FICTION BY TOM KROPP

Tom Kropp’s work has appeared in Chiron Review, Churches, Children and Daddies, Lowlife Lit, The Listening Eye, J Journal, Evening Street Review, Conceit, Spontaneous Spirits, Bracelet Charm, Spotlight on Recovery, Muscle and Fitness, Outdoor Life, Woodworker’s Journal and many other magazines. His play “Jailhouse Confessions” was performed at the Kennedy center in Washington, DC in 2019.

You can find more of his writings at kroppswritings.wordpress.com and Scars Writings websites.

ASTRAL ENTITY’S VENGENCE
by Tom Kropp

Sixteen-year-old Scot Lancer put his back to the living room wall and shifted to see three members of the football team circling him. Other party attendees scattered. The loud house party the kids were having suddenly became very quiet as tension rippled the room.

All four football players stood over six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds. In comparison, Scot only stood five feet eight, and weighed only a hundred-sixty-five pounds. Scot’s small frame was all muscle from two years of weightlifting and mixed martial arts training, but he knew he would be no match against a football player, must less four of them. He ran his hand through his light, close-cropped hair as he desperately attempted to think about how he could deal with this situation.

No words were spoken. That made Scot even more afraid than he already was. It made him understand that these jocks had already decided what they were going to do and no more discussion was necessary.

The big teens pounced in a pack. Scot was bombarded by blows as he fell to the floor under flailing fists and feet. Scot seized and squeezed an ankle with a jujitsu twist of his wrists that made a bone pop. The ankle-injured boy screamed as his limb folded under him. That was one football player who didn’t get up again for a while.

Scot slipped out of another boy’s grip and continued in combat with the pair pummeling him.  Scot’s fingers jabbed an eye and that boy stumbled away, briefly blinded, but somehow bounced back to attack again.

Suddenly a big lamp rammed against Scot’s skull. He dropped, dazed. There would be no more fighting for Scot on this night. Things appeared dire as Scot lay on the living room rug and the three remaining football players circled him like buzzards.

And then someone came to Scot’s rescue.

Anyone seeing Fred Bendon wouldn’t think he looked heroic. He was tall and very skinny with bright red hair and freckles on a homely face. He was seventeen and never had a girlfriend. He’d been bullied for years, especially by the football team. The other day several of the football players had stuffed a used jock in his mouth and he was stewing with rage over it.

Fred had come to the house party because he knew John, whose parents owned the house. He watched Scot go down fighting in the living room. John tried to break up the fight. One of the football players stomped John to the floor for intervening.

All those years of bullying had caused resentment to build up inside Fred to the point where something was going to give sooner or later. It turned out to be sooner.

Something in Fred snapped and he acted. He snatched another lamp off a table and waded into the whirlwind battle, then smashed the glass lamp on the back of the football player that was beating Scot.

Another bully turned and practically walked right into Fred’s swinging of the lamp’s metal core. The metal crunched the bully’s nose and dumped him flat on his back.

Somebody thrust a baseball bat into the final football player’s hand. Fred went down like a rock. Neither Scot nor Fred moved where they lay on the floor with blood oozing from their shattered bodies.

The party broke up as kids fled to avoid the cops and ambulances on the way.

*****

In the hospital bathroom, Scot studied his reflection in the mirror. He considered himself good looking with short blond hair and blue eyes, but now he wasn’t so pretty. His head had been shaved to stubble and bandages covered part of his skull where the bat had cracked his cranium.

Doctors had operated on him to relieve the brain bleed. He had a severe concussion and cranium fracture. The stitched wound ran around the left side of his skull to his fractured orbital bone. He’d lost his peripheral vision in that left eye. He sighed unhappily.

He was still better off than poor Fred, who had died in the fight. Scot vowed to himself that he would do his best to talk to the TV news stations about how Fred died a hero. Scot knew that everyone loved a hero, and he felt it was the least he could do for the poor young man that had saved his life.

In the meantime, the three football players were out on bail. That was the thing about rich people: they certainly had privileges. Would they go to prison for the murder of Fred Bendon? Scot figured the jury was still out on that one, pun intended.

Rich people could literally get away with murder.

*****

That night, Scot tossed and turned in his hospital bed. He would be released the following morning to his parents and allowed to go home. He should be feeling good about that, but something was wrong.

Something in his hospital room seemed off. Different. Strange. His hospital roommate had been discharged, so Scot was alone. He tried to understand what had changed in his room, but nothing initially appeared ominous except for a feeling that something was going to happen. Something he wouldn’t be able to understand.

The night was quiet, yet suddenly Scot heard a sound that seemed out of place. He froze in fear. Hospital rooms were never completely dark, so he was able to see across the room.

Three huge jet-black shadows moved in front of the far wall as though they were gliding above the floor. They were like dark wisps of smoke, shaped and sized like grizzly bears. He couldn’t make out the details of their facial features, but their smoke outlines bristled with bull horns on their heads, very long claws on their paws, spikes up their spines, and barbed tails undulating behind them.

And then he knew what they were. Scot had been brought up with religious teachings and felt that he understood the things that could come from Heaven…and from Hell.

These creatures were demons.

Their faces came into focus. The demons’ eyes glowed like burning coals, brimming with the fires of their origin.

Suddenly Scot felt like he was burning from the inside out, as if acid was frying him alive from within. He smelled the scent of brimstone and choked, inhaling what felt like a gust of smoke. He heard one of the creatures speaking to him in its alien language that sounded like savage snarling and rumbling bursts of foreign words.

His mind glimpsed the dimension of what looked like hell, where it was all black, scorched rocky terrain interspaced by rivers and lakes of fire and the sky itself seemed to burn with scarlet light. Across that landscape, Scot could see what looked like glowing human figures and somehow he understood that what he was looking at was the astral energy of human souls trapped in Hell. Those humans screamed and flailed in anguish as they were being tortured by demons that looked like the ones in the hospital room. The demons were ripping apart human souls, along with dunking them in the lakes and rivers of fire. Scot got the sense that those human souls couldn’t even die to end their agony, because they were already dead.

He was abruptly thrust back into the hospital room, and he lay back upon this pillow, drained and exhausted. Timidly he looked again at where the demons had appeared, but they were gone. He was wondering if he should summon a nurse when he took a second look at where he had first seen the demons across the room.

The demons were gone. But something else had taken their place.

Fred Bendon stood in the hospital room, facing him. Scot stared, and mixed emotions flowed through his thoughts. Fred shouldn’t be a demon! Fred had saved his life. Scot saw him as a hero. Why was Fred part of the demonic afterlife?

As though to answer Scot’s questions, Fred began to stride in his direction. Scot oddly felt no fear when Fred reached out a hand that looked very alive and touched Scot’s shoulder—bare skin because the hospital gown had slipped away. Pure energy passed through Scot, and the touch brought a rush of images from Fred’s memory. Somehow Fred’s soul was communicating. 

Scot saw through Fred’s eyes all the months of enduring bullying and humiliation by the boys on the football team, and most of all, the bullying done by the boy named Greg who had been the one that killed Fred with the baseball bat. When Fred lay unconscious and dying at that ill-fated party, demons had been aware of the violence and relished it.

Then Scot saw something else from Fred’s mind: Fred’s father had sought vengeance on the boy Greg for killing his son. Fred’s father had shot Greg and then killed himself before the cops could get him. In the cruel, unfair way of the world, Greg had survived the shooting but Fred’s father had not.

Fred communicated that Greg just happened to be in the same hospital as Scot.

Fred ceased his contact with Scot’s mind, then nodded sadly as he moved away and walked silently into the hospital room wall and disappeared.

Scot lay on his pillow, oddly at peace now and unafraid. He went over what he had seen, heard and felt. There had obviously been a message given. The murderous football player was in the same hospital, maybe a few doors down; maybe right next door.

Close.

Tentatively he got out of his hospital bed and stood, testing his weight on his bare feet. The linoleum floor felt cold but he didn’t care. He was a man on a mission.

He silently went to his room door and peered into the hallway. Which direction to begin? He stood listening. The hallway was brightly lit but no one seemed to be in it. He began to wonder if he would actually get away with what he hoped to do.

He saw that his room seemed to be in the middle of many hospital room doors. He randomly chose to go left and he crept down the hallway, peeking into every doorway.

Suddenly a nurse came around the far corridor and Scot ducked into the nearest open hospital open room door. He crouched inside the room and hid. Just like his room, this one was dim but was lit enough where he could see his surroundings.

When Scot turned to see who was lying in the bed, he realized that he had found Greg. Could it be this easy? He was surprised, then wondered if he had been paranormally guided.

Scot approached Greg’s bed like a grim, wounded specter of death. The football player was asleep, and Scot had no way of knowing if it was a natural sleep or a drugged one. He studied the very tall, massively muscled, good-looking, dark-haired monster. Obviously the bullet wound had gone through Greg’s stomach without killing him. Rage flooded Scot with adrenaline. For a few moments he just stared down at his enemy.
 
Some instinct woke Greg. He opened his eyes and saw Scot standing there, hovering above him. At first there was a flicker of fear in the jock’s eyes, but his normal arrogance quickly took over.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Greg spat. “I thought you were dead, you punk.”

“Actually, I’m thinking about killing you,” Scot said.

Greg actually had the temerity to laugh. “Fuck you, punk. I’m indestructible; haven’t you realized that? Not even a bullet wound to the gut can kill me. What makes a skinny feeb like you think you could possibly take me on?”

Greg grabbed at his nurses’ call button box and Scot ripped it from his grip. Greg snarled and snatched Scot’s arm, jerking him closer, and actually whispered into Scot’s ear, “Better without a nurse to save your skinny ass anyway.”

And then Greg sat up in his bed. “I may be wounded, but I am still powerful enough to snuff you out in seconds.”

Scot felt fear return as he realized he had underestimated the football player. What had he been thinking? Other than the hope that Greg would be drugged and unconscious, he really had not formed any plan.

But as he stared at Greg’s face, he was surprised to see the football player’s expression change. Scot realized that Greg was no longer looking at him, but instead, looking past him.

Without warning, a black swirling wormhole appeared in the hospital room wall. From it stepped the three demons Scot had seen earlier. And after the demons entered, suddenly Fred appeared and entered as well.

Fred nodded in approval as the demons reached for Greg. The football player struggled impotently in the demons’ clutches. Greg opened his mouth to scream, but one of the black shadow-demons bent over and sucked any sound from his lips. The demon inhaled and Greg went limp because he no longer had a soul. It had just been taken, sucked into the mouth of a demon.

Scot stood in the hospital room, frozen, and waited for whatever was to happen next. Would he also be killed?

But Fred smiled grimly at Scot and said, “You’re free now. Go back to your life.”

Scot quietly counted his blessings and wondered if he would be seeing more ghosts and demons.