Cold Fear

by Timothy Friesenhahn

  Trembling, she fought off the urge to turn and run. The bastard boys needed to pay and maybe, this evil man Ms. McQuaid spoke of was the answer. The more she looked at the smiling man she realized he didn’t seem all that harmful to her. Maybe, Ms. McQuaid was just off her rocker in her last days, maybe she just didn’t like the man, Cici didn’t know.

  The man motioned for her to enter the house. He shut the door behind her and began to speak again, “those two little fucks deserve to be taught a lesson. Wait, maybe they deserve a more severe punishment. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  His hidden glare seemed to penetrate his dark shades as he looked in the direction toward her. Her mind was spinning, emotions were burning hot within her body and soul.

  Shaking her head in agreement she barely got the next few words to choke from her mouth, but she asked, “can you kill them?”

  Laughing as if he was amused with that belittled request, the smiling man replied, “darlin’, don’t you know who I am, didn’t the old whore ever tell you about me? I am Moloch, eater of children. I will tend to the boys under one circumstance, I have one little favor to ask of you, and this little favor will benefit you fully.”

  She was going to speak and try to deny any favor he would ask. Fear had replaced her need for vengeance, and she began to wonder if she had made a mistake by not turning around and running. At the same time, however, intrigue had got the best of her and she wanted the boys to pay. She winced her eyes shut, trying to push the next horrid thought from her mind. But the thought stayed; she wanted the two pieces of shits, racist little assholes, dead. Before she could speak, though, he waved her words off with the flick of his hand.

  “No need to talk darlin’, I’ll do the talking. Let me ask a favor. But before you answer just think about it while I speak about myself and tell you a little of just who I am, or rather what I am. My favor from you can be one to yourself. I know you’re here illegally and your desperate not to return to Mexico. My favor I ask of you is when you come across the crystal ball that I know is in Tanner’s possession, I can feel it, I want you to make a wish. You will find the crystal ball in the trunk of his car. You will know the moment to get it. The wish I want you to make is to have Tanner be your husband. I know, I know what you’re thinking, magical crystal balls don’t exist, and if you still feel that way as this day continues, I advise you make a simpler wish first. Wish for the snow to stop, the skies to clear, a piece of candy to appear out of nowhere. Something easy so you have proof if you need it. Now, let me tell you, you only get three wishes so be sure to save one, to wish me out of existence as the old hag requested. That doesn’t matter to me, existence is a mere figment of human conception. Time and space bend in an infinite manner. Just remember three wishes is all you get. Oh yeah, don’t even think about wishing one of your dead parents back. The crystal, as amazing as it is, has its limits. Do you understand?”

  Shaking her head, she motioned that she understood. Fear was slowly fading from her bones. The heater that she had left on and the gas-powered oven had warmed the house well. The smiling man then, motioned for her to sit, and she did as he asked. Across the couch where she sat and next to the small coffee table in front of her, he sat cross legged on the floor with his back against the wall. “Now I want to tell you about myself, not that you may want to hear it, but I just feel like talking about myself for a bit. Besides, it’s been centuries since anyone has heard my story.”

  Chapter 15

  Moloch looked unto the young Hispanic girl and removed his sunshades. What she saw, neither struck fear nor awe. Her mind was set, she needed to hear the man’s story and then, she would agree to the favor in which he asked. As hate filled her heart, she knew what she wanted, she wanted the boys to suffer and die.

  He spoke softly, but with a distinction that made her feel his words had truth behind them. “Centuries ago in a time where angels and man walked side by side, the history of the world as you know it, is all make believe. Scientists and scholars think they know of the world, it’s all wrong, they know absolutely nothing. Everything in ancient texts that they deny as fantasy or hallucinations, it was all in fact true. It’s all real, every mythological God and beast. All cultures the Gods and beasts they speak of, there’s truth behind all of it. The only false statements those ancient people made was by identifying the beings as Gods, for they were mere angels. You see, darlin,’ there is only two real Gods, the God of good and the God of bad.”

  “Now when I was a young boy, I knew an angel—well I thought she was an angel. Her beauty was tranquilizing. There’s a reason I waited a hundred years for the arrival of your Ms. McQuaid, not because she was special in any way—well she was a tiny bit special. Her lineage had the last drop of blood relation to Lilith. If you don’t know who she was, she is considered to be Adam’s first wife. However, she claims she had no relations with him.”

  “The God of bad swooped her up as fast as he could recognize her beauty. They had issues over centuries of being next to each other, so the God of bad, or the devil as I believe you humans call him, let her roam the earth free for a thousand years. She destroyed many homes as she took loyal men and women and lay with them. In that time, she had birthed two daughters, names unknown. History will never discover their identity, because that’s how the devil wants it so it will be.”

  “Well, as you can imagine, one daughter went to hell to stand next to the devil himself. He recognized her as a daughter. The man that planted the seed within Lilith, paid with an eternity of having his flesh stripped from his bones every day. According to some, the ringing in your ears you get sometimes is the distant screams of agony felt by the man.”

  “When the magnificent beauty, Lilith, came to my village she wasn’t looking to seduce a man nor a woman, she wanted a boy. I still remember the day she walked through the gate, all the people stopped their work and gawked at her. She only wore a loin cloth over her lower half as she seemed to hover through the village. There’s something I should tell you, though. There is a reason she chose me, for I was a boy, but I was also a boy who had done a bad thing.”

  “You see, my father had left my mother just a few moons earlier than Lilith’s arrival. He had left us to starve, so that he could lay with another woman. When he returned my mother was sick, and I too was sick. I wasn’t ill with sickness, though; I was sick with anger. When my father tried to accuse me of being the reason my mother fell ill, I snapped, I lost control and I used his own dagger to kill him. I had committed a major sin. Lilith offered me a reprise, all I had to do was go with her for a century and let her have her way with me.”

  “I stayed a boy for a hundred years as she did things to me, I now long to forget. She cursed me so I would neither hunger nor thirst for anything in the hundred years she held me prisoner. All I did, day after day, was sexually please her, and the task may sound simple to some, but by no means was it. She was an ex-angel turned demon and she had abilities to make her lust explode even further. Over the hundred years, you must remember I was a boy, I had heard of Lilith, a beautiful woman ruining families and condemning souls to hell; but I thought I was being held by a sorceress, a mistress of dark magic. Over the hundred years, she explained to me who she was, and as frightened as I’d become, there was nothing I could do, I was held against my will.”

  “Eventually she was with child, the second daughter. She placed the child far away from the village she took me from. The girl would start a bloodline that has survived thousands and thousands of years. The old hag’s grandson will continue the bloodline.”

  “Eventually, the devil found out about Lilith having me as she pleased and he put an end to it. That’s where, what I have become, comes in. It wasn’t my choice, and I begged the devil for forgiveness, but he had none to give. He took me to his domain and showed me the men and women who had lay with Lilith and the price they pay for eternity. I wanted no part of it. He offered me a deal and I accepted it.”

  “His deal was every boy in t
he world that was bad, but not just a normal bad like stealing or lusting for girls. The boys I was to look for were real bad boys. Murderers of animals, rapist, abusers, and the ones who took the lives of people. The devil gave me a choice, either I suffered an eternity as Lilith’s other victims, or search and eat the bad boys. I chose to eat the children.”

  Cici’s mouth gaped as she felt fear reenter her blood. There were no words that could express the thoughts that flew through her mind. The smiling man with white eyes, only looked upon her as if he knew what she was thinking. The house was fully warmed and she was able to remove her thick jacket. Her slender body sat back against the couch as she decided, she had nothing to lose by accepting his offer. So, with that in mind she listened further to what he had to say.

  Moloch continued, “after a hundred or so years, being what the devil had turned me into, I came face to face with a demon. The only other demon I had ever seen was Lilith, and she wasn’t an ordinary demon. She was, as I said, an ex-angel. This demon had a small child in its mouth, wandering the dark forest of the underworld.”

  “You must know that the underworld is the top tier level of hell, and many judged souls live there forever. Being unworthy of heaven or hell is more common than you would think. This demon was one of the evilest ones of its kind. Its name was Moloch and it was the eater of small children. The demon recognized me as its brethren and paid me no mind, but I just couldn’t let the feeling of dread for the small children leave my mind. Back then I was more sentimental than I am now.”

  “I could care less if the children die, but still, no child deserves the fate the victims of Moloch faced. For I only eat bad boys, every few hundred years I’ll eat a bad girl, but there’s a reason for that.

  I let Moloch leave from the path I was walking, going in any direction, just walking endlessly. Later, I followed his bloody path. I wasn’t sure how I would face the demon, but I knew it had to be done. The path was treacherous, and I can still smell the stench of rotting flesh. Moloch’s domain was one of pure agony and terror, dead children hung on meat hooks from his ceiling, some still quivering for a last breath of life. Some children still clung to life, chained to the walls, staring hopelessly into nothing. Bodies of bones and decaying flesh filled the dimly lit cavern. The piles grew bigger and bigger the further I went. When I reached Moloch, it had no idea of my presence. The child that hung from its mouth was letting out one last fierce plea for freedom. Its tiny bones crunched in the demons’ mouth and the small body fell limp. I had had enough at that point and I released my tentacle the devil had cursed me with and shot into Moloch. The demon struggled with eternal might, but I beat the demon’s head with a bone until nothing was left but mush. I set the living children free, the dying ones still clinging for life begged me for death, so I obliged. It was terrible. The last little girl who I had to lay to rest was the one that called me Moloch. Her mind was gone, her eyes bloodshot with fear. The name stuck, for the devil had erased my name from my mind, all he left me was the lingering fragments of my memory.”

  With the demon dead and my new name set, I lived a thousand years, only walking on earth if a teenage boy committed one of the worst sins. That’s how I liked it, sleeping away century after century. The sleep, however, was interrupted for some time, by I don’t know what. My senses were drawn to nothing. So, I walked the world as a nomad, searching for nothing as I walked.”

  I walked a hundred years until I happened to come across a young lady, no older than yourself, sitting alone in an abandoned village. The young lady caught my attention, not because she was alone, but because she resembled Lilith. Now, it could have been coincidence, but I think otherwise. I firmly believe that she was in the bloodline of Lilith and myself. This here, was my family. I could fill the connection; I was drawn to her. Her name was Penelope. The small Celtic village she stayed in alone sat in a vast green covered land. The hills rolled as far as I could see on either side. Her red hair was hanging lose behind her. Her pale skin was like that of the devil’s wife. Her eyes were black as coal. She was as beautiful as Lilith, and if you would have known Mathelda when I met her, you’d know they looked the same besides the eye and hair color.”

  “Penelope offered me into her home willingly. She told me I had been the first visitor since all the village disappeared. Of course, as you would suspect, my curiosity was growing. It wasn’t common to find a beautiful girl sitting alone in an abandoned village. I pried at her with my repeated questions of what had happened to the rest of the people. It took her awhile, but she finally gave in. She left the room in which we sat in the poorly built cabin. I remember the cold air could be felt creeping through the old wood walls. Most of all the other cabins I noticed before she invited me in; they all looked like hers. When she returned, she held the crystal ball. When I asked her where she had found it, she said it had just appeared before her one evening. Trust me, I spent hundreds of years searching for the origin of the magical ball, but I found none. The girl explained to me that she became attached to the crystal ball and that it showed her things, scary things. She told me, just a few moons earlier, she had given birth to a baby boy. The village was going to have her banished for having the child so young. The father she said, was a charming nomad like me. If she knew what I really was, she wouldn’t have confided in me as she did. The father she said, took the child and ran for the hills. The village people were going to prosecute her, but they public humiliated her, instead. She said they stripped her naked and beat her; some of the men even raped her. They threw stones at her and spit on her. Later, when they threw her back into her empty home, her parents left the village ashamed of their daughter; she used the crystal ball. She wished her whole village gone, and when she woke the next day, she said they vanished.”

  “As I looked over the girl, she seemed sadder than I had ever seen a healthy young person look. Her mind was still innocent even though she’d given birth at such a young age. She handed me the crystal ball and the mistake I made, without realizing it, were the words I spoke. I told Penelope I would make my duty and bind myself to the crystal ball so that it never got into the hands of another. I thought those words I spoke were meaningless, but I was wrong; the crystal ball attached itself to me. I took the crystal ball and the girl with me. Together we walked a hundred years. Through the ball, I gave the girl immortality, in hopes that it would cheer her up, but she refused to let go of her hate. I’m sure somewhere in the world she hides in the depths fueled by hate, jealous of happy women and their newborns.”

  “From that day on, I walked the earth endlessly; never sleeping, never stopping, just me and the crystal ball. Every now and then, I had to eat, of course. By now you should know what my meal consisted of. As I said, I walked endlessly, until about eighty years ago when I stopped and decided to live in the very house that Mathelda found me in. I wished into the crystal ball that I could be rid of the devil’s curse. The wish rebounded, though, for the crystal ball is magical, but it’s not stronger than the God of bad.

  “I changed. My body grew old and I felt human again. It gave me a chance to live as a person and so I did. I knew the devil’s curse was still inside, and someday I would wish to go back to be the demon I had become, but I ignored those thoughts for many years. I just lived by granting people’s small wishes with the crystal ball; some would come true, some would not. I had gotten smart in making money and staying under the radar. For many years I used two crystal balls, I used the real one for which you must find and then I used a fake one. Sometimes, I would grant people there wishes if they were mundane and not wishes for power and riches. Most times, however, I used the fake ball and their wishes never came true.”

  “Eventually, people thumbed me as a phony and that was fine. I had grown restless dealing with people, and I longed for solitude. My hunger was growing as well, but my body was fragile and weak, so I was stuck and starving. Finally, the crystal ball showed me a vision of your Ms. McQuaid, she looked so much like Lilith. The magical
ball showed me she would come to me. That’s all it showed, the rest I devised myself. I made her think I was a sick, dying old man. I told her the truth and the powers the crystal ball contained. She had found me creepy, I guess; I can’t quite recall. Anyway, before she left, she made her first wish which was for my health to return. She had no idea who I was. With the return of my health and my body, my mind was struck with immediate power. Your Ms. McQuaid belonged to me, and the crystal ball. We were bound.”

  “It took years for my powers to return fully. That day she wished my health restored, she hit me harder than I had ever been hit in all my years on this wasteland. The old hag stole my crystal ball and took off. It took a long time to track her down. When I did, I realized, she had a companion to do the biddings in which she was bound to do for me. Poor Arthur, he had no idea what she had sucked him into.”

  “Anyway, when I found her, she was pregnant. I waited to see if she would deliver a son, but she didn’t. So, in the years that passed, I had Arthur become my servant. He searched for bad boys and kidnapped them so that they could be fed to me. When their daughter had grown of age and given birth herself, she had had a son. Tanner, I thought would be the one, but for some reason I decided to wait. I wanted the services of Arthur a little longer. I had been starved for many years and now I had a servant to find my meals for me. Call me selfish, I don’t care.”

  I waited for Tanner to grow up and birth a child himself. This time I would care not if it was a boy or a girl. You see, the devil came to me in the years while I was searching for Mathelda. The devil let me know that my time known as Moloch was coming to an end. My soul would be allowed to rest in peace. However, before it could be done, I needed a protégé of my own bloodline. So, I wait, and Tanner will be the father and you will be the mother.”

  Cici’s mind stopped racing. The favor the smiling man asked of her seemed out of the question. If she wished for Tanner and herself to be married, she would be binding herself to the crystal ball and to the demon man. The fear of being deported still outweighed the fear of the words coming from the man as he spoke. Her heart was tangled in what was true and what was not.