Crimson Seal the Broken

By R. G. Tanner

Riley Jacobson was a normal twentysomething, trying to get his life in order. However, he was haunted by a dream from his childhood. A dream with two crimson eyes peering into his soul telling him that he could "see." It felt too real, lingering with him throughout the years. Having squandered his youth on unimportant things, Riley decided to enroll in college and finally get a journalism degree. Upon arriving at college, he reconnected with his longtime friend, Erin, who always had intrigued him.

Everything was normal, almost idyllic. Then one day while writing a paper on urban mythology, Riley fell asleep and was awoken by an entity with those same crimson eyes boring deep into him. This entity informed Riley that he is an angel who has come to Riley due to his ability to "see," the meaning of which still illuded Riley. This angel is named Ingall and informed Riley that he is both human and divine. Furthermore, Ingall had a mission for Riley. Telling him once more he can "see."

Riley must learn new and angelic talents, something that was always in him and was only recently awakened. Those crimson eyes drove Riley down a path of confusion, intrigue, danger, and faith.

Riley embarks on this journey, straddling the worlds of the divine, and human; all while trying to understand who he is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889820567

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Epilogue

About the Author

cover.jpg

Crimson Seal the Broken

R. G. Tanner

Copyright © 2023 R. G. Tanner

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2023

ISBN 979-8-88982-055-0 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88982-760-3 (hardcover)

ISBN 979-8-88982-056-7 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

For My Amazing Husband Who Inspires Me To Imagine The Impossible And Love Through Eternity

Prologue

It started when I was young. I don't remember the exact day, for children rarely keep track of such things. Yet the memory still lives within me, as alive now as it was then. It was a dream that began it all. A man, a dark man with wings and red eyes that burned like embers. He wrapped his outstretched wings around himself as if he were a lost child. Even though his eyes seemed to be as fire, tears gently fell to the ground. I wanted to comfort him, to hold him and ease his pain. My arms couldn't reach him. He looked towards the ground and sobbed, Only I can see, only I can see.

None of this made any sense to me. I couldn't begin to wrap my mind around it. Then he looked to me with unforgettable crimson eyes and said, But you can see. I woke up with a dream that was never to be forgotten. Those crimson eyes and outstretched wings, and the pain on his face; those have never left. Those burning eyes…

Chapter 1

It has been many years since that dream. One night I knew I couldn't forget. But a childhood walk through the subconscious was the least of my worries. I had put off college for too long to pursue my dreams. As it turns out, I had no idea what my dreams were, and I spent years of idle time racking up debt. The fact that I was correcting my vices by finally getting an education didn't change the fact that an empty bank account had no sympathy. I prayed the day would come when I would find the perfect woman on my way to the mailbox instead of a handful of bills addressed to Riley Jacobson. Much to my humiliation, I was living in a friend's basement until I could afford my own place. This wasn't how things were supposed to happen. By this time, I was supposed to have completed college, have a career and a home to call my own, not bumming off a kindhearted friend.

I was thumbing through my envelopes as I started to walk back to the building I called home. My roommate was sprawled out in a pathetic structure which was once a couch at some point in time.

Hey, Ricky, he said as I closed the door behind me. He decided to call me Ricky because he once dated a girl named Riley. He said it was too feminine a name for me anyway. Is there any mail for me?

No, I replied. Are you ever going to get up, Tyler?

Not if I can help it.

I walked past him into the kitchen, rolling my eyes. All my classes were in the late afternoon, so I had some time to kill. It was only noon, and I was still wearing my pajama pants and nothing else. Of course, my homework was nowhere near finished. Much like most journalism students, I waited until the last minute to complete my work. The more recent the events and topics were, the better. It's as they say: You can't beat fresh blood on the street.

Tyler! I yelled from the fridge door.

What?

Did you know this milk has been expired for a week? I asked, having noticed the small bits of stiffened milk floating at the surface in the carton.

It still tastes okay! he yelled at me.

Dude, when the milk starts to grow legs and walk on its own, then it's time to throw it out!

Sorry, Your Highness, Tyler remarked sarcastically. I didn't realize you were so high-maintenance.

Shaking my head, I threw the rancid milk carton into the trash. After the milk, I was afraid of what else might be lurking in that fridge, so I shut the door and scavenged for food in the pantry. I found some Pop-Tarts, a staple for any college student. Armed with my untoasted meal in hand, I descended to my basement to finish my dreaded assignment.

My creative writing class had asked that students write a piece about a legend; furthermore, a legend that we found ourselves closest to. I drew a blank. As far as I knew I had lived a painfully normal life. I stared at my computer screen for what seemed to be an eternity. The calming light of the screen slowly claimed my consciousness. My eyelids slipped closed, and I drifted off to sleep. First there was only blackness wrapped around me. There was a strange comfort in that, as if my mind had surrendered to peace.

I found myself in an all-too-familiar darkness. It felt as if I were walking through a memory long ago. Should I wait? Should I walk? I was suspended in a state of confusion. It wasn't long before the answers came to me. Two answers, burning as coals, looking through me as they had years ago. All and any questions I may have had melted away as I stared in amazement. Still crying, still sobbing. A silhouette of misery.

Then in a distant whisper, he said, You can see.

I woke up in shock as cold sweat coated the back of my neck. I had fallen asleep at my computer and the iridescent light pulled at my eyes. At first I found myself bound by fear and unable to move. Where had I been? Reality slowly set in, and the terror lifted. My sight began to focus, and I found that my computer screen was not as I left it. There had been a blank page before me, but now I was looking at a website. At first I thought it was a pop-up of some sort, but after closer inspection, I saw that it was something quite different.

The webpage was titled The Mothman. It was the title itself that drew me in. It spoke of a small town called Point Pleasant in West Virginia. On December 15, 1965, one of their roadways called the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing forty-six people. Yet this was not the phenomenon or reason for this town's fame. The tragedy became a footnote under the ominous shadow of the Mothman.

I read further to find that an abnormally large amount of people who lived in Point Pleasant had seen this figure multiple times in the month just before the bridge misfortune. One couple saw him flying alongside their car. Another woman claimed he was watching her from her backyard. Most commonly people would catch glimpses of him gliding through the air near the bridge or over igloos, which allegedly stored TNT for the government during World War II. Their current day use is unknown. They are called igloos due to their dome-like construction under foothills, which are for the most part isolated in location.

While reading this, I first thought it was some sort of godsend. I needed to be at class in less than two hours with a nonfiction piece about a legend, and strangely I had been blindly led to a story about a creature much like the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot. I felt secure that no one else in my class would be writing about this Mothman since I had never heard of him before. Immediately I started writing, engulfing myself in a flurry of words as my fingers danced across the keyboard.

Ricky!

I gave into the voice calling me instead continuing the creative flow. What!

You left your fucking cell phone here, and it won't shut the fuck up!

Deal with it! Who's calling?

Your mom, I think.

Shit, I thought. I didn't have time for a parental lecture. If I stopped writing, God only knows when I would be able to pick it up again before class. Just answer it and tell her I'm not here! I yelled up the stairs.

That never works, Tyler replied, standing three feet from me.

I jerked back, not realizing he had come down the stairs. That stealthy bastard always loved the thrill of surprise.

And you know it.

I sarcastically rolled my eyes at him and re-devoted myself to my assignment. I didn't have time for Tyler's random babbling either. However, he never really seemed to need my attention to talk anyway. His voice blended deep into the background as I continued to type. Give or take twenty minutes later, I pressed the print button still locked somewhere in my thoughts. I stood up to grab my paper to see Tyler lounging on my bed still talking about God knows what. There are times when I wonder if he knew he was basically chatting it up with an abyss of nothingness. Either way, he seemed content enough.

Okay, get out, I said, standing over him.

Fine, fine. I have a date with an IM chick anyways. Who knows? Maybe I'll get lucky, he said, laughing and walking out my door.

Tyler's version of getting lucky was cybersex. Sadly, Tyler never left the house, and the only physical effort he ever put forward involved his right hand.

With class only a short time away, I rushed through a shower and threw on the first clothes I saw. The only item of actual interest was my freshly printed homework. With that in hand, I bolted through the door toward the bus stop. Once I was on the bus, there was no need to worry about being late. The thing about college is that most officials don't care about a student walking in fifteen minutes after the class had begun. As long as you showed up at some point and did the work, that was all that mattered. After all, you are paying them to let you sit in the classroom. I suppose I still had some high school instincts left in me, ones that reminded me of being chastised by teachers and parents, and knowing that if I missed too much, it would be the state delivering my punishment.

Chapter 2

Once I reached the campus, I found myself blending into a massive collage of faces. I could look to either side of me, and I'm sure I'd recognize most of the people swarming around me. Yet the greetings went unspoken, and eye contact was all but forbidden. It took something truly extraordinary for anyone to stand out. Even the girls who had spent hours doing their makeup and hair went unnoticed. So much of their lives were hours wasted applying false beauty. So many hours lost for the sake of their pride.

Class came and went, and my paper ended up in a pile on the professor's desk. Part of me wondered if our professor actually took the time to read each paper, each assignment produced by every student. Or did he merely flip through the pages and give a grade based on the basic structure of the homework? In the end, your motivation was all that mattered. If you wanted to actually pursue your chosen career, you did the work. Having spent several years wandering randomness, I found having direction could carry you through the world. How my direction became journalism, I may never know. I suppose it found me.

Somehow, most or all college campuses have a nature motif. I can't decide if that was the product of nature-loving professors or pot-loaded hippies. Either way, they all seem to have large, towering trees scattered between buildings, sheltering us students from the harsh unloving sky.

While I was wasting my thoughts and randomly wandering, I saw Erin leaning against a tree, much like the ones I was just contemplating. Erin and I went to high school together centuries ago. The only difference between her and I was that she went to school while I dragged my sorry ass out into the world to find myself. Now she was working on her master's degree in political science, and I was barely three years in. It had been years since I had seen her, but somehow, we ended up in school together again, and it was as if no time had passed.

Hey, you, I said from ten feet back.

She turned and smiled at me through thick black eye makeup and rusty-red hair that went everywhere and nowhere. Her eyes shined like emeralds through a face that grinned with chaos.

How's it going? she asked.

Scraping by as usual, I replied, sitting next to her in the shade. I just got out of class. You want to hang out?

Can't. It's my sister's birthday. What about tomorrow?

Sure. Give me a call and we can meet up somewhere.

She had asked me countless times why we couldn't hang out at my place. In the end, she'd have to settle for the answer that I was embarrassed by my roommate. I didn't want to tell her that the second Tyler would see her, she'd instantly become one of his porn fantasies. Even worse, he'd start begging me for her number and take it from my phone while I slept after I would have denied giving it to him. Next he'd be calling her at four in the morning, hoping she'd make his fantasies into a reality. I couldn't subject her to that.

So show me this new tattoo you were talking about.

She giggled and leaned back against the tree. She slightly pulled down the edge of her pants on her left hip. Seductive as this was, I did my best to keep the expression on my face calm and unflinching. She revealed a small black symbol that looked like a sideways crazy eight.

It's the infinity symbol, she said. Proof that everything is connected. She traced her gentle fingers over the raw skin caringly as if this tattoo was her newborn child.

I've got to go, she said. I have class in a few.

Okay, call me tomorrow and we can hang out.

She threw her bag on her back and clutched her scattered notebooks. Sure thing!

Then she was gone, and there was nothing left but to walk home. I only took the bus when I had to be somewhere in a hurry. I liked hearing the soft sound of my footsteps as I walked. It made me feel like I was going somewhere. Making up for all the time in my past, I spent just standing watching the scenery fly by.

When I walked through my front door, Tyler was lounging on the couch just as I left him. While we split the rent evenly, it seemed that I should be paying more considering that I used the whole house while he habituated a total of eight square feet on the location. I guess I had it easy in that case. Knowing that he would only notice me if I blocked his view of the secondhand TV, I walked calmly behind the couch.

Dude, that was some weird shit on your computer, he said with most of his attention still directed toward the television.

What?

That moth guy thing. What was that?

I have a better question…what were you doing looking through my computer?

Hey, don't snap at me! You just left it like that when you went to class. I just read what was already there.

I didn't know you could read, I said with a sly smile.

Ha ha, fuck you, Tyler responded.

Our conversations frequently went like this. Never once had there been ill will intended so every insult became something to laugh about.

At this point, I had no idea what Tyler was talking about. The Mothman was an urban myth and a lame one at that. It's not like he had any real horror stories like the Wendigo or Jersey Devil. Still, I couldn't help but be curious about what Tyler had said. It couldn't hurt to double-check the website.

Once I went down to my room, I threw my bag into some random corner and sat down at my computer. The screen had gone black from idling, and I clicked it back to life. It looked just as I had left it—a title, paragraph of information, etc. But when I scrolled down, I saw a link for images of this elusive Mothman drawn by those who claimed to have seen this myth at Point Pleasant. I could only guess this is where Tyler ventured. I clicked on the link, and when the page loaded, every nerve in me went frigid. The screen gleamed with drawing after drawing of a tall ebony entity with all-too-familiar crimson eyes. I could do nothing but stare.

How could I have not seen this while I was writing my paper? Furthermore, how did I find this Mothman creature? This internet page was waiting for me when I woke up after staring at a blank screen. I had never typed it in or searched for it. It had found me… How is that possible? None of this made any sense. The only thing I knew for certain was that I had seen this being before. Not online or in any book. It had been in my mind many years ago. I was trying not to remember as if it were some awful memory, but there was no escaping it.

I closed my eyes and heard a voice whisper, You can see.

I shut off my computer in a panic and ran to my bed. All I could do was stare into nothingness. What was I supposed to think of all this? Confusion was too weak a word to describe what I felt. The world seemed to be moving around me faster than I could ever hope to understand. My first instinct was to call someone, anyone, just so I could hear a human voice to eradicate the whisper still ringing in my ears. I pulled out my cell and called Erin only to get her voice mail.

Who else in the world could I talk to? Sure as hell not Tyler. Who knows what deranged reaction he would come up with?

In the end, I