We found the plans online.
My best friend Lilith and I have always been interested in the macabre. (Ok, her real name isn’t Lilith, it’s Katie. But I call her Lilith.) Our parents think we’re “goth,” but we’re not. Those are the kids that wear too much eyeliner and write cringey depressed poems. We do cooler stuff, like hold seances and read dark magic spellbooks and obsess over the Salem witches.
So when Lilith found plans online to summon Satan, I was SO excited.
“Are we seriously going to try to summon Satan?!” I whispered, my heart pounding in my chest.
“Why not?” Lilith answered, as she pulled out her phone and brought up the plans. “It’s easy. We just have to draw this giant pentagram on the floor… and say this stuff in French…”
“That’s Latin,” I corrected.
“Latin. Whatever. Nerd.” She rolled her eyes at me. “And then we write ‘SATAN’ in blood in the middle of the pentagram.”
“That sounds too easy,” I said, frowning. “If it was that easy, wouldn’t everyone summon Satan like all the time?”
“You think normies want to summon Satan?”
“No…”
She unzipped her bag and pulled out a black Sharpie. “Then let’s get to work.”
It was hard work. My room has a really fluffy carpet, so I had to draw each stroke several times over before it was actually visible. “Are you sure this comes out with soap? My mom will kill me.”
“Shut up and keep drawing,” she replied, furiously scribbling with the marker.
After twenty minutes or so, we were finally done. I stood up and admired our handiwork: a pentagram in a circle, with several strange symbols inside each cavity of the pentagram. It looked good. Part of me hoped it wouldn’t wash out—how mad would Mom be if I had a literal SATAN SUMMONING CIRCLE on my bedroom floor?
Ooooh. That would really get her goat. And she totally deserved it, after not letting me go to Sadie’s sleepover. I swear, sometimes I was so mad at her I wanted her to die.
“Okay. Now the Latin stuff.” Lilith pulled out her phone and began to read. “Ego te voco…” She read the entire thing, terribly. I mean I don’t know Latin but listening to it was painful.
“Now the blood,” I said, scowling. “Wait. Did you bring blood?”
She tapped her arm. “We use our own blood, silly.”
“Like we actually have to cut ourselves?”
She nodded.
“I dunno, Lil. That sounds kind of… extreme.”
“Don’t be such a baby,” she said. And then, before I could stop her, she grabbed my hand and knicked my palm with the scissors she’d been hiding in her sleeve.
“LILITH!” I shouted. “What the hell are you doing?!”
“Stop wasting time. We gotta do it before the blood dries up.” She reached out for my hand. “Here. You write the first three letters and I’ll write the last two. Saves time.”
I was mad, but she was right. We were running out of time.
We bent over the carpet and got to work.
Writing stuff in blood is totally overrated. They make it sound like this cool soulbinding thing but it actually sucks. My hand was stinging and writing just that first letter, S, was enough that I needed a break. Why didn’t we use Lilith’s blood?! I thought as I closed my eyes, breathing hard, trying not to focus on the pain. Then I sucked in a breath and got back to work, sticking my finger against my palm and writing the T.
Breathless, we both got up and stepped away from the circle.
And that’s when we saw it.
“You idiot!” Lilith said. “You forgot the A!”
She was right. The letters in blood read STAN.
“Oh no. Uh, I’ll fix it.” I looked down at the wound on my hand—but it’d stopped bleeding. “It’s dried up. Get the scissors and cut your hand—”
“I’m not cutting my hand!”
“Are you serious?! You literally STABBED me!”
“Just squeeze your hand and more blood will come out.”
“I don’t want to! It—”
We were both cut off by a low humming sound.
We both turned to the circle, our hearts pounding. “Holy shit,” I whispered, as the Sharpie-engraved pentagram began to glow. Dim red light that pulsed like a heartbeat; then faster and faster, brighter and brighter, as a horrible roar rushed in our ears—
POP.
We both stared, mouths agape.
There was not a demon in the center of the circle. Not a leather-skinned, fiery-eyed, red-horned creature from the depths of hell.
No… there was just a guy.
An average-looking white guy. Maybe in his twenties or early thirties. He was wearing a gray T-shirt and khaki-colored cargo pants. There was stubble on his jaw and his hair was kind of messy.
“You called me?” he asked.
Lilith and I stared at each other. I made an unintelligible stuttering noise.
“I’m Stan,” he said. Then he let out a yawn that exposed his yellowed, crooked teeth. “You need help or something?”
“How—how did you get in here?” I finally asked, composing myself.
“You summoned me.”
“Um,” Lilith interjected. “We were TRYING to summon SATAN.”
“Oh. Common mistake. That pesky little extra ‘A’, huh?”
I backed away, still staring in horror at this man who had just popped out of thin air. I wanted to believe that this guy had somehow broken in. Maybe climbed in through a window while I wasn’t looking. But the truth is, I was looking. And I saw him just appear, right there, in the middle of the circle.
Lilith and I never should’ve gotten involved in this stuff, I thought. I felt like I was going to throw up. It was fun to talk about demons and dark magic and Salem witches… when, deep down, I didn’t ACTUALLY believe any of it. But now… I just saw a man pop out of thin air. Just like that. “Maybe… maybe I should call my parents,” I stuttered to Lilith.
“You’ll be grounded forever.”
That was true. I would be grounded forever. Maybe we could just… get rid of him somehow. “Hey, um, my mom has some really expensive jewelry in her room. Why don’t you just take that… and leave?”
“I don’t really need the money,” he replied in his nasally voice. “But thanks anyway.”
“Um. Well, you can’t stay here.”
“I like your room,” he said, ignoring my comment. “Is that a Black Sabbath CD? Your parents let you listen to that? What are you, like, 14?”
“Uh…”
“I mean, that’s cool to have permissive parents,” Stan said, shrugging. “I guess I should’ve guessed that, since they let you draw a pentagram on the floor and all.”
“They’re not permissive,” I replied quietly.
“You’re just good at hiding stuff then, yeah?”
He stepped out of the pentagram and started towards my desk. Picked up the Black Sabbath CD, then pulled out a drawer and rummaged through some of the contents. “Mmm. These are awesome,” he said, holding up one of my Milky Pens. “Love these things. You probably got ‘em ‘cause they draw on black paper, right? So you can have a whole, like, goth journal?”
Lilith and I stared at him, speechless.
“We’re not goth,” Lilith finally whispered.
“Yeah, yeah, emo or something though right?” He let out a laugh. “You gotta be something to try and summon Satan.”
Lilith turned to me as he bent over the other desk drawer. “We’ve got to get him out of here. He’s probably dangerous. And if your parents see him…”
I nodded. Slowly, I took a step towards him, standing as straight as I possibly could. “Listen. I’m sorry Stan, but you have to leave. My dad has a rifle and he’ll shoot you as soon as he gets back—”
Lilith jabbed me in the ribs. “Don’t—tell—him—we’re—home—alone,” she whispered through gritted teeth.
“—And my older brother is napping in the basement. He’s going to come up and beat the crap out of you. So you better go.”
Stan finally stopped rummaging in the drawer.
Slowly, he turned around. Straightened up before me. Then his mouth stretched into a grin that showed off his yellow teeth.
“But you don’t have a brother, Ava.”
My heart dropped. I looked at Lilith—she looked back at me. And then as if communicating by telepathy, we both raced for the door at the same time.
Surprisingly he didn’t follow us as we raced down the stairs. Panting, I grabbed Lilith’s hand and dragged her towards the kitchen, towards the sliding glass door. We could run right to the Thompson’s on the other side, tell them someone had broken in—
I skidded to a stop.
The refrigerator door hung open. And underneath the crack, I spotted his dirty white sneakers.
“Going so soon?” Stan asked, as he swung the door closed. “Hey, do you have anything good to eat around here? Maybe those little, like, puffed cheese things with the cheetah on the bag?”
We backed away.
“Hey. Listen now. You two are the ones who summoned me,” he said. “You’re not going to just kick me out, are you?”
“Will you go if I give you Cheetos?” I asked in a small voice.
He shrugged. “Maybe. Why, you have any?”
I ducked into the pantry, grabbed the orange bag, and blindly threw it at him. “Here! Now get out!”
“Now wait a second,” he said, plopping down on a chair, propping his feet up on the kitchen table. He opened the bag with a loud POP. “If you were summoning Satan, you were clearly trying to make a deal with him. Right?” He threw some Cheetos in his mouth and crunched on them loudly. “I want that same deal.”
“We were just summoning Satan for fun—”
“Yeah, right.” Crunch, crunch. “So what was the deal going to be? What did you want?”
Lilith and I glanced at each other.
For a long moment, there was silence. Stan staring expectantly at both of us; Lilith and I glancing nervously at each other. Finally, I sucked in a shuddering breath.
“Please. Go,” I choked out.
“Alrighty then.” He held up his cheese-covered hands in surrender. “Y’know, I was just trying to be polite. Offer my services. Make sure you got something out of that whole summoning business. But I’ll go. Plain and simple.”
And with that, he got up and walked out of the kitchen. A second later, I heard the door swing open and slam shut.
Lilith and I stared at each other in silence.
We only moved when the shrill ring of the telephone jolted through the silence. I glanced over—no one ever called the home phone anymore. We only kept it around for my dad’s long business calls, really. But it was nine o’clock—too late for that.
I stepped towards the phone, confused, and slowly picked it up. “Hello?” I asked in a soft voice.
“Ava?” The voice on the other end of the line was shaking, but I recognized it immediately. It was my sister, Sam.
“Sam?”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, through breaking sobs. “But they just… they just told me… it’s Mom and Dad.” She sucked in a breath. “They got in a terrible accident on Route 40. Dad’s being airlifted to the hospital but Mom… Mom…”
My heart sunk.
“She’s dead, Ava.”
The phone fell from my hands and clattered on the floor.
But all I could picture in my head was Stan. With his yellowed grin and steel-gray eyes.
Smugly smiling at providing his ‘services.’