Dead Billy (cont.)

‘Aw man,’ said Gavin.  ‘Aw man.  Look at all the blood.’

Sean didn’t say anything.  He was sitting on the ratty yellow couch on the far side of the basement, shadowed under a naked swinging lightbulb, lighting up a hit of meth.

It was Billy who had done it, actually.  Not Gavin or Sean.  He had done all of it.  It was Billy who had come home with the big spellbook looking thing (‘It’s a grimoire,’ he had said,), something extra he had pilfered from his mushroom-and-heroin dealer Damien.  It was Billy who had spent hours deciphering the Latin of the spell, checking it a Latin textbook and an online dictionary, and who had bought all the supplies that they would need.  The candles, the pigs blood, the cows heart, the eye of newt, the massive wooden cross, the lighter fluid and the matches, the brazier, and of course the hunting knife.  It was Billy who painted the pentagram in pig’s blood on the ground.  It was Billy who had lit the candles, and invoked the words intoning them aloud in a deep, sullen voice.  Gavin and Sean just kept the chant from the sides of the pentagram, as Billy lit the cross on fire over the brazier, then poured the eye of newt over the embers, then threw in the cow’s heart.  And it was Billy who, at the apex of the spell, as Sean and Gavin’s voices grew higher and louder and as the cow’s heart blackened and the embers were finally snuffed out, plunged the knife into his chest.  A final offering, it was meant to be.

‘Don’t you think that’s risky, dude?’ Sean had said.

‘No no, man it will be all right,’ replied Billy.  ‘It’s just like, a down payment, you know?  After the spell is done, we three will be like gods.  I’ll be fine!  I’ll be better than fine! Don’t you want unlimited power?’  Billy might have been tripping at the time.

Now, the room was starting to smell sickly sweet.  The smells from the blood and the body were overwhelming the smoke from Sean’s meth pipe.   Sean was shivering.

‘Oh shit, man, what are we going to do?’  Gavin was kind of leaning against a support pole over by the stairway, if leaning was something that could be agitated and intense.

Sean kept shivering.  ‘Aw man.  Aw man, this can’t be happening.  This isn’t happening.’  There was a faded orange blanket thrown on the couch.  Cradling his meth pipe in one hand, he wrapped himself in the blanket with the other, got up, and walked past Gavin and up the stairs without saying another word.

‘Sean?’ called out Gavin.  ‘Sean?  We got to do something, man.’  Gavin followed Sean up the stairs.  ‘We can’t just leave him here.  We can’t just leave him like that.’

The door to the basement slammed shut.  A light turned on underneath it.  The lightbulb was still on, but after awhile it stopped swinging. 

Billy didn’t move.