J. Gonzalez - They

“—but they found you, they actually found you almost ten years ago! Can you fucking believe that!”

And what Frank said about the Children finding him ten years ago stopped him. He opened his eyes, suddenly frozen. “Ten years…”

“Yeah? Can you believe that?” A hiss of pain. Vince could dimly make out the background noise of traffic. “They’ve been working at you, prepping you for ten years now.”

“Prepping me for what ?”

A soft gasp, a hiss of pain. “I can’t get it to stop bleeding.” Frank’s voice broke. He began to sob. “Oh God, it really got me…”

Vince felt his chest tighten up. “ What are they prepping me for, Frank ?”

“You’re it,” Frank said, and Vince could barely make out what he was saying through his tears. “Just like you said… I know you weren’t serious about it at first, but in a way you were right, Vince. They didn’t bring you into this world to be the Anti-Christ, Vince… they brought you here to be the Red Opener—”

“ What ?” Was Frank kidding him with this shit?

“You are the Red Opener,” Frank continued. “You’re not the Anti-Christ. You’re the doorway that will allow Hanbi entry into this world.”

Suddenly, Vince’s mind went back to that day when he’d walked into his mother’s bedroom for the first time in over twenty-five years. His mind flashed on those symbols drawn in thick blood on the bedroom walls, those strange words that looked to be indecipherable gibberish and one of those words now leaped out at him. Hanbi . “I don’t know what that means,” Vince said.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Frank began, his voice tinged with pain. “I learned some of this in my research, but I didn’t think the Children were that heavily into him. In ancient Assyrian myth, Hanbi is the father of Satan; he’s also the father of the demon Pazuzu.”

“Father of Satan? I don’t understand. How can Satan have a father? I thought he was originally an angel—”

“No! He wasn’t an angel because there’s no such thing as angels! There’s no such thing as God, either! Just shut up and listen!”

Vince held his breath and listened, his heart hammering madly in his chest.

“Hanbi is its oldest name,” Frank continued. “He’s known as Hanpa in Western Civilization. Throughout ancient history he’s been known by many names. Ancient Mesopotamia has a myth about a being called Hanbi, a creature that was mentioned in numerous oral stories. A few archeologists believe he was actually worshipped by primitive man, by Neanderthals. The Assyrians and the Sumerians had numerous gods and demons. Pazuzu was known as an evil god of the wind who brings disease to man. Belial was an evil underworld deity who became Satan in Judaism. He was also known in other Middle-Eastern cultures as Shaitan. He’s mentioned in the Book of Enoch as Satanael, the leader of the Grigori, or the Watchers… the so-called angels that became enamored with human women and came down to earth to mate with them. The ancient people of the South Pacific islands called him Dagon. The original Native Americans had a name for him too; I can’t pronounce it, and I can’t pronounce the name given to him by the ancient Europeans. Despite the different names within the different cultures, he’s the same thing.”

Vince’s mind was rebelling at the information. He tried to say something, tried to interject a word of reason, but he couldn’t.

“Hanbi’s name faded and died out as man evolved and developed a system of religion and government. In time, the religious scholars of the time took those old myths and assigned them to the evil spirit of the thing he spawned: Satan, Lucifer, Pazuzu, Behemoth, Melek Taus. The list goes on. Satan became the ultimate bogeyman for all the Abrahamic religions that sprouted up for one specific reason. To divert attention from Hanbi.”

“You’re not making sense,” Vince finally said.

“There’s a book called the Liber Daemonorum ,” Frank continued. “I thought it was bullshit when I first stumbled on this thread. Thought it was a bunch of Lovecraft crap, but apparently even H. P. Lovecraft built his mythos and his fictional book The Necronomicon off the mythos of ancient Mesopotamian myth and legend. The Liber Daemonorum is the oldest and most rarest book on black magic ever compiled. There’s a French translation from 1328 or so, by Protassus, but it’s based on fragments from ancient Mesopotamia and Sumeria… in the ancient Sumer language as well as another language… one that is still unknown to modern man. The Liber Daemonorum is the most recent reference to Hanbi we have. Protassus claimed to have had access to older manuscripts, including one in Arabic, which had been translated from Sumerian. The Children of the Night… they went back there in ’65… went to Iraq and came back with ancient Sumerian artifacts. Those artifacts were probably those missing fragments!”

“This is crazy,” Vince said.

Frank coughed and Vince could sense he was struggling, but he continued on. “Long story, short, The Children of the Night have reached all the way back from beyond the Dark Ages. Yes, they’re descendants of the old Devil cults of medieval Europe, but they used their reach and their influence to locate a copy of the Liber Daemonorum and the missing Sumerian fragments. They used these to set things in motion… to bring Hanbi back into this world. And the only way to do that is through a half-demon half-human hybrid.” Frank’s voice became a parched croak. “You.”

“I thought you said I wasn’t the Anti-Christ!”

“And like I said, you’re not. Remember the soul-cracking your mother went through? You were the reason for that… to bring something through… so it would inject a bit of itself into the child that was growing in her womb.”

“Where’s Mike?” Vince asked.

“He’s dead,” Frank said. “They’re going to make it seem like he went crazy, raped and killed his granddaughter, then killed himself.”

“What?” Vince’s stomach plunged down an elevator shaft.

“Turn on the news. It’s already starting.”

Vince went into the living room and snatched the television remote. He turned on the TV, still talking to Frank. “What got you, Frank? How badly are you hurt?”

“Pretty fucking bad, buddy,” Frank wheezed.

Vince switched to a local news channel and for a moment was confused by what was on. He was watching a live feed from somewhere in Huntington Beach. A middle-aged woman with blond hair and pleasant features was weeping. “I never thought,” the woman sobbed, tears streaming down her face. “I never thought he’d be capable of this… of doing this to a little girl!”

The camera cut away to the newscaster in the studio who updated the viewing audience that a man authorities were identifying as Michael Peterson had killed himself by slicing his throat open with a broken mirror shard after killing his three-year old granddaughter. Vince gasped. “He what??”

“Don’t believe a word she says,” Frank said. “She did it. She orchestrated it. She was one of them the whole time and Mike never knew it.”

Mike’s wife Carol one of them? How was that possible? Had she been a cult member this whole time? A sort of sleeper-cell-like cult member waiting for the right time to obey the commands of the unknown shadowy figures of the organization? “What happened to you guys, Frank? Tell me.”

“We dropped everything off with Billy and went to Mike’s house to get… to get pictures of his kids,” Frank said, his voice wheezing. “We were going to disappear. Billy was going to help. But they beat us to it. They were at the house, waiting. They’d just performed a ritual and… something came out… something came out and ripped me open.”