The Dark Messenger (53 page)

Then he started thinking again for the
thousandth time that maybe he was just somehow loosing his mind,
and that he couldn’t have really seen a vision of the future. It
must have just been some kind of very weird disturbed dream.

As he glanced his eyes in disgust over the
demon pages, he allowed his mind to remember the things that had
happened since he had woken up on that terrible morning. The things
that had proved undoubtedly, and clearly without a shadow of a
doubt that he had seen a vision.

The first thing he remembered was that it was
so damn clear. It was so unlike a dream where you woke up realising
that your brain had just been thinking very weird things through
the night. This dream or vision was actually like being there first
hand. He could smell the different smells in the air, see
everyone’s faces, count the buttons on their clothes, and even see
the dust particles that covered the poor woman’s face. At one point
as a werewolf had charged at him, he had felt extreme pain as its
course fur brushed hard against his right leg. At that moment he
had spun around fast with his heart in his mouth thinking he was
its dinner but he wasn’t. The beast had charged straight past him
like it hadn’t even seen him.

Then the next morning when he had felt pain,
he had rolled his trouser leg down to check and the skin had become
inflamed where the beast had touched him. He wasn’t horrified
though, or at least not as he should have been, because by then he
was still in deep mental shock from the other things that had
happened on that dreadful Saturday morning.

One of the things had been far worse.

In the vision he had seen a priest who was
being blackmailed by an evil man called Raffious. He was some kind
of truth messenger to Heaven and on the run from an angel called
Abdiel. The priest had a child called Jenny by a nun called sister
Ursula, which was very weird because he had a pregnant girlfriend
called sister Ursula and she was a nun too.

Then just after he had woken up and was
getting ready to take a shower, she had said to him that she had a
name for their baby if it was a girl. John had naturally paused for
a second to hear the name and she had smiled at him and said she
wanted to call it Jenny too.

‘
Whats up you look like you
have seen a ghost.’ Ursula had said to him as he had simply frozen
on the spot when he’d heard the name.

‘Oh nothing, I just remembered something I
had to do.’ He had replied with deep shame in his mind that he had
lied to her.

Then he had walked into their en-suite shower
and after a quick wash, minutes later he was fumbling for his car
keys in yesterday’s clothes. Then shamefully and most out of
character for him, he had muttered ‘bye’ under his breath and
without even kissing her goodbye, he had charged out the door.

On the short drive to the cathedral, a couple
of other things had dawned on him from the vision, one of them
being the priest’s daughter. She had been chased throughout the
story by vampires from the future.

Then the second thing was a good vampire
called Kaine, and his loving wife Regina had protected her right up
till the very end. Then sadly the evil vampires had got to her and
she was killed.

The scariest of the lot though, which proved
indubitably that it had been a vision of the future for sure, was
when he had met the guest speaker in the cathedrals car park. He
had gone over to apologize to the choir for being late, and to Jane
who arranged the hymns, before turning around to greet the
stranger. He hadn’t realised at that point because he was tired,
that the man was a spitting image of the man from his vision. Only
as soon as he had said his name was Raffious, then suddenly the
penny had dropped so to speak, and extreme fear raced through every
part of his soul.

It was then that he had realized for sure the
dream was a vision.

John was utterly thrown and deeply distraught
by it all. His inherent reaction had been to get as far away from
him as possible, only as he was running, and like a cancer, he was
overtaken by fear. Then as his subconscious mind alerted him to the
true severity of the immediate danger he was in, the fear had
metastasized into something far worse--pure terror.

He wouldn’t call himself a particularly fit
man, but that morning the fear provoked adrenaline had kept his
legs moving beneath him at a frantic pace for more than 5 minutes.
He had run straight up into Bakely town centre itself and then
beyond.

Two days had passed since
that day and now in his office he felt so alone and so trapped with
evil surging all around him. He knew he should have gone to the
Arch Bishop but that would have meant telling in him about Ursula;
he knew he couldn’t do that because of what it would have meant to
his career. As soon as he admitted to his peers that he had a
pregnant girlfriend, he would be admitting to breaking his vowels
too.
The Sacrement of Holy Orders
that he had signed many years before. There would
be no way his peers would help him, he would be quietly sacked from
the church, and then where would that get him, no he had to solve
these problems himself, but how?

The vision had shown him that the world was
maybe going to end in 2099 and that when his daughter Jenny was
born, she would be stolen away from him by Raffious on the very
first day of her birth. He couldn’t allow that, never would he
allow that, but then how could he a mere priest stop it. Raffious
the old man in his white robes was really a dark messenger who was
so powerful with his spells, that he even created the werewolves in
the vision too.

No there had to be a logical way to stop it
and maybe in the Ponerology books on his office desk, somehow,
somewhere there would be mention of vampires and werewolves, and
the answer to stopping everything in the vision would be there
too.

Frantically turning the pages of the first
book he saw nothing so then started a new book. Then when he had
finished that one with nothing mentioned either, he started
another, then another till finally he had gone through the lot of
them. All five books and nothing, not even the slightest mention of
the fanged people or howling beasts, how could that be?

Turning around on his chair, he looked up in
the direction of Heaven through the coloured glass windows and
suddenly, as if bestowed upon him by God himself, it came to
him.

If the evil truth messenger Raffious existed
as the vision said, then the two good vampires, Kaine and Regina
must exist too, wouldn’t they? With this thought in mind and
knowing how they protected a human, he felt it would be safe to try
finding them. If he could and they really lived beneath the old
ruined cow shed in Devil’s Dyke, then they just might have the
answers he needed.