[WARNING: While looking for a new story, you chanced upon the quaint shores and fertile pines of Delaware. But the First State and its unique hundreds are not for the feint of heart…]

Valmar, Delaware

The Creek Motel, Room 17

February 22, 1970

          “Torture be more art to them than labor, blood excites their eyes. Anything, aye, they did anything to reach the other side. Thus too, their ravenous followers who came after.”

            -Samuel Hansor, 11th letter in the Lore Theses. 

          Much to her surprise, Seraphina Quattlander found mad violence fun as hell. She fell into rumpled sheets naked, perspiring, heaving, next to the body of her victim. Women rarely entertained such a power.

          “Dead yet?” she quipped. A waving hand slithered across a nearby end table until it found a bottle of backwash infused gin and applied it to her gasping mouth. Sweat and liquor.

          The husband groaned, pitifully. This only served to enhance her euphoria. She spat the first swig of the clear liquor against the back of his coarsely shaven head. Drunken laughter. A split second later, Seraphina shoved the limp body off the stiff bed.

          “Get over it. I need breakfast.” I could get used to this.

          A huff followed by a woeful moan came out of Daniel Quattlander on the motel’s barren orange carpet. “Hurts,” he stammered. Fibers swelled fat from fresh blood.

          Seraphina finished off the bottle, rolled over to grace the table with her nostril. A snort of white. A Winston end burned by a lighter. Soft inhale. She had a sense of empowerment and felt she could truly end her spouse’s life this morning. Love and domination made the damnedest cocktail.

          “Hungry, Danny!” Small fists pounded the water bed, making it and her body undulate. “Just gonna put this out there. I got my act together a lot faster back when it was your turn.”

          Daniel, on all fours, stretched for an open first aid kit on a nearby brown chair. Good to plan ahead. But the hand trembled too much. The kit cascaded to the carpet, where he scrambled to pick up what he needed, rolling over, nude, blood forming bleak plumes at the inner left thigh before streaking away from their source.

          Skin pale.

          “Got me good,” he moaned. The right eye, swollen. A dozen cuts and welts all across his lean, muscular frame. “Didn’t think you had it in you but this–”

          Seraphina pounced toward the edge of the bed, eyes sizzling. Her left eye showing the hint of a mostly healed blackening. “I did it! And we’re in, right? We have to be in by now. We’ve done it all.”

          Bandaged up, palms reddened, a final grunt, he eyed his bride of seven years through weary eyes with absolute adornment. “That we have. Long road from Baltimore to this dump.”

          “Mm-hmm. When should it kick in?”

          He fought to stand. Slip. Fumble. Successful, Daniel arose from a hunched seating position and limped for the bathroom. “The power? Dunno. For me there were.” Pain made him woozy. “Sights? Visions? Remember Paris? I felt a strange sensation of…” he saw himself in a streaked mirror and felt futile, emasculated. Beat by a girl. You asked for it. Suck it in, Pretty Boy. Worth it if this works.

          Seraphina rolled around on the bed, laughing. “I feel it! I do! Radiant. Like the Rapture just under my skin! Holy! I might start thinking the Bible and mythologies are real.” She studied her arms, also full of faded bruises, and found them glistening. The pores gone. “Hey. There’s something, sweet, breathing on my wrists.” She writhed in ecstasy.

          He stumbled out of the bathroom and watched her. “Yeah. Like that. One of the letters detailed it, called it the First Ascension or whatever. First me. Now you. We’ve got it.” Suddenly his great pains were minimized as a high swept through him. A coke high. Alcohol buzz thrill. Uninhibited.

          “We crossed the threshold, Sera.”

          His wife, in ecstasy, saw him for but a second.

          He glanced at a table across the room where an ice bucket rested next to a series of open, faded, xanthous letters. They filled him with a perverse joy.

          “I’ll let you have your moment,” Daniel noted. Then he forced on some clothes. Blue jeans. White tee. Plain socks and loafers. A thick yellow sweater and brown jacket with broad collar, and he went out the door to hunt for his lady.

          Delaware’s low position in America allowed it to hold in all the cold a resentful Atlantic could throw at it. Daniel sported a cane as he strutted down Siconese Street. Plan ahead. The thigh jab was argued over for weeks, where to strike to inflict intense pain while missing the temporal. Boxing lessons for Sera. The coke dealers, fifty grand on various hookers they both did unspeakable acts against in order to begrime the sanctity of marriage.

          Siconese Street was a narrow lane of perfectly even sidewalks crowned in arching black iron lampposts from the baudy Victorians. Faded garland from last year’s Christmas festivities dangled from a few of them like wicker man sacrifices.

          Daniel passed a litany of local shops catering to hats and farm equipment, bridal gowns, and auto parts. 

          Verne’s Scrapple Yard summoned Daniel inside with its overpowering scents of coffee and grilled fats. 

          Two years ago I swore off meat, he thought. “Hey, I’ll take two platters, eggs over easy, toast, waffles if you got them, sausage, and the scrapple. Oh! And two coffees.”

          The gentleman behind the counter, a burly giant wearing blue denim overalls and a farmer’s tan offered a wry smile. “‘Ey there, Mans. Told you you’d like that meat, boy.”

          “Like it, yes. Still not sure what parts from the pig forms into block.” He laughed, regretted it. The pain rolled up.

          “How’s your missus doin’? She heal up fine?”

          “Yes.”

          “What about you? Face lookin’ raw. You two do any wrasslin’?” the tall man’s smile broadened.

          Daniel eyed him hard. Then, the old charm crept up, his preferred style. He matched the man’s smile. “We may have broken the bed.”

          The tall man laughed deep, resonate. “I bet you did. I bet you did that and more.”

          The meal hit the grill as Daniel watched customers, mainly from the older set, dine and gossip. Wooden beams overhead gave the place a distinct red barn appeal, along with numerous photographs of Valmar in days gone by. Pictures of serious folk leaning on automobiles. Road workers. Women dressed as witches for the old Gothic Parade.

          All of this denoted a quaintness he was unfamiliar with, having come out of old Maryland money. So odd to have found the Theses in this podunk. He thought of the years of searching for those aged papers, the money well spent. What lay ahead.

          Then the glistening of his skin from his time renewed. Daniel heaved as a sense of exhilaration took over every nerve ending. He felt empowered through weakness. Memories of the beating from Sera flashed across galvanized mind. Everything flooded in. Power and prestige. Euphoric transcendence. Affliction. Torture. Sex. A scent of bitter coffee, blood, the tangerine tint in waffles, perspiration. 

          Stress.

          Suddenly he looked out to see a new patron at Verne’s, one who sat at a rear table, someone who had never walked in. A pious soul, hunched, all in black. A face so sunken in it defied life. He eyed Daniel in a way that fixated the man, kept the two locked. Daniel noted a black bulge at that man’s feet, a slithering thing moving away from him and stretching across the old wooden floor. Coming for Daniel.

          He sensed something venomous in the shape, a toxicity formed from shadow but found himself unable to move away. His brow knotted, heart seized up like a panic attack. Everything had been right but now went horribly–

          “Here you go, Mans.”

          The flimsy flap of a weighty plastic bag hitting the counter startled Daniel. He squealed, alerting every patron to look his way.

          Leaning on the counter as if it were an altar, he noted beads of sweat hitting it. The bag. Two cups of coffee resting in a gray cardboard cup holder. Packets of Domino Sugar. Slowly whatever coil held him removed itself from around his heart and he relearned breathing.

          “You okay?”

          He could only nod.

          “Best take it easy on the missus.”

          Daniel emptied his pocket on the counter, giving the tall man more than needed for the meal. He snatched up the bag and the cup holder, and staggered out the door.

          Something’s wrong something’s terribly wrong did we miss a step can’t be I was thorough we were thorough clouded Daniel’s minds as he beat the motel door open, slamming breakfast on a circular table beside a window shrouded in tan curtains.

          “Sera!” He didn’t see her on the water bed. Her clothes were strewn about. 

          The sound of vomiting alerted him to head into the bathroom.

          “Sera?” Daniel found her curled into a fetal position, head resting on the rim of the toilet. 

          Sobbing. Mascara running. “I was fine so fine better than ever everything was golden then the room got dark and there was a huge spider on the ceiling with a man’s face and oh God!” Her upper body began to spasm, head forced up as a bluish, blackish bile erupted from Sera’s mouth to spray the toilet.

          Daniel staggered backward. He dropped the cane and sank to the carpet. Stunned. Mortified. “I. I don’t understand.”

          Sera collapsed on cold tiles. “What is happening?” Her eyes were deep shadows of water.

          Daniel looked away. Those shadows felt like venom. His mouth dried out. “Um. I.” He fought to get up and raced for the table, grabbing the old letters known to a select few as the Theses and tore them from their elderly confines. “Just let me.”

          He perused every word in a frantic, heaving pace, elegant words in old ink penned by two friends who shared a common passion. Or revulsion. 

          “Come on, Hansor and Ake, give me something to work with, dammit!” But he couldn’t find answers or a cure-all for whatever suddenly ailed them. The Theses spoke only of violations on the path to some reticent stairwell to power beyond a veil the writers termed as Antithesians.

          It was this title Daniel and Seraphina craved to own. 

          He heard his wife heaving once again, crying. Defeated, he noted his skin continued to glisten. Is this it? More agony on the road?

          No. He limped into the bathroom and hoisted Sera off the floor, grunting as the thigh roared from the added weight. Jean leg wetted.

          “Come on and get dressed. We’re going to find Ladol.”

          Sera, weak, feverish, offered a bewildered glare. “The old man we bought the last letter from? What will he do?”

          “He’d better do a whole damn lot!” Daniel groaned, anger rising. Power and terror were coursing through his veins. He would have the one. And kill the other.

1 Swedes Hill Corner Road

          There is only one domicile on Swedes Hill Corner Road, basically a gracious driveway sweeping away from the chicken plants and bungalows of Rural Route 15 up a forested hill to the sole modern home in all of Valmar.

          A red 1965 Lincoln Continental sits in the drive, ahead of a lean rectangular building straight out of Frank Lloyd Wright’’s playbook. Simple and elegant, a thing of brown wood and whitish concrete, full of long windows to capture sunlight.

          A frozen pool in the backyard offered enjoyment in hotter weather and a fair view of deep evergreen trees. Inside a glass patio, an old man lays back in a lounge chair, a pipe dangling from the mouth. A classic Victrola XII record player needled a Frank Sinatra album. ‘When Your Lover Has Gone’ off of the album In The Wee Small Hours.

          Zebedee Ladol pulled his thick sweater tighter over his old body, determined not to budge an inch this frigid day. 

          Then the doorbell rang and the friend supporting his feet departed.

          “Rufus, old man, what in the Dickens?” he complained as a surly Saint Bernard jogged for the front door. “Oh fine, who is it come bothering me in this weather?”

          Zebedee straightened an apricot ascot and strolled for the front of the house. “Coming! Coming! Hold your proverbial horses, ringing the bell like a madman.”

          The faintest crack of the door, and Zebedee was shoved aside by a man and a woman. Rufus barked old and feeble, but gave them what the dog considered to be his best work. 

“I beg your pardon!” Zebedee announced. “What is the meaning of–? Mister and Mrs. Quattlander? Is that blood? Were the two of you in a car crash?” He found himself following them in his own home as they moved into the living room.

          Daniel placed Sera on the sofa. “Enough with the Hollywood Mid Atlantic accent, Ladol!” Daniel demanded, storming with the cane for the bathroom, where he tore apart the cabinet for medical supplies.

          “Stop that! Listen here. I don’t know what’s happened, but I assure you I will be of assistance if only you would–”

          But Daniel exited the bathroom balancing bottles of pills in one hand, brandishing a Buck knife in the other. “Shut up! Sit the hell down and shut up. The Theses, how do we cure it?”

          “Cure? What in the Devil do you…oh. Oh my. You two used them? I thought you were merely collectors of rare occult lore.” Not damnable cultists.

          Daniel moved fast for his condition, aiming the knife at Zebedee. Rufus intervened.

          A weak howl of pain from an old canine filled the living room, startling the debilitated Sera. Rufus slumped over.

          “My God!” Zebedee knelt over his companion. “You criminal! He never harmed a soul.”

          The point of the blade touched the old man’s nose. “Listen you old bastard. I have always gotten what I want. Yesterday. Today. We paid a ton of money for those papers.” He tore the Theses, all six letters from the 18th century, from his pocket. “These papers and the power they hold! But something isn’t working right and now you’re going to help us reverse course. Or else.”

          Zebedee saw Sera, paler than death. His fingers felt Rufus’ chest heave for the last time. His mind assessed. “Very well. Might I observe your wife?”

          “Why?”

          “Please, sir, I had some minor medical training back in the Pacific Theater.”

          Daniel debated. Snorted. “Fine.”

          The old man got up, hands raised in submission, and approached Sera. He felt her brow, checked the pulse. “Cold. Colder than cold, actually. Has she vomited?”

          “Yes. A lot.”

          “Was it a blackish bile?”

          Daniel swallowed hard. “…yes.”

          “And before this was euphoria, an excitement of the body? Something neither drink nor drug could ever match.”

          “Heaven.”

          Zebedee caressed Sera’s face as if she were his own child. “Not even close I’m afraid, Mister Quattlander.”

          “You sold them to us!” Now Daniel was back on his feet, sweating profusely, hands shaking.

          “Sir, I sold letters to two young people enticed by old lore. Or so you told me. Had I any idea you would dare endanger yourselves by active practice of the mad scribbling along the margins of said pages such an arrangement would never have transpired. Damn August Ake and his insipid curiosity!”

          “Yes!” Daniel screeched.

          Zebedee faced him. “I see now. You wanted the ritual around the words. You crave audience with the Antithesians.” Instinct made him look around his home, suspicious of every corner and angle.

          “The ritual is to become one, old man. The Theses aren’t just historical factoids for playground magicians. They’re a blueprint to godhood. I had the Foresian Scrolls from my father. Read them all my life. They led me to the Rembault documents, the statue of thirteen bleeding eyes in Spain, here to Valmar and you. The Theses to complete a spell written across multiple works. Had to violate something utterly. Fine. We chose our marriage.”

          “Blasphemies best kept locked in a bomb shelter.”

          Daniel rushed Zebedee. “You don’t lock up power. You use it.People were agog over a trip to a dead satellite. Idiots sit home every night fearing when the Bomb will drop, or whether Commie or democratic laws will take over civilization. Who cares? With this! I’ll be the world. Laws don’t matter when you can write new forces of Nature.”

          Zebedee took a deep breath. “Forgive me, but you read without comprehension. My boy, the Antithesians are not a path to godhood. They are sellouts of the highest order, servants to a dozen plus one entities that seeped into the very fabric of the New World. Poisoners. Cannibals. Mass murderers. Rapists of every conception, direction and creed. Their power, such as it is, are sullied gifts given by those things for their allegiance to corruption. They are the most vile, contrarians who make sense of life through plague and misery.”

          “You’ve sold antiques to the rich many times. Surely you’ve seen how they got it. The money. The connections. Prestige. Everyone takes. But earthly cash and stocks only go so far. I want the cream of the universe’s crop.”

          The old man saw Sera in his hands. “And what of her? The woman you love?”

          “She’s as committed to the cause as I am. We had it all planned out. Two Antithesians. A dual ascension. Together forever. Outwit the powers that be.”

          “So you are aware. Even knowing their stories, the lives they ruined, you both raced toward the end.”

          “You mean the beginning.”

          “Oh, young man. Such powers, as those on Earth, are illusory. What they offer will come at a price you can never repay. Turn around. Go home and forget all of it. Surely you haven’t glistened yet.”

          But then he noticed her skin. And Daniel’s. Despite their pains and weaknesses, sickness and trials. The blood loss. Their pores were gone. Skin shone as starlight. Sickness bred perfection. Ambrosia in human form.

          “Dear God, no.”

          “Yes! We’re right on the precipice. But why is she sick? Why am I shaking so much? And the shadows. Why do they…is it getting dark in here?” Daniel gazed at the lamps one by one, frantic. Knife waving around. “Dark. And hot.”

          Zebedee knew the words but feared revealing them. “Sir, any and every ritual demands, in their workings, an excise. This being the grandest one I know of, well.”

          “Well!”

          “You must die to reap the benefits.” Zebedee waited for the knife to penetrate his throat. He would welcome it, the cool blade, the blackness. Anything before the Veil broke.

          “What is that sound?” Daniel danced around the living room, searching. Pacing. “Oh.”

          Zebedee chanced to remove himself from the sofa and take a look. The backyard. His pool. Frozen water. Now misty, roiling. Boiling.

          “Too late.” Terror pierced Zebedee’s heart and he ran out the front door, heedless of knife or sick woman. Daniel, preoccupied, forgot him.

          “Is this it?” Daniel wondered. He watched paint on the ceiling peel into a thousand little curls. The television came on all on its own, The Frank McGee Report blaring loudly. 

          Sera sat upright, frightened and pleasured all at once. “Is it summer? I smell strawberries.” She held her stomach and felt relieved. “Is this it?”

          “This is–” Daniel, staring at a fuming ceiling, moved backward. “Sera, move out of the living room.”

          “What? Why?”

          “Now!”

          She scurried after her husband, squealing in fright. Something fell from above in a hail of paint chips. A large mass slammed into the living room floor, setting the thin carpet to smolder and burn as the ceiling continued to peel and bubble just like the swimming pool.

          “Oh my God,” Daniel whispered.

          He witnessed a man lying there, in the way worms suddenly froth up from soil after a heavy rain. A man in ancient clothing, fanciful, dark, yet ragged and besotted and soiled. He fell face first into the carpeting as if a corpse.

          Then, the body jerked. Arms of extravagant length and two elbows each bent in inhuman ways to assist this unsightly form in rising.

          “Oh God!” Sera cried over and over as she hid, weakened, behind Daniel’s dripping, unstable leg.

          The corpse man reared up and got on his feet. He was thin in the head, bald, small in chest, but the gut was distended, swollen, things bulging as if there was a living being inside him trying to get out. He wore an outfit straight from the 17th century, frilly collar round the double chins, but filthy. Worm infested. 

          Yellowed toenails had grown through the boots, as if they had been part of the feet for ages.

          “Antithesian,” Daniel mumbled. “The first. Hue Weigh.” He could barely get the words out.

          The corpse man turned to face the sound. Here Daniel saw the fullness of death and degradation in the figure. Eyes of brightest blue smothered in bloody swells. Cracks in the skin as if it were porcelain. The bottom lip missing an inch in the center, revealing misshapen, gnarled, black teeth ground down to nubs. Nostrils fumed open and closed as if each was a lion fresh from the chase.

          It wore a waistcoat that in a better age might have been scarlet with gold trim, but now bore more detritus than style. Frills on the shirt rode all the way down the button length, wrinkled, messy. A haven for bugs and worms.

          “I prefer Gentleman of Savage Respites,” it spoke, voice crackling, as if the mouth and lungs were full of water. “Daniel Quattlander. Seraphina Quattlander. I have inhaled all your inequities and found them righteous, as tobacco smoke in the tenderloin lungs of dead children.” It paused. “Ah! Tobacco! Aye cannot ensnare such a fine repugnance out There.”

          At that the Gentleman licked his gaped open lip with a fat tongue coated in pus. 

          “We defiled the marriage bed,” Daniel announced, “to get what we deserve.” he pulled Sera up to his side, tried to make them appear presentable. “We passed the ritual. Have the sheen.”

          “Oh?” the Gentleman posed, voice oddly high in pitch.

          “Yes!”

          The Gentleman took three steps in waterlogged, squishy boots. Knuckles on the long arms dragged across the carpet. “Hath she expelled the womb yet? No birth in death.”

          “The, what?” Daniel felt Sera collapse against his shoulder as she realized what she had thrown up long before he did.

          “Oh God please too much too much make it end,” she begged.

          “Stop?” the Antithesian inquired. “All this way to sit at the crossroad of mouse and Titan. Perish the thought. Completion. Aye.”

          Sera caught her breath. “How?”

          “Be the one.”

          Her eyes glazed. So did Daniel’s. “But we’re–”

         The Gentleman of Savage Respites held up a snakish arm and a filthy hand of ruffled sleeves to stop them. “One must complete the trespass.”

          In a fierce scream and lunge Sera attacked Daniel without hesitation. It lasted for a solitary second. For he still held the knife, and he plunged it into her throat. He grabbed her with his free hand, felt her go limp. Power coursed through the veins, vengeance for the emasculation. 

          Loss over misspent love. She gargled blood, spit a little at his shocked face. Then her body slid down, down, out of Daniel’s embrace. He sank after, unblinking. Out of touch.

          “Such sacrifice,” the Gentleman grinned. “The altar to Avarice brimmeth. Stomach never filled taketh a meal.”

          Daniel never had a chance to say goodbye to his beloved partner in mysticism and shame. For the hand of the Gentleman was there, fingertip under his chin, raising the head up.

“I…needed her. This was about us. I…”

The Veil ignored such human niceties.

          “Daniel Quattlander, I dub thee an antithesis to what the Holy hath wrought. Come. Walk with us through a field of deadlights and human caviar.”

          Daniel, face marred by tears and confusion, “H-how?”

          “By suffering the change.”

          Fingers pulled on Daniel’s handsome face, stretching flesh beyond the limitations of design.

          Daniel Quattlander’s screams wobbled the long windows. Pool water boiled away into the atmosphere. Seraphina expired. Blood met tile. 

          The Veil tattered.

          Zebedee Ladol raced as best he could for the Lincoln. But the key turning in the ignition did nothing.

          “Damnation and hellfire,” he quipped. “Too close to the Splinter.” Huffing and wishing he never had to force a run, he moved down the now extensive driveway as road, cursing for ever knowing anything about the Out There.

          In his mind he felt he would reach Route 15 and hail a passing vehicle. Fetch a ride into town proper. Call a friend. Purchase a plane ticket to India. Remain gone for a decade. Assuming, of course, he had even another day of life left in him.

          Why me oh God why need to get away from here house is tainted now ruined done in forever!

          He walked fast, then slowed to a manageable pace. But the dark shadows creeping moved along the pines on either side of this isolated roadway. He felt them crawling sideways, pouncing across the woods. It would contaminate the area for hours before the fiends would finally be called back to that fetid placenta which claimed them.

          At last, he stopped to catch a breath. That’s when he heard it. A mouth making sucking sounds, breathing like an asthmatic.

          All tucked inside a woman’s laugh.

          Zebedee studied the treeline until he found her, a stunted woman shrouded under branches and layers of tatterdemalion cloaks and unreachable darkness. He could only make out a mouth grinning, every tooth pierced with rusted rings. 

          “Softest Aphra,” he stated, a tinge of quiver in the voice. “Betrayer! Skinned a hundred women to clothe your demonic bed!”

          “Silence,” she rasped out, “feeble town crier, he who screams danger and beggeth awareness from a race with neither ears nor eyes.”

          “Your race, you mean?” He found strength to raise both hands, deftly motion a half dozen signs, fingers twitching like mad.

          “Wards?” she seethed.

          “The finest I know. Stay away from me. I did not summon the Fervent.”

          “Cretin. Magic and mine own heart share a commonality. Both lie. You live this day, save one condition. Taketh this proclamation to those who hear, and savor thy escape. Write a new thesis.”

          A wicked dread pierced his abdomen, as if his heart sank into the stomach and was immediately digested. He felt powerless. Exposed. Unable to do anything except submit. “…yes?”

          Her head raised, revealing a neck covered in red fingerprints, the marking of near infinite lovers she let choke her into Ascension. “Hail, hail, keeper of the inane. Gouge out another shard from the broken vessel called Mankind. This day, a new abhorrence learns to crawl between truculent Veils and suckle from the scurvy breasts of human agonies.”

          Zebedee dithered. Knees knocked together, arms rigor mortis. Bowels tried to expunge as she, Aphra, left the woods to approach the old man. Close. Closer. Death touch chill. Grinding brown teeth and rings clicking next to a fevered earlobe.

          “The Mire Of Matrimony is born.”

          And just as sudden as twilight is swallowed by Night, he stood alone, helpless, on Swedes Hill Corner Road outside of taciturn Valmar, wondering what became of the couple left behind and if he would make it to the inhabited world beyond this vaunted wood.

E N D ?