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

by Peter Meredith

  The only thing that kept them going forwards was the fact that there wasn’t a single disturbed grave in sight. The grass had been browned by the chill of winter but it hadn’t been overturned by clawed hands and the doors to the various mausoleums hadn’t been hammered open, and, most importantly, there weren’t hordes of undead charging the Ford.

  If the evil in the air could be ignored, then the cemetery was just that, a cemetery—a place where teens came to scare each other or make out, or a place where loved ones came, perhaps on Veterans Day or Christmas or a birthday, or, more often than people knew, on a deathday, to pay their respects.

  But the evil couldn’t be ignored.

  The four of them rolled into a darkness that wasn’t God-created. It was a roiling black cloud that ate up the headlights of the Ford and swirled among their feet, freezing their bones and causing their hands to hook into claws and their teeth to chatter.

  Cyn turned from Jack, holding the shotgun toward the window. He put his back to hers, expecting to be attacked at any second. In the front seat, Father Paul began to pray: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven...”

  Richards interrupted him: “Father, maybe you should stop that.” The blackness had grown thicker, heavier, angrier. It was now as substantial as London fog and it stopped their high beams as if the lights were shooting into a wall.

  “I am of a different mind,” the priest said. “I rather think that I should keep going if my prayer is agitating whatever is causing this. As well, I find it reassuring.” He began again from the beginning. Jack wanted the priest to keep going, hoping that the culmination of the prayer would bring with it some sort ecclesiastical outburst that would drive away the darkness.

  It did not.

  The darkness was unaffected other than the swirling and the increasing depth. Jack wasn’t the only one disappointed. “I’d turn off the headlights,” Cyn suggested in a quiet voice.

  “Yeah, I think you’re right,” Richards said. Now their running lights were all the illumination they had, forcing Richards to drive at a snail’s pace. Jack was glad for the lack of speed. They didn’t have far to go and he had a sinking feeling that they were driving into a hornet’s nest of trouble.

  Father Paul had moved on and was voicing the Psalm of David, when Cyn whispered: “We’re close. We’re bloody close.” Her lips were blue and jabbering up and down and her eyes were wide, unblinking ovals and yet when Richards stopped the car, she was the first out, holding the shotgun against her stomach instead of her shoulder.

  The improper stance was enough to get Richards out of the car. “Brace it like this. Good, now remember, you don’t really aim a shotgun; pointing is good enough at close quarters...and it’s gonna be really fricking close.”

  As they couldn’t see three feet in front of their faces, Richards wasn’t wrong. Jack climbed out of the Ford and swished at the darkness with his rapier causing it to only swirl and spin. Father Paul was last out and the other three turned to him.

  Cyn waited, impatiently as the priest only stood there. “Do something,” she hissed. “Try a spell or something. They are out there watching us.”

  “I’m a priest, not a sorcerer,” he answered. “We don’t have spells or voodoo. Our strength comes to us through faith and payer.”

  A sound that might have been the scrape of an old leaf blowing across the ground or the scuff of a dried-up bone on concrete had Cyn spinning to her right, once again thrusting the shotgun out in front of her. “Then pray for some bloody light!”

  “That I can do.” Father Paul raised the bible and said in a loud voice: “All powerful and ever-living God, cast out from our hearts the darkness of sin and bring us to the light of your truth. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. AMEN!”

  “Whoa,” Jack said. As the priest spoke, the darkness was swept back as if blown by an unfelt wind and now, they could see the cemetery just as Jack had envisioned it in his dream—the graves were still undisturbed; Loret was naked, spread eagle split open from throat to testicles and Robert Montgomery, still arrayed in the same suit he had been wearing the last Jack had seen him, knelt over him with a camel-hair brush in his red hand, putting the final touches on the last of the glyphs.

  Richards’ shotgun swiveled to take Robert in his sights. “Stop! Put the brush down or I swear I will end you!"

  The brush paused on a down stroke and Robert glanced up. There was something wrong with his eyes that even the night couldn’t hide. They were twitchy and appeared to be filled with blood. “This is your fault, Detective. And yours as well, Wild Jack. This entire episode wasn’t supposed to occur in this manner. I never wanted to include any of you in this, especially you my dear cousins...of course, I couldn’t have done it without your help, either.”

  Jack stole a peek at Cyn. The truth seemed to have wilted her and the shotgun wavered, coming off her shoulder. Her chin swung Jack’s way, but she wouldn’t look up from the tops of his dusty boots.

  “Put the brush down!” Richards ordered a second time, his finger slipping into the trigger guard. “You are under arrest, Robert. Put the brush down and no one will get hurt.”

  The detective should have ignored his training and his humanity. He should not have hesitated or issued a warning, and above all, he should have killed the man on his knees, who was armed with only a paintbrush. If Jack had a gun instead of a sword, he would have pulled the trigger without a qualm, because, unlike Richards he could feel Hor and the other undead creatures.

  They had been swept back with the darkness, but now as the shadows advanced once again, they crept closer. The dark hid them until they were only steps away.

  Cyn shot first.

  Jack watched as if seeing the world in slow motion as she tugged her chin around to the right; the shotgun came around even slower. She could sense the creatures as well as Jack could. “Detective!” she cried.

  Richards took his eyes off Robert for a split second and the moment he did, everything snapped back to normal speed and all hell broke loose...literally. The Incan appeared out of the darkness and was on Cyn so quickly that she didn’t have time to haul the heavy gun to her shoulder. She fired from the hip. There was a blinding light and a roar of an explosion that was shocking to the ears.

  The force of the blast, coupled with an unseen headstone sent the hundred-and-five pound girl falling over backwards, her gun going off a second time, luckily it was pointed at the stars and not at any of them.

  “Help her!” Jack cried, pushing Father Paul toward Cyn and then spinning to face Amanra...or so he thought. The magical blackness was coming back stronger than ever and all Jack could see of the mummy was a flash of bleached bone as claws whistled at him.

  He threw himself backwards to avoid the strike that would have taken out his eyes and left him blind...or rather more blind than he was. The darkness made the next few moments a nightmare of leering bone-faces, sharpened claws and ear-shattering explosions.

  Jack whipped his rapier back and forth, fighting, using only the strange “feeling” he possessed that emanated from behind his breastbone. He could tell the direction of his enemies and if they were closer or further, but not how close or far, so that half the time he flailed at nothing.

  A half minute went by without him being gutted and he found that if he used his ears in conjunction with his ability to “feel” his opponents, he was able to hone in on them. A lucky strike took Amanra’s right arm off and then Jack was so close that he was able to see the monster well enough to send a kick into its chest, knocking it over the front of the Ford.

  Under the pale glow of the running lights, Jack dismembered Amanra in two more swings. Flush with victory, he spun around and headed to where the twin shotguns were tearing up the night. Every time they fired, they appeared to Jack like the breath of dragons. He almost forgot that neit
her Richards nor Cyn could see him and one shot fizzed so close that Jack felt his hair blown back by the blast.

  “It’s me!” he yelled as he cowered behind a tombstone. “Don’t shoot!”

  “Where’s Robert?” Richards bellowed.

  Caught in the swirling darkness, Jack was completely turned around; he barely knew which way up was. “I don’t know he was….” He stopped as he heard mumbling off to his left.

  The words were dreadfully familiar: “Hrr vahl Evi ah hurrumm fd. Kulhrr hrer hrrfhk. Ahk kul, ahk fd, ahk thul ah fherd...” Jack knew these words. Jack had even spoken them aloud when he had been working on deciphering the scroll that his father had left to him. The words and the bloody glyphs opened the portal to the netherworld!

  “Father Paul!” he screamed. “Give us some damned light!”

  There was a moment of hesitancy and then Father Paul began in a wavering voice: “All powerful and ever-living God, cast out from our hearts the darkness of sin…”

  Jack tuned out the priest and with his sword-arm cocked back, he let the sound of the ancient words—“Hrr vahl Evi ah hurrumm fd. Kulhrr hrer hrrfhk. Ahk kul, ahk fd, ahk thul ah fherd.”—lead him to Robert; however, before he could find his cousin in the dark, Hor appeared before him, a ghastly apparition. His presence was a tumor in Jack’s mind causing him to reel back swinging at the darkness with his sword, this way and that.

  The cuts were so feeble that Hor’s laugh bounced back and forth in his mind, echoing, echoing, echoing…beguiling him and stunning him at once. He staggered, knocking into unyielding objects: the Ford, a tombstone, a leafless tree that had lived its life, sucking the remains of the dead from the earth.

  And then, when Jack couldn’t tell up from down, the darkness suddenly drew back and with it went the pounding laugh in Jack’s mind. Jack put out a hand to the nearest thing to him: a weathered tombstone with only the name Orin Haymech and the date April 4th 1863 chiseled upon it. After a hundred and fifty-three years the surface of the granite was so smooth that the lettering was visible only at an angle and even then it was barely visible.

  He gazed around him like the survivor of a car crash would. The ground was littered with bones and ugly chunks of the mummies: an arm here, a torso there, a death shroud caught up in the tree like a child’s kite.

  His cousin Cynthia was alive and unharmed, standing with her back to Detective Richards; there was a gentle wisp of grey smoke rising up from the bore of the shotgun she held in a tight grip. Her breath was running in and out of her causing the smoke to curl into spirals.

  A sound pulled Jack’s head around. It was Robert. During the fight in the dark he hadn’t budged and still knelt over Dr. Loret. Jack’s eyes were drawn to the glyphs and saw that this was the fourth time the spells had been used. Each set of the spells were oriented on the compass and had been drawn at the furthest reaches of the cemetery, north, south east, and west…and this was the last, and when it was done, every corpse within its boundary would come alive.

  “Hrr vahl Evi ah hurrumm fd. Kulhrr hrer hrrfhk. Ahk kul, ahk fd, ahk thul ah fherd,” Robert said, or rather repeated. The spell was spoken in threes and there was no need to guess that this was the third utterance.

  As the last syllable left his lips a harsh, tinny noise rang out from the circle in front of him. It was an ugly sound that made the living cringe and the undead stand up straight as though they had been called to attention by some other-worldly drillmaster. The sound became louder and louder and was joined by other, distant metallic cries, each corresponding to the cardinal points of the compass.

  The sound set up a vibration in Jack’s chest that ran along his nerves and deep into his bones. His strength left him so suddenly that his legs gave out and he fell against Orin Haymech’s stone. The others were in much the same situation. Even Robert was affected by the sound; he backed away from the twin circles that he had drawn with his hands over his ears, his eyes squeezed shut, and his teeth clenched. He too, struck a tombstone and he sagged down against it until the sound gradually became less and faded away.

  Then came a moment of dread expectation. Everyone stared at the twin circles and saw that the cement drive within them had disappeared and now there was what looked like a pool of oil. It was slick ebony and so black that it looked wet. But it wasn’t endless and neither was it perfect in its blackness. There were motes and imperfections that grew as Jack stared, becoming yellow-grey boils that swarmed up from the awful depths.

  “Make it stop,” Jack said…it was more of a beg. He could hear the child-like petulance in his own voice.

  “I can’t,” Robert said. His face was still afflicted by the terror that the metallic sound had induced in them.

  Jack knew he had to get away. He had to run from there before it was too late, before whatever that had been imprisoned in the pit escaped. And yet he couldn’t move. His muscles were jello and shaking and his will wasn’t strong enough to overcome the terror that was building.

  The surface of the black pool became scummed over as the sick boils hit the slick top and flattened out. The surface didn’t balloon as Jack expected, but instead it grew tight and thin. There was a layer of something holding the scum in but it was failing. It grew thin and tighter and tighter until there came a strange sad sigh, a loud aaahhh from the earth as though the planet was dying and giving up its soul.

  Then they escaped.

  They weren’t exactly spirits as Jack understood the term, nor were they ghosts or even souls. What came from the pool was the essence of evil, condensed and given a human shape and maybe even human memories, but they weren’t human, or if they had been, they had been scorched in the void and malformed beyond recognition. They were twisted and tortured. They were chaos. There was nothing to them, they were phantoms of rage.

  In a billowing wave they came soundlessly screaming up out of the void, riding a wind of ice and death, and, ignoring Robert altogether, they made straight for Jack. Neither instinct nor skill saved him. He threw himself backward and slashed with his rapier, but the beings had no form. They were creatures of pure malice and couldn’t be hurt, at least not until they had a body to possess and Jack’s was the closest.

  Dozens of them swept past the blade and swarmed down Jack’s open mouth and went straight up his nose until his lungs were filled with them, freezing the air there and turning his blood to ice. His heart stuttered, forgetting its rhythm and his chest hitched, but no air could move in or out and slowly the world went grey. He was dying, but the creatures didn’t care.

  They fought for supremacy. They fought to see which of them was greatest, to see which would be able to wear him like a meat suit.

  Chapter 17

  Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York

  Jack’s hands went numb and the rapier fell. He could barely feel his fingers as they clawed at his own throat. The swarm inside his chest was killing him. The sensation was similar to that of drowning; however, there was no sweet release from the agony by sucking in lungfuls of seawater.

  The horrible feeling simply went on and on until an unassuming and almost girlish voice said: “Release him. I-In the name of J-Jesus Christ release him.”

  Something gold flashed in the night and Jack was able to focus his eyes long enough to see the unwieldy crucifix Father Paul had been carrying, thrust forward. Then came a screaming in his mind that was picked up by his body as the spirit creatures fled.

  He screamed uncontrollably until the last of them had been forced from him. Jack sat up, but didn’t thank Father Paul—he turned to the side and puked his guts out. Only when he brought up loud croaking burps did he look around and see that not even a minute had passed and that the portal into hell was still open and still gushing forth the warped spirits.

  Father Paul stood hunched over Richards, Cyn, and Jack, holding the symbol of his faith out toward the portal. The spirits would rush up, see the crucifix and then veer away, heading into the cemetery toward the hundreds of thousands of bodies just w
aiting for someone or something to bring them back to a semblance of life.

  As they watched, the phantoms slipped around the cracks in the doors of the mausoleums or slid beneath the dirt—and there were just so many of them.

  “We need to close the portal,” Cyn yelled. The night was no longer quiet. A howling wind rushed up out of the portal and kept her hair spinning so that at times it floated around her face like gold flames. The night was loud but also the four of them were subject to a psychic storm that filled their heads with the crackling static of an unturned and blaring radio.

  They all turned to Father Paul, who nodded, but not as the eager strong priest he had been, but more like a frightened boy. He cleared his throat and raised his hands—the bible in his left, the crucifix in his right. “In the name of the Father, and the son, and the Holy Ghost!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “We humbly prostrate ourselves in your presence, oh Lord, and beg your mercy. Please hear our prayers, Lord and destroy these minions of Satan. Send them back into the void whence they came. In your name, Amen!”

  The swirling spirits flared briefly so that their translucent forms lit brightly from within, but only for a flash and then it was as if nothing had happened and they continued to rush out into the world the way they had been.

  “How come that didn’t work?” Cyn cried. “That should’ve worked.” No one knew, and with the evil in the air and their minds being raped by the static noise, none of them looked capable of properly analyzing the situation.

  “Maybe if we broke the circle it would close the portal,” Jack suggested, coming up with a solution that was in essence: What if we shut the door? They all agreed it was a good plan and then the three of them looked once again to Father Paul. None of them had known the meek priest three hours before, but now they were putting their lives in his hands.

  His arms holding up the bible and the crucifix were trembling, his soft brown face drooped, and his breath was ragged. It took a lot out of him just to yell over the gale: “I don’t think I can. I am very tired and I don’t know why. I am afraid to use up too much of my energy. Mister Jack, you should do it. In my coat pocket is a little bottle of Holy Water. It should do the trick if anything will.”