Greg Gifune - Kingdom of Shadows

Heart smashing his chest, Rooster attempted a deep breath. “You’re telling me everything I read in those files is true?”

Poindexter scooped up a forkful of meatball and slid it between his lips. “That is precisely what I’m telling you.”

“Why can’t I remember?”

“We didn’t want you to remember.” He wiped a smear of marinara from his chin with a cloth napkin. “So your memories—all your memories—were wiped clean and replaced with memories we wanted you to have.”

“Then there was no armored car job?”

“There was not.”

“But Carbone, he—he was shot.”

“He was killed, yes, but not from a gunshot.”

The tremors returned. He struggled to control them. “What then?”

Poindexter rolled more pasta onto his fork, the sauce dripping in thick globs back to his plate. “You remember the farmhouse,” he said, the fork shaking in his arthritic hand. “It’s coming back to you.”

“Yes. Slowly.”

“As I mentioned, you were the best of the worst.” He stuffed the spaghetti into his mouth. “You tortured and murdered a priest, claiming at your trial that you’d been repeatedly sexually molested by the man when you were a child and that’s what had led to your life of crime and eventually his murder. He’d ruined you, and in turn, years later, you had ruined him.”

A spike of pain dug deep into his temple and ran down along the right side of his jaw. Rooster fought it back. “I don’t…”

“Remember. Yes, I know. For that you should thank me.”

“For wiping my memories away and leaving me with lies?”

Ignoring the question, he took up the goblet, sipped some wine. “Of course the pedophilia scandal that shook the Catholic Church had not hit yet.”

Rooster had no idea what scandal he was referring to. How much of his mind had these bastards destroyed?

“The idea that a respected, admired and loved parish priest would’ve ever done such hideous things to a little boy was unthinkable. No one, including us, believed you.” Poindexter savored the wine a moment before continuing. “Turns out you were telling the truth, who knew? The fact remained, however, that you tortured and murdered a priest in cold blood. Well done.”

“What the hell did you people do to us?”

“We sent you where no human being had ever been before…and returned from.” He stabbed another meatball. “You were all given the mixture. It took you to depths none of us could’ve imagined in our wildest dreams. You went to the core, the heart of evil, to its very soul. I must confess that until that night I hadn’t counted on it actually working. But it did. As we’d hoped, you weren’t alone in that boundless darkness, there was something else there with you. Something… alive .”

“Where did we go?”

He grinned like the demons in Rooster’s nightmares. “You touched the face of Lucifer, Mr. Cantrell. And he showed you evil in its purest, most savagely beautiful form, unbridled violence beyond comprehension.”

“The farmhouse,” Rooster muttered, “the scarecrows, the rooms beneath the house…”

“Props,” he said, waving at the air as if to knock the words away. “Familiar images that would elicit fear and discomfort were necessary so the mind would have something to reference. Interesting thing about the human mind, it fills in what is not there, often pulling images from a bank of previous experiences to fill the gaps. We simply helped you all with that, giving you something to experience in a pseudo-physical sense. Something terrifying that you could all relate to and understand.”

“This is bullshit.” Rooster stood up.

Poindexter continued eating. Candlelight flickered across the plate. The spaghetti was not spaghetti at all, and it was not drenched in tomato sauce. Blood…bile…excrement… worms…human eyeballs cooked to a crisp, burned nearly beyond recognition. “Technically the experiment was a success,” he said. “We did achieve what we’d set out to do, at least initially. But then it all went horribly wrong.”

“This isn’t happening.” He pressed his palms to his temples, his head pounding now and his legs weak. “This isn’t…this isn’t…”

“Once we realized what we’d truly tapped into, that it was the equivalent of accessing the literal power of existence, and the dark side of existence at that, we knew we’d overestimated our abilities. It was actually quite beautiful in its purity, but you were all torn to shreds by its profane glory. It became an orgy of violence and blood, an orgy of death.”

“You’re lying, you sonofabitch.” Rooster pointed the 9mm at him.

“Do you really think we could let any of you come back at that point? Or that there’d be anything left to bring back?”

“Then where am I? I’m standing right here!”

“The longer you struggle against truth, the longer the forces of darkness will bind you, Mr. Cantrell. There are some things human beings can never control. We’re not meant to, regardless of how badly we may desire it. Evil—true evil—is one of those things. I understand it’s hard for you to accept, but you were all thoroughly expendable, Mr. Cantrell, a bunch of hooligans and lowlifes, losers and drains on society no one cared about then or now.”

“It wasn’t enough that you used us as guinea pigs for your demented projects, crippled our minds and broke us to pieces. You had to wipe out our memories and send us back into the world haunted by nightmares you put there and with no knowledge of who we are or how we got here? You destroyed us—you admit it—and yet you still try to cover it up with bullshit stories about demons and Hell and—”

“Do you really believe telling yourself that long and hard enough will keep the terror at bay?” Poindexter placed the fork next to the plate and wiped the blood from his mouth with the napkin. “You all disappeared from the face of the Earth and not a single person noticed, much less cared.”

“Then why come to us after all this time?”

“Penance,” he said softly, the air of arrogance fading. “It’s what’s required of me now. Eventually, we all serve one master or another, Mr. Cantrell, whether we like it or believe in it or not. And I’ve come to learn that it rarely turns out to be the one we were counting on.”

“Who are the men that killed Snow, the men in the Crown Vic?”

He smiled blandly. “They’re not men.”

“What do I do?” Rooster leaned across the table so that the gun was only a few inches from the man’s face. “How do I kill these things in my head?”

He leaned further into the light, pulled his glasses from his pale and sickly face and pushed forward until his forehead met the barrel of the gun. “Deliver me from my sins,” he whispered. “Deliver us from evil.”

Rooster’s finger remained remarkably steady as it curled to the trigger.

The old man’s eyes rolled to white.

Everything else turned crimson.

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.”