Chapter Text
In retrospect, it was a stupid idea from the start.
Of course, that was meant to be part of the joke. Summoning a demon? Ridiculous, obviously, but it sounded so inane in its prospect that something compelled them all to open the book and skim it instead of focusing on the lecture Mr. Drako was currently giving.
Chad had found it in one of his signature ‘Dumpster Dives for the Divine’ as he liked to call it. The book was tatty and worn, somehow leathery in its texture and notably ripped and dusty along its cover. It smelled like it had been in a dumpster, that was for sure, but nobody bothered to point it out.
The faded title cover was in Latin, but with the help of google translate, Melissa’s phone offered a version of the title as close to it in English as it could get: Demons: An Inscription Of Summons.
“What dumpster did you find this in, Chad?” Bradley asks, sounding unamused. He flips through the pages lazily, voice hushed so their teacher wouldn't notice. Zack notices smudges and burns tattering the words of a few pages as he skims, entirely clouding the entries of pages here and there. There were a few illustrations Bradley took no time to pause over, flipping through them lazily as though they were the lame artworks they’d find in Science or Social Studies texts. Even so, they catch Zack’s eyes with their demonic looking pointed-tails.
As though he’d caught him staring, Bradley groans in overdramatic disinterest and slams the book closed. Zack flinches, both at the sound and at the notion of getting caught by Mr. Drako, but the class continues as though no sound had emitted from the book at all. Drako seems too invested in his lecture to even notice the sound.
“It was in the communal dumpster for my neighborhood,” Chad answers proudly. “I couldn’t tell who put it there, but it was right at the top, like it was just… waiting for me to find it.”
Bradley rolls his eyes. Chad ignores him, grabbing the large, heavy book from his hands and shoving it at Melissa. “You like destroying things, right? Well, here. You have to destroy this.”
She raises an eyebrow as she turns the book over in her hands. “Destroy it? I thought you just said-”
“Melissa, this is a book written entirely in Latin with detailed instructions as for how to summon a demon, or even demons, and we cannot let this fall into the wrong hands. I mean, if it stays with me, I could be the wrong hands. I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to summon one with this in my possession! Its power is too dangerous. You have to destroy it.”
“Okay, Okay, sheesh,” she frowns, looking at him like he’d grown an extra head. “You do know demons aren’t real, right?”
Chad gasps, looking rather upset. “Please don’t joke about that, Melissa. Of course they are.”
“Just like Mr. Drako is a vampire?” Zack asks in amusement, gesturing at the teacher, who was seemingly deep in a lecturing rant that not even their babble could drag him out of.
“He is. We are not having this argument again. Just- please destroy it, Melissa.”
She blows out a puff of air. “Alright, fine.”
With that, she turns away from the group, casting her eyes back to the chalkboard and tuning back into the lecture. Chad seems satisfied with the answer and leans back in his seat, letting out a sigh of relief, and Bradley scoffs at his relaxed expression without any further objections.
Zack tries to tune back into the lecture after that, but something about the smirk that had crept onto Melissa’s face the moment she’d turned away from Chad lingers in his mind.
“Oh, we’re summoning a demon.”
Zack closes his locker door, eyeing Melissa’s easy-going expression and sensing no hint of sarcasm in her voice. “Are we, now?”
“Yep. I’ve got a great idea. Chad wants me to like, burn the book he gave me or whatever, right? Well… how about we don’t do that. ‘Cause that’s bad for the environment and I can probably sell this for way more than it’s worth once we’re done with it.”
He adjusts his backpack over his back and makes his way out of the school, and Melissa follows, continuing as they walk: “And, well, I was thinking we could pretend to perform a summoning from this book, and I could photoshop a demon into it afterwards to show Chad. We can really freak him out,” she says excitedly. “I mean, it’s not like an actual demon would show up or anything. But we can make it look real, and let's be honest, he’d probably believe us even if it looked really fake.”
“You just wanna monetize this, don’t you?”
“You know me so well. But not just that– it’s that your dad is on a business trip, right? And your mom works night hours? And your brothers are on that overnight field trip to the Ice Rovers, right?”
Zack stops walking. “You wanna do this at my house?”
“We can’t do it at mine,” she shrugs. “My dad is home today. He’s super religious, there’s no way he’d let us do it, not even for a joke.”
It made sense. And honestly, it did sound like a harmless prank. Melissa would no doubt give him a share of the cut from whatever she sold the book for, and Zack’s family was well-off with money but his allowance was limited and he wasn’t one to argue against some extra cash.
Plus, it would be fun to mess with Chad. The guy was nice, but last week he’d tried to convince Zack that his water bottle was haunted by throwing it across the schoolyard in a fit of what Zack had dubbed ‘heroic hysteria’, breaking the lid in the process. Zack didn’t usually pull pranks on others, and he was sure Melissa wasn’t the type to either, but this was just a harmless joke anyway.
Melissa waits expectantly for an answer, like she knows she’s already won. Zack rolls his eyes endearingly.
“Who do you think will hate it more, Chad or Bradley?” he asks, giving in.
“I think they’re both going to hate it in polar opposite ways,” she says smugly as they board the bus to Zack’s house, the book tucked safely away in her backpack, heavier than it should be.
They do it in Zack’s room. He figures his parents don’t go into his room often, so if he somehow manages to mess up the carpet, he could hide the mess for a longer period of time than if they do this out in the open.
Preparing a summoning circle (which was apparently required for a realistic looking summoning) while being instructed by a dumpster book and the near useless help of an infallible translation app takes more work than it has any right to. By the time the circle is as accurate as they could get it, made with chalk over carpet (his little brothers always had some tucked away, and Zack figured it would be easier to vacuum up chalk before his parents got home than it would any other artistic utensil) and with a variety of his mother’s red velvet scented candles, it's already getting late. Melissa finishes lighting the last candle, looking downright smug at their creation, though Zack could already feel himself nodding off. The whole process was meticulous, if you asked him, but Melissa only looked more excited by the second.
“I’m beginning to think you want a demon to show up,” he says lazily, eating a granola bar off to the side as Melissa finishes up.
She laughs. “They aren’t real. But oh, wouldn’t that be cool.”
Zack doesn’t comment. His mom taught him to say nothing at all if nothing nice was left to be said, after all – he didn’t want to crush her weird satanic dream of meeting a demon she didn’t even seem to believe in. Zack was raised agnostic, but Melissa grew up judaist despite following no religion herself. He’s not sure what she thinks about demons in a religious context, but for Zack, all they were were funny little red guys with pointed tails and rakes that he’d find occasionally in pop-up books as a kid. Or, if you were his mother, a term of endearment to call her children when they were acting overly playful. The thought makes him smile, even as Melissa wipes chalk off her hand and looks proudly over their creation.
“Now for the incantation,” she says casually, reaching for the book, and the smile wobbly slides off Zack’s face. It suddenly dawns on him what they're about to do, even for a joke.
“You know how to pronounce the words?” He has to ask.
“Well, no. But no harm in trying to do it right. It doesn’t matter, anyway – nothing is going to show up. This is just for show.”
Zack figures that would make more sense if he was filming and they were planning to show the footage to Chad, but Melissa begins to read without asking him to do anything of the sort, looking excited. He decides to let her have this, keeping quiet as he watches.
Honestly, the Latin words don’t sound entirely awful out of her mouth. He wouldn’t be surprised if she was at least half accurate on most of the words, as they sounded foreign and cryptic enough to be proper Latin. It’s a long incantation, and she reads aloud brazenly for several minutes. Zack feels himself getting tired listening to her, but before he can close his eyes and simply listen to her unfamiliar speech, he sees it – out of the lines of the circle rise a thin, veiled layer of white, plumed smoked, almost like the dust from the chalk itself was rising upwards and forming clouds in his room.
Melissa hesitates for a moment. Her words stop, watching the smoke momentarily before casting a glance at Zack. Panicked, he yells something – he thinks he might have yelled at her to stop, but he isn’t too sure if that’s what Melissa heard, for she steels her gaze and begins to read from the book again, though her voice is shakier than it had been just a moment ago.
The clouds of white fog cover his entire room, and Zack coughs as it flushes into his face, stepping backwards uncertainly and pressing himself onto the door to his room, opening it as wide as it can go and watching the smoke file out in a trail down the hall, though thankfully now out of its face as it disperses. He can still hear Melissa reading aloud, and he turns back to yell at her to stop, but he can’t find the words when he sees it. A shadow, behind the smoke wall layering the circle, hard to make out through the clouds but clear enough in its shape for Zack to feel a cold dread.
There was something in the circle. There was some one in the circle.
Melissa stops reading. The sudden silence feels crushing in Zack’s chest, and he stands frozen in the doorway, staring at the unidentifiable silhouette and finding himself unable to stare at anything else. As the smoke dies down, no longer fueled by whatever words Melissa had been chanting, the silhouette becomes more shaped and defined. The plumes thin, spreading out from the circle and falling downwards painfully slowly, making it impossible for Zack to see his own bedroom floor.
It only takes a few more moments for the smoke to nearly clear out in its entirety, nothing more than a lingering effect- but the body in the circle remains. And the flick of a sharp, pointed tail was unmistakable.