The Intuitives(91)

52


A Very Bad Idea



“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ammu began, “our job today is to summon something much more closely aligned with evil—not in the interest of taming it, this much needs to be very clear from the beginning, but of destroying it.”

He stood in the observation room, surrounded once again by all six students of the ICIC. Rush’s return had infused the group with a new sense of energy and purpose, but seeing a living gargoyle on the tail of a civilian airplane had also impressed upon them just how serious their mission was. They watched Ammu attentively, understanding, as they had suspected, that they were about to proceed into much more dangerous territory.

“We will, of course, perform the summoning here, in the observation room, opening the portal on the other side of the glass. As an additional precaution, the weapon to be employed will be an automated turret. Staff Sergeant Miller will control the turret remotely, from here in this room with us, so that no one need be exposed to the creature.”

They could see for themselves that the contents of the white room had changed again. The table was gone, and now a gun stood on a tripod just to the left of the window, aimed at the middle of the room. Staff Sergeant Miller took Ammu’s words as a cue to demonstrate, and he used a remote to turn the turret to the left and then back to the right again, showing them how it moved.

“Nice,” Rush commented, but Miller only nodded in return.

“We are hoping, Rush,” Ammu continued, “that you will be able to control the creature well enough to place it directly in the turret’s line of fire.”

“I’ll sure try,” Rush promised. He knew the others had told Ammu about the workshop, and he knew they had had trouble working with the gryphon ever since. He understood their theory that he had been controlling it. He only hoped they were right.

“So then,” Ammu said, bending down to retrieve his book from his satchel and paging through it until he found what he was looking for, “this morning, I would like for you to summon this.”

Kaitlyn looked at the image and then glanced back at Ammu, her eyes wide with disbelief.

“It is not, by far, the most deadly thing in this book,” Ammu said, his words offering little reassurance, “but it is more closely aligned with the forces of destruction than anything you have yet summoned, as I suggested it would be.”

“It looks like a gargoyle, but it doesn’t look like the gargoyle that was on the plane,” Sam commented after taking a closer look for herself. “What’s up with that?”

The creature in Ammu’s image looked like it might be about knee-high on a full-grown man when sitting on its hind legs like a dog, as it did in the picture. If it extended itself to its full height, it might be able to reach a man’s chest.

It was dark gray and hairless, its body looking a bit like a pit bull’s, but with a face that belonged on a gothic building in a graphic novel. Its eyes were black as coals, it had no ears at all, it had two twisted horns protruding from its forehead, and its snout looked like a demented cross between a dog’s and a crocodile’s, full of four rows of razor-sharp teeth, two rows on the top and two on the bottom. As if that weren’t enough, bat-like wings extended out from its shoulders.

The gargoyle on the plane, on the other hand, had shared little in common with this image beyond its wings. That creature had been much lighter in color and twice as tall as a man, looking far more humanoid in both its posture and the shape of its skull, its vertebrae protruding cruelly from its spine, giving its back a ridged appearance, with a long, spiked tail extending behind it.

Its feet had been preposterously long, so that it stood upright by balancing forward on its toes, its heels sticking high up in the air and acting like a kind of second knee that bent the wrong way, giving its legs a ghastly, almost alien appearance. If Sam had had to place the two creatures on the same family tree, they wouldn’t even have been second cousins.

“Ah, yes, it is true,” Ammu began, answering her question. “The term ‘gargoyle’ is highly misleading. The creature in this image and the one from the plane are both aligned with the forces of evil, but their natures are not the same, and therefore their preferred appearance is not the same.

“The beings of the other dimension are not limited, as we are, to a single shape, but can adopt many forms, changing their appearance even to those who can see through the eyes of the unconscious mind. This is why Sketch, here, is so very important. He sees the true nature of things, so that even if something evil were to disguise itself as something beautiful, fooling the rest of us, Sketch would see it as it truly is.”

“Way to go, Sketch!” Rush said, grinning at him and thrusting a friendly elbow at his shoulder.

Sketch beamed with pride. Maybe being able to see things that everyone else couldn’t, wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

“The spirits that battled here on Earth during the days of Alexander the Great were of many, many forms, varying widely in shape, from animals very like those that exist naturally in our world, to fantastical and oftentimes horrific creatures, whose alignment with the forces of good or evil was reflected in their natural appearance.

“What we are summoning today was known as a zairmyangura in the ancient Persian tongue. The creature on the airplane would have been called a spengaghra. But I suppose that ‘gargoyle’ is as good a term as any for either one, in this day and age.”