As I descended the steps, I got a clue as to what Churchill had meant. There had been a fire in the area under the bar at some point in the past, not recently, but one that had been bad enough to leave a thick layer of ash and soot covering everything. Light came in through a small window high up that was itself smeared with a greasy film of thin soot. The window overlooked the river, and despite the soot was letting in enough light for me to see that I wasn’t in a beer cellar after all.
The fire that had left the soot and ash behind had also left remnants of furniture: three long sofas, all halfway burned through, and a squat square table that had been overturned and leaned against the wall.
A roughly circular piece of the floorboards, a yard or so at the widest point had been cleared of ash, and I got my first inkling of why Churchill had asked for my help. I could not see all of it, but there was definitely a magic circle and an interior pentagram drawn there.
But this wasn’t one of my protections, far from it. I had seen the like of this before, in books in my library, old books, that dealt with calling up all manner of things to do your bidding. This was a summoning circle, and from the quick look I’d had at it, I had a sinking feeling it wasn’t mere necromancy that had been attempted in this room.
Whoever had been at work here was after something rather more sensational. It was clear to me now that they had been involved in a medieval ritual of some infamy; this room had seen an attempt at summoning, and controlling, a demon.
Of course, I know there are no such things as demons, there are merely mischief making manifestations from the Outer Darkness. But people who dabble in the esoteric disciplines without any training are wont to see what they expect, especially those of a religious bent to start with. I had no doubt that this small room here under the bar had seen some excitable people get excited, perhaps even over excited while under the influence of drugs and liquor and the promise of power from the great beyond.
While I’d been examining the circle and arriving at some conclusions as to its nature, Churchill had been watching me.
“First impressions, old boy?” he asked.
“Stuff and nonsense,” I replied. “People with more money and liquor than sense looking for an easy thrill, and receiving precisely what they were looking for. It’s all parlor games and cheap tricks to rook the gullible. You’re a man of the world, Churchill; you know that for yourself.”
Churchill nodded.
“I have usually been of the same mind,” he replied, “despite having come across several things on my travels over the years that have as yet defied explanation. And, like you, I would put this down to too much liquor, money, and high spirits. But there is more to it than that; otherwise, I would not have bothered you with it in the first place.”
“More?” I said, looking around at the burned remains of the room and the marks on the floor. “What more could there possibly be?”
“Just wait,” Churchill replied. He hadn’t put out his cigar, and he chewed on it as he spoke. I sensed tension in him, a rare thing to see in a man who was normally so self-assured, and I wondered what might be the cause. Then a cloud went over the sun outside the only window, and I saw exactly what had brought on his uncharacteristic nervousness.
A dark, shadowy figure stood inside the circle on the floor, insubstantial, like something produced by smoke and mirrors. It wasn’t quite as tall as a man, more child-like in stature and stance, and one that appeared to be bent and twisted, as if all the bones in its body had been broken, then imperfectly set.
It took several seconds before my eyes adjusted to the growing gloom, and it was only then that I got my first clear look, and saw that it was not human, not even remotely. It was reddish in color, appearing almost as burned as the room in which we stood, and it maintained its balance in the circle with the aid of a pair of large, leathery, wings that stretched out from its shoulders and fanned the stale air around. It stared at me from dark, almost black, eyes and I felt an involuntary shiver run through me.
For all intents and purposes, I was looking into the eyes of a demon.
It did not speak, for which I was grateful, but it stared at me most balefully. It opened and closed small fists, gripping with long, slender fingers, as if it wished it had them affixed around my neck. A tongue flicked from the thin black lips; I did not have time to check if it was forked at the end, for at that moment the cloud moved on outside, the sun reappeared, and the figure in the circle became thin and unsubstantial once again, before fading away completely.
“I do not believe in demons,” I said, mostly to reassure myself that I had not, in fact, witnessed what I had seen.
Churchill laughed.
“I don’t think he cares, old man.”
Demons again, and Churchill again, but nothing that could help Banks in his quest for clarity here.
“I don’t believe in demons,” he muttered, repeating the words he’d just read, but he couldn’t make himself believe it after all that he’d seen since their arrival at the base. He started to close the journal, but knew that would only leave him alone with his thoughts, and vulnerable to the call from the darkness. Reading had been helping to keep it at bay, so he skipped forward a few pages until he encountered the word again, and read on from there.
It did not take long for the demon, if that was indeed what it was, to show itself again. It started to come into view almost as soon as I switched off the lamp and the wash of colors from my valves only emboldened it and brought it ever more into solid reality.
I sat on the step and watched it closely, trying to ascertain if it had any sense of purpose or intent, but it was more in the nature of a moving image, albeit a solid one, rather than anything with any degree of intelligence of its own.
The circle in which it stood was another matter entirely. Its lines and daubs, primitive though they might be, exerted a definite opposing force against my valves, and it sent out a darkness that tried to dim the pentacle’s brightness and infected the colors with a pinkish-red hue that was almost fiery.
I picked up my small control box and started to modulate the valves, rotating through various pulses and color combinations, searching for one that might defend, and even repel, the red darkness that tried to ooze from the original circle. But in doing so, I almost brought about my own downfall. I discovered that if I used too little blue, or too much red, the strength of the inner circle swelled ever stronger.
It pressed hard against the valves, causing all of them to whine and complain even as I tried to switch to a different modulation. It was as I was attempting to turn up the yellow that I saw the thing that worried me.
The oozing red color thickened inside the original circle, flaring like a raging fire. The demon, no longer quite so static as before, danced in the flame, no longer grinning but screaming soundlessly as if burning in great agony. I felt a blast of heat reach me, even protected as I was by the circles of my electric pentacle. There was also a warm glow on my face, like sun on a hot summer’s day, but it was as nothing compared to what appeared to be hungry fires lapping all around the now thrashing red figure that was imprisoned right in the center of all the commotion.