The Music of Midnight Read online

  The Music of Midnight

  © 2019 – Dallas Mullican

  All Rights Reserved

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual persons, places, or events are purely coincidental. No portion of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the author with the exception of quoting lines in reviews or blog posts

  Published by Charon Press

  Cover design and interior graphics by Jeffrey Kosh

  www.jeffreykoshgraphics.com

  “Spiral” keys artwork by Luke Spooner

  Interior design by Matthew Cox

  ISBN - 9781074897048

  “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; And in the lowest depth a lower deep

  Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n”

  - John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Contents

  I. The Arrival

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  II. Death of the Old Gods

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  III. Into Tartarus

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  IV. Birth of the New Gods

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  V. A Lower Deep

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Titles

  Chapter One

  Long before claws came to tear through flesh and ice-filled winds swept skin from bone, I stood rigid at the edge of oblivion, fearing to move or breathe. Absolute darkness forbade sight, ripped away sound, and corrupted thoughts as they wormed incoherent and sluggish along the pathways of my brain. This prison held me fast—one of infinite space or a constricting chrysalis—where unknown terrors lurked moments away or eons removed and offered madness with endless anticipation.

  Like an infant expelled without knowledge from the womb, pushed into an incomprehensible otherness, I struggled to make sense of my surroundings. Existence seemed instantaneous, consciousness conferred without memory or past. Consumed by a terrifying reality where nothingness rendered senses obsolete, my mind fought to find any anchor.

  Within my fear-bent imagination, a nightmare landscape took form. From my perch upon the precipice of a great chasm, a fathomless expanse stretched out below me. A cavern thrust deep into the bowels of a world far from the one I had known. Massive rock walls fixed with cutting angles and razor points rose high as glistening stalactites hung down from the ceiling. Droplets of condensation, pungent and sour, fell from their jagged tips to explode against rock. Across the abyss, a thin slab of stone jutted out into the impenetrable blackness, forming a bridge. Though made of stone, a foot’s nudge caused the span to tremble and sway. The distance across waited indistinct and vague, the way behind walled high, retreat impossible.

  From far below came a soft wailing—the sound of the wretched lost, the damned, mustering a faint moan. Humiliated in helplessness, yet unable to stifle pathetic pleas, their voices echoed through the vastness full of sorrow and fury. Apparitions bound to this place, chained against all will or control.

  Paralyzing fear gave way to urgent need, escape the only goal. An awful realization dawned; perhaps no exodus from this horrid place existed. The causeway might simply end and spill into the mouth of the void. Worse still, this could represent my entire world. This cold, dark realm all that remained of what I once defined as my life.

  I edged forward along the narrow path, the yawning maw below promising annihilation. My movements teetered hesitant and unsure, like the fresh arrival of a fawn—a newborn, intimidated by the world’s immensity, stumbling forth on fragile legs with no mother’s assurances or warnings.

  A breeze drifted up, icy, so cold as to seem a solid force beginning to exude its breath. The wailing entities became aware of my presence and drew close, investigating the trespass. Pulse racing, hands trembling, my trepidation grew with each step, adding desperation to necessity and prodding progress. The first touch on my skin sent a bolt of shock and horror through my body—real, not of pure terror-born imagination, but some probing intelligence. The breeze became gusts, joining their own bay to the escalating cacophony of ghastly moans and my own pitiful whimpers. The contact lingered an instant, abated, then returned with earnest interest. The unmistakable touch of fingers splayed wide, grasping for me, just out of reach to gain purchase.

  From somewhere ahead, a spark of radiance and…hope. If the pinprick of light lay far enough away, it could be much larger. A potential way out, but the distance remained impossible to discern. Perhaps, I only imagined the glow and would find nothing waiting beyond this impenetrable darkness. Still, some hope was better than none.

  The gusts strengthened to shrieking winds, surging with intense velocity. In my mind’s eye, they whipped me from the narrow way, flinging me into the mouth of madness. The bridge rocked side-to-side, disrupting balance. I flailed my arms, extending them outward, fighting to retain stability. The hands grew in number—a horde reaching out, insistent in their desire to hold this fleeing source of life and warmth. Moans accompanied the hands, no longer quiet in humiliation, but a din of need. Accusation rang in their screams, blame for some egregious wrong done them.

  The light ahead grew to the diameter of a coin and brightened. Heartened, I pushed forward, seeking to gain some distance from my maniacal pursuers. In the darkness, I imagined demonic forms—fang filled jaws gaping, drooling venom, and vicious talons seeking to tear mind and body asunder.

  I ran with the devil at my back, no longer caring if I fell with him into the bottomless pit. My one chance lay in making it into the light. Whatever existed beyond must be better than this. Any world where illumination chased away darkness and allowed vision to comprehend its horrors would be paradise by comparison.

  The winds grew to hurricane force, and the cries of the damned became overpowering. Fingernails sank in deep and held on, begging for salvation.

  The light, grown to window sized, cast no halo into the pitch-black, but hung as a portal to another place and time. As my mind visualized the first tender strands of flesh ripped away by the hardened nails of clutching fingers, imagining icy gusts eroding skin to skull and bone, I leapt into the brilliant glow, engulfed in blackness once more.

  Chapter Two

  Waking into the dark yet again brought renewed terror, a recurring nightmare trapped in the black above a swirling aby
ss. The sounds of the howling lost, the feel of their insatiable need, remained with me. The sensations spawned by the void crept and crawled through my imagination. The possibility I had again woken into that place, forever imprisoned in the sinister gloom, threatened to tear any lingering sanity from its tenuous hold. This time, however, the darkness faded into light.

  My vision cleared, drifting with lazy reluctance from haziness to startling clarity, and induced inchoate fear of a new kind. When the bizarre need not rely solely on the imagination to give it substance, its shape and form conjured an equally frightening reality. The familiar rendered in an unfamiliar way could boggle the mind no less than sensory deprivation.

  A new nightmare contorted and slithered into being, one where the conversant twisted into unrecognizable composition. Staircases rose and fell at sickening angles. The floor slanted away then rocketed straight upward. Walls appeared where no walls should stand. A great domed ceiling shifted underfoot, the entire building assembled like a parody of an M.C. Escher painting. And all around me doors beyond counting. Frantic, I willed the scene to verge from its nonsensical arrangement. I begged the inanimate to obey my cries for order, to give way to some small measure of discernible design. The landscape bent to my will with protesting creaks and groans. In crawling, excruciating rhythm, the structure morphed into a new form.

  The transformation threw my body about the building, until at last I slammed down against a cold, hard surface. I suffered no injury and felt no pain, but experienced an odd sense of vertigo—vision battled to focus and queasiness roiled in my stomach. Gaining some measure of equilibrium, I stood and surveyed the end-product.

  A marble floor shined with a blinding gleam, casting my reflection in a grotesque caricature or a humorous distortion as in carnival funhouse mirrors. Thick silver veins crisscrossed along the surface, stretching out like a vast white sea. A circular tower rose up and up beyond sight, segmented into levels. Thousands of stories divided and stacked one atop the other. And within each floor, doors. More doors than I could fathom. The sheer scale of the tower, its cylindrical shape climbing into an unseen sky, staggered me. It seemed to sway and contract simultaneously. The walkways circling its vast circumference appeared to rotate one way and then the other. With my footing spinning beneath me, my head swam and nausea returned.

  At long last, the tower calmed. Placing a hand to my forehead, I shook the dizziness from my mind and steadied myself. I avoided looking upward too far, instead focusing across what I thought of as the Great Room. In the distance, a massive staircase rose to the second level. . Scanning up a few stories, I noticed a staircase on each floor granting passage to the next.

  My body appeared corporeal and solid, gone now the ethereal feeling that had plagued me within the darkness, yet, a spiritual fatigue burdened my movements, scattered my thoughts, and sapped strength from my will. An ominous void had vomited me into a tower of doors, one that stood both real and a composite of imagination. Not a contradiction, but more aptly a paradox, both realities existed in the same moment. The tower was constructed of recognizable materials—stone, wood, glass—yet at the same time, a work of fantasy. A miniature world enclosed in a fever-dream, like Alice’s Wonderland, or a building crafted of Legos by an industrious, albeit, disturbed child, block after block laced together and propped up with a legion of doors.

  Whether to be up and moving, or struck by a need to investigate this eerie place, I wandered toward the staircase. Either my pace lagged, or the dimensions of the tower deceived. It seemed to require hours to reach the far side of the Great Room and the base of the stairs. To my surprise, I suffered no stiffness in my legs or burning in my gut after such a trek, but the spiritual fatigue intensified—an invisible leash laced around some phantasmal part of me, trying to restrict my progress.

  I moved upward, walking around level after level, up stair after stair. A peculiar fact, which would only occur to me later, I did not attempt to open a single one of the myriad doors I passed along the way. Then, abruptly, quite contrary to my passage across the Great Room, I reached the uppermost floor of the tower. The long ascent similar to sleeping on a plane ride, hours condensed into mere seconds.

  I stood at the mouth of a long corridor lined by still more doors. This hallway alone broke from the perfect circumference of the tower, all others rounding the interior and guarded by waist-high banisters. An inexplicable truth struck me—this corridor remained incomplete. In time, still more rooms would increase its length. I knew it would eventually swing around to encircle the building, adding a new floor to the ever-heightening edifice.

  Fatigue and constant fear brought on staunch indifference. Too tired, disoriented, and confused to care what might hide beyond these facings, I began to try door after door. Not one along this solitary corridor would open. Only when I reached the top level did the latch of the first one there give, and the slightest gap revealed itself. Exhaustion evaporated in an instant, and apathy turned to keen apprehension. Fear, my perpetual companion, came to stand beside me, gripping my gut and whispering alarm into my mind. I could not help but assume the worst; given my environment, whatever lay beyond this door must be monstrous.

  I edged into the darkened room, back pressed against the wall, eyes searching for any movement or danger. Not what I expected—nothing more than an ordinary room. Perhaps twelve feet square, barren, boasting no furnishings whatsoever. Two small windows broke the far wall, a closet inset into the partition on my left. Catching a glimpse of motion from one of the windows, I stepped forward and peered out. A gentle mist swirled outside. Thin as dust and sparked with tracers of golden light, it covered the entire landscape. Distorted shapes shuffled through in slow motion. The golden mist evaporated revealing two figures.

  A girl dressed in a short, pink sundress stood in a meadow of flowers. Purple lilacs, yellow daisies, and tall sunflowers swayed about her in an ocean of colors and fragrances. She held a pure white lily, its long petals closed tight.

  A young man stood before her. He seemed to find something fascinating about his feet, looking up at the girl in brief glances before returning his stare to his leather laced sandals.

  She smiled at him. A bright red blushing swelled up his neck and onto his face. The girl extended the lily toward him. The petals, as if summoned, opened wide greeting the boy, beckoning to him. He reached out, shy and hesitant, wanting to take the flower and accept her gift. His hand shook in tremors of anticipation. However, he could not grasp the flower. It remained just out of reach no matter how he strained to take it in hand.

  The lily began to wilt. Its long white petals darkened, turned grey then black, and fell to the earth. Silver, salty tears traced their way down the girl’s cheeks. Soft sobs turned to sullen cries, then to wails of fury at the audacity of this rejection. She beat upon his chest and protested his villainy. The boy stood and accepted her wrath in quiet resignation.

  The mist returned, sweeping in from all directions, swallowing the boy and girl in its golden hue. Something shifted hard to the left outside the adjacent window. Moving my position closer, I touched the cool glass and gazed deep into the fog. After a few seconds, it again dissipated to reveal a new scene.

  A boy skipped along a silvery stream flowing through a hillside. He wore a rainbow cloak striped in red, blue, yellow, orange and green, brilliant under an afternoon sun. A pleasant lad, in a pleasant mood, yet a sadness swam deep within his eyes. Near the stream’s bank, he stopped and removed his cloak. He appraised it, running his hand down its length, then for no obvious reason began to weep. A tiny head popped out from beneath the stream’s undulating waters.

  “Oh my, you startled me,” said the boy.

  “I’m sorry, do forgive me,” replied the other.

  “Who are you? Why were you hiding there?”

  The other moved out from the cover of the water and pranced around a peculiar tree. He bore a head of wispy, white hair sprouting from behind large pointy ears. His eyes seemed too large,
but shone a deep blue, filled with curiosity and wonder. Standing no more than a couple of feet tall, he wore brown wool shorts, a green vest, green shoes, and a small, pointed red hat perched atop its head between the thin tufts of hair.

  “I’m a fairy,” said the other. “My name is Dreamer, and I’ve been waiting for you. Why do you cry, little one?”

  “It’s my cloak.” The boy stared at the garment, tears drying on his cheeks, new ones filming his eyes.

  “And a beautiful cloak it is. Why should it make you so sad?”

  The boy shrugged. “I’m ashamed of it.”

  “I’m sure I can’t understand why. If I owned such a colorful cloak I would be most proud and wear it for all to see.”

  “I’m just too tired to wear it any longer. I need to rest.”

  “I can help. These buds growing from the low limbs of this tree are magic. I call them dream buds. Not very creative I know, but I find function trumps style every time,” said Dreamer, with a soft giggle.