Samuel flailed and sank in the rushing water. His eyes opened wide but saw only blackness. Chilling pain dominated his last thoughts before consigning himself to death. That is, until he snagged something with his hand.
Samuel was being pulled from the river before he realized what was happening. He blinked hard to get the water out of his eyes, rubbed them with the palm of his hands and squinted before he could make anything out in the darkness.
The rain soaked his mother's hair, pasting it to her face. She looked concerned.
“Mom! There was a goat..and Miss Gordon...”
“Shhhhh...” his mother offered. “You almost drowned, but Dale saved you.”
Samuel could see Dale standing behind his crouching mother. He didn't look too concerned.
“But...”
“It's okay, baby. You're okay. Momma's got you. No need to make stories anymore. It's all over.”
Samuel furrowed his brow in confusion before unconsciousness took him.
___
It was the cold that woke him. The cold or the pain. Samuel was certain he felt both. A remarkable warmth, though, pressed down on his body. His back cold as ice. His ankle throbbed in agony. He tried to roll onto his side, but found that his hands were pulled up over his head. He opened his eyes and his vision was bathed in a warm orange blur. He blinked his eyes to clarity to see Dale staring down at him from his left side.
“Dale?”
“I told you not to come here, Samuel,” he said. He was stone cold sober. Samuel couldn't remember when he'd last seen that.
Others stood around Samuel, farther back than Dale. To his right he saw his mother, and beside her, Mr. Waite. There were a few others from the community and a couple other white people Samuel didn't recognize.
“What? Why?” When he tried to sit up, he realized his hands were bound together above his head with heavy rope. He pulled and kicked with his legs, despite the pain in his left ankle, but his feet too were bound. He twisted on the stone slab in a vain effort to free himself.
“Calm down, Samuel,” his mother said, placing her palm on his forehead. “It will be all over soon.”
“What? Like it was for Miss Gordon? What the fuck, mom? What are you doing here?”
“You should never have come here, Samuel,” Mr. Waite said. He'd always looked unremarkable, but with the hood over his head and the flickering torchlight on his face, he looked positively skeletal.
“So I'm told...” Samuel said under his breath while straining with his wrists. The pain faded from his mind as he focused on getting away. It wasn't working.
“We don't want to do this, Samuel,” Dale said.
“I tried to tell them it would be okay,” his mother said. “That the stories you tell would make it so no one would believe you no matter what you said. They believed me, too – “
“Until,” Mr. Waite interrupted, “I brought up that you ruined our sacrifice.”
“What?”
Mr. Waite came around to stand behind Samuel's head. Samuel could see the Black Goat standing and watching him, heaving huge breaths. Two sickly yellow eyes peered out from under its heavy brows.
“That's what we do here, Samuel. We appease our god in hopes that she will look upon us favorably. We still need to do that, Samuel. You understand.” It was a statement, not a question.
“That's your god?” Samuel asked, unable to take his eyes off of the Black Goat.
“No,” Dale said. “He is the emissary.”
The Black Goat exhaled quickly out its thick snout, blowing steam into the air before it. It did it two more times, and Dale nodded at Mr. Waite.
“It may not feel like it right now, Samuel, but this is an honor,” Waite said, raising the dagger up into the air.
The hooded ones began to moan, and the Black Goat joined them. The noise built and caused an irritation in Samuel's ears until it shook his vision. He tried to keep his eyes open as much as he could. The last thing he heard, other than the moan, was his mother.
“I'm proud of you, Samuel.”
Waite brought the dagger crashing down into Samuel's chest. Samuel gasped sharply as he saw the black tendrils dancing into the sky from the spot behind the slab, behind Waite. They weren’t shadows that he saw earlier, after all. The tendrils shuddered like snakes slithering and the room shook, the moaning noise taking a far deeper tone
Screams of the hooded ones joined the cacophony. Orgiastic tears of reverie rolled down their faces. Samuel expired to the sound of ecstasy all around him.
A red-winged blackbird halted its song abruptly, listening to whispered movement in the brush. Trailing an elusive deer, Boone Skelly and his younger brother Luke tread lightly through stands of birch and black willow. Two squirrels dangled from Boone’s belt. They slapped his leg as he stopped to part a curtain of Spanish moss with his rifle.
Luke hefted his metal detector onto his shoulder.
“Sure it ran this way?”
“Shut up.”
“Never been this far north, is all. You?”
Boone grunted an indecipherable reply that Luke took as a no.
The copse of trees in Wilder’s Creek had thickened dramatically as they ventured north. A dirt trail turned into a breathtaking tunnel entirely encased by foliage, and then the path had disappeared altogether. Boone didn’t falter. He was an infamous tracker. Brief flashes of the buck spurred him on.
Luke scanned for predators with a lump in his throat as his older brother cleared a path. This area was remote and wild. If any man had ever ventured this way, the woods would have devoured his trail long ago.
Boone muttered something under his breath. His straw-colored hair and square shoulders were framed in a hacked archway of green. Luke pushed forward to see. Beneath the dome of entwined trees was a clearing. On the left a ruined church lay like a decomposing giant, stones and cross toppled and askew in lush beardgrass. To the right stood the markers of a dozen graves. Weather and time had taken their toll. Three wooden crosses had completely fallen over and were nearly lost from view in the weeds. Weary, stone slabs jutted at odd angles as if their owners had tossed with fitful dreams.
Shadows lay heavy behind the church. Luke thought he could make out a backdrop of rocky hillside with a possible cave entrance. His eyes were better than Boone’s, but there was not enough light to be sure. What he could see was a form lying near the edge of church rubble. Still as death, the fawn markings and hooves were unmistakable.
They checked the perimeter and approached with caution. Without question this was the deer they had been tracking. Boone’s eyes narrowed as he clenched his teeth. This buck had been a four-point beauty. It lay dead at their feet with strange wounds at the base of its throat. Something had feasted on its blood. Both its eyes had been removed.
“What the Hell did that?”
One sick son of a bitch.
Boone kept the thought to himself. He had pulled out his knife to take meat, but on examining the strange wounds again he thought better of it, keeping his rifle in the crook of his arm.
Luke knew it angered Boone to waste the tracking time. Firing up his metal detector he let his brother keep watch as he began searching the church grounds.
“Be quick about it.”
Boone frowned as the metal detector waved over wild grass and foundation stones green with lichen. It was a bone of contention. His little brother---the dark-haired, blue-eyed boy most girls in Twiggs County fell for, who never learned to track or hunt properly, was of all the men the one to find a lost child. The mayor’s daughter, no less. She had fallen behind on a school camping trip and become disoriented. A search party went out, but it was Luke who found her. The reward had been substantial. He spent most of the money bailing out their drunkard father’s debts. With what remained he chose a single luxury item from a catalog. A god damned metal detector.
High-pitched beeping caught both brothers off guard. Luke narrowed down the heart of the detection and pulled out his own knife to dig. Moist, bl
ack earth parted easily. Bloated grubs wriggled away. With ringing stabs the knife found a metal box.
Thready roots and dirt flew as Luke ripped it free. Encrusted, several swipes with his shirtsleeve were required to reveal its surface. The box was unmarked, made of a hardwood he didn’t recognize, likely some rare species of maple or walnut. A gold clasp securing its contents gave way to his blade with a puff of sour-smelling air. Brow furrowed, Luke hesitated, glancing up at his brother. A nod passed between them and he lifted the lid.
Stench of a decomposing corpse flew out and was gone as quick as the escape of a trapped bird. Rotten burlap swaddled something. It bore markings in black ink that reminded Luke of the odd signs his grandfather had slashed on his bedroom wall in the asylum.
“Maybe we shouldn’t…”
“Get on with it.”
Lifting away the burlap revealed a book. It looked older than dirt but was sturdy, bound in thick, black leather. An inlaid stamp of gold with a beckoning skeleton adorned its cover. On the spine, also in gold, were letters that Luke presumed to be the book title and author. He read them aloud slowly.
“Nespus de Mare Grimorie, by Dragoi Nicolescu.”
Boone cut to the chase.
“Can we get money for it?”
Luke stood up, wrapping the book back in its burlap.
“We? I found this, Boone. You never would have known it was here.”
Boone’s jaw tightened. “You never would have been here without me.”
“Fine. We’ll split it. We can take it to Earle Claiborne’s stall at the Fair next week. He’ll know its worth, or be able to find out.”
As Luke bent to pick up his metal detector, a hunting knife flashed. The blade caught him in the back. His eyes looked skyward as he sank to the ground. Blood rushed from the wound without sound.
Extra digging widened the hole. Boone worked quickly, pushing the metal detector in alongside his brother. There seemed less dirt to cover than came out originally, so he drug over loose stones and mortar from the church. It was close enough to have rolled there, he reasoned.
With the book back inside its box he tucked it under his arm, hefted his rifle and made his way home.
As swaying foliage closed over his departure, subtle movement stirred in the cave behind the church. A vaguely human shape stepped forth from shadows. It was a shockingly thin silhouette, black and faceless, crowned with inward facing horns. Folded behind it were slick, bat-like wings and a long, barbed tail. A bright gleam that might have been eyes blinked twice as it surveyed the clearing and disappeared again into the dark recess of cavern.
The following week Boone made an appearance at the Fair. Rumors were swirling about his little brother. Luke had been popular enough to spark several versions to explain his disappearance. Some said he had bolted to attend college in Mount Vernon; some said he had run off with a girl, or met with foul play because of one. A few theorized that a bobcat or bear got him while treasure hunting with his metal detector. No postcard had come and no body had been found. Playing the grieving brother was wearing thin. All Boone wanted was to sell the cursed book, take the money and hop the bus for a bigger town.
Earle Claiborne inspected the cryptic burlap through gold spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He raked a hand through his unruly, white hair and scanned the fairgrounds with shaken nerves.
“Where did you get this, Boone? The Skelly family has never brought me anything like this before. Your brother found a couple of rare comics in town, but nothing, nothing like this.”
“What does it matter, old man? I was hunting south of Wilder’s Creek. Found the box in an abandoned house. Now I’ll ask again, what’s it worth?”
Using burlap as a buffer the retired professor checked the book’s interior, sliding the mouthpiece of his carved pipe into its pages. The dark circles beneath Boone’s eyes had not gone unnoticed. Experience had taught Claiborne not to trifle with antiquities.
“Afraid of it?”
There was a glint of madness in Boone’s steely gaze. He had never been a kind man, but something shadowed him, some unseen, unwholesome spirit that had not been there before.
“As should you be. There were thought to be only two of these in the known world, Boone. I don’t really want to know how you came by it. And valuable, you ask? Evil doesn’t begin to describe it. Nespus de Mare Grimorie means Unspeakable Grimorie. It’s Romanian. A textbook of dark, forbidden magic. Instructions on how to raise the dead and invoke demons. Worse than that, spells to call forth The Great Old Ones from their slumber. The book itself has power. There are some who would pay obscene amounts for it.”
“Buy it from me.”
Claiborne covered the book again and shut it away in its box, dropping his pipe in a trashcan by the stall.
“No. Even if I had that kind of money I would have no part of this book. I will put you in contact with someone. That at least will take it away from Twiggs County. But I fear something terrible has been awakened.”
Boone turned to leave but an idea stayed him.
“Who are The Great Old Ones? Could I make more money by raising them?”
The color drained out of Claiborne’s face.
“My God. No. Boone, as insane as it may sound, even you don’t want to summon gods from beyond the stars. I can’t begin to impress upon you the dire consequences. It would mean the end of our world.”
“So you say.”
The old professor leaned forward across his table, spilling college pamphlets to the ground.
“I don’t know what you did to your brother, Boone Skelly, but karma will have its due. Tentacled demons be damned. Best watch your back.”
“Call me what you please, old man. Words will never hurt me.”
As Boone disappeared into the crowd Earle Claiborne collapsed in writhing fits. Green foam bubbled from his lips. Fair attendants rushed to his aid, but the professor had drowned in a mysterious, dark fluid that smelled of brine.
One week later Boone was $500,000 richer. He had no idea the professor had died without making inquiries. All that mattered was the appearance of a man at his door with a briefcase full of money. The fellow had been tall, with a pale, brutish face and arms as big as trees. There had been no conversation, just a simple exchange. Once he had been relieved of the book the world seemed smaller. Boone experienced a pang of loss. He had never felt this for any of his family. Without the book he felt weak and vulnerable.
He bought a house the next town over and lived in high style, but miles and money couldn’t vanquish the nightmares. Luke haunted him. A crowd of people from his hometown whose eyes had been gouged out chased after him with torches and signs that said Murderer. There were other dreams too, far more nasty and disturbing. Dreams of probing tentacles and cyclopean eyes; of diaphanous columns overgrown with flowering sargassum, and a night sky lit eerily by a dozen moons where winged creatures feasted on souls.
More often than not Boone called out a name in his sleep. He didn’t remember at first, but woke with the residue of gibberish running through his brain. It was elusive as a deer he once knew. He paid exorbitant fees to psychiatrists and sleep analysts. A hypnotist swore that he had been cured. Eventually he bought a tape recorder to capture his ramblings.
While all this was happening a young man was out walking with his dog in Twiggs County, throwing a stick for him to fetch. The spaniel broke away and was out of sight for a long while. His owner followed, hearing whining and the thrash of digging. The noises led him to a clearing deep in the woods. The tops of grave markers could barely be made out in snarled weeds, and beside the crumbling remnants of a church he found his dog. The spaniel’s white legs and muzzle were covered with black earth. Something was sticking up out of the ground.
Beneath crisp starlight the thing seemed luminescent. The young man crouched down for closer examination. It came away in his fingers---a small bone he thought most likely from a woods animal or stray pet. Its shimmer was extraordinary. He po
cketed the find, and being a guitar maker took it home for ornamentation in a project.
When the instrument was finished its rich wood shone with a luster unlike anything the young man had ever crafted before. Eyes were drawn to its first fret, the polished bone carefully fitted across fingerboard. The young man fancied that it gave his guitar spirit. He sold the piece to an agent representing an anonymous buyer, who was well known in the rock industry. That first day it was lifted from its case, the guitar held power over the musician. He became obsessed, driven to write a song that he could not explain.
The story it told was that of two brothers chasing a deer through the woods. It spoke of jealousy and betrayal, and a secret treasure that spread madness. The song was completed in one sitting. The musician, a platinum selling artist and multi-millionaire with his own private recording studio, chose to lock himself in the bathroom of his small guest house. Using his smartphone he recorded a grainy video of his initial performance of the song with his new guitar. Once finished he posted it to social media sites and put a gun in his mouth.
Viral in record time. What crime scene specialists couldn’t determine was how a handful of random images that flashed with strobe-like quickness had been edited into the performance. The first was a lightning-effect image of two men standing in a wooded area. A sinister church loomed behind them in abandoned disrepair. The second image was that of an outdated metal detector. After that was a knife gripped tensely overhead. Second to last, during final verse, flashed a shot of one man filling in the other’s grave. The handle of the detector could still be seen poking through soft dirt. Right before the song ended, with acoustic strings still vibrating their final notes in the cramped bathroom, a closing image filled the screen in slightly longer duration before fading to black. Walls were splattered with bright blood. The rock star was motionless, slumped backward. The gun had fallen to his right, landing in the bathtub. The prophecy was completed by indecipherable words slashed at odd angles in blood on the walls and ceiling. How all of it got there in a simple selfie video posted two minutes after being recorded was an impossible mystery.
A Mythos Grimmly Page 31