Servants of Darkness (Thirteen Creepy Tales)

by Mark Edward Hall

  Winston moaned. Blood ran from his face and dripped from his chin. His visage was unrecognizable, like a gourd painted in red and white abstract by some demented artist. Winston’s head lolled deliriously and his lidless, protruding eyes rolled around like loose ball bearings in their fleshless sockets. He was struggling to speak. “Go, my dear friend,” he finally managed. “You must tell the world of this discovery.”

  Joseph stared in silent horror at Winston, and wept. “No,” he said. “I think not. The world was not meant to know of this place.”

  “Please,” Winston said weakly, struggling to hold on. “You . . . must . . . do . . . as . . . I . . . say. Promise . . . me.”

  “But master—”

  “Promise me!”

  “Yes, master, I promise.”

  Winston thrust his hand out toward Joseph and Joseph noticed a small glint of metal. A golden chain, dripping with blood hung from his master’s hand. He reached out and took hold of it. The amulet fell from Winston’s hand and into Joseph’s, and Joseph encircled his own bloody hand around the object.

  “Go now,” Winston said. “See that . . . the child . . . gets . . . this.”

  “Child, master? I do not understand.”

  “Alex’s child . . . the dream . . . you remember . . . the dream . . . I told you . . . ?”

  “Yes, master, you dreamed of this place.”

  “I did not tell you the . . . entire dream . . . in the dream a child is born . . . a special child. The amulet is meant for him.”

  “But how do you know this is true master?”

  “No . . . time. Promise . . . me that you will give the amulet to the child.”

  Joseph leaned over and kissed Winston tenderly on the forehead. “I promise you, my beloved master.”

  “Thank . . . you, Joseph, you are a . . . good man.”

  Joseph was straining under the burden of Winston’s weight. “I cannot hold you any longer, Master Winston.”

  Winston groaned in agony. “. . . Is . . . all right . . . my friend. Go now before . . . too late.”

  “Goodbye, kind master,” Joseph said, and finally, reluctantly, he let the big man go. In an instant Winston had vanished, falling into nothingness. It was as though the pit had no bottom.

  Joseph gathered up his torch and struggled to his feet, staggering drunkenly up through the crumbling cavern as huge chunks of the limestone crashed to the floor behind him. He chanced a quick glance over his shoulder, sure that he could not outrun the collapsing ceiling. Huge clouds of dust blew past him as chunks of ricocheting limestone pelted into his back.

  Suddenly he was there at the foot of the stairway. He leapt up the stairs three at a time. At the top he sprinted toward the door exiting the funerary temple and into a world filled with horror and chaos.

  Chapter 22

  It seemed obvious from the moment Anwar ducked through the slit Alex had cut in the rear of the tent that it would be nearly impossible to make it to the river. Conditions were atrocious. The place was a confusion of fire and sand and blowing debris. There was fighting everywhere, he saw, both German soldiers and camp laborers engaged in combat with an impervious enemy that seemed to have come from another time.

  Anwar stopped, and holding the child close to him, gazed around in amazement. Men were running blindly and screaming in panic. The encampment was caught in a flurry of commotion and confusion. He heard a terrible wailing sound as a German soldier staggered toward him all ablaze, beating out flames with hands that were lit like torches. It was a futile exercise he saw. The soldier’s actions only fanned the flames to greater heights. Anwar stared in horror as the soldier’s head caught fire. He staggered drunkenly around in a series of short circles, twirling like a dervish, and then he collapsed into a fiery pile, his shriveling body twitching spastically.

  Anwar spied an opening through the chaos, and hoping it was the way to the mess tent, moved quickly toward it, holding the child close, shielding it with his body. He was almost through the worst of it when a blazing ball of fire fell out of the sky and struck a series of fuel tanks that had been set up just to the east of the encampment. A gigantic explosion erupted. Anwar, still holding the child close to his body, protecting him, was blown over by a solid wave of heat. He landed on his back, the child bouncing in his arms. Hastily unwrapping the child, Anwar peered in, terribly afraid that it had been injured. Not so. The child was awake and unscathed, its eyes wide open, the expression angelic and strangely placid.

  Anwar stared at the infant for a long moment as if mesmerized. It was as if the child held him in some sort of spell and it wasn’t an entirely pleasant sensation. With a shiver Anwar pulled the blanket back over the child and clawed his way to his feet. Now the entire encampment was a solid sheet of wind blown smoke and fire as more of the flaming missiles fell from the sky. A second larger explosion rocked the very ground he stood on as flames flared up all around him. In the distance he spied the mess tent, miraculously unscathed. Anwar moved swiftly towards it.

  He found himself alone inside the tent even as the din outside continued unabated. Here he rifled quickly through pantry stores as he filled a bag with supplies; bottles of fresh water, dried milk, flatbread and cured meat.

  He was exiting the tent when he encountered two German soldiers on their way in. He tried to avoid being seen but it was too late. Anwar backed away into the tent as the soldiers lifted their rifles and edged towards him. They were soot covered, battle scarred and decidedly tense.

  “What have we here?” one of the soldiers said. “A thief?”

  “Maybe he is one of the phantom fighters from the sand,” the second soldier said, his quivering voice belying his false bravado. “Perhaps we should blast him, see if our bullets pass through his body.”

  “He looks normal to me,” the first soldier said. “As normal as a thief can look. We should shoot him on principle.”

  “Colonel von Straker warned us against taking unnecessary life.”

  The soldier grunted out an ironic laugh. “We are not sure that von Straker is even alive. There is so much death and confusion.”

  Although the soldiers were confident that Anwar could not understand them, they were wrong. He’d studied Germanic languages at Cambridge when he was young and had at least a rudimentary grasp of what these two were going on about.

  “I am not your enemy,” he answered back in German. “I am merely a worker trying to survive.” He backed up a careful step but the soldiers hefted their rifles to firing position.

  “What do you carry in that sling?” the second soldier asked.

  “Stores,” Anwar replied. “I was making my escape.”

  “No, no, no.” The soldier shook his head adamantly. “Not the sack. I can see that it is filled with stores. What is in that bundle you have strapped around your neck? You are holding it protectively against you. Perhaps it is some rare Egyptian artifact.”

  Anwar felt the newborn stir, and he was terribly afraid in that moment that the child would make a sound that would give it away. He had not forgotten Alex’s admonition about allowing anyone near the child. Alex had indicated that his newborn son was somehow important, and Anwar had to admit—although he could not adequately articulate his feelings—that there was something special about him.

  Decisions about his and the child’s fate were rendered as moot in that moment when the child seemed to convulse dramatically in its sling, and a vociferous whirring sound that was greater than all of the combined noise outside filled Anwar’s ears like legions of chattering locust. The roof of the large tent tore open suddenly as though it was a fragment of fabric in the hands of a giant, and through the rent sifted a black and grainy substance streaming down like water over some macabre waterfall completely engulfing the two Nazi soldiers. The black substance somehow passed into the two men and exited as fire. From the eyes, nose, mouth and ears columns of orange flame spewed, engulfing both men. The soldiers dropped their weapons and began a duel dance of death, twir
ling madly, attempting to beat out the flames with their hands to no avail. In a few short seconds they were both reduced to ash.

  The flames which had been inspired by the strange black mist did not abate, however. On the contrary, they began to spread out across the floor to tables and chairs and cabinets and stores, completely ignoring Anwar and the child. In a matter of seconds the entire tent was ablaze, and the burgeoning wind was feeding the flames. Anwar, with the still squirming child strapped to him, slipped quickly back out into the desert and set a course across the blowing dunes toward the Nile River.

  Chapter 23

  Colonel Gerhard von Straker moved out away from the shelter of the vehicle and walked directly into the heart of the chaos. It was now urgent that he find what he’d come here to find, but at the moment, in the midst of all the noise and confusion, he had not the slightest inkling of how he would proceed.

  In the streaking light of dozens of wind-blown fires, he could see that the majority of his men had perished, yet he remained miraculously unscathed. Surely there was reason to all this madness. Von Straker did not believe in divine judgment, nor did he believe in divine intervention, yet here he was, in the midst of an insane situation where his troops were being slaughtered by an army of phantom fighters and he was being ignored as if invisible. Was he being spared for some grander purpose? Though his intellect told him that the axe could fall at any moment, instinct made him press onward until he came to a place at the heart of the encampment where he halted. All around him there was chaos that seemed somehow separate from him.

  In the distance he saw what he assumed to be the main mess tent all ablaze, and out beyond it, toward the camp’s perimeter where vehicles were parked, huge gouts of flame were erupting with sounds like bomb blasts. Evidently the stockade fence had been breached because a herd of panicked pack animals, their eyes swirling madly in their heads, ran straight at him. Von Straker did not have time to jump out of the way, so, not having any other choice, he stood his ground waiting to be trampled. In the last possible moment the herd parted and went around him.

  Von Straker shook his head in amazement and moved on. There was death everywhere, he saw, German soldier and laborer alike, but now, as their numbers rapidly diminished he noted fewer and fewer of the phantom fighters that had been in abundance just moments before. Had they buried themselves back beneath the sand from whence they’d come? As preposterous as it seemed, this was the only logical conclusion he could draw. Von Straker moved determinedly past corpse after corpse, both astonished and repulsed at the extent of carnage that had befallen this place. The blowing sand stung his face even as the smell of oil smoke sickened him. But beneath that stench there were other, darker odors coming into play: the stench of decay and ancient corruption, not unlike the stench of earth from an old tomb.

  Up ahead he spied a tent. From the tent a man emerged and stared off into the blowing sand. Von Straker stopped and stood very still watching him. There was an air of breeding and sophistication about this man; he was young, tall and distinguished looking, dressed in khaki shorts and chukka boots. He was not an Arab but an Englishman. This was obvious and von Straker’s pulse quickened.

  He stood stark still for a long moment, watching the man, wondering why he seemed so calm under the circumstances. “Yes,” von Straker said to himself after another long moment of staring. “This is the man I have been searching for.”

  The man, seeming unfazed by the destruction around him, ducked back inside the tent.

  Von Straker moved carefully closer.

  Chapter 24

  “Where is the child?” a strongly-accented German voice asked.

  Alex whirled, his gun pointed. An officer of the German Army stood in the opening to his tent. He too held a gun. He was of medium build, with a solid frame and piercing green eyes. His mouth was set in a grim line. His eyes shifted to the dead woman on the bedroll and then back to Alex.

  “I have been expecting you,” Alex said.

  “So you have,” von Straker replied. “Is this the mother?”

  “What is your name?”

  The German officer clicked his boot heals together. “Colonel Gerhard von Straker. My Führer has sent me here to retrieve the child.”

  Alex glared furiously at the man. “Yes, I know. But what does your Führer want with the child?”

  “It does not matter.”

  Alex raised his gun. “Humor me.”

  Von Straker sighed. “The Führer knows things . . . he sees things. He has determined that the child is of some importance to the Third Reich and has sent me here to retrieve it. This is all I know. I am merely a soldier. My orders are to return the child along with an artifact to Berlin.”

  Alex managed a small chuckle. “Good luck with that, old chap. There are no artifacts here.”

  “What about the archaeological dig? Surely there are artifacts?”

  “Afraid I can’t help you there, for the discovery was made only this morning, and as you can see, I have been busy here.” Alex gestured toward the dead woman on the bedroll.

  “Was she your wife?”

  Alex shook his head frowning. “We were planning to marry when we got back to civilization. But as you can see, fate had other ideas.”

  “Where is the child?” von Straker asked again.

  Alex did not reply.

  Von Straker’s eyes narrowed. “Where!”

  “Your Führer will never know my child.”

  Without warning von Straker fired. The bullet struck Alex in the chest, spinning him around and knocking him down. Alex’s gun fell from his hand and skidded across the tent’s canvas floor toward von Straker.

  Von Straker kicked it out of the way and leveled his gun at Alex’s face. “Now, I will ask you one more time. Where is the child?”

  Blood was pumping from a hole in Alex’s right chest. He put his hand there hoping to stem its flow as he coughed blood from his mouth. He knew that his lung had been punctured and that his moments were numbered. “I will never tell you, Nazi.”

  Von Straker reached down and laid his hand on Camille. “She is still warm,” he said, “and the blood on the bedroll is wet. The child cannot be far. Now you will tell me where it is or you will die.”

  Alex’s smile was a grimace of pain. “Yes, I will die, and I promise you I will never tell you where the child is.”

  It was then that von Straker noticed the slit in the rear of the tent. “It is all right,” he said. “There is only one place the child can be. You have sent him to the river with a servant. I will find him.” He pointed the gun at Alex’s head and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 25

  Von Straker set out across the blowing dunes. Along the way he spotted a few escapees, although he did not recognize any of them as his own soldiers. A disheveled man, burnt and blackened, staggered across the dunes. Von Straker wondered briefly how the man, in such a terrible state, could motivate at all. He lifted his handgun and shot the man dead.

  He moved past the dead man toward a small gap between two small wooden structures that were mostly unscathed by fire. There was solid flame on the far side of these buildings, however, making his way impassable. The ground everywhere seemed to be covered with a green jelly-like substance that burned ferociously, like congealed gasoline. He had to be careful to avoid these areas. Hitching left he tried to skirt the fire. When he saw flames erupt there he feinted right and ducked through a small blasted out opening in a sandbag wall just as flames closed in behind him, engulfing the area he’d just occupied.

  Even so, the flames began to subside quickly as the wind picked up and there was little fuel left to consume.

  But now the sandstorm had burgeoned to epic proportions. Von Straker could barely motivate. He knew he would not be able to reach the river tonight. He could not see. He could not hear. He needed to find shelter from the storm or die out here in its midst. There would be time to locate the child in the morning. Of this he was certain.

  He r
eturned to the two wooden structures he’d passed moments before, hoping to find sanctuary. The buildings were both unscathed by fire. Breaking the lock he entered the most easterly building, which was somewhat sheltered from the blowing sand by the other. He found the building filled with drums of animal feed and bins of machinery parts.

  Von Straker fashioned a small comfortable bed of packing blankets, and, with his pistol resting in his lap, he settled down to wait for morning. He was wondering if his shelter would withstand the brunt of the storm when he fell into a deep sleep.

  In his dream he was a very old man—ancient, in fact—and he was sitting with his back against a wall in a place he did not recognize. It appeared to be a shelter of some sort, perhaps a bomb shelter, constructed beneath the ground. The walls were made of crude wooden boards and the floor was earthen. He was sick and in need of medicine but the medicine was being cruelly kept from him until he gave the medicine giver the information he so desired.

  “Please,” von Straker begged. His whole body spasmed as waves of pain rippled through him.

  “I will give it to you, Herr von Straker,” the other man said. “But first you must finish the story.”

  Von Straker sucked in a ragged breath and reached weakly for the injector.

  His interrogator held the instrument just out of reach. “After you finish the story. It is important that I know everything.”

  “What does it matter now? It is too late.”

  “It matters to me. I need to understand why you did what you did.”

  “Oh, sweet Christ,” sobbed von Straker. “Please!”

  “Yes! As soon as you tell me the truth.”

  “You bastard,” von Straker gasped. He took several shuddering breaths, held one until his body quit quaking and tried to focus his eyes on his interrogator. He saw the blistered sores on the man’s face, but there was something like relief in the maddened eyes. “Then you will . . . kill me?”