Abaddon, p.1
Abaddon, page 1
ABADDON
ROBERT W. WALKER
Copyright © 2010 by Robert W. Walker, www.robertwalkerbooks.com
Cover copyright © 2010 by Stephen Walker, www.srwalkerdesigns.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Robert W. Walker.
PART ONE
And he opened the bottomless pit;
as the smoke of a great furnace;
and the sun and the air were darkened
by reason of the smoke of the pit.
—Revelation 9:2
PROLOGUE
In the beginning…
Seventy mile an hour winds jolted a row of ancient oaks standing in a curious line atop Watch Hill. The trees stood on the granite cliff like so many sentinels overlooking a ramshackle trailer home below. The lifeless, hard branches pitch forked about in the wind, jabbing at one another. The noise created sounded like thundering rams butting heads.
The howling winds quaked the yellow trailer and toppled its tinker toy-like antenna. Awnings swung loose and ripped away. Shutters flapped crazily; windows threatened to explode.
Lightning flashed and thunder peeled while the small trailer performed its silly dance. Inside the trailer, below flickering lights and the hum of a television voice warning of bad weather, screams and shouting wafted up to the dead oaks. A heated argument heard only by the nearest tree when suddenly the trailer door was flung open and left slapping in the wind by the shirtless, shoeless boy with unkempt red hair. He ran, crying in terror, pursued by a man.
Half naked, the boy climbed the steep incline toward the cover of the oaks. His back was streaked with blood from the belt buckle that had cut into him several times before he had hit his father with a chair. Behind him, he heard his apologetic, drunken father shouting his name: “Richard! Richard!”
But Richard stood behind the oaks, peeking out to see that his father had been too slow and had no idea the direction he’d taken. He watched his father searching the darkness without luck. Richard watched the drunk throw up his hands and scream, still holding the belt.
Cautiously, the boy clawed his way further up the slope, panting, fearful and getting cold, a knot of anger and hatred rising between his stomach and heart, a response to the unreasonable hatred his father held for him. Mom always said it wasn’t really him talking, that it was the booze. Richard missed her greatly and she had always known how to deal with the situation, but she was gone now. Still he heard her excuses for his father in his ear as if she were whispering in the storm: “He really loves you, son…it’s the whiskey talking.”
“Excuses,” he muttered at the same instant a lightning flash lit the entire hillside, and fearful his father would make him out in the flash of light, he dropped to the earth and fell into a hole as wide as himself that had opened up at the base of the oak he’d been hiding behind, the one that spoke in the voice of his mother.
# # #
Richard tore and scratched at the sides of the muddy hole, his bare feet in water up to his ankles; he remembered no such hole as this in the earth here and it confused him. Had the storm opened it up? The roots of the tree appeared the way out, but they were so large and fat and slick with rainwater that it was impossible to get any kind of hold on them. He leapt and grabbed at crumbling mud, falling back and finding himself sitting in the muddy bottom, fearful that he’d drown here and never get out.
He fought to save himself. Tried pulling himself along on his belly from jutting rock to jutting rock down here when one rock bit him like a viper, drawing blood and pain. He again fell away and plopped into the muck below him, and strangely, with the splash, he could have sworn he heard laughter. He looked straight up, expecting to see his father standing over the fissure he’d fallen into, laughing and offering the end of his belt to help him up. He waited for the next lightning flash to see his father’s cruel smile but when it came there was no sign of the old man. So where had the laughter come from? Had I imagined it, he wondered.
Richard felt something touch him and he swung around in the water. Something in the mud was swimming about. Perhaps a snake. He felt it slither between his legs. He shuddered and pushed away only to find himself caught up in a tangle of cascading roots.
“This is your father’s fault,” he heard his mother whisper in his ear.
“Damn straight it is,” replied the teen.
“You got good reason to hate him,” he heard next in a voice that while his mother’s was using words she’d never expressed before.
He wondered if he were hallucinating; if a great deal of time had passed and he was close to death, freezing out in a hole where he had become trapped. The cold he felt had gone beyond shivering to a numbing feeling.Maybe I’ll just lie down and die here, he imagined, exhausted, unable to climb up, the water rising, something deadly in the water.
“Gotta fight,” he told himself. “Gotta get outta here.” Richard found new courage and strength, and he grabbed out at a promising looking root not too fat to wrap his hands around but when he grabbed hold and pulled himself upward, the root made a sucking sound and came out of the wall. Richard went back first into the water, holding firmly to the stone-like root but when he righted himself and a flash of light from overhead lit up the root, he realized he was holding onto a skeletal arm and hand. He threw it into the air, gasping, terrified. More laughter as if from another room filled his ears.
Trying anew to extricate himself and find safe footing in the network of interconnecting roots which now appeared to be bones and skulls as well, Richard realized that he had stumbled onto the remains of the twenty-one summarily executed witches and wizards of Salem, Massachusetts infamy. That this was the communal burial plot—if it could be called that; the hole into which the bodies were cast after hanging, and the oaks standing over Watch Hill were just as Professor Crim had suspected, the natural gallows used by the authorities of 1692 to get the job done quickly and efficiently and to save lumber in the bargain—not having wasted it on a proper gallows.
It’d been an argument of the time Richard had been spending with Professor Crim of the University of Massachusetts, an archeologist, who had precipitated the trouble that had been brewing between Richard and his father, Jacob Fiske, for months now. Crim had paid his father for the rights to dig in and around the trees in search of evidence of the past, and Richard had been spending a lot of time with Crim and his students at the dig.
A dig which apparently had caused the earth to give way here.
He flashed on the argument that had ended with his father ripping off his belt and tearing into him. What was the big deal? He’d only half-listened to his father’s growing distrust and dislike of the situation with Professor Crim. At first he’d called Crim a pervert, most likely just wanting Richard for his perverse ends, but each time Richard talked about Crim and how he’d like to himself become an archeologist and how much Crim was teaching him, the hotter his father became. Jealous is what it was, spewing four-letter words about the professor and asking Richard, “Whataya think, boy? You think you’re smarter than me? You gotta have brains to go to college. Hell, you ain’t gonna make it outta high school.”
Richard lost his temper when the old man asked if Crim had asked him into that tent he’d put up on their land, and “did the old pervert put your hand down his pants?”
That’s when Richard slapped his father, shouting, “All you ever think is dirt, dirt, dirt!”
After that, Richard could not recall every detail save the pain of the belt and throwing the chair at his father and running out. And now he was here, trapped in this damnable hole in the ground with the bones and skulls of the Salem Witches and Wizards all around him.
He felt like a mouse in a maze. He knew, too, that if his father discovered this bone pit, he’d either make Professor Crim pay dearly for each and every bone, or he’d open a crude, stupid museum and gift shop on his own. So in a way, he was glad his father hadn’t discovered where he was, but by the same token, he could conceivably die of the cold and wet her of hypothermia. It was November in the back bay, the scrub earth of Danville, once known as Salem Village.
Again an attempt at freeing himself failed when his eye was suddenly drawn to a brass-colored chain. Thick rings of joined metal in a manner that spoke of its ancient origin. A foot in length, the shining metal chain and amulet dangled from one of the skeletal hands he’d earlier mistook for a tree root, as if extended to him like a carnival prize. The chain was dangerously perched over the mouth of the deepest part of the pit, its center.
Another lightning flash revealed something moving among the roots and the bones—an army of grasshoppers — locusts! Thousands of them climbing over one another and combating the rain and sludge just like him. Again he wondered if he might not be hallucinating.Until the locusts began covering him as if seeking shelter on his body.
“Take hold the chain, child,” came his mother’s voice in his ear like smoke.
Staring at it, the amulet seemed to speak as well; it seemed to say that by possessing it, Richard began to believe this medallion, whatever it was, whatever it represented might actually be what Professor Crim was looking for, despite his avowed reason for paying Richard’s father for the right to dig on the property. Ric hard began to believe that the amulet could free him — not simply from the pit but from his father and this place as well. As he formulated the thought, his mother’s voice agreed and encouraged his newfound faith in the amulet which had a green emerald at its center.
A rising steam rose off the watery pit below him. He’d found refuge among the roots of the tree and stood on a ledge. To grab hold of the amulet it would take a leap to the other side where more tree roots and skeletal remains awaited. It would take a leap of faith as well, the faith that he could grab hold and not fall into the pit further still.
The steamy substance rising from below enveloped him, surrounded him, stung his eyes. It held an acrid odor and flavor as it found his nostrils and throat. But for now he was fixated on the chain and the amulet. Get it…get it…get it. He knew deep within his soul that it was valuable beyond all reason and like finding a message in a bottle that’d floated over the ages to here and now. That’s how old Crim would speak of it. Certainly, it was the kind of object that all archeologist pray to one day unearth.
Hell this could be Richard’s Massachusetts lottery. This was the Salem Witchcraft archeological dig lottery, and it was within his grasp! Until he leapt for it, took hold, and slid down and down into the pit, going under and into the blackness.
But he held tight to the chain and amulet, believing in its power, and the voices had changed from laughter around him to words:
“Him? He’s skin and bone.”
“So are you.”
“But him?”
“Really?”
Richard opened his eyes and found himself coming to outside the pit and on level ground. He still heard the voices, many of them old women’s voices and angry; not at all pleasant like his mother’s voice.
“Who? Who is he?”
“Carr, I think.”
“Putnam perhaps.”
“Naw, Fiske.”
“That’s me!” Richard coughed out the words.
“That’s a damnable name,” replied one angry voice from the air around Richard, who noticed the ghostly gas still rising from the pit.
“Fiske!” the anger came out like spitting.
“Remember Fiske?”
“What do you want from me?” asked Richard.
“Get up…watch and learn.”
Richard did not recall placing the amulet around his neck but here it was. He sat up, worked to his feet, feeling woozy in the storm that continued. It seemed he had never fallen into the pit.
“Look at your father, Fiske,” came a commanding male voice in his head.
Richard looked back down at the trailer to see that his father was staggering toward the TV antenna atop it, a familiar sight but not on a night like this. Just how drunk was he? Just then all of the voices inside Richard’s head which had come into his head from the pit told him to focus on his father and his anger toward his father. Richard did so, and as he focused and concentrated his hatred for the old man at the form atop the trailer, he saw a milky white fog with a green tinge to it encircle the old man, blinding him, making him stumble and grab hold of the antenna.
Richard expected a lightning strike would blow his father into the next life; he even prayed for it, but no lightning came. Instead, Jacob Fiske went down on the wet surface and began flailing like a fish—as if hit by lightning. When a flash of light revealed the scene, he saw that somehow the antenna had gone through his gut and that his father was impaled on the thing, alive but bleeding out.
Richard’s hands went around the amulet and he found it warm and glowing like an ember. One foot started for his father, to help him, but the rest of his body held him in place. Instead, he watched his father bleed out and die.
# # #
Dr. Morris T. Crim’s thin, leathery hands shook as if possessed when he held up the heavy gold chain and bone obelisk with the green emerald eye at its center. Peering through thick eyeglasses at the unusual medallion that Richard had discovered the night of his father’s death, the old archeologist flecked off years of encrusted mineral deposits with great and meticulous care. Even so, he feared he was being impatient, going too fast, being clumsy, careless, stupid. Breaking all the rules.
He was anxious to get at some looping words inscribed on the bone, scrimshaw lettering on what appeared whale bone. There’s so much to do, he kept telling himself, his nerves frayed with the joy of the find. He’d waited years before this moment, after all, to stand here with the object in hand, dazzling his eyes. Not to mention that the kid had found the actual site of the bone yard that cradled the remains of the Salem witches. An extraordinary twist of fate as the storm had washed away a gulley and turned over a tree, a tree that was one of several used as the gallows in 1692.
Yes, the storm had saved them a great deal of time and labor, but the storm had done his work with a shattering disregard for the site, devastating much of the remains and splintering brittle bones and skulls. He’d wanted to care for the site, nurture it to completion. It was to have been my child, he told himself again.
A court injunction was in the works to gain control of this small plot of land, so long hidden away, buried over time, ignored and forgotten for over three-hundred ten years. But now he feared everything could be ruined. Even if he and his team could reconstruct who was who in this common grave, even if able to salvage the overall plan, get a demographic on the victims: age, size, sex, health at the time of death perhaps. He might salvage some bits of cloth, small items the witches took to their grave, wood, clay, seashells, bone and rock—all finds around the mud slide. He might salvage a few interesting relics but in particular this relic in hand, as this artifact, which he continued to pry and poke at with a little auger, could make his career go from a joke to a success overnight.
He forced himself to stop for a deep breath of air, and to place the chain, and its melded round medallion or amulet on the table. It rattled noisily as he did so, looking out of place amid the other items, despite the whale bone and scrimshaw. In fact, that part of the amulet seemed a strange addition to the rest.
All around the dimly lit tent, he had scattered the larger bone fragments, many in remarkable condition, including several skulls. But it remained the chain and amulet, brought him by the boy who told him some inner voice insisted he bring it to Crim, that somehow called to Crim as if there were some imprisoned animal within that green eye.
It was no good to lay it aside on the table in an effort to restrain himself. Dr. Crim snatched it right up again. He must pick away the years of impacted earth. Using the small, too-sharp auger in his expert hand, the old man scrapped again and again at it. The entire time he that he worked, he thought it odd the medallion did not look like something from the 17th Century but rather eons before. If so, how did it find its way into that grave with the Salem witches?
When the flickering light of his oil lamp here in the field tent moved, enlarging his shadow against the interior. He turned to see who’d moved the light and his eyes met the boy’s—Richard’s. He’d never before noticed the deep jade of color of the boy’s eyes. Why hadn’t he noticed them before? They were powerfully beautiful, mesmerizing.
The boy had dressed in the shirt and shorts that Crim had offered him. He’d been surprised when Richard had showed up in the middle of the night after the storm, his back scarred. The boy had simply wandered from the woods from the hillside, the chain about his neck like a slave in bondage. And he seemed anxious to get rid of the chain and amulet.
Crim, from the moment he met and spoke with Richard and then his father, in setting up the opportunity to dig on the land, had felt sorry for the boy’s having to live with this man Jacob Fiske—a wreck of a human being. To Fiske’s credit, he did at first offer his trailer for Crim rather in a hospitable manner, but to that Crim merely raised one of his Wellington boots and indicated the caked mud there, and said, “Gets real messy, Mr. Fiske. Wouldn’t want to trample your carpets.”
