Of Kings and Demons (3 page)

Eugene’s pursuit of the darting
shadows brought him to the vast countryside of New York state. It was on uninterrupted
plains
, next to a farmhouse
when he lost track of his subjects. He had
probably reached Maryland, judging by the vast stretches of farmland.

However, in place of the quilt
of green and brown, he was greeted by stretches of snow. The snow he had
witnessed in New York was not a sporadic phenomenon. The weather had gone
seriously wrong and Eugene suspected the change was more than just the vagaries
of nature.

He spotted a miasma of darkness
along a strip of the farmland and began descent for a reconnaissance. The found
smell of dead greeted him and soon he found the torn remains of fowls.

Somebody was hungry, very
hungry.

There was a whiff of air and Eugene sensed
a draught overhead. He looked up but found nothing.

He paused. He heard the heavy breathing. It
was too late. He felt a force behind him, a sharp pain in his back and he
doubled over and in an agile turn, landed on his feet.

He felt the pain travelled up his body.
Eugene tried to numb his pain but shook uncontrollably. He inhaled and looked
to his assailant.

He was stoned like he had seen Medusa,
speechless.

 “Bruno?” the winged-man said.

 “Eugene, the medicine boy!” the gargoyle
chuckled.

 “I prefer ‘the Healer.’ The Archangel gave
me that title.”

“Empty titles.” The Demon hissed.

Eugene noticed the blood stains at the
corner of the mouth.

“Hungry?”

“It has been a while since I ate.” Eugene
smacked his lips.

“You don’t belong here.”

“You don’t own the place.”

Eugene swung his warhammer and sent a
ripple of energy. Bruno swung his wings over himself to block out the energy.
Then he unwrapped the wings to reveal a face of fury. The ears perked up, and
his bulging eyes rolled as if they were connected to batteries. The gargoyle
was angry.

“Explain your presence.” Eugene demanded
however the Demon was in no mood to talk. His wings stretched to full length as
he struck a sparring pose with wrapped fists.

“Defeat me and you will know why I am here.”
Bruno taunted with an impish grin.

“That is interesting challenge,” Eugene said
with a flap of his wings, shaking off the effect of the ambush. The
excruciating pain dissipating into thin air.

“My master and his master; they are going
to rout you.” Saliva drooled from a corner of his mouth.

Eugene was stunned.
My master and his
master…

Eugene had no time to seek a clarification.
The gargoyle had charged at him. Eugene parried every blow confidently, leapt
back and forth, an elusive target.

The Demon was pugnacious but the Guardian
Angel was swifter despite the injury on his wings. Their combat saw limb against
limb, flesh against flesh and steel against claws. After about half-an-hour,
with mutual bruising, Eugene had the better of the Demon, thanks to his
agility.

The final blow was a ruthless slice to the
right wing of the gargoyle. The Demon blanched and somersaulted onto a beam.

“Medicine boy, you have grown strong.”

“Fleeing?”

Eugene was wrong as Bruno next dived like a
falling cannon ball and crushed him to the ground. The impact knocked Eugene
into sickening darkness but only for a moment.

“Healer boy. Die…”

However Eugene recovered swift enough. Stretching
his wings heroically, he slipped off and, with the agility of a fish, leapt
over the back of the demon and knocked him into the ground.

He sliced his warhammer downwards for the
killer blow but there was an upward draught of air and the Demon darted passed
him. His warhammer sent tremors upon impact on the earth.

Eugene somersaulted upwards in pursuit but
Bruno was a lithe being and had darted into the open. He searched his vain but
managed to pick up a trace of sulphur.

Eugene knew he had to find Bruno. The
Demons had hatched a conspiracy and a sense of darkness clouded his senses.
Something was gravely amiss.

Maryland - Chestnut Asylum

Full moon. The lunar
illumination had turned the countryside into a picturesque of melancholic blue.
The air was frosty with chill and an unusual bout of snow in September had
blanketed the countryside white and deserted. The picture of melancholy was
punctuated by a solitary building, a hundred and fifty-year-old structure.

The building’s location hinted
of poor planning, a world away from roads and amenities, but the structure was
once a mansion built for a wealthy family of maize growers in the early 19th century.
It was later abandoned in the 1950s when the family moved to the city in search
of wealth and status.

After decades of neglect, the
aging building needed a fresh coat of paint, though the moonlight did compensate
by lending a decent cloak of respectable antiquity. Refurbished six years
earlier with congressional funding, it housed one of the key mental asylums of
the state.

The building had some one
thousand five hundred spacious units, all occupied by men and women with
sicknesses of the mind. They had been abandoned by their loved ones to live, or
to die, in the institute.

The third floor housed a
sensitive belt, an area designated for special patients. The mentally ill
boarded there were unique cases of prolonged symptoms that had defied medical
treatment. In layman terms, they were extraordinarily mad and beyond cure.

At the end of the long corridor
of peeling walls, a room labeled 03-118 had been reserved for a special
patient. The occupant has for the last decade been afflicted with condition that
left doctors confounded. Despite the best efforts, his condition remained stagnant,
with his tenure in the mental institute remained indefinite.

The patient’s dossier read:
John C Springs, New York City. Admitted when he was only thirty-four, his life
has been a soap-opera tragedy. John began his career as engineer with an
established construction firm and was happily married to his sweetheart, Susan
Hartson. Their first child, a boy, had been almost ten and they eagerly
anticipated the birth of their second—a girl, prior to John being institutionalized.
They had been a picture of bliss, the envy of many.

Then tragedy struck.

John met a fatal accident that
altered his destiny and that of his family: a head-on collision with an MUV
truck. He survived but fell into a coma for three long months. Everyone,
relatives and friends, had given up but Susan Hartson held on. Prayers were her
only solace, and she prayed hard and long.

Miraculously, John regained
consciousness, but he was a changed man. The verve of a go-getter became a
thing of the past. He began to exhibit traits of a deranged man, as if he were
possessed. Insomnia plagued him, and his mental state degenerated. He often
talked to himself, and his behavior oscillated between unbridled joys to
unexplained sorrows. Once he was seen vandalizing the walls of the Church of
Nativity that he had frequented, offending the pastor, who happened to be his
mentor during  his youth.

What follows was a taxing
period for Susan -managing a new baby, a growing-up child and a problematic
husband. The last straw that broke her came with an unexpected diagnosis of cancer.
She had only six months to live. The burden of tragedies mutilated her
rationality and drove her to the edge of a breakdown. Only thoughts of her
children kept her buoyant. As her life seeped away, she steeled herself and sent
John away to the institute. On that heart-wrenching day when John was taken
away, there was a downpour and the children wept with it.

Susan died on a rainy day, too,
and again there was much weeping. The children were entrusted to John’s aunt,
the only relatives within reasonable proximity.

John was quite immune to the unfolding
tragedies. He could barely manage himself as his mental malaise continues to defy
medication. He continued to a dream,  the same dream, every night for ten
years. On the walls of his room at the asylum, he had scribbled a strange
description of a sighting, a lady in long robes and flowing hair. When
questioned, he hemmed up and whispered only these words: “I don’t know. Ask
her. Ask her.”

Initially they tried to bind
him to prevent the acts of vandalism on the walls of the compound, canteen, and
his room. However, after the enlightened management moved him to a new room and
had the bindings were removed, the drawing on the walls stopped.

John turned docile with books
as his new venue of solace. His children rarely visited him, and when they did
he barely reacted or remembered them. Occasionally he wept when he remembered
the death of Susan. Most of the time, John was in a daze, lost in suspended
reality. Day after day, year after year, his existence consisted of an
existence in the tossing waves of self-delusion.

He had a dream this night, the
tone and background of which was vastly different from the rest of t night.
Instead of the usual world of white, John found himself in the midst of a dark
forest. He was on his way down a meandering track.  The path ended by the bank
of a purplish river, where a figure stood. The vision was blurred but the
purplish hair and the voluptuous figure was unforgettable. The figure turned
around gradually and John was about to glimpse the face when he slipped and
fell into the river.

John’s hands were chill and
rigid. Panic gripped him and he found his lungs bursting. Then a hand grabbed
him and hauled him out of the water.

John woke from his dream with a
yell, wet with perspiration.

“Good gracious. Just a dream, a
dream . . .” He crossed his heart and prayed.

“How do you know it was only a
dream?” someone whispered, but it was distinctive. John missed a heartbeat.

I am not alone? I am not
alone.

In the corner of the room lay the
same lady he had just seen in his dream. The face was not immediately visible
as her back was to him. She was full-bodied, dressed in a resplendent robe of
purple, and her thick and purplish hair flowed luxuriously to her waist.

The presence of a stranger sent
John huddling into the corner of room like a frightened puppy. He coughed
nervously as the lady gradually turned to face him. Under the pallid
illumination of the lamp, her high cheekbones were accentuated and the huge
eyes crafted in lascivious allure. The purplish cloak emphasized the voluptuous
curves of that supine body. The sheer force of the beauty left John breathless.
A ring of dark light, of oppressive vibes dropped over his neck like a noose.

He struggled to talk but the
words melted on his lips before they were uttered.

“Your fear, John, is so strong.”
She smiled. “We had just met. By the river. You clumsy fool . . .” she chuckled.

“You are not real.” John shut
his eyes. However, his feeble gesture did nothing to ward off the lady. She
sashayed over and in an intimidating pose held John by the chin like hapless
prey.

“Mad for so long, and still wasting
away.”

“What do you want?”

The seductress smiled, her
cheeks glowed with sinister pride.

“Is this some kind of
experiment?” John eyes rolled over to the door.

No reply came and John snapped,
“What is this?”

“I am Seraphina. Seductress is my
title,” she said. “It is always a joy as I quenched the lust of your race.”

“You are a Demon?”

“You remember? You haven’t lost
all your sanity, John.”

He struggled to sit upright. “I
am not mad. It is simply that I have a gift of sight of your world and just the
inability to explain that gift to my fellow man.”

“Gift? A curse, you mean. A
curse that has torn your life apart.” She winked “Humans can be so hopelessly
optimistic.”

John felt blood draining away
as Seraphina chuckles filled the room.

“Do you still remember your beautiful
children?”

A look of despondency fell
across John’s face as he tried to recall as his eyeballs scanned his surroundings.
Tears flowed as memories of his loved ones surged through the corridors of his
mind.

The seductress winced. “Spare
me the emotions, mortal!”

However, John showed no sign of
abating as his sobbing triggered asthmatic coughs. Seraphina shot her long, willowy
hands and their razor-sharp nails towards John and locked them on his neck.
Like an unwitting animal he was hauled from the bed.

“Do not upset me, mortal. I
would have destroyed you if not for—”

“What do you want?” John grimaced,
the veins bursting at his temples.

“A favour.” She bent over with
an intimidating glare.

“What?” Johns attempted to ask
but received a slap on the cheeks. The slight touch belied her demonic strength
and John rolled over in a hellish cry.

“I need you as bait for the kinglings.”

“Kinglings?”

Seraphina leaned closer and
whispered “Your children.”

John was speechless before
howling pleas but nobody came to his rescue. The on-duty medics and guards had
grown numb to the regular display of outlandish behaviours from the inmates, especially
the hardcore patients.

John Springs happened to be one
of them.