47
Trouble
After another two days of rest, Ammu led them back into the basement tunnels, but this time, instead of turning into the white room, he led them past it, turning into a side tunnel and opening a new door they had never seen before. Walking into the small, dim space, they realized they were now behind the observation mirror, looking out upon the summoning room.
Whoever might have been watching them before, there was no sign of them today. They were alone with Ammu, and Miller was alone in the summoning room, standing armed and alert in the back corner. The table was still there as well, but now it held a paintball gun.
“Today, I am going to ask you to summon something different,” Ammu said. “You would know it as an imp, more or less: a small creature, technically aligned with the forces of darkness, but not as vicious or cruel as… well, as other things that exist—things that you must never, ever try to summon, for any reason. Is that clear?”
“Like what?” Sketch asked.
“Do not try to summon anything unless I ask you to,” Ammu repeated, eyeing Sketch meaningfully, and they all looked down at the floor, feeling a little guilty despite having received his forgiveness for their midnight escapade in the workshop.
“Yes, Ammu,” Kaitlyn said, speaking for all of them.
“As I was saying, you will be summoning something that is inherently somewhat dangerous, due to its nature, so as a safety precaution, you are not going to be in the same room with it.”
“How is that possible?” Mackenzie asked.
“You will perform the summoning here,” Ammu explained, “but you will open the portal in there.”
“Oh, sure,” Sam commented. “Send the Asian kid in alone to die. I see how it is.”
“As I am quite sure you have already deduced,” Ammu said, raising one eyebrow but otherwise ignoring her sarcasm, “no one will be going into the summoning room to die, as you say. You, Samantha, will be standing here in this room, along with everyone else. You and Mackenzie will open the portal together, with your joint intention: yours for the timing, and hers for the place.”
“Where do I draw the circle?” Kaitlyn asked.
“Right here,” Ammu said. “The room is a bit smaller, but the space should be ample enough.”
Eyeing its dimensions, Kaitlyn decided he was right; she could fit a full-sized summoning circle here. The observation room was just as wide as the summoning room, with the same whitewashed floor and a small table to the right of the long window for the usual rag and bowl of water. The only limitation was the space between the window and the door, but still, it would be large enough.
“This is what you will be summoning,” Ammu said.
He opened his book to the page of a strange little humanoid creature, standing in front of a man, just barely tall enough to come up to his knee. It had a bat-like face with a squished-in nose, beady eyes, a mouth that protruded a bit, almost like a small beak, and tall ears that stuck out of its head at an odd angle. The picture made Kaitlyn laugh, but Daniel grimaced, peering at it over her shoulder.
“Its appearance is a bit laughable,” Ammu agreed, “but I assure you, this creature is potentially harmful, so you must remain here with me, in this room, at all times.”
“OK,” Kaitlyn promised. “I think I have the pattern. Should I draw the circle?”
“You may,” Ammu conceded. “But please do not begin drawing the runes themselves until I am certain that everyone understands how we will proceed.”
Kaitlyn nodded, taking the blue chalk and tracing the circle on the floor at their feet, the others all moving toward the left side of the window to give her more room.
“You will, of course, draw the runes here,” Ammu continued. “And Mackenzie will bless the circle, as she usually does. I apologize that there will be less space in which to move, but I believe it will suffice for our purposes.”
Mackenzie nodded. Whatever Ammu needed, she would figure it out.
“Samantha, you will stand in the center of the circle,” Ammu continued. “When you sense that the portal is ready, you will open it, just as you have been doing. Because Mackenzie’s affinity is for position, she will hold in her mind, all the while, the intention of placing the portal in there. Together, your combined intention should place and open the gateway properly.”
“What if it doesn’t work, and it ends up in the wrong place?” Kaitlyn asked.
“Samantha will start the portal very small, as she has been, only opening it further once we see that it is in the correct position,” Ammu explained.
“Oh, right,” Kaitlyn said, clearly relieved. “OK.”
“She will also check with Sketch, again as she has been, to make sure that what we are summoning is, in fact, an imp, rather than something else.”
“Yep,” Sam agreed.
“Now, Sketch,” Ammu said, “your job is very important. If the thing that wants to come through the portal does not look like this, you must warn us. I am painfully aware that art in 335 BC was not what it is today, but the drawings reproduced in this book were designed, nonetheless, to depict for the summoner the true nature of the thing being summoned. Dark creatures like to play tricks on the mind, so no matter what we see, you must see this creature, or we will not bring it through. Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” Sketch said.
Ammu continued to look at him pointedly, as though Sketch’s reply might not have fully reassured him.
“I got it,” Sketch said. “What I see, goes. This thing here, or shut it.”
Ammu chuckled. “Concisely put,” he agreed. “Finally, Daniel, the song for the imp will be different than the gryphon’s. It might, at times, be a little unsettling, but trust your intuition.”
“OK,” Daniel agreed.
“The same is true for you, Mackenzie. The movements you will feel called to perform will be different than the movements that protected the gryphon circle. Focus on the imp, intend to repel anything but the imp, and trust your instincts.”
“Roger that,” Mackenzie confirmed.
“Well then,” Ammu announced, “when you are ready.”
“Here,” Mackenzie said, choosing their starting position. “Count us in.”
“It’s go time,” Sam said somberly. “One… two… one, two, three, four.”
Sketch watched as the runes began to glow with power. The blue light did not seem any different, but everything else did. The shapes of the runes were strange, almost twisted. Mackenzie’s gyrations were no longer fluid, containing writhing, jerking movements that seemed unnatural. And Daniel’s song was now in a distinctly minor key, its notes discordant, leaping dramatically away from the rest of the music before returning to the larger theme.
The overall effect set his teeth on edge, and he watched even more intently when Sam, standing in the center of the circle, began to raise both hands toward the summoning room. She counted backward so Mackenzie would know the exact moment in which she intended to open the portal.
“Five… four… three… two… one… now!”
Sam splayed the fingers of both hands out wide and flung her arms forward as though she were trying to shove the air itself through the observation window. In that same moment, a portal opened in the center of the summoning room. It was small, just as she had promised—no larger than Sketch’s own thumbnail. She looked over her shoulder and nodded at him, making him breathe a little easier. She would hold the portal at that size for as long as he needed.
Rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck to each side, he took a deep breath, exhaled it, and then reached out with his mind toward the thing he could feel sniffing around the portal entrance. He was nervous, remembering the rotting face he had seen before, but where that thing had felt like disease, like decay, like the cold hand of death grasping at your heart, this thing felt more like… trouble.
Sketch relaxed a little. He didn’t like trouble, but he was used to it. He could survive trouble.
He saw the thing clearly in his mind’s eye, just like the photograph. Its tiny hands reached into the portal, alternating between one and the other, feeling around inside the tunnel up to its shoulders, exploring it. Its pug-nosed, bat-like face was too big to fit into the circle, but Sketch imagined it pushing one beady jet-black eye into the darkness, trying to see through the hole, and he giggled a little.
He pulled his mind back to the here and now enough to give Sam a thumbs-up, and she gradually moved her hands apart, widening the circle until the imp burst through the hole and fell immediately to the ground, the portal having opened waist high in the air.
“Oops,” Sam said. The imp tumbled end over end across the floor before coming to rest against the far wall, its head and torso lying supine on the concrete, its legs extending vertically above it. “Note to self: not everything has wings.”
Ammu flipped a switch on the wall next to the window. “I have set the intercom system to work in both directions so we can hear Staff Sergeant Miller, and he can hear us as well.”
Miller nodded toward the window in reply.
“You have company, as they say,” Ammu announced, “on the floor to your right, roughly center of the wall.”
“Roger that.”
Miller snatched a spray can from one of the many pockets on his camo pants and deployed it in the general direction Ammu had indicated. The imp screeched in annoyance, turning orange for just a moment over about half its body before shimmering in place, absorbing the paint and returning to its original dark gray hue. To Miller, it seemed as though half of a neon orange imp had appeared on the floor next to him for just a moment and then disappeared again.
“I am so not going to get used to that,” Miller muttered, his words coming through clearly over the intercom.
“It’s moving,” Mackenzie called out.
“Where?” Miller looked around the room helplessly.
“Straight at you!”
Miller sprayed the can again toward the floor at his feet, catching the imp in a new coat of orange just as it lunged for his pants leg.
“What the…” he exclaimed. “Hey!”
The imp was already halfway up his body before the orange coating disappeared, but this time Miller was ready for it.
“That was a mistake, little bugger,” Miller said cheerfully. “I might not be able to see you, but I can feel you all right. Ha! Gotcha!”
Grabbing at his own chest, Miller managed to grasp the imp around its waist, but it was moving quickly, already starting to pull itself through his hand.
“Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,” Mackenzie warned him over the intercom. “You won’t be able to hold onto it.”
“Yeah, they briefed me,” Miller acknowledged. He reached into another pocket, trading the paint can for a tracking dart, managing to shove it into the imp’s back just before it broke free from his grasp.
“Nice!” Kaitlyn cheered.
“OK, per protocol,” Miller announced, obviously for a microphone that was recording the session somewhere, “ICIC Experiment 6A, trying paintballs first.”
He picked up the paintball gun from the table and shot it in the direction of the dart, which appeared to Miller to be floating in midair. Unfortunately, it was no longer in the imp’s back. The creature had reached behind itself and tugged the thing out, and it was now holding the tracker in front of it, staring at it curiously. The first two paintballs sailed between the imp’s face and the tracking device, causing the creature to screech and drop it to the ground.
Assuming the imp had fallen, Miller aimed the next two paintballs at the tracker on the floor, the first round hitting just in front of it, and the second landing just to its right, both of them exploding to shower the floor with neon paint—first yellow and then pink, as it happened.
Glancing back and forth between Miller and the tracker, the imp picked up the device and held it out in front of itself at about chest height, watching as Miller fired another two rounds at the tracker and then dancing about gleefully. It launched into an impressive series of acrobatics, holding the dart away from itself all the while, letting Miller try to hit the device as it bobbed and weaved through the air, the staff sergeant obviously getting more frustrated by the moment.
“It’s just holding the tracker in its hand, Miller,” Mackenzie called out—giggling, to be sure, but trying nonetheless to be helpful.
“I figured,” he growled back.
“It’s to the left… no, right… no, left…”
But the imp was too quick for her directions, and the observation room finally dissolved into laughter as it started tossing the tracker into the air, throwing and catching it twice until Miller finally shot it away, failing to hit the imp entirely but at least ruining its game by sending the tracker spinning into the window, where it hit and fell to the ground.
“ICIC Experiment 6B, attempting rubber rounds,” Miller growled, returning the paintball gun to the table and pulling a pistol out of a holster he wore on his right leg. “Tell me when it’s going for the tracker.”
“Now!” Mackenzie shouted.
Miller took aim in the general direction of the dart and sprayed a barrage of rubber bullets from left to right at about calf level. The imp let out an enraged scream that dissolved into an angry sort of chattering, waving a fist in Miller’s direction and then running away into the far corner below the window.
“What’s it doing?” Sketch wanted to know, the imp having moved out of view by ducking against the wall of the observation room.
“How the hell should I know?” Miller answered testily. “I hit it, though. I can see one in… damn.”
“What?” Mackenzie asked.
“The round disappeared.”
“It must have absorbed it, like the paint,” Kaitlyn suggested.
“So the bad things eat bullets for breakfast,” Sam commented. “Outstanding.”
“That wasn’t a bullet,” Miller interjected. “ICIC Experiment 6C, live ammo exercise. Repeat, this is a live ammo exercise.”
“Tell me this is bullet-proof glass,” Mackenzie said to Ammu.
“Affirmative,” Miller replied, not realizing she wasn’t talking to him.
“It is,” Ammu confirmed. “And the walls and ceiling have been constructed to firing range backstop specifications, designed to trap bullets without ricochet, for Staff Sergeant Miller’s safety as well as our own.”
Miller walked over to the abandoned tracking device, picking it up in his hand and turning his back to the observation window, tossing the device across the room so that it slid into the far wall.
“Tell me when it goes for it,” Miller said, removing the clip from his gun, making sure the chamber was empty, and then replacing the clip with a fresh one from a different pocket.
“Roger that,” Mackenzie acknowledged.
Miller took aim at the tracking device and waited. The imp, seeing that Miller wasn’t paying it any direct attention, started sneaking toward him along the observation room wall, but Sketch caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, having pressed his face right up to the glass, trying to see what it was up to.
“It’s under the window! Coming toward your right leg!” he shouted.
Miller whipped to his right and fired rapidly along the floor, starting near his own leg and swinging his arms up, sending a steady stream of bullets in a tight, controlled pattern along the floor and then up the wall, again stopping at about calf level, but as soon as Miller had begin to fire, the imp had scampered away across the room, moving back toward the far wall.
“Where is it?” Miller asked, his words clipped and urgent.
“Across from the window,” Sam said. “You missed, by the way.”
“Where, exactly, across from the window?” Miller wanted to know, switching out the clip on his pistol and then pulling something large and tubular out of the calf pocket on his left leg.
“All the way back at the wall,” Mackenzie answered him. “At your one o’clock.”
“Roger that.” Miller tossed whatever it was in that direction, aiming it to hit the floor in front of the position Mackenzie had indicated. On impact, a wave of green paint exploded toward the imp, hitting it full on.
“Paint grenade!” Sketch shouted happily, but before the words were even out of his mouth, Miller unleashed another barrage of bullets toward the small creature.
“No!” Sketch yelled, but the imp had already dropped to the floor, squishing itself impossibly thin, absorbing the paint, and slithering away beneath Miller’s gunfire.
Apparently deciding that things were getting a bit too serious, the imp chattered at Miller angrily again—this time waving both fists in the air and puffing its little chest out belligerently—and then ran across the floor to leap gracefully back into the portal, looking none the worse for wear over their encounter.