My New Pal

You must believe me when I tell you that this is all true.

The first time I summoned It, it was quite by accident.

It was the Summer when I was eleven.

That summer I spent nearly every day over at my friend Simon's, playing D&D with a couple of friends. I was a 9th level Magic User.

Simon's Dad had converted their two-car garage into an extra room. It was littered with old, slightly stained orange furniture, and cheap cast off junk that wasn’t good enough to make it into the main house. It was a little off to the side, and mostly the adults never bothered us.

We'd order pizza, and throw 20 sided dice for hours. We'd argue about how many experience points you should get extra for killing the chief Orc, stuff like that.

Kid stuff.

And then, at the end of one particular gaming evening, after a particularly difficult battle, my character found an old magical scroll in the game. It contained the Summon Demon spell.

As I walked home later, I thought about what Simon told me about my new spell. To cast the spell in the game, I just needed to know the Truename of a demon, and I could use the spell to summon that demon.

That first night, I didn’t have any demonic names, so I couldn’t cast the spell yet. I didn't want to wait to see what piddling little demon Truenames Simon would assign me in the game, I decided to research it for myself.

It could be argued, I suppose, that what I did next was cheating. Perhaps it was, but buying the rulebooks was common enough, and I didn't see this as all that different from memorizing the stats in the Monster Manual.

I went the next morning to the weird little bookstore downtown that sold D&D books. It sold other things too, but we mostly paid attention to the gaming aisle. They had all the cool obscure stuff that you couldn't find anywhere else.

I asked the guy at the front desk if they had any books with lists of demonic Truenames. He got me a special book from the back.

"We only had one of these left," he said as he put it in the bag for me. I briefly noticed him give me a strange look as he rung me up.

The tome was called "Unaussprechlichen Kulten." The descriptions weren't quite as clear as the Fiend Folio, but I thought the pictures were totally cooler.

The next day, the game resumed.

I couldn't wait. The first serious battle our party went into, I decided to cast the Summon Demon spell, to show off my research.

Simon, the Dungeon Master, looked me in the eye, and said, "But you haven't discovered any Truenames yet."

Oh ho, I thought, just you wait and see.

"Not so," I said, pulling the tome up onto the cluttered tabletop. There, in amongst the hand painted lead miniatures, graph paper, dice and pizza sat the gnarled tome, bound in human skin, steam still rising from the top.

"I have all the Truenames here."

Simon just looked through his glasses at me, "What is that?"

I opened the book to the page I had chosen earlier, and started reading the unspeakable words aloud, "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn..."

Something weird was happening in the air over the gaming maps.

"Um, what…?"

"Mithnac p'tah al Ryddardaei f'nagen. T'l'fnorgen…”

Just at that moment, the air above us ripped open, and a sentient ball made of smoke and flame flew out of it.

For a tiny moment, we all looked at each other. Simon and I stared at the flaming ball, and the flaming ball looked right back at us.

The ball blinked.

And then it flew through the air towards Simon’s face. Simon put his hands up to shield his face.

I... I don’t really know how to describe this next part. I can’t seem to find the words to do it justice. But I'll try.

The ball melted Simon. It flew through his hands, flowed into him, and then burned him up. But he didn’t ignite, he melted. The fireball itself grew bigger as my friend’s body was absorbed into it.

That doesn’t begin to describe the horror of it at all.

I think I passed out then.


Much later, when I finally got back home, I ran into my sister.

By that point, it had told me what I had to do.

I told her, “Sis, meet my New Pal.
“He followed me home.
“He'd like to show you something.
“Don't tell Ma.”
_________________________

But somehow or other, Ma found out. And there was Hell to pay.
But that's the story for another day...

Words and picture copyright (c) 2006 by David Tarleton

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.5 License.