Sleepers Awake Read online

  Sleepers Awake

  A Ministry of the Wraith Novel

  Patrick McNulty

  SLEEPERS AWAKE

  * * *

  Copyright © 2017 by Patrick McNulty

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

  First Printing: 2017

  ISBN 978-1-387-35549-5

  The Ministry of the Wraith Press

  * * *

  www.patrickmcnulty.ca

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Also by Patrick McNulty

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  Also by Patrick McNulty

  Also by Patrick McNulty

  Join my mailing list to get The Blood Singer, the first entry in the Haden Church Supernatural Thriller series.

  Sometimes only a demon can save you

  Meet Haden Church, a demon taught to use his dark set of skills to track down evil. When an innocent girl is kidnapped and buried alive, Haden turns to The Blood Singer for help, a devil Haden once tried to kill. She has the skills he needs, but her price for participation could be Haden's life.

  Prologue

  BEFORE THE DARK

  November 13, 1976

  * * *

  With only minutes to live, he crawled, covered in blood, up his basement steps. Moaning and grunting with the effort, he pulled himself over the threshold into the kitchen, closed the door behind him, and secured the metal bolt. He would have prayed for the bolt to hold, but he was too tired.

  At thirty-six, he was a young man, healthy, full of vigor, handsome, but sprawled across the kitchen floor, he looked like a man twice his age. His loose, wrinkled skin was the color of ash. His face was smeared with soot and blood that plastered his short black hair tight to his skull. His normally clear blue eyes were glazed, jacked wide with fear. They darted in every direction, scanning everything and nothing.

  He dragged himself across the green linoleum, leaving a wide smear of blood as his bony hands clawed for purchase, fighting for every inch. When he reached the oven, he opened the door and turned the gas to HIGH. With that done he had little left to do but sit and wait and apply what pressure he could to the vertical gash that ran from his abdomen to his sternum.

  A river of warm blood flowed through his thin fingers as he sat listening for the footsteps that would eventually come. For now all he heard was the hiss of gas and the crackle of the fire eating its way through the basement ceiling.

  Maybe she was dead, he thought. Maybe ...

  His breathing grew shallower, his heart slowed, coming down off the adrenaline boost that had got him up off that basement floor and all the way to the kitchen. His sight grew dim, curling in at the edges. Soon he would sleep.

  A coil of barbed wire shivered in his belly, ripping him back to this world when the first footstep dropped heavily onto the riser in the basement. His heart trip-hammered, slamming painfully against the cage of his ribs. His body shook violently.

  The footsteps grew closer as they charged up the stairs. The wounded man imagined its legs moving like pistons as it picked up speed with every step. He braced himself.

  The impact nearly ripped the door off its hinges. The solitary bolt bent in its cradle. The door showered splinters of wood and plaster dust, but it held.

  The other side of the door was where chaos lived.

  The frenzied thing flew into a rage, fuelled by frustration and survival, clawing at the door, digging its nails into the wood, slamming its body against the frame again and again as tendrils of black smoke curled into the kitchen through the gaps between the basement door and its frame.

  He couldn’t move even if he had wanted to. And he wanted to, desperately. The door creaked and groaned as the bombardment wore down its defenses. He felt the heat of the flames climbing the stairs. He choked and coughed as he swallowed smoke. His vision swam from breathing the gas. He wondered how long the door would last. Would it be long enough?

  The door shuddered violently with one last blow, and a two- foot crack ripped up the center. A pale arm snaked through the gap, its little fingers searching wildly for the locking bolt. The man whispered. It wasn’t a prayer exactly, more of a plea. He begged forgiveness, for what exactly he wasn’t sure. But there was nothing left to do. He hoped God would understand.

  The pale hand found the bent bolt and slipped it out of its cradle. The door swung wide. Darkness and light flooded in together. The figure was clothed in flame as it charged across the kitchen floor, arms outstretched, reaching, searching, screaming.

  The man whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  In the next breath, a hurricane of flame obliterated the house.

  1

  Thick white snowflakes fell in lazy spirals out of the darkness and passed straight through the wraith in the black suit and fedora. Oliver Dannon moved with purpose across the dimly lit street and slipped silently into the passenger seat of a Cadillac CTS. Almost instantly the temperature inside the vehicle dropped like a stone. The wraith’s image trembled like a desert mirage as he settled in the plush leather seat.

  Behind the wheel sat Bishop Kane. Black hair cut short atop a bone-white face, strong chin and eyes so black they seemed to absorb the light around them. To Oliver, he looked very much the image of death. The Grim Reaper. And he was.

  Bishop’s long pale fingers drummed restlessly on the steering wheel.

  “How many?” Bishop asked.

  “Three,” Oliver replied. “All asleep on the second floor.”

  Bishop slipped from the vehicle and made his way up the street through the shadows. It was just past two in the morning and Malberry Street was quiet. The snow quickly covered everything in a thick white shroud. At the back door he teased his way through the lock with a thin metal tool, then slipped as silently as smoke into the home of James Rayford and his family.

  Tomorrow, when asked if they knew the Rayfords, the neighbors, friends and coworkers of the family would say of course they knew them. They played golf together almost every Saturday, they were on the same PTA. They would say that

  they were decent people, polite neighbors, good workers, and that Jeremy, their nine-year-old son, was an excellent student and a well behaved young man. He was on the lacrosse team at his school. They weren’t perfect, but who was? They were your average American family. Friendly, harmless, invisible.

  Inside the house there was nothing unusual or ostentatious, merely the normal trappings of middle-class life—a lazy-boy recliner, X-Box, big-screen TV—but Bishop paused in the living room. Above the fireplace hung a painting, a beautiful and eerie depiction of a ship at sea. Now Bishop
wasn’t much for art, but he did know the difference between dogs playing poker and true talent. Even in the weak light that spilled in from the streetlamps, Bishop could tell the artist was a master. The dark and stormy sea, the vessel turning on its side, these images were very well executed, but there was something else, something within the painting, something ... hidden. Bishop took a step closer to the canvas and stopped. For a moment he thought the image trembled. He realized that he had been holding his breath. He took a step back and turned away without a backward glance.

  Bishop climbed the carpeted steps to the second floor. He passed pictures of the loving family at birthday parties, ski trips, around Christmas trees opening presents. In all the pictures, they smiled and grinned for the camera. A family very much in love, he thought. At the second floor he crossed the hall to the third door on the left.

  He killed young Jeremy first.

  2

  Bishop Kane sat silently in a chair opposite the very cold and very sore James Rayford, savoring the moment. It had taken Bishop seven months, traveling through three different countries, to finally catch up with the man seated before him. He wasn’t going to let this end quickly.

  Rayford writhed uncomfortably on the metal chair. His arms were stretched painfully behind him, his hands shackled together through the bars of the metal chair he sat on. A cloth bag covered his head. He shook his head in the hopes of dislodging it, but it was tied just under his chin.

  His hooded head swung left and right, searching for something, anything that would give him a point of bearing.

  “Hello?” he croaked. A wracking cough bent him at the waist. His body shuddered. When the coughing subsided he shifted in his seat and realized that his ankles were also chained to the legs of the chair.

  “Hello?” he begged. “Answer me, please!”

  Bishop’s footsteps rang out like shotgun blasts over the bare concrete.

  “Hello? Hello?” James pleaded. “Please.”

  Bishop untied the drawstring on the bag that covered Rayford’s head and tossed it aside. On paper, James Rayford was forty-two, but tonight he looked a lot older. Naked and pale, he was small and shriveled. Bishop could see that, in his day, he had once been athletic, maybe a long distance runner. He had that kind of frame. Tall, skinny. Knobby knees and shoulders. Definitely no contact sports for little Jimmy. But as James entered middle age, his runner’s body was running to fat. A pale little paunch sat in his lap like a hairless cat, and what was left of his brown hair was losing the battle to gray. He looked like an eighth-grade science teacher, the one everyone hoped they wouldn’t get. The only color on his body was the dark purple bruise that threatened to swell his right eye shut.

  Bishop couldn’t help but smile, reliving that memory, watching Rayford’s eyes roll open sleepily, slowly, his brain a little behind the game, trying to process what the eyes were seeing. Then the combination of shock and horror as Bishop loomed above him. In his house. In his bedroom. Then BAM! Bishop drove a right fist into the side of his head and fired the tranquilizer gun into his throat. Perfection.

  “What is this?” Rayford asked. “Who are you? Where am I? Where’s Jeremy? Where’s Linda?”

  “So many questions.”

  “Please.”

  “Please what?”

  “Tell me where Jeremy is?”

  “He’s at home. In his bed. Dead.”

  Rayford’s face seemed to crack and collapse in on itself. His eyes were swollen with tears that ran down his cheeks. He made a low moan in his throat. Bishop recognized the anguished sound when he heard it. He had made it once before himself. So far he was impressed with Mr. Rayford. He was good.

  “And my wife?”

  “Do I have to say the words?” Bishop replied. “I’m afraid they didn’t make the cut, as it were. They just weren’t as important as you, Jimmy.”

  Rayford lunged toward Bishop but the metal chair was bolted to the ground and the chains held. He strained and snapped. Spittle and snot and tears ran down his face.

  “I’ll kill you! You motherfucker! You hear me? I will cut your fucking head off!”

  Rayford strained and flexed and pulled, but all he managed to do was cut his wrists deeper with the cuffs. Blood flowed through his fingers, dripping steadily onto the concrete floor.

  When the fight left him he whispered, “I’ll kill you.” Surprisingly, he thrashed again. He pulled on his cuffs hard enough for Bishop to believe that he might pop off a hand and come at him with his bloody stump. But the hand held, and soon, defeated, James Rayford slumped in his chair and wept, sniffling and dripping into his lap.

  Bishop took a long look at Rayford and smiled a small thin smile with all the mirth of a Great White.

  “That was very good,” he said.

  James Rayford looked up stupidly.

  “I mean, if I didn’t know you—”

  “You don’t know me,” Rayford spat.

  “And I didn’t know what you are, I would have thought that you actually cared for those things back there.”

  Rayford looked up. “They were my family.”

  Bishop leaned close enough to smell the sweat and snot and tears rising off Mr. Rayford.

  “Fuck your family. They’re dead. Stone-cold fucking tag- on-a-toe dead, but here’s the good news: you won’t be too far behind them.” Bishop shot out a right hand that snapped

  Rayford’s head back on his neck and shattered his nose. Blood exploded across his face and chest.

  “Who is Eve?” Bishop asked.

  3

  December 10, 2007

  * * *

  The woods were deep and quiet and still. Snow sifted silently down from a twilit sky painted by a dying sun in brilliant reds, oranges and gold. The fields seemed to burn as the shadows lengthened like wild vines in the growing darkness. In Danaid, Alaska it was just past one in the afternoon, but in this part of the world, at this time of year, sunlight was a precious commodity. Locals called this time of year the Dark Season.

  He had to admit the old man was fast.

  Randy Tinsel dipped his right shoulder and angled his snowmobile through the line of snow-covered evergreens, deftly navigating the drifting terrain as Rage Against the Machine screamed in his ears.

  Since he and his father had left Route 4, he figured that this time, finally, he had him. His dad had cut wide right to follow the river, while Randy opted for the more direct, albeit dangerous route through the forest. He gunned the throttle, felt the machine respond and jerk forward and cut across the fresh powder, swerving around trees, cresting peaks and dropping down into valleys of the terrain that had been his second home for the last twenty-seven years.

  A smile broke as Randy relished the thought of finally beating the old man to the mine. No mean feat, but it was inevitable, he thought. Only a matter of time until the young warrior overtook the old, the student became the teacher. It was the way of the world. Survival of the fittest.

  Every year their annual hunting trip began the same way, with the race to the mine. Randy’s mother didn’t like to hear them talk about it because it involved riding machines with little or no protection other than a helmet and snow gear while traveling at high speeds over unpredictable terrain. Moms are like that. So they didn’t talk about it. They didn’t have to. It was understood.

  Randy switched on his headlight as twilight finally bled away to night. Deepening shadows blurred the edges and filled in the gaps of the landscape as the last trace of amber light was smothered into extinction. He wasn’t frightened by the dark or the reduced visibility. He was well familiar with this area and this path in particular. It would take more than nightfall for him to let up on the throttle, much less turn back.

  Randy guided the sled down a sharp decline and dropped into a narrow channel of closely cropped evergreens. Their sharp needles slapped and scratched at his helmet as he powered through the gauntlet, but it didn’t matter. He was close.

  As Randy negotiated the last stand o
f trees before the clearing, he almost felt sorry for the old man. Tragic, really, but inevitable. In another second he exploded into a clearing enveloped in a cloud of fresh powder. His powerful halogen headlight swept over the crumbling remains of the mining office. Broken windows, bare cinderblock scrawled with graffiti, and from beneath a blue plastic tarp a piece of reflector tape winked at him mockingly.

  Son of a bitch.

  Randy powered the sled toward the flickering bar of light and found his father’s snowmobile neatly stored beneath a quickly made lean-to constructed from a rusted piece of corrugated steel.

  Unbelievable. Not only had his father beat him here, but he had enough time to secure the tarp to the machine and set up the lean-to.

  Randy was still shaking his head as he baby-stepped his sled in alongside his father’s and adjusted the tarp to cover both sleds. He replaced his helmet with a knitted watch cap, pulled off his gloves and pressed STOP on his MP3 player, silencing Rage Against the Machine halfway through “Bulls on Parade.” The silence rushed him from all sides like a pack of wild dogs. There was no wind. Thick snowflakes steadily tumbled, burying the world in white. His breathing, ragged and wheezy, was loud and clear in his ears. It was not the first time lately that he found himself out of breath during relatively easy tasks. He promised himself, again, that he would quit smoking. After the holidays.