Deeper into Darkness

by James, Russell

  He unlocked a drawer in the bottom of his desk and pulled out a heavy ledger bound in rich leather. The book smelled musty as an old attic. Stains soiled the wrinkled page edges.

  “I am confident of the Lebanon charity’s honesty because I own it,” Mr. DiAngelo said. “That charity and twenty-nine others, including Sunrise here and the two others you mentioned. Each one supports Christian communities or causes.”

  He flipped open the ledger and leafed through a few yellowed pages. Each one had a charity name as a heading and figures for annual income, overhead and outlays. Some of the dates were over one hundred fifty years old. Frank thought that this Good Samaritan empire must have been passed down through Mr. DiAngelo’s family.

  “Here are the bottom line records for each one, the summary P&L to you accountants,” Mr. DiAngelo said. “Fundraising ebbs and flows, but never in sync with need. So when we have a banner year here in Miami, I spread the wealth to places with greater need, like Lebanon.”

  “But we could do that legally,” Frank said. “I can show you the forms we need to use, even for overseas transfers.”

  “I wish I could,” Mr. DiAngelo said. “But we have to stay below the radar. Too many charities under one umbrella look suspicious. It looked suspicious to you. Could be a front for a drug cartel, slavery or whatever the sin-of-the-decade fad is.”

  “I can make sure our organization stands up to financial scrutiny,” Frank volunteered.

  “I’m sure you could,” Mr. DiAngelo said with a slight smile. “But it isn’t just Sunrise that needs to stay out from under the microscope. It’s me. I’m going to tell you a story that may test the limits of your faith.”

  Frank sat up a bit straighter in his seat.

  “Years ago,” Mr. DiAngelo said, “I committed a cardinal sin. Your number one answer, murder, or at the minimum, I was an accomplice to one. As soon as I realized what I had done, I was filled with remorse, like something black and horrible had taken up residence inside me. I knew, as you said, there was only one punishment for my crime. Death. So I tied a noose to a stout tree and hung myself, too stupid to realize I was compounding the sin of murder with the sin of suicide.”

  Mr. DiAngelo unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt and pulled the collar open. An inch-wide purple scar circled his neck. Frank winced.

  “The problem was, I didn’t die. I blacked out and woke up atop a pile of bodies, other unclaimed corpses waiting for burial. Well, I bolted out of there and went to try it again. And try I did. I threw myself off a cliff, drowned myself in the ocean, even impaled myself. Each time I blacked out and awoke alive and uninjured.

  “So Frank, when you say the ultimate penalty for murder is death, I tell you the ultimate penalty is life. Eternal life living with the sin you have committed.”

  Frank shifted in his chair as the story veered into fantasy.

  “Once I accepted that every pain inducing torment I endured wouldn’t kill me, I gave up,” Mr. DiAngelo said. “I decided to use this interminable life to do good. I would support Christians in need, to atone for my sin. Over the decades I founded charities around the world. This decade, I work from Miami to keep them all in business.”

  Frank thought about the leather bound book, not passed from person to person over the decades, just annotated by Mr. DiAngelo each year. All the entries were in the same handwriting…no, the idea was impossible.

  “And you hope your acts will gain you forgiveness?” Frank asked.

  “Not in the least,” Mr. DiAngelo sighed. “I am beyond redemption. After so many years, so much effort against insatiable demand, I’d be happy to just die and go to hell.”

  Frank wasn’t a fan of the supernatural. His face betrayed his skepticism for Mr. DiAngelo’s story.

  “You’ve seen my handwriting on some impossibly old documents, but you still doubt my story,” Mr. DiAngelo said. He stood and spun the dials on a combination lock on the file cabinet behind the desk. The drawer rolled open with a screech and Mr. DiAngelo pulled two fragile photographs from within. He tossed them on the desk.

  One showed Frank’s boss near the turn of the twentieth-century, helping a rowboat of Turkish Christian refugees landing in Greece during one of the Ottoman purges. The other showed him standing by a tent bearing a red cross. The uniform of the legless soldier next to him dated the picture from the Civil War. “I’m afraid I don’t keep a lot of souvenirs, and since the 1860’s I’ve tried to keep out of pictures, but there are these two.”

  A hobbyist photographer, Frank could spot a fake. He knew the feel of true antique photographic paper. These photos were undeniably real. Frank looked into Mr. DiAngelo’s eyes. For the first time he realized how old they looked. Could he really…

  “The Bible’s full of miracles, Frank,” Mr. DiAngelo said. “Don’t you believe one when you see one?”

  “So, how old are you?” Frank had to ask.

  “A lot older than this,” Mr. DiAngelo said, giving the leather book a tap.

  Frank sat in silence. The scar, the ledger, the pictures. Overwhelming physical evidence lay before him. True faith demanded far less.

  “So what should we do about our accounting problem, Frank?”

  “I say we forget it,” Frank said. “And on Monday, I’ll show you a better way to cover your financial tracks.”

  “I’m glad you understand,” Mr. DiAngelo said. “It goes without saying that this conversation is just between us.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then go before you are late for Holy Thursday Mass, Knight. We’ll discuss this more Monday morning.”

  Frank collected himself as best he could. He gave Mr. DiAngelo a nod and left his office. He stopped in the doorway for one last question.

  “What was your sin?”

  Mr. DiAngelo stared out at the brick wall again, but Frank knew he was looking uncounted miles and years away.

  “I arranged the execution of my best friend,” he said, “for thirty pieces of silver.”

  I love hearing about judges who make creative sentences. I thought I’d try my hand at it.

  Ω

  Dark Vengeance Sample

  Will the blood of innocents release an evil entity near Galaxy Farm?

  A coven of witches has moved into the tiny town near Galaxy Farm. They know about a dormant evil entity, and they hope to resurrect it and set it free to renew its hunt of mankind. All they need for their sacrifices is the blood of innocent children. Only Laura Locke and Theresa Grissom have the skills to defeat this supernatural danger, but their previous brush with the evil at Galaxy Farm has shattered their relationship. If they can’t work together to stop the coven in time, hundreds will die. Starting with Theresa’s son.

  Chapter One

  The fire left little of Galaxy Farm.

  Only the old barn still stood. The glass in the central cupola reflected the moonlight like some low-output lighthouse. Three deaths had occurred in there: the sheriff, the crazy writer and Vern Pugh. Stories of barn hauntings already circulated throughout the nearby small town of Moultrie, Tennessee. Even before the fire took the main house, the triple homicide had sparked stories of the barn being haunted. Everyone in the nearby small town of Moultrie, Tennessee, accepted the tales as fact.

  Later, the foreboding barn would no doubt be where the kids would go. Middle school boys on a dare. High school teens on a date. The only structure left on the fifteen acres would draw them all.

  But the willowy woman who moved through the night didn’t give the barn a thought. She trudged up the long gravel drive to the ruins of the once-proud home. Three of the walls on the first floor still stood. Their ragged, burned edges were all that hinted an upper story had existed. That second story, and all that had been above it, now lay in a charred heap in the house’s open interior. Twenty-four hours after the blaze, the remains were cool, but the humid air was still redolent with the conflagration’s acrid smell.

  The woman crossed the remnants of the front porch.
The boards creaked with each hesitant step. There was no telling how badly the fire had damaged the joists below. Her research confirmed that the house had no basement, but even a short fall through to the foundation could break a bone.

  Her long, open black duster flicked the edge of the gaping front doorway as she entered the house’s dead shell. Mounds of shadowy remains covered the floor. Jagged, broken rafters jutted from the pile like limbs of the dead in rigor mortis. Now shielded from the prying eyes driving along nearby US 41, she flicked on a penlight.

  She played the bright, narrow beam across the wreckage. The legacy of the long-dead previous owner, Mabron Hutchington, would still be here somewhere. None of his supernatural works ever left the house after his death, not when his brother owned it afterwards, not when his nephew Vern inherited it and certainly not when Doug and Laura Locke had moved in last year. A tiny rural-Tennessee town like Moultrie would know.

  Mabron had practiced his brand of dark magic here for years. It was Egyptian-tinged, but parallel to her own, tapping the same great sources of natural power.

  She pulled aside a blackened board. Yellow eyes and a set of bared white canines flashed in the penlight’s beam. Her heart skipped a beat and she stumbled backwards against a wall.

  The teeth did not move. She panned the light around them and lit a wolf’s head, long dead, taxidermied for eternal preservation. But the fire had seared away its hide and left just a blackened, clay-infused skull, two marble eyes and the menacing teeth.

  She smiled at the welcome sign, a part of Mabron’s extensive collection of magic-infused taxidermy. When the house went up in flames the night before, Mabron’s possessed possessions had indeed still been here.

  She moved the penlight to her mouth to free up her hands. Tossing aside some boards, she uncovered a collapsed wooden chest. She pried open the warped lid. A stack of charred papers, perhaps once books, filled one side. They disintegrated at her touch, as if whatever magic they once relayed wanted to stay out of her reach.

  On the other side sat a collection of glass eyes, all sizes and colors. Each gazed off in a different direction, like a cyclopean swarm in search of an escape.

  These tempted her, but they were unused. A proper talisman had to have already been infused with magic, already begun on that difficult path between the world of reality and the one that pulsed just under reality’s surface. The wolf’s glass eyes perhaps would do, but they carried a low residual charge. The optimal piece would be a personal item, something Mabron had kept close to him while he cast the spells he’d used to keep souls barred from the hereafter. Perhaps a ring, a watch, a pair of glasses.

  She pawed through the rest of the cinders in the box and found nothing. She turned and shined her light into what had been the living room. A flash of silver winked at her from within a recess in the debris. She picked her way across the unstable wreckage and knelt at the location.

  She pulled off her glove and reached blindly into the small space. Her fingertips tingled. Her pulse skipped a beat. She sensed that this object that called to her from across the ruined house was rich with magic. It had not been an object of it, but instead continually exposed to it, like iron magnetized by passing through an electric field. The house fire’s residual heat rose and enveloped her arm as she reached deeper into the debris. Her fingers touched cold metal and she snatched it.

  She opened her fist in her flashlight’s bright glow and revealed a silver locket. Its delicate, detailed turn-of-the-century engraving implied it had been a woman’s, but the aura it exuded left no doubt that Mabron wore it during his most intense magic spells.

  She popped it open. Ashes were all that remained of the pictures inside, as if whoever the locket had immortalized had fully passed from this world. But that did not matter. The magic mattered. And with its previous prolonged exposure, this talisman would be powerful indeed.

  She snapped off her light and buried her treasure in her front pocket. She thought better of that and placed the chain around her neck. She flipped her long hair outside the chain and tucked the locket into her shirt. It nestled between her breasts.

  From atop the barn, an owl puffed out two shrill hoots, as if warning that it was time to depart.

  She hopped across the house’s remains and through the missing front door. Her open coat flew behind her like a cape as she broke into a run back to her car. With each stride, the locket bounced against her chest, little taps timed like a countdown clock on the greatest spell her coven would ever cast.

  Ω

  Dreamwalker Sample

  What if you lived in two worlds, but could die in either?

  College freshman Pete Holm can. He is a dreamwalker, one gifted in traveling to the realm of dreams. There he finds the devastated world of Twin Moon City, a place where the evil voodoo spirit of Cauquemere holds trapped souls at bay with his army of the walking dead.

  In the waking world, Pete becomes enmeshed in the Atlantic City drug empire of Jean St. Croix, a psychopath on the verge of completing a deal that will consolidate his hold on the heroin trade in a tri-state bloodbath. St. Croix knows that Pete is the only one with the power to stop him.

  The clock ticks as Pete must do what only he can, rescue the lost souls in Twin Moon City and cut short the earthly reign of St. Croix. In the balance hangs Rayna, the captivating girl from his dreams. Is she real or imagined, and can they have a future together when all this is over?

  Chapter One

  Flaming arrows sang by Pete’s ears, one so close the heat singed his hair. A quick glance over his shoulder revealed a horde of tribesmen closing fast from the edge of the jungle clearing. They wore animal skin loincloths with bizarre fur patterns. Necklaces of human teeth pounded against their tanned chests as they charged. In unison, they screamed like shearing metal and displayed mouths full of tiger shark teeth. The lead savage, face painted white as death, brandished a trident with a man’s gaping skull on each tine.

  Pete’s instant arrival here wasn’t the least disorienting. In a flash, his memory gaps filled in. A magic emerald figurine sat heavy in the pouch at his waist. When he and his team took it across the rope bridge over the gorge, the spells the leader had cast over the local villages would be broken.

  Three of them were running to the bridge, one man yards ahead and almost there. He was familiar yet somehow nameless, the same late-teen age as Pete, clad in similar khaki shorts and a grimy t-shirt. Sunlight flashed off a tortoise shell shield slung across his shoulder. He reached the anchors of the rickety suspension bridge and spun around. He unshouldered the shield. Wind from the gorge behind him blew his brown hair back across his face. He crouched to defend the rope bridge entrance.

  “Pete, hurry!”

  Pete instinctively glanced back to check for her. She was right on Pete’s heels, her footfalls in sync with his. Her long blonde hair trailed behind her, a hint of panic in her green eyes. Even mottled with the jungle’s dirt, her graceful features were beautiful. That’s why she was Dream Girl.

  “I’m here,” she panted. “Don’t wait.”

  The tribesmen’s scream came louder this time as they closed the gap. Another volley of burning arrows cut the air. Several stuck into the suspension bridge planks. Pete hit the bridge at full speed, hands gliding along the gnarled rope railing. The blonde was right behind him.

  They were halfway across when Pete heard the scream. He could only get a glimpse past his shoulder, but that was enough. A shield pierced with flaming arrows. A lifeless body on the ground. Men with machetes chopped at the ropes.

  “Don’t look back,” he yelled. “Run!”

  The hand railing ropes jumped in sync with the hack of each tribesman’s machete. The bridge bounced as they bounded down the last few feet. Pete leapt across the remaining planks and landed on the far side of the gorge. The sickening crack of rotted wood rolled across from the gorge’s other side.

  Pete whirled around. The log towers at the far end tore from the ground and tumbled in
to the expanse. Parted twin support ropes flew towards him like snapped rubber bands. The bridge dropped. Dream Girl’s determined look turned into shock as the planks fell away beneath her.

  “Pete!”

  Pete’s hand darted out and grabbed her arm. He wrapped his other arm around one tower’s base log. Her hand gripped his wrist. It was soft, but strong. She looked up with a smile of relief.

  “A bit too close, don’t you think?” she said.

  Then it all dissolved, that episode over.

  Pete Holm spent his nights this way, bouncing from dream to dream. They were usually great adventures, Hollywood blockbusters inside his head as he sailed pirate ships or fought off space aliens. While most people had fuzzy dreams with muddled narratives, Pete dreamed with exceptional clarity. Technicolor hues, exquisite detail, nuanced scents. He’d describe it as more real than reality, if there was someone he’d ever describe it to. And while most people’s dreams faded with the advance of consciousness, Pete’s remained sharp as high definition TV.

  But the real nightly treats were continuing storylines. His dreams often picked up the next evening where they left off. And while Pete might start in media res, as his English professor described certain stories, he knew exactly where he was and what he was doing, as if he’d just paused the movie from the night before. Characters rarely made the transition from one storyline to the next, except for Dream Girl, the forever unnamed beautiful blonde with the emerald eyes.

  He was always aware that he was dreaming, but knowing that never made it any less real, any more than a pilot in a flight simulator ever felt like he wasn’t flying. He regretted that he lacked control of the dream’s outcome, a prerogative his subconscious refused to yield.