Artem's Trouble, Pt. I
Hugo has an unexpected visitor
This is my fourth short story from the HugoVerse.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Just a small reminder that I’ve published my previous short story, “Theodora’s Necklace”, currently paywalled, as an ebook on Amazon! If you’re not ready to take out a subscription and follow my writing on an ongoing basis, you can support my writing by buying it here!
When the last movement of Bach’s Magnificat ended, Hugo Czartoryski, a prominent Warsaw wizard, turned off the player, went to his bedroom, took off his robe, got into bed and opened Dan Jones’s new book about Henry V.
A few pages in, he heard a loud and desperate knocking on the door.
Who could this be at this hour?
Another knock, louder than before.
Oh, dammit!
Hugo got out of his bed and went to open the door.
Artem Kovalenko, Ukrainian wizard and Hugo’s friend, was slumped against the entrance, bleeding and beaten up.
Without a word, Hugo helped him get inside. The minute he closed the door, Artem slipped from his grip and fell on the floor, shuddering and sweating.
He looked like a drunk with a bad case of fever – which was a textbook symptom of a curse.
Christ, how did he even make it here?
Hugo immediately went to his office, opened his cabinet with a password spell, sorted through his selection of potions and selected one. He also took some bandages and a bottle of iodine.
He returned to the room, took his phone and put it in speaker mode, chose a number, and left it nearby on a coffee table.
Then he gripped Artem firmly, and said: ‘Hold on, buddy. You’re going to be OK. Drink it.’
And he held the vial at his mouth. He forced Artem to drink it.
‘Hugo? Christ, it’s late! What’s going on?’ a voice said on the speaker with an Italian accent.
‘I have a severe curse case, can you come over? This looks like Russian work. Please, it’s important.’
‘Oh, shit. Give me 20 minutes. Did you give him the potion?’
‘Of course I did. I hope it holds till you come.’
‘It should. If it starts waning, you know the procedure.’
‘Unfortunately I do. See you.’
And they disconnected.
The potion seemed to start working. Artem’s shivering subsided. He was still trembling, but not so much.
‘I… must… go back…’ Artem murmured.
‘Not so fast, my friend. First, we need to get you in shape.’
Artem tried to get up. Then he felt a sharp pain, and fell back on the floor.
‘What did you get yourself into?’ Hugo asked, while tearing Artem’s t-shirt apart to locate the source of the bleeding.
*
Artem started shuddering again, this time in more violent spurts, uttering strange sounds. The potion’s effect apparently wore off quite quickly, which indicated a very strong or an adaptive curse. This could have been inflicted by a high-level magician only. A sort of mind fracture hex, perhaps, but more persistent, like a new virus mutation.
Shit! Matteo, where are you?
Artem’s convulsions got more spasmodic and incontrollable. It was necessary to immobilize him, otherwise he would tear off all the dressing work Hugo had done and start bleeding again. But he feared using immobilization spells, as it was hard to predict the interaction with the curse. And he had no tranquillizer at home. He had to wait for Matteo.
During another convulsion, Hugo tried to overpower Artem – and the Ukrainian was a very strong man, with a robust constitution and considerable weight – and in that struggle he managed to look him straight in his eyes for a second.
This gave Hugo a glimpse into what was going on in Artem’s soul, and it wasn’t pretty.
In that moment, the door opened and Matteo came in.
He was a tall, dark-skinned Italian man in his late thirties, with alertness and focus in his eyes.
‘We have a problem. This isn’t just a curse. It’s a hex with a possession opening spell,’ Hugo said.
‘Ok. We need to work on the curse first, anyway. There’s no time to lose.’
He took out a syringe, put on a needle, then filled it with a tranquillizer.
‘Hold his hands for me please.’
Then Matteo sat on Artem’s legs to immobilize them and injected the liquid into one of his veins.
After a few moments, Artem stopped moving. Matteo took out a few diagnostic crystals which he laid out on Artem’s torso and began performing additional diagnostic spells.
‘It feels like a Mind Fracture Curse, but with a layer I can’t quite recognize. I can either try to take it off, but I’m not sure how he’ll react, or I can take a few more diagnostic trials.’
‘I’m not sure he’ll hold much longer. Take it off.’
Matteo took out a small glass container, two tuning forks and a bag of powder. He opened the container and gave it to Hugo.
‘Hold it close to his head. Whatever happens, don’t move. And create a protective barrier around you.’
Matteo did the same. After that, he took a position over Artem’s body, shook the first tuning fork and moved it over the Ukrainian.
‘The 741 Hz resonance should start dismantling the curse,’ Matteo said to Hugo.
‘Is it working?’
‘We’ll see. It needs a minute or two. After that, the curse should start floating around his body and it will be easy to extract it with a Siphoning Spell. At least, this is how it would work with an ordinary curse.’
Just when Matteo finished, Hugo heard a barely perceptible crackle.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asked Matteo.
‘No, what do you mean?’
‘That sound, like a static.’
‘No. But wait…’ Matteo listened more closely to the tuning fork. ‘Something’s not right – the frequencies get distorted. This never happened to me before.’
‘I don’t like it.’
Suddenly, the lights in the room flickered.
Hugo and Matteo looked at each other, both knowing very well what it meant.
Hugo ran to his cabinet again and took out a jar with a black, shiny powder. He opened it and brought the jar with him to the living room.
‘Watch out, and close your eyes!’ he cried to Matteo, while taking out a handful and throwing it into the air close to Artem’s head.
A black figure immediately emerged, hovering over the body. Some kind of a demonic being, almost ready to enter Artem.
Hugo instantly created a fireball and shot it at the demon.
This instantly redirected the demon’s attention. A hiss echoed in the room – ugly, eye-piercing, demonic hiss.
‘Matteo, you must siphon the curse off immediately by yourself, I need to fight that damned thing!’
‘Just draw it away from the body, it creates distortions and I can’t use the fork properly!’
Hugo formed a very strong ball infused with kinetic energy and immediately blasted it at the demon, which recoiled a few metres away. Then he took a bit more of the powder, swiftly magnetized it with a spell, stepped forward toward the demon and threw the powder.
The demon hissed again, and there was a crackling sound. The iron contained in the powder, when magnetized, usually distorts the demon’s frequencies. This weakens its power, but also makes it unstable.
But it gave Hugo a few seconds he needed. He swiftly approached Matteo, took the small jar he knew contained protective salt and formed a circle around Artem and the Italian.
The demon hissed again. It was ready to strike. Hugo stepped out of the circle and threw another ball of kinetic energy. This gave him a few more seconds – he activated the salt circle. Matteo was safe and could calmly perform the procedure.
Now, on to the demon.
It’s better to not destroy the demon, as they don’t die (not in a normal sense of the word), they just recalibrate and come back more vicious and evil, hating and desiring to haunt the person who tried to destroy them – you need to banish it back to where it came from.
The problem was, the demon had its anchor point – something that tethers them to the material world dimension – in the curse present in Artem’s body. And Hugo knew that until Matteo finally destroys the curse, he can’t banish the demon back to its realm. The crackling sound was the sound of the demon tethering itself to the curse, as if making a “jump” from its summoner’s energy on to Artem’s.
For now, Hugo could only divert its attention and contain it. He briefly looked at the Italian, who seemed to be focused on his job – and it appeared to be going well.
However, the demon has become unstable, and thus unpredictable. And now its attention scattered between his would-be host and Hugo, and feeling its anchor is getting slowly dismantled, it also became desperate for a new host or for a previous anchor with his summoner. So it began moving haphazardly around the apartment, confused about where to go.
A demon loose in an apartment can be worse than dealing with a crazy cat. It needed to be contained.
Hugo threw more powder to paralyze it for another moment. Then he created a Compression Field Spell – a highly demanding and exhausting spell (imagine the force you need trying to squeeze five suitcases into one), but it was his best chance. Then he used the demon’s confusion to envelope it with compression field – and before the demon realized what was going on, Hugo began squeezing it – until it reached the size of a basket ball.
Hugo suddenly felt exhausted – the spell used a significant amount of his energy. He thought he would faint. His eyes began to close.
This is almost over, Hugo said to himself. Hold on.
He knew he had something like twenty seconds before the compression bursts from the demon’s pressure. He ran to his office.
He suddenly felt dizzy and stumbled on the Persian rug, losing his balance for a moment.
He slapped himself in the face to regain his focus – and trudged towards the chest to take out an iron chain. The he dragged the chain to the living room and laid it out in a circle a bit larger than the demon’s natural size, immediately magnetized it and created a magnetic column rising right to the ceiling.
The compression field burst. The demon tried to move forward – and it shrieked when it touched the magnetic barrier. Passing through would cause severe distortion – as if a human tried walking through a wall of fire.
This was a good call.
The world around Hugo swirled, he lost his balance and fell on the nearby sofa. He looked at Matteo. He only nodded, telling him things are going well. Then he looked into his bag and threw something at Hugo.
Energy-enhancement pills. They were very rare, sold on prescription and more freely available only to emergency wizards. Hugo took one and waited.
Then Matteo finally began siphoning off the curse. He put the jar by Artem’s head and began to slowly direct the curse into the jar. Hugo saw sweat on Matteo’s forehead. He knew that siphoning off a curse is as exhausting as Compression Field Spell. You can’t allow the curse to get dispersed in any way. And you needed a second person to put the lid on the jar immediately.
Hugo felt a jolt of energy. Thank God for Matteo and his pills.
He approached Artem’s body and took the lid in his hand.
The stream of the curse was flowing slowly into the jar. It was getting thinner and thinner. Hugo looked at Matteo to give him a sign.
‘Now!’ he shouted.
Hugo sealed the jar with the lid immediately.
The demon shrieked. When the curse left a human body, there was nothing physical to hold on to. It lost its corporeal anchor and became suspended in the liminal dimension between the two worlds.
‘I need to restore his healthy frequency. Can you banish the demon by yourself?’ Matteo asked, visibly exhausted.
‘Why don’t you take another pill?’
‘I shouldn’t. But now, it’s an easy job.’
‘I think I’ll deal with it. It doesn’t look like a very powerful demon. And oh God, I’m sick of these shrieks! I was listening to damn Bach an hour ago!’
Hugo stood in front of the demon and began murmuring expulsion spells. It was weakened, it was contained, it had no anchor.
The demon went into spasms, but its shrieks were getting weaker and weaker.
And puff! It disappeared.
Then he heard a strong inhale – like the one a drowned person takes after being given rescue treatment.
Hugo saw Artem breathing heavily and coughing, with Matteo, exhausted, sitting on the ground by the sofa.
‘I… What happened?’ Artem looked around, confused.
‘You got yourself in some serious shit. You’d better tell me all about it now.’
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