At World's End Page 9

  Zac remained stock-still and silent. He still could not fathom how the monster was speaking so coherently and direct.

  “We are genuinely honored to meet you,” it said, as a general sound of consensus spread around the room.

  Zac still could not assemble the courage to enable him to speak. He was attending the devil’s assembly.

  “It is a good thing that we meet now,” continued the monster. “And it’s because it’s a chance for both of us to save our lives.”

  The monster inched further forward, its slimy skin coming within inches of Zac. He could smell the horrid odor of decaying mold, a swamp-like odor that seemed to follow the monster like a shadow.

  “You have to realize that we will cause no harm to you,” said the monster, stopping right on the edge of the couch.

  Up close, Zac could see that the creature had the physique of a man, but there seemed to be something distorted about its body shape. Its pale, green skin was even more callous to look at up-close, and Zac was particularly revolted by its yellow teeth that had all manner of items stuck in between them, from grass clippings to chunks of meat.

  “W-what are you?” Zac finally stammered after a strange silence hung in the air for a minute. The resonances of the sleeting snow and the howling wind outside interspersed the space between Zac finally uttering horrifying words, and the monster speaking.

  The monster seemed to be amused by Zac’s question, first staring around the room at his fellow creatures, before answering anyway:

  “I’ve just told you,” it said, “we are the Guardians of the World.”

  Zac stared on as the monster continued:

  “The world that you live in is full of lies; any history that you think you know is false, and the truth is the truth.”

  The acrid smell of decaying flesh seemed to hit Zac squarely in the face, but he did not express his disgust openly.

  “W-what are you trying to tell me?” Zac had noticed that the barking ghosts seemed to have settled down on the carpet; they barely made any noise other than an occasional whimper.

  “We are the original settlers of the world,” the monster spoke up, its gruff voice frightening Zac despite its assurance that the monsters will do him no harm. “The evil human beings that first inhabited the Earth were magicians. They set a spell upon us that so strong that it changed us from men into whatever you want to call this.”

  It gestured at itself, pointing to the fact that it had green skin covering it.

  Zac had listened to so many strange things since he arrived on the South Pole; he was not interested in making any sense of what he was being told. However, he was interested in the invisible beasts.

  “How would you explain the invisible animals?” He asked.

  “They, too,” said the monster, swaying his hand behind him to gesture at the invisible mutts, “were set upon a curse. They are to roam the Lands of Ice as invisible creatures for eternity.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Zac, timidly. “But none of this makes any sense to me. If you’re going to cause no harm to me, then can I ask you to tend to my injured friend?”

  The monster’s eyes switched their focus back on Valeria, and it let out a low, angry growl beneath its breath. There was some murmuring among the monsters, but Zac could not understand any of the words they were speaking at that time.

  Then, the lead monster spoke up once more, “It’s her and her people that are responsible for our demise, they are the real monsters.”

  Zac raised his eyes without asking any questions, but the monsters could see the queries plastered all over his face. There was some more murmuring going around the room.

  “Your friend there and her people are magicians who came from another world that is renowned for very ugly creatures,” said the monster. “When they came to this world, they turned us, the appointed Guardians of the World, into monsters so that they could take control.”

  When Zac turned to look at Valeria, wondering what sense he was making, he noticed that she had stirred and her eyes were opening slowly.

  Her vision came into focus progressively, and the room hushed.

  “Valeria,” said Zac, sinking to the couch to embrace her. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

  However, as he embraced her and knelt over the couch, wrapping his arms around her bloody clothes, he felt a tingling sensation on his chest, at first, then a sudden piercing pain.

  “Ow,” he cried out, releasing his hold on Valeria. Then, he noticed what was happening, much to his shock.

  There were long spines growing out of Valeria’s body, glistened by her blood, and they were similar to that of a porcupine. They were growing slowly and purposefully while Valeria laid there, motionless with her eyes opened.

  Then, her eyes also started changing from their deep blue color into a dark, hazy color that completely changed her outward appearance.

  Her face seemed to collapse into itself, and all that was left was an ugly skull—her long lustrous hair disappearing as if consumed by the couch.

  Zac stared in horror, completely unable to say anything.

  “You want the truth,” the monster said slowly. “Here it is.”

  Chapter 23

  The room had fallen into a dead silence as the strange transformation of Valeria continued. She transformed into something that Zac had never seen before—some type of ancient creature that he might have seen in a cult book, perhaps—some type of phoenix.

  Outside, there was a snowstorm that seemed relentless on reducing the entire place into a white, sub-zero desert.

  Inside, particularly inside Zac’s brain, there was a storm of his own brewing, and the questions he wanted to be answered would need a lifetime to be reviewed in their entirety.

  The creature opened its eyes only once, looking straight at Zac.

  It uttered in a very restrained and chocking voice; “I’m very, very sorry, Zac.”

  When it closed its eyes, it had taken its last breath.

  There was an ominous silence that hung in the room for a while as Zac attempted to make sense of what he had just seen. However, the lead monster spoke up, breaking the silence.

  “We have been in their clutches for over a thousand years,” it said. “And it has given them the opportunity to spread lies for a very long time.”

  “Is this some sort of magic?” Zac asked quietly.

  Zac took his eyes away from the creature that now lay still on the couch and turned his attention to the problem that he resented the most—he was well and truly alone.

  “We need your help,” continued the monster. “We believe that you can help to reverse the spell cast upon us. Only by revealing the truth, does the truth manifest in the eyes.”

  The monster gestured to the creature that was once Valeria by rolling its round eyes in her general direction.

  “W-what do you want me to do?” All Zac could do at that point was to stammer and try to stay alive.

  There was murmuring around the room and some loud whimpers from the barking ghosts.

  Then, the lead monster spoke up once more, “The wand that you possess, do you know how to use it?”

  Zac felt the pace of his heart quicken.

  “No, I don’t know how,” he said, shaking his head fearfully. “Honestly, I have no idea how these things work or –”

  “That’s okay,” said the monster, cutting him short, “we know that children of today do not know how to use magic. The establishment is trying to phase it out of mainstream society—even here in the South Pole.”

  There was some more murmuring amongst the monsters.

  “Do you know where my grandparents are?” Zac asked.

  His question appeared to have touched the wrong nerve because, suddenly, the room fell silent, and stone-cold, hard eyes started staring at him. The lead monster spoke up:

  “Your grandparents are responsible for holding us captive in this place,” it said. “They are responsible for causing some much trouble for us.”
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br />   Zac’s heart was pacing.

  “What did you do to them?”

  The monster raised its massive shoulders in a shrug. “Nothing.”

  The murmuring around the room resumed.

  “If you won’t hurt me, will you allow me to look for them?” Zac asked.

  “Well,” said the monster, “they are probably not here. We would know if they are home; we can sense them.”

  Zac had Valeria’s wand stashed in his pocket. He removed it, still amazed by its appearance. He remembered back in the synagogue how the thought of light on the tip of the wand caused it actually to happen. He, therefore, conceptualized a big fire in his mind—closing his eyes for a minute and pointing the wand downwards.

  Suddenly, a massive flame appeared, so large that it immediately consumed everything in its wake, including the large table in the middle of the room and also the lead monster.

  The large fire caught the monsters completely off-guard, and they were all thrown off their feet as a sudden massive blast of hot air changed the aura of the room. There were loud and desperate screams as Death visited them like an unpleasant dinner guest. The barking ghosts were also yelping in horror as they struggled to get out of the place.

  Zac’s coat caught fire, and he dropped the wand to the ground, immediately getting consumed by the flames and burning with loud, crackling sounds like firecrackers.

  Oh my God, Zac thought.

  The fire spread rapidly and systematically, consuming several furniture items as well as monsters in its wake. The doors were already jammed with fleeing monsters, and the drapes had already caught fire in a spectacular flaming show.

  The barking ghosts were howling so loudly that Zac had to plug his ears with his fingers momentarily. The living room was getting filled with a thick black smoke, and Zac started to cough desperately.

  Then, there was a loud deafening noise by the drapes, and it was accompanied by the shattering of the windows. Glass flew everywhere, adding a new hazard to the already murderous peril that had befallen anything that was breathing in the living room.

  Zac saw his chance to escape, and he took it, jumping across the room past the simmering wood and the mutilated corpses, and hurling his body through the window. He landed with a hard thud on the open snow outside, immediately cringing at the sudden change in temperature.

  The screams seemed to have only gotten louder with his face buried in the snow, and he quickly staggered to his feet, slipping and sliding on the icy ground.

  He immediately noticed that he had been surrounded by a dozen monsters, each of them staring down hard at him as he stood in the middle of their circle, helpless.

  The last of the screams from the living room were subsiding, but entire sections of the small farmhouse were starting to collapse.

  Zac knew that there was no place for him to run.

  This was the end for him.

  He closed his eyes and hoped that his death would not be painful or gruesome.

  Chapter 24

  At the moment that Zac was surrounded by the monsters, the snowfall let up for a moment, enough for four hooded figures to skirt through the darkness quickly, undetected.

  As the fire brought down the beautiful farmhouse, injured monsters attempted to get away from the wreckage. There were monsters carrying their injured colleagues away from the inferno into the welcoming coldness of the snow.

  However, there were unfortunate sufferers within the farmhouse itself who were directly victimized—either by the scorching flames or by the thick, black acrid smoke that was now rising to the sky in columns.

  The dark hooded figures did not reveal their presence, and they only moved from one group of monsters to the next, quickly like a flash of light. New screams rent the air as a new victim swiftly joined the fray.

  The monsters that were closing in on Zac halted their approach towards the little boy, throwing their gazes around them as one monster after another fell to the ground with puncture injuries.

  “What the hell is going on?” Asked one of the monsters with its thick, slobbering lips, allowing a gob of saliva to trickle down its chin. “Who are those people?”

  They whizzed around the place, barely visible, their movements appearing like a blur.

  The other monsters turned their attention to the chaos that was developing before them, turning to the assailants and trying to attack the fast-moving hooded figures.

  Amid the conflict, one of the hooded figures got right to Zac, lifting him sharply by wrenching his hand up and almost unbolting it out of its socket.

  “Ouch!” Zac cried out, immediately realizing that it was a human hand that had pulled him up.

  The other monsters were desperately trying to stop the zigzagging hooded figures. They barely took notice of the hooded figure that was supporting Zac to his feet. The other figures were moving so quickly through the snow that they were living copious trail marks.

  “Grandpa?” Zac said, astonished when he realized the identity of the hooded figure helping him to his feet.

  The person removed the hood that was covering his entire head, revealing the aging face of Grandpa. He seemed to be particularly annoyed by the razing of his house, and he kept staring at it in disappointment.

  The zigzagging hooded figures, now only three in number, had managed to kill almost all the monsters single-handedly, and Zac could not understand what was going on before him.

  “How can you move like that?” He asked his Grandpa whose focus seemed to be on the disappointing scorched farmhouse before them. It had been reduced to a dark, simmering rubble, and there was barely any evidence to suggest that it was once a beautiful home.

  The screams around them had subsided, and the monsters in the snow who happened to be still alive were waving their hands desperately in the air. The hooded figures stopped crisscrossing all over the snow, and the area looked like an ugly wreckage.

  There were ugly, green dead bodies everywhere, and the snow had been enriched with a mixture of different colors, from red to black to blue. There was a decaying odor in the air combined with the strong smell of the voluminous smoke.

  “Come with us,” said Grandpa, grabbing Zac by the shoulder and pointing in the general direction of the synagogue.

  “I came looking for you, Grandpa,” said Zac, “in the synagogue. Were you amongst the hooded people in there?”

  The other hooded figures had gotten alongside Zac and Grandpa. They retained their hoods, and they started at Zac through the darkness that was their faces.

  One of the last monsters to have died shouted defiantly in their direction; “Don’t believe them at all, they are the murderers, Zac. Believe the truth for yourself, boy.”

  One of the hooded figures proceeded through the snow to the monster to drive a dagger so deep in its chest it came out on the back side and gushed a rich red elixir of blood into the snow.

  Zac was glad to be back with his grandfather because now, he would have the opportunity to ask him to help him get out of the South Pole. Taking into consideration that their house was already torched to the ground, Zac felt that he would meet no opposition with a proposition to leave the South Pole.

  For good.

  No way was he coming back to a weird place such as this.

  He could not get the death of Valeria out of his head. None of what was happening made any sense to him, at all.

  His Grandpa started pulling him across the snow, away from the house. Zac was not worried about where they would spend the night because it was his intention to get transported out of this weird place immediately. He did not want to spend a moment longer in the place.

  “Grandpa,” said Zac, “Can you get me out of this place?”

  Grandpa did not respond. They were walking rapidly through the snow, the sounds of the collapsing embers of what was once the farmhouse behind them being slowly replaced by the crunching of their footsteps as they moved across the snow.

  “Is it possible, Grandpa?” Zac asked
again, this time leveling a glance at his grandfather.

  Grandpa stared at Zac, and that was when he noticed that Grandpa’s eyes were of a particularly dark color, with his eyeballs suddenly growing bigger.

  They stopped walking for a moment as Grandpa suddenly fell to the ground clutching his chest and crying out.

  “Hey,” said Zac, his shoulder feeling a sense of relief as Grandpa’s grip on it disappeared.

  Grandpa sunk his face into the snow, writhing in pain. Zac sunk right beside him.

  “What’s wrong, Grandpa?”

  Zac looked up for assistance from the other hooded figures but was surprised to see them walking on through the snow in the direction of the synagogue. They ignored what was happening.

  “Hey! Come back!” Zac shouted at them, but it seemed inconsequential.

  When he looked at his grandfather, suddenly wondering what he was going to do, he noticed it.

  The familiar thick, black spines.

  Like those of a porcupine.

  Growing right out of his chest.

  “N-no, no,” Zac stammered to himself, failing to believe what he was seeing before him.

  The spines grew fast and rapidly, spreading all over Grandpa’s body. He lay there silently, writhing in pain, the only sounds were the sickening sound of a sharp item piercing flesh.

  As Zac watched in horror, he got to his feet, unable to kneel next to whatever was transforming before him.

  Grandpa’s body disappeared and was gradually replaced by a large, black phoenix bird with sharp claws, but with shut eyelids.

  All around its body on the snow, there was a black residue, like ash, sprinkled on the snow.

  And then its eyes opened very abruptly, and the creature lunged off the snow and went straight for Zac’s face.

  Chapter 25

  A strong wind was blowing, and it rifled Zac’s black hair on his head. Consequently, his vision came to, and he realized that he was seated on a grassy section of the peak of a hill.