Worm in a Jar: A Novella
by B. Pigeon
Chapter One
It was not desperation but curiosity that drove Malee to summon the demon.
The distinction didn’t make the reality of the situation any less humiliating, since her plan was a stupid risk from its inception, but it mattered to her. If she ever told the story—if she had anyone to tell it to—she would be clear on that detail. Summoning a succubus was simply an experience she hadn’t had, one she wanted to try for its own sake, not because she was as miserably horny as one might assume from the choice.
Nobody was even supposed to know that she’d done it. And if she had managed to do it correctly, perhaps nobody ever would.
She had copied the summoning circle with such precision off the Internet—a slow process, since the thing was elaborate, containing an eight-sided star with different embellishments along each individual line, constituting several hours of deliberate and focused work. This fact added another layer of embarrassment to the whole ordeal—how had so much time elapsed as she chipped away at the project, and still she failed to consider what a monumentally bad idea it was?
The day she finished was a Saturday; it was in the afternoon, on the first weekend of fall, but with the lingering feeling of summer due to the temperature pushing ninety. Malee was sweating in her shitty little box of a microstudio, the ancient air conditioner in the window cranked to its highest setting and still failing to provide any measurable relief from the oppressive heat.
She drew in the last of the additions to the overlapping mess of shapes with her liquid chalk pen and double- and triple-checked her work before settling onto her knees and preparing herself.
Would the succubus care if she was… presentable? She was dripping sweat, wearing an old heather gray sports bra and rolled-up purple gym shorts… but no, that was a petty human concern. Besides that, any additional layers of clothing would be intolerable.
For a minute she knelt at the edge of the circle, taking deep breaths, trying to clear her mind. The process, now that she had finished the drawing on the floor, was simple: she would only need to give an offering of blood, and focus her intention…
Her plan was to bleed from the skin in between her index finger and thumb, something easily hidden, and which could pass as a kitchen injury if anyone happened to see it. She was clumsy enough to assume that nobody would catch the lie.
In the seconds prior to starting, as she stalled with the knife drawn, its point hovering by her palm, she came so close to reconsidering—but she drove forward, slashing the blade over the delicate skin and gasping aloud at the sudden pain. She thrust her hand in front of her, holding it over the middle of the chalk to drip the blood down to the small triangle at its exact center, focusing her intention on the image of a succubus materializing suddenly before her.
The magic swallowed up her blood, drinking it all at once down through the wood of her floor.
And the circle responded immediately, radiating strong magic that made her eyes water and her arm hair stand on end—the space within its bounds looking unreal, the power contained inside giving a sort of shifting, shimmering, liquid quality to the solid wood, with the white lines trembling violently as if just barely managing to keep their shape—
There, at the exact midpoint, on the triangle where she’d given her offering, was something inky-black, formless, looking at first like a small ghostly worm wriggling its way up through the floor.
As soon as she registered its appearance the darkness spread, filling the confines of the circle with its shadowy presence until it began to press against its boundaries. The shadow drew back to half its size and expanded suddenly out again, rippling and shivering as it tried to push past the protection magic containing it.
“Oh, goddammit,” Malee groaned. She grabbed the Mason jar half-full of iced coffee on her desk—tossing its contents over her shoulder, the cold liquid splashing up onto her heels—and ran a finger over its mouth, muttering a prayer to herself. As hard as she could without shattering it, she brought the glass down to the circle’s exact center, hoping desperately that the demon hadn’t moved from where it first sprouted...
It hadn’t. The jar successfully cut the shadow off from its source, and outside of its edge the blackness dissipated into a smoky fog which vanished as it drifted upward from the ground.
The creature instead filled the container with its dark heavy aura, then realized it was enclosed and shrank back down into the wormlike original shape, its vaguely-defined red-glowing eyes fixed on her. If she were to anthropomorphize the thing, she would’ve imagined a glare through narrowed eyes.
Reminiscent of catching a spider to release outside, she pulled a piece of junk mail off the desk at the foot of her bed and pushed it under the jar’s mouth; the demon climbed cooperatively onto the sheet and made a disconcertingly loud squawk when she quickly flipped it over.
Malee crossed her tiny room to the kitchenette and switched the paper out for a real lid, staring at the writhing worm for a few seconds before hastily grabbing her bloodied knife off the floor, wiping the blade carefully on the inside of her shorts, and stabbing several air holes into the thin metal of the top.
The creature shrieked at this, too, but quieted itself, perhaps coming to understand what she was doing. She lifted the glass directly in front of her face, closing one eye to focus clearly with the other on the wiggling subject of her summoning spell.
“You’re not a succubus,” she said definitively, mostly talking to herself.
“You poked holes for me to breathe?” She jumped at the sound and almost fumbled the jar in her hands. The thing’s voice was as loud as hers but unpleasantly high-pitched, and somehow echoed discordantly with itself.
“You talk—you speak English.”
“Are you going to keep telling me facts about myself?” the demon shrilled. “Or are you going to kill me?” It spun a circle along the walls of its enclosure.
“Undecided, as of now. What do you want?”
“Out.”
She rolled her eyes, not buying the helpless act—although, if she had contained it so thoroughly from a hastily improvised spell, there was the distinct possibility that she actually had the upper hand. This, too, could have been part of the ruse, so she didn’t let her guard down. “You really can’t get out of here by yourself?”
“I can change my shape,” it said, “so I could expand to break out of this, but I think that would hurt me. Then maybe you’d kill me right away, in my injured state.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. That only gave more weight to her belief in its helplessness; either the thing was incapable of breaking through the magic along the lid, or couldn’t even register its presence. Unless, again, it was faking. “Right. Hold on.”
She carried her prisoner over to the desk, stepping in the puddle of iced coffee she’d forgotten on the walk, which she disappeared with a quick wave of her hands. This struck her a second later as a waste of magic she might need soon, but there would be no getting it back.
Carefully, she set the glass down on the crowded surface of her desk and sat in the chair, staring at it; unsure of what else to do, she pulled her phone from the pocket inside her shorts, tapping at the screen while glancing up at the demon every half-second to ensure it wouldn’t attempt escape.
It laid flat, motionless, looking kind of tragic until she pressed the phone to her ear, when something—the distant sound of ringing?—caused it to perk up and press the length of its body to the side of the jar.
“Ezra,” Malee said, the second he answered the call, “come over now.”
“What’d you do?”
“Why are you assuming I did something?” she asked, staring down at the black worm of a creature, swaying slightly as it held itself upright.
“Mom told me there was some shit going on with you,” he said. But of course she shared that with him; Victoria always withheld her bad omens from the relevant parties until it was too late, if she bothered to convey them at all. “I think she knows more than she told me, but she was worried about you. Will you tell me what’s happening?”
“I’ll tell you if you come over.”
“Well, I’m not coming over until you tell me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Is Victoria around?”
“No,” he said, “she’s at the apothecary—not working, I don’t think, just picking up supplies.”
“In that case… I accidentally summoned a demon.”
Through the line came a harsh bark of a laugh, signaling his disbelief—and then he fell silent when she said nothing in reply.
“Oh, fuck. I’ll be there in five.” He ended the call and she stayed there at the desk, uncertain of what to do in the meantime—phone in one hand, still pressed to her ear, with the other wrapped around the container in which the pathetic little creature sat motionless.
“Were you talking to a hunter?” it asked. “You’re going to make someone else kill me on your behalf, is that it?”
“Coward. I have no intention of killing you yet,” she said, “and I would strongly prefer not to at all, if I can help it. I’d like to send you back to where you came from, to be honest. What kind of demon are you?”
“Not a succubus,” it said, “clearly! I think humans might call someone like me a shadow demon.”
Once again, as she consulted her phone, she flicked her eyes up every few thumbstrokes to ensure that the creature wasn’t up to something. It was still standing upright, the red eyes fixed unsettlingly up on her face, making no attempt to escape. She searched “shadow demon,” pulling up results about video games and tabletop RPGs, nothing useful.
“Never heard of a shadow demon,” she said after giving up on her search. “That might be what some humans call you, but what do you call yourself?”
“I don’t call myself anything. You summoned me so if you want me to conform to human naming conventions you have to choose a name for me.” It dropped to wiggle a circle around the bottom of its prison with a little more intensity than earlier, then pressed the length of its body to the side of the glass again, glowing eyes directed at her. “You gave me form through your own blood, actually, human, so I could take a human’s shape, if you want.”
“I don’t want that.”
“Not human-shaped? Isn’t that the point of trying to draw a sex demon here, to summon for yourself a demon in the shape of a man—?”
“In the shape of a man,” she scoffed. “I said succubus, didn’t I?”
Frantic knocking sounded from the door, causing the dark worm to voice its disconcerting little screech again. Malee flinched and picked up the jarto grip it tightly in both hands as she made her way to the door, confirmed through the peephole that it was Ezra, and cracked it open.