Greg Gifune: Kingdom of Shadows

There were no markings on the exterior of the manila folder itself but it was stuffed with various documents. The book was black, had no dust-jacket and was badly worn, the back cover blank. Rooster flipped it over.

A bright red inverted pentagram filled the front cover, the title in matching color above it: DEMONOLOGY: Incantations .

He vaulted back and away from the table as if hit with an electrical charge, eyes transfixed on the pentagram as his chair tipped over backwards and fell to the floor.

What do you know about demons?

Fear crashed him like a wave, surging up through his legs, guts, and into his chest, chills firing through his shoulders and neck, his eyes burning as the uncontrollable shivers returned, this time violently throttling his entire body.

I’m so cold …

Voices in his head…familiar voices…

I’m so…so…cold…

Flashes of a face stricken with horror, mouth ripped open into a bloody and devilish grin, the skin on the cheeks and forehead moving and tenting impossibly, like something was trapped beneath and trying to get out, something barbed and small slithering for purchase…

Help me…God in Heaven, help me!

Clutching his temples, Rooster staggered back, muttering prayers he hadn’t recited since childhood.

Shadowy visions of a man standing over a body, the stomach cavity split open, his hands grasping a tangle of viscera—ropes of blood and guts squished between his fingers—laughing and squatting closer to the carnage, his face spattered with blood and colorless jellylike fluids, shards of human flesh dangling from the corners of his mouth…and all the while, horrible screams of agony bellowed amidst vicious laughter…

It wasn’t until Rooster felt the far kitchen wall against his back and slid down to the floor in a heap, sobbing and moaning like a traumatized child, that the visions and voices finally retreated.

But not before he realized that the face of the man he’d seen—the man in the shadows disemboweling another human being—was his own.

They move across the field in a staggered line, weapons drawn, the overgrown grass and weeds nearly to their waists. The fog moves with them as they negotiate the uneven terrain, slowly, cautiously, the darkness deepening with each step they take. The scarecrows watch from their wooden crosses, some nailed, some tied with rotting lengths of rope, manlike ghouls in old and torn denim overalls and decayed work shirts, hands of straw protruding from the sleeves like talons, legs dangling, vanishing into the tall grass. With badly worn, stuffed and filthy burlap sacks for heads, their mouths are stiff grim lines of worn leather thread sewn into the fabric in a disturbing crisscross pattern, their eyes sunken black holes, as if the sockets have been long-since picked clean.

Starker is in the lead. He stops and the others follow suit. His eyes pan the area, take in each scarecrow. No one speaks for several seconds. The night is unnaturally quiet.

“Come on, what is this bullshit?” Landon moans. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Nobody’s been here in years. Why bother with the house at all? Let’s split the take now. What difference does it make?”

“We are pretty far from the road.” Nauls looks back. “Haven’t seen any cars pass by the whole time we’ve been here.”

Ignoring them, Rooster looks to Starker. “What’s wrong?”

“Notice anything about those scarecrows?”

“I’m trying not to notice them at all,” Nauls says.

Landon rolls his eyes. “What are you, five-fucking-years-old? There’s nobody here but us, let’s get on with it.”

“Starker,” Rooster presses, “what is it?”

“There are six of them,” he says, “six scarecrows.”

Snow shrugs. “So?”

“There are six of us.”

Rooster studied the shadows cast throughout the kitchen, opaque swathes of darkness slashing the light. Still on the floor and covered in a thin sheen of perspiration, his flesh was clammy and hot but his breathing and heartbeat had finally returned to normal. He wasn’t sure why the pentagram specifically had triggered such terror, he only knew it had. His fear had weakened, though it was still close by, and a steady throb above his eyes signaled another headache was on its way. Luckily the pain hadn’t kicked in yet.

With a willful grunt he forced himself to his feet, and on shaky legs, returned to the table. Once he’d righted the chair he dropped back into it then cautiously reached for the book. The cover was old and shabby, rough in his hands. Without looking at the pentagram, he quickly flipped open the cover.

In rather ornate script, printed on the first page:

The pages of the book looked even older than the cover. Made of stiff thick parchment, faded and badly furrowed, they mostly sported what appeared to be very old drawings of demons. Hideous winged creatures with leering eyes, many with horns and cloven hooves, huddled in darkness. Others perched over the beds of unsuspecting sleeping victims or sat on blasphemous thrones of human bone. Others still were illustrated engulfed in flames or in mid-flight amidst the clouds, tangled in battle with angels. But for the cover and Milton quote, the text was written in Latin, in a calligraphy-like style, as if scribed by some mad medieval monk in the bowels of a candlelit monastery. Just touching the book made Rooster uncomfortable, so he quickly flipped through the remaining pages of lurid illustrations and indecipherable text then slammed it shut. Placing it facedown, he took another shot of whiskey.

When his nerves had settled a bit, he turned his attention to the manila folder. Six files were individually bound and stacked within, the front of each marked with a name: Paul Carbone, Terrell Snow , Anthony Starker , Perry Nauls , Thomas Landon, and the sixth and final file, his own, Michael Cantrell .

Rather than immediately delve into his own file, he decided to begin with someone else's. Carbone’s dead , he reasoned, I’ll start there . He opened the file to find a mug-shot staring back at him. He hadn’t seen Carbone in anything but nightmares for years, and looking into the man’s eyes now shook him to the core. He remembered Carbone as a short and stocky man of few words, with a dry but cutting sense of humor and a laid-back personality. But mostly he remembered him screaming in agony and begging for his mother as he bled to death.

Rooster moved to the next page. All of Carbone’s stats were there: his full legal name, date of birth and social security number. Lower on the page it listed no living next-of-kin, the fact that he’d never graduated high school and had no formal education beyond the tenth grade, and that he was unmarried and had no children. The next page revealed a bullet list regarding his criminal record, which went back to his late teens and covered everything from petty theft to numerous sexual assaults and indecent exposures, to child pornography charges to assault and battery. The final entry, highlighted in yellow, documented his final arrest and conviction, the rape and stabbing death of a seven-year-old girl. He’d received two Life Sentences with no chance of parole, and according to the entry, had been serving them at the time this information had been originally compiled.