Kingdom of Shadows

by Greg F. Gifune

  “Rooster, I...we’ve…been there since.”

  “You’ve been back there since that night?”

  “You don’t understand,” Landon said. “We never left.”

  * * * *

  Running…screams…confusion…

  Panic explodes through the darkness…

  The flashlight bounces, throwing strobe-like splashes of light along the corridor, floors, walls and ceiling before finally settling on Nauls. His face protrudes from the darkness, eyes closed but with a look of horrific pain. Blood slowly trickles from his nostrils into his beard.

  The others scramble about trying to cover the corridor. Landon frantically knocks Snow out of the way and climbs the stairs back to the house.

  Nauls opens his eyes. “He’s here,” he says in a loud whisper.

  His body begins to shake. Slowly at first but gradually building in intensity, he begins to buck, wracked with increasingly violent spasms. His thin frame twists as he flails about, and his weapon falls to the floor. He brings his shaking hands to his face, screams and stabs his fingers directly into his eyes.

  Rooster reaches out in an effort to stop him, but it’s too late.

  Nauls tears his eyes from their sockets with a spray of blood and fluid, his screams replaced with laughter as his spasms grow worse and he begins to spin like a top.

  “Jesus God!” Snow shrieks, falling away in horror.

  “Go!” Starker grabs Snow and throws him toward the stairs. “Go!”

  Rooster stands paralyzed, holding the flashlight on Nauls, who comes to rest, laughing through the blood and pain, holding an eyeball in each hand as if in offering, hideous moist strings dangling from them and dripping blood. “We’re going where there are no eyes,” he says, his voice little more than a garbled growl now. “Where everyone is blind...yet everyone sees.”

  Blood suddenly spews from his mouth, eye sockets, nose and ears. Like something has exploded deep inside him, the blood sprays free as his screams return, this time as raspy, animal-like squeals. “He’s here,” he gurgles, choking on the blood as it pours out over his bottom lip. “He’s—”

  Nauls flies backwards, crashes into the far wall like he’s been thrown by something savage and powerful. His body slides to the floor, swallowed by the shadows there.

  Rooster feels Starker’s enormous hand clamp onto his arm and yank him back just before he fires a burst from the AK-47 into the darkness. Together, they run for the stairs. “Don’t look back!” Starker yells out.

  But it no longer matters.

  The darkness, and all that dwells within it, follows.

  In the room upstairs, Snow lurches about, lost in the dark, his guns at his side and his mouth open, soundlessly forming words—perhaps prayers—while something speaks to him from the surrounding shadows only he can hear. The voice of a woman, a young woman asking him why, her voice oddly hollow as she shuffles about nearby, hidden in darkness, her breath cold and rapid on the back of his neck. But when Snow turns there is only night, moonlight and fog beyond the blown-out windows. The scarecrows watch a field of weeds, a dead forest and a path to nowhere, an empty road no one will ever cross again.

  The voice, different now—neither male nor female and no longer entirely human—whispers his name.

  Snow wants to run for the door but can’t move. He knows, understands for the first time, what is coming, and still cannot move. He trembles and begins to urinate. As the .45s drop from his hands the fire appears from nowhere, sweeping over the ceiling then down the wall and across him, engulfing his body in seconds. Oddly, Snow feels no burning sensation, no pain, only sorrow and hopelessness the depths of which he never believed possible. He stumbles, flaming arms and hands held out in front of him as if to embrace some invisible presence. He sinks to his knees. Eyes wide, he stares at something through the growing inferno and laughs maniacally.

  The last thing Snow sees is Starker and Rooster rushing up the stairs.

  Outside, Landon runs with all his might, the tall grass and overgrown weeds slowing him as he wades toward the road. The van, he thinks, just have to make it to the van and I’m free. He ignores the scarecrows’ dead stares and does not look back, even when he’s certain there is something right behind him, closing in with impossible speed and ready to swoop down and pluck him from the field like a hawk closing in on a mouse. He bolts through the last bit of field and jumps the final embankment down to the road. Pitching forward on landing, he catches himself, and now on pavement, takes a quick look back. No one coming, nothing behind him. He pulls the revolver from his belt just in case, sees the farmhouse in the distance. It’s on fire, the flames creeping up through the roof, lapping night. He turns and runs for the van but pulls up short after only a few strides. It’s gone. He looks around frantically. This isn’t possible. He parked it there himself, out of the way, just as Rooster instructed.

  “Yeah, I need this shit.” He heads off down the road, running right down the center lane through the darkness; the fog-shrouded moon his only guide. Every now and then he looks back. The farmhouse, the scarecrows and the fire grow fainter and fainter until the night swallows them whole and he is alone in the darkness.

  He slows his pace a few minutes later, finally opting for a fast walk. His chest heaves as he tries to catch his breath and a sharp pain digs at his side. Landon keeps moving, knowing eventually he’s bound to run into something—a car, a house—anything. He notices a slight incline to the road. He pushes on, trying to forget the things he saw back there. All he needs is a car. He can hotwire anything and be long gone from this place for good. He kicks it back up a notch, jogging up and over the sloped portion of road. In the distance, he sees an outline of a building. Set back quite a distance from the road, it is merely a silhouette, but a hulking one. Must be a house, he reasons, then increases speed and veers off pavement onto grass.

  Running across the field, he watches it become more and more defined the closer he gets. Within minutes Landon realizes it’s a barn.

  Beyond it is a farmhouse.

  A farmhouse guarded by scarecrows…a farmhouse in flames.

  “No fucking way.” He comes to a stop between the barn and the house. He’s gone in a circle, but how is that possible? He ran straight and in the opposite direction the entire time.

  Shadows drift through the weeds before him. Landon steps back and raises the revolver. He can hear screams and smells a suspicious burning odor. Beyond that of burned wood, it is sickeningly sweet and similar to the stench of charred meat.

  A baby cries somewhere nearby. Landon whirls in the direction to find only darkness. Blind with terror, he runs but trips over something and pitches forward into the grass and dirt. He scrambles to his feet, sees what he fell over. A wooden stake…a cross of wood…

  The scarecrow, he thinks, his mind shattering. It’s gone.

  From behind him, shuffling movement.

  A strange shape comes toward him through the tall grass, hobbling like a crippled man.

  Only this is not a man.

  Landon fires the revolver. Keeps firing even when the revolver is empty and makes only clicking sounds.

  And then something coarse covers his head, cold dead hands wrap around his throat and he hears another scream shred the night, unaware that this one is his own.

  In the farmhouse, Starker and Rooster run through the burning front room, trying to find a way out in all the madness and confusion. The darkness is alive, shifting and thick with the shrieking cries of countless dead, nameless lost souls all wailing in the night with violent fury. Rooster sees a pillar of fire and realizes it is Snow kneeling before them, his body wrapped in blankets of flame.

  Like a cold winter wind, something follows them up the stairs, gusts into the room and cuts through them. It feeds the flames and Snow’s body becomes a firestorm. Yet he doesn’t topple. Instead he struggles slowly to his feet.

  Rooster shoots him, emptying his gun.

  Snow finally topples over and the fi
re spreads, racing up the walls and along the floor in search of more victims.

  The strange wind passes, surging out to the field beyond the doorway, and Rooster feels some part of himself go with it. He stumbles after it, dazed and fighting the gripping cold suddenly rising from the depths of his body. He finds Starker standing next to Snow’s body, staring at it with a strange look of…satisfaction? He throws the AK-47 aside, drops down, and eyes ablaze with passion claws at the burned heap that had once been Snow, ripping charred meat in stringy handfuls he hungrily devours.

  And as the fire spreads, Rooster understands. He feels it too. Lust not for sex but violence, death, mayhem, destruction and pain…as if these things have been his destiny all along. Rather than reload the 9mm, he drops it and reaches for a combat knife tucked in his boot. He slides it free, already salivating as he closes on Starker.

  Behind him, Nauls slowly ascends the stairs, his hollow eyes piercing the smoke and darkness, his mouth twisted into a hideous demonic smile.

  Rooster slams the blade deep into Starker’s lower back, pulls it free and stabs him again. He seems not to notice at first, but then collapses from his knees to his side and lies there laughing, his large teeth bright in the darkness and caked with blood and human flesh.

  As Rooster sets to work on him, gutting Starker from throat to pelvis, Nauls moves past, through the fire and out the doorway to the field.

  His feet do not touch the floor.

  Rooster focuses on Starker’s laughter. No—not laughter—not anymore, cries now, screams. Beautiful screams…his face and bald head covered in blood as he spits and slobbers, each scream more horrific than the last. As Rooster tears at the enormous incision then plunges his hands inside the body, Starker chokes on the bodily fluids bubbling up into his throat and begs for mercy.

  But all Rooster hears are the shrieks of souls trapped in the darkness and flames surrounding him.

  Cords of intestines clutched in one hand and the knife in the other, he leaves Starker’s now silent but convulsing body and slowly approaches the doorway. Darkness waits…a field of tall grass and weeds…six wooden crosses…three with fresh scarecrows nailed to them…three still waiting…

  Rooster begins to laugh, bringing the intestines to his lips and eating as he steps out of the flames and into the night.

  Somewhere within the hurricane of violence and howling souls, a frantic, familiar and decidedly human voice screams for salvation.

  * * * *

  Visions of demonic creatures—some human, some not, and others still stranded at various horrific points between the two—flashed through his mind. Held in rusty metal cages, pinned, strapped or chained to medieval devices of torture and imprisonment, the creatures gawked at him in horror, several deathly still, others violently struggling to free themselves, all of them moist with blood, urine and excrement, their bodies grotesquely deformed and savaged.

  The terrifying chambers of blood and death dissolved; became a roadside.

  Landon had already gone quite a ways up the incline on the side of the road and looked back as if he expected Rooster to follow. But Rooster knew now what lay on the other side of the tall grass blowing in the wind behind him.

  With a shrug, Landon held his arms out like the victim of crucifixion and backed away over the ridge, vanishing from sight.

  Nauls turned to him, removed his sunglasses.

  We’re going where there are no eyes…

  His eyes were gone, just empty sockets.

  Where everyone is blind…yet everyone sees.

  Without warning his body shook with impossible velocity, transforming him into little more than a blur before he again fell still. “Come with us,” Nauls said. “We’ll all figure this out together.”

  Rooster shook his head no.

  Nauls slid his sunglasses back on, slowly walked up the embankment after Landon then hesitated and looked back. “You really think you have a choice?”

  “That’s all any of us have.”

  Nauls reached into his jacket pocket, pulled free the car keys and tossed them to Rooster. “We’ll be waiting,” he said sadly. “Forever.”

  -10-

  He made the car tailing him even before he’d reached his apartment. Rooster pulled over a block from the housing projects and continued on foot. As he crossed the courtyard, hurrying through the cold, the black Crown Vic crept slowly past, the windows and windshield impenetrably tinted. It continued a bit further down the street then pulled over and parked. Rooster kept checking back over his shoulder, but no one emerged from the vehicle.

  When he’d reached his floor, Rooster stopped at the incinerator shoot and dropped the briefcase in, listening to it slide away down the shaft to the fires below.

  Burn, he thought. Burn in Hell.

  He slipped into the apartment and was met by a welcome burst of heat. Moving silently, he went to the bedroom and stopped just inside the doorway. Gaby was standing next to the bed, a blanket in her arms and a laundry basket at her feet. She’d already stripped the comforter, blanket and top-sheet from the bed but the bottom sheet remained. She seemed surprised to find him there, but smiled anyway. It was perhaps the most reassuring and comforting thing he’d ever seen.

  Until he took a closer look at the bed. Rich dark soil was scattered across the sheet, blood and straw along the pillows. He narrowed his eyes and grimaced as fear clawed at what few defenses he had left.

  “It’s all right,” Gaby said, quickly tossing the blanket over the bed. “Don’t look. It doesn’t mean anything. They’re just trying to frighten you.”

  The night sky rolled above, moving, the fog turning and twisting as the rough ground tore at his back and shoulders.

  “Gaby,” he said softly, voice breaking. “Gabrielle…help me.”

  They were dragging him by his legs…pulling him across the field, the grass and weeds tangling and scratching him as he went, the night sky overhead, vast and ominous, the smell of death and burning flesh filling the air.

  “Hell does more than burn the wicked,” she said. “It cleanses the lost clawing for the light. Remember what I told you. Let me help you tear them apart like they’ve torn at you.”

  Hideous hands of straw, of charred flesh and exposed bone held him down against the fallen cross of wood while shadows moved about, laughing horribly even as they drove nails through his palms, destroying flesh and shattering bone, even as they hoisted the cross up and into position, even as Rooster screamed and begged for God to save him, even as unseen filthy hands held his mouth closed while others pierced his lips with an old rusted needle, running the leather string through the holes and pulling it taut until his screams were muffled groans and his mouth could no longer open.

  “Remember what I told you,” she said again.

  Those in the shadows pulled the burlap sack over his head, two holes cut out in the fabric to accommodate his eyes. Eyes that could still see…inhuman eyes now, the eyes of a soulless scarecrow…impossible eyes opening, seeing, watching, frozen in time, crucified to damnation and endless suffering.

  “Rooster,” Gaby said forcefully, “remember what I told you about my name and what it means. Do you remember?”

  “God is my might.”

  And his eyes see the Hell he is trapped in…a Hell not of demons with pitchforks and cloven-hooves or boundless oceans of fire…but one in a small bedroom not so different than the one Rooster stood in now. A quiet and dark room where a little boy sat on a bed with crisp white sheets, crucifixes on the walls and a devil he’d believed a god sitting next to him whispering assurances that the things happening were just and right and moral and clean. Father McKay staring down at him with those striking blue eyes and telling him everything would be all right if he simply obeyed God’s will.

  Tears stain Rooster’s cheeks. Rage, sorrow, fear—he cannot decide. All of them, goddamn you, all of them in a tempest of blood and tears and evil.

  “They’re dying. You’re killing them one by one.” Gab
y motioned to him with a slight turn of her head, her beauty shifting to something decidedly more sinister. “Burn them. Burn the fuckers away like the leeches they are.”

  He smelled death…dirt…an open grave and its rotting remains…

  Terror strangled him, its grip desperate.

  The priest stood behind him, filthy and discarded now, like the souls he’d torn from countless children years before. “I know you,” he said.

  “I watched you die.” Visions of Starker came to him. No. Not Starker. Father McKay, his head drenched in blood, choking on his own body fluids and gasping for forgiveness. “I killed you. Slowly.”

  Blood so dark it was nearly black trickled from the corners of his eyes. “Did you think that would save your soul?” the priest asked.

  “I only knew it would end you.”

  The priest moved deeper into the room, stepping between him and Gaby, smiling wide like a demonic Cheshire Cat. “But that’s what you hoped for, wasn’t it. Just like now, you hope it will save you from me, from this place, from those waiting for you outside, from yourself. It won’t. Do you know why?” A fat brown spider scurried across his bald head, disappeared into his ear. He didn’t seem to notice. “Because the illusion of hope is Hell’s greatest joy.”

  “And Heaven’s greatest weapon,” Gaby said from behind him, her eyes rolling to black as she grabbed hold of him, sunk her teeth into his neck and pulled him to the floor with shocking strength and violence, straddling him and tearing at his throat the way a wild dog might.