THE DEVILS HARVEST.
THE END OF ALL FLESH.
By Glen Johnson.
For my big brother.
Steven McLeod.
Acknowledgements.
Thanks to my older brother, Gary Johnson who went over the raw ma.n.u.script with many read-through and editorial help. To Matthew Chilcott for help with cover suggestions. To Steven Mcleod, Anthony & Barbara Stokes, Anthony Pike, Victoria Tamkin, Sarah Shortt, Rachel Shapter, Kate Pike, Sarah Kelly and David Choules. And once again not forgetting Jamie Kerr, Stacy Folan, Richard Plaine, Kimberley Driver, Stacey Driver, Amy Barr, Chris Manning, James Smith, James Northcott and Catherine Flaherty for the Good Old Days but not forgotten.
Whereas the structures, wall paintings, ancient text and locations in this book are real, the events and characters are merely a fabrication of my imagination.
Glen Johnson.
Now it came to be the day when the sons of the true G.o.d entered to take their station before G.o.d, and even Satan proceeded to enter right among them. Then G.o.d said: "Where do you come from?" At that Satan answered G.o.d and said: "From roving about in the earth and from walking about in it."
The Christian Bible, Job 1: 6-7.
"I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld; I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living!"
The Sumerian legend - The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VI.
"Even though millions of people worldwide read the New Testament whether from curiosity or religious devotion very few ask what this collection of books actually is or where it came from, how it came into existence, who decided which book to include, on what grounds, and when."
Bart D. Ehrman Lost Scriptures.
PROLOGUE.
The Ultimate Biography.
Millions have died. Tens of millions across England, and the world, are still suffering from the loss and confusion that only a catastrophe of this magnitude could create.
As for my life, it will never be the same again. My perception of the world has been completely distorted. Even now I still grope for the right words to describe what has happened. How such an experience can be placed into simple words to be read. How it has without doubt changed my life, and the very way in which I view life itself. And the way life in my adopted country of England even now tries to recover.
Almost five million souls were ripped from their warm bodies.
When you consider there are almost seven billion people in the world today, the chances are astronomical that the devil would choose to knock on my front door. But he did, bringing death and destruction in his wake. You can read the dark chilling story of how death came knocking and the story he brought in with him from the cold, a story that will transform your life forever.
A single person (I think he can be called a person) came into my life and gave forth his story. One he said needed to be told; needed to be out in the open. Because the Bible has warped people"s perception for thousands of years and now it was his turn to put what happened into words. Tell the story from his point of view. Set the record straight.
G.o.d be d.a.m.ned.
I would be the devils biographer.
Many will not believe the words conveyed by him. At some points I didn"t even believe what he was saying. But all I can say is, you needed to be in the same room, see his decorum, the way in which he held himself. And the things he showed me; hallucinations? I cannot say. But they felt real to me, as if I had been there, viewing them with my own two eyes, feeling the light tickling wind upon my skin, and the baking suns heat upon my face, the sticky blood upon my hands. What if it was only hallucinations, tricks? But small things also made his story believable. Things, that as I now look back, made sense. The way he sat, hand movements, simple things that conveyed a lot. He was a good showman.
Now I am simply rambling, confusing you. I will start my story, as all stories should start, from the beginning. I will allow you to judge for yourself, to see if you believe his words, his stories, and his view of events that have transpired.
I will let you come to the decision to whether you believe the Dark Angel Satan, the Devil himself, appeared before me and gave his side of the story, his view of creation and the happenings thereafter. Why he was thrown out of heaven, along with countless other angelic rebels. Why, along with some of his angelic brothers, he now resides upon the earth: earth being their playground and their prison. And his plans for the future, and how it affects each and every one of us, and the very future of mankind itself.
Or whether you think that I did indeed simply lose my mind (as I sometimes believe) and I am now paying the consequences for that.
Of course now, at the end of it all, I know the truth. I now know what it was all about. But I will let you read my story, read the events as they took place in chronological order. Then you can be the judge. But I will not give away the fatal twist that makes this whole story all the more unbelievable, more horrific.
Just remember, what makes a person evil, their actions, their effect on others? Could someone so evil and so unbelievably cruel, who caused the death of untold millions, truly aspire to the name of the devil himself?
Read the Devils Harvest and make up your own mind.
But be prepared, the truth will blow your mind. Your world will never be the same again.
Millions have died...
PART ONE.
The Fallen Angels.
So down the great dragon was hurled, the original serpent, the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth; he was hurled down to the earth, and his angels were hurled down with him.
Revelation 12:9.
1.
Dead Man Walking.
It was a cold January evening. The wind was howling outside, making the laden trees give up there burdens, depositing even more snow on the already heavily covered ground. Roads were blocked. Telephone lines were down, having snapped from the weight of the snow upon them. So far it has been the worst winter in living memory, and apparently, so the meteorologists say, the worst was yet to come.
It"s at times like these that I wonder and not for the first time why I lived in a G.o.dforsaken place like this? Dartmoor, or the Moors, as the locals refer to it.
England has ten national parks, only two, Dartmoor and Exmoor, are situated in the southern part of the country, in a county called Devon. I live on the larger of the two, Dartmoor: a large national park area, covering several hundred square miles. Wild ponies roam aimlessly, and sheep continually try to run you off the road by appearing at almost every bend in the narrow hedge crowded lanes, where most of the time two cars can"t even pa.s.s each other. You spend most of your time reversing to let others pa.s.s, (they never seem to give way to you).
There are only two notable cities nearby. Dartmoor sits sandwiched between Exeter to the east and a navy port of Plymouth to the west. Few noteworthy towns or villages. Mainly though the area was just a large collection of identical little towns skirted by even smaller villages, around the Moors fringes and dotted around the Moors itself. Apart from that it"s a sleepy section of an already sleepy countryside.
But then, as I reflect, that"s why I choose this section to be my home. Away from the cruel streets of America. Away from Washington D.C., my home city for thirteen years. Away from the mad hustle "n" bustle, the crime, and the shootings. Most writers prefer to be in the middle of everything. Be where the pulse is, as some of my writer friends refer to it. But I"m not like most of them.
That soon became abundantly clear.
Sometimes I do miss my former home, my old hectic life. I used to live close to the waterfront. Maine Avenue Fish Wharf was only a short stroll away. The countless times I had walked over the Francis Case Memorial Bridge to get to Pruitt"s Seafood Restaurant, looking down to see the faded red painted sign of Jessie"s Cooked Seafood, sprawled across the dirty white wall. I had tried many of the large restaurants along the half-mile strip, but no one steamed crabs like Pruitt"s.
Once, I had even considered buying a boat and living in the marina. But that"s before I had travelled to England to do some research for one of my books, and ended up falling in love with my mother"s home county of Devon. That was more years ago than I cared to remember.
Both my parents were British. My father dragged my mother across the Atlantic Ocean to his new job, working for the Sacramento State Department of Geology. I was born on a day trip to Lake Tahoe. I was awarded American citizenship, purely because that"s where I came out. If I had waited another twenty-eight days, and not been premature, I would have been born in England, like my mother planned. The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.
My mother still had a choice, because she held a British pa.s.sport I could of been registered as British. She never did explain why she choice American?
In the end my mother couldn"t stand the heat, or my alcoholic father, so I returned with her and my older brother and sister, to live with my grandparents in Biggin Hill London, leaving my father behind, with only his drinking habit for company. I never heard from him again. I was an American by law, even though I lived there for only two months, as a baby.
My mother died from a brain aneurysm when I was twenty-one, two weeks before my first book was sold to a publishing house. By twenty-two, when my first royalty check cleared, I moved back to America my birthplace, but still an alien land to me.
I left the grey streets of London as a young adult. I tasted the dramatic life of America, and found it wanting. Now I have found somewhere I can be at peace with myself and my chosen life. I found Devon. And I had been back living in England for three years. I now lived sixteen miles away from where my mother was born and raised.
Devon has some outstanding beauty. Dartmoor mainly consists of smooth contoured hill after rolling hill, as far as the naked eye can see, often supporting large rocky outcrops. Wide expanses of bogs, which are continually filled by the mist and clouds that frequently shroud the hills and vales. It"s a painted canvas of blue hues and greens. More trees than a sane person would try and count, splattered here and there, or making up huge tracks of woodland. Alder, rowan, blackthorn, hawthorn, birch and large oak trees. What"s not covered in trees is plastered with bracken or spidery ferns, making large green-carpeted areas. And so many rivers and small streams that cascade down numerous waterfalls, and filling rocky gorges, that it seems like you"re forever driving over one kind of bridge or another a mythical troll"s paradise.
It also has its fair share of ghost stories: supposedly, haunted houses and manors, mysterious graveyards and famous graves.
Sir Frances Drake is supposedly the Headless Horseman who rides a dark hea.r.s.e coach, pulled by black headless horses. The legend is called The Wild Hunt, led by a psychopomp: the leader of souls to the Underworld. On certain nights and holy days you can see the hunter come for his prey, as the headless Sir Drake chased his quarry. He also supposedly rides out on every full moon to chase the lost souls back to h.e.l.l.
There is the Spectral Hounds or otherwise known as Devil Dogs or h.e.l.l Hounds, with its red eyes and blood curdling howl, which still allegedly roams the misty marshes, the very ones that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about in The Hounds of the Baskervilles. Legends state that a hunter, Richard Cabell, the Squire of Buckfastleigh who was described as a monstrously evil man had sold his soul to the Devil. After Cabell died on July 5th 1677 a phantom pack of h.e.l.l Hounds was witnessed racing across Dartmoor to get to the promised soul. But his tomb was a large solid sepulchre, with a ma.s.sive heavy slab of stone resting on top, to stop the soul from being removed. Having not accomplished their given mission the h.e.l.l Hounds apparently still roam the barren moors. Folklore also states that if you walk around the tomb seven times then put your finger into the large old keyhole, then it would be bitten off by the devil, who patiently waits for the tomb to crumble so his can get the soul beneath.
Jay"s Grave or Kitty Jay as she was known, was an orphan teenager who died late in the 18th Century, who was raped and then shunned when she became pregnant. Kitty hung herself and due to suicide laws at the time, all three parishes refused to bury her on consecrated ground, so she was buried at a crossroads a traditional practice for suicide victims at the time. Her grave became famous because there are always fresh flowers on it, without fail, non-stop since she was buried. Local folklore claims they are placed by pixies.
During a full moon a ghostly collection of Roman legionnaires have been spotted at the old Roman hill fort on Hunters Tor, marching without purpose around the area of l.u.s.tleigh Cleave.
There are the Hairy disembodied Hands that pull at the wheel of your car or motorcycle as you drive along the deserted road near Postbridge, known as the B3212. These have supposedly caused numerous accidents since it started in 1910.
There is the famous out-of-the-way village of Princetown, with its ancient prison, which was built to hold prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, which has countless horror stories and ghostly happening a.s.sociated with the brutality once used to keep the prisoners under control.
Most alarmingly, local legend states that during the Great Thunderstorm of Sunday the 21st of October 1638, Dartmoor"s town of Widecombe-in-the-moor (the closest settlement to my farmhouse) was even said to have been visited by the Devil himself. The local church of St Pancras was packed with three hundred people when it was apparently struck by ball lightning. Four died and sixty were seriously injured, and the church was badly damaged, having the roof almost completely ripped off. Folklore states that the devil had made a pact, a Faustian bargain with a local card player called Jan Reynolds. Reynolds received a diabolical gift, he was unbeatable at cards, but it had a catch, he was never to fall asleep in church. On that particular day, he had.
While en route to collect the soul of Reynolds the devil had supposedly travelled past the Tavistock Inn, in the nearby village of Poundsgate, where he stopped for refreshment. The landlady reported a visit by a strange man dressed in black with cloven goat-like feet riding a jet black, sweat dripping horse. The devil ordered a tankard of ale that hissed as it went down his gullet. Where he rested the mug on the bar it left a scorch mark. He left old strange coins that the landlady found had turned to dried leaves in her hand when she picked them up.
Also, Dartmoor is not just an untamed place of heather and bracken covered hills, with deep wooded gorges and twisting rock strewn rivers, and dangerous bogs and mires with plentiful ghost and occult stories, for amidst this abundant wealth of natural and mythical beauty are hints of the industries of the past and an abundance of ancient archaeological sites, including an abundance of burial chambers, cromlechs, kistvaens, countless stone circles and menhirs, more than anywhere else in Western Europe.
There are also remains of tin, zinc, copper, lead and silver mines and vast open pit quarries, ruined castles, ancient churches, medieval abbeys and countless bridges.
There is the famous Merrivale Stone Circle (also known as the Plague Stones) which is the largest prehistoric site on Dartmoor; supposedly according to local folklore it is the Gateway of the Dead, with its three rows of long standing stones and a cist and stone hut.
There"s also Spinsters Rock, Scorhill Stone Circle, Grey Wethers Stone Circles and Drizzlecombe, which is Dartmoor"s tallest standing stone at four and a half meters. There are also the seventeen stones, named the Nine Maidens of Dartmoor why they are called the nine and not seventeen has no explanation. Supposedly, during a Hunters Moon, (or Blood Moon, the first full moon after the Harvest Moon, which is the closest to the autumnal equinox) these stones have been witnessed to sway back and forth as if dancing.
Occultism abounds in the area, stretching back as far as recorded history. There"s countless tales of witches and covens. One famous local witch was Vixana who nightly conjured up mist to confuse lost travellers, so they would stumble into a stretch of bog and slowly get sucked under.
In January 2005 seven dead sheep were found with their necks broken and eyes removed, and arranged in the shape of a heptagram a seven pointed star symbol, which has for centuries been a.s.sociated with the dark arts and black magic rituals. Then in November of the same year it occurred again near Vixen Tor.
Sacrificial examples, such as these, date back to the time of the druids (these being the priestly cla.s.s in Britain during the Iron Age). The earliest known written description of druids was from the Roman military general Julius Caesar in his work the Commentarii de Bello Gallico; which was his first hand accounts of the Gallic Wars, dated from 50 BC.
Dartmoor teems with reference to the druids. Their presence exists in place names such as the Druid"s Stone, Druid"s Chair, Druid"s Altar, Druid"s Well, Druid Mine, and the Druidical Temple, and not forgetting the village named Drewsteignton; which its original name (Taintona) was first mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086.
As well as numerous stone formations accredited to the druids, there is also what are called Rock Basins, these were cavities cut into the rock to collect water, and for sacrificial purposes. One on Mis Tor is referred to as the Devil"s Frying Pan.
Strangely, it also has a negative gravity anomaly, due to Cornubian batholith, which is a group of a.s.sociated granite intrusions which underlie the southwestern peninsula of Great Britain; and the main exposed ma.s.ses of granite are at Dartmoor.
All in all, Dartmoor has more stories related to the devil, the occult, druid sacrifices and bizarre anomalies than any other section of land in Great Britain. I provide all this information to give you an idea of the region I live in, and the tales that inundate the folklore in the area.
This may all relate to why the Devil came knocking at my door, it was simply a matter of location, location, location, as the estate agents like to say.
I have a celebrated twelve horror novels under my belt, and a few awards adorning my walls and shelves. Some of these books have stories similar to myths and legends that prevail in this area. Funny, when I think about it, this is my thirteenth book. Does that have some bearing on what took place?
I have a few other ma.n.u.scripts I"m working on at the moment. But no more horror stories. What happened changed that part of me for ever.
Why do I write? Some people ask me. I would like to say it"s because I love to read, and also I like to see one of my books in the hands of a pa.s.serby. To see the look of concentration upon their face as they read the words that I have placed on paper.
But if I was to be brutally honest, I would say it is for the money. In this day and age everything always comes down to money. Supposedly, the route of all evil.
I have made plenty of money from my written creations. That"s how I can afford to live in such an out of the way location in a big farm house. Some ask: Why do I stick it out, why do I put up with the critics" sharp tongues when I could retire from writing and simply live off the royalties? But as any writer worth his salt knows, it"s not that simple. Once you have one book in circulation it"s not long before another joins it. A natural high some say. It"s something needing to be done, needing to be written.
And the most asked question: Where do I get my ideas from? As my many ex-wives said, as well as friends and family, I have a very overactive imagination. Even more so now after I was released from his hold on me.
But all in its proper place.
Has not one of the greatest horror writers of our time, Stephen King written almost fifty novels? Each one a masterpiece in its own right. What if he had given up after his fifth novel or tenth novel? This generation would be different, would it not, without the works of his great mind?
Likewise, after only a mere thirteen novels compared to his fifty I still can"t steal the laptop away, not just yet. Over the last few years it has been my only companion, a good faithful friend.
I don"t use a typewriter, like you see in the movies; an author clicking away at an old cla.s.sic machine. As they finish a page they pull it out and stack it on a pile of other crisp white sheets. In reality writing isn"t like that. I make mistakes with my spelling and grammar, just like everyone else (just ask my editor). And with a computer you can go back over, readjusting, correcting and fleshing-out. And with a typewriter there would be only one copy. Way to risky. As I write I back my books up on multiple external hard drives. Also sending them to myself via email, so if anything happened to all my drives I still have a copy in the digital world. Because that"s the other important thing with a laptop; the internet the writer"s best friend a world of information right at my fingertips. No more library visits, pouring over old books, or phone calls to collect information. Now it can all be done from the comfort of my desk. G.o.d bless Google and Wikipedia.
Maybe it"s because of my pa.s.sion for writing or merely because of the location I choose to live, is the reason he decided to choose me. I don"t think I will ever know why he picked me. He never gave a reason. Then again I don"t think he needed to, or would have given me an explanation even if I had the courage to ask. And to be quite frank, I don"t think I ever thought to ask. That was my reasoning to start with; it all became apparent towards the twisted end.
It would have been many days, if not weeks, before I would have seen another human being, let alone whatever he claimed to be. That"s one of those small details I told you about.
When I opened my door to the intensive knocking on that cold, dark January evening, when most sensible people would be huddled up in the heat and comfort of their home. Not that anyone could even move about in the snow outside. And it was impossible to get to my out of the way house with all the blizzards blowing, snow piling up.
That"s when I saw him standing upon my snow-incrusted doormat. I noticed not one snowflake clinging to his clothing or hair. His black highly polished shoes still glistening from the warm light issuing from my open fire in the room behind me, as clean as if only having just been polished no snow or mush on them (and no cloven hoof feet). And the fact that besides the freezing cold and drizzling snow, he was wearing no coat of any kind, just a simple black suit jacket that matched his expensive looking black trousers and waistcoat.
"Good evening," he said, as if having met him on the sidewalk in town. A perfect gentlemanly voice, not one you would expect coming from someone like him. His eyes locked intently upon mine.