I found myself in my parents’ old house.
Well, a version of it at least.
I was in the living room and it was a brighter, prettier, and more idealized version than had ever existed. It looked like the movie set someone had made of our old house. There was a beautiful white fir tree covered in Christmas lights in the corner, a warm inviting couch with a homemade quilt laying over it, and a big stuffed chair with a giant teddy bear on top of it marked ‘Jeremiah.’
A little toy train set was rolling around the Christmas tree with dozens of gift-wrapped presents around the bottom. The place didn’t smell of brimstone, blood, and the excrement of victims that had lost control over their bowels during torture. Nothing was ratty, threadbare, and in need of being thrown out. There were no rats, roaches, or starving animals that my sister tried to take care of out of desire to have some companionship.
The window in the center of the living room wasn’t boarded over and gave a beautiful view of a white Christmas outside with snow covering a beautiful well-maintained lawn. A snowman, complete with top hat, was right by the mailbox. Highlighting the supernatural nature of our location, the snowman waved one of its stick hands and tipped its hat before hopping away. I could roughly make out all the neighbors houses as well, all of them brightly lit and decorated despite the fact all our neighbors had moved away or died by the time I was sixteen. Oh, and we’d lived in Vulture’s Rest, Arizona so I wasn’t sure what my father was trying to accomplish by pretending we’d ever known the gift of snow during the winter months.
“Okay, where the hell did you bring me, Billy?” I asked, feeling less than happy at being kidnapped into another dimension. I mean, I knew they existed, but this was a pretty freaky experience even for me.
“You’re an ungrateful little brat, you know that?” Billy spoke as he walked out of the kitchen that looked cleaner than it had ever been except the one time that I’d tried to get it spotless. I’d gotten my eye nearly put out for that one.
Billy was solid, or solid-looking, with his ugly green and red sweater on as well as a brown pair of slacks. He was also wearing a pink apron that had been splattered with blood so many times that I could see the spots on it despite its pristine appearance here. There was a cookie sheet in the kitchen and the smell of chocolate chips coming from it. One of Billy’s hands was covered in an oven mitt that I knew he kept razor-blades in.
“So you’ve told me,” I said. “What is this, some kind of dream realm?”
“Close enough,” Billy said, puffing up his chest. “It’s my mind palace. A place inside my soul that is shaped by my will and aspirations.”
“Bullshit,” I said, figuring out that wasn’t true in an instant.
Billy narrowed his eyes. “What did you say?”
“Why I’m saying it’s not true is there’s no way in hell that you came up with this place. It doesn’t have nearly enough blood and sinew or body parts lying around.”
Billy frowned then shrugged, ripping off the apron. “Alright, you’ve got me there. You were always a weak-willed little puss—”
I narrowed my eyes. “Careful. I can punch you now. Thankfully, Nancy isn’t here or you’d really be screwed,” I said.
“That thing—” Billy started to say.
“That woman is my friend,” I said, firmly. “More so than you have ever been, much less a parent.”
“Ugh, this is how women get to you,” Billy said. “They destroy friendships, brotherhoods, and lives.”
I ignored his casual misogyny. No matter how much he denied being a hater of women, he was probably the worst among slashers in my opinion. It was funny how bigots often denied being them, even believed it. “Have you got anything substantial to say or shall we get to fighting? I’m pretty sure I can take you.”
I was a slasher now, for better or worse.
Billy smirked. “You could try. But you were always the smarter of my kids.”
“I think you underestimate Carrie tremendously,” I said.
“Not at all,” Billy said. “After all, it’s her that I’m feeding off of.”
I blinked as the pieces fell together. “Oh crap.”
We weren’t in father’s dream realm, we were in Carrie’s. The ability to enter dreams was one of the more esoteric slasher powers, made famous by Fred “The Child Eater” Killian, but my father had never shown much aptitude for such things. Him mentioning he’d dropped a suggestion to come to Wounded Buffalo was the first time he’d ever mentioned it. “She fortified her mind against you.”
Billy smirked. “It took a while to get the keys to get in but, at the end of the day, a part of her still wanted Daddy’s approval. From there, I’ve just been soaking up her power. You wouldn’t believe how much you two have between you. Enough that I could rebuild myself here after you chopped me up.”
The last words were an accusation, which didn’t quite have the effect he wanted.
“Yeah,” I said. “You had it coming.”
Billy stared at me then shrugged. “Touché. I will admit, I am an enormous bastard. It’s the family business you’ve taken up.”
“What do you want?” I asked, wondering how my father was feeding on Carrie and how much damage he’d already done.
“I can’t let you go against the Fraternity,” Billy said. “You’ll get yourself killed.”
“It’s a bit late to start acting parental,” I replied.
“I made a promise to your mother,” Billy said, as if the matter was distasteful to even contemplate. “She’ll know if I break the technicalities.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the term technicalities. “We can handle the Cassidy brothers.”
Truth be told, I wasn’t sure we could. Money was a superpower all its own and the Cassidy brothers had a combined net worth to make themselves billionaires a hundred times over.
Billy snorted. “Screw the Cassidy brothers. Those late comers aren’t the people you should really fear. It’s the slashers who founded it.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”
Billy frowned, which was his natural state since I’d been old enough to recognize facial expressions. “You have no idea what it was like in the Seventies. The sheer joy of killing anyone you wanted, whenever you wanted, and the cops not bothering to follow up on it. They were too busy attacking colored folk and the government was run by weaklings. Unfortunately, that was before things went south in the Eighties.”
“I thought that was the heyday of the slasher,” I said, not bothering to correct his version of history.
Billy gave a half-smirk but there was a pained expression his face. “That’s when we became famous, which as any actor will tell you was a double-edged sword. The other supernaturals came down on us in ’79. The vampires, shifters, and wizards all had their own organizations. They’re the ones who armed the Artemises and hunters. The Satanic Panic may have been over nothing, but it was good cover for them rounding us up one by one along with our cults. Slashers had always been lone wolves with no support network. That is until I decided to fix that.”
I was about to point out that Wounded Buffalo and his own words proved otherwise as he’d always had people he could call. “You founded the Fraternity of Orion.”
Billy now was grinning with yellowed teeth. The idyllic house around us was starting to look shabbier, dirtier, and nastier too. I could smell the viscera and offal coming from the basement and garage. “Me, Mike, Fred, the Kid—”
“I’m pretty sure the Camp Killer was not the sort of guy to unionize,” I said, thinking of the stories I’d heard about the crazy backwoodsman.
Billy chuckled. “Don’t confuse what the movies said about us with who we really were. Fred only went after children, Mike was the only invincible one, and the Camp Killer normally looks like a twelve-year-old boy when he’s not the Jersey Devil. And the guy who went after busy co-eds? That was my thing! They gave it to everyone else in the movies. F-ing Hollywood.”
I made a worlds’ smallest violin gesture with two fingers. “How’d you get kicked out?”
It certainly explained how he knew so much about the group at least.
Billy growled. “I gave them everything. We disposed of Dad in order to prevent him from keeping the Elder Gods asleep and made pacts with them. I gave them his copy of the Necronomicon—”
“How did we get it back?” I asked.
“Don’t interrupt,” Billy said. “Hell, I even conceived you two for one of the early rituals. But did it satisfy them? No. We had immortality and everything we could want if we observed the rituals. But they sold out for money! All so they could get their names in films and feed on the urban legends! To be gods!”
I blinked. “Oh my God, you’re telling me that the slasher movie craze of the 80s is because you made a pact with the Devil?”
“Worse!” Billy said. “Capitalism!”
It was so insane that it had to be true. The Fraternity of Orion was the reason so many monsters had become immortalized in film and television was because the Cassidy brothers had provided the funding to various studios to do it. Like the Spirit of the Hunt said, they gained power from spreading fear. What better way to do it than spread fear on a national scale? It also helped cover up the reality of the supernatural since any idiot who claimed Fred was killing their kids in dreams would sound like a lunatic.
“That explains so much while leaving me so confused,” I said.
Billy sighed. “Okay, maybe I tried to kill the Cassidy brothers and offended the Lamia, but they had no right to kick me out! I have every right to feed on their rites as the others.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So, what you’re saying is the Fraternity of Orion isn’t just a bunch of rich people.”
Billy closed his eyes. “Son, you have no idea who you are messing with. The Wild Hunt is just one of the rights that must be observed to keep their bosses happy. They may be poseurs but the people they answer to are the real deal.”
I contemplated that and the potential for dealing with some of the worst slashers of all time, people who were immortal not because of their innate powers but the fear they’d reaped for the Red Gods. It made me fear my own immortality was benefiting from my father’s pact with them.
No, the Spirit of the Hunt said, showing she was here too. No, my dear, that power is all your own. By blood and birthright.
Billy growled and pulled out a butcher knife from a kitchen drawer. “She talks to you, huh? Well I guess we’ll just have to settle this now.”
I looked down at the knife in his hand. “I thought you said you made my mother a promise.”
“I said you’d never die under my watch,” Billy said. “You wouldn’t believe the pain I felt when you were killed even temporarily. It almost destroyed me. However, your body won’t be dead when I’m walking around in it.”
I took a step back. “What?”
Billy stepped forward as his features gradually became more inhuman. His teeth became long and needle-like while his face elongated into a stretched thing twice its normal height. His eyes became serpentine and his tongue forked. “Do you know how frustrating it was to die, only to have you two kids locked up in a mental hospital warded down to the bedrock? I couldn’t feed off you. I couldn’t possess you. I was barely a whisper by the time you escaped and even then, I couldn’t get inside you because you only slept for an hour a night.”
“You should work on your phrasing,” I replied. “You were a child murderer, not a child molester.”
“Teenagers aren’t kids,” Billy said, a large pair of horns growing out of his head. “Barely even human really. That’s what I hate most about your generation, really. It’s so soft, weak, and coddled. Acting like twenty-somethings shouldn’t be out doing important things like fighting wars and getting jobs.”
I picked up the Christmas tree, grabbed it by its stand, and held it in front of me like a lance. “Spare me your ‘in my day’ B.S., Krampus. You dodged the draft to avoid Vietnam and lived off Grandpa. He was part of the Greatest Generation.”
Okay, technically he was still a serial killer and a priest of darkness in addition to being a WW2 veteran, but I was trying to run my father down.
Billy’s butcher knife shifted and became a jagged, curved sword that he used to hack at the Christmas tree in my hands. It knocked away branches, but I concentrated, causing the end of the tree to become a jagged stake before running forward to impale my father’s mutated form through the chest. It ran through him and came out the other side, Christmas ornaments hanging out from both sides. Billy let loose an inhuman roar as he swung at my face but couldn’t quite reach it with the end of his sword.
“Arghhh!” Billy shouted. “You ungrateful little bi...argh!”
The Mark of Caine glowed for a second and hellish fire spread up the Christmas tree before causing my father to go up like he was covered in gasoline. I backed away, still clinging to the Christmas tree until I had to let go. The flames spread up and down the trunk as well as branches, burning with a hellish orange-red fire. I watched Billy’s flesh melt and covered my face to protect it from the heat. The flames consumed Billy and the tree both, leaving nothing but a blackened stain on the ground.
I blinked then looked around. The house looked like a mixture of Carrie’s idealized version and the real disaster, as if someone had torn strips away of a costume to show the ugliness beneath. I didn’t see any sign of my father, but something told me he wasn’t gone yet.
“That was too easy,” I muttered. “It’s harder to kill the dead than that.”
There was also the slight issue that I was still inside my sister’s dreamworld, physically too. It was as close to real death as to not make a difference if I couldn’t figure a way out. I could starve to death here or rot away until I was nothing more than a thought of my sister. I wondered briefly if Billy’s presence was part of the reason my sister was, with no offense intended, ax crazy but I knew her to be that way before we’d escaped from the asylum. No, Billy might have been feeding on her essence but he hadn’t changed her fundamental character.
In retrospect, I was grateful to my father’s misogyny for the first time in my life because it occurred to me that he could have stolen her body due to our blood connection. Indeed, if he continued to fail to take mine then he might have taken her until he could find a way to pass onto a male host. It was ironic that if he’d threatened her, I might have given up mine willingly. A thing that was, without emotions to cloud my thinking, a profoundly stupid thing to do and unlikely to preserve her life.
You’re such a good brother, the Spirit of the Hunt said. It’s kind of sickening.
I don’t suppose you can lend me a hand, I asked.
The Spirit of the Hunt clapped.
“Funny,” I said aloud.
The game is no fun if there are no stakes, the Spirit of the Hunt said.
Is what my father said about the Fraternity true? I asked.
You know it is, the Spirit of the Hunt said. He helped it go national. Now it’s a global phenomenon. Slashers for slashers by slashers. They even have a convention.
You’re making that up, I said.
Maybe. Get ready for round two.
“William?” Nancy’s voice spoke behind me.
I spun around and assumed a fighting stance.
Nancy looked identical to how she had in Demeter’s Garden but was carrying the polearm from earlier, one of the few weapons we’d chosen to take with us before burning down the farmhouse. If my father was trying to trick me, he’d done a good job of conjuring her doppelganger. Unfortunately, I couldn’t trust anything I saw here.
“How did you get here?” I asked, staying a few feet away.
Nancy took a step forward. “You disappeared and Carrie collapsed. Gerald brought her out to the car and I got a weapon from the back. Then I touched her and appeared here. I think my Artemis powers are a bit wilder than I gave them credit for. Maybe they have a magical curse-breaking mode.”
Or I brought her here, the Spirit of the Hunt said. Maybe it was your sister’s magic or your psychic connection with Nancy. You are linked after all. Could be anything really. Oh, maybe it’s your father assuming her visage so he can get close enough to stab you to death since that’s by far the most likely scenario. I’ll never tell. It’s more fun to leave things ambiguous.
I was getting really irritated with my unseen patron.
“What the hell is this place?” Nancy asked.
“Hell,” I said, taking a step back. “Mine at least.”
“I’m here to help, Will,” Nancy said.
“Prove you’re who you say you are,” I said, not sure how she would go about doing so.
Nancy nodded, walked three more steps and kissed me.