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  FEAR CLUB

  A Confession

  The Means of Escape

  Book One

  by

  DAMIAN STEPHENS

  FEAR CLUB: A Confession

  The Means of Escape

  Book One

  Copyright © 2019 Alfred DeStefano III writing as Damian Stephens

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express permission in writing from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. We’re pretty sure.

  Brief quotes on pages 112, 114, 193, and 240 are adapted from Liber AL vel Legis by the preternatural intelligence AIWASS (as communicated to Aleister Crowley in 1904 ev). Liber AL vel Legis is in the public domain.

  FOURTH MANSIONS PRESS, LLC

  Charlottesville, Virginia

  fourthmansions.com

  ISBN: 978-0-578-46466-4

  Cover art by Pantelis Politakos

  Cover design by Fourth Mansions Press, LLC

  For two who aren’t here anymore, who I think would have liked it:

  my beloved

  Scarlett (2000–2018)

  &

  my friend

  Charles Steuart Estes

  (1977–2018)

  ~~~

  And for those who remain, with all my love and affection:

  my wife Kathryn

  —sine qua non—

  &

  our two perfections—Muggi & Bela,

  my family and parents, Al & Linda,

  &

  the original “Silent Goblin Gang”

  (to whom I sincerely apologize ahead of time) especially James for helping invent (discover?!?) Golem Creek and Richie, for inadvertently letting me know it could be done at all

  Box 1132

  (I’m pretty sure it will work.)

  contents

  Prologue

  remember

  ~~~

  Part One

  fear club

  ~~~

  Part Two

  the murk

  ~~~

  Interlude

  that which remains

  ~~~

  Part Three

  quick fix

  ~~~

  Part Four

  the silent goblin gang

  ~~~

  Epilogue

  the gods are forgetful

  prologue

  REMEMBER

  Remember! The many worlds and the means of escape!

  I’m taking pen to paper and recording it all. You know, the pen. (That ought to get it over to you without too much in the way of incomprehensibility.) I hope it makes a difference; I hope that you will find this and I hope that you will remember. The parts that I wasn’t there to witness I pieced together as best I could from what I was told. The rest of it—as for the rest of it, well, I tried to write it the way it happened.

  If I got some of it wrong, then remember it for me—write it down, try to figure out a way to get it to me. And if anything else goes wrong, I hope that you still have the lighter—just burn it. There may be good reason to.

  Don’t worry about us. For the moment, we’re in the Emporium. It turns out there’s a post office here, too—of course. (I think I mention it later.) Roland tells me that on your side, where we’re guessing you are right now, there’s a post office across the street, and someone who will be able to retrieve this and leave it where you can find it. We put something of a reminder for whoever does retrieve this on the dedication page, just to be sure. (Creepy, right?)

  Roland also tells me, perhaps unfortunately, that there may be—probably will be—at least one transmission error, for which I apologize right off the bat.

  But please remember! We want you to know, at least, if nothing else: we miss you. (I steadfastly refuse to pass along what your dear old pal just told me to say.)

  part one

  FEAR CLUB

  “Descent into the Pit.”

  The pronouncement came like the shuddering fall of a plane in high turbulence.

  “That’s just outside of the by-lines, Mike.” Thank the gods for Julie. She would convince him. Everyone knew he had a thing for her. Sure seemed to, at least.

  “No, it’s not. Not if we give him a way out.” And this? From Steve Chernowski, smoking by the little fire that burned continually during all meetings of the Bhairavi Society. He grinned, idly clicking together a handful of multi-sided dice.

  Thanks, Steve.

  “It’s descent into the pit, my friends! We will give him a way out. We will see him purified!” Michael Flowers spoke with a little grin on his face that emphasized the weird scar on his left cheek, which seemed to glint softly in the firelight.

  “What ‘way out’ do you propose, Mike?” I finally had to say something. He could tell what I was implying. The Murk, or just the “wishing well”—for so it was known to generations of Honorius High youths—was a one-way street, according to the rumors.

  Mike’s grin took on a slightly more devilish cast. (Or perhaps it had always looked like that?) “Charles, brother, when does death truly not threaten us? We will see you outfitted appropriately. But on All Hallows’ Eve, you will be delivered to the Lords of the Pit for judgment.”

  Julie snorted. “And if he brings us back a couple of broken beer bottles? What then?”

  “He will have fulfilled his obligation,” Mike responded.

  The room fell briefly silent.

  “Speaking of beer...” Steve scrabbled around in the cooler under a decrepit Black Sabbath poster. “Aha! Yes!”

  “I may need one of those,” I said.

  Julie busied herself documenting the agreement in the black, leather-bound ledger that held all of the Society’s oaths and obligations. Steve tossed me a can of Milwaukee’s Best, which I accepted. It had a dent in it.

  Mike had returned to the altar at the front of the room. “To Thee, Lords of Chaos, beyond fear, beyond death, we offer this champion to be tested!” Into the brazier at the altar’s center went my latest yearbook photo.

  I had just turned eighteen. I was in my last year of school at the not-so-prestigious Honorius High. And I had just agreed to die, on the word of the town lunatic that everything would turn out all right.

  I felt more anxious on the way home.

  “Mike’s got it in for me,” I told Julie. I typically walked with her back down to South Street, at the very edge of town where she lived, then cut through the forest on Chicken Hill to get back to my own house. Steve had cut and run—his evasive remarks made it obvious he was going to score drugs of one form or another.

  Julie gave her usual derisive snort. “Mike’s got it in for everyone,” she said. “Death just doesn’t seem afraid of him yet. He’ll keep trying. Meanwhile, he’s going to experiment on us.”

  “How am I supposed to take that?”

  “When we lower you into that old well, put a smile on your face and give him a thumb’s up.” Julie looked suddenly pensive. “Come to think of it, that might kill him.”

  I laughed. “Be sure to let everyone know it was my fault.”

  Julie pulled a warped cigarette out from a package in her jeans pocket and lit it. We walked in silence for a few moments. Although Steve and Julie had been friends (off and on) since kindergarten, and both had known me only sin
ce the Bhairavi Society had been inaugurated by Michael Flowers, I felt somehow perfectly safe when confiding in Julie. I still wasn’t too sure about Steve, admittedly, nor his motives in any respect.

  “What if it’s true?” I had to bring it up. We had all “kind of” talked about it at intervals, but never seemed to come to anything more than speculative conclusions.

  Julie took a long drag off of her cigarette and exhaled. Nicotine-laden contrails scurried through her blue-black hair. “If it’s true then we’re done. We win. Mike goes to heaven, or whatever.”

  “And Curwen Flowers? It would all be true.” I waved my hand at the streetlamps which burned a soft orange against the night sky. “None of this would be necessary anymore. ‘No more school, no more books,’ and all that.”

  Julie’s home appeared ahead, off to the right, at the foot of Chicken Hill. We paused so that she could finish her cigarette.

  “Forgive me if I don’t get too excited about it,” she said. “We’re probably fools to listen to him. No—we’re definitely fools for listening to him. But the fact remains—”

  “He really does know something,” I finished for her. We had all seen it: myself, Julie, Steve. That incredible night two years ago, and we were the only ones to have seen it, and there was nothing we could say to anyone about it. There was nothing we could do except agree to Mike’s wild plans, believe his wild tales, and put our faith in the wild magic he had demonstrated that night.

  For all intents and purposes, to the rest of the world, Mike Flowers would have to stay dead—at least, until we had discovered the means of escape for ourselves. Dragged into his dream, we could only live out the story and hope that its author’s madness proved somehow more durable than the cold, sane world none of us could ever return to.

  I made it through the woods that night by instinct, as usual, but not without a certain added concern for dark shapes rustling in the trees and bushes, barely containing their glee at my imminent demise.

  Once back home, I climbed the trellis to my bedroom window. The moon, I noticed, peeked out from behind clouds scudding past. It seemed peculiarly intent on me, on the goings-on in and around Golem Creek. Is this the sensation that death provides? I wrote in my journal. Everything begins to glow with a strange light, like in a dream, where everything lives because it’s all part of you.

  And perhaps its awareness is your own awareness, and its fear your own as well.

  How sleep came I don’t remember. A blackout. Before I knew it, I was up and on my way to school, having barely seen my parents at all. This wasn’t unusual, but it was something I was suddenly very conscious of.

  Molly Furnival. English composition. The gods shone down as best they could upon her, perhaps aware of their own inability to properly shadow forth such perfection, such inexhaustible beauty, such—

  “—idiocy? Charles, please wake up.”

  Mrs. Hurtangle rapped gently on the podium before her. Molly gazed at me, as did Steve (clearly about to burst with laughter) and the rest of the class. How some of us had gotten into AP English was beyond me.

  “The text? Charles? What does it have to do with idiocy?” She waved a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot before the class.

  This would require cleverness.

  “I’m pretty sure—I mean—” I began. “Nothing,” Molly said. “I mean, not in the usual

  sense. It’s a translation, first of all, of course.” Mrs. Hurtangle smiled. “Go on.”

  “But being an idiot means living in your own world, not seeing the world that everyone else lives in.”

  Mrs. Hurtangle was obviously pleased. “There! Yes. Very good. The word derives from the Greek idios, which basically means ‘private.’ The rest of the world, the common world, is koinos, or shared. It’s just this common world that an ‘idiot’ either does not see, does not experience, or rejects.”

  I tried to formulate a grin which, I hoped, did not make me look like an idiot in the usual sense. Molly would have to wait until the next life, I supposed, the one where I had any chance of going to Yale or Harvard or some place like that. The one where I might actually have something to offer her besides admiration.

  “In a sense, then,” Mrs. Hurtangle continued, “being an idiot is a necessary precursor to changing the world outside of you. Being so stubbornly preoccupied with your own internal world that the world around you either adapts to you or destroys you. You may have heard the old observation: ‘The truth is first laughed at, then viciously fought against, and finally accepted as self-evident.’ The idiot is one who upholds what he or she considers ‘true’ until the world changes.”

  “Or until they die,” I said.

  Mrs. Hurtangle grinned. “Certainly, Charles. Glad to know that you’re paying attention. Now are there any—”

  “Why don’t people see what’s true right off the bat?” I asked.

  Molly chanced a look over at me, then jotted something down in her notebook.

  “How do you mean, Charles?” Mrs. Hurtangle asked.

  “Well,” I said, “if we live in a real world with real things, and what’s true corresponds with what’s real, then how can anyone ever miss that? How can we start out not knowing what’s real? Doesn’t that seem weird to anyone?”

  There were a few murmurs of what I took to be appreciation from the rest of the class. Then the inevitable.

  “That’s what learning is.” This from Pete Jarry, one of the “back of the class” kids. Steve bought grass from him occasionally, so we knew he was at least okay. I recalled Mike saying something about Pete’s brother Stek at one point, something about part of the prophecy. And everyone had heard all about the weird things Stek had been claiming he saw.

  “Your brain starts out dumb,” Pete continued. “Its job is to map out the world around it, but sometimes it gets things wrong, like when you try to draw something and, even though you know exactly what it looks like, you can’t seem to draw it right. So you learn more and your map gets better.”

  “Thank you, Pete,” Mrs. Hurtangle said. Pete waved and grinned. Seeming remarkably sober today, he resumed leaning back in his chair and gazing up at the ceiling. I happened to notice Molly looking at him with a mixture of—what was it? Caution—and perhaps interest? Did my Molly (not to put too proprietary a turn on it) have a thing for—gods be damned—Pete?

  “That’s a particularly sound response,” Mrs. Hurtangle continued. “There was an entire field of study based around this idea called ‘cybernetics,’ developed in the mid-twentieth century, when people were trying to understand how to optimize learning strategies, both in humans and, potentially, in machines. Another famous quote also ties into this: ‘The map is not the territory.’”

  The bell rang, evoking its usual chaos.

  “It looks like we’ll have to continue our discussion next time. Thank you all for some great comments today! Be sure to continue with the reading—”

  I was already out the door. I usually tried to get the hell out of English as quickly as possible, so that I wouldn’t have to feign brilliance around Molly.

  “Charles?”

  It was Molly. How did she get out here so fast? “Uh.” Perfect start, Charley, as always.

  “I liked your comment.” She stood there before me, those strange lavender eyes of hers wide and somehow glittering in the fluorescent light. “I’ve thought about that before. No one’s ever put it quite so bluntly, though.”

  “Yeah. Well.” Was I staring? I think I was staring. Should I say something? “That’s me, you know. Blunt.”

  Beautiful.

  Thankfully, Molly laughed. Was she blessed in all possible respects? Even her teeth were flawless. “Okay,” she said. “Anyway. I just wanted to say. You know.”

  She began to walk off.

  “What are you doing on Halloween?”

  Oh, gods, no. That was me
. I said that. But I’m supposed to DIE on Halloween night...

  Molly paused and turned back around to face me. “I don’t know for sure. I think I’ll be at Amanda Whitfield’s party for a little while, at least. Are you going?”

  “Hey, Charley.” It was Pete Jarry. What the hell did he want? “You got a minute?” He seemed to be waving a sheet of paper at me. From this distance, it looked like a grid of random letters.

  Recover—please! “Sure am,” I blurted out to Molly. What?!?

  Pete was being overrun by the chaos in the hallway. I waved at him, and continued failing myself with the love of my life.

  “Great! I guess I’ll see you there?” she said. I resigned myself to it. “Yes. Definitely.”

  She turned and walked off, still smiling. A crowd of impudent mortals, fathomless, flowed past me in the corridor; I, mere scurf amongst them, stood, astonished by my self-betrayal. Was that a date I had just made? Or at least an outline of one?

  Pete had disappeared in the chaos. Whatever it was must not have been overly important. I’d have to ask Steve later if he knew what it was about.

  Only one thing kept me from utter despair: if I did survive the Ordeal on Saturday, I might have the courage to ask Molly out on a real date at the party afterward. Mike wasn’t going to be pleased, though. The Ordeal was to be followed by an all-night vigil to ensure that The Ones Beyond were fully propitiated. What if the Descent actually revealed what Mike had implied it was going to? A solution, however nebulous, to all of our mundane problems?

  I supposed that—despite my situation with Molly technically falling into the category of “mundane problems”—after I died, Mike was probably going to kill me for this.

  I had done this type of thing before.

  Darkness, I remember vividly. Thick, deep darkness; even more frightening for the fact that I did not feel as if I would suffocate in it—I felt as if I could reach out or fall forever, and never touch a thing...

  It was the crawl space beneath the house on Brake Street first, the house behind which was the grotto of ash trees within which Mike’s hovel sat, where all the meetings of the Bhairavi Society—or “Fear Club,” as Steve called it—took place. I felt relatively certain, as I slid on my belly through dank, decrepit, mold-ridden passageways, provided with no light or protection of any sort, that the “heart’s blood” ingredient of the “elixir” Mike had all of us partake of prior to this was something like LSD or finely powdered Stropharia cubensis. The earth beneath me began to come alive; everything wriggled, everything lived. How many black widows were down here? How many scorpions? How many rats driven mad by hydrophobia?