Chapter Text
Craig sat in the snow. It fell and left a lingering, cool feeling on his skin, with watery marks imprinting on his jacket. The falling snow was too delicate to simply darken the blue clothes he always wore, yet eventually it would melt and seep into the fabric. Though the sun attempted to peak out, it remained unsuccessful; what was left behind was the whitened outline formed on the grey clouds that shadowed South Park. The sky and ground were one with the formation of the slushy colors Craig had become accustomed to withstanding. A cool breath escaped his lips and outward came a light huff. It looked like smoke. When nobody was looking he would sometimes put his fingers up in a scissor-shape and blow through them as if he were smoking.
To his left, the doors swung open and out came the many inhabitants of South Park. The chattering and laughter rang out in stark contrast to the previous solitude and silence that had overtaken Craig’s peace of mind. He remained still and looked over to those leaving, many of whom he was acquainted with already. There went the Marsh family; his son, Stanley, was a boy that Craig sometimes saw at school. Then there was the Stotch family with the gullible Butters… Clyde’s family came out, Tolkien’s, Nelly’s, and the list went on until there was nobody. The shoe prints left in the aftermath of movement had created a clear route leading to the sidewalks and streets.
This meant that it was time for Craig to get up. He brushed some of the frost off of his chullo hat which he wore so often. Of course it was blue. His mother had given it to him as a gift for his ninth birthday, and he had worn it ever since. Turning to the entrance of the large church, he stepped out of the soft blanket of white and onto the wet asphalt. The church towered above him and contrasted its dark and rich woodwork against the purity of the ever-raining snow. His shoes sounded out against the pavement as the sound of laughter and9 conversation slowly drifted. To go inside the belly of the church was Craig’s daily routine.
More noise as he scraped his shoes against the mat in front of the structure. From the front of the chapel a redhead shuffled. His curly orange sprung out against the dismal tones inside, and then he spoke. “Craig, you’ve had enough of playing in the snow?”
Craig nodded, but only for a second. Others wouldn’t have noticed this subtle nod, but it was an instinct at this point. His father could always understand. Mr. Tucker smiled at the boy and walked to him before giving him a pat on the shoulder.
“Are you ready to go home?”
Another nod, only this time it was accompanied with a small exhale that one may compare to simply Craig’s way of affirmation. Mr. Tucker took out his keys and out came the sound of a beep from down the street. They walked out together, and Craig tried his best to copy his father’s steps on the sidewalk. They were always rhythmic and fast. Craig liked being in sync with his dad, and thought about how hard it must be to always keep the same steps. He was much smaller than his father and so it was hard to keep up his pace. They would skip all of the lines in the sidewalk and take the same amount of steps in every square as if they were solving some kind of elaborate puzzle.
Once home, Craig continued with his plans as they always were. His footsteps could barely be heard with the combination of the padded carpeted floors and his fuzzy socks as he practically skipped up the steps to his room. On his door hung a flurry of papers which Craig had hung himself. One of them was a picture that he had drawn in third grade of an astronaut, with the others being other crudely made images poorly placed with tape. The handle of the door was cold against his hand and it opened with a click.
Craig’s room had looked the same since second grade. A Space Trek poster adorned the top of his bedpost and a robot figurine looked over to him from his nightstand nearby. He had always loved space and the universe. The stars were pretty and of course, the night sky was always a rich shade of blue. That part of him hadn’t changed much and probably never would. The only thing that ever shifted in that room was the addition of more posters and the setup for his guinea pig he had gotten the year before. There weren’t many things that Craig liked, though the few things that he did like he sure did like a lot.
That was when he took out the book.
After closing his door, Craig slid to his knees in anticipation and quickly crawled over to the edge of his sleeping place. Underneath, he took out a large book with a sleek black cover. There were words inscribed on the front and back, but they were strange and didn’t make sense when Craig tried to put them together. Lots of symbols and strange lines that just didn’t seem to fit right. His father could understand it, that much he knew. The book was heavy and took effort to pull out from underneath the darkness of his bed, but Craig did so with a slight amount of effort.
The boy had managed to obtain such a thing only after seeing his father with it. Two days prior, Craig’s dad had been reading the book with an intense look on his face. His bushy brows furrowed as he skimmed the pages. At the time, Mr. Tucker did not particularly mind his son seeing him read the book. Again, it wasn’t like Craig could understand it anyway. But the one thing that Mr. Tucker had not foreseen was that Craig would steal the book. It was not like Craig to steal. He was generally a good child, excluding the mild issue of making some obscene gestures with his hands. Yet Mr. Tucker knew that his son looked up to him. Steal? It was a stretch.
Despite this, that was exactly what he had done. When his dad had put away the book in his room, Craig had gone in and taken it out again. He didn’t know if it was exactly considered stealing, considering that they lived in the same household. Yet at the same time Craig hadn’t specifically told his father about taking the book. Was not saying anything really the same as outright not telling the truth? There was too much thinking involved in finding the answer to that for someone like Craig Tucker.
The one thing that had been good about the book was the context behind it. Craig couldn’t read the book for sure, but he definitely knew what the book was written about and why. It was a spell book. These kinds of books were fairly popular within Craig’s family circle of priests and other mystic companions. They were always large and had a hard thick cover of some sort, typically leather, and of course, they were all written in Remorse. As spell books did, they were written with the purpose of helping the reader with their magical endeavors. Or perhaps in this case, the word holy would have been a better term.
Craig had planned to learn Remorse, but his mother and father didn’t have enough time to make sure he was fluent in it, and there was nobody else in the town of South Park that was truly familiar with the language. It wasn’t like it was a necessity anyway; Remorse was only used for those who wanted to use grimoires and spell books. It was sort of like latin; slightly old and outdated that many didn’t use in practicality anymore, yet useful under the right circumstances. In fact, Craig was fairly certain that a modernized version of the language had come into popularity recently. Aargan was what it was called. Remorse was ancient.
Craig’s favorite part of the book was looking at the pictures. While many of the pages had nothing but scribbles of nonsensical scrawling everywhere, occasionally some of the spells and enchantments would have diagrams or images accompanying them. This was particularly popular with the summoning chapters. At least, Craig thought it was the summoning chapters based on the circles drawn underneath each of the characters illustrated throughout the dusty pages.
The images were printed in black ink, and the quality of them had a certain sharpness to it. They were fairly realistic drawings at that. He wondered who had drawn them. Were they mass produced in assembly lines? Or were they written out individually? Grimoires had a lot of mysteries behind them that Craig did not care to find out about. He couldn’t find the answers if he wanted to anyway.
Craig’s favorite image to look at was the humanoid one. He knew it wasn’t a human, that was obvious by the furry red legs, wings, tail, and horns that it had, yet the face was one that was familiar to Craig; a human’s. The diagram was the only one of any creature that even looked remotely human, with the exception of a few fairies and gnomes. The creature appeared to be an imp. It had cropped curly hair and a softer look in its eyes. Craig knew better than to call it soft though. It was an imp after all. A description of the man appeared underneath the image, but it was impossible to read. Craig wished that Remorse was easier.
That was until he looked online.
Upon doing further research, Craig had been pleasantly surprised to find Remorse to Aargan and English translators. Of course the internet had it. The internet had everything! He looked at the link through his phone and snapped a photo of the entire spread of the book’s page. Craig looked at his screen and smiled. It had worked. What had before been a slur of random phrases and images had turned into something sensible. All he needed to do was drop his blood onto a circle, call the magic words that were on the page, and viola, he had himself a demon, excluding some of the other gross materials.
But then he paused. What was he doing? Why was he thinking of even summoning an imp in the first place? They were evil, and they went against everything that his community believed in. He looked back at his phone and then turned it off to reveal his own blank face in the black reflection staring back at him. Maybe Craig thought it to be fun? He didn’t know. He turned on the phone and read the description underneath the image of the half-man one more time. A particular cluster of sentences caught his eye.
“Make any of your wildest dreams come true by calling on this creature. Sign a contract (preferably not your soul) and rest assured your cruel and unusual companion will get the job done for you!”
Wildest dreams, huh? Craig thought to himself. Did Craig have any dreams? Any aspirations? He decided not. That was a little sad to say out loud. He ignored this and contemplated a little more. Did Craig want anything at the moment? What kind of contract would he want to sign? Another pause. Why was he even trying to convince himself that he should summon the imp in the first place!? It was a bad idea, period. He shook his head and shut the book, and the sound came off a little louder than he had expected it to. All of those pages really added up in weight.
A little panicked by this sudden sound that had boomed across his house, Craig silently cursed to himself and practically kicked the book under the bed again in a scramble of haste. A few minutes passed where Craig just hoped nobody had heard anything at all, though following this his mother eventually opened the door. She peaked through, her festive shades of spring green harshly washing out the dark walls, and spoke.
“Are you okay, Craig? I heard a loud noise. Did you break something?” She stroked one hand through her pretty blonde locks and gripped the doorframe with the other.
Craig paused for a second before spitting out what he needed to say. “No, I — I just hit something.” His heart rate increased ever so slightly and his voice came out raspier than he had wanted it to, but it was fine. The response was quick enough to not cause any suspicion. “Sorry.”
Mrs. Tucker gave off the same warm smile that she always did and nodded just a tinge. “Well, okay,” she softly recited before creaking the door closed to its original position. A wave of relief washed over Craig after this, though it made him feel incredibly guilty. He was hiding things from his mother now? Boy was he in deep. Too deep to escape?
He got up from off of his carpet and laid down in his bed. He felt much calmer on his bed, and some feelings of gratification came to him once he placed his head on his pillow. There was something about lying in bed that always made him feel much better. The rest of the day he continued doing his tasks like the day before that and the day before that, and spent the remaining time blasting music into his ears.