The Curse of 1977 (Book 2)

Chapter 12

In every city, in just about every corner of America, there was always a section that seemed to be closed off; a portion of a town that was seemingly left behind, abandoned or just plain forgotten. On Cypress' lower west side there resided such a section. It's not that it was forgotten by the rest of the city, Cypress residents could have only been so fortunate; it's just the mere fact that it was a reminder of what the city what once was. A piece of Cypress that city developers had a desire to overhaul, but persistently kept shoving to the side in favor of more profitable ventures.

On this particular side of town, there were unused rail tracks, along with three abandoned apartment buildings. All three buildings were dilapidated and appeared as though they had been that way for decades due to most of the structures' bricks being strewn all over the ground. In the bleak midst of night, there was that one building among the three that became a dwelling; a hopeless hovel to others, but a home away from home for another.

Way up top on the eighth floor of the middle building. Inside one of the disheveled apartments were two beings. There was no furniture to speak of within the darkness, just a floor where a lone, naked man was kneeling in the middle of a chalk drawn circle.

Standing above him was another individual. The individual possessed only two dark, glowing, orange eyes that beamed down upon the kneeling man. There were a pair of arms, hands, legs and feet, but any sort of attire or facial features were nowhere to be seen. It appeared as more of a vapor in human form than anything.

The kneeling man was black, young looking and bald. He kept his head bowed before the one standing above him in humble reverence.

The bald individual remained there inside his hand drawn circle locked in a stringent prayer that caused his forehead to sweat profusely. The apparition above him never budged, it just stood looking down at its subject with its pair of ominous eyes as though it were admonishing an unruly little one. But the bald

man stayed put in his position, seemingly content in his servitude, which was until his ears caught the sound of something scraping across the floor towards his direction.

At once, the specter that stood above the bald man vanished completely out of sight, in its place appeared a young woman who was crawling across the ragged wood floor in a fashion that would have suggested she were physically drained.

Ever so steadily the bald man lifted his head and opened his eye lids to reveal two pairs of shining eyes. Once the woman at last reached the man she collapsed at his side. Appearing unfazed by her rundown condition, the man simply lifted her up by her unkempt hair and examined her bloody and bruised face from side to side.

The woman never parted her lips to speak; she just stared ever so feebly back at the man with her own pair of shining eyes.

"Dey come to us." The bald man softly uttered in a broken Jamaican dialect. "Soon...dey come to us. You go now." He said as he shoved the woman away from his sight before he got to his feet, walked out of the apartment and down the ram shackled stairs that led outside to the empty street.

With only the silent darkness of the night caressing his naked form, the man simply stood right in the middle of the closed off road and listened to the dead evening.

"We go now." He whispered into the sky. "We go now."novelbin