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he stench of sulfur wafted through the air as Colin lit the black candles positioned at each corner of the pentagram. Colin stared intensely at the large pentagram he had drawn on the bare concrete floor. It had taken a while to remove the carpeting and padding from the room. Harder still was the remnant of glue that was swirled on the floor to keep the padding in place. Colin even went so far as to remove the tack strips and their anchors, in order to get a nice smooth surface for the task at hand.
If his grandparents were still alive they would be screaming right now. His grandmother would be looking for a ladle to swat across his bare behind. Even now she was probably rolling over in her grave. As for grandpa, his moment of shock would be replaced with the need to save his grandson from the ladle-waiving loon he called his wife. Colin could picture it quite well, her yelling and screaming, ranting and raving at the mess he had made in their bedroom, while the old man tried to calm her down, almost suffering several swats from the ladle himself. The whole time Colin would be hiding underneath the table curled in a little ball.
All this fuss over their fuzzy new blue carpet. Carpet they had spent a fortune on according to his grandmother. Carpet he had made a mess on in his grandparent’s bedroom. That had been a long time ago and yet the carpet had remained. Colin thought he could even still see the stain he had left all those years ago. By this time though the carpet was no longer fuzzy and was a long ways away from being new. He couldn’t believe that the new owners of his grandparents’ house hadn’t bothered to change the carpeting in all the time they had lived there.
He thought it made sense though, since the whole house was in disrepair. What were once white walls were now yellowed with smoke stains. Small holes could be found in the plasterboard where no one ever bothered to run a putty knife past. As for this room, the room that had once been his grandparents’ bedroom, it too had seen much better days. He remembered his grandmother spending several days applying the rose colored wallpaper in large strips across the wall. Within the swirl of color, cherubs pranced and prattled, staring and gawking at all that entered.
Colin remembered the numerous times he had stared at those little angels wondering if they could see him. Wondering if they were watching over him or judging him when he did something wrong. Now those baby faced angels looked at him through a dullish haze. The paper was puckering in some spots and peeling away from the eaves at the top. Again Colin wondered how the previous tenants could have left it like this.
Even the yard, which was once the pride of the neighborhood, was now overgrown with weeds and crab grass. The backyard, which contained a beautiful vegetable garden, thanks to the numerous hours his grandmother had spent toiling away, de-weeding, re-seeding, and mulching, was now a junkyard of car parts and trash. Although pungent, the burning yellow sulfur failed to cover the stench of oil that seemed permeated within the whole house. Other rancid smells were interlaced, which Colin couldn’t place. Something acidic, based on the look of the house it had probably been converted to one part auto shop and one part methamphetamine lab.
Colin grabbed the candle at the tip of the pentagram and began pouring a circle within the center. Colin wasn’t sure if any of this was going to work, but there was no turning back now. He thought much of the stuff was pretty corny. At least he didn’t have a goat’s head hanging from a rope and he wasn’t garbed in black robes. What felt like a lifetimes worth of work was all boiling down to this moment. His palms sweated in anticipation as he completed the circle and then went to unbind the rather large brown book. It was supposedly bound in human skin, but Colin was pretty sure it was just leather, maybe even imitation. The binding didn’t matter though; it was the pages inside that mattered. Pages he was almost killed for.
Colin looked again at the faces of innocence peering out from the wall and again thought about his grandfather. Almost a day didn’t go by when he didn’t think about his grandfather. Heck, who was he kidding, there was never a day that went by that he didn’t think about his grandfather. His grandfather, with those piercing blue eyes, which could look at you and make you almost believe everything was going to be alright. The man with the jovial smile and infectious laugh.
The only one who never seemed to laugh was his grandmother. Colin couldn’t even remember seeing the woman smile. All she ever seemed to do was yell. If she wasn’t yelling as his grandfather, she was yelling at him and if she wasn’t yelling at him, she was yelling at the two of them together. Colin knew that it was at these moments that his grandpa turned down his hearing aid so he could remain oblivious to it all. Unless of course, she was going after Colin, then he became Colin’s protector. Colin’s knight in shinning armor, shielding him from the evil witch or fire breathing dragon.
This was like taking one’s life in their own hands and Colin was fearful the man might not be able to take the blast of fire. He always walked away unscathed though and would make sure to whisper something nice in his ear. “What does she know? Your piano playing sounded good. Besides, how are you ever going to get good if you don’t practice? Once she goes to the store, I’ll let you play all you want.” His grandpa was always trying to do what he could to comfort him, whether it was playing chase in the house, when grandma wasn’t around or showing him how to whittle wood in the garage.
Colin was never good at whittling, but grandpa was real patient.
When his grandfather died, Colin cried quite a bit. Like a never-ending fountain that kept re-circulating the tears from the bottom of his heart. As hard as Colin took it, nothing compared to his grandma. She crumbled. Her hard exterior gave way to a person devoid of all feeling. She wouldn’t yell and scream when Colin did something wrong, she would just sit in her chair and watch TV. That felt like the worst year of Colin’s life. He was wrong. Losing her husband seemed to suck the life right out of his grandmother. She died almost a year to the day his grandfather died.
He didn’t cry then. Maybe he too became devoid of all feeling by then. Colin went to live with an aunt and uncle and their seven children. It didn’t work out. One would think that with seven children, what harm could one more do? According to his aunt, quite a lot. Colin’s presence was disrupting their happy household. Colin thought that being the good Mormons that they were that they would care for him as one of their own. Again Colin was wrong. He wound up in foster care bouncing from family to family until his eighteenth birthday.
Life hadn’t been easy, but Colin never gave up hope. He struggled through school, as much as he struggled through life. Drugs and petty crime became commonplace for a time until Colin finally realized it was distracting him from his life’s work.
His grandpa died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in his sleep. His aunt and uncle had tried to comfort Colin by letting him know that he had died painlessly and was now with our Heavenly Father. His grandpa had taught Sunday school and was even the bishop for a short time at the church they attended every Sunday, so the thought of his grandpa being in heaven wasn’t too far fetched. Didn’t the Heavenly Father forgive all sins?
At least it gave Colin a place to start. He began with the bible. He poured through it, highlighting it, dissecting it. When the regular bible didn’t work, he got an annotated one. He searched and he scoured, but he quickly found out that the path of righteousness was a dead end. Even his grandfather’s book yielded little more than a fairy tale. He delved into Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, which all promised paths into heaven, but nothing spoke of a return trip. Hinduism came close, but it only spoke of the self and not someone else. The Satanic Bible was nothing but a farce, but at least it got him pointed in the right direction.
Much of what he found were a bunch of drugged out freaks looking for an excuse to have sex. It wasn’t all bad; it was at one of these satanic orgies that Colin met John Shayman. The man talked a good game and was even able to pull off several parlor tricks to impress the weak. The man wasn’t there to partake in the festivities; he was there to recruit. He found a disciple in Colin; at least for a little while.
They would meet every Saturday night in a musty old storefront located in the downtown section of Fountain City. John said he had hopes to convert the place into a bookstore in order to have an outlet to spread the word. There were just six of them for now, but John had high hopes and an ego to match. This mattered little to Colin. What mattered to Colin was the book. John had a book which he claimed contained the secrets of life and death. One could live forever if they so chose. Colin didn’t; he just had one question, and the answer was yes.
Getting his hands on the book was harder than he thought it would be. John took the thing everywhere. Like his grandfather though, Colin was a patient man. He bided his time and took his opportunity when it presented itself.
It was a Saturday and the readings were just beginning to take place. Candles were lit everywhere sending shadows dancing across the walls. The meeting was interrupted by a jingle at the door. Two more people had accepted John’s invitation. Like a good host John and the rest of the group went to the front to great the new initiates. Everyone except Colin. John had left the book on the podium where he conducted his sermons. It was the first time he had seen the book alone and it was all the time he needed.
He grabbed the book and ran towards the back. He heard a woman’s voice screech “stop!”, but he continued on. He knew the woman yelling at him was Vivica. She was John’s right hand disciple and rumor was; his enforcer. Colin found this hard to believe at first. The woman was gorgeous with piercing deep brown eyes. It didn’t take long for Colin to realize his mistake. There was something behind those brown eyes that seeped with venom. Like the beautiful curves of a flaring cobra. It might look stunning, but like the snake her strike was deadly.
The scream was followed by a gun shot which grazed Colin’s right arm. Another shot went wide and Colin was out the door. He was on foot with no place to go. He remembered a place he used to go when he was a kid. There was a drainage canal which led into a tunnel that the storm drains throughout the city fed into. It was a place he sought out for solace as a child. Now, years later, he returned to it for sanctuary.
Colin knew that John’s minions would never give up their search, but one man alone in a city was hard to find. Colin made his way the best he could. He knew he could never return to his squalid apartment, but that mattered little. He had few, if any possessions and anything he needed could be acquired again. A lifetime of obsession bares little fruit. Colin survived off of the misfortune of others. The first thing he required was some bandages for his arm. The graze wasn’t deep, but it was enough to soak his sleeve in crimson.
Many of the homes he entered weren’t even locked. People were careless with their hard earned belongings, although Colin would do little to disrupt this. Since Colin needed little, he took little. He would take a shower, a change of clothes, maybe some food from the refrigerator, but nothing more. He never left a mess and many of his victims didn’t even realize someone had been there. In one home he found a nickel-plated Colt .45 and a box of ammunition. Being hunted the way he was, he thought it would come in handy.
It only took a week of pouring through the book to find what he was looking for and it came in the way of a manifestation, a visitation if you will. Someone or something had answered the call and a deal had been struck. A one sided bargain.
Colin finished with all of his preparations then opened the book. He had spent the last two weeks rehearsing this very moment. If he wasn’t doing it out loud, he would do it in his head. He opened it to the page and began to recite the words he knew by heart. Emotions within him began to stir, but nothing else seemed to change. Colin continued the verse raising his voice louder into the night. Soon, oh so soon, he would be reunited with the one person who claimed to love him. The one person who always tried to be there for him.
Colin began to shiver as the room got noticeably colder. Steam hissed between his lips and still he chanted on in a fevers pitch. The candles began to flicker, the flames growing taller. The yellow tips bent to the left, then the right, before all of them seemed to be pulled towards the center of the pentagram, pulled by some unseen force. The flames continued to burn, pulling closer and closer to the center of the mark.
Colin knew his moment and approached. He stepped into the pentagram and immediately felt its warmth. Outside the star, frost began to form on the windows as all of the heat was pulled inward. Soon Colin’s chills were replaced with beads of sweat that dripped from his forehead. He pulled out an ordinary kitchen knife from his back pocket and gripped the blade with his right hand. In his left he held the handle. He pushed down and pulled drawing a jagged line across his palm, grimacing at the pain. He kept his hand in a fist and turned it so the rivulets of red could pour upon the spot of lost innocence. Blood for blood was the ritual, now Colin stood back to watch.
It didn’t take long. From the moment Colin’s blood dripped on the form below, it began to writhe. The small nickel sized hole in the sternum of the body slowly closed shut as the runnel of blood that had seeped out hours earlier seemed to pour back into the body. The form twitched and spasmed, then began to convulse, thrashing the body with such force that Colin became concerned that the body was going to explode as it kept impacting the hard concrete floor.
Colin realized he was holding his breath and had to release it to prevent from passing out. As soon as he let go of the air from within him the thrashing body stopped and the eyes flickered open. Seeing this Colin sucked the air back in. The form lifted its head and gazed about. Recognition replaced fear and the body sat up, starring at Colin.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It appeared to be an adult version of his grandson. “Colin?” He questioned, looking through new eyes.
“Grandpa?”
“Colin is that really you son? Is that really you? Or is this just another vision to drive me even further insane?” The form asked in an alien voice that was not his own.
“It’s me grandpa. It’s me. I brought you back.” Colin spoke with true earnest in his voice.
“You did what! You brought me back? Brought me back from where?” His grandfather asked alarmed.
“I brought you back from the dead grandpa.”
“You did what? How? Why?” His grandfather quizzed.
“I brought you back for me, grandpa. It must have been horrible where you were.” Colin spoke feeling like a little kid for the first time in years.
“Horrible, yes, it was horrible. You cannot imagine the horrors I have endured. I have had my flesh shorn from my body and then beat repeatedly with the tail of a long black scorpion. Only to have my flesh reapplied with staples and nails so it can be done all over again. I’ve been dipped in wax and burned like a human candle. I’ve been frozen and then smashed into a million pieces then my all too feeling flesh was consumed by an acidic beast, only to be regurgitated so the pain can continue. Pain and suffering? All I have known since I died has been pain and suffering. All the while I asked why my lord had forsaken me. Why did he allow me to suffer so? I was dedicated to the church. I paid my tiding. But now I have seen that I have not been forsaken. He has remembered me in the way of my grandson. But how? How did you do this?”
“I made a deal grandpa.”
“A deal?” His grandfather looked around and noticed the pentagram he was standing in. He noticed the black candles and suddenly it dawned on him. “A deal! My boy. What have you done? You have just damned yourself to suffer like I have!”
“No grandpa.” Colin spoke timidly at first, and then pure hatred poured from his heart. “You damned me a long time ago Grandpa. On that very spot. My blood spilled over when you took my innocence. Now it’s your turn. The suffering you have gone through will be nothing compared to what I have in store for you. And when that body gives out I have another one waiting for you.”
His grandpa looked over and saw a crumpled body on the floor. It was female, her glazed over eyes said all that needed to be said about her condition. Colin didn’t have anything against the couple living in his grandparents’ house. It was a necessary evil.
The foreign body now possessed by Colin’s grandfather struck a familiar smile. His once blue eyes were now green, but they still held his devilish charm. A charm Colin had felt one too many times. Colin proceeded to wipe that smile off of his grandfather’s face, one slice at a time. |
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