The Last Rite

by Chad Morgan

  Walking alone down Main, the last of the daylight gone, the monsters didn’t swarm her. From what she could tell, the warring factions were staging elsewhere. The abominations from the other dimension wouldn’t harm her, they worked for her – or did she work for them? – but she was unsure what the nature creatures would do. The strange thing was, she feared the creatures on her side far more than Lightfoot’s legions. She didn’t think the nature monsters worked for the Lightfoots any more than the abominations worked for her.

  It didn’t take long before Lightfoot stepped out from an alley between two buildings. The canister holding the scroll, that damn scroll, was slung over his shoulder with that feather-covered quiver of his. He spied her at the same time and aimed his bow at her, but she wasn’t naked in a shower this time. She pulled out a semi-automatic 9mm pistol from inside her torn business suit jacket and aimed it at Lightfoot. They stood frozen, each one aiming their weapon at the other.

  “Just tell me one thing,” Lightfoot said. “Why? Why here? What’s the point?”

  She lowered the gun. Having to admit she helped cause the death of a couple thousand people and had no idea why sapped her energy. “I don’t know why they would have me do this. We’re a business, there’s no profit to be had by destroying a town. It makes no sense.”

  “A town?” Lightfoot asked. “Are you kidding me? You can’t be that clueless!”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, afraid of what Lightfoot would say, but knowing she needed to hear it.

  “Oh, come on!” Lightfoot said.

  She stepped up on him, ignoring the sharp flint point aimed at her face. She brushed it aside and grabbed Lightfoot by his shirt, pulling his face to hers. “What do you mean? What did I do?”

  Lightfoot studied her face, and the anger melted off him. “You really don’t know, do you? This town is just the beginning. If you and your friend pull off the last rite, the gate that you helped open gets wedged open permanently, and this . . .” He gestured to the town in ruins with his free hand. “. . . spreads to the rest of the world.”

  The business suit woman let go of Lightfoot. Her legs were shaking as the weight of what she had done, the full weight of it, sat on her shoulders. She leaned against the wall to steady herself.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why would we do this?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” Lightfoot said. He slid the arrow back into the quiver.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You must have seen what was happening. And you kept going.” It wasn’t a question.

  She stood up, regaining some bit of her old composure. “I had an assignment. You don’t succeed in business by being kind, especially if you’re a woman.”

  “Aw, poor baby,” Lightfoot said, his tone mocking. “I’m sure the couple thousand men, woman and children you’ve killed would be sympathetic.”

  “I didn’t know . . .” she tried to say, but it was feeble, and she knew it.

  Lightfoot stepped up onto her. “You did know! Maybe not in the beginning, but somewhere along the line you figured it out. And you kept going right along . . .”

  “How do I know you’re telling me the truth about the last rite?” she asked, interrupting. She needed it to be a lie. She had convinced herself that the deaths she caused were a necessary evil, but if this was only a small taste of a carnage yet to come . . .

  Lightfoot’s eyes went wide, and for a moment she thought he was going to hit her. She stood in defiant anticipation, but the slap never came. Instead, Lightfoot yelled, “Does it fucking matter? Six billion too much for your conscience to bear but a few thousand, that you can float?”

  She was prepared for this argument. She had rationalized it to herself enough times to have her response rehearsed. She gestured to the dead town and said, “Two hundred times this many die from cigarettes every year. Over six million die from auto accidents. Soldiers die in war every day somewhere in the world. What’s one small hick town no one’s ever heard of?”

  “I heard of this town,” Lightfoot said. He didn’t yell it, and somehow that was worse. “I knew these people. I was raised in this town. And their blood is on your hands.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but she had no counter argument. She was rescued from the awkward silence from the sound of her partner calling out, “Any luck?”

  She spun her head over her shoulder, but she didn’t see her partner. He was still out of sight. There was still time. She snapped her head back to Lightfoot. “Go,”

  “Go?” he asked.

  Was he this stupid? “My partner is coming. He’ll kill you on sight.” If her partner caught her talking with Lightfoot, he might kill them both.

  He stood there. “Why aren’t you?”

  She didn’t have time for this. Quickly she said, “You spared my life in the bank. Now we’re even.”

  Charlie unshouldered the scroll case. He held it up, and it made her think of a boy teasing a dog, holding up its bone. He asked, “You’re going to let me leave with this?”

  She looked back over her shoulder. No partner. Yet. “You going to let me have it without killing you?”

  “No,” Lightfoot said.

  “Then I’m going to have to let you keep it,” she said, snapping her head back to Lightfoot. “For now. But we’re even. Next time . . .”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Lightfoot said, but there was a hint of a sly grin, and she wondered what exactly Lightfoot thought he got.

  Lightfoot shouldered his bow and the scroll case again. He started to walk away and she felt a wave of relief, but then her stress snapped back when he stopped and turned back to her.

  “What? Go!”

  “What’s your name?” he called.

  His call sounded to her like a car alarm ringing out, and she expected her partner to pounce on them from around a corner, but he still didn’t show. Then it hit her what Lightfoot had asked. “Wha . . . It’s Tanya. Why?”

  Charlie didn’t reply, but turned and walked off down the street. Tanya turned and walked in the other direction, but after a few steps, she turned back to see Lightfoot again. He was gone, and she felt an odd sense of disappointment.

  Tanya walked to the end of the street and turned to find her partner walking up to her. He barely noticed her, walking past and expecting her to step in line behind her, which she did. Without looking back at her, he said, “Did you find him?”

  “No,” the business suit woman said. “Didn’t find anything.”

  31

  Daniel dropped his backpack on the table and sat next to it, resting his feet on a chair. The center of the library was a dim glow, the pale light streaming in from a glass dome above him, but it wasn’t much. He searched through his backpack, rummaging through what he gathered from the camping store. He couldn’t remember what all he grabbed, save for handfuls of boxes of shotgun shells, so he dug through the bag, pulling out Anna’s diary and digging past Chrissy. His fingers touched the plastic of a small flashlight, and he pulled it out of the backpack. He turned it on and aimed the beam down the way Lisa had skulked off, but the beam couldn’t cut all the way down the row of bookshelves. He figured Lisa was down there somewhere, sitting in the darkness and pouting.

  Daniel didn’t have a lot of recent experience with women. Once Anna left, he couldn’t find his way to another relationship, and that was complicated further by the incident in the alley when he was shot. It took months to recover from the wound, and he never truly came to terms with what he had done in order to survive. From there, he quit the police force and found his way to the security company where he started his new career as a security consultant. With all that in his life, there was no place for a new romance. There was the occasionally interested lady, but Daniel’s heart wasn’t in it. So, for ten years, he kept mostly to himself, which meant not dealing with other people’s tempers and idiosyncrasies. His attempts to talk to her had only made things worse, so his current strategy was to sit, wait, and let her cool o
ff. Daniel wasn’t a fan of sitting and waiting, but he didn’t have a better option.

  Daniel picked up Anna’s diary and looked at it. There was some irony in holding this book, probably the only one that meant anything in his life, while sitting in a building full of books. He aimed the small flashlight to the book and began flipping pages to find his place. He was getting towards the end of the diary, and he knew what that meant. Soon, either the story would abruptly stop, or he would read what would, in essence, be a suicide note.

  “November twenty-second . . . twenty-third? Twenty-fourth? I can’t remember any more.” As Daniel read her words, he heard Anna’s voice in his mind. “I’ve been in here for so long, on so many meds, I can’t think straight. What I do know, these are the last pages I will write, but I have to tell Daniel the truth, or at least what little of it I know . . .”

  Anna sat in front on the psychiatrist, a large orderly standing guard on either side of her. Compared to the large men she sat between, she felt small, and she couldn’t help thinking of her daughter. Bethany was in foster care. Was she scared, surrounded by large and intimidating adults? Anna assumed Bethany was safe if only because to think otherwise when she couldn’t do anything about it drove her into a manic frenzy, but she imagined Bethany cringing from strange if well-meaning adults. To a small, scared girl, they must be like giants.

  The psychiatrist was a thin-faced man and compared to the large orderlies was also small and meek. It was weird to think this wisp of a man had so much power over her when either one of the orderlies could lift him up and toss him around the room. He stared at her through round glasses that caught the light, making his eyes look like glowing searchlights peering down at her.

  Anna’s eyes were red from crying, her hair frazzled. She wore the assigned hospital pajamas and a robe with no tie on it, in case she wanted to use the cloth strap to hang herself. Stenciled on the robe was the hospital logo and the name “Sunrise Mental Hospital.” Under that, in smaller type, was stenciled “A BEC Subsidiary.”

  “Ms. Sloan, must I have you restrained?” the psychiatrist asked.

  Anna wasn’t struggling or trying to escape. She was too drugged, too exhausted to try. She shook her head, but in her drugged state it moved slowly and wobbled like those bobble-head toys.

  “No, please,” she said. “I just need to get out of here.”

  The psychiatrist folded his fingers in front of him and stared down at her. “You know we cannot allow that.”

  “I’m not seeing the shadows anymore,” Anna blurted out. This was a lie, of course, but the truth wasn’t going to convince them to let her leave. She wasn’t crazy, but she couldn’t argue that saying you saw moving shadows that attacked you and your daughter sounded normal. It was no longer important, though, to convince anyone that the shadows were real. The priority was to get out of the mental hospital and back to Bethany. “I’m better, I swear.”

  “Now why don’t I believe you?” the psychiatrist asked.

  “Please,” she begged, “I just want to see my daughter.”

  The psychiatrist studied Anna’s face, and she strained to hold back any physical ticks that could be read as dishonesty as he said, “We can’t let you see Bethany until you’re no longer a threat to yourself or her.”

  “I would never hurt my baby!” she blurted. “I . . .”

  “You’ve had a psychotic break, brought on by the deaths of both your father and your brother,” he said as if reading from a script. “You attacked one of our orderlies because you were convinced he was possessed by a shadow.” He did air quotes at the word shadow, and Anna swallowed the urge to slug him. “What if you think Bethany is possessed by a shadow? You can’t go back to your daughter until your better. You wouldn’t want to hurt her, would you?”

  “But they’re coming for her! Don’t you get it?” she shouted, forgetting her strategy in a haze of fear and sedatives. “That’s what the shadows want! I have to save my baby! I have to get out of here!”

  Anna shot to her feet – or tried too – forgetting for a moment where she was or the two large men flanking her. They each grabbed her by a shoulder and shoved her back down to the chair in a synchronized, practiced move. The quick movements made her medicated head swim. Anna stared up at the glowing eyes of the psychiatrist. He grinned, taking satisfaction in being proven right.

  “Take her back to her room,” he said.

  Anna offered little resistance when the orderlies hoisted her to her feet. Her instincts were to fight, to argue her point and make them see reason, but she knew his mind was made up. She twisted her head and body to glare at him as they led her away. The psychiatrist’s smug expression made Anna wonder if maybe he did know the truth, and was locking her up anyway. For the first time, she wondered if she was crazy after all.

  They dragged Anna into her room and to her bed, where one orderly held her down while the other one strapped large wool-lined leather cuffs to her. The soft wool was to prevent the leather strap from cutting off circulation or causing sores on her skin, which meant they could leave her strapped to the bed for hours without checking on her. Even so, they were required to check on her every few hours, but with no way to measure time and pumped full of medications, it would sometimes feel like she was strapped in place for days before seeing a soul. She thrashed against her constraints, the feeling of being stuck driving her nuts. She had learned there was a name for that – cleithrophobia.

  The orderlies left and locked the door to her room. It looked more like a cell than a hospital room, stripped bare of anything that she could use as a weapon or a tool for suicide, which meant it was almost completely empty. They left Anna her diary, but she had to write in it with a blunt crayon. The crayon was thicker than a pen, so her words burst out of the neat lines on the page, adding to the look of being a crazy person. That is when they left her free to write. Anna exhausted herself from thrashing against her constraints and laid there, staring up at the ceiling. She could see the shadows of people walking by her door dance across her line of vision. She cinched up every time, afraid the shadows would turn and come to her, but every time the shadow would drift away and she would relax again. The constant fear-relief cycle wore on her, and she began to cry.

  “That’s what they want, you know,” came a familiar voice from within the room. “To break your spirit. To have you quit.”

  Anna turned her head to see the old woman sitting at the edge of the bed, looking down at her. The old woman hadn’t changed since the first day Anna met her, hiding her wrinkled old face under a mass of tattered robes.

  “They’ll never let you go,” she said.

  Anna pulled against her constraints, sitting up as far as they, and her strength, would allow. “Why are they doing this? Why are they torturing me like this?”

  “I told you, child,” the old woman said in a patient tone of a grandmother repeating an explanation to a child. “They need for you to give up all hope of seeing your daughter again. They cannot act out their plans unless Bethany has been forsaken.”

  Anna started to cry harder. “I don’t understand. I just want to go home. Please, help me.”

  As the old woman turned her gaze away, Anna caught something on her face. Was that sadness? Guilt? “I can’t, child. I’m sorry this curse has been passed onto your daughter, but she is the only one that can end this, for better or for worse.”

  Anna collapsed back onto the bed. With the drugs in her system, it took every mental effort to hold a thought, and she was equally exhausted physically. “I don’t understand. I’ve done everything you’ve told me to do! Why won’t you help me?”

  “It needs to end, and I’m sorry dear, but you can’t do what needs to be done,” the old woman said. “But Daniel . . .”

  Anna jerked her head up at the mention of Bethany’s father and regretted it. It felt like her brain was sloshing around in a skull a size too big. “Daniel? You told me to hide from him!” That Bethany’s life depended on it!”

/>   “It does, and now it’s time for him to serve his role,” she said, nodding. Then she turned her gaze back to Anna. “Now is the time for your one last act of courage.”

  Anna dropped her head back to the bed and looked to the wall. “Please, I don’t understand.”

  She felt the old woman’s hand on her forehead. The skin was old and lose, but soft and with a gentleness only a grandmother could have. Anna looked up to see the old woman’s eyes looking down at her, and in her eyes, Anna saw herself. The old woman continued to caress her forehead.

  “You’ve been so brave, but you can’t be brave forever,” the old woman said. “Everyone has limits, there’s no shame in that, but they have pushed you to yours. As I knew they would. It’s up to Daniel now.”

  This was so insane. All those years being alone, of being away from Daniel, because this old woman convinced Anna that had to happen to protect her daughter. Now everything was up to him? Did he know what was happening? She didn’t believe that for a second because she was still in her hospital room tied to her bed. If Daniel knew anything, he would figure out the rest and come save her.

  “Then why did you have me hide from Daniel?” Anna asked.

  The old woman smiled. “My dear child, you weren’t hiding from Daniel. We were hiding Daniel from them.”

  The old woman pointed to the window of the hospital room, and Anna understood the old woman meant the shadows, the psychiatrist, the people in business suits following her – all of them.

  “Let me go! Get me out of here!” Anna pleaded. “We can run . . .”

  The old woman shook her head. “There’s no place you can run, dear. They’ll find you wherever you go. They will continue to torment you until you kill yourself.”

  The old woman turned away, and for a moment Anna’s heart clenched as she thought the old woman was leaving her. The old woman, however, pulled open the drawer to her nightstand where Anna kept her diary and placed it in Anna’s bound hand. The old woman closed Anna’s fingers around the spine of the worn book, then patted her hand.