Free Kingdom of Shadows by Greg F. Gifune Page A

 “You’re telling me everything I read in those files is true?”
    Poindexter scooped up a forkful of meatball and slid it between his lips.  “That is precisely what I’m telling you.”  
    “Why can’t I remember?”
    “We didn’t want you to remember.”  He wiped a smear of marinara from his chin with a cloth napkin.  “So your memories—all your memories—were wiped clean and replaced with memories we wanted you to have.”
    “Then there was no armored car job?”
    “There was not.”
    “But Carbone, he—he was shot.”
    “He was killed, yes, but not from a gunshot.”
    The tremors returned.  He struggled to control them.  “What then?”
    Poindexter rolled more pasta onto his fork, the sauce dripping in thick globs back to his plate.  “You remember the farmhouse,” he said, the fork shaking in his arthritic hand.  “It’s coming back to you.”
    “Yes.  Slowly.”
    “As I mentioned, you were the best of the worst.”  He stuffed the spaghetti into his mouth.  “You tortured and murdered a priest, claiming at your trial that you’d been repeatedly sexually molested by the man when you were a child and that’s what had led to your life of crime and eventually his murder.  He’d ruined you, and in turn, years later, you had ruined him.”
    A spike of pain dug deep into his temple and ran down along the right side of his jaw.  Rooster fought it back.  “I don’t…”
    “Remember.  Yes, I know.  For that you should thank me.”
    “For wiping my memories away and leaving me with lies?”  
    Ignoring the question, he took up the goblet, sipped some wine.  “Of course the pedophilia scandal that shook the Catholic Church had not hit yet.”
    Rooster had no idea what scandal he was referring to.  How much of his mind had these bastards destroyed?
    “The idea that a respected, admired and loved parish priest would’ve ever done such hideous things to a little boy was unthinkable.  No one, including us, believed you.”  Poindexter savored the wine a moment before continuing.  “Turns out you were telling the truth, who knew?  The fact remained, however, that you tortured and murdered a priest in cold blood.  Well done.”
    “What the hell did you people do to us?”
    “We sent you where no human being had ever been before…and returned from.”  He stabbed another meatball.  “You were all given the mixture.  It took you to depths none of us could’ve imagined in our wildest dreams.  You went to the core, the heart of evil, to its very soul.  I must confess that until that night I hadn’t counted on it actually working.  But it did.  As we’d hoped, you weren’t alone in that boundless darkness, there was something else there with you.  Something… alive .”
    “Where did we go?”
    He grinned like the demons in Rooster’s nightmares.  “You touched the face of Lucifer, Mr. Cantrell.  And he showed you evil in its purest, most savagely beautiful form, unbridled violence beyond comprehension.”
    “The farmhouse,” Rooster muttered, “the scarecrows, the rooms beneath the house…”
    “Props,” he said, waving at the air as if to knock the words away.  “Familiar images that would elicit fear and discomfort were necessary so the mind would have something to reference.  Interesting thing about the human mind, it fills in what is not there, often pulling images from a bank of previous experiences to fill the gaps.  We simply helped you all with that, giving you something to experience in a pseudo-physical sense.  Something terrifying that you could all relate to and understand.”  
    “This is bullshit.”  Rooster stood up.
    Poindexter continued eating.  Candlelight flickered across the plate.  The spaghetti was not spaghetti at all, and it was not drenched in tomato sauce.  Blood…bile…excrement… worms…human eyeballs cooked to a crisp, burned nearly beyond recognition.  “Technically the experiment was a success,” he