“You’re not making sense,” Vince finally said.
“There’s a book called the Liber Daemonorum,” Frank continued. “I thought it was bullshit when I first stumbled on this thread. Thought it was a bunch of Lovecraft crap, but apparently even H. P. Lovecraft built his mythos and his fictional book The Necronomicon off the mythos of ancient Mesopotamian myth and legend. The Liber Daemonorum is the oldest and most rarest book on black magic ever compiled. There’s a French translation from 1328 or so, by Protassus, but it’s based on fragments from ancient Mesopotamia and Sumeria… in the ancient Sumer language as well as another language… one that is still unknown to modern man. The Liber Daemonorum is the most recent reference to Hanbi we have. Protassus claimed to have had access to older manuscripts, including one in Arabic, which had been translated from Sumerian. The Children of the Night… they went back there in ’65… went to Iraq and came back with ancient Sumerian artifacts. Those artifacts were probably those missing fragments!”
“This is crazy,” Vince said.
Frank coughed and Vince could sense he was struggling, but he continued on. “Long story, short, The Children of the Night have reached all the way back from beyond the Dark Ages. Yes, they’re descendants of the old Devil cults of medieval Europe, but they used their reach and their influence to locate a copy of the Liber Daemonorum and the missing Sumerian fragments. They used these to set things in motion… to bring Hanbi back into this world. And the only way to do that is through a half-demon half-human hybrid.” Frank’s voice became a parched croak. “You.”
“I thought you said I wasn’t the Anti-Christ!”
“And like I said, you’re not. Remember the soul-cracking your mother went through? You were the reason for that… to bring something through… so it would inject a bit of itself into the child that was growing in her womb.”
“Where’s Mike?” Vince asked.
“He’s dead,” Frank said. “They’re going to make it seem like he went crazy, raped and killed his granddaughter, then killed himself.”
“What?” Vince’s stomach plunged down an elevator shaft.
“Turn on the news. It’s already starting.”
Vince went into the living room and snatched the television remote. He turned on the TV, still talking to Frank. “What got you, Frank? How badly are you hurt?”
“Pretty fucking bad, buddy,” Frank wheezed.
Vince switched to a local news channel and for a moment was confused by what was on. He was watching a live feed from somewhere in Huntington Beach. A middle-aged woman with blond hair and pleasant features was weeping. “I never thought,” the woman sobbed, tears streaming down her face. “I never thought he’d be capable of this… of doing this to a little girl!”
The camera cut away to the newscaster in the studio who updated the viewing audience that a man authorities were identifying as Michael Peterson had killed himself by slicing his throat open with a broken mirror shard after killing his three-year old granddaughter. Vince gasped. “He what??”
“Don’t believe a word she says,” Frank said. “She did it. She orchestrated it. She was one of them the whole time and Mike never knew it.”
Mike’s wife Carol one of them? How was that possible? Had she been a cult member this whole time? A sort of sleeper-cell-like cult member waiting for the right time to obey the commands of the unknown shadowy figures of the organization? “What happened to you guys, Frank? Tell me.”
“We dropped everything off with Billy and went to Mike’s house to get… to get pictures of his kids,” Frank said, his voice wheezing. “We were going to disappear. Billy was going to help. But they beat us to it. They were at the house, waiting. They’d just performed a ritual and… something came out… something came out and ripped me open.”
“Listen to me,” Vince said. “Stay where you are, I’m coming to get you.”
“It came so fast,” Frank continued, babbling now. “It ripped me open and I laid there on the floor and watched as it possessed Mike, made him cut his throat and then… I don’t know how, but I got away. They were still performing the ritual as I crawled away. I saw the book… the Liber Daemonorum saw the words they’d written on the wall and that’s when I knew. I should have paid attention better! Should have… realized what they were up to.”
“Tell me where you are,” Vince begged. “I’m coming to get you.”
“Don’t let yourself be led to them, Vince. Don’t let them find you. They’ve got… something horrible in store… for…” Frank’s voice grew weak.
“What? What do they have in store for me?” Vince was agitated. Now he was on his feet, ready to go.
“Not for you…” Frank’s voice trailed to a weak whisper. “…the… world…”
“Frank?”
The hiss of an open line.
“Frank?”
With panic rising, he jabbed the hang-up button. His nervous system was on edge. He hesitated, frozen, not knowing what to do. Not knowing what he could do. The only thing he could think of doing was calling 911.
He hit the 911 button on his cellular, then Send. When the 911 Operator got on the line, Vince got right down to business. “I just got a call from a friend of mine who says he called me from a phone booth in Fountain Valley. He told me he was hurt, but before he could tell me exactly where he was, I lost the connection.”
The sound of fingers typing on a keyboard. “And your friend called you at this number?”
“Yes.”
“Is this a cell phone, sir?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t trace cell phone calls, sir, but one of our 911 operators just took a 911 call from somebody reporting an injured man lying in a phone booth on the corner of Brookhurst and Talbert.”
Vince checked his pockets to make sure his wallet was there, then headed outside, locking the door on the way out. He got in his car, keeping the phone to his ear as he started his car. “That’s it. He said he was hurt and that he was bleeding. Can you send—”
“We’re sending a unit right now,” the 911 operator said.
By the time Vince zoomed out of his cul-de-sac his heart was racing, and his mind was clouded with a thousand thoughts and images, all careening madly from the past and racing towards the present.
Chapter Twenty-two
IT TOOK HIM twenty minutes to drive from Newport Beach to Fountain Valley; there had been a traffic jam on Harbor Boulevard from a three car accident, and Vince found himself boxed in, unable to move forward. By the time he was able to inch his way around the accident along with everybody else, he realized that by now Frank would be at the hospital. As he raced up Harbor Boulevard toward the 405 Freeway, he wondered what hospital Frank would be taken to. The only hospital he could think of was Fountain Valley General, which was just across the street from the phone booth he’d called from. How convenient for Frank to have called within close vicinity to an Emergency Room.
When Vince pulled into the parking lot of Fountain Valley General, he squealed to a stop and rushed out of the car toward the Emergency room. He was panicky and out of breath, but he was also worried.
He was standing at the Emergency room entrance, not even paying attention to the traffic of patients and doctors and orderlies moving back and forth past him. He came out of his semi-trance-like state and moved over to the registration desk. An overweight black woman glanced up at him with wide eyes. “Help you?”