Category: Macabre
The Path – December 1892
IMAGINATION AND OCCULT PHENOMENA —
William. Q. Judge
The faculty of imagination has been reduced to a very low-level by modern western theorisers upon mental philosophy. It is “only the making of pictures, day-dreaming, fancy, and the like”: thus they have said about one of the noblest faculties in man. In Occultism it is well known to be of the highest importance that one should have the imagination under such control as to be able to make a picture of anything at any time, and if this power has not been so trained the possession of other sorts of knowledge will not enable one to perform certain classes of occult phenomena.
Those who have read Mr. Sinnett’s Occult World will have noticed two or three classes of phenomena performed by H. P. Blavatsky and her unseen friends, and those who have investigated spiritualism will know that in the latter have been many cases of similar phenomena done by so-called “controls”. Others who made no such investigations have, however, on their own account seen many things done by forces not mechanical but of a nature which must be called occult or psychical. In spiritualism, and by the Adepts like H. P. Blavatsky and others, one thing has excited great interest, that is the precipitating on to paper or other substances of messages out of the air, as it were, and without any visible contact between the sender of the message and the precipitated letters themselves. This has often occurred in seances with certain good mediums, and the late Stainton Moses wrote in a letter which I saw many years ago that there had come under his hand certain messages precipitated out of the air. But in these cases the medium never knows what is to be precipitated, cannot control it at will, is in fact wholly ignorant of the whole matter and the forces operating and how they operate. The elemental forces make the pictures through which the messages are precipitated, and as the inner nature of the medium is abnormally developed, acting subconsciously to the outer man, the whole process is involved in darkness so far as spiritualism is concerned. But not so with trained minds or wills such as possessed by Madame Blavatsky and all like her in the history of the past, including the still living Adepts.
The Adepts who consciously send messages from a distance or who impress thoughts or sentences on the mind of another at a distance are able to do so because their imagination has been fully trained.
The wonderworker of the East who makes you see a snake where there is none, or who causes you to see a number of things done in your presence which were not done in fact, is able to so impress you with his trained imagination, which, indeed, is also often in his case an inheritance, and when inherited it is all the stronger when trained and the easier to put into training. In the same way but to a much smaller degree the modern western hypnotizer influences his subject by the picture he makes with his imagination in those cases where he causes the patient to see or not to see at will, and if that power were stronger in the West than it is, the experiments of the hypnotizing schools would be more wonderful than they are.
Take the case of precipitation. In the first place, all the minerals, metals, and colored substances any one could wish for use are in the air about us held in suspension. This has long been proved so as to need no argument now. If there be any chemical process known that will act on these substances, they can be taken from the air and thrown down before us into visibility. This visibility only results from the closer packing together of the atoms of matter composing the mass. Modern science has only a few processes for thus precipitating, but while they do not go to the length of precipitating in letters or figures they do show that such precipitation is possible. Occultism has a knowledge of the secret chemistry of nature whereby those carbons and other substances in the air may be drawn out at will either separately or mixed. The next step is to find for these substances so to be packed together a mold or matrix through which they may be poured, as it were, and, being thus closely packed, become
visible. Is there such a mold or matrix?
The matrix is made by means of the trained imagination. It must have been trained either now or in some other life before this, or no picture can be precipitated nor message impressed on the brain to which it is directed. The imagination makes a picture of each word of each letter of every line and part of line in every letter and word, and having made that picture it is held there by the will and the imagination acting together for such a length of time as is needed to permit the carbons or other substances to be strained down through this matrix and appear upon the paper. This is exactly the way in which the Masters of H. P. B. sent those messages which they did not write with their hands, for while they precipitated some they wrote some others and sent them by way of the ordinary mail.
The explanation is the same for the sending of a message by words which the receiver is to hear. The image of the person who is to be the recipient has to be made and held in place; that is, in each of these cases you have to become as it were a magic lantern or a camera obscura, and if the image of the letters or if the image of the person be let go or blurred, all the other forces will shoot wide of the mark and naught be accomplished. If a picture were made of the ineffectual thoughts of the generality of people, it would show little lines of force flying out from their brains and instead of reaching their destination falling to the earth just a few feet away from the person who is thus throwing them out.
But, of course, in the case of sending and precipitating on to paper a message from a distance, a good many other matters have to be well known to the operator. For instance, the inner as well as the outer resistance of all substances have to be known, for if not calculated they will throw the aim out, just as the billiard ball may be deflected if the resistance of the cushion is variable and not known to be so by the player. And again, if a living human being has to be used as the other battery at this end of the line, all the resistances and also all the play of that person’s thought have to be known or a complete failure may result. This will show those who inquire about phenomena, or who at a jump wish to be adepts or to do as the adepts can do, what a task it is they would undertake. But there is still another consideration, and that is that inasmuch as all these phenomena have to do with the very subtle and powerful planes of matter it must follow that each time a phenomenon is done the forces of
those planes are roused to action, and reaction will be equal to action in these things just as on the ordinary plane.
An illustration will go to make clear what has been said of the imagination. One day H. P. Blavatsky said she would show me precipitation in the very act. She looked fixedly at a certain smooth piece of wood and slowly on it came out letters which at last made a long sentence. It formed before my eyes and I could see the matter condense and pack itself on the surface. All the letters were like such as she would make with her hand, just because she was making the image in her brain and of course followed her own peculiarities. But in the middle, one of the letters was blurred and, as it were, all split into a mass of mere color as to part of the letter.
“Now here,” she said, “I purposely wandered in the image, so that you could see the effect. As I let my attention go, the falling substance had no matrix and naturally fell on the wood any way and without shape.”
A friend on whom I could rely told me that he once asked a wonderworker in the East what he did when he made a snake come and go before the audience, and he replied that he had been taught from very early youth to see a snake before him and that it was so strong an image everyone there had to see it.
“But,” said my friend, “how do you tell it from a real snake?”
The man replied that he was able to see through it, so that for him it looked like the shadow of a snake, but that if he had not done it so often he might be frightened by it himself. The process he would not give, as he claimed it was a secret in his family. But anyone who has made the trial knows that it is possible to train the imagination so as to at will bring up before the mind the outlines of any object whatsoever, and that after a time the mind seems to construct the image as if it were a tangible thing.
But there is a wide difference between this and the kind of imagination which is solely connected with some desire or fancy. In the latter case the desire and the image and the mind with all its powers are mixed together, and the result, instead of being a training of the image-making power, is to bring on a decay of that power and only a continual flying to the image of the thing desired. This is the sort of use of the power of the imagination which has lowered it in the eyes of the modern scholar, but even that result would not have come about if the scholars had a knowledge of the real inner nature of man.
Entonces, El Dolor de Los Ninos
a young girl in a delivery room. old and painted dirty white, peeling, the large industrial windows filthy, without shade revealing everything in the room to the world outside. the view to them is of factories and an industrial gray colored sky. the girl lay in a worn and stained hospital bed, her legs held up in stirrups. she cried. a steady stream of tears and sweat flowed from her forehead and legs; there was pain. a pair of hands. the surgical gloves covered in fresh blood as they manipulated a long pair of forceps extending from the girl’s vagina.
the pain is greater, sharper and more exact in location. she tries to be strong but can’t. she sobs and turns away from the rage but the pain is too great. blood and death dominate…
we see a child in waiting, playing with others in a white room. the children are all half formed. without gender. hairless and incomplete. as they play, one is summoned a sound. the others stop playing and watch. the one called steps up to a wall of white drape. it spreads them apart and steps through. looking forward at an endless tunnel, lit by an almost blinding white light emanating from within the walls, seeing a brighter source of light emanating from what seems like it’s end. A turmoil of light and shadow erupts from the point of light. it grows dark… red. the red rushes up to the formless child, as if the walls were made of linen and cotton, soaking up blood. the tunnel, now shaded in an angry red, begins to bleed, dripping down upon the child, and soaking it, red. it turns to where the curtain wall should be, but it is not. The child turns back and before it stands a figure. a tall white phantom masked figure dressed in a long white robe, its eyes hidden by a surgical mask, untouched by the red that is filling the tunnel. from under it’s clean white robe, the figure reveals a long metal instrument with a shining blade at its end. the hands of the figure are thin, almost skeletal covered in blood. looking up at the figure, the child’s mouth is open wide, it’s solid black eyes glisten with tears of terror. the figure rears it’s instrument back and high up, then brings it down upon the child’s head. the child lay dismembered on the floor. the figure walks away.
the girl sits on a bench in a park area across from a school. there are children in the school yard playing. first and second graders. the girl watches them. her eyes still. she watches as the children are then herded back into the building by the teachers. she stares at the door they had just entered when another child steps into view. it is looking at her. but she can’t see what the child looks like, silhouetted against the blinding white light of the sun. but from what little she can see, the child has no hair. the arms short, the fingers short, almost non-existent. the arms thin. the ears small. the feet small. the clothing it wears sparse and torn. the child turns away from her and then runs into the school.
in her hands, the girl holds a black leather bound book. the letters on the cover are gold but we can’t read them because her hands hide them.
Passed this point, to get passed this point…
That’s what she thought… get passed this…
Then Inez’s life would be at rest…
She had imagined, a journey upon a sea of black…
Nothing where she imagined the shore to be…
The children she left without a care…without a life…
Sobbed within the darkness of the waves…
Lost as a child…
No Mother…she thought, never found…
No Father, never sought, just as lost…
She pondered the emptiness of her imagination as she held remnants…
Inez examines a young Puerto Rican woman showing scars…
The scars of a badly performed abortion evident…
Surrounded by the memories of children aborted…
Washing up on shores of living limbs…
Reaching out from the depth of misery and sorrow…
Inez awakens…
Perhaps, sixty years of age…
Home alone… the room is black and all she can hear is the dark of the night…
A home she purchased alone years before…
Using the wealth she gained as a doctor…
Performing abortions…
She had been married but Charlie, her husband, aptly died while they were still in medical school….
The house sat on ten acres of land surrounded by hundreds of acres of protected park land…
She lived alone as she had always with a daughter, Alma, a few pictures on the wall showed the girl was in her twenties…
Inez’s hand moved quickly across the page as she wrote her notes to recall…
The other hand held the probe of the stethoscope bell against her chest…
Catching the resonant beat of her heart…
The only light in the room was an old desk lamp…
Darkness surrounded her….
A thumping sound came from the basement…
Inez looked down the hall at the dark stairwell from where the noise came…
The noise continued as she stepped down to the basement…
Holding the bell shaped probe of the stethoscope to her heart…
She walked down the stairs approaching a thumping, dull wooden sound…
The sound of dull objects pounding on metal…
Down in the basement she turned on the light…
Revealing an expanse of priceless artwork…
Passing it all she walked to an open large, heavy wooden door at the back wall of the basement…
Musty air exhaled to escape and mingled with fresh air in the rest of the basement producing a queer smell…
She reached up into the darkness turning on the lamp that hung from an old mangled wire….
The noise continued as she approached the room at the back wall it was coming from…
Lining the rotted walls of the unkempt secret room were a series of old wooden file cabinets that bore a likeness of a the city morgue…
Row upon row of the dead were kept in coffin draws…
Rolled out when needed like files in a filing cabinet…
It sounded as if an animal was in the cabinets and were daringly trouncing about inside…
An animal?
What kind of an animal would get into this room? Rats!
She had rats!
Damn it! she thought…
The pounding continued until it came to settle within one of the draws…
She listened carefully trying to pinpoint the source…
Sounding as if the animal were running from draw to draw and settling…
The arrhythmic pounding seemed to be coalescing into the heartbeats of many coming from a single draw…
Inez stood before the draw listening to the slow, muffled drumming…
Holding the stethoscope probe to it and listening carefully…
As she had done so often when listening for the heartbeat of a child in it’s mother’s womb before…
Hearing the soft heartbeat thump, thump, thump…
An animal?
She ran into the main basement room, found a hammer and a screwdriver…
Inhaled a deep breath and counted down as she pulled the draw back quickly…
The fetus folded, lay still, dead and moist: Aborted… one would assume…
Threw herself away from the draw, ran out of the room and locked it…
Stepping back from the door, her eyes fixed on it’s stillness…
Pressed the stethoscope bell against her chest, listening to her heart…
Haunted…
Standing at the wooden door of her basement…
Listening, as the draws alone opened one by one…
Listening as the sound of whimpering children’s hearts murmuring filled the room…
She imagined the death of her husband the moment she let him go to find his end and her freedom…
Raising herself from his death as she let him die…
The door resonating, pounding the door from the other side of their existence…
“You have hurt us…” they said.
“And we will hurt you…”
Helena Montes sat in the kitchen nook beside the bay window. Sipping coffee she read the newspaper. The morning sun streamed through the trees. she wore a stethoscope around her neck, the sensor plate in one hand pressed against her chest.
She dressed. She slipped her long ageless supple legs into the stockings. She dressed in a short blue dress.
She pulled the Mercedes out of the driveway and streaked down the road, driving across rolling hills and farmland.
She drove into town and parked the car in a municipal parking lot at the entrance to town. She strolled through town, greeting friends and townsfolk as they met her happy smile and returned the greeting.
She walked into the bakers shop and stood on line with a few others. They greeted each other and talked. Helena purchased a dozen rolls and bagels and walked out.
She walked into her office greeted the nurse, Robin, a young newlywed living in town.
Helena examines a Puerto Rican woman with extensive scars from a bad abortion.
“Alma, go see your mother…”
“How would she know…?”
“Your dreams are the result of your own life… there is so much to learn from her…”
“But I love you so much…”
“Do you Michael?”
“I do… That love no matter how real or sincere doesn’t result in the relationship we have…”
“There are so many assumptions to consider…”
“Don’t you recall mother?”
“I don’t…”
“You called me…”
“I recall falling asleep in the rocking chair, having a terrible nightmare…”
“Really? Why?”
“Mom, you always wanted me to have a child…
A husband…
Listen to the order you prefer,
That’s not what I wanted… do you recall?”
“I don’t…”
“Mother, are you alright?…
Mother, this isn’t the life I wanted, this is what you want…
You wanted us to marry and have a child…
I’m not even sure I even want to be married at all or marry Michael…”
“I wanted your life to be the life I wanted for myself when I was a little girl…”
“And now, this is the life you wanted?”
“No, I never had a life that I could grow from…I had to choose my life along the way…
No directive or guidance…No one was ever there for me… To accept the choices made for or left for me…”
“Which is the life you now want me to have with which to have my child…the life you imagined for yourself you wish for me without a say?”
“No Alma…”
“You already have chosen that existence for me…”
“There is so much joy in giving birth…to nurture….a man can never have what you can…”
“Mother, I don’t want that, I hope to have what I want.”
“But you do…”
“I why would I want what you feel I should?”
“Don’t you also wish for the child to have a life with a mother who wants the child as well?”
“No mother.”
“But you will Alma…”
“Like you wanted me?
“Of course, love…”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes…you have doubts?”
“About you and my existence mother?”
“I had a dream, a nightmare of children hurt and in pain, they knew nothing else…
“They expected nothing…”
“They lived in that very moment…”
The love they needed was forever to be one of sorrow…
They stood about waiting…
Watching, knowing where the children were going and rising from the black ground…
And they could see nothing they would want of birth…
Imagine the life they were becoming a part of not being the end result of their birth…
They imagined more so but they couldn’t turn back…
They couldn’t turn back the life offered was one they couldn’t turn down…
But live it as is best and worse they could imagine…
Nothing to fulfill, nothing to chose but accept death and fall where they must…”
“Do you understand what you are, Alma?
You are the child of a woman whose wrath is the scorn and hate of others…
You are the child born of a woman who blamed and aborted the children of others for her childless life…
Aborted the lives of others out of vengeance…
Realized she could steal another’s to have her own and rid herself of a useless man…
Having a child is the joy of seeing it appear from the womb, the joy of watching that child grow up.”
The child poured forth, its birth, its spirit now free of any restriction of any afterthought was lost…
As if to stretch and awaken from a deep sleep…
To rise from a sleep that was never complete…
The children, risen from their sleep angered to rise…
Risen to become anger from a sleep of hate
Alma calls from the room…
The sores erupt as births…
The emergence of a child born, from the body of its mother…
Blind from birth…
To be born like cancer, to be born from death…
These children are triggered to fruit by the very death of its mother…
I am a child of misery poured forth.
Looking in the mirror, Alma’s puss filled sores cover the whole of her body…
Embodying the dead children, becoming a mass of ill-formed arms, legs, heads, eyes and mouths from the fetus’ of the children she aborted…
Witnessing the army of ill formed children rise up from the open land around her…
A woman stands across the field watching…
A child speaks, the wraith, speaks as the the wraith form for the woman who watches from across the field, and was a patient of the doctors.
This child appears from the composite of aborted fetuses that embodies Alma… the children aborted are the victims of Inez who are the deceived minority patients, convinced to abort what they thought were deformed children, only to satisfy the animal within her that sought to restrict other minority women from having children… her anger was deep…why should she not have a child.
Having killed her husband, we learn that Inez killed her husband believing his impotency kept her from having children….
But it was her that was sterile…
The anger drove her to open a practice in a depressed neighborhood where she performed abortion after abortion…
Killing the children she could never have…
She re-imagines the sensation of life within the mother’s belly…
Quivering with anxiety dying in her hands…
While still within the body of the mother…
Alma, is a stolen child.
Alma knows now that she is not her mother’s true child, but a child left and disposed, a replacement for her mother’s twisted dreams.
Alma had been summoned by the ghosts of those whose suffering and death we’re not allowed to live because of her mother’s quest for sacrifice, a more suitable punishment for a vengeful woman, who cherished her daughter more than anything else in the world…
Alma, finally consumed by the dead children, consumed…
The mass undulates in the bed…
As her daughter calls as if from far away…
Inez runs off down the steps… She slips and gets hurt…
The house shutters, the floor shakes, the walls quiver in a giant wave…
The faces of children suddenly appear from the fabric of the wall…
As if they were pressing through from the other side…
She runs for the exit door…
Grabs the knob…
The little hands reach out and grab her, pulling her down…
She yanks at them, pulling the door off of it’s hinges.
She falls back to the floor and looks out through the door, across the field…
An army of children appear, standing in line across, like land mines laid across a field.
Inez rushes the door and charges through the army of children…
She runs out onto the field where an army of angry of children, who slowly sink into the ground, dragging her with them…
The house weakens and is consumed by the Earth, then falls into the darkness…
Punishment for the divine…
ABUELA
“Bring me more.”
“Quickly!” Abuela roared!
Lilliana scurried out of Abuela’s room and off into the hall, down the stairs and doubling back into the kitchen, where a large iron stock pot filled with meaty gruel boiled violently, spilling it’s slop over the top and onto a filthy black iron stove. She placed abuela’s giant clay soup bowl on the wooden table opposite the stove, then dipped the big wooden ladle in the soup and stirred.
Lilliana looked at her reflection in the worn and stained metal tile finish of the wall behind the stove.
She wasn’t pretty anymore. Not since Abuela took Lilliana from her parents. Her hair matted now, when once she was young her hair draped gracefully over her shoulders, black and shimmering. Her black eyes had once drawn stares but were now ringed with black circles. Her face wrinkled and worn, pasty white, lips parched, mostly hidden by her matted hair. She wore a stained blue house dress that clung to her bones; bones that poked through her skin like trash filled Hefty garbage bags. It seemed to her that her breasts would grow no larger than the pimples they were.
Puberty would never be the same for her as it would be for so many other girls
The gruel continued to pour over the side. It was the only way to make this gruel right, abuela said. Bring it to a boil and keep it there. Simmering won’t stop the demons, boiling them will. To kill them though, you had to eat them, and abuela did. Everyday she ate demons, as she called them. Everyday. Always as a soup. She hated the soup, but it had to be done. The demons were out there and as long as she was alive and still had her powers, she would eat them
The soup boiled but wasn’t filled with enough meat. “Anton!” Lilliana turned to the stairs and called down the basement. “Anton! I need some more meat for the soup.”
Lilliana turned back to the pot on the stove, leaving the door to the basement open for Anton to drag up some more meat from the freezer.
Anton was a tall lanky black guy, with a big head and black happy Einstein hair, wearing a long black t-shirt, faded blue jeans and pink Keds sneakers.
Anton was abuela’s manservant. He did all the repair and heavy work around the house. As well as dragging bags full of demons up from the freezer when Lilliana needed them. He did all the gruesome work on them too. He found them at night, brought them home and kept them in cages, then killed them and chopped them up. Though Anton was mostly silent, Lilliana could occasionally hear him whisper something to them. “Anton? What do you say to them, can I come down and listen to what you say to them and hear their response.” “What they say isn’t so important and your Abuela may not allow that…”
“Then why do you talk to them?”
“Oh, just something to do before I kill them I guess. It calms them. I like them calm. They thrash around less when I’m cutting them up.”
On this day, though, Anton agreed to take her down later to speak with the last one before he killed it
Lilliana returns to Abuela with her soup.
“Abuela! I have your soup. Abuela gave Lilliana a start… she seemed dead at first but Abuela raised her head, she had fallen asleep. She stared….”Abuela, are you ok?”
“Tired and hungry.”
“I brought up another helping of the gruel.”
“Good…”
And she raised the bowl closer to her mouth… as using her arm like a mechanical shovel and crane, she shoveled the putrid gruel from the bowl to her mouth, the contents of which was hot murky liquid and chunks of fresh bloodied meat that danced in kind that almost seemed to be alive as abuela shoveled… Lilliana watched the madness in abuelas motions Like a child’s legs crossed and playing with it’s toys, consuming her favorite food in an effort to rid the world of demons, she imagined…
Abuela paused in exhaustion.
“Abuela, can you tell me more about the demons?”
“I tell you this because you must know, you will eventually do the same and will need to know…. They hide in the bodies of young human children to cast spells which is when you bring them out into the light. Once they become visible you must eat them quickly, seasoned appropriately and why they hide in little bodies is to fool everyone but the most knowledgeable and aware.”
Back in the basement, Anton takes Lilliana down to meet a demon, a little girl of about ten who calls herself Trisha.
“You know Anton is really a sweet guy, he treats you nice until the end.”
“No he doesn’t then why am I here?”
“Because of Grannie and what you are and what she has to do…”
“What are your parents like? Do they know about what you are?”
“What do you mean?
“A demon? That you are a demon.”
“But I’m not a demon.”
“Everything will be easier if you’re honest.”
“But I am being honest.”
Lilliana talks with Trisha, asking her questions about her life at home. What her parents are like. Her home. Her friends. Her toys. School. Does she like boys? Trisha often whimpers, afraid of Anton. Lilliana tells her that Anton is really a sweet guy. He just has a job to do
As they talk, Anton paces by, after chopping at meat in the back room, putting it in the freezer, then returning, bending down to Lilliana who sits outside the cage on the soot covered floor with Trisha, and reminding her . . .
“Trisha is a demon, don’t let her fool you.”
Anton walks away up the steps.
Lilliana asked her outright . . . “Are you a demon?”
“What’s a demon,” Trisha asked her pouting innocent lips…
“Well, you…”
Trisha sobbed uncontrollably.
“I’ve done nothing wrong, I don’t understand. Why was I taken? What is he going to do to me?” Lilliana looks back as he works..
Anton watches from the open door of the cutting room
Trisha asks about the locked door.
“What’s in there?”
Lilliana motions to the door down the hall from the cutting room…
“Abuelas secrets, all the scary things that make her who and what she is…”
“What about you? Let’s play some games, what games can you or want to play?”
“Hide and seek!” Trisha spoke with some elation distracted by the current terror…
“I’ll hide, you seek…”
“Ok… I’ll look for you…”
Lilliana lets her out to play, closing the basement door. They play awhile but Lilliana doesn’t recognize her own strength and so Trisha finds the play to rough. Together they press their ears to the secret closet door. They can only imagine. Lilliana tells what she knows about Abuela’s past. That she was a Bruja, and she made clothes for a living, clothes that some said had magical powers. To wear her clothing could be either good or bad luck, no one ever knew. And so the people of her small town in PR exiled her. What happened to all the clothes she made? Perhaps that is her secret.
The bell from Abuela rings out, deafening them. Lilliana runs, dragging Trisha into the cage and leaving her crying. Anton calls down from the top of the stairs to the kitchen. Lilliana fills another bowl from the seething pot on the stove then hurries back up the stairs to tend to Abuela, as Anton unloads another bag of demon meat into the pot While Lilliana sits with Abuela on her bed, feeding her, she looks out of the window to the empty streets.
Their home was a condemned tenement in Brooklyn, the only one on the block left standing. The building was surrounded on all sides by a debris ridden one-acre lot. In the distance she could see children playing in the schoolyard, from which Anton had found and taken two demons in the last year Lilliana turns to Abuela and asks.
“Do you ever wonder if you’ve chosen the wrong child, Abuela?”
She looked up from her soup bowl? Her eyes glistened when opened so wide. Suddenly her head grew twice its size and thrust forward to meet Lilliana’s. Abuelas exposed monster teeth, the ones she needed to chew the demons well but hid in her gums behind her mortal set, and sneered at Lilliana.
Saliva and blood dripped down from her stained fangs, a horrible stench from her breath warmed her face and made Lilliana turn away, sick and afraid Abuela relaxed, sitting back. Her head shrunk back to normal size, her teeth slowly retracted, allowing her to speak again. “Lilliana. Your mother and father wondered the same thing when I went to them with the truth. I told them what some children had become in the wombs of their unsuspecting mother. That two of their own children might be demons. And when I found them to be so, they fought me, until I killed them all. Except you, Lilliana. You were born free of demons. They had not found you because you were supposed to die in your mother’s womb. But you survived.
Don’t doubt my powers, Lilliana. Don’t doubt my knowledge, wisdom and awareness. I know that it may all seem amazing and fantastic, and terribly cruel and morbid, but the horror’s we live with must be found and our world cleansed. Trust me, Lilliana.
Lilliana bolted from the room crying
Lilliana sat in the kitchen with Anton, who had made them both some hot tea. Lilliana asked Anton if he ate the soup too. No! Only her grandmother could, because if a mortal drank demon remains, they would be possessed themselves, and she would have to kill and eat them also. Demon infested adults were much more difficult to deal with. Younger mystics could deal with them better than an old ugly fart like Abuela. Perhaps Lilliana would one day be groomed to carry on Abuela’s mission.
Lilliana asked Anton if he was ever afraid they were making a mistake. That they might be killing innocent children
I used to, Lilliana. For a very long time I was doubtful of what I was doing for your Grandmother.
Did you ever say anything to her?
No! Oh no! I’m sure she knew everything I thought, as she knows all that you have in your mind, and anyone else’s that she cares to invade. But I never said anything to her
Then you’re no longer doubtful?
Those doubts are all gone. I trust your grandmother, as you should too. And you will. . . eventually.
Lilliana went back down to the basement without Anton’s permission to speak with Trisha in whispers, hiding behind a column beside the cage, while Anton hammered away at the meat in the cutting room down the hall. Trisha asked all the questions. Asking about Lilliana’s own past. Her own childhood. Lilliana becomes sad and feels strongly for Trisha.
Trisha asks what a demon is.
“You are, you lie…”
“Everybody lies, all children lie. How do you know the children from the demons?”
“The wings.”
“If I’ve got wings, show me or show yourself the wings I have.”
“I’ve never seen them.”
“Never? Then how do you know? I’m scared of you, not a demon like you imagine that I am. I just go to school, play with my friends and toys…”
Anton pokes his head out to listen, believing he hears voices, but then goes back to work…
“Go ahead go down and look… All you have to lose is your innocence…”
Lilliana walked quietly down the hall to the cutting room, never having seen inside the room before never having seen a demon dismembered. She stepped in and watched in horror, as Anton chopped his away at the body of a small child. She looked away, sickened, and saw a sledgehammer leaning against the wall in the corner of the room.
Trisha reached passed Liliana for the sledge hammer and lifted it over Anton’s head. Anton turned and saw her, as Lilliana brought the hammer crashing down on Anton’s big head, smashing it to pieces like a ripe pumpkin at Thanksgiving. He fell to the ground. She knelt down to check if he was breathing, leaning close to him. Not a breath seemed to come from him. His eyes opened wide and she pulled back Lilliana, whispered Anton.
Lilliana. You should’ve listened to your Grandmother.
His eyes closed and he was dead.
Lilliana ran down the hall to the cage, keys in hand that she had taken off the hook in the cutting room.
She unlocked the cage as Trisha’s face brightened. Trisha scurried from the cage, holding Lilliana’s hand as they hurried up the stairs to the kitchen. The kitchen door to the backyard wouldn’t open. Lilliana wasn’t allowed out and she never saw how Anton left the house. All the doors were bolted Abuela’s bell went off Abuela knew.
A great roar rattled the plaster walls. Cracks like lightning opened up to shine their light. The house shook. And like thunder, there was a constant slow pounding that came from above, causing the whole house to quiver. Abuela became the monster, a slithering giant snake like beast.
Abuela was stalking them. My God! “What is that!” asked Trisha.
“My grandmother”… said Lilliana.
Lilliana and the girl ran down further in the basement, to the locked door that keeps Abuela’s secrets. Lilliana smashes the lock with a chain kept nearby and enters the room filled with Abuelas mementos of magic. The girls rummage about noting the overwhelming magic that comes to life to… Abuela slithers in after them, confronting herself, she is quickly immersed in herself. Lilliana battles her Grandmother. Lilliana wins and frees the girl Trisha thanks Lilliana, sprouts a demons reptilian wings and flies away, laughing… Lilliana finishes her story… related to the children from the neighborhood, pointing out how she had taken on her demon hunting chores…
Strange Tug: Threshold

