For a moment, there was nothing, then a hiss of static. “Hello?” Vince raised his voice a little. It sounded like a bad connection.
“Vince?”
There was something recognizable about that voice. “Yeah?”
“Vince…” A pause, a crackle of static. “Vince, it’s Frank.” It sounded like Frank was out of breath and calling from far away.
“Frank!” Vince felt a wave of relief wash over him. He sighed, felt his body ease up as he started to sink into the sofa. “Man, I’ve been trying to call you and Mike for the past twenty-four hours. What’s—”
“I don’t have much time, Vince, listen to me.” Frank’s voice was suddenly loud and direct, as if the connection was suddenly re-established. Vince frowned; there was something in Frank’s voice that gnawed on him. Something tha— “I’m hurt, Vince,” Frank said, and now Vince recognized the heavy breathing in Frank’s voice. He was panting, his voice tinged with an inflection of pain. “I’ve been… it fucking got me, man.”
“What?” It got me? What got him?
“Listen carefully,” Frank said, and now Vince detected the urgency in his voice. He felt his stomach roll in his abdomen. “They were one step ahead of us. I don’t want to get into it now, but I got away. I’ve… managed to elude them at least for a little while, and I had to call you… to warn you…”
“Where are you?” Vince heard his voice, panicked, frightened.
“I’m at a phone booth, somewhere in Fountain Valley… maybe Huntington Beach.”
“Listen,” Vince said, thinking quickly. “Hang up now and call 911. I’m leaving for the hospital now—”
“No!” Frank’s voice was a hiss of pain. Vince cringed; his nerves were on edge. “Listen to me… I know everything now… I put it all together and… I know why… why all that happened to us… happened… why we had the same dreams… why we… why we went through what we did when we were kids…”
“Frank,” Vince muttered, feeling the dread rising. He didn’t want to hear this. He just wanted to find Frank, find him and help him, but he felt powerless to do anything except listen.
“You were wrong, Vince,” Frank said, gasping, breathing heavily now. “I was right… about most of it. Our parents… The Children of the Night… it’s all real…”
“Frank, I know they’re real,” Vince said, trying to inject an inflection of authority in his voice, a sense of reason. “I know these people think they’re performing some—”
“They don’t think anything, Vince!” Frank barked. “They know! It’s the real thing. The Children… they’re the real deal. They put us through those rituals… they exposed us because it was all part of the plan. And…” A wheeze in his breathing. “…and our minds suppressed it… it’s like those Vietnam vets that bury the memories of the war in their subcon-scious… they carry it with them and then it starts coming out… just a little bit… at a time…”
“Frank!” He did not want to hear this, he DID NOT—
“…they brought us to the rituals because… because it was part of the plan… and you…” his breathing grew heavier, as if he were struggling. “You…”
“Frank you don’t have to say this,” Vince begged. “Please, just hang up and call—”
“…you’re important to them,” Frank said, ignoring him. Vince wasn’t even sure if Frank was listening to him, if what he was telling Frank was even registering. “You’re important to them because they’ve worked at bringing you into the world for so long. And then your mother almost ruined their plans by taking you from them—”
“Frank!” Vince shouted. He closed his eyes, not wanting to hear this, knowing what Frank was going to tell him, but not wanting to hang up either.
“—but they found you, they actually found you almost ten years ago! Can you fucking believe that!”
And what Frank said about the Children finding him ten years ago stopped him. He opened his eyes, suddenly frozen. “Ten years…”
“Yeah? Can you believe that?” A hiss of pain. Vince could dimly make out the background noise of traffic. “They’ve been working at you, prepping you for ten years now.”
“Prepping me for what?”
A soft gasp, a hiss of pain. “I can’t get it to stop bleeding.” Frank’s voice broke. He began to sob. “Oh God, it really got me…”
Vince felt his chest tighten up. “What are they prepping me for, Frank?”
“You’re it,” Frank said, and Vince could barely make out what he was saying through his tears. “Just like you said… I know you weren’t serious about it at first, but in a way you were right, Vince. They didn’t bring you into this world to be the Anti-Christ, Vince… they brought you here to be the Red Opener—”
“What?” Was Frank kidding him with this shit?
“You are the Red Opener,” Frank continued. “You’re not the Anti-Christ. You’re the doorway that will allow Hanbi entry into this world.”
Suddenly, Vince’s mind went back to that day when he’d walked into his mother’s bedroom for the first time in over twenty-five years. His mind flashed on those symbols drawn in thick blood on the bedroom walls, those strange words that looked to be indecipherable gibberish and one of those words now leaped out at him. Hanbi. “I don’t know what that means,” Vince said.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” Frank began, his voice tinged with pain. “I learned some of this in my research, but I didn’t think the Children were that heavily into him. In ancient Assyrian myth, Hanbi is the father of Satan; he’s also the father of the demon Pazuzu.”
“Father of Satan? I don’t understand. How can Satan have a father? I thought he was originally an angel—”
“No! He wasn’t an angel because there’s no such thing as angels! There’s no such thing as God, either! Just shut up and listen!”
Vince held his breath and listened, his heart hammering madly in his chest.
“Hanbi is its oldest name,” Frank continued. “He’s known as Hanpa in Western Civilization. Throughout ancient history he’s been known by many names. Ancient Mesopotamia has a myth about a being called Hanbi, a creature that was mentioned in numerous oral stories. A few archeologists believe he was actually worshipped by primitive man, by Neanderthals. The Assyrians and the Sumerians had numerous gods and demons. Pazuzu was known as an evil god of the wind who brings disease to man. Belial was an evil underworld deity who became Satan in Judaism. He was also known in other Middle-Eastern cultures as Shaitan. He’s mentioned in the Book of Enoch as Satanael, the leader of the Grigori, or the Watchers… the so-called angels that became enamored with human women and came down to earth to mate with them. The ancient people of the South Pacific islands called him Dagon. The original Native Americans had a name for him too; I can’t pronounce it, and I can’t pronounce the name given to him by the ancient Europeans. Despite the different names within the different cultures, he’s the same thing.”
Vince’s mind was rebelling at the information. He tried to say something, tried to interject a word of reason, but he couldn’t.
“Hanbi’s name faded and died out as man evolved and developed a system of religion and government. In time, the religious scholars of the time took those old myths and assigned them to the evil spirit of the thing he spawned: Satan, Lucifer, Pazuzu, Behemoth, Melek Taus. The list goes on. Satan became the ultimate bogeyman for all the Abrahamic religions that sprouted up for one specific reason. To divert attention from Hanbi.”