Covan
Chapter 2
The Book of Paradox
2030 – Western Missouri
A new moon and scattered clouds converged over the western plains of Missouri forcing a wraithlike darkness to befall the harsh tundra that made up this desolate area of the world. Oh, how Valtos hated being here. And he wouldn’t be, if not for the mystically intense nightmares that fancied themselves as revelations. It was their intensity that forced Valtos’s belief, but he was overtly frustrated that the visions hadn’t given him the foresight to take his 4×4 on this expeditious jaunt instead of his precious black and orange Bugatti.
Valtos down shifted to first gear as a he approached a large crater in the ungraded dirt road, only to be greeted by a loud scraping noise to the Bugatti’s undercarriage as he tried to cautiously traverse the obstacle. He drew out a low-toned curse word and despondently turned up the volume to his stereo which, at the moment, was playing Screaming Bach – a new age German band whose shtick was recreating classical music using modern techno instruments and synthesizers.
The loud music offered a reprieve. If he couldn’t hear the car’s complaints, it wasn’t happening.
The reprieve was short-lived.
“Son-of-a…” Valtos started through gritted teeth but didn’t finish as he pitted yet another hole moments later. Why can’t that cursed bastard spend eternity wallowing in self-absorbed indignity somewhere else like New York or Amsterdam? I’d have taken Kansas City over this hell! He thought to himself.
Cursed or not, it was a disgrace for someone so prominent to Earth’s morbid history to live like a vagabond out in the middle of nowhere.
Valtos was cursed, too, but he wasn’t about to be denied the great pleasures of life, especially not an immortal one. He was of Grecian descent and had devastatingly good looks. Coupled with his carefully crafted charm and wit, and the lifestyle of a European prince, he was, by his own computation, the world’s greatest predator.
But preying on humans was one thing – this was entirely different.
Valtos followed an old cattle fence littered with rusty ‘No Trespassing’ signs for over five miles, which seemed like a lifetime when driving at only 10 MPH on this depressing, broken-down country road. Then, like a beacon of hope, his night-stalker eyes scanned a small hill near an unusual grove of trees over two-hundred meters away.
This was it.
Valtos stopped his exotic street machine and stared at the hill for several seconds. He then rubbed his forehead contemplatively, but what choice did he have? Did he really want to dismiss the visions out of a poverty of logic?
He wasn’t a gluten for punishment, so he turned the engine off and exited the Bugatti. After hooking the hilt of an extendable sword to his belt, and making sure his Colt .45 was secured behind his back, he flashed-ran over to the base of the hill.
The hill sloped up at a steady angle thirty feet high and dropped off like a cliff on the far side, and its surrounding basin was littered with cantankerous Scotch and bull thistles. At the face of the cliff, as if nobly standing guard, was a line of gangly Jack pines accompanied by a drove of smaller Devils-walkingstick trees. Neither had any business being in this part of Missouri. Valtos empathized.
He crept tepidly around the earthly sentinels, respecting their authority, and then he carefully scanned the cliff until he located a jagged crack just big enough for a man to slither through. It was the entrance to the cave he’d seen in his visions. He paused for a second directly in front of the entrance so that he could take a deep whiff of the chilled air escaping from it. The stink of rotting carcasses alerted his nasal cavity like a concerto of menace. It was either dead animals or his query – they both smelled alike.
Valtos carefully made his way through the crack where he was instantly met with bizarre writings on both walls that looked like hieroglyphs, but not like any he’d seen before. The odd hieroglyphs were mostly comprised of circular angles connected by jagged lines, and they all fell in descending order in perfect columns. He surmised that the writing was some kind of ancient warning, or perhaps a spell, but he didn’t know for sure. He hadn’t seen them in his visions, and he didn’t have time to dwell and it.
The cave opened up to a small chamber after the tight opening, and Valtos could see that there was a passageway beyond the chamber that angled at a slight downward trajectory. While exerting extreme caution, Valtos crept through the passageway while masterfully negotiating the maze of protruding stalactites and stalagmites so as not to alert the beast within by the inevitable echoing sounds that would accompany the shattering of Earth’s precious art.
But he soon discovered that his prudence was for not. After a minute of slow walking, a soft demonic toccata of rhythmic sounds from dark shadowlike beings hummed the air, and they soon escalated to screeches and cries of pandemonium as he continued to move forward.
The seared visions in Valtos’s mind progressed like déjà vu to living reality as he drew closer to his destiny until he reached a rounded corner where mysticism and certainty finally met.
Free your mind, he said to himself while preparing to confront the nightmare ahead. The hysteria of loud demonic noises turned to merciless anarchy making it difficult for Valtos’s mind to do anything except bow to the will of chaos.
“It won’t work, Valtos,” a deep, resonating voice said from around the bend in the blackness of the cave. The whaling screeches and cries abruptly stopped as the shadowlike scoffers hastily absorbed into the cave walls as if on command. “I’ve been on you since you left New York.”
Valtos slowly rounded the corner. Through his vampiric eyesight he saw an impossibly large man squatting against a wall in the back of a naturally formed chamber. The man would have easily been over eight feet tall if he was standing, and his freakishly muscular body was partially covered in a patchwork of fabric and animal skins. His eyes were a bright, solid red that seemed to glow in the darkness. He had long, unkempt, brown hair that fell past his shoulders and a ratty beard that housed a few undesirables. His features were Caucasian but his skin was dark and leathery, as though he’d spent years roasting in scorching sunlight.
“Cain,” Valtos smugly replied in a miserable attempt to hide his bloodcurdling fear. “It’s been what, a thousand years or more?”
“Not long enough,” Cain retorted. “You had visions, but you’ll regret following them.”
“That depends on how you define regret,” Valtos submitted, still trying to sound more confident than he really was. He darted his eyes around the room until he saw a small leather bag on the ground at Cain’s feet and an oversized Thor-like hammer next to the bag, and then he leveled his eyes back on Cain’s oversized, yet oddly sunken face.
The shadowlike creatures started to creep out of the walls again. Valtos snuck a glance and said, “I see you have a number of friends keeping you company. Anyone I’ve met?”
“The seventy-two bide their time here when called upon,” Cain replied with growing annoyance. “They keep me informed.”
“I didn’t know you practiced Goetia. Does Baal really have three heads?” Valtos mocked.
“Don’t be a fool,” Cain sneered at him. “They are Legion.”
“And do they protect you or keep you captive?” Valtos shot back intensely. He was rather impressed with how confident he managed to sound.
“They do his will,” Cain passed with a nodded glance towards no one. “You can’t have my blood, Valtos. You wouldn’t kill me even if you drank every ounce of it.”
“My intent isn’t to kill you.”
“You want it for power then? Think it will help you on your quest to rule the world?”
“Something like that,” Valtos proffered as he started to slowly edge his way down the far wall trying to maneuver himself into a good striking position. “The visions told me that the Awakening is at hand, and I intend to exploit it. I need all the power I can get.”
“You bloodthirsty fool,” Cain growled. “You have no idea what the Awakening is.”
“It’s a day of reckoning – immortal judgment day – or so say the myths that Zane believes in.”
“Vampiric folklore,” Cain said dismissively.
“Whatever…Zane means to let it happen, and I can use that to my advantage.”
“Zane means to let nature run its course, and maybe you should, too.”
“That’s rich, coming from the very man who’s destined to rein as the prince of eternal darkness after the Awakening. Doesn’t Hell mean anything to you?”
“Your obedient arrogance is daunting. I’m already in Hell,” Cain grumbled loudly as he watched Valtos’s pathetic attempts at being sneaky. “Your kind is the scourge of the Earth. I should have killed you all during the Elder Wars.”
“But you didn’t, and now it’s my time to rule!” Valtos shouted as he lunged forward while simultaneously unhooking his sword hilt and extending its razor-sharp double-edged blade. The demonic screams and cries returned along with their ghostly presence.
The massive beast flashed to the side, easily evading Valtos’s pointed lunge. Valtos smashed into the cave wall where he was immediately met with a volleyball sized fist to the back of his head which rattled his brain like a pebble in a maraca.
Before Valtos had time to recover, two powerful hands clamped down on him like a vice and lifted him into the air smashing him against the cave’s ceiling. Sharp stalactites impaled his abdomen and right thigh. Cain then pummeled him back down to the ground and kicked him into the far wall. A thunderous noise from the crash echoed through the cave which temporarily drowned out the demonic sounds from the ethereal ghouls who were now swimming in the air.
Barely conscious and bleeding profusely from multiple gashes around his mangled body, Valtos reached a shaking hand to his backside and pulled out the Colt .45 from his waistband. He began to shoot indiscriminately in the direction of the massive haze in front of him. He then rolled to the side trying to change his firing angle when his waist hit something that felt unusually soft; not like something that belonged in a cave. It was the leather bag, and there was something in it.
An unexpected jolt of anticipation swept over Valtos.
“NO!!!” he heard Cain bellow in the scariest earth-shattering howl he’d ever heard – a howl that would have killed a mortal. The evil spirits simultaneously exploded in ear piercing shrieks forcing Valtos to tuck his head and cover his ears with his forearms.
There was only one way to stop the noise and the pain. He had to leave.
Valtos wrapped a hand around the bag while gathering up every remaining ounce of strength and will that he had left, and then he flashed-ran through the tunnel, shattering most of the stalactites and stalagmites that got into his way, while severely gashing his shoulders, legs and head on several that refused to break. He slowed just enough to manage his way through the tight opening of the cave and then he reached lightning speeds again until he reached his Bugatti.
Valtos threw the bag into the passenger seat and slammed his door shut before roaring the Bugatti’s engine to life. A tingling sixth sense ran up his spine encouraging him to look out his window. Dozens of shadows launched into the air near the hill followed by a black heap of fuzzy mass.
Fearing the hesitation may have cost him precious seconds, Valtos tore off down the dirt road trying like mad to escape the pending doom, relying heavily on his vampric powers to keep him from wrecking – the undercarriage of the Bugatti be damned. Unlike before, it was either the car or his immortal life, and he could always replace the car.
The cragged road curved sharply right and left several times before Valtos saw the liberation of asphalt at a junction just past a rightward bend in the road. He slowed down enough to make a stiff turn onto the blacktop, but it was a mistake. Cain had thrown his Thor-like hammer with precision a heartbeat before the turn and it nailed the back end of the Bugatti, forcing it to skid crossways over twenty feet. In a fit of luck that defined who Valtos was, the car abruptly stopped on the pavement.
Valtos looked out of the passenger window and saw Cain leap high into the air like a tiger pouncing on its prey. The Thor-like hammer boomeranged back to the soaring fiend on command of will and he caught it in mid-flight. Cain arched back with the hammer in both hands as he made his descent. He looked like an ancient warrior about to make a decisive kill.
On the ground, the beleaguered vampire let out a telling curse word as he frantically fidgeted with the stick shift trying to find the right gear. He finally shoved it into first and popped the clutch forcing the tires into a roasting spin before they gripped the asphalt with enough power to slingshot him down the road.
Just as Valtos made it out of the danger zone, Cain crashed down like a thunderbolt hitting an electric generator. An explosion of raw power trebled the air and rippled the ground below. Valtos could see the rolling convulsion coming for him through his rearview mirror. He gripped the Bugatti’s steering wheel tightly as he was rocked by a bounding shockwave.
The Bugatti skipped and swerved as the shockwave rolled under, but Valtos was able to maintain control. He eventually reached a cruising speed of 205 MPH after it passed. There was no way Cain could catch him. Valtos was home free…for now.
The déjà vu-like experiences from his visions had stopped, and an eerie feeling of the unknown uncomfortably set in. Legend had it that Cain couldn’t kill the possessor of the Book of Paradox, and if he really did have the book, he just proved the legend to be true.
While keeping his trembling left hand on the steering wheel, he reached over to the passenger seat with his right hand and opened the leather bag. Inside was a large leather-bound book made from human flesh. There were no writings or symbols on the cover. It was just dark, tanned, human leather.
Valtos touched it, and in that instant, he knew it was real. He didn’t need Cain’s blood, for he now possessed the secrets to Earth’s darkest mystical powers.