"There's no going back now, Billy."
"I know. But, we have to try...for her." Billy says, more for his own benefit than anything.
The body of a recently deposed feline lay at the center of a sigil drawn unto the flat cement foundation by a red crayon. Kneeling at two opposite sides of the sigil are Billy and Mandy at eleven years old, with the latter still in possession of all her limbs.
At the same time they both clap their hands together then after hesitating briefly, the children lay their palms flat against the wax-marked floor.
"Wait!"
The children look up, pulling their hands away from the floor.
A third child - one bespectacled boy with slicked black hair covering one eye - runs toward them, from leaning against the wall where he had been watching, squeezing his beloved teddy bear so tightly that its eyebuttons were beginning to come loose.
"You changed your mind, Nergal?" Mandy asks in disbelief.
The boy nods decisively, and joins them kneeling around the sigil.
...
A photograph on a dresser features a dozen children lined up dressed in matching grey uniforms. A young Billy stands next to a wheelchair bound and legless young Mandy whose arms are wrapped around a teddy bear, at the center of the shot.
"Humankind can not gain anything without first giving something of equal value. That is the first law of summoning." Says Mandy off-screen.
Tongues of fire are reflected on the glass face of the photograph.
"Back then, we thought that was life's one and only truth."
...
Young Mandy cuts her palm with a kitchen knife and the blood sprinkles over the makeshift magical mark.
"That should be enough, right?" Mandy says, and looks between the two expectantly. "Well, aren't you going to contribute?"
"I thought you said that was enough." Billy protests, but Mandy slides the knife across the ground to him.
"I meant for me, stupid." She casts a sharp look at Nergal. "Put that bear away. This is neither the time nor place for snuggling."
Billy yelps as the rusty blade rips through his flesh, making Mandy and Nergal flinch.
His pouring blood creates a small puddle on the floor.
"Looks like Billy gave enough blood for the both of you. Well..."
She stops to inspect the intricate design of the sigil she stayed up all night drawing, one last time. It was her first time attempting a summon this extravagant, but she could not allow Billy the slightest whiff of her uncertainty, an objective made all the more difficult considering that big wonking nose of his. Milkshakes was his cat after all, whose eternal soul was now on the line.
"Are we really gonna do this?" Nergal asks.
Mandy presses her hands against the floor again. "For Milkshakes."
Billy nods. "For Milkshakes."
Nergal nods at each of them then, after clapping his hands together he presses his hands unto the floor, letting his teddy bear slide off his lap and fall to the ground.
...
We were just kids, and she was our best friend. That's all that mattered.
...
"Mandy! What did I tell you about playing with that boy?"
An eight year old Mandy winces expectantly, but this time her father did not hit her. That would come later, somewhere where no one would see. Not out here in the school parking lot.
"Why can't he just be my friend, daddy?"
Daddy. The word stung worse than the tender pink slashes flayed across her back like the territorial clawmarks of a wild bear. It was what she had to call him in public so as to keep up the facade of a warm and loving, perfectly normal family he had invented, to cover up the truth about his private world.
"I've already explained this to you a dozen times. You serve a special purpose, and you are not to be tarnished in preparation for it." I try to look away but he just pulls me back. "It's for the good of mankind, Mandy."
That's what he always said. And whenever he did, I knew that there would be lashings. "For the good of mankind" ironically made me begin to slowly hate all of mankind, and to this day I haven't learned what he meant by it.
Eventually the secrets behind our perfect family, and the true identity of my father were released when, as I hear it, my mother had evidently grown so jealous of my father's many affairs that she felt the need to get back at him in the worst way possible.
As everyone in Endsville would come to learn as a result, these affairs were actually endorsed by the Satanic cult my father had secretly been a member of since before I was born. And he was the Head Priest of the Endsville chapter so, in other words, he twisted the rules to justify his own sleeping with multiple women, many of which were underage. Very classy.
He told me from birth that I must lead a clean life, detached from the trappings of an ordinary life. 'Friends' were excessive. 'Fun' was excessive. Disobedience was 'sin'. Being raised like this, I rebelled every chance I could get and it made me cold, uncaring, aloof. By the time social services could stick me in the orphanage, I was practically soulless.
But that all began to change when I met Billy, who as fate would have it was already living at the orphanage.
I first saw him sitting at the back of the lunch hall all alone, occasionally glancing at something under the table or on his lap. Being the new kid, I figured my best bet to gain some notoriety among the other kids was to humiliate somebody. I figured the big nosed kid with the Mickey Mouse hat and cheap Salvation Army denim jacket was an easy target.
"What exactly are you doing?" I asked, taking a seat across from him.
I remember he looked up sharply, brow sweating, mouth puckered awkwardly; his stupid guilty face.
"Nothing. I'm not doing anything."
"So does that mean you're just sitting here playing with your Johnson?"
Billy gave me a confused look, like he wasn't sure if I was letting him off the hook or not. "Johnson?" He asked with as much uncertainty underlying it as Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski.
"You know, your little Billy."
He still just shrugged. The dip. Seeing that there was no sense in making fun of a boy too stupid to know what he was being laughed at for, I took a more direct approach.
"So what's that you got there anyway?" I lean over the table and catch a glimpse of his backpack before he hides it underneath his crossed arms. "Come on, I just want a peek."
"I don't want you telling nobody."
"But I would never do that!" I lie, pretending to be offended. It was the old guilt trip tactic, and it seemed to work because then he started to get real fidgety, like he was suddenly conflicted.
"Fine." The sucker says after some thought, and once he was sure no one was watching, let me look into his bag, with a strange warning. "Just don't scare her."
Assuming that he was referring to something stupid like a ladybug, I was surprised to see a pink, furry animal poke its head up.
"Is this...a cat?"
"Yeah. I found her outside, in the bushes. I think I'm gonna call her Milkshakes."
I was awestruck. I had never been this close to a real life cat before, because my father strictly forbade it.
"Well, how do you know it's a girl?" I asked, as Milkshakes was rubbing her head against my fingers.
"She doesn't have a dinger, that's how."
A dinger. That's what he called it. What was I expecting?
"She's swell, isn't she, uhh..." He trails off with one finger on his lower lip.
I roll my eyes. "My name is Mandy, dipshit. And don't you dare forget it." Milkshake purrs as she licked my fingertips. That sandpapery texture I felt for the first time creeped me out.
"Alrighty then, Mandy dipshit. How's about we be friends?"
...
A sliver of electricity that was like a lightning bolt straight out of Hell, blue like my mother's eyes, flies out of the ground. Straight out of our handmade gate to Hell.
"It's working, Billy. Sweet pudding it's working!"
I glance at his smiling profile, then at Nergal, who had a weird expression I couldn't decipher. Perhaps if I did, we would have stopped right then and none of this would have ever happened.
"Nergal?"
The sparks flicker, leaving behind grey scorchmarks as they bounce off the walls. The faint smell of something burning fills the cramp cellar.
"Milkshakes!" Billy screams at the blue blaze glowing at the center of the sigil.
...it was only then that I knew something had gone horribly wrong.