Canticum Tenebris (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 2)

by John Triptych

  Ilya just stared at the window.

  “In order for us to help you, you must answer our questions,” Klimov said. “How can we let you go if you don’t tell us more?”

  Ilya looked at the general first, then turned to look at Denikin. “You must let me go. If you want me to stop Chernobog, you must let me go.”

  Denikin put his hands in his pockets. “Not until we know more, Ilya. Do you know who it was that might have told us where and when you would return to this world?”

  Ilya shook his head. “No.”

  “Why would they try to take the girl but not you? Is Tara more important to them? What can she do that you cannot do?”

  “I don’t know. The dog is hers.”

  “Where did she get the dog from? Is it some sort of American military dog that’s specially trained or something?”

  Ilya looked at the Deputy Director. Was he stupid or something? “This dog is not part of the American military. That is all I can say.”

  Klimov had had enough. He immediately stood up and grabbed Ilya by his shirt collar as he pulled the boy up on his feet. “You will tell us about this dog now! I can beat you to death and no one will care! You are a ward of the state and we can do anything we want to you.”

  Denikin immediately reacted by taking hold of Klimov’s arm and forced the general to let go of the boy. “That’s enough, General,” he said before turning to face Ilya. “I apologize for that outburst. But we have lost a lot of good men because of Chernobog’s machinations. Our cities are either being turned into defensive enclaves or are being abandoned. If you do not help us, our country will surely cease to exist. I beg of you, tell us about this dog.”

  Ilya trembled from the momentary fright. He was barely able to resist the urge to cry. “It says it’s a god.”

  Denikin placed his hands on the boy’s thin shoulders. “What type of a god? An animal god of some sort?”

  “I-It said that it was a trickster god.”

  Denikin’s eyes narrowed. “So it is this god that allows you to travel between worlds?”

  Ilya slumped back down on the side of the bed. “I don’t know. I was able to go into the Spirit World before I met the dog.”

  “How were you able to do that? Oh, I just remembered, you were in Baba Yaga’s hut when it traveled across the worlds. But if you don’t have the dog or the hut, then how can you go back to that magical land?”

  Ilya looked away. “I will find a way. If I could do it before then I can do it again.”

  “Very well, Ilya,” Denikin said. “You will stay a few more days and answer more questions for us tomorrow. I’m sure you must be tired now. We shall call back Private Anosov and you can resume your chess game with him, alright?”

  “I just want to be alone right now,” Ilya said softly.

  “Very well, I will have the mess hall cooks make you a special meal in a little while,” Denikin said as he made for the door. “You’ve earned it. Then we talk some more tomorrow. Enjoy what’s left of the day.”

  With that, both men left and closed the door behind them. Once more, Ilya was alone in his cell as the dim light above him gave the whole room an orange look. He had told them too much. That general was pretty dumb but the dark-haired FSB Director might be very dangerous. From what they told him, he began to realize that there were enemies that wanted Tara. That was how they got ambushed in the forest when they returned after they helped to transform Okeus into Ahone. But that also meant that while the enemy had Tara, it didn’t have Coyote the Trickster God. The trickster was the being that made travel to the other worlds possible. Even though the soldiers fired at the dog, Ilya had a feeling that it was still alive somewhere. So his first plan was to escape from this building and then go find the dog. From there, he would then find out where the enemy took Tara and then he would rescue her.

  Ilya lay down sideways on the bed as he faced the wall and pretended he was asleep. He knew they were still watching him. If not through the metal slot then probably a hidden camera somewhere in the room. He needed to think up an escape plan by tonight.

  9. Cabal

  Germany

  Built during the early 17th Century as an auxiliary residence for the local princes of the area, Wewelsburg Castle stood on a small hill like an ominous stone monolith over the abandoned town that surrounded it. The castle itself was shaped like that of a gigantic triangle, and it had fascinated the Nazi Party when they came to power, most notably the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. A former office worker who quickly gained Hitler’s favor and became the leader of his personal guard, Himmler became preoccupied with the occult and old pagan religions, incorporating many rituals and runes of his own devising into the spiritual culture of Hitler’s private army. When one of his acquaintances recommended the old crumbling castle located in Germany’s Westphalia region as a possible headquarters, Himmler instantly saw a unique opportunity to implement his strange obsessions. Under his influence, Wewelsburg became an SS training school as well as a kind of temple in which rituals would be conducted to heighten the mystical aspects of Hitler’s Third Reich. To that end, the Nazis constructed several additions to the castle and added occult symbols within the interior in order to turn the place into a spiritual enclave of pagan myth.

  As the Nazis began to face defeat at the end of World War II, Himmler ordered the castle’s destruction, but his henchman lacked the means to completely obliterate it. In the end, the SS officers in charge of the demolition used converted anti-tank mines that only succeeded in destroying a part of the structure before they fled. In the succeeding years, the local government took over the castle, turning it into a museum and youth hostel until the recent arrival of a new religious order called the Temple. Just two years before the Glooming began, this mysterious organization made a startling bid to rent out the entire castle and the cash-strapped local government could not refuse, despite the protests of the youth groups and the historical society that maintained a museum. The Temple quickly silenced their critics by constructing another youth hostel not far from the town as well as a brand new museum building in order to placate the historical society.

  As calm settled in the town once more, there were soon disturbing rumors that had begun about the new owners of Wewelsburg Castle. Less than two months after they had acquired the place, the Temple began to hire foreign contractors to renovate the interior of the castle and when the local council inquired about it, they were quickly rebuffed and set upon by an army of lawyers who told them that according to the contracts they themselves approved, the Temple could do whatever it wished so long as it did not damage the castle in any way. Small protests had started over this but there was nothing that the local government could do, citing reasons that the criticism was unfounded since the entire castle was in private hands now, and whatever they were doing inside was their own business and no one else’s.

  However, this did not quell the concerns of the locals nearby as their pets began to disappear from their homes just a mere six months after the castle was newly refurbished. The townspeople became somewhat alarmed when their remaining dogs would face the castle and howl all night, and their surviving cats soon turned hostile to their owners, hissing and attacking other pets as well as their own children until they were thrown out. Their fears were heightened even more when they would see convoys of black-tinted vehicles that would come and go from the castle late at night as the inhabitants of that fortress never bothered to associate themselves with the locals. The few that did show up in the town’s stores and food markets always wore black robes; they refused to communicate other than just to inquire about prices for goods and they would always pay in cash before immediately returning back to the castle. When the Glooming began, things became even worse when people started to disappear from either walking the streets at night or from their own homes; whole families just seemed to vanish into thin air. A few of the more courageous people in the town organized a march onto the entrance of the castle to demand tha
t the people inside leave the area, but there were too few of them now so in the end, almost everyone in the surrounding town had left for fear that they would be the next to disappear in the night and fog.

  As most of the locals finally left, a number of small, mysterious groups of people began to converge into the area; they were followers of the Temple and they soon took over a number of abandoned houses and began to fortify these dwellings while conducting strange rituals at night within them. The remaining townspeople sought help from the German government but to no avail, Berlin and the military seemed powerless as they concentrated their remaining forces on the border with France due to the threat of invasion by the Fomorians. In the end, anyone who still considered themselves to be decent human beings completely abandoned the area and now the Temple and its followers stood alone and unchallenged.

  The Grand Magus of the Temple of the Black Sun was Kurt Orlok. He was sitting in the castle’s newly built divination room as he continued to stare into a black bowl of water. He was nearly eighty, the son of an SS major and one of his mistresses. Orlok never knew his father. All he had was an old photograph of him in his black uniform and proudly wearing his death’s head cap. By the time the war had ended Orlok and his mother lived in virtual poverty. But after graduating from university he succeeded in creating a multi-million dollar export company through his sheer will when the country’s economy began to right itself during the 1960’s. During his free time, Orlok became obsessed with finding his father even though he had a feeling that he was no longer alive. Sure enough, by using his money and influence, Orlok eventually tracked down the remains of his father who had died on the Eastern Front against the Bolsheviks. He had also learned that his father’s death head ring, an ornate symbol of the SS, was supposed to be interred in a special crypt in Wewelsburg Castle but was stolen by American soldiers when they occupied the country after the Nazis had surrendered. With a ruthlessness born of anger and neglect, Orlok used everything he could in order to find the man who stole his father’s ring, eventually tracking the thief down in New York. The American who kept the ring was by now an invalid living with his sister in an old, dilapidated house. Orlok pretended to be a German reporter researching the war and when the old man had his back turned, Orlok strangled him with a telephone cord before killing the man’s sister sleeping in her room upstairs. After avenging his father’s honor, Orlok took the ring with him back to West Germany and later found out that his father was formerly assigned to Wewelsburg as a researcher for one of Himmler’s occult projects- finding the Spear of Destiny, the Roman lance that had been used to pierce Jesus Christ’s heart when he was being crucified.

  It was at this next phase of his life that Kurt Orlok began to have a growing obsession with the occult. He had learned that his father had abandoned his Catholic faith when he joined the SS and therefore as his son, he needed to follow in his footsteps. The Temple of the Black Sun started out as just another New Age pagan hobby group led by an unemployed drug user named Bruno Muller out of Berlin forty years ago. But the moment Orlok became a member he slowly gathered support until the was able to throw out the original founder since Muller treated the order as nothing more than a false front, purely for his drug use and womanizing. Once he became leader of the Temple, Orlok immediately began to dismiss the ones who did not take to his esoteric directives as the organization began to embrace a new kind of religious paganism, one devoted to finding obscure artifacts and to engage in magical rituals to bring forth spirits and otherworldly beings. As the Temple’s membership grew, Orlok styled himself as the Grand Magus and created an inner circle of his most carefully chosen disciples. Hidden from both the public and the general membership, this small cabal of twelve declared themselves as wizards and dedicated their entire lives in the pursuit to gain power through supernatural means.

  Using his business acumen, Orlok also created a corporation and numerous charitable fronts to hide the Temple’s finances. The German government attempted to label the organization as a cult and began an investigation into its tax avoidance schemes. But Orlok’s army of lawyers and influence among the federal politicians (some of whom were members of the order) were able to successfully quash any sort of bad publicity and the investigations were quietly dropped a few years later. What spurred Orlok on was that he had a vision of the coming apocalypse, though very much different as compared to the Christians who believed that Jesus Christ would return but rather a bleaker, more sinister end to the world in which only the strongest humans would survive and not their through faith, but with their own magical powers in order to live indifferently among the monsters and demons who would inhabit this new, darkened world. His last vision compelled him to purchase Wewelsburg Castle at all cost and he did everything in his power to convert it into his seat of authority. As the Glooming began he realized that he was now vindicated. His foresight had at last come to fruition as he gleefully watched all those that had doubted him suffer and die.

  As time moved back to the present, Orlok stood up from the stone chair and then looked away from the witching bowl; he had sensed the one he was waiting for had arrived. He walked over to the ornate mirror in the other side of the chamber and adjusted his black robes. The Grand Magus had numerous ailments and he could hardly stand but an old enemy was coming to see him and he needed to put up a powerful front. Orlok believed in never showing weakness, especially to one’s nemesis. His forehead and the top of his skull was now bald leaving only the pale white strands on the sides and back of his head that covered his ears. Orlok’s swollen cheeks had been pockmarked by acne since he was in his teens, and his portly girth continued to put undue strain on his back since he could no longer control his metabolism. Just as he took the cane from the nearby table and used it to balance himself, he heard a knock on the door.

  A tall, well-built man came in. He was also dressed in black robes and had a military haircut. “Grand Magus, the one you expected is here.”

  Orlok turned to look at him. “Thank you, Helmut. Where is he?”

  “He somehow appeared in the center of the Crypt, Magus. The other fraters and sorores are watching him carefully,” Helmut said.

  “Then let us go meet him.”

  Both men made their way to the North Tower. Before the Temple was able to acquire the castle, the Crypt, which contained a sunken, circular floor underneath a stylized stone symbol of the swastika that was carved high up in the tower ceiling, was nothing more than a display room for paintings and other exhibits. Once it all came under his control, Orlok immediately had the entire area refurbished and it was now used by the Temple as both a meeting room for the inner circle as well as a sacrificial altar. The sunken stage in the center was very convenient in order to prevent the spillover of blood when the victims were killed. They first began to ritually sacrifice small animals like dogs and cats but once the Glooming had started, they were soon able to abduct people with no legal or criminal ramifications. The Temple had secretly constructed an additional series of subterranean dungeons underneath the castle and it was there that they would keep the prisoners until such time as they were ready to be sacrificed. The rituals continued day and night until there were hardly any people left in the area.

  By the time they got to the Crypt, they saw half a dozen robed men and women standing in a ring around the sunken center, weapons drawn and at the ready. An old man wearing a dark suit stood in the center of the depressed circle. Orlok waved his hands and the other fraters and sorores turned and left the Mourning Hall until it was just the three of them.

  The man with the suit turned to look at him and smiled. His gaunt appearance and yellow stained teeth made him the stuff of nightmares. “Ah, it is nice to meet you again, Grand Magus. It has been so many years.”

  Orlok scoffed as he griped his cane tightly just in case the other man would attack. “How did you get through the wards I placed on this castle?”

  The man held up his right hand so the other two could see the ornate brass
ring he wore on it. “With this, of course.”

  Orlok still had good eyesight as he could see the ornate symbols that were carved on the ring. “You have a lot of nerve to come back, Solomon. And to proudly show off the seal that you have stolen from the temple piles insult upon insult.”

  Seth Solomon continued to smile. He knew he had the upper hand. For the moment anyway. “Your one time apprentices willingly gave the seal to me, Grand Magus. I would hardly call it stealing.”

  “It was not theirs to give!” Orlok hissed. “You were banished from the Temple because you stole sacred artifacts like the seal of King Solomon and murdered our fellow members. For you to return now either implies that you either wish to surrender and plead for my mercy, or you lack the courage to kill yourself.”

  Solomon laughed. “Did you know what this hall was once constructed for? It was known as the Trauerhalle, the mourning hall for the SS. Every time a senior SS officer died, his ashes were placed in an urn beside this well, right where I’m standing now. It was then that his coat of arms was burned and its ashes were interred into this well here to conclude the ritual,” he said as he pointed downwards to a depressed stone pillar in the center of the circle. “But now I can see bloodstains all over this little sunken stage. My, my, you must have been quite busy lately.”

  Orlok gripped his cane tighter as tiny blue sparks began to emanate from the entwined metal snakes that were carved around it. “You will answer for the crimes you have committed against this order, you Jewish swine.”

  Solomon wagged a bony finger at him. “Ah, so your anti-Semitism now reveals itself. You’re really not too dissimilar from your father, but I have not come here to insult you, I have come for a truce.”

  Helmut took out a 9mm SIG Sauer pistol from underneath his robes and aimed it at the interloper. “You talk as if you had anything to negotiate with. You are here in our sanctum and we can easily kill you right now and be done with it.”