“It takes turtles.”

“What?”

Nul pointed a painted black finger at a witheringly ancient page.

“It takes turtles!” she repeated.

            Void read the heavy gothic print by flickering candlelight, her mouth silently forming the words.

            “Oh no. Nuh-uh. No,” she backed away from Nul, clutching a turtle against her chest. “Not Stanley, he’s my familiar, so he doesn’t count as a turtle.”

            “He’s a turtle.” Arguing with Nul was like trying to outstare yourself in the mirror.

            “Can’t you find a different one?”

            “Not tonight. There isn’t a twenty-four hour turtle shop. Who would pay for all these wasted candles? “ She gestured at the dozens of candles in skull candleholders, strategically placed for maximum witchiness.

            “Wait, I have an idea. Let me read that again,” said Void. She eased over the book, eyeing Nul as though she might lunge for the turtle at any moment.  Void mouthed the words again, almost dropping Stanley in her concentration.

            “Void…Void! Sally!” Nul used Void’s real name to get her attention.

            “What?” she looked up irritably.

            “Your hair is on fire.”

            A pause, as the stench of burnt hair reached Void’s nose.  A few frantic seconds scuttled by.

            Water dripped off Void, extinguishing a few of the candles.

            “You didn’t have to-“

            “You had it coming. I told you that hair was a liability. And witches aren’t supposed to have long beautiful hair anyhow. I daresay that’s an improvement,” said Nul while Void shook ashes from her hair.

            “Well I figured it out,” sniffed Void.

            “The meaning of existence?”

            “No.  It doesn’t say how much turtle. We could just clip a toenail off into the cauldron.”

            “This isn’t a legal system, Void, it’s a spell book.  You’re not supposed to go looking for loopholes,” said Nul incredulously.

            “It’s not a loophole, it’s…an improvement,” said Void, who was already chipping a bit of the turtle’s shell into the cauldron.

            Nul turned back to the book. It had a long list of the true names of devils, broken only by advertisements for witch reagent shops, witch, I mean, which carried only the freshest frog legs and slimiest fish eyes.

            Nul picked the most powerful devil on the page.  If she was going to fail, she wanted to fail spectacularly.

            “Burn a paper with the demon’s true name, then cast it into the cauldron (see Proper Cauldron Casting Techniques p.244),” she read aloud.  “Burn it, and then throw it in? How does that work?”

            “Maybe you gotta throw it in while it’s still on fire?” suggested Void.

            “No. It would say something like ‘cast the symbol into the cauldron before the searing hellfire becomes A Fire Safety Hazard. I’ll just throw in the ashes.”

            She did, noticing that the ashes were the same color she had painted her fingers, and thought of A Way to Save Money.

            “Now what?” asked Void.

            “Stir (see Stirring for Demons p.342)” Nul answered.

            “Isn’t it supposed to be green and bubbly?”

            “How should I know? Look, not every witch concoction is going to bubble green. I’m sure brown mudish glop is fine for some of them.”

            “Only...it broke the stirring stick.”

            Void held up the top half of the Effective Stirring Device.

            “Use the metal one! Why do we even have a wooden one?” demanded Nul in a voice that clearly wasn’t going to be appeased.

            “It came free with the candles, I think,” offered Void.

“You shouldn’t have to stir for very-“

The cauldron exploded.

 

*          *            *

 

Hot needles swam in her gut.  Nul kept a sticky hand pressed between her stomach and the ground she lay on, too scared to remove it.  Her chin rested on the rock floor.

A chunk of cauldron lay a on the ground a few feet away.  Nul reached for it, her hand scraping along the ground.  She could just reach it, but it burned her, blisteringly hot.  Her arm shook, and she reflexively knocked it away, burning the back of her hand as well.  She smeared a tear off her cheek, only to discover it was blood. Her breath quickened.

            Nul did not panic. She wouldn’t panic. She was going to deal with the situation.

            Nearby, a candle had somehow remained upright and was melting itself.  There was also a torn page from the book, and…a trail of maggots.  Nul’s eyes followed the trail of squirming insects to a flame. Not a natural fire, it was higher than she could see without moving her head, and it had no fuel, burning steadily on air.  The maggots were crawling into the fire and cooking themselves.

            A black line appeared in the center of the flame.

            “Living flesh has never before summoned me to such a pleasing scene,” the line wavered as a voice filled her mind.

            “Sally…” Nul groaned.

            “Her body is cold, soon to be devoured by beasts.  She is infinitely luckier than you.”

            “No!” Nul rolled onto her back, with a terrible ripping sensation.  Blood trickled into her left eye.

            “This circle of confinement is flawed a thousand ways. The first of these flaws heralded the end of your soul. Now.”

            The flame deepened, and grew larger.  Briefly, Nul felt as though she had gotten lost on her way home.

            “It is done,” the voice was smug.

            “What…does that mean?”

            “When you are no longer living, you will experience agony unparalleled, ever increasing, for eternity.  Those with souls have a chance of avoiding this fate. You do not.”

            “Damn,” seemed the only appropriate response.

            “You will be the only being to ever summon me and live, as part of your reward for greeting me so pleasantly.  Now, you may demand something of me.”

            “My soul-“

            “-was just destroyed. You cannot get it back, not even from me. Ask for something else. You have little time.”

            “I don’t want…agh… to be ‘no longer living’.  Make me un-killable, even by time.”

            “A wise demand. It is so.”

            If only she had blacked out then.  Instead, she was awake to hear the shrieks of the damned leak through the flame as it evaporated. She would wake in cold sweat to the echoes of that sound for thousands of nights to come.

            As the sound faded, so did the pain in her gut. She removed her hand in time to watch the last of a gaping cut in her abdomen close itself.

Nul wiped blood from her eyes with a hand free of burns, and stood.

 

*          *            *

 

            Five hundred years later…

 

            A beaten van trundled into John’s gas station.  At least, John thought it was a van.  It was so dented the original shape of the vehicle was not clear.  Before it finished parking, the side door slid open smoothly, surprising John, who had expected it to fall off.

            She was short, not even coming close to the five foot mark, but she compensated with her hair- damn hippies.  Thick and black, it was ludicrous, actually dragging on the ground behind her.  John was already on his guard, as hippy-types often came with no money, but the way she moved was alarming enough in itself.  It was beyond confidence.  It was the way animals moved, free of things like self-esteem. She was feral.

            She squeezed through the door into his mini-mart, careful to make sure her hair didn’t get caught.  He half expected her to pounce on him, but she disappeared down the candy aisle.  She came back into view on the toy aisle, popping sours into her mouth from a bag of candy she hadn’t paid for.

            “That aint free, miss.” John found his voice at last.

            She turned to face him. Grey eyes regarded him dully, as if she couldn’t be bothered to focus them.

            “Ahh…you’re assertive, aren’t you? Is it because you’re so much bigger than me?” Her voice contrasted so sharply with her feral manners, John wasn’t confident it was her speaking, and not someone behind him.  Her voice was mild, cultured, even soothing, like she was whispering ‘good night’ to a lover.

            The glass door shattered as she kicked through it. With shards of glass in her hair, she shouted “Bron!” at the van. When she turned back, John had a shotgun leveled at her.

            She grinned.

            “Thank you. I didn’t even need Bron,” she said, and lurched towards him. John tensed, but he wasn’t about to shoot a woman for stealing a bag of candy.

            She put her eye to one of the shotgun’s barrels.

            “It is loaded. Sometimes people...bluff.” A sour crunched between her teeth.

            “Not you, right…John?” she asked, eyeing his nametag.  John tried to take a step back, but she grabbed the gun’s barrel.

            “You’re going to shoot me right…here…” She pressed the shotgun to her stomach. “Right in the gut…please?” She laid her head on his chest.

            The crunch of glass caused both of them to turn their heads.  A mountain of a man ducked through the doorway.

            “I brought the pistol-“

            She bit down on John’s arm. Reflexively, he pulled the trigger. The blast threw her into the espresso machine, which poured scalding coffee on her.

            “Shall I shoot him?” Bron asked, unphased.

            “No…” she groaned, still clutching the bag of sours.  Bron shut off the espresso machine as she pulled herself upright.  Her stomach was a bloody mess.

            “I-I didn’t…it-it…” John fumbled with the shotgun, trying to reload it, but dropped it instead.

            Ting! A shotgun pellet bounced off the linoleum floor.  John looked up from the shotgun.

            Ting! Ping! Ping!  Shotgun pellets were raining from Nul.  The blood on the floor began to retract, running back up her leg.  The skin on her stomach folded and stretched as Nul walked through the shattered door.  Bron grabbed the shotgun, then felt around behind the counter until he found John’s box of ammunition.

            “We’re on pump three.”

 

            *            *            *

 

“You should cut your hair. It is a liability.”

            “The bible speaks of a man called Samson.”

“Ha.”

“It doesn’t tell you about his affair with me.  It’s how I got my power.”

“I don’t think you are as strong as Samson was.”

“Not his power, mine.  But now you have my dark secret. My weakness. What will you do with it?”

“I shall keep it safe. With the guns.”

Sitting in the passenger seat, Nul had a knife.  Idly, she poked the knife’s tip into her finger.  A drop of blood fell, but never made it to the ground.  Slowly, it lost momentum, then reversed direction altogether, flying back into her finger just before the cut disappeared.

The van lurched down a dusty desert path- it certainly couldn’t be called a road.  The speedometer didn’t go past eighty, but the needle was certainly trying.  Bron kept the accelerator floored, thinking of it as a switch.  The van kept the path directly underneath it, never swaying more than a few inches in either direction before correcting itself.

With a grunt, Nul drove the knife into the dashboard. She pushed against Bron’s arm, futilely trying to drive him off course.

            “You need to sleep,” he said.

            “I can do five days,” she whispered, leaning on his arm.

            “Behind us, blankets and pillows are lying neglected.  You have ten hours.”

            She bit his arm in frustration, before climbing over her seat into the back.  Bron kept driving.

           

            *            *            *

 

            Bron tugged the back door open.  It had been silent, which she had said were the worst, but she had said that just after a silent one.  She was lying on the van’s carpet, having banished the blanket to a corner in her sleep.  Eyes clenched shut, teeth grinding, muscles tensed, Bron noted.  She had popped the stress relief ball he had forced into her hand.  Its spilled sand lay close to a tear-soaked circle on the carpet.

            He waited until she inhaled a full breath, then put his hand over her mouth and shook her.  She screamed, a raw throat-tearing scream into his hand, until she ran out of air.  He removed his hand as she began shaking and sucking air, and grabbed the blanket.

            “How-” she swallowed and panted a few more times, “How long?”

            “The full ten hours,” he wrapped the blanket around her shoulders like a cloak.

“Where are…no, I remember. Carry me out.”

Tents and campfires lit up the desert on a moonless night.  Whispered conversations were obscured by the pop and hiss of insects drawn to flame. Bron crushed thorny plant life underfoot.

It was the demon’s night.

Nul and Bron sipped steaming coco, sitting in foldout chairs near their fire.  Nul drew circles in the dirt with her big toe.

“Are the silent ones really the worst?” asked Bron.  Only he could ask that without sounding concerned. 

“Yes. They’re psychological.” Nul threw her cup angrily into the fire.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“Shut up. I want to watch it burn. I’ll get you a new cup. As many as you want,” she mumbled.

“It won’t burn. It will melt. It’s made of plastic,” he told her, not to argue, but to inform.

“It won’t burn…” She chewed on her own hair for a moment.  “Don’t follow me. I’ll be back soon.” Nul walked away, still using the blanket as a cloak.  Two young men sat at the nearest campfire.  She cast off her cloak as she drew near.

“So I said he was a prophet, and he said he was more of a herald-“

“-Tumble!” His friend elbowed him until he noticed Nul approaching.

“Your name is Tumble?” she asked, sounding disgusted.

“T-Tumbleweed. Well it’s the name they gave- Ah!”

            Nul had stepped into the fire.  Her feet blistered and bubbled.

“A spirit!” Tumble’s friend shouted.  He looked as though he might begin groveling at any moment.

“Ah…” Nul sucked in air through her teeth, as though she had just stepped into a hot tub and not a fire pit.  “I’m going to tell you a story, and once I’m done, you can think on its meaning while you run as fast as you can from this place,” she said as the hem of her pant leg caught fire.

“Once there was a boy. He was a sickly boy, spending most of his time in the hospital.  Something was wrong with his head. Some rare condition you fools could not pronounce to save your soul.

The boy liked to paint.  His family kept his paints and canvas and brushes well stocked, because it was the only thing he liked to do. It was his only passion.”

The fire climbed, clutching at the threads of her shirt, what the shotgun had left behind.  The stink of burning hair made their eyes water.

“He began work on a painting he said would be not just his best, but the best painting to ever exist on earth.  As his painting neared completion, the doctors found a complication, something that needed emergency surgery, but the boy wouldn’t let them operate until he finished his painting.  He said the anesthetic would make him forget how the painting should be finished.

The moment the final brush stroke was put on the painting, he fainted, and they wheeled him off to surgery, but it was too late.  He died on the operating table.”

There was a pause before one of them worked up enough courage to ask the terrible flaming visage, “What about the painting?”

“Nobody thought it was much good. Not even his parents.  They tried to sell it at a garage sale later, but nobody bought it.  Eventually it rotted away in a dump.  And because the boy had not been a particularly nice person, he burned forever in the fires of h-ahh-“

            The fire reached her throat, burning it away.  That was enough for the two young men, who turned and ran.

            Nul, wreathed in flames, began to sway backwards, caught herself, convulsed forward, and dropped to her knees as the fire seared away the muscles in her legs.  She fell forward, out of the fire pit.  Dust and ashen skin scattered as she hit the ground, but the skin soon returned.

            Bron’s huge hands wrapped the blanket around her.  A cloud of charcoal skin streamed in through a hole in the blanket as Nul’s body rebuilt itself.

            “I told you not to follow me,” said Nul hoarsely, once most of her throat was back.

            “My apologies.”

            “Aren’t very sincere, are they? Ah…” she stretched.  “Where is that ridiculous robe?”

            Bron produced black hooded robe with an intricate pattern of red flames. As Nul pulled it over her head and fumbled around inside for the armholes, he asked, “What are the silent ones like?”

            Nul pulled the robe’s hood over her head.  By torchlight, a crowd of people could be seen forming in the distance.  Bron and Nul strolled towards them.

            “I told you, they’re psychological.”

            “Yes.”

            “You want to know what psychological torture is like?”

            “Yes.”

            “Imagine.  You meet the girl of your dreams.  You confess your love to each other, and share your first kiss.  Before you even finish, some psycho with a gun grabs you both, and makes you torture your true love to death.   You do it, because otherwise he will, and it will be worse for her. It’s like that, only it happens a thousand times a second, so fast you can’t keep it straight and you think you love the psycho, or you are the psycho, and the pain of the torture blends with the pleasure of the kiss and you start to think that all pleasure is actually pain. Imagine that. For ten hours.”

            “Here is your gun,” He replied.

            Nul scowled.  Bron let the pistol’s clip fall into his hand, holding it out so she could see the row of bullets, then loaded it back into the gun and handed it to her. It disappeared into her robe.

            “Safety?”

            “It has been removed.”

            The crowd was anxious, expectant.  Nul could see it in the way they stood, the way they rubbed their hands together and stamped their feet.  Tonight, years of work would see fruition or failure.  Tonight, they would get what was coming to them. Tonight was the demon’s night.  Nul and Bron stood in the back of the crowd.  Bron watched over their heads. Nul listened.

            “…the future! Whatever you desire will be yours! No longer will you have to conform to the world; it will bend to your wishes instead.  And it will be a better world, not just for you, not just for us!” the voice of an old man wavered through the desert.

            “Be ready to shoot their leader. His heart, please, it’s more dramatic.”

            “I know you’ve earned it. You know you deserve it.  Your whole life has built to this moment. It has boiled into this cauldron.  Tonight, you will see fruition! Tonight, you will see-“

            “-A demon!” Nul’s voice cut across his.

            The crowd parted.  Nul strode into the center of the ring they had formed around the old man and a cauldron.

            “Who are you? What-“

            “I am your prophet,” she cut him off.

            “I’m-“

            “-more of a herald, I understand. And a poor one at that, seeing as how you didn’t announce my arrival.”

            “What do you want, so-called prophet?” he spit, angrily.

            “The same as you, all of you.  Only, I know how to do get it, and you do not. Where is the turtle?”  Nul was peering into the cauldron. Her voice, taut with restrained anger, unnerved the herald.

            “We thought it would be alright if we used just a bit of turtle.” He produced a turtle with a missing toe.  “We’ve grown quite attached to the little guy you see, and it didn’t say…” he trailed off under her angry glare.

            “You need a Whole Turtle.  It’s the suppressant.”

            “What can you suppress with a turtle?” he demanded, regaining his pride.

“An explosion” she snatched the turtle from him and hurled it into the cauldron.  As the turtle sank, the brown mudish substance began to bubble and turn green.

            “Outrageous! I will not stand idly-“

            “-then fall,” Nul commanded.  In the back of the crowd, Bron appeared to adjust his jacket.  The bullet tore through the herald’s heart.  Blood welled up through his shirt.  He watched the stain spread across his shirt.  He frowned.

            “black...magic…?” he asked Nul, dazed, before collapsing.

            “And if any of you so much as twitch, you will share his fate!” Nul shouted at the crowd.  “This is…for your own good.” She added.  They were frozen.

            “What do you call yourselves my…children?” She had a hard time getting the word out.

            “We are The Deserted Ones, prophet!” rang out a strong voice.  When Nul said nothing, the voice felt obligated to continue, “See, it’s kind of a double meaning because we’re in the d-desert and…” The voice faded away, losing it confidence just as the herald had.

            Nul began rubbing out the line of chalk around the cauldron.

            “There is no such thing as a circle of protection.  Why would mere line of chalk stop a demon?” asked Nul, who had told them a turtle would prevent an explosion moments earlier.

            “Then what will protect us from the demon?” asked a frightened woman.

            “Only me,” was Nul’s answer.

            The cauldron was boiling. Nul began to stir the cauldron using an effective metal stirring device, slowly, then faster and faster. It didn’t matter how quickly she stirred, but it made for a better show this way.  Acrid steam rose, condensing into a cloud above the cauldron’s rim.  The cloud began compressing itself, becoming smaller and thicker until it was too small to be seen. The flame appeared.

            “A veritable buffet of souls!” the black line wavered.

            The crowd panicked.  Some ran, some shouted variations on the theme of “Save us, prophet!”, and some just trembled.

            “Prophet? Ah, soulless one.  It has been many years since I last saw you.”

            “You’ve never seen me, but you’re about to.”

            Nul dove into the flame, and vanished.  The black line disappeared.

            Seeing their prophet apparently extinguished by the demonic flame, what remained of the Deserted Ones scattered.  Bron pulled his pistol out of his coat and adjusted the silencer.  He moved closer to the flame.  A thin spiky beetle crawled over his boot towards the flame.

            Two Nul’s tumbled from the flame, rolling in the dirt.  They were identical, wearing the same robe, shouting insults at each other in the same voice, grappling each other with the same hands.  They rolled and spun and flipped over each other in the dirt, their hair fanning about tangling in another’s.  Bron kept his gun pointed in their general direction, and tried to follow the movement of just one of them, like watching the cup with the pea under it.  He gave up quickly.

            A mutual shove pushed them apart.  They both produced the gun he had given Nul a few minutes earlier, but neither fired.  They panted and glared at each other as if they could stare the other one dead.

            “It’s over,” said the Nul on the right.

            “It’s just begun,” countered the left Nul.

            “Why are there two of you?” interrupted Bron.

            “The demon has no form in this world.  He had to copy the only form from this world he’s ever encountered,” said left Nul.

            “But…” began right Nul.

            They fired.  The two bullets passed each other in midair.  A bullet ripped through each Nul’s forehead.  They collapsed simultaneously.

            The flame vanished.  The spiky red beetle turned around, heading back the way it came.

            The right Nul sat up.

            “He never slept with Samson.”