Envy

 The book was quite clear about the amount of mess that would be created if you summoned Envy into too weak a body. 

“Em? Where do you keep the whiskey?” Charlotte called out, her voice echoing in the dusty, unfurnished room.  She kept shuddering and she had to fight to keep her thoughts from returning to what she’d just read.

“At home,” called back Emily.  There was a moment of silence and then the steady pad-pad-pad of slipper-clad feet.  Emily came into the room holding a lump of green wax and a cloth bag closed with a golden draw-string.  “What’s up?” she said, looking at Charlotte.  “You’re shuddering.  At regular intervals, no less.”

Charlotte grimaced and tried to control herself but then her thoughts would start going back to ‘…eyeballs popping like untreated blisters and fountaining forth viscous humours…’.  “The book is quite graphic,” she said.  “I could use a drink.”

“I brought some camomile tea,” said Emily.  “But then I discovered there’s no kettle here.”  She sounded like this was home already despite having arrived only half an hour earlier.  “You could try sucking on a teabag if you like?  That’s probably quite unpleasant, it might do the trick.”

Charlotte tried to consider it but the thought of it brought up ‘…tongue will elongate to the length of their arm and loll from their swollen lips like an opium-fiend falling from a couch…’.  “I don’t think I can,” she said weakly.  “This book’s warnings are meant to be taken seriously, I think.  Are you sure we want to summon Envy?”

Emily wasn’t a pretty woman; some men might call her handsome, but others were likely to compare her to a horse.  Even so, the look of affront on her face at Charlotte’s question was enough to make Charlotte wish that her features weren’t quite so strongly defined.  Her eyes seemed to bulge outward and her jaw, a square, powerful apparatus that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a gorilla, for example, pushed forwards with an audible grinding of bone.

“I am certain,” she said in the tones of someone who is holding back a lot of their opinion, “that We. Need. To. Summon. Envy.”  The emphasis she gave the words, separating them and stressing them, left no doubt in Charlotte’s mind that Envy was being summoned and would be expected to feel happy about it.  “You shouldn’t worry about the warnings, I’ve read them all too.”

Charlotte shuddered again.  “Didn’t they affect you at all?” she asked.

“Not like this.”  Emily turned away.  “I need to finish putting the symbols in place,” she said.  “Do you want that teabag or not?”

“I’ll manage without,” said Charlotte, but her hopes of sounding put upon but determined were shattered by the pad-pad-pad of Emily’s feet as she walked off.  “And where did you find a pair of slippers already?” she whispered to herself.

Charlotte made herself reread the page in the book, hoping that it would somehow help.  It did a little as some of the images were so awful that she found she was blocking out the memory of them altogether, and she was gratified to find that she’d stopped shuddering.  Then she turned the page to the actual summoning ritual that Emily would be carrying out to find out how awful that would be.  The ritual was described in a single, short paragraph and Charlotte read it three times, marvelling at how simple and easy it sounded.  There was a two-sentence invocation and then the invoker just had to slap the intended vessel for Envy with a green lotus flower.

“Em?” she called.  She stood up; there was only one chair in this abandoned house and it had a broken leg so that it wobbled disconcertingly every time she shifted her weight.  She set the book down on the chair, which rocked and creaked.

“What now?” Emily sounded distracted rather than annoyed so Charlotte followed the sound of her voice.

The house had been built a century ago and was narrow but tall, with four floors above ground and a cellar below.  There were two or three rooms on each floor; here on the ground floor there was a narrow hallway containing the stairs, and a large sitting-room for guests and a small kitchen.  The kitchen still had its cupboards and counters intact but any equipment had been stripped out and taken away.  Emily’s voice came from upstairs where the first floor had a morning-room and two smaller rooms that were just empty cuboids that could have been used for anything.  The larger room was now covered in waxy green symbols that shimmered in a light whose source Charlotte couldn’t find.  Emily was standing facing the wall opposite the window, drawing something on it that was as tall as she was.

“Where are we getting a green lotus flower from?” asked Charlotte, squinting at the drawing.  There were curves and arcs and the whole thing seemed to be afraid of straight lines, but it was somehow hard to look away from.  “There’s no such thing, you know.”

“Hah,” said Emily.  She continued drawing.

“No, really,” said Charlotte after a pause.  “The closest you can get is a blue lotus flower.”

“You can get green,” said Emily.  “You just have to grow them the right way.”

Charlotte thought about this, while her eyes tried to follow the curves of Emily’s drawing.  It was like a maze; every time she thought she could see what a line was doing it turned away and she found some other part of the design catching her attention.  She closed her eyes and was startled to find that the design still glimmered on the inside of her eyelids, now in red lines instead.

“Do I want to know how you grow them?” she asked.

“I don’t know, do you?”

Charlotte turned around before opening her eyes and was very relieved not to see the drawing in front of her any more.

“I don’t think so,” she said carefully.  “I’ve finished reading the ritual now though.”

“That’s good,” said Emily.  “You can look round now, I’ve finished.”

“I’d rather not,” said Charlotte.  “It… it’s giving me a headache.”

“Hah,” said Emily.  “Lucky we don’t have to do the ritual in here then, isn’t it?  Well, if you’re ready then, so am I.  All we need to do is go and fetch Envy’s new best friend.”