“Thirty-seconds,” Ricky said.
His brother whispered, “Look.”
Ricky took his eyes from the trees overhead and looked down to the ring of candles. George had laid out a fresh pillowcase, meant to symbolize the one they had burnt. Below it, a shape was already rising from the ashes and taking form beneath the cloth.
It was the right size and shape to be a baby, but Ricky knew it had to be Dr. Hugs under there. When Tucker was a puppy, he had inherited George’s teddy bear and carried it around. Ricky took it away from him when Tucker had eaten one of the eyes off of Dr. Hugs. They had burned it once. Now it was reforming from the bones of the dead fire.
“Fifteen.”
Amber’s eyes were open.
George was cradling some rocks near his mouth so he could whisper power into them.
“Ten.”
Ricky counted down the last five seconds. In the candlelight, George tossed one stone to Ricky and another to Amber. Mary and Vernon finished their verse and George took over.
There were ten syllables that George had to speak aloud. He said them carefully, enunciating each one with a gap in between. When he finished the last, the shape under the pillowcase began to squirm.
Amber held out her rock. It was her turn. She started strong, but then lost her way when she was halfway through her line. She stammered and Ricky and George both whispered the next word to her. Amber’s voice was shaking by the end, but she finished her incantation and then Mary and Vernon began chanting again.
Amber bent over with a shriek and pulled at her hair.
A moment later, there was another shape in the circle of candles.
# # #
Amber stumbled back when she saw the monster that was materializing in the candlelight. Gray smoke was rising from the ashes of the fire and it was trying to assemble into a howling wraith, shimmering in the center of their triangle.
George and Ricky stood strong, but the vision was too much for Amber. She tripped and spilled to the ground. Mary stumbled in her incantation and Vernon spoke louder to cover for her until she found her place again.
Amber’s entity reached a smoky hand towards her. She held up her rock to ward it off. The creature’s hand struck out and knocked the rock into the darkness. Ricky wanted to run to her and help Amber to her feet but he didn’t dare.
Beneath the pillowcase, Dr. Hugs was sitting up and was still growing.
He suddenly remembered the blood demon that he had fought. For years, the memories were so faded that they felt like stories that someone had told him when he was a child. Now, they flooded back in bright, undeniable colors. Ricky remembered what April Yettin had yelled to him. He yelled the same thing at Amber.
“You control it,” he said. “It was called to you, so you can control it.”
Even before he finished saying it, he knew that it wasn’t precisely true. Amber could entrance the monster—the thing was so fixated on her that she could induce some kind of hypnosis into the thing if she found the knack. It wasn’t precisely control, but it might be all they needed to keep the thing paralyzed long enough for George to finish the ceremony.
Dr. Hugs stood up and tossed away the pillowcase. It couldn’t have covered him much longer. Dr. Hugs was growing too big for that. The way the stuffed animal moved, it almost looked like he was already fifty feet tall. His limbs swung slowly, like they were covering a great distance as he reached for George. Ricky remembered the monster that ate George. From his wide eyes and the way his mouth was hanging open, it appeared that George was remembering the same thing.
“George, you too. You have to control it.”
George’s eyes blinked back into focus and he regarded his brother. He tossed a pack of folded paper right by Dr. Hugs and Ricky caught it. He turned it so he could read the words from the candlelight. Meanwhile, George was trying to wrestle out of the grip of Dr. Hugs.
Ricky found the place where George had left off and he began to read aloud.
Dr. Hugs’s head whipped around and regarded Ricky with his one good eye.
“I remember this part,” Vernon said.
Ricky kept his eyes on the paper, reading the incantation that was supposed to reopen the passage and send the demon home for good. They had been stupid to believe that fire would kill it. The fire had only broken the thing down—disorganized it—until it could recover. Ricky realized that the same might be true for the blood demon. That monster had plunged deep into the lake and broken apart, but maybe it was still down there somewhere, trying to reassemble itself, atom by atom, so it could find revenge.
Vernon swung a heavy stick down on Dr. Hugs’s head. A branch snagged the fabric and tore the top of Dr. Hugs’s head. Stuffing began to ooze out of the wound.
Ricky continued his incantation, trying to keep his focus so his words wouldn’t slow.
He realized that his mother had stopped reading too. She was swinging her flashlight towards the smoke creature that was tormenting Amber.
In a matter of seconds, their careful planning had gone out the window. They were all attacking randomly. Ricky realized that he had lost his place and said the same line twice in a row. His father was still swinging the stick at Dr. Hugs, but the thing didn’t seem to notice. It was almost as tall as George now.
He read two more lines of the strange syllables.
Nothing was happening. Dr. Hugs was growing. Amber’s entity was whipping around with the speed of the wind. It slashed at Amber as it dodged Mary’s attack.
Ricky felt helpless and
