Patten / Abbott / Johnson Hell At Brooklyn Tea

The Sequel To Hell At The Way Station
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9996588-7-1
Verlag: Laughing Black Vampire Productions LLC
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 291 Seiten

After a harrowing battle with the demon, Baphomet and his cultists at the Waystation bar, Brooklyn-based adventurers Marc Abbott and Steven Van Patten attempt to regroup at a Bed-Stuy tea shop. As they gather their wits, the owners confide in them of strange goings-on within their establishment. This quickly turns into more than anyone expected. Eventually, mystic archer Kirk Johnson is called in to help as a vengeful abomination leads them all down a path of supernatural violence, and one of them endures a transformation that will change his life forever.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Patten, Steven Van

Abbott, Marc

Johnson, Kirk

Leseproben

THE BARLOW BAR:

THREE NIGHTS BEFORE THE BAPHOMET INCIDENT THAT TOOK PLACE IN ‘HELL AT THE WAY STATION’

Marc ordered two Heinekens, then turned to his friend. “Nice job last night. Not sure I could have gotten through that exorcism without you.”

Steven adjusted his barstool. “Thanks. It’s weird, though. I don’t have your abilities, but I could definitely feel something…”

“You can hurt them. It’s like they can’t touch you.”

The bartender placed their beers on the coasters before them, gave an obligatory smile, and discreetly stepped away.

“Hey, whatever works, right?” Steven shrugged.

“Whatever works,” Marc agreed, offering a silent cheer as he raised his beer. They clinked glasses, smiling wearily.

“Did you always have your powers, Marc?”

“Pretty much since the day I was born. But I also worked at it. Studied. Everything from theology classes to Harry friggin’ Potter. And Latin, of course. Lots of Latin. You?”

Steven shook his head. “No. Not at all. I mean, I had dreams and premonitions. I learned how to conduct exorcisms, even communicate with displaced spirits who weren’t hurting anyone. But my ‘powers,’ if you can call them that, only began to manifest after my first real encounter with the supernatural. That was a long time ago. I was very much a grown man by that time.”

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense, Negro!” Marc chuckled. “Lay it on me!”

Steven sighed. “Okay, just don’t judge me once I’m done.”

Marc smiled. “C’mon, man! You know me better than that.”

****

The year was 2005. I’d made a habit of going on research trips, to give my written work authenticity and gravitas. That’s what I was shooting for when I visited the West African nation of Senegal, and Osaka in Japan. My motivation in going to South Dakota was specifically to research the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. I wanted to incorporate key elements of that infamous day in American history into a vampire story I was writing.

But it’s South Dakota, right? A red state. Not the greatest place to be wandering alone if you’re a black man, or so my instincts said. The same New Yorker instincts that kept teenaged me out of neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge after dark. While the notion of tearing down the open road on a rented Harley, getting my Hunter S. Thompson on, had its appeal, I knew I should just settle down and hire someone to show me around.

At the rate of three hundred dollars for two days, I hired this nice woman named Carol. She was a South Dakota native, and a well-fed housewife who frequently hired herself out for tours while her husband worked at his Meineke shop. However, she was used to people wanting to see Mount Rushmore and go whitewater rafting. Me? I wanted museums and sacred burial sites. I wanted an education. I wanted legitimacy. We worked out an itinerary that included a walkabout in the town of Deadwood because, along with my need to explore the horrid details of what happened to the Lakota Sioux at the hands of the United States Army, I am a fan of Western lore.

As it turned out, everything I wanted to see was two hours away from everything else I wanted to see. Carol and I ended up talking a great deal while she drove me to burial grounds and museums. By the time we’d hit Oglala State University, which was supposed to have an exhibit that broke down exactly what happened to the Sioux, we were practically buddies. She proved surprisingly easy to talk to and, more importantly, she was a woman secretly fighting the barbaric abortion laws her state was trying to enforce. The sort of laws that force women to carry babies to term even when rape or incest are factors. The kinds of laws that make your skin crawl if you actually perceive women as people. Carol had to fight these laws clandestinely, or the less open-minded people of the area would boycott the husband’s car repair shop. We were discussing this problem when we pulled up to Oglala.

The college was primarily attended by young Lakota Sioux, which was rather encouraging to see, considering all that their community had suffered. After a friendly greeting at the front desk, Carol and I were each given a pair of headphones. Lights dimmed and the exhibit began, a series of paintings and maps explained in order by punching numbers into a handheld audio unit. Unfortunately, little of the information provided by the narrative was new. The way the U.S. Army herded Sioux families like cattle from one increasingly unsustainable location to the next, then fought and killed their heroes, Crazy Horse among them, when they resisted. The purposeful misbranding of a harmless Sioux celebration into a symbolic ‘going on the warpath,’ and the shortlist of events that led to nearly three hundred Sioux men, women and children being slaughtered in the Wounded Knee Massacre, made up the final chapter in the audio-visual tour. It ended with a short black and white film that captured the creation of the mass grave where the army placed their Sioux victims.

When the lights came back on, Carol ran outside, claiming she needed a minute to recover. This left me standing alone, awkwardly, with my young Sioux hosts. Eventually, I grew worried she might have left me, so I went outside. I found Carol braced against her Jeep Cherokee, bawling her eyes out. It never occurred to me the lessons provided by our tour through the past would hit her so hard.

“They never told us about any of this in school,” she said, through full-on sobs. “This is terrible. Those people were killed for nothing.”

The cynical black man in me wanted to chastise her. How could she not know? Wasn’t she from this damn place? But, in my heart, I saw the bigger picture. Like slavery, like interring Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Wounded Knee Massacre obliterates the United States’ narrative as a place of moral equity. Teaching children of any color this truth in U.S. schools would create one anarchist after the next, across the nation.

“I have Sioux friends,” she continued. “Some are probably related to the people in that mass grave. They’ve never said anything.”

“It must be hard for them to talk about,” I volunteered. That only made it worse.

She wound up in my arms, still crying. I was uncomfortable at first, holding a white woman I’d only known a few hours as she wept over the murdered Sioux tribes. Just like that, my research trip became so much more, a reeducation for one nice lady already open to the truth, despite everything I’d been taught telling me she would never be. The more she cried, the better I felt about humanity.

*

Steven toyed with his glass of beer. “After she assured me she was okay to drive, I thought she’d take me back to my hotel and we’d call it a night. Then a friend of hers called her cell phone. I couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation, but apparently, once the friend learned Carol had a horror writer in the car, she made a suggestion Carol was all into.

“Her girlfriend reminded her, if I was looking for spooky, she should take me to the abandoned copper mine on route 8. She swerved the car out of the Oglala parking lot. ‘Maybe it’ll inspire you to write something scary when you get back to your hotel room.’

“Don’t get me wrong. My first instinct, which I should have gone with, was to put a stop to that bullshit. Then it hit me: she was leaning into being an extra helpful tour guide as a way of getting past her sadness. What kind of jerk would I be to try to stop that, right? Besides, the location could be a great place to stage a monster fight scene.

“Twenty minutes later we pulled up at the site. There was no parking lot, so Carol positioned her Jeep Cherokee along the side of the road. To a Native New Yorker, it looked the type of spot on the highway you’d pull into after an accident, or if your transmission had shit the bed.

“We got out of the car. At the time, the most unbelievable part of this was that my black Brooklyn ass really let this white lady I just met lead me into and through some woods and down into a cave.”

Marc took a healthy swallow of his beer. “Well, it looks like you survived. I assume the Klan wasn’t in the copper mine waiting for you.”

“Actually, what happened was way worse than that. And harder to believe.”

Marc’s eyes narrowed. “We did just perform our tenth exorcism together. Lay it on me, partner.”

Steven smirked. “At first, we just saw a lot of machinery, like lathes and foundry equipment. The cave floor was muddy, and there were nuts, bolts and gears strewn all over the place, some items rusted to the point of being...