by Peter Hartz
CONTENTS
Title Page
Forward
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Plane of the Godless
Book One
By Pete Hartz
Plane of the Godless, Book 1 Author: Peter Hartz
Copyright © 2019 Peter Hartz
ISBN-13: 978-0-578-46601-9
Edited and proofread by the author.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is an original work, conceived of and written entirely by the author. All characters depicted in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living, dead, undead, or resurrected, is purely coincidental. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Dedication
To my wife Kristen
and my daughter Addison,
who bring the sunlight to my life,
and the colors to my world.
Acknowledgements
Loads of thanks to the people who have supported and encouraged me on this long journey in addition to my wife and family: Luke Trombley, for coming up with the series title; Jay Woodard, the best boss I’ve ever had, bar none; our very good friends Scott and Shelley Paulsen, Shelley's sister Heidi, and Shelley's college roommate Physicist Dr. Angie Foudray; and last but not least the team of Phil Rustad, author of Dart, Alamo North Dakota, and Judge’s Choice, and his editor Patricia Morris, an amazing person, both of whose advice and support was so amazing and so appreciated.
Forward
What you are staring at blankly at the moment is the result of ten years of my spare time being obsessively devoted (or maybe ‘committed’ is a better word) to my first serious writing project. Ten long years of finding even a few minutes of my spare time, obsessing over the details, trying to not obsess over the details (and failing), trying to write an outline because everyone said that’s how you do it (and failing), and ten years of my characters either laughing at me or basically ignoring me every time I tried to impose at least some sense of direction and order on them.
I had all these good ideas on where I wanted the story to go, and the characters simply told their stories the way they wanted them to be instead. As a result, I ended up pretty much writing this entire series ‘stream of consciousness’. The result is that this story at the end of the word-slinging is almost nothing like how it started out. I think that is hilarious. I think the story is great now, and my original ideas would have probably produced something much less than I think it is. Oh well.
The world can be a terrible place. Even when evil is not involved, there is pain, suffering, and loss. One of the lessons I have been working to teach my daughter something I read on the Internet somewhere: while life isn’t fair, it’s still good. This story is how I would make the world a better place if I had the chance; how I would push back against all the negativity in the world if I could.
This work is also entirely mine. I had no budget to spend on unimportant little things like paying for professional editing, proofreading, or layout. I had to do it all myself. So, while I have spent a lot of hours working to extirpate every possible typo I could find, I bet someone somewhere someday will find at least one, and probably a lot more. And for that, I apologize. I hope that you will be forgiving if you do find something in the book that is less than perfect, and that you can enjoy the story without any little errors I made getting in the way.
“And now, on to the show.” Strap in. I hope you have as much fun reading this as I had writing it...
Prologue
The guard had come to his cell and told Koren that his mother and his sister had checked in at the jail and were waiting to see him. His heart, so heavy since the whole incident began, lightened up slightly, but it was really hard to get very happy about anything. The nightmare seemed to never end. He was certain that if he just tried hard enough, he would wake up, and all this would be just a bad dream. It was getting harder and harder to believe that's all it was, though. The arrest, the charges, the trial, the guilty verdict; all of it was a horrific experience he was trying desperately to forget, or wish away.
“Don’t move.” The statement had been abrupt, shocking him out of his reverie in the small bus stop shelter. He had turned towards the voice, and his blood had run cold. Two white police officers were there, one at either opening, trapping him in the bus shelter, guns drawn. And they were staring at him with cold, hating eyes. It was bad enough being a young African American man in an inner city, but he had to take the bus down to the community college, then from there to his full-time job where he tried to earn enough money to stay in school and out of trouble.
“Yes officer? What can I do for you?” He hoped the fear hadn’t shown through, but he wasn’t very good at hiding his emotions.
“You’re under arrest. Turn around, and put your hands on the glass. Do it now!”
His shoulder still hurt all this time later where the officer who cuffed him had wrenched his arm around behind him, eliciting a yelp of pain and an instinctive physical reaction that had only made the officers mad. With bellows of “Stop resisting,” he had been forced down onto the concrete sidewalk where the officers had painfully forced him into submission as they finished cuffing him. When they lifted him up off the cold sidewalk, he was bleeding from above his eye and the side of his face.
“Oops, looks like you shouldn’t have done that, should you?” No sympathy there. The scars had mostly faded in the year or so since he was accused of killing someone he’d never met, or even heard of.
The prosecutor had argued that he was a flight risk because he had family in other states, Florida in particular, and bail had been denied. The overworked public defender had not seemed to be very effective, and Koren had wondered if she had really believed his repeated statements that he was innocent. Never mind that he’d had an airtight alibi. The prosecutor had torn that apart with conjecture and hearsay and legal maneuvering. His lawyer had
fought valiantly against the destruction of his only defense, but she hadn’t succeeded. His mother believed that he was innocent, and he thought his sister still did, but neither of them was on the jury that had unanimously found him guilty. He was immediately remanded into custody, and now that he was convicted, he was a guest of the county until sentencing.
Guilty. He was found guilty of second-degree murder, and some other charges that seem to have been added simply to prove that he was an awful person. How was this possible? Even just the sight of blood made him queasy. The only time he’d ever been in a fight, he’d gotten beaten up pretty badly, and hadn’t even landed a single punch. He sat in the holding cell by himself, dressed in a jail jumpsuit, resigned to never seeing the sun as a free man again. The prosecutor had made the news with the guilty verdict. A new prosecutor, the assistant county attorney had made a lot of speeches and statements to the press about “cleaning the scum off our streets”, “justice for victims”, and other things that made the news. In private, he was, in Koren’s opinion, just a rich white man trying to make a name for himself at Koren’s expense.
It was overwhelming, and incredibly unfair. He knew he hadn’t done what they said. Why didn’t anyone listen to him? The thought of spending the rest of his life in prison for something he knew he didn’t do was overwhelming.
He went with the guard and sat down in the chair on his side of the glass while trying to smile. He picked up the phone handset, and his mother did the same. A moment later he was speaking with his mother, then later his sister.
◆◆◆
“We still can’t believe that that you were convicted,” his sister said. “The prosecutor seemed to have it in for you, and your public defender didn’t seem to be able to do very much.”
“I know, but she is so nice. She tried really hard to do something, but there wasn’t much she could do. I mean, the policemen that testified seemed to know everything, and they convinced the jury that I was guilty. I mean, I never knew her, I didn’t even know who she was; I don’t think I have ever seen her before in my life.” Koren shook his head as his spirit seemed to crumble and tears came. “How did this happen to me? Why? I tried so hard to stay out of trouble! I didn’t do this! I didn’t do this...” His voice trailed off as he broke down entirely, sobbing, with his arms on the small ledge in front of him and his head on them as tears flowed from his eyes.
“Honey, come on, honey, you can get through this,” Martha, his mother said as soon as she could take the handset from her daughter and get it up to her mouth. “Koren, honey, talk to me. You can get through this.”
“Koren! Pick up the phone!” she said a little louder. She finally got to him to lift his head, and her heart broke at the look of utter devastation on his face. She desperately wanted to take him in her arms, hold him tight, and make everything alright again. But this time, she couldn’t even touch him. It hurt. It hurt so much that her own tears fell as her willpower failed her in trying to hide what this had done to her.
“You believe me, don’t you mom? You believe I didn’t do this?” Koren begged. Her faith in him was the last lifeline, the last tie to the outside world he had. None of his friends had even tried to contact him since his arrest, and the rest of his family all had turned their backs on him. Everyone except his mother and his sister Aisha had stayed away, abandoning him to the hellish nightmare he was going through.
“Honey, Koren, I know you. I know the boy I raised. I am proud of you, of the young man I raised. I never, not for a single moment, believed that you might even think about harming someone, especially a woman. You, of all my children, are the most incapable of doing anything remotely like this. I don’t understand why God is allowing this to happen to you. I pray every day to God that you will be pulled out of this and returned to me. No matter what anyone else has said or will ever say, I will NEVER believe that you could do this!”
Aisha nodded at their mother’s words. She had grown up doting on her younger brother. They were only sixteen months apart, and had been very close since their father had died of heart disease nearly seven years ago. They had grown closer and had bonded in the aftermath of Troy’s death, as their mother had struggled to make ends meet until the life insurance money had come through. Even then it had been nearly a year until some new sense of normal had come to their lives.
Koren’s heart rose at his mother’s unwavering support. He put his hand up on the glass, and his mother and sister both put their hands on their side of the glass, showing their support for their brother and their belief that he was wrongly-convicted.
The all-too-brief meeting eventually had to end, and the family was further separated once more as Martha and Aisha reluctantly had to leave the jail, and Koren was, with great reluctance and a returning sense of overwhelming dread, led back to his jail to the interminable wait of the next few days until his scheduled sentencing hearing on Monday.
Chapter 1
He released his concentration slowly and carefully, feeling the energies subside as he listened to the familiar sound of his success, and opened his eyes. In front of him was the gate he called, shimmering blue-black depths with white glows skittering across the surface, making the familiar but indefinable sounds of every gate he had ever seen. He sat for a moment to catch his breath, and pondered his life, and the path it had taken, once again. He was a long way from home, if a home he ever had. The gate stood as all the others had, taller than he was, reaching down to lay across the ground here under the trees. The open sky before had given way to the edge of the almost-forest in front of him now, and as he had walked, the pull inside had told him he was almost where he needed to be.
Now he lifted himself up from his knees and stretched. Calling a gate was always tiring, even now after so many times, more so when he must rely on his Patron for where the gate would lead. It was weariness not of body, but of some inexplicable way, like the times he had been brutally injured, or fought to exhaustion, and had taken weeks to fully regain his strength. The pull was stronger now, leading him through the gate, and he paused to consider cursing his fate. It was not worth the effort, he finally thought with an old familiar gallows humor. Why should the tide curse the shore upon which it stops? It just is the way of it.
Taking a deep breath as he always did before entering a gate, he stepped forward, stepping over the bottom and into the oval-shaped… thing in front of him.
◆◆◆
The pain she was in would be over soon, she knew. They hadn’t told her what would happen when they started, but she could see it in their eyes. The punishment they had been inflicting on her for the last – she’d lost all track of time a while ago – however long had nearly broken her and left her a mass of sobbing human wreckage, but she had retreated deep inside herself, to that silent, comforting place she had found after the accident that had nearly killed her those years ago. There she remained, while the men who had found their way into the cottage, and taken her here earlier in the night, acted like the animals they were. She had no chance to grab her glasses from the bedside table before she was punched and beaten into submission, her hands tied behind her with a short piece of rope brought along for the purpose. Then outside, into the big, black Suburban SUV she hadn’t heard come into the yard.
None had offered clues as they had dragged her out of the secluded cottage, into the SUV, and out into the nearby woods, where, in their words, the fun had begun those hours ago. What little she had been wearing to bed on that warm late summer night had been cut away after she had been tied up. The beating that had commenced, because it was supposed to look that way. The one who told her that was almost apologetic. Almost. Whatever he had felt inside about what he was involved in, whatever guilt and shred of conscience that had flared in that moment, had been thrust aside by other thoughts as he carried out his part of their planned event.
The trip from the cottage took them deeper into the woods, their vehicle following a dirt trail they seemed to know. Stopping at a small foo
t path, pulling her out, dragging her up to a small clearing, throwing her to the ground. Retying her hands and feet. Then it began.
They beat her when she fought them, kicking and punching her. Then after the will to fight back had been replaced by pain, one tried to take crude liberties with her body, only to be thwarted by her resumed struggles. One continued to swim into and out of her vision, frustration clearly written all over his face but mixed with something else she couldn’t quite define. Nothing personal, he said, just business. The look on his face said it was more than that to him, mixing business with his pleasure, but she did believe him, in a way. It wasn’t about her, really. He was just paid to do what he was doing, regardless of who she turned out to be. His frustration was because she was winning: preventing them from taking from her that which she refused to surrender. They could, and did, beat her until near death, but when they attempted the other, somehow she found the strength to resist once more. After it became apparent to them that they could only have that sick prize after she was dead, they lost all will to add that to the insults and injuries visited on her. They knew that she would never surrender to them, without knowing where that strength came from.
She realized that her concentration was wavering, and her thoughts were wandering; a sign that she was very far gone. It would end soon, she realized, as visions of childhood, her past, her life began to flash before her eyes and her mental focus slowly left the mortal world behind. Blood loss, the pain of the broken bones and the horrible injuries, the eyes gone now from the knife, the voice that screaming had eroded to a hoarse gasp, all of it was slowly starting to fade. The darkness she could not see any more was slowly creeping over her now, easing away the pain. The coldness her body felt as her blood cooled and dried on her skin was fading away, replaced with a strange warmth that comforted her at last.