Ash: Return of the Beast

by Gary Tenuta

  A thick drool leaked from the corners of his mouth as he coughed and sputtered, his limbs flailing wildly like a fish out of water. A surge of terror rushed through him but eventually, mercifully, the spasmodic episode ended.

  Breathing heavily, he pulled his heavy body back up into the chair, wiped the drool from his chin and, in spite of his near total exhaustion, he managed a grin. The gift he’d so urgently sought had been given to him. He knew the answer to the riddle. The game was on.

  After taking a few minutes to gather his strength and calm his nerves, he rose victoriously to his feet and stretched, feeling perversely smug as if he had just battled the gods and won.

  He placed the diary and the urn, side by side, atop his father’s antique mahogany desk and exited the Inner Sanctum through the secret door. In a somewhat perverse reflection of his father before him, he strode out into the library. He was energized, confident and ready to secure his place in the great Hall of Destiny. But his reverie was cut short. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

  His stomach began to churn, he became nauseous, his bowels cramped painfully. He felt disoriented. His legs quivered, barely able to sustain the weight of his body and, in a matter of moments, they gave way completely and he toppled to the floor.

  Retching violently, writhing in the warm soup of his own vomit, he slithered a few feet across the dark hardwood floor, one hand gripping his stomach, the other reaching out in desperation toward the bookcase behind which the diary and the urn now sat secluded and silent, closed up within the Inner Sanctum.

  “…Aleister…”

  The word gurgled from his mouth, his eyes rolled back, his body twitched ever so slightly––once, twice, a third time––until finally the dark, billowing shroud of death settled over him, engulfing his beleaguered soul.

  Michael J. Moorehouse, the would-be host of the infamous Beast, and the bridge across which the Antichrist would walk into this world, now lay dead on the floor of the great library within the confines of the dreary, deteriorating mansion.

  ***

  In the years following the death of Michael Moorehouse, the Manor became the property of a series of new owners who came and went. Curiously, none of them ever actually lived in the old house. It was always purchased as an investment with intentions of fixing the place up and reselling it. The exterior of the structure was in dire shape but the interior required very little in the way of refurbishing. That being the case, and as fate had apparently dictated, no one ever discovered the existence of the secret room, the Inner Sanctum.

  Eventually the home was restored, not quite back to its original condition, but much improved over the state it was in when occupied by the now deceased son of the late William Bentley Moorehouse.

  So, for the most part, Moorehouse Manor sat quietly at the far end of Millionaire’s Row waiting for its own fate to unfold. Empty it was, and empty it remained, save for the extraordinary secret it kept hidden behind a certain and otherwise very ordinary bookcase.

  PROLOGUE – Part 2

  Seattle

  March, 1948

  Joshua Kane had a lot on his mind. Only a week ago he’d celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday. Still, sometimes, he felt like more things had happened in just the past four years than had happened in all the previous years of his life.

  Barely a year had passed since he’d been honorably discharged from the Army and only six months ago that he and his wife, Margaret, had settled into their modest 2-bedroom home across from a lumber yard and a smoke-billowing industrial plant near the edge of Seattle’s Lake Union, just a few miles north of the city’s downtown district. He was also trying to run the small antique store that he’d inherited from his father just before the War and, to top it all off, Margaret was pregnant and the baby was due any day, a week at most.

  Joshua never dreamed that naming a baby could become such a contentious topic of discussion between he and Margaret. The list of names was eventually whittled down to three possibilities: Mary for a girl––they both agreed on that––and John or Peter for a boy. He favored John and she favored Peter. John was the name of Joshua’s favorite disciple in the story of Jesus.

  “I know,” Margaret, said. “But Peter is the one Jesus called ‘his rock upon which his church would be built’.

  In the end, unable to come to an agreement, they decided to toss a coin. It was an odd way to name a baby but, given the circumstances, it seemed to make sense at the time. Heads, it would be John. Tails, it would be Peter. It was tails.

  Joshua accepted his defeat with a grin and a bit of relief. It was one less thing on his mind and he was okay with it. The only thing left to do now was wait to see if they had a Mary or a Pete. Either would be a blessing.

  He put on his coat and grabbed the keys to his old pick-up.

  Margaret saw him heading for the door. “Where are you going?”

  “There’s an estate sale at an old mansion up on Capitol Hill. Moorehouse Manor, I think they called it. Saw the classified ad in the paper. The owner passed away some time ago.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, apparently there was no family to inherit the place. It went to the State and somebody recently purchased it and they’re selling off some of the furnishings. I thought I’d check it out. Might find a good buy on a few pieces to resell. Never know what little gems you can stumble across at those estate sales. I won’t be long. You relax.” He gently patted Margaret’s bulging belly. “And take care of our little rock.” He gave her a wink as he opened the door.

  “Josh?”

  He turned around. “Yes?”

  “It could be a girl, you know.”

  He shrugged. “Could be.”

  Unfortunately, by the time Joshua arrived at the Manor, most of the good stuff had been sold. In fact there were only two items that caught his eye. One was a Tiffany lamp and the other was an ornate old trunk that looked like it had been imported from China. He was certain the lamp would be out of his price range but the trunk was probably something he could at least try to bargain down if the asking price was too high. As it turned out, the owner was anxious to sell everything as quickly as possible and he offered Joshua a package deal on the lamp and the trunk. It was too good to pass up.

  “Can I check out the inside of the trunk?” Joshua asked.

  The owner shrugged. “Well, yes you could but it’s locked and I haven’t been able to find the key. So whatever’s inside, it’s yours if you want it.”

  “There’s something in it?”

  “I think so. When we brought it down from upstairs we felt something inside slide from one end to the other.”

  Joshua purchased the two items and on the way home he couldn’t help fantasizing about whatever was inside the trunk. Some valuable antique that would bring a fortune. Diamonds. Gold doubloons from a sunken ship. Why not? He’d read about people stumbling across valuable things at estate sales and flea-markets. He grinned.

  That evening, after supper, he set about trying to unlock the hasp that held the secret to his fortune. After an hour of trying every ingenious idea he could think of to pick the lock, nothing worked. Finally, he couldn’t take it any more. The suspense was killing him. He grabbed a hefty 14-inch screwdriver, wedged it between the hasp and the body of the trunk and gave it a couple of good tugs. Nothing. Again and again. Still it would not budge. Then, fully determined to get the damned thing opened, come hell or high water, he put his full force behind it. Straining like a man determined not to fold under the pressure of an arm-wrestling match, he conjured up one last shot of adrenaline and let it loose. The hasp snapped with a resounding Crack! and, from another room, Margaret screamed his name.

  “It’s nothing!” he called back to her. “I just––” He turned to see her standing in the hall doorway, bracing herself against the doorframe. His eyes grew wide. “What the––?”

  Her dress was soaked below the waist. Water was dripping down her leg, forming a puddle at her feet. The look on her face was t
hat of the proverbial deer caught in the glare of oncoming headlights. Joshua dropped the screwdriver. The baby was coming.

  ***

  Margaret and the baby remained at the hospital another day following the birth. Joshua, returned home alone. It had been a long, exciting, nerve-wracking and, ultimately, joyous night with not but a few nods of the head that could hardly be called sleep.

  Exhausted from the ordeal, he immediately flopped onto the couch with all the grace of a bag of rocks. His eyelids were about to close under their own weight when he noticed the old trunk still sitting on the floor across the room.

  He managed a half grin. “Oh, yeah. I’d almost forgotten about you.”

  He stared at the trunk for a minute, recalling his visions of diamonds and gold doubloons. He chuckled. It was silly, of course. Still, his curiosity once again got the better of him. The hard part was over. He’d already ripped the hasp nearly clean off the damned thing. All he had to do now was lift the lid.

  With an exaggerated grunt, he sat up, ran his hands through his hair, and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn. He pushed himself up off the couch and sauntered over to the old trunk. “Okay, you. Let’s see what you’re hiding in there.”

  He dropped to his knees, grabbed the sides of the lid and gave it a gentle tug. The hinges gave a series of tiny staccato creaks as he pushed it all the way open. His visions of priceless treasure vanished at the sight of nothing but a very plain, old cardboard box. It was sealed with cellophane tape, dried and crinkled with age. Still, he thought, you never know. Gold doubloons could be cleverly hidden inside a cardboard box. Why not?

  He lifted the box from the trunk and guessed its weight to be about ten pounds. How many gold doubloons would make up ten pounds? He shook the box like a kid with a mysterious present on Christmas morning. The anticipated sound of the rattling of gold coins was not to be heard. Maybe they were tightly wrapped in multiple folds of fine Chinese silk from an ancient dynasty. Yeah. That could be. He grinned and set the box on the floor.

  The crinkled tape peeled away easily and nearly crumbled in the process. He opened the top flaps and let out a sigh of disappointment when he saw his treasure: a bunch of old books. Six, to be exact. He pulled them out, one by one and read the titles: The Complete Works of Aleister Crowley; The Secrets of Alchemy; Divinatory Geomancy; and three whose titles were in Latin and completely meaningless to him. He’d never even been sure he knew the correct translation of E Pluribus Unum. He had no idea who Aleister Crowley was. The word ‘alchemy’ seemed vaguely familiar. He knew he’d heard it somewhere but he didn’t know what it meant and the title, Divinatory Geomancy, just brought a shrug.

  If the books had been rare imprints of the works of Charles Dickens or Mark Twain or Tolstoy, or any of the great classics, then he would have been interested. Books like that could bring a pretty penny. Maybe even better than gold doubloons. But this stuff was probably not worth its weight in pennies, pretty or otherwise.

  He put the books back into the box and was about to close it up when he noticed he’d overlooked one. It’s dark leather binding was cracked with age and was beginning to peel back at the edges. It was small enough to fit in the palm of his hand and very thin, maybe only 20 or 30 pages. He read the title: The Keys of the Gatekeeper. There was no author’s name on the cover. He flipped through the pages and had no idea what he was looking at or even what language it was written in. He sounded out a couple of the strange words. “Brishem halak malthalah Kutulu.” No sooner had the words left his mouth than he was overcome by a feeling of light-headedness. He put out a hand and braced himself against the old trunk. The strange feeling passed quickly but was enough to remind him that he was in dire need of some good sound sleep.

  After returning all the larger books to the box he wedged the small book in tightly between them, closed the box up and set it next to the basement door. Tomorrow he would take it to the basement and store it away. Right now he just wanted to get some sleep and dream about his brand new baby boy.

  ***

  January, 2000

  Joshua Kane passed away at the age of 87, barely one month into the turn of the new century. His wife, Margaret, followed him into the next world a month later. The box of strange books, along with a number of other personal effects passed into the possession of their son, Peter, who had become a pastor at a local church. The items were stored in the attic of the pastor’s home where he’d been living alone since the death of his own wife from a tragic accident many years earlier.

  The new millennium had not been kind to the Kane family. Only a few weeks following the death of Joshua Kane, Pastor Pete––now in his 60s––suffered a heart attack that resulted in the paralysis of his legs. He became severely depressed and quit the ministry. Hospital bills and lack of insurance forced him to sell his house and he moved into a rented single-wide mobile home at the Trail’s End, a trailer park on the edge of town.

  There was not enough room in the small trailer for many of the items from his house. So, his son, Brian, reluctantly offered to store several of the items in the basement of his own house. One of those items was the box of books that had once belonged to Pastor Pete’s father. Brian had never bothered to open the box so he had no idea what it contained and, frankly, he couldn’t have cared less.

  PROLOGUE – Part 3

  Four Years Earlier…

  August, 1997

  Somewhere in a peaceful Seattle suburb

  Pastor Pete had just completed a heinous, depraved activity.

  Sweating and sated, he untied the straps that bound the naked, shivering eleven-year-old boy to the bed.

  The chubby, fair-haired youth lay shaking uncontrollably.

  The restraints had been needless. The preacher had made the situation quite clear from the beginning. He’d leaned in, a warm breath away from the boy’s rosy cheeks, and whispered:

  “If you move, if you scream, if you make any sound whatsoever, I will most assuredly kill you and dispose of your body and no one will ever know what happened. You will simply cease to exist. Do you understand?”

  The terrified youngster nodded.

  The preacher’s soft lips grazed lightly against the boy’s ear as he continued:

  “And when this is over you will tell no one because, if you do, I will find out and I will hunt you down and I will bring you back here and I will kill you. Do you understand that?”

  Again the boy nodded. It was better to be raped and silently bear the burden of shame than to be dead.

  Freed from the restraints and having somehow endured the endless minutes of terror, Rodney wanted to run but his eyes rolled back, his eyelids fluttered uncontrollably, and he nearly collapsed onto the floor.

  The preacher flung the straps aside and tossed the boy’s clothes onto the bed. “Well, Duckworth? What are you waiting for?” He seemed genuinely perplexed by the boy’s hesitation. His eyes narrowed and he bellowed with the same grandiose, commanding voice the boy had heard so many times thundering from the high pulpit on Sunday mornings, “Go now! And sin no more!” Then he added, almost parenthetically, “And use the back door on your way out, for Christ’s sake.”

  The boy’s response to the command was instant. He grabbed his clothes and threw them on in a single, fluid motion. In the process, something slipped from the pocket of his jeans and rolled under the bed. He didn’t bother to see what it was. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. He fled across the floor of the preacher’s bedroom, flew down the stairs to the living room and out the back door.

  The preacher knelt down to see what had rolled under the bed. He retrieved it easily and stood up. In his hand he held one of the boy’s prized possessions, something that cost the boy two cereal box tops and 50 cents of his allowance. It was a black plastic coin about the size of a silver dollar embossed on one side with the Batman logo and the visage of that famed masked crusader on the reverse. It was the ninth and final coin in the set and Rodney had collected them all. The preacher star
ed blankly at it for a moment, then flipped it into the air. With a sweeping motion, like swatting at a fly, he caught it, gave it a final moment of consideration and then dropped it into the bottom drawer of his dresser. A memento of sorts. A keepsake. A trivial thing. The boy would never miss it.

  That night Rodney discovered his precious Batman coin was gone and he knew who had it.

  ***

  Sunday morning, as Pastor Pete preached on the sins of the flesh, young Rodney Duckworth glared at him from a back pew as he sat somberly, squeezed between the alcoholic breath of his useless father and the overbearing perfume of his self-righteous mother. The boy watched the preacher’s mouth moving but he heard nothing coming from it. The only sound he heard was that of his own inner voice struggling to formulate a vow of revenge. But his 11-year-old vocabulary had not yet acquired words strong enough, dark enough, to articulate the phrasing necessary to form a vow of such a deep and bitter hatred. Hard as he tried, only one word seemed to surface with any clarity. But it was enough. It was loaded, ready to explode:

  ‘Someday’.

  For a brief moment he fantasized a scenario in which his hero, Batman, would swoop in and wreak havoc on the evil villain behind the pulpit. But the fantasy faded quickly. He knew full well there was no Batman. No, he would have to manage this revenge on his own. He didn’t know how but he knew he would. Someday. He relaxed with a long slow breath, folded his arms, bowed his head and drifted into a half sleep, waiting for the Someday that would surely come.

  ***

  Four years later:

  Chubby little Rodney Duckworth was now 15 years old and not so little. He was thrilled to learn of Pastor Pete’s heart attack and couldn’t have been more pleased that the bastard had moved out of the neighborhood. Nevertheless, he was still emotionally and psychologically scarred from the abuse he’d suffered at the Pastor’s pleasure, an experience he never shared with a living soul. He was also tired of being bullied by his schoolmates who constantly taunted him with names like ‘Rubber Ducky’, or worse yet, ‘Rodney-Fuckworth-Not-Worth-a-Fuck’. That was the year Rodney Duckworth had taken all he could take and he decided to do something about it. It was time for a change. If he couldn’t change the bullies, he would change himself, like Bruce Wayne transforming into Batman. He didn’t know what he would change himself into or how he was going to go about it but he was determined to make it happen.