Chapter 6 — What Lurks Beneath

  What felt like a lifetime ago, Allen had fallen off the top of the school jungle gym and broken his left arm. The cast was what stuck with him physically in the weeks that followed, but what clung to him mentally was the flummox in his gut — the sudden tilt of the world beneath him, the weightless lurch of plummeting. Time had slowed, and the word vertigo had introduced itself far more personally than he’d ever wanted to know it.

  He wouldn’t have called the event traumatic, per se.

  But as he now tumbled through a shadowy abyss, tangled with an extra-planar entity that very much wanted to eat him, he realized something rather unsettling:

  It was all he could focus on.

  The same sickening drop.

  The same gut-clench.

  The same gravity, dragging him toward something sharp and painful.

  And he realized then, too — perhaps the jungle gym had left more of a mark than he’d thought.

  This wasn’t without its redeeming qualities however.

  For one, Allen now knew better than to try and catch the fall with a stiff arm.

  His first stroke of good luck?

  The extra-planar entity snapping at his jugular was physical enough to break the fall — sparing him any fresh fractures.

  His second? The creature, as it turned out, could still have the wind knocked out of it — the impact loosening its grip just enough for Allen to roll clear.

  And in his third and final bit of good fortune, he discovered the thing was quite averse to being repeatedly shot in the face with his trusty brass’n’glass revolver.

  Unfortunately that was where the luck ran out — because the vicious fucker was very fast, very strong, and had a very painful left hook.

  both the blow and the body part, it would seem.

  Blood dripping from a puncture wound in his rib cage, Allen rolled to avoid the next strike while taking stock of his surroundings.

  The unnatural darkness above, he realized, was likely enforced by the script etched into the walls — because while the lighting down here was dim, it wasn’t enough to blind him.

  Which allowed him to see the summoning circle that had brought the beast here — an upturned cross at the head, and a very dead body impaled upon said cross.

  The sight was grotesque.

  The corpse's skull had been pried open, the cavity — stained with more than just blood — clearly picked clean.

  The demon had been feasting on its brain.

  Two things hit Allen in that moment:

  First — the creature's form was malleable. It had just reshaped itself into a nightmare-fueled approximation of a zombie bear — rotting flesh, glowing eyes, lurching with ethereal weight.

  Second — he knew the summoner.

  “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—” Allen chanted, scrambling behind a stack of furniture as the demonic bear lunged at him.

  He barely made it out of the way.

  Desperate, he whipped out a trap card and flung it at the beast’s leading leg, aiming low — the same trick that had worked on the parasites upstairs.

  The card struck the bear's forearm and, with a green flash, sucked the entire limb away like smoke into a vacuum.

  The creature was unfazed.

  It regrew the arm in an instant — bone, flesh, fur, all stitched together in a blink.

  Allen, however, was deeply fazed.

  FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK— he chanted silently, louder than any scream.

  The regrown appendage swung faster than Allen could dodge.

  He avoided a lethal hit — barely — but bloody claw marks raked down his face, neck, and shoulder.

  His shirt and jacket tore under the strike, and worse: the protective pine-needle necklace snapped — the wooden sigil shattered, scattering splinters across the basement floor.

  This resulted in what could generously be described as a beige flag in the encounter.

  Sure, he’d just lost the minimal protection the necklace had afforded him — which now allowed the creature to fully exert its influence — but it also gave him a vital piece of information.

  Because the moment the sigil broke, the creature shifted again.

  Gone was the zombie bear.

  In its place now stood a fucking wendigo.

  And that told Allen exactly what he was dealing with.

  He tripped over something fleshy mid-sprint, twisting into a half-fall, and began peppering the beast with BnG rounds — crab-walking backward under an ancient wooden table. At a glance, the thing he’d tripped over seemed to be another corpse, but he couldn’t spare the attention to confirm — his mind was firing on all cylinders, clawing toward a way to put this bastard down.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  He ran a mental tally of his inventory, and just like that — the beginnings of a plan took shape.

  Allen slammed against the wall on the far side of the table — now the only barrier between him and the demon — and swapped out his BnG cylinder for the fireball prototype.

  Another swipe from the beast split the table in two, but Allen was already ducking, weaving through detritus and support beams — barely staying ahead of its claws.

  He fired once — a shot that barely scorched the creature, but kept it off him momentarily.

  Then again — this time at the inverted cross anchoring the summoning circle.

  The wood caught instantly, the corpse along with it.

  And finally — he focused. He remembered.

  Allen directed all his will toward recalling a single memory: one of the most terrifying creatures he’d ever faced — a scarecrow golem, stitched together with spell-thread and nightmares.

  One of the most terrifying, you ask?

  Yep. Back in his earliest days on this side of the veil, Allen had done a short stint with a foster family out in the Elderfields. At the time, he was still reeling from his parents’ deaths — and the string of supernatural phenomena that kept cropping up — phenomena no one else seemed to see. It had him gnawing his nails down to the beds and sleeping with the lights on.

  The foster father he’d been assigned to had had more than enough of Allen’s “crazy talk” and decided maybe he could beat the madness out of him.

  Allen had had enough of that real quick.

  He packed what he could and took off, but he didn’t make it far.

  He was violently waylaid in the fields by one of the neighbors’ crop guardians — a creature meant to keep pests out and protect the land, but not one designed with nuance.

  Those neighbors had been the Halvors, a working-class family who lived in a small cottage on the edge of a sprawling estate.

  They maintained the orchards and boundary-wards for the Vasserthorn family, one of the oldest and most respected houses in magriculture.

  The Halvors weren’t bad people — just caught between old magic and old money.

  Fortunately for Allen, after a long and thorough beating, Brian Halvor finally decided a young boy's life was worth more than some rich assholes golem — and set the thing ablaze, saving Allen… and damning himself.

  Allen never saw the Halvors again.

  They were dismissed by the Vasserthorns and evicted without a word.

  But for years after, Allen would see that towering golem in his dreams — burning, silent, merciless, its charred limbs lurching through fields of dry wheat.

  And now…

  That same nightmare stood manifest before him.

  KA-FHWOOM.

  The clap of the revolver’s hammer cracked through the air, quickly overtaken by the roar of fire — as the Dream Eater demon-turned scarecrow golem caught ablaze, completing the scene from Allen’s childhood nightmares.

  The demon lurched in surprise and pain, its body burning with flames fueled by memory — Allen’s fear given form, and now given fire.

  The heat tore through flesh and illusion alike, searing away the entity’s grip on the world.

  And with the flames consuming the inverted cross, the final anchor holding it in this plane collapsed into ash alongside it.

  Revolver still raised, barrel smoking like a Marlboro, Allen let out a long, relieved breath and pressed a hand to his neck — checking the rate of blood loss.

  Minimal. For now.

  Then, as if on cue, reality reintroduced itself.

  No dramatic sting. No slow fade-in.

  Just a rush of ‘oh right, there’s still a dead guy on a burning cross,’ and Allen lurched into motion — scrambling toward the summoning circle in the hope that there was anything left that might explain why the hell this idiot had been summoning demons in the first place.

  Rhett Aldwin. It took real effort to come off as trashy while wearing designer clothes, but Rhett had mastered the art. A former collegiate peer — Rhett was a classic case of bored rich kid. The kind who turned to drugs and crime, not for the money, but for something to do.

  Allen quickly emptied the man's pockets — before the rest of him went up in flames.

  The smoke clawed at his lungs. He choked, coughed, gagged.

  There wasn’t much. A wallet. Keys. A phone.

  The phone was dead, the keys were bent, the wallet empty.

  Figures.

  One lead down, time for the next.

  Allen stood and made his way toward what he had previously — and correctly, it turned out — assumed was another corpse.

  This one was far less intact than the first, and even if Allen did know the guy, there wasn’t much left to recognize.

  After a quick, skeptical once-over, he crouched beside the body and began patting at what might’ve once been pant pockets — hoping for another wallet, maybe an ID.

  Nothing.

  Sighing, Allen turned to find the fires merging together along the far wall of the basement — setting a clear time limit for whatever investigation he had left. He shuffled over to the summoning circle to confirm his suspicions: that these nimrods had been trying to net and harvest lesser Demons for their constituent parts… and had instead hooked ‘ole Nelly’ over there in the corner.

  The reagents they’d used were surprisingly well preserved, considering how long that circle had likely been active.

  Allen swept up anything of interest — salts, stones, bones, whatever looked expensive, important, or illegal — and made for the stairs, time running out fast.

  He burst through the basement door, splintering it off the frame and sending fragments skittering across the floor. Allen blinked, confused — unsure why shouldering the door had such violent results.

  Then he recalled the railroad spike.

  First mentally… then physically, as he stooped, yanked it free, and bolted out the front door.

  Bloody and beaten, but victorious nonetheless, Allen stood on the sidewalk and watched as the flames rose from the basement — consuming the rest of number 43, Barrow Hollow Road like an autumn effigy to the departed.

  He wondered if burning the place to the ground would count against his case completion…

  Or if tactical arson counted as a “job well done”.