“I don’t know what it is,” the ghost exorcist said, “but it is definitely not a ghost.”
Mark had already sent a couple of his demons to check the entity out. They hadn’t reported back yet, which meant it wasn’t a ghost… ghosts were easy to identify. He knew nothing had happened to the demons; they were just having difficulty figuring out what the thing was, as far as he could tell.
“I feel you,” he said, agreeing. “I’m guessing you ruled out psychokinesis as well?”
Melvin Farber, the best ghost hunter Mark knew, nodded. “Nothing’s being thrown around. Nothing’s breaking mysteriously. The family just sees a wisp, a vaguely human shape in shadows, and then it’s gone. But…” He shook his head. “Normally, if you’ve got a ghost, you can command them with the names of God, and if you’ve got a psychometric projection or a fragment of a ghost, you can tighten up reality to dissolve them. When I tried to tighten reality… nothing happened.” He shoved graying, curly hair back from his forehead, where sweat-soaked curls had fallen forward.”
Kabbalistic magic was not Mark’s strong suit. “What does it mean to ‘tighten’ reality?”
Melvin shoved his hair up again. “Okay, so. Malkuth is the sphere we are in, the sphere of matter on the Tree of Life. The one directly above us is Yesod, which represents communication, contact with the spiritual, connection in general. Yesod allows us to connect with entities outside the Tree – the dark entities on the Tree of Death, the ghosts, the fragments of broken memory imprinted on reality, all that kind of thing. What I did was I – briefly—blocked the connection to Yesod. Without Yesod we cannot perceive spiritual realities. Obviously we can never permanently block Yesod, we’d cease to exist without the emanation of energy that comes from God at the top of the tree. But if you block it for a moment, in your local area… you cut off the spirit world’s ability to communicate with us, and us with them. So ghosts vanish.” He pointed at the small golden demon sitting on Mark’s shoulder. “Your Sharro Varánas, your demange homeland – blocked. Your demons wouldn’t be able to get through.”
“It’s not my homeland,” Mark said. His father might have been a demange, and as such belonged in Sharro Varánas, but Mark was half-human, and couldn’t go there any more than, alive, he could go to Valhalla, or Hell, or any other realm outside the human world.
“Whatever. My point is, the wisp – whatever it is – didn’t go away. So it’s not above us on the tree, or below us. It’s at our level but it’s not actually here. Or, it’s not part of God’s creation, which sounds ridiculous but it could happen. If it doesn’t naturally connect to Yesod then what I did wouldn’t have done bupkiss to it.”
“All right,” Mark said. “That gives me some idea of what we’re dealing with.”
“The family is very stressed out. I called you in because they say you’re good.” The short, middle-aged man looked up at Mark, shaking his head. “But you’re young. What are you, 18? You’re a child. A child.”
“I’m 25,” Mark said, a note of irritation in his voice, “and thanks for reminding me about the babyface right before I have to go in and get some entity to take me seriously. You’re doing wonders for my self esteem.”
Melvin waved his hand. “Oh, you know I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said. “You must be up to your armpits in girlfriends. Wish I’d looked like you when I was 25. But you see me here? Skinny old guy, glasses, long face, big nose? I looked just the same when I was your age except I was a skinny young guy and my hair was black.”
Mark had no idea what Melvin expected him to do with this information, but he was used to it. When he first met people, either they were uneasy around him and they clammed up or made excuses and disappeared, or they were drawn in, compelled by his preternatural charisma. They overshared, they tried to give him their number if they were attracted to men at all, they hung on his words… and then eventually, the unease got through to them too. Hopefully that wouldn’t happen with Melvin – the man was a professional exorcist, he had to be pretty used to unease, and he knew what a demange was. Also, Mark hoped he wouldn’t be around Melvin long enough to trigger such a reaction.
“Well. Like you said, the family is stressed out, so I’d better go get to work. Does this wisp have a preferred place to appear?”
“Anywhere the family is. It likes to try to be around people.”
That didn’t sound like ghost behavior, no.
“Golden, make yourself scarce,” Mark told his familiar. No point in freaking out the homeowner with the demon on his shoulder.
*will do, boss*
Golden vanished, and Mark headed into the house, Melvin following.
A blonde woman met them at the door. “Mr. Farber? Any luck?”
“This is my colleague, Mark des Demanges,” Melvin said. “He’s an expert in cases like this.”
“He looks so young,” the woman said.
“I get that a lot,” Mark said, offering her his hand to shake. “You’re the homeowner?”
“Well, my husband and me. And we have two children.”
“This is Ms. Mitchell,” Melvin said.
Ms. Mitchell, who had to be 40 if she was a day, was looking at Mark with entirely too much interest, as her hand held his for just a little too long for a simple handshake. “Where was the last time you saw the wisp?” he asked.
“In the living room.”
***
The living room was exactly what he expected from the lawn and the clothes the blond woman was wearing. Lawyer foyer, hardwood curving staircase that looked downright slippery, white shag carpet, white leather couch. Glass coffee tables.
Shadowed shape of a person sitting on the overly wide bottom step.
“You see?” Ms. Mitchell’s voice was shrill with fear. “Right there! You see?”
“I do, actually,” Mark said. He approached the shadowy figure.
There was absolutely no reason for the figure to be in shadow. The living room had monstrously huge windows, and all of the rest of the staircase was brightly lit in the afternoon sunlight.
“You’re stuck, aren’t you,” he murmured. Even without help from his demons, he could tell that much.
The shadowy figure looked up at him. No features were visible, but its slumping shoulders and downward-pointing head went back and up, the figure leaning back slightly and looking up at him. With interest? Hope? Fear? No way to tell through the shadow.
“I’m gonna get some info and I’ll be right back,” he told the shadow. He turned back to the homeowner. “I need to perform a ritual and I’m going to need privacy. Are there any rooms around here with doors that actually shut?”
“There’s the first floor bathroom…”
Mark sighed. “Yeah, okay.” Obviously the hired help wasn’t allowed to go upstairs where there were actual room rooms.
***
In the bathroom, he summoned Golden back. “What have you got for me?”
*we can’t get there, boss*
“Can’t get there how?”
*anyhow*
Mark rolled his eyes. “That is not helpful, Golden. I need to know where, exactly, that entity is. If you can’t get to where it is, tell me where it isn’t.”
*anywhere. it’s not in your world. it’s not in ours. we can get to a lot of places. this one’s not one of them.*
“That gives me a good idea of what I’m working with.”
***
He returned to the being. “Okay. First we need to establish whether you understand me or not. If you understand me, and you want to say ‘yes’, nod your head, like this.” He demonstrated. “If you understand me, and you want to say ‘no’, shake your head.” He did the back and forth motion that generally meant “no”, or sometimes “I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around how dumb you are.” “Now I’m going to ask you, Do you understand me? If you do, nod yes.”
The shadowy head nodded. “Great!” Mark said. “We have a basis for communication. I’m going to ask you some questions about where you came from and where you’re trying to get to. First of all, it’s my theory that you’re stuck here, between branes, and you are trying to get to a different brane, which is not where you are now. Is that correct?”
The entity nodded.
“Wait, branes?” Ms. Mitchell asked in a very loud whisper. “Isn’t it ‘planes’?”
“Don’t look at me,” Melvin said. “I just chase out ghosts.”
“Are you attempting to get into this one? Yes or no.”
The answer was “no.” “Are you attempting to get out of this one?” Mark asked, and again got a no. “Ugh. What am I missing, what am I missing… oh! Okay. Are you attempting to get to a completely different brane but you are for some reason stuck on the edge of ours?” That got a yes.
“If I open the door to let you into this one, will that help you?” No. “If I open the door to let you free of this one, will that help you?” Yes.
He turned to Ms. Mitchell. “Do you have any chalk?”
“Chalk?”
“You have kids, right? Chalk. Like the stuff their teachers use, or the stuff they draw on the sidewalk with.”
“At the summer house I think they have some… but we’d never let them draw anything on the driveway, and this area doesn’t have a sidewalk. So I don’t think so.”
“Figures,” Mark muttered. “Oh, well. I’ve got my own, it would just be more powerful if it was strongly associated with this place.” He turned back to the shadowy creature. “I’m going to have to ask you to stand up and walk forward… no, not onto the carpet, stay on the hardwood. Okay. Now, stand there and don’t move.”
Quickly he knelt down and drew a sigil around the shadowy thing. It was a lot like a banishment sigil, but it lacked the modifiers for “force” and “destination”, so instead of banishing someone to somewhere, it would give them a gentle push to get out of the universe and go find their way to something else.
“You’re drawing. On my hardwood floor!”
“It’s chalk, Ms. Mitchell,” Mark said, not entirely able to control his exasperation and keep it out of his voice. “It’ll wash up the moment the floor is mopped.” With his ritual knife, he slit the fingertip of the ring finger of his right hand – he was left handed – and dripped his blood onto his sigil. “As will this.”
Demanges – somewhere between demon and angel, or perhaps both at the same time – had enormous amounts of magical power. Mark was only half demange, child of a demange in male form and a human mother, but that still left him with far more power than most people. Melvin had to call on the names of God to perform any kind of serious working; all Mark needed was his own blood.
The sigil flared to life, glowing with excess magic. “The door is open,” Mark intoned. “Go you now in peace, traveler, whenever it suits you to do so, and good luck to you in finding your way to the destination you chose.”
The shadow bowed its head, once, and began to fade. In a few moments it was gone.
“And it won’t come back?” Ms. Mitchell asked nervously.
“I don’t think so.” Mark pulled the power he had fired the sigil with back into himself, now that the trapped entity was gone. “It never wanted to be here in the first place. Can you grab me a wet sponge? Not dripping wet, just, you know. Wet but wrung out.”
“I… I’ll see if I can find one. My cleaning girl isn’t working today and I’m not sure where she put the sponges.”
As soon as Ms. Mitchell was gone, Mark rolled his eyes. “How do you not know where your own sponges are?” he murmured.
Melvin nodded. “Rich people. Useless, the whole bunch of them.”
“Not all of them,” Mark said, thinking of his mentor. Andre qualified as rich, although rather than buying a tacky McMansion on a postage-stamp sized piece of land, he used the money to have multiple decent homes he could stay in, all over the world, and then he traveled all the time.
Ms. Mitchell returned with the sponge, and Mark knelt down and mopped his sigil up, taking care to get every last bit of chalk, and especially blood. After they’d been charged with so much magic, it was important not to leave any bit of it around. He had Ms. Mitchell show him to the sink, and thoroughly rinsed and wrung the sponge out. It’d be safest to throw it out, but he didn’t know how well supplied Ms. Mitchell kept her cleaning lady.
“All done, Ms. Mitchell. Pleasure meeting you.”
“Yes,” she said, still staring at him almost hungrily. In fact, she hadn’t taken her eyes off him unless she had to, such as when she went to get the sponge, the whole time. “A pleasure. What did you say your name was?”
“I do have to get going. Melvin, call me once you’ve wrapped everything up.” Ms. Mitchell was Melvin’s client; Mark would be getting his pay from Melvin, not Ms. Mitchell. He’d have done the job for free, but when there was a ridiculously wealthy client who obviously didn’t have enough to do with her money, why not take advantage?
Outside, he whistled as he went to his car. This had gone surprisingly smoothly. They didn’t usually go that smoothly.
He looked around himself nervously, as if the universe might have overheard him and decided to do something about it. Nothing seemed wrong, so far.
I am pretty sure that if I turn this into a full story, the universe will have heard him and decided to do something about it.
I’m not Jewish, so the Kaballah stuff with Malkuth and Yesod might not be fully accurate to how Kaballah is actually interpreted, but in this particular series I’ve never paid a lot of attention to real-life magic or spiritualism; this is fiction set in a universe where there are entities between demons and angels, so I make a lot of shit up.
I actually have a published story about Mark’s origins on Amazon.com, under my own name, called “Tainted Blood”, if anyone is interested in the character. This is no longer true, I took it down to try to sell it somewhere. Eventually it will be back available somewhere, but I don’t know when.
Mark Donovan, thirteen years old as of a week ago, hit the pavement hard with his knee and elbow. His foster parents had gotten him a bike for his birthday – well, handed it down from an older child who'd aged out of the system, but it was a bike, and it worked – and a new helmet, but hadn't sprung for knee or elbow pads. The fall ripped skin away, left him bleeding in multiple places on both joints, with a sprinkling of tiny gravel and rock dust clinging to his skin as if the ground had offered him an equal exchange. "Your skin for my rocks," or something like that.
"Not a fair trade," he mumbled, sitting on the curb and rocking slightly. He felt cold, dizzy and sick, gray flickering at the edges of his vision, but he knew the feelings would go away if he just sat still for a bit. He was in shock, that was all. Impact and pain. He'd be fine in a minute, and then he'd limp home and wash his wounds. He wasn't ten minutes from his house… by bike, it'd take longer to walk the bike back, but he wasn't in any shape to actually ride it.
The roads were not exactly safe places to ride a bike, so Mark had half-ridden, half-walked the bike to a former big box store, now quite dead, with an empty parking lot, and he'd just been riding around aimlessly, doing donuts and figure eights. He hadn't noticed the rock on the ground; he'd gotten too comfortable with the bike and had started to think too much about the birthday party he hadn't been invited to. Last month, Eddie had declared Mark his best friend. Their birthdays were two days apart, they both liked the same video games and TV shows, and at age 12 that was enough to declare forever friendship. This month, Eddie had invited several of his friends to his birthday party, but not Mark. And hadn't explained why.
Mark was so damn sick of this. Tears stung his eyes. From falling off his bike, he decided. Yet another rejection from a friend shouldn't upset him anymore. He ought to be used to it. The older he got, the more often it happened. When he'd been younger he'd been able to keep friends for at least a schoolyear before they decided they never wanted to talk to him again, and his first foster family had kept him from infancy to the age of 6. The second one had lasted until he was ten. This was the third. They'd turned cold, flinching when he spoke to them, not meeting his eyes anymore, barely talking to him. The birthday present had been perfunctory, something they'd done because of course foster parents gave their charges birthday presents, not because they cared. He'd seen this pattern before. But at least the bike worked.
Well, actually, he hadn't checked it over since he'd hit the rock and it had thrown him, falling to the ground itself, so maybe it wasn't working anymore. He'd better check it.
Mark looked up… and there was a small, golden… animal… sitting on the asphalt in front of him, looking at him plaintively.
It was cute. It looked kind of like a gargoyle, so, objectively, ugly as hell, but Mark had always thought gargoyles and similar monstrous-looking creatures were adorable. He had a collection of human skulls – not real skulls, art pieces and foam sculptures and the like – and had had a plush Cthulhu before he'd come here to his current foster parents, who were religious and had probably taken it away from him, though they'd never admitted to it and claimed he must have lost it. That was his aesthetic. Edgy, but cute maybe.
The little gargoyle was about a foot tall. It looked kind of like the Pokemon Charmander, like a tiny baby dragon, but its snout and mouth were longer and a lot more aggressively sharp, and its eyes were smaller and closer-set. It had ridges above its eyes that made it look like it had eyebrows, though it was scaled and as hairless as any other scaled thing. A short tail twitched.
Is that a baby dragon? Mark thought, and then, Am I hallucinating? Did I hit my head?
He took off the helmet and looked at it. He couldn't see any damage.
The creature was still looking at him with puppy dog eyes like it was begging for a treat, patiently. Dogs had never liked him, and thus he'd never liked dogs back, but this was obviously not a dog.
"C'mere, little fella. I won't hurt you," he said to the creature, which inched forward just a little bit. "I haven't got any treats on me, but if you want a pet or a scritch, I'm up for it."
The thought occurred to him that it was a carnivore. His blood, currently oozing out of multiple spots on his knee, might serve as a treat.
The next thing he thought was that that was unbelievably stupid and a great way to get bitten.
The very next thing he thought after that was to wonder when he'd decided to do it anyway.
He'd wiped his fingers against his bloody injuries, then held out his hand to the creature. It came forward, walking bipedally, right up to his hand, then looked up at him. Mark felt like it was asking permission. Obviously animals didn't do that, but whatever.
"Go ahead," he encouraged the critter, offering it just one bloody finger. Ready to snatch it back if the thing tried to bite him.
Instead, it delicately licked his finger.
"You wanna come home with me?" Mark asked. "You wanna be my pet? I can keep you in my room. You like blood, I can get you meat juice?"
It inched forward, to his bloody knee, and started licking the blood off. It felt good, actually. The tongue was a little raspy, like a cat, and probably he shouldn't be allowing this and he was probably going to get some kind of infection and die, but it was so cute. The sun glittered off its golden scales. Its tongue was so delicate for a creature that looked like it could bite his face off if it really wanted to.
"How about I take you home?" Mark said. "I can call you Goldie. No, wait, that's lame. How about Golden? You look like a Golden."
*that what you wanna call me, boss? then that's my name.*
Mark jerked. The voice hadn't really been there, he was sure of it. No sound. He couldn't have said what it sounded like. The words were just in his head, like a song you suddenly think of because someone mentioned a word that reminded you of a lyric, except he didn't know any songs like that.
"Did… did you just talk to me?"
*sure did, boss*
Okay. This had gone rapidly from slightly strange to totally bizarre. But it was cool. Mark was good at rolling with what life threw him. "I'm your boss now? Why, because I fed you my blood?"
*yeah. can I lick your elbow, too?*
"Why the hell not," Mark said, and offered it his elbow. "You like, a baby dragon or something?"
*nah, i'm a grownup. not getting bigger than this.* It was able to talk and lick at the same time, since it wasn't using its mouth to speak to him.
"You look kinda like a gargoyle. Or a Pokemon. Or some kind of demon. That'd really mess with Mr. and Mrs. Donovan, wouldn't it? They already half think I'm worshipping Satan because I like heavy metal and I draw skeletons on my textbook covers." He laughed.
*sure, i can be a demon if you want*
"Doesn't really sound too confident, but sure, whatever. You're my pet demon? Can you do any tricks?"
The golden demon vanished and then reappeared next to Mark. *i can do that.*
"Teleportation. Sweet. Uh, did I pass out here in the parking lot and I'm dreaming all this? Because this is kind of abnormal."
*normal's not any fun, though*
Mark grinned. "You got that right. Look, I don't think my foster parents ought to see you. I know they're gonna throw me out but I'd rather they do it after getting the agency to get me a new placement, not freak out and toss me out of the house, okay? You can come to my bedroom but I can't carry you into the house."
*no prob, boss. i'll meet you there*
And then it was gone.
Well. Now Mark needed to get back home, as soon as he could. He didn't feel shocky anymore, and the scrapes on his knee and elbow were no longer bleeding… in fact, they were still scraped, with loose skin flaking off, but they were no longer bleeding, or dirty, and didn't look like they'd ever bled. The pink color of tearing off some epidermis, not the red of broken skin.
"That's a cool trick," Mark said.
He really hoped he wasn't hallucinating this stuff. He couldn't wait to find out what other tricks his demon could do.
---
A ficlet about Mark des Demanges (though he hasn't adopted that last name yet), the main character of "Tainted Blood", the first story I ever got accepted for publication in a real magazine. And then the magazine went out of business and never actually printed my story. Can't post it here because I'm trying to sell it to markets who are like "it can't be on the internet but it's okay if it was in a magazine" or "it's okay if the magazine went out of business and never printed your story" (how often does that even happen, that there's at least one webzine where that is a valid criterion for submission?)
There's a story about him as an adult that is online though, in my Inktober/Writeober 2020 collection. It's Inktober 2020 2., Wisp.
