Protectors of the Veil
Presented by
The H.P. Lovecraft Lunatic Asylum
We would like to give a special thanks to Josh Harmon and Gevera Bert Piedmont for fixing our atrocious grammar. Thanks to Chris Reynolds for helping to perfect the story. We’d also like to give a special thanks to Vincent Charles, our military and weapons expert. He perfected our fight and killing scenes. Thanks to Alter Ego Creations for creating our cover art. We’d also like to thank our groups, many of the members of our groups volunteered to have their names used as characters in this book and/or the next book. Our Facebook groups include The H. P. Lovecraft Lunatic Asylum, Miskatonic, Kek’s Meme Magick, Nerds on the Right, In the Ring, Rise Against the Liberal Agenda.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1: The Office, The IVA, and the Police
Chapter 2: Gods and Demons
Chapter 3: Blood and Sacrifice
Chapter 4: The Underground Bar
Chapter 5: Breed
Chapter 6: The Recruit
Chapter 7: Mork’s Disappointment
Chapter 8: Vampire Dreams
Chapter 9: The Bartender That Saw Too Much
Chapter 10: The Wendigo
Chapter 11: Conspiracy Theories
Chapter 12: The Stoned Men
Chapter 13: My Goddess is Better Than Yours
Chapter 14: Secret Government Agencies Everywhere
Chapter 15: Befuddled
Chapter 16: Aftermath
Chapter 17: The Temple of Kek
Chapter 18: The Vampire Showdown
Epilogue
Bibliography
Contributors’ Section
Dawn M. Matthews
Chris Reynolds
John DeLaughter
Wondra Vanian
Bernadette Perez
Bryan Nickelberry
Frank Montellano
Shivendra Kapoor
Rob Santana
John Perri
David Nickleson
Gevera Bert Piedmont
Joanna Elphick
Shaun Avery
Samantha Louise
Alter Ego Creations
PROLOGUE
There is great unrest in the world today. There has always been great unrest but something is different now. I think we all feel it. In the past, unrest was isolated to conflicts between people in the same area, or someone from a different area trying to conquer another. While that is still going on, this unrest is different. The whole world seems polarized.
We have always had duality, but now it’s like that duality is at war…or maybe it always has been. If you look at politics all over the world there is a clear battle going on between the Ordered government-controlled society and the beautiful Chaos of freedom. One side wants to silence all people that speak truths that they don’t like or have a different opinion, while the other side is fighting to hold onto free speech, keep government at a minimum, and uphold Nationalism. In America, the Chaos of freedom is also fighting to ensure the Constitution is upheld, while Order fights to change the Constitution. It is not just in America, all over the world: Brexit vs EU supporters, France, Canada, Europe and the Western world in particular are seeing this huge polarization. It is not confined to the Western world. Conservative Japan is seeing a rise of Nationalism. India has a nationalist movement. It seems most countries are having a globalist vs. nationalist battle right now. Why? Many are wondering.
As above, so below. Chaos and Order are in a desperate battle and have been since before the human world existed. You are with Chaos or you are with Order, that is why our world seems to be splitting apart.
A line has been drawn in the sand, there is no middle ground. People are being sorted. The final battle between Chaos and Order is upon us. The end is near; which side are you on?
CHAPTER 1: THE OFFFICE, THE IVA, AND THE POLICE
The sound of heels clicking on the tile floors echoed through the deserted hallway. The sound ended at the elevator, as Agent Bertha Kalb pushed the down button and waited impatiently for the elevator doors to open. She knew the importance of her job, which added to her impatience. She tapped her left heel on the floor as she watched the numbers slowly ascend to the twenty-fifth floor. Finally, the doors opened and she raced in, pushing number five with a vengeance. The doors slowly shut as the Muzak version of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” assaulted her ears. Bertha found herself dancing and singing along despite her urgency.
The doors opened before she stopped dancing, causing Agent Mason Shandy to raise an eyebrow. “That was some nice dancing, Agent,” he said as he stepped into the elevator. They reached the fifth floor, and their voices could be heard singing, “OOOOHHH GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE…” Then the doors opened as Mason twirled Bertha and then dipped her. Applause and whistles echoed throughout the entire floor. The two agents stepped out of the elevator and bowed.
Bertha called out, “Cannon, front and center.” Jordon Cannon got up from his desk and grabbed his black hat on the way to meeting Bertha. He knew if she called him, it was for an urgent assignment. She handed Jordon a slip of paper with a series of numbers, letters, and symbols. He took it, put his hat and black coat on, and headed for the elevators and the garage. The Muzak version of “No More Mr. Nice Guy” was playing. Jordon smiled and bobbed his head to the song.
Once on the first level, they walked to the garage area. Agent Cannon pressed his thumb against the machine that read his fingerprint. The garage was entirely automated by technology that was far beyond anything Jordon suspected any human had ever seen, at least not since the Ancient Ones walked the earth. “Good morning, Agent Cannon. I will set up your car, please stand by,” said a robotic female voice. About thirty seconds later, the car rose up out of the ground. The agent got in the driving seat. Once he started driving, the car gave them all the information on the case.
In the robotic female voice, it said: “A man named Helmut Heydrich told this story to the local sheriff, who then told it to some deputies.” Amazingly, the voice always managed to change to the voice of the speaker of the story:
“THE THING BENEATH THE TREE”
Helmut spared no expense because he could barely afford anything as it was. Life on a lien-seized property was all he had the funds for, given his lean wages as a lower-rung Massachusetts civil servant, and the slim inheritance left by his parents. He could not bid for any property on which Massachusetts or its affiliated political entities had placed a lien. Instead, he watched the federal registry of seized properties in the hopes of finding land within driving distance of his job, but remote enough from civilization to live off-the-grid. A place where the civil unrest of the large metro areas—of Boston and Worcester, of Springfield and Lowell, of Arkham and Kingsport—to surmount the thin, blue line that, to date, kept the new barbarians in line. He intended not to become someone else’s prey.
Helmut sipped a cup of coffee while he sat at the rough table in his kitchen. He pored over the accounts book that tabulated his expenses, incomes, and outgoes. In their lifetime, his folks squandered the accumulated seed of their retirement savings, leaving him the chaff. He had hoped for more but now planned for less.
He wanted to forget. One means to do so was to sever contact with the friends and acquaintances from his former life. He was in no witness-protection program but intended to live as if he were on the judicial lam.
When the old Billington estate came available on a usmarshals.gov auction he sprang on it as an answer to his prayers. Helmut considered himself a man of prayers.
He was surprised that no one else bid on the house and acreage.
He owned no cellphone; instead, he kept a single landline for emplo
yment purposes, unlisted as best he could from internet registries. As he raised the funds, he strung unmarked wires across the treetops ringing his property to interfere with unwanted drone traffic.
He planned his protective outlays much as a marijuana farmer did in states unfriendly to medicinal hemp. But he shielded only himself. The doctors pigeonholed him for such behaviors. They said he was paranoid. When he turned eighteen and was no longer under the authority of his parents, he dispensed with the shrinks. Their chemical straight-jackets did not fit him well.
Instead, to his way of thinking, Helmut possessed an uncommon sense that would help him survive the coming civil unrest.
Deepening shadows crept across the overgrown field outside the kitchen window. The radio said Arkham was due for an extended rain squall tonight. The end of the day marked his one-month anniversary on the property. Earlier he had emptied and re-baited the traps that encircled the perimeter of the estate. Helmut tried to capture vermin alive. He needed them fresh for his purposes. He still had a room or two to clean out. One room was blackened by fire, a den where apparently, a previous owner tried to burn a floor-full of documents. Such was the haste that he or she did not use the room’s fireplace. He had to replace a major window upstairs, evidently broken from the outside in, for big pieces of stained glass still covered the upstairs hallway. A large plank of plywood now covered the hole.
Rudimentary wiring, evidenced throughout the house, was not up to code. Rather than invite a stream of municipal inspectors from nearby Dunwich, he temporarily used kerosene lamps and battery lighting.
Tomorrow he needed to find a second source of water on his land. With the damming of the mighty Miskatonic upstream from the Billington land, the stream that once bisected the property had dwindled to an intermittent brook. Well-witching was frowned upon by strangers to the practice, but he was attuned to the land’s vibrations. He practiced a discipline, whose origins were from time immemorial. Helmut realized early that to make a go of the property, he needed to become self-sufficient in many things. Finding one’s own water represented one survival skill.
Now, to my evening devotions, Helmut thought, finishing his coffee. As he stood, lightning flashed in the window and thunder rumbled outside. Helmut stopped for a moment to consider Thor’s words before he left the kitchen.
***
Three rows of cages lined one wall of the parlor. A few animals of various kind and sizes paced in the occupied cages, while most of the barred boxes remained vacant. Muskrats, minks, red foxes and snowshoe hares—the barking, yelping and mewing were deafening when the cages were full.
On another wall, instead of being lined with power-tools, his pegboard was festooned with the sharp implements of an orthopedic surgeon—the Old Saw Bones of the Civil War. From sword-like scalpels and an odd assortment of nippers to an arch formation of small to large bone saws, a line of sacrificial daggers, and a cone of freestanding whale harpoons—it had taken Helmut years to acquire his collection, beginning in his teens. Each blade was oiled to prevent rust and sharpened to a keen edge. Helmut meticulously maintained a working collection with which he lived off the land.
A half dozen meat hooks hung on the wall apart from the pegboard to suspend prey larger than his cages. Bags of salt, bottles of smoke brine, and bins of exotic herbs were piled under the deck of a long table that lined the third wall. Strewn in heaps atop the table, there lay an eclectic assortment of mystical volumes, sundry cookbooks and odd folklore references.
Leaning against the wall atop the table were gallon-size pickle jars, each labeled with the specific name of the incense sticks that tightly filled each receptacle. There was sage, frankincense, myrrh, sandalwood, Egyptian kapet, agarwood, styrax, olive wood, copal, balsam, Dragon’s blood, rosemary, and eucalyptus. He had bought the incense inventory of a New Age store when it went out-of-business. Piety for pennies-on-the-dollar. He stayed away from designer scents, preferring older selections associated with ancient worship from forgotten corners of the globe. That is why the parlor smelt like a cross between a shrine and a slaughter house.
Helmut leaned over the table, adjusted the kerosene lantern to the best reading light, and pondered a name in an English translation of the Papyrus of Ani. He wrote down a variant name from the margin footnotes, that of an ancient Egyptian God-Wizard, on his five-by-seven notepad, along with its phonetic spelling. He tried to form the sounds of the name—anglicized sounds, based on modern Egyptian pronunciations that were said to best mirror the high priestly tongue of Thebes. All such enunciations were at best conjectures. No one had voiced the dead language since three millennia before Christ. But it had to do, for Helmut was on a scientific quest of sorts. To an outsider, his passion bordered on metaphysical madness.
He opened a closet door adjacent the parlor. Between the folding doors of the ebony-inlaid Shinto house-shrine, which sat at the opposite end of the closet, evidence of the previous night’s experiment remained unchanged. An exhausted stick of myrrh tilted oddly in a ceramic incense tower. A silvered, pentagram-shaped ash-tray still bore its unburnt note paper. From a scaled-down meat rack hung the upside-down body of a gray squirrel, its head nearly severed, its once fresh blood, now turned rancid, filling a gilded catch-basin below the rodent.
No blood sacrifice lapped up. No smudge of divine life, nor singe from a Shekinah spark of deity. No response to his prayers. Again.
Sacred symbols from a dozen faiths adorned a shelf immediately above and behind the altar table. Among them sat a trinity-knot tied from the hair of a scalped priest, a dharma wheel executed in finger bones, an eye of Osiris woven from barbwire extracted from atop the Berlin Wall, a gilded Tibetan Gong etched with cabalistic symbols and minted from the gold teeth of Auschwitz prisoners, and a bronze fetish of Shiva forged from a dagger Robespierre used to secretly dispatch state enemies.
Helmut was especially fond of the Shiva fetish. His great grandfather, Reinhard Heydrich, was the first in his family to renounce his birth religion and take up worship of the Destroyer.
Roughly inscribed on a brass plaque at the bottom of the altar read, “…To an Unknown God…”
Contrary to that sentiment, one day Helmut would know. If any reality existed behind a name once worshiped by ancient man, he would uncover it through his devotions. The unknown would be made known. Perhaps tonight, on the anniversary of his hundredth try, he would succeed.
***
Elsewhere, something old stirred in a dark corner of a forgotten catacomb. Near centuries-old Luxor Egypt, lies the Valley of the Kings. For untold millennia, the dull clang of stone hammers and copper chisels echoed in the Valley.
During the eternal nights that still enshroud Egypt, the crack of taskmasters’ whips and the cries of the ancient slaves haunt the Bedouins who cross the Valley. The blood of the oppressed cried out, spilt as protesting tongues were cut out or as obstinate thralls received thirty-nine lashes. Not only had the ages deposited sedimentary patterns, but violence was laid down layer upon layer in its own rivers of life that ran into the mighty Styx. The blood of the downtrodden, stirred by multiplied savage acts, cried out.
In a hollow of the rock, sealed off by plaster and limestone, by spell and sigil, it shifted. That which was assumed dead, that for eternities stood still, trembled in recumbent repose. Like attracts like, as an ancient name, long forgotten by the lips of man, had again been invoked in the world.
Swarms of teeming familiars flocked to the object of their adoration. Tongues not used for untold millennia sprang to life, intoning forgotten incantations, and singing bygone songs of praise. Stained cauldrons bubbled afresh and effervescently. Once quiet familiars tossed hoary alchemist tools into the air with jubilation. A thousand preparations began.
A cacophony of sound—of sistrums shaken, of qanuns strummed, of castanets clattered, of mizmars, arghuls, and neys blown—echoed in the depths of Hades. Hoary dignitaries of the weird procession shrieked and caterwauled in time.
The things t
hat could not be, life that was not life, lumbered and lived.
Few candles were lit among the throng that lightless night. The Master of the minions preferred the succor of shadows. They applied cautious preparations and curious spells, laying wards of silence, and scratching runes that cloaked the Master’s activities in secrecy. Such spells captured the essence of death; for the dead were not known for making damaging slips of the tongue. There was nothing quite so quiet as a cadaver.
***
Weeks passed as a new season began with fresh palette to paint the countryside.
The day after a torrential thunderstorm and jagged lightning found Helmut in an old two-bencher ATV, slowly driving across his property, here and there the ground a sea of mud. In his backseat rode a jumble of traps, cages, and baits.
Autumn painted groves of hoary alders, some of their reddish-brown boles laid bare by an early shedding of leaves, and lofty branches studded with cones. Stands of smaller ninebark walked up the low hills that boxed in three sides of the Billington estate, their billowing branches weighed down by dense clusters of five-sided fruit. Between grove and stand stood copses of mountain laurels, tree-sized shrubs little affected by the coming of winter. Stubborn thickets of persistent hard hack grew aimlessly throughout the woods. And coverts of wild witch-hobble straddled the lost corners of the land.
Helmut worked his way slowly through puddles and ruts that crosshatched his land. He came upon a thin spiral of smoke that rose from an enigmatic point in the sweeping lay of the estate. There, the otherwise fertile land was barren and broken, scarred by the once coursing waters of the Miskatonic and crowded with a jumble of old Indian ruins.
Was it a squatters’ campfire? He carried a six-inch, bull-barreled .357 Magnum in a swaying shoulder holster, in case of rogue bears or two-legged vermin that turned nasty on him. Was it a forest fire? That was the last thing he needed.
The retreads he called tires squirmed for traction, as he gradually rounded the last stand of dogwood, and saw an upended tangle of roots and clumped earth, shaped like a medusa head some ten feet across. From there, the smoldering remains of a once-ascending angel willow, followed the uneven terrain.
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