Piece by Piece

Seven candles. A connection to the other side. But what emerges comes only in pieces, until it is whole.

PIECE BY PIECE

by Susurrant Horror

PIECE BY PIECE

By Susurrant Horror

Seven candles.

That was the number. Only seven.

Seven to be lit, in a specific fashion: a loop curling in on itself. At a squint in the flickering light, it looked more like a hook.

A hook to capture something from the other side. But only if there were seven.

The words to be uttered were unfamiliar to me, but I had them practised: they only had power amidst the candles. There was something twisty of them, a strange feel in the mouth. They tasted like moist moss and petals. And indeed, those soily smells began to permeate the shadow of the room, in a sickening, invisible bloom.

None had attempted this before. And yet why not – if the ritual was so clear, and so simple?

My tongue splashed over the exotic words and as it did so, the words became a hum. I did not understand those words and never would: they were not of my world. They were from somewhere else: somewhere loamy and beyond.

“It is a strange thing you do,” my companion chided, though there was interest there, too. If I could see him loitering in the dark, I would not fail to see a glinting eye. “And I wonder why you do it?”

I shook my head. The hum vibrated through my body.

I knew the sequence of events: the lore was not forbidden. It had just never been thought.

One candle extinguished with a strange pop, and suddenly the smell was floral. Sickly and unguent.

The creature to be summoned would come in seven parts.

Why seven? It was not a significant number of my world. Perhaps it was a hallowed number elsewhere, in the place beyond.

Smoke curled and dissipated from the now-empty wick, and as the obfuscation drifted, I could see something present that was not there before. A small rock, perhaps.

No.

A tooth.

“You’re calling it over in pieces. It won’t like that.”

I shook my head once more and briefly ceased the dirge in order to respond, seething. “It will be whole in the end. It just needs to come. Be silent.”

The hum grasped me once more – this strange language which flowed out of me as though I had known it all along. It now tasted of light, and there came another pop.

That small fragment of tooth was joined by something else. Something wet, shining slick with the candle-fire.

An eye.

But alive, though separated from whatever whole it had been hewn. The dark pupil rolled across it. I imagined fright. I imagined anger.

But I had to continue.

My companion whistled. “It’s really coming. How very strange. How very new.”

The ritual would not cease: I would not allow it. To bring forth something new – to reverse the usual order of things. It felt as though it should be forbidden, and yet nothing told me that I could not do this.

Seven. Even just the concept of that number smelled foul.

Pop.

The curl of a finger, taut with leathery, bleeding flesh.

Pop.

As the candles extinguished, the darkness seemed to gorge all about us. Upon the smorgasbord slowly being presented to us. And yet it was possible to see the newly manifested nail, almost transparent in the gloaming.

Pop.

A tousle of hair.

This creature was really coming in segments. It was being birthed in agony, by my hand.

I grinned in delight. This was not the way of things, and yet it felt beautiful. I surged with the newness of it.

Pop.

Innards, coated in excrement. Because they were all full of shit, weren’t they?

Pop.

Lips. Smeared into a rubbery paste.

I licked my own with anticipation. My chorus had become a rhapsody of one. My companion could not stop me now, even if he wanted to. But he did not want to.

His claws tapped with his own anticipation from the shadow.

My claws knitted together with excitement.

Pop.

And the summoning was complete. That foul odour was impossible to ignore now: it had rushed in from the other side, from the divide between our worlds. A blight-scent of growing flowers, and salt air, and sun. The natural brimstone of my world had been ousted.

The creature was whole. Bare flesh and panicked eyes – all assembled together.

Its mouth gaped and it whimpered.

My companion cackled with delight. “What a strange thing you have done. And what will you do with your human now?”

In truth, I did not know.

The thing was clearly terrified, and stricken by the shock of it all. After all – why would it not be? Its usual methodology had been reversed: its kind had been summoning my brethren for millennia.

Piece.

By.

Piece.

Wasn’t it time the tables were turned, as the humans might say?

The scriptures relating to Earth had been difficult to parse, such that I had the barest and most rudimentary understanding of that language. Certainly, the hum of the invocation had been entirely alien to me. But as the thing sat here and whimpered, I could understand some small snatches of its shock.

“Please,” I believe that it begged. “What are you? How am I here? Am I dreaming?”

I found myself cackling too.

I would respond, to the extent that I could. And yet my tongue, forked and coarse as it was, found the phonemes difficult. “I have brought you here. And you are mine.”

In a surge of something wearing the shape of empathy, I compared my own shadowy voice to this thing’s, and tried to understand how it might hear me. Raspier, perhaps. The human shuddered and its eyes darted frantically from the dark places to my cloven hooves.

I tried once more. Not to soothe, really. But to make it understand. “It’s not so nice, is it?”