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covered her, but it would do so no more.

Chapter Three
    The Pentagram
    Julia was more drunk than she realized, but this seemed like a fine idea at the time, following her breakup with a boyfriend of three years. All that effort and all those plans shot in the ass. The Pentagram bar had looked like a great answer to the problem, but now she was home and the truth of the matter was setting in once more.
    Unsure whether she could make it to her bed or not, she fell on the sofa and shut her eyes. The world spun around her, and holding back tears, she called out the name of her former love.
    “Sammy. Oh, Sammy.”
    “To hell with Sammy.”
    The voice was audible. Opening her eyes, she sat up to expect herself confronted by some intruder in her home, but she was alone.
    “Is someone here?”
    The voice was dimly familiar to her, coming from the past that had long since been forgotten. It was a voice she had never expected to hear again.
    Falling back on the sofa, she again shut her eyes and waited, but there was nothing.
    Again she thought of the words, as her lover told her he had found someone else.
    “Sorry, babe, but after all this time, it just isn’t working.”
    The images were hazy in her alcohol-sopped mind, but nonetheless aching to behold.
    “To hell with that son of a bitch!”
    Once more she heard it and sat bolt upright, only this time she found herself staring face to face with a friend of old she had been forced to forget about. He had not entered through the door, but materialized.
    “Erbmoh!”
    “In the flesh, baby. I always come when you need me.”
    Julia looked at him in utter disbelief. He was no longer a little boy, but grown into a man. They were around the same age.
    “Erbmoh?”
    The intruder knelt on the floor beside her and stared into her eyes.
    “It’s been a long time.”
    Memories long forgotten came back as Julia regressed into her childhood. Erbmoh was an imaginary friend she had created for herself, until her father had put a stop to that.
    “You aren’t real,” she chided. “I made you up.”
    “I look pretty real to you, don’t I?” he asked. “Want to feel my arm?”
    Though her eyes were wide open, Julia’s mind was elsewhere. She was thinking back to when she was a much younger girl and could hear a different voice echoing within her skull. It was not that of her surprise visitor, but her father.
    “You’re too big to have an imaginary friend anymore, and I want you to stop it! I want to hear you tell me there is no Erbmoh.”
    Erbmoh had been her mentally conjured playmate, at least according to those around her, but back then he was very real. Acknowledging him, however, proved to be a big mistake.
    “Either you stop it now, or I’ll spank it out of you.”
    Daddy was not as patient as he might have been, and she remembered what happened. He had taken her upstairs, lifted her dress, pulled down her panties, and beaten her red with a hair brush. For someone in third grade, it was a traumatic ordeal.
    “Say it,” the enraged voice kept demanding. “Say it! We don’t stop until you say it!”
    Finally, through tears, the words came, and Erbmoh was no more.
    “There is no Erbmoh!”
    It was as if her returned friend could read her mind.
    “Daddy was full of shit,” he smirked. “Doesn’t matter though. Him being dead and all. Nice of him and your mother to drop off like they did and leave you this house.”
    “Daddy was a good man, overall,” Julia rebuked, “He was a good father.”
    “Except when he busted your ass and convinced you I wasn’t real when we both know I am,” came the reply.
    Julia had forgotten that furious going over with the hair brush and had forgotten Erbmoh from Planet Horecod as well. Now however he was back.
    “You could have come to me sooner,” Julia complained. “Nothing stopped you.”
    Erbmoh pouted like a small child himself and held a finger to his lips, encouraging silence.
    “No. You stopped me when you blotted me from