Haunting The Chapel
fiction by Nickolaus A. Pacione
inspired by H.P. Lovecraft

The thoughts that remain are of the nightmares that stand alone inside of one's mind. One living in a small Iowa town cannot begin to describe the horror that sits inside their dreams as they would sleep. When they would speak to their church pastor about them -- he would say that they are tormented by a demon. As this would be said, the tormented man walk over to the chapel and would quietly watch the children pray to the cross hanging behind the altar. They could see the Deity sitting on the top of the cross which is also looking back at them with a pair of dark, omniscient eyes and bares a pair of gray wings that are scabbed.

It was a cold, shadowy figure that laughed as one had ingested twenty five sleeping pills and then followed by a bottle of everclear. Then as the person slept, she began to dream about watching the people dump blankets of dirt upon her -- drifting into an eternal nightmare that would become of her. She would not know when the nightmare will begin or end, but she would awaken in a cold sweat in a hotel that is just south of Ackley, Iowa. She knew that she could not speak of the dream or the incubus that came to her as she would sleep because they would have her locked up in a mental health unit in a hospital -- the hospital of Mason City, Iowa, because they would think that she is crazy or mentally unstable. She was a member of an Assemblies of God church and always attended a Bible study. The nightmares haunted her since she had moved to Dumont in October of 1989 from Seattle, Washington. She was trying to get away from her brother's suicide -- when she had seen the body, there was an upside down pentagram carved into his forehead. The tragedy had frightened her and the rest of the family. She had gone to a church to hide from the horror that had haunted her. She could not see the nightmares that are haunting the chapel -- the mandrake that is sitting on top of the cross and is looking back at her.

The mandrake had been in the chapel for quite some time -- it had fucked the minds of the pastor and the other patrons that had made their three to four day stay in Mason City because of attempted suicides and drug overdoses. The one that I have seen was the pastor fixing in middle of the pews after services -- I am a pagan but I was invited to go to a service with a friend that lived in the area. I would see people fixing all the time while I would go into Chicago or Joliet, and I was there on a visit to another friend that lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The girl that overdosed is named Trina Husentruit, no relation to the anchorwoman that disappeared in June of 1995 at Key Apartments in Mason City. I learned of Jody Husentruit in a correspondence to Tony Blake who was from Dumont, Iowa. He was saying that with me coming from Elgin, Illinois, I would understand the occult and knew about the hour that I would spend in the library reading the books “Man, Myth, and Religion.” There in the book was something about phantasms and incubus. They refused to believe in the supernatural in that form, and they would say that ghosts are a form of a fallen angel -- a demon as the Bible would call it, according to the ones that live in Hampton, Iowa. They refuse anything that would explain otherwise and shun other ways of thinking because it does not agree with that I have written of in my letters to Blake. Blake knew of my pagan knowledge and respected it all of these years, and the reason he started writing me was because of he was researching for a term paper about the occult. He told me about the disillusioned pastor that used a page out of The Book of Mark as a straw to take in his lunch which was divided by a razor blade on a mirror.

The time that the overdose happened was September 29, 1996, and it happened while I had been to the hotel visiting Husentruit before she had overdosed -- she was describing the horrific nightmares in chilling detail, and she had described a Deity that looked like a mandrake. There was a pastor there that also saw it as well, I found him in one of the pews fixing on herion. He had the needle in his arm and began to shoot up so he can forget about the thing that is looking back at him. Trina had been admitted into Five East the next day, but she sobbing about the incubus that was watching her all the way into the hospital bed. Tony and I went to the hospital following behind the ambulance, they wheeled her in a stretcher into Five East. It was there that we discover the Deity that was following her. It had pale gray wings and had one eye that was in the middle like a Cyclops in Greek Mythology. Its skin was pale gray and had no mouth on it. It also had an eye on its left had where there was a gash on there as well like a person that had tried to commit suicide. “What the fuck is that thing?” I shouted, “Did you just see that Tony? That thing with one eye in the middle like a fucking Cyclops. Holy shit -- Trina, we do believe you because we had seen the fucking thing too. This is weirder than when Iris had taken me to that college in Glen Ellyn that no one had been in for 27 years. Fuck -- no one is going to believe me, this being is utterly frightening. It has wings like that of a bat.”

The next day, Tony had invited me to go to church with him. I was wearing a drab green flannel shirt with a black hooded sweatshirt, a fitted White Sox hat and a pair of Converse hi tops. I had a quartz crystal around my neck and an Indian Cross that I got when I was walking around in Glen Ellyn. “Albert, I have seen that thing too, and I go to church so I can find help in higher places -- though that I wonder that Pastor Crawford will believe me. There was a time when I had seen that thing before while I was in church -- it was sitting on top of the cross behind the altar. I tried to tell Crawford about it, but when I had gone into his office he had a needle in his arm. He said that it was his medication, but I wonder if he drives to Des Moines every weekend so he can by herion so he can fix. He takes about a hundred dollars of the church fund and drives down to Des Moines. During a retreat, I found him walking into a bad part of Minneapolis and handed a guy wearing a purple and black sweat suit fifty dollars -- my guess that he was preaching to him, but the man gave him a needle and some herion. He stashes his herion in a blue leather bound bible. Then at night after the service he would go into one of the pews and begin to fix until two minutes to midnight then he would go into a room at the Hampton Inn and continue to fix. He had been fixing ever since his wife had killed herself after seeing the incubus her bed side as well as that thing that we had seen in the Trina’s hospital room. The police had once arrested him in Cedar Rapids for having herion on him, but they let him go if he would go into treatment.”

“The wife was a charity case because she had seen her brother die in a drive by shooting while she lived in Milwaukee. Her brother died on January 29, 1992, he was coming home for the holidays and the neighborhood they had lived in wasn’t all the best -- like the apartment complex that you wrote of in Addison, Illinois, where a mother and her children had been stabbed 87 times. After he died she started to fix on herion while she was also going to a church where she met Crawford, then a student out of Wheaton College. He had the addiction for about seven years, and the reason that they moved to Dumont, Iowa, is to get away from Milwaukee and her nightmares of seeing her brother die -- she could still see that day in her mind as she would go to sleep at night.”

“Tony, hold on -- how the fuck did you know all this shit about your pastor? It is true about small towns where everyone knows about everyone else’s business. What you are telling me is really fucked up, and how did you find out about his brother in law’s death?” I had asked him, my curiosity was growing quite morbid almost frightening. “What you are telling me would be something out of a Robert Blake novel. How the fuck did you know about all this shit if you are a Christian? Are related to Robert Blake by some chance, the one that had disappeared in New England seventy eight years ago?”

“Robert Blake is the brother of my great grandmother, and Crawford’s wife allowed me to read her journal when she and Thom had moved to Hampton on February 13, 1993. People from small towns have this thing about learning all the dark secrets of people that move into a small town from a large city. There are things that I found out about this town that no one will openly talk about -- like how the dead will overpopulate the living. That is one of the jokes that go around here and Hampton. There was a murder in Sheffield a few years ago, Franklin County Sheriff had found a corpse that had been impaled on one of the farm equipment in one of the barns. They had never found the murderer. They said that the person was still alive when they found her, but when they tried to move her -- a piece of machinery had pierced part of her heart and died instantly. The crime had horrified the nine county area. It was as disturbing as a six year old child from South Central Los Angles who moved to Charles City who had brought a .22 pistol to school and pumped a few slugs in her in 1991. The police had found papers that were written by his twenty-two year old brother about Charles Manson. The city wanted to hang the child and his parents from the bridge as they did to criminals almost a century ago.” Tony stated, “I am sure that you coming from Kane County would see people die in shootings all the time.”

“In Aurora there would be shit like that, but I will go into detail about it -- come on, I’ll buy you a drink. There is something that I have seen that would tie into what we had seen in the hospital, do you have a library card? We’re going to need a few books, and that includes the writings of Robert Blake. One of them is ‘Man, Myth, and Religion’ and other books about an incubus. There are things that you have to learn about this kind of shit and you are not going to learn in a church. I have seen something like this when I was in Joliet back in 1988, it was a being that was dressed in black -- it only appeared at night and would walk around in Joliet Union Station about midnight during a waning moon. Some were able to see the being and others were not able to. It was without any eyes or ears, but walked like a fucking human -- one had seen what it had left behind. It left behind a man that had both his arms torn off and removed the man’s eyes as well as his ears. The police had found the body laying on one of the floors in the women’s bathroom -- one of the homicide officer had thrown up at the horrifying site -- the picture had been in my mind for a few years. I had never seen anything that grotesque or queer for that matter, but I had seen the thing that had did it -- it was that of an incubus. It had been many years since I had seen that thing in Joliet, and there was a few killings that happened in Cabrini Green where two gang members supernaturally bled to death -- it was a form of a stigmata. The horror that took place revolved around a jade idol that had the head of a squid, it was the symbol of the Demon God, Kthulhu. Here, you may have drug addictions and an incubus. In Illinois, they have hauntings and grotesque murders. I didn’t spend four days in the Marynoll College for nothing.” I had said to him while riding to the diner. “Damn Rossini, that is really disturbing -- okay, let’s go get some coffee and I got those books that you had said for me to check out. There might be something hinting to what we had seen in Robert Blake’s writings. I have also went through my mother’s things to find some of Robert Blake’s letters before he had disappeared. I had seen that thing we had seen in the hospital before. It had been sitting on the cross in back of the altar. I am not one to rebuke things that are not of the odd and queer, in fact, things like that intrigue me because of Robert Blake’s disappearance. That is the reason I started writing to you to begin with -- I found you name in a supernatural magazine because of you knowledge of vampires and incubus. Are they one in the same? Is that thing we seen in the hospital a demon or a different kind of spirit? Either way what we had seen in the hospital is utterly frightening. There is something here in a paperback copy of the Necromicon -- something describing that thing in the hospital, it had a name -- Lthulhu. What ever that thing was, it sure the hell was frightening,” Tony had been saying while driving. “Trina -- damn, we should go back there after we are done researching these books. I had to go out to Waverly and Waterloo to get some of these books. I know that I am going to be shunned for looking at some of these books because I live dead in the Bible Belt, but I am looking for some answers to the riddle of the incubus.”

“Fuck -- Trina is still in there? What is today?” I had asked while sipping my coffee.

“Saturday,” Tony answered, “Visiting hours start at one o’clock in the afternoon and end at eight o’clock at night.”

“We should get up to Mason City then because that fucking thing we had seen may return while Trina is in there. The doctors and the chaplin will not believe her then they would up her medications and keep her locked up for at least two weeks. Come on -- we have little time to lose. If you know anyone that has knowledge of what we are reading, you should contact him because we may need his help. If you are wearing a crucifix, drench the thing in holy water because an incubus is similar to a vampire expect that they will not drink the blood of their victims. An incubus will sit on their victims causing sleep paralysis. I have seen this happen with a girl I had dated for two years -- she was from Zion, Illinois. They are sensitive to Christian and pagan icons. Like vampires, they are also sensitive to sunlight.”

The ride to Cerro Gordo County was long and felt like days from Cedar Falls, and the time was about six o’clock at night. The sun sets about six thirty in October and it is much colder during this time. We had stopped in the Assemblies of God church to find that Thomas Crawford is dead -- he had overdosed while he was fixing on herion. He had also sliced his wrists at the altar, allowing himself to bleed to death as he was fixing. There was a mirror on the floor as well as a razor blade. On the mirror was a white powder as well -- it turned out to be cocaine, and he was using a torn page from The Bible that was rolled up tight to make a straw to inhale the cocaine. As he was having his dinner on a mirror, he allowed himself to slowly bleed to death. It was about seven o’clock when we got to Mercy Hospital and we were sprinting to the mental health unit because of what we had seen a few days ago. We were almost shaking with sheer horror because of that thing that appeared in the room that night; it left some of the medical staff dead -- they were missing their eyes like that man that I have seen in Joliet Union Station. Tony had heard a bloodcurdling scream in one of the rooms. It had sounded like Trina’s srceam.

“Trina!!!!!!! TRINA!!!!!!!!!!!!! TrINA!!!!” We were both shouting, “Where are you?

“Albert?????? Tony???? Get me fucking out of here -- I had seen him return. I am pregnant with the thing’s child. And I have been carrying it for nine months. That is why I had tried to kill myself . I am really fucking scared because I am in labor -- the doctors tried to deliver the child, but that fucking thing had returned. I am a mother of a goddamned freak!! Kill that motherfucker because it had raped me a few months ago. Look at my stomach, there is something that is carved into it and it is really scaring me. What happend to the pastor because I heard that he would fix at the altar --- I got a call from another friend that heard about Pastor Crawford’s addiction to herion. It was something that was kept well hidden -- even from the members of his church. Not even the church board knew that he was fixing or of how he had killed himself. God this burning on my stomach, I cannot keep it from bleeding -- something is telling me that I am dying because I had found a pentagram upon my stomach just like the one that appeared upon the head of the pastor’s younger brother that had killed himself five years ago.” Trina had said as she was holding a needle to her head -- it was filled with just air and she had just thrusted it into herself and pressed upon it. She had then died minutes later on the couch of the visitors area, she was covered up to her neck with a white blanket She was laying on the couch facing the ceiling as she would be going to sleep.

There was nothing that we were able to do but take the blankets and tightly wrap her up with them. She had been embalmed as would a mummy in Egypt, then it took the both of us to carry her because she had weighed close to 200 lbs. We had to keep them bound in some way and in one of the closets, we had found some duct tape so then we had gone to work with the wrapping process. Tony and I had to first lift her off of the couch. One of us had checked her pulse, she still had a pulse and was very shallow with her breathing. Lifting her was a job in itself and I had grabbed three blankets from her room. I was moving like a ghost and had jumped over a corpse that had been ripped apart by the incubus. Trina appeared dead, and her plan was to fake her death so we were able to sneak her out. I had grabbed some surgical scrubs for both Tony and myself to disguise ourselves as medical staff and had grabbed a stretcher on wheels -- Tony had a 1987 Dodge Van that was the size of an ambulance that he had parked near the ER -- it had a mummy style sleeping bag in the back that I had rolled out to stick Trina in because we had to get her out of there so we can take her to a Voodoo Preistess somewhere in Elmhurst. I had placed the blankets on the couch and then we proceeded to move trina back onto the couch.

“Okay -- now Tony, I am going to need your help moving her on to the blankets and then tape them around her. I have been in Boy Scouts and they had taught me how to wrap someone if they were sick with hypothermia. Lift her legs for a minute while I get the first half of the blanket around her. I will then take the rest of the first third and wrap it tightly around her -- it would be big enough to cover her. Now help me roll her to her right side, then take the rest of first third of the blanket and wrap it aroud her. That should cover her arms and her chest. Then once you do that, roll her toward me -- now I will take the second third of the blanket and wrap it around her the other way. What you must do now is roll her toward me so I can do this. Now that is done and please hand over the duct tape so I can finish this task -- I am taping the blanket around her so we will have an easier time moving her around and transfering her. Now lift her up at the waist so I can wrap this duct tape around her. I want to do around the waste first so that will give us something to work with. I will then wrap the tape around her ankles and at her knees. I will now hand you the tape and what you will do is wrap the tap around her stomach and shoulders.” I explained, “Now what we do now is take the wheeled stretcher and bring it in here then what we do then is to lift her on to the stretcher making sure she is lying on her back. Now is what we will do with the other blankets; use them to cover her up and if anyone will ask, we are taking her to surgery -- I have a friend that was working in the hospital that can show us where we can sneak Trina out and then wheel her to your van. What we are going to do then is to place her into the sleeping bag and ditch the scrubs. If any police officers ask, we will say that she is very tried -- it appeared that she and my other friend were planning a way to sneak her out. That needle she stuck in her was a tranquilizer that would allow her to sleep for a few hours, and if she asks why is she tied up -- we will say that we needed a way to transfer her without getting caught. I will zip her into the sleeping bag and close the drawstring hood to hide her black hair. When the hood is closed around her, I will tie a knot into the drawstring to keep it closed; when we cross the Iowa-Illinois border, we will stop in a small town to untie her.” “Rossini, did anyone say that you are a madman -- but still that is a trait that I had respected about people from Chicago,” Tony responded.

Trina was moaning slightly, but she was in a coma-like sleep because of the drug that the doctor friend had given her. Hours had passed as Tony travelled on the road, and we were heading toward Joliet because that is a place that we were able to keep low. Husentruit was about 23, and she was planning to go back to Illinois with us because she knew that there where people that would listen to her story without placing into a mental health unit because one would not understand the story of her encounter with the incubus that haunted the chapel.