On the demonic manipulation of temporal dynamics
She looked up at Jenny with a doubtful look on her face.
“Yeah, that’s about what I thought.”
“And then?”
“It looks feasible. I mean, there’s nothing completely insane in there.”
“Time travel isn’t insane?”
Andi couldn’t help herself. “Dead?” She’d seemed perfectly fine when they’d been there. Who could she be dead.
The officer watched her for a moment more. She realized belatedly that he had dropped that particular nugget on them precisely in order to elicit a reaction. Hopefully surprised was the correct response…
When she didn’t say anything else, the officer continued. “Dead. The neighbors called us at about 3:30 pm about a potential disturbance. They said that they’d heard someone screaming and then several gunshots. When we arrived shortly later, she was dead.”
She found him within ten minutes.
More accurately–he found her.
One moment, she was alone. At this hour, there weren’t many other passengers. The last of the daytime passengers had already gone home and the late night partiers had hours to go yet. She was the only person on the lower level of her car and there was only one couple on the upper floor. However, they seemed otherwise occupied.
If she hadn’t seen her with her own two eyes, she wouldn’t have believed it. The demon was still burning away behind them–she could feel the heat–but that meant…
“Of course dear. Now, how can I help you?”
Andi and Jenny looked at each other. Without a word, they moved together, doing their best to hide the still burning body behind them. Andi stole a quick glance behind her–not long left now.
After bandaging up her hand, Jenny brought up a point that Andi hadn’t even considered. Had Morris–the old lady who owned the bookstore where Andi had originally found the book–known about it?
Had she had anything to do with the book showing up in Andi’s bag?
It turned out that the more powerful the demon was you were trying to summon, the more complicated the summoning became. This was going to take hours of prep work and the better part of half an hour just to do the summoning. Honestly, she would have liked to take longer, but she didn’t know that she would be able to. The new chapters of the book had laid out what she’d expected–the more you tried to add to a summoning, the less time you had to do it in. That seemed to set a hard limit on just what could be done, but it was hard to calculate. Perhaps there were exceptions.
Andi awoke the next morning, sure that the entire night’s activities had been a dream. Sure, she couldn’t particularly remember how she had gotten to bed–or even how she had gotten home, if her memories of the bookstore and the train were not to be believed.
But it had all been too ridiculous. A book that had somehow followed her home. The feeling of falling, even if it hadn’t come back. The man on the train; had he even been related to all the rest of it? A book that her cat irrationally hated–and she couldn’t even read. Writing that wasn’t writing, at least until it was.
And that title.
Computational Demonology
