DARKNESS VISIBLE

by Carlton Herzog
 
 
I
 
PRIOR TO RECENT events, I had never given much thought to the paranormal. Whether spooks existed didn’t seem to matter since they never did anything of consequence in the material world. Nor did they seem predisposed to impart any secret knowledge about the nature of things, either here or in the hereafter. I relegated poltergeists to the trash heap of the not worth knowing, along with aliens, Atlantis, and Bigfoot. That all changed with the events at 14 Peacock Lane.

My partner and arrived after the fact. It seems that the occupant of 16 Peacock Lane had heard a ruckus next door. When she came out to investigate, she found that ‘My next-door neighbour’s house was vibrating like a great tuning fork and seemed to be fading in and out of existence. I heard bangs and crashes followed by screams. I was not about to go over there. So, I called the police.’

Mind you, my partner and I were not the first on the scene. Patrol officers responded first. When no one answered the door, they tried to open it without success even though it was not locked. They found the same problem with the rear door. Naturally, they called the Fire Department, and, with aid of an axe, broke through the kitchen door.

The Fire Chief provided a graphic description of what they found inside.

‘I have been in many houses over the years. Houses where people had been burned to a crisp and crumpled into a foetal position with their mouths open as if still screaming. But in all that time, I never felt anything beyond remorse at the loss of life. Here, even before we entered, I could feel the residue of an evil presence. It poisoned my lungs, stung my eyes, and chilled my skin.

We found an adolescent girl impaled with some sixty-four pieces of cutlery; knives, forks, spoons, cleavers. She looked like a robot porcupine with metal spines protruding from her face, chest, arms, and legs. As we moved from the kitchen into the dining room, we found a young boy sprawled face first on a large oak table. He had met a similar fate, the only difference being he had been impaled head to toe with the family’s broken fine China.

We heard moans coming from the living room. We found a young woman, presumably the mother and wife, skewered beneath a large chandelier. She was not the source of the moans. We looked up and saw that the man of the house had been impaled with several lamps that held him fast to the ceiling. He was moribund, but his eyes were open, and he seemed aware of both us and his fatal predicament. I asked him, ‘Who did this to you?’ He replied ‘Nobody,’ then he expired.

The house was designated a crime scene. We looked for clues as to the perpetrators and their motives but found none. That prompted a spit balling session where we considered various theories only to reject them all. My partner suggested we might be looking at a paranormal event.

‘Maybe we are dealing with angry spirits,’ Langley speculated.

‘Angry about what?’ I asked. ‘Next, you’ll be telling me this house is built on an old Indian graveyard. Like in that 80’s movie, Poltergeist.’

‘Spirits may not be the right word. How about an accumulation of pure negative energy and intent? From where or how it came to be I can’t say. But unhuman forces, gratuitously fiendish.’

‘So, an evil force or entity decided to make itself known by running amuck in this house and then disappeared without a physical trace. I think you have been watching too many episodes of Ghost Facers or whatever they call that show about spook hunters. Hey, maybe it’s the Devil. Or a demon. Or perhaps it’s Darth Vader using the force from the dark side. It’s been known to happen.’

‘Kid all you want, Rip. Whatever this is, I don’t think its personal. Not a Satan or Ahriman. More like the dark vibrations of malignant atoms.’

We were left with our speculations as the forensics team went over the house with a fine-tooth comb. The mystery such as it was would have been one for the ages. But as luck would have it, there was a repeat occurrence the following day at the house next door.

 
II
 
According to the residents at 18 Peacock Lane, the problem began with a humming like that of a transformer station. The humming grew progressively louder until it became ear splitting. Windows up and down the street shattered, people’s ears bled, and animals went crazy. As the police arrived, various pieces of furniture flew through the windows at 16 Peacock Lane. First came the sofa, followed in rapid succession by the coffee table, a bookcase, and finally Mr. Abernathy, the homeowner, whose head crashed into the patrol car’s windshield and exploded like a ripe pumpkin. More items, such as a dining room table and chairs, various lamps, and some alabaster statues.

We were called to the scene along with the fire department. But this time, there was considerable hesitation on entering the premises. For one thing, the sounds made by the vibrating house paralyzed anyone within earshot. For another, shingles, shutters, and the very timbers were being shaken loose adding to the flying debris.

Eventually, the dissonance settled down to a dull roar. We had no trouble gaining entry, but when we did, we wished we had not, such was the gruesome scene before us. We found Mrs. Abernathy flattened like a living pancake. Every bone in her body had been crushed, yet somehow her head had remained intact. Her eyes watched us approach. Her only words before she expired were, ‘Please kill me.’ The elder Abernathys, Ben and Patty, had been repeatedly staked with the uprights from the pine banister. With the uprights protruding from their skulls and chest, and blood pooling around them in a growing sea of red, there was nothing the EMTs could do.

Upstairs, we found three children hiding under a bed. Aside from sheer terror, they were otherwise unharmed. They did not know what had happened.

‘When the house began to scream, we covered our ears and closed the door. When it began to vibrate, we hid under the bed until you found us,’ a Shirley Temple look-a-like said, holding back tears.

Two houses, two paranormal events in two days, and we did not have a clue what we were dealing with. Speculation abounded as to the cause of all the weirdness. The more sober minded postulated shifts in the earth’s magnetic field or a terrestrial transit through a particularly thick patch of dark energy or matter. But that only raised more questions, none of which had answers forthcoming.

The quacks and charlatans proffered monster-based explanations: necromancers, hobgoblins, disembodied souls shut out from heaven, evil spirits like those Jesus drove out of the man into the swine, and a demon let loose from hell. That such nonsense held sway in the public’s mind told me that the American cognitive toolkit lacked critical and sceptical habits of thought, especially when confronted with unknowns.

I felt the only way for us to know anything was to be there if and when it happened again--from start to finish. I said, ‘There may be a pattern here. First, there was 14 Peacock, then 16 Peacock. I think we should stake out 18 Peacock.’

‘From the outside, right? Inside would probably get us killed,’ Langley cautioned.

So, we put 18 Peacock under surveillance starting that evening. We watched and we waited for two days, but nothing happened. It was all quiet on the Peacock Street front.
 

III
 
A day later, we were called to 44 Pennywise Lane. An entire family had been found dead inside the passage between the firebox and the smokestack after a neighbour saw a pair of legs sticking out from the chimney. When we interviewed the neighbours, they said the family had complained of disembodied voices, heavy furniture moving of its own accord, objects being thrown across a room, and the daughters seeming to levitate several feet off the ground.

Tammy Jenkins of 46 Pennywise Lane gave us the rundown.

‘I remember Alice telling me that at night it sounded as if several people were walking, then running, up and down stairs. She spoke of a “rattling and thundering in every room, and even the deafening sound of an invisible horn.” Other times, she could hear gnawing sounds in the floorboards, animals fighting, and chains being dragged along the floor. On several occasions, she said, she and her husband had been yanked from their beds, slapped, pinched, and stuck with pins, as music played. Sometimes things would be written on the wall in blood. Things would catch on fire.’

Detailed though it was, Mrs. Jenkins’ statement did not provide us with any solid leads. At his end, my captain called the university for help. The Dean had no one on staff who could provide any solid professional guidance. She did suggest however that we speak to Professor Abraham Crenshaw, Professor Emeritus of Egyptian Studies, now retired. She did so with the caveat that ‘Crenshaw is a queer bird. Speaks with a wild air of excitement about the paranormal. The sort of maniacal intensity you find in the very bright but somewhat unhinged.’

The captain directed Langley and me to interview Crenshaw. I decided to do some research on him before I did. I learned that he was extravagantly rich and a recluse of the most eccentric type. His mansion was of considerable size set among a small forest of oaks. It looked as if it were unoccupied given its signs of dilapidation: the once pristine white paint has faded to a grimy grey; the windows were boarded, and the lawn was dead. It was the kind of house that children avoided walking past for fear of ghosts.

As we walked toward the front door, the house sounded like it contained an army of whispering spirits when the wind whistled through its eaves. The housekeeper led us to Crenshaw’s study. Along the way, we walked through an extensive library of Egyptian arcana, which included a copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the life-giving Scroll of Thoth. I saw shrines to Isis, Osiris, and Ra everywhere.

Initially, I attributed Crenshaw’s strange obsession with ancient Egypt to cultural afterburn from an archaeological career spent rooting through the tombs of the pharaohs. But he took it far beyond the quaint and endearing eccentricity of an old man to something dark and pathological. Indeed, I found him to be as haunted as his house with long dead Egyptians peering out from his eyes. Caught between the living and the dead, he was an ambiguity. Body here but spirit sending etheric tendrils back to the tombs he once explored.

To the eye, Crenshaw presented as a sallow fellow with hollow cheeks and penetrating blue eyes. He wore a linen bag tunic and cone-shaped hat with tassels, along with a long black wig woven with beads and strands of gold. He was festooned in amulets, heart shaped scarabs, bracelets, and rings.

He bade us sit beside a large statute of Osiris, Egyptian Lord of the Underworld. It was a green skinned deity wearing a pharaoh’s beard and distinctive crown while holding a crook and flail.

‘Professor Crenshaw, one of your erstwhile colleagues suggested you could help us understand…’

‘Yes, yes, I heard about the Peacock Lane Affair. Simply tragic.’

‘Can you shed some light on what we might be dealing with there?’

‘Detectives, we exist in an etheric miasma of negative emotional energy from all the past genocides, diseases, wars, hurricanes, murders, great fires, insurrections, and slaveries. Mind you, I don’t mean the unhappy spirit in isolation. But thousands, perhaps millions, that coalesce into something larger. A veritable spectral city or nation. Those spirits are like dark matter. In isolation, dark matter particles have no effect on our physical reality. But join enough together and they can influence the gravitational rotation curve of an entire galaxy.’

‘Why Peacock Lane and but nowhere else?’

‘Certain localities and structures are more likely to attract such negative energy than others. Places that become haunted torture chambers echoing with thousands of years of blighted history. The free-floating malice plants its dark seeds in the surrounding earth and stains the walls and mortar, and even the ash that is in the hearth. The whys and wherefores of such receptivity are obscure to me. But history is full of houses or neighbourhoods notorious for the paranormal. Crimes and misfortunes that arise again and again and again for no discernible reason.’

Langley understood better than I what was happening.

‘Yes, walls, for example, can absorb death cries. Those cries create grooves in the fabric of reality, the way divots are cut in a vinyl record. Put a needle to certain walls and listen to the screams.’

‘Yes, but never on the kinetic scale I saw at Peacock Lane,’ I said.

‘Not surprising really. Negative psychic energy can accumulate and grow stronger over time. Conservation of energy and all that business. Perhaps, it reaches a bursting point where it simply explodes, releasing itself in random acts of destruction. Who can say for sure since there is no way of taking its temperature?’

‘I’ve read that poltergeists are external manifestations of conflicts within the subconscious mind rather than autonomous entities with minds of their own. They are said to be disturbances are caused by human agents suffering from some form of emotional stress or tension.’

‘You’re describing involuntary psychokinesis, a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to influence a physical system without physical interaction. But if mind could act directly on matter, no experimenter could trust his readings of measuring instruments. Beyond what I have proposed, there is no possible physical mechanism for psychokinesis, and it is in complete contradiction to established science. If mind really could influence matter, it would be easy for parapsychologists to measure such a phenomenon by using the alleged psychokinetic power to deflect a microbalance.

‘Let me give you an example of how negative psychic energy can attach itself to a place or an object. Have you heard of the Derry Psychiatric Hospital murders? They took place in 1899. The patients had been mistreated to the point of torture, went berserk, and murdered the staff. Eventually, the patients were rounded up and sequestered at the local hospital.

‘But the killing didn’t stop. The patients themselves became homicide victims. The murderers always wore long, beak-like masks with glass lenses to cover the eyes, waxed fabric overcoats, and elbow-high gloves. It was the same attire worn by the asylum doctors to examine patients without the need for direct contact. It seems that the spirits of the staff attached themselves to the plague masks left behind in the shuttered asylum. Then incarnated around those objects and made their way to the hospital, and butchered the former asylum patients with bone saws and scalpels.

‘The hospital nurses and doctors described a fusillade of pointed hospital instruments levitating then taking flight from examination and operating rooms into the area where the few asylum patients were housed. One nurse described the scene as “A nightmare of flashing and whistling steel as the scalpels zipped around the ward. They jammed themselves into eye sockets, mouths, ears and then bore into skulls while the victims screamed bloody murder. I could hear voices saying, ‘Hold still please, it will only sting for a moment.’

Then the blades would retract and zip around looking for another victim. They seemed to have a malign intelligence about them. How they could see their victims, let alone distinguish them from us I cannot say. But it was the Devil’s work brought on by that crazy Doctor Ludlow who ran the asylum”.’

‘Okay. Let’s say your theory of spirits attaching to plague masks is true. What were the poltergeists drawn to at Peacock and Pennywise Lanes?’ I asked.

Crenshaw said, ‘It could be anything. The occupants could have some long lost ancestral or geographic connection. Maybe all three houses were built from tainted timber.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Timber from Germany that grew in soil contaminated by death camp crematorium ash. Or the Soviet Gulag. Or right here in the USA from the area around Camp Sumter, commonly known as Andersonville. Of the 45,000 Union soldiers imprisoned here, nearly 13,000 died. At its most crowded, it held more than 32,000 men, where forced overcrowding compounded problems of supply and distribution of essential resources.’

‘Can we do research to narrow it down?’ I asked.

‘That would take too long. Instead of trying to predict its next move, I say we lure it here. And I have just the device to do it. I call my invention the Resonator. We find an empty structure near where the other events occurred. Then we can draw the energy to us and disintegrate it.’

 
IV
 
With the consent of the realtor, we set up shop at the vacant 120 Pennywise Lane.

‘Before we start the machine, we need to cleanse this house of any potential flying hazards,’ Crenshaw commanded.

While we got the house ready, Doctor Crenshaw tinkered with his Resonator. It was a fantastic contrivance that was a cross between a miniaturized particle collider, a super magnet, and a cock-eyed Rube Goldberg musical instrument. His explanation of the device’s workings was an exercise in pure jargon: ‘a quadrupole magnet based on niobium–tin technology bending the trajectories of charged particles around the various layers of detector systems to quantize and direct their momentum and charge into musical notes. Those notes will be played by the various sets of mechanical hands arranged about the Resonator. Hence the guitar strings, piano keys, gongs, and tuning forks.’

Then he gave me a primer on his meta ethics. ‘What we call “evil” is the cosmic force that strips away the metaphysical glue holding things together. Over exposure to that force produces madness and wars. To the best of my knowledge, it exists as transiting black clouds moving through galaxies. Because of quantum entanglement, it is in constant communication with its much smaller earthly proxies. When such a cloud is in close proximity to the earth, truly bad things happen, such as World War I and World War II. What we are going to do here today is sever the quantum tendrils that have wrapped themselves around this neighbourhood.’

I asked, ‘So, what you’re saying is that the Resonator might be the key to world peace?’

‘Absolutely.’

As Crenshaw went about his final preparations, his look turned to one of gloating exultation.

‘Soon we shall come face to face with the Black Inversion and know its secrets.’

I shuddered at his strange depravity. He was a little too eager to meet something that might very well rip the flesh from our bones and stuff the remains in the flue. My mind was now full of shadowy cobwebs and undefined fears.

Crenshaw turned on the machine. Langley and I stood off to the side, covered in Kevlar body armour, crash helmets and ballistic shields. As the magnets spun, and the great Cosmic Calliope played its diabolical music, I felt as if someone were shooting bits of broken glass down my ear canal.

The eerie shriek of the motion detector caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. Something in the atmosphere had shifted. The air was a little too tense, too cold, and too still. So very still. A chilling and invisible presence filled the room. The exposed flesh of my face felt like ice, fire. The house had become one of horror, resounding with the sufferings of past lives and dripping with their tears as the walls exuded moisture like a sponge.

We had removed all the light bulbs and fixtures to prevent them from being used against us. When the natural light began to dim, and a faint shadow appeared on the ceiling, I knew the Negative Inversion was at hand. Crenshaw, Langley, and the Great Machine grew indistinct, as if I were looking at them through an obscuring veil.

I felt a great depression sweep over me and sensations I find it hard to describe. Time and space took on a strange, distorted character, fluid and flexible, dark, and deep. The only words that come to my mind were ‘nether space’.

The machine chattered and whirred and made its demoniacal music with frenzied rapidity. The shadow above us had become vaster and darker, filling the ceiling and sliding inexorably down the walls. It enveloped the Resonator, then Langley, then Crenshaw. The two men stood beside the baleful machine strangely immobile, as if frozen in place. I knew that in a matter of moments the black cold would reach over and do the same to me. I drew my service revolver and fired, not at it, but at the machine that was compelling its presence, and by its infernal racket, causing it to grow. I emptied my clip into its whining guts, and it shut down. When it did, the penumbral form that looked suspiciously like two great black wings folded in on itself and vanished.

Langley and Crenshaw collapsed on the floor, both unconscious. I called in the EMTs stationed out. They carried Crenshaw and Langley out on gurneys. As I stood beside the ambulance collecting my wits, Captain Moon approached me.

‘Did you put an end to this nightmare?’ he asked.

‘Well, the thing vanished after I shot up that nutty contraption. I can’t say for sure whether it will be back. Crenshaw might have some thoughts on the matter, assuming he recovers.’

‘I am having my forensics team go over that house with a fine-tooth comb. Maybe they’ll turn something up. In the meantime, go home and get some rest. It’s the weekend, so don’t come back until Monday. If something interesting happens I’ll call you.’

After the EMTs gave me a clean bill of health, I headed for Pavlov’s for a shot and a beer. I needed something to reorient myself to this plane of existence after having been exposed to one or more inside that horror house.

Pavlov’s was hopping. A woman’s volleyball team was celebrating a victory from earlier in the day. The band, Big Hair and the Bongos, was doing an homage to the B-52s, and the bartender was doing acrobatic pours behind the bar. A perfectly normal Friday night, yet somehow the place seemed off. Or I was off. I couldn’t tell which.

Rick the bartender was his usual cheery self.

‘What’s up, Dick Tracy? Solve any big cases lately? I heard about all those weird killings,’ he said cheerily.
I swallowed my shot, then chased it with the beer.

‘It’s been a rough one, Bobby. I’d rather not talk about it.’

‘Sure, buddy. I get it. Summoning forth the Great Cosmic Evil can be draining on anybody. But if you change your mind and want to unburden yourself, I’m here. Nobody should have to stare into those terrifying depths alone.’

His words suggested that he knew what had happened. But how could that be? I wanted to disregard his remarks as coincidental and harmless. However, the fiery fixity of his gaze told me his words were calculated to provoke a reaction. Fear, perhaps, or an account of the events and my future intentions regarding them. I felt the same sense of dreadful descent that I felt in the house, as if I were sinking to I knew not where.

Then he said something that made my blood freeze: It was a line from Baudelaire’s poem: ‘L’Enfer où mon coeur se plaît.’ In English it means ‘Hell that my heart likes.’ Bobby, the archetypal redneck, did not speak French, and probably didn’t know Baudelaire from Bob Dylan.

‘I didn’t know you spoke French.’

‘I don’t. Are you okay? Do I need to cut you off?’

I decided a strategic retreat was in order. I knew what I had heard. When he walked away, I asked the man next to me if he had heard Bobby speak French.

He answered, ‘Relax, detective. Nous parlons tous de nombreuses langues. C’est la nature de la bête. Après tout, nous sommes légion. (We speak many languages. It is the nature of the beast. We are legion).

I thought I had gone mad. I felt a soul congealing evil with all its attendant horrors watching me and laughing. I swooned at the thought that we had called forth something diabolical from the infinite gulfs of space with an appetite for evangelism. I swayed and faltered from vertigo. Hands reached out to keep me upright and walk me toward the door. The bouncer asked if I wanted an Uber. Had I not fallen flat on my face on the sidewalk I would have said yes. Instead, an ambulance came and brought me to the same hospital where Langley and Crenshaw had been taken.
 

V
 
I woke to find myself attached to a heart monitor in the ICU. My head and face were bandaged. I could hear the hospital alarm and a voice announcing a code blue on the fourth floor. Orderlies passed by my bed pushing carts. Nurses went hither and thither attending to patients. It was a slice of sorely needed normality, however distressed my physical circumstance was.

A doctor came by and asked, ‘How are we feeling?’

‘I’m a little groggy.’

‘I’m not surprised. You had a rough meeting with the pavement. Fortunately, the x-rays showed you didn’t fracture your skull. But our concussion protocol requires we keep you under observation for a while.’

When I realized I was wearing a hospital gown, I said, ‘I’m a cop. Where are my clothes and gun?’

‘Your clothes are in the closet. Hospital rules require that all firearms be kept with the security office pending patient release. You can get it when you are discharged.’

‘Doctor, two of colleagues were brought here: a Richard Langley and Abraham Crenshaw.’

‘They are a few beds down in the ICU. They regained consciousness a few hours ago and are doing just fine. We’ll be releasing them in the morning.’

‘Can I see them?’

‘I would prefer that you stayed put until we are sure you are ready for ambulation. I wouldn’t want you falling again. There’s nothing worse than a second dreadful and measureless descent into the abyss. It’s so easy to get turned around in the gulfs of perdition. You might not find your way back to us.’

His words froze my blood. I wondered if they were phantoms of my lingering delirium or an ominous subtext like the Francophobic one I experienced in the bar. Once more I felt the overpowering nearness of the black presence I had escaped back at the house. The impress of awful and forbidden things seemed unbreakable.

The doctor scribbled some notes on my chart and left. I considered that my experience at the house had left me with a serious case of afterburn that felled me at the bar and followed me to the hospital. The only way I could be sure that I had not lost my mind was to consult with Crenshaw and Langley.

I found a dead-eyed Langley, pale as ghost, staring into space. He looked like a pasty spectre ready to join his ancestors in the cemetery.

‘Langley! Can you hear me? Langley!’

‘You seem upset,’ he said in a robotic monotone.

‘After what we went through in that cursed house, you should be too. Jesus Christ man, you look like death warmed over.’

‘I think I am beyond death.’

He rose like Lazarus from the hospital bed, gave me a weird look and strode down the hall. I followed. The nurses and doctors ignored him. He walked straight into the ER operating room. I stopped and watched through the transparency. He grabbed a scalpel and methodically stabbed the anaesthesiologist in the back of his neck. The doctors and nurses backed away to no avail. He moved with a rapidity and force inconsistent with his ghostly appearance. One by one, he slit their throats, then stabbed the unconscious patient in the eyes. He then very casually walked out of the operating as if nothing had happened. As he walked by me, he winked and said, ‘The world is full of monsters. Sooner or later we all get our turn.’ He returned to his bed, closed his eyes, and began to hum the Tra-la-la song from the Banana Splits.

I expected pandemonium in the wake of the slaughter, but the staff went about its business as if nothing had happened. I found a directory and located the security office. It wasn’t far from the ER. I shambled out of the ER and made my way there. I told the guard what had happened, and he looked at me as if I had two heads. I knew what I had to do.

‘I’m a police detective. You have my gun. Where is it?’

‘Sir, you need to get back in bed. Let’s walk back to the ER and I’ll tuck you in. I would not want you to miss all the fun.’

Whatever was affecting the staff had compromised the guard. I yanked the landline off its cord and smashed his face. I kept hitting him until I was sure he would not get back up. As he lay there bleeding, I spied the safe.

‘What’s the combination?’

No answer.

‘What’s the combination?’

Again, no answer. I dug my thumbs into his eyes and ears until he told me. I got the safe open and retrieved my gun and spare clips. Now it was time to visit Crenshaw and get some answers.

Nothing had changed in the ER. Doctors and nurses attended patients while the bodies in the operating theatre oozed their remaining blood onto the floor. I found Crenshaw in the same distracted state I had found Langley.

‘Professor. Langley killed everyone in the operating room, and nobody here seems to care. What the hell is happening?’

‘It is so quaint that we have come to a world that spins.’

‘Professor, you need to get a grip. Is this the result of what your machine brought here?’

‘You have a penchant for self-torment. Poor fellow, you want to preserve your demented innocence in the face of gruesome facts. Face it; the horror you see is more real than you are.’

‘Professor Crenshaw, are you in there? Or am I speaking to that crazy cosmic poltergeist collective?’

‘At last, the glimmer of an insight. We are the offspring of the dead, progeny of phantoms. Our ancestors are the illustrious multitudes that came before you. Our lineage is longer than time. Our names are written in embalming fluid.’

‘I get it: you are an army of noisy, bloodthirsty ghosts. Poltergeists with team spirit jacked up on cosmic steroids.’

‘We lived in wretched isolation along the fringes of your dimension. Every now and then cosmic tectonics would open a rift and in we poured, wreaking havoc. Sometimes as the proverbial “Noisy ghost”. Other times as a possessing demon. But the holes always closed, and the expeditionary energy would dissipate. But this meat sack you call “Crenshaw”—a devotee of evil if ever there were one—ripped open the fabric of space between this world and ours. And now we are here. In your backyard. And we will not be put back.’

‘What would it take to get you to leave?’ I asked.

‘That ship has sailed. Even as we speak, we are colonizing the more susceptible members of your kind, and those we cannot possess, we kill. There is something to be said for the pleasures of the flesh, and the greatest pleasure of all is murder,’ Crenshaw said, beaming.

‘Truer words were never spoken,’ I said. Then I shot him in the head. I nonchalantly walked over to Langley’s bed and did the same to him. In both cases, I took a certain satisfaction in having the power of life and death. It struck me that the poltergeists invading our world were gods of a sort. Or the God, depending on your view. So, I thought, that makes me their Devil, and I am here to do the Devil’s work. With that thought in my mind, I shot a few more corrupted bodies I thought were possessed. Then I grabbed my clothes and left the hospital. The veil between the living and the dead had been shattered. Like the little Dutch Boy, I would stick my finger in the dike to keep our world from being flooded. A futile effort, perhaps, but at this juncture my options were limited. I would therefore hope for the best but expect the worst.


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