Paternus

by Dyrk Ashton

  Fi screams, “Nooo!!!” and moves to help Edgar, but Zeke holds her back.

  Kleron steps on the sword and kicks it backward into the well. Edgar squeezes his eyes closed at the sound of the splash.

  Zeke tries to drag Fi away but she fights against him, shouting again for Edgar. A hideous cackling comes from above and she looks up to see what Zeke has been fretting about—Max, clinging upside down to the bottom of a platform overhead. They back away, but not fast enough.

  Max drops, knocking both of them to the ground. He pounces on Zeke, swiftly lifts him with middle legs and rolls him over and over, using his back legs to guide a stream of milky thread that exudes from his abdomen. In seconds Zeke’s wrapped from ankles to shoulders, arms bound to his sides, and dumped roughly, just as Fi aims a kick at Max’s head.

  “Ho ho!” Max shouts, easily deflecting the blow. He leaps on Fi, who lands on her back with a shriek. He pins her tight, pressing a disgusting hand over her mouth, all eight eyes and drooling mouth of pointed teeth hovering inches from her face. He presses his ghastly body against hers, paws at her with his claws—but he’s careful not to harm her, not to damage her precious skin. Not yet.

  “Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet...” he breathes. The reek of his breath makes her eyes water.

  Dizzy and nauseous from being spun in Max’s web, Zeke sees the blurry image of The Spider perched atop Fi. He struggles in his bindings, tries to shout, but is forced to gag back his own rising gorge.

  Edgar fights frantically in Kleron’s grasp. “Do not touch her!” he gasps. Kleron presses hard against him, tightens his grip on his throat. Then both of them notice a wisp of smoke curling between them.

  “Ahh,” notes Kleron. “The blood of Joseph of Arimathea.” He grips the edge of the shield with his free hand, moves back just enough to peel it away from his chest and wrench it from Edgar’s arm. The fur on Kleron’s chest is burned, the skin blackened and smoking in the shape of a ragged cross.

  “That will leave a mark,” says Edgar wryly.

  “You did warn me,” Kleron concedes. “The bloodline of Joseph may be toxic, but it is not deadly to one as old as I.” He gives Edgar’s broken arm a twist with his wing claw, causing Edgar to wince hard. “Tell me, how did Pater dispel the mentia so quickly? It is... unprecedented.”

  Edgar glares in response. Kleron loosens the hold on his throat, enough for him to croak, “Divine intervention. Unconditional love. Blessings The Accursed One will never know.”

  Kleron smiles his mirthless smile and gives Edgar’s broken arm another twist. Edgar suppresses a moan. Kleron turns his attention to The Spider. “Max, enough,” he reproaches.

  “Yes, Master,” Max says in disappointment. He lifts Fi and gives her the same web-spinning treatment he gave Zeke, though he wraps her more sparsely, with a few strands of web around her ankles and just enough to hold her arms to her sides. He drops her on her back, then proceeds to secure the unconscious bodies of Mol and Mrs. Mirskaya. When he’s completed his task, he returns to hunker on top of Fi.

  Edgar struggles in protest. Kleron leans close. “Begging your pardon, good knight,” then suddenly releases him and steps back, holding his arms out in a non-threatening gesture, though still holding Edgar’s shield.

  “Children!” he cries, addressing Fi and Zeke. “I’m afraid you have gotten the wrong impression of me. I have no intention of harming you.” His human cloak returns. “I’m here to save you.”

  Edgar doesn’t dare attack without his sword, but at least he can speak his mind. “Do not hearken the Lord of Lies!”

  Kleron ignores him and addresses Max. “Maskim Xul, leave the young lady be, if you please.” Max removes himself reluctantly, skitters to squat between Edgar and the well, blocking him from the others and all exits.

  Kleron gazes at Fi with what appears to be heartfelt compassion. “I hate to tell you this, young lady, but Galahad, your dear Uncle Edgar, is little more than a well intentioned fool, guiltless of all but faith in a non-existent God, and folly in his devotion to a fickle lord. Peter is not who he pretends to be. He is The Father, yes, but one who abandons his children. He will bring you nothing but misery and woe. Woe to you, and all whom you love.” He looks at Zeke for a long moment, then sets Edgar’s shield against the wall and crouches next to Fi.

  “We haven’t much time, dear ones.” He continues, switching to the language they heard earlier when the water from the well was frozen then decimated by fire—foreign beyond time and place, ugly, unintelligible, but he speaks calmly and without malice. The words morph, melt, and though they still echo in the background of their minds, Fi and Zeke also hear Kleron in English, his voice mellifluous, consoling.

  “Come with me, my children. Follow, and be free. You will know the truth, and everything you have ever desired will be yours.”

  Fi thinks she can hear Edgar shouting, somewhere, far away, but she’s spellbound, lost in Kleron’s voice and black eyes. Eyes like portals to another universe. Deep within them she sees a flowering meadow under the sun, and her mother, laughing with a toss of her hair, skipping, dancing, playing her flute. She can smell the grass, the flowers, her mother’s perfume, see the sparkle in her eyes. And suddenly Fi is with her—not a young girl like she was before her mother died, but the age she is today. Together.

  Zeke has a similar experience, but his visions involve a guitar, amorphous images of parents he never knew, and Fi.

  “This world will be the last, and it will be ours. Come with me, and live.”

  The pain, horror and grief of the day fade away, like a nightmare forgotten upon waking.

  * * *

  “FIONA MEGAN PATTERSON!!!”

  Edgar’s commanding voice rolls like thunder over the sunny meadow. Fi pauses, just feet from her mom. Her mother smiles, but her eyes are vacant, lifeless.

  “This isn’t real,” Fi says softly, her own voice watery and faint.

  “FIONA!!!”

  “This isn’t real!” Fi says louder. She can still hear Kleron’s voice, but it has returned to the harsh, terrible utterance it was earlier.

  She whispers, “Zeke.” She spins to the trees, then shouts to the sky, “Zeke!”

  * * *

  Zeke is seated at a large dining room table, family all around. And though Fi is sitting right next to him, holding his hand, he hears her voice from elsewhere.

  “Zeke, this isn’t real!”

  He blinks. The faces around the table are vague, unfamiliar. It’s a family he never knew. A family he never had. He looks to the Fi beside him. She smiles, her eyes void of the spark of life.

  “Don’t listen to him!”

  Somehow, Zeke understands. He takes his hand from the fake Fi’s, and begins to extricate himself from the dreamy web of Kleron’s spell.

  “Okay!” he replies to Fi’s voice.

  “Don’t believe him!”

  “I don’t!”

  “He’s the Devil!”

  “I know!”

  “He’s evil!”

  “I got it!!!”

  The illusions shatter into tiny splintering fragments, which fall to the floor of the chamber and vanish.

  * * *

  Kleron ceases to speak. He looks at Fi, to Zeke, then back at Fi, clearly puzzled. It takes a few moments for his false smile to return. “The Devil, you say? It was not I who tempted your Jesus Christ in the desert. That was our father. And I’m sorry to tell you this, but there is no such thing as evil.”

  “Whatever!” Fi retorts. “Flowers in a sunny meadow? My dead mother? Is that the best you’ve got, Lucifer?”

  Both Edgar and Zeke are shocked by Fi’s bold defiance.

  Even Kleron is befuddled. “Well, I...“

  “Go to hell!” Fi shouts.

  Kleron’s smile fades and his icy black glare drops the temperature in the chamber 50 degrees in an instant. “Better yet,” his eyes glow hot, “I’ll take you with me.”

  He growls, thrusting to his feet. S
hedding his human cloak, he throws out his arms, clawed fingers splayed, spreads his horrendous wings and raises his face to the ceiling. His growl becomes a roar of the ghastly language from before.

  This time Fi and Zeke hear no other words. They just see. And feel.

  Kleron’s eyes are blazing, his breath a yellow sulfurous fume. Flames curl from his nostrils. Smoke flows out of his ears.

  The temperature rises so quickly that Fi and Zeke’s clothes begin to smolder, then flame.

  And they scream.

  The chamber is engulfed in a vortex of fire. Edgar grits his teeth against the heat and howl of it. Wooden steps are set aflame, metal railings glow and sag.

  And Fi and Zeke scream.

  Kleron’s fell voice becomes impossibly loud, a chorus of horrors from another world. His wings whip up the inferno.

  A whirling pillar of fire erupts from the well, and within its flames a hideous face takes shape. Red, scaled and horned, yellow eyes with pupils like black fangs, flaming pits for nostrils—and two cadaverous mouths packed with scythes for teeth, twisted up in heinous grins on either side of a wicked scar, like an axe wound roughly healed. Both mouths speak with the infernal chorus, the same words as Kleron, but with a pitch even deeper and more primeval.

  Edgar shrinks against the wall, squeezes his eyes shut and prays. “Satan, the Lord rebuke thee. I renounce all ungodly anger and give no place to The Devil...”

  Fi and Zeke gag on the mephitic fumes, cough, and scream. Pain surges through Fi’s head, threatening to split her skull.

  Mrs. Mirskaya stirs, fights against her bindings, moans through the web that wraps her mouth. Mol shudders, wakes, and howls.

  The chamber shakes. The walls and ceiling crumble and fall. They find themselves lying on a jagged promontory of stone overlooking an endless cavernous landscape of rock, magma, and fire, its high smoky ceiling glowing with a sickly nuclear radiance. There are hellish screams of multitudes in agony—not of the dead, but of the tortured and dying.

  Edgar raises his voice as he draws strength from his supplications. “Devil, I resist thee! I loose myself from every bond of Satan in the name of Jesus Christ. I am delivered from the power of Satan unto God!!!”

  His eyes snap open. “Fiona! Zeke!” he cries. “It’s only an illusion! It is not real!!!”

  But this feels real. Wholly different from the earlier delusions. Wholly other. Their clothing withers in flame, skin blisters and peels. All around them, for as far as the eye can see, thousands of people are being tortured—flogged, flayed, scalded, scorched, dismembered and raped. Some are attached to machines, both archaic and futuristic, abhorrent and unimaginable, on cliffs and plateaus laid out with butcher’s tables, cables, rods, spikes, vials, crystals, and chemical vats, like an evil laboratory more despicable than anything dreamed up in a Nazi concentration camp.

  Aberrant creatures stalk the cavern, abominations of parts taken from a variety of beasts, sutured and welded together, the subjects of vile experimentation. Some are recognizable from fable and myth—griffin, chimera, nue, baku, sphinx, ammit and tarasque. Others they have never seen depicted or described. But all are the substance of nightmares.

  Hundreds of twisted demons with necrotic indigo skin and scorching sapphire eyes are herding the humans, manning machines, prodding, tormenting, brutalizing. Three are very close, skinning a man alive with their claws, driving wires and tubes into every orifice of his body.

  Fi smells their purulent breath, observes with revulsion the sloughing skin of their gangrel bodies, the leprotic pustules and sores—and for some inexplicable reason, she knows what they are. They’re called Blues. And they are not here!

  She somehow calls up the courage and willpower to resist, tapping reserves of fortitude she never thought she had, and cries out, “THAT’S ENOUGH OF THAT SHIT!!!”

  And the hellish landscape is gone, every trace of the conflagration ended. Nothing in the chamber is burned. It’s not even hot.

  * * *

  Kleron stands fixed in Fi’s furious glare, his wings still spread, arms wide, but looking, and perhaps feeling, a little ridiculous.

  Fi breathes raggedly. She’s still terrified, but she’s also really, really pissed off. Maybe angrier than she’s ever been in her life. “It’s one cliché after another with you, isn’t it?! Cheesy illusions. Fire and brimstone? Get with the times, asshole. You’re a fake.”

  Max chortles, wheezes and coughs.

  Kleron’s wings fold behind him, arms drop to his sides. A range of emotions flit across his features as the red glow fades from his eyes. He’s amazed, then impressed, and finally, amused. He addresses Edgar while keeping his eyes on Fi. “You’ve had your hands full with this one, eh, Galahad?”

  Edgar makes no response. He’s as surprised as Kleron.

  Kleron studies Fi intensely. “And still so young...”

  Zeke doesn’t know what to think. He’s mostly just relieved not to have been burned alive, for real.

  Kleron picks up Edgar’s shield. “Was my facile defeat of almighty Mokosh fake?” He holds it out to his side dramatically. “Is this?” He utters a single unhallowed word and the shield bursts into flame.

  And Fi knows—this is no illusion.

  She gapes in terror at the incandescent, unholy hue, feels the intense heat, smells the reek of real brimstone—

  * * *

  Through her own eyes, Fi tears her bedroom apart—but the hands doing it are black and clawed. She looks into the dresser mirror to find herself staring directly into the dead black eyes of Kleron. He smiles a crooked smile. Behind him, reflected in the mirror, are her antique brass bed with Mrs. Mirskaya’s handmade quilt, her chair and closet door, her travel posters and books. And it all catches fire. The black hand strikes out and smashes the mirror.

  Kleron’s hand slides down the stairway railing of her and Edgar’s home, igniting it as it goes. He strolls leisurely through the hall downstairs with his hands out to his sides and a sardonic grin on his face. Smoke and flame rise from his claws as they gouge wainscoting and plaster. He looks into the parlor as he passes. It’s all on fire.

  On the bookshelves, Bibles burn.

  Hanging on the wall, a Latin cross burns.

  From some disembodied perspective in the front yard, Fi sees Kleron emerge from the house, now a blazing inferno. One-armed Surma leans against a white van parked on the street, cleaning his teeth with a stick and sneering.

  As Surma and Kleron drive the van away, the house explodes.

  This happened.

  * * *

  Fi gasps, her sight and mind returning to the hub chamber, to the present.

  What’s left of Edgar’s ruined shield crumbles from Kleron’s grasp, smoking cinders and ash. He speaks to Max. “Prepare her.” Max leaps atop Fi without hesitation.

  “No!” Edgar lunges, but Kleron is on him, hand clamping his throat, slamming him against the chamber wall once again.

  “And Max,” Kleron adds, “do something about that insolent tongue of hers, will you please?”

  Max grins wide. “Yes, Master.” He grips Fi by the jaw with a disgusting hand, moves the claws of one leg to her mouth, clicking them together in a snipping motion. Fi tries to scream.

  Edgar shoves at Kleron and groans.

  Zeke yells, “Hey! You mother—”

  Kleron realizes what Max is about to do. “Max!”

  Max grumbles, then reaches to his bloated ass-end and pulls out a strand of web. “Where was I?” he wheezes. “Oh yes,

  Little Miss Muffet, sat on her tuffet,

  Eating her curds and whey...”

  He wraps the web around Fi’s head and over her mouth. The sticky strands adhere to her skin and hair like tape.

  “Leave her to breathe,” Kleron cautions.

  “Of course, Master.” Max snips the web, runs his filthy clawed fingers through her hair. He continues to croon his rhyme as he touches her cheek and neck.

  “Along came a spider..."
>
  He caresses her breasts through her shirt. She tries to protest, but it’s no use. She sobs as the revolting hand moves slowly over her stomach. His voice becomes a scratchy whisper,

  “Who sat down beside her...”

  His hand slides down, down. Fi screams, again and again, as loud as she can through her gag of web. Edgar shouts his outrage, tears streaming. Mrs. Mirskaya struggles, helpless, and Mol barks wildly. Zeke writhes in his bonds, cursing Max at the top of his lungs.

  Their cries do not go unanswered.

  Peter’s voice comes to them, fulminating through the tunnels. “L-U-C-I-F-E-R!!!”

  Kleron’s reaction, however, isn’t quite what Edgar would have hoped for. Instead of dropping him and fleeing for his life, Kleron reaches into a small shoulder sack with his free hand and retrieves what looks like a smartphone. His bat ears twitch as he listens. Peter’s voice echoes into the chamber again. Kleron eyes one of the tunnels above, slides his thumb over the touchscreen of the device, and taps it.

  * * *

  “KLERON!!!” Peter roars, racing through the tunnel. In his haste, he pays no heed to a small heap of stones against the wall. As he runs past it there’s the triple-flash of a red LED accompanied by a quick beep-beep-beep—KABOOM!!!

  Peter stumbles and regains his footing, but another explosion rocks the passage, and another. The floor collapses beneath his feet. He falls, bouncing from wall to jagged wall, and plunges into black rushing water.

  * * *

  The tremors in the hub chamber subside. Dust billows from the tunnel above, wafts down gently over all. Kleron listens. Satisfied, he returns the device to his shoulder bag.

  Edgar slumps in Kleron’s embrace, realizing Peter must be trapped—there is no help on the way.

  Max turns his attention back to Fi,

  “And frightened Miss Muffet away.”

  He heaves her onto his back, where he holds her firmly with one arm.

  Zeke cries out in despair, his voice painfully hoarse, “Fi!”

  Kleron leans in, wings reaching forward, and whispers in Edgar’s ear. “She will undoubtedly serve quite entertaining, your lovely niece.” The wings creep around Edgar, pressing between his back and the wall. “Even if she does not prove to be useful otherwise.” Edgar squirms, groaning harshly. Kleron clenches Edgar’s shoulders with the single talons at the tops of his wings, while the claws at the wings’ ends hook his ankles. He pulls the two of them even closer together, then very slowly opens his horrific mouth, pushes out his pointed blood-red tongue, and licks Edgar’s face. Max watches, silently grinning.