Ten Thousand Gods Season 1 Episode 1

by Jim Hodgson

  The park was shaped like a wedge, with the pointiest corner facing north. It had a few meandering walking paths, but there was a lesser known footpath in the northern triangle, behind the Botanical Gardens. Phineas had happened upon it when Karlyn's dog Bunny had jerked her leash free and scampered away. He'd found her in a clearing through the trees, peeing on a discarded diet soda bottle. Unless he'd seen the dog bounding in the clearing's direction, he'd never have known about it.

  The best part was that the encroachment of industrial development on all sides of the park meant he could park close by after hours without worry about his car drawing unwanted attention. He carried his now single pail of goat's blood, its wire handle chilly from being in the refrigerator, plus a few candles and a long-stemmed lighter with a flexible tip. He'd burned his fingers a few times trying to light the candles with regular plastic lighters so he'd grabbed the long-stemmed one on a whim.

  In the clearing, he dropped the candles by a bamboo tree and looked around using a head mounted flashlight. The ground was covered in bamboo leaves, which were shades of tan. His first instinct was to clear the ground of them, but the layer of leaves seemed pretty thick. Aside from this, the goat's blood might not show up against dark brown ground underneath the leaves, especially given the low lighting conditions. In the basement it had been dim but nowhere near as dark as this stand of bamboo. He decided to let the leaves stay. If he couldn't make out the pentagram, he'd just have to come back and try again some other time.

  He carefully poured the goat's blood in a pentagram shape, orienting the first point of the pentagram southward. He didn't have any reason for doing this other than it seemed prudent to match the design up with a cardinal direction, and south seemed the most possibly demonic. He had been too miserly with the blood, though, and the pentagram looked thin in a few spots. He went back over those with a second pass.

  He admired his work. Not too bad. It looked like the cover of a horror novel. He put the candles at the tips of the stars, readied his camera, and then went around lighting them with the long lighter. It had been a wise purchase. His fingers didn't get burned at all. The flames looked good, swaying ever so slightly, even though the air felt perfectly still. Couldn't have asked for a better night. If one of those candles fell over, he'd have to stomp it out before the bamboo leaves caught and he ended up setting fire to all of Midtown.

  He set the camera's timer then posed in the pentagram for a few shots. He prayed again and again for Satan to come, using every possible format he could think of. In the end he was just sitting cross-legged on the ground chanting "Satan! Hey, hey! Satan!" He was being silly, but he was excited with how these photos would look. They were absolutely going to kill on social media.

  As he was standing to begin the packing up process, he remembered the message from the C2lu person on the message boards. "In your own skin," it said. He looked around. Well, there was no one to see, was there? What could be the harm? He'd strip down, take one more quick shot before the candles burned out, and then be home before anyone saw his dangly parts.

  He kicked his shoes off, feeling the ground's cold damp on his bare feet and the bamboo leaves crunching a bit. Soon he was standing in just his briefs, looking around. Might as well get it over with. He set the camera's timer, then hurried into the pentagram, laying down on it with his head pointing toward the south-most point of the star. He began to pray, but then something gave way underneath him and he was falling through the ground.

  His arms and legs flailed for some way to stop himself, but he was falling through a cold, stinking darkness. Every breath nearly suffocated him with a rancid odor like someone was warming a long dead thing over a hot fire, and the sensation of falling was a spike of fear driven through his body.

  He screamed, expecting the sound to reverberate back into his face from the sides of whatever he'd tumbled into, but the sound was swallowed by the blackness. Something hard flicked past the outstretched tip of his right hand's middle finger and he waved his hand toward it, but there was nothing. Now he banged his elbow against something in the dark, hard enough to send stars of pain shooting up his arm. He reached for the elbow with his opposite hand and felt blood flowing there.

  He was falling at terrific speed when he slammed into the wet bottom of the pit. It gave, like landing on a trampoline, except it felt like it was made of wet leather. In the center was a hard ring of some kind. A trail of blood ran down his left arm, and his right hand was slick with it as well, but as he felt the rest of his body there were no injuries. The trampoline membrane thing he was on appeared to be admitting a dim glow through from the other side. He could see that the membrane had crazy markings on it like veins. His eyes had to be playing tricks on him. How could—

  Then the hard donut thing at the center of the membrane opened, and his foot slipped through. A shaft of light shot up through the hole, and he could smell burning and fire. He scrambled for the wall of the pit -- he could see it now -- but the membrane was slick and opening wider. He managed to get a hand onto the pit wall and grab onto something, but it too was slick and his hand slipped away, tearing something with it as he came. He saw it in his hand as he fell through the membrane. Hair. It looked like human hair, with a section of rotting scalp attached.

  He crashed down again, this time with a crunch and a hard whack on his head. His vision tilted this way and that, clearing just in time to see a chitinous spike stab him through the left thigh. He screamed, then looked skyward to find it belonged to a gigantic ant beast with a thousand mouths. Mouths inside of mouths, with mandibles clicking. The thing dipped its head toward Phineas with a nod, and two of the pincers caught him around the middle, slicing him open and spilling his insides from his body. He felt them tumble across his hand. The thing lifted him, tearing his leg free of the spike that had pierced it, then threw his twisted, bloody body into a lake of fire. The flames engulfed him, vaporize his body, and someone was kicking his feet.

  #

  Kicking his feet? Yes. He scrambled away from the flames, pushing wildly with his hands. The flames made a ... crackling, rustling noise?

  "Whoa, easy slick," came a voice. "We got a live one here, huh?"

  Phineas realized he was on all fours in the gloom of the park clearing. A candle flickered, showing the bamboo leaves, his pentagram, and someone smirking at him.

  "Barry? What are you doing here? I just—" He struggled to collect his thoughts. He'd just been eviscerated and tossed into a lake of fire by some kind of gigantic ant dragon. Hadn't he? He could still feel the warm syrupy wetness of his intestines spilling past his fingers as he tried to hold his body together.

  "I think a better question is why are you flopping around like a fish on a hot dock, butt naked in Piedmont Park?" Barry swiped his left hand through his hair and gave a sardonic laugh. The other was jammed in a pocket.

  Phineas could still smell that choking, burning smell from wherever he'd just been. "Do you smell that?"

  "Shut your pie hole," Barry said. "You just had a little episode, right?"

  "I don't... I don't know what I just had."

  "Well, let it be a lesson to you. Don't fuck around with things you don't understand."

  Phineas was cold to his bones. He got unsteadily to his feet and looked around for his clothes. They were piled where he'd left them. "I guess you did warn me," he said. "Wait, where's my phone?"

  "I let a bum take it. Let that be a lesson to you too, ya little shit."

  A thunderclap sounded somewhere across the darkened park. Suddenly the copse of trees seemed to be looming over Phineas, ready to claw at him. He dressed hurriedly. "Wait, you let what?" he asked, turning to face Barry again. There was no one there. Phineas stared at the empty space where Barry had been just seconds ago, and his eyes registered a lessening of the darkness. The sun was rising. It was a new day.

  End of Episode One

  Author’s Note

  Hey there. I hope you enjoyed this first episode of Ten Thous
and Gods!

  I’d love it if you could give me an honest review on Amazon.com. Reviews are vital to authors like myself, so if you have the time, I’d appreciate it.

  Find me on the web at jimhodgson.com, and sign up for my mailing list for news on the rest of this season as well as other projects I’m working on. I can be found on Twitter at @jimhodgson, and on Facebook as, well, myself. My email is jim@jimhodgson.com. Hit me up, if you like.

  There are five more episodes of Ten Thousand Gods in this series. I’m very proud of them, and I hope you’ll join me on the rest of the journey.

  I owe big thanks to Meghann Cantey, my partner, best friend, and chief beta reader. Thanks to Garrett Marco (marcoediting.com) for his editing on this work, and Bear Roberts (bearroberts.com) for the cover art.

  And thanks again to you for checking out my work. See you on the next one, I hope.