Eldritch Exorcist

I took a last look at the pumpkin, or rather, what was on it. The arcane rune of the spark, depicting a singular flame with an infinity sign—the very magic sigil representing the eternal soul, also associated with soul magic. It was burned into the front of the massive vegetable as if it were a branded cow.

Shaking my head at the sight, I approached the boy as he looked at me with furrowed eyebrows.

“Hello,” I greeted.

“Hi?”

“One of them is your family, I imagine?” I asked, pointing at the two bickering over the trophy.

“Yes,” he said, and became even redder with embarrassment.

“So, which side of the conflict are you on?”

“My grandfather’s, although I don’t think I have a side.”

His eyes drifted to the fight, which had devolved back into a screaming match as the man in the suit wrestled back the trophy.

“I wanted to ask about the sign on the pumpkin,” I said, pointing at the largest vegetable on the stage. “I didn’t know people branded pumpkins. Is it in case they stumble into another farmer’s herd?”

The boy just groaned. “It’s like my family… um… sign, you could say.”

After saying that, he looked back at the scene, clearly not wanting to talk about the vegetable.

Well, too bad for him, because I needed him to talk about the vegetable. I rummaged through my trousers before realizing I hadn’t taken my wallet with me for the fight.

“Wait here,” I shouted to the confused teenager and ran to my car.

Once there, I took my wallet and came back. The argument had stopped, but now the farmer apparently decided to wait for the judges to return, as he sat in the middle of the stage.

The boy was at the side, doing something on his phone.

“Hey,” I shouted to get his attention.

He raised his eyes from the phone and rolled them as he saw me approach.

“Look, dude, I don’t want to talk—”

I pulled out a hundred dollars from my wallet and shoved it into his hands. I was in no mood for mind games or interrogations.

“I need you to answer all my questions. I’ll give you another hundred once I’m satisfied. Deal?”

The teen gazed at me with a scrunched face, but then looked at the money.

“Okay? What do you need to know?”

“The origin of that sign. I assume your family didn’t come up with it themselves?”

The boy hesitated. “Well… It’s kind of a family story.”

“Oh, a secret? I’m sorry,” I said as I started to put my wallet back in my trousers.

“Okay, okay. It was my great-great-grandfather, Ernest, who came up with that. It’s just a bizarre story. He was a miner back when the copper mine was operational.”

The boy started explaining the origin, and it quickly became clear that I had missed the mark with my initial theory by quite a bit. I assumed that it was something that came up in some family documents or books, something they didn’t understand but were told was important and had power. It would make sense if they were the Butcher’s descendants, unaware of their true origin. Didn’t think that the story would start as recently as his great-great-grandfather.

“He worked in the mine when the copper beds were slowly running dry. They were made to dig deeper and deeper, cutting costs as much as possible, until finally there was a collapse. Ernest was caught in it, alone, deep underground. The rock’s shift opened up a passage to a tunnel system. He crawled for hours in complete darkness with barely any fuel left in the lantern. And when he was losing hope, he said that…”

The teen stopped, cringing slightly.

“Go on…” I said.

“He said that he finally came to a larger tunnel that opened into a massive cave. One where he felt some air movement and one where he could finally stand. So he decided, for the first time in hours, to turn on the lantern he had with him, burning the last of the fuel. And then he saw it—the… the sign from God. A pumpkin chiseled into the rock…”

The kid stopped, looking at me weirdly.

I blinked a couple of times. That was nowhere near my guess.

“A pumpkin? Deep underground? Wait…” I pointed at the sigil burned into the vegetable. “That?”

“Yes, a pumpkin. I know it’s weird, but that’s the story, okay? A pumpkin etched into the wall deep underground.”

“How the fuck…” I stopped myself.

Pumpkin, my ass—that was a sign of the eternal spark of the soul. I mean, sure, if you draw the infinity sign slightly rounder, then maybe...