A Short Story a Day

by David Michael

The Old Man squatted in the huge iron cauldron, resting with his human leg folded under him and his devil leg extended in front of him, uncomfortable as hell–in a manner of speaking–cursing the bloody-minded-ness of the ancient rites. Even when the rites worked, as this one seemed to be working, the Old Man couldn’t help but wonder what was so damn special about fire-blackened iron and the lack of sex life in the sacrificial victims. And why discomfort always figured in somewhere.

Uncomfortable or not–and he had born much worse over the years–he would put up with it. Because he needed all the power he could muster to bring the Summoned to this world, and then control it when it arrived. And then there was Reese, the big unknown in his equations.

Not for the first time, he wished he hadn’t left the weapons with Reese. That was probably hubris–not something he admitted often.

If he had enough power to properly Summon the Summoned, though, he should have enough to manage whatever Reese could do to him. Which was why he was going to go through with this particular rite twice. If once was good, twice must be twice as good. The old text describing the rite didn’t exactly promise that, but it hinted that doubling up, if it could be afforded, offered even more power.

Still, he wanted to know–but didn’t ask aloud because the rite, forcing boredom on top of discomfort, forbade him to speak during the ritual–what was so damn special about virgins?

The first surges of fresh, hot power that had soaked into him with the blood of the thirteen virgins had put him in a good mood. But waiting for his cursed nephew assistants to get the bloodless bodies stacked and lit–and being unable to yell at them to go faster–that had soured the mood.

The clawed fingers of his left hand twitched, wanting to rip out the still beating heart of someone. For example, an incompetent flunky. Related or not.

And why did he have to sit in the cauldron while it was heated with the burning corpses of the victims? That was the hardest part. Because the biggest cauldron he could find was too short for him to stand in. 2.6 meters of height looked foolish standing in a two meter pot, and he had to be completely inside the pot during the ritual. The description of the rite was adamant on that point.

And so his irritation mounted. Because he couldn’t have a chair to sit on, and he wasn’t built for extended squatting on his haunches–not any more, anyway–and his muscles got cramped.

And because the smell of so much cooked meat made him ravenously hungry.

But the rite seemed to be working.

His stomach rumbled, and he hoped that didn’t violate the imposed silence. He preferred ancient rites that let him eat the sacrificial victims.

Or maybe he would eat Paul Campbell, later, after the rite was over. The man wasn’t family, and he hadn’t been around earlier, like he should’ve been. Paul had been with the Old Man for nearly a decade and knew how to get corpses to light properly, among other talents the Old Man had found useful over the years.

But Paul was AWOL, and that didn’t bode well. The Old Man hadn’t been too concerned about it earlier. Rakspu and Biqast were enough to run the press and manage the queue.

Now, though, as he felt the heat of the cauldron rise around him but not touch him, and felt the new bloodpower within him coagulate and blacken, wrap itself around his bones and twine its way into his muscles and mind, a hint of something entered into his thinking.

A hint of betrayal.

He wondered what Paul had done, what could have forced the man to risk the wrath of the Old Man, a wrath Paul surely knew couldn’t be outrun. Then the Old Man let himself smile as he thought of the perfect way to deal with his absent henchman. He wouldn’t eat him, after all.

He flexed his fingers, and the muscles of his arms, enjoying the feel of his new strength, resisting the urge to stand up and stretch his legs, waiting for full potency.

He felt the fire beneath the cauldron respond to him, flaring up as he willed it, consuming the bodies of the boys and girls collected for this purpose, passing on to the Old Man whatever strength they still had to offer.

He wanted to dance, to feel the power coursing in him as the fire still burned. The text that accompanied the description of the Rite of Virgin Blood and Flesh had suggested dancing. Helped the blood flow, it said. But the height issue, the need to squat to stay within the cauldron, left the Old Man trembling and jerking, trying to keep his great bulk inside the cauldron. The braces that held the cauldron upright creaked under the strain, but he willed the braces to withstand the stress.

The fire beneath the cauldron didn’t die away. Instead, at the point when the Old Man figured the bodies had been reduced to ash and bone, the fire exploded into a great flare up that encompassed the entire cauldron.

This time the heat touched the Old Man, from the flames, from the red hot metal of the cauldron, wrapped him in searing pain as if he were being burned alive, but not actually scorching him.

“One last test must be passed,” the rite had said, offering no details or advice. “Then the transfer of blood is complete.”

The “last test” continued longer than the Old Man thought he could bear. Pain such as he had sworn he would never again experience or endure shot through him, testing his worthiness, trying to get him to scream, trying to force him out of the cauldron.

The end came like a blast of cold air as the fire imploded in on itself, leaving the Old Man sweating and shivering in the still steaming cauldron.

He took a deep breath, then resisted the urge to burst the cauldron in his ecstasy of strength and power. Not only had the big iron pot been hard to find–Reese and Sam had found this for him, two years ago, in the ruins of an abandoned coven house, and nothing bigger had ever been located in Hell on Earth since then, and it was too much trouble to order one made properly in Suburbia–but he would need it again. Soon.

He leaped up from his squat and balanced–impossibly? nothing seemed impossible to him now–like a bird, perching on the lip of the cauldron.

“You can never be too rich,” he shouted down at Rakspu and Biqast, the occasionally useful devil-nephews he had pulled with him out of Hell. “Nor too thin. And you sure as Hell can’t be too powerful.”

Rakspu and Biqast ran away as he leaped down to the floor, cowering in separate corners, veteran flunkies who knew how to get out of reach when the boss was on a power frenzy.

The Old Man laughed at them, shaking the room as he did so. His stomach rumbled, and that seemed to shake the room too. “Let’s eat out tonight,” he said.

The nephews took circumspect routes, staying out of reach, to the door of the big room, a converted warehouse redesigned specifically for the Rite of Virgin Blood and Flesh, and opened the doors for the Old Man. They leaned away from him as he passed between them.

“Which one of you is the faster?” the Old Man asked, and laughed as they bolted away from him, each one trying to hinder the other, scratching and clawing and tripping, trying to leave the other behind for the Old Man to catch.

But the Old Man didn’t want chewy, gristly devil meat. Not tonight. He wanted something tender but well-seasoned, plump but not fat. Female, too. He would prefer to have it cooked, but time didn’t allow that luxury. Not tonight.

“Be back here in two hours,” the Old Man shouted after the fleeing nephews. “Have it setup and ready to go again.”

The power inside him longed to be unleashed. He threw himself at the sky, jumping high enough that he could imagine he was flying, and soared through the night air in a great arc, breathing in the scents of the city.

The city that would soon be his.

With the Summoned at his command, none of the city fathers–those that still remained–nor the other crime lords, human or infernal, would be able to stop him. He smiled a teeth-baring smile at the moon and the stars.

His first landing came on the fringes of downtown. He ignored the riffraff that he crushed under foot and hoof, and the rest that ran away from him screaming. Nightcrawlers, whores, dealers, junkies, fringe elements. Not at all what he wanted.

He changed his heading and leaped again. This time he landed in a quiet neighborhood with small houses that had been old before Hell Erupted and manifested Itself. Better. But still not what he wanted.

What he really wanted, he realized, would be a pudgy white woman from Suburbia. Not a tourist, though  that would come close–and he was tempted, even though several of the better tourist hotels were under his protection–but rather the kind of people who would never come–willingly–to Hell on Earth. He sighed, wishing he had thought of that weeks ago, when it could have been arranged in time.

He had a couple extras in the shipment of Suburbian virgins he had waiting for him back at the warehouse. But virgins weren’t his favorite. They tended to be bland. And he might need the extras. He was more power hungry than food hungry, and wouldn’t jeopardize repeating the rite as planned.

He settled for a chubby mother he found after two more leaps put him into a much closer, Hell on Earth version of a suburb.

He crashed through the roof into the dining room where the woman, her husband, and two kids sat around the dining room table, eating their own dinner.

The Old man grabbed the mother, held her over his head while he killed the father, who proved unusually courageous, kicking the man with his hoof hard enough to take off the head and send it flying across table to land in the adjacent living room.

The kids hadn’t moved since he crashed in. They stared in shock at the wreckage of what had once been their lives. He considered taking the little girl with him, as dessert for the meal her mom would be. But decided against it. He just needed to take the edge off before going through the rite again. He didn’t want to be too full. The rite advised against that.

“You will thank me for this later,” the Old Man told the kids. Then he laughed. That shook them out of their stupor and they ran away from him. “No. Probably not.” Then he leaped out the way he had come in.

He ate the mother as he leaped back to the converted warehouse. He left parts of her at each place he landed, a leg in a back yard here, the other leg on a sidewalk there, an arm in a topiary, or discarded the parts as he soared through the arcs of his leaps. He kept the head until last. He didn’t eat it, though. Instead he threw at his nephews, who stood waiting for him outside the warehouse.

“Heads up!” the Old Man shouted, putting just a bit of his new power into the throw. Or more than a bit.

The head flew like it had been shot from a cannon. It hit Biqast first, knocking the little devil prone, and then bounced to hit Rakspu hard enough to stagger him, as well. The Old Man laughed, and the air rocked like a thunderstorm. Nothing amused him like relatives in distress.

“Are we ready?” he asked as he walked into the warehouse.

Biqast scrambled to his feet, his claws scritching on the bare concrete floor. “Yes, Uncle, yes,” he said. “The first one is in the press.”

The two devils closed and secured the big doors.

The Old Man stood under the shower he had modified to accommodate his height and pulled the lever to rain down water to clean off the blood from his meal and prepare his body for another passage through the rite. An unexpected scent in the air, an echo of the hint of betrayal he had felt earlier, caught his attention. “Did you find Paul Campbell?” he asked.

“No, Uncle,” Rakspu said, almost whimpering. “You didn’t tell us to find–”

“Nevermind,” the Old Man said, waving his human hand dismissively. “I’ll take care of Mr. Campbell later.”

He finished his shower, then stood with his arms and legs extended so that Biqast and Rakspu could towel him dry. They were afraid to be that close to him, he knew. They could detect his new potency just as he could smell the details of their fears and almost read their minds. But they did their task because they were more afraid of disobeying him.

The Old Man leaped into the cauldron and squatted down. He listened as Rakspu intoned the necessary incantations, phonetically spelled out since the devil didn’t speak ancient Sumerian. At the proper time, Biqast climbed up to the press where the first virgin, a girl, waited, fresh from Suburbia and made impassive just days ago with a quick, efficient lobotomy.

These virgins had been imported from Suburbia, as far from Hell on Earth as possible. Hell on Earth had virgins, of course. But there were virgins, and then there were virgins. True innocence was hard to find in Hell on Earth, even among the kids who hadn’t had sex yet.

The girl screamed as Biqast spun the wheel and the blades of the press bit into the girl and started the rain of her blood.

The scent, the hint, became a stench and the Old Man knew what Paul Campbell had done, and why he had tried to disappear

Power throbbed in the Old Man and time slowed down. The drops of red blood from the first virgin froze in mid-air less than a meter above his head, not stopped just paused, and he tried to think of a way to escape this betrayal.

His first impulse was to leap out of the cauldron. But he needed to save both his own … purity? He almost laughed at the thought. His own state of preparedness, and that of the cauldron as well. This girl’s blood, brought to bear with the ritual already started, would force him and pot both to start over–and maybe destroy them both. And he didn’t have time for either of those possibilities.

So he drew back, feeling the blood beginning to move again, and threw himself against the inside of the cauldron.

He underestimated his new strength. Again.

He dented the side of the cauldron where he hit it, and easily broke the braces supporting it. Old Man and cauldron rolled, ass over teakettle, over and over, until smashing into a wall of the warehouse with a clang that rang in his head.

When he could hear again, it was Biqast whimpering, asking how he was. Neither Biqast nor Rakspu, who was trying to crawl over with a broken leg, expected him to laugh as loud and long as he did.

So close. And it had almost worked. Oh, he could enjoy that. Even better than distressed relatives. An adversary that surprised him.

He was still chuckling when he sent Biqast to take Rakspu to get the broken leg set. Then he moved the cauldron back in place, propped it up again. He finished that before Biqast returned with a new helper. So he climbed up and pulled the dead non-virgin from the press to munch on while he waited. He wouldn’t eat all of her. Just enough to be a good snack. It would be a shame to waste a delicacy.

He was glad, again, that he had purchased extras from the meatseller. And that he had budgeted in a little extra time, as well.

Not that he had expected Paul Campbell to betray him like that. But that was the nature of betrayal. If you expected it, it wasn’t betrayal.

As he chewed he went over the plans for the next day again, how the Summoning would go, repeating the words in his head, and the all important True Name. And he thought about Reese again. She was the key to the Summoning. Sam had been the first part, but without Reese …

He pushed the thought aside. Reese would be there.

He shouldn’t have left her with those weapons, though. Those things hurt.

Copyright © 2006 by David Michael.