An older man stood behind the desk, his back to them. Gazing out the large windows, he calmly smoked a fat cigar, apparently transfixed by something outside.
Trent leveled the .45, holding it with both hands now as he stepped deeper into the study. Joel reached into his coat pocket and gripped the 9mm, but kept it in his pocket.
“Come in, children,” the man said in a deep, raspy voice. “Father’s been waiting for you.”
Joel knew that voice. It had spoken to him countless times in his nightmares. It struck him like a hammer. He shook like the frightened child he’d suddenly been reduced to.
“Turn around,” Trent demanded, remaining in his shooting stance.
Simpson did as he’d asked. Thick necked and broad shouldered, he was under six feet tall but built like a professional wrestler. Age had robbed him of what was probably once a powerful body and had left him pudgy and soft around the middle, but money had allowed him, among other things, a year-round tan, a bright capped-tooth smile and a watch and pinky ring that cost more than most cars. With a slow and plodding gait, Simpson came out from behind the desk. In one hand he held his cigar, in the other, a glass of brown liquor. He motioned vaguely to the bar. “Something to drink, children? Some vintage Scotch, perhaps?”
“Stop calling us that,” Trent snapped.
“We’re not children,” Joel said. “Not anymore.”
Simpson watched them a moment, his beady eyes dark and intense and looking mildly amused. Bald but for a ring of closely cropped white hair, the man possessed a presence and arrogance those in positions of power often wielded. He took a tug on his cigar, then exhaled a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “You’ll always be my children,” he said, plucking the cigar from his thick lips. “Always.”
“Are we alone in the house?” Trent asked. When no answer came, he stepped closer, the gun aimed at Simpson’s face. “Answer me, you piece of shit.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Joel said. “Answer him. Are we alone in the house?”
“My wife is in the other room, but she’s of no consequence.”
Simpson’s pig eyes found Joel. It felt like they’d gone right through him, stabbed directly into his soul. He knew this man and yet he didn’t.
“It’s almost like meeting God for you, isn’t it?”
“You’re no god,” Joel told him.
“I’m your god, boy.” With bored indifference he drifted across the room to the bar. Selecting one glass decanter from a row of them, Simpson poured more Scotch into his glass, swirled it around a moment, then took a long sip. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink, children?”
Trent joined him at the bar, this time pressing the .45 against the man’s temple. “Last time I’m asking.”
“Is there anyone else in the house?” Joel said.
“No,” Simpson replied evenly.
“Awful lot of vehicles out there for only two people.”
Simpson raised his glass. “You always were the smartest one.”
“Close the door, Joel,” Trent said, lowering the gun.
He did.
“Anybody comes through it, shoot them.”
Joel nodded. “You killed Lonnie to bring me back,” he said, “and you brought me back to bring Trent out into the open. Well, here we are, Simpson. After all these years, here we are.”
“You’re the only one that ever really counted,” Simpson said. “The other four, well, they had their purposes, of course, but you were always my special boy, Joel.”
“Is that why you tried to have me killed?”
“Everyone has an expiration date, son. Even you. Even I.” He shrugged as if there was nothing else to do. “Sooner or later we all become irrelevant. Bees in a greater hive is all, serving the queen, the master, for a greater purpose.”
“What about Lonnie? Was he irrelevant too?”
“Now here I call you the smart one and you ask a silly question like that.”
“Kidnapping us as children—abusing us, experimenting on us, destroying us, ripping our minds to shreds—that wasn’t enough?” Joel tightened his grip on the 9mm but kept it in his pocket. “Why did Lonnie have to die? Why do any of us?”
Simpson considered him the way one might an addle-brained preschooler. “Not only were you the smartest, you were the best of them, weren’t you, Joel? Are you worried about Sal and Dorsey? Don’t be. We have no use for a broken-down, alcoholic greaseball and a drug-addicted old nigger. They present no threat to us or anyone else. Frightened mice scarcely worth the time, much less the bullets.”
“You’re not worth the price of a bullet either,” Trent said, raising the gun again. “But I don’t mind wasting one long as it goes through your skull.”
Simpson ignored him and sucked on his cigar. “They’re ghosts now, Joel. Gone from you, as if they were never really there at all.”
“Why was Lonnie branded?”
“It was necessary and he was our property. We own you. You’re our slaves.”
“He was a human being, with a daughter.”
“You think you’re gonna reach this garbage?” Trent asked. “You think you can reason with evil like this?”
Joel shook his head. “I just need to understand.”
“Rebirth,” Simpson said flatly. “There are many portals. We open them.”
“With no regard for what comes through?”
“We know exactly what comes through. And so do you.”
“Why then?”
“The master we serve, Joel. We serve him, you serve us.”
“We were able to conjure entities,” Joel said. “Trent and I.”
Simpson smoked his cigar a while before answering. “Others glimpsed them. You made them real.”
“What did I tell you?” Trent said.
“So many doors,” Simpson said, laughing lightly. “You already know everything you’ve come here to ask me. It’s all about opening the right doors, isn’t it, Joel? Unlocking them to reveal the right answers.”
Trent, the .45 still aimed at him, said, “You’re gonna give us those right answers, Simpson, or I’ll put your brains all over this nice rug.”
“Who are you?” Joel asked.
“Just a man,” Simpson said. “A scientist. Some might say a pioneer.”
“A devil.”
“Some might say that too.”
“And they wouldn’t be wrong.”
“I suppose not.”
“We’re part of the Monarch Program,” Trent said. “Aren’t we?”
Simpson sipped his Scotch but didn’t answer.
“Monarch,” Joel said. “Like the butterfly.”
The swarm of butterflies flying from Trent’s mouth…
“What is the Monarch Program?” Joel pressed.
“In simple terms, trauma-based mind control.”
The voices…the swirling voices moving all around him…human voices from everywhere and nowhere…
“Trauma,” Joel repeated, as if involuntarily
One lone gurgling voice finally becomes clear enough to understand.
Simpson grinned. “Mmmm.”
This voice. His voice.
And then he knew. He remembered. Joel put a hand to his mouth.
Sexual abuse is paramount, as it breaks the subject down and brings about the compartmentalization…
“We teach the brain to disassociate,” Simpson said, slowly pushing the cigar between his fat lips with a suggestive widening of his black eyes. “And the result is a mind-controlled subject that has no idea he or she is being controlled.”
Once programmed to forget such abuses, subjects can be more easily programmed to forget other things as well…
“The result, Joel…is you.”
A stern, older man looks down at him, holds out his hand.<
br />
Joel focused on Simpson’s hands. “You,” he said through a hard swallow. “It was you.”
He takes the man’s hand even though he doesn’t want to.
“Do you remember the fan, Joel?” Simpson asked.
The old table fan, the metal blades spinning, twirling…
“No, I—you sonofabitch, I—”
The ringing phone no one ever answers…
“Don’t listen to him,” Trent said, leveling the gun at Simpson again. “I’m gonna shoot this motherfucker. I’m gonna shoot him in his fat fucking mouth.”
“There are so many,” Simpson said, unfazed by the threat. “Slowly, gradually, we’ve taken you. One by one, and readied you for what’s coming.”
What we’re talking about is a type of structural dissociation where the occult is assimilated into the equation in order to bring about compartmentalization of the brain…
“Do you think your descent into the occult, into the satanism running rampant all those years ago, was a mistake? Do you think it happened by chance?”
During this process, satanic rituals must be performed so that specific demons may be attached to the subjects and alters as well…
“Nothing happens by chance, Joel.”
The shattering of a personality brings about compartmentalization of memory…
“The assassins, the sex slaves, the spies.”
Of trauma too horrifying to grasp or process…
“None of them mean anything without the special ones.”
The result is dissociative identity disorder…
“The ones like you, Joel, because you helped us usher them in.”
The wiping clean, the death of one mind…and the birth of others…
“First come the children. Then the master.”
“You’re sick.”
“Diseased,” he said, grinning again. “Wonderfully, eternally diseased.”
Trent’s gun hand began to shake so violently he dropped it back down to his side and took a few steps away. “Christ. Christ, I—I don’t know what to do, I…”
Simpson chomped his cigar with a disturbing slurping sound. “Do you know what happens to a child’s mind when it shatters, Joel?”
Please—stop—help me—I—I can’t move…
Joel looked away, his emotions raw and surging through him. He felt sick, like he might vomit or pass out at any moment.
“When something so horrible happens to their sweet, pure, innocent little minds?” Simpson rolled the cigar back and forth along his bottom lip, the leaf damp with saliva. “Do you know what happens, Joel?”
“Shut up,” he said through gritted teeth. “Just—just shut up.”
“When the trauma is so extreme, the child’s mind protects itself. Do you know how it achieves that, Joel? Do you remember?”
“Shut your mouth.” Joel staggered over toward the desk, swung at a glass lamp on the corner and knocked it to the floor. It shattered at his feet. “Shut your fucking mouth!”
Trent looked at him, horror and panic in his eyes.
“The most severe torture,” Simpson said, licking his lips as he pulled the cigar away. “The most delectable rape. It creates MPD. Do you know what that is, Joel? Multiple personality disorder.”
His head, held in place…locked in place…held by some strange metal contraption that holds his head still…his eyes pinned open so he cannot blink, cannot close them…cannot look away from the things moving through the walls…
Joel’s eyes locked on Trent, who looked as if he were about to explode as well. Please, his eyes seemed to say, let me kill him. Let me end this. Now.
“Do you know what an alter is, Joel?” Simpson asked. “Would you like Father to tell you? Those created when the mind breaks, yes? From chaos and pain, from horror and violence, comes birth. Messy and covered in blood, it comes, and in the same manner they must die, systematically destroyed, one by one. That’s what we’re doing, you and I. We’re killing off those alters.”
“You’re lying.”
“Or are you the alter, Joel? It’s so hard to know for sure, isn’t it? So hard to be completely sure of who is who and what is what in a world of deception…”
“You’re a liar.” Joel moved toward him.
“I serve the King of Lies. As do you. You haven’t come here for answers. You’ve come for vengeance. You’ve come because I’ve sent for you, son.”
“I’m not your son.”
Simpson smiled, then winced in apparent ecstasy, rolling the cigar back between his lips. “You’re my little boy, Joel, my special little boy. Father’s missed you so very much.”
Before he realized what he’d done, Joel had pulled the 9mm from his coat, closed on Simpson and hit him across the side of the head with it.
Simpson staggered toward his desk, dropped his drink but remained upright, a slow trickle of blood running from the fresh wound on the side of his forehead. Still clutching his cigar, he raised his other hand to the bloody gash and let out a slow moan. “We’re in the final stages,” he said. “You can’t stop it. No one can.”
“You’re insane.”
“No, my precious,” Simpson said, smiling through his pain. “You are.”
Trent paced manically over by the windows, mumbling to himself.
“The whole world is a lie, Joel.” Simpson leaned back against the desk. “It’s the world behind the world that matters, and the one who controls it all from the world we cannot see. Not yet. It’s not what anything thinks it is. Not the pipe dreams of the nonbelievers, not the hooves and pitchforks the Jesus freaks piss on and on about, fearing their alleged savior and his tormentor both, frightened little children huddled in their ridiculous churches to nothing. Not any of the madness disguised as religions a bunch of savages dreamed up in their simple and stupid, superstitious minds while wandering in their deserts, as frightened of themselves as the world in which they found themselves. Weak, all of them, weak, with their rules and laws and prayers to a void that doesn’t even know they exist, much less care. Not even the fools who think they’ve harnessed and worship darkness have it right, with their television rituals and music industry nonsense, their movies and award shows and their silly little cabals. Even the precious scientists, even we were wrong about more than we had right. It’s all a magic trick. It’s all a lie. And it’s all the truth. Every last bit of it, because everything is possible in the abyss. Everything and nothing…”
The horrible screams…
“It’s time to come home, Joel. Don’t you see? I’ve brought you home. It’s time to quiet all those storms in your pretty little head, boy.”
“You made those storms.”
The horror and darkness…
“Yes, and now Father can quiet them.” He dropped the cigar into a glass ashtray on the desk but kept his other hand pressed against his head wound, though it did little to curb the flow of blood. “Just like your pain and fear, Joel, do you remember?”
The agony…the shame…
“Father can bring pain…or Father can take pain away.”
“Kill this fuck,” Trent muttered, still pacing back and forth in front of the windows. “Kill him. Just kill him, just—just kill him.”
Joel kept the gun at his side. “Tell me about the number stations,” he said, motioning to the windows and the second building beyond. “That’s one, isn’t it?”
“They’re all over the world,” Simpson said. “Speaking to those who can hear them, to those who don’t realize they can, and to those who have no idea they even exist. It’s all part of a bigger plan, Joel, a bigger hive. Bringing the world to slavery slowly and quietly, while using our greatest gift against us. Our minds. Listen to the broadcasts, Joel. I know you hear them even in your sleep. Hypnotic, aren’t they? Nearly as wondrous as the growls and whispers you hear at the ver
y back of your mind while you’re awake. It’s beautiful. Beautiful slavery, child, beautiful slavery…”
“Kill him,” Trent said again, suddenly more focused. “Or I will.”
“All these years of magic,” Simpson said. “All this time. The Devil’s not a sprinter, Joel. He’s a stroll on a hot summer day. He’s a gentle breeze slipping through the trees. He’s a drop of rain slowly gliding across a pane of glass, dew hanging from the petals of the most delicate flower. He’s a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis in all its exquisite glory. He’s everything you think he’s not…and everything you fear him to be. Magic is real, Joel. Reality is built on it.”
The door suddenly opened, and in one motion, a man stepped into the office, a shotgun leveled in his hands. By the time it registered, he’d already fired.
Trent vaulted backward, into the windows, as a huge wound exploded across his midsection and a deafening boom shook the house to the chorus of shattering glass and splitting wood.
Reflexively, Joel raised his 9mm and fired several times.
The first two shots missed, tearing into the doorframe behind the man. The third struck him in the shoulder and spun him around. The fourth hit his side and dropped him to his knees as he cried out in pain.
In shock, Joel stood in the center of the office, the gun still aimed at the man he now recognized as Novak. Simpson remained where he was, a ridiculous grin on his face. Trent was collapsed and caught in the destroyed windows, half his body hanging outside, the other half still in the office and covered in blood.
Snow and cold air blew through the newly formed portal.
Novak, grunting and groaning in agony, reached for the shotgun he’d dropped when he fell to his knees.
Joel aimed and fired, blowing several of Novak’s fingers from his hand in a spray of blood and bone.
Screaming, Novak slumped forward. “Motherfucker!”
Music…I hear music…sad…strange music…piano…a sad and lonely piano…
Stepping closer, and with a skill and calm Joel had no idea he possessed, he placed the 9mm under Novak’s chin and fired.
The body flopped over onto its side, the top of Novak’s head a bloody and mangled mess of brain and tissue. The body convulsed several times, then lay still.
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