Something Wicked
By Eve Hathaway
Published by Publications Circulations LLC.
SmashWords Edition
All contents copyright (C) 2013 by Publications Circulations LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, companies and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
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Prologue
THE SALLOW GLOW of the candelabra cast a dim, haunted glow over the sparsely decorated room. The house was quiet now, quieter than it had been for many, many weeks. The servants had been dismissed by the master in a fit of hopeless fury and they fled, leaving behind the monstrous manor and the cloud of death that hovered above.
Yes, death walked the hallways of this place, leaving traces of his breathless caress on every aspect of the property. He had been a visitor here for the past several months, reducing the mansion's ruler from a tall, powerfully built former general to a withered husk of burgeoning humanity.
Now his large hands had shriveled into brittle twigs and his once tanned skin was almost translucent, revealing a network of blue veins and splotches all across the balding skull. So crumbled was the once great man.
He was dying. Oh yes, the shadow of death moved closer and closer every night. He could see the black feathers as they reached out to brush him softly across the face. All his wealth, his power, and his connections -- everything was worthless now. He had nothing left that could save him from this creeping specter.
He reached out a frail hand and seized up a bowl of cold soup that had been rotting by his bedside for several days and threw it with all his might at the encroaching spirit. However, the dish just passed right through it and shattered on the opposite wall, leaving the remains of his final meal to decorate the floor.
"Be gone, Demon! Leave me in peace!" His voice had once been powerful, thundering over the heads of troops without the aid of a microphone, but now it emanated in a faint, croaking rasp. The shadow was silent.
"Take me now then," the old man hissed. "Dispense with your waiting game and take me now! I won't tolerate this cankerous weakness any longer! Curse you, curse you! Curse everything you stand for! Take my soul if you must have it, what would I not give to be rid you?"
Spittle and blood sprayed from the dying man's cracked lips as he screamed obscenities at his haunter, at God, and at the Universe. Bloodshot eyes rolled madly in their sockets and the old man fell panting backwards on the bed in exhaustion from his wild outburst.
When he opened his eyes, the dark shadow had vanished. The room was as empty as it had been in the days of his health. The old man blinked his rheumy eyes in disbelief and squinted for a better look, for he suddenly realized that while death's shadow was certainly no longer there, something had indeed replaced it.
Three somethings. Three disembodied shapes, as they appeared to his failing vision, encroached upon him.
"Who are you?" He demanded, the fear sickeningly obvious in his voice. "What do you want? Speak up!"
"Why boy, is that any way to talk to your associates? I was under the impression that you had something to offer."
The voice was cream and iron, honeyed steel, smooth but powerful and disembodied, belonging to no man who walked the earth. It struck a cold blade of fear into what was left of the old man, numbing him as if he'd been touched by poison. No longer did he feel any physical discomfort.
"Now," the voice continued, "What you have to offer is, I'm afraid, hardly worth our time. The question is, how much are you willing to give up?"
"Anything! Everything!" The old man rasped in desperation. "I will give you anything you ask! I am the master of my bloodline, every drop is yours! Only stave off the demon!"
A terrible, booming laugh echoed through every corner of the mansion. Never had the man heard such an awful sound in his life. It struck horror into his very soul and he drew away, every nerve in his body trembling.
"You misunderstand," the voice chided with amusement, "it is the Angel of Mercy whom I stave, I shall pin her wings to the wall. We, we are saviors of your mortal soul. We are much more worthy of the name Demon."
"Whatever you are," the man replied, "angels, devils, whatever. I ask that you protect me from the netherworld and deliver me from death. My bounties, bodily and otherwise, are forever yours. Grant me the immortality I seek and even my descendants will repay you. My bloodline is yours. Take what you will."
The light of the candles flickered with a phantom wind. A pair of smoldering eyes materialized over the elderly man's bed, and he suddenly felt cold, as though he had been doused in icy water. When he opened his eyes, the three shapes had faded away, leaving behind only a lingering whisper.
If that is your wish.
THEY TOLD ME I was special.
They assured me I was about to change my life.
But where I used to dream of the world and all its strangeness and splendor, I now only see oiled darkness and gnashing teeth when I close my eyes. They're eating me alive.
Tell me...what day is it?
Chapter One
I AM GOING mad.
Even as I speak, the words are twisting away from me, writhing like living creatures to whisper horrible things. They mock me, push me, tempt me to obey their lewd commands, and it is all I can do to resist them.
Nevertheless, I know that I must be heard, I must communicate my hell to the world so it can know what I know. So it can be warned. I have seen evil. Actual, true evil and I have looked it in the eye. Seeing something like that fractures the soul, and mine has been ground to powder.
The darkness is coming. Now my mind is clouding and the veil smothers me, but while I still have the strength to speak, I will tell my story until the last rattling breath escapes my broken esophagus.
Time has no place in this god-forsaken place, whether I have been here for a hundred years or a few hours, it is impossible to tell for sure. I only know that I can see the end to my hourglass. I am going to die. Death for me holds no fear but, but being forgotten...the thought terrifies me. I need to tell you who I am.
I was born Judas Stoker III, on January first in Albany, New York, to my mother, Ella Stoker. My father had long since faded from the picture and I neither knew nor cared to know his name.
My mother raised me by herself in a little apartment in the city, both of us perfectly content with each other's company. I remember we had a fat white cat named Moses who used to sit on my mother's violet beds and drove her crazy. Those memories are almost evanescent now.
The one constant blight to our peaceful lives, however, was my constant hallucinogenic nightmares. The darkness blurred the lines between reality and fantasy for me, and I became catatonic at times in my terror.
On more than a few occasions, I would wake up after an episode to find myself surrounded by four white walls with my wrists secured to a bed and my mother white-faced and large-eyed at my side.
"Oh Judas!" she would let out a shaky sigh and embrace me, her cheek, wet and salty against mine. "You're safe, baby, you're safe."
I remember looking down to see long, red scratches snaking up my arms and my fingernails reduced to bloodied stubs. These hospital visits would end in a long, boring session with my psychologist, who always concluded that a new brand of
medication was in order.
Needless to say, my education suffered drastically and I spent more of the school year at home than in a classroom. Still, my mother did her best to teach me herself and thanks to her, I made it into high school with the rest of my class.
But I digressed. All of that is meaningless now. The happy, smiling faces of my schoolmates are a thing of the past. I doubt I shall ever see a single one of them ever again. I need to tell about The Night. The Night! The Night! The cold, thundering, September night when my mother left for work and never came home.
Chapter Two
I CAN REMEMBER every fraction of every second of that night with crystal clarity. I remember being curled up on the sofa staring blankly at the flickering TV screen while my ears strained against the rhythmic drumming of the storm outside.
Each time there came the familiar swoosh of a car pulling in from the street, my heart leaped and I'd peer fruitlessly out to the window, only to be disappointed.
As the hands of the clock dragged themselves agonizingly across its face, I became more and more uneasy. Midnight was approaching and my mother hadn't yet come home. Worse, her cell phone seemed to be off, and no matter how many times I dialed and redialed her number, I was greeted with only her voicemail.
I felt like an animal in a cage as I paced around our apartment in agitation, always returning to the window to gaze out in the bleak night with no new results. In my core, I knew something was wrong.
The jangling of the cordless phone startled me out of my own head and shattered the remainder of my nerves. I jumped in fright and only after the third ring did I violently snatch it up.
"Hello? Mom?" I demanded breathlessly.
"Mr. Stoker?" The voice on the other line was cracked and muffled, and I could barely make out the words. All I could tell was that it was female. "Mr. Judas Stoker?"
"Who is this?" I shouted, unsure if she could hear me or not.
"This is Lana Christopher from St. Stephen's Hospital. May I speak to Joshua Stoker?"
My heart contracted in my chest with such force that for a moment I found myself temporarily robbed of breath. "Y-yes, this is he," I managed to push out.
"Mr. Stoker, is there someone you can call who can bring you here to the hospital?" The voice sounded clearer now, more business-like. "I'm afraid there's been an accident."
"An accident?" I repeated stupidly. "What accident? Who?"
There was an excruciating pause.
"A Ms. Ella Stoker, car accident. She is currently under intensive care, so if you could come down here and fill out some paperwork for us..."
The rest of Lana Christopher's sentence went unheard. The cordless slipped from my paralyzed fingers and hit the floor with a crash, spinning out of sight beneath the bookcase. Horrible images played through my mind as I imagined my mother's car crushed beneath the wheels of some metal monstrosity. Miniscule droplets of cold sweat beaded on my neck and forehead as I remained frozen in my horrified trance.
No, no, no. This couldn't be happening. My mother could not be hurt. She was invincible, all-knowing, and all-seeing. She could not be brought down by anything. My mother was God.
And yet...
Forcing my mind to stay shut, I grabbed the emergency cash from the jar on the fridge and fled from the apartment to hail a cab. We had no relatives to help us, no friend willing to risk their own safety to drive the troubled boy in apartment 21B to the hospital to find his mother.
My mother and I were all we had, and I couldn't let anything change that.
The following events passed in a haze of webbed misery. I can't recall the drive to the hospital or even talking to the front desk, trying to make them understand that my mother was there somewhere. They looked at me with pitying eyes and told me to wait until a broad, male nurse came to escort me to the room where they were working on my mother.
The male nurse would not let me through the doors, but I could see through the square windows the huddle of masked faces, each one with hands painted red. The body on the table, obscured by the gargantuan bodies around her, was too small to be my mother.
My mother was tall, like a runway model. She could not possibly be that small, sad, crumpled thing on the metal table. Someone had made a mistake. My heart leaped with hope at the notion. Yes! It was all just a big mistake! My mother was fine, probably at home wondering where I was. I should go home and be with her.
I turned away from the windows, clumsily knocking into the nurse as I did so. I had no control over my body, and my limbs moved jerkily, like a poorly coordinated puppet's. I felt strong hands steady me. I tried to explain their mistake, but my words came out jumbled and nonsensical. They looked at me with pitying eyes that infuriated me.
"Mr. Stoker, please calm down!" The large male nurse and his female associate guided me gently but firmly to one of the seats against the wall. Someone thrust a plastic cup of freezing water into my hand but I knocked it to the floor. I was crossing into hysteria by now in my desperation to make them understand that there had been a case of mistaken identities.
Chapter Three
THERE WAS A clatter of swinging doors, and a tall man in white with salt-and-pepper hair walked out and pulled the mask down from his face. He looked solemn. Too solemn.
"Mr. Stoker?" He inquired briskly. I could see him fidgeting with his fingers, absently rubbing the whitish string circling his finger where his wedding ring should have been.
For some reason, I couldn't take my eyes off his hands. There was a tiny splash of blood on the cuff of his white coat where the plastic covering had failed to protect it.
"You are Judas Stoker?"
I nodded dumbly, unable to bring myself to answer him. He put a heavy hand on my shoulder and gave me what I'm sure was supposed to be a sincere look of deep apology.
"I'm very sorry, Judas. I'm afraid there was nothing we could do for your mother."
"What?"
"She didn't make it. I'm very sorry." The doctor gave my shoulder a squeeze and I resisted the urge to attack him like a wild animal. What language was he speaking? The words had no meaning to me.
"She can't have." I insisted stoutly. "My mother has to be okay."
"I'm sorry," Dr. Sickening Sympathy rearranged his features to a more professional, no-nonsense look. "I'm afraid she's gone."
No. No, no, no.
His voice was drowned by the panic in my ears. The world spun and dipped, making it impossible for my feet to find the floor as earth and sky reversed their roles. I couldn't get the image of red out of my mind, and when I looked down at my hands, I was horrified to see them coated from fingers to elbow in thick, glistening blood.
My mother's beaten face stared up at me from the street and I saw her ruined body on the pavement, a broken doll.
"Why Judas?" her voice echoed boomingly through my mind. "Why did you let this happen to me? You were supposed to look out for me! You promised! You're such a bad son!"
"Stop it!" I could hardly recognize my own voice in its terror. I was vaguely aware of being restrained, my arms being pinned to my sides as I struggled, but the horror branded on my eyelids was all I could see. Before I could regain control, the melancholic blackness had taken me.
The following weeks slid by to make one long, heartbreaking day. I found myself institutionalized for the first time in my life without my mother helping me. Every time I opened my eyes, I saw her battered, bloody corpse at my bedside, accusing me of murder.
Instead of her unshakable support, I had now earned her wrath and hate. She hounded me relentlessly with her unanswerable question: why?
I could never reply to her. I didn't even try. I had no idea how long I was destined to be locked away in this white box with only the silent orderlies for company. For all I knew, this was how the rest of my life was going to be.
Now, looking back, I long for those four white walls! They are a distant, unattainable heaven to me now. I would give anything to b
e back, safe and isolated.
Chapter Four
MY SOLITUDE IN the sanitarium was short lived. Bear with me, my dearest listener, because I'm about to share with you the true origin of my suffering. My linear existence was interrupted by the early visit from the mothering female orderly that cooed and petted whenever she came to see me. This time however, she was not alone.
"Judas, poor lamb, you have a visitor! Isn't that wonderful?" She smiled down on me as I forced my eyelids to rise. She was so close that I could see the unsightly dark hairs sprouting on her chin and smell the overpowering odor of cheap cologne on her blouse. Behind her, my mother's corpse hovered in the corner, mouthing hateful curses.
"Who?" My voice was weak and fuzzy, my tongue swollen and parched and difficult to maneuver. My hands were free but it didn't matter. I was far too weak to even consider standing unassisted. My eyes dropped to the floor, and I noticed a pair of shiny black shoes, freshly polished and clearly expensive.
The shoes stepped forward and my gaze traveled upwards to the freshly pressed black pants, the custom tailored suit, and the white gloved hands with extraordinarily long fingers.
"Young Master Judas," the voice was startlingly deep and sent goose bumps across my skin.
The mothering orderly moved aside, allowing me my first proper glimpse of my warden. I found myself craning my neck to see the face of the man who introduced himself only as Blu. Blu the Butler.
His age was impossible to discern, he could've been anywhere from twenty-five to mid-forties. His skin was very pale, almost transparent, and he had the bluest, fiercest eyes I had ever seen in my entire life. They burned with a cold, cruel fire that set my nerves on edge.
Even then, I knew there was something evil that lurked behind his facade of normalcy.
"I assume you are wondering why I am here," he spoke perfect English, but with the curious clarity of one to whom it is a second language. I noticed, as he spoke, that his teeth were very white. For a moment I imagined that they were pointed, but when I peered closer, I decided that it must have been a trick of the light.
"What do you want?" I rasped weakly, my voice was like two bits of paper sliding against one another.
The strange man calling himself 'Blu' reached into the vest pocket of his overcoat and withdrew a neatly folded envelope. "This is a letter from your great grandfather, Judas Stoker I." The name stirred up faint, far-off memories of a rambling, gargantuan mansion with maze-like halls and limitless properties.