by Tristan A. Gilmore – This story is unrelated to the Barbarian novel
The proverbial adage goes that one cannot have their cake and eat it too. That is to say, one cannot pay the cost of something and retain the payment. It should be common sense, and it generally is an easy thing to comprehend, although there are always exceptions.
For Becca Olivia, that exception came on a stormy night in the beginning of April, with cold winds lashing at the windows, and a bright flame on the candelabra in the center of her lipstick-red pentagram.
“What does it say to do next?” Lonnie asked, leaning over, trying to make out the small letters of the book on Becca Olivia’s knee.
“Now we have to put each of the five things in their circles as we say ‘I forsake thee’ to each of them.”
“And after that’s the quiet part, right?”
“Yeah, so don’t forget. We can’t say anything until we hear three taps at the window.”
“I got it, no worries.”
The two friends smiled, their nervous cheeks casting confident shadows in the candlelight.
“Ready?” Becca Olivia asked, holding up her shoe box of trinkets. Lonnie nodded and picked up her own, rattling it loudly.
“Okay…” Becca Olivia chewed her tongue as she reached into her box and pulled out an old wooden yo-yo. “Dearest friend, I forsake thee,” she said, her voice low and serious as she placed it into one of the circles drawn around the edges of the pentagram. Lonnie nodded and repeated after her, placing her own Trollz doll head.
Becca Olivia could feel a laugh bubbling up in her throat, thinking how ridiculous they might look if someone were to walk into her bedroom right then, but she held it down; this was serious. They were summoning a demon.
And so she held onto her deep, gravelly tone as she cleared her throat and said “dearest friend, I forsake thee,” placing a small finger puppet from her childhood in the next circle. Lonnie followed suit with a small paper envelope.
Next came the tag from her old blankie, and Lonnie’s baby-blue pacifier. Then the key to a locket that Becca Olivia lost years ago, and Lonnie’s favorite rock.
Finally, Becca Olivia placed a small, worn out plastic dinosaur, and Lonnie placed an old bouncy ball.
At least, she tried to, but it rolled outside of the circle, and Lonnie swore under her breath, snatching it before it could roll under the dresser.
“You’re not supposed to talk!” Becca Olivia stage whispered, and Lonnie frowned.
“Well, it was rolling away and probably ruined it already! Do you want to do it again, to be sure?”
“No, just shut up and listen!”
The two friends sat in frustrated silence, listening to the whistling wind and slapping rain and everything that came along with a spring storm, but no tapping came at the window in the first few minutes.
After ten minutes, Becca Olivia was feeling quite certain they had ruined the demon summoning, and she was afraid they would have to do it all over again, and was just wondering if they would have to find new old “friends” to forsake for it to work when a loud smack smack smack sounded from the window, making them both jump.
“Was that it?!” Lonnie asked, her voice much higher pitched than usual.
“I don’t know, did it sound like a tapping to you?” Becca Olivia asked.
“No, it was more of a smack, like someone’s open hand.”
“Well then it probably wasn’t?” Becca Olivia half-asked, half-stated. “How pedantic do you think demons are?”
“Probably pretty pedantic,” Lonnie said, nodding hurriedly with fear and relief. “I doubt they’d even come for a couple of little girls when there are, like, evil murders probably summoning them all the time anyway.”
“Probably,” Becca Olivia agreed, her head drooping from disappointment and resentment of being a little girl in a big world full of big people. “Maybe we should invite it in anyway? Just to be sure?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Lonnie admitted hesitantly. “But we shouldn’t wait too long after that, because my mom will want me to go home soon and I can’t get caught up in busy business with demons right before bed.”
“I thought you said you had an hour!” Becca Olivia scowled.
“Well, yeah!” Lonnie rolled her eyes in the candlelight. “But that was before I heard the smacking sound and thought about it really.”
Becca Olivia grumbled under her breath about which friends she’d have to forsake the next time she was summoning demons, and put her hands in the air over the pentagram. Lonnie did the same on the other side, so their hands formed a steeple, and Becca Olivia called out: “Demon! You who have heard our offering! We bid thee enter and converse, so that we might make a deal!”
When nothing happened, Becca Olivia repeated the words two more times, (because demons were dumb and needed things repeated a lot, apparently), and the two friends fell silent once more.
And they waited.
And waited.
And Becca Olivia almost gave in to Lonnie’s timid whisper-pleas, but decided she didn’t want to give up accidentally because of a scaredy-friend, and shook her head until Lonnie quieted again.
And then, from the hand mirror in the middle of the pentagram, she heard a voice.
“What human calls? What needs have ye? What offering sweet shall you offer to me?”
“Hey, we already paid you!” Becca Olivia snapped. “So you need to pay us back!”
The soft chuckle could have been the rain pattering outside, but Becca Olivia wasn’t going to give something away for free if she could help it, and after almost a minute of silence, the voice responded.
Very well. What are your desires?
Lonnie and Becca Olivia looked at each other over the candlelight, and shared a shrug. The movement reminded them of how tired their arms were from holding them up in the steeple for so long, and Becca Olivia asked “first, can we put our arms down, or is that something you need us to keep doing?”
“Yeah, my shoulders hurt!” Lonnie added.
The voice might have sighed, but it might have been the wind.
“You can put your arms down. Now, what are your desires? Wealth? Love? Glory?”
Lonnie nodded profusely to each word, but Becca Olivia shook her head.
“Well, we didn’t know if you’d be available or not, so we wanted the favor for later,” she said, feeling tricky with her fib. Really, they had never gotten that far in their plans before starting.
Another sigh.
“You play games, mortal. I should curse you for your hubris.”
“Well, I don’t know what that means,” Becca Olivia stated, “but my mom would be really mad if you did, so you better not!”
Now the wind really did sound like a snarl.
“Very well. A coin for each of you, capable of paying any cost… but be warned, that whatsoever you purchase, the payment shall be taken from you twice over!”
And with that, the sound of metal plinking against the mirror drew their eyes down to two silver denarius.
“Hey, I thought I told you we already paid!” Becca Olivia complained, picking up one of the coins.
“For audience. But the services of devils and demons run steep. Take care with what you choose to purchase, dear child, for I shall reap it from you twice at a day of my choosing. Farewell…”
And with that, the voice whistled away into the trees, and Lonnie turned the bedroom lights on as Becca Olivia blew out the candle.
“What?!” Lonnie cried out excitedly. “We did it? Becca Olivia, you got a deal with the devil for us!”
Becca Olivia folded her arms smugly. “Of course I did! I told you I could!”
Lonnie shrugged. “Yeah, but you’re only nine years old, so I didn’t think you actually could.”
Becca Olivia scoffed. “Yeah? Well you’re only ten, and your mom doesn’t even have HBO, so how would you know what other nine year olds know?”
Lonnie didn’t have an answer, so they each pocketed their silver, ancient-looking coins, and Lonnie rushed back to her home before her mom grew suspicious while Becca Olivia cleaned up the pentagram. The toys and things went back in her shoebox without a hitch, but the red lipstick she’d taken from her mom was really hard to get up off of the hardwood, and she settled for putting some wet paper towels over it in hopes it would soften up later.
Dinner and a movie followed, but Becca Olivia only half-heartedly acquiesced to her parent’s attention as she considered what she might do with her boon. What if she bought a country? Or maybe just the moon, because there wasn’t a lot there, and she was certain she could haggle with whatever price the demon deemed necessary. Maybe she could just save it for an emergency? But she didn’t like the idea of people asking a lot of questions when she had a broken bone or something and would probably be in a foul mood.
Then, she had an idea, and it made her snicker so hard her sprite came out of her nose during the movie, and not even at a funny part, so her dad gave her a funny look and she had to pretend she thought the boy in the movie was cute or something. (Gross).
But after the movie had ended and she had brushed her teeth and assured her parents she was actually going to go to bed because she had a test the next day (she didn’t) she carefully slid the wet paper towels off of her smeared pentagram, and carefully relit the candelabra with the lighter she found on the sidewalk.
“Dearest friend, I forsake thee!” Becca Olivia intoned, placing her yo-yo again in the circle. And then the finger puppet. Then the tag from her blankie. Then the key.
Finally, it was the turn of her dinosaur, and as she clicked it into place in its circle, she smiled, carefully holding back the chuckle in her throat.
The minutes passed much more slowly this time, because she knew it was coming, and that meant the waiting was just boring. But, finally, the swishing of rain and wind outside coalesced into a tap tap tap at her window, and she smiled. That was much more of a proper tapping than the last time.
“Demon! You who have heard my offering! I bid thee enter and converse, so that we might make a deal!”
Again, the pause, and then the voice, like rustling leaves.
“What human calls? What needs have ye? What offering sweet shall you offer to me?”
“I just paid you, I know how this works. I’m not some newbie to this, y’know!”
The voice sounded almost surprised when it asked, “what is it ye desire?”
“I…” Becca paused, staring at the coin pinched between her fingers, before she smiled maliciously, raising the coin before her in triumph. “I owe the owner of this coin a favor. I want you to pay it for me.”
“A strange request, but surely done. I pay your debt, and claim my own!”
“Great!” Becca Olivia smirked.
“Is that all?” the demon asked, still evidently skeptical.
“Did you pay it already?”
“I shall.”
“Well, I won’t consider us done until you do, so do it now!” Becca Olivia said, folding her arms.
“Very well… It is done! It… wait, there was nothing owed on this coin!?”
“Perfect, so what I owed has been paid?”
“… yes?”
“Fantastic. Goodbye!”
“Wait! You owe-”
“I don’t owe nothin’,” Becca said, shaking her head at the idiot devil. “Twice nothin’ is nothin’, so you just gotta accept that.”
“I… okay.”
And the voice whistled away, head shaking with the wind.
Becca Olivia smiled. Apparently, nefarious beings spent too long being undead, and now their brains had rotted and they were dumb.
She snuck out and down the hall, past her parent’s room, where she could hear their tv playing some dumb drama series, and down the stairs to the laptop on the coach. Pulling it open, she typed in some quick searches, and, grinning ear to ear, held up the coin.
“I want to purchase the real one of that!”
The coin disappeared with a snap! and a wisp of smoke.
~~~*~~~
It had been several days since their dealings with demons, and Lonnie was pouting about having purchased an essay she really hadn’t wanted to write. She didn’t regret having the essay finished, but through a sick turn of events, she had been signaled out by it for a competition to enter two more essays on the same subject, and she couldn’t seem to convince them that she shouldn’t have to compete in it without admitting to not writing the first one. And so she had her debt to pay.
Becca Olivia, on the other hand, was smug as a bug in a rug, which she had decided must be pretty smug, because she felt great.
So it was that that day, after school, when her parents called her downstairs, sounding every bit as perturbed and upset as she had known to expect, she smiled with all that smugness and hopped down the steps with a spring in her step.
“Honey, what is the meaning of this?” her mother asked, concerned.
“Did you… did you use our credit cards?” her father asked, although by the look on his face she knew he didn’t really believe she could have purchased what she had with his cards.
“A friend owed me something,” she said, shrugging nonchalantly, “and this is what I asked for.”
Her flabbergasted parents shook their heads, and argued that there must have been a mistake, but when the only information on the “return to sender” slip was a scrawl of greek (which her father managed to google and discovered meant “Hades”), they had no choice but to accept that a) their daughter had a friend who was very powerful indeed, and b) Cerberus was a very real thing, and he was perfectly happy obeying every word of command their daughter uttered.
Even when an apparently frustrated man arrived at their door in the middle of the night, arguing of unjust actions and payments due, their daughter just shook her head and stomped her foot and told him he needed to learn some better contract law before he made more deals, and that no one said she couldn’t forsake her toys twice, or that payments had to happen at certain times. And when he still wouldn’t leave, Cerberus bit him in the rump and sent him away cursing.
And that is how Becca Olivia came to be the owner of Cerberus, three-headed hound of the underworld, for the price of no longer playing with a yo-yo, a finger puppet, a blanket tag, a key, and a dinosaur, all of which she kept in a shoe box under her bed.