Many religions over the course of human history have laid out in either implicitly clear or vague, uncertain terms what happens to the souls of sinners in the afterlife. Not all faiths speak of a hell or an underworld, and not all promise eternal punishment for those who die after living evil lives.
When someone struggles to find explanations for the strange and frightening spirits he has encountered, the answers will not always match his cultural background or religious belief. Sometimes the answers are simply the only ones that seem to fit, no matter now unconventional they are.
Morgan Coles is someone who saw a fragment of what the Shadow held and then came to an unusual conclusion. As an avowed atheist, he believes in neither Heaven nor
Hell. What he does believe is that spirits are the souls of the deceased, existing in some kind of “Otherworld” — a realm of the dead that exists in an invisible parallel to the real world.
It started as many mortal encounters with spirits do; with a breach in the Gauntlet and a human witnessing a spirit’s manifestation. Morgan started out as a mugger, and was not above killing his victims if they put up too much of a fight. His first encounter with the supernatural hap- pened in an alleyway where he was mugging someone. A spirit of murder came through from the Shadow, excited by the Essence caused by the death and seeking to possess the killer. Morgan fled in terror at the sight of a being re- sembling himself, only punctured in 100 places by knives of various sizes and shapes.
Over the course of the next three years, the same thing began to happen at irregular intervals. Sometimes he’d be killing a victim and he’d get a powerful sense of being watched, right before some monster looking like a cut-up version of him would leer out of the shadows nearby, from behind a fire escape, or a Dumpster or from the back of an alley.
Morgan became a prolific serial killer. He remained uncaught for more than 20 murders — he no longer knows exactly how — and was arrested, charged and sentenced to life without parole two years ago. While in lockup, he was regularly sexually abused by his cellmate. It was a relationship that terminated in the cellmate’s murder, when Morgan could suffer it no more. At 2 am one night
mid-“session,” he bit off his abuser’s penis and savagely beat his cellmate while the man screamed and tried to stem the blood flow as he went into shock. Morgan killed the man with his bare hands.
Seconds later, from the darkest corner of the cell, the spirit he had seen in back alleys so many times manifested and reached for him. And this time, trapped behind bars, Morgan had nowhere to run. He became Spirit-Urged, possessed by the murder-spirit that had become obsessed with him.
The spirit has loose and sporadic control over him. Morgan feels the creature in his head, pushing him on to more murderous deeds and twisting his emotions and his temper so that some nights he can’t think straight. He has been moved to a special care institute since killing two more prisoners and, at one point, trying to break his own head open on the bars of his cell. While here, Morgan has taken advantage of the expansive library and his own half-finished education. He slowly read through the holy texts of several religions, not seeking solace and faith as the staff suspected, but seeking answers to the “ghost” he is sure possessed him. Where holes remained in his understanding, he used his friendly relationship with several staff members (cultivated when he wasn’t raging incoherently at them while restrained) to order other books on various mythologies.
ence or panicked flight.
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After reading of the gaki and the jikininki of Asian cultures, the pretas of Indian mythology and the sluagh of ancient British paganism, Morgan believes he has nailed it. These creatures are all eerily alike in nature — the souls of the dead spurned from both Heaven and Hell to walk in an invisible world people cannot see. They are lost souls, the spirits of dead sinners, whom Morgan believes must seek comfort in those who resemble them in life through deeds. The spirit of a long-dead murderer, which Morgan recognized as a caricature of himself, has possessed him and wants him to kill, kill, kill.
While the doctors here at the institute are curious and amused at the thuggish murderer pouring over mythology books, they chalk it up to behavior akin to a serial killer seeking salvation in the Bible. And they certainly never believe Morgan when he tries to speak of what is wrong. Privately he keeps searching for folklore stories of how people resisted possession by these sinful souls, though again, he is limited in his resources to a few hours online a week, monitored closely by hospital staff.
He has a sickening sense of dread that he is running out of time. He searches now for some way, any way, of “exorcising” himself, though his resources are limited and he is under constant supervision. The murder-spirit within him still uses its Essence and Influences to affect both Morgan and some staff members, and Morgan has had to endure beatings from Influenced staff members while he was bound and unable to even move to defend himself. And all the while, he feels the lost soul sinking deeper into his mind. Perhaps it will not be long before he becomes Spirit- Claimed, and then the staff at St. John’s Maximum Security Hospital will really have something to worry about.
The Naismith Family
“This way has been good enough for a half-dozen of your kind before now, son. It’ll sure be good enough for you. Now stop kicking and it’ll all be over real quick.”
Harold Naismith is another man plagued by lost souls. He’s what some of the locals refer to as a good ol’ boy, well- liked in town and a hard worker on his farm. He provides well for his family, he supports the most arch-conservative politicians “no matter what the liberal media or the Jews say about them” and he likes to kick back at the weekends with a crate of chilled beer and watch sports. He hopes one day to become the Grand Dragon in his local cell of the Klu Klux Klan, which sees fewer and fewer members each year, so his chances are looking better as time passes.
His daughters, 11-year-old Nellie and 7-year-old Bethany, have a lot of acreage to play in when they’re not at school. The one place they consciously avoid on their family’s land is the old farmhouse by the tall tree, about a quarter mile walk from their home. Their father has never warned them away from there, but they avoid it anyway. The girls once heard shouting and crying come from inside the farmhouse, and have never plucked up the guts to go back
since. From a distance, on certain nights, they sometimes think they see someone hanging from one of the tall tree’s lowest branches. Harold tanned their hides the first few times they mentioned it, and they’ve never said a word about it since.
Nellie and Bethany are not Harold’s only daughters, though they are the only ones still alive. His eldest girl, Maryann, vanished 12 years ago, several months before Nellie was born. Maryann’d been missing for three nights when Harold drove into town to ask around after her. When he discovered she’d been secretly dating a black kid, he called his Klan buddies together and they had themselves an old-style hanging. There was no danger of the law getting involved — the local sheriff and two of his deputies were part of the lynch mob.
Adam Jameson, who also had no idea where his girl- friend had got to, was beaten despite his protests and strung up to strangle, hanging from the tall tree by the disused farmhouse on Harold’s land. The Klan were sure justice was served, though they still kept their hopes up for finding Maryann. The following month, her body turned up in the next state over, and a traveling salesman, as Caucasian as Harold himself, was arrested (later getting a lethal injec- tion) for the murder.
The tall tree is a powerful locus in the Shadow — a locus of abusive pain and sickening desperation. Spirits are drawn there for the rich, if bitter, Essence. On some level, Harold knows this, or at least senses it. The tree was used by his grandfather and the Klan 100 years ago for execut- ing black people, and he felt a savage pride at getting to do the same. But he senses there’s something wrong at the tall tree, and he knows things go there because of what was done. He’s heard them many times, and on nights when the wind howls and almost sounds like 100 baying voices, he’s seen things there, too.
The Gauntlet is so thin around this locus that it is practically a verge — a complete split in the spirit world where Shadow and substance overlap. Turning to the Bible has answered few of his questions, for he does not believe the things at the tall tree to be demons or messengers of the Devil, or that they are the ghosts of those who hanged there. In his innermost thoughts, he sees black people as so close to animals that he’s not even sure they have souls.
So what Harold suspects instead is actually close to the truth — some kind of creature comes to this place of suffering in order to feed from it. The idea he clings to is the possibility that the tall tree is the haunting ground for those Klan members long dead; the ghosts of those men righteously buried as Christians down in the town. He is not certain of it, but he hopes it hard enough that he’s beginning to convince himself. He now thinks that dead Klan members are coming to see and enjoy the place where people are still getting strung up the old-fashioned way. The shapes he has seen on the windiest nights certainly do resemble robed figures, often with pointed hats (or heads?), though details are difficult at best to make out.
Faith and the Occult
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Chapter One-Invisible Lore
He would go down and get closer if he was sure they were the ghosts of his people. But he’s not, so he doesn’t. The biggest worry on his mind lately is that he can now hear the crying and the cheering and the yelling even when he is out in the fields near the tall tree. This is a recent occurrence, as the locus grows and spreads. Harold, with his cobbled-together and ramshackle understanding of the situation, does not know this. He worries that the ghosts are getting angry at him for only using the tree once. When he hears the alien sounds of the spirits feeding and killing each other over the Essence, he hears recriminations that his proud monument to the “good old days” is going unused. And he fears that if it stays unused, the ghosts will be angry with him.