Okay…this is awkward. I’ve compiled a lot of stories over the years, from other Hunters, from various organizations—both rival and friendly—from witnesses, and even some accounts from the very monsters we hunt, but I’ve never written one myself based on my own experiences. I’ve read thousands of records like this, but telling the story about one of my experiences is different. I’m a librarian, not a writer.
—A.L.
Albert Lee and the Scroll of Doom
Larry Correia
I suppose I should do an introduction. I’m Monster Hunter International’s archivist, Albert Lee. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m likely one of the world’s leading experts on monster lore. I don’t claim to be a brilliant scholar or anything like that, it’s just that the more academic types who do what I do for a living keep ending up cursed and insane, so I’ve outlasted the competition. It’s all that insatiable curiosity, delving into forbidden mysteries thing. It gets them every time.
Oh look, here’s an ancient Sumerian tome of rituals bound in human skin and inked in blood. Most paranormal archivists would be pumped at such a find and immediately read it. Me? Though tempted I’ll take a quick look, make a note about the contents for the catalog, and then toss it in the safe with the rest of the haunted crap that whispers it wants to be read, to be saved for a rainy day if/when MHI runs into something pissed off from ancient Sumeria. I’m pragmatic like that.
It’s not that I’m incurious. On the contrary, I love this stuff. It’s that I’ve seen firsthand the costs of curiosity when it comes to certain haunted subjects, and that price is way too high for me to mess around with that sort of thing willy nilly. That’s how you get your Martin Hoods and Ray Shacklefords. Specifically, Julie’s dad, not the several other Ray Shacklefords who turned out sane and uncursed, but that family does love to recycle their names through the generations.
One downside of becoming the de facto company historian is learning that guys like that—who got corrupted or driven crazy—aren’t that big of an anomaly in this business, and some topics are forbidden for a reason.
Generally speaking, knowledge is good. As we were taught by the greatest philosophical work of all time, knowing is the half the battle. There’s nothing more satisfying than pinning down the details that allow us to banish or kill the latest evil beastie.
But when it comes to magic, oh hell no. Do not screw with that shit. Humans messing around with magic is like giving a toddler a stick of dynamite to play with.
As company archivist, I’m basically the guy who hands out that dynamite. Well, I guess it’s more like metaphysical dynamite. Milo Anderson’s the one who hands out the real dynamite. Not that I’m a slouch in that department either. When I was recruited by MHI I was working as a county librarian, but before that I was a 1371 Combat Engineer, United States Marine Corps. Books and bombs are my favorite things.
But anyways, back to the evil magic stuff.
Long story short, MHI has accumulated a lot of wicked, nasty, possibly haunted, sanity-devouring tomes over the last century. When you off some necromancer or mad scientist, you can’t just leave their grimoire or lab notes lying around for normies to mess with. And we can’t just get rid of them either, because, as we’ve seen repeatedly, those things can be super useful. So part of my job is to make sure dangerous knowledge is only used responsibly in the proper circumstances. It’s like don’t drink and drive, don’t take this medication and operate heavy machinery, don’t commune with the wrathful spirits of the dead and open portals to hell, that sort of thing.
Years ago when my leg got badly injured and I had to go off of field duty, I volunteered to fix the MHI archives. Back then the place was a disorganized mess. It was more of a fire hazard than a proper library. Arguably the third or fourth best collection of monster lore in the world looked like something off a reality TV show about mentally ill hoarders. The state of the MHI archives offended me to the core of my librarian soul.
It took years to get the place up to my standards, with everything properly labeled and cataloged. What used to take weeks of combing through dusty tomes to find some nugget of monster trivia, now takes minutes. Hunters call in, wanting to know about some odd creature they’re up against, and I can send them copies of everything we have fast. I might not be out in the field, kicking doors and blowing shit up anymore, but I still help save lives.
Nowadays I’ve got a pretty good system. Regular records on the shelves. Creepy books under lock and key. Since if you let just any random Hunter dick around with sensitive information, there’s going to be bad results, I’m extra careful with the forbidden knowledge. Barring a few unforeseen complications early on in my career, I’ve managed to keep those particular scary records accounted for, to only be checked out in case of emergency—with MHI leadership approval—and brought back and stored safely as soon as the crisis is averted.
Everything was organized, accounted for, and in its place.
Or at least it was, until Owen Z. Pitt held a giant fucking gunfight in my library.
I’ve put up with a lot of indignities since joining Monster Hunter International. On one of my very first hunts, my buddy Trip left his tomahawk buried in a master vampire’s head, and the vampire returned that tomahawk by throwing it through my leg. More recently, I caught a .357 Magnum bullet to the chest, fired by some poor bastard who’d been possessed by an Adze.
Surveying the damage to my beloved library was worse.
As broken glass crunched underfoot, I saw that there were spent plastic shotgun hulls everywhere. Shelves had been knocked over. Books had spilled in every direction. Some of them had been turned into confetti from buckshot. The ghostly projectiles fired by the army of Drekavac had started several small fires, but at least their corpses had dissipated upon death. Tiles had gotten knocked out of the ceiling and most of the lights had been broken. The walls were puckered with bullet holes and scorch marks. The glass wall was in ten million jagged pieces.
I’d stacked a bunch of Drekavac monsters myself during the battle, but I’d had the decency to do it out in the hallway like a civilized man. Z had gotten chased in here, hosed the place down with a full-auto shotgun, and even tossed some grenades for good measure, like a barbarian.
Z was a good friend, teammate, had saved my life upon multiple occasions, the entire Earth at least once, and in his defense had been trying to protect a girl from the hell-spawn clone army of an undead witch hunter…and even considering all that if he’d been here right now I still would’ve beat him over the head with my cane because look at this place. He was lucky he’d gotten teleported to Brazil.
News on that front was still spotty, but Earl Harbinger was leading a quick reaction force of Hunters to South America. We didn’t really know what was going on down there, but apparently millions of lives were at stake. So, the usual. Those injured in yesterday’s battle—and there were a lot of those—and those of us who weren’t physically up to fieldwork anymore, were left here at the compound cleaning up and waiting to be called on for our expertise. Which was supremely frustrating, but again, the usual.
My bad leg was really bugging me, and I would have sat down to take in all the destruction, but a spectral sword had sliced my nice office chair in half, which was just adding insult to injury at this point. Rather than stand there angry, I went to the closet and got out a broom and dustpan. Somehow even the dustpan had a bullet hole in it.
I’d spent the last day helping to put out fires and ferrying the wounded to the orc healers or the hospital. Between Silas Carver’s dark magic and Milo’s defense system, we’d torched or blown up half the compound. This had been the worst monster attack on our headquarters in MHI history.
But now that the immediate damage control was done, there was some unholy threat out in the jungle, some of MHI was on the way to deal with it, and in the process they might need me to look up some useful lore on whatever they encountered. I wouldn’t be able to do that very efficiently with all our original reference material lying on the floor covered in broken glass, so I got to sweeping.
It was after a few hours of righting shelves and restoring books to their proper homes that I found the secret compartment.
That particular bookshelf was some early 1900s, Bubba Shackleford-era furniture. Which still worked great because they built things to last back in those days, and all the new shelves I’d built from Ikea were flimsy in comparison. The sturdy old shelf covered one entire wall and had caught a Drekavac ghost bullet in the top corner. I had to stand on a ladder to inspect the damage, and it pissed me off to find that some of the original Professional Monster Killer journals had gotten hit by flaming shrapnel.
Hannah Stone had been the most prolific writer of the Hunters from that early period of the company’s history, and it pained me to see one of her journals had gotten shredded by splinters. That was over a hundred-year-old, irreplaceable, historical document, obliterated in an instant by some undead asshole Puritan. That really pissed me off.
Except when I started pulling out the burned chunks, the wall behind it shifted. At first I thought it might just be a loose brick, but when I poked at the edges with my pocketknife, I discovered a hinged mechanism had been holding it place. It was well concealed and had been plastered over sometime in the distant past, but the Drekavac’s bullet had cracked it open.
Finding a long hidden compartment wasn’t too strange, as there were secret doors and tunnels all throughout the MHI compound, which is what happens when a bunch of militant paranoids do renovations. But when I used my flashlight I saw the hole was small, and the only thing inside was a sealed metal tube.
“What’re you doing?” someone asked from below.
I looked down to see Trip Jones standing there. “I found a secret compartment or something.”
When you see Trip, the first thing you think is tough guy, because he’s this really buffed black dude, who was a high-level athlete and still carries himself with that kind of physical swagger that only really confident jocks have, but Trip is one of my favorite coworkers because he’s just genuinely an all-around nice guy. Except right that moment he looked weary and in pain.
“You’re limping bad as me, Trip. What happened to you?”
“I sprained my ankle really bad during the battle fighting a succubus.”
“Huh…” Things had been so chaotic that night I’d not even known there’d been a succubus involved. “Succubi are mind-controlling demons who attract their prey by seduction and feed on their life force. How’d you sprain an ankle?”
“This one was less sexy, more punchy. It’s a long story.”
“That’s nonstandard monster species behavior. You need to update that for the records ASAP.”
Trip sighed, because my coworkers weren’t as zealous as I was about proper documentation. “I just got back from the hospital, Al.”
“You didn’t go to the orcs?” Magic and humans didn’t mix, but it worked fine for the tribe of orcs MHI provided shelter for, and they had some fantastically good healers. They were why I was hobbling around on a gimpy leg, instead of an artificial one.
“Gretchen and her girls are exhausted and been working nonstop since the fighting stopped.” Trip shrugged. “There’s a lot of Hunters who were worse off than me who needed their attention more. I just had to make sure nothing was broken.”
Putting others first was just Trip’s nature. “I’ve got some ibuprofen in my desk if you need it. Assuming Owen didn’t shoot that too.”
“I’m good. What’s in there?”
“I’m not sure. I was just checking it for booby traps first. It looks clear.”
“Should I go put my helmet on?”
“Naw.” I was pretty sure it was safe. The hole was plain and from the dust this thing hadn’t been disturbed for a really long time. When I poked the metal tube with my knife nothing happened, so I reached in and pulled it out. It was just an old lead pipe with a cap screwed on each end. “That’s a lot of effort to hide plumbing supplies. I bet there’s something inside.”
Trip held the ladder while I climbed down. “Anything in your notes about this?”
“Not that I can think of.” I held the pipe out to Trip. “You want to do the honors?”
“In case it’s black magic or radioactive?”
“What are the odds of that?”
“Around here? Greater than zero. Naw, man. I’m good. I’m just going to stand over here while you open it.” Trip hobbled back a few feet. “You know, in case ghosts come out and melt your face like the Ark of the Covenant.”
“Now you’re just being dramatic.” I had to wrestle the cap because it was really on there. I was thinking about going to find a wrench when it finally came loose. Rather than face-melting ghosts, the only thing inside was a tightly rolled-up sheet of paper. “Hello, beautiful. What do we have here?”
I took it back to my desk so I could put on my white librarian gloves and get a pair of tweezers. If that pipe had been in there since the Bubba days, the paper was over a century old, and was likely to be extremely fragile. Now that I knew the contents were paper I was really kicking myself for suddenly exposing it to air and humidity. At least the main building’s central air-conditioning had survived the attack so it wasn’t too bad here in the basement. I put on a surgical mask anyway.
Trip followed me back to my desk and watched as I worked. “Why the mask? Do you think it’s got anthrax or something?”
“Anthrax? For a guy who fights disgusting slimy creatures for a living, you are so nervous about germs, I swear…The mask’s not to protect me, I’m trying to protect the paper from my breath.” I eased it out of the pipe with the tweezers and laid it on my desk.
“It’s a scroll.”
“Just because it’s rolled up doesn’t make it a scroll,” I explained as I gently began to unroll it, and the first thing I saw was that the title at the top read Scroll of Doom. “Well, shit. My bad.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet.” Despite the ominous title, it didn’t feel dangerous. I’d dealt with thousands of old records, and the ones we knew to be legitimately tainted by evil tended to give off an icky vibe. Other than the unorthodox storage method, this one seemed perfectly normal. Plus, this was just a single handwritten sheet of paper. All the haunted tomes I’d ever messed with had some heft to them. They had gravitas. This was probably nothing.
What’s the worst that could happen?
I got the whole thing opened up and saw it was in cursive English. The message wasn’t very long, so I started reading, got through the entire thing in a few seconds because I’m a natural speed reader…and immediately regretted it.
“Shit…Stay back. Don’t look at it. It’s a curse.”
“I knew it!” Trip was brave, but he took another couple of steps back, because he’d had some bad encounters with voodoo before. “You sure?”
It could just be a hundred-year-old prank, except it had been hidden in the basement of one of the world’s best monster-hunting companies, so I sincerely doubted that. “I think it’s legit.”
“Then don’t just stand there looking at it. Burn it or something.”
I thought about the warning in the message I’d just read. “It’s more complicated than that.” I had no choice but to read it again to make sure I understood the ramifications. The first part I can’t write down here for reasons that’ll become apparent as the story goes on, but it concluded with By reading these words the contract is voluntarily entered into and the ritual begins, which of course I didn’t see in time because that was at the end of the damned thing.
“What’s it say?”
“I can’t tell you. If I do, or read it out loud, you might be bound too. I’ve got to think about how to paraphrase this…” I hate to admit it, but I was kind of freaking out right then as the ramifications begin to sink in. “You remember how there used to be those emails, where it was if you forward this message to someone else, you’ll have good luck, but if you don’t, you’ll die?”
“Yeah. Before that it was chain letters. Make copies of this and mail them to ten other people or else. Some guy in Canada named Fred didn’t mail this letter and a piano fell on his head.”
“Exactly.”
“Then it’s probably nothing.” Trip seemed relieved, but then he noticed I was sweating profusely. “What’s wrong, Al?”
Rather than reply, I flipped the Scroll of Doom over so Trip couldn’t read it and endanger himself, grabbed my keyboard, and typed in the name from the signature at the bottom of the scroll. It had been signed by one Orson K. Pangle, Professional Monster Killer.
SEARCHING.
“I’m looking to see how the guy who wrote this chain letter died.” I was really hoping to find that he’d gone peacefully in his sleep at a very old age. The results came back, and…nope. Orson Pangle had been suddenly devoured by a horde of imps, a few days after the date beneath his signature, exactly like the Scroll of Doom promised. “That’s not good.”
My computer screen Trip could read safely, so I swiveled it for him to see.
“Who’s this Pangle dude?”
“A Bostonian lawyer, recruited to be one of the earliest of Bubba Shackleford’s Professional Monster Killers from before the company changed its name to Monster Hunter International, and the alleged author of this Scroll of Doom.”
Trip skimmed the end of the file. “It looks like this OG was just standing on the corner minding his own business in front of some other Hunters, when a bunch of little carnivorous mutant-bug demons appeared from out of nowhere, and were on him like piranha on a cow. In a few seconds all that was left of him was just a bloody mangled skeleton, they didn’t attack anyone else, then poof, those creatures vanished without a trace, no explanation, never to be seen again.”
“Since I can’t tell you specifically what’s on the scroll, let’s just say that fate is pretty spot on with what Pangle foretold in that note, and he’d read the curse exactly seven days prior.”
“Oh…” Trip said as he truly grasped the enormity of the situation. “I’ll go find help.”
“Thanks.” After Trip had limped off as fast as he could, I rolled the scroll back up and returned it to the tube. I’d been so damned careful for so long when it came to this sort of thing, that I was really kicking myself. One of the rules of handling ordnance is that you never, ever get complacent, because even the smallest mistake can kill you. Evil writing worked by the exact same principles and I’d been sloppy.
Now I had seven days to figure out how to break the curse, curse someone else to take my place, or die horribly.
I found myself in a difficult position. It’s my duty in life to document everything I can about monster hunting, only I got cursed with something that if I were to write it down, that would risk passing that curse onto someone else. I can’t even write it here without putting the lives of whoever is reading this into danger.
I looked up everything I could about Orson K. Pangle in the archives, and by all accounts he was a charmer, a ladies’ man, and a great card player, but he was also a very intelligent and courageous Hunter, as well as a decent, honorable man. I was pretty sure that last part was accurate, because when he’d found himself in the same situation as me, rather than take the easy way out and pass the curse on to some other sucker, he’d kept it secret to not endanger his friends, and instead tried to lawyer his way out. He couldn’t destroy the message without dying and inflicting the curse back upon whoever had given it to him, so he’d written it down and sealed it away somewhere it might eventually be found, believing that would be a sufficient technicality to count as passing the curse on. Since he’d gotten ripped to pieces shortly thereafter, clearly it had not.
I don’t know if Pangle was the one who’d hidden it in the wall, or if it had been put there by somebody else after his death. Whoever had done that had probably been hoping that future Hunters would be better equipped to deal with the curse. The problem was, I didn’t know if we were.
The help Trip had sent me so far were some of the smartest Hunters MHI had. Milo Anderson had been on MHI’s primary team forever and seen a lot of craziness. He’s a bona fide mechanical genius. Ben Cody was a much older Hunter who had come out of retirement to help with our recent situation, but before that he’d been the leader of our New Mexico team that specialized in mad-science issues, and Cody collected doctorates like I collected Funko Pops.
Unfortunately, Milo had just punctured a lung and Cody was still suffering from a concussion. Like I’ve said, that had been one hell of a fight against the Drekavac. Our orcs had gotten them tuned up, but they were still obviously hurting.
The three of us were sitting around my desk, and I was still bitter that I was using a cheap metal folding chair instead of my eight-hundred-dollar office chair that had gotten cut in half. Z owed me a new chair.
“So how’d you get your skull cracked?” I gestured at the bandages around Cody’s big shaggy head.
“Succubus.” He muttered the word while squinting like he had a bad hangover.
“The same one who clobbered Trip?” When Cody nodded, I laughed. “You guys are really ruining my image of succubi. I thought they would be more of a ‘death by snu snu’ sort of thing.”
“She tried to get in my head like that, but I love my wife way too much for that nonsense to work on me. When I resisted her charms, she just body-slammed me instead.” Cody massaged his temples with his fingers. “Can we please focus on your mysterious death curse?”
“Good idea.” Milo was sitting behind my computer, reading the Pangle file, and making a wheezy noise as he breathed. He’d told me the healers had reinflated his collapsing lung with some orcish device that looked like bagpipes, and that yes, that was as painful as it sounded. “Just don’t tell us anything that’ll get us cursed too. MHI’s kind of swamped right now.”
I glanced around my shot-up library, and sarcastically said, “I’d not noticed.”
“What do you have so far?” Cody asked.
I’d been doing my research, skimming through records as fast as I could. Which made me glad for all the work I’d put in scanning documents. “Chain-letter curses go back a longer time than you’d think—sixth-century Europe even, but those records are super spotty, and we’d have to go to Oxford to see the originals. Then in the Edo period in Japan there was a rash of these, with legit monster activity involved, something about an oracle with the body of a cow but with a human face, only the translations are spotty.”
“I’ve fought Japanese monsters before,” Milo said, “but no cows with people heads. Though come to think of it, I do know a minotaur, which is pretty much the opposite. Just don’t call him a minotaur. They think that’s racist. The polite term is Texas Bullmen.”
“Okay.” To the uninformed it might seem like Milo had a hard time focusing, but it was just that his brain worked on a different plane from the rest of us mortals. Sometimes you just needed to let the man cook. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“What’s the ratio of real curses to hoaxes and scams preying on social anxiety?” Cody asked.
“Actual magic ones are exceedingly rare. But it turns out there have been some capable assholes and creatures who’ve done this sort of thing from time to time, using everything from handwritten letters to VHS tapes as the delivery method. I’ve printed off the shelf a number of everything in the archives that’s got any sort of reference to those cases.” I handed both of them a sheet of paper. “I’m thinking we should start by checking for any examples of thwarting or breaking this sort of curse.”
That was when Trip returned with one more expert in tow. Cody groaned and Milo grinned when they saw her. Cody was too sciency to put up with what he referred to as elven nonsense, but Milo thought she was great. “If it isn’t Tanya, princess of the elves. Hey, Your Majesty.”
“Good to see you too, Red Beard. How y’all doing?” she asked as she flounced in, wearing Daisy Duke cutoffs and a tank top in proper trailer-park-royalty fashion. It looked like MHI’s token elf employee had made it through the battle unscathed.
“We’re okay except for the part where Lee’s probably cursed and about to get carried to hell by a swarm of hungry, vicious little demons,” Milo said.
“Yep. Trip told me ’bout that. Bummer. This ain’t my usual area, but I can maybe still help.”
Humans can’t do magic without it coming at some great cost, but that rule didn’t seem to apply to our supernatural cousins. Even if she did look like any other hot, slutty redneck girl—only with pointy ears—if I knew anybody who could break a curse, it was Tanya. “Happy to have you aboard.”
She scowled at me for a long moment. “Hoo-boy, Al, you’re like super cursed. It’s all over your aura. Whatever you attracted is downright nasty. I bet it’s promising all sorts of fancy reward if you do something evil to put another link in the chain.”
I couldn’t tell her about the vague promises of immortality for any bearer of the curse who was selfish enough to pass it on to someone who was so righteous they would willingly sacrifice themselves to end the curse once and for all. “Yeah. That’s in there. And the way it’s written I suspect that whoever cursed Orson Pangle might still be alive.”
“Oh, we can remedy that!” Milo declared with great and murderous enthusiasm.
“Even though you can’t speak specifically on what the scroll says, I feel safe assuming time is of the essence.” Cody wobbled, dizzy, as he stood up. “Let’s get to work.”
Six days, twenty-three hours, and forty-five minutes after reading the Scroll of Doom, I rudely walked into a wealthy investor’s study, unannounced. The man of the house was standing behind his desk, looking out the window at his majestic estate, contentedly surveying his kingdom. According to my research he was two hundred and ten, but he didn’t look a day over fifty.
He heard the door open, but didn’t bother to turn and look. “Leave my supper on the table and go,” he said dismissively.
“I didn’t think to bring any food, but we could probably order a pizza if you want.”
I’m not good at the one-liners under pressure like some of my wittier teammates, but that was pretty good for me.
Vernon Gastelon glanced my way and saw a stranger, holding a suppressed .300 Blackout carbine aimed at his face. Despite my obvious willingness to shoot him dead, he remained calm, and gave me a slow nod of greeting. The dude was cool. I’ll give him that.
“Where are my guards?”
“Your human employees are alive. Zip-tied, duct-taped, and tossed roughly into the back of a van which is now departing the grounds of your mansion, but they’re alive. Your inhuman employees, not so much.” Keeping the gun on him, I slowly hobbled into the room, and then nudged the door closed behind me. “We’ll be filing the PUFF on those to offset the costs of this little expedition.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t play stupid, Vernon. It doesn’t suit you. I know who you are. So you can probably figure out who I’m with.”
He looked me over, took in all the tac gear and weaponry, before he saw the green smiley face with horns patch on my vest, and smiled. “Ah…Monster Hunter International. I suspected this confrontation would come someday.”
I’d seen that smile on TV before. Hell, I owned stock in some of his companies. It was just that nobody had ever realized that Vernon Gastelon the Fifth was actually Vernon Gastelon the First, and he’d just turned himself functionally immortal through a blood-magic-fueled chain curse.
“So how’s it work? You make up a kid, and send him off to some imaginary boarding school so nobody ever sees him. Fake your death when you can no longer hide the fact you don’t age. Inherit your own riches. Repeat for five generations. That’s how higher-level undead do it.” He was standing in front of a sunlit window without catching on fire, and his reflection appeared just fine in the mirror on the wall, so he’d not turned himself into a vampire. “I wonder with the immortality curse if the adjuster will declare you count as a subtype of lich, or if you’ll just be categorized as a predatory sorcerer.”
“Why does it matter what I am?”
“Because we get paid more for liches.”
“Is there good money in that?”
“It pays great.” But then I looked around his office, which was decorated with a bunch of sculptures and paintings that each cost a lot more than my house. “Well, relatively speaking, of course.”
“Of course…If you were here to simply kill me, you would have shot me already. Your leg appears to be troubling you. Would you like to take a seat?” He gestured toward the couch.
Comfy as that looked, I said, “I’ll stand.”
“Would you care for a drink?”
“I’ll pass.”
“Too bad. This is three thousand dollars a bottle. It’s rather good.” I believed that, but I was already cursed. I didn’t need to get poisoned too. When I shook my head in the negative, he picked up an empty glass for himself. “Do you mind if I have one?”
“Go ahead. Just do it slowly.”
As Vernon poured himself a glass, seemingly unworried about me and my bullets, he asked, “So what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected visit, Mister…?”
“Lee. Albert Lee.”
“I’ve never heard of you. Not many people know about MHI, but as a student of the illicit arts, I pride myself on keeping up with potential threats. I know of the Shacklefords. I’ve met the lovely Julie at a fundraiser once. I’ve heard tales of the legendary Earl Harbinger. And what’s the large one? Pitt? But you, I’ve never heard of.”
“You wouldn’t have. I usually work in the basement.” I checked my watch. Assuming demons were punctual, my time was short. “I’m the guy who’s been cursed by your stupid chain letter.”
“Splendid.” Vernon pulled out his chair and sat down. “I wondered what happened to that branch. It dropped off forever ago. I never know the specifics, but I can always tell when there’s a new link added to the chain, as that’s one more useful life—or death—for me to draw energy from.”
“Like a non-sexy succubus…There’s a lot of that going around lately.”
He clearly had no idea what I was talking about there. “How did you figure out it was me?”
“It took a bit of effort.” I still needed to kill a few minutes. “Can I tell you a story, Vernon?”
“You’re the man with the gun, Mr. Lee. Do as you see fit.”
I lowered the carbine to my waist, to let the sling take most of the weight, but I kept it casually leveled at his chest. “I was born here, but my parents were immigrants. You know those stereotypes about Asian parents, right?”
“No. I do not.”
“Well, anyways. One time when I was in high school, in this advanced placement math class—which by the way, I am not good at math—one Friday our teacher screwed up, and handed out the wrong homework assignment. This was something we hadn’t covered yet, and wouldn’t get to for months. It was way too advanced. But we didn’t know that. So I go home, and I am stumped. There’s no way I could figure this out. I tell my parents this has to be some kind of mistake. But my mom and dad were like, oh no, you lazy ingrate bum, your older brother’s in med school, you’re going to get back in there and figure that math homework out or else. We don’t care about fair. But oh yeah, make sure you do your piano practice first. Man, I hate the piano to this day.”
“I do not understand where you are going with this.”
“I’m getting there. So I practice the piano, then I spend the entire weekend trying to crack this math homework. This was pre-tutorial videos on the internet too, so we had to do it the hard way. So I get with my friends from class and we went to the library, and we racked our brains and tortured ourselves, but we got it figured out and basically taught ourselves calculus over the weekend—which, keep in mind, I’m bad at math. Monday morning, the teacher goes, I’m so sorry I gave you kids the wrong homework. I sure hope none of you wasted your time trying to do something that was way too advanced for you. Who did the homework? And guess what happens.”
“I have no idea,” he said, bemused.
“Every Asian kid in class raised their hand.”
He stared at me for a long time. “What?”
“I’m trying to tell you that you picked the wrong nerd to fuck with, Vernon.”
I wasn’t going to explain it all to this asshole, but after gathering the smart Hunters, we’d gone to work, done the research, learned how this type of curse operated, tracked down similar events, built a map and timeline, looked up all the known and suspected wizards from that period and region, and then found a painting of one particular dickweed who happened to look exactly like his great-great-grandson, who we already had a file on for being a known trafficker in black magic.
Just like back in school, we’d been given an advanced homework assignment, but we had brains, a work ethic, a really well-stocked library of monster lore, and a powerful lot of incentive to get this done. MHI had bigger fish to fry and I really didn’t want to get ripped apart. Though that was still preferable to piano practice.
“A lovely story, Mr. Lee, but the clock is ticking. As a Monster Hunter, surely you must understand what’s at stake. You need to find someone to trick into reading or listening to the curse or you will die rather horrifically. When you spread the curse, you’ll be blessed with extra years taken off their life. There’s no need to feel sorry for them, though. All they have to do is continue the cycle. It’s a win-win. But you need to hurry. This is a limited time offer.”
“Wow. I’ve seen you on Shark Tank, but you really are a good businessman.”
“With this spell I created a product which must be forever propagated to escape great personal harm. There is no greater motivator than that. I didn’t invent multilevel marketing, Mr. Lee, but I perfected it.”
Even without the curse part I would’ve shot him, just for that. “You’re a prick, you know that, right?”
“So I take that to mean that you will not be participating in my program?” Vernon looked past me, to where the door was closed. “What is that noise that I am hearing? Is that your friends talking outside?”
“Nope. It’s just me. They’re waiting a safe distance away.”
“I find it curious that you came to face me—an opponent of unknown capability—alone. I was under the impression that Monster Hunters were smarter than that, working in teams whenever possible.”
“We do.”
“Then threatening me in my own home all by yourself was a very foolish thing to do.” Vernon blinked, and now his eyes were gleaming purple. Even as he was just sitting there behind a desk, he seemed to puff up, becoming bigger and more dangerous. His previously baggy silk shirt was stretched by instantly generated muscles, like he was on supernatural steroids. We still weren’t sure what exactly playing with dark magic had done to him, but Vernon went from kindly to profoundly fucking intimidating in an instant. “My mortal bodyguards were just for show. I am more than capable of defending myself from the likes of you.”
“I figured that, but I didn’t want to put my team in danger when the horde of whatever kind of extradimensional beings you enslaved to enforce your curse show up here.” I looked at my watch again. “In about three minutes.”
Vernon blinked, this time in surprise, and his eyes flipped back to normal. “You’re bringing the blood swarm to my home?”
“Party at Vernon’s house! I bet it’ll be a rager.”
Despite being momentarily shaken by that idea, he went back to fearsome real quick. That transformation must have helped his hearing too, because the faint voice he’d been hearing earlier was now loud enough that he stuck one finger in his ear and wiggled it around. “Though insane with a desire to kill, the swarm will not lay a claw on me. When they come into this dimension they only attack those who have been cursed.”
“Yeah…about that. A bit of bad news for you. You’re cursed too.”
“Impossible. I’ve seen no letter.”
“No, but we hacked your computer and pretty much everything you’ve looked at for the last couple of days, the Scroll of Doom has been crammed in there somewhere. Subliminal messages, audio and visual, not to mention we snuck it onto some of the documents your secretary had you sign, white print on a white background, and those two times you clicked yes on a user agreement, that was all from Melvin, MHI’s internet troll. He’s still regrowing his legs from when they got blown off last week, so he was bored and got creative.”
“Surely such low trickery doesn’t count!”
“Take it up with my elf. She said that should be close enough for an Irkallan blood swarm and that when you play with Fey fire you deserve to get burned. And just in case…” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the speaker that had been playing a recording of me reading Orson Pangle’s Scroll of Doom out loud, on a loop, at ever-increasing volume the entire time I’d been here. I turned it all the way up.
“No!” Vernon rose, flipping his heavy desk end over end. It crashed into the couch and knocked the stuffing out of it. Thankfully he couldn’t attack me, because he was too busy mashing his now gigantic hands over his ears to try and block the sound of my voice.
Milo must have been watching the window through his scope for any sudden movement, because a hole appeared in the glass and one of Vernon’s hands exploded into a cloud of meat and bone fragments. Flesh barely slowed Milo’s .338 Lapua bullet, which kept on trucking along to smash one of the marble statues at the far end of the room into dust.
Cody’s bullet hit a split second later. This time the whole window shattered and the big .50 tore Vernon’s other arm clean off.
He might have turned himself immortal, and would probably heal from even that, but he sure couldn’t plug his ears anymore!
The message on the recorder ended, and my voice started over again.
Vernon turned to me, purple eyes bright as LEDs now, shrieked, “You bastard!” and started my way.
The carbine’s selector was already flipped to full auto and I let it rip. I’d been using subsonic projectiles to get past the guards, because those were ninja quiet, but for my meeting with the big man himself, I’d loaded a mag of full-power, high-velocity, ruin-your-afternoon rounds. Even with the silencer on the end of my gun these were a lot louder, but thirty of them in one continual burst did a real number on his pelvis.
We didn’t want him dead. We just didn’t want him getting away quite yet.
With his bowels falling out his taint, Vernon slid, stumbled, and fell against the wall. Unfortunately for him, he could still be seen through the window, and another big bullet from outside exploded his collapsed right leg. Milo was so brilliant it was easy to forget that he was also a really good shot.
According to my watch, we’d gone slightly over time, except then there was a rumble, and the whole mansion shook. A red glow began to gather around one wall. It was time to go! Since we’d not damaged Vernon’s ears, I dropped the speaker on the floor so it could continue condemning him on a loop, and limped for the door.
“Lee, wait! Don’t leave me. I’ll give you anything.” Vernon looked at the red fog that was quickly solidifying into a gate and began to panic and flail. His curse was so potent—powered by so many lives—that I could see he was already healing. Purple light was shooting out of the stumps where his arm and hand had been, and the flesh was bubbling and reforming, but even then he wasn’t going to come back together before the blood swarm arrived.
The red wall bulged, like hundreds of baby-sized hands and lobster pincers were straining against a layer of plastic wrap. It was really gross.
“You want money? Power! Magic! Name your price!”
Z probably would have thought of some really cool thing to say as he walked out, but honestly, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure if I’d successfully transferred the curse or not, and was scared to find out, so I just yanked the door open and started down the stairs. Thank goodness there was a safety rail to hold onto or I might have fallen and broken my neck.
I was halfway down the steps when I realized that Earl Harbinger would’ve played it even cooler and picked up that really nice bottle of bourbon on the way out, but that’s why Earl is the leader and I’m the librarian.
Behind me there was a tearing sound as the blood swarm erupted into our world. It was like boiling, hissing, and ten thousand cicadas screaming and clicking. Vernon was wailing and begging for their nonexistent mercy, when they lit into him with a noise like electric knives carving a moist turkey combined with a dentist grinding your teeth, and somehow despite all that horrific racket, I could still hear my recorded voice, calmly reciting the promises of the Scroll of Doom.
Trip and Tanya had been waiting for me right outside in our getaway vehicle, parked next to the truck with the gigantic homebrew ammonium nitrate bomb they’d parked there while I’d been talking to Vernon. I’d hopped in the back of the van, we’d sped off, and once we were at a safe distance, set off the truck bomb. Popping a pseudo lich—or whatever the hell Vernon Gastelon would be declared to be by the PUFF adjuster—was great and all, but eradicating an entire extradimensional blood swarm too? That would make for a fantastic PUFF bounty. We’d even provided the MCB a convenient cover story. According to the Monster Control Bureau, thousand-gallon home propane tanks blow up by themselves all the time. I’m pretty sure we got the swarm too, because when I looked back at the mansion, blood had still been spraying out the broken office window like it was going through a lawn sprinkler.
Being the one who’d been cursed, I’d gotten to do the honors with the detonator, and it had been a rather pretty explosion. That was satisfying.
As the mushroom cloud had risen into the sky, we’d pulled over, I went off a ways by myself just in case, took out the Scroll of Doom, and set it on fire. With both the originator of the curse and his blood-swarm enforcers dead, nothing appeared to punish me for that act of defiance, so the spell was broken. Then we picked up Cody and Milo from where they’d been sniping and the five of us headed for the airport so we could get back to Alabama.
During the drive, I checked my messages, and there were fifteen new ones from different Hunters asking me questions about monster lore. Earl needed to know how to fight a monster made out of colors. Now that sounded fascinating.
It would be good to get back to the office.
_____________________________
Sloppily getting cursed taught me a valuable lesson about hubris. But that’s a good example of why I started compiling these records, so that today’s Hunters can learn from those who came before us, whether it be from our mistakes or our triumphs. I hope that the other entries in this volume will prove helpful and educational. And most importantly, if you ever find something labeled something ominous like the Scroll of Doom buried in your wall, don’t read the damned thing!
—A.L.