By Kyle Toucher
Loomis feared a long drive to Devil’s Flats―the sandstorm half the problem, Katija’s 1997 Nissan the other.
“This rattling crate scares the hell out of me, Loomis,” Katija said as she dropped the trunk lid over a package prepped for travel in bubble wrap and duct tape. “Shot bearings, tires bald as Mr. Clean. Forget about AC, I run the heater to take the strain off the blown-out thermostat. One headlight out. She’s a cyclops.”
Loomis silently kicked himself for not snagging a rental, but the last thing he needed was a paper trail or GPS footprint. Transport of a high-value package in a nondescript vehicle seemed like a wise decision at the time, but with the five a.m. deadline in Devil’s Flat fast approaching, Loomis felt a pang of regret on this particular dice roll.
“Showtime at seven-eighteen, duration four minutes,” he said. “If we don’t hit the road now, we’re screwed. Your sister is good to go, she confirmed, yeah?”
Katija leaned against the trunk and wiggled the taillight’s housing back into place. “Minerva’s on top of it. A pyramid of sixteen by eight cubits, as requested.”
“Good.”
“She seemed impressed you requested cubits.”
“The Old Rules,” Loomis said as he laid the scuffed Pelican case on the hood and snapped it open. Set neatly into a nest of pick-and-pluck foam lay an antique from the days before elixirs and alchemists, inquisition and witch-burning.
Wind rose from the east.
Dry. Brittle.
Infernal.
* * *
Minerva’s two trailers had long ago been joined by sheet metal and rivets, slathered with base coat then decorated by hand with symbology not seen since the persecutions in Salem, floating upon vague suggestions of writhing faces and groping hands woven into a technicolor rendering of the Milky Way’s infinite smear. Tucked into the cracked hills behind her conjoined hovels, the ghost of a copper mine rusted in the big Mojave empty, a discarded wreck of leaning structures, abandoned gear, and gouged earth.
After coffee and cigarettes, Minerva slipped into her finest kimono, a scarlet masterpiece when it rolled off the loom, now a vestment suited for secrets and conjuring. Atop her graying fright wig, a sombrero decorated with dangling, jangling bells. A pair of trifocals purchased at RiteAid hung round her neck on a ball chain. Each toenail boasted a different color, eager, it seemed, to flee a pair of well-worn sandals.
She smoothed a palm over a sixteen-cubit beam. For all his risk-taking and brazen guile, Loomis had done his homework. The Old Rules. From the pyramid’s apex hung a rope terminating in a bright blue D-ring, motionless despite the wind. She turned to the horizon, soon the first sliver of dawn would devour the constellations but leave the jewel of Venus unmolested. Time, always tight, assumed its ancient role of enemy, but Miranda had worked under more pressing conditions.
The lowing east wind ushered Katija’s sputtering beater into Minerva’s camp, a stony acre littered with statues born of scrapyards and acetylene torches. Chaise lounges surrounded a circle of river rocks that corralled many a fire, old runes harvested from Shasta and Tahoe, which had warmed both the sensual and primitive, fraternal and ritualistic.
The car wheezed to stop, its single headlight pointed downward like an embarrassed man’s eye.
Loomis, all six foot five of him, unfolded the sub-compact like an origami mantis, a puzzle of limbs crowned by sandy hair left to its own musings. He arched his back, eyes on the wooden frame. After nodding his approval, he fished around in the back seat and raised the Pelican case like a trophy.
“Here it is, finally and for real. And the pyramid looks good, Minerva, nice work.”
“You’re an hour late,” Minerva said. She tossed a thumb over her shoulder. “Loomis, haul that antique over there and get it attached.” A knobby index finger at Katija. “Sissy, pop the trunk, we have two hours of work to cram into less than one.”
Katija slapped the keys on the roof. She chugged from an enormous water bottle like a college kid feeding from a beer-bong.
“Cool your jets,” Katija said. “My nose is filled with sand. Goddamn vents don’t close.”
“No time. The Santa Ana is on a tear, and the sky clock never waits. Mother Sun and Sister Moon dance soon, Sissy.”
Katija sighed and jabbed the key in the lock. The lid opened with a rusty, tired creak.
Through a hole in the bubble wrap Minerva met the destitute stare of a lifeless, cloudy eye.
“Let’s get him prepped.”
* * *
Loomis still could not believe his good fortune. Two years scouring every shitty ooga-booga store, dark web shenanigans, and an entire drama with a corrupt Jakarta antiquities dealer, and he found the bloody thing on Etsy, a man in Bathhurst, New Brunswick, who had no idea what he had―the old bastard thought it a Christmas Tree topper. My grandmother Odessa kept it in her family for generations, he’d emailed as Loomis finalized the sale. There’s several stones the jewelers in Quebec can’t identify. If three thousand is okay with you, we can close the deal tomorrow.
Dropping three grand on Vurdullion was like buying an Aston Martin for a trunk full of beads and candy necklaces, and after countless false starts and one attempt at fraud, there it slept in the frozen north, stored next to inflatable reindeer and plug-in snowmen. The indignity suffered by one of the legendary talismans lost to history did not evade Loomis’ sense of irony, but that’s how these things often unfold. The great lost treasures don’t rest in velvet sepulchers, revered in mysterious underground lairs; they hide cloaked in anonymity, packed into attics next to the unused Thigh Master or leaning in a basement corner nestled among rat turds and garden tools.
Loomis shifted his eyes from the Pelican case to the approaching dawn, where a once in a millennia event awaited the world. In the far away, Hell’s furnace glowed behind shifting, airborne dust. Ineffable shapes roiled within, dangling upon the precipice of recognition, only to be pulled back into the maelstrom.
Uncanny, unprecedented conditions.
“Except for that goddamn sandstorm.”
* * *
Mathias Őbbernuȭght dropped dead mid-séance. His acolytes, the story goes, well-educated on the dangers of perishing while cocooned in a psychic trance, acted immediately. Within three hours, Őbbernuȭght, still clad in silk pajamas and scarlet brocade robe, occupied a hastily slapped together plywood box. After stuffing Őbbernuȭght’s make-shift coffin with garlic bulbs and nailing it shut, they hauled it to an accomplice at Forest Lawn in Glendale, who buried it in an unsold lot at a depth of twelve feet.
That was 1957.
Őbbernuȭght and others like him, their names faded into history save for the obsessive interests of a few scattered amateur conjurers, students of the profane and forbidden, or hustlers looking to gain an edge in the con game or an angle to glamour rich, desperate widows.
Loomis, on the other hand, the names of the Master Mediums were known to him like pop stars. He’d acquired a mad fascination for a Ouija board he’d stolen from a neighbor’s garage sale in 2015, and by the time he dropped out of high school his collection of occult books, whether focused upon practice or history, filled his cramped bedroom.
Expulsion from his parent’s house became inevitable, followed by hopeful excursions to psychics and fortune tellers, mystic healers, and hippie crystal cults. Very few of these meetings bore useful fruit, but the presence of even low-level practitioners set his mind aflame. In 2019, after failing to find true kinship with many of these types―most of whom turned out to be either too scatterbrained or on the make―Loomis encountered Katija and her much older sister Minerva in an occult bookshop in Burbank. After a few minutes of lively chit-chat they headed to Ernie’s Taco House on Lankershim, famous for its Cadillac margaritas. Low light, dark wood, and red vinyl booths, the bar a relic from the days of three martini lunches and movie deals made on blow. As lunch turned into happy hour, Loomis hoped he’d found his tribe.
“I see ambition,” Minerva said, peering over her glasses. As Katija nudged closer to Loomis, the waiter brought another round. “Only the steadfast attain real power. There were true mediums here in the LA area all through the big spiritualism movement, way back in the Houdini days. Sure, Houdini may have been taken in by a bevy of hustlers, but beneath…below…the real activity swelled here like you wouldn’t believe. The stories are pretty eye-opening. An entire underworld. People not to be trifled with.”
“I know about that,” Loomis said. “Old players like Gustav Ollman and other movie execs.”
Minerva shook her head. “Mediums, Loomis, not servants. Second only to Magicians. The ones people like Ollman and Osterheimer feared.”
Katija set her hand on Loomis’ thigh. He jumped as she gave it a soft, playful squeeze.
“A Master Medium. Here, in Burbank, all places. You know who I’m referring to?”
Loomis nodded. “Őbbernuȭght.”
Minerva leaned in and brushed Loomis’ hair from his eyes. “You’re well studied. What do you know about him?”
Loomis raised one eyebrow. “Bits other than that wild story around his death. Rumor has it he’s buried in Glendale.”
“Then we’ll have to remedy that. Is that what you want my friend, to be a Magician?”
Loomis did not break eye contact with Minerva, even as Katija’s hand grew bold in exploration.
“I do.”
Minerva nodded and said, “Then be prepared to take bold steps.”
“I believe I am.”
She waved for the check. “Then bold steps it is. Katija and I will help you take them.”
“That sounds exciting,” Loomis said, turning to meet Katija’s gaze. Her brown eyes swam in her skull like glowing marbles, her lips cheery red even after several encounters with a margarita glass.
“Oh it will be,” Katija purred.
* * *
When exhumed by Loomis and Katija, Őbbernuȭght’s body was desiccated but not decayed, eyes pinned open as if witness to the end of all things, mouth tugged into a grimace brought by cardiac arrest. Both hands had curled into terrible root burls, fingers gnarled, and nails peeling like lemon rinds. Beneath that ruin, wood splinters.
Those acolytes had acted impulsively.
“Katija, you’re not going to believe this.”
Matthias Őbbernuȭght indeed survived séance, coronary, and burial, but left a message for a future disciple. One word had been carved into the coffin lid in a scrawl of manic scratches and decades-old blood.
Vurdullion.
And Loomis’ search began.
He spent the better part of the first month in his apartment, a larger, smokier version of his teenage bedroom with shelves crammed to capacity, books and pamphlets stacked into leaning Jenga skyscrapers. Manhattan rendered in witchery and alchemy.
He studied into the small hours and resorted more than once to psilocybin microdosing in the hope of a mental breakthrough. That method bore little fruit, although he did relive the painful cancer death of his beloved childhood beagle, Mr. Scrumptious. Psychedelics abandoned, he relied on caffeine and nicotine, long nights, and strung-out mornings.
On an unpleasant August evening, the kind in which the sidewalk stays warm until ten PM, Loomis lay atop of his bed with a cigarette in one hand and a rare English translation of Marceau Benoit’s 1745 autobiography En Compagnie des Sorcières in the other.
One sentence caught his eye.
“Genevieve, flushed scarlet by orgasm and wine, graduated from lascivious to drunk, swaying like the mighty pendulum Vurdullion, her jewels as fine as Luchesse’s glimmering masterpiece, her magic no match for its unearthly capabilities.”
“A pendulum?” Loomis said, straightening against the pillows, cigarette forgotten. “Vurdullion is a goddamn pendulum?”
He recalled the massive Foucault Pendulum in the Griffith Observatory, its motion in tandem with the heartbeat of the earth, nudged by electromagnetism and the aether. He’d watched it for an hour, hypnotized, in a way, by its unaltering rhythm.
Why would a man buried alive want with a pendulum?
Could a pendulum perform some sort of supernatural miracle? And if so, what occurs?
With his target acquired, Loomis expanded his research. His own library, respectable for one with very little resources and even fewer connections, had been exhausted. Low on cash but high on ambition, he booked a cheap, agonizing layover flight to Boston, rented a shitbox Kia, and spent two and a half weeks crashing as many university libraries as possible. The Ivy League schools refused to give him the time of day, the state colleges shrugged but offered zero assistance. However, Georgetown University, smack dab in the magic circle of the Beltway, surprisingly enough, seemed eager to accommodate.
“We entertain very few requests for deep occult research,” an assistant librarian, a crowbar of a woman named Euclid Ford, said and she waved Loomis into a Riggs Library basement measured in acres. “Only a portion of it has been scanned into the microfilm spools, even less into our cloud server. This is a Jesuit institution, Mr. Loomis. Deep pockets and even deeper archives. If there’s something you want short of some arcane Vatican exclusive, it is likely here―not in the theological library as most assume.”
Loomis found himself gobsmacked by the sheer scale of the place, a labyrinth of cast iron shelves and hidden alcoves. The true antiquities had been sequestered in an ISO-6 clean room, an angle of document preservation he’d never considered. Though soon overwhelmed and overworked, he settled into a rhythm. An unaltering rhythm.
On day four, Loomis tasted paydirt, and not from a slog through a Medieval epistle or a series of woodcuts rife with horned imps offering pendulums to wide-eyed sorcerers. Instead, it had been laid out in everyday English, written, no less, in the year of his mother’s birth.
The stars drag the aether through the cosmos, Loomis read in Candace Fruilia’s 1963 history of influential psychic mediums, The Elevated Art.
… Upon the occlusion of our Mother Star by its silent sister Luna, fissures between here and Elsewhere allow, for a sliver of time, the immeasurable and the miraculous …what is required of us is a lens to focus that power, a tool to assist the clumsy fingers of men in the feeding of their greedy will. Pietro Luchesse, aided by the Shamash Sisterhood, a secret splinter sect of Syriac Orthodox women, crafted such a device in twelfth-century Genoa … powerful mediums such as Craine Mauldin, Francesca Duvalier, Mathias Őbbernuȭght, and Gregor Suppuolos were rumored obsessed in unearthing Luchesse’s Master Pendulum … its true benefactors, The Shadowless, imbued Vurdullion with overwhelming power in this world and the next and will seek its return upon use …
The connection, plain as day and twice as bright.
“So an eclipse is essential to Vurdullion’s workings,” Loomis muttered as he drained the last of his thermos. “And Őbbernuȭght knew it.”
A pendulum, Loomis learned, did not limit its movement in a straight line. It completed an arc as it traveled, steered by Earth’s great magnetic, electric, core. With an unparalleled celestial event imminent―the sun in eclipse as it broke the horizon―its anomalous influence on the Earth’s magnetic boundaries had yet to be measured, but, as further Georgetown research revealed, had long been revered by magicians worldwide. The staggering cosmic power of this rare sunrise alignment modified Vurdullion’s unique circle of precession in such a way the Master Pendulum’s formidable supernatural workings pierced reality’s soft membrane.
To open doors.
To speak to the dead.
* * *
Now, Őbbernuȭght lay upon a bed of bubble wrap, the Master Medium painted in interlocking characters from tongues not spoken on Earth since the time of Christ. The sandstorm whistled its warning through nostrils wrenched so wide he’d become a hideous woodwind instrument. Above hung Vurdullion, the Master Pendulum, an oeuvre of occult genius rendered in crystal and silver, studded in emerald, ruby, and sapphire. Immune to the wind. A collision of ages, here, in Devil’s Flats.
Scorching the horizon, the eclipse’s boiling corona crested the eastern hills. Beneath, the sandstorm roiled, a dust cloud now home to the colossal bolt of shadow descending from the broken clouds.
Minerva said, “Loomis, this is it.”
Loomis wrapped Vurdullion in his fingers. Weight greater than its appearance suggested, surface thrumming with the sun’s electric pulse, the Master Pendulum ached to do its work. With the writings interpreted correctly and the preparations accurate, Loomis’ first attempt at necromancy was poised to make occult history. To speak to a resurrected Matthias Őbbernuȭght, hear his tales of Elsewhere, and mine purgatory for its profound, dark truth proved a lure too savory to ignore. All pointing to this moment, the ultimate risk, with a novice at the helm of a battleship.
Still, Loomis hesitated. “What if we’re wrong?” He thought of that lunch, now far in his rear-view but still crystal clear. Minerva juicing him up with tequila, Katija’s immediate attraction to him. Three weeks later he and Katija dug up Őbbernuȭght.
Is that what you want my friend, to be a Magician?
Katija, shooting video with her tablet, turned to her sister, whose scowl did not go unnoticed. “What the hell does he mean?”
Minerva waved Katija off and pointed a finger at the fledgling Magician. “Doubt compounds pressure. Perform the ritual as rehearsed, as this alignment won’t happen again for another eighteen-hundred years. Earn your place. Do the work.”
To the east, oh how glorious the Mother Star in her eclipsed ascension, the edge of the moon now gorging itself on a three quarters of her regal glare, blotting it out like the Devil’s hand over a child’s eyes.
The power. The scale.
Still, doubt.
“What about the Shadowless?” Loomis’ voice pinched at the word Shadowless. “If they come, I can’t control that.”
“Remember what I said about risk.”
The wind brayed infernal, the throat of a beast released for this moment alone blooming in cauliflower glory. Backlit by the eclipse, the sandstorm billowed, powered by supreme celestial force. With every act of Magic―a stolen art―comes an attempt to stop it from those from whom it had been taken. The Shadowless, lunatic marauders of the astral, would certainly show with an artifact such as Vurdullion in play.
Katija, her lens now on Loomis, shivered, though the heat pressed unbearably. His shirt flapped, hair pushed back from his brow in a snarl of twisted cords. The hollows of his cheeks appeared more prominent, and near his eyes the crags of a much older man appeared. When Loomis crawled into her car, he’d been clean shaven. Now his face bloomed rugged with salt-and-pepper stubble. Time, awry. He’d aged twenty years in as many seconds.
“Don’t look at the storm,” Minerva said, raising her voice above the fray. The sleigh bell chorus from her sombrero never reached Loomis’ ears. The wind swallowed everything. Not far from the Siamese twin trailers, junkyard statues teetered. A chaise lounge rolled across the dirt like a drunk in a frontier town. A pack of coyote yipped and screeched. “Keep your eyes on the pendulum, work through the Sirocco. Sent by Them.”
Loomis lifted his hand from the pendulum.
The ancients built massive temples in service to the sun, aligning structures built to glorify its rise and fall, documenting the majestic clockwork of the stars. Minerva’s witch-hovel claimed no difference in attitude―poverty its only inhibitor. The sun, now fully eclipsed, rose glaring and accusatory at the center line of her conjoined trailers, a mammoth ring of light so incomprehensibly huge it defied logic, setting her entire camp awash in bright angry gold and soft lullaby purple. She gasped at the beauty of it, fingertips to her lips.
The moon nevertheless performed its sworn duty between Sun and Earth. The edges growled in a corona thousands of miles long, primordial fire blast into the cosmos. The eclipse crested the hills, shrink-wrapping the world in its violet caul. The shift, that bend in primal forces brought only by this once in a millennia event, pushed the sandstorm toward them, a roaring monster born of wind and earth, a sneering, howling commune of mad things from stars long gone. A shape Minerva didn’t want to know about pushed through the fray―an eye, a ugly, accusatory eye―and then it was gone.
Sirocco to some. Santana to others. Shadowless to all.
Glittering Vurdullion swung in a flawless arc, tooled centuries ago for this very morning. Aberration in its precession soon became evident, and by the time the Master Pendulum passed Őbbernuȭght’s body a seventh time, its path had warped into a rattling S-shape.
“Now!” Minerva shouted above the wind. “Now, Loomis!”
Loomis stared directly into the eclipse’s eye, uttering verses found only in volumes thought lost or burned. The words poured from his lips like the whispers of a lover. True and effortless, an incantation shoved so far down history’s hole, it lay mired in obscurity.
The Sirocco howled in that dungeon voice, great roiling blossoms ripping through the copper mine behind Minerva’s camp. A ghost mill rusting since 1904 blew apart like magician’s flash paper, the ancient frame of a conveyor belt bent in terrible, dystrophic spasms. Cacophonous and harboring a tornado’s will, the Shadowless rushed toward them with a mighty desert to fuel their fury. The first glimpse of a face, inhuman and eternal, appeared in the tumbling dust and rubble, followed by a claw corkscrewing from the roiling debris in a magnificent display of ire. In the distance, mammoth vertebrae fashioned serpentine from tons of rushing desert soil curled upward from the Sirocco.
At the sight of it, Loomis’ voice became wraith-like, his utterances weak and frail. As summoning came to a close, his confidence drained through the holes his collapsing expression bored into the face of a much older man.
“Loomis!” Minerva screamed. “Obey the Old Rules! Finish the fucking job!”
Katija struggled to keep the tablet steady. She kept Loomis and Őbbernuȭght in frame as he shook failure from his bones. Vurdullion swept past. Here, now, then, a kaleidoscope off-kilter in the innards of a clock gone mad. Loomis raised his now stick-thin arms and wrinkled hands, cupped his mouth, and screamed one last command over the titan roar of the sandstorm.
“O dei immortali! Converte dorsum tuum in vacuum sine nomine et iterum respira!”
* * *
Őbbernuȭght drew breath.
His corpse wheezed hideous. Through a sandpaper tunnel stuffed with fallen leaves, the Master Medium drew air from one world into another. His brittle chest heaved, silk pajamas and smoking jacket fluttering.
The sandstorm, now a behemoth of snarling faces with eyes wide as eighteen-wheelers, closed in, and from Őbbernuȭght’s nostrils its unnatural, lowing voice brayed.
ƉӉŰȞȐЦЦЦՄӉ…
A stunned Loomis stared slack-jawed at the husk at his feet. A nightmare gasping its way into the flesh. Skin and sinew, bound to both sand and sun.
Őbbernuȭght sprang up in a scrawny L-shape like a B-movie vampire, Vurdullion’s razor tip barely missing his liver-spotted pate. His skin, adorned in a tapestry of occult symbols rendered crude, ancient, and ugly, shone pale beneath the eclipse. Eyes which had been little more than cloudy marbles now blazed like fierce diamonds, and Katija trembled at the sight of them, knowing, in her gut, in her womb, that the trance that had felled this man resumed where it had left off sixty-seven years ago. The door they’d opened had been ripped off its hinges, aging Loomis to near unrecognizable while dragging a dead conjurer from the pyres of Elsewhere. Impossible, but it was so.
“Vurdullion,” Őbbernuȭght croaked, lifting his eyes to the marvel of the rising eclipse, a terrifying furnace of Creation and the molten sentence of Hell. He raised his hand, fingers unable to respond, broken from the message he’d carved in his coffin. He examined them with grim fascination, reading, it seemed, the arcane language scrawled upon his parchment skin. For the slightest moment, a carnivore grin displayed his long, brown teeth.
“Who ends my internment?” Őbbernuȭght’s tongue, a slab of freeze-dried muscle, flicked snake-like at Loomis. The croaking Nordic accent drove Loomis’ skin to seek his bones like shrink wrap. “I taste fealty crumbling in regret. You walk unprepared in stony lands, boy. Tell me. Magician or bungler?”
Darkness gripped Devil’s Flats in the eclipse’s final minute of totality. Loomis realized he had never conquered his fear of night and the creatures that stalked it―especially if they looked like Mathias Őbbernuȭght. This was no puppet to be played with, not a prop painted by a Hollywood production designer. Őbbernuȭght was the resuscitated dead, a cruel violator in life and only more so now he’d been plucked from damnation. Those fuming eyes, that skin smothered in the Devil’s handwriting. So awful and so, so real. The dream of necromancy finally realized and crushed by hollow, brittle regret.
My God, what have I done?
Katija, though she ached to run, obedience to her sister kept her shooting. Her screen displayed miracles, here in the run-down hovel occupied by ambitious, manipulative Minerva. Nothing like this had ever been captured on video, and if she made it out of this alive, she’d broom Loomis and Minerva so fast it’d make their heads spin. TMZ paid real money for footage this goddamn crazy.
“Answer me, boy.”
Őbbernuȭght’s voice penetrated Loomis like father’s reprimand. That desiccated face, adorned in filthy symbols, sucked the life out of him as it demanded answers.
Loomis knew: for Őbbernuȭght to regain his foothold in the world required not only Vurdullion, but the life force of a dupe too ambitious to realize he’d been conned.
Loomis wiped his fingers over his face. A new terrain, frail and gaunt, wrinkled and coarse with several weeks of beard growth. Never meet your heroes, he’d heard a friend say after meeting an arrogant rock star. You’ll always come up short.
“Who are you?” Őbbernuȭght demanded.
“He is Theodore Loomis, your Excellency,” Minerva prattled. “Learned and devoted, an apprentice no more―”
“Silence!”
Minerva crumpled like a battered wife, batting away her sombrero as the wind pressed it into her face.
“I ask the conjurer, not the carnival card reader.”
A half mile distant lashed a colossal bullwhip of vertebrae, the mighty tail of a sand-born giant, dragging with it the remnants of the shattered copper mine. It flung the immense nuisance away with brutal dismissal.
“Witness their arrival. Relentless and stupendous. The Shadowless claim Their own. Vurdullion and the Fool.”
With a speed astounding for a dead man, Őbbernuȭght snatched Vurdullion as it passed. Bejeweled and broiling, the Master Pendulum set his broken fingers alight, smoldering and reeking. A fever-light emanated from the pendulum, the exact hue, Loomis noticed, as the eclipse’s corona. Smoke twisted between Őbbernuȭght’s fingers with a crispy hissing noise.
“A wise man would have buried Vurdullion with me,” Őbbernuȭght said in his windblown scarecrow voice. He leaned forward. The hinge of his jaw loosened, amplifying the dreadful lowing pouring from his nostrils. He brought Vurdullion close as if to take a bite from it and the smoke sought solace. Utterly resistant to the wind, tendrils of it burrowed into his nose, the remainder reaming his mouth. The medium fed, his corpse-face an odd paradox of pleasure and suspicion, as he kept one eye on the raving mass of the Sirocco, the other on the Loomis―who had become a timid, sway-backed crone in the presence of greatness.
Seconds from storm impact, even less until the moon cleared the sun. Dawn swelled in the desert sky. Light returned to the world, but the damage had been done.
Őbbernuȭght smoke through a swirl of smoke. Filaments curled and eddied around his gnarled hands, the outcropping of his chin, glorious Vurdullion, and the masterless apprentice.
“My revival is your burial, my rescue the first step in the disemboweling of your bloated, bloody world. You opened a Gate through which we will all pour through.”
A now eighty-year-old Loomis would not crow that he’d raised the dead, as the dead remained flat for reasons beyond vanity and ambition. The Old Rules. His plan to interrogate the Master Medium, command him to answer questions, harvest the knowledge of the next world, now seemed like the errand of a young fool, an idiot led by hubris and guile. Instead, Loomis thought of the stolen Ouija board, the hustlers and their tarot cards, and how cleverly Katija and Minerva cornered him in that Burbank bookstore. Booze and beguiling. Risks and recklessness. Long nights and ludicrous actions.
“I was the mark?”
“All of you.”
Loomis looked straight into Katija’s lens. Though aged, his eyes told the story of a man in his prime trapped in an old man’s prison, each brick regret and floundered youth.
Amid the astonishing, Katija knew she’d captured the moment of his revelation.
Loomis pointed a creaking index finger at the lens then turned to Katija’s sister like a prosecutor eager to make his case.
Loomis and Minerva’s eyes locked.
“She is the criminal you want,” Loomis said.
Őbbernuȭght laughed. Through billowing smoke, the Shadowless brayed their warning.
Twelve seconds of totality remaining. That immense spine, rendered titanic in boiling sand, horsewhipped Minerva’s camp. Talons the size of aircraft reached from the fray and seized the conjoined trailers, pulverizing them.
Desert earth, moving at incredible speed, bored into a stunned Minerva, shredding kimono and flesh. Stripped to bleeding bones, the vortex seized her.
Katija. Too little, too late. She dropped the tablet and stumbled back, but the impact from the cyclone of her sister’s bones, now hideous wind chimes ringing at terminal velocity, tore her to pieces.
“I thought I’d followed the Old Rules, I thought―”
“Vurdullion is Old Rules, boy. The Shadowless have found it.”
Loomis burst into a vapor of flaming blood.
“And you.”
* * *
Kyle Toucher is the author of the novel Live Wire and the collection The Medusa Psalms: Welcome to Wal-
purgis County, both from Crystal Lake Publishing. Other works include the novellas Life Returns and Southpaw, plus appearances in the anthologies Dead Letters: Episodes of Epistolary Horror, To Hell and Back, and Halloween Horror Volume 3. He is a two-time Emmy Award-winning visual effects artist, a musician with old school punk rock street cred, and also writes under the name Mason Chaine. Further atrocities await.
* * *
Gnarly.
A lot packed in a small space without feeling rushed. Nice and weird!