The Cost Read online

  Gael looked down at his materials again and began to ponder.

  “The Baphomet symbol makes sense” he concluded immediately. “I don't know why, but goats and all that nonsense have always been connected to this stuff, and a constant across all mediums is really the only reasonable place to start. Also, full Baphomet artwork is about depicting halves of a whole represented in full, which in itself represents the sum of the total universe. That, at the very least, is a somewhat powerful sentiment to build off of.”

  Gael removed the other wax circles then, and set about going over his various bowls of ingredients for whatever else might make sense. Unfortunately; gold, feathers, antlers, shells, sulfur, and a myriad of other fantastic offerings; while eliciting the proper sense of mystique, really didn't make much sense to Gael.

  'Why would any of these things in particular summon a demon?' he wondered. 'They're here more for me than anyone else, so why not fill the bowl with something else entirely?'

  “Why am I struggling to summon a specific demon this way at all” continued Gael. “I could just as easily put anything in the bowl and hope to get lucky. Why not, instead, put things representing me into the bowl? What if that's the appropriate catalyst? What if they need a path to me, or at the very least I might land a demon I have something in common with...”

  Gael smirked as he began looking over his ingredients with a fresh perspective and renewed optimism, all the while quietly musing over how serious he had begun taking everything.

  “Right... what do I have? Well there's gold. Gold is wealth, and power, or perfection, but none of those things really describe me” Gael pondered aloud. “I'm more like, say, copper, because it represents mental agility and quick wit.”

  Gael added not just a pinch, but a long pour of copper to his bowl.

  “Next is lead, for malleability and diplomacy” said Gael. “Then the eagle feather again, because I'm American, and nothing says love of freedom to me like an eagle. After that... Well, I don't know.”

  A pause to think prompted Gael to question the contents of the bowl, and then the bowl itself.

  “Computer, play some music I like” Gael said next.

  The computer beeped an error sound, and Gael quickly realized his request was too broad.

  “Fine, play something different” said Gael. “You know, not the typical classical genres, like rap or rock, or something strictly electronic... Oh! Play Caravan Palace!”

  A grin spread over Gael as a bizarre concoction of of electro-swing brought to life one of the most eclectic versions of Black Betty one could ever hear.

  “Perfect” he said gleefully. “I love every damn version of this song. And who cares if it's not in the bowl? It's part of the offering now.”

  Turning his attention back to the offering bowl, Gael then found himself considering the concept of sacrifice.

  “Right, you know what, let's go for it” he said nervously. “Nothing wrong with getting a little skin in the game, right?”

  Lacking any sort of a proper knife or cutting edge to do the deed, Gael instead opted to use his own teeth in an attempt to draw blood from his palm. After half a minute of trying, and immediately wishing he had just used the matter printer to make him something sharp instead, he eventually succeeded in breaking the skin enough to allow a few drops into the offering bowl.

  “There” Gael said with a smile. “How do I make it 'go', though? Spells almost always have words and chants involved, so I guess I'll need to come up with something of my own. Language shouldn't matter, that would be a ridiculous thing to get hung up on, but something to state my intention makes sense...”

  Gael took a moment to look about himself and ensure that he was, in fact, alone, which was wholly unnecessary of course. Still, the ridiculousness of what he was about to do went beyond the realm of comfort, because he wouldn't just be talking aloud to himself anymore, he'd be talking aloud to someone who wasn't even there.

  “Demon!” Gael called out uncertainly. “Recognize my offering to you! See myself as it is, and you who are equal, show yourself!”

  The lights in Gael's room flickered momentarily, before returning to their original, dim setting.

  Gael gasped as it happened, before bursting into uproarious laughter.

  “You have to be kidding me!” he cried out triumphantly. “That was amazing! How lucky can I be, having a short hit the grid right at that moment! No wonder superstition took off so easily, it only took one favorable outcome for me to forget all the others!”

  Gael's laughter trailed off, and the nagging thought that he should repeat the experiment edged its way to the forefront of his mind.

  “Computer, repeat the song” he said first. “And keep doing it.”

  The song started anew, and Gael steeled himself for his second attempt.

  “Demon!” he called out, more forcefully this time. “Recognize my offering to you! See myself as it is, and you who are equal, show yourself!”

  Gael's smile faltered as he mentally prepared himself for nothing to happen, but then, much to his amazement, the room's lights flickered again.

  “No way” Gael said immediately. “That's... It's impossible.”

  Once was a gas, but twice was just downright creepy. Regardless of the apprehension the strange turn of events had brought, though, Gael was still certain it was merely coincidence, and resolved himself to continue the experiment.

  “Demon!” he called out for the third time. “Recognize my offering to you! See myself as it is, and you who are equal, show yourself!”

  Gael gasped as the lights went out for a full second this time, and the sudden feeling of a harsh lurching motion in his room nearly shook him from his seat.

  “No! No fucking way!” Gael cried out in disbelief. “Everyone in the academy should have felt that!”

  Gael's heart hammered away as the reality of the situation began to set in. He was very clearly causing something to happen, but whether it was an actual supernatural phenomenon or just his mind playing tricks on itself he didn't know.

  What he did know, however, was that he wasn't about to stop...

  Far off, at a distance unknowable, in a place unreachable, Gael's efforts were having a very real effect.

  Arid plains, seared red and black by the constant plumes of fire that leaped free of the tortured land, stretched on for an indefinite distance. Those plains never fell away in the distance though, for there was no curve, or planet, for it to bend along. Instead, the minuscule bumps of titanic mountains laying an unfathomable distance away eventually curbed the eternity of hellscape and gave the feeble minds of mortals and immortals alike some semblance of a limit to its existence.

  Laying among the infinity were landmarks that, by their nature as a fixed point in an infinite space, couldn't exist. Great towers, immense obsidian castles, torturous prisons of molten rock and gnarled steel were just a few, but throughout the tortured landscape were landmarks of another sort.

  Great chasms, craters, canyons, and volcanoes dotted the landscape, not as geological formations, but as immense grave markers to the most ancient and powerful beings of the land, for Hell had not seen the reality it was destined to torment for Millennia, and nearly all of the great horrors it offered had wasted away to oblivion in their isolation.

  Only lesser creatures remain, save for a particular four greater monstrosities that remained because they, from their very inception, were meant to outlast time itself.

  These four legendary demons were not the subject of Gael's meddling, though. No, at a chasm dedicated to the death of a particularly noteworthy demon, all manner of lesser nightmares went about an existence that no longer had any meaning.

  Goat-hoofed titans walked mighty, striking down their brethren at every turn, only to be reborn should they fall in battle mere moments later. Masters of seduction, succubi and incubi alike, reveled in an unending orgy of boundless lust. Imps of every shade, some gangly and chitinous, others yet dwarf-like and mischievous
, made games against each other whose severity ranged from harmless pranks to horrific atrocities.

  All the while, though, members of each lesser caste huddled off to the side, their eyes glazed over by the prospect of unending life after hundreds of years in the same dance their younger brethren now gleefully partook. They had been born from the fiery aether of hell without warning, and it wouldn't be long before the endless suffering of a meaningless eternity spurned them off into blissful oblivion, where their long dead superior demons had already retired to in their unending melancholy.

  Among the lively, though, was one demon who had stopped in her activities. An imp of no particular note, who stood just under four feet tall, had suddenly and without warning paused in her chase of another. The games of her kin, as enjoyable as they were, had suddenly been interrupted by the haunting melody of a distant song. Its constant droning pulled her attention away from the ashen dirt of the land that now stained her bare, bleached white skin, and dragged her subtly luminescent red eyes up to the hellfire raging in the skies above.

  She wasn't of the gangly variety, and boasted a somewhat humanish figure that was mostly correct in proportion for an adult, if not a little small. Her eyes, just the slightest bit glowing red as they were, were just a tad to large for her face, and her numerous teeth, bleached white like her skin, seemed to be filed down to a series of jagged, intimidating points.

  As she stared, the other imps began to take note, and most fell victim to their curious nature as they too shambled over to her side and stared up at the sky like she was now.

  “Show yourself!”

  The imp's eyes widened as she heard it, but a glance around at her peers showed that she was alone in this. No one else heard the music. No one else heard the words. No one else felt like they weren't as firmly attached the ground as they should be...

  Back in the reality that was, Gael's calls and commands had only gotten increasingly feverish and emphatic as the phenomena surrounding his attempted demonic contact intensified.

  The lights flickered constantly now, and even Gael's computer screen kept cutting in and out. All electrical devices had begun to go completely mad around him, save for the speakers running the music, which themselves seemed to be shielded for being part of the spell. A constant cacophony of whirling air had joined the noise of the music, though, and had scooped the spell's ingredients up into a whirring tornado of copper dust, lead dust, eagle feathers, and Gael's own blood directly over the bowl.

  “Demon!” bellowed Gael. “Recognize my offering to you! See myself as it is, and you who are equal, show yourself! Show yourself! Show yourself! SHOW YOURSELF, DEMON! SHOW YOURSELF!”

  The storm of otherworldly madness continued to go on around Gael, but the escalation had stopped. No matter how energetic or earnest his voice became, the spell simply wouldn't come to an end.

  “DAMN IT, DEMON!” Gael cried out in frustration. “MEET ME HALFWAY!”

  The storm of ingredients stopped. The flickering of the lights stopped. Even the music stopped.

  But the flames on the candles turned red.

  Stillness fell over Gael's dorm, and for a moment he wondered if the demon was present. Then, everything lurched like it had before, except that this time the room stayed still and Gael moved.

  “Um, what's-,” Gael started, before finding himself rocketing through space at several times the speed of light.

  Great gas clouds and nebulae fell away to galaxies as Gael's soundless scream followed him out to the very edge of the known universe. Light fell from view as the stars, ever expanding outward from the point of the big bang, were left in the dust by Gael's impossibly rapid departure. Then, lights of things unknown began to fill Gael's vision. Titanic black holes so stuffed with matter that they looked on the verge of exploding lumbered along beside stars that danced in the hundreds and bore the orbit of trillions of planets in a single system. Gargantuan walls of ice were tended to by swarms of lights larger than red giants that would periodically assemble themselves into humanoid shapes and seemed to take care of reality itself.

  And then that too fell away.

  Things defiant of reality itself began to fill Gael's vision as he continued hurtling forward. He flew through rock formations so large that they blotted out the endless black horizon, sinking down into their tunnels that seemed to have been hollowed out by some great creature many eternities ago. Places where darkness fell across great landscapes like light and left only light where the shadows should have been were followed by swaths of amorphous, blob-like rock that constantly moved and rolled to reflect the entire scope of Gael's thoughts as he passed by them.

  Finally, after what seemed like an hour, Gael landed in a patch of open space over a galactic oddity he couldn't quite describe. It was, in not so many words, a star caught mid-explosion and frozen in time. It moved though, despite seeming frozen, but moved in a way that made it look like an iris. Opposite it, a great and terrible black orb filled the space the space overhead, stretching onward for as far as Gael's own eyes could manage.

  It was there, trapped between the most brilliant and most horrific things he'd ever laid eyes on, that Gael finally spotted what he must have come all that way to meet: an imp, with pale white skin, faintly luminescent red eyes, teeth that reminded him of a shark's, and hair that was black as night itself and matted with the same ashen dirt that comprised most of the filth covering her bare form.

  Without explanation, Gael felt the sudden need to kick at the open space around him. Slowly, after gaining maybe an inch at a time, he succeeded in finding a way to swim through space itself towards the creature opposite him.

  The creature did the same, and both she and he did their hardest not to think about what might happen if they question their circumstances too deeply.

  After all, should they not be starving for air? Should the cold of space not be turning the blood in their veins to ice? How was it that their skin, exposed to direct sunlight as it was, wasn't immediately wracked with burns to compete with said ice?

  The questions were never asked, and answers never came, because after forty seconds of valiant struggling on both of their parts, they finally grew close enough to reach out and clasp each others' hand.

  Their grip to each other fused with an otherworldly force, and all at once Gael found himself hurtling back from whence he'd came with the imp in tow. A journey that had taken forever came and went a second time in mere seconds, until he was thrown bodily back into the far wall of his dorm by the force with which he returned to his body.

  “Oof!”

  Gael gasped a second time as he hit the floor, before quickly and excitedly looking back to the baphomet circle still sitting in the middle of the room.

  Sitting there, in the circle's center, was the imp he'd grabbed hold of in that mysteriously nightmarish and hauntingly beautiful place they'd met at.

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed Gael. “I did it! Holy shit, I really did it. It happened. You're real, right? Yeah, you're real. And you're here. I summoned a demon.”

  Gael's excitement came to a sudden halt as his own words hit him.

  “I'm going to have switch majors” he said shrilly.

  Meanwhile, the imp had been left to survey her new surroundings with an awe she didn't know she was capable of. The first thing that hit her was the stark realization that, in a world where the temperature wasn't always blisteringly hot, being naked was a bad thing. She was freezing, and couldn't help but leap up from the circle, spilling the contents of all the bowls Gael had arrayed around it for the second time that day, and hop atop his bed to get at the blanket laying atop it.

  “Oh” said Gael. “You're cold. Of course you're cold, you're from hell! Wait, is hell explicitly hot? I don't...”

  “W-W-W-Where a-a-am I-I?” the imp managed, her voice shrill and raspy.

  Whether it was like this because of her condition or not, Gael could not say. He knew only that her voice certainly had what he imagined to be an im
pish quality to it.

  “You're at Academy Nine” replied Gael. “On Enterprise Island.”

  The imp's sharp, jagged teeth continued to chatter at she looked about herself confusedly.

  “W-W-What a-are y-y-you?” she asked next.

  “I'm Gael Walsh” replied Gael. “A student here. I'm a human, the one who summoned you.”

  The imp, still shaking, felt her chattering momentarily stopped as a gasp took her.

  “I-I'm on E-E-Earth!?” she exclaimed in awe.

  “Well, n-,” Gael started, before finding the imp sprinting around his room in search of something with his blanket wrapped around her like a cloak.

  “W-W-W,” she stammered as she ran. “W-W-Whew, WINDOW!”

  “You want a window?” queried Gael.

  The imp stopped her frantic search and nodded at Gael eagerly.

  “Transparent, on” called Gael.

  The wall opposite the door into Gael's room became as glass, and the view of what lay outside became known to the imp and himself.

  “Huh?” the imp sputtered in bewilderment. “Th-That's... W-What is thhhhh, thhhhhh-,”

  “That?” offered Gael.

  The imp nodded.

  “That little blue marble out there in the blackness is Earth” replied Gael. “We're on Enterprise Island, a city-sized space station that orbits the planet. It's the year four thousand and eight, and I'm here attending my first year of college. I'm twenty-four years old, and I'm studying criminology, psychology, and sociology for an advanced career in law enforcement.”

  The imp's teeth chattered away as the most shocking revelation of her entire existence rumbled through her feebly prepared mind, and threatened her very delicate, impish insanity with something far more normal.

  “It happened” she rasped. “I'm out. I'm out of hell.” Her eyes went wide, and she turned to Gael pleadingly. “You have to send me back. N-Not for forever, but for a little while. I have to tell War.”

  Gael furrowed his brow curiously as the request hit him. “War?”