Dark

by JD Jones

Chapter Ten

  Saph walked around in the shadows of the buildings as he moved through the debris of the warehouse district. He could walk in the sun in his physical materialization but old habits were hard to erase. He kept to the shadows and felt at ease knowing they had at least come partially into this plane for a time. It would still be a couple months before they could claim their bodies from the fully developed seeds when they were birthed. Part of him was saddened by the need to kill the host mother afterward because she could not be allowed to give witness to the habitation of the Alliance brothers in the birthed children. But it was necessary for their plan to work. They needed to anonymously take over as those birthed children to create a legal existence in this plane. Then they could grow up normally with the humans, find each other later and begin their domination of the human plane again.

  Personally he had liked the old plan they had executed the last time they dominated the earth in this human plane. Then their father had found five suitable virgins who had just entered womanhood and were strong enough in their sexual energies to carry his seed. He had impregnated them and cared for them while they nurtured the brothers inside their bodies. At birth they had come out walking. Five months later, they had been adult men, ready to stand beside their father and take on the world they lived in.

  Those had been glorious days of battle and victory, back then. He and his brothers had championed the cause of a small band of people who had accepted them. It had been a fantastic time of revelry and fighting and just enjoying the sensations of the human kind. Their mothers had been exalted by all the people as blessed of the gods. They were seen as super women who had given birth to supermen. Their father had not been able to stay because he was not actually of the human plane. He had left Gol in charge and given him charge over the fate of their kind in the human plane. That was when the Alliance had been born. Five brothers over the world of human kind.

  Saph enjoyed his memories of the past as he strolled around the new confines of their desolate existence. It was better than remaining in the spiritual plane they inhabited when not in physical form. They had a place given to them by the Creator of Life when they were first created. It was a world of giants like themselves. They were nothing special there. Just another family going through the motions of living in a world planned for them. But their hearts reached out for more. Their father had made a deal with Dark and found a way to travel to the human plane back in the near history of the human plane. Now it consumed the brothers to once again find a way back to the plane where they felt alive and dominant. They loved that feeling. It was also their father's desire for them. They were half human after all.

  The seed watched Saph walking from building to building. He was squatting down, making a low profile in a deep set of shadows at the end of a row of dilapidated buildings. He had made his way across town under cover of the fading darkness. Now he watched the desolate place where he knew he would find the brothers. He hoped to catch them one at a time. He was barely a match for them then. He would need the element of surprise to take them. If they caught him with two or more of them present, he would most likely not survive, unless he could capitalize on their hesitancy to break the deals in this plane. Such was their desire to remain here. However, he was not planning on being able to out think them if they out numbered him. He would watch and plan a way to take them one at a time.

  Though he saw Saph was alone now, he needed to have a better plan than just picking them off one at a time. Once one was killed, the others would be on alert. That would make his task much harder. He needed surprise to make the most of this opportunity. He needed a way to get them all together, within a short distance, but not actually within sight of one another. That would take some watching and planning. But he was confident that he could accomplish it. He had to. His life depended on it. The brothers might not come after him now that he was out and had strength. But once they found a way to reenter the world of the humans, they would hunt him down and destroy him if for no other reason than their own desire to dominate this plane for themselves. It was either them or him. He planned on it being him.

  Kathy awoke in an empty bed. Her first thought was to wonder where John was. Then she saw the clock by the bed. Eleven. She felt a pang of guilt. She had gotten carried away with Emil last night. They had enjoyed a prolonged experience within the Mist and she had taken much longer in her “walk” than she had planned. It was almost two by the time she had slipped out of her clothes again and slipped under the covers with her husband.

  John would have been up for hours already, she surmised. Probably also found a coffee shop. He was predictable that way. Early riser, even when he didn't need to be. Then he always turned to the morning bracer of black coffee and something to read. She smiled as she realized how well she had learned his morning habits already. She loved learning him. It was like a whole new extension of her own life lived out through her husband. A fantastic adventure waiting to be explored and lived all over again. That was how she viewed her life with John. Marriage. Not just an institution of relationship, but an opportunity to take life to new levels. They were one. He and she. Him and her. John and Kathy.

  For several minutes Kathy moved her arms and legs back and forth in the bed, running them over the soft sheets time and time again, taking in the sensation the friction created in her limbs. Life. Something that until a few months ago she took for granted. Now, it was everything she had ever dreamed it would be. Love. Companionship. Purpose. Stability. Protection. A future. That was what she had now. She had a future before but did not care what it was. Now, with John in the picture, she had a future and she cared about it. Deeply.

  She lay on her back spreading her legs and pulling them back in again. The heat generated underneath her legs against the warm sheets was sensuous. It reminded her of last night with Emil. Her other lover. He had taken her beyond just feeling good last night. He had transported her to a world of sensations and experience that made mere earthly delights seem pale in comparison. And he had not just given her a taste of it and then sent her home. He had allowed her to dive in and revel in the experience for as long as she desired. That was what made her so late. She had expected a quickie in the pathway by the river but Emil had brought an entire ten course picnic for the soul. His as much as hers. It had been wondrous and wonderful. She knew that it was the experience every couple aspired to in the natural but she had experienced it in the spiritual where it was originally conceived. That made a normal encounter in the natural a lesser event sensually if not totally.

  As she lay there remembering her walk with Emil last night, she wondered if sex in the spiritual plane would change or dampen her desire for sex with John. She hoped not. That would be terrible. For a moment she allowed that fear to run through her. She couldn't lose John. He had been her salvation. Without him, she would have just been a woman wasting away in a small seaside town. She could not let anything ruin what they had. No matter how good it was in the spiritual plane, she had to live her life with John, here.

  As she moved to get up, she felt the twinge of memory between her legs. It had been good, she smiled to herself. She would not regret the good. She would add to it. She would find John and add to it. She laughed to herself as she moved to the shower. She would find John and add to it wherever she found him. She hoped it was not too public a place. As the hot water cascaded over her body, she wondered what John's reserved mother would think if she ever knew the promiscuous thoughts her daughter in law had about her well raised son. Her laughter echoed off the ceramic walls of the bathroom as she cleaned her body of the previous evening's activities. She didn't think of it as washing Emil off. Instead, she thought of it as washing Emil in. Deeper. That was how she thought off him. Inside her. Deeper.

  Gol was furious. He had visited each of the apartments of the host mothers of their seeds. Each had been viciously torn apart after having their necks broken. Three had been reported in the paper. The fourth had not been found in time to m
ake the paper. But the television stories announced that a vicious killer was on the loose, killing young mothers to be and tearing open their wombs to steal their unborn children. The humans did not know the whole story, but Gol did. He saw the handiwork of the seed.

  His rage was part anger at the ruination of their plan to birth shells for a human existence. The other part was his own inability to stop the seed from continuing his murderous existence. He had set the seed free when he failed to inspect the body of the Cranston woman. He regretted that oversight now. He had made this problem and it was causing the downfall of all his brothers and he had worked towards. They were in this plane now. Their energy stores were dangerously low. Adequate for living here but not for any special moving about, which they obviously still needed to do with this threat of the seed hanging over them. And it was all his fault. He had been the leader. His father had left him in charge. He alone had decided to undertake this existence and recapture the glory of the life they once knew in the human plane. It was because of him that they were all there now instead of going back to their own plane.

  The seed had been gathering energy. That was plain. He did not consume the women or their blood, which was good in one way. Less explanation for the murderous rampage the police now had to deal with. A monster who tore fetuses out of a womb was bad enough. But one that drank the mother's blood and consumed her spirit would have set off spiritual alarms all over the country.

  Gol was thankful the seed could only consume the other seeds one at a time. It left a gruesome but somewhat explainable murder scene behind. Nasty and disgusting to the human mind, but not a flag raising spiritual onslaught the religious nuts would jump on. The mother's blood and spirit would have been an overload that would have slowed the seed down. He would not have been able to get to all of the seeds in one night if he had stopped to consume the mother's energies too. The seed was thinking things out. He was making sure the brothers did not get a chance to stop him as well as providing for his own energy needs.

  Still, the seed had to be in need of more energy. The seeds of the brothers would have developed at normal human rates. Gol's wayward seed had to be developing at twenty or thirty times the regular rate. It needed to attain adulthood as fast as possible to create its own safety position. That meant the seed was still hungry. And human energies would be too small to feed it all it needed to thrive. There was only one source in the human plane that would satisfy the seed now. Gol needed to get back and warn his brothers. This was no longer a plan of dominating the human world. It had now become a plan of surviving the hunter that was stalking them.

  Saph, Lah, Ish and Tos had been accounted for. The Seed was satisfied that Gol was nowhere around. The four brothers were alone. He could see their diminished energies, too. It had cost them a lot to move to the physical realm of the human plane. They had not yet set up feeding levels sufficient to sustain their now physical bodies. Saph was still out walking. Lah was alone in a building that overlooked an old field that was overgrown with weeds. Ish and Tos were preparing some kind of meal from whatever it was they had brought back with them a few minutes ago. It smelled awful from the seed's vantage point. The air brought the smell to him in gusting whiffs of acrid smoke and oily fragrance. Meat. They were grilling meat. U-h-h-h-g. The Seed preferred his meat fresh. Uncooked. Full of all it's energies.

  He knew that as he progressed, he would also have to revert to this human form of preparing food for consumption. It was the expected way in the human plane. The human body also had trouble dealing with raw meats. Digestion was a touchy thing in humans. Physical bodies required one to obey the physical laws. He resented the day he would no longer be allowed to savor the blood of the kill. That was not allowed in the human plane. The lack of blood energies kept the human body too weak to move from plane to plane. It was part of the deal between the Creator of Life and the humans. No blood energies. To partake of the blood for humans would be breaking a deal with the Creator of Life. Instead of bringing them freedom to roam the panes, such a blood meal in the human plane would send the deal breaker forever to the Place of Chains. Of course, in the physical existence of the human plane there was still the option of asking forgiveness. That singular characteristic of the human plane allowed the wrongdoer a chance to erase the slate, so to speak, and return to the proper balance of Life by stopping the wrongdoing and going in a proper direction from then on.

  Spiritual energies were of no value in the human plane either. Not because they had no strength or real power, but because the humans ignored it. Power has to be given in the human plane. Possessing it was not enough. Because of the deal with the Creator of Life as their protector, every human also had the ability to deny the power others possessed. Indeed, humans seemed to make a life out of living below their abilities and dragging others along. With statements of denial, human leaders sought to exclude everything except whatever the leaders chose to acknowledge. Humans were such fickle and degenerate creatures that they thought progress was making bigger and bigger boxes to live within. The spiritual planes understood that the only real progress was living without any boxes at all. That was a spiritual knowledge. Humans had freedom but chose to exert limitations on one another as a means of control.

  The fluid energies in humans were limited to a committed relationship by the Creator of Life, thus limiting the growth of spiritual strength, which met at the point of sexual consummation between a male and female. This limitation ensured a lack of desire to attain a different level of existence. Not that there was anything wrong with living in the human plane. It was just limited in the experiences of life afforded it. The experiences were there, but they were not. They were limited by the relationship a human had with the Creator of Life. The better the relationship the greater the freedom to experience life at a higher level. Humans did not travel the planes because their relationships to one another kept them at home.

  Humans had created a devil spirit to offset any attempt to experience life in its fullest extent by other humans. Humans were control freaks if nothing else. Not that the spirit of the Dark did not exist. He did. And he was indeed the antithesis of all that the Creator of Life stood for. But he was never intended to be the reason for a human to be in good relationship with the Creator of Life. Choice was not about persuasion or even a decision between bad and good. Choice was about recognizing all that was available for enjoying life and choosing to enjoy it. Life was the goal of the Creator of Life. Death was never supposed to be one of the choices.

  Humans were so limited in the life they enjoyed, yet they were given the freedom of choice to explore it in great detail, if they only knew how. In other planes, where procreation was possible, those born there were taught the joys of life and all that the Creator had made available to everyone. Only in the human plane was there a destructive streak of self control that forced the choice proposition to become a deal between humans and the Creator of Life.

  Choosing the Creator of Life as the Creator of Life was complete silliness in every plane except the human plane. There, certain humans, under the direction and influence of members of the Dark, had created an alternative to the life the Creator of Life designed that really did not exist. They did it to maintain control over others. The Dark wants to be in control, but they have to have permission from the sanctioned creatures of the human plane to even operate there. Certain humans, assessing that they could achieve a measure of control with this affiliation with the Dark, bought into this alternative to the Creator of Life. Thus was born the devil and the adversaries to the Creator of Life. In truth, none matched the Creator of Life or threatened him. All dark influences in the human plane were just other planes of existence trying to exert some control over the human existence.

  Humans had choice and the Seed had a choice to make now. Take the brothers he could see and find Gol later, or wait until they were all together? His hunger made the choice for him. He needed to feed again. Before the weakness started. If he waited too late, he would b
e no match for any of them even with surprise on his side. His need for growth dictated his need for more energy.

  Tos left his brother grilling the meat they had acquired and went to try on the new clothes they had brought back. Clothes were a novelty that only a few of the planes utilized. Spiritually, no one needed clothes. Humans wore them to cover up their nakedness and thwart the sexual awareness that threatened to overcome their dignified societies. Wearing them was a new sensation that Tos enjoyed. Each type of material brought new sensations to the nerves in the human skin. He liked testing out different materials just for that fact. They all felt different to his skin.

  Engrossed in the sensation of the soft material wrapped around his legs, Tos did not hear the movement behind him until it was too late. He turned in time to see a small figure moving with an incredible speed. The first sensation was of fire and a pain that fully engulfed his shoulder upward to the top of his head. The last sensation was being driven into a dark place from which there was no return.

  The Seed did not dare take the time to enjoy his conquest or to feed more than a few drops of the blood to replace the energy he had used to make the kill. Time was of the essence if he was to keep surprise on his side.

  Making noise, like he had observed Tos making in his comings and goings, he approached Ish from behind. Ish never turned to see his brother coming. He just assumed it was him. The noise was the same, mostly. When he thought something sounded slightly off about Tos' movement, it was too late. The Seed was already upon him. Ish was overcome with a swift attack that swiveled his head in an unnatural twist of the human form neck. A great cracking and crunching accompanied the shifting position of the giant's head. His eyes glazed over before the body ever fell. The Seed stood looking at his handiwork. Two down.

  He found Lah still watching any approach from the east. It was the direction Gol had left in. Presumably, he would also return from that direction. Lah would not be there to see it. From where the Seed stood by the big wall of windows, Lah laid on the dirty, debris covered floor with his head twisted in a manner that defied any presumption of life still existing in that body. Even if Lah were an owl, the small amount of skin holding that head on was too twisted and constricted for the furious attack the Seed had used. He had spun around Lah twice while holding that head in his firm grip. Lah's body had remained immobile, stunned, and he had thought he might twist the head clean off, but the resiliency of the human skin was remarkable. It held even after such damaging twisting. Remarkable, the Seed thought as he viewed Lah's dead human body.

  Saph was out in the open when the Seed came upon him. He assessed Saph's course and adjusted his position to come up behind the giant as he passed by one end of a building. Crouching in the darkest part of the shadows, the Seed depended upon the natural inclination to believe the first view of the shadows was all that was there without actually seeing into the depths of a shadow. Saph looked, assessed all as safe and passed by without alarm. That was when the Seed pounced. Speed, accuracy, and deadly efficiency combined to send Saph to the permanent Dark from where he came.

  Four bodies lay on the ground or dirty floors of the abandoned buildings of the desolate place. The Seed had done his part to cause it to be even more desolate. Now, he waited. There was one more that he needed to deal with. Dragging the bodies together, he started his feed. He would be strong when Gol returned. If nothing else he would be satisfied.

  John returned to their room in time to see Kathy strut from the bathroom in her birthday suit. The sight of her naked form caused an ache to form in his lower regions. He gave brief pause to consider giving in to his instinct to take what was before him. But it was getting close to lunch time and he wanted to eat. Kathy would be hungry, too. She had not eaten much at supper the night before. He knew she had a lot on her mind. Becoming part of the Mist in a greater fashion seemed to affect her more than it had him. He thought she needed her space to deal with all the things the Mist offered to the mind. She was the kind of person that needed to explore everything. He knew she would, too. Space. That was his answer for her.

  Right now, he needed food. She smiled at him as she rubbed her naked body slowly, teasingly, a few more times with the towel and let it fall to the carpet. She bent over to retrieve her clothes, which she had already laid out on the bed and John knew that special ache again. Beautiful. He enjoyed wanting her as much as he loved fulfilling his every desire with her. It was a glorious desire that filled him and washed over his person letting him know he was definitely still alive. Later, he knew he could fulfill that desire in a personal way that would make the waiting worthwhile. And he intended to.

  “Horrible murders in the paper this morning.” John started the conversation.

  “Murders?” Kathy questioned the plural use of murder.

  “Yes. Three mothers-to-be killed in their beds and their fetuses torn out.”

  Kathy grimaced at the picture his description evoked.

  “Torn out?” She winced as she said it.

  “That's what it says. Must be some deranged killer on the loose.”

  “Maybe we should help with that investigation, too.” Kathy suggested. “Baby killers even before the baby was born. That's extreme at the least.”

  “Disgusting is more like it,” John added.

  “And I was looking forward to getting some lunch before you told me about that.”

  “Sorry,” John meant it. He had not thought about the picture such a gruesome crime might evoke. He just didn't think like that. But he knew Kathy did. She could picture everything.

  “It's okay. I wanted to go out to the accident scene with Emil before I ate anyway. Thought we might survey the area, get what memories we could from Emil and then discuss it over a great lunch at that Italian restaurant we saw driving in.”

  John remembered the restaurant. He wanted to eat there, too. He was hungry now, but it had been his fault that she wanted to wait. He was eating as a couple now. He did not set the timetable on his own plans any more. Neither could he afford to act like he was alone, either. Caution would have to be the watchword before telling such stories in the future. It was affecting his dietary practices, now. That made it worth thinking twice about. Living with Kathy was making him learn all kinds of new things. She was so amazing and so much a part of who he was now. She deserved his thinking twice before speaking.

  “Sure,” he relented. “I located the place on a map. It's way over on the other side of town.”

  “A long drive?”

  “About a half hour, I imagine.”

  “Can you hold out that long?” She inquired about his need to eat. He had ruined her appetite and still, she thought about his. He loved her all the more for being that kind of a person. He could wait.

  “I can wait to eat,” he announced. “Could probably miss a few meals so I can fit into my pants.”

  “Yeah, like you're getting fat or something.” Kathy laughed and hugged him. She was not completely dressed yet and her cool skin felt good against his arms as they wrapped themselves automatically around her.

  “If you aren't careful you could excite another desire in me,” John warned her with a chuckle.

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Kathy breathed in his aroma deeply. “I see you found a coffee shop.” She laughed and pushed him away. “Leave me here in bed all naked and slip away for some coffee. Seems like you made a bad choice, Buster.”

  He winced at her use of Marcie's pet name for him. He wished she would not use it. He would never say so, though. That would make her use it all the more. She liked pushing his buttons. And Marcie was a point that definitely pushed his buttons.

  “Okay. Okay. Let's go. I have to eat sometime today.”

  Kathy laughed as she finished dressing and smoothing out her look. John watched. She was more beautiful than ever. She absolutely glowed with a radiance of life he only hoped he could one day achieve. She was the best person he had ever known.