Ardeur (Abbey of Angels)

by Danielle Gavan

  Boyd's craggy face appeared above mine wearing a sneer and smelling of his usual, stale cigarettes. “You'll find out soon enough, sweetie. Now shut up and behave like a good little monster.”

  He stepped back and I took in the rings of black candles glittering around the table and emitting a heavy scent of beeswax. The sheer number of them should have been enough to warm my goose bump covered skin, but the wintry temperature of the water had ensured I was cold and would stay that way. An enormous mirror, half painted black, hung from the ceiling above me and reflected my own terrified expression. I made out the outline of a pentagram chalked into the floor and I knew - something very bad was about to happen.

  Hooded figures in black robes standing at my filthy, bare feet confirmed this as they began what my young mind recognized to be a summoning chant. I'd used them often enough in the last few years to recognize it and a mix of fear and adrenaline zinged through me. My legs kicked feebly at the thick leather shackles that held them by the ankles and my hands pulled with what strength I could muster at the bindings on my wrists.

  “Oh no. Nononononono. Please don't do this. Somebody help me. Please? Please don't do this?” They had been smart in their handling of me since I'd been handed over to them. Had my captors tried this when I'd first been given to them I would have snapped the restraints in a matter of minutes and bolted for the door as fast as my legs could carry me. Keeping me malnourished sapped my strength, preventing me from the escape they had anticipated. As things stood, an IV of straight adrenaline wouldn't have helped with the predicament I was in.

  Malevolence swept through the room and the chanting picked up in speed and cadence. My mind rebelled, my skin crawled with uneasiness and my empty stomach clenched as whatever they were calling drew nearer. Synapses fired and urged me to fight, to run from what was coming but I'd been starved and cold for so long, any strength to do so was gone.

  A tall hooded figure reached out and traced a frigid finger over the hollow of my abdomen. Symbols were drawn with precision in something cold and viscous. My brain took a moment to recognize the symbols - but when I did the level of terror ratcheted up to full and I began to scream in earnest. The hand pulled back and my eyes caught the glint of a reddish residue on the tip of a finger before it disappeared inside the robe its owner wore. Blood. They were going to summon a demon. “No, not blood. Please no. You can't do this. I'm a kid. I'm a kid.”

  The chanting increased to a fever pitch. Another voice, deep and menacing, overlaid them with the words of calling. “Shadekar, Denizen of the Underworld, Demon of Chaos and Servant of the Morning Star, we summon you to possess this child and assist us with our mission. Come forth fiend and walk the world once more. Take this body we offer you and make her your home. Feed from its strength and take nourishment.”

  Evil, stinking of sulfur and corruption, enveloped me in the next moment. The demon sank deep into my skin and burrowed inside like a parasite. I screamed and begged for mercy, for the pain to end. The hollow cavity of the warehouse echoed with the shrill sound of my voice bouncing off the corrugated steel walls that had become my own personal hell.

  My small body bucked off the table like an archer's bow pulled taught before the discharge of an arrow. The muscles and tendons that held my body together strained under the stress of the convulsions. Each joint at shoulder and hip popped and threatened to dislocate. Release from the pain came in the form of darkness. I lost consciousness while my new companion took control of my body and locked me in the darkest corner of my mind.

  A Nephilim. Of all the luck. I get a new body and it belongs to a half-breed Angel. The boys and girls upstairs are going to freak when they find out one of their precious offspring is the skin suit for a demon. Poetic justice at its finest.

  I woke up later and found I'd been left strapped to the table once the ritual was completed. I was no longer in complete control of my own body. The demon sat in the driver's position and surveyed my captors through my eyes. Cowering in the recesses of my mind, I thought of the one good thing in my life; Brody, the only real friend I'd ever had.

  Shadekar left me to my musings while he used my lips to bark orders and demands in a voice not my own. His first demand, in the low, menacing growl that would forever be imprinted in my mind, was to be unshackled from the table. “Get me some clothes, too. This place is freezing and the kid's teeth are chattering.”

  The demon's hold took and my captors began to feed me in increments. They started with a thin, flavorless beef broth and worked with me until I stomached small meals without vomiting the food on them. Allowing me to wither away and die would have wasted all their work and they persisted in seeing me thrive to fulfill the purpose they had set out for us to achieve. Any fight I was able to put up resulted in more pain and I gave in after the third beating nearly broke my back. I hated them with a passion; but being alive, even possessed, was better than dead.

  The demon continued his incessant torment. He berated and belittled me daily; relentlessly reminding me of how I was unloved, unwanted and unworthy. I was fortunate he'd say, I had been chosen to be his vessel while he carried out the task he'd been given.

  Whenever I took out the memories of Brody to keep me company Shade, as the demon insisted he be called, would howl with laughter and taunt me until I learned to shield myself and my thoughts from him.

  Days turned into weeks before they finally allowed me to see daylight. A bath, fragrant with a delicate floral scent, had been provided to remove the filth and grime that coated my skin. The prettiest pink dress I'd ever seen covered my new undergarments and black patent leather shoes slipped on over pink tights that matched my dress to perfection. My hair was washed and pulled back into a ponytail that was tied with a matching satin ribbon. They trimmed, cleaned and buffed into perfect pink ovals the broken and jagged ends of my nails.

  If ever there had been a more innocent looking child, I was it in that moment. No one would have expected the evil lurking beneath the surface of the pretty package I presented in my frills, bows and freshly scrubbed wholesomeness.

  A young couple, my frequent companions on the outings Shade and I went on, waited outside. They smiled and ushered me into the backseat of their sedan. The demon had full control and my cries for help went unheard by anyone but Shade and he didn't care how hard I screamed. My chaperons, I would later learn, were members of the terrorist group that had funded my purchase and subsequent imprisonment.

  We drove around the city for hours until we stopped at a busy park. I was given a ball and shooed away to play with the other children. I recognized an added weight to the soft red rubber but was powerless to stop what came next. Shade forced me to walk out to the grass border of the field.

  A large group of children gathered to play and the demon forced me to roll the ball out into the field. The shiny red ball rolled right into the middle of a pack of a kids; I turned and calmly walked away. On the exterior, I looked cool as a cucumber, while I raged inside at what I feared came next. Once safely back in the car, the demon turned us and I watched in terrified horror as one of the bigger boys drew his sneaker clad foot back and walloped the ball with everything he had.

  The explosion blasted the entire park into an unrecognizable tangle of twisted metal, dirt, trees and, worst of all, bodies. The screaming in my head drowned out any other sound and kept up until the demon forced me back into oblivion.

  What happened in the park convinced me whatever Shade and our handlers were up to, I did not want to bear witness to again. I threw up the strongest shield I knew around myself and hid in the back of my mind, biding my time and enduring the bits I couldn't block out when Shade forced me to witness what he had done.

  I hated my parents but the emotion was tinged with the smallest bit of gratitude for having been made to read the spell books shoved at me. My photographic memory had stored the information and I now had plenty of time on my hands to pull each of them out, one by one, and plot an escape.

 
Three

  My name you already know. What you don't know is, I was born dead at 3:46am on August 1st, 1984; and reborn at 3:50am. Four minutes isn't much in the average life. In mine, they would prove to be the most important ones and would seal my fate forever.

  I was born in a small town in Ontario, Canada shortly after a house fire nearly took my parent's lives. It seemed only fitting to my parents that my name should reflect the circumstances which led to the event of my birth.

  To say I had a normal childhood would be a gross overstatement. Normal was never a word in my vocabulary. Ghost, spirit and evil however, were words I became very familiar with at a young age.

  When my mother left me in my crib as a baby, the spirit of an old woman who had died down the hall would comfort me. Marthe was my ghostly nanny and she loved me more than my own parents ever did.

  Their lack of feeling toward me puzzled the spirit. She would later tell me, when I was old enough to understand, that I was a quiet, peaceful baby for the most part; only crying when a nasty or angry specter startled or scared me. The fact that furniture rearranged itself, dishes crashed to the floor and other disturbing things started to happen soon after my birth might have been the cause of their feelings. Marthe refused to believe anyone could hate their own child.

  Maman had what Marthe told me were the Baby Blues. I didn't understand what she meant but figured it had something to do with how my mother refused to come near me. She did the bare minimum for me according to my ghost nanny - feedings and diaper changes were as much as my mother could tolerate. Daddy refused to let her give me baths after he found her trying to drown me in the tub when I was two weeks old. It was no surprise that I learned to fend for myself at a very young age.

  All too often, I'd look up as a child and find my mother standing in the doorway of the room I was in while she muttered about evil under her breath.

  As I grew older, I played with the ghosts of the dead children down the street when I was locked in my room as punishment for an imagined slight.

  By the time I was five years old, it was clear to my parents and those around us that I was different from the other children. The number of supposed imaginary friends and the frequency with which they changed made it apparent something else was going on besides an over active imagination. It was never as clear as it became the day the first spirit possessed me at the age of six.

  My life was never the same after that one fateful day.

  For once, the teacher had not been yelling at me but at another of the students in my class. Brody, the boy who sat behind and to the left of me, had been pulling on the long, wheat blond braids of Emilie Cross and he'd made her cry.

  Miss Paul was busy berating the most adorable six-year-old boy I'd ever seen in my short, young life. He had the sweetest hazel brown eyes, and deep dimples gave him a roguish look when he smiled. I know, roguish? A six-year-old? Yes. Even at six, you could see the man that lurked behind Brody Callaghan and the promise of what he would be when he grew up.

  I took the opportunity Miss Paul's momentary distraction provided to glance out the window at the swings on the playground and the one swing that almost always swayed, even on days when no wind blew. I knew why it moved; I could see the greasy, dirty-looking man who sat in it, watching my classroom and all the children inside.

  My attention must have strayed for longer than I knew; Miss Paul slapped her ruler down on my desk to divert my attention from the swings and back to her.

  “Ardeur, forget the swings and pay attention. Did you hear what I just told everyone to do?” Her red eyebrows shot up toward her hairline impatiently while she waited for me to answer the question she knew I didn't have the answer to. “Well?”

  Greasy Swing Man was at my side, whispering in my ear before I could answer Miss Paul. “Tell her to shut up. Tell her to shove that ruler up her prissy ass.”

  Hot, stale cigarette breath, that none but myself could smell, blew across my face causing me to scrunch my nose and screw up my face. I closed my eyes and shook my head only to have them fly open again with a second slap of the ruler across the width of my desk.

  “Ardeur Blaise Lisle. Did you hear me?”

  Before I knew what was happening, my tiny body snapped up out of the chair I'd been sitting in and a hand whipped out to pull the ruler from the teacher's hand. Foul language tripped off my tongue and Miss Paul gasped in surprise. The other children snickered behind their books until they realized the voice coming out of my mouth wasn't mine.

  The man from the swing had found a way in and taken control of me when I'd refused to tell the teacher off the way he'd wanted me to. Once he was satisfied Miss Paul was sufficiently shut up and terrified, he vacated my too small space and went back to his swing, leaving me to deal with the fallout - and fallout there was. Loads of it.

  It didn't take Miss Paul very long to recover from her shock and haul me down to the office. Her long, red nails dug into my skinny bicep as she pulled me along beside her and then flung me into a chair while she went in and recounted the ordeal to the principal. I sat and cowered in the outer office. My parents would be called and that terrified me more than anything Greasy Swing Man could have said or done to me.

  Miss Paul's voice carried out through the office door in shrill bits that had me sinking down further in my chair while I waited for what was coming. I knew my parents wouldn't come to the school to fetch me. Oh no, I would have to spend the rest of the afternoon in class, ride the bus home and walk up the five flights of stairs to our grubby apartment before I paid the piper.

  As expected, the teacher exited the principal's office twenty minutes later with an expression of anger and hatred on her face. She dragged me back down the hall to our classroom and ordered me back to my desk before resuming lessons.

  I sat down in the hard plastic chair and turned my eyes down to the page in my notebook that had been open before I was hauled out. Two words were scrawled across the page in the boyish lettering I knew belonged to one person. Brody Callaghan. The words spelled out I'm sorry. It was the first and only time anyone had ever said those words to me and it sealed his place deeper into my heart forever.

  The boy with the hazel eyes, dimples and roguish smile would live in my memory because I was never to see him again after that day. When I got home from school, my parents punished me severely and informed me I would no longer be going to school. I was to be homeschooled from now on and would not be allowed to see my classmates again.

  Maman and Daddy were quick to realize the power their pretty baby doll possessed over the dead. Their cash crop had been sitting under their noses for years and I was made to earn my keep from that moment on.

  Torment became the flavor of my days. I was ridiculed by the neighborhood children during the day and forced to communicate with the dead at night. Freak, ghoul, monster and crazy were words that followed me everywhere. They were also my companions as I walked graveyards in the dark while my daytime tormentors dreamt of Barbie and GI Joe in their warm beds.

  The storybooks other children read were replaced with books full of spells and rituals I was expected to memorize and put to use when I was sent out to work. By the age of ten, I could read and speak half a dozen archaic languages thanks to those books and the ghostly tutors who followed me home on occasion. Marthe took care of the rest of my education.

  I don't remember how long it took for the nightmares, filled with the atrocities I witnessed, to end or even to subside. Each night brought something new into my world and my sleeping nightmares blended with my waking ones until nothing much fazed me anymore.

  Kindness and generosity were things I'd become unaccustomed to with the passage of years. The bare minimum was the status quo for me. My clothes came from thrift stores and my toys, the few I had hidden away in the back of my closet, were scavenged from dumpsters. I was allowed to eat a decent meal while in public in order to keep up appearances. Normally, meals consisting of more than bread, cheese and a glass of water were
things granted only if my performance the night before warranted such a treat.

  Understandably, it came as a shock when, for my twelfth birthday, Maman entered my barren room to tell me that we were going shopping in Toronto for my gift. The fact she was taking me shopping at all should have clued me in that something was wrong. The four-hour trip we were making to the province's capital should have been a dead giveaway but my attention-starved heart didn't care. I was being treated with kindness for the first time in six years and I was going to absorb and enjoy every last minute of it.

  There weren't many preteen girls who had the trust issues I did. The way my parents treated me made sure I didn’t trust easily, or often. If I'd known what awaited me at the other end of the trip my parents had planned, I'd have done anything and everything I could to avoid getting in the car the next morning.

  The trust issues I had then were nothing compared to what I would feel after the events that had followed.

  Four

  “Yo, Callaghan. You sticking around over break or heading back home?”

  Brody straightened to his full six feet and turned to face his best friend Alby as the other teenager appeared in the doorway in faded jeans, sun-bleached t-shirt with the school logo on the left breast and beaten up Reebok sneakers. “Yeah, it's my Gran's seventy-fifth birthday this weekend and the sisters planned a big dinner party for her.” He smiled, dimples flashing, and turned back to resume his packing. “You staying here?”

  At seventeen, Brody's build showed the promise of being a formidable size when he hit full adulthood. His shoulders were broader than any of the other boys and the muscles, from years of playing basketball and the military style drills his father had taught him, were better defined than those of his classmates. He wore his medium brown hair short, as required for all cadets; today it was covered by a baseball cap with the emblem of his favorite football team, the Chicago Bears.