The man with the shotgun went out into the crowd and disappeared. Alan still stood behind Hank and Amy.
He put the gun to Amy’s temple and said, “Take off all of your clothes, both of you.” He was so direct and cold that neither of them hesitated in the slightest. They both stripped bare naked.
Hank covered his genitals with his hands but Amy stood defiant. They were both trembling in fear. Neither of them had ever seen anything like the throng gathered in their yard. The severity of the situation was not lost on them. Several of the congregants lit tiki torches off of the bonfire and made a path that was wide enough for two people to walk abreast from the porch to the bonfire. Hank let out a little urine as he struggled to contain his fear. They were both shaking from the cold fall air. They both noticed Kelly Williams and D.E.A. agent Daniel McCormick among the congregation of maniacs.
“Come forth high priest!” Alan yelled out to the crowd.
A figure in a black robe with a red stripe, much like the white ones, emerged from deep within the crowd and there was a steady chattering of teeth clicking together as he walked to the porch. He carried a plain black robe in his hands. When he got to the porch he walked right between Hank and Amy straight to Alan. They could see that the figure was Jared. He gave the robe to Alan, who put it on over his regular clothes. It had a yellow stripe down the front and on the hood, then all the way down the back. It occurred to Hank that their cult was much more organized than he had even imagined.
As Alan got robed Jared pulled out a large, curved ritual blade from under his robe. He walked between Hank and Amy, to the front of the porch, caressing Amy’s ass with the blade of his sacrificial knife. He addressed the crowd by lifting his hand in the air and giving a strange sign, a gesture neither Hank nor Amy had ever seen before. He followed it with a series of deliberate slashes through the air. When he was done he took a step back and the crowd roared.
“S’arl Amoth! Ia Shub-Niggurath!” They were words Hank had never heard before, but he knew they meant he and his wife were screwed. Amy had seen the words at Jared’s house once, scrawled on a piece of paper. When she had asked about what it was he had told her that it was from a religious studies class he had taken in college and that it was a phrase from a dead language that hadn’t been spoken in thousands of years. At the time she seemed content with the answer. At the moment she wished that she had found out more, but he had gotten irritated just at the mention of it so she had let it go.
Jared turned back toward Hank and Amy. Alan cleared his throat to remind them both that he was still present in case either of them tried to flee. Not that there was anywhere to go except empty fields until they got to woods, which the locals knew much better than they did. Hank had never felt so much like a fish out of water. He knew he was about to be ritually sacrificed. He looked over at his wife and stared deep into her eyes. “I love you Amy,” was all he could say. She gave him the best Mona Lisa smile that she could manage, trying to reassure him. Trying to be supportive even in such a moment of pure terror. Jared grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her forcefully down the stairs and started pulling her toward the bonfire. Alan kicked Hank in the lower back and he fell straight to the ground, skinning his knee on the pavement of the walkway from the front porch to the driveway, leaving a thick bloody smear that he could easily see in the torchlight.
Alan dragged Hank to his feet and grabbed him by the hair, put the gun to his head and marched him to the fire right behind Amy and Jared. The entire crowd’s focus shifted from the porch to the fire. When Hank got there he saw that they were fitting Amy with a black robe, but it had a white sash tied around the waist. She seemed confused and he saw tears flowing down her cheek in the firelight. A random, robed figure brought forth a goat, leashed with a simple rope.
Jared shouted the strange phrases again, followed by several other more guttural noises that Hank couldn’t follow. Noises that did not come from any human language and reminded Hank of a cat hacking up a fur ball more than any spoken tongue. He was floored when the crowd would return Jared’s strange calls. Jared pointed the blade at the goat and it shone bright in the fire light.
As he raised the blade Hank followed it and noticed Jared had it pointed at the full moon. He turned toward Hank and leaned in close to him and whispered in his ear, “Tonight is the full moon. Tonight all the gas giants are in conjunction. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. This night has been millennia in coming. This night we bring our lord to this world. This night we make our lord flesh and you have the privilege, out of everyone in all of humanity to be the offering that calls him forth. A new era will come and the world will know the power of the Old Ones. You should rejoice. It is your blood that has been chosen.”
Hank began to cry. Jared turned back to the goat and slit its throat. He took a handful of its hot blood and wiped it on Amy’s face, chanting in that strange tongue. He shouted something that sounded much like gibberish and the crowd returned something equally as ridiculous sounding. Jared snapped his fingers and two men came forward and threw the body of the goat into the fire. When they were done they both knelt in front of Jared and tilted their heads all the way back after lowering their hoods. Their bare throats, exposed in the firelight and the full moon, were quickly turned crimson by Jared’s blade. Hank and Amy both gasped as they again recognized their handler, agent McCormick as one of the two. The men had given themselves willingly, without hesitation. Pure cult fanaticism like they had never imagined. Jared put his empty hand to each of their throats and smeared a swath of blood across Amy’s chest and breasts. She squirmed at his touch, as he put his hand beneath her robe and smeared her with the cultist’s life essence. Four others came forward and threw the two bodies into the bonfire. The smell sickened Hank, not because it was foul, but because it reminded him of any other meat cooking and it made his stomach growl. He was appalled at his own body’s natural reaction to cooking meat.
The people who had been nearest the porch, with the robes striped with white, came forward as a group. One of them had a satchel that appeared to be made out of human skin. They opened it up and Jared reached his hand into it and produced a powder that he threw into the fire, producing a bright green light that lasted for several seconds. “S’arl Amoth! S’arl Amoth Te Za’vrock! S’arl Amoth!” he shouted and the crowd repeated the same three times after him, sending chills through Hank and Amy both.
The second of the white striped figures produced something from under her robe and it took a moment for Hank to see it as it was in shadow from his angle, but Amy immediately noticed that it was the severed head of an infant, retching as she beheld it her mouth filled with bile. Jared took the tiny head and raised it into the air. The crowd shouted something neither Hank nor Amy could make out and Jared threw it into the fire too. The fire roared, sparked and hissed. The flame itself then turned the shade of green it had previously, but remained that color as the fire swelled into a thirty foot, roaring conflagration fueled by some eldritch and unknowable power.
Another of Jared’s deacons stepped forward. This one pulled a living pit bull puppy out from under his robe. Jared just gave a gesture with his blade and the deacon tossed it right on the fire. Hank cried out, “You Fucker!” as he heard the poor animal shrieking in anguish as the flames consumed it. Alan’s foot kicked him in the knee from behind and he fell to the ground with a thud, landing right on his bloodied kneecaps.
Hank stayed down for a moment, tying not to see any more of the horrors. After another few minutes of chanting and throwing things into the fire the cult, in unison, took a few steps back. Hank and Amy joined them instinctively, fearing something might emerge from the fire.
Several more minutes passed in what seemed like total silence. Then just as the Ramseys were both wondering what was about to happen, if anything, a thick, sickly yellow smoke came rolling out of the fire. It coalesced above the flames and they went out entirely, although it got brighter as the thick smoke became luminescent. A ghastly gr
een glow filled the yard and the field and all the robed figures fell to their knees in prostration, touching their foreheads to the ground and chanting, “S’arl Amoth! S’arl Amoth!” Only Jared still stood, along with Hank and Amy.
The cloud of smoke began to coalesce and swirl about in a vortex that kicked up a high wind around the entire yard. It began to shine brighter by the moment, bathing everything in the wretched green light. Lightning began to crackle through it in arcing bursts. The smoke shot into the sky, a green pillar all the way to the clouds, it seemed almost solid. An amorphous face came together in the center of it, some thirty feet off of the ground. Two large red eyes the size of men opened in the face that was otherwise featureless. They slanted in a sinister, piercing gaze and a voice that was thunder and death rang out, addressing Jared directly.
“High priest. You have called me forth. It was not my time to entire your world. A thousand, thousand lifetimes will pass before I make myself whole in your realm. You dreamed of power and so you opened the gate, thinking I would come through the threshold and thrust it upon you. I offer only death.”
Jared’s deacons all stood up in unison, as if receiving a message no one else could hear. They seized him, disarmed him and dragged him to the bonfire pit where the entity’s disembodied spirit was hovering between worlds. Jared did not protest, he was totally silent. He was put on his knees.
“Hank, they thought that you were the chosen feast that I would dine on. That your soul should be the nourishment that I required to manifest. The fools! Come, plunge the blade into the heart of this priest and let his death have meaning where his life did not,” the voice was more than Hank could resist. Even as it spoke he felt compelled to obey it, didn’t even consider that there was another option.
It was only when he had the ritual knife in hand that he noticed the red eyes of the children of Larvamog all around, at the periphery of the yard, just out of the firelight. He would have never even known they were there if it weren’t for their eyes. Then Hank stared Jared in the eyes deeply, showing no mercy with his own stare. Jared closed his eyes and began chanting to himself under his breath. Amy screamed as Hank brought the blade down in a brutal thrust. He plunged it into Jared’s chest as deeply as he could and gouts of blood pumped out onto Hank’s hand. He found pleasure in stabbing Jared so he did it again, and again, and again. He stabbed Jared until he could no longer stab because he lacked the strength to go on. He was no longer totally naked. Hank wore a suit of blood, nearly from head to toe.
Hank and the deacons, without even communicating, threw Jared’s body on the smoldering embers as the sky high pillar of glowing green smoke dissipated, lightning arcs crackling as it did so.
Hank didn’t even care what was going to happen next. He turned to see Amy was only a few feet behind him and that all of the cult members where standing again, mulling about, wondering what just happened and what to do about it. Hank grabbed Amy’s hand and they began running for the house as fast as they could while the cult was still confused. Hank had picked the ritual knife up again after throwing Jared in the fire and he used it to hack at anyone that came between them and getting back inside and to their shotguns.
There was the loud sound of gunshots and the screams of somebody getting shot, mixed with the screams of a few men Hank had severely wounded with the knife. As they got to the front door and made it back inside the house Hank noticed Alan standing in the middle of the yard, pointing his pistol at the house. The glass pane in the window of the front door exploded as a bullet came through right next to Hank’s head. He turned to run back further into the house and noticed that Amy had already gotten their shotguns out of the bedroom and was heading back to the foyer to shoot anybody that approached the front door.
She threw Hank his shot gun and they both pointed out the front door and started blasting. They took their time aiming, even hit a few of the cultists, but Alan was nowhere to be seen. The remaining robed cult members scrambled out of the yard, all to vehicles which had been parked out on the main road. Hank and Amy kept firing until they no longer saw nor heard anything else.
Hank didn’t even wash the gore and blood off of his naked body until the sun had risen. Still he took his loaded shotgun into the bathroom with him and had Amy watching the approach to the front door, using binoculars to see anyone long before they even made it to the driveway. As he washed off his red suit Hank wondered how many dead bodies were in his front yard.
21
The Battery
Hank got out of the shower and yelled through the house for Amy to make sure that everything was okay and that they hadn’t come back in those few minutes. She affirmed that everything was fine. She was sitting on the porch smoking a cigarette. He dried off and went into the bedroom where they had the last of their things, other than the grow room in the upstairs and all the equipment. As far as he was concerned they were going to leave it all behind. After all, staying an extra day to clean up had resulted in the horrible events of the previous evening. Who knew what staying another day would cause? They had bigger problems than the grow room to worry about anyway. What about the bodies in the front yard? Some of them were sure to be victims of their own shotguns.
Hank decided that he might leave the lights and the hydroponic setup, but he wasn’t going to leave the plants themselves hanging. He went upstairs to get them, taking an empty duffle bag with him to shove as many plants into as he could take with him. The majority would be left behind, he knew, but he would take what he could get and was determined not to make it a total loss.
As he got about halfway up the stairs he collapsed, feeling a deep pain in his side. Hank knew he wasn’t having a seizure, but he knew over the past few days he hadn’t taken his medications as he should. Trying to ween off of so many drugs in order to keep his dying liver from giving up on him was a good effort, but one enacted far too late. He knew that eventually he would have to give up all of his drugs, if he wanted treatment for his hepatitis. He just didn’t expect that his liver would give him so many problems, he had been in a deep denial about the state of his health since he had been diagnosed with Hep-C and told his liver was failing.
Hank struggled to his feet, he told himself that he had to endure, had to press on. Every part of him just wanted to lay down and give up. He could tell that he was full of toxins, that his liver hadn’t been doing its job in a long time. His own blood was poison, a vile venom that kept him in a delirium. Hank could feel a terrible headache come on as he realized that his brain was being poisoned by his own nasty blood. He fought to clear his mind, breathing deeply and trying to center himself.
After a few minutes Hank was able to drag himself up to the top of the staircase, using the handrail to bear much of his weight. When he got his bearings he took another deep breath. Hank opened up his grow room door and took as many of the hanging plants as he could fit into the duffle bag. It was about twenty five. He thought that he could fit forty if he had another day to dry them, but it didn’t matter. It was all going to produce hash oil anyway.
As he got done putting the premature plants up, he looked around thinking what a waste it was to leave the rest. He sighed deeply, turned and walked out of his grow space forever. As Hank headed back to the stairs he stepped on something. He looked down and saw that it was the doll…Matilda. He began to panic, stumbled backwards, bewildered. It hadn’t been there a moment before. He tripped over his own duffle bag as he dropped it and fell flat onto his back, scrambling to try to get away from that hellish toy.
Before Hank could sit up a boot came from behind him and put its full weight on his shoulder. He looked up to see Quan standing over him, pinning him to the ground, smiling from ear to ear. Hank screamed as Quan vaporized into a fine blue mist and penetrated every pore of his body, wholly consuming him. Hank was helpless in his own body as the railwayman took control. If Hank could have still cried he would have as he screamed at the possessing spirit in his mind. As even his tear ducts failed him he o
nly had his thoughts to fight the possessing spirit and even those were privy to the wretched thing.
“I ain’t done wit’ chew yet Hanky buoy. I’m gonna have me some fun,” Quan made Hank’s lips move and the voice was his own, but his ears dreaded the words he was making.
The first thing Quan did with his body was to walk over to the doll and pick it up off of the floor. Hank could hear Amy on her way up the stairs. She must have heard the screams. She appeared at the top in only another moment, brandishing her shotgun, but only seeing Hank she lowered it immediately.
“Are you alright Hank? I heard screaming!” Amy seemed frantic, which was completely understandable given what they had just been through.
Hank hoped that Quan would just use her for sex the way he had with Amanda Wexler. His hopes were in vain. He knew as soon as his mouth opened again and he heard Quan’s words come out.
“Ain’t no Hank here girl. Why’re you playin’ ‘round? I thought I done told you not to leave your damn dolls layin’ ‘round, didn’t I?” there was little of Hank left, he could see that in Amy’s reaction that she knew it wasn’t him. He took a step towards her and backhanded her hard across the mouth, drawing blood. She tried to gather herself, but he was upon her raining blow after blow down on her head and shoulders as she cowered and tried to block what she could.
Quan kicked her and hit her with balled up fists with as much force as he could muster through Hank’s body. She was crumpling up, failing to block most of the attacks from landing. Even when she did manage to block him she still suffered horrible pain in her arms. She could tell that he meant to kill her.
Gravel Switch: the black goat chronicles book 1: a Weird Tale of Extreme Horror Page 18