Seasons of Heaven (27 page)

He ran the flashlight along the rest of the walls. One thing stood out, the word “Banished” had been engraved in the wood in several places and above some of them were spray painted the word, “Liberate us” in big, block letters. Eddie wondered what it all meant. Frank’s mother mentioned something about him talking about the banished after he was beaten. Was it a delusion that came about after a head injury? He kept shining the light along the walls and he came to another place where the words, “You only get one chance” were written. Eddie had seen those words before. He went over and looked closer. They were written in red. In this case it was paint, or a marker he thought. The last time he’d seen them they’d been written in blood on the wall of the warehouse the night that Tim was attacked.

There was a small bookshelf in the corner with three leather-bound books on it that looked like journals. Eddie went over and took one off the shelf and opened it up. After reading the first entry he felt like he’d struck gold. He sat down on an old stump that was fashioned into a chair and with the help of his flashlight, he began to read. It seemed that Frank kept a journal detailing his conversations with what he called “the world beyond.”

The first chapter said,
“Who are the Banished?”
Underneath that, Frank wrote:
They have been rejected by the Ancient People for a number of reasons. Some of them lied, some killed, and some of them had simply trampled on the rules of their community by collaborating with humans. These men and women lost a part of their bodies. Their behavior and their hatred turned them into dangerous creatures, shapeless and phantom like. They nourished themselves with the sadness.

It all sounded like wild ramblings of a disturbed mind to Eddie. He kept reading however and the next sentence said:
They will do all they can to make James’ journey impossible.

Eddie wondered who James was and if the poor guy knew that there was a group of evil “banished” ones who wanted to possess him.

The most disturbing thing on the page that Eddie read said in red ink and underlined twice was:

On the Earth, Banished will guide the most vulnerable men to help them exterminate human children.

Eddie shuddered. He put that book down…for now and picked up another. The second one looked older and when Eddie opened it up, he could see why. It was Frank’s journal that he’d started as a boy. He wrote about his parents and their satanic rituals and he wrote about the way his mother would lock him in a secret closet behind the wardrobe in the dark when he was only ten years old. He had printed out in excruciating detail the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his parents and at the hands of the children he went to school with as well. He described being beaten in the woods by the kids his own age and left for dead only to wake in the hospital two days later all alone. That was the point that he decided there was no longer any point in even pretending to be a part of the human race.

Eddie was disgusted and fascinated at the same time as he read on. Frank’s journal told of his “first kill.” It was a young woman that looked like his mother and he’d enjoyed it so much because it was like he’d finally gotten to kill her. Throughout the scrawling’s were places where he would suddenly begin to talk about the invisible voices that told him what to do and who to kill.

After he’d killed the woman he’d left the adults alone and he’d begun killing the innocents: the children. He said the Banished asked him to get rid of the small ones. He was told to observe families and find their weaker points and use them to take the children.

Eddie had to stop reading every so often. It was almost like being in Frank’s tortured mind and it was taking a lot out of him.

Frank wrote about explicit examples of how he would capture the children. He would feel bad for them sometimes and try not to kill them even though he knew that he had to do what the Banished asked of him. He would stroke their soft hair and look at them for a long time wishing that he could breathe in some of their innocence, their purity. After he killed them at last, he would keep their belongings…usually their backpacks in an effort to continue to feel close to them.

He had listed out the states where he’d committed these crimes: Oregon, Wisconsin, New Jersey…it even said that he’d been to an old castle in Aquitaine in France and to a farm in the south of Italy. Both places had dark history and Frank had written that these places were where the Banished “sucked” the souls from the children.

At the bottom of the page Frank had written:
The depopulation of the world has begun. Without children there is no future. The goal of the Banished was to attack humans at their weakest point…the children they loved dearly.

Eddie felt nauseous. This was really sick stuff. He told himself one more page and then he would leave this gloomy place and have the crime scene techs come up and clean it out. The next page detailed the killing of a little boy that Eddie had heard Tim refer to in one of his cold cases. It was a boy named Thomas who had disappeared and his father had been accused of the crime. Frank admitted in his journal that Thomas was the first child he killed. He killed him in an open air daycare center where he had worked at one time. He stabbed him and then let him die as the Banished consumed his soul

Frank had described in his journal in intimate detail how it had felt to pull the knife across the flesh of the young boy and watch as it split open and the blood began to spill out. He said that it was horrifying and exciting at the same time. He talked about looking into the little boy’s eyes and the look there going from shock to terror and then nothing. The life drained out of him right in front of Frank’s eyes. Afterwards, after the Banished had consumed the boy’s soul, Frank thought about him a lot. He wondered about his life and if there were people who missed him. He fought the feelings of guilt that he had and eventually let it be replaced by an intense feeling of satisfaction that he had accomplished what had been asked of him and if he had to, he’d be ready to do it again.

Eddie suddenly had to put the book down and run outside. As soon as he hit the fresh air of the woods he began to vomit. The remains of his lunch were spewed onto the muddy ground. When he finished heaving he stood against a tree. He felt unclean just from reading Frank’s thoughts. He wasn’t sure who these “Banished” were or if they were even real. Frank’s head seemed to be mixed up and confused between delusions and reality. What Eddie had been able to discern was that Frank was a sick son of a bitch and if these people the Banished did exist….the world was in serious trouble, on the verge of becoming as macabre as the thoughts in Frank’s head. 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“MONSTER”

              James was moving slowly under the suddenly scorching sun. He was in bad shape; his body was marked with scars, scratches, dried blood and bruises. He was also sweating profusely and brown stains marked his neck and arms. He entered the forest, at last sheltered by the close trees from the heat of the sun. He looked around the dark place, realizing that it’s much less welcoming than other places he’d seen since coming here. His mind kept going back to the things that he’d discovered in the office, and he was talking to himself like a mad man as he made his way through the gnarled forest.

“They know everything about us, humans … My God…how is that possible? Nobody is informed about that … Where the fuck am I?”

He questioned himself as he struggled to breathe in the dense forest. The vegetation seemed to be sucking in all of the oxygen. 

The forest he just entered didn’t let the air come in. It was difficult to breath, the vegetation was very dense. He walked and walked, eventually coming to a row of houses in the middle of the forest. James let himself through the rotting fence and examined the houses. As he’d suspected, they were deserted and in various stages of disarray. They were built in a haphazard manner, some along the sides of a stream and some were set back further into the trees. Some looked like they had been tall structures and what was left of them rivaled the trees for height. There were others that looked like a basic shelter, like the one James had built on the beach. The houses were partially furnished and looked like they’d been gone through the last time in a hurry. Now all that was left lay scattered around and covered with a fine coating of dust. Moss had found its way into the cracks of a few of them and had taken over the structures. The forest had continued its growth around them and if they’d had small yards in the past, one was indiscernible from the other now. The lazy river meandered through the center of it all and the weeds had grown up so thickly along the banks that they almost choked the water out as it tried to flow through it. It was obvious that no one had been here in a long time and he couldn’t help but wonder what had made them leave in such a rush that most of their things even seemed to have been left behind. He remembered what he’d read in the journals in the office he’d passed through. This must be the place where the Banished had gone to start over when they broke away from the Ancients.

“You are already done, the second stone is just there…” a man’s voice came from nowhere to tell him.

“Leave me alone!” James yelled out.

“I like that James. You’re fighting back. You’re becoming stronger! You’re almost ready to become….”

Behind one of the houses James suddenly saw a strange violet light flashing.

He ignored the voice and followed the light. It led him to the entrance of a cave. Looking inside he could see that everything was illuminated. This cave was different from the others that he’d gone through since he’d been here. This one had vegetation growing in rows across the floor. James knelt down and upon closer inspection he could see that what grew there were not just abstract plants and weeds like he’d seen in the forest and jungle. Vegetables were growing, rows and rows of them.

The daylight must have been too intense for the vegetables, making it impossible to make them grow in a conventional way. James realized then that he had not seen a single flower since he came here. He’d been slowly growing accustomed to the intense rays that came from the sun but he knew that a vegetable garden would dry up and shrivel under that kind of heat. The sun here seemed closer somehow and it spilled out over everything.

James entered the greenhouse, and had to bat his eyes a few times against the ultraviolet light. It was actually giving him a headache the way it bounced off of everything in the cave. He lit his bunch of sage and the beam from the flame filled every corner of the cave. James had his nanigata ready in case it was needed. He walked through carefully feeling the squish of the vegetation underneath his feet as he did. The cave was deep but he eventually arrived at the back of it where he discovered the second irradiated stone. It was fixed to the wall like the first one but for some reason, this one was more easily removed.

He removed it with his sabre with no difficulties and put it in his bag. He felt a sense of relief now knowing that he had both of the stones. He started back through the greenhouse, but before he made it halfway he began to become uneasy with dizziness assaulting his senses. Everything began to shake and the rocks along the walls began to shift and some of them slipped out of place and fell to the ground. Then James heard a terrible rumble that seemed to come from deep down in the belly of the earth beneath his feet. He began to run as the cave crumbled faster around him. The ground was shaking so hard now that he could barely stay on his feet. By the time he got to the entrance of the cave, the falling rocks had already begun to gather there. James had to climb over the small wall that had already formed there.

Once he was back outside he heard another rumble and then the shaking became fiercer. He ran back towards the forest with panic in his chest as the structures around him began to cave in around their own foundations, falling and striking the ground with a mighty impact that sent dust and mud flying and crushed whatever was underneath it. James ran stumbling across the shaky earth until at last he was under the cover of the trees in the forest once more.

The shadows began to come at him again and he once again used his sage and nanigata to try and protect himself. This time though he could feel their violence inside his body. It was as if they were passing through him, going in and out of his body as if he didn’t exist. It was painful and exhausting. He forced himself to continue forward and at last he came to the exit and ran outside, heading towards the village. 

James was running…he knew he was, but it felt as if time around him had slowed down. He felt dazed and he could feel the presence of something in the air. He stopped for a second, unable to move because of the presence that stood before him. This time the presence was different than the others. He could feel the presence of two entities, but these were light…good, not dark and evil like the others. The feeling that there were two other people there with him, next to him only lasted for a few seconds and then it was gone.

James had just intersected with the future although he didn’t know it. His destiny had crossed paths with Yann and Ani in the pursuit of theirs. As soon as he knew he was alone once more and could continue to move forward he did, and in the distance he could hear the hubbub of the Banished increasing in volume. He ran for a few feet before at last collapsing and for James, everything went black.