52
A Very Bad Idea
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ammu began, “our job today is to summon something much more closely aligned with evil—not in the interest of taming it, this much needs to be very clear from the beginning, but of destroying it.”
He stood in the observation room, surrounded once again by all six students of the ICIC. Rush’s return had infused the group with a new sense of energy and purpose, but seeing a living gargoyle on the tail of a civilian airplane had also impressed upon them just how serious their mission was. They watched Ammu attentively, understanding, as they had suspected, that they were about to proceed into much more dangerous territory.
“We will, of course, perform the summoning here, in the observation room, opening the portal on the other side of the glass. As an additional precaution, the weapon to be employed will be an automated turret. Staff Sergeant Miller will control the turret remotely, from here in this room with us, so that no one need be exposed to the creature.”
They could see for themselves that the contents of the white room had changed again. The table was gone, and now a gun stood on a tripod just to the left of the window, aimed at the middle of the room. Staff Sergeant Miller took Ammu’s words as a cue to demonstrate, and he used a remote to turn the turret to the left and then back to the right again, showing them how it moved.
“Nice,” Rush commented, but Miller only nodded in return.
“We are hoping, Rush,” Ammu continued, “that you will be able to control the creature well enough to place it directly in the turret’s line of fire.”
“I’ll sure try,” Rush promised. He knew the others had told Ammu about the workshop, and he knew they had had trouble working with the gryphon ever since. He understood their theory that he had been controlling it. He only hoped they were right.
“So then,” Ammu said, bending down to retrieve his book from his satchel and paging through it until he found what he was looking for, “this morning, I would like for you to summon this.”
Kaitlyn looked at the image and then glanced back at Ammu, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“It is not, by far, the most deadly thing in this book,” Ammu said, his words offering little reassurance, “but it is more closely aligned with the forces of destruction than anything you have yet summoned, as I suggested it would be.”
“It looks like a gargoyle, but it doesn’t look like the gargoyle that was on the plane,” Sam commented after taking a closer look for herself. “What’s up with that?”
The creature in Ammu’s image looked like it might be about knee-high on a full-grown man when sitting on its hind legs like a dog, as it did in the picture. If it extended itself to its full height, it might be able to reach a man’s chest.
It was dark gray and hairless, its body looking a bit like a pit bull’s, but with a face that belonged on a gothic building in a graphic novel. Its eyes were black as coals, it had no ears at all, it had two twisted horns protruding from its forehead, and its snout looked like a demented cross between a dog’s and a crocodile’s, full of four rows of razor-sharp teeth, two rows on the top and two on the bottom. As if that weren’t enough, bat-like wings extended out from its shoulders.
The gargoyle on the plane, on the other hand, had shared little in common with this image beyond its wings. That creature had been much lighter in color and twice as tall as a man, looking far more humanoid in both its posture and the shape of its skull, its vertebrae protruding cruelly from its spine, giving its back a ridged appearance, with a long, spiked tail extending behind it.
Its feet had been preposterously long, so that it stood upright by balancing forward on its toes, its heels sticking high up in the air and acting like a kind of second knee that bent the wrong way, giving its legs a ghastly, almost alien appearance. If Sam had had to place the two creatures on the same family tree, they wouldn’t even have been second cousins.
“Ah, yes, it is true,” Ammu began, answering her question. “The term ‘gargoyle’ is highly misleading. The creature in this image and the one from the plane are both aligned with the forces of evil, but their natures are not the same, and therefore their preferred appearance is not the same.
“The beings of the other dimension are not limited, as we are, to a single shape, but can adopt many forms, changing their appearance even to those who can see through the eyes of the unconscious mind. This is why Sketch, here, is so very important. He sees the true nature of things, so that even if something evil were to disguise itself as something beautiful, fooling the rest of us, Sketch would see it as it truly is.”
“Way to go, Sketch!” Rush said, grinning at him and thrusting a friendly elbow at his shoulder.
Sketch beamed with pride. Maybe being able to see things that everyone else couldn’t, wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
“The spirits that battled here on Earth during the days of Alexander the Great were of many, many forms, varying widely in shape, from animals very like those that exist naturally in our world, to fantastical and oftentimes horrific creatures, whose alignment with the forces of good or evil was reflected in their natural appearance.
“What we are summoning today was known as a zairmyangura in the ancient Persian tongue. The creature on the airplane would have been called a spengaghra. But I suppose that ‘gargoyle’ is as good a term as any for either one, in this day and age.”
“OK,” Sam said, dragging both syllables out unnecessarily. “Little sorry I asked, to be honest, but thanks for the history lesson.”
“If you want the short version, do not ask a professor,” Ammu replied, grinning at her. “Or so my students have told me.”
“My bad,” she agreed. “So are we doing this thing or what?”
“Indeed,” Ammu said. “If everyone is ready?”
“I have the pattern,” Kaitlyn announced, and Ammu retrieved the chalk from his bag, opening its protective container and handing it to her.
“Here,” Mackenzie said, choosing her spot while Kaitlyn sketched the basic circle on the floor as a reference.
Sam stood in the circle and gave Ammu a silent thumbs-up.
“I can hear it,” Daniel said. “I’m not gonna enjoy singing it, I can tell you right now, but I have it.”
“Sketch?” Sam said, getting his attention. “Same as before, OK? Only if you say it is what it is.”
Sketch nodded.
“OK then,” Sam said, taking a deep breath. “Counting us in. One… two… one, two, three, four.”
Kaitlyn traced the first rune on the floor as Mackenzie started moving in strange jerks and pops around the circle, with Daniel intoning an ominous chant in a minor key that made Rush’s skin crawl.
“OK, this is creepy,” Rush whispered to Sketch, who only nodded in return. Today’s summoning was making Sketch doubly glad that Rush was back. Even Staff Sergeant Miller, usually the picture of stony impassivity during the summoning sessions, looked a bit unraveled by the scene.
“It is appropriate for it to feel uneasy, even frightening,” Ammu murmured. “Fear is one of the most primal ways in which the unconscious mind warns us of danger, and we are dealing now with forces that would harm us at any opportunity, make no mistake.”
“Fantastic,” Rush said. “No pressure, right?”
As the circle neared completion, Sam began the countdown for Mackenzie. “Five… four… three… two… one… now!” Sam raised her arms, splaying her fingers wide just as before and shoving both hands toward the window, causing a tiny portal to appear in the middle of the room on the other side.
“OK, now that was cool,” Rush muttered, but Sketch didn’t answer him, focusing with his mind’s eye on the creature that awaited them on the other side of the portal, and soon enough, Rush felt it for himself.
He almost reeled backward in disgust, but he remembered their earliest attempt at summoning the gryphon, when his fear broke Sam’s concentration and closed the portal, so he forced himself to stand firm even though every fiber of his body was telling him to run. The… thing… on the other side was already clawing at the tiny hole, sniffing at it eagerly, ready to hunt. Rush felt it as it became bound to his will, writhing and screaming on the other side of the portal, its initial curiosity devolving into rage.
It felt grimy and greasy and dingy and dark, making Rush wish he could shower right where he stood, but Sketch gave Sam the thumbs up, signaling her to let it through. It was vicious and cruel, but it was what it was, and the portal opened wide, vomiting the creature into the stark, white room.
It hovered for a moment, getting its bearings, seeking and finding Rush’s essence through the glass that stood between them. It wanted to move toward him, but Rush held it in place—forcing it to land and sit quiescently on the floor—his mind straining against the creature’s dark intentions.
“Good?” Rush asked through clenched teeth, one hand raised in a posture of both control and defense, pushing against the creature even as it pushed against him.
“I have no idea,” Miller admitted. “One second. Can you keep it from absorbing the paint?”
“I can try,” Rush said. The others had told him about the targeting problem, and he held the creature in his mind as best he could, ordering it firmly not to respond to its surroundings. “OK. Ready.”
Miller pressed a button, and a fine mist of neon orange paint burst forth from several nozzles mounted along the legs of the turret, coating the creature fully. The creature narrowed its eyes and snarled through the glass, but it did not absorb the paint.
“Brilliant,” Miller whispered. “OK, hold it right there. Steady… steady…”
The creature eyed the turret as Miller angled the gun slightly to the right and then down, lining up the shot on a viewfinder mounted in the remote.
With a sudden explosion of sound, two things happened instantaneously. The first was that the gun fired several rounds directly through the creature’s chest, the bullets slicing through it viciously and embedding themselves in the far wall.
The second thing, however, was entirely unexpected.
The moment the gun fired, the creature roared in triumph and broke free of Rush’s mental grasp. Apparently unharmed, despite having been shot clean through by enough firepower to have severed any normal blood-and-bone creature in half, it thrust itself into the air with a single downstroke of its wings, absorbed the orange paint with an angry shimmer, and then hurled itself directly toward the bullet-proof window, colliding against it with a resounding thunk and starting to push its way in, beating its wings vigorously and thrusting with its hind legs to add to its momentum.
In seconds, the tip of its maw was already through, the vehemence of its struggles making it clear that the zairmyangura would not be trapped in the glass for long. Kaitlyn shrieked, and Miller, realizing that something must have gone horribly wrong, yanked the door open and tried to herd them out of the observation room.
“There’s nowhere safe to go!” Rush yelled. If bullets couldn’t hurt it and bullet-proof glass couldn’t hold it, then no amount of running was going to save them. The creature was almost halfway through the window, its progress slowed temporarily while its wings were hampered by the glass. Its maw, already free, snapped at him viciously, it claws scratching at the glass as it worked to pull itself through. In desperation, without even knowing what he was doing, Rush reached out with his whole mind.
“Help!” Rush yelled.
“Tell me what to do!” Miller shouted.
“Not you! Him!” Rush hollered back, as the gryphon cub burst through the portal.
With one powerful stroke of its wings, it braked in midair, locating Rush and surging toward him, but when it identified the threat, it stopped again, hovering for a split second and shimmering angrily as a full set of armor burst forth from its body, settling around it majestically.
It looks just like you, Sketch thought, the gryphon’s armor matching not just the shape and design of the armor Sketch saw on Rush but also its color, blazing forth in angry red and a deep, bronze gold—in the exact same hues Rush wore at the moment, whether he realized it or not.
Completing its transformation, the gryphon charged at the zairmyangura, grabbing it by its hindquarters before it could finish pulling itself through the glass. The beast screamed in pain as the gryphon reached underneath it and sank its beak into its underbelly, but there was little it could do beyond scrabbling at the gryphon ineffectively with its hind legs since the front half of its body was still on the observation room side of the window.
Although bullets had not harmed it at all, the gryphon’s bites opened gaping wounds in the creature’s belly that did not close, each new gash pouring angry red light out of its abdomen. In moments, the gryphon had torn gruesomely through its body, ripping through its midsection until the hideous thing had been severed in two.
With a defiant screech and a final flash of light that was almost too painful to look at, the gargoyle fell silent, the back half of its body falling to the floor in the summoning room and the front half going limp, its head slumping against the window in which its chest was still embedded. The humans all stared in silent amazement as what remained of the zairmyangura shimmered and vanished, leaving nothing behind—all except for Miller, that is, who was still looking around at everyone else, trying to figure out what their sudden stillness meant and what, if anything, he should do about it.
“It’s OK, Miller,” Mackenzie said. “You can stand down now. The good guys won.”
“We did?” Miller asked.
“Yeah we did!” Rush exclaimed, and he and Sketch started whooping and hollering, cheering at the gryphon, which shimmered away its armor, descended casually to the floor, and began preening its feathers as though slaying gargoyles was all in a day’s work, which maybe it was for a gryphon, for all Rush knew.
“Well, thank God,” Miller said, sounding profoundly relieved.
“Indeed,” Ammu agreed.
Without wasting any time, Kaitlyn snatched up the waiting rag.
“If you don’t mind?” Kaitlyn said, addressing Rush and indicating the gryphon with a tilt of her chin.
“Already?” Sketch complained. “But it just got here!”
“As much as I love the little guy,” Mackenzie said gently, “and I do—I mean, I really do—I think we’ve all had about enough of this particular portal.”
Rush looked at Sketch and grinned. “It’s OK, man. I’m here now, yeah? We can call him back any time.”
“Yeah, OK,” Sketch agreed sadly.
Rush closed his eyes for a moment, and the gryphon looked up, bobbed its head at the one-way mirror, and flew back through the portal.