooped and recovered one of their rifles, struggling to pull the sling over the limp body’s head, then checked the magazine and the safety. It was a Galil MAR chambered in 5.56mm, a shortened version of the Israeli assault rifle platform. It made sense to use a rifle with a short barrel in these tight corridors. Might as well go loud, everyone in the base would have heard those gunshots.

He set the fire selector to full-auto and stowed a second magazine in his belt, wishing that he had recovered one of the chest rigs from the dead soldiers back in the forest. He set his Glock to safe and then shoved it down the back of his pants, continuing on his way.

The lead weight feeling in his gut had returned again. These men hadn’t been trying to kill him, they hadn’t burst into his apartment with their weapons drawn and they hadn’t been shooting at his friends. They would certainly have done the same to him, but he couldn’t do mental gymnastics this time. He was solely responsible for their deaths. He felt nauseous, but he had to press on.

After running for another minute or so he heard shouting coming from around the next bend, emerging to see a frightened scribe dart into a side door and close it behind him. Ryan leapt back into cover just as a hail of bullets whizzed past. There were more guards down at the end of the hall, perhaps thirty meters away.

He poked his rifle around the corner and blind-fired it, letting the recoil bounce it around. He loosed a couple more short bursts, waiting for the return fire, then leaned his upper body out from behind the wall. One of the men was down and the second was dragging him away, aiming his weapon in Ryan’s direction with his free hand.

Ryan should have hesitated, he should have felt remorse when he saw that guard trying desperately to pull his counterpart out of the line of fire, but the killer instincts that Vapula had bestowed upon him only saw an opening. He cut the guard down with a three-round burst to the chest, and the man slumped against the wall like a rag doll, leaving a smear of dark blood as he slid to the ground to lie motionless beside his friend.

They knew that he was coming now, things were about to get hairy. He passed by the bodies and emerged from the corridor into a larger chamber, the white paneling giving way to polished stone. It looked like a cave that had been hollowed out of the solid bedrock, and it was full of large crates that were stacked on tiered shelves, like a warehouse. More and more he was starting to think that the strange and illogical layout of this place was not by design. Had these tunnels and caves existed before the Masons had set up shop here? He could think of no other reason that they would place a storage area in such an odd place.

He heard a sizzling sound, and then something that sounded like liquid hitting the floor. He looked around him, and then saw a thick strand of what resembled molten rock drop from the air a few meters in front of him. He aimed his weapon at the ceiling, and then had to cover his eyes with his forearm. There was something up there, as bright as a cutting torch, the blazing circle that it was carving in the roof of the cave burned into his retinas. He tried to blink it away, but the ghostly afterimage remained.