by David Risen
“Are you ready?”
“Please don’t hurt me,” Abel pleaded.
The demon gave him a sad look. He paused for a moment as if in deep thought, and then he crossed back over John’s body and stopped inches away from Abel.
He reached out with both hands, unbuckled Abel’s belt, and stripped his slacks and boxers down to his ankles.
Abel strained with everything he had against his shackles, but the vault proved stronger.
The Beast paused again for a long moment, staring at Abel’s manhood, and then he grinned mischievously and pointed his eyes back at Abel’s face.
“Your wife is a smart woman, but she’s not a very happy one.”
“Fuck you,” Abel screamed.
The thing nodded at the shackles. They released, and Abel flew up ten feet in the air pivoted, flailing and kicking violently, and then hovered backwards toward the tree trunk.
He screamed and cried.
And the demon merely stood calmly watching the spectacle unfold, and as he did so, he almost looked sad.
And then it came, the sharp burning and piercing pain in his rectum. It was so sudden and harsh that it took his breath.
Abel dug his heels into the trunk of the tree and pushed himself upward, but he only rose a few inches before his feet slipped out from under him, and he fell hard back onto the spike.
“If I were you,” the thing said. “I would keep the struggling to a minimum. That will increase your pain, and cost you your life much sooner.”
The further they advanced, the more everything changed.
The blind woman Rider led introduced herself as Gladys Mann. As they progressed slightly down the mountain and west, she clutched his upper right arm for both balance and direction.
The fog on the mountain rescinded, and Rider began to hear the rumbling of engines up the access road to Skitts Mountain. The trees thinned slightly, and on a hill, built up on a mound on the steep slope of the mountain, a house appeared.
A small, stick-built white house stood atop several squarish pillars of stone.
As they approached, everything changed.
The fog engulfed the woods.
The windows of the house shattered and disappeared. The front door fell and disappeared from the porch.
Part of the roof caved in.
Gladys clasped his arm tight and stopped.
Rider looked at her. “What is it?”
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “I feel cold, and scared.”
Rider turned his head slowly back toward the house.
Through the gaping holes that had once been the two front windows to either side of the door, a white flash of light whipped through the house.
Rider furled his brow.
You’re about to find out about wraiths, Amelia’s voice said.
Wraiths?
It seems that you’ve walked into one of those afore mentioned traps, the voice in his head responded.
What should I do?
Play it by ear, but you probably shouldn’t take the girl in there until you’ve settled the situation down a bit.
Rider looked back over his shoulder at Gladys.
“Wait on me here,” Rider said, subvocalizing.
“Where are we?” she whispered.
Rider frowned. “We’re near your house, but something’s strange up ahead. I want to make sure it’s safe.”
“Will I be safe here?”
Rider eyed the house. “We’re far enough away that you should be fine. Just don’t move a muscle no matter what you hear. I’ll be back as soon as I fix this.”
“What is it?”
Rider shook his head. “I’m not sure. Wait here.”
Rider removed the rifle strap from his shoulder and propped the weapon against a tree, and then he made for the house.
His heart pounded so fast, that by the time he reached the rotten planks that comprised the floor of the old porch, he could see his pulse in his vision.
He climbed the one-step onto the porch. The frame and planks of the porch were so old and unmaintained for so long that the center of the porch bowed to the ground in the center.
Rider stopped at the open-mouth front door and peeked inside.
A round, wooden kitchen table sat off to the right on the bare wood floor. It stood only on its two remaining legs. The left side of the tabletop had long since fallen to the floor.
A Victorian era couch sat against the wall across from him. Most of the lining rotted away revealing the stuffing and the springs beneath the backrest.
Old leaves and scraps of paper lined the floor.
And now it was so cold inside that Rider’s breath turned to vapor as he exhaled. The thick and distinct odor of whiskey permeated from the house so strongly that Rider thought he might get a contact buzz.
“Hello?”
No answer.
He wondered if he had only imagined the flash of white he saw through the missing windows.
He slipped inside the doorway.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark within.
When he saw it in the archway on the wall opposite him, he froze.
The specter seemed to be hanging from the archway. His shoulders were slumped and his arms and legs dangled loosely. His rotten head with only a sparse cropping of red hair on the sides and the top was cocked jauntily to the side. The skin on the sides of his face mostly rotted off leaving a leathery brown hide.
His mouth drooped open far more than the muscles of his face would have allowed. And only deep, empty holes remained in his skull where his eyes should have been.
The spirit drifted toward him swinging back and forth.
It stopped swinging inches before his face.
Its putrid brow furled, and it shrieked so murderously that Rider thought his eardrums would rupture.
It slammed into him so hard that it threw him across the room. His back crashed into the wall and he slid down to his feet.
Before he could suck the air back into his lungs, it yanked him upward by his neck and held him a foot off the ground.
A flash of white light blinded him.
And suddenly....
Rider is a disembodied spirit hovering through the house.
The antique couch in the den area mends itself and sits in place with a gold velvet lining.
The kitchen table to the right stands on four legs, and Gladys sits at one of the wooden chairs eating cream corn and smoked pork with three boys – ages ranging from adolescent to toddler wearing trousers held up by suspenders.
The front door opens, and Gladys glances across the room. Her smile says welcome, but her eyes say terror.
A tall man, still wearing his mining hardhat saunters inside. Soot covers his face, and his stained white shirt.
Rider can smell the whiskey from the dining area.
He staggers across the wooden floor with his boots clopping against the surface, and he stops a foot away from Gladys and stares.
None of the boys, not even the toddler, dares look at him.
He’s so drunk that he sways in place as he gapes at them.
“So why’s my debt at the company store thirty-eight dollars more’n it was yesterdee?” the man says.
Gladys takes a deep breath and releases it slowly, and then she looks at him and smiles.
“We had no food. We have to eat.”
He nods. The gesture is overwrought and angry.
He turns his head and considers the kitchen area at the cupboard and then back to Gladys.
“I see ‘bout twenty-five dollars worth’a food in ‘ere, an’ you’re ‘awearin’ thirteen dollars worth’a dress.”
Gladys looks straight down at her food.
In one motion, the drunk squats and flips the chair over on top of her.
Gladys rolls over on her back and pushes herself away.
All three boys rise from the table.
The eldest, a tall boy with shaggy blond hair leaps on his father from behind wrapping h
is arms around his shoulders.
The drunk flings him off and the boy lands butt first on the floor.
“Don’t you ever touch me like that again you little bastard. I’ll break your neck like a toothpick.”
He spins back around and kicks Gladys who yelps like a stricken dog.
“You been a’whorin around on me?”
A white flash of light blinds him once again.
Rider finds himself floating around an empty bed.
He smells the drunk before he sees him. The man staggers into the bedroom to find it empty.
Thunder claps behind his eyes.
He turns and staggers out of the bedroom and into another bedroom across a small hallway.
Inside, the three boys all lie on the same rod-iron bed sleeping.
The drunk shoves his hands in between the mattress and box springs, and flips it off the bed with the boys on it.
They clamber to their feet and gape back at their father with fear in their eyes.
“Where th’ hell’s your damn momma?”
“She was here when we went to sleep,” the thirteen-year-old says.
The drunk chases them out of the house.
“You git outta here and find her ass before dark. You don’t find ‘er you best not ever come back!”
Eight-year-old Blake Rider sits at the dining room table doing his first-grade Math homework.
His heart sinks when he hears the engine of his mother’s yellow Volvo station wagon pull into the garage and turn off.
The front door opens and he hears her high heels against the hardwood floor.
He smells the tequila before he sees her.
She walks into the dining room, and shoves him so hard that the chair topples over. His chin slams into the wooden surface of the table as he falls to the vinyl floor.
He claws his way back up.
“If you ever go to the goddamn school and tell the counselor that I beat you again, so help me God, it’ll be the last time you ever tell anyone anything. I brought you into this world, and I’ll take you out of it.”
Back in the ruined shotgun house, something very old and very angry rose from the darkest and lowest reaches of his soul.
He felt as though thousands of volts of electricity coursed through his body. He didn’t even notice when the red sword made of light formed in his hand.
He rose slowly and glared at the specter.
It slammed into him again, but this time, he didn’t budge.
He belted it across its ruined face so hard that it flew through the ruined back wall spraying strips of the lath and plaster walls across the den and dining area.
The ghost looked up but this time, he was the same dim-eyed, wife-beating drunk.
He gaped back at the Abysmal Patron with terror.
Rider smirked.
“Never know who you’re fuckin with, huh?”
The ghost’s mouth fell open to retort, but no sound escaped him.
Rider snarled at him. “You’re a real special kind of son-of-a-bitch, you know that?”
The man shook his head. “I didn’t want to hit ‘er. I just couldn’t control it. It was th’ booze.”
Rider huffed. “Yeah, I’m sure. You know the reason that your wife never returned?”
The ghost shook his head.
Rider nodded. “You beat her so hard and so often that the day she disappeared, she woke up blind. She got lost in the woods and walked off the edge of a cliff.”
“I’m sorry. Please don’t hurt me, sir.”
Rider smirked. “You’re right. You are sorry, but be that as it may, that girl still loves your stupid ass. I’m gonna give you one chance to make this right. You do the wrong thing even once, and I’ll throw your ass into hell myself.”
He nodded vigorously. “Anything.”
Rider gave him a skeptical look. “I’m gonna go get your kids. You treat your wife like a queen, and you make your boys think you’re the greatest father in the history of humanity. If you don’t....”
“Yeah, please give me a second chance.”
Rider turned to find Gladys staring in from the door.
“Vinny?” she said.
The man clambered to his feet, ran to the door and hugged her hard.
“Awe, baby, I thought you was lost forever.”
Rider ignored them and stalked out of the house to go find the lost children.
Rider? Amelia thought.
No answer.
Amelia clenched her eyelids together and pressed her hands against her temples.
Rider, where are you? I’m having trouble finding you?
Only mournful silence responded in her head.
She opened her eyes. Her hands shook from anxiousness. The sunlight – what little she saw of it through the thick, white fog, was beginning to fail, it would be dark in less than two hours, and she was unable to contact him for what felt like an hour now.
Outside, she heard the muffled thuds of Gage Kinder’s axe as he split firewood on an old stump out back.
Amelia stood, pulled her gray trench coat on over her shoulders, and stepped outside.
The fog was thicker now.
She aimed her eyes at her feet, and touched the side of the cabin as she rounded it and approached the lean-to around back.
As she approached, she saw Gage’s silhouette as he cocked the axe over his head, and launched it at the three-foot log standing upright on the stump.
She looked to the right and by the old gasoline generator that sputtered and huffed before the lean-to, she found a shed full of firewood, and a red phone just as the document taped to the cabinet inside described. She frowned and glared across the steep incline at Gage.
“There’s an entire wall of firewood here, why are you chopping more?”
He stabbed the business end of the axe into the stump, dusted off his hands, and turned to face her.
“You know, idle hands?”
She sighed. “I’m worried about Rider. We should make sure he’s okay.”
Gage looked down and shook his head. “CB radio, HAMM radio, and cellphones don’t work up here. If he has a problem, he’ll use the flares.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I have a bad feeling.”
Gage sighed and slumped his shoulders.
“Or you have a little faith that your friend, who is far stronger than either you or he believes, can meet the demands of his own fate.”
She shook her head. “You’re saying that we should just leave him there?”
He looked up to the gray sky as if he were asking divinity for help and then dropped his head and stared at her.
“How long have you been around now, since the 1930s?”
Her mouth fell open.
He smirked. She had the feeling that his out-of-turn crack revealing his deep knowledge of her situation was intentional.
He cocked his head to the side. “You have not yet surmised that these things simply tend to work themselves out especially when fate is involved.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “I know that you’re not a Park Ranger and that this is not your cabin. So why have you been lying?”
He rolled his eyes and turned away from her.
“If I told you the truth about my intentions and who I am, you would have tried to harm me.”
Amelia’s eyes bulged. “Who are you?”
He shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I’m here to help you. As it happens, your interests and mine coincide.”
Amelia glared at him. “Leave and never return, or I will destroy you.”
Gage smiled and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “That’s not going to work on me. For one thing, virtue or not, I’m much more powerful than you are. For another, I’m bound to a physical body, which makes me practically invincible to anyone but Daddy. You can thank the sissies for that.”
Amelia turned and started back the way she came.
“Where do you think you’re goi
ng?”
She turned and eyed him. “To help my friend.”
He looked down at the ground and shook his head again.
At once, he stood inches away from her peering into her eyes.
“You’re going to wait here with me. If he’s not back in three days, we’ll go look for him, but I don’t believe we’ll have a problem with that. He’s wicked powerful, and this isn’t part of your journey now.”
Her mouth fell open. “Helping my friend expose the Sisters of Divinity is a part of my journey.”
Gage bunched his lips and shook his head. “He’ll expose nothing. That’s not what he’s here to do, and this was only a part of your journey up until you saw him safely to the mountain. The next leg of your journey lies down South.”
She glared into his eyes. “Let me go, or I’ll move you.”
He gave her a sad look. “No. One way or another, you’re cooling your heels here with me until Father Fury returns.”
She glowered at him. “You don’t have the juice.”
A glint of mischief filled his eyes. “No?”
Amelia had a sudden swift sinking feeling.
Darkness surrounded her.
When her vision cleared, she found herself trapped in a Pentacle like the vault the sisters used the last time they captured her, inside the lean-to on the back of the cabin.
Gage stood at the open door smiling like a demon.
“Now, you just sit here in time-out until you decide not to disobey Uncle Lucifer.”
“Lucifer?”
“Oh, yes of course,” he replied as if he’d forgotten an important point.
He bowed. “At your service.”
Rider stopped cold in his tracks. Twenty feet in front of him, an adult black bear stood in his path. Rider always heard that the best thing to do with a black bear is to freeze, so that’s what he did.
The giant mammal craned its head in his direction and sniffed the air with its dry, black nose. Rider thought his heart would pound out of his chest.
The beast – one of the few creatures on God’s earth that truly was a monster – turned its body toward him and advanced lazily.
Slowly, Rider slipped the rifle off his shoulder and assumed a firing position.
The bear stopped ten feet away sniffing the air again.
Rider swallowed hard and peered through the sites. He knew he would only get one shot at the massive animal should this encounter turn violent, and his hands shook with fear.
