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Invocation

Finally, Lore must’ve lost her patience. His phone vibrated. He didn’t want to answer it. Didn’t want to talk to her. Every part of him itched with anxiety just seeing her name there on his phone.

But he knew Lore too well. She would call and call and call. The woman would fly here herself and rappel in through the window like SWAT. Lore was a Hunter-Killer drone on a kill streak. It was why she was successful at, well, everything.

“What the shit,” she said when he answered. “You planning on calling me back or what?”

“Yeah. I dunno. Sorry.” He didn’t want to get into why he didn’t want to talk to her. So instead he said, “I just keep reading it. I can’t stop reading it.”

“Owen gonna Owen. Always tonguing that broken tooth.”

“Don’t.”

A pause. “Sorry.” Another pause. “Hey, so we’re doing this, right?”

“Going? To his…” Funeral, he tried to say but couldn’t.

“Yeah. To fucking New Hampshire, of all the places.”

“I dunno, Lore. I dunno.”

Silence on the other end. “You do know. You gotta go. We all do. Nick is sick. We owe him this. Don’t we?”

Owen tried to imagine Nick being sick. Nick was like a human cigarette. All tar and nicotine. Was it possible for cancer to get cancer? But then his mind put Nick in a bed. Frail and crooked—the man-sized cigarette cooked down to the filter, the rest of him ash. Same way Owen’s own father went out. The way most people seemed to go out. In a hospital bed, like a wilting plant in a pot of dry, dead dirt. Owen tried to shake the image. He chewed a thumbnail.

It was clear Lore couldn’t abide the silence. So she filled it with:

“The Covenant, Owen. Nick invoked the Covenant.”

“So what? The Covenant’s been broken since…” He couldn’t finish that sentence. They’d all broken it in their own ways.

Her especially, he thought, but dared not say.

“Maybe this is how we fix it. Even a little. We gave it a name, not to make it real, but because it was real. Once upon a time.”

“Lore—”

“Shut up. You’re going. We’re all going.”

Dog with a bone .

He sighed. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah.”

A pause.

“You think Hamish will come?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” And he didn’t. He’d last seen Hamish on that Zoom call, and nothing since. Those bridges had burned long ago, leaving only the chasm. “I dunno if you check his socials, but Hamish is different these days.”

“Seems like.”

Seems like . Sounded like Lore hadn’t been talking to him either. Which made him grotesquely, uncomfortably happy. Owen would’ve been jealous to learn they’d been talking still. That somehow he had been the one left out. Of course thinking that just made him feel extra shitty. But what didn’t?

“Flight’s tomorrow,” she said, filling the void of silence Owen had accidentally left wide open.

“Wait, what? Tomorrow? Shit.”

“Oh, what? Got something big going on?”

You know I don’t, he thought bitterly, but didn’t say that. Instead he deflected: “I have a shift at the bookstore. But I figured you’d be the one who was busy. All the stuff you’ve got going on—I mean, it’s impressive. It’s great. I’m happy for you.” Saying those things felt like acid on his tongue. He felt weak, like he was capitulating. Like he was just a shadow cast by her light. “Seriously, I mean it,” he added, wincing. Really gilding that lily, Nailbiter .

“Hey, thanks. It’s been good. But I can make the time for this.”

“Good to be the boss.”

“Sure.” But the way she said it sounded like she didn’t mean it. Or she didn’t like him saying that. Owen couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t comfortable enough to probe for the truth. “You saw he cc’d Matty, right?” she asked.

“He, ah, he does that sometimes.”

A pause. She didn’t know that Nick did that sometimes. Which meant—what, Nick wasn’t emailing her? Just him? Huh.

She finally said, “I can’t tell if it’s sad or sweet or just fucked up.”

“I think it’s all of the above.”

“Yeah. Well.” A sound like her sucking air between her teeth. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, Owen.”

“See you tomorrow, Lore.”

When the call ended, he bit down and ripped off a half-moon of thumbnail in one go. It bled.

—

Owen looked around his apartment, which he could do from the edge of his bed. It was essentially one room, not more than five hundred square feet. Place was a mess. Not a hoarder’s mess, not a filth pit, either. Just clutter at the edges because he was trying to live an adult life in a place that was too small for it, and no amount of Marie Kondo was going to fit his existence into an apartment this miserably cramped. Didn’t help that his computer—a gaming rig, mostly, a Frankenstein monster of bartered or refurbished parts—took up a good chunk of the desk. (Next to it: a little cairn of bitten fingernail slivers.)

He stood up and went to the corner of the room next to his shitty IKEA dresser. There, under a pile of old Omni magazines, was a file box. He hooked it with a foot and pulled it out. The magazines slid to the floor in a pile, and he didn’t bother to pick them up. Owen knelt and lifted the lid of that box with some trepidation, as if it were the Ark of the Covenant and opening it would release the souls of the damned, eager to melt the face off his skull.

But the dead souls that awaited inside were just stacks of old notebooks from high school and from college. They were not his notebooks, not entirely—and they were not Lore’s notebooks, either. They were theirs, shared property, or so he’d always believed them to be. All throughout school, the two of them used these books for an unholy host of purposes: to write shared stories, to design adventures and characters for D&D, to draw stupid shit and share stupider jokes, and of course to design games. Pen-and-paper games, board games, but mostly video games. Inside were maps, lines from text adventures they programmed in fucking BASIC, bits of dialogue, little sketches of everything from Pokémon rip-offs to riffs on Fallout -style power armor. Half of it was derivative shit, they both knew it. But there was good stuff in there, too. Original stuff. Real stuff.

And it was supposed to be theirs.

Not his, not hers.

Theirs .

Of course, Lore went off and did it all, didn’t she? Conquered the world. Hunter-Killer, hungry for that streak. And all he’d conquered was a shitty apartment and an endless series of dead-end jobs. She left me behind, he thought with no small bitterness. She’s living our dream. Without me.

Though, of course, it was way worse than that, wasn’t it?

He needed to pack, but instead he stood there, paralyzed.

Looking out the window in his apartment meant looking at algae-stained brick. He sometimes searched for patterns in the brickwork: faces, animals, landscapes, anything to help him not doomscroll on his phone and get lost in an endless loop of bad news. He stared now, trying to find something to take his mind off tomorrow, but the only pattern that emerged from the smears of seasick green and the lines of rust-red brick was a staircase in the middle of nowhere, leading to nothing, calling his name.