Apok: The Birth of Đavo

About the Author

Adrian Lee Baker lives in a small village outside Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire. He is fifty-three years old, married to Angela and has two daughters, Phoebe and Milly. His occupation is in teaching and works as a lecturer and trainer-assessor in further education. He likes country walking, mountain biking and is a Second Dan in the combat sport of kick-boxing. It has always been his ambition to write and have something published. He is an avid fan of both books and films, especially of the sci-fi and horror genres, and latterly, dark fantasy. Hence his writing style reflects the darker side of life. Favourite books include Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Clockwork Orange, Heart of Darkness, Dracula, Naked Lunch, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Dedication

To my wife, Angela, who has allowed me the time and freedom to

pursue my dream.

Copyright Information ©

Adrian Lee Baker 2022

The right of Adrian Lee Baker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528907101 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398426382 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Acknowledgement

Lyndsay Purdie, thanks for your help during the early stages of Apok. Catherine Dunn, for your outstanding skill, incredible feedback and making me believe I can do it. Carol, my biggest fan. I’m just so glad you liked the story. Sarah, for always asking about the story I was writing. Your enthusiasm and belief was invaluable.

Prologue

Apok: No prisoners – death to all – spare no one…

To fully appreciate Apok and what it is, you must first understand where it comes from and its concept.

Apok is an abbreviation taken from the Ancient Greek word apokálypsis. It is also where the word apocalypse originates.

An apocalypse (Ancient Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis, from ἀπό and καλύπτω, literally meaning ‘an uncovering’) is a disclosure of knowledge or a revelation. In religious contexts it is usually a disclosure of something hidden, ‘a vision of heavenly secrets that can make sense of earthly realities’.

In the Book of Revelation (Greek: Ἀποκάλυψις Ἰωάννου, Apokalypsis Ioannou – literally, John’s Revelation), the last book of the New Testament, the revelation which John receives is that of the ultimate victory of good over evil and the end of the present age, and that is the primary meaning of the term. Today, the term is commonly used in reference to any prophetic revelation or so-called end of time scenario, or the end of the world in general.

But what if humanity has got it wrong? What if apocalypse doesn’t mean the end, and in fact, means something quite the opposite? What if it means a new beginning? What then…

Is humankind ready for such a concept?

And just suppose that this new beginning doesn’t lie in the hands of the world’s greatest powers but, like all radical thinking, is locked away deep in the minds of each and every one of us. Something that is so frightening, so formidable, modern society has done its utmost to bury it, suppressed as though it is the most fiendish of prisoners, entombed in the darkest innermost recesses of the human psyche. But this is where the answer lies. It is where the answer to all our problems has always been, standing next to you in the street, in a shop, at work, whenever you see family or friends, or behind the face that stares back every morning from your bathroom mirror; everyone carries a tiny piece of the puzzle, the complexity and vast multitude of which, when brought together, will combine to shape a revolution that will change the world forever. It lies in that innate part of us that has always challenged convention, the part that wants to flip John’s Revelation onto its head by asking: Where exactly on this earth is good winning the fight against evil?

It’s just that no one can see it! And, what’s more, the great powers that control our day-to-day lives want it to stay that way. To them, the status quo is everything; it is to reign with absolute supremacy. From the laws they impose to the relentless plethora of advertising, their master network is an apparatus so entrenched in the collective consciousness that it has the dominance to affect dreams, and in turn it can coerce our moods and behaviours, working its divine magic 24/7. It covertly dictates what we read and what we watch, the food we eat and the beverages we drink, the clothes we wear and the vehicles we drive, right down to the toothpaste that is best for us and even the holidays we go on. All of it is decided by a faceless, nameless master race, the secret elite who don’t want the masses to know that we, as individuals, are each perfectly capable of playing our own part in rescuing humankind’s future.

The year is 1991, the beginning of a new decade. There is no let-up for the warmongers as they regroup after Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm to heighten the rhetoric between Croatia and Serbia. Not content with stirring up the Middle East, they are threatening war in Europe for the first time since World War II, their appetite for power and destruction insatiable in the spectral twilight of yet another millennium. The phantom cries of wars past heckle the victims of the devastation yet to come.

As intellectual beings, we never learn from our mistakes. That’s why history always repeats itself. I suppose, if nothing else, the aggrieved can seek revenge for previous injustices. Our conceit and narrow-mindedness are so ingrained, it seems that every person who is either eligible to vote or capable of carrying a gun is willing to cut off their nose to spite their face in settling past grievances, as though we can only find true happiness in the idea of hurting others, whatever the cost. Einstein said, I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

It is frightening to think of what, if left to the secret elite – a bunch of egotistical, pseudo-Aryan billionaires who aspire to fill the shoes of God, playing ‘chicken’ with their Scuds and Tomahawk cruise missiles – they will one day leave us.

Not that God cares. He would waste no time in having us press the button. To Him, we are a burden, nothing but an unwanted scourge ruining what should have been his magnum opus. Yet here we are, the most ungracious and belligerent of pests, as arrogant as ever, like an old Victorian schoolmaster rubbing God’s face in our technological success as science continues to debunk His credibility.

So, it is no wonder He has left us to perish in a flood of our own making, the deluge slowly but surely overtaking us to pollute land, sea, and air, placing our species in jeopardy for the first time in its short but extraordinary history. What’s more, leading scientists have conceded that the data proves that this thing they call ‘the great human experiment’ is at serious risk of failing. It’s showing no signs of slowing down.

At a recent climate technology conference, a guest speaker broke protocol and grabbed the headlines: As a scientist, I was never inclined to pray, but perhaps now is a good time to start. A tabloid newspaper’s front page read: Surprise away win! Science 0, God 1. The 1980s saw consumerism explode and individual expectation skyrocket exponentially to movie dogma and pop culture mantras. The audience soaked up quotes like ‘Greed is good’ and ‘Sex and horror are the new gods’ and took them straight to heart, their hunger voracious and impatient, the youth movement, in the time it took to sling on a pair of headphones, replacing the old gods of tradition, hard work and the quid pro quo of due reward, with the easy fix of glitz and glamour, fast food and an even faster life, with everything on tap at the mere flick of a switch.

It was a decade ill-equipped for the demand. Everyone was having too much of a good time to notice the glaciers melting and the seas rising, as animal species fell off the radar in unprecedented numbers to warming temperatures and increased deforestation. It was a period that defined a new era of haves and have-nots, a super-breed of super-wealth generating an ethos devoted only to furthering the new hierarchy of worldwide commerce and high finance, the latest in a long line of emerging deities favoured by the secret elite. They cared not for the gods of old, not because there was a clash of interests but out of sheer apathy, which played straight into their hands. They let the wars rage and allowed biblical famines to flourish unabated, starving millions, just as they were equally indifferent to the diseases that plagued entire continents. Death’s icy grip reigned supreme as the Four Horsemen smiled and looked on, as they always have, with the same patient optimism. Where the 1980s finished with the ongoing conflicts in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the Romanian Revolution, the US invading Panama, and civil war in Liberia, the 1990s upped the ante in the Gulf and, with the death tolls in Rwanda and the Balkans, the international stage was set yet again for genocide.

Croatia had always been considered a melting-pot of centuries-old prejudices bubbling away, festering like an invisible contagion of the deep subconscious. Its roots stretch back as far as the fifteenth century and the Ottoman Empire’s expansion into Europe. It sparked a brutal struggle in the region that for the next few hundred years, with only a few brief respites, saw no let-up. By the late twentieth century, it left in its wake a time-bomb, a tightly interwoven incendiary mix of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, the social map like that of a prison yard, confined and intense. Its multiple factions were always in sight of one another, no one giving an inch, old wounds never forgotten, scornful in its conceit, in the backhanded scowls and abrupt conversation of daily life. Common courtesies were voiced to friends and merely nodded to others, people looking down their noses, the hurt and disdain always there to the discerning observer.

Having trained with the Croatian military for months as part of an international influx of volunteers, Andrew is one such observer, an adventurous 23-year-old who, after embarking on an extraordinary journey of discovery, found his true meaning and purpose serving as a soldier in the nation’s new emerging defence force. He knew the hate had never gone away. Those outsiders who thought it had didn’t know the people of the region. After World War II, they had simply learned to bide their time.

It was a kind of self-imposed selective mutism to avoid direct contact; a discriminatory form of social distancing – ‘If you can’t say anything good, don’t say anything at all’. But the sentiment was so callous and so obvious, it didn’t so much suppress the ill-feeling as concentrate it, driving social divisions underground, firmly putting a lid on the communal pressure cooker.

However, it only takes one person to see the situation for what it is, to lift the lid, to see the potential and how best to tap into it. Now, that takes one hell of a keen eye and an even keener intuition. It was this inexplicable ability that allowed Andrew to see the darkness behind the glowered looks, the layers of hatred and the social complexities these layers represented. He didn’t know how; he just knew that he could. But, more than this, he could see it wasn’t just one faction of the prison yard which hated all the rest but a dire dichotomy where every faction hated the others with equal intensity, placing each side on tenterhooks, nearly at one another’s throats.

It was this same ability that allowed him to see the dark for what it was, just like he could see war, horror, fear, hunger, pestilence, and death for the gods they are and the domains they rule. To Andrew, they were fantastical creatures who had learned to co-exist alongside humankind, albeit at our continued expense.

But some gods exude more dread than others, their reputations never failing to precede them. The master of terror and the most formidable monster of them all is the dark; the domain in which all evil prefers to dwell.

Andrew could see war’s pace gathering momentum, the darkness pervading people’s lives, trending on televisions and across news media the world over, but this time to a global community divided, screaming out for a non-complicated solution to ever more complicated issues.

Andrew saw the decline and found it uncanny. He could feel the horror as though it was reaching out. His dreams provided dark conduits to the screams of bombed convoys and strewn bodies scorched into the desert sand along Kuwait’s Highway 80 and to the slow grind of stone on steel as the Hutus sharpened their machetes to the radio message of ‘Cut down the tall trees’. But now Andrew is in war’s theatre, training, and preparing. As graphic and horrifying as the conduits were, they darkened still further allowing him to see Croatia and its people rapidly transforming from a brooding tinderbox of social unease to a case of dynamite sweating under the midday sun, its volatile beads of nitro-glycerine trickling down the thick greaseproof wrapping to drop and snap-crackle on the floor, ready to set Europe and the world on fire, just as the Balkans had done seventy-seven years ago on 28 June 1914.

But as much as he saw the problem as being global, Andrew knew that Croatia and whatever it led to would be the guinea pig, a litmus test of things to come.

With war imminent, Andrew knew instinctively that the time was finally right to put his plan into action; a plan which, once hatched, would spread with war’s lightning speed, its relentless barrage of hateful paranoia preying on those centuries-old prejudices, prising open ancestral wounds, unresolved feuds and unwelcome family alliances, casting doubt and suspicion, turning neighbour on neighbour and brother on brother. It would unlock the minds of all who touch it, like a super-malevolent virus, its vehemence unparalleled and its course unstoppable.

In Andrew’s mind, if humankind was ever going to get a glimpse of heaven, it must first go through hell. Everything has its price, and the admission to utopia is the highest there is – your soul. To enter the light, you must first cross over to the dark in order to prove you have what it takes to survive the forthcoming revolution. However, not everyone who crosses over will come out on the other side. Like all monsters, the dark will have to be fed, leaving its mark; that is the only definite outcome. In the months to come, there won’t be a community, family or individual that doesn’t bear the hideous scars of war’s merciless wrath and the dark’s insatiable appetite.

Andrew could see a nation heading for calamity, its people already subservient to the dark’s subliminal call. He knew that, given the current climate, if you gave two hungry Croats a chicken leg and a knife, one would end up dead while the other feasted. He saw the darkness affecting human nature, dividing, exposing innocuous cracks, then flipping them to create vast differences, separating what used to be cohesive into opposing adversaries, forcing them to compete. But Andrew wanted to take this concept a step further by giving them a knife. What would happen then? To this game-changer, Andrew thought he knew the answer; just like the food, the knife would not be shared, and one would still end up killing the other. In this way he saw that, as a species, we are deeply flawed; our survival instinct, that primordial part of us, is too powerful, overriding our reason in a nanosecond. And it is exactly this that the dark relies on: Our intrinsic human frailty, the characteristics we cannot shake.

The human mind is already a dark place without anything darker invading it.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Captain Walton is quoted as saying, There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.

This quote is true of everyone regardless of age, gender, colour, creed, or era. It is a curse inherent in mankind; a darkness that dwells within us. As individuals, we all battle our demons; the struggle forces us to make choices we hope are good and that put our minds at ease. But what Shelley’s really doing is asking the reader this: When it comes to choosing, which one do you favour? Good over bad; yourself over others? Do you think of yourself as a good person, or are you cursed as well?

Andrew sees this curse as the madness that drives us to do evil things and individual acts into collective actions. To him, it captures the very essence of what it is to survive, to kill, to do whatever it takes. He wants the people of the world to wake up and decide: Is life meaningless and cheap, or is it the most precious commodity we have? He wants them to go through the pain barrier to places once thought inconceivable, flipping minds, and playing with their addictions, and personal fallibility the result of not being able to kill. He wants everyone to ask themselves: Can addiction make us stronger and better able to survive? And on a spiritual level to ask God: What are your thoughts? After all, throughout the Bible’s text, does He not promote ruthless ambition and blind devotion – qualities not a million miles away from addiction? But if you’re asking God, it is only right to ask the Devil how he might reply. Because what is good for the goose, I guess, is good for everyone else. There is a lot to be said for a level playing field. Parity is the greatest weapon there is in fighting inequality. It’s how the mighty fall!

For it is this curse that will outdo the gods and the powers that be, giving rise to the most hideous of beasts, the dormant monster that lies within each and every one of us, the darker primordial half that knows only kill or be killed and the barbaric art of survival.

A curse that was intended to be humankind’s downfall, a kind of self-destruct mechanism God slipped into our DNA when He fell out with us, will now act as our new guardian angel, with its army of monsters led by a new redeemer. Who said the next messiah would be from heaven and that the second coming hasn’t already happened? And what if the fate of humankind is not yet decided; if the gods have left it for us to fight it out among ourselves? What if the real battle for our species’ survival is just about to begin?

Chapter1

The Spark

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here; A Message Etched Deep into Every Fitful Sleep…

Spontaneity is the craziest thing. Not thinking, not rationalising, just doing what you’ve got to do, like it’s the only thing that matters but you don’t know why.

Not knowing if you’re acting out your ultimate fantasy or something you’ve always wished to do but have put off for too long, but in your heart of hearts you’re confident it will be the most decadent thing you will ever do – a moment of pure selfishness, where whatever you do will be for yourself and only yourself and nothing else; a moment that will see fear and consequences fall by the wayside, leaving you free to take the plunge and see where the rabbit hole takes you. Have you ever been compelled to challenge yourself in such a way, to do something extraordinary in a place no one would believe, that is incomprehensibly out of this world? I have. But not only did the experience affect my outlook, it made me completely re-examine who I was and where I wanted my life to take me. Talk about giving life to a monster!

It was like being hit by the proverbial diamond bullet. My mind expanded in a million trillion directions all at once, as if something godlike had whispered the true meaning of life into my ear.

But ask me to remember and I can’t – just snippets in the wee dark hour’s past midnight, the recurring night terrors my only recollection, like it never really happened, though my battered and scraped body told me otherwise. It’s as though during the day my amnesic mind spares me the trauma only to go looking for it once I’m asleep. My sleep is a place of Death’s shadowy vileness, populated by the fantastical beasts that carry out its bidding. It is a domain of chaos, where legends are born, and the foolhardy brave are slaughtered in their quest for notoriety. The gods lap it up in the darkest and most violent hell, Jahannam, has to offer: The ruckus.

How I found it I’ll never understand; I’d never even heard of it. I was led by a casual encounter, a faceless, hooded street urchin, through a maze of tiny, cobbled alleys and covered courtyards that somehow bypassed the main thoroughfares, as if Jahannam was a puzzle to solve and a prize to be had, lost at the centre of some elaborate labyrinth. But once there, I knew my mystery friend had taken me to the right place. For Jahannam is a realm without comparison, without an equal; an ancient palace of sorts that descends deep into the earth, its layered tyranny dedicated to the gods of old and the power they still command.

There, decadence knew no bounds, and horror became my dearest friend. In the sickening imagery that haunts me to this day, the ruckus is an ultra-violent maelstrom of bloody torrents and flesh boiling and bubbling to acid-red froth, fizzing to melt a virgin’s butter-soft complexion. It is a self-contained world of jaw-dropping amazement and gut-wrenching terror, where sight and sound combine to awe-inspiring effect. It is the roaring rage of sadistic exhaustion and the almighty medieval clash of steel on steel as maces and axes bludgeon through armour, as weapons of old compete to drown out the two-stroke motors of chainsaws, and their high-revved buzz as they slice sinew and bone. It is a pair of desperate hands that claw to grab a face and the snapping teeth that pluck out its eyes. It is the insanity of a speckled-red ghoul biting into a still-beating heart while parading the offal of its victim around its shoulders like macabre bunting. It is a world like no other, a world turned on its head, where elderly gimps rape child-like nymphs, and infant siblings are coerced into slitting older siblings’ throats, drinking their blood hot from its source. Sons are forced at gunpoint to pleasure fathers, and daughters are forced to pleasure everyone else. It is a place debauched beyond darkest depravity, where only one mandate rules: Lasciate ogni speranza o voi che entrate – abandon all hope ye who enter here; a message etched deep into every fitful sleep. I know that when I close my eyes the rabbit hole will take me back. It always does, back to low-lit caverns and the dull clank of heavy manacles and thick chain, to gibbets swinging, to petrified faces of stammering tears, smeared with snot and puke, the pathetic creatures within screaming in incoherent delirium to the whir of power tools and the revving of industrial disc cutters.

My dreams never fail to regurgitate the bread and butter of my sleep’s toil: The bashing in of someone’s face, pulling at teeth and gums with pliers, the cutting out of a tongue from a toothless face and the pouring of acid to dissolve a person’s features. I see flash segments of battle and hear the sharp noise of limbs being severed and brains dashed out. I catch a glimpse of a cannibal butcher sharpening his cleaver, his gluttonous chops salivating to the splash of arterial spray and the slop of spilt guts hitting a hard floor. From the gloom, fiendish mutations growl and snarl with glowing eyes that track your every move, fighting over body parts and discarded foetuses. A new mother slumped against a pile of cadavers struggles to stuff her stillborn baby back into her mutilated C-section, in an attempt to save it from the circling beasts.

It is horror personified, as though your very essence gets swept up in a crowd of other dreamers, all out of their depth and all trying to escape. Prostitutes, sex-loving freaks and sex-hating fiends, sodomites, cannibals, sadists, masochists, rapists, torturers, murderers, mass murderers, serial killers, mutilators, and devotees of bestiality, urophilia, coprophilia, paedophilia, and necrophilia – everyone has bitten off more than they can chew in a mad crush, buffeted around in each other’s crazed dreamtime, hoping they’ll wake up. But when you don’t, the horror continues its freak show; a gore-fest to suit every perverted mind. Fingernails and toenails prised up with red-hot needles, then ripped from their root only for the bloody digits to be amputated and the stumps cauterised with naked flame. Dungeons bellow with the sound of elbow and knee joints being drilled as freshly made monsters, unable to blink, cry into dirt-speckled mirrors, their eyelids, lips, nose cartilage and ears cut away, the titbits left for the worm-like sludge that inhabits the floor, a writhing secretion alive with millipedes, centipedes, and all manner of bugs. But violence alone can’t satisfy all.

There are those who seek more.

They want high heels, seven-inch Louboutin’s stamped through cheek and mouth, pinning their quarry while the other shoe is used to excite the prostate to the point of prolapse.

I’ve seen virgins thrown to the wolves as they pick their way through a minefield of studded leather and shiny PVC locked in death-defying duels; livid females clawing and scratching, biting and gouging, doing whatever it takes, armed with greased up strap-ons and macabre dildos. The losers, hung by their hair, are fisted, brutalised, and left to bleed out as other floor-dwellers, enticed by the lure of fresh offal, scurry around everyone’s feet in a race to mop up the hysterectomy scraps. I’ve listened to the mock wedding bells and screamed echoes of twisted erotica, seen a beautiful blonde slumped across a butcher’s block, her partner reeling at the soggy crunch of a spit-roasting pole as it enters her rectum to travel the length of the spine and exit through the neck against the side of her delicate jaw. It is where the morbidly obese are waited on by salivating anorexics, and starved vegans, bound in carnivorous servitude, convulse, straining vacant stomachs while serving stillborn calf fillet tartare.

And still, this is just the tip of a very dark and enticing iceberg. For me, it was the spark that started my fire burning; a rage that has been intensifying ever since. I remember a newscaster quoting a terrorist: I am the spark that will burn down the forest. And although I recognised that this man knew he wouldn’t see his plans through to the end, what he did know was that regardless of him being alive or dead, the fire would keep on burning. And then it struck me – what an adversary! What an inspiration! How do you fight someone like that? How do you even counter an enemy who will willingly die for their cause? The thing is – you don’t. The best-case scenario is that you get to die alongside them. For the terrorist, it’s win-win, and this was what the Jahannam faithful represented – a hardcore throng that would do anything to satisfy their next fix, let alone live out their dreams.

It was the most despicable of wombs, a melting pot of what should not be, yet there it was, hell’s abyss and the darkest recesses of the human psyche spliced in perfect harmony – the ultimate fusion of soulless contempt. Where on that fateful night, not one, but two evils were conceived, a spark igniting two fires that began to grow. Two evils that complimented one another, both destined to be inseparable. They were identical twins of the foulest marriage. A union that should have never been allowed, but the gods – they wanted to play.

They were two evils that reset the axis between right and wrong, light, and dark, the surface world and the underworld, tilted in favour of the latter. Two evils whose names, Đavo and Apok, were but a rumour whispered in the dingy bars of back streets amongst the lower classes and seen as daubed graffiti in alleys by delinquent kids. Yet the stories inspired all who heard them, despite their myth and fantastical boasts, the onset of war fuelling their impact.

They were the kind of tall tales told in bars that would go quiet on the main door opening, only to pipe up again, but staying quiet to strangers. Hunching around tables, hushed groups in fervid excitement would regale the latest saga in a series of ever more lurid Chinese whispers as they went around the houses – Đavo, the ultimate psychopath and his superhuman exploits. He was seen as a peoples’ champion, a warrior-king, invincible, who relished the heat of battle and revelled in its carnage. However, Apok was a different tale to tell, in that, it was not about a person. It was more of a concept, an ideal described as the ultimate addiction – the vice of killing. But however hard folks tried to grasp the nuts and bolts of it – what it is to kill and enjoy the act of killing – the more insane their chatter sounded and the more like killers they became. And so, having fought my first ruckus, I left Jahannam under a new name and for the very first time, had given myself meaning and purpose, albeit whispered. But again, ask me to remember – and I can’t. Not until the next time I sleep.

Chapter 2

A Baptism of Fire

Wars Are Like That; They Attract All Sorts…

They’re coming around. Everything needs to be ready. It has to be perfect, all my props in their rightful places ready to