The Unbeliever: A Morbid Tale (The Morbid Tales Book 5)

by Zachery Miller

  Somewhere along the time when she was first slapped by the old man, or maybe before that when Beth had seen the ravens and crows on every tree, a plan had hatched itself in her head, and she was going to try to follow it, even though it meant killing herself in the process.

  Ax in hand, she walked over to the front of the altar, to better see who it was tied to it, and she froze, all plans escaping her, every thought of rebelliousness leaving her.

  It was herself. Tied to the altar was a doppelganger of herself. Hair all ruffled up, eyes sore from crying, lips quivering, and the whole nakedness of her very embarrassing.

  Forgetting that the Being and his legion of animals were all around her, she bent to face her doppelganger. “Are you real?” The doppelganger only shook her head.

  “Kill her! Pass the test. This is an easier one I devised. I’ve conjured dragons and demons in my days, and the townsfolk have fought with them. This is nothing in comparison. This is your ego. This is Bethany, the Unbeliever. Kill her, embrace me, embrace belief. Believe in me,” the Being said, standing behind her.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Me believing in you?” she said, hiding the patronizing in her tone. She posed it as an honest question, her eyes never leaving the girl—herself—tied to the altar.

  “I would. I’d like that. Your belief, all of yours, is what strengthens me. And in return, I give you what I have in my power. It is, how you say it, symbiosis, of a kind.” The Being had his hand on her shoulder. The revulsion she felt at his touch she could only so much hold inside of her; the next steps depended on her being outwardly calm, even though there was one great big storm brewing inside her.

  She stood back on her feet, her hands feeling the ax draining her of strength. It was charging with her life force, she assumed. She faced him, the Being, and said, “I don’t believe in you. Or all that you stand for...I don’t believe in your values, but I believe in whatever Stockholm Syndrome you’ve got going with the town. You’ve held them captive with fear. But not me! And I believe that this ax, I don’t know what it is, whether it is magical or just some fake glitter slapped on barn equipment, will kill you if I will it if I believe it! Have a taste of fear, you false god!”

  She didn’t give him time to react. Beth, with what little strength was left in her arm, swung wide, and fast. The ax cut deep into the Being’s chest making sure she had reached his heart—if he had a heart, that is.

  Nothing happened, at first. The Being glared her, his green eyes wide in incredulity, then he began laughing. Dark yellow teeth, some of them black, stretched across in the inside of his mouth. He laughed a dry cackle. He put his hands where the ax’s head had gone in. Beth staggered backward. The wolves were disappearing like fumes all around her. There cawed no more crows, and no ravens crooned on treetops.

  Blood. Blood gushed from where the metal had met flesh, and it spurted against the ax. The Being put his hands helplessly to stop the flow. It was useless. He tried to take the ax out, but the moment he touched the wooden handle his hands became scalded, and that’s when he screamed. He wailed, fell to the ground on his knees, and then fell on his back.

  Beth didn’t waste time. She took the ax out of his dead body, assuming that he had died and wasn’t pulling some trick on her, and cut the ropes that had tied her lookalike to the altar.

  “Here!” Beth took off her own hoodie, now standing in a t-shirt in the cold, and gave it to the naked woman. She gratefully took it and pulled it over her body. The hoodie fell to her thighs—it wasn’t modest by a long shot, but it would have to do for now.

  “Come on, let’s go!” Beth said to the girl.

  Around the two of them, trees were blooming back to life, and a wild wind swept away all the brown and dead leaves and branches away. In the glare of moonlight, they saw green leaves sprouting unnaturally fast on the trees, and grass shot out of the floor of the forest in fast forward motion. The sound this spontaneous action made was muffled by the rush of the wind.

  “Why won’t you move? Why don’t you speak!?” Beth shook her twin, and still, the twin said nothing. Beth didn’t know what to do as the forest blossomed forth in such fast progression that she was frightened, the world seemed to end and begin at once. She hugged the hoodie-wearing version of herself and closed her eyes. Beth tried to think of other things to quiet her fear as she felt the soil moving beneath her feet.

  “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. You can come live with me in my dorm room. I’ll tell my roommate I have a twin sister. Yeah, that's right. We can go to classes on alternate days. We can fool everyone. Think of the possibilities! I’ll have someone to talk about stuff, and who better than another version of myself!”

  The other Beth hugged back, her arms closing around her savior strongly, roughly, pushing herself against Beth, squeezing her. Beth didn’t resist. It felt good hugging herself. She began crying. Too many things to process. Too much had happened in too short of time. She could hear her twin crying too. But then she noticed it was only the echo of her cries within the woods around her. She opened her eyes. The dawn had come, the sunlight peeked through the leaves of the treetops.

  She was alone. She had her arms around nothing but the hoodie. There was no one in the forest clearing except her. The ax lay on the floor of shrubbery and looked as ordinary as any ax. She looked at the place where the altar was. Now covered in green ivy she noticed it looked as though it hadn't been used for centuries.

  There was only one way in and out of that forest—the path. All the townsfolk stood at its helm, waiting. They stood baffled when all the greenery returned to its original splendor. They wowed when they saw everything returning to normal.

  “She’s done it,” the elder said, satisfied.

  “She did it, aye!” said another.

  They saw a silhouette walk along the pathway, step out of the forest. It was Beth, holding the ax in her hand. The bloodied ax. The elder went to greet her, to congratulate her on making everything right. He hopped with a spring in his step and made to hug Beth.

  She kicked him in the groin. Everyone gasped. The old man fell to the ground, holding the seat of his pants, yelping.

  “That’s what you get for slapping me, you moron,” she spat.

  Some henchmen from the townsfolk made to restrain her. They ran towards her, but she held the ax up in front of them. “See this? See the blood.”

  Everyone grew silent. The henchmen stopped in their tracks. The old man she had kicked sat on the ground, wincing, drawing sharp breaths. They all looked at her, anticipating what she’d say.

  “I killed your god.”

  An uproar ensued. “She’s out of her mind!” Someone said. “Strangle her on the gallows!” Every mouth uttered its share of crowd talk.

  “That’s right. I killed him. I never believed in him in the first place, and when forced to believe in him, I saw him for the thing he was. He had you for his cattle, and he played with you how he willed. Enough of all that. There’s no more God. He’s dead. No more Being. No more sacrifices, no more living in fear, no more dream hauntings."

  She threw the ax in front of the elder, walked past all the people staring at her wide-eyed, walked all the way to her home. She got in her car and left.

  She never came back to Drumfort. The town stayed normal, without any hazards or anything out of the ordinary ever happening there again. The new elder didn’t have any ethereal dreams nor any visions about the Being. One year passed, and nothing happened to the crops, nothing happened to the lives of the people—they kept living ordinarily.

  Beth’s mother and father tried calling her many times, even sent Henry to track her down, but they never found her, and she never answered the phone.

  Beth changed colleges, went to NYU on a whim, began interning at the literary agency she had always wanted to work at, and then stopped working there after one month. All those people there, they were helping other people achieve their dreams. Writers would come, and writers’ careers would get
made.

  Those people at the agency were just that: agents of change. She had had her fair share of being an agent of change for one lifetime. She quit her job, dropped out of college after deciding that whatever they were teaching there she already knew, and decided to make it big as a writer. She wrote one novel, got it rejected by a dozen publishers (all of those were publishers whom she had made contact with her in her time as an intern agent at the literary agency), then wrote another one, and this one was picked up by a smalltime publisher. It didn’t make her rich, but it was an honest novel—it was autobiographical. She wrote a couple of short stories for commercial magazines. Whatever she wrote to please the people, to please the market, to target niches, it always got rejected. Whatever she wrote to make herself happy, whatever she wrote honestly, it got selected, published, praised by a few critics, criticized by a few.

  She’s writing another novel these days. She lives in downtown Manhattan these days, where she spends the mornings writing, and nights at a bookshop where she pretty much handles everything by herself: stocking the books, being behind the counter, dealing with book suppliers, cleaning the store. Hey, she’s got to pay for her apartment some way.

  She’s not had a bad dream—about the events of Drumfort or the Being—in a long time. Sometimes, though, her twin shows up in her dreams, and they talk, because in dreams the other Beth can talk. They talk, and when Beth wakes up, and this she’ll never tell anyone, the right side of her bed is always warm and pressed in as if someone had been sitting on it.

  The End.

  If you loved this and my other Morbid Tales, please check them out and help out a self-published author by leaving a review—> click here.

  Also by Zachery Miller

  A Morbid Tale #3

  The Nightcomer

  Trish and Henry mistakenly turn onto a dead-end street. The wrong street, at the wrong time of twilight, and find themselves in the grip of the Nightcomer. But in this cul-de-sac of horrors these two people, so busily caught up in their lives, will find that there can be only one kind of ending on a dead-end street.

  A Morbid Tale #4

  The Silhouette

  Tonight, little Amy lays in bed, hurt and sad at how unfair life has been toward her. From a dark corner, the darkest place in her dimly lit room, a silhouette watches, listens, and speaks.

  Fearful and distraught, and nowhere to run, she has no choice but to stay. But who is this thing, this creature, this…it? It asks a question, Amy answers, and with her words many will die tonight.

  About the Author

  Zachery Miller is also the author of Psionica and The Droid Chronicles. He writes from his home in Florida about action, adventure, horror, and androids bent on taking over the world.

  www.zacherymiller.com

  books@zacherymiller.com

  Copyright 2017 by Author Zachery Miller. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, send a message to books@zacherymiller.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes only. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Edited by Zachery Miller

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