SPECIAL 2011

by Frank Murdock

The Cover: Blue Devil stands in the center of the cover towards the back. He has a party hat on Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) are holding up a large party cake and the trickster is holding a large gift wrapped box. George and Lenny, the Muldarian aliens from BD V.1 #6 & 22 are standing with gifts too; Lenny has a large box and George has a smaller box. Other characters in the background are Manhunter (Mark Shaw in his red and blue w/ metal mask outfit), Captain Atom, The Question, Firestorm, Black Lightning, Metamorpho, Halo, Geoforce, Katana, Animal Man, Guy Gardner, Fire and Ice, Elongated Man and Sue Dibney, Plastic man, Starman (Will Payton), The Demon, Red Devil, Kid Devil, Steel, Gypsy, and Vibe. Everyone looks confused except for Lobo standing to one side drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels and Ambush Bug who is dangling from above like Spider-man and is trying to lick some icing off his finger which he has dipped into the cake.

Above them the Blue Devil logo is being covered up by a larger logo for House of Mystery Special 2011.

In front of everybody stands Cain. Cain is saying: “My apologies my horn-headed boarder, but before you get to celebrate your break-out first issue, it’s time to pay the rent!”

Dark skies rumble as storm clouds move in over a cemetery that spreads out for several acres. A large broad house rests upon a hill at one end of the cemetery. Two dim lights from the upper windows eerily animate the aged mansion with dead cataracted eyes that cast a baleful gaze out over the landscape.

Five small figures approach the house with hesitation. All is dark except for a flickering light resonating dimly by the door.

“You knock on the door” Said a little witch wearing a purple pointed hat.

“No way” retorted the other clad in a sheet with several holes, his hands firmly grasping a white garbage bag.

“Ladies first” Said another small ghost holding a white pillowcase tightly in his hands.

The witch standing next to him with a black hat rolled her eyes. “Whatever you guys. What a bunnch of blockheads.”

A third ghost whith a dirty sheet stood next to a beagle wearing a pilot’s goggles and red scarf. He said nothing. The beagle on the other hand looked at the front door and let out a low whine.

Moving slowly up the stairs onto the porch with a pumpkin shaped pail in hand, the small witch with the black hat reached for the door knocker and rapped three times.

A few minutes pass without an answer.

“Well,” said the ghost. “I guess they went to bed. Let’s get out of here.”

“You’re probably right,” said the little witch. “Let’s go try that last house on the other end of the cemetery.”

“No way!” cried the boy in the multi-holed sheet. “Let’s go get your brother from the pumpkin patch and go home.”

“Whatever” Said the little witch as she turned and began to head down the stairs.

But before she could make it to the first step the sound of a dead bolt disengaging could be heard by the children. The small witch stopped in her tracks and quickly turned as the door slowly opened. All five children gasped at the sight of the man who opened the door.

He was a thin long-limbed man whose brown hair drew up to points above his ears and covered his angular chin with a tuft of beard. He looked at them with small beady eyes that narrowed through the pair of wire-framed spectacles that rested upon his thin nose.

“Hello?” said the man like one of those narrators of the old black and white movies of late night television. “May I help you?”

The little witch swallowed hard and spoke. “Tri- Trick or Treat?”

The man seemed surprised by what the girl had said. “Is it that time already? Oh, I do apologize my dear children. It appears that I have lost track of time this year. Halloween completely slipped my mind.”

The small ghost feeling quite terrified said, “Th- that’s alright. We- We’ll just go. N- Never mind.”

The thunder cracked and the rain began to fall. Like buckets the skies emptied down over the five small costumed children.

“Hmmm. I tell you what my little goblins and ghouls. Have a seat on my porch until the rain lets up. While you wait I can read you a story. No need you all get sick or leave without a treat of some kind, eh?”

The five children looked at one another unsure what to do when the thunder cracked again.

As the rain fell the five children sat huddled together on the porch of the old house. Each drank from cups of hot chocolate as the old man took a seat in a rocking chair in front of them. In his hands he held a large book. The cover had strange markings upon it and its pages looked old and yellowed.

“I do not tend to keep candy around my home. But since this is a grand holiday, and you are here until the storm subsides, perhaps Uncle Cain can entertain you with a story to fit the occasion...” He smiled at the children with a wicked grin. “You do like spooky stories do you not?”

The little witch with the pink hat nodded her head slowly. “I love spooky stories! Is it a ghost story?”

The man shook his head.

“No. This is no ghost story my little friends. No vampires or werewolves in this story at all; although you may hear the mention of a demon or dark magics in the telling.”

“What’s the story about?” asked the ghost with the dirty sheet.

The man merely smiled before he opened the book and turned the first page.

“The History of the Necronomicon.... by Howard Philips Lovecraft.” Began the old man....

Do not think from my succumbance to alcohol that I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Hopeless, and at the end of my supply of the intoxicant which alone makes my situation endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and, with the shotgun at my side, shall extinguish myself from this Hellish nightmare into the darkness of oblivion. Do not think from my inebriation that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realize, why it is that I must expediently leave these words of warning and escape the horrors I have unleashed by means of death.

My name is Raymond Knowby. I am a professor of ancient Egyptian mythology in Gotham University’s ancient history department. These final entries I write from a small cabin in the southern mountains of Tennessee. Here, I had come with my wife, Henrietta, for a few weeks so that I could continue my research undisturbed. By all that is holey, how was I to know that my retreat from distraction would come to serve as an exile into Hell?

It had all started in May, when a group of associate professors and myself had been excavating the ruins of a desolate region of the Arabian Desert -- -- the Roba el Khaliyeh or "Empty Space" of the ancients -- and "Dahna" or "Crimson" desert of the modern Arabs, where the mad Arab , Abdul Alhazred, was legend to have spent ten years in seclusion uncovering the dread secrets which he, in the insanity that it took upon his already fragile psyche, would document in a manner which I can only refer to as Abhorrent.

But I get ahead of myself… Abdul Alhazred, a poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who it had been said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D, visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis, which had been held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of his madness many things are told. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities known as M'Nagalah and Cthulhu. He claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or the City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind.

It was these secrets – secrets that were never intended for the minds of men to realize – that we had sought to uncover in our exploration of the ancient ruins -- that should have stayed buried beneath those sands which had so long ago sought to protect the world from the evil -- that we had made our most misfortunate findings; the long lost text known as the Al Azif – the original tome that would later be known as the Necronomicon!

I shudder as I think of the excitement I had felt at the time upon discovering this forbidden blasphemy before me… may god forgive me for whatever insidiousness that must have compelled me to remove these damndable writings from their cryptic entombment… forgive me for the evil I have unleashed… Oh Henrietta… please forgive me.

In our research of his last years, we came to uncover that Alhazred had dwelt in Damascus, where it is said he wrote of what he had discovered beneath the sands of that loathsome and most vilest of places, the Al Azif, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) of which many terrible and conflicting things are told.

The discovery of the text had been a mix of historical and academic intrigue. The carbon-dating analysis of the text for age and authenticity had revealed the atrocities connected with the books earliest origins – the bindings having been made of human flesh and inked with the blood of the deceased. And while none can be sure to posit the accuracy of me and my colleagues suppositions, the macabre possibility that the biology might be that of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred himself – the ultimate price he might have paid for the forbidden knowledge he had come to discover – a hypothesis which coincides with one of the horrific and unfathomable conflicting tales of his demise, is something I am now in my final hours, in no doubt of being the most likely of realities.

This should have been a warning to us to burn the text... to destroy the pages of the unmentionable evil stained across its very pages… but be us all damned for being that which we are who call ourselves “learned… damn us all scholars and scientists alike!

And so it was here, in the cabin far away from the disturbances of day-to-day life, far away in a remote place of wilderness, far away from the modern luxuries of a telephone or help from others, that I began to translate the pages within the Al Azif.

It has only been a few days since I translated and spoke aloud the first of the passages from the ancient tome. The particular chapter in which I speak was that which dealt with demons and demon resurrection. These are of the earthen variety, meaning those forces believed to inhabit the caves and woods of man's domain. The first few pages that I had translated warn that these demons are dangerous, ever present, and exist primarily through this vile tome. As legend has it, only the sacred high priests of the Cult of the Elder Ones could possess these books, for they alone could properly control the resurrected demons. It is only through the act of reciting the resurrection passage that these demons would be able to possess the living. For many years, it was thought that this legend was nothing more than the practices and beliefs of a superstitious and primitive culture … but I now know otherwise… for after I spoke aloud the phrases of the demon resurrection passages, I came to understand that my wife had become host to an earthen demon of the Berith family. May God forgive me for what I have unleashed onto this earth… and may my beloved wife forgive me for the torments I have brought upon her eternally damned soul.

I have returned to writing after opening a third bottle of wine. I find it is calming me and enabling me to tell what you will soon come to find is the most horrific part of my experience.

The fact that my wife had become possessed by the evil I had mistakenly released was by now quite apparent when Henrietta came after me and attempted to murder me. My own wife… At first I thought it was a mental or physical disorder because of what had happened to her eyes, but I was only fooling myself. I knew what it was.

During my struggle for survival… it was an accident… she was everything to me… Henrietta is dead. I buried her. I... buried her... in the cellar. God help me, I buried her in the earthen floor of the fruit cellar!

But she did not stay dead for long… or more accurately… her form did not remain lifeless.

The mental and emotional exhaustion only served to increase the physical toll the experience had brought upon me. Instead of making a hasty exodus from the nightmare I had unleashed upon myself, I rested and soon found myself fast asleep. When I awoke the day had passed me by. The encroaching night came crashing upon the forest around the cabin like a tsunami of darkness… and that is when my Hellish nightmare soon spiraled into a dream terror of unimaginable horror!

The demoniac spirits I had unleashed through the reading of the resurrection passages began their assault. First came the insidious taunting and maniacal laughter at the anguish it bestowed upon me. Then came the animation of items throughout the cabin which attacked me through the hurling of objects and the slamming of doors and cabinet drawers. I thought I would surely lose my mind… But that had only been a prelude to their evil intentions…. I believe it was here that I began to break from the sanity that I barely cling to during these final moments of my life…

I had just finished nailing closed the doors of the cabin… the sounds of movement and pounding from outside the cabin driving me barricade myself inside the cabin in an instinctive response to preserve my life. I was resting near the fire in a rocker when I heard the creaking of a door behind me… when I turned to face the next assault from my antagonists I felt a fear like none I had ever experienced before seize my soul as I saw that the door to the root-cellar had been opened. Frozen in place I thought I would truly go mad as I heard the voice of my deceased wife come from below.

“Let me out, dear. It's so cold and dark in here.”

All rationale had left at that moment. If it hadn’t I most surely would not have found the strength to break the grip of fear upon me and move towards the impossible.

“Why did you bury me Raymond? Please help me… free me from this entombment…”

I halted. Something in my gut took hold of me. Call it instinct or call it the hand of God, but something stopped me in my tracks.

“No. No. I don't know what you are, but you're not my Henrietta…” I said nervously.

That’s when a growl emerged from the darkness below. My heart missed a beat before the growl grew louder and my wife’s corpse burst up from the cellar entrance. I screamed in horror as her bloated and decaying body rose up into the air and looked at me with white glazed eyes. My wife’s possessed corpse spoke to me smiling with gnarled teeth, it’s arms rotted and worm infested extended.

“Come to me. Come to sweet Henrietta!”

At that point the thing flew towards me. I barely dodged its attack as I hit the floor and scurried towards the shotgun I had loaded and placed beside my chair near the fire. As I turned to fire upon the abomination it once again spoke.

“Yesssssss. You and I. We shall spend eternity together.”

I fired upon it. Blackish green ichor splashed from the wound and washed across the wall behind the thing that could not be.

The animated corpse of my wife looked at me and grinned wickedly as more of the black fluid ran forth from its mouth and onto her bloody and earth stained dress.

And then, in a voice that was like that of many, she cackled before uttering: “But first I'll swallow your soul!” and jumped at me once more.

I screamed as she hit me and the shotgun flew across the floor and beneath the couch… I don’t know what possessed me… what gave me the strength to shove her clawing and gnashing toothen maw off of me… and grasp the wood axe I kept beside the door for cutting lumber… But I did… and somehow climbed to my feet and swung, hitting the monstrosity with enough force to sever it’s head from the body. God! God! I don’t know what came over me as I swung again and again and again and again and again and again…. Theblackish green ichor! So much of it as the animated and now headless body of my wife spun around grabbing and moving in all directions, her bodiless head laughing in that macabre chorus of demoniac tones while tears fell from my eyes as a flood of anguish escaped from within me.

I won’t go into detail with what happened next other than to say that I was able to eventually wrestle the flailing form to the ground with a few more well-placed chops… and with great difficulty… bringing myself to dismember the loathsome thing… before I pushed it back down into the fruit-cellar and nailed it in. I must have passed out at some point from exhaustion as I sat up pointing my shotgun at the door in fear… and much to my anguish, I missed my opportunity to escape as the day had come and gone again during my restless sleep.

So now I sit here with my final bottle of wine in hand. The vessel is nearly empty as I write these last words, my hand never too far from my weapon, and one eye constantly looking back towards the cellar door. Occasionally Henrietta’s voice can be heard coming from below... she pleads to me to release her... sometimes she asks me why I have done that which was necessary for my survival… and other times it is that strange demoniac voice mocking and taunting me as I try to leave this record of my experiences.

It is night, the moon is gibbous and waning, and I hear the thing. The numbness of alcohol is the only thing that keeps me from fully falling apart; the alcohol only granting transient surcease. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm—a mere freak of fever as I sit inebriated and paranoid in this chair after those horrific acts which I have recorded herein. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the dark forest without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and shambling on its accursed grounds, laying in wait, plotting their detestable machinations. I dream of a day when they may move beyond the shadows of these insidious hallows to reach out with their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall spread its foulness, and the daemonic forces shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as if some immense slippery body were lumbering against it. The voices in the root-cellar are taunting me again. They are laughing at me. It shall not find me. The door is cracking and splintering under the pressure of something outside... God, that hand! The shotgun! The shotgun!

The man closed the book and laid it into his lap. The rain had subsided and only the rumbling of distant clouds could be heard as the storm moved into the southern skies. He looked at the children in front of him and could see that they had hung onto his every word.

“Well, my precious little boys and ghouls did you like that tale from the crypt?” he asked with an expectant wicked grin.

The children sat together with their arms wrapped around one another. The beagle with the flight goggles and red scarf whimpering with his head buried deep into the arms of the ghost with multiple eyeholes. The children nodded frantically with wide eyes.

The old man looked out at the night skies and said “It looks as if the storm has let up. I’m guessing you might want to go now. I do hope my story did not scare you too much – it’s a long walk home in the dark.”

The children looked out into the night and saw that the old man was right. As they murmured among one another the sound of the door opening behind them could be heard along with the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

“Ah, Gregory!” said the old man looking into the door. “What have you got there? Treats for our guests?”

The children turned expectantly when they heard the word “treats”.

Their smiles of anticipation froze on their faces as one three-clawed leathery green-scaled foot stepped forth from the shadows beyond the door.

When the second foot fell the children were halfway across the cemetery screaming in stark terror; the beagle with the goggles and red scarf several dozen yards ahead of them all.

It was only as the children made a hasty exodus from the front porch of the old house of mystery that the seven foot rotund pot-bellied dragon-like gargoyle shifted the entirety of its body into the dim light.

The creature looked at the old man and croaked, “Eep?”

Cain chuckled.

“Maybe I should have told them the tale of the child who waited all night in a pumpkin patch on Halloween?”

The large lumbering gargoyle cocked its head and grunted inquisicly.

Reaching for a cookie from the creature’s platter he said, “Oh well... maybe next year.” And with a wicked grin took a bite of the freshly baked morsel.

November 5, 2011. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, commonly known as Widener Library, is the primary building of the library system of Harvard University. Located on the south side of Harvard Yard directly across from Memorial Church, Widener serves as the centerpiece of the 15.6 million-volume Library, the largest university library system in the world.

The 320,000-square-foot Beaux-arts brick building houses 57 miles of bookshelves and 3 million volumes. Among them is one of the few remaining perfect copies of the Gutenberg Bible. Widener includes many special collections, including African, American, Asian, Germanic, Judaic, And Iberian, Middle-Eastern, Modern Greek, and Slavic texts of antiquity.

It is a typical Monday morning for Ms. Monica Friedman. As the head librarian of the Widener Library she begins her day early with a stop by the local bakery where she purchases a cinnamon bagel and cup of coffee. At the age of 57 she is in reasonably good shape for a woman of her years who has maintained a sensible diet of low carbs, lean meats, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. The exercising of her mind through the joys of reading have always superseded that of the physical sort, but one would hardly say that Ms. Friedman had let herself go.

Pulling into the library she noticed she was the first to arrive. The parking lot was empty except for the three cars belonging to the library security guards: Moe, Larry, and Joe. She and the guards had a running gag between themselves regarding the coincidence of their names to those of the classic slap-stick trio. She had told them that someday they would have a real situation to deal with in the library and the bad-guys would laugh themselves stupidly into custody once they had read their name tags. This had of course sent the three guards into an ad-hock impressionist’s mode of their respective namesakes.

Ms. Friedman made her way to the front doors and was surprised to find that none of security was there to let her in. It was a rare occasion when one of the three security guards was not sitting at the main desk to let employees in before the official hours of operation - Rare, but not unheard of. She recalled the time she had come in early many years ago and something similar had happened. Security had been called away to assist a student aid who had slipped and fallen down a small flight of stairs while carrying a stack of books. The student had needed to be assisted to the campus Health Center due to an ankle sprain.

Sure it was nothing so serious; Ms. Friedman unlocked the doors with her employee card key and entered the building letting the door close soundly behind. Moving past the front desk she turned right and headed up the stairs into the stacks where her office lay just beyond. She was almost to her destination when her foot was caught on something causing her to stumble a bit in the dimly lit building. The librarian was taken back to see it was a hat belonging to one of the security guards.

A touch of caution washed across her manner as Ms. Friedman cautioned forward and turned the next corner where her office door was but ten steps away. When she did she saw a sight that stopped her cold in her tracks. Hot coffee splashed across the floor as she raised her hands to her gasping mouth.

To be continued in Night Force Special 2011

Author’s Note: I’d like to give credit to the genius of H. P. Lovecraft for some sections of this story that I lifted from the tale “Dagon” and his creation of the dreaded Necronomicon; And the creative genius of Sam Ramie’s classic cult films: Evil Dead 1 & 2. So if some of this seems somewhat unoriginal, it’s because it’s not, it’s re-imagined and expanded upon. ? Sort of a prequel to Evil Dead. Anyways, hope somebody enjoys it. It’s a prelude to something bigger.