The Realm of the Drells Read online

  © Copyright 2016–Kenneth Zeigler

  All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit. The use of short quotations or occasional page copying for personal or group study is permitted and encouraged. Permission will be granted upon request. Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations marked PEB are taken from the Plain English Bible, copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Destiny Image Publishers, Shippensburg, PA 17257. All rights reserved. All emphasis within Scripture quotations is the author’s own.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DESTINY IMAGE® PUBLISHERS, INC.

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  ISBN 13: TP 978-0-7684-0812-6

  ISBN 13 EBook: 978-0-7684-0813-3

  For Worldwide Distribution, Printed in the U.S.A.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 / 21 20 19 18 17 16

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  The Personal Journal of Miss Debbie Langmuir

  My name is Debbie, and I’m seventeen years old, but I’m not like other girls my age, not anymore. I still look the same; at least I think I do. Auburn hair, green eyes, medium build, all of that is pretty much the same as before. I played on our high school girls’ volleyball team and was on track to be the valedictorian of my graduating class, the class of 1992. Believe it or not, I was seriously thinking about going to the Air Force Academy next fall, major in engineering. But all that has changed.

  I use to hang out at the West Shore Mall on Saturday afternoon with my friends. Oh, how I enjoyed those times. We’d visit a dozen shops with plastic in hand, but spend less than ten dollars. Up in my room late at night I’d listen to my favorite tunes on CD, rocking to the beat of Blind Melon or Pink Floyd. I even went out on dates, nothing serious, mind you. But that’s all part of my past, part of my life in another reality, another world. Now I live in a world where sunlight is but a memory and freedom but a dream. I live in a hell created for the living.

  Ever since I was a little girl I’ve loved to write. There was a time, in my other life, when I figured that I might be able to write a fairly good romance novel. Maybe it would occur in medieval times. There’d be this girl who meets the love of her life, a love who takes her away from her life of hard labor, a real knight in shining armor. There’s money in writing if you have the talent. Money, what does money mean now? Money can’t buy you anything here. I work 12 hours a day every day just so they’ll let me eat. Anymore I don’t care what’s on the plate, food is food. Anything they slide through the bars is fine by me. As for knights in shining armor that sweep the fair young maiden off of her feet; they don’t exist here. I’m not even sure where here is. There are lots of things medieval about this place, but knights in shining armor aren’t one of them.

  Now I write to preserve my failing sanity, my dying hopes of ever escaping this place, to put the pain and hunger out of my mind. Through my writing, my spirit soars free, even if my body is locked away in this cell with chains on its feet. I don’t even get to take them off at night, here in my cell. Maybe no one will ever read this thing other than me but I still have to write it.

  Since I now have a sort of pen, and a stack of paper, which I’ve bound together into a diary, I’m trying to piece together the fragments of a waking nightmare from which there is no escape.

  Looking back, I guess my story all started in my senior AP English class late last October. As usual, Mrs. Peters had droned on and on for most of the period. I swear she had a gift of making even the most interesting topics boring. What a class to have during the last period of the school day. It was near the end of the hour, and Mrs. Peters had finally given up trying to put us to sleep, when my close friend Keira leaned in my direction.

  “Hey Deb, do you believe in spirits, ghosts, that sort of thing?”

  She gazed at me with blue eyes, and she was oh so serious. You might have thought that her question was one of great significance, a major issue of our time. Yep, it was just the sort of off the wall question I’d come to expect from Keira. She was blond to the roots and then some.

  “Not really,” I replied.

  “Well, I just inherited a real crystal ball. It was passed all the way down from my great grandmother. It was old even when she was a little girl.”

  “How can you tell a real crystal ball from a cheap imitation?” I asked, trying to give her a hard time, to derail her train of thought.

  “No, honest to God, it’s the real thing,” she insisted. “It’s been hidden away for years in my great grandmother’s attic. A hundred years ago it sat in the fortune teller’s tent of a circus sideshow, but now it’s setting on an antique table in my bedroom.”

  “Doesn’t it clash with the decor?”

  “No, it looks really cool, you’ve just gotta come over and see it.”

  Keira had piqued my curiosity, so I stopped by her house on my way home to see this thing that had her so wired. It sat upon an antique mahogany table, the same one it had rested on in the fortune teller’s tent all those years ago. The ball was big, bigger than I’d imagined, setting on the three prongs of its gold base. Its cloudy depths possessed an unnatural vastness. It was like a crystalline universe. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was really spooky. It wasn’t quite what I’d expected.

  “My grandmother inherited it from her mother. Her mother told her it was dangerous and never to play with it. My grandmother gave me the same warning,” said Keira, running her hand over its glossy surface, gazing into its depths. “She had shown it to me when I was just a little girl years ago but then she hid it away again. She wouldn’t even tell me where she’d hidden it. She once told me that the world would be better off if it were to be thrown into the deepest part of the sea. You see, you couldn’t destroy it or you’d be even worse off.”

  “You couldn’t destroy it,” I repeated.

  “No,” replied Keira, “because of the curse.”

  “The curse,” I said. “You wouldn’t care to elaborate on that one would you?”

  Keira’s somewhat confused expression told me she wasn’t quite sure what the word elaborate meant, though she wasn’t about to admit it.

  “I mean tell me more about it,” I said.

  “I know what you meant,” she retorted. I’m sure there was a little bit of frustration, even anger in her voice. It caught me by surprise. “Just b
ecause you’re probably going to be the valedictorian this spring doesn’t mean you’re better than me.”

  “Oh, Keira, I didn’t mean anything like that,” I said. I really didn’t mean to offend her.

  “Everyone around the school thinks I’m nobody,” continued Keira. “I’m not a part of the in crowd, I’m not one of the popular ones, the beautiful people. The other people in our class laugh at me behind my back, I know it.”

  Now I was really blown away. I’d never heard Keira talk like that, not ever. “That’s not true,” I objected.

  “Well, they’re going to find out,” she raged on. “They’re going to find out just what I can really do. Then they’ll be sorry. At least some of them will.”

  Keira had me really scared now, though I didn’t tell her. I tried to change the subject, get her out of this freaky spiral. “But you were telling me about your grandmother, about the crystal ball.”

  It was like I’d found some kind of switch and changed the channel. Keira’s tone changed immediately. The sudden change was almost as scary as the rant she’d been on.

  “Oh, my grandmother died of cancer just a few months ago,” she continued. “She went peacefully in her sleep. A few days later I went looking for this ball. I’d wanted it from the day she told me about it. I hunted all over for it. When I ran across it in that old trunk in the attic, it seemed to call out to me. It was really freaky. You know? I think it wanted to be here. I think it wanted to belong to me.”

  She stroked the ball in a real strange way. It was like it was a pet cat or something. The way she gazed into it was, well, almost like she was in love with it.

  “Okay,” I agreed, almost afraid to say anything else. “So, what do you plan to do with it?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking,” began Keira, turning to me once more. “Friday is Halloween, and my parents are going to some sort of company party. They’ve given me the okay to have a few friends over for the night. How about a séance? We could invite Leslie, Maya, and Wendy. It would be a blast.”

  “The five of us and a bunch of dead people, sounds charming.”

  Keira’s smile was broad but devious. “Oh come on, where’s your sense of adventure?”

  Adventure? Some adventure. I had a bad feeling about the whole thing from the start. If I’d only known what was in store for me as the five of us gathered around that crystal ball, I’d have gone trick or treating with my little brother instead. A bag full of fattening candy, even an apple with a razor blade in it, would have been better than this. Still, we all thought that it was going to be harmless fun, an evening of supernatural entertainment.

  Leslie had been drinking. I remember her annoying giggle as Keira told the four of us the story that her grandmother had told her, a story of the crystal ball, and its former owner.

  “Her name was Tanya Cassadore,” began Keira, lighting the incense candle on the nightstand. “She was a side show fortune teller whose mystical talents made her both feared and admired. Today she would have been one of those psychics with a one-nine-hundred number. You know the type, call us and find fortune, love, and success. Back then, those kinds of people wandered about the countryside with the circus sideshows, predicting your future for a quarter. Tanya followed in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother before her. It was they who had schooled her in the art of witchcraft.”

  “I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog Toto, too,” giggled Leslie, trying her best to imitate the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz. Her impersonation wasn’t all that good.

  Still we all laughed. I suppose that none of us took this whole thing very seriously.

  “It’s no laughing matter,” objected Keira, joining our circle around the crystal ball. There was anger in her blue eyes, anger that surprised the others. I’d seen it before. “It would be a serious mistake to offend the spirits of the ball.”

  “Don’t mind Leslie,” said Maya, trying her best not to laugh, “just go on with your story.”

  “Well,” continued Keira, “the owner of the circus, a real ass by the name of Karl Bonner, had the hots for Tanya, but she’d have nothing to do with him. His lust for her grew and grew, until late one night, he and Samson the circus strong man, wandered into her tent, the smell of whisky on their breaths. They vowed that nothing was going to stop them from having their way with her that night. I mean, who was going to stop them? Back then women were more property than people. No one knows exactly what happened next, but somehow, Tanya was struck on the head, splitting her skull and splattering the magical orb with her own blood.”

  Keira gently caressed the shimmering crystal ball with her hands, gazing into its depths intently. For a moment her face took on a strange blank expression, as if she were in a trance. I turned to Leslie, wondering if I was the only one at the table who was getting seriously spooked by this whole affair. She looked back at me, a puzzled look on her face, but she didn’t say anything.

  Keira pulled back from the ball and turned toward me, her eyes wide and intense. No, not just intense, I think a bit crazy. “Yet even as she lay dying on the floor, she cursed the two men. ‘The drells shall punish you, and all those who would dare to usurp the power of the crystal,’ were the last words she ever spoke.”

  Keira looked straight at me just as she said the word usurp. It was like she was proving to me that she knew the meaning of a word used by the more intellectual crowd. To tell the truth I thought I saw something like hate in her eyes. Keira and I had been good friends since the third grade. I don’t think I ever saw her look at me that way before. It hurt.

  Then Keira looked about at the others. “It was only then that the two men realized what they had done. Yet it was not the mysterious drells, but the law that they feared. The body had to be dumped, and quickly. Karl and Samson wrapped Tanya in the blood stained rug of her tent and carried her deep into the woods, where she was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.”

  “You mean they didn’t hack her up first?” Leslie snickered, leaning back in her chair.

  Keira ignored Leslie’s comment, yet I saw the gleam in her eye. Once again she didn’t quite look like the Keira I knew. It sent a chill up my spine. It was like she was two people, the Keira, the friend I knew and this other Keira, this new Keira. Come to think of it, she wasn’t even talking like the Keira I knew. Keira never could get a story you told her straight. She really wasn’t a very good story teller. That was until tonight. Tonight she told the story almost like she’d been there.

  “The following day the circus broke camp and moved on to the next town, yet it wasn’t long before questions of Tanya’s whereabouts came back to haunt Karl Bonner. A young girl, one of the circus performers, had seen Karl entering Tanya’s tent on the night of her disappearance, and later heard her muffled screams. She told her parents, who in turn had gone to the police. Yet when the police confronted Karl, told him of the charges against him, he laughed. Tanya hadn’t just disappeared, he’d fired her. He’d caught her practicing the world’s oldest profession from her tent. He couldn’t afford to have her giving the circus a bad name.”

  “Oh, come on,” objected Maya.

  “They didn’t just take his word for it, did they?”

  “They did,” confirmed Keira.

  “Male chauvinist pigs,” said Leslie.

  “Maybe, but like I told you it was a different time,” replied Keira, turning in my and Maya’s direction. “Anyway, it was more than just his word,” Samson testified that he’d seen Tanya arm in arm with a mysterious young man on the very night of her disappearance. It hadn’t been the first time he’d seen her in the company of a stranger, nor heard moaning coming from her tent. A child’s overactive imagination, that’s what they called it. Although Tanya had been with the circus for nearly ten years, she was little more than a stranger to most of the troupe. The disappearance of the witch, as she had come to be called, came as a relief. It wasn’t long before Karl replaced Tanya with another young attractive fortune teller, one
more inclined to meet his needs.”

  “The creeps got away with it?” asked Wendy.

  “Did they?” asked Keira, a smile coming to her face. “It wasn’t long before a bizarre series of accidents started plaguing the performers, earning their show the title of the jinx circus. The Great Redondo’s fatal fall from the trapeze, the brutal mauling of the lion tamer, the tragic death of the beautiful assistant of the Fabulous Leonardo, during one of his knife throwing performances, it was uncanny. Amidst the mounting debts of the circus and the terrible nightmares that tortured him night after night, Karl began to see Tanya’s revenge taking shape.

  “Then one morning, the body of Samson was discovered in a corn field not far from the circus, his neck snapped like a twig. The expression of horror upon his face told of an encounter with something terrible, something from beyond the grave. Two days later, the new fortune teller vanished in the middle of the night without a trace, never to be seen again.”

  Keira rose to her feet and walked around the table. She placed her hand upon Leslie’s shoulders, then upon mine. The way she ran her finger along my neck frightened me.

  “Well, don’t just leave us in suspense,” objected Wendy, her voice excited. “What happened next?”

  “Patience,” whispered Keira, returning to her chair. “We have all night.” There was a really strange smile on her lips as she scanned our anxious faces. “Karl was terrified to the point of madness. He went to the law, confessing to the grisly murder of Tanya Cassadore. He pleaded with the sheriff to place him under arrest, to protect him from the dark evil thing that was stalking him. Yet no one could save him from Tanya’s vengeance. Only two days after his arrest he was found dead in his jail cell, his head crushed, and his body pulled half way through the bent bars of his cell window, a window hardly more than a foot square.”

  “Gross!” remarked Wendy.

  “There’s more,” replied Keira, who seemed as much caught up in the story as the rest of us. “Three nights later, the circus burned to the ground, sparing nothing. Well, almost nothing. The following morning, the crystal ball and the table upon which it sat stood untouched among the ashes.”