[hider=The Bargain]The tolling of church bells yanked the writer from his restless sleep. The dingy apartment in which he resided was lit only by meager moonlight streaming through the blinds, and the screen of his laptop. He had crashed while sitting at his desk, his face on the keyboard. The formerly blank document was now filled with three pages worth of the letter “r”. The writer sighed audibly and downed the last of the room temperature coffee in his mug. He deleted the “r’s” and stared at the blank page. The endless expanse of white mocked him and did little justice to the visions of epic battles and nightmarish creatures that his mind could conjure up.

He stood and stumbled into his tiny kitchenette. He played the messages on his answering machine, hoping for messages from his friends or maybe even one from her. Instead, the debt collectors had called again. His credit was far too poor to take loans from any banks, so he was forced to resort to less legitimate means. The message was a quite thinly veiled threat. He sighed and deleted the message.

He remembered that today was his father’s birthday and he sighed. He hadn’t spoken to his father in four years, he had said all he was willing to say, yet he still felt a slight emptiness. It was the emptiness that accompanies those who alienate their friends and families.  
	
As he made himself another coffee, he grew increasingly frustrated. Frustrated at himself, at the debt, at the loneliness, at all of it. His frustration grew into anger, which matured into rage. Rage came with its good friend, desperation. It was because of that desperation that he ended up sitting cross legged in a circle of candles, slashing into the throat of a goat.
	
It had been easy to find the ritual, every self-respecting new age movement website had one. They all came attached with warnings, but the writer was far beyond any state of mind where he cared about his physical well being. They all had different recipes or nuances, but the general process was the same. Goat’s blood, Sulfur dust, and a sacrifice were things every ritual had in common. They also required that the performer of the ritual kill someone prior to the summoning. 
	
He had gone to an alley in the seedier side of the next town over. Well, more correctly, he had searched seven different alley’s before finding one that housed a sleeping homeless man. After getting out of his car, he maneuvered towards the unconscious form of the vagrant. At first, he was careful not to wake him, but the seven empty bottles of beer littering the ground around the homeless man made him reasonably confident that he wouldn’t be waking up any time soon. He slid out the small knife he had brought and for just a moment, he realised how crazy this whole thing was. The moment faded, and the doubt was replaced with rage. He drove the knife into the man’s abdomen. He had been aiming for the chest, but his shaking hands had failed him. The drunk drifter bolted up and was immediately aware of the blade in his abdomen. The writer stumbled back as the vagrant flailed his arms wildly and began to shout. The writer’s mind told him to run, but desperation rooted him in place. He was unshakeably convinced he had to kill this man.

He decided to act before the vagrant’s errant screams attracted attention. He leapt forwards and easily tackled him, his hands searching for the knife that the man had already yanked out of his body and tossed aside. Cursing himself for not bringing a backup weapon, the writer grabbed the man by the throat and climbed on top of him. The drunk feebly battered the writer, his blows losing strength as he lost oxygen. Once he had fallen unconscious, the writer stood up and found the knife. He got on his knees and plunged it into the vagrant’s throat. The man opened his eyes for only a moment, before producing a sickening gurgling sound and slipping from the land of the living. The writer calmly stood and tossed the knife aside. He went back to his car and stuffed the bloody gloves and his jacket into a bag, which he threw out of his car on the way back to his apartment. If one were to look at a photograph that had been taken of the writer that night, they’d see a broken man, one whose bloodshot eyes were clouded with madness. One might argue that he broke that night, others say that he had teetered on the edge for a long time, and that all it took was something to push him off.

The rest was far easier by comparison. He bought a goat off of Craigslist, deciding to check the sacrifice and the goat's blood off his list at the same time. He grabbed a bag of sulfur dust and some candles at his local hardware store. The whole preparation process took about two weeks. He hummed softly as he made a pentagram on his floor out of chalk. He lit candles at certain points on the pentagram. He dragged the protesting goat into the circle, quite happy his neighbors were gone for the night. It was a simple matter to behead the goat, the creature bleats not phasing him. He mixed the goat’s blood, the sulfur dust, and a piece of paper with his wish written upon it into a large bowl. He then dropped a lit match into the bowl and, to his surprise, it immediately ignited in a brilliant blue flame. He watched, transfixed, as the flames began to twist into the form of the creature he was summoning. 

The being had no lower body, its torso streamed from the bowl like a genie from a lamp. It’s face was surprisingly human, and conveyed indifference. The fiery being then spoke to the writer.

“Is it you who summons me?” It’s voice was not unlike the sound of someone crushing shards of glass under foot. The writer nodded affirmatively. The being stared at him, his eyes boring into his soul. The writer’s body became numb. “I know what you desire, draw closer and I will provide it,” it then smiled “but know there will be a price.” The writer stepped closer and the being extended one fiery arm and touched his forehead. Its’ fingers burned his forehead, but nothing else happened. Just as he began to back away, every experience over the course of human history flooded his mind. War, peace, famine, feasts, joy, anger, fear, desperation, an entire species worth of emotions and experience taken on by one man. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground. He laid there and screamed as he became the wisest, happiest, and most troubled man all at once. He then stood on shaky legs.

“Thank you.” Said the Writer, a broad and weary smile on his face. With the sum of all humanity’s experiences in his mind, he would have no trouble writing.

 “Don’t thank me just yet.” Just as he was about to ask why, his eyes began burning. 

It was pain on a level he’d never felt before. It felt as though someone was holding a blowtorch to his eyes. He screamed and threw his head back, his eyes becoming solid orbs of searing white light. For just a moment, he saw everything. Everything that was hidden by the veil of reality. It shook him to his core, terrifying him in ways beyond his comprehension. Then his world folded in on itself, and there was silence.

When he woke in the morning, the being was gone. His sight was somewhat normal, but the burning remained. It had dulled significantly, but he had the inkling that it would never go away. He threw his materials in the trash, excluding the goat, which had disappeared. He poured some bleach on the large puddle of goat blood. The fumes were getting to his head so he he threw back the curtains and opened a window. The moment the sunlight touched his eyes, his head felt like it was on fire. A searing blanket of white was thrown over his vision. He fell to the ground and covered his eyes and, after a few moments, things returned to normal.

After his incident with the window, he decided to become nocturnal. Being self-employed made it quite easy to do so. So he slept during the day, and wrote at night. One might have argued that the being’s blessing as well as the constant pain would have driven him insane. They’d be correct. But, insane or not, he wrote. He wrote endlessly, the nights bleeding together until he no longer took notice of time. The writer would not stop, for writing was the only thing that gave him any pleasure. He would write until the vast well of information in his head dried up. and when it had, he would simply perform the ritual again. As he began to entertain the thought of summoning the being again, there was a knock at his door.

“Open up!” Commanded the loan shark on the other end of the door, his voice dripping with the influence of a Serbian accent. The loan shark was a husky man with a neck beard, low ranking in terms of influence with the Russian Mob, though that much could be discerned from the fact that he was loan sharking. When no response came he sighed audibly and hefted his baseball bat. He would have brought back up, but he remembered that the writer was a meek, mild-mannered man. The door wasn’t locked and he thanked the writer silently for being so stupid. He closed the door behind him, afraid the writer would try to escape. He turned to the left, towards the main room of the apartment and saw a pentagram on the floor. The place reeked of sulfur, it was bad enough to make the loan shark want to leave the writer alone. “Where is our money?” Shouted the shark into the darkness.

“I have it for you right here.” said a shape coming out of the darkness. The shape began lighting candles.

“Then give it to me, before I break your legs.” The  loan shark’s bravado masked his unease.

“Come and get it.” The smile was the only clearly visible part of the writer. The shark took a tentative step forward, it was the last mistake he ever made. The writer lunged forwards and effortlessly slipped a blade between the loan shark’s ribs, savoring the look of dumb surprise frozen on the Serbian’s face. He dragged the body into the pentagram and lit a match, dropping into the bowl of leftover supplies he had scavenged from his trash. The being came without any other provocation. It no longer bore a face of indifference, but rather, one of amusement.

“You summon me again?” His glass-shards voice would have unnerved a sane man, but the writer just smiled. [/hider]