The light at the bottom of the basement stairs clicked on and someone took several steps down but halted when a gravely female voice called out. “Billy-boy, grab our big crockpot while you’re down there. Thinking I’ll do some slow-cooking with this new meat for tomorrow.”

“Right Ma,” Billy-boy yelled back and came down the basement stairs. He let out a litany of southern-fried curse words when he flipped light switches to no avail.

The bulb at the base of the stairs created a perfect oasis of light that deepened the darkness in the rest of the trash room. Isaac put his hand into the shadow of the boxes and pulled the darkness to him. It constricted around his fingers, eel-like and cold, and encased his entire hand like a living glove.

The cannibal moved slowly into the room, then suddenly stopped and snapped his fingers energetically, like he’d just had an eureka moment. He yelled back up the stairs, “Ma! The lights are out. Throw down my night-vision goggles!”

“Seriously?” Isaac whispered to himself. The family didn’t own a working washer and dryer but Billy-boy the cannibal had night-vision goggles. Footsteps came to the top of the stairs. Billy-boy said, “thanks” to someone and then the only working light in the basement clicked off, plunging everything to total darkness. Isaac assumed that the man had his night-vision equipped.

Through practice and study, Isaac had found that the shadow-magic was particularly dependent on environmental conditions. Too much light washed the spells out, weakened them, or dissolved them outright. Too little light and the spells couldn’t conjure at all. Pulling shadows from total darkness was like trying to take water from a lake with a fist. The level of illumination had to be perfect.

And now it was too damn dark. He had to be able to see to wield it. The skin of shadow on his hand tightened. He’d grown more resistant to it over the weeks and could tolerate its presence longer before it started to hurt, but he couldn’t withstand it indefinitely.

Somewhere in the dark room, Billy-boy said, “Sooo green,” and started giggling. Noises then of things being jostled around, as Billy-boy rummaged through all the rubbish. Then footsteps going back towards the stairs, followed by his voice calling, “Hey Ma! Where’s the crockpot?”

Momma called back, “Check in the storage room!”

Jughead whispered to Isaac, “Oh shit. She’s right. It is in there. I used to flirt with it. It’s got curves.”

Although he couldn’t see it Isaac knew the storage room door was directly to his left, with nothing to block the line of sight to his current hiding spot. He was going to feel awfully stupid when Billy-boy plainly saw him crouched there in that green night-vision light. He had no seconds to waste as he heard Billy-boy footsteps coming his way.

From the Everbag he produced a clear, glass marble and proceeded to rub it vigorously between thumb and forefinger of his non-shadowed hand. Then he whispered, “lite and fly” and the marble began to glow and flew away, its path carrying it to the storage door, where it floated in place. The luminescence wasn’t enough to brighten the whole basement or even overload the sensitive green field of night vision. It floated like a single Christmas light in the dark.

“What the hell?” Billy-boy said aloud when he saw it.

Next from his bag of tricks, Isaac pulled a length of rope fashioned with a loop on the end. His own variation on Brit Knit’s slithering scarf spell, this nasty creation was indeed foul magic. It needed no spoken instructions and Isaac concentrated to set it to task. It levitated up, like an angry cobra, and slid sidewinder-style across the ceiling.

Billy-boy passed the last row of boxes and the marble cast just enough glow for Isaac to make out his silhouette. If Billy turned to the left, he’d have seen Isaac crouched there plain as day. Instead, he stared in open-mouthed wonderment at the marble. He pulled off the goggles to see it in real sight. “That is one big lightning bug,” he said.

Isaac sent the rope in. It dropped down, slipped around Billy-boy’s neck, and hauled him up. The loop tightened as it did and suspended him in mid-air as efficiently as dangling from the gallows. While it clearly worked as intended, Isaac frowned with disappointment. The spell didn’t have that quick-strike neck-break capability that dropping through a hatch would have. Instead, Billy-boy just swung around, slowly being strangled to death, legs dancing on the air. It was a fairly ugly way to go and Isaac would have almost felt guilty if the man weren’t a murderous cannibal. Billy-boy couldn’t scream out, but his kicking legs knocked over a stack of boxes that toppled with a loud thump.

“Billy?” the gravelly voice of Momma called down the steps. “What was that noise? Did you get the crock-pot? While you’re down there get a hock from the pit. This new meat won’t be ready for a while.” Then silence. Billy-boy’s kicks started to slow, and his hands fell away from the noose. “Billy? Whatcha doing? You down there? Dammit boy, you better not be naked in the pit again!”

“I just threw up in my mouth and I don’t even have an esophagus,” Jughead lamented. Isaac agreed and suddenly felt very okay with murdering the now motionless man hanging in the air.

“Fine. I’m coming down there and I’m gonna tan your hide. I gotta do everything myself around here.” The stairwell light clicked back on and Isaac sighed with relief that he had his shadows again.

The hanging man’s movements ceased except for the occasional death twitch. Isaac moved past him, snatched the marble out of the air, headed into the storage room, grabbed the crockpot, and carried it to the center of the room. He found the tallest stack of junk and set it on top before hurrying back to his hiding spot.

At the top of the stairs two large, dirty slippers stepped into view. Going up from the slippers were two cankles, ascending to even beefier legs. The hem of the flower-print muumuu fluttered into view. She took one step, then another. Either unable or uncaring enough to hurry, she thumped down the steps one at a time, wood creaking beneath her.

Isaac’s first impression of Momma pegged her as being old and out of shape. He couldn’t fathom why Jughead held her in such dangerous regard. Still, better to play it safe and take her out of the equation quickly. As she took her next step, Isaac telekinetically snagged her heel and pulled it forward. She missed the next step, did as much of a leg split as someone of her shape could, and toppled down the stairs, bellowing like a bull the whole way.

“Ooh, what was that?” Jughead asked and Isaac picked him up, held him to see Momma lying on the floor. “You knocked her down the stairs? Really? Oh, that’s not going to cut it.”

Before Isaac could argue his apparent success, the woman moved. She groaned, got to her hands and knees, and then used the banister to haul herself back standing. With an adjustment of her glasses, she peered into the darkened rear of the basement. “And now I fell down the damn stairs,” she growled. “Billy-boy, wherever you’re hiding, I’m gonna find you. You’re gonna have to carry that crockpot up the stairs with two broken hands.”

A threat of such violence against her own kin made Isaac wonder what she’d do to an actual interloper. Next to him, Jughead whispered, “Oh shit, we’re screwed. I mean, you’re screwed. I don’t have a body for them to eat.”

The stairwell light cast enough of a glow into the room that Momma’s eyes adjusted fairly quickly. She saw the crockpot teetering on the junk tower. As she reached for it, Isaac telekinetically lifted the appliance and hurled it as hard as he could into her face. The distance and the size of the pot made it a headache-inducing strain but the irony of blasting a cannibal with her own cookware proved irresistible. The blow dropped her like a rock, and she hit the floor hard, one slipper flying off. He had assumed, with her obesity and advanced age, that the blow would have rendered her incapacitated or even dead.

Instead, Momma immediately sat up, unfazed, blood streaming from her nose. She narrowed her eyes into the darkness. “So, someone down here thinks it’s fun to throw crockpots at people eh?” She clambered to her feet, kicking off the other slipper as if it would vastly improve her dexterity in the upcoming conflict. “Roy! Roy Junior! Get down to the basement! We got trouble!”

The magician debated at this point just pulling Wilma and blasting this woman to death. However, he loathed using such conventionalities. Someday this ramshackle house would be a major crime scene. Killing with magic generally confused such investigations. All the rational leads would go nowhere, and the irrational would be dismissed. But dead cannibals riddled with bullets? That’s the type of investigation that would drag on because it made sense.

“You may as well come on out, whoever you are,” Momma said to the shadows. She picked up a slipper and slapped it threateningly into her palm. Isaac stifled a laugh. At least he thought he did. Momma might have heard him, or maybe she realized her slipper threat wasn’t the least bit intimidating. She dropped it, rummaged through a box under the stairs, and then turned back to face the dark room with an old clothes iron in her fist. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said, as she looped the electrical cord around her forearm and then made a few surprisingly impressive practice punches into the air.

Isaac started to understand why Jughead had whispered her name with such fear. Momma advanced again on the storage room. He concentrated and lifted the crockpot once more, intent on just dropping it on the woman’s head. Momma simply knocked her traitorous cookware out of the air with an iron-fisted haymaker. The magician was wearily impressed with her ferocity and very disturbed by the fact that she hadn’t seemed at all fazed that her crockpot had been floating. She may as well have been swatting a large bug. Obviously, the totem had twisted her tether to reality.

Momma moved slowly through the basement debris, the iron held out as both sword and shield. Eventually, she found Billy’s body. “Billy-boy? There you are. Just hanging around like the lazy ass you are.” Her magically swinging dead son didn’t faze her in the least. “Not only did you not get my pot, you somehow got killed while trying. Jesus Herbert Christ. That’s fine. I always told you that if you ever got yourself killed that I was gonna do a barbeque with you. Ribs with spicy sauce. Maybe I never told you that out loud, but I know I wrote it down somewhere.”

Isaac released the rope spell and Billy-boy’s body collapsed onto Momma, who ended up on the floor under the corpse. With Jughead in one hand and the totem barely fitting in his pocket, Isaac sprinted by her, dodging through the hoarded junk to the stairs. He nearly made it up to the first floor when Momma’s other son, Roy Jr., appeared in the doorway and swung a hatchet at him. More by instinct than design, Isaac brought Jughead up defensively and the axe blade deflected off. The jug hadn’t been exaggerating when it claimed to be indestructible because it survived with nary a scratch, but it started swearing as if it had been fatally insulted.

Junior had superior position and Isaac could only retreat down the steps, blocking several more hatchet swings with Jughead. The savage attack drove the magician back across the basement through the hoarded junk. Finally, a jug counterattack managed to catch Junior’s fingers and jarred the hatchet from his hand.

Isaac had little time to take advantage as the man quickly grappled him, threw several painful punches into the magician’s torso, and knocked Jughead out of his grasp. A diet consisting of humans must do a body good, because Junior was as strong as an ox, despite his wiry frame. Isaac quickly deemed it a losing strategy to trade punches with the man. Instead, with his shadow-wrapped hand, he went for the throat. However, a last-second twist from Junior resulted in Isaac missing his target and grabbing the man by the lower face instead. Junior slapped free of his grip but not before the shadow magic left a painted-on replica of Isaac’s hand across his chin and cheeks.

Part of the strides Isaac had made with his new shadow magic was that he could now deliver it to a target in doses or all at once. He went with the latter in this case and when he pulled his hand away no shadow remained.

Junior immediately felt the wrongness of it. He pushed Isaac into a stack of boxes, sending the magician tumbling to the floor. The cannibal put both hands to his face, wiping at the damp, icy sensation suddenly stuck to his skin, but he may as well have been rubbing dried paint.

Then the shadow hand started to squeeze. Junior began clawing at his jaw, swatting with desperation at the unseen force. He fell to his knees, screaming in pain. His howls muffled down into a sick gurgling noise as his jaw compressed. His jawbone broke with a deafening crack and several shattered molars shot from his mouth. Junior somehow stayed conscious and continued to weakly paw at his face as the shadow hand continued its merciless vice-like crushing, grinding the man’s mandible into pieces. Blood speckled with bits of teeth leaked from his lips. Finally, he collapsed, whimpering in the incapacitating pain.

“Wow,” Isaac muttered. “I only meant for it to strangle you to death. That looked a lot more painful than I intended.”

With Momma still ungracefully pulling herself free from Billy’s dead weight, Isaac scooped up Jughead and tried again to run for it. This time he found his path hindered by the cannibal patriarch, who stomped down the basement stairs, shotgun in hand. With only one route left, Isaac ran back to the altar room and slammed the door behind him. An instant later Roy Senior put two shells into it, leaving fist-sized holes in the cheap wood and spraying Isaac with painful wooden shards.

“So, let me sum up our first adventure together,” Jughead whispered. “I’ve been hit in the face with an axe about fifteen times and now we’re trapped in the flesh-pit. Bang-up job so far.”

“At least you’re off the toe shelf.”

An eerie silence, minus the constant buzz of the totem in his jacket pocket, filled the basement. Isaac chanced a look through the damaged door. Momma and Roy Senior were moving calmly through the mess, seemingly in no great hurry to chase him. They knew there was no other way out of the basement.

Isaac had cornered himself.