by Athanasios
The months of trial, jail, asylums, and present incarceration at Danvers State Hospital were a blur after that day of discovery following the collision that came less than a year before.
Adam was now in a nice padded room and snug in a long sleeved, buckled jacket. It had taken some time to be in such comfort, but I was past much of his troubles including a few misguided attempts at suicide. He was now peacefully watching television. Not much was new on the tube since he was put there, but I/He watched everything anyway. I watched a few episodes of The Waltons but couldn’t take their love for one another. Family was something I couldn’t relate to. It was too painful. M.A.S.H. on the other hand was a miracle. It was the perfect cerebral fodder that kept Adam from our emotions, or so our doctor and superintendent told us. Those two were a pair; what a sight.
Dr. Mary Megin was taller than Adam by about a good six inches while her boss Dr. Helen Gallagher was close to a foot shorter than him. When they walked down the halls it was like the number one with a period strode towards you. They were good-hearted people who were trying their best to deal with his mind-bending life.
Today, All Saints Day, one and dot walked through our door with someone new. He was a slight man, brown hair starting to gray and stubble on his slightly pockmarked cheeks. He had a slight, minced bounce in his step and smiled nervously on meeting us.
I/We nodded and thought, what a pansy.
Time: November 1st, 1973, Boston Massachusetts, U.S.A.
In a shop window, Xar-eel looked at a wall of televisions showing the aftermath of ritualistic carnage. He smiled at the beauty of it. He looked down at a newspaper under his feet that sported a headline to the right of its story about the mounting Oil Crisis Embargo that blared “MASSACRE IN L.A.”
“And Paris, Cairo, Montreal, and Timbuktu,” Xar-eel said to the world through his new body’s slivered smile. Adam wouldn’t recognize this dilapidated, filthy vagrant as the same slim, dapper gentleman who was partly responsible for his incarceration. The devil had possessed what most would call a bum. He felt he needed to stay beneath notice for a short time and chose the filthy meat suit he now wore. He hadn’t bathed in weeks and must’ve soiled himself when Xar-eel took hold of him. This was perfect for his needs: someone who would be purposely ignored and remain overlooked. He stood at the #14 bus stop and to his surprise, the bus stopped for him.
The bus driver was furious at his sudden appearance. He could’ve sworn he wasn’t there the instant before. Having glanced at the next scheduled stop and seeing nobody waiting and nobody needing to get off, he only checked his schedule and traffic at the intersection. He was ahead in both and about to speed up when the man was suddenly waiting at the stop startling him.
He barely had time to stop and upon reflection almost didn’t let the grimy figure on. He walked onto the bus dressed in a long overcoat, jeans and canvas sneakers and passed the driver without paying. He barked at this unshaven, grimy vagrant with thinning hair and hands stuffed into his pockets who took a seat without paying the toll.
“Sir, you have to pay the fare,” he said simply.
“I’ve been waiting for nearly an hour and a half. You call this service? The Hell I’m paying. I froze my ass off out there. Drive the bus and shut up.” Xar-eel decided this would be another tribute to his Redeemer. Sooner or later he would find the proper sacrifice. He just had to keep trying.
The driver was a burly, middle-aged man. His bald head reflected back the little light in the bus as he grabbed his latest passenger and ejected him into the street.
In a blur, Xar-eel leapt back on and shoving the driver back, impossibly stretched out his hands and grew monstrous claws out their fingers. Wrestling with the driver, he overpowered him and with three quick slashes cut open the driver’s pants and severed his cock. He shoved the screaming, now falsetto driver back into his seat, picked up the phallus and lit it. Oblivious of the rest of the passengers and drawing a few good puffs, he got the gruesome stogie going and focused his attention on the driver.
“Shut up. You were going to die eventually anyway. This way it’ll be memorable in the next life,” he said through a cloud of cock-smoke and burning flesh.
Some of the horrified passengers choked from the stench of charred meat, and the driver only groaned plaintively, but all were terrified of the man resting his clawed, blood-dripping hand on the driver’s shoulder. Xar-eel admitted to himself, it would also be best to let this body go and as he looked back on the rest of the bus he slowly transformed into his own leering, rail-thin form.
The clothes he was wearing rotted with the skin falling away like dough from a hot knife. He stood in front of them finally wrapped in nothing but his Darkness. It was a cadaverous, serpentine form whose vigor defied its slender, bony façade. There was undreamt of lethal strength there hidden behind a face that would’ve looked at home rending flesh off prey.
“You’re all going to die. You will be tribute to The Redeemer.” He turned back to the crying driver and hooked his claws deep into his chest. He grabbed his rib cage securely and with a twist of his wrist threw him out the same way he had been minutes earlier.
“I said shut up.” The words followed the still groaning, barely alive driver. Xar-eel twirled on one leg, turning his back to the bus and with a theatrical flourish sat behind the wheel. Still facing away, he turned his head completely around at the neck to address the remaining screaming passengers.
“The world is going to end in the Storm within the century anyway so hold on. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” And with a cloud of smoke from tire and exhaust, the bus peeled away screams and maniacal laughter fading away till they could no longer be heard.
The Storm Worsens
Time: November 1st, 1973, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
The LaPress headline beside Sophie Bertrand read DEATH TOLL MOUNTS. This news didn’t help her sleep in the past ten days. Nothing helped. She tried hypnosis, positive thinking, alcohol, drugs, anything and everything. No luck.
The space under her eyes had gone from her usual brown to dark, chalky gray. Even her day hours provided no solace from her thoughts. She was obsessed with the thought there was little time left in the world. She saw the end everywhere.
One second she was watching Sue Anne Nivens on Mary Tyler Moore, finally forgetting all the doom and gloom, and the next second, it would be replaced by cataclysms. Volcanoes erupting when earlier Betty White was batting her lashes at Ted Knight.
Many times she watched television and thought it was the news, but it wasn’t turned on. She called a friend to convince herself she wasn’t going crazy. She talked about everything she was sure she just saw, but her friend didn’t know what she was talking about.
Nobody did.
Time: November 1st, 1973, Puritan Theatre, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
A bus-full of screaming passengers went past the abandoned boarded-up theatre. It was to be reopened as a Spanish movie house, but now, instead a smug, doughy, bespectacled man surveyed in self-indulgent satisfaction. He had brought Xar-eel out of Hell. Only a premier witch could conjure a ninth-ring fiend and live to tell the tale. Their screams alone were a shower of pleasure and worth the effort it had taken.
Guy Benoit had achieved this pinnacle of learning independently. He was never part of the Luciferians, Satanists, or any other group. The very idea of sharing anything with anyone repulsed him. He was a twin and had had enough of that growing up with his brother Daniel. They were forced to share everything. Sharing was the first thing he put a stop to when he ran away at fifteen years old. He hated sharing and charity. His fellow man, women, and children were constant irritants.
Stupid people.
He hated them.
He hated people.
He hated everybody.
Listening to the news on his transistor radio, he tried to find a tally of the litany of destruction.
“The death toll rises to well over 1500 people. Authorities are pooling resources to get to
the bottom of the ritualistic murders.”
As he listened to others contributions to the tribute for The Redeemer, he reviled everyone he had ever known and anyone he was yet to meet. He walked past pentagrams scrawled on the floor; runes painted in blood on the walls complemented those that covered him from head to toe.
He continued past corpses hanging upside down with their throats cut, the blood drained into buckets beneath them. His loathing thoughts came into mumbles bubbling out of his mouth and rose in volume until he was almost shouting them in a mantra.
“They will suffer, oh yes they will! The Redeemer will crush them all under His heel and they will be pieces of blood, pulp and entrails!”
He felt his pulse start to race as he thought of those idiots out on the street being massacred like the fools around him.
All in the name of the Redeemer.
Oh and the Dark Master’s reward of His loyal servant. Guy had been dreaming of the reward for most of his adult life. Bathing in the blood of seventy-two virgins and being given immortality to serve the Dread One, the Great Leviathan.
Unconsciously, he stroked himself and bit his lip so hard blood began to trickle down the side of his mouth. He had worked himself to a frenzy and took several deep breaths to calm down.
Guy prayed to all below that the Master, the Prince, would not punish him for losing control, and despaired again at the terror of the Prince’s punishment. Standing still, his face was ashen and frozen at the possibility of Lucifer’s correction.
A bellow of outrage brought him back to the present and after getting his emotions in reign, he stooped down to pick up a drenched, ceremonial knife and continued to the center stage.
“Please let me go! I won’t tell anyone, just please let me live!” the bound, spread eagled man pleaded.
“Scream as loud as you like. No one will hear you.”
Guy had soundproofed the Puritan. He inherited it years ago and had built most of the devices around the stage himself. The ornate stone altar that held his latest object of attention had taken him a month to meticulously construct from plans in condemned, obscene books he collected in his travels. He had arrived in his life’s work after many years of searching for a direction to his seething and all-consuming hatred of everyone else.
Nobody could explain it. His twin had turned out splendidly and was even running the family business. Their older brother had become an engineer yet everyone had shaken their head at Guy’s plight, his loathing. He laid his own path long before his brothers’ successes and counted the family’s disappointment with his life as further reason for his universal hatred.
The shackled man was helpless on Guy’s altar and almost mad with terror from the previous sacrifices he witnessed. He was the last. Everyone who had come to see the independent production of Jesus Christ Superstar with him was dead.
Thirty-five.
Nine women.
Eight men, and oh God.
Nine little boys.
And nine little girls.
He knew how many because he could not look away. Keeping count was a ridiculous triviality to center on, but he couldn’t stop himself or the maniac with the wickedly curved knife. He saw each of them beg and cry for their life under its slashes and cuts. Some of the adults, and most of the children, soiled themselves with fright and as their bodies gave up their ghost. Some shouted and others prayed, but nobody tried to fight or run. They all stayed like lambs at slaughter. When he was led to the altar and civilly asked to disrobe and lie down he complied, all the while his mind screamed to run.
Run.
Run.
Run.
He just lay back and unbelievably let himself be shackled the same way he had seen the thirty-five others.
“Don’t kill me please!” The tears began and led to sobs when he could not believe he would die like the thirty-five others. He couldn’t believe his last moments would be like this. He always prided himself that he would go out fighting, but it was turning out much different than he ever intended. In a desperate act of defiance, an attempt to be true to his shattered hopes he spat at Guy, full in the face.
This stopped him in his tracks.
Guy raised a hand, touched the spittle, and brought his hand forward to look at it. Seeing it stun his tormentor, the man felt a fleeting exultation. He had this trivial blow to placate his pride before he died. So he gobbed up another and hit his tormentor on the forehead. The nearness of death must’ve given the tortured accuracy Guy thought, and sighed, reaching for someone’s fallen kerchief. He wiped off the spit and some of the blood off his body.
“Please, sir, some more. I nearly forgot I have to be clean before the final ceremony.” Incredulous at its obscene sincerity he did. After discarding the kerchief, he picked up a fallen shirt and cleaned his entire body of the bloody symbols. Guy then retrieved the wicked knife and smugly stepped up to the altar.
“It’s showtime.”
Time: November 1st, 1973, Dublin, Ireland.
Michael was fit to be tied.
He tried to hear the rabbit-eared television in front of him. David Frost was interviewing a riveting bald man who was as severe as he was charming. His eyes held a brilliant charisma, a fierce countenance that captured Michael completely making him nearly forget his anxieties.
“We are talking with Anton LeVey, well-known Satanist and founder of the Church of Satan. Mr. LeVey would you be able to shed some light on the recent ritual deaths attributed to your movement?” David Frost lisped and lobbed forth his inquiry.
“Mr. Frost, I would be careful, you’re bordering on slander. First, we believe in Satan as our God. He does not condone wanton, unlawful killings anymore than the Catholic Church condones such behavior.”
“But, sir, you believe in Satan who, according to popular knowledge, is the enemy of God and is the personification of evil,” the host countered.
Anton LeVey squinted at the offered bait but did not try to counter the long, overused perception of his God. “That is the Catholic propaganda. We see Lucifer as a fallen angel who was God’s favorite first son. We worship him as a shining being, not a cloven-hoofed, horned bastardization of a pagan god.”
Michael turned off the report to go to his window and stare wistfully out and thought of his current lover of twenty-five days. He was currently without him and thankful for the rest. A few days ago he showed up and began kissing him with such passion that their eventual efforts succeeded in breaking the kitchen table. To his surprise he had gone on for more, to be discreet.
And an hour after that.
And an hour after that.
And after that.
And so on and so on.
He stood right now because he couldn’t sit for too long. Michael had waved Shane off from sheer exhaustion. Shane still couldn’t help himself, and that’s what Shane did actually, help himself to be discreet.
He helped himself to completion several times, and Michael went to work and returned to find him still at it. He asked what was the matter and Shane replied he couldn’t stop. He cried through pained grunts and groans. He didn’t stop despite rubbed raw hands and uhm, rubbed raw, little Shane, to be discreet.
He then ran screaming into the night.
The police and everyone he had spoken to had not been able to locate Shane. Michael wished he was all right and that he would return because he was getting pretty randy just thinking about little Shane, to be discreet.
Time: November 1st, 1973, Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A.
The news report on television was forecasting a projected total of the ritualistic body count, and Mike Whiteman thought he was going insane. The pretty brunette on TV was saying that by the end of the week it would have reached five hundred. It just felt that everything was joining forces to push Mike Whiteman over the edge.
Nothing was the same since his second divorce. He tried taking things one day at a time. Nothing too strenuous or involving, just go to work, come home and watch television. Then on
e day about a month ago his father began visiting. That would be fine and good if Mr. Whiteman hadn’t passed away seven years before.
The worst thing was not that he was back. It was that he wasn’t alive. Just walking around like there was nothing strange and to be perfectly honest, after the initial shock, he started getting used to having him around again.
But the older Mr. Whiteman didn’t exist outside of Mike’s house. And no one but Mike could see him.
Apart from that, they both thought everything was normal. So much so that about a week ago Mike remembered why he had moved away in the first place. He couldn’t stand his father. Absence does make the heart grow fonder but not when it has to deal with David Whiteman day in, day out.
And Mike felt so guilty about it.
Time: November 1st, Pebble Beach, Florida, U.S.A.
Brian Tepper’s world had always been benevolently ruled by golf. In fact more than five years before he bought a condo right on the edge of the most beautiful green in all of God’s green earth. He was out on those greens in any weather and as often as he could.
A short while ago, he began to know them well enough to golf in the dead of night. It was uncanny. He could smell the hole and since then his daytime scores had improved. He was shaving ten strokes off his best tallies and even considered turning pro.
There was a problem. At night, once he was out on the links and close to the woods he began to lose hours of memory at a time. He blacked out, but Brian was as sober as a priest. He would find himself hours later his clothes in tatters looking down at blood stained hands without recollection of how he got there. There were also bulletins of missing pets and children all over the club.
Brian was really worried. If he was connected to the disappearances, he might lose his privileges.
Time: November 1st, 1973, Milan, Italy.
Since she moved to Italy for a job, life was not wine and roses for Lisa Leanihan. She’d been having problems concentrating because everywhere she looked there were dead people, demons, and chattering fiends and they spoke only to her.
