THE RED WAKE

Chapters 41&42

The guest speaker was a trickster who sometimes wore the guise of a giant possum, one with extraordinarily sharp teeth.

Pitch extended his hands over the heads of the panicked congregation. And as the doors to the chapel slammed shut and locked themselves, the good people of Persephone learned too late that nowhere on Earth was safe from the dark beyond their little Redwood paradise.

And as the screaming began, the soon to be dead townspeople of Persephone learned that their time, as well as their luck, had just run out.

*

He subjected them to their worst nightmares before he slaughtered them. For some that meant sudden blindness, the dismemberment of a loved one, the rape-torture of a parent or spouse. Pitch delved into the minds of each of the humans gathered before him, finding that which terrified them the most, while the headless body of the local Holy Man stood by, a macabre observer to the slaughter.

The humans had been immobilized by his will, immobilized by his power. As he drew sustenance and life from the anguish of each man, woman and child, Pitch slew every one in turn, until not one human being from Persephone California remained alive to tell the tale.

Afterward, he opened the doors of the old church to greet the things that had crept and slouched their way through the night to meet their new Lord. As he stood in the doorway of the old church, the sounds of his new army greeted his ears. A shuffling, moaning cacophony of the damned echoed through the night air from the hordes of twisted figures that surrounded the silent town of Persephone.

There was a noise behind him. With a leer, Pitch turned as the body of the Holy Man stumbled and fell over a pew and out of sight. As if they had been awakened by the scuffling sounds as the shaman's feet kicked and drummed against the floor, the violated bodies of the murdered citizens of Persephone slowly began to rise to their feet.

Five hundred corpses rose like Lazarus and shuffled silently, obeying Pitch's will like loathsome marionettes, out into the night to join the hundreds of undead that awaited them.

Pitch did not address his army. They were dead, resurrected and enslaved to his will by the darkest necromantic Arts. As he stepped out into the night, Pitch expanded the scope of his command, increased the strength of his Summoning. Thanks to the invasion, and the power of his enemies, the dead were plentiful wherever he walked. They would answer his silent call as long as their bodies remained intact. They would act as his thralls, his spies.

They would kill in his name, and their murdered victims would rise, compelled from the realm of Death itself by the power he wielded, spreading carnage as he willed.

Overhead, the blackening sky split open, and thunder pealed like the ring of Judgment Day. And even miles away, the plentiful dead screamed as his strength flowed out over the land and forced them into a blasphemous parody of life.

His power would no longer be denied.

As he placed his feet upon the road once more, Pitch felt the Summoning's terrible call grow as more and more of the undead shambled out of the dark to join his army of the night. Soon the countryside was filled with the animal groans and screams of the damned.

He headed west, toward the fulfillment of his heart's desire. And in his wake nearly two thousand reanimated corpses shuffled behind him. Pitch walked on, laughing into the night, a depraved Pied Piper, playing a song only the dead could hear. Behind him he left a silent Hamlet fit only for ghosts.

         *****

                                                                    CHAPTER 42