In the Beginning - Borders

Chapter 38, as always the other parts are below.

Tim found staying with a family strange, especially one with a teenaged daughter and a nearly teen son. He worried he was going to end up as de facto father figure, but it didn't turn out that way. The children paid little attention to him, except when the daughter was bossing him around. The new son, as they insisted on calling him, simply stared at Tim most of the time.

Nicole, the woman he rented from, made one thing clear. He was not to enter the basement under any circumstances. A simple enough rule, even if it did remind Tim of too many fairy tales. He had just moved to the city though, and very few were willing to take a chance on a long haired, starving musician. It would all work out.

Nicole seemed to be an absentee parent though. A week after Tim moved in, she vanished. That was when the chanting started. It came from the basement and continued into all hours of the night. It did not keep Tim from sleeping, as he mostly did that during the day. It did make it hard to practice though.

Though Tim had never seen anyone other than the three family members there was a chorus full of female voices chanting in the dark down below. At first he thought it was just the daughter's friends, but she never really seemed to have any over. He held his curiosity in check for a few days.

Then he started wandering the downstairs while the chanting increased. After a week he was pacing in front of the door for most of the night. After several weeks he could not take it anymore. He opened the door and descended. The sight before him made him wish he was born without curiosity.

Nicole, nude and bound to a stone dais, a gag keeping her screams held back; that greeted his eyes. A gaggle of younger women in varying states of leather clad surrounded the altar and chanted in what sounded like Latin. All of that was strange enough, but the daughter in a short silk robe, holding one of those wavy daggers, standing over her mother, was beyond bizarre. The son sitting in a corner, staring at where Tim stood, was the cherry on top of the insanity Sundae.

"The time has come for the torch to pass, mother."

The daughter raised the dagger as she spoke. Nicole squirmed and screamed against her gag. Imploring eyes looking to the stranger in their midst. Her faith failing her, in her last moments, she cast about for rescue. Tim was frozen where he stood though.

The dagger plunged. A looser, but still near perfect, chest parted before the steel. Warm blood sprayed and flowed down over stone. The younger women showered in it, scooped it up in cupped hands to wash and anoint their flesh with it. The boy spoke some of the first words he had to Tim, with a sick smile on his face that Tim felt obliged to obey.

"I need a first follower and recruiter. Mom broke the one that belonged to my brother."

#shortstory #novel #author #writer #writing