One Minute to Midnight (6 page)

"I'm not sure. I don't know why I'm
here." Farley stammered.
"You want to know if you can be free of your college debt. That is
what I see in your thoughts. You are also scared that you will not
be able to find a job after spending so long chasing the white
rabbit down a hole." Jinks said.

"Well, yes." Farley
admitted.

"Let me look into the crystal ball and
see if I can find your future within." Jinks said.

"You can see that in your ball?"
Farley asked.
"All that, and more."

Jinks sat quiet for a moment, staring
into the orb on his table, and as he did Farley could feel the tent
expand and contract around him as if he were inside the lungs of
some great beast. Farley began to perspire and his heart raced as
Jinks reached out to the ball, cupping his fingers around it. When
they were an inch from the sides, Farley could see electric sparks
flashing between Jinks' fingers and he saw that the ball was now
filled with dark smoke. Farley could hear voices in his head and
the screams of many people in pain. Sweat poured from his forehead,
and the louder the noise became the more he felt his sanity slip
away. Farley fell sideways, screaming and holding himself in the
fetal position as the world swam away and he was locked in an
embrace with his knees. Tears filled his eyes and he could see them
now: the dead and dying all around him on a field of
battle.

Humans, orcs, werewolves, minotaur's,
and centaurs, engaged in mortal combat with spears, axes, and
terrible great swords. Fires raged in his mind as Farley heard and
saw shrieks of terror and rage. Two tall figures emerged from the
battle like warriors out of a nightmare. Farley looked on as
werewolves in leather armor slayed enemies before them, one after
another in the fray of a horrible battle. Their claws shredded
through centaur attackers, as the horse men leapt over the corpses
of the fallen and stabbed down with their mighty spears. Farley
felt as if the wolf men were inside his head and he could hear
their thoughts. So much anger and sorrow. They fought back to back
through the encroaching fire as bombs exploded and hell rained
down. Farley saw that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of the
dead piled in an ocean of bodies.

He was no longer in the tent, and
Jinks could have been a figment of his imagination, as he writhed
on the ground and screamed in a pit of flames. What he saw next
caused an involuntary release of his bladder. Rising out of the
fires, standing high above the battlefield was a black demon with
the head of a bull and massive horns of onyx staring through red
eyes toward the battlefield. His massive arms wielded a battle-axe
the size of a skyscraper that had been forged with demonic skulls
at the tip. With bulging biceps, the minotaur demon god swung his
weapon and cleared a division of soldiers from the field, smashing
their bodies with a single blow.
"I am Smoke!" It screamed.

Farley could see the two wolf men stop
and stare at the hopeless horror before them. A moment later, the
ground quaked and out shot a black winged woman and he knew her to
be Lilith, but he didn’t know how he knew her name. She ringed the
giant Smoke and stabbed at him with her dual bladed staff as he
swatted at her like a bug. The two wolf men dropped another
centaur, and began to run to her over the bodies of fallen comrades
and foes like.
"Lilith! We are coming!" The larger one yelled.
"Dante and Ramos! It's about time you started doing some real
fighting. Are you going to let a girl do it all for
you?!"

Covered in blood and gore,
the two wolven looked at one another with a
get-serious
expression.

"You sure she needs our help, Dante?
She's got quite an attitude."

As he was speaking, Smoke caught her
with the back of his hand, and although she managed to slice off
his right pinky finger, the dark angel tumbled through the air
slamming into a mountain of the dead.
"I'd say yes, brother!"

Before Farley began to see the world
he entered fade away, he saw her rise once more and look his way.
She was beautiful, terrible, ancient, and he fell in love. Her
black wings spread wide as she glided to solid ground and began to
walk toward him. He could see her perfect ashen skin was flawless
in the light of battlefield fires. She wore a leather battle plate
that accentuated her ample breasts and leather pants that hugged
her thighs. Lilith's lips were the color of darkest night and her
eyes blood red, as if the whole world were bleeding inside them.
She strode forward as the battlefield turned to ashes. The wolven
brothers disappeared, and Smoke faded like a dying light. She
looked directly into Farley's eyes. He saw her mouth the word
"Farley" and then it was over. He was laying on the fairground dirt
in the fetal position and the tent was gone. His eyes were closed
tightly as tears ran down his cheeks, and once he opened them he
realized there was a crowd standing around him. Jim was shaking his
shoulder and calling his name when he came to.

"I'm fine. I'm fine." Farley
said.

"Where'd you go? You disappeared for
over an hour! We thought you'd gone home or been kidnapped and then
poof you're laying here in the ground." Jim said.

"You missed Joe tossing his cookies."
Tim said. He was shaking his head with solemn reverence.
"I don't know what happened. Am I still on earth?" Farley
asked.

"What was in your beer, man?" Joe
asked.
"I'm not sure, but all of that seemed so real." Farley
said.

"You must have had a seizure or
something. Let's get you home, brother." Jim said.

They walked Farley up to his door and
made sure he got inside before leaving him with his parents.
"I'll give you a call in the morning to see how you're doing, but
you may want to seek some medical attention if you have one of
those episodes again." Jim said. He clapped Farley on the shoulder
and the other guys gave him bro hugs.

Farley had been wearing cargo shorts
that night, and when he got upstairs to his room he noticed
something hard in his right cargo pocket. When he reached in he
found a glass ball like the one he had seen on Jinks'
table.

"What the hell?" He said to
himself.

He placed the ball on his dresser and
laid down on his bed fully clothed, and fell into a deep sleep. At
some point in the night he was awakened by a loud thump on the
floor. Farley shot awake with a racing heartbeat, and looked around
to see what it was. The streetlight outside shone though the
blinds, illuminating the room with dim half-light. Farley could see
the ball that had been in his pocket sitting on the floor, and
noticed it was growing. Since the fall, it had doubled in size and
now it was the size of a beach ball. As his eyes widened he could
see a forest through the clear glass, and now it was the size of
his bed. Farley wanted to jump out of his bedroom window and then
he saw the black winged woman and stopped. She walked through the
forest and as she stood in her beauty, the raven-haired woman
beckoned to him. Lilith was summoning him to her world and he felt
the strong desire to join her. But how, he asked himself, was this
happening?
"There are many portals between worlds, Farley." She said through
the bubble. "Join me in the forest."
She was just as magnificent as she had been when he saw her at the
fair. He had to be with her, and so he stepped out of bed, and
walked toward the man-sized clear ball. Farley found that he could
put his hand through the translucent material, and then his foot,
and finally he pushed himself all the way through the glass portal,
looking back at his bedroom as the ball began to shrink once more.
His world disappeared as he stood in a strange forest, light-years
from his own planet. Lilith embraced Farley from behind, under her
black wings. His love for her was supernatural, and as long as she
wanted him he was there. Farley never went home again, but in his
pocket, available for use at any time, was the key to his world in
the form of a tiny crystal ball.

in light and darkness

When an angel decides to interfere with the
world of men, she inadvertently unleashes a dark power so great it
could tear the universe apart.

In ancient times, great wars erupted
between the forces of light and darkness, each side immortal, and
terrible with power. Their bitter struggles were ferocious. Angels
and demons fought for cosmological domination in the ninth
dimension. Planets were born and destroyed in neighboring
dimensions in the wake of their chaotic battles, as The Creator
passively observed. Lucifer dominated all darkness with his army of
devils, and Gabriel, the archangel, commanded all else with beings
composed of pure light. Their futile quarrel caused a vibration
that reverberated through the cosmos from one dimension to another,
giving life to unexpected forms of consciousness. For Mankind, and
all of the natural creatures on Earth, Martians on Mars, Venutians
on Venus, and elsewhere in the multidimensional field of energy,
many changes began to occur in the space before time
existed.

The Creator held a council with
Gabriel and Lucifer and told them this fighting was futile, and not
worth the destruction. They ceased their quarreling, and entered an
armistice. Bored after several millennia of conflict, the forces of
light and darkness began to redirect their energy. Pure curiosity
drove them to watch over the life that their battles had
unexpectedly ushered into existence.

From the ninth dimension forces of
dark and light now had a new game to distract them from their petty
violence and cosmological ownership. The only rule imposed upon
them was that there could be no physical interaction with humanity,
or any other sentient creatures. The angels guided mankind and all
other humanoid, reptilian, and insectoid life forms by positive
suggestion, while agents of darkness sought to undermine their
counterparts using psychic manipulation to achieve domination. For
millions of years they each played their side of the game, never
physically interfering with the actions of men. Empires of great
technology rose and fell on Earth, repeatedly, and mankind was like
an infant learning to walk. The stumble and fall for humanity meant
the collapse of entire societies, cultures devastated beyond
repair, and the memory wipe of each species as they began again.
Erasing knowledge of past civilizations was the only physical
interaction permitted by The Creator, and so that there would never
be a question of blame for one side or the other, angels and demons
worked together in this task.
Jim Taggert knew this, because he had been in contact with an
entity from the ninth dimension since childhood, and she had
communicated with him almost daily. Yalesh, the entity, came to Jim
because she saw that humanity was in trouble once more, and
although she was breaking the rules, she gambled that her
interference with the natural order would not cause any damage.
However, her contact with the human world was not wholly unnoticed.
When Yalesh contacted Jim as a child, she opened a tiny hole in the
fabric of space-time, and as this hole grew larger, an unnamable
horror from a dimension of chaotic madness slowly began to
approach. Each time she physically interacted with Jim the hole
grew larger, and the celestial vibration of life on earth began to
decrease.
Today was Sunday, Jim's favorite day of the week, when he refused
to feel guilty for reading a good book for fun, or to be ashamed
for vegetating on his apartment balcony. A knock came at the door
as he was sipping his first cup of coffee of the day, and when he
opened it, Yalesh was standing before him. Yalesh was a blonde
beauty, standing five foot three, with long eyelashes and soft
alabaster skin. She reminded him of a beautiful porcelain
doll.

"You know, you don't have to knock. I
know you see everything I do anyway. Just let yourself in." Jim
said.
"Your human custom is to knock and receive acceptance before entry.
I simply choose to honor your customs." Yalesh replied.

"You want to talk about the limits of
the cosmos again, or something? To what do I owe this honor,
madam?" Jim said.

"I have to go away." Came the
answer.
"What do you mean, you have to go away? Where?"
"Back to my dimension. My interaction with your species has opened
a hole in the eternal abyss. This is more complex than you can
understand, but you need to know that your planet is in danger. My
kind will have to fix it, and I was a fool to believe that
interacting with only one human would not cause a problem. I regret
the pain my actions will have caused before this is over." Yalesh
said, sighing with sadness.
Jim stood dumbfounded by this new information. Yalesh was a very
beautiful woman and Jim had fallen in love a long time ago. Her
leaving was the last thing he wanted to hear. She was by all
intents and purposes an Angel of Heaven and Jim never wanted her to
leave his side. Humans and angels vibrated on different
frequencies, but the truth was that Yalesh was the love of his
life.

"I love you. You can't go, and it
doesn't matter what you've done because it's done. Stay here and
help." Jim pleaded.

"What is coming will be war on a scale
I have not seen in a very long time." Yalesh said.

She seemed upset, which was only
perceptible to Jim because he had known her his whole life. Angels
tended to be stoic in expression, and Jim always thought Yalesh
reminded him of Spock from Star Trek. He—like she—showed no
emotion, but Jim knew her emotional side was deep inside of her,
lurking behind a mask of calm, waiting for the right spark.
"I'm to be punished for my part in this affair. We do not have
long, Jim."