The Dark Messenger

by Milo Spires

  Fumbling for a few seconds for his glasses that had unsettled themselves slightly, he repositioned them on his nose and then lowered his gaze to peer through the lenses at the titles.

  Pausing to think which one he should take, he cursed, then did the cross sign and apologised to the man upstairs, before grabbing as many as he could carry and then retreated back upstairs to his office. Seating himself behind his desk, he rolled up his sleeves and began flicking through the first book that was nearest to him.

  As he reached the chapters section, he began thinking back to the vision again that he had experienced when he was asleep a couple of weeks previously. In it there had been clear mention of vampires and werewolves but in the book he was looking through there was nothing mentioned about them at all. The list he had to choose from was Demons, Dark Rituals, Necromancy, Sin, The Possessed, Ghosts, just no vampires or werewolves listed at all.

  Then he started thinking again for the thousandth time that maybe he was just somehow loosing his mind, and that he couldn’t have really seen a vision of the future. It must have just been some kind of very weird disturbed dream.

  As he glanced his eyes in disgust over the demon pages, he allowed his mind to remember the things that had happened since he had woken up on that terrible morning. The things that had proved undoubtedly, and clearly without a shadow of a doubt that he had seen a vision.

  The first thing he remembered was that it was so damn clear. It was so unlike a dream where you woke up realising that your brain had just been thinking very weird things through the night. This dream or vision was actually like being there first hand. He could smell the different smells in the air, see everyone’s faces, count the buttons on their clothes, and even see the dust particles that covered the poor woman’s face. At one point as a werewolf had charged at him, he had felt extreme pain as its course fur brushed hard against his right leg. At that moment he had spun around fast with his heart in his mouth thinking he was its dinner but he wasn’t. The beast had charged straight past him like it hadn’t even seen him.

  Then the next morning when he had felt pain, he had rolled his trouser leg down to check and the skin had become inflamed where the beast had touched him. He wasn’t horrified though, or at least not as he should have been, because by then he was still in deep mental shock from the other things that had happened on that dreadful Saturday morning.

  One of the things had been far worse.

  In the vision he had seen a priest who was being blackmailed by an evil man called Raffious. He was some kind of truth messenger to Heaven and on the run from an angel called Abdiel. The priest had a child called Jenny by a nun called sister Ursula, which was very weird because he had a pregnant girlfriend called sister Ursula and she was a nun too.

  Then just after he had woken up and was getting ready to take a shower, she had said to him that she had a name for their baby if it was a girl. John had naturally paused for a second to hear the name and she had smiled at him and said she wanted to call it Jenny too.

  ‘Whats up you look like you have seen a ghost.’ Ursula had said to him as he had simply frozen on the spot when he’d heard the name.

  ‘Oh nothing, I just remembered something I had to do.’ He had replied with deep shame in his mind that he had lied to her.

  Then he had walked into their en-suite shower and after a quick wash, minutes later he was fumbling for his car keys in yesterday’s clothes. Then shamefully and most out of character for him, he had muttered ‘bye’ under his breath and without even kissing her goodbye, he had charged out the door.

  On the short drive to the cathedral, a couple of other things had dawned on him from the vision, one of them being the priest’s daughter. She had been chased throughout the story by vampires from the future.

  Then the second thing was a good vampire called Kaine, and his loving wife Regina had protected her right up till the very end. Then sadly the evil vampires had got to her and she was killed.

  The scariest of the lot though, which proved indubitably that it had been a vision of the future for sure, was when he had met the guest speaker in the cathedrals car park. He had gone over to apologize to the choir for being late, and to Jane who arranged the hymns, before turning around to greet the stranger. He hadn’t realised at that point because he was tired, that the man was a spitting image of the man from his vision. Only as soon as he had said his name was Raffious, then suddenly the penny had dropped so to speak, and extreme fear raced through every part of his soul.

  It was then that he had realized for sure the dream was a vision.

  John was utterly thrown and deeply distraught by it all. His inherent reaction had been to get as far away from him as possible, only as he was running, and like a cancer, he was overtaken by fear. Then as his subconscious mind alerted him to the true severity of the immediate danger he was in, the fear had metastasized into something far worse--pure terror.

  He wouldn’t call himself a particularly fit man, but that morning the fear provoked adrenaline had kept his legs moving beneath him at a frantic pace for more than 5 minutes. He had run straight up into Bakely town centre itself and then beyond.

  Two days had passed since that day and now in his office he felt so alone and so trapped with evil surging all around him. He knew he should have gone to the Arch Bishop but that would have meant telling in him about Ursula; he knew he couldn’t do that because of what it would have meant to his career. As soon as he admitted to his peers that he had a pregnant girlfriend, he would be admitting to breaking his vowels too. The Sacrement of Holy Orders that he had signed many years before. There would be no way his peers would help him, he would be quietly sacked from the church, and then where would that get him, no he had to solve these problems himself, but how?

  The vision had shown him that the world was maybe going to end in 2099 and that when his daughter Jenny was born, she would be stolen away from him by Raffious on the very first day of her birth. He couldn’t allow that, never would he allow that, but then how could he a mere priest stop it. Raffious the old man in his white robes was really a dark messenger who was so powerful with his spells, that he even created the werewolves in the vision too.

  No there had to be a logical way to stop it and maybe in the Ponerology books on his office desk, somehow, somewhere there would be mention of vampires and werewolves, and the answer to stopping everything in the vision would be there too.

  Frantically turning the pages of the first book he saw nothing so then started a new book. Then when he had finished that one with nothing mentioned either, he started another, then another till finally he had gone through the lot of them. All five books and nothing, not even the slightest mention of the fanged people or howling beasts, how could that be?

  Turning around on his chair, he looked up in the direction of Heaven through the coloured glass windows and suddenly, as if bestowed upon him by God himself, it came to him.

  If the evil truth messenger Raffious existed as the vision said, then the two good vampires, Kaine and Regina must exist too, wouldn’t they? With this thought in mind and knowing how they protected a human, he felt it would be safe to try finding them. If he could and they really lived beneath the old ruined cow shed in Devil’s Dyke, then they just might have the answers he needed.