“We’re going to use the regressions to find the truth. The more we use the Trinity Link, the more autonomy you seem to get. I need answers. There is so much I still don’t know about the estate. With your added influence…” He trailed off, lost in the memory of the estate’s destruction.
Chuck collected his tapes off the table, stuffed everything into their carrying case, and then grabbed his other belongings from near the front door. “There is something to the regressions, the Trinity Link, whatever—it’s not just you making stuff up—but I can’t promise I’m coming back, not until I talk to my wife. I’ll contact you soon.”
Chuck hurried out to his car, fearing that if he didn’t leave now, Everett would never let him go.
Everett followed, but at a distance, as if afraid to leave the shelter of the building. “Chuck! This book will change history. This biography! You can’t run away from this.”
“I’ll call you.”
Chuck slammed the door, pulled away, and watched Everett dwindle in the rearview mirror. Everett was still so young, and he was likely the most beautiful man Chuck had ever seen. It scared him. Such perfection was unnatural, like Everett had made a deal with the Devil. At that moment a Faustian bargain didn’t seem that far-fetched.
Maybe the knowledge discovered by the House of Cabal was a Pandora’s Box that shouldn’t be opened.
On Chuck’s left, the Pacific Ocean reflected silver clouds. It was the middle of the night and it seemed odd how bright they were. A surfboard leaned against an old shed on the beach. Lane and Kyle were said to live close by in the orchard. Chuck wondered if the surfboard was theirs. He rolled his window down so he could breathe again. Those spiders! His skin still crawled. He shivered. He feared some had stowed away in the backseat but quickly realized he was being paranoid.
The spiders reminded him of something that he had subconsciously tried to forget. A cold sweat broke out as he remembered my alien visage from the regression. He had a vague memory of my cloak and my many arms, but what he remembered clearly was the way my two pupils had changed into four. He remembered my clockwork-like eyes very well indeed.
Chuck’s impulse to scream took more than a few moments to pass.
Despite the darkness and the roadblock up ahead, he could still see the line of the road as it continued north and rounded its way up the cliffside. The next regression would take Chuck up that road, back in time, before the fall.
He turned right, the way he had come that morning, and drove down the narrow road through the grassy flat and into the orchard that separated the shore from the highway.
After a few minutes of winding through the grotesque trees and smashing oranges under his tires, he came to a slow stop. How could he just pass through the orchard when he knew what waited inside the oranges?
The smell of rot was less pungent at night but still strong. He turned off the engine, leaving the buzz of insects to fill the silence.
Too scared to get out of his car, the orchard a dark twisted unknown, he unbuckled his seatbelt, reached out the window, and grabbed a low-hanging orange just within reach. The skin felt warm, like inside burned a tiny fire. He breathed in the citrus smell.
“Pinsleep? Are you still watching? If you are, I want you to know I’ll do it.” He felt chosen and sanctified. I scared him, but of course an angel of God would be frightening. “I’ll help you find out what happened at the House of Cabal.”
He peeled the orange and felt the bugs scramble inside. They were his anointment and reward. He leaned out the window, resting his gut on the door, and held the orange out over the ground.
He broke the orange in half.
A mass of opalescent bugs swarmed out onto his hands, while others spilled onto the brick. They were tiny, yet they could grant him immortality. All he had to do was eat.
Soon the whole world would know their miracle. He might as well be one of the first to partake.
He put as many of them as he could into his mouth. They tasted like sunflower seeds. He thought they would make him gag, but after mashing them between his teeth, they went down easily.
He brushed off his face and hands and any that still clung to his shirt sleeves, and pulled himself back into the car. He looked at himself in the mirror and made sure none had infested his beard. It was best to start out with a conservative amount. He examined the crow’s feet around his squinty eyes. Would those wrinkles go away? If the bugs actually worked, he doubted it would take a large quantity. After all, if he consumed too many, they might cause the side effects Everett had warned him about.
If he was going to live forever, was forgetting trauma really such a bad thing? It sounded more like a benefit. There were already quite a few things he had experienced in his life that he wouldn’t mind forgetting.
He never liked to admit it to himself, but his father’s death made him worry about his own mortality all the time. Cliché maybe, but it didn’t make it any less true. Sudden heart failure killed even successful people. He wasn’t going to go out that way if he could help it. And especially not before releasing this next book. This one would eclipse anything he had written before. Meredith would finally understand why he worked so relentlessly.
“Pinsleep, I’ll do it. I’ll show you what man has hidden from God.” It sounded like something a prophet would say.
Maybe he was a prophet.
As he drove out of the orchard, he had to pull off to the side of the road to let a white van pass in the opposite direction. He had no idea that his wife was trapped in a box in the back, abducted by two actors loyal to the House of Cabal.
Continued in House of Cabal: Volume Two coming March 2016
###
Thank you for reading, The House of Cabal Volume One: Eden.
For a free Lovecraft inspired short story, “The Ovum Horror,” sign up for Wesley McCraw’s mailing list HERE.
About the Author:
Born, raised, and currently living in Oregon, Wesley McCraw writes speculative fiction. Right now he is focused on horror. Next, maybe it will be romantic, comedic fantasy.
Wes graduated from the University of Oregon, where he completed the much-acclaimed Kidd Tutorial, a one-year intensive writing clinic. During his time at the university, he was also a member of Write Club, where he trained under screenwriter Omar Naim (The Final Cut, Dead Awake).
The Forgiving is based on Wes’s screenplay of the same name. He plans on adapting more of his screenplays in the future, including Brief Pose, the 2011 winner of the StoryPros screenplay competition in the sci-fi/fantasy/horror category.
Wes is also working on a multi-installment epic, House of Cabal, a romantic comedy, Lucky in Love, and the sci-fi pulp serial Vampire Fiction.
You can follow Wesley’s misadventures in self-publishing at:
http://selfwrite.wordpress.com/
and find him on twitter @wesleymccraw.
A note from the Author:
If you liked what you read, please write a review and copy and paste it in as many places as you can find The House of Cabal sold on the internet. Your help means everything to the life of this book. The House of Cabal is independently published and doesn’t have a budget for marketing. It lives and dies on your word-of-mouth.
If you have yet to buy a copy, that’s okay, but please consider buying a copy now to show your support, or maybe consider buying one of my future releases. The more books I sell, the more I can focus on writing.
Thanks you, reader. You are why I write.
Wesley McCraw
Roseburg, Oregon
January 1, 2016
Here is a sample from The Forgiving, currently available HERE.
Chapter One
The House
1
Jacobi House stood like any house—severely erect, perhaps even proud, but made by human hands.
Its two-stories perched high on a bluff on the Willamette River, not in isolation, but in Portland, Oregon, a city of more than six hundred thousand souls. In dec
ay the house remained defiant, but that was true of most historic buildings that had survived into the new millennium.
Evil may have walked its halls, but the building itself wasn’t evil in any of its parts. Its foundation didn’t disturb any burial plots, American Indian or otherwise, and its architectural design wasn’t a demonic summoning glyph, though these theories had been suggested each time the house had been partially torn down and rebuilt.
People feared the place like they feared the dark. Hope died there. Horror put down roots. But Jacobi House was like any other house.
Save for one thing.
Jacobi House needed forgiveness. And it would have forgiveness, hell or high heaven.
2
On the south side of Jacobi House stood the smaller Stonecipher House.
After the railway had connected Portland to Sellwood in the early 1900's, the Stonecipher tradesmen, mostly carpenters, built a blue and white Victorian Revival next door for the same reason lighthouse keepers build family lodging near lighthouses. The Stonecipher men took shifts in Jacobi House fixing plumbing, replacing rot and rust, minding the electric, and remodeling whole rooms, but they needed accommodations less harsh and unforgiving for their wives and children.
The caretaking of Jacobi House passed down through the generations until only three Stoneciphers remained alive: mother and her two young children, Molly and Alexander.
“In the beginning...” Six-year-old Molly read out loud at her child-size desk in her austere bedroom. Her Bible lay open to a picture of the serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden. “...God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
Molly’s hair, having never been cut, was the same length as Eve’s in the picture. Members of The Cross of the Lamb had to follow a long list of rules: conservative dress, long hair for girls, prayer three times a day, no unclean meats, no caffeine, no spicy foods, memorization of the whole Bible before age twelve. The list went on from there.
As required, she read from the Bible every day in the light from her window, even though she didn’t know the meaning of many of the words. She had six more years to get it right. “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” She yawned into her fingers. “And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.”
Antsy, she flipped ahead. The Bible was the longest, most boring book in the whole world. It had illustrations, but she already knew them all, even what pages they were on.
Jacobi House's upper-story windows stared back through razor wire that topped a dividing wall. Dead leaves blew past. Molly usually paid the house next door no mind, but her father’s rattling, wet coughs had echoed through Stonecipher House the past few nights, even though Mother had buried Father out back more than six months ago. It had to be the cursed house next door that made his suffering linger.
Molly left the Bible. She put her ear to her door and held her breath to listen. She swallowed her excess spit. Satisfied no one was coming, she crept back across the room, knelt beside her desk, and removed a baseboard.
Inside the wall waited Dolly, a cornhusk doll Father had let Molly squirrel away, and she hugged it and kissed its corn silk hair. The doll was all she had left of him.
“You be a good little girl,” she whispered. “Or your skin will burn like paper.”
She replaced the baseboard and sat at her desk.
As she played behind the glass of her window, the wind howled, and the trees behind Stonecipher House undulated and lost more leaves. The leaves covered her father’s grave. They floated out over Sellwood Park and the river.
Mixed with the rustling leaves and the howling wind, human screams originated from Jacobi House.
In contrast, Molly’s room was almost silent. She repressed the urge to tell Dolly stories (Mother might hear), and instead danced the doll across the picture Bible, across the burning of Sodom, across the Nile red with first-born blood, across the Jews wandering the desert, and finally into the loving arms of Jesus.
She pulled at the tight, itchy collar of her Puritan dress. More leaves blew past her window. How nice the fresh air would feel.
Windows could usually be opened.
She crawled onto her desk and pushed up on the window frame. It wouldn’t budge. She braced her feet on the surface of the desk and pushed up with all her strength. The window burst open with a loud CLACK and let in a rush of wind that reversed direction and blew the doll between Molly's feet off the desk and out the window.
The husk dress caught on the razor wire on the dividing wall.
“Dolly!”
The doll danced on the razor until another gust sent it flying down onto the Jacobi property. Dolly was gone.
The wind died and left a distant screaming pinned in the air. Molly backed off the desk and covered her ears. Her eyes watered.
From a barred window across the way, the screaming intensified. A lace curtain wavered behind the bars. Sometimes, if Molly watched closely, she saw glimpses of children in Jacobi House.
Molly’s window slammed shut and cut off the screams. Her mother, buttoned up in her own murrey Puritan dress, stood with her hand clutching the window frame. “Molly! What've I told you? You know better! Never open this window. What've I told you about Jacobi House?”
“It's haunted.”
“What haunts Jacobi House?”
“Sin.”
“Then why did you open the window? I've warned you. I've told you about this.” She continued in a more controlled tone. “If not for the House of Skulls, that sin would bear down upon us. And what would happen then?”
“We'd burn.”
Her mother gazed out the window. “You must promise me to never go to that house.”
“I promise.”
“Good girl.” Her mother let out a breath and forced a smile. “Now, have you studied your Bible verses?”
Molly nodded a hesitant “yes” and then looked away, avoiding her mother's gaze.
“Molly...”
She had studied her verses, just not enough of them. It wasn’t a lie. “But Alex gets to go to school!”
Mother reached out. Molly flinched, but Mother just fixed Molly's hair. “Yes, but Alex is a boy.”
The girl flushed with anger.
Since father died, she often wished her mother wasn’t her mother, that Alex wasn’t her brother, and that she herself wasn’t Molly anymore. She needed Dolly back from that dark, no-good house. She couldn’t go during the day; her mother would see. But at night! At night she would sneak out the window, down the fire escape ladder, and through the front gate of Jacobi House. In the shroud of darkness, she would save the one thing she still loved and that loved her back.
3
At the same time the wind stole Molly’s doll away, her brother, Alex, drew a circle on a piece of paper at his desk at school. His yellow crayon snapped from the pressure. He ripped down the waxy label and continued to draw with the stump.
While he and the other children of his class continued to draw, his first grade teacher, Isabel Torres, cleaned a whiteboard with hand sanitizer and a paper towel. The alcohol in the hand sanitizer made it an effective alternative to expensive cleaning solutions. The children were all so quiet and focused that as the teacher scrubbed, she noticed the ticking of the clock above her on the wall. For her, the last hour stretched longer than the whole morning before it.
Lumen Christi Catholic Elementary originally opened its doors as Lumen Christi School for Boys more than a hundred years ago. Back in those days, while Catholic priests taught young boys on the first and second floors, other priests used the basement as an infirmary for the old, dying priests and nuns of the whole Northwest area. As the boys studied, screams sometimes came from below, especially from the basement room reserved for exorcisms. A hundred years later, th
e basement housed school supplies and broken desks and projectors, and few ventured down the dark corridors or into the stone, windowless storage rooms; the basement had a reputation for unsettling even the bravest souls.
More than one paranormal website featured the school as a haunted hot spot, quoting past custodians and even a few students about eerie encounters with spirits from the beyond.
Directly above the old exorcism room were Isabel and her pupils.
The classroom door opened to the hall, and Becky, the headmistress, stood in the doorway. Her boney hand beckoned.
Isabel set down the hand sanitizer. Becky already looked annoyed by the wait, her arms crossed, her shoulder holding open the door. She glanced down Isabel's body. Isabel became hyperaware of any exposed skin; was her modest Sunday dress still not conservative enough?
Becky didn't speak immediately and instead studied Isabel's face. A marker smudge marred Isabel's cheek. The headmistress wrinkled her nose. “You coming to Sunday Mass?”
“Of course.”
“We missed you last week. If you can't manage…”
“I was sick.” Isabel had already explained her absence more than once. It was the one time she had missed Mass since starting at Lumen Christi six years ago.
“How would it look to the parents? I mean, one of our teachers never attending services.”
Isabel un-tucked the collar of a child's coat that hung by the door. She knew Becky's real issue. Over the summer, someone had discovered Isabel's relationship with Howard Stark. Having been together for more than eight years, they were as committed as any married couple, but she knew the school board didn't see it that way. To her shock, they had let her stay on (she guessed some were just happy she wasn't single), but since then, her coworkers, especially Becky, had stopped hiding their contempt.
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