Rising Dark (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 2)

by A. D. Koboah

  I noticed something odd about the walls and moved closer. The walls hadn’t been painted black, but something had been written over the walls in black ink. I peered at it, my brow creasing. Then I moved to another wall and stared at it. No, I wasn’t mistaken. She had written the twenty-third psalm over and over again, covering nearly every inch of the wall. It was the same with the floor. And the books stacked against the wall? Bibles of different sizes and translations.

  I moved to where she lay and gazed at her sadly, admiring her hands, which were long and slender like Luna’s.

  Drugs, her mother had told me. She had been dabbling in drink and drugs ever since her late teens. It seemed as if she had beaten it. But then, a few months ago, she began acting strangely, isolated herself from everyone and they suspected she had descended back into the lure of drugs once more.

  Abruptly, she gasped and then bolted out of sleep staring straight at me. Terror flamed in her delicate, soft brown eyes as she stared at me, her mouth working as if to scream, but no sound came out.

  “Ebony, I’m a friend,” I said as gently as I could. “You have a sixth sense, like your mother, you should be able to tell that I am a friend.”

  Her features relaxed as the truth of my words infused her mind and the terror began to recede.

  “You’re not him?”

  “Who?”

  She reached for a Bible that had been placed under her pillow. The page was already open on the twenty-third psalm. She began reading it, mumbling it under her breath.

  I knelt before her. The pungent smell of her body odour filled my nostrils. It was clear she had not bathed in a few days.

  “Who?” I asked again.

  She glanced up, mildly surprised at finding me there and gazed at me in confusion.

  “I don’t know if it’s a he or a she.” She appeared distracted, as if any moment away from her Bible was squandered. “I don’t think even he knows. It’s been so long since—”

  She stopped abruptly, appearing to have forgotten about me again and was listening for something. It was only then that something struck me. I had been around drug users and the drug, like so many other chemicals humans ingested, could often be smelt in their blood. I didn’t smell that on her. I had chosen to respect her privacy when I entered the house and had closed her mind to mine, but there was clearly something keeping her from focusing on her surroundings. So I looked into her mind.

  What I saw there made me go cold.

  I saw the underground chamber in the chapel. Corpses were nailed to every wall and were hanging from the ceiling. Their faces were frozen in the same mask of terror and there was blood everywhere. The sconces surrounding the gold altar were lit and the flames were moving, dipping and leaping unnaturally as if they had a malignant will of their own.

  I recoiled from the vision and backed out of her mind at the same time she screamed. She clutched at her throat, as if terror had just yanked her under water.

  “Ebony,” I grasped her by the arms. “Calm down. I told you. I am a friend.”

  Even as I said those words, I realised she was looking past me and that her blinding terror had nothing to do with me.

  “He’s coming. He’s coming!” she screamed, wrenching herself out of my grasp.

  She scrambled on her knees to one of the stacks of Bibles and knocked it down, reaching for the Bible on the bottom. I straightened as she abruptly faced me, the Bible clutched to her chest.

  She was still, her gaze lucid as she stared at me.

  “You,” she whispered. “It wants you. It wants you dead.” The horror returned as quickly as before and she got to her feet. “It’s here! It’s here. You have to leave! Now!”

  “Not without you!”

  I went to grasp her, to pull both of us out of the room when she screamed again.

  “Noooooo! He’ll kill you!”

  Before I could touch her, she pushed me. Behind that push was a torrent of telekinetic energy. I was flung back with such force that when I hit the window, its casing cracked beneath my weight and I was thrown out of the house.

  Her screams reached me before I hit the ground. Piercing shrieks of unadulterated pain that dug into me, making my stomach contract in anxiety. Chaos appeared to erupt within the room I had been thrown out of and I heard the sound of things being smashed as if a herd of wildebeest had entered the room in my absence.

  I was on my feet and into the ether. The room was flowing into being around me when I found myself thrown out of it again. This time when I hit the ground, it had gone silent. As bad as the screams had been, the silence was much worse. Panic surged within me and I was on my feet again.

  This time, I was able to enter the room. The scent of steaming fresh blood filled my nostrils before the room finished coming into being around me. The sight that greeted me was one of the worst I have seen in my long years on this Earth.

  The black walls and floor were splattered with blood. Even worse, what was left of Ebony littered the floor. Next to my foot was part of her jaw. Half a hand lay to my left. There wasn’t a part of her that was larger than my fist in the gore that splattered the walls and floor.

  I shimmered out of the room into the humid night air, but I could still smell the bloodied room I had left behind. Never had the scent of blood filled me with such nausea as it did now. I dove into the nothingness.

  ***

  Augusta glanced at me for a long moment when she opened the front door.

  “It ain’t good news, is it?”

  I shook my head. She let me inside.

  She waited silently in the chair by the fridge in the kitchen after I sat down. I took a few moments to try and compose myself. It seemed a lifetime had passed since I had been in this very room, although it had only been a few hours.

  “She’s dead,” I said abruptly, there being no other way to give her such devastating news.

  She didn’t move, her bottom lip trembled and it appeared as if she fought back tears as she nodded.

  “She’s with the angels now.” Her voice wavered as she spoke. “My baby’s at peace now.”

  I let the silence gather for a few moments, wishing I could leave the suddenly too-small kitchen and the weight of her unexpressed grief. But I had to tell her the rest. I had to try and find out as much as I could about Ebony’s life, and that terrifying image of the chapel I had seen in her mind before she pushed me out of the house, probably saving my life.

  “Augusta, there is more. There is something very...odd about the way she died.”

  “Well, I worked that one out. Why else would you be sitting there looking as if you’s about ready to wet your pants?”

  “Have you ever had dreams of this place before?” I showed her a very brief image of the outside of the chapel.

  She drew in air sharply and the colour seemed to drain from her leaving her skin looking ashen. For a moment I thought she was going to collapse.

  “Augusta?” She met my gaze, hers slightly cloudy.

  “I used to. Before I had Ebony. They stopped the day she was born.”

  The significance of that statement left both of us silent.

  “How did she die?” she finally asked.

  “Something killed her.”

  “The thing from that place?”

  “I...I cannot be sure. I thought it had been beaten, that it did not have the power I...I...saw tonight. In fact, I do not understand how this could happen.”

  “It uses our power,” she said abruptly, as if a sudden spark of inspiration had come to her. “I always said my Ebony had gifts. It has its own power, but it can’t do nothing unless it’s through a living person.”

  “I need you to talk to as many of the family as you can. Find out if anyone else has been dreaming of the chapel. There is also something else you need to know.” I inhaled and was suddenly speechless, unable to find the courage to tell her the rest.

  “Just say it!”

  “Her...her body. It did not leave very much of he
r remains...intact.”

  She took a breath and her composure seemed to crumble. But she held on to it although a tear slid down one cheek.

  “So she suffered.”

  “Not for long. She protected me. She was able to use her gifts to throw me out of the window, and she prevented me from re-entering until...”

  It seemed she barely heard. She was looking off to a distant place.

  “Is there anyone I can call? I would rather not leave you here on your own.”

  “Lawrence. I’ll call him and tell him his sister’s with the angels now.”

  I rose as she moved to the telephone by the fridge. There being not much more for me to say, I made to leave. She stopped me when I got to the kitchen door.

  “Mr Wentworth. You make sure you find out what this thing is and send it back to hell where it belongs.”

  “I will not rest until I do.”

  She nodded and turned back to the phone.

  I left the house.

  I stood outside in the deserted street. It was quiet outside but, as always, my vampiric hearing picked up signs of life. Couples caught in the throes of lovemaking, heavy snores, gurgling noises made by the indoor plumbing in the homes around me as well as the breathing of multiple bodies in deep slumber. I caught fragments, ghosts of disjointed thoughts and dreams through the night air and Augusta clearly as she connected to her son. I chose not to remain and listen. I escaped the town, moving swiftly until I was away from the claustrophobic homes and in the clear, empty open spaces of the Louisiana countryside. I stopped by one of the bayous and stood in the ghostly moonlight beneath the weeping foliage. Glancing up at the moon, I realised that for the first time in my life, I was completely alone. There were no visions of Luna to keep me moving forward through a wilderness of despair. Mama and her wisdom, strength and insight seemed far from me too. And Lina was long gone.

  In that moment, my loss overwhelmed me. Whether she was the young frightened woman I had chanced across praying at the chapel, the angry, vengeful vampire spinning out of control, or the subdued, contrite woman that had visited me, her remorse and love laid bare like an open flower trembling in the breeze, I desperately needed Luna. I was so woefully unprepared and inadequate to deal with this new threat and lives depended on me. I wanted to curl into a ball and weep. But there was no time for it. Lives had already been lost. I ran back to the mansion.

  Chapter 44

  It took years to discover fully what had been happening. Another three members of the Marshall family died horrifically during that time. I was always too late to save them. Along with what Augusta was able to find out, I did some research of my own, visiting as many of the family as I could, often guided by images of family members Mama sent me and, at other times, dreams or intuitions the family members I spoke to were able to give me.

  From what I had gathered, the entity from the chapel was trying to be reborn through one of Luna’s descendants. It usually began by trying to possess them. When that failed, it drove them to madness, or despair, or killed them brutally. The first sign I was able to find of this dark thread that had interwoven itself in the bright fabric of the Marshall families’ lives, were the random disappearances of family members who were isolated from the fold or had somehow gone astray. There were also the odd suicides. Looking through the information I had gathered, I realised that the disappearances began during the years Luna had walked out of my life. That was also no coincidence. It had used that period when she had been distracted by her own hatred and anger to begin attacking the family.

  Luna had been able to control it. Her descendants were not aware of what it was, or of their latent powers, and so could have no idea where to start or of how to subdue it. And it had grown stronger over the years.

  Thrown into a new wilderness, a valley which held untold depths of cloying dread, I remained present for Mallory’s sake and continued to take care of her. Soon she was away at college. I spent every second I could spare researching the supernatural in order to try and find out all I could about exactly what the entity residing at the chapel was, and how I could vanquish it.

  It was 1983 and Mallory had turned twenty. She was home from college for Christmas. She had spent the last few Christmases with Bernice, who no longer worked for us, and so it was a pleasure to have her home for Christmas that year. Especially since it would probably be the last Christmas we would spend together. I could deceive the people around me, changing staff regularly and it was easy to acquire false documents and assume different identities as the years passed. But it had been over eleven years since I had come across Mallory outside the mansion, and I had not aged in all those years. It was only a matter of time before her highly intuitive mind began to notice, once again, that I was “different.” I did not want her burdened with the secrets of the undead. So I had to ease her out of my life and be alone once more.

  When I awoke that evening, Mallory was waiting for me in the dining room.

  “Good evening, Mallory,” I said when I entered, distracted by a letter that had arrived from England.

  “Good evening, Uncle Avery. Can I speak to you for a moment?”

  My gaze was on the letter before me. I turned around, moving back toward the door. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  I was walking down the corridor before I realised what had just happened. I rushed back to the dining room. She was sitting at the dining table dressed in jeans and a royal blue jumper, looking expectantly up at me. I stared at her in surprise for a few moments before I moved to sit opposite her.

  “You can speak?” I said.

  She nodded. I had been hearing her mental voice for so long that I hadn’t realised how beautiful her real voice was.

  “But why...?”

  She sighed heavily, her mind on her hazy recollections of those days spent with her mother’s corpse, the mounting dread that weighed down her heart whenever morning came and her mother had not awoken. The only thing she remembered clearly was the intense feeling of safety she experienced outside the mansion when I picked her up and carried her inside.

  “It was silly, really. But I knew you could hear me and it was a way for me to be close to you because no one could hear me but you. But I wanted to talk to you today, I have done for years. I know you can make me forget about this conversation, like you’ve done before, but you don’t have to. I’m not a child anymore, Uncle Avery and I want you to know you can trust me. And I get scared sometimes, that I’ll wake up one morning and you’ll be gone and I won’t even remember you. I don’t want that to happen. You’ve been there for me, so let me be here for you.”

  She exhaled deeply after her little speech. I reached for her hand.

  “I would have never done that...well, not in that way. But you remaining close to me...it may not be good for you.”

  Anxiety flittered across her features, but she nodded, although she appeared to be greatly unhappy.

  “Mallory, you mean a great deal to me. I don’t want to push you out of my life. But I need to think about what would be best—for you.”

  She stared at me carefully and the anxiety passed away. Perhaps she already knew what I had not decided yet, that I would not make her forget the conversation we’d had, or push her out of my life.

  I got to my feet. “We’ll talk more later.”

  “There is one thing I’ve always wondered about,” she said. “When I was twelve something happened. Did it have anything to do with the woman who came to see you that time? Luna?”

  Even hearing her name after so long brought heart-wrenching pain. I nodded. She said no more, just stared at me.

  “We’ll talk more later,” I repeated, kissed her on the forehead, and left the room.

  The image of Henriette’s broken body entered my mind as I moved down the corridor, but it was not enough to rid me of the stubborn, selfish joy that had asserted itself. I did not have to push Mallory out of my world. I needed her. I could not be alone when there was so much darkness ahead
.

  When she returned to college after the Christmas break, I left Louisiana to continue to look for a way to vanquish the chapel entity. I searched for witch after witch, but none of them knew what to do and most were too afraid of whatever this thing was to attempt to exorcise its hold on Luna’s descendants. Auria was the only hope I had of discovering what this being was. But although I searched the world for her and the son she had spoken of to Emory, I never found her.

  When I ended the search for Auria in 1994, another five of Luna’s descendants had perished. Unless I could find a way to stop this thing, they would all meet horrific fates at its hands.

  An article I had seen in the paper that day seemed trivial in comparison to the problem of the chapel entity, but I decided to pack a bag and go to New York. Another of Luna’s descendants, Ella Marshall-Simmons, had been receiving death threats of late and it had been reported that an attack had been made on her life a few days ago.

  Ella was the owner of a global cosmetics company. She was a strong, mercurial businesswoman who had received her fair share of intimidation on her rise to the top. I knew this because I had dealt with some of her more serious opponents. She was not a woman who showed fear of anything. So it was unusual that she had let this story become public knowledge. Mama usually warned me whenever there was a serious threat of any kind to one of her descendants and I had not had any dreams of Mama for the last month.

  It was odd, but I got on a plane anyway and made my way to New York. I got there before dusk and remained outside the mansion on Fifth Avenue, searching the thoughts of its residents and keeping a close watch on anyone entering or leaving the premises. Most of the residents of the mansion had gone to bed by midnight. But Ella remained in her study on the ground floor. I materialised in one of the living rooms on the first floor and went to the window, where I could look out on the street below.