Wolf Asylum (27 page)

Shawn wasn't entirely wrong about where Lynda resided. The entrance to her home was under the blood, but not in the sense of a blood lake. They actually did see a pond that appeared red and for a time, Darwin expected they would be going for a swim. The duo kept the conversation to a minimum.

The door to her home was in plain view if it even had been visible. It was under the blood, near a ledge in a rock face—that much had been true. Like Shawn's cave, when Lynda walked past a certain point she merely vanished. She could still be heard quietly moving around just on the other side. The spot where Lynda disappeared was next to a large tree that oozed globs of blood all around the doorway; it was a bloody mess.

Darwin closed his eyes and walked through the barrier, entering the world of Lynda Aspen. Unlike Shawn's home, Lynda's domain felt like a prism with the outside world being refracted and shattered. Her home was not large, but it felt like a solarium, giving it a very open feel.

“Wipe your feet please!” she demanded. “Damn blood gets tracked all over the place. If the location wasn't this good I wouldn't live here.”

“Don't the foot prints outside give you away?” Darwin asked, scuffing his feet on the unknown rawhide.

“I rarely go out, so it's not a problem.” Lynda moved to her work bench that was piled with papers, jars and other gelatinous substances. “It took some getting use to—being out in the open—but for all the times things have come near my home, they've never found me.”

“Shawn said you're human. Why did you come here?”

“I'm a black arts specialist, at least that's what Shawn called me, and I kinda liked the name. In my time, they were burning people who didn't conform to societal norms. Basically, if you weren't a white Christian you were in trouble. At the time I saw nothing wrong in magic. I wasn't a bad person, I just wasn't a God fearing Christian like the rest of the herd. So, like all witches of the day, they were rounding up the suspects and I knew I had to flee.”

“Why?”

“I may have started a small pestilence and that may have caused a bit of a famine, but that was not my intent!” she insisted. “Anyway, I fled west. I had been told through another mystic that it was possible to enter a magical world where I would be free to explore my desires. Finding the entry point was the hard part,” she said as she flumped into her woven twig chair.

“You mean a gate?” Darwin asked.

“Call it whatever you want. It goes by many names. There are hundreds of points all over the planet where you can enter the other world. I had no idea that this place was Hell, though!” she said, mystified.

“So, how did you find it?”

“With a lot of effort,” she answered. “I used dowsing rods. It was a lot of trial and error, but I eventually found a spot.”

Darwin was mystified. “How did you get in?”

“A little ceremony and some offerings were enough to crack open the door enough for me to slip inside.”

“That was it?” Darwin asked, expecting more.

Lynda laughed and kicked back in her chair, nearly toppling herself. “Once you find the door, slipping inside really doesn't take much. Getting out, that's a different story—but it can be done, especially if you're human.”

“I have a plan for escape!” Darwin insisted. “The gate is opening; as it opens we should be able to leave.”

Lynda shook her head. “The gate is one way only. If you knew when the door was being opened on Earth, you might be able to time it…but it slams shut so damn fast! Also, you don't know where the gate will open here; it could be anywhere.”

“The door is being wedged open! Like you using your magic to open the gate, we found a way the gate can be forced open. Werewolves emit a power and that power is opening the gate near my hometown, and it's not closing! The more werewolves there are, the faster the gate opens,” Darwin educated.

Lynda slumped further into her chair digesting the information. “How many werewolves are there?”

“Thousands!”

“Then Marta coming home was no accident,” Lynda confessed. “What you are proposing, it can work, but the world we send you back to…you might not want to be in.”

“I can't fight them here!” Darwin shouted.

“You can't fight them on Earth either,” she said quietly. “No one really knows what evil is, but I've been studying it for hundreds of years. It's infectious. It doesn't make you do anything; it merely influences you to do things your soul already wanted to do. It taps into us and plays us like a doll. There's an old legend, it predates the bible but I think a lot of the stories stem from these legends. The idea of Heaven and Hell are not new. There will always be good and bad, greed and kindness. The dark lords were cast out, the fallen angels; they were sealed in the underworld in an attempt to keep them at bay. Every now and then a piece of them manage to escape into the real world and they infect more people with their reaping. That's how they grow! That's how one day they may escape. How many people live on Earth now?”

“Around seven billion.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “The gates have a feel for them. In the old world, people could feel the evil and would just naturally stay away from the gates. With that many people on the planet, more people are being forced to live near these wells. It's no wonder they're making a push for escape. If they get out, it might truly be end times.”

“I need your help!” Darwin insisted, slamming his palms on the wooden table.

“I'm not sure that I can,” she said softly. “I wasn't sure what Marta was when she arrived. She is something new. The baby she carries is even stranger. Everything I know says she's a succubus, a female demon who seduces men into sex which ultimately consumes them. I've never seen anyone arrive and flock directly to the void.”

“Void?”

“It's where they lurk, mostly. It's like a den of snakes, cold and wicked. We're a long ways from there so you needn't worry.”

“Marta is my sister and it's my child she carries!” Darwin blurted out forgetting tact.

“You're not right in the head, are you?”

“It's a long story. The short version is the baby she carries, we believe it's something called
Se Venire
, at least that's what we call it.”

“That's just Latin for–he is coming. What will happen when he arrives?” she asked, having no insight.

“How should I know? All I know is, my family…somewhere in time…we were marked. My sister, my brothers…all of us were touched by the underworld. I think the plan all along was to get my sister pregnant; like a way of concentrating the evil. It was slow and methodical, but they were always advancing. I've given it a lot of thought and I think I almost have it figured out. I still don't know when they got Marta, but I think they've been trying to get anyone from our family since the camping trip my brothers and I took to the woods near the gate.”

“Explain,” she asked.

“Marta brought the evil into the house—I'm not sure how. What I do know is it grew over time. I think she infected Zack; he in turn began abusing me after Marta was taken away. I think he got Cornell, too. The infection was mild or not enough. My brother abused me but he stopped, so he still had some free will.” Darwin thought about it, he was close to the answer, but he knew it wasn't all there.

“You sound unsure of yourself,” Lynda commented.

“Not unsure, there's just something missing still. You see, the night my brothers and I went camping in the woods near the gate, Zack saw our father killed. By his description, today I would have said it was a werewolf. Strange thing was the next morning when we found my brother, there no sign of anyone being killed. We raced home and our dad was just fine. My dad had to go back to the campsite because we had left everything behind. We never saw him again. I think what was happening was the forest was trying to draw one of us in and it didn't matter who. It never quit, it kept trying. It got my Dad; I never knew what happened to him. If he had become a werewolf he would have come home but he didn't, so I believe he died. It wasn't long after my brother Zack killed himself. Probably from the guilt he felt for sending my dad to his death. Cornell and I stayed away from that part of the woods and I never returned until I was a werewolf, years later. It was Steve they used to get to me and even he felt that was exactly what they wanted. Steve was made a werewolf through the hot spring; they touched him because they knew he was connected to me and he was within their reach.”

“Why are you so important?”

“I'm not!” he shouted. “That's the thing. They used me! To open the gate they needed thousands of lycans. I did all of that because I thought it was the right thing to do, improving the species, getting rid of rotten elements in society. They tapped my hatred of mankind and manipulated me because I was vulnerable. They were sly, making me believe I could do as I wanted but I would have to pay any negative consequences. Of course I couldn't see the wrong; they were just playing with me! It was what they wanted all along! As soon as I impregnated Marta, they stopped talking to me. I was no longer needed.”

Lynda said, “The one thing I've learnt over the years is the underworld can be disconnected in what they want. Anyone from the surface who has come here has always said they were tricked into doing something they would never have agreed to. The messages they sent made no sense or could be interpreted in several ways.” She paused for a moment. “So, what about your brother Cornell…what happened to him?”

“Yeah Darwin, tell us about you and Cornell,” Steve said now standing at the entrance of the prism.

“Steve! I'm so sorry!” Darwin rushed over to give him a hug but was greeted with coldness and a hand that pushed him away.

“How did you find us?” Lynda asked, worried about her own security.

“I followed you. Don't worry, I was careful. Tell us about what you and Cornell use to do,” Steve again sneered. “The blood doesn't lie, does it? I saw what you did.”

“Should I leave?” Lynda asked.

“Steve, don't…you don't want to know that side of me,” Darwin begged.

“I already do, but I want to hear it from you! If you love me, you'll be honest for once! What I saw, it was true wasn't it?” Steve asserted in a way that Darwin had never seen before.

He was caught. A secret Darwin had carried with him for years; a sick pleasure that he had been brought into, groomed and trained in. No one had known, both Cornell and Darwin had gotten away with it, but Steve had seen it.

“Cornell and I were infected. I didn't know that then, but I think that's exactly what it was,” he said, turning his back on Steve. “After Zack died, Cornell began disappearing for long periods of time. My mother was an absent parent, so she never said anything. One day, maybe a year after Zack had died, Cornell says he has a secret he wants to show me. So he takes me out to this cabin. A summer place, but it was the fall so it was abandoned. In the shed there was an ATV. Cornell found a hidden key, so we take it and travel deep into the mountains to this place, a really thick place, very hard to find.”

“Stop delaying!” Steve demanded.

“Cornell had a girl tied to a tree,” Darwin admitted. “He asked if I wanted to have some fun, which of course I did. He passed me a rifle and told me to take a shot at the girl. I did what he had asked. I don't know why I didn't say no, I remember feeling curious, that's all. So I shot her in the leg. Cornell laughed at my incompetence but he said he could live with that. The girl, she must have been in her late teens, she looked rough—like a transient. Cornell whips out his pecker and…”

The room was silent waiting for Darwin to confess.

“He raped her. He didn't do it normal though. He fucked her bullet hole. She yelped like I'd never heard before. She begged him to stop but he kept smothering her. After awhile streams of snot leaked from her nose. When he was finished, he asked if I wanted a go at it but I said no. The hole was twisted and slimy; his seed was lumped in with a stream of blood that ran down her thigh.”

“How did you feel?” Steve asked still incensed.

“Perverted,” Darwin confessed. “It excited me. I don't know why I did it, but I did. I licked up the stream from her leg. That was the first time I had ever drank blood.”

“And…” Lynda interrupted.

“Then it was time for clean up. Cornell was very methodical. She was alive; in and out of consciousness. He chopped off the arms first with this rusted, dull meat clever. He swung into the meat and hit the bone. She started to scream again but he just ignored her. He took another swing, and another. Finally he snapped the arm off by breaking the bone. He did the other arm the same way and then he started on the legs. It was a game for him-to see if he could finish the limbs before she died. She bled out on the first leg. Once she was dead he put her on the ground and hacked her head off. He sorted the pieces into piles. There were other skulls there…probably four, I'm not really sure anymore.” Darwin approached absolution and was feeling surprisingly good.