1,000 Word Story in Five Parts, Part II

Chuck Wendig started a challenge last week that will yield another 1,000 word story that is a little different from the usual. Last week, the participants posted the first 200 words of a story. This week, we choose from one of the beginnings and write another 200 words. The stories will continue on until they hit 1,000 words. You can read the beginning of my story here and Samantha’s continuation here. 

This week, I chose to continue Meagan‘s story featuring a snarky demon, some particularly terrible summoners, and gin. I’ve included her part first and then my addition. Enjoy!

         “Yes, this penthouse view is quite breathtaking,” I turned to the luscious blonde before me, “but not nearly as lovely as—”
         A thunder clap, and then I was standing in a small, glowing circle, surrounded by a gaggle of chanting fools in robes.
         “Oh great Sorasel im Palat, lord of fire and darkness, fell devourer of the innocent, conqueror of—” Arcane symbols covered the speaker’s robes, nearly obscuring the heavy crimson fabric.
         “Yes, yes, get on with it.” I gestured with my gin martini.
         He paused, then finished in a post-pubescent squeak, “We invoke thy true name and bid thee do our will.”
         “Oh you do, do you? Well I want you to send me back. I was having a smashing time, and that girl may not have two brain cells to rub together, but she looked quite likely to do some rubbing together. If you know what I mean.”
The robe-wearers shuffled, and whispered amongst themselves. The leader piped up again.
         “O great Sorasel im—“
         “Stop that, stop that,” I interrupted. “Only my dad calls me that. I prefer my middle name. If you must speak, call me Stewart.”
         More shuffling and whispering from my summoners.

—————-

         “Oh great and mighty…Stewart….” the leader—whose pasty face was mostly spots—began again. “We bind thee to our will.”
         I took a sip of my martini—extra dirty, extra olives—and raised an eyebrow at the little prat. Summoners used to know what they were doing. I looked at the floor where their demon trap was sloppily drawn with what smelled unmistakably like fresh, store-bought spray paint. I sighed. What happened to the blood of a virgin? Or even the vital fluids of an unwilling Christian priest?
         I noticed their silence; I could practically smell their fear—a mixture of piss and that foul deodorant that promised them flocks of women. I took another gulp of the martini—it was perfect. Almost as flawless as my blonde client who was no doubt currently working her minimal intelligence into a sweat in an effort to find me.
         “Well? Get on with it.”
         “We bound you, oh great Sora—er—Stewart.”
         “I heard that part. So,” I made sure to smile with all of my teeth. “You’ve bound me. Congratulations. Now, what do you plan to do?”
         “Jaime, this was your idea.” One of the other robed figures poked the leader.

Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

Photo by Al Forbes

 

“Are you sure this is the right doorway?”

“They said to look for a creepy stone face with a winged helmet.”

“But it’s not even a doorway. This is just a blank wall.”

“This is the Gateway! Have I taught you nothing?”

“I expected it to be bigger.”

Alastor closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Serax, I brought you on this mission for a reason.”

“Yes, Master,” the little demon hung his head. “Do you get the feeling that face is watching—”

ZAP.

Michael, the archangel, blinked his flaming eyes once and retreated back into the stone.

Death and Destruction are Never Satisfied

Halloween is nigh, but this is no ghost story. A far older creature treads this path, dating back to the dawn of creation and the first cracks of destruction.

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         “People are basically evil, y’know?”
         Vita stopped polishing the glass in her hands and looked down towards the end of the bar; he sat alone, the last barfly.
         “You say somethin’, sugar?”
         “Evil. Downright, no good, rotten to the core.” He looked up at her with eyes so woeful she wondered if he was reciting something famous. “Filled to the brim with putrefaction.”
         “Uh…huh…” Vita wasn’t sure how to respond to the maudlin mumbling. “Can I get you another, hon?”
         The man stared at his empty glass as though he couldn’t figure out what to do with it. He shook his shaggy head, dark hair streaked unevenly with gray. With the big eyes and his long hair, Vita couldn’t help comparing him to the old, tired dog her parents finally put out of its misery. She slopped several fingers of whiskey into a glass and downed it after toasting poor, dead Polo’s memory.
         “Listen, I gotta close up, and if you’re not orderin’ anythin’ else…”
         “For your troubles,” the man shoved some coins across the bar.
         Vita stifled a sigh. The last customer of the night was always the worst. This guy’d been drinking top shelf vodka all night and now he was trying to pay her with change? She wished Luis hadn’t left early. She could throw the drunk out if she had to, but Luis could just scare the guy out with no fuss. Walking down to retrieve the pitiful sum and explain to the sodden stranger that the stuff on the top shelf cost more than…
         Vita blinked at the coins. They were solid gold. She looked up again at the stranger and blanched. His eyes were black–she couldn’t distinguish pupils from irises against the whites of his eyes. She backed away from the counter, leaning against the back bar when her knees threatened to buckle.
         “You ooze it, you know? Your fear, yes, but also all those little dark and tiny things you ferret away in the corners of your soul. The time you shoved little Ben Zerin down the stairs in fourth grade, the money you’ve stolen out of the register or the tip jar, the club you visit every Friday. Do you think you’re better than the average “bad” person because you never kill? Because you only steal fives and tens and not fifties and hundreds?” The man’s thin lips spread wide in a smile that exposed all of his white teeth. “You disgust me, all of you.”
         “All…who?” Vita’s breath caught in a sob.
         “Humanity!” his voice made the bottles behind the bar shake and Vita whimpered. “The whole putrescent, pathetic lot of you. You’re like pigs, wallowing in your own filth, decaying day by day.”
         Vita couldn’t look away from his face, his thin nose and high, clean-shaven cheekbones. A handsome face, except for the eyes and the loathing that twisted his mouth. His skin seemed almost translucent, his hair no longer unkempt. There was no resemblance now to the beloved family dog. Vita clutched the edge of the back counter as black spots began to speckle her vision. She was trapped in the bar with a crazy man, whose eyes were black.
         “He chose you above His favored ones–above EVERYONE. And look at you. LOOK AT YOURSELF!” His empty glass shattered as he swept it from the bar and leaned over, fixing Vita in his gaze like an insect squirming on a pin.
         She saw her pale, white-lipped face reflected in his black orbs and felt them pulling her in. She saw, in flickers, herself. Shoving Ben down the stairs and hearing his leg crack. Pocketing the money from the register with a grin on her face. Dancing with men with rings on their left hands and money in their pockets. She saw herself with her best friend’s husband, with her sister’s husband, with the earrings she stole from her mother. She was drowning in memories that tasted like thick, rotten oil and filled up her nose and mouth and the black spots became black blobs of sludge.

         Abbadon, the destroyer, looked down at the woman behind the bar, her limbs still faintly twitching. The black ooze spewing from her eyes, mouth, nose, and ears steamed slightly, pooling on the floor around her head. He wrinkled his nose; they were foul enough when the taint was inside, once the corruption spilled out it was nearly impossible to be around it.
         A faint buzzing reached his ears and he cocked his head for a moment, his entire body straightening, primed like an arrow on a taught string. As the frequency became clear he realized it was not the Master,the Morning Star. One of Them. One of His, the cronies, the kneelers, the mindless, pandering hoard. Singing His endless praises while we wade through human scum, Abbadon sneered.
        Abbadon left the gold coins on the bar. Let the lawmen with their tiny brains puzzle out how Babylonian coins from 600 B.C. connected to the bloating corpse. The Others would know what it meant–little good it would do them. The Battle was far in the future; these little skirmishes were just plain fun.
         The melted candles on the bar twirled in the breeze that signaled Abbadon’s departure. If anyone in the bar were alive to hear, they would have sworn there was the whispering sound of wings.

Abbadon – meaning and origins
Title origins: Proverbs 27:20 Death and Destruction are never satisfied, and neither are human eyes.
Disclaimer: I also watch too much Supernatural

Demon Hunters, Inc.

I’m too impatient to wait for Chuck Wendig’s weekly challenge, so I went back to his archives and used a photo from an old prompt.

       “You did what?”
       It takes a lot to get Chas worked up but when something does…damn. This vein starts throbbing in his neck like some big blue worm set up house there and refuses to leave. His eyes get all watery like he might cry, but anyone who knows Chas knows this: Chas never cries. And Chas has seen some things. Things that would make grown men piss themselves and bawl like little girls. Not Chas.
       “Well, I didn’t mean to.” Obviously. People don’t just go around opening up the gateway to Hell intentionally. “There was this scroll…”
       “For the love of Lucifer!” the vein in Chas’ neck looked like it was crawling right up his face.
       I didn’t think his chosen swear was exactly appropriate at the moment…but then again, I guess it was. I tried not to cringe as I looked down at Chas. You’re always looking down at Chas since his fight with a demon overlord put him in a wheelchair. But if anyone could repair a crushed spine, fractured femur, and all sorts of tangled nerves out of sheer anger, it was Chas.
       “What the hell’ve I told you about reading old scrolls, Elijah?” Chas shoved his chair away from the computer and wheeled towards me.
       I resisted the urge to grab something red to fend off his charge. Instead I looked at my feet and scuffed one of my dusty boots against the peeling linoleum.
       “It didn’t look demonic,” I said.
       “’It didn’t look demonic,’” Chas mimicked, lips curling back from his yellowing teeth. “The hell does that mean, Elijah? When has anything demonic actually looked demonic to begin with? Don’t answer that,” as I opened my mouth to recount, most recently, the Nickar of Narvik, the Jinn of Abu-Kamal, and the so-called Incubus of Fingal, North Dakota.
       “Now what?” I asked.
       “What do you mean: now what?” Chas looked pretty demonic himself. “Now, you tell me what scroll you read and how you ‘accidentally’ opened the Infernal Gate.”
       I retrieved the scroll from my bag, feeling like a teenager caught with beer. Chas has a way of making you feel fifteen years younger. And that would place me at about eight. The scroll was in a tube made out of horn and capped on each end with etched silver. I found it in a tomb somewhere in Croatia but Chas said he didn’t have time to look into it. I got bored waiting for the next frantic call for a clean-up; so the day before, I found the scroll in a pile of other scrolls and took a peek. The writing was ancient Akkadian, but that’s one of the easy ones for me. So I read it. And I was sounding out some of the trickier words and phrases, not even paying attention to the words as a whole until…
       “…the ground started shaking and I swear I thought it was the End. The hill burst open at the top like that water demon when we whacked him with the shovel,” I looked up at Chas, hoping the happy memory would cut me a break.
       He was scowling so hard he looked like his head was going to blow off, so I went on.
       “I guess it didn’t exactly burst off so much as sink into the ground and there this lava glowing like that fire demon’s…anyway…I could feel the heat straightaway and that was when I went back and looked at what I read and…” I gulped. It felt like I’d sucked in a whole mouthful of sand. “I guess it was the chant to open the Infernal Gate.”
       It wouldn’t do me any good to tell Chas that you had to recite it on the hottest time of day in the middle of the summer when the sun was directly overhead and that if I had been bored an hour earlier or later, the gateway would probably still be sealed. If I wasn’t bored at all, it definitely would be.
       “Of all the…” Chas choked for a minute, unable to think of a bad enough word. Which is impressive considering how many languages—human and demonic—he knows.
       “We can shut it though, right?” I gnawed at my chapped lip. “I mean, there’s got to be a way to close it off again.”
       “I’m sure there is,” Chas’ voice dripped with honeyed optimism. Not good. “It’s probably on that scroll you had to read. Out loud.”
       “Well…that’s the thing…the bottom half is missing,” I made myself stay still, no matter how badly I wanted to back into a corner of the tiny trailer.
       “The…bottom…half?” Chas repeated.
       “Yeah…like somebody tore it or it disintegrated or…it’s just gone,” I held the horn tube out to him.
       He didn’t even look, he hadn’t taken his eyes off me and I thought it had been about a minute and a half since he last blinked. That was a very bad sign. I pushed my hair back from my face, feeling it stick to the sweat running down my forehead. I let it grow out when I took the job with Chas.
       “You’re going to take this,” Chas sped across the narrow trailer to the weapons closet and pulled out a pole with a black bladed scythe on the end (courtesy of a reaper demon), an ammo belt stocked with vials of holy water, and a cross that was blessed by ten different popes. “And you are going to guard that blasted gate until something comes out or I figure out how to close it.”
       I clumsily caught the ammo belt and cross—Chas knew better than to throw a sharp object in my direction. As I pushed open the door of the trailer with one hand, scythe in the other, the usual wind flung sand in my mouth and eyes. I looked at the faintly glowing hilltop and sighed. I thought I heard Chas mutter something as I stepped out.
       “Gonna need a new intern.”

photo found here