Nocturnal Whispers: Volume I

By Dan Champagne

A series of shorts occurring between Volumes I and II of the Abaddon Trilogy.

Simon Diamond:
Welcome to a little tale about the happy-go-luckiest serial killer you’re ever liable to encounter. You might like Simon, but Simon isn’t so apt to like you. Join up with Simon ‘For a Day in the Life’ as he strolls through downtown Philadelphia, and spends his overnight in all-hours diner. But don’t get too close! Because if Simon says– you’re dead!

Ben Arlington:
How does an ordinary police detective deal with the dangerous world of the supernatural underground? Very, very carefully. Join Benjamin Arlington as he investigates a string of grisly murders while on the path to finding his immortal companion, Cupideau. There will be blood...

Hillary St. Claire:
What do you do when you’ve just turned eighteen, inherited a family tradition of black magic from your father, and you’ve just finished murdering your mother, finally gaining you their financial fortune, as well? To top it off, your mentor in evil is missing, and your friends are no help at all? Well, Hillary St. Claire is about to figure that out for herself.

Molly Bethlehem:
Molly is the cutest little girl you ever could see. She’s also one of the most evil people in the world. So evil, in fact, that her talent for black magic attracts the attention of none other than the Antichrist himself. Here’s the story of the best Halloween that Molly’s ever had.

Bonus, unrelated Chapter One:
the Dark Hand of a Hundred Days:
A father abandons a son, and a son abandons a father. One war is traded for another when a sword of dark power is taken up by living hands once again. Weakness is banished in a singular display of terrible strength, dragging from the shadows the magic and monsters of the past ages. The age of myth and wonder is reborn in blood and the dust of a thousand years...

Genres: Occult & Supernatural, Horror, Action & Adventure, Sub/Urban Fantasy, Humor/Satire, Philosophy, Religion, War, Pre/Post-Apocalyptic, Sword & Sorcery.

Prior Reading:
Provoker. Volume I
Further Reading:
Seducer: Alliance. Volume II:I
Seducer: Escalation. Volume II:II
Seducer: Insurgence. Volume II:III
Nocturnal Whispers: Volume II
Destroyer: Onus. Volume III:I

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Champagne
• Release date: Oct 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9780991357840

Dan Champagne

Dan Champagne Born: 1974, Died: ???? Writer, Occultist, Dark Magician. A small, thin, but muscular bald man, with pale skin, and piercing hazel eyes, almost always dressed in black. [Note: All stats, GURPS® 3rd edition] ST:10, DX:12, Speed:5.75, IQ:14, HT:11, Move:5, Dodge:6. Advantages: Animal Empathy, Combat Reflexes, Eidetic Memory/1, Magical Aptitude/3 (Limitation: Black Magic only), Strong Will+1, Composed, Less Sleep/2, Versatile, Awareness, Racial Memory, Immunity (the negative effects of self-cast Black Magic). Disadvantages: Personal Code of Honor, Split Personality, Unluckiness, Secrets, Insomniac, Undiscriminating, Voices, Xenophilia, Divinely Cursed. Quirks: Loves foreign foods. Prefers his women heavy. Doesn’t care about nostalgia items like photographs. Talks to his cat like it’s a person. Skills: Thaumatology-13, Writing-14, Acrobatics-10, Brawling-12, Broadsword-11, Guns (pistol/rifle)-13, Karate-10, Climbing-11, Survival (northern forests)-12, Computer Operation-13, Ecology-11, Geology-11, History-11, Literature-11, Occultism-14, Psychology-11, Theology-13, Acting-13, Stealth-11, Tactics-10. Languages: English (native)-17. Equipment: Dan will nearly always be found with a knife somewhere upon his person, although he is usually careful to ensure that the item is legal for him to carry. Depending on the time period of his life in which he’s encountered, he may also be carrying other weapons, including, but not limited to: a pistol, pepper spray, a pressure baton, and perhaps a taser. Character Notes: This is Dan as he is most likely to be met in a contemporary setting. Note that this is a conservative, mostly realistic treatment of the author, which does not assume that the supernatural is either real or not. A cinematic treatment of Dan, especially one that includes the existence of supernatural elements, would have much higher skill levels, the addition of spells, and even other supernatural advantages and disadvantages, such as the ability to spontaneously cast spells, reputations among angels and demons both, plus allies and enemies among them as well. Dan was born in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1974. He showed aptitudes for art and language at an early age, but was always somewhat socially withdrawn. His earliest memories of interacting with other children were ones of alienation. By the age of twenty-one, he had been married and divorced, and events previous to that left him convinced that he was somehow fundamentally different from other people, and would never fit into contemporary society. At age thirteen, he received a copy of The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey. Upon first reading it, he became enamored with philosophy, but by adulthood he had abandoned the tenets of modern atheistic Satanism in favor of a more broad and personally-developed Left Hand Path philosophy. When he was a teenager, he became a ward of the state due to difficulties involving his home life, mostly surrounding his mother’s divorce from his father, who, while not being Dan’s biological, was the man who had mostly raised him. During these years, his anti-social tendencies deepened, but these feelings were somewhat lessened during his early twenties. Since childhood, Dan had been plagued by undiagnosed schizophrenia (reflected by the disadvantages of Split Personality, and Voices), which had served as the springboard for his interest in the occult and supernatural in his youth. The author made an unsuccessful attempt at a college career. While being a stellar student, his college aspirations eventually failed due to a combination of his worsening schizophrenia and problems financing his education. He managed a comic store for a decade, which coincided with his short college attendance. After this period of his life, and due to several hospitalizations from acute mental illness, Dan came to the conclusion that his best destiny was as a writer, and he increasingly concentrated his time and efforts to that end. Encountered: Dan can be socially abrasive, but how much of that is truly self-generated, versus being an understandable response to others’ negative reactions to his strangeness, is debatable. Due to his focus on his writing, he increasingly evaluates situations on how much they might help, or harm, his writing career. At times he can seem cold and distant, or even hostile, but this is another reaction to, and often even an anticipation of, the poor treatment generally dealt to those who are socially divergent. Despite the above, few people come away from an encounter with Dan without being left with an impression of the energy, intellect, will, and pride that form the core of his personality.

Book preview

NOCTURNAL

WHISPERS

Volume I

a series of shorts

by Dan Champagne.

published by PonderHouse.

copyright 2014 Dan Champagne.

[smashwords edition]

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, creatures, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, business establishments, organizations, faiths, or actual persons, living or dead, or manifest entities, undead or otherwise, is entirely coincidental, with all due respect intended.

Copyright © 2014 by Dan Champagne

Artworks copyright © 2014 by Creative Monkey Designs

All rights reserved.

a PonderHouse publication

produced, edited by silent.

version 1.1s  2019/03/20

ISBN-13: 978-0-9913-5784-0

ISBN-10: 0-9913-5784-1

NocturnalWhispers.com

PonderHouse.com

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Penned in the United States of America,

New Hampshire.

If you bought this book,

the author appreciates it.

For Jebus.

Simon Diamond

~~~

Simon was a serial killer.

And like most serial killers, he didn’t really appear to be what he was. What he appeared to be, was happy. And in truth, he was happy. But he hadn’t always been. He’d been miserable for most of his life. But he wasn’t anymore. In The-Before-Time (that’s how he thought of it), he’d been miserable, a serial killer, and it showed. On both counts.

His childhood hadn’t been a tragedy-strewn battlefield. You might expect that with a boy who would grow up to be a serial killer. But, no, his childhood hadn’t been tragic, or full of abuse, or any of the other things that most ordinary people might assume when the end result is ‘serial killer.’

Simon hadn’t worked his way up to human victims, either. He hadn’t started out torturing and killing animals before finally graduating on to human targets. Quite the opposite. He liked animals. He felt that animals deserved their lives, while people almost never did. Animals were honest. People weren’t. If you raised your hand to pet a dog or a cat, it was usually pretty obvious whether you were going to get a wagging tail, purring, or get your hand bitten. Simon had never found any such honesty with other people.

It wasn’t that Simon found other people unreadable, and so had fallen prey to their dishonest habits one too many times. That might have made a sort of sense, but it just wasn’t the truth with Simon Diamond. The opposite was actually the truth.

Simon was too observant to like other people.

For as long as he could remember, from the earliest memories that he could conjure, he’d seen people plainly. It was almost like a superpower. Also for as long as he could remember, he’d been aware of his strange, high-powered perception.

He knew that he could read people plainly, and that others couldn’t.

Truth. Too often, real truth is a fertile ground for evil to grow in.

So… Simon Diamond.

He’d always seen the wires behind it all. He wasn’t able to unsee it. That was a power that Simon didn’t possess. He saw, with shocking clarity, all of the tiny signs and actions that gave away people’s motivations. Simon saw the twisted wires, the invisible cords that connected people and their relationships, even if those relationships were nothing more than momentary. And it was always bad.

Simon was always privy to the truth behind the lies and small social actions. People were always motivated by small hatreds. Petty jealousies of each other. Tiny, hidden prejudices. From the insincerity of the exchange of ‘please’s and ‘thank you’s between two people standing on opposite sides of the counter at a coffee shop, to the false ‘I love you’ spoken by a husband or a wife while they were thinking about someone else… Simon saw it all. He saw it with perfect clarity, like looking into deep, clear, cold water, the kind that acts almost like a glass lens. And that lens served to magnify the filth down below. Most people only saw the water.

Simon could only ever see the filth at the bottom.

He just wasn’t able to accept all of the tiny lies and betrayals that people constantly perpetrated against one another. When he was young, he had been convinced that, first of all, he had to be wrong about all of it. He had to be. People just couldn’t be this sad, angry, petty, and jealous. It couldn’t be true. So he had doubted his own perception of it.

He’d been proven wrong, of course.

Simon just couldn’t deny the proof that his own perceptions of other people constantly shoved into his face. He’d meet new people, and it wasn’t long before he plainly saw all of the tiny iniquities that they harbored, and the bad behaviors that followed from them. He wanted to see people in a better, kinder light. But it just wasn’t possible. Not when all they did was always bad, and for bad reasons.

Simon just wasn’t able to set aside the truth in favor of being a happy fool.

Then, after that, he’d come to believe that things would change. That as he grew older his sensibilities would evolve, and he’d come to see other people in a better light. When that had never come to be, he’d started to become convinced that maybe, just maybe, he was simply surrounded by assholes. That if he could get away, get to someplace different, that the people there would be as different as the new geography.

So, Simon had wandered. First off to college, and then as a nomad, never staying in one place for very long. He stayed just long enough to satisfy himself that, yes indeed, the people here were just as bad as they had been there, and just as bad as they had been in all the other ‘there’s before that.

After that, he’d tried to kill himself, more than once.

So there was Simon, a sad, lost, lonely, depressed man.

Until he started killing people.

That had helped only a little, at first. It hadn’t made him truly happy… at first.

But in the end, the very gift of perception that had brought such soul-crushing misery down upon him had at last served to engineer a great and lively happiness in Simon Diamond.

That, and Simon had gotten extraordinarily lucky, more than once.

~~

Simon was walking down a street in the city.

It was like any other city to him. This particular city was Philadelphia, and Simon was well aware of where he was, but that hardly mattered. It wasn’t Philadelphia that he had been after by going there, it was the city he’d been looking for.

Simon loved cities. He loved the urban environment. The movement of so many people as one. He loved to walk through a city during the day, experiencing it in his own special way. Simon wore earbuds with twin cords hanging down, leading to a digital musical player that he kept in his pocket. He liked bouncy, jaunty music for when he was walking. He didn’t fit in with other people, and he had given up on trying to, years ago.

He was wearing a white suit-jacket over a black undershirt. The black shirt had a big yellow smiley face on it. Simon loved the shirt. Black cotton slacks for style and comfort below that, with a pair of the classic black and white ‘Chuck Connors’ Converse sneakers. There wasn’t a cloud in the warm blue sky as he walked, but Simon still carried a long and thin umbrella in one hand.

Simon never simply walked at times like this, he sauntered, he strutted, he be-bopped his head in time to the music singing into his brain. He swung his umbrella in a happy arc as he strolled. If he had to wait on a street corner for the light to change, he didn’t just stand still. He clapped his hands in time to the music, snapped his fingers, and from time to time he even did jaunty dance steps. He always had a smile on his face. A warm, wide, happy smile.

And people responded to his childish antics. It never mattered to Simon whether or not they were laughing at him, or laughing with him. They laughed, and Simon laughed along with them. Sometimes when he danced, other people danced with him, even though they couldn’t hear the music. Every once in a while an especially bold person would take his hand, and then there’d be a few seconds of impromptu dance-duo.

Simon wove through the thin and moving crowd of people of downtown Philadelphia at midday. Katrina and the Waves Walking on Sunshine was playing in his ears. The music itself was like an unending ray of light to him. The lyrical quality was like a beam of sunlight in his mind, and the drum-beat melody was like a second heart giving him life. He loved upbeat music. So it was new wave pop from the ‘80s for him all day today.

He shook his head back in forth in a swaying, walking rhythm as he moved down the street. He didn’t have any particular place to go, not even a certain kind of destination in mind. Simon was just wandering the city, seeing what would find him.

♫

…walking on sunshine…

I feel alive, I feel the love

I feel the love that’s really real

I’m on sunshine baby, oh!

…I’m walking on sunshine…

WHOOOAH!

And don’t it feel good!

♫

Simon stopped on a street corner, looking up with disapproval through the screen of the sunglasses that he wore at the light across from where he stood. The red of it annoyed him. But it was only a tiny pang of annoyance. Easily pushed aside. It was too good of a day to be brought down, and so Simon wasn’t brought down, not for more than a second. The red of the light was glaring and persistent, but it just rolled off of him now. Red was an angry color, an aggressive color. Simon had no need for aggression at the moment. Maybe later, but right now, it was all sunshine and rainbows.

Standing near him, wearing a nervous smile, was a woman with too many children. She had one in a stroller in front of her, and two more straggling at her feet. The mom might have been nervous, but her kids weren’t. One of them, a boy of maybe six, turned a wary eye on Simon. But that was only for a moment. Next, seeing the happy, dancing music-man, the kid laughed and danced too.

Maybe a unicorn will come around the corner and shit me out a pot of gold, he thought.

No. No unicorns. What did come around the corner, sliding like a shark through the urban waters, was a police cruiser.

And it was such a nice day… Simon thought.

The cop that sat at the wheel of the cruiser didn’t like the look of him. Simon could tell. He didn’t like the look of the cavorting, cartoonish man holding an umbrella. The cop had a pretty typical look. Shaved head, heavy, muscular build, dark sunglasses, and a face that was chiseled into a perpetual expression of blank and vague hostility.

This is one of the serious ones, Simon thought. This might be fun.

The woman looked a little too nervous for the cop to just let it go. The policeman didn’t hit his lights, or bother with the siren. Simon was a little disappointed. It was like he didn’t rate enough for it. But the officer did ignore the red of the light, performing a quick turn and pull-over to the side of the curb like a bird of prey swooping on a low-flying pigeon.

But Simon was no pigeon.

The cop popped open his door, somehow making even that simple act ooze with aggression. Then he stepped out onto the street, all squared shoulders and an air of command. He didn’t even bother speaking to Simon. He just stared hard, and then raised a hand, giving Simon the common index finger ‘come here’ gesture.

Simon acted like he hadn’t seen the cop.

Boy, did that make Officer Friendly angry.

The cop walked toward Simon, his feet stomping the pavement in aggression.

Simon stopped, turned to the cop, pointed to himself, and gave the officer his best ‘what, me?’ expression. The cop nodded, and continued approaching. He then stopped short, taking what Simon was sure was his best angry-bull-ape stance in front of him, and began barking.

But Simon couldn’t hear him.

Men Without Hats, The Safety Dance was playing too loudly.

Now the policeman was really angry, and not just putting on a show. He pointed at Simon, and his face contorted with unconcealed rage. Simon couldn’t hear a word the copper was saying, but his meaning was pretty clear. ‘I am the law officer who breaks faces! Obey me, or I will break your face!’

So, Simon pulled out the earbuds.

Why didn’t you obey me when I started talking to you?! the cop snarled.

Didn’t see you, officer, Simon answered. A pretty good mock-polite, which wasn’t lost on the cop. The man breathed hard out of his nose, and then he plunged right into it.

I could arrest you right now! the cop said. Simon lifted his hands and looked around with a fake expression of bewilderment.

Uhh… why, officer? And then he smiled. The policeman didn’t like that. Simon could tell. He could tell a lot of things about this man, in the same way that he could tell much about nearly anybody, with just a few short seconds of exposure to them.

Disturbing the peace, and failure to obey an officer of the law, for starters, the cop growled.

This was the kind of cop that really enjoyed the violence of his job. They always said: ‘Oh, woe is me, that I must bust heads as a guardian of law and order!’ But most of them got off on it. And the one that confronted him now was the worst sort of that kind. The type that referred to homeless people as ‘lice-heads,’ black people as ‘niggers,’ and women as ‘cunts’ (but only privately, and only in safe company… other cops that were just like him).

Simon could tell.

Disturbing the peace? Simon asked. For what? Dancing in public?

Shut your mouth! the cop barked. Then he took a step closer. Let’s see some ID! he demanded.

Simon’s nearby friend didn’t like that step towards him. Not at all.

But Simon didn’t want to make a scene in the street. So he raised a hand, and waved his helper away. The cop took note. Expecting some kind of sudden attack from the ‘perp,’ he flinched, and took a step back, his hand darting to the butt of his gun.

Simon giggled.

And that’s what did it. The officer had had enough of this fool.

ID, NOW! he practically yelled. The light had finally changed, and the woman hurried her stroller and other children across the street as quickly as she could. The boy that had danced with Simon turned and waved. Simon waved back.

And that was when the cop grabbed him.

NO! Simon abruptly shouted. The cop, of course, thought that he was shouting at him.

That’s resisting arrest, buddy! the cop said through gritted teeth. Simon doubted that shouting ‘NO’ when a cop grabbed you was technically resisting, but he was pretty sure that the officer didn’t care. Let’s see that ID, the cop went on as he muscled Simon over to his car.

"Well, officer, you’ve