Hello, Operator

or alternatively: Phone Tag

"So is there a reason you're suddenly desperate to summon something that doesn't exist, or are you just getting into the Mabon spirit?"

Sam was leaning against the doorframe, swinging her key ring on one finger when he answered the door (bell rung about six times in the 40 seconds it took him to get there). It was dark out, and the streetlight in front of his house flashed a pale orange off the wings of tiny bugs whirling in enthralled, erratic circles below it.

"Uh, the first one," Tucker responded. "What's Mabon?"

"Pagan harvest festival. It goes through, like, the 28th I think?" She paused, glaring at the clouded-over sky as she tried to remember. One star peeked out a hand's span above the horizon. "It's around the autumnal equinox, celebrating the last light before the coming dark of winter. The druids offered, like, food and stuff to trees for the Green Man, and Wiccans celebrate the Goddess moving from Mother to Crone and the God preparing for death and rebirth."

"Huh. Uncomfortably auspicious."

"Yep!" She scrunched up the edge of the welcome mat with one black skater shoe. "So, uh…I'll do this if you want me to, but you know it's not going to work, right?"

And there it was. Tucker groaned internally. "Can you just do this for me? Please? I won't push or anything if it doesn't work. Just do this for me once, and I won't bug you again."

The lines around Sam's mouth relaxed a bit. "Yeah, okay. Of course."

"Thanks."

They stood there, slightly smiling, for a second of perfect mutual understanding. Then apparently something occurred to her, and Sam's smile widened in a way that boded extremely ill. "But you have to do one thing."

Tucker narrowed his eyes. "...What?"

"Go vegetarian for a week."

Tucker groaned. "For real, Sam? I thought we had a moment there!"

"One week, Tuck! It's healthier anyway."

"Ugh, fine. Deal."

Sam grinned and flipped some short hairs over her shoulder with a victorious air. "Okay! Do you have, like, a clear ground area? Maybe five feet square?"

"I can move the rug out of my room."

She considered. "That should work. Okay, I need you to help me get a bunch of stuff out of my car."

The stuff in Sam's car turned out to be a pile of white candles, incense (sandalwood), a single lemon, and a thermometer, in addition to a bar of what Sam called "spirit chalk." Apparently she'd dug around in her closet and found a leftover half-bar that she bought during her goth phase from "some middle-aged crystal mom on Ebay." "It's just salt and chalk, I think. And maybe crushed wolfsbane or something else suitably bullshitty," she explained.

Then, desperately juggling his armful of candles, Tucker followed her up into his room, where they rolled up his round carpet and shoved it in a corner. Sam unpeeled the rest of the label from her stub of spirit chalk and started drawing in bold lines on his worn wood floor.

"This is the fifth pentacle of Mercury, from the Key of Solomon the King. It's supposed to just open all doors as well as removing obstacles, in the figurative sense, but I'm treating it as a traditional summoning circle instead of a seal by not doing it on paper and adding a Triangle of Solomon for conjuring. Ugh, I really should've done this on a Wednesday."

"Uh...will it not work since it's not Wednesday?"

Sam didn't answer, intent on transcribing some tricky symbols around the triangle she'd placed on one end after consulting the compass on her phone. "We stand in the circle, and whatever you conjure supposedly appears in the triangle. So do you know who you want to summon?"

Tucker shifted and stuffed his hands in his pockets, feeling awkward standing against the wall while she crawled around on the floor doing all the work. He did not want to tell her he was summoning one of the murder victims after her earlier eagerness to investigate; it would only encourage her. "...No, but—"

She looked up to glare at him. "For real?"

"I have these symbols! I think they're like a phone number." He pulled up the picture on his phone.

She took it and crooked an eyebrow. "Huh, these look like Nordic runes. All right, I guess I can throw these in."

"I feel like that's weird though, right? Like, those are only five symbols, I think that's a couple thousand permutations if you allow repetition? There have to be way more dead people than that."

Sam hummed agreement and continued sketching. Tucker, bouncing a little with nervous energy, grabbed for his phone in his pocket, then realized Sam still had it and stepped carefully around her drawing to get to the laptop on his desk. "Okay, so this article is saying about a hundred billion people have died since the emergence of the species. And there are...24 runes in the 'Elder Foo-thark,' or whatever, which is the proto-Norse runic alphabet." The sound of keys clacking furiously overlapped with the sound of breathing and the gentle scraping of Sam's chalk on the floor. "So that's 5,100,480 permutations, if you allow repetition. Wayyyy less than there are dead people." He took off his hat and played with the brim, swiveling toward her in his chair. "I guess they don't all have to be five runes long. Or maybe intention matters?"

Sam grunted. The thing on his floor was getting increasingly complicated. There were three circles around the outside, with some phrases that looked vaguely like Hebrew but could also be a lot of other languages, and a sort of grid-like thing in the middle along with the ghost in the bathroom's—Victor Schulker's, and somehow it was a lot more disturbing to think of it that way—symbols. On one end there was a pretty hefty triangle, big enough to hold about three standing people comfortably.

Tucker's voice sounded loud in his own ears. He pulled his hat back on extra snugly. "Isn't there supposed to be an upside down star in the middle? A pentagram, right?"

Sam snorted. "Upside down? Buddy, we're not trying to summon Satan here." She straightened up, brushing chalk off of her hands. "Okay, so we need to put all the candles equidistant around the edge, then light the incense. The thermometer can go anywhere."

Tucker grabbed three candles from where he'd dropped them by the door. "Why the thermometer?"

"Fifth pentacle of mercury. It's supposed to help if you have the metal nearby."

Huh. He'd been pretty sure she'd brought the thermometer just to screw with him, but that sounded reasonably occult-y. "And the lemon?"

She paused in setting a candle down to wink at him cheekily. "You'll see." Okay, so she was at least partially screwing with him, which he guessed was to be expected.

They finished setting out the candles, and then she instructed Tucker to light them while she tapped something into her phone. Wow, okay, this was actually happening. He stood from the last candle, wringing his hands. He was nervous, but not as much as he'd anticipated. Something about Sam made it a lot harder to be scared when she was there. As a goth-turned-punk, she'd probably resent that if he told her.

Sam scrolled down on her phone. "Oh, right, and if at any point you have any doubts about the identity of the spirit we're summoning, we need to terminate contact immediately," she mentioned offhand, in the tone of someone reciting from a truly stultifying textbook.

"Wait, what?"

"Yeah, that's a thing they say. There's a chance whatever you summon won't be who or what it represents itself to be."

"That's...horrifying."

"It's not real, Tuck."

"It really, really is."

"Are we doing this?"

"Okay! Yes! Just say the evocation already!"

"It's a versicle. Oh wait, I probably need an evocation too…"

"I thought you knew how to do this!"

"I learned magic from the internet, what do you expect?"

"So we're doing, like, a lot of things wrong." A sneaking suspicion slithered around his chest. "Sam, are you actually trying to make this work?"

She gave him a look, then sighed at length, with the air of a college professor with multiple PhDs teaching remedial chemistry to undergrads. "Okay. So there's eighty million ways to summon a ghost on the internet, and way more off of it. Almost every culture with a belief in the afterlife or spirits or powers of some sort has a way to summon the dead. The only real common thread through most of them is belief: you have to really, earnestly believe you're about to summon something. And, remember, I did, and it still didn't work for me. But anyway, one of my favorite blogs talked about how this belief, channelled through any kind of symbolic, spiritually resonant objects, is the only thing that really matters, so I got a bunch of the objects and associated processes I liked most and combined them. Once this fails, if you want to do some in-depth historical research and go one-by-one, by-the-book through all of the million distinct summoning processes that have ever existed, be my guest–I tried it, and it wasn't exactly a party. For now, I'm going to do what's most familiar."

"Okay, jeez, sorry. I will follow your lead, Sensei."

"And that's two weeks you owe me now."

Tucker mustered a theatrical gasp, more for his own benefit than anyone else's. "Two weeks?! I'll die of malnutrition!"

She sniffed. "If you died of two weeks without meat I wouldn't even bother trying to summon you. You'd make a pretty pathetic ghost."

Tucker scowled. "Say that again when I'm haunting you. And I can confirm that that is not fun!" Sam kicked him in the shin and stole his desk chair, logging into his laptop with the password he very much did not remember telling her (" . 69420").

So they took a five minute break for Sam to find a decent evocation on the internet, during which she made him check over her runes–apparently they had a lot of common lines and were easy to get mixed up. Tucker had no idea what her standards were for a "good" evocation, and he didn't ask.

Finally, she made an approving noise and motioned for him to step into the circle. She walked to the door and, though he'd known it was coming, his heart still jolted up into his lungs when she flipped off the light that had been left on for a solid three days. Tucker imagined the overheated bulb and wiring gasping in relief. Sam stepped into the circle and grabbed his clammy right hand with her own much drier left one, turning them both to face the triangle. He noticed that her right hand was holding the lemon. As she started to chant, all the ghost stories that had ever terrified him as a kid flashed through his head. He really wished he'd remembered to bring extra salt. It was right downstairs, in the pantry, he could just….

Sam was finishing the versicle and moving on to the evocation. "...ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in…." Her voice shifted, got perceptibly deeper. "Papa Legba, Saint Peter, Hermanubis, Keeper of the Gate, Lord of Hidden Road Between Life and Death, I call on you. Hermanubis, I summon you. A follower of the Old Ways calls out to you. Open the gate between the realm of the Living and the realm of the Dead for I would traffick with the peac–" –she caught and corrected herself– "the departed."

The room was silent. Tucker realized he was holding Sam's hand way too tightly, although she hadn't said anything about it. His other hand's sweaty fingers trembled and writhed against each other. He was suddenly aware of the silence–no wind outside–and his exposed neck.

They stood there for thirty seconds. Then a minute. Then Sam, who'd been getting visibly impatient, sniffed the air. "Tucker, did you leave the stove on? I think I smell gas."

Tucker sniffed. There was a weird smell, sliding around and under the heady scent of incense. It was sour; otherwise, he couldn't place it. He turned to face her. "I don't think–"

There was a deafening sound, like boots crunching shards of broken glass but multiplied by a thousand. The world spun and shifted; both of them staggered. The candles ceased producing light. Tucker's heart rate accelerated into hummingbird territory, and then he noticed that there was someone standing in the triangle.

Sam saw it too. Her eyes widened to an almost unnatural degree. "Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit–" She took one quick step backward, and Tucker panicked and yanked her hand hard to keep her in the circle.

The person in the triangle was hard to make out. It looked vaguely male in a square sort of way, and it wasn't tall; it might have actually been shorter than Tucker if it were standing on the ground. There was a vague suggestion of white drifting around its head, and darkness below. As Tucker watched, features began to become more distinct–the shadow resolved itself into a black shirt and...maybe jeans? The face was still an amorphous shadow, but Tucker thought he saw two flashes of green and a wide, wide black mouth underneath.

The thing cocked its head, then spun in a quick circle in the air, moving like a swimmer underwater. It hit the ground with an actual audible thump. It was at this point that Tucker stopped considering the way that side of the room was weirdly visible, the broken gadgets on his dresser casting knife-sharp shadows as if the thing itself was generating light—would that be abioluminescence? Necroluminescence?—and remembered that they'd set out to catch a specific specter, and this was almost definitely not it. It wasn't even pretending. And then he remembered what Sam had said about if the thing you summon isn't who you wanted, and he swallowed a yelp so that it came out a little strangled noise in his throat.

"Sam." He grasped her hand harder, shaking it between them. "Sam, it's the wrong–it's the wrong thing I don't know how to get rid of it please Sam please–" He groped with his left hand for her shoulder, not daring to look away from the thing in the triangle, which had turned to face them and that was almost definitely a mouth. "Sam! You have to get rid of it NOW!"

Sam didn't respond to his shaking. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth kept moving, but almost no sound came out. She'd abandoned her "Oh, shit" mantra. Leaning in, Tucker caught only one whispered word: "Unreal…"

The thing in the triangle put one hand (or something that could have been a hand or could have been streaks of pale greenish-white paint) up and forward until it hit some sort of invisible barrier extending from the chalk line on the floor. It raised its other fist and banged once, and the barrier gave a little bit before rebounding back inward. And then it went crazy, pinballing off the walls in a flurry of streaking motion until the invisible triangle barrier was made visible as a prism of furious shadows. The dim light from that side of the room flickered and whirled as if the actual air was boiling. Tucker found that he was hyperventilating, which was unhelpful. Instead he tried desperately to remember the names Sam had said in the evocation. "Hammurabi! Saint Peter, whoever the–you need to close the gate, please please please listen to me you need to close the FUCKING GATE!"

In an instant, the it resolved itself again into the short light-haired boy-shape. It made a noise, a grating staticky gurgle that reminded Tucker a little bit of the crunching-glass sound that had accompanied its summoning, but somehow more–pained?

Then the thing in the triangle crumpled to its knees. Its shoulders heaved, and it made the glass sound again, almost like it was...retching. It swayed, and then it fell over on its side, curling in a loose heap on the floor.

Huh. Not exactly what Tucker had been going for, but he wasn't one to kick a gift horse in the teeth. He directed his gaze tentatively upward. "Uhh, thanks? Saint Peter? Anubis, whoever? Yeah…sorry I swore at you… " Was it dead? What do you even do with a dead ghost?

Slowly, a gray-blue mist seeped out from around where its mouth and nose (did it have a nose?) seemed to be. It started in little rivulets, and it built against the barrier until there was a growing mound of greyish smoke writhing upward, more and more until it completely obscured the dark, slumped shape behind it. Tucker's hair follicles stood back on end. Now this particular flavor of terror he knew. It was the creeping stomach-deep rabbit-dread, the bone-deep knowledge of one's unfavorable position on the food chain. The instinctive understanding of an apex predator.

The mist resolved itself into something resembling Schulker. He looked the same as he had in the mirror that day, scruffier and dirtier than his pictures. He smiled, and Tucker could see the dirt in his teeth and his beard, and the way his lips cracked as they stretched, opening up old scabs and sores. He looked a lot more human than the thing on the ground behind him. "Hey, kid. You called. Now we can talk for real."

Tucker licked his own dry lips. "Thank–" His voice broke. He coughed and continued, shaky. "Thank you for coming. Did you–what do you want to tell me? Are you, I mean are you gonna tell me who–" Again, his voice cracked high and dwindled, and he lapsed into silence.

The ghost chuckled. The room temperature dropped a few degrees, and Tucker became aware of how tall Schulker was. His head almost scraped the ceiling. He loomed, and even in the dim light of the room his shadow seemed to project huge on all four walls. "Ya know, kid, that would be–" He cut off, suddenly frowning. His eyes widened. Tucker and he looked down at the same time.

Four greenish-white bands clutched tight around his ankle. Schulker only had time to growl once, an animalistic sound that made every muscle in Tucker's body tense for flight. Then he dissolved back into mist and dissipated into nothing as the thing that had appeared first dragged itself to its feet.

Green eyes bored his. That long mouth opened, and it spoke. "You will not do this again." The voice carried undertones of static that made every hair on Tucker's body rise Ben Franklin-with-kite style. It was like listening to the feeling of chewing on tinfoil.

It took one step forward and pushed on the barrier. "You're gonna erase this figure, you're gonna throw away that chalk and that stupid thermometer, and you're gonna go home and live nice, happy, long lives and never mess with this shit again, 'cause this shit will kill you, okay?" It took a step forward, and Tucker could tell that the barrier stretched. "You're lucky I was here." It had one foot almost over the chalk line. "You could very easily have died right here, right now." It was an inch from entering the circle. "You still could."

And at that moment, Sam came back online. "I banish you from this space and this realm!"she screamed hoarsely. "Return from whence you came and trouble the Living no more!"

The thing cocked its head. "Now that's just rude."

"I banish you from this space and this realm!" She wrenched her hand from Tucker's and shoved it into her pocket, pulling out what looked like some kind of herb. "Return from whence you came and trouble the Living no more!"

The thing took another floating step forward, more cautious. "Do you really think some dime store exorcism's gonna…."

Sam threw the herb; Tucker watched, transfixed, as bits of leaf floated to the ground, glimmering silver in the light the thing cast. "I banish you from this space and this realm! Return from whence you came and trouble the Living no more! Papa Legba, Saint Peter, Hermanubis, close the gate!"

There was no crunching glass sound this time. Just a flash of white light and a quiet, diminishingly staticky "Ohh, shit."

Tucker squinted through the sudden darkness and choked on his own spit. "Danny?!"

Danny was standing in the middle of the triangle, wearing pajama pants and no shirt, looking simultaneously terrified and extremely sheepish. He had toothpaste smudged on one cheek. Slowly, carefully, he placed a palm flat on the air between them. "Okay, I'm sorry for the whole 'scared straight' thing, I swear I can explain, could you just like...let me out? Please?"

Sam was shaking her head very rapidly. "No. No way, not until you tell us what the hell you are."

Despite his obvious discomfort, Danny had the nerve to smirk. In the dark, it was actually super disturbing. "Okay. The thing is–well, I swing both ways, if you know what I mean."

Sam stalled. "...What?"

"You know, like, I bat for both teams."

Sam remained stalled. Tucker made a cracked sort of sound.

"Jesus, okay, tough crowd. Basically, I'm both very much alive and maybe sort of a little bit...not alive." He shifted uncomfortably to his other foot and leaned sideways against what to Tucker's perception was thin air. "Vitally neutral. Schrödinger's ghost, except not, because that would be the ghost of an old German guy. And then also sometimes I'm a portal. Is that good enough?"

Sam managed her second reboot of the night and choked out a laugh, taught and incredulous. "Uh, no?!"

Danny gazed off somewhere in the distance. "Well, it had better be, because Tucker's mom just got home." The next second, Tucker's mom's voice drifted up to them: "Tucker, honey? I'm home!"

"Are you really looking forward to explaining to her why you've got a major fire hazard going on her nice wood floor?" Oh, yeah, Tucker noticed belatedly, the candles are burning again. They lit most of the room with a cheery warm light, but threw huge shadows on the ceiling. Danny's kept moving in ways Danny himself didn't. "Sorry, guys, I'm not helping you play this one off." He let one accusing finger drag pointedly down the barrier.

Tucker's mom yelled again, "Tucker? Are you up there? Sam?"

"Yeah, we're here!" Tucker called back. He came to a snap decision. "How do we let you out?"

Sam spun on him. "What? No,he could eat us or something!"

Danny sighed. "For real, Sam? I've sat next to you in MUN for two full weeks, and now you think I eat people?"

"Sam, I am not telling my mom ghosts exist and my classmate from Chicago is actually dead." (He ignored Danny's sullen little interjection of "Only half….") "We don't have proof, and she already thinks I'm traumatized and fragile. I'll end up in a psych ward."

"That's better than eaten! He's almost definitely, one hundred percent the serial killer, Tucker!"

"Woah, wait, hold on. You thought I was the serial killer?" Danny raised an eyebrow. "Based on what? I'm from Chicago?"

"He's not going to eat us, okay? And I saw the killer; it was a guy in a hoodie. If anything, this is proof that he's not the killer, because why would someone with a horrifying ghostly alter-ego kill people as a human guy in a hoodie?"

"I don't know why he would do anything, Tucker; he's dead!"

("Half….")

Tucker sighed. "Okay, whatever you are, how do I release you?"

"Uhh…." Danny paused, thoughtful. "Widdershins is a classic. Counterclockwise, I mean. Just walk widdershins around the circle and say something about releasing me, maybe call upon a gatekeeper entity or two, and that should do it. Possibly I'll just revert back to where I was when you started summoning, and you won't have to call an Uber for me. Because I don't have my phone, and I feel like that would be really awkward under the circumstances."

Tucker didn't even have the energy to laugh anymore; he had experienced too much supernaturally induced terror in the span of ten minutes. He felt like someone had injected anaesthesia directly into his brain. Slowly, he started walking counterclockwise around the edge of the circle. "Saint Peter, please release the spirit we have brought into this home. Hammer-Anubis, please release the spirit we have brought into this home. Uhh, leg guy–"

"Papa Legba," Sam interrupted impatiently, though her voice was still trembling. "Ugh, fine, I'll help you get us killed. Hermanubis, Saint Peter, Papa Legba, Keeper of the Gate, we thank you for opening it to us tonight. As I erase the lines that bind the gate, release the spirit bound within. As I snuff out the candles that light the way, may you guide it back from whence it came." With one foot, she smeared away each of the runes as well as the Hebrew words and grid figure inside the circle, and then she pulled a pocketknife out of her pocket (and Tucker wasn't even alarmed to see Sam with a knife; he was truly spent) and quickly cut the lemon she was somehow still holding in half. She walked around the circle extinguishing the candles with one half of the lemon, while keeping distrustful eyes on Danny whenever possible. When she got halfway around he started to look wispy around the edges, and when she snuffed out the final candle both she and Tucker looked away or blinked for a split second and then squinted back through the almost pitch blackness to find the triangle empty.

Tucker released a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "Is he gone?"

Sam grabbed his hand again in the darkness. He could feel her pulse jumping through her skin. "How should I know?!"

"Can we...turn on the lights? I mean, leave the circle…."

"Who knows if the circle even does anything? I sure as hell don't." Sam sat abruptly on the ground, letting go of his hand again in the process. "Ghosts are real. The supernatural is actually real."

Tucker gathered all of his courage, then leapt the two steps to the wall, slapped on the lights with extreme violence, and sprinted back into the circle. Under the harsh fluorescents, the room was suddenly a very different place. It was his room, with his green bedspread and ceiling fan and cluttered dresser with one long sleeve hanging out of the top drawer. It was not a place that had been invaded by monsters, though it was a place they had been called to. Even ignoring the sprawling pentacle scarifying it, the floor looked weird bare of his round carpet. He stepped carefully out of the circle and went to get it from where they'd rolled it up against the wall. Nudging candles and Sam out of the way with his foot, he carefully unrolled it to cover the whole array; then he plopped down in the middle of it, relishing the way his fingers dug into the coarse knotted fibers. After a second, Sam joined him.

"Why the fuck did it work for you?" He could tell she tried to say it casually, jokingly, but there was a weird bitter undercurrent biting off her consonants, and he looked up, confused. She was still breathing hard and smirking to herself, a little wryly.

"What, summoning?"

"Yeah. I spent a whole year trying, and now…." She trailed off.

Tucker avoided her face; it was showing complicated things he knew she didn't want him to see. "Maybe...now that Danny's here?"

"Maybe."

They sat in silence, leaning against each other for a minute, then two. Finally, Sam laughed once, a short, high sound, and pushed herself laboriously up, staggering a little when she made it to her feet. "Well, one thing's for sure," she commented. "Amity Park just got a helluva lot more interesting."