In the “shit rolls downhill” sense of things, Daryl was who the shits, shat on.  Skinny, pale, ill-complected.  His glasses were so thick, he could see the back of his own head.  His voice got halfway through puberty and stopped.  He would unpredictably honk certain words, or his voice would cut out entirely; he’d stutter and mutter and spit.  Few things made him laugh and when they did, he snorted and squawked and occasionally blew a snot bubble.    

            Despite a rigorous, near compulsive, hygiene regimen, his hair was perpetually greasy, and he smelled like a damp sponge. 

            Around 9th grade, he stopped even trying.  Somewhere between Rusty Becker ambushing him with fart spray and a trailer-trash runt from 7th grade named Lenny Farley jumping him in the hall.  Even for a 7th grader, this kid was tiny.  No shit, man, Jenny Healy finally intervened and pulled the kid off.  He was saved by an 8th grade girl.  Lenny pecked his way up a peg, Daryl was now firmly on the bottom.

            After that, he made an overt effort not to fit in.  He embraced his off-putting nature.  Listened to the most inaccessible music and wore all black.  Any efforts at grooming were fully abandoned.  No one could tell if his hair was slicked back by product or grime.  He reduced his voice to a gravelly croak that subdued the unwanted peaks and squeaks, but still grated the nerves.  And the smell.  It was like August at low tide.  Even if he knew how to wash leather pants, he wouldn’t have.  Still, he fancied himself a bit of a dandy.  In his mind, he was dangerous and mysterious, and mortals recoiled in horror.  He was Aleister Crowley.  A wizard.  A fiend.

To others he was more like a smelly, Eddie Munster cos-play.  No one was threatened in the least, though, they did recoil.

            By the time he was a Senior, the desired effect had been achieved.  No one really wanted anything to do with him.  At the same time, he was the de-facto target for teasing and the occasional beating.  Anyone, from any tier in the social hierarchy of the school could lay into him with impunity.  Even the teachers.  Coach Travers once tripped him in gym.  It was blatant.  A sprawling, skin splitting, skweeee across the floor.

            He wasn’t without friends along the way.  Or at least some known associates.  As part of his nosedive into the obscure and absurd, he had gotten into role playing games.  He was, hands down, the best dungeon master in the area.  Maybe on the planet.  He was in deep.  He had converted his basement into a real-life dungeon, with a gaming table that took up the bulk of the space.  With 3D-printed characters and hand-painted pewter monsters in a homemade dungeon within a dungeon.

            He ran the sort of campaigns that players would dread playing and dream about afterward.  Nate LaSpada once sat there and pissed his pants because he couldn’t find a moment to ask for a pause, then finished the round without changing, clamping a wad of paper towels in his crotch.  Friday and Saturdays during school and every night of the summer, the uber caffeinated soda flowed, toaster pastries were broken and shared.  Alliances forged; treaties broken.  He was, as his own mother once put it, “King Zit on Nerd Island.”

In parallel to his evolution from screechy little Emo to fully-upright Goth Lord, he was increasingly pulled into the darker realms of his RPGs and associated lore.  The last, fully attended campaign was a journey through the Nine Hells, overrun with demons and evil spirits.  Daryl had invented his own D20 game.  The rules were complex and arcane, even for a troupe of seasoned geeks.  The twist was that with every injury, the player had to cut themselves with a razor.  Deep enough to leave a meaningful scar.  On paper, it sounded fun.  Fully immersive.

            He called it Zend.  They played it over Winter Break.

            It was fucking brutal.  There were no survivors.  It was no longer fun for the player.  It had become torture porn for the game master.  One by one, his “friends” dropped out.  Leaving his game table spattered with the blood of innocents, most of which he had collected during the in-game bloodletting and stored in a mason jar.

###

            This year’s events committee voted on Dante as the theme for Spring Fling.  The gym would become a lilting, white homage to Paradiso.  Or more of a semi-literate projection, as none of the girls on the committee actually read that book.  Billowy tulle, flowing satin, a cascades of string lights.  Heaven on Earth, full of angelic princesses and their demigod dates.  Chief among them was Jenny Healy, now the most powerful Junior in school and her alpha brute, Rusty Becker. 

            It wouldn’t be accurate to call Rusty a dumb jock, since he was perpetually ineligible.  His only sport was mockery and then pummeling the mocked if they back-mocked.  He was plenty dumb, though.  His crew included other jacked up primates and their toady, Lenny.  Lenny had still not grown much since Junior High.  He subsisted on canned meat and nicotine gum.  You could count his ribs through his clothes.  Despite having arms that looked like twigs wrapped in rubber bands, he cuffed his short sleeves and walked with his chest puffed out like he was posing for a swolfie; arms out, a gunslinger looking to draw. 

            His primary purpose was to talk people into a fight.  Either getting in too deep himself and needing to call his ape army for backup, or just being the hype guy.  Peppering any minor confrontation that emerged with “fightin’ words.”

            “What the fuck did he just say to you?  You gonna let him say some shit like that?”

            As they grew older and bored beating up on each other and the same underclassmen, this had become more of an intramural activity.  Organized rumbles with rival schools. 

            As the year wore on, it was dawning on them that they had peaked.  This structure would not carry forth into the world.  Some of them had enlisted.  Some of them would work at the founry.  Lenny was already learning to cook meth.  He would likely acquire a taste for it himself and never do more than enough business to support that habit.  Like his father before him.  He already planned to drop out when Rusty graduated.  They weren’t going to promote him through to graduation out of pity.

            Mike Hillman and Jerry Schroeder were dumb jocks.  They signed yearbooks with their name and jersey number.

“It was a great year; Summer will be even better. Mike Hillman – 69#”
            “Stay cool! J-Love 88#”

For today, they worked as captive labor, in the gym they dominated for three years.  Countless towel snaps and wedgies and swirlies and dick jokes and bravado and lies.  Those days were over.  Phys Ed was moved outside and would be mostly co-ed.  The gym itself was devoted to the Spring Fling from now until the big night. 

Hillman was on Jerry’s shoulders, swaying and tacking fabric to the wall.  Rusty mostly coached from the side, passing instructions from Jenny.  Lenny was up in the catwalk, draping fairy lights and streamers from the rafters.

            The bell rang and they went to the cafeteria.  Their final fiefdom.  Alone, as always, was Daryl.  No matter how busy it got, he always got his own table in the back corner.  No one ever saw him eat.  He just perched himself on the back of his chair, usually reading something “Goth-tarded and gay” that no one in Rusty’s crew could comprehend, let alone appreciate.

            As little as his new persona did to win him any male friends, he was changed.  Even since last break.  His face had cleared up.  His posture was straight and strong.  His muscle tone had started to catch up to his lanky frame.  The layers of dark clothing and platform boots added 20 pounds and three inches.  He had… presence. 

The boys at school had mostly forgotten him.  He was lost in the boredom of last year’s abuses as they turned their pointless anger toward the other schools in the region.  The beatings had subsided, the jokes were in hushed tones. 

            But the girls had begun to notice.  And then the boys noticed the girls noticing.  Just like that, he was back in the crosshairs.  Jenny—who was actually not interested so much as just re-registering his existence—was staring.  Wondering if he was the same sad, little boy she had to rescue in Jr. High.  Daryl felt her gaze and met it.  Rusty, whose only real motivation in life was to impress her didn’t miss a beat.

            “Hey! Daryl-in Manson! Eyes on your own paper!”

“Meus… culus” his eyes drifted from Jenny’s to Rusty’s “man-du-caarrrre. Sternetur tinea.”

            “The fuck did you just say to him?!?!”  Lenny screamed.  “Rusty!  Beat.  His.  Ass.”

            Mr. Randall, the shop steward and lunch room proctor, stepped in.

“Get your dirty feet off my table, Leonard.”

            Rusty waited for Daryl to look back up from his book. “I’ll see you after break, Dumble-dork!”   

###

            As background research for Zend, Daryl had collected occult books.  Western translations, mostly.  Forbidden rites, demonology, spells.  The Munich Handbook, The Book of St. Cyprian, King James’ Book of Daemonologie, Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, Sepharial, Wickland and his personal favorite: The Grand Grimoire. 

            His basement walls became a collage of pages and passages from The Book of Soyga, The Voynich Manuscript, a partially constructed Mirror of Lilith, hierarchies of angels and demons.  His book collection was now becoming less referential and more practical.  Lesser spells, manifesting, mediumship.  Though most everything he tried had borne no fruit, he had some minor victories.  A Wiccan guide helped him with his acne.  Whether through true magic or thanatomaniacal belief, his confidence spell worked.

            He began to dabble in languages.  He was partly convinced that he could be the one to finally unlock the encoded pages of of Soyga and Voynich, and fully convinced that many of these manuscripts lost something in the translation or were even outright frauds like the Oera Linda.  He printed and hung scans of rare and ancient texts and scrolls from online archives, side by side with modern translations.  He made special note when the texts agreed.

            He moved on to summoning and conjuring.  With some truly spectacular failures.

            Once, in a horny fog, he summoned a succubus, only producing a nightmare where he was ravaged by an angry and mean-spirited incubus—which, in a way, was lucky, the incubus took it easy on him.  He fought off the sleep paralysis and shrieked himself awake.  Scratches on his back, blood on his sheets. 

            He attempted to levitate, managing only to fall over and spill ink on his Map of the Nine Hells.  He found a stray black cat and tried to make it his familiar.  That just ended with a tetanus booster.  He had killed two rats and several birds in similar misfires.  The smell of burnt feathers really sticks around.

                        The more he learned, the more he understood that many of these spirits and demons were reliant on you doing most of the work.  Like, you invoke Mammon, right?  In the hope of a financial windfall, vast riches, laid at your feet.  Instead, he gives you a stack of books.  Homework?  No one summoned you as a life coach, jackass.  Anyone can “rise and grind.”  You wouldn’t conjure a demon if you didn’t need to, would you?

            The greater demons, the fallen angels and outcast gods were not available to just anyone with a black candle.  No, both the conduit and context had to be worth their time and attention.  The stakes had to be high.  Eternal life on the immortal planes gets tedious, after all.

            Bribery isn’t a great shortcut.  Offerings are appreciated, but really curry no favor.  Contrary to what we often read in books and see in movies, not every soul is worth a deal with the Devil.  In most cases, you aren’t even dealing directly with dark prince of the hoary netherworld.  It’s most often an imp and his deal comes with strings.  You get what you want, with some unwanted twist or unintended consequence. 

            When you do get the Real Deal, he collects at the end, when you’ve lived your life and made your soul worth having.  Often in some multi-level marketing scheme where you fuck over a bunch of erstwhile good people, damning yourself in such a manner as your soul would be his, anyway and taking a bunch of suckers with you.

            As far as Daryl was concerned, that part was all horse shit and the soul wasn’t worth selling.  It had no intrinsic value, if it existed at all.  If that’s what it took, he was perfectly willing to part with his own.  Now that it was Spring Break, he set to work on his own tome.  He couldn’t fully read Avestan script, but he had begun to work on phonetic translations.  Writing out the lines as they should be spoken aloud into a leather journal that he considered his own, personal grimoire.

He would use this fragmented knowledge.  Find those links and common components among the sources and cobble together a true conjuring spell.  He had collected innocent blood, given to him freely.  He had worn the bronze leman around his neck for weeks.

            He would bring forth a true god.  One who would wreak havoc and exact revenge.  Fathomless fury.  Righteous rage.  Foment chaos and disorder on a biblical scale.

            He would make his mind and body a wretched and inhospitable place where nothing good nor holy might find purchase.  If there was truly a soul, he would blacken it.  He would embrace evil.  Personify it.  The initial rites had been performed.  The invitation was made.

            He would become worthy.

###

            After break, Daryl returned to school.  He had emerged from the chrysalis.  Velvet and leather.  Silver ring claws.  Layered trench-cloak and big, stompy boots.  He wore that large bronze amulet they couldn’t see.  It needed to be against the skin.  A lamen of his own creation.  Avestan script around a stylized emblem made from runes. 

            The kids who had spent five years throwing shoulders into him stepped aside in the hall.  Whether anyone had gained any real respect for him, they regarded him as if they did. 

            Rusty and his posse weren’t afraid, they had muscle and numbers.  They taunted and baited Daryl.  He ignored them.  It wasn’t time.  They largely stayed out of each other’s way for that first week after break. 

            Until the night of the dance.

            Daryl came home from school that Friday and put everything he needed in his leather courier bag.  He went to the basement window and pulled down a small bottle with a hazy liquid inside.           

At the beginning of break, he had started a tincture of absinthe and dried vervain.  He placed it on the sill where it would get a good balance of light and heat, which had turned it from clear, bright green, more toward an aqua-turquoise.  He put this in the bag along with a paintbrush, the mason jar of blood and the leather journal.  He rolled up the canvas on his gaming table, stuck it in the top of the pack and left.

###

            Daryl got back to school as detention and extra-curricular activities ended.  As he made his way to the back hall and over to the gym, Rusty saw him walk by the detention room and watched him round the corner toward the gym.  He motioned for Lenny, Jerry and Hillman to follow him into the hall.

            Daryl walked into the locker room and put his bag on a bench.  He pulled out the jar of blood, the tincture and paintbrush.  With the canvas scroll under his arm, he went into the showers.  He unrolled the canvas and laid it on the floor.  It had a Solomonic circle etched into it with charcoal.  He would stand upon it, to protect himself from the conjuring.

            He poured some of the tincture into the jar of blood to thin and quicken it.  The absinthe would sweeten the offering and what devil or demon could resist that touch of iron herb?  He took the paint brush and went to the wall.

            A triangle, with each line he recited a word.

            “Tetragrammaton. Anaphaxeton. Primeumaton.”

            Then he drew a circle inside the triangle, filling the space, touching the three sides.  In the smaller triangles made by that circle, he drew two Greek letters in each one: MI-XA-HA.  Inside the circle, itself, he drew a six-pointed star.

He took his shirt off and went out to the locker room to get his grimiore.

            “Sweet. Fancy. Moses.”  It was Rusty, he pointed Lenny to the janitor’s closet.  “Get the toilet brush.”

“Yeah, you gonna shove it up his ass?” Lenny seemed a little too excited about that.

            “What?  No-the fuck is wrong with you?  We’re gonna scrub our boy here up for the dance.  Then he’s gonna clean this fucking voodoo off my walls.” 

            Daryl tried to squeeze past him and run, but Jerry and Hillman closed ranks and dragged him back to the shower, slamming him against still-wet, blood-art on the wall.  They pinned his arms in an ironic crucifixion pose.  Rusty approached, grabbed the lamen and looked at it. 

            “A-ESH-MA? Seriously, how many cats have you killed, Sabrina?”

            Oh, those cats can take care of themselves, buddy.

            Lenny walks in with the toilet brush. And the grimoire.

            “Dear diary…” Lenny giggles as he feigns writing in it with his toilet-brush/quill-pen.

            “I really, wouldn’t read that if I were y-” Rusty’s gut punch interrupts Daryl’s warning.

            “What is this… some kind of-is this a fucking poem?” Lenny holds up the grimoire. 

            Rusty laughs. “Let’s hear it.”

            Lenny, who was barely literate, could still easily sound out the phonetic spellings.  He holds the toilet brush high, like a scepter. 

“Luh-red s-eye-ah ah-f-zay-sh”

A low rumbling in the bowels of the building.  The creaking pipes of the boiler below?

“Kuh-sh-m, kuh-sh-m, kuh-sh-m”

            The tiles behind Daryl split.  Jerry and Hillman let him go and he dropped to his hands and knees.  The bloody talisman, transferred in reverse from the wall to his back, began to pulse.  The lines raised to welts.  Racing snakes traced the outline beneath his skin.

“What did you do to him?”  Rusty, for maybe the first time in his life, was afraid.

“We didn’t do that!” Jerry squealed as he and Hillman circled back and away.  Lenny, either oblivious or too distracted by the hard work of reading, continued on.

            “Kuh-da br-uh sh-mah ont-qahm az bid-kah-rahn AHST!” He finished with a flourish, waving his toilet brush like a wand over Daryl. 

            The rumble from the boiler room grew closer.  In the floor, then the walls, into the overhead pipes.  The pipes shook and shower heads began to blow off in succession, steam hissing into the showers.

            Daryl looked up.  Yellow irises floating in a sea of red, now sunk deep in the eyeholes of his bony face.  A voice that was a mix of his own, barely post-pubescent screech and the roll of distant thunder fought from the knot of muscles in his neck.

“Run!”

            Run? Rusty and crew could barely even back away.  As the shower room was enveloped in steam, they slid slowly back from it and into the locker room, clutching each other tight.                           The white-noise of the steam was punctuated by the sound of bones cracking, skin stretching, nails dragging on tile, grunting, snarling.  Daryl’s pinched screams became a train whistle.  All at once, the noise stopped.  Breathing.

            They could make out a figure in the roiling vapor.  Even on all fours, it was massive.  It stood and became a hulking silhouette.  With every, limping step, the floor shook.  The building shook.  The world shook.

            Boom.  Drag.  Boom.  Drag.  BOOM.

            Had they been able to verbalize what they saw, each would have painted a different picture.  Lenny saw a grotesque, piecemeal minotaur.  Half bull, half humanoid.  Not neatly segmented, head, torso and bottom like he had seen in pictures.  One hoof, one giant foot.  Four arms.  The head of a longhorn, the twisted face of a man.  This bullwhip of a tail.

            Jerry saw the boss from the final battle in Epic Dark.  Just as he was in the game.  A 3D animated, winged devil with purple armor and a skull-mace.  Standing there in his “ready to fight” loop animation.

            Hillman didn’t see shit, because he fainted as it emerged from the fading fog of the showers.

            Rusty saw three heads.  A ram, a bull and a grimacing man snorting fire.  He had a stout, well-muscled torso, chiseled chest and arms, scaled legs with hooked spurs, that ended in talons.  He rode a beast like a lion with wings and a long, serpent’s neck.  When all heads of the rider and mount roared together, Rusty audibly shit himself.

            It rushed him first, the beastly steed rammed his head into Rusty’s chest and slammed him through one row of lockers into another.  Killing him instantly.  The three-headed demon riding it waved his hand and Rusty was resurrected, to feel all the pain of his now broken body.  He cast this same spell over the others.  Death would not come for them before he was through.

            Rusty screamed in pain and the demon brushed one finger across his lips, wiping the mouth from his head.  His eyes went wide, his screams muffled as blood and tears streamed down his face.

            Lenny turned and ran into the gym.  He was blocked by the nightmarish minotaur, outside the confines of the locker room, he had swelled to his full size.  Lenny held up the toilet brush like a crucifix.  The horrid beast grabbed the brush and for one terrible second, Lenny thought the monster would shove it in his ass.

            Instead, it grabbed Lenny and stretched him like taffy.  Then squeezed him from the bottom up like a tube of toothpaste until his guts popped out of his mouth; a party-popper of gore.

            Hillman had come to.  He and Jerry had made it to one of the gym doors, which were locked tight as they banged and strained against it.  The beast approached them.  Jerry turned to face the MMORPG boss of his nightmares and Hillman finally saw his own version of the abomination.  It was his third-grade gym teacher.

“Mr. Zurlych?” 

            Before they could so much as scream, the demon slammed both of their heads together, merging them into one. Leaving them to scramble and bash about the gym like four-legged finger-cuffs.

###

            As night fell, cars began to fill the parking lot.  Spring Fling was nowhere the high spectacle of prom, but there was still a red carpet and a photographer.  Jenny was getting impatient.  Other couples had already made their entrances.  She turned to her own posse of jilted dates.

            “Those assholes stood us up!  Pair up, ladies, let’s go get our pictures.”

            What they saw when they got to the gym stopped them dead in the doorway.

            “What in the actual fuck.”

            The last they had seen the place, it was a vision in white.  Billowing swags of fabric and showers of light.  Now, it was entirely red.  The overhead lights flickered dimly and with the tattered crimson tapestries swaying in the breeze of the ceiling fans, cast shadows that looked like flames licking up the walls. 

The individual stations of heaven had been turned into horrific dioramas of pain.  The angels had been turned to demons, punishing the posed bones of the damned.  The streamers in the rafters were joined by long strips of leather and stretched faces, racked in pain and… entrails, maybe?

            Paradiso had become Inferno. 

            An earnest Sophomore ran up to them. “Oh my God, Jenny, you did such a good job.  I swear I thought those skeletons were real!”

            “Yeah… thanks.”

Jenny was in shock, she walked to center of the gym, where one of the tortured had been flayed open, his flesh being pulled and stretched and pinned to the floor around him.  Cherubs had been turned to imps, encircling him like dancers.  Using him as a makeshift Maypole.  It did look real.  And familiar.

She was as impressed as she was angry.  She looked at the double doors at the other end of the gym.  Barely hanging on to their hinges, the hall light beyond them flickering.

“Jenny? Where-“

Jenny was through the broken doors before she knew where she was going, stepping through the rubble around the gaping hole in the wall.  Walking, now running, following the trail of debris into the night.