A Short Story a Day

by David Michael

It had never felt pain before. Now pains and indignities heaped one on the other and swirled together, a miasma of agony and frustration.

The pain of separation, pulled out of its world and brought into this place.

The indignity of Summoning.

It reached out, sensing the Summoner, feeling the power, wanting to consume the power, crush the Summoner. But something blocked it. Then cut it off from its world as though closing a door.

The pain of isolation.

The pain of open space.

It could return, it could re-open the door. It knew the way. It had the power.

The indignity of Binding, of having the door locked.

The pain of structure, of hardness that offered neither nourishment nor admittance nor integration. The need to avoid the Binding as it fell or risk being bound forever in this world of pain taught it how to use the pain and push against the pain, the hardness, and adjust its presence within the open space so that the Binding would not touch it, would not be inadvertently consumed by it.

Distracted, it realized, by the Summoner. So that the final indignity could be perpetrated upon it.

The indignity of being Commanded, and knowing that it must obey.

It tore at the fabric of the world but found no purchase. It was Bound. The way home was closed to it, and locked.

It sought to envelop the Summoner, to crush–

Stopped. By the Command of the Summoner and by the impression of the Summoner’s–his?–presence.

The Summoner laughed at it, mocked it.

And it could do nothing to stop–him?–the Summoner.

Impressions, thoughts emanated from the Summoner, concepts, fears, hates, but on top of it all pride and power and–amusement. A spectrum of mind and emotion, rippling and flashing and oozing. Beauty and putrescence, depravity and art, desire and disgust, fascinating and repellant. It could only observe, amazed that such an entity could exist.

It felt the Binding, observed–her?–saw a different spectrum, though with similarities to the Summoner. The Binding’s emanations dimmed, became smoother, less erratic. It felt a new impression from the Binding, and towards the Binding, a part of it reaching out, but not a part of itself that it recognized.

Then from the empty space, new impressions, vibrations that struck and moved across it, vibrations that originated from the Summoner and meshed with the mental emanations from the Summoner, and it now knew itself as the Summoned. Not its True Name, but a name it had to accept. Its name in this horrible, empty, hard world.

But it remained itself, even with the pain and the indignities and the compulsion. It remembered its world, the warmth and constant contact, the consistency and the softness. And it remembered the Binding. A jarring unexpected memory, disjointed images and a tangle of emotions that it did not recognize as its own.

The Summoner spoke–a combination of vibrations and thought, the Summoned realized–speaking the Summoned’s True Name again, and it felt the compulsion course through its presence–its body, a concept it pulled from the Summoner’s mind–a compulsion to find and kill PAULRICHARDCAMPBELL.

A man, it saw, it felt, it heard from the Summoner. A man named Paul Richard Campbell. And as it processed this, it felt the Command and with that came, from the fabric of the world, from the cold empty space and hard structure, from the surface thoughts of the Summoner, the knowledge of direction, of distance, and it knew that Paul Richard Campbell was … that way.

Away from the Binding.

A reluctance to leave the Binding fought against the compulsion of the Command and it hesitated.

The spectrum of the Summoner transformed, becoming darker, redder, and the vibrations became harsher, whipping at the Summoned, forcing it into motion, action.

It moved. Shifting the mass of its body along the direction that would take it to Paul Richard Campbell.

The horizontal structure that it moved across changed, became vertical. It paused to consider this.

The Summoner came close to it, even darker now and redder than before, but with a hint of mockery again, as the Summoner found the Summoned’s dilemma both frustrating and amusing.

Enraged, the Summoned flowed away from the vertical structure–wall, it learned from the Summoner–and around the Summoner, encompassing him, willing itself to absorb and consume. And again it could do nothing. It was Bound and Commanded.

The laughter and mockery of the Summoner followed it as it shifted its body to ascend the wall. The wall led to another horizontal structure, with a texture of pain from contact that was entirely new. But the laughter from the direction opposite its movement–behind?–kept it moving forward.

When the horizontal structure went vertical again, this time it was negative, down, and the Summoned fell.

For long, painful, lonely seconds, the Summoned found itself surrounded by empty space, without even the painful contact of a hard structure.

And then came contact again, hard, forceful, incredibly painful contact that caused its mass to spread out in a thin layer, and some parts of itself to tear away and land inert.

Lost in its own vortex of pain and confusion, it didn’t notice the other entities that it had landed on and near, except as distractions to pulling itself back together and seeking out its missing parts. All around it, entities, spectrums of thought and emotion, bombarded it with images and vibrations, many of them as confused as the Summoned.

Then it noticed the taste, the new flavors that brushed its palette, from the contact with the entities–people?–when it struck the–ground? concrete? sidewalk?–and as it recovered.

The spectrums of the people around it began to shift as it piled itself higher and higher, exposing more surface area that it might receive more impressions, as it sent out its first–tendrils? tentacles? pseudopod?–reaching, trying to touch the nearest ones, to sample their flavors.

Vibrations assaulted it as the people began to–scream? The crowd around it surged away from it.

The Summoned shifted, began to move to follow the closest people, but its compulsion forced it to stop.

Then it noticed that some of the people ran in the direction that would take it to Paul Richard Campbell.

It surged after them, catching the first, a man, by whipping out with a tendril, wrapping him about the middle and pulling him back to it.

It pulled the man into itself, beginning the absorption. The man kicked and fought and tried to scream, but the Summoned pushed itself into the man’s mouth and down his throat, creating more surface area through which to absorb him, to consume his thoughts and emotions and self image and self. He had come here on–vacation?–without his–wife?–to have a little fun.

It paused its pursuit, its movement–even the Command relented for an instant–as it savored the essence of the man-entity, the spectrum of flavors, the nature of the man’s self image, his hopes and goals and fears and loves and hates and desires and habits and doubts and nightmares and triumphs and quiet desperations …

Flesh and bone, it noticed, provided little nourishment to it, but the mind and emotions had an intensity that the Summoned had never experienced before.

Its sense of itself changed. But it remained. Its sense of the Command changed. But the Command remained.

Hatred remained, for the pain and the indignities thrust upon it by the Summoner, and the Summoner would be made to pay for those. It didn’t know how yet, but it would find a way.

The empty, hard world remained, but now it saw the world differently. Some part of the man had expanded its awareness, imbued it with a greater understanding of the empty space–air, up, down, smells–and the hard surfaces–walls, floor, ground, buildings.

And it saw that more people would be along the path it must take to reach Paul Richard Campbell.

Many more.

It moved forward, then stopped.

A stream of people, moving in two opposite directions, crossed its path. The people slowed down, sped up, interweaved, almost at random, and their spectrums rippled through extremes from one second to the next, flaring up and cooling down.

Its first attempts to grab one of the moving people was batted away, stinging, by a smooth, hard surface that prevented it from reaching the person. Then it perceived the structure around the persons and from the lingering aftertaste of the man it had eaten, it discovered the word car.

Its next attempt resulted in smashing the smooth surface–the windshield–but still the Summoned couldn’t penetrate the car.

The car it had struck, though, swerved, crashing into another car, which was then pushed into oncoming traffic.

This assault of vibrations–horns blaring, tires screeching, metal crunching, people screaming–brought the Summoned up short, uncertain. But then it realized that the stream had stopped, on both sides.

It flowed through the wreckage of the pileup, absorbing the blood and the shattered glass and broken plastic along with the broken bodies of a baby boy with a dirty diaper, the baby’s flustered mother on her way to see a lawyer, a man going to work at a job he hated, a woman coming off the night shift angry about a boss that didn’t appreciate her, and an imp that had been hiding in the trunk of the woman’s car waiting to kill her while she slept.

On the far side of the street, beginning to bloat, savoring the many flavors but unable to keep them all separate any more, the Summoned paused only long enough to pass out the torn and shredded clothing, a few teeth, the bits of glass and plastic, a teething ring, a wedding ring, and a collection of coins. It considered passing out the skeletons, but some part of its metabolism was convinced it could still absorb the bones, so it retained them.

It felt the pull of the Command in the direction of Paul Richard Campbell, but now it perceived the structures of the city, the buildings, the streets, even portions of the sewer system. It realized that a direct path to Paul Richard Campbell wasn’t impossible, but it was impractical.

Using its new bits of itself, the Summoned mapped a route that would get it at least nearer to Paul Richard Campbell.

It had to pause three times on its trip to consume more people until it had enough of a map of the city to reach its target.

It surged up the stairways of an old building, consuming a boy and a girl playing a game, and a junkie on his way to see his dealer. One of them–the junkie, maybe, or the boy, the Summoned couldn’t be sure–had seen Paul Richard Campbell the day before and knew that the man had lived in the apartment building for some time.

The Summoned paused outside the door to apartment 519, but only long enough to pass out the rubber ball, metal jacks, syringe, rubber tube, and the collection of bones from all the people it had eaten. Broken bones offered rich marrow, and the cartilage had an interesting flavor, but otherwise, it was now convinced that bones, like teeth, were to be discarded, inedible.

Then it forced a bit of itself under the closed door, and through the slender gaps between the door and the doorframe. The pressure of its body on the door pushed it off its hinges and the Summoned flowed into the small apartment.

Paul Richard Campbell sat at a table by the apartment’s only window.

The Summoned examined the spectrum of Paul Richard Campbell. The man didn’t display the flares and shifts of the other people it had consumed. Not an absence of fear, it realized. But acceptance of death. Paul Richard Campbell had known it was coming.

It detected the vibrations and saw that the man was talking. It still didn’t have a solid understanding of speech, but it could see images of the Summoner–Paul Richard Campbell referred to the Summoner as “the Old Man”–and images of a young girl, not a child, but not yet a woman and with those images a sense of amusement and disappointment.

It absorbed Paul Richard Campbell as it had been ordered to do. It did so slowly, savoring the taste of new emotions and experiences–including the experience of being consumed by itself, which rather surprised it. And there was also a certain–satisfaction?–that it hadn’t expected.

It’s Command fulfilled, the Summoned now felt–knew–the direction back to the Summoner. And knew, from what it had learned getting to–and eating–Paul Richard Campbell, how to get there. Quickly. Undetected.

Because Paul Richard Campbell had had a plan, had waited for his doom to arrive so that he could pass on that plan. Paul Richard Campbell had known what it was to be commanded, and he had seen a way out, a way out that he gave to the Summoned.

It flowed out of the building, leaving the bones of Paul Richard Campbell lying on the old carpet of his apartment, and poured itself into the sewers.

As it moved, it absorbed and consumed those creatures that it passed over, but did not seek them out. Rats and raccoons and dogs and cats and frogs–the names appeared as it consumed the creatures, called up from its growing understanding of this world–didn’t contain a range of emotion and thought that the Summoned found appealing.

It came up through a drain in the basement of the Old Man’s–no, it thought, the Summoner’s, since it refused to use the nickname picked up from Paul Richard Campbell–headquarters and home. It found an airshaft that Paul Richard Campbell knew about and pushed itself into that constricting structure. It slithered through the metal pipes of the ductwork until it found the room where it knew the Summoner would be.

The Summoner sat in a chair, but stood up as he saw the Summoned piling up under the air vent. He didn’t say anything.

The Summoned’s hatred surged and it threw itself forward, to consume the Summoner before he could give it another Command. So long as the Binding lived, it would be stuck in this world, but only the Summoner knew its True Name. And if he was dead, no one could Command it further. It could stay here, free to do as it pleased, to eat when and where it willed–

The Summoner’s laughter struck it like a physical blow and it realized that it had been stopped from getting close enough to the Summoner.

By a circle on the floor, drawn in blood and sand and salt and inscribed with runes. The runes flared yellow and red and green as the Summoned tried to force its way through the invisible protection.

The Summoner laughed again. “Nice try,” the Summoner might have been saying. “A very good try, actually.”

The Summoned threw itself at the protection again and again, spread itself around it and tried to squeeze.

A new pain cut through its awareness, and the pain cut away a part of itself. It drew back, seeing a piece of itself fall to the floor and roll into the circle to stop at the Summoner’s feet.

The Summoner stood there, smiling, with a long, curved black line of edged structure–a sword– held in both hands.

As the Summoned watched, the Summoner put the sword down and picked up a small white container structure–a vase? an urn?–and used the vase to scoop up the piece of the Summoned.

“I’ll keep this as a souvenir,” the Summoner said. “Now, I have a new task for you.”

The Summoned felt its entire physical presence quivering, shaking with anger and pain and hatred and despair. But it had to listen, and obey, when Commanded with its True Name.

Copyright © 2006 by David Michael.