The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead A Post-Apocalyptic Epic

by Peter Meredith

  She had the frightened eyes of a kitten about to be gassed.

  In the front seat, Richards drove, his hound dog look morphed into a scowl. He had, in his own words: Lied his ass off, concerning the crime scene at Dr. Loret’s home. “I told my lieutenant that we were dealing with a highly-financed gang of devil-worshipping art thieves. I’m pretty sure that he didn’t believe me, not that I blame him. It was as cockamamie a story as I’ve heard anyone tell, but it was the only thing I could think of that fit even remotely with the facts.”

  Next to him sat Father Paul who was the only one of the four who was completely at ease. On his lap, sitting primly like a pet cat, was a bible and on top of that was a cross that he had taken from a wall in the little chapel that was tucked in a corner of the maze-like hospital. In his pocket was a bottle of blessed oil and another of Holy Water.

  “I think lying may be the wrong approach here,” Father Paul said. This was the second time in the last half hour that he had said those words. The first came after Jack’s heart attack. He was sure that it wasn’t really a heart attack and that it was only a panic attack or some sort of event brought on by stress, but it sure had felt like a heart attack. He had honestly thought he was on the verge of dying.

  Dr. Rayman had tried to calm him by saying: “You’re too young for a heart attack.” And yet he hadn’t taken any chances and had administered nitroglycerin to Jack. The nitro had done nothing as far as Jack could tell.

  “Try to relax,” Father Paul said. “The Lord is looking out for both of you.”

  “He had better be,” Cyn had said from a chair in the corner of the room. She had been brought around by a whiff of smelling salts. She was itching to say more, but waited until Dr. Rayman left the room. The moment he did, she told Father Paul everything in a rushed condensed version that made the events sound as though they had been lifted from a movie.

  From time to time, the priest had glanced at Jack as if to verify he was not being pranked. When she had finished with: “And now something’s happened. We both felt it, Jack and I did. It’s something big or the start of something big, I don’t know.”

  “What are we going to tell Dr. Rayman?” Jack had asked. That’s when Father Paul had first used the line about lying. Cyn had gotten around the necessity of lying by calling Detective Richards and begging him to get to the hospital as fast as he could. He didn’t even ask why, and three minutes later, the Ford’s siren could be heard, quiet at first, but with growing urgency.

  When he arrived, he took one look at their faces and began ordering the hospital workers to disconnect Jack and to fetch his clothes, and he wasn’t lying when he told Rayman that lives were at stake.

  “So, what are we looking at?” Richards asked as they sped west, towards the city.

  “I dreamt that Robert was sacrificing Dr. Loret,” Jack answered. “He was drawing the glyphs and the circles, but I couldn’t see where, exactly. I think it might have been a park somewhere in Brooklyn...no wait, it was Queens. I could just make out the tips of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler building. The angle suggested that he was straight east of 34th Street. That’s Queens, right?”

  Richards nodded, his scowl deepening. “There aren’t that many parks in Queens, at least not close in. There’s Juniper Park. In your dream did you see baseball fields?”

  “Maybe,” Jack said. “The grass was trim but thick, sort of like an outfield.”

  “This seems all so fantastic,” Father Paul said, his easy look of contentment still upon him as he caressed the leather cover of his bible with his soft brown hand. “It is hard to believe that your story is real and yet, I am sure that it is. I feel it in my bones and I see the truth in your faces.”

  Jack touched the rapier that sat point down between his legs. When they had first jumped into the police car, he had been loath to touch it, but as the buildings had gradually grown and the suburbs had given way to the city, and his fear had built, he pulled the weapon close.

  “It’s real, Father,” Jack said. He then pointed to the bible and asked: “Is there a special prayer or a passage in there to help us fight the undead? Or what about...” He words stopped and his throat began working up and down as a feeling of dread struck him and hot bile built up inside of him.

  They were on the Long Island Expressway, in the middle of Queens. On their right was Flushing Meadows Park; it was dark and cold and the grass was a dull brown. On their left was a cemetery—the grass was browned but deep and plush, even in winter and there were tens of thousands of headstones.

  Jack felt his heart begin to tremble.

  Father Paul did not notice his discomfort or the fact that he was on the verge of passing out again. The priest was speaking about prayer in general. “We can pray for those in need of guidance and we can pray for courage in the face of our enemies, but as for actual battle, there is little that is uplifting, though most consider the Psalm of David adequate. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

  “I think I’m going to need more of that fear no evil stuff,” Jack said. “I think it was a cemetery that I saw Robert in, not a park. Everything was dark and there were what I thought were parts of rocks sticking up out of the ground.”

  “They were headstones?” Cyn asked. Jack nodded. She stared out the window, shaking her head as they rode past rank upon rank of graves. Finally she said: “Then we don’t go. We let someone else take care of this, like the army or something.”

  Instead of slowing at the suggestion, Detective Richards hit the gas. “You know, I wanted to quit this earlier. After I dropped you off at the hospital, I wanted to beg off sick and let someone else shoulder the yoke, but I didn’t, because what if the next guy did the same thing? No, we don’t run. We have a chance to nip this in the bud. We need to take out Robert now before he can call any more of these things back to life. Really, it shouldn’t be that hard. We know what they can do: fear, darkness, poisonous touch. These are all things we can fight against and we can fight against the monsters as well. We have two shotguns with us and two swords and we have Father Paul.”

  With a friendly smile, the detective reached over and punched the priest in the arm, saying: “Who knows what sort power he has. I for one think we have a real good shot at ending this.”

  “But what about what Jack and I felt earlier?” Cyn asked. “It was big.”

  “And the feeling hasn’t gotten any better,” Jack added, licking his lips, which seemed desert-dry. “The feeling has been coming to me in pulses, there’s been three so far, and it feels like it’s building to something.” Cyn nodded along in agreement.

  Father Paul glanced back at the two of them with a confused look. “Perhaps you are making more out of this than is necessary. How many mummies...you know, embalmed people can there be in New York? I’m betting the number is not over twenty and can he raise them all at once? I doubt it, but even if he could, twenty is a manageable number.”

  Again Jack licked his lips; twenty mummies were far from manageable. It was a huge number to Jack. They’d had their hands full...more than full with six of them. He was about to say so when his heart skipped a beat. “Oh. The focal point has shifted. It’s west of here and a little south.”

  “That’s the Calvary Cemetery,” Father Paul told them. “Take the next exit and go south on Laurel Hill.” The four of them grew quiet, and now, even Father Paul looked nervous. The night was deep and the cemetery was like an immense playground for the dead, but instead of swings and slides, there were tombstones and mausoleums and hallowed shrines holding the moldering bones of not thousands of corpses and not tens of thousands of corpses, but hundreds of thousands.

  Cyn had her phone out and looked like a corp
se herself with the white light shining up to highlight the extreme paleness of her face. “It says here that Calvary Cemetery has 850,000 people buried in it.”

  Jack leaned over and looked at the phone. “That’s impossible.” She showed him the link. He felt like he had been punched in the gut. “The Incan mummy,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Cyn replied.

  “But that was an accident,” Richards said. “He probably wouldn’t make the same mistake, twice, and even if he did, it’s like the Father said, how many mummies can there be?”

  They reached the gates of the cemetery and found them flung wide and yet nothing had ever looked less inviting. The night was moonless and dark, darker than usual; however, the cemetery seemed darker than was physically possible. The shadows were not just deep, they looked endlessly deep as if they could swallow you whole, as if you could get lost in them and never find your way out.

  Jack found himself staring into them; certain he would see a living corpse in every one of them, waiting for him to come closer. The shadows were so sinister that he failed to notice the circle of glyphs spelled out in blood beneath the cast-iron sign spanning the entrance.

  When Cyn nudged him and pointed, he couldn’t help feeling relief. The cemetery was dark, sure, but it wasn’t crawling with half a million zombies. “I don’t see any empty graves,” he said. “Maybe we got lucky and he screwed up.”

  “You should go check it out,” Cyn said, nudging Jack and trying to hand him her phone.

  He refused to take it, pulling his hands back. “Me? Why me?”

  “Because you’re the expert,” she told him, placing the phone in his lap. “You’re the only one who knows this language well enough to catch a mistake. Besides, you can take Father Paul with you.”

  The euphoria of the healing miracle appeared to be fading quickly and now the priest had a shine of sweat across his brow. “That is blood, is it not?” he asked, staring at the glyphs.

  “Yeah,” Jack said, taking a deep breath. “Come on.” With the rapier in hand, he opened his door and took a tentative step out. The first thing that struck him was just how quiet the night was. There were no sounds at all coming from the cemetery. There was the low rumble of the Ford and nothing else, seemingly for miles.

  When he took a step, the crunch of gravel under his foot felt magnified and it also felt unwelcome. Jack had the distinct sensation that he didn’t belong. Calvary had always been a place for the dead, but now it felt as though it was only for the dead. It felt as though all 850,000 sets of rotted and sunken eyes were watching him as he began almost tiptoeing towards the twin circles that Robert had drawn at the entrance.

  Next to him, Father Paul was also treading as lightly as he could, taking comically exaggerated steps in order not to disturb the gravel and the eerie quiet of the cemetery. “I didn’t think it would be like this,” he admitted in a whisper. “I honestly didn’t think I would be afraid.”

  To Jack, even the priest’s whispering was loud and he wondered how he had been saddled with the unarmed Father Paul. Despite her size, he would’ve preferred Cyn. Not only did she have a tenacious manner to her, she also clung to the gigantic shotgun that Richards had taken from the Lindenhurst police cruiser. From the moment they had climbed into the Taurus, she had laid the gun across her thighs and held it there in a firm grip.

  “It’s going to get worse,” Jack told Father Paul. “Just remember that it’s all in your head and that you can fight it. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to concentrate.”

  Jack turned on the phone’s light and shone it down on the glyphs. The outer ring was a dull brown, while the inner one glistened. “He calls for protection first, before he opens the portal,” Jack said to himself. “But there’s something missing. There were three heirs but there’s only evidence of two spells. There has to be another one, but what does the third spell do? And look, the arch-glyph, the one at the top center is different. This sun rising with the three lines below it, what’s it mean? Three more spells or the same spell three more times? Or maybe it’s describing a boundary?”

  He stood for a few minutes biting the inside of his cheek, however the answer didn’t jump out at him and his anxiety grew steadily. He gave up on that riddle and squatted down just on the outside of the rings. It made sense for him to analyze “his” spell first. He knew it by heart and spoke the words in a mumble under his breath, stopping just short of finishing the incantation…just in case.

  Other than a few curved lines that should’ve been straight and a couple of smudged wedges, the opening spell was well done, especially considering the medium that was being used. “He’s getting better,” Jack murmured.

  Then he started in on the protection spell. Three words had been changed; or rather one word had been changed three times. “It should say ‘one’ walks in the light.”

  “Is that significant?” Father Paul asked. The priest held his bible tight to his chest in his left hand, while in his right he held a weighty crucifix with his brown fingers curled around the lower part of the cross as though it was the pommel of a sword.

  “Very,” Jack said. The symbol of ‘the one-legged ant’ denoting a single individual had been replaced by a circle meaning ‘all.’

  It seemed that Robert had tried to raise all of the dead in the cemetery, but had failed. Yes, there was an eerie, unnatural feeling in the bone yard, but there wasn’t any evidence that a single grave had been disturbed. The plots were all covered over in sod and the mausoleums were silent houses of the dead.

  But what explained the dreadful feeling of being watched from beneath the earth? And what was with the sour air of expectation that he sucked in with every breath?

  “Wait here,” Jack said to the priest. He walked under the wrought iron sign and stood just inside the cemetery and tried to feel with that unknown part of him that had sprung into being two days before. He could sense that Hor and the other mummies were near. Jack could feel them to the southwest.

  They were close maybe a mile, which meant that there was still time to run. At this time of night, they could be in New Jersey in an hour and in Pennsylvania an hour after that, and on the west coast a day after that, if they took turns pushing the Ford for all she was worth.

  He dearly wanted to. With all of his shaking heart he wanted to run away, but he had the sinking feeling that the planet just wasn’t big enough anymore. If he could feel Hor, didn’t that mean that Hor could feel him as well? That was little kid logic and yet it couldn’t be denied that Hor could find him anywhere he went.

  Jack crossed back over the threshold of the cemetery and felt instant relief. It made the idea of heading back in that much more difficult. He walked around the circles and said to the priest: “Let’s go.”

  Seconds later they were back in the car and the fear he’d been feeling receded that much more, it allowed him to say: “We still have a chance. Robert tried to raise all of them…”

  “What?” Cyn almost screamed. “All of them? Why? Why on earth would he do that?”

  “He tried and he failed,” Jack said. “Look! The graves aren’t disturbed. But I think he’s trying again. I can feel Hor and the others. They’re still in the cemetery.”

  A shiver went up Cyn’s back and her shoulders twitched. “Me too,” she admitted. “That way.” She pointed in the direction Jack’s heart knew they would find the living dead.

  “Then we go after him,” Richards said. “We go after him with the intent to kill him. Is everyone agreed?” He had his beefy arm flung over the headrest of Father Paul’s seat; however, he wasn’t talking to the priest; he wasn’t even taking his opinion into consideration.

  “I’m in,” Jack said, trying to forget the extent of the soul-crushing fear that he had endured or the pain or the fact that he’d been at death’s door not long before. Cyn sat in the back seat with all eyes on her. She sat cringed inwards, so much like a child that it hurt Jack’s heart to ask: “What about you?”

  She started to nod
and it went on for half a minute until the action made it to her lips: “Yes. I-I…this is at least partially my fault, so yes, let’s kill him.” Her British accent was cool and clipped, but it didn’t hide her fear.

  Father Paul began to offer reasons why they should consider mercy or a different path besides violence, but Jack stopped him by holding up a hand. “Give me this speech when you see what he’s done or when Hor has his bony fist five inches deep in your chest or when you see what’s left of Loret. Then go ahead and tell me how forgiveness and love will win out. Until then…keep that bible ready, we’re going to need it.”

  Chapter 16

  Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York

  Father Paul nodded to Jack, but said nothing. His confident look spoke volumes that was a cinch to read: the priest had a direct hand in an actual verifiable miracle not three hours before and he had all the faith in his Lord that he would ever need, enough faith to overcome the bugwumps and the closet monsters and the things that hid under the bed when the lights went out…or whatever their Indian equivalents were.

  Jack knew better than to trust the look. His confidence would fail and so would his faith, but there was also a chance that it would fight back—the faith that is. The confidence was only seconds from being wiped away forever.

  Just as Jack knew it would, the look vanished the moment they crossed over the threshold of the cemetery and the thousands of dead eyes in their crypts turned toward the car. That very second, every inch of Father Paul’s exposed flesh was tented up by goosebumps and when he swallowed, it was with a clicking sound.

  He wasn’t the only one suddenly stricken by terror. They all were. It was impossible not to feel the unnatural, magical hell-fear that saturated the night. The feeling was akin to the dread that Hor had been able to create, only it was tremendous in scope and shivered the very air.