Published at 8th of March 2024 7:45 am

Book 2, Chapter 29

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

Ten minutes later Alice went to go flag Tony down. We didn’t want to have a record of us giving directions to our current address so Alice had used a messenger spell to give him directions but because of the nature of the spell, couldn’t give the exact address. It was a weird telepathy spell I couldn’t begin to understand, so I took her word for it. The result was that Alice needed to go to the main road so he didn’t miss us.

My curiosity got the better of me and I took a moment to peek into the guest house with Bogo on my tail; it was much worse than I could have imagined. Ida loves this show called Trueblood, and we watched a few episodes together over Discord. I bring this up because when a vampire dies on that show, they turn into a big pile of sinewy blood. The main room of the guest house looked like… five vampires had exploded. Did the magic that made the cultist explode give him more fucking blood? I quickly wiped down the doorknob and closed the door. Or, I tried to. Bogo was trying very hard to get in there. I struggled with the not-dog for a moment before I finally closed the door. “Sorry, boy,” I apologized to the irritated not-dog. Also, sorry, family who lived here. I hope you know a good cleaning service.

I found Ida by the driveway that snaked up for a quarter mile from the main road, two large bags carrying all the crap we managed to take from my car before abandoning it. Dammit, now I will have to get another car when this is over. Should I splurge and get a new car? I’d have to do a bunch of back-channel shit to make sure I could buy it under an assumed identity. (While I was thinking about car possibilities, Bogo went over to Ida and begged for pets. He got pets.)

Or maybe not? I’m not really hiding anymore. My folks (or, at least my mom) know my new name, and I have actual friends again… Keeping up the cloak and dagger shit will be pointless with these new points of contact in my life. “Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.” The old saying says a lot about the nature of information security. The more people know a thing, the more difficult it is to keep it from spreading.

Also, it’s not like I can hide from the assholes who are looking for me.

I told Ida I’d be right back and went into the house, checking doors until I found one that went to the garage. Luckily the owner seemed to be a fixer-upper kind of person as I found a tool rack and a work bench. The center of the room was dominated by an engine hanging from a ceiling-mounted winch that was partly assembled (disassembled?). The walls were lined with standing metal shelving, the whole place giving the impression of someone who spends time here to relax rather than to work. Perfect. I started to look around.

I needed to finish what I was doing pretty quickly, as I didn’t know if Tony was thinking along the lines of Mama Maria and didn’t want him out there yelling at Alice while I was dicking around in the garage.

The last time I had cast the Incognito spell I’d rushed it out on a piece of vellum that I’d glued to my chest (or was it my neck? No, the neck one was the mental defense ward… right? Jesus, I wasn’t thinking clearly then.) with resin. Which, let me tell you: Don’t do that. I don’t know if there are resins that are safe to touch with human skin, but the one I used certainly wasn't. If I hadn’t beefed up my natural healing I’d still have a nasty scar as evidence of how bad of an idea it is.

“Okay, so I need a base for the spell,” I muttered as I began to scan the tool rack shelves for something to use. I found a soldering iron and plugged it into the wall outlet while I continued my search. After a bit I found some paint cans and, shoving those aside, found what I was looking for: a paint scraper. I was about to go digging through for more items when I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be leaving prints and swore, quietly but elaborately. I took the rag out of my back pocket and began to wipe everything I touched down.

Now using my magic to move things, I continued to search until I found a roll of masking tape. I snatched it up with my magic and brought it over to the vice mounted to the workbench. I wrenched the blade of the scraper out of the handle and clipped the… I guess tang? In the vice. I wrapped the blade in masking tape, not caring so much for neatness so long as the whole piece of metal was covered. I tested the soldering iron to see if it heated up and… it hadn’t. I mean, it was getting warm, but it was less than a minute since I plugged it in. I made a frustrated noise and went back outside to see if Tony arrived.

“What are you doing?” Ida asked when I popped my head out.

“In the house?” She nodded. “Making a protective spell.”

“The one that cuts you off from the astral?” She asked with a frown, crossing her arms.

“Yeah,” I said with a nod. “It’s… not a great solution. But it’s the only one I have right now.”

“Can I watch?” She asked.

Up until right now, it had never occurred to me that I might be turned on by my girlfriend being interested in my vocation. I did my best to channel that energy into general excitement. “Yeah! I’m just waiting for the soldering iron to heat up.”

She blinked. “Soldering iron?”

I shrugged and waved for her to follow. “I usually use a diamond engraver of my own design but I left it at home, so I’m MacGyver-ing a new setup.”

When we got to the garage I tested the soldering iron and found it ready. “Fair warning: This is really boring magic,” I told Ida who was standing to my right. “It’s like watching someone do math in their head and just writing down the answers. I’m channeling energies in a series of patterns that overlap with the symbols I’m drawing, which will bind them to the material.”

Ida nodded in understanding. “What’s the tape for?”

“I don’t know if the soldering iron is hot enough to melt this metal,” I said. “Or even score it as fast as I need it. So I’m using the tape and the glue on it to stain the metal with carbon so I don’t have to sit here for a half-hour drawing. There are probably technical terms for what I’m doing but I tend to learn enough to be dangerous and jump in.”

Ida hummed knowingly, arching an eyebrow at me.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said with a wave. I lifted the soldering iron and bent over the vise. “Okay, starting now.”

Having said that, I still took a few moments to arrange the pattern in my head. The scraper blade was an odd shape and I had to rearrange the formula a couple of times before I was satisfied it’d fit on the few inches of metal. Once I had that settled I touched the iron to the scraper and began to draw.

The smell of acrid burning filled the room as I worked, making me breathe through my mouth. After a few seconds, I noticed Ida checking her phone and leaving with a murmur, but I was too engrossed in what I was doing to really pay attention. It was a slower process than I liked. The tape didn’t just burn away instantly like I hoped and I had to work the iron through some of the thicker bits, which slowed down the process. If I was just drawing it wouldn’t be a big deal, but when you were drawing out and imbuing a spell, there was a rhythm you needed to maintain or the magics you were channeling could go haywire. The result could be anything from having to start over to giving yourself a migraine. Drawing out spells is one of my preferred casting methods, however, so I’ve developed a few tricks to handle problems that come up.

Eventually, it was done and I used my magic to remove the tape and glue residue, looking over the finished product for any defects. It wasn’t the prettiest piece of spellwork I’ve done, but it’ll work and that’s the important part. I unclamped it from the vise and lifted it into the air with my magic, letting it cool before I touched it. I wiped down everything I touched, unplugged the soldering iron, and went out to the girls.

When I got outside I found two cars and four people. The first car was Alice’s, as it was a blue Prius. It was smaller than my Honda, which filled me with dread. My poor knees.

The second car was a red Mustang that looked pretty new. I’m not a car person so I couldn’t say what year it was, but if it was older than three I’d eat my hat. Leaning against the hood was Guapo, who gave me a little nod as I walked out.

His mood was reserved, and the cause of that was the argument happening between Alice and Tony next to the Prius. The argument abruptly paused as Tony spotted me.

“You alright, Colm?” Tony asked.

“No,” I said as I squatted by one of the bags Ida had put our stuff in. I found my Mantle and began strapping it on. “My brother’s been kidnapped by a cult that worships the Distiller. But physically I seem—okay.”

I had been thinking since I told the girls about the Distiller. If he really had a presence in this reality, even if it was just a small branch of a cult—this whole thing was bigger than me and my family now. A noise behind me made me turn to see Ida coming out of the main house with a bag filled with bottled water. I sighed.

“Look, man,” Tony began after an awkward moment. “We’re grateful for what you did for Alice last year, but this whole mess you’re caught up in—you should probably contact the Concord.”

Irritation flashed across my face. Not at Tony, but at myself, because I was thinking along the same lines. Alice, who had been quiet since I exited the house, shifted when she saw my expression. “What’s wrong? She asked.

I snapped on the final plate of the Mantle and stood, rolling my shoulders to see if anything needed to be adjusted. I then grabbed the new spell plate that had been floating next to my head with the help of my magic and waved Ida over.

“Can you help me with this?” I asked, ignoring Alice’s question for now.

With Ida’s help, she held the plate over my forearm at an angle as I slotted the paint scraper blade into a groove on the underside of the plate. It wasn’t meant to slot paint scrapers, obviously, but I had designed the Mantle to be slightly modular and I had looked for the paint scraper specifically because it was similar to the pieces of metal I had envisioned when I designed the Mantle. I moved the clasps around with my magic until I felt the spell take hold and cut me off from the astral.

“The Distiller, as I said, is kind of the parent of the Doorman… but that’s a gross oversimplification,” I said as I returned my attention to Alice, giving Ida’s shoulder a squeeze as thanks. “The Distiller is to the Doorman what the Atlantic is to a puddle. The Distiller… Okay, to understand this, you need some background.”

I waved everyone over to a patch of dirt and made a line in the sand about two feet long. I was about to launch into my explanation, but stopped and turned towards Tony and Guapo. “How much about multiverse theory do you know?”

Guapo shrugged and Tony was giving me a searching look. “Almost nothing,” he said. “Gran set a policy decades ago that she was the only outsider we should be contacting. Family who broke the rule were… punished.”

I didn’t like the way he said that. Ignoring those implications, I nodded and gestured at the line in the dirt. “This is our reality,” I said. “People tend to think of other parallel realities as layers on top of one another. There is some truth to that, but the actual scene is a bit more nuanced. To understand it, you have to go back allllll the way to the Big Bang.

“The thing you have to know about the Big Bang is that it is still happening.”

This declaration was met with a bunch of frowns.

“Not here,” I said quickly before anyone could interrupt. “Not here,” I said while pointing at the line representing our universe. “The prevailing theory amongst civilian scientists is that the Big Bang happened and then everything cooled and then bam, you have the universe, right? What is actually happening is the Big Bang is just continually going off, and every bang is a new layer of reality.”

With my magic, I started drawing a series of lines below the one that represented us, each one slightly shorter than the last. When the lines got a few inches across, I drew a simple cartoon bomb to represent the Big Bang.

“Obviously not to scale, as the number of realities are so near infinite as to make an actual distinction pretty much pointless. Each reality—for the sake of the metaphor—“below” our reality is slightly younger, while the realities above—“ I started drawing slightly bigger lines above our line. “Are slightly older. The ones nearest us are so close in age that the difference is negligible, so much so that you have to go really, really far across realities to start finding actual different universes.

“Which is why, when summoning interdimensional beings, having a name of a being to summon is the main thing that makes it possible. If such beings could naturally form in universes as relatively young as our own, we wouldn’t need to look far to find them. Trouble is; they don’t. Or, we haven’t found any. Axt—“ I paused at a hard look from both Tony and Alice. “Er, your gran is from a much older reality. So old and so alien that a brief glimpse she gave me once bestowed enough insight that I was able to formulate a much stabler summoning circle.”

“What does this have to do with the Distiller dude?” Guapo cut in.

“I’m getting to it,” I said, slightly irritated. I opened my mouth but closed it again. This was probably enough information to understand what the Distiller is. “The Distiller is in a very old reality, and… I think it’s the only thing in it?”

“I assume from your tone, that is bad,” Ida said.

“Incredibly,” I said. “Because it made it that way. Not much is really known about the Distiller because of the way it operates. Even its name is just something we call it because it's the closest we can get to an identifier.

“The Distiller distills. It strips away. It wants everything to be its most base form. From what little I’ve been able to read on the thing, it started with its own reality. We don’t know what happened, but what we do know is that any contact with that reality ends in disaster.”

I ran a hand through my hair and took a deep breath. “Another thing we know is that it wants more. It wants to spread its influence to other realities. I’ve only been able to find two or three records of what happens when it manages to directly contact another reality, and they are super fucking spotty. A couple of trends appear though. First, people start going batshit. The first thing the Distiller seems to strip away are things like rationale, or perhaps knowledge. It wants us at our most base, or perhaps it would be better to say as pure instinct, pure reaction. Over the course of a few centuries, society seems to completely disappear and is left with a no man's land that’d make a Post-Apocalypse movie seem pretty tame.”

“The other common trend is that complex substances start to break down,” I said. “I’m not a chemist so a lot of this shit went over my head, but it seems like anything that wasn’t comprised of just one element just started to fall apart. You know, like animals?”

I inhaled deeply through my nose and regarded my little drawing. “If he has cultists here,” I said as I turned toward the group. My mouth opened and closed a few times as I tried to convey just how bad it is. I finally shrugged. “The nuke is in the air. The timer is counting down.”

Tony frowned. “It can’t be that bad,” he said, clearly incredulous.

“I hope it isn’t,” I said. “Jesus, I hope I am wrong. Then it just means Conner was kidnapped by some assholes and we’re all in the clear. But if these assholes really do have a link to the Distiller, it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation.”

“How does a thing like that have a kid?” Alice asked.

I sucked air in between my teeth. “It’s not really a parent/child situation. The Doorman was more of… I guess it was just a lump, er, a cyst that grew a mind and decided to break off from the Distiller,” I fidgeted as I tried to think of a better way to explain. “There’s no real analog in nature for them.”

“So the Doorman is a piece of the Distiller,” Alice said slowly. “A being that is pretty much indestructible, able to teleport infinite distances at will so long as it has a door and has a habit of eating anyone it meets… is a piece of the Distiller?”

I nodded, words seeming to be inadequate. Alice sighed and pulled her phone from her pocket. “I’ll make some calls.”

Bogo chose that moment to shove his head under my hand and to look up at me with sad not-dog eyes. “We’ll be leaving in a few minutes buddy, just hold on a little longer,” I said, giving him thorough ear-petting.

Tony watched his sister walk away with a pensive look. He glanced at Guapo, who shrugged before his gaze settled on me. I returned his gaze coolly, my hand idling stroking Bogo’s ear. Tony muttered something to Guapo who nodded and gave me a little wave before he turned and went back to the Mustang. Tony put his hands in his pockets and took a step closer to me.

“How serious were you about all that shit?” He asked, nodding toward the drawing in the dirt.

“Like a heart attack,” I said. “I know I’m a newbie to all this magic society shit, but if there’s one thing I know; it’s summoning and related fields. The Distiller is bad news.”

Tony regarded me silently for a few moments before he seemed to deflate. “Shit,” he said. “I believe you.”

Guapo got into the Mustang and called out something to Alice in Spanish as he closed the door, getting a wave in return. The engine roared to life and Guapo began to carefully back down the long driveway. I raised my eyebrow at Tony.

“I’m coming along,” he said. “It sounds serious, and you’ll need the extra muscle.”

I smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “Happy to have you.”

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