The Devils Harvest: The End of All Flesh. (3 page)

Then I simply stood aside, knowing there was nothing else I could do. I could no more of stopped him from entering as I could of waved a hand and abated the storm. And that simple act changed my life. If I had refused him entry I might not be alive today to tell the tale – his tale. But of course now I know different, things having already run there course and I am now relating them for the first time.

As he serenely glided past a waft of musk and ancient spices drifted from him.

I stood next to the open door, the wind howling, snow clinging to my back and trousers, making my slippers wet and cold. All the heat I had accumulated rushing out the wide-open door. Doors banging loudly from inside as the wind whipped around the confines of my once sane home.

I would never have the sense of normality again. My life was now forever changed. My fixed natural order in the cosmos had now been radically altered. Destiny was looking the other way.

I watched as he gracefully moved across the room. The way in which he moved was more like a predator than a mere man. After a couple of steps he simply opened his clenched hand and dropped the umbrella as if it was of no significance – social norms not high on his list. He took a high backed seat besides the open crackling fire and gently lowered himself down onto it, crossing his long thin legs, showing of his black socks.

“Please, take a seat,” he simply said. He waved a hand at the empty chair opposite.

I was still in a state of shock. I hadn’t worked out what he was yet, but I knew something was not right. My primeval instincts’ telling me something was very wrong. It took all my will power from simply stopping myself from running out the door, plunging into the cold stormy night, taking my chances out there, rather than be anywhere near him, and that smile of his.

“Please,” he said once again. As he did so this time the door was wrenched from my grasp and slammed shut. I let myself believe for those few precious seconds that it was my imagination taking hold, nothing more than the wind pulling it from my hand. That was until the latch clicked and the bolt locked.

My eyes pried away from the now locked and bolted door, to see him sat motionless, only the wide smile being any movement from his direction. Then his tongue raked over his chapped lips. Like a dead body having just been raised by necromancy, I slowly moved across the room, bumping into a knee-high table in the process, upturning it along with the dead telephone.

“Please sit, Mr. Cain,” he said, in his relaxed modulated voice. I hadn’t told him my name. Had I? But then everyone in the area knew I lived here, but they kept at a respectable distance. Until now. My body answered by taking another high backed wing chair opposite, with its studded buttons in red hard leather. My favourite seat, one I sat in while thinking or simply reading. I never knew why I had another positioned opposite, never having visitors. I think it was for comfort reason. Freudian psychology would say I was creating an illusion that I wasn’t alone.

The two chairs were framed by the large fireplace. There was a thick wooden fire surround that was almost twelve foot across, and five high. The fire nestled in the middle on the grate, and it had two stone seats to either side, if you wished to sit uncomfortably close. I believed they were also used for drying out food and herbs were hung to either side. Firewood was also stacked on each side to keep it dry. There was a carbon copy of it in the large kitchen.

“May I smoke?” he asked, already reaching into the confines of his jacket to remove a packet of unfiltered Marlboros. I knew them well, my chosen brand before I had given them up after losing a brother to lung cancer.

He looked around, his eye skipping all around the room.

“I have –” I coughed, trying to clear my constricted throat. “I have no ashtrays,” I managed to squeeze out eventually. The first time I had spoken, and for such a mundane reason.

“That’s right,” he stated matter-of-fact, “after the unfortunate sickness with your older brother.” He lifted the cigarette to his thinly pressed lips and lit it with a single match he had struck by scraping with his fingernail, like you see in the movies. Smoke encompassed his face, shrouding him from view for a fraction of a second. Then two long plumes of smoke issued from his nostrils, now encircling his lap like the witches Vixens deadly fog.

“What about the ashtray in the cupboard under the stairs?” he asked politely, as if inquiring about my health.

I dislodged an old memory, realizing that yes there was an old ashtray under the stairs in an old cardboard box, right next to the small collection of Christmas decorations I had put away a few weeks ago. I had put the ashtray there years before, stowing it away with some of my brother’s belongings. Not wanting to throw it way because it had been his, even though – in a way – it had been the cause of his death.

In fact it was an ashtray I had bought him on one of my numerous escapades around the world. Thinking back it was a small hand-carved chunk of stone, ground down by the hands of a Mewalky Indian. Traditional, they said, even though I had never heard of ancient Indians using ashtrays. They simply used long decorative pipes and knocked the ash out onto the ground. Everyone has to adapt when it came to making money. But before I had chance to climb to my unsteady feet and retrieve it, he waved the thought aside.

“No problem,” he had announced, as he tossed the match into the fire, and pushed his hand back into the hidden pocket, removing a thick black leather wallet. He then flicked it with his wrist to open it up; he proceeded to use it as an ashtray.

“This will suffice,” he simply said, while pulling long and hard upon his cancer stick, pulling it deep into his lungs, before blowing the blue plume into the fire that then disappeared up the wide chimney.

He stared fixated upon my face, as if studying every inch, every flaw. Until what seemed like an eternity later he once again spoke.

“Interesting stuff,” he simply stated, even though after his initial viewing of the room his eyes hadn’t left mine. Smoke curled out his nostrils, running up his pale elongated face.

It was true, my furniture was unusual. I had collected items from various countries I had visited. Not caring if a particular object went with what I already had, but buying it because I simply liked it, regardless. The overall effect of my large front room was that of a museum. Ancient alabaster vases and statues from all over Egypt, of all shapes and sizes. One of my most expensive objects in the room in a small eight inch high statue of The Dwarf God Bes, which is over four thousand years old. There are tapestries from all over Europe – my favourite being a copy of
The Hunt of the Unicorn: the Unicorn is Found
. Traditional kilim woven carpets from Turkey and Pakistan. Antique giare’s from Puglia in Italy. Swords from Scotland, from a Ballhead Claymore to a Six Finger broadsword and a Basket Hilt broadsword. There’s big chunky furniture from Germany and Holland, with hand carved Segusino Mexican Pine tables and sideboards from rural Taxco, Guanajuato and Cuernavaca from around Mexico City. And a collection of pictures and painting from all over the world, my most prized being a small ten by ten inch pencil drawing of a rose by Picasso, valued at £45,650 at its last appraisal. There is also numerous trinkets and objects covering almost every surface. I hated starkness it made me itchy. I also hated dusting, which gave it the appearance of an abandoned museum.

Also the whole house had large, thick wooden exposed beams running across the ceilings. The beams in the front room had numerous objects hanging from them, or nailed to them, ranging from old horse shoes to a breech-loading Westley Richards rifle, or nicknamed the
Monkey Tail
, dating back to 1861.

There was also a vast collection of books and manuscripts that any museum would be proud to own, perched on a selection of Victorian mahogany 1880 open bookcases, with the rare first editions sat inside the glass doors of an impressive William IV mahogany bookcase from the 1830’s.

My ex-wives used to call it a junkyard. Funny thing was though, in the settlements they all tried to get their sticky hands on it all without success.

I cleared my throat once again and tried to speak, only creating a croak like noise that seemed to make him smile all the more. He looked like a Cheshire cat sat inside human clothing. And I felt like a mouse that he had just caught out in the open.

“Now aren’t I the rude one, coming here and not explaining myself?” He took another cigarette from the red and white packet resting upon his lap, gave it a tap on the packet, and then lit it from the stub of the last, then simply tossed the old stub into the flames. His eyes never left mine, as if he was waiting for me to make a move and was ready to pounce.

I still hadn’t said much in the way of conversation. My throat seemed to be constricted, as if some unseen force had its hands wrapped tightly around it, trying to squeeze the life from me. It felt like I had an elephant sat on my chest.

“Would you like a drink of anything,” I coughed to clear my throat. “Tea, coffee or something stronger?” It was an automatic question, born from English etiquette I had picked up. I felt stupid the moment I said it.

He simply stared and didn’t bother to reply.

I had sat there so long without speaking that he had finished yet another cigarette. This time he tossed it directly into the flames, while once again reaching for another. A compulsive chain-smoker if I ever did see one. It almost seemed like he needed the smoke to be able to breathe.

This time he didn’t have the stub to relight the new one. Or this was the simplest way he could demonstrate my worse fears. He now leant forward slightly and pushed his hand into the flames, picking up a burning cinder of white hot wood, which he proceeded to light the cigarette with. My god, his hand. The fingers that was now holding the cigarette were steaming themselves, flesh having been burnt, the skin curling and blackened, puss running from his discoloured, now twisted fingernails. One finger was even burnt down to the bone – a fourth degree burn.

He sat back in the seat, repositioning himself more comfortably, seemingly not noticing his blackened burnt disfigured fingers. He gave one of his predatory smiles, as he lifted the cigarette to his cracked lips, his twisted black fingers up before his face, the smoke rising off of them, adding to the greyish-blue smoke from the cancer stick.

“You know who I am, don’t you?” he asked casually, as if simply asking if I think the storm will last for very long.

I couldn’t answer I simply nodded, my Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as if it was in white-water-rapids.

It was as if a casting director had picked someone to represent the devil; he ticked all the right boxes – he had found the perfect body.

He studied my eyes again. That awful grin still locked on his face. A patronizing grin, like the Joker from Batman.

Now I noticed something else about him, something alarming. His skin had, during the time he had been sitting there, started to take on a greyish colour. His face around his upturned smile looked like it was cracking. Flakes of skin dropping down on to his once spotless black jacket, now covered in grey skin and some of his loose greying hairs. Nice brush over by the way. His hair was so thinning you could see the comb lines running through his oily scalp.

He lit another cigarette from the butt of his last. Eyes still locked on mine, watching me studying him. Maybe he didn’t mix much with humanity? Or maybe I was viewed as a mere insect to him?

“I have a message for you,” he simply stated, once again in his matter-of-fact voice.

So this was it, time for me to pass on from here. Beelzebub had come for me. Possibly this is how it went for everyone. Who knows? I tried to think what I had done to have him come for me personally. Was I going to eternal torment? Was he my chauffeur, with a black horse or possibly a long black hearse waiting for me outside, ready to take me off in to the dark unknown? The headless Sir Frances Drake my driver.

“I am not here for you in that sense,” he stated, as if reading my mind. “I never come for anyone, regardless of what you have heard or read.” He blew a long plume of blue smoke towards the ceiling. “I have a message that I need you to write. A book,” he stated plainly.

I looked on in confusion. Not being able to grasp what he was asking from me.

“For way to long His Book,” he said looking at the ceiling while he said His. I had the feeling he was referring to God, but he couldn’t get the word across his lips, as if it had a bitter taste. Now I know that was simply one of his little tricks, a subtle ploy to keep me from the truth.

“His Book has been in circulation for thousands of years. Lives have changed because of it, and millions of people have died for it. For example,” he started to tick off fingers on his burnt hand, “from the Crusades of 1095 to 1291 which were to restore Christian control of the Holy Land, which were fought over a period of nearly two hundred years. Millions murdered in the name of God.” He flicked his second finger.” There was the
Reconquista
which was an almost seven hundred year religious crusade, from 711 to 1492, to take land away from the muslins. Another is the Massacre of Vassy, which started the thirty-six year (eight wars) French Wars of Religion, between the French Catholics and Protestants. Also the Thirty Years War of 1618, which was one of the single most destructive wars in European history, starting in Germany, by the end most European countries were involved. Then there was the Taiping Civil War from 1850 to 1864 which killed over twenty million alone when they tried to replace Confucianism, Buddhism and Chinese folk religion with Christianity. And that’s not counting the countless dead from movements such as Milkhemet Mitzvah and Jihad, just to name a few. Your history is riddled with bodies due to His Book.