Mother Dora realized that I was staring her down like she was a grizzly bear taking refuge in our kitchen, and the smile vanished from her face. She put the blood ball back inside of her hand, a sight that made us all wince. Seeing blood flow back into someone’s body felt unnatural, and it flowed slowly, forcing itself through the thin slits in her hands in a way that sent visceral shivers down my spine. She scoffed at my continued glare.
“Calm down, slime boy,” she said. “I’m still Mother Dora. No demon here. Jeesh, you’re touchy.”
“Excuse me for being a little on edge when someone starts doing satanic rituals in my fucking kitchen,” I said. “What made you think that was a good idea, anyway?”
“The book said ‘No Demon Soul Binding Required’ and I had an academic curiosity,” Mother Dora shrugged.
“So there was no trade-off for this ritual? No sacrifice? No nothing? Are you sure you read that ancient Latin properly?”
“Yes,” she said, clearly offended that I’d even suggest such a thing. “It required a very small sacrifice. A minuscule one. Luckily for me you guys have waterbugs.”
I hadn’t noticed, but there was a cockroach laying belly-up on the table. It looked like it had been dried out, like all of its insides had been sucked out so that it was just a hollow shell of chitin.
“One roach soul for the ability to control blood?” I asked.
“One roach soul to control a handful of my own blood,” she replied. “Still, a pretty good deal if you ask me.” She extruded the blood back out of the slits in her hands and started playing with it again like it was some sort of loose Play-Doh.
I had seen a lot of blood flowing out of people lately, but something about watching someone playing with their own blood, smiling widely as they stretched it into different shapes, made me want to puke. I was overcome with disgust at the depraved act. Was this how people felt when they saw slime oozing from my hands?
Caleb had maintained his doe-eyed stare the entire time we had been in the apartment watching this crazy old woman play with her own blood.
“Can you teach me how to do it? I think we have another roach around here somewhere,” he said.
“Absolutely not!” “No fucking way!” Anita and I both exclaimed at the same time. We were so loud that Caleb jumped in surprise. Anita looked at me and nodded. I’m not sure why she was surprised that I didn’t want Caleb to fuck around with demon magic, but it was good to know she approved of something I did, I guess.
“This is too dangerous for you, little boy,” Mother Dora said, much to our relief. “Maybe if you learn Latin and understand the flow of magical energy throughout the universe, you may learn some day.” We didn’t like that second part quite as much.
“Really?” Caleb said. “Can you teach me?”
“Absolutely fucking not!” I repeated. “Caleb, you don’t want to get caught up in this shit. Trust me. This isn’t a movie. This isn’t a video game. These are curses, and they come straight for you fucking soul. It’ll eat you alive and you won’t just be doomed until you die — you’ll be doomed forever.”
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It was a bit dramatic, I’ll admit, but I really wanted to scare the little fucker away from this stuff.
“I think that cockroach was the one that got doomed forever, not Mother Dora,” he said. Caleb was a dangerous combination of intelligent and immature — intelligent enough to immediately see how the magic worked, even with very little information to go on, but too immature to realize how slippery this slope was.
“Mother Dora, I think you need to leave,” Anita said. It seemed we had come to the same conclusion.
Mother Dora squinted at us, seething at our suggestion. She put the blood back in her hand and the slits closed up so that they looked like day-old scars.
“You still don’t have your answers though, do you?” she said. “And there’s an entire library down there, right? A library that these cultists clearly do not know how to utilize. Let me go down there, and I will find the answers you seek, if there are any. If you rely on the fools that are already down there, you’ll never find anything.”
Damn it, she was right. They had had these books for god knows how long — years at least — and were never able to accomplish anything, while Mother Dora completed a ritual after having just a few books for an hour. Clearly, whoever was supposed to be translating these books down there was not doing a very good job.
“Alright,” I conceded, “we’ll bring you to the library, but if we catch wind of you teaching Caleb anything, I’ll blow your fucking head off. I don’t want to see you sliding him anything to read, giving him any covert instructions; I don’t want to see you helping him with his goddamn algebra homework. Got it?”
“Jeez Louise, slime boy, take it easy,” she said. She held up her hands like I was pointing a gun at her. “Caleb can remain ignorant. Just take me to the library.”
I hesitated for a moment, but agreed to take her. I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice, really. Despite all of the signs pointing to her being a fraud, she really did seem to have some grasp of the occult beyond anyone else I’ve met — anyone else that’s willing to help me, anyway. And if she decides to become a demon witch or some shit, I’ll just have to kill her. She wouldn’t be the craziest motherfucker I’ve tussled with this year.
I told her I would take her to the Tunnels that night, when everyone else will be there, and I headed out the door. That was a lot to take in all at once. Even after all of the fucked up shit I’ve seen recently, that small act of demon magic still repulsed me. It was a repulsion that I could feel deep in my id, like all of my ancestors were shouting out “What the fuck are you doing? Get the fuck out of there, moron!” from the great beyond. Did everyone else feel that? If Caleb did, he was good at hiding it. If he didn’t, that didn’t seem like a good sign.
I desperately needed a break from all of that demon shit. Thank fuck for my boxing lessons — my only reprieve. I never thought I’d be so happy to hang out with a guy who tried to run me over with a truck.