Desperate, Vesper brought up the Glock, but the magazine was empty.
“You’re not real. None of you are real.”
Her words didn’t halt the relentless march of the phantoms. More and more members of the terrible biker gang materialized in the observatory.
This couldn’t be happening.
And then she heard the voice. A voice seared in her memories for all time.
The exotic, guttural chanting of the biker cult leader. Vesper never found out what dark god they had worshipped or even what language he’d been speaking. Simon could doubtlessly have told her, but she’d never asked. It was better to leave the past behind you—but the dark forces that held sway over the observatory had other plans.
She spun around and came face to face with the monster of her nightmares. The cult leader's fleshy arms raised high, a large rock in his hand.
Without hesitation, the biker cult leader brought the rock down on Vesper’s head.
Pain exploded in her skull.
And then there was only darkness.
Chapter Fourteen
I was battling my way through the icy landscape, each step taking me deeper into the dark heart of the forest. Up ahead, barely visible, the two-headed mutant beast led the way through the maze of firs, pines, and thick undergrowth.
Distant voices followed me through the haunted landscape. Delgado was calling out my name, yet I didn’t answer. There was no point in risking the sheriff and his deputy’s life too.
This was my fight now.
The demon inside the observatory had made it personal once it went after Vesper.
It took all my discipline not to let my imagination run wild as I pressed through the cold night. I had to cling to the hope that Vesper was okay, and that the demon wouldn’t destroy its best bargaining chip.
Delgado’s voice began to fade out and then went quiet.
Good.
I was moving at a brutal pace despite the challenging terrain. Adrenaline roared through my veins, my concern giving me nearly inhuman strength. My hooded ski jacket barely blocked the howling wind, but I had become indifferent to the icy assault.
As I fought my way through the silent, foreboding forest, the thick branches blocking out the canopy of stars above, I tried not to think about what I would find in the observatory. But the harder I decided to make my mind go blank, the more I thought of Vesper.
The day I’d saved her in the desert. That first night in the mansion, when she’d been so traumatized that she shied away from me like a scared, half-feral cat. The evening she finally joined me in the occult library and cracked open her first esoteric text. I vividly recalled the title of the book that set her on her path to becoming my assistant: The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy.
I had no idea why she’d picked that title over the other books in my library. I guess it had been as good as any place to start her education on the subject. I thought of her smile, the twinkle in her eyes, her wiseass cracks tinged with affection.
Why the hell hadn’t I told her?
Why had I wasted so many chances?
You’ll get a chance to make up for lost time, I told myself. If only I believed it.
An eerie howl caught my attention. I peered into the darkness, looking for its source.
A shadow darted through the woods on my right, and I caught a glimpse of another mutated forest dweller. The thing looked like a wolf, but a large pair of bird wings sprouted from its muscular, furry back.
I was gripped with a sense of morbid fascination. What foul magic had spawned these hybrid beasts? Moreover, why had the demonic force inside the observatory engineered these abominations?
Was the entity merely bored after decades in captivity? Or was there some dark purpose behind its little experiments?
More activity in the dark, more flitting shadows of creatures better suited to nightmares than the waking world.
The thought that this might be an elaborate trap crossed my mind. If they all tried to come at me simultaneously, I was a dead man. Even my magical weapons wouldn’t be able to stop them all.
No, if the observatory wanted me dead, the creatures would’ve already made their move.
The demon wanted my athame, but it also needed someone to wield its power, someone intimately familiar with its abilities.
The demon hadn’t gone through all this trouble to just have its automatons tear into me.
It needed my help.
And, as much as it sickened me, I would do it. I’d give the demon whatever it wanted, if it meant Vesper came back to me unharmed.
Another inhuman howl erupted, sending a chill down my spine. A second, more sinister thought occurred to me. Perhaps these hybrid beasts had plans of their own…
I paused to watch as the mutant animals gathered on top of a small hill in the near distance. As one, they all turned to look at me, yellowed fangs bared, an eldritch intelligence in their eyes.
The message was clear. They wanted me to join them on the hill.
No, this was not a mere invitation. They were giving me a simple choice. Either I could follow them the rest of the way to the observatory or they would tear me apart.
I cranked up my pace, pushing my body past its limits, and I powered my way up the steep slope. I almost slipped twice but mercifully caught my balance.
And then I arrived.
As I reached the summit of the hill, a domed cathedral of darkness suddenly loomed before me, sinister and imposing. It had not been there a moment before, but between one breath and the next, the cursed observatory appeared.
The giant steel door was open, a window of light in the cold night.
All around me, the strange mutant creatures started to form a menacing circle around me.
I faced them without fear, met their blazing gazes.
“You want me to bring this damn knife to you or not?”
My voice pulsed with anger, and it almost seemed like the beasts backed off slightly—or perhaps that was again wishful thinking on my part.
Regardless, I sucked in a sharp breath of air and stomped toward the observatory, gloved hand tight around the handle of my athame. The pentagram at the base of the double-edged, five-inch blade gleamed in the pale moonlight.
“Here’s how this happens,” I said, trying to sound like I wasn’t petrified. “You send out Vesper, and then I give you the knife.”
I waited in the bone-chilling night for an answer.
“Bring me the blade,” the voice demanded. The booming voice in my mind erased all other thoughts. “Hurry. Time is running out for the female.”
Well shit. The demon apparently wouldn’t engage in any form of negotiation. Despite what you might have heard, not all such entities are eager to make deals with mortals.
I clenched my jaw in frustration, tightened my grip on the athame’s wooden handle.
And entered the observatory.
Chapter Fifteen
My footsteps echoed as I entered the abandoned structure. Its walls seemed to sag. For a split second, I could almost see the cracked dome collapsing in on its rotting weight and burying me under a ton of debris.
I banished the horrific vision from my thoughts. There was enough to worry about without imagining more dangers.
I studied my surroundings. The shadowy interior felt hauntingly familiar. Coleman’s photographs had entirely captured the observatory’s atmosphere of decaying grandeur. The air felt stale, and a metallic aftertaste laced each breath.
Every instinct in my body instructed me to turn on my heels and flee this godforsaken place before it was too late. Even my Ouroboros tattoo was getting in on the act. It felt like phantom hands were poking my shoulder with hot needles.
My gaze swept the circular space and fastened on the telescope. The complex formula of wards etched across its surface glimmered in the sickly light.
But there was no sign of Vesper. Where the hell was she?
The entity was most certainly probing my mind as
I received an answer a moment later. The floor in front of me rippled almost as if I was walking on water. Even though my feet told me I was still standing on solid ground, my eyes made me think I was suspended over a whirlpool. The giant vortex resembled an endless spiral, calling to mind the mad spinning of the possessed men’s eyes.
I’d never seen such a thing in person, but some of the books in my library spoke of places like this. The spiral had to be a border realm between my world and the world of the demon. Shapes grew visible beneath my feet, flitted around me like large fish in an aquarium. Some of the silhouettes were humanoid, others animal.
I watched some of these shadowy silhouettes come together and fuse into new configurations. Okay, that explained the strange hybrid beasts that had led me to the observatory. The inter-dimensional space below the observatory’s structure had become a petri dish in which the demon could spawn new life forms, the genetic slab of a mad god.
Not only was the demon luring people into the structure, but it was also absorbing the surrounding wildlife and perverting it into new horrific shapes—all part of its attempt to seed our world with its otherworldly evil.
I stopped dead in my tracks when I spotted Vesper’s floating form among all the other shapes in the ethereal void beyond the floor. She looked like a sleeping angel in her white snowsuit as she drifted through the ether below me, her eyes closed, her features in peaceful repose.
Was she still alive?
The observatory responded instantly to my thought. Vesper’s head breached the floor while the rest of her remained trapped below, like a drowning victim fighting to escape the ice. Her eye jerked open, and her lips parted as she gasped for air.
“Vesper!”
A beat of recognition as she registered my presence before the shapes inside the floor pulled her back into the endless void beneath my feet.
No, don’t take her away from me. Please.
A wave of desperation hit me as I reached out to her, but it was no use. It was like an invisible forcefield separated me from the swirling, weightless realm beneath me.
“As you can see, she is alive. Now it’s your turn to hold up your part of the bargain. Use your father’s knife. Remove the wards. Release me from this prison.”
The demon’s words gave me pause. How did this entity know about my father? As far as I could recall, I hadn’t brought up the subject of Mason Kane.
“What kind of a game are you playing here?”
“See for yourself, monster hunter.”
As if on command, the giant telescope rotated in my direction. The contraption’s rusty gears creaked and the wards lit up with a spectral luminance.
“Step right up. Don’t be shy.”
The telescope loomed menacingly, casting a long shadow over the circular floor. I suddenly remembered the telescope my father had gifted me on my tenth birthday, years before I would learn the truth about him and his cult. I remembered the excitement I’d felt the first time I peered into the eyepiece and gazed at the stars above the Malibu mansion. At that moment, a new and bigger world had opened up to me. A world of wonder and infinite possibilities.
But that initial thrill soon turned to existential dread. As I peered up at the countless twinkling stars, the tone in my father’s voice had changed as he pointed out to me that my whole world, as amazing and vast it seemed to my ten-year self, was just another one of those sparkling dots. One world out of billions, he said almost gleefully.
“Humankind is a speck of dust when compared to the cosmic forces coursing through the universe,” he told me.
I remembered shivering at the thought. At that point, all I wanted was to go inside and get a hot chocolate. But my father wasn’t done with his lesson yet.
“We’re all just ants in the eye of God,” Mason Kane said, his voice almost hypnotic. “At the same time, those of us who find a way to tap into the power pulsing through the universe can go surpass our limitations.”
I hadn’t realized it then, but my father was already grooming me to join his cult. Dad sure had the whole parenting gig down.
I pushed all thoughts of the past aside and gingerly approached the telescope, my legs heavy, almost as if I was moving through cotton. Curiosity warred with fear. What horrors did the observatory plan to reveal to me?
“You want to know what is going on? You want to know who I am—what I am? The truth is waiting for you, Simon Kane.”
There was an eerie familiarity in the way the demon spoke my name. Was the beast probing my mind? Or was there more going on here?
Vesper’s unconscious form drifted past my feet again beneath the see-through floor, a sharp reminder of why I was here. I couldn’t waver. The demon was writing the script, but that didn’t mean I had to play the role it cast me in. All I could do was wait for the right moment to strike.
The wards pulsed with a creepy light as I leaned over the eyepiece. I steeled myself for the worst.
To my amazement, there was no hellbeast waiting for me on the other end of the lens. Instead, I was looking at myself in the present moment. Horror mixed with fascination as I received a bird’s eye view of myself, almost as if the telescope’s eyepiece was a video monitor hooked up to a camera above me.
The telescope’s lens was reflecting reality at me like a mirror with one crucial difference—the observatory in the eyepiece appeared to be brand-spanking new and showed no signs of neglect and decay. This is what the observatory must have looked like over a hundred years ago before it vanished.
Multiple figures appeared in the scene as I watched. The men wore black tuxedos, white vests, and bowties, the women elaborate evening gowns, some with a fur hat or coat. The materials were saffron, silk and satin.
Among the milling crowd, one man carried himself like the leader of the group. It was Rockmore, the infamous industrialist and occult practitioner who’d built this observatory. He arrogantly appraised the crowd which had gathered at the observatory.
If I had to guess, this was a replay of that fateful night when the demon entered our world. I still didn’t understand why this entity wanted me to witness that event, but I had no choice but to humor the monster. Vesper’s life hung in the balance.
I sensed movement behind me and instinctively pulled away from the eyepiece. As I spun away from the telescope, shock rippled through my chest. The present-day observatory had transformed into the one from the past. Rockmore and his many well-heeled followers surrounded the telescope, oblivious of my presence.
It seemed I had gone from voyeur to extra.
Rockmore addressed his flock without even glancing in my direction. His magnetic eyes blazed with fanatical glee as he held sway over his flock.
“Thank you for joining me here on this special night, my friends. Are you ready to embark on a quest for absolute truth?”
The tuxedoed upper-class gentlemen and high class ladies in their fine gowns nodded solemnly.
“Since the dawn of time, man has feared the darkness and worshipped the light. We pray to God, fear the devil. Hope to go to heaven, dread the idea of ending up in Hell. But what is Hell? Is it a pit of burning fire? A blazing inferno of ever-lasting punishment? An ocean of flame ruled by pitchfork-wielding devils?”
Rockmore paused dramatically to let the questions hang in the air.
“Tonight, we’ll solve the mystery that has perplexed humanity since the beginning of time. What is Hell? Imagine, what if you could take a peek into the pit and see for yourself? A glimpse of another world, another realm beyond space and time, life, and death.”
Rockmore swept his arm in a wide arm to indicate the arcane machinery. “This isn’t an ordinary telescope. It won’t show you the stars or let you explore the heavens. This telescope looks inward and will reveal the mysteries that exist beyond our earthly realm. Are you ready to stare into the abyss?”
The group nodded, eyes entranced by the dark promise of the gleaming telescope.
Nietzsche’s famous quote popped into my mind: Whe
n you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you.
These mad bastards had believed they could peek into a dimension of darkness without there being any consequences for their reckless, foolish actions. They thought they wouldn’t have to pay the price for challenging the natural order of things. The wealthy and powerful never did.
Rockmore smiled. A smile I’d seen many times before on my father’s face. The smile of the true fanatic.
The cult leader produced a knife from his tuxedo and slashed his upraised hand. And as the blade caught the light, I stifled a gasp. I finally understood why the demon was letting me witness the past.
The knife Rockmore was using wasn’t an ordinary blade. It was my athame!
Chapter Sixteen
The exact history of the Hexblade was shrouded in mystery and legend. Some stories claim it was fashioned from the Roman lance that killed Jesus Christ, better known as the Spear of Destiny. Another tale claimed the pentagram affixed near the handle was made from Perseus’s shield, the one given to him by the goddess Athena and which he used to cast back Medusa’s reflection and turn the serpent-haired beast into stone. According to one ancient text, wood taken from Noah’s Ark formed the knife’s handle.
Did I believe any of it? Not really. Wild tales made even wilder through the fog of time.
What I knew for a fact was that a Celtic druid used the Hexblade to fight evil before the fall of Rome. A long line of demon-fighting medieval monks had later wielded the weapon throughout the Dark Ages. Leave it to my old man to take such a weapon and pervert its original purpose. Or so I had believed all these years.
From the looks of it, Rockmore was the first to use the knife for evil. Tapping into its power, he’d conjured and entrapped the demon in this observatory before the blade ended up in the possession of Mason Kane.
No wonder the athame had absorbed the tattoos from Jeremy’s neck. The same knife had etched those protective sigils into the telescope in the first place.
My attention shifted from the blade in Rockmore’s outstretched hand to the crowd. The cultists began kissing and groping feverishly and ripping their clothes off each other’s bodies. Furious copulation followed. I’ll spare you the details.
The Paranormalist 4: The Unearthly Page 9