Published at 8th of March 2024 7:44 am

Chapter Twenty Three

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Except I wouldn’t pass out.

Fuck me… I can’t catch a break.

Alice’s spell felt like dozens of tiny hands grabbing parts of my body and moving them around, like a kindergarten class attempting to assemble a single castle Lego set. One kid only wants to play with the blue blocks, another kid lost the instructions and half the kids don’t even want to make a castle, they all wanna make something from Star Wars.

“Stop fighting it!” Alice said through her teeth.

“I’M NOT!” I cried back as my back arched off the cot. I felt my ribs shift with a wrenching pain. I wanted to collapse but my muscles just wouldn’t answer me—it felt like thousands of volts were coursing through me.

“Ida! Help me!” Ida came over, her expression guarded. “Hold him down!”

Ida didn’t hesitate, placing her hands on my hips and trying to force me back down on the cot. She couldn’t do it. I should be weak as a kitten, but whatever Alice was doing to me was lighting up my nerves and muscles and for some stupid reason I just couldn’t relax my muscles.

“He’s going to break his own back,” Alice said, a sheen of sweat breaking out on her brow. She shifted her hand over and started to help Ida push me down.

“Just end it!” Ida said. “You’re going to kill him!”

“I can’t!” Alice said. “The spell has to be brought to a close and I can’t DO that with him fighting me!”

“NNNNNNNOOT FIGHT,” I ground out as best as I could, my jaw not wanting to work. I felt the magic reach for my jaw and instead of putting it back into place it seemed to make it looser.

“Colm, there’s something going on with your body,” Alice said as she and Ida finally slammed me back down onto the cot. “It literally feels like something is undoing everything I’m attempting, as I do it.”

What? There’s—could it be the Gift of Body? I split my attention and focused on the Bargain I got from Trix, the one that allowed me to make changes to myself and—Holy shit it’s going haywire. What the fuck?

I took a moment to examine it with both the senses it gave me over my own body and with my magical senses. Alice’s magic was entering my body and shifting things around, and the Bargain was… Oh! It was trying to do what I told it to do! But it didn’t know how to deal with a foreign influence and was fighting back! Which is one of the contingencies for poison I had put in when I had first gotten the power. I didn’t think it’d also react to magical healing in the same way. Probably can’t differentiate.

I quickly started to mold it and change some of the alterations, laying down some new rules. It was remarkably like programming a simple AI, designating what is good, what isn’t, doing if/and branches and the like. As I worked I felt the pain recede in my body and the locked muscles release. I kept making alterations to the gift until I felt it working in harmony with Alice’s magic.

Distantly I heard Alice give me a running commentary, saying whatever I was doing was working and to keep at it, but I only got the snippets. Mostly I got the message from her tone of voice, too distracted with the pain and managing the otherworldly magic that governed my body.

“Jesus Christ,” Alice whispered. “I’ve never seen anyone react like that.”

I heard Ida sigh and stand up, resuming her spot by the door. “He fought me when he was with fever, too.”

“Fever?” Alice asked. I felt a blossom of warmth from her spell that I had to quickly okay with my Bargain before it decided whatever she was doing wasn’t welcome. “Oh, God,” she muttered. “He’s wrung out.”

My jaw popped into place with a sharp pain, which quickly faded. I stretched it experimentally. “Mostly my fault,” I muttered when I found it operational. “I panicked something fierce for the first few days.”

“I’ll say,” Alice said. “I’m reading several sources of dehydration, malnutrition, chemical burns, some sun stroke, infections, three broken ribs, four fractured ribs, five additional hairline fractures in your fists, three more on the left eye socket and a dislocated jaw. I’m not even bothering counting the contusions. It’s a miracle you aren’t dead.”

“Miracle nothing,” I slurred, suddenly very tired. “This toughness was bought and paid for.”

“A Bargain with Axtrixxinizinia?” Alice asked.

“Mhm,” I said, stifling a yawn. Now that my body wasn’t fighting the healing, it didn’t hurt nearly as much as she implied. Maybe the worst was over? Oop, no, I feel the magic digging into my bones and now comes the pain. I couldn’t even grip the sides of the cot because the pain was in my hands as well.

“What’d you pay for it?” Alice asked gently as the pain pulsed, hot and cold over my ribs, hands and face.

I felt Ida’s attention on me. I’d never told her I was a vigilante warlock (wow does that sound lame in my head, but I guess it’s technically true?). Did Alice know that and was giving me a chance to clear the air between all three of us? Or was she just trying to figure out if the man she was saving was worth it?

I’d spent near a decade hiding from everyone I knew so I wouldn’t have to lie to them, and then I lied to everyone I met. Lying was such a common thing for me it became easy. And I was good at it. At least, I like to think I am.

But…

But fuck it. These ladies were in a life or death situation with me, with stupid fucking magical pirates. Though a large part of me was still very scared to tell the truth, I’m going to do it.

“Walter Fayer and John Dimos,” I said after a pregnant pause. “Fayer was guilty of murdering three prostitutes and two children in upper Washington, but his case was mishandled and he ended up walking. Dimos murdered his mother and made it look like an accident. He inherited her estate, which he liquidated to fund a child trafficking ring.”

I felt the healing pause as Alice and Ida’s attention focused on my story.

“I used Fayer for the first half of the payment, then broke his knees and fingers with a hammer to make it harder to get up to his old habits,” I noted that my usually flippant voice was flat and without emotion as I related my tale. “It was my hope that he’d develop a crippling case of arthritis. Dimos I did much the same to, which formed a pattern for the Washington State police to track. It made my life difficult for a while until they determined my trail went cold.

“After that I stopped dispensing physical punishments and simply made anonymous calls to detectives who worked the cases of the murderers I found, pointing them to new evidence I’d uncovered. Sometimes it worked, often it didn’t.”

Alice has resumed the healing, making it harder for me to focus.

“How did you know they were guilty?” Ida asked.

“Psychometry,” I responded. “I can turn it off and on.”

“What?” Ida blinked.

“You ever see Vibes?” I asked, getting a shaking head in reply. “You should. Cindi Lauper, Jeff Goldblum and Peter Falk. Great flick. Anyway, I can read the history of things I touch with my hands.

“So I’d go to a police station, bribe the cop in charge of the evidence storage for cold cases and just run my hands through them. After a while I had enough magic and other tricks that I’d just break into the place myself.”

I can see Ida was getting angrier the more I spoke. “And you use this, to, to do what? Get more powerful? When will it be enough?”

“I was—I am scared. I did all that to avoid the very situation we find ourselves in,” I replied, surprised at how calm I sounded. I must be really tired. “Your bosses are here to find me and sacrifice me to a very specific demon, one I’ve tangled with before.”

“Who?” Alice asked, moving her hand from my chest my side. A fresh wave of pain flowed from it as I felt my bones move.

“The Doorman,” I said through a grunt.

“The fucking Doorman?” Alice all but shouted, though she had the presence of mind to continue healing. Man, I’m going to have to learn this spell. “You met the Doorman and lived?”

“Who is the Doorman?” Ida asked.

“The classic Boogeyman,” I supplied when Alice didn’t. “They call him that because if he’s hunting you, he’ll be behind every door. This is true for the most part.”

“For the most part?” Alice prompted.

“He likes to take his time with his meals,” I said, emotion finally moving into my voice. “The only reason I’m alive is because he took his time eating my friends.”

“What happened?” Ida asked. Her expression was closed, hard to read.

I started to sigh but aborted it as it sent a lance of pain through my side. “I learned magic in college,” I said. “My best friend got a girlfriend that was way into Wicca and anything supernatural and stumbled onto an honest to God ritual book in an estate sale. We started summoning up lesser beings from what the book titled ‘Beyond the Veil’ and traded with them for more magical knowledge.”

“During our third semester, Kathy got a bug up her ass about summoning something from the back of the book. The book warned against contacting the thing, but the book warned against contacting everything. It was also in Latin and we were all pretty shitty with our translations. Whatever the case, by the end of the semester she wore us down and we ended up summoning the Doorman.”

Suddenly Alice’s spell sent a rush of soothing warmth through me and I looked down to see that, aside from some pale flesh where my spells had been pasted and dried blood, I was whole. Alice helped me sit up and passed me a bottle of water, which I drained.

“We thought we were being clever,” I continued, my eyes focusing on the past. “We tripled the protections, double and triple checked everything. John even brought his dad’s old Remington in case it got loose.” I barked out a bitter laugh.

I noted, idly, that tears were gathering in my eyes. “None of it mattered. We were putting up mosquito netting to catch a tiger. He… It. It appeared and…

“You have to understand,” I said, looking up and meeting their eyes. “It’s just an empty suit. Pinstripe, gray, three piece suit. It’s the lamest fucking monster. But when you’re in the room with it, you can feel your insignificance. This thing has watched more worlds come and go, seen the heat death of countless universes. It’s what it does when it’s bored. And here we are, seven stupid kids thinking we could cage it?”

I took a deep, shuddering breath.

“John died first,” I continued. “He didn’t even wait for the Doorman to cross the circles. He took one look at it, knew it was pure evil, and decided it needed to die. Too bad bullets might as well be marshmallows. Bullets slapped into that suit like… I still remember the sound it made. It didn’t sound like metal hitting cloth, or a bullet proof vest. It sounded like when you throw a small rock into a puddle. The Doorman seemed to watch John with some amusement until he ran out of bullets then it just… stepped through our wards. You could hear them tearing. Then it reached up with it’s empty sleeve, and the gun, John’s arm and then John’s face just fell apart. Like it was both rotting and exploding in slow motion.”

My voice was shaking, the words coming out in a rush. “Ryan rushed it with a bat while Jennifer started to cast a spell. I had no idea she could do that, at the time. She’d never mentioned piecing together a combat spell. She yelled for Ryan to get out of the way, but when he died she didn’t hesitate to finish the spell, sending a wedge of white-hot fire at the thing. Didn’t matter. She died.

“Mary and Kathy grabbed Patt and me and hauled us out of there,” I was genuinely weeping now, barely able to speak. “That’s when we learned why it was called the Doorman. It was just behind every door. We couldn’t get away. When we tried to not open any doors, it got impatient and opened the one nearest us. Patt was the next to go. Then Kathy. Just Mary and me left.

“Mary—“ I suppressed a sob. “Mary figured it out. While it was—it was eating K-Kathy, we needed to get to a field, a big open space. We needed to create a new circle, the one we don’t usually use because of how complicated it was, and wait for dawn.”

I glanced up at Ida, whose expression was one mixed of horror and sympathy. “Dawn is magically significant event,” I explained, wiping my nose with the back of my hand. “When you make a spell that lasts for more than one day, you gotta do s-special shit to make it survive dawn. We figured t-the Doorman couldn’t stick around past dawn or crazy demons would be more prevalent, you know?”

“We made it to the park, and I started spray painting the ward. It was sloppy and not being done fast enough. Mary knew it. She walked away and stood in the entrance of some building across the street, near the door. I-I tried to get her to come to the circle but she told me to continue drawing, and-and…” I sniffed and made my voice go into a higher register. “’If you fucking die I’m going to find you and kick your fucking ass! Don’t make me do this for nothing!’”

I was silent for a while, reliving that horrible moment. How Mary had shoved me back and slapped me when I tried to stop her. She was shit at wards, we both knew it. I’d only have a chance to live if I had more time.

Ida shifting brought be back. “I saw how… the Doorman eats. It prefers its food to be alive. I—“

I took a deep breath.

“When it’s chasing you, it kinda moves at a sedate pace,” I said. “But it can be fast when it wants to. Something about my circle must have gone right because he suddenly dropped what was left of Mary and charged me, crossing the hundred feet in an instant. I got the final rune down and the protection came up right in time to cut off whatever it calls a hand. A bit of cuff and a single cuff link.”

A small, sadistic smile ghosted across my face. “I heard that fucker scream that night,” my expression fell. “for most of the night, in fact. It promised me all sorts of horrors.

“Nobody came out to check out the screams,” I continued. “Mary made a hell of a lot of noise and the Doorman kept ranting at me in a voice that was not human. You’d think someone would come out. But no one did, and then dawn came, and the fucker was still screaming at me.”

I ran a clawed hand through my hair, feeling it snag on a few tangled. “I couldn’t keep it up forever, either. The circle was different because it needed to be powered by my magic. In desperation, I made a smaller summoning circle in the one I had already made. I called the Orphan.”

I took, a deep, shaking breath before continuing. “Unlike the Doorman, we’d called the Orphan before. The Orphan was great practice because he responds 50% of the time and isn’t dangerous from any account I’ve ever been able to dig up on him. The only problem is that unless you have something truly unique to trade him, he’s useless. But I figured I finally had something that would get his attention.”

“The cuff link,” Alice breathed.

I shot a finger gun at her. “Bingo,” I said. “Oh that pissed him off something fierce. And I got a good deal, too. For the cuff itself I got these—“ I gestured at my hands and feet, covered in shadow stuff. “—and the cuff link I got—“ I focused and made my tentacles phase back into visibility.

Alice recoiled slightly at the sight, her eyes darting from my face to my tentacles with rapid fire quickness. Ida took the transformation with much more aplomb. “And you fought it off?”

I snorted. “Fuck no,” I said. “These—“ I gestured at the tentacles and my empty eyes. “Are just side-effects. The… Okay it’s hard to explain. Basically, if I understand what the Orphan said (and I’m not sure I do), he basically gave me parts of myself from another universe? One where I am not human and what is common knowledge there is like, miracle here. He warned me not to communicate to much with.. him, or me, or it, too much.

“But thoroughly exhausted I asked the other part of me how to get rid of the Doorman and turned my circle into a banishment. The Doorman vanished, but not before telling me my days were numbered. I’ve… been living in fear ever since.”

The ladies were silent for a minute or two. Alice, kneeling next to my cot, staring into the distance. Ida had her arms crossed, her expression closed. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“This is what you meant when you said a fate worse than death,” Ida said at last. “You fear what the Doorman will do.”

I nodded. I had calmed down a bit. “Pretty sure actually injuring him has gotta warrant something worse than a quick death, considering what my friends went through for merely summoning him.”

“I will help you,” Ida said simply. It took me a moment to register her words, and then I felt gears strip in my mind as I tried to formulate a response.

“Thank you,” is what I settled on, trying to convey my confused emotions.

“I mean, we should all help each other,” Alice chimed in. “Yes, we shouldn’t let Colm be sacrificed to the Doorman, but we shouldn’t let the passengers and crew be sacrificed either.”

I blinked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“You didn’t know?” She rocked back on her heels and stood up, stretching her back. “The pirates are planning a mass sacrifice.”

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