Read Spirit Wars Online

Authors: Mon D Rea

Tags: #afterlife, #angel, #crow, #Dante, #dark, #death, #destiny, #fallen, #fate, #Fates, #ghost, #Greek mythology, #grim, #hell, #life after death, #psychic, #reaper, #reincarnation, #scythe, #soul, #soulmate, #spirit, #Third eye, #underworld

Spirit Wars (3 page)

BOOK: Spirit Wars
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I should’ve known better. The water
subsides
as rapidly as it has come. More have gone missing. I take
big, hungry gulps of air while the elevator boy carries on as usual,
ridiculously unfazed with just
the daintiest
trace
of algae on his cap. My eyes follow the swampy river as it ebbs back to its
original course. On the reddened banks,
a myriad of people
are locked in an eternal free-for-all because everyone
rises back up like rabid animals in spite of their mortal injuries.

“Sub-level 6: Split-level practitioners, the hypocrites and the
intolerant…”

The elevator
dings
and right
away my bladder empties again, releasing a warm, even flow inside the leg of my
wetsuit. A giant hand made entirely of roaring flames squeezes in and pinches
people between its thumb and forefinger, instantly roasting them and singeing
everyone else around. The obscene smell of burning human flesh fills the
elevator, then the spirits are lifted away and locked in flaming coffins.

I’m now too terrified for myself to think of anything else. The
next will be my stop, the Seventh Circle where all suicides are punished. And I
can’t for the life of me remember…

Another hand, at least of normal size, pokes in at the last moment
and catches the closing doors. I become fixated on the fact that this hand is
perfectly human, with a ring on every finger; rings of all gothic themes,
mainly skulls but also scorpion, talon, jester and a black pearl.

When the elevator doors reopen, this new character steps in
wearing a black cloak with a hood that completely hides its face except for two
glowing, predatory eyes; all reminiscent of Kharon. The striking resemblance to
the ferryman makes my heart skip a beat.

For a reason unknown even to my enhanced psychic abilities, this
newcomer is carrying a guitar case. His identity, however, is readily clear to
me: King Death.

 
Chapter IV: Hell’s Supercomputer

“I’ll take it from here, fleshie,” Death whispers in a voice
oozing with menace, enough to turn a sumo wrestler’s knees into jelly. Unlike
Charon’s voice which sounded like it was borrowed from an ogre, Death’s works
on a whole different level of threat-making. Its calmness will send shivers up
and down your spine. It’s the perfect voice from beyond the grave, gravelly and
frosty, and gives the impression that Death is a gangster of the literal
underworld.

The elevator boy makes the sole little mistake of doubting what he
has just been told and looks over his shoulder for the first time. Like an owl,
he swivels his head 180 degrees so I see that for a face he has nothing but two
dots for eyes and one eternal frown, basically an upside-down smile, all slit
into a smooth, round mass of flesh.

The face is heartrendingly crude, like a stickman’s face traced in
dirt by a preschooler. But once those inanimate peepers lock on Death (whose
own face is still hidden from me), they bulge. No sight could be more literal
for the expression “eye-popping.” From the taut skin, vitreous humor the size
and shape of billiard balls jump and dangle at the end of raw, exposed nerves;
like the trademark feature of a
Ghostbuster
action figure, only more
graphic.

To help him hold this reaction, the exact spot he’s standing on
collapses like a trapdoor and he disappears into a neat black square; that is,
the whole person except for his innards still attached to the ceiling. First,
the organs stretch like the longest suspenders then, the instant slingshot that
they are, they fling the elevator boy straight into and through the ceiling in
a blur, creating his own jagged emergency exit. The poor kid leaves with a
final, reverberating snap.

All these things were made possible by pure psychokinetic energy,
which I fear to be only one of my new tormentor’s many abilities. We’re finally
alone in the car and this thought fills me with cold, paralyzing terror. I
imagine this is how a mouse feels when placed inside the cage of a python.
Around this character Death, wanton violence is the norm like in an episode of
Tom
and Jerry
, but the pranks are much too real to be funny and they’re just
shockingly brutal.
Then again
there’s something
strangely right about a Grim Reaper that’s funny in his own twisted way.

L
ike the world’s most cruel punch line, it turns out there’s
actually a panel of buttons to control the elevator, where Death now proceeds
to input a secret code.

Everything starts shaking and, before I can crunch my stomach
right where it is, we
drop like a boulder.

I can’t tell just by looking at Death though. No matter how fast
we’re falling, the Grim Reaper stands as erect and elegant as a general in the
bombed frontlines, the back of his hood still turned to me. We slide past more
torture floors, reach the bottom and still keep going.

The bottom has fallen out and the elevator walls are revealed to
be made of glass once they slide out of their shaft. And so, with a
stomach-lurching, top-of-the-world view spreading out beyond my toes, I pray
that my unattached VIP
box
is impervious
to boiling magma because that’s exactly where we’re headed.

As imagined, there’s a whole army of giants toiling on ledges as
we plummet at breakneck speed, but everything in this part of the netherworld
is in titanic proportions that even though we do, I don’t miss a thing. In
fact, if I didn’t know any better and if the glass walls of my prison weren’t
rattling like tin roof in a hail storm, I’d think we were traveling in slow
motion.

Buried here in the very center of the earth crouches gargantuan
Abaddon, hideous and malformed with inky fur, three heads and three pairs of
membranous bat wings. There’s magma all over the colossal walls but the ground,
the middle of hell itself, is made of smoking ice and the Great Red Dragon is
buried to the waist in it. All three of his jaws are chomping down on
three other major personalities – the heavyweights, the senior and most coveted
inmates of hell (one of them I think is Hitler) – and as tears fall from his
six bloodshot eyes, they mix with the blood of these VIPs.

I
say another quick prayer that we wouldn’t crash into any of the
six massive wings as the beast makes his endless attempts to escape. And
miraculously, we miss every wall of claw and membrane. We pass so close to
Abaddon I could touch the pitch-black, unholy fur if I just reached out my
hand.

We drop squarely into an opening under the monster and the next
thing I know the elevator’s clattering through very narrow pipelines. In all
the confusion, my restraints slacken and I promptly do a reverse head-butt.

I feel blood flow in an instant. There’s a flush of heat, a blur,
and then everything turns to black.

****

I was out for an uncertain amount of time. As I drift back into
consciousness, I hear nothing but silence; tomblike and earsplitting. I
fearfully open my eyes and take in my surroundings while doing a mental check
of every ache in my body. I’m alive and, all things considered, still in one
piece in Death’s office.

Death has an office. This impression is only the second one I get;
the first that actually entered my mind was: mind-blown. 

The room I’m in is the exact scene of my persistent nightmare. In
all four directions, floor to ceiling the walls are covered with computer
monitors, every one of them showing a different video feed. The only thing I
wasn’t able to foresee is their outlandish, hexagonal shape and how they all
fit one another like the inside of a beehive. The material that makes up their
edges is crude and looks like a whitish, waxy substance secreted by some insect
of horrifying size. Also, it’s not liquid crystal inside the monitors but water
somehow engineered to flow upwards instead of down, probably from yet another
enchanted river.

The noise that the computers emit is eerily accurate, however.
There’s no mistaking that hybrid insectile-mechanical drone. It’s the white
noise that has surrounded my entire life; this perverse sound of death.

Each and every monitor in the room is showing a scene straight out
of painfully innocent human lives: people going about their everyday affairs
oblivious of these very powerful spy cams trained on them. At first, the feeds
look like home videos but the longer you look at them the more you see that not
all of them are memorable or even properly focused; they’re just your
candid
people seen from both routine and God-worthy perspectives
– standing in a jam-packed subway, kneeling in church, making love in a
run-down apartment, passing a
joint
at a
party…

It
finally hits me as more of the same thing enter my consciousness: all the
people have what appear to be white balloons attached to their necks. These
things are floating and bobbing after their owners like real balloons but
they’re sort of
meatier
and softly lit like paper lanterns, from the fat
strings to the ovals themselves. These balloons also have varying lengths of
string for each person and thus reach more than one height. Some kiss faces
while others tower as high as skyscrapers and yet, inexplicably, the humans
live their lives completely unaware of this excess baggage. And whenever the
string of a balloon gets caught somewhere or crosses that of another, they
never get tangled but dissolve and reconstitute themselves in a flash.

I
recall one other place I’ve seen them: down the River Akheron where they float,
deflated but recognizable.

Umballicus
, their name
echoes in my ear, in Kharon’s ogre voice.

The thing that really knocks the wind out of me though, even after
all I’ve been through, is the fact that in one of the monitors nearest me I can
see Samantha. Sam. Simply thinking of her name makes me feel old, ancient; and
home feels like billions of light-years away, both in space and time.

Sam’s umballicus-bearing image is sitting on a bed in a room that
looks faintly familiar. She’s hugging my dusty, stringless guitar and sobbing
piteously. It takes a moment for me to realize that she’s in mourning. For me.
And all at once through another psychic sitrep, this time with the force of a
4G bullet to the brain, I come to have a very vivid picture of everything that
has transpired in my absence:

In the hospital, the sight and sound of all those machines
surrounding my bed reminds Sam that the substantial part of me, that which once
made me me is in danger. The man lying in the hospital bed is Nataniel Cuervo
but at the same time not him. Right now a very thin line divides the person
from an empty shell.

She’s grown familiar with those additions to my body. They’re her
best pals in so much as they still keep me with her. The ICP monitor attached
to my skull, the pads on my chest linked to the ECG, the ventilator pumping air
into my lungs through a tube inside my windpipe, the PEG tube going directly to
my stomach wall…

She worries about bed sores. She feels anger – at herself, me, the
fishermen’s children who stole me from her, God – but always there’s the gnawing
feeling of not knowing what comes next. She feels the urge to do something
stupid and crazy, to tear away clumps of her hair and scream herself hoarse
because she could’ve done something to prevent everything. She should’ve seen
it coming. At least this is what she believes.

Ironically, it’s during this time (time flows much faster in the
world of the living than it does in the land of the dead) that she finally
learns about my personal history, deeper than what she would have found out
under normal circumstances. That I was a foundling and most of my childhood had
been spent drifting from house to house, family to family. That I didn’t have
any real parents to speak of though I pretended to be just like everyone else;
when all I had was a name assigned by a social worker and a judge. Nataniel
Cuervo, after all, was too fancy a name to be true. 

The unglamorous truth is, when I was an infant I was discovered
naked and wailing inside a cardboard box in front of Blessed Children’s, with
nothing so much as a note or a piece of lint in the way of identification;
nothing except an inquisitive crow standing by like some emissary of the devil.
To the old nuns it seemed as though I had been delivered to earth by a crow
instead of the usual stork. Hence the name Nataniel Cuervo – child of the crow.

Going back to the crisis at hand, I can see in the monitors how
Sam’s silently suffering inside. She acts calmly and bravely above my bed but
collapses like a castle of cards out of earshot.
More than
any man at any point in his life, I’m now aware of how grief is the other side
of the same coin. Love, heartbreak, memories, pain; humans can never really
have one without the other. Any idea to the contrary is nothing but human
illusion.

I
guess it’s Sam’s private limbo
counting the days that I didn’t open my eyes while dreading what will come
after. The doctors are already talking about pulling the plug as I’ve been
declared brain dead. I’ve lost a lot of functions in my cerebrum, cerebellum,
and brain stem but amazingly my heart still makes normal cycles per minute. I
know it’s just a matter of time though.

“Diabolical, isn’t it?” My skin breaks out in goose bumps when I
realize Death’s in the same room. More alarmingly, the dark angel’s addressing
me
in that voice that will wither a freshly-bloomed flower.

“The
Lachesis supercomputers, courtesy of the Fate Weaver.
These
machines are thought-run. They never lie. They always show you the thing you
desire the most to see.”

I recognize the name
Lachesis
from my constant nightmare
and my memory of Greek myths, but
Fate Weaver
doesn’t ring a bell.

At
Death’s words, the computer monitors
directly in front of him flicker and switch to only one image and, from where
he stands with his hands clasped at the back of his cloak, it’s like a huge
wave of dominoes rolls over and spreads this single image to every last monitor
until it’s almost narcissistic; except instead of his own reflection, we’re now
looking at a striking woman sitting at a coffee shop, reading a book and just
enjoying her private time. She could be an actress or a model judging by her
looks.

I
wonder about this woman, and also the Fate Weaver, and just about a hundred
other questions running through my head.
But the
thought of speaking to this spawn of darkness, the reaper of souls, was enough
to zip the mouth of even the most
loquacious
man.

“Don’t fall on your face, you maggoty meat,” Death hisses with
pure vehemence. “I hate your kind that stutter even inside your heads.” When he
says this, it’s with a distaste reserved only for squashed roaches still
crawling with their insides sticking out. Now concerned for my safety more than
ever, my brain registers how the glass elevator has split in the middle and its
only remaining piece is the wall on which I hang; very convenient for my
captor, though something also tells me nothing ever happens around the Grim
Reaper by accident.

BOOK: Spirit Wars
9.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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