Beltaaine

By C. Michael Hubbard

A supernatural thriller traveling through a week, and over changes's reprise. A sreial killer haunts a town. Dreams haunt the lead dective. Life mocks a sixteen year old boy. A convict struggles against the tide. All marching to the tune of an occult Celtic Holiday. Told over a week, a slow week that frenticaly collides into a single holiday, Beltaaine. A story of robbery, resserection, minor deities, fears, old dreams, and new nightmares. All played in a chord of discord in front of a tune that resonates of hell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C. Michael Hubbard
• Release date: Feb 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465794673

C. Michael Hubbard

C. Michael Hubbard is an author who may or mayn't have been a centaur in a previous life. He was born in the Southwest and raised all over America and Germany. Although, he considers Seattle his home and the Northwest as God's gift; he currently resides in eastern Wisconsin with his son. And when he's not writing or doing something stupid, then he's probably working.

Book preview

BELTAAINE

C. Michael Hubbard

A Plastic Bunny Production

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 C. Michael Hubbard

Cover Art

Sylkia Adorno

Copyright 2012 Sylkia Adorno

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people (unless you really like that person). If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient (it makes a great gift). If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy (unless you can’t afford it). Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author (really thank you).

CONTENTS

Forward

Prologue

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday—Beltaaine

Saturday

Epilogue

Afterword

FORWARD

Take me to your leader.

That’s just something I’ve always wanted to say although, technically I still haven’t said it. Oh well. Nanu nanu.

Thank you for taking the time to read my novel, a few things up front.

Rule one, screw fight club, you can talk about this book all you want. In fact, you should tell all your friends that only dead horses and non-English speaking illegal immigrants haven’t read this book. It’s that good. And do they want to be lumped in with dead horses and non-English speaking immigrants? That’s the only rule, now onto something completely different.

First: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person alive, dead, almost dead, in a coma, undead, back from the dead, slated to be dead, or living in the deep recess of your mind is purely coincidental.

Second: Yes I know that there are 28 days to a lunar cycle, and I know that I condensed that to one week for the ambiance of this novel. I apologize to all you lunar purists out there, but its fiction and it worked for me.

Third: For anybody who picked up this book thinking it was about Beltane. Sorry. Yes I know I bastardized the Celtic Holiday. But this is fiction, and I picked the most obscure spelling I could find. Nothing against your holiday it sounds nice, really it does. I just liked the name and nuance of the holiday, although, I did have to alter many things to make it mine. I hope the reasoning discussed later in the book makes up for it. Happy Beltane.

I hope that any of the aforementioned fictional changes won’t take away from your enjoyment and possible escape to my world any less enjoyable. If so, I blame the bunny. Stoopid bunny.

PROLOGUE

Darkness blossoms in the sky as fear embraces him.

Drowning in a feeling of insufferable doom, Willy begins to choke on his clambering panic. Barely holding back truculent tears that ebb and flow behind his innocent brown eyes, he does his best to reason with the darkness seeping into his heart. He’s been hiding for a long time now—fifteen minutes—which, to a boy of seven, is an eternity or two, driving his fear faster and harder because he hasn’t heard nor seen his older brother, Jacob.

Maybe the butt-nugget’s gone home, he thinks. Nah, he’d get in big trouble from mom for leaving me out here all by myself. He pictures his father spanking his brother, turning his butt a metallic black-and-blue so he won’t be able to sit down for a week. A smile breaks through his flooding fear.

A few hours ago his brother asked him if he wanted to play a game of hide-and-seek. Although, he would’ve rather played his video game, he agreed. It isn’t often his older brother wants to do anything with him except beat him up or deliver noogy-bombs. Once outside, and out of mom’s super-hearing range, Jacob said, Why don’t we go play in the forest. There’s nowhere good to hide in our backyard.

No way! You know we’re not allowed to play in the forest. Mom’ll kill us if we go out there, he replied. His brother began making fun of him, calling him a sissy girl, wuss boy, anal dwelling butt-chicken, ass-hat, and any other name he could think of. He continued to needle and cajole Willy, until finally, I ain’t scared ‘a no stupid forest, he said in a voice that spoke otherwise. That decided, the two brothers headed into the malignant woodland growing behind their house.

Jacob was It first finding Willy faster than an echo. Willy sighed, counted to ten, and a searching he a went. First, he looked in a stump. Then he went and rustled some bushes looking behind them. Finally, he looked up into the tree where Jacob was hiding; looking surprised, he yelled, I found you! Once again, it was Jacob’s turn to be It, and that brings us back to the present—two eternities later—with Willy still hiding underneath a mound of gnarled tree roots that look like a tattered ball of willowed yarn strewn across the forest floor.

The sun tucked in, night stretches out from her tepid bed sleepishly ready for a stroll across the sky. Although it’s technically spring, the temperature is cold enough that Willy watches his breath float away from him in short raspy bursts, a misty butterfly convoy. Cramps begin eating into his legs as if hundreds of fire ants were making a meal of them while he sits in the uncomfortable position he forced himself into—Houdini himself couldn’t contort his body into this position. Under night’s ebon drape, he decides it’s time to go home before he gets in trouble; tonight is a school night after all. Muscles fight him in a lactic revolt as if he were a stranger instead of the boy in charge of them; slowly he crawls out from his hidey-hole, looks around, fear tightening her grip on his heart giving it a leaded squeeze.

Which way is home, he wonders. He calls out, Jacob…Jacob, I’m going home now. Hello…Jacob, can you hear me? You out there, Jacob?

He stumbles one way, doe-eyed, his stomach clenched tighter than a boxer’s fist. Then he wobbles in another direction—feeling seasick even though he’s never been on water before. He does his best spinning top impression, going round and round staring at the encroaching trees. In his anxiety-induced dementia, he believes the trees are beginning to look more like craggy old ogres than trees, with their torturous octopi-limbs outstretched reaching for him, ready to pull him in and gobble him up.

Panic consumes him for its evening meal.

Willy’s desperate screams for, Jacob, fall deafly upon the forest’s mildew ears. Frightened legs begin running in search of the path home. Between machine-gun breaths and TNT cramps, he continues to scream his brother’s name until he becomes a skipping record player that has lost its breath. Scared and lost, he begins to doubt his direction, after a brief debate between his left and right brain he changes course running left, ahead of his shadow.

Images of delirium attack his senses.

He stumbles through the forest’s groping rotted hands and fettered feet, fumbling between the grabbing hands of the scratchy underbrush. A jutting rock almost causes him to fall as it kisses his foot with the softness of a truck. He stops running, deciding to walk as fast as a frantic ghost that has forgotten where it lived. All around him the trees moving in, inching closer and oh so much closer to tonight’s dinner.

He struggles through the night-veiled forest and its sinister secrets, which lie hidden everywhere, behind every nook and cranny, impregnated in every shadow. The feeling of despair grows larger in his heart as the darkness around him begins to feel like an evil presence, a hideous sentient being, chasing after him. He pulls his red hood over his head, trying to wear blinders to the undulating blackness surrounding him, a biting pnumbra with oaken teeth and compost breath.

Every sound reminds him of the monster that used to live under his bed until his dad bought him a nightlight. Each night he listened to the monster singing songs about boiling little kids and turning them into jelly for sandwiches. Then, his dad bought him a nightlight. Bedtime monsters being perniciously afraid of light moved onto some other poor kid whom didn’t have a nightlight for protection.

Willy begins to realize that he’d be home by now if he were heading in the right direction. After another mental deliberation, he changes his direction again; his shadow—tired—lags further and further behind. His heart motoring fast, fast and faster, he begins to think he might never get home again. He swallows down a steel-hard lump of fear, leaving an acrid taste in the back of his mouth and an empty feeling in his stomach. Thoughts about spending the rest of his life living as a crazy hermit fending off the land dance in his head. Never to see his parents or his brother again (at least there’s one bonus to his situation). Soon they’ll forget about him, and they’ll rent out his room to a kind stranger, all the happier—and richer—for it, while he’s left all alone.

Then, he sees a patch of cashmere moss on the side of a rotted tree, and his father’s words come back to him from one of their hunting expeditions: Moss always grows on the north side of a tree. He knows they live south of the forest, on Mulberry Lane, so he heads in the opposite way of the moss, toward hope. He forges on ignoring the wooden ogres and the resonating darkness, but in the back of his head he still feels hungry eyes are upon him, sizing him up to see if he’d make a good meal or not.

He starts to pray that he’ll find something familiar in this alien environment. His senses try to comply with the pains of serene irrationality, anything for sunshine. First, they try to convince him that he knows the boulder on his right, but the more he looks, the more he realizes that its not even related to the boulder he knows. Secondly, his senses tell him that the tree to his left is a familiar old friend, but then he realizes that its not even close to the same tree, personality overview—it’s far too skinny and spindly, trees don’t change bark and leaves don’t tell. Thirdly, he knows that he’s never seen the entwining nest of thorns that form the terrifying mound blocking the path in front of him no matter how much his senses tell him he does.

He looks up the prickly mountain’s peak catching his first glimpse of tonight’s moon, a small sickly silver fingernail hanging skewed in the soft night sky, the tip looking sharp enough to cut yourself on. Its penetrating but comforting sight keeps him transfixed, bringing him into a Zen-like trance. The shadow world around him, forgotten for a few brief moments as he washes his soul in the moon’s gentle silver light, if only he could lie down and sleep with the moonlight to protect him from scary’s way.

He quickly snaps out of his trance when he hears suckling, ripping, and snapping sounds coming from the other side of the briar fortress in front of him. He loses his grip on the moon as he focuses—intently—on the gnawing that he’s hearing. Through dreaded fear he tries to figure out what it might be (it reminds him of his dog when it’s eating wet dog food). As slow and as cautious as a tightrope walker, he inches around the briar patch toward whatever is making the supple ruckus. Creeping, trying not to startle the stillborn air; more focused than a weapon he doesn’t notice that his shadow has run off to hide from the oncoming confrontation.

Probably nothing, he thinks, just a deer eating some leaves and twigs, or a bear eating a deer.

His head crests round the tree’s trunk, and he sees the source of the commotion. His mind lets go, his body tenses releasing a torrent of warmth down his legs. His legs become dead weight refusing to let him move; his throat tightens around his larynx stopping all sounds from exiting his mouth. Stuck in a paralytic pose he watches what looks like a horror movie creature devouring something small and fleshy. A copper smell crawls up his nostrils reminding him of a trip to his aunt and uncle’s farm last year; it was time to slaughter the pigs, the smell of blood and exposed flesh hung in the air, a festering blanket of stomach turning disgust. There was no escaping it then, as there is no escaping it now.

Through a sliver of silver light he sees a monster that has something like a wolf’s, or dog’s face, with two black as coal eyes (all the better to see you with) set deeply above a small snout (all the better to smell you with), where red tinged yellow daggers gleam with menace (all the better to eat you with). Pointy raggedy ears adorn the hairy creature’s head (all the better to hear you with). Thick slate-black hair covers most of its body, but the bits of skin that are seen look textured and as rough as an elephants skin that’s tanned from too much sun.

Lean and sinewy, its body shows every hard muscle. Hunching down on all fours its spine stands up forming what look to be spikes along its back; its shoulder blades also jut out giving the impression of small sharp wings. Unnaturally long arms (all the better to hug you with) with even longer fingers decorated with two-inch knife fingernails (all the better to skewer you with) hang down in front of two short, but tree-trunk thick legs.

Smelling fear, it turns its hellish face toward him, murky eyes shooting through him with infernal hunger sewing him still. The monster forgets its current appetizer turning to face Willy. Red tinged drool froths from its mouth as well as the sound of a thousand jukeboxes filled with razors as it growls. Although neither the monster nor Willy move an inch the air between them fills with a chaotic locomotive pressure waiting to blow.

Willy slowly backs away from the monster. Then he turns and runs from it. He doesn’t make it to the next tree before it grabs him by his red-hoodie and throws him back the way he came. The ground isn’t kind to him when he lands with the force of a one-ton sledgehammer; a rock tries to stab into his ribs as if trying to defend the ground from his attack. Gasping for breath and racked with endless pain he looks up at his attacker. Through the golden-umber toasted fog that separates them, wax electricity explodes igniting a supernova.

Pain stabs him with every movement, but he starts to back away from the monster for fear of his life. Please don’t eat me, please, he begs through a flotsam of tears that streak across his dirty cheeks leaving salty ravines in their wake. The ebon hellhound snaps at him as if saying, running is useless. He looks over at what the monster was eating, and recognizes his brothers red t-shirt saying, "What can I do to annoy you?" A dying locomotive scream erupts from him, and he scrambles backward in a drunken crabwalk to get away.

The hellhound, he thinks it might be a werewolf, advances on him as slow as a sanguine cat that knows it has its prey right where it wants it, ready to bleed it. Willy continues to beg and back away, when his hand bumps into something solid, he turns and sees the gnarled pointed mass of thicketed brambles. From behind him, he hears a low growl and he feels the monster’s torrid breath on his neck.

In a last bit of desperation, he screams from deep within as he tries to scramble into the briar patch, twisting and contorting himself between the thorns and berries to get away from the werewolf. It rips through the thickets as if they were papier-mâché, and quickly catches Willy dragging him back. He screams as loud as he can but silence quickly follows in one cavernous bite.

1

Sunday, April 25

ONE

Nightmare sweat glistens off his forehead like dew on the morning grass as he awakens with a start.

Victor Burgess lies in his bed listening to the spry world around him. His blanket pastes itself to his sweaty, hairy body. His eyes slowly adjust to the darkness filling his bedroom as he listens to the house moan and the outside world groan—slow creaks from things in the walls and small squeaks from the settling stairs. Outside, the trees whisper a lullaby; in the kitchen, the refrigerator hums its familiar tune.

What woke me, he asks himself.

He lies there listening—worlds collide—nothing but slumbering sounds and nocturnal rhythms. His heart begins to unwind as he calms himself down from the nightmare—the horror—that woke him.

God I feel like I’m waking up dirt and bones.

He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. Rolling onto his side he looks at the burning red numbers on the clock—the numbers stare back at him with the menace of electric hell-fire—02:13. Rolling onto his back, he stares at the shifting shadows on the ceiling, drifting and dancing with each other, intertwining in a hypnotic pantomime that rolls in on golden despair hinting at dark revelations. He listens to the exaggerating quiet but his mind tells him that somewhere out there Mr. Scary isn’t being quiet at all; no, out there he’s raising hell and dancing with the moon.

Burgess sits up, hangs his legs over the side of the bed, and runs his hand through his short wavy black hair with Spanish-lace grey streaking through it. His haunted tombstone-grey eyes search the dark room for familiar shapes: his nightstand, his clothes from yesterday, still balled up on the floor, the bedroom door outlined by a faint light—a soft halo—cast from the nightlight perched in the hallway.

This damn case is digging up memories, too many memories and too many nightmares.

He stares into the darkness replaying past events in his mind; twenty days ago, a Monday (an atypical Monday, if such a thing exists) the city of Congruous awoke to a horror.

FOREST CLAIMS THE LIVES OF TWO CHILDREN!

Is what the headline read, but behind the scenes, hidden from public knowledge, is the fact that the two children were mutilated, eaten, more than eaten, they were devoured down to the marrow of their bones. Blood and frayed body parts everywhere, a repelling jigsaw puzzle for the macabre.

Six days later, another body, a forest ranger this time, was found dead, devoured just like the two little boys. And that’s how Burgess got the case. The brass always hand him the case when it gets too big a rating, too much media attention, and this case had reached Def-Con 1. Around water coolers, his fellow officers call him Nostradamus, there’s no case too big or too weird for him. Now here it is fourteen days and two murders later, he still has no idea of what, or who he’s looking for.

A dog barks in E-flat somewhere off in the distance interrupting his reminiscence.

Burgess looks at the window seeing his stoic reflection, cold sweat trickling down his brow. A quick shooting memory of pain, he looks away, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and first finger. Pain ebbs, he gets up and walks through the darkened house down a worn grey hallway into the dreary kitchen that’s dressed like a tomb, cold and unloving. Opening the freezer, he grabs a bottle of vodka, sits down at the small circular table pushed against the wall, and begins drinking straight from the bottle.

He looks at the clutter on the table searching for his sickness. Finding it, he grabs a cigarette, finds the matches, takes the last one, and sparks it to life. The quick violence of the light mesmerizes him for a sluggish moment—a beautiful burning ballerina. He lights the cigarette and muses that they will be the death of him. He tosses the empty matchbox onto the grimy floor and closes his eyes; he takes in a deep inhalation of tobacco and stress relief.

He begins to tap his fingers one two three four on the table as his unconscious mind rambles on over the stones of the last two almost three weeks—twenty days—of nothing, no clues, no breaks, nothing but five mutilated bodies. The…monster has no specific modus operandi, no pattern…just the forest. Somehow that’s important, maybe he’s afraid of crowds or maybe he’s a coward. Also, there’s no particular or…any generalized pattern to the victims that infers to any specific race, religion, or gender that’s he’s targeting. This unprejudiced approach makes him, her, or them grossly harder to predict when the next attack will occur.

The where is easy…the forest, that’s the problem. An evil entity if there ever was one. Not like the open plains of my home, where you can see for miles and miles on all sides of you, but in that forest the creatures of the night lurk and feed off the innocent.

He opens his eyes staring at the jigsaw puzzle sitting uncompleted on the table beneath his litter: empty and half-full cigarette boxes, an ashtray, bills, a dirty dinner plate, a birthday card from his mother, and the paper bag the puzzle came in (As a young boy he always hated having the solution to the mystery. It cheapened the thrill of discovering it by himself. He would take a puzzle, empty the pieces into a bag, and throw the box away. Then days later, he’d put the puzzle together relishing in the accomplishment of solving it without cheating on the finality of it). The border completed, he works on reconstructing the puzzle's viscera—his favorite part of the enigma's restoration. He picks up a few pieces and, one at a time, he tries to tease them into place. Silently, the puzzle begins to slip out of focus, slowly blending into background noise. Instead, he focuses on the mystery of the forest serial killer.

A piece slides in.

The third murder, my introduction, a hunter fell off a craggy cliff to his death. It seemed an accident, the man fell. Then the carrion animals came out to have themselves a small bite, or so it seemed, until I found cartridges that matched the bore from his rifle strewn about the forest floor. Following what was more than likely his death march, I traced his trail back to nothing. I could picture him running away from some hellish attacker, not turning to shoot, just pointing his rifle behind and shooting blindly at his attacker in desperation as he ran away. No blood was found; meaning he never hit whatever was chasing him.

He grabs another cigarette, lights it from the first, then stubs out his first cigarette. He cocks his head to the side in the same manor of an inquisitive dog and continues rambling through his seared mind.

He tries to picture his adversary, probably a…big man with strong hands and a mask, or make-up, or something to inflict instant fear into his victims. Moreover, he's intelligent, extremely intelligent. He never leaves any clues, DNA, anything, just animal hairs. That’s all we ever find are animal hairs, which are—more than likely—left behind from carnivores that came out for the free meal. Therefore, he’s meticulous and observant, anal and patient; he blends in well, a hunter, no, a predator, a friend with every shadow.

Feeling that he’s getting ahead of himself, he slows his head down. He needs to get inside the monster’s head, find out what makes him tick. However, all attempts at that have opened up effervescent trapdoors into his dungeon-dark past. This thought makes him get up from the table and walk over to a drawer in the kitchen. He opens the drawer and pulls out an evidence bag filled with a pill bottle. Look at me. Now I’m stealing drug evidence. I’m not fine, forget pretending, I definitely need to get the hell out of this city and away from that bitch of a forest, back to the wide-open spaces of my home before the forest consumes me. He opens the pill bottle emptying four diamond blue pills into his hand.

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. LSD.

He stares at the four little blue pills listening to the gilded promises they tell him. They sing to him of diamonds in the sea and champagne sunsets. They’ll crown him the king of The-Land-of-Do-as-You-Please. Mandarin ocelots will watch his court in a field of velvet clovers, while he flies on a paper kite to the moon to bathe in a tub big enough for ten people. He blinks breaking their spell; he puts the pills back into the bottle, and shuts them back into the drawer. He stands staring at the sink as a new deluge floods his mind.

The fourth victim was an elderly man taking his dog for a walk. He made it less then forty yards from his own backyard. The killer was quick, the old man slow, and the dog lucky. (Unlucky actually, once he’d gotten home he never moved, hiding in the basement refusing to eat, its only movement was to piss or shit until, three days later he died of dehydration and failure to thrive.) He looked down at the old man’s body, whose head had turned to an unnatural angle while forest scavengers ravaged his body again. He searched for clues, and once again, he found no footprints, no blood, no broken leaves, or twigs, no anything. The killer is a bloody ghost.

His focus wanders as—muffled—the blue barbershop quartette pills sing to him their aria of empty promises on sweet candied voices: Come on, detective, let us help you open your eyes to see what’s hiding in the shadows. We’ll help cleanse the hell from your soul, help stop your body from breaking, and your mind from flaking. You poor fragile soul you, let us vivify your inanimate being with scarlet begonias. No more black and white taste for you. We have a myriad of colours to show you, more colours than you ever knew existed. We’ll open doors to life that you never noticed as you lurked in your sheltered life, a troglodyte when you could be a zephyr. Come with us on a mystical tour of how life should be. Come now let’s be friends, detective. We’re the key that you’ve been looking for. Let go of gravity’s shackles.

His cigarette burns down to scald his fingers, shaking him out of his waking dream. He quickly puts it out under the cold water from his wiry spigot.

No excuses, he screams inwardly, even though it’s been…four days since the monster last struck. I still don’t have any clues as to what is going on. All I have are nightmares of old friends, bad reflections, and animal hairs. He turns on a burner and lights another cigarette then he sits back down and continues to drink vodka straight from the bottle. He stares out the kitchen window at the night sky, looking up at the moon he says, Diana, you have some secrets to tell me, don’t you? Well, I’m listening. Let’s talk…talk about our upcoming hunt, great huntress of the night.

Down the street, a dog howls a broken nocturne asking her the same question.

TWO

The Sun peaks up from behind craggy purple canyon walls.

Kurtz stands on a terrace, surrounded by black wrought-iron railing, watching the sunrise; his steady mahogany eyes narrow to slits as he stares directly into the sun. The morning’s slight breeze ruffles his thick curly raven-black hair. Standing naked outside his Mediterranean style mansion with his golden skin highlighted by the morning sun’s first light, he looks more like a bronze statue of Adonis than a man. His muscles stand out, chiseled into his tall athletic body, without a strand of body hair to deface his unblemished skin.

When the sun’s entire body crests the Canyon’s wall casting water-coloured reds, purples, and oranges painting the Canyon’s western wall, he turns his attention to the forest; the overgrown Emerald Forest perched behind his house in wait of a suitor. A sea of rolling green hues ranging from soft yellow-greens to iridescent vermilions rustling in the breeze before him as far as the eye can see—an arboreal ocean. The forest, peaceful and serene, yet belligerent and agitated—yin and yang, the cycle of life in perfect dichotomy, he begins to feel her pulling at him, tugging at his soul, calling his name. She whispers to him on the breeze, Come and play. A smile stretches across his unshaven face as he thinks about her offer. He imagines her cool touch upon his burning skin and subconsciously he takes a step toward the terrace’s edge, toward the waiting woodland.

He pictures himself running through her veins, running after an elusive