Rise Of The Dreamer (8 page)

            Dennis immediately keeps quiet and he steps back very frightened.

            “I wasn’t given a pack.” One of the captives claimed. “Where’s my pack?”

            The meal man looks at the leader, as if waiting for him to speak, the leader glances at the two armed men, then nods at them.

            The armed men proceed to release the man who hadn’t been fed.

 The hungry man was alarmed that he was being led out of the cage. “What’s happening, where
are you
taking me to.”

None of the men respond to his questions.

He began to resist and struggle with the armed men and refused to move. “All I asked for was food. Please I’m sorry. Somebody help me.”

The other captives didn’t raise a finger to help him. Some continued with their meal, while others briefly stopped eating to look as he was being dragged away. They were all scared and nobody knew who was next.

Dennis was terrified and wondered where they were taking the wailing captive to. He wondered why it was that whoever was taken was never returned.

All the four men left immediately. Once Dennis heard the basement door shut he asked Lucas, “Where are they taking him to?”

“Nobody knows
,
all we know is that he isn’t coming back.”

“I hate to think what they might be doing to him, probably this is an illegal medical facility and their performing tests on people.” Dennis proposed.

“What kind of tests?” Lucas asked.

“I can’t tell, but it gives me the creeps.”

“What bothers me is the way they come down here and look at us as if we’re turkey or something, feeding us until they think we’re fat enough and then they pick us off one by one anytime they feel like it. It makes me sick to my guts.” said Lucas.

“When you put it that
way, that
sounds really scary.” Dennis replied.

“How come that guy knows your name? He spoke to you in a direct kind of way. They never speak to any of us like that.”

“I really don‘t know.” Dennis said. “It kind of bothers me.”

“It sounds to me like they have special plans for you.”

All Dennis could do was just
sigh
heavily.

The hungry man continued lamenting as he was being dragged away. The two armed men dragged the hungry man along a corridor of the main house. On their way they came across Lucy. She signalled for them to stop. The hungry man became quiet.

She looked at the hungry man with a mixture of disdain and amusement. “Prepare him for the ceremony, it’s almost
time
.”

The two men nodded in obeisance.

The hungry man shouted a question at Lucy with his eyes glaring.
“What ceremony!?”

Lucy smiled. “They haven’t told you? It’s the time for the sacrifice.”

The man was dumbfounded and lost for words.

Lucy gestured the men to move on.

The two men continued dragging their captive along the corridor while his lamentations became louder.

Within a matter of moments they entered a very large room that served as a place for assembly. The seats at the back were raised high while the seats at the front were lower. At the front was a raised platform that was visible to everyone in the room. On the platform was a large marble alter that a full grown adult could lie down on.

The room was completely filled with men and women wearing black hooded robes and they were all standing. All of them had their hands stretched towards the altar and they were chanting inaudible words.

The hungry man couldn’t say a word because he was highly terrified. The room was filled with some kind of perfumed scent that made him sick to his stomach. Tears were beginning to stream down his cheeks from his eyes as he began to breathe more heavily out of fear and extreme anxiety. He was taken to the front of the assembly room and his back was placed on the altar. His clothes were stripped from his chest as his legs and arms were securely fastened to the altar with ropes.

“Why are you doing this to me? Please stop this.” He was completely ignored. The only thing that he could move was his head and he turned it from right to left. He looked up at the back of the room and saw Lucy enter with four other people behind her in a single file as they made their way to the platform. They were wearing black robes as well. The only thing that distinguished Lucy from the others was that she had a gold chain placed over head.

Once she got to the platform she stood in front of the hungry man and raised her right hand up. Immediately, everybody stopped chanting and the whole room was totally quiet. The only thing that you could hear was the hungry man’s heavy breathing.

The hungry man looked right and left repeatedly and anxious about what was going to happen next. He noticed a small table that had several small golden bowls and he saw a knife with a serrated blade placed next to the bowls.

Lucy spoke out in a sonorous voice. “My fellow witches of the coven, the time has come again for another sacrifice to master Lucifer and the drinking of blood to renew our strength in order to serve him with all available might. We must expand our ranks in order to win our battles against those Christians and gain more control of this world for our master, Lucifer. As the High Witch of this coven, I declare the beginning of the season of the Feasts of blood, as instructed by lord Lucifer.”

All the witches in the assembly begin to roar and cheer in unison.

The hungry man begins to scream and cry.

Lucy smiles and looks at the other witches at the podium and immediately one of them
gets
a thin piece of cloth and uses it to bind the hungry man’s mouth. Another one of the podium witches picks up the serrated knife and hands it over to High Witch Lucy.

Lucy raises the knife up into the air for everyone to see and plunges straight into the hungry man’s chest where his heart is located. She methodically cuts out his heart and raises it up for everyone to see and they all cheer. Lucy then takes a bite out of the heart and begins to chew it. One of the witches on the podium approaches Lucy with a gold platter and collects the heart from Lucy onto the platter. The remainder of the witches on the podium share the heart and consumes it. The
honour of eating the hearts of the sacrifice were
reserved for the most senior witches in the coven.

Lucy then receives a golden bowl from one of the podium witches and puts the knife to the dead man’s neck. She cuts open a vein in the neck and begins to collect the dripping blood into the golden bowl. After she had collected an amount of blood she lifted it to her mouth and drank from the bowl. After she had drunk, she passed the bowl to the other podium witches and they also drank of the blood one by one.

After the witches on the podium had taken of the blood, they took the remaining bowls and collected more blood and passed the bowls around the whole assembly. One by one every witch in the assembly part took of the drinking of the blood and they all felt rejuvenated.

At the exact time of the sacrifice of the hungry man, Dennis fell asleep in the cage and had another dream. He dreamt about what happened to the hungry man. Everything that happened in the assembly including the witches and the sacrifice was revealed in a dream to Dennis. It was as if Dennis himself was present at the sacrifice, but nobody could see him. It was apparently a lucid dream for Dennis and he was fully aware of everything that was happening in the dream.

Dennis didn’t know how, but he knew the dream was happening in reality at that moment in time, and it made him terrified.
I thought witches were a myth.

Once the sacrifice was over, Dennis awoke from his brief slumber terrified. Lucas looked at him from across the cage and Lucas could visibly see the fear written all over Dennis’s face.

“Are you okay?” Lucas asked. “You look like you just had a nightmare.”

“You have no idea.” said Dennis.

“You want to talk about it?” asked Lucas. “It’s not like I’m doing anything. I have all day.”

Dennis looked at Lucas with a certainty. “I think I know why we’re here and what they’ve been doing with the others and what they’re going to do with us.”

Lucas was surprised and sceptical about what Dennis might have to say. “You had a dream about what they do here?” The few other captives
which were just a handful
of people showed interest for the first time in what Dennis had to say.

“Yeah.”

“So what did you see in your dream?” asked one of the others.

Dennis didn’t want to mention the word witches so that he wouldn’t be ridiculed. He wanted them to take him seriously. “There are a bunch of devil worshippers here. They’re going to sacrifice us and drink our blood. That’s what they’ve been doing with the others. That’s why the others never come back. They’re feeding us fat so that we would be juicy enough for the sacrifice, for their evil feast.”

For the first time, the normally calm looking Lucas looked terrified and horrified all at once. For no certain reason at all, Lucas believed Dennis, and it all began to make sense to him.

            The man hunt was on. It was a joint effort between the FBI, US Marshals Service, State Marshals, State Troopers and local law enforcement officers. Dr Dennis Riley was a wanted man, a fugitive and one of the FBI’s most wanted. Normally, the US Marshals Service would have taken the lead in this man hunt, but due to the sensitive nature of the case, the FBI was taking the lead and Supervisory Special Agent Marcus Gates was coordinating the hunt with all instructions and orders going through him. He had been given the full support of the Executive branch of the government to go to any length to recover Dennis Riley before he leaves the country through any internal or external assistance.

            All law enforcement agencies had been alerted and the pictures of Dennis Riley had been splashed all over the TV, newspapers and the Internet. There was no way he was going to get away, not on Marcus
Gates’s
watch.

            Every individual involved in the multiple car accident that day was questioned and had their backgrounds checked, even the dead were not spared. No stone was left unturned in tracing the witnesses of the fatal car accidents. Well over a hundred and sixteen people had been questioned in a space of twenty-four hours. FBI analysts were working overtime in getting data about every suspect. Dennis Riley was tagged as public enemy number one. A million dollar cash reward had already been promised to anyone that would be able give useful information on the whereabouts of Dr Dennis Riley.

            Marcus Gates and his team spent hours in reviewing every interview that had taken place with every suspect involved in the accident so far. He looked for anything that seemed remotely out of place and ensured that every potential lead was investigated. This was easily becoming the largest man hunt in US and FBI history.

            Marcus used every connection he had established from investigating home grown terrorists to find out about Dennis Riley, but there were all dead ends. Nobody knew anything about Dennis being associated with terrorists. What amazed Marcus and his team was that it seemed as if Dennis had disappeared from the face of the earth without a trace, it was like he just vanished.

            It was three days after Dennis had gone missing that Joshua arrived in the US. A taxi dropped him off at a quiet and peaceful suburban town on the out skirts of Chicago. He was dropped off right in front of a church. All he had with him was a small travel bag. He stood in front of the church briefly to have one more look at the exterior before he would step in. He was wearing a well-tailored dark blue pinstriped suit with a white shirt and a red tie. He swung the small bag over his back, opened one half of the large beautiful wooden double door and walked in.