Chapter 13. Jenny #2
I’d seen this spell before. He wasn’t attacking us with cold. He was stealing the heat from our bodies and concentrating it into a small, powerful flame. Which, if memory served, he would then launch at our frozen flesh.
“It’s me, Jenny.” My tetradrachm necklace felt like dry ice. It blistered the skin on my chest as it fought Temple’s spell. “Wake up, Mr. Wizard!”
His eyes remained closed.
I stumbled on stiffened legs into the gifts-and-souvenirs side of the shop and grabbed the first thing I could reach: a handful of magnetic souvenir bottle openers with little cartoon witch hats burned into the wooden handles.
Not exactly the throwing knives or shuriken Felipe trained me to use, but almost anything worked as a weapon if you threw it hard enough. My fingers felt like they would break off my hand as I gripped the first opener and sent it spinning through the air.
It struck Temple in the center of his forehead.
Sparks erupted from his fingers like logs shifting in a campfire. The fire in his hands grew.
I threw the second bottle opener. This one hit his trachea.
Temple brought one hand to his throat. His spell died. Ronnie collapsed against the wall, shuddering. Burning pain spread through my limbs as my circulation returned.
Temple still hadn’t opened his eyes. His lips moved, mumbling foreign syllables.
I flung two more bottle openers. Three feet in front of him, they dropped to the floor with a clatter, like he’d drained all the kinetic energy from them.
I hobbled forward, my semi-frozen joints protesting each step. Before I could reach him, he vanished. His pajamas fell to the floor, empty.
“He can teleport?” asked Ronnie. “That’s cool.”
“He’s still here.” I could hear his breathing. The sound was sharp and high-pitched, almost a squeak. I crouched with one hand to the wall for support. With my other, I poked the fallen pile of flannel.
A tiny Temple Finn, six inches tall and naked except for a similarly tiny cap, climbed out of the pajama top.
“I’ve got him.” Ronnie held a circular net the size of a handkerchief, with strands like silver thread and tiny metal weights around the edge. He tossed it frisbee-style.
Temple stopped it the same way he’d stopped my second round of bottle openers. But instead of letting the net drop, he gestured and sent it shooting back at Ronnie. The net wrapped around Ronnie’s hand and clung like a cobweb.
It was enough of a distraction for me to step forward and get the toe of my sneaker onto the edge of Temple’s pajamas. I used my foot to yank the pajamas toward me, fast enough to send Temple tumbling backward in a full three-sixty that would have been hilarious in other circumstances.
I snatched him up with both hands and held him tight so he couldn’t move. He didn’t struggle. He appeared stunned or worse. “Temple? Are you in there?”
“Has he lost his damn mind?” Ronnie was slowly peeling the net from his hand.
I was not going to answer that question. Instead, I said, “Hall closet. Red first aid kit. Get the smelling salts. They’re in a black bottle with a yellow label.”
This time, he didn’t complain about being my errand boy. He returned with the bottle in one hand and the first aid kit in the other. “In case he needs anything else.”
The first step was to keep Temple from attacking us again. I carried him into the kitchen. Holding him in one hand, I rooted through the drawers. “This should work.”
I tore off a strip of aluminum foil and wrapped it around Temple’s body, leaving his head exposed. After eight more wraps, I added twist ties at the shoulders, waist, and knees.
“This is the weirdest house,” said Ronnie.
“Says the guy who carries around a net for Barbie dolls.”
He bristled. “It’s a fairy net. Edith Kensington invented them in 1901 for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The spellcraft in that net is vintage.”
I set Temple on the counter and unscrewed the cap from the bottle. Ronnie wrinkled his nose.
“Be thankful your senses are only human.” The pungent smell made my eyes water. I held the bottle at arm’s length and brought it toward Temple.
His tiny eyes snapped open. He tried to jerk back but only managed to topple onto his side. “Jenny? Why are you giant? Why am I tied up in foil? Why does everything smell like piss?”
Relief drained the adrenaline from my body. I closed the bottle and set it aside. “That’s the ammonia in the smelling salts.”
“Do you always try to kill people in your sleep?” asked Ronnie.
“Only on special occasions.” Temple cocked his head. “I was dreaming about . . . Well, never mind that. I remember my wards going off. Oh, hell. Did I try to fireball the two of you?”
“You did,” I said.
“I’m so sorry.” The weariness and regret in his expression made him look older than usual. “I thought you were a shoggoth.”
“Do I look like a fucking shoggoth?” Ronnie blinked. “What’s a shoggoth?”
“On that note, I figured out what’s in those pills that Sage took.” Temple rolled back and forth like a skinny baked potato. “And I’ll be happy to explain as soon as you unwrap me.”
· · ·
A few minutes later, Temple was free, back to his normal size, and, most importantly, once again wearing his pajamas.
“Give me a moment.” He looked at the ceiling—or through it—then nodded. “I’ve turned on additional protections in my workshop. Thankfully, everything is as I left it. Given my nightmares, I was worried Slimey had found a way out of his jar.”
“Slimey?” asked Ronnie.
Temple ignored him and grabbed a mug from the cabinet, along with cocoa powder, chocolate chips, and vanilla. “Anyone else want hot chocolate?”
“Of course,” I said. “And so does Ronnie.”
“I don’t take drinks from people who try to kill me,” said Ronnie.
I sat at the table and motioned for him to do the same. “Here’s your next lesson. When Temple Finn offers to make chocolate of any kind, you say yes.”
“One for me, too.” Annette yawned as she joined us in the kitchen.
“You sleep through the whole magical battle in the hall, but as soon as Temple mentions chocolate, then you show up?” My heart wasn’t in the banter. Ever since Temple had mentioned shoggoths, I’d been fitting the pieces together and dreading what they revealed.
“I woke her,” said Temple. “I wanted you both to hear this.”
Annette looked at the scraps of tinfoil on the floor and the fresh welts on Temple’s throat and forehead. “What happened?”
I let Ronnie fill her in on the fight. My thoughts were on the other side of the country and decades in the past.
Too quickly, Ronnie reached the end of the story. “Temple thought I was something called a shoggoth,” he said. “Whatever the hell that is.”
“Extraplanar leftovers from before the Big Bang,” I said, before Temple could explain. My words were numb. “Imagine giant black slugs covered in eyeballs.”
“They’re not truly black.” Temple handed me a mug of hot chocolate topped with whipped cream as tall as the mug.
He gave two more to Annette and Ronnie. “Our eyes just can’t see most of the colors.
The pattern is like a banana with mottled brown spots, only instead of yellow and brown, they’re the color of time moving sideways with spots the color of forgotten stars.
If you look at them closely, you go mad.
Shoggoths were servants and not particularly intelligent.
Slaves, really. It’s said they were builders, if you can believe that. ”
“Lovecraft wrote about them, yes?” asked Annette.
Temple opened Stuart Little to a section titled At the Mountains of Madness. The illustration showed a mouse fleeing a glistening, tentacled horror. I flinched, not at the sight of the shoggoth but at the memories it stirred.
“How many books do you have saved in there?” asked Ronnie.
“Eleven thousand and four. I’d have more if certain people weren’t so stingy with their stock.”
Annette jabbed a finger at the book. “Keep that thing away from the store.” To Ronnie, she explained, “It literally eats other books. Devours them like a paper piranha. It’s not allowed in the shop or within ten feet of the stock room.”
Ronnie pointed to the picture, keeping his finger clear like he was afraid the book would bite it off. “You were just dreaming, though. That thing wasn’t really here, was it?”
“Yes and no.” Temple emptied his mug and wiped whipped cream and chocolate from his moustache. “Sage’s pills contain essence of shoggoth. It’s why Slimey was unaffected by my slowsand.”
“What the hell is Slimey?” asked Annette.
“That’s what I named the goo I extracted from one of the pills.”
He was more animated, energized by the prospect of extradimensional incursions. Or maybe he’d just been flirting with Margaret again. Either way, I was glad to see it.
“Shoggoths existed before time and space,” he went on. “Many of the rules of our universe don’t apply. Even trapped in a jar, it must cast a kind of shadow into our universe. I think I’ve got it locked down now, though. Shadow and all.”
“You’re saying the stuff in those pills is alive?” asked Ronnie.
“As much as your blood or mucus is alive, yes,” said Temple.
Annette pushed her mug away. “And people are voluntarily putting that in their mouths?”
Ronnie leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “Just tell me how we kill them.”
“Fire usually works,” I said. “Eventually. The other option is to banish them back to their plane of existence.”
“You’ve fought shoggoths?” Ronnie asked with what almost sounded like respect.
“You look remarkably sane for a woman who’s faced these creatures,” said Temple. “Even gazing upon one in a dream was enough to break my grip on reality.”
“I’ve had a lot of therapy. And Prozac.” I got up to refill my mug.
I couldn’t put it off anymore, but this conversation was going to take a lot of whipped cream.
“I was seventeen and on a break from Felipe and the Guardians Circle. It was the first of several splits with them. My father had died, and I needed time to just be human.”