Cursed Rivalry: Book I (Cursed Career Series 1)

By Leroy Benes

The case began with the uncovering of an ancient relic under the Boros estate ... Soon, members of the team hired by the Boros family fell victim to unexplainable illness, insanity, and in one case, suicide. The curse was loosed ...

Sebastian Moorhead, a paranormal investigator with self-described ‘scientific pretentions,’ thinks that his latest case on the Boros Estate is just what he needs to give credibility to his peculiar resume. In his hopes to discover what laws of science govern the supernatural, he teams up with Martin Boros, his daughter, a hard-headed priest, an archaeologist and a detective suspicious of Sebastian’s eccentric career.

As they search for clues as to what forces lie behind the strange apparitions in the caves and the horrifying things that happened to those who went into them, several things strike Sebastian as peculiar. The case, along with the estate itself, are not what they seem. As they journey deeper into the earth, a paradox unfolds involving the rivalry of two dark forces and those who pledge them unholy allegiance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shane Eide
• Release date: Feb 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311395412

Leroy Benes

Leroy works and lives around Portland Oregon.

Book preview

Cursed Rivalry

Leroy Benes

Copyright

©The Cursed Career Series

©Cursed Rivalry: Book 1, Edition 4, February 18, 2016

All Rights Reserved by Shane Eide

©Cover Design by Shane Eide

Portland Oregon

The following is a work of fiction. All characters resembling people, ghosts and disembodied spirits in real life are merely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

When Martin Boros went into those dark passageways with Dr. Quigley and his team, much searching awarded them a moment’s glance at a slight indentation in the rock wall. It was their only indication that the room they were looking for was behind it. After drilling and cutting, they got inside long into the night.

Ebenezer’s box stood on its stone stand, exalted by the domed hollow interrupting the rock wall. God only knew how long these subterraneous passageways sat below the estate or whether there was even an estate above it when they were created. Martin held his hand up to halt Quigley and his team. He proceeded into that sacred chamber with his flashlight. Ebenezer’s box was about the length and width of a briefcase and it was made of some ancient metal. Martin’s flashlight yielded view of the strange, hermetic hieroglyphs all over the frame: eyes, animals, suns and planets.

The ground before it was perfectly flat with neat, stone slabs. Quigley’s team came in behind Martin and started setting up stands for light fixtures.

‘Would you like to save some of the excitement for tomorrow and let us clean up in here a little bit?’ Quigley said, unable to contain his joy.

‘Of course not,’ Martin said. ‘I’ve been waiting months. What’s another hour?’ He proceeded toward the box. Sudden laughter echoed through the passageway from which they’d come. Martin turned, frowned and said to Quigley, ‘One of your people?’

Quigley frowned in the light of one lamp getting fixed to its stand by a burly member of his team.

A short woman, one of Quigley’s people, came from the doorway and said, ‘I didn’t see anyone.’

Martin squinted and turned to Quigley again. ‘It was quite loud. It wasn’t anyone in here.’

Quigley shrugged. ‘Do you think it was Wendell coming—’

Another laugh interrupted him. It was loud but brief.

‘Who in the hell is that?’ Martin said and started toward the doorway.

The members of Quigley’s team moved out of his way as though his mere touch would turn them to stone. He shined his light down the left tunnel from which they’d come, despite the fact that most of that angle was already visible from the light fixtures that the team had set up, and shined it to the left. ‘No one,’ Quigley muttered.

‘Could be an animal,’ a man among the team said.

The short woman screamed and pointed at the opposite side of the dim room. Martin looked that direction but saw nothing. Other members of the team crowded around her, giving her touches of comfort and asking her what she saw.

Quigley went to her and sought her vantage point.

The woman’s eyes were wide and she had her hands in the air about level with her shoulders, her whole body convulsing as though she was cold.

‘What was it? What’s wrong?’ Martin asked her.

‘It … I saw …’

‘What?’ Dr. Quigley asked.

She shook her head, still shaking. She dropped to her knees.

Dr. Quigley exhaled loudly through his nose and, close to Martin’s ear, said, ‘Probably the work getting to her.’

‘Get her some water,’ one of the men shouted.

Martin exhaled heavily and, feeling a tingling sensation in his nose, began to sneeze.

‘Martin,’ Dr. Quigley said, pointing to his face.

Martin lifted his hands to his running nose, wiped at it and pulled away bloody fingers.

‘Here,’ Dr. Quigley said, reaching into his pocket. ‘The air pressure, surely.’ Just as he retrieved a stack of tissues, blood began to pour from the corner of his right eye.

‘Doctor,’ Martin said, and suddenly felt dizzy. He looked around as startled cries sounded about the group. Everyone was bleeding from the nose and eyes.

The lights shut out and complete darkness swallowed them.

‘Someone turn a light on,’ Dr. Quigley barked.

‘My flashlight won’t work,’ a member of the team called.

There came a steady hum in the caves around them like moaning tree trunks rubbing and bending in the autumn winds.

‘Doesn’t someone have a light that works?’ Martin said.

‘Mine won’t work either,’ another member of the team said.

By now, Martin was so dizzy that he slowly dropped to his knees and planted his palms on the ground.

The peculiar moaning grew louder. The lights turned back on all at once. It was only when the light had been given back to them that Martin realized that his vision was going black. Through that hazy penumbra crowding around his dizzy sight, he saw a great pool of blood on the floor next to the stand on which the box sat. In that pool of blood sat the end of a body, its neck severed from a swollen head of dark hair lying cheek-down beside it.

Martin’s vision went completely black.

1

It was a good day for Sebastian Moorhead to implicitly quite his job. At the very least, he anticipated (and secretly hoped for) an extermination. He would lose his place at Ruthgard University because his lack of tenure wasn’t complimentary to his propensity for going on ‘extended vacations’ (they refused to refer to his research endeavors as anything else).

This time, he’d put everything in order just in case the university happened to want him back. He left notes for his assistant, Greta, to run his classes with little invested trouble. He made sure his students knew he was going to be gone. He preemptively made a secret attempt at clearing out what could only conceptually be referred to as his ‘office,’—a glorified janitor closet with a water cooler and a coat-rack installed just below the phantom wounds of chipped-paint and screw-holes that surely once had fixed into them some kind of broom or mop rack. At least it had a window.

Perhaps the illusion of a burnt bridge was needed for him to dive headlong into his paranormal research; something to which he always had been and always would be more devoted.

The fruits of his labor were scattered about his large desk for months. Before moving them out of the office, he’d organized and reorganized his notes, news-clippings, charts and statistics in such a way that they would mimic the interior world of his always fatigued but never satisfied intellect. If there was a secret history to the world, he was determined to discover it. German psychoanalytic journals from the early part of the twentieth century were paired with his own notes on pagan and Christian glossolalia. Stories of Madonna manifestations were paired with notes on incarnation in Greek mythology. The history of the Freemasons rested adjacent to numerous notes on the French Revolution and early church history. Philosophy and theology, myth and politics, religion and spiritualism all earned their blurred lines in his study, and this blurring was so complete that to tease the distinctions apart again in his own way was one of the greatest pleasures of his insatiable, interior world. It was impossible for him not to believe in ghosts but it was also impossible for him not to believe that all paranormal activity contained an inherent set of mechanics that could be mapped out and better understood with time, patience and a cold, analytical eye. The paranormal had yet to find its appropriate science and that was all.

While the two suitcases he miraculously fit all of his most important belongings into were not meant as a gesture of ostentatious departure, they lessened the subtlety he had, until then, fooled himself into believing he could exercise as he traveled to the west side of the campus. Students and staff alike were staring at him. It was only a matter of time before he would be interrogated. It would be hard to win the favor of his peers even after a good interrogation. He’d been called ‘that tenureless twit with philological pretentions,’ and this was one of the politest things said about him. He’d gathered a reputation as something of a dandy—which was code for saying that he was usually broke but wore suits to informal events, that his ties were often eccentric and that there was usually something decorative sticking out of his breast pocket. He’d also gathered a reputation for being anti-social, which was only ever said by people who didn’t win his favor. He was feared and admired but few people were ready to invite him to lunch. He’d been an asset, able to fill in great department gaps due to little more than his wide reading and gift for improvisation.

Just as he reached the west courtyard, Dr. Cyril MacDonald came trotting up a cement pathway riddled with fallen orange and brown leaves. He was an old mathematician for whom history and anthropology were just as haunting as ghosts and sorcery.

Sebastian muttered ‘Shit’ under his breath and smiled when Cyril, all too quickly, arrived at his side.

‘Fine autumn day, isn’t it?’ Cyril said.

‘Oh, it’s autumn and it’s fine al—’

‘Did you see the photograph where he’s wearing the pyramid hat?’ Cyril interrupted excitedly, his breath flicking his mustache about. The said ‘him’ was Alistair Crowley—the only subject that Cyril ever, in Sebastian’s whole time of knowing the man, ever brought between them.

‘Yes. I’ve seen it,’ Sebastian said, walking quicker.

‘It is odd, the bit about his funeral, no? That they tried to pass some rule never to have a public black mass performed, since that’s what they considered his funeral to be after it was far too late.’

‘It was something.’ Sebastian couldn’t remember for the life of him why Crowley as a conversation-point bound him to these tedious walks with Cyril.

‘To call oneself the Antichrist!’ Cyril said and let out an audible shiver.

‘Cyril, can I ask you a question?’ Sebastian said, slowing down a little bit to give him a chance to catch up. ‘Have you heard Kenneth say anything about my trip coming up?’ Kenneth was the dean of the college.

‘I suppose one would have to believe in Christ before one could even go about making such a claim of oneself.’ Cyril said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘To call yourself Antichrist,’ Cyril clarified. ‘You’d have to believe in some kind of Christ in the first place, wouldn’t you?’

‘I believe so,’ Sebastian said, not actually believing so. ‘Cyril, I’m going to miss our talks but I’m leaving for Europe tomorrow and I suspect that Kenneth won’t like my leaving … You wouldn’t happen to have heard him express any thoughts on the matter?’

‘Kenneth? Kenneth doesn’t talk about his misgivings to me, you know,’ Cyril said. Cupping his hand to the wrong side of his secret so that it faced a group of grad students standing under a tree, he said, ‘Even if they’re obvious misgivings.’

‘Am I an obvious misgiving?’ Sebastian asked.

‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll always have a place for you, good chap!’ Cyril said. ‘What is it you’re going to be researching this time?’

Sebastian almost told him the truth but suddenly feared the one particularity that Cyril would fix himself to forever in further conversations. He tried to think of some subject in which Cyril couldn’t possibly find interest. ‘Psychedelic mushrooms.’

‘Oh, you don’t say!’

‘Have a good weekend, alright. I’ll be back before the holidays, assuming I’m not an obvious misgiving.’

Already a yard away from him, Cyril called out, ‘I’m told The Book of the Law has some frightening things to say about the subject of race.’

‘Is that right?’ Sebastian said, turning his head just slightly and waving, almost to the nearest door.

As he went inside, he could hear Cyril calling behind him through the closing door, ‘I’m afraid impressionable young people today will be just as drawn to the racism as the fanatical—’ The door shut.

Leonard Pike was the only person Sebastian would have ever felt comfortable calling a ‘mentor.’ Leonard was tall and ancient-looking from a life of steady cigarettes, post-prandial liquor and much rigorous thinking. Nevertheless, he was sturdy in comportment. His white hair was puffy yet ever emulating some shape that looked fashionable without trying, as though years of styling it had fixed it into a permanent mold. He wore coats indoors and never talked too quickly or too loudly. He rarely smiled yet he rarely seemed grave or uncheerful. He sat at his desk writing something in longhand, looking down at it with a pair of bifocals that always made him seem grandmotherly.

He glanced up at Sebastian briefly and said, ‘Is your arrangement for leaving this time more formal?’

‘Arguably less,’ Sebastian said. ‘I may be shooting myself in