Part II. The Black Day Angel (A Very Christmas Day)

From the faux Irish pub revolution.

By Tess Doberville

Once upon a very dark time, as you will remember in our last The Black Day Angel fairy horror tale, our handsome male heroine, Lonnie who with his strangely Indian looks and demeanor, of the Black Irish ~ meaning of the early Spanish conquistadors who had came to Ireland in the earlier centuries and took Irish brides as their own, now faces a different mystery.  As we left off in Part I. of our story, Lonnie who had gone to a graveyard that he seemed as if to stumble upon, after drinking a rather large bottle of premium Irish whiskey, in the entirety of the thing, guzzled this down nonstop and very drunk sobers at the ghost of his own dead and presumed forever lost father.

Staring at the ghost who with extended hand misted and at once seemed to welcome Lonnie as opposed to life, to enter the land of the grave beyond with him, the guardian Dark Angel, whose full purpose a heaven elsewhere known, smiled only slightly.  She extended her two arms before her and lowed, her hands with palms upturned, outstretched.  Lonnie knew though in his spirit, for a fact that on this very Christmas eve he faced his own real birth father.  Created in his image, the two nearly mirrored eachother.  Lonnie, flesh.  His father, a spirit being gone from the earth, for how long now?

The mystery of his father’s life brought forth so many immediate questions.  Where had he lived while on the earth?  Where had he gone after Lonnie, a newborn baby he had deposited on the orphanage steps?  The rectory had refused all information to him.  And anyway, in those days, nobody kept records, and definitely not accurate records.  The days and years of a birth, most estimated to the closest common denominator.  Only efficient churches  kept records that revealed such things through baptismals and the what not.  However, the important thing was that Lonnie was here and now, and that he was neither dreaming, nor having a nightmare, nor blacked out, as was normally the case.  He wanted to converse with the man, and Dark Angel who seemed ministerial, as if she were pleading, beckoning him to come said nothing.  He stepped forward and as he did, he heard the choruses of many angels singing.  He remembered a sermon during church on Sunday, when he was about eight, of Father giving a sermon that said certainly all of these mysterious things are in the earth.  But that man is neither to commune with or worry about such things. And yet at this time, another ghost he thought of much more than this.

²³And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone. ²⁴But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary.²⁵And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.²⁶And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.²⁷But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.²⁸And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water.²⁹And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. ~ Standard King James (Pure Cambridge)

What did it all mean?  For here before him was a challenge.  What had he done?  Had he said or done wicked things to hurt others while drunk?  Did he even remember all of his behavior?  Of course, he remembered the old addage:  What you say, and what you are while drunk is who and what you really are deep down inside.  The alcohol does that, you know.  It is an emotional painkiller, used mostly for anesthesia and colds during wars and by well-meaning old Irish grandmothers for medicine. But more than that, the hard liquor was the greatest uninhibitor. What was never meant to be forever, Lonnie had made forever.  To deaden the pain of the loss of his family.  An orphan all of his life, and even up until now in his adult life, he felt constantly abandoned and alone.  The terror of the loss of the only woman he ever really and truly loved to a deep, dark grave compounded matters profusely.  He had questions.  And not only did he know God.  He was very close to God.  Not ever a mean, cruel or violent being, the gentle Lonnie had hurt no one while drunk.  He only saddened and sorrowed so greatly at times, not so much about a God who did not care.  But more, about the people whose hearts God placed heavy burdens on to care, but who sat in darkness while proclaiming to a world who really needed something that they had the light when they did not.

It was almost like the people who did not really have the light saw one who did, and instead of considering the cost, only saw on the surface of what they wanted from it.  Like a she wolf who had long since cast away her mate, she ran after the old slab of meat embreasted amidst a mound of snow and chomped her greedy bit down upon him.  Not because she wanted him. But only to keep the real sheep from having him, from dining of him first.  Just as greed is an animal and not a true and deep spirit instinct, the wise ewe stood back and hid safely in the woods, allowing her to perform the silly act.  After all, the female sheep had seen the Indian hunters come earlier and place a knife up inside of the dead wolf in order to capture a live animal ~ Who once she had eaten away all of the dead flesh, in her desperation realized after it was too late after she hurriedly chomping the bit of a sharp upright knife blade, now fatally bled to death.

The lesson, even Lonnie knew as plain as day is day, and night is night.  The eye is a trickster, and only by a denial of the flesh and what the flesh both holds and desires and wants may the spirit within you arise.  And he did want to quit drinking this way.  Although, true, the alcohol did make you feel better and worry less at the time.  But it was bad medication.  The viscious side effects sometimes included a quiet desperation no human heart could reach past to comfort him.  Head aches aspirin would not cure only spurred the heartache that returned stronger with each following sober day, whose problems only seemed to mount greater as opposed to ease or suffice.  And contrary to the popular tin tray and paper magazine and billboard ads of these pre-prohibition days, the booze decreased instead of heightened male sexual pleasure.  After all, what did his deceased Christian girlfriend ever miss out on.  She did not believe in sex before marriage, and he was glad about that ~  For certainly because of his secret and declining physical condition, that was the one thing he did manage to provide her with.

So, this his moment of truth shined brightly. Or as in this case, darkly.  A lonely night alone standing wet and soaking and smelling like Kilbeggan, pure Irish whiskey, to coin a pun, no this was not his idea of a very Christmas night.  The Larry O’Rourke pub, his most precious Dublin toasting place, he often felt the spirit of the young Joyce who once was there before his trists in Trieste, Paris and Zurich.  The writer would be proud of his success, and yet even Lonnie had no idea the man would die at the prime of his creativity.  Lonnie additionally did not know that God himself had actually destined him for a long and blessed prolific life.

Lonnie breathed deeply and walked forward.  And contrary to Father O’Mallie’s teaching, he listened.  For truly, he had already destined himself to talk to the ghost.  “Lonnie,” illumined the spirit who spoke as if wind, and he felt his father’s emotions.  It was the strangest thing.  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. They buried me while I thought of God.  Standing at the place of the battle, as a soldier in the American war one moment, and I considered I might die.  And then I did.”  Lonnie knew the rest of the story by some kind of strange and heartfelt telepathy.  Of course, he knew right away.  His father was thinking of accepting Jesus Christ as his lord and savior.  He had drug it out.  Trudged what seemed a thousand miles through German wasteland only to delay.  And just as the moment of decision came, he never had a chance.  The enemy knew that his only chance required for him to move forward quickly and remove the person suddenly.  The dirty deed done, who would know that the person never even had a chance to stand up and speak his piece.

But the limbo that many said did not exist, did.  Of course, it did not exist the way many thought.  It was temporary limbo, set up until the time that people throughout the earth would crawl out of graves everywhere to find the master of light.  Lonnie thought of the way his girlfriend brought him a tree last year.  She had cut it herself, and dragging it behind her brought it into the house.  She found him passed out on the kitchen floor, and threw away the empty bottles.  She pulled him to the bedroom and bathed him the way she had heard her mother tell her that good Samaritan story over and over and over.  As a child, she had this kind of a strength all along.  So it was nothing to chop up vegetables and put a large pot of home made soup on the stove.  While he slept smelling like soap and powder, his cotton pajamas smelled gently of the delicate lavender she placed in the wash.  And just like her own grandma before her, she washed the clothes by hand and set them near the radiator.

Her own grandma had actually only had a kitchen cook stove do this.  But still, the grand daughter liked this modern way.  It just seemed more free and easy.  That was what she was, he thought.  Free and easy.  He had even called her that once, and meaning it in a wrong and bad way, now felt as if he had wounded himself instead of her.  She was not harsh and self-centered and demanding like other women.  Over controlling women and her did not get along.  Love does not demand it’s own way.  But so now he stood where she must have gone, except he slowly reasoned, she actually must have gone up and not down. He reached out his hand to the father ghost standing before him, as if to say, “My name is Lonnie.”  But the man only said, “Lonnie, I love you.”  And suddenly, Lonnie knew that all of his life that this very thing that he an orphan, long abandoned could not ever understand was an actual thing of existence.  She had given him lots of this actual love.

A strange and mysterious feeling washed over him.  A good and not a ghostly feeling.  For truly, this must be love.  That his Christian girlfriend who had died had laid down her life for him suddenly became clear.  Before she had died, she had held his face in her hands and told him that he should cry.  A lot.  For God would store every tear in a bottle and give it back to him in the form of crystal water rivers to bend and cup his hands around and drink from someday.  By now, she was drifting off to that place.  She begged him not to hold onto her, as if to say, “Let go of my ankles.  If you do not let go, I cannot go up to that lovely place I now see.”  She told him of the land she now saw.  It was filled with so much beauty, and glistening ponds and cattle and birds above and tender dancing trees whose leaves rattled with song wind.  So much rolling farmland that everything she ever lost diminished in an instant. And in her eyes, he saw that she wanted him to live forever and not perish too.

“I will not make the mistake of denying God,” Lonnie said to his father ghost, and then glanced slightly at The Dark Angel.  “I will ask Jesus into my heart this instant.”  Someday I want to go where she, my Julia went.  It is the only way I will ever find her again.  “I do not know if we will ever be together,” his father said.  “I made so many mistakes in life.  Even now, I am waiting for the heavens to decide.”  By this, he meant God.  After all, you have to understand, the Irish way of thinking and speaking is different than the English.  It is a matter of dialect.  “But nevertheless, it is the age old matter that is being decided,” surprisingly spoke The Dark Angel.  Her voice sounded like crystal on a cloud, and she hesitated, for she did not hurry.

Of course, he knew this in the spirit place of his heart.  Everyone wondered whether those who went into a coma and wanted to go to heaven had the ability to make this decision with the heart of the spirit, speechless.  Right now, Lonnie felt speechless.  Such a thing as he had not ever felt before all of his life came over him.  The elation, nirvana, so precious and so innocent and yet so pristine.  He prayed to stay in this all of his life.  Suddenly nothing else mattered.  Suddenly the very atmosphere of the graveyard, of all places had turned out to be after all, a very Christmas night.

¶ For God so loued þ^e world, that he gaue his only begotten Sonne: that whosoeuer beleeueth in him, should not perish, but haue euerlasting life.

John 3:16  (1611 King James Bible)

To be continued…

A Christmas Farm Redemption In Charmington, Missouri [The Saga of Dark Boy]

By Tess Doberville

Dark Boy whose long black hair flowed down around from a tree dead, all tangled up thought calmly to himself.  He viewed himself at the age of four and remembered how he commanded his entire household in Spleenville.  He wondered with a great marvel at his own unfounded hatred against an innocent dead man’s wife, of whom he had thrown off of the farm ~ Even now, he lived in her very own home with her own grandchild, the blue-eyed blond girl. Indeed, he had so hated his father, and Slidell’s second little wife.  He spent months plotting and planning to obtain the money of every relative and her farm home upon his father’s death.  His father dropped dead on the spot he now stood on.  Landing on top of a macho-man sized pile of sweet grainfed cow manure.  Stealing the brown sludge, his body soaked up the odorous stuff. Dark Boy promised himself the hard working companion would be lucky if she escaped with a cheap thousand-dollar auto.  He laughed cunningly to himself, remembering the time he had prayed to the holy pentagram at the center of Charmington, Missouri and the door got tore clean off the white car while backed out of the little carport awning.  The exact same spot where Lapsy Dog got shot to death.  There were other auto accidents he prayed this way to happen too; but fortunately all of those individuals, although some cars totalled, lived.

The boy who viewed himself as very handsome flaired out his nostrils with anger at everything that did not go his way, felt no shame concerning any violent crime he committed.  This was no mystery.  Spoiled, his mother always made sure he had the most collections of  hotwheels out of every boy who resided at the helm of the fanciest neighborhoods she hustled her unknowing, now dead husband to buy houses in: While his last wife and her five children, whose home they now lived in, lived on the streets homeless with all of those children.  Even as a young child, Smaddam, pushed around and bullied along with his sister, who used the weight of her rude, demeaning and bad behavior, despite nothing but the finest in each and every material lavishment to push around, bully and punch on every classmate they ever attended school with.  This was talked about all the to Bedwardsville.  Later, when they moved to the small town of Charmington, Missouri the reputation the family had as a bully family reigned as if throughout the world.  But likely only the states of Illinois and Missouri. As the two became teenagers, even a few of the rookie police sat in dark, lonely bedrooms and wept to themselves late at night. Cowardice lawmen, who once feared the wrath of the mother.  The children, if you could call them that ran crack labs larger than those of any Illinois adult from Kentucky to Arkansas.  Every teenager who complained found themselves beat to death, and dead and thrown up against the side of a shed down a country road by the green abandoned, lime green watermelon colored lean-to house on Shu-bee-dew Road in Illinois. “Ya’ll better not come messin’ around with me,” grunted the deep-voiced other relative of Smaddam, Tron fAllen. Shortly after, he dissapeared into his male (Hell) cave, and started thinking up some more evil to do.

His brother, once a Spleenville cop had beaten a man half to death and left him for dead just because he looked at him the wrong way.  To this day, that man is a vegetable, and not as in cucumber. Most of the other cops in Spleenville, without any real strong backbone made Barney Fife look like a Greek God.  Too terrified to do their job and clean up the mess , the cops kissed the back ends of fAllen and Smaddam while Smaddam and his sister boldly knocked both indefensible kids at school and adults alike around like yesterday’s filthy trash.  Most families got sick of it and vacated Spleenville for Bedwardsville.  Then Smaddam began to chase them down in Bedwardsville where Smaddam sometimes attended church with his seemingly mousy wife, pretending to read the word, while only using people to benefit himself and while arming himself with secret treachery ~ He used the woman preacher’s son-in-law to gain financial and otherwise evil leveredge while, as it seemed Pastor Smandy of Greater Boring (Glory Gone) Church, believed his every lie. He fooled and tricked everyone while never telling anyone how kind the blond haired and blue eyed woman had been to him.  Het got angrier by the second as he thought about how she had shown him the kindness of Jesus.  Truly, he would get even with her the most for that, and try to make her look otherwise.  He decided to steal everything she ever loved and treasured, and especially all that his father owned.  There his rooted evil festered and grew like a moldy casserole someone cooked, but left in their fridge for three years, along with that filthy block of green white cheese too.  And still, not many later attended a sodomizing gangster’s funeral.

“But “Absalom’s heart was wicked, and ungrateful, and cruel. He formed a plan to take the throne and the kingdom away from his father, David, and to make himself King in David’s place. He began by living in great state, as if he were already a king, with a royal chariot, and horses, and fifty men to run before him. Then too, he would rise early in the morning, and stand at the gate of the king’s palace, and meet those who came to the king for any cause. He would speak to each man, and find what was the purpose of his coming; and he would say: “Your cause is good and right, but the king will not hear you; and he will not allow any other man to hear you in his place. O that I were made a judge! then I would see that right was done, and that every man received his due!” And when any man bowed down before Absalom as the king’s son, he would reach out his hand, and lift him up, and kiss him as his friend. Thus Absalom won the hearts of all whom he met, from every part of the land, until very many wished that he was king instead of David, his father. For David no longer led the army in war, nor did he sit as judge, nor did he go among the people; but lived apart in his palace, scarcely knowing what was being done in the land.”

Speaking of Dark Boy who stood around and scratched himself deliciously, he closed his eyes and breathed of the fresh farm air deeply.  One-hundred miles of Charmington, Missouri farm road lay outside the farm.  And he had taken it all by folly.  Slick as wet.  However, the sweet young girl, the mother of the baby girl who Smaddam falsely claimed as sister, Sistina had nicknamed her baby girl, Spicy. “Smaddam! Ohhh Smaddam!” His father used to call him forth as a boy.  “You got Feryl out there working on the farm like a dog for you. You got more Matchbox collections than any boy in the universe.  You get to lay around the house with your sister and mother and eat all day and make all sorts of crafts, like cloth door and Christmas wall wreaths with your mama all night long.  And you dress new and fine all the time with $200 designer jeans. And spending Feryl’s money while keeping him in rags.  Feryl lives in a deep dark dungeon of the basement eating table scraps from the black trashcan we put down there.  And you eat filet-mignon and other such sorts of delicacies while sitting at the helm of the upper dining room next to me. What more could you steal, I mean fill your decrepit, selfish and greedy, I mean your lovely life with? You sell drugs on the side to all of the Spleenville teenagers, and you said you do that for even at times you smashed the windows out of some cars for backpay. You have grown up to be a whoppin’ cheap shot of an asshole,” said his father proudly.

Smaddam, who spoke well and who once fooled everyone easily twitched not even one slight inch as he hung from the three-hundred year old tree.  On the lookout for Santa Clause, he had his bow and arrow cocked, ready to shoot the man down.  The tree once gave cover to the good little woman prophet, a fourth wife who  taught the children to watch for and admire (but never shoot the deer), as she tried a hand as mother seer to Smaddam.  Smaddam who had his own greedy, selfish ideas about life listened not to the woman, but decided to go his own way.  And yes, he had those ideas too.  But she firmly and wisely denied him.  Plowing her down at every hand, he lighted up his eyes with a skinny beam of centralized lazer glare and sent the two beady messages to her through the sub-conscience world.  He called this Satan, God.

At the tender age of four, Smaddam’s head began to swell largely.  As a young teenager, he walked through tenement walls and school halls and flashed his evil from where he walked.  And not even the teachers realized that Satan himself lived large in the evil boy who lurked just yards away. Perhaps he only imagined the grey-white movement. He began to twitch more and madly with the excitement of taking out Santa.  Dancing for the first time a lovely dance, for the first of it’s brief cruel life, the spirit of the thing actually looked soft, warm, kind and lovely for once.  Did it smile sincerely instead of politically?  Not possible.  For certainly, the father’s instruction for mean treatment of others paid off in the curse the dark white boy had incurred. A white horse, given by the good meth lab family who got busted and unlike Dark Boy repented, ran across the field in front of the newest evil stepfather looking for the baby girl of the woman grandmother with the short blonde hair.  This had been the real mother of the new baby, (Sistina’s)  horse.  The old aunt of Smaddam, who had her skinny crooked nose and spindly, unkind heart to match in everybodies’ business but her own, also felt a great and unfounded jealousy for the prophet woman who fed the horse and  who also fed the first little blond girl, Sistina, a child with spiritual things so supple and trim it made even the evil Dark Boy cry with a great and green envy at church services.  Holy, Hallelujah all of the angels sang!  Smadam’s favorite Christmas song, and one he loved so much he sang this to himself all year long, I Believe In A Thing Called Feed The Holly, Jolly Flesh Or Bust (Sung To The Tune Of  ‘I Believe In The Old Rugged Cross’): 

I believe in a thing called feed the holly, jolly flesh

I believe whatever the cost

And when the true Christian I find

And I take all his children

The land is next mine

For I’m really the devil’s hind.

(Refrain)

I believe in once saved, always saved,

For I believe I do no wrong

And loathe the day this comes to an end

I pray my evil will grant me a Hell,

Where I can at last praise my sin.

(Refrain)

One day, the horse who appeared at the window while she saw him as she washed dishes, had broken out of the corral.  As free as a white dove, he glided across the fields with hooves and legs no longer battling the imprisonment of the secret evil of the farm.  Two-hundred and fifty acres of Charmington family secrets.  The good woman, who once lived there, she helped build along the shanty farm house underground sewer system with nothing but a ditch-witch and her own slave labor to offer.  She and little ten-year old Sistina ~ Of the three corrupt preachers who abided Satan’s deep sin and godless evil at the helm of the three corrupt churches, once practically the whole entire county seat of St. Asses County of once sweet Charmington, Missouri. Pastor Chucky, who always had a quick smile and an even quicker lie, but with no backbone sat and watched the corruption of the other two preachers like watching a movie.  He once sold insurance for a living,  for the same company that Shark’s big brother once scammed a scam in he thinks the 50’s, where they talked a forty-year old woman into faking her death.  Then they put up a false tombstone in the city of Redericktown and she moved to St. Louis and everyone in the family collected the insurance money and began building churches.  “Well, with that information, I’m lucky I’m still alive, “said the young hoosier man who once attended Christian D.O.A. (Dead On Arrival) Reformed Church of Charmington, Missouri across the street from the state fair combination race track.  “What do you mean by that?” Asked the woman, a stock employee of Stall-Mart Stores, Inc., the feature combination grocery store and department store of all of Charmington. Smaddam thought of how much he truly loved himself. Twitching severally, he also watched a prophesy which meant nothing to him now that he thought about every relative he had hoodwinked, tricked and fooled to get this baby and this farm.   Depression and darkness, as a dungeon, his mind thrice possessed, but not of holiness expungiated through the trees.  Tiny deer shivered and her rabbits ran for cover.  Would she ever appear to claim the farm again?  Somehow the evil ones knew she would.

Jeremiah 12:3 But thou, O LORD, knowest me: thou hast seen me, and tried mine heart toward thee: pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of slaughter.

“The secret’s in the swamp.  The secret’s in the cow swamp,” whispered the ghosts.  Buried at the bottom of the cow swamp lay a waterproof tight green safe with thousands of dollars.  (Walk eight feet out.  Dig about ten feet down). A local resident thought he had read about that somewhere.  But where?  And how would he ever remember?  Not the brightest star on the family Christmas tree, Dark Boy’s best friend from Spleenville seemed a combination of a clinical L.S.D experiment and too many years of anti cross-breeding, and although his family came from Illinois, the smart prophet girl’s family knew of their evil too close up.  Wrong superstitions were meant to be broken and while it was true that she came to save and not to destroy, the evil Smaddam had throughly tricked the owners of the family farm who he also plotted to someday secretly try to trick and destroy.  What you do evil to others first, he quoted from his Satan Bible, they can never therefore in turn do to you. “Moooo!” Protested one of the five-hundred rustled cows.  The beautiful young blonde woman who once lived here loved them though.  She kneeled on the poly-sealed wood porch and prayed often for God to block the protagonist meat-load farmers from coming to make hamburger out of them at the butcher, and eat them for lunch.  They fought like good men looking for good women to go back out to the pasture when the tricksters came.  They did not want the perfunctory marriages of the death enemy.

A tree convulses however as the dark boy provided no white oil like the sweet woman who cried until God’s good olive oil flowed down the twin branches.  And as if to say, “I am the way and the goodness and the light and the life,” the tree although repulsed by the unwelcome charge of dark boy Smaddam hanging there, lit up her eyes as the woman once lit up her eyes for her.  And if imagination runs dark, imagination filled it’s streams and rivers and gullies with no trepidation of loveliness when that woman lived here. Now the Smaddam boy’s cruel wife hangs by him and with every inch of her rebellious strands of white hair, she too sought to wipe out the Santa Clause.  She perched mid-air where the barn once was, hangs as an unfairly skilled second-hand gangster, a proverbial Bonnie & Clyde who produce the fruit of death by association of Dark Boy, Smaddam.  No laundry spins out of the rickety washer where the older good girl, blonde-headed prophet woman once risked her life to spin empty instant coffee jars in the washer in the winter, and washed her clothes on the stiff rocks at the bottom of the hill where Smaddam now hangs, he once crafty with a bow and arrow.  Certain smells now arose up from the once sweet creek.  For betrayal followed by the stench of a once-promised tragedy finally punished him as foreboding as the black snake who hangs from the tree there and opens his mouth wide as if to crow like a chicken.  He simply hisses at the dark boy. Smaddam thinking the dark snake his friend fell hook, line and sinker for that.  After all, the snake promised him life for his hanging.  But instead, Smaddam’s belly and his guts threaten like a Judas to spill into the creek fouling up the girl’s once life-refreshing healing waters with the defilement of bad blood from the bad seed that comes to at least one of every child of certain lines of heredity.

⁹¶ And Absalom met the seruants of Dauid; and Absalom rode vpon a mule, and the mule went vnder the thicke boughs of a great Oke, and his head caught hold of the Oke, and hee was taken vp betweene the heauen and the earth, and the mule that was vnder him, went away.

2 Samuel Chapter 18  (1611 Bible)

She, the prophet woman gets on her buffalo and rides down the middle of the gravel and dirt filled road to the gate the angel only guards for her alone, and always ever and never for them did. The road once all dirt, Smaddam alone filled his belly with the empty gravel, and now chews sour grapes with a gasped open mouth.  And as the bright woman now eats and laughs and loves and lives elsewhere, the dead carcass on the tree knows the truth.  She who homesteaded the ghosts of the land knows the day will one day come for her good return. In the meantime, she knows that he who prays for he who prays against her, only prays against himself.  That the voo-doo of a million years, the slaves and the plantation owner of the 1700’s Indigo and tobacco farm want vindication for the girl, and for the land at the helm. This is no mystery.

Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother, (which is the first commandement with promise,). That it may bee well with thee, and thou maiest liue long on the earth.

Ephesians 6:1-3  (1611 King James Bible)

The police report sent out over the Charmington and Fonne Terre circuits on more than one night,  said things about those who died throughout the land of causes both personal and natural to their individual human nature, like, “Do you think he had time to commit his sick soul to Jesus?” For example, once the authorities left after safely and carefully scraping the smashed blood, guts and brains of the unsuspecting criminal from off of the pavement outside. A single white snot rag of surrender sweet, decorates the road there after the wrecking crew’s departure. An unseen angel wrapped itself around the gate, only looking on for what truly he must now finish to carry out.  He thought of the girl who once lived here tenderly and carefully.  He promised himself he would go to her now, and bring her back for a visit someday. Together they would walk the length of the creek ~ She and with Slickery and Sistina singing and skipping and dancing and tracing cow-made paths all the way ~  No longer the acres of the land ugly with the defilement and lies of the Dark Boy who lives there now.  Coming to the dip of the river, after sunning at the storm made sand beach, the three (the real mother, daughter, and grandaughter) made a dive into the creek near where black snack lived. And heaven on earth had finally come.  For them and them alone, black snake purified the holy spot and spread out with the unseen red blood of the Christ figure swam until the late sun fell deep upon soft summer trees.

The Bride

By Tess Doberville

Staring at the hundred foot tall corrider straight ahead, she thought.  It was not that she actually believed she may mount and hurdle up the wall, although she knew no other way to go. She turned her head slightly and stared into the partial hallway of the hooded cult who held her captive.  She gathered her long floor length pentacostal skirt.  Grey.  Again.  So much like the days she lived.  The office held files and long lengthy tables and a few papers on a large desk, long old St. Louis city depression glass windows ~ A sound forum for which an opera might live.  And suddenly it filled her.  A spirit rising higher and higher and higher.

“And when the lamb opened the first seal,  I saw the first horse.  The horseman held a bow.  And when the lamb opened the second seal, I saw the second horse.  The horseman held a sword.  And when the lamb opened the third seal, I saw the third horse. The horseman had a balance.  Now when the lamb opened the fourth seal, I saw the fourth horse.  The horseman was the pest.  The leading horse is white, the second horse is red, the third one is a black, the last one is a green.”  She opened her mouth to sing.  Where had they put her now?  A mental (asylum) institute?  The facto place of higher mental learning and ultimate spiritial meander.

Her voice made an echo throughout the building.  And still no one came.  Unusual.  But the spirit of something still greater broke through the cold and still air of winter on the inside of the other room they sometimes brought her to here.  And she remembered another session where she admitted that he went everywhere with her.  And then one day, he just went away.  Days and hours happened and sometimes she slept by day and stepped out into the streets and walked all night.  Holding her body against the cold, welcoming and comforting concrete of a sea wall, she massaged this with her palms while she listened to the river and dreamed of barges from other times and angels who ate candlelight dinners with a handsome gentleman, while rolling down the dark and welcome river.

Do you hear voices?  Certainly, you hear them too?  “A definite split in personality. Harmless as a fly.”  “Lately, I buy my groceries alone now,” she told them.  Explaining the rooms and the people and the halls here, a little more difficult to navigate now that her imaginary friend had left.

A wet sweat scurried down her temples as she prayed and trembled only slightly.  She held her little friend who by now did not need to describe the heavenly realms her medication had taken her to.  Of course, leaving this world that way, more painful than many even know.  Only since you must return to do it time and time again.  Once she told them about this time she went to although she had some years before that, travelled to a distant future ~ Of another woman’s past long ago and far away.   A dance hall.  The band never showed.  She had no date.  And her solitare suiter that night was engaged to her girlfriend.  Secretly, she told him kindly to just go away.  As she left, her shoe heel stayed behind on the faded swirling banquet carpet there, and everyone else stole away into their own dark night.  The next day, she told the doctor, all of her beautiful blonde hair fell out in August.  The same month of the tragedy of her daughter and her other daughter and her two uncles.  But only from the shoulder down.  It was the strangest thing.  And in this dream of this past, this other woman went to her hairdresser and had the hair cut up even one inch shorter than that.  This had not ever happened in all of her visionary woman’s life. Then a few weeks before that and during and after, dark and strange events began to happen, in all of the places where there had once been light.  It was a mystery as to why.  The month of August and of September is forever to be avoided at all costs she elaborated ~ For it is filled with a full fledged array of a treachery of ungodly curses.

At midnight, she watched the mediterranean blue sky and painted an imaginary oil painting of the Apocolypse of the Four Horsemen on a canvas suspended there.  As she moved to carry the lovely treasure to a place on a wall, they came.  Something about a curfew, and how did she get out anyway.   A protection mechanism overtook her, and she froze and going at a speed faster than light found the hiding place of the soul.  She did not exist for all portentious purposes for many hours.  She watched skies of ochre yellow and felt sad for her arms would not move and she knew she was wasting precious painting hours.  “Schitzophrenic?”  Asked one.  “Not sure,” said the other.  And she heard them.

She did not speak for days.  And when she finally did, she described to them what she saw.  The scroll she explained listed upon the leaves of an ancient scroll some three thousand years perhaps before this  2070 year of the lord of this age, King Ghandi Ghandi, she explained.  She needed to locate King Ghandi Ghandi.  And as visions like colors swarmed before her eyes, she said, she saw this thing they called a holy bible.  These men, and women had once used it for something.  She only knew that there were six seals altogether, seven he once told her the holy golden number of heaven, and one more did exist.   Death, famine, war and conquest she told him.  Though it tarries, watch for it, it waits.  The man I am to leave with, he will be here soon she warned him.  “The sky will come here.”  She reached out her arms and flapping her wings as a mighty, vast bird, she showed him.  She pulled a glass jar from out of behind her back.  His eyebrows rose.  Where did she get that? He thought, looking at her strangely.

“All of our tears,” she promised him, the tears of the saints, who he, her imaginary friend whose hand holding hers as they walked through parks and woods and stores, whose person she missed painfully ~ “Are stored up in these jars like glass, and when we get to this place all the winged ones often showed me, the trembling and the pain, it will shatter and as the glass like water breaks, will shower us with sheathing rains of love.  It will rain for one thousand days and one thousand nights, I think the book they read to me in my dream, showed me.  It will wash the earth away.  And the man named Noah will turn into a woman, and reign forever and forever and forever.  Well, the facts may not exactly be right.  But it is difficult to remember everything they wrote in that book, when you awake up from a dream in the sani-masoleum.”

Although he trepidated, still the doctor listened, and very late for a date with his techno-helmet, he would miss his daily dose of virtual water, food, entertainment and sex in that order.  “Then I saw the lamb open one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures say with a voice like thunder, “Come!” “I looked and there was a white horse.  The horseman on it had a bow.  A crown was given to him.  And he went out as a victor to conquer.”

⁶And I beheld, and loe, in the middest of the Throne, and of the foure beastes, and in the midst of the Elders stood a Lambe as it had beene slaine, hauing seuen hornes and seuen eyes, which are the seuen Spirits of God, sent foorth into all the earth.

[1611 King James Bible]

A man named John had once walked through the heavenly door, and although it seemed no one had time to climb into the virtual reader and let it speak to the brain though these days.  With everyone who operated at the level of a constant busy rush, the nation of the beings she knew who had all of her life always lived out there, knew about doors.  The light that came to the ones who had much, who could travel and buy and go wherever they wanted though did not seem to appreciate this at all.  Her gift, therefore to go many places while not ever leaving that place, she understood how this one opened a door within a door.  To the king of the throne, how bold and beautiful his light, and as it increased as the winged ones sang.  So hard to believe, but so necessary the need.  Everything cascaded to the sevens.  And they sang:

Soon the Lamb will take his bride to be ever at his side.  All the host of heaven will assembled be.  O, ’twill be a glorious sight, all the saints in spotless white.  And with Jesus they will feast eternally. “Come and dine,” the Master calleth, “come and dine”:  You may feast at Jesus’ table all the time.  He who fed the multitudes, turned water into wine, to the hungry calleth now, “come and dine.”  To the hungry calleth now, “come and dine.”

Well, the doctor shrugged, and then went out.  These crazy ones, he muttered to himself.  It was a good thing they moved them all to these institutions during the years of 2020.  It made the streets safer for public sex night, he figured.  After all, how could everyone drink and brawl and parade down the streets nude in comfort with these nuts on the loose.  It would be so convicting, and yet a strange kind of a guilt overode him, and one thing for sure was, he could not stop thinking about this funny little thing called love.  What was it?  Eight sessions ago.  And she begged him for some of the forbidden stuff.  Canvas and oil paint and brushes.  What was she going to do with that stuff?  Was machino rec time not enough?  Besides, he could get fired for bringing in that stuff.  It was outlawed years ago, right along with women actually being allowed to carry their babies to full term, let alone keep them and raise them themselves.  It was if she had asked for a shot of whiskey and some cherry chew.  He grimaced.

Nevertheless, he had found some of the things in his great grandmother’s farm attic.  He grimaced again.  When they had such nasty places.  He thought of the fatal germs that had wiped out a couple of billion of the joined world order around our globe of the holy darwinian sepulchre about twenty years ago.   Besides, he was curious to see this image she wanted to make for him, of a great earthquake that practically ripped around the entire globe, a thing thousands fell into, and slipping down slopes too slippery to cling to, she claimed she heard their tormenting and screaming and defiling cries for help for hours.  And when she looked down once the dust had settled, saw many slung against walls and crushed vehemently, their empty guts spilling out and sentenced to a place called Hell forever and forever and forever.  Fascinating little girl, he thought although Sybil was a woman.

It is too bad they had outlawed books some time ago.  And plays and live human actors, as the great computer machines only used the images of them now and sprayed them on the city halls and New York walls.  Hello darkness my old friend.  Back in her little room, she pushed her palm up against the foamy paddy walls.  The living things made breathing noises, and like a safe mother womb, comforted her all around, and even though no one really fell asleep naturally anymore, she did not know that.  She rolled back the little railing in the floor though and thanked mother breath for befriending her.  At midnight, she would escape again.  And with just enough time to dance on the plaza of the old building before they came to lock her away again as they had done every day of her life since they put her here at the age of twelve. Once a place they called a palace ~ Now these worldwide palaces, which made way for the five world kings housed and kept inside people like her everywhere.  Her feet bare, and the long dark skirt she so loathed, danced anyway and as rain began to pour as if from the midnight moon ~ She danced as barefoot as a lion in a midsummer night dream, while she clutched her strange black book named only Holy Bible and sang the song the angels taught her, When I Danced Liked David Danced. 

Scoot, Boot and Ugly: A Terror Story About A Small Town Named Bleedville, Illinois, U.S.A.

By Coldcase Detective, Maggie Maise

Dark Boy wandered down a singular country road on Slain Street.  His ripped and torn three-thousand dollar designer jeans spoke of the teenagers he had helped slaughter.  They hired them to sell drugs for the string of dealers from here to Arkansas.  And then they killed them fast.  With no one to avenge the boys, some of them came from families who did care, some who cared and were too poor to do anything about it ~ And still others, nice boys who got lost in the shuffle of the mean mother who stuck her brat drug using and selling kids out front because she was too mean to punish, and hoped hers would punish innocent and other humble kids for not having served her little bullies best.Dark Boy’s Bleedville, Illinois mother thought she taught him how to do it better.  How he loved to puff up in his red-robin pride when he thought of himself and of all of the evil satanic godlessness he had secretly committed and gotten away with.  But mostly he slithered around Bleedville hanging out in the dark and crusted drug shacks painted farm crackle white and heisting heinous lies for leveredge of later days ~ Or so he thought.  But what he did not know is that the latter days were already here, and the bells had come to toll for him.  As mama taught him, when he opened his mouth to lie, his black tongue dropped down and fell out green and smooth.  Something like a woman’s pre-pregnancy goo, green of color, slithered out of the mean idiot’s slummed-up mouth, because like his mother, when did he tell a lie?  Every time he opened up his mean mouth.As a cold wind hit him, he spoke.  And the white chill of winter got him every time and froze the slime like a thousand years of flem on two lines below his wide, flared nose.  Like the time he made plans to hide the drugs at mama’s house.  Using her house for the pivotal Satan point-of-sell contact, the dark, arrogant then eighteen-year old  outsmarted police by what he bragged to everybody about in  Bleedville, Illinois ~ That he gave free drugs to some people in the area who said they served the local government there.  At least, that’s what he said he and they did.  To keep things quiet for himself.

One could never really know though, could they?   But one thing one could know for sure as a cruel summer day in Bleedville, Illinois and it’s sister towns of  Tebecca, Spleenville, a good place to breed and raise a wicked and corrupt family, Torento, Illinois is long.  He killed his older brother and he did not care.  And neither did his mom.  It was the other woman’s son she sacrificed for hers.  So what the heck.  All was fair in love and war in Bleedville, Spleenville and Torento. Dangling there, the meth tucked in his younger sister’s shirt pockets totalled thousands of dollars.  Hiding on her father’s property, she loved stealing and selling the meager property of his new wife even though she knew he kept her carless, and penniless and never gave her jack, because of the girl’s mom’s own meaness against him.  She examined the tattoo on her body on the back of her neck that matched that of her mother as she hung hiding from the old oak tree like a bat fresh out of Hell.  Soon the cops would be on the way.  She laughed wickedly as she remembered the night she and her boyfriend drove up and sacked all of her dad’s new wive’s only belongings in the army green pick-up truck and sold it for crack. Even the Curtis Mathes Stereo.  The girl knew the woman could prove she bought it in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  That records, paperwork and sales receipts could be traced ~ The greedy girl had no more respect for that than the young man’s life she had ended in a car wreck just to get more crack into her body.  Like her mother, it was all for me.  And none for you. Scoot.  Boot.  And ugly.

No holly, jolly Christmas that.  Dark boy continued walking down the dark road called Slain Street.  This was no rubidue of a plan tonight.  He planned to get some prime cash for selling the life of his older brother to some crooked drug boys to get them out of hock for their lives and greedily and self centered as usual, his.  His brother lived over the bar called The Black Owl.  The father had thrown the good boy out because of the assignment of Dark Boy’s mother.  Life or death.  Bread and butter.  Who cared.  It was all the same.  He bit into a hard snicker bar filled with nuts and let his tongue travel lustily over each and every one.   He thought of his ugly hearted girlfriend, and mumbled to himself about how he was going to trick the nimwit into buying him and his sister some kind of desired material thing next.  He smacked his stomach and broke out into an evil version of the Mr. Bojangle dance, and danced farther on down the black smogged country road.

The town was undergoing a shakedown.  The good governor’s son who wanted to move his good family to the small town of Spleenville and buy a house there, had heard from somebody at the state capitol of Illinois that there was a lot of corruptness going on in the town.  This made the good governor’s son very sad, as his great, great, great, great, great grandmother had bought a piece of property in Spleenville when the French settled the town.  Known for the little hills and vales that once emanated a slice of French countryside, the original Europeans likely did not envision the crack ridden murdertown, or the existential criminal regime under the direction of the dark boy’s mid level illegal drug and teen murder management team.

But unbeknownst to the town, the governor’s son moved another friend’s good son into a job at the local sheriff’s department.  This man, not used to performing an undercurrent of godless evil and flowing in it much like the dark boy’s black hooded late night of the church of the devil meetings.  At Christmas time and otherwise, many of the older and more gentle humble elderly people of the town secretly wished they could roast the dark boy, actually of German European descent, on an open fire.

Christmas eve came quicker than everyone expected.  And during the night that dark boy and his sister usually spent robbing houses and terrorizing the other kids their age at the high school – A thing that caused many of the parents to sell their houses and move to Shedwardsville, not a much better choice.  The land where all of the attorneys charged way too much and did way too little. In any case, though, this was the night that Dark Boy decided to sell his older half brother’s life for a piece of silver.  Giving him the kiss of death earlier that day, he visited him at his little dump of an apartment over the top of the street tavern.  He pretended to invite him to Christmas dinner at his dark hearted mom’s trailer dump for the next day, for a meal of turkey and thick, plump  gravy as dark as cow manure.   Faryl, the older boy said he really just wanted to stay in and rest over the holidays as he’d been working for a double promotion at the construction yard just to get his rent paid.  Faryl told Dark Boy, whose real name was Smaddam, he knew he’d told Smaddam eight months before or more that he was done with drugs.  Aw, said Dark Boy.  “Now you know I got that crack hid in my mom’s kitchen cabinet.”  Flour bin theology tsked Faryl.  “Dark Boy, it’s time to knock it off and get right with God.  You know they’re going to find out your behind the deaths of all of those teenage boys one of these days.”  “But, I have so much hatred in my bones and my veins.  This dark, ugly, angry, violent bitterness my mother put here monitors me every second of my life.  Everything I touch turns to hate.” Dark Boy took off down the stairs.  But not before putting dubs on Faryl’s boots and guitar.  Memories, he knew he’d grab of the boy’s dead carcus and a few of his belongings once his Satan friends got through beating him to death.  He went to meet the murderers,  not even realizing as he drove by in a stolen old dark, cranberry Cadillac the new sheriff who passed him by the road on the other side.  The man, the epitomy of godlight probably shielded in it noticed the dark entourage floating by on the other side, and discerned an immediate evil.

Standing at the edge of Howl Creek off of Demented Road in Torento, Illinois, the dark boy and his two accomplices discussed the night’s business.  “He’s a big boy.  He knows boxing.  He won’t be that easy to haul off,” they complained.  “Naw,” insisted the dark boy.  “Promise, I’ll make it so smooth and easy, the police’ll never know who did what until we have some time to move around and get away.”  “Look,” said Dark Boy.  “Give me the cash for selling you my half brother’s life now, and meet me next to Snalderman Bogie’s house at eight pee m.”  The other slightly darker boy, also a white boy and the son of the town minister and the second-in-line pastor for the local Church of Satan, handed dark boy a sack of cold cash money, filtered with a good stash of freshly made homemade meth, he’d just cooked up in the midst of a group of stinking, nasty pitbulls at Dark Boy’s sister’s house.

The murder plan for the night was all set in order.  One of many that Dark Boy had sold and supervised for the tri-state drug ring.  But this one had one small gliche.  The new sheriff in town.  Walking into the police department of Spleenville,  Sheriff John Dorighty, finally, sniffed a sleeze in the air.  Sneezing out loud, the thing was so powerful he thought the force used properly could blow the windows out of the home of a lying bastard anywhere at any time.  He was right.  He’d just finished casing the sprawling, flat stretching seemingly bored farmfields of the tri-communities when he heard an ambulance go by.  Ambulances in this area didn’t do much save take old people to the grave, and old people round these parts meant 90’s and  100’s for those who lived a good life and usually 60’s or 70’s or sooner for those who didn’t and 19 or 20 or less for those who used meth.

Sheriff Dorighty hurried to the new cop car he’d just got out of.  Thinking it best to check to see who was being rushed and headed fast to the hospital, his intuition told him something.  When he got to the emergency ward, the first he saw on a stretcher with a group of emergency ward crew was a young teenager boy covered in stab wounds.  The crew worked fast to bring him back to life.  Sheriff Dorighty pitched in, rolling up his sleeves and performing C.P.R.  as fast as he could and with everything he had within his soul along with the hospital emergency team!  Sweat pouring down every face, the unconscience red headed boy with a freckled nose showed no signs of life whatsoever.  The color of the Irish looking boy’s white skin drained from every pore of him. Sheriff Dorighty  kneeled down next to the blood filled white bed sheets, and as one drop hit the sharp shining smart, furniture polished white linoleum hospital floor he prayed.  “Dear Jesus, don’t let the boy die, please God, if you’re a real God.”  Weeping profusely, while ripping and tearing at his stiff, starched gray sheriff’s shirt he looked down at the glinting star badge, and remembered his vow to God and to himself years ago. And as one finger reached down to touch a single drop of blood, osmosis met fingertip, all workers looked on.  A single eyelid fluttered open.  And Sheriff Dorighty Finally smacked the floor repeatedly playing a series of Thank the Lord My God patty cakes with open webbed fingers hooked to the gentle surgeon-like white, clean smelling dear, delicate hands.  The chapped, crack lipped boy mumbled something.  “No, no my boy,” hushed the good sheriff gently standing.  He wanted to take him in his arms like a child and caress his sweet, soft red curls.  The two males blinked at eachother with eyes covering dual spirits bred of the original sweet innocence of the bo didney kindness of the Lord God, Jesus Christ himself.  Sheriff Dorighty knew that somehow, someway he had to get to the bottom of this.  Who was killing and trying to kill more teenage boys, and seeming to get away with it all?  He knew right then, he had to find the center nucleus of the dark creature heading up and responsible for all of this.  And little did the dear, good man know that he had just passed him on the cornfield that day while making his rounds.  The presence so dark, that it seemed not even Satan wanted to look his way.

Dorighty asked the Lord God to direct him in wisdom, information and discernment.  And soon it was if the supernatural hand of destiny had reached down and drove him to an overall redemption, encompassing a broad and vast territory of everything he was ever built, birthed and designed for.  Through sovereignity, he downshifted and sped through misty country roads.  Nearly spinning out at a turn, he stopped at a man’s house. It was just a sniffing suspicion, and hoping he wouldn’t get stoked out, Sheriff Dorighty  and this particular man stood on the man’s large over hundred years old front porch whispering back and forth, while he stared at the scuff marks on the porch and watched how dull the long since unshined thing looked.  But it didn’t take long for Dorighty to figure out that a showdown was getting ready to take place.  Dark Boy, or somebody named him or like him.

Dorighty jumped into his sheriff cop car and sped down the road toward the Black Owl.  Skimming past a dirty glass door that said Free Drink’s on Lady’s Night, he didn’t detect anything  out of the unusual.  A sweet, young and kindly girl who exuded the light and purity of a large, southern church simply lit up with sparkles of light blue eyes as her glistening short bouncy hair curls bumped up against her forehead and cheeks.  She smiled sweetly at the sheriff and her energy like to of brought him to his knees, again.  He watched several young men shooting pool.  One short brown-haired guy aimed at the eight ball and called them all home.  And did it.

Dorighty sensing something more than what meets the common eye down here thought of the tenants in the number of small one-room shanty apartment utilities who lived over and atop the Black Owl.  He asked the one bar owner with a bright-lit cigarette hanging out of one side of his mouth if he’d seen any strange action or strange people hanging out at the Owl lately.  Remembering memories, Dorighty saw a man with a little boy propped up at the bar.  The man, with a wad of expensive bills flowing out of his sharply tailored suit coat pocket laughed as the small child chomped big on a fried fish sandwich.

Glad that the little boy could be a partaker of the delicious food and no slave to it’s grease, the man laughed and joked with the bar tender of the old 1930’s or something sooner, scene.  Dorighty woke up from his daydream staring at something, or rather someone dark.  Dark Boy strode through the doors of the Black Owl’s Christmas eve glitter lights.  And suddenly, Sheriff Dorighty knew the reason why he was here at this time.  And at this place.  And at this exact minute. The horror of the moment struck him in the way of a reality.  Dark Boy pulled his black ugly stretch hood over his long waist length black Indian hair – And, where some might try to make him a movie star, Sheriff Dorighty knew better than that. The kid was a menace.  A brat.  Dorighty took a seat at the far end of the bar and ordered a fresh baked fish sandwich with pickles, onions and double tarter.

Dark Boy ordered vodka, straight.  He slugged down several shots in a row before breathing.  And when he did finally breath, a dark cold stream of black smoke like the breath of Satan came out of his mouth.  Dorighty played it cool.  He pretended to have a need to use the men’s room and went there.  He came back.  He munched on his fish sandwich while the secondary bartender joked and chatted with a regular man wearing a Cardinal’s ball cap sitting next to the dark boy.  People laughed and chatted and a fear of shouts went up here and there as the sound of pool balls cracking in the background and the juke box played Jimi Hendrix Purple Hayes, one of the dark boy’s favorite songs.

Dark Boy got up suddenly and started walking toward the hallway of the upstairs apartments.  Sheriff Dorighty stood up slowly and followed.  For a few slow seconds, Dark Boy felt confident.  After all, he’d always gotten away with it all.  They let him.  But this time, for the first time in all of the born days of his short and very spoiled rotten life, the boy turned around sideways.  And what he saw both brought a sudden and trembling terror filled anxiety to his very soul and produced seven identical sweat beads over his top lip.  He speeded up his pace.  One of his lopsided legs tripped and made him fall face down across the stairs.  Nervous, he released a blast of quiet, yet nervous gas.  The smell almost overwhelmed Sheriff Dorighty.  Dorighty held the railing of the peeling paint walled stairway and held on for dear life. Despite the nauseus  smell, he managed to put another foot on the stairs, and keep going.

Dorighty knew he must do it now.  Walking across Dark Boy’s back while Dark Boy howled out bloody murder, Dorighty sped up the stairs toward the bright headed, blue-eyed blonde boy’s little apartment adobe.  Looking down from the top window, he saw two boys like Dark Boy sitting in a large, older classical cranberry red Cadillac.  Dressed in black too, the nasty boys smoked a cigarette apiece and sat quietly in the car, side by side, like two spouses married to Satan for life. He strode down the faded carpet of the hallway, and knew what he must do next.  While fighting God’s redeeming visions like a night time movie of all of the teenage boys before who they’d killed, he knew he must make it to the older brother’s place before they did.  A shuffling in the hallway behind him, and he turned to see Dark Boy pulling his one scraggly leg behind him hand rocking back and forth sideways as he both dragged the leg and then ran and walked.

Dark Boy tackled the sheriff, and he was down.  He began clawing his face and with a look on his face much like his dark dad’s when he beat his new wife to a pulp, Dark Boy burnished a piece of broken soda water bottle glass.  Determined to begin stabbing the sheriff’s face, much the same way some of the teenage boys he’d killed, found on the sides of outer Spleenville sheds and over by Torento, Illinois, Dark Boy raised his hand to get the sherriff good.  His dead carcass doesn’t know to this day how the sheriff slipped like grease from the spirit of his father’s own two wicked arms.

The sheriff made his way to Faryl’s apartment and bursted through the door like a saint ridden angel god.  Sheriff Dorighty turned his face like flint to the heavens and stormed at Faryl telling him to brace his life from danger.  Faryl began immediately digging in a nearby duffle bag.  He threw the sheriff a noosed rope and held two in the bush of his hand for himself.  The two accomplices of Dark Boy stormed into the apartment together, one twin more evil than the other.  They wrapped their arms around Sheriff Dorighty.  Faryl threw out a rope and one magically noosed and lassoed Dark Boy around the waist.  Pasting down his arms, he pulled.  But since the dark things came for a murder assignment Faryl grabbed, pulled and dropped the boy out of the nearest open window.  Hitting the pavement, his brain split wide open and spilled all over the pavement there.  Death to a future prison convict came quickly. Sheriff Dorighty snapping out of his delusion quickly grabbed the other boy, and stabbing him an exact thirteen times watched in wonder as blood rolled and flowed out of his mouth and down his neck like a volcano at full lava eruption.  His eyes bulged and you could tell he knew the suffering of a silent scream.  And although he could not communicate it, it was almost as if he could talk, and say that he wanted to tell you that justice had finally been done.

Dark Boy screamed liked a Rambo with severe brain damage and with black pools of angry tears cascading down his cheeks charged at Dorighty like a madman.  His nostrils flared with anger.  A sudden look of horror more frightening than the Amittyville Horror and the crooks who killed his father that got the electric chair when the great Mississippi River floodgates broke, and filled the corriders of the prison just as the execution was taking place ~ Dark Boy’s ears filled and spilled with blood, his dark heart excreting same.  He had run his dumb chest into Sheriff Dorighty’s star badge.  Dorighty ripped it all the way down to Dark boy’s belly without flinching a bit and with no emotion whatsoever.

The star of David saved the two Jews of Black Owl from a certain extermination that night.  Faryl threw the lasso around Dark Boy and roped him on in.  Just before Dark Boy took his last breath, and as a chorus of Jingle Bells winded up on fumes of hot chocolate and frothed apple cider, and some chose to celebrate with coffee singles, he said, “I did it.  It was me all along.  I killed them all.  Grandma hid me out on Fate Street in St. Louis, Missouri.”  But it looked like not even the mean streets of North St. Louis could protect or hide him now.  Faryl lowered Dark Boy’s mangled body out of the window, but dropping the rope accidentally, the deceased Dark Boy fell head-first out of the window leaving black and purple bruises all over his dead, dark hateful face, after he hit the pavement. Despite, it looked like he had been beat to death instead of stabbed by a star. 

But the fearefull, and vnbeleeuing, and the abominable, and murderers, and whore mongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all lyars, shall haue their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. ~ Revelations 21:8