Willingly I Too Say Hail - One
Willingly I Too Say Hail!
-Emerson, Essay on Demonology
ONE
"I suppose that will do. That will just have to do.”
Halleck struck the fried end of his finger with a milk-swollen chicken bone recently peeled of its mango habanero marinated carcass. Black flesh hissed and split and stank and Halleck’s nostrils trilled with an intake of pained breath passing through partially blocked nasal passages. The necessary blood slipped its broken venal carapace and dribbled over Halleck’s burned phalange, over his bent minor knuckles then reached the dripping point at the major. Miniscule pieces of the man’s heart-driven vitality collected into stains on his jeans, snowflake fractures winding along the threads. He needn’t worry about a pre-wash cleansing. Not if this all worked out.
Prayer noises erupted within Halleck’s stomach, screeches battling his innards for space until his gut swelled even more than it had over the previous four years, six months, two days, and seventeen hours of total gluttony. He winced as if he’d eaten all the air in the room, cramping and wheezing, feeling the pain of imparting his woe to the entire world.
It had been his last possible hope, after so many cheated days. He knew there was something beyond reality; that the unreal was possible. Where the gray began to darken as his understanding of how or what or who could help him change things back. The search for a guide had led him to this - a literal last gasp, excreting his sharpest pains of unrequited desire into the aether like an atomic lighthouse. A massive blip on a magical radar, undefined but remarkable for its power.
His prayer spilled with his innards, every orifice on his body expelling ectoplasmic contents, among other things, across the room, the apartment, the floor, the building, the street. If nobody saw this desperate expulsion he’d be lost inside himself forever.
Halleck rolled his electric chair away from a table littered with hundreds of orders in chicken wings, each one nibbled into pale, clean u shapes. His stomach sagged over his legs and he leaned back, awash in his interior detritus, and cried himself unconscious.
---
Ow.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow! Pins. Jabbing me in the back. No, not pins. Dragging. Knives? It takes a few seconds but I realize the cuts are patterned. Alphanumeric. English. Something, something G A N O. It lets up and I hear a murmur. His murmur, in my head. O B S I D I A N. If I were corporeal right now this would be extremely annoying. ~mrrh phhn mrh ssmeh dn~ E R A What in the name of the Seven Djinn is he getting at? Some bizarre new torture to accompany the curse? I swear, Loomis, I’m going to futzing kill you the second my servitude ends. T H A C K - Y E E - R U G N’ N - P E H N
This one, however, makes sense.
Between blinks I’m manifest before Loomis, kneeling as per the articles of demonic indenture. He’s holding a newspaper folded by eighths, compulsively clicking the end of a pen. “Did you just summon me through a crossword puzzle?”
“Hedri!” Not my name. “I figure crossroads, crosswords; Devils can always be found in the most peculiar of places.”
He pauses, bites the end of the pen, and then points it at me. “Cultural name for a furball afraid of a dip in the Andaman Sea. Seven letters, starts with S.”
“Siamese. I thought you were the world’s most deductive magical mind.”
“Purr-fect.” You feebling wucknozzle. I think it and he hears it. Another enjoyable matter of the articles: Our minds are melded as long as our communication is intentionally direct or overly emotional. “Feebling wucknozzle! Fabulous, Hedri, just fabulous! You’re getting better without the swears.”
The inability to use more colloquial verbiage is an addendum Loomis added himself. A sort of double bind. Cursed to serve while unable to curse. “Is this business?”
“Could be,” Loomis says, scribbling another answer into the puzzle while I consider hunting Will Shortz through every hell he can reach just to punish him with one-word jumble - an easy one - eternally being pecked into his ribs by a sentient tattoo gun. The clever are best destroyed by perpetual monotony.
“What business. Not…?” My cloven hands split into a series of intricate padded throbbing prongs, once utensils of sinister destruction, now reduced to channeling the healing touch of a cult of dead masseuses trapped between realms after uncovering a pressure point that opened the cosmos.
Loomis grimaced. “Graces no.” He took a thoughtful beat. “Later though. I’m bored and I wanted some company. Do you really think I sit around crossing word? There hasn’t even been a hint of a cataclysm this moon tribunal and these walk around stiffs out there are barely even practicing dark arts. Where have all the monsters gone, Hedri?! I ask you that! Where. Have all. The monsters. Gone!”
He flings the pen at the wall and it explodes, ink scribbles cascading outward in a swirling black burst, crackling and writhing. Paint slid away from the screaming ink shadow, lesser mundanity flailing against warped truth from a higher dimension, fleeing like prey uncomprehending the enormity of the attack it was witness to. A literal parlor trick but impressive nonetheless. “Maybe if you hold your breath and wish upon a star as hard as a dying patient on drug trial day the worlds will grant you a catastrophe.”
We both felt the tremor billow from the suppurating ink splotch where the wall thinned the barrier between ourselves and the intangible lands beyond human ken. Loomis was a bit faster diving behind a couch than I was dropping to the floor when the temporary hole in the material plane spewed things for which I would have words but for the leashing of my more colorful lexicon and spared himself through his alacrity from the otherworldly phlegm. I, on the other hoof, was besotted by what I recognized from an abundance of experience as animal waste. Human. Every variety.
Loomis’ fingers crept over the top of the couch and pushed divots into the man jam clumping into the felt covering and rapidly withdrew. His forehead and eyebrows rose across the furniture’s horizon, right brow raised in my direction. “It’s safe,” I said, hoping it would geyser again across his smug sorcerer’s mug the second he revealed himself entirely. He practically leaped up. “I knew that.” Yeah, sure, I whispered into our shared space. “Did so.” He lifted his fingers to his nose, recoiled and I felt his want to retch. I wasn’t prone to laughing and under draconian circumstances doing so at the expense of my temporary lord would breach our contract but, one item to his credit, Loomis was a human bestowed with a sense of humor so my light inner chuckle remained unpunished. “It smells like…”
“Shivenkup.” I finished.
“Yes. Shivenkup. Which is of course... Excrement. In the old words.” I loved it when he wasn’t sure. “It is well known among the learned.”
It was another invention of the double bind but may as well have been of the original language. I was there at the Naming of Things, after all, and was granted dominion over the organizing of Fools. Mine were names that had lasted since mortality began. Oh, but that was a wonderful moment out of time. I shivered in my recollection and let a small near orgasmic gasp pervade the space before me. A little too much, it turned out. Loomis felt my memory.
“You’re so gods blazed proudly of that. The naming of fools. Surely there must have been another day that saw you happy in the millennium to follow?”
“Not like that there weren’t.”
He shrugged and waved his sludge smudged fingers in the air, smearing the gastric concoction over a nonexistent wall and began drawing pieces from it, examining the makeup of the slime from the cosmic perforation. DNA, RNA, magical remnants, pieces of evolutionary traits, and environmental mutations. Anything and everything that might have a clue as to why and where and what and who.
“Male. Human. Heart and lung issues. Traces of undigested meals…” He cupped his hands, jabbed them into the living hologram, and pulled them apart, dragging the tiny piece wider creating a large rectangular purple spongiform. Loomis leaned in, studying it at a molecular grade. “Sweet dead stars above, that’s a lot of undigested meal.”
I took a quick peek at the lost innards and felt the innate lack of will that all demons can sense. It’s how we find the easy ones. “He’s a gorger. But he doesn’t want to be.”
“Given how decayed some of these bits are I’d imagine not. This body doesn’t have much pep left in its step.”
“One last leap into the gaping flames of a cursed afterlife.”
“Unless we find him, cure him of his ail and send him on his way.”
“We personal trainers now?”
“No. Examine the aura.”
I focused on the splayed bits and saw the fraying and bending at the edges. Magical traces are still connected to the source of the willpower that birthed the casting. An ethereal chalk outline on immaterial asphalt. The images refracted and wavered, like 3D glasses where one lens was being un- and recovered in quick succession. I was witnessing a sick essence.
“The halos don’t match. This isn’t just the person they want to be. This is a whole person they’re not.”
“Indeed, my dear Hedri.” I swear Loomis, I’m going to kill you twice just for that stupid name when this over. “This is a body swap. And a body swap-”
“Is our kind of business.”
“Indeed again. Indeed a-gain.”
Loomis withdrew his hands and let his spell dissipate. The spongiform snapped inward forming a melting sphere that dropped to the carpet, popping and spattering it with a gut stench. We were silent for several seconds before we caught each others’ glances.
Loomis broke first. “Did we…use our real names on the rental agreement?”
“No.”
“Excellent.”
