Ritual Dreams

by Hadena James

  Five hours later, Brexton was tired of listening to Parker’s screams. They had gotten their revenge. They had done everything they could think of to Parker. The man was a bleeding lump of quivering sobs.

  He was slumped against the lower cabinet in the kitchenette. His clothing was in a pile, soaked with blood, urine, excrement, and other bodily fluids. Both eyes were nearly swollen shut from the scalding water Brexton had poured on his face. Blood continued to pool around his body, no doubt the result of internal bleeding caused by the handle of a broom.

  If screams honored Cthulhu, then Brexton and Parker had honored him like no other. Brexton found a large chef’s knife in one of the drawers and sat down on a chair a few feet from Parker.

  “I imagine you regret your life choices now, Parker old buddy.” Brexton leaned forward and showed him the knife. “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, I’m going to make sure that Cthulhu hears one more scream from you, as I take your head. I had forgotten about that Parker. Despite everything else I’ve done to you, I’m still going to take your head and then I’m going to go stick it on top of that awful chalice in the altar room and let some poor sucker that follows you find the fucking thing. I’ll write your confession on the wall in your blood, let the world know that you were the real leader my mother followed, not that twisted fuck Gerding, but you. Which is worse, the physical abuse or my promise that I will tear down your legacy and destroy your public image like the wrath of God?”

  “You’re so weak,” Parker rasped out.

  “From where I’m standing, it’s you that’s weak. I lived. Amber lived. Martha and Caroline are both alive. You’re the one dying. If I called an ambulance for you right this second, you’d still die before you got to the hospital. Do you know why? Because none of your shitty little evil gods care about you. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is defined by screams.” Brexton drew themselves upright in the chair and readied themselves. They swung with all their power, the chef’s knife entering Parker Carr’s throat with a sickening thud as it slammed against his spinal cord. Brexton had to rock the knife back and forth to free it from the bone.

  They drew back and swung again, like it was a short baseball bat. The knife bit into the cabinet behind Parker Carr’s head. For a second, everything seemed frozen. Carr’s eyes blinked once, then twice, and then Brexton jerked on the knife handle. It broke in their hands. Parker Carr’s head lolled to the side and fell to the floor slowly.

  Brexton grabbed it by the hair and took it to the altar. He set the chalice up and placed the head on top of it. There was a bloody trail from the kitchenette to this room. Brexton used the blood from the floor and wrote “The Almighty Cthulhu has spoken, you will not be saved from this monster created by the sins of Parker Carr. Row your boat.”

  Broken and Bloody

  Amber stared at her hands, an extreme sense of Deja-vu threatening to overwhelm her. She had once again awoken in a parking lot behind the steering wheel of a car, with blood and cuts on her hands and arms and no clue how she gotten there. She was going crazy. She wanted to go to the hospital and talk to Dr. Abernathy. Dr. Abernathy would help her she was sure, but the thought of going to the hospital made Amber feel like she’d swallowed a brick. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt that something bad had happened and Dr. Abernathy would blame her for it.

  She’d been having a nightmare, a man covered in blood. Beaten to a bloody pulp and sitting quite still on a floor with those tacky black and white squares of linoleum on it. Blood had been pooling around him. Then there had been a big knife and someone had used it to cut his head off. In her dream, the head fell into the man’s lap with incredible slowness.

  Dr. Abernathy had told her she couldn’t have dreams about people she’d never met, the brain didn’t work that way. But Amber didn’t think she recognized the man. Where had she met him that allowed him to invade her dreams?

  She wanted to go home and take a shower, but something told her she couldn’t do that anymore than she could go see Dr. Abernathy at the hospital. Was this Caroline’s idea of a joke, forcing her to wake up in strange places covered in blood and cuts that she couldn’t explain? She wanted to ask her, to yell at her, but she couldn’t.

  Amber realized her hands were shaking and she hurt all over. She got out of the car and found her knees felt rubbery, like they might not hold her for very long. She stared at the car. It wasn’t her aunt’s car. It was a car she had never seen before, a black sporty, luxury car, maybe. Amber didn’t know much about cars, but she thought it might be a BMW. She stared at the tinted windows for a moment or two. Why did she think it might be a BMW? What did she know about BMWs? She walked around to the front. It was not a BMW, it was a Jaguar. Not a new Jaguar, an older model, it was kind of boxy shaped. Maybe a 1990s model Jaguar. But it was very clean. There were no scratches, dings, or dents on it.

  Amber walked into the park. Caroline had now stolen a car and Amber was going to go to jail for it. She felt sick. She sat down on the first park bench she came to. How would she explain to police that it hadn’t been her but some parasitic twin that had stolen the car, a twin named Caroline that didn’t have her own body and made Amber do things. Amber sat on the bench and tried not to cry. This was all Caroline’s fault. She took out her cell phone, she had three missed calls from her aunt. She ignored them and just held the phone in her hands, fighting tears. Maybe she should turn the stolen car in. Maybe that would keep her out of trouble.

  A woman sat down next to her on the bench. She was young, pretty, attractive, with a big, goofy looking dog. It reminded her of something that wasn’t a dog, but Amber couldn’t remember what it was. She stared at it. The dog came over and sat directly in front of her. It held up a paw. Amber just looked at it.

  “Are you okay dear?” The woman asked.

  “Yeah, I think so.” Amber answered. “My sister keeps getting me into trouble and I’m not sure what to do about it.”

  “She wants to shake,” the woman said pointing to the dog. “She’s very intuitive. She wanted to stop here, I think she could tell you needed a friend.”

  Amber took the dog’s paw and shook it. The dog responded by licking Amber’s hand and then nuzzling against her leg.

  “I just need my sister Caroline to stop being mean to me.” She said after a few moments of silence. “Do you have a sister?”

  “I have five siblings, two sisters and three brothers. When we were young, they could be trying, especially the youngest. He would break things and then blame someone else. But surely you’re old enough that your parents know better.”

  “I don’t have parents, I live with my aunt. My aunt is a really nice woman, but Caroline is trying to kill me and my aunt doesn’t seem to care, she says I must make allowances for Caroline, because there is something wrong with her.”

  “Oh, is she autistic?” The woman asked.

  “I don’t think so, she doesn’t have a body for some reason. She steals mine and makes me do stuff I wouldn’t do. Like drive a car. I’m too young to drive, I don’t even have a learner’s permit yet.”

  The woman looked at her blankly for a minute. Amber didn’t notice she was staring, Amber was petting the dog. She looked like Falcor off the Neverending Story, the luck dragon, a big, golden-white dog with floppy ears, a big tongue, and soft curly hair.

  “Come on, Rainy, let’s go.” The woman said after a moment. “I hope you get things worked out with your sister.”

  “Thanks,” Amber said as the woman started to walk away.

  Amber sat almost completely still for another couple of minutes, trying to think. She wasn’t going crazy, she was crazy. Finally, she opened the browser on her phone and found the non-emergency number for the Tallahassee police department. She called it. The line rang twice and then a man with a nasally voice answered the phone.

  “My sister Caroline stole a black Jaguar. It’s at Rockhill Park,” Amber hung up. Then she stood
up and started walking. An animal control vehicle with flashing lights came roaring down the road past her, along with a police car. Both of them were speeding Amber noted, as she moved closer to the grass that bordered the sidewalk on the side of the park. She wondered where they were going. Then her feet stopped moving.

  “Are you fucking kidding me!” Brexton asked after a moment. “Why didn’t you stop her, Martha!” Brexton tried not to yell, but it was hard. Brexton was mad at all of them. What was Martha doing. Martha was supposed to be in charge of Amber and Caroline. It was Martha’s responsibility to keep the two younger girls from having massive freak outs and doing things like calling the police to report this kind of activity.

  Brexton pulled the baseball cap out of their bag and put it on their head, tucking their hair up under it. At least Amber had grabbed the damn bag, Brexton thought. Amber was trying to make sure they all died in prison, Brexton decided. Martha needed to take control of Amber, Brexton couldn’t save them if Amber was working against him.

  Sixteen

  The scene was a wreck. There had been a group of people who discovered Parker Carr’s body and head, separated around the temple complex. They had walked in the blood, touched damn near everything. Forensics was going to be a nightmare. Techs were trying to get finger prints, DNA swabs, and blood samples from each of them, but some were not interested in cooperation.

  Parker Carr’s head had poured out a lot of blood on the altar and floors. The kitchenette where I was currently hiding from the living people was a gore covered mess that would probably give at least a few members of the team nightmares. The coroner was lifting his badly burned and abused corpse onto a gurney to take it away. But there was so much blood and other things that even the professionals had slipped a few times and moving him wasn’t easy.

  “This is rage, it isn’t like the other kills.” The FBI agent who hadn’t left enough of an impression on me for me to remember her name said to me.

  “This is well beyond rage,” I replied. “This man has a personal connection to Amber or Martha or whoever does the killing.” If the line “row your boat” hadn’t been written in the victim’s blood, I wouldn’t have guessed it was the same killer. This kill was much different. The level of brutality was so far above and beyond anything I had ever personally witnessed, it was rough even for me. Parker Carr had been sodomized repeatedly and brutally with a broom handle, a fork tine had been broken off and shoved in his urethra, and if he hadn’t had his head chopped off, he would have bled to death anyway. They picked the body up and some of its intestines fell out.

  “Damn,” Xavier said, rushing over to help the medical guys.

  “Yep, I don’t think rage covers it,” I repeated and looked at the floor. Fiona, Lucas, and Gabriel had all excused themselves to go look at other things. Xavier and I had stayed with the body and now the FBI woman was here. Even Kimberly had made a hasty exit from the kitchen.

  “We’re all going to need counseling,” the FBI woman said.

  “We all needed counseling before this,” I added dryly. “This just solidifies it as one of the worst things I have ever seen done to a human being and I have seen some fairly bad things.”

  As the morgue guys put a sheet over Parker Carr a woman came running into the room. She was older, mid-fifties maybe, with too much make-up on and her white hair pulled up into something that looked like a beehive hair style, held together with a gallon of aerosol hairspray and sticks.

  “Who did this to him?” She asked.

  “We were hoping you could tell us that,” FBI woman replied.

  “I can’t imagine anyone doing something like this, we don’t condone violence.”

  “Really?” Fiona asked from the doorway. “Because I just cracked his laptop and found a ton of dungeon and kiddie porn.”

  “Whoever did this must have planted it there.” She said, not looking at all surprised by the pronouncement. I scowled and considered tasering her for lying.

  “And a snuff film, I think. I refuse to watch it in real time, but the handful of frames I caught in fast forward, makes me think it was real and it has that giant carved aardvark headed god in it that stands behind your altar.” Fiona commented before turning around and walking away.

  FBI woman moved towards the woman, grabbed her wrists, and began to read her Miranda rights. One of the few uniformed cops still in the room, came over put cuffs on her and escorted her out once the FBI finished Mirandizing her. I watched all of this with interest. This woman had barged in to see the corpse of the dead and defended him against Fiona’s accusations, but I hadn’t gotten her name or her relationship with him. The FBI obviously knew more than I did at the moment.

  “What was that about?” I asked as the FBI profiler came back to stand near me.

  “His wife,” she answered.

  “You knew that by her actions?”

  “Nope, we’ve had Parker Carr on our radar for a while. The FBI still monitors cults they deem dangerous to society, we just do it very quietly. We haven’t caught him in the act of anything, though, which is what we would need to shut it down, until now.”

  “Maybe you should have had him under surveillance a decade ago.” I said dryly.

  “We would have, if there had been a reason. And we aren’t surveilling Parker Carr and his wife Jean the way you think, we have a person inside the group and we have listening devices at their house, we do not have the resources to have a team of agents following him around taking pictures.”

  “That’s obvious, if so one would need to ask why this happened. No listening devices here in the temple?”

  “The technology available to the public these days is fairly astounding. We’ve tried to put listening devices in here, but the place is one giant faraday cage covered in stone and concrete, check your cell phone.” I pulled out my phone and sure enough, it said No Service in the upper left hand corner of the screen. “There’s no WIFI and no radio signals get in or out. The contractor that built the place tipped the FBI to the weird specifications which includes foil lined insulation, extra rebar throughout the concrete in a mesh like pattern, and the copper roof has a lining under it that looked a lot like heavy duty aluminum foil, but the contractor didn’t do the roof, members of the temple did, which is odd when you consider the skills needed for a hammered copper roof to be installed.”

  “Most cults are looking to go mainstream when they build a temple, I guess that isn’t the case with this one?” I asked.

  “Yes and no, the temple is meant to attract followers, but we aren’t sure that it is going mainstream in the sense you or I would consider it.”

  “If he’s into pedophilia, it is a good way to expand his victim pool.”

  “Sadly, that was our thoughts, but we’ve never been able to prove it.”

  “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing he’s dead,” I responded.

  “And just like that, you went from normal to less human.” She said. “Your face even changed, I’ve seen that blankness a few times on killers I’ve helped capture, but never on someone I was having a conversation with.”

  “I’ve gotten pretty decent at hiding the fact that I’m not all there over the course of my life, but sometimes, I have to just let it go and stop pretending I care. It’s exhausting to keep it up all the time and this guy isn’t worth the effort. I’d be willing to bet that by tomorrow when we’ve sifted through all the evidence including the kiddie and dungeon porn and the suspected snuff video, most of the cops involved will feel he got what he deserved. I’m just lucky enough that I can afford to think it now, before we’ve gone through the evidence.”

  “No innocent until proven guilty?” She asked.

  “He is a cult leader, I have a hard time believing any of them are innocent. People start cults because they can’t find what they are looking for anywhere in mainstream society. I feel most people who are fairly normal can find people with like interests without a lot of effort. Therefore, people who start cults must be loo
king for likeminded individuals who are interested in something society finds deviant. And the imagery he picked is a symbol of his deviance. Set is the god of chaos, war, and destruction. Cthulhu is a fictional demon created by HP Lovecraft to scare his fictional characters half to death along with his readers. In other words, Carr wanted a cult that was ruled by fear. The best way to terrorize families is through the children. And terrorized families don’t report crimes to the authorities. From my position, a cult that worships gods and demons that inspire fear are always up to no good.”

  “How do you explain Satanists then?” She asked.

  “Baphomet is a hybrid deity not a historical one. He is scary looking mostly as a giant ‘up yours’ to Christianity. He doesn’t inspire fear and he doesn’t represent it. His image is only scary because modern religions are obsessed with duality. Most ancient religions were less concerned with duality, there weren’t good deities and bad deities. Set was the god of destruction, chaos, and war, modern humans consider him an ‘evil’ god, but the ancient Egyptians revered Set, he wasn’t evil, he was just himself. Sometimes he was seen as doing great things for his people, smiting Egypt’s enemies on the battlefields or in the deserts before they reached the limestone covered cities. The Egyptians believed that from chaos and destruction came rebirth. These two aspects were necessary features of life, they explained so much of what happened in Egypt. Why did the Nile kill so many when it flooded that one time several years ago? Because Set and Osiris wanted to rebuild something greater and water destroys and purifies. Therefore the gods overflowed the Nile to destroy parts of the kingdom that needed to be destroyed. Quite honestly, even the demonic Cthulhu isn’t that scary either, he and Set shared some features, though, they are both destroyers who appreciate chaos, but being demonic doesn’t necessarily require a being to be evil in the grand scheme of things.”