Call to Arms - Intro Chapter

A Christian fantasy adventure story that gives Paul's letter to the Ephesians a twist!

Please don't get too excited about this one, as it's a work that I've abandoned! I pitched it to a couple of Christian Publishers in the UK, but it didn't pique their interest enough, so I moved on. I did complete a few chapters as a sample and I suspect there are readers here that will enjoy the concept. If there's interest, I'll post more later.

CALL TO ARMS
Book 1 – Demon Slayer

Chapter 1 – A Real Eye-Opener

Why me? I’ve caught myself wondering that a lot recently. It’s not as if I was brought up to believe in anything like this. Angels, demons, the heavenly realms … it was the stuff that nerdy religious kids got excited about, and I’m about as far from that stereotype as I could be. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been bad exactly. But I just never saw myself as the churchy type.

I was never hip, trendy, nor a cool jock either, despite being fit and good at lots of sports. My thing was ambition. I had plans for my life. I intended to do well at school so I could get a good job, travel widely, make a name for myself and experience life to the full. I was determined that Nathan Price was a name that people were going to respect. Church, religion and stuff like that seemed irrelevant and kind of stupid. Never for one second did I imagine being able to cite slaying demons as a skill on my CV.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself. I should really go back to the beginning. It’s a good place for any story to start, and boy do I have a story! This one began, as most stories about teenage boys do, with a girl. I was in between events at a regional inter-schools athletics competition when I first saw her.

‘Hey, Jimbo,’ I said, nudging my mate with my elbow. ‘Check out the girl in the short shorts!’

‘Where?’ James asked, looking round.

We were standing in the middle of the four hundred metre track at the high jump area, waiting for our division to start. He followed the line of my finger.

‘The one in second?’ he asked, tracking the girls as they sprinted round the bend into the home straight.

‘That’s the one.’

‘Yeah, she’s nice,’ he agreed. ‘Her name’s Rhiannon. Do you want me to introduce you?’

I stared at him for a moment in amazement and then returned my focus to the end of the girls’ two hundred. Rhiannon finished still in second place, the winner beating her by a fair margin. It wasn’t that she was drop dead gorgeous or anything. Sure, she was slim and she had legs that seemed to go all the way up to her neck, but her features were more quirky than naturally attractive. Dimpled cheeks, an almost heart shaped face that accentuated her small mouth and overly pointed chin were balanced by delightfully expressive hazel-coloured eyes. I’d always been a sucker for nice eyes. It was her quirkiness that placed her more in my league and made her all the more attractive to me.

‘How do you know her?’ I asked, curious to discover the source of his knowledge.

James ‘Jimbo’ Stephens had an even less successful track record with the girls than I did, so my curiosity was well-founded. He wasn’t helped in his efforts at attracting a girlfriend by looking something akin to a stick insect. True, you could say there wasn’t an ounce of fat on the guy, but there wasn’t much in the way of anything else either. He was painfully thin and gangly to look at, but I knew from having seen him devour his lunch at school that there was nothing anorexic about his eating habits. His metabolism must have been through the roof.

Some of the older lads had nicknamed him ‘Foot and mouth’, which I found secretly funny, but too cruel to adopt. His feet weren’t overly large, but he did have a reputation for exaggeration and boasting which wound some people up. Not me, though. I liked him. For all his bravado and wild stories, he was also dependable – a good friend.

‘She goes to the same youth club as I do,’ he explained. ‘She’s pretty quiet, but she seems nice.’

‘I didn’t know you went to a youth club,’ I said, unable to totally hide my surprise. With valid reason, I thought. Jimbo was not exactly the sort to keep a thing like that under wraps.

‘Yeah, well I’m a regular man of mystery, I am,’ he laughed, his face alight with a broad smile.

‘Riiigggghhhht!’ I drawled, piling as much sarcasm into the single word as I could manage.

‘Come on, Nathan. Let’s go talk to her. I reckon we’ve got time before the high jump starts,’ he said, striding off towards the finish line where the girls were cooling down.

‘Woah there, buddy!’ I called, feeling suddenly alarmed. In truth, I didn’t want James blowing my chances with her by association. The last thing I wanted was him blasting in with the subtlety of an over-excited rhino. ‘Look, the judges are coming. Let’s leave it until later, shall we? We can go talk to her after I whoop your sorry butt at the high jump.’

‘Ha! In your dreams, maybe!’

My play for time worked and as it happened I didn’t get to talk to Rhiannon that day. The high jump competition went on for some time and by the time we finished, she had disappeared. That suited me fine. A one-off chat wasn’t what I had in mind and if I’d spoken to her on the track and then turned up at her youth club, she’d be on to me straight away. I’d already decided that I needed to check out this youth club.

James spent a while scouting the sports field looking for her without any luck before I made my play.

‘Hey, don’t sweat it, Jimbo,’ I said casually as he flustered from one part of the field to the next. ‘I’ll just have to come along to this youth club of yours sometime. What nights do you go and where is it?’

James suddenly looked embarrassed. He squirmed as he struggled to answer. I was tempted to tease him into answering, but in the end I let him get there on his own.

‘Fridays at 7pm,’ he said finally. ‘But I’m not sure it’ll be your thing.’

‘Why not?’ I asked, more intrigued than ever. ‘There’s at least one hot girl there. She’s my kind of thing. I’m sure I’ll cope with the baggage that comes with that.’

‘It’s a church youth group,’ he admitted, lowering his voice and glancing round as if he was afraid he might be overheard. ‘The meetings are rather God-squad-ish.’

‘OK,’ I said carefully. ‘So she’s a God-botherer. I guess I can cope with that. I must admit I didn’t have you pegged as one, though. So what sort of things do you do at this youth club?’

‘Well, there’s normally a bit of singing, someone gives a short talk, we pray a bit and then we hang out… you know, chat, eat and drink. That’s what I really go for – they’re a really open and friendly bunch.’

James was literally bright red in the face now. I’d never seen him this uncomfortable before. It was kind of funny. I pressed on.

‘You sing? What … like hymns and stuff? Like morning assembly in school?’

‘Sometimes,’ he nodded. ‘But more often we sing modern worship songs. The leader plays a guitar and sometimes other musicians play as well. I’m certainly not going to attempt to sing one here, so you’ll have to just come along and see for yourself. The leader’s great. He organises different speakers most weeks and some of them are really interesting. He’s a good speaker too. Craig comes most weeks, too.’

‘Craig Fairbrother?’

James nodded. Craig was another boy in my class. He was a good guy – bright, football mad and with a good sense of humour. His presence would add more competition than James presented. He could also sing. I couldn’t. At least, not as well as he could.

‘So it’s mainly boys there then.’

‘No,’ James said quickly. ‘There’s at least twice as many girls as boys. Maybe more. That’s kind of why I joined.’

I could believe that. It was, after all, also my reason for going along. I must admit that I liked the sound of those odds better than the ones we had at school. I made a show of considering it for a moment, but in reality I’d already made up my mind.

‘Friday at seven, you say…’

Friday couldn’t come fast enough. I thought of nothing else all week, though my excitement at potentially getting to meet Rhiannon was mixed with a nervousness unlike anything I’d felt before. What little I knew of church had come from sitting through weddings, the odd funeral and an occasional carol service that Mum had dragged my younger sister and me along to over the years. Not that Mum was much of one for going to church either. I think she just liked the whole Christmas atmosphere, the decorations, the candles and the fact that the carols were songs that she knew from her own childhood. I reckon it was probably nostalgia that made her think to take us along to the local church with her then. Dad never went. Church definitely wasn’t his bag. Should I feign knowledge or try to get away with a casual interest in the God stuff? It was a dilemma.

A worse conundrum was what I should wear. If it was a regular youth club then I’d have been comfortable in sloppy jeans and a t-shirt, but this was different. I didn’t want to be the goth among the emo’s. Should I dress smart? People did that for church things, didn’t they? I didn’t like to ask James, who was far from being a fashion guru. I settled on black jeans and a pale blue short-sleeved shirt – not special occasion smart, but not slobbish either. I reckoned even if there was an unwritten dress code, I’d get by dressed like this.

I needn’t have worried. I’d arranged to catch a lift with James, as the club met in Oxtree, a little over ten miles away from our village. When I climbed into the back of his car and saw him in scruffy faded jeans and a deliberately ripped t-shirt, I realised that if anything I might be overdressed.

‘Hey, James!’

‘Good to see you, Nathan,’ he replied. ‘Should be fun tonight.’

‘I hope so. Thanks for driving me, Mr Stephens.’

‘My pleasure, Nathan. Anytime.’

The rest of the drive I spent listening as James told stories of previous meetings, reeling off crowds of names that I was never going to remember. I let them wash over me. I’d long since learned not to take anything James said at face value. I was just looking forward to meeting Rhiannon and making my own mind up on whether the youth club was worth working into my weekly routine.

We arrived with about ten minutes to spare and I looked up at the front of the Oxtree Baptist Church building. A tremor of nervous anticipation fluttered in my gut.

‘You meet in the actual church?’ I asked, a little surprised. It didn’t seem the obvious venue for a bunch of kids to get together.

‘Nah!’ James chuckled. ‘There’s a small church hall through the back. We meet in there. Come on. I’ll show you. Later, Dad!’

He sprang away from the car and leapt up the steps two at a time, pushing through the large double doors, which swung open easily without so much as a squeak. I waved my thanks again to Mr Stephens and followed, trying to act cool. I’ve no idea if I pulled it off, but I took my time as I strolled through the main body of the church, taking time to look up at the U-shaped upper level balcony of tiered pews.

It was very different from our local Church of England building that dated back to the time of the Norman invasion. It was warmer. More focused. I’m not quite sure what I’d been expecting. There was a strange mix of traditional church fixtures with bizarrely anachronistic modern add-ons. Monitors were mounted on many of the stone pillars and there was a large central screen behind the lectern from where I presume the preacher spoke. Amplifiers, speakers and microphones seemed in abundance. There were even electric guitars and a full drum kit behind a clear plastic cage, while the seating and decoration of the church was clearly from another century. The mixture of technology and tradition made me feel as if the building was uncertain of its identity.

The church hall was more of a large back room rammed full of chairs in rows along its length rather than its width. I estimated there were about fifty crammed into the small space. Again there was a microphone obviously meant for the speaker, though why he would need one in here, I wasn’t sure.

We were among the first arrivals. There were a handful of others chatting in a cluster in the open space in front of the chairs. Rhiannon was not among them. I turned to take a seat at the back, but James wasn’t going to let me sneak in without announcing my arrival.

‘Come on, Nathan. Let me introduce you to Max. He and his wife, Jenny, are the leaders.’

I suspect that even if James had not been intent on making me known to Max, the man would have made a bee-line for me anyway. He had clocked me as a new face the moment I walked through the door and I had likewise noticed him noticing me. He looked friendly enough. By the smattering of grey hair and the laughter lines at the corners of his eyes, I placed him in his mid-forties. He didn’t try to dress like the teens he was leading, which was a relief. That sort of falseness really irritates me. We exchanged pleasantries and I was allowed to quietly fade into the background.

From my vantage point on the back row I was able to observe the rest of the group filtering in. One thing I noted immediately was that James hadn’t been exaggerating about the ratio of girls to boys. What he hadn’t told me was the age span, though. Some of them were probably only ten or eleven. Others were out of my league in the other direction. Where were the thirteen to fifteens? Then a gaggle of them entered together and my eyebrows rose. Some of them were really attractive. One could even have been described as beautiful. Totally out of my league, though. I dismissed any thoughts of even trying there. I was nothing if not a realist. Besides, I was waiting for the girl I’d been thinking about all week.

Rhiannon was one of the last to arrive. Dressed in casual clothes, she looked even more attractive than she had at the athletics meeting. Her hair, no longer tied in a ponytail, framed her face like a soft chestnut cloud. For a moment I was filled with doubts, but I was here now. I resolved to meet her. I needed to know if there was any chance she would like me. Unwittingly, she sat almost as far from my central position as she could, but I knew my chance would come later.

The meeting began and after giving a short welcome, Max shouldered his guitar and began a time of what he called worship. To me it was just standing and singing songs, but looking round the room I could see that to at least half of the people in the room it meant more than making a pretty noise. Some had their eyes closed as they sang. Some had their hands in the air, or held out as if expecting something to be placed in them. I won’t lie. I found it all a bit strange, but little did I know that on a scale of one to ten, this would barely register compared with the weirdness yet to come.

Max put his guitar down, closed his eyes and began to pray. His prayer was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It was passionate and clearly unrehearsed. Unlike the majority, I didn’t close my eyes. I was here to observe and assess, I told myself, and that is exactly what I did. His ‘Amen’ brought a hearty echoed response from the audience and then everyone sat down.

When he picked up a huge leather-bound bible, I inwardly groaned. However, I was totally unprepared for what happened next. The words he began to read captivated me immediately.

‘Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power,’ he began. ‘Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.’

He read the passage with such fervour and emphasis that for a moment it felt almost as if I was under a spell. Then it happened – I glimpsed something impossible. As Max read on to describe the armour of God, I looked around the room my eyes widening with amazement. Armour was actually appearing on people. Not everyone. For a start my mate James wasn’t wearing any, and there didn’t seem to be a full set anywhere in the room. Even Max seemed to be missing his breastplate and belt.

My heart was pounding like crazy and my mouth had gone dry. I blinked hard … several times. It was still there. The most prolific items were the glowing helmets. More than half the room were wearing them now, ghostly and transparent, yet they had an aura of strength about them. They looked like those worn by Roman soldiers in the classic films.

Some of the young people were also wearing shining breastplates and had shields on their arms, but my darting eyes kept coming back to one thing that dominated the room. It was hypnotic. The bright glowing sword that Max held in his hand was as impossible as Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. Yet there it was.

It’s official, I thought. I’m totally off my head!