by Matt Drabble
The outer office was well maintained and organised by the late Mrs. Merryweather, but he knew that he would find little of any use out here. The real gold would lie inside the Headmaster’s inner sanctum.
He tried the door and found it locked. Fortunately, the door itself was flimsy with a large glass pane in the middle. He checked around the outer office and found a thick scarf hanging on the coat rack. He wrapped his fist tightly and enjoyed the feeling as he broke the glass. He stood motionless as he waited to see if the muffled noise had attracted any unwanted attention. When he was sure that it hadn’t, he reached through the hole and unlocked the door.
He stepped over the broken glass on the inside and, with a sudden moment of inspiration, picked up the pieces and laid them by the outer office door entrance.
Barnaby’s room was stuffed full of shelving and paper files. The man was obviously not a fan of computers despite the state of the art machine sitting on his secretary’s desk.
Stuart stood back at the sight and wondered just where to start. Every wall space was laden with shelving and every shelf was weighed down with boxes. He moved towards them and started scanning his finger along the carefully labeled files. Most seemed to be school business - student records that stretched back through the years - and all were carefully marked. He was waiting for an idea to strike him when he heard the telltale noise of breaking glass as someone stepped inside the outer office and onto the shards that he had left.
He crouched down behind the inner office door and concealed himself in the shadows. He heard two sets of footsteps approaching. Two silhouettes moved through the doorway. The first, he could not make out, but the second was Alex Thompson.
His anger at being struck from behind by the boy overtook his rational mind and he launched himself at the teen. He grabbed Thompson by the collar with two hands, fuelled by rage, and slammed the boy into the wall.
“Wait!” the second person hissed, but he was in no mood to listen.
Fingernails dug painfully into his forearms and he smelled a woman’s scent.
“It’s ok, Stuart,” Sarah said pleadingly.
“Sarah?” he asked unsurely. “Is it you? I mean, really you?”
“Yes,” she replied softly. “Let Alex go; he’s trying to help.”
He looked into her face and let Thompson go, but watched the teen from the corner of his eye. “What the hell is going on around here, Sarah? Did you know that Jemima has gone nuts and is somehow about nine months pregnant?”
He saw something pass by Sarah’s eyes and knew that something was wrong at the mention of Jemima’s name. “What is it?”
“She’s dead, Stuart; Jemima’s dead,” she answered.
He heard a soft moan escape Thompson’s lips. “Who? How?” he asked in shock.
“It doesn’t matter, we don’t have much time,” Sarah replied with a face set in stone.
“What’s going on Sarah? Please, you have to tell me; I deserve that at least.”
She looked at him long and hard before she spoke again. “The town was called Eden and his name is Tolan Christian,” she began.
----------
Brendon steeled himself against the blood and gore and tried to place his mind elsewhere. He prayed to God to send him the courage and strength to do what needed to be done. He knew that there were only minutes available to him to get the baby out of the woman’s womb. As soon as the mother died, the baby was going to be starved of oxygen and would surely die soon. He had to perform an emergency caesarean to get the child out into the world and breathing on its own.
“What can I do?” Donald asked from over his shoulder.
“Stop me from fainting,” Brendon answered seriously.
He had placed all of the towels that the sergeant had been able to find around and under the body. He gripped the knife in his hand. He hadn’t washed it as time was of the essence and he knew that with the mother dead, there was little need for cleanliness.
He made the first incision below her bellybutton and drew the blade down carefully so as not to cut too deeply. He gritted his teeth and inserted his fingers into the wound and pulled the sides apart. He gagged fiercely but fought against the rising tide of panic and revulsion.
His hands sunk inside and he began to feel around for the child, pushing the folds of fat aside. He was desperately aware of the passing time and it had felt like hours since the mother had died.
He snagged what felt like a leg and began to pull. Eventually, the baby emerged - a blood covered mess, wrapped in entrails. He grabbed a clean towel that had been wetted in the clean water that Donald had brought and set aside.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” the sergeant muttered under his breath.
Brendon could immediately tell that the child wasn’t breathing. He laid the boy on his back, carefully pushing the umbilical cord aside. He tilted the baby’s head to one side and placed his small finger inside its mouth to clear it. He started to massage its tiny chest as gently as he could and blew a small amount of breath down the baby’s throat.
“Please God, hear me now and answer my prayers,” he begged as he worked. “Behold now, thy servant hath found grace in thy sight, and thou hast magnified thy mercy,” he quoted. He worked faster and harder and soon tears started to fall once again down his cheeks.
“It’s no good, son,” Donald said gently from behind. “You did your best but it’s no good, the poor mite’s gone.”
“Plead my cause, and deliver me: quicken me according to thy word,” Brendon wept. “Grant me this life in all that I served in your name I beg of you, are you listening to me? ARE YOU LISTENING?” he roared. “YOU BRING HIM BACK; DON’T LET IT END THIS WAY, YOU SON OF A BITCH! BRING HIM BACK NOW!”
The silence of the large dining hall was suddenly split by the choking sound of a baby’s screaming wail. Brendon stared down in disbelief as the tiny boy bawled and it was the single greatest sound that he had ever heard in his life.
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“Wait a minute,” Maurice said as held up a hand to Paterson behind him. “Did you hear that?”
The young PC stared upwards, “What?”
“I thought that I heard something overhead, someone crying or screaming. Quick, this way,” Maurice ordered as he took a side passageway.
The narrow walls grew closer but he didn’t care. The floor started to slope upwards and that was all he cared about. They had been wandering in the dark for what felt like a lifetime and all he wanted to do was see the light again.
Throughout the catacombs of Ravenhill he could hear disembodied voices drifting on the foul air. The dead were free to wander unencumbered down here and most were lost and angry; he now knew why his father had been so adamant that he stayed away.
Up ahead, he could see the faint glow of natural light in a square shape around a closed opening of some kind. He rushed towards it, eager to be free of the voices in his head that spoke with seductive ease and expertly stroked his yellow bone.
“Is that a way out?” Paterson’s shaky voice from behind pleaded.
“I think so,” Maurice replied.
“Then for fuck’s sake get it open already,” Paterson demanded in a shrill scared tone.
“All right, keep your bloody knickers on,” Maurice grumbled, shaking his head.
The opening was around four feet square and he tried pushed at it with his hands, but it wouldn’t budge. He sat down and placed his feet on it and started kicking hard. “It won’t open,” he called back over his shoulder.
“Dammit, old man, I don’t like it in here; get it open,” Paterson whined.
Maurice placed both feet against the small covering and braced himself. Somewhere off in the distance behind them he could hear some kind of low rumbling noise. The sound echoed through the catacombs and began to rise in volume and pitch as it drew closer.
“What the hell is that?” Paterson demanded in a panicking voice.
Maurice didn’t bother to answer; he only doubled his efforts on
the small hatch. His back groaned in protest and his leg muscles burned with the effort as he pushed harder and harder.
The sound behind them became a shrieking wail, driving him to push harder as he strained every sinew. The rising scream became a tidal wave of terror as it flooded through the passageways and headed right for them. Somewhere inside the ungodly screaming he could just make out the sound of Paterson’s voice joining in. The young PC’s own scream became mingled with the sound of Ravenhill’s until Maurice could not separate the two.
Maurice was about to give up when Paterson’s panicking weight thudded into the back of him and their combined force suddenly broke the hatch moorings and they tumbled out and through the opening.
They fell forward together, a tangle of sweaty limbs out onto a wooden floor. Maurice looked back behind him at the small black hole that had spewed them out and waited for whatever had made the hellish scream, but nothing followed them out into the light.
He looked around and saw that they were in the dining hall; he could also see that they weren’t alone. There were two men sitting on the floor, either side of a body, and a whole ton of blood. It took him a moment to place the men because of the splattered scene. Then he suddenly realised that the priest was actually holding a baby.
He walked closer until he recognised that the woman lying pale and split open on the floor was Jemima, the young teacher. “What the hell did you do?” he blustered as he reached them.
The priest turned to him with such sadness and misery in his eyes that it stopped Maurice in his tracks.
“What I had to,” Brendon answered, grief-stricken.
Maurice wandered over to the four of them, with Paterson following close behind. The priest was holding a small baby boy and the elderly sergeant looked to have aged 20 years if that was possible. Both men were pale and drawn and looked to be in shock. The teacher lying on the floor was enough of a mess to make his stomach lurch and he looked away quickly.
“Well now, this won’t do; this really won’t do at all,” a new voice boomed in the great hall from behind them and all of their heads turned towards it in dread.
----------
Sarah finished her tale as quickly as she could. Including her therapist it was only the second time that she had spilled her own private wound since she had left Eden and it was a painful experience to relay, no matter how quickly she did it.
Stuart’s face was pinched thin as he listened without interruptions. She could not tell what he was thinking but at least he hadn’t run laughing from the room.
“So?” she asked dubiously.
“You’re telling me that Joshua Bradley is the reincarnation of Tolan Christian?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“That the guy is hundreds of years old and he worships some kind of ancient Aztec god that allowed him to first rule Eden and then come back to tap into Ravenhill’s power source and try and rule the world?”
“That’s about the long and short of it,” she said, hating the way that the words sounded when spoken aloud.
“Well, alright then; how do we stop him?”
“You believe all of this?” she asked incredulously.
“Hey, I’m not saying that,” he replied, holding up his hands. “But there is some freaky ass shit going on around here and that bloody kid is the heart of it. Whatever this place really is, it’s definitely not normal. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote in a Sherlock Holmes novel that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Sarah took a long deep sigh. “So what are we looking for in here?”
“Honestly, I don’t know, it just seemed like…”
“Like it was the right place to go,” she finished for him.
“Exactly,” he agreed.
“Alex, watch the door,” she ordered the boy and watched him move silently to the outer office.
“How the hell are we supposed to trust him?” Stuart asked.
“Look, Tolan has the ability to put people under a kind of spell, but it can be broken. I broke it, but it was just a little too late,” she said sadly. “Alex has broken his, only a little easier than I did. I think that Tolan isn’t as strong yet as he was. It’s all bravado and swagger, I think that he’s covering for it. But I believed him when he talked about needing 12 deaths to fulfill his 12 new disciples. Before, back in Eden, he seemed content with just owning a town; now it seems he wants the whole damn world.”
“But he’s lost a disciple in Alex, hasn’t he?” Stuart said hopefully.
“That’s true, but it won’t take him long to find another willing convert, if he hasn’t already. You have to remember that we have no idea just who is under his spell right now, that’s how he works. He’s a puppet master - always pulling the strings and making us dance. He had to have had help for him to have gotten this far before we noticed. He told me of the nine already dead and he couldn’t have carried that out alone. That’s why we have to hurry; we have to find something that can help us.”
They both started at opposite ends of Barnaby’s office and scanned the shelves carefully for anything of use. She, like Stuart, had no idea what they were looking for but she instinctively knew that they were in the right place. Ravenhill may be a power source that drew the blackest of hearts, but she had the feeling that the place itself wasn’t necessarily evil, it just attracted evil men.
Her ears picked up an approaching noise out in the hallway. She was slowly starting to feel in tune with her surroundings now and she could feel them coming.
Suddenly, Alex ducked back inside. “They’re coming,” he said breathlessly.
“We need time,” Stuart said from the other side of the office.
“I’ll buy us some,” Alex answered.
“No wait; you can’t go out there, they’re going to know that you’re not with him anymore,” Sarah stressed. “They’ll know the second they look at you.”
“I have to do this,” Alex said sadly. “My old man may not be worth a damn, but one thing that he always told me was that a man pays what he owes. I’ll lead them away.” With that, he ducked out of the room and was gone.
“You have to stop him,” Stuart said desperately.
“No,” Sarah said firmly. “This is what happens; good people make mistakes and they have to pay the bill.”
“Dammit, Sarah, this whole thing is nuts; I mean who’s running around out there but just a bunch of kids, for Christ’s sake.”
“Really? That bunch of kids hacked Barnaby to death and God knows who else. If they see us, they’ll kill us as soon as look at us. We have no choice,” she said coldly. “If we don’t stop him here, then who knows what damage he’s going to be able to do, so just keep looking.”
She tried not to listen to the shouts and yells from the hallway beyond the office as they drifted away. It took every ounce of self-control not to charge out and help Alex, but she had to take her own advice no matter how bitter it tasted.
“I think I’ve found something,” Stuart said excitedly a couple of minutes later. “Here, it’s a will; it’s Barnaby’s last will and testament.”
Sarah took the outstretched document and scanned her eyes quickly across the details. There was one thing that leapt out at her straight away, one thing that just might throw a spanner in Tolan’s works. According to Barnaby’s will, the school was left to only one man - Maurice Duncan was now the rightful owner of Ravenhill.
----------
Brendon looked up at the new arrival. The boy looked to be in his early teens or so; he was slender and blonde and spoke with an American accent. But there was something beyond the child’s eyes, something deep and dark that radiated out from his soul and Brendon knew the presence of evil when he tasted it.
“So you’re the one,” he said in a tired voice. “This is all your party I take it?”
“Yes, Father,” the boy smiled. “And you may call me Tolan, Priest.”
“If there be a contr
oversy between men, and they come unto judgment, that the judges may judge them; then they shall justify the righteous, and condemn the wicked,” Brendon said calmly.
“You know your scripture, Priest,” Tolan nodded. “But your God is not here; only mine are and I shall soon be raised above the heavens and made immortal.”
“What the hell is this?” Donald exclaimed. “He’s just a kid for Christ’s sake. Now you listen to me son, where are the grownups? Where are your teachers?”
“What is it that you want Tolan?” Brendon asked, ignoring the sergeant’s outburst. He knew that this was no boy, no child, no innocent babe in the woods; this was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“I want the world,” Tolan smiled broadly. “Is that really too much to ask for? Have I not suffered enough? I spent 10 years wandering in the wilderness, lost in purgatory, when I should have been ruling in heaven. When I needed your God, he was absent from my side. Your God offers me nothing, despite my tributes.”
“So you turned to blasphemy instead?” Brendon asked. “You turned your back on God and made a deal with the Devil instead?”
“God and Satan, Michael and Lucifer, they are all merely fairy tales told to children,” Tolan mocked. “Real power lies beyond your comprehension and your book,” he spat. “The real power in this world comes from gods far older and ancient than you could possibly imagine. I make no apologies for striking a deal to save my soul and become immortal, and now I am close Priest, so very close,” Tolan said, looking down at the body of Jemima. “Only two to go.”
“Look, I’ve had quite enough of this nonsense,” Donald said in a strong and dismissive voice.
Brendon watched as the sergeant stood tall, if a little wobbly. He wanted to tell the man that whatever was happening here was far out of his jurisdiction, that Tolan was far from the boy that he appeared to be. But Donald was a man with both feet planted firmly on the ground and concreted in.
The sergeant started to walk or, if truth be told, to shamble towards Tolan. Almost immediately there were several other sets of eyes that appeared out of the shadows like rats. The other children formed a protective shell around their master. Their faces were blank but their eyes were dark and full of menace. Brendon could see little signs of humanity within the children and he was scared at how far past the light they had walked.
