Dead Souls Read online

  DEAD SOULS

  By Michael Laimo

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / Michael Laimo

  Copy-edited by: Darren Pulsford

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Michael Laimo’s novels include ATMOSPHERE, (nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in the category of ‘first novel’), DEEP IN THE DARKNESS (nominated for the Stoker in the ‘novel’ category), THE DEMONOLOGIST, DEAD SOULS, FIRES RISING, SLEEPWALKER, and RETURN TO DARKNESS. His short fiction has been collected in the books DEMONS FREAKS AND OTHER ABNORMALITIES, DREGS OF SOCIETY, and DARK RIDE.

  Book List

  Atmosphere

  Dark Ride

  Dead Souls

  Deep in the Darkness

  Demons Freaks and Other Abnormalities

  Dregs of Society

  Fires Rising

  Rare Cuts

  Return to Darkness

  Sleepwalker

  The Demonologist

  Audiobooks

  Dark Ride

  Dead Souls

  Michael can be contacted at [email protected]

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  Prologue: Evil Returns to Wellfield

  August 24th, 2005

  11:45 AM

  The man takes his break.

  He is permitted outside once a day, at least for now, while it is summer, while the weather is cooperative. In the winter, it's a different story altogether. He never gets to go outside. It's much too cold.

  And today—what a nice day it is! The man can feel the sun's warmth against his face as he is ushered into the open-unit courtyard. Alongside him is a nurse. She leads him gently by the arm. Smiling warmly. Walking slowly in thoughtful consideration of the man who has a lame leg, a portion of his skull missing, and only one eye.

  He looks around at the manicured courtyard. It is penned in by four three-story buildings that make up the Pine Oak Institute for the Mentally Insane. There are many trees here. Some of them have pretty flowers. Their leaves bustle lightly amid the gentle breeze. Beneath the trees are park benches where many of the patients sit and talk to themselves.

  The nurse leads him to one of the benches. He sits down. She smiles again, says, "Lunch in forty-five minutes, David."

  The man, David, smiles. He likes her. She is pretty.

  The nurse leaves David. But he is not alone. There are guards here in the courtyard. Large men that wear white pants and white shirts with ID cards on them. They watch all the patients, some more than others. They barely pay any attention to David because he has been here for seventeen years, and has never caused any trouble.

  After some time, a voice calls to him: "David." It is soft. Whispery.

  He looks around, but sees no one.

  "David," the voice says again. He realizes that it is coming from inside his head. He's scared because he's never had this problem before. Some of the other patients have, but not him.

  David looks down. There's a large blackbird on the walkway, a few feet away. It is looking up at him. David squints his one eye at the bird. The bird hops closer. Again the whispering voice fills his head: "It is time, David."

  "Time for what?" he asks out loud, brow furrowed.

  "The man who killed your parents," the voice in his head says. "The man who made you like this…his blood is returning to Wellfield…to the house."

  Although David feels frightened, he also feels a surge of excitement, of…sudden strength, and power. He's been waiting for this moment since his first days in Pine Oak's crisis stabilization unit, seventeen years ago.

  "Go to the house, David."

  David twists his head; the bones in his neck crack. He eyes the bird curiously. Then, nods. "When?" His voice cracks.

  "Now."

  "Mr. Mackey?"

  David rips his gaze away from the bird. He looks up. The nurse is there, staring down at him. She looks concerned.

  "Are you okay?" she asks.

  David nods.

  "I thought I heard you talking to someone," she says.

  He points to the walkway. "I was looking at the pretty bird." He looks back down. The bird is still there. Only now it is dead. Maggots writhe in its eyes, and on its head. Its feathers are thin and ragged.

  The nurse shakes her head. She smiles insincerely. "Come, David. Let's go inside. It's lunchtime."

  "There you are, Mr. Mackey," another nurse says. This one is a man. He is younger than David, who believes himself to be 100, but is really only 31. David looks up at the nurse with his one eye. The nurse smiles at him. All the nurses smile. The guards don't, though. They never do. They are very serious.

  The nurse places a tray down on the lunch table. There are other patients nearby, but none of them talk to David. They don't talk to anyone but themselves. Unless, of course, they get angry. Then they yell at everyone.

  On the tray is his lunch, a tuna fish sandwich, a plastic cup of Jell-o, and some tea biscuits with pats of butter. Usually, David eats everything. But today he isn't hungry. He is thinking of the bird, and the voice it brought, telling him to go to the house. To wait for the man's blood to arrive.

  So while no one is looking—they don't pay much attention to David because he has never caused any trouble—he removes the plastic butter knife from his tray, and tucks it into his pants.

  David is allowed restroom breaks at any time. There is a bathroom in his room. He shares it with an old man who groans all night, and swats invisible mosquitoes all day.

  After lights out, he gets out of bed. He goes into the bathroom and shuts the door. He removes the plastic butter knife from his underwear (he'd hid it in his mattress during shower time), and begins to gently rub it against the steel bolt connecting the drainpipe to the sink. The rigid plastic begins to whittle. He makes certain to collect all the shavings.

  He continues this activity for two days, never staying in the bathroom for more than a few minutes at a time. Eventually, he files the plastic knife down until the point is razor sharp. He then works on the edges, whittling both sides so they too are keen enough to slice.

  He hides the knife back inside his underwear.

  And waits.

  He hasn't slept at all. He's waiting for the night nurse to make her rounds. At night, there's only one nurse and two guards on duty on each floor of the open unit ward. They spend most of their time watching television, or reading books.

  He pretends to sleep. Finally, he hears the nurse come into his room. He hears her adjusting the groaner's sheets. She then scribbles something down in his chart. Soon thereafter, he hears her leave the room.

  He removes the knife from beneath his mattress. He touches the point and pricks his finger. Sharp as hell, he thinks.

  He gets out of bed, tiptoes across the room. He peeks out into the dim hall. Sees
no one. The nurse, she must be in one of the other rooms. He limps down the hall as fast as he can, all the way to the guard's station. The night guard, a muscular man with black hair and glasses, is seated at a desk. He is reading a magazine with pictures of pretty women inside. His back is facing David.

  He suddenly turns, eyes wide as he spots David.

  David leaps forward and plunges the knife into the guard's right eye. The guard staggers to his feet. His arms raise. He tries to scream, but can only wheeze. He falls to the floor with a heavy thump. David reaches down, yanks the knife out. Blood gouts out onto the floor, black and oily. He removes the security card clipped to the man's belt.

  Limping, he races to the Plexiglas security door. Swipes the keycard. The door clicks open and he moves into the reception area.

  From behind, the nurse screams. He looks back. She is at the far end of the hallway. She has a hand over her mouth. Her eyes are bulging.

  David runs to the front doors. They are locked. He swipes the keycard. They make a buzzing noise before granting him access to the outside world.

  He races outside, across the dark and empty parking lot, his limp no match for the hurrying footsteps pursuing him.

  The voice returns to his head: "Go to the house…"

  Halogen lights on the outside of the building ignite the parking lot. Now it's as bright as a baseball game at night. An alarm tolls. He can hear sirens in the distance. A white security vehicle appears from around the side of the building. It speeds across the parking lot, toward David.

  Tires screech.

  A man cries out; there is a loud, horrible cracking noise.

  David turns. Under the bright security lights, he sees a guard rolling across the blacktop. When he comes to a stop, David can see that his legs are twisted into 'L' shapes.

  The security vehicle stops; there's a splotch of blood on the hood. Its front bumper is dented. The man, only a few feet away, is writhing on the blacktop in agony.

  "Go to the house," the voice repeats in his head. He looks up and sees a lone blackbird flying overhead, seemingly guiding the way. A feather drifts lazily down toward him. He catches it in mid air.

  David Mackey looks at the feather, smiles, then gazes up at the circling bird one last time before fleeing into the dark woods surrounding the Pine Oak Institute for the Mentally Insane.

  PART ONE: THE DEAD, LIVING

  Now, upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre…and they found the stone rolled away, and they entered in and found not the body of the Lord Jesus Christ...

  Luke 24

  Chapter 1

  August 24th, 1988

  5:00 AM

  It began with four bells, each tolling simultaneously throughout a large farm home commonly known in town as the Conroy House.

  They rang once, their vibrations sounding much louder than usual, signifying a singular event. Thirteen seconds later, they rang again, stirring those in the house from their fitful slumbers.

  This early morning, a quarter moon beamed proudly in the sky, the winds blowing gently from the southwest, carrying with them the cries of blackbirds now searching for the day's first worms. Rainclouds had dominated the skies the first two weeks of July in the summer of 1988, leaving everything in Wellfield gray and wet. Two days earlier, the power had gone out, and in parts of town the houses were still dark. The outage had only affected the Conroy House for twelve hours, an event soon thereafter considered to have been a small grace from God.

  At the tolling of the third bell, at exactly twenty-six seconds after the onset of the first, a man of forty-three years of age sat up in bed. He swung his feet over the edge of the quilted mattress and placed them in the perfect white circle painted on the oak flooring. The sweat-matted sheets drifted away from his naked form. He clasped his hands together, then closed his eyes and silently recited two prayers, the first to the Lord Jesus Christ, the second to the Lord Osiris. His lips moved gently against the hushed words escaping his throat, parched tongue parting them between verses, helping to absorb the determined vibrations of the tolling bells.

  At the conclusion of his prayer, the man stood in the circle. He set his sights on its intricacies, at the outer border and running queue of hexagrams, then at the inner border and the many sacred names of God etched into the bright paint. Upon each magnetic pole of the circle, pentagrams jutted: from the center of each, white candles rose like the stripped branches of ash trees. At the top of the circle, painted on the floor directly before him, was a triangle with the name of OSIRIS divided up, three letters at the lower right point, two at the left, and an 'O' at the uppermost point that faced south.

  The bells continued to toll.

  He raised his gaze and aimed it out the window overlooking the wide stretch of land leading to the barn. A lone blackbird fluttered into the still picture and landed on the sill, one oil-drop eye ignited by the faint moonlight, peering in at him. It cocked its head once, twice, then pecked a gentle message against the corner of the window, making a sound not unlike the soothing carve of a paring knife on soft wood. The bird hopped along the sill, then flapped its still-damp wings and flew away, leaving behind a sole black feather: a gift from Osiris.

  At the thirteenth toll of the bells, the man, unsmiling, paced heel-to-toe about the circumference of the circle, knowing that in three of the other bedrooms, a woman, a girl, and a boy, were carrying out the same exact procedure. He performed sixteen revolutions, then stepped away and paced to the window. He cracked it open and removed the feather from the sill.

  After closing the window, he stepped to the bureau, where he struck a wooden match and lit a white candle. A yellow flame rose four inches high, its point flickering energetically, releasing a thin black line of wavering smoke. Alongside the candle, he lifted the pyramid-shaped top of a brass censer. Inside, loaded from the evening before, was a cone of sandalwood. He placed the feather alongside the cone, then lit the incense and inhaled the escaping aroma as if sniffing from a pot of steaming soup.

  Still counting the toll of the bells, he waited until they struck thirty, then opened the bureau drawer and removed a leather parchment. He paced back to the circle, lit the four candles, then knelt inside the circle, hands resting lightly on his lap, palms facing upwards and holding out the parchment like an offering. He relaxed his shoulders, facing his head toward the triangle. He began to breathe more slowly, inhaling deeply through his nose, holding the air in his lungs until the bell tolled thirteen seconds later; then, exhaled for the same stretch of time. He repeated this process until he achieved a rhythmic state of reflexive breathing.

  Concentrating solely on the spirit of Osiris, he unfurled the parchment and placed it down flat inside the triangle. He read the sigil etched in black ink on the worn leather, clearing his mind of all unwanted thoughts and worries. He repeated the spirit God's name for the toll of thirteen bells, his voice chanting in unison to the voices of the woman, girl, and boy performing the same ritual in their prospective rooms.

  Following the tolling of the thirteenth bell of which he repeated the God's name, he recited a prayer, his voice drawing out each word in a string of monotone notes: "I beseech thee, O Spirit Osiris from the vast astral plane, by the supreme majesty of God, to allow the child Bryan Conroy an association to our purpose, so that he too may benefit from your empowering gift."

  As his words ended, the bell tolled again.

  The Conroy house immediately grew hot. Beads of sweat formed on his brow. He closed his eyes, and in his shuttered sights, a warm glowing sphere appeared. He reached out for it, fingers extended like tiny tree branches. The light of the sphere seeped toward him in a thin tight line, as though it were composed of liquid. It ensconced his grasping fingers, quickly filling his body, snug and comforting, his legs, body, and head fully absorbing its fluid offering.

  Once the light saturated his body, a slow vibration filled him, his body wholly accepting of the powerful beat. He could hear it
in his head, his ears, each encompassing cadence taking on a tonal contour that eventually formed into lucid echoes. His ears popped with every echo, and he could see two dark misty spheres now settling in the space alongside his head.

  Windows to the astral plane.

  The dark spheres expanded, faint gray holes appearing at their cores. He could hear a cadence emerging, like the distant footsteps of a great and powerful giant that approached in perfect unity with the vibrations in his body. The man's lips moved on their own accord, his voice a long flat line of pronunciation as he repeated his prayer to the spirit God Osiris.

  The golden light before him expanded, as did the dark spheres alongside him, whose gray focal points had expanded now to swallow up their once near-black states. A doorway appeared in the golden light, a glowing blue image on its flat metallic-like surface. The image took on a definitive shape of curved lines atop an inverted triangle, bisected by a crooked arrow.

  Slowly, the doorway opened. The pounding vibration exploded out from the darkness beyond—from the realm of the astral plane, into the physical plane.

  The man gazed into the swirling black eddies, a storm of whistling winds that backed the slow, thunderous pulse. From within its murky depths, he could hear the spirit's message clearly, each word spat out one syllable at a time, embedded within a single booming pulsation.

  "Benjamin Conroy…proceed with the ritual."

  Chapter 2

  September 7th, 2005

  12:56 PM

  Despite the persistent rain and pain-filled thoughts that had kept him company on the bus ride into New England, Johnny Petrie was still able to unearth a bit of excitement in his heart—his stomach fluttered with invisible butterflies, his skin tingled with nervous anticipation. It was all so bittersweet: he'd spent most of his eighteen years, at least those of which he could recall, in Manhattan under the roof of a brownstone on the Upper East Side, 88th between Lexington and Park. Now, to see this: trees and mountainsides displaying their browns and greens in never-ending arrays; the hidden sun whose filtering daylight still managed to illuminate the moist environment. Despite its simplicity, it was such a grand feast for his city-bred eyes. Just south of Providence, on I-95, he'd caught sight of a raccoon or possum that'd met its fate beneath the tires of some unassuming vehicle, but even this was something new and exciting to behold. The country, yes, that's what this was, and he cursed himself—his parents—for never having gone further north than Westchester County before.