House of Cabal Volume One: Eden (20 page)

Maybe he was a prophet.

As he drove out of the orchard, he had to
pull off to the side of the road to let a white van pass in the
opposite direction. He had no idea that his wife was trapped in a
box in the back, abducted by two actors loyal to the House of
Cabal.

Continued in
House of Cabal: Volume
Two
coming March 2016

###

Thank you for reading,
The House of Cabal
Volume One: Eden
.

For a free Lovecraft inspired short story,
“The Ovum Horror,” sign up for Wesley McCraw’s mailing list
HERE
.

About the Author:

Born, raised, and
currently living in Oregon, Wesley McCraw writes speculative
fiction. Right now he is focused on horror. Next, maybe it will be
romantic, comedic fantasy.

Wes graduated from the University of Oregon,
where he completed the much-acclaimed Kidd Tutorial, a one-year
intensive writing clinic. During his time at the university, he was
also a member of Write Club, where he trained under screenwriter
Omar Naim (
The Final Cut, Dead Awake
).

The Forgiving
is based on Wes’s
screenplay of the same name. He plans on adapting more of his
screenplays in the future, including
Brief Pose
, the 2011
winner of the StoryPros screenplay competition in the
sci-fi/fantasy/horror category.

Wes is also working on a multi-installment
epic,
House of Cabal
, a romantic comedy,
Lucky in
Love,
and the sci-fi pulp serial
Vampire Fiction
.

You can follow Wesley’s misadventures in
self-publishing at:

http://selfwrite.wordpress.com/

and find him on twitter @wesleymccraw.

A note from the Author:

If you liked what you read, please write a
review and copy and paste it in as many places as you can find
The House of Cabal
sold on the internet. Your help means
everything to the life of this book.
The House of Cabal
is
independently published and doesn’t have a budget for marketing. It
lives and dies on your word-of-mouth.

If you have yet to buy a copy, that’s okay,
but please consider buying a copy now to show your support, or
maybe consider buying one of my future releases. The more books I
sell, the more I can focus on writing.

Thanks you, reader. You are why I write.

Wesley McCraw

Roseburg, Oregon

January 1, 2016

Here is a sample
from
The Forgiving
, currently available
HERE
.

Chapter One

The House

1

Jacobi House stood like any house—severely
erect, perhaps even proud, but made by human hands.

Its two-stories perched high on a bluff on
the Willamette River, not in isolation, but in Portland, Oregon, a
city of more than six hundred thousand souls. In decay the house
remained defiant, but that was true of most historic buildings that
had survived into the new millennium.

Evil may have walked its halls, but the
building itself wasn’t evil in any of its parts. Its foundation
didn’t disturb any burial plots, American Indian or otherwise, and
its architectural design wasn’t a demonic summoning glyph, though
these theories had been suggested each time the house had been
partially torn down and rebuilt.

People feared the place like they feared the
dark. Hope died there. Horror put down roots. But Jacobi House was
like any other house.

Save for one thing.

Jacobi House needed forgiveness. And it would
have forgiveness, hell or high heaven.

2

On the south side of Jacobi House stood the
smaller Stonecipher House.

After the railway had connected Portland to
Sellwood in the early 1900's, the Stonecipher tradesmen, mostly
carpenters, built a blue and white Victorian Revival next door for
the same reason lighthouse keepers build family lodging near
lighthouses. The Stonecipher men took shifts in Jacobi House fixing
plumbing, replacing rot and rust, minding the electric, and
remodeling whole rooms, but they needed accommodations less harsh
and unforgiving for their wives and children.

The caretaking of Jacobi House passed down
through the generations until only three Stoneciphers remained
alive: mother and her two young children, Molly and Alexander.

“In the beginning...” Six-year-old Molly read
out loud at her child-size desk in her austere bedroom. Her Bible
lay open to a picture of the serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of
Eden. “...God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was
without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the
deep.”

Molly’s hair, having never been cut, was the
same length as Eve’s in the picture. Members of The Cross of the
Lamb had to follow a long list of rules: conservative dress, long
hair for girls, prayer three times a day, no unclean meats, no
caffeine, no spicy foods, memorization of the whole Bible before
age twelve. The list went on from there.

As required, she read from the Bible every
day in the light from her window, even though she didn’t know the
meaning of many of the words. She had six more years to get it
right. “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” She yawned
into her fingers. “And God saw the light, that it was good: and God
divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day,
and the darkness He called Night.”

Antsy, she flipped ahead. The Bible was the
longest, most boring book in the whole world. It had illustrations,
but she already knew them all, even what pages they were on.

Jacobi House's upper-story windows stared
back through razor wire that topped a dividing wall. Dead leaves
blew past. Molly usually paid the house next door no mind, but her
father’s rattling, wet coughs had echoed through Stonecipher House
the past few nights, even though Mother had buried Father out back
more than six months ago. It had to be the cursed house next door
that made his suffering linger.

Molly left the Bible. She put her ear to her
door and held her breath to listen. She swallowed her excess spit.
Satisfied no one was coming, she crept back across the room, knelt
beside her desk, and removed a baseboard.

Inside the wall waited Dolly, a cornhusk doll
Father had let Molly squirrel away, and she hugged it and kissed
its corn silk hair. The doll was all she had left of him.

“You be a good little girl,” she whispered.
“Or your skin will burn like paper.”

She replaced the baseboard and sat at her
desk.

As she played behind the glass of her window,
the wind howled, and the trees behind Stonecipher House undulated
and lost more leaves. The leaves covered her father’s grave. They
floated out over Sellwood Park and the river.

Mixed with the rustling leaves and the
howling wind, human screams originated from Jacobi House.

In contrast, Molly’s room was almost silent.
She repressed the urge to tell Dolly stories (Mother might hear),
and instead danced the doll across the picture Bible, across the
burning of Sodom, across the Nile red with first-born blood, across
the Jews wandering the desert, and finally into the loving arms of
Jesus.

She pulled at the tight, itchy collar of her
Puritan dress. More leaves blew past her window. How nice the fresh
air would feel.

Windows could usually be opened.

She crawled onto her desk and pushed up on
the window frame. It wouldn’t budge. She braced her feet on the
surface of the desk and pushed up with all her strength. The window
burst open with a loud CLACK and let in a rush of wind that
reversed direction and blew the doll between Molly's feet off the
desk and out the window.

The husk dress caught on the razor wire on
the dividing wall.

“Dolly!”

The doll danced on the razor until another
gust sent it flying down onto the Jacobi property. Dolly was
gone.

The wind died and left a distant screaming
pinned in the air. Molly backed off the desk and covered her ears.
Her eyes watered.

From a barred window across the way, the
screaming intensified. A lace curtain wavered behind the bars.
Sometimes, if Molly watched closely, she saw glimpses of children
in Jacobi House.

Molly’s window slammed shut and cut off the
screams. Her mother, buttoned up in her own murrey Puritan dress,
stood with her hand clutching the window frame. “Molly! What've I
told you? You know better! Never open this window. What've I told
you about Jacobi House?”

“It's haunted.”

“What haunts Jacobi House?”

“Sin.”

“Then why did you open the window? I've
warned you. I've told you about this.” She continued in a more
controlled tone. “If not for the House of Skulls, that sin would
bear down upon us. And what would happen then?”

“We'd burn.”

Her mother gazed out the window. “You must
promise me to never go to that house.”

“I promise.”

“Good girl.” Her mother let out a breath and
forced a smile. “Now, have you studied your Bible verses?”

Molly nodded a hesitant “yes” and then looked
away, avoiding her mother's gaze.

“Molly...”

She had studied her verses, just not enough
of them. It wasn’t a lie. “But Alex gets to go to school!”

Mother reached out. Molly flinched, but
Mother just fixed Molly's hair. “Yes, but Alex is a boy.”

The girl flushed with anger.

Since father died, she often wished her
mother wasn’t her mother, that Alex wasn’t her brother, and that
she herself wasn’t Molly anymore. She needed Dolly back from that
dark, no-good house. She couldn’t go during the day; her mother
would see. But at night! At night she would sneak out the window,
down the fire escape ladder, and through the front gate of Jacobi
House. In the shroud of darkness, she would save the one thing she
still loved and that loved her back.

3

At the same time the wind stole Molly’s doll
away, her brother, Alex, drew a circle on a piece of paper at his
desk at school. His yellow crayon snapped from the pressure. He
ripped down the waxy label and continued to draw with the
stump.

While he and the other children of his class
continued to draw, his first grade teacher, Isabel Torres, cleaned
a whiteboard with hand sanitizer and a paper towel. The alcohol in
the hand sanitizer made it an effective alternative to expensive
cleaning solutions. The children were all so quiet and focused that
as the teacher scrubbed, she noticed the ticking of the clock above
her on the wall. For her, the last hour stretched longer than the
whole morning before it.

Lumen Christi Catholic Elementary originally
opened its doors as Lumen Christi School for Boys more than a
hundred years ago. Back in those days, while Catholic priests
taught young boys on the first and second floors, other priests
used the basement as an infirmary for the old, dying priests and
nuns of the whole Northwest area. As the boys studied, screams
sometimes came from below, especially from the basement room
reserved for exorcisms. A hundred years later, the basement housed
school supplies and broken desks and projectors, and few ventured
down the dark corridors or into the stone, windowless storage
rooms; the basement had a reputation for unsettling even the
bravest souls.

More than one paranormal website featured the
school as a haunted hot spot, quoting past custodians and even a
few students about eerie encounters with spirits from the
beyond.

Directly above the old exorcism room were
Isabel and her pupils.

The classroom door opened to the hall, and
Becky, the headmistress, stood in the doorway. Her boney hand
beckoned.

Isabel set down the hand sanitizer. Becky
already looked annoyed by the wait, her arms crossed, her shoulder
holding open the door. She glanced down Isabel's body. Isabel
became hyperaware of any exposed skin; was her modest Sunday dress
still not conservative enough?

Becky didn't speak immediately and instead
studied Isabel's face. A marker smudge marred Isabel's cheek. The
headmistress wrinkled her nose. “You coming to Sunday Mass?”

“Of course.”

“We missed you last week. If you can't
manage…”

“I was sick.” Isabel had already explained
her absence more than once. It was the one time she had missed Mass
since starting at Lumen Christi six years ago.

“How would it look to the parents? I mean,
one of our teachers never attending services.”

Isabel un-tucked the collar of a child's coat
that hung by the door. She knew Becky's real issue. Over the
summer, someone had discovered Isabel's relationship with Howard
Stark. Having been together for more than eight years, they were as
committed as any married couple, but she knew the school board
didn't see it that way. To her shock, they had let her stay on (she
guessed some were just happy she wasn't single), but since then,
her coworkers, especially Becky, had stopped hiding their
contempt.

Becky continued in a whisper. “The last thing
we need is another
scandal
. After that
boy
.”

“You mean after that boy's two mothers.”

“You know very well what I mean. We couldn't
let that boy enroll. What kind of message would it send? You need
to start taking your job more seriously.”

Isabel remained mute. She reminded herself
that any teaching opportunity was a godsend, and that this school
paid better than most.