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“You know, it doesn’t look that impressive. It’s just a slab of granite.”
“And yet it is so much more than that,” Bilis said. “It is said that the stone goes down 213 feet. It is an outcrop of a much larger system of stone that Mallam Cross is built on. It’s called a batholith, like in the Sierra Nevadas.”
“That’s a long way down.”
“Some would argue it goes all the way down to the Afterlife, and that’s why it serves as a door.”
“You can feel the power here, can’t you?” Seamus said, resting his hand on the old stone.
Seamus looked toward the sky.
There was a full moon and no clouds, making the granite sparkle.
He could understand why his ancestors thought the night sky had been captured in the stone.
He looked between the formations toward the hill’s dimly lit outline and the silhouette of the old abandoned house up there. He couldn’t remember any time in his life where someone had lived in that place, and yet, as ever, that single light burned in the window. There was something eerie about the way the house just brooded over them.
“When you entered the ribbon how did you do it, Bilis?”
“I just kept walking toward the house,” he said, pointing up at the old building. “I don’t think there’s an exact place. No “x” that marks the spot. I just focussed on the light in the window and kept walking. Actually, I may have started running when I felt the first tingle in my old bones. Then it’s like a goose walking over your grave and the thrill shivers all the way down to your balls, and suddenly, violently, you are torn apart, I mean atom from atom, and flung back together again on the other side. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before. And to be perfectly truthful, I’m in no hurry to feel it again. It’s not like walking through an invisible door. And I came back with the mother of all migraines. Einstein said it made him a tad nauseous, which isn’t what I felt, at all. So, maybe it’s different with each traveler?” Bilis shrugged and ran his hand over the headstone.
Seamus and Bilis talked through the nature of the ancient stone, with Bilis looking back toward the stand of silver birches that backed onto his property.
“Guys. We have visitors.” Miranda nudged Seamus, bringing him back to the much more physical than metaphysical here and now. She gave Bilis a quick nod to her left.
Cirrus clouds came in and scattered across the sky, providing quick shadows.
Jasmine and Roxane walked through one and into the moonlight, emerging just a few feet away from where the three of them gathered around the ancient batholith.
Their expressions were grave and made all the more haunting by the red bija that, in the moonlight, took on a dull glossy shine.
Roxane was elegant as ever, but Jasmine looked flustered. She wore all of the fifty years she’d amassed before her passing heavily, unlike Roxane, who had moved on in her prime, sacrificed at nineteen and full of the beauty and vigor of youth. As ghosts, though, Roxane was considerably older, being the first.
“We have the fight of our deaths on our hands,” the ancient one said, and they all knew her words to be true.
It was all coming undone.
The haven that was Mallam Cross was under threat from within and without, the ghosts of Gwydion and Gilfaethwy looking to end the existence of the lingering souls that had found a home here, and Maggie Carlisle and her ghost hunters promising to exorcize the town off the map.
There was going to be no happy ending for Mallam Cross.
––––––––
“Well done, brother mine, that is a most fine specimen indeed. As fine as you are likely to see. Or purge from this place.”
The young man lay on the fresh grass.
His anguished cries were muffled by the dirt shoved into his mouth and up his nostrils.
They relished his pain.
And his shade took quite some time in dying, which just added to their enjoyment.
Gwydion sat on his head and held his arms to either side as Gilfaethwy used a finely sharpened knife to slice down his spine and pull the flesh away. It was no ordinary knife to slice through ghostly flesh. But this was what they did, these brothers. Gilfaethwy salted the wound as he cut the ribs away from the spine. He was an artist. A slice and dice man of no little skill. It always fascinated him how the spectral flesh remembered its mortal remains, and clung to them, offering up the same internal organs and blood vessels, as though it mattered to a soul what its innards looked like. He pulled out the lungs and broke the ribs one at a time, opening them up in a spread eagle that left the memories of blood and gristle on them.
The tiny bits of spectral flesh glistened in the moonlight.
They called it Blood Eagle.
“What’s next?” Gwydion leered, looking into the darkness.
“Patience, my brutal brother. There is an art to soul murder.” Gilfaethwy walked away, tilting his head upward into the wind. He began snorting as he slowly moved toward the woods. He was a nocturnal predator.
There was something on the wind.
A presence.
He breathed deeply of it, trying to discern all of the subtle perfumes that made it what it was.
He motioned to his brother to follow and the chase was on.
They moved towards the boundaries, sniffing every step of the way, following the scents of the evening, and savoring the perfumes that promised so much fun waiting for them.
Deeper into the woods they went.
They heard whispers of sound. They caught fleeting glimpses of movement, silver glimmerings in the moonlight.
And deeper still they went.
Gwydion tossed back his head and howled like a wolf, earning a chuckle from his brother even as Gilfaethwy dropped to his knees and began pawing in the grass, bringing it up by the roots. The grass itself was intoxicating. He held it to his nose, breathing deeply of it, of that extra note of fragrance where the roots had snapped. It was a heady aroma. All of their senses were coming alive at once, though they did not realize it could be anything so ordinary. Everything around them, from the prickle of the night breeze on their skin where their shirt sleeves were rolled up, to the rub of that fabric on their bodies. It was all so visceral. They were animals in spirit only, their flesh retained its human echo.
Gwydion stripped out of his clothes and, naked, dropped to his hands and knees and scrambled through the trees, still baying like a wolf.
His brother stripped out of his own clothes and loped beside him now, looking for a soul to kill.
Throughout their tortuous run, they killed squirrels and other woodland creatures purely for personal delight. They ripped the lifeless bodies apart and tossed them into the air. They slaughtered a small boar and reveled in the warm flesh and fresh blood. The killing made them feel all-powerful. They were the deadly sovereigns of the woods.
It was dawning light as the brothers emerged from the woods.
They jogged into Mallam Cross following the back streets, naked as the day they were born.
Neither felt the least bit self-conscious about their nudity.
Neither was in a rush to feel the confinement of clothes. There were no social mores that they needed to adhere to.
They were warriors.
The potency of their flesh struck fear into their enemies.
So, they walked, heads high, cocks erect, through the streets, looking for a soul to kill.
“Should we make ourselves more presentable, brother?” Gwydion asked, looking at the window of Mallam Cross’s single clothing store.
“Should we fuck, brother. We walk heads high, proud, and let any man try and stop us.”
“Aye, as you say, brother.” Gwydion rubbed at his meat a couple of times, then turned his attention towards something considerably more fun:
The diner.
The pair haughtily made their way down Main Street towards the lights burning in the windows of Ella’s diner, enjoying the way the ghostly reflections in the plate glass windows stared at them.
“Look on, oh enemy, and be humbled.” Gilfaethwy grinned.
They pushed open the door and went inside but didn’t get the reaction they had been hoping for from the diners.
“You might wanna put that away.” A middle-aged man pointed to Gwydion’s cock. All heads turned to look at the sight. There was quiet sniggering from one of the booths, where teen girls had their heads together. They kept turning to stare, smiling.
“That’s right, Rhianwen,” Gilfaethwy said. “Enjoy the might that is Gilfaethwy.”
“It’s something all right,” one of the girls said. None of the four were called Rhianwen. It was an old word that meant, rather quaintly, comely one, though there was nothing quaint about his erection.
More diners tried not to stare.
Ella saw them, but rather than come bustling over with a menu, chose to ignore them.
“We have a murderous hunger,” Gwydion said, enjoying the double-edged truth of his words. “How might we sate it?”
“You might wanna sit, and maybe put a napkin across your ding dong,” Ella said, still not coming any closer. She indicated a table beside Griffin. “How about if I get the blue plate special?”
They looked at each other. “It will do for now, until some proper soul food comes along.” Gilfaethwy smirked.
Griffin sat to the left of the naked brothers.
He offered a grin of his own and moved over to their table.
The three stared at each other.
Gilfaethwy leaned toward Griffin and put his hand through him.
“Perhaps the night is looking up, brother,” he said to Gwydion, offering Griffin an amoral grin.
Gwydion pulled his chair close to Griffin.
He laid his jeweled hand above Griffin’s head and spoke a brief incantation in Welsh, putting a geis on him, then leaned back to watch in fiendish anticipation.
Griffin cocked his head and stood up.
Ella was on her way with the specials for the depraved brothers.
He stepped into her path and backhanded her across the face.
Ella and her tray’s contents were strewn across tables and the floor.
It all happened so quickly, and so unexpectedly. Diners were on their feet moving to help Ella, others coming at Griffin to take him down. He discarded them like rag dolls hither and thither, grinning all the while.
His brutality delighted the brothers.
“You really are a quite marvelous ysgrublaidd,” Gwydion crowed with obvious amusement.
Griffin turned and walked over to sit with the brothers again, the sudden outburst of violence spent.
“I don’t think so, brute. We didn’t give you permission to sit with us.”
“That’s not right,” Griffin said, confused. “I sat with you before.”
“Ah but then we were charmed by you, now we are bored.”
Griffin bent forward and seized Gilfaethwy by his throat, moving so fast the brother barely had time to react, and yet somehow he grasped Griffin’s broad arm, while Gwydion looked on hungrily.
“Soul food, brother,” he said.
“I think so, brother,” Gilfaethwy echoed.
His grip tightened on Griffin’s ethereal arm, making it more and more substantial with every second’s contact.
“Do you think he understands yet?”
“Oh no, brother, he’s far too stupid for that,” Gilfaethwy said, enjoying himself.
The sweat from Griffin’s brow trickled into his eyes, burning and making him flinch with each drop.
He was hurting.
And it was painfully obvious the spook couldn’t understand why he was hurting and didn’t like it.
He tried moving his head away but Gilfaethwy was having none of it.
Griffin’s heavy breathing escalated to grunts. Spittle foamed at the right corner of his snarling lips, and from the spittle came a long thin line of drool, as it slowly dribbled down his chin.
“Feast, brother mine,” Gwydion urged, and Gilfaethwy didn’t need telling twice.
He leaned forward into Griffin. His mouth opened in a lewd smile. For a heartbeat it seemed as though the ancient warrior was about to chew through his foe, but anyone thinking that had missed his hands. His fingertips sank into his flesh, hooking around the white bone of his ribcage, and prised them apart, tearing the skin open and parting the bones like razor-sharp teeth, opening them wider and wider on the gaping black nothing that was the damnation that awaited Paul Griffin. And still, impossibly the blood eagle widened, until Gilfaethwy’s bones clamped down on Griffin’s soul, tearing through them as the soul murderer fed with a frenzy.
It took no time at all to tear his soul to shreds.