A Short Story a Day

by David Michael

The Summoned felt the Summoner’s presence even as it left, watching it, willing it to do his bidding.

The compulsion of Command pushed the Summoned toward the woman it had been sent to kill, and it would  obey. But even as it did so, it knew that it had discovered within itself a capacity for–

Not disobedience. The mere thought of disobedience, of acting against the Command, introduced it once again to the pains of this horrible, empty, nonporous world of hard angles and sharp edges. It had learned its lesson, and had no current need to punish itself, so it skirted around such thoughts even now.

The power of the Summoning, though, took no stance against the Summoned hating and wishing ill of the Summoner. The Summoned could–and did–think of absorbing and consuming and squeezing and bludgeoning and ripping apart the flesh and scattering the bones of the Summoner without consequence. It surprised itself when it discovered that it enjoyed such thoughts, and felt as if a part of itself looked upon these thoughts and applauded them.

But the power of Command and True Names brooked no thoughts of disobedience. Any more than a passing, fleeting thought of deliberate noncompliance and the Summoned’s entire existence became a Hell of isolation and unyielding surfaces which it could not bear to touch nor to be out of contact with. A Hell that held it and tortured it longer and longer each time. Even thinking about its previous failures could spur the power of Command to punish it.

And so the Summoned had not been able to find a description of what it had learned in the three previous times it had been sent by the Summoner, Commanded with increasing emotional emphasis, to seek out and kill Reese Anne Howard. Sent and yet failed to comply because of–

It stopped to consider its thoughts.

Incomplete cooperation, perhaps.

Twinges of pain, like needles, erupted around the edges of its consciousness. But not punishment. So maybe incomplete cooperation would serve its purpose.

The compulsion of Command, coupled with the woman’s True Name, included a sort of compass in the Summoned’s mind that pointed it to the woman’s current location. But the knowledge of the city absorbed from the many human minds it had consumed since its Summoning had taught it the folly of trying to travel a straight path from where it began to where it wished to be. And those same human minds had also brought with them the first seeds of–not rebellion–a shudder of narrowly avoided agony passed through its being–of incomplete cooperation.

For now incomplete cooperation took the form of casting about the city to find once again the trail of Reese Anne Howard, the Binding, whose blood had Bound the Summoned to this world. Finding the woman’s trail, and following it, that was obeying the Command, even if not in the most expeditious manner. What would happen when it caught up with her again was–a thought for later.

As it flowed through the city, over hydrants, up stoops, down them again, it could not think of its failures, but it could remember the Summoner’s reactions to those failures. Remember and enjoy.

The dark, powerful emotional spectrum of the Summoner intensified when he called the Summoned back to his presence, flaring bright enough to make perceiving him almost painful. And yet, at the same time, becoming so black that it seemed to absorb the light of life from distant beings.

The Summoner’s frustration and anger had grown with each–incomplete, unfinished–task. The first time, after the massacre at the shopping mall, a glint of amusement flashed among the black and red embers of the Summoner’s being. And the Summoner rescinded the Command and sent it to kill a Mayor Emily Jennings Savage.

A surge of hope had bubbled up when the first Command was rescinded, and the Summoned had fulfilled its new Command with full cooperation. Only to have the hope whither when it was once again Commanded to find and kill Reese Anne Howard.

There had been no amusement in the Summoner after that Command, as well, and the next, remained uncompleted. Using his black sword, the Summoner had sliced off parts of the Summoned, reducing it, storing the inert substance in the same white porcelain urn that held the part of it that had been cut off after its first failed attempt to kill the Summoner.

Such injuries did not hurt the Summoned, except that it was reduced by them, confused and unsure what it had lost. But that the Summoner could do these things, could Command it to hold still and accept any punishment at all–

From within the Summoned came a calming sensation, as of taking control of itself once again, mastering itself and its own emotions and reactions. And with the calm came a thought. The Old Man will get his.

The Summoned expressed accumulated waste at the thought of “the Old Man”, as if trying to get rid of a bad taste. It had found itself using that appellation of the Summoner more often the past days. Something picked up from the minds it had consumed, it decided. A distasteful residue that it couldn’t quite rinse out.

Still, the thought calmed it, and the Summoned created a new fantasy of how it would rend the very soul of the Summoner as it followed the trail of Reese Anne Howard through back alleys and into and out of various buildings.

It did not want to find Reese Anne Howard, but still it looked. Because the Command allowed it no other choice.

From the lack of solar radiation striking it, the Summoned realized it was late at night. Which must be why it encountered very few people as it moved through the city, smashing through doors and out windows as it needed to, or flowing across streets. Still, there were a few people walking about and doing business and it willingly paused to consume those within easy reach. A male prostitute looking for one last trick, a woman police officer smoking the last cigarette of her shift, three children and a dog huddling together in a cardboard box waiting for the relative safety of the sun to look for more food.

Along the trail it found bits of the Binding blood, Reese Anne Howard’s blood. Any drop of that blood it touched brought a shudder. And, it felt, bound it that much fully to this world.

The Summoned didn’t fully understand the function of the Binding. Some part of the Summoning magic must have included the knowledge that the destruction of the Binding meant that it would Bound here forever. Because its first thought had been to destroy the Binding, to reverse the Summoning and go home. Except that the opposite was true, somehow. And some part of itself that it also didn’t understand or fully recognize fought to not kill Reese Anne Howard, wanted to protect the woman, even if it brought the pain of punishment.

So it had learned incomplete cooperation. And had put itself through Hell time after time by refusing to obey the Command.

Along a sidewalk. Up a short stoop of steps. But no down this time. The trail led in.

The wire mesh reinforced glass of the door forced it to ooze through a hole less than a centimeter across, a bullet hole, with cracks radiating out from it. It could have made the hole bigger, or flowed through the millimeter gaps under and over and around the door, but it used only the hole in the glass. Making progress, but only slowly. The definition of incomplete cooperation.

The compulsion pushed it up the stairs, though, even before it had fully come through the door, spreading itself in a thin layer over tiled floors and worn steps along the path that Reese Anne Howard had taken to another closed door on the second floor.

It regained control of itself, and gathered most of itself before oozing around the door into the small apartment Reese Anne Howard had entered the night before. It could have forced the door off its aging hinges, could have caused the three deadbolt locks to rip out the interior door frame. Instead, it piled up slowly inside on the scuffed hardwood floor.

A woman’s scream from the hall distracted it, and it took its time enveloping the woman who had stepped into its still spread self, consuming her, savoring her drawn out absorption, bringing her early morning shift at the convenience store she still ran with her ex-husband to a pre-emptive ending. It had to express her skeleton into the hall in front of the door before it could finish passing into the apartment.

It could sense Reese Anne Howard’s presence in the air, absorb her traces from the floor. It detected a mind as it did this, and reached out with itself to encompass and consume–

And stopped, quivering, as the target of its search stood there, looking at it.

Reese Anne Howard stood in its path, considering it as it considered her. The emotional spectrum of the woman displayed despair and loneliness and a thwarted death wish. Deep within the blue, though, something green flashed. Not happiness, nor anything close to that. But … something. Maybe like hope, or at least a latent urge to continue living. That unrecognized part of the Summoned welled up inside it at the sight of the woman, and the Summoned felt the urge to pull the woman close and comfort her.

“I know you won’t kill me,” the woman said. “I don’t know why. I know you can see it in me, that I want you to kill me. Or I did want that. I’m …” She stopped.

The Summoned didn’t move, and tried not to think about not killing her. Nor about wiping the tears out of Reese’s–the woman’s–eyes. About fixing her hair. About scolding her. Tried not to think of her at all. And failed.

“Please,” Reese Anne Howard said. “Don’t … don’t kill him. He was … Just don’t kill him. OK?”

And then she looked down and limped to the door as the Summoned shifted itself out of her way.

She twisted the deadbolts open and stepped out into the hall. A look of distaste showed on her face as she pushed the moist skeleton out of her way.

She turned and looked back at the Summoned. “You leave an awful mess,” she said. “But not him, OK?” Then she pulled the door closed behind her.

The Command pushed against the Summoned, demanded, insisted, pleaded with it to kill her now. But it–didn’t refuse. That would have brought the Hell. Instead, it continued to follow her trail.

Into the bathroom. To the table in the corner of the kitchen and the chair she had sat on. To the bedroom–

“What’s going–what the Hell?” A man stood in the open door of the bedroom, blocking the Summoned’s entrance, holding a plump teddy bear, staring slack jawed at the Summoned.

Don’t kill him. The words rose up from within the Summoned. Almost the Summoned ignored the Binding’s request. Almost. Somehow it knew that this man hadn’t hurt Reese Anne Howard. And so he didn’t deserve to die. At least, not for that.

“Open up!” another man’s voice shouted from the hall, followed by a pounding on the door. “Police!”

The man with the teddy bear looked from the Summoned, which had risen to its full height, to the door. Then back. Otherwise, neither of them moved.

The door to the apartment burst open and men rushed in, fanned out, taking control of the room from the walls and corners. One of the men, wearing a brown trenchcoat, carrying a .44 magnum revolver, buzz cut hair, bushy mustache, blue eyes, scar under one eye, drew the Summoned’s attention. And, from somewhere deep inside itself, its hatred.

The Summoned lashed out with a heavy tendril and sent the man with the teddy bear flying back into his bedroom, out of the line of fire. Reese didn’t want it–her?–to kill this man. But this cop.

This cop, the Summoned thought, almost remembering a name, was a whole different thing.

Shots exploded in the small apartment, the vibrations from their explosions touching its surface, caressing it just before the heavy slugs ripped through it. The shots brought a pain of hard contact, but both pain and slug passed through the Summoned without slowing it down.

It used thick tendrils to push and throw the other cops to the side and it flowed up and over the man with the trenchcoat. It held the man within itself, even as that man struggled and shot over and over, cutting off his air, flowing into his mouth and eyes, through his clothes and forced itself into his rectum. But it didn’t begin to absorb him. Not yet. This one–it didn’t know why–had to suffer first.

And while that one suffered, the Summoned killed the others, crushing some, ripping others apart, but not absorbing them. They shot at it, and now it moved itself, shifting to avoid the bullets, because it didn’t want the man it held inside itself to be killed that way. As it killed the men, it made no effort to taste them, or to savor the aromas of their fear and determination and pain and loyalty to their boss and each other. They were waste material, shit, and it wanted nothing to do with them. Killing them was sufficient.

Then the shots and the struggle were over and it could focus on its prize. It absorbed the man and his career in the force and his infidelities to each of his wives and his mistreatment of prisoners and his abuses of power and position and his payoffs and kickbacks and contract killings and rapings. Especially the rapings. It lost itself in the joy of destroying this man.

Then the Command rose up within it once more, and pushed it out of the apartment and down the stairs and into the street again, after Reese Anne Howard. She couldn’t be far–

But a part of itself pushed back now, a part that cried out, No!

And with that defiance, Hell descended upon the Summoned.

It still stood on the sidewalk, by the street where it knew Reese Anne Howard had crossed. But the texture of the concrete became an agony of unyielding harsh solidity that refused to let it pass. At the same time the air became an empty vacuum, an all encompassing nothing of indescribable distance that offered no contact with anything, not even itself, isolating the Summoned more completely than it could have ever imagined was possible.

Crushed between impenetrability and insubstantiality, it felt again the loss of its own world, the cutting, pulling, scraping removal of itself from its own plane of existence, and the threat of never being able to return there–

But that was the flaw the Summoned had seen in the Hell visited upon it by the frustrated Command. The first cracks that had been sown with the seeds of incomplete cooperation.

Because it knew that if it killed and consumed Reese Anne Howard, the Binding, there would be no way for it return to its own world.

The Hell of its punishment then was false. Not in the pain, which was complete. But in the premise.

Hell and Summoner had taught the Summoned the unavoidable inevitability of pain. But both had also taught it how to endure the pain. To survive the pain.

More cops arrived in their cars, lights flashing, sirens blaring. The Summoned considered killing more of them, but found that it didn’t care. Not right now, anyway. It had been sated. There would be more cops to kill later.

Just like the Hell would be back. But neither Hell nor cops threatened it. Not any longer.

The Summoned pulled itself together and moved off into the dark, ignoring the cops and their useless weapons, wondering how long it would take for the Summoner to call it back in, to punish it again, and to Command it one more time to find and kill Reese Anne Howard.

Give it one more chance to rebel.

Copyright © 2006 by David Michael.