Asymmetrical – Reactor

A man accidentally summons a shapeshifting demon with anger-management issues…

Short story | 5,130 Words

“I should mention that, uh, I have raised a demon,” said Peter Lark. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. They had slid down because his face was wet with perspiration—from anxiety, not exercise—as he had been lying on his psychiatrist’s lounge for the last half hour.

“You’ve raised a demon?” asked Dr. Klaber. She spoke quietly and calmly, as always, and made a notation with her propelling pencil in her black notebook.

“Yeah,” said Peter. He spoke quickly, as if he really needed to get the words out. “It calls itself Stencil. That’s not its real name, obviously. I found out how to summon it in an old journal of my great-great-grandfather’s. I might have mentioned him before . . .”

“This is a new development, Peter,” said Dr. Klaber. “When did this . . . idea . . . you have raised a demon begin?”

“I raised it last Saturday night,” said Peter glumly. “And now it follows me around everywhere, causing trouble.”

“It follows you around, causing trouble?” asked Dr. Klaber. “Can you . . . hmmm . . . see it now?”

Peter thought she muttered something about hallucinating under her breath in the middle of her reply.

“Of course,” he said. The demon was a shapeshifter, constantly changing forms. Right now it looked like a giant toad, albeit one that stood upright on its hind legs and had a toothy maw. “It’s standing behind you.”

Dr. Klaber didn’t look around. She shuffled through Peter’s file, clearly looking for a recent police report or the like, of something he’d done that he would blame on this demon.

“What sort of ‘trouble’ does this ‘demon’ cause?”

“It overreacts to people who . . . uh . . . piss me off or do something to annoy me,” said Peter. “I mean, everyone gets annoyed by small stuff, right? If it wasn’t for Stencil, it wouldn’t be a problem. I’d just tell them off or whatever, but Stencil overreacts, I mean way overreacts—”

He paused and started shaking his head. Dr. Klaber was doing that thing he hated, where she leaned forward and rested her chin on her hand and stared at him with an expression she probably thought indicated interest or kindness, but it made him feel like an exhibit in a zoo, like she was looking at some baboon’s bare scarlet ass and was trying to think up a joke about baboons and bare scarlet asses and he knew she didn’t believe him and was leading up to some comment about how he was doing whatever he said Stencil did and it was just so unfair—

“Stencil, don’t . . .” he said weakly, and closed his eyes.

It was too late. Dr. Klaber’s head came off, and a great gout of blood gushed out. Fortunately, in terms of crime scenes at least, Stencil gulped that all down, and then consumed the body, lifting the psychologist by the ankles to force her down its gullet. It used her high heels as toothpicks before crunching them up with great satisfaction. Its many-tendrilled tongue rolled out to clean up the blood splashes.

Peter waited until he heard the quiet ding-ding of the antique ormolu clock that announced the end of the session before he opened his eyes. Stencil was perched on the desk, now in a vaguely vulture-shaped form, if a vulture had been crossed with a cobra and set on fire, though there was no heat or smoke. It was much smaller than it had been when it was eating the psychologist. Peter didn’t know why it kept changing shape. It was one more thing to try and find out, but that meant . . . something he didn’t want to do, but was probably going to have to face up to. . . .

“Uh, thanks, Dr. Klaber,” said Peter, very loudly. He got up and went out, shutting the door behind him.

Leon, the receptionist, smiled at him.

“Hey, Peter, he said. “There’s some paperwork to do for your insurance, and we also really need your partial payment this time—”

“Next week!” gabbled Peter, hurrying out the door. “I love paperwork and paying, I really do, thank you so much, Leon, you’re a great guy, but I have to go!”

He didn’t look back, but he still heard the horrid gobbling sound, and a sort of ripping noise that was probably Leon being torn apart by Stencil’s vulturelike beak. It didn’t matter what he said. Stencil knew how much paperwork aggravated him. Not to mention the price gouging. Peter’s insurance would only cover every second session and sometimes not even that, and the demon must know how much he hated everyone involved in extracting money from him.

Peter ran home. He kind of hoped if he was quick enough he wouldn’t get into any situations where Stencil would intervene. He was almost there, starting to cross the street, when a car ran a red light a fraction of a second after the amber changed, and made him jump back to the kerb. There wasn’t any traffic, and it was something he might have done himself if he was driving, but he reflexively gave them the finger.

Even as he arrested that motion, clenched his fist, and shouted “No!” Stencil manifested on the car’s hood, gibbering through the windscreen. This time it had chosen to appear as a kind of bile-green slug the size of a pony. Understandably, the driver panicked and the car ran off the road, slamming into the corner of a building. Peter winced at the awful sound of the crash and shut his eyes again. But the flash of the car exploding leaked through his eyelids, and the blast made him stagger.

“That was, like, random,” said someone slightly behind him, a young man from the sound of his voice. Peter didn’t answer, or look, and tried very hard not to be aggravated by the teenager’s chosen expression, which managed to combine two of his most hated word choices. He opened his eyes a fraction and staggered over the road, ignoring the blaze and the column of smoke some fifty yards to the right. He heard a thud behind him, suspiciously like a body falling straight down from a sudden, totally unexpected heart attack after witnessing a bizarre road accident, but he ignored it and ran up the stoop, fumbled out his keys, and went inside, slamming the front door behind him.

There were a lot of sirens in the street for a while after that, but Peter went straight to his favourite armchair, put on his noise-cancelling headphones, started his phone playing an endless loop of falling rain, and tuned out the world beyond. He had to think.

This was hard to do, as Stencil sat opposite, picking its nose. It looked like a kind of bulbous-nosed Tolkienesque dwarf now, but naked, and it had no beard—though the dense black hair on its grey-skinned body grew out in vast, blowsy tufts, which Peter was relieved to note completely camouflaged whatever lurked in its groin area.

Distressingly, even when Peter shut his eyes, an afterimage leaked through. He could still see a sort of luminous, X-ray view of the demon, with one long finger drilling into a nostril, being extracted with effort, and the findings examined before Stencil began again. He was thankful he couldn’t hear it.

He could hear something though. A faint sound was managing to penetrate his noise-cancelling headphones. He thought for a moment the batteries must have gone flat, before realising it was simply a very loud noise, quite close, and sadly one that he recognised.

Stencil heard it too. Its body was melting and reforming into a rather horrid version of a faithful dog, ears cocked to listen to something interesting. The ears in question were a foot high and warty, and while undeniably dog-shaped, Stencil had hide like a crocodile’s, only scabby and oozing pus.

“It’s my neighbour,” said Peter, trying to maintain his cool. He slowly removed the headphones, the sound of the endlessly ringing doorbell and his neighbour Ben shouting becoming very clear. “My neighbour Ben, who thinks I owe him three hundred dollars, and though his claim is . . . is fine, actually . . . so I am going to pay him now and he will go away again. I am not upset, you understand. Ben thinks I was responsible for hurting his cat when I fell over it the other day, because it was on my stoop, right in front of my door, and . . . and he wants me to pay the vet bill, which I completely understand and I’m happy to help him out. So you don’t need to get involved, Stencil. Okay? Stay here, and do nothing.”

Stencil began to drool from both sides of its mouth. The drool fell upward, in defiance of gravity, twin streams splashing on the ceiling.

Peter rushed to the door. The knocking and shouting stopped before he even turned the doorknob, and when he opened the door, there was no sign of Ben, save for the orange plastic sandals the neighbour always wore. They were slightly melted. A long tentacle slithered in from behind Peter and dragged the sandals inside. There was a ghastly sucking sound.

“A demon with a shoe fetish,” whispered Peter. He shut the door and leaned his forehead against it. He knew what he had to do now, but he really, really didn’t want to do it. Maybe, he thought, if I just stay in and lie low, Stencil will disapparate. Demons couldn’t stay in the mortal realm for very long before they began to erode. It would only be a matter of a few days, or weeks at the most . . .

Peter’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He straightened up and slowly removed it, glancing at the screen.

Zanny. His wife. Ex-wife. Sort of. They’d got divorced years ago but they still lived together, mostly. She’d moved out last month, gone to her sister’s, supposedly forever. As it was the sixth time for “forever,” Peter had been expecting her to call. Looking at his phone, he saw she had in fact called three times in the last hour. He hadn’t noticed.

He didn’t answer this time either, but even before he could put the phone away, a message popped up.

Dony andeet then addjikr I come ober joxl yout add

Peter had a lot of practice deciphering Zanny’s hurried texts. He took a deep breath, held it for six seconds, exhaled slowly, and called her back.

“You asshole! Ghosting me now, I’m going to come over there and kick—”

“Zanny! Listen. I’ve got a problem. You need to stay away.”

“Got a problem? What’s her name? Or his name? You didn’t wait long before—”

“Zanny! Listen, please! I . . . looked at great-great-grandad’s books, and—”

“You did what! After what happened to your father? Peter, you—”

“I know, I know. But I . . . I got tired of being always . . . you know, people treating me like shit, and I wanted to get my own back, just a little, so I thought . . . anyway, I’ve raised a demon and it’s a lot of trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” asked Zanny. Unlike Dr. Klaber’s, hers was a serious question; she had no difficulty believing Peter had actually summoned a demon. Zanny had grown up in the same demimonde as Peter, full of practicing sorcerers and witches of some degree or another, even if the majority of them were borderline charlatans with only occasional glimpses of real power. Unlike Peter’s family, who were the real deal. Zanny still didn’t know the full extent of that, and Peter hoped she never would.

Peter found himself chewing his lower lip. He took another breath and then said shakily, “It’s killed a bunch of people.”

He heard a shocked cry, but Zanny recovered quickly.

“Anyone I know?” she asked.

“Dr. Klaber and her receptionist,” said Peter. “A couple of people in the street. Oh, and Ben from next door.”

“That’s not so bad,” said Zanny. She’d always disliked Ben. In fact anyone who had anything to do with Ben disliked him. He blamed everyone else for anything that ever happened to him. Like the cat incident.

“He didn’t deserve to die,” said Peter. “And the others . . . I mean, I’m basically a murderer now.”

“You didn’t kill them, Peter,” said Zanny, her voice softening. She was always kindest to Peter when he was in trouble. It was when things were going well for him that they didn’t get on.

“I kind of did,” said Peter quietly. “The demon—its name is Stencil—it, uh, reacts when I’m annoyed with someone, but it way overreacts.”

“Right, I’m coming over,” said Zanny. “You need help.”

“No, no!” shouted Peter. “Stencil will kill you and pick its teeth with your shoes.”

There was a grim silence.

“Are you saying I annoy you, Peter?” asked Zanny.

Peter transferred the phone to his left hand and wiped his sweaty forehead with his right.

“No, no,” he stuttered. “It’s just that Stencil picks up on even the tiny, littlest, small bit of temporary peevishness, and that’s all it takes. I love you, Zanny, you know that, but you have to admit we do annoy each a little bit every now and . . .”

His voice trailed off. Stencil had risen up next to him, this time as a nine-foot-tall cadaverous ghoul with radioactively leprous skin and a mouth full of decaying square teeth. It breathed on Peter and he almost vomited. Being the only person able to see and smell the demon was a definite drawback.

“Get away!” he ordered. “Go and sit in the corner.”

“What?” asked Zanny.

“The demon,” said Peter. He watched the demon slowly slink away. It looked back at him and waggled its tufted ears. The left one fell off, only to be caught midair, shoved in the creature’s disgusting mouth, and crunched up. “It was listening. You have to stay away.”

“I’m coming over,” said Zanny. “I’m going to give that demon a piece of my mind.”

“It’ll eat your whole head!” shrieked Peter, but Zanny had already terminated the call.

It would take Zanny at least an hour to arrive, Peter figured, since her sister lived way up on the north side. So he had to deal with Stencil before then. He couldn’t vacillate and delay and dither like he normally did; he had to do what he didn’t want to do immediately. Immediately!

He went to the kitchen and fired up the espresso machine, telling himself he needed coffee before the ordeal. The necessary ordeal, the first step of taking care of the Stencil problem. He glared at the demon, which had followed him in and was perched on the table, trying to look cute. It had turned into a big fluffy chick the size of a beach ball. It was cute if you ignored the fact that its beak was actually a kind of elongated jaw, like in Alien, and its eyes were bloodshot and cruel.

Three cups of coffee, a trip to the toilet, and half an hour later, Peter finally faced up to the situation. He went to the fridge and took out the carton he needed, then picked up the special first aid kit and clipped it on his belt before unlocking the cabinet in the corner to take out the ornate iron key that hung there. It was cold to the touch, far colder than any normal metal. He winced as he gripped it tight, but that was a necessity. The key was already trying to squirm out of his grasp.

He used it to unlock the heavy oaken door to the cellar, leaving it turned in the lock. It rattled and jittered, but could not get free. He pushed the door open and started down the steps. Stencil followed him. He didn’t look back to see what the demon looked like now, but he could hear talons on the steps, and occasionally a few sparks fell past him, struck from the stone.

It was a long way down. He passed some of the house’s nineteenth-century clay pipe plumbing, and much farther down had to edge around the vast curve of a 1930s riveted steel water main where it intruded into the stairwell. Like all the Larks, he could see well in the dark, but there was a light behind him, the blue glare of burning gas accompanied by the smell of rotting eggs. It had to have come from Stencil, but again he didn’t look around.

Finally, they reached the lower door. It was carved from whalebone, decorated with scenes of something no human mind could comprehend, and even Peter, who had inherited his family’s unusual senses, found it hard to look at it even sidelong in order to reach out and grab the brazen chain that dangled out of the hole in the . . . the hole in . . . whatever it was, it was best not looked at.

He pulled the chain and the door groaned open, a sound not at all like an old door opening—it was far more a literal groan, a long, drawn-out gasp of only just bearable human pain.

Lights flickered into life as Peter entered the room. Gas jets high on the walls fizzed into incandescence, bright as tiny suns, banishing every shadow from the stark, bare room with its whitewashed stone walls, floor and ceiling. There was a single, rough boulder in the middle, its top cut flat to serve as a table. A silver bowl rested on it. There was a crescent knife to the left of the bowl and a fat, square, leatherbound book to the right. His great-great-grandfather’s bowl, knife, and grimoire.

Peter didn’t need to refer to the grimoire for the particular ritual he had to carry out. It had been drummed into him from an early age, along with the warning that it could only be used in the direst circumstance, given the risks involved and the toll it would take. He had also been warned that he must never attempt any of the spells from his great-great-grandfather’s grimoire without proper preparation and supervision, a warning he had half ignored. He had prepared as carefully as he could, but had no one to supervise, given that both his parents had previously ignored the same warning and paid the price.

Whatever that price was. He still wasn’t sure if they were dead, trapped somewhere, or—and this was the most hurtful—had actually succeeded in their effort to transmute copper-nickel quarters into gold and had gone off to lead a better life without him.

Peter stared at the stone table, the bowl, the knife, and the grimoire for a long minute, until Stencil shuffled into his field of view. The demon now resembled a kind of scarecrow made of overlapping or stacked tarot cards, its head a cube of oversized cards the size of a small fridge, which slowly rotated to show in turn the Fool, the Hanged Man, Death, and Judgment.

“Go stand in the corner!” snapped Peter. Stencil complied, cards fluttering and snapping as it moved.

Peter opened the carton of donkey milk (Cleopatra Brand) and poured it into the bowl, shuddering. It was helpful that there was a current trend for donkey’s milk in coffee, now rivalling oat and soy. It made it a lot easier to get the stuff, but he really didn’t like even the smell of it.

Next, he rolled up his sleeves and rested his left forearm on the rim of the bowl, rotating his hand to expose the inside of his wrist.

Peter took a moment to think about what he needed to ask. The spell would only last as long as he bled sufficiently, so there was a lot of risk involved. If it went on too long, he would pass out and die.

But he couldn’t think of any other way he could get help to deal with Stencil.

Peter took a deep breath, spoke the words he had learned by rote without real understanding, and used the crescent knife to cut into a vein. Blood flowed instantly and began to drip into the bowl, curdling the ass’s milk, tendrils of red spreading and twisting through the white.

Nothing else happened. Stencil made a noise that might have been a grunting laugh, or the sound of someone being choked to death.

Peter stared into the bowl. Tendrils of blood had spread through the closer side, but there was still an unstained quarter or more where the ass’s milk resisted and remained white. He moved his arm slowly across, so the blood fell like a ghastly rain, leaving no milk untouched.

As he did so, the horrid mixture began to turn translucent, losing all colour, white and red. The silver metal also turned clear, like glass, the whole thing becoming a window, a window into the distant past. Through it, slowly swimming into focus, Peter saw a smoky room, a salon of early twentieth-century style, with large, high-backed armchairs in front of dark mahogany shelves tightly packed with clothbound books, hundreds and hundreds of them, in green and pale yellow, black and silver bindings.

The smoke rose from the enormous cigar being enjoyed by the man in the closest armchair, an imposing figure of middle years, considerable girth, impeccable suiting, and a massive square-cut white beard with attendant moustache. He looked straight at Peter through the arcane window, took the cigar from his mouth, and puffed out a cloud of smoke that curled back as it struck the viewing portal.

“Welcher bist Du?” he asked, in a weary manner.

“Uh, my German isn’t very good,” said Peter. “You want to know which one I am? I’m Peter Lark, son of Peter and Hannah, and Hannah was daughter of Elias and Agnes, and Elias was son of Peter and Anneliese, and Anneliese was, um . . . your daughter.”

“Yes, I see it in your forehead,” said August Lerche, with a slight grimace. “It is as well you have made our name into English, I would not want it otherwise.”

“I, uh, need your help, sir,” said Peter weakly. He looked at his arm. The flow of blood seemed to him to have quickened. He had to talk faster, be more to the point. “I used your grimoire and I’ve raised a demon and I don’t know how to get rid of it. It calls itself Stencil.”

“Stencil? A demon? From my grimoire?” asked August. He frowned and stubbed his cigar angrily into an exquisite Limoges demitasse, which was unfortunately still full of coffee, so it splashed on his hand. He ignored it. “So you read German better than you speak it?”

“Not really,” admitted Peter.

“So, you used the Latin version?”

The grimoire was written in German, Latin, and some other language in which Peter didn’t even recognise the characters.

“Uh, I don’t have much Latin, or any of the . . . er . . . other,” said Peter. He had used Google Translate to work out what the spell was supposed to do, but he couldn’t even begin to think how he would explain this to his ancestor. “I translated it with an . . . um . . . English-to-German dictionary, and then worked out how to say it in German phonetically.”

August shook his head and muttered something, before asking, “Where is this ‘demon’?”

Peter turned his head.

“Stencil! Come over here.”

The demon came to Peter’s side, but it moved slowly, with obvious reluctance. It now had the shape of an enormous black rat, one about the size of a Great Dane. Its fur was very wet and nasty, as if it had just emerged from a sewer. It stank.

Great-great-grandfather August leaned forward. His eyes narrowed, and he scrabbled in his waistcoat pocket for moment, pushing aside the watch chain to take out a monocle, which he fixed in his left eye. To Peter, that eye was now greatly magnified, but far more alarmingly, both white and pupil were subsumed into a sapphire-blue fire.

“That’s not a demon,” said August. He removed the monocle, to Peter’s relief, and leaned back. “You are a very foolish boy!”

“It’s not a demon?” asked Peter weakly.

“It is exactly as it described itself to you. A stencil, die schablone. A pattern. An entity of extraplanar energy that models itself upon your desire, your stated will. What were you trying to summon?”

“Some little demon that would . . . would make life difficult for people who do things that annoy me,” whispered Peter. “But only when I told it to, and I don’t know, would make them trip or break their phone or whatever. But Stencil, it kills people! I only have to be a little tiny bit annoyed with someone and it kills them! How do I get rid of it?”

He glanced down. He couldn’t even see the cut in his wrist, which was all bloody now, as was most of his hand.

“You are beyond merely foolish; you are a complete ignoramus,” said August, with considerable disgust. “Your entire line is a great disappointment. You parents were particularly . . . but enough. You have misplaced a decimal by three places.”

“What?”

“This summoning. Your Stencil is a thousand times stronger than it should be. That is why it can only react in a disproportionate manner.”

“How do I banish it?”

“Banish it? Banish it? Do you know even less than nothing? It is not a demon, it is a force of energy which has taken shape from your defective personality!”

“I don’t have a defective personality! Dr. Klaber says . . . said . . . that my, my issues are due to my parents, and with enough therapy I can work—”

“Some follower of my friend Freud, I take it? Very well, in his terms, your id has given Stencil its pattern, and so I am not surprised it seemingly cannot decide which particularly repugnant form it should take.”

“But what do I do?” wailed Peter. “How do I get rid of it?”

“Es ist dein eigenes Problem, Dummkopf!“

The old man gave a negligent flick of his index finger, and the window was gone. There was only the silver bowl, now rather more full of blood than donkey milk. Peter leant on the bowl, which tipped and spilt the mixture across the table, and he had to thrust out both hands to stop himself falling over, as a wave of sudden weakness made him dizzy.

Shakily, he unzipped the first aid kit on his belt and pulled out a gauze dressing, slapping it on the wound in his wrist. The blood helped the dressing stick as he got out a bandage and wound it around, keeping the pressure on. He had trouble with the hook fastener, but eventually managed to fix the bandage in place.

He had only just got it done when he heard footsteps on the stairs. Stencil heard them too, and lurched toward the door. It was a grandfather clock now, nine feet tall and made of rubber like a weird movie prop rather than wood, and the clockface was a gaping mouth with twelve very pointy steel teeth, sphinctering open and closed, so tightly closed the teeth clashed with a terrible metallic screech.

“Zanny,” whispered Peter. Surely an hour hadn’t passed? But he knew it had. She knew about this room, knew enough to leave the key trapped in the lock, to avoid the trapped seventh step; she would be able to open the door of bone. It had to be Zanny.

She would be here in less than a minute, and Stencil would eat her, that horrid, toothy clockface would munch her bones, leaving only her shoes, almost certainly the Salvatore Ferragamo flats which admittedly did make her look a bit like Aubrey Hepburn, so she wore them all the time.

There was nothing he could do to stop Stencil.

“I hate myself,” sobbed Peter. He paused and considered that for a single second. His great-great-grandfather’s parting words suddenly made sense. Stencil was his problem. Stencil was himself, or a part of him drawn out and magnified.

“I hate myself,” he said, louder and more clearly. “The person who irritates me the most, who is the biggest problem of all, is myself. I am the one I want punished, a thousand times more significantly than is warranted. Stencil, I am by far the biggest and most annoying problem I have, and I want you to deal with me as I would myself.”

The grandfather clock melted and sank, reforming itself into a mirror image of Peter, albeit one sculpted from human excrement. The real Peter gagged and almost stepped back as the shit Peter approached, but he managed to stand fast. The footsteps were very close now.

“Do what you have to do,” said Peter.

Stencil stepped forward, embraced him, lost its shape, and was gone.

The excrement remained. All over Peter.

He had just started to wipe it off when the door opened and Zanny came in. She immediately recoiled, whipped out a handkerchief, and held it to her face.

“I did it!” exclaimed Peter, dripping in noisome liquid. “I defeated the demon!”

Zanny shook her head slowly. Likely she was doubting what she saw and smelled, her decision to come over, and her entire relationship with Peter. But she was made of stern stuff.

“You think the garden hose would reach all the way down here?” she asked, through the handkerchief.

“Halfway maybe,” said Peter. “But it’ll be cold, better if I take a shower—”

The bathroom was on the far side of the house from the cellar. He’d have to traverse the kitchen, the living room, and a hallway to get there.

“Walk up halfway and wait there,” instructed Zanny. “I’ll run the hose down.”

“But I saved you from being eat . . .”

His voice trailed off into a sigh. He was talking to the air. The sound of Zanny’s rapid footsteps up the stairs was the only reply.

“I defeated a demon,” said Peter. He smiled, opening his mouth wide, which was a mistake, but even that could not spoil his mood. He opened his mouth even wider and shouted out to the world, with a small gurgling retch at the end.

“I defeated a demon!”

“Asymmetrical” copyright © 2025 by Garth Nix
Art copyright © 2025 by Weston Wei

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