The eyesore of an apartment building teetered on top of the hill like a seesaw. The residents swore that they could feel the old structure sway back and forth in the middle of the night, sometimes leaning right, sometimes left. Today, a Tuesday, the building was canting decidedly to the right. So old that that the shingles on the roof blew off with even the lightest gust of frigid October wind, the attic of the building was perfect for stargazing on a clear night. The holes in the roof of the old domicile were small, but very convenient for looking up at the country sky, abundant with twinkling stars like lights of a busy city, even though there wasn’t a city around for miles. However magnificent the spectacle of the night sky was, the man in the fancy suit and tie pacing impatiently in the attic paid no notice. He looked at his watch and then plowed a hand through his long, jet-black hair, the ends of his curling locks almost to his shoulders. He inhaled deeply and wrinkled his nose; the sharp odor of incense swirled through the dark and musty attic like grains of sand during a sandstorm.

“Aren’t you done yet?” He growled at the teenage girl kneeling on the old, creaky floorboards, chanting softly in words that might have been English but were too quiet to tell. He peered over her shoulder expectantly and she stiffened, her shoulders tensing. Lit candles surrounded her, the light of them all she had to see by. Laid out in front of her was an empty cardboard box of matches and three small, imperfect, quartz gemstones arranged in a triangular formation.

“It… it takes time… you see,” The girl stuttered, turning her face upward to look at the man but not directly meeting his luminous green eyes, avoiding his steely gaze.

“See what? I don’t see anything.” The man leered down at the girl. He squatted so that he was eye level with her. “I would expect more from someone with your powers—if, of course, you are what you claim to be. So, what do you say if we hurry things up, hmm?”

The girl said nothing, only pushed a clump of lank, sweat soaked hair off her forehead and began chanting with renewed vehemence. The man turned his back on her and returned to his pacing, looking skyward at the stars shining through the dilapidated roof. The girl visibly relaxed once the man’s ogling gaze was gone, but she did not stop her chanting, even though she brought a trembling hand to her dry throat in an unsaid plea for water that, of course, the man did not answer. Beads of sweat gathered on her upper lip, the perspiration not from exertion but from anxiety of failing and facing the man’s wrath. Every minute that went by seemed to become longer than the last, the air becoming hotter and heavier with every passing second. Finally, the girl ceased her barely audible chanting and wiped sweat off her forehead. She stood up. “It is done.”

“Finally.” The man sounded pleased, though his face showed no emotion. The only sign that he was satisfied was the slight smirk that began to creep up his face, but it was gone as soon as it appeared. “Then let’s get on with it.”

The girl looked surprised. “But sir—”

“What, did you think you were done?” He stepped closer to her. “You won’t be done until you successfully give me what I want. And if you fail, well, I believe I can find a suitable punishment for you.”

The girl mustered up her courage. “My money—”

“You will get your money when we are done and I get what I want, as we agreed.” The man hissed in her face, his handsome features contorting into a gruesome expression of barely-contained rage. Then he seemed to collect himself and hide behind his mask of deceit once more. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?” He suggested politely.

The girl nodded meekly, staring at a spot on the ground so she would not cry. She took a deep breath. She could do this, of course she could. She wasn’t called one of the best mediums in the world for nothing. She rolled up her sleeves, trying to ignore the man watching her intently with fire in his eyes. She had not pried when he had come to her old, dilapidated apartment building on top of the hill and asked for her to do this for him. She had not pried, had only thought of the money and how it would help Mamma and Julia and Dominick, how it would help them all, maybe even give them a chance to survive…

She forced her thoughts back to the present and began to chant again, louder this time, in a language that was clearly not English, and was guttural and sharp like the chopping of an axe against a tree trunk. The man did not know much of the ancient language the girl was chanting in, for it, and the people who had spoken it, were lost long ago, but he knew enough to recognize the words the girl was chanting over and over. Great spirit, I summon thee. Across the darkened world to the plane of the living, I summon thee.

It was a whole lot of bull, if you asked the man. He could’ve summoned the spirit himself, of course, and in half the time. But there were certain…complications that occurred when summoning such a powerful apparition. And anyway, it didn’t matter. It all would be over in a matter of minutes and the outcome would still be the same. After all, the man had been waiting a very long time. Hundreds of years, in fact, so he could wait a few minutes more.

The room was becoming increasingly hot, and sweat poured down the girl’s face, but not a hair on the man’s head was out of place. His incandescent eyes danced with an excitement that even he could not contain, and the fire in his eyes disagreed with the nonchalant expression on his smooth face. The three quartz stones on the ground began to glow bright white, and smoke began to pour out of them, so quickly that within seconds the ground was blanketed; wisps of the smoke began to curl up around the girl’s and the man’s ankles like ghostly hands. The girl raised her arms over her head, the air she touched pulsing and humming with electricity that shocked her fingers and made the hair on her arms stand on end.

The mass of gallivanting smoke was growing; the beams of ivory light the quartz stones gave off barely penetrating the foggy substance. The girl saw this and began chanting even louder and faster, until the words didn’t sound like words at all, just one long string of nonsense like the blaring of a foghorn. The man smiled. Soon, very soon, he thought to himself.

With a sound like a sharp object whistling through the air, the smoke began to swirl around inside the triangular formation the girl had created with the three stones. The smoke pulsed and hummed as it clumped together in the shape of a shadowy, formless being. The girl was circling the formation now, her arms still raised, tracing delicate patterns in the air. Inside the formation a plume of black smoke shot up, the inky column quickly swallowing the achromatic mist that lingered around the ground like a thick carpet. The girl abruptly stopped her chanting and for a moment all was silent and nothing moved, save the girl’s trembling hands. Then two glowing crimson eyes blinked open in the shadowy column, suspended in the smoke like drops of blood caught in a spider’s web.

“Who dares summon me from the depths of hell? Who dares to have dragged me to the plane of the living?” A gravelly voice hissed from the smoky column, the voice dry and raspy like the scraping of rocks. The air stank of burning rubber and gasoline.

“I am the medium who has summoned you,” the girl said, her voice wavering like a canoe in choppy waters. “I now command you.”

“Stupid, stupid girl,” the voice wheezed and a harsh, breathy sound was heard, the noise like air being sucked from a tire. It was laughter, the man recognized, though the girl didn’t.

“I command you now, and you will be trapped here until I release you.” The girl said with an air of confidence, but her voice trembled like her thin body, swaying almost as much as the old apartment building she was in.

The voice from the smoke continued to laugh, and if it had a body the man suspected it would be doubled over, tears streaming from its eyes. “You will not command me for much longer,” the voice cackled.

The girl’s eyes widened. “W-what do you mean?” There was a tremor in her voice that she couldn’t disguise.

“Look at yourself,” the voice advised. “You won’t be with us much longer.” The girl was seconds away from crying as she looked down at her quaking hand and then screamed.

“What did you do?” She cried, reaching out at the man in the suit with her hands that were becoming more gnarled and wrinkled and spotted by the second. Before the man’s very eyes she was aging; her dark hair speckled with silver, her face wrinkled and lined, her shoulders slumping over. The only thing that remained the same, as her hair became limp and white and her eyes milky, was the expression of pure terror and fear on her face and in her clouded eyes. “You…” she gasped, her breath rattling in her chest. But the man just stood there and smiled as the young girl who had stood before him turned unrecognizable. She began to fold in on herself, her body and her bones compressing until she fell to the ground, an empty shell of a person.

The man stepped over her lifeless corpse distastefully, wrinkling his nose as he walked toward the column of smoke that was slowly spreading and solidifying, starting to have some sort of a shape—a malformed, gigantic, hideous shape elongating and shifting into a body-like form, its eyes glowing brighter as they turned on the man with a stare that would send even the bravest of men running home to their mothers. “You did this? You had the girl summon me without telling her of the curse?”

When the man smiled, his pinched face softened, and he would have looked almost human except for the malicious look of glee in his emerald eyes. “Precisely.”

The smoky black mass looked impressed, as impressed as a column of smoke could look. “That was clever,” it admitted with grudging admiration.

“I’d like to think so,” the man said slyly. “And now I am your master, and you will serve me.”

“As you wish,” the smoky mass groveled, seeming to bow down to the man in a mocking gesture of loyalty. “I obey your command, master…?” The sentence ended in a polite question.

The man grinned, his pearly incisors catching the last light of the dying out candles, making his smile look eerily sinister. “You may call me Amaranth.”