Author’s note: God, this dialogue was hard to write.

I stared in horror at the massive, writhing mass of tentacles and eyeballs that seemed to twist and writhe through space, somehow passing through itself in ways that didn’t seem possible when considering the laws of physics. Dozens of eyes blinked at me, reddened pupils boring into me with a disconcerting gaze.

“WhO dArEs To SuMmOn Me?!?” roared out the monster, speaking from hidden mouths in a cacophony of voices that grated at my ears like heavily distorted death metal. “WhO dArEs To SuMmOn HyPeRsAtAn!?”

Finally, I found my voice. “Wait, what?” I exclaimed. “Hypersatan? I didn’t summon you!”

“YoU dId!” Several of the tentacles lashed out at me, turned back at the last second by the confines of the summoning circle. “I hAvE bEeN sUmMoNeD bY tHe RuNe, 6666!”

“I didn’t put that rune- oh, shit.” Ignoring the gigantic mass of eyeballs and tentacles, I dropped down to my knees, examining the markings on the floor. “Crap. I put in an extra digit.”

“YoU dIaLeD mE bY aCcIdEnT?” The eyeballs blinked malevolently at me.

I stood up, scratching the back of my head. “Er, yeah. Sorry, wrong number.”

“No! I dEmAnD rEcOmPeNsE!”

Ugh. This is what I got for arranging to call up Satan while still hungover from yesterday’s Margarita Monday. I just wanted to confirm, on a whim, that my bitch of an ex-girlfriend ended up in Hell where she belonged. I didn’t need to deal with pan-dimensional beings getting annoyed that they had such a similar number to our plane’s manifestation of evil.

“Fine,” I decided, crossing my arms. Better to just deal with it than hang up, even if he probably wouldn’t be able to find our plane of existence again. “Hypersatan, so what, you like hypersouls? Souls of gods, magical beings, that sort of stuff?”

“YeS, tHaT wOuLd Be SaTiSfaCtoRy-”

“Right, right, got it,” I interrupted. That voice was giving me a hell of a headache, no pun intended. “Okay, here’s one. Back when I was eight, I believed that the coat closet in my front hall contained a monster, a giant stick insect that disguised itself as a hat rack. That thing got a good four years of solid belief, up until my fat Uncle Erwin tried to hang his coat on the hat rack while he was still wearing it for a laugh and broke the damn thing. Go ahead and eat that monster.”

The tentacles writhed inside of the portal. For a moment, I thought I heard that same cracking of wood, bringing up memories of poor Uncle Erwin tumbling down on his ass as the hat rack gave way.

“You good?” I asked, once the echoes of memory died away.

“YeS, tHiS iS sAtIsFaCtOrY. i Am ApPeAsEd. Do YoU hAvE dArK rEqUeStS fOr Me?”

I considered for a minute. “Actually, maybe. Do you have any idea what happened to the soul of Kimmy Saltzberg? She died a couple months ago in a car crash while giving head to her passenger.”

I noticed that the writhing tentacles, with the eyeballs scattered among them, reminded me strangely of spaghetti and meatballs. “HeR sOuL sCrEaMs In AgOnY fRoM tHe DePtHs Of HeLl. ShAlL i ReTrIeVe It FoR yOu?”

“Nah, that’s fine. I just wanted to know where she ended up. Have a good one, Hypersatan.” I reached out and scuffed the rune of connection, closing the portal and making the tentacles twist themselves all the way out of existence.

I erased the additional 6 in my summoning address, groaning as I considered that I now needed to go stock up on more vole blood. The whole summoning thing really was a crapshoot, all planes considered. I should have listened to Uncle Erwin’s advice, when he wasn’t exercising his utterly idiotic sense of humor, and gone into medicine.

Too late now. At least Kimmy got what she deserved.