Max Booth III - We Need to Do Something

“It was ruining her life.” I try sounding more serious by deepening my voice and waving my hands to punctuate certain words. “The thing inside her. It used to be dead, but then it came to life, and it wanted to destroy her, wanted to take over her body and do bad things.”

“Just be quiet, okay?” Dad says. “You’re delirious. Close your eyes. Go back to sleep.”

“Bad things like what?” Mom asks, voice cracking.

“Like… like… you remember that boy from my school, the one who died?”

“What?” Dad says.

Mom nods. “They sent an email out about it.”

“What email?” Dad says. “I didn’t get no fuckin’ email.”

“They probably don’t have yours listed.”

“And why the hell not?”

“Probably because you never gave it to them.”

“Well, why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I what , Robert?”

“Give them my fuckin’ email.”

“Because I already gave them mine.”

“Will you guys please stop fighting?” I ask them, nearly yelling. “Jesus Christ. Please. Just… just let me say what I have to say.” What I don’t point out is they’re arguing about a goddamn email address less than five feet from their dead son. His body rapidly decomposing and still they have to bicker about things that don’t matter. What I don’t tell them is they should have never gotten married, that they could have easily spared us all future horrors by simply dissolving their relationship long before having children. Our existence has been a burden on not only them but also ourselves since day one in the womb.

“Okay,” Mom says. “I’m sorry.”

“The boy who died… it was because of us. Amy and I, we performed a spell, something to make him stop spreading rumors, to stop making up lies. He wasn’t supposed to die. That was never part of the plan. But… something went wrong. The spirit inside Amy, somehow it twisted the spell, made everything worse, and… and… and… he died. We did a tongue spell on him and that same night he choked on his tongue while sleeping.”

“It’s impossible to choke on your own tongue,” Dad says, uncertain.

“Well, it happened. And who knows what would have kept happening if we didn’t put an end to it?”

“What do you mean?” Mom says. “Put an end to—”

“—put an end to the thing possessing Amy.”

“A demon,” Dad says, no longer sounding so amused.

“We didn’t know what it was, just that it was bad news.”

“What did you do?”

I lick my lips and it takes me a moment to realize it’s the same way Dad licks his own lips. I want to vomit but there’s nothing left inside me to regurgitate besides hazy memories. “Amy found a PDF of this old grimoire, this—”

“An old what? ” Dad says.

“Grimoire. Like… a textbook of magic. Old, super dark magic. It was called the Black Pullet .”

“The Black Bullet? ”

“ Pullet .”

“Oh.”

“It was really old,” I tell them. “Like, from the seventeen-hundreds. Someone uploaded a PDF of it on the occult subreddit. I don’t know how they had a copy, but they did. All those old books are on the internet, if you know where to search for them.”

“And how did you know where to search for them?” he asks.

“I didn’t. Amy did.”

“Of course she did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, fists tightening at my sides. What am I going to do? Punch him? Shit, maybe.

He rolls his eyes. “Nothing.”

I consider challenging him, but what’s the point? This isn’t about him. It never was. “We found this one spell in the book that looked promising. It said it had the power to destroy everything while also protecting your friends. We thought maybe we could direct it into the thing eating Amy from the inside. Channel all the magic into the evil force and destroy it once and for all. And, since it was also meant to protect friends, we thought Amy would be able to withstand it, that it would only harm the bad stuff inside her. At the time it was the only thing that made sense. We were so afraid something else would happen. We… we didn’t know what else to do. Joe was dead and it was our fault and what if something like that happened again? We needed to get rid of the bad thing. We needed to kill it.”

“So you did this ritual?” Mom asks.

I nod. “Yes.”

“What happened?”

“We passed out at one point, inside the circle.”

“What circle?”

“We made a circle out of salt. You know. For protection.”

“Oh,” Mom says.

Dad points at my arm. “Is that why you came home with a band-aid?”

I hold up my arm again, showing off the cut they’d long forgotten about until now. It’s practically completely healed at this point, which worries me, because what does that mean for how much time has passed since the initial puncture? “The spell required a merging of blood.”

“Jesus Christ.” He laughs crazily. “You can’t be fuckin’ serious about any of this.”

I nod at the bathtub, at what it holds. “Why would I lie?”

He stops laughing.

“When we woke up, nothing was different. We were both just… really tired. And it’d started raining. I asked Amy if it was gone and she didn’t know. She had a headache and she felt sick to her stomach but she didn’t know. It was raining so hard outside and I wanted to stay at her house but she said she needed to be alone, that I had to leave immediately, and I couldn’t stop crying because she’d never acted so distant before, so… so… so mean . She actually shoved me through the front door. Said I needed to go immediately. Why would she do that? Why would she treat me like that after everything I did to help her?” I lick my lips again, just like my father, and continue before either of them have a chance to speak. “I ran home in the rain. Halfway here she texted me and apologized. She said she had to go to the bathroom and was embarrassed, that the spell must have affected her stomach funny. But I didn’t believe her. It was obvious she was lying. I tried calling but she wouldn’t answer the phone and it kept raining harder and harder and suddenly the tornado warnings kept popping up on my screen and I was freaking out, so I rushed the rest of the way home and you guys were all waiting for me in the living room, waiting to scream at me for not answering your dumb phone calls. Well now you guys know why I wasn’t answering your fucking phone calls. I had much more important things going on. More important than any of you will ever understand. And I still don’t know if she’s okay. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead or what and there’s nothing I can do to fix things because we’re trapped in a goddamn fucking bathroom and now Bobby’s dead and it’s all my fault, the ritual did this, I know it did, it said it would destroy everything and that’s exactly what it’s doing. It’s going to kill us all. Bobby was only the first to go.”

Mom scoots closer, reaching out. “Oh, honey, that sounds like just a coincidence, you didn’t—”

“You’re right,” Dad says, stone serious. We both turn toward him, caught off guard. “If that’s true, what you said,” he licks his lips, “why didn’t you say anything before?”

“I-I-I was afraid.”

“Brave enough to destroy the world, but too chickenshit to own up to it, huh?”

“What?”

“Robert—”

“—I want you to look in that tub. I want you to look at your dead brother. Do you smell that? That’s his body, decomposing. Rotting. And it’s all because of you and your voodoo bitch girlfriend. I hope your fun little time on the internet was worth it. You’ve murdered your entire family because of it. The whole goddamn world, maybe.”