THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 3 by CHARLES E.J. MOULTON (ereader that reads to you .txt) 📕

forest was still lit by a full moon. The Rumzils were still circling the muddy pathway and, God bless, not daring to enter the road. The ghouls were still flying around his head making him spin. The fire was still throbbing in his brain. He was still very frightened. The forest was still dark and he still hoped that he and all of them could be all right once he got out of this. Had this experience a minute ago just been an exorcism?
He was more worried than ever now, but relieved that it was over. But he was afraid that this relief would turn into fear and rage of having conjured up bad things. He had, due to Lucinda, been a victim of compulsion for so long that he was used to finding things that did not exist.

Then, at once, he saw it.
The cave.
Bloody and plagues by hell raisers, his soul full of scars and and his heart beating, he stood and looked at it. He had never been here and yet he knew the place. Its entrance so familiar. Its shape like an old friend waiting for him to come and say hello.
He looked inside and saw the cave walls covered with blue moss.
There seemed to be a bright light coming from down where the path ended after a long curve.

Alexander Winsletenna stepped off his horse and lead it, along with himself toward the goal of his journey, realizing himself to be at the zenith of his powers, at the peak of his fears and at the climax of his entire spiritual trip.

He was about to duel inside the abyss.


CHAPTER SEVEN

DUEL IN THE ABYSS


Night time, A.D. 1430, The Forest of Western Callenia, Nocturania

The Rumzils had not been out for eons until this night. They had hid underground in their holes, victimizing carefully chosen suspects, like Oleana van Ochsenskjöld, with their large mouths and eager eyes. Their obscenely large faces grinned with one hundred brown fangs, their tousled hair and half-meter frame waddling, crawling, in order not to be discovered by the black rider on his blue horse. Only the spies, those invisible terrorists capturing them and dragging them down, had not come up for air ... until now. And they were not the only ones lingering about.
The worlds and levels of creations as they knew them were breaking up and mingling about, time shifting about. Creation knew that everything was as stake here and so, like a nervous child, it danced about, as a worried youngster would, waiting for its mother to grant it a piece of sugar candy. The gypsies were returning, the animals of the night popping up from their hibernation into the blue-grey shadows of west Callenia. If this was granted continuation, complete anarchy would be result.
Everything good would fight against everything evil without mercy.
It was a race against time in a timeless world that was speeding up immensely.
The forest seemed to live and breathe death that night as he rode. For the one eyed rider, calmly unsettled in saddle, who rode his dark-blue stallion past the rushing foliage of his close vision, was galloping at breakneck speed to revanquish his master’s victim and save what he could of himself.
There was a wave like quality to the black silk cape as it fluttered behind him in its own breeze. It looked like a stormy sea whereupon demons would ride, barely staying alive. A sea which from afar did not even recognize the presence of living creatures. But they were there. Oh, yes. They were in that black sea, screaming for help just like humanity was trapped in its momentary amnesia. A species that tried to trap the demons imprisoned in the engulfing abyss hoping for mercy, evil and good intertwined in one family.
This night, for good or ill, would determine the victor of creation’s greatest battle.

The cave had been empty now for exactly 6537 years. Ever since he had escaped his cage in 5107 B.C. he had been on the run. When mankind already had been around for a while, rats doing his work and the white one sleeping his eternity away, mankind’s destiny was determined only within the grasp of its own venture. But now, in 1430 A.D., a battle was being fought that could change the course of it all for the better, or for the worse.
And the road that one of them had walked and rode, crawled and ran more like it, now for quite a long time had led him to an underground lake whose white child lay, head lolled back against the stone, golden brown hair swimming in the water like it had now for exactly 7540 years, a non-existent sub angel lurking in the corner of the evil eye.

Right opposite it hung a cage from the cave roof. It was long, rusty and only bent open in two places. The place where evil had resided once for one-thousand years. Alex looked around and was amazed at how much of all this he could see in spite of how deep below the earth he was. There was the blue moss and there was that strange light coming from the end of the tunnel river. It seemed to part in two directions at the end and a light seemed to be shining from above it.
Was that a hum he heard? What was that hum? From where did it come? He did not know that.
Mercutio was shifting from hoof to hoof and it was obvious that he was nervous.
Alexander had heard the entire story, of course.
The story of how he had been encaged.
The story of how he had broken out and how he had been a recluse ever since.
That was the real thing, was it not?
The first archangel’s real prison.
He shuddered at the thought.
The sound of the iron chain creaking and squeaking and rocking back and forth as it hung from the cave ceiling was only accompanied by another sound: the dropping of melting ice water from the walls. It all made Alexander realize where he was. In that famous cave that was created as an oasis, but that in the end became what he saw it as today: a twilight zone gateway between heaven and hell.
It all made him realize that he was ending a very long journey. A journey that, for him at least, had begun 1392. This journey had, however, begun way before man ever was chosen to walk the earthly spheres. It had begun a long time ago.
The cage hung from one large iron chain that seemed to steady every one of its movements. Alexander looked at the cage and found it quite hard to imagine anyone, even a demon, living there for a thousand years, let alone with a rat as a companion. The cave walls oozed drizzle and the two silhouettes, the cage and the dead angel, lead the eyes to the January tunnel who’s deceiving and discount light showed the way toward two entrances, from where the apprentice would soon arrive in a canoe of Hustilar-wood rowed by the bony hands of Charon.
How did he know this?
The angels, his angels, were telling him so.

The light was strong and the tunnel longer than first appearance. As the traveller, on whose shoulders all of this rested, watched it, his white stallion unsteadily shifting from hoof to hoof, he realized that his family's, nay his country's entire destiny, rested solely on his success or failure tonight. Ever since that day so many years ago when she had disappeared he sensed that this day was going to come. Now it was here. It all depended on tonight.
And was he scared? How strange, he thought. No, he wasn’t scared at all. He had never felt so calm.

A black rider was riding thru the darkness of the Nocturanian Forest that final night, his sinister silk cape fluttering in the breeze, his long black mane flying, his temple hair haphazardly swaying in the breeze.
His one eye desperately staring, wincing in an attack wind coming from the galloping horse's acceleration. Staring at the leaf covered path, he tried not to get distracted by the nervous hooves of this age-old stallion. It desperately left a trail of mud and dust behind it, which in the light of the full moon looked like waves of darkness spilling across the path into the bleakness of the Rumzil territory.
The rider’s other eye, or the hole where its’ ball should've had its home was covered with an eye patch. It bore an upside-down cross sown on its black surface in gold and red, reminding the bearer of that strange encounter so many years ago. Against a canvas of bleak, naked trees that spoke of nothing but death that night, the forest looked hollow. The light of the moon shone upon the trees with eerie fashion, creating shadows that seemed topsy-turvy, strange and ghoulish.
As the rider galloped past the ever dark grey-blue foliage of the nightmarish forest here in Callenia a Rumzil popped out from behind a tree and giggled and soon enough others imitated the leader.
The Rumzils always appeared in little groups of three or four above ground and there was always a leader among them. That beast was no different than the others, but his eyes, or rather the behaviour of the other Rumzils, showed his prime position. Once they waddled out toward the coming victims, the arms, long enough before, extended and the fingernails buried deep into the throat of the victim, like they had with another human, a girl, who now rested in lack of peace in the pits of Rumzilian bowels.
The black rider tried hard to see where the path lead, the darkness almost complete and somewhat eerie, even for this man. The path twisted and turned in every direction and the rushing foliage past his eyes confused his concentration. But while the Rumzils waddled quickly behind the rider, his ultimate goal was indisputable: Yambalah. The cave of original sin where that last duel would take place in less than one minute and ironically named after God's original nickname of his son. The Loved One.
The man's bony grey fingers moved constantly, clutching the horse, and both the nostrils of the man and the blue stallion's were flaring. Their muscles moved in unison with the dark stars and the dirt beneath their gallop. The man's leather, metal-studded uniform stuck out against the light-brown, bluish dark surface that was these Callenian Woods. No one, except the man in the cave, of course, who had arrived before him, would've been so foolhardy as to enter the forest where it counted, let alone here. Not only the Rumzils but the werewolves and the ghouls as well as many other creatures would be too dangerous for any man's mind to stand.
The man was anonymous to the Rumzils, at least here. This place was not of this world. His history, though, had been more glorious than his faded desperation now proved to be. But when the good man, who now stood silently watching an underground lake unknowingly was pursued by a black rider who inspired had reclaimed his fate, back then his spirit had rode away. He was leaving his own flesh and blood bleeding on the floor of the royal palace and the dark man now on his way holding his one eye in his hand, Lucifer smiling gently and patching him up with the Antichrist.