Kentucky--Cumberland, March 15, 1935

The three men moved quietly through the dense underbrush in the backwoods, deliberately disregarding the established path, remaining several yards into the cover of the thicket. The rain had been driving since before noon and now, nearing the witching hour, the downpour had continued unabated, turning the foot path into a river of mud and the undergrowth into a slick, soggy mire. It wasn’t because of the mud the men remained in the weeds: these men were on the hunt.

Though it wasn’t a deer path, it was a track just as obvious. That two other teams of men--five men in all--had already gone missing blazing this particular trail puzzled the leader of this hunting party, Malachi Morelock. Morelock was puzzled to the point of paranoia. He was being more cautious than the situation usually called for.

But even a tracker as skilled a Morelock, who was primed for trouble that already sent so many others missing without so much as a discarded hat, muddy footprint, or blood stained trail, couldn’t have known there was another tracking him. One who had been in this game far longer than Morelock could imagine, let alone fathom.

Big Mal, as he was known throughout the state, was a tall, brutish thug of a man, with rough fists and a square head that proudly displayed a bulbous nose. He had thin wisps of hair that clung to his scalp under a brown-tweed driving cap. A bulge of chewing tobacco forced his right cheek out permanently.

“I reckon these ‘shiners is very smart or very touched,” Mal growled to one of his men. He spit a long, brown streak of tobacco juice. He let the rain wash off his chin, his hands clinging to his pump action shotgun with no visible indication he’d let go anytime soon.

“They got a path beat right to their door, practically. I fear they got some mighty big sticks back home, jus’ waitin’ fer us to walk onter their front porch,” the big man spit again. “Well, hell no. We gonna grab them on this here path, boys. And we gonna beat the devil outta ‘em. They can keep their damn still. We’ll take their scalps.”

Big Mal Morelock had a reputation in the tri-state area as being one of the most merciless revenuers ever turned loose on moonshiners anywhere. The man was less concerned about busting up the stills, as he was about bringing in the illegal distillers for whatever bounty might be on their heads. More so with this bunch of moonshiners, who were probably responsible for the deaths of state officials, which ramped up their bounty stratospherically.

Although technically not an employee of the Treasury’s Bureau of Prohibition, Mal was often employed for his “special” services by local officials of the Treasury Department in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee, when brewers of sour mash proved too wily, dug-in, or too dangerous for regular agents to apprehend. Mal loved it. He loved traipsing in to the back-country to get into a fight with ‘shiners, dragging them back to town, bloodied and bruised. He most especially liked hauling off their brew to bolster his own private stock of illegal swill.

“Stand still, fool!” Mal barked to one of his men, a skinny, jittering man whose white knuckles gripped the stock of a hunting rifle with a force only death could sever. His head darted back and forth, peering between the flashes of lightening, seeing horror in every shadow cast across the woods.

“You a fool, Pud. You know that? You a fool.”

“Don’t, Mal,” the man corrected his gait, straightening a tad and locking his jaw in frustration.

“Ghosts. You believe your granny’s ghost stories?”

Mal laughed through a series of expletives, punctuated with a final black bolt of tobacco. The rainwater dragged a brown trail over his fat chin and into the folds of his fat, thick neck.

Pud was Mal’s brother-in-law and along for the hunt because his sister needed the money. But Pud was worthless, from the bare patch at the top of his head to the worn out soles on his boots. But his sister had begged him to let Pud tag along. With four mouths to feed and no discernible skills to maintain any real employment, this was the best kind of work he could manage. Mal considered the possibility the man might have an “accident” on this hunt. Might solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.

But the man had proven even more of a liability than Mal had dared consider. Their prey was hunkered down in a lonely stretch of Pulaski County in Cumberland. The rolling slate-stone hills and deep, craggy valleys hidden under the willow oaks, dogwoods, and sycamores meandered for miles in the Appalachian ridge of eastern Kentucky. The God-forsaken patch these moonshiners were hiding out in was a place called Red Run, though not named for the thick Cumberland clay that covered the ground. This place had a foundation built upon blood. Dozens of mountain folk put down an Indian uprising on the site in the 18th century. Local legend held that a witch, an Irish woman who lost her sons to the Indians, had conspired with the men of Pulaksi to bring ruin to the tribe in the woods at the cost of their very souls. From that day the hills were cursed; not by the dead natives, but by the souls of the men whom the witch had claimed in her savage bid for revenge.

Now, more than a hundred years later, the locals claimed the damned dead still haunted the woods, hunting for the living and keeping their claim on this ragged plot of land their own.

It was a ridiculous tale, Mal thought. Sure it was reported that occasionally an arrow or tomahawk head was found in the brush and muck of the woods. What part of the area wasn’t littered with such weapons? Every dark thicket and lonely clearing in every county had such a tale connected to it. Once he heard a fellow had found a skeleton hanging in a tree. Folks were always getting lost on the road to Somerset, which ran nearby Red Run, but that was for sure not the work of ghosts. Hell, he thought, travelers and passersby--Outsiders: folks that ain’t got no business in these woods sure as hell are gonna git lost. Perfect place to moonshine.

In fact, in all his thirty-eight years, Mal couldn’t remember a single local ever getting lost in these woods and valleys who didn’t find their way back out again. None of them ever emerged with tales of phantom hillmen or walking dead attempting to drag them to their doom. More than likely, they’d come out with tales of having been buckshot by ‘shiners. Local ghost stories only helped serve the moonshiners’ business.

Now, Pud was sure this night they’d all draw their last, when the haunted dead rose up and tried to defend their battleground again, taking their souls in vengeance-fueled hunt. He spent the entire trek into the woods worrying himself, looking over his shoulder and starting at every crack of a branch or screech of a hoot owl or blast of thunder. It had no affect on Mal, other than to irritate him to no end, but he could tell it was making Andy, the third man on the hunt, anxious.

Mal couldn’t afford Andy to get spooked. He’d need his big arms and skill with a rifle before the night was over.

“Mal!” Pud whispered louder then he’d wanted, misjudging the drone of the rain.

“Hush, Pud,” Mal snapped."

A flash of lightening lit the woods, turning it to a black and white photograph for a blinding moment. That was all Big Mal needed.

The reflection through the veil of liquid diamonds falling before him was unmistakable: their pale faces were moving up the path ahead, towards Mal and his men. Two men, each with a big gunny sack draped over his shoulder. One was chomping on a corncob pipe, flipped upside down to keep his tobacco lit in the rain.

As the moonshiners moved up the path towards Mal and his comrades, they spoke with one another, unaware of what was lying in wait for them. Much in the same manner, Mal and his men were unaware their prey had other stalkers.

Mal stepped out into the path, his riot gun held out at the ready, only about five yards from his quarry. They stopped, eyes wide and dumbfounded.

Mal cycled his shotgun, sliding a shell into the breach of the weapon with a resounding clack-clack.

“World’s most effective laxative,’ Mal smiled down the barrel of the scattergun.

The pipe smoking man drop a sack marked “YEAST” in big black letters, at his feet. The other man growled.

“I told you not to smoke that thing,” his voice an oily snarl directed at his companion, “It makes it impossible to catch the scent.”

The pipe rolled from one side of the man’s mouth to the other and his eyes narrowed. The man was taller than his companion, looking gaunt in ill-fitting denim overalls that hung from his thin frame, swollen with rainwater.

“Listen here, you ‘shiners!” Pud barked, his voice rattled with nerves, “You stay right where you at!”

Pud stepped forward, holding up his rifle in shaking hands. Andy stood off the path in the dark weeds. Mal stood, silent.

A flash of lightening lit the sky, followed by a rumble. That crack of electricity helped mask the shotgun blast from Mal’s gun; the shot took off the pipe smoker’s foot above the boot. The man howled an inhuman wail of pain.

“By the authority of the U.S. go’vment,” through a mouthful-sputter of tobacco, Mal shouted over the rain and wounded wailing, “I’m gonna reprimand you boys into m’custody.”

Big Mal Morelock spat out a brown streak of juice with a smile.

“I can’t have you runnin’ off.” Mal pumped the empty shell from his gun, replacing it with a new one and aiming the gun towards the wounded man’s partner who was still clutching a bag of yeast. “Yer gonna make sure yer friend here walks back with us, y’hear?”

“You shot me!” the wounded man screamed, clutching his ankle and spewing forth vulgarities.

“Don’t make me bind and gag you,” Mal pointedly instructed.

The wounded man stood like a bolt. His human features disappeared, pulled forth into the bared-fanged muzzle of a black wolf; muscles strained against his overalls and filled them now with the raging aspect of a horrific man-beast.

The werewolf lunged towards Mal, who was so gripped with terror that all he could do was watch this engine of his death fall upon him with razor claws and slavering fangs, and a howl so piercingly savage as to freeze a man’s blood to ice.

Pud screamed as the night air cracked again, this time from a flash not from the sky, but blasting out from the dark woods.

The wolf-man dropped to the mud at Mal’s feet, dead.

“Inluminate,” a voice boomed in the dark, and the path was awash in flaming, flickering brilliance. The night seemed to grow still for a moment, as a man stood in the radiant white flames glowing from the long Bowie knife that burned in his fist.

The shooter was tall and lean. A black overcoat pulled tightly across his sinewy back, soaked. Dark drenched curls ringed his olive-skinned face and hung about his wide shoulders, dripping with rainwater. Cold steel eyes reflected back the fire from his knife, unflinching--a bird of prey poised to kill.

Emerging beside the man now were two companions: one a short, stocky, ham-fisted, round-faced brute of a man, in a rain-swelled woolen overcoat and driving cap, who held a shotgun in his big, meaty fingers; the other, a tall man of muscular frame in a rain slicker and high rubber boots, who bore a heavy canvas pack on his back and clutched a shotgun under his arm.

These two men stood at either side of the tall man in the leather overcoat and waited instruction, like so many men before them had for some many times, stretching out into antiquity. These men had been hand-picked and primed for service in hunting the foulest evil in the world, mostly due to their own personal familiarity with said-evil. Normal men borne of tragedy, brought to the edge of ruin in service against that which nearly drove them to madness.

Witch hunters. Demon Reapers. Vampire killers. Giant slayers.

For countless years and as many personas, the man before them had led others on such hunts, always the one who was there at the beginning and the only one who would be there at the end. This night, this hunt, to this team of “volunteers,” this man was known as George Casey Longford--Grand Inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus Dei. The Hammer of God, a secretive monastic order devoted to suppressing the worst sort of evils. The two witch hunters flanking the Inquisitor didn’t know him as Gaius Cassius Longinus. And they never would.

Longinus held the burning knife blade in his left hand; in his right, he held a large caliber revolver of singular design. Its six-bullet cylinder perched forward in the gun’s metal frame, at the front of the trigger. The Damascine swirls and whorls on the gunmetal frame and cylinder appeared like delicate scrimshaw work on its surface. The big bore of the barrel was still smoking from the last shot.

“Revenuer,” Longinus barked, “You have a knife?”

“Them ... them are our bounties,” Mal barely managed, missing the question in the dark man’s voice.

“I don’t give a damn about your ... bounties, man. These things don’t die easily. Do you have a knife? Use it. Cut the head from the shoulders of the one fallen there.”

Mal looked about in confusion then withdrew a knife with a blade less than half a foot long and held it out for the witch-hunter to view.

“That will not do, son,” Longinus shook his head. In a blinding blur, the Inquisitor raised and lowered his burning blade, severing the head of the dead wolf-thing at his feet.

“No!” the other moonshiner protested, “These men here are the law, witch-hunter! They have the authority.”

“This is the only authority you’ll need answer to, therian,” the Inquisitor grinned, raising the revolver through a rumble of thunder and flashes of lightening. He leveled the big gun towards the moonshiner, adding, “Besides not having knives, these men don’t even have badges. Do you, gentlemen?”

Without turning to see if Mal and his men acknowledged his question, Longinus drew back the hammer on the big revolver and the swirled-metal cylinder chambered a fresh round.

“Inluminate,” the witch-hunter spoke; the pistol burst into white flames.

The Inquisitor didn’t recoil from the fire about his hands nor were his weapons consumed by the flames that rose from the surface all around them. Blade and revolver both burned brightly and Longinus’ eyes glared in the glow, his grin flashed in the white-hot warmth as the acrid scent of brimstone and myrrh cut through the wet night.

Mal and his men watched in renewed horror as the second moonshiner changed form now, as his comrade had, into a wolf-man, growling and snarling in the glaring light pouring forth from the stranger’s knife and pistol. The beast seemed compelled to stare at the weapons, ensnared by their glow.

“Spare me!” the beast hoarsely howled, “Spare me, witch hunter. Powerful man most-high amongst all the Favored. I can lead you to his lair, monk. To his grim dread. To his killing floor. You have only to promise to let me go, and I will take you.”

“You beat the same path you’ve been using for five-odd and unholy years now, therian. Look at it,” Longinus pointed up the muddy red path with his long knife. The clay-clad trail flowed like a little river of blood now at their feet, as it cut back and through the woods in the distance.

“Blind men could follow it in the dark,” Longinus’ hawkish eyes scanned past Mal and his men back to the werewolf in the woods.

“You’ve been hunting under the guise of moonshiners, which you’ve had to support by actually holding in thrall humans to distill liquor for you, drawing the attention of the authorities, who all seem to mysteriously vanish, along with many “clients”, all of whom happen to be out-of-towners. Questions get asked--and go unanswered. Soon the men whom you’ve paid off with silver start to get complacent and start talking. Funny how that little bit of history likes to repeat itself.

“So, as much as I appreciate your sincere offer for assistance in this matter, I’m sure I don’t need it.”

“You’re a pig, monk!” the wolf-beast lunged.

“Rest in peace,” Longinus prayed, as the hammer dropped on his gun, and the single shot killed the wolf-thing.

The flames over the Grand Master’s weapons instantly extinguished, and the woods went dark again, save for the flickering bolts of lightning still at play in the night’s sky.

Longinus sheathed his weapon and holstered his gun.

“Revenuer,” he turned towards Mal, “You’ve got alcohol, yes?”

Mal feigned disbelief.

“Come on, man, there’s no halo over either of our heads. Besides, alcohol has many uses, one of them being fuel for the flame.”

“Get some grain alcohol ...” Longinus pointed to Mal, “and quickly douse the unclean here. Set them to flame. Then leave this place and forget what you’ve seen.”

Mal searched his companion’s eyes; all had the look as if they were in a waking dream. Longinus could read them well enough.

“None will believe you, at any rate. Now, get to it and quickly. These ... these creatures aren’t truly dead until they burn.”

The men stood, hesitant.

“You heard d’man, get the lead out!” the round, fat man brayed in a thick Brooklyn accent, which seemed to Longinus somehow even more foreign in the Cumberland Gap, than the lycanthropic monsters that now lay dead in the clay. The fire-plug of a man followed his command with a series of epitaphs.

Larry was, amongst other things, a former back-alley bare-knuckle brawler, and he was fond of punctuating his vocabulary with a mix of vulgarities as rich and as varied as the five boroughs.

“Lawrence,” chided Longford, “Language.”

“Sorry, boss,” Larry’s face drooped apologetically.

Longinus turned towards his other companion and addressed him quietly.

“William, see to it the bodies are cleansed in accordance.”

“Will do, Casey,” William said, then moving towards the men, who all had managed to produce enough illicit whiskey from hip flasks to get a fire started, despite the downpour.

At the fire’s first light, Malachi Morelock and his crew disappeared into the forest.

William rejoined his team on the path in the woods, who were discussing the evening’s events.

“I’m just sayin’, Case, Do you really think it was the wisest thing t’do, you know, killin’ d’guy who knew where they are at?” Larry asked.

“I’ve done this long enough; I can smell them until nothing they attempt masks the scent. No matter how hard you try, you can’t get the rank stench of them to fade. It’s a hellspawn odor and it draws you towards it, drives you mad trying to eradicate it. I don’t need one of them to take me there. I can ‘see it’ as clearly as I see you.”

A bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, as if vouching for the validity of the statement.

“Sure, Casey. Whatevah,” Larry raised his hands in acquiescence, “You’re d’boss. Just, it seemed so stone-hearted to blast the guy like that. Second chances and what-not.”

“I understand your concern, Lawrence, I do,” Longinus’ dark face lightened and his voice dropped to a near-whisper.

“And I hear your heart,” Longinus put a hand on squat man’s shoulder. “It is right you pity them, the demon-bound. Some deserve your pity. All deserve your prayers. Redemption is a coat of many colors, however.”

Longinus leaned closer to Larry, staring down at him with eyes opened to mere slits.

“Give them your prayers, Lawrence, if you must, but never--never give them your trust. Never negotiate with something that has nothing left to lose. All they seek in their ruin is company, understand?”

Longinus looked hard at Larry, hoping his point was made.

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Larry finally responded.

The warrior-monk repeated the passage, smiling.

“Well,” Larry added knowingly, “...suffer at least one to live, right boss?”

Thunder rumbled and lightening flashed and the rain drove down anew, harder than before, though none of them would have guessed that would have been possible only moments ago.

Unconsciously at Larry’s words, Grand Master Longinus absently rubbed his chest, as if a phantom pang stabbed there underneath his saturated clothing. Larry didn’t take notice, and Longinus absently took off down the path. Larry and William followed, walking in silence next to their commander.

The trio walked for an hour into the woods along the muddy path, until they came upon the mouth of a cave.

The gaping hole in the earth was wide, a rough crag of layered gray slate plates jutting out of the foot of the ravine they’d been walking in, which now ran red with clay washing away from the hills above.

The entrance was a well-worn foot path. The tell-tale sacks of yeast and bushel baskets of corn husks were a dead giveaway, as was the acerbic stench of sour mash coming up out of the cave itself. A heap of sour mashings smoldered nearby, discarded at the mouth. There was a still, a big one, in operation inside that cave, churning out illegal brew, of that, there was no doubt. The still was of no concern to Gaius Cassius Longinus, however.

That aroma--a mixture of gore and death blended with the faint but unmistakable fragrance of an evil as ancient as it was decadent--filled the Inquisitor’s nostrils. To anyone else, it would have passed unnoticed, but to Longinus the smell was a pungent assault leering at him in the dark and beckoning him to disaster.

“Do we go in?” William asked, expecting to be given the order to march, he slung his back pack over his shoulders and readied his shotgun, but Longinus shook his head.

“No, William,” he finally said. “You wait.”

Larry swore; Longinus glared at him and the fat man shrugged a silent regret.

“I’ll go in. You have work to do out here.”

“Whatta we supposed to do? Stand out here and ...,” Larry stumbled, revising a vulgarity that would have normally fallen out of his mouth involuntarily, “...and make whoopee with the willow trees?”

“William,” Longinus asked, “you packed something besides breakfast in that bag of yours, yes?”

William blushed and grinned a big, toothy grin, for the two men new exactly what tools that dull canvas backpack contained.

“Trust me, Lawrence. You’ll be too busy to make ‘whoopee’ while I’m gone. And these aren’t willows, they’re Cladrastis kentukea.”

“Good t’know. I’ll grab some leafs for my scrapbook,” Larry waved his hands in feigned excitement at the dripping, leafy canopy overhead.

“You’ll need to work fast,” Longinus continued, ignoring Larry’s tone. “The rain is going to start coming down as dawn approaches.”

“Oh, that’s good to know,” Larry rolled his eyes and pulled the cap off of his head nearly hairless head. He wrenched swollen wool in his meaty paws and water gushed out from between his fat fingers. “I was afraid we were only going to get a few sprinkles.”

Larry replaced his hat, and William extracted the tools from the canvas bag, as Longinus disappeared into the cave. Larry chuckled incredulously.

“The rain is going to start coming down,” Larry mocked, as tiny torrents washed over his still water-logged cap.

There was no way on God’s green earth, he knew, it could rain any harder than it already was.

#

Gaius Cassius Longinus stepped into the first recess of the cave, beyond the wide-open entrance, to find the first stage of what he knew to be a vampyric holdfast in the Cumberland hills. Already the violent thunderstorm outside diminished under the surrounding walls of the cavern, but the humidity in the hole was excessive, fogging the atmosphere. Everywhere water dripped from the craggy surfaces of the ceiling and walls, collecting in pools on the floor.

Longford paused and squeezed something in his hand tightly, then opened his palm and examined the item. It was a wooden statue, an African carving of a rhinoceros. His mother, long ago, had given him the totem, which she had acquired in an open-air market in Rome. At the time, it was merely a plaything given to a small boy as a token of affection. A treat from a wild world far away to honor good behavior. Now, the witch-hunter held it close as the only remaining remembrance of a lifelong past and a symbol of a mother’s love and assurance.

“Rhinos are strong and fear nothing,” she told him. “The natives of their land revere them as wards against evil to their households. The rhino is a warrior of surpassing strength.”

The witch-hunter smiled at the words of his mother and tucked the wooden charm into a pocket, the only such ritual of luck he ever allowed himself.

Longinus withdrew his blade and spoke the word. The Bowie knife was ablaze with white light.

This ruse was not unknown to the witch-hunter, he’d seen it several times in the many decades he’d spent hunting hellspawn. It was a typical tactic of covens of witches or vampires: stake a claim to an area. Solicit the aid of locals, who were paid handsomely for their silence. Then draw those from outside into the area with the promise of some form of wealth beyond their wildest imaginings. Ancient ruins hiding lost gold, deep woods protecting secrets of sorcery, dark caves shielding white lightening. Whatever it took, it would draw them from the surrounding area, where their disappearance wouldn’t be noted for days or weeks, maybe even never noticed, as those who set out for glory went missing on a path to their doom.

But just as typically predictable, such inhuman rabble would grow complacent and languid, growing fat on their victories and becoming careless, believing themselves to be invulnerable. This was one of their great weaknesses, a blind spot that pride built for them each and every time.

This coven of vampires and werewolves had been working the area for nearly five years, Longinus reckoned. They had been luring victims in with the promise of illegal liquor, selling openly to the locals at more than reasonable prices and taking their prey from those who’d wondered over form other counties and states, but they’d become very sloppy, on all ends of their business.

They had managed to draw the attention of the federal government, when agents investigating the area went missing. They had beat a path straight to their own door from the outskirts of town, and they had let some of their inside men try to expand their business outside of Pulaksi County.

These men, as always, tend to “talk” too much in the local speakeasies and taverns where their product was plied. This kind of loose talk always found its way to the “wrong” ears. Always.

But for all of the predictable nature of the beasts the Inquisitor hunted, they still managed to surprise him from time to time. This cave was one such surprise.

The second chamber he came to was the distilling operation. Sacks of corn and yeast, ceramic jugs, boxes of corks were all stored here. Two men were sleeping on cots in the room, which was lit with a kerosene lantern. The flame on his knife burned red, an indication the two men were just that, men. Human.

A natural vent to the surface opened here, and water was cascading into the room into a bucket that had been placed on the floor. It was filled to overflowing, and the floor in the cave was standing in about an inch of water, but the drunken stewards did not seem to mind.

The big still was dripping out its whiskey with a regular cadence. A collection of shotguns and rifles were stacked on a natural ledge. Crates of ammunition were stacked nearby.

None of this was the surprise. What was unusual to Longinus here were the series of makeshift metal cages--strands of barbed wire-wrapped metal piping-- that ran along the length of one of the walls in this cavern. Most were empty, but one had an occupant. A disheveled man in round eye glasses and mused up hair with several day’s growth of beard. He looked a wreck, as the bottles about him could attest to. He was clearly a drunk.

A crack of thunder echoed into the cave from the vent in the ceiling and the water continued to pour through the hole.

Longinus made his way to the cage. Closer now, the Inquisitor could see the bite marks on the man’s neck, blood stains on his rumpled white shirt and tweed coat. He was sickly and pale and reeked of sour mash.

“Sir,” Longinus whispered, “Can you hear me? Are you awake?”

The man stirred and the Inquisitor hushed him. He had the look of an academic about him, in his tweed coat and spectacles. His captors had removed his shoes, apparently to discourage escape over the sharp slate fragments in the cave. But they had let him drink his fill of booze, that was evident, and he was in no condition to walk, let alone flee.

Longinus looked about, the two drunks were still asleep on their cots, so he wedged his knife through the cage gate, and pried the door free. It snapped easily, more form than function, and the door swung out and away. Longinus quietly lifted the man up and hauled him over his shoulder. He had taken two steps out of the cage when the man awoke.

“My work! My books!” the man slurred, shouting.

Longinus turned to the two guards, his hand on the grip of his pistol. They weren’t stirring.

“M’research! I must have my valise!” the man continued. Longnius was taken aback at the distinct English accent slurring from the man’s mouth.

“Right,” Longinus hushed.

Longinus stepped back into the cage without taking his eyes off the sleeping caretakers across the cavern floor.

At the bottom of the cage floor, amongst the scattered bottles and chicken bones, was a large leather satchel. Longinus fetched the case and made his way back out of the cage.

“Be quiet,” Longinus chided the drunk.

“I know you,” the man nearly shouted, his voice echoing in the cave. “Cambridge or Oxford?”

“Yes,” Longinus hissed. “Shhhhh!”

“What have you brought me? I can smell that fresh blood! Blood, untouched!” a hoary voice cackled from within the cavern beyond.

The flame on the Grand Master’s blade grew white.

“Blood free of ... roasted bird and poisonous swill!” the demonic voice spat. “Blood. I must have that blood.”

The voice was resonating. Penetrating. Captivating.

Though it had been years, the voice was all too familiar to Longinus, who once again found himself in the presence of the man whose own people named K’thaqwa, the Devourer, the Wendigo Priest of the lost Mawl Nation.

The two sleeping guards roused now, though in a comatose haze.

One of the drunk-thralls reached for a shotgun.

Longinus, in one fluid motion, sent his knife on the fly even as he drew his pistol.

The knife sliced cleanly through the thrall’s forearm, leaving behind a gushing stump, before coming to rest in the slate wall beyond with a sharp metallic ring.

The drunkard could only stare aghast at the gout of blood issuing forth from the limb, before he fell over.

“Run!” Longinus leveled his big revolver at the other drunken guard, “Now!”

The Inquisitor let a shot ring out into the belly of the still’s receiving cistern. A silvery clear liquid emptied out through the big holes left in the metal tank, swirling on the top of the water on the cave floor.

Longinus retrieved his knife from the wall.

The temperature in the cavern plummeted and the witch-hunter shivered against the cold.

“My children …,” the voice of K’thaqwa rose into the cave, “shall feast on the warmth of your flesh and blood, Hellrazor.”

The wendigo-witch emerged from the dark cave, into the light cast from the Inquisitor’s weapons. He was dressed as a man, though his skin was a pale, bluish-white, so that no trace of his original ancestry could be gleaned from his appearance.

About his throat hung a necklace of bone-carved fragments in shapes and signs of demonic import. His long gray hair was so-entwined with similar relics. His body was wrapped in a leather tunic of tanned human hide, knitted together with sinews and ligaments of past victims.

“I thought I killed you in Sure Would?” Longinus growled sardonically.

“I know you thought you did, Inquisitor. Your faith is misguided in oh-so-many ways, I’m afraid.”

The witch laughed, a sound that chilled Longinus’ blood. From behind the pallid shape of the wendigo crowded three or four corpse-like forms, slavering for hot blood.

“Their feast,” the Devourer continued, “will be savored slowly, monk. And I shall see to it, that you are present in mind and spirit, for most of it.”

The grizzled old witch held up a vial of some damnable elixir for the Inquisitor to see. Its origin or purpose was unknown to the warrior-monk, not that it mattered.

“In the time of Enoch, wendigo, the good Lord saw fit to wash away the sins of your kind in the Great Deluge,” Longinus raised his pistol. “It is to my great shame that I have failed twice on that count with you. I won’t fail a third time.”

Acrimony rose from deeper in the cavern; the Children of K’thaqwa were stirring in a panic over something.

“Tell me, K’thaqwa, in all your ‘feasts’, have you managed to consume a soul that could draw breath from water?”

The Mawl lich’s eyes widened into milky-white spheres of terror, as the water level rose in a great rush to its knees from the caverns below. The crevice in the ceiling was now a waterfall, a flowing pillar dropping in a steady torrent.

Longinus aimed his gun and shot the oil reservoir of the kerosene lantern hanging from the wall. Flaming fluid splashed out of the shattered lantern, setting aflame the whisky floating on top of the water in the cave. The space erupted into an inferno, driving the witch-priest back into the tunnel he had come from, the wailing and cursing screeches of his “children” could be heard above the din of the conflagration.

The water surged again, to Longinus’ waist, the whisky on top inching the flames towards the witch-hunter.

The Inquisitor turned and ran as fast as he could, carrying the full weight of the incapacitated man over his shoulder. On his way out of the cave, he passed the other thrall, who, drunk and dazed, had not yet found his way out of the hole in the hill.

Longinus found his companions at the mouth of the cave. The sky was dark as pitch and the storm was raging harder than ever before, but towards the far distance, to the east, a red dawn was brewing.

William greeted his leader, who beckoned the two men to follow him away from the cave as fast as they could. Several yards away, at the base of a towering hemlock, they stopped.

Longinus set the man he rescued down at the tree’s roots and stood to catch his breath. William handed the witch-hunter a box with a plunger handle. While the Inquisitor held the plunger box, William attached the wires.

“Hope you got a boat, boss. We gotta float the flock outta here,” Larry’s joke fell on humorless ears.

With the wires attached, Longinus raised the plunger and pushed it down without hesitation.

The dynamite blast collapsed the mouth of the cave and the stone overhang dropped down with a rumbling shudder. A surge of water displaced by the falling rock swept down the trail and through the legs of the men behind the tree with enough force to knock Larry and William down into the mud. They floated on the wave for several yards before being able to catch themselves and get their footing.

#

By the time the two men traipsed back to the tree where Longinus stood, the rain had stopped and the red light of morning was showing in the sky. The flood waters were spraying in tiny geysers through rents all about the cave exterior, fed by some unseen spring running under the earth, now swollen to flood level by the powerful storm.

But that did not have the Inquisitor’s attention. The warrior-monk was busy examining a leather-bound journal he had found in the rescued man’s leather valise.

“Who’s the rummy?” Lawrence nodded to the drunken man slumped against a tree.

“Brummie.”

“Who?”

“Englishman.”

“Oh yeah? How’d y’know that?”

“Jacket. Harris Tweed.”

Longinus lifted the opened journal as evidence.

“His ubiquitous use of the superfluous ‘u’ in words like … favored.”

Lawrence scratched his head, switched the frayed stub of his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

“His accent,” the witch-hunter continued, “He hails from Mercia”

“Thought he was a limey?”

“Mid-Lands,” Longinus sighed, attempting to clarify to the blank look on Lawrence’s face. “He’s tried to mask it with a practiced RP, but his stupor’s given him away.”

“Me. I never been farther from the five boroughs than Atlantic City. Leastways, not until you drug us out here in the middle of bum f--,” Lawrence stifled the impending vulgarity. “Middle of nowhere.

“So, you can tell all that by what d’guy wears and what he talks like? OK, wise guy, what’s his name?”

“Craveloft,” Longinus said matter-of-factly. “Horace Craveloft.”

“No shit?”

Lawrence’s eyes went wide, then wider still demanding a response, despite Longinus’ disapproving glare in return.

When Longinus could see his reprimand was gaining no ground, he flipped the leather front cover over so Lawrence could see it.

Embossed in gold lettering on the red leather jacket was the name, HORACE CRAVELOFT.

The cigar fell from Lawrence’s lips.

“He’s written his address is on the inside,” Longinus laughed.

Lawrence waved the Inquisitor away; Longinus returned to the journal and his amusement quickly faded.

From what he could gather, he’d liberated an inebriated investigator from an organization calling itself The Fortean Society. The man had articles, newspaper clippings, hand-scrawled notes from interviews and research, some relating to various cryptozoological phenomenon around the world, from missing persons in Kentucky, to frog rains in Oklahoma, to the Beast of Gévaudan in France, to a lake monster in Scotland, to something called the Devil’s Eye in Patagonia.

Amongst the many newspaper articles folded in between pages of the journal, one in particular brought furrows to Longinus’ brow. The article was from The Arkham Advocate and detailed search for the lost Darlinghouse Expedition of 1926 that had gone missing in South America under the lead of British botanist and zoologist Ambrose David Darlinghouse. The expedition had all but vanished and local legend held the Devil’s Eye had been responsible for the loss.

Now, five years later the article detailed, the American adventurer and big game hunter, Jonathan “Buck” Kincaid, was off into the wilds of Patagonia to claim this ‘giant’ from the South American jungles, vowing to bring its head back, if it actually existed.

A large portion of the book was devoted to occult esoterica--rituals, spells, formulae--some of it seemingly transcribed with references from other tomes of forgotten and forbidden lore.

Still other entries contained notes and correspondence with the leadership of the preeminent occult lodges and colleges of the day. Voluminous dossiers filled the pages on Crowley, Blatavasky, Junzt, Mathers.

Clearly, this scholarly Fortean Society was dedicated to uncovering and cataloging the strange phenomenon in the world and those who actively were pursuing it, which meant trouble for a clandestine group like the OMD. Nothing made their job so difficult than amateurs out of their depth poking under rocks better left undisturbed. They would do it all in the name of science, diligently blundering forth in the dark in a misguided attempt to explain the unexplainable. Most instances would be hoaxes or rare but explainable phenomenon. Which meant, when they really did wonder into legitimate occult territory, they would be unprepared, sacrificing themselves to the Luciferian evils seeping into this world, feeding a power that strains at the tether in an unyielding attempt to be loosed upon the world. These groups, more numerous since the days of Man’s “Enlightenment” were pure trouble, not only for getting under foot, but for the unintended havoc they could create. “Seekers”, these men and women often referred to themselves as. Gullible prey anxious to snatch the bait laid out by far more cunning and wicked entities lurking in the shadows of Man, was more like it.

To Longinus, these “Seekers” were nearly as dangerous as the human thralls who endeavored directly to call upon the services of evil.

“Children playing with matches,” the Inquisitor sighed to himself.

Craveloft stirred, rolled half-lidded eyes towards the witch-hunter.

“I know you …,” the man mumbled, a hint of sobering recognition rising up through his lethargy.

“Lawrence,” Longinus called, “You have any whisky left?”

Lawrence turned away from William sheepishly, then, after the Inquisitor cocked his head, produced a flask from his hip pocket.

“Give it to him,” Longinus indicated Craveloft. “He’ll find his own way out.”

Longinus turned back to the journal. It was this last section of the tome that bothered him the most. It was scrawled in an identical hand to the previous pages, but with a wildly palsied penmanship that stabbed and slashed at the pages so that the red ink bled across the parchment.

At least Longinus hoped it was ink.

With growing agitation and hostility accentuated by his increasingly erratic script, Craveloft detailed vitriol and venom towards a rival lodge’s surreptitious and successful influence growing on the political landscape in Europe, a Germanic group called die Thule Gesellschaft. The witch-hunter’s ears practically rang from the implied rage fuming with each and every ink-stained inscription of one name associated with the Thule Society: Baron Werther von Kroen.

Next Chapter: Chapter14 - Hellfire Forged