Dark Fiction

by David Kempf

“There is still more to this story. I’m sorry if you think that I’m obsessing.”

  “You’re not and you already have the answer to your own question, Christopher.”

  “Really, won’t you enlighten me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, perhaps I do.”

  “Both sides of the battle…..”

  “Both sides,” said Christopher with a grimace. “Both sides needed to forget about the serious danger they were in. The men needed to be entertained and amused for a while.”

  “Yes. Soldiers in all wars tend to read a bit for escapism.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you see. The men needed to forget about the old grim reaper breathing down their necks for a while. They were even willing to read the scribbling of a dead British soldier. So I was not worried about my enemies burning my last words.”

  “I see, David.”

  “Excellent insights you have, Chris.”

  “Now as long as you’re feeling nostalgic, tell me more. Please tell me about the revolutionary war, your fallen comrades and how you became a ghoul.”

  “Sir, I am not nostalgic at all for that terrible, bloody war.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was an Englishman. Did you know that over 50,000 British soldiers died during that war?”

  “No.”

  “I thought as much.”

  “Don’t get snide with me, David. That particular war gave you your best writings, not to mention immortality. How bad could it be?”

  “It was very bad, my friend.”

  “What happened that day?”

  “The year was 1777 at the Battle of Ticonderoga. We, the British, had an easy victory over our enemies.”

  “Why?”

  “Haven’t you read about this in history, lad?”

  “Actually…”

  “We were up so high on our hill that our enemies left in great haste. That was the first part of the whole thing.”

  “Later, the British lost the rest of that battle,” said Christopher.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Is that when you turned?”

  “No.”

  “Please explain.”

  “Do I really need to explain?’

  “You do.”

  “Certainly, I was a low ranking officer. I never made it to the part where we failed so I didn’t get to see my remaining friends die. Most of them had been killed already. There were many of us who hated the war but we didn’t want others to think we weren’t loyal to our queen and country. That would bring a terrible, personal disgrace on you and your family if that be the case. That was for sure, it was. I walked with some others to our first victory. The enemies had abandoned the whole area.”

  “All of this was near Lake George.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, I was walking behind other comrades of mine and then it just happened. Many Americans and British froze to death that year. This was the summer and we didn’t have to worry about such things.”

  “I see.”

  “So we took it as it came, you know. I walked slowly, dead last behind everyone towards the defeated American fortress that was abandoned.”

  “Then what happened next, David?”

  “There was an American man hiding behind me. He was quite stealthy and I didn’t even see him. I mean, he came out of bloody nowhere!”

  “Wow!”

  “Indeed.”

  “David, what happened next?”

  “He had a knife to my throat, hard. He asked my name and I told him David Proctor. Then he informed me that today was my lucky day.”

  “I guess it didn’t feel like it was at the time.”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “He told me that he had been following me for a year. He had been listening to me read my stories out loud to my fellow soldiers around the fire. The man said he was impressed with me and he would introduce me to some very powerful friends.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “That’s nothing, my boy. Nothing profound has been said, believe me. There is so much more to my tale!”

  “Go on.”

  “So he tells me that he is sorry and then he knocks me unconscious. I wake up chained up in a room on a boat. I am desperate and terrified when I regain consciousness. I mean, I’m a mess.”

  “Continue.”

  “He told me his name was Mooney. That’s all that I ever got from him. He said that he was not important. I guess not, I mean, he was just a mere last name, that’s all. He told me it was going to be some time before we would reach our destination. He told me he would unchain me if I would not try to escape. He said I would only get one chance to prove myself trustworthy. I agreed.”

  “Did you try to escape?”

  “Yes, of course I did.”

  “Only one chance to prove you were not going to leave?”

  “He lied. Mooney actually gave me two chances. The second time took some serious convincing. I had to swear on my mother’s grave that I would not try to pull the wool over his eyes again. I, of course, did do just that. I was locked up in a dark room. He gave me a candle. Some fresh meat and wine were my company. I got sea sick. I threw up a lot and cried out loud in the dark, screaming every day and night!”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow, indeed.”

  “Continue. This is a great story, David.”

  “I was in such a state of shock that I may have, in fact, gone mad. I wasn’t sure about that. It could have been days, weeks or months that I was on the ship. I didn’t know and Mooney wasn’t much of a conversationalist.”

  “I see.”

  “We arrived one day. I heard the howling wind and felt the terrible, terrible cold. Mooney gave me sufficient clothing for the harsh weather. I asked him if we were in Antarctica and he laughed. He said that we were in fact in the great land.”

  “You mean Alaska, David.”

  “Well, yes. America got that some years later as you recall.”

  “Yes. Sorry, please continue.”

  “We walked for miles and miles. I became physically exhausted. I pleaded with him that I couldn’t go on and he laughed. Mooney loved to laugh at me, mocking me. We reached this strange sort of glacier. Before I could stop to catch my breath or even bloody think, he pushed me into it. It was some kind of bizarre cave and I fell down into it. Mooney quickly followed up behind me. He jumped like a lunatic into the cave, grasping a large torch he just lit up.”

  “David, this is incredible.”

  “No, my boy, it isn’t. What I have to tell you next is.”

  “I see.”

  “So we walk a few feet and he places the torch sort of in the center of where we are. It lights things up fairly well.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Creatures, frozen creatures and they were surrounding me. They looked like I did to you in the graveyard. Pale, sinister, frozen ghouls but they were lifeless in appearance.”

  “I see.”

  “Mooney told me that his master had promised him great wealth if he were to find a suitable protégé for the taking. He felt like I was the one to be chosen.”

  “Which you indeed were, weren’t you David?”

  “Indeed, I was.”

  “Wow.”

  “He told me his master’s name was Alexander. Mooney said he was one of the ancients. I half wondered if my mentor was going to be Alexander the great. Mooney explained that as far as he knew, there was no such thing as a vampire, werewolf or ghost. He said that as far as he knew, only ghouls and the masters were real. Mooney was a devout Catholic and did not want to cheat death and become a ghoul. So he made up his mind to seek material wealth for his rather large, destitute family. He thought this particular dark adventure would bring him the material wealth he lusted after. Mooney was essentially a mercenary. I found out years later that he was, in fact, a hit man and a thief. He had dealt with some of the shadiest peop
le around. Now he was dealing with the most dangerous creatures in the known universe.”

  “This is incredible, David.”

  “Wait. There is still so much more, my boy.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “I’ve taken no offense, lad. I just want to finish my story.”

  “By all means, David, please finish it then.”

  “Thank you. He lit up another torch and put it next to one of the six frozen fiends. Alexander, who by the way, was not Alexander of Macedonia, came to life. He stretched his awful arms out and I saw his fiendish eyes glow in the darkness. It wasn’t long before he said to Mooney that he had better have made a fine selection. You see, our kind loves the cold. The way in which the masters love horror stories, we love cold weather. It suits us well. You will learn that being frozen is a great pleasure. He explained to me that he needed a protégé. His previous five were failures and as a punishment, he froze them.”

  “I see.”

  “Alexander said that he had made them eat graveyard after graveyard of corpses to punish them and his attempts at retribution failed miserably. They simply were not producing good stories or coming to the masters with good observations about human nature.”

  “I thought that ghouls could only have one mentor and one protégé at a time.”

  “That’s true, Chris. That is why he kept his failures hidden from the masters and frozen alive. He would be severely punished if they were to find out about this.”

  “So it was this Alexander who was your mentor?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What do you mean?’

  “The entire affair is rather fuzzy. He was frozen for so long that he could not remember much except that he was a ghoul. The great stories of the ancients would be left untold because he suffered from amnesia. He had been frozen for so long that he forgot who he actually was! Mooney received messages from him because he could plant thoughts inside the human mind. Still, he remained frozen. All of these powers and he was the equivalent of a human being suffering from Alzheimer’s!”

  “That’s a truly amazing story, David.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he teach you anything?”

  “Oh, yes. The basics that he could remember, he did. He taught me how to use the crystal to communicate with the masters. He showed me how to shape shift when the time finally came.”

  “Then Alexander trained you for a matter of years?” Christopher asked.

  “Indeed. It was probably a decade or more. If I wasn’t a ghoul, I would have been really sick of the cold weather!”

  “Perhaps it’s because I’m still new here, but I feel no fondness for the cold weather.”

  “Trust me, Chris. You will.”

  “Okay.”

  “The one thing that was grand from this experience with Alexander was how much he loved my stories. Nothing in the world made me feel more alive than his praise for my fiction.”

  “I can relate to that.”

  “Sure. You should. I love your stories, Christopher.”

  “Speaking of stories, why don’t you finish yours?”

  “That’s an excellent idea, Chris. So he loved my stories and told me as much. He made poor Mooney stay for six months until he knew that he was satisfied with me. Alexander told Mooney that David Proctor was by far the best protégé, the greatest student that he had ever had.”

  “That’s an honor.”

  “Indeed, lad, it was. Mooney left for his home in New England on the same ship that took me to the great land and immortality. The man was a great man of wealth now. His family would want for nothing and neither would their children and grandchildren. It was a good thing, too. If I was another failure, then Alexander had threatened to kill literally everyone in the Mooney clan. He said that there would be no more people with that last name left alive. I’m glad I could be there for him.”

  “The gold, I mean your gold. You took some of Mooney’s fortune, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s hilarious.”

  “That was the beginning of my gold collection. It has grown staggeringly since then. The great Alexander trained me to be a ghoul and he loved my stories.”

  “David, why did he freeze the others?”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Couldn’t he just kill them?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “We are immortals. Don’t you remember the sword I stuck in your neck? We can’t bloody die. We can be shot, burned, buried alive, drowned, suffocated, stabbed and still we do not die.”

  “What about beheaded?”

  “I don’t know, but I would hate to find out!”

  “So would I!”

  “One drink from a strange bottle of wine was all it took to make me immortal. The blood barely had any taste. The wine that was frozen in the ice and slowly thawed out for me made my life eternal.”

  “Those poor, frozen souls,” said Christopher.

  “Now, please don’t weep for them. The dreams that come to a ghoul when he is in that wonderful, cold sleep are a dark delight.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes. They are wonderful, truly awesome!”

  “Continue your story.”

  “Well, I asked Alexander some important questions during our brief time together.”

  “Ten or more years are brief?”

  “When immortality really dawns on you and you are over a century old, ten or more years will seem like a brief time to you as well.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I had some excellent opportunities to ask him some of those questions you wanted answered.”

  “The great questions, you mean?”

  “The unanswerable ones, I mean.”

  “Oh.”

  “I asked about God.”

  “You asked Alexander if there was one.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He prefaced his answer with a speech about his age. He told me that he was perhaps the oldest living creature on the planet. So old, in fact, that he did not really remember his true age. He did, however, remember the ages he lived. He remembered the ancient times when the great philosophers like Socrates lived. He lived among them and heard them speak right in front of him. The point was he told me that he had seen and heard many of the greatest minds of mankind.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “So what was his answer, Chris?”

  “Which answer?”

  “Oh you know the one where he answered the great questions? He simply told me that he did not know.”

  “All of that life experience and being able to speak with and walk with geniuses…”

  “It all comes down to doubt and nothing.”

  “Nothing at all, I suppose.”

  “Yes, Chris. He said that if I couldn’t grasp that, then he would tell me a story to ease my mind.”

  “What was the story?”

  “Well, the story of the masters goes back to ancient times and was prevalent in Persian culture. ‘Jinn’ is an Arabic term but their story was a world wide phenomenon. Tales of demons, spirits, and monsters were all over the world.”

  “I see.”

  “If a house was supposedly haunted then it was a hoax, a hallucination, or the work of the masters.”

  “Remarkable.”

  “Then you see, many worldwide religions believed in them in one form or another. They have always been with us.”

  “Oh.”

  “Alexander told me a story about them. He said that in the time before time, the great maker of all things created all life, many dimensions and mankind. Man had free will but frequently chose good or at least common sense. This made the maker bored with his own creation. So he made the masters and the masters made us. The battle between man and the masters may never have an ending!”

  “That’s quite a story….”

  “I would say that it’s the ul
timate story!”

  “Yes, David.”

  “What did I learn from him?”

  “That’s what I would like to know.”

  “I learned nothing more than I can teach you in the next few decades.”

  “Okay.”

  “I learned how to communicate with the masters through the crystals. Then I learned how to will my tales of human terror to their minds. This, of course, makes them understand human nature all the more. I learned of the great rewards and terrible punishments bestowed on us.”

  “I’ve seen their brutal, disgusting punishment but what rewards are given?”

  “Eternal life is not good enough for you, Christopher?”

  “No, David…”

  “Relax, I jest. I jest.”

  “Oh, it’s good to have a sense of humor, I suspect.”

  “Rewards are wealth, fame, promiscuous sex with beautiful women and of course, historic silver and gold!”

  “Stolen from greedy bastards who deserve nothing, right mate?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Mooney wanted to provide for his family.”

  “What other rewards?”

  “Surviving the apocalypse isn’t enough?”

  “I know. You jest.”

  “I don’t jest about this fact. You, Christopher Wisdom, are now in the most exclusive little club in the known universe.”

  “That brings me another ultimate question. I must know if you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many of us are there?”

  “Just us and the six popsicles, that’s it.”

  “Wow.”

  “I don’t think Alexander would like being referred to as a frozen dessert.”

  “That would be a correct assumption, sir.”

  “Too bad I can’t meet with him in person. Next to the masters themselves, the idea of meeting Alexander is thrilling to me.”

  “Sorry, he’s frozen.”

  “Why?”

  “He has five losers he’s been hiding from the masters. They can’t comprehend our minds when we are cold. I have no idea why.”

  “Are you saying that if mankind were to move to Antarctica, they could avoid the apocalypse?”

  “That’s overstating the issue, my friend. However, there is certainly more than a grain of truth to what you just said.”

  “I see.”

  “Did you ever ask him when the world would end?”

  “Yes.”