by Ric Dawson
Did that shadow move? No. Relax, Dammit.
Night-time business lights began to flicker on as dusk cast long shadows on the streets. A light wind drew cold air down from the peak.
The cool breeze’s caress eased the tension. My grip loosened on the open window as the Caddy cruised down the crowded street. Night fell under the shade of the mountain and premonition became dread. I pulled off the main drag and followed a small road heading around the foothills to the south. Traffic dropped to nothing and the trees closed in, with branches that overhung the road. The air cooled my arm as darkness and evening mist clung to the trees like lovers. With the night, the smell of pine mingled with damp earth and my apprehension grew.
Thick trees reduced visibility, and my headlights struggled to penetrate the soupy gloom. The pavement had stopped miles back. The eerie forest nudged memories of dark creatures and my skin crawled.
A deer bolted across the foggy road. The car kicked gravel as I crushed the brake pedal and slid to the road edge.
Damn.
I wiped sweat from my brow and kept the speed low.
Darkness grappled with the headlights and struggled to extinguish the worrisome light, and the air grew still. Only the sound of the tires crunching on the rough dirt road broke the eerie silence. The premonition of monstrous evil oppressed the air, and a faint voice in the back of my mind told me to get the hell out of there.
Something resonated, No. Courage. A surge of confidence strengthened my resolve as the gloom pressed in.
The feeling of horror spooked me, but I pushed ahead. Adrenaline tingled my spine and my hands gripped the steering wheel.
A small rundown cabin nestled among trees on the right. No lights showed other than those from the Caddy headlights. I pulled into the overgrown driveway with the headlights pointed at the cabin porch and front door.
Large swaths of grass struggled to sprout amid the rocky soil. The air hung stale with a hint of decay. My nose wrinkled at the scent of sickly sweet roadkill. I couldn’t see the carcass. A creak of wood pulled my eyes towards misted trees. Nothing there.
The gloom thickened around the cabin and clung to it like sticky tar. I opened the car door. Mute dark trees bordered the road and cabin. The wind had dropped. Still. Anticipating. I left the car lights on and got out of the Caddy. The battery was new, and the light was reassuring. The shield warmed my left thigh and the focus warmed the right. Sweat trickled down my cheek. I knew something hid in the cabin, something wrong. The cabin rose on short, thick stilts with a front porch of warped planks, centered door, and a single shuttered window. I took a deep breath, rolled my shoulders to ease the tension, and cautiously walked towards the cabin door.
The focus burned hotter, and I knew what that meant. Something empowered by a shadow primal was in that cabin. Strength pulsed through my muscles and fury tightened my grip.
I’m ready this time, you bitches.
The soft crunch of gravel under my shoes echoed in the trees.
Everything that happened next came in a flash. The porch light blazed on, and the cabin door opened. A tall, slender woman stood in the doorway. Her black hair hung loosely around her shoulders, and she wore a black dress that shimmered in the headlights.
“May I help you?” she said with a slight smile which instantly turned to a snarling hiss when she saw the psionic focus. She dodged behind the door, faster than any human I’ve ever seen as the focus belched out a golden beam that sizzled and splashed the interior wall in blazing gold sparks.
Missed her. My arms flew up and my head swung back.
What the—
I fell. Feet kicked empty air as rough dirt walls sped by my eyes. I looked down. Bottomless black. My legs wiggled violently to balance the plummeting fall. Fear grappled with resolve as the floor of the shaft rushed up. Wooden stakes.
Shield activate.
Boom! The shield blazed a soft blue glow around me. But I wasn’t crushed and impaled at the bottom of a shaft. I stood in the driveway, just as before, in front of me the dark and foreboding cabin.
An illusion, wow, and – it – waited for me to enter. I found myself muttering an old ritual of protection involving four angels. Sure, I had a fancy shield from some astral aliens, but requesting aid from angels drove away imagined evils and comforted the spirit.
Are angels egregors?
The porch creaked, a slow rolling moan, as I mounted the short steps. Something scurried inside the cabin and went quiet.
Neck hairs tingled as my hand twisted the doorknob and pushed the door wide open. The car’s headlights shone into the interior. Foul air assailed my senses like a butcher’s shop after a long day. Blood, and lots of it. Fresh. Moist.
In the momentary blaze of the headlights, I saw them. Squat. Oily. Black-skinned. Hundreds of hairless creatures. Baleful, black eyes gleamed in the flash of light, and vicious, cruel-hooked claws gouged the wood.
Crap.
They clung to the walls, ceiling and in between. Blood dripped, smeared, splattered everywhere like some giant blood fountain had exploded. Partially eaten arms and legs poked out of the gore. A severed head bobbed above the carnage.
No sooner had I cleared the door than it jerked from my hand, throwing the room into semi-darkness.
Brilliant flashes of golden light blasted the darkness like a strobe and vaporized every ugly little creature in its path. But there were so many.
They charged. The shield flashed a radiant blue as swarming creatures covered it. The sound of hundreds of skittering claws erupted in my ears. The creatures popped, sizzled, and flared into flame as they tried to gnaw at the shield. I stumbled back and fell as their mass drove me hard against the closed door. I gasped as blue turned dark, flickering in places. The shield buckled under the large numbers of the creatures, or maybe it was not as effective here. The assault continued unabated. More of them came from the back of the cabin and surged forward like voracious rats. My legs and arms disappeared under the heaving black mass. The sharp sting of teeth caused me to cry out in pain. Teeth ripped my flesh. I was being eaten alive. I had seconds to live.
“Help! Kill them all!” I hysterically shouted at the focus.
–Acknowledged … reconfiguring … please place protective eye cover now–
A soundless explosion of brilliant golden light sunburst in the room and muffled my screams. Light penetrated my partially closed eyelids, searing retinas. The air sizzled and felt hot like an open stove. The nova-like explosion blasted every creature into a smoking heap of blackened teeth and claws. The walls and shattered furniture of the cabin were not affected.
A blue glow flickered around me. Through my blurred vision, deep tissue damage oozed blood from gouges and rips in my shredded arms and legs. It looked like I had fallen into a piranha tank. Exposed muscle and bare bone showed through pooling blood on my right leg.
“Aw, Damn,” I said to empty air, trying to slow my racing pulse and thundering heart.
I’m not in shock?
My ripped flesh started to throb and shriek with pain as my blood flowed into growing reddish pools on the floor. Deathly cold seeped into my limbs, and my blurred vision swam. A blue light grew in the cabin. The shield strengthened slowly and within a minute or two reached its usual radiance. The blue color was brighter now and illuminated the room. Green mixed with the blue over the heavily damaged areas of my legs and arms. Pain throbbed in a dull roar and slowly diminished.
Breathe, breathe. Calm.
My racing heart eased its pounding.
I looked down at the focus. All of the five silver concentric bands were dark.
What were those creatures?
No response.
Great. I’ve broken the damn thing.
Remains of the creatures turned to black smoke and vanished, leaving no trace behind. The blood covering every foot of the room remained. Straining, I pushed myself up. I didn’t want to look into the back of the cabin, but I needed to. Just to be sure I had killed
them all.
Boards creaked and squished as I slid over slippery footing. My blurred vision made it difficult to see in the dim glow of the shield. I reached for the wall and my hand rode its sticky surface for support. I shuddered. The scent of sickly rotted flesh permeated the cabin.
In an adjacent room, small black candles ringed a five-foot-plus sign drawn in dull red on the floor.
Blood?
The black candles flickered with reddish-yellow flames in the darkness. Nebulous symbols drawn in each quarter of the grid formed a circle inside the candle ring. They glowed a faint dull brown. I took out my cell phone and snapped a picture of the drawing.
Faint wisps of red smoke sucked into the symbols and disappeared into the floor. Rivulets of blood ran into the grid from the other room. Wider stains around the rivulets hinted the sanguine circle was old. As the blood touched the rune circle, the viscous fluid vaporized, and the vapor siphoned into the floor with the red smoke.
“Don’t cross the grid,” a soft whisper said.
I picked up a small dusty board from the corner of the room and tossed it at a candle, knocking it over. The board burst into flame as it touched the runes. Heavy smoke filled the area, and I backed into the decimated living room.
I didn’t want any pictures of the living room and stumbled out into the night.
The Caddy started up without a whimper, unlike me. Gravel rattled off the undercarriage, and I spun the tires backing out of the driveway. Small flickers of flame danced through the cracks in the shuttered front cabin window. Shoving the car into forward gear, I eased the accelerator and rolled back the way I had come. It was slow going, but gradually my eyes improved. Odd. Nothing hurt. It took me a few minutes to realize that weird fact. I wanted to check my legs so I pulled to the side of the dirt road. The yellow and blue glow surrounding my legs pulsed like a heartbeat; the psionic shield worked and clung close to my skin. The bleeding stopped and, to my surprise, my leg already appeared to be in the process of healing.
Yellow motes rose up from below my skin and drifted over the torn flesh. New skin formed even as I watched. Not instantaneous, but by the time I pulled into my driveway fresh cell growth sheathed the exposed muscle and bone. Maybe shock had unhinged my mind, but the sight of my injuries healing themselves didn’t seem that unusual. Was something altering my feelings? Was I so deadened to weirdness that nothing affected me?
Thank God I don’t have to explain this to a hospital.
I staggered from the loss of blood. In the house, I took out the unresponsive psionic focus.
Please don’t be broken.
The shield didn’t have the same data function the focus did.
Leftovers littered the fridge, and after dinner, I was in much better shape. The shock and trembling had stopped. I looked at my legs again.
I’m going to have some wicked scars. Chicks dig scars. The old movie line brought a faint smile as itching replaced pain.
Mentally exhausted, I wasn’t up to any astral hot-rodding so headed to bed rather than gather up the headphones for a session with the brain wave disc. The soft bedcovers were heavenly. But I was wrong about astral traveling that evening.
# # #
I woke to find myself hovering a few feet above the bed. The two psionic devices on the bed stand emitted a faint blue, and I floated over to grab them. The focus had two of the five circular rings lit up. Encouraging. Maybe the device was recharging. The rings blazed orange instead of silver.
Wait. Oh, crap. Orange means travel.
The device started to flash, bathing my bedroom in orange pulses of light.
–Transport link received ... portal binding accepted … initiating phasing–
“Aw. Damn,” I exclaimed in surprise, and the room was gone. I almost dropped the devices in shock. For a brief moment, gray limbo encased me. I emerged surrounded by the sloped walls of a small, rocky ravine. The weathered crack stretched about thirty meters. I was on one end of the depression, and embedded in the ground around me a circle of eight monolith stones stood four feet high, like a miniature Stonehenge. Each stone had a symbol cut into it with a carved animal below.
Three of the symbols, the dragon, snake, and star glowed orange and began to fade.
Begin recording.
–Acknowledged … recorder activated–
Diffuse light permeated the air like a cloudy mid-afternoon. A red glow from cracks in the ground bloomed like lava, yet the air cooled my skin. The light caused odd shadows at angles that disoriented me. In some places, the rock had a glassy sheen as if melted by intense heat.
I looked skyward at rolling gray and black clouds that crackled with streams of crimson in the murky maelstrom. The turbulent sky further confounded the shadows on the ground, making them jerk and leap. I shuddered for a moment, recalling the shadows in Woodland Park. Angular, rubbery, ankle-high growths accentuated the sparse vegetation. No trees. Nor blade of grass. The air smelled of burnt soil and soot.
Stepping out of the circle launched me into the air.
It must be low gravity here compared to Earth.
Scrambling up the shallow side of the ravine sent loose gravel spinning to the bottom. The terrain looked the same, undulating littered landscape with sharp, cracked rocks and no signs of erosion. In the distance roared a gigantic column of smoke and flame that extended high into the sky. Farther away, more burning columns erupted from the clouds. Blackened earth and cracked dirt stretched to the horizon.
The image of astronauts on the moon came to mind, and the solution to moving presented itself. Steps became a rhythm of hopping and walking at the same time. Taking long jumping strides, I headed towards the closest flame column. Jumping became bounding in colossal jumps and the distance closed quickly. Behind me, several lone blackened peaks rose above the burnt plain. I made a mental note of the landmark to find my way back to the ravine.
Curious. Sensations of being winded or tired were missing.
Is the air a fiction of my mind, just like everything I think I see?
After a short while, I came to the hill with the flame column on the other side.
The enormous column of fire extended to the clouds. Heat from the column warmed my face as the roaring flames smashed and shook the earth. Inside the incandescent column, bursts of lightning arced to the ground with ear-splitting sound. The thunder added to the wild cacophony of noise. The fire flowed from the swirling mass of crimson-flashed clouds that boiled overhead.
The hill’s crest dropped into a shallow bowl and on the ground, the fire column plunged into a large blood-red grid.
The grid.
My gut clenched as I recognized the pattern from Manitou Springs. The large pulsing runes burned an intense violent crimson as flames and lightning crashed around them. A thin network of brilliant glowing lines knit the runes and grid together.
My courage wavered as I spotted tall humanoid shadows dancing around the scorched grid. Ghostly apparitions, shaped like tenuous human brains with attached spines, phased in and out of sight like flickering movie frames. They spun and flew around the burning column in rapid spurts like feeding piranha.
A strong desire struck my mind like a hammer. Greed. Leakage from the supercharged emotional essence of the firefall.
Money. Sex. Blood. Power. Tangible. Insatiable. I wanted it all. I’d kill millions to get it.
I groaned. The powerful desires ravaged my mind, and my knees sagged toward the ground. My soul wept in a furnace of lust.
Tears streamed from blind eyes. Only the firefall existed, nothing else, nothing more.
Greed was a living thing with needs and desires. It wanted me, and I would do anything to satisfy it. Anything. Every cell in my being cried for more. The flesh on my arms peeled back and flew towards the firefall. Horror transformed to eager acceptance as the burning column fed on my astral essence, piece by piece.
I crawled forward, irresistibly drawn to the firefall. In a flash, the overpowering desire stopped. Gasp
ing for air, I fell back. The defense field sparkled blue all around me.
My God.
I gibbered, while my consciousness gripped the reality of my weakness.
Out of the corner of my eye, something moved among the rocks to the left of the firefall. I turned to face the motion and the focus device auto fired. The blast of searing golden light splashed over a dark smoky figure now out in the open ten meters away. My defense field flared under a lash of crimson light. The figure advanced, trailing ruby sparks from its cloaked body. The golden beam was stopped inches from the tall humanoid and splashed off in several directions.
A murky, blood-red glow surrounded the cowled and robed figure. Blood-red energy streams flowed from the ground into a rod the dark figure held.
Thick trails of energy snaked like heavy power cables from the grid runes to the humanoid’s feet. It was drawing energy from the firefall.
–Lej’jin, we’ve missed you.–
The deep resonant timbre of its voice echoed familiarly in the recesses of my mind.
–Your traitor’s debt must be paid. Give us the Jin devices and you may yet live.—
You don’t know me.
–Don’t I? Look deep into that black soul of yours. Remember Kai’rii.—
Knowledge, buried and dark, shifted in my mind. I instantly suppressed it.
Tricks and mind games.
We continued blasting, but neither of us could breach each other’s shields. After several exchanges, the psionic focus was down to one full circle still brightly lit, while the second circle grew fainter with each golden energy blast. The focus was losing power. My shield showed similar dimming of the fifth band, but I still had four left on it. While able to withstand the blasts of the attacker, eventually the shield would go down.
–You cannot win, Lej’jin. Save yourself. Throw down the devices.—
–Maybe he will access the firefall, Ussa’kai.–
The ground around my feet turned into a shallow pool of blood-red tar. From the tar, small tentacles launched themselves at the shield. Each tentacle stuck for a moment as it sizzled and popped. Horrified, I saw two more dark smoky figures come around from behind the roaring flame column. Within moments, two more beams joined the first and my shield began sparking into weakened violet as it adjusted to the increased energy assault. I knew once it went black nothing would stop those beams from hitting me.