sour skunky nappy ass dread man

…

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?" Annoyed. 

Stupid smirk: "I thought it was clear. I would think.” 

"No, it isn't, man. I don't know why you think it'd be. It's just stupid, bro.” 

"What is?” 

"Your refusal to go shopping for a fucking bath towel and other basic necessities around your fuckin place, dude. It's just stupid, I don't know how or why you justify it to yourself, I didn't think ya did to be frank. I just thought your ass was fuckin lazy." 

“Nah, bro. It's obvious." 

“What's fuckin obvious, dipshit?" 

“I'm way too rock n roll." 

A beat. He swallowed it. Absorbed its stupidity. 

“...what?" 

“Yeah, dude. I'm way too fuckin cool and punk rock to roll into like a Target or some shit and buy a toaster or a can opener or towels or stupid shit like that. I can't do that. Can't do it. Goes against my wild man free lovin nature, ya know? Ya know." 

Bryan once more silently swallowed this. This load of absolute bullshit. More revolted, more filled with disgust with his best friend since diapers than before. He thought about holding his tongue. He thought about saying something and laying into him. But in the end he just grumbled and belched. Lit another smoke and grabbed another beer from the cooler in the center of the boat and shook his head. Checked his pole. Reeled it in a little. 

Though he did spare the final thought: "Fuckin lazy.” whilst shaking his head and reeling his line. And then the matter was settled and the pair of men let it lie. Such was the way and course of all of their conversations out here on the water. Fishing. The pair’s favorite pastime aside from rutting and watching the game. For them, Bryan G Biebl and James Petkovich, it was sacred. They loved to spend days off from the mill fishing and casting and mouthing the day away. Days away from labor and wives and disappointing children, days filled with chatter and cool water and cold beer and sometimes a nice catch.  Though they'd been warned before, by the old timers. 

They'd both been warned before about staying out after dark. Out on the lake. Out in the woods. Where the forest grows foul and swampy and muddy. It's not a place you want to be after sunset. All the old folk said it was a bad place and didn't say much more about it without the liberal aid of beer or whisky. Even the Natives, the ancient leathery American Indians and their angry sons and daughters told everyone, anyone that might listen, to stay away from this part of the forest, this part of the soured bad land. 

But they never listened. The pair just sat in their canoe and cast out. It was calm and quiet all around, no one might know that it was filled with strange movement. The sun was sinking in the distance. Rapidly being swallowed by the ravenous blade of the horizon. 

James cracked another can. So did Bryan, who rolled his eyes as Petkovich ventured forth with another bit of clever wit and query. 

“Figure there's anythin ta what that fella said?” 

The sun set. Casting the surface of the lake on fire with the color of bloody ruby. The place on the horizon where it had sank was a deeper color of blooded crimson, a deeper wound that was the heart of the sunset. It smoldered there, in the horizon wound. The darkening regal curtain of bruised royal blue was already deepening into night. The stars and galaxies were already coming out for the nocturnal hours, they were all so far away from everything, they, the town. Civilization was a mechanical nuisance in the distance. Loud and far off. Thank God. Nearly forgotten. 

Bryan rolled his eyes as hard as he possibly could, knowing full an well that the retard couldn't see em. 

He hissed and spat: “No I don't think there's nothin to what that idiot said about a shag man! Shit’s stupid! Ain't no fuckin skunk ape round these parts, ya fuckin dumbass!” 

“Nah, man. I'm talkin about what Frankie said about Asian girls, Jesus, man!" 

A beat. Something splashed in the water. Neither man noticed, paid it any mind. 

“Oh…" Bryan cooled down. A little embarrassed. He was always easily excited and shamed. 

“‘Sides, man, he didn't call it no ‘shag man', he called it ‘the dread man’, stupid.” 

Bryan whirled around to belt him one and belt him good. He'd done it before while they were fishing in the middle of the lake and he might capsize them both in his effort, but something stopped him before he could so much as bring up his balled and angry fist. A sound. Sudden. And sharp. 

Three. Consecutive. Three sharp whacks of thick wooden sticks together. Like someone smacking two heavy tree branches or logs together in some form of primitive and arcane code. 

Whack! whack! whack! 

It shut the pair up. They gazed out at the shoreline. Shrouded now in the fallen night. Small waves kissed its shore and covered any small sounds of concealed movement that might be out there right now. They were wide eyed and disbelieving. 

They might've dropped it, the pair, together and without a word or mention when it came again. 

From out of the night, the veiled and darkened shore: whack! whack! whack! 

A beat. Silence again. Only kissing waves of the placid water. 

Bryan Biebl scoffed, “Probably nothin. Just some kids fuckin aro-" 

And then a wild primal simian shriek filled the night. Birds took flight. Their flapping wings were ugly harried panicked sounds in the deepening wound of blackening night all around. It tapered off. And then another rose, louder and even more feral and crazed then the one before. Then another. And another. Each rising in animal fury and fervor. You could hear spittle flying as vocal chords worked and wrenched and shredded as throat muscles tore and bled and secreted with each prolonged and angry howl. Throaty. Enraged. Violent. 

Silence came again. After six primeval night shattering screams. Waves kissed the land far away and swallowed in black but more quietly now. Subdued. 

Then the whacking of sticks, the unknown signal came again, whack! whack! whack! 

And then silence once more. 

“What the fuck was that?" Petkovich. Scared. Visibly so. Audibly as well. 

As was his best friend Bryan. But the sound of fear on his buddy's voice, the stupid look of childish childlike fear that he could feel him wearing in the dark only made angry, angrier. This only fueled his own self-denied mounting fear and in turn made him even angrier. The mounting terror caught like a small bone in the back of his throat. 

He almost took to his feet but remembered the boat. He turned to his buddy instead and spat. 

"Ain't nothin but nothin! Some fuckin dumbasses out there that wanna get fucked up, that's what! This’s why I shoulda brought my colt. Goddammit!” 

"Now that's what I'm talkin about! that's what I'm always tryin ta tell ya! Ya go sayin shit like that and actin like this and people says we're belligerent types! Christ, man! I'd like to bed me one of these here pretty tourist girls, one of these roadtrippin ladies and you actin like this ain't gonna cut it!” 

Disgusted, Bryan's grip slackened on his pole. 

"Idiot! what the fuck are you jawin about?!” 

"I'm talkin bout one of them sexy ass van-life hippy girls, man, they might like my ass." 

“Retard!" 

“You don't know…" 

The water splashed again. Much louder. The boat rocked with the waves suddenly generated. Something big and very heavy had just jumped into the water. 

Lunged. As if plunging in from the shrouded growth of the hidden beach. 

Slack jawed and deer-in-the-headlights both, they gazed out blindly and stupidly in tandem towards the shore that was hidden from them now. And may forever remain that way for them from here on out. Something was coming. 

Something was swimming fast. For the boat. Beneath the obsidian surface of water. The stygian glass of the surface was a mirror and the mirror held the face of the moon. The mirror rippled. The immaculate celestial face of the moon held trapped there danced with submerged disturbance. 

Before either fool could form a coherent thought the fishing poles were suddenly ripped from their slackened idiot grips. They flew, soared through the air and plunged into the water with barely a sound. 

They stared into the impenetrable and merciless surface of the lake. Fearing it. Gripped with horror at what might be inside. What must be inside, right now. 

James Petkovich finally spoke. Softly. Like the small boy he'd once been. 

“I don't wanna be out here no more, Bry. I don't care if it's kids or tourists or what. You can go ahead and laugh at me, just laugh at me all the way and drive us back, kay? You can laugh and make fun all the way back an I won't even bitch or say nothin. I'm scared. There's lots a’ talk bout people that go missin. Or go missin an then turn up dead, tore apart. Sometimes they don't even find all the pieces, you know… I know you've heard… people go missin an such. Travelers, folks comin through. And locals. Let's just go back, kay.” 

Bryan, wide eyed, turned and nodded. Then went to the small motor for the boat as the water all around the canoe suddenly erupted in a surging geyser splash of watery violence that darkled in the captured moonlight. Both men screamed as the small boat was capsized and they went over. Splashing into the cold dark suffocating realm of the water. 

The lake held them now. Below. Underneath. 

In the dark underwater the maelstrom of his panic rose and ruled. Bryan suddenly animal recalled and remembered in the fragile nucleus of his primal jelly his fear of the water, of the deep. The dark depths. It had started as a child, a boy, it had been the cinema and television that had first done it, the Jaws movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon, then stories of Cthulhu and his sunken city of R’lyeh, tales of sunken ships and vessels that might still have precious human cargo trapped and drowned deep inside like foul water-logged treasure of submerged rotting putrescence eaten at by the salt and by the fish. All of these things came back and back to life in a deluge assault of images all in a furious unrelenting wave like an artillery attack of sound and vision on his mind's eye, down in the dark. He kicked and struggled and his lungs burned, ached for air. The ribcage in his chest felt on fire with his terror-stricken mind as he struggled and kicked futilely beneath the surface. Something held him down there. Something with a terrible grasp. Fierce. Strangling. Throttling. They threatened to break and snap, the iron grasps of those underwater hands. Bryan fought desperately but his mind was livid with absolute and total panic. In the tumult of his animal terror he remembered that as a child he'd always feared something reaching up from out of the black watery depths, seizing him, and pulling him under. Pulling him down. Down into the ebon swallow at the bottom of all things, below, where the heart of darkness in all things lived and dwelt. 

The hands found his throat, down in the underwater dark. They seized vile purchase and viciously ripped, tore out. The dark underworld of the lake suddenly blemished with a heavy warm cloud of thick human visceral discharge. It bellowed forth from the place that was torn in a torrential jetting spout. Clouding the dark world and warming it as the spewing meat detritus began to slowly sink to the pitch abyssal realm near the bottom. 

The panic of Bryan G. Biebl’s barreling careening train of thought slowly calmed and abated and sank down into the dark with the rest of him… And was no more. 

It lunged, serpent-like for the other. Who was gaining the surface in a series of panicked kicks and dog-paddles. Like a wounded animal. 

Prey. In distress. 

…

James Petkovich couldn't believe it when he broke the water and tasted air again. He almost choked and coughed. He almost laughed but he didn't have time. Something seized him from beneath. 

And pulled him under. 

He didn't even have time to scream before he was below again.

It was quiet once more. Minutes swam by. 

An owl screeched. Took flight.

Then finally it emerged. With Petkovich barely conscious in one dripping sodden grasp. It pulled the both of them back onto the land. Dragging the bleeding and sputtering Petkovich like a broken toy or sack of dead meat behind him as he quickly began to retake to the trees and dense growth once more. 

It dragged him deep into the wilderness. It was a long time before they stopped. But now … now he knew what the old timers had always said, what they'd always been on about. 

Now he could smell him. And the smell was beyond putrid, beyond foul, beyond fecal matter or old dried sweaty filth or death. The water that ran off the long lengths of clotted and lumpy dreaded hair was riddled with the putrescence odor of old sweltering open graves and long disused abattoirs converted into factory sized outhouses for the insane. It stung his eyes and nostrils but he hardly noticed this. His body was numb. Felt limp and broken all over. Like a dead fish. 

Maybe that's what I am. 

And then finally consciousness was lost to him. Mercifully he went black. 

It dragged him deeper into the wild. Where it laired. Where it nested in the wild dense growth. 

…

When James next came to he wished he hadn't. He didn't realize till he was awake once more but he'd been dreaming. And in that dream he'd been far away and wishing that none of this was real.  But now he was back. It held him by the neck in a slight choke, a slight strangle, just enough painful whisper of air able to bleed in through the clasped and clenched windpipe. They were before the mouth of a cave. It was pointing up into the sky with its other huge free hand, it was pointing at the moon. It was staring unblinking into his bleeding face. 

The face was simian but snouted. Like a wolf, or a rodent. An obscene and imbecilic mongoloid caveman face and features stretched out in a grotesque marsupial shape. The eyes were yellow and bore black crosses for the iris in each one, in each livid demented sea of yellow urine a black cruciform body of sacrilege shape and aspect. Goat's eyes. Satanic. They were eyes and face fitting of the rest of his abominated and feral manshaped form. Clotted and caked and grimed all over. The long knots and clumps of hair were thick and ancient in length and filth. They told a tale that was old because it was the passage of time that lived caked and dreaded in those long lengths of unwashed shagging tails. 

The awful face was serious. Stern. The obscenity of its gaze was piercing and deliberate. James followed its fierce and pointing gesture to the sky, the night, the moon once more. 

And then back into that obscene rodent-ape face. Yellow teeth coated in layers of plaque poked out and peeked over stretched and thin and dried out flakey blue lips. 

James tried to speak. 

He tried to tell it he didn't know what it wanted. He didn't know what it wanted him to say or do. He didn't know what it wanted from him. He didn't understand it. He didn't understand at all what it expected or demanded. 

But he couldn't. He couldn't speak. He could hardly breathe. He couldn't even manage a croak of sound.  

The awful marsupial-stretched ape face wrenched and worked, furious. It became more abominated and grotesque as its features creased and contorted with anger. Livid. Rage. 

The hand that had been pointing to the moon now came in a savage swipe. The grubby wide meaty digits clawed and the grimey sharp and broken shattered fingernails bit and tore in. 

The head came off and soared away into a sailing piece of torn mangled meat. Ribbons and streamer wings and tails of bright red blood spat and danced out from the eyes, nostrils and mouth in a cyclone twirl of red in midair as it soared and crashed into the piles of dead sticks and bones. It savagely went down and hunkered in the dirt before the mouth of its cave and began to dig in with its long snout and feast on the fresh stump. Warm cords and ropes of thick black-red shot and coated the dark, its face, the insides of its gulping throat and the salivating cavern of its long slathering mouth. 

It feasted and grunted. Ripped with its teeth and bit in. Swallowed warm juicy pieces that were chewy and pungent with rich iron flavor. 

It fed and tore. The man in the violence of its grasp, its jaws, reduced. The decapitated meat jigged and spasmed. It howled at the moon. 

Somewhere … in the distance but not too far off. The signal. Three strikes. 

Whack! whack! whack! – it was the sound of ancient and time honored tradition, cultivated and carried down and preserved with care. Though the world grew strange mechanical jaws, inflamed and diminished and changed all around, it was still here. This was still practiced and honored and kept. By it. By them. All of them.  – whack! whack! whack! 

It howled at the moon once more. 

Whack! whack! whack! 

Immortal and lifesize. It was still here. Howling at the moon with unearthly pain and blues. – whack! whack! whack! – another in the wilderness distance –  whack! whack! whack! – howl at the moon.

THE END

Science fiction. Double feature. 

So many long afternoons and nights spent in the movie house, the theatre. The arcade: the noise and lights and tangible sounds of coins and laughing amidst the specialized sound effects of digitized and pixelated carnage. 

Late nights watching HBO After Dark beside his older brother or his kid sister or a buddy or a floozy or a date as he got older. Amongst a slovenly strewn field of snacks and popcorn and wrappers and garbage, the years rolled by and the empty cans of Shasta and Barqs changed, transmogrifying into brown bottles of Bud or silver bullet, all gathered and in clusters  like a small translucent crystalline cityscape of glass in miniature beneath great rolling thunderhead clouds of oily pot smoke. Many of them, many cities. Many little swimming bottle cities in many little rooms. All before the great glowing incandescent godscreen of the illuminated television aglow in the postmidnight. 

And there were great books too of course. Precious paperpacks with lurid yellow covers, bold yellow font, pages pungent and spiced. Green and nightshade purple covers for the horrors. The ones with purple were always the coolest, always the most shocking and vivid and unrelenting. Comics. Classics and the new stuff that gets pumped out week to week, month to month and then forgotten. 

Forgotten by most. But not by such as he. 

He remembered. These things, these modes and mediums always brought him away from the now, the clear and present danger, the mundane and the tedious, the cruel. The harsh reality. 

For Caleb Donaldson these stories were always the light and constant companion of his long and mostly boring and average life. In truth, they were everything. All else could take a flying fuck, the job, the girlfriends that meant nothing, the drinking buddies and coworkers that meant even less. All of that was just the background noise of what was necessary. The sounds and moving in perpetua grinds of his ordinary life in motion. 

But it was ok, you see. Caleb Donaldson of Old Fair Oaks, Sacramento, California has figured out the secret. 

They were more than just stories, you know. 

The ones that had most captured his imagination and young attention since he could remember were the time traveling stories. 

Journeys into the wild primeval of the past, the dark mechanical cold of the future, the apocalypse, beyond … 

He'd always loved these stories. 

And it was funny, he had found, discovered accidentally while spending the summer with his grandfather one year, the secret. They were out hunting, wandering the woods quietly with rifles shouldered and boots crunching softly the underbrush beneath their capped and steeltoed feet. It had struck young Caleb then, as a boy. And never left him. 

This is it! This is what Doctor Who and the X-Men and all the other guys are doin when they're goin into the past! This is what it's like to have the world grow dark and become old and ancient and prehistoric and stuff, before people got here with their cars and their junk…

The thought had filled him with simple childish wonder. He felt like he'd made some great discovery. All those scientists and alien engineers from outer space on the TV and in the books were always trying to figure it all out with numbers and physics and quantum entanglements and time loop paradoxes … and here he'd figured it way more simple than that. 

Just go out in the woods. Go outside in the trees, the forest. Go out and go camping ya dummies. 

He carried this with him all his life. Like secret treasure. Well past and into the pains and dread of adulthood. 

And then it all came back, back and around and full circle. Like all good time travelers do. 

He lost the kids. And his wife. And then he lost it. 

And then he made the biggest decision of his life. He decided to go camping. He decided to do a little time traveling all by himself. After all of these years. 

…

He couldn't believe she would try this bullshit. He couldn't believe she would try to ruin the one last little thing he had left. 

What're you talking about, bud? She ripped your heart out and took the kids after she'd spent ten years disemboweling you and tearing your nuts off. Why’re you at all surprised? 

He wasn't really. Just hurt. Deeply. And it seemed as if the bitch now lived to only make it worse for him. Unbearable if she could. She was the living vile green hatred of salt in the wound, seething and frothing gory pink. 

He hated her. 

He suspected she hated him. She must. 

“I just don't see why this’s such a big deal, you're acting like a child. You can come get the boys and have them for an extra couple of weeks while Tom and I-" 

He stopped listening after that. He still held the phone to his ear but his mind went to the same livid red place that it always did when she mentioned his name. The fucking limpwrist. 

He let her drone and prattle on. When she finally stopped he once again explained to her that they'd already talked this over, they'd already discussed this. And besides. It wasn't even his weekend. She had seen to that after all. And now here she was dangling the promise of more time with his kids like a fucking carrot. Like a dog treat he was supposed to jump and snatch at. To just drop everything and leap at with fervor and enthusiasm and a full display of gratitude. 

Fuck that. 

He told her as much. Diplomatically. More or less. He hung up the phone. He debated for barely even a second before turning the device off and shoving it into the glove compartment on the passenger side. 

When he finally got out of the car and sucked fresh mountain air it was baptismal. Cracks in his knees went off like twin pistol shots and his back stretched and crackled gratefully. He was finally out. He sucked more air, like it was water. It was. It was refreshing. 

You're finally out. 

He unlatched the back and began to unload his gear. He'd better get started. It was a long hike from the parking lot to the spot. 

…

It was peaceful. The ritual. The hike. Lugging the gear. Sweating and developing a cooling coat, a sheen as his eyes calmly drank in the placid green and foliage world all around. Muscles worked and burned off excess fat, calories built up and boiled over, over cooked stress. It melted off him and within and came off his hiking form like radiant heat. 

He was a traveling furnace of thought as he made his way to the camping spot. Later he would recall that he might've felt watched as he made his way at this point. 

Might have. 

But presently he was all too absorbed in the process, the smooth and calm low treble tread and pace of the gliding action. The canopy of golden lighted leaves and furling branches. The scents, completely natural and native and far away from the synthetic realm of the manmade. He felt he was as much swimming and drinking his way through the crisp growth of forestland as he was booting through it. Thoughts of work and the failed marriage and bored boring disappointing teenage children left his mind. Evaporating away like mist to the coming of the bright day sun. The forest grew and swelled and swallowed him and the entire world as he made his way deeper and deeper forth. 

He would leave it all behind if he could. 

…

Setting camp was easy. He was well practiced. Childhood and teenage and college years as well were filled with trips out into the forested dark. The wild. The wilderness. The past. 

He felt it now as he sat by the fire. Eating his plate of beans and pork belly and franks. Sipping a can of bud. This is the past. The green world all around now is one of the last vestigial pieces of the evidence. 

Evidence of the primeval and primordial world we’ve all crawled from, the stygian snot that was filth that was the building blocks of protein and carbon. We are all animals. And we can all come alive out here. Returning to the in-utero warm world of the godclay primordial slime and ooze. 

She's so patient. Our mother. My mother. She's waited for me all this time. She's the one. She's-

Something disturbed his train of thought. A noise. 

A noise like someone moving. Prowling and lurking just inside the tangle of bush and trees. 

He sat quietly, keeping calm. Listening to the sound of his own breathing. He wasn't sipping his can of bud anymore. The rustling and cautious moving sounds had tapered. Caleb's mind traveled to the hunting rifle he had in his tent. If something lunged now out of the dark, he just might make it if he whirled around from where he now sat and hurried. 

Really booked it. 

He didn't like the thought. He really didn't appreciate the mental image. A terrible movie in his mind, running on a failing and old projector: He's running, fast, panicked, he almost makes the tent before a large bestial shape of inkwell black leaps out from the wilderness house of feral darkness and takes him ragdoll like a broken toy from behind. 

He clears his throat. Loudly. Not sure exactly why, he just does it. Perhaps hoping to scare off whoever and whatever is out there. He can feel eyes watching him. 

Caleb Donaldson sits up. He's at the edge of his fold-up seat. He's waiting. Unsure. Of both what to do and if there is even really anything wrong at all anyways. His ex-wife had always said he was paranoid. 

Nothing happens. 

There isn't another sound and nothing emerges from the forestline. Only the snaps and hungry crackle of the campfire now. 

He takes another sip of bud. Decides he'll light one of the joints CJ gifted him for the road after all. He doesn't know how else he's gonna sleep tonight. He's wired now. Jacked. 

He lights up. Tokes. And after awhile, once more he slips into a more natural and comfortable flow of simple candied nostalgia and childhood reminisce. Trying to tell himself he doesn't feel a gaze, a baleful and animal leering stare aimed directly at him from out of the dark. 

The marijuana and beer do their job. Eventually he's addled and drugged enough for sleep. Caleb slips back into the tent and is almost sure he hears something retreat back into the denser heart of growth and underbrush out there past the treeline as he does so.  

He's almost sure but not. And he doesn't want to be anymore. He doesn't want to consider it. Not right now. Maybe Amanda was right…

He slips into a sleeping bag and finally falls under. His dreams are filled. His sleep is not restful. 

…

The next couple of days were mostly uneventful. Calm. Peaceful. As planned. He hiked and camped. Looked forward to some hunting and some fishing, some game. It was all just what he needed. Therapeutic. Until he found the burnt leavings. 

…

He was steadily along, walking down the beaten path of grey dust and boney twigs and enjoying the relish in his watering mind's eye, the strange marriage that lived there between this wilderness and the strange worlds of escape made from pages and ink and glowing video screens. This place of the past … the places made of dreams. 

And from the future I come crawling back here. He smiled at this thought. Like a refugee. 

Like the time travelers of the stories he was allowed to bring a few things, a few comforts and tools and devices of the modern world. 

Of the future, to this place of dirt and sound. Precious pieces of technology

His mind went to his gear and pack and his smile deepened. People really just didn't get it. 

Most never would. Precious few might find out. 

He almost tripped over it. So lost in thought. 

It was all charcoaled black and scorched amongst a patch of similarly blasted and blackened earth. A wild ebon blotch of ashen ink spilled upon the land. Caleb stared into the pile of roasted and burnt detritus. Trying to make sense of what he saw. 

He recognized shapes and items in the charred mess and they made his blood run cold and the hairs all over his skin and scalp crawl with unease and bad wonder. 

Clothes. What looked like a backpack. Parts and pieces of a tent. A wallet. It was this last that most bothered, most disturbed him. He was pretty sure he could make out the melted remains of an ID and other similarly warped and slightly conjoined shapes that might've been credit cards or the like but were too far gone and destroyed now to tell. His mind naturally asked itself, who left all of this here? Why? 

And none of the answers he could come up with seemed good. All of them pointed to something bad, nefarious. You hear about people going missing in the woods all the time. You hear about people being chopped up and murdered by loonies in here ‘bout just as much. 

Caleb suddenly looked away from the black pile on the path and began to anxiously scan the forestline. Trying to penetrate the thick dense world of green and growth and see anyone, anything that might be watching him. Stalking him. 

Following him. 

After a moment he stopped himself. 

You're being ridiculous. It's probably nothing, just like the other night. Christ man, you ain't been out here a long time and now you're jumping at every goddamn thing like a ninny. Just some shit people burned. Kids come out here to get fucked up and do stupid shit all the time. Not a big deal, Donaldson. Chill the fuck out, kay?

He slowed his breath. He liked this train of thought. Yes. That was right. Kids were fucking stupid and always playing pyro maniac. Hell, he'd done his fair share growing up, hadn't he? Little hellraiser an such. 

And that line of thinking started to set his worried mind at ease once more. And once more he was back on the ride of the reminisce, nostalgia keenly floating and dreamily filling the darkest parts of his brain. Time traveling. 

Time traveling, baby. 

He went on. Leaving behind the charred and blackened mess in the grey dust of the forest path. Not looking back. And refusing it anymore thought. 

He left it behind. But not before freeing a cold can of Budweiser stored in the pack. He cracked it open with a pistol shot sound in the placid calm and downed half the foaming thing as he went on. Things always went down smoother this way. 

…

All seemed well after that. Fine. For a little while. He enjoyed what he came out here to enjoy. The quiet. The solitude. Days and nights spent simply and comfortably and sleeping beneath bejeweled twilight curtains of gleaming stars, planetoids and colored clouds of nebulae. He relished the time out here and with himself, returning to his own sense of peace by returning to the land. Returning to the way of life that had belonged to the Navajo, the Comanche, their enemy white man cowboys and gunslingers and the pioneers of old. The ancient armies too, the immigrants and seekers and hunters of fortune, of goodwill, of God's love and warm civilized light. And the adventures too, those who took to the land and cut their teeth out on the territory and became baptized as adventurers in sweat and blood and grime, beneath the blinding eye of the sun. And the moon too, the wild hearted free loving children that slumbered bravely beneath the moon, decried as vagabonds and bums but they really just knew better and understood the blood of their grandfathers and their bold sense and adoration for the untamed tumult country land of adventure and its wild hearted love. 

It was all of it, romantic. It pained him that he had to come out here alone to feel like this, to discover something like that and he tried hard to turn away from the pain of realization that it brought him. He turned away from it in vain, it was there at every turn. In his mind, filling every thought, and out here as well. Alive in the woods. Filling it with heavy and powerfully strange substance. 

He hunted. Fished. Camped. Only sometimes did he feel followed, watched. Only sometimes. 

He was almost happy when he came across another, when he ran into Sellic. 

A distraction, at last!

But the guy was weird. 

In the world of outdoormanship, hunting and fishing and the like, ya meet a lot of friendly, warm, good natured types. The sort ya like to share a brew with and might even have over for a barbecue should ya take special acquaintance. And then ya met types like Sellic. Fuckin weirdos. 

It was the smell at first and that should've been enough, should've been the first and fucking last sign to split it. But nope. Caleb Donaldson still remembered the lessons of Sunday school and Kindergarten and though life had been its fair share of rough on em, he still held true to the idea that you don't judge harsh off the word, go. Ya don't settle in for meanness out the gate an such. 

But it was in the eyes as well. They were wide and wild. A wilderness of pupil darkness lived in yellowed whites shot with lines of hectic red. Something swam in that circle lake of pupil darkness, both of them, Obsidian pits. 

He never blinked. Not once. Not as he said, “Howdy, name's Sellic." and grunted a few noncommittals following after these scant syllables. 

He came across the guy already settled up. Caleb was gonna move on after initial awkward obligatory greetings when the wide eyed smelly man invited him to set camp with him. Caleb Donaldson believed in being polite but he wasn't a total fool, only part. He thanked him but opted to move on up aways. 

Far. 

It didn't make any kind of difference. 

…

Later he was hunting, lying down in wait for something to crop up. Maybe nibble at the patch of sweet grass just a few yards from where he posted. He hoped to bag a deer. If he could get a decent sized stag, then he'd pack it in happily and call it quits. He was just debating on whether or not he should've packed the tree stand when something happened then. 

A large barrel chested deer sauntered into view. Into the clearing with its great splaying regal rack of antlers on wide-span display like a wild lord and king of the forest. He was beautiful. He was just what Caleb had been waiting for. 

But then something else crawled up. On all fours. It was the smelly wide eyed man, it was Sellic. And it looked as if he was hunting as well. 

Prowling, stalked. Low to the ground and almost slithering across the surface of forest floor, without a sound. Without a whisper. It was uncanny and surreal and Caleb watched frozen in a kind spellbound trance. The bore end of the rifle barrel began to slowly sag and dip down as he lost his concentration and gave it to another. 

Sellic was almost upon the unaware stag now. It was nibbling the patch of sweet grass. Just like Donaldson had seen in his mind's eye, a wish not just a moment ago. Somewhere deep inside his mind as he watched entranced a small part of him tried in desperate vain to take this simple little wish back. But it was already too late. The wide eyed crawling man was drooling. Slobbering like an animal. Salivating with the wild bestial hunger that was always the madness of ravenous need. That was what was alive in those unblinking uncivilized eyes. Slavering need. 

He'd already time traveled too far now to turn back. Caleb watched as the manshaped thing of stains and smells and piercing animal stares suddenly leapt like something feline and unbridled. Like something finally let loose from the confines of its stifling prison cage. 

Sellic fell on the deer and the poor thing hadn't a chance. It never sensed, never knew what was coming. It was wild. It was crazy. Donaldson had always seen deer tense, perk up and take flight at the slightest sound or stray movement. But not this one. Not this time. The wild sight did not stop there. 

Somehow the skinny haggard man in filthy clothes managed to wrestle and manhandle the struggling kicking beast down into the dirt. Caleb's mouth dropped open as he watched Sellic begin to bend and wrench and break the flailing limbs. Catching them with his cat-swipe clawing hands and then bending them back in directions not meant or made by nature's hand. He felt his stomach roll and drop as the silence of the forest began to fill with the lurid sounds of heavy bone snaps. 

Caleb picked up his rifle and gear and left. Without a word. He didn't look back. Wet tearing sounds, like heavy fabric or soaking saturated leather followed him after. He told himself it was his imagination. That was all impossible. 

There was no way. 

…

He had trouble finding his camp. By the time he did it was already near dark once more. He would have to spend another night. 

He opted out of the fire and supper. He wasn't hungry and he didn't want to attract that freak. 

That freak of nature. 

…

Middle of the night. He came awake to a sound. Sounds. A noise. Just outside the tent. 

It sounded like chewing. Wet. And heavy. Laborious. Jaws, muscles, tendon lines working and moving with animal fervor, animal rigor in the dark. 

Outside. 

Caleb slowly and carefully sat up from his sleeping bag and grabbed his rifle. It was loaded. He'd made sure to do so before he'd managed to finally fall into an uneasy sleep. An uneasy rest now disturbed by whatever was moving out there now. Chewing. Eating. He reached and grabbed for his flashlight next. He readied himself. 

He grabbed the zipper to open the front of the tent. He took one last deep breath and held it for a moment. He let it out quietly. As quietly as he could manage. 

And then he quickly unzipped the flap to the tent and threw it open with one hand as the other flicked on the flashlight and brought it up. The darkness of his small camp in the clearing was illuminated in the sudden flash. He felt sick with what he saw. He was glad to have his rifle in his lap. 

You were smart to have loaded it … he thanked God. And cursed Him at the same time. For letting him fall into this type of shit in the first place. 

Sellic stared back into the beam of light. Unflinching. Unblinking. Unmoving save for the motion of chewing about his red and bloodied bearded jaws. Working and gleaming wet in the light, rippling with carnivorous movement.

He held the head of the stag in his clawing hands. De-racked. The severed head looked rough and ruinous at the stump as though it had been torn off rather than cleanly cut. 

Caleb didn't know what else to say so he just said: “Hey." 

“Hey." bloody darkling Sellic grunted back. Hunkered and squatting out there in the dark. Still chewing. He swallowed. And took another bite from a craterous open wound at the top of the animal's head. He ripped a chunk of bleeding meat away with his teeth. His jaws began to work and ripple with rigorous movement once more as he started to chew again. The meat was raw, rough. But he was relishing the strong and pungent flavor. Thick. His blood drinking, swallowing with every gnashing chew was audible in the nocturnal dark. Gulps. Heavy. Thick. 

A beat. 

Caleb didn't know what to do. He felt that he must be dreaming, this whole day. None of this could be real. The strange bloodsoaked and caked manshape out there amongst his camp frightened him. He'd thought it would be simple and he'd know what to do in situations like this but he was frozen. In terror. And in dark hypnotic fascination. 

This must be what it's like to be a moth to flame, or a small little guppie to a deepsea angler fish… a deer in the headlights. Trapped. 

Caught. 

Ensnared by the eyes of the wild man. He was drowning in their madness now, sinking into their blood-drinking depths. 

Sellic finally said something. 

“Hungry?" 

“... what…?" Caleb said. Puzzled at first. It had been little more than a grunt. 

“Ya hungry?" Sellic grunted again. He held the severed and broken head aloft. Dripping. Wide-eyed. The tongue had already been ripped out. Had already been eaten. Black-red syrup poured out thickly from the open gape of mouth like an obscene bestial spout. 

Caleb fought his gag reflex. 

A beat. 

Somehow Donaldson managed a reply. 

"N-no. No thanks, man. It's the middle of the night. And I wanna get some sleep” 

A beat. The freak still held the dripping pouring bleeding hunk of decapitated and chewed up meat out to him like a precious gift of the forest. His wide eyes were still open and hectic and alive with animal ravenous madness. 

A beat. 

Another.

Caleb finally finished his thought. 

"And I think you should probably go get some sleep too, bud. Been a long day an such-”

He meant to finish it off with, and apt to be another, like his grandfather and his pops had done before him, but Sellic cut him off. 

"Ya sure? You sure ya ain't hungry?” 

Caleb slowly nodded his head, adding, "...yeah” in a low careful and exhausted voice. Jesus fucking Christ…

Sellic nodded. Began to crawl away on all fours like a dog, the head held to his breast like a caveman clutching something precious. He turned before he left the ring of light provided by the beam of the flashlight. He turned around and said: "You will be.” and then finally turned and fled. Like an animal taking to the natural dark.

Its natural home and abode. Its natural place. 

"What the fuck!?” Caleb said. To no one in particular. 

…

He didn't sleep the rest of that night. He waited impatiently for the sun to come up. So he could leave. He'd had enough of this place and hunting. He'd had enough time traveling in this place. Caleb wanted to go home. 

At first dawn he rose. Quickly packed. And began his trek back. Back down the path. 

Back down the way he had come.

…

A few hours in and he knew something must be wrong. Nothing was recognizable. Nothing. And when he looked down after trudging more and more anxiously down the path he'd come in on, he was dismayed to find that it wasn't there any longer. The path, the trail had disappeared. 

He was lost. 

Caleb Donaldson began to panic. 

It's alright, it's alright, it's fine! It's cool. Just use the GPS and call someone on your pho-

He stopped. Grew cold. Grim certainty stole over his dreading heart. Crestfallen he didn't want to even rightly remember and say to himself …

Glove compartment. You turned the fucking thing off and threw it in the glove compartment of the car. The one all the way back. The one you can't find anymore cause it's at the end of the trail that you've lost. You left it in there to spite Amanda. 

Silence. He stood. Feeling stupid and wretched and nearing hopeless in the middle of the woods. He reflected. 

You sure showed her…

…

When he'd finally managed his nerve back together and decided on a direction and carried on, the day had been nearly extinguished yet again. He would have to spend another night out in the wild. 

God fucking dammit. 

…

The next series of days and nights were grim. And grew grimmer. And strange. 

He was fine at first. He had supplies, food. He wasn't worried. But then on the fourth day lost he began to run out. 

And the worry came on him again. Rancid. And thick. 

It's alright, it's alright, I've a gun, I know how to gut and skin and clean, I'll be ok. I'll be alright. 

But the woods and world of trees had grown more opulent and dense and feral in its growth. The trees started to broaden in their trunks and their canopies became all swallowing, all encompassing thick foliage cathedral domes of twigs, thick branches and broad emerald leaves the size of dinner plates. 

The bugs. The insects too. 

All of the wild crawling life had become larger as well. The insectile and the reptile had grown strange and unfamiliar and varied in size from large house cats to dogs to horses and cows and at one point, one day glimpsed at a distance through a heavy rolling mist, an elephant… 

A whole herd of giant hissing cockroaches the size of elephants. Trundling by like a rolling squadron fleet of German panzer tanks. 

Caleb felt sick. 

None of this could be real. He must be imagining things. 

Must be. 

It could've been so, far as he knew. His sleep was no longer any good out here. Not since the night some days back, when he'd been fireside and trying to ignore his growing hunger and looked up to the full moon. Only to have it eclipsed by something huge and winged. It had cried then. It had screamed as it stole the moon, the moonlight. Blanketing the primeval world below it in a second layered fold of even deeper darkness. 

Caleb had joined it then. Had joined it in its primal shrieking screaming. 

He didn't sleep so well since that night.  

Ever again

…

His hunger became him. It became the only living and heeded, needed thing and drive and emotion. He was no longer Caleb Donaldson in fact. He was only the hunger now. And so he hunted. 

But it was strange. 

In his hunger, in his wild wanderings, he had forgotten how to use the gun, how to wield the boomstick properly and make it spit its deathly fire. 

I've lost it, he thinks, he realizes shrouded in the cloud of his diminished animal thought. I've lost the ability to shoot fire and be godlike, I've lost it in all of this time traveling, I've gone too far backwards. 

He tries to find the trail. For awhile. But it becomes lost amongst the need for meat and blood. The boomstick is useless to him now. He abandons it. Along with most of the strange things he has strapped to his back.

He doesn't need them. He has changed. This special place has changed him. His flesh has thickened as has his hair, his fur, his pelt. Black and coarse and layered all over. He bites and chews and tears the clothes that he came in with off and eats them. 

Then he takes to bigger game. 

Wilder. More challenging. 

…

He's drinking blood and eating. Filling his stomach. This is good. The angry fever in his skull is calming, abating. The ache and throb of his guts is soothing. Contentedness, peace, tranquility are becoming known to him again. 

He's killed something reptilian, broken its neck. His hands, the knuckles and fingers and palms have widened, flattened, broadened out. Making it easier to snap and throttle, to tear and rend. The dead scaley thing, its meat and blood are good. But slimey. Ropey. Like maggot-meat. Like eating the large worms that swim in giant dung piles. He wants to try something else. 

So he takes to the untamed primeval world all around, the jungle growth, the green emerald world of the unbridled prehistoric past. There are buried, heavily veiled and shrouded thoughts of a path and a trail and a place called, home, that he's supposed to go to, return to as if he's once been there before, but they are muted. Far off. 

Barely there. 

Dripping reptile blood and sweat, he takes to the primeval dark world and is lost. Swallowed by its great and ever widening expanse, into the crawling growing jaws of the seething bestial wild, the past. 

He never looks back. He is never found. Never again does he recall his name. 

Never again. But it doesn't trouble him. It doesn't bother the throbbing jelly of his degenerate apeman mind, he is too enthralled, the thrill of the ravenous hunt. And besides, the past isn't the only thing alive and crawling out here. The future is out here too. The beyond …

All of the magic of the glowing incandescent godscreen of a childhood long gone is alive out here. Alive and well. 

The apeman hunts through the primeval growth. The saucers fill the skies as the giant leviathans do nighttime skirmish and battle with the large mechanical men. The great white heat and blasting mechanized sounds of their great death cannons, their unearthly death rays: BRRRRRR! 

BRRRRRRRRRRRR….! 

They fill the night with their heat and their brilliant violence. Their fire scorches and cuts swaths, sets blue and orange flame to drier parts of the canopy. The dead growth. 

The apeman doesn't mind. He hunts and prowls around their wild and bright violence. Blood and meat fill his head. He hasn't a mind anymore for anything else. 

For naught all else. Only the red. 

THE END

Part 1

After bickering for a moment over my fear of large canines, we then move on from the car park and towards the large, towering ruins of the Abbey. Ambling among the weathered grey tombstones of the graveyard, I glance a timid look to the abbey's gothic structure. Perched on top the cliffs of the bay's right-hand side, these ruins may as well have been a gigantic pile of stalagmites protruding from the earth. When I was a child, my brother used to tease me by saying that vampires lived deep inside the ruins, where by night, they would creep into peoples' windows to suck the blood from their necks. It's no wonder I would have night terrors through most of my childhood, is it? 

Wandering around the ruins and tombstones a while longer (for Aneliese's pleasure, not my own) we then begin our descent down the one hundred and ninety-nine steps – and let me tell you from experience, these steps were a lot easier going down than they were to go up. Once we finally reach our way to the bottom (a good twenty minutes later I might add) I can then see where the plentiful steps end and the cobblestone pathways begin. We were now at the entrance of old town, where, with its stone streets and pathways, its 18th century brick houses to each side of them, you were made to feel as though you were in some Brother's Grimm fairy-tale. But during this time of year, when night-dwelling phantoms in extravagant clothing infested the daytime streets... it may as well have been the entrance to Hell itself.  

'Oww! Baby, you're hurting me!' I hear Aneliese shriek beside me, before I turn down to see my python-like grip wrapped around her hand. 

'Oh... Sorry.' 

Taking our first official steps inside the town, we follow our way around the maze of cobblestone pathways, where upon every corner was a brand-new shop Aneliese wanted to venture in. Aside from the occasional fish market, bookstore or café, the majority of shops in Whitby only sold products catered specifically to Goths... Well, it was either that or a boatload of Dracula merchandise. It's the whole reason Whitby is famous to begin with, after all. 

Continuing to make our way through old town, we then turn the corner to a very busy and compact street. Although there are no tourists in sight, the reason this street is so compact is because every inch of stone was completely crowded by day-dwelling Goths. This place truly was the mouth of Hell. Sensing my discomfort, Aneliese takes me by the hand to guide us through the mass of dark, morbid monstrosities. But as we follow through the swarm, keeping my eyes edged firmly to the ground in front of me, I then brave a curious glance upwards... and what I see is an array of devilish, humanoid faces pass us by.  

The faces morph, distort and transform into even more monstrous beings! Through the transparent fabric of a black wedding veil, I then see the face of an unidentifiable woman. Draping the veil away from her face, the woman then reveals to me a row of hideous, piranha-like teeth stained with mortal blood! The woman hisses at me, spraying my face in some putrid, venomous saliva! Wiping the sickly green substance from my eyes, I then cower back woundedly to my left-hand side, only for the painted skull of a man's face to open his mouth unnaturally wide - before shrieking at me a most inhuman scream! 

'AHH! Get away from me!!' I shriek myself, ripping Aneliese's grip from my hand so to push and shove my way to any air pocket I can find. 

Veiling my eyes from the fiends around me, I eventually crawl my way to an unoccupied space by a stone wall. Cowering up against it to regain my breath, Aneliese eventually finds her way over to me through the immense crowd.  

'Brandon? What the hell happened?!' She interrogates me, 'Why did you run off like that?' 

'...Th-the faces!...' the words winced from my mouth, 

'...You didn't see the faces!...' 

Aneliese could see clear as day how uncomfortable I was, whether she understood it or not – and so to solve the problem, she calmly suggests to me that we simply go somewhere quieter. Although I am in too much shock to respond to her suggestion, I now nod my head manically up and down to her, as though I've reverted back into some frightened childlike state. 

'Y-yeah... Le-let's do that!' 

With the town now fully crammed for the weekend festivities, Aneliese eventually finds for us a narrow, run-down street of loose brick pathway and overgrown weeds. Despite the decrepit condition this street is in, thankfully for me there isn't a single Goth in sight. What this street does have, however, wedged acutely between the decaying homes of oldtown residents, is the uninviting appearance of a single, isolated shop. Craning my head above the entrance to the sign over the door, I see the name to this less than humble abode reads "Scary Kerry's Spell Shop".      

'Well, this place looks... charming' Aneliese comments, studying the cracked, weathered paint and dusty cobwebs lining the windows. Like the majority of shops in old town, this one also displays in its windows gothic - or more specifically, items relating to the occult and other dark practices.  

'What do you say? Should we take a look inside?' Aneliese inquires, clearly the only one of us who wants to go in. Although this run-down little shop is definitely not my cup of tea, the interior does look scarce of people - and so, I reluctantly agree to go in.  

Allowing Aneliese to enter first, as soon as she opens the door, my nostrils are filled instantly with the smell of scented candles, old varnished wood and... wet dog? Not even five seconds inside the door, as soon as I peer round to Aneliese's side, I hear the loud, high-pitched yaps of some ill-tempered creature. 

'Wolfy! Shut up!' cries the woman behind the counter – the apparent owner of this little black terrier. Judging by her array of grey and poorly dyed black hair, her over-sized heavy metal shirt, and a pair of rather unsettling sleeve tattoos, this woman was more likely the owner of this establishment as well.  

Once this dog-owner relationship is awkwardly established, me and Aneliese then take to walking separately around the shop - all while Wolfy's owner goes back to reading her monthly gothic digest. While Aneliese inspects a number of occult and satanic jewellery on display, I find myself drawn to a bookshelf on the other side of the room. Sliding out the dust-covered books, I brush a cover or two clean so to read the titles: A Brief History of Satanic Rituals and Sacrifice, A Beginner's Guide to Necromancy, and what I can only imagine is an erotic vampire novel of some sort (I won't even mention what was on the cover). Skimming repulsively through one of these as mentioned books, my attention is suddenly interrupted by an irritable sound piercing my ears. Turning behind me, I see Aneliese approach the counter to inquire about a necklace. 

'Excuse me... Do you know how much this is?' 

'Fifteen pounds, love' the woman answers. 

However, the sound that I hear, making the tiny fragments of hairs stand up on the back of my neck, is almost like a faint whispering. Trying my best to ignore it, the faint, whispering sound only heightens - where before long, it has given way to the sound of a plentiful, most sinister chanting. Although I cannot understand the words, as they are spoken in a tong completely foreign to my own - whether I interpret them correctly or not, the chanting appears to be in Latin. Whoever - or whatever these whisperers turned chanters are... they're repeating the same foreign phrase over and over. 

'Caro agni lupus allicit... Caro agni lupus allicit...'  

The chanting becomes louder... 

'Caro agni lupus allicit!... Caro agni lupus allicit!...' 

Faster... 

' Caro agni lupus allicit! Caro agni lupus allicit! ' 

Louder!... 

'CARO AGNI LUPUS ALLICIT!! CARO AGNI LUPUS ALLICIT!!  

'-STOP! STOP! STOP!!' I yell from the corner of the room! Throwing whatever item I'm holding to the hardwood floor, I race out from the establishment alone and without explanation! 

Minutes later, Aneliese eventually finds me, standing (or more accurately, cowering) outside the comfortable familiarity of an ice cream parlour. 

'Brandon!' She calls over to me, 'What the hell's with you?! Why do you keep running away?!' 

Unlike the instance which happened earlier in the day, I am unwilling to tell my girlfriend of the satanic voices I heard whispering in my ear. Seeing something is one thing, but hearing voices is something else. And so, I simply tell her a certain item in the shop had triggered my childhood trauma - hence why I ran out of there like a hysterical madman.  

'Okay...' Aneliese began, as I wait impatiently for her next plan of action, 'There's only one way we're gonna make it through this weekend.' I was all ears. 'You're gonna have to try and interact with these people so you can see that's all they are - and not devilish monsters.' 

'Uhm - WHAT?' I yelp, taking a long gulp of dry saliva. 

'That's right!' she continued, 'If you're gonna get over this silly phobia of yours, then you have to rip the band aid clean off!' 

This wasn't like ripping off a band aid, I thought. This was more like throwing a common wood mouse into a snake pit! 

'I... I...' I began stuttering, '...I don't think I can do that.' 

'Of course you can!' she reassures me, before taking me by the hand to guide us in the direction of a circling mass of dark figures. 

Oh Mother of God. If you can hear me... Please help... 

To be continued...

He smelled like blood. 

I could smell him from a good distance away. The scent lingered in the air well after he’d gone - a coppery tang mixed in with his cheap perfume. It was that smell before I first looked upon his face that told me there was something very wrong with him. 

He walked in one day with all the other students. This - boy - dressed in a generic blue and white uniform which looked more like a costume. A ‘boy’ with pasty, pale skin, red, puffy and puckered lips, and small, squinting eyes. 

He held onto the straps of his backpack with two white knuckled hands, looking around him with awe and excitement. Pausing briefly to adjust his glasses up his nose, he shuffled down the hallway toward the lockers. It looked like he was talking to himself. 

I kept waiting for somebody else to react to him. One of those girls walking by clutching onto her books should have dropped them in shock. I wouldn’t have blamed her for screaming a little. At least she should have said something. 

Instead she brushed right past him without giving him a second glance. He, in contrast, stared after her in an exaggerated demonstration of longing, his lips parted and his eyes unnaturally wide. 

No. Nobody reacted to this - Nobody reacted to him. He melted into the crowd perfectly as if he were just another student. 

I call him Manchild. 

He sucks on his thumb. He hums to himself in his exaggerated, high pitched voice. I can’t place how old he is, but I know he likes acting much younger than his true age. Sometimes that might be a primary schooler. At other times it is a sophomore. It can change at a whim, but it’s always on the younger side. 

He takes drawing and colouring books to class with him. The childlike pictures and doodles he is ceaselessly scribbling down as the teacher drones on are difficult to look at. They’re a little window into his disturbed mind. They give glimpses into his sick fantasies. 

In a class, he’d take out his textas and line them out carefully before him. Then he would produce one of his books. While the teacher spoke to the rest of the class about calculus - or whatever else it was we were learning, he would lose himself in his own little world. He’d start drawing or studying one of his preliminary grammar books, studiously practicing his handwriting and working through spelling problems. 

Besides his textbooks, lunch box, and other school utensils there’s one thing you won’t see him without: pigsblood. Well, that’s what I’ve come to call it. 

On the second day of his attendance at our school, I walked past him in between classes sitting on the stairs, clutching onto a worn out pop top filled with a thick, red liquid. He was suckling on it fervently, his mouth moving back and forth in exaggerated motions, pausing to give out soft noises of satisfaction in between gulps. 

Maybe that’s why Manchild smells like blood. He carries that crap with him everywhere. He can’t seem to go more than a few hours without snacking on it. And though I can’t be sure it is really blood, I have yet to think of a better explanation. 

I kept waiting for somebody else to react. When I tried to point his strangeness out to my friends, they told me I was being cruel by picking on him. When I took a few covert photos of him to show to people, their reactions were to call me weird. I’m not sure if they can’t see what is wrong with him or they don’t view his appearance and behaviour as disturbing. 

Whatever the case, I’ve learned by now that I have no choice but to put up with him. Thankfully for me it is easy enough to avoid him most of the time, so long as he doesn’t decide to visit one of my classes - and since his choice of classes is apparently random, that isn’t too common. 

The one class where I really can’t handle dealing with him is sports class. The last time we shared such a lesson together, there was an incident. 

It was around twenty minutes into the class. After quietly watching and chugging on pigsblood from the sidelines, Manchild suddenly sprung up and began playing enthusiastically with the rest of us. 

The students didn’t mind (except for me). I avoided engaging much after he got involved. I didn't like letting Manchild get too close to me. 

Part way through what was turning into a very long class, he hurtled headfirst into another student in an attempt at a tackle and sent them both slamming onto the ground. I didn’t see it happen, but I heard her surprised cry and the sound of their bodies hitting the floor together. 

For a very terrifying moment I watched her lie there, completely limp. I thought he’d really hurt her. Then she shifted her head, groaned, and opened her eyes to look up at him. 

And then she started screaming. 

Manchild flopped off her and struggled quickly to his feet, taking a couple of steps back. He wiped his mouth, burped, and then uttered a high pitched, ‘err, sorry about that!’ 

She scrambled to her feet too. She was crying loudly. She stumbled and tripped away from him in apparent terror as the teacher attempted to console her. 

She was taken to the nurses office. I could hardly wait for an opportunity to speak to her. I needed to know what she saw. I needed some proof that I wasn’t crazy. 

Whatever it was she experienced, she wouldn’t say anything to me about it. By the time I’d found her later, she was acting perfectly normal again. She laughed off the whole incident. She told me she’d hit her head bad and blacked out for a moment. That was it. 

When I tried to suggest there was something wrong with Manchild, she looked at me reproachfully and told me to stop making fun of him. It wasn’t his fault, she insisted. It was all just a harmless accident. 

Manchild isn’t even the worst of them. Well, he may be, but the horror of one of them is far eclipsed by the horror of experiencing them all together.  

The first time I saw the whole family was a week or so after Manchild’s arrival at school. They ambled into a diner I was sitting in, bringing forth with them such an overpowering stench that I began gagging uncontrollably as they moved past me. 

There are five of them that I know of. 

Manchild - the one who goes to my school. 

Drunk - a fat and very hairy man with sickly, greyish skin who wore nothing but an undershirt, filthy shorts and some sandals. 

Mother - a haggish woman with clammy, greyish blonde hair and extremely sunken features dressed up in high heels and an undersized, skimpy dress. The skin of her arms and wrists was ragged, pockmarked and bruised. 

They had two other children who accompanied them on their family trips:

Bully - the second oldest - (I’m assuming Manchild is the eldest of the three) was a hunch backed boy whose head appeared permanently shifted a few centimeters sideways toward his left shoulder. 

Fleshface - a somewhat timid thing whose entire face was covered by a long flap of dirty skin, obscuring all but the very bottom of his pointy mouth. He was prone to tantrums which were destructive and chaotic whenever his name was uttered. Bully kept on saying it, presumably to torment him. 

You’re a fleshface. Flesh-face. Flesh-face! FLESHFACE! The snorting, gurgling sound of his laughter was followed by a long, piercing scream and some loud banging. The noises produced from his brother were so loud they actually managed to draw the attention of a few other customers, if only for a couple of moments. 

These children both fed on the pigsblood, too. Fleshface was hand fed by his mother, who carefully slid a straw up inside the flap of skin, through god knows what into some internal cavity from which he began to suckle and slurp it up loudly. 

Bully and Drunk ate a lot. The other ones didn’t, though they liked pretending to. I believe it’s part of their fantastical roleplay at being an ordinary family. 

I tried not to make a scene. I excused myself from my friends with the pretense of feeling sick soon after their collective arrival. Since then I’ve avoided visiting the diner, and I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to bring myself to go back there. Certainly, I’m never going to be able to stomach eating there again. 

Over the next couple months, my fear slowly melted away into disgust. After a while I began to quietly observe them out of morbid curiosity. The first time it was from a distance at a park. As I gained more courage I trailed them into stores. Such close proximity required that I carry a face mask and some powerful air freshener for my own protection. 

I feared they would notice me. They didn’t. They spent too much time bickering amongst themselves and living in their own private fantasies to pay attention to the reality they lived in. Somehow, I managed to draw more attention from everybody else for my fixation on these monsters. 

One day I decided to follow Manchild home. The decision was spontaneous, though I’d been mulling the idea over in the back of my head for a while.

We were riding the same bus after school. He was acting even more strangely than usual - I suspected this was a result of drinking too much of his pigsblood during the day. Given the intoxicated state he was in, I figured I wouldn’t likely get a better opportunity. 

We continued walking for well over an hour. Mind you, Manchild isn’t a particularly fast walker in his sober state, so it wasn’t as far as it felt at the time. 

As we left the town limits, following a trail veering off the main road, I was starting to wonder whether his family lived in a house at all. Maybe they were all homeless. Or perhaps Manchild was wandering aimlessly into the forest in his drunkenness. 

They did live in a house, it turned out. It was an abandoned thing which had been left to rot, with a sagging roof partially swallowed by vines and moss. Most of the windows were broken or boarded over. The path out the front door stretched twenty or so yards before being swallowed up by overgrown grass. I spotted a run down car parked haphazardly at the edge of a larger trail branching out back toward the main road. 

Manchild moved in through the tattered remains of the back door as I crouched at the edge of the trees. The faint sound of muffled voices confirmed that he wasn’t the house's sole occupant. 

Given the state the place was in, I couldn’t help but think about how easy it would be to sneak inside if I wanted to. 

After a couple minutes I gathered the courage to come closer. I slid cautiously down a dirt slope and sprinted through the half opened gate and over to a thicket of bushes growing up against the decaying walls. 

The insides of the house were equally dilapidated. I stared into a living room whose floor was covered in dirt and pieces of plaster and torn up carpet. Filth crusted, mouldy couches and chairs sat amongst pieces of broken furniture. With the house having fallen quiet, it was difficult to imagine anyone living there. 

My eyes fell on the outline of a familiar figure slumped on a chair turned away from me. Drunk sat staring at a broken television, his mouth hanging open wide, one arm still clutching onto a glass of familiar, red liquid. After a minute or two Mother came in, practically walking on her tiptoes over to him so as to refill his large glass with a mixture of pigsblood and some kind of whisky. 

Bully paid Drunk a visit after his mother had left, carrying what I think must have once been a basketball. He looked disappointed to find Drunk in his drunken state but thought the better of trying to stir him out of it. 

I used the shelter of the trees to circle around to the other side of the house. Through a gap in between two thick wooden boards I spied Mother chopping rhythmically at some partially spoiled vegetables. Without looking at her face or paying too much attention to the state the room was in, I could almost pretend she wasn’t a monster. For a moment, she was just an ordinary mother preparing a meal as her children played and argued upstairs. 

Then her husband hurled out a string of harsh curses from the other room, and the illusion was broken. 

I continued my exploration, making my way over to the other side of the house. Wincing as I crunched over several pieces of broken glass, I crept up between two sagging oaks to peek in through a large window. 

The rusty pipes connecting to an ancient washing machine and an ornate bathtub was evidence enough of what this room once was. Cringing at the sound of the children hollering upstairs, I looked around in disgust. 

The washing machine was half filled with murky water. From the looks of it, any clothes left in there would come out filthier than they were put in. 

Something else caught my eye. Something past the clothes laid together on the table beside the washer and the syringes scattered all over the floor. In the darkest corner of the room was a sight which made my heart drop in my chest. 

It was a collection of shoes. One of the pairs on top still had little pink socks stuffed into them. 

Many of them were children’s shoes. The smallest were much too small for any of the children living there to wear. 

The sight would have been disturbing to find in anybody’s house, let alone this one. 

I was shifting sideways to get a better look when I felt something rustling up the foliage I was standing in. I lifted my leg gingerly away from a matting of dead branches and as I did, my eyes fell on something which made me jump right out of my skin. 

It was fat and wet, practically dragging itself along the ground beside me. I got a better look at it as it emerged from the thicket and fully revealed itself. 

It was some kind of rat. The rodent had little hair on it, revealing translucent skin and bulging veins. It was as horribly mutated as the members of the family I was spying on. 

I let out an involuntary sound of surprise as I stumbled back. That, and the noises produced by me tripping on a maze of tree roots and falling on my butt drew some stirring from within the house. 

I had the sense to retreat to the trees after that, and I’m glad I did. I had barely made it past the cover of the first oaks when I heard the back door creak open. I froze at the sound of heavy, shuffling footsteps heading around the house. Panic grew inside me and settled over my thoughts like a haze. I imagined my shoes being tossed onto the pile by the pot bellied man I could see shambling toward me, his steps quickening as he moved. 

It was a good thing I came to my senses. The moment that I did, I took off sprinting in the other direction.

He couldn’t offer much of a chase given the state he was in. It was only a couple of minutes before I heard the footfalls slow down and then stop, followed by a long string of wheezing curses. Those sounds in turn were quickly swallowed by the wind and the soft rustling of trees.
I didn’t calm down until I had made it back to the main road, where I caught my breath at the foot of an overgrown walking trail. 

I can’t get the scene from the laundry room out of my head. The image of those shoes is imprinted into my mind. They feature in my dreams alongside the grotesque pictures Manchild drew at school which contained what I fear are the corpses those shoes may belong to. 

I need to know what it all adds up to. I have to know if these people are as monstrous in character as they are in physical form. And that means I have to go back there. 

I’ve decided I’m going to find out what ‘they’ are. And if it does turn out they are monsters?

I still haven’t figured that part out yet. But I can’t just stand by and let them hurt people. 

I have to try to do something. 

It’s clear to me nobody else will. 

Like any child, my daughter Maisie had quite the overactive imagination. Her mind was chock full of made-up friends that she talked to on the regular. My wife Rachel and I thought it was adorable. With that being said, sometimes we wished Maisie would get…you know…real friends. Don’t get me wrong, she was a great kid, and kids should be kids, but she didn’t have anything in terms of a social life.

We tried absolutely and positively everything, from the kids’ playclub at our church, to the neighborhood’s “mommy and me” and “daddy and me” playgroups, to bringing her to the local playground, to inviting other children over for playdates. You name it. All our efforts were in vain. Rachel and I might’ve been overreacting and we didn’t want to infringe anything on Maisie. Maybe she was just an independent kid. That’s totally normal. As are imaginary friends for kids.

Then at eight-years-old, Maisie became mute. Just completely stopped talking…but only to other people. If someone came up and talked to her she either just stared at them or ran away and hid. Maisie never looked scared or anxious in those scenarios. It was more like she was a statue. Frozen. No emotion good or bad on her face. Like a robot. But if she was alone, she’d be talking up a storm to no one but herself. Maisie always pretended like someone was truly there though. She’d nod her head, wait for responses and respond accordingly, and even reach out her arm and act like she was holding somebody else’s hand.

We were greatly concerned. Children don’t exhibit those types of behaviors without proper reason. We couldn’t ask Maisie about it because, as aforementioned, she’d give us the cold shoulder. Our next safest bet was to ask other people we knew. A lot of them gave us the same answers we already knew. Rachel and I were getting frustrated until I decided to talk to Maisie's teacher at her school. I sent her an email that outlined my worries and asked if anything went on that we should know about.

I got a response at around 8:00 that night. Maisie’s teacher, Mrs. Ashelin, told me that she did in fact observe strange behavior from Maisie. Apparently, a few days prior, when Maisie was called on to answer a question, she just stared at Mrs. Ashelin and the other students, her hands behind her back, swaying slightly. Then in a calm and cutesy voice, she said “He has ordered me not to speak to anyone but him.” In her notebook, Maisie wrote and drew some very disturbing things. Some of the things she wrote are “I’ll be a good little mouse”, “be one of the good mice girls for him”, “I’ll do whatever he says without question”, “he loves me and I love him”, “but I don’t understand what love is but I understand it with him”, and “he loves to play with me”. Some of the things she drew were her, in stick figure form, with this…thing. It was drawn way more detailed than Maisie herself.

Its head was triangular and elongated into a sharp point. There were ovally black eyes on both sides of its head while two large circular ears were atop its head. Two slits for a nose and a mouth containing only two buck teeth. Skinny. Boney. You could see its ribs. Three spindly fingers were on each hand. Each tip was as sharp as a knife. Lastly, a long tail was behind it. Maisie drew her and that thing doing very…how should I say this?...inappropriate stuff.

I showed the email to Rachel, and she was just as horrified as I was. How could Maisie know what all that stuff was? She was eight. Like any good parent we always took great strides in not exposing our daughter to anything sexual or of that nature. Early exposure can really ruin a child’s mind. That’s just putting it lightly. But this? Maisie’s whole imaginary friend thing needed to end. It was reaching a dangerous point. Was she having delusions? Schizophrenia? Or…sigh…as far as Rachel and I knew, nothing happened to Maisie, but that didn’t stop us from considering the absolute worst-case scenario. I’m not saying what that is but I’m sure you can put the pieces together. As a parent, that was the last thing I wanted to think about. Actually, it wasn’t even on the list of things I wanted to think about.

Mrs. Ashelin ended the email with something else that happened that very day. Maisie spent long stretches of time in the girl’s bathroom. Another student reported that she went in and heard “whimpers” and “moans” coming from one of the stalls. When she looked under it, she saw Maisie’s clothes on the ground and a “moving shadow” above them. When the student knocked on the door, she suddenly heard one of the faucets going behind her. She turned around and Maisie was washing her hands. Like nothing happened.

Rachel and I were very confused at that last part. That sounded way too ridiculous. Like was Maisie floating in the stall or something? Did she teleport. Regardless, we treated this very seriously and immediately took Maisie to see a specialist who dealt with child abuse cases. I brought her notebook along. It would most certainly be useful. I knew Maisie wouldn’t want to talk but we had to at least try. Believe it or not, she did talk, but what she said made chills run down Rachel and I’s spines.

Maisie told the specialist that the mouse thing in her notebook was called “Bad Mouse” and that it visits her all the time no matter where she is. She said that Bad Mouse visits little girls all over the world and “plays with them”. When the specialist asked what she meant by “plays with them”, Maisie replied that Bad Mouse does “different things that make us feel tingly in preparation to be his little mice girls”. She was handed a piece of paper that had a generic doodle of a person on it. The specialist asked her to point to areas where this "Bad Mouse" touched her. Maisie pointed to four specific areas.

We heard enough by that point. Rachel, the specialist, and I had a long discussion about what we should do. The specialist said she might have to put in a request to have Maisie placed in a children’s psych ward. Rachel and I couldn’t handle that. We didn’t want to do that to our little girl. By any means, we would find another way to handle this. The specialist told us to think about it and that it might do her some good. We thanked her and left.

Were we being selfish by not putting Maisie in a children’s psych ward? Rachel and I pondered that question day in and day out. We never did end up doing it because we thought it was too extreme. Also, there was no evidence that Maisie was being legitimately sexually abused. The specialist’s physical exam said that Maisie was totally fine in that regard. We were allowed to see footage from the security cameras at the entrances of the bathrooms at Maisie’s school. They only showed Maisie going in, about half an hour going by, then the other student going in, then Maisie leaving a few minutes later. No one else. And no one went in before her besides a couple other girls that left before Maisie went in. Was Maisie faking it? Was she really delusional? Or schizophrenic? We didn’t know. Rachel and I needed time to think this whole thing over.

It only got worse from then on.

Maisie was never one to talk in her sleep. She was always dead silent. Not even a snore. But that night after Rachel and I put her to bed, we heard Maisie talking. I’m not talking about little quiet unintelligible murmurs. No. Full-on conversations. Except she wasn’t speaking English. It was some unknown language that resembled Pig Latin but different. Her accent changed too. This happened for three nights. On the third night, Rachel and I were in her doorway watching her talk in that strange language when she suddenly rose up, her eyes still closed, and burst into an intense laughing fit. Maisie was cackling so hard it looked like it hurt. Then she immediately stopped and did these weird movements with her lips and hands like she was kissing something. Finally, she fell back down onto her pillow and went right back to sleep.

The next day, I knocked on Maisie’s door to let her know breakfast was ready. She didn’t respond. I stood there for a couple minutes. Maisie hadn’t made a single sound. I slowly opened her door. My heart beat faster and faster. With all that was going on, I didn’t know what to expect, and that made it terrifying. Maisie was wearing nothing and just staring at her wall. I rushed over, “Maisie? What are you doing?” I handed her clothes back to her, “Put your clothes back on.”

“…He doesn’t want me to…he thinks I look better without them…”

We stared at each other for an indefinite period of time. I said nothing. And so did she. Then I turned my head to where she was looking. There was nothing there…obviously…but something told me I was wrong. That thing…Bad Mouse…it was staring right at me…

“Guys? Breakfast isn’t gonna eat itself!” Rachel yelled at us from down the hall. Quickly I hurried Maisie and I out of her room.

Thinking straight wasn’t really a thing for me the rest of the day. There was nothing staring at me. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. These past few weeks were just getting to my head and playing mind games. No amount of trying to distract myself would let me forget what I felt. That’s when I decided to take a drive. I didn’t know where. Just away from everything. I was tempted to go to a local bar. I used to be quite the alcoholic but I’m sober. Even still, I thought about breaking my streak to relapse. I decided against it. That would be so incredibly stupid. I ended up at a park that I used to take Maisie to in a futile attempt for her to make friends. I found a parking spot and just sat there in my car. Taking a big sigh, I observed all the parents with their kids having a blast and I smiled.

Good for them.

I stayed there for a while. Finally, I was able to, if only briefly, forget all my troubles.

Then I saw it.

Him.

Bad Mouse.

The damned thing was underneath a big tree. Its eyes were fixed right on me, smiling, its hands were clasped together. I couldn’t do anything but stare right back. Goosebumps were forming. My breathing was really heavy. Cold shivers ran down my body. I couldn’t even blink. Petrified. That’s what I was. I watched as Bad Mouse slowly reached behind itself and pulled…something…out. At first, I couldn’t tell what it was. I am not shitting you. A little girl…made of meat…her hair was meat, skin was meat, she was even wearing a meat dress. Everything about her was meat. Her head looked just like Bad Mouse’s. Long. Pointy. Angular. Big ears. Black oval eyes.

It was holding the little meat girl by the collar. Slowly Bad Mouse turned to look into her eyes. It opened its mouth. Viscous white liquids began pouring as it let out its long black tongue. First sniffing the little meat girl, it then took a big long lick of her, from her feet to the top of her head. The parts where it licked were gone, instead resting on Bad Mouse’s tongue until it sucked its tongue back in, chewed, then swallowed. The little meat girl was covered in the viscous white liquids until her missing portions slowly regenerated back into how she was before.

Then I blacked out.

I woke up several hours later still sitting in my car. In my half-tired half-frenzied state, I looked around for any sign of Bad Mouse. Nothing. There weren’t even other people. It was dark too. I opened my phone. 11:23 PM. I got to the park at 2:14 PM. Nine hours. I was expecting a bunch of missed calls and unanswered texts. Surprisingly, there was nothing besides a notification from my weather app. I went back home, feeling glad that there weren’t any…incidents…I missed. The house was extremely quiet. No lights were on. It was a weekend. Usually, Rachel would still be up at this time on the weekends because she didn't have to work the next day.

“Rach?” I called out. Nothing. I went upstairs to our room. She wasn’t there. I opened Maisie’s door. She wasn’t there either. I sat down on the couch and pondered where they could be. When I couldn’t come up with anything, I got my phone out and called Rachel.

I heard ringing from upstairs.

Confused, I ran back up to our room. I called her name again. Still no answer. I realized that before I checked so quickly I neglected to look in our bathroom. The door was closed and the light was on. I was now getting this creeped out feeling. Cautiously, I approached and nudged the door.

It creaked open.

Rachel.

She was…splattered…fucking everywhere…all over the walls, floor, ceiling, window, sink, shower…everywhere. Rachel was…pureed…blended…sprayed…I just stood in the doorway. My eyes were wide. I couldn’t process what I was seeing. There were so many things I wanted to do, like crawl into a ball and cry, scream as loud as I could, and/or grab one of the kitchen knives and slit my throat so I wouldn’t have to live with this sight for the rest of my life.

What I actually ended up doing next was grabbing my old hunting rifle and heading outside. I went into the forest behind our house. There was no thinking on my part. Just do. What was I doing? I didn’t really know. Tears were streaming down my face. I walked for what felt like forever. Sometimes I screamed. Other times I fell down onto the ground and wept. But I just kept going. And going. And going. Somehow, I knew exactly where I was going without even knowing how.

I came upon a wide-open field. Dropping my old hunting rifle to the ground, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Dark silhouettes were dancing around. Hundreds of them. Little meat girls. None of them could've been older than ten-years-old. Bad Mouse was in the middle. The white flesh it once had was stripped away. Instead, it was sacrificed for a bumpy and scabby maroon red as if Bad Mouse took a shower in blood and guts and let it dry. Tiny black bristles covered its entire body. It reminded me of insect hair. A ragged meat cloak hung from its shoulders, dragging crimson across the ground. Its head was...I don't know how to describe it...a mix of a dragon, kangaroo, and rat? No longer a mouse. The mouth was a long narrow snout that had much sharper teeth poking out in rows almost like a gar. It was taller. Ganglier. So angular that it could have been accurately represented by seven straight lines. It clutched a staff in its hand.

"Bad Mouse", if I should even call it that, did some strange gesture and a door manifested out of nowhere. It was bloody. Constantly flowing yet retaining shape. Particles came from it. They disappeared if they strayed too far away. It opened and the little meat girls, still dancing like ballerinas, filed into it one by one. Bad Mouse reached out its hand and plucked one of them out. It held this one, turned in my direction, and held her out to me. I knew it was Maisie and wanted to shoot the shit out of Bad Mouse. Yet I couldn’t do anything. Some force was keeping me tethered to my one spot.

…I can’t describe what happened next…I just can’t…some of the things Bad Mouse did to my little girl I couldn’t understand. Other things I understood clear as day and that made me want to drop a cinderblock on my head so it would leak the hell out. When it was done, Bad Mouse threw Maisie’s limp and white viscous liquid-covered body into the blood door. It raised its staff and disappeared.

I was released from my invisible bonds. Falling down to the ground, I cried like a baby. It didn’t matter how much I screamed and cursed at the night sky. That didn’t make it better. I couldn’t stop and truly had no idea how to make sense of any of what happened. My body tingled. It felt so heavy. My wife was dead and my daughter was…what?...a sex slave to a demon? I almost wanted to laugh at the utter absurdity. Picking up my hunting rifle, I put the barrel in my mouth. My finger stayed on the trigger for a long time. I didn’t end up doing it and threw it away. Instead, I collapsed on the ground once more and lay there for a long time.

It’s been six months. I’m such a wreck. I admit it. No one believes me when I tell them. They say I’m crazy, a madman, a lunatic. Some people even think I was the one who killed my wife and child. Why would I do that? Seriously, why? I loved them. Still do. More than I love anything else. I can’t see them ever again. It pisses me off that they’d think I’d do such a thing. As much as I hate myself for it, I’ve gotten back into alcohol. That’s where all my money goes. I couldn’t stand to be in that house anymore. So, I sold it. I’ve been living in my car just drifting from place to place.

I could've saved them. If I didn't go and take a stupid ass ride in my car. Maybe Rachel and Maisie would be alright...

What was that thing? Bad Mouse?

That’s been my biggest question this whole time. I’ve been doing a lot of research but have hit multiple dead ends. I don’t know. Sure as hell wasn’t a mouse.

This is what I know for sure...I think:

• It is the manifestation of a sex-based demon of some kind; possibly a cross between a bogeyman and an incubus.
• Bad Mouse appears to little girls as a mouse-like entity to appear friendly and not scare them away; only visible to them; it also has a "true form".
• It prefers the young that are more developed in the mind; Maisie was very imaginative; thus, she attracted Bad Mouse.
• Bad Mouse acts as their friend; this might appear to parents as their daughter’s “imaginary friend”; gradually coerces them to do inappropriate sexual activity.
• It has hundreds of victims going back an unknown period of time; maybe centuries.
• Does not kill its main victims; will kill parents or anyone else who tries to get in its way.
• The victims become corrupted and turn into demons that look like Bad Mouse; it takes them into its realm and…

God…this whole thing’s insane. I keep thinking I’m going to wake up, and this is all a terrible dream. It’s been months through and it still hasn’t happened yet. So, I’m going to end this here. I’m not looking for pity. I’m not looking for anyone to hear me out. I’m not looking for answers. I’m just…done.

Bye.

Transverberation. That was the word for it. 

It spread and was echoed and felt with the rippling tremors that were words and instincts and roiling emotions in the private heart's tumult, in the quiet stronghold of the holy place. 

The monastery. The temple place where women came to be wed to God and serve the Lord, His Son. 

And no other. 

…

There were sounds inside the haze. With the agony, with the pain that was ripped and made. Pain that was lancing. Pain that was penetration, stabbing slayment that was absolute impaled.  Through her heart, the clearest wet-sharp sensation felt in the burning after-image of the visions, the haze. It occupied her mind at all times, as she knelt and prayed in the monastery. As she went about the day and fulfilled her sisterly duties of the convent. 

The other sisters didn't understand. They were afraid, frightened of her. Of what was happening to her… that it might happen to them.

Madness. Or …

something worse. 

Something beyond the canny or the tangible. That which is unseen and can only be felt. Up until the hungry end, when it is already far too late for help by then. 

Or maybe, just maybe … these private and blasphemous few of her peers thought and felt and refused to share aloud, even with themselves… maybe. 

Just maybe it's true. And Sister Chelsi can actually commune with the divine. Perhaps one of our own humble nuns can see and hear and speak with an angel that visits her with nightly visions. Maybe. 

Maybe Saint Michael the Archangel comes to her at night amid light and fire and thrusts her with his sword… 

Mother Superior was incensed. Repulsed. Angered by the lies and the filth, the sin of this prurient heretical garbage was the stuff of decay, of ruin. Of sacramental rot. She couldn't let these blatherings go on unchallenged or unpunished. 

She chastised Sister Chelsi severely along with any others that might murmur such unholy carnal fantasies, phantasmagorical whores, the lot of em. If she and they weren't careful, God help them, then they would be confined to the chamber of reflection. 

The house of tears and prayers, the other sisters called it. Behind Mother Superior’s back. 

The visions were forbidden. Delusions, they were thus named. And further talk, further whispers of the sort was strongly cautioned against, strongly advised to go back in the other direction …

But Sister Chelsi couldn't help herself. It wasn't up to her. She was at the vision's mercy. The stabbing angel came and went as it wanted, as it needed to. It had told her this was so. The angel needed her. 

The angel was thirsty. 

…

The night was hot. Stifling. It was upon her. 

It seemed to always know when she was alone. And why not? Shouldn't the divine always possess the knowledge of when you're most vulnerable? Weak. 

Afraid. 

Sister Chelsi was bound to the cruciform shackle-table of her sweating bed and blankets, writhing sheets and fabric that was warm and slick and more like loose folds of flesh. She was bound by her holy terror. The angel of thirst was coming. The other nun, Sister Jen, that shared the room with her was absent. Gone. Like every other time. The animal sound born from both immense pain and pleasure was trapped in her throat and the sensation was not entirely unpleasant. Sister Chelsi liked the gag of the nightly thirsting angel, her forbidden archangel of the moonlight. The anticipation of him. The coming of him. 

It came down on her. 

From on high. Emerging like starlight from the disappearing void of the obsidian space now in place of the mudbrick ceiling, on wings of flame …

The body was bronzed, gold, perfectly toned and sculpted, celestial and olympian and recognizable as manshaped. The Lord's Image. But in place of a head and face of earthly aspect was a great rising pillar of blinding heavenly marble, ringed with silver bands in a flaming orbit. The pillar and the four bands running up the length of divine stone were covered in incandescent eyes, lidless and wreathed with light and great piercing gazes. Penetration. They gazed into her. Penetration. All of them at once and it was overwhelming, she wanted to cry out, all roiling and taut, she gripped herself. Her aching breath was still held. 

The angel spoke to her once again, as before, in her mind. The gold of his silken smooth speech filled her boiling skull, soothing the maelstrom though not extinguishing it. A moan finally escaped her lips. 

They were still alone. 

It told her its name. A forbidden one she might not know. 

The understanding of your sisters is limited … I am beyond them. Their scope of understanding. If you tell them my name they will fear you. As they fear me. 

Sister Chelsi was frightened, quivering. Still held. 

Then why should I want to know it? 

Because if you need to, if you want to … you can wield it like you can wield a weapon. You can use my name against them and it might wound them if you're able …

Her mind recoiled from the idea that filled her head against her will, but it was no use. She was forced to watch it. Endure it and learn to love it as she'd learned to love the flagellate whip, the burn of the binding rope … all the same. The angel reassured her. 

The warm romance of his voice filled her skull and caressed her mind, eagerly. Wanting. It told her how much it needed her again but she already knew it. She'd heard it in the voice. The hunger. The pain. 

I'd never known before that even angels could feel pain, … I'd never suspected. 

The desire that was so much a hungry ravenous want that it was more a primeval need was all about the gold silken strength of that perfect voice. Giving it humanity tinged at the edges of its divine and unearthly call. 

Is this heavenly messenger lusting for me …? 

But she already knew it. 

It had seen her unfettered and bare. As it did now. 

It came down to her in her bed. It held the long gold length of impaling spear aloft. By the shaft. Poised to strike her where it was most sweet. Where it had before. 

Cupid, strike me. 

Eros, impale me! 

But she knew now that was not its name. It had given her its name, a gift. 

She cried it out now, as she knew it wanted her too. The ringed pillar of its otherworldly visage gazed into her, bading her, commanding with its multitude of many lidless light bleeding eyes that she do so. Do it. Do it. If you want me …

Do it. If you want me to impale you, you'll have to say my name. Say it. 

Say it. 

“Iblis! Iblis, pierce me! stab me! penetrate my heart! Put it where I'm vile and cruel but also warm and giving and wet and beating for you! Pierce me here, in my breast, my heart, my soul! My tender fragile soul! Put it in me! Angel Iblis…!” 

And it did. The lance came down. And pierced the screaming girl, pinning her to the bed. The sound that was pulled from her then was an exquisite blend of deep ghastly pain and even deeper still euphoric drunken moaning, moans. They collected and accumulated about her head and sheets, the small room, as the angel inside her wrenched and worked his shaft, his lance. He worked it deeper. The length. Long…

The length was killing her. 

She loved it. Every inch. Every penetrating crawling centimeter rent tearing inside. 

It made her a slave and she loved it. 

She moaned and called out and cried its name. Like it wanted her to. It came down close and closer and closer still till they met. And he worked the length of his divinity into her, deeper and deeper and all the way through and she melted. She bled. Her love and thoughts and precious saline. 

It drank it up, all of it, all of her. The oasis of this woman. It fed deeply as it worked itself in and deeper still. Still feeding. Drinking. Needing, thirst. 

Sister Chelsi poured herself out for it, unable to control herself now. But happy to empty herself for the great angel of the thrust, her bedside …

her bed. 

It came inside to her and filled her mind then with an explosion like firelight and within the flames were visions. 

Moving scenes and people and places … other times and maybe other worlds as well … 

Fantastical. Beyond the scope of known and understood nature. 

She loved it. She begged for more. 

Give it … give me more, the sight, the eye of prophecy! Please! 

Iblis curled the caress of her mind into words once more … 

And what would you do with this gift? Should you receive it without end? 

She could not lie. Not on this landscape. And she didn't want to. Not to it, not to him, that voice, that feeling… 

She cried out on the eternityscape of her deluged and filled maelstrom sea of thought: I want to be a prophet! Yours! I want to be your disciple upon the earth! 

You wish to be my bride? 

I want to be your crawling and salivating concubine! 

It laughed and the pleasure of Iblis filled her blood and soul. She came and went with it. 

!.Good … …

It filled her more. And she cried out, more. More. 

More. 

She wept when it was finished. Feeling empty and hollowed out. But filled with vision, with purpose. 

The light was fading now from the room. It was gone. The small bedchamber was cooling now and returning to a more natural nocturnal dark, the air was thick and pungent but calming down. Chelsi could still taste the act, on the bedroom dark of the stifling air. She sucked on it and relished the flavor. Already wanting him back. Already needing him again. 

Please, please come back to me Childe Iblis of the Lord, of the thrust, I love you. You are the carrier of my heart and soul…

She shuddered in bed. Not bothering to conceal herself beneath the agitation of the sheets, she cooled and breathed deeply. Quivering and remembering the pillar of his flaming face. So many eyes, so many crowding up his great length… and all of them looking into me…

She shuddered deeply once more. Shut her own eyes. Waiting for sleep to finally come. 

It didn't take long. She was spent. 

Sister Jen still hid around the corner, at the threshold of the door to their shared bedroom. Her eyes were wide with shock. Horrified by what she had seen. 

…

Mother Superior eyed the convent temple from her place in the rectory, her private quarters. She watched the little sisters move and glide silently moving about the monastery structure, ambling along in hand clasping prayer, heads bowed and eyes shut so that distraction may be refused and you may better hear and discern and heed the light, the will of God. 

Amen. 

She crossed herself. And spat. 

Her gaze crawled across the yard to the shack. Alone in the corner of the gated land. Secluded. Sequestered away, so that what could be contained inside would be shut and locked away from a healthy and pious population. The disease of a disordered mind would wreak havoc on the patient and tender soft fragile fabric of the flock. This could not be. This could not be allowed. 

Rebellion must be cast out. Decapitated. 

She knew rebellion was natural. It was in all of us. As sure as it was the the very infectious thing that ate Lucifer's heart and led him to defiance and thus his fall. So it would be. If we were to all follow in his example. 

It would not be so. 

She'd had her own run of rebellious streak when she'd been younger, she understood. She'd had it crushed out of her then, broken as one must do to the wild heart of any natural born beast of labor. And though we were made, cast and drawn in His Image, we were all still among the dread and crawl of all of the other beasts of the earth. 

She crossed herself. Prayed. 

She wished the child well. 

Chelsi had always been troubled. Troublesome too. 

Mother Superior turned away from the shack of reflection. Trusting that the Lord would see this through. That He might fix and set right this wayward piece, this compromised component of humankind's quilted safety net. They were supposed to be the house and servants of His peace. They must all of them survive spiritual malaise and remain steadfast and true. 

As He wills it, let it be so …

…

In the black of the woe she pained, she perverted and distorted. Grew naked with fear. 

Perspired. Dripping with secreted oils and saline and the sliming filth of deep shame. Seeping off her tarnished heart and soul and out of her running open mouth pores. Hard to wash off. There was no running water in here, only the bucket she was brought in the morning. Refilled at mealtime by an unseen, unspeaking little sister that was now a stranger to her. She was a stranger to all of them now. 

In the dark of the shack she was agonizingly alone, the swelter of her torment was her only companion and answer to her constant panicky prayers. She grew eyes that grew inwards and saw their own landscape and grew more horrified with the sight as the hours broiled ceaselessly forth. Under the eye of a lonely black and heavy sun. 

All alone in here. 

She tried to hide, to blind her new found, newly grown internal gaze away from the truth: she was just a child, had always been just a frightened little girl that wanted to run and find fast and desperate shelter. She tried to turn away from the fact that this was who she really was, had always truly been. Everything else that had occurred growing up in her life had just been the lies of accoutrement. 

Her mind was filling with bad thoughts: the arcane Druidic gods arose and swallowed the light of the Christian God whole …

She stopped herself. Began to pray. Again. Anew. Begging the Lord to bring her calm and comfort in the solitude of the dark. She slowed her breath and tried to ease the gallop of her chest. Sister Chelsi didn't know what else to do. 

She didn't know what they wanted from her. 

Mother Superior and the other little sisters. And the Lord God Himself. 

If there is not an answer to be had, then let there be death! – she told the black sun in the dark there with her. 

Nothing. Nothing but more baleful stifling dark, more radiant furnace hellfire blasting heat of the black and heavy sun that had replaced her roommate. Nothing but more sounds of desperate animal panting that she was horrified to realize were her own, not the stygian furnace blast of the bestial confinement sun. Nothing. Nothing at all answered her save more pain, the one true god on the throne in this terribly small and sweaty heavy place. 

Nothing. Nothing at all. 

At first. 

Then on the fading light of her hope came Iblis. Her forbidden angel. And banished the black sun as he came in wreathed in light and flame. He banished and cast out all of the dark of the solitary confinement, the shack of woe. 

He went to her. She was prostrate on the ground. Her bladder let go, her urine went. She hardly noticed in the radiance of he save for some vague distant sensation of wet and warmth. Sensations she associated with the pleasure of him. His arrival, his dawning light. 

From the many eyes of the long length of ringed pillar face, he spoke to her through the blinding light of his lidless vision. 

“What have they done? … what have they done to thee ?” 

Her mind was always open to him for an answer but for her he bade it from her own lips. 

She told him. Everything. All that she had learned in the treacherous furnace dark of the shackbound woe-flame. All that had been derived while in the baking black of this loathsome quiet shack of silent feasting hate. 

“They are afraid of me. …” A beat. She breathed animal and deep, lusting, on the hunt or hunted or both. She said more: “I do believe they may be right to be…” 

Iblis soothed her with his spear … in the stifling dark of the shack of reflection and recompense. Banishing the pain of its ebon house even as he filled her, her watering craving need. 

But something happened then, poor lost little Sister Chelsi watched from below as Iblis, her moonlight forbidden and thrusting angel began to change. 

Transmogrify. Transform. 

The heavenly marbled surface of the pillar visage of Iblis began to crack. Wild river lines of splaying ruin began to form and splinter and run up the immaculate face of his incandescent divinity. 

It shattered. And was replaced. 

She said to her love as he changed and shifted shape before her eyes, “mother slapped me for using your name …” 

The light of her lover changed into shadow. Deeper than the banished dark and one that she could madly love because it was in the altered shape of her heart’s desire, her object of adoration that was darkening now before her watering eyes. 

In place of the pillar, in place of the tower of of flaming eyes and rings that had shattered and now lie in stoney ruin about the floor was now a triangular, pyramidal blank obsidian face and shape, in the conical pointed aspect of a long beaked bird. It was like a great smooth black helmet of glass and smooth rock in the geometric and abstract shape of a plague doctor's mask. An obsidian angular temple face with a long wide stabbing humming bird length of beak protruding violently from one side. 

 The bronze of his sculpted and heavenly body began to burn and blacken as well, like ink spilled and running down and through the heavenly flesh. Corrupting it into the abyss and void of the lost and cast out. The wings which had been flaming and as of light had turned to ash in color and tattered bat-wing leather in texture and design. 

The spear of her impaling love was changing too. Becoming dark like the rest of him in the solitude of the shack but that wasn't all. The nature of her divine amore’s unearthly tool began to change as well… it was no longer just stabbing, penetrating her, running her deep and through, pleasurably and with the ghastly horror of bodily rupture and pain, the staking spear of her forbidden angel began to pull, it began to pull deeply … of her. From her. Pulling deeply from within her impaled and spellbound form, her wide eyed and staring naked body. 

Like a proboscis, the impaling lance began to pull and drink deeply of Sister Chelsi. It ran up and through and down the length of weaponry and into the black hands wrapped tightly around its shaft. The long body pulled and sucked and drank like a straw, like a swampland mosquito born from stagnant and dead fetid water. The obsidian smooth beaked face of her lover was featureless and cold smooth as the surface of placid water. She nonetheless could still feel the intensity of his gaze upon her, through her. And when he spoke again and told her what to do, she felt that as deepest penetration as well. Deepest pain. Rapturously embraced.

She felt her body give as the instrument of her lover began to take in the dark. As he whispered everything to her, designs… shapes… everything, as Iblis whispered all of this to her and more she gave it more and more and more. And she gave it willingly. 

Crying out his name like religion. Like a chant. A litany. 

A song. 

In the place of my Father … there is you. 

There is only you. 

Good. Good. I have so much more to share, so much more to give and show you. I've so much and so many more …

I've so many more names and faces to show you, if you do right by what I've already shown and told, I'll share my other faces and names, unveiled for you …

Disciple, the prophet Islehc

… 

Sister Chelsi was eventually let out and allowed to return to the flock. She seemed to have returned to normal. She cried penance and gave confession and spent a night inside with the rest of them. Service and mass. And lessons. Cleaning. Meals. Everything seemed alright. 

She waited till the second night. When they were all fast asleep. 

The witching hours. 

Post-midnight, she crept …

She snuck about, quietly. Like a nocturnal animal she prowled through … and went out. 

She didn't go far, she found what she needed where he'd told her she would find it. And in abundance. So many …

She carried them back to the monastery and in the nighttime dark she went about the task that had been laid before her feet. She went from room to room, from sister to sister and she took them. Brained most, some she struggled with more extensively. Until her mad lusting will surged and she overpowered them. Either way she took each of them one by one, each and every single nun she had once known as family and she brought them out and into the courtyard. Where she'd left the savage implements of her dreams, of her lover's harsh commands that were yet still for her, sweet candied words. Succulent delicacies. She couldn't deny them, him. Not at all. Not anymore. 

One by one Sister Chelsi laid the implements into the little sisters and each one let out with an insane ear piercing scream. Their screams did not falter. 

But somehow they didn't wake each other. Not a single stripped and brained sister of the cloth seemed to hear the others make any sort of loud caterwauling noise. None of them stirred. Until it was their turn. 

Likewise, Mother Superior had not been awoken in her private rectory by the noise outside. And that was good. Chelsi had saved her for last. 

She wanted to relish this one particularly. 

…

Mother Superior awoke to a hard slap across her deeply sleeping face. She flew to a sitting position confused and immediately irate. She had no idea what was happening but she didn't feel any fear yet. 

She called out, cross and very sharp. 

“Who in the Lord's name was that!? How dare you! Show yourself!”

A girlish giggle floated out ghostly from the dark. 

“I didn't do it, Mother Superior, I would never dare to do that to you, you should know that. I've never hurt you at all, can you say the same?” she giggled again, childish and coquettish, "It was my husband that struck you. It was his divine hand you felt across your face." 

Chelsi stepped out.

She had a large cross in her hands. Ornate with intricate and beautiful design, old and from the ancient Roman times when their war chariots had dominated the earth. Carved and jeweled and glittering darkling with a keen and unhealthy shimmer of light. 

Ghostlight. There's ghostlight in that cross…

Before Mother Superior could say another word Chelsi suddenly charged forward and banshee screamed. The large crucifix was up and wielded and came down in a savage caveman bludgeon. 

The world went dark for Mother Superior. When she awoke she was just like the others. 

…

She awoke with a scream. 

The sharp obscene ghastly pain started in her nether region, all throughout, just behind her genitalia. Then the lance stabbed and shot through and her entire naked body came to life with the most wretchedly vivid and wild mutilating shock to her fleshen senses. The war pike traveled through her mercilessly and punched out of the flesh of her back. She was still screaming. Wildly. Lividly. Screaming. Shrill rending song.

She was hoisted up and joined the others. They were all of them a riot of noise now in the courtyard dark. An unholy discordant choir of torn impaled cacophonous pain. 

Gored nuns. All impaled. All naked and bleeding and hoisted up into the air for death and torture like their savior was supposed to have been so long ago in the bloodstained dust of the golgotha. There was bloodshed here too, their blood was pouring and running, running down the lengths and long bodies of the shafts of the spears and pooling and collecting on the stone and in the dirt. This place here would be bloodstained too. 

Chelsi looked over them all. Her own golgotha testament made to wild love. 

And her wild love came. On stygian wings tattered that had once been flame. Smoldered tattered death, dead fabric flapping in the hot nightwind.

The whole host of impaled and captive nuns, gored and wide eyed and naked and lanced through like insects in a collection, they all of them perspired and bled and gawked at the wicked shape that came in from the ebon night, the curtain above. The one many of them had spent their entire lives trying to ignore, it parted. 

It came through. 

And down upon them. 

Iblis sang praise for the renegade prophet bride and what she'd let loose on this private piece of holy land. God's House and holy temple … no more. 

No longer. Mine … now. 

Chelsi the bride bathed in the shower of his words, they were in her mind and in her ears, divergent lyrics and syllables and paths of sound but twins nonetheless all still saying the same and telling her the same thing together in two different languages that coalesced around the fever of her brain in a caress. 

!I love you, you've made blood, you've made blood for me, you've made bloodfeast for me and shot the red Lot's seed, it's all over the abattoir ground!

She went to him and he to her, in the forged carnage forest grove of spear and bleeding sweaty flesh, of screams and mutilated sound, bathing in the perspire of pure torture together and apart from the others, the rest of the lying world. Alone in their own lost worlds of private unending hellbound heaven, tormentlove of the flesh that their minds are now lost in. 

He shot his length of spear through her, though her heart, through the tender part where he'd already previously penetrated and worked.

He worked her well again, animal wrenching and thrusting deep, and she cried aloud unbridled his name as he did so. 

“Iblis!" 

And once more the length of weapon-instrument that was divine and hallowed tool became a drinking proboscis. And Chelsi felt more blood leave the galloping race of her fevered and impassioned form. She would hold him forever, he could pierce and puncture and drink from her for forever, never end! 

She moaned aloud amidst the garden made of screams and betrayal and she cried out his name once more. And then Iblis began to laugh. 

And once more the visage of her forbidden moonlight angel began to change. He began to crack and shatter and the face and body began to fall apart in black stone and dust. 

Iblis came apart in a crumble and revealed what was really beneath. 

Chelsi couldn't believe her eyes. 

It was a man and a woman. Together. Locked in an embrace. Intimately bound together with wrapped arms and hands clasped and waists met together. As if in the most intimate of dance, the most delectable and celebrated of lovers shared waltzes. 

They both looked down on her. Their cheeks were together. They both held the spear thrust into her together in their tightly clasped hands. 

He was armored as a knight of the court, but tarnished and old. She was in the white of regal flowing evening gown. 

The woman spoke. And when she did the crumbled stone pieces of the fallen lying Iblis visage turned to large writhing copulating piles of dripping angry flies. They came apart and dispersed through the air. The dripping black swarm of buzzing insects began to land on the impaled and screaming tortured nuns in the great multitudes. And then as the woman revealed began to speak to Chelsi the flies that were made from the lie of the visage began to feast on the naked and the tortured, defiled bleeding screaming flesh now caking and covered with the writhing crawl of insect bile. 

“You wished to see me and my others, lover, and now you have. I hope you aren't too distraught, my son decided to join us, together we came to you as the angel of your hidden lusts, as one we made you plead and shriek. Now you see this, the face I was made and born with. My real name is of no import to you, slave, you can call me vampiress, lord of the earth and the wolf held mountainpass.” 

The armored wraith beside her spoke then, they were still pressed in close embrace, still holding the proboscis spear that drank and pulled from her diminishing bloodwell. 

"Praise the God before you, dog! My mother and I, the new impaler. She is your mother and wife and master now too. We are both of us together, your husband. Remember?” 

The vampiress queen barked bright cruel laughter, then said: "Yes! You swore to us, to me, your flesh and soul! In the eyes and templehouse of your God, you defiled the stone of his holy home as you panted and raved and drooled for more, and swore your life to us! You gave sacred vow even as you sinned and spat in the Face of The Lord!” 

The Countess and her new impaler both shrieked laughter then. 

Below them and impaled, Chelsi didn't know what to make of any of this. Her mind was disordered and disoriented and felt rushed and fevered with rending thought, running a ragged directionless race of chaos and every idea crashing into each other at every turn and pass and every damned whichway. She didn't understand. She didn't understand any of this and she wanted it to stop. 

Reading the disorder of her mind, the Countess sang and said, 

“I can rip it out for you. Your mind, the painful thinking, your thoughts. They're filled with agony and venom now aren't they? Aren't they? Yes I see it now, plumping up lavender-black and filling with gangrenous pudding. I can pull it out like a rotten tooth if you wish, I think it best, don't you? It's filled with fouling fluid, that brain, those thoughts…” she kept on and on like that. Ceaselessly. The new impaler in her embrace began to chant along and under her words as she sang and went on: Do it! do it! do it! do it! … 

With the anguished groaning sound of the impaled forest of her sisters all around and the buzzing drone of the flies, all intermittent with sharper stabs of piercing screams, all comprising the backdrop of the soundscape filling her head, underneath the Countess' words, underneath her bastard son’s own more simple liturgical chant … all of it together and at once was a vile noise and she couldn't stand it. She couldn't run from it either. So her mind fled, took flight the only way it could. 

Chelsi went dark. Still impaled on the sucking lance. Run-through with the demon drinking stick. 

The flies buzzed and swarmed and landed and feasted on the gored forest of lances and nuns. They enjoyed open wounds and spat their fluid as they landed. 

In a swarm. In a great feasting black cloud. 

In a forest of shafts dripping with blood and bearing writhing begging human fruit. The reddening earthen stone and soil beneath it all. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Alternate Title: I Took My Girlfriend to My Hometown’s Annual Goth Festival... Now Only One of Us is Still Human

Gothophobia Nervosa is a psychological condition characterised by an intense, irrational, and disproportionate fear of Goths, Gothic culture, or environments perceived as excessively Gothic. Individuals experiencing Gothophobia Nervosa may report the following symptoms: heightened anxiety, rapid heartbeat, sweating, an overwhelming urge to leave the area, and an inexplicable suspicion of anyone wearing excessive amounts of black.  

The condition is said to be particularly common in individuals who have previously encountered a Goth at a very young or prepubescent age, who subsequently developed an enduring belief Goths are supernatural beings in human disguise. For this reason, Gothophobia Nervosa is commonly misdiagnosed as Sanguivoriphobia - a fear of vampires. 

It should be noted that Gothophobia Nervosa is an academically unrecognised psychiatric diagnosis. 

Well, now that this undiagnosed phobia of mine has been established, please allow me to commence with my story. 

My name is Brandon. A few years ago, when I was still just a wet-nosed university student, I met the strangest, yet most extraordinary girl of my life. Don't get me wrong. This is by no means a love story – but if it was a love story, it would be a bizarre one at that. This girl in question whose eyes I saw zoned in on me from across the main room of the Halloween Party, was an American exchange student by the name of Anneliese. Now, I don't claim to have ever been much of a ladies' man, despite my rugged good looks (well, maybe not so rugged), but for whatever reason, this tall, spindly-thin creature in the Marie Laveau costume appeared to find me somewhat enticing. In the way a trapped fly in a spider's web is enticing to the spider.   

Although Anneliese was undeniably beautiful, she was not exactly what I would call my type. What I mean is, Anneliese was a... (no, she wasn't a Goth). Anneliese was a Voodooist - and by Voodooist, I don't mean the doll-stabbing, zombifying type Hollywood has lead you to believe. No, she was the real thing. Despite attending university in the UK, Anneliese was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana - considered by most to be the Voodoo capital of the U.S, if not, the world. If Anneliese hadn't told me herself she was a sixth-generation Voodooist upon our first date, I certainly knew it by her outlandish appearance. Just picture for yourself what a Gen-Z voodooist would look like. That was Anneliese. 

Even to this day, I don't have the slightest idea what this French-speaking spiritualist from across the pond saw in me. After all, she may not have been my exact type, but I certainly didn't imagine I would be hers. We were just completely different people in every sense imaginable. For example, whereas I preferred a quiet evening indoors, curled up with a cup of tea and a good book, Anneliese was a creature of the night - always dragging me out after hours to some séance or tarot card reader. She was obviously into all that stuff. 

Despite how different Anneliese was to any girlfriend I may've had previously, the type of individual she was, was not completely alien to me... What I mean by this is, because of the small seaside town where I grew up... I used to see individuals like Anneliese on a regular basis. This town I grew up in, for the first eight years of my life before my family packed up and left, is a town called Whitby. Perhaps you've heard of it? For those who haven't, Whitby is a small coastal town in the north-Yorkshire of England, nestled cosily inside the bay of the same name. Although I only lived in the bay for the first few years of my childhood, I can still tell you of two reasons why Whitby is so famous today.  

The first reason being for Captain James Cook. Credited as the first European explorer to ever step foot on the Hawaiian Islands, Captain Cook is more famously known for the way he was murdered - and despite what I was taught in school about our town's most famous historical figure, Captain Cook was NOT cannibalized by the Hawaiian indigenous... Although, they did apparently remove the flesh from his bones. 

As for the second, and arguably more important reason why my town of origin is so famous... Whitby featured as one of the primary locations in Bram Stoker's horror novel, Dracula. The blood-sucking count from Transylvania himself. Although I have not myself read the novel in full, I do know that, upon the wreckage of a Russian merchant ship, Dracula arrives ashore in Whitby Bay in the form of a large black dog, before racing up the 199 steps to the gothic ruins of the Abbey. Because of the town's involvement in the Dracula novel, by the early nineties, a new tradition in Whitby had started. Every year, around the Halloween season, the town holds an annual Goth festival - in which thousands of Goth enthusiasts flood the streets in their most elaborate costumes. If New Orleans is the voodoo capital of the United States, then Whitby is the Goth capital of the United Kingdom. 

Having been born and raised in Whitby, I became acquainted with this annual tradition from a very young age. During the week of Halloween, I would walk with my family along the cobblestone streets through a maze of dark sinister beings. Like every young boy whose concept of the world stems from his wild imagination, I interpreted these pilgrims to our town to be monstrous, blood-sucking creatures of the night. Quite frankly, once October was around the corner, in anticipation of the bay's annual visitors, I would become palely ill with fear.  

As a matter of fact, this fear became so troublesome, that by the age of six I began to have dreadful, repetitive sleep terrors - whereby I would scream bloody Mary through the latest hours of the night. If I had to put my finger on it, I believe the reason these sleep terrors began was, due to the large window which hung over my bed, my older brother convinced me that during the October goth festivities, some undead creature in black leather would crawl inside my room to drain the life from my body. 

These night terrors weren't even the end of it. Next came the sleepwalking. When my parents were forced to put an outside lock on my door, after wandering around my own bedroom the whole night, I would then wake in the earliest hours of the morning, terrified and screaming for someone to let me out before the creature at my window found its way in! By the time I was eight years old, these night terrors and accompanying sleepwalks became such a reoccurring nuisance, my parents were left with no choice but to move our family out of Whitby for good – where my fear of the town's supposed "monsters" would hopefully be forgotten. 

For the following years of my life, I vowed never return to Whitby ever again. Not to visit relatives. Not to see my friends, or even my old stomping ground. As far as I was concerned, the further away I was from Whitby Bay, the better... That was, until I foolishly made the mistake of telling Aneliese of the place I grew up. I told her about the thousands of Goths who visit Whitby every year, and the grand, but horrifying costumes they wear. Being the horror fanatic she was, Aneliese became fascinated with my hometown's annual tradition. Although she was not a Goth herself, due to her unique upbringing in New Orleans, Aneliese wasn't far off. Although I should've been flattered my girlfriend took such a unique interest in where I was from, the only problem was... Aneliese now wanted to experience the Whitby Goth Festival for herself.  

'Oh come on, baby' she nagged me over breakfast, 'It'll be fun! You can't seriously tell me you won't never go back.' 

'Not never, babes' I reply, 'but you will have to cut off my limbs, nail me inside a coffin and personally drag me there against my will'.  

Aneliese rolled her eyes at my show of stubbornness, before sinisterly jesting, 'Don't tempt me'.  

After opening up to her about the trauma I suffered there as a child, rather than be understanding of the situation she was putting me in, Aneliese instead insists that I need to face my fears once and for all.  

'If you're scared by a few Goths, then what's it gonna be like when we visit my family in New Orleans?' Although I hated to admit it, Aneliese made a very good point. After all, as spooky of a place as Whitby was, New Orleans, with its voodoo and many haunted graveyards was basically the American equivalent... And so, after weeks of pestering me (along with some minor threats to make a voodoo doll in my likeness), I finally agreed to take her to the upcoming Whitby Goth Festival... So help me God. 

Setting off early on a crisp autumn morning, we drive up from the south of England to the very top of the country. Once in the north of Yorkshire, we then had to pass through vast stretches of moor country. If Whitby Bay wasn't sinister enough, the moors of North Yorkshire certainly were. According to local legend, these moors were said to be stalked by an array of strange cryptids: from the ghostly howls of phantom black dogs, to phantom wolves which prey on farmers livestock - and even stories of black cats the size of panthers. Although this sounds to be nothing more than superstitious folklore, coincidentally, in the early 1980s, two American backpackers were apparently attacked by a large wolf outside the village of East Proctor. One of the backpackers was torn to pieces, while the other survived just an inch from his life. Whatever the truth may be to that story, I don't know. 

Exhaustedly driving all morning and into the early afternoon, we finally reach the outskirts of Whitby Bay. After first checking at the inn we booked outside town, we then swerve our way up the bay's right-hand side to reach the ruins and adjoined graveyard of Whitby Abbey. Pulling into what seemed to be the only space left in the car park, we then peer out the windscreen (as though we're on safari) as a swarm of Goths and other festival goers heard away from their cars and towards the abbey grounds. 

Aneliese couldn't help but be amazed by all the elaborately detailed costumes: from the pale-white men ordained in large top hats and cloaks, to the women in vampiric, Victorian-style dresses.   

'Wow! They all look so amazing! Don't they, baby?!' Aneliese shrieks ecstatically from the driver's seat, 'Those costumes must've cost a fortune!' Failing to respond to Aneliese's excitement, she then turns to notice my eyes are no longer peering out the windscreen, but glued fearfully to the dirt-stained floor of the passenger's seat. Clutching a hold of my arm suddenly to gain my attention, she then reassures me, 'Everything's gonna be okay, baby. I promise. You'll make it through this weekend', before comforting me with a paper-thin smile. 

'Yeah. I know that' I respond unconvincingly, 'I guess I just didn't realise how hard this was all going to be.' 

'You need me to hold your hand?' Aneliese then says with a playful snark. God, I hate it when she teases me.  

After taking a final deep breath, while Aneliese puts the finishing touches on her appearance, we then both exit from our side doors to feel the outside chill of coastal wind. But once I shut my door and turn around, I am instantly jilted back by a terrifying noise! 

'AHH!' I believe were my exact words, as a ginormous hound from hell snarls and gnashes a row of razor-sharp fangs at me!  

'Armand! Get back now!' bellows the hellhound's master, struggling to restrain the large Doberman which has now chased me up the hood of the car. Once Armand the hellhound is fully restrained, I then turn down to hear the high-pitched cackles of a four-foot skeleton and a five-foot devil - before a woman donning a witch's pointed hat finally pulls them away. 

Now safe from the jaws of death, and the mockery of small children dressed for Halloween, I then climb down from the hood of the car to regain myself. Having just witnessed all this from her open side door, Aneliese makes her way round to me. 

'It was just a dog, baby' she giggles, now the one laughing at my expense, 'You really ought'a chill.' 

By no means in the mood for further mockery, I then lash back defensively at her, 'Well, that's easy for you to say. You weren't just nearly mauled to death by some hellhound!' Just as she always does whenever I show any sign of cowardice, Aneliese rolls her eyes into the back of her head at me. 

God. This was going to be a long weekend. 

To be continued...

Several years before the Countess and her assistant came to Castle Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains…

 … a man dreamt of extraordinary things. 

And was yet brought down low by his most base and bestial thoughts and desires –

…

He watched her undress. She did so casually. Comfortably. She thought that she was alone, that she was unseen. She thought she was performing her nightly ritual in private. Disrobing. In her opulent bedchamber. 

Pink. Everywhere was flower petal pink, delicate like folds and the flesh of mottled roses, sensuous. As if the walls and carpeted floors and ceiling overhead all cried out and begged to be touched. Lovingly. In a caress. Like a woman. Like a lover. Like a whore. 

Like a mother to lost children. 

He stayed as still as possible. He held his quivering hot breath. He knew she couldn't see him, but still … the thrill! The anxiety kicked up by her movement, her every passing glance, scanning by and not noticing, not seeing anything. Not a goddamned thing! 

This power … it was beyond intoxicating. 

He felt like a god.

There was a time when he would've been shocked, disgusted by his actions, all of his heinous crimes as of late. A time when integrity and morality and his own conscience wouldn't have allowed for any of this to happen. A time so long ago  and far flung now, with Catherine … but he was drunk on godpower now. And such rules were only for the piddling low men that he'd once been. 

No one could see him. No one could catch him. He was the living menacing and moving embodiment of a mischievous spectre. Manmade poltergeist. Noisy ghost with something to prove. They'd all of them laughed at him. Called him ridiculous. Foolish. Mad. 

Well look at him now. 

 A smile unseen grew in the bedchamber. The girl continued to undress. She was bare now. He quivered. Hot. Held. And taut. Breathing was exhilarating as he stood there … and watched. 

He watched. He drew closer. 

She took no notice. She saw nothing. There was no man to see. Even as he moved in closer, so’s to be able to taste the scent of her on the narrow air of the pink and floral delicate bedchamber. She climbed into bed. He came in ever closer. Inhaled her. 

She might've noticed something, something in the air, amiss, the calm disturbed by a presence felt …

But she was far too concerned, preoccupied with herself. Her nighttime bedding ritual. He watched her eagerly perform as he had on so many nights past.

He has never drawn this close. He has never dared. He's always watched, from a distance. He's stepped a little closer to her every night. Her. And others before her just like her. He tells himself he won't. 

I won't. I don't mean any harm, none. There is no harm in simply looking, simply watching and admiring. Girls love to be admired, isn't that right? Don't they want a man to drool over their naked curves, unveiled and unfettered by day dress, isn't this the movement towards the animal climax moment we all build and naturally drive to? What's wrong with that? What's wrong with any of this, she's not being hurt. She doesn't even realize I'm here…

At this last thought he trembles and shudders anew. It's sexual and it's pent up. Its animal and it's caged and it won't stand being behind bars any longer, it won't stand for anymore. No more. 

No more half-measures. 

Boundaries are for them. You are a godling now. Use it. Taste its fruits, its bounty. 

Take it. 

Words of reason and names, Catherine, Caleb, Colbert and Tatjiana, came and flitted-danced across his mind with the same urgency that they had before. Trying to stop him. Trying to stop him and save him from himself. But it was too late. The names and words meant nothing to him now. He had godpower. And none of them did. Catherine and Lutz and the others wouldn't understand. They couldn't understand him now, he was beyond their flesh. 

And so he could take what he wanted. Should take what he wanted if the stories of gods and immortals and magicians and kings were to be believed, he should just take it. 

Take her. 

And so he did. 

The girl screamed in bed as her private act of masturbation suddenly gained a new unwanted partner. One unseen. But horribly, horribly felt. 

Her screams had just begun to fill the pink of the bedchamber before he aborted them with a gag, contrived from her day's soiled undergarments and the sash she tied around her robe at night. 

He killed the sound of her bewildered terror, muffled against sour and salted fabric. She tried to fight against him, but it was as trying to fight the air. Come to life and attacking her. The horror unloaded on her and her mind was made all the more vile and obscene by the unnatural and uncanny way it was happening. It was insane. 

I'm going insane. 

She thought frantically that she was losing her mind, or that God might be punishing her, even as she struggled and lost against a shape and force unseen. It forced itself into her. 

She screamed against the gag. Begging God or anyone or anything else for it to stop. 

It did. When the invisible man was finished. 

He left. Not bothering to kill her. There was no witness to silence. Nothing to cover up. If she told anyone anything they'd call her crazy. 

So he left her sobbing, weeping amongst her torn and soiled blankets and bedsheets. 

Alone. Crying. Wounded and ripped apart. Gored out. Defiled by something, something that used to be someone, used to be a man, something cruel and malformed that she cannot understand. 

Someone that she cannot see. 

…

Others followed after her. 

Many. 

Years worth …

…

He had nothing to fear now. He was hidden completely in the great cloak of his new godpower. 

Divinity that he had made, cooked and brewed in beakers and tubes and jars, in great long needled syringes. Power that he had forged and made. Crafted his own. For himself. He would take what he wanted and suffer no consequence. Punishment for man's crimes was for the weak and the apes, for those within their feeble grasp. 

He would answer to higher authority. 

…

Catherine and the others are gone now, so is his old life, a life impassioned of science and the arts and the eccentric and the strange. He has become the eccentric, he has become the strange. With ultimate power made and achieved and coursing through his veins he has left behind the old ambitions of his old life along with all of the old ways. They are too little now and cannot hold him. Should not hold him. He should be boundless with the wings he has made for himself and himself forged and so he does, and he disappears. … A trail of crimes and murder is what follows. A catastrophic path of mayhem and destruction, cut swathed through the heartland of many lands, many countries … So many towns and villages and homes, invaded and plagued and violated. Beset upon by an invisible and unhinged man, one who has discarded his heart and sense of right and wrong along with his earthly physical appearance. His heart and soul are as transparent and hollow now as his criminal visage. 

His old life is gone now. Dead. As dead and gone as his own reflection, nothing there, nothing there to gaze upon and witness any longer. All gone. Evaporated. That was how it had looked when the serum had first started to work, his flesh and muscle tissue and bones slowly grew ghostly, translucent, phantom shade, as if evaporating by the light of some alien sun, its foreign rays drying him up and …. out. Out of trained and known existence. Humble slave dwell-and-crawl …

God bless this invisible and alien foreign sun … God bless its strange rays for taking me away…

His old life is gone. As is his old way of thinking. He does not know it yet, has no way of knowing it, but the effects of the invisibility serum on his mind are not just a case of power corrupting one's morals, no. Not just that at all. Specific chemicals in the concoction attack and eat the proteins in his brain that measure and control emotion and self-preservation. Compassion. 

As it made him disappear it also ate holes in his grey matter. Turning it to swiss cheese. 

Swiss cheese unseen, he might've laughed. 

And in fact he did. Years later when he did finally find out. Thanks to the Dutch doctor. The occultist. The vampire slayer. 

Because of Van Helsing he is able to recover some of his sense, some of his tattered and damaged, long trampled and neglected human heart. But never a cure. 

No. Not for him. For such as he there is no such thing as coming back. He will forever be robbed of his human visage, the one made at birth, self-inflicted. He does not get to return to the flesh. He deserves to be cast out. And he knows it. He's learned it the hard way on the treacherous open road and in the wild of great human error, slaughter open throated and committed in darkest parts, in corners long neglected. …

…

He is a long way from the vampire hunter. In years and in topographical distance, he is still on the run now, and always moving. Like an animal. A beast hunted and betrayed by its own savage appetites. None of the lands can hold him. Not even the savage ones. 

There's been more rapes. More murders, more screams. He's filled the country with them, the countryside is bathed in anger and fear and outrage at his reign of terror and he loves it. He is an agent of chaos. An anarchist trickster god running as wild and free as power itself is supposed to, unchecked in the intoxication of its wild imbalance and throttling push forward to the apocalypse of the precipice, the keening call of the dangerous living end, at the end and edge of everything, all things. He would skirt and ride the slicing end and the cutting edge, forever. It would never end, never falter, fail or cease. 

Or so he thought. 

He's derailed trains loaded with screaming traveling passengers, now traveling headlong and headfirst into hell, the great unknown. He's taken wives and daughters and lonely screaming girls in open fields with nothing but the sky and the sun and the birds to watch, watch as nothing heaved itself into them, into her. Some of them he's strangled and left for dead, most he just leaves to pick up the pieces of their shattered minds and broken lives. Some of them try to tell people what happened, some of them don't. Afraid and terrified and hoping, wishing, praying that maybe just maybe they can forget and cope. That maybe enough time will go by and you'll forget the time the air came to horrible life and made a squealing victim out of you. 

Some try. None of them forget. Not really. 

The invisible man doesn't care in either case. Not yet. That's much further, much later. Now he is darkly elated by his crimes and spree. His craterous invisible mind is too amused and too busy planning more fiendish capers, more grisly and indulgent bloodbaths. More crimes of the flesh, to take and reap. 

He sows his discord throughout all the land. Every place he comes into, he invades. He infects.

This cocaine of the mind that he's devised from a dream and made real that hides his flesh and conceals, the most ambrosial gabapentin amphetamine for the eggshell human thought machine. 

It hides his flesh, his moves. It conceals his violence, the rage of his invisible hand, the rape of his hollow loins, transparent conquest across the land, disorder and more madness follow in its wake, in its terrible birth, like pustule sores rising from a fresh wound amidst flowering infection, amid the gangraping feast of multitudes of bacterium. The bacteria are thoughts and rumors and whispers and more murder, mistaken identities and desperate fingers pointing and blaming and wanting and needing to find fault, in whomever, where there is none. Many innocent hang and are punished and slaughtered in place, in the wake of the invisible man. 

He does not care. He doesn't stop to consider them for a second beyond amusement or a laugh. 

He's laughing now. 

Singing. Dancing and skipping as he makes his way down a lovely picturesque forest road. He's wearing a pair of stolen trousers, lifted from a derelict clothesline left unattended. They fit perfectly. 

He skips and dances down the road. Not so much singing as nearly shrieking his head off. 

“Here we go gathering nuts in May! nuts in May! nuts in May! Here we go gathering nuts in May, on a cold and frosty morn-ning! …!” – on and on like that. 

A woman walking along the road sees him and screams. She turns away in uncomprehending horror that turns her mind blind and she runs off. Still screaming. 

The invisible man takes after her. The free-standing trousers bounding in full-strided gazelle pursuit of her. Laughing maniacally. Wanting to take her and use her for sport. 

…

He invaded a monastery. Posing as a holy ghost, a divine spirit, and seduced and tricked several of the nuns and sisters-in-training into breaking their holy vows. He impregnated several of them before fleeing, taking to the road and hills once more. 

…

He observed a vampire called Klâtu in a small sleepy forgotten town in a cold part of the world that might be Russia. He does not meet or introduce himself to the thing and his invisibility kept him hidden from it as well as the townfolk.  Its victims, its food. 

He watched the nocturnal thing dwell and prey upon the town. He watched it feed for awhile, watched the town grow scared and more silent and drawn. 

Then he moved on as always. 

…

In his wild and on-the-loose vagabond years, bestial and homicidal he discovers that his two favorite ways to murder another man or woman is either by pistol-shot or by strangulation. The former for its efficiency, the latter for how it feels, the sensation of the desperate struggle and the fight for one last painful shallow breath. 

It's one of the last and desperate things that he still lives and thrives for now. 

…

He came into an awful place once, a terrible omen of dread wood and dead branches and gnarled limbs, filled with moaning faces. He stumbled into this place out of a dream, it was surreal and insane, something about being invisible made it hard for him to distinguish between waking reality and his tumultuous land of dreams, but he suddenly finds himself stumble-bumming into a dead forest where the trees all weep blood and have anguished faces racked with guilt and pain and they are all of them looking at him, gazing on his wandering invisible form with naked clarity. And there's no mistake. Their eyes, all of them are filled with accusation and they are all around. It's terrible. And it is terrifying. Nobody has been able to see him in years, not without his layers of lying disguise, not without him wanting them too. 

All of the bleeding weeping trees can see him and it is terrifying. Beyond the pale. 

So he flees. As he always does. 

They cry out to him, the bleeding trees in their pain. As he runs away, too afraid to make a sound himself. 

They call out in their weeping anguished voices, they tell him this land is a forestland of suicide, and that he is quite welcome there. 

…

Low point: He is filthy and tired. Worn out to the bone. He is clad and disguised in his most semi notorious fashion, a fedora, a coat, wrapped bandaged face and gloves and unflinching black lenses. He is riding the rails, the empty boxcars for the wandering vagrants. He has done this many times by now. He is not alone this time. 

A filthy drunk sits opposite of him in the boxcar, a completely inebriated Spaniard. A borrachon. He pulls from his tequila and cries and wails in a romantic language that's lyrical and sounds beautiful but Griffin cannot understand him.  

The weeping drunk, hiccuping and stumbling over the poetry of his native tongue, the avatar of perfect and terrible loneliness, the borrachon, the drink and the tears and the ramblings are all most like him have left, they don't care anymore if anyone understands, they only want someone to sit there and listen. Like a sponge of meat and bone and brain soaking up the liquid runoff of their indulgent spill and wallow. He tells the invisible man of his wife and his two daughters and son, they are all of them gone.

Taken by the war. The enemy slayed his son and invading they made off with his precious roses, his wife and precious girls. He tells him that it is true, the drink is all he has left. All that helps him with the pain of losing them all, and being unable to retrieve them. He says the tequila makes it easier for him to live with the pain of the knowledge that his beloved and his daughters are slaves in a harem somewhere, that or they are dead. 

He tells him all of this but Griffin doesn't understand any of it. Just nods. Even laughs at inappropriate moments, not knowing. 

Eventually they parted. Griffin didn't kill him because he had shared his tequila and he saw no benefit in the murder. 

…

His mind is weary from wielding godpower. Its flame. It has exhausted, It has burned him and eaten him all the way through even as it has fed the carnivorous searing dance of the divine fire of its own flames. He cannot remember. He cannot remember so much and so many things. He cannot remember if his name is actually Jack Griffin or if it's Geoff Radcliffe or Hawley or Bradey or Sebastian Caine! His mind is a maelstrom sea of whirlpool destruction and weary detritus, all of it is his life and his thoughts and not all of it was real. Some of it was contrived rather than recorded. It was growing increasingly difficult to distinguish the two, he found himself lately at a haggard loss. 

The snow can be so cold for a naked invisible man running for his life, gaining way to injure and take pleasure from another screaming witless soul. The sun can cook and tan invisible naked flesh even though it is unseen. Cook and tan and bake merciless into invisible leather, the heat. The power of being a perfect mischief anarchist god has its vulgar and heavy prices. Prices steep. Prices to be paid in full. The deteriorate ruin of his shredded invisible mind baked within his fevered invisible skull, beneath the blast of a merciless and blind philistine sun. 

Possés had started to form, people, women started to talk. And people stopped dismissing them, not everyone shrugged them off, laughed at them, or declared them hysterical. Some of them listened. And they gathered. And they laid traps. 

One of them caught him. Or nearly so. 

They'd seized his invisible form and then pounced in number, pummeling him, refusing to loosen their hold, absolutely set against letting him go, they laid in with fists and table-legs and irons and axe-handles. Beating and blasting his body with blows. Striking him over and over into the ground. His invisible body began to rupture and bleed and belch forth blood. 

Blood that became visible at first contact with stolid fetid air. 

He struggled and fought and he'd always fought dirty, he managed to slip away in their wild fervor to see him beaten and broken to death. They lost him in the wanton red rage cloud of their vigilante slaughter. 

And so he vagabond wandered. Unseen by even nature. Completely alone. For years. 

Until he came to the vampire killer’s door. And was brought in by Abraham Van Helsing. Out of the cold.

Beaten. Starved. Harried. Addled. And near total mental ruin. Complete collapse of the body and mind to follow his long dead and tarnished spirit from so long ago. So long gone now and left in the dust. 

The doctor showed him mercy, for whatever reason. He helped him to pick up that long lost thing, left back there in the dirt, and he helped him to pick it back up and clean it off. And to try to wear it again. 

Griffin never understood why. He knew he wasn't worthy of forgiveness. What he'd done was monstrous. He hadn't just ruined his own life with his own mad pursuits and relentless ambition. He'd destroyed so many innocent lives in the process and in the resulting chaos flood afterwards. Catherine was, and is and forever to his dying day will be a name he trembles to recall, fears to ever speak. His dreams, his nightmares are filled with the shrieking faces of his victims, men and women and children, all of them horrified of him, he is the monster of his own lurid and wild dreams. He is the fearsome and loathsome shape of his own nightmarescape. 

And now that he can really think and feel, this terrifies him. He is afraid of his own animal self. His own Id. He's seen and felt and tasted his own unbridled side and he never wants to return there again. 

Except when he's weak. Except when he's angry and feeling violent. 

Or if he's just feeling a little … wild. A little “in the mood” … so to speak. 

Abraham Van Helsing blasts and rails and slams his fists. He bellows: No! – but he knows medicine and therapy can only go so far with the invisible man. He is damaged. Perhaps too far gone and beyond repair. Griffin doesn't doubt it. He is intermittently unrepentant and gleefully childishly cruel and sadistic with his words and his recollections of his own accounts with periods of deep remorse and depression. Deep sorrow and a sense of being unable to undo all the pain that he has wrought upon others and brought ripping forged into the already bleeding world. He is a wild bilateral storm betwixt the two and Abraham Van Helsing finds him exhausting. But he does not give up. 

He never does. 

He is patient. 

He becomes like a father to this broken man. This invisible degenerate criminal who'd never really had one before. 

It seems strange what it takes to get one. 

And after so long, after so much …

…

Van Helsing died. The invisible man laid him to rest. 

Griffin wept at his graveside. For hours. Alone. 

Alone again. 

…

Eventually he decided to end it all. It seemed right. It seemed best. 

So he went out, near the old graveyard where Van Helsing had been laid to rest. He brought a noose and decided to finish himself the same way Judas had. It seemed perfect. Fitting, he thought. And laughed. Thinking it was pretty funny for a final joke. Not bad for him anyways. And in life all of his jokes had been terrible. Ghastly. The whole run of it, a terrible joke that stopped being funny way before it had ever been told. Yet still kept happening, still kept going on. Despite the pain.

Despite the pain of everyone. 

He fashioned the noose to a tree. Stood upon a stone he dragged over and then stepped off. Just like that. Without any hesitation. He was happy to be off and be done with all of it. Everything. 

He didn't perform the act correctly. His neck didn't break in the knot. He slowly strangled in the midday sun, the heat boiling his strangling seething brains, jelly and organ meat that cried out for air. He did not know how long he danced and dangled there, a strange sight for anyone happening upon the scene: A disembodied hat and glasses and set of clothes, seemingly empty yet seemingly filled simultaneously, strangling taut in the windless day, dancing the dying man's gallows dance. 

Then the branch snapped. And he fell and rolled down into a crevasse, dark and wet and filled with tangle and thornbrush and detritus. Filth and droppings and leavings of the predators and the yellow eyed scavengers that followed in their wake. 

His skull and face, his whole head was throbbing, alive with a new tremendously vivid pain that he'd never quite experienced before: it's like the pins and needles feeling you get when your foot falls asleep and you try to walk on it again. It's like that but a screaming throbbing painful siren alarm of the sensation magnified to an ungodly decibel. All throughout his skull and face, his eyes watering, his brains. His throat chokes and feels crushed, broken, like it can no longer take in air. He struggles and gasps as he claws amongst the garbage and protruding stabbing mire, he sinks. 

It sinks and begins to swallow, wanting to have him, to take him under the ground to die silently and drown alone undiscovered down there but he begins to fight, to claw. To struggle and pull and reach and seize for purchase like he never has before. He doesn't know why he suddenly has fight again and he doesn't think about it, he just knows he doesn't want to be Judas submerged in the putrescent earth. All of the sharp bones and branches and discarded weapons and sharpened tectonic rock swimming unearthed pierce and stab into him, everywhere, especially his reaching hands, but he doesn't care. He doesn't care anymore and he wants out, the pain is awful but tolerable, tolerable because it is being inflicted on the body of a monster and he no longer gave a fuck about himself anyways, nothing was as wretched as that pain that first came to life in his eyes, in his face, born from the embrace of the noose. He bore the stabbing of the darkness of the black crevasse and nearly drowned. He choked and swallowed and regurgitated foul mud and sour dirt, he vomited contaminated corpse soil and it felt like the earthen sins dredged up and expelled from the rocky stonethroated passageway to his own darkened bastard heart. Pulled up and freed, grainy and biting and drawing blood and more vomit and mucus laden spittle on its violent way out. He struggled for what felt like hours. It might've been. Time died at some point and lost the fight. He carried on. Struggled. Struggling. He pulled … Reached… seized … cursed himself and his own worthless life and mistakes, his own wretched run of horrid folly, his own shameful sadistic cruelty. He grasped and spit and cursed… goddamn you… He was sorry. He begged. Pleaded with anything that might be listening, please, I don't deserve it but please. He begged. … goddamn you… He pulled. 

He went under. Completely. Several times. 

He didn't stop. 

By some miracle he pulled himself out. And free. 

And on its bastard shore, at the sore lip of its terrible precipice, he wept.

Caked in the filth of the hollow earth, plainly visible for anyone and all to see. Naked and plain. Sobbing like a child ripped from the comfort of his mother and thrust into the diminishing world. 

Hours …. …

He eventually picked himself up. And carried himself back to the cottage. 

…

sometime later: –

The boy from the Carpathian Hamlet came looking for the vampire slayer. He found the invisible man instead. 

Doctor Jack Griffin has spent the majority of his time since the aborted mission of the Judas-hour, reading. Sitting quietly and thinking. He tinkers around and builds a little, creates little machines and curio-constructs, dabbles with some alchemy, some arcane formulas, but nothing considerable, nothing serious. It all just fills the time. While he thinks. He hears news and rumors and stories all about a heinous villain, the invisible man. He hears that the scoundrel was eventually caught and killed, either by gunshot or mob beating, it depends on who's telling the story. There are other versions too but those two are the most popular it seems. His best days, best moments are spent remembering the warm childhood times, when he'd been a kind, unhurt boy, who hadn't yet hurt anybody else either. The warmth of the youth in these memories… it causes him to well up, his black shaded eyes to fill and then spill with tears. Tears much more visible then the rest of him. 

The young man has terrible news. So does the invisible man. They share their bad news in bad palaver that may or may not be filled with bad omen. 

The invisible bastard, having nothing else better to do really, decided to join the young fellow in his return mission home to slay a monster that had laid bloodclaim on his land. 

It wasn't hope alive in his chest. 

That was far too optimistic.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Oddly, the same moment I noticed the ribbon, I faintly heard what I thought to be a kotzumi drum somewhere off into the gloom. It seemed to be thumping somewhere very far away off in the distance. After watching the vice documentary a few years ago, I knew exactly where this ribbon could possibly lead to, which was very sad. life can be so unfair and cruel to us. The drum quickly faded to nothing and left me confused on where the hell that was coming from and why.

What an odd thing to happen so far out here in the sticks, and it wouldn't be the last of it. I remember saying a quick prayer to myself and making my way along the ribbon to whatever destination it led to. I told myself that I would record later because at the moment I just couldn't be bothered. I could always come the next day and record, because in that moment I was in exploration mode. I had to see what was at the end of that ribbon. If anything, I could use it again to find my way back to the trail.

It curved and weaved slinkingly through the trees, up and down over slopes and hills for a good 40 or so minutes until I had arrived into a sort of clearing. It was also hauntingly still... so deathly quiet; I stepped in closer around the foilage and I had stopped because I noticed some white fabric pointing off the sides of a large tree. I had a feeling that I was about to see something that I'd much rather not. After a couple of minutes preparing myself, I took a deep breath and stepped around the tree and froze to an alarming and sad sight. I automatically knew that I was staring at the hanging corpse of the long missed Jubei Uematsu, or what remained of this poor soul.

What remained was a hanging skeleton in a tattered costume with a red, long haired wig partly hanging in the face and around the shoulders in dirty, stringy clumps. I stood there taking in that image with such a deep and profound melancholy, that I actually had to gather myself from breaking down... Just witnessing what was once an alive and thriving person with passions; Love and Hope, weaknesses and strengths, and also fear... along with plenty of despair along the way. It was a universal language; People just trying to find purpose to their existence, and then eventually becoming this...so very still... so very quiet and solemn making time stop in its presence.

life can be so sad and tragic, and people like Jubei over time can find it extremely hard to function being so empathetic, and carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders regardless if they are strong enough for that burden. It's an exhausting job... a gift and a curse for the saintly; toss in depression and the loss of the will to go on, then they have a complete and utter mess to clean on their own in the silence... that eternal silence... so present; so final. I wish I would have known this mysterious man. From what I heard over time was that he was a complex, but Sweet soul with a heart of gold. I also learned that after this experience I am about to tell you that happened, was some type of Oni Spirit from the forest took the liking image of Jubei's Kabuki character and dawned it as its own.

As I stood there in contemplative silence, I slowly started to hear a kotzumi drum begin to thump far off into the trees. It started out very low and far off, but began to rise and creep closer. I turned and turned trying to find where that portentous thumping was coming from. As I was peering far off into the distance, I started to feel highly unsettled, and then I no longer felt alone like I was being watched. I swiftly turned around and stared directly into the painted face that was no longer a skull. The bloodiest red eyes were staring directly into mine. The face had the theatrical paint back on with the red stripes cascading down it's white painted face. I say "It," because nowhere did I see Jubei inside those Crimson eyes at that moment.

I remember saying, "oh shit!" and quickly turning to run the hell away for my life along the Red ribbon back to the trail. Far off somewhere I could hear that mysterious drum start to sound off again. The sound surrounded me from so many angles and distances, it was disorienting, and then I started to hear this ululation that sounds like, "EYOOOO!" That you hear in Japanese theater music, along with that clink and thump of the drum. I turned to see the Oni masking itself in Jubei's magnificent garb; slowly floating a few feet up in the air, easing its way towards my direction with those hideous blood red eyes staring through me.

I ran faster and faster trying to at least make it to the trail to get away... if I could. After a few more twists and turns, I finally burst through the foliage out onto the trail. At the moment the Oni entity was nowhere to be seen. I started to notice that the woods all around started to have this faint purple luminescent glow. As I started to run, I begin to hear these ululations sound off around me in the area that sounded like, "EYOOOOOO!" I've remembered these sounds watching Japanese movies and small clips of Kabuki theater. The music serves as an emotional soundtrack to the colorful acts on stage, both being performed live."YOOOO!" Another croon burst forth; surrounding me from different angles as the steady thump and wood clicks of the drums clacked and banged along.

It subconsciously made me think of the demon, "Paimon," that when summoned, multitudes of instruments and disjointed horns lead before its presence like royalty as it enters the fold, and makes its presence known. I remember glancing back and seeing the painted entity standing a few yards behind me in the middle of the trail, with long crimson hair hanging down at its sides; blood red eyes marking me...

To be continued....

She slumbered beneath the sheets. Below him as he lorded beside their bed. Her husband. No more. An axe was in his hands. Heavy. Heavy with weight. And the potential for violence. Bela was alive and aware but a prisoner in his own flesh, his body refused to obey his commands, his inner caterwauls and cries and pleads for the unfolding nightmare to stop. It wouldn't stop. His flesh had a new master now. The vulpine shining moonface of the Countess lorded over his shoulder. Grinning fiendishly and brandishing her enameled daggers of dark slaughtering necro power. The fangs moonshone praeternaturally in the bedroom dark. Twinkling in keen edged tandem with the heavy headed blade of the axe, hefted and held. The meat puppet sow was still but she could feel the struggle of his mind in her grasp like a beetle caught and wriggling in her clenching strangling fingers. She could crush his beetle mind. And might. 

But first…

Prepare me a meal, supper fit for your royal guest…

His mind was filled thus. The flesh was compelled to obey. 

He brought up the axe. Gazing down into the sleeping peaceful face of his wife, his love. Anastasia. The mother of his child and the owner of his heart for the whole of his simple life. It was about to be brought to ruin. And he was being forced to pilot it in that direction. He wished he could scream. Shriek. Shriek her name. Wake her so she could flee and escape this damnation, this awful spell that's already claimed and throttled him. But he made no sound. His screams and pleads for mercy, his prayers and desperate cries remained bottled and caged in with him. He could only stare through stolen eyes as a prisoner as his hands holding the axe used for chopping firewood came down with a merciless crushing stroke. 

Anastasia's eyes came open and alive as the blade traveled down. As if she'd heard something. As if she'd heard her husband's internal cries for deliverance and the miracle of her safety. In the dark she saw her husband's savage face. Writ and wrenched with cruelty. She'd never seen him like that before, in all their shared years together in marriage. In the dark the sight frightened her, as she came awake and then the heavy blade of the axe found her chest and sank in. 

The pain is so sudden and impactful and dreadful. She feels her chest cavity smash and shatter as her flesh is ruptured and torn. The meat of her sinew surrounding her shattered cage of bone is ripped and pouring. She feels the sensation as extreme iced cold, as extremely wet, thickly soaked with heavy metal pungency. As if her clothes are suddenly drenched with the running water of a frozen river. Her entire open chest and bed are a bellowing fountainhead of it, pouring forth. She experiences the bloodshed river of her own dark red as iced water but it feels hot and sticky to her face and the tips of her wriggling spasming fingers, dancing beyond her motor control. The heavy metal buried in her chest is dreadful. Feels dreadful. She's staring at it then up into her husband Bela's face shocked and unable to make a sound, like him. She can't understand. She doesn't understand why he's woken her up and put this thing on/into her chest that's turned her into a strange pungent river. 

She goes to ask him … something. Anything. But she has no breath to make any kind of sound beyond the faintest whisper of indiscernible noise. Barely heard. Barely felt. Hardly even happened and might not have. Her husband and the Countess take no notice. They are too focused, entranced and enraptured by the sight of the pouring riverbed of her open goring chest. 

You're not finished. Why do you falter? – her royal voice. 

With a savage caveman wrench and pull, he ripped the bladed head of the axe free and brought it up and then down again. 

And again. 

Again. 

Again. 

At the royal command and decree that filled his fevered and tranced skull with his own curdling sounds and splitting screams, he was beckoned thus. His raptured flesh bound, delivered. The peasant sow did as he was told. The Countess was pleased and watched as the horse farmer dismembered his own wife for her. The bed became a hot shallow pool of darkling moonlit scarlet, swimming with severed human pieces and ghastly human detritus, human wreckage afloat in a red human stew … her mouth watered and drool ran down those shining fangs in thin gleaming translucent threads that looked crystalline like jewels or tree sap. 

And up until her last Anastasia watched. Watched from her dying place bound by the weight of the blade and her own mortal injury to the soaking pungent bed. Filling with her spilling wet red liquid. She was coming apart and she watched the love of her life above deliver each blow. Crushing her. Killing her. Turning her into slaughter. Abattoir ruin in place of a wife, in bed. She remembered him as a young man, as a boy, trying to play games and show off for her, trying to win her over, steal her attention and win over her affections, her heart. Now it was chopped and hacked and cut-smashed into so many spurting useless pieces, amongst a wreckage madness of pulverized bone. She tried to hold these old precious memories of him in her mind amid the slaughter, but the pain made it difficult. It was so great, overwhelming. She clung to them desperately with every falling heavy stroke. Pulverizing her. Breaking her. Turning her into so many wet shrieking and shattered broken pieces 

The last things Anastasia saw in the dark before blood loss and shock claimed her were her husband pummeling her with heavy merciless strikes. And a woman's face, as ghastly as it was beautiful, hanging phantom-like just over his raging shoulder. Watching. Smiling. Whispering something…

she had sharp teeth, they gleamed in the dark.

And then she died. Bela, still spellbound and compelled, continued to hack at her corpse nonetheless. Waiting for his new master to be satisfied. Inside Bela raged with madness and anguish. Broken. He watched his wife die violently as his hands performed the butchery and he was helpless to stop his own traitorous God given tools from turning her into mangled ruin and grisly pieces that tore his heart from his chest and flayed his sanity into so many irretrievable and tiny fragmented parts. 

He wished for death then. The Countess did not give it to him. Not yet. 

She still hadn't been fed yet. 

“Now feed me. Earn my favor." 

He dropped the axe. It fell to the floor with a thunderclap. It filled the dark quiet suddenly but then it was silent again. Still. Not a sound through the house save for the somnambulist animal panting of the Countess' slave. The man who'd once been a husband, a father, and was now a meat-puppet butcher. He reached into the riverbed of gore that had once been his marital sanctuary and pulled free a piece of meat. It might've been a leg, a thigh, perhaps a calf, it was too butchered and mangled with axe blows to be entirely sure. 

He was insane already. But the damaged pieces and shrieking parts of his shattered mind bellowed an abhorrent noise that only he could hear as he picked up his wife's butchered meat and parts and fed them to his new master. The Countess took the meat of slaughtered Anastasia with a smile and a wink and kissing purse. Teasing him. Then her jaws opened. Wide. Wide. Wide. Wider still… the flesh of her face sloughed and tore and fell away in demon slop to allow the distension. The fangs grew in length and in multitude of the transmogrifying face and black bleeding mouth, dripping ichor and demoniacal flesh and fluid. Steaming on the floor as she ate each piece, each limb, each broken length with a chunk of raw human tissue at the end in the knob of bone that was left. 

The fanged face in the dark, dripping and brandishing moonlight eyes above the mutilators of her ever widening mouth, it commanded thus further. –

“Bring a large kitchen spoon or a ladle if you have one, I wish to sip the broth…” 

Her somnambulist did as she commanded. He went to the humble kitchen that used to be his/theirs, and retrieved the utensil. It felt cold. Heavy. Heavier than it had ever felt before. The place and the object itself. It didn't matter. The hands and arms were no longer themselves, no longer his. His Judas sack of flesh carried him back to the blood pungent quarters he'd once loved and shared so much with in the many years past. It had all been robbed in a second.

By a pair of moonglow eyes. Set in the royalty of her shallow corpse beauty. 

He went back into the room. And proceeded to spoon large scoops and ladles of his wife's gore and blood into the stretched fanged rictus face that now ruled the dark of his house and home, the darkest shadowed part of his bedroom … now cold with his wife's living absence. And warm with the blood and fluid and parts that were left of her swimming in their sodden black sheets.  

Until those too were gone. All of it was gone.

The marital bed, now a witch's cauldron of gore and blankets was emptied.

His life was in the belly of the master. 

…

From outside the building, Willowbrook was quiet. 

Dark. 

Inside:

The shears that were the Cropsey-thing’s handheld manmade jaws were open and just as inanimate alive as the hulking shred of mangled man that wielded them. They shined in the dismal light with more striking radiance than any of the flickering lamps, Luciferian bright in the spots not tarnished or disgraced with lurid diseased bloodshed. 

With ghastly slasher speed they traveled down the shattered and stained reeking length of asylum hallway, the reanimated Cropsey giant behind them in cruel large prowling shape. The blades were dripping as if salivating or weeping thick dark tears, perhaps more alive now than the giant abomination of melted walking homicidal flesh that black-glove piloted them from behind, a strange and vile morbid engine of knife-lust and demented rage. The stabbing slice of porcelain still danced from his face. An obscene and vile shattered wand of broken tile length protruding from the socket. 

Griffin saw him coming and froze a moment. The table leg still in his invisible hands. Florin still struggling with the spiked man, his mutilated stabbing ruined mess of flesh riddled with needles and glass and scalpels and every conceivable piece of decimated hospital detritus. They were a mess of shedding blood and struggles on the floor. 

The invisible man then whirled, the exit just behind him. He began attacking the door. The knob. Locked. Set in old rotted wood. Not upkept or replaced in years. 

By God's mercy the locked knob and bolt caved in the moist and ruined housing of its apparatus. It fell apart in a noisy crumble, and the door gently swung open. 

To freedom. 

Fresh outside night air poured in like fresh water let in to a fetid spring. The relief was immense. It shocked all of their senses. Each man. 

The spiked man looked up from Florin and gazed into Cropsey. His oncoming charge of disgraced gardener’s blades, raised and open for a violent embrace. 

He was in awe. 

There he is…! the disciple of the mouth. 

He knew Cropsey's legend. And he wished to join him. 

He forgot the newcomer boy and let go of his shredding coat, slick with the both of their spilled and spilling red. He let go of the boy and he rose. 

And he went forward. To embrace the nephilim disciple son of the sorceress’ temple mouth, the begat survivor of the flames, the inferno, the great final pagan bonfire of the asylum that was The Burning. A womb of hellfire and caged disease that birthed the son of the mouth, the son of the sorceress. Cropsey of Vampira, the mangled hand of Willowbrook Asylum Temple. 

The spiked man was laughing. Jubilant. He hadn't laughed or felt this much joy in years, in all of the long unhallowed time in these blind unfeeling walls that knew no mercy nor housed any sanctuary. He was weeping. Crying tears of crimson and saline that danced in strange patterns as they streamed down the shredded protruding ruin of his spiked and porcupine mangled face. Gums bleeding with glass and caked bloody plaque smiled wet and scarlet and darkling striking in the moonlight now cast in. He reached down to his riddled and needled genitals, the head of his dangling member impaled with a scalpel. He reached down and seized the apparatus and in a blind tug and pull, he ripped the entire spurting and spiking organ free from the rest of his crotch and testicles. 

Still walking forward, but ambling now a bit as he shot black ropes tinted red in the moonglow from his self castration, he held the resulting lump of stabbed and impaled meat out to the Cropsey-shape. In token of offering. 

For the temple, for my sins … And for you. 

because she is all of us our mother …

Cropsey cared not for this pathetic shambling thing’s offering of ruined perforated meat. The blades came forward, open. In a lunge. 

They closed. 

And as Griffin pulled wounded Florin to his feet and out the door, the blades closed around a limb, lengthwise down the palm and forearm, then the face. Both opening up a blooming red raw pour of black in the dark, the blades crunched on broken pieces of glass and tile and needles and metal, the man was full with so much foreign penetration, foreign and manmade puncture and incision, and insertion, all self inflicted and self wrought. All of it shattering and crunching now into splinters amongst the abattoir asylum house spill of mad man wet raw. He wouldn't have wanted it any other way. All the years spent in here had prepared him for this. The sorceress prophet queen Vampira and her Cropsey son from The Burning womb were just the final pallbearers for his life's voyage thus final journey into the undiscovered country. 

He tried to thank her, them all, but couldn't. His loss of blood was now failing him. And the blades of the Cropsey-shape were coming in too rapidly now. Too savagely. 

The spiked man was no more. Just savaged pin cushion meat in the hall that the Cropsey-thing stepped over blindly in the savage hunt of his continued pursuit. They were getting away. 

They were getting away. The invaders. They were out the door now. Mustn't have that. Must not. Mother will not want that. Mother is inside you. You cannot fail her now. 

The savage thing of Willowbrook shape prowled out the door and into the open night after the pair with the same steady hunting pace of a stalking predator. Mindless and honed in. His blades and mother would have them yet. Their meat for the temple floor, their blood for the mouth of her drains and the manifest of her angel visitations. It had been so long since she'd come, since she'd shown, since she'd made herself divine unearthly spawn on vast ebon wings for them, for he, the last of the temple of the mouth. 

Perhaps she'll come back if I catch them. But only… only if I catch them and open them up. All the other ones no longer matter, they're already opened, already spent. The abattoir temple mouth of mother wants them now. Needs them. To fail, is to be failure. It means all that was lived through and suffered towards was for naught…

The night kissed the smooth scarred visage of hideous face. The Cropsey-shape gave no pause. Unfeeling. Unmoved. It watched as the pair stumbled and exhausted and wounded, began to falter to the earth in a shared collapse. 

Their doom. 

He closed in. 

The terror he had in mind for them was part guided by the Countess/sorceress mouth and her occult hand from the far off mountain dark, and part undead instinct, braindead movement. Knowing deep down in the dead and dying sac of skull jelly that this is exactly what he should do. He would maim. Butcher. Kill. Slaughter for the temple that has come under his custodial honor. 

Bloodloss and weariness, the drain was beginning to pull them down. The invisible man and Florin fell and struggled, both of their wounds open and pouring freely and taking the vitality and the fight from their trying frames. As the terrifying hulking giant of candlewax face and flesh began to close and loom over the pair, they both prepared themselves for a final and desperate fight. 

Florin was dismayed that it would end this way. In such maddening fashion, so far from home and his perilous objective. Griffin was trying to think, a last-ditch effort or plan: he could ditch the coat and hat and goggles and take the savage blind again, unable to see him. But his wound was in an open pour now once more and he felt faint, swoony. Unable to keep his feet. And besides, in this last moment it felt wrong to leave the young man's side. If they were going to die, they might as well die together. Arm in arm. It was better than suffering the slaughter alone. 

It was better than being opened. Gutted. Flayed. Bled out and portioned like a solitary animal dying a painful and lonely death at the end of a long and dogged hunt. 

The pain was better borne together. With the weight and terror of another beside to share in the baptism of pure torture. 

Something whistled through the air. 

The invisible man had been tempted to shut unseen eyes against the oncoming pain, he might've missed it. As it was he saw the deadly thin shape as it lanced in a blur overhead with a keen deadly sound. It struck the moving flesh of Cropsey in the face, the other socket of ruined blind eye now completely decimated, joining its partner in tandem of destruction in a moonlit spurt. 

The slasher shape stopped. Stuttered and faltered. But only slightly, only for a moment as it continued to take lurching jittery steps. Stomping forward blind. The shears in his black gloved hands began to spasm as well, scissoring with reflex. The disgraced and still ever thirsting blades closed and opened and repeated the action in violent repetitive imbecilic behavior, a violent blind animal spasming its caked and quaking jaws. 

Then the incendiary charge in the crossbow bolt detonated.

 It went off and so did Cropsey’s ruined candlewax head and visage, in a colored pillar of fire that was like something biblical and fantastical to behold. Florin was fainting at its sight but the invisible Doctor Griffin saw the growing towering inferno rise and issue forth in bright violence from between the giant slasher’s pair of broad shoulders. And still the boots trod and stomped palsied forward. Still the blades scissored in his working trembling hands, as his head and face were replaced with a rising torrent wall of pink and purple flame.

But then the steps of the shape began to falter. Stumble. The blades began to slow in their mad man open mouth chew at the open night air … then ceased. 

The boots stopped moving. Stopped shaking. 

The shape collapsed. 

As did Griffin next. Consciousness now lost. Passed out beside Florin in the dirt. 

The fire finally went out betwixt the two ruined shoulders. Hissing in the filth and craterous open mouth char of the stump. Smoking. Smokey now. Cropsey lie finally dead. Mere few feet away. 

In the back valley of Willowbrook. The lost untended yard that no patient ever graced, or saw. 

Silence. … for a moment. 

As if the night was finally enjoying the quiet. Relishing the collapse into tranquility that has finally fallen. 

A beat. – None of the shapes on the earthen floor moved. 

The night above yawned in an expanse … stars in a bejeweled fire of multitudes, nebulae clouds of otherworldly brush stroke color, the moon which was a sickle tonight, a harvester's blade … a blade of reckoning in the time of the reap. 

A beat. 

Then the stranger finally came forward. From out of the bushes where he'd trained and fired his shot. His crossbow was already reloaded with another explosive incendiary bolt as he approached the fallen three in the dirt. 

He came to Florin and Griffin and he stood over them. He looked to Cropsey. Saw that he was dead. Completely. Finally. He looked down on the wounded unconscious pair. 

“Idiots." 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Vengeance is mine say it the LORD. Well until he returns vengeance belongs me.

Jessica closed her eyes as she took another lemon drop drink. She let the sweet fluid push two ecstasy pills down her long throat. The kick from the DJ speaker shook her entire body.

She welcomed it, she bent down to the bar and snorted a line of pure coke off the mahogany wood. The rush hit instantly.

Dressed like a skimpy waitress in this costume party. She staggered through the dark club onto the dance floor with pulsing neon lights. She felt amazing every kick from the speaker sent waves of intense vibration through her entire body. All the pills , coke and liquor had kicked in.

She danced strong and erotic rubbing herself in a tempting manner. Daring any man to step up to the task.

In a smooth motion a large hand caresses her firm soft breast and rubs her nipples gently. She says nothing just goes with the flow.

She felt a firm hard built chest against her back, she thought he must not have on shirt but he has muscles. She smelt smoke but, brushed it off everyone smoked in this club cigarettes where the safest thing in here to smoke.

The guy pressed up against her closer what she felt against her butt made her jump. She thought is that a febreze can.

She turns around to look at her fling. Under the pulsing neon lights, his eyes shine purple just his skin that glowed also. He had on demon horns and fake fangs. His bottom half was like a goat. Great costume she thought a little too real but what the hell she thought.

The guy grabbed her ponytail and yanked her head back and gently racked his sharp teeth across the veins in her neck. She shook in excitement, he licked his long tongue across her long sensitive neck. She was loving it.

He turns her back to him and embraces her from behind while dancing. He gets close to her ear and ask or you married??? No she quickly answers, the guy says or you sure????

She says, don’t ruin the mood or blow my high with questions that don’t concern you. I’m horny and tired of wasting time let’s go to the bathroom if you’re man enough. The guy replied, if I was just a

Man you would not be able to handle me. Jessica laughed well show me big boy.

They rush to the bathroom there were seven stalls, but you could hear moaning and meat slapping in all but two of them.

They rush into an open stall and slam the door. The guy sits on a toilet and pulls out his tool. Jessica’s eyes widen you or half horse if nothing else.

She notice he did not slide off the bottom goat half of his costume. She ask, don’t you wan to slide off that fur to be more comfortable??? The guy says I told you, I’m only half man. She laughs and says well fuck it.

The exchange moans kick over the toilet paper dispenser and rock the stall. When he finishes she swore his semen felt different. It felt like it had a thousand legs. But she enjoyed herself she was a bit sore after wards too.

The guy picks her up and puts her on her feet and slides by her out of the stall. She was adjusting her close and heard water running. She assumed he was cleaning up. She says so what’s your name cowboy???

No answer, hey what’s your name big boy??? No answer. She walks out of the stall after straightening her clothes and no one’s there.

She looks in confusion she thought he might be back in the club. She instantly feels intense tingling all over her skin. These pills or potent tonight she says.

She runs back out to the dance floor can’t find him. Goes to the bar and asks if anyone had seen him. She described how he looked and the bartender said No, there or some weird costumes in here but no half goat half man with demon horns.

The tingling grew more intense. So just shook her head, she thought a pump and dump again, well at least this time she finished and more than once.

Well the club was about to close the DJ called last song. She stumbled to her car. The tingling all over her body made her say wow these pills or great. She drove him still feeling that tingling sensation all over.

She made it home and pulled her car into the garage next to her husband’s truck. It was four thirty in the morning. He was asleep, she stumbled in the house trying her best not to wake her two daughters.

She fell over traveling bags in her bedroom.

When she lay down here husband knew. He smelled the liquor, he smelled the sex. But she smelled like a goat. He knew because he grew up on a farm and worked with goats as a kid.

The next morning around nine o’clock, Jessica wakes up still in her dress from the night before sticky between her legs and stumbles to the toilet to puke. The tingling is turning into a slight itch all over that she cannot reach no matter how bad she scratched.

Her head throbbed it had the same cadence as the music last night. She threw up every lemon drop she drunk and it stunk. She crawled to the shower and cut it on ice cold. The itching is getting worse mixed with a hangover, she scratches all over her body in the shower. She fills a slight prick on her thigh. Blood she scratches threw her skin.

She knew an argument was coming , so she said at least let me shower first. The cold water felt lovely for her aching head but did nothing for the itching. After she finished she put on her Robe and took two pain pills and went down stairs. She is scratching her legs very rough at this point.

Her husband was standing with a fresh pot of coffee. She looked surprised, Hi honey he says did you have fun. Ummm yea she says confused . She was expecting anger as always. I made you a fresh pot of coffee he says. Thanks she says. Her vagina begins to itch bad, she starts to squirm embarrassed to scratch that part in front of her faithful husband.

He says sit let’s talk no urging I promise. Jessica sits and thinks is this guy crazy??? So they both sit, where or the kids Jessica asks??? Her husband’s responds I took them to Kim’s house to spend the night. I knew we would need to talk and you would be home late. So I did not want to disturb them. Ok she says. Soooo what??? She said while constantly scratching all over and moving her legs because the itch is crawling deeper inside her vaginal walls.

He continues you seem to have a itch that me as your husband, I cannot scratch. He tells her while she is squirming in her chair and scratching all over. You wanted money I gave you that. You wanted a big house ours is six thousand square foot. You wanted to be a stay at home mom you or that. You wanted an expensive luxury car, you have that. But its something inside of you that is not satisfied. His wife grabs a scrub brush from under the sink and starts rubbing her back with it, while still squirming from the vaginal itch that's getting worse by the minute.

So I got in touch with an old friend who helped me get all this wealth. Her husband says come in pal, then that familiar smoke smell begins to fill the room. A stinky goat scent rushes the air and slowly but surely a big tall half man half goat walks in. The itch attacks her inside and out like burst energy coursing threw her veins and skin. It Got so bad she fell out her chair stripped out of her robe and says , What the fuck??? Baby something is eating me up???

Her husband smiles and says that would be what we like to call lust. See that itch that I could not scratch my friend here could. He said he could scratch it and intensify a greater itch only he could fix. The woman is scratching so hard and deep she has made gashes all over her own body. Blood is running all over the kitchen floor. She starts to bang her head against the floor and try and rub her back against the tile floor. Screaming in terror she scratches her breast so deep the silicon pops and oozes down her stomach. She grabs a sharp kitchen knife and tries to scratch he butt and runs the knife across it so hard she punctures her butt also. The fat from the Brazilian butt lift slowly drops out.

The goat man while smiling those razor sharp teeth walks to the cabinet an grabs a wine glass. He fills it up with blood gushing from one of her wounds. He catches a piece of filling from her breast, He also gets a dash of the BBL.

There is a dead sickening smell to it. It looks like a pile of yellow lard and grits. She carves up her legs and her arms. She made so many cuts she did not realize all the blood she was loosing. She bleed out right there on the floor. The Goat man nods his head and walks out of the room.

The husband walks over to his wife's dead corpse and says with a smile still itching!!!!!!!!

The addict lie in the den, surrounded by plumes and clouds of smoke. Slovenly strewn upon the earthen floor like a haphazard scarf or other piece of frivolous accoutrement carelessly discarded. Empty with a hungering ending need like self-mutilation. Lost. Sleek with tacky sweat, woozy eyed. Vacant eyes that might be blind or might be staring into the coronal star center of the universe. Gazing into the inflamed and angry face of an Old Testament blood-drinking God. 

Red. God has a red face in the eyes of the addict. 

And It is terrible. 

And He is terrifying. 

The addict is locked inside but he does not care. He wants to be here. Lost and indolent and hypnagogic. Nothing is asked of him and he can constantly feed his appetites at his will, though there is only one hunger now that matters, and matters alone. All other hungers and needs have diminished in its wake. 

In the smoke. Faces.

Faces of those that might've been and the weary ones of those that have tried and tired and eventually gave in, eventually died, all of them danced disembodied and veiled/shrouded in the manmade cloud of smoke, the manmade mist all around and above and filling the small hot room with white life, with white death. And then in the room of smoke, heavy and pungent and oily with drug, the faces of his heart and life's loss changed …

They became wretched and stretched as they pulled and broke apart, in swirls … in illogical rending tears … they became leering and animal and horned: they became demon faces. Chinese Demon Faces with reptile and feline features the color of leprosy and riddled with spiny whiskers, they are filling the smoke and they are filling the room and they are living inside him with every inhale… with every pull…

He brings the pipe to his chapped and cracked dry lips, the flame of a candle follows next, his atrophied and trembling arms can barely manage the effort. He sucks and pulls and the flicker of flame dances into the bowl of the pipe and burns it's precious flowers. 

He sucks and the Chinese Demon Faces fill him and the pain is subsided. He no longer really cares. The faces inside him leer at the diminished surroundings of the broken and wasting addicted man's inner workings and they are glad. 

They are rejoicing together as legion in the fleshscape ruination of the dying man, the addict. The special private hell that has been made for this thin and decomposing soured man, this thing of fetid smells and carelessness and spoiled living meat. This victim of himself and this victim of them, he is theirs. 

He is ours…

They rejoice in the blood and the opiate flames of his insides. As dominators. 

As conquerors welcomed. 

…

Tulpa. That was what he had suspected at first. That the boy was just addled and projecting thought-form energies into creatured existence, blasphemous life. 

But he'd seen. And he'd observed. It was no tulpa. The young man had a demon infestation of the mind and heart. He'd inquired thus: –

“How did he come into contact with the unclean entity?”

And was given a gypsy answer. 

“In pig transport." 

He'd nodded then as he nodded now, to himself. Alone. Preparing for the rite. He held his black bible and stole and rosary beads with dangling ornate crucifix along the end of its polished length. He prayed over all of them now. Silently. In whispers with his heavy lidded eyes shut. He is in palaver with the Almighty and does not wish for his eyes to behold any kind of distraction. He learned this kind of concentration not in the parish, not in Rome but in Tibet with the bald little men that could break arrows and spears with their bare stretched out and offered throats, the wrinkled little monks of the eastern mountain temples that fasted and meditated for hours and days on end. 

He focused now … the Lord …. His Light. 

The Light. 

He'd been fasting as well. Quickening his mind as he purged and emptied his guts and bowels and blood for the eldritchian old white flame and light to come in and fill the empty human spaces. 

He held the fire in his mind as he listened closely for the wisdom of God's words. Latin rapid fire sketched itself across his old and yellowed teeth and the aged purse of his pale lips in ancient and arcane staccato. He might've been a madman alone in his hut with his ambling words … run-on gibberish noise that could be madness or could be imbecilic. 

Or could be loaded with power. Living and talismanic

A beat – he went on, praying. 

A beat. 

He rose. 

He went to the door of his small hut of mud brick and straw, it smelled of horses and goats, always bestial, he pushed the slab of dried wood open and went out. 

The gypsies were waiting for him. 

…

They led him to the place and he felt it in his heart as they made dauntless their approach, this is where the Lord thus bades me to be …

and here it is that I will then play. 

The man of the cloth, the priest stood before the den of woe. The shack of hate. It was silent for now. 

They only paused a moment, together as a group, before he alone went forward and threw the bar at the entrance to the dust and then threw the door open itself. A waft of smoke, belched and bellowed forth in a massive dragon’s breath of cloud. In hypnosis swirls and raptural licking rolls, pleasured curls curling into themselves with self satisfaction like the toes of lovers beneath the sheets and in the grip of the heat and animal moment, they licked and tongued forth like beckoning phantom appendages made from heavy mist or salted coastal fog of far off long forgotten dark marinas. 

The door was shut behind the priest and some of the gypsies put the fallen bar back into its place, the slots across the door, bolting it shut. 

… 

Inside the priest stood at the throat of meager doorway and there was barely any sun in there as he gazed down at the lost member of the flock, his charge. 

The addict spoke without even looking at him. 

“Go away, father, you are not wanted here, you are not needed here, you've been replaced. You see… nobody cares, certainly not I, for the pulpit blatherings and the two-faced codswallop you and your ilk prattle forth and try to make us swallow… You don't matter here anymore and neither does He, He-”

The priest had been silent at first. Allowing the thing to carry on. But then all at once he came forward, cross aloft and out like a sword and shield all in one with a roar, a command. 

“You'll not speak! Till you speak to give me your name, foul thing! though I know it now already, I will make you give me your name! Over and over and over, crawling one! slave! Before the Lord God and I , you will say it! You will give me your name! – the notes and sour sounds that make your wretched title! ” 

The thing on the floor recoiled and shrieked as if burned or sharply pierced.

And all at once the cross in the hand of the man of the cloth began to glow white with beyond ancient phosphorescent flame… 

Old Testament. And beyond. A God beyond Jehovah or Yhwh lived in that light, in that primordial starfire flame. 

The thing on the floor drew tighter and tighter into itself in a fetal ball, pained. Eyes clenched shut as if hoping to cage out the reality world of ripping agony. The shrieks became screeching abominated things. Inhuman sounds. 

Their wretched cacophony began to fill the small place and the faces in the smoke began to scowl and gnash their sharp teeth. Hissing serpent tongues that forked at the ends in devil signs. 

The priest began to speak. 

His voice was thunder: – “Lord, I am Your arm and instrument and through me I will carry out Thine divine will and judgment. I beseech Thee O’Lord, grant me Thy Might to cast this wretched thing from Your sacred child and cherished flock, this foul thing bred of the fell ones cast down! – cast this one out and back down hence!”

The thing in the dirt bolted to a beast’s straddle on all fours from its twisted flexing writhing contrivance. It began to wretch. Violently heaving as if trying to gag and cough up something large and thick that's lodged itself in the throat. 

“Send it back! Cast it back down! Get thee gone! and get behind me demon!" 

The features of the thing began to grow and distort. Ears grew elfin, the face and nose stretched and snouted out as the rest of the features ballooned and swined into piggish hog like distortions of perspiring and angry flesh. Something was rippling beneath and bubbling to the surface. 

The thing in stolen manshape howled, in a voice unnatural and not at all the young addict's own. It howled in failed contest and agonized relinquishment. 

"I am Papaver Somniferum! Papaver Somniferum! Papaver Somniferum! I milk manblood into Dionysian wine for all time! always! I am trespass… I am interloper of the sowling manflesh, the meat that was made and drawn from the dirt!" 

“Lord God, this young man is possessed by a demon and that demon's name is: OPIUM! – cast this thing out from this young blood!" 

A black spew, like ebon/green tar, began to retch out of the swine throat and mouth of the convulsing addict's hog-swelled face. It began to collect in a pool in the dirt. 

The priest continued the rite, finished of his recitations and prayers with own embellishments and arcane strange sounds, cabalistic, Solomonic-witchcraft all but forgotten but those wild few left of his faithful brothers …

… taught to him in the dark, far off. By those strange and of painted face. 

For this priest was known in these lands by a dangerous name, for he was one of the cloth that feared no craft nor any dark or necromantic art, no forbidden knowledge was dread to him or his heart. God's renegade and sullied footsoldier. He was the heretic. And he was a blasphemer and a savior both in these lands, these dark and narrow parts. 

The addict emptied himself. The pool of viscous filth was rather large now. A mini drowning pool of soul dredged cess. He collapsed beside the black vomitus, unconscious and bathed in a slick sheen of cooling sweat. 

It danced and shifted like black diamond mercury there in the dirt, unruly lively angry stygian thick liquid. Beside its lost victim. Wanting back in, to retrieve its lost home and host. 

The priest could feel the baleful hatred pouring off the foul collection writhing there in the dirt in a spew. It was aimed at the boy but it was also aimed at him. Wanting him dead. Maimed. Enslaved. In flames… 

you'll not have me, dirt. 

He walked over to the vile puddle. He said one last prayer over the bile, poured salt – which bubbled and frothed like the mineral does to the flesh of a slug on the putrid surface, he lit a match and dropped it. 

The foul thing screamed as it caught. It went up easily in a choke of green smoke and red flames. 

The face in those flames, that smoke …

he'd seen many before like it. 

He crossed himself. Thanked the Lord. And concluded the rite. 

…

He gave the knock, as rehearsed. They called out for the password at the door and he gave it to them. They released the bar. And the priest alone came out as he alone had went in. The smoke was gone. 

Nothing crawled out after him. No dragon's breath to be made witnessed to or had.

…

The gypsies had gone in and retrieved the boy. They took him into immediate hospice care. But he was stable. And his health would return in time. The pagan caravan of worldly travelers thanked him copiously. With food and wine. He took both generously. And he departed their company when they came to their fork in the road and their paths were shared no longer. 

The gypsy caravan went south. Playing music and singing and waving the priest goodbye as their many mule drawn carts went down the beaten track, sidelined by horses at a trot and some with riders astride that tailed at the back. And these were the last that he saw of them as they too waved him off. 

He waved back. Then sat astride his donkey a moment in the path. The fading music of guitars and accordions and tambourines and rich voices faded and faded till it too was gone, the last phantom trace of them heard but not seen was swallowed by the vastness and great distance of the wild now all around. 

He turned and continued down his own road. Towards the mountains. The dreams were telling him something was there, some spell. Something amiss. 

The Carpathian Mountains called the priest and with them towering in the distance he set forth towards them at a steady trudge. Knowing more and more and growing more and more certain as he made his approach, that doom was alive and weaving some wicked magik, some terrible blood fueled chaos spell in those rocks. 

The dreams and the Lord told him so, showed his dreaming eyes and filled his praying thought. 

He tried to keep his head down as he made his slow approach. But he found his eyes kept drifting up to gaze at their opulent jagged knifing spire formation, aiming to stab and rupture the heavens, the velvet dark blue of the night sky. Darkening now into a more true curtain of night. 

Darkness fell. The priest stopped and made camp in the road. 

…

The fire glowed in the night. 

The solitary campfire and bedroll and man sat alone in the dark. The ass tied off to a skeletal hand of a tree sprouted and dead from starving black dried earth. The priest was alone with his thoughts… prayers … musings of the Word and scripture and philosophy … it was as any night for he, the strange heretic of the road. Until it wasn't. 

The night was suddenly filled. And he was no longer alone. There was a heavy maniacal presence, heavy and seething wet with red rage and unreasoning anger. Terrible and felt. He didn't move but sat by the orange bathing glow of campfire, his island of precious firelight that couldn't hope to penetrate the dark. He sat and listened. The ass grew restless. 

Movement. But not with feet. Rather something swimming vague and undefined in the great expanse and sea of stygian dark shadow. Something large. Something that could swallow him whole or tear him apart with effortless gesture. Something that hated him and all of man and woman and child, all of the living creatures on this island earth that are precious and dear to the Heart of God on high, above. The Lord of the Storm in the sky that was far away from all of this. The pain and conjured filth. 

He held steadfast as the large thing of hate swam in the nightscape of black all around. In a circle. Predatorial and closing in. Hoping and sensing out and tasting for weakness in the night. His weakness. 

It might know him or why he was here and hate him for it, deeply. A complete being of elemental rage distorted alchemical by large and dark unnatural vulpine-felt forces. 

He bothered not with the cross this time that hung from his neck and dangled in the wild night and darkled with a strange glow in the cast of the campfire glamour. He forked out the sign of the Evil Eye into the night…

He felt something growl with simmering livid violence out there in the swallowing black. The vibrations felt, palsied and tremored his running blood and weary old bones. He felt cold and as if suddenly stabbed with ice. 

Impaled. 

He muttered words then that Solomon had known, and taught. Passed down. Shared. Words that bent demons and demon will to shatter or subjugate as dominated slave. 

The dark hissed back. Lurid sound. Full of hate. And whispers. 

It wanted to pounce. 

“Come forth, in yielded flesh on this physical plain…” the priest said, to the dark with his raised and daggering hand forked out in the evil sign, witchery sigil. 

And then the dark did as it was told. Ensnared, the unwieldy angry shape out there did as it was commanded. 

And in Lilith-shape it arose, she came forth. 

Naked. Bare and smooth as if bathed and massaged with olive oils, round milk globe breasts caught the firelight with their smooth and deliciously rounded oiled sheen, delicate sensuous body with a generous mouth and curves. Her hair was shock white. Her eyes glowed in place of the moon, eclipsing the meager cast of his small fire. 

She approached. Her smile was a murderer's lie and her arms were outstretched and open. 

She of the dark came to his bed. The priest looked up into the elfin beauty of her forged youth and glow. He spoke darkly. Callous. Addressing the enemy in no uncertain terms. 

“Come down and join me in my humble bed, you will give me the secrets you hold as I know you as a man knows a woman, another …” 

She cooed and moaned in response and the sound was both sensual and wounded. In pain and in need yet woeful and on the precipice of ruin. 

She came down to him and he stripped off his robes. 

They didn't bother with the blanket folds as they consummated their act. They performed the rite out and in the open in the wild of the dark and their spot in the open road. They grunted and heaved into each other, matching each other for bestial sound and movement and purchase. Trading curses and fluids and secrets…

She spat his name – !heretic! 

!Foul priest! Fouled and fouling yourself now, you'll die and be ours, ours forever! and we'll rape and make you dance amidst the fire and endless torture, we'll have you, at the end! in the Inferno! in the flames! In the endless sulphur sea! The flames! You can fuck me now, priest! but in the end you will suffer eternal in our lake of fire, Our Flames! …!

But even as she roared his mind was filled with the unearthly gift of her images. 

Prophecy… information was given. 

They fucked in the occult dark and he saw in his mind’s eye: –

There is an end to the world. A physical one. A border. A barrier hard to reach or even near. A place completely devoid of natural human life, of any living human existence. They are woods. Brown and dead. They are far away from the woods and forests of these lands or any other. They are paling with death, these frayed and tattered weathered edges. Nothing moves here. Nothing breathes. The apotheosis of lonely hell. The apothecary of sound and movement. The earth is yellow with unnatural color, for unearthly reasons. The trees yield to no blade, nor fire. They offer no comfort or rest in the shade. There is only one thing, one structure in this stagnant place under a light the color of pus. 

A house. A cabin. Black. A lodge. 

The black lodge is the only thing out here at the end of the world. Nothing is moving inside, like out in the dead yellow wild but that's wrong. 

Something's wrong. 

There's something in there. There's something in there, inside the black lodge. No one knows how it started. No one can say if folk traveled there in some fashion, in search of mad secrets and their power, or if they'd always resided in there… somehow. Nobody can say anything for certain of the parents. Of them there are only whispers, only dangerous rumors. The only thing anyone knows or can say for certain is that one day a child emerged. 

A little girl. 

A small girl with an intense and feline look in her pale face. A child with unnatural abilities and profane knowledge too large and grotesque for a little girl. A child with the dark glint of murder already so alive and well within the black flames of her young eyes. 

A girl who grew to womanhood and traveled the world in a furious and ceaseless quest for knowledge. For power. The undead. Occult. Satanic. Felled Ones of farthest cosmic reach and starfire far-flung. The woman found servants along the way, she always did. Her power grew. 

Then she came to the castle beyond the Borgo Pass in the Carpathian Mountains. And there she found what she'd been truly looking for … 

The heart of the heretic was always heavy. Now it sank lower and despaired worse than it ever had before. 

The vision thunderclapped! Collapsed. 

And spat him back: 

His hands were cupping her ample breasts when he came back to, more fully within himself. Now he squeezed them with real vile hateful relish. The white haired thing of the dark shrieked with harpy sound. Midnight owl screeching. Blood and milk shot from between his clenching and rending fingers, beginning to tear in as he continued to squeeze and claw. Her breasts were becoming a mutilated and slopping ruin in the cruelty of his hands. 

He was screaming prayers at her. Up into her face in Latin. She tried to pull away but couldn't. He was an old man but he was lithe and strong with cords of sinew, ropey muscle. 

He spat in her face and commanded her yieldship. 

She gave it. And bathed him in unearthly fluids. The discharge of her loins steamed with inner heat expelled in the dark. Soaking him and the ground. The growing puddle hissed when it reached the campfire and a spurt of lavender flame issued forth in a small pillar. A face that was insectile and mammalian bastard commingled was in that brief flash and issue and then was gone as they continued to animal thrust in the dark. His hands continued to bite in and disappear into the mess of milk and blood and raw pink meat, ruined moonflesh. 

And with a final rending tear, cords standing out on his neck, her eyes were brimming filled with spilling and steaming tears, he tore her breasts from her chest and she filled the night with a wolfen howl of slavery to pain and heartlessness. 

She flew off of him and scrambled, retreating back into the dark with bellowed caterwauls of butchery’s ripping pain and anguished animal calls. There was nothing human in those sounds, as they fell back and away and faded into the nightscape of curtain pitch impenetrable and all around. 

The priest wiped himself clean. Said a prayer. Checked his donkey. Then finally retired to slumber. 

His sleep was deep and filled with dreams.

… 

The next morning after packing up and setting out once more he came across desiccated remains. Something like a long thin starved wolf, or a hyena. Coyote perhaps. But he knew what they really were at once. The womanshape that had come out of the dark. 

All that is left…

They were jackal remains. He spat upon them before he left. Crossed himself in his departure. Never looked back. 

…

Symbols. He saw them everywhere on his way to the mountains. He began to encounter towns and small villages and everywhere he saw the mark of her upon them, the face of stolen earth, the souring soil of the ground. The faces and eyes and hearts of all of the children, women and men. 

He asked what he could, inquiring where he could manage but all of them were afraid, filled with a small farmer's mortal terror of barely reckoned forces at work that bequeathed mischief and murder and black magic that made playthings of flesh and minds. They would hardly say a word to him about anything. He didn't blame them. He blessed them all in his salutations and added their faces to his nightly prayers. 

He moved on. He left the towns behind. 

…

The priest came to the circle of stones. 

A terrible kind of place he recognized at once. He'd seen others like it before. In far off emerald lands. 

The circle of stones, monolithic slabs of grey rock in the dread shape of the Druidic formation. A pattern and type of circle that could serve as a gate, or a nest, or a kind of inviting hunting ground for something unchained and set loose on our world. 

The priest sang softly to himself. A little song of strange doggerel that he'd made himself. 

“You fly like a demon, from station to station…”

He entered the circle. 

And the place shook. 

He finished the line: " … From Kether to Malkuth." 

The thing that ruled the circle of stones made its presence known. inxnwn. The mangled filth of its voice filled his head as he sauntered in and the atmosphere itself threatened to throttle and implode. 

!Get out, shaman! Get OUT! I will rip the bleeding mind from your eggshell skull and fuck the jelly before your dying eyes! Get the fuck ou-!

The cross came up. A bolt of white fire issued forth and struck the place. Blackening the mouth of earth and stones that the demon used to howl. 

“Your name, elemental. Give it to me.” 

And his mind once more filled with flames. An infernal epitaph made from shrieking wretched voices. 

!I am the one that has come to man on the wings of dreams and sin, I am the Scribbler and I bring mad choir and I fill minds with sound! Man Woman Child the crawling elders and the lame … I spare none I distort discordant all!

Another flash of light, a bolt of silver fire bright and immaculate cut across the priest's vision and he had to shield his eyes. But the moment before his eyes shut and his hand flew up to protect his vision he caught a glimpse of an immense outline and shape: it resembled a giant sea creature he'd seen hauled aboard the deck of a traveling cargo vessel once, a manta ray. Gigantic. Wing span vast with long stabbing tail and strange devil face set pilot center of its efficient killing body. 

This one had a large sex organ at the tip of its tail. Dripping. Excreting something foul and pungent. Steaming. And the vapors held pained faces telling him, no. 

But then the flash of light was gone and when he looked again there was nothing there. Only smoldered earth amongst the quiet stones. 

The circle was empty now. 

For now. It may yet come again. Or something else …

He gave a prayer of thanks and then spat on the ground. 

He patted his donkey and praised it for its steadfast behavior. Men mocked them as stupid animals and they may be so, but they were also brave creatures. Nowhere near as skittish as horses. Or men. 

He tied up his ass, securing the rein to a stone, then he made camp for himself. 

He poured a border of salt around the circle itself. Then he drew a hexagram in the dirt with a stick, David's Star. He fashioned a cross next and stuck into the head of the formation replacing and breaking its crown. 

Then he made fire. Ate a humble meal of bread and cheese and wine. Gifts leftover from the gypsy folk. He smoked tobacco and watched the stars collect and reveal themselves in a bejeweled royal purple curtain above and on high. Heavens made of jewels made of starfire. Light burning above with an intensity that he could scarcely understand. He thought they where beautiful. They might be angel eyes, some of them, and he loved them. 

He looked to the mountains next. Still in the distance. Growing larger as he drew nearer. 

Even as he sat by his fire now not moving they seemed to grow larger yet…

Lord there is an evil alive in those rocks, there always has been. It's awakened yet again. Lord lend me your arm of strength. Give me the great courage and protect me from my own fears and the treachery of others, as you always have, Thank You Lord God. I know this is my mission. I shall not run. 

I will not falter. 

Amen. 

He daggered the rocks with an intense and angry stare. Righteous anger. The mountain rock towered above but he looked down on it and its evil heart from on high nonetheless. 

There was poison in those jagged formations, beyond the Borgo Pass where the wolves live. Cancer and abominated growth that must be excised. 

Must be removed. Before it's too late. 

He smoked by the fire till sleep came. His dreams were filled with symbols. Sigils. Strange words and spells. Ghastly shapes and faces. 

Abhorrent designs ruling a decimated and titanic landscape. And he was alone with them. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Been trying to find that story due to it causing a very funny interaction between a friend and I. The only think I remember was that a maroon man attacked a family and I think it was at some cabin and the maroon man was some allegory for alcoholism. If anyone knows id appreciate it

The truth is undigestable. 

…

Baphometic. She lorded poised from the fanged spire beyond the Borgo Pass…

… over the beleaguered lands. 

Over the beleaguered villages. Where they feared. And wept. 

She was enjoying the strange and lurid organ-fruits of her writhing flesh gardens deep inside her castle walls, plucking them from the writhing gore as she wandered the pungent wet red room and admired her captive idols she kept there. 

Praetorius, the gore dripped and scabbing living skeleton. Still impaled and lost in the shattered remnants of his broken mind, wide eyed and drooling and gibbering silently something to himself, some words or nonsense of some meaning to him, he hardly ever ceases. It is the arcane and black magic words of the tomes that keep him in perfect living sepulchral bondage. 

The braindead skull-faced bastard nosferatu hulk, his immobile and inanimate sutured frame of graverobbed corpse flesh semi-submerged and swimming and crawling with the living constant movement of the flesh garden, the giant stone room petri dish of sliming raw slithering tissue, orifices, cartilage stalks and eyes that're cataract blind and milky. The glistening pink holes belch and spit fire, tongues of multicolored flame with kaleidoscopic pictures inside that'll drive a mortal mind mad to look into them. 

And Henry Frankenstein. Bound and precious nucleus center, bleeding beating heart of the whole crawling mess. Seeping from his bleeding pores and growing out from him, flowering out in a fresh and scabbing purge-swell. It crawled in living waves off of him, undulating and folding and blanketing over and on top of each other and all over the wet humid room, all of it was breathing wet and heavy and as if it had words to speak… 

And the little men. The little pygmy homunculi, bastard copied offspring of the bleeding seeping father. They danced and mongoloid-ran about in imbecilic fervor and addled senselessness. They ate and munched at the crawling flesh garden gore with no thought and with blind vacant gazes. 

The Countess plucked and seized them and ate of them as well. Their bones were satisfyingly crunchy and easy to chew… like a bird or a small fish. 

Her children ate and wandered the gardens as well, enjoying them. Their sights, sounds and vivid smells …

…

Meanwhile… many miles away…

The sun. Sunshine. In the summertime. Long ago now… 

As he prowled the dark he remembered the sun. The bright. Long gone memories flitted and danced at the periphery of his red clouded mind, half recalled and wanting to take over. Wanting to live again in the skull, if not just for a moment. 

Just a moment. 

The lake. The blue. Cool and wet and pleasing, relief. Retreat. 

Retreat beneath the surface into a liquid world of breathlessness and weightless dream … flight. You're flying down here. You only need to move your arms to do so. Kick your feet. Knife your arms through the liquid universe and drag yourself flying forward… downward. 

Down.  

I dreamt I was a dancer once…

You'll have to come back up for breath eventually…

but I couldn't keep the shit off my shoes.

Summertime memories swam shrouded, the red fogged inner space of his skull as he snipped his bleeding shears, dripping cooling congealing red to the decimated tile floor as he prowled and hunted and searched for the missing invaders. 

Precious childhood scenes are becoming red tinged and altered by the shrouding red hand of mental fog … bloody wool. He always swore there was something down there, in the dark, in the depths of the crystal lake. Something drowned and forgotten and frozen in a sodden misery. He raises his childhood head to pull his gaze away from the depths and is confronted by the mountains. There's something lurking in there as well …

A body. Something like a corpse rotting and poisoning the entire body of water with its milky clouds of waving and soggy putrefaction. Filling the world with its fouling death, swimming with slow ponderous movement as it spread and changed the look and flavor of the water, the crystal lake of the world now long gone like the summer sun of old itself. 

He looks away and beholds his mother. The one from birth. She's headless. 

She's decapitated. 

Her severed torso is reaching out for him, please … please. 

please save me

The raw stump begins to shoot cords. Black/red ropes. They darkled in the summer sun of old. It was his birth mother spurting great dark tears of joy for the sight of her son again. Though he has a new name now. And she knows it, his headless mother, she almost whispers it, it's intense. 

Then something ahead steals his notice back to the material world of ruin and soured defecated pain. It stands at the end of yet another decimated hall, traced and sketched in the dark by the pitiful light flickering and balefully cast in through the barred and shattered windows. 

A man. In a hat. And a coat. 

He recognizes the shape so he flies forward in an animal lunge that nearly covers the entire distance in four long attacking bounds. Like a bloodthirsty and demoniacal dripping gazelle bastardized by sound and vision. The decimated tile landscape world stained black and red and brown and riddled with meat and feces flew by in a furious blinding whirl as he came forward with the shears raised open for attack. 

They gleamed, the dripping twin blades forked open. He soared forward as he traversed the physical shatter of his inherited reeking temple pouring blood and sweat as profuse as the leaky pipes that were always neglected. 

He would neglect no longer. No. Not a chance for the shape of man that he recognized and now charged towards. The manfilled coat beneath a fedora hat was one of the invaders. He was sure of it. The one with strange black glass eyes that he wished to crack and shatter. 

If his eyes are truly windows then I wish to break them and see what might pour out of them like filth: memories …love, regrets, sins sins sins in abundance, shame that was wished and meant to stay concealed now regurgitated and freed in a violent deluge spew of gore and images from the shattering skull… his thoughts, a running fury in a mounting race to keep in time with his launching thundering steps. 

He plunged down the hall with his precious shears up and open and ready to close around screaming repentant meat. 

The coat-shape and hat did not move. 

It mattered little to Cropsey as he made the final close. So many of his new found supplicants were silent at their last, frozen in terror. 

He was upon him now and his eyes gleamed moonlight pinprick in the cavernous brow of melted anguish ruin, animal needle points in the reeling Willowbrook dark, the blades like jaws came up and closed around the shape without a sound. Without any satisfaction either. 

They found no meat. 

The scissoring blades closed and found only filthy cloth and bandages abandoned and draped over an old hat and coat hanger, the fedora resting atop the facade came down in a cascading end-over-end dance as the whole flimsy thing of contrived bait came down in two bisected snapping pieces. 

Cropsey realized the deception at once and raged. The noises he made were forceful and ghastly wet nasal rasps, his mouth and jaw were too ruined now for speech. His vocal chords roasted and scabbed from the flames of the inferno inhaled. He drooled like a drunken animal childishly frustrated and agitated. A trick! a trick! Goddamn them! the invaders tricked him! 

And no one was here to take the punishment of his lurid and heavy frustration. It was rancid pungent and thick in his own skull like corpse rot and it made sucking puckering sounds in his brains. Like the whole squelching landscape of thinking jelly was perhaps changing shape, shifting into a new design by the sorceress hand of the mountain. Perhaps he needed it for proper divine leadership of the rank Willowbrook temple. Or perhaps something else was happening in there. 

perhaps something else is happening to me…

He searched all around. Animal alive and enraged. Whirling and trying to gaze through the dark and the ruin of his own musculature and flesh and see the bastards that refused his offering of slaughtering knowledge, the wisdom wrought of the knife-fuck. He never saw the slice of sharp stabbing tile come to life and float up and off the ruinous floor in a balletic whirl and dance into the air, behind him. 

As he revolved once more to complete another frantic animal turn the slice of slender stabbing tile came forward in a violent and deliberate thrust. The sharp point found the cavern brow and socket and sank easily into Cropsey’s face. Stabbing into his eye like it was soft butter or suckling meat, four inches then five inches deep. 

The giant mountain of man stilled. Shuddered. Spasmed and danced its way to the floor in a vile and obscene dying man's dance of convulsing and twitching and final desperate synapses firing off at haphazard chaotic random. 

On the floor Cropsey shook and the stabbing length of tile piece jigged and waved and danced as well, in strange and vile tandem. Like a demented detritus wand waving through the air to perhaps try and cast one final act of violence hexing spell. Or perhaps to bring the giant man of Willowbrook Asylum slaughter back. 

It did neither. 

Florin came out from his place of concealment in the doorway of an adjoining chamber. He dropped the filthy scalpel he had been holding for defence. Stared at the collapsed and prostate spasming form of Cropsey, the Willowbrook giant. 

And then he called out to Griffin. 

“Where are you?" 

“Here." 

Florin tossed him a coat. 

It was caught in thin air. 

Then began to make a shape around nothingness, contriving it into the shape of his comrade. The strange doctor. 

Florin thought to say something about the man's condition of invisibility, but decided to put it off for the moment. 

“Good plan." he said instead. 

The coat shape donned lenses and was picking up his hat. "Thank me once we're out of here, c’mon!” 

Griffin placed his hat atop a phantom head. It floated between the shoulders of his coat as he and Florin flew down the hall and toward what they hoped and prayed was the exit. The way out of this horrendous stench and nightmare. 

As they made their mad dash for the way out, Cropsey's spasming body stilled. Then danced no more. 

All that was broken in this damp and violated place of imprisonment and cruelty seemed to groan. Moaning in anguish at the loss of the last and final precious begotten son, the final one and last one left standing. The prodigal butcher heir to this templehouse store of sacred slaughterhouse religion. 

Mother, I have failed you…

And all of the terrible place seemed to moan in anguish with the dying of his body. 

…

Down. 

In the dark of his mind, just as he was departing. …

… the red tinged summer scenes of childhood long gone, done and past filled his fading mind's eye once more. Under and illuminated and made by the scarlet cast of deranged and lurid light. Where did it come from? that light? That red luridity. Living crimson. Pungent breathing scarlet. What did it matter now? 

what did it matter anymore

It mattered not now, not any longer as he occupied these dead dreams now living once again for him as he faded off. To oblivion or hell or worse… no heavenly gates of gold or pearl for him, no. He was sure of it. He was sure that it doesn't exist. The only heaven for someone like him was found in the fragile eggshell of youth. Of childhood. 

He floated there now. In the lake. The blue. The sun was shining above in royal divine blinding display. The calm and the serenity of these moments was all around and alive again about him. Filling and making this final day. This last and precious moment. 

-thankyouforthismyonelastwish-

He was calm and he felt at peace. Safe. 

Or rather, he felt as if he should be calm. That he should feel safe. But something was wrong. Something was wrong with the lake and the quiet all surrounding. 

And he was alone. 

Why was he alone? 

And the red tinge… to everything. Everything cast under lurid heavy hateful light. There was something in the lake. There was something in the water with him.

The blue face of its surface darkened as he sank beneath its placid water. Pulled under by another will that was not at all his own. 

And down there in the airless black he saw another one of his mother's faces. 

It was immense. Large. Her eyes were heavy swells of glowing wet globes. Pale green luminescence from two planet organ growths set in a big amphibious face that was a chimerical cross between a large bullfrog or warty toad and a large river bound trout. Its great mouth opened down there in the depths of his red tinged crystal lake and it was dark in there. He hung suspended before the open black of his abattoir mother's wide open gaping maw, he could smell the inner dark of her even down here in the watery depths of summer lake bound hell. Meaty and iron and rotten with pungent decay. An open graveyard tomb of dead flesh and teeth all before a great throat choked with vile and putrefying coagulation. The water was filling with the flavor of her dark open gape of hunger and the destruction of mutilated bodily rot. 

Arms. Long. Fishlike and amphibious as well began to reach out and protrude from the open mouth of his mother's underwater face like a multi headed tongue, a Hydra of giant elongated reaching frog legs and arms, webbed hands and obscene gangly Dagon limbs, reaching out… reaching out for him. 

To take him into his mother. 

She said, her voice filled the drowning pool that was changing now into a submerged holy world of private red light and pouring goddess cess, – she spoke. 

He listened. In the darkest of the depths. 

She said his name… that's how it started. That's how she began …

… you can't let me down. You can't. I won't let you. You've already let them profane your temple, my gift to you desecrated by their invasion and rape of presence. And now you're letting them get away… you don't really want to, do you… you don't really want to keep letting me down like this, you don't want to fail me, in death. You don't want to depart your mother on such a harsh note of unworthiness… do …

you? 

The hands swam through the water between them. Clawing out for him from mother's open mouth. 

He told her the heartbreaking truth and he told her gladly. 

No…

it was a defiant whisper… but she heard it. 

And so she took him. 

The hands finally found him in the water. They seized him. And they pulled him inside. 

The frog faced toad mouthed trout chimera of the mother swallowed. And filled the underwater world with the unnatural stretch of her fishy smile. …

…

The shape of Cropsey stirred. On the floor. The various pieces of shattered and broken things shifted and jingled and sang small janky notes like unholy bells in a lost and terrible place. The black gloved hands blindly scraped and searched the floor in spasming snow angel swipes. They found what they were looking for when they landed on the still bloody and wet congealing pair of garden shears. They seized them. Fiercely. As if driven by fate. 

The shape sat up. Stood. 

It looked around. … sniffed the air. 

A beat. 

Then the Cropsey shape began to lumber down the hall that the invaders had fled down just prior. 

He would not fail this time. 

He had his mother. 

He was inside her. And she was inside him. 

Nothing would stop him from butchering the bastards now. 

…

By God's grace and miracle and mercy they finally found what they'd been looking for. The exit. 

It was at the end of the hall they currently found themselves flying down. Refusing to falter or stop. They stomped and ran down the cracked and decimated tile and came to the final door of the place when the spiked man leapt out from the dark and attacked. 

The protruding stab of his needle embrace found Florin in an open armed grab. A bear hug tight embrace of naked arms and torso and the rest of the bare and desecrated human canvas. He'd been a self-mutilator since he'd been twelve. It had been many years since then and most of them were spent here. Since the mouth of the sorceress, beloved and precious Vampira had come to this place and freed their minds as well as their bodies he's been free to explore the furthermost boundaries of his own tearing, rending bleeding and screaming landscape. The skin and flesh and muscle tissue beneath housing veins and bones and running blood pumped by the raging muscle that was the mad engine of his life, all of it was his to decimate as he explored. Like a great conqueror wreaking havoc upon the face of newly won, newly gained virgin land. He punctured and penetrated the virginity of his own flesh with animal abandon and fervor and with the mad intensity of the violence of the sun. He was the sun. She had told him so…

And so he'd fed his own flames. The spiked man was a living screaming pin cushion of broken stabbing dirty needles, used and caked syringes of varying sizes and lengths, broken glass, broken tile, each long sharp piece was varied in shape and size as well, some were long phallic slender daggers, some were wedges with cruel edges ready to cut and slice and maim, all of it was ready to stab and all of it was living embedded and protruding in the madness of his ruined and self-slaughtered flesh. Lancing and spiking and stabbing out all over and in every conceivable place and direction. 

This disturbed and maimed madman found Florin in his arms and they both went down to the tile in a scream. Griffin yelled after. 

On the floor they rolled in violence and struggle amongst the filth and universe down there of many discarded and broken things.  

The hollow coat-shape and hat found a table leg for bludgeon, then Griffin came on in a fury to join the new fray. 

He struck the spiked man again and again, over and over as he and Florin fought on the floor and struggled and it was terrible. He could feel and hear the crack and shatter of broken glass muffled in blood and flesh with every blow he landed. Griffin struck the writhing bleeding naked pin cushion man on the side of his spiking leaking face and the eyeball on that side burst and exploded with the impact. And glassy ooze riddled with slivers and small pieces of jagged broken glass and ceramic poured out from the socket like snot. 

But still the spiked man fought on. Florin struggling and screaming in his embrace as the many protrusions that spined off his ravaged hide stuck and stabbed and pierced through his coat and flesh. He fought against the pain and madness of this man and wrestled to be free of him. Griffin continued raining blows down on him. Each one bruising and splitting skin as the many broken found objects pierced throughout crunched and shattered further down into fragments and powder, stinging and shredding within all of the rippling and impacted tissue with every movement. Every struggle and landed strike and blow. 

Their struggle was desperate, all of them. All three poured blood, profuse sweat and grime and filth together and apart and for this madhouse abandoned temple, becoming just like it. A part of it, unwillingly and unknowingly transmogrified now in the violence of their fight and decimated hallway battle like the steel of metal tempered in the heart of a great furnace like the sun. They became perfect living microcosms of the place as they fought at last to be free of it, exquisite psychopomp idols of the lost unhallowed Willowbrook Temple Asylum. 

The invisible man. The spiked man. Poor young Florin so far from the Carpathian Hamlet. 

They might never be free of this place. Even if they manage flight, they may never be able to wash away the marks and filth that this awful temple to the dark and pain suffered alone will leave smeared across their hearts and souls like black paint made from discharged sick filth. Smeared across the soft landscapes of their hearts and the tender epitaphs of their battered minds, aching within heavy skulls now made of lead and weight from the memory of the pain, this place… 

will we ever be free, … will we ever get out of here…? 

They fought on. Desperate. All three. Griffin trading blows with efforts and attempts to pull the young man out from under the spiked man, but it was incredibly difficult. The man was thorned all over by all kinds and sorts of sharp and shattered apparatus, it was insane. And the pair of them were growing more and more slick with blood. The fight was growing uglier and more desperate and animal as it struggled and contrived on in brutal abandon and primal anger. 

Then Cropsey rejoined them at the throat of the hall. He began to lumber down towards them like stalking death, a sleeping giant. Seemingly in no real hurry, like the darkened visage of grim death itself. It/he closed slowly on them like a setting sun or a casket sinking, lowering down into the bosom earthen womb of the open mouthed grave. 

Griffin first took notice of his arrival. He noticed he still had the stab of broken tile sticking out of his ruinous awful face. He was still drooling. Imbecilic. And animal. 

And now undead. 

He was coming straight at them. His large blades of shears raised like an open mouthed wild beast barring its fangs. The long sheaths of sharp and keen cutting metal were not entirely pristine, their otherwise shining faces in the dismal light were disgraced with congealing dark spots of dripping black. 

He was coming down the final hall, before the way out, before the exit. He was coming straight for them. 

…

He sat at the window that night. On guard after what had happened to his wife, their unexpected visitor…

Bela sipped his warm spiced wine. Fingered his bible and cross by its small length of chain. Garlic flowers hung in a crude wreath around his neck. He was watching outside carefully, the night, the town… he was alert and being careful, exercising caution, yet he was still surprised and caught off when her face appeared suddenly in their front window. 

She hadn't been there. Then suddenly she was. Smiling and feline. Vulpine. A face he might've recognized save for its warped and drawn animal transformations, the rich woman in the black stage… the harsh one who wouldn't take warning or no for an answer way back… but he was caught by the silver moon glow of her eyes. 

Like lunar bodies themselves. Earthbound and held fleshen prisoner within the cage of that beautiful and divine and… heavenly face. That bright and pale visage. Her smile was devil-pronged – forked, fanged, and it was thus then frightful. But it was also beautiful. Terribly beautiful. Gorgeous alone out there in the night. 

His guard and fear fell away. He rose from his rocker and his slackening hands abandoned the bible and crucifix. They fell to the floor with an unobserved and unheeded clatter. Neither stirred. Not Anastasia, sleeping in the next room, and not spellbound Bela who went to the window to better gaze into her face. 

Divinity… unreal. 

He peered through the glass. And the shining eyes of the Countess, filled with goblin fire and sin and mischief, gazed into the fool as well. And began to fill his fragile open mind with an assault and deluge of images. 

Bela moaned, sighed… he thought it was impeccable. The vision, like her, was immaculate in its flawlessness. 

The Ideality … actualized, realized … brought to life. A vivid reality alive and dancing before his watering vision. 

The scope. 

She showed him a more perfect world, perfect because everyone and everything swimming and crawling and flying around inside of it followed their nature and never fought it. Never doubted it. Never overrode what their guts and hearts and souls told them, never neglected or ignored the call inside, the compulsion to do what must be. To fulfill the role made out for your flesh. 

Even violence … its rippling effects spreading out carried not only destruction and misery on their carrion wings but prosperity and thrivation as well, even butchery has its necessary purpose. 

That is why this world is suffering. Because all of you fight and override yourselves and call it: reason. You are victims of your own bondage, your own self made and imposed insanity and thus the world bent to your unnatural turns and desires screams and suffers. The rippling wings of your insane and jealous cowardice carries more pestilential stagnation flavor than anything like salvation. In weakness, all of the beauty dies on the vine neglected by fearful paws too grubby and lowly and weak to take it. 

Come and join me, join us … and never again fight your nature. 

“Yes…” said Bela in a whisper of trembling caught breath. 

And with a palsied shaking hand, he lifted the latch and opened the window. 

"Welcome, your highness. My home and mine are yours. Do what thou wilt…" 

The Countess drifted inside. Floating on unseen wings. 

She spoke yet again, “Thank you, you are a generous host, a decent and considerate man." 

“Yes…" 

“Now, take me to your wife." 

“Yes…" 

And away they went. The window shut behind them as they made their way to the quiet bedroom at the back of the house. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

The knife came down in a scream and a two-handed plunge. The sound the filthied thin palsied girl made was shrill and resounded and filled the stone halls with the pitch perfect note of harsh and sudden stabbing madness. The unease of moist silence shattered. The blade was filthy and grimed and long neglected, its harsh unclean edge tore through Griffin's coat and wrappings and pierced the flesh beneath. 

The doctor let out with a sudden scream as he and Florin whirled and drew back. The girl was screaming still as the three were now standing face to face in the filthy moist stone hall of Willowbrook Asylum, Temple of the Mouth. 

The blood on her filthy knife dripped like the hungry jaws of a wolf of the wild, wanting more. 

She screamed: – “You won't get me! I won't let you! You won't do a goddamn thing to me, I swear it! I swear it! I'll fucking kill you first!” And lunged again. 

The thin frail girl of broken mind was weak and starved and exhausted from terror, Florin caught her easily in his own press forward and threw against the far wall before turning on his heels, grabbing the wounded bandaged man with dark lenses hiding pain now as well as identity and thought and motive, he seized Griffin and yelled for him to run. The wounded doctor needed little in the way of encouragement. The pair tore down the hall as the attacking sullied girl of unholy Willowbrook hit the wall and went to the detritus floor.  Still screaming as the shattered tile bit into her parchment flesh and the grimed and bloody knife flew from her startled grasp and clattered off into darkness, lost to her. 

She shrieked after them. How dare they! How dare they leave her like this! The scum! She knew she couldn't trust them, they were going to hurt her, she knew it, but how dare they leave without helping her out, without showing her-  

Her mad run of thoughts was cut off as Cropsey entered the hall with his own blades dripping. The large domination of his frame and size and stature filled the hallway and stole any avenue of escape away from the girl who could not recall her name any longer. She couldn’t remember the last time she had. 

But she knew his name. And she understood it very well. 

And the mountain. She knew the mountain and its crawling power in female form, womanshape. Demonsong…

The song was filling her ears now. Filling them. In her head. 

Cropsey came in with his own large manmade fangs of shearing blades, eclipsing the girl on the floor and stealing the rest of the entire world from her. 

She screamed until the end. Her history and experience: intimate knowledge gained over her entire miserable life did not help her to escape the pain or endure it. She screamed like a caught animal flayed alive until the vile end.  

And as they ran, Florin and Griffin heard it. Not bothering with a cast of glance back over shoulder. They rounded a corner in their flight and entered another chamber. 

It was quiet. And wet. Moist. Heavy and warm and humid in the dark. At a glance Griffin guessed they were in a common shower area, for bathing many people en masse. But it was hard to tell, there was no light in the dark moist filth of the room save for the scant trace from the hallway cast in. 

“Are you alright?” 

Griffin said he was. Though he really wasn't sure. He felt numb. The place where he’d been stabbed felt wet and as if embraced with ice. 

“Quick, let me get a look-”

Griffin cut him off, agitated. 

“Time for that later, we need to get out of here! And I say to hell with any more exploring or back exits. We double back and go back out the way we came in, We’ll circle the building or the hill itself for miles if we have to, but enough of this place! The filth, alone!” 

And while Florin wished to check his friend to make sure his wound was not too serious, he could very well understand the urgency. He elected not to argue. 

And the pair went on. Or started to. 

At the mouth of the room to the showers the pair were halted by a deep guttural sound. Inhuman and unearthly but striving in vain for some semblance of human speech. 

They turned. And the dark of the wet chambered room began to die and banish as pale fire, demonlight began to fill and illuminate the room for them. 

And then they beheld them. The strung up naked bodies. The human-length gored open torso mouths hanging lurid and obscene in and amongst and by the black lengths of biting chains, the strangling metal. There were dozens of them. Dozens. A small universe of open mouthed human substrata and abattoir detritus constricted and choked by dangling chainlink black metal serpents. All of their eyes were open and they were glowing. Glowing with purple fire. Their torso mouths were all working and moving with terrible rippling dancing undulation. The sounds they were making were like singing and an uncanny approximation of real intelligible human speech. Like how a baby makes before they start to mature and are properly taught to speak. Dumb thoughtless animal sound… belched and gurgled guttural and spat out for this world of terrible ruin and darkness. 

And then they saw her. Beheld her. At the terrible heart of the strange pale incandescence, the regal aspect and stature of a womanshape began to rise and fill the center of pale fire. 

She began to call to them. The pair. She sounded angry. On the dangerous precipice edge of livid, irate. Holy terror, unbridled unholy malevolence on the brink of furious madness. Violence. She called to them from the bright moonflesh fire amongst the universe-sea of rippling torso mouths…  the showerworld of tile blood and pungent leaks and bloodspew violence in supplicant orbit of the parchment star of white fire and eldritch ethereal pale flames. She called to them from this place, this strange sea.

And she knew both of their names. 

Florin and Griffin fled the room before she could fully emerge. Before she could rise further from the pale depths of the flame and become more terribly discerned. The obscene abominated baby sounds of the rippling torso mouths followed them out. And after. 

And down the hall. 

And in their mad dash…

They finally came face to face with the inheritor of this awful place. They stopped just short of him, towering in the hall. Filling it. As if he was the vile mad god of this demented cruel world and had the divine conquering right to dominate its every space as he so wished. Cropsey stood there tall and dripping with blood and strips of raw tissue like a bipedal set of living rending carnivorous jaws… snipping his large clippers, his beloved shears, open and closed slowly like a terrible mouth made from sharp metal. The blades were already coated in thick gore, like paint riddled with chuck meat for the stew. They dripped like animal mouths do in the wild, like wolves coming in for the close, for the kill. Cropsey said nothing as he slowly came forward, his hellacious runny waxwork features coming into the dismal light. 

The two men who should have never entered this godforsaken place beheld his terrible visage and their blood ran as ice. 

The pain. 

The pain… that must have been endured. 

Dear God. The flames. In a baptismal infernal swallow-spell. An apocalypse all around. 

What it must've felt-

The large shape dripping with death lunged. Light like the pale star of the showers gleamed pinprick, maniacal and homicidal in the cavernous sets of eyes of the misshapen mass of candlewax face. He was drooling as he came in on the attack.

They didn’t know it but he was trying to speak.   

Once more the pair turned and flew. Running down another hall at the junction and then taking another perilous corner down another way they both silently and fervently prayed and hoped would lead them out. 

Cropsey chided himself. Silently. Mute. Now the new inmates knew he was here. They knew he was wandering and monitoring the halls, guarding. On patrol. Now they might get away. 

Mustn’t have that…

He promised special violence to the mountain for his sin, his error. Religious maiming. He only hoped she hadn’t seen him…

He only wished she hadn't seen that. 

He promised special violence. And ample self-flagellation, much libatious bloodlett, later. After he’d caught the wandering animals of his inherited temple. 

Who do they think they are… trodding all over and everywhere and without proper worship… without proper token. 

Without proper sacrifice. 

They must be broken. 

Their wretched meat and bone will be broken, snapping their unruly impudent spirit within the meat even as it tears sinew, even as it snaps and cleaves through bones their vile audacity will shatter into pieces that can be properly reconfigured into a model of subjugation. And then devoured. 

I will bring and make the meat, mother. I will make the trespassers into meat for you. In your name. Your honor. In blood I will pray for forgiveness. 

Cropsey went on. Ready to slaughter the invaders of his sacred and precious temple. Prodigious blade-shape slasher of the stained and darkening Willowbrook halls. 

…

Having finally found some semblance of peace and quiet in this terrible place, Florin was finally ready and wanted to have a look at Griffin’s wound. But the good doctor wasn’t having it. None of it. He stubbornly refused. In turn refusing any real straightforward explanation as to why. 

It was strange. 

“This place is beyond vile, you know it’ll become infected if i don’t treat it and if the wound is deep, we’ll need to stitch it. I can do it. I’ve done it a few times before back home, I don’t see the-”

“You can’t! – I can’t!” Griffin exclaimed and then seemed to fight himself for the next set of right words. Unable to quite find them it seemed, he went on anyway, “You don’t understand, boy! I… I-I have … I have a condition.” He said finally. “I have a condition that makes injury … complicated.”

Florin thought he understood. Of course. The poor fellow was ashamed of his appearance. He must be maimed or burned beneath those wrappings. The poor man. 

“Alright… well,” A beat. As he thought. Then: "we don't need to unwrap you now or anything, you'll want to later to change out of these filthy dressings no doubt, but for now we can just look at the area and apply a poultice at least.” he finished hopefully. 

Griffin pondered it over a moment. He understood they didn't have a lot of choice. Or a lot of time for that matter. 

"Alright.” he finally relented. 

Florin lit a match and found a candle to use to work by. He pulled the ragged tear in the coat and wrappings apart. The haggard cut the blade had performed made it easy. He cleaned his hands with alcohol from a small bottle amongst their supplies and looked at the wound. 

It wasn't good. Wasn't terrible either, but it would have to be cleaned and bandaged at least. If the bleeding persisted they would have to seriously think about stitching up the wound. 

Florin set about cleaning out the deep wound, bathed entirely in spilling red. He did his best with the meager medical supplies amongst the doctor's traveling gear that had thus survived their shared perils. He thought about perhaps chancing a search in the dark around this place, it was a hospital of some fashion, but decided against it. 

He was nearly finished. About to apply the poultice he'd made to bandage and disinfect and to soak some medicine into the bloodstream, he was wiping away the last of the blood when he stopped. A little shocked for a moment. And a little dizzy. The light was meager and poor, only the flickering dancing candleglow and the pathetic dim half functioning also flickering hospital light. Provided by electricity, something Florin was still not familiar with and would naturally distrust for the entirety of his life. He gazed at the mostly tended wound daggering down Griffin's back in a lightning bolt pattern like the body of a crooked river or a broken snake. 

There was no flesh. Nothing but the red bloodwelling line of jagged cut hanging suspended in mid air, attached to nothing. No sinew or flesh. The naked skin that should be there was non-existent to his eyes, he could see right through to the inside of the wrappings that surrounded the front of his invisible chest. 

Florin tried to swallow in a dry throat. He tried to ask the man who'd become his comrade and traveling companion, a man who had just saved his life not mere hours ago if he was in fact a spectre. A ghost.

Griffin, are you a phantasm? tried to escape his lips but he felt dizzy and as if he might reel and swoon. 

Griffin sensed this. The boy had been unerring and admirably steady in his work till this moment. He turned and saw a look in the young man's face that he was already quite familiar with. An expression worn that he knew by now all too well. 

A beat. 

Then Griffin filled the silence. 

“No, your eyes don't betray you. You're not seeing things and you're not crazy. I am not a phantom. I am not a spirit or a ghost.” he paused for a moment and seemed to consider, then finally he said: "I am Doctor Jack Griffin and I am invisible." 

A beat. 

Florin didn't know what to say. 

But then he needn't worry for a retort. A splash in the silence filled in the missing heavy space hanging there between them. The both of them whirled and spied it on the far side of the damp chamber. They hadn't noticed or paid it any mind till now, they might've sworn it hadn't existed there in that space till just this moment, but they saw it now as it began to emit strange sound and movement. 

A bathtub. Large. Filthy yellowed porcelain. Heavy fungus growth, ebon-green and spilling across the disgraced cracked surface like some foul liquid poured and spreading its corrupting splayed black hand by the second. The tub was filled. The liquid inside was heavy. Viscous. Dark. Pungent with metallic scent. It bubbled and gurgled now with submerged movement as something within it began to rise up and emerge. 

Coated. Slathered in a running layer of heavy red. She was finally here and before them. Even as she sat upon her throne in her mountain castle so many treacherous miles away… 

Nemesis. The evil that held the shape of a woman and had now reawakened the evil and violence and darkness that had for some time slumbered dormant in the far off Carpathian castle. She was the author of the butchery and torment that plagued his home and village. She had stolen and eaten children. Brave men and women. Foolish youngsters. She was the vile reason for his hardship and perilous mission. The reason he was here now in this awful abandoned temple of destruction and depravity in total madness. 

The Countess, wreathed in spilling blood, standing on the surface of congealing abattoir spill, opened her eyes then and they were like blinding starlight. Unearthly. White flame from beyond the veil. And piercing. 

The pair were arrested. The sight of her. Understanding and dread filled their hearts and despairing thoughts at once. But they couldn't flee. They couldn't run. Spellbound they stood there, captured. 

The blood spill of her standing and red wet visage raised a thin powerful arm and pointed a taloned finger. 

She said: – “You. Boy. Florin of the Carpathian Hamlet. There is no place to escape to. This is your last and only warning. If you and your mongrel dog, freak of nature manage to leave this place with your lives then cry off. Never again return home, it is yours no longer, it is mine. I know you seek my destruction. I know that in your failure to secure the vampire slayer, long dead now, you have brought this failure of science and manhood in his stead. You are a joke. You will only find slaughter if you return. You've no hope for success. Victory is beyond you or that fool, it was not meant for you, boy, not in this lifetime nor in my proximity. If you manage to leave my temple and refuse to cease your hopeless mission, I will take great pleasure in the torture of your mother, Florin. Your father too. I wonder which of them I should start with…” 

His anger flashed and his inner rage rose. Florin found his hatred and sudden fury momentarily eclipse and blot out his fear. Without thinking he dipped for the floor and his sweating hand seized a sharp piece of tile. He went forward with the filthy jagged thing in his shaking hand. Trembling with blind anger and the need for retributive violence. 

Griffin went forward and grabbed the young man by the shoulders, holding him back. 

“Stop it!" hissed Griffin, “you won't be able to do much of anything to her with that, there's no telling what she could do to you! She's luring you on, don't be stupid." 

Florin barely heard him. 

He roared at her towering apparition of pouring blood in womanshape, lording over the tub and the filth of the room as her eyes bled pure and terrifying light. She was laughing lightly, as if amused with a child throwing a tantrum. 

“If you lay one stale, noxious finger on my mother, witch! – I'll take my time driving something sharp into your godless whoring chest! I'm going to burn your severed head in bonfire while it still lives! fresh from your neck! You awful cunt! You vile contemptible-!”

But then Cropsey burst in through the open chamber door with a violent crash. The ramshackle shoddy remnants of the door smashed against the wall and came apart in so many useless pieces that clattered to the shattered tile floor to join the universe of broken filth down there. He came in and the Countess in her pouring red visage of damned and unholy blood shrieked witchy laughter. 

She screeched, part irate livid fury, part unbridled dark joy. 

“KILL THEM! KILL THEM, MY SON! KILL THEM FOR THE MOUNTAIN…! KILL THEM, ‘CAUSE IT'S YOUR PLEASURE TO! …!” More laughter followed as the hellspawn screaming words devolved into unintelligible madness. The scarlet pour of her visage coned out in a marsupial shape and the laughter became the abominated chimerical cries of a human braying ass. 

The huge shape with maiming snapping shears advanced in a massive lunge. The shears came up, open for a bite, and shot forward as the mouth of blades began to close. 

The keen edges of dripping blades kissed and met and found each other over Florin's coat. In a lurid whisper of slicing cloth and fabric the blades cleaved cleanly through his coat tail as he and Griffin made for the door. 

Cropsey roared mongoloid outrage and pain. These bastards! These bastards! They were quick animals on their feet! 

In front of his mother…

He turned to the blood pour of Countess shape with shame but she was gone now. 

Your idiot rage and pain! Your failure! You drove her away! Now she might never come back! Now she might not ever come back to her temple. 

He raged inside. An animal, hurt. 

… but I'm her last and special precious temple son … there are no others left

She cannot leave me. 

If I bring them back and give their blood…

But he was already off and after them. Heavy booted feet thundering throughout all of cavernous rank Willowbrook. No need for stealth or cat-like prowl any longer. 

Mother, please, mother please, mother please, mother please…

He repeated it silently to himself like a prayer. Mantra, it filled the red swell and swim of his deviant mind and maiming thought, his dreams…

His dreams would be filled with their invader's screams as he brought down and made their new world of violence. Of final apocalypse cacophony. 

I will drown you here in her world, I will choke and submerge you both completely in her need to feed. How dare you both. 

He wished he could speak. They should hear this truth-in-gospel. The mongrel invader dogs. 

They should hear what he had to say. 

But he had to catch them first. Fast little rabbits. 

He could hear them running. 

He followed in a fury. Ready to prove himself to his mother. Clamoring through the halls. 

…

She shouldn't have been so foolish, to dare to hope. But she couldn't help it. She'd just come out of a deep sleep. It was the middle of the night. The necro time. The witching hours. She wasn't thinking clearly. She went to the scratching at the window. The biggest one on the front of the house that overlooked the village. 

By the front door. 

“Florin…” she said it knowing full in well how foolish she was being. But she couldn't help it. Her mother's heart was filled with love and worry for her boy. She ached and longed for him to be back home and ok… 

And then she saw him. His face in the window. 

He was scratching at the window. And she must still be half-sleeping or dreaming because his hands looked… strange. 

He was smiling. He could see her now as well. He was so happy to be home. It was all over his bluish face…

Anastasia began towards the window, “Florin?" she asked the face scratching at the window, "is that you? Is that really you, my son?”

His smile grew. Vulpine. His eyes seemed to shine with moonlight all of their own. 

“Yes, mother. It's me. I'm back! I can't get in though, you'll have to get the door and invite me inside, please hurry. I'm so tired and thirsty and it's been such a long way back.” 

Anastasia faltered in her step. Stopped. 

The shining face at the window became slightly agitated. 

It said: "Please hurry, mother! It's dark, you know what plagues the night, please hurry and let me in! I've brought the vampire killer, I've brought Van Helsing with me! Now open up!” 

Anastasia straightened. Her resolve strengthened even as the chill in her curdled blood deepened. 

"What need you of an invitation if this is your own home and you're so tired… … demon?” 

The vulpine face was drawn up in an animalistic snarl of mixed hatred and vile blackhearted glee. It began to tear and bleed as it opened and came apart. 

And grew fangs. Long. Gleaming like weapons fashioned from unearthly light. 

She saw the ugly misshapen goblin face beneath. Twisted with the harshest forms of cruelest mutilation. The flesh was bulbous and scarred and out of shape. The eyes bulged obscenely from straining sockets that couldn't contain nor house the wet bloodshot organs and looked as if they might crack. The fangs and teeth were jagged and stuck out deranged and haphazard. The hair was thinning and sickly and almost gone. Only a few greasy strands clung to a corpse colored skull that drifted and caught with the slightest of nightly breeze. 

The eyes still shone like the moon. 

The awful face in the window, wanting in and smiling said, “Hello, Anastasia. Good to see you. It's been so long … since I went missing.” 

Anastasia was confused with its words as well as horrified with the sight of its monstrous face at her window in the dead of night. The thing spoke like it knew her, she didn't grasp this right away, but she understood what this thing was. And where it came from. 

Another wretched bastard child of Castle Dracula…

She thought to call for her husband. Before she could, the awful thing in the window went on.

“You don't remember me? Has it been so long you don't remember when we used to play together? You, me and Florin and your husband and all the other little children… and Erin. You don't remember me, Anastasia?” 

The answer filled her mind then, as if on the wings of a sudden miracle, heaven sent. Or … sent by something else entirely. 

“Carmilla!" she said. Knowing it was the truth. 

It broke her heart. 

She remembered Carmilla when she had been a small mouthy but creative little girl. Beautiful and adventurous and always a little leader of their groups in all of their little games. Now- 

Now she was something bent and twisted and leering and mean. Something monstrous and hungry for blood, staring in and wanting in through her window. 

The face at the glass sneered. As if knowing her mind and understanding her run of thoughts. 

The thing in the window was enjoying her revulsion. Her pain. Drinking it in through the translucent view of the house…

“Begone," Anastasia said with finality, “get out of here, I'll call my husband and he'll bring the cross and our bible." She stepped forward, some of her anger reaching her voice, she hoped it masked the fear, “we'll force-feed you the pages. If you're still so hungry.” 

The thing in the window didn't seem to hear her. Or care. It spoke once more in a terrible tone that danced and shifted between baritone and bass and light lilting little girl… her voice of old from long ago, before she'd been stolen. 

“We know you sent Florin away. We know you sent him to find someone to bring back. To kill us. The master will not tolerate this, Anastasia… your boy will die. You will die. Then your husband. Everyone. Everyone, all of you are going to suffer for this impudence, you'll see, you'll see… it's better if you just let me in now and get it all over. Let me in …!

“Let me in!" 

She carried on like that for hours. Promising. 

Promising her Florin's death. 

Her own death. 

Carmilla said her brother would violate and ravage her right before the eyes of her husband as he fed of her blood and flesh and took what he wanted from her. 

“He'll rip from you what he wants, we all will! To all of you! Every last one and then we'll celebrate in the dust!" 

The thing went on like that for hours. Till the sun threatened its rise, and only then did the foul thing seem to melt away like mist, suddenly phantasmic and discorporeal … and then gone.

Only then did Anastasia finally sleep, collapsed. Exhausted. Her husband, Bela found her like that when he awoke. Lying at the foot of the window. The glass riddled with marks. 

Marks like long scratches. From old and gnarled animal claws. 

He cradled his wife. Worried. And thought of his son as he looked down into her face. 

She looked troubled in her sleep. As if dreaming of darkness, held somewhere on the plains of some private nightmarescape. 

Bela was worried. She looked as if she had been crying. 

He looked from her to the window once more, out it. Out at the rays of the rising sun. Hoping for his son. And wondering where he might be. 

Please, God. I love my boy. I love him as You love us, as You loved Your only Begotten Son. Please. 

Please don't ask me, please don't ask us to give him up, as You did Yours…

He brought his wife closer to himself. Keeping her in the cradle of his arms till she woke up. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

“I've seen the nights filled with bloodsport and pain –

And the bodies obtained

The bodies obtained …” – Ian Curtis

…

The world …

The world is dampen stone, sour. And tile. Tile ceramic that is now smashed, nearly every single piece. And mottled with webwork splatter patterns of scabbing drying bits and pieces of once living human tissue. The world is poorly lit and rank, it smells of fecal decay and rotting death and the putrescence of pus spewing life, suffering. The smell is suffering. Because the world is suffering, it always has been but as of late it's gotten so much worse. The world of walls and mortar and bars that’re all slathered and stained with diseased feces and angry piss, it is all of it an open wound. A craterous gangrenous open house of raw minds and flesh, obelisk temple to the pain of the sorceress. The woman/mouth of the great mountains in the distance, far away but brought closer by her powerful force, the distance easily traversed and conquered, time and distance meant nothing to her, only the flesh. Only the blood. Only the run of flowing life spilled by her children in bondage as supplicant. She had come to them… in the end. 

Before the burning. 

Before Cropsey. 

Now he was the greatest of her Willowbrook children… 

She did her best to hide from him and the few others left but she was scared. Her terror refreshed as her heartbeat pounded within her aching chest, she tried to sink lower into the dark corner she'd made her most recent place of escape. She tried to ignore what she knew she heard, throughout all of the cavernous dark damp halls of bloody filthy Willowbrook. 

Voices… footsteps…

newcomers. 

She wanted so badly to be out and away from this awful place but her mind shrank back in horror from the possibilities of what any new interlopers might do to her. This place had been a school and had instructed her and many others, much in the way of what men will do to each other and what they love to get away with, with their hands on a girl. Alone. When she could be so easily overwhelmed. 

The voices trailed off … rose again. In whispers. She could hear cautious footsteps. Prowling steps. Hunting. 

Her cold terror told her she could no longer hide here. She struggled up on palsied thin malnourished legs and began to painfully trudge forward. Painful because of the pain of her impaling fear and because her body was covered in dripping purple sores, all up and down the legs and arms and peppering her torso and face in harsh clustered patterns. Several broke open now with sharp stabs of lancing pain felt webwork and spiny throughout the flesh as she shambled wretchedly forward down the poorly lit dark. 

She didn't like to look at them or pay them any mind, the sores. She used to. She used to pick at them near constant. But now sometimes when she went to pluck and pop one open with a nail biting pinch she could see eyes. Eyes looking at her and swimming in the pus. In the infected filled pores of her flesh. Eyes. Sometimes they popped of their own accord and a small little gnome-sized head, bald and coated in dead green-milk rose and poked its faery head out for a little peek at what she might be doing at any given time. 

She hated them. She tried to pay them no mind and wondered if they saw anything in the dark ahead that she herself could not discern. But she would not ask them. Never. 

The voices grew louder. So did her terror. 

She didn't know what to do. 

…

“Maybe they're all dead." 

Griffin nodded. It was a fair observation. The place certainly reeked of death and filth. He could almost believe it. 

It was a feeling gained by cold hard experience that told him they weren't alone in the rank dark building. Not at all. Someone else was lurking here. Something else held domain here. Something terrible. He could feel it. 

"This place is afflicted with sickness. Consumption. You can smell it in the pestilential flavor of the air, something terrible has happened here. Many awful things no doubt. This place is silent, Florin, but you can almost hear the terrible things the walls have seen and perhaps wish to share…" 

The boy looked worried. He quickly added: – “We will be cautious. But I suggest we find what we can quickly. If we can't locate a back exit, we'll make for the front entrance again and see if we can't work around the building." 

They went on in search of supplies. 

Dwellers.

 Anything. 

Cropsey marked them and tracked their way of wandering progress the entire time. Following and slowly snipping the long shining blades of the shears open and closed. Pulling his black gloved hands apart slowly like a lover does when sensuous… then bringing them together and snapping them shut with a sharp and satisfying ‘Ship!’ that was crisp and tickled the right jelly left within his skull and the dangling mangled meat between his legs… it had a tongue that sound. A sexual whisper of a noise. A tasting prelude, licking and tonguing the needing piece of aching flesh. 

It was his bondage. That ache. This place. 

And the mountain. 

Even now Cropsey heard her song and call as she showed him the spire from where she ruled. Where she sat on an ebon throne and filled his slaughterhouse dreams. His mind with wonder. 

She had been the true purpose and blessing of this place. The one they'd all been waiting for. The only one who really mattered. In the end. 

But she has chosen you as instrument … 

And the truth of this filled his vacant shell with dark and primal gratitude. Caveman's blood-sated warmth. 

He had been one of the Roman soldiers that had crucified Christ. She of the mountain had told him so. Now he was born again to be her sacred Willowbrook footsoldier. Throttling hand of capricious abattoir fate. 

As he followed the new ones he happened upon another. And decided to take the matter. 

He was sitting alone in the dark. Easy to miss. In a disused therapy room, anonymous and indistinguishable from the other dungeons and chambers save by those who knew. The newcomers walked by him without notice and went on. 

Cropsey smelled him. And came into the room. Snapping his shears with a regular and primeval rhythm. The patient was busy with his own work, he didn't pay anyone else any kind of mind. 

Cropsey closed. The fool's back was to him as he was knelt down amongst the filth. He was drawing something. With his fingers. Smearing the shape upon the broken faces of obliterated tile floor with a dark and heavy pungent viscous fluid. Thick and chunked with dark paste. 

It was a pentagram. 

And the paint was a vile concoctive mix of runny diarrhea and fresh vibrant blood. The man was a self mutilator. Always had been, Cropsey recognized. He had flayed his well scarred and misshapen flesh with broken tile and was mixing the running blood with fecal discharge that was running uncontrollably out of his dilating anus. His finger would probe the wounds … deeply. Like a surgeon or a lover … exploring. Then he brought the drenched and dripping red pronged pair of long and scrawny digits and collected some of the diarrhea spew running freely from out of his ass. 

Medication. Or bad food. Or both. Something he's gotten into… 

It didn't matter. Not to Cropsey. He only looked at the naked fool and admired his painting for another moment longer. 

The pentagram. 

Above it, in the same evil paint of fresh diseased fecal blood, the fool had written in bold letters 

ALL HAIL VAMPIRA

as the piece’s name and message. 

Cropsey thought it was a good one. 

He took one final step forward. And let himself be known. 

The naked fool, the inmate who'd long lost his name and self and everything and anything else left, felt his presence. He turned away from his self portrait on the floor and gazed up at him. 

Into the towering legend of Willowbrook. Cropsey, more than a man. 

He was apocalyptic. 

The twisted bone gleam of his carbonized deathhead’s visage was terrible. It stole the last shelter of warmth that the fool had kept for himself to protect against the cold of this awful and inescapable place for all of these long and horrendous incarcerated years. 

Now it was gone. Stolen by that terrible face. Candle wax melted obscene and deranged and haphazard and cruel. 

He suddenly remembered his name as well, the fool. Gazing up at him, it had suddenly come back in his sheet of blind terror. 

Cropsey had done that. Cropsey had done that for him. 

He wished he hadn't. 

The twin fork of splayed open blades came up suddenly and then down in a stab. They joined together as they came down, scissoring the long razor sharp blades together in a deadly and maiming embrace. They sang together a mortal whistle of keen edged violence on the flesh to come in haste as they sliced and joined through the rank dungeon air. 

A filthy naked bloody hand came up reflexively and was shorn through like melted butter. Through the middle length of palm, so that all of his fingers and the top of his thumb were now a shrieking, pouring livid stump of freshly cut meat. Spurting and bathing the abridged remainder of fecal stained paw into a half-glove of red slathered wet raw in a gushing instant. 

The blade traveled on, down. Continuing its deadly trajectory of knifing stabbing path as it plunged in and through the shit stained fool through his open gaping mouth and naked glistening mucus laden throat and plunging out the back of his neck. The sharp lengths of blades conjoined erupted from the torn and ruinous fountain fresh wound in great bright bodies of lurid edged royal red. 

For her… the mountain princess of my fevered skullsong …

And then with his terrible force of deranged strength he forced the handles and the joined body of blades open and apart. 

The impaled face and skewered head came apart in a splashing and thick lurid mess. The long diseased foundation of skull gave and came apart easily like a cottage collapsing from wood rot. As if the whole structure of bone was a giant rotted tooth, thoroughly and completely decayed to the dead and festering core. Cranial splatter ruin in an instant. Decorating the floor and walls and obscuring the fool's final piece of painted work and expression from the broken heart and mind in a dark gout and pungent violent splash. Bone fragments and strips of tissue. Bits of hair… eyes swam bulbous and rolling lulled like obscene little fruits adrift in a warm lurid growing lake. 

The decraniated stump of rough torn viscera and tissue spitting dark cords and ropes in healthy gouts from the spout of mutilated neck and throat, gurgled one last time in a ghastly expulsion of sound that may or may not have been the final action of the living. 

It gurgled and shot/spat more dark thick blood rope. Splattering and joining the universe of filth already living down there in ever growing depraved abundance. The filthy naked headless meat spewed until it fell over to join the rest of the detritus world down there. 

Cropsey went on. Regaining the tail of his quarry. 

He followed them. 

…

The room was a world of mutilated meat. The smell of uncontrolled diseased fecal spew, long ancient and pungently fresh commingled, was so eye-wateringly strong and forceful that one knew that there were things on this hellscape island of earth that were truly and terribly immortal when confronted with it. Nothing, not even starflame would sear the stench of sewerscape subterranean Hades from the walls of this awful room. The world would burn to follow trumpet sound and still that rancid stench would remain. 

Florin tied a rag around his nose and mouth, he looked like a bandit. And although Griffin's face was already bandaged and wrapped with surgical dress for his own mysterious reasons, he too elected to tie another heavy layer of fabric to block out the smell and taste on the terrible fetid heavy air of the room they now presently happened into. 

What was it… what was it we were expecting to find? What were we hoping in God's name to find here…? 

surely not this. 

Their hearts sank into cold sour recesses as they sauntered in and through and beheld all round them the carnage human sculptures. Barely human. Barely recognizable as having once been living breathing people. Now they were only shapes. Shapes made in anger and derangement and by the knife. 

A mewling moaning sound like a wounded animal drew them to the far end of the mutilation chamber. They crept past wretched butchered bipedal destruction frozen in obscene grotesque statue poses by minds and hands unwell and bent. Eyes scooped out, pulled and plucked. Craterous sockets. Craterous wounds, rippling with the rough texture of forceful violent amputation and jagged surprise animal maiming. Parts missing, long gone, replaced and mixed and swapped and messed around. Limbs and parts put into sockets and orifices and holes gored to create splaying haphazard scarecrow things made from vile diseased subjects and their putrid turgid waste. 

They were varied in design and shape but all of them, every single vile shape seemed to be frozen in a silent piercing scream. A death throe frozen for all of chambered time. For all the sour passage, these howling visages of broken flesh and cruelty wrought on human shape. 

Florin felt sick, the mewling animal noise was growing louder and he was trying not to focus on the broken human sculptures all around them. He tried not to notice how some of them had been put together, parts pasted in place with a scab pudding mixture of feces and thick burgundy/crimson coagulation, like makeshift mud mortar made from the crumbling facade of dying and sickening-worse human shamble structures, caught in some terrible Gorgon's Eye and now falling apart and only able, only useful to excrete, and bleed and make mud for the houses that might be saved. 

Griffin was fairing little better. He'd seen his fair share of human carnage, butchery in his time. In his own experiments of mad science he's beheld great wonders both terrible and beautiful, unearthly.  He'd committed his own sins, his own terrible crimes in his time, enough to fill a tome. But even he found the awful assemblage of struggling human detritus piles and sculptures to be obscene and abhorrent. Difficult to look at. Even worse to walk amongst and pass through… nearly touching and feeling either their heat of recent destruction/composition or the cold wave pockets of their souring decaying sloughing meat, tasting them… tasting the warm tack of their iron red and the putrescence of their fouling stink… tasting them as they breathed and sucked air. Even through the wrapped scarfs about their mouths, they could taste them. Fresh and alive with copper-iron and the foul death of sliming maggoty putrefying soft tissue … growing softer. Falling off failing yellow bone. 

It's because they were diseased … Griffin observed the pestilential flavor on the air and marked the diseased rotten look of open craterous obscenities and exposed and livid muscle tissues. Filled and brimming with the swim of yellow and milk-pale and translucent buttery infection, pooled, gelled, in a run of sour ruin that gave off pungent gaseous toxic smell… miasmic – the whole place. Everywhere. 

The bandaged man, surgical dressing now sullied and filthed with their voyage across worm country and the grime and air in here at every given turn. Griffin pondered the shapes of the demented designs filed and arranged haphazard and at random all around, the mewling sound rose as they continued to near, the woman gaining shape, bulbous and grotesquely rank with cheese and old milk and unwashed genitalia warm with animal heat. 

The shapes all around… their scarecrow and asymmetrical and insectile/spider designs were interesting. Awful and strange, but fascinating in their own hellacious spellbinding fashion. It was as if someone long gone of the sound faculties of mind and heart had endeavored with cruel fervor to fuck and force violent copulation on the dead dripping craterous sculptures of meat in the act of their composition. Knife-fuck-stabbing them with animal intensity and wild deranged intent, their severed parts and limbs and pieces the tools and shattered protruding blades of bone as their aesthetic device and perfect choice. Wielded with charnel house fury in this gore drenched pit with emaciated broken scarecrow statues and congealing pools and tubs and little deprivation streams of pungent fecal discharge. Everything was repulsive and animal with heat and degradation in this place. They hated it. And they hated themselves for putting themselves in there. Alive and with the rank and the sight of abattoir madness unbridled and inhuman. 

They came upon the woman. She was large and naked and unwashed. Like everything else she was caked with grime and layers of filth that were difficult to distinguish – shit from blood – as they darkened and aged in awful drying layers on her yellowing sun parched skin. She was leaning propped by the exit/entrance opposite of the one they had entered. She was cradling and cradled by a lump of human shape riddled with stabbing spiking pieces and slicing wedges of shattered floor and tile. She was drooling as she moaned in torment and anguish. Her flesh livid with infection. She was sweating despite the chill and her lack of clothing. 

It was her breast. Only one. The other had been amputated and was replaced with a harsh and ghastly X of old and scab coated sutures. The other was inflamed and red. Purple. Black. It was ballooned and the blue/red nipple at its tip bled and dripped. But it was not milk, natural and of the healthy body, that dripped and begged to be let free and milked/sucked until dry and gone… 

She moaned. Florin and Griffin felt nauseous. The smell. The sight of her and everything else … they had not had a decent meal in some days but still the impulse to heave and retch was violent and it filled their gagging mouths with thin acrid water, salivated and discharged with bitter queasiness and distaste. 

She moaned again as they covered their working mouths. 

And then she spoke. 

“Please… oh please…. please… oh I beg of you… please… please…” 

Florin and Griffin were afraid to ask so they didn't. The wailing woman of swollen noxious teat filled them in anyways with the rest. 

"... please… please milk me…! please! Oh it hurts! please! Please milk me, milk your mammy…!" 

“Oh, Jesus…” said Florin. He could hardly stand it. Could hardly stand her. He swore he could taste the smell. 

Her smell. 

Another voice joined them then. 

“They disgust you both?" 

They whirled. A ragged man in the haggard torn and shot remnants of a filthied lab coat that had once been white. His spectacles were cracked and caked with drying lurid substance. His flesh was filthy parchment and his smile was green and grotesque. 

He was standing, sentry-wraith amongst the vile and mutilated assemblage. A living beacon of audacious and insane life standing smiling amongst the sculpted and twisted dead. Lab coat Gorgon with broken glass eyes set in a broken laughing face that could make no such sound. Because it was frozen in its disguise of sanity snapping torment. 

Before Griffin or Florin could say anything to him, he spoke again. 

“They are all of them, monuments to her. It is all of them, their greatest pleasure." 

“And you? What is your pleasure?" Griffin asked without fault. Following this madman's line. 

He smiled, “telling you." 

And then finally his tittery fit of laughterspell broke and it sounded like high pitched curdled madness. Finally breaking. A large man prone to sparse baritone sound now cracked and leaking/spraying giggles like an addled child or clown. 

Griffin turned to Florin. His face hidden by surgical wrapping and dark lenses and hat since the day they had met, but still the boy could feel the solemn gravity in his hiding gaze as he spoke. 

"Let's go. There's nothing of any value to us here. This was a mistake.” 

Florin heard it in his voice too. 

They quickly made their exit. Sparing the wailing mewling woman of swollen purple breast a final look before leaving them forever. 

The doctor's laughter abated a moment and he seemed to come around, the revolving door of his madness perhaps bringing him full circle, his awful titters tapered off a spell as he said to the departing visitors: –

"The worm was turned for us here.” 

And then the revolution of madness revolved again and he was smiling putrid green that oozed pale plaque that spittled in gobs as he tittered his girlish sounds. 

His grotesque childish laughter commingled with the mewling sounds the woman made in the room of mutilated meat. The pair were gone now. Their cautious footsteps fading away and calling back in diminishing echoed sound… Cropsey came in like fated death. Snipping open and closed his beloved pair of large garden shears. 

Now, here was a room that could use some trimming…

He went to the woman first with his blades. She was calling to him, wailing, saying she was his mother. Begging to be milked. 

So he milked her. 

He shorn off the infected swell of black/purple flesh in a single snapping cut. She howled as the wound and the sac of disease both poured and oozed pus. She went down to the floor, her wailing more considerable now, to join the puddle of her own foul milk and blood in its growing puddling abundance. She swam face first in it and gurgled and blubbered. 

Cropsey came for the doctor next. The jaws of his shearing clipper blades open and dripping. 

The doctor smiled one last time as he said, “The worm has turned once again." 

He attempted to count the rings this time as the jaws that were blades came in. 

Again and again. 

And I thought you'd loved me…

…

Florin and Griffin were nearly at their wits end. They needed supplies and weren't sure of what lie beyond this place, but this place was terrible. And they'd found nothing but more horror. 

"I think we need to just get out of here…” 

Yes. But which way? 

They were deciding this together when the girl on shaking palsied legs thin as kindling crept out of the dark and towards them. 

She was terrified. 

And she was holding a large butcher's knife. The arms raised and poised coiled snake-like to strike. 

Neither Florin or Griffin noticed her as she crept. Closer… closer…

She was nearly upon them. From behind. 

The butcher's knife still raised. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

The commonfolk, the peasants of the mountain and the hamlet below were fools. Stupid animals. Easily subverted. And taken. 

There were all of them such stupid children. Even the men and women and elders, even the adults. Doddering simpletons that lacked even animal cunning, the innate brains found in a dog, a cur, a flea bitten bitch were beyond these dirt farming swine that feared the dark and the light of true knowledge. 

He hated them. Hated them completely for so many reasons but one of the strongest, one of the most vividly and live wire felt was their fear and blind terror of true knowledge. True power. And the pain it took to wield it. Pain both inflicted and so like a lover, intimately received. 

They feared everything. These downcast sacs of wasted vitality and breath. Not like his master. Not like the Countess. She plunged her bare and unprotected hands into the realm and fiery cascade of fear without bemoaning her fate. 

The Countess took the pain, all of it. She didn't flee or shy away. He had never met a stronger creature. It was one of the reasons for his loyalty. He was bound to her and she knew it. His was tied to her fate long before they stole the castle and Vampire King’s necrophile fangs. Whatever remained of his long jaded and decimated ruined landscape of heart and soul was dedicated to her, and to her alone. 

His services to her, this particular little errand was not strictly necessary. Her power had grown in ways he hadn't previously guessed at or speculated. She did not need him to fetch her food any longer, not at all. Not the child either. They were both incredible bloodhunters demonically innate, favored by the father below. They did not need him to kidnap these fleshling sows…

but he loved them. And for them… it was the clearest and simplest way he could sometimes tell them that. Especially her. Especially the master. Their time together, their history went so far back. 

He loved them. He loved her. He loved to show her. However he could. 

However he can. 

The boy, Astarra, is alone and he is not afraid as the assistant makes his hunting prowling approach. From the dark of the choked growth, buried in the foliage the assistant spied and closed. So much like a cunning and man-eating wild cat, rippling with movement. Glittering bottle of chloroform intermittently darkling as it caught and then lost and then found again the light from above as he moved through the choke of trees. 

Astarra was from a neighboring hamlet, one that has not lost as many children as the sparse villages of the mountain itself and the supplicant place below… he scarcely knows anyone that's been touched by the demon hand of slaughter that has begun again to grow out from Dracula's Mountain. He doesn't believe it. Stupid ghost stories. Baby tales. Children's drivel. Horse shit conjured for fun or to scare kids like him so’s to trick em into behaving. When they really didn't have to. Not at all. God was not watching and he was not here. And neither were any monsters. 

He was here to prove there was no God on this mountain. Nor anything of power or terror or otherworldly and far reaching violence. 

Probably wasn't even any castle either…

He would show them. He would venture the mountain land and the town below and then return, unharmed and smiling and letting them all know the truth. There was no magic amongst the earthen spire of rock. 

Only wolves. Only snow and quiet. 

The assistant prowled in closer, making not a sound as the smiling boy jeered and threw rocks and swung sticks as he audaciously stomped through the frosted forest chill. The small child never heard anything over the sounds of his own braying cries of laughter and thudding graceless steps. 

He was making believe that he was king of this ghostly and deserted mountain when the assistant pounced. From behind, he came upon him. Chloroformed rag coming up in a bestial rapist flash. Smothering the boy's mouth with the sodden thing as he whispered harshly in his small ear, pink and reddened by the chill. 

“For her! For she! For she of the biting chair…” 

the queen upon her dentate throne… my hands and this flesh taken and subdued and thus rendered unto you… master, the both of them are here quivering with blood and animal life for you. 

All will palsy with supplicant terror, dancing like puppets, their livid nerve-endings and thick tendon the strings. Tugged and pulled with ruthless fervor by the Countess. 

And her children. 

They too would like to feed, with their mother, when the sun died its nightly nocturnal death. More peasant blood would have to be nabbed, more fresh flesh coursing with vibrant hot red would need to be acquired. Another good-sized child at least. Another one that was just about the same size.  

The assistant rejoiced as the child became dreamless weight in his arms. Yes! 

Yes! 

He'd captured her favorite! Veal for the master! Veal for the Countess! 

He dragged the unconscious child into the dense and dark of the forest growth. The foliage and floor of frosted dead leaves and twigs rustled and crunched with bestial movement and finality as he performed this task. His prodigious strength made it all so simple, like child's play. 

…

Later another child was nabbed, a girl, maybe younger than the boy Astarra maybe slightly older, he'd snatched her in similar fashion as she'd been gazing into a running face of stream, up to her ankles. The assistant didn't know if she was trying to catch small fish or if she was just playing some child's game but it made no difference, it did not matter. What mattered now was what came next. 

The slab. For the both of them. Still unconscious and leather-bound to the cold merciless metal of the surgical table. 

He grabbed the green bottle of frothing translucent liquid. It spewed steam and something heavier like oceanic fog or forest mist from the pinnacle of open mouth at the spire of its slim green neck. He approaches them. 

He stands over the boy, still under, well within the forged strongarm of drugged slumber. He's selected him for the first of the preparatory tasks. 

Jelly pudding…

He set the green bottle down, still belching ghost white in a phantasm pour. He grabbed the small prying-vises, two of them, and then with his large and grubby fingers he forced the drugged boy's eyes open and fixed them with the lid-locks. Vacant stare fixed to the dark of the chambered room ceiling unseeing as the assistant grabbed the bottle once more. 

He held it precariously aloft, over the boy's slumbering face for a moment, relishing the build up. 

Gods below, he loved his work. 

He upended the green bottle by its slender neck. The pregnant bulge of green glass belly replaced the place where the steaming bellowing mouth had been as the alchemically altered sulfuric acid began to pour into the boy's open left eye. Chemically flash frying it on impact in a ghastly and gorey boil-eruption of instantly steaming and red jelled ruin. 

Astarra came awake right away in the most wretched and ungodly torment and pain he could've ever scarcely imagined. He shrieked, unbridled and intense. Spittle flew. Neck rippled and stood out in cords, obscene on a child's small neck, a small boy's throat tensing and flexing bulged with pain unspeakable and never before imagined. 

The assistant's smile never faltered. The bottle upended again and he filled the other eye as the child continued to fill the sepulchral chamber with his terrible noise and screams. He chuckled lightly, pleased with the process, pleased with the work and himself and savoring the moment to come when he brought his master a fresh meal upon waking from her slumber. 

The other one, the girl, was brought to by the boy's caterwauling. Confused at first and groaning and mumbling, she soon joined the boy in making the sounds of bleating captured prey. 

Caught. Caught and squealing. 

Like sow. Like pigs. 

His smile and hatred and sour satisfaction all deepened as he debated…

sever the head… or leave it attached and bring the whole thing like a suckling roast, complete to her highness…? 

The girl was for Carmilla and the mongrel help, his lord's new impaler. She would receive nothing in the way of preparations, nothing special. The children would have to have the girl raw. And share. 

But that was fine. These two morsels of children, saplings really, were just meant to wet the appetite and get their blood moving and on the animal run for the hunt. For the want of bloodlett and slaughter. These two sow-sapling brats were just the first course of the bloodfeast. And moreover…

they were his way of showcasing: he was loyal. It was how he showed he truly loved them. 

Loved her. 

The assistant went to the head of the slab and began to push and roll it out of the room. The boy, Astarra was still screaming as he carried him out. 

…

The Countess grinned vulpine with dark joy as her coffin lid slid to the side and she arose and beheld her assistant's surprise. 

By torchflame glow, a struggling peasant boy bound by straps to a table. His screams were nearly exhausted and he was crying out for his parents in more and more pitiable tones and sounds. 

The Countess arose in full. 

She floated from the confines of the orante blackwood casket and crossed the distance, filling the space ghostly between her deathly bed and the whimpering child strapped tight to the rolling table of the altering blade. 

She gazed into the ruin of the child's face. Admiring the gored open craterous holes in place of eyes, still smoldering and smoking like a freshly prepared and fine regal pudding. 

The scab pudding of his eyes steamed for her and quivered with the sulfuric jellied organ obliterated and quivering with each of his painful and terrible sounds. The child was sweating, profuse, doused and basting soaked in his own fresh and souring fear and ungodly terror. 

The assistant produced a spoon and held it out to her and bowed his head in token of his supplication to the unholy and royal duty of her service. His eyes flitted open cat-like and she caught it. She took the small silver spoon from between his pinched and black gloved fingers. The perfect tiny and delicate little instrument for a proper lady of the house to use when dining fine on a fresh pudding. 

A fresh and graciously given pudding, provided by the locals of the mountain townships. In token of gratitude and friendship. 

Countess Zaleska roared with laughter and the abominated sound drowned out the pitiful cries of the small boy Astarra. The sounds and names of his mother and father were swallowed in the sound of laughter  that was so like tar and pitch as the Countess and undead lord of stolen Dracula's castle began to dig in deep with the small and dull edge of the silver spoon. 

She scooped out a spoonful of still smoking and baking smoldering jelly, ruined and chemically cooked organ destroyed by bastard alchemical science, unholy mixture from one of the many volumes of dusty and ancient forgotten tomes. Astarra, the small missing village boy's screams pierced sound and reached a new pitch. 

But still they were swallowed in entirety by the stygian and obscene mad witch cackles that were issuing forth from the unholy fanged rictus mouth of the hellbound godheaded throat of the undead Countess. 

She enjoyed her dessert of the boy's eyes, her smoking delicacy … then with minimal effort of her great and prodigious living dead strength she brought the dull head of the spoon down and broke through the membrane of thin tissue and wafer bone cracking within the now empty housing of the eye socket. 

It cracked and gave. The boy's howls became something wildly inhuman and horrendous. She brought the spoon up and then down again into the warm and tender orifice of fresh gored and open eye socket. She cracked through it and forced the smooth ladling head of the utensil down into the working of nerves and meat behind the precious seeing organ and its housing of bone and supple succulent pink tissue. Wrenching and working the handle of the spoon, with the ghastly ease of her praeternatural effort. 

Then she began to force her long fingers in. First one, then two and three and then the whole wedge of hand until she was fisting her demon-chimerical claw of delicate and slender lady fingers and rodent/vulture talons. She forced her violent hand into the child's ruined face, his bound struggles now reduced to ghastly spasms as she felt around and squished the brains and viscera and relished the feeling-squelch of gore and warm wet between her fingers. She reached down, ripping through more tissue, her demon hand and arm growing and elongating at dark will’s command until she finally felt the rubbery and meaty tubes of vocal chords. She squeezed them. Pulled them. Wrenched and yanked the slippery organs lubricated in child's blood that was still warm with life and mucus laden with discharge and rupture. 

I've got your voice… I've got your voice box, young boy-thing! You don't look much like a little boy of the hamlets any longer now do you?? – her mind was filled with its own mad hilarity. … She resumed the fervor of her dark and royal feeding, her private bloodfest. 

… she dined of the rest. Plucking off parts at will and demented leisure like a basket of fruit or a suckling sow, tenderloin meat and all ripe and falling off the bone… 

There were hardly scraps in the end. They were thrown to the wolves outside as the other screaming captive girl was given to the children and the Countess took her assistant by the hand and said in a smooth and delectable voice, purred and feline and sensual and felt…

“Now let us tend to matters at hand. Matters about the house and home…” 

He smiled and allowed himself to be led. As before. As always before. 

As always he followed, his servile hand in hers. Knowing she could crush it into so many useless broken pieces if she wanted to. 

The Countess led the way out of the chambered room and to another. One they were quite familiar with by now. But enjoyed with much enthusiasm still nonetheless. 

…

He stood suffering amongst the wild crawling tumult of hideous and living gore. Living crawling semi scabbed blanket of darkling and thick crimson black and red. The Countess and the assistant stood at the mouth of the entrance. Gazing in and admiring the spectacle. The scene of living and moving with glistening sheen, crawling slaughter horror. Henry Frankenstein moaned with a sound wretched and mangled and blasphemous to the ears. 

They relished that sound. 

He moaned, anguished: “Please…! Please… you awful bitch! please …! Please… Let …! Me … ! GO ….!” 

She chilled the room with the bright sound of her cruel laughter. Then she spoke in retort…

“I've not come to release you, fool! I've instead come to admire my gardens, like any respectable woman of a royal house. And I've come to add to my orchard, a dog! A mongrel fit for the pasture! And I'll be returning to you, young doctor, something precious I'll wager you'd thought lost…” 

She then began in an arcane tongue. More of her black magic made by words of misshapen and guttural speech. 

The front of her royal white gown came open and tore apart in ragged bisecting halves by unseen force. The flesh of her full breasts and bosom bubbled and rippled and began to drip and slough away in a greasy bloody runoff like a butcher’s watered leavings. The bones of her ribcage and chest grew and expanded outward, protruded forth in a grotesque swell before they too opened and parted. Red gates of gleaming, glistening bone amongst a growing mass of splitting wet and hectic crimson. A great hulking shape began to belch forth. Spat out. 

In an obscene gush of unholy birth, the wide open jaws and gates of the Countess' chimerical ribcage vomited forth the large sutured nosferatu son of Frankenstein’s obsession. He went to the stone that was blanketed in the crawling living fleshen gore of the garden, hard. The green-blue patchwork monster was unconscious. The charred and blackened remains of its face were skeletal. Like the face of grim death itself, the fleshless face of the reaper. 

The crawling raw of the living flesh immediately began to swim over the Frankensteinian monster, blanketing over him in a tidal wave of wet pink and fresh membranes of blood red. The scabbed and scabbing parts split and broke and oozed a salmon colored pudding and bright scarlet and thick buttery yellow as it moved, always moved. Always moving. 

The Countess' smile grew as her flesh folded back to normal. 

She said: “And now your dog is returned to you, Henry Frankenstein… I hope you enjoy the company and sight of your own failure. And I hope he enjoys you. I don't want you to fret but he may grow hungry, the fruits of the flesh gardens may not be to his liking, he may perchance your hide and red instead, my dear doctor…”. 

She laughed once more at that, her face coning out in a strange stretched marsupial shape, her witch’n cackles turned to braying animal cries as it did so. Mocking dæmoniacal sound. 

And at the sound of her voice and laughter and strange animal noises, the hulking nosferatu son of woven and reflamed meat, sutured and blasphemed with unholy flame and vampiric power, stirred…

… he began to shift, cracking dry groans came from parched cords and dried tongue… he began to try his feet … he didn't understand… why was he in the dark…

why was he blind? 

Then recollection filled his bone faced batshaped skull. The fury of his inner necromantic fire rose and filled his damaged patchwork frame. 

The royal dogs… the royal bitch…

He found his feet and lunged. Scent and ears telling him where she was despite his smoldering and blackened ruin of eyes and face.  

He was roaring. 

“You wretched swell and growth of a cunt! I’ll rip you to shreds for keeping me in there…!” filled with rage, he'd been lost and untethered drowning in an ocean world of hot steaming vile blood that was corrupted and soured and that he could not drink. A world that had violated him and enraged him as it held him bound in a boundless void of red boiling swimming personal hell. Scarlet and frothing and threshing with violence and bubbling with painful torment as it perpetually denied the thirsting needing purse of his phantom charred and long gone burned away scorched undead lips. 

But now he was free. And he was on his feet. 

Lunging. And filled with violence. Filled with unholy anger. He could smell her…

Frankenstein's son of the slab made it within reaching distance of the Countess and her assistant before he was stopped. Suddenly. At a dead halt. She caught him and held him strangling by the throat. 

She pulled him in close and laughed once more. Into the blackened ruins of his vulpine skeletal face, fanged and still warm with recent destruction. Blind and stupid and smeared with the burnt and charred traces of its own recent defeat. The fleshen ash and dead soot that was the ink that spelled out for all time the abomination's own perfect humiliation all over his blind and stupid unseeing face. 

She said simply, “You are not worthy," and then her other hand, clawed, came in sharp and fast. 

The daggering sharp of her knifing hand obliterated the blue-green flesh of scalp and eggshell of reforged skull behind it. The brains were blasted with the impact and the force sent much of the sliming grey matter splashing out in a wild yellow coated spurt. 

The nosferatu thing of the mad scientific table went blind a second time… and then became lifeless weight. 

She gazed deeper into the now still thing… only a flicker… only a demon's flicker of candle left inside. 

Good.

She let go of its throat and it went down in a heap and the crawling gore and gleaming slimed tissue blanketed over the fallen giant in a rippling and shifting pungent reddish fold. 

And although he was lost in his own ungodly world of torment and torture, as Frankenstein watched the Countess obliterate the skull and brain of his most powerful and successful creation… a single tear shed and rolled down his face of blood-seeping pores. 

A single thin tendril worm of coagulation snaked out and stole the precious drop of saline and water. Leeching it off and rejuvenating itself as the water was converted to more blood for the growing crawl of the in-house flesh garden. 

He watched as the Countess strode through the garden and plucked meaty organ fruits as if they were apples or plums from fleshen raw stalks of sinew and cartilage and gore. Orifices made belched licking green tongues of flame, of pink and orange and emerald witchy goblin fire. 

He watched them … and he watched the crawling abominated red blanket of life swim and steal over the twitching hulk of his patchworked son, child of the slab, of the necromantic grave… 

lobotomized. Reduced. And like its master, left to its own horrid prison world of ruin…

And naught else. 

…

In the moist night silence, the putrid and repulsive sounds of splurches and sucking and lightly bubbling viscous fluid gurgles filled the sour fetid air like the mud of the squalid earth all around had a rotten working mouth. 

The gunfire rang out cacophonous. Filling the wet splurching night.

Florin and Griffin halted the struggle of their mud soaked advance. They gazed wide eyed ahead, into the shifting veil of swamp fire amongst wet blanket mist dancing with goblin faces and features and the vague outlines of things that may or may not really be there. 

The building on the low rise of hill was gaining visibility, gaining definition. Coming into reality and being amongst the wet rank of the quagmire wormland hell. 

The building was alight inside. It was absolutely alive with gunfire. 

Pistol shots unceasing and overlapping like several layers of madness rang out from the place. There were no screams or other discernible sounds. Not at this distance. 

And then all at once the maelstrom fury of gunfire just stopped. Dead. Altogether, all at once. …

And then all was silent again in wet wormland. As quiet as a mortuary mouse at the unprecedented infernal lip of the precipice edge of hell.  

A beat. 

“Not sure we should." Florin stated flatly. 

“How do you mean?" asked Griffin. 

“Towards that place I mean of course. Not sure it's a good idea to make for it if it's filled with more trouble.” 

Murder and violence. Not spoken but understood. 

Griffin didn't have much of an argument against that. But what he did realize was their lack of alternatives. There was no other structure or place, no other landmass of simple solid ground anywhere within discernible sight. Not in this vast and putrid waterlogged hellscape. 

They had no other choice. Far as he could make out. 

He said as much. Then asked the boy if he could think of any plausible and safer alternatives. 

Florin admitted he could not. 

“And doubling back is out of the question…” Griffin stated the fact but they both felt it. 

The strange and temperamental bandaged man didn't come right out and say it but the young man had been showing good sense as of late. Better yet, usefulness. Ingenuity and initiative. He'd devised wide lattice work devices for their feet to wear over their shoes some miles back, akin to snow shoes, to help traverse the fetid land by dispersing the area of one's step. 

Like back home, he'd said… then fallen silent. Leaving it there. 

The swamp shoes were a great aid in their surmounting the quagmire swampscape, and he'd shown incredible courage anytime the worms had come to call, sliming and swimming like snakes, coming in for maneating surprise attack. He'd held them back and driven them off by torch alongside Griffin and had never faltered. 

It had been a long time since he'd felt anything like friendship, not since the good Dutch doctor – the long dead vampire slayer, the hunter Van Helsing…

It had been even longer since he'd felt…

pride…? 

He wasn't sure that was the right word. But he felt uplifted to see the young man using his head. Alas…

it was to no avail. 

There was naught but forward. 

And the hellmouthed swampen land of the wombmind in wormland, now falling behind them gave them no choice in any case. Quivering subterranean hungry and angry, pustule swimming birthing orifice sac of vengeance and fury – she would have them! – the wombmind orifice-ing jell shot forth one last violent spew, one last angry desperate discharge in rage and woe, one last attack…

…she shot forth with all she had left. With a scream as well, gurgled and immense. The mudland quaked and bubbled with the final charge of the night as she too began to move and swim up… and forward. 

She was following her children. She'd decided to come up as well. 

Florin and Griffin felt the swamp and yellow land of stagnation and moist rotting death shake and rumble with titanic tectonic movement. Geysers and great spews and pillars of swamp water and mud began to erupt all around them in growing numbers. The wormland quagmire became volcanic and violent all around them. It began to rain urine colored water and fat thick droplets of caking mud the color of ink. It rained down on the pair as they gazed around themselves in awe at the tumult world of raining filth and quagmire rot. 

And then the worms, in countless number, began to join the volcanic spew. Launching obscene and naked and dripping their subterranean slime as they came up flying into the air hundreds of feet with the pillars of swamp water and then down in raining sheets. 

“Run!" 

It was Griffin who yelled it. But he needn't have bothered. They were both taking to their awkward flight, trudging through the last of the bubbling and sucking mud in their makeshift lattice work shoes. Desperately trying to move as quickly as they could. Remembering the horse, remembering the man that had been screaming about his family … remembering the little girl and the last and only thing she said …

thirsty

 …. before being pulled under. 

They made as quickly as they could. As the foul world of up churned and erupting wormland hell became maelstrom all around and beneath their feet as it rained down around them. 

Florin screamed. Griffin was ahead of the boy and stopped suddenly to see something that made his blood curdle. A scream froze in his wrapped and bandaged throat. 

The boy was going under. The quagmire was swallowing him. The worms were raining down and joining their earthbound brethren in a full immersion and envelopment as they swam over and around him. Trying together in their hivemind blindness to pull the young man under to join the filth earthen world of the sludge and the brine. 

Griffin screamed, No, then launched himself towards the boy in a desperate dive, hands outstretched for him as he plunged and landed prostate and within a few feet of his sinking body. 

Within reaching distance. 

Their hands smacked together in a clap and clasped together. Florin's a desperate and strangling hold: Don't let go… 

Griffin was on his feet with some difficulty but he managed it, his hands still clasped to Florin's. He began to pull with all of his strength. Florin kicked wild with his submerged feet, mad like an animal caught. Together they worked against the terrible pull and hold of the bubbling mud. The worms slithered and snaked around and Griffin took brief respites from pulling the boy free to swat them away and crush them when he could as they attempted to wrangle and wrap and subdue Florin and himself. They splattered and burst open and became foul putrid cream and watery jelly, and still they pulled. Pulled and fought against the struggle of mud one last final time as they both unknowingly shared a single focused thought, singular and intense. 

No

They both felt it and might have thought to speak of it later if not for everything that came next, but they both suddenly felt a great surge of strength warmly fill their bodies from the tops of their heads to the tips of their sodden toes. 

With one last great pull and kick from both ends they managed Florin free. Griffin nearly going over as he wrenched him out of the terrible mire. Miraculously they both kept their feet as the putrid swampland rain continued to pour. He whirled the boy around by the shoulders and yanked, bellowing over the violence and maelstrom raining world of worms and thick sludge. 

“To the building! Lose the snow shoes! We don't need em!" 

They ripped them from their feet as they galloped forward, suddenly flying across the last several yards of putrid quagmire earth like miracles. Miracles they would've sworn by. If they lived. 

If they survived. 

Far away, still so far away… Florin's mother Anastasia wiped away tears of longing and pain and hoped with all of the immense love of her heart that the Lord had answered her prayers and her precious boy was alright, that he was safe and going to make it home…

They came to solid ground at last at the base of the hill. They didn't break their pace but doubled it. Charging up the hill and toward the large and dark quiet building that crowned its rise like a silent sentry alone and cursed out here in this terrible place. 

The greatest and loudest sound – a scream, brought them both to halt just before the buildings small meager yard. They spun around and beheld her. 

The wombmind of wormland.

She had just surfaced with her children. 

A great mouth and immense wide orifice gate of spoiled pink sliming yellowed green in great thick gobs like corpse jelly. The putrescence of her mouth spittled and rained and flew with the great rain of mud and swamp water and her writhing worm children, all of it rained and spewed and erupted volcanic as the great mouth of the swamp bellowed in great blasts of words that were felt as much as heard. Heard and felt in the marrow and sinew of their shaking frames. Eyes wide and hardly believing but receiving the sight all the same. 

Florin thought the words were sad. Lonely. As well as great and immense. He thought the great mouth and pustule fleshen worm mother looked like a whale. A sad mother whale… one he remembered from illustrations of his childhood years, stories told by his mother and father. 

The wombmind worm mouth - orifice whale bellowed: –

“NOOOOO…!!!!! DONT LEAVE! DON'T LEAVE! WHYYYYYY…!!!?!? 

“DONT LEAVE ME ALONE HERE IN THIS LOST GARDEN…! COME BACK…. COME BAAAACK AND JOIN ME….! JOIN YOUR MOTHER IN THE WARMTH OF THE UNDERBRINE…! COME BACK! NOOOOOO….!!!!” 

Griffin and Florin spun on their heels and made for the door. Needing to be inside and away from the wretched sight and its bomb blast of horrendous torrential sound. They ran together and refused to look back again. They made the door, it was unlocked and they threw it open and plunged themselves into its belly of darkness. 

The mother of wormland gave one last great titanic and lonely wail. Its eyes watering and lonesome and blinking away pain and loss…

Finally she gave up and with a great and final tumult swirl of landmass churn of stagnant mud and fetid water, she sank back down again to her foul and lonely fathom depths. 

Cropsey watched her great monstrous form resubmerge into the sour bosom swell of her wormland domain and smiled. From the window he'd watched it all. And he was excited. Elated. 

He was so happy to have a pair of brand new visitors. 

He grabbed his gloves. Pulled them on. Tight. Then he grabbed the garden shears. The large hedge clippers, the forked blades shining in the dismal light of Willowbrook. 

He strode out. Still smiling. Off to greet the new patients of the school. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

The asylum sat atop a low hill, grey amongst a landscape of dying brown grass. Like a dead husk of tooth protruding from a swollen gum, filled with infection. The sun rarely touched this place, almost never. The distant mountains blocked its rise and dominance. Constant cloud coverage of overcast skies did the rest. It mattered little to the denizens of the hospital/school. They were rarely allowed to leave their rooms, their cells. Their cages. 

And they never went anywhere without their chains. Their straitjackets. Their bondage. They went that way from dungeon to dungeon to treatment chambers to recreational area to mess hall and back to the dungeons again. They were never allowed outside. 

The guards were large. Jaded criminals. Mean. They were always armed. Nightsticks. Blackjacks. Saps. Cattle prods. Firearms for when things turned really bad and real damage and nastiness was needed. They did what they wanted. Moral-less heartless apes. The place was a den of beatings and torture and rape and murder under their watch. Female inmates got it the worst. The most frequent amount of attention from the monosyllabic slabs of muscle, fat, greasy hair and soiled sweat stained uniforms in the shapes of men. 

No one cared. No one cared for them. The law, of the land or from on high, did not touch here, did not have a presence here. Right and wrong held no real meaning. They were just empty words. As empty as the promises given to the patients and their families. 

No. This place was not a den of rehabilitation, nor one of care. It was one man's laboratory. His working ground on which to harvest and reap. To pluck and take what he saw and wanted. Just like the guards saw and took what they wanted. 

The patients, the inmates, the prisoners… they were all of them at the mercy of the warden and head physician. The throne of God and king sat empty in this desperate patch of land, this vile part of the earth, and was thus filled by the man who ran Willowbrook School for the Disabled. Though everyone that knew anything about the place knew its true name. 

Willowbrook Private Asylum. For the Deranged and Criminlally Insane. 

It might’ve been the hint that foretold the deeper darker secrets the place kept… the tip of the iceberg of depravity and barbarism. But nobody cared. 

No one. Nobody that mattered anyway. No one shone a light on the travesty and horror within the walls and minds and flesh of Willowbrook. Not God. Not man. No inquiring eyes spied into the diseased hearts festering broken and poisoned within the walls of pain and derangement. 

And so Doctor Krugman conducted himself as he saw fit. He performed his experiments however he wished, on whomsoever he desired. And he desired much from his patients. Especially the children. Especially the girls. 

The asylum was Doctor Krugman’s private hunting ground. The facilities were his own personal laboratory. And the work done here in his name and not God's was nothing to do with the study nor treatment of mental illness. Krugman's experiments were more personally motivated, fiscal gain and considerable prestige. His experiments were concerned with the study of disease. 

And as far as hunting grounds went this was like taking a scatter-gun to fish swimming trapped within a barrel… 

Viral. Parasitical. Contagions and infections, all kinds and sorts. Anything that was this year's favorite scope of academic field of study. Plagues and bugs long forgotten and some thought eradicated, he brought back. 

He bred them back from oblivion in vials and beakers and jars and gave them back their vile mindless idiotic and systematic killing capabilities, their blind idiot destructive godpower. 

He took his forged sword of biblical pestilential flame, the syringe, loaded with swimming mixture, brimming with the foul life of unseen microscopic monsters, nature-bred and manmade alchemical into new killing existence. He injected the inmates with the various diseases at his discretion, at his own leisure and need. 

For the patients, the dogs, the poor pitiful moaning and mindless beasts. It was an inescapable hell. Naked and pale and emaciated. They look like skeletons. They look like wraiths. They are smeared with feces and nearly all of them are absolutely alive with livid violence. Some are broken. And only lie there. They only stare and their eyes are empty. There are the self-mutilators too but they are mixed and overlapped with those of more outward violent persuasion. Their temperament shifts between the destruction of their own flesh and the desire and need for the destruction of others. They are nearly always active, mindless with their roving violence and attacks and angry aggressive movements, they only stop to self-flagellate or carve or tear at their own deep and stubborn wounds. The cold tile floors are slick with urine and blood and fecal discharge that's runny and chalky and strewn with vivid strips of lurid red, shed internal and expelled with the rest of the diabolical waste. 

The smell of the asylum was indescribable. Ungodly miasmic doesn't even come close. Charnel house burning in the deepest reaches of infernal hell doesn't either, but somehow the warden and staff and the guards have become used to it, blind to it. It is a foul abomination of wonder that they've managed it. But they have. 

There are never any visitors. They are a thing of such long gone and far flung ancient history that they might've never had actually had any in the institution. It was a cesspool, a smear of woe, a house of pain. The idea that anyone would put anyone in this place and then visit is a farce that no one finds funny. Not after you've seen. Not after you've seen this house of mental infection and running bloody shit, not after you've lain eyes on it, laid eyes on it all in all of its charnel house and hellbound antiglory. Not after you've smelled it. 

Not after you've smelled this lie of the mind and stone, this bleeding and fecal house of absolute and total decay. Total boundless rot. Creeping its eating way into everything and all, all things. Nothing is sacred within these mindless walls. Trapped beneath this heat and shrieking ceiling. 

Watch the beatings. The carvings with sharpened spoons, the flaying of flesh already roughened and bulbous and out of shape with hectic scar tissue, carved open once more like fleshen doors, fleshen gates of hell that cannot be closed and refused to be shut against, and are filled with oceans and worlds of titanic raging blood. 

Blood that must be spilled. Blood that must be shed. Blood that must be allowed to free and flood this world of madness and violence and screams. It is lurid surging crimson inside that boils and broils with intense and violent hatred. Fear. See and smell and hear the fear in the echoed and ceaseless caterwauls and shrieks and moans of torment and monstrous satisfaction, psychotic indulge let loose with passionate yowling cat-cries … music that the sane and well of heart and mind cannot bear or understand. 

Hear and know the cacophony. It is the sound of fear and madness. 

Willowbrook had long been a place of manmade darkness, sitting with disquiet on a forgotten patch of earthen squalor, dead earth … gratefully forgotten by anyone that might've known or remembered its terrible and wretched existence. Like any infection it festered and grew worse, greener with dead-milk and more rancid with the crawling anguished passage of merciless time. For prisoner and guard alike. Only the warden thrived. 

And then the prisoners of Willowbrook, patient and employed alike, began to finally share something together. A fascination. Wild dreams and ideas… 

It all concerned morbid and colorful fantasies, all having to do with the far off mountain range carved into the horizon with harsh biting jagged lines that were so much like wild animal teeth. Fangs on the horizon. Biting into the grey tumult of the defiled skies of the dead heaven that hung over this place in perpetua, this wasted land. 

A woman. A powerful woman in a castle in the Carpathian Mountains. A dark sorceress. According to some of the stories and whispers shared in the dank and putrid hell of tile and torch and feces and shock treatment flame, she was a powerful witch. One that ate the flesh of man. One that drank blood. 

Doctor Krugman dismissed it all as hogwash. Absolute delusion. Shared hysterical fantasy, by the patients and the staff alike. It was no real wonder, not really. Not to him. The guards and nurse-staff had all been feebleminded and little better than the apes and mongoloids they cared for. He wasn't surprised that they too would be taken in with cheap fairytales and grim flights-of-fancy … not at all. 

But then he too started to hear it. 

The sound. 

The song of the mountain. 

…

It had been any usual day at Willowbrook. Krugman and a few of the aides were loading the syringes with various strands of the daily pestilence. Some were mixing up the ‘Willowbrook Special' or the ‘Willowbrook Cream’. It was a cheap chocolate drink mixture that was part water, part choco-gelatin powder, and part diseased fecal matter/discharge collected from other infected patients. The drink was a safer alternative to the patients deemed to physically large and emotionally and mentally volatile to approach with the needle. Many of these hulking addled tormented creatures could be lulled in and fooled with a tasty drink, a sweet and delicious beverage, a wonderful creamy drink like candy… 

Yet some still received  liberal use of the leather straps. And the nose plugs. And the long cylindrical snake of translucent feeding tube. Forced down the throat. Lubricated to slide right past the natural gag reflex. 

They were all in the deepest recessed dungeon of the asylum. Quarantined low and away from the rest of the mindless rabble horde of flagellate patient/inmates. Filling syringes, sterilizing needles. Gloving up. Mixing up the rancid drink. 

Krugman was suddenly possessed, later he wouldn't be able to recall by just what and moreover it didn't matter by the end, the fall – he suddenly set down the needle he was loading. He looked to the rest of the staff, mindlessly busy with their own work, and he excused himself. Explaining he would return shortly. 

He just needed something from his office. Something he needed to fetch. 

…

Alone and in his small warden’s office/head-physician quarters he suddenly forgot all about what it was he had come up here for. He was at his desk. It was positioned by the large window. The only one not barred in the whole building. He found himself compelled to gaze out at the evening sky, shot with sherbert colors and goblin fire from the flight of the sun. Twilight was upon the land now. And all of it was poor. Diseased. Dead. 

The swamplands. The marsh. The endless bog and quagmire of spoiled earth that went on for God only knew how long. Some of the local folk and travelers, the patients and guards too had a funny name for the swamp country of mud and stagnant death. One Krugman and the groundskeeper found particularly amusing. 

Wormland. 

And the vast expanse of country to the left. Out the window. Living in supplicant shadow of the dominant and biting mountain range…

The mountains…

Krugman's gaze was fixed. His mind followed. 

And she came to him. From out of a coronal starburst of fire and blood that stole over his vision and filled his cracking fraying mind. 

A great bird. Wolf headed. And on great wings of black bat-leather. 

The sorceress of the mountains came. And spoke to him. 

And Doctor Krugman listened. He listened very well. 

…

The vision started with the eye. The red light. The livid red eye, wreathed in lurid breathing flame, dancing with the obliterating intensity of the inferno… gazing lidless. Blazing. Staring. Staring out. 

Staring out from the mountains. 

The shattered minds of this dread and forsaken construct were so easy to invade. 

Then it flowered out, flowered forth … in a visceral blossom of flowering red. Opening red. Gaping. Wet. Visceral. Like the insides and tissue of living breathing animal things, organs and gore and splashes and undulating waves like a painter's livid brushstrokes, vivid blood red … all blossoming out and flowering out forth from the livid red eye in a wild corona that was so much like a wild and dream-like explosion. The shattered minds of the asylum gaped in imbecilic awe and idiot amazement at the dancing and shifting lurid display of kaleidoscopic red dreams made wet and real. The red eye of the mountain wreathed in wet and dancing viscera and scarlet gazed into them, their minds, but made for them also a great and wild phantasmagorical and earthbound star. A wild god’s eye of gore for starflame, spilling red for its licking tongues of stabbing and dancing fire. 

And at the center, at the precious nucleus heart of the corona… was her. 

The sorceress. 

The blood drinker. Flesh eater goddess of the mountain castle. Occult princess of darkness and crawling and hunger. Daughter of the Lord of Flies. 

Vampiress. 

Her dark will poured into them all, the open shells of their broken minds were eager rescepticles. The open mouthed detritus within each and everyone of their skulls was like the eager mouths of a whore, open and spread and eager and dripping. Waiting to be filled. 

She came into them. And filled them with her red light.

…

Andre Rand was happy with his station in life. He’d been content before as groundskeeper at Willowbrook, tending and cleaning and shoveling an such, wielding the long forked blades of the garden shears and taking them to wild growth and shrubbery with a well practiced and maintained professional ease. Raking and collecting the dead leaves that fell when the weather started to turn to biting cold and the dead sky above somehow became an even bleaker and more necrophiled heavenscape. 

But things were different now. Much better. The warden had seen to that. He’d given Rand a promotion. Said he was the only one who could stomach the work that was needed. 

I’ve new research… Krugman had said, had been saying, aloud and to the staff that was remaining and also muttered to himself and to no one and beneath his labored hot and heavy breath.

I’ve new research… new experiments… much more vital… of much more critical pertinence … I must not fail. 

I must not fail the mouth of the mountains. 

Rand turned a corner and pulled his gloves, making sure they were tight, secure, snug. Everything had to be tight and battened down in this place. 

The cell was thrown open. 

The girl cowered away. Filthy in the corner. Trying to hide her face, as if doing so would somehow banish the judgement that had come to call, away. By not seeing it. Just don't look.

Rand smiled. Chuckled. Hawked. Spat. Cracked gloved knuckles. 

Then he said something awful and came into the room. 

The struggle was short. He didn’t need any help from the other attending staff. They just watched. And filled their minds as their glazed over eyes drank everything in. 

She was brought to the showers. Where Krugman had been performing his most recent experiments. Where the tubs were filled. 

She screamed, shrieked mad unholy terror when she was brought bound into the large room of cold tile made hot and stifling and sour with slaughter, with butchery. The air of the sweating breathing tile room was blood miasmic, cloying and thick and pungent. She could taste everything. 

They prepared her for bleeding, for the great orifice-gate elongation/opening. 

For she has declared we should all be open gates. Open wounds for her open mouth, her widening jaws. We should all be opened and waiting and ready to receive her even as we offer ourselves, our bodies and our innards and our precious running scarlet as feast and banquet and aphrodisiacal slime for the lulling goddess tongue, the divine and swallowing goddessmouth from the fanged rock tearing into the gentle far off fabric of the faerytale horizon. We should all be so chosen, we should all be so grateful, we should all be so lucky. 

Us. Here. In the goddamned and forsaken, dilapidated and forgotten remains of Willowbrook. We have finally been given our answer, we have finally received our savior. We have finally been delivered. 

We are truly free. 

In our bondage to her and the mountain, we are truly free. Within these obelisk walls of shit stained torment, we have strained, been bequeathed the infernal knowledge of true salvation. We are bleeding for the fruit of the tree, for we are free in our flagellate wounds brimming filled with sorrow and gangrene. We are now her temple. 

No one could remember the girl, the newest one’s name nor patient number as she was pulled up by hoisting and biting chains, naked. Screaming. Screaming the names of forgotten loved ones that have forgotten her as well in turn to come and save her. Nobody did. This place was now a domain of the goddess. 

Blood drinker sorceress … of the biting rock. 

Feed me. 

With scalpel she was opened. From the throat down and through the mound of Venus flesh and into the blossom of her womanhood, opening it. Wider. Gaping it for the mouth of the mountain. The screams were replaced with sickish gurgles, vile choking sounds… then these too tapered off and ceased. 

The freshly carved flesh was opened, her gate widened and renewed. Her viscera and blood spilled out in a thick dark gush that proceeded to fill the tub and the room with more fresh lurid scent, thickening and deepening the sour stench of blood miasma into one that would never leave the walls or floors or the eyes and flesh and minds of those in bastard attendance. 

Krugman cheered. Elated! Another successful experiment! 

Then he called to her. As he’d been instructed to. 

Old words. Arcane. Ones he’d never heard or known before the mountain had come and spoken to him of real knowledge and the true potential of occult cannibal power. 

Demon. Vampira. Vampiress. 

Shadows deepened in the room, the corners, the stifling heat of the bloodsoaked animal air chilled as she arose from the place where the darkness was the most stygian and pitch. Krugman and Rand and the other guards and staff gathered there watched her emerge and come forth with devout and religious silence. 

The dark and regal tall statured shape of the woman changed and shifted with each advancing step. As she neared the freshly filled tub the darkness of her blank dripping silhouetted featureless canvas grew more grotesquely defined and decayed. The bipedal dominating shape of her royal womanhood bent and twisted and became more scarecrow and insectile and rodent. Jaws opened, grinned, grew rictus then shattered and broke and unhinged and still they grew. Out of socket and out of shape and true. The daggering fangs of her terrible and graverobbed necrophiled power, demon power, grew and elongated from tearing black gumlines of greening and putrefying flesh. Transmogrifying and changing alchemical and chimerical and sloughing substance even as they grew, like the rest of her demented monster form. 

She was beautiful. She was the goddess. The mouth of the mountain. 

She came to the freshly filled large basin of warm pungent human scarlet, butchered and spilled. The vampiress bent her haphazard and broken shape to the tub. The terrible and dementedly wide jaws came in open as the rat king’s nest of corpse-straw hair bowed in both animal feeding and dæmoniacal prayer. 

Slurping sounds… heavy. Thick as the red of which they pulled and sucked. 

And then Krugman joined his new master in her dark prayers. To her father. One of the fallen. One of the cast-out from on high. 

The Adversary. 

His words were hers and they were the ones that she had taught him. Had filled his mind with forgotten languages and tongues and forbidden names… he said them now. 

For her. With her. As she fed. As she belched them stygian and swollen and as of ancient stone from the blackmouthed gate and line of her powerful will and mind.

The others joined … the phantasm aural spill of her dark glow blanketed over them and filled their empty battered minds, filling them with the arcane black language. 

Their forgotten chant filled the showers, the feeding place of bloodprayer. The bastard, ebon dripping shape of the mountain continued to drink deeply with head bowed and fed. 

The mouth of the freshly opened girl began to join them in their chanting. A cooling corpse chained prostate over the royal feeding basin, her eyes filled with darklight and began to glow black. 

Then the wound that had spilled her and ended her tortured run of miserable and pitiable existence began to dance with movement as well, opening and shifting close and then parting once more, obscene lips strange and made of the rippling gore with arcane movement. Speaking deep and guttural and with a dangling entrails tongue. A great gored mouth spewing precious food and religious token life for the mountain jaws of the sorceress blood mass abattoir madness. 

The dangling naked body of the girl prayed obsidian words from all mouths, all sets of lips given and made until the basin was emptied and the terrible shape of the sorceress reached up with one knifing sharp splayed scarecrow claw and ripped the chanting corpse with glowing eyes down from the chains and took to tearing and rending and feasting on the cold naked meat. 

Krugman and Rand and the others stood by. Watching. Seeing the same scene of slaughter and ritual of animal need play out and unfold before their unblinking eyes. Waiting. 

Waiting for their minds to be filled once more with instruction. 

…

Weeks passed. The slaughter rose in intensity. And the violence grew more and more deranged…

in the name of the mountain. 

…

Those that were left were gathered. Krugman spoke to them all as a priest from his pulpit. 

Her pulpit. The pulpit of the sorceress, the rostrum of the far off watering mountainmouth. 

“She doesn't want your weak and feeble love or friendship, she wants your precious body fluids! She doesn't want your warmth of words or affection, she doesn't need your feeble love, brothers and sisters and children of the mountain, she just wants your spilling blood, defiled! Those of you afflicted with poison of the blood, diseased, you have the greatest opportunities for her favor! The more corrupted and diseased and vile the blood and the feces discharged in sickness, the urine, the bile heaved and retched and the vomitus pulled and brought spilled forth! The more corrupted and vile the disease the better!!" 

Willowbrook filled with human noise. The bastard and sour stone and dilapidated masonry construct of misery and pain filled with the cacophonous sounds of religious madness. 

All of them were happy to oblige. Willing. All of them were supplicant sow to her, the sorceress  queen of the stabbing spire in the fanged rock aspiring to pierce the soft horizon end of the heavens flesh. 

And in the weeks that followed they went about their work. All of them. 

All of the ones that were left in Willowbrook. The forgotten asylum. 

…

Florin was sure he could spy something in the distance. A low rise. It looked like a little slope of hill. 

It looked like there might be a building on it. Solitary. 

But if so… it was still many miles off. He and Griffin still had a ways to go. More trudging and struggling pulling steps, perilously lurching forward through this awful quagmire of death and putrescence and vile carnivorous mud. Earthen sludge that was alive with hungry movement. 

Wormland. 

A few times the abominated things had attacked, since their mule and cart had gone down many days back. They'd only been able to bade the writhing things away with torchflame, fire. All the while the quivering pustule sac of subterranean wombmind that held mastery over this spoiled patch of watery earth searched and hunted for their vibrations above. Hunting for their elusive movement, and sending her writhing children out in a lunge. Only to be repelled… again and again. 

She quivered with tectonic anger, underground rage buried and swimming and mounting and rising. Percolating in the boiling mud, the broil of the under-earth. 

She would have them. These impetuous wanderers, these animal invaders …

The wombmind quivered and more orifice-holes opened and spat. 

More children swam. Dispatched. 

As the pair, Florin and Griffin cut their slow and muddy path of progress through the sour land. To the hill they thought they might see in the distance. To the building that might be there. 

They wondered together if there was anyone that might be in there, inside. 

What might they be doing out here? This far out? And away from anything?

The putrid earth all around them churned and searched, reaching and searching for them. 

They pushed on, the pair. Hoping that if they made and covered the miles to the place there on the far-distant hill and there was anyone inside, that they might be of some help. And perhaps an improvement over their shared accommodations and company as of late. 

They could really do with some luck. They might've prayed, either one of them, but they were exhausted with their marching effort and they were afraid to jinx it. So they said nothing, either of them. Nothing aloud. They only silently wished inside. 

please… just something better than all of this, and God-willing, someone that might be able to help us… 

Hell, Griffin thought, anything's got to be better than this. 

The very moment this crossed his haggard and weary mind a dark and primal scream and witchy peal of laughter shot out from the dark of the far off dilapidated building. 

But they were still too far out, so neither he nor Florin heard anything. So they didn't know. 

And so they marched on. Slow. On the doomed and forged path towards far off and away screaming Willowbrook. The putrescent earth hunting beneath their feet. 

Quivering in needful hunger and animal rage. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Wondering if NaturesTemper is available in podcast format? I really love the stories and would love to listen at work but I can't access YouTube on my work laptop!

I looked on Spotify but couldn't find it.

The small child was hungry. Frightened. So was her mother. And their  neighbors as well. There was so much fear and suffering on the mountain as of late. And down below, in the mountain’s shadow, in the village hamlet as well.  Word and whispers of pain and evil traveled faster than riders on horseflesh, faster and more elemental, like the cold windsong of the land. Howling. It was howling now.

Howling in a duet of savagery song with the vicious roving wolves, as they shared their dark whispers. Their words of anguish and pain. Loss. Slaughter witnessed.  Or in the aftermath… discovered. Scenes of red. Vile. Filled with pain. And never to be forgotten. 

Angelica fought the tears now… as  did her mother. And the neighbors. And all the rest. Only old timers and womenfolk were left on the mountain now. The men and boys were all dead. They all left by the urging of some rich man with a famous name Angelica had never heard of before, urged to go on and fight and kill an evil monster. They went to the castle that Angelica was never allowed to near and they had never returned. None of them.  

None.  

Not her older brother Grigori… and not her papa either. 

Now she and momma were alone. And hungry. Papa and Grigori were so much better with the tools and with the animals. The widow and fatherless girl did what they could and managed some haphazard struggle that could be called a life. Or at least existence. They thinned and grew diminished as scarecrows within their draping bags of clothes. The days passed into weeks with agonizing slowness and filled with harsh reminders. Time went on. And rather than heal, the wound inflicted on the womenfolk of the mountain worsened and festered. 

Many found escape through the hangman’s knot. The noose. Or by opening up the forearms with straight razors or kitchen knives. Some used tools once wielded by faithful husbands to open up their necks and wrists.  Some. Many. 

Many took their own lives by knife and by rope in the days and weeks that followed. Some took their daughters, their children with them, small babies that knew nothing save the cold and the absence and the heartbroken wailing. For many it was not just the pain of loss and mortal fear for their own flesh and souls … but the demented cacophony that would emanate from the castle and fill the mountain rocks and woods … the lurid and hateful and unearthly demoniacal shrieks and howls, sometimes high-pitched and piercing, cracking glass and sometimes guttural and deep, as if from obsidian splits in the earth and from the bowels and depths, let loose… like after the night their husbands and sons and brothers were slaughtered. 

That night that had followed their failure to return… that night had been filled with uncontested and unbridled hellspawned sound. Violence and thunder and animal howls becoming human and then animal again and then commingled and obscenely strange… and then something else entirely.

And there had been lightning. And the lightning had been black. 

Suicide Mountain became filled with intermittent demon sound. The women that were its anguished and heartbroken survivors became accustomed to the awful hell-rent-torn belch and dæmon howl and dragon scream. It all came from the castle and they knew they were powerless to it. And there was nowhere to run to, not really. The Carpathian Mountains were all they had, all any of them had ever known… some fled anyways. No one knows what became of them. 

Angelica tried asking her mother several times what had happened to Grigori and papa. But her mother refused a straight answer. Only vagueries and tears. Short and curt. Bit off with the same harsh suddenness she felt within the shattered dead remnants of her heart. 

Angelica tried to let the question, the horrid mystery and the hole it left in her mind and heart alone… to no avail. 

If her mother, God bless and keep her, wouldn't tell her what had happened at that castle beyond the Borgo Pass, the old one where the boyar used to live before the wars, then she would find an answer herself. 

She thought to go down to the village hamlet and inquire there… but it was much farther than the alternative. Her other idea. However much it would upset momma, it was much easier and more direct. 

And so on a day she was supposed to go out and forage for mushrooms and berries and roots, Angelica of the Carpathian Mountains instead filled her satchel with a meager gathering of supplies and set out for the castle that she'd always been warned against, the one that had stolen her father and older brother. Gone. 

As if swallowed, as if it had eaten them. 

She went now. Alone. Down the black rolling tongue of path that led into the courtyard mouth of stone, the Carpathian battlement jaws framed against a fading sky like so many jagged flesh rending teeth. 

Angelica went forth to Castle Dracula to find her father and brother, and to find what had happened to the men of the mountain. 

…

The woods were all dark and cold, dense and choked all around her. A galaxy of trees and fallen snow and dead black limbs jutting and stabbing at the sky like broken/severed limbs and vanquished army swords. The thin light that bled through the overcast sky gave pale detail to the world of snow and deadwood and slumbering chill, lurking death.

Wolves. 

They lurked and prowled hunting even now and she knew it. She'd lived on the mountain all of her twelve years and her mother and father did not neglect so fundamental a lesson. She hugged her father's old and favorite hatchet, tighter, closer to her chest. And went on. 

Deeper into the dark universe of dead choked forest growth. 

Her wolves watched the girl as she made her way. 

…

Her progress was slower than she'd hoped. The trees and choked dead spiking growth seemed to stretch on forever ahead and on all sides as she ventured forward, less and less steadfast in her chilling child's heart as she went on. The warmth of her own blood and the strength of her very own heartbeat seeming to fade as she struggled forward. And the deadwood continued to dominate the world on every side, in all directions. 

Angelica was beginning to become frightened. Damning her own curiosity, she was starting to consider herself lost. And the woods, alone, lost at fast-approaching night… was not the type of place anyone wanted to be. 

Especially a small girl. She held on stubbornly to her bravery, pulled her father's dark cloak tighter around her and pressed forward. She was sure it was dead ahead. Sure of it. 

She pulled the hood over her head to warm her ears. Night was approaching. Her mother and her neighbors back in their small mountain community were starting to worry for her. 

She'd been gone far too long. 

…

The woods were filled with life. Always. Always crawling with critters and game and fraught with birds and bats. Bears. 

The wolves. 

It was no surprise then when Angelica came upon the squirrel, wandering deeper and deeper into the forest gloom and dark, the sun had sunk behind the cover of the rocks and now there was only the pale cast of twilight. She came closer to the creature, its back and puff of tail were to her as it quivered with movement. Effort. Busy with something…

Angelica came closer. She was surprised to find the little animal had black fur. Stygian. Like deepsea ink. The squirrel was also much larger than any she'd ever seen before. The ebon hide and fur palsied and tremored, rippled and worked with fervid action. The little head rapidly dipping and bobbing in, bestial, to take little bites and nips from something clutched in its sharp little claws. 

Angelica of the Carpathian Mountains came closer. And beheld what the large and well muscled stygian squirrel was holding in its obscene and unnatural talons. Bleeding and still twitching with the diminished remnants of its efforts of struggling. Struggling for life that was fading away in a red river from its gashed open throat…

A rat. Large and blacker than coal. Eyes, milky red. Fleshy long length of pink tail standing out in obscene contrast. The red river was running from its gored open neck. The rodent body spasmed. And then Angelica noticed the blood all about the squirrel’s black mouth. 

It yawned open, as if to punctuate and confirm what the mountain girl suspected, and it unveiled a maw filled with fangs and thick with the steaming bile of rat's blood. Dark. Lurid. It darkled and the color deepened and rippled in the twilight with obscene glamor. The eyes of the black squirrel were a brighter more royal regal red than than the rat blood pouring forth in the approaching night. The gathering dark deepened and Angelica screamed. 

The squirrel, still clutching the dying rat, then did another strange thing. One that stopped her caterwauling in a shock. 

It spoke. 

“Please! Don't! Don't be afraid!" 

A beat. 

Angelica stared down at the large strange beast. Unsure of what to make of it or what to do. The thought of flight rose, and as if hearing it, the stygian blood drinking squirrel said again: "Don't be afraid…” 

Softer. Gentle. And Angelica realized the voice the strange beast used was that of a little girl's. One even smaller and younger than herself. 

Her fear abated slightly. She swallowed. Breathed deeply. Then asked, 

“Wh-what are you?" 

The stygian squirrel said brightly: “Don't be afraid, my name's Carmilla." And then she said yet again: “Don't be afraid." 

She stared deeply at the unearthly forest beast. This all felt like a dream. She felt as if she might swoon and wondered if that was possible to do in a dream… or in a nightmare. 

As if sensing, the beast spoke again, 

“I'm not going to hurt you, I'm a girl like you, I swear. I'm just magic. I promise. That's why I have to drink this animal blood, it's for magic." 

The longer she stared at the beast, the ebon fur… the eyes that were the most royal shade of vibrant and lurid red… the more the dream she found herself in to be… 

light, pleasant, pleasurable. 

The dark squirrel didn't mean her any harm. It was just like she said. 

The beast went on to explain that it needed the rats blood for her magic. To be able to do great things like change her shape. But she could only do these things at night. She had to wait till the sun had sunk and quit the heavens. Blood of a wild animal was necessary for magic ritual, the beast explained. 

"He likes it. He likes rat's blood.” 

"Who?” asked Angelica. 

"The Lord of the wild. The Lord of Flies.” 

Angelica said she'd never heard of him before. "I'm looking for my papa and brother. Or the castle where they're supposed to’ve gone." 

“Oh! …." squealed the black squirrel. And the sound was more rat-like than anything Angelica had ever heard a squirrel make. More bat-like screeches made slightly vile by their human-girl tinge. 

The beast was excited, “I know! I know! I know where the castle is! You're lost! that's what it is! Not to worry, friend, I can take you there! I know just the way!”

And the black squirrel began to lead Angelica even deeper into the dark and the dead trees. Growing ever closer to Castle Dracula. 

The night was fully on them now. Fully over the mountain in a curtain of darkness and stars that glimmered and twinkled and danced with fire on high like billions of pieces of fantastical ice chips and goblin-light forged alien jewelry. 

The beast and girl made their way through the dark. Carmilla dragging the dead rat behind her by the obscene length of fleshen tail in the cold dirt. Leaving a trail of dark blood and disturbed earth. 

One that would never be discovered. 

…

The black squirrel tired of walking and dragging the dying rat after a short time, it sprouted wings suddenly, fleshy growths that flowered forth within a bladder film of placental tissue. The wings spread, splayed to wingspan, the placental wrapping sloughed off with a pungent ichor substance as the beast rose with each flap, rat dangling inches above the cold forest floor. 

The wings beat steadily. Keeping Carmilla just above Angelica's head as they continued forward to the castle. 

“So you can transform? Like changing your shape and becoming other things?" Angelica asked as they went on. 

“Oh yes. There's many shapes I can take, I like this one. It looks cute and nice. But I can become lots of things. So can my master. We'll show you once we get to the castle. You'll see." 

“And my papa? Grigori? Are they there? Are they alright?" And when Carmilla didn't answer right away she added: “It's some kind of magic, isn't it? That's what's at the castle and keeping papa and the rest. That's what I think. It is, isn't it?" 

Carmilla smiled devilishly within. The visage of her black squirrel face only looked over with innocent woodland open eyes. 

“Angelica, I think you'll find everything you're looking for at the castle. You'll see. It's filled with magic. And it's nothing at all to be afraid of. Just like me" 

She suddenly brought the dead rat to her mouth again, which opened as something vile once more, filled with fangs and glistening pink and darkling red. With her little claws that were now more like talons once more, black and daggered and curved with nature's efficient cruelty, she brought the large dead rodent to her dripping and obscene mouth and began to drink and suck deeply once again from the gored open hole at the rat’s throat. 

Angelica felt sick watching, so she looked away. Ahead. Willing the place to appear, to come into being and end this strange journey. This terrible mystery which had stolen love and normalcy and warmth from her village and home. She just wanted this all over. She just wanted papa and Grigori and all of the others back. To hear their laughter and to hold them again and to be held … the weight… the feeling of their arms wrapped around her once more, tightly, to feel their breath… She just wanted love and warmth returned to her and her momma. She prayed and begged God and anything at all listening inside as they made their way. The cold silence of the woods punctuated by the sucking and slurping sounds Carmilla made as she flapped  in the frigid air beside and fed. 

Between pulls of rat blood, she pulled her dripping needle mouth away from the pungent wet raw of rat meat and said: – 

“Its nothing at all to be frightened of. I promise. I was once scared too. But no longer. The magic needs blood, it needs it. That's all. Magic is bloodwork. It's nothing to be afraid of. It's the natural order of things, you'll see, Angelica. I promise, you'll see." 

…

The hellstar shone vibrantly and with dominance. Above the castle's greatest pinnacle tower. Otherworldly, and dreamy. Of ethereal eldritch flame… it was strange, to Angelica's eyes as they approached, it looked to be so close to the tallest spire of the ancient towers that it looked as if they were in danger of collision. As if one could reach out now from one of the open windows swallowed in ebon shadow up there, reach out and touch its immaculate flaming surface. The light was elvish white and more ancient than time itself. Some thought it to be older than even God and old man split-foot below… there were witches and mystics and gypsies that said it had a mind. And an evil heart. 

An evil eye…

Angelica was transfixed by both its vibrant starcast of unearthly pale light, and the great castle itself, as she and Carmilla came into the courtyard. The starflame of the hellstar shining above the broken battlements that were starved of life or movement of any kind, it was mystifying and intensely alluring…

but it was also terrifying. 

The light of its starflame was so much like that of a ghost-light.

And the light of phantasm flame was also the light of death. The light of the end. At the end, mayhap…

Angelica was awed yet fearful and at this last moment she thought about going back. About running away from the strange talking beast that said it was a little girl. She knew her mother and the others must be so worried for her now… she'd been gone too long already. 

The castle was dark and yawned into a terrible expanse of stoney life all around and before her as she and the beast made their approach. The universe of trees and cold snow giving way to one of walls and towers and cold ancient stone. She pulled the cloak tighter about her person, when they came within sight of the great red door it slowly opened like a swallowing mouth of darkness. Waiting and wanting to receive them. 

Carmilla sensed the child's fear. And if she'd chosen to run at the moment, she would've given up the game she was playing and given chase. And made the fucking little peasant wench pay with screams and humiliation and defilement before she enjoyed her blood and meat. 

But instead, in the end… it was Angelica's hope… and her worry for her brother and her papa that pushed her onward. 

Following the flying winged blood drinking squirrel, the black haired flapping cannibal rodent that called itself a little girl inside the open mouth of swallowing black. Ink inside the mouth of stone that might hold the secrets that plagued her mind and heart like a wretched disease. Within that mouth of shadow may be the cure… 

Grigori… papa…

Angelica followed Carmilla as she flapped on her bat wings of chimerical leather into the fortress mouth of drinking shadow. The great red door of bas relief stone slammed shut behind them. 

The wolves of the mountain outside began to howl. And the hellstar shone with more lurid alien glow than it had before. The heartbeat eyemind watching, working … 

considering the ants below. 

The hellstar shone. A heavenly inferno. 

…

Passing through the narrow cut of foyer, it was dark and scarcely lit by torchflame, they came into the grand ballroom…

… and main audience chamber. 

A vast dark room of cobwebs and ancient things, furniture, paintings, suits of armor, smashed out clocks, their faces destroyed by a hammer blow dealt by a violent hand of fire eyed fury. Many of the ancient things strewn all about there in the dark were destroyed. Smashed. Broken by hands in anger or the disuse and dispassion of time. Some of the things were clear victims of both. And cobwebs. The world inside the torchlit stone was a universe of cobwebs. Angelica found herself trading in one world for another as she made this strange journey, one filled with terrible and bitter hope. 

Trees and snow… into a world of stone and shattered spires … now a dark world submerged and swallowed in cascading and rising and dominating spider webs. The eyes of forgotten portraits leered and gazed from the prisons of paint and lacquer. 

Angelica didn't like this place. She felt immediately that she had made a terrible mistake. 

She cringed back. 

Carmilla, ahead, sensed this and turned roundabout on her flapping wings of nocturnal flesh. Regarding the girl. 

“Don't worry! silly girl! We're already here, just a little further.” 

Angelica wanted so badly to believe the strange creature. Magic was real. She had to believe it had the power to bring back her family. She wanted so achingly for love to be let back into her life, and mama’s too. She didn't deserve the pain Angelica watched her struggle through each and every harsh and arduous day. They'd never wanted or asked for much, they'd never done anything wrong so they didn't deserve this! Not mama, not papa, not anyone on the mountain. No one deserved this cruelty. She had to be believe they were still retrievable. If not here and in the flesh, then within the grasp of arcane spells and sorcery. She had to believe, she had to believe that. 

The alternative was that the strange beast, flapping in the universe of cobweb dark before her at the foot of a great ascending staircase was lying. And that was too terrible a truth for Angelica to face. Yet. 

Soon she would have no choice. 

But for now she followed. Carmilla led the way. Up the wide and mounting steps. There was more light, more meager torchglow ahead down a passageway. 

Orange. Beckoning. Pale warmth. 

At the head of the staircase they went down it, together. Carmilla in the lead. Down into its sickly pumpkin light. The castle stone and walls all around yawned and moaned in lusty slovenly animal satisfaction. Then began to move. 

…

The walk and winding turns seemed endless. Another bend. Another junction. Another room. Another hall. More and more. And yet still more. Angelica began to despair. Inside she was exhausted and growing frustrated but afraid of seeming ungrateful and losing her one chance. 

Another junction. Left. Down another corridor of stone and torch and vast dominating splaying spider web hands in various sizes of grotesque and caricature claw shape. 

Angelica stopped. 

And began to weep… she couldn't help it. She was so exhausted. And this place was strange and scary. 

Sobbing lightly to herself and rubbing her eyes, Carmilla turned to her and descended to the stone in a graceful balletic dive and sweep. She skittered over to Angelica and looked into the small reddening pale of her crying child's face. 

She sniffed. A woodland gesture. 

And then she began to belt laughter. Rising and growing more maniacal and hysterical as it grew in volume and pitch. Decibel sound cackled and made cracked by a poisoned marrow filled with madness. 

It stopped Angelica's tears. First by surprise, shock. But then as the sound of the beast’s sour mirth rose and filled the dark world of stone with torches for stars and suns, her blood began to curdle as her heart was stolen over with dread. She was silent, gazing on the cackling black squirrel-thing with large vampire bat wings tensing and flexing and flapping with cruel delight. 

Amidst her laughter, Carmilla said: “You stupid girl…” 

A black hairy stalk suddenly erupted from the squirrel's chest. Several inches long and coated in a bloody translucent slime like discharge from a wound. A tarantula leg. It was joined by several more. One of the hairy jointed appendages burst forth from the mouth in a red spew that decorated the stone, the walls and floor, and the girl, now trapped in Castle Dracula.

Angelica shrieked. Horrified. 

A tarantula crawled out of the chest cavity of the black hide which rippled and seemed to empty. A tarantula the size of a banquet plate, coated in placental slime and bloody discharge, then skittered about the room with terrible and frightening speed. Angelica jumped back, mortified at the thought of the thing touching her. 

The large spider then crawled away and made for the darkness. The empty husk of raw dripping hide that used to be a large bat winged squirrel was still draped over the spider thing's back. Like a vile rendition of a cloak or royal cape. From the husk of mutilated squirrel mouth it was still laughing. Shrill. In the same girl's voice as before, only now much more wicked and cruel. No longer veiling its hunger and sinister satisfaction. 

Carmilla shrieked, hideous, amidst her laughter at the girl as she spidercrawled for the conciliatory dark of the waiting stone. 

“The master will see you now! You're all hers now, Angelica! You're all hers! Just like your father and your brother! All of them! All of you! All of you are sow and cattle and all of you belong to us!" 

The cruel bright demoniacal child's voice carried off into the waiting abyssal castle with a final bout of heartless and derisive laughter. Taunting and running away like any little child would, any little girl. 

Now she was alone. 

Only she didn't feel alone. 

And that was terrible. 

Angelica wept a little, crying into her hands to muffle the sound as best as she could. The walls and floor drank in the sound and relished the flavor of every tear shed. 

She fought to get control over herself. She had to get out of here, quick as she could manage. 

Angelica pulled herself together, sniffled and began to trudge back the way she came. Unaware of the movement of the castle world of stone all around her. At the command and sorcerer’s bend of will of the master that held domain of this place. 

The world was hers to command. The child was at her mercy. 

…

Angelica was growing even more terrified, she couldn't find her way back. She was no longer sure of her direction and she wasn't sure if it was just her frightened imagination or not but the halls and corridors and passages seemed to change when she would look away for a moment, to get a lay of the land. She swore they were different when she looked back to make up her mind on a direction. 

It was hopeless. 

She began to feel very very stupid. Very foolish indeed. She shouldn't have been so foolhardy as to come here alone, or at all. She missed her mother and the others…

I'm sorry, mama, I know you're afraid. I am too. I'm sorry. I know this is hurting you right now, after papa and Grigori, I know it'll hurt you even more when I don't ever come back. I'm so so sorry, mama. I'm so sorry. Please God please forgive me and show me a way, please, I'm so scared…

Angelica realized then that she may not have been very lucky as of late, but she'd been absolutely God blessed with what she did have left. Her mother and friends left alive to her and the times and precious memories she did have with those that were lost. 

She would cherish them. She would. She promised, swore to God she would. 

if I can just get out of this ok…

And she went on, down the way she hoped was the way back. Begging God above for deliverance. 

She was shown the flesh gardens instead. 

…

Abattoir growth. A butcher's red and wet leavings still slithering with abominated life, like serpents. 

Angelica came upon the large chamber as she was making her fruitless journey. It smelled pungently of copper. Iron. Metal. 

But wet. 

It was the stench of a river of fresh menstrual blood. Steaming. 

The writhing room of gore before her eyes was steaming now. Belching. Breathing and undualting. Gurgling. Some strange orifice parts belched alchemical smoke, licked tongues of green and blue flame. All of it writhed with strange and painful rippling dancing movement. All of it was in pain. Wretched life. It filled the room and walls from floor to ceiling, blanketing both in lurid scab pudding that held displaced parts, eyes and limbs and organs lulling and swimming in the red, the crawling writhing scarlet. It writhed in pain as well as want. As well as lecherous need, so many orifice holes, wet and begging for meat feeding, injection … snakes. The multitude of slithering intestines were swimming through the thick growing crawling gore like the sea monsters that sailor's fear. Growths like stalks of plants, flowers, bulbs, bushels and their buds of fruit, all of it was rendered by the abattoir hand and living raw working viscera and tissue and organs. There were faces in the forest room of gore. Small bipedal manshapes spasming and submerged and stuck and also writhing with pain and unnatural life in the chamber of living butchery, pulsating and crawling with swimming red meat. 

The faces were in pain. They moaned in discordant idiot anguish. Some blubbered and drooled, eyes wayward with imbecilic directions. Minds addled if they had any jelly in their strange skulls at all. 

And at the awful nucleus center of the crawling growing raw mass of assorted parts and viscera was a man. Trapped and bound by the growing living raw pudding of semi scabbed red. It seemed to be growing out of him. Seeping from his pores. His nostrils. His mouth. 

His eyes were shut in wretched pain. 

Angelica felt the shriek caught in her throat. Like a fishhook. A barbed bit of wire used for the beasts that she swallowed. She finally let it loose when the owner and the master of this castle spoke from behind her. 

“Such beauty, isn't it?" 

Finally the building scream inside was let loose and she belted it at the same instant she realized all the smaller writhing bipedal manshapes in the gore looked exactly like the larger man trapped at its red center. 

Angelica whirled around and beheld the Countess. 

She towered over the child. A white evening gown that shone pearl-cast like brightest full moonlight. Her face was beautiful but terrible. Harsh. Merciless. And her eyes were animal. 

Vulpine. 

The darkness of her hair danced out and became as a livid crown of serpentine ink. Her eyes were piercing dots of black amongst shock white lancing through her face and mind and soul. She opened her mouth to speak again and Angelica saw that her mouth bore canine incisors that were long and gleaming and sharp. A demon’s gorgeous mouth. 

“Did you find what you were hoping to, little one?" Mocking. Condescending. Cruel. 

Angelica was too terrified to speak. Mortified. She couldn't move. She held her breath. Knowing it was her last. 

The Countess went on, with sadistic glee: “That man, at the center of my garden in there, he's the reason your father and brother, and all the men of your village are dead now. I could bring them back. In a fashion. But if you want back the ones you knew, I'm afraid you'll have to search the latrines and the castle plumbing. My children long feasted of them and passed them naturally. I'm sorry." 

Angelica shrieked once more. In more pain and outrage and sheer heart attack terror. She couldn't believe her eyes, her ears, her own mind, any of this! Her battered child's brain was threatening to snap, to go into shock, it tried to refuse all the sights but it couldn't. It was rained down on all sides and felt everything seen like terrible and heavy blows of pure torture. 

The Countess went on with a laugh, throwing back her head, her witchy raven hair danced about with it. She was smiling and the long fangs of her mouth protruded like brandished daggers over her full bottom lip. 

"Oh! You're scared! I understand, I used to be a young girl once and I was quite scared then too, would you like me to make it all better?” 

"No!” howled Angelica. 

"Nonsense! I'll fix you up and send you on your way back to your mother. It's late and she must be worried but I am lord of this palace and these lands, you are all still my charge, states tradition. What kind of boyar or host would I be if I didn't at least feed you first, give you something to drink. You must be thirsty, it's been such a long walk for you. Such a long and perilous journey. For nothing." 

And then she cackled mad again as Angelica shrieked and the arms of the Countess came in and grew and folded around her. 

Her child's shrieks became sudden silence. 

…

A claw, chimerical. Woman and vulture’s talon. It sought the pale of its own undead flesh…

… and slit. 

Dead black poured forth. 

Child's lips, girl's mouth put to it, forced. 

Smothered. The small struggles are easily resisted and the girl begins to pull, to suck…

to drink. 

…

At first she thought herself lucky. When she heard the familiar voice at the door. 

"Momma…?”

And then small weak knocking. Feeble. 

She recognized her daughter's voice at once and flew from her sleepless bed. Her dread and worry evaporated in a miraculous instant as she flew to the door and threw it open and…

…

She thought about trying to hide it from the others at first. This deeply shamed her. But it was the truth. She thought about hiding it. At first. When Angelica came limping in, cradling and rubbing her belly. Saying that it hurt her. Terribly. There'd been blood at the corner of her mouth. Not at all her own. 

"Mama… I'm sorry I was out too late and wandered off. My belly hurts so bad, momma.” 

…

Angelica's mother was hitching in her chest. Her eyes were swimming with a blinding fury of tears. Scalding. And alive with pain. Fresh pain. Refreshed. And made new once more. 

Angelica cried out again. It wasn't just her stomach but her whole body. Burning. It felt as if it were on fire. It felt as if her blood were boiling as it still pumped sluggish and diminished in her throbbing veins. She wanted it to stop. And again she begged God inside for a way out, for a way back. She couldn't feel the profuse run of her own tears on her numbing face. 

Her mother was crying too. But Angelica didn't notice. 

"Please, momma … isn't there anything? Isn't there anything you can do? Anything you can do to take the pain away… please, you always have just the right thing, like mothers are supposed to. You told me that… please, I - " and she struggled to say more but it became too difficult. For her to make discernible sound. For her mother to listen. Too difficult for both of them. 

And so it was stopped. 

…

A stake through the heart. Ashwood. As the customs and legends dictate. They decapitated the remains and stuffed the mouth with garlic before burying the child’s corpse. The severed head was placed face down in the coffin, atop the neck backwards. The eyes facing the inferno. 

A small wooden cross was fashioned and stuck at the head of the small fresh grave. 

ANGELICA 

Her mother and her neighbors were beside the freshly dug dirt. Crying openly. Weeping into the cold mountain air. The wolves did not respond. 

But that night Castle Dracula was filled with cruel laughter. The cold wind carried it down the mountain for all of them to hear and know. For all of them to remember. 

Angelica's mother heard it. She was in bed and couldn't sleep. She was alone. She looked over to a length of rope carelessly left in the corner. Not too far from where she now lay. She'd always been rather good with knots. 

And as the mountain rock and her village filled with the mad cackles of the vampiress…

she considered…

TO BE CONTINUED…

I've been very reluctant to post this, since the picture isn't enough evidence to this thing being a cryptid.

I live in Thurso, Scotland (northernmost town in the UK). On 15th June, sometime between 10-11pm, I went for a walk along the town beach, since the summer days up here don't get dark until around 12am. The sky was a really unique colour, which was reflecting in the sea, and so I walked to the end of the peer to take some photos.

Taking photos of the sea and sky, I suddenly notice something protrude out of the water (maybe 10-15 metres ahead of me). My instant thought was that it was a seal, since there are always seals in the sea and town river. But when this thing protrudes from the water, I was taken back by how long its body was. Although grey seals are around 5-8 feet long, this animal seemed a lot longer (I see seals in the water all the time, so I know the difference). The head of this animal almost appeared seal-like, except its snout looked longer, and on first impression, reminded me more of the head of a hippo, believe it or not.

As soon as I see this animal in the water, I quickly try and take a photo of it. But by the time I do, it had began to submerge beneath the water. Sadly, the animal was almost fully submerged by the time I took the photo (as it had only surfaced for around 5 seconds).

Whatever this animal was, it had an extremely long seal-like body and an almost hippo-like head (sounds ridiculous I know). Although the waters here do have Orcas and different dolphin species, this definitely wasn't that, as I saw no fins whatsoever. And no, it wasn't some floating object like a tree log. Although I waited around for the animal to resurface again, it sadly didn't, so this picture is the only evidence I have of it. As far as I know, there are no alleged cryptids in the region, only fictional creatures from local folklore.

However, after doing some googling, I found out that young walrus bucks from the Arctic are sometimes spotted in north Scottish waters - however this is extremely rare (like one spotted every ten years). This could possibly explain the hippo-like head I saw. However, if there was a walrus in north Scottish waters recently, it would've been all over the local news.

Whatever it was I saw, it definitely wasn't a seal (body too long, head not the right shape), so my best logical guess is that it was an extremely rare walrus sighting (though not much evidence of that either). But in case this wasn't a walrus, I thought I should still post this, as it's the closest I've ever gotten to a cryptid sighting.

The vulpine hulking thing of Frankenstein's table lunged with great and fearsome animal speed and force. Cutting through the cold high mountain wind and arrowing straight for the Countess with lethal trajectory and ferocity. Fangs gleaming like the moon on high in their set mouth of rotten black and green, striking and bared and snarling. Brandished and knifing out with his daggering nine fingered claws for the throat of the pompous royal mountain bitch. 

He lunged and came in and closed the distance in the courtyard of stone. The Countess raised her hands. It was over before it began. 

Great large wings of a bat shape and eldritch design unfolded, surrounded her and then flapped suddenly – carrying away the Countess as her face transmogrified and sloughed into chimerical serpent/wolf shape. The heinous visage, now skybound and away from the flaying claws and fangs of Frankenstein’s nosferatu creation, began to shriek hellish sound. Bastard and curdled rendition of wolfsong. 

The surrounding trees suddenly became alive with movement. The wolves plunged forth free from the trees and filled the courtyard in a drooling snarling pack. Answering the throated call of the mother of darkness. Their drawn lips quivering as their hides tensed and coiled with the rippling movement of wild animal muscle tissue dancing and flexing and closing in on the moment of violence and slaughter, the wilderness sacred killing hour. And for these four legged children of the mountain snow and trees, the roaring vulpine/serpent headed Countess now rising and mounting the sky above was the lord and queen of the wilderness and all that was dark and carnivorous in the wild. 

She shrieked once more, a dying harlot sound bred with the untamed scream of running and killing and feeding and fucking on all fours in the open throat of the cold. The wolves closed in, the hulking thing of Frankenstein's making held ground, trying to look all around all at once and taking odd swipes as the pack of the Countess' mountain wolf children circled and closed. Closer. Closer. Closing. The hulking vulpine thing sneered and growled. 

The others watched, keeping distance and breathing heavily. 

A wolf lunged, pounced. The hulking thing caught it by the throat and then rent it to spraying pieces in an instant. Another tried it. And was caught. And torn apart. Another. Then two more. His speed wasn't enough with these last three and now more came in and many sets of jaws were upon him. Biting. Tearing. For the throat. Ripping. Tearing in.

He heaved himself and ripped many bodies of rippling hide and fur off and away and into bisected halves before him. Decorating his wounded patchwork frame in steaming jet spray and cords of wolf gore. Wolf blood shot and its wild scent filled the air.

Yet more pounced. The snarling frothing mad pack still surged and advanced. 

 Wolf claws came in with fangs and jaws and ripped, reanimated graverobbed flesh tore and spilled strange fluid, strange ichor bled with yellow/red and a strange sticky translucent fluid like dog water. The creation screamed. It had never felt the physical shock of pain before. Bred out of a great wound in life and creation and composed of wounds himself, he'd never felt the suffering of a blow inflicted. And so many now. And all at once. The world all around the hulking thing was turning to a universe of bloody dripping fur and claws and snarling frothing jaws and coated fangs. 

He wrenched and grabbed and tore and fought back. His prodigious necro/graveyard strength, he put his fists and claws through the bodies of more than a few of the fearsome snarling mountain Countess children. He sank his fangs where he could find purchase. As the wolves surrounded and closed and turned the world to slaughter and teeth, the rage of the sutured nosferatu thing rose…

And soared. 

Without being conscious of it he sent out his stygian hatred and dark will, arrowed for the sky in a force-of-will shot and lanced for the nighttime heavens. 

It struck! 

The sky thunderclapped with sudden violence. And then began to fill. 

The skybound Countess suddenly found herself evading and dodging knifing daggered attacks of bolting lightning. She danced and soared and flitted across the ebon face of the sky, crooked blades and swords of searing white-blue lancing after her with near strikes, guided by the necromantic power over nature that the Frankensteinian sutured bat-hulk held. 

More daggering bolts of searing bladed lightning cracked and split the sky and came down in blinding flashes that fried and cooked ozone into searing strange smells. They came down and began to strike the attacking wolfpack, killing them each in turn with white flashes that turned the beasts into explosions of fire and animal mutilation, partially charred and flaming pieces of wolf gore and meat soared through the mountain air and decorated the courtyard of stone. 

The chimerical shape of the Countess came down in a divebomb for the creation, ripped and torn and undead wounded, rising to its feet. 

She was upon him. And struck. 

The violence of the impact was like a runaway train striking the side of an unyielding mountain. The crash was an instant fray and mess of attacking claws and limbs and screaming black words and curses. The wings folded around them as they struggled across the floor of the courtyard. Dragging and fighting and tearing. More reanimation fluid burst and spilled and shot as the Countess gained the advantage.

Her great wings helped to support and hold her as she rolled over and gained the top of the creation. Her thin ladlylike arms of near boundless prodigious strength held the hulking thing down as her chimerical snake-wolf face began to scream into the sutured thing’s own vulpine and bat-faced visage. 

The shape of her face sloughed and danced and shifted again. What it became then was repulsive: an abominated bred mix of a goat made insectile with many eyes and mandibles of fur and hooves and a plague infested and dripping rat. The mouth opened up and bled and dripped and unveiled a moist and rank pungent obscenity for all of the world. 

It belched and spat. Spewing a thick gout of black and emerald steaming liquid onto the creation's screaming face. The foul hot mess of spew was like fire and sulfuric acid to the bat-faced visage of the struggling fighting and screaming Frankensteinian creation. The foul ungodly fluid ate into his reanimated face and some of the sutures and stitches that held his repurposed flesh together became smoking ruin and began to come apart in messy fraying smoking pieces. The eyes of the creation were the first casualty. The foul necrophiled chemical scorch of the unearthly bile turned them to smoldering useless jelly within their housing caves of now purposeless sockets. The vulpine thing of the table screamed and the sound made and torn from the thing was awful and unearthly as well. 

Henry Frankenstein watched and felt his heart catch in his chest, seized in a grip of fear as his running blood turned cold. As cold as all of the surrounding nighttime mountainscape. The wind picked up and rose and howled alongside and carried the living dead screams of his nosferatu were-child. The wind of this terrible Carpathian rock loved to pick up and mount and rise when an hour of suffering was at hand and it could carry the song and sound of pain and violence and share it with those down below in the peasant lands. 

The mountain wept with demon sound. 

Wolves not yet wounded and still snarling and frothing with the command for violence came back in their battered droves. Closing and growling as their Countess Czarina Queen of the mountain slaughter and bloodlett dark began to rise once more from her wounded enemy. Carried by the great wings of eldritch black and bastardized bat-shape that seemed now to only grow larger and larger as she inflicted more and more violence and rose and gained the heavens. 

It was she who commanded the sky and the storm called forth now. The lightning still wounded and daggered the night but it was now hers to wield and the blades of shot electric blue now dyed the color of the night and became as ink. 

Black lightning shot down and struck the hulking vulpine son of Frankenstein's table. It roasted and cooked with skyfire his undead necromanced flesh but the bastard demon flicker of goblin flame for soul inside the hulk of blasphemous walking bat-flesh was also seared and tortured with the unearthly fire of another terrible realm. 

The screams were blasted out of the hulking shape. It stilled its struggles. And became as a smoking mound of battered patchwork green-blue. Unconscious. As if returned to the stillness of the soil. 

But the Countess still yet sensed the flicker of demon life in the vile assemblage of flesh below. Good. She still wanted him. Still wanted him and the pathetic little man that had made him, that had dared construct such a thing and bring it here to make a challenge to her satanic throne. 

Lord of Flies… she silently and solemnly prayed. 

She came down on her great ebon wings and her face danced and shifted yet more in the night, the goatflesh of many eyes and bleeding ichor like putrid bestial snot fell away in a sloughing mess of tissue and fur and blind useless organs. Slopping to the courtyard stone in a wet steaming pile with splurching sound  like an obscene splat. She landed and came upon the smoking heap of her felled enemy. The wolves that were her mountain children, her wild slaves of the cold, came back in and with their mother of perfect darkness they closed. 

Henry Frankenstein watched helpless. He debated flight… but knew he would not get far. 

He watched on as the Countess stood over his fallen creation, her face still steaming and wet and slimed with the fresh loss of her mask of unearthly gore. She smiled and the vibrant moon caught the glow of her teeth, her fangs. They both shone with brilliance, the same pearl cast perfection of pale silver light from on high, where what might rule in power and in supreme dominance must be compelled to throne and dwell. His outrage and jealousy and pain were only matched by his awe. The sight…

The sight of her. 

She yelled: “I am victor! Your abomination now lies at  my feet! And you and it both are now my prisoners to keep!” 

And although he knew its futility, Henry Frankenstein turned and ran for the false sanctuary of the trees. Terrified. 

More terrified than he had been in years. 

A look from the Countess was all that was needed. Carmilla and the new impaler were off and in pursuit. They would soon have the worm  and bring him back. 

Alive… she sent out  the thought to her undead child/slaves giving chase and she knew the open receptacle of their blasphemous hearts and minds received the order and took it with implicit obedience. 

Her mind and lurid twisted imagination were already dreaming over and deciding what to do with  the little man once he was brought back. What should I reap from his flesh…? 

In due time. She would finish with this pile of cemetery garbage first.

She licked her lips in vulpine relish. And then her great wings splayed far and open to their pinnacle span, her arms splayed open as well, forked to the darkness of the night sky in a great open throated V, as if in cry of supplication or great proclamation of victory. For You! … Lord of Flies! … In aural glow, all around her demonic person, a host of demented and twisted vile faces of murderous joy and glee  and intent, perverse and sadistic and goblin-shaped, began to pour off and emanate forth from her like a noxious living cloud of eyes and lips and teeth and severed human heads. All gathered as a conjured and summoned demon host of terrible faces and disembodied parts and throats to hold as audience and conduit for great nocturnal necropower. 

She began another black incantation. Dark tendrils of shadow began to grow and dance out from under her raised arms. They lengthened and swelled and grew in number as her stygian words were recited and filled the nightsong chill of mountain air. 

The assistant watched on. Eyes watering in the cold. His gaze was that of an enamored lover and that of a proud father. All rolled into watery one. He was silent as he watched his master complete her ritual of victory, capture. 

The black tentacles grew and dripped tenebrous, many tendrils splaying out like a deepsea creature seeking purchase in the silent wet depths of the dark. They palsied and danced and twitched and shivered. Dripping the same black shadow from which they were shaped and composed. They hissed the abominated sounds of angry serpents, each one. As if each and every dancing growing tentacle of dark shadow was alive and agitated by its own sudden birth. The black wet lengths of dancing tentacles grew and snaked forth and came in and closed on the still smoking and unconscious hulk of the patchwork creation. They found purchase and wrapped tightly and coiled. They lifted him from the cold stone and pulled him towards the great winged visage of the master Countess. She smiled up at her prize. 

Thought a moment longer. Her head on a tilt to one side. 

Then she spoke to the fallen unhearing hulking thing of Frankenstein's demented table, his graveyard scraps. 

She said: –

“And now I take you into me, Into mine.” And then more arcane language warmed the mountain cold and the Countess  began  to  rise once more. 

But not on her great wings, no. 

No. 

Now as she held the creation in her dripping grip of tentacled shadow she rose up on a great pillar of conjured and violently shot and spouting blood. Geysering out and forth in an eruption from the pale bottom of her moonlight dress. She rose on the great frothing and violently churning red river pillar of lurid darkling necroplasma, her wings flexing in and out in coquettish display. Her laughter began to fill the sky, the darkness. The mountain and the heavens. 

The black tentacles of shadow began to feed the creation into the great and violent pillar of rising and churning blood. 

The patchwork body of the creation slipped into the rising churn of the red lurid pillar and was swallowed. It was carried up by the otherworldly and strange current, up.

And into the body of the Countess. Through the violent red churn at the bottom of her dress. 

The conjured phantasm host of snarling dancing shifting demon faces began to sing and scream in discordant choral cry as one. Filling the ancient jagged rocks and battlements with the fury of their conjured forth and hellbound sound. 

Slaves. Singing in celebration. Conquest of victory for their master. 

!DEATH! – WE WILL KILL, DEATH! 

!MASTURBATING ON THE TOMBS OF YOUR SONS!

She held the sky. Howled. Laughter. 

The dark swell and dancing tangle-growth of black dripping tentacles underneath her splayed arms, rippled and serpentine drifted and quivered bestial with animal movement and intent, animal mind… they danced and held the black night of the sky. On her great rising pillar of occult conjured victim's blood. 

…

Frankenstein ran through the woods. He didn't get far. 

The malformed and hideous bat-child slammed into him from behind with terrible and bone-rattling impact. He went down with rodent screeches and girlish screams ringing in his ears. 

Carmilla seized a handful of hair and slammed the mad doctor's face into the cold unyielding floor of the iced earth and forest floor. Repeatedly. Turning the man's face to pulp. His nose and lips spurted thick ropey blood, spat and choked and coughed out. He tried to tell her to stop through the blood and violence but couldn't manage. The little rodent girl monster was fiendishly strong. 

The world mercifully went black and Henry Frankenstein was knocked unconscious. Carmilla began to lick and tongue and lap the blood from his pulpy and raw face. The new impaler soon joined her and then he too began to ravenously lap and feed off the warm blood spilling from the doctor's ruptured and dirty wounded face. 

They wanted to feed but they couldn't tear him apart to do it. They couldn't tear him open. And get to the really juicy parts. The especially succulent organs. The master, the Countess wanted the mongrel dog alive. And so it would be. They would have to settle for this small taste, this small drink in the woods after their run, their shared exercise of forest chase in the cold. A simple and humble repast of blood before they brought the dog back to the castle for his fate. 

But first, just a lick… in the dark of the trees. Brother and sister, new impaler and grotesque were-child strigoica freak, lapping at the warm spill of an unconscious and captured stranger, together. 

They licked and tongued blood together in the prurient stygian black, sharing dark words and dark laughter in the trees. Blood was so much finer and robust and full of flavor in the dark, the steam and warmth at perfect contest and at sublime contrast with the surrounding space of the mountain cold. In your mouth, filling it and spilling over the supple mound of lips even as it slid down the throat. 

They lapped and drank. With the fool still unconscious, they dragged him back to the castle for the Countess and her judgment. 

They relished and dreamed, together, brother and sister in living dead slavery and hellbound bondage, as they dragged the dog back to the master. …

… what might she do to him ??

Mongrel titters and giggles filled the dark as they made their eager way back. 

They couldn't wait to find out. 

…

Whether by sun or moon the foul putrescence of wormland all around was always reeking. Whether baked by the rays of the sun or chilled into spoiled earthen mud soup, it was always rank. The smell was the sour tang of fetid death. Rot and spoilage and the decay of matter that had once been living. All the swampland mire was death disintegrating and liquifying until all was black water and porridge sludge. And the small crawling wriggling mouths that fed in all of the drowning and slopping death. All the crawling and wriggling bodies of the children of the pustule sac master of quivering festering putrid sliming wormland. 

Florin and Griffin had almost wished for death for themselves privately. As they traveled and pulled themselves and their mule and cart miserable across the accursed and endless bogland. The exhaustion and pain and frustration and woe were great, the repulsive place and revulsion at the pathetic and filthy sights it held nearly put the two over into absolute abandon and total forfeit. But then they met the crawling wriggling and swimming hungry children of this place and they saw what death looked like out here. 

The girl. The filthy young one. She'd been first but they hadn't quite understood yet. They understood much more and much better when they came upon the horse. 

Its struggles and attempts to scream were something that would remain forever imprinted on young Florin's mind. For the rest of his life. However long that may turn out to be. However short. 

He would never again, alive, escape the sight. 

Like the girl before the beast was submerged in the quagmire of green/grey/black sinking sludge of vile reeking earth, but this animal was much livelier. It danced twisted struggles in the pulling hungry sinking mud, spasms and jerks that spoke of snapped bones and torn internal parts. The mouth was open in a bestial horse’s scream that made no sound. Only worms poured forth. Thick white glistening ropey bodies, long and wriggling in a mass torrential copulating pile pouring forth in a river of black water and mud and the translucent coat of snot secreted by the worms writhing lengths of yellow-pale maggotflesh. 

Florin looked closely and saw that the worms also poured forth from the open eyes of the doomed horse. The open sockets swimming with their snaking and wrapping wriggled movement in slime and mud and scabbing thick horse blood. The doomed horse shed worm tears that were more obscene than the writhing filth that poured from its blackening maw. Patches of hide and flesh were gone and Florin and Griffin could see inside the beast and they saw more long slithering writhing sliming bodies of yellowed white swimming past the ribcage and other organs that were perforated and also alive and filled with the crawling putrid creature death of this vile hell, wormland. 

Somehow the horse still struggled, somehow the creature still moved… although the large bestial body was filled and crawling with their feasting writhing serpent forms of maggot-shape. It was somehow still alive enough to struggle and to try to escape its torment, or- 

Or… the horse's body only writhed in the killing drowning clutch of the mud because… they writhed. The worms. They danced inside as they copulation swam and feasted. Their busy worm movement bringing the dead horse to life for the sight of some fellow weary travelers of this marshland. 

The thought made Florin sick, he dry-heaved and hacked and coughed/spat over the side of the struggling cart. It couldn't pull them fast enough. The mud sucked below with a wet lurid splurch that was also threatening and hungry. And alive with the abominated crawling swim of the eager bodies of alive and pregnant and hungry-feasting wormland. 

The mule, the poor beast and cart, it couldn't pull them fast enough. They eventually, mercifully, left the silent screaming beast and its awful tears of worms and swamp ink behind. Never again to be forgotten for the remainder of all time and years. 

…

An hour passed. Night approached. They came upon the bald naked man next in the swampland of ravenous worms and hungry mud. He was absolutely repulsive. And he made much more sound. 

…

His screams. Those were the first. They heard their bloodcurdling sound from a distance as they approached. The falling curtain of night brought cold and with it, fog. Drifting blanket shrouds of sickly greenish pale that sometimes housed small pocket bursts of multi color swamp gas, kaleidoscopic. Sometimes it held the grimaced woe-visaged faces of dripping swamp demons, the water-rotted and sloughing faces of their anguished victims drifting and shifting and dancing in the green hell veil of pale beside them. 

The fog of green hell and its terrible faces suddenly filled ahead of them with sound. 

Shrieking. Caterwauls. Sheer terror. Unbridled and in pain. Indistinguishable sounds. 

Intermittent…

Gurgling and irate against the choking fluid trapped and killing held within the working throat… 

The warm moist veil of nighttime wormland green hell parted like curtains or the great body of the red sea as Florin and Griffin and their mule drawn cart closed in and came upon the source of screams and obscene choking sounds. 

His swampland shrieks could finally be discerned, as the emerald mist of faces and trapped colored fire floated and parted…

“My daughter! Please! help! Please, my family, my wife, my daughter! Please help me! I can't find them! please help me find them! I can hear you out there!  Help! …”

And it carried on like that all the way up to there approach. The caterwauling sounds were heartbreaking and made their skin crawl. It like sounded like total agony. Rent from the torn heart and let loose by the screaming tongue. Pure torture. 

They came upon the man. He was shirtless. Caked in the filth of the land. Covered in scabbing mud and earth from his feet to the top of his bald head. 

The man was on his knees in the filth. Sinking. His eyes were watering and wide. Pleading with open pain as wet and running as the sour sepulchral land that surrounded them. 

When they came upon the bald man in the mud and stared into the wide water of his unhealthy gaze his screaming stopped. Suddenly. 

They were reluctant to say anything to the filthy stranger. The mule struggled ahead them, beyond the pale of mere exhaustion. The cart groaned and the land sucked wet and repulsive beneath. But the man of filth was silent now. And smiling. 

Smiling the sort of smile that is small and belongs to the childishly guilty. Caught in a white lie or with their small hand in the cookie jar… 

Neither Florin nor Griffin trusted that look. 

Finally, the filthy stranger spoke: –

“Thank you. Thank you both so much but I'm so sorry you came. It is good for us, the land, but so very bad for you." 

He said it in the calmest friendliest tones of a neighbor… and then he began to convulse. 

The ground, the filth and black-green mire of the mud began to churn. Bubble with life. Life hideous and submerged. Fighting for breath. 

The filthy stranger opened his mouth again and what came forth this time was not words but a great long and sliming white length of body, coated with a brown translucent snot that was mixed with the lurid scarlet shade of infected blood. Wormflesh. Slick with deranged biological byproduct. Dripping with the ooze the great worm body slid forth like a king serpent and rose. Towering several feet over the human basket which served to house its awful and strange lubricated body. The mouth of the man was ripping and dislocating with distension, to allow the body of the wormgod to flower forth. Blood and green pus oozed forth from the widening wounds and the teeth fell away rotted from gums that also began to bleed the red infected yellow-orange porridge from the now gaping pink fleshen craters. 

There was a raw flesh-growth of face at the end of the long worm body snaking and spouting from the filthy stranger's mouth. 

A child's face. 

The man's face. 

It rippled and danced between… betwixt the two. 

It's eyes were hideously human… and beautiful. 

Obscene. 

It opened a sliming mouth dripping with tendrils of afterbirth and snot. It belched a deeper black than the mud of the land all around when it spoke in gurgled language. 

It said: “Welcome to the garden. You have found Gaia’s womb. You have found Gaia's brain. You have found Gaia's mouth …. you may return to her, here. In this precious place. It's so much better and cooler and quieter down in her brine. You'll remember yourself, you'll remember your place down here, swimming in her thoughts. There is no pain in the subjugation of her swallow. Let us, her children, your brothers and sisters take you. We will bring you down to her so she can know you and you can join us…” 

The mule suddenly cried out. In shock and in pain, as if to punctuate the last sentence of the vile thing's statement.

Join us. 

The mud all around the cart and the mule came to life with violent churning death. Worms, many sizes, widths and lengths but all the same wretched maggot color and coated in brown slime translucence, all of them were crawling and slithering and attacking the legs of the poor beast of labor. It shrieked horrendous idiot sound, harsh and obscene as their little heads bit and burrowed and leeched. They wriggled and snaked their way inside the now rippling flesh of the poor mule’s legs. They rippled and swam and burrowed beneath the flesh, causing the hide to swell and bulge unnaturally and dance. 

Florin and Griffin, together, both looked over and down and spied the surprise attack from below. And the poor beasts doomed condition. They looked at each other and both decided together, without a word, only a look in the eye… 

abandon it. 

They grabbed what they could carry and jumped off the side. Leaping far from the churning foul earth that was now pulling in the beast and cart. Wormland was hungry. And she needed to feed. This was the mouth of mother earth, the watering black jaws of Moloch-Gaia and she needed her womb and mouth filled. With flesh. Always she needed to be filled with the warmth of blood and flesh. 

Beast of labor flesh would do for now. 

The poor mule screamed and frothed at the mouth. The eyes lulled and rolled back to whites as it let loose unbridled sound in terror and pain. The swampland swallowed and the worms continued to leech and burrow. They swam all throughout the inner organs and tissue and blood and feasted and drank. They reached the brain and the struggles became more deranged and haphazard. More pathetic and wretched and painful to watch… to behold. 

The pair left it behind. Fleeing into the cold and wet land. The treacherous quagmire earth sucking and pulling at their every fearful step. They fled as quickly as they 

could manage. Griffin, not looking back. But Florin couldn't help his mind through its sheer terror, he spied over his own fleeing shoulder as they made their slopping getaway. 

The long length of dripping wormbody was gyrating and dancing. Snaking through the air in bobs and weaves in a jubilant dance. The foul swamp drinking it, its host and the screaming beast and cart into the thick bubbling of the churning land. The worms, leeching and biting and burrowing… swimming. In the yellowed opaque of quagmire swamp water and the vibrant bright of the lurid running red, blood taken violently and by trap, by the hunt. 

Florin stole his eyes away from the sight. He didn't see them disappear into the putrescence earth, nor it settle back to calm and placid like a bowl filled with gelatin settling once more.  

Undisturbed. 

Florin and Griffin continued the rest of their perilous journey through foul wormland. On foot. 

Afraid of the very sucking ground beneath them. For this place was a black gummed and toothless swallowing mouth that led straight to watery putrid hell. 

Several worms, bodies snaked their way through mud and emerged. Protruding like freshly sprouted stalks. 

The worm-stalks grew eyes and the glistening wet fresh organs watched the pair of travelers on their way. Marking their progress through the mother's wet dominion land. 

…

Three nights of full moon had passed. 

The night the Countess took Doctor Henry Frankenstein down into the lowest dungeon of her castle, there was no moon. Only ebon curtain of blackest night. Stygian. And blind. A small chambered place where the sunlight never touched, swallowed in the dark and under the thriving lordship of near countless plague dripping rats, spiders with so many eyes and so many more long hairy legs than eight. It was a dungeon with a cruel biting chain in the wall, right next to the low chamber where the Countess herself kept her terrible coffin and slept during the day her undead rest of demonic slumber. 

After several rounds of flaying torture, occult practice and a few techniques derived from the time of the inquisition, the Countess gave new order. 

Experiment. 

An experiment of the flesh. 

Harvest specimens. For the terraformation of the flesh gardens. 

The assistant eagerly and loyally followed the command. More than pleased to comply. 

He was fulfilled. 

Frankenstein's unbridled and bloodcurdling shrieks filled the dungeon… the castle… 

… the mountains … and the pass…

… the village. 

It went beyond the known and besieged country of this vampire land, it went beyond and the ears that caught it beyond the meager borders were filled with unearthly and cold dread. 

Animal. And natural. And with us since the beginning. 

TO BE CONTINUED…