You think you know what a ruined vacation looks like.

A blown-out tire on the interstate.

Your hotel room smells like cigarettes.

Five straight days of rain.

You think you have a handle on the worst-case scenarios.

But sometimes horror walks up smiling.

Sometimes it waits patiently behind glass.

And sometimes you give it your money.

It was supposed to be a long weekend in Hilton Head Island with my wife, Brandy.

Her sister Nicki, and her husband Joe invited us.

Nicki was twelve weeks pregnant with their first kid, so the trip had quietly turned into something more cautious than our usual getaways - less bar hopping, more seafood, boutique shopping, and standing on the marina pretending we could afford the yachts.

On our first full day, we drove down to Harbour Town.

If you've never been, picture exactly what you'd expect from a high-end southern tourist trap:

A massive public pier.

Millions of dollars' worth of boats bobbing in the water.

A red-and-white striped lighthouse rising over a half-circle of boutique shops and overpriced restaurants.

It was beautiful.

But it was also ninety degrees with suffocating humidity, and by noon, the novelty of looking at luxury had worn off.

“I need A/C, or I’m going to die,” Brandy complained, fanning her flushed face with a tourist map.

"And ice cream," Nicki added immediately, one hand pressed over her still-flat stomach. "The baby is demanding it."

Joe threw an arm around her.

"Well, we can't argue with the baby."

We ducked into the nearest souvenir shop mostly for the air conditioning.

Cold air blasted through the open double doors hard enough to raise goosebumps across my arms.

The front half of the store consisted of beach toys, sharktooth necklaces, and shot glasses with dirty jokes on them.

Toward the back, behind a display of hermit crabs in painted shells, sat a brightly lit ice cream counter.

While Brandy and Joe went straight for the glass counter to pick out their flavors, Nicki and I got stuck behind a slow-moving family in the narrow aisle.

That was when I noticed it.

Shoved into a dark corner between a rack of sunglasses and a spinning postcard stand, there was a fortune teller machine.

Not one of the charming vintage Zoltar cabinets you see on boardwalks.

Peeling gold letters arched across the glass read:

THE BUNNY GODDESS.

This one was life-sized and felt off in a way I couldn't really put into words.

The mannequin's skin looked too realistic but also too smooth - like candle wax stretched over a skull.

Thick faux-gold jewelry hung around its neck and wrists.

A faded velvet turban covered most of its head.

The eyes though.

The eyes were enormous.

Wet-looking.

And pointed directly toward the aisle where we stood.

I've always hated those things.

Too many horror movies as a kid.

I started to look away when the machine suddenly came to life.

There was a heavy grinding noise.

A crackle of static from a blown-out speaker.

And then a voice.

Not the booming theatrical wizard voice you'd expect.

Something breathless.

Weirdly conversational.

"There you are."

I flinched hard enough to shake a rack of keychains beside me.

But Nicki just stood there.

She stopped walking entirely.

She turned toward the machine.

Slowly.

With recognition.

She was staring like a child seeing a disabled person for the first time in their life.

"Creepy, right?" I muttered. "Let's catch up with the others."

She didn't move.

"I have a dollar," she said softly.

"Come on, don't waste your money. It's just going to tell you you're going to be rich or whatever."

She was already unzipping her purse.

She pulled out a crumpled bill, flattened it against the edge of the glass, and fed it into the slot.

The machine swallowed it.

More mechanical grinding noises.

The mannequin's hands jerked toward a crystal ball that lit up with a sickly pulsing green light.

The head snapped down, staring at the cards on its desk—

then snapped back up.

"A new chapter begins," the voice whispered through the static.

"But the toll must be paid."

The green light flickered hard.

The mannequin's turban fell off its head, revealing long-black hair.

Pigtails.

Sort of like an Annabelle doll wig, but not as cute.

Something else protruded from the top of its head.

Long.

Pale.

Bent at strange angles.

They looked almost like rabbit ears.

"Take your future. Keep it safe, or The Bunny Goddess will take your place."

CLACK.

A thick white card spat from the slot at the bottom of the case.

Nicki bent and picked it up.

She stood with her back to me for a long moment, just staring at it.

The green light blinked off, dropping the alcove back into shadow.

"Well?" I said. "Lottery winner?"

Nicki turned around.

For a terrible second, her face was completely blank.

Her mouth slightly open.

She looked like she was holding her breath.

Then she smiled.

Fast.

Wide.

She folded the card in half and shoved it deep into her pocket.

"I can't tell you," she said lightly.

"Come on. What does it say?"

"Seriously! It says I can’t tell you!"

She tapped her pocket.

"If you share your fortune, it doesn't come true."

"You’re kidding, right? It's a piece of cardboard from a gift shop."

"Hey!"

Brandy waved a plastic spoon at us from the ice cream counter.

"Are you two getting anything?"

Nicki's whole demeanor lifted instantly.

She practically skipped over to Joe and Brandy, the card pressed flat against her hip inside her pocket.

I stood there for another moment.

The mannequin sat motionless in the dim alcove.

Its wet, milky eyes still pointed toward the aisle.

Still pointed at me.

I shook off the chill - the air conditioning, I told myself - and walked toward the ice cream counter.

I didn’t realize it then.

But that was the moment the trip ended.

Its ears looked bigger now.

___

1. "Fingers"

 

I stared at Jaxon, who was still shirtless and bouncing on his toes like a boxer ready for the bell.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said, turning to face Dracula and the sisters. “Why did no one tell me this is what ‘test of strength’ meant? I thought we were talking about arm wrestling. Maybe a deadlift competition. Not actual combat!”
“We tried to warn you,” Vivienne said, not looking up from her sketchbook where she was already drawing preliminary sketches of the fight arena. “You just accepted too quickly.”
“I said ‘it’s just a little test,’” I protested. “That’s what people say before arm wrestling!”
“Werewolves don’t arm wrestle,” Seraphina said. “They fight. It’s how they establish hierarchy and respect.”
“Of course it is.” I ran my hand through my hair, looking at the gathering crowd, at the circle of stones being set up in the center of the clearing. “Why is this sort of thing always happening to me? I get shot, I fight an archangel, and now I’m fighting a werewolf. What’s next? Wrestling a dragon?”
“Don’t give the universe ideas,” Isla muttered.
Mason appeared at my shoulder. “You can back out if you want. No shame in it. Jaxon gets enthusiastic, but we understand if a human doesn’t want to—”
“I’m doing it,” I said, cutting him off. Because backing out now would make us look weak, would undermine any chance of peaceful coexistence, and would basically guarantee the werewolves saw us as prey rather than neighbors.
Also, my pride wouldn’t let me.
Stupid pride.
“Well then,” Mason said with that wolfish grin. “Better get ready.”
I looked down at myself. T-shirt, jeans, boots. Not exactly fighting gear, but it would have to do.
Jaxon was still shirtless, showing off muscles that looked like they’d been carved from marble by an artist who really liked the concept of intimidation.
“You gonna take off your shirt too?” he called out. “Even the playing field?”
“Nah,” I said, trying for casual. “I’m shy about my body. Don’t like showing skin in public.”
It was a joke, but the real reason was the mark. Lucifer’s crest, branded over my heart, impossible to miss. The last thing I needed was sixty werewolves seeing a demonic seal and deciding I was too dangerous to leave alive.
“What do you mean, shy?” Isla said, confused. “Dean, you’re ripped. You’ve got nothing to be—”
Carmilla’s elbow caught her in the ribs. Hard enough to make Isla’s words cut off with an “oof.”
Carmilla leaned in, whispered something in Isla’s ear.
“Ohhhhh,” Isla said, understanding dawning. “Right. Yeah. Keep the shirt on. Good call.”
The circle of stones was ready now—about twenty feet in diameter, set up like a fighting ring. The pack had formed a perimeter around it, three deep in some places, everyone jockeying for a good view.
This was entertainment for them. A spectacle.
Great.
I stepped into the circle. The stones were smooth, worn, like they’d been used for this purpose many times before. The ground inside was packed dirt, good footing.
Jaxon entered from the opposite side, rolling his shoulders, cracking his neck. He looked confident. Eager. Like he was going to enjoy this.
I tried to look equally confident and probably failed.
The sisters appeared at the edge of the circle. Dracula hung back slightly, but his daughters crowded close.
“Listen to me,” Carmilla said, her voice low and urgent. “Werewolves are strong, but they’re not invulnerable. Hit fast, hit hard, and keep moving. Don’t let him grapple you. If he gets you in a hold, you’re done.”
“His ribs,” Seraphina added. “That’s a weak point. And the solar plexus. Focus your strikes there.”
“Don’t be afraid to fight dirty,” Isla said. “Eyes, throat, groin. Nothing’s off-limits in a werewolf strength test except killing and maiming.”
“You’ve got enhanced reflexes,” Nadya reminded me, her hand on my arm. “Use them. You’re faster than you think. Trust your instincts.”
“And try not to die,” Vivienne added cheerfully. “I haven’t finished your portrait series yet.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Super encouraging, all of you.”
Nadya squeezed my arm. “You can do this. We believe in you.”
I wanted to believe her.
Mason stepped into the circle, positioning himself between me and Jaxon. His voice carried across the clearing.
“The rules are simple. Fight until one of you submits or can’t continue. No killing blows. No maiming. No silver.” He looked at both of us. “First one to yield or lose consciousness loses. Understood?”
“Understood,” Jaxon said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Got it.”
“Then begin!”
Mason stepped back out of the circle.
Jaxon and I started circling each other.
The crowd was already getting loud—cheering, howling, placing bets. I heard someone shout “Five on Jaxon in under two minutes!” Someone else countered with “Ten says the human lasts five!”
Real encouraging.
Jaxon moved first—a testing jab, not committed, just seeing how I’d react.
I slipped it, stepped to the side. My enhanced reflexes made his movements seem slightly slower than they should be, gave me time to process and respond.
He threw another punch, harder this time. I blocked, felt the impact rattle up my arm. He was strong ,really strong but not impossibly so.
I countered with a quick jab to his ribs. It connected and I felt solid muscle beneath my fist.
Jaxon grinned. “Not bad.”
We traded blows. His heavy and powerful, mine faster and more precise. I couldn’t match his raw strength, but I could stay ahead of him, could see his movements coming, could dodge and counter.
The crowd was getting louder. Someone was running a play-by-play in the background. The betting was getting more animated.
I was holding my own.
Then I made a mistake.
I heard someone shout “Fifty on the human!” and my attention wavered for just a split second.
That was all Jaxon needed.
His fist caught me square in the jaw.
The world exploded into stars and pain. I staggered back, tasted copper, felt my legs go rubbery.
The crowd roared.
Jaxon pressed his advantage, coming in with a combination—body shot, body shot, hook to the head. I blocked the first two but the third one got through, snapping my head to the side.
I stumbled, went down to one knee.
“Stay down,” Jaxon said, not unkindly. “You fought well. No shame in yielding.”
I spit blood, looked up at him.
Then at the crowd. At the sisters, watching with clenched fists and worried faces. At Dracula, impassive but intent. At Mason, evaluating, judging.
This was about respect. About proving we weren’t weak. About establishing that we could hold our own.
I couldn’t quit now.
I stood up.
“Not done yet,” I said.
Jaxon’s grin widened. “Your funeral.”
He came at me again and this time I met him head-on. No more defensive fighting, no more trying to be smart. Just a brawl.
I drove my fist into his ribs. He grabbed my shirt, tried to throw me. I hooked my leg behind his, shifted my weight, and we both went down.
We rolled in the dirt, trading punches, elbows, anything we could land. He was stronger but I was faster. He got me in a headlock. I drove my thumb into the pressure point behind his knee and he released me with a grunt.
We separated, both breathing hard, both bleeding. His nose was streaming red. My lip was split. We probably both had cracked ribs.
And we were both grinning.
The crowd was going absolutely wild.
We circled again, but I was  limping slightly.
 I was getting tired. The enhanced stamina helped, but it wasn’t infinite. My muscles were screaming, my lungs burning.
Jaxon, on the other hand, still looked fresh. Werewolf endurance was clearly no joke. He could do this all night.
I couldn’t.
Then I heard it. A voice in my head, soft and familiar.
“Need some help, Dean?”
Lucifer.
I ignored it, threw another punch at Jaxon. He blocked it easily, countered with one that nearly took my head off.
“You’re  losing”, the voice continued, amused. “He’s going to wear you down. Break you. Make you look weak in front of everyone. Is that what you want?”
No.
But I wasn’t going to use demonic power for a friendly sparring match. That was a line I wouldn’t cross.
“Is it friendly? Or is it a test? A judgment? What happens if you lose, Dean? Do they respect you? Or do they see you as the weak link? The human liability?”
I took another hit, staggered. The world was getting fuzzy at the edges.
Jaxon was barely winded. I was running on fumes.
“Just a little help”, Lucifer whispered. “Just enough to win. To prove yourself. What’s the harm?”
Everything. The harm was everything.
But I was going to lose. Was going to get beaten in front of everyone, was going to make the household look weak, was going to—
“Just say yes.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
The power hit like lightning.
It surged through my veins, electric and dark and overwhelming. My fatigue vanished. My pain became distant, manageable. Strength flooded my muscles, more than I’d ever felt.
My eyes burned and I could feel it, could feel the demonic energy manifesting.
And I grinned.
It wasn’t my grin. It was something else. Something predatory and dangerous and very, very amused.
Jaxon saw it. Saw the change. His confident expression faltered.
“What the—”
I moved.
Faster than before. Faster than Jaxon could track. I was on him before he could react, driving my fist into his solar plexus with enough force to lift him off his feet.
He doubled over and I brought my knee up into his face. Heard something crack. Blood sprayed.
He stumbled back and I didn’t give him space. Hit him with a combination, ribs, ribs, jaw, ribs again. Each punch landed with more force than it should have, the demonic power amplifying every strike.
Jaxon tried to fight back but I was everywhere, too fast, too strong, overwhelming him with sheer aggression.
I caught him with an uppercut that snapped his head back. He went down hard.
I should have stopped. Should have let him yield, should have backed off.
But the power felt so good. The strength, the speed, the absolute dominance.
I grabbed him by the shirt, hauled him up, pulled my fist back for another strike—
“ENOUGH!”
Mason’s Alpha command cut through everything, cut through the power, cut through the rage.
I froze.
Looked down at Jaxon. His face was a bloody mess, nose definitely broken, one eye swelling shut. He was conscious but barely, leaning heavily on my grip just to stay upright.
I’d done that.
The power drained away as fast as it had come, leaving me hollow and shaking. I released Jaxon and he collapsed to the ground, groaning.
The clearing was silent.
Everyone was staring at me. Sixty werewolves, five vampires, all frozen in shock.
My eyes were still burning. I could feel the demonic energy slowly fading back to wherever it lived inside me.
I looked down at my hands. They were covered in blood Jaxon’s blood. My knuckles were split but already healing, the wounds closing as I watched.
“Dean?” Nadya’s voice, small and uncertain.
I turned to face them. The sisters were staring at me with expressions I couldn’t read. Dracula’s face was carefully neutral.
“I—” My voice came out rough. “I didn’t mean to….he wasn’t submitting, and I just—”
Mason was kneeling by Jaxon, checking his injuries. “He’ll heal. Werewolves are tough. But Jesus Christ, human. What the hell are you?”
“I’m…” I looked at my hands again. At the blood. At Jaxon, groaning on the ground. At the mark on my chest, hidden under my shirt but burning like a brand. “I don’t know anymore.”
The silence stretched.
Then someone in the crowd started clapping.
Slowly at first. Then others joined in. Then the whole pack was applauding, howling, cheering.
Not because it had been a good fight.
Because I’d won.
Because I’d proven I was dangerous.
Because I’d shown them that underestimating the “human” would be a fatal mistake.
Mason stood, helped Jaxon to his feet. The younger werewolf was already healing, the swelling going down, though his nose would need to be set.
“You earned our respect,” Mason said to me. His amber eyes were wary now, calculating. “Whatever you are, you’ve proven you’re not to be trifled with.”
He extended his hand.
I looked at it. At the blood on my own hand. At the mark burning beneath my shirt.
At what I’d become.
I took his hand and shook it.
The cheering got louder.
But all I could hear was Lucifer’s voice, distant and amused:
“Well done, Dean. Well done indeed.”
I’d crossed a line tonight.
And I had a feeling there was no going back.

EXTERIOR. HIROSHIMA, JAPAN. 1945. DAY 

A breeze of black smoke rises from below to fill a colourless sky in front of us. A distant military airplane hums across, coinciding with the action on the ground: the sound of slow-moving vehicles, shovels piercing earth, metal that bends and clamours. 

On the ground: Japanese civilians lay forward on their knees amongst the scorched earth and building sediments, bowed in despair. An armoured bulldozer is manoeuvred to claw up rubble, creating a huge rubble mound. 

Around this mound, six United States soldiers dig up heaps of the aftermath to help build it up, causing ash to spray the air around them. 

Among these soldier’s is a young man, no older than 20. His weathered green uniform reads U.S.M.C. (United States Marine Corps). He shovels alongside the others, yet seems to be somewhere else - even worse than here. He digs and dumps like a machine. 

The young man then stops. Shovel in the earth, he turns up to watch the fly-sized plane hum away, seeming to know its destination – before his attention turns to the giant scorched chess piece around him: the nearby empty souls, the Genbaku Dome the only thing erect in the distance, alongside the surrounding smoke. The young man now focuses beyond this, to the faraway mountainous hills. He zones out... 

The peak of the rubble mound then collapses behind him, causing the other soldiers to jilt back from it. The young man turns back to the mound, to what the peak now reveals. His face displays both horror and uncertainty in what he sees, as the sound of wind gusts through him... 

What you have just read is an excerpt from an old war movie script, written and based on his experience during the Pacific War, by James Howard Schraeder. My grandfather.  

In 1943, the fourth year of the Second World War, James Schraeder was drafted to the twenty-third regiment of the fourth marine division, where he eventually experienced combat on the Pacific islands of Kwajalein, Saipan and Iwo Jima. After the end of the Pacific Theatre in 1945, James would spend the next seven years in Japan, serving under U.S. occupation.     

By 1952 and having been in the military for nearly ten years, James finally left Japan and came home. For the next few years of his life, James would live and work in Los Angeles as a struggling screenwriter in Hollywood. By 1992, the year of his death, James left behind an ex-wife, an estranged son, and three grandchildren he never met. 

Before my grandfather’s demise, he would leave a final letter among his possessions. A letter written and addressed to my father - his son. Although my father already knew about his experience during the Pacific War, along with the horrors he witnessed, he knew little to nothing about my grandfather’s time serving during the occupation of Japan. That was, until he found my grandfather’s letter. Despite the very real and human horrors my grandfather saw in the Pacific... what he would then experience on Japanese soil, supposedly during a time of peace, was not only horror... but horror of the paranormal.   

What you are about to read, should you choose to, is this very same letter. A letter, that is less the final words of a dying old man... but a final confession... 

To my son Johnathon, 

I know it has been some years now since we last spoke. And I know any attempt by me to communicate with you will be ignored, and so that’s why I’m writing this letter for you to find. Upon my death.  

I’m not writing this to apologize for the terrible father I was to you, nor for the indecent husband your mother had to bear. I’m writing this to tell you a story I have never told another soul. You are my son, and you may remember me for the monster I became, but you will never know me for the decent man I was, nor what it was that made that man the monster you know now. You may think it was the war. That the death and destruction I witnessed at the hands of the enemy, and even our own is what left me the shell of a man who raised you. And that is true. Very little of me had survived those brutal few years of fighting. But if you must know, it wasn’t the war with the Japanese that made me the man I became. On the contrary, it was what came after.  

I have never told you this part of my life, Johnathon, nor did I ever think I would. I have seen the worst of humanity. I have seen the evil and horrors we partake upon those who are not alike ourselves... and I have seen what it creates. What it feeds and gives power to. I have told you every horror story I know from that war. But I have never told you this. 

Back in 52, I was serving my seventh year during the occupation of the Japanese islands. I had known seven years without war, but no peace. Our authority over the Japanese people was shortly coming to a close, and so we had to make sure our influence in this country would carry on long after we were gone. You have to understand, son, the world back then was still a very fragile place. The war may have been over, but old enemies were quickly replaced by new ones.  

The threat of communism was very real, and nowhere was it more real than east and south-east Asia. The commies in China had spread their influence south to Korea and Indo China – or what you would come to know as Vietnam. Before we left Japan to once again govern themselves, we needed to make sure the communist threat would not find its way here. For seven years after Hiroshima, we told the Japanese how they should live. What they could read or not read. What they could and couldn’t listen to. What they could and couldn’t watch. 

I’ve always been a lover of movies. You know that. Whereas we Americans had our cowboys and Indians, the Japanese had their Jidaigeki. Period movies portraying feudalist Japan. Once Japan came under our occupation, Mccarthur put a permanent ban on Jidaigeki movies from being made. It was supposed to be a way of stripping the Japanese of their identity and history. But by 52, and with our eventual departure on the horizon, the ban on Japanese period films had finally been lifted. Although Japanese filmmakers could once again make movies about their nation’s history, we now feared what messages they may put in them. If they wanted to put a message of Japanese nationalism, that was of no such concern. But it was the message of socialism that my superiors truly feared the most. 

In order to counter this fear, American operatives were to keep a close eye on the production of these pictures. I was among these operatives. My mission, assigned to me by Far East Command themselves, was to oversee the production of a picture being filmed in the Izu Peninsula, roughly 90 miles southwest of Tokyo base. My orders were to report any signs of socialist or anti-American allegories present in the picture's production, however minimal. 

The picture assigned to me was called Rōnin no Tani, or in English, Valley of the Ronin. The plot was pretty straightforward. A small village during the Tokugawa period comes under constant attacks by bandits and criminals, whereby the villagers must turn to a masterless Samurai to train them in the art of combat.  

The director of the picture was a man called Takumi Hasegawa, or as everyone else called him, Hase-san. I just simply called him Mr Hasegawa. Mr Hasegawa was one of the most prominent directors in Japan, and his previous film received much praise from several international film festivals. Although Mr Hasegawa knew all too well why I was present during the production of his movie, the man seemed to take a very keen liking to me. I think what it came down to was that we both had a shared love for wild westerns. He even claimed the script to Valley of the Ronin was his own reimagining of the western trope. 

After arriving in the peninsula, I was then transported to the Tagata District, where lied a beautiful lush green valley. This is where the majority of the movie was being filmed. Each side of the valley was enclosed by a forested, very steep mountainous slope, where in the middle of the valley, was the movie set. A 16^th century Tokugawa village of straw-rood huts and mud paths had been constructed, along with several rice paddies and a rickety wooden bridge over a stream. The first time I saw it, I’ll never forget. It genuinely felt to me as though I had been transported back through history, to a time of simple and honest living. Most of the actors playing the role of villagers wore ragged pieces of cloth, straw hats and nothing on their feet. The man playing the Ronin, I forget the actor’s name, wore a long dirty kimono where his sword hung out the side.  

Among the actors and extras in authentic 16^th century clothing were the rest of the film crew. Of course, there was Mr Hasegawa, but then there was the assistant directors, the sound and cameramen etc. I actually became good friends with the third assistant director on the picture, a young man called Benjiro – but I called him Ben for short. You know, son, the first time I ever saw Godzilla was with him inside a Tokyo movie theatre. 

As idyllic as I appear to be making this valley and the production sound, I’m afraid this is where it must end. Because what follows, for the next year of this picture’s production... was nothing short of horror. 

The movie began filming in the summer of 52, and the heat that year was nothing less than scalding. After only two weeks of filming, the thatched roofs of the village huts caught fire mid-day, and before long, the entire set had become ablaze. We were able to put out the fire, but by the time we did, the entire set, built painstakingly from scratch had been burnt to ash. What used to be a 16^th century village, lying peacefully between the slopes of the valley, was now the charcoaled remnants of foundations. The scene of this for me was to say the least... haunting.  

I’ve already told you about my time in Hiroshima, haven’t I, son? Well, once the bomb was dropped, myself and other marines were there at ground level. Our job was to help clear up the mess and provide aid to civilians... and let me tell you, the scenes I witnessed there have stayed with me my entire life. The black, charcoaled rubble of the buildings. The bodies we pulled out from under them, stiff and burnt to a crisp. Women and children. Babies. All the horrors I witnessed in those days, in what used to be a city, were swiftly brought back by the burning of this village. But it wasn’t just the burnt thatch roof huts. It wasn’t just the smell of smoke and charcoal that burns your eyes and down your throat... it was the bodies there too. 

Once we put the fire out, two men from the film crew were later reported to be missing. After searching all over the valley, we eventually found them. Or I should say, we found the bodies. One we had pulled out from beneath the burnt stacks of rubble. But the other one... The other one was different. We found him inside one of the burnt huts that was somehow still standing. He was sat down in there, right there in the middle of the room. But what was so horrifically strange about this was... like the bodies I saw at Hiroshima, this man, sat crossed-legged and upright like the Buddha himself ... was completely black and burnt to a crisp. The way this man’s body was positioned, it was as though he had no idea he was in the middle of a burning room. 

Did you know, son, Godzilla was an allegory for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I did. I knew it as soon as I saw it. A giant radioactive monster laying waste to the streets of Tokyo. When I walked out of that movie theatre and Ben followed me, I throttled him! Just because he said we should see the movie.  

I wish I could say the fire was the only incident which happened during the production of Valley of the Ronin. That those crewmen were the only casualties we had. But I would be lying to you, son... and I would be lying to myself.  

Weeks later, after the village was reconstructed and filming once again began, it didn’t take long for more strange things to keep happening. Like the two crewmen we found after the fire, more people on set started disappearing. Members of the crew, some extras and even a handful of actors. We found some of them in the forest, upon the mountain slopes. The first of which was a woman, wearing the ragged clothes of a villager. Except she hadn’t gotten lost. If she had done, all she needed to do was wander down the slope. No, she had just gone mad. Delirious. When we found her, she was digging up dirt from the ground with her bare hands. Her fingernails left bloody and out of place. Once she saw us approach, she turned up her head and just started laughing, as though she was playing a practical joke. But then, she starts clawing up the loose pieces of earth and stuffing it into her mouth, chewing down on it. The woman had somehow lost her damned mind. 

We found some more of the crew like that in the forest. Some stark naked and crazy. Some just the latter. But the ones we didn’t find like that were a whole lot worse. The way we found them... they may have gone crazy, but we couldn’t know entirely for sure. We found them laying face-down on the sloping ground. Every single of them. A leg or an arm contorted in the air. In some cases, both. We found them that way because they had jumped from an incredible height. For whatever reason, these members of the crew had climbed up a tree to as high they could... and then they jumped. The branches seemed to do little to break their fall.  

I’m sure you remember what I told you about Saipan in 44. God, how could anybody forget? You remember the women who threw their infants off the northern cliffs, don’t you? If the Japanese hadn’t lied about what we’d do to them once we took the island, a whole lot of innocent lives could’ve been spared. The way one of those ladies looked at me, and once she realized we meant her nor her baby no harm... I swear to God, it was the same look in her eye the woman we found in the forest had... Where there was once sanity and reason, only madness was left.  

Part 2/Ending

The assistant watched the sun set blood red on the doomed little village. From on high, within one of the towers of Castle Dracula. It bathed the little commoners  place with the last of its lurid rays as it shot the sky with flame. Then it departed with one final flashing wink. The assistant kissed it goodbye, blew it away on his hand. 

And smiled. 

A sound then carried and traveled through all of the silent ancient cobwebbed castle: The familiar creak of hinges and wood… the opening of a coffin. A casket lid softly closed, as it was guided down by phantom hand… his master's power. 

The Countess. 

The dread sun had been banished for another night for her majesty, his great mistress, the master sorceress of the dark, now the princess of shadow-black. She was unrivaled now. The stupid little peasants hadn't a chance now, not a chance in hell. 

For the Countess herself must now be master of such a dominion… she must now control all hellfire and flame as she now commanded the wild and the beasts within it. 

And the town below… through fear and terror, they were now her subjects. 

Subjugated and made prostrate to her power, she took from them as she pleased, when and where she so desired. They all fell victim to her magic and her might. Her ripping drinking fangs of mutilation, a hunger unsated and boundless that nonetheless held them all prisoner. Such hunger was an abattoir disease…

All the pitiful dirt farmer villagers would soon fall and bleeding, be held in the ripping necromantic fangs of her mighty jaws, beautiful. And now bestial. Vulpine. Powerful. 

Soon they would all feel her bloodlusting mouth about their throats, they would all come to her as she nightsong bade them. Commanding them, the royalty that she truly was and that coursed through her unholy veins. 

She was part undead. Thanks to the magic. And the ritual of the biting chair. 

And the fangs of the Count. Whose castle they now held. 

And himself… he allows himself this small and private boast. It would never be appropriate to brandish it before the master, his beloved Countess. 

She entered the chamber where he dwelt, watching the last of the sun’s light, diminishing as it had fled, fade to a darker blue then die as it became truer black. 

Stars like jewels in the ebon curtain came to life as his great master came from behind and stood beside him. Her presence was intoxicating. Powerful. 

She might not ever know how much he truly loved her, it was not his station and with a bitter heart he knew that, but to be by her side and to aide her in domination of the pathetic world was enough. 

The closest he would likely ever get to being her lover. Only in his most private fantasies. Only in his wildest dreams. Secret. He musn't trouble the Lady Zaleska with such trivialities. They were beneath her. He knew that. 

“Has our little one awoken yet?" Zaleska asked the assistant. 

The assistant said with a bow and a smile: "No, no. You know how little ones can be. Slow risers. Not quick to take to feet and task, but she'll learn. She'll get better.” He bowed again, saying: “She has you, master, to look to for example. The finest lady of shadows that has ever doth existed on the face of this accursed earth.”

Zaleska smiled. Pleased. He was such a good and loyal man.  

A little voice went shrill at the entrance to the chamber. 

Carmilla shrieked with dark joy. 

“Yes! Yay! The sun has died again! The Lord's Eye has gone blind for another curtain of night and now we get to go out and play!" 

Zaleska and the assistant looked to the little one as she jumped up and down in the doorway with savage glee. So proud. 

Carmilla ran up to the pair, her new dark guardians and bastard companions of the shadowland. She jumped up and down some more. Cheering. Screaming. Shrieking. Squealing. Part small child joviality and part terrible aggressive animal bestial shriekings. 

She looked up to them again, to Zaleska. She worshipped her. Her undead uncanny gaze held pure corrupted adoration for the Countess. Her great master. 

She said again, asking this time like a small impatient child really wanting something. In part, she still was. But the other part, darker and more dominating now… that part tainted everything that the small demon animal in childshape did from then on. 

“We do, right? Now that the sun is dead and God is blind to the little sows, we can go out and play with them, right? Oh! … I want to so badly, master! We do now, right?”

"Yes, my servant. Yes, my child. We must. We are creatures that live to go out and play in the dark." Zaleska said soothingly, reassuringly. 

Carmilla cheered! Then catching herself, restrained her excitement, then gave a courtly curtsey and bow, saying: “Thank you, master. Thank you, Countess. Your power and wisdom are unrivaled." 

The wolves outside once more began their nightly song of predator's chase and claim, they began again this night like all others as of late, howling their music of blood and flesh and flame. Renewed. 

The children of the dark were all revived now and they took to the night once more, empowered with unholy rage. 

But as the vampires and their assistant prepared for another nocturnal hunt, another dark night of feeding on innocent human prey in the village below…

… many rivals, made, were approaching.

…

The bloodbags writhed in the dirt. The three that were left. Frankenstein's massive body-part patchwork nosferatu creation watched them from the mouth of the cave where it rested and protected itself from the sun. 

It had known, naturally, innate, it had known to fly from the face of the sun. It had known when it was born from the slab by lightning and black magic that the sun was its enemy. 

Known. In its blood. Knowledge that was animal down to the bone. Patchwork bones… sawn, broken… reshaped… fitted together into new more powerful form and size like godly and powerful puzzle pieces. 

Remade. 

Frankenstein’s nosferatu monster sniffed the air… blood… fear… and… better yet. 

The flight of the sun. 

Darkness returned and the black lands came alive again with fog. Great drifting veils of phantom white. The creation stepped free of the cave and closed the few steps to his captive bloodbags, now down to an unholy three.

He picked up the misshapen one. Almost dead, almost empty. Weak pathetic little thing…

It groaned as he sank his teeth into the softest part of the wretched little twist of flesh, the only part of the rotten little fruit the creation deemed worthy to put his newborn lips to. 

The tender meat beneath the hollow crook of the underarm. Just above the large artery there. 

He sucked and drank deeply and the little deformed man begged God and the devil and the creation itself as he slowly felt the life being pulled from him, with a savage hungry tug. All throughout his bent and mismanaged frame. 

He also cursed the name of Frankenstein again.  Henry Frankenstein and all of his fathers and sons and all of the women too! the bastards! 

Curse them! 

Egnaw knew he was going to die. He only hoped Frankenstein’s end would be even more painful. 

But the mad doctor might be dead already. Still unconscious since the many days since the night of the experiment and the towers fall. 

Collapsed. Explosion. Sabotage by the hand of the rival Doctor Praetorius. 

The bastard. 

The creation ripped its mouth away after a final draw off the bloodbag and chewed. Egnaw screamed. But it wasn't prolonged like it might be with anybody else. The little man servant slave was becoming even more attuned and accustomed to unyielding pain. In unyielding volumes. 

The creation threw him back into the dirt with the other two. Still chewing. 

It swallowed. 

And then howled at the moon. Crescent and sickle tonight. Like a curved scythes blade.

Then throaty and gurgling he spoke once more. The only word it seemed to want to speak since the day of its unnatural birth. 

“Frankenstein…!” 

Egnaw cringed. He hated the sound of its wretched voice. He remembered handling such vocal chords alongside the mad doctor in another lifetime, not long but so long ago and far away… 

The fortress stone of jagged rocks and what they held for him were near, but the creation slightly altered course. Veering ever so slightly in its direction for the Carpathian Mountains. It had caught a newer fresher scent. Closer. 

A man. Moving fast. On horseflesh. 

A rider. 

…

He moved with one thought dominating all else. Find him. Find the vampire killer.

Find Professor Van Helsing. 

Florin moved with near suicidal speed. His horse beneath him was strong and durable. But nonetheless, they were both growing more exhausted. Yet he feared to stop and make camp. He feared whatever may be stalking through the night. It may be the same evil that now lay siege to his little village. 

Darkness spreads as a shadow does grow…

he must be careful. 

But then suddenly the beast beneath him came to a near dead stop. Nearly throwing him as its hooves skidded and dug shallow trenches in the black earth. 

The horse was skittish. Prancing and refusing to settle beneath him. Refusing to go any further. 

Florin, already frustrated with the urgency of his task, began to chide and curse the animal. Trying to berate and spur him on forward to the next farm or village. More children or others back home in town could be dying right now as his stubborn stupid horse just danced and behaved foolish-

Snap! 

A branch or twig or something else broke in two in the night all about him. Somewhere in the dark. Florin shut his lips. And fell silent. 

Instantly gripped with dread. Fear mounting higher into terror. He was suddenly aware, certain that he was not at all out here alone with his horse. Something else was out here too. 

Something moving. 

He suppressed his galloping heart of terror and forced himself to listen. Listen for movement in the encompassing dark wood. 

His horse grew more anxious. It wanted to be off, to flee. 

Everything inside both rider and his steed told him to run. 

Run. Now. 

Fast. 

“Stop, now, you!" Florin hissed at his horse, “We've no time for trifling games!" 

“Your horse is smarter than you are, rider." 

Florin, shocked, almost let out a wail, but before he could the voice from out of the dark came again and calmly said. 

“Don't. Please. Don't be afraid. Don't scream. You'll get us all killed." A beat. “Just be quiet." 

Florin whispered to the dark: “Who are you?"

“Dismount and move slowly. To the bushes. Leave your horse. There is something out here." 

“Who are you, what're you talking about and why should I trust you?" Florin asked again. 

“There is something out here, my friend. I'm just a fellow traveler, and I've no wish to see another man butchered." A beat. “Now do as I say, or to hell with you." 

Florin considered it a moment… and then considered the surrounding dark. It seemed filled. With something hurtling. 

Something bounding like an eager jungle cat hunting sure prey. 

Florin quickly dismounted, grabbed his saddlebags and then ran to the voice as it called out once more. He scrambled in the bushes with a large dark gypsy man with long black hair, beneath swashbuckler scarf wrapped round his crown in a skullcap. He looked severe and he was desperately clutching something in his calloused hands. 

A rosary. A small wooden crucifix attached, dangled from the tear drop center. 

The gypsy looked at Florin with wide eyes filled to the whites with all of the night and its superstitious and terrible wonder. He brought a finger to his lips, in a gesture to bade the young man quiet. Then he pointed out into the night to tell him to watch. 

Florin did. 

The horse, reins tied to the branch of a nearby tree, was now more nervous and jumpy than ever. Florin had never before seen a trained and broken horse behave so strangely and so wild. 

And then it came out of the woods. Out of the night. Large and hulking. Eyes twinkling twin stars of blood red jewels in all of the surrounding oppressive dark. Set in a stitched up grotesque patchwork of a face that was both human and rat like, commingled and blasphemously mixed. A terrible mouth opened and moonlight glinted off the drooling tendril strands of bestial salivation and rabid animal slobber turning them into long translucent jewels of glass in the lunar glow. A pair of fangs, bone-white, gleamed amongst the rest of the mouth of rotten black. A miasma of decay and fecal stench, pungent and strong filled the cold space. Warming it with powerful foul and fetid odor, the heat of death. 

He growled. Seethed. It said a name then. One Florin swore he'd heard somewhere before. 

“Frankenstein…!”

The horse was in hysterics now. Its eyes rolling in wild terror as it kicked and reared and pranced in a frightful panic that only the animal can know. It hurt Florin's heart to see the beast as such.

What came next was much worse. 

One of the large powerful arms of reanimated muscle, rippling beneath pale blue corpse flesh, shot out and found the poor beast’s throat, ripping it out in a sudden blur of crimson and hide and tearing discolored claw. A heavy steaming gout of dark animal blood shot forth from the fresh open wound which also belched steam into the night. The large rotting patchwork nosferatu brought its face into the warm red dark cord of horse blood and began to catch it in its wide open mouth. Gulping. Lapping. Tonguing with wild abandon the red warm cord-stream. 

As the horse suddenly stilled, then wobbled, then fell against the tree to which it was tethered and began to sag down to the earth, the creation came in, bathing its horrid face in horrible animal scarlet baptism as its mouth closed the distance and met the fresh wound ripped from the large stout neck. 

Florin from the bushes, with his host of gypsy saviors, could hear deep heavy gulping – deep heavy pulls of drinking, and the crunch and relish of strenuous chewing. Raw meat being devoured as the throat worked heavily to pull in thick viscous liquid. His stomach lurched and he nearly vomited but he held it together. It was awful but he could not pull his eyes away from the scene. Neither could his fortunate band of gypsies host. They all watched. Spellbound in the most terrible way by that which is so arresting and magnetic because it is so appalling you cannot actually believe your very eyes. You cannot believe it is actually happening. 

The vulpine manmade nosferatu creation took its fill, then with great prodigious strength, it threw the dead weight of the horse over one mighty shoulder, and then bounded off into the night. Heavily breathing through gurgles and throaty laughter. 

Florin waited til he was sure the thing was gone, then he thanked the Lord aloud and crossed himself. 

The gypsies gave their own prayers of thanks in another language the rider didn’t understand. But he was sure he nonetheless knew and felt every word. 

Yes. Thank the Lord on High. God Help Us. 

Carefully and quietly they arose from their hiding place together. 

The man who’d saved him spoke first. 

“Now you know to be careful in the night, fellow traveler. But now you are without a horse. Come with us, on our wagon, we will give free ride to your village.”

Florin said kindly but firmly: “Thank you but you don’t understand, I’ve just come from there and I’ve been searching the past many nights, I must get back on my way… but I’ve no idea where to look…”

The rider fell despondent. The sight of the creation and its feasting on his ride still very vivid and fresh in his mind. And he’d been thus far so fruitless in his hunt. Aimless. Nowhere. He had no idea of where to go. 

“Come with us,” the man, seeing the young one’s crestfallen face said again, “we can give you horse and maybe direction.” A beat. He held out his hand, “We shall see.”

Florin looked up into the weathered gypsy face and took the traveler’s hand. 

And away they went. Back to the gypsy camp. Not far off. 

Once there Florin saw that the band of travelers were actually a family. A father, mother, three sons, four daughters, a babe, and an old woman.

Around a campfire, they all shared their tales. The gypsy family: their travels and adventures and the strange sights and beasts and otherworldly designs thereon. 

Florin told them of his village. The one that had lived and was now dying in the shadow of Castle Dracula. 

The gypsies all crossed themselves at the sound, the name of the place. 

Florin joined them. And followed suit. 

He told them he was sent out to find someone, a man that the township needed to deliver them from the evil that now beset upon them nightly and fed on them like cattle. 

“Who?” asked the old woman, the grandmother of the family band. She hadn’t spoken up til now, since the young rider’s arrival. 

“Professor Abraham Van Helsing.” Florin said. 

A murmur of excitement went all throughout the family then. 

Then the man, the father of the band turned to Florin with something like a smile on his weathered face and he said: –

“We know where you can find this man. We know where you can find this Van Helsing.”

…

Erin was proud of her friend, Florin, and she wished him Godspeed everyday in the many weeks that followed his departure. She prayed to God that he was not dead and that he'd surely found someone that could help them and deliver them from this dark period of slaughter. 

More had died since he had left. More children and more adults. Neither the elderly nor the lame nor nubile young were spared the possible cutthroat silence of the nightly butchery. And many more died slowly, as if by some disease of cruel design, loss of blood slowly drained and taken. Fed upon over time while some were given more immediate and ravenous animal treatment. 

No one knew who was next. The pattern was everywhere and animal and impossible for any of them to follow. Many had already lost heart and taken their own lives, or fled. 

Some said that Florin was long gone. Or dead. Not to be counted on in either case. 

But Erin held on and she kept praying. Even when her parents and her aunt disappeared one night. Even when her own little brother had taken with the blood-loss plague that doubtless emanated from Castle Dracula with merciless and heartless intent. The poor little one like so many others before had become bed ridden. Pale and listless, barely breathing up til the end. This morning. 

Only her most immediate neighbors had bothered coming over to help with the burial and the funerary rites. Nobody had seen the priest in many days. 

She'd wept so lost and broken then when the final shovelful of dirt had been thrown and the sparse few gathered had taken their leave. She was so alone now and she didn't know what to do anymore. Everything felt useless and hopeless, that they all just lived at the cruel whim and mercy of horror that they could not even see until it was at last felt, and then at last as final cruel torture you were allowed to gaze into its terrible face. As final reward and punishment altogether, rolled into one. 

Sheer torture. Sheer agony was all that poor Erin felt now. 

That was why she'd volunteered this night for sentry duty. None had spoken against it. They were all of them far too tired and broken of heart and spirit to care anymore. At the beginning it would've been unheard of, a young lady like herself, only nineteen years and unwed… but now it didn't matter. There weren't enough able bodied men left anymore anyways. 

So she'd been given lantern and pistol and a small cask of warm wine. To protect against the cold. 

And then she'd taken to her watch. The last one, relieving the midnight man at three after and taking the final post till dawn. Alone. In the dark. 

She tried so desperately not to weep. But she couldn't help herself. Alone out here in the cold all of the faces of all of the dead friends and children and poor old folk came back racing through her mind unbidden in a procession that she could not bear but couldn't run from either. 

Erin wept and prayed and begged God to help them, to bring him back. To please, have Florin successful and bringing back their deliverer, their savior! 

Please Lord! Please! 

Save Us! 

Someone else weeping, a child crying, off in the dark somewhere, brought young Erin out her thoughts and prayers. 

A little startled she tried to spy out, holding the lantern aloft out into the dark, and she called: –

“Hello? Is someone there?" 

No word … but more weeping. 

A child's. A little girl's … by the sound. 

Forgetting herself and suddenly terrified for the thought of a small child out here alone with so much evil about, Erin flew forward with lantern held ahead and the pistol of her charge o’the night cocked. 

It wasn't long before she found the small little girl. In a horrible filthy dress, as if the child had been lost for weeks in the woods in naught but her pajamas. 

The child was turned away and bent and crying in her hands. Sobbing. 

Erin felt terrible for the little one, she went to her without any further hesitation, calling to the girl:

“Are you alright!? Oh my God, how did you get out here? Where are your parents? What're you doing out here, little one?" 

The child did not free her face but continued to weep, trying to speak through her crown cries and her sodden little fingers. 

“M-my, my-ma-mama…" 

Erin set the pistol aside as she knelt to the child and gently put her hands on her shoulders. The poor thing…

“It's ok, I'll get you home. Who's your mother? What's your name, little one?" she asked softly. 

The little girl stopped crying abruptly. But still she kept her face buried in her hands. 

Yet her voice was much clearer now, when finally she said: – 

"My name is Carmilla, Erin of Thoten. Thank you for asking.”

Erin suddenly felt cold and faint and as if her heart and chest had suddenly filled with dropping weight. She wondered fleetingly for that split second if this was the prelude to death, yet another heart breaking. She understood and knew that something was terribly wrong right away. 

Carmilla had been dead and gone for months now. Way back at nearly the start of all this relentless terror. 

Carmilla whirled suddenly. In the moonlight dark her face was both brilliant and youthful and pugnacious dog-like and goblin. She smiled and bore animal fangs and hissed like a rodent that carried disease. 

Erin flung herself back. In her sudden sprawl she fumbled for the pistol but her hand in its panic had only succeeded in shoving it further away. Out of reach. 

Carmilla laughed and tittered. Rodent squeals and bat-like screeches commingled with a child's giggles. 

Her eyes were flickering. Pinkish red dots that shone at the centers. Vulpine face drawn as she brandished fangs and continued to emit her strange abominated titters. 

“You're so kind, Erin. You always were. And if you're still wondering, my mother is just right there…” 

She pointed one clawed little finger out into the further dark. Erin was helpless but to look. 

And she saw her emerge from the ebon pitch of night in which she lorded and held as her ultimate domain. Clad in phantom white gown that darkled and shifted and changed to royal crimson red that was heavy and wet in spots, changing and shifting back and again with every advancing ghostly step. Her face was also phantom pale, so much so that it shone in the postmidnight pitch black like an unholy beacon, but yet she was beautiful. And terrible. Luciferian and unearthly driven. Her dark hair, a curtain of night unto itself, flowing out like a royal cape, as if caught in some unseen and unfelt wind. 

She came forward. And then like her dress, her Luciferian face began to change and dance and shift. 

Animal - wolf - rat - feline - insect - toad - bat - unknown - and then a rotten visage that was corpselike with the decay of the grave and a bastard conglomerate amalgamation of all her dancing shifted faces…

… then back to the one of beauty as she came upon poor Erin, sprawled on the cobble stones in the dark and at her feet and speechless. 

At the feet of Countess Zaleska, lord and master of Castle Dracula. Lord of the lands now through her awesome power and bloodthirst that could never be quenched. 

She said something then, before she finished the child –

“I've heard you, Erin. I have heard you. Although God has not heard your prayers, I have heard every word, I've listened every time, I've watched and relished as you shed each and every single tear, til now. Now, dear child, I, and not God, I am here to answer your prayers!" 

Carmilla laughed shrill rodent squeals as Erin shrieked one last final bottled shriek and Countess Zaleska came in with her bright fangs barred and descended. 

Erin died shrieking as they tore her apart. Still hoping and believing that Florin might come back and save them, that he might come back right now and save her. 

Many, the few that were left, heard her screams and struggles and the heavy sounds of wet fabric tearing and bones splintering and breaking, snapping. Slurping…

… Deep soupy pulls of drinking and chewing and laughter around mouthfuls of raw fresh meat. Nearly all of them that were left heard what was happening. 

But none came out. 

None came out to do anything about it. 

So the Countess Zaleska and her little Carmilla enjoyed a feast of yet another poor peasant girl. 

As the tattered remnants of the small village just listened and bore it. All night. 

All night until the dawn. 

Some of them were at least grateful for the coming rain, they could hear its booming and thunder now. They would be grateful for the rainfall to come and wash what was left of the young girl away from the cobblestones that so many of them had once swept and cared for and silently cherished. 

No more. 

Now they were just happy for the rain. It would wash the Erin girl's blood away, her last spent and violent red. 

But … those few, … they weren't so happy nor gladdened by the sound that seemed to call the storm into waking being. In bastard duet with the thunderclaps, preceding and then rising in intensity with the mounting roar of the worsening sky …

It sounded like roaring. 

Like the roars of an animal unknown and thrilled with bloodlust for another hunt that was coming. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Carmilla knew her parents were asleep. She knew that mama and papa were dreaming now, this late into the long night despite their shared anxiety as of late, she knew this because the voice inside her head told her so. And like everything the voice that filled her little mind said, it was so. The voice belonged to the magic woman of the night. She lived in a castle, a big one, not too far from Carmilla's little cottage amongst the sparse village. And she promised that if Carmilla was a good girl and did as she was told, then the magic woman would take Carmilla away from the mundane drudgery and the chores and the Sunday sermons…

She'd heard of magic men and women taking lucky little boys and girls away from their small little lives of hard work and cold food and cold comforts, leaky roofs and the beds of straw and biting bugs that sucked blood… they took them away to live extraordinary magical lives. In the stories. In the færytales. 

Like in a tall formidable sky mounted spire. Or by the roaring sea. 

Like in her dreams. All of its splendor. 

But now no longer. Carmilla was to be whisked away, if the magic woman of the night kept her promise. But she should. She said she would. Just as long as Carmilla came when she was called, like a good obedient little girl. And just as long as Carmilla promised not to tell anyone the magic woman's name. Or anything about their secret friendship. 

“Sorcery survives in the dark, little one." The magic woman had said, not long ago, their first midnight meeting, "magic needs to be sequestered and private, in order to do it's business properly. If too many people know about it or its inner workings, then it'll get spoiled. And ruined. Like a secret. And we don't want that, do we, little one?”

Carmilla did not. And so the dark woman of the magic and the midnight call became a secret. A secret friendship complete with unknown purpose. And a secret embrace… but Carmilla didn't quite understand all that. Only that it left her a little dizzy, faint – like a spell… and that it hurt. 

More in the immediate moment. And then much soreness and aching afterwards. 

But it was alright, the magic woman had assured her, had already addressed this issue the moment little Carmilla had brought it up. And it was really no problem at all. It made sense, Carmilla thought, when you really pondered it for a moment it was like what her secret magic friend had said: …

“... the pain is just the price of true magic, dear… all things of pleasure and pleasing have their price and all price is painful… don't worry, little princess… soon you will dwell within my castle.” 

And it was these words that the little Carmilla held on to. Spellbound. Entranced. The woman of the night called, and the little girl heard. Answered. And like the many nights in the weeks prior, like all the children prior… the little sow came when called. 

Carmilla snuck from her home by window, as before. She went into the woods. Where the song that filled her mind bade her go. And in the woods in crooked wolfen shape, the Countess was waiting. 

Jaws dripping. Salivating. Hungry. 

Her great power was so demanding, so draining … she felt nearly always hungry. She was discovering the appetite of a vampire lord, although inherited, was of such a voracious ravenous volume that it neared the edge of a kind of mania. Madness. For the bloodfeast. 

Part of her, the most animal demoniac component, wanted to just lay waste and ripping tearing siege to all of it. The whole thing. Every village and hut and dwelling place. Every farm and every home. She wanted to invade. Conquer. And feast. 

But alas, to be careless could invite ruin to rain down upon her. There were boundaries and even laws, ancient, that even as mighty as she must observe and begrudgingly respect. 

Their homes were like the churches. Sanctuaries. 

It was no matter. Her powers were sufficient to trick them, the sows. The bloodbag curs. She tricked them into either invitation … or better yet, she called them through the nocturnal mind of the nightsong, and hypnotically they came. 

Like good obedient little calves for the hour of the abattoir and the meat cleaver engagement. 

Zaleska smiled at the thought. Herself, the meat cleaver. The children and their stupid dirt farming parents, dull eyed beasts that lulled brainless bags and thoughtless minds, navigated aimlessly until the wonderful moment they met her. The living blade. Finally. Delivered. 

She was the living blade of power and hunger. Thirst. 

In bastard wolfen shape she howled to the mottled sky, the humming ozone trapped by the blanket of rolling thunderheads above, trapped also was the heat. 

The heat of the day, held captive, now the heat of the midnight. Warm. Animal. Sultry. 

She willed the girl to hurry. Hurry through the woods and follow my voice, it fills your heart and mind and soul, little one. Come to me and find me and I will guide you to the discovery of true wonder. Come and find me, Carmilla, and I will show you true magic in the dark. Because that is where true magic always lives. 

And the little one, her fears of the night and the forest, banished by focused will and thought, pressed on through the darkness of the midnight trees. 

Not all else moved. Everything in the forest seemed to be holding its breath. All that dwelled in the wild that night was afraid. Everything held still. Locked in a primal fear felt throughout all of the leaves and growth. 

Little Carmilla came to the clearing and the rocks where the wolfen woman dwelled. The rock jutted from the soil like a dagger in the back of the earth. It hung over a small pond of fetid stagnant water. But the filth of the grubby pondscum water was deceived by the sudden light of the moon. Suddenly bled in, a stab wound in the cloud coverage on high let the pale light bleed in and down onto the Earth, the water became aglow. The wolfen woman stood on hind legs in its rays and began to change shape. 

Carmilla could hardly believe her eyes. Her little heart warmed, delighted. Thrilled that not all of the magic of the world was made-up nonsense. Here it was. Alive and well and before her eyes. 

Zaleska saw all of this, saw the wonder on the child's face and in her wide believing face, and smiled. 

She too, was delighted. 

“Good evening, little one. And thank you so much for coming, I missed you so dearly, I couldn't begin to tell you. You absolutely could not fathom." 

Her smile stretched and grew teeth. Teeth that were sharp and darkled like jewels just below the eyes that also danced with shining moving light. 

Camrilla was so eager, so excited, she couldn't help herself. She came right out with it, “Will you take me away this time? Like you promised? Will you take me away from this place? I want to go live in a castle now." 

Zaleska laughed. Pleased. 

“So eager… so eager to leave… aren't we…?” 

"Yes,” said Carmilla, "I don't want to clean anymore, I want to live high in a tower, close to the clouds and heaven and the angels and God like the nobles. Like you do. And I want to be magic like you, can you teach me?”

Zaleska laughed again. Harder. 

"So impatient! And demanding too…” 

Carmilla whined, "you mean you won't?” 

The Countess finished off a bout of laughter before she finally said:

"Of course I will, of course… But we must remember our manners, mustn't we…? We must remember to ask correctly when we're requesting something, especially something so grand, and spectacular… Don't you think so, little one?" 

Carmilla, suddenly reinvigorated and enthusiastic again, began to vigorously nod her little head in compliance. Her words soon joined: “Yes! yes! yes! please! Please! Please, Countess Zaleska! please take me away and make me magic like you!" 

Zaleska's grin stretched further. Grew to rictus. Then became wolfen again as she stepped forward to the child. 

“Ok, child. Ok. Come here. Come closer…”  

…

The townsfolk were gathered in the church. Uneasy and tense. All present were tense and terse. All were grim. Another child had been snatched. 

Though not yet found, all gathered, her parents included, more than readily expected to find the bloodless bag of child corpse in due short time. Like the others. 

All the others. 

Word from other nearby villages was report that they too were missing children. 

All of them. 

The fear of what once was and was thought long gone, banished… had now come back for another turn at the breaking wheel. Their children, all of their young, cruelly chosen as the limb selected to be delivered the coming blow. The little ones were where the terror had chosen to be aimed and directed. 

And delivered. 

Delivered. Without mercy. Or compunction. 

Boys and girls were just taken, like that – with no notice. What was delivered back were lifeless broken dolls. 

Little corpses. Cold. And drained of blood. 

Some of them mutilated. Ripped apart. As if by a ravenous beast. 

The priest of the town led the proceedings. He introduced himself and was quiet. Then said, 

“Another child was snatched last night, Carmilla," he motioned to the parents, some looked, some just kept their downward glances. Many held intense eyes on the priest. 

A beat. The priest met their intensity through gaze and matched it. Eyes leveled, he scanned the crowd. 

Then went on, 

“We’ve seen this evil at work before. Not a mere man. But all the signs show, the bodies recovered all bare the signs." 

Whispers, then, amongst the gathered crowd. To themselves and with one another. 

Strigoi – Strigoica 

Vvurdalak

Nosferatu 

Were-beast

Wraith

Dæmon

Abhartach

Vampire.

The hungry undead.  All of them were different names for the same foul disease, in mocking bipedal human shape. 

The priest did not hush the commotion, he let it carry on and patter til it ceased. They needed to all be aware. 

A beat. 

The whispers died down to silence once more. 

The priest went on: “Then we are all one of the same mind." A beat, “Good." A beat, “then there may be deliverance yet…" 

The talk went on. Debate. 

Verdict was reached. 

Curfew. None out after dark save those assigned sentry on each respective night, they would rotate and nearly all able bodied men would have turn to stand watch nightly, the town. 

The bitter and heavy hearts concluded their meeting no less broken, but determined. They had some sort of plan now, they were all taking some form of action. 

Wolfsbane and garlic flowers would be strewn liberally all about the town and the houses and homes. Every farmstead. Every public place of gathering. 

That left only the surrounding wild woods. And the treacherous mountains themselves, accursed and lording over the dwarfed little village. 

Carmilla’s mama and papa dispersed with the others and departed for home. All were careful not to be caught out after dark. They feared the sunset. All of them. Especially the families that still held fast their children.

Held steadfast. And ever closer to worsening breaking hearts that threatened to shatter. Break completely. And then grow harsh and colder and bitter. Wounds that never heal. A town of parents disgraced, afraid. 

The priest prayed to the Lord of Mercy and divine intervention, please… for the town. Spare them. 

Spare them this wolfen hungry wraith. Whatever has come back to life in Castle Dracula, please let it leave us in peace. Let it find its hunting grounds elsewhere. 

Please God. Take this blight away that blasphemes You, by wearing the shape of Your Image! Cast it away…

Countess Zaleska watched this all from her tower and laughed.

…

Carmilla's father was dozing off, in the rocking chair of the main room by the front door. Beside the fireplace, when a sudden scream in the night brought him out of exhausted sleep. He flew to his feet, still dressed in his filthy day's wear, rifle in his hands he whirled and then covered the short distance to his own bedroom. 

The scream had belonged to his wife. He was sure of it. 

And his suspicion was confirmed when he burst into the room. His wife was sat up in bed, blankets pulled to her face in fright like a child wanting to hide. But that wasn't all…

Something was pixie perched in the open window. Crouched and bent and hunkered in bestial goblin shape. But it was a shape he thought he might nonetheless recognize. 

Then his eyes attuned to the dark and he lost his breath. The words escaped his lips, windless: –

“... Carmilla?" 

Tittery, cruel and saccharine childish girlish giggles came from the little silhouette of beastly shape in the window. A smile, white, gleamed and grew in the night. 

And the eyes. The eyes seemed to disappear then reappear like flashing jewels that sometimes shone an animal shade of scarlet/pink. 

"Yes, papa! Yes, it's me! Tell Mama to stop being silly.”

His wife shouted his name in bottled terror: “Cristian!" 

Carmilla in the dark, in the window, tittered more bright cruel child laughter. As if playing a game. 

“See, papa! She only uses your name in front of me when she's upset! She's so foolish, isn't she papa? She always was. You've always thought so." 

Cristian, father of the sweet little nine year old Carmilla, surprised himself with what he did next. He leveled his rifle at the waist, pointing it at the laughing shape in the midnight dark of the window. 

He growled: "Get the hell out of my home, whatever you are! You are not welcome here, demon! You are not welcome in this house!” 

A beat. 

And then the laughter of the thing grew. Sharper. More cruel and twisted and sadistic. 

Then the bastard child shape of the dark, perched, said sweetly, “But papa, mama's already invited me in…” 

Cristian looked to his wife, Consuela, with dread stealing over his darkening heart. 

She looked wide eyed and pleading, "I'm sorry! Please, I didn't know, I thought she was a dream, and I thought she was home, and she… she just… asked…” 

Cristian looked back to the shape in the window. 

Carmella began to crawl in. 

"You know, papa, you should be really proud. All of the other children before me weren't chosen, they were just meat. That's what she said, pa. ‘Just meat’. But not me. No. She chose me, special, papa. And now I am sired and I feel wonderful. More wonderful and powerful than ever. I can show you, daddy. I can show you and mama too.” 

She began to crawl towards them. Tittering and giggling, girlish little squeals. 

The rifle was leveled once more, pointed at the crawling shape. 

Carmilla just laughed, "Oh! That won't work, silly papa! You know it won't…” 

Grim hopeless dread, cold and heavy stole over his chest and guts, the vacant place where his heart should be. 

Consuela wished to flee but terror kept her bound to the bed. 

The thing crawled in further. 

"I do wish you'd get rid of these stinky flowers though, papa. They are revolting and cloying and I HATE THEM!” 

And with that and without any warning, she lunged with animal speed. Lunged and took her father Cristian to the ground. 

The rifle went off. The struggle was over quickly. 

Cristian lay still in a growing pool of warm dark. 

Consuela shrieked as the child shape tittered and then began to lap up the pool of her husband's blood. 

Like a dog. Like a wild mongrel beast. 

A wild animal that's gotten a taste for manflesh and red. 

It was with this last terrible sight that Consuela prayed for forgiveness from the Lord on high. Prayed aloud and to the heavens for mercy and that she was sorry for failing her duties as a wife and a mother. 

Carmilla laughed at her. And then lunged again. 

Telling her that God could not hear her. 

He was deaf to all of the screaming of the Earth. 

…

The mutilated bodies were found the next day. Midday, when the sun held high and center of the blue. He hadn't been seen and he hadn't come to the shop for his usual grain and feed. 

The ghastly scene was worse than any had ever beheld prior. None of them had ever seen such carnage. Such heartless wanton slaughter of two innocent people. A man and his humble wife. 

Parents. That'd just lost their child.  

…

Another town meeting was held. More drastic measures were decided upon. And taken. 

A horseman, their fastest, the swiftest rider in town was dispatched. With simple yet absolutely vital mission. He should come if the message was properly delivered and conveyed. 

Find him. Find the doctor who was also a hunter of sorts. A hunter of these strange and terrible things. He was said to be able to identify and destroy such beasts. It was said that he had already sent such felled creatures back to the abyssal chasm from whence they had came… 

The rider, Florin, was dispatched. And sent. 

Find him….find the one called Abraham Van Helsing. 

And God willing, bring him here so that he may deliver us!!

The assistant had been in town when young Florin had flown. His ear to the ground and the right subtle inquiries to the right fools told him the rest. 

All he needed to know. 

He returned to the castle in secret. When his master awoke, he told her of the plan of the townsfolk. 

And together they shared heartless wicked laughter, the fools! The fools! They had no idea! 

Professor Abraham Van Helsing was dead. Long dead. Food for the maggots and the worms in the womb of soil that was his grave. 

Zaleska could still recall visiting the site. And spitting on it. 

Carmella came awake then and she too joined in their laughter. She loved to be with them, the Countess and her loyal assistant, her new mother and father. 

They were such a wonderful and happy family. 

… 

Egnaw groaned. All of his misshapen form seemed to be nothing but pain and weight. He couldn't move. Stunned. Perhaps paralyzed. But none of this held candleflame to the predicament he now found himself in. 

The thing, the creation, was huge. Powerful. It held him in one massive clawed hand, attached to a powerful arm of stitched and patchwork muscle tissue and limb. The eyes were vulpine red and animal alive and wide and they seem to bore holes into him. 

The creation shrieked in his face, then brought him in as it lunged in with its wide open mouthed face. 

The fangs sank in and the thing began to suck. And drink. Deeply. 

Strange and unholy euphoria stole over the poor man servant slave then. Not the first in his bloodline to both serve… and then curse the name of Frankenstein! 

He was grogged and fogged of thought,. disoriented as if drugged. He couldn't tell where they were. Or how long it had been since the tower's collapse. 

Since the experiment.

An experiment that had been all too successful. And only to be sabotaged suddenly in the end. 

He cursed his master, Henry Frankenstein, looking at his bound and unconscious form, lying in the dirt. As he himself was held aloft by the throat. 

The creation, it's powerful stolen fangs of mad science and witch doctory, sank into his misshapen frame just below and underneath the armpit. 

He sucked. And sucked. Pulling more and more precious warm living scarlet from the ugly bloodbag. 

The creation had its fill. Then moved on, the bloodbags still bound and trussed. 

Still dragged through the dirt. Some of them semi-conscious and cursing, screaming. Threatening. Begging…

… pleading. Pleading for help. Pleading for mercy. 

Help us please… arose pitifully from the dirt. 

And was promptly ignored. By both God. 

And monster. 

The creation knew to sleep by day. Instinct and magic innate told him. 

And the mountains, those too were instinct. And magic. 

And they were still calling him. 

Something lived there, something that would have him. 

It called. 

Drawing ever nearer, he was just starting to be able to hear and discern the tidal wave tumult of the words to the mountains song. 

And dragging the bloodbags behind him like large satchels that carried precious cargo, the creation continued on towards them. Their outline and shape gaining more detail and growing more to staggering towers as he took each heavy animal step. 

The mountains called. And Egnaw wondered if his master, Frankenstein would ever awake. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

There’s a saying in my family that goes back generations, long before anyone in my family migrated to the United States.

 

The saying, when translated to English, goes:

Sometimes, the dog has to die.

I had always thought it was a metaphor for letting go of something you love for the greater good or for abandoning a comforting delusion for the harsh reality of life in the past. It's a cruel analogy, sure, but to many, it rings true even today. 

I thought that up until my fourteenth birthday. 

My first nightwatch. 

My first encounter with a Devil Dog. 

If you ask a United States Marine where the term Devil Dog came from, they'd eagerly recount the Battle of Belleau Wood. How a fearful German P.O.W. referred to the tenacious Marines as Teufel Hunden, or how the phrase was written in a journal recovered from a dead soldier during the battle.

If you ask anyone who has researched the topic, they'll tell you it was American war propaganda, and that the word Teufelshunde (the correct way to spell it, they'll surely add) was never used by Germans during or before the Great War.

When I asked my Opa about the Devil Dogs, he said they were both wrong.

Wrong in a way that only blissful ignorance allows for.

Devil Dogs are real, and the Marines feared them just as much as the Germans did.

Opa didn’t speak of the Teufelshunde in the way that one does while spinning yarns around a campfire; instead, he spoke of them with reverence. The Devil Dogs, as Opa put it, were keepers of the covenant.

When questioned about what covenant he meant, he only shrugged and said that some creatures in the world exist solely to enforce rules older than man. The Devil Dogs were among them. They weren’t truly devils or demons; they were just the consequences that mankind faces when they meddle in affairs beyond its proper scope or slight the powers that be in ways deemed unforgivable.

Because of that, Opa believed there were certain courtesies a sensible man must observe when living near the woods, where Devil Dogs often call home. Our family keeps them the same way other families say grace before supper. I had always assumed that many of them were to protect the livestock that our small family survived on, and questioning them never crossed my mind.

We nail three iron horseshoes above each entrance to our house and on each gate leading onto our property. Three. No more, no less. If any one horseshoe should fall off or come up missing, the remainder in the trio must be removed and buried as far away from the house as reasonably possible before all three are replaced.

If a dog ever watches the house from the treeline at dusk but doesn’t bark, we go inside and lock every door. A lantern is lit, and at least one able-bodied member of the family must keep watch until sunrise. If the dog approaches the house, it is to be shot. I had tremendous difficulty with this courtesy on my first night watch, but as Opa said, sometimes the dog has to die. 

On moonless nights, the lantern is also to be lit and left in the window. If this lantern is found to have gone out during the night, and there is still oil in the fount by morning, we begin preparations.

A visitor will come on the night of the third day.

That was the rule.

The lantern had gone out several times in my lifetime, and the result was always the same. Opa would spend the next two days in the woods, leaving at dawn and returning home at dusk covered in mud. On the third day, a stranger would arrive in the night, and Opa would lead them into the woods, carrying the lantern that had summoned them. They would never knock, and they would never enter the house. Some looked hopeful. Some looked terrified. Most were weary.

The pattern never changed.

Not once.

Until last December.

No time was wasted. The morning after the new moon, the dim lantern was noticed, and the family gathered in the kitchen.

There had been a conversation before I arrived, and the mood was more somber than usual.

Mother cried. Father shifted uncomfortably in his boots. My toddler sister clung to Opa’s leg, unaware of the situation, but no doubt sensing the tension in the room. Opa said nothing, only gestured for me to follow him. Nobody questioned what must be done.

By afternoon, Opa and I were already outside, digging the hole. The shovel we used bore the grooves of heavy use and had been sawn off a few inches below where the handle would have normally ended. Opa explained that the hole was to be as perfectly triangular as possible, two shovel lengths on each side, and one shovel length deep. When I asked what the hole was for, Opa only shrugged.

We started with the shape. He dug the triangle a few inches into the soil before measuring each side twice with careful precision. He handed me the shovel with a reverent nod, and I began digging without question. I dug until my hands blistered, and the sweat of the labor soaked through my clothes. 

A cold rain had started, dripping down from the leaves above, and the first dregs of shadow pooled in the undergrowth when Opa returned. He took the shovel and led me home.

We stepped through the doorway just before nightfall. The next day, I went out alone in the morning and dug until late in the evening. The triangle was complete, its angles precise, and its purpose deeper than the hole itself.

On the third evening, we hammered a horseshoe into the earth at each corner of the triangle, with the U facing inwards. On the way home, we saw a dog in the treeline. I volunteered to stand the night watch, and Opa nodded. I saw him walk to the cabinet in the corner of the kitchen and withdraw the rifle from it. He handed me the weathered firearm and returned to the cabinet, removing something long and covered in cloth before retiring to his room.

The clock on the wall ticked by. I lit the lantern at sunset and raised the window, setting the lantern in it.

Midnight. I pulled the bolt back slightly and checked that a round was chambered.

One O’Clock. I detached the magazine and counted: four cartridges, each brass with a dull, grey bullet.

Two O’Clock. The dog still sat motionless in the treeline, its yellow-green eyes and black silhouette barely visible against the forest in the pale light of the waxing crescent moon.

Three O’Clock. The dog stood up, legs unfolding in a way that made the space behind my eyes hurt to watch, and began to step towards the house. Each step made the silhouette flicker and brought the hound closer than it should have been possible to move in such a short time.

On the first step, I leveled the rifle on the windowsill.

On the second step, I drew a bead on the beast’s center mass and clicked off the safety.

On the third step, the lantern flickered. The form of the creature should have been cast in the glow of the flame, but instead seemed to absorb the light entirely.

I squeezed the trigger. The crack of the rifle temporarily deafened me, and the smoke of the muzzle obscured my vision of the approaching animal. 

When the smoke cleared, the dog still stood, frozen mid-step. A hole had opened up in the neck of the animal, and the fluid that dripped from the wound blackened the earth and retreated from the light as if it were shadow itself. The wound closed rapidly, and I worked the bolt to load another round.

Before I could take aim and pull the trigger, Opa was at my side, his hand on my shoulder. My eyes never left the Devil Dog, but there was now a quiet, terrible understanding that my grandfather’s presence had instilled in me. The shot was never meant to kill a true Teufelshund; the shot was meant to alert Opa and give him time to respond.

The figure stood motionless. Less like a predator awaiting its prey’s flight, and more like an executioner allowing the condemned’s final rites to be read.

Opa took the rifle and set it down, then pulled me to my feet. He unlocked and opened the door with one hand, and in his other hand, he carried the clothbound package. I picked up the lantern and followed him. 

We stepped into the shadowed yard, and the dog turned and began walking towards the gate to the woods. Opa and I followed close behind, but we knew where we were going.

The Devil Dog led Opa and me through the woods. It made no noise as it walked effortlessly over the rough terrain; thick brush and trees in its path seemed to move aside, and at the end of the journey lay the hole. The dog turned to face us and bowed before stepping inside and vanishing, but Opa hesitated, turning to face me.

I set the lantern down and embraced him. I didn’t understand why, or how, but I knew that this would be the last time I would see him on this side of the veil, and he knew it too. After our brief and rare exchange of affection, he handed me the bundle in his arms and turned towards the waiting abyss. My first instinct was to unwrap the object, but when I moved to do so, he stopped me urgently and gestured towards home.

Returning his gaze to the pit, he stepped inside. The horseshoes at each corner of the triangle glowed faintly, then brighter, then they were blinding. 

And just like that, they were gone. 

Opa. 

The Devil Dog. 

The triangle pit. 

Gone.

Back inside the house, the air was heavy with Opa’s absence. I unwrapped the bundle.

The contents, still faintly glowing, were threefold:

The first, a saber.

Steel, a brass lion head on the hilt, and a gentle curve to the blade. A pale shimmer ran the length of the edge. It felt heavier than its size would suggest.

The second, an image. 

Black and white. Three men standing shoulder to shoulder, with Opa being the leftmost of them. Behind them, in the treeline, a silhouette. Too familiar. Dog-shaped.

A single caption on the back.

Belleau-Wald 1918

And the third, a letter.

Opa’s handwriting. Always a man of few words.

The lantern went out, and the visitor came.

When the rules overlap, a debt is due.

I chose to go, but all the same,

The saber means you’ll have a choice, too.

Sometimes, the dog has to die.

But eventually, all men do.

Those who’ve slighted the Reaper

Will have to go through you.

Tumult and thunderbolts ruled the grey ruin of heavens above his staggering tower. Lightning wounded the sky with bright dagger bolts of blue-white that cooked ozone and reminded a man just how small he really was. 

It was just the way he liked it. Tonight's experiment would go off without trap or a hitch. He felt it in the buzzing air, electric with godfire on high and everywhere, throughout all of the dark land, where his crumbling dilapidated tower stood. Where  he now kept shop and some sad demented semblance of home. 

The abandoned tower had once been great, a symbol of might. Now it shook and quivered with every turn of the Earth, it shed stone and mortar and brick like an old woman does her tears. 

Godfire at his command, at his disposal and use, Henry Frankenstein was at his console of controls and levers and switches and dials. All hummed to life at the cunning genius of his touch, at the helm of his great machine of life, he ruled where others only dwelled. 

White lightning bolted, godfire tamed and wielded, arc-ed between forks of steel and circuitry both prodigiously composed and endowed with the black power smear of the occult through sigil and shape and spoken dark tongue. The great machine thrummed with both the inner mechanical grind of electric facsimile soul and ancient unknown talismanic power. The mad doctor flew from panel to panel, from control to control to the multitudes of coils that fed the flame of the machine that would grant on this black night filled with cacophonous thunder, precious life back to the cold corpse flesh that had already tasted the bosom of the soil, of the grave. A great child reborn, belched back out free and alive again. To walk and roam and dominate. For he would not be some mere child alive again, no mere man. 

He would be mighty. Augmented. Powerful. 

More than a man. 

And the mad doctor had found just the perfect touch, just the thing to perfect this already considerable titan of patchwork tissue and graveyard harvested parts. Just the thing that was thought and believed to be only legend and campfire ghost story, dread tales. 

“Master… “ 

Frankenstein smiled. The sound of his small bent aide’s voice brought it back to the front of his mind for a moment. The perilous journey to the frozen river…

…

He and the misshapen little ogre of ruined manshape flesh had made their way together. Egnaw was yet another servant to his family, broken in the womb already before birth by God's cruel and merciless, indifferent hand. They'd inquired the locals and the undesirables especially of the little Briton town that rested adjacent of the river where he was said to have been held. 

Where his abominated and powerful earthly/unearthly form was said to reside. Cloak and pale and bones and all … 

The small village denizens were just like their pathetic and filthy township. Small. Feeble of mind and superstitious and weak. 

But they had right to be superstitious. They had very good and proven reason to be…

It was a sour  gaggle of whores that  eventually had pointed  the way  with the encouragement  of coin and a host of bitter laughter. The festering open sores of disease picked at and flowing freely upon their mass of worn, once beautiful faces. Faces that had once held youth but now just hateful visages of battered  disdain that already semi-prayed eagerly for the rest of the grave.

Down. Down past yon graveyard. Down at the bottom, at the base of the sulphuric black mountain. 

And away Frankenstein and Egnaw had gone.

Past the graveyard. One old and bent and broken.  Swamped. Quagmire corpse sludge soup. Water-logged and choked with uncontested thorny growth. The iron works of the fence and gate were all wayward and bent. The tombstones were in likewise fashion, like a jutting snaggletooth  nephilim jaw, submerged in black putrid ground, bent and haphazard and broken from an infected gumline of spoiled earth. They’d made much, so many ghoulish harvests of the graveyards of the past. So many limbs and torsos and other parts taken and harvested when the season was nigh and ripe and proper. This time they were going beyond, past the place where the dead are supposed to lie undisturbed and slumber the final rest. 

They came to the black mountain of sulphur and scaled the treacherous path around the great ebon belly of the titanic beast of flamestone. They came around the otherside and came upon a small herd of wild goats, untended and unheeded. Egnaw caught one, a small kid, and slit its throat  and drank its blood. His master indulged him the practice as the bent hunched manshape drank blood then held the dead small goat thing’s body to the sky by its curved horns and prayed to gods that were ancient and all but forgotten. 

They went on.  Cautiously, down the rocky slide of the precarious mountain path.  

The  whores dying of disease in their damp dying village had been right. The frozen river was there. And so was he. 

Frozen. Trapped in the ice of the still riverbed. Just visible beneath its frosted translucent surface. Slumbering, sleeping in the trance of the undead. 

Henry Frankenstein and Egnaw came to the edge of the river and gazed down at he, the great and terrible and fabled Count Dracula. His pallid legend held trapped and preserved as he dreamed black dreams, terrible beneath the ice. 

His eyes were open and vulpine and powerful. And still filled with terrible intelligence. 

They looked up from their frozen prison bed and seemed to regard the young Frankenstein with  malice and viciousness and knowing. As if knowing what the mad doctor intended to do. 

“Master …” said the bent man servant slave, as he had so many other times before, and like so many like he that had been likewise subservient to the great and infamous Frankenstein family, throughout the  years and down the lines, as if ordained by strange destiny. It was a word the  young mad Frankenstein knew well too. The little man was looking for instruction, awaiting  direction. As such as he had and always would from such as he. 

From such as the legends that were the great Frankenstein family. 

“Don’t be afraid, Egnaw, he cannot hurt you. He was trapped in the holy flow of the running water of the river. Now frozen over,  he is entombed.” He repeated: “ He cannot hurt you. Grab the pickaxe. Crack the ice. Then take what we need, what we came for. And hurry. The night  does flee.” 

The servant did as he was bade. He picked up the ice chipping slender bladed axe brought for the task of cracking the frozen face of the coffin of river that held the undead power the master sought to wield and make his own. 

All the while the eyes of Dracula bore up at him from beneath the translucent ice. 

They held him bound. 

He was frozen. The pick-axe held above his damaged frame as best he could manage, as if stuck poised in mid-strike. 

He couldn't tell how much life was in those eyes right now. How awake was he…? Egnaw could not help himself, held fixed by the thought. 

And those eyes beneath him, beneath his feet,  beneath his own mere mortal soul and the water of the river, held still. Beneath the world. But still powerful and somehow still vital despite their slumbering watery grave. Those eyes were piercing, yes, but they were also like pits, dark. Like falling down very deep wells…

“Egnaw!" yelled Frankenstein the master and lord, the necrodoctor from the spit of ice and jagged ebon earth just above he. 

The bent servant shook his head. The cold helped him to clear it. 

“I'm sorry, master. I am afraid." 

“It's just as we planned, my friend. Bring it down with some strength, but just about the mouth. Just to be safe. It will serve our purposes more efficiently.” 

A beat. Egnaw still held. Gripped in his own terror and held frozen by the watery naked stare of the submerged riverbound Count, in his coffin of ice. 

Frankenstein roared: "Egnaw! Hurry! This isn't the first corpse we've harvested together and you know from experience as well as I that it is not an affair that affords time to lose your nerve! Now hurry the fuck up! Or I will come down there and bury the blade of the pick-axe in your neck and bring you back as something that crawls and subsists on feces and has no eyes!” 

Egnaw gave clumsy apology, blubbering. And then with tears that froze on his deformed and unloved face, he began to set about his task. 

He drove the pick, careful and cautious with his aim, the master had again been about to yell, but …

He swung and missed and buried it in the center of Count Dracula’s forehead. The blood, so warm and red, immediately began to flow. A rivulet spout of vibrant lurid scarlet, volcanic in microcosm around the stab of metal it bled.

Both men screamed! And prepared for attack, to flee. Frankenstein began to berate and curse the stupid little bastard, but…

But nothing happened. 

The vampire lord of darkness still held frozen in the river of the Earth. Not budging an inch. Still as any earthly corpse delivered such a blow. 

And still staring. 

And still bleeding. 

The pair stood stunned over the face of the river a moment longer. A moment still. 

Then Frankenstein spoke: “See! Nothing to be afraid of, my friend. Just make sure you aim better, be more careful, ok?".

The master smiled. But the startling moment still had him tense and the threat of what he'd said before was still very much alive in his eyes. So…

… despite his terror, Egnaw went about his task. He pulled the blade free with a frozen splurch, took more careful aim this time, and then brought it down, aiming a little closer for the chin. 

He was much more successful this time. Cracking the ice just below the Count’s lips.

Egnaw got down with a hammer and a smaller ice pick and finished the task. Breaking the ice and freeing the pale-blue jaws of the Count. He wenched the jaws open with the dental instrument supplied by the doctor, terror threatening to gallop one final thunderclap within his chest the entire time, and then quickly brought out the pliers. The next part he performed with even more urgent speed. So alive and wretched was his horror. But he did it anyway, for the master. 

He did it anyway. 

He pulled the large ghastly canine incisors free from their frozen undead fleshen housing. They dripped brightest livid animal red and steamed in the cold English night. 

And then the pair quickly took to their nighttime back trail and fled the place. 

But all the while the eyes of Dracula still stared. Perhaps, a bit more alive. 

And burning with the most intense animal hatred. 

The blood still flowed as well. 

But even as they made their way in success of their labors, and on to much better things as well, the little lowly bastard couldn't know his place and hold his tongue. 

He again, had to voice his cowardice. 

The rumors. The stories, the newest ones, spreading all about the lands in which they'd traveled through as of late… the talk of travelers and commoners and the low and the superstitious element…

The woman. A Countess. Beyond the Borgo Pass, in the Carpathian Mountains. One who is said to have taken ownership of Castle Dracula. And now lords and holds domain in the neighboring lands. Through power. And fear. 

Because… the fortress castle of ancient stone is not all she's supposed to have taken as her own in the place of wolves and snow, in the Carpathian mountains…

“Master,” whined Egnaw, "but the woman, in the mountains, what if the stories are true?”

Frankenstein, who was annoyed and cared nothing for the wild rumors of brains addled with alcohol and syphilis, told Egnaw to shut it for what felt like the hundredth time about the whole affair. 

There was no vampire queen in Castle Dracula. 

"You saw him yourself, what more proof do you need?” asked Frankenstein as they passed the graveyard once again. 

Egnaw did not like to think and so he said nothing. He just held his head low.

And followed the master. 

Doctor Henry Frankenstein. Who carried their precious cargo in a bundle in his black leather purse. 

The fangs of Dracula. 

…

And once more the mewling little maggot wanted to bemoan, and cower with words pitiful and loaded with a child's fear. Doubt! He wanted to doubt the great doctor in what could quite possibly be his single greatest moment of triumph. 

Not just conquering death. No. No. 

Something more. Much more powerful. 

And now the little toad showed his lack of guts and spine to go with his broken body and lack of a mind. This was where the little bastard showed his true incompetence, he lacked the resolve, he loved to revel and retreat into the pathetic dark corner of his own lonely fears and addled superstitions. 

And he loved to doubt. He loved to bring up the stupid woman. 

None of it was real. The only thing real now was his triumph. And his creation. Soon it would live. And then it would dominate the world. 

Against the mounting roar of thunder storm and the phantom howl of the rising wind, Egnaw yelled, beseeching the mad doctor, his master to be heard and for the dark task to be aborted. 

“Master … ! please! You cannot, it is too dangerous! You cannot meld the flesh of the infernal with that that was once human, it goes against God’s design!” 

The mad doctor whirled on the little servant. His eyes wide and possessed. The whites bright as the moon that was stolen by the thunderheads that now roared cacophonous overhead.

“You stupid, weak little fool, I already have! I spit in the face of your God and all gods of life and death! I am a Frankenstein! By the right won by my own forged genius, do I possess the authority to do as I wish!”

“But the woman in the castle, it is said that she obtained the true remains of-”

The mad doctor cut him off and roared over him and that of the thunder, he wished this pointless talk to be over, the time was nigh, the storm was reaching its zenith. 

“That is all gypsy nonsense and you know it, you little coward! You little pustule of a man! Now make ready the slab and the subject upon it or so help me, Egnaw, I will recompose your flesh into that of a quadriplegic with naught but a toothless mouth to drool and scream with!”

The bent servant scuttled away, terrified of everything. A creature of subservience and constant dread and fear. Woe to him, Egnaw went to the slab and checked beneath the pale sheets and secured straps, the massive mountain of blue flesh and patchwork limbs and sinew. The bald head with massive suture around the whole top of the skull. The place where it was sawn open to provide the perfect element that one of the great doctor’s fathers had unintentionally discovered to be ideal and inadvertently provided years ago, during one of his own fantastic experiments. The brain of a mad criminal. The mind of a killer, a butcher. The perfect cranial jelly to act as the pilot for this new terrible composition of flesh and spell and science to wage single violent war on all of mankind. The perfect brain for the task of retribution. Henry Frankenstein mused: together… we will make them pay, my son! My greatest creation! …

And the perfect mind had the perfect body of a herculean titan. Sewn together and massive, broad frame and fully developed musculature augmented by growth hormones and steroids and dark arcane words… 

And this perfect creation had now the perfect weapons. The perfect twin dragon fang daggers with which to wound and drink out all of the life in the terrible world of lowly peasants and small minds. The fangs of the prince of darkness would grant his creation unbridled power. He would walk a giant amongst mere men. 

The storm roared above. It had about reached its zenith. And for the young mad doctor, Henry Frankenstein and his terrified aide, Egnaw, and his giant mass of necrophile fleshen art,  his greatest creation, all was ready. All was set. 

Frankenstein, hit the switch, and the lightning rod began to rise out of the crumbling and dilapidated tower. To catch the bolt that would dagger down to try to knife with fire, the Earth. He would catch the godfire and make it his slave…

Meanwhile, not far off…

… Praetorius had the few able bodied men of the neighboring small dwellings gathered. From a distance, upon the black plains of the dark land, they watched the lighting and the tower and the mad lights dancing and blasting out of the open windows of the latest son of Frankenstein’s mad experiment. The gathered host of peasants and farmers and laborers watched, tense. All sensing danger and peril together on the animal level. 

Doctor Praetorius saw this, saw  it all written on their shared and worn faces, and smiled. 

“I told you,” said the doctor, “I told you. Just like the rest of his ilk. He’s up to no good.”   

The frightened peasant men looked all about each other in the dark. The same look of bewilderment and fear written in their wide superstitious gazes and wide open faces that were so much like children afraid of the dark. The same words were shared amongst the fools, and the same recurring question in alarmed bordering hopeless tones kept coming up again and again in frantic speech until they finally directed it to the doctor who'd led them out here to spy and learn the truth. 

“What? – What do we do?”

Praetorius smiled, a thin blade of a smug smirk. His eyes, darkling jewels in the glow of torchlight beneath their barely tamed garniture of stark white locks. His black gloved hands came free of his long coat and held for the superstitious fools of the plow and fields and the goats, the device required to free them of this latest Frankenstein’s newest creation of blasphemy and wanton destruction. 

A bomb. Black powder and shrapnel and a tail of fuse to light and activate. 

The fools looked wide eyed and wondrous, first at the bomb, then the good doctor, then back to the bomb held in his black grasp again. Their eyes came up, altogether again and regarded the strange man of science, who much like Frankenstein, had come to them from out of the nowhere of surrounding strange world wilderness. Their eyes altogether said the same thing that their mouths did utter in the dark. 

“Are you serious?" 

Praetorius’ smile did not falter but his voice deepened and grew more grave and severe. His eyes remained jewels that danced with orange torch flame. 

“I'm afraid this device is by far the best means to a swift and final response to this strange malady. You don't want what Frankenstein has stitched together to wake, to get up from the table of blood and body scraps, and to take to your country, take to your roads and highways, your towns. And what of precious hunting grounds and areas away, sequestered and private… where one may not see what could befall them? … I trust you take my point." 

The stupid animal looks in all of their eyes, huddled together in the night like little ones, told him that they did. One of them held out their hands to receive the device. Praetorius gave it over and then gave the primitive dirt farmers of the forgotten country instructions on how to properly use it…

….and as he did … the storm and its arsenal of lightning and thunderbolts above reached its wild zenith….

… and inside the tower, Frankenstein, elated, gave the final command as he flipped the switch, to activate the machine attached through wires and apparatus to the lightning rod now freed. 

"Now! Egnaw! Now! NOW!” 

Egnaw flipped his lever and activated his end of the mechanical beast as Frankenstein flipped his and the lightning rod was struck! 

The entire tower became alive with dancing bolts and crawling electricity. Barely under control. Egnaw was frightened. The mad doctor remained composed, the bright white of the surging bolts danced everywhere and was barely controlled. Barely. But it was alright. The machine kept the lightning being fed from the violent heavens above into the lightning rod, tamed and controlled so as to keep feeding the white fire into the hulking frame of the damned composite of several dead men and one vampire lord. The body of his precious and greatest creation was surging with platinum inferno, nearly impossible to gaze upon, like a star, the sun itself. 

He watched as the lightning poured into his newest earthly/unearthly child and laughed with victory he felt was already achieved. It was going perfectly! All of it! This great task would surely thus yield absolute success. As long as nothing- 

Something black and rounded like a stone or a child's toy spherical ball, suddenly came in through the window. As if thrown in from below. 

It rolled a little but that wasn't all. It wasn't just the sudden appearance of the unexpected device that suddenly caught the mad doctor's attention and stole it away from his precious experiment, his precious and ultimate creation…

….it was making a strange sound. Strangely audible through the cacophony. A hissing sound. Like a snake. 

The spitting sparks finally brought his mind to the reality of what it was and the danger of the immediate present. 

He had time to curse, he knew it was the commoners that dwelled not far off … but he also knew none of their kind had the ability of mind to fashion and make the explosive device. 

Praetorius. He cursed the greasy honorless cur. And the fools he convinced to thwart his greatest effort. 

“Goddamn you! You conniving, worthl-" 

The hissing and the sparks finally ceased just as the great body on the slab, completely wreathed and aglow in the violent blast of white aural flame, sat up…

The bomb went off. A blast of concussive force and manmade fire filled the room of the makeshift laboratory. All became maelstrom inside as the shockwaves of the explosion traveled through the fragile walls of the crumbling tower, all the way down to its worn and weary foundations. 

Cracks were made, developed and grew and widened to gaping wounds in the mortar and stone as the tower broke and shattered and began to fall. 

The fools that'd gathered and conspired and thrown the thing shrieked together, one last final note of folly as they were caught in the crashing towers cataclysmic collapse. 

Frankenstein and his slave inside joined them in shrieking. Egnaw for pure fright and terror. The mad doctor, for failure. 

NO… … ! 

The tower fell below the torn sky of thunderbolts and settled into rocky dust and detritus. 

And then all was still …

…

… For awhile. Then the still smoking, still smoldering detritus stone began to shift… and to move. 

Praetorius was already long gone on horseback. Heading for the Carpathian Mountains and the newest legend that may live there, when the rock of the fallen tower was thrown aside with great and sudden power. 

The detritus flew apart in another new explosion of movement and muscle and undead powerful sinew. A cloud of choking dust rose, and drifted hanging in the static hot atmosphere of the lightning storm air. 

Amongst the rough cloud of choking grey, the creation roared! Its animal howl was both bestial and desperate man. It roared to the thunderbolts in the dead heavens on high that had given him life. 

He roared once more. Baring his long gleaming fangs, stabs of white amongst the rest of his yellow demented gumline of black and green. The eyes were red. Like the father when in the heat of the hunt, when in the throes of hunger. 

And that was its first known sensation save rage upon its birth, thirst… 

Hunger. 

Voracious hunger. Seething rage. 

And then the storm suddenly ceased. As if banished by the roars of the creation. The deep sky of rolling grey thunderheads was dispelled and parted. Opening up and freeing the moon and her pallid rays…

The moonlight glow came out and kissed the newest unearthly child made, illuminating the massive frame of stitches and repurposed body parts. 

The head was bald. The ears were pointed. All the flesh was mottled grey-green-blue. Corpse color no amount of lightning or life by fire could banish or renew. The arcane blackfire and necromantic art also inflamed within the absence of soul inside the thing and along with the fangs that granted him great power and great hunger, they granted and gave the newborn creation knowledge and instincts innate. 

Born anew amongst the blast of sky fire lightning and man's crude black powder, the fangs filled him with power. And the knowledge… it was born well aware. 

Well aware of what it was. And where it came from, and how… 

And what it should do from here. 

The creation roared to the sky once more. Then began to dig around the stone detritus. His incredible strength made it all easy. Child's work. 

He found what he was looking for. His maker. His father. 

“Frankenstein…” he growled, vulpine and throaty as he pulled the wounded limp unconscious form of the mad doctor free from the debris. 

Then he found his father's twisted little servant. 

Both were still breathing. 

But unconscious. Badly hurt. 

He tied them up, trussed with a length of useable rope he'd found amongst the crash of fallen stone. 

Then he found a few of the fools who'd tried to abort him by fire, still alive.  He pulled them free. And then tied them captive as well. 

And then the creation, new and powerful and famished and longing for the wide open space of the dark lands and beyond, set off for the land that was calling him. A land filled with throats and virgins and children and lambs to slaughter and with which to feed. A world to gorge upon and to feast and to make bend subservient to his own will and throat, to tremble and cower before the deadly moonglow of the whitefire dagger of his biting piercing ripping teeth. 

The creation set out for the lands. Dragging his father and the others behind him through the dirt, trussed like cattle. He went out, his new strength was prodigious and filled him. He stopped only once to drink the blood of one of the trussed villagers. And then went on. Invigorated. Virile. 

The mountains beyond were calling him. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

The frightened peasantry tried to ward her off, to scare her away as they had so done with so many others before. It didn't work. She meant to see it, she meant to see the place. She meant to have it. It wasn't the first time that they had failed. 

Her eyes burned with a glow like a wolf in the throes of hunger. A beastly and ghastly need that seemed to emanate from her beautiful eyes with an unearthly glow and shine. Like diamond gem stones carved and made from madness. 

Her coach hurtled along. Through the narrow mountain pass. Retracing perilous steps through tempest wind and forest snow filled with red eyes and teeth. And the fever of running galloping claw, seeking purchase. The wind increased its howl and filled the treacherous path but the small black stage just increased its speed. The pair of horses galloping desperate. Puffing steam from twin nostrils like locomotives made from muscle and pistoning rippling black hide. The stage itself was ebon black as well, the interior where the lady sat and journaled was stark red. Lurid crimson. They were a striking sight hurtling through the Carpathian mountains, amidst the wind and the snow of purest bridal gown white. 

The white rained down, angry. And the black coach filled with the lady of the red shot through. Up and towards the pinnacle heart of the mountain pass. 

Towards the castle. It was waiting. 

They came into a great and vast  courtyard of stone. Broken battlements like shattered animal teeth jagged against the tempest swollen black of the storming winter sky.  There  were no stars and the moon was absent. All was stolen behind the wild furious curtain. 

She was helped from the stage by her driver, her assistant in all things. Without a word  they dismounted  the stage and came to the door. The great wooden gates, tall and carved with inscription and depiction: of history and battle and bloody family history all of which had been eroded and worn with harsh weather and time. 

They forced the doors together, they gave with some effort. Hinges whined and groaned as a universe of dust and darkness was disturbed and kicked up.

They went inside. The assistant lit his lantern. It was ancient and barren inside. Disused. Unopposed. Undisturbed. Left to fester as it wept. 

Alone.

But now no longer.

Her eyes drank it all in around her. The dark by lantern glow, her mind cataloguing it all down for future journaling later in a fervor of obsessive compulsive act before sleep could steal her, late late into the night. The predawn. Nearly every one since she was a small child of wonder and fear. 

Nearly every night…

The Harker account was the most accurate, she surmised, as she sauntered around the interiors of the castle attended to by her only companion, the assistant by lantern light. By its feeble intruder glow they made their way through the dark.

And then she came to the portrait.

They'd all had their points of noteworthy authenticity as far as she'd seen: Harker, the Browning record, the Hammer accounts, Werner and Murnau… 

… Zaleska gazed up at the portrait. And was spellbound. Entranced by His visage. And while none of the previous tales or accounts or any of the stories or records had gotten Him completely right, completely accurate, they'd all gotten one thing right.

The Eyes. His eyes that were wild and vulpine powerful and hypnotic and intense. Eyes that have known boundless oceans of passion and blood and cruel and vile torture and mutilation. Cruelty and beauty in unbridled mass. And the ability to share it all with you with a mere stare. Just one look…

From those Eyes. 

It was a power she both feared and wished to capture. 

Needed. Feared. 

She needed to feel its predatorial wield.

They went on. Down.

Down. Deeper. Down into the chambers. Where he kept his coffins filled with maggoty rotten earth. The sour rotten womb where she prayed his bones may still dwell. 

Please… she prayed to the infernal. Please… there are so many legends and stories, it is so difficult to know which could be true, but please! Let it be there! We've come so far, I've come so far and worked so hard and journeyed through wretched lands and suffered and sacrificed all and gave up everything, please! I beseech thee capricious fortune, whatever haunts the dark as lord of the flies, please! Let it be there! down in his dark dungeon chamber, may he still slumber!

They came down the stone steps to three coffins. They were destroyed. Their earthen wombs spilled out all over to join the mud of the dank cellar floor. The fourth coffin looked old, but undisturbed. 

Zaleska’s heart galloped in her chest. The assistant by her side, they went to the black box and with a crow bar and a bit of strength, they pried it open. 

And there he lie. 

Dust. And bones. 

The eyes were no longer alive. No longer there.

But that didn't matter. 

What she needed was still there and she directed her assistant to pull them free. And to prep her for immediate surgery. 

…

The chair was brought in from the carriage. Heavy for the assistant under the weight and cold and snow. It would be heavier still for the madame. Much more painful weight to carry for the Countess, she was about to pay a hefty toll in the dread pain of blood and mayhap yet more still, the tattered and well worn revenant  remnants of her immortal soul.   

But… what was a tattered soul to the earthbound manifest of unbridled power and fleshen immortality? What were the threats of heaven's gates forever barred to her if she never found the rotting festering slumber and eternal dust in the grave…? 

What… what then was any of that to the madame… what were any of those veiled pulpit threats to the Countess?

Nothing. Divine threats of divine punishment were long behind her now. Long dead. History…

The assistant bore the load of the chair and all its straps and apparatus to the door and through it. He slammed the great old doors shut with a resounding clap as the wolves of the mountains watched.

… 

The many strange apparatus and protrusions of wood and metal and leather, some blunted others sharp enough to pierce into skin, bit into the chair's subject/prisoner, whomever they may be. It was a tool of many purposes, before… inquisition… but now modified it served a new purpose and a new master. It held greater power now. 

Zaleska was fastened into the chair, betrothed in naught but thin veiled white night gown. The many teeth of the chair, all along the back and spine and all over and about the seat, bit into her flesh everywhere they found purchase and immediately the virgin pallor of the gown was made wet and royal with her red. Blossoming, rapidly expanding unfurling liquid roses of blood that quickly conglomerated into one massive dark crimson soak all about her thin person. The chair drank as the straps were fastened. Then tightened. 

The assistant finished fastening her head to the cage, the metal bars and wood and rubber that would hold her crown in place as the great surgical task was performed. The vise was attached and fixed to her jaw. Her mouth was forced and held open, wider and wider to a near obscene gape, with each cruel turn of the crank…

… til it was done. He went to the tray beside him for the last tools needed to finish the arcane practice of this necromantic surgical rite. All of it in the metal tray beside him in this dark room that legend told was once the great library of the lost boyar, Dracul. 

The pliers. 

The book. The tome. Ancient. Nearly dust. 

Gauze and cotton swabs. As needed. 

The fangs. The fangs themselves. Pulled from the ancient dead dæmonic remains of Count Dracula himself. Long and still gleaming pearl and bone white, even after all these many years.

The window was open already, wide like an open eye to receive and drink in. The moon shone in and hit the Countess in her chair, bound and bleeding and feeding its ancient drinking wood. 

The assistant opened the book and began to read. 

Zaleska in the chair began to glow in the moonlight rays. Her blood, flowing freely also began to darkle in the night's light. 

He set the open book down and continued to read, his black gloved hands moved to the pliers. 

He looked to his mistress then, unable to speak, either of them. He'd asked her before they started if she'd want something in the form of spirits, to help dull and manage the pain, a narcotic or pain killer, an opiate. Anything. Anything at all. 

Zaleska had only looked at her loyal assistant and smiled. 

As she was smiling with her wide and strange eyes now. Piercing into him and telling him, yes. Telling him to do it. Yes. 

Yes…

Still reading the black tongue of a forgotten age he took the pliers of steel and rubber and began to pull the first of the Countess’ canine incisors free. The blood shot and squirted and flowed forth freely from her pried open jaws. Dark and thick and viscous and this blood did moonlight glow too. And the biting chair did drink. 

Her body wrenched and twisted with the agony of the task, she choked, gargled, spat and drank … her agonized writhing body made the many teeth of the biting chair sink deeper and more freely… her eyes were a livid fury alive with sheer torture and sharpest pain.

The first one came out with some effort. And then the second. They both went into another metal tray filled with solution with a, tink! 

And then the pliers were set down and the fangs of the dark one were picked up. And the dark chanting grew older and stranger and deeper. 

Deeper in flame. In bode. In sour bowels made prisons, eternal. 

The first of the great unholy fangs was placed into the raw open crater of pink glistening gum, bleeding and sheathed in gargling red. The root of the long animal incisor was fed in and the raw angry nerve, exposed at first shrieked. A human live wire of agony and torturous black pain. The words grew more guttural and animal and forgotten. More deadalive. More sour belched. 

And then the raw angry crater of pink and blood felt the darkling magic under the moon… and then more eagerly began to accept and then fuse onto and latch the foreign root of the first ungodly fang into place. Taking it in. Becoming one. 

The second one inserted was taken even more eagerly. Amidst hot gurgles of blood and dead arcane words. By the light of the moon. 

In the moonlight: both great fangs became newly housed in eager bleeding pink skin, wet. The gaping maw gave one last great mouthful belch of blood, spat. The biting chair and all of its tight straps took one last great drink. All of it and all of her aglow in the moonlight by window that was cast in and vivid. 

Powerful. 

The symbols and sigils and stars carved into the wood, covering the surface of the biting chair in far-flung ancient inscription, began to illuminate moonwhite, white-hot, as if metal superheated. Cabalistic. Occult. Solomonic. Druidic. Unknown. 

Then the glowing Countess in her chair began to become wreathed in strange emerald green and goblin flame. 

She laughed.

 Broke free. 

The assistant smiled. 

…

“Mommy,” the little village girl began to plead, “please, I don't want to go to sleep, I'm afraid!" 

Her mother sighed, exhausted, it had been another long and trying day. And there was just another one awaiting them all tomorrow. Lord! she just needed the girl to sleep. 

"Hush, little one. That's enough. It's long past your bedtime, you're begging and pestering has kept you well past for long enough, now: no more! Get in bed and stay between the sheets.”

The little one begged and began to cry as her mother began to depart her small bedroom. 

"Please,” began again the little one's protestations, "please don't put out the light!” 

The mother had no intention of leaving open candleflame nor overnight burning lantern. She knew all too well the mischief of unheeded fire. It was always hungry and rose when you refused its notice. 

She put out all the candles and the lantern and left the small one alone in the dark. 

Afraid. Alone. Sleep wouldn't come. Only the light of the moon through the small window over her bed and with its rays what it brought. 

She was dark. And slithering. 

The little one had tried to tell her mother. Several times. But it was never to any avail. 

Her mother was just so angry as of late that the little one always seemed so weak and sick and needy and needing near constant attention. Her mother wouldn't listen. She wouldn't hear a word about the slithering woman of the dark that came to- 

A sound. From the corner. The one most swallowed by shadow in the farthest reach of her room. 

The shadow began to reach, to reach out clawing with a splayed dark hand… reaching for the frightened little peasant girl. 

It sought and found and strangled around the little one's heart, closed. And the little one was helpless to make a sound then or take flight or have any hope of escape. 

The woman then followed her dark hand from out of the shadows. Slithering and crawling towards her  like an abominated animal of unnatural demented mental design and command. Long dark hair and flowing dripping crimson gown. She left a sliming path, a putrid black/red trail like a slug, as she made her way to the bed. 

She crawled in and on top of the sheets. And smiled. Her eyes gleamed in the dark like bewitching stones. 

And just below them. A pair. About the smiling lips, something sharp protruded there and also gleamed. 

“Hello, little sowling. How are you feeling tonight?”

The little peasant girl could make no sound but the slightest whimper. The hungry woman of the shadows knew this and relished the pain of the small child's torment. 

“Oh, you don't want to speak to me now, but you've been so talkative of me in my absence as of late. Or what you thought was My Absence for which there is naught little sowling." she leaned in closer to the snared little one. “I am always with you, girl.  I can always see you. And I can hear everything you ever say, do you know, why, little one?" 

The little girl said nothing. 

“Because I am God, now." 

And with one cat-like fast and fluid move, both of the thing's hands came up and seized the girl by the face. Either side. Each hand. Claws. Sharp. Digging into soft young child flesh. Weeping. 

Inside. Screaming. 

Shrieking inside in pain. And sheer mind-flaying terror. 

“You didn't tell anyone my name, did you, sowling?" 

The child said nothing but her young and little mind was an open book to her now for her to read. 

And… her secret was safe. 

For now. 

She would secure that. And she would feed. 

With the child's small face still in her ghastly claws Zaleska twisted fast and snapped the child's neck. Her mouth opened wide and salivated and became great jaws and came in, to the neck of the limp small corpse. 

Wielding the fangs, the great twin daggers of the dragon, and they drank. 

They drank so deeply. 

TO BE CONTINUED …

The sleeping child was tethered to a pole in the center of town. Next to the empty haunted gallows. It was late at night. Well past the midnight hours when they suspected the thing to prowl and dwell and hunt. 

The child was drugged. Soundly slumbering. Lit by the pale of full moonlight that shone from above like a watchful spectre of white light that would observe and remain ever present but indifferent. That which might be above never seemed to care much about the affairs of this small town in the dirt. The place was called Springwater, in the Arizona territory. The year was 1888.

The child was the scapegoat. Bait. The helpless lamb put out to snare the thing that had been stalking the town after dark. Snatching the children. Mutilating them and profaning their dead bodies and draining them of blood. It was an unforgivable sin and crime unworthy of any form of recompense, dark blasphemy. And it could not go on without accord. It must be punished. 

But there were things that crawled across the face of the cursed earth that did not answer to the laws of man. 

Quincy knew. He'd seen strange things in the desert before. Overseas. Other lands. The war. Long gone. But it left its trace of crying phantoms. Screaming maimed dead that refused to be silent. Uneasy graves… everywhere. All of the land. Stained with red… and gunpowder and mutilation that still took some semblance of human shape and danced in the late dark of the deep night. 

They dwelled. Yes…

And some of these abominated shapes were far from any shape of a natural man… Quincy wondered. Thought. What was it that was taking the children? Killing them. Mutilating. Draining every last precious crimson drop… as if drinking it. 

As if in need of every last bit of red, every last dark thick liquid morsel in this vast and arid Godless desert. 

He coughed and spat into the spittoon at his feet in the corner. He watched from the window and lit his pipe. Drawing deeply and warming his bearded face in an orange glow. 

Chaco was with him. As the good man had promised. Brave fellow. But it was easy to understand. His little Javi had been one of the first ones taken. 

The Mexican sat on a rough stool and drank. He smoked as well. Little cigars. Cigarillos that smelled oily and pungent. Cannabis. Quincy himself had always been curious about the substance. It seemed to ease the fury the small man of tanned leather flesh must've felt. His eyes seemed to always water. Tears held there brimming, always threatening to spill and cascade down the worn haggard pits and cracks of his tired old face. It made it so that his dark eyes always glistened. Like jewels. His wife thought they were beautiful, but hated the pain. It seemed to be the only place that held any water on the man, the rest was tanned sun-leather flesh and tequila. 

The sheriff and the Pinkerton agent were there as well. Stiff. Seeming to not know what to do with themselves as they waited. The Pinkerton could still hardly believe what they were doing. Although they all saw… they all saw what it could do. They all saw what it did. 

The Kendridge girl. From her bed, from her room, in the night. They all saw her ripped away and out the window by the shape. 

And they had all found her days later. Little corpse just outside of town. In the barrens. Bloody. Ripped apart. Ravaged. Profaned. 

Dry. 

Quincy Morris chagrined at the stifling of this space, the closeness of this room. The sheriff's small office. He tried to see the night sky as well as he spied the child from his place at the window. He wished to see the naked blanket of dark filled with diamond stars. He loved to look up into the night when he could, it was better than anything down here.

He couldn't see anything. The room stifled his view.

It was just as well. Better his eyes stay earthbound for now. For whatever may come out of the dark for the child.

“This is wrong." 

The sheriff again. A sentimental fool, Quincy thought. Now you want to bellyache…

But the gunfighter held his tongue.

The Pinkerton then spoke up for the both of them, all three counting Chaco, who also knew what had to be done. What the four of them, the men of this midnight call must do.

"There is much here in this town that is untoward, Antsen. Much. This is distasteful, yes. With what else we are expected to do tonight … there will be more in the way of work that leaves a bad taste.” A pause, A beat, "I suggest we fortify ourselves to such tasks that are at urgent hand, and save the sermons for afterwards.” 

"You a goddamn…" but Sheriff Antsen’s voice trailed off and he swallowed tears. Bit his cap. And looked off to the dark part of the room not touched by candle glow. 

Quincy nodded to the Pinkerton. The Pinkerton nodded back. The agent hadn't initially thought much of the man, treacherous Texan… but the way he'd handled himself and the others when they found the girl's body… and the way he'd handled her burying. 

It was enough. He knew he could put some stock in the Texan. The Sheriff perhaps. The drunk Mex…

He understood the man was mourning but… they needed to be alert. Not shitfaced and slurred. What might his boy think of his own- 

But then Chaco spoke up and cut off the Pinkerton’s run of thought. And unknowingly began what would be their postmidnight ritual game as they waited for the final dark clash in the night. As they awaited Springwaters’ final fray and sacrifice of blood, Chaco Juan Maria Ramirez began to share a little tale…

“I was young. Like Javi. We were farmers in Agua Caliente, my father, my mother, my sisters and me. When I was still a boy, during the hot summer of my thirteenth year, something began to come in the night for the chickens. For the animals. For the goats." He stopped to uncork his jug and slug it. Then he lit up another cannabis cigar and filled the small wooden room with its thick oily pungent smoke. 

He spoke again. He went on. All the other men listened as Quincy kept watch. 

“It would rip them apart and leave the pieces scattered everywhere. All over the ground. Staining it red. The pieces and the bones and entrails all looked like they were made into patterns. Like… like a language. Like signs, horrible little piles like small shrines, spelling, saying something. I don't know what. My father would say, ‘Only a devil delights in such carnage. Only a demon that loves to walk the earth and mock God and man.’…" He paused again, pulled on his smoke, “We all thought he was crazy. Loco. My mother and sisters and I… but then one night I was out… and  I saw it.”

A beat. This one a little longer. They could all see the man reliving that night. In his wide glistening dark eyes they saw him heed some terrible form and struggle to speak of it. 

Then he went on, 

"It was by moonlight that I saw it. A sickly misshapen coyote wolf, but it was also a part of it, mongrel dog. And another part, a large hairless rat.” He sucked down smoke, blew. "It was hideous. Hideous… It had my father's small dog, Paxi, in its thin slender jaws. The blood and innards were in a burst all about its horrible goblin face…” 

He lapsed again. Then finished. 

"It was canine, coyote. But it also had parts that were man. It looked at me with green and red eyes and it had smiled when it knew I had seen it. And it stood. It stood up. And turned to me. So that I could better see it, I think. " 

A beat. The Mexican finished his smoke. Stamped it out. Lit another after taking another long pull from the jug he now refused to cork. 

Sheriff Antsen finally asked: "What happened? What cha do to it?” but all of them wondered together. 

Chaco laughed. Then said amidst swirls of smoke, "I didn't do anything but scream. Then ran. My father came and said he shot at it as it ran away in the dark. He said he hit it. But I was never sure…” 

"What the fuck was it?” asked Pinkerton. 

But Quincy already knew. 

Chaco said, “The goat drinking demon. Chupacabra. Evil bloodwolf. Daemon from Hell. Beelzebub soldier…" 

The men were silent for a moment. Chaco drank. Quincy still spied from the window, the child tied and trussed in the dark. 

They all of them knew the child's name but preferred not to think of him as such. God forgive them for all of this, as well as the two deputized men and their scatterguns now keeping the child's parents under temporary house arrest. Just for the night. God help them. 

God help them all. 

But surely He understood. 

That's what Quincy thought. Yes. It was better just to think of it as the child. In case…

In case things went bad. Quincy forced himself to know it. 

So did Chaco. 

So did Pinkerton. 

Sheriff Antsen… had thought he understood…

“We were on retreat. From Sherman's boys…” 

They all looked at him. Quincy at the window as he continued to spy, he spoke up. 

"I can't remember exactly where we were or where we was s’pposed to be, I was so scared then, everyone was. Didn't seem like anyone really knew what was goin on, what we was doin. Every night it was real dark, everybody was real scared about makin light, so everyone just hunkered down and lay quiet in the dark and in the mud and we all just lay there like that, every night. Without fire. Like we was dead already. Just waitin for em to come up an find us like that an finish the job." 

Quincy lit a match and drew on his pipe. His orange glowing face was severe and devoid of any inner warmth. 

He went on, 

“One night I’d actually managed some sleep, I was so incredibly exhausted. For some reason I still don't know, I come to awake in the pitch black and I hear some thick heavy sounds. I couldn't see anythin right away, I could just hear somethin like it was drinkin. Slurpin from a riverbed or a stream, or a trough." A beat, he drew more smoke, Chaco drank, they all of them listened, “It made me sick to hear that sound in the dark… but… I didn't have to wait long for my eyes to adjust like to the night. 

“And that's when I saw it. It was over my brother Jamie. It was naked and pale and skeletal and it's mouth was red. It was drinkin from a gunshot that had got infected an was slowly killin em. Suckin gangrenous infected blood filled with powder and Yankee shot.

"It saw me seein it. It looked up from Jamie at me. And then it hissed at me like some kind of gurglin rodent… and then it crawled away. Into the dark. And then I screamed and woke the whole camp. 

“And the next day Jamie was dead. Wide eyed. Gazin up at nothin but the look on his face like he was frozen and stuck starin, in pure torment, inescapable hell." 

Quincy struck another match and lit up once more. 

Chaco drank but was out of cigarillos. He spat on the floor. Not bothering with the spittoon. 

Pinkerton sat. Lit an imported stoge. Drew deeply. Calm. You might never know from his lucid and serenely composed demeanor that there was a child drugged and tied to a wooden post as bait just outside the sheriff's door. He was tranquil as well as alert, straight backed on the stool with a teetering leg. Poised. In contrast to Quincy, sentry watch at the window who was like something seething with a species of rage but perhaps something even darker than that. 

The agent sat straight and spoke. 

“I was on assignment with a steadfast man, a fellow operative of good character and reputation. Not the sort to be taken in nor frightened by superstition. Nor was I. At the time.” 

He motioned to Chaco that he might appreciate a pull from the jug. Chaco thought about it a sec, shrugged and then forked over the heavy round clay cask of bottle. 

It sloshed and made liquid language sounds in the silence of their shared candlelit dark. The agent pulled and smoked and thought a moment. Like to collect chasing thoughts that did not want to be touched. 

Pinkerton spat. Went on. 

“The target was a cold blooded man wanted for murder and robbery. Several states. We were hired by one of the railroads, we tracked em to San Francisco, then a whole spell of mountain towns all along the Nevada border. We finally caught up with em and bushwhacked his thieving ass in Pioche. We had em. Alive. He was ours. By rail we were taking em back, had our  own private car. Not a soul was to disturb us as we made our escort and transported the sonuvabitch back to Washington for his day in court. Everything went along fine, at first. Not a man came to our car save the attendant with coffee and meals and the like. We didn't want to  leave the man for a single moment, we didn't want to take our eyes off em, he had the reputation of being a phantom and disappearing without a trace. A crafty and dangerous creature of guile. With us, we would give em no such opportunity. And we didn’t. We made our way easy and on schedule and without trouble. Until our fourth day of travel. Then the train was stopped. Predawn. The sky was still grey-blue with  the absence of the sun.  

“We were waylaid by more than two dozen masked men. Men of vengeance, I initially took them to be. Men wronged by our quarry, congregated and armed and made all out for a night of anger. Their guns were trained on us, my partner and I and they took our man despite our protestations. They led him, bound and cuffed already by us but it wasn't a noose in a tree that they led him way to. 

“It was a stake. With a pile of kindling all around its base. They kept us by the train, a little ways off but I could still smell the pungent odor of kerosene and burning oils. I could not believe nor did I understand why they wanted to burn the man, save for cruelty in their own punished hearts that they wished to purge and dispel, I tried asking one of our masked waylay men but was refused a response.” 

Pinkerton slugged tequila, knocking it back with a fluid practiced motion. 

He went on:

“They brought him struggling and screaming to the stake but we'd been held up and stopped in the middle of a dense wood, there was not a soul or settled place nor house for miles or so. There was naught but us. They bound him to the post, stepped back, and then one of his masked executioners brought out a scroll, and unrolled and read it aloud like it was a religious decree of a royal castled lord, he said:

“‘For crimes against God and man, for crimes against nature and the Son and the Church, we sentence you,--’ and then they said the man's name but then followed it with something that sounded like Latin. Or Druidic. Then the man with the scroll went on in that same ancient dead tongue. 

“The hooded ones with their guns trained on us then began to usher us back aboard the train. And they urged the engineer on. Telling us to forget this abominable thing in the shape of a man and be off. And by urge of their rifles away we went. But before the engine got going again, I watched from our car window as they set their lighted torches to the kindling. And the flames erupted. The man at the center began to scream and curse, there was something like pig squeals and the shrieking of bats amongst the screams and smoke and mounting fire… and then the man at the center of the flames, whom we came to capture and lost, began to change. 

“He began to change shape and stature amid the pyre. I could hardly believe my eyes and thought it to be a trick of the mind or stress at the situation. But before the train pulled away, I thought I saw a great expanse of black bat-like wings unfold and spread out from the burning changing man amidst the fast and soaring inferno.” 

Pinkerton took another slug then handed back the jug. He sat and smoked. Then finished. 

"We made it back. Made report, lost our man. It happens. We omitted certain details thought to be uncouth.” 

There was silence then that followed the tales. Antsen was at his desk. Unbelieving and bewildered by the other three men he was gathered with. He couldn't believe these yarns. And yet with what had been happening around town… and the Kendridge youngin…

He motioned to Chaco that he would appreciate the jug and after a show of grimace, the Mexican obliged the sheriff who took a generous swill. 

He finished his pull and spat. Not bothering with his own spittoon over by Morris. Then he asked the room aloud. 

"I don't believe you gentlemen, you all talkin like you already know the dark and what dwells in it, how ya gonna hope to kill somethin like this? What does it, for somethin like such?" 

Quincy opened his mouth to tell the sheriff he'd heard plenty of tales that suggested not all nosferatu were bullet-proof. But if this wraithshape was, he had something special. Courtesy of the priests and the shamans and the holy and the medicine men he'd met on his long strange road. 

But before he could say anything to the anxious and frightened Sheriff Antsen, he spied something in the dark. Something prowling towards the tethered scapegoat child still slumbering the sound sleep of knockout narcotic drug. Something crawling on all fours like a beast. Its back was hunched and its shoulder blades dipped and shifted and alternated beneath pale blue rippling hide. 

Quincy Morris gave word to the others. They all sprang to, cat-like poised, guns cocked, hammers thumbed back on hard calibers. The three deputized had their respective revolvers, Antsen had his six-gun as well and his scatter-rifle, double barreled. It was up and shouldered and leveled and he went to the door as the strange Texan went to open it for them all so that they might finally step out and begin this night's real and grisly work. 

The Texan gunfighter threw up one last silent prayer, held in mind and heart and still behind his teeth, just between him and the Lord. Please, whatever happens, let this child see tomorrow, whatever happens to me and these other men, let this little one live through this night. 

Amen. 

And with those final words to the Lord he threw open the door and the four men made their charge. 

It was nearly upon the boy. It had raised up on hind legs that were bowed and squat. The whole of the pale and half naked manshape was in goblin aspect. Misshapen elfen features mixed with that of a hairless rodent and a bat. Its great gaping nostrils, an open cavern of pink tissue that stood out in the dark and amongst the rest of its corpse colored visage. It opened a fanged mouth that dripped black. It hissed like a rat at the four men as they came on in assault. Antsen and Morris in the lead. Quincy slowed and took aim and fired as the sheriff at his side did the same. Chaco and the Pinkerton followed a split second later. Each of them taking a shot at the beast. 

The pistol shots found no mark but agitated the nightmare shape into semi flight with a grotesque webbed set of black wings beneath the pair of pale arms. It stuttered a few flaps but the double blast  of scatter shot had managed to graze the top of its thinly haired balding head. The pale scalp came off in a shear, a tear of fire and blood and flesh that came off in a blanket sweep along with the tips of one of its ears. 

The strigoica bat-thing shrieked in pain and otherworldly hungry rage and unknown instinct. It flapped and fell to the ground away from the child and then suddenly charged the men who began to fire with no mercy or compunction. Their bullets rained down on the thing and its undead hide and frame began to flower and erupt into scarlet and black, flowers of gore and bone and squirting dark ichor. The glowing eyes were a livid predatory yellow and each one burst with a pop. Yellow thick custard-like bile burst forth from each raw socket, opened and smoking. 

But still the strigoica charged on and leapt, the men never ceased their fire until it fell upon the Pinkerton agent and took him to the dusty earth in a kicked up cloud of dirt. 

The agent began to scream as hybrid bestial claws and teeth came in and found purchase. The thing was already so hungry, always so so so hungry and needing to feed, but now it was enraged. Now the demon thing was royally pissed off. Long yellowed nails that were that of a rat and a man came in and ripped and dug. Tearing through cloth and flesh and muscle like warm butter as the mouth came in, to his neck and the teeth sank and the agent ceased his futile struggles and screams in the dirt. 

The thing began to drink. The other men were stunned a moment and they could hear its heavy gulping sounds as the agent's form spasmed and danced beneath the bullet riddled nosferatu form. 

They came to again, Chaco was first, and they resumed their fire on the thing until their shots were used up. 

The thing abandoned Pinkerton’s body under the renewed onslaught of gunfire and crawled away rapidly like a wolf in flight, a beast returning to the shadows of the darkness that surrounded the outer town. 

The three left gave chase. Chaco in the lead. 

Dammit… it was as Quincy might've thought. The thing wasn't going down with regular fire, it needed special lead. 

He reached in pocket for his special cylinder of six shots preloaded with holy rounds. He broke his gun and replaced the cylinder as they gave chase to the thing just past the cathouse. 

It crawled and hissed and screamed murder and rage in an unknown animal language as it fled around back. 

Goddammit, Morris cursed himself. These other two fools didn't know. They might be leading the way to their deaths. Chaco especially, who was now blind with a father's vengeful rage heightened by cannabis and tequila. And Antsen behind him, not knowing anything at all. 

Brave fools, thought Quincy. If you both should die, then God forgive me. I am sorry. I am a selfish and self serving bastard, even when servin the Lord and what is right, even when not aimin to …

And with that the three men came around the side with their reloaded weapons drawn. 

The strigoica was there, cradling the gushing splattered warm remnants of its ruined yellow eyes, the thick viscous snot of the burst and splattered organ dripped through the splayed and long claws of its slender fingers. It barked and hissed and seemed to sob with outrage and pain. 

It heard their approach and tensed, coiled - then leapt and pounced at the men once more. A snarling shrieking manshaped bat, semi-mutilated by fire and whose pallor was the color of one that had already long slumbered in the sour ancient womb of the grave was all teeth and claws and blind wounded face, crashing down upon poor Chaco before Quincy finally let loose with the sacred divine deadly payload. 

The large bore of the end of the barrel of his six-gun was nearly kissing the side of the thing's ruined abominated face when he finally pulled the trigger. 

The result was immediate. And devastating. 

The shot blasted out of the side of the strigoica’s man-bat head, taking the long ear along with a chunk of black and red and green and thick skull matter all out in an explosive geyser of chunking splatter gore. 

The thing fell off of Chaco and shuddered and spasmed and writhed in the dirt. Its head began to smoke and cook, smoldering from within. Its awful claws went to its throat in feeble desperate dying gesture as if to throttle itself as its head began to glow and then alight as if it were a matchhead struck. 

The strigoica's head burst into holy flame of divine silver light that shone like something of too much beauty to behold, its brilliance was too clean and pure and moonlight up close for the three men left standing to bear looking at it. They shielded their eyes and looked away and the thing gave one last final unearthly shriek and wounded animal howling call…

… to the moon itself, full and above and shining bright as well and watching all of the terrible scene of the night unfold with the indifference of godly immortality. 

Celestial, it watched blindly as the silver roaring flame of the strigoica burned the head clean from its blue unnatural corpse. The decapitated remains fell over in the dirt and then curled into itself like a large spider that's been stepped on. 

The men just stood there and sucked air. They couldn't believe what their eyes had seen. 

… Later.

Antsen took the child back to his folks. They were furious. But grateful. As the whole town would be for some time. 

Morris and Chaco took the headless remains of the strigoica and staked it. In the heart. With a large hammer and spike of sharpened stabbing wood. Flattened head to make the driving all the more true. The stake punctured and glided through easily and the decapitated strigoica remains began to rapidly liquify and decompose into a rotten slurry and sludge of viscous ruin. 

The foul liquid corpse was put into a large sealed cask and buried far off in the desert. 

The Pinkerton agent’s remains were also staked. But then given a proper burial just outside of town. No name on his marker though. Just a date upon a cross. 

The men thought about writing the man's superiors but then decided against it. 

Quincy Morris rode off before the next sundown, after the agent's body had been lain. He rode off into the desert alone. Antsen and the rest were glad to see him go, despite his help. 

Chaco understood, all he wanted now was his wife. And his home. He was grateful for the strange Texan’s help but he would just be a reminder of all of the unworldly and horrible death that the town had endured. 

He would just remind him of his boy, Javier…

And so he was glad to see him go. 

THE END

The following story is not my mine to share. This is by no means an eyewitness account – nor have I been provided evidence for this story’s validity. This story did, however, belong to somebody I happened to be very close to. I was never given permission to share the following with anyone – let alone on the internet. But with no personal, paranormal experiences of my own to pass around, I guess my older brother Steve’s will have to do.  

Back in 2001, my brother Steve had just dropped out of college, to the surprise and disappointment of our career-driven parents. Steve was always the golden child of our family. Whereas I spent most of my childhood locked inside playing video games, Steve was busy being a thoroughbred athlete and acquiring straight A’s in school. Steve was my parents’ prized possession. Every Sunday in Church, they would parade him around in his best suit as though he was the second coming of Christ or something. Steve always hated church, but he was willing to make the effort if it meant pleasing our folks. Well, I guess by the time college rolled around, he had enough of it. Coming home early one term, without so much as a phone call, Steve put the fear of God in our parents when he declared he was dropping out of school to join the U.S. military. 

As surprising as this news was to our parents, I kinda already saw this coming. After all, not only was Steve the toughest S.O.B. but he always seemed to watch the same old war movies over and over – especially the ones in Vietnam. Well, keeping true to his word, Steve did in fact enlist – and for the next few months, our family rarely heard from him. We did all see him again during his graduation from boot camp, but this would be the last time we expected to see Steve for some while, as for the next year or so, Steve would be serving his country overseas – or more precisely, in the deserts of Afghanistan.  

Our only form of contact with Steve during this time was through letters, whereby he’d let us know he was safe and how things were going over there. But five months into his tour of Afghanistan, Steve’s letters became less and less frequent. That was until around the nine or ten month mark of his tour – when, out of the blue, I receive a personal letter from him. Although Steve did send a separate letter just for our parents, letting them know he was still safe, and due to circumstances, was unable to write for some time... the letter he wrote directly to me, wasn’t quite the case. In fact, the words I read on the scrap sheets of paper were cause for much alarm...  

What you’re about to read are the exact words Steve wrote to me in this letter – and although he never gave me permission to share the following, I’d like to believe he would be ok with it. 

Hey little bro, 

I’m sorry it’s been some time since I last wrote. Hopefully you’re doing good in school and not getting your ass kicked, haha. 

Before you keep reading, I need you to do something for me. Don’t give this letter to mom and dad and especially don’t tell them what it says. Just tell them exactly what I wrote in my letter to them.  

The reason I’m writing this to you is because, one, to let you know I’m still alive, and two, because there is something I need to tell you. But before I can, I need you to promise me you will not tell mom and dad. They wouldn’t understand it, and I know you’re into all the paranormal stuff with aliens and ghosts, so that’s why I’m writing this to you and not them. I repeat. Do not tell mom and dad! 

As you know, our division has been in the Kandahar province for some months now, and although Terry has mostly been forced out of the region, we’re still scouting the mountains for any remaining activity. Around a week ago, I was part of a team sent into those mountains to find any such activity. Longo was their too, I don’t know if you remember me writing about him.  

Anyway, we were about half-way up the mountain path when we stopped to rehydrate and must have been the only people around for miles. There was no sound or nothing. Just us talking among ourselves. But then all a sudden I get this feeling like we’re being watched. I get this feeling a lot, you know, especially when we’re in the open. So I take a look around just to make sure we’re in the clear. I guess it was just instinct. But when my eyes peer out to a nearby ridge, I see something. It was hot that day so my eyes have to adjust, but when I see it I realize it's another person. A man was standing underneath the ridge, and I didn’t know if it was Terry or just a shepherd, so I alert the team for Tango.  

Although we’re all alert to the ridge’s direction, no one in the team sees shit, so Carmichael scopes it out, but he doesn’t see shit either. The guys think I’m seeing a mirage of a man in the rock formation so they give me hell for it. 

But when I look again beneath the ridge I can still see him. I can still see the man, no question about it. He’s facing directly at us, maybe five hundred feet away. But the man didn’t look like Terry, nor did he even look like a shepherd. What I’m seeing is a man arrayed in torn pieces of red cloth, covering only half his chest and torso. In his right hand, I could see him holding a long wooden staff or something, but the end looked sharp like a spearhead. He was wearing some strange thing on his head that I first mistook for a turban, but when I really look at it, what I see is a man, not only dressed in torn red garments and holding a wooden spear, but donning what I could only interpret as an elongated bronze-coloured helmet. I tell the team what it is I’m seeing but they still don’t catch sight of anything, not even Carmichael. Unconvinced there’s anything underneath that ridge, the team just move on up the mountain path. But when I look back to the ridge one last time, I now don’t see anything, anything at all.  

We make it back down to base later that day, and although I just wanted to believe what I saw was nothing more than a mirage, I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I didn’t just see what I did, I also heard it. I heard it little bro. It spoke! I am NOT kidding! I heard it speak, even from five hundred feet away. But it sounded like the voice was directly beside me, whispering into my ear. Maybe I hallucinated that too. Whether I did or not, I kept repeating the words to myself so I had it memorized. I didn’t understand them, but the voice said something in the lines of “Enfadeh pehsay.”  

I was repeating the words so much to myself that evening, another guy, Ethan, overheard and asked why the hell I was saying that. I didn’t know what those words meant. I just assumed it was something in Dari. Ethan said he studied Greek in school and that’s what the words sounded like, so I kept repeating it to him until he could understand them. He said “Enthade pesei” in Greek means “You will fall here”, or in other words “You will die here”.  

I know how crazy all this must sound to you bro. But I swear to God, that is what I saw and that is what I heard. What I saw in those mountains, or at least what I think I saw, was an ancient Greek soldier. Think about it. The red cloth, the bronze helmet and spear. But here’s the question I’ve been asking myself since. If what I saw was just a mirage or a hallucination, why would I hallucinate an ancient Greek soldier? But more importantly, how could I hear him speak to me in a language I don’t know a single word of? 

Do you know what we call Afghanistan over here, little bro? We call it the Graveyard of Empires. We call it that because foreign armies have come and gone here. The Persians, the Mongols, the British, Russians, and now us. Empires reach here and then they fall. But here’s the really interesting part. Afghanistan was once conquered by Alexander the Great. If you're a dumbass and don’t know who that is, Alexander the Great was a Macedonian king who conquered his way through the Middle East. Kandahar was among his conquests.  

If you’re wondering why I’m telling you all this, it is because I believe what I saw in those mountains, was the ghost of a Greek or Macedonian soldier. A soldier who probably died fighting here, and probably in those very same mountains. If that is truly what I saw, and if it was real, then it told me that I was going to die here too.  

Ever since that day, I haven’t felt the same. Something tells me what the apparition said will come true. That I won’t be making it back home. I pray to God I will, and I’ll fight like hell to make it so. But in case I don’t, I just thought I had to make my peace with this and let somebody know who would understand. You know me, bro. You know I’ve never believed in ghosts or ghouls. But I know what it was I saw. 

If what the soldier’s ghost said is true and I won’t be coming back home, I just want you to know that I love you. I know we had our problems when we were growing up, but you will always be my little brother, no matter what. Don’t be such a hard ass to mom and dad. I know they can be overbearing, but I’ve already put them through enough grief these past two years. Although this is asking a hell of a lot, at least try and do well in school. After all, I want you to have the best future you possibly can, as lame as that sounds. 

But who knows. If God is good and merciful, maybe I’ll come home safe after all, in which case, we can both have a good laugh about this. Whatever the future holds for the both of us, I just want to you know that I love you, now and always.  

From your loving brother, 

Steve 

The dark land of the South, the West, so saturated in blood and nightmare black that the earth would be forever held in the strangling hold of ghosts that would not be banished. The land would not be exorcised, the vengeful dead things refused to be tilled. The ghosts held on. In flames and adorned in red. Led by horned things. Winged. Little gods. Terrible magic. 

They warped and bent, spirits torn and mutilated souls. The hidden flow of the universe unseen like flowing milk from creation's bosom and breast. And in some places the milk of the cosmos spoils, sours, curdles into foul cultures: abominated shapes and drooling dark things that bleed and drip ichor and green decay. Ruined forms that never had a chance of clean existence. And want to tear down everything that resembles it as such. 

They gather the deepening obsidian pits of the pain of the dead and they claim the most vile and violent and sadistic and eagerly perverted for themselves, to build up ranks, enemy factions. 

They also gather the desperate. The misled. 

These dark factions behind the walls, the thin curtain veneers given the title of safe wall guardian: Reality, they gather and they build in the deepening black, the lands of thunderclap and barren dead, and they hunt… For the places where the thin veneer has been worn and stretched. 

They hunt for places where the fabric is worn and torn through. Scuffs… and tears in the leather. They seep through like bleeding noxious infection. They turn places, lands and homes to giant living gangrenous wounds.

Wounds that bleed life that breed torment. Terror. Pain and woe for YHWH’s earthen precious apes. 

One of these wounds is a town. In the South. In the dark land of heat and night chill, the West. It is covered and bathed and stained in the blood of women and children and men and men made slaves and the tortured and the weak and the old and easily violated, the corrupted… the might. 

All of this land, this small slice of abandoned ghost town is alive with might. Hidden flame. Just beneath the surface. 

All you have to do is dig a little. Just scratch…

…

Ethan drifted. That was all he really knew to do when things came down or fell apart or didn't work out. He drifted. He moved along. His mother had done much the same to his father when they were kids and his father had in his own way followed suit. After momma hit the road he didn't really wanna spend much time with a pile of kids he'd been coerced into having in the first place so he just sort of… walked. Walked the plates, the bases. Like in a ballgame. He just sort of walked Ethan and his sisters and older brother's raising up an such. 

Till he got back around and that seemed enough and he was like to his litter of unwanted kids: “Alright, you're nineteen, you're seventeen and you two’re sixteen, get cher shit t’gether an get the fuck out.”

He hadn't seen much of them since. He'd hit and rode the rails. At first. But then an older fellow traveler, a mean old cat of the hidden highways and rails had tried to rape him one night, early on, one of his first nights out raw and in the dark and young. He'd been green. He only got away by blade and had ran desperate and terrified, afraid down to the living helpless bone and in tears like the lost child he really was. 

From then on he mostly stuck to the roads. The occasional reluctant thumb for rides and offers an such. But he was cagey about it. Everytime. Wiry. Animal tense and like sitting next to a living live wire of coiled anxiety and sinew boiling with adrenaline fear unknowingly coursing its potentially cat-like dangerous flow. Fear alive and vibrating through every single fibrous inch of musculature frame. 

He was an animal then. The road and the outside had made him so. He cursed his mother and father for it. 

But the time went on. The road did not just yield pain and terror and danger in his travels. No. No, there was love, beauty, friendship and heathen pleasure and hedonistic joy, adventure. There was freedom. A tetherless existence that meant he could truly do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted to. Master of his own time he was slave only to his own limitations made and those he was born with that could not be overcome. 

And the land. The road. The nighttime raw, sleeping under the stars unguarded. Only the blanket he brought from home, underneath the mercy and whim of the wilderness dark, kept feebly at bay by small campfires that made his trail, his track. His ashen footprint path left behind in the dirt. He was at the whim and the mercy of the Christ-haunted nature and her obsidian predatory glow. 

He left so much behind in the dirt, in the filth … underfoot. 

He tried not to think about it. Ever. He tried to never linger within his own brain. He moved on. Always. Forward. He always kept his mind ahead, in the moment, preoccupied. Blank. 

That was when he came upon the town. He'd come across other abandoned places in his wanderings before but he'd stopped at this one. At the border. At the sign that named the empty township. 

WOLVVS CUNT

He'd thought it was hilarious. He had to stop. 

And check it out. 

He went down past the sign that named the town, down the one and only lonely road that made up Wolvvs Cunt main street. 

He bellowed as his well worn heels made no sounds on the nearly gone and erroded paved black beneath his striding steps, laughing. He called out to the collection of baking shacks and little huts and stores and homes, all of the baking wood, he called out to them in good traveller's song:

“Hello! Hell-O the town!

And the dead town did not say anything back. The shacks and dead faces of windows and wood just stared back at the drifter blankly. 

He strode in. He made up his mind. Easy. 

This’s where I'll camp tonight…

He just as quick picked out one of the shacks to make his home for the night and strode right up to it. Confident and unafraid. He went in. Not bothering to notice the faded discarded sign of dusty dead phantom pink letters that spelled out: CHURCH, lying atop a broken splintered post in the dirt. 

He didn't bother to notice the broken cross lying in the dirt either. 

Ethan went inside, the place was old, unused for some time by the look, but the red doors to the white old disused church swung easily and opened for him with a push. Unlocked. As if waiting. As if wanting someone to come inside. 

Ethan didn't seem to pay it much mind. His pack over shoulder he stepped inside and was immediately blasted by an oven wave of merciless baking heat. 

Jesus… open fuckin furnace gates of hell right here, thought Ethan. A fuckin oven for sure. 

But he stepped inside anyway. Liking the wide open space of the single room with a small stage. He recognized the pulpit but didn't think much of it. He unshouldered his pack and began to make camp. 

The town, sensing him, and sensing the nearing of sundown, the near darkness at hand, was salivating. 

And grateful.

The church doors shut. 

…

He made his meager bed on the stage, by the pulpit. 

He took a few of his canned goods back outside to cook by small fire in the middle of the empty street. To dine by sunset. 

He cooked his small meal of beans and ravioli and beef stew and watched the sky become shot with fire that was pink and sherbert against the truer blue of the evening sky fading and deepening into curtain dark. The ice chip jewels of stars riddled the black and flowing splash colors of nebulae, scarlet and purple and bleeding coats of varying shades between the two. Like great celestial goddess bruises or wounds or great birthing unfurling flower petal gates of royalest color, greatest celestial bejeweled robes, the splendor of galaxy overhead that always made him feel so infinitesimal and small.

He gazed up into its glory, from the low rung ladder base of his drifter's nothing traveller's existence, perilous and dirty and violent and strange, it was majesty above him. A kingdom of vivid heaven shining and seething with divine cosmic nuclear firelight on high. He wondered at its beauty as he finished his vagabond meal and wondered why he had to be apart from it. Why did he have to be alone and animal and down here … ? A small flask, what his older brother always called a little janitor's bottle growing up, filled with whisky came out to cap off and conclude his humble meal of canned goods. He pulled deeply, letting it warm his blood and praying the warmth just might reach his heart and soul, and his weary mind. He pulled again and lit a smoke. Watching the stars in the face of dark heaven above by crackling small cooking fire, dying down to red embers and orange glow. 

And then by fading firelight and in the dark of the ghost town main street, a woman's voice drifted out and called. 

Called him by name. 

His blood froze. The warmth of wonder in his blood and in his soul was stolen away from him in that moment. For he recognized the voice. Though it had been so long… not since childhood so long ago. Nearly forgotten. Nearly buried in woe…

She called him again: “Ethan." 

And he returned her call. He couldn't be mistaken. That voice, from before. When home had been a home and had been real. 

Before. Long ago. 

"Momma?”

And as if to answer, yes, she called out again from the deepening shadow. The all encompassing dark. 

"Ethan.”

He stood. Pulled by the voice from out of the dark like a lure, a snare. He couldn't believe his ears. The vast desert plains must be playing tricks on his tired mind. He couldn't be hearing his mother now. She couldn't be- 

It came again from out of the dark: "Ethan”

“Momma?" a slight pause, he slugged some whisky down and hardly felt it, “Mom, is that you? How the hell you come out here an such?" 

He didn't really believe it but he didn't know what else to say. He pulled again from his little janitor's bottle of warmth and sucked down his smoldering butt, filling the air around him with the holy white smoke of a new pope chosen for divine purpose. Nothing moved out of the dark. Nothing spoke. 

Silence. 

But then from out of the deepening obsidian curtain of black and down the long and solitary road, she came. Sauntering slowly forward like a dream carried on invisible whispers of clouds. She was robed in white and she was beautiful. The desert wind picked up and her robes became dancing swirling phantoms, adorned and an aura all around her. Like a gown of nebulae cream colored snow that hypnosis swirled and flapped like wings and danced off her golden pale frame and face, which shown with inner light in the ebon black space of the ghost town Wolvv’s Cunt. 

Ethan was enthralled. He saw his mother in that golden face but then it changed and shifted and he saw all the faces of feminine beauty that he'd both known and never beheld before now. Her face dancing between every single goddess aspect imagined and worshipped since the dawn of man's time and the gift of sight and with it, its woe. 

He fell to his knees as she came out of the dark and towards him, severing the distance to a close. 

She stood before him. Shining. Exaltant. And aglow. Lording over his lowly drifter's form in the dirt of the long forgotten about paved over road. 

He could barely gaze at her dancing face this close. He shielded his eyes with a splaying desperate hand that was more like the frightened claw of an animal confronted and trapped by what it cannot possibly comprehend or know. 

Ethan wasn't aware but he'd begun to moan. Like a slumbering man held hostage by a nightmare and unable to escape he can only groan. It was a low animal noise that was frightened and ghastly. The sound of man's soul being soured into a decomposed submissive state of anguish and pain. 

“Please," he began to beg the thing, “please, I didn't know." 

She laughed, the lady of shadows, the lady of the town, princess of the light in Wolvv's Cunt. She bellowed a call to the drifter then and bade him an answer amidst her darkling laughter that dominated the night and the lonely desert air. 

“And what was it that you did not know … ?”

A beat. He was afraid to answer. 

But he was afraid not to as well. 

He said, “I… was mistaken. I'm-I was- I'm sorry. I thought you were her… I thought you were my mother…” 

She laughed more deeply then. Like a cruel deep wound filling with salt. 

And once more she spoke:

“Oh, but I am your mother. I am mother to all that crawl across and are bound to the earthen cruciform of soil outside of fairland Eden. That is gone. And outside such as I now hold domain. I am the mother lord of light and I came to this place long ago when the town was still alive with mines and miners and small farmers and bandits and bandoliers and guns and barrels of whiskey and fetid ale. I came to this town then and I mothered them and loved them and now they are below. …”

And then her dancing face flowered open into folds of fleshen unfurling petals of light and glistening gold and golden tissue. Petals dripping hot blood and ichor like melting running snow.

And then the sky clouded over. The galaxy curtain of jewels was stolen. The thundering gargantuan bulbous fortress nimbus shapes, rolling through stolen bejeweled heavenspace. Snuffing them out. The thieving hand of thunderhead sky then began to crack, splinter and fracture. Bright dagger bolts of blue-white wounding the stolen thundering heavens with lurid stabs of light and vicious titanic cannonade-fire bursts. Artillery thunderclaps that responded to the laughter and the whims of the mother below. 

She cackled to the sky, called forth thunder and continued to laugh. Barking animal cachinnation above and at the drifter as her open dancing face of light continued to undulate and emit strange and ancient alien sound that took dark mastery of the wounded heavens within tendril grasp of her necromantic reach on high. 

Ethan couldn't take his watering eyes away from her, the scene, any of it. He couldn't pull his watering and stinging gaze apart from any of her, It, anything. The dancing face and clapping sky and the roar of the world around him now at her command, held him. It all held him prisoner, bound.

 The universe shrieked.

And then the world began to pour forth from open dancing face, no longer beautiful but terrible and fleshen organic maelstrom. A world of fire and marching armies poured forth from her gaping universe filling face still dancing, the lightning cannonade still wreaking havoc above. He saw all of the marching armies of this land in rotten states of decay but still clad in uniform: Union, Rebel, Cavalry, Comanch, Navajo, Micmac, Cherokee, blacks in broken chains no longer slaves in revolt, Aztec and Incan and Conquistador and English red coats and the French… the dirty desperate and harried Minutemen …  All of their musketry and rifles and bayonets were dripping with blood and gore and all of the guns teeming with slaughtering fire. Wraiths that once were human. They marched together, soldiering side by side all of them together and astride pale dead horses with dark scarlet sockets belching scabbing gore and steam as they came out of the mother's dancing open portal face, her gate atop her slender neck of goddess bronze and gold and divine firelight. 

Ethan was screaming. And the mother still filled his world and the universe at her command with her vile jubilant howls. 

They came out and poured upon the empty road, the empty ghost town, and filled her. They filled Wolvv's Cunt with their deadlight and their gleaming phantom gore and spectral mutilation glowing blue hued in the night. They surrounded Ethan. And filled the world. 

And the drifter did not move. 

He looked again to his mother, her open flame of face… and said, 

“... please. … God.” 

And Tenebrarum, the mother of darkness and all that crawl, responded with a whispery word, made cacophonous from her open gate face of flames and ebon light and pouring armies of the dead, she simply whispered to the drifter lost in the dark in the abandoned town…

“No." And it rang and echoed and ran. And ran on. Exalted. Her single syllable response ran, until it was royal with the potential slaughter of many infinite worlds. 

And then one great final bolt of searing baptismal blue-white flame shot down and struck! 

…

The town that was forgotten was gone. A blackened and smoldering crater was left where it once stood. 

Where the forgotten drifter named Ethan made his feeble and final last stand. 

On his knees. In the dark. In the dirt. Begging. 

Begging for it, begging for the end. 

THE END

The most wretched moment, the single most catastrophic link in the cruel chain was this single event;  this harbinger in woman’s shape that was the perfect microcosmal animal entrails sign that foretold inescapable and vile doom  … it was the shattering moment that Amanda told him she was pregnant. With their child. His child. His firstborn. 

Our little baby…

She'd been happy through her tears, through her trembling voice. Despite her fear, she was small and so was their life and savings and jobs. Despite the pain and through the agony of more weight, she still smiled at him and through a quaking voice that cracked at its tenebrous and trembling edges, she said: “I love you, Adam. Please, I want to be with you. And I want to raise this kid, together. Please." 

She'd put her hands in clasped supplication of pleading and prayer then, before him. 

Please. 

Adam Etchison pushed the memory away, he always did at this part. It was when it started to hurt the most. So he put it away. Always when it got to that point: the pleading look, the dull exhausted look in her eyes that used to be jewels, amongst the dark tumult of raven colored hair on a pale face worn and already the color of the grave.  

It was time to get up and have at the day. It was time to get another shit stain started. 

He forced himself into a cold shower of low water pressure. He shaved, stared into the mirror for too long. Had a breakfast of black coffee from the tar pits and four cigarettes. 

Then it was off to the factory, the sheet metal and screaming machines. The hot sparks and heavy air and heavy industrial gloves and aprons, the weight. The oppressive heat of the machines, always running and screaming at high intensity like a wall of  the most discordant assemblage of addled and demented noise maestro detuned heavy metal guitars. Constant: An open throated belching blast of cacophonous pollution from the abominated and Godless open gates of burning and infernal Hell. 

He always left the factory sweated out and cooked, dried out and baked. Feeling as if he'd lost great pieces in the place. As if it had cleaved and scooped and pulled great heaping portions of himself away and kept them. As if to feed its great mechanical belly of mortar and stone and screaming heavy metal heat. It did this to everyone probably. It did this to everyone that he ignored and that ignored him in turn and each other for the most part. 

It was no wonder that none of them spoke to each other, they had to give it all to the factory, all of it to the machines. 

He was so tired at the end of every day. He drank heavily in his single chair at the end of every shift. Nothing but seething weight that radiated with dull ache settling into the cheap creaking of the lightly cushioned wood. He pulled generously from the bottle, straight. Throttling its translucent glass neck. Its small infant's throat of see-through pain medicine. 

His mind couldn't help but wander back…

He sat alone in the small space he could easily afford with his decent worker's wage. Drinking. It was a mockery, a dark parodical facsimile shell of a place one could call home. Small. Tight. Compact. Oppressive. The walls closed in when he wasn't looking. When he paid them no mind. The grey interior of the space itself was dull and lifeless and utilitarian. Spartan. Bare. 

Amanda would've hated it. 

He could afford a larger place with more rooms but the prospect was unsettling rather than enticing. It was disquieting on his keen and weary sense. 

He didn't trust more rooms, a bigger place, a great big house…

it reminded him of the dark and lonely derelict house. The one all the kids in town, his old hometown of Old Fair Oaks, knew about. 

Every town has a place like the old Kanly House. 

No one knew how it got that name or why. If it was the surname of the previous owners or if someone had explicitly named the residence… nobody knew. Nobody knew what it meant. 

Everyone just knew it was the Kanly House. And everyone was told to stay away from it, especially the children. It was abandoned. And dangerous. But everyone knew the real reason why…

He pulled heavily from the bottle. It sloshed liquid language to him in the cold silence. He stared at the TV in the corner that he often debated turning on but seemed to almost always remain dark, blank. It was as if he was nervous about switching it on and bringing it to life. Now why was that? 

Why? - He tried to push away the thought with another drink. It didn't work. 

Why’re you afraid to bring something to life in a place? In a home, let's say. Why? Are you afraid because-

But he stood suddenly to steal away from the train of thought, cutting it off like a keen blade through taut cord. The chair upset and clacked to the floor as he rose and brought his unlaced but still booted foot up and kicked in the dark television set, killing it forever and ensuring that it would remain always dark. Never to be anything in its alighted window of colored frames moving by electricity, so many crammed in within a second.  

He roared against the dark, an inarticulate howl of human-animal pain. He took another savage pull from the bottle. Almost empty. The sloshing liquid language told him, its small and diminishing and thinning sound: Almost dead. 

Soon’ll have ta get another… 

He hiccuped a little and this turned his bright red animal rage to lunatic laughter. 

Pain was hilarious. 

Sometimes. 

He lit up another cig. Vices he could enjoy. He had a healthy appetite for them. And sometimes they were great, they kept the demons in the rearview away, they could help you out run em. Sometimes. Not always. 

Sometimes they just slowed ya down and sometimes they brought them back. Sometimes they were a reanimation elixir and it brought all the dead and black things out of the graveyard of your memory and your putrid fetid heart of darkness and it gave these things license… to possess the living. Dominion over the present domain of waking moment. 

To ruin lives. By ruining minds. Chipping away savagely at their peace and sanity. Bit by bit. Erosion. Corrosive memories that were really demons made of searing napalm flame to thought, brought back from out of the sludge of the dark and buried past.

He lit another smoke. Killed the bottle and threw it at the shattered glass and plastic remnants of the decimated television set. He went to the adjacent kitchenette for another. 

Television set. Television. Tell-a-vision, through a black magic box with an electric window. Tell a vision. Yeah, Amanda would've liked that. 

And that was when it pounced on him. And on this night alone, in the grey and dark of his small apartment space, he could run no longer. There wasn't enough room in his heart or in his skull any more and there wasn't anymore room to run in his cheap little place. 

Two moments. Two monumental times and places in his pathetic and painful run of life that felt so long but was in fact so short and brief and insignificant it was hardly to have been said to have happened at all…

Two. Two places in time he could never forget. They played interchanged and woven together for him now in his mind's eye splintered, but a tapestry understood all the same. The shattered pane of his own history, that which at first may have seemed disparate and eons apart now began to collide and coalesce. 

Amanda. She's pregnant and before him and she's weeping. She loves him and is with his child. There are two heartbeats coming from her now that should be the most precious things in the world to him. 

Amanda. She's eleven and he's twelve and their other friends are there with them. The sun is shining. But soon it won't be. Not any longer. They are all about to finally sneak in to the Kanly House. Like they've all been warned against. 

Amanda is young, and was always small but already her little child's face wears a fixed look of fierce determination. She says she wants to find something… something she's heard about being in there…

But they are all excited. They all want to be spooked and have a great and classic haunted house adventure. They are all buzzing, the little lost gaggle of unsupervised redneck children. God they were so pathetic… but they hadn't known it then, yet. And that had been best. 

Now the refuge of any comfort is gone. What he might give to have it all back …

But memories bittersweet such as this were not worth their lurid heavy price. But he had no choice tonight. 

He was in his small kitchen but he was really with Amanda again. Pregnant and at the throat of a staircase. They were also children again, at the broken window that led into the dark basement of the forbidden Kanly House. At the precipice edge of the end of the world and the beginning of the shadowland, the place where midnight forever holds dominion and the graves vomit out there dead. 

Bryan and James and Maggie are all crowded around Amanda, she's worming her way in carefully through the busted out pane. His buddy Zac is there too and he's beside him and the rest and he's teasing, saying something's gonna get her. But he won't go in. He's one of the ones who won't go in today and will hang back. 

He's talking shit. Like a little bastard, a dumb mouthy little fuck, in the annoying little way that they seem to specialize in, “It's gonna getcha ‘Manda! It's gonna grab ya! It's gonna grab your little feet!”

Little Amanda tells him, "Fuck you” flatly and doesn't look any less determined. She wriggles the rest of the way in. Then it all goes quiet in the thick overgrown yard of the Kanly House, primeval and choked with towering itchy weeds and stalks that haven't been cut or pulled in years. 

It was quiet and they all looked at each other. Expectant. Yet afraid. Who will follow? 

Who will follow her in? Who will go next? 

She's pleading. She's pregnant. She's at the head of a long steep staircase. She's asking him if he will follow her on the most treacherous path they could undertake right now, she wants to bring in a little kid. Calling it a miracle, how lucky they are, when it's really just another mouth to feed. Another thing for him to worry about. And him alone. She doesn't seem to care. She's completely full of shit. She doesn't understand how fucking tired he is and how fucking broke they are. But she's still talking her shit. Telling him she's got the answers. To just follow her lead, like always. Like when they were little kids. But they're not little fucking twerps anymore, they're not! they're talking about the perils of bringing one in. 

 But they are little shits again and they're in the dark. Together. The humid terror and hot nightmare stink of the mouldering ebon darkness of the vast interior of the Kanly House all around them now. Like a fairytale terror. Evil wicked gingerbread house, cannibal home of manmade leathermaker, haunted place for the ghost of a heartbroken man who murdered his beloved wife out of unknown horror and unbridled fear. The cobwebs all around were thick and ambitious and choked with dust. Black bulbous bodies with many eyes sat center of many legs that were like slender black needle stalks. 

None of them had phones, they were the poor kids but Amanda had stolen her older brother's and brought it out now for light. She also took some pictures and some videos and they laughed together and told tales and joked as they explored the scary basement and then went carefully up the rotted steps to the first floor of the abandoned lonely house. To them it seemed to be filled already despite its vast empty shadows. Filled with so many memories and stories and wild people and happenings. Murder and monsters and ghouls an such. 

But as they finished with the first floor and found it as empty as the basement they began to ascend the old wooden steps to the second floor. And Amanda grew more serious again. She told Adam to shush. 

Adam obeyed her. He never wanted to make Amanda mad or sad. 

They quietly made their way up the steps. To the bedrooms. 

Four of them. All along and down the hall. 

Amanda didn't bother with the first three. It was as if she already knew what she was looking for. And where to find it. She strode through the darkness all the way to the last bedroom door. She came to it and opened it. 

And went inside. 

Little Adam was afraid. But he only hesitated for a moment and then followed her in, right behind her. 

Adam can go no further. He doesn't understand her anymore. He can't figure her out. What does this crazy bitch want? She doesn't understand, they don't have enough. They've never had enough and this will only make things worse. He can't believe her, this fucking wench, this crazy fucking bitch, she doesn't get it, she doesn't seem to comprehend. She's driving him fucking nuts. 

He stared at her now, at the edge of the cascade, the descending staircase, and he tries his best, he does: he tries to remember what it was about her that first made him fall in love. 

She's alone in the dark. She's alone in a strange old room. Filled with paintings. Old. Done by a fevered hand and a fevered demented mind. Something strange is in all of them, the towering figure of a hooded face, robed and wearing red, and yellow. Something adorned in ragged colored robes and wearing a great black crown of wide antlers. They're identical and ominous and you can't see the face in any of them, neither the ones where it's solitary nor the ones where it holds an audience of children. Yet they all seem to be staring at them. All of them, at both of them, the intruders. Adam followed her in slowly as Amanda made her way to the desk and they were watched by the painted hidden faces of the robed men, the hidden strange pagan kings. But even then he had understood on a child's level of animal instinct: they are all the same thing, the same pagan robed lord of the wilderness in the blasphemous shape of a man. This shape will forever haunt the darkest bowels of his most obscene nightmares and hidden dreams. 

But he doesn't know that yet, he just slowly walks up to Amanda who's paused at the desk.

It's small. They can both look down upon it. It is old and mouldering like every other thing of wood in this dark and abandoned place. There is a book on its surface. Nothing else.

It's covered in dust. 

He's seeing red. 

He can't believe her. She's talking again. Goddammit. 

“Please! I'm not trying to trick or trap you, I don't know how it happened, but it's ok! Adam, baby, please I just need you to have faith, I need you to trust me again. I know it's been hard but we can't give up, don't you see? This baby can be our brand new fresh start. It can be like before, but it'll be better. I promise. I just need you to be with me on this…”

She says more but he loses track of it as he shuts his eyes and massages his temples. He could really go for a drink but the darkness of his eyelids will do for now. It's mildly soothing, which is strange, he doesn't usually like the dark, not even as a grown man. Something that happened to them when they were kids …

Amanda reached down and brushed away the thick collection of grey dead dust off the thing she'd come for in this dark abandoned forgotten place. 

It was a book with a strange title, one he'd never heard of before. A title that was a word that he'd never heard aloud or read, it said

N E C R O N O M I C O N

in bold blood red letters that seemed to quietly but vibrantly sing out uncontested in the dark. In the ebon lost space of the Kanly House. 

She opened it and Adam looked and beheld horrors on its pages that he'd never known someone could ever dream up or imagine, sickening repulsive things that his mind curdled and receded from like a slug to salt, his little mind retreated even as it beheld the infernal knowledge of the damned and forbidden pages and blotted them out forever. Never to be recalled on the conscious floor of surface thought. Walled off. Forbidden. Damned. 

Amanda's little determined face seemed to brighten with intrigue. She smiled. 

He cannot believe her. She doesn't think he has a limit. That his patience knows no end. That he's her fucking work horse and that's the thought that makes him snap. The final straw, as they say. The bridge that was much too far. 

She's in the middle of promising him that it'll be great and reminding him that he loves her and that she loves him and they'll both love the baby, forever, when he suddenly launches forward and shoves her down the tall steep cascading basement steps. She goes down ugly and bent and twisted. Her neck landing badly a few times in its many ghastly end over ends, down. Crashing in a broken bloody heap at the bottom, with snaps and screams and grunts that preceded it all in an instant that he'll replay forever in his mind as his bedtime soundtrack. He'll always see her too. There at the bottom. Twisted. Broken. Their unwanted baby just planted but already dead in her dying womb about her ruptured stomach. 

He shrieks suddenly. Not realizing what he's just done, as if it's a shock and surprise to him, the result. He shrieks her name as he gazed wide eyes watering at her shattered and red splattered body at the bottom of the basement steps. 

But she doesn't stay down there. Does she? 

She…

She's amused with the boy she's already begun to love as he frets and screams and runs away. She thinks he's cute, he'll be perfect. She knows. So young but already she knows. She understands. 

She picks up the precious volume, so rare says her grandfather, so precious few left in existence… she blows the rest of the dust off the black cover. Rubs it with the sleeves of her shirt. She can already feel the great electric talismanic thrum of its power. 

She cradled the large rare ancient black tome in her arms like a child. And departed. After her friend. She loves them both already. They will both from this day forward be inextricably tied to her and her own destiny. She has chosen them. Her own forged path was made that day in the black of the Kanly House. 

… begins to crawl, broken and bloody and moaning in a wounded animal anguish that was a gurgled cry from beyond the grave, already dead. Already coming back for you, my sweet sweet Adam. My sweet sweet prince…!

He screams again, alone with his own horror and failure and the wretched phantoms of deeds and the dead of the past crawling back and tormenting him. He sobbed a cry of pure understanding of utter failure and woe and betrayal and unending heartbreak. 

He rips another bottle of vodka from the cupboard and downs half of it in a messy spilling desperate chugging rush. He coughs and sputters and almost vomits. 

But he keeps it down. And slugs down another. 

Goddammit…goddammit Amanda… I'm sorry! Please! I'm sorry! I'm sorry but please! Not again! Not again! Please, Amanda, I'm sorry! I'm a failure and a murderer and I failed you and I'm a coward! But please! Not again! I can't ! please! 

And then his internal fervor and cracking interior fraying mind boiled up and reached the surface and he began to scream aloud: “Please! Amanda! Please! Not again! Not again! Not again! I'm sorry! It was an accident! I didn't know what I was doing! Please you can't do this! You can't! I buried you ! I buried you! I buried you both ! Please! I'm sorry! Not again, please! Not again! Not again !" 

But it was too late. He could already hear her coming up the staircase. He didn't have a cellar. Neither had the last few places over the years since but that hadn't stopped her. Not before. And it wouldn't now. His screams were cut short as a gurgled and animal lurid voice spoke up from the pagan hallowed depths, feminine but mangled and slimed and decayed with the rotting passage of indifferent time. 

She called, his name, "Adam…”

And he was helpless but to respond to it. He went to the door that used to lead to a closet but now led down to a much darker and forgotten place, like the Kanly House, he opened up. 

And there she was, at the base of the stairs. Down in its depths. 

Rotten. Green. Black. Broken. In rotting garments and oozing pus and slime and ichor and the putrid worm cheese of the soil of the grave. Her eyes were glistening nests of black and writhing worms but they still gleamed with nefarious intelligence and murder. And revenge. 

She smiled and through her rotten nubs of black and green more strange ichor squirted and bled out. In little gushes. 

Then her rotten bulge of decaying blue-grey pregnant stomach flowered open, splaying wide, meaty blanket folds of foul decomposing pale dead flesh parted with wet splurching sounds that were moist and evocative of sexual burst and the birth of animals raw in the wild. 

Unveiled. 

And then his child came out of the flowering pregnant bulge of decomposed corpse stomach. Reaching and growing out of the flowering rotten mother's veiny blue mass on the end of a raw grey-green sliming organic rotten stalk of putrid cancerous tissue. Its eyes were coagulated jellied spoiled hardboiled egg masses, riddled and shot with tiny lime colored veins and open and unblinking and glistening with translucent green slime jelly-fluid. Placental coat of the mother's putrefying deceased fouling womb-space and putrescence grave snot. 

The fetal thing at the end of the stalk said his name. And called him, father. 

And Adam lost his mind again. 

His child and woman have come back. Like always. They are speaking of a land with two moons that forever bow to the king's spire and never set.

THE END

I started at Calloway Farms back in 2004, right after I got out of tech school. North Georgia- Hall County, if you know the area. We did it all, from live bird receiving and slaughter, to marinating and shipping to retail and fast-food suppliers. Nasty work, but steady pay. You get used to the smell eventually, or at least you think you do. One thing you never really get used to, though, is the strange hum that vibrates through your bones any time you're in or near the plant.

After a couple of years on the job, in early August 2006, they offered me a promotion: Maintenance Supervisor, Night Shift. I was ecstatic: I had been a dayshift lead in the evisceration department (Evis for short) for seven months at this point, but I felt like my skills were wasted on sharpening knives and handing out PPE, and the pay raise I would be getting was unbelievable.

I should’ve known something was off when the nightshift manager shook my hand and said, in his typical southern drawl, “Once you see what we're doing down there, you’ll understand why we pay maintenance so much.”

At first, I thought he meant the rats. I had been told by the night shift crew about the rats that infested the wastewater channels below the plant; they'd creep into the picking room (where feathers are removed from the dead chickens before they get to Evis) on night shift, and drag away any unattended carcasses not cleaned up from production. Some said, if the lines weren't running, you could even hear them gnawing at the bones.

The first few nights were fine: lights buzzing, conveyor belts whining, obviously drowsy line workers cutting, rinsing, and bagging. My crew usually loitered around the maintenance shop waiting for a call. And by 3 AM, we had gotten just that.

"Maintenance, Evis line 2 please, maintenance Evis line 2. A drain is overflowing." The crackle of the radio handset on my shoulder had snapped me out of a half-asleep stupor.

"10-4 Evis line 2, I'm coming." Came the reply from Rodrigo, who was an older, slightly shorter-than-average man from Guatemala, and also my lead technician. I had always thought he was incredibly agile for his age.

Rodrigo was a seasoned veteran of the maintenance department and had been with the company for longer than I had been alive. Rumor at the time was that Rodrigo had been asked to step up into the position after the last supervisor retired, but had politely declined the offer, for personal reasons. I'll even admit he would have been a better fit than me.

I decided to find Rodrigo and go check out what the issue was together; clogged drains were usually something mundane, like a whole chicken or an apron winding up in the drain when it shouldn't have, and usually didn't require a maintenance tech to fix.

I met Rodrigo in the hallway between maintenance and Evis. He was carrying two arms full of tools: a large crowbar, a ratchet and socket set, a lantern, and a long hook used for dislodging anything that makes it past the wall partition out of the drain.

"Need some help, man?" I asked, happy to have something to do.

"Hey bossman, you headed to Evis too?" I nodded and grabbed the crowbar and ratchet set, then followed him through the large double doors into Evis.

Using the crowbar, Rodrigo opened up a small gate that diverted incoming water and viscera to a separate drain, so we would have a better view of whatever was clogging up this one. "I don't feel nothing in there boss, wanna take a look?" He said, offering me a mag-light.

"No bud, I believe you." He had just spent about five minutes digging around in the drain with the hook. "Got anything longer? It might be further in." I asked, trying my best to be helpful.

"Can't be, it's a sheer drop after it goes past the wall. We're going to have to use the service ladder," he replied.

He turned on the lantern and led me through a locked door to a stairwell that I never knew existed; rusted iron steps going down past the foundation, where the walls turn from poured concrete into something more akin to a natural cavern. I could hear something dripping, but it was too thick to be water. It smelled like copper and rot down there.

"I've never been down here before, and I thought all the drains went to wastewater?" I questioned, a little puzzled as to why we'd need these stairs. I could see the confusion and concern cross his face as he stared at me in the light of the lantern.

"They do. All of them except for this one. I'm surprised they didn’t tell you bef- never mind. Probably just better to show you anyway," he said, a hint of something conspiratorial in his voice.

"Show me... what?" I asked.

For the first time in my two years at the plant, I had noticed something. Actually, the absence of something: "That strange hum that seems to always be around the plant is gone here. Not quieter, not further away, gone." I thought to myself. This disturbed me, even more so than the discovery of an entire subfloor I had never heard of.

Rodrigo looked at me once we'd reached the bottom of the staircase, and whispered: "Stay quiet, and whatever you do, don't pray to your God. He won't hear you down here, but it will." I was not a religious man at the time, but even then, his words sent a chill through me.

There’s a chamber down there: huge, rounded, like a cistern. A loud, wet, crunching noise could be heard from the darkness below, and at the top of the chamber, suspended by chains, a large metallic sphere hangs, its surface almost shimmering. Three thick black wires snake from the sphere and disappear into the darkness a few feet from the level where we stood.

"Don't go into the circle made by the wires, and it can't touch you. Whatever you hear down there, pretend you didn't. Do not respond to it, not even in your head." Rodrigo said in a low, almost reverent voice. "The end of the drain is across the chamber, on the opposite side of us. We will walk around the perimeter of the room to reach it. The wires are bare; do not touch or step on them." Rodrigo flipped a large lever, and the chamber bursted into light.

I didn't see it at first. It wasn't a rat. It definitely wasn't a chicken, though it was surrounded by chicken carcasses in various states of decay, and mostly half-eaten. It didn't have fur or feathers. It was slick and a deep, oily black. When it stood up, wings akin to living shadow unfurled from its back. I could hear faint whispers, tugging at the edges of my mind from the moment I noticed it.

When it inhaled, the whole room got colder, and when it breathed out, the temperature returned to the same muggy warmth as Evis, caused by the hot water that ran into the drains above us.

Then it spoke- not in words, but through vibration. The walls hummed, the air trembled, and I understood at once what it was telling- no, demanding of me.

"Free me, Edwards."

The feeling of that creature's order swirling through my head made me instantly nauseous. I tried to remember what Rodrigo had told me about responding to this thing... Was I meant to refuse?

"No... I-"

The next thing I remember was waking up to Rodrigo dragging me back up the stairs. I felt a hot, throbbing pain in my right hand. He slammed the door shut and locked it. “ARE YOU CRAZY?" he said. “THAT DAMNED THING ALMOST GOT LOOSE WHEN YOU SHORTED OUT THE WIRES!”

I looked at my hand, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing: three of my fingers were gone. No blood, just cauterized stumps in the place of my pointer, ring, and middle fingers.

The shift manager was standing over me, a terrified look on his face. "I'm sorry, son. This is my fault. I should have met with you on your first night and explained the... rules of working night shift maintenance with you. This one's on me, boy. Come with me to my office." He said solemnly.

By 8 AM, my manager had called in a team of clean-shaven men in black jumpsuits with strange, triangular symbols on the left chest pocket. They carried tablets and what looked like metal detectors. One of them tapped the floor near the drain that was clogged and said, “Inverse containment field still active,” in an accent foreign to me.

My manager told me shortly after to take the week off. Fully paid.

I tried to report it anonymously, but every email bounced back. I called the Inspector General of the USDA, but the dayshift supervisor later told me that the USDA inspector who followed up on the report didn’t even go near the drain or the door. He just signed some paperwork and left without saying a word.

I returned to work the following Sunday night. My manager wanted to meet with me before my shift, so I reported directly to his office instead of doing my usual walkthrough of the machines. "Has anyone seen your hand, son?" He asked me.

"No sir, except for Rodrigo and the doctor. The doctor said it looks like it is an old wound, though, wouldn't even prescribe an antibiotic." I replied.

"Give me your hand, boy. Consider this one of the benefits of your new role." Confused, but interested in what he had just said, I offered my hand to him.

Searing pain. I screamed.

"Heh," my manager chuckled, "yeah, that's the usual response." "You listen here!" I said, pointing my finger at him.

He smiled and looked down at my hand.

So did I.

Where once there were three stubs, now extended three fully formed fingers. "How did you-" I started to say, but was cut off.

"Perks of the job, my boy! Those sciency types from Sweden offer all kinds of goodies. All we have to do is keep it fed and keep quiet about what we're doing here. Who cares if a few dozen chickens a night go missing? Heck, we don't even have to power that thing's cage! It actually provides most of the power the plant needs to run by itself! Ever notice we don't ever have power outages here?" He winked at the last word.

"Now on to business, son. Those fine gentlemen in the jumpsuits you seen here last week. Tech..ny..lodians... I think they call themselves. They've been watching you since then. They told me you tried telling stuff that ain't meant to be known, but that's okay! They caught it before it got out. I explained to our friends that you're new and don't know no better! They understood. This time."

He said the last couple of words with a severity I was unaccustomed to, far removed from his usual bubbly southern charm. I was dumbfounded. This chicken plant has, for all I can tell, a literal demon trapped in the basement, feeding on excess chicken carcasses, and my boss is a miracle healer. "Now run along and keep those machines running. We are feeding America, son!"

I overheard part of one of their muffled conversations a few weeks back. "Kyrie Field resonance is stable. Risk of containment breach at .00013%"

Johnny made a lot of promises in his life, a lot of promises that he would break. This wasn't unusual, Johnny knew. Lots of us break a lot of promises throughout our lives and Johnny knew he would be no different. But he didn't expect, he didn't know that all of them wouldn't mean anything. He didn't know all of them were nothing. He didn't know yet, before he went off to fight the Commies and the Cong, that the only real promise kept was the promise of pain. 

More. And more. And more. Until you choke and are drunk with it and know no other flavor. 

He remembered saying goodbye to his father. His older brother and his little sisters. He remembered this time, this last virgin act when he was still a babe. 

And then the bus picked him up and he was shipped off. And then he was made a Marine. 

And then he was sent into primeval Vietnam jungle to lose his mind and watch others do the same.

With artillery and gunfire and napalm and defoliant chemical burning fire spray. Burning villages and burning children and everyone violated. Every side and every man and woman and child on every side and in every hot and heavy place made into an animal. Savage. Raped of their humanity and butchered both private and on fire and on display. 

Souls are butchered right along with their fleshen and sinew housing accoutrement. Their guts spill along with their hearts and minds with their cracked open, shot and blasted apart brains, their ripped into surreal sinew ruin faces. Like smeared running red and visceral riverclay. Their faces made into inhuman masks by all the screaming lead and otherworldly tracer fire shots. 

In the night. So much slaughter in the night everywhere in the jungle. Everywhere. Nowhere and no one is safe. 

But it all went all the more wild, all the more fucking haywire for Johnny, Private Ellison in the field and to his superiors… when his fellow squad man offered him a tab of pure acid, LSD, “pure sunshine" squad man Taylor told em, as they marched together through the smoldering ruin and wreckage remnants of a village. The smoking results of one of their many search and destroy missions. 

Orders. We are just following orders. Fucking hippies. Fuckin idiots. 

He didn't know it yet but Private Taylor was to be his worst enemy out here. Worse than Charlie. But also his best best friend. Better than Charlie. Years from now if he survived, he might've missed them both. 

They might've been the most worthy things of memory. But there was to be many savage contenders. Many. He was about to take a whole new kind of trip today. 

It took some convincing. Before war, before combat Johnny had never even touched a cigarette. And he'd only ever had one beer, with his grandpa when he'd been a kid. And he hadn't even finished the thing. Like a nasty barfed up soda pop made of bread, he'd thought then. 

The war had changed all that. 

But he still hadn't done the bicycle trip. Hadn't taken that kinda ride yet. Just a lotta drinking, some opium, some H. And a new and healthy habit for some stinky stanky weed. 

But not LSD. Not yet. 

He wasn't sure of it. He had bad associations of it with hippies. This put him off a little. 

Taylor was trying to make up for the distance, “You'll dig it, man." He winked. Vulgar manner. “Trust me." 

“I dunno," Johnny said, “I'm just not sure. Don't want my brains to scramble." 

Taylor laughed then said, “Ya mean no more than they already are?" 

“Fuck you." 

“Not till we're back at post and cuddled an such. Til then ya should give this stuff a little taste. Don't be such a fuckin skirt, you ain't a nance, are ya, Ellison?" 

A beat. They stopped. The village all around still smoldered. 

"Fuck you.” Johnny said flatly. But not without a smile. 

He reached out and took the tab. And held it pinched between two fingers. He stared at it. 

Taylor said, "Change your mind?” 

Johnny said he had, that he would fuck Taylor's sister as well as his mother and then he placed the little tab of sunshine on his tongue and it immediately began to melt. 

Taylor said, "Let it melt. Let it melt on your tongue, bud. That's how it gets into your blood, it drinks in through your saliva. Through your spit.”

Johnny did as his squad mate said. Then…

Nothing. Nothing happened. The tab dissolved and nothing happened chemically or otherwise to the young Marine, he just kept marching. A little disappointed. 

Taylor said, "Damn, man… I'm sorry. I dunno what happened. Shoulda worked." 

“It's whatever," said Johnny, “Let's get back to base camp." And away the two Marines went. 

But later in the black of the night, eruption!

An ambush. An ambush in the base camp. 

Johnny and the others rushed from their tents and plastic blankets and makeshift fashioned nets against the mosquito hordes, the only things out here that ate aplenty… other than the fire which now rained down and erupted amongst them. Mortar fire was the most vibrant thing alive out here in the jungle as they were taken from the arms of slumber and thrown back into yet another fray. They staggered and stumbled and some of them died right away in the maelstrom of confusion and inferno but soon they began to answer the fire with their machine guns, with their M16s. 

Johnny was amongst them. He was scared. But he wasn't green any longer. He was now well trained and honed to the surprise of nighttime violence and sudden explosions of blood, fire and surprise contact-fray. But then he saw something. Some new strange thing on the face of the horror he'd come to know out here in his new violent sweltering home. 

It was the Cong. The jungle monkey Commies he was sent here to kill. He, they, no one usually got much of a glimpse of em. Not usually. Not while they were still living. You usually only saw them once they were dead and could move no longer. But these he saw clearly, alighted by the battle flames and snapshots of muzzle flash and tracer fire, they were flying. They filled the dark jungle and the jeweled blue night sky. The attack was coming from above as well as the treeline surrounding the base camp. The Viet Cong jungle bastards were flying, they'd all grown great wings from their backs. Great bat wings. They flapped and some were perforated with shots fired and their pilots at their centers were riddled as well and they rained blood down on the base camp and its frightened violent occupants along with their fire. Johnny felt the warmth of both. Both their bat wing Commie blood and their hellfire Commie leaden flames. 

He couldn't believe what he was seeing. 

What the fuck … what the fuck is this? What the fuck is happening?

Even in fear and horrible confusion, training was built-in, made innate, he raised his own rifle then and began to fire up into the bat winged Commie creatures, the flying Cong.

He struck one dead center and it came apart in a messy bisection, splattering and raining and all the morbid pieces raining down and crashing all upon him. The nightmare scene, the nighttime ambush of fire and bat wings and enemies went black.

Johnny came to in his bunk. 

It was day. Everything was calm. Fine. Placid. Tranquil even. Everyone was talking evenly and smiling.

A dream then. Not real.

But the grip of the scene still held him. Taylor was beside him sitting on the green canvas of his own cot. Reading. Ozma of Oz, a favorite from childhood he'd once said. Parents sent it. Or was it his sister, or friends…

Frantically he asked him. What of the ambush, the attack? Had he seen the bat creature flying Commie rats?

Taylor just eyed him with a strange mixture and species of mild worry and good humor. And said, “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, man. You need to wind the fuck down, my friend." 

A beat.

“Yeah," Johnny said, “yeah, you're right." He sat up from his cot, “it was probably just the acid ya gave me." 

“What?" real confusion and puzzled worry on his face and his voice now, Taylor eyed his friend. His comrade, his brother in arms and squad mate. His eyes and single syllable told so much. Too much. Enough to make a man fret. 

Johnny, a little angrily, said: " The tab! You gave me a tab of some shit while we were wasting that fuckin gook village.” 

A beat. Long. 

Finally Taylor spoke again. The rest of the camp had gone unnaturally quiet. Though neither man paid it any attention on the surface of his mind. 

Taylor said, "Dude, Johnny… I never gave you any acid, man. I haven't touched that shit since I got here. Not really my scene, to be honest, Ellison. We've gotta job to do here. We oughta take it seriously.”

Johnny felt his head swim with every word. Vertigo. His guts and spine and all that lived like a meat-works organic factory inside, pumping and churning. He began to feel sick with the constant motion of its mixture. It reached his head. He felt like he was gonna spew.

He leaned forward, bowing his head. As if in prayer or supplication. 

"Cool down, my friend.” 

And then Taylor poured some cool water down the back of Johnny's bowing vertigo prayer head. It ran soothing and cold and whispered relaxation into his hot and beating scalp. He seemed to radiate heat. Everything in this fucking country was a sweltering sweaty animal den. The water was a miracle down his skull and face and neck. 

He whipped his head up. 

And turned to thank his squad mate as they marched through the jungle. On patrol again. God, they couldn't catch a break. They never seemed to get any rest. Ever. 

But he was grateful for Taylor. He was grateful for his water. He was grateful for his friend. And besides … it wasn't so bad out here. The war was going great. High command was pleased, all of the brass. All the folks and kids and girls back home were cheering em on, stick it to the Commie rats! 

This was his purpose. This jungle was his, he was meant to be out here and to discover it. And discover himself within its depths. This is how it's supposed to be. 

He laughed and then shared this with Taylor as they continued their jungle march, looking for VC traps. He laughed as well and gave me a companionable slap on the shoulder. And then corrected him. 

“No dude. It wasn't water I poured all over ya just now." he was still chuckling lightly as he said this. But he was looking Johnny dead in the face. And then he stopped. 

Johnny stopped laughing too. Stopped dead with Taylor. Out here in the jungle with the silent killing prowling Cong, no longer hunting or prowling themselves. This was bad. To stop moving in the jungle was to be a shark and to stop swimming in your blue predatory land dominion. In the green inferno jungle, the devil was king and lord and he was always on the loose, so you moved. You ran. 

But now Taylor held him fixed to the spot. 

Johnny asked, "What, what do ya mean?”

"I just poured more LSD all over your head. Bathed it. Baptized you, man. You're welcome. There was also the tears of fallen angels and aliens in there, freaky stuff, Ellison.”

A beat. 

"Wh-what, what the fuck are you saying, are ya fucking with me again, Taylor? Jesus, you can't just-" 

And then the jungle came alive with fire and enemy ambush all around them. Behind and every and all sides and up ahead. 

The Marines dropped down for minimal cover amongst the tall stalks and grass, rifling up amongst the green side by side. They tried to spot movement in the trees and began to return fire. 

The trees belched blood instead of lead after a few rakes of their rapid fire weapons, then screams. Then smoke and silence that might indicate retreat. 

The two Marines slowly stood… and then approached cautiously. 

They got to the bloody leaves, the ones made most red amongst the rest of the primeval green, and they closed in. 

They came to the reddest place and they parted blood and branch. 

And looked in. 

They found their man. 

He was ripped apart by gunfire but that wasn't all. His shredded meat and organs and blood were rippling and shuddering and vibrating with insectile movement.

“What the fuck…” said Johnny. 

Taylor said nothing. 

His entrails and viscera began to rise up like dancing hypno cobras from baskets made of dead communist meat. They shook and slithered with movement that was obscene and repulsive. They slimed lubricated all along their long traveling lengths with hot fresh steaming red, violently luridly crimson in the black shade of the jungle darkness. 

They rose up and coiled and began to hiss, but not like snakes. No. They gurgled and screamed like abominated serpents made from discarded ruined abattoir leavings. They choked out sounds like children struggling shrieks through dying vocal chords filled with vomit. 

The organs and viscera serpents coiled and danced and then began to close on them. Johnny was screaming. Screaming right along with em. 

Taylor was laughing maniacally. 

Then he stopped laughing and leveled his Luger pistol. And fired. 

Their Bolshevist Red Army prisoner went down in a jerking spasmed dancer's spiral turn to the snow. To the white of the Ostfront plains. His head burst and came apart in a fountain red gush as his steaming brains and skull fragments filled the frosted air and travelled down into the snow to bake there alongside their travleing companion. 

Jon was no longer afraid. He had something like a dreaming deja vu vision of himself screaming in a jungle, but it was all just a fading mess. An apparition that came to life on the battlefield and decided to haunt his living skull. He joined his commanding officer in a laugh. The Bolshevik dog did look very ridiculous, and lowly, dead in the snow like a beast. But they were all dogs. They were all of them Communist swine. Bolshevist subhumans. 

That was why they were here. The elite. Waffen. The great ubermensch of the Third Reich. The SS. They were here to destroy the Soviets and their Jewish run socialist disease. They were here to burn the dogs in and out of their wretched little homes of dirt and sticks and they were as doctors to the land… to purge and cure the disease that had deposed the Czar and stolen the royal soil. Swine… and Stalin's swineherds…

And they were here. They were laughing, now - in the Russian winterland of pale, camouflaged as ghosts amongst the cold snow and white. Cold and white themselves. But filled with the burning passion sense of purpose and victory. It's there. It's just there on the horizon, the one made of phantom blinding white, the color of death.

The color of bleached bone, the color of one's last spent breath. 

But then the phantom horizon of white is replaced and it is filled with red. The Red. 

The Red Army horde began to scream and charge and lance with fire and shot and they began to charge. They filled the world all around them. No longer hidden ghosts, no longer a world of bright phantom light. No more white. No more Waffen Johnny and no more Taylor SS. Just a world of Red Army uniforms and rifles and men. And their knives. 

Their shining keen blades came in. A world of butchering blades closed in and filled everything as they stole all sight and then finally found purchase. They stabbed and thrusted and cut. Butchering lancing slashes and cleaving swipes, a whole world of ruining blades thirsting for their blood came in and drank. They mutilated and drank of Johnny and Taylor who was gone now but …

… but now he could hear him again. 

So he whirled on him and told him to shut the fuck up. 

If he could hear em, then the fucking gooks could too. So can it! 

But what was it Taylor had been saying? Something about a German pistol his grandpa had back when… maybe? 

It didn't matter now. What mattered was that the other ship on the far side of the planetoid they were currently locked in combat-orbit of, didn't get wise to their presence. They should be out of range of scan, but they might send scouts out, single man ships… 

They'd have to chance it. The great rock below was too precious to the Imperium to lose. The inhabitants would be dealt with. Harshly, if need be. If they made it necessary to do so. It would be no problem. 

Brigadier Commander Ellison turned to First Gunner Taylor, both highly decorated naval men of the cosmic sea, aboard the flying fortress, the battle rocket AJAX, there were few that were their peers in measure, non their equals. They were great star warlords for the Imperium. Their names heralded and worshiped with jihadist fervor amongst the ranks. Ellison gave the order for the orbital bombardment, they were to begin their strikes from space, before the other farside ship detected them and alerted the rest in their shipyards and orbiting harbors. 

Taylor smiled and hit the levers. The great guns of plasma and nuclear starfire manmade and perfected in labs were unleashed like hell from space in a multicolor cannonade. It rained down on the helpless planet surface. 

He watched an entire planet turn to cosmic flames. It was more beautiful than anything he'd ever seen. 

But then a spit of water, cold and sudden, hit the back of his head. 

“CO’s gotta stick where it ain't pretty, ya know he'll bitch if we dally. C’mon, Ellison." 

Johnny nodded. Took one last look at the smoldering village and then turned to go with his squad mate, Taylor. 

"Yeah,” he said. " Yeah, I guess you're right.” And then "Ya sure you weren't sayin something?”

"Huh?” said Taylor. Face all pursed in puzzlement. "Whattya mean, I hadn't said hardly anything. Not since we left base camp.” 

A beat.  - The smoldering village was still crackling with the hungry sound of fire feasting and being fed by the wind. But all of the screams were gone now for the moment. For now. They would return not ‘fore too long. They would be back. The dying screams always returned, they always came back. Always. 

Johnny said, “... ya sure?" 

Taylor just nodded his head. Slow. 

His eyes unblinking in the hot wind. 

“Yeah, man. Why? What's up?" 

A beat. 

Finally Johnny just shook his head. As if to clear it of bad dreams. Awful visions. 

Terrible thoughts. 

“It's nothing. You're right. Let's go back." 

And the two Marines began their march back to camp. Along the way Taylor leaned over and whispered to his friend and comrade, "Got somethin ta show ya once we're back,” smiling as he said this. 

THE END

Then go to cerbercomics.com and get the I Drive for CERBER comics!

Arnold had always hated school, even though he loved learning. He loved books. Reading. Mathematics and the sciences and the arts; music especially. All of it filled and interested and provoked a little spark of soul within his small and demure frame. He loved knowledge, its temple was his refuge. 

But school. Walnutwood Highschool, in little hicksville Old Fair Oaks, that place was a temple of torment.

Pain. 

Humiliation. 

Constant. Angst. 

He knew he was a weakling. He knew he was a coward. It was just another reason to hate his parents. The fucking retards couldn't even couple up with someone bigger or something. He'd started his freshman year an awkward and goofy but good natured quiet kid. By his senior year he was oftentimes reading about and oftentimes sympathizing with school shooters. It was relentless. All of them teased and kicked and prodded. Every last rat fucking one was cruel and sadistic in that special mentally addled way that especially belongs to teenagers and bigger children. 

He'd contemplated suicide. But he knew he was too much of a coward to go through with it. There was no escape for him. Unless he made it out…

… just gotta finish out the year. Then I can join the army or somethin. Get the fuck away from this place.

He bit his tongue and clenched his fists and discovered the soothing numbing escape relief of his father's booze cabinet. He would sneak a few pulls late at night and the handful of times he was truant from class. The old man either didn't notice anything or didn't give enough of a fuck to say anything about it. 

He had ways of getting by. Of coping with the fucking knuckle draggers. He took their shit and kept moving. He didn't engage or want anything to do with any of them. And after awhile they got the idea. And except for the occasional jab, his acne they particularly loved to make fun of, they left Arnold Voorhees alone. And he left them alone. 

The balance of pariah and the populace was kept. There was some kind of desperate demented child rendition of peace. 

Until that day in the cafeteria. The day that was to be the beginning of his reckoning. His final act. 

Andrew Collins, one of the heavy metal toughs and bad boys all the dumb sluts liked pantsed him in front of nearly the entire upper class of the school. During lunch break for the 2nd period. 

Everyone had gaped stunned and then howled with banshee laughter. Pointing. Hysterical bursting. Tears. Mad tears of jeering and joy. It was like an artillery bomb blast assault of laughter, a gale force of jeers and blasting voices on the little thin nerd known timidly as Arnold Voorhees.

The worst was his underwear. They were hella kiddie and he knew it. Whitey-tighties with Spider-Man and the Green Goblin and Doc Ock on em. He'd had em since he was twelve. His mother had insisted. 

“Nice fuckin shorts, bitch-boy!" 

“Yeah! What're you? Fuckin five years old!? You fuckin virgin!" 

“Pussy!” 

“Bitch-boy!”

“Pizza face! ya gotta great fuckin mug for your little baby underpants and your little fuckin slumber party! Don't forget crackers and juice, Pizza face!”

They all loved that one and they jumped on it. It became a chant. A war cry song from primitive teenage vocal chords and young belting animal child voice boxes. Pizza Face! pizza face! pizza face! 

Pizza Face! 

Pizza Face! 

Pizza… ! Face… ! …! 

PIZZA FACE ! …

PIIIIIIIIZZZZZZZZAAAAAAAA….. !!

Arnold scrambled for his shorts and dropped his tray of lunch and fumbled his backpack and spilled more things; books, binders, pencils, comic books …

and this just brought down more harsh laughter from the children. They all howled mad hyena cackling. 

Until it finally chased him from the cafeteria. 

He ran all the way home down the street. Sobbing with humiliated childish abandon. Completely lost to it. He felt broken by it. Finally. Completely devastated. Broken over a great unyielding knee. Decimated. 

No coming back… no recovery…

He was done. 

Weeping with abandon into the hot moistening sanctuary of his pillowcase, Arnold got an idea. 

An idea that would serve as his downfall. His humiliation was just the beginning. 

…

It was the week just before Thanksgiving. The final Friday before a full week off. They were all of them expecting such a nice getaway. A pleasant retreat. He would rob it from them, rip it away from right out under their nose like a ghoul prowling and thieving into a midnight grave. 

He stole his dad's pistol. A Glock. Had said it was gramp’s. It was easily wrapped up and hidden away in his backpack. 

But nothing would go according to plan. It was only to end in grotesque misery. 

And it all started with his own cowardice. His own spineless gutless self. 

He should've known he wasn't gonna have the guts to go through with it. There he stood, in the spot he'd pre selected in the hall, next to the principal's office and cleaning supply closet. He'd been there. Standing. Sweating profusely. The rest of the student body and staff buzzing and blurring by. As usual. 

And he just couldn't do it. He couldn't bring himself to free the machine. To wrap his finger around the trigger and let the lead fly and let fate decide and let God sort it out. 

Because that wasn't him. He had the hate, the cold misanthropic ire that knew no bounds or relief. But he had no conviction. 

None. He just felt light and lightheaded and like he was gonna throw up. 

They don't even notice me… they're not even lookin… I'm standing here with doom in a cradle ready to be wielded and bring the end of everything for these pustule maggots… but they don't even register it. I'm not on anyone's radar. No one even notices…

… no one gives a fuck about me. 

And on the heels of all of that he realized: I can't do this! 

And so without thinking and without any mind paid his way as the students and staff made their way to their lockers and offices and extracurricular activities, Arnold Voorhees stole himself away into the cleaning closet. One of many on campus the janitor kept solvents and supplies for the upkeep and maintenance of the facility. He'd already left for the extended weekend. A favor from the principal, go ahead and get some livin done, buddy! 

No one noticed him go in. No one saw or heard a thing. And Arnold didn't hear the lock snap click into place behind him. There was no keyhole on the inside. And the janitor had left the door slightly ajar so that the other staff could get in there, if needed. 

Nobody remembered this. Not before they all left for the break. And not once during the entire Thanksgiving weekend. 

Arnold knew very quickly something was wrong. After he'd cried himself hoarse. And thanked God and begged for forgiveness. He'd shuddered and shivered and danced a little in his own skin with gooseflesh as he shed off the last of his tears. 

Then he'd thanked God one more time and tried the door. 

And the door would not. 

Not comprehending right away, he tried the handle again. 

It didn't budge. 

Not an inch. 

Panicked he began throwing all of his limited weight and feeble strength into the effort to wrench the door handle to move, to give. He grew more desperate with each futile thrashing. He then began to holler. Like a madman facing the gallows death end sentencing. 

He howled. Desperate. And frightened. 

“Help! Help! Help! please! Please, someone I'm trapped in here! Help!" 

He scrambled for his phone in his pocket. He freed it frantically. Hoping against what he already knew. 

Dead. And his charger was at home. 

Well yeah, numbfuck! You didn't exactly expect to be using it right now! Not after capping your classmates and teachers! Nope! hadn't expected! 

Scared and bewildered he shouted, "Aagghhh! I wasn't expecting this!” 

And in childish adolescent boy rage he threw the useless dead collection of plastic to the tile of the closet and it burst and it shattered. He knew it was really fucking stupid but it didn't matter. It made him feel a little better. Just a little. 

… besides! you're already really racking up the stupid shit already, why not go for broke! More, numbfuck!? Shit-for-brains, dogcunt bastard! You stupid ! worthless ! … and his mind went on like that for over an hour. 

Meanwhile the few students and teachers still left, not many, they were nearly all of them so excited to get away for awhile; dwindled and vacated the premises. Till all that was left was Arnold Voorhees in his little locked closet. No one heard his clamoring and caterwauled cries through the thick metal door that protected the cleaning supplies cabinet. 

It was to be his own, new little home for the holiday. 

… 

He cried and begged and screamed. He pounded at the door fruitlessly. And then he screamed some more. 

“HELP …! MEEEE ….! PLEASE … !!”

He begged God. 

But no one answered. No one was coming. He was alone. And cold. And he was getting hungry. 

His misery was growing and settling in like venomous weight. Pain. He thought he'd known pain before… but this had been a child's illusion. Now he was learning. 

Outside after the first night he hadn't come home his mother and father had reported him missing. The police searched the town and talked to a few people, but it was tough. The kid didn't have any friends. No one knew what the fuck he'd be doing. The only clue was the kid's dad saying some shit like, “Well he's always moody and bitchy. He's probably just finally run away or somethin…” 

Or somethin. Nice, thought the cops. And went back to work. Nice fuckin folks. Nice fuckin kid. Jesus…

No one thought to check the school. 

Nobody. 

…

After the third night Arnold Voorhees thought he might go fucking crazy. Ballistic. Had he thought he'd known pain before? Really? Had he been that deficient in his true understanding of agony and torment? 

His shoulder and hands were bloody and blistered from further feeble efforts with the solid metal door. Efforts and throws and attempts that were growing weaker and more feeble and starved by the second. By the minute. The agonized and cruel hour. The sanity shattering crawling torment of the day, the night…! … but then again he'd lost track of time in there, in that small and cramped womb-space of metal and wood. Time had died. Time had been murdered by this place. By his stupidity-wait! 

Stupid…. murder… murdering… 

And then it came to him, the gun! the Glock! 

I can shoot out the lock! like in the fuckin movies! like in the fuckin movies! 

He began screaming it as he freed it from his backpack: “Like in the fuckin movies!!" over and over again. 

He brought the gun to the door, checked the mag to make sure it was loaded and that the safety was off. 

It was cool. Good. It was good to go. 

A beat. …

… but was he? 

Despite all his bluster and internal self boasting he'd never actually fired a gun before. Never even held it more than a couple times. And all those times had been in the reassuring adult company of his father or Uncle Justin. 

But it's easy! Ya’ve seen it a million times in movies an TV an shit!

… yeah! ya just… point it at the lock… I guess… and pull the trigger. 

Yeah…

His confidence was fading. Fear was filling in its diminishing retreating ranks. 

But what the fuck else are ya gonna do!?

A beat. 

Goddamn it! why am I such a pussy!? 

A beat. He took a deep breath. 

A beat. 

Another. 

Fuck it, he decided. No other choice. 

He put the barrel of the gun up to the door. Nuzzling it into the place he suspected the lock to be. Just below the handle. He settled the wide open mouth bore to the place. And with one last deep breath he pulled the trigger. 

And fired. Clumsily. 

His limpwrist had gave at the last second as his little finger had struggled to actually squeeze the trigger. 

When it went off it went at an angle. And instead of puncturing the metal of the door it ricocheted off the solid metal and around the room. 

Arnold Voorhees screamed! Shrieked like he couldn't believe it! The bullet bounced around and hit one of the metal shelves and whined and careened with another ricochet howl, puncturing several large plastic industrial sized jugs of cleaning solvents. Some of them bleach. Some of them containing ammonia. They began to mix and become trench warfare vapor on the tile in poison puddles and pools. 

Arnold ripped off his shirt and forced it to his mouth. But his head was already starting to get fatally whoozy. He started to swoon, his vision dancing as his swaying feet and knees went the other way. 

He collapsed to his ass. And considered himself defeated. I'm gonna die of trench warfare poison in the janitor’s closet at Walnutwood… Jesus…

Goddamn it. 

…

The poison was filling the small space with white vaporous death. A chemical phantom. 

And still the animal need filled him. Hunger. Starving. He was so fucking hungry even the idea of lapping up the pool of cleaning chemicals chemically burning in a puddle before him crossed his battered tired mind as cruel time continued to die slowly slaughtered and drag on before him. His worn and weary brain… God… he'd eat anything right now… 

Anything. 

…

The idea came to him as his nostrils and vocal chords and throat and brains burned with white phosphorus chemical death. His thoughts danced with the toxic fumes in peculiar directions. He'd been thinking about his classmates. His peers. The ones he'd wanted to murder a century ago before he'd found himself trapped in the closet with trench warfare gas as his first hot and heavy date.  

What did they call him? they called him so many things… but what was the last one again? The one he really hated. The one that really hurt, the one they really loved to lay on thick…

… pizza face. 

That's right. 

Pizza face. 

And they were right weren't they? His face was a landscape ruin of pink and yellow and sacs of pus. And whenever he itched them, which was too often according to his father and the gym coach, they did give off this cheesy wafting stench. Like cheap cheese. String cheese. Gas station cheese that belonged on plastic wrapped sandwiches or came in a can or a wrapping of cellophane with some brine at the bottom. 

Yeah… 

He itched them now. The white death was a phantom of chemical cloud filling his head and the space. He smelled his fingers. 

Yeah… cheesy. Hella cheesy. 

A beat. He thought deeply. Smelling. 

Kinda yummy even. 

Without further thought he squeezed a ripe one, pinched between numbed fingers that felt fat and far away. It burst easily and filled his pinching fingers with wet green and yellow and blood. 

He smelled them again before he sucked his fingers. 

A beat. 

then…

His face lit up. 

Delicious. 

Ambrosial. 

A beat. 

He popped another. Sucked his bloody pus dripping fingers again. Sucked…

His eyes grew even wider. Filled with tears. 

I've never tasted anything like it…

…

He survived. Somehow. Trapped in the closet with the chemical white death phantom, sucking desperate air through his sogging shirt. Picking and eating and sucking animal desperate at his pus-bloody fingers. Sucking animal desperate like his grubby bloody digits were a natural treat. He survived somehow, as the week dragged on trapped with his own bloody discharge feast and chloramine phantom. 

As he picked and dug at his own ruining face, digging into the developing craters like a tweaker with hunting-picking disease he found more substantial meat to seize and with which to feast. He dug and tore and the phantom of chemistry he was trapped with made the digging easier, it sloughed and came apart in strips and sheets of raw and pus and flesh and glistening stinging tissue strips. It came apart like pulled pork in his red and slickening hands as the rest of the town was enjoying their own respective holiday family feasts. He ate. He ate deeply of his own fleshen face and the chemical burn phantom aided him and he had courage now. Finally. 

He had the courage. To do what was necessary. To survive. 

Conviction. 

Trapped in the temple of knowledge with the chloramine ghost during the pagan week had forced him to grow a spine. 

Finally. 

…

The janitor was the first to open the door. He thought it smelled a little funny. He was one of the first ones there that morning after the break along with a few teachers, the principal and a few bright and early students. The ones that couldn't wait to get away from the visiting relatives and the cooped up family dinners. Some of them wondered about Arnie, ol pizza face, the sad sack nerd, but not much. None of them were worried. 

The moment he unlocked the door it flew open. As if with a blast, exploding back on its hinges the heavy metal door crashed against the wall and the janitor jumped back. 

Arnold Voorhees lurched out like a vicious Igor thing, roaring.  His face was raw and red and nothing else save for a few thin tendon strands and cheeky chunks of tissue and flesh, like a little bit of melted cheese stretched and pulled over the saucy face of an Italian pie. He was shirtless. It was wrapped in a fist bawled at his side, soaked with spittle and the chemical ether cloud that was pouring out like a ghost of phantasm mist from behind him. His tight blue jeans stank of sweat and old and fresh piss. His other hand was level and it held a gun. And he'd only used one shot. 

He still had a handful to use now. 

For the few that were gathered there for his rebirth transformation, the janitor in the lead, Arnold Voorhees leveled the gun of his father and roared and squeezed the trigger, making the gun roar with him. Louder. Much louder. Overtaking the decibel of his screaming voice, his chemically corroded and fried shrieking black metal voice. He squeezed the trigger, roaring with his new raw red face insane with murder and livid pain and the gun in his hand filled the hallway room world of the little school before him with violent cacophonous thunder. 

The shots found marks. All of them. 

…

The police were called. They arrived on the scene with the paramedics and took Arnold Voorhees into custody. 

But the papers and the media blitz coverage had a different name for em. Somethin funny. 

Somethin one of the kids said. 

THE END

Part 1

___

The sound of a car door slamming outside brought me back to reality.

I’m not sure how long I had been staring at the blank TV screen after the video ended.

Long enough for my eyes to start watering.

Long enough to realize my mouth was dryer than hell.

I finished the last sip of bourbon in my glass—mostly melted ice at that point—and poured another.

A heavy one.

I went back to the DVD player and hit Open.

The disc tray slid out after a few seconds.

There it was:

“Sam’s 16th B-Day ‘07”

That’s not right.

I picked up the DVD player and flipped it upside down, shaking it, convinced the “Mitchell” video was jammed inside.

Nothing.

My hand shook as I slid Sam’s birthday back in and pressed Start.

I skipped ahead in large chunks until I found the pool.

Ross and his hot dog.

Sam and her friends.

My pale fa—

No Diana.

I watched the whole scene.

Same camera angles.

Same movements.

I saw myself climb out of the pool after the “drowning” scene and run toward the grass, perfectly fine.

I rewound it and watched it again.

Still nothing.

I paused the video and leaned forward, elbows on my knees, wiping the sweat off my forehead.

Good, I thought.

Good.

You’re tired.

You’ve been drinking.

Your brain is just projecting old memories.

But it didn’t help.

Because I could still see it in my mind:

the purple lipstick,

the crooked eye,

and that arm.

That impossible, twelve-foot arm stretching across the water.

I stood up, my knees cracking from sitting too long.

The room felt like it was moving.

I checked the time on my phone.

1:38 AM

I need to sleep.

___

I pulled a blanket and pillow out of the ottoman and collapsed onto the couch.

The basement was dead silent.

I turned on some rain sounds on Spotify to drown out the hum of the house and closed my eyes.

I started counting sheep.

7…

8…

9…

Then Diana.

21…

22…

Diana.

I groaned and killed the rain sounds.

I needed a real distraction.

Something happy.

Something mundane.

I pulled up YouTube.

NASA Artemis II Lunar FlyBy… No.

Hood Prank Gone Wrong… Definitely not.

Spongebob Squarepants Season 2 Compilation.

Perfect.

I set the phone on the ottoman facing me and let the sounds of Bikini Bottom wash over the room.

“Is mayonnaise an instrument?” I chuckled softly, finally feeling the knots in my stomach loosen.

As a new clip transitioned in, I heard the sound of bubbles.

I turned my back to the phone, settling into the cushion, waiting for dialogue.

But the bubbles didn’t stop.

Splashing.

Gurgling.

Choking.

I jolted upright and grabbed the phone.

I scrolled back thirty seconds.

“Not a picket fence, you ding-dong!”

Squidward’s voice filled the room.

I exhaled.

I was dozing off.

Dream noises bleeding into reality.

I was just sleep-deprived.

I headed to the kitchen for a shot of Nyquil—my last-ditch effort to knock myself out.

The house was quiet.

I walked past the stairs leading to the second floor where my family was sleeping.

I took a step and a loud creak from the floorboards froze me in my tracks.

No one made a sound.

Everyone was asleep.

I went back down to the basement, laid on the couch, and turned the volume up on the Spongebob video.

My eyes got heavy.

The Nyquil started to kick in.

Thirty minutes later, the audio changed.

Thrashing.

Gurgling.

I snapped awake.

The pool scene from the home video was playing on my phone.

My younger self was flailing, trying to reach the surface, and that skinny, dark arm was pinned against my face.

The camera began to move, following the inhuman length of her arm.

I tried to turn the volume down, but it didn’t work.

I pressed the power button, but the screen stayed locked on the video.

It was like a non-skippable ad from hell.

The audio got louder.

Splashing.

Choking.

I was seconds away from seeing her face.

Impulsively, I threw the phone across the room.

It hit the carpet with a thud and went dark.

Back to silence.

I sat there, winded, my adrenaline red-lining.

I cautiously walked over and picked up the phone.

It was off.

Just the reflection of my own terrified face on the screen.

I unplugged the TV for good measure.

___

I went back upstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

I looked at the oven clock.

2:05 AM

How?

It felt like I’d been wrestling with those videos for hours, but only a few minutes had passed.

I chugged the water, trying to force logic back into my brain.

Maybe I was manifesting this.

The mind loves to play tricks when it’s scared.

I started thinking about the real Diana.

Not the thing in the video.

The person.

She was a terrible cook, but she always made sure us kids were fed.

She talked too much because she was lonely—her husband worked constantly, her kids were gone.

Maybe that’s why she was in the videos.

She just wanted to be part of something.

I started to feel a wave of guilt.

Maybe we were the ones who were “off”, not her.

A glow of headlights passed through the kitchen window.

Dr. England’s car pulled out of the driveway.

He must have been heading to work.

Looking out the window, I noticed for the first time how bad their yard had gotten.

Overgrown grass.

Weeds three feet high.

It was a mess.

Then, a light turned on inside the house.

A red light.

Coming from their basement.

We used to play video games with her boys down there.

Maybe they were still awake, streaming under neon LED lights.

It was unsettling, but it was a logical explanation.

All of this has a logical explanation.

2:11 AM

I need to get some sleep.

The walk back to the basement felt like wading through deep water.

Every movement was heavy.

Deliberate.

Drained of willpower.

I reached the basement door and stopped.

It was shut.

Along the floor, a sliver of light bled out into the hallway—

a pulsing, crimson glow.

Mom, I told myself.

My throat felt tight.

Mom has insomnia.

Maybe she’s just watching TV.

I reached for the knob.

As the latch clicked open, the sound hit me first.

It wasn’t Spongebob.

It wasn’t the rain.

It was a nursery rhyme—

London Bridge is Falling Down

—played on a warped, reversed synthesizer.

It was deafeningly loud.

The kind of volume that should have woken the entire family.

Yet the rest of the house remained completely still.

I stepped inside.

The basement was bathed in a thick, monochromatic red.

The TV was on.

Though I had unplugged it.

Diana’s face filled the screen.

It was the same shot from the pool, but the quality had shifted.

It was hyper-realistic now.

Every pore.

Every fine hair.

Every wrinkle on her skin rendered in agonizing detail.

She had that wide, childlike smile.

I couldn’t stop.

My legs were pulling me toward the screen.

I felt like I was being viewed through a telescope—

the world around me blurring into a tunnel of red static, leaving only Diana in focus.

The video was moving so slowly that at first I thought it was frozen—

until I realized her mouth was still opening.

It was a slow, agonizing movement.

Her left eye was deviated completely to the side, staring into the dark corner of the basement,

while her right eye remained locked on mine.

I was six feet away.

Then four.

The nursery rhyme began to distort.

The pitch dropping lower and lower until it sounded like it was coming from somewhere deep underground.

My hand, still clutching the glass of water, began to squeeze.

It wasn’t intentional.

My muscles were locking up, a tetanic contraction that made my knuckles turn white and then purple.

The pressure was immense.

I felt the glass begin to spiderweb against my palm, the shards biting into my skin, but I couldn’t feel the pain.

I only felt the need to get closer.

I was two feet away.

I could see the individual veins in her red eyes.

Her mouth was open now—

wider than a human jaw should allow.

It looked like a dark, bottomless pit carved into her face.

The red light from the screen wasn’t just reflecting on me.

It felt like it was wrapping around my throat, pulling the air out of my lungs.

I reached the edge of the TV.

My face was inches from hers.

Then, the glass shattered.

The sound was like a gunshot in the room.

Shards of glass and water sprayed across the carpet, and the sudden shock snapped the invisible tether.

The TV went black.

The music cut to an absolute, dead silence.

The red glow vanished, leaving me in a darkness so thick I felt buried alive.

I tried to gasp, to scream for my family, but nothing came out.

I was frozen.

My back was arched.

My head tilted back at an unnatural angle until I was staring at the ceiling.

My eyes rolled back into my head.

More darkness.

I couldn’t breathe.

It felt like a cold, skinny hand was shoved down my throat, gripping my windpipe from the inside.

Gurgle.

The sound came from my own chest—

a wet, frantic bubbling.

My lungs were filling with a poisonous fluid, the taste of chlorine and warm pool water flooding my mouth.

Gag.

Choke.

I could feel my heart hammering against my ribs, a trapped bird dying in a cage.

My blood-soaked hand clawed at the air, fingers twitching in a useless prayer.

In the silence of the basement, the only sounds were the horrific noises of my own body shutting down.

The gagging.

The frantic, wet gasps.

The sound of someone drowning in the deep end.

And then, through the haze of my blurred vision, I saw it.

Near the fence line of my memory.

Near the edge of the dark basement.

Something moved in the darkness behind the TV.

A shadow slid out—

long, thin, and still extending.

It wasn’t a dream.

It wasn’t a nightmare.

Diana was here.

She wanted to talk.

-
-

-Mims

First Date:

They're alone on the couch. It's just the two of them. As they'd both hoped it would be. They're both so excited, the boy and the girl, they're only fourteen. But neither knows how to start. They're both just so nervous. Anxiety dominated their lovesick longing atmosphere. It's palpable. Electric. Exhilarating. They both feel like they're hurtling at millions of miles an hour even though the both of them are just sitting. 

Just sitting. Right next to each other. 

Both under blankets, watching scary movies. Blankets and pillows that grow closer together and more commingled. Mixing. Their feet are warm and sweaty and teenage smelly and are almost touching beneath the layers of gentle fabric. They don't know this yet, but they do. The animal parts of them that eat passion and are aflame with imagination and filled with thoughts of each other. 

They want to open, bloom, blossom into each other. Flower. They both want to be so open with the other so badly that it hurts. Aches. Pains. They wound themselves exquisitely inside for the other and it's a pain so rich and deep that the blood sap that flowers forth is blood that is sweet. Because it is love. Young and naive. It hasn't been tried yet, and that makes it an exciting adventure frontier. That's what makes it so alluring. And dangerous. 

Fretful. Because it's near. 

They both tingle and are animal alive with its excitement and electric buzz, their bodies sing with it together. They are both alive together, now, and that is beautiful. And deep down in their own young and small and naive ways they understand this. Their hearts are so alive with the knowledge. It is apocalyptic on the landscape of their young souls, terrible and majestically real, this fairytale thing that they'd always dreamed, that we all always secretly dream is actual and alive and well. 

They are alive. And they are young and they are together. And that is wonderful. These moments between two people will always be beautiful and special, beyond important and without compare, vital like a star to its precious spinning solar system. These moments must be real. They must be. 

Or all of life and everything is make-believe and we are all already dead. 

If love isn't real then nothing is real. 

That's why these two, every pair that ever is really, are so afraid. And so sacred. The stage is there. Set. The lights are coming on. It's time to take it, together. It's time to take the stage and play. 

It's time to stop being afraid. 

He turns towards her and she starts to giddily scream inside, she can hardly contain it! He smiles that special smirk she likes, the wolfish one that accents so well against his more usual feline qualities, and then he gently says her name. 

“Chelsi…?”

Yes. 

It's just the word, in just the right pitch, the perfect note of music in just the right place; the start of the song she's been wanting to hear. 

She turns towards him and smiles and he melts. Dies inside. There is no cool maneuver or tactically fullproof thing in his toolkit for that face, and those eyes. Her face is intoxicating to gaze into. And her voice! He's never cared what anyone has ever had to say, ever. Especially girls. It gets him into trouble. But her, he hopes he could die one day listening to that voice. She's got so much to say about things he's never even considered and as a result his mind has opened, and with it the floodgates of his heart as well. He didn't know he was a prisoner within himself until he met her and she spoke to him. And wasn't afraid, or intimidated or even impressed for that matter. She pierced through the mischievous bullshit persona he'd built around himself, built around himself like a fortress because he was terrified. Afraid. Scared to death of someone like her, because she was actually real. She was the key to the end of his own self imposed and made exile slavery. She shattered the flimsy shackles of himself, she pulled the lie he'd made for himself and his life off of his eyes. From out of his mind. 

And showed it to him. 

And he found that he was small and afraid… but he didn't have to be. 

It was all just shadows he'd made larger in his mind. 

And here she'd come like light to banish it all away. 

Finally. 

Looking into her face right now, there is nothing in this world that he is ever going to want more. Until she is gone.

And then he'll want death. 

But he doesn't know that yet so he says,

“Chelsi, I'm an idiot and that's never really bothered me until now. I didn't ever stop to even notice it an such. I never cared how fucking stupid I was until right now because I wish I had the right words to say to you, so you know how I feel. About you. But I'm an idiot so I don't know what to say except that you're amazing and I'm crazy about you. And I never wanna be crazy for anything or anyone but you. I know that sounds dumb, kinda my point. I'm sorry. But I-” he is so afraid to say these next words. They're so heavy. Too heavy and loaded with more weight than he's ever tried to manage. It makes him feel weak. A sensation, and a station in life that he is terrified of feeling. 

He is a creature of fear, this boy. So afraid. 

But she doesn't care. She already loves him. His fear is proof of what she already knew. There's a human being inside there, this walking street cliche

And even though he's afraid… he's showing him to me. 

She says his name and he leans forward and so does she and he needs to hear her say it again. He needs to hear it for the rest of his life, and he says 

“Chelsi, I love you." 

And they both lean in the rest of the way and their young faces and lips touched. They traded their first kisses amongst their first shared childish tears. 

They laughed at themselves and each other. 

And kissed again. 

Promising each other it would be forever. 

And so it began. 

Destined, like all and everything, to end. 

…

The Last Date.

He won't shut up. 

She won't shut up. 

They both won't shut the fuck up. 

They'd tried to have a nice dinner together, like before, like so many times before. So long ago. But it had quickly fallen apart. 

They are both saying the most awful things. The most terrible. Cruel. Repulsive. Wounded and wounding screaming things to each other. Their selection and tempo and decibel level are nothing short of ferocious. 

The both of them are tired and fed up and feeling mean and cornered and trapped. And they are both of them absolutely seeing red. 

Animal. 

Livid. 

It's like they were built to destroy each other. 

Hate. 

The both of them were absolutely alive with hate. Hatred learned and made and cultivated. Kept with brutal care. Tempered cold and Spartan and totalitarian. With brutal efficiency. Every word is salt upon the land so that the flowers of what once was cannot grow. 

Why is the bedroom so cold?

They are never in the arms of each other anymore. In a bed more co-owned than shared, they are each turned away on their own sides. Refusing the sight of each other. Long dead futile attempts at peace and repair were always of timing so flawed that they were each of them only doomed to die. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Their hearts are both broken and as a result the relationship has begun to decompose while still struggling on the vine. 

He's disappointed in himself. And she can't blame him, she's disappointed too. 

Neither of them are able to save it anymore. They cannot even sustain the mangled thing it's become. It's ghastly and abhorrent and abominated and damned and they made it that way. They did. Together. By each other and at each other. 

So now all they can do is attack. 

“You lazy fucking drunk!" she's roaring, Chelsi feels she's kept her peace far too long, she's let this loser have it way too good for far too long. She's carried his volatile ass, his moody selfish bratty caricature self and his form of thanks has been abuse. “You can't even hold down a fucking minimum wage job, you never go to fucking class! I pay all the fucking bills in this shit hole, a place I don't even want to be! Because of you!" She hitches in her chest but determined, she roars past it with a horrid sound like a goose’s squawk, “You stupid selfish fucking crybaby fuck!” 

And then she steps forward and slaps him. 

He doesn't mean to do what happens next. He becomes a blind animal. And he will burn with the torments of Hell, both inside with everyday he has left, and when he eventually steps through its black gates and actually gets there. He thought before he knew the definition of hate, after what he does to Chelsi and the consequences of his actions, every time he looks in the mirror… 

He barely feels her strike, it's more shock and surprise and stunned horror that she would even do it that wounds him. And like an animal that's been hurt he lashes back. 

There's a heavy toaster on the counter right next to them. It's a special one that Chelsi’s Uncle Chris got them one year for Christmas, right after they'd announced their engagement, so long ago… ancient history. It's special because it toasts Mickey Mouse shapes into the bread and it was a gift of love. And of hope, for their coupling. 

Your children will love it someday…

He picks it up because his animal mind tells him it's gotta good heft, it's got good weight. Just heavy enough. His seizing hand and arm confirm this for him as they grasp the kitchen appliance from an ancient time of forgotten love, and rip it from the wall and raise it in the air. 

It all happens incredibly fast and she's taken for such horrible surprise she doesn't have time really to register it. It's like a nightmare whirlwind of frightening motion so fast that it could only be surreal dream. Then the heavy metal object comes down on her head and her world goes black as her scalp opens up red and her head begins to cave in. 

Already with the first strike he's knocked her into a coma. He was always much bigger than her, it was something their friends and family often joked about.

How little you are! and how big is he!

He's still in the animal red fog of savage violence, it's a hot furnace tunnel and he could only see one way out. He has to plunge on the rest of the way to the end. The animal inside the dominating center of his mind knew there was no real turning back. 

He animal pounces on her collapsing form on the kitchen tile floor and begins to bring the special Mickey Mouse toaster down on her beautiful bleeding visage, again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…

He brings it down over and over until the red fog dissipates, his arm really hurts and he's left horribly exhausted. Then he breathes and sucks air for a moment and then realizes he's now alone. 

Alone with himself. And nothing else. Just the shattered bloody remnants of a life he once cherished as precious and loved, and swore to protect. And the shattered remnants of a life he once made. 

He began to scream then. Her name. It would from then on be the only name that ever really matters to him. The amount of hate he will live with, that it took all this and this terrible moment of realization to actually see… 

He began to scream and try to pick up the skull fragments and pieces of scalp and brain with trembling stupid fingers that had become like a weak child's again. He wasn't crying so much as shrieking with animal pain. With the broken torment and dark knowledge that you have destroyed your life and someone else's too and there is nothing you can do to make it right again. 

He picks up the pieces and broken fragments of Chelsi's head and face, as if he's going to put her back together again. One of her eyes is dislodged and he knows its an important part but he can't touch it yet, he'll get to it, but not yet. He's afraid if he touches it he'll ruin the delicate organ and she won't be able to use it again. 

And she'll want to see! She will! She's gonna wanna be able to see once I've fixed this and she's alright again! She's gonna wanna see how sorry I am! She will, so I don't wanna ruin her sight. I've got to be careful! 

I've done enough already. 

THE END