Now, I've been known to lie, but this story I am about to share with you is one hundred percent true. It may seem incredible at times, and at others you may think it borderlines the fantastic, but this is a very real account of one night in my life several years ago.
It was the twelfth of June, 2012. I had just gotten off work and made my way home, then to the kitchen where I immediately pulled a beer from the fridge and sat in my recliner. As I kicked off my Wolverine work boots, I looked for something to watch before attempting to enjoy the beer, then I happened upon
The Big Bang Theory
. "Good enough," I told my empty apartment. I set the remote down and moved the beer toward my lips when my phone rang. I didn't recognize the number, but that didn't stop me from delaying my alcohol consumption long enough to say, "Hello?"
"M-Michael?"
It had been so long since I last heard her voice. Even still, I immediately knew it was my sister, "Shelly?" The last time I saw her was in court, where I was trying to free her from a lesbian convent cult. My own attorney pulled the okey-doke on me, though, and filed papers on behalf of the Sisters of Merciful Grace to keep me from interfering with their business. That was three years ago, so why would Shelly be calling me now, especially seeing as to how hers was the most outspoken voice against me?
"Michael. Please. I don't have much time. I ... I escaped, Michael. I finally got away, but you have to hurry before they find me again."
"Where are you now?" I asked frantically.
"It's some fleabag motel on the southside. Casa Royale, I think. Third floor, room 3-B. Hurry, Michael." Then the line went dead.
It would take me an hour to get there. Hopefully I wouldn't be too late. I reached down for my Wolverines, but then opted for my cowboy boots. My "ass-kicking boots," as I liked to call them.
When I arrived, I found a black man dressed in a white T-shirt and blue jeans standing in the middle of the room, surveying the carnage that had been wrought. His arm was in a make-shift sling. "Who you?" he asked me.
"Who're you?"
"I'm the owner. Who you?"
"I'm the brother of the woman you rented this room to," I told him as I approached.
He backed up and into a corner. "Look, I don't want no more trouble tonight, man."
"What happened to your arm?"
"It was those damned bitches." He immediately made a cross in the air, kissed his forefinger, then pointed to heaven. "Sorry, Jesus." Then, back to me, "It was those witches, the ones from the convent."
"And you just let them take my sister?" I asked in my ignorance.
"What was I supposed to do" he asked in return. "Last time I got involved with them bitches, they put me in the hospital for six weeks. Even after my insurance paid, I still owed over half a mil. Made me have to file bankruptcy."
"Is that what happened to you tonight?" I asked. "Did they give you a friendly reminder of what would happen if you got involved?"
He looked at his arm and laughed, but there was no mirth to be found. "My daughter did this to me. You hear me? My own flesh-and-blood daughter. Yeah, she's caught up with them bitches, too. I tried to stop her, reason with her, and she damn near tore my arm right out the socket."
"Where did they take my sister?"
"Back to that damned hell house of theirs, more 'n likely."
"Well, I'm going after her," I apprised him. "You want to come?"
"I ain't going anywhere near that place."
"But ... Your daughter—"
"Is where she wants to be."
"You can't believe that," I said to him. "You know she's being held against her will. Why else would you try to stop her tonight?"
"That was just out of what the old folks call worriation."
I stepped close to him, putting us nose-to-nose. "If your arm wasn't already busted up, I'd kick your ass for you, you damned coward."
He sank to the floor, crying. "I know. I know," and that is how I left him.
I made my way to Hell House and surveyed the grounds as surreptitiously as I could. It was 9:45, so I had the cover of darkness on my side, but it also served to cover any defenses the good Sisters may be employing. After assuring myself that there simply was no quick, quiet way in which to gain entry into the convent, I walked to the door and kicked it in only to find ... nothing. Not a single person, not a single thing. I was standing in a foyer bereft of décor of any kind. It was just white walls and hardwood floor and nothing more.
I took a step, then I heard it. Growling. Low, bestial. Then about fifteen yards ahead of me, I saw the daemonic brute. It was a rottweiler. It tensed. Remembering the lessons my father taught me when dealing with wild beasts such as this, I assumed a karate stance, then turned my right hand into a spearhead. It charged. I maintained my position. It gained speed. I never faltered. It leapt, barking loud, slobber flying from its mouth. I pushed my arm forward with every ounce of strength I had, and just as soon as I felt my hand slide down the fiend's throat, I clenched it into a fist as I brought it down hard upon the floor. I drove a knee into its exposed ribs and kept my full body weight on it, waiting, just waiting.
The dog thrashed about with its claws, rending my flesh. It gnawed more out of panic than a sense of protecting its masters, tearing my flesh even more. Then, finally, its movements slowed as the animal became more and more enfeebled from lack of oxygen, then it died. Just to be sure, I broke its neck once I removed my hand from inside it. I surveyed my arm. I was bleeding, but there wasn't anything too deep.
I looked up and saw a dim light coming from a doorway. That was my next destination. I made it there to see that it was a stairwell leading down. My arm had really begun to hurt, but my adrenal glands were pumping their precious, fight-or-flight hormones throughout my system, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. For the record, I was here to fight.
Once I had bottomed out, I came across a floor of cells. All were empty except for one, which housed a small, Asian woman. "Please," she said to me when I looked in. "Please help me. "The things they make us do ... It's awful."
The door was secured by a latch only. I unbolted it, allowing the woman freedom. "Oh, thank you so very much. I owe you my life."
"Just help me find my sister."
"Then you'd better come this way," she said as she led me forward. "If she's not down here with me then there's only one other place they'd have taken her." She led me to a room that was thirty feet in circumference. "Each one of these leads to a cell," she told me of the twenty red doors that peppered the wall. "Shelly should be in one of them."
"I never told you her name was Shelly."
She slowly turned, a huge, beautiful smile on her face, then she quickly kicked me in the nads. I doubled over from the pain. I vaguely remember seeing her fit brass knucks on her right hand—wondering where she had kept them—and the next thing I knew she was cracking me up side the head over and over again until I fell to one knee. She drew back as far as the Canadian border to deliver the death blow, but I pushed myself up and violently drove an uppercut to her chin. She flew five feet up and ten outward before hitting a wall and crumpling to the floor. I stumbled toward her and cautiously looked. I had driven her jawbone out behind her ears.
I grabbed the brass knucks, fitted them onto my own hand, then began checking cells one-by-one. They were all empty. There was silence in this great hall of pain and torture and God knows
what else, then I heard it. The tiny rustling of chains. "Shelly?" I cried out.
"Michael. No."
I followed her voice to a throne at the back of the room. "Shelly, it's okay. I'm here now."
"No, Michael. You must leave. I was wrong. My place is here."
"Shackled like a slave?" I asked in disbelief. "They've brainwashed you again, but we're going to get out of here and get you some help." Amid her protestations, I searched for a way to remove her chains. Finally, I just grabbed them and pulled, jerked, heaved, hoed, over and over again until the concrete around the bolt began to crack, then I uprooted the damned thing. "Come on," I said as I lifted her, but she continued to fight me. We had gotten about halfway through the room when it erupted with light.