Chapter 5 — THUD THUD TH—

  Glancing warily at #43 across the street, Allen un-summoned his grimoire and dug the tackle box out of his bag. Turned out, this piece of appropriated fishing gear was perfect for sorting and storing various alchemical reagents. Quick access. Modular design. Cheap.

  Of course, plenty of ingredients in your average alchemical toolkit would melt right through the plastic like acid through tissue paper — but those tended to be expensive, and therefore not something Allen often kept in stock.

  He popped the latches and started sifting through the compartments. Being an old hand at this particular dance, it only took a moment to find what he was looking for: barrier salts.

  Now, there were plenty of “premium” versions of barrier salts on the market — kept in glass jars with ornate seals, or bundled together with silver-etched sigils on imported lace. This was pure marketing bullshit.

  Barrier salts were basically just salt rocks that had soaked up enough ambient void energy to become sensitive to fluctuations in the fabric of reality. Leave a few chunks out near an open summoning circle long enough, and congratulations — you’re in business.

  Was the potency of Allen’s homebrew version weaker than the store-bought stuff? Yes. Did it still work? Also yes.

  Why he needed it now? Because the first step in breach protocol was generally containment —, and it’s tough to contain something you can’t see or feel. He held the nugget of barrier salt in his open palm as he walked slowly toward #43, eyes scanning his surroundings while watching the rock for a reaction.

  A few paces out from the edge of the property, the rock began to twitch — not violently, just a subtle shifting in his palm, like a magnet slipping into another magnets field of influence.

  Another perk of the homebrew: the fancy shit would have disintegrated by now. Allens? Ready for round two baby.

  —

  He repeated the procedure at the rear of the property, then again to the western side between #43 and #41, effectively triangulating the breach.

  One marker might’ve been enough to get a rough radius, sure. But Allen didn’t trust the — very likely — rent in the fabric of reality to sit neatly, dead-center on the lawn. These things bloomed out in a general approximation of a fibonacci spiral… but once something from the other side got involved, “usually” usually went out the window.

  Case in point: this breach skewed wide toward the neighboring houses — no surprise considering his with Mrs. 45.

  Allen ended up with a radius that was more akin to an oval than a circle, but that was enough to confirm the origin point was near the front of the home.

  As for verticality? He didn’t have the equipment to check — but if whatever started all this wasn’t in the basement, he’d eat his tackle box.

  With a rough idea of the breaches reach, Allen drew quick protective runes in regular chalk along the perimeter, as well as the outer walls of #41 and #45. They wouldn’t do much, but they’d help. A little.

  Finally, after donning a necklace woven from pine-needles and bathed in ox blood — the dangling wooden sigil meant to ward off psychic influence — he bit the bullet and walked up to the door of number 43 Barrow Hollow Road.

  —

  The knock never finished. The door creaked open on its own — unresisting.

  Allen hesitated. Then, slowly, leaned in — scanning every crack and crevice, every shadow, trying to catch even the slightest hint of movement.

  RATTLE.

  Something jerked inside his bag.

  Allen recoiled, stumbling back to the sidewalk with a startled hiss. Fumbling open the flap — .

  The tackle box had blown open. His barrier salt must’ve detonated from proximity to the breach.

  He muttered a curse under his breath and mentally revoked one gold star from today’s performance review. Still — silver lining — that was the only piece of gear liable to die to proximity alone.

  And hey — it reminded him to pull out his flashlight and trap cards!

  Just because there was definitely a lurking inside didn’t mean those pesky little pimps weren’t probably still creeping around as well.

  Returning to the front door, Allen clicked on his enchanted flashlight — really just a finicky runed rock crammed into a hollowed-out casing — and swept the hallway from multiple angles, watching for distortions that might hint at a fracture in reality — finding none.

  “He—” “Hello?” he called into the dark.

  No response, but that in itself was almost worse.

  He stooped, grabbed a rock from the yard, and chucked it down the hall.

  A menacing hiss echoed up from the door underneath the stairwell, drawing every hair on his arms and neck to attention. So… basement then.

  With utmost reluctance, he stepped inside — flashlight in one hand, revolver in the other, and a short stack of defiled playing cards peeking from his jacket pocket.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He moved carefully toward the basement door, hyper-attuned to every flicker, creak, and chill. The house was just as run-down inside as it was out, but scattered throughout were unpleasant signs of life.

  Beer cans in the den. Graffiti scrawled along the hallway walls. A pair of discarded women’s-wear draped across a coat rack that looked like it predated indoor plumbing.

  Allen was starting to think the house had served as a crash pad for the city’s lower rungs — the broke, the broken, or actively breaking — at least before extradimensional predators had made themselves at home.

  A flicker at the end of the hall caught his eye and kicked him into red-alert — flashlight and revolver raised, steady and silent. He eased a step to the left, and there it was: a faint shimmer, a ripple in space.

  He holstered the revolver and slid a trap card from its sleeve.

  Fun fact about the denizens of our neighboring dimensions: The early Romans were with them — rituals, summonings, sacrifices, etc. All that interest led to a of interaction, a decent amount of bloodshed, and one surprisingly useful quirk:

  they often reacted to Latin.

  “Ave!” Allen whisper-yelled.

  The air spasmed. A translucent tentacle — twitching in directions that didn’t exist — blinked into view.

  With a crisp flick of the wrist, Allen sent the trap card flying with startling precision. It struck the appendage mid-writhe and flashed a disquieting green. A screech — not heard but — reverberated through the corridors of his mind as the creature was pulled inward, swallowed by the metaphysical space bound within the rune-etched card.

  The card lost all momentum and drifted to the floor like a leaf on the wind, still glowing faintly where the runes had been drawn.

  He couldn’t leave it long. The enchantment would degrade, and whatever that thing was would claw its way back out with alacrity. Allen didn’t plan to give it the opportunity.

  He crept forward and crouched beside the basement door. Setting his bag down, he withdrew a large canister of Morton salt and the same stick of chalk from before.

  He poured a thick, unbroken line of salt around the door’s frame, then chalked a slap-dash containment sigil across the wood. To activate it, he bit at the scab on his thumb and dabbed a drop of blood in the center.

  It wouldn’t hold for long — just until the blood dried — but that was enough.

  He just needed to keep whatever was behind the door from lunging the second his back was turned.

  With the bare minimum of safety in place, Allen shuffled over to the card.

  Kneeling, he pressed his thumb to the rune at the base of the seal he’d scribed and recited the spell trigger from memory:

  “Consutum et sigillatum. Claudatur.

  With a muted green flash, the card spontaneously combusted — leaving behind neither ash nor residue. Just a faint sting in the air where it had once been.

  Real spells were long and unwieldy — far better suited to rituals than field work. Fortunately, if you knew what you were doing, you could encode most of a spell using special ink and the right runic sequence, letting you fire it off with just the script and a spoken trigger — as Allen had just done.

  Much like most of his arsenal, the trap cards weren’t really meant for this kind of use.

  They were cheap, janky pocket-dimension enchantments — Functional, barely. But unless you used absurdly high-grade materials, they degraded fast. Too fast for safe storage.

  Still, when paired with a sealing spell, Allen found them perfect for moments like this.

  It was easier to lock something away from reality when you had a formal to slam in its face. It didn’t actually send the thing home — just barred its return to

  “You don’t gotta go home,” Allen muttered, pleased with himself, “but you can’t stay here.”

  That settled, he returned to the basement door, deep in thought — turning over how best to keep it sealed while he searched the rest of the house.

  He started combing through his bag, hoping to jog an idea loose, when his hand brushed an old, rusted railroad spike in the prac-ap bag.

  There were many schools of hedge-wizardry, and one of the more obscure revolved around repurposing industrial artifacts — using the item’s original symbolic purpose as a base to shape the magical effect. Railroad relics had all kinds of connotations: connection, guidance, momentum, violence, boundaries, etc. — leaving plenty of wiggle room.

  Allen spat into his palm, then jabbed the point of the spike into it. It was too dull to draw blood but that was fine. The rust and saliva would suffice.

  He muttered under his breath as he swirled the spike in his hand, “ trying to drill his intent into the object itself.

  Raising the spike above his head with both hands, Allen intoned in a low, resonant bass:

  “Piké sa fémen lapót-la

  Then he drove the spike into the floor in front of the door.

  He was fully free-styling now — mixing some old Louisiana bayou hoodoo with fringe industrial hedgery — but he knew it had worked.

  The echoing thud rang deeper than wood. It echoed in his bones. In the walls. Not just sound — .

  Shaking off the slight disorientation, Allen stood and turned toward the base of the stairs to the second floor. With the basement door sealed — at least for now — he could clean up the rest of the house before tackling the main event.

  —

  Six parasites total. So far.

  Allen thought with a twinge of despair.

  He’d cleared the upstairs rooms with little trouble and less reward — finding nothing at all of interest. The downstairs, however, proved more promising. He’d found an upturned satchel much like his own, stuffed with some high quality reagents, journals and a couple of artifacts — purpose unknown. He hadn’t spotted any names in the journals, but he also hadn’t gone through with a fine-tooth comb.

  He repacked the contents and stuffed the whole bag into his own before heading for the final room at the end of the hall — what he assumed to be the master bedroom. The floor leading up to it was streaked with old blood, and the door bore a sigil drawn in the same.

  He paused, studying the mark carefully.

  At a glance, it looked like a piece of a larger circle — likely inscribed along the inner walls of the room beyond. He knocked once.

  No response.

  Again, not as comforting as it should’ve been.

  Allen cracked the door open slowly, eyes locked on the threshold. If the sigil was wired to a trigger, this would be the tripwire — but as the door swung out fully, nothing happened.

  The room beyond was pitch black — unnaturally so.

  A second sigil stood out on the inside of the door, this one , rather than drawn. Its looping script coiled into the darkness on either side, implying a pattern that likely encompassed the entire space.

  Allen flicked on his flashlight and aimed inward. The beam barely penetrated.

  The darkness wasn’t just present — it was . Supernatural. Ward-driven.

  From what little he could make out, the room was sparsely occupied with decaying furniture and shadow-cloaked clutter. He stepped closer, narrowing in on the carved script running along the walls.

  Whatever this place was, it hadn’t just been a hideout.

  It had been prepared.

  containment Allen thought, tracing the carvings along the wall. His hand bumped against a wide table, and his flashlight revealed an open case sitting atop it.

  Inside: several tools that looked equally suited for mummification or vivisection.

  he muttered internally, taking stock — then noticed blood spatter trailing from the leg of the table.

  He followed the trail, breath catching as it led toward the center of the room — and a ragged hole in the floor, cut straight down into the basement.

  The same basement whose door he had so confidently — and now, he realized, — sealed.

  Before he could even curse, movement flickered at the edge of his vision.

  He turned — just in time to see something eldritch and lunge from the shadows.

  It hit him full force.

  Allen and the creature crashed together, plunging into the abyss yawning beneath the floor.