About Demon Summoning for Beginners:
If you try to summon a demon to grant you your heart’s fondest desire, you’d better get your Latin right…
When studying ancient grimoires, it’s never a good idea to actually read the contents out loud or you might just cause the end of the world…
Following your grandma’s heirloom recipe might just conjure up something other than marinara sauce…
Four short humorous horror tales of rituals gone very wrong by Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert of 5800 words or approx. 20 print pages altogether.
Excerpt:
Lucas took a deep breath. Everything was ready.
The altar had been prepared and the ritual circle had been drawn on the basement floor with chalk pilfered from the classroom. A gong had been set up. The candles and the incense — proper church incense and not those joss sticks from the Chinese import store — awaited. The correct page was bookmarked in the ancient grimoire he’d found in the local used book store. Lucas had put on a ceremonial robe that looked only a little bit like the bathrobe it was. The athame was ready — forged of virgin steel as required (though Lucas wasn’t sure if there even was non-virginal steel — after all, who had sex with daggers?). He’d even procured a sacrifice, a clucking chicken that had gifted him with a bonus egg it had laid that afternoon.
Lucas checked his wristwatch. The hour was here, determined by arcane calculations. In its cage, the chicken clucked and idly picked at some grains.
Time to get started. Time to summon a demon, a real bona-fide demon. A demon who would hopefully help Lucas win the heart and undying love of Bethany Morris, the prettiest girl in his class.
Lucas lit the candles and the incense and promptly inhaled a plume of smoke, which caused a violent coughing fit and drove tears into his eyes.
So Lucas had to step out of the circle again to get his inhaler, which he’d forgotten. Of course in theory, you weren’t supposed to leave the circle, once the ritual had started. But then, Lucas hadn’t gotten started yet, not really. All he’d done was light the incense and the candles. And besides, he was extra careful not to smudge the chalk lines that marked the circle.
Once he’d dealt with his inopportune coughing fit, Lucas picked up the grimoire and began to read, solemnly intoning the words. The summoning ritual was in Latin with a bit of Hebrew sprinkled in, as magical rituals tended to be.
Of course, Lucas spoke neither Latin nor Hebrew, so he had absolutely no idea just what he was intoning. He only hoped it wasn’t something terribly embarrassing.
Besides, the guy in the used book store who’d sold him the grimoire had said that most magicians did not actually speak Latin, let alone Hebrew. It was perfectly okay just to recite the words.
So Lucas did just that. He recited the words, struck the gong at the prescribed moments and did his best to ignore the clucking chicken. He did all that and nothing, absolutely nothing happened, except that the chicken began to pick at stray crumbs of ash raining from the incense burner.
After about ten minutes of nothing happening, Lucas began to feel very silly indeed. After all, he was standing here in his bathrobe in the basement, breathing incense fumes that made his asthma flare up and reciting strange words in a language he did not understand, while a chicken offered a running commentary in clicks and clucks.
It was, in a word, ridiculous. And obviously not going to work, because there was no sign of a demon, not even the faint smell of brimstone, whatever brimstone was supposed to smell like. Unless it smelled like this godawful stinking church incense he’d bought.
Lucas abruptly stopped and plopped down on his butt in the middle of his magical circle. He looked over at the cage with the clucking chicken and wondered what to do with it now. The ritual called for slitting its throat with the athame and spilling its blood on the altar, but Lucas probably could never have brought himself to do that anyway. The chicken was a living creature, after all, and Lucas was just too damned soft-hearted to kill it, demon summoning ritual or not.
Maybe he could just keep the chicken as a pet. After all, he’d always wanted a pet. And fresh eggs every morning would sure be nice and a welcome change from last night’s stale pizza.
So he reached for the cage and got to his feet. “Sorry, pal,” he said to the chicken, “I wasn’t really going to slit your throat, you know? No hard feelings, okay?”
And then, as he was just about to leave the circle, the cage with the chicken in hand, the unthinkable happened. A demon appeared in a puff of smoke that stank of the aftermath of a high school chemistry experiment gone wrong.
Okay, so that’s what brimstone was.
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About Cora Buhlert:
Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. She is the author of the Silencer series of pulp style thrillers, the Shattered Empire space opera series, the In Love and War science fiction romance series, the Helen Shepherd Mysteries and plenty of standalone stories in multiple genres.
When Cora is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher. She also runs the Speculative Fiction Showcase and the Indie Crime Scene and contributes to the Hugo-nominated fanzine Galactic Journey. Cora is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Award.
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