The Summoning

Barry paced the floor of the garage, anxiously gazing up at the clock. The timing had to be precise, bang on midnight if this was to work. This was definitely the big one, and it would not do too screw it up.

The chicken in the corner clucked oblivious to Barry’s evil machinations. It was but one of the ingredients that Barry had procured for this day. The chicken, the candles, the Necronomicon ex Mortis on extended loan from the public library. It was overdue by some weeks now, and the fine was fast amounting into mortgage territory. Barry cared not. Idly he flicked through the pages of the Unholy Book as he paced, mouthing silent incantations and curses to himself. He fidgeted and fiddled and worried at his fingernails in the seconds between the mute blasphemes. Despite his determination, Barry was nervous.

And why not? He had every right to be nervous. At the stroke of twelve, Barry’s garage would play host to the Dark Lord Himself. And he was a cranky bugger by all accounts. How the Lord of the Flies would take to being summoned from his Hells by a pimply pubescent, Barry did not dare to guess. If the Fallen Angel broke the wards and left the pentagram, Barry would be, for want of a better term, Totally Fucked.

Striding around the cold garage clad only in his boxer shorts, Barry waited and gnawed upon his bloody cuticles. He eyed the chicken in cold blood, steeling himself against the demonic deed he was about to perpetrate. Barry was, despite his Satanistic leanings, not a boy given to casual cruelty upon God’s lesser beasts. In the past week, he had grown rather fond of the bird. His parents had never allowed Barry to have a pet. “Unhygienic,” they declared when faced with pet propositions from their moaning child.

Bastards, Barry decided. Even goldfish had been nixed by his unloving parents. He once had a pet spider, but the dismal daddy had sat down and squashed it. Barry remembered that day, himself but two feet high and tears rolling down his face from staring eyes as he watched the denim clad buttocks of the daddy stroll away, Sammie squashed sad and flat upon the left cheek.

He fingered the Necronomicon and selected his curse carefully. The daddy would soon pay for his past transgressions. He shall be blown up, Barry decided after deliberation. It wasn’t subtle, but one had to start somewhere.

And more than just the daddy were going to be getting their component atoms sprayed over a wide area. Barry had composed a list in his English jotter, scribing his mortal enemies in one at a time with his cursed blood red biro. Howie, the history teacher and Welsh despoiler of sheep had earned particular bile and ire of late, and he had the dubious honour of heading Barry’s to-do list.

Time slipped away slowly. Midnight slithered closer like the proverbial satanic slug. Barry passed these monumental minutes composing crudely constructed illiterate alliterations. And smoking a fly cigarette.

And then it was time. Barry had work to do now, and he set about the summoning with sweaty professionalism. He picked up his chalk and defiled the concrete garage floor with obscene and eye-watering sigils and symbols. The pentagram. The symbol of the Hierophant and Lost Cthulhu reinforcing the wards. Six candles were lit and laid out by the points of the star.

Barry read passages from the Necronomicon aloud, specific passages previously highlighted with Post-It notes and a Garfield bookmark. He stumbled over ancient Latin incantations in a trembling voice, and when it was done thanked his foolish and ineffectual parents for his classical education.

When that was done to his satisfaction, Barry looked upon all he had made and saw that it was good.

Only three more components were needed. The chicken, who had sat through the rites and rituals looking bored and unimpressed and only put up a minimum amount of fight when Barry viciously stabbed it to death with his biro as an offering to the Dark Lord. He tossed the dying animal in the center of the pentagram and allowed the poor creature to bleed its last. The blood of a beast.

The next item on Barry’s satanic shopping list had been rather harder to come by. The blood of an innocent. He had solved the conundrum by raiding the sanitary waste bin of the girl’s toilet in school.

Two tampons were hurriedly tossed next to the dead chicken. Finally, Barry retrieved his pen knife and slashed the palm of his hand. It was fairly blunt, and it took a fair few attempts and a fair amount of garden variety cursing, but he got there in the end. And standing there above the dark and dreadful patterns of his own creation, Barry let his own blood fall and mingle with his offering.

The clock struck midnight, and the pact was made.

Barry was unsure of what to expect next. Research into the subject had born little information. Hollywood movies tended to depict much wind and expensive pyrotechnics to herald the coming of the Dark Lord. Barry suspected that Hollywood executives would probably be on first name terms with Beelzebub, so he was expecting big bangs miniature hurricanes.

The dead chicken farted as gas escaped its ruptured body. And that was about it.

What a bloody disappointment, thought the Barry, feeling something of the fool standing above a bloody pile of poultry and tampons in nothing but his plain white boxer shorts. Idly he scratched his balls with his bloody hand, leaving a print that would be difficult to explain to his parents in the morning.

With a sigh, he turned to leave the pentagram and gather his things. He stooped to retrieve his t-shirt when his third sense detected something amiss.

Barry pricked his ears. A low electric pulse filled the air, almost inaudible.

It’s a bloody guitar, thought the Barry as the sound built. The distorted chords were rising slowly in volume, a low thrumming progression of powerful notes that no earthly speaker could ever hope to reproduce.

The inner musician buried deep inside the terror-struck Barry identified f-sharp.

The naked bulb that illuminated the garage began to tremble in its housing under the rising aural onslaught. The air began to pop with static electricity, sparks crawling across the metal beams that supported the roof and rising Barry’s great and unwashed mane of hair until he sported a hideous and unnatural afro.

Still the sound came, rising ever higher with each dreadful note, melting the candles and causing the earwax to run and drip from Barry’s lobes. Two fillings exploded inside his mouth and went shooting across the garage, trailing electric fire.

The bulb detonated, raining hot glass down upon the immobile and rapidly expiring young Satanist. In this new darkness he saw the pentagram glowing putrid green as his eyes began to liquefy inside his skull. The tampons in the center of the rune burst into flame, and the awful smell of fried chicken assaulted Barry’s last unabused sense.

Barry felt his brain begin to vibrate inside his head with every sonic blow, and realized that he had perhaps made an error of judgment.

Every infernal power chord of the hellish guitar was now causing massive structural damage to Barry’s garage. The walls cracked, plaster rained down upon Barry and sparked wherever it touched his skin. The green light of the pentagram blazed with the sick fires of Hell, reducing the Barry’s offering to charred ash and bone. The blood burned fiercest of all. And still came the crushing blows of the guitar, one after the other in a seemingly never-ending funeral march for a rock star.

The air thrummed and the pentagram sucked it all into itself, leaving poor Barry gasping in the vacuum. Then the Garage exploded with a mighty exhaled breath and all was silent.

Barry stood in the middle of this Holocaust, the emerald flames blowing the doors off their ruined hinges and sending them spinning into the night. Like writhing tongues, the fire licked along Barry’s body. It did not burn him.

In the spinning green light of death and Hell itself, the Dark Lord stepped over the boundaries of the pentagram and came to claim Barry’s eternal soul.

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