Chapter 44

[seymoure]

Chapter 44
“Burn”

Vaskania and Sanchez sat on a couch. They were not bound in any physical way, but they had neither felt such helplessness.

The thing that enjoyed calling himself Damien Kane strutted before them like a man who help pocket aces in Texas Hold'em.

“Oh,” the creature stopped and smiled at them, “I had something I wanted to give you, sort of as a present.”

On the coffee table before them appeared a solid gold hacksaw. From the floor bloomed a bush with but a single rose in full flower. Then, from the hallway, in flew a blue and green parrot. The bird flew into the bush and exploded into a dusting of feathers.

Kane burst into thunderous laughter.

“Oh, I love this world!” He screamed.

“Enjoy it while you can, creep,” Growled Emilio, “You won’t be here long.”

Kane bounded toward the pair, “You actually think those three can defeat me?”

“With all my heart and soul,” Sanchez said.

“Oh you poor, hopeless sap,” The entity chuckled, “Your doglike loyalty will be as flat as their . . . whatever device does the flatline thing.”

“You seem very confident,” a calm voiced Vaskania added.

“They have no idea what they are up against, what they have to do or how long they have to do it in,” He explained as though he were talking to uninterested third graders, “And they are the least threatening of the group. You two might have been a slight challenge, but they haven’t . . . what is your people’s phrase? Yes,” He leaned down into Emilio’s face and said, “They don’t have a hope in Hell.”

It was all the man could do to control his wish to lash out at this monster.

“And, what they don’t even suspect is that, when they die they will be my entrée into those planes of existence. I will not only own this world, but all those other worlds as well.”

“You cannot enter any plane without a contact?”

“Of course,” He admitted as he looked down at them, “There was a Damien Kane on this world, but he was nothing like what the history books now tell. And he was nothing like what I will be remembered like if and when any further histories are written.

“He was a clerk in a packing house. They slaughtered chickens and he took the orders and shipped the birds to hungry people all over England.

“But he knew he deserved more out of life. He wanted to be famous. Like his favorite writer. He aspired to be like Collier Paige.

“Not a writer, no, he had read the writings that were ‘unreadable’ to the general public. He thought they were written just for him. His mind created a magic world that he could call up with the things he found in Paige’s ‘Forbidden Texts.’

“His mind screamed with such madness that I, eons and light years away, heard him. Planting my own thoughts in his mind, giving him the right things to say and the right magic to invoke, he repaid me by letting me enter his empty head.”

He turned to them again, but this time he was a small, ugly man with little hair and bad teeth. The balding crooked man’s eyes didn’t match, and one of his legs was slightly longer than the other. Sanchez couldn’t tell, but he thought the man had a slight curvature of the spine.

Suddenly Kane’s movie star good looks returned.

“I made him what he wanted to be. Now he was handsome, powerful, with people fearing and respecting him. Only he no longer existed. That was what he really wanted, but he didn’t accept it until he had no power to accept or reject anything.

“He was gone in the first fire I created on your world.

“I do love fire. They don’t have it where I’m from. It is so cold there. Bone chilling cold pervades you all the time. Maybe that is part of what made me what I am.”

Kane was instantly engulfed in flames from head to foot.

“I will burn this world beyond recognition,” He enthused.

Vaskania wondered how his friends were doing.

Sanchez wondered if a golden hacksaw could cut the damn thing’s throat.

Kane wondered how long he could make this world burn before he would have to move on to find more fuel. And, he wondered, how much screaming would there be? How he loved this little world.

© 2005 by C. Wayne Owens