Chapter 17. Temple
Temple
I reread the words of Morgan’s prayer as we drove. Mggoka’ai R’gngyk ngth na’ghtagn. Hotept R’gngyk na’shub. The language was unfamiliar. “R’gngyk . . .”
Annette turned around from the van’s passenger seat. She probably thought I was having a stroke. “What was that?”
“A name, I believe. Both times Morgan spoke that word, I felt a response. Like he’d hooked something’s attention.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be saying it, then.” Ronnie was cranky about having missed out on Morgan’s stomach eyeball and the ritual. It was affecting his driving, making him speed and take corners too sharply.
“Without the blood and the prayer, I’m pretty certain it can’t hear us,” I said.
“But it heard Morgan.” Annette’s tone was brittle. She didn’t handle fear or helplessness well, let alone both at once.
I tried to reassure her. “I don’t think it was fully aware. The connection I sensed wasn’t like the one Jenny has with Artemis. More like someone stirring in their sleep.”
“What is this thing, Temple?” Annette asked. “What’s it going to do when it wakes up?”
I held my book flat. The pages turned so quickly, they created a wind on my face. “There’s no R’gngyk in any book I’ve collected.”
“Dude, come on,” said Ronnie, like he was afraid I’d call R’gngyk’s wrath down on the van.
“How about we give the ancient god of shoggoths a nickname?” Jenny suggested. “Just to be sure we won’t accidentally draw its attention. How does Ringo sound?”
My mind had already strayed. In my memory, I watched Morgan complete the ritual again. He’d given twelve drops of blood in total.
The blood hadn’t shaped or powered the magic. It had simply sizzled and vanished: an offering, then. A small but symbolic sacrifice. Twelve drops, given several times each week, multiplied by however many kids Alex Barclay had recruited into his little cult . . .
Alex had been trying to rouse R’gngyk slowly and gently. Now he was running out of time. If he didn’t yet know we’d spoken with Morgan, he’d find out soon enough, and things would get far more dangerous. If small sacrifices weren’t working quickly enough, he’d escalate.
Annette’s phone made a shrill triple beep. It repeated the annoying sound four more times before she managed to switch it off. She tapped her cracked screen and swore. “Something set off one of the security alarms.”
Sweat dripped down my face, stinging my eyes. My breathing quickened.
“Sage,” guessed Ronnie. “What’s he doing?”
“I’m pulling up the camera feeds,” she said.
Sharp, burning pain made me gasp. “He’s trying to set me—to set the shop, I mean—on fire.”
Ronnie accelerated. “I thought your place was protected from fire and things.”
“Mundane fire, yes,” I said. Or it had been, back when I was strong and healthy. “Other types, it depends. And our defenses have been weaker as of late.”
“Sage doesn’t know magic, right?” asked Jenny. “This has to be Alex working through his minions’ bodies.”
“Minions?” Ronnie grimaced. “Really?”
“Do you have a better word?” Jenny snapped.
Ronnie pursed his lips. “If they’re being controlled, I’d go with thralls.”
Jenny started to argue, then sighed. “You’re right. Thralls is better.”
I leaned forward in my seat. “Annette, describe the flames.”
“Orange and red.” She held the phone at me.
I struggled to focus, to separate my senses from the house’s. Her damaged screen showed a partial pixelated image of the child trying to destroy my home, and the small fire he’d started on my porch.
“Not fairy fire or chaos fire, then.” Fairy fire would have more green and gold, and chaos fire would have killed Sage the moment it started. My fingers curled and tightened on my seat.
“We’re almost there,” said Margaret, whispering to me alone. “Just breathe.”
No matter how far I traveled, I never lost my awareness of the house. Most of the time, it faded into the background. I could feel the state of my home, but I didn’t notice it any more than I noticed my own heartbeat.
Now the sensations of my flesh and blood blended with those of brick and concrete and fire.
My boundaries were slipping. I was losing myself.
I thought back to the night my father and sister had taught me to separate the house’s pain from my own. I’d woken up crying during an unusually nasty hailstorm.
“It hurts.” I remembered crawling under my bed to try to escape the sensation of inch-and-a-half hailstones pounding my head and back. When that didn’t work, I fled to my big sister, Kitty. She would know what to do.
Kitty fetched my father while I lay curled on the floor of her bedroom, covering my head with my hands.
“Temple, tell me what you’re feeling,” my father had said.
I’d tried, but I didn’t understand what was happening. Kitty had answered for me. “I think it’s the storm.”
“He’s only five years old. You didn’t forge that strong of a connection with the house until you were ten, and that was early.”
“It hurts,” I said again.
“We’re almost there.” Jenny squeezed my hand.
I hadn’t meant to speak out loud. Flesh and brick, present and past, it was all swirling together.
“Hold my hands,” said Kitty. “Imagine you’re in my room.”
“I am in your room.”
“I know, but I need you to visualize it. See yourself here, surrounded by these walls, protected by the ceiling. Concentrate on the things you can hear and smell and feel right here. My hands. The carpet. Our voices.”
My father placed his fingers on my forehead. I smelled the mint mouthwash on his breath. “Repeat your name.”
“Temple Finn.”
“Good,” he said. “Names have power. Make yours a mantra. Repeat your name. Use it to anchor yourself to this body.”
“Temple Finn,” I whispered. “Temple Finn.”
“What’s happening?” asked Ronnie.
I felt the stinging pain of the hail as strongly as I felt the slashing heat of the flames. But slowly, the pain eased, just as it had that night almost a century before.
“Well done, Temple,” said my father. “You too, Kitty.”
“Temple, can you hear me?” Jenny touched my cheek, then waved her fingers in front of my eyes.
“Yes, I can hear you,” I snapped. I was ninety-nine years old. I hadn’t needed that mantra since I was a child. “Can’t a man lose himself in memories of his dead father and sister in peace?”
“And he’s back,” said Annette.
We turned onto our street. People had begun to gather on the other side of the road. Sage had moved back as well. I both saw and sensed him standing on the sidewalk near the crowd but separate. The siren of an emergency vehicle screamed in the distance.
The fire was centered on the porch in front of the door. The door and the walls were blackened, but so far, the house’s protections had held. The flames couldn’t seem to get a grip. They’d jumped to the rose bushes, though, and those were burning brightly.
As soon as we stopped, I climbed from the van and hobbled toward the house. Some of our neighbors rushed toward us. Annette and Jenny intercepted them, thankfully. Ronnie took my free arm, helping me hurry closer.
Painted shutters blistered from the heat. Oily smoke clung to the brick wall and the underside of the roof. I felt the fire beneath my skin, and I fought to keep it from breaking loose.
“Temple Finn,” I whispered. “Temple Finn. Temple Finn.”
A fire truck came to a halt in the middle of the street. Flashing lights made the scene feel otherworldly. Two people jumped down and began connecting a hose to a hydrant. A third shouted, “Is anyone inside?”
“That’s our house,” said Jenny. “It’s empty.”
The flames appeared normal, but they were edged in blackness that was difficult to see at this time of night.
None of the onlookers appeared to have noticed.
The house’s magic encouraged people to overlook such strangeness.
Though for all I knew, that layer of protection might be failing along with everything else.
The color narrowed the possibilities to eldritch fire, ghost fire, or the flames produced by certain species of djinn.
“Margaret, tell me what you see.” A ghost’s senses were different from ours, duller in most respects but not all. “Describe the fire.”
“It’s cold,” she said. “Hard to see.”
Not ghost fire, then. And I saw no sign of djinn. That left eldritch fire: a caricature of life trapped within the flames, knowing only hunger and madness.
Water from the fire hose slammed the house hard enough the windows would have shattered if not for their magic.
The fire hissed and spattered and spat sparks twenty feet in all directions, but refused to die.
The firefighters were shouting about accelerants and calling for chemical sprays to smother the flames.
Those wouldn’t work either.
I started walking.
Ronnie held me back. “What are you doing?”
“I need to end this.”
“Let them do their job.”
“They can’t. If they’re not careful, the fire will kill them, too.” I fumbled with the zipper to my fanny pack and grabbed Stuart Little.
The glass in one of the porch lights popped and shattered. The fire was breaching the outer wall, slithering between the bricks.
The house called out. Not just the house, but the land and the creatures in and around it. I was supposed to protect them. That was the deal, the price for the power and strength they gave me. I was failing them.
I opened the book to the banishing spell I needed. The Sanskrit symbols were simple enough, but I stared at the instructions in despair. “I have to get closer.”
Ronnie looked from me to the house and back. “How close?”
“The porch would be ideal.”
He stared at me. “The porch that’s on fire?”
“That’s the one. There’s a logarithmic relationship between the distance and the impact of this class of spell. You’d be surprised how much math you need to know to do magic. The closer I get, the better my chances of putting this out before it spreads.”
The heat cracked a windowpane.
One of the firefighters spotted me. “Hey, kid, keep your grandpa back!” he yelled at Ronnie.
A lifetime ago, I would have erased myself from his thoughts and walked right past. Concentration was easier in those days. Trying to focus with so much chaos whirling around us was like building a house of cards in a hurricane.
“This is crazy, but all right.” Ronnie cracked his knuckles and rolled his shoulders. From inside his trench coat he produced an eighteen-inch brass pipe with a small bowl on one end.
“Are you taking a smoke break?” I asked.
“It’s a kiseru, a Japanese battle pipe.” He sounded excited, like a kid on Christmas getting ready to play with a new toy.
“This one was enchanted to confuse and disorient your enemy. It’s been in the Kensington family for a hundred and seventy years.
I’ll hold them back long enough for you to do what you have to do. ”
“Do not let him start beating up firefighters,” said Margaret.
I relayed the message. Ronnie huffed and turned to face the van. “I’m not going to kill anyone. Would you rather we let the place burn down?”
It was a kind thought, if misguided. Margaret’s son was a good boy, deep down. Just confused and angry and too eager to punch and stab and pummel his problems away.
My house whimpered like a wounded pet looking to its master, asking me to make the pain stop and confused when I couldn’t.
I couldn’t. Other things could.
“I have an idea.” I double-checked the book, making sure I’d memorized the layout of the spell. Then I closed my eyes and opened my awareness.
Pain and panic and confusion knocked me to my knees.
“What’s happening?” asked Ronnie. “First a stroke, now a heart attack?”
“Shut up.” I sensed the worms and grubs and ants and moles in the earth. They were all frightened, though only those closest to the surface knew what was happening.
I concentrated on the ants. They were used to working together. At my guidance, they gathered in the dirt beneath the porch and began to dig. Each group dug new tunnels into a different symbol.
Ants didn’t feel fear the way people did, but they instinctively wanted to escape the heat of the flames.
I pushed them to continue. Those that got too close to the fire curled up and died, but slowly an underground circle formed in the earth.
It was only two feet in diameter, but that should be enough for a noncorporeal banishment at this range.
I released the ants. They scurried away. I opened my eyes to read the incantation, but the words were a blur. “Where are my glasses?”
Ronnie set them on my face. “You lost them when you fell.”
A thumbprint smeared the right lens, but it was clear enough for me to see and recite the spell to activate the banishment.
The circle opened like a bathtub drain for the unnatural. The heart of the fire brightened, fighting the pull. Firefighters shouted and directed their hoses at what they thought was a flare-up.
Ronnie’s hand clasped my shoulder, offering encouragement and support. “You’ve got this, man.”
If the banishing circle was the drain, my determination and strength of will were the plunger.
My old teachers would have smacked me for the impertinence of the metaphor, but it was accurate enough.
All the house’s strength was needed to resist the fire, so the spell drew power from me, a slow leak deflating my flesh and spirit as I forced the living heart of the flames from our world.
Inch by inch, I drove the blackness from the flames, until nothing was left but normal fire that soon faltered against the firefighters’ assault.
My home’s pain eased.
Ronnie squeezed my shoulder. “Good job.”
“Thanks,” I said, and passed the hell out.
“Principal Richards, I apologize for calling so late. I thought it would go to voice mail. I wanted to tell you I won’t be in tomorrow.
Hopefully, you can still find a substitute for my class.
I can’t—yes, I know how inconvenient it is, but it’s a family emergency.
There was a fire, and—no, they’re still alive.
For now. But it was pretty bad. I don’t think they have much time left . . .”