The Haunts

Fear turns brazen men into fools. Cailleach Bhéarach didn’t expect Levy to get a good grab of Corvus’ dagger. She was too busy messing with his head by trying to confuse the poor young man by intimidating him, thus taking her time to torment him. She wanted to give Fellman a chance to recuperate before slipping off the roof of his squad car. He’d stumbled over to reach the front entrance. Then to the living room. Where he’d make Levy the sorriest son-of-a-bitch in history. But Levy wouldn’t wait for that to happen. Fear prompted just enough adrenalin to get a good grip on Corvus’ dragon-toothed dagger and then escape.

He couldn’t wait for help. Cailleach Bhéarach had tricked him too many times. Levy had to distance himself from her as far as humanly possible. He stabbed the empty air with the blade, cutting through both time and space, attempting to escape through the Haunts. Levy ripped a hole just wide enough to slide through, and he didn’t care if he got lost again. He just needed an exit. So as he pushed through the split between worlds, something grabbed onto his leg and held it tight as he tried to crawl away.

Shit! Levy fell onto his stomach and turned around to find the Hag’s hand pulling on the heel of his leg to yank him back into the earthen realm. Freaking out, Levy tried to kick her hand with his other foot, but it didn’t help. She crawled in after him. If this continues, he hyperventilates; she’ll be in, and then I’ll be in big trouble. Terror gripped him, and all the while she fed off it in waves.

“I’m coming for you.” She first cackled and then squealed a shrieking laugh that made Levy cringe. With the blade still in his hand, he slashed it across her face, causing her to retreat. To his astonishment, he had sliced clean off the tip of her nose. The blade in his hand glowed a bright blue as it melted her unnatural flesh. He hacked downwards to ensure that she’d let go, and, in doing so, he had cut her left arm clean off from the elbow. Levy felt her grip on his leg slacken, but the severed arm still held on. Levy sliced at the limb. By the time it let go, it didn’t resemble an arm. Cailleach Bhéarach’s limb crumbled away, became ashes, and then blew apart.

Levy stared at how quickly she fell apart, thinking to himself, that was too easy. He glanced up at the tear between realms. Saw that she was whole again, smirking. The hag god created an illusion of herself to seem genuine enough.

“Not so easy to kill me, hey!” the Cailleach Bhéarach cackled as she retreated into the seam Levy had made.

Levy rushed towards the sea. With the side of the blade, he swished it downwards like a trowel. Within seconds, the major part of the tear between the two realms had sealed off. In one tear through time and space, Levy spotted Cailleach having a tantrum.

“I shall find you!” Cailleach Bhéarach clawed at the empty air. “No matter where you go, I shall seek you out, and then I shall destroy you! Do you hear me, boy? I will gut you like a caught fish with my bare hands, then grind you into a paste, and then bathe in your blood!”

Levy fell on his back. He glance at the pockmarked seam and turned away. Too exhausted to run.

As he went to exit, he noticed a crowd gathering in the surrounding shadows. A blazing fire behind them gave a sinister and foreboding feel to the whole encounter. Levy staggered upward and tightened his grip on the dagger. The hag god did not haunt this spot. In fact, the place smelled considerably nicer than his own world. He looked around and got his bearings. This place reminded him of the time when he and his Grandma had gone camping near a crystal-clear lake, far from any village or rural town. The freshness you’d never find in a city full of smokers, the heart-clogging smell of car exhaust, or skies stained by smog This place smelled like a sweet paradise. In his attempt to escape with his life and keep his balls intact, Levy must’ve used Corvus’ dragon-toothed blade to slice clean through into another whole new world, one perhaps far younger than his own and nothing at all like the Haunts.

Neither Guilbert nor Corvus had ever mentioned anything other than the Haunts; Levy contemplated as he stood his ground, but felt like he wanted to fall over. Those in the shadows drew closer. They stood around the young man with the glowing blue blade in his hand.

“Stop right there!” Levy points with his blade and says, “Don’t make me use this on you!”

A bold stranger, perhaps the leader of the group, withdrew from the shifting shadows dressed in a monk’s hooded habit made of coarse burlap. Only the individual’s face wore a white wooden mask with narrow slits for the eyes and mouth. A religious symbol was finger-painted burgundy on its forehead. His flesh looked dark, like the surrounding night.

“Behold!” He turned to his people. “The blessed one stands before us!”

“Blessed one?” Levy positioned his ear toward the preacher as if he hadn’t heard him right.

“Look!” another pointed out. “He has the mark on his hand!”

“Then he’s a holy man,” someone else said.

“What now?” Levy glanced behind him at the cheese-holed entrance on the other side. He imagined the hag god watching him through the holes, whispering the vilest things she would do to him, cursing his very existence. Levy should remain in this place. He needed to see if this realm was worse than his own. If that were the case, he’d have to return to his own reality. If he wanted to defeat Cailleach Bhéarach, that is.

The leader of the group drew close and looked over the dimly glowing dragon-toothed blade.

“Such a curious weapon you’ve got there, blessed one.” He reached out to touch it.

Levy stepped back, saying, “Anyone that touches my blade will suffer the consequences.” He eyed the man’s hands, and in the flickering light of a distant fire, he noticed how strangely the leader’s hands had moved. As though stacked like a plant’s roots.

What’s the deal with that? Levy squinted as he gazed around in the dim light. How many of them are there?

The Leader of the group, who had bent low, tilted his wooden mask up at the warrior and nodded in agreement. “Yes, we’ve all here sinned. The slits on his wooden mask glowed like hot coals.

“Which is why we have been expecting you, oh blessed one; we know you will set us free!” One woman in the group clapped. The slits in her mask glowed with heat.

“Yes, come along with us! Come, set us free!” The rest that hid in the shadows chorused in unison.

Levy eyed the group of worshippers as he limped along. His eyes fell on their legs, and he noticed they were all joined like the roots of a tree that had strange, snake-like scales instead of the texture of wood. In the distance, a furnace of fire and light came from within the land—a Hellfire that fuelled such unnatural heathens to wander the earth by luring warriors to their demise. Levy’s blessed hand had never stopped glowing since he leaped into their world, and now it was burning as bright as a torchlight. So when he held his hand up in the air, it had become a beacon of holy light.

The crowd that had gathered around him looked composed of an elaborate system of roots from a most unnatural pine tree that towered into the night sky and dangled silky pod-like cocoons from its branches. Some of which had broken open and showed human remains.

“What are you?”

They said in unison, “We are the Pinacae!” As they shrank from the light.

Their subhuman bodies, composed of black roots and sharp thorns, started to whither. They screamed, and once they opened their mouths, the mask moved too. Showing zigzagged wooden teeth, and their eyes glowed like hellfire. “The light!” They said in unison, “It burns!”

“What the heck?” Levy was aghast. With the flick of his hand on Corvus’ dagger, something unexpected occurred. The dragon tooth blade elongated until it had become a sword with jagged edges that gave it a most menacing appearance.

Levy smirked and looked back up at the Pinacae as they surrounded him.

Levy gripped hard on the handle, prepared for what would happen next. Tired of being in fear. Tired of being the victim? Levy looked to retaliate. A part of him wished he had known about the dagger-to-sword thingy before his arrival. It might’ve given him an incentive to reconcile his differences with the Cailleach Bhéarach in his world.

This might be the training Corvus and Guilbert kept badgering me about. Levy swung his blade over and split the leader of the group in two. An explosion of hot sap splattered upon his clothes. But he didn’t care.

For the first time in Levy’s miserable life, he felt liberated. For once, he was alive and driven with purpose!