The 4 Phase Man Read Free

congregation will tell of their goodness.”
    “And there be some who have no memorial; whose names have vanished as though they had never been. They lie at rest in nameless graves. Their resting places in far-off forests and lonely fields are lost to the eyes of their revering kin. Yet they shall not be forgotten.”
    The old man lowered his hand, staring deeply into Xenos’s sad eyes. And the old man’s voice was firm as stone and hard as iron.
    “My son is lost to me, now and forever. His name will be vanished, his memory as though he had never been.”
    Then, as if on cue in this kaleidoscopic horror that haunted Xenos virtually every time he closed his eyes, the mother he had never known stood beside them, crying deeply, her voice begging.
    “No!” Avidol, don’t do this! He is your son! You cannot—
    “I have no son, was the old man’s simple, pained,” inelastic reply. “He is a stranger to me.
Yis’kadal v’yiskadash, shme raboh.
”
    And the scene would grow dark, insubstantial, as Xenos would reach out—through—the image of his father. Would be racked with a soul-deep pain that threatened to do what countless evil men’s bullets could not do.
    Destroy the man he had become.
    As the scene would shimmer, blink from existence, then repeat itself in even greater strikes of torment and anguish.
    He awoke with a start, instinctively grabbing the person he sensed above him by the neck, pulling the person down, his knife pressed hard against the exposed throat.
    “Emai Eleni!”
    A quick glance around the tiny room confirmed that they were still alone.
    “What is it?”
    “Soldiers,” she whispered urgently. “Downstairs!”
    “Have you seen the bastard or not? the lieutenant spat out in Greek through his thick Cypriot accent as two enlisted men held the bartender’s arms behind him.”
    “I know nothing,” the bartender slurred out from somewhere in his battered face.
    A baseball bat to the groin was the lieutenant’s response.
    As the man collapsed to the floor, the soldiers began kicking him.
    The lieutenant casually turned to the nearest prostitute, a trembling girl in her early twenties.
    “Listen, grandmother,” he said to the old woman in broken English so that he would not be understood by his men. He may have been speaking to the old woman, but his eyes never left the girl in front of him as his bat began to work its way beneath her skirt. “We do business here. I give you piece of commander’s reward, yes? You get rich, I get richer, an enemy of the state is removed, and your girls stay…” The bat lifted the skirt, then tore it away. “… Charming.
Parakolutheô
?”
    A commotion upstairs caught his attention and he drew his pistol. The soldiers with him cocked their weapons and looked nervously at the stairway. An almost endless moment later the bodies of the two soldiers who had been sent upstairs came rolling down.
    Blood still spurting from gaping wounds in their throats.
    “Attention!” the lieutenant ordered. But it wasn’t necessary. His men couldn’t have been more aware of the gore and threat in front of them if they’d tried.
    It came from two weeks of “hunting the Devil.”
    “Attention,” the tense man called out in Greek. “This is Lieutenant Kazamakis of the Cypriot Provisional Guard. You will immediately surrender all weapons and slowly come down the stairs, hands above your head.”
    No answer.
    Knowing what his men did not, he repeated the order, in English this time.
    “Yeah, right,” came the slow atonal reply.
    The soldiers shivered at the lack of humanity in that voice. Some overturned tables or moved into the cover of doorways. Others crossed themselves and prepared to die.
    “If you do not surrender immediately, we will be forced to come up and get you, the lieutenant said with less strength than he would have liked.”
    “The stairs are in front of you. Come ahead.” A pause that seemed to last many lifetimes. “I’m