October 18, 1957
Hans Rupert Gustavson III reached out nervously for the
doorknob of the oldest house in Stull, Kansas. “Trey," as his family called him, breathed in shortly
and swallowed hard as he pushed his weight against the enormous white oak
frame. The cool night air vacuumed in at the sides and underneath the door,
as if the house inhaled for the first time in decades. A wincing squeak
from the door broke the dead silence within. The small 8-year-old took a
moment to focus on the task at hand.
It had been two days since Greta came to him with a small
brass bird she had taken from this very home. She was so excited when she
showed him the prized trophy proving that she had been the first to do what
they had been talking about since they moved into town two weeks prior. The
gauntlet had been thrown. Trey felt, threatened with embarrassment, that he
didn’t have much of a choice in visiting the dilapidated building himself, so
tonight he made a jailbreak. After all, this was the first real sense of
excitement he had felt since they moved. A cross look on his face, he mustered
the courage to enter, galvanized by the feeling that he would not be bested by
a girl, especially his twin sister. Trey clicked his flashlight on, determined
to find some kind of souvenir proving that he had also crossed this threshold
into darkness. He played the beam around the entryway.
Dust covered everything in this place. The large foyer led
to an elegant dining room to the left, a sitting room to the right, and an
eerie stairway leading up right in the middle. A short hallway leading true center
continued into darkness. Brass candelabras and matching sconces hung on the
wall, dim and austere. The floor creaked under his weight with each tentative
step. Strange paintings were all over the walls: royal figures with chalices
and swords, magic wands and weird beasts. Some were violent, some scary. Each
painting seemed to have a certain portent about it. They looked like they could
have been drawn by either a skilled artist or some kind of weirdo. This one
showed a man hanging upside-down, by one foot. This other one showed two naked
people standing under an angel with strange hair. Another showed the same two
people, this time with horns, standing under a great winged demon with menacing
horns, an upside-down star on his forehead. Creepy. The flashlight beam
wandered around the house until it scooted down the hall and he saw something
that made him start.
At the end of the hall was a portrait of a giant horrible
black tower set ablaze. It sat in an ornately carved frame on the wall, this
blazing building, the reds and oranges screaming angrily from thirty feet away.
He moved closer to the frame, hypnotized by the color, when he noticed more
detail. Two figures, a knight and a priest, fell just outside the tower
windows, either thrown or jumping, as if to their death. Something about
this picture resonated deeply with the young man, and he kept staring for some
time. The portrait burned with sinister intensity, blocking out all that was
good, wracking him with cruel, foreboding evil. He didn’t remember anything
after that except the dream.
Clouds pass ominously across a pale moonbeam splaying
splatter patterns of liquid light across the bare countryside. Silhouettes of
amoeba-like Rorschach patterns ebb and flow through the clouds and across the
landscape like strange pools of darkness. Trey emerges from the abandoned
home dragging a shovel. His eyes are distant, vacant, and lifeless. As he steps
into the moonlight, you can now see his nose is bleeding, and just now his eyes
roll back until white.
He walked through a broken wooden gate at the stone wall
that lined the property, pacing along an empty dirt road. At the main drag, he
turns right, headed east towards Town Hall. His gait was steady, not staggered;
with purpose. He marched directly in front of the brick building and found one
of three trees, dropping to his knees. With grubby hands he began to dig,
quickly making short work of a two-foot hole. The automaton blankly removed a
satchel of canvas wrapping a large leather-bound book, heavily engraved. He
opened the book, laying it out on the canvas. Grimy fingers leaf through
several pages until he comes to the one that he’s looking for. The boy
stood over the book, a single drop of his blood falling neatly into the open
page. Suddenly, his body convulses. He coughed violently, blood splattering off
his nose onto his neat white button-down shirt. A deep, resonant quality took
to the coughing, to where it no longer even sounded like a boy at all, but a
beast. A pig, a bull, perhaps, or a large dog’s bark started to erupt from the
boy’s chest as he wet himself, all while gouts of blood erupted out his nose.
Heaving, growling, snarling, he made it back to his hands and knees, a
possessed child thrust into grisly evil more potent than words can capture.
The demon-child slowly looked up as a flashlight fell on his face from
across the small courtyard.
“Hey!” a voice called out. “You all right?” The boy stopped
coughing. A young man, early 20’s, well-built, sprinted across the lawn;
flashlight in hand, shiny five-pointed star pinned to his black suspenders.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What in God’s name happened to you?”
The boy was breathing normally, now, and stood up. His nose
wasn’t bleeding any more, but crusts of the dark red stuff were now forming on
the corners of his mouth and cheeks. The whites of his eyes shone in the
darkness reflecting vividly off the beam of the flashlight. He spoke with
a deep unearthly voice. “It is time.”
“Look, I don’t know who you are, whose kid you are, or
nothin’ so…”
“It is time.”
“It is time to get you some help…”
“You cannot stop it.”
The officer was at a loss. “Why not?”
“No one can stop it.”
“No one can stop what?”
“It is time.”
“What’s it time for?”
“To build the gate,”
the creature stated plainly. The young boy then dropped to the ground landing
flat on his back. There, he lay, unconscious.
