Kingdom of Shadows

-9-

The flashlight beam slides along the dirty floor to the door under the stairs. An inverted pentagram has been painted across it in blood. Above it and to the left, also in blood, are the numbers 666 and a series of words Rooster cannot decipher.

“Oh hell no, that’s Devil shit right there.” Snow backs away.

Rooster studies the words scrawled on the door. “What language is that?”

“Latin.”

They all look to Starker. The giant shrugs. “I took it in high school you ignorant motherfuckers.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” Starker finds Rooster in the darkness behind him. “Supposedly that’s what it says at the gates of Hell.”

“Why would somebody put that there?” Nauls asks in a panic.

“Probably a bunch of drugged-out, loser, never been laid, douche bag, Devil-worshipping-wannabes.” Landon pushes past the others. “Who gives a shit? If we’re doing this let’s get it over with.”

With that, Starker steadies his stance then kicks in the door. It implodes and tears from its hinges with a loud cracking, splintering sound, tumbling away into darkness down another set of stairs. They hear it land seconds later as an enormous cloud of dust and dirt kicks up in response, wafting out the open doorway and bursting into the room. A stale mildew odor is followed by a pungent smell similar to rotting garbage and raw sewage. They cough, block their nostrils then huddle together in the limited light until the stench weakens and the farmhouse is returned to eerie silence.

No one speaks, but before anyone can motion Nauls to lead the way with the flashlight, he hands it to Rooster. With a sigh, Rooster takes the lead, the light in one hand and his 9mm in the other. He steps through, aims the light and sees a small set of wooden stairs. Beyond them is a cement landing and what appears to be a corridor he and the others were somehow already aware of.

He begins his descent. Starker is behind him, his weight shaking the staircase with each step. Next is Landon. Snow and Nauls pull up the rear.

They reach the corridor without incident. Rooster pans the light along the walls. Several doors line either side. The far end of the hallway is draped in a darkness that the flashlight is unable to penetrate from this distance. The fear and danger is palpable now, a spiritual entity unmistakably alive and horrific, real, it drifts and moves around them like liquid, invisible to the naked eye but without question, present. Rooster sweeps the light along one wall and then the next, as together, the crew slowly moves deeper into the corridor. All the doors are closed.

Except one. He places the light on it. This door is ajar.

Rooster uses hand motions to let the others know what needs to be done. He sends Starker to the left side of the doorway, Snow to the right. Rooster then crouches, facing the door head-on while Landon covers his back and Nauls watches the section of hallway and stairs behind them.

Starker holds the AK-47 in one hand and raises the other into the light so everyone can see. Slowly, he counts off, raising one finger, then another and finally a third. A quick nod, and the crew springs into action, rushing into the room with weapons at the ready and the flashlight leading the way.

Silence returns. A mocking silence…

The light trembles in Rooster’s hand. But they see. They all see.

A series of metal slabs like something out of a coroner’s workshop, bodies atop them in hospital johnnies, IVs attached to their arms pumping some clear fluid into their veins, oxygen tubes implanted in their nostrils, wires running from their heads and chests and limbs to machines and computers along the far wall, all of it organized and functioning in the dark bowels of an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Six metal tables. Six men.

“God in Heaven,” someone says in a desperate whisper. “It’s us.”

It might’ve been hours, might’ve been days.

He could no longer tell the difference.

The rain had stopped and the air was still, but it had gotten much colder. Bundled in a heavy coat and knit hat, the briefcase in his free hand, Rooster stood arm-in-arm with Gaby before a fresh grave. Dressed in a black dress and heels, her face partially covered with a lace veil, moments before she had placed flowers where a headstone should’ve been. Her lips moved in silent prayer behind the veil, dark eyes lowered. No one else was there. A life, Snow’s life, had ended. Here, at this unmarked grave. And no one cared. It was like he’d never really been there at all.

Gaby finished her prayers, and together, they turned to leave.

It was then that Rooster saw them. Across the sea of headstones, crypts and monuments to the dead, two men watched them, their breath converted to spiraling clouds rising from their bodies like fleeing souls.

Gaby saw them, too. “Do what you have to do.” She lifted the veil, rose up on her toes so she could reach, and kissed his cheek. “I love you.”

As she moved away toward the gates of the cemetery, the men started toward him. Rooster lit a cigarette and smoked it until they reached him.

They looked the same.

Landon stared at him, said nothing.

“Hey, Rooster,” Nauls offered, scratching at his beard and smiling nervously, eyes concealed behind the usual sunglasses. “Good to see you, bro.”

“Good to see you too, Nauls.”

“That is so precious—seriously—I think I just tinkled a little. How about we save the group hug for later and you two can finish jerking each other’s gherkins then, OK?” Landon stepped closer. “Paper said the hit-and-run was probably an accident, driver just panicked. I say kiss my celluloid-dimpled ass, whoever hit Snow did it on purpose. Can’t blame them—I would’ve run the prick over if he stepped in front of my car too—but sounds like somebody took him out to me.”

Rooster took a final drag on his cigarette then dropped it and crushed it out with his boot. “They did.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“I’m not sure yet, but—”

“You heard about Starker?”

“Snow said he killed his old lady and ran to Mexico.”

“He never got that far. Big bastard was hiding out in a fleabag motel right here in the city. They found him a few weeks back, in the bathtub, wrists slashed clear to the bone. Sorry, I’m not buying that one either. Same fuckers probably did him too.”

“I keep having these dreams,” Nauls blurted out. “Nightmares, I—”

Landon held a hand up like a crossing guard. “Let the grownups talk.”

“Fuck you, man! You’re having them too. Tell him. Tell him.”

Landon defiantly bit his lip and looked away.

“Rooster,” Nauls said, barely able to contain his tears, “I’ve been having these dreams. There’s all this screaming and yelling and blood and horrible shit. Then it gets dark and I can’t see. I can’t move, I can’t even breathe and it feels like I’m being smothered. I try to open my mouth to scream only I can’t. My mouth, it’s—somebody’s sewn it shut. Who would—the bad dreams won’t stop, they—I’m even starting to have them when I’m awake, I—”

“We all are,” Rooster said evenly.

Nauls ran a hand through his tangle of hair. “Every time I leave the house I see this chick and this older dude, they’re dressed like they work in an office or a bank or something and they follow me and want to talk to me, but there’s something not right about them. They look so familiar only I don’t know who they are. And Landon, he—he don’t drive no more. Landon don’t drive. He can’t. Every time he gets behind the wheel of a car he sees this lady holding a baby.”

“She’s on every fucking corner just staring at me.” Landon became visibly shaken as his resistance fell away. “I know her from somewhere but…I’m pretty sure the baby’s dead.”

“What’s happening?” Nauls asked. “What happened to us that night at the farmhouse? We can’t remember nothing but bits and pieces.”

“I’ve got something to show you,” Rooster said softly, as if the dead might otherwise hear. He held up the briefcase.

“What’s that?”

“The truth.”

“This isn’t possible,” Landon mumbles.

As if in a trance, Snow approaches the last table, the only one covered with a white sheet which has apparently been thrown there to conceal Carbone’s body. “Carbone’s dead,” he says. “He’s dead, and he’s back in that van.”

Mesmerized, the others gawk at their likenesses on the tables before them, confusion and fear igniting as one and slashing at them like razorblades. Rooster cocks his head, studying his own face just feet away, eyes closed and face void of expression as if in the throes of a deep, drug-induced sleep.

Inches from the covered metal table, Snow pokes at the sheet with one of his .45s. The sheet begins to shake in response, as whatever lies beneath convulses. Horrified, Snow yanks back the sheet.

Sans johnny, wires and tubes, Carbone’s nude body lies quivering violently on the table. His lower abdomen and sexual organs are ripped to shreds, and the remainder of his body has sustained thousands of small but horribly deep serrated cuts, as if it’s been wrapped in barbed wire then torn free. The lacerations, many blackened and scabbed over, others fresh and still bleeding, form a crisscross pattern on his savaged skin that is as strangely alluring in its symmetry as it is appalling in its brutality.

As Snow backs away, both .45s locked on the body, Carbone suddenly sits up, vaulting forward. His eyes open but they are empty raw sockets. He continues to spasm uncontrollably in seizure. “He’s coming.” His voice is no longer exclusively his own, but many, and sounds as if it is stacked atop countless others, giving it an unsettling echo-like, inhuman tone. “He’s coming…”

Hands to his ears, Nauls stumbles back into the hallway like a terrified child.

“Shoot it!” Landon screams.

Snow is frozen in place.

“He knows who we really are,” it says. “He knows the things we’ve done. Our secrets, he knows them all. He’s coming…”

“God help us,” Rooster mutters.

“God?” Carbone turns what remains of his butchered face in the direction of Rooster’s voice. His split lips curl into a hideous, bloody-toothed grin.

Starker levels the AK-47 and unloads.

The discharge is deafening in such an enclosed space, and sends the body tumbling from the metal slab. It crashes to the floor as if boneless, flesh slapping cement floor as the impact empties the remains of its internal organs from the body cavity.

From the corridor behind them, Nauls begins to scream.

At the outskirts of the city, on a lonely dirt road, Rooster leaned against Nauls’ car and smoked a cigarette. He’d waited as Nauls and Landon poured over the material in the briefcase, then he answered their questions as best he could. Both men exchanged uncertain glances throughout, and now stood watching Rooster as if expecting him to tell them what to do next.

“They used us like lab animals,” Rooster finally said. “They wiped our minds clean, and now that we’re starting to remember they’re taking us out one by one. They figure they can toss us aside like garbage.”

“We are garbage,” Nauls replied quietly.

“Maybe so, but we never even got the chance to make things right, to—”

“What?” Landon interjected. “Repent? Save our souls? Deliver ourselves from evil like this Poindexter dude told you?”

Rooster stared at him.

“Maybe that’s exactly what we’re doing right now,” Landon said.

A breeze blew past, causing nearby trees to whisper and sway.

“We have to go back,” Rooster said.

“To the farmhouse, are you serious?” Landon gave a wry smile. “You want to go back there?”

Rooster nodded, smoke curling around his head like creeping vines. “You think you could find it again after all this time?”

“Yeah.” Landon looked to Nauls but he had his back to him. “I can find it.”

He hadn’t expected Landon to be so adamant. But then he hadn’t expected his and Nauls’ nearly blasé reaction to the things he’d told them either. Something had changed since they’d driven out here. The moment he’d agreed to go with them they no longer seemed quite as upset as they’d been initially. He dropped his cigarette and pushed away from the car. “You’re sure?”

“Rooster, I…we’ve…been there since.”

“You’ve been back there since that night?”

“You don’t understand,” Landon said. “We never left.”

Running… screams… confusion…

Panic explodes through the darkness…

The flashlight bounces, throwing strobe-like splashes of light along the corridor, floors, walls and ceiling before finally settling on Nauls. His face protrudes from the darkness, eyes closed but with a look of horrific pain. Blood slowly trickles from his nostrils into his beard.

The others scramble about trying to cover the corridor. Landon frantically knocks Snow out of the way and climbs the stairs back to the house.

Nauls opens his eyes. “He’s here,” he says in a loud whisper.

His body begins to shake. Slowly at first but gradually building in intensity, he begins to buck, wracked with increasingly violent spasms. His thin frame twists as he flails about, and his weapon falls to the floor. He brings his shaking hands to his face, screams and stabs his fingers directly into his eyes.

Rooster reaches out in an effort to stop him, but it’s too late.

Nauls tears his eyes from their sockets with a spray of blood and fluid, his screams replaced with laughter as his spasms grow worse and he begins to spin like a top.

“Jesus God!” Snow shrieks, falling away in horror.

“Go!” Starker grabs Snow and throws him toward the stairs. “Go!”

Rooster stands paralyzed, holding the flashlight on Nauls, who comes to rest, laughing through the blood and pain, holding an eyeball in each hand as if in offering, hideous moist strings dangling from them and dripping blood. “We’re going where there are no eyes,” he says, his voice little more than a garbled growl now. “Where everyone is blind… yet everyone sees.”

Blood suddenly spews from his mouth, eye sockets, nose and ears. Like something has exploded deep inside him, the blood sprays free as his screams return, this time as raspy, animal-like squeals. “He’s here,” he gurgles, choking on the blood as it pours out over his bottom lip. “He’s—”

Nauls flies backwards, crashes into the far wall like he’s been thrown by something savage and powerful. His body slides to the floor, swallowed by the shadows there.

Rooster feels Starker’s enormous hand clamp onto his arm and yank him back just before he fires a burst from the AK-47 into the darkness. Together, they run for the stairs. “Don’t look back!” Starker yells out.

But it no longer matters.

The darkness, and all that dwells within it, follows.

In the room upstairs, Snow lurches about, lost in the dark, his guns at his side and his mouth open, soundlessly forming words—perhaps prayers—while something speaks to him from the surrounding shadows only he can hear. The voice of a woman, a young woman asking him why, her voice oddly hollow as she shuffles about nearby, hidden in darkness, her breath cold and rapid on the back of his neck. But when Snow turns there is only night, moonlight and fog beyond the blown-out windows. The scarecrows watch a field of weeds, a dead forest and a path to nowhere, an empty road no one will ever cross again.

The voice, different now—neither male nor female and no longer entirely human—whispers his name.

Snow wants to run for the door but can’t move. He knows, understands for the first time, what is coming, and still cannot move. He trembles and begins to urinate. As the .45s drop from his hands the fire appears from nowhere, sweeping over the ceiling then down the wall and across him, engulfing his body in seconds. Oddly, Snow feels no burning sensation, no pain, only sorrow and hopelessness the depths of which he never believed possible. He stumbles, flaming arms and hands held out in front of him as if to embrace some invisible presence. He sinks to his knees. Eyes wide, he stares at something through the growing inferno and laughs maniacally.

The last thing Snow sees is Starker and Rooster rushing up the stairs.

Outside, Landon runs with all his might, the tall grass and overgrown weeds slowing him as he wades toward the road. The van, he thinks, just have to make it to the van and I’m free. He ignores the scarecrows’ dead stares and does not look back, even when he’s certain there is something right behind him, closing in with impossible speed and ready to swoop down and pluck him from the field like a hawk closing in on a mouse. He bolts through the last bit of field and jumps the final embankment down to the road. Pitching forward on landing, he catches himself, and now on pavement, takes a quick look back. No one coming, nothing behind him. He pulls the revolver from his belt just in case, sees the farmhouse in the distance. It’s on fire, the flames creeping up through the roof, lapping night. He turns and runs for the van but pulls up short after only a few strides. It’s gone. He looks around frantically. This isn’t possible. He parked it there himself, out of the way, just as Rooster instructed.

“Yeah, I need this shit.” He heads off down the road, running right down the center lane through the darkness; the fog-shrouded moon his only guide. Every now and then he looks back. The farmhouse, the scarecrows and the fire grow fainter and fainter until the night swallows them whole and he is alone in the darkness.

He slows his pace a few minutes later, finally opting for a fast walk. His chest heaves as he tries to catch his breath and a sharp pain digs at his side. Landon keeps moving, knowing eventually he’s bound to run into something—a car, a house—anything. He notices a slight incline to the road. He pushes on, trying to forget the things he saw back there. All he needs is a car. He can hotwire anything and be long gone from this place for good. He kicks it back up a notch, jogging up and over the sloped portion of road. In the distance, he sees an outline of a building. Set back quite a distance from the road, it is merely a silhouette, but a hulking one. Must be a house, he reasons, then increases speed and veers off pavement onto grass.

Running across the field, he watches it become more and more defined the closer he gets. Within minutes Landon realizes it’s a barn.

Beyond it is a farmhouse.

A farmhouse guarded by scarecrows…a farmhouse in flames.

“No fucking way.” He comes to a stop between the barn and the house. He’s gone in a circle, but how is that possible? He ran straight and in the opposite direction the entire time.

Shadows drift through the weeds before him. Landon steps back and raises the revolver. He can hear screams and smells a suspicious burning odor. Beyond that of burned wood, it is sickeningly sweet and similar to the stench of charred meat.

A baby cries somewhere nearby. Landon whirls in the direction to find only darkness. Blind with terror, he runs but trips over something and pitches forward into the grass and dirt. He scrambles to his feet, sees what he fell over. A wooden stake…a cross of wood…

The scarecrow, he thinks, his mind shattering. It’s gone.

From behind him, shuffling movement.

A strange shape comes toward him through the tall grass, hobbling like a crippled man.

Only this is not a man.

Landon fires the revolver. Keeps firing even when the revolver is empty and makes only clicking sounds.

And then something coarse covers his head, cold dead hands wrap around his throat and he hears another scream shred the night, unaware that this one is his own.

In the farmhouse, Starker and Rooster run through the burning front room, trying to find a way out in all the madness and confusion. The darkness is alive, shifting and thick with the shrieking cries of countless dead, nameless lost souls all wailing in the night with violent fury. Rooster sees a pillar of fire and realizes it is Snow kneeling before them, his body wrapped in blankets of flame.

Like a cold winter wind, something follows them up the stairs, gusts into the room and cuts through them. It feeds the flames and Snow’s body becomes a firestorm. Yet he doesn’t topple. Instead he struggles slowly to his feet.

Rooster shoots him, emptying his gun.

Snow finally topples over and the fire spreads, racing up the walls and along the floor in search of more victims.

The strange wind passes, surging out to the field beyond the doorway, and Rooster feels some part of himself go with it. He stumbles after it, dazed and fighting the gripping cold suddenly rising from the depths of his body. He finds Starker standing next to Snow’s body, staring at it with a strange look of…satisfaction? He throws the AK-47 aside, drops down, and eyes ablaze with passion claws at the burned heap that had once been Snow, ripping charred meat in stringy handfuls he hungrily devours.

And as the fire spreads, Rooster understands. He feels it too. Lust not for sex but violence, death, mayhem, destruction and pain…as if these things have been his destiny all along. Rather than reload the 9mm, he drops it and reaches for a combat knife tucked in his boot. He slides it free, already salivating as he closes on Starker.

Behind him, Nauls slowly ascends the stairs, his hollow eyes piercing the smoke and darkness, his mouth twisted into a hideous demonic smile.

Rooster slams the blade deep into Starker’s lower back, pulls it free and stabs him again. He seems not to notice at first, but then collapses from his knees to his side and lies there laughing, his large teeth bright in the darkness and caked with blood and human flesh.

As Rooster sets to work on him, gutting Starker from throat to pelvis, Nauls moves past, through the fire and out the doorway to the field.

His feet do not touch the floor.

Rooster focuses on Starker’s laughter. No—not laughter—not anymore, cries now, screams. Beautiful screams…his face and bald head covered in blood as he spits and slobbers, each scream more horrific than the last. As Rooster tears at the enormous incision then plunges his hands inside the body, Starker chokes on the bodily fluids bubbling up into his throat and begs for mercy.

But all Rooster hears are the shrieks of souls trapped in the darkness and flames surrounding him.

Cords of intestines clutched in one hand and the knife in the other, he leaves Starker’s now silent but convulsing body and slowly approaches the doorway. Darkness waits…a field of tall grass and weeds…six wooden crosses…three with fresh scarecrows nailed to them…three still waiting…

Rooster begins to laugh, bringing the intestines to his lips and eating as he steps out of the flames and into the night.

Somewhere within the hurricane of violence and howling souls, a frantic, familiar and decidedly human voice screams for salvation.

Visions of demonic creatures—some human, some not, and others still stranded at various horrific points between the two—flashed through his mind. Held in rusty metal cages, pinned, strapped or chained to medieval devices of torture and imprisonment, the creatures gawked at him in horror, several deathly still, others violently struggling to free themselves, all of them moist with blood, urine and excrement, their bodies grotesquely deformed and savaged.

The terrifying chambers of blood and death dissolved; became a roadside.

Landon had already gone quite a ways up the incline on the side of the road and looked back as if he expected Rooster to follow. But Rooster knew now what lay on the other side of the tall grass blowing in the wind behind him.

With a shrug, Landon held his arms out like the victim of crucifixion and backed away over the ridge, vanishing from sight.

Nauls turned to him, removed his sunglasses.

We’re going where there are no eyes…

His eyes were gone, just empty sockets.

Where everyone is blind…yet everyone sees.

Without warning his body shook with impossible velocity, transforming him into little more than a blur before he again fell still. “Come with us,” Nauls said. “We’ll all figure this out together.”

Rooster shook his head no.

Nauls slid his sunglasses back on, slowly walked up the embankment after Landon then hesitated and looked back. “You really think you have a choice?”

“That’s all any of us have.”

Nauls reached into his jacket pocket, pulled free the car keys and tossed them to Rooster. “We’ll be waiting,” he said sadly. “Forever.”