The House of the Claw: Reaper

  

That’s not my Jimmy.

The man that went with Emily to get revenge, to bring back the Reaper so we could interrogate him, punish him…that man is gone now. The one that came back…I don’t know what to call him. Jimmy claims he became an Ascendant during the trip, and that certainly might be true. He is stronger now, and he has powers of some kind—when he came back, he started giving orders, and everyone close to him has obeyed without question.

They cleared the basement level except for guards and stuck Emily in one room and the young man Jimmy brought back in the other. Any ideas of a chain of command in the House or the massive Tattersall office building we’re in have been abandoned where he’s concerned. He commands, and they obey.

I have only talked to him twice since they came back. When he first arrived, he recognized me, but was indifferent and strange. He was handling Emily and the man roughly, and he gave me little more than a passing greeting before carrying them down to the basement. I waited a few minutes and then followed him down.

When Jimmy came out of the room holding the man, he was already dripping with his blood. He seemed untroubled by the gore, but he was clearly irritated by the interruption. Still, he did talk to me then. Told me this man was at least one of the people responsible for killing our little girl. That he was going to find out everything he knew. That he had been rewarded with Ascendency during the mission, and he saw everything very clearly now.

I asked him why Emily was being kept down there. He said it was necessary for now. She was in danger too, and he had to keep her close. That with his newfound power, being with him was the safest place for her. I wanted to ask more questions, but he had already gone back into the room. When I asked the guards in the hall to see her, they refused. When I asked Polly to make them, she gave me a frightened look. She said they wouldn’t listen to her either. No one around Jimmy would listen to anyone but him.

The plan, according to her, was to just wait and see. If he truly was Ascendant, he was likely working for the good of the House’s goals. If it became clear he wasn’t, we could talk about what the next step should be then. A day passed without any word from the basement. Without Jimmy or Emily coming up, or any sign of what was going on down there.

I went back to Polly then. She still asked for me to be patient, but when she saw that wasn’t going to cut it, she said the best she could offer for the moment was a security room that gave me live video feeds into both basement rooms. In one, Emily was curled up on a sleeping bag on the concrete floor. She wasn’t asleep, and it was clear from the way she jumped occasionally that she could hear some of what was happening in the other room. And in the other room, Jimmy was tearing the young man apart.

I thought I was going to be sick as I watched him torturing the man Polly said had been identified as Jason Halsey. Even at his lowest, his angriest, Jimmy wouldn’t have been capable of doing something like that. He had too tender of a heart. There had been times over the years where I worried I’d lose him, that the harsher realities of what the House does, what it has to do, would become too much for him. To see the man I love…or something that looked like him, at least…doing what he did…

It didn’t feel like the actions of something higher than us. Something that was causing pain or death for the greater good. It seemed more like some alien thing that was enjoying itself, and I didn’t think it was revenge for Madeline either. I watched for hours, horrified but unable to stop, and I only became more certain that whatever interested that thing, it had nothing to do with what I wanted or the House wanted or what my sweet Jimmy would have wanted.

I’d avoided turning on the sound for all that time, afraid that if I heard on top of seeing, I would lose whatever self-control I had left. But I had to know. I had to know what they were talking about, what this thing was after. So I found the place to turn on the audio and felt my blood run cold.

“…gonna to tell me how you did it. Even if I have to rip you apart over and over again.” The voice coming from Jimmy was deep and gravelly—the sound of some terrible stranger. What was he talking about?

Jason looked up at him out of his remaining eye. “You better work fast. Your clock is running out.”

Jimmy lunged forward, digging out the man’s other eye. The man jerked, but didn’t scream. In fact…but that was impossible. The eye that was already missing looked like it had grown back, and several of his other wounds had faded away already as well. What was he? What if he was an Ascendant too? What if Jimmy was making a mistake, or the thing inside him wasn’t good after all?

Jason’s head rocked back as Jimmy struck him hard across the face. Spitting out some blood, the younger man looked back up at him placidly. “The problem you have is that you can’t kill me. I mean, I literally don’t know if you’re capable of killing me, but aside from that, if you kill me, you can’t get any of the answers you clearly want. Now I’m telling you, I don’t know what those answers are. So either I’m lying, in which case, you should just keep attacking me, because that’s going so well for you, or I’m telling the truth, in which case, maybe you should tell me more about what the fuck you’re talking about. Maybe it’ll jog something loose. Because I admit, I do feel like I know you. The Gravekeeper you, not this dude you’re in. But I don’t know how. So why don’t you try talking to me instead of just wasting your very limited time?”

Gravekeeper? What was that? And why did the guy keep talking about him having only a short amount of time? I looked back at the other screen. Emily was standing up with her ear against the wall, listening to what they were saying. She didn’t need to hear any of that. I didn’t care what that thing in Jimmy wanted, I needed to get her out of there.

---

Narrative Summary of streamed security footage uploaded to cloud from Tattersall Security Cameras 68359 and 68360

“Maybe you’re stalling, boy. But you have proven very…resilient to my methods so far, so I’ll try your suggestion.”

HRL19 aka “Jimmy” aka “the Gravekeeper” sat down a couple of feet away from where Jason Halsey (“Jason”) was chained to an old copier that had been left in the room for that very purpose. The past footage had demonstrated that the Gravekeeper had a degree of physical strength, knowledge of anatomy and torture techniques, and sadism that had ostensibly been absent before the recent mission to recover or neutralize the House antagonist informally designated as “the Reaper.” The next three hours, beginning with this conversation, demonstrated just how deep the recent changes apparently ran. The working theory is that this is due to an heretofore unknown form of Ascendancy, whereby the identity of the person is wholly supplanted. Going forward in this narrative, references to the Jimmy/Gravekeeper entity will be modeled to reflect this theory.

“You want to know how I know you. I know you because you are, along with your French friend, the one that trapped me…” the Gravekeeper tapped the side of Jimmy’s head, “in this fucking ‘rock’, as your grandfather calls it.” Its voice grew deeper with anger. “Trapped me in it and banished me here, to this lesser plane of being.”

Jason appeared genuine surprised at this. “How did I do that exactly? I don’t remember anything like that. Plus I have no idea how to do anything like that. Nothing you’re saying makes any sense.”

The Gravekeeper rocked in his chair, clearly on the verge of more violence. “I figure it is either because you are lying, you have amnesia, or…”

“It hasn’t happened for me yet.”

The Gravekeeper nodded. “Or that. It seems far-fetched, but it’s possible. Since we came to this building, since they learned who you really are, I’ve had these people pull all kinds of information up on you. Birth certificate, where you went to school, places you’ve lived, people you’ve known. In all of that, there are no gaps or irregularities they can find. To listen to them, you are no different than the rest of these…cattle.”

Leaning forward, he grabbed Jason’s chin. “Except…you are, aren’t you? And not just because of how strong and tough you are. Or the hunting that you and your grandfather waste your time on. No…” He turned Jason’s head one way and then the other. “I can almost see what you really are, or what you will be.” Releasing the man, he sat back with a sigh. “But you’re not the one that trapped me, at least not yet.”

Jason nodded. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. So where were you banished from?”

The Gravekeeper shook his head. “I don’t think so, boy. I know you think you’re being pert, getting me to give you information and all, but I’m only going to tell you things if they benefit me. If your role in trapping and banishing me hasn’t occurred for you yet, then maybe it could be prevented from happening, at least in some timelines, by me killing you. Or maybe not, cause some things is fixed while others not so much.” Standing up, he clenched his fists for a moment. “Then again, if I’m about to escape this place, go back and finish my work, maybe everything worked out just like it should.” He chuckled. “What do you think, boy? Should I leave you alive?”

Jason shrugged. “Hard to say. Honestly, I think your best move is to decide and then get out of here. Because you’re starting to look like shit.”

This affected the Gravekeeper to an unexpected degree. He moved toward the door even as sounds of commotion outside the room could be heard. There were no cameras in the hallway, but when the door is opened, a voice identified as belonging to HL1 aka “Haley” could be heard, as well as other voices, presumably belonging to guards.

At first she was demanding to see “Emily”, the young Ascendant being held in the adjacent room. Then she began asking the Gravekeeper if he was all right. That he looked sick. There were sounds of a brief struggle and then the Gravekeeper ordered the guards to kill anyone else that tried to come down into the basement. Based upon ancillary reports, it has been concluded that the Gravekeeper snapped Haley’s neck and threw her some distance down the hall.

The Gravekeeper then enters the room where Emily is being kept. The girl is clearly terrified of him now, but she has been trained to serve, and does not resist when he tells her to come forward. He kneels before her and tells her to touch his forehead. To try and sense the thing inside his head. Can she feel it buried deep in his brain?

She says she can.

Can she picture where that thing came from?

She nods. A strange place, she says.

He chuckles at her. It is that, he agrees. But can you open a gate there?

She trembles. She says she’s not sure. She feels so bad today. So weak.

His hands flex. He tells her she must try.

Tearfully, her legs unsteady, she agrees.

And then everything flares white.

When the light dims, only the little girl is left in the room. Becoming the gateway has taken its toll, accelerating whatever illness she was already showing signs of. She collapses to the floor as loud noises are heard from nearby. A return to the room holding Jason shows the source.

He has broken free from his bonds and is swiftly battering down the door. It is uncertain due to the lack of video coverage, but it appears that he kills the four guards outside in the hallway before entering Emily’s room.

He approaches the little girl and kneels down as he takes her hand. She is trying to talk, but whatever she is saying is inaudible. He squeezes her hand and leans close, whispering to her. They speak back and forth for a short time, but all too low to be intelligible to the camera. We will attempt audio enhancement during the full forensic analysis.

Then the girl nods and Jason gives her hand a final squeeze. He says “Give me one second.” With that, he quickly stands and wipes some of the blood from his chest onto his hand, which he then uses to write a single word on the wall. Turning back to the girl, he smiles at her. “I’m ready, Emily.”

There is another flash of light.

When it subsides, Jason is gone and the girl appears to be dead. Emily’s body lay still for nearly an hour before it begins shifting. Melting down into a runny puddle of sludge that pools around the clothing her inexplicable decomposition has left behind. The only other sign of what has occurred in the room is the bloody word Jason has left on the wall.

NIGHTLANDS

---

Narrative Summary of events transpiring at TG Tower 1 and 2, as well as TG Office Alpha. Reporting completed by Tattersall Security Final Level Redundancy for archival and investigative purposes. No supplementals expected to this file.

Seven days after the abduction of Jason Halsey, five days after both he and the entity known as the Gravekeeper disappeared, an outside message began playing over all internal intercoms within the three largest publicly-held buildings of Tattersall Global. This message began playing at 11:02 a.m. EST in TG Tower 1. One hour later, it began playing in TG Tower 2. One hour after that, it began playing at TG Office Alpha. During this time, all landline phones and wired internet at these locations were also disabled, and some kind of sophisticated cellular jammers made cellular communications impossible within approximately one hundred yards of each building. This is troubling for several reasons on its own.

First, the knowledge of our offices and its systems needed to commandeer the intercoms and disable outside and inner office communication would be profound. Second, the coordination of these attacks, coupled with the sheer technical knowledge and manpower reasonably needed to accomplish it, makes the effectiveness of the assault all the more concerning. Third, the prevailing theory is currently that this was all done as a reaction to Jason Halsey being taken less than a week earlier. That means that this plan was finalized and put into action at three locations across the continental U.S. in an extremely short amount of time.

Finally, that all of this—including the unidentified, heavily-modulated voice of the speaker in the message itself—was all a mere preamble to what was to come…it is not hyperbolic to state the obvious. The implications are terrifying.

The message, in its entirety, was as follows:

Good morning. You have someone that does not belong to you. You know who I mean. If you give him back immediately, most of you will be unharmed. If you don’t…

By now, you have already noticed that you don’t feel very good today. That is because you have been poisoned. Not today, you understand. No, you were poisoned two days ago. You may even have some information about the poison from one of your cohorts. What I told him was true, but not wholly accurate for the strain of poison you have in two regards. First, your strain takes slightly longer to show symptoms, which is good news for you. Second, your strain can be cured up to thirty minutes before death.

Please don’t mistake this for mercy. It’s not. But it would be fairly useless for me to poison you to coerce you into releasing your prisoner if I didn’t have a viable antidote, and it would be hard to convince you that I’m not lying if you weren’t already feeling the symptoms. Fortunately, I have a great deal of experience with creating variations of the little gift that is nesting in all of your lungs. Whether that is to your benefit or your detriment…well, that is entirely up to you.

You will notice that your internet and phones are all down. But if you check, you will see that all corporate email accounts received a final email before everything went down. If you respond to that email by walking your prisoner out of one of your main buildings or bringing him to the parking lot of one of those buildings within the next hour, I will restore your communications and provide the location of enough doses of the antidote to cure at least the majority of those afflicted. Time is of the essence, as from the end of this message, you only have two hours before you will be dead—if you were at work two days ago. If you’ve been out this week and this is your first day back, then congratulations. You have two days to get your affairs in order.

Or you can give him back.

Chaos ensued. While there were no protocols for this, there were certain containment procedures in place to ensure no one left the building without permission. Security sealed the doors and began searching for ways of communicating. It took twenty minutes before it was discovered by one of the security staff that cell phone coverage resumed roughly three hundred feet away from Tower 1. It was another ten before the administration was notified at the other two sites. The decision was made to lock down those locations temporarily until the matter was resolved.

Then Tower 2 received the message. Then Office Alpha. During this time, it had already been determined that there was no viable response to give. Jason Haley was clearly the person being demanded, and he had disappeared five days earlier from the basement level of Office Alpha. There were ongoing discussions about finding someone who resembled him enough to buy time and potentially lure the poisoner out into the open, but then the call came in.

Within the last ten minutes, nearly everyone inside of Tower 1 had died. Two hundred and seventy-three people had literally fallen apart into a thick liquid while another twenty-nine people looked on in horror. Presumably these people had been absent two days earlier, so they were exposed to the poison later on than their co-workers. The only reason anyone even knew about it yet was because the closed circuit relays had been turned back on so we could access the camera feeds.

Because he wanted us to see.

An hour later, Tower 2 died. Three hundred and seven gone, forty-nine soon to follow. As with Tower 1, he gave us back our eyes so we could see the carnage that had been wrought. The remaining people were fighting security, trying to get out. Ultimately, security executed those that were resisting confinement.

Evacuation was made of top leadership from Office Alpha. It made little difference. They died in helicopters and SUVs instead of their offices. Five hundred and twenty, with sixty-one soon to follow.

Ten minutes later, all cameras were lost again. In the ensuing panic, it took six more hours before recon teams were dispatched to any of the sites. There were no survivors at any of the locations. Those who had not liquefied had been shot, including the handful of remaining security forces. There were also signs of one or more individuals searching each of the buildings thoroughly. Looking for Halsey almost certainly, but also taking the time to download files, steal sensitive material, and perhaps more. The full extent of their actions is unknown at this time.

What is known is that Tattersall Global has lost eighteen percent of its workforce in one day. The House has lost its top leadership, a number of corporate members, and encrypted files pertaining to individual cells that are among the data believed to have been stolen. The three buildings have been sealed, with a controlled reporting model being utilized to account for the death toll.

This will be one of our greatest challenges in the coming weeks and months. Most of the staff had already had their personal lives pruned to the extent that they could be easily removed if the need arose. But there are over a hundred low-level staff whose deaths have to be explained and accounted for eventually. The prevailing plan is to account for thirteen percent in random manufactured “accident” narratives at various times and locations that cannot be readily contested by any family members or loved ones. These must be dispersed sufficiently that no pattern can be easily or credibly drawn. Another twenty-six percent have been identified as good candidates for a “transfer” narrative, whereby there is documentation that they were transferred to an international office, moved there, and later met some unfortunate fate in the months that follow.

The remaining sixty-one percent of this group will “die” in a chartered plane crash headed to a tropical resort for a work retreat. A fund is already being established to provide death benefits to their families and exploit the maximum PR benefit from the fund. These will be the only deaths that will be made public, and even then, they will be pulled after two days in the news cycle.

These practical measures are necessary, as they protect our interests while projecting an image of continued strength and resilience. This is, unfortunately, a stark contrast to the reality. We have lost innumerable resources and assets. We are now in a weakened position against our known competitors, such as the Kin. And we are still being hunted by this man or group known as the Reaper, with most of our primary means of learning more or retaliating being seriously degraded or entirely lost to us.

For now, all plans and projects are on hold. All but essential communication with House cells is restricted. There is only one edict, one mandate.

Survive. 

---

Credits

 

The House of the Claw: Apotheosis

  

Crossing over the gateway that Emily had created with her Ascendant form was always stomach-turning, and it didn’t matter that I had travelled with her during several practice runs in preparation for this day. Walking through some kind of magic gateway from one place to another just wasn’t something your body got used to, I guess.

Still, I didn’t know how much of my current state I could contribute to the method of transport. I was bursting with a combination of fear, anger and excitement at finally confronting the Reaper. Aside from myself and Emily, Polly had given me eight of the best trained House members she had—nine people and Emily herself were the most we’d found the girl able to get through before she had to revert to her human, terrestrial soul form. But the members were all former or current military and were loaded down with top of the line weaponry and gear. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but between the team I had and the element of surprise, I felt sure we could face down whatever the Reaper threw at us.

And then we found three people—an old man and a young couple—sitting down chatting in what looked like a fancy basement rumpus room.

Is this what we had been afraid of? Surely not.

I had a second of indecision at seeing them, wondering if the shard of plastic hadn’t really been from the man who had killed an Ascendant in Atlanta years ago or if Emily had somehow made a mistake despite her seemingly unerring accuracy when she had become a gateway in the past. Then the old man looked at me as the younger guy stood up and started coming forward.

It was like a switch had been flipped in both of them—faces that had been open and relaxed a moment before were now hard and filled with purpose. The young man’s eyes were filled with barely restrained violence, but the older man’s gaze was somehow worse. He was just watching us with interest and maybe mild surprise, as though he had just found a new bug he wanted to study.

No, we were in the right spot. These were the fuckers behind all of this, or at least some of them. As we had planned, four of the men broke off to secure the location while the other four remained with me. Their guns were already trained on the trio as I stepped forward, an exhausted Emily in my arms as I addressed them.

“Hi there. I’m Jimmy, and we’re here to collect you in the name of the House of the Claw. You can come peacefully or you can resist.” I looked between the two men and then at the woman between them. “Please resist. I’ve got my orders, but I’d love to burn you all to death the way you did my little girl. I really fucking would.”

The woman looked a bit shocked at this, but neither of the men did. They were the ones that did it, or at least knew about it. Either way, they were all either coming back with us or dying here. And I had been honest about which I preferred.

“No need for any of that.” The old man was standing slowly now and seemingly with great effort. “I’m too weak to put up a fight, and they both have enough sense to know that any firefight in here would result in too many casualties.” He exchanged a look with the young man, who nodded and seemed to relax a bit.

“Yeah, sure. We’ll go with you. Just leave the girl, okay? She’s not a part of any of this. She’s only here because we made her come. She doesn’t have anything to do with your beef with us.”

I laughed. “Sorry, this isn’t a negotiation. Anyone who’s here is going with us. But just so my team doesn’t unnecesarily kill anyone trying to subdue them, do you want to tell me of anyone else that’s here?”

Another look between the old man and the boy. They looked similar, possibly grandfather and grandson? Not that it mattered. They’d both be dead soon enough. Still, their exchanges were troubling. They weren’t panicked, and it was clear they had some plan they were attempting.

The old man cleared his throat. “No one else is here, but there are booby traps around. Your men may not come back in one piece.” He pointed to the younger man. “Jason, why don’t you show them where the traps are. It won’t get them all, and it will only make the survivors go harder on us if their friends are dead.”

Jason frowned slightly at the older man. “Are you sure?”

The old man nodded. “Don’t worry. Just go with them and show them. We’ll be okay here. You can take that to the bank.”

I felt like I was losing control of the situation, but I didn’t see a strong reason to not take the help. If they were telling the truth, it would be good to know. If it was part of some trick, it would give me all the excuse I needed to kill them on the spot rather than risk taking them back for interrogation. Polly and Haley might be mad, but they could get over it.

I pointed to two of the members. I think their names were Rick and Selina. “You two. Stay with them. If they try anything, shoot them.” Pointing at Jason, I gestured for him to go to the other two men. “You go with them. If you try anything, they are going to shoot you in the head and then come back and kill these two. Understand?” I saw the man’s jaw flexing angrily, but he nodded, his eyes locked on mine. “I understand.”

With that, they headed up the stairs. Emily was awake enough to stand now, and as I sat her down, I debated where I should stay. It would likely be safer for her and myself down in the basement with the old man and the girl, but I wanted to see the rest of the place for myself and I didn’t trust anyone else with Emily. Also, she was looking increasingly alarmed as she came back to herself. It might be that exploring the place might be less distressing for her than watching a seemingly harmless pair of people being held hostage at gun point. I understood some of this was my rationalization for wanting to see the extent of “the Reaper” for myself, but that didn’t change anything. I was here to get revenge, and Emily, while a sweet little girl, wasn’t my daughter. She was a tool.

So giving her a comforting smile, I took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Let’s go look around, honey.”

---

Narrative Summary of streamed body cam footage uploaded to cloud from Tattersall Security Unit 5482. Video partially corrupted. Files from other Units were somehow wholly corrupted and unretrievable.

The camera footage from Unit 5482, Selina Abarya, shows the initial entry into the Ascendant’s gateway and encounter with the suspected hostiles. 5482 and 5988 are told by HRL19 aka “Jimmy” to stay and guard the older man and younger woman. 5482 takes up a secure guarding position with AR-15 in ready posture while 5988 does a preliminary clear of the downstairs area beyond what had already been done by the recon quad.

No other hostiles are located, but 5988 does come back stating that he can’t open a large metal door in the hallway. He asks the hostiles what is inside, at which point the older man waves his hand and says, “Nothing, nothing. Just storage” in a hurried and visibly nervous manner. Based upon subsequent events, it is believed this reaction was artificial and intended to pique the interest of the team members.

It was successful.

Presumably thinking they were in control of the situation, 5482 and 5988 use command tone and language to direct the hostile to the metal door with orders to open it. The woman states she doesn’t know how to while the man protests, saying there’s nothing there to see. That it’s empty. This is obviously an implied contradiction to his earlier statement that it was “just storage”, and it is this analyst’s belief that this was again intentional to ensure the team members continue compelling the door’s opening.

5988 again orders the door to be opened, pressing the gun against the woman’s head while using command tone on the man. The old man complies, unlocking and opening the door. From the open doorway, a large metal room containing what appears to be an operating table and various apparatus is visible. The glimpse is brief before the old man starts to wail, clutching his chest and stumbling. His words are slurred, but he seems to be saying, “My heart, my heart, oh God, not now…”

The old man staggers toward 5988, appearing to be on the verge of collapse. 5988 pivots and catches him easily, but doing so moves his gun away from the female hostile. There is suddenly a grunt followed by a gurgling sound and 5988 is sliding down the wall clutching his throat. Further study of the video and brief frames that show 5988’s wounds in 5482’s camera allow a limited reconstruction of what occurred.

It appears that the man utilized the pretense of falling to get within arm’s reach of 5988. He then stabbed him deeply in the area of the axillary artery—one of the few areas not covered by his body armor. This wound, while not immediately fatal, provided sufficient distraction to allow him to deal a far deadlier wound to the throat approximately two seconds later. The result was that 5988 was incapacitated and dying as the old man turned on 5482.

5482 had her gun raised, but was in a poor firing position due to her reaction to the old man’s sudden outcry and subsequent attack of 5988. These factors, combined with her training about firing high caliber rounds in the direction of nearby steel, appeared to be the cause of her momentary hesitation. The old man, suddenly much quicker and stronger than he had put on previously, did not suffer from any such hesitation.

He darted forward, and based on his movements and position, it appears that he struck her somewhere on her arm with whatever bladed implement he had used on her teammate. She lets out a yell of pain, and almost immediately you see her gun fall from view and hear the sound of it clattering to the floor. Then she is being pulled into the vault by the man as he tells the female hostile to get in and close the vault door behind them.

As the door begins to close, the footage cuts out, likely due to signal interference from the dense walls of the bank vault 5482 had been pulled into.

The reason for the other body cam videos being corrupted is still being investigated at this time, and thus far, location of the operation is still unknown. It appears that some frequencies in the area were being intentionally jammed by the hostiles, so our best location estimates are based only limited satellite triangulation, placing the site of this slaughter somewhere in the Eastern U.S. This report will be updated as new information becomes available.

---

“What is it?”

We were standing in one of the other buildings now—another largely empty warehouse with a subterranean secret it turned out. Jason was looking concerned for the first time, and I felt a flush of pleasure at the worry on his face. He wasn’t afraid of me or the men I had brought with me, but he was afraid of whatever was buried under the recently poured concrete floor I was now standing on.

Shaking his head slightly, Jason raised his hand. “Look, you don’t want to open that. We’ve got explosives down there. Really volatile stuff. I don’t even know how to get into it. But if you start hammering away we’re all going to go up.”

I let out a short laugh. “I think your grandpa, or whoever that old fuck is, is a better liar than you, son.” We had met up with the other four members, and I figured the six of them could have that thing open quick enough. “Bust this open.”

One of them, Marvin maybe, asked me how they were going to do it. They hadn’t brought tools for that. I told them to figure it out, and after an irritated exchange of looks, they went and retrieved hammers and crowbars from the small workshop we had seen in a corner of the other building’s surface level. Jason remained silent until they started breaking out chunks of concrete.

“You’re all going to die if you keep at this.”

I smirked at him. “So you say. Just keep in mind, if you act up, not only will we gun you down, your friends die too. All it takes is a word on my mic and they’re done.”

He looked at me for a long time, his eyes seeming to bore into me with an intensity that caused me to finally look away. Just then, he said, “You know, you haven’t heard from those buddies of yours in awhile.” I glanced back up and saw he was smiling coldly at me.

I didn’t want to take the bait, but I couldn’t resist doing a quick check to make sure everything was okay with the hostages in the basement. These people were so strange and self-assured, and it was making me jumpy. Clicking the button on my body mic, I asked how things were going with “the other two”.

There was no response.

Worried I wasn’t using the mic right, as I wasn’t used to all this weird, paramilitary bullshit, I told one of the men tearing through the floor to try calling them. He did, but still no answer. I told them to send someone to go check, but then I heard Jason behind me, closer. One of the men had kept a gun trained on him while the others worked on digging out whatever was buried underneath the floor, but Jason seemed to be ignoring him now.

“I wouldn’t bother with checking. They’re already dead. Just like you’re about to be.”

He shot back toward the man aiming at him, wrenching the gun away with enough force that I saw the man’s wrist and arm twist past the points of breaking as he let out a scream. Impossibly fast, Jason slammed a fist into the man’s chest twice, and even through the bulletproof vest I could hear the muffled crack as his chest caved in. Within five seconds he was dead on the floor and the other men were screaming.

Except they weren’t screaming because of what had happened to their friend. They had finally broken through the floor and met what was sleeping underneath. I watched in mute horror as they began writhing on the ground before growing still as life was taken from them. And I thought I could see something pushing through the rubble, but then my world exploded as my head shattered into bright shards of pain and pressure and…something…

Something was in me. Oh God, something was in my head. I could feel it. It felt cold and unclean somehow, and in the illogic of my terror, I found myself looking at Jason, the man I had wanted to hurt and kill so badly just moments before, for some kind of impossible help. But his wide-eyed expression told me he had no help to give.

I felt like I was drowning, being pushed down into the black depths of some cold, ancient lake. An inhuman, cruel place that never saw light and only bred creatures accustomed to such conditions. It was with growing horror that I realized I was being pushed farther down into the darkness of my own soul. Not the soul of a young man full of hope and ambition as he tried to find a novel approach to the doctoral thesis I never finished. Not the soul of an older man full of love for his wife and daughter, proud of his accomplishments and what the future still held. But the dark and stagnant tides of a bitter old man who had nothing left but his grudges and a willingness to trade away the last of his humanity for a chance to wrong those who had wronged him.

And high above, seated now in the throne of my conscious mind, I could see a foul thing looking down at me. It was looking down at me and laughing a deep, raspy laugh. As I continued to drift down, I saw it look away, using my eyes to regard Jason, using my voice to speak.

“Hello, boy. Doncha think it’s time we finished what we started?” 

---

Credits

 

The House of the Claw: Retribution

  

“You need to eat something.”

I looked up at Haley’s tired, worried expression and I tried to force a smile as I shook my head. “I’m not hungry. Let me get some more work done and then I’ll take a break.”

She sighed and sat down next to me, gently resting a hand on my forearm as I went back to looking at the computer screen. I had to be close. There had to be some kind of pattern, no matter how smart or careful the Reaper was. So far, my best idea had been to try and identify the time and location of every killing of an Ascendant or House member that could reasonably be attributed to the Reaper. That should give me a minimum age and hopefully a smaller search area if the majority of the murders were clumped together. Unfortunately, the pattern of death was spread pretty wide. Most of it was confined to the continental U.S., but there were some “Reaper deaths” in Europe and Asia over the years as well.

Then it hit me. Start with the first one in recent times, as it was likely closer to where the Reaper lived. While I couldn’t say for sure that any particular death was caused by the Reaper, I had seen enough through my research to suspect the majority of the unsolved deaths we had suffered in the last forty years were the work of one group, or if Haley’s fears were right, just one person. Looking back through it all, it seemed obvious that the Reaper had likely gotten his start with the killing of our group’s own Ascendant, Dr. Marcus Salk.

But that was where I ran into a dead end. Marcus never shared many details of his life with us, and I didn’t know much about his associates or his “victims”. I could guess at some of it, but it was just that—a guess. If it was someone Marcus had known personally, someone who had somehow figured out his true nature, their motivation for killing him could be anything from ignorant moral outrage to revenge. Revenge seemed more likely to me, but there were so many unknowns. People he worked with as a doctor were also an option, but I had no real way of getting staff information that was over thirty years old from anywhere, much less a doctor’s office or hospital. If only I could…

“Honey, you need to take a break now. Eat and rest. We’ve got the trip coming up tomorrow, and I don’t want you to be exhausted.” Haley was still sitting with me, and now she gave my arm a squeeze. “Please, for me.”

I glared at her, hating the harsh tone in my voice when I spoke. “I’m doing this for you. For both of us, and our little girl.” I pulled my arm away. “As for the meeting, Margaret Templeton can go fuck herself. She’s not our boss and I don’t have the time to waste going up there for whatever bureaucratic bullshit they have planned.”

I saw Haley frowning out of the corner of my eye. “It’s not just bullshit. Something bad happened out in California a few weeks ago. Something big. Tattersall, the old man Tattersall…he’s dead. And the word I’m hearing is that Margaret is planning on taking things over now that he’s out of the way. Not just Tattersall Global. The House too.”

This got my attention. Turning back to her, I raised an eyebrow. “Is she insane? That’s not how the House works. Just because Tattersall has a large following and shit-tons of money doesn’t mean that the true believers like us will listen to shit from them. Much less the psycho crowd.”

Haley nodded, her expression growing more concerned. “I know that. But she doesn’t. She’s already a megalomanic, but she’s also about to control the part of the House that has most of the money and resources and political power. How long do you think it’ll take for her to make the House over in her image?”

I wanted to argue, but I knew she was right. It was hard for me to care about anything anymore beyond retribution for Madeline being taken from us, but some part of me knew that was short-sighted. Besides, Haley was right about something else. Tattersall did have tons of resources. Maybe they had buried their head in the sand up to now, trying to pretend that the Reaper wasn’t real or couldn’t touch them, but Margaret knew first-hand that wasn’t the case. Maybe reminding her of her sister’s death and her own wounds at the Reaper’s hands would be enough to get her to see reason and give me the help I need to stop this once and for all.

The smile made it to my lips this time. “I was wrong, Haley. We need to be at that meeting.”

---

It felt strange being in a room with so many members of the House. Looking around, I saw there were at least thirty people there, and out of those, I only recognized a handful. That was by design. This mass meeting of higher-ups and influential group leaders was against protocol and stupid. Before my girl died, I’d have been unable to sit there without saying something. But now…now all I cared about was getting what I needed from these people.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe any more, because I did. If anything could have ever cemented my faith and certainty in the House’s beliefs and primary cause, it was watching what my daughter Madeline could accomplish. It was just that I was coming to realize how warped that central framework of belief had become over time. We were letting in sociopaths, or as other House members called them, “the psychos”, who were only there to give intricacy and dim meaning to their inherent, abominable drive to torture and slaughter people. We were handing over the reins slowly but surely to money men and soulless corporate types like Tattersall in general and Margaret Templeton in particular—people that cared more about the bottom line and gaining personal power than they did helping the human race ascend. The House has lost its way, I thought, and the first step towards finding it again needed to happen today at that meeting.

That’s when Margaret stepped into the room, a man and a woman in business suits following her like well-heeled hounds. Her cold gaze swept the large space, and even from a distance I could see the scar slashed across her face like a brand. The brand I planned to use to get her on board with hunting down the Reaper once and for all. But first, there was the meeting and the speechifying. Clasping my hands impatiently, I tried to look attentive as she began to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us today. I know such a meeting is highly irregular, but these are highly irregular times. Some of you may be aware that Wilson Tattersall, our company’s founder, as well as a vital member of the House of the Claw, is dead. Brutally betrayed and murdered several weeks ago while working on one of his long-term side projects.” She paused as hushed whispers passed through the room before continuing with a solemn nod. “Yes, it’s terrible news. Wilson was like a father to me in many ways, and we are all less without him. But it just underlines the dangerous times that we live in and that it is more important now than ever that we are united.”

An uneasy rumble began to spread through the room, but it quieted when she raised her hand. “I know, I know. This also breaks with tradition. Change is a frightening thing. But if we are going to accomplish our goal of helping this world, we need organization and resources. We will work together to attain organization, and I’m making Tattersall’s resources fully available to insure we succeed.”

“How’d that work out for your hotels, Marge?” It was a voice I didn’t recognize on the other side of the room, and it drew a combination of gasps and laughs from the crowd. Everyone knew about Margaret’s failed experiments trying to create a deadly super-virus, but I didn’t know so many people thought it was as funny as I did. Maybe Margaret wasn’t as well-liked or in control as I had thought.

Margaret’s smile was cold as she went to respond. Before she could, I blurted out, “What about the Reaper?”

There was no laughter this time. You could have heard a pin drop. I saw a mixture of anger and fear pass across Margaret’s face before she regained control. She did better than the rest. Most of the faces I could see were clearly terrified.

“This isn’t a pep rally or a Q and A session. Just an introduction to what I hope will be a fruitful meeting of the minds. We will be talking throughout the day privately, and this afternoon we’ll see what kind of agreement we have reached.” She looked at me, her eyes glittering dangerously. “Let’s start with you.” As though on command, two people came up to “escort” me.

I think the intention was to frighten me or intimidate the others if they thought about speaking up, but it didn’t have the desired effect. I wasn’t afraid of Margaret or her stupid company, and as I walked out of the room behind her, I saw more looks of anger and defiance than fear. I didn’t think this coup was going as well as Margaret had hoped it would.

We followed her to a nearby conference room dominated by a long wood table flanked on all sides by high-backed black leather chairs. Margaret sat at one end of the table and gestured for me to sit as well. I ignored her and stood back, my arms folded.

Smirking, she gave a light shrug. “Jimmy, are we going to have a problem?”

I glanced at the two goons in the room with us. “I don’t know. You’re the one with enforcers following you around like we’re in a mob movie. Planning on breaking my legs?”

Another smirk and she waved her hand. I heard the door open and close behind me as the others left. “Look, Jimmy, let me be frank with you. I don’t care for you much. Though I don’t think you’re directly responsible for Barbara’s death, I’ve always felt that the incompetence of you and your group was a contributing factor. That…”

I felt my face growing hot. “Your sister died because of the fucking Reaper. And while we’re being frank, you were with her at the time.” I touched my face where the scar lay on her own. “I didn’t see you stopping him either.”

Giving me a smile that was closer to a baring of teeth, she went on. “That mark against you aside, you do have a great deal of influence among certain factions within the House. During this period of transition, I would really value it if you were on my side. It would make my job easier, and your own group would benefit greatly as well.”

I wanted to yell again, but I forced myself to stop. This was the crack I was looking for. “Ok. I’m listening. What kind of benefits or resources are we talking about?”

Margaret seemed to be considering something before she spoke. “Well, we have a new Ascendant here. Her name is Emily. She’s very unique and vital to our plan going forward, but she’s also a nine year-old girl. Whatever my misgivings of you and Haley, there’s no denying that you are very skilled at providing for the domestic needs of upcoming Ascendants. Caregiving and the like. Even Barbara was always complementary on that point.” She tapped on the table and a screen behind her came on, showing a picture of a little red-haired girl with freckles and a large gap in her smile. “It goes without saying that this would be a joint effort. You would have to agree to some of my people being involved with security, and any field exercises would be solely under Tattersall Security’s purview.”

Her words were starting to fade into the periphery as I tried to sort out several conflicting thoughts and emotions. After several moments of looking at the girl’s picture, I looked back to Margaret to ask the simplest of my questions. “What is her Ascendant form?”

Margaret smiled widely. “It’s something truly amazing. She’s a gateway. If she knows a place or a person well, or if she has an object that belongs to someone, she can create a doorway to where they are. She can even pull herself along afterward.” She leaned forward, and I could tell her excitement was genuine. “Can you imagine the potential of that? Once she’s well-trained, she can give us access to nearly anywhere on the planet. Anyone. Even better, it’s theorized that she can actually access the other Realms too, though it’s too dangerous to test that yet. We may finally have a direct path to the Nightlands.”

This all sounded so incredible. Unbelievable. Perfect. “I’ll do it.”

It may take time, but once I knew who the Reaper was, I’d have the perfect weapon to find him or them and end this once and for all. I debated bringing up needing resources to find the Reaper after being given a gift like this girl, but I didn’t know when I would have another chance to make demands. Deciding to push my luck, I went to speak, but Margaret was already standing up from the table with a satisfied nod.

“Excellent! I knew you’d see reason. Emily is a sweet girl, and I think you’ll find she’s a good replacement for the Ascendant you lost recently. Once today’s meetings are over, I’ll…”

“What did you fucking say?”

Margaret blinked. “What?”

My vision was turning red, anger blazing so hot in my chest that I felt like I was burning up from the inside out. I had known when she started talking about Emily that part of the reason it was being offered to us was to placate us. To give us a new child to focus on. But to come out and call Madeline replaceable? It was too much. I had been holding my rage in check since entering this temple of corporate greed that morning, been trying to hide my hate for what it and Margaret represented. But that wrath was loose now, ravenous and snapping, and it wouldn’t be satisfied until it had blood between its teeth.

“She wasn’t a fucking puppy.” I stepped forward and Margaret took a step back, her face shifting from confusion to annoyance and fear. “She was my daughter. She can’t be replaced like a goddamned pet.”

Margaret raised her hands. “Look, I get it. Poor choice of words. But let’s be honest and clear. The last Ascendant wasn’t your daughter. Emily won’t be either. They’re assets, valuable members of our organization that have a bigger role to play than just playing house with you and your wife. If you can’t wrap your head around that, then…”

It wasn’t hard to grab Margaret’s skull. Her mind was sharp and relentlessly ready for combat, but her body wasn’t used to fighting. So when I lunged forward and pushed my hands past her own, it was a simple thing, too quick for her to react. I caught a brief glimpse of surprise and dismay in her eyes before my thumbs were on them, pressing them into their sockets as she began to scream.

I expected someone to come in and stop me, especially with the noise she was making. But either she was even less-liked than I thought or the room was well soundproofed. She twisted and flailed against me as I bore her down to the ground, putting my full weight behind my thumbs as they drove down in their quest to crush her imperious eyes and destroy her hateful brain. The eyes gave quickly, their fluid and the accompanying blood providing more than enough lubrication to push on to the back wall of the sockets.

She had grown still, but I knew she wasn’t dead yet. So I stomped on her head until I was sure she was. When I was done, I sat down next to the body, falling into a kind of stupor as I stared at the bits of Margaret slowly drying on the expensive carpet. After what felt like only a few minutes, I heard the door to the conference room open. Hearing a startled gasp I recognized, I looked up to see Haley standing there.

“Oh God. What have you done, Jimmy?”

I just shook my head. I didn’t have a response. I wasn’t sure why I had done it now, only that it had made me feel much better. Still, the immensity of the act hadn’t fully escaped me. How was I ever going to get to the Reaper after they found out that I had murdered their leader?

Haley was beside me now, holding my face in her hands. “Listen to me. Hey, stay with me. Listen. I was coming to tell you that in the couple of hours you’ve been in here, the rest of us decided. Margaret’s right. We do need a leader to organize us better. But not her.” A brief smile flickered across her face before turning serious again. “Me. I didn’t want it, but they couldn’t agree on anyone else.” She glanced back at Margaret’s feet. “As for that…most people didn’t like her, but she did have her allies. We’ll say that I came in here to tell the two of you about the decision and she attacked us. Gave us no choice.”

I was coming back to myself a bit more now and I looked past Haley at the ruined head of the body laying behind her. “No one is going to believe that was self-defense.”

Haley sighed and nodded. “They won’t, but hopefully they won’t care enough to argue against it. They just need some reason for it, whether it really makes sense or not. Unless you have a better idea?”

I shook my head again. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself. She acted like she was a puppy.” I knew I wasn’t making sense, but Haley just kissed my head and nodded.

“I know, baby. Let’s get you cleaned up some and go sell this thing.”

---

It was the next day before it was done. There had been arguing and accusations, but in the end, it went surprisingly well. The next person in line for heading up Tattersall was the young woman who had been part of Margaret’s entourage at the earlier meeting. Her name was Polly Brenner, and she actually seemed to hate Margaret as much as I had, in large part because Polly was firmly in the “true believer” camp like us. She had actually been one of the main champions for Haley taking on a leadership role in the House, and she assured us she would have Tattersall under her full control by the end of the next board of directors meeting.

In the meantime, we met Emily. She really was a sweet girl, and while I knew I’d never feel more than a passing affection for her, I did feel a strange kind of immediate love for what she represented. She was the future of the House in many ways, a milestone in our fulfillment of the Grand Plan. But most of all, she was the door I was going to walk through when I went to kill the Reaper.

I’d told Polly and Haley about my plan, and after some discussion they agreed. We were to take Emily home with us. Help her develop her abilities further. And when the time was right, she would take us where we needed to go.

It was late in the afternoon of the third day before we were packing up the car to head home. Polly was out in the parking lot of the corporate housing we had been staying at, talking with Haley and Emily as I loaded the last of Emily’s things into the trunk. I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts that I jumped slightly when I felt a hand on my back. It was Polly.

“I’ve got something else for you too. Not for now, but for when Emily’s ready. When we’re all ready.” She held up a small, clear bag that contained what looked like a black piece of plastic. Seeing my confusion, she smiled and explained.

“This was recovered from a construction site in Atlanta in 1989. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the incident, but it was where the Ascendant Steven Kulchek was murdered by the Reaper.” I knew about it, and I was already feeling a buzz of excitement in my ears. “Based on our analysis and a partial lot number stamped on the inside, this appears to be part of the plastic casing for a stun gun. While the gun itself wasn’t found, it seems likely this broke off in the fight that led to Kulchek’s death.” Her face grew serious. “We could never get prints or DNA from it, but it doesn’t change the fact that whoever this Reaper is, this likely belonged to them. And when the time is right, Emily may be able to use it to find them.”

Polly let out a surprised gasp as I swept her up in a tearful hug. Finally. After all this time, the path had been revealed.

We’re coming for you, Reaper. Your time is almost done.

---

Credits

 

The House of the Claw: Indoctrination

  

I remember the first time I killed someone. I didn’t kill them directly, but I knew what was coming for them and I did it anyway. It was an eight year-old boy named Steven Chester.

I had slipped into the house earlier in the day and crept up to the second floor where I eased down the creaking ceiling ladder that led to the attic. Haley had told me where the house was the night before, and had even given me a key. Apparently the family’s housekeeper was a member of the House in good standing, and she had told Haley when to expect them home and even warned about the creaky ladder. I had brought a small can of oil and sprayed down the hinges and springs until I felt confident they should be quiet later in the evening.

The boy was sent to bed like clockwork at 8:30, and while he piddled around for a little while, by 9:00 I didn’t hear any further movement, with the only noise coming from the parents watching t.v. downstairs. I eased the ladder down, wincing when it made a faint protesting groan despite the oil. Gingerly stepping down, I moved to the boy’s door and heard him softly snoring.

When I entered the room, I looked down at him for several seconds before taking him. Sometimes in life you can feel yourself at major turning points—at crossroads that you can’t come back from. This was one of those times. I believed in the House of the Claw and what I had been taught by them. I believed that by taking this boy and submitting him to pain and fear and death, I was ultimately helping to free him from a hellish cycle of reincarnation and push him closer to spiritual evolution and perfection.

But he was still just a little boy.

All my beliefs, all the trust and faith I had in Haley and Dr. Salk and the others, it was all untested faith. Words were easy. Actions were hard. And I knew if I took this action, I was down an immutable path that would either see me as a murderous, lunatic cult member or a champion of humanity that had finally found the right path to our ultimate destiny. It was be easy to just open the window and sneak out to the car I had parked right around the corner. They would never know how close they came to what they would view as tragedy.

But then I remembered what my mother used to always tell me. I said the words in a whisper as I stood over the small child’s bed.

“Most of the time the right thing isn’t the easy thing.”

---

An hour later and the boy was waking up as I was drawing close to the destination. The drop-off point was behind an old grocery store, and the timing worked out perfectly. The boy was looking around confusedly, asking where he was and who I was just as I was rolling to a stop to let him out. When I told him to leave the car, he didn’t argue, his eyes wide dinner plates of fear as he got out and stepped back a few feet. I drove away quickly, seeing headlights entering the far end of the alley behind the chain of stores as I was exiting. Dr. Salk was right on time.

It wasn’t until the following afternoon that I learned that Salk was dead and the house where I had spent so much time with Haley had been burned to the ground. That was one of the worst times of my life. I mourned Salk, of course, but I knew he had gone on to the next stage of his Ascension. We were now left rudderless as a group however, and Haley would barely talk or eat most of the time. We had been slowly building our friendship towards something more in the last few months, but she didn’t want to see me most of the time now, almost as though she blamed me for giving him the boy in the first place.

We knew that the boy had been killed in the woods, of course, but we had no idea who had killed Salk and burned down the house. Salk would visit us from time to time, but he was a private man. If he had any insights into specific enemies, he didn’t share them with us. Still, it left a large cloud of fear and worry hanging over all of us. If someone knew about Salk, they might know about us, and if they were able to kill him, how much of a chance did we have?

The next few weeks were terrible. Elise disappeared one night and we never saw her again. The following week we found David hanging from an extension cord in his bedroom. It was down to Bruce, Haley, and myself, and the times we got together it felt more like a wake than anything else.

But as with so many things, time passes and things change. By the next fall, Haley and I were dating and Bruce, who had looked for awhile like he might drink himself into an early grave, had bounced back to at least a pale shade of his former self. He would crack jokes and talk again, even if the wounded look in his eyes never fully went away.

As for me and Haley, we were largely happy. We would sometimes provide assistance to other nearby groups of the House, but it was never face-to-face, so it was more something to do than any kind of social interaction. Still, we had each other and we were in love. By the early 1990s we had a new Ascendant—a small woman with a short temper named Barbara Templeton. Her family had been raised in the House, and her younger sister Margaret was already an up-and-comer in the high ranks of the larger organization. Haley said that having her assigned to us was a real honor, and I’ll admit, for the first few months it reinvigorated our group with newfound purpose.

Templeton was entirely different than Salk had been. Her and her sister took a much more secular and scientific approach to things, and her night soul form accommodated that. It looked like a shabby gray housecat in most regards, unless you looked at its belly. There you’d find endless rows of sinister looking red eggs, all pulsing slowly and out of rhythm with each other, like some troubled crimson sea. She could alter people if they ingested just one of those eggs. Nothing overly dramatic usually, they would just become more impulsive and paranoid, more prone to give into their darker, baser urges.

So she went one state over, found a small, isolated town, and shed four hundred or so eggs into their water supply.

Over the next year, that town and surrounding area saw over a 1000% increase in violent crime, including a 450% increase in sexual offenses and a 300% increase in murders. We have the figures, because Barbara and Margaret delighted in visiting the town periodically and collecting the latest data. It was ghoulish, like repeatedly checking the pulse of a patient you know is dying for fun, but they would have said it was progress.

There were times that I would agree with that…times when my faith in what we was doing and my love for Haley and our friends was strong enough to overcome the doubts and fears I still carried with me in the secret chambers of my heart. I didn’t talk about it with anyone, not even Haley. She might would have understood, but I was always afraid she would reject me for it. That I would lose her love.

When Barbara was killed three years later, it was hard, but nothing like Salk. The main focus was on how it had happened. We knew that they were visiting their little science project again—the town had now gotten three more doses of the eggs in their water over time and was on the verge of economic and societal collapse, with more wild dogs and cats on the street than people. Then we get the call that there had been an explosion. Their car had gone up in a blast of unknown origin, effectively vaporizing Barbara and badly injuring Margaret. Bruce had gotten along better with Barbara than me and Haley, and he volunteered to go and find out more information.

The news was grim. It was being called a freak accident, but the inside word was that it had been a shaped charge of plastic explosive. This news sent us into lockdown mode. There seemed little question that someone was hunting us now. When we next had communication with the higher orders of the House, I demanded answers. I wanted to know who was hunting us and what was being done about it. The silence I got in response was deafening.

---

“They don’t know.” Haley was sanding a chair she was refinishing in the garage. She had taken up the hobby in the last couple of years and only did it when she was nervous or upset about something. “I’m telling you, they don’t know who’s doing it either.”

I frowned. “How do they just not know? Are you telling me someone is that good at killing Ascendants? Are we somehow cursed and only ours are being taken out?”

She shook her head. “No, I hear things occasionally. With the internet and all, some people in the House are setting up semi-anonymous ways of passing notes to each other. Coded electronic message boards and stuff.” She glanced up at me guiltily. “I would have told you earlier, but I was worried you wouldn’t approve. I know you’re a stickler for the House rules and I didn’t want to put you in a bad position.”

I sighed and walked over to her, putting my arms around her shoulders. “You come first, you know? And right now we need to know everything we can before whatever group this is comes for us.”

She patted my arm, but I felt her tremble slightly. “From what I’m hearing, they don’t think it’s a group. They think it’s one man.”

I pulled back slightly, my eyes widening. “How would one man kill not one Ascendant but two? Or if what you’re hearing is right, even more than that? How could that be?”

She put the sandpaper down and turned to face me. Her face was drawn down into a mask of fear. “I don’t know. But if what I’m hearing is true, he’s killed close to two dozen Ascendants across the eastern part of the country.” She swallowed. “People on the bulletin board are calling him the Reaper.”

Fear and anger crawled up me, digging in sharp claws with every step. “Fuck that. Fucking boogeyman bullshit.” Haley recoiled slightly at my tone and I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I’m just scared and pissed off. But we need to be extra careful now. Bruce too. And if that fucker comes, we’ll be ready.”

Except he never did. And while we would still hear reports of things in other places from Haley’s secret network of House members, our lives were relatively quiet for the next few years. We would help the House when we were asked, but most of our days were filled with just living a fairly normal life together. We tried to have children, but apparently my swimmers only dogpaddle a little, so we set that plan aside. And our lives were very happy over all, with the shadow of some mysterious Reaper fading more into the background with each passing year.

And then Madeline came into our lives.

She was an Ascendant, and at 6 she was one of the youngest that had ever been recorded. Her parents had noticed the change in her a couple of weeks before, and after several troubled days, had seen her transformation. Apparently after that they had carried her to a rest stop and abandoned her there before picking up and moving to parts unknown.

It was their loss. She was such a sweet, intelligent child, and me and Haley immediately fell for her. We were being given a huge responsibility, as we were going to act as both her parents and House representatives. But we were ready for it. We taught her everything we knew, and she taught us so much in return.

Madeline would have strange and wonderous dreams, and when she awoke, she would tell us about them. Some of them were more traditional child’s dreams and nightmares, but many of them seemed to be something more. She would dream of traveling in strange lands, flying high above the dark twisted trees of a yellow swamp and among the blue cliffs of a small island chain.

And while for many children, dreams of flying would seem like a flight of fancy, not so for our little girl. Our Ascendant could fly quite well, and in another example of how extraordinary she was, she was a Binary.

Occasionally, though it is rare, the night soul of an Ascendant takes a form that is not just one creature, but two. These are called Binaries. There are a handful of examples of even more diverse forms, but most House members live their entire lives without ever seeing or even hearing about one. The point is, our baby was extra special.

As she grew up, we learned more about what she was capable of. The flying portion of her night soul could resurrect people it had previously stung so long as they had been killed by a person affected by the other half of the Binary. This smaller portion of the Binary would be released from her abdomen and could drive people into a focused murderous rage followed by unconsciousness and amnesia. This was not some random set of traits or gifts, but rather evidence of a new facet to the Grand Plan. For as the person was killed and brought back, they began to change. They began to Ascend in a new way that married the terrestrial soul and the night soul together.

Haley argued that this could not be. That Madeline’s abilities were useful and interesting, but the changes she wrought were not the same as ascending spiritually through the joining of the two portions of the Trifecta. But as I showed her time and again what our little girl was capable of, her protests grew weaker. We had yet to achieve full conversion, but however she did what she did, Madeline was growing stronger and better at it.

Then I came up with the idea of a mass test. She had just turned 13, and I felt sure that if we had a large group of willing participants, we could finally achieve a fully Ascendant individual. There were factions in the House that opposed such a large scale experiment with House members, of course, with Margaret Templeton being chief among them. And understandably, as subjecting dozens of members to Madeline’s gift with no guarantees that any would survive all the way to a full transformation was a costly proposition. But after a couple of months of discussion, it was approved.

The plan was to use one of Tattersall’s many holdings out in the desert—an old building that was remote and secure enough to allow for the necessary days of transformation. Based on past attempts, those that survived the later stages would become ravenous for live food, so we arranged to dupe a limited pool of people to arrive at the location for a “rave” during the latter stages of the transformation. It was an unfortunate but necessary cost of bringing such wonderful new life into the world, and knowing it was not only going to benefit the prey spiritually but also help my sweet Madeline achieve the acclaim she deserved…well, it made any guilt I felt seem like a very small thing indeed.

When I last saw her alive, Madeline hugged me tightly and said how much she’d miss me and Mama until she got back, but that she was going to make us proud and come back with new friends. A condition of the plan was that we, as her parents, couldn’t participate and potentially skew the results. It was hard to swallow, but if that’s what it took, I would happily accept it. I’ve never been prouder than when we saw her off to what was going to be one of the first big crossroads in our little girl’s life since she had Ascended.

The next time I saw my baby, she was broken ashes scattered across a blood and shit covered concrete floor surrounded by the burned remains of those she had tried to help. The Reaper had returned and destroyed our lives once again.

Haley was sobbing softly against my chest, and as we stood in the still smoldering ashes of the burned down building, I didn’t have words to comfort her or myself. I had cried all the way there, but seeing our sweet girl’s night soul burned and twisted like that, my sorrow was being scoured away by rage.

“He’s going to pay, Haley. Don’t you worry. This Reaper, whoever he is, we’re going to hunt him down and find him. And when we do, he’s going to pay for everything he’s done.” 

---

Credits

 

The House of the Claw: Epiphany

  

I never forgot the first time I saw the Devil. Out in the woods with Haley and the rest, watching Marcus Salk change, I was horrified and awestruck, a voice screaming in the back of my head to run away from this terrible thing that should not be.

I had never been a religious man, but I come from a religious family. I remember growing up in church, and I remember a time when the ideas of Hell and the Devil terrified me. Over the years, my spiritual beliefs and fears just sort of faded away. It wasn’t anything sudden or dramatic, but as I had new beliefs and ideas and experiences taking up more and more interior space, they slowly crowded out any otherworldly contemplations. By the time I finished college, I was convinced that all religions were shams, and by the time I decided to find and join a cult for my doctoral thesis, I was proudly confident in my intellectual and moral superiority to the unwashed rubes that fell for the ploys of the cult, the religion, the philosophy that asked you to believe in things you could not see.

When I shook Dr. Salk’s hand, I felt a small flush of unease pass through my body like a brief summer storm. It made me feel uncertain, but I chalked it up to being tired, being nervous about getting closer to the inner workings of this cult, and to getting slightly caught up in the excitement that was radiating from Haley and the others.

I had expected that Salk was going to join us inside and spend awhile spinning me yarns of spiritual awakening and personal growth that were just around the corner if I just joined them. Possibly the sales pitch would include references to community and family or provide examples of how the group helped others in some real and tangible way.

Both are well-worn tropes in cult recruitment. Many cults pad their ranks not just with the truth-seekers and the personally dissatisfied, but with the lonely. The people that have no friends, have alienated their family, and are desperate to find a place where they can belong. And for prospects that consider themselves more shrewd and worldly, the cult talks about how much good they are doing in the world. Picking up litter, reading to the elderly, helping out in a natural disaster, that kind of thing. The actions of a legitimate organization, not a cult.

That may sound silly, but you need to understand that if someone is still listening to a cult’s sales pitch after more than a few minutes, they want to believe. They want to be convinced. It’s just a question of giving them the right thing to hang their hat on, whether it’s a benefit like a new family to be loved and accepted by or a distinction like public service they can use to silence the nagging doubts they have about this strange group they are being drawn into minute by minute.

But that wasn’t what happened with Salk. Instead, we all loaded into a van that I later learned belonged to Haley’s grandparents and went for a drive. Haley was behind the wheel, and Bruce sat up front with her. Salk and I were in the next row of bucket seats back, with Elise and David sitting in the rear.

From the moment Salk had arrived, the entire dynamic of the group had changed. All four of them were like candleflies dancing around his flame, their words and movements all exuding a strange sort of deferential excitement. For Haley and Bruce, this led to them being more direct and assertive—it was clear that they were the leaders in the group. Elise and the already quiet David, on the other hand, faded into the background even further, their eyes locked on Salk with some kind of silent desperation.

For his part, Salk just sat and talked to me as we drove. He clearly knew more than a little about me already, but he made a point of asking me questions about myself, where I was from, what I did for a living. I considered lying, but a part of me sensed it would be a mistake. So I admitted to working on my PhD in Sociology and tried to make sure that all my other answers, while vague, could never be called outright lies either.

While I had talked about myself over the course of the evening playing cards, I had managed to avoid the topic of sociology entirely, and I could see Haley stiffen in her seat when I mentioned it to Salk. The thought occurred to me that I may not be the first skeptic or spectator that had tried to get a peek behind the curtain with these people, and that inevitably led me to picturing what they might do when they found me out. I’m not stupid, and I had known this entire thing was going to be potentially dangerous from the start, but I’ll admit that a nighttime ride out into the middle of nowhere with a group of virtual strangers brought it home.

Still, Salk was affable enough, making the occasional joke and telling me about himself as well. He was an orthopedic surgeon about an hour away. Originally from Kansas, he had moved to the area five years earlier after experiencing what he called “an awakening”. He told me he had been married once, and his wife had been a good person, but he had known she wasn’t ready for how he had changed, and so he had left to find a new life with new friends.

Bruce chuckled and glanced back. “We do what we can.” He seemed to be the most at ease with Salk, but even he was far more guarded and reserved than he had been before the man’s arrival. I knew we had been driving for some time now, and despite planning to pay attention to our route in case I needed to make a break for it, I realized I was totally lost. Looking out the front windshield, the headlights illuminated what had become a dirt road with trees and scrub on both sides. Turning back to Salk, I decided to go ahead and push for some answers.

“So what exactly do you all believe? I know we’re going out here for you to show me something, but can you give me a hint?”

Dr. Salk studied me for a moment, his face unreadable and almost unnaturally blank. Then it lit up with a small smile as he glanced out the window.

“I can do better than that. We’re here.”

Following his gaze, I saw that we were at a small ranch house in the middle of nowhere. No lights were on and there were no signs of cars or people. In fact, I didn’t remember us passing any cars for the last twenty minutes. As though reading my mind, Salk responded.

“The group owns this house and about five hundred acres around it, so it’s a nice place to get away from everything or when we need to do things of a private nature.” He leaned over and patted my arm. “And don’t worry. You’re perfectly safe. I know this all seems very strange, and what you’re about to see will be remarkable and frightening, but just remember, you are safe.”

We piled out of the van, and I remember thinking at the time that Salk’s words and presence weren’t reassuring me. Instead of seeming uncomfortable in the adoration of the others, he seemed to glory in it. Not because of what he said, but the way he said it. All of his jokes and good-natured conversation seemed forced or hollow, and I don’t know that I believed his reassurances that I was safe either. In fact, the only things that seemed truly genuine about him was his arrogance and his conviction that I was about to see something terrifying.

Instead of going into the house, we went around it, walking along a small path lined with rocks and scrub brush to a small clearing around fifty yards away. The center of the clearing had a small patio of paving stones laid out in a large square, a tiki torch jammed into the ground at each corner. I had the thought that it looked like an unfinished Aztec sacrificial altar that had been started with materials from a discount home improvement store.

As David went up and started lighting the torches, I found myself fighting a hysterical laugh that was pushing its way dangerously close to the surface. I knew this was not the time to crack wise. I was looking at the ground, trying to regain my composure, when I saw Haley approaching me. When I looked at her, I felt my heart break a little.

Haley’s face was lit up with a mixture of excitement and joy that made her already beautiful face seem radiant in the dim light of the torches. She believed in this—whatever this was—so much, and I could tell she really wanted me to be a part of it too. And I could also tell she was a good person. My attraction to her had been a reaction to her appearance at first, sure, but having been around her several hours now, I knew there was more to it than that. She was smart, and she had a good sense of humor, and when I thought about betraying her trust, about hurting her and debunking the thing that she believed in more than anything…well, I realized it terrified me more than standing out there in the dark with no idea what was about to happen.

Bruce clapped me on the back as Salk walked toward the paved square. I had the impression he was trying to comport himself with some degree of theatre, but it wasn’t working. It seemed forced, and if I’m being honest, he didn’t cut the most dashing figure to begin with. Still, when he reached the center of the square and turned around, his face sent a chill through me. Flat and expressionless, his eyes were the only thing that seemed to flicker with some kind of dim life. My mind was racing, wondering what the big reveal was going to be. Speaking in tongues? A vision only he could see? A coin trick? I felt another laugh wanting to bubble up, but then Salk was gone. And when I saw the thing that stood in his place, all I could do was scream.

My first thought was, Oh God, it’s a monster! A real monster! I have to…, followed by a frantic jumble of ways I could escape or how I would die. Not able to settle on a response, I stayed rooted to the spot and took in this impossible thing.

Its body was massive, covered in a mixture of grey fur and a black, shiny material that reminded me of an insect, its large torso and monstrous arms supported on relatively smaller legs that reminded me of the legs of a cat or dog. The arms themselves were mismatched and horrific, one ending in a bestial claw while the other looked more like some kind of fleshy dark club covered in protrusions of some kind. But its face was the worst. Partially covered by that same strange black flesh, I could see yellow eyes set into a deep-socketed, long reptilian face. Some distant part of me recognized that I was screaming--had been screaming for several seconds in fact--but I somehow didn’t know how to stop it.

Then I felt something touch my arm. My heart felt like it was going to stop, but I did cease yelling for the moment. I looked over and saw it was Haley. She was smiling at me, her expression sympathetic.

“I know. I reacted pretty much the same way. If I’m honest, I peed myself a little. But you are totally safe. That is still Marcus. You are still here with us, and you are totally safe.”

As though to illustrate the point, the monster stepped forward and reached out its claw hand, patting me on the head gently as a wet sound that might be its version of laughter squelched its way out of its throat. It took all of my willpower to not jerk away or start screaming again, and turning my gaze from it to focus on Haley is what kept me from losing my mind in those next few moments.

Then the creature backed away, returning to the square. The next second, Salk was back in its place, looking like he had never left. He smiled at me, my mind flashing back to the long teeth I had seen lining the mouth of that other face.

“You did really well, Jimmy. I know it’s a lot to get hit with all of a sudden. I know you have questions, tons of them most likely, and they’ll be able to answer them for you. But for now, you need rest. Your mind needs to absorb what you’ve seen before you can really start processing it.”

I nodded numbly, my brain feeling wholly detached from my body now that the immediate threat was no longer visible. I recognized dimly that I was in shock, but that didn’t really matter to me. I just wanted to rest. I just wanted to be safe and sleep.

As the sky began to turn gray with the approaching sunrise, they led me back up the path, and this time we went into the house instead of back to the van. I dimly remember Haley saying she was going to stay there with me for the next few days so I could have some questions answered and start my process of gaining understanding. I wanted to protest, but I was too tired.

I woke over twelve hours later. Haley was sitting up on the bed next to me, a warm smile on her lips.

“Hey there, sleepyhead. How’re you feeling?”

I rubbed my face, my confusion at waking up in a strange place with Haley starting to fade as I remembered the night before. My heart started thudding as I looked around.

“Is it here? Are we alone?”

She shook her head with a laugh. “We’re alone. And Salk, or as we call him when we’re being fancy, the Ascendant, isn’t here. I guess really we should call him an Ascendant, because there are a quite a few of them. But he’s the only one we know personally. He’s the Ascendant we are assigned to help.”

I felt a strange anger flaring up in my chest. “But he’s a monster! I saw him turn into that thing. What is he?”

She patted my leg. “Fair question. But I want to start at the beginning so you have a clear understanding of what he is and what this group actually stands for. So can you bear with me and save your questions for the end?”

I nodded. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was no longer worried about getting away or remembering details for my thesis project. What I had experienced the night before had woken something in me. I had seen and sensed something real and true, and now I hungered to know more. I reached out with a shaking hand and gave her own a squeeze, my heart thudding both at the contact and the feeling that I was standing on the precipice of real Truth. “Yes. Please tell me.”

She squeezed back. “Do you know what a Trifecta is?”

I shrugged weakly. “I’ve heard the word before. Isn’t it a betting term?”

She nodded. “Yes, that’s one definition of it, and an apt one. In betting, a trifecta is when you place bets on not only the three winners, but the order in which they will win. Though nearly no one knows the true and older meaning outside of the House of the Claw.” At my confused look, she laughed. “Shit. Yeah, that’s the name of the group, the cult, whatever. I know, again, super-culty and sinister. Just bear with me.”

“During the Middle Ages in Europe, there was plague, wars, mass killings, etc. Look, I’m not a historian, but suffice it to say, a lot of bad shit went down. There was a lot of ignorance, inequality and violence, and for hundreds of years, people lived short, dirty, miserable lives for the most part. But do you know what caused the Dark Ages?”

I frowned. “Um, the fall of the Roman Empire, famine, and lack of good roads?”

She frowned back. “Okay, fancy pants. It was a rhetorical question, and anyway, you’re only partially right.”

“There was a group called the House of the Claw. I don’t know if anyone knows how old it really is, but it was radically different than the way we are today.”

“So the group is literally called the House of the Claw?”

Giving a slight wince, she nodded. “I’ll admit, it’s not the best name. Not my top pick. But they forgot to ask me when they were founding the secret cult hundreds or thousands of years ago. So no more commentary, okay? I’m already nervous trying to make sure I convey this to you in a way that makes sense.”

I sighed, feeling a stab of guilt. “You’re right. I’ll stop with the smartass comments. I want to hear this.”

“Okay, so that version of the House of the Claw had actually been working for some time to undermine civilization. They were of the belief that this life is actually a form of hell, and the sooner everyone was dead, the better off everyone would be in some form of afterlife. And for awhile, things seemed to be going their way. But then a divide starting forming between members because of a man named Alexander Trudeau.”

“Alexander was the first recorded person to become an Ascendant, and while at first his newfound form and abilities were labeled some form of evil magic by many within the House, over time he developed a following. Part of this was for much the same reason Salk revealed himself to you—it’s hard to deny something when you see it with your own eyes, particularly something that real and true. It touches you at…well, this sounds corny, but it kind of touches your soul.”

“The other reason that people started trusting and listening to Trudeau was because he had great insights into the way things truly worked. He was the one who first coined the term ‘Trifecta’. And the original meaning, the true meaning, lies at the core of what the House of the Claw stands for today.”

“The idea of the Trifecta is this. All living things have a soul. But this soul is divided into three parts. The first part, is what we call the terrestrial soul. It is the soul you have anchored to your physical body, whether you are living on Earth or in some distant part of Alpha Centauri. The second part is what we call the night soul. It exists in another place, call it a different dimension if you want, though I’m not sure that’s exactly right. The third part is called the key soul. That is the core of your spirit, and it remains perfect and unchanging in a form of afterlife. Some call it Heaven, though most members feel that term is too loaded at this point. But call it what you will, that third piece is what binds the rest together and will ultimately make you whole.”

“The thing you saw Salk turn into last night? That is his night soul. He and the other Ascendants have managed to call this second part to them, make it a part of who they are. We don’t fully understand how or why it happens, but we do know that being around other Ascendants and following the ways of the House seems to help a great deal.”

“But now maybe you see why Ascendants are so respected. The House believes that all of existence is actually designed to help us become whole. People live full of sadness and yearning because they are missing parts of themselves. Trudeau figured out that by claiming your night soul, you can then ascend to the afterlife and claim your key soul as well. You can become complete and immortal.”

She paused as she wiped away the tears springing up in her eyes. “But the Ascendants, they stay with us. They could move on themselves, but they stay behind to help the rest of us. They sacrifice so much, do terrible things, just to help us all.”

I frowned. “What terrible things? What do they do?”

She nodded with a sigh. “This is always the hardest part, because it goes so against everything we’re taught. People…well, people without their night soul, they are caught in a cycle of reincarnation. This is a good thing, because pain and death are the two things we have found that reliably bring you closer to claiming your night soul. Some people say the night soul is the violent, or even evil, part of ourselves, but I don’t believe that. I think that there’s good and bad in everything. But either way, what we know for sure is that if you kill living things, if you make them suffer, you are bringing them closer to gaining the second portion of their soul. It seems terribly cruel in the moment, but it is actually the greatest kindness we can ever do for each other.” She paused. “Have you decided I’m crazy and this is some weird death cult now?”

I surprised myself by shaking my head. “No….No. I’m still listening. I’m trying to keep an open mind.”

She smiled and went on.

Over the next two weeks, I learned more about the House, the Trifecta, and the dim outlines of something called the Grand Plan. I kept waiting for the moment when I knew this wasn’t for me, where the horror and illogic of some aspect of the House would drive me away from whatever yearning was keeping me not only willing, but eager, to learn more. But it never came.

The beliefs of the House were provocative--of that there was no question. And it wasn’t something that you could tell to just anyone and have them react well. But as the days stretched on, I began to recognize that the shrill, querulous voice in the back of my head wasn’t my sanity or my conscience. It was my enemy. It was some regressive part of my genes, some bestial instinct to stick with the familiar and the known. Or worse yet, it was some evil outside influence trying to keep me and others from the true path to our spiritual fulfillment.

By the end of those two weeks, I had a name for that voice. It was the Devil. And the Devil was a part of me. It had fully come out for the first time on the night Salk revealed himself in all his glory, screeching for me to get away, but it had always been with me. Holding me back, making me doubt myself, making me fear and feel alone.

I remember when I saw the Devil, and I remember when I cast it away from me. I was holding Haley’s hand and taking the Oaths of the Trifecta under the Ascendant’s brilliant, yellow gaze. That is the day I was reborn. 

---

Credits