The Wager

By Bill Atherton and Jason Mccaig

Though my friends and I had been making wagers with each other and daring each other with different things all through our lives together nothing had prepared me for what was in store for me that night after lodge meeting as we sat talking about one thing then another. They bet me $1000.00 that I wouldn't spend the night in the old Mize castle. Naturally I accepted. We planned the event for Friday the 13th none the less and set up camp at the edge of the castle grounds. It was near dusk when I started my trek through the castle. Little did I know that my journey would be into parallel realms of existence, other time frames, and even other worlds and kingdoms. To say nothing of the deities I would be forced to meet and the near death experiences. But it did give me food for thought as to the possibilities of the existence of life in other realms, some that run parallel to ours.
Had it not been for a teen age boy, Jake and his furry friend, Oola as well as Diana, Jacque, and their pet, Gar who saved me on more than one occasion I more than likely would have been lost somewhere in time in a universe that we believe is non-existent.
But what is it that lies beyond that which our minds are limited to accept as fact ? Is it possible that there is an existence out there someplace ? Or better yet is it possible that we are just a figment of a greater beings imagination and that all we say and do is only their thoughts, and our existence rests only in their thoughts of us ?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499036770

Bill Atherton

I live with my family in Texas. I have been here now for almost a year. I am from a small town in West Tennessee, about eighty miles north of Memphis. I am a retired thirty-one-year veteran police officer out of Tennessee. I grew up for the most part living with my grandparents in Northeastern Kansas. With my last few high school years, I spent it in Las Vegas, Nevada, with my parents. After having spent time in the USMC, I went to work for the Merchant Marines on the western rivers. Much of my time on the boat was spent in the Louisiana Bayou Country. That was where I started writing short stories for my own pleasure—and so that I had something to do in my spare time—and the area and the culture was ideal for stories of the supernatural, voodoo, and quite possibly the things that go bump in the night. I was always drawn to the macabre and the supernatural. My inspiration for my stories, I owe credit to Edgar Allen Poe and Vincent Price. This book is one of fiction. However, as we all know, there is a bit of truth in all legends. I hope that you, the reader, have gained as much pleasure out of reading the story as I did writing it.

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THE WAGER

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I had taken a wager for $1,000 during one of our weekly card games after mee ting.

We had been together since grade school, and there was very little, if anything, that we didn’t know about each other. We were more like brothers than friends. Our conversations usually revolved around baseball, world events, the war in Iraq, pretty little Jenny down the bank who had been our high school prom queen and who we had all dreamed of dating in school. But for whatever reason, today conversation had turned to the macabre and the supernatural.

We have all seen the show on TV last night which featured haunted places throughout the world. George, who was the quiet one, started the conversation by asking if we have seen that particular show—we all answered yes.

George never actually enjoyed horror or supernatural things. Dave and Ron, however, were into it almost as much as I have been ever since I was a kid. I, on the other hand, have gone to great lengths to study all I could about the dark side, the occult, and the supernatural. Not only have I read and watched everything I could get my hands on throughout the years, but I have also spent my past seven annual vacations down in the Louisiana bayous. I had studied quite avidly Bucaria and Santeria, black magic and white magic, and had become quite a believer.

I could tell George was deeply troubled by something he had seen on the show last night, but to ask him would have been futile, for when he had something on his mind that was heavy or troublesome—I had learned years ago—George would mention it in his own way and time but not until then.

Dave, Ron, and I had been laughing and joking about different things on the show, and our conversation had just about drawn to a close when out of the clear blue sky George asked, Do you really believe spirits can come back and actually communicate with us?

The question took us all by surprise, especially because it was coming from George. But before any of us could reply, George started talking about the old Mize mansion. Actually, it was a small castle that Jeremiah Mize had purchased over in Europe back in the late 1400s. It had been one of the many that the king had attempted to take from a family, which had dated back to the medieval times.

This family had befriended Jeremiah during one of his many travels. Jeremiah had been taken down—ill and had fallen from his horse and into a side ditch after riding for several days with an extremely high fever.

As this family had been traveling to town, they had come up on Jeremiah lying in the ditch, and his horse standing devotedly beside him. They thought he was dead at first glance. They could tell by his clothing that he was not royalty, yet they could tell he was no commoner either.

Jeremiah’s clothes spoke of wealth, and he was clean shaven—something you rarely see, if ever, in a traveling man. The only jewelry he had on was a signet ring of some kind that he wore on his left ring finger, made of the finest and purest gold. There was a diamond in the center of it. There was also a design on the face of the ring that looked like a couple of tools—a compass perhaps and possibly a square; tools of a builder of some kind. There was also a ring of gold which he wore on his right index finger. It was a red crusader’s cross set in the middle of a stone that was white as the pure snow. They knew not what to make of either of these rings. The stranger’s clothing also left much to question. His clothing could be taken like those of a traveling man, yet they were neither tattered, or torn, or soiled. And his knee-high boots that folded at the knees had been shined to a degree that you could nearly see your reflection in it, even though they were covered in road dust. The sword he carried on his side was not one of fancy fullness—the handle was of a pure white material, perhaps of ivory or bone, and carved and ground in a manner which made it next to impossible to slip from his grasp.

As they pulled the sword from its sheath to inspect it, by just a mere few inches, Jeremiah stirred ever so lightly. They quickly returned the sword fully into its sheath, but not before they had observed that it had been made from the finest steel in all of Europe. And the angle and the design of the blade were of the finest perfection, and it also shone with the brilliance they have never seen and was without blemish of any kind, save some engraving that they noticed on the upper portion of the blade.

The engraving was those of symbols of some kind—squares, right angled lines in different positions, triangles, and dots within some of the symbols in different positions. The symbols had to be a language of some kind but nothing they have ever come in contact with.

They touched Jeremiah’s face. Not only was it a crimson red in color, it was so hot they could not leave their hand on his skin. They loaded Jeremiah on the wagon, tying his horse to the back of the wagon, and headed back to the castle.

Jeremiah lay for many days, drifting in and out of semi consciousness. He was unable to eat, and they were barely able to get fluids in him to keep him from dehydrating as he was sweating profusely. Sometimes during the night when his fever would peak, he would ramble incoherently, and it would sound like he was in great distress. This would go on sometimes for up to an hour before he would become still again.

Jeremiah awoke one morning to the smell of breakfast cooking. Though he was in a very weakened state, he attempted to get up and make it to the table under his own power. This however failed and he found himself in a heap in the middle of the floor. He was aided to the table, and he ate like he had never eaten before. But much to his dismay, the food did not stay down but only for a few moments, for he had not put anything solid in his stomach for nearly three weeks. He did manage to make it out the door with help before he emptied his stomach of his entire breakfast.

It took a couple of months before Jeremiah regained his total strength and was back to normal. It was during this time when Jeremiah learned of the fact that the king was about to serve foreclosure on these people and take their land and all their belongings, as he had done so to many other families.

Jeremiah and I talked late into the evening one night and an agreement was reached—that Jeremiah would purchase the castle and all holdings and would pay for the families’ safe passage to the destination of their choice. In just a few short weeks, the family was ready to leave, and they bid one another a heartfelt farewell.

Jeremiah set forth, having the castle completely dismantled stone by stone and numbered so it could be reassembled in its entirety exactly as it was. Jeremiah’s destination was what is now known as the Peavine Mountain Range, located in Eastern Nevada about eighty miles east of Tonopah, Nevada, where Jeremiah had made his fortune by a gold strike that was second to none.

The area Jeremiah chose to settle in was totally uninhabited. Jeremiah had come upon this area several years before during his many travels. The exact spot where he chose to reconstruct the castle was next to impossible to access.

It has been told and passed down through generations that all of those involved in the reconstruction of the castle were killed by Jeremiah, keeping his location secret. It was said that Jeremiah finally took a woman of an Indian tribe, and they were married and had children. They said that there was a time when the eldest child had reached teenage years that Jeremiah began to go quite mad—one evening, a couple of years later during one of his fits, he slaughtered his wife and the youngest child. The two older ones managed to escape.

The castle and nearly one hundred acres remained abandoned, yet in the Mize name for nearly two generations, Addison Mize—the great-great-great-grandson of Jeremiah—decided to reinhabit the castle and completely restore it to its originality despite all of the stories that have been handed down through the years regarding the castle.

The Mize’s had never longed for wealth. It seemed that whatever their endeavors were, they prospered quite well from it. But each generation had a dark and sordid past. Addison married a quite prominent woman named Ligeia Jameson from England. Her family had moved here when she was only three years of age. After she had graduated college top of her class, with honors, her parents decided to return to England, but Ligeia chose to stay.

Addison and Ligeia had three sons. They had both become obsessed with the reconstruction of the castle. Life for Addison and his family had been quite a routine and uneventful for the most part. The boys were in their late teens when unexplainable events started taking place. At first, it was just subtle things that no one paid much attention to. Little things, like small items that had been put in one place only to be found in another. Then there were some items that were never found. But for every missing item, there was always something left in their place. Then one night as Ligeia had gone down to the kitchen after having retired for the evening, the first of the many horrifying events yet to come took place.

It was a warm and pleasant evening, and a warm gentle breeze from time to time would come through the windows. As Ligeia started to enter the kitchen, she saw a form that looked like a transparent smoke move past her in the hall and just vanish as quickly as it had appeared. As she entered the kitchen, it was like entering a walk-in freezer. Her arms were full of goose bumps; she wasn’t sure if it was from fear or the cold. She could even see her own breath as she would exhale.

As she gazed about in the kitchen, everything had a greyish hue like the dead of winter. Everything was covered in frost and ice. The ice had a rather macabre fashion, sometimes even taking the form of grotesque figures. Ligeia felt a strange force drawing her into this area of what she felt was sure death. She retreated rapidly back into the hallway. Once back in the hallway, things felt normal. She glanced at both ends of the hallway, nothing seemed amiss, and then she glanced back into the kitchen, only to find it normal as it should be.

She rapidly returned to her bedroom and sat down her rocker next to the fireplace and stared at her sleeping husband, debating as to whether she should tell him of her experience or not. She finally decided against the idea and just chalked it up as sleepwalking and dreaming. But something in the back of her mind kept nagging at her that this was not the case.

She went back to bed and slept with no further incidents and awoke to a bright and beautiful sunshiny day. Time went on for several days uneventful, and Ligeia had dismissed the events of that evening entirely from her mind. Late one afternoon, the boys, who were in their late teens, had returned from hunting which had been quite prosperous. There was no limit on how much game you could bag in one day.

Chad, the eldest of the boys, had found a small figurine about the size of a fist that had been carved from a stone of some kind. It wasn’t the whole body form, just more or less the head. The eyes had been honed out with a perfection that was unequaled. The details of the mouth and teeth were of exquisite perfection. This figurine seemed to almost take on a life of its own.

Chad had said nothing of this find to his brothers, and he stuffed the figurine deep in his pouch, along with his kills of the day. As they were skinning and cleaning their kills, Chad managed to keep the stone figurine out of sight. After they finished rinsing everything at the stream, they headed back to the castle. Chad however held back and told his brothers that he would be up in a bit. As soon as they were well out of sight, Chad removed the stone figurine from his pouch and found it quite covered in blood from his kills. As he began rinsing the blood from the figurine in the icy-cold water of the stream, the figurine became warm.

Chad took the stone figurine with haste to show it to his father in hopes for some kind of explanation to the thing. As Chad rounded one of the outback buildings, he ran nearly headlong into his father. Chad showed the figure to his father, and his father’s face immediately drained of color and became ash-white. His father kept any emotion well hidden, but Chad had picked up on his father’s surprise and thought he had detected a touch of fear in his eyes.

Addison looked at the figurine very briefly and rapidly said, We shall take this to my study and put it under lock and key. We will say nothing of this to anyone.

Chad knew his father would explain everything in its entirety in due time. Everyone retired for the evening early as it had been a long day for everyone. As Chad dropped off to sleep, he began having the most horrifying nightmares he had ever experienced. There was a fire, something like a small bonfire and people scantly clothed; they appeared to be natives of some kind. They each had necklaces of bones, teeth, and claws—each necklace had a smaller version of the stone figurine hanging from the center of the necklace—men, women, and children alike.

They were all dancing around the fire and around Chad. Some had shrunken heads about the size of a softball; they were caring while others had what appeared to be human organs still dripping with blood. They were all yelling and chanting in perfect unison and working themselves up into a dance frenzy, the likes of which Chad had neither experienced before nor could he make out any of the chanting. Chad was not tied or bound in any way, yet he could not move a muscle in his body, with the exception of his eyes. He