Authors: Robert Kroese
PROLOGUE
To Your Holiness the High Council of the Seraphim,
Greetings from your humble servant, Ederatz,
Cherub First Class,
Order of the Mundane Observation Corps
“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
So that’s the
when
sorted. No word yet on
how
or
why
. Now there’s a question I’d like to have answered.
Why?
Because he was bored, God created the Heavens and the Earth.
For his senior cosmology project, God created the Heavens
and the Earth.
To fuck with Ederatz the Cherub, God created the Heavens and
the Earth.
I was leaning toward door number three for a while, but it’s
been pretty quiet around here lately. In fact, it’s been nearly four years
since I was fucked with on a truly epic scale.
The whole apocalypse business turned out to be something of
a bust;
[1]
Heaven couldn’t get its act together, and Lucifer’s plans to destroy the
world didn’t pan out either. If Mercury is to be believed, the End is still
coming, but it’s about ten thousand years off—and in any case Mercury said it’s
one of those “not with a bang but a whimper” deals. Of course, he also claimed
that the world ends with a ping-pong match between Job and Cain, so it’s hard
to know how seriously to take him.
Given the fact that Mercury also blew up the planeport with
a nuclear bomb, there’s virtually no chance of this report ever getting to you.
Travel and communications between the Mundane Plane and Heaven—as well as
between all the other planes—has been disrupted, perhaps indefinitely. Angels
in Heaven can’t get here, and we poor saps stuck on the Mundane Plane can’t get
back to Heaven.
On the plus side, travel to and from the
Infernal Plane has been cut off as well.
And I assume that Lucifer is
still in Heaven’s custody, so at least he won’t be wreaking any more havoc
here.
Anyway, here I sit, somewhere between the Beginning and the
End, filling my days with beer and futile ruminations. I’ve given up on ever
returning to Heaven; I assume most of my
kind have
come to accept their fate as well. Many other angels, both seraphim and
cherubim, have been stranded on the Mundane Plane, but I’ve had minimal contact
with them. Most of them have presumably been content to blend in with the human
population, but of course the more ambitious seraphim were bound to cause some
problems eventually.
And that’s where this story begins.
Chapter One
Milhaus, Texas; August 2016
The summoning wasn’t going well.
Sean Simpson, who had been elected High Priest by dint of
his encyclopedic knowledge of
Demonology for Imbeciles
, had accidentally
drawn a hexagram instead of a pentagram, at which point the ceremony had
devolved into an extended argument about whether a hexagram was an acceptable
demonic gateway.
“What is your concern, exactly?” demanded Sean. “That the
demon is going to be confused? Or offended, maybe? That he’s going to show up
and say, ‘Whoa, hang on, that’s a hexagram, I’m out.’”
“Don’t be a douche, Sean,” replied Brayden, an Unholy
Acolyte. They were all Unholy Acolytes except Sean. “The book says the ceremony
has to be conducted perfectly, or there’s no telling what might happen.”
Brayden was the newest member of the group, and he was still a bit skittish
about the idea of summoning a demon. He had suggested they start smaller and
work their way up to a demon. “Maybe do a marmoset first,” he had said,
hopefully.
“Or a ferret.”
But the other Unholy Acolytes had overruled him. They didn’t
share Brayden’s love of exotic furry animals, and in any case Sean was fairly
certain that marmosets were mythical creatures.
All told, there were four members of the First Satanic
Church of Milhaus, Texas: Sean, Brayden, Clay and Neva. The four of them had
met in Mrs. Cheatwood’s remedial Spanish class at Smith & Wesson Public
High School and had bonded over a shared hatred of irregular verbs and Mrs.
Cheatwood’s in-class proselytizing, which was of dubious legality even by Texas
standards. “Repeat after me,” she would say. “
Vamos a la iglesia
a
orar por nuestros pecados
.”
Let’s all go to church
to pray for our sins.
“Screw that,” said Sean defiantly one day, “I’m a Satanist.”
This declaration had gotten Sean sent to the principal’s
office. The principal, a tired old phys-ed teacher, had insisted that Sean
recant, but Sean sensed (correctly) that the longer he maintained this ruse,
the fewer irregular verbs he would be subjected to. Eventually the ACLU got
involved, and someone suggested that Sean would have a stronger case that his
religious freedoms were being impinged upon if there were some solid evidence
that he were a practicing Satanist. The next day he found a copy of
Demonology
for Imbeciles
in his locker, and he had no trouble recruiting a few more
aspiring Satanists whose struggles with conjugation left them feeling
spiritually empty.
That was several weeks ago, and the ACLU had dropped its
suit in exchange for assurances that Mrs. Cheatwood would curtail her
proselytizing during school hours. The First Satanic Church of Milhaus,
however, lived on. It never grew beyond its first four members, though, who met
irregularly in Brayden’s aunt’s basement, and lately it had started to feel
like they were just going through the motions. Enamored of his newfound
authority and desperate to keep the group going, Sean had suggested that
summoning a demon might spice things up. The idea wasn’t as popular with the
other members as Sean had hoped: Neva and Clay were convinced the summoning
wouldn’t work, and Brayden was terrified that it would.
“Seriously,” said Brayden. “We need to be careful. If
we do this and something goes wrong ...”
“What?” interjected Neva, through a menagerie of
painful-looking
piercings.
“What’s the worst case
scenario, Brayden? We fail to summon a demon?” Neva was the only female of the
group, and also the smartest of the four, which wasn’t saying much. Her parents
substituted permissiveness and cash for affection, which had resulted in Neva
weighing nearly three hundred pounds, approximately six of which was in the
form of hardware attached to her face.
Brayden shrugged. “I just think if we’re going to do this,
we should do it right.”
“And by ‘do it right,’ you mean that we should try to summon
a tamarind?”
Brayden’s face flushed and he sank into the cushions of the
lumpy old couch. Clay was to his left and Sean and Neva were sitting on easy
chairs with badly worn and stained floral upholstery. Brayden’s aunt’s basement
was like a furniture graveyard.
“Fine,” said Sean, who had been dragging the edge of his
sneaker around the pentagram in an effort to adjust the lines. “I fixed it,
see?”
“What the hell is that?” asked Clay.
“Pentagram,” said Sean defensively.
The group regarded the blurred lines dubiously.
“It looks like Bob Marley,” said Neva.
“It does not!” Sean protested. Then, after a moment: “Who’s
Bob Marley?”
Neva sighed heavily. She already had her doubts about Sean’s
fitness as High Priest, and his ignorance of a revolutionary leader like Bob
Marley
[2]
only cemented his incompetence in her mind.
“Whatever,” said Clay, the most pragmatic of the
group.
“My mom wants me home by eleven, so if we’re going to
do this, we need to get started.”
“OK,” said Sean. “Let’s do this.” He rooted around his
backpack, producing four black candles and a cigarette lighter. He lit each of the
candles in turn and handed one to each of the three Unholy Acolytes, keeping
one for
himself
. He directed them to take their places
around the ersatz hexagram and opened
Demonology for Imbeciles
to the
chapter on summonings.
Demonology for Imbeciles
was a strange book, even by
…for
Imbeciles
standards. After dominating the instructional book market in the
90s, the publisher of the
…for Imbeciles
books, I Don’t Get It, Ltd.,
fell on hard times due to the rise of a plethora of free instructional websites
written by and for imbeciles. Imbeciles wanting to build a gazebo or breed
cuttlefish found all the information they needed online without having to pay
$19.95 for
Building a Gazebo for Imbeciles
or
Breeding Cuttlefish for
Imbeciles
. IDGI’s response to this threat was to launch the
…for
Cretins
line of books, aimed at people who were too stupid to get on the
Internet. When titles such as
Watering Plants for Cretins
,
Four-Way
Stops for Cretins
, and
Are My Clothes Inside Out Again?
for
Cretins
inexplicably foundered, IDGI spent $6
million on market research, which informed them that most of their target
audience thought cretins were a kind of aquatic animal. The
…for Cretins
line was thus relaunched as the
…for Total F*cking Dumbshits
line, but
this effort failed as well because, as it turns out, even total f*cking
dumbshits have a little pride.
The end result of this series of failures was that IDGI
began to skimp on the content of their books while simultaneously attempting to
broaden their appeal. Thus
Quantum Physics for Imbeciles
,
Feng Shui
for Imbeciles
, and
Urban Engineering for Imbeciles
shared the same
cartoons, with minor variations in the captions.
Demonology for Imbeciles
was a rush job thrown together from various public domain sources of dubious credibility
by an editor whose knowledge of the occult was gleaned entirely from Black
Sabbath records and
I Dream of Jeannie
. As it happened, though, the
editor had come across one of the few extant recipes for a bona fide demonic
summoning in the semi-coherent ramblings of an eighteenth century inventor and
occultist named Josiah Vandersloot, which Vandersloot had published under the
awkward title
The Little Book What’s About Demons
. Had Vandersloot’s
grasp of English syntax been on par with his knowledge of the dark arts, the
publication of
The Little Book What’s About Demons
might have ushered in
a golden age of demonology, but unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on
your perspective), most readers were unable to make any sense of his garbled
prose. The IDGI editor cleaned up the verbiage as best he could, throwing in
Rush lyrics when he got stuck.
The result was that although
Demonology for Imbeciles
was almost entirely rubbish, chapter fourteen included, purely by chance, a
nearly flawless recipe for summoning a demon. The only thing missing was the
name of the demon to be summoned. Demons guard their true names jealously, and
it’s virtually impossible to summon a demon without knowing his or her name.
Demonic names are represented by a complex sigil that is
generally comprised of a geometric figure enclosed in a circle. It is commonly
thought that the pentagram is a
Satanic
symbol, but in
fact the use of a pentagram in Satanic ceremonies arises from a misreading of
ancient texts in which a five-pointed star is used as a placeholder for the
name of a particular demon. Trying to conduct a summoning by using a pentagram
is the spiritual equivalent of asking the telephone operator to connect you to
Insert
Name Here
.
By an odd coincidence, Sean’s imperfect hex-
cum
-pentagram
very closely resembled the sigil for a certain fallen angel who had been exiled
on a distant plane as the result of the accidental detonation of a small
nuclear device at an interplanar transport hub. And so it happened that shortly
after Sean finished reciting the incantation on page 124 on
Demonology for
Imbeciles
, a cloud of sulfurous smoke arose from the sigil, enveloping the
terrified members of the First Satanic Church of Milhaus, who dove behind the
furniture for cover. After a moment the smoke began to clear, revealing a lanky
figure
who
immediately doubled over in a fit of
uncontrollable coughing, apparently overwhelmed by the fumes. After some time
it became clear that the man was trying to speak.
“…open… window…” the man gasped.
His initial fright having been supplanted with nausea, Sean
eagerly complied, propping open one of the ground-level basement windows. Clay
found a small electric fan which he turned on in an attempt to disperse some of
the rotten egg smell.
“Ugh,” said the man, waving his hand in front of his face.
“You never get used to the smell.” The four congregants stood gaping at the
newcomer. They weren’t sure what a demon looked like, but none of them had
expected this. Other than being exceptionally tall and adorned with an absurd
shock of silver hair, he looked like an ordinary human being.
Male, good-looking—if a little lanky—apparently about twenty-five
years old.
“Are you… a demon?” asked Brayden at last.
The tall man frowned. “Let’s not get hung up on labels,” he
said, regarding the dilapidated furniture of the basement. “Speaking of which,
what sort of operation are you running here?”
“We’re Satanists,” announced Sean, trying to sound
confident.
“Ah, Satanists!” the man said, nodding.
“Adherents
of Lucifer.
Of course you realize that Lucifer is in Heavenly custody,
and therefore unable to continue his rebellion against the highers-up? And that
even if he weren’t, all transportation between the Mundane Plane and the
Infernal Plane has been cut off, thanks to the some knucklehead detonating a
nuke at the planeport?”