Five was an auspicious number, Blake said. I suspected that whatever number they had, Blake would say it was auspicious. We all stood in a circle in the forest clearing, Blake and Fred and Claire and Derek and me. We clutched pieces of paper containing gobbledygook that Blake claimed to have transcribed from an ancient manuscript of lore and transliterated into the Roman alphabet they all understood.
The sky was cloudy, and for a summer day, it was nice and cool. The air was fresh out here, deep in Channel Woods park. The clearing was down a game trail, and only the most ambitious hikers went down the trails. A little girl had been lost here a couple of years ago, and they'd had a three day search. That sort of thing tended to scare people off, although adults still ventured in now and then.
Adults like us. We'd grown up together, so it was hard to think of us that way, but we were. Back in Springvale after finishing our freshman year, we had gotten together once again.
"Now remember," Blake said, "Continental vowel sounds. Ah ay ee oh oo, not Ay ee ai oh you."
I'd been hanging around with Blake, Claire and Derek since high school. I had a crush on Derek, but he had eyes only for Claire. Claire was everything I wasn't: blonde, busty, unfreckled. The thing was Claire was also basically a pretty good person. She was almost impossible to hate.
Claire, however, was dating Fred. Fred wasn't part of our little group, and normally the former star linebacker of the Springvale high school football team wouldn't be caught hanging out with the geeks, but men tended to do what Claire wanted them to do.
Blake was just weird, and had been getting weirder, but usually in a pretty harmless way. Derek had stuck by Blake even as he'd become the most ostracized kid in Springvale, not caring whether he was one of the cool kids. I knew I'd never be one of the cool kids anyway.
Blake had dropped out of college, saying he'd found knowledge way better than any school could teach. Now, he placed a chicken on the altar. Well, a frozen chicken, anyway, and the "altar" was an old and half-rotted stump in the middle of the clearing.
"Why are we doing this again?" Derek asked.
"I figure it's a cure for existential angst," Claire said. "What is our purpose in life, anyway? Can anyone answer that?"
"Um, to do something good?" Derek replied.
"And good is?" Claire asked.
"Um, the most good for the most people," Derek declared.
"You just defined good in terms of itself," Claire remarked. "Seriously. So, if this works, we'll have a purpose. The great god, um, what was the great god called again, Blake?" She raised her voice enough that Blake could hear them.
"Baaruuleth," Blake said.
"Baruleth," Claire repeated, without quite the same intonation. "Our purpose will be to serve the great god Baruleth. If it doesn't work, and of course it won't, we can always read Kierkegaard or Sartre."
"A fate worse than death," I said.
Fred looked like he probably agreed, but he sure wasn't going to say so in Claire's hearing. I watched, quietly. When the ritual was over, I was going to try to see if I could get Derek to ask me out. Or maybe I'd be brave and ask him out. Ha. Who was I kidding. I'd had that thought for years, and I never made anything of it. Derek would always just be a good friend, and someday I'd find someone else. Maybe at college.
Blake rejoined the circle. "Okay, everyone ready?"
"Sure," I said.
"Yes," Claire responded.
"Whatever," Fred said, with a hint of an eyeroll.
"Let's do it, man," Derek said.
Together, we read the syllables printed on our pieces of paper. The only intelligible part of it was "Hail Baaruuleth." Fred, predictably, ignored the instructions about the vowel sounds, and was probably mystified as to why Claire was glaring at him. I sidled closer to Derek, and we chanted in unison, my natural tone harmonizing with his. We'd laugh about it all together, hopefully, sometime soon over a couple of cappuccinos.
Claire was across from me. I couldn't blame Derek for staring at her boobs, because it was way better than looking at a dead, frozen, headless chicken that we were supposedly offering to some elder god. Fred was between Derek and Claire. Blake was on Claire's other side, next to me.
Claire's eyes started glowing. I thought it was a trick of the light, at first. Then I felt really strange. Peaceful, like, but I also felt warm right where, well, my eyes were. Then I noticed that Fred's eyes were glowing, too, with a greenish cast. I glanced right. Blake's eyes were glowing, too, and I felt sure mine were. Which made everyone except Derek, who was looking around at the rest of us, seeing what I saw. But his eyes were the same brown they always were.
We kept chanting. The chanting felt exactly right, and we all chanted in perfect unison except for Derek, who looked like he wanted to stop. Maybe to stop everything. But I squeezed his hand and he kept going. At last, we reached the end.
"You have summoned me?" asked a loud and almost impossibly deep voice.
"Yes, Lord Baaruuleth," I said, together with the others, except for Derek. We'd have been like one voice if Fred could pronounce it right.
"I need a living sacrifice," said the voice. And the weirdest thing was, I was tempted to volunteer.
But before I could, Fred grabbed Derek and threw him into the middle. It wasn't hard work for him. Derek went sprawling, knocking the chicken off the stump and ending up draped over it himself.
"We serve you, Lord Baaruuleth," everyone said except Derek. Even me. But I stepped forward, wanting to do something, although I didn't know what. Lord Baaruuleth was purpose. But Derek was my friend. Fred was a bully, always had been, and this was just like him.
"Okay," Derek said, "Ha, ha, good joke! Where's the recording? That's a great voice, by the way." He got to his feet, and looked around at us. "And how did you do the glowing eye thing? I guess you're all in on it."
"You shall be the vessel," said the loud voice.
Suddenly, my eyes didn't feel warm anymore. Claire's eyes had stopped glowing. So did everyone else's. We were just a group of college kids standing in a forest with a frozen chicken on the ground.
"Whew," I said. "I think I thought it might work for a moment there. I kinda got carried away. I will say, though, that you were very brave, Derek."
"Um, thanks," Derek said.
"He was, wasn't he?" Claire said. "Well. Sorry it didn't work, Blake, but you had to know that if summoning elder beings was easy it would happen all the time, and we'd live in a very different world."
I bet Claire's compliment counted more than mine did. That was a shame, in a way, because I wanted to make him happy. Of course, if Claire could make him happy, that was good too. It was an odd thought, because I'd never been that selfless, and I was pleased with myself for having it.
"You can take the chicken, Derek," Blake said. "I think you've earned it."
