by Wood, Rick
It must belong to someone in one of the local houses. Why on earth was it fussing him? He didn’t know it.
Kneeling, he stretched out his hand and gave the cat a long brush down its back. It looked up to him and blinked its eyes, Eddie being sure that if it could smile that is what it would be doing.
It purred, and this made Eddie feel warm inside. A strange thing, how making an unknown feline purr can make feel a little triumphant. Smug, even, that an animal instinctively likes you.
It slumped itself on the floor, laying down and stretching out, Eddie tickling its belly.
Eddie moved his hand upwards to its head and gave it a fuss, tickling its neck. It stretched its head upwards, allowing its neck to come into full view so he could tickle it further.
He stretched his hand out and used the skin between his thumb and finger to stroke down its neck. Slowly, he stopped rubbing his hand downwards and placed his hand over its neck, hovering it there, lucidly looking at the cat below.
It stopped purring and looked up at him, unsure why he had stopped.
Eddie ignored its confusion, still hovering his hand over its throat. He applied a slight bit of pressure and the cat struggled, so he moved his knee onto its chest and knelt on it with the full force of his weight to hold the cat still.
He squeezed harder and harder, tightening the grip in his hand, feeling his fingers against its oesophagus, the solidity of its throat beneath its soft fur.
The cat struggled. Eddie didn’t care. It couldn’t squirm or squeal, Eddie was pressing too hard.
And it felt good.
Then, it went still.
Its body flopped.
The chest was no longer rising or deflating beneath his knee. The eyes of the cat were wide, like it knew.
Like it was aware that these were the last moments of its life.
For a while after the cat stopped struggling, Eddie remained firmly in his position, ensuring it was completely dead. Once he was sure, and not until that exact moment, he stood and opened his car door.
Switching the engine on with his right hand, he used his left hand to navigate the stereo to the radio. A happy song about sunshine was playing, so he turned it up loud and smiled, jigging along as pulled the car away and drove off.
15
Derek’s legs bounced up and down uncontrollably, unable to shake his anxiety. He knew fretting would do nothing, nor would it speed the plane up, but he couldn’t help it. He felt useless, floating 30,000 feet up in the air without anything to do.
What if Eddie had already killed? What if Derek was going to come back to find everyone he cared about destroyed? The neglected messiah present within Eddie latched onto his soul, taking control without Eddie having any idea.
Realising the woman next to him was staring at him out of annoyance that his leg was bouncing against hers, he tried to keep it still. He glanced up and down the aisle, not sure what he was looking for, but looking just the same.
“Excuse me,” prompted the woman next to him, and he let her out, watching her walk down the plane to the toilet.
As an air hostess walked past with a trolley, he put his hand out.
“Excuse me, miss, could I have some water?” he requested, his throat dry and closed.
With a smile, she obliged. He opened it immediately and drank half the bottle in one. He checked his watch. It was hours until they were due in London. It was a long flight from Cambodia.
As this thought entered his mind, he wondered, why had Bandile taken him to somewhere so far away from London? Surely he could have foreseen, or had some kind of feeling, that Derek would need to return?
Although Derek knew Bandile’s visions didn’t work like that, he couldn’t help but feel hazy in his mind when it came to Bandile’s foresight.
Bandile could have taken him to a more recent genocide where the devil still lingered. The Kurdish genocide in Iraq in 1986, maybe? The Bosnian genocide in 1992? The death toll was significantly lower, but they were still enormous atrocities nonetheless.
“Derek.”
He shot his head around.
Someone was sitting next to him.
It was a familiar face. It took Derek a while to place it, but once he had, he could barely move.
“I thought you were dead?” Derek gasped.
“I am,” replied the stone-cold face of Jason Aslan.
Derek’s jaw hung open like a door without a lock. His mind thumped; he already had so many questions, then this rose so many more. How was he here?
“You are,” Derek spoke in a paralysed whisper. “I saw your head severed from your body. I watched it happen.”
“And I felt it happen, though I assure you, my head is very much on right now.”
Derek held his hand out to touch him Jason. Could this be a trick of his mind? Anxiety’s manifestation?
But Jason’s shoulder felt firm under Derek’s palm.
Derek’s heart raced and his lungs expanded at a million miles an hour.
It took only a second until Jason’s shoulder burnt Derek’s hand and he had to instantly withdraw it.
“What’s going on?” Derek demanded. He willed himself to think clearly. He had faced difficult, inexplicable situations before.
“I am here from the master of hell,” Jason spoke blankly.
“What?”
“Please, don’t make this any more difficult…” Jason bowed his head and gathered himself.
“Make what any more difficult?”
“You can’t let Eddie know that there’s something inside of him. I’m sorry.”
With a reluctant smile, Jason lifted his fist into the air.
“What are you going to do?”
Jason didn’t answer. He simply pointed his raised fist down and, with that slightest of gestures, the plane tipped downwards, accelerating faster and faster.
They were going down. The plane was going down.
“Stop it!” Derek cried out. Around him were shrieks of fear, hostesses falling onto their backs and plummeting down the tilted floor of the capsized aeroplane.
“I can’t.”
Jason stood, looking down at Derek, who stared up at him helplessly. With a bow of Jason’s head, he faded away.
The plane was plummeting harder and harder. The lights flickered. People screamed for their lives.
The oxygen masks plunged downwards and the captain’s voice came over the Tannoy.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost control of the plane. Please assume crash positions.”
Derek’s eyes darted back and forth around the cabin.
People were in floods of tears.
Husbands. Wives. Mothers. Fathers. Friends.
Children.
All clinging onto each other, all clutching their loved ones.
Hysterical shrieks merged into the devastating scream of the plane’s engine whirring out of control.
Everywhere Derek looked, people were preparing for death.
No, he decided.
He unfastened his seat belt and knelt on the back of the seat in front of him. The plane was almost at a full 180-degree tilt, plunging to its destruction.
The sound of the wings buckling consumed the room. A sudden jolt shoved the cabin on its side and the sight of a wing flying into distant fire hung in the periphery of the window.
Derek moved, dropping himself into the aisle and held onto a seat with both hands. He let go, tumbling with full ferocity, and slamming against the tilted door to the cockpit. His back ached from the slam, but he didn’t have time to care.
Beside him was the hostess, in crash position, tears streaming down her eyes. Derek lifted his hand out and grabbed hers.
“Is there a parachute?”
She looked back at him, eyes blurred with water, unable to answer.
He crawled along the wall to the window beside her. The clouds had disappeared and the sea was getting closer.
He threw his fist into the window with all the strength he could ga
ther.
Nothing. It did nothing.
He tried it again. The window wouldn’t break. Of course not. These things were designed to be tough.He rested. There was no way out. The plane was heading into the middle of the ocean and there was nothing he could do to escape.
With a desperate clamber, he reached for the seat next to the hostess and pulled himself to it. He tied the seat belt around his waist and held the oxygen mask in front of his mouth with his shaking hands.
I’m sorry Eddie.
“Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.”
John 3:20
16
1 January 2000
Millennium Night
“Free my sister!” Eddie screamed at the wicked beast before him.
“I command you, bitch of hell. Release her!”
Balam screeched, its voice caught on the wind of its spin. The room turned into a tornado of chaos, objects turning to weapons against Balam as they got caught in the circle of the whirlwind it created.
“It is done!” Balam replied, and Eddie dropped the girl’s body to the floor.
From within it, a body rose. A translucent, vacantly existential, bare form of a spirit. But to Eddie, it was instantly recognisable.
Cassy was the spirit. Eddie’s sister, stuck in child form for over a decade, forced to be tortured in hell for what seemed like an eternity.
He had freed her.
And her heart ached to see him on the floor, midst of battle, in such pain.
She loved him so much. She was so grateful for what he had done. She had felt his pain, felt his love – even from within the evil heart of Balam’s conjured form, she could see Eddie battling to free her.
The hurt that was done could never be undone. The suffering she had endured… endless nights that literally never ended; being suffocated by demons, stretched between them as they played, ripped open and fed upon her. Endless nights of rape, abuse, and torment. They had somehow kept her in a form of undead consciousness so she could still endure the excruciating agony the subjects of hell wished to inflict on her.
She had spent over a decade in hell. And now, thanks to her wonderful, wonderful brother, she was free. Free to leave the pain of hell and pass into heaven.
She hovered above Eddie for a moment. Eddie, her older brother, with whom she’d had an adolescence of growing up together robbed. Soon, she would be able to look back and relive his grief, his desperation to free her, his devastation at her parting.
“Eddie…” she whispered, holding her hand out toward him, a translucent entity he couldn’t touch. “Thank you…”
He was gone.
As was her heavy body, the torn muscles, the aching lungs. All of it. Disappeared, along with the house.
When she next opened her eyes, she was in a field. Sun shone down at her with beautiful luminosity, green blades of grass leading to trees full of life, a gentle breeze soothing her delightfully empty body.
Is this heaven?
Taking her first steps through this new world, she smiled the first genuine smile she could remember. She felt older, wiser, like the mind-set she was meant to be. At peace, one with the environment painted around her.
She felt free.
“Cassy,” came a safe, feminine voice behind her.
She spun around and feasted her eyes on a woman with long, straight, gorgeous brown hair and a smile that set her at ease.
“Cassy, you angel. You beauty. You saint,” this woman asserted with a welcoming, elated grin. “You absolute saint. You truly are remarkable.”
“What – what do you mean?” Cassy stammered. Her voice was no longer croaky, no longer weak.
“We have seen all you have endured, and we are sorry, but your brother… What he did for you. What you did for him. For love. It was… nothing short of remarkable. It was inhumanly powerful.”
Cassy blushed.
“Is this… is this heaven?”
“This is heaven and you are very welcome here.”
Finally.
“I…” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I’m so grateful…”
“No, we are grateful for you.”
She wiped her eyes. This wasn’t a time for crying. This was a time for rejoicing.
“Now, Cassy. We have a choice for you. Listen carefully.”
Cassy nodded and focussed.
“If you wish, you can pass into heaven. You have earnt it, after all. I will step aside, you will step forward, and you will stay there forever. Untouched.”
“Okay…” Cassy wondered. A sinking feeling in her stomach left her unsettled about what the second option could be.
“The second option. Now, Cassy, you have earnt your place here, more so than most. But your brother is going to need your help. He is going to need you to intervene.”
“Why?”
“On 25 July, 2002, at 3.00 a.m., there will be a ritual in attempt to raise hell. They will succeed.”
“How can you know this?”
“We know. Trust us, Cassy. We’ve been doing this a long time.”
She nodded.
“If you choose this option, you earn your place as an angel. As a saint. Someone of divine power. But you will be need to be involved. Without you… there is little hope.”
“But – can’t another angel do it?”
The woman shook her head. “I’m afraid not. It’s hard to explain, Cassy.”
Cassy closed her eyes and bowed her head. Just when she thought life was complete. When she was convinced her suffering would end.
“Like I said, you have a full pass to enter heaven, and you will not be held in contempt if you choose to turn the second option down. But I have a feeling, from what I have witnessed for the past years, you will struggle to.”
“One question… if I don’t do this… will my brother – will he die?”
“No.”
Cassy breathed out a sigh of relief.
“It will be worse.”
Her sigh abruptly ceased.
“He will become the antichrist. He will be the coming of the devil. He will end everything.”
Cassy brushed her hands over her face, torn, her non-existent heart racing. She thought about heaven, thought about what could be, where she could end up, how she could be at peace.
But they both knew which choice she was going to make.
17
21 July 2002
One year seven months since the millennium
Martin sat at the table in silence, his mother staring absentmindedly at the floor, as usual.
He glared at her.
He loved her, yet he loathed her. And he felt guilty for it.
Of course, he wished he had a mother who would take care of him. Or maybe even a father who could take care of them both. But this was the hand he’d been dealt, and he would deal with it.
Having finished his beans on toast, he moved to the chair beside Anna and scooped her spoon through her beans.
“Y’need to eat, Ma,” he told her, though she didn’t react. He didn’t expect her to. She was in one of her hazy, open-eyed sleeps.
He took a spoon full of beans and lifted it to her mouth, forcing it between her lips and dragging the spoon out against her teeth to ensure she ate it all.
The phone rang. Finding it a welcome relief, he stood up and answered it.
“Yeah?”
“Martin, it’s Kristy.”
His heart raced.
“Sup, Kristy.”
“We goin’ down park tonight, you in?”
He looked to his mother. Sitting there, dormant, vacant, catatonic.
“Sure, babe, what time?”
“Like, now.”
“Now? I got to take care of me ma.”
“Oh, come on,” she moaned sexily. “I’m feeling well up for it…”
His eyes widened at her forthrightness.
“A’right, I’m comin’.”
&nb
sp; He hung up the phone and walked into the hallway, shoving his coat on. He felt bad for leaving his ma, but he couldn’t just sit inside watching her do nothing all evening – not when there’s a fitty on the line.
“I’m poppin’ out, Ma,” he called out as he returned to the kitchen.
He froze.
The light… It had been turned off.
How did she…?
She was still sat in her wheelchair, completely motionless. Except, her back was to him. Her wheelchair, and her, had turned completely the other way around.
“Ma?” he asked, cautiously.
He glanced at the light switch beside his head. She was sat vacantly on the other side of the room. How had she managed to switch the light off without him noticing?
What’s more, how the hell had she turned around? She could barely lift her legs. She couldn’t even toilet herself, so how had she managed that?
“Ma?”
Martin took a step toward her and stopped.
“Ma? How’d you do that?”
A growl hissed throughout the room, silently teasing him with its faint sound.
Martin froze. His eyes scurried back and forth.
Something felt wrong.
“Ma? That you?”
Her hair blew with a draught of wind.
Martin was confused. The doors were closed, the windows were shut. There was no wind.
“Ma, what’s going on?”
He took another marginal step forward. He was freaking.
How was she doing this?
That’s when he saw it.
A faint silhouette, barely visible. Beside her. The black outline of claw, lifting in the shadows of the room.
It was dark and he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a trick of the light, the trees brushing in the wind out the window and causing movement within the light. He was sceptically assured.
But he had seen something.
“Who’s there?”
Another step.
