The Adventures of Dead Dan: The Old Religion

by John Rossi

Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

part 6

All three dogs broke into a run as well, two chasing Dan and one coming right at him. The massive mastiff in front of him came rushing towards him like a gigantic, canine bull. It suddenly sprang into the air. The huge beast opened its massive maw as it flew right at his face. It never even saw the crowbar Dan had started swinging the moment it leapt. It took the blow right on its head.

The blunt force of Dan’s swing was so inhumanly powerful that the dog’s skull nearly exploded. The supernatural force of the blow altered its trajectory, and it spun around like a canine tornado as it sailed through the air. It crashed into the shed off to Dan’s right. It smashed through the wall with a terrific racket. Wood splintered, tools went flying and its body impacted off a metal tool bench in the shed with a loud, metallic thud. By the time the mastiff finally landed, it was already dead. Its lifeless form lay all but decapitated under the wreckage of the tool shed.

Dan’s arcane senses made him aware that the other two dire dogs were right behind him. Using the momentum from the first swing, he whirled the crowbar in a wide arc, spinning himself all the way around as the two, huge mastiffs leapt into the air to try and bring him down. He managed to hit the one on his left with a glancing blow that pushed it away and into the other dog soaring through the air right next to it.

Both dogs were knocked to the ground by the force of the hit and landed in a heap together. Dan regained his balance as the gargantuan mastiffs started to leap back up. They weren’t as fast as he was. Just as the first dire dog got back to its feet, Dan brought his grandfather’s crowbar crashing down on its neck. The sound of snapping bone was accompanied by an inhuman yelp of pain as he killed the second beast. The power of his downward swing smashed the dog’s corpse to the earth beneath it with such titanic force that the other mastiff felt the ground shake when it hit the ground.

The third dire dog leapt up at Dan, going right for his throat. Having lost his balance again with the ridiculously powerful swing, he reacted with a fluid grace and agility that would have made a professional gymnast jealous. Rather than recoil away from the attack, he leaned into it. His greater dexterity allowed him to duck under the leaping dog as he rolled beneath it. The huge beast went right over him, and both massive combatants whirled to face each other for anther pass.

The dire dog did what was in its nature to do, and went right at Dan. This time Dan was ready to receive its charge. The canine monster opened its huge, slavering jaws as it hurled itself towards him. Dan came right at it, thrusting the straight end of the crowbar down its gullet. The crowbar ripped through the dog’s throat, past the insides of its chest cavity and tore through its body to emerge out its back, jutting from between its huge shoulder blades.

The dog’s howl of agony was horrifying to hear, but Dan barely noticed it. Skewered on the crowbar, the dire dog writhed in unfathomable pain. Dan didn’t register its torment. He did not act out of any sense of sadism or cruelty when he impaled it. It just was sheer instinct. Looking to end the fight quickly, he then ripped the crowbar out of the dog’s body and promptly broke its neck with yet another massive blow.

The third mastiff fell dead at his feet. He looked down on it, barely registering a sense of grim satisfaction at having slaughtered them so brutally. Despite his victory, something was still wrong. He could now hear the witch who had created the creatures yelling inside. Dan believed the witch had not only heard the noise of their fight but was probably aware that his creations were dead. Still, Dan had a nagging feeling as the headache of his sixth sense flared up. He could feel something above him that he could not see. He was sure it was there, and the sense of another’s presence seemed to emanate from a massive, nearby tree not far from him.

In his instinctual state, he was not sure what to do. Realizing he might need to hit another enemy from a distance he finally remembered his revolver. He switched the crowbar to his left hand. His right hand found its way to the Colt Python at his hip; he slid it out of the well-worn holster and cocked the hammer back. He did not point the gun up into the trees but kept it ready as he approached the spot where the disturbance seemed centered.

Even with all his supernatural acuity, Dan couldn’t clearly see what was up there. He could make out some sort of blur, and it was big. He stopped, it moved, he raised the gun ready to pull the trigger in an instant when the witch’s voice inside the house began to grow louder, and he could now hear Drina shouting as well.

His senses shifted. He wasn’t quite ready for it and suddenly found it hard to concentrate. Some sort of parabolic effect he couldn’t truly hope to describe, much less comprehend, suddenly sharpened his hearing to the point where he could hear both Streghe talking clearly.

“What do you mean you didn’t lose control of them!” Drina demanded. “Why aren’t they in the kennel?”

“What did you do, what happened to my dogs, Drina?” the witch yelled back.

“I don’t know. I’ve been here with you the whole time!”

“Who came with you?” he sneered.

There was no answer.

A long, painfully tense silence ensued. “My dogs are more than just my pets!” he snarled. “They are my totems, my avatars. I stopped keeping them in cages weeks ago.”

“What do you mean?” she asked in a stunned tone.

“I mean my totem animals roam these grounds as freely as I do. They roam the Barrens whenever they want. I don’t cage them.”

“But, E... the deaths, the workmen?” she said with disbelief.

“Drina,” he said as his tone shifted from a loud to a simmering anger, “I’ve always cared about you, but this is why I couldn’t confide in you. You are too naïve for your own good. I never lost control of my totems; I sent them to Beesly point. The Pine Barrens are our home, our territory, our hunting grounds. Did you think I was going to let those greedy corporate pricks run their pipeline through it? It is the same thing every time! They build these things with cheap labor and shoddy material. The damn pipelines rupture or break down, and the corporations never have to spend a dime to clean any of it up. Not this time, not here. Even the other Night Children in the Barrens are with me.”

“If the Shaper was with you,” Drina protested, “why did it send word to The Council of the Craft about what was happening even before my grandmother could? The Shaper never gets involved in politics, E! Its lived in the Pine Barrens for over three hundred years, and to this day no one knows if it’s a shifter or Quick, but they know it likes its privacy. It must think you’re risking the Silence of Night and, if it does, then the other children living in the Barrens might think so, too. You have to stop!”

“Is that who’s here? Is that why I can’t feel my totems? Did you have the Shaper kill them?”

“E...” she tried to say, but he wasn’t interested in hearing her anymore.

Dan could suddenly hear Drina gasp in fear. He also heard the sound of pads striking against the floor of the house. The pads of huge paws. There were more dire dogs in the house.

Realizing what Drina was seeing, he heard her say, “You... you created more?”

“I’ve unleashed their true essence. I haven’t created anything. I gave them back what generations of careless and callous breeding took from them, their true spirit,” he said as the dogs began to growl menacingly. “If their sibling totems are dead, Drina, they’re not going to be happy. I don’t know if they will even listen to me at that point. So what did you do?”

Drina was apparently too shocked at the threat to reply. Dan’s instinct kicked in when he realized the danger. He holstered the gun, hefted his crowbar, and ran towards the house with all his preternatural speed and power. Like a glowing, undead locomotive, he barreled towards the back porch with terrifying speed. He leapt towards the porch and flew nearly forty feet through the air with no effort and with his forward momentum smashed into the back door.

The effect was spectacular.

The door didn’t just come off the hinges, the entire door and at least three feet of wall attached to it in every direction just gave way. The sound was like an explosion as pieces of wood and plaster flew out into the room showering the witches with debris.

E and Drina both screamed and fell to the floor of the well-stocked kitchen. The two dire dogs recoiled in fear at Dan’s entrance and jumped back. Dan arrested his forward momentum and stopped dead. All around him, the nine-foot hole he had just torn right through the house gaped out into the night. He now stood on the door he had just knocked down.

Drina looked up and gasped in awe. What she saw was not the forklift operator she had brought with her, but something utterly arcane. His eyes were glowing with an intense, argent illumination that was hypnotic to witness. He was bathed in a large yet dim halo of white radiance. The look on his face was almost empty accept for a slight sneer of grim resolve plastered across his visage. Clasped tightly in his hands was the crowbar which dripped with gore that she could only assume was what was left of E’s other mastiffs.

He was an otherworldly sight to behold. She had been around the mystical all her life. She had seen wonderful charms, and some truly beautiful magic, but nothing like this. She realized as she looked up at him from the floor that he was the stuff of legends that her grandmother had always told her about when she spoke wistfully of the days of yore. He was something to her in that moment that belonged in another world, and another time. He came from those ages when mighty spirits roamed the earth and the great crafters of old worked miracles long since lost to time.

Both witches could only look up at him. The two remaining dire dogs whined in uncertainty at this unearthly being that had just barged into their master’s home. E looked up from his stomach with a gaping jaw, and then slowly began to get back to his feet. Dan never took his eyes off him. He watched his every move ready to react in an instant if E tried making a move toward Drina.

“What is this?” E asked in awed consternation. “Who is this?” he posed to no one in particular as he tried to fathom what had just happened. Then it dawned on him. “The revenant,” he whispered in shocked revelation. “This is the revenant Mama Cat has been watching all these years. You brought it here!”

E looked down at Drina with an ire-filled glance of accusation. “You went to the Council of the Dead. You betrayed me. You betrayed us. You brought these undead freaks into Craft business.”

Dan said nothing as E accused Drina. He continued to stand there, waiting to strike if E made the wrong move. His hands remained tightly wrapped around the crowbar. The holstered gun on his hip was easily visible, but Dan made no move towards it.

“I didn’t have a choice!” Drina screamed back at him as she got up. “The adjudicators are coming, E! If you haven’t destroyed the skull by then, they might destroy you!”

“They’re no match for us. My totem is too strong for them. Even Mama Cat with the whole coven behind her couldn’t bind me. When they arrive, I would have had five totems, and they would have never left this place alive,” he finished with deadly finality.

“E! Have you lost your goddamned mind?!” Drina cried.

He looked over at her while Dan continued to stay perfectly still. “I didn’t bring in this monster. I didn’t go against tradition and seek the aid of the Dead. Maybe I’m not the one out of my mind.”

Drina didn’t know what else to say. She couldn’t deny it now; this was not the man she grew up with. This witch in front of her was a violent psycho. Now she was in a room with a murdering Streghe and an insanely powerful revenant that she doubted anyone she knew could possibly control, and she had brought them together. What horror had she unleashed?

Dan and E locked eyes. E knew that making any sudden moves might be suicidal. Drina watched, uncertain what to do while a deadly tension filled the decimated kitchen.

E glared at the monster before him defiantly, but it only glared defiantly back. It infuriated E that this creature could stare at him like this all night long and never have to twitch. He was assuming that the beast had somehow surprised his mastiffs. He couldn’t conceive of the possibility that anything, even this large a revenant, could possibly outfight all three of his dogs at once.

The witch knew this undead savage physically outgunned him. Fortunately, he didn’t rely on any physical means to defend himself. He also didn’t need to move a muscle to act, much less get into any kind of physical altercation with this monster. He only need to say a word.

“Kill!” E said through gritted teeth.

Drina screamed.

The two dogs overcame their fear at their master’s word and flung themselves at Dan with ferocious abandon. Both mastiffs were smaller then their now dead siblings, but not by much. In the close confines of the kitchen, Dan didn’t have much room to maneuver. His powerful instinct told him there was only one thing to do, and he went right at them. He raised the crowbar and held it out across his chest thrusting it toward the dog on his right.

Drina watched in terror as all three juggernauts flew at each other like three battering rams. Dan lashed out and smashed the long edge of the crowbar right into one of the giant mastiff’s mouths. Its anguished yelp was ear-piercing. Its teeth shattered, and its head snapped up with the titanic, supernatural force of the blow. Despite its massive bulk and its huge neck, its oversized body could not endure Dan’s colossal power. Its neck broke from the effect, and the dog was dead before it even began to fall.

The other mastiff finally succeeded in doing what its siblings could not: it locked its huge maw onto Dan’s massive bicep. Its jaws closed with crushing force. It tried to rip its head back and forth savagely to tear Dan’s limb right off his body. It desperately attempted to pull Dan from his feet so that it could maul its prey beneath it and continue to savage it until it didn’t struggle any more.

Dan braced himself intuitively for the pain. He looked over at the huge, grey head of the dire dog as it tore at his arm. He waited as it ripped his sleeve apart. He looked on as the dog’s massive claws tried desperately to rake and gash him. He felt a consistent and forceful pressure on his bicep where the mastiff had latched on, but nothing more.

The huge dog tried frantically to move him, but couldn’t. When Dan began to realize that the beast wasn’t hurting him, a certain fascination began to steal over him. A part of his reason started to return. While both Drina and E looked on in mortified fascination, Dan looked at the great hound with curiosity. He didn’t fight back, instead he just let the dire dog gnaw at him.

All three of them realized the huge canine wasn’t even hurting him.

E cursed in rage-filled disbelief.

Drina could barely fathom the events happening before her, and called out, “What the hell?”

Dan’s curiosity about his fortitude quickly abated as he watched the gargantuan mastiff ineffectually maul his arm. His instinct began to return and, with it, his fury. The silver anger flared up, and Dan dropped the crowbar. He reached over with his left hand and grabbed the mastiff by the neck and began to squeeze. The huge mastiff began to cry out in pain. The moment it let go, Dan grabbed it, then lifted the now squirming and yelping dire dog up over his head and then threw it right at E.

Proceed to part 7...

Copyright © 2021 by John Rossi