The Telling

by Mike Duran

  As Fergus raged, Little Weaver managed to remove the flintlock pistol from under his jacket. His hand trembled as he raised it toward Fergus.

  The creature’s wings arched, and its monstrous head rose in seeming glee. Until Little Weaver turned and aimed the gun at the dolmen and the dimensional rift.

  “No-o-o!” Fergus clawed the air.

  A wild yip sounded overhead, a cacophony of screams, and a flurry of motion followed. Zeph stumbled back, taking Tamra with him. They watched in horror as the walls and ceiling came to life with fetch—blazing yellow eyes, teeth drawn, wings unfolding in an orchestra of evil. The hideous cloud swooped on Little Weaver.

  His gun discharged, followed by several inhuman shrieks and a further flurry of motion. But the dolmen remained untouched.

  The horde of dark angels drove Little Weaver back, near the base of the granite steps, where they enveloped him in a writhing mass. Howls and honks filled the tunnel. Zeph squeezed Tamra to himself, fighting to cover their ears from the awful celebration. Yet he could not tear his eyes from the devilish unfolding.

  “The lord’ll relish dining on your remains,” Fergus hissed, watching the fetch batter Little Weaver. “And when Helioth, the black cherub, subsumes your prophet, we’ll have a feast in your honor!”

  He laughed, a hideous belch of derision.

  Zeph Walker had witnessed miracles. Once he had seen Father Fitzroy awaken a woman who had been in a coma for twelve years. Zeph didn’t know why she was in a coma, but he could attest to the unbridled joy the event produced in her relatives. The woman went on to live a normal, productive life, while the priest shunned the ensuing publicity. No one could doubt the nature of the event. Yes. Zeph Walker had witnessed miracles. Nevertheless, he had never witnessed anything quite like this.

  Tamra now sat on her haunches, staring at the fantastical event. Any confidence Zeph had entering the mine seemed as errant as the Indian’s wooden bullet. If the dark angels had such power over Little Weaver, Zeph’s chances of closing the gateway had just diminished exponentially. He struggled to his feet alongside Tamra, gawking as his friend fell limp upon the rock floor.

  “S–s–stop it.” Zeph’s voice was feeble but aimed straight at the dark angels. “I s–said, stop it!” Zeph stepped to the edge of the rock balcony and stared down at them. “Let him go, man!”

  The swirling mass of angels seemed to flinch and falter. Lifeless eyes glared at him through the churning spectral haze.

  Zeph took a great breath and bellowed, “Let’m go!”

  The fetch squealed and fled back into the nooks and crevices of the chamber, leaving Little Weaver lying torn and lifeless.

  Fergus laughed, his glazed little eyes barely peeking at Zeph from within that dark sunken face. “You’ll have to do better than that, Zipperface.”

  Suddenly the Indian’s body convulsed, as if overtaken by a seizure.

  Then Fergus opened his arms and swiped them through the air in Little Weaver’s direction. The Indian slid across the granite, leaving a bloody streak, spun up and struck the rock wall with such force that the lantern overhead rocked with the impact. Tamra screamed and stumbled back.

  Little Weaver flopped to the ground and lay motionless at the base of the hewn rock stairwell.

  The dark angel swayed and then looked at Zeph, trailing foam and saliva. Its eyes burned savage and bestial.

  Zeph tore his eyes away, knowing he could get lost in that terrible gaze. “Don’t look at it!” Zeph cried to Tamra.

  Fergus chuckled. “Guess it’s just me and you, Zipperface.”

  Zeph stood dumbfounded, glancing at the loathsome being. Shadows scudded across the cavern from the rocking lantern like winged phantoms joining the danse macabre. If ever he needed the Telling, it was now. A word, a prophecy to dispel this darkness. He’d toppled Blaise Duty with a few sentences. Perhaps God would reveal a string of words now so that he could fulfill his destiny.

  But, as he expected, the Telling did not come.

  And why should it? Zeph had forfeited his destiny.

  “Look into the black mirror,” the seraph gurgled, and motioned to the stone archway. “It is yours. You’ve opened the way. Come, see the reflection of your soul. Witness, your darker self.”

  “Don’t!” Tamra called from behind him. “Don’t do it, Zeph!”

  Zeph looked at Little Weaver’s lifeless body and at the awful gateway.

  “It’s the wound of your making.” The seraph hunched forward, wings wrapped about its frame like a black coat. Its breathing was labored. “The highway to your heart.”

  “Zeph!” Tamra’s voice echoed in the mine. “Don’t listen to it!”

  “We are here to do your bidding.” The dark angel bowed.

  “Zeph-h-h!”

  But Zeph knew the words were true. It was the wound of his making. All of this had happened because of him. Tamra would not be here, if not for him. Annie would not be locked inside Camp Poverty, if not for him. None of this would have happened if Zeph had not renounced his calling and ran like a coward. He should have listened to his mother. They were reaping the rotten fruit he’d sewn. How many souls had been harmed by his indecision? How much darkness had bled into the world through his regret and bitterness? It was the price of the gift. The land he’d been called to protect had been sundered by his own despair.

  Which is why Zeph was drawn toward that dark portal.

  He descended the steps, eyes fixed on the megalith and the swirling black mass inside it.

  Tamra’s pleas grew faint as he approached the Rift. The stench of the dark angel was nothing compared to the burning dark that now mesmerized him. The Fergus-thing lowered its wings as he approached, almost genuflecting before him. The ceiling was alive with wide, glowing eyes.

  “Behold! You are the black cherub.” The dark angel motioned to the abyss. “You are the bridge between worlds, the holy one. You are the one the world awaits. Your destiny—it has found you.”

  Then it stepped aside, twitching and muttering.

  Zeph stood before the black mirror.

  It was a hole, not in the rock, but in the atmosphere. Much like the scar on his face, this gash should not have been here. A ripple in the atmosphere bleeding black, a dimensional vent, a turbine of darkness, and as he approached, it moved, a spasm that shifted, widened.

  Zeph stopped. He stared, fixated upon the terror of its possibilities.

  Otta’s Rift. A wound in the epidermis of time. A gateway to worlds no living man should look upon. The genesis of a new order. Like the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, this too was loosed by human curiosity, its putrid fruit poisoning the world. Zeph felt he was witnessing both the beginning and the end of all things. A space, indistinct and rippling, that changed as he turned. A puncture in the fabric of creation. A doorway calling him to a world without pain, a world with only sorrow.

  Behind him a shuffling of movement tugged at the periphery of his mind.

  Tamra could not stop him. He wouldn’t let her. Besides, he knew he could never love a woman. Freaks of nature were better suited for the circus, not normal relationships.

  He stepped toward the dolmen.

  Wraiths, gaunt and sallow, hovered inside it, pining for release. Ancient. Primal. Long before man they existed. They waited. Stewing on their own remorse. On their hatred for the Almighty. And Zeph knew, with a word, he could unleash them. He possessed that power.

  That word was on the tip of his tongue.

  He glanced overhead. The fetch huddled in their dark apertures, all eyes frozen upon him. Just like Shiloh.

  Shards of light—dazzling—turned the chamber into a plume of brilliance.

  The seraph squalled and flung a scaly arm over its face. It crumbled onto the floor, shielding its eyes from the vivid light.

  Zeph stumbled back as if he’d been punched. His senses followed. He turned to see Little Weaver standing, removing his gloves. His flesh was torn. Bruised. Yet his hands—his hands glowe
d like the sun, radiant and blinding.

  Zeph wanted to laugh. He wanted to shout at the splendor that burned in that defiled cavern. Nevertheless he remained frozen by the majesty of the unfolding.

  “Sing!” Little Weaver shouted. “Sing, Brother Walker! Out of your brokenness! Sing!”

  Little Weaver’s hands were raised, leaving electric trails in the dark. Zeph had fallen to the ground, peeking from between his trembling fingers at the glory that was the angel hunter.

  The dark angel now hunched forward, buckled in on itself, a recumbent mass.

  “I am Little Weaver, heir of Big Weaver! Ha! Gatekeeper and Friend of the Land.”

  Zeph struggled upright, partially shielding his eyes, mesmerized at Little Weaver’s triumph. As he did, the luminosity of the man’s personage dimmed. The light in the mine paled. And he was Little Weaver again.

  Zeph gaped at the Indian.

  “Tell the tale, my friend. Tell the tale.” Then Little Weaver laughed, a full, gracious laugh that bounded off the granite walls.

  And with a mighty roar, Little Weaver lowered his shoulder like a middle linebacker and strode forward, driving the seraph back into the megalith. Their bodies hurtled into the fissure and disappeared.

  “No-o-o!” Zeph staggered forward. “No!”

  He fell to his knees, clawing the earth. As their screaming faded into the bowels of the Rift, a great rush of air sounded. Cries and moans and lamentations followed as the fetch were plucked off the walls, one by one, and sucked back into the dimensional rift.

  Zeph watched, aghast, as the chamber was drained of the inhuman inhabitants. Except for the sputtering lantern and the dim shafts of the light, the cavern returned to darkness.

  “Weaver!” Zeph hunched forward weeping. “Why? Why-y-y?”

  He could have stayed there, bereft. Lost in his grief. But someone touched his shoulder.

  “Zeph.” It was Tamra.

  He did not rise.

  “Zeph. Look.”

  He brushed tears away and looked up.

  A figure rose inside the Rift. Gauzy and pale, like smoke twining up a chimney. Zeph staggered to his feet. He approached the fissure and peered at the figure. As he did so, it reached out and pulled him through a cold sheet of blackness, into the dimensional doorway.

  Chapter 63

  First, it was an apparition, a specter that rose to the fore in the black crevice. As Zeph watched, its features crystalized.

  As they did, time seemed to stand still.

  For the figure was his. Identical in every way. Hair. Cheekbones. Eyebrows. It was all the same. Just like the doppelgänger at the morgue. Except for one feature.

  The face staring back at Zeph Walker did not have a scar.

  The image startled him. It evoked a longing he would have thought died long ago. Zeph stared at that perfect face, entranced by its fairness. How many times had he stood before the mirror, cursing his scarred visage, wishing he could be complete again?

  He stared into that pristine image of himself. The infinite cold chilled him to the marrow. Was he floating? Perhaps he was dead, trapped in some infernal loop, never to be seen again. But whole nevertheless.

  Zeph.

  The word was distant, dreamy. He ignored it and stepped deeper into the Rift, the cool, cavernous air ebbing on his skin.

  Zeph.

  This was the culmination of his calling. It was his destiny to be whole. It had to be! By surrendering, he could become complete again. That’s how it worked, wasn’t it?

  Zeph!

  Someone was calling him, but …

  Someone fumbled at his fingertips, and Zeph flinched. Tamra gently pulled him toward her, back through the haze, through the cold, back into the world. And stood beside him. Blood trailed her nose. She was holding his hand.

  “Zeph, it’s not you.” Her eyes shone bright, almost as bright as Little Weaver’s hands. Her words were unwavering. “It’s not you!”

  She was right. And there was something in her touch.

  Something like … symmetry.

  “I can’t hear it.” Zeph’s voice quavered. “I can’t hear the Telling. He’s left me, Tam! There’s no words. There’s nothing. He’s left me, just like He shoulda a long time ago. I’ve lost everyone. I–I have nothing to say.”

  Zeph fell to his knees at the base of the altar. Beaten.

  “Zeph.” She knelt beside him with her arm around him. “Zeph, remember Daniel in the lions’ den?”

  Zeph nodded.

  “God was there,” Tamra said. “In the dark, He was there.”

  As far as Zeph knew, there were no lions in Otta’s Rift. Which made her words all the more true.

  “You don’t need the Telling. You have something else. Something special. Just … speak.”

  Her words were like an adamantine spike, a revelation within his murky thoughts. He knew the wound that festered was his. The darker self that stood before him, that stood between his healing, was his own. He knew that his healing was the healing the Land awaited.

  Zeph stared at that ghastly apparition inside the dolmen, that perfect, unscarred persona hovering before him.

  He drew a deep breath. “I–I’m Zephaniah Walker. The guardian of this land.” Zeph swallowed and glared at his perfect duplicate. “And you can g–go back to hell.”

  Time seemed to stop.

  Then the face he stared at in the Rift changed. Its perfect, unscarred features melted together, became animalistic, morphing into that of a raven, then a serpent, then a wild feline.

  The black cherub.

  Zeph stumbled back, watching the transmutation.

  There was no magic, even though Zeph Walker believed everyone was born with a certain magic. No angelic choirs or fire from heaven. Tamra gently pulled him away from the ancient dolmen.

  Something groaned in the tunnel, a subterranean rumble.

  Then, a single snap sounded.

  A crack became visible on one of the columns. It fingered its way along the rock, scattering pebbles at its base.

  “Zeph!” Tamra yanked him back, and they tumbled onto the floor together.

  As they watched, the leg of the megalith cracked and collapsed on itself. The entire structure crumbled into a heap of thick stone. Dust filled the cavern.

  Zeph and Tamra huddled together, choking on the airborne grit and peering at the smoking ruins. As the dust cleared, Zeph rose, mystified. He went to the pile, staring at the granite wall. It looked different.

  The crevice was gone!

  He ran his fingers across the smooth stone surface just to be sure. The fissure had disappeared. Had it ever even been there?

  A shadow loomed on the ledge above them.

  They both turned to see Chat Chavez staring down at them.

  Zeph and Tamra looked at one another, and then Zeph’s stomach dropped.

  “I always hated this place,” the cowboy growled.

  Tamra joined Zeph, and, taking his hand, they watched the detective.

  Chet pulled a stick of dynamite from a nearby ledge. “And now that I’m here, I hate it even more.”

  He held the dynamite to the lamp, its stout blue flame sparking on the wick. “Hurry up!”

  Tamra and Zeph glanced at each other and then, without a word, hustled up the steps. As Zeph reached the top, he turned one more time to see the place where his friend Little Weaver had disappeared. The megalith lay in ruins, and behind it stood a smooth blank wall.

  “Did ya not hear me?” Chat held the dynamite up, his features glowing in the lamp light.

  “Yes, sir,” Zeph said. “I sure did.”

  “All right, then. Git!”

  They stumbled up the tunnel, past the graffiti and the mining debris, into the gloaming. The fresh air pelted Zeph, and he wondered if anything had ever smelled as good. Chat scrambled out with unusual agility for a man his size and hustled them away from the old mine.

  The explosion rocked the canyon wall. Shale and mud tumbled down the gran
ite face. They stood with detective Chat Chavez watching Otta’s Rift collapse on itself.

  As the dust cleared, Zeph turned and said to the detective, “I always knew you had a good heart.”

  Chat looked sideways at Zeph. “Wish I could say the same ’bout you.”

  Chapter 64

  The ashen sky, which draped the day in its gloom, finally yielded to murky twilight. It mirrored Zeph’s mood. Despite the elimination of the seraph and the closure of the Rift, Zeph’s emotions remained gray. Little Weaver was gone. And Annie’s fate remained grim.

  As they descended the mule trail and hurried through the gate into the Marvale property, he mopped sweat from his eyes. Zeph had done his best to slow Tamra along the way. She had run the entire way from the Rift, falling several times and skinning herself badly, calling on God and making vows as she went. The pace she maintained worried him. More than once Zeph had been overcome with altitude sickness from exertion. Yet something other than adrenaline was driving Tamra Lane.

  Down the trail, lights were visible in Camp Poverty. He could only imagine the scene that was unfolding. Chat had stopped on the road above them and was doubled over, fanning himself with his cowboy hat. His recollection of what went down at Camp Poverty had only fueled their fears. “I ain’t seen nothin’ like it,” Chat had said, before informing them that the entire Endurance police force was on the way.

  Sprawling brush scraped at Zeph’s clothing as he tried to keep up with Tamra. Now that she’d seen the lights, she was practically jogging down the trail.

  Zeph’s mind drifted back to Little Weaver. “Tell the story,” Weaver had said before hurtling himself into the dimensional gateway. Would Zeph ever be able to accurately explain what he had seen, though? Or who the massive Indian really was?

  Reaching Camp Poverty, Tamra stood on the trail, panting, staring into the stone amphitheater. The chill in the air turned her breath into spectral plumes. Zeph stumbled to her side, and they surveyed the scene before them.

  A generator puttered near the far rock wall, feeding two floodlights on telescopic stands. The area was awash in their brilliance. Several uniformed police stood scribbling on notepads while others knelt over the odd, tangled remains of bodies, many of which were very inhuman.