The Unbeliever: A Morbid Tale (The Morbid Tales Book 5) Read online

  The Unbeliever

  A Morbid Tale #5

  Zachery Miller

  Contents

  A Morbid Tale #5

  The Unbeliever

  Free Horror Book

  Also by Zachery Miller

  About the Author

  A Morbid Tale #5

  Beth thought she’d escaped the cult-like traditions of her childhood home in Drumfort, Illinois. College life has given her what she yearned for; the ways of the world, for knowledge, and the freedom that it brings. No more of that nonsense and ridiculous blind faith that has kept so many trapped back home.

  But when strange dreams disturb her sleep, she returns home to find out why she is having these visions. And when she is chosen for the Sacrifice she must hold firm to her unbeliefs if she is to survive.

  For all the Unbelievers.

  The Unbeliever

  Her mother was calling again. Beth swiped her phone, rejected the call, and crammed it back into her pocket. Even though it was on silent, it vibrated, and everyone in the library in her vicinity was staring daggers at her. Given that it was one week before the semester finals, the library was stuffed with bodies and humid. Beth was sitting in the main hall—more of a room than a hall—with all the bookshelves, tables, newspaper stands, and people.

  “Sorry,” she whispered and leaned her head back into her book. Someone muttered something rude about her, and another said something more insulting. These people had no respect. Beth tried to re-read what she had been trying to learn before her mother had started calling her and discovered that the words made no sense.

  The words were there, in black printed letters, all right, but they were in the wrong order. She couldn’t read knowing that everyone around her was giving her the Evil Eye. Sighing, she stuffed her books in her backpack and got up. She would study better someplace else, someplace she could focus. Maybe the college grounds, under an oak tree, or her room where her weird roommate always laid on her bed, rocking her head to Reggae music in her over-sized headphones that still leaked the sound of drums and strumming guitars. Or perhaps she wouldn’t study at all.

  “Screw you,” she stooped toward the girl whom she heard curse at her and flipped her the bird as she left. Doing this made Beth smile. She could hear the girl saying something like, “I don’t believe it. These days they let in just about any vagrant. No manners!”

  Once outside, where it was still hot but less humid and stuffy, she took her phone out and dialed her mother.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for the entire day now!” her mother said. No ‘hi baby, are you okay?’, no ‘do you need any help with funds?’ No ‘are studies going well?'. Nothing but a barrage of complaints. Classic mother. Always turning the table on the other person, that was her unspoken motto.

  “Well, mom, I’ve been trying to hit the books, you know. The semester finals are in a freaking week!” Beth said. She didn’t mind elevating her voice up now. See, she had learned, in her twenty-one years, that when Judith McCaw turned the tables on you, you set them back on her. She wasn’t wired to take a rebuttal.

  “Don’t take that tone with me, missy!”

  “Great to hear from you, too.”

  Silence. Beth could hear dogs barking from the phone. Her dogs, Keen and Sheen. She wondered if her mother, father, and brother were taking good care of her dogs. She wouldn’t put it past them to do so, but still, she hoped.

  “Anyway," her mother cleared her throat, her way of resetting the conversation. "How are you?”

  “I’m okay. That is if I don’t flunk these exams,” Beth said.

  “You have money? Do you need some help, maybe some money to pay for a tutor or anything?” Now her mother was acting as she cared. It must mean she meant business.

  “What do you want, mom?” Beth had no mood for crap today.

  “Well. Today’s Friday, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, and Earth’s blue-green and Trump won the election. What else is new to you?”

  “Listen to me,” her mother disregarded her sass. Always had. Had she gotten some encouragement in that department Beth wouldn’t have opted for a B.F.A in English Lit; she’d have become a standup comedian. “You’re wanted in town for the weekend.”

  “Wanted or needed?” Beth asked. She wanted no business in whatever her parents and the town were planning, and she had a good idea what it was. “I’m not coming back. No way.”

  “Think hard on this, young lady. Think hard. I’ll give you the day to decide,” her mother said and hung up. She always did that on purpose: have the last word.

  Beth put her phone back and strode towards her dorm room, her head a conflicted jumble of thoughts. She didn’t need to go back. Hell, they didn’t have any leverage to use on her. For one, the scholarship she was skating on—barely skating on—made her financially independent, and other than that, her gig at the cafeteria was enough to give her pocket change. She cleaned plates and utensils after lunch and dinner. When she would graduate, if she would, that is, she had a decent entry level position lined up for her at Writer’s House Literary Agency. She hadn’t ever dreamed of the way kids dream of growing up and becoming an astronaut or scientist. She imagined she would become a literary agent, but given her choices (teacher, writer, editor, a jobless avant-garde beggar with a sign saying “Will reflect on society’s doom for dollars”) becoming a literary agent wasn’t such a bad thing. She had done an internship for them in New York last summer, and Berk Hannigan, the chairman of the agency, had told her that her position, once she graduated from college, here at the agency was looking promising. She had thought then, and she was still pretty sure of it now, Berk had a thing for her. She didn’t mind. He hadn’t made any advances at her, nor had he tried to touch her or anything. He’d just smiled a lot, and showed half a dozen missing teeth.

  Now she had reached her dorm, and she was going to take a nap. Friday had the toughest class schedule, and as if that wasn’t enough she’d gone to the library. She was toast. And on top of that, the burden of having to answer her family. It was only her mother now, calling to summon her homeward, but soon, if Beth persisted on not coming back, there would be her father, her brother, and then the entire town pestering her to return...or else.

  Beth fell on her bed, didn’t even bother changing clothes or taking off her shoes, and dozed off.

  In her dream, she was in a place faintly recognizable. Yes. There was the town square with the Paul Bunyan statue; the barbershop, with its otherwise gleaming window, now boarded shut. The grocery store, with all its groceries gone moldy, sat dark and decrepit. The community hall was lying desolate with bats flying in and out of its broken windows; the sky velveteen black, the moon crimson and haunting; trees all about the town were whispering mutinous whispers as the wind rustled their leaves; and lastly, an altar.

  Beth had a knife in her hand, and she had a pretty good idea who was on the altar. She didn’t want to go any closer, but there were people all around her, hidden in the shadow of the night, behind the barks of trees, behind the broken panes and walls of buildings—everywhere. They had driven her, her townsfolk, to do this, and there was no getting out if she didn’t do it. And yet she didn’t believe this had any logic, any of this. She didn’t want to sacrifice whoever was tied naked to the altar.

  She threw her knife away and ran in the opposite direction, heading for the interstate. Laughter and the sound of stampeding steps behind her. More laughter. Now her mother was screaming, “We thought you would uphold the Law. Now bear the wrath of our God!”

  Before she could run further, he was standing in front of
her. A man. Or it resembled something of a man. Skin as pale as a white man’s corpse. His face was bearded and grisly, his eyes cold and merciless, his stature big and surrounding. In his grip he held an ax, and he swung it at Beth. “Escape me? Escape the town? Escape your roots? No, no, little girl. Not your roots.” The god said and cut her belly with his ax as he chanted, “your roots are my roots. Our roots are one. Roots! Roots! Roots!”

  Beth saw her blood and entrails flowing and falling out. She woke up screaming. But her nightmare wasn’t over. Even though she was awake—panting and sobbing and sweating—someone was standing by the door, in the shade the moonlight cast.

  Moonlight. She’d slept for hours, and now it was night, and her roommate had left for her parents for the weekend. She was alone and in the corner of the room stood some specter.

  “Would you relax?” The specter standing in the doorway said.

  “Christ!” Beth yelled and pulled the covers up to her neck.

  “No, it's just Henry. Your cousin, remember?” Henry said.

  “Jesus Christ, Henry. Privacy much? And who let you in?” Beth sat up and squinted at her cousin whom she was pretty sure she’d thought was the serial-killer Ted Bundy with a beard. He was wearing a lumberjack jacket and cap, and he had a beard the size of those Taliban guys they showed on Fox News late at night and had three teeth on the front missing. He was ogling at Beth, and that made her uncomfortable. She stood up and looked at him, making sure he kept his distance.

  “I…um…I…” he struggled with words, staring at her. He always did have a thing for her ever since they were kids. And it always made her skin crawl. Maybe that was why she had such a strange nightmare; her body was telling her this cretan was watching her sleep.

  “Spill it, Henry.”

  He said nothing, for a minute, after which he spoke, “Your mother sent me.”

  “Really? So soon?” But the way his eyes lingered over her bosom, down her figure and the way his eyes just yearned to do more than just look.

  “We need to talk.” He broke the silence of his awkward gaze.

  Beth rushed past him to the door. But before she had opened it, Henry grabbed her roughly by her wrist and pulled her back, toppling her balance, throwing her on the pile of her roommate's dirty clothes.

  “Not so fast,” he said, and the goofiness was gone from his face, now replaced by vexation. “You listen to me. Miss fancy college girl. I don’t need to be here, but your family, and the townsfolk, they want you to listen to reason. You’re needed back home, and you’re needed there now. You hear me?”

  It was Beth’s turn to get vexed. “Screw you and your town. I decided I was done with all that mess when I left. I am not going to take part in some stone age cult. God. Do you people hear yourselves? Sacrifice to please some deity! Asking me to sacrifice...sacrifice what exactly? Whatever shit biscuits you people are baking and eating, leave me out of it. And you better leave in less than five minutes, or I’ll tell the guards that you’re a pedophile, or something worse.”

  Henry started laughing. He turned around, made for the door, and as he left, he said, “the dreams are only the beginning, you know. First, you’ll dream of him, then you’ll see him, and then...hahahahaa...then you go mad. You’ll kill yourself if you don't come back.”

  He left.

  Beth ran after him. As much as she'd rather let him go, she had to know about the dreams. Was it just coincidence that he arrived as she had had her first nightmare?

  “What do you know about the dreams?” she asked once she had caught up with him. He was walking down the corridor towards the stairs, winking at a girl here, at a girl there. He disregarded her even though she was struggling to keep up with him. He was a tall, muscular, guy and took long strides. She was five and a half inches, at best.

  “I don’t know. How many have you had?” Henry asked with a smug leer on his face once he reached the stairs.

  “One. But I don’t believe any of it. I don’t believe there’s some meaning to the dream, to the cult, to the sacrifice or any of that other crap you people peddle in the name of religion,” Beth spat at him.

  “Then why’d you come running after me like you’d seen the devil in your room?” Henry was enjoying this. He saw her pride disintegrate in a matter of seconds and now she wasn't all haughty, but meek. Scared.

  “Listen. Me, personally, I don’t care if you believe or not. I sacrificed my oblation last year, and things have been peachy for me, and for the town, since. Except, it’s been one year now, you dolt, and the elders have chosen you, and if you don’t do it, then so much for the worst, not just for you but everyone. Are you that selfish?” Henry said, his face intimately close to Beth’s. His breath stank of chewing tobacco and beer.

  “But I don’t believe in any of that,” Beth said, but she could feel the surety in her voice shaken loose. She didn’t believe that there was a town a hundred miles south of Chicago where there lived no more than a thousand people, and those people worshipped some being and sacrificed something to it every year to keep it quelled, keep it happy. She didn’t believe that just like she didn’t believe Santa was real. Demons, gods, angels, hell, heaven, to her they were concepts that began and ended in your head, poured in there by overly religious zealots. All just tales.

  “Believe it, don’t believe it, I don’t care. You don’t partake in sacrifice, and it practically goes downhill for you from here. Old Man Sim didn’t last long after he refused,” Henry cackled and slid down the staircase railing. Beth wished he would topple and break his neck and die right there.

  But Beth remembered Old Man Sim’s case. Quite extraordinary, the case was. She had been a girl, maybe 6 or 7, back then. She recalled the old man and her father arguing in the town square. She had been sitting in her dad’s truck, sipping juice, watching the men throw wild hand gestures all over the place, spit as they talked in enraged chatter. She watched Sim walk away angrily.

  The next time she saw him, a month after that, he had been screaming, crying, profusely swearing as two huge townsfolk grappled him from either side and threw him in the back of an ambulance. Apparently, it had driven off all the way to Chicago, her mother had told her. But she never saw Old Man Sim after that.

  Beth spat. “It could’ve been anything. Doesn’t even have to be something quasi-religious or some folklore piece of crap!”

  “Oh yeah?” Her cousin sneered in her face—she came close to strangling his neck. “You do know he died on the way to the hospital, right? Never reached the place. Died of a heart attack!”

  “He was old. Old people die, you dunce!”

  “Whatever helps you sleep better at night. Soon you won’t,” Henry cackled and went out of the dorm building, whistling at a passing group of freshmen girls.

  Beth climbed the stairs, headed for her room, but stopped at the hallway window. She could see the parking lot from here. Henry’s beat up station wagon was reversing out of it. His hand lopped out of the window, holding a cigarette. He was staring up at her while he was backing up. This unnerved her, made goosebumps sprout on her neck. She rushed back to her room, locked the door—she’d open it when her roommate returned, if she’d come back at all—and tried to go back to sleep.

  After a few minutes of failed attempts, she sat up, sifted through the catalog of Kindle e-books on her phone, and began reading the first book that interested her: 20th Century Ghost Stories by Joe Hill.

  Yeah, right. Ghosts and all that hoodoo voodoo crap belong there, in the 20th century, along with notions of God is real, and how the world can become a better place if all the hippies gathered in Woodstock and smoked pot, she thought. We disproved that there was a higher power with science and Rick and Morty.

  Beth fell asleep before she could finish reading the first short story.

  The nightmare resumed from when she had last awakened from it. She was lying on the floor, stomach gutted with an ax, her blood everywhere, and the chaotic madman with a ghastly emerald glow to his ey
es standing over her.

  “I brought you to this land! I nourished! I provided! I am your god, whether you like it or not!” He said. He took his ax out of Beth’s torso and struck her flailing arm.

  It's just a dream. She kept telling herself, but she felt it in all its sheerness, the pain. She could see her detached arm, writhing on the floor like a fish taken out of the water. It spurted crimson from where it was cut off. Beth screamed.

  “I am your god, and you will bow like your elders, you will offer me sacrifice, or I, who brought you here, will take you to a place you wish you hadn’t known!” He stomped on her good arm—her only arm—and crushed her fingers with his sandaled foot.

  “Do you kneel? Do you obey?” His face was kissing-close to Beth’s now, she could smell his rancid breath, his beard stung her chin, but more than any of that, the maniacal glow in his eyes—his godforsaken green eyes—burned into her own, hypnotizing her.

  What she said next wasn’t up to her. It came out of her on its own. It was a meek 'yes,' a slight gasp of acceptance, and then she woke up again. Her right hand resonated with the brute crush of his foot, and where he had butchered her left hand, it throbbed. She could smell him, even though the dream was over.

  This isn’t real, she told herself. Sleep paralysis or lucid nightmares happen, and it’s natural—it’s your subconscious playing twisted games with you. But her words didn’t comfort her. She saw, wherever she turned to look in the darkness of the room, a green after-glow.

  The air in Drumfort, Illinois—a small town, tightly knit, with a community where everyone knew everyone’s name—was festive. The town square was decorated with bright bulbs, even though it was still a long way from the evening, men and women hustled about businesslike. The women had pots in their hands; the men handled tables and chairs. The commemoration was about to begin. With or without the inductee, it had to start, just like it commenced every year, and just as inevitably as it ended every year.