The Last Rite

by Chad Morgan

  “You need to tell Daniel everything he needs to know,” the old woman said.

  “Like what?” Anna asked.

  “That the last rite must be performed,” the old woman said, speaking in a clear and authoritative voice. “The last rite will open or close the gate forever, depending on who performs it. Those who want the gate open, they need Bethany forsaken, but they don’t know about Daniel. Daniel must perform the last rite for the gate to be closed forever. Do you understand.”

  A calm washed over Anna for the first time in weeks, and all the pieces of her life made sense at last. She wasn’t sure she understood all of it, but she understood her part, and Daniel’s. She didn’t know when she had stopped crying, but she saw a tear roll down the old woman’s face as Anna said simply, “Yes.”

  The old woman beamed pride down at Anna. Then she began to undo the restraints, saying, “The rest is up to you, dear. And then your torment will come to an end.”

  With the restraints off, Anna sat up and swung her legs off the bed. She sat on the bed’s edge, her head clear in spite of the drugs she knew were still in her system. She could feel them washing over her brain, but now they held no power over her. She nodded to the old woman, who reached into her sleeve and pulled out a small dagger. It was old, the leather bindings on the handle stained with sweat and oil, the blade peppered with small scratches and chips. She held the dagger out to Anna handle-first, and when Anna took it, the old woman held Anna’s hands in hers.

  A tear rolled down Daniel’s face as he read the words on the page, written with a hasty hand, the crayon forcing her neat penmanship to look like the handwriting of a nine-year-old. He flipped to the final page, ignoring the drops of blood dried on them.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on, Daniel,” she spoke to Daniel from the page. “I can’t take it anymore. But I don’t have too, because Daniel, you will be there for Bethany when I can’t. I know now that I had to leave you to protect you, to hide you from whoever these bad people are, but please believe me when I tell you that I’ve never stopped loving you. You were the love of my life, and I die comforted knowing Bethany will have you to look after her.”

  Daniel wiped the tear away, only to find it had friends. They were both pawns in someone’s weird chess game, but he’d be angry later. For now, he knew the truth about Anna, and he felt the love he still had for her, and he thought he could feel the love she had for him.

  “Daniel?” came Lisa’s voice from the row of books she had vanished down.

  Daniel looked up, but he couldn’t see her. “Lisa? I found out why Anna left?”

  “Daniel?” she said again.

  Something in her voice tickled the back of his neck. Something wasn’t right. He sent the weak flashlight beam down the row of bookshelves. Lisa stood there, her head hung low, but so deep in shadows, Daniel could only make out a gray Lisa-shaped form.

  “Lisa?” Daniel called out. “Are you all right?”

  Lisa came closer, but something wasn’t right. He couldn’t see it, she was too dimly lit, but something in the way she moved was wrong, something so barely visible that it only registered in Daniel’s subconscious. He found his right hand sliding towards his shotgun as if on its own.

  “Lisa?” he called out again.

  As she came closer to the dim beam of the small flashlight, Daniel finally saw what was wrong, and it froze his blood in his veins. Lisa bobbed up and down as she walked, but the tips of her toes scraped along the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was distant, devoid of any emotion.

  “Lisa,” Daniel sighed, feeling for both of them.

  She hung in the air like a marionette, and as Lisa emerged from the dark, Daniel saw that she wasn’t floating but walking by two long pairs of crab-like appendages coming out of her back, not unlike the legs of the spider creatures that attacked them in her apartment.

  Lisa wasn’t immune after all.

  “I told you we should have left,” Lisa said, her head dangling as if it was too heavy for her to lift.

  “Oh, God, Lisa,” was all Daniel could say. His fingers woke up, and slowly wrapped around the grip of his shotgun.

  “I would say it doesn’t hurt, but it does.” she said, a new vibrato in her voice. “A lot. But it makes you kind of like the pain.”

  Daniel backed away, the shotgun, in his hand, as Lisa emerged into the open area of the library, stretching out to her full height on her new legs. The human part of her body lifted from the floor and hung halfway to the mezzanine level above. As she spoke, her voice continued to shift, becoming less Lisa and more something else.

  “You’ll understand,” the thing that used to be Lisa said. “You’ll be one of us soon. I understand so much now. I still don’t know why you haven’t changed yet, but I can smell it coming now.” She took a huge intake through her nose as if to prove her point. She grinned down at Daniel. “Very slowly, but it is coming. Soon you won’t give a shit about your brat child any more than I do,”

  Daniel turned to run, but one of the spider monsters dropped down and blocked his path. He raised the shotgun, but the spider monster swiped across with a large, thick leg and knocked the shotgun from his hands. Daniel fell to the ground, his shotgun rattling across the floor. He hurried to his feet as the spider monster encroached, herding Daniel back to the center of the library. Daniel bolted for another exit, but another spider monster spilled over from the mezzanine and blocked his path.

  “You killed me, Daniel,” the Lisa-thing said. “Now I’ll return the favor.”

  32

  Charlie Lightfoot circled back to Buck’s after his run-in with the woman in the business suit. Tanya, she said her name was. When he thought of her, his mind flashed to Tanya naked, stepping out of the shower. He tried to push that image out of his mind, but like a catchy jingle, the image kept popping back. Then he reminded himself the woman in the business suit helped killed several thousand people.

  Walking around the ruins, the flames were dying down. Mixed with the smell of burning wood was the acrid odor of melted plastics and other man-made materials. Littering the ground were the deformed corpses of the abominations, along with several of the large avatars lying like fallen trees. The avatars were beautiful in a way when they weren’t torn up or burnt down, but the abominations were something out of nightmares. It reminded him of a legend his grandfather taught him as a child. Over time, he ignored it as just that, a legend, but in a world where trees walked and monsters stalked the streets, he thought back on it with a new perspective.

  Charlie could hear his grandfather talking in his head, as clear as when he heard him the first time as a child. “Before the world was created, there was only ocean. Under the sea lived the All-Father. But he was not alone. He has a brother. And evil brother.”

  As a child, Charlie listened to his grandfather with rapt attention. When you were six, everything adults said was magical and fascinating. When you were fifteen, the same adults were then idiots who were out of touch, but now, as an adult himself, his grandfather’s words carried new weight.

  “When the All-father broke the surface of the water,” the mental recording of his grandfather continued, “he did so with his eyes closed, for he had never seen the sun before and it would have blinded him. Once his eyes grew accustomed to the light, the All-Father began to create the world, but as he did so he attracted the attention of his brother, who wanted to make his own creations in this new world.”

  The teenage Charlie would scoff at the idea of an All-Father and his evil brother creating the world, but now he wondered if maybe there wasn’t some truth to it, not rising from the ocean but from an alternate dimension.

  Charlie looked down at a misshapen abomination, remembering his grandfather’s tale. “The brother asked the All-Father how he had left the water, if the All-Father had his eyes open or closed. The All-Father knew his brother would create evil in the new world he was making, so he lied. The brother surfaced, and
seeing the sun for the first time, was blinded. The brother tried to create things in the world like the All-Father but, being blind, his creations were deformed and ugly. They were seen by everyone as the evil creatures they were, and the brother became forever known as the Blind Evil One.”

  Charlie could image that to be true. The abominations looked like the creations of someone who never saw real animals and were putting things together by feel. He could imagine a blind god slapping together random limbs on a bent and twisted torso. He was going to have to have his grandfather re-tell him all those old legends if he could hear them all without falling asleep.

  He shoved the thought aside. He needed to stay on task. Daniel was here, that much was obvious, but where had he gone from the fire? He turned in place, but in all directions, he only saw the bodies of avatars and abominations.

  “C’mon, Daniel, where the hell did you run off too?” he asked himself.

  He knew Daniel and Bethany were estranged. Charlie, with some influence from some people his grandfather knew – and he and his grandfather would need to have a long conversation about that when this was all over – had cut through a lot of red tape to expedite Daniel’s custody of Bethany. Still, Daniel was the only family she had left, and the kid seemed to worry about him. Charlie didn’t want to think what would happen to the poor kid if she lost another parent.

  Charlie continued to turn in place, scanning for some clue. At the edge of the light from the fire, Charlie saw two gleaming eyes peering back at him. Charlie froze, and one hand slid to his bow, but as the eyes walked into the light he saw they belonged to the wolf. It stepped towards the fire, which wasn’t typical behavior for a wild animal, but Charlie suspected the wolf was more than that. As a child, his grandfather filled his head with tales of animal guides, and in his rebellious teens he denounced such tales as superstition, but now he lived in a world where anything was possible.

  “Hey, where have you been?” he asked the wolf. “I take it you know where Daniel is?”

  The wolf turned and walked towards the library. Charlie shrugged and followed the wolf, figuring weirder things had happened in this town. The wolf walked up the to the library’s front doors and sat, like a dog waiting for its owner to let her in. Charlie looked over the front doors. There were no boards or chains like many of the other doors in the town, which meant it was possible Daniel ran in there. He tried pushing them open, but they didn’t budge. The wolf gave and impatient woof.

  “It’s locked,” he said to the wolf. “Either your boy isn’t in there, or he locked himself in. What do you want me to do?”

  The wolf woofed at the door again.

  “Maybe he’s not even in there,” he suggested to the wolf. “Maybe you’re wrong.”

  From within the library, a large crash boomed. Charlie snapped his head back to the closed library doors, then back to the wolf. The wolf looked up at him as if to say I told you so.

  “Okay, someone’s in there. Or something. I’ll give you that,” Charlie conceded. “I just hope once we find this guy, we can actually help.”

  Charlie stepped back and looked at the library. He remembered the building having a big dome on the top, mostly glass, but first, he’d have to climb on top of a two-story building and then drop all the way down to the ground floor below. He tried to recall everything he knew about the building, dredging his mind for a better option, but his thoughts drifted back to Daniel and Bethany.

  “I mean, that girl Bethany, she’s such a sweetheart, it would break my heart if I couldn’t return her father to her,” he continued saying to the wolf. The medicine bag his grandfather gave him was strapped to his quiver, and now it felt heavy on his back. He had no idea if his grandfather’s hocus pocus would work or not.

  “Something she wasn’t telling me, though,” Charlie said. “That look between her and Grandad. Something’s up, something neither of them are telling me. I’m really worried about that little girl. You know what I mean?”

  Charlie turned to the wolf, but the wolf was gone. He looked around, but there was nothing around the library but an empty street.

  “I’ll just figure out how to get in by myself, okay?” he called out to the night. “Don’t hurry back, I’m sure I got this.”

  He turned back to the library and scratched his head. The front doors were impassible, and he’d kill himself climbing through the dome on the top, but wasn’t there a back door? No, not exactly, but he vaguely remembered something was in the back. Charlie began to circle the library, trying to remember a possible way inside before Daniel got himself killed. Or worse.

  Daniel wondered why he bothered getting weapons. First, he had the pistol from the late sheriff, only to have it eaten by an abomination emerging from the bottom of a pool at Lisa’s apartment. Then he had a hunting rifle to accompany his shotgun, but in the confusion at the camping store, it was lost. Now his shotgun was knocked from his hand and laying across the floor. His eyes darted from the shotgun to the spider monsters encroaching on him, calculating the best time to dive for it, when the abomination closest to the shotgun spewed some kind of webbing all over the weapon. The gun was buried in a mound of glistening gray strands, gluing it to the floor.

  The dim fog-diffused moonlight beamed through the glass above the central hub of the library, making Daniel feel like he was on judgement. The long-legged spider monsters, along with the monster formally known as Lisa, surrounded Daniel and tightened the circle.

  “Lisa!” Daniel shouted. “Call them off!”

  She cocked her head to the side, and it snapped like Lisa was fighting against rigor mortis. “Why?”

  “Lisa, c’mon!” he shouted. “Fight it!”

  Lisa looked down at him with dead eyes. “Don’t want to fight it, Daniel. You won’t be able to fight it either. Not for very much longer.”

  Daniel rubbed his injured arm. The infection was growing back again, but it still wasn’t as bad as when he entered the camping store when he doubled over in pain and blacked out.

  “Tell us,” Lisa said, “how are you fighting us? That’s the only part we don’t know.”

  “We?” Daniel asked.

  “You can’t hear us?” Lisa asked. She sounded genuinely confused and not taunting. “You can’t hear the darkness that’s spreading through your body? The blood of the true gods that unite us all?”

  Lisa made it sound like they were all connected like some kind of network. Maybe he could use that to his advantage. Keeping one eye on the other spider monsters, he asked, “Lisa? Why did they come here? Can you tell me? Do you know?”

  “We were summoned here,” Lisa said, her voice growing stranger, with more vibrato and an echo of screeching, as if she was still in the process of turning into something else. “They opened the gateway.”

  “Who?” he asked. “Who summoned them?”

  “The ones who found the scroll, upon which the last rite is written,” Lisa said.

  The crazy old woman had mentioned the last rite back at the apartment pool after Daniel fought off the hoard of child-monsters. Her words rang out in his memory. “The last rite was never meant to be found. But they now have it, and they can use the key to swing the gates forever open.”

  The key. Bethany.

  “What’s the last rite?” he asked. “Lisa? What is it?”

  Lisa looked up through the glass dome to the sky above. “It will open or close the gateway forever.”

  The old woman had said about as much. Daniel needed more. “Why? What do they want?”

  “To destroy everything,” Lisa said, and she smiled.

  Bethany sat on the edge of the porch of the caretaker’s cottage. She didn’t want to go inside, it was gross inside, but it was too dark and too cold to go anywhere else. Light spilled out through the windows onto the porch and out into the graveyard, but the light didn’t reach much past the porch. The graveyard was creepy enough during the day time, but at night it was terrifying.

  Bethany sat on the porch a
nd cried. Her tears made the world blurry. She wiped the tears from her eyes, and when the world came into focus a large grey-white dog stood in front of her. No, not a dog, a wolf. Bethany tried to scream, but her throat pinched it off and it came out as a muted squeak. She scurried backward on her hands and feet until her head banged against the wall of the caretaker’s shack. The wolf approached, its head lowered. Bethany closed her eyes and turned away, awaiting the wolf’s fangs.

  Bethany felt the wet, rough tongue against her cheek. Her eyes popped open, the pounding of her heart fading away almost as quickly. She turned to face the large wolf, still not convinced the thing wasn’t just tasting her. They sat there, staring face to face. Then the wolf stepped forward and nuzzled against Bethany’s face.

  For the first time in a long, long time, Bethany felt love. The last time was when they took her mother away to the mental hospital, and her mother wrapped her arms around her so tight Bethany thought her head would pop off, and she didn’t care. The people in the white coats had to pry her mother’s arms off her, and Mrs. Garcia had to hold her back as they dragged her mother away. The wolf didn’t hug her back, the wolf didn’t have arms after all, but she let Bethany hug her tight. Then, the wolf pulled back with a gentleness that was almost familiar. It stepped back, looking Bethany in the eye, then turned and started to leave

  “No, don’t go,” Bethany begged.

  The wolf stopped and turned. It stared at Bethany for a moment. Then it stepped forward. The wolf licked Bethany’s cheek one more time, as if to kiss her goodbye, then turned around and stepped off the porch. It started to fade from view as it walked out of reach of the pale light from the caretaker’s cottage.

  Professor Lightfoot stepped out through the rotted front door. “Bethany, I think you should . . . oh, my God.”