The Trilogy of the Void: The Complete Boxed Set

by Peter Meredith

  If he had to he'd make the French toast, though it was likely she'd be the one to fix breakfast. "Of course, if that's what you want," he replied, struggling to be cheery. "Do you want blueberry syrup or..." he really didn't need to finish the question and his face sunk, "or strawberry?"

  "Actually...mmmh...I want chocolate. Mmmmhh." Chocolate meant she would be at this for at least an hour.

  "Sure Tal, anything you want...sweet dreams."

  "Mmmmhhh...get out."

  Will shut the door behind him and went to turn on the lights in the cabin. As tired as he was, there was no way he'd be able to sleep, not with her erotic symphony going on. At the same time he didn't want to sleep, his dreams would be anything but sweet. Tonight he would dream about the rapes. There were so many...seemingly an endless number of them, one after another. An impossible amount, but the void was an impossible place after all.

  Poking about in the cupboard he found his Wild Turkey and looked long at the deep amber colored whiskey. There was a formula to getting the right amount of drunk, though he didn't know it. Talitha would be able to tell him he was sure. If he asked her in the morning, she would break it down into charts and graphs and have a gay ole time doing it, too. However, he didn't need a chart to tell him he was going to drink half the bottle in front of him and follow that with a couple of sleeping pills.

  He poured himself his first shot; his hands shook as the glass went to his lips. But he paid the shaking little attention; he knew it would stop in a few minutes, just as he knew there would be some sort of terrible rhino creature tonight. He shuddered at the image that popped into his head and quickly threw back a second shot. The horn of the rhino thing was not on its head. Will shuddered again.

  "MMMmhhh, yessss."

  Have fun, he thought to himself.

  That wasn't something he'd ever say out loud. Even with her door closed, she would hear him. Her hearing, her sense of smell, and her eyesight, were all phenomenal. She had spent a day in the void, and it had turned her into some sort of insane superwoman. One moment she'd be taking a bath, something she never tired of, and the next she would break your arms with her bare hands. She was a murderer, but he loved her.

  "Number three...down the hatch," he whispered and drained another shot.

  The horn was long, over two feet in length and it wasn't smooth as he had first thought, but was ringed every few inches with jagged teeth like barbs.

  "Oh jeez!" Will gave his head a vigorous shake to clear away the vision of the horn; it didn't work, it lingered like an early morning haze.

  How Talitha had endured it was a mystery he hoped he would never figure out. Nevertheless, she had endured it and a lot more than just the rapes. He knew it because he dreamed it. It was all part of his curse.

  Eight years ago, when he was only seventeen and Talitha sixteen, she'd been sacrificed to a demon and her soul had been sucked into the void of hell. It had taken the deaths of two people, one innocent and one guilty to free her, but she had come back changed.

  For the most part, she was his sister as he had always known her sweet, funny, smart. Her eyes would still crinkle up when she smiled and she still corrected his grammar at every opportunity. Yet sometimes she'd become a monster, a beautiful killer who enjoyed the pain she caused.

  She wasn't the only one that had changed.

  He had tiptoed on the edge of the void himself and had seen the demon in its true form, just as she had. The gypsy, Adrina, had given Will her "gift" of foresight...a gift she saw as more a curse than anything. It had passed from her at the moment of her death and had been made permanent when he was cursed by the sight of the demon.

  His curse was not nearly such a burden as Adrina's had been. For the most part she saw visions of death, but she couldn't interfere in any way or she would only make the victim's suffering worse. Adrina would know when a loved one was about to die and yet have no option but to sit and watch.

  Will, however, could interfere with the future without repercussion, and had done so on a number of occasions. His visions were of many things; some random, concerning strangers, or even the weather, while others were quite personal. They would come to him out of the blue; he could see what would happen in the next few seconds or sometimes in the next few years.

  Seeing the future wasn't the only aspect of his curse. There was another odd talent he possessed, and that was the ability to steal his sister's dreams. When he had pulled his sister from the void they had become linked in way neither fully understood. If they were to fall asleep anywhere near each other, his mind would instantly become flooded with her dreams and for some reason she only dreamt about her time in the torture chambers of the void.

  He dreamed what she had experienced for real.

  The worst part of this was that once he began dreaming he was stuck in her hellish nightmare until she woke up. Of course, he did have the choice to not fall asleep near her, but Will's conscience, his brotherly love meant he had to do something for her. He knew her pain and it was too great for him to let her experience it a second time.

  Therefore, every weekend he'd take the two-hour drive up to her isolated retreat in the woods. They'd spend the day together, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, and unfortunately when the mood was on her, sometimes fighting. At night he would tuck her in and then get drunk.

  It was the only time he ever drank, but it was necessary—her dreams were that horrifying. She'd been tortured in every conceivable way by the most hideous creatures. The rapes, the machines, the blood, the pain were all as real to him as they had been to her, with one huge exception: even while it was happening, he knew it would end, eventually.

  She never had that tiny luxury.

  For Will, only the earth spinning about measured her time in the void. For him it had been twenty-four hours and forty-two minutes, a total of just under 89,000 seconds. But for Talitha...there was no telling how long it was. More than years or even decades, it could've been many centuries.

  "Oh yeah! Oh God!" Her screams of self-inflicted ecstasy jarred him from his thoughts and made him remember he had work to do. He tossed down two more shots in quick succession. "Yes! Yes!" she screamed.

  "Oh, jeez!" he mumbled to himself. He was starting to feel the alcohol.

  Talitha's place was hardly more than a shack and the walls were thin enough that he didn't need super-hearing to figure out she was nearing climax. She would go at it a few more times, but he figured he still had at least seven shots left to down and he never liked trying to race her to sleep.

  On occasion he had misjudged the timing. The last time, her painful shrieks and racking sobs had been almost impossible to bear and strangely when he had finally fallen asleep he'd been thankful when the torturer had turned the flames on him instead.

  Will's stomach, angry over the infusion of whiskey, knotted up suddenly and he grimaced. By experience he knew the nausea would pass, yet he also knew it would slow him down in his race to get drunk. He had to concentrate on something and he went out to his jeep Wrangler to get the first of four boxes of books.

  Talitha had been a reader of unbelievable appetite before her sojourn in the void, and now it was all he could do to keep up. The fact that she only slept one night out of the week didn't help, either. For the last year, he'd been bringing college textbooks as a way to appease her craving for information. The previous year, she had zipped through three different sets of encyclopedias. To keep her from being bored he would also throw in foreign languages books and sadly, romance fiction.

  Talitha loved the romance novels, and would've been quite content if that was the only kind he ever brought. Sometimes she'd read to him from her favorite passages and cry when some shirtless, muscle-bound man finally realized his true love was right in front of him the whole time.

  Will would very frequently cry as well, just not in front of her and certainly not over some book. His sister would never be in love again. She had torn out the throat of the only boy who had ever loved h
er and kicked his lifeless body out into the forest. Her love affair with Brian Galt was over before it started.

  There would be no one else.

  Coming in from the growing cold, Will plunked the box down heavily in the main room, knowing that Talitha would be able to pick it up one handed if she wished. He then went back to his bottle and despite the queasiness churning at his innards, took another shot.

  Thinking about Brian made him long to get drunk even when he wasn't with Talitha. Brian had been an amazing individual and yet there had been absolutely nothing special about him at all. He had been small and skinny, with hair that would become a dense, impenetrable brown thicket if he went too long between haircuts, which would be always. He was cute, Will supposed, after a nerdy fashion, and Talitha had loved him

  Will poured a bit too much whiskey this time and it sloshed over the side of the shot glass. He paused with the glass touching his lip, trying to remember if this was number four or five.

  "Who cares," he said to the glass and drank it off. Just then he remembered that he was going to drink half the bottle and decided he would mark where he would drink to. There were plenty of pens lying about the place, but the trick was finding one that actually held ink.

  Splashing about in the kitchen junk-drawer, he unearthed a pen and began to scribble away at the halfway point on the fifth of whiskey...

  The horn was now covered in blood, and shreds of dripping flesh hung from the barbs of it. Will gasped, feeling the horrific pain of his insides being torn out and he pushed the horn away as hard as he could. He looked down and saw a great gory hole.

  "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" Will came back from his vision and felt sudden tears coursing down his cheeks. His breathing came fast and heavy, and the first thing he did was put his hand to his crotch and rub at the lingering phantom-pain. Glancing down, he saw that he had thrown the bottle of Wild Turkey away from him and he thanked God that it hadn't broken.

  Crawling to it, he drank straight from the mouth with hands that shook greater than before. The shaking was so profound that he fumbled at capping it, and ended up taking another swig. Placing the open bottle on the counter he gave it a long look, but it suddenly reminded him of the horn and he shuddered convulsively.

  "Holy crap! This isn't good, jeez," he whined miserably to himself. It was never good and it was always like this. He'd continue to get a preview of his coming torture until he passed out and then he would get the real thing. With another moan slipping from his lips, he wiped at the tears on his face and shook his head trying to figure out why he was doing this to himself.

  At this point he really didn't know. All he knew was that he was supposed to get drunk. He reached for the bottle and took another long pull.

  For perhaps the hundredth time Will thought about how he could kill Talitha.

  "Put her out of her misery, I mean," he said to no one in particular. A high-powered rifle from three-hundred yards might do the trick, but only if it were a head shot. Anything else would just make her angry.

  Killing Talitha was not something a person could do with ease. She couldn't be poisoned as far he could tell: if she didn't smell it a mile off, her body would simply break the chemicals down. That same sense of smell would make getting a gun anywhere close to her impossible and the fact that she lived in the thick woods made the long range shot just a pipe dream.

  A knife, an axe, a club, or even a sword would be just silly. She could move with blazing speed and it was highly likely that she would take the blade from him and sheath it in his own belly. Still he was the only person with a ghost of a chance of killing her. His ability to see the immediate future had saved him from her on numerous occasions; it allowed him to dodge, duck or block with uncanny precision. However, on the few instances, during their frequent fights, when he has been able to strike her, he had knocked her about quite a bit but it rarely did more than increase her enthusiasm for his blood.

  The thought of blood made him remember the horn. "Shun of a bish!" Again, he drank from the bottle and gave it a bleary stare. "Thas better. Ok...pill time." Will got up unsteadily and went for his bag, walking as if on the side of a steep hill.

  "Donut take with alcohol ny ass," he said after glancing at the prominent warning label.

  There were only two pills in the container and that was by design. Once, he had awoken the following morning from one of his tortured nights, cover in vomit. He discovered that he had taken half the pills in the bottle; deep down he knew he'd been trying to kill himself before he had to face the night.

  Will popped his two pills, washing them down with the whiskey. He then looked at the bottle groggily; he was well below the line he'd made for himself. In the background, he heard Talitha's moaning, but it wasn't coming through to his brain clearly anymore, and he sat gazing about, losing focus with each passing moment.

  "Ah crappity!" His stomach was going up and down like a rubber seesaw and he was going to get sick. To stave it off, he had to get up and walk around until the feeling passed or he'd lose the pills for sure. Standing up, he had only a moment of balance left in him and then the cabin heaved over on its side and sent him sprawling.

  "Whoa now," he said to the floor, clutching it as though he were on the deck of a rolling ship. Crawling over to the couch, he used it to steady himself, and managed to stand on his own again. "Thas better...what the hell?" he exclaimed to the cover of a romance book staring up at him from the box. "You guys even know what the friggen buttons are for on your shirts?"

  Will smirked at his own great cleverness, but in the next second he was despondent, "Oh Lisa, why do I do this? I should be at home wif you an da baby!" Lisa's beautiful face came to him and he sighed heavily with longing.

  There was no baby just yet. Lisa was seven months along and her belly was only the size of a bowling ball. He loved to place his large hands around the small lump of the baby and caress Lisa's soft skin.

  Thinking about her, he plopped heavily down on the couch, his nausea forgotten, and puffed out his own belly. Putting his hands on his stomach, he smiled stupidly and sang, "Gold-en slum-bers kiss your eyes..."

  Lisa constantly sang to the baby inside her and it always made him smile to hear her secret voice. As far as he knew, he and the baby were the only ones who had ever heard that magnificent sound. He stopped his own deep, raspy attempt at singing, and it was with a lullaby drifting through his mind that he finally fell asleep. A short while later, Will met the owner of the terrible horn.

  Chapter 2

  The First Scent

  "Good evenin', Sistah."

  The words were soft, as if the man who spoke them wanted to disturb the night as little as possible. In the chill of the darkness the unexpected voice startled Sister Mary Agatha. Her hands shot like wounded butterflies to her chest and she gasped. She knew the voice; it took a second for her to remember it and when she did, her fright passed.

  Turning slowly, in order to give herself a moment to hide the fact that she been surprised, Sister Mary took in the outline of a police officer framed against the streetlight.

  The man's face was unfortunately familiar, he had been snooping around the orphanage off and on for years, but at the moment she couldn't recall his name. It was on the tip of her tongue, however there it stayed. She used to know it. Lately, little things like that would slip from her mind and she had taken to peeking at his nametag whenever he came by. Tonight he would get nothing more than officer from her, it was just too dark.

  "Hello, Officer."

  "I didn't mean to scare ya. I thought ya heard me." The policeman smiled disarmingly and stepped even closer to her. Now she was able to get a better look at his heavily jowled face, but the name danced even further out of her mind and she felt a moment of irritation. Nevertheless, she managed a smile, exposing her teeth, which were crooked and grey with age.

  "I heard you, Officer, and you didn't scare me. I was just praying. Probably something I should get back to... if you don't mind." She tur
ned away with a small wave of her hand indicating dismissal and said over shoulder, "So you have a good night now."

  There was a time when she was much younger that she liked and respected the police, but that hadn't been for a quite few years. They were always coming down so hard on her boys, using them as scapegoats for any trivial and not so trivial crime in the neighborhood. She wasn't stupid, and she understood that her boys could be a bit rowdy at times but on the whole they were just as good as the neighborhood kids, perhaps even better.

  "Well actually, I need a moment of your time," the officer replied in his thick Boston accent, his voice holding a touch of annoyance. With her back turned to him and the black coif of her habit hiding much of her face, he didn't see her rolling her eyes.

  Here it goes, she thought. Which one of her boys was in trouble this time, and for what? Her mind ran down a list of the usual suspects, as the officer continued in his annoying accent, "Ya know about the kids disappearin' in the city, right?"

  At this a small feeling of alarm crept over her and she turned back to the man. She knew about the children, everyone knew, the news had gone nationwide after the third boy went unaccounted for and in the last three weeks, two more had vanished. It was as if they had wandered into quicksand on a city sidewalk and had been sucked into the earth.

  "Yes, yes I know about those poor boys...all very tragic, I'm sure. But what does that have to do with..."

  A wild thought struck her. Sister Mary was a big woman, shaped rather like a shoebox, but she still managed to find her hips and she placed her hands squarely on them.

  "You don't think any of my boys had anything to do with this? That is preposterous!" She glared at the startled police officer with eyes that were a rheumy wet blue and hard with her anger. "In all my seventy-three years, this is the most..."