Short Story: Summons
Mar. 4th, 2012 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaThis was unabashed fun to write. I will not apologize for hamming it up with the descriptions and verbs and *atmosphere*; the idea of Violet getting summoned, and just being really pissed off about it but also not able to control how much of the eldritch crept into her demeanor, was just too good to pass up.
I started reading Lovecraft a few days ago, can you tell at all? (Definitely more towards the beginning … once Blade showed up, things got distinctly more ‘campy weird author’s darlings having their way’ and less ‘atmospheric weirdness’.)
Title: Summons
Core Characters: Violet Krikorian
Wordcount: 2,468
Rating: PG-13 for some gore
Summary: The game is simple; a nursery rhyme to summon the spirit of the Black Plague.
It’s a game that kids play, middle school and high school and sometimes beyond. It’s the game that kids play when their parents are asleep, when their friends are gathered into a slumber party for safety, so that they can giggle afterwards and relish their communal bravery.
The game goes something like this:
First, find a mirror. The bigger the better, and it needs to have edges. Because the next thing that the game requires is a piece of cloth, to be draped over the mirror halfway through. Any color cloth will do, really, although over the years, tradition dictates that it be a purple cloth.
Having obtained the mirror, the cloth, and the gaggle of friends, the players wait until one am; just past the witching hour. When the witching hour has passed, the participants must gather around the mirror in a semicircle, and hold hands to keep the spirit from escaping, once it has been released. How is it released, you ask? With a nursery rhyme.
You all know the story of the Black Plague, and its alleged inspiration of the Ring Around the Rosy song. Never mind that history has disproved these claims; oral tradition will always win out in the end. The game is played thus: when the players have arranged themselves, they place the cloth over the mirror, and light a candle in front of it, and sing the song, swaying back and forth as they do so. At the conclusion, the two players closest to the mirror whip away the cloth, and the spirit of the Black Plague itself will climb out of the mirror. It will reach out its fingers, searching for a victim, but as long as the players keep their hands clasped tight, it will find no escape, and it will vanish back into the mirror from whence it came.
So go the tales. But if everything always went the way it was supposed to, then there would be no stories, would there?
This particular game was played, for dramatic effect, in the attic of the home of the birthday girl, whose parents had magnanimously allowed her seven companions with whom to spend the night, refusing to sleep and disturbing her older brother in the room next door. Until everyone else was asleep, when they had taken the mirror from the birthday girl’s bedroom, the candle from the dining room table, and the purple bed sheet from the linen closet, and made their way up to the attic.
Despite the name, and the circumstances, the attic was nothing short of homey; old furniture stacked high with cardboard boxes filled most of the floor space, and the girls were forced to lift up some of the lighter chairs and move them around as quietly as possible to clear enough space for their circle. The mirror was propped up against three old mattresses, the cloth draped over the front, and the candle ceremoniously lit, while the light bulbs were extinguished. The girls huddled around in their circle, giggling and exchanging nervous glances with each other. At the behest of the birthday girl, eight small, high-pitched voices began to sing quietly:
‘Ring around the rosies, a pocket full of posies,’ they sang, still giggling. ‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!’
On the last word, the two girls sitting on either side of the mirror grabbed the cloth, and clumsily dragged it away from the mirror with hushed shrieks of excitement. It snagged on the frame, and for an instant, only the upper corner of the mirror was exposed. In it, the glass swirled in a myriad of sickly colors before settling on black; and by the time the mirror had been fully exposed, nothing could be seen in its reflection except for a ring of wide-eyed girls, lit from underneath by a white taper candle.
‘I thought I saw something in the corner,’ said the girl closest to the mirror. ‘Do you think that was it?’
‘Probably just the candle flickering,’ said the birthday girl. ‘Tracy, turn on the lights.’
Tracy started to get up, and froze in a crouch when, from somewhere inside the mirror, there was a muffled scream.
‘Ohmigod!’ shrieked the birthday girl as she jumped to her feet. ‘Cover it up again!’
The other girls scrambled to their feet instead, and piled out of the attic as quickly as possible, disregarding the lights and the mirror and the candle. They didn’t bother to be quiet; why bother, when they had broken the circle, and now the Black Plague was coming back to kill them all? They thumped down the ladder to the second floor landing, and rushed back to the room of the birthday girl with much shushing and squeaking and mutter of fear.
Up above, in the attic, a figure dragged itself out of the frame of the mirror and onto the floor of the attic in a gasping, dripping heap. Far from being the spectral, hooded skeleton of legend, the figure bore a very strong resemblance to a bony, tomboyish twelve-year-old, scarcely two years older than those who had summoned it. The figure covered the candle with one dripping hand, extinguishing the light and allowing the attic to be lit only by the faint moonlight coming in through the vent in the far wall.
The figure moaned and lay there for upwards of a minute. After that time, adult voices could be heard below, mingled with the hysterical cries of the birthday party. The figure squeezed its eyes shut. It heard heavy footsteps on the landing, followed by heavy footsteps on the ladder leading up to the attic.
‘Blade,’ muttered the figure. Its voice was that of a young girl, backed and given depth by the sounds of a chorus of pipe organs and white noise. Water dripped from its mouth as it spoke. ‘Blade, get thee here.’
The footsteps arrived in the attic, and the man to whom they belonged gave a shout as he turns on the lights again. ‘Who the hell are you? What did you do to my daughter?’
With a monumental effort, the figure raised itself into a sitting position. It pushed the wet tentacles of hair curling into its eyes back into the brim of the newsboy cap on its head. ‘I was summoned.’
‘Bullshit,’ snarled the man. ‘My girls come down screaming bloody murder, talking about a screaming mirror. How do you know Alexa, are you one of those kids from school who thinks it’s funny to pick on someone smaller than yourself?’
The figure’s eyes flickered towards the mirror. It was satisfied by what it found in those depths, and spoke again. ‘My name is Violet Krikorian. I was holding court, until your daughter and her friends saw fit to summon the Black Plague. And here I am. Where am I?’ Violet stood, leaning on the arm of the chair for support. Though its body was indisputably human, it gave off the impression of jelly contained inside a tissue-paper bag, ready to burst forth at the slightest disturbance and fill the room with a semiliquid substance.
The man readied the rake in his hands, jabbing nervously at the air. ‘You’re in my house, little girl, where the fuck do you think you are?’
‘Violet,’ called out a second voice from within the mirror. ‘Move aside, I’m coming through.’
Violet gave the man a small smile. ‘My compatriot. Neither of us is going to do anything.’
The man’s eyes widened, and he lunged across the room to menace the figure with the spines of the rake, but stopped dead when the head and upper torso of a teenage boy burst through the mirror, gasping and dripping water like Violet had done, but looking altogether more like a true human being, albeit one permanently mired in black, baggy clothing. This one climbed out and stood up at once; when it saw the man with the rake, it bowed and put up its hands at once.
‘Hi,’ it said, the timbre of its voices both deeper and less cacophonous than those of Violet. ‘I’m very sorry about this.’
The man’s eyes bulged in his head. ‘What the – son of a bitch – that’s our mirror! That’s just a mirror.’
The second figure scratched the back of its head. ‘Yeah …’
‘I despise this title,’ gurgled Violet. ‘Where are we?’ It turned on the man, and the insufficiency of its skin to contain its form became even more apparent. ‘Where are we?’
The man turned pale, but his makeshift weapon never wavered. ‘Garrison.’
‘How far is it from Gallows Hill?’
‘I – what?’
‘They may not be of our world,’ Blade reminded it.
This stumped the first figure. It pressed its way through the clutter of the attic to reach the vent at the opposite wall, ignoring with imperiousness the man’s commands to stay still. It ran its fingers along the lines of the vent, then pulled them away, as though sucking the air in through the cracks by sheer force of will. It leaned in close, and sniffed. ‘No,’ it agreed. ‘What Earth is this?’
The man readjusted his grip on the rake to direct its attentions towards the second figure. In his mind, he traced the route from the police station to his house, and calculated the time it would take since he had called, and wondered how to keep the two odd, inexplicable creatures from doing anything until help arrived. ‘The Earth,’ he said. ‘There isn’t any other.’
‘One of the counterparts. I think it must be ours,’ said Violet. ‘It is better than last time.’
The sound of a little girl’s voice drifted up from the second-floor landing below. ‘Daddy, are you okay?’
‘Your father is fine,’ said the first figure. It crossed the room again, leaving a trail of thick liquid coating everything it touched as it did so. The man couldn’t tell from whence the liquid came, or why there was so much of it; the child-figure, though damp and distorted in appearance, appeared to be covered only in water. Two more minutes, at the most, and then they would be out of his hands.
Violet attempted to pass by him and approach the trap door. He swung the rake around to prevent it from passing; it landed against its chest. ‘You stay right here,’ he said.
It bent its head to view the impediment to its progress. Its fingers skimmed the rake, leaving trails of water along the tines. With a protracted sigh, it simply walked forwards again. The man yelled and dropped the rake, for as the figure pressed itself against the rake, its body simply yielded as though it were nothing more than soft butter, at once proving and refuting the notion that the figures which had climbed out of the mirror of the birthday girl were flesh and blood.
‘Thank you,’ said Violet. ‘That would have been messy.’ A gauge, horizontal across its chest, dripped dark, thick strings of blood that soak into its antiquated shirt as it strode in jellylike motions to the trapdoor. Its companion followed it somewhat more fluidly. The man attempted to stop it as well, and was reprimanded by a sideways glance and a finger drawn across its own chest as a warning. The man stepped back, hands twitching and gripping the pole of the rake in strangling motions.
Violet leaned down over the edge of the trap door. Below stood the birthday girl, eyes wide and hands clapped over her mouth, surrounded by her party of friends. She squeaked upon seeing the figure silhouetted by the lights above it, and again when stray droplets of blood splattered her and her company from its wound.
‘I am the Black Plague,’ said Violet, the tintinnabulation of its voice rattling the glass in the landing chandelier. ‘You summoned me out of the world to which I am a native, and out of the world of which I am monarch. It will take me several days to return, and as the summoning was made in haste, there was no time for proper incorporation. What have you to say for yourselves?’
The girls shrieked, and all but the birthday girl fled. The birthday girl stood her ground, wiping the blood from her face and hair with the back of her hand. Her face began to crumple, as though on the verge of tears, for which she could hardly be blamed. ‘It’s just a game,’ she said. ‘It was supposed to be a spirit, not a real person.’
‘Better me than my companion,’ said Violet. ‘I have no doubt it was from his visitations that the game was played in its current form. But the rules have changed, and I am the Plague now. The next person who summons me will not be granted the mercy of even a partial incorporation, and no weak linking of hands can contain me.’
‘A fiction for my own amusement. There would be no dreamers if the plague came to visit again,’ added Blade from above. ‘Your Highness, the man who wakes to cold sweats from dreams of house fires has called the police some minutes ago.’
In the attic, the rake clatters to the ground from nerveless hands. ‘How did you know that?’ asked the man.
Violet climbed down the ladder, dripping water and blood on the carpet as it went. Blade followed it in quick, jerky motions. The birthday girl gave them a wide berth, but her hands were no longer over her mouth; they clenched into fists at her sides, to prevent them from shaking. ‘The Black Plague,’ said Blade. ‘The title given to the monarch of the land of dreams.’
‘My advisor,’ Violet said.
‘My successor.’ He bowed, and fell into step behind her. They descended the stairs of the house, two inhuman blackened figures set against the cozy plush carpet and framed pressed flowers hung from the walls.
At the bottom of the stairs, Violet turned, its body stiffening, and raced back up to the birthday girl and her hidden friends. ‘And think, next time, before you seek to summon the forces of another world. They may have lives to get back to. My family is tired of me disappearing for days on end while I wend my way back from the lands of the imbeciles.’ Its face solidified, and for a moment, it appeared to the birthday girl that she was looking at an ordinary person who might have ridden the bus to school with her. ‘My brother gets horrible nightmares when I’m not there to hold them back,’ it said with a smile. ‘I’ll see you tonight, Alexa.’ It oozed down the stairs once more, and, slamming the front door with a gust of rainy wind, vanished from corporeality.
The End
I started reading Lovecraft a few days ago, can you tell at all? (Definitely more towards the beginning … once Blade showed up, things got distinctly more ‘campy weird author’s darlings having their way’ and less ‘atmospheric weirdness’.)
Title: Summons
Core Characters: Violet Krikorian
Wordcount: 2,468
Rating: PG-13 for some gore
Summary: The game is simple; a nursery rhyme to summon the spirit of the Black Plague.
It’s a game that kids play, middle school and high school and sometimes beyond. It’s the game that kids play when their parents are asleep, when their friends are gathered into a slumber party for safety, so that they can giggle afterwards and relish their communal bravery.
The game goes something like this:
First, find a mirror. The bigger the better, and it needs to have edges. Because the next thing that the game requires is a piece of cloth, to be draped over the mirror halfway through. Any color cloth will do, really, although over the years, tradition dictates that it be a purple cloth.
Having obtained the mirror, the cloth, and the gaggle of friends, the players wait until one am; just past the witching hour. When the witching hour has passed, the participants must gather around the mirror in a semicircle, and hold hands to keep the spirit from escaping, once it has been released. How is it released, you ask? With a nursery rhyme.
You all know the story of the Black Plague, and its alleged inspiration of the Ring Around the Rosy song. Never mind that history has disproved these claims; oral tradition will always win out in the end. The game is played thus: when the players have arranged themselves, they place the cloth over the mirror, and light a candle in front of it, and sing the song, swaying back and forth as they do so. At the conclusion, the two players closest to the mirror whip away the cloth, and the spirit of the Black Plague itself will climb out of the mirror. It will reach out its fingers, searching for a victim, but as long as the players keep their hands clasped tight, it will find no escape, and it will vanish back into the mirror from whence it came.
So go the tales. But if everything always went the way it was supposed to, then there would be no stories, would there?
This particular game was played, for dramatic effect, in the attic of the home of the birthday girl, whose parents had magnanimously allowed her seven companions with whom to spend the night, refusing to sleep and disturbing her older brother in the room next door. Until everyone else was asleep, when they had taken the mirror from the birthday girl’s bedroom, the candle from the dining room table, and the purple bed sheet from the linen closet, and made their way up to the attic.
Despite the name, and the circumstances, the attic was nothing short of homey; old furniture stacked high with cardboard boxes filled most of the floor space, and the girls were forced to lift up some of the lighter chairs and move them around as quietly as possible to clear enough space for their circle. The mirror was propped up against three old mattresses, the cloth draped over the front, and the candle ceremoniously lit, while the light bulbs were extinguished. The girls huddled around in their circle, giggling and exchanging nervous glances with each other. At the behest of the birthday girl, eight small, high-pitched voices began to sing quietly:
‘Ring around the rosies, a pocket full of posies,’ they sang, still giggling. ‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!’
On the last word, the two girls sitting on either side of the mirror grabbed the cloth, and clumsily dragged it away from the mirror with hushed shrieks of excitement. It snagged on the frame, and for an instant, only the upper corner of the mirror was exposed. In it, the glass swirled in a myriad of sickly colors before settling on black; and by the time the mirror had been fully exposed, nothing could be seen in its reflection except for a ring of wide-eyed girls, lit from underneath by a white taper candle.
‘I thought I saw something in the corner,’ said the girl closest to the mirror. ‘Do you think that was it?’
‘Probably just the candle flickering,’ said the birthday girl. ‘Tracy, turn on the lights.’
Tracy started to get up, and froze in a crouch when, from somewhere inside the mirror, there was a muffled scream.
‘Ohmigod!’ shrieked the birthday girl as she jumped to her feet. ‘Cover it up again!’
The other girls scrambled to their feet instead, and piled out of the attic as quickly as possible, disregarding the lights and the mirror and the candle. They didn’t bother to be quiet; why bother, when they had broken the circle, and now the Black Plague was coming back to kill them all? They thumped down the ladder to the second floor landing, and rushed back to the room of the birthday girl with much shushing and squeaking and mutter of fear.
Up above, in the attic, a figure dragged itself out of the frame of the mirror and onto the floor of the attic in a gasping, dripping heap. Far from being the spectral, hooded skeleton of legend, the figure bore a very strong resemblance to a bony, tomboyish twelve-year-old, scarcely two years older than those who had summoned it. The figure covered the candle with one dripping hand, extinguishing the light and allowing the attic to be lit only by the faint moonlight coming in through the vent in the far wall.
The figure moaned and lay there for upwards of a minute. After that time, adult voices could be heard below, mingled with the hysterical cries of the birthday party. The figure squeezed its eyes shut. It heard heavy footsteps on the landing, followed by heavy footsteps on the ladder leading up to the attic.
‘Blade,’ muttered the figure. Its voice was that of a young girl, backed and given depth by the sounds of a chorus of pipe organs and white noise. Water dripped from its mouth as it spoke. ‘Blade, get thee here.’
The footsteps arrived in the attic, and the man to whom they belonged gave a shout as he turns on the lights again. ‘Who the hell are you? What did you do to my daughter?’
With a monumental effort, the figure raised itself into a sitting position. It pushed the wet tentacles of hair curling into its eyes back into the brim of the newsboy cap on its head. ‘I was summoned.’
‘Bullshit,’ snarled the man. ‘My girls come down screaming bloody murder, talking about a screaming mirror. How do you know Alexa, are you one of those kids from school who thinks it’s funny to pick on someone smaller than yourself?’
The figure’s eyes flickered towards the mirror. It was satisfied by what it found in those depths, and spoke again. ‘My name is Violet Krikorian. I was holding court, until your daughter and her friends saw fit to summon the Black Plague. And here I am. Where am I?’ Violet stood, leaning on the arm of the chair for support. Though its body was indisputably human, it gave off the impression of jelly contained inside a tissue-paper bag, ready to burst forth at the slightest disturbance and fill the room with a semiliquid substance.
The man readied the rake in his hands, jabbing nervously at the air. ‘You’re in my house, little girl, where the fuck do you think you are?’
‘Violet,’ called out a second voice from within the mirror. ‘Move aside, I’m coming through.’
Violet gave the man a small smile. ‘My compatriot. Neither of us is going to do anything.’
The man’s eyes widened, and he lunged across the room to menace the figure with the spines of the rake, but stopped dead when the head and upper torso of a teenage boy burst through the mirror, gasping and dripping water like Violet had done, but looking altogether more like a true human being, albeit one permanently mired in black, baggy clothing. This one climbed out and stood up at once; when it saw the man with the rake, it bowed and put up its hands at once.
‘Hi,’ it said, the timbre of its voices both deeper and less cacophonous than those of Violet. ‘I’m very sorry about this.’
The man’s eyes bulged in his head. ‘What the – son of a bitch – that’s our mirror! That’s just a mirror.’
The second figure scratched the back of its head. ‘Yeah …’
‘I despise this title,’ gurgled Violet. ‘Where are we?’ It turned on the man, and the insufficiency of its skin to contain its form became even more apparent. ‘Where are we?’
The man turned pale, but his makeshift weapon never wavered. ‘Garrison.’
‘How far is it from Gallows Hill?’
‘I – what?’
‘They may not be of our world,’ Blade reminded it.
This stumped the first figure. It pressed its way through the clutter of the attic to reach the vent at the opposite wall, ignoring with imperiousness the man’s commands to stay still. It ran its fingers along the lines of the vent, then pulled them away, as though sucking the air in through the cracks by sheer force of will. It leaned in close, and sniffed. ‘No,’ it agreed. ‘What Earth is this?’
The man readjusted his grip on the rake to direct its attentions towards the second figure. In his mind, he traced the route from the police station to his house, and calculated the time it would take since he had called, and wondered how to keep the two odd, inexplicable creatures from doing anything until help arrived. ‘The Earth,’ he said. ‘There isn’t any other.’
‘One of the counterparts. I think it must be ours,’ said Violet. ‘It is better than last time.’
The sound of a little girl’s voice drifted up from the second-floor landing below. ‘Daddy, are you okay?’
‘Your father is fine,’ said the first figure. It crossed the room again, leaving a trail of thick liquid coating everything it touched as it did so. The man couldn’t tell from whence the liquid came, or why there was so much of it; the child-figure, though damp and distorted in appearance, appeared to be covered only in water. Two more minutes, at the most, and then they would be out of his hands.
Violet attempted to pass by him and approach the trap door. He swung the rake around to prevent it from passing; it landed against its chest. ‘You stay right here,’ he said.
It bent its head to view the impediment to its progress. Its fingers skimmed the rake, leaving trails of water along the tines. With a protracted sigh, it simply walked forwards again. The man yelled and dropped the rake, for as the figure pressed itself against the rake, its body simply yielded as though it were nothing more than soft butter, at once proving and refuting the notion that the figures which had climbed out of the mirror of the birthday girl were flesh and blood.
‘Thank you,’ said Violet. ‘That would have been messy.’ A gauge, horizontal across its chest, dripped dark, thick strings of blood that soak into its antiquated shirt as it strode in jellylike motions to the trapdoor. Its companion followed it somewhat more fluidly. The man attempted to stop it as well, and was reprimanded by a sideways glance and a finger drawn across its own chest as a warning. The man stepped back, hands twitching and gripping the pole of the rake in strangling motions.
Violet leaned down over the edge of the trap door. Below stood the birthday girl, eyes wide and hands clapped over her mouth, surrounded by her party of friends. She squeaked upon seeing the figure silhouetted by the lights above it, and again when stray droplets of blood splattered her and her company from its wound.
‘I am the Black Plague,’ said Violet, the tintinnabulation of its voice rattling the glass in the landing chandelier. ‘You summoned me out of the world to which I am a native, and out of the world of which I am monarch. It will take me several days to return, and as the summoning was made in haste, there was no time for proper incorporation. What have you to say for yourselves?’
The girls shrieked, and all but the birthday girl fled. The birthday girl stood her ground, wiping the blood from her face and hair with the back of her hand. Her face began to crumple, as though on the verge of tears, for which she could hardly be blamed. ‘It’s just a game,’ she said. ‘It was supposed to be a spirit, not a real person.’
‘Better me than my companion,’ said Violet. ‘I have no doubt it was from his visitations that the game was played in its current form. But the rules have changed, and I am the Plague now. The next person who summons me will not be granted the mercy of even a partial incorporation, and no weak linking of hands can contain me.’
‘A fiction for my own amusement. There would be no dreamers if the plague came to visit again,’ added Blade from above. ‘Your Highness, the man who wakes to cold sweats from dreams of house fires has called the police some minutes ago.’
In the attic, the rake clatters to the ground from nerveless hands. ‘How did you know that?’ asked the man.
Violet climbed down the ladder, dripping water and blood on the carpet as it went. Blade followed it in quick, jerky motions. The birthday girl gave them a wide berth, but her hands were no longer over her mouth; they clenched into fists at her sides, to prevent them from shaking. ‘The Black Plague,’ said Blade. ‘The title given to the monarch of the land of dreams.’
‘My advisor,’ Violet said.
‘My successor.’ He bowed, and fell into step behind her. They descended the stairs of the house, two inhuman blackened figures set against the cozy plush carpet and framed pressed flowers hung from the walls.
At the bottom of the stairs, Violet turned, its body stiffening, and raced back up to the birthday girl and her hidden friends. ‘And think, next time, before you seek to summon the forces of another world. They may have lives to get back to. My family is tired of me disappearing for days on end while I wend my way back from the lands of the imbeciles.’ Its face solidified, and for a moment, it appeared to the birthday girl that she was looking at an ordinary person who might have ridden the bus to school with her. ‘My brother gets horrible nightmares when I’m not there to hold them back,’ it said with a smile. ‘I’ll see you tonight, Alexa.’ It oozed down the stairs once more, and, slamming the front door with a gust of rainy wind, vanished from corporeality.
The End
