“Ronnie, shine it that way!”
Ronnie? Why would they be calling that name?
I heard a dim response that ended with, “… a flare?”
Flare? Waitaminute! There was a flare in my kit.
“Stay there,” a second distinctly different voice answered. This one was a voice I definitely did not recognize. In fact, he sounded like a teenager.
Then, the first one again. “Call out!”
“Who are you?” I yelled down to them.
There was momentary silence, then: “Friends!”
A strange thought occurred to me then, one that I instantly dismissed.
I gave another yell. “Hello! You still there?”
Silence.
I peered down into complete darkness. Even the light had disappeared.
My blood ran cold.
I pulled the emergency kit into my lap and began rummaging.
“HELL-OOO,” I screamed with as much intensity as I could manage.
My hand brushed against a long tubular object inside the kit and lost it again.
Dimly, distantly, there was almost a shadow of a sound: “Paul!” Then a second “Paul.” And a third voice calling, “Paul!”
It was them! I knew it this time. Dad, Uncle Hank, and a third voice, female, which sounded as if it could be Tracy Tatum. The voices were coming from a much greater distance away than the ones I had heard previously and those had been completely different.
Then just behind me, I heard a scuffle of a shoe. I turned.
Dad stood before me holding a flashlight and smiling.
“Dad,” I screamed in joy and rushed toward him, dropping the kit behind me.
Before I could register what was happening, I felt a sudden searing pain against my cheek and was falling backwards over my own feet, the contents of the emergency kit scattering across the cave floor in the darkness.
My father had just slapped me.
I looked up in wounded disbelief.
“You worthless son of a bitch,” I heard him hiss.
I could only stare, immobile at this man, who by all appearances was my father, but at the same time, could not be.
“Why couldn’t you have waited for us,” he shouted, a thin stream of foam dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “We’re all as good as dead because of you!”
He rushed at me, his one free hand clenching and unclenching, close enough for me to see the wild rolling of his eyes. Then I felt him strike me again and again in a flurry of blows. He was panting like an animal.
“No! You’re not my father!” I screamed from beneath the protective cradle of my arms, and suddenly, the blows stopped.
I opened my eyes. The world had returned to complete darkness.
My muscles rung with the pain of the blows as once again I heard my name drifting up from somewhere down below. It was a taunting whisper, mocking me. I cringed in the darkness, struggling beneath my shirt and finally touching with my index finger the crucifix my uncle had given me.
What had just happened, I asked myself.
Suddenly, another voice broke through from the darkness below. It too called my name, but this one more passionately. I could feel the flesh and bone and blood behind the sound. For several indecisive moments, I hesitated to answer. Was this another trick?
The second time I heard my name, I knew it was truly my father this time.
“Hello!” I screamed back.
“…you okay?” I could hear the dim voice call up.
“Yes!” I yelled back.
“We’re coming, Paul!” This sounded like my uncle.
Relief rushed over me and I began to shiver uncontrollably, now that the moment of high tension had passed. I touched the side of my face where the doppelganger of my father had first struck me. This was the blow that had hurt far more than the others, when I had thought that my father had been disappointed in me.
Fighting off the fear, I forced myself to rise to my feet. I had no concept of how far away they actually were, but I would not meet my father cowering in the dust.
“You’re all going to die down here.”
I spun around in an attempt to face the source of the voice. Fear was replaced by anger. This time I knew who was standing behind me.
I rushed forward a few steps. I heard the other shuffle back.
“Don’t bother,” Nathan Graham said with amusement. It was completely dark again, and though I still could not see a thing, I could hear a sneering quality in his voice. “I can see you clearly by the way. The night-vision goggles are worth every dollar I paid for them.”
“Tell me where she is?” I demanded between clenched teeth.
“She’s safe,” he replied. “For now. Just as long as the others are coming.”
“Why do you want them?”
“They told me to bring them here. All three of them. Nothing about you, though,” he told me. “I think what happens to you will be up to my discretion. Maybe I should leave you to consider what you’ve done to them for the rest of your life.”
Ignoring the threat, I asked, “What’s going to happen to them?”
“Their business. Not mine,” he dismissed with a sniff.
“Is that going to be your defense, Graham?” I asked him, my hate transparent. “You and you alone conceived and carried out four separate murders. You and no one else!”
“Six,” he countered. “Did you forget my old man Cyril and dear Patricia? By the way, did they pull the plug on that brain dead cop yet? That would make it a lucky seven.”
Having pinpointed the source of the voice, I rushed him, but he skipped aside. I fell to my knees.
“Don’t do that again, Paul. I don’t want to have to end this conversation with the gun I’m holding.” I heard a sound then that could have been his palm slapping against a gun. “Y’know, they’ll probably pin all of your deaths on me as well. That would make an even ten. Now that’s a substantial figure, isn’t it?” In the darkness, I could hear the smack of lips, almost as if he were savoring something. “Though, if asked, I’d never take credit for anything but the first four. You were right about that, at least. Those were truly my own.”
I slowly turned my head hoping to detect some light source or some flickering LED readout from the night-vision goggles, but I could see nothing. After a moment’s consideration, I concluded that there would probably be no evidence left from a piece of equipment that’s sole purpose would be to avoid detection in the dark.
“What do you want? Why are you doing this?”
“I did it because I was bored, man,” he snorted contemptuously. “Got to live every day as if it was the last, right, and I tried everything else. Skydiving, base-jumping. You name it.” His voice dropped an octave as he said, “But nothing approached killing. Nothing came close to the rush I felt when her heart stopped beating in my hands. I didn’t even know it would work, y’know, giving her that extra dose of insulin, but it did.”
I realized then that he was talking about his mother. His first victim. I recalled now that he had told me that he was only ten years old at the time. What kind of child took the life of the one who had given him his own?
“You can probably dig that, right Paul? Both you and Claudia have a couple of big craniums in those fragile eggshells skulls of yours,” he continued, his words picking up a momentum now like an eighteen wheeler on an incline. “I figured for the longest time that you two were getting close to me. I could see the way she would look at me in the hallway. Saw her connecting the dots. I knew it wouldn’t be long before she remembered me in that stupid Halloween store.” He paused and took a deep breath. “That was when I started having the dreams.”
I felt a sudden coldness over my right shoulder and resisted the urge to turn.
“At first I thought I must have finally cracked, and then I decided that it didn’t really matter. After all, life is perception, isn’t it? And if this is the way I perceive it, then that’s the way it really is,” he continued, a p
assionate edge to his voice like a researcher trying to explain to a layperson his amazing discovery. “But I wasn’t crazy, was I? They told me that they had been talking to you as well.”
“That’s a lie,” I heard myself snap angrily.
“Said that they were using you as a piper to get the other three here.”
Somewhere in the distance below me, I could hear my father’s voice calling my name. He might as well have been miles away.
Graham chuckled, feeding on my burst of emotion. “But you weren’t working nearly fast enough, so they gave me the words to put down in the note. They told me where and when to find dear Patricia and suggested that I get rid of my father. I’d outgrown him anyway,” he murmured under his breath. “They even told me when to take Claudia. Imagine my surprise, when you handed her to me.”
The tear that rolled down my cheek surprised me, until I realized that the emotion I was feeling wasn’t sadness but incredible frustration.
“Maybe you heard those voices too, eh,” he continued, “and wanted to give her to me.”
“I was protecting her,” I responded. “But you wouldn’t get that concept. Protecting the ones you love.”
He began to laugh. “Love?” he croaked bitterly. It was then that I heard it once more, that wispy voice, like the bristles of a broom through cremated ashes. The one I’d heard over the phone at the barn, but this time much louder. “Is that what you call what you did in the shadows out at the camp?”
I began to shiver uncontrollably then.
“I love her,” I affirmed. “And I love my family. You’re not going to hurt any of them!”
Again, the voice whispered in the shadows. “Deny your father,” Graham proposed. “And I will give her to you right now. Right here.”
In the distance, I heard both Dad and Uncle Hank call for me in almost a single voice.
“It’s only a few words,” he said in a soothing tone. “What is that in exchange for a life?”
“I love my father.”
“Take it off and cast it over the edge of the abyss.”
Every muscle in my body stiffened then. This voice did not belong to Graham. It was as if someone had found a way to form human speech with compressed steam.
Before I was conscious of it, my fingers had grasped the crucifix at my neck.
“You defile our home with it,” the voice rasped at me. “Take it off!”
“You can’t touch me, can you?”
Then I heard a jumble of strange voices of different pitches and tones, all talking over each other, each one cursing and wailing. Over these, I heard Graham exclaim, “Do not ask the reason for the season. I am, was, and will always be here.”
There was an icy sensation at my ear again, this time on my left. It was more than I could resist. I spun around this time, hearing the taunting laughter of invisible children ringing in my ears. The tinny tinkling voices increased to a frenzied speed until it became the sound of jackals tearing at each other to get at a fresh kill. Suddenly, it dropped in pitch until it was something warped, something unnatural.
“There is no Allah. No Great Spirit or Yahweh.” Graham’s voice now seemed to change and deepen before my ears. “There is only LEGION.”
A bitter absence of warmth surrounded my neck now. I bent forward and tried to duck from its grasp, but it was like a cloak of moist frost running across my shoulders and down the muscles of my arms, dripping through the small of my back. Clutching my crucifix, I went to my knees, penitence the furthest thing from my mind. Self-preservation was the only thing I prayed for.
Lord, what does it want from me, my mind screamed?
The voice that spoke next was no longer the voice of Nathan Graham. It was no longer even human. “What do we want from you? We want you to feel what we have felt for the generations we have been left to languish here in this pit of darkness! It was entirely your fault! You men! You women! Because of you, we are unable to return from wince we came! Yet you have the audacity to ask us, what we want? We want you to suffer as we have, for as long as we have!”
I peered up from the floor of the cave, wondering if there was still sunlight somewhere in the world outside this hole in the ground and whether I would ever set eyes on it again. What hell had I set foot willingly inside? Had I ever made a conscious choice or had I been manipulated all along? Was this all the calculated act of a malicious foe seeking retribution?
How could I have been so egotistical to think I could face this alone?
“WE-WANT-YOUR-SOULS!”
The voice deepened and warped until the words were no longer audible within the normal human auditory range and I could only feel the vibration within my bones and deep, deep within the white hot core of my screaming mammalian brain. In that moment, I felt I was what Darwin had always said humankind was. An accident. Random freak quantum spittle and whatever had set its teeth in me was the true homo superior. I felt like a whining cur cowering in the dust at the foot of my master, waiting for the foot on the back of my neck, listening for the crack and splinter and the sudden flash of brightness followed by nothingness… nothingness…
Chapter 34 Friday, October 30th, (8:45pm)
Upon awakening, the first sensation that returned to me was a sense of weight and the sting of aching muscles.
Claudia!
I sat upright and began to call her name.
Hands restrained me gently. “Relax, Paul. You’ve been hurt.”
And for the first time I could pinpoint the source of the ache I felt. The ringing pain of the blows I had sustained to my arms and ribs defending myself against my father.
My eyes finally adjusted to the flickering light of a kerosene lantern that sat nearby and hovering over me with bared teeth was the same man who had hit me. Instinctively, I recoiled.
“Easy there! Easy!” the voice attempted to soothe.
I felt another hand, this one cool and smooth, began to stroke my forehead. I glanced up and behind. Another familiar face. Female.
“Mom?” I murmured.
The feminine voice chuckled in response. “No, you’ll have to make do with me.”
“We left your mother safely behind,” I heard my father say. I glanced again into his face and could see that his teeth weren’t bore in anger, but in elation. It’s not often that I was treated to a full-toothed smile from my father. He blinked rapidly and touched my face once before glancing back over his shoulder. “He’s coming around finally.”
“Thank God.” There was no mistaking my Uncle Hank’s voice.
I glanced over my father’s shoulder and saw the figure of my uncle wearing a backpack over one shoulder. Beyond that, I could see little else but shadows and walls.
We were inside a room.
“Claudia?” I managed. “Not dead?”
My uncle glanced at Tracy, who gave me a nod. “I’m certain she’s alive.”
“What happened to you?” Uncle Hank asked.
“Hallucinating in the cave,” I croaked. I could see a look pass between my uncle and father. I felt the rim of a bottle at my lips and I sucked like a starving babe. After a few gulps, it was taken away from me.
“Rest your voice,” my father said. “Thanks for leaving us a trail. We found the chain back at the gate and followed your apples down here.”
“Finally located you after you lit the flare,” Uncle Hank added.
“What flare?” I croaked. Then I remembered the emergency roadside kit, its contents scattered across the cave floor somewhere in the darkness. Had I found the flare and lit it?
There was a moment of silent confusion. I could see the dim reflections of eyes looking from one to the other. I saw Uncle Hank hand my dad what looked like a candle. He stared down at it in contemplation then simply set it aside atop an apple crate.
“Where are we?” I managed.
“Looks like a storm cellar. The cave path dead-ended at a stone staircase that led here.”
I used my father’s arm as leverage to sit up.
I could feel Tracy’s guiding hands on my shoulders, holding me protectively like something fragile.
The light from Dad’s lantern revealed a tight and narrow space. Wooden crates and cardboard boxes had been stacked so high that the top ones nearly touched the low wooden beams of the ceiling. I could just make out something dangling in the shadows a short distance away.
For the first time I realized that both my father and uncle were nearly doubled over to compensate for the height of the ceiling. Tracy knelt beside the boxes where I lay atop a stack of what appeared to be fire blankets.
“What’s the last thing you remember, Paul?” Tracy asked.
My uncle stepped closer and I saw for the first time that he was holding a Bible at his side. “We heard raised voices.”
“My flashlight went out and Nathan Graham attacked me.”
“He was here?” my father asked incredulously. “What did he say to you?”
“He kept making references to a ‘they’ and a ‘them.’ Kept saying that they wanted you three, and Claudia and I were only used to get you all here.”
They were using you as a piper to get the other three here.
“He tried to make me take off my crucifix,” I explained, giving Uncle Hank a look. Not “he,” an inner voice corrected. I knew now it hadn’t been Nathan Graham that had spoken to me then. “I heard a voice raving about being trapped in a pit of darkness for generations because of humans.”
Tracy had taken a step back from me, her eyes glazed and distant. “ ‘When men began to multiply on earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of Heaven saw how beautiful the daughters of men were, and so they took for their wives as many of them as they chose.’”
Uncle Hank shook his head, his eyes trained away from Tracy. “You speak of the sons of Seth, who disobeyed God when they took the daughters of Cain and produced wicked offspring against His will.”
“Watchers,” Tracy murmured under her breath.
Uncle Hank grunted and shook his head again, this time emphatically.
Tracy finally turned to Hank with a look of challenge in her eyes. “ ‘The angels, too, who did not keep to their own domain but deserted their proper dwelling, He has kept in eternal chains, in gloom, for the judgment of the great day.’” She was using my uncle’s favorite game against him. Answering questions with scripture.
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