“What He’s planned!” This from one of the nameless men. He looked solemn, serious. “No more, no less.”
Vince’s eyes darted along the sea of faces, still not believing what was happening. How could this have gone on for so long and he not know anything? Brian and Kimberly Denison… Tracy Harris… he saw her now for who she really was; he saw that long ago lover he’d had in Diana Roberts perfectly in her. A change in hairstyle, a slight gain in weight, a change of clothing and make-up style.
“Of course, God doesn’t remember,” the old man continued. “He might as well not even exist. In fact, he hasn’t existed in many trillions of years. He was rendered old and blind and a babbling, senile idiot long before the creation of the universe set things in motion.”
“I… I don’t understand,” Vince said. “How…” He looked at Tracy, trying to comprehend what was happening.
As if reading his thoughts, Samuel Garrison said, “Diana was the test. We’d been looking for you for a long time, and when the Dark Father gave us Diana, we sent her out in the world to find you. And she did.”
Vince looked at the old man, his eyes widening in horror. “What?”
Samuel Garrison smiled, his face beaming with pride and satisfaction. “Obviously you thought she was a real woman. The Dark Father granted us a Succubus that He knew would draw you out, and it did. And once it found you we called her back… then sent her back out under a slightly different persona. You know this second version as Tracy Harris.”
Succubus? Wasn’t that a female demon? A demonic seducer of men? Vince looked at Tracy, his face contorted in dawning shock and horror as she smiled seductively at him. “The hardest part was walking away from you and having to give you up for ten years.” She laughed. While her voice still contained the timbre of a normal laugh, there was something behind it that sounded inhuman, like the throaty laugh of a creature from the depths of hell.
“You can’t be serious,” Vince said, tearing his eyes away from Tracy and turned back to Samuel Garrison. His brain commanded his feet to move! Run! But they wouldn’t budge; they were rooted to the floor.
“All the memories you have been reliving are real, Andrew,” Samuel Garrison said. “Everything that feels like it was a dream really happened. It’s your subconscious bringing them back to the surface; it’s your memory being allowed free reign again.”
“I don’t understand,” Vince said, his voice cracking as he looked at Brian Dennison, tried to see the friend he’d known and loved for eleven years. The man that Vince knew as Brian Dennison was long gone; either that, or the man he was now looking at, the man that now smiled at him with a look of malevolence, had been there the whole time, lying to him.
“Your mother took you from us years ago, Andrew,” Samuel Garrison resumed. “But we knew you would come back to reclaim what’s yours.”
“The Kingdom is yours, Andrew,” Brian said. His eyes were locked on Vince’s; his angular, handsome features were now menacing, yet triumphant. Kimberly beamed beside him. “You are the gateway. Once you’ve fulfilled your duty, you will be rewarded like no other human being on earth.”
Vince’s mind was a rustling vortex. He felt his emotions crumble. A tear slid down his cheek as he saw his memories rush by in a whirlwind; his mother, memories of his upbringing, his years in Pennsylvania, the fights with his mother over her increasingly strict Christian ways (she knew, she knew the whole time and that’s why she turned so Christian, she knew what I was and she didn’t want to kill me, she wanted to save me, she thought that by saving me it would thwart His plans), his flight to California, graduate school, his marriage to Laura, his friendship with Brian, whom he thought was his friend. More tears slid down his cheek. His voice cracked. “What’s happening? I still don’t understand.”
Tracy stepped forward and now she was holding him and he was letting her. His mind wasn’t even registering what he already knew about her, that she wasn’t even human. His senses weren’t even registering the faint scent of brimstone and rot that seemed to permeate from her pores, the heat that radiated from her body as she took him in her arms, pressing him close to her. He didn’t resist as he felt himself lust for her, felt his penis rise to the occasion. He felt another flush of heat rise through his groin as she placed her lips to the cusp of his ear and began to whisper to him, and what she whispered to him was what he’d been thinking for the past week, not seriously, but as a bad joke. It had all seemed like a bad joke back then, even when he’d brought it up to Frank Black. Now the bad joke was not only confirmed as being real, it was real.
“Your mother took you from us,” Tracy whispered, her voice deep and ancient and evil. “We didn’t foresee that; your mother’s state of mind hid that from even Sam. She’d been gone for over a week by the time her husband came home, and by then she’d erased her tracks. They went crazy looking for you—after all, you’re the Dark Prince, the Red Opener, who will allow the Dark Father into this world to reclaim it for us and defeat the lowly prince of hypocrisy. You were our only hope, we couldn’t let Maggie bring us down. Satan promised he would bring you back; as your father, He saw this as an opportunity to expose you to the world, to allow your mind to develop on its own. Sam was wary, but he allowed it. The dark seed was planted inside you, and we knew it would grow, that it would need time to grow, that there was no fertilizer better than His Kingdom, what god gave him when he cast our Father into the pits of hell.”
Samuel Garrison continued. “On your twenty-second year, we conjured a Succubus from bodily fluids that we preserved from some clothes your mother left behind when you fled. She was designed for the purpose of zeroing in on you, and it didn’t take long. She located you here, in Orange County, and we couldn’t have been more delighted.” He laughed; it sounded like hot coals being rustled by a barbecue stick. “I knew then that the Dark Lord had kept his promise; He’d protected you; His guiding hand had led you back to your birthplace.”
“We worked at bringing you back into the fold,” Brian Dennison continued the narrative. Vince felt the walls close in on him as the nightmare unfolded. “Once Diana learned your name, it was easy to find your mother. It turned out that in the end her loyalty to us won out. She could have killed you hundreds of times after she took you, but she didn’t. She let you live because deep down, she knew that this was what her blind, idiot god wanted.”
“No,” Vince said, shaking his head.
“When we found you, I came in to your life and offered you the position at Corporate Financial, which is actually a front company for our global expansion. And through it all we groomed you for your future position as the years went by. Rituals were held, sacrifices made for the Lord of Darkness to protect you and give you strength. You learned fast. Rituals were performed to awaken your memories on your thirty-third birthday, a magical year for us because it coincides with Christ’s thirty-three years on earth. You would achieve magical powers on this year in your life. All that was needed was to bring Diana back in to your life as Tracy. She worked in protecting and guiding you. We knew there might be danger, and there was. Those assassination attempts… you thought that was us?” Brian shook his head, chuckling, a slight grin on his face. “That was the work of a defector of The Children of the Night, a member who knew of His plans. A renegade Christian cult that thought they could go against their god’s plan by killing the Anti-Christ. What fools!” Brian shrugged, his eyes glimmering. “After introducing Tracy back into your life, it was a simple matter of taking your mother out once and for all and then—”