The Point 1
There’s this place in Onatario, Canada: Queenston Heights. It’s a park, national historic site, the whole shebang. It’s also home to a large area of forest. If you take a stroll through them, keep at it long enough, you reach what the kids around here call “The Point.” It’s in the densest fucking part of the area, but there’s this big rock there and it’s pointy. I wish I was making this up.
I think I’ve stepped on a few hundred spent condoms since I started off, sex in public places must be very common here. It’s rather interesting, they (the condoms) almost seemed to orbit the rocks in the center like electrons to a nucleus. The further out a person gets, the fewer he steps on, but you couldn’t get too far out, you see, the whole section of woods was cordoned off by a few strips of flashy-yellow police tape.
Not exactly what I had been expecting. In most of my encounters with Rifts, they’ve been in places with little to no traffic, but this was something else entirely. I did some digging my first night in Canada, some kid was murdered at the Point not too long ago. He was gutted and impaled on a tree. It’s not the first I’d heard of this incident. One of my followers mentioned it to me in a Facebook conversation not too long after I was reunited with Faceless.
I should have expected what happened at the Point, after two years of this shit, I should’ve seen it coming from a mile away. There was something in the air, apart from the stench of ejaculates, a sort of quiet so persistent that it felt tangible. I felt cold, yet sweat formed at my temple. It was Him, it was the Father. I had encroached upon his territory and he wasn’t about to let that slide. The trouble was, I couldn’t see him.
I felt something brush against the back of my neck, and spun around to face a tree. Just another goddamn tree. There were so many places something could be hiding, so many trees around me, closing in on me. I was in a trap, this was his turf and I had no business being there, and the thought of what He could do to me brought about a trembling in my appendages.
This trembling was soon accompanied by a sound, a whisper in my mind that beckoned me. I tried to cover my ears, but I knew the action was futile. It was intoxicating, and for every inch of control I lost, I was met with the greatest of pleasures. It was release from fear, it wanted me, it wanted all of me. I closed my eyes and screamed.
That’s when there was a boom and the trees around me exploded into wooden shrapnel. I fell to the ground and covered my head as splinters sprayed into my back. I heard a shout of pain among the chaos, but it wasn’t a shout I recognized. The whispering in my thoughts had ceased as soon as the trees burst, and a horrid silence punctuated by heavy thudding and crumbling stone replaced it for a few moments before being hidden beneath a high-pitched screeching.
Then there was silence.
I forced myself to my feet, wincing in pain as my back straightened. There, standing in the center of the destruction, was the Father. He had in his hands the entrails of the beast I had been hunting for almost a month. The Father’s form was different than I remember, coat was shorter, much more conservative. I’d heard about this phenomenon, but this was my first time seeing his appearance differ in person.
He stood 8 feet in height, maybe more. His body was thin, and his torso’s length dwarfed by those of his arms and legs. He wore a black business suit, black tie, white shirt, and he was looking right at me. His face was not non-existent and smoothed over, though most perceive it as such, He had something of an unfinished face that had been glossed over by a layer of translucent skin, and in the right light you could almost see his empty eyes shine through.
He was staring at me, he let the guts slip out of his branchlike fingers and then raised his right hand to his face. With a quick movement of his appendages he painted a smile on his face in blood. It was like he was spitting in my goddamn face. I pulled a flip-knife out of my pocket and approached him. He stood his ground and his head tilted slightly.
It felt like he was laughing at me.
“You bastard,” though I wanted to say as much myself, it was not my mouth that uttered the cry, “you took everything!”
The desperate screams belonged to Sebastian. A man whose trees could no longer bring him an iota of happiness.
