Malevolent

by David Risen

  Rider squinted at Ben.

  “So, what do you do for a living, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  He smiled.

  “I own a construction company. You break it, and I rebuild it.”

  Rider looked across the car at Amelia.

  “How do you two know each other?”

  Ben Viracocha turned his palms up.

  Rider noticed something strange about them. Thick ugly scars on both palms – jagged tears that nearly split his hands in half originating from two points in the center of his palms smaller than the size of a dime.

  Ben Viracocha gave him a Mona Lisa smile, and picked his hat off his head revealing a mane of raven hair and

  Old

  Puncture

  Scars

  Tracing the center of his forehead in the shape of a band.

  Rider gasped.

  “Who are you?” he said, but even as the words left his mouth, he realized that he didn’t want to know.

  His heart pounded.

  He felt small, dirty, ashamed.

  Ben Viracocha considered Rider’s eyes. His expression was one of deepest sympathy and understanding.

  But his face was no longer Native American, exactly. He looked almost Arabic.

  “Not to worry, Father Fury. You’ve done well. You’ve been good with a few things, and you will become ruler of many. I’m here to offer you food and quarter, so you can rest and heal your mind and spirit before moving on to the darkest end of your journey.”

  Ben Viracocha placed his hat back on his head and suddenly he was Native American again.

  “I’ll show the two of you to your rooms myself.”

  Without another word, he turned and started back to the house.

  Rider looked back across the car at Amelia who also hadn’t moved. She was looking after Ben Viracocha with an expression of confusion.

  “Where did you get that guy?”

  She looked at him.

  “We met in New Mexico shortly. He smuggled me out of the state when the sisters found me.”

  “Is he who I think he is?”

  She smiled. “I have no idea.”

  Rider shook his head with self-reproach.

  “I didn’t cuss, did I?”

  Amelia laughed mischievously.

  Rider’s face filled with accusation. “So why didn’t you warn me?”

  “Daddy, do you ever get scared sometimes?”

  A Freightliner grille plunging toward Rider’s driver’s side door.

  Beyond, blue skies.

  Warm, spring day.

  Foo Fighters, “This is a call,” blasts from the premium sound system of his white Escalade.

  Alyssa, his five-year-old daughter, shrieks in the back seat.

  The trailer on the Freightliner jackknifes as the driver locks it down – the back end of the trailer bounces – hammering I-85 like a piston.

  It slams into the back of a white, compact Hyundai. The car swerves right. It comes up on two wheels and spins into the dirt median.

  Later, Rider discovers that the driver is an expecting mother. She loses the baby. Her husband leaves her, and she attempts and fails to kill herself.

  Now, she’s wheelchair-bound for the rest of her existence.

  The Freightliner smacks into the side of the Escalade.

  The force of the blow drives the driver’s side door into Rider’s left side. His head slams into the driver’s side window so hard and fast that he only feels the blow.

  The airbags explode from their respective cradles punching him hard in the face. The tires of his SUV shriek murderously and then explode as the momentum of the Freightliner hurls the vehicle sideways at seventy miles per hour.

  The screeching sounds of metal bending and tearing.

  Foo-Fighters still blasting from the speakers as if nothing were amiss.

  Then....

  Weird, dreamless sleep.

  Rider opens his eyes sometime later to find himself strapped to a traffic sign orange backboard.

  His waist doesn’t look right – as if his pelvis has collapsed in on itself.

  The view past his brown boots is horrendous. A twisted and wadded hulk of steel with police officers and paramedics huddled around sits in the middle of the road by a ruined Freightliner that lies on its side on the opposite side of the road.

  Acrid pall of electrical burning and ruined tires fills the air.

  “Daddy?” Alyssa cries hoarsely, but the sound is wrong. It is a slack-jawed enunciation.

  A bloody right hand reaches through the rubble and officials and beckons him.

  “I want my Daddy!” she cries.

  Weird, dreamless sleep again.

  Five years before, Rider is the happiest man alive.

  He files down the white tile hallways of Bridgeton University Hospital with an egg crate drink carrier in one hand containing two large coffees, and a McDonald’s bag in the other full of Bacon, Egg, and Cheese McGriddles.

  He’s about to turn the corner and walk into room 316 when he hears sniffling from within.

  He peeks around the corner to find his wife, Lauren, holding their baby for the first time. The little girl with blondish hair is cradled in her arms and batting at her Mommy’s face.

  Lauren’s shoulder-length blond hair is tangled and oily. Her squarish wire-framed glasses droop halfway down her nose. Her face is pale and her lips – colorless.

  Tears stream down her face, and she’s trying to hum to the baby, but her voice keeps cracking.

  Rider’s eyes well up at the sight.

  He walks into the hospital room and sits the McDonald’s bag on a side table.

  “You okay?”

  Lauren gives him a vulnerable look the likes of which he’s never seen on her face before.

  “Thank you for this,” she says. “Thank you a thousand times, just....” She looks away.

  “What is it, baby?”

  She looks at him with renewed resolve on her face.

  “Just don’t do anything stupid. Be a good man for us, please.”

  Rider gives her a sober look.

  Last night, Lauren turns to him in the center of the clearing by the old, dirt road.

  Rider is pinned hard against the trunk of an oak tree.

  The woman he loves and once thought that she loved him, wears a white, ceremonial robe stained red around the right sleeve – a stain he will not fully understand until hours later.

  And the look she gives him through the thick plastic frames of her glasses could turn water to ice.

  “I’ve never felt one way or another about you, Rider. You were always just a job.”

  Six-year-old Blake Rider’s little hand has disappeared inside his mother’s black, leather driving glove.

  She wears a gray waistcoat, and as he looks up to her stark but pretty face against the gray winter sky, he finds her eyes trained on the church ahead.

  “Mommy, I don’t want to go in there again.”

  She looks down at him – her eyes sparkling with dark hatred.

  She stops walking short of the steps, kneels, and glares deep into his eyes.

  “You will go in there, and you will be good for the sisters. They’re just trying to help you.”

  “They hurt me,” he pleaded.

  She furls her brow.

  “There’s something very bad inside you. They’re just trying to lock it away so that it doesn’t hurt you later. You will do what they say when they say, and you will not tell the ladies at school again.

  An hour later, little Rider looks up at the vaulted ceiling crying and naked.

  A woman in a white robe approaches him with an Athame sparkling in the darkness. She presses it against the upper left quadrant of his chest.

  The sting of the blade cutting flesh.

  Shivers of a horror half-remembered.

  Three years ago, Blake Rider opens his eyes from a dreamless sleep to find himself in a hospital bed.

  Lauren stands. She’s w
earing a pink blouse ruffled at the throat – her eyes red, behind her thick-sided, boxy glasses. Her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  Rider opens his mouth to speak but the motion causes the broken nerves in his jaw to scream.

  He pauses for a moment to allow the pain to abate, and then he says, “Where’s Alyssa?”

  She bunches her lips together, turns her head away from him, and shakes her head tightly.

  So many emotions hit him at once that he thinks he might scream. Two hours later, when he’s alone, he does scream, and the sound that comes out is tantamount to the bellowing of an alley cat.

  Lauren sniffs, wipes her nose with the back of her hand, and then looks in his general direction.

  “Why did you do this to us?” she says.

  A month ago, Rider, believing his name is Nick Carcer, sits in a chair inside his daughter’s room looking down upon her.

  “Dad,” she says, “Were you ever afraid of the dark?”

  Four days ago, he finds himself a disembodied spirit circling Dena’s head.

  “What if I’m not good enough?” she asks her high priestess.

  Three days ago, he sits across from her in the driver’s seat of his Lincoln Navigator. She stares straight forward watching the rain sheet down his windshield.

  “They’re expecting me to take you home and make love to you...for real.”

  Rider squints at her.

  “I’m a virgin,” she blurts.

  Two hours later, Rider lies in bed with the comforter drawn up to his waist and his arms folded behind his head.

  The bathroom door opens, and his eyes follow the sound. Dena steps into the bedroom.

  Dena Carcer – the real one – stark naked.

  She turns toward him with a look of fear and utter vulnerability in her eyes.

  Her arms folded over her breasts.

  Rider extends his hand.

  She stares at him for a moment.

  “Are you sure about this?” he says.

  Her face softens, and she takes his hand.

  Her body is nowhere near as perfect as it seems in his fake, wet dreams.

  Her breasts are much smaller and her areolas are enormous and diamond-shaped. Her left nipple is inverted, and she has a circular, brown birthmark about the size of a quarter on her left shoulder.

  Her palm is clammy and hot.

  And now Rider knows how perfect the woman inside the meat suit really is.

  He pulls her to him.

  She lands on top of him straddling his waist.

  He releases her hand and cups her breasts.

  She closes her eyes and tilts her head back.

  Inside, Rider is crestfallen. He knows she’s trying to give herself to him, but she doesn’t love him. This is still not real.

  Fake, plastic love.

  He wraps his hand around the back of her neck and pulls her head close to his face.

  “We don’t have to do this if you’re not ready.”

  She peers into his eyes with a look of firm resolve about her mouth and forehead, but her eyes speak of remorse and fear.

  “Yes, we do.”

  Last night, the old Pathfinder bumps along the deserted dirt road.

  Rider sits in the gray cloth passenger seat wearing only his jeans, his hiking boots, and his socks.

  The dim headlights first illuminate a dark Chevy Suburban then the dim beams catch a glimmer of something dark lying on the ground before it.

  Amelia gasps and stomps the brakes. Rider lurches forward. He has to brace himself on the cracked gray dashboard to keep from banging his head.

  “What the fuck was that?” he snaps.

  “Look,” Amelia says pointing at the black square before the SUV.

  Rider squints through the darkness and the haze of dust the Pathfinder kicked up when it stopped suddenly, and that’s when he sees it.

  He throws his door open and thrusts himself back out into the night.

  His recollection catches up to his eyes.

  Dena lying on the black blanket at his feet has reverted to her original look in death. Her body looks like a severe wax figure of itself.

  Her chest is torn open as if something clawed its way out, and the dainty features of her face are forever locked in a final silent scream.

  Rider’s eyes well up, and he turns away.

  For the first time since Blake Rider was a small child, he awoke from a nightmare crying.

  His new smartphone – an LG that Amelia picked up for him at a Metro PCS still cycled through his Google Play Music playlist.

  At present, Radiohead yawed through the song “Fake Plastic Trees.”

  Rider threw his legs over the edge of the bed and batted the tears away from his cheeks only to have more collect and drip from his eyes.

  He looked down at his lap and beyond at the rough, unstained planks of the floor below his bare feet, which dangled off the edge of the high, King-Size bed.

  He still wore the same light-colored jeans that The Sisters of Divinity yanked off him the night before.

  The same jeans he wore as he looked down at the murdered ruins of his second wife who didn’t love him.

  Dena was a lost and damaged soul. Rider’s sorrow only deepened as Amelia recounted the reason for her decision not to kill her the night before – that her real name was Delilah Powers, and she found herself entangled with the sisterhood via a girl’s home after authorities discovered that her mother was more interested in maintaining her relationship with a pedophile than protecting her daughter.

  Rider buried his face in his hands as if he were about to play peek-a-boo and cried. He didn’t look up until the tarnished, brass doorknob of his bedroom door rattled and the door squeaked open.

  Amelia, wearing a white, silk slip gazed back at him from the doorway.

  Her ability to change the way she looked at a moment’s notice was tantamount to the skills of a Hollywood makeup artist, but right now, she was the same as she appeared in the strange dream he had, in which she revealed her amnesia about her identity.

  Long Auburn hair.

  The features of a woman in her early twenties.

  Beauty that needed no appliances.

  At two in the morning, Amelia gave up on sleep, climbed out of bed, and did the only thing she ever did when melancholy.

  She sat at the old, rotten vanity by her bed and brushed her hair in long, gentle strokes.

  And that’s what she was doing when a light tap at the door summoned her attention.

  “Come in?” she said.

  The door opened and in stepped Ben Viracocha still wearing his Stetson and suede vest.

  “Mother Justice? I thought you went to bed with the chickens.”

  She sat the brush down and folded her hands in her lap – atop her white, silk nightgown.

  “Just having trouble sleeping,” she sighed.

  “I’m aware. Both of you are. The sorrow and fear wafting through this side of the house is so loud I can’t sleep. The spirit healer in me had to come see what I could do.”

  She looked down at her lap and smiled thoughtfully.

  “Can you erase forty-three years of bad dreams that really happened?”

  He nodded. “I can if you believe I can.”

  She gave him an interested look.

  “You know I saw you through Rider’s eyes today, right?”

  He smiled.

  “I saw you see me.”

  “Is there any truth to all of that?”

  Ben Viracocha shuffled his feet and picked his hat off his head revealing his scars. Amelia saw them many times before, but she never associated them the way Rider had.

  “I’ve been many things over many lifetimes. I’ve visited every culture in one way or another. What you saw Father Fury see was a reflection of but one of them.”

  Amelia stared at her own reflection in the mirror without really seeing.

  “All of it is true.”

  Ben Viracocha pulled a wooden chai
r out from under the antique, roll-top desk to his right, pushed it over beside her, and sat with the backrest against his chest and his arms folded over the top of it.

  “Allow me to answer some of your questions in a way no one ever has before.”

  She turned to face him. “Okay?”

  “The reason I always tried to teach mortals to forgive had little to do with the person that harmed them. Forgiveness is for the victim. If the victim does not forgive, the seeds of bitterness will grow inside until it transforms him or her into something unintended.”

  She squinted and nodded.

  He patted her on the hand and smiled.

  “That’s why I like you mother justice. You’re agile. Justice can be ugly and difficult for everyone involved, but it always tries to be fair.”

  She grinned and shook her head.

  “But you’re also wrong about all of it being true, he added.”

  She looked at him with renewed interest.

  He looked down at the floor below the back of his chair.

  “Religious texts were written mostly by prideful men who proclaimed themselves prophets and philosophers, and they’ve been edited and re-edited by governments and individuals looking to control a body of people. The original message did come from the spirit world, but they’ve contorted it through their own narrow world views and edited it to include things that simply aren’t true.”

  “Such as?”

  He offered her his cold, Native American stare.

  “Women. Women are vastly important in creation, but in almost all religions, their roles have been completely diminished. Would you like to hear the true history of it?”

  Amelia was intrigued. “Yeah.”

  “When the Great Spirit created the souls who are called mortals, he spent tens of billions of your years doing so – handcrafting each one. He knew every mistake each would make before they were ever inserted into mortality, so he also created everything you see and much more that you don’t to allow them to grow in virtue and power until they could become great spirits of their own who created worlds of their own. Some souls were more female than male others more male than female, and all of this had a purpose.”

  “Who are the Celestial Spirits?”

  “Children from a previous round of creation who didn’t exalt themselves completely. They are here to oversee Mortality and the Spirit World in Father’s absence. The Great Spirit knew everything that would happen before it occurred, but all of it is to teach men and Celestial Spirits alike.”