“Maybe that’s not how he died. Maybe that’s just what we remember. Maybe this is all some kind of sick game.”
Nauls looks at the floor. “Well I don’t wanna play no more.”
“Think about what he’s saying,” Rooster says. “Does anybody really remember anything before the job today?”
“Of course we know what happened today,” Landon says.
“Do we?” Rooster watches him, doing his best to keep his face void of emotion. “Do any of you remember anything before the van? Because I’m not sure I do. I mean, I think I do, it feels like I do but…”
“It’s in your head,” Starker says, “but you don’t actually remember it.”
“Yeah,” Snow agrees. “What he said.”
Rooster nods.
“So I’m the only one who wants to leave then?” Nauls paces about wildly. “Really? Are you guys fucking high?” The light drifts back and forth across the dark room, cutting shadows and revealing quick glimpses of a long-dead house.
In that moment, eyes following the beam, fear wells in Rooster the likes of which he’s never known. He’s sure he sees something more, something there yet not quite there, waiting in the darkness, slipping from sight like scuttling insects just as the light passes over them. He grips his weapon tighter but it does little to calm his rising terror. “We need to search this place.”
“No we don’t.” Nauls shakes his head. “We can just leave.”
“We need to know what’s happening here.”
“We can’t get upstairs,” Starker tells them. “Staircase is blocked with shit and it’s all rotted out. But there’s something dead up there and whoever killed it did some finger-painting with its blood.”
“There’s something wrong with this place, man, it’s—you guys all feel it too, I know you do. Shit Starker you and Rooster felt it outside, and…I don’t…” Nauls suddenly becomes strangely calm, his voice quiet and childlike. “I don’t want to die out here.”
“Easy, Nauls,” Landon says. “Don’t wanna trip and fall on your vagina.”
“Bring the light around to the door under the stairs,” Rooster tells him, his gaze moving between the horrified faces before him. “We’re going down there.”
* * * *
As daylight splintered night, it brought with it an icy rain that descended upon the city in violent torrents. Shaking off the residue of nightmares, waking and otherwise, Rooster adjusted his position in the chair. He’d placed it in front of the window and watched the street all night. Every muscle in his body hurt, his neck was stiff and sore and his temples pulsed with a dull ache. Ice ticked against the window, mixing with the sluicing rain to blur the glass and world beyond. Numerous lost souls had come and gone throughout the night, hurrying through the darkness, but the priest had not returned.
Though he couldn’t be certain, Rooster thought he’d briefly nodded off a few times during the night. After asking him countless times to put the gun away and come to bed, Gaby finally gave up a little after midnight and drifted off to sleep. She lay sprawled out across the bed, her breathing slow and deep. He watched her a while. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. It didn’t seem right, Rooster thought, for someone so intelligent, so caring and just, so uncorrupted and faithful to be associated in any way with such madness and horror. Yet somehow it made perfect sense, a pure and tranquil soul like Gaby existing amidst the mayhem, calm beauty at the eye of an otherwise violent storm. His storm.
He sat on the bed next to her and gently caressed her face. She stirred and moaned quietly but remained asleep. Who are you? He wondered. Why are you here with me?
The pain in his temples drifted behind his eyes, lingering there as he gently kissed Gaby on the cheek.
With the 9mm tucked into the back of his pants, he threw on his jacket, swallowed a handful of aspirin and slipped into a cold and unforgiving rain.
-8-
Rooster found himself standing in the same rain some minutes later, having traced the address on the card to an old restaurant in a long-dead neighborhood. A small dark hole-in-the-wall, it sat alone between a series of boarded-up storefronts and a huge lot of bricks and debris that had once been a building. The street was filthy, cold and lifeless. No cars out in front of the restaurant, but the sign in an otherwise dark window blinked: Dante’s. There was no one else around, and the second floor above the restaurant appeared deserted, most of the windows blown out or boarded up. Rooster looked to the end of the block, checking the corners in both directions. If he was being watched or tailed, they were the best he’d ever encountered.
He moved through the door, which alerted those inside to his arrival with the jingle of a little bell. His eyes slowly adjusted to the dim lighting as he was met with a blanket of thick, oppressive heat. A series of tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths and small candles encased in glass orbs at their centers lined the walls to his left and right. The open area between them provided a path through the narrow restaurant to, he assumed, the kitchen in back, but it was so dark he couldn’t make out much beyond the first few tables. The smell of burned food hung in the air, and although there was a podium for a maître de the restaurant appeared empty, perhaps closed.
“Here,” a voice said from the rear of the room.
Rooster casually slid a hand to the gun in his belt and moved down the center aisle toward the direction of the voice. As the shadows parted, the candlelight danced along the floor and walls, flickering about, alive in the dark. As he cautiously approached the only occupied table in the place, the silhouette of a man’s head and shoulders emerged.
“Mr. Cantrell.” Not a question. Said with what almost sounded like adoration. “Nasty rain out there this morning.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s not important,” he said. “Call me whatever you’d like.”
Same aged and drained voice as on the phone, Rooster was sure of it.
“Mr. Snow seemed fond of Poindexter.” The man motioned to the chair across from him with a spindly arm, his hand brushing through the circle of candlelight cast across the table. Skeletal and liver-spotted, his pale flesh was laced with bulbous blue veins, the fingers gnarled with arthritis. “Not terribly original, but we can go with that if you’d like.”
“Snow’s dead.”
“Yes.”
Rooster looked behind him. He could see the front door and the light beyond, though it seemed farther away than was possible.
“It’s all right, Mr. Cantrell, you’re safe here. Please. Sit.”
He pulled the chair out, slid it to the side so he could still see the door then took a seat. He’d never cared for sitting with his back to doors. “Who are you?” Rooster pulled his gun and laid it flat on the table, barrel pointed at the man. “I’m not asking again.”
Until then the man’s face had remained in shadow. He sat forward enough to allow the candlelight to reveal a glimpse of a loose-skinned face ravaged by age, his features sharp and birdlike. A pair of eyeglasses with black frames sat high on his needle nose, the flickering flame from the candle reflected in lenses so thick they might have been comical under different circumstances. “Don’t be an ass,” he said wearily, “put that away. Our time together is limited.”
Rooster reluctantly returned the gun to his lap.
“Are the headaches getting worse?”
He nodded.
“It happens as the mind recovers and remembers more and more. Truth always comes with some measure of pain.” He folded his damaged hands before him on the table and sat back, his face again engulfed in darkness. “Does The Kingdom Project mean anything to you?”
Faraway screams tore at him. “No.”
“Named for the famous Eliot poem ‘The Hollow Men’ which speaks of ‘death’s other kingdom’ compiled with numerous books on demonology and the occult that consistently referred to the darkness on the other side as a ‘kingdom of shadows,’ The Kingdom Project was a top secret program begun in
the late 1970s and continued until the mid-80s. The occult has always been of interest to the powers that be. Hitler spent a fortune on its study and possibilities. Many of the same scientists that worked for the Third Reich ended up here, in the United States, after World War II. They weren’t all rocket scientists, Mr. Cantrell. Many were those who worked on the Reich’s most classified occult projects. Their work not only continued here in the states, it expanded and went farther than even Hitler could’ve imagined.”
Outside, the muted sounds of a siren rose then fell away to silence.
“The early programs of the 50s and 60s met with failure,” he continued. “For much of the 70s nothing changed, and the majority of programs were scrapped. Many concentrated on psychic phenomenon or the like, but The Kingdom Project had different, more sophisticated ideas. Our goal was to discover a connection—a bridge, if you like—between our reality and the underworld. We weren’t concerned with an afterlife that could only be entered through death, but rather alternate existences existing simultaneously with ours.”
A waiter materialized from the shadows holding a plate of spaghetti and meatballs and a goblet of red wine. He placed them before Poindexter without comment then slipped away.
“I understand you’re not a man of science, so I won’t bore you with the technical details, but suffice to say it all boils down to physics and mathematics. Our existence, our entire universe, this entire dimension, is based upon them. They all are. It’s simply a matter of finding the correct equation then executing it via the proper tools. What we as well as the others before us failed to realize was that in a psychological sense, the physical world is essentially an illusion. The path to the other side, to the power we were searching for—the darkness, that place of pure primal terror and evil—isn’t something one can find in the depths of the Earth or on a saucer ride through space or any of that nonsense. It exists in the limitless caverns of our minds. Our minds provide the gateway to the other side…the underworld…the darkness. It wasn’t Heaven Hitler was searching for, Mr. Cantrell, and neither were we. In the end, these programs all have military—or similar—applications. The Kingdom Project was no different. We focused specifically on the dark side of the occult, the concept that things like demons, devils, demonic entities—whatever you’d like to call them—literally existed on some level, if not on a physical plane then perhaps a purely spiritual one. Think about it, beings of pure, unadulterated, unapologetic evil. Beings of pure rage, pure violence, pure hatred. Imagine if that level of evil truly existed in a conscious, intelligent form. Imagine the possibilities of literally summoning such creatures. Imagine harnessing their power, the very essence…of Hell.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind.”
“No, but unfortunately you are. And I’m largely responsible for it.” He took up a fork, poked at the food on his plate. “Our push, specifically with The Kingdom Project, was largely chemical-based. We believed that once the bridge was found, if it truly existed outside theory and mathematical probability, could only be crossed in a spiritual way. In-other-words, psychologically, as the real-world applications of physics and mathematics had to be merged with spiritual, non-physical, synthetic components.”
“Synthetic,” Rooster asked, “as in drugs?”
“Yes, and it was only if and when these two areas were in perfect synchronization that our goals could be achieved. The mind itself had to be altered in order to access the other side. There was no question about that. You could get there from here, as it were, and the key was right before our eyes. Many ancient cultures, from Native Americans to countless tribes of people worldwide—people we considered largely inferior savages—already possessed the process we’d been searching for. These peoples used it to commune with paradise, to find nirvana, God, peace and transcendence. And they all used mind-altering substances to achieve it—roots, leaves, plants, things of the Earth—ingested before these journeys were taken. It’s precisely that angle I studied and brought to the project. There were numerous formulas over several years that used pieces of these various concoctions from different cultures. And of course, as a chemist, I implemented my own mixtures, including LSD derivatives and other mind-altering substances. Many did nothing more than standard hits of LSD. The initial versions were far too strong and brought on brain damage, permanent insanity, even death in a few cases. Eventually we were able to isolate the aspects we required and produced what I believed was the perfect elixir for The Kingdom Project. Once the right formula was found the challenge became finding proper test subjects. No one sane would knowingly volunteer for such a thing, so we were forced to utilize subjects that hadn’t volunteered.”
Rooster tightened his grip on the gun but left it in his lap. “You forced people to take a mind-altering drug you cooked up in a test tube?”
“We did. And the results were interesting. Not what we’d hoped for, mind you, but very interesting.” He twirled the fork around strands of spaghetti, brought it to his mouth and chewed. “Many subjects experienced something,” he said, “but it wasn’t the darkness we were searching for. Many believed it was nonsense, false near-death and other psychotic episodes brought on chemically. But I knew this was different. We were so close. The problem, you see, was not with the drug, but the subjects. I began to more closely study the nature of evil, the various interpretations of it in different cultures and varied religions, and though they were often vastly different, I uncovered one consistent thread throughout. According to every doctrine, evil was partly voluntary. One had to embrace it in a sense, allow it. The Devil, if you will, could not simply snatch you up in the dead of night and carry you off to Hell to do with you what he liked. Nor could his minions—demons—attack without provocation, their powers were limited as well. One had to let them ‘in’ so to speak. Simply put, if the road to Hell truly existed, one could not be dragged there. One had to voluntarily walk that path—through either conscious decision or even outright deception—but one had to allow it. Without that consent, evil could control no man, and no man could find or tap into pure evil. What we needed were not subjects forced into service but rather test subjects that had already embraced the darkness. We tried various subjects that practiced black magic and evil—Satanists and the like—but again met with failure. Evil, it seems, does not want those who so enthusiastically want it. So we began searching prisons. And that is where we found you, Mr. Cantrell. It’s where we found all of you. You and your crew were chosen from thousands of potential candidates. You were all condemned, all paying for the horrible crimes you’d committed, all hopeless. If damnation was real, you were all headed straight for it. Murderers, thieves, rapists, terrorists, destroyers of innocents, you were perfect pieces to a larger puzzle of absolute darkness and depravity the likes of which even this hideous world could not begin to comprehend. You were the best of them, granted, the best of the worst, but the best just the same. As it turned out, you were also, however, a rather large fly in the ointment.”
Heart smashing his chest, Rooster attempted a deep breath. “You’re telling me everything I read in those files is true?”
Poindexter scooped up a forkful of meatball and slid it between his lips. “That is precisely what I’m telling you.”
“Why can’t I remember?”
“We didn’t want you to remember.” He wiped a smear of marinara from his chin with a cloth napkin. “So your memories—all your memories—were wiped clean and replaced with memories we wanted you to have.”
“Then there was no armored car job?”
“There was not.”
“But Carbone, he—he was shot.”
“He was killed, yes, but not from a gunshot.”
The tremors returned. He struggled to control them. “What then?”
Poindexter rolled more pasta onto his fork, the sauce dripping in thick globs back to his plate. “You remember the farmhouse,” he said, the fork shaking in his arthritic hand. “It’s coming back to you.”
�
��Yes. Slowly.”
“As I mentioned, you were the best of the worst.” He stuffed the spaghetti into his mouth. “You tortured and murdered a priest, claiming at your trial that you’d been repeatedly sexually molested by the man when you were a child and that’s what had led to your life of crime and eventually his murder. He’d ruined you, and in turn, years later, you had ruined him.”
A spike of pain dug deep into his temple and ran down along the right side of his jaw. Rooster fought it back. “I don’t…”
“Remember. Yes, I know. For that you should thank me.”
“For wiping my memories away and leaving me with lies?”
Ignoring the question, he took up the goblet, sipped some wine. “Of course the pedophilia scandal that shook the Catholic Church had not hit yet.”
Rooster had no idea what scandal he was referring to. How much of his mind had these bastards destroyed?
“The idea that a respected, admired and loved parish priest would’ve ever done such hideous things to a little boy was unthinkable. No one, including us, believed you.” Poindexter savored the wine a moment before continuing. “Turns out you were telling the truth, who knew? The fact remained, however, that you tortured and murdered a priest in cold blood. Well done.”
Kingdom of Shadows Page 6
