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  Feeny certainly saw parallels between characters of the book and his host who read the story aloud. He wondered what else might be lurking below the veil; perhaps the story would provide him clues to unlocking the broken author and securing his freedom. Another option remained possible, however: Kurtis might kill him. And that option had looked the most likely since day one.

  “Where was I?” Kurtis mumbled as he paged through to find his spot where he’d left off. “Oh yes. The Texas Witchhouse where local occultists dabbled too deeply under a full moon a century ago. They awoke the dormant spirit of Akko Soggathoth.”

  The fact that he had so specifically named the Black Goat only further unnerved Feeny.

  As the asylum begun to burst at the seams with new intakes, the longer-term ones began to thoroughly lose their minds—reduced to raving lunatics, they’d covered walls, floors, and ceilings with mad scribblings from their shared dreamstate. Quintin became increasingly worried for Victoria who’d advanced more deeply within the cult’s order, lured by promises of arcane and secret knowledge that would satisfy her gnawing thirst for answers about the nature of the universe and the things she’d seen when she was young. Quentin went deep as well—following her into the cultic advancement, though the elder’s powers seemed to hold a far lesser sway over him than it did over the woman he pursued.

  Quentin knew how to play people and he faked his way higher up the chain of the cult and gained access to the scriptorium arcanus: a kind of ancient library the cult had compiled. The scriptorium had worked hard to translate every work into English. To the investigator’s amazement the collection of mystic writings went back far more than a mere century and some of the ancient writings appeared to originate somewhere other than Earth.

  Victoria sought answers to other sorts of questions, but her involvement took a heavy toll on her psyche. Quintin could see it—but he had to understand the situation first so that he could attempt a rescue of woman he’d come to care for. She would not stop until her personal mysteries were unraveled—and so he had to unravel it for her!

  Surrounding himself with cabalistic works, Quentin discovered that Sh’logath would be released to slake his black thirst for destruction if the herald, Akko Soggathoth, took a human host as an avatar—he would gather his brothers and sisters for an awakening ceremony in the Lost Temple of Koth. He would first need a sacrifice of blood to open the gate to the Darque realm.

  The Dark Goat was already physically manifesting. Quintin had to find a way to stop him from gaining more power—with everything new he learned secret society he’d become convinced that they were grooming Victoria for a role as either sacrifice or avatar Akko Soggathoth needed to access the Darque and secure his brothers.

  “Who is Sh’logath?” Feeny interrupted.

  Kurtis stared at him blankly for a second. “He’s nothing.” Kurtis turned back to the book and attempted to restart.

  “No. Really. Who, or what is he?”

  Kurtis folded a page and closed the book. “He is literally nothing. He doesn’t exist—he is the embodiment of nothingness—the great nega-god that existed before existence. He’s an eternal hunger, the actuality of nonbeing, and a high religious ideal in extreme nihilistic theology. I dreamed it up after these weird cultists tried to recruit Felecia and I one night in Nebraska when…” he trailed off in nostalgia.

  Feeny welcomed the introspective silence. He felt deep down like Sh’logath might be a metaphor: something the author used to deal with his grief... a coping tool for his emotional pain. If he was right that didn’t bring much comfort with its implications. The author still meant to kill his hostage if the narrative was any indication.

  “Tell me about her,” Feeny said, almost in a whisper.

  Kurtis sniffed up a tear and sat in silence for a long, uninterrupted moment. “She was gorgeous. She was my everything—I lived for her… and our children were perfect: part of us both and yet somehow greater than either of us.”

  “She was from Texas?”

  Kurtis nodded. “Yeah. Came up here on a full scholarship… you know what they say, ‘come to the northland for the scenery… stay because your car won’t start.’”

  Feeny faked a sympathetic laugh with the man. It was convincing enough to work, he thought.

  “She stayed because she fell for me. I didn’t want to deal with all the crazies down south. I blamed it on Chupacabras and whatnot. Really, Felicia stayed up here in the tundra because I wanted to… It was the ice and weather that killed her. Car accident.”

  Feeny thought back to the hoof prints and the fractured sanity of his kidnapper and all the little ties back to this Felicia—who Feeny had to assume was a real person—she was real enough to Kurtis, anyway—though he couldn’t rule out the possibility that he’d made her up. “Have there been any Goatman sightings up in this area?”

  Suddenly Kurtis’s sorrowful demeanor changed. A dark spark lit in his eyes, but then passed as if a shadow. “Why yes, actually. They’ve mostly been in the south and creeping into the upper mid-west only recently, but there have been a few recent cases I found while researching my novel.”

  Suspecting that Kurtis might have terrorized other people, perhaps under the guise of the Goatman, he felt certain that it wouldn’t have been a creative publicity stunt. He only knew that Kurtis Ward was fundamentally broken inside and was absolutely dangerous. He didn’t know what to do next except stall—as long as he still had pages left to read from Black Goat, Mark Feeny would remain alive. After that all bets were off.

  Kurtis tossed aside the book which bore his name and gathered up the paper bag and cheeseburger wrappers from his prisoner’s most recent meal. The folded page-marker indicated that about a quarter of the book remained.

  Feeny guessed he had a few hours of narration at most. He’d have to get creative.

  Kurtis tossed the trash atop the starving cinders within the potbelly stove. They flared up and then crumbled away to nothing. Kurtis didn’t slash his leg this time. What he did was far scarier than those knife wounds had become.

  He smiled blithely and said, “I’m looking forward to your final lesson, Mister Feeny.”

  The author departed, locked the door, and left Mark Feeny to stare at the crude seven-pointed star facing him on the door.

  16

  Kurtis awoke in his living room and lifted his head off the old wooden floor. A sticky puddle of drool pasted his cheek to the ground and the wetness made the black ink of a floor drawing transfer to his face in a large smudge. He licked his lips and crawled to his feet.

  The light hurt his eyes and he shied away from the shuttered blinds, retreating into the darker, central part of the house. He ignored the growing conglomeration of seven-pointed stars that had been scrawled all across the floor as he slept. They’d crept far enough away from the first one that they had begun crawling up the wall.

  It should have bothered him, but he had effective coping mechanisms. He simply refused to think about it. Booze helped with that.

  Reaching for a half-drained water bottle, the author’s hand veered aside and he grabbed the whiskey instead. He took a slug and stared into his kitchen sink. A mound of dishes grew teenage lip fuzz and dark spots; he hadn’t washed a thing in weeks… since before taking Feeny.

  The dish pile didn’t bother him, but he didn’t have any clean glasses to pour his liquor into. He considered using Charlie’s sippy cup which still remained in the cupboard. Kurtis sighed and pounded back another dram of Kentucky lobotomy fluid as he retreated from the reminder of his dead child.

  He needed a distraction. Kurtis thought on today’s “lesson” and wandered back into his living room. He picked up his notes for the second installment of his book and began fleshing out details for Sh’logath who he wanted to play a more prominent role in Black Goat’s sequel.

  As he paced the floor and tapped his ink pen against the legal pad, ideas suddenly overwhelmed him. Kurtis leaned against the w
all and began recording them. Thought after thought filled his burgeoning mind; his cramping hand could barely keep up with the furious onslaught of ideas.

  Everything else fell away, disintegrated by the euphoric grey that overwhelmed his brain. He was lost in it, swimming in it. Time shrank away, inconsequential by comparison. Nothing else remained. Everything was Sh’logath—Sh’logath was nothing! Kurtis couldn’t put down the pen if he wanted to, as if that desire could somehow become a possibility.

  And then everything stopped.

  Everything focused into a sudden moment of intervening clarity that disentangled the author from all-consuming nature of his muse.

  Kurtis dropped his pen. It had died and run dry, anyways.

  He stared at the pile of used up ballpoints at his feet. Nearby lay his discarded legal pad, covered in black ink as neatly as if had been painted with a roller.

  An overwhelming thirst lodged in his throat and made his tonsils stick like glue. Kurtis rushed to grab that used bottle of water. He snatched it up, noted the milky film floating atop the surface but drank it anyway.

  He caught sight of his reflection as he went to the kitchen to refill the grimy bottle. Black smudges and stray scrawls covered his face which needed a fresh razor.

  Going back to his living room he suddenly recognized the room for the first time as what it had become. It looked like the hovel of a homeless man—like the cell of an asylum patient in his book! Seven-pointed stars covered the floor and walls; a massive black pool on one half of the wall consumed all else in the inky void.

  The more Kurtis stared into it, the deeper it seemed to draw him. At the edges of the giant stain he could barely make out the word Sh’logath as if the name had been scrawled over and over until its overwriting filled in the gaps with the black pool of ink and bled dry every pen in the author’s home.

  He dropped his bottle and looked at his stained hands splattered with indelible fluid. “I don’t think I’m okay,” Kurtis said aloud. Picking up his cell phone he found three days’ worth of missed alerts. He cleared them all with a push of a button. “How long have I been out? Three days?” Panic suddenly struck him to the core. “Mark Feeny! What have I done?” he exclaimed as the memories of the last month suddenly flooded back to him. “Why on Earth would I kidnap someone?”

  His head snapped to the side and he stared into the maw of blackness. “You’re in control,” he said in a voice two octaves too deep to be his voice.

  “What?” he asked himself, recoiling from the otherworldly scribble. “How in God’s name am I in control!”

  The black drew him in again. “How in my name, indeed. I am in control,” he growled.

  He turned to fully face the all-enveloping darkness, inexplicably ignorant of the dark presence in his mind. “I am in control?”

  “I am in control.”

  17

  Feeny stared through the fog of his dehydration and glowered at the menacing star on the opposite side of his cage. He could barely see straight any longer. He certainly struggled to think right.

  The hunger was overwhelming, but the thirst was literally killing him. Every fiber of his being resonated with hate and regret—both for Kurtis and for himself. He didn’t want to die, though he expected it. Moreso, he didn’t want to carry the guilt of Julie Baird’s death into whatever afterlife awaited him.

  Perhaps God would consider his torture by a madman as penance enough? Was penance a thing for non-Catholics? He wasn’t Catholic… did that mean he would go to Hell? There was supposed to be fire and no water, right? Maybe he’d already died. Maybe he was already there?

  Stop being stupid. You’re not dead, but you will be soon if you don’t escape. And why is your inner voice using the second person point of view?

  Feeny shook off the disorientation that messed with his mind.

  It had been three days since his last drop of fluid. He had no idea what might have happened to his captor but his mind imagined all manner of scenarios from Kurtis’s suicide to a random car accident, each outcome left him here to die while abandoned in the woods.

  He’d struggled for the last two days and nights, enduring dry sweats and panic attacks as his water-starved body and mind cursed him with visions of a black goat who mocked the impotent, overweight captive. Feeny tried to break free from the chair but he could not replicate the results from last time. Following the first escape Kurtis had taken extra precautions.

  Feeny shook the chair and poured all of his frustration into the act. He was far too weak to have much of an impact. He stared at the star—the one, single star seemed to mock him from across the room and he could do nothing about it save curse the irony.

  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars—but in ourselves.” Shut up! You hate Shakespeare. Right, but you like Joyce. “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit,” …I’m going to die.

  He knew that if he couldn’t get free, or get a drink, he wouldn’t survive the day. Even if his kidnapper returned, he was not much longer for this world.

  18

  Kurtis—what was left of him—snatched up his knife and other belongings. Among them were a book of matches and a jug of camp fuel. Excitement lightened his steps at the thought of delivering the final lesson to the wicked Mr. Feeny. Today the critic would finally see. Kurtis knew that not every story had a happy ending and he was thrilled to share that premise with his detractor—but not before revealing the final act of the Black Goat’s story. First, he had to show Feeny that he was a great writer—no a genius!

  He leaned against the blackened wall and reflected on the fates of Quintin and Victoria as if they were real people and not just characters of fiction. Would their dark fate bother him if they were real? If they were actually real would it still bother him that he had chronicled their end through nothing more than a sheer act of imagination?

  “They were very real,” his too-low voice stated of its own accord. That fact that this new voice didn’t bother him should have bothered him. Instead, he stared at a stack of paperback copies of Black Goat; stack after stack lined the room. The end would come soon—the end of the story, which only he knew, was coming… coming for Feeny and then for everyone. He retrieved a copy and flipped it open—meditated on it.

  “You don’t understand,” Quintin exclaimed, “The Black Goat wants you as his acolyte!”

  Victoria shrugged. “Then so be it.” She’d fallen that deeply under the elder’s thrall.

  “No! He cannot have you—I will not share.”

  “Share?” She looked into his eyes.

  “Don’t you see how much I love you?”

  She trembled at his words and stepped over the corpses littering the room where they’d planned to summon their master fully and give him a vehicle of flesh. Quintin had shot each and every cultist in the room to protect his beloved, but he knew that more of them would arrive soon—the cult would have satisfaction and Victoria had been marked for sacrifice.

  They shared a brief embrace under the moonlight which fell through the opened, overhead panels of the society’s compound. The sound of applause interrupted them. No, not clapping, they realized, but the sound of cloven feet upon the stone tile.

  The black goat-man emerged from the shadows and regarded them through his jaundiced eyes. Shimmering pale, the seven-pointed star glowed upon the floor.

  Twirling his finger like a puppet-master, Victoria obeyed his command and spun away like a ballerina. Akko Soggathoth cooed and stroked her face as intimately as any lover. “You have so faithfully fed my vitality, young one,” the goat said. “You are a true believer.”

  “Let her go!” Quentin screamed and fired a round from his forty-five. The bloody exit wound exploded out the rear of the beast’s cackling head. Victoria howled in pain as Akko Soggathoth’s wound closed and healed while Victoria’s forehead burned and turned to ash with an identical burn wound.

  “She is mine,” adversary. “Now
you will stand back and allow me to spill her blood as toll for entering the Darque.” He grinned as the watched the quaking human male.

  Leaving Victoria transfixed to her spot nearby, the herald stepped towards Quintin with incredible speed. “But I see now that you are a believer, too.” He reached out to touch the man but the amulet reacted violently. A shimmering field of energy sparked and fought the beast, causing pain in the strange creature. Akko Soggathoth hissed in response. “Yet you are protected from me.”

  He returned to the woman. “And now I shall open the passage between the realms and find my kin.”

  Quentin leveled his pistol at the creature once again. “Don’t you dare touch her!”

  The creature chuckled menacingly. “If you shoot me, I will consume every ounce of her flesh and join her to me. She is mine already.” He jabbed a single talon into Victoria’s chest, puncturing the skin with a claw.

  She gasped with both pain and pleasure. Her eyes shone golden as Akko Soggathoth whispered into her ear, pouring her full of his eldritch power.

  Quintin threw the gun aside. “Take me instead!” He splayed his hands to his side in surrender and the monster withdrew the claw from the woman.

  “I cannot take you.” He hissed and pointed to the amulet around the man’s neck.

  He ripped it from his neck. “An even trade, then!” he demanded as he stepped over to his beloved while still clutching the jewelry in his palm.

  Akko Soggathoth stood back and presided over the act. The man tied the jewelry around Victoria’s neck. Her eyelids fluttered as the beast’s hold on her was shattered. “Quintin? What… I love you too.”