The Eye of Madness Read online

  Malakhi shrieked, causing his mother to charge from the other room, her hair still in rollers. They cried and called for Nehemya for several minutes before they realized their search was fruitless. Malakhi collapsed in his mother’s arms and wept for the loss of his grandfather. Rebekah mourned the loss of her father, now for the second time.

  The landlord of their small apartment complex was not tolerant of noise in the thin walled building. He also happened to live right next door. He was a heavy set, balding man whose harsh facial features were a perfect match for his unforgiving personality. He never spoke to Rebekah unless it was to collect the rent money. Malakhi knew to tread lightly in the hall, lest he receive a scathing lecture from the man.

  The knocking at the door did not register with them. When their landlord began to scream in agony they forgot their grief. The knocking was replaced with a dull thumping as if someone were taking deliberate steps down the hallway. The thumping, however, was barely audible over the man’s horrified screams. The odd thing, the thing that made the hair stand up on the back of their necks, was the noise. It permeated through the thin walls with horrifying clarity. Hhhhhhhhhh. It was as if a reptilian choir filled the hallway, all humming the same note. As horrible as the poor man’s screams were, this noise was worse.

  Malakhi started to walk to the door, but Rebekah stopped him. The small closet next to the front door was open a crack. In the sliver of darkness, she saw unnatural movement. It was as if the dark itself struggled to get out. The only thing keeping it back was the light streaming in through the window. She did not know how or why, but Rebekah knew the absurdity in the closet was somehow related to what was happening to their landlord. She threw herself across the room, slamming the closet door with one fluid motion. She grabbed Malakhi and rolled into the warm sunlight.

  The room closest to the front door was little more than a sitting room. It would seem cramped if more than three people sat there. Malakhi and Rebekah’s apartment was a mirror image of their landlord’s. His sitting room was on the other side of the wall.

  As Rebekah lay under the window cradling her frightened child, the floor vibrated. The noise was still drowned by the man’s screams, but she could feel someone taking hard and deliberate steps on the other side of the wall. He was no longer outside their door; he had gone back into his apartment. His screams ripped through the thin wall making it seem as if he were right beside them. The single noted hiss underscored his cries like a thousand slithering creatures, all locked in a chorus of wicked synchronicity.

  Just when they thought they could no longer take the noise, they heard a crash. Rebekah’s head shot up, her eyes drawn towards the source of the shattered glass … towards the window. The sitting room windows in the two apartments were only about three feet apart, so Rebekah had a clear view. Their apartment was about four stories above the busy street below. Mr. Zahavi, the landlord, flew through his window in a fatal dive toward the hard concrete. Seeing a man die was horrible enough, but the truly horrible thing was that there seemed to be no fear in the man, none whatsoever. There was no flailing of arms, and no screams. In fact, the man could have been on trampoline for all the fear he showed. It was a stark contrast to the screams of pure horror from seconds before.

  “It was almost as if he were relieved to die,” Rebekah thought to herself, but never shared with another soul.

  She wanted to turn away, wanted to hide her face from the gruesome act. Yet, she found she could not tear her gaze from Mr. Zahavi as he fell lower, lower, lower …

  He landed on the hood of a taxicab with an impact hard enough to collapse it and shatter the windshield. His body was thrown forward where it smashed into the back of a bus before crumpling on the pavement in a bloody and battered mess. He was dead, there was no doubt, but something was peculiar.

  Rebekah saw two people die in the last two months. One was an elderly man who suffered a heart attack in her restaurant and the other was a young boy who was hit on his bicycle by a city bus. Both of them were still there, or at least their spirit was. They all remained, trapped by the cosmic storm. The man and the boy both remained, standing over their body in a state of shock and bewilderment. But they were here, and they were visible. Mr. Zahavi was not standing over his mangled body, he was gone like her father and all the Impals around the world.

  Rebekah squeezed Malakhi tight and tore her eyes from the sickening scene below. As she held her weeping boy, her own grief began to wash back over her. She replayed the image in her mind of her father vanishing. His terrified face etched in her psyche for eternity. This played over and over in her head in a never-ending loop. The more she tried to block the image out, other unpleasant memories drifted into her head. The day of her father’s funeral was now spliced into this tormenting mental movie.

  As she wept, something else crept into her mind, another memory more recent and every bit as horrible. She opened her eyes and turned her head toward the closet door. It opened with an ominous groan. She held her breath as she focused on the door. Her breath escaped in a single blood-curdling scream at what she saw in the moving and undulating darkness.

  CHAPTER 3

  MAJOR GARRISON

  “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”

  ~Bram Stoker

  Major Cecil Garrison had endured more in the past twenty-four hours than most people do in a lifetime. Up until yesterday, he worked with a covert organization, made up of both military and civilian combatants. Their sole objective was the rescue of Impals from the clutches of Major Garrison’s own father, General Ott Garrison. Yesterday, they evacuated several hundred Impals to an island in the English Channel. The success of this mission came with great costs.

  The leader of the resistance, Colonel Danny Bradley, was killed. Cecil had returned to their base later to find their camp raided by the military. Everyone, including his wife and daughters were gone. He received the emotional jolt of his life when he found that his wife and others managed to escape. However, his youngest daughter was the one who betrayed them to the military. His oldest daughter died in the raid, but her Impal managed to escape with his wife and make it back to him. Cecil decided to cling to the hope that his father would not hurt his youngest daughter.

  The eye of the storm passed over the United States several hours before it did Europe, but the results were the same all over the world. The Impals vanished, including his eldest daughter. The darkness was no longer a figure of speech or a metaphor for evil and despair. It had become those things incarnate. Cecil was outside when he heard the screams of his wife from the upstairs bedroom of their secluded cabin. His wife, Barbara, was now alone in a dark room.

  Cecil bounded up the stairs to the cabin porch and flung open the front door, knocking over a rocking chair sitting nearby. Upon hearing the screams, everyone emerged from the kitchen. They were about to ascend the stairs when Garrison flew past them, taking three steps at a time. He bolted through the bedroom door before any of them reached the first step.

  As Cecil clambered into the darkness, he found himself no longer in a dark room, but in bright sunlight. He was lying face down, staring at white fiberglass. The dull and dingy white he recognized as the bottom of a canoe. It was the same canoe from when he was a boy at church camp. Something slimy and cold moved over his lower calf and a moment later he felt white-hot pain light up the back of his leg. In an instant, he forgot about his wife, forgot about Impals, and forgot about the past thirty years. He was twelve years old again and he was a terrified little boy trying to escape a nest of angry water moccasins.

  Jerking his body up, he spun around on his seat. The snake still clamped its fangs into his lower calf. He screamed and yanked the snake lose, pulling a small divot of flesh from his leg with it. He tried to fling the snake overboard, but the motion seemed to take an eternity. The snake turned and glared at him. Cecil’s blood dripped from a sinister reptilian smile. In an instant, he saw something that froze his heart. The eyes
were not the slitted eyes of a reptile. There was intelligence in these eyes. These eyes projected an evil only humans are capable of committing. He knew what and who he was facing.

  This serpent abducted six children, five boys and one girl. He killed her the most brutally because she had made him angry. Her short haircut and football jersey caused him to mistake her for a boy. This was what he loved, catching little boys and molesting them with a sickening perverted creativity. He then took his time dismembering them while they were still alive. After flying into a rage on discovering the seven year old girl’s true gender, he sodomized her. Instead of beginning his dismemberment at the shoulders and hips, he started at the first knuckle of each finger. He took his time worked his way up in three-inch intervals. It took all night and the poor girl lived through most of it.

  Cecil did not have the time to ask the question of how a snake, a slimy slithering reptile, could have accomplished this, yet he knew somehow. This was once a person who had lived as flesh and blood, yet they were not an Impal. As he flung the squirming abomination into the water, he saw more movement out of the corner of his eye. At the back of the boat five more snakes slithered over the side. They plopped into the bottom of the water-logged canoe with a vile splash. He searched wildly for a paddle, but there were none. He watched in horror as more snakes peered over the edge of the canoe, ready to drop in and come after him. Their eyes were the same as the first serpent, all with a sickening human intelligence. All contained a ghoulish story in their cold and calculating eyes. Rape, murder, molestation, and genocide were the common themes emanating from the nest of snakes. As they slithered over the side of his boat, Garrison saw no alternative. He let out a scream and threw himself over the side. He began to swim as hard as he could toward the shore.

  He had only swum a few strokes when he felt several cold and scaly bodies wrapping around his legs. Numerous sharp pains ran from his ankles to his hips. He screamed and thrashed, trying to propel himself faster, but it was no use. A moment later, he felt them wrap around his torso and arms. This was followed by more brilliant pain as they began to bite again. The pain was more than he could stand. He cried out but it was a muffled, gurgling shriek as his head was now a foot under the murky water.

  The serpents covered his entire body. He was bitten so many times from head to toe his whole body was one sharp piercing pain. The agony and the vivid evil memories he gleaned from the sentient reptiles were maddening. Death was preferable to this; death seemed as welcoming as a soft bed at the end of a long hard day. It was the only way, the only way to stop the pain and to purge his mind of the dozens of sick memories. Major Cecil Garrison let go. He ceased to struggle and prepared to draw a deep breath of lake water into his lungs, but then something happened.

  He felt himself being pulled upward and then thrown back onto a hard surface. Instead of inhaling, the breath was knocked out of him and he lay on his back gasping for air. He was wet, but he was no longer underwater. The pain and the slithering feeling were still there, but it was fading. His eyes flew open as he sucked in air. Cecil blinked up into the bright sunlight. He realized he was underneath the upstairs bathroom window of the cabin. Burt and Derek stared down at him.

  “You okay, Cecil?” Burt croaked, his face ashen white.

  “Jesus … what the hell was that?” Derek asked, wide-eyed and waving a large flashlight around the room.

  Cecil didn’t respond to either of them. The dark green bathroom curtain was torn from the wall, rod and all. It lay a few feet away in a crumpled heap on the wet tile floor. Every light in the bathroom was on, including the overhead fan. Cecil made a move to sit up, but Derek and Burt each grabbed an arm and raised him off of the cold wet floor. He leaned back against the wall and pulled his knees in close for warmth. Even though it was not a cold day, he couldn’t remember when he had ever been this chilled. Soon his eyes fell on the claw foot bathtub sitting in the corner. The water inside sloshed about as if there were an earthquake.

  “What happened?” Cecil asked.

  “What happened?” Burt snapped. “I’ll tell you what happened! You came running into the bedroom and then the next thing we knew, you were screaming your head off and running into the bathroom.”

  Burt stopped as Dr. Winder entered the room. The doctor walked to Cecil’s side and knelt down.

  “Are you okay, major?” he asked.

  “Thanks to you!” Burt said. “Thank God you stopped us before we wandered in here. We might have all wound up …” his voice trailed off sheepishly.

  It was then that the hazy, confused fog lifted from Cecil’s head. He remembered why he stormed into the bedroom in the first place.

  “Barbara … where’s Barbara!?” he shouted trying to scramble to his feet. He slipped on the slick tile, but Burt and Derek caught him.

  “Easy, Cecil,” Derek whispered. “She’s right out here. We’ll take you to her.”

  They escorted him from the swamped bathroom with Burt on one side and Derek on the other. Cecil jumped at a sloshing and gurgling noise behind them. Gazing back over his shoulder, he saw that Dr. Winder had just pulled the plug on the bathtub.

  He was about to ask why the bathtub was full when he saw Barbara lying on the bed. Charlotte sat beside her and held her hand while Sam Andrews ran a cold beer bottle back and forth across her forehead. Despite his concern for his wife, a burst of anger ran through him at the sight of a beer bottle being used to cool his wife. Sam Andrews was an alcoholic and a pretty bad one. He let his withdrawals get the best of him for the couple of weeks they were in the secluded Impal refugee camp. He almost murdered the president. Andrews also displayed several other temperamental outbursts that could have put them in jeopardy. Now here he was, drinking and acting the part of a concerned citizen.

  “He’s mocking me,” Cecil thought as he strode across the room and knocked Andrews out of the way.

  Judging by Andrews’s face, he considered beaning the major over the head with his bottle. If he did, he reconsidered. The bottle was over half full. It would be a terrible waste. Instead he sauntered into the bathroom to join Dr. Winder who was staring out the window as if gazing at death itself.

  Every light possible was turned on and every blind and shutter was torn down. The room was so bright; it almost made it necessary to squint. Barbara’s tan skin was pallid. Cecil peered into her hollow and haunted eyes. They were wide open, frozen in terror, unblinking and unresponsive. She did not even react when Cecil bent down and kissed her on the cheek. She was alive, as evidenced by her rising chest and a raspy snorting exhale, but she was in deep shock.

  “Oh dear God, did she see the snakes too?” Cecil thought as he brought her limp hand to his mouth and kissed it.

  But how could she? That was something Cecil had experienced when he was a boy. He never discussed the details with anybody, not even Barbara.

  Cecil turned to Charlotte who was sitting at the foot of the bed.

  “What happened to her?” he whispered.

  Charlotte fought back tears and put a fist over her mouth to stifle a sob.

  “She—she was in the floor. She looked as if someone was attacking her,” she said as tears burst down her cheeks.

  “Attacking … how?” Cecil pressed.

  “She … she … she was being raped,” Charlotte said, wiping tears away.

  “Did you see anybody?” Cecil asked. His insides started to twist in knots at the thought of his beautiful wife enduring this despicable violation.

  “No one visible … it was almost as if she was acting. But, the terror in her screams and on her face … she wasn’t acting.”

  He kissed Barbara’s cheek and squeezed her hand while stroking her forearm. Her eyes were still fixed on an invisible spot on the ceiling. Her terrified expression burned a little deeper hole into his heart with every glance. Her chest heaved up and down with rapid regularity, as if she completed a rigorous workout.

  Cecil closed his eyes. His experience was much more th
an a vivid recollection of a childhood incident, it was far worse. This was a true nightmare. He had no idea his experience was not real until he was pulled out of the bathtub. How the bathtub was filled in the first place was a question he brushed to the back of his mind. Right now, the logistics did not seem as important as the encounter itself.

  He did not know how or why, but he knew what each one of the snakes, these things, had done at one time. It was as if a demented movie played out in each of their eyes, a movie full of a lifetime of horrific atrocities. These brutalities gave each and every one of them a high level of satisfaction. There was no remorse in the entities minds. Every murder, rape and abuse was as benign and pleasant to them as taking a trip to Disneyland. They had injected their horrible deeds into his soul like poisonous venom with every vicious bite. He felt frigid as if he sat with a high fever in a deep freeze. Cecil did not realize how much he was shaking until Charlotte reached out and clasped his free hand between her palms. She gently rubbed as if treating someone with frostbite. Her hands vibrated in response to his trembling. She tightened her grasp, soon managing to reduce his shivering to a dull quake.

  Even though he felt cold, his heart burned red hot with anger and hatred of these things. To call these things human was unfathomable, but then Cecil knew that they all were at one time. His anger skyrocketed when he thought about how these things violated Barbara. They had tormented her into this pathetic petrified state. But, if they used to be human, what were they now? They were not Impals. If they were, they would no longer be here. A troubling thought crossed his mind … could his father have been right? Could the eye of the storm have revealed the Impals’s true nature? Perhaps they hadn’t disappeared at all, but instead reverted back to their natural state. He found this thought disgusting and downright absurd. He had interacted with Impals, his own daughter was now one, and he knew there was no malice, no hidden agenda in her. They were good, frightened people who were trying to make the best of their circumstances. Sure, there were some ‘bad’ ones. The two prison guards who beat him and the two bounty hunters shot by Colonel Bradley came to mind. One thing became evident to Cecil in the past two weeks—‘bad’ was a subjective term. The bad he just experienced was worse than anything he ever felt before. The evil of the unrepentant entities and their enjoyment in their deeds made the ‘bad’ Impals seem like saints. They may have once been human, like the Impals, but they were different … very different.