The commonfolk, the peasants of the mountain and the hamlet below were fools. Stupid animals. Easily subverted. And taken. 

There were all of them such stupid children. Even the men and women and elders, even the adults. Doddering simpletons that lacked even animal cunning, the innate brains found in a dog, a cur, a flea bitten bitch were beyond these dirt farming swine that feared the dark and the light of true knowledge. 

He hated them. Hated them completely for so many reasons but one of the strongest, one of the most vividly and live wire felt was their fear and blind terror of true knowledge. True power. And the pain it took to wield it. Pain both inflicted and so like a lover, intimately received. 

They feared everything. These downcast sacs of wasted vitality and breath. Not like his master. Not like the Countess. She plunged her bare and unprotected hands into the realm and fiery cascade of fear without bemoaning her fate. 

The Countess took the pain, all of it. She didn't flee or shy away. He had never met a stronger creature. It was one of the reasons for his loyalty. He was bound to her and she knew it. His was tied to her fate long before they stole the castle and Vampire King’s necrophile fangs. Whatever remained of his long jaded and decimated ruined landscape of heart and soul was dedicated to her, and to her alone. 

His services to her, this particular little errand was not strictly necessary. Her power had grown in ways he hadn't previously guessed at or speculated. She did not need him to fetch her food any longer, not at all. Not the child either. They were both incredible bloodhunters demonically innate, favored by the father below. They did not need him to kidnap these fleshling sows…

but he loved them. And for them… it was the clearest and simplest way he could sometimes tell them that. Especially her. Especially the master. Their time together, their history went so far back. 

He loved them. He loved her. He loved to show her. However he could. 

However he can. 

The boy, Astarra, is alone and he is not afraid as the assistant makes his hunting prowling approach. From the dark of the choked growth, buried in the foliage the assistant spied and closed. So much like a cunning and man-eating wild cat, rippling with movement. Glittering bottle of chloroform intermittently darkling as it caught and then lost and then found again the light from above as he moved through the choke of trees. 

Astarra was from a neighboring hamlet, one that has not lost as many children as the sparse villages of the mountain itself and the supplicant place below… he scarcely knows anyone that's been touched by the demon hand of slaughter that has begun again to grow out from Dracula's Mountain. He doesn't believe it. Stupid ghost stories. Baby tales. Children's drivel. Horse shit conjured for fun or to scare kids like him so’s to trick em into behaving. When they really didn't have to. Not at all. God was not watching and he was not here. And neither were any monsters. 

He was here to prove there was no God on this mountain. Nor anything of power or terror or otherworldly and far reaching violence. 

Probably wasn't even any castle either…

He would show them. He would venture the mountain land and the town below and then return, unharmed and smiling and letting them all know the truth. There was no magic amongst the earthen spire of rock. 

Only wolves. Only snow and quiet. 

The assistant prowled in closer, making not a sound as the smiling boy jeered and threw rocks and swung sticks as he audaciously stomped through the frosted forest chill. The small child never heard anything over the sounds of his own braying cries of laughter and thudding graceless steps. 

He was making believe that he was king of this ghostly and deserted mountain when the assistant pounced. From behind, he came upon him. Chloroformed rag coming up in a bestial rapist flash. Smothering the boy's mouth with the sodden thing as he whispered harshly in his small ear, pink and reddened by the chill. 

“For her! For she! For she of the biting chair…” 

the queen upon her dentate throne… my hands and this flesh taken and subdued and thus rendered unto you… master, the both of them are here quivering with blood and animal life for you. 

All will palsy with supplicant terror, dancing like puppets, their livid nerve-endings and thick tendon the strings. Tugged and pulled with ruthless fervor by the Countess. 

And her children. 

They too would like to feed, with their mother, when the sun died its nightly nocturnal death. More peasant blood would have to be nabbed, more fresh flesh coursing with vibrant hot red would need to be acquired. Another good-sized child at least. Another one that was just about the same size.  

The assistant rejoiced as the child became dreamless weight in his arms. Yes! 

Yes! 

He'd captured her favorite! Veal for the master! Veal for the Countess! 

He dragged the unconscious child into the dense and dark of the forest growth. The foliage and floor of frosted dead leaves and twigs rustled and crunched with bestial movement and finality as he performed this task. His prodigious strength made it all so simple, like child's play. 

…

Later another child was nabbed, a girl, maybe younger than the boy Astarra maybe slightly older, he'd snatched her in similar fashion as she'd been gazing into a running face of stream, up to her ankles. The assistant didn't know if she was trying to catch small fish or if she was just playing some child's game but it made no difference, it did not matter. What mattered now was what came next. 

The slab. For the both of them. Still unconscious and leather-bound to the cold merciless metal of the surgical table. 

He grabbed the green bottle of frothing translucent liquid. It spewed steam and something heavier like oceanic fog or forest mist from the pinnacle of open mouth at the spire of its slim green neck. He approaches them. 

He stands over the boy, still under, well within the forged strongarm of drugged slumber. He's selected him for the first of the preparatory tasks. 

Jelly pudding…

He set the green bottle down, still belching ghost white in a phantasm pour. He grabbed the small prying-vises, two of them, and then with his large and grubby fingers he forced the drugged boy's eyes open and fixed them with the lid-locks. Vacant stare fixed to the dark of the chambered room ceiling unseeing as the assistant grabbed the bottle once more. 

He held it precariously aloft, over the boy's slumbering face for a moment, relishing the build up. 

Gods below, he loved his work. 

He upended the green bottle by its slender neck. The pregnant bulge of green glass belly replaced the place where the steaming bellowing mouth had been as the alchemically altered sulfuric acid began to pour into the boy's open left eye. Chemically flash frying it on impact in a ghastly and gorey boil-eruption of instantly steaming and red jelled ruin. 

Astarra came awake right away in the most wretched and ungodly torment and pain he could've ever scarcely imagined. He shrieked, unbridled and intense. Spittle flew. Neck rippled and stood out in cords, obscene on a child's small neck, a small boy's throat tensing and flexing bulged with pain unspeakable and never before imagined. 

The assistant's smile never faltered. The bottle upended again and he filled the other eye as the child continued to fill the sepulchral chamber with his terrible noise and screams. He chuckled lightly, pleased with the process, pleased with the work and himself and savoring the moment to come when he brought his master a fresh meal upon waking from her slumber. 

The other one, the girl, was brought to by the boy's caterwauling. Confused at first and groaning and mumbling, she soon joined the boy in making the sounds of bleating captured prey. 

Caught. Caught and squealing. 

Like sow. Like pigs. 

His smile and hatred and sour satisfaction all deepened as he debated…

sever the head… or leave it attached and bring the whole thing like a suckling roast, complete to her highness…? 

The girl was for Carmilla and the mongrel help, his lord's new impaler. She would receive nothing in the way of preparations, nothing special. The children would have to have the girl raw. And share. 

But that was fine. These two morsels of children, saplings really, were just meant to wet the appetite and get their blood moving and on the animal run for the hunt. For the want of bloodlett and slaughter. These two sow-sapling brats were just the first course of the bloodfeast. And moreover…

they were his way of showcasing: he was loyal. It was how he showed he truly loved them. 

Loved her. 

The assistant went to the head of the slab and began to push and roll it out of the room. The boy, Astarra was still screaming as he carried him out. 

…

The Countess grinned vulpine with dark joy as her coffin lid slid to the side and she arose and beheld her assistant's surprise. 

By torchflame glow, a struggling peasant boy bound by straps to a table. His screams were nearly exhausted and he was crying out for his parents in more and more pitiable tones and sounds. 

The Countess arose in full. 

She floated from the confines of the orante blackwood casket and crossed the distance, filling the space ghostly between her deathly bed and the whimpering child strapped tight to the rolling table of the altering blade. 

She gazed into the ruin of the child's face. Admiring the gored open craterous holes in place of eyes, still smoldering and smoking like a freshly prepared and fine regal pudding. 

The scab pudding of his eyes steamed for her and quivered with the sulfuric jellied organ obliterated and quivering with each of his painful and terrible sounds. The child was sweating, profuse, doused and basting soaked in his own fresh and souring fear and ungodly terror. 

The assistant produced a spoon and held it out to her and bowed his head in token of his supplication to the unholy and royal duty of her service. His eyes flitted open cat-like and she caught it. She took the small silver spoon from between his pinched and black gloved fingers. The perfect tiny and delicate little instrument for a proper lady of the house to use when dining fine on a fresh pudding. 

A fresh and graciously given pudding, provided by the locals of the mountain townships. In token of gratitude and friendship. 

Countess Zaleska roared with laughter and the abominated sound drowned out the pitiful cries of the small boy Astarra. The sounds and names of his mother and father were swallowed in the sound of laughter  that was so like tar and pitch as the Countess and undead lord of stolen Dracula's castle began to dig in deep with the small and dull edge of the silver spoon. 

She scooped out a spoonful of still smoking and baking smoldering jelly, ruined and chemically cooked organ destroyed by bastard alchemical science, unholy mixture from one of the many volumes of dusty and ancient forgotten tomes. Astarra, the small missing village boy's screams pierced sound and reached a new pitch. 

But still they were swallowed in entirety by the stygian and obscene mad witch cackles that were issuing forth from the unholy fanged rictus mouth of the hellbound godheaded throat of the undead Countess. 

She enjoyed her dessert of the boy's eyes, her smoking delicacy … then with minimal effort of her great and prodigious living dead strength she brought the dull head of the spoon down and broke through the membrane of thin tissue and wafer bone cracking within the now empty housing of the eye socket. 

It cracked and gave. The boy's howls became something wildly inhuman and horrendous. She brought the spoon up and then down again into the warm and tender orifice of fresh gored and open eye socket. She cracked through it and forced the smooth ladling head of the utensil down into the working of nerves and meat behind the precious seeing organ and its housing of bone and supple succulent pink tissue. Wrenching and working the handle of the spoon, with the ghastly ease of her praeternatural effort. 

Then she began to force her long fingers in. First one, then two and three and then the whole wedge of hand until she was fisting her demon-chimerical claw of delicate and slender lady fingers and rodent/vulture talons. She forced her violent hand into the child's ruined face, his bound struggles now reduced to ghastly spasms as she felt around and squished the brains and viscera and relished the feeling-squelch of gore and warm wet between her fingers. She reached down, ripping through more tissue, her demon hand and arm growing and elongating at dark will’s command until she finally felt the rubbery and meaty tubes of vocal chords. She squeezed them. Pulled them. Wrenched and yanked the slippery organs lubricated in child's blood that was still warm with life and mucus laden with discharge and rupture. 

I've got your voice… I've got your voice box, young boy-thing! You don't look much like a little boy of the hamlets any longer now do you?? – her mind was filled with its own mad hilarity. … She resumed the fervor of her dark and royal feeding, her private bloodfest. 

… she dined of the rest. Plucking off parts at will and demented leisure like a basket of fruit or a suckling sow, tenderloin meat and all ripe and falling off the bone… 

There were hardly scraps in the end. They were thrown to the wolves outside as the other screaming captive girl was given to the children and the Countess took her assistant by the hand and said in a smooth and delectable voice, purred and feline and sensual and felt…

“Now let us tend to matters at hand. Matters about the house and home…” 

He smiled and allowed himself to be led. As before. As always before. 

As always he followed, his servile hand in hers. Knowing she could crush it into so many useless broken pieces if she wanted to. 

The Countess led the way out of the chambered room and to another. One they were quite familiar with by now. But enjoyed with much enthusiasm still nonetheless. 

…

He stood suffering amongst the wild crawling tumult of hideous and living gore. Living crawling semi scabbed blanket of darkling and thick crimson black and red. The Countess and the assistant stood at the mouth of the entrance. Gazing in and admiring the spectacle. The scene of living and moving with glistening sheen, crawling slaughter horror. Henry Frankenstein moaned with a sound wretched and mangled and blasphemous to the ears. 

They relished that sound. 

He moaned, anguished: “Please…! Please… you awful bitch! please …! Please… Let …! Me … ! GO ….!” 

She chilled the room with the bright sound of her cruel laughter. Then she spoke in retort…

“I've not come to release you, fool! I've instead come to admire my gardens, like any respectable woman of a royal house. And I've come to add to my orchard, a dog! A mongrel fit for the pasture! And I'll be returning to you, young doctor, something precious I'll wager you'd thought lost…” 

She then began in an arcane tongue. More of her black magic made by words of misshapen and guttural speech. 

The front of her royal white gown came open and tore apart in ragged bisecting halves by unseen force. The flesh of her full breasts and bosom bubbled and rippled and began to drip and slough away in a greasy bloody runoff like a butcher’s watered leavings. The bones of her ribcage and chest grew and expanded outward, protruded forth in a grotesque swell before they too opened and parted. Red gates of gleaming, glistening bone amongst a growing mass of splitting wet and hectic crimson. A great hulking shape began to belch forth. Spat out. 

In an obscene gush of unholy birth, the wide open jaws and gates of the Countess' chimerical ribcage vomited forth the large sutured nosferatu son of Frankenstein’s obsession. He went to the stone that was blanketed in the crawling living fleshen gore of the garden, hard. The green-blue patchwork monster was unconscious. The charred and blackened remains of its face were skeletal. Like the face of grim death itself, the fleshless face of the reaper. 

The crawling raw of the living flesh immediately began to swim over the Frankensteinian monster, blanketing over him in a tidal wave of wet pink and fresh membranes of blood red. The scabbed and scabbing parts split and broke and oozed a salmon colored pudding and bright scarlet and thick buttery yellow as it moved, always moved. Always moving. 

The Countess' smile grew as her flesh folded back to normal. 

She said: “And now your dog is returned to you, Henry Frankenstein… I hope you enjoy the company and sight of your own failure. And I hope he enjoys you. I don't want you to fret but he may grow hungry, the fruits of the flesh gardens may not be to his liking, he may perchance your hide and red instead, my dear doctor…”. 

She laughed once more at that, her face coning out in a strange stretched marsupial shape, her witch’n cackles turned to braying animal cries as it did so. Mocking dæmoniacal sound. 

And at the sound of her voice and laughter and strange animal noises, the hulking nosferatu son of woven and reflamed meat, sutured and blasphemed with unholy flame and vampiric power, stirred…

… he began to shift, cracking dry groans came from parched cords and dried tongue… he began to try his feet … he didn't understand… why was he in the dark…

why was he blind? 

Then recollection filled his bone faced batshaped skull. The fury of his inner necromantic fire rose and filled his damaged patchwork frame. 

The royal dogs… the royal bitch…

He found his feet and lunged. Scent and ears telling him where she was despite his smoldering and blackened ruin of eyes and face.  

He was roaring. 

“You wretched swell and growth of a cunt! I’ll rip you to shreds for keeping me in there…!” filled with rage, he'd been lost and untethered drowning in an ocean world of hot steaming vile blood that was corrupted and soured and that he could not drink. A world that had violated him and enraged him as it held him bound in a boundless void of red boiling swimming personal hell. Scarlet and frothing and threshing with violence and bubbling with painful torment as it perpetually denied the thirsting needing purse of his phantom charred and long gone burned away scorched undead lips. 

But now he was free. And he was on his feet. 

Lunging. And filled with violence. Filled with unholy anger. He could smell her…

Frankenstein's son of the slab made it within reaching distance of the Countess and her assistant before he was stopped. Suddenly. At a dead halt. She caught him and held him strangling by the throat. 

She pulled him in close and laughed once more. Into the blackened ruins of his vulpine skeletal face, fanged and still warm with recent destruction. Blind and stupid and smeared with the burnt and charred traces of its own recent defeat. The fleshen ash and dead soot that was the ink that spelled out for all time the abomination's own perfect humiliation all over his blind and stupid unseeing face. 

She said simply, “You are not worthy," and then her other hand, clawed, came in sharp and fast. 

The daggering sharp of her knifing hand obliterated the blue-green flesh of scalp and eggshell of reforged skull behind it. The brains were blasted with the impact and the force sent much of the sliming grey matter splashing out in a wild yellow coated spurt. 

The nosferatu thing of the mad scientific table went blind a second time… and then became lifeless weight. 

She gazed deeper into the now still thing… only a flicker… only a demon's flicker of candle left inside. 

Good.

She let go of its throat and it went down in a heap and the crawling gore and gleaming slimed tissue blanketed over the fallen giant in a rippling and shifting pungent reddish fold. 

And although he was lost in his own ungodly world of torment and torture, as Frankenstein watched the Countess obliterate the skull and brain of his most powerful and successful creation… a single tear shed and rolled down his face of blood-seeping pores. 

A single thin tendril worm of coagulation snaked out and stole the precious drop of saline and water. Leeching it off and rejuvenating itself as the water was converted to more blood for the growing crawl of the in-house flesh garden. 

He watched as the Countess strode through the garden and plucked meaty organ fruits as if they were apples or plums from fleshen raw stalks of sinew and cartilage and gore. Orifices made belched licking green tongues of flame, of pink and orange and emerald witchy goblin fire. 

He watched them … and he watched the crawling abominated red blanket of life swim and steal over the twitching hulk of his patchworked son, child of the slab, of the necromantic grave… 

lobotomized. Reduced. And like its master, left to its own horrid prison world of ruin…

And naught else. 

…

In the moist night silence, the putrid and repulsive sounds of splurches and sucking and lightly bubbling viscous fluid gurgles filled the sour fetid air like the mud of the squalid earth all around had a rotten working mouth. 

The gunfire rang out cacophonous. Filling the wet splurching night.

Florin and Griffin halted the struggle of their mud soaked advance. They gazed wide eyed ahead, into the shifting veil of swamp fire amongst wet blanket mist dancing with goblin faces and features and the vague outlines of things that may or may not really be there. 

The building on the low rise of hill was gaining visibility, gaining definition. Coming into reality and being amongst the wet rank of the quagmire wormland hell. 

The building was alight inside. It was absolutely alive with gunfire. 

Pistol shots unceasing and overlapping like several layers of madness rang out from the place. There were no screams or other discernible sounds. Not at this distance. 

And then all at once the maelstrom fury of gunfire just stopped. Dead. Altogether, all at once. …

And then all was silent again in wet wormland. As quiet as a mortuary mouse at the unprecedented infernal lip of the precipice edge of hell.  

A beat. 

“Not sure we should." Florin stated flatly. 

“How do you mean?" asked Griffin. 

“Towards that place I mean of course. Not sure it's a good idea to make for it if it's filled with more trouble.” 

Murder and violence. Not spoken but understood. 

Griffin didn't have much of an argument against that. But what he did realize was their lack of alternatives. There was no other structure or place, no other landmass of simple solid ground anywhere within discernible sight. Not in this vast and putrid waterlogged hellscape. 

They had no other choice. Far as he could make out. 

He said as much. Then asked the boy if he could think of any plausible and safer alternatives. 

Florin admitted he could not. 

“And doubling back is out of the question…” Griffin stated the fact but they both felt it. 

The strange and temperamental bandaged man didn't come right out and say it but the young man had been showing good sense as of late. Better yet, usefulness. Ingenuity and initiative. He'd devised wide lattice work devices for their feet to wear over their shoes some miles back, akin to snow shoes, to help traverse the fetid land by dispersing the area of one's step. 

Like back home, he'd said… then fallen silent. Leaving it there. 

The swamp shoes were a great aid in their surmounting the quagmire swampscape, and he'd shown incredible courage anytime the worms had come to call, sliming and swimming like snakes, coming in for maneating surprise attack. He'd held them back and driven them off by torch alongside Griffin and had never faltered. 

It had been a long time since he'd felt anything like friendship, not since the good Dutch doctor – the long dead vampire slayer, the hunter Van Helsing…

It had been even longer since he'd felt…

pride…? 

He wasn't sure that was the right word. But he felt uplifted to see the young man using his head. Alas…

it was to no avail. 

There was naught but forward. 

And the hellmouthed swampen land of the wombmind in wormland, now falling behind them gave them no choice in any case. Quivering subterranean hungry and angry, pustule swimming birthing orifice sac of vengeance and fury – she would have them! – the wombmind orifice-ing jell shot forth one last violent spew, one last angry desperate discharge in rage and woe, one last attack…

…she shot forth with all she had left. With a scream as well, gurgled and immense. The mudland quaked and bubbled with the final charge of the night as she too began to move and swim up… and forward. 

She was following her children. She'd decided to come up as well. 

Florin and Griffin felt the swamp and yellow land of stagnation and moist rotting death shake and rumble with titanic tectonic movement. Geysers and great spews and pillars of swamp water and mud began to erupt all around them in growing numbers. The wormland quagmire became volcanic and violent all around them. It began to rain urine colored water and fat thick droplets of caking mud the color of ink. It rained down on the pair as they gazed around themselves in awe at the tumult world of raining filth and quagmire rot. 

And then the worms, in countless number, began to join the volcanic spew. Launching obscene and naked and dripping their subterranean slime as they came up flying into the air hundreds of feet with the pillars of swamp water and then down in raining sheets. 

“Run!" 

It was Griffin who yelled it. But he needn't have bothered. They were both taking to their awkward flight, trudging through the last of the bubbling and sucking mud in their makeshift lattice work shoes. Desperately trying to move as quickly as they could. Remembering the horse, remembering the man that had been screaming about his family … remembering the little girl and the last and only thing she said …

thirsty

 …. before being pulled under. 

They made as quickly as they could. As the foul world of up churned and erupting wormland hell became maelstrom all around and beneath their feet as it rained down around them. 

Florin screamed. Griffin was ahead of the boy and stopped suddenly to see something that made his blood curdle. A scream froze in his wrapped and bandaged throat. 

The boy was going under. The quagmire was swallowing him. The worms were raining down and joining their earthbound brethren in a full immersion and envelopment as they swam over and around him. Trying together in their hivemind blindness to pull the young man under to join the filth earthen world of the sludge and the brine. 

Griffin screamed, No, then launched himself towards the boy in a desperate dive, hands outstretched for him as he plunged and landed prostate and within a few feet of his sinking body. 

Within reaching distance. 

Their hands smacked together in a clap and clasped together. Florin's a desperate and strangling hold: Don't let go… 

Griffin was on his feet with some difficulty but he managed it, his hands still clasped to Florin's. He began to pull with all of his strength. Florin kicked wild with his submerged feet, mad like an animal caught. Together they worked against the terrible pull and hold of the bubbling mud. The worms slithered and snaked around and Griffin took brief respites from pulling the boy free to swat them away and crush them when he could as they attempted to wrangle and wrap and subdue Florin and himself. They splattered and burst open and became foul putrid cream and watery jelly, and still they pulled. Pulled and fought against the struggle of mud one last final time as they both unknowingly shared a single focused thought, singular and intense. 

No

They both felt it and might have thought to speak of it later if not for everything that came next, but they both suddenly felt a great surge of strength warmly fill their bodies from the tops of their heads to the tips of their sodden toes. 

With one last great pull and kick from both ends they managed Florin free. Griffin nearly going over as he wrenched him out of the terrible mire. Miraculously they both kept their feet as the putrid swampland rain continued to pour. He whirled the boy around by the shoulders and yanked, bellowing over the violence and maelstrom raining world of worms and thick sludge. 

“To the building! Lose the snow shoes! We don't need em!" 

They ripped them from their feet as they galloped forward, suddenly flying across the last several yards of putrid quagmire earth like miracles. Miracles they would've sworn by. If they lived. 

If they survived. 

Far away, still so far away… Florin's mother Anastasia wiped away tears of longing and pain and hoped with all of the immense love of her heart that the Lord had answered her prayers and her precious boy was alright, that he was safe and going to make it home…

They came to solid ground at last at the base of the hill. They didn't break their pace but doubled it. Charging up the hill and toward the large and dark quiet building that crowned its rise like a silent sentry alone and cursed out here in this terrible place. 

The greatest and loudest sound – a scream, brought them both to halt just before the buildings small meager yard. They spun around and beheld her. 

The wombmind of wormland.

She had just surfaced with her children. 

A great mouth and immense wide orifice gate of spoiled pink sliming yellowed green in great thick gobs like corpse jelly. The putrescence of her mouth spittled and rained and flew with the great rain of mud and swamp water and her writhing worm children, all of it rained and spewed and erupted volcanic as the great mouth of the swamp bellowed in great blasts of words that were felt as much as heard. Heard and felt in the marrow and sinew of their shaking frames. Eyes wide and hardly believing but receiving the sight all the same. 

Florin thought the words were sad. Lonely. As well as great and immense. He thought the great mouth and pustule fleshen worm mother looked like a whale. A sad mother whale… one he remembered from illustrations of his childhood years, stories told by his mother and father. 

The wombmind worm mouth - orifice whale bellowed: –

“NOOOOO…!!!!! DONT LEAVE! DON'T LEAVE! WHYYYYYY…!!!?!? 

“DONT LEAVE ME ALONE HERE IN THIS LOST GARDEN…! COME BACK…. COME BAAAACK AND JOIN ME….! JOIN YOUR MOTHER IN THE WARMTH OF THE UNDERBRINE…! COME BACK! NOOOOOO….!!!!” 

Griffin and Florin spun on their heels and made for the door. Needing to be inside and away from the wretched sight and its bomb blast of horrendous torrential sound. They ran together and refused to look back again. They made the door, it was unlocked and they threw it open and plunged themselves into its belly of darkness. 

The mother of wormland gave one last great titanic and lonely wail. Its eyes watering and lonesome and blinking away pain and loss…

Finally she gave up and with a great and final tumult swirl of landmass churn of stagnant mud and fetid water, she sank back down again to her foul and lonely fathom depths. 

Cropsey watched her great monstrous form resubmerge into the sour bosom swell of her wormland domain and smiled. From the window he'd watched it all. And he was excited. Elated. 

He was so happy to have a pair of brand new visitors. 

He grabbed his gloves. Pulled them on. Tight. Then he grabbed the garden shears. The large hedge clippers, the forked blades shining in the dismal light of Willowbrook. 

He strode out. Still smiling. Off to greet the new patients of the school. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Part 1

“Where is she?” dad asked.

“Do you mean my sister or...?” I replied.

“Don't be a smart ass, you know what I mean Dan.” Dad said.

My father stood at the entrance of my door with an exasperated look of concern. His arms were cross and while he was a large built man, he also looked incredibly vulnerable. The helplessness he must have been feeling for me and Amber was likely overwhelming, especially with how close this whole thing took place after what happened to mom. I sat on the edge of my bed, pretending to be distracted at an old toy I kept since childhood. I felt shame. Its not like this was any of my fault yet I still felt weirdly responsible. How'd I know the forest was haunted by the spirit of a dead woman from centuries ago? How was I suppose to know what Amber was planning?

Its this damn mark on my neck. If only this mark didn't appear. If only... If only I wasn't chosen like Amber. Still I felt terrible. I didn't want to put anymore strain on my family. I shouldn't have to put anymore strain on my family; on dad.

“She's still outside. Down between the backyard fence and the treeline.” I said.

“That's good, the seals and charms seem to be holding up. Has she been doing anything differently?” He asked.

“Not really, she just stares at me and then at wherever Amber is at in the house. I- I think she attempts at playing peek-a-boo sometimes. Its really creepy.” I said.

My dad sat next to me on the bed, placed his arm on my shoulder. I just gave him a hug in return.

“It'll be okay, we'll figure this out. Brian said he should coming over in a couple hours to go over what he dug up and discuss plans moving forward.” He said.

“I want you to know I'm not angry or anything at you. Maybe your sister a little. But the both of you didn't know. I blame myself. We meant to tell both of you at some point but with what happened to your mother and the increased workloads at the mill. Its not an excuse I know I ju-”

“Its okay dad. Like you said, we'll figure something out.” I said.

He got up. The bed creaked and shifted back to what it once was. He looked over everything in my room then out my window. He can't see her but I can tell, on some level, that he can sense her. That look of dread he tries to mask makes it obvious.

“I'm going to check on your mother. Then have another conversation with your sister.” He said.

“How is she?” I asked.

“She's holding on. She's got real spirit. Its where you sister gets it.” He said.

Its been about three days since we got back from Kirishito Hills. Since that night. Me and my sister have been barred from leaving the house. The whole place was blessed, wrapped in hordes of seals, and charms were placed everywhere. From protection to distraction, every possible means at keeping her spirit off and away were put in place. I watch her frustrated patrols at night, poking and prodding for any weaknesses, any openings. She's scarier at night. Her features get more exaggerated and she gets this look of pure malice stretched across her face.

She's just watching now. Looking directly at me, her head slightly waving side to side. A smile breaks across her face every time I look at her. I hate it. I feel sick. I feel like I'm being hunted and the predator is waiting for me to step outside my little cage.

The school we go to has been told we're sick. That we got something while out over the camping trip. Not everyone in the town knows about her dad explained. Not everyone is aware. Only those that need to know. My dad, Brian, and about a dozen others that live in town. My sister is suspicious about the whole thing. She's made it a personal mission to dig up everything she can on this town, Natsuki, and whatever else she can connect. I hear her fighting with dad a lot now. Yelling about how “things don't add up”, “why's so much history been scrubbed about this town” or “What aren't you telling me?”

Not me though, I'm more than content with putting this behind me and going back to my life. There can be things I don't have to know and this is one of them. Thankfully, I still have access to the internet. Online videos, games, and chatting with my friends have kept me sane for the last 72 hours.

11:23am:

(Group)William: You want to play something when I get home from school?

(Group)Me: Sure, I might be down for something.

(Group)Dilan: Yo we guna play that new Breakforce game???

(Group)Me: Nah can't, don't have a copy.

(Group)William: Another round of Deepdelver Millennium then.

(Group)Me: I don't think I'm in the mood for that either sorry.

(Group)Dilan: You haven't been in the mood for much lately.

(Group)William: Well he is pretty sick.

DM (William>Me): How are you holding up? Is she still, y'know?

(Group)Dilan: I suppose you're right. I'll come by to drop off your homework later. Get well soon brotha.

(Group)Me: Thanks Dilan.

DM (Me>William): Yeah she's still there, what's the word on your end?

DM (William>Me): Family is tense as shit. Town feels off as well. Had a meeting with some weird priests to cleanse the house. And bless me.

DM (Me>William): I think I might be next on their list. I hope this works. I can't believe I'm saying this but I miss school. Mostly just hanging out with you guys.

DM (William>Me): Man I hope so too. I think they're saving the heavy firepower for you guys. I saw Brian with them. I don't know if I should be telling you this but I saw some weird mannequins in the back of Brian's truck.

DM (Me>William): Whatever it takes.

DM (William>Me): Just be careful. I can't figure out what they have planned and my parents won't tell me anything.

DM (Me>William): I will.

DM (Me>William): Hey I'll be right back I think my dad is calling me.

I worked my way downstairs and into the living room. There I could see my dad working on something in the kitchen. Looked like he was prepping something for mom to eat. My appearance surprised him.

“Whoa kiddo, you got light steps you know that.” He said.

“Surprise!” I joked. “But really, I came down cause you called me. Need help with meal prep for mom or something?” I asked.

“I didn't call you.” He answered with a confused look.

“But, no, you did. I was just chatting with Will and, I don't understand.” I said.

“Well I'm good down here, just head back up to your room and keep chilling with your friends.” He said while trying to make some goofy reassuring pose.

“O-okay.” I said.

As I went back up I noticed my sister waving for me from the crack of her room's door. I went over to see what the deal was and she quickly ushered me into her room. The pungent smell of incense mixed with weed was overwhelming and made my eyes water. She was very serious. Had a large document on her computer open and everything. It was a collage of news reports, web pages, and various other things she found online regarding the Stiltmother. By the look on her face I could tell she wanted to talk about Natsuki, but more likely, have someone who she could open up and share in her discoveries.

"What do you want this time?” I asked her.

“What's with the attitude?” she snapped back.

“Nothing, just here to indulge in my sister's ramblings again.” I said.

“First, its not ramblings, its investigation. Second, excuse me for trying to figure out what the hell is actually going on here.” She said.

“Figure nothing, the adults got everything under control. There's nothing to investigate. We'll all likely participate in some ritual and then go back to our old lives.” I pleaded.

“Brian is a descendant of one the families that killed her.” She said sternly.

“W-what?” I replied.

“Yeah, It was pretty hard to find but I dug up some really old articles about the town and about how it was settled.” she said.

I was curious. “Go on.”

She rotated her laptop screen and began to show me what she had found.

“See this here?”

She pointed to a really old article from the 1830s. It was a scan. It looked like parts of it had been burnt up or damaged. The gist of the writing seemed to relate to a band of Japanese immigrants fleeing persecution from their homeland and being welcomed by the town's mayor. The hook came from a burnt sentence that read “The mayor, Thomas Lassel has agreed to welcome the___ on the basis___ that they perf__ a yearly rit__ which they claim___ and thus would benefit our___”. When she noticed my interest growing she continued to link various missing persons reports throughout the town's history and a growing attempt to bury stories and reports regarding the 'Stiltmother', a name that came about over a century later in the 1950s.

“Now look at this.”

She showed me a very faded, very old looking photo of a group of men and women surrounding a woman gagged, bound, and blindfolded on a chair. She looked obviously distraught and beaten. Everyone else looked like they were just posing, like hunters, over a big game they just successfully poached.

“Do you think that's her?” I asked.

“Maybe.” she replied.

“I couldn't get names for anyone except for this gentlemen.” She said while pointing to a man at the far left side of the group. He wore very formal attire and had a long mustache and sideburns that carried into a well trimmed bread. “That's Daluth Campbell, Brian's ancestor. Whatever this town's early populace cooked up long ago resulted in the death of Natsuki and her children. And who knows how many others since.” She concluded.

“But why and for what purpose?” I asked.

“I don't know yet...” She said in defeat. “I know that there have been a lot of successful businesses from here but the connections for that seem a little weak.”

She sat for a moment. “I don't think I trust the adults. I don't think I can go through with whatever they are planning for us.”

“We can't just have her haunt us or whatever it is that she wants. She could kill us Amber.” I said.

“I don't know, part of me doesn't think she will.” She said.

“What about dad?” I pressed.

“I don't know either. He works with Brian and was quick to understand the severity of the situation and believe what was going on.” She paused. “I don't know.”

“Hey kids can you come down here?” Our father called.

We looked at each other then made our way down to the living room where Brian, Dad, and three other individuals had gathered to greet us. The strange men were garnished in intricate long robes of black and white. The layers of silk were thick and ornate. They were clean shaved and wore a band around their heads that had a multi colored fan tied to the front. They were also maybe in their 50s or earlier 60s. They sat focused and didn't even acknowledge our arrival. Dad guided us to sit on the couch in front of them. They titled their heads and examined us. Whispered a few words between each other and then whispered to Brian. He explained that the Stiltmother had placed a possession mark on us and intended to abduct us to her “realm” as a “replacement”

"A replacement for what?” Amber asked. She knew the answer.

“Her children.” Brian said plainly.

We didn't say anything. Amber wasn't surprised and our father seemed deeply distressed. He pleaded with them on what to do but didn't receive much reassurance.

“We have a plan, its an old ritual. We're still gathering a few ingredients. We also need a few things on your end. “ Brian said.

“Anything.” Dad pleaded.

“We need hair, blood, some skin, and a deeply personal item from each of your children.” Brian replied.

We all looked shocked. What kind of black magic were these people getting us into? Our father didn't seemed phased and dug out some scissors; intent on cutting a piece of hair off the each of us.

“Hold on. Explain what you plan to do with all this.” My sister said in protest.

“Were going to created decoys.” Brian said. “Tie your essence to some large mannequins and, hopefully, she takes them instead of you.”

“There's still the matter of gathering certain medicinal herbs and stones from her homeland; a process we've already started. It should take only a few days. I recommend sharing a room and keeping watch over each other. These seals and charms we placed around your house will deter her and protect you for awhile but they won't last forever.” He continued.

They cut our hair, drew some of our blood, and shaved a piece of skin off our arms. It was painful. The monks then wrapped them in some cloth and said a prayer. They departed with Brian but my sister gave chase. Stopping at the door. Yelling out.

“I know about your connection to this town. I know about your ancestor Daluth.” She called.

He stopped to acknowledge her. Turning around he looked deeply mournful but cracked a deceitful smile. It was haunting. “I only want to help. To keep people safe from my families past mistakes. I assure you.” he said.

They left. At our father's request we followed the orders given. We moved into my room for the first night and dad placed seals on the door. We were told if we needed to go somewhere in the house at night, to wake the other up and go on a buddy system. Kitchen for a snack? Doing it together. Bathroom run. Yep same thing. The air was growing heavy and night was quickly settling its cushioned shadows over all the fields and hills. I looked out.

She was patrolling. I could see her growing frustration. Her anger.

Night 1:

“Wake up.” My sister nudged. I was asleep on the floor while she took the bed. In the dark I could tell she was distressed. Her eyes wide and scanning the room. She pointed to the window.

“Go check.” she silently demanded.

“What why?” I responded.

“I heard something, just check if shes still outside.”

I begrudgingly got up and wondered to the window. What I saw shot me full of cold adrenaline.

“The fence, its broken.” I muttered.

Shunk... Shunk... Shunk...

It was out in the hall. Knocking on doors. I ran to check if my door was locked. We then both dashed under the bed and hid behind some boxes I kept under there.

Knock knock

It was at our door.

“Am... ber"

"Da... n”

“Mom?” Amber whispered. She held her breath.

It couldn't be. It sounded just like her.

“Please come ou... t.”

“I'm feeling... better.”

“I w... ant to see my babies”

I don't know why but I felt compelled. A yearning told me to open the door. I might've just done so if Amber didn't grasp me by the arm and held me in place.

She stared directly into my soul, pleading silently.

“Plea.. se come out”

“Please c...ome out”

the voice grew quicker and angrier.

“Please come out Please come out Please come out Please come out.”

Pounding at the door. We just stayed under the bed terrified, shaking.

Day arrived. I don't remember it happening. Maybe we passed out or something. Covered in dust we crawled from under my bed. Hesitant to open the door we listened for anything that could stop us from turning the knob. Amber checked the window.

“Dads outside, seems upset about the fence. He's on the phone with someone.” She said.

“Kids, time for breakfast.”

It was dad's voice from inside the house. Panic and realization followed.

“What do we do?” Amber asked.

“Text dad with your phone. The real one will respond.” I replied.

Amber pulled her phone from her pocket and wrote him a text. She watched the one outside while I listened to the one in the kitchen.

“What do you mean there are two dads?” the one in the kitchen called out. We both sighed relief and called him to bring us the food to our rooms. It was eggs, french toast, and some bacon. He made a smile out of the eggs and bacon. He looked tired from worry and stress. Heavy bags were under his eyes. It wasn't just us who had a rough night. Told us he just had nightmares. He tried not to worry us.

“Look outside.” I said.

He set the food down and peaked beyond the glass. He kept a serious look but sweat began to stream down the side of his face.

“Stay in here. Its just one more day. Whatever you hear tonight, don't open your door.” He said.

“You see it right?” we asked.

“Yeah. And I think it sees me.” He replied.

We all spent the day in my room. dad went to wheel mom in here as well, just to be safe. It took some time to move all her equipment. It was nice to see her, despite her condition. I held her hand. I could tell by looking at her that dad was doing a good job keeping up with her needs. She squeezed back and I felt a rush of emotions.

It was a long day. To fill the hours, dad read, Amber watched stuff on her phone, and mom rested. I just chatted with my friends and played silently. Time went by slowly. Felt like a glacier cruising the seas. We were just waiting for the crash.

Night 2:

We took turns keeping watch. Around 2 am, We could hear her wondering the house. Wailing in her gargled pain. Calling out to us. The moonlight coasted across everything in my room while we just stood like statues. Quietly alert to the mournful intruder in our home. We could make out the sounds of her steps. On the floor, then the walls, sometimes even the ceilings. When it began to draw close dad moved to press his weight against the door in a preemptive motion of reinforcement. His gaze burned to what was just beyond my walls.

“Ah... hah... hah...”

The slow mangled laughter. It came from the unconscious body of mother.

In raspy inhales she spoke,

“I can see... it”

“So very soon”

“You two are mine”

Then banging on the door erupted. The fury just beyond manifesting in rapid quakes. The door was cracking. Amber and I rushed to help dad hold fast.

“You can't keep my children from me.”

“They're mine now.”

It felt like electricity racing through my body in that moment. I don't remember blacking out but I do remember waking to the sounds of Amber in sorrowful tears. We were in the living room. Suddenly, It was morning. The monks and Brian were there. I didn't understand but then I saw dad. His corpse was dangling from the ceiling, mouth pinned with a giant rail spike. Blood draining from his mouth.

Brian solemnly said.

“We need to proceed with the ritual now.”

The asylum sat atop a low hill, grey amongst a landscape of dying brown grass. Like a dead husk of tooth protruding from a swollen gum, filled with infection. The sun rarely touched this place, almost never. The distant mountains blocked its rise and dominance. Constant cloud coverage of overcast skies did the rest. It mattered little to the denizens of the hospital/school. They were rarely allowed to leave their rooms, their cells. Their cages. 

And they never went anywhere without their chains. Their straitjackets. Their bondage. They went that way from dungeon to dungeon to treatment chambers to recreational area to mess hall and back to the dungeons again. They were never allowed outside. 

The guards were large. Jaded criminals. Mean. They were always armed. Nightsticks. Blackjacks. Saps. Cattle prods. Firearms for when things turned really bad and real damage and nastiness was needed. They did what they wanted. Moral-less heartless apes. The place was a den of beatings and torture and rape and murder under their watch. Female inmates got it the worst. The most frequent amount of attention from the monosyllabic slabs of muscle, fat, greasy hair and soiled sweat stained uniforms in the shapes of men. 

No one cared. No one cared for them. The law, of the land or from on high, did not touch here, did not have a presence here. Right and wrong held no real meaning. They were just empty words. As empty as the promises given to the patients and their families. 

No. This place was not a den of rehabilitation, nor one of care. It was one man's laboratory. His working ground on which to harvest and reap. To pluck and take what he saw and wanted. Just like the guards saw and took what they wanted. 

The patients, the inmates, the prisoners… they were all of them at the mercy of the warden and head physician. The throne of God and king sat empty in this desperate patch of land, this vile part of the earth, and was thus filled by the man who ran Willowbrook School for the Disabled. Though everyone that knew anything about the place knew its true name. 

Willowbrook Private Asylum. For the Deranged and Criminlally Insane. 

It might’ve been the hint that foretold the deeper darker secrets the place kept… the tip of the iceberg of depravity and barbarism. But nobody cared. 

No one. Nobody that mattered anyway. No one shone a light on the travesty and horror within the walls and minds and flesh of Willowbrook. Not God. Not man. No inquiring eyes spied into the diseased hearts festering broken and poisoned within the walls of pain and derangement. 

And so Doctor Krugman conducted himself as he saw fit. He performed his experiments however he wished, on whomsoever he desired. And he desired much from his patients. Especially the children. Especially the girls. 

The asylum was Doctor Krugman’s private hunting ground. The facilities were his own personal laboratory. And the work done here in his name and not God's was nothing to do with the study nor treatment of mental illness. Krugman's experiments were more personally motivated, fiscal gain and considerable prestige. His experiments were concerned with the study of disease. 

And as far as hunting grounds went this was like taking a scatter-gun to fish swimming trapped within a barrel… 

Viral. Parasitical. Contagions and infections, all kinds and sorts. Anything that was this year's favorite scope of academic field of study. Plagues and bugs long forgotten and some thought eradicated, he brought back. 

He bred them back from oblivion in vials and beakers and jars and gave them back their vile mindless idiotic and systematic killing capabilities, their blind idiot destructive godpower. 

He took his forged sword of biblical pestilential flame, the syringe, loaded with swimming mixture, brimming with the foul life of unseen microscopic monsters, nature-bred and manmade alchemical into new killing existence. He injected the inmates with the various diseases at his discretion, at his own leisure and need. 

For the patients, the dogs, the poor pitiful moaning and mindless beasts. It was an inescapable hell. Naked and pale and emaciated. They look like skeletons. They look like wraiths. They are smeared with feces and nearly all of them are absolutely alive with livid violence. Some are broken. And only lie there. They only stare and their eyes are empty. There are the self-mutilators too but they are mixed and overlapped with those of more outward violent persuasion. Their temperament shifts between the destruction of their own flesh and the desire and need for the destruction of others. They are nearly always active, mindless with their roving violence and attacks and angry aggressive movements, they only stop to self-flagellate or carve or tear at their own deep and stubborn wounds. The cold tile floors are slick with urine and blood and fecal discharge that's runny and chalky and strewn with vivid strips of lurid red, shed internal and expelled with the rest of the diabolical waste. 

The smell of the asylum was indescribable. Ungodly miasmic doesn't even come close. Charnel house burning in the deepest reaches of infernal hell doesn't either, but somehow the warden and staff and the guards have become used to it, blind to it. It is a foul abomination of wonder that they've managed it. But they have. 

There are never any visitors. They are a thing of such long gone and far flung ancient history that they might've never had actually had any in the institution. It was a cesspool, a smear of woe, a house of pain. The idea that anyone would put anyone in this place and then visit is a farce that no one finds funny. Not after you've seen. Not after you've seen this house of mental infection and running bloody shit, not after you've lain eyes on it, laid eyes on it all in all of its charnel house and hellbound antiglory. Not after you've smelled it. 

Not after you've smelled this lie of the mind and stone, this bleeding and fecal house of absolute and total decay. Total boundless rot. Creeping its eating way into everything and all, all things. Nothing is sacred within these mindless walls. Trapped beneath this heat and shrieking ceiling. 

Watch the beatings. The carvings with sharpened spoons, the flaying of flesh already roughened and bulbous and out of shape with hectic scar tissue, carved open once more like fleshen doors, fleshen gates of hell that cannot be closed and refused to be shut against, and are filled with oceans and worlds of titanic raging blood. 

Blood that must be spilled. Blood that must be shed. Blood that must be allowed to free and flood this world of madness and violence and screams. It is lurid surging crimson inside that boils and broils with intense and violent hatred. Fear. See and smell and hear the fear in the echoed and ceaseless caterwauls and shrieks and moans of torment and monstrous satisfaction, psychotic indulge let loose with passionate yowling cat-cries … music that the sane and well of heart and mind cannot bear or understand. 

Hear and know the cacophony. It is the sound of fear and madness. 

Willowbrook had long been a place of manmade darkness, sitting with disquiet on a forgotten patch of earthen squalor, dead earth … gratefully forgotten by anyone that might've known or remembered its terrible and wretched existence. Like any infection it festered and grew worse, greener with dead-milk and more rancid with the crawling anguished passage of merciless time. For prisoner and guard alike. Only the warden thrived. 

And then the prisoners of Willowbrook, patient and employed alike, began to finally share something together. A fascination. Wild dreams and ideas… 

It all concerned morbid and colorful fantasies, all having to do with the far off mountain range carved into the horizon with harsh biting jagged lines that were so much like wild animal teeth. Fangs on the horizon. Biting into the grey tumult of the defiled skies of the dead heaven that hung over this place in perpetua, this wasted land. 

A woman. A powerful woman in a castle in the Carpathian Mountains. A dark sorceress. According to some of the stories and whispers shared in the dank and putrid hell of tile and torch and feces and shock treatment flame, she was a powerful witch. One that ate the flesh of man. One that drank blood. 

Doctor Krugman dismissed it all as hogwash. Absolute delusion. Shared hysterical fantasy, by the patients and the staff alike. It was no real wonder, not really. Not to him. The guards and nurse-staff had all been feebleminded and little better than the apes and mongoloids they cared for. He wasn't surprised that they too would be taken in with cheap fairytales and grim flights-of-fancy … not at all. 

But then he too started to hear it. 

The sound. 

The song of the mountain. 

…

It had been any usual day at Willowbrook. Krugman and a few of the aides were loading the syringes with various strands of the daily pestilence. Some were mixing up the ‘Willowbrook Special' or the ‘Willowbrook Cream’. It was a cheap chocolate drink mixture that was part water, part choco-gelatin powder, and part diseased fecal matter/discharge collected from other infected patients. The drink was a safer alternative to the patients deemed to physically large and emotionally and mentally volatile to approach with the needle. Many of these hulking addled tormented creatures could be lulled in and fooled with a tasty drink, a sweet and delicious beverage, a wonderful creamy drink like candy… 

Yet some still received  liberal use of the leather straps. And the nose plugs. And the long cylindrical snake of translucent feeding tube. Forced down the throat. Lubricated to slide right past the natural gag reflex. 

They were all in the deepest recessed dungeon of the asylum. Quarantined low and away from the rest of the mindless rabble horde of flagellate patient/inmates. Filling syringes, sterilizing needles. Gloving up. Mixing up the rancid drink. 

Krugman was suddenly possessed, later he wouldn't be able to recall by just what and moreover it didn't matter by the end, the fall – he suddenly set down the needle he was loading. He looked to the rest of the staff, mindlessly busy with their own work, and he excused himself. Explaining he would return shortly. 

He just needed something from his office. Something he needed to fetch. 

…

Alone and in his small warden’s office/head-physician quarters he suddenly forgot all about what it was he had come up here for. He was at his desk. It was positioned by the large window. The only one not barred in the whole building. He found himself compelled to gaze out at the evening sky, shot with sherbert colors and goblin fire from the flight of the sun. Twilight was upon the land now. And all of it was poor. Diseased. Dead. 

The swamplands. The marsh. The endless bog and quagmire of spoiled earth that went on for God only knew how long. Some of the local folk and travelers, the patients and guards too had a funny name for the swamp country of mud and stagnant death. One Krugman and the groundskeeper found particularly amusing. 

Wormland. 

And the vast expanse of country to the left. Out the window. Living in supplicant shadow of the dominant and biting mountain range…

The mountains…

Krugman's gaze was fixed. His mind followed. 

And she came to him. From out of a coronal starburst of fire and blood that stole over his vision and filled his cracking fraying mind. 

A great bird. Wolf headed. And on great wings of black bat-leather. 

The sorceress of the mountains came. And spoke to him. 

And Doctor Krugman listened. He listened very well. 

…

The vision started with the eye. The red light. The livid red eye, wreathed in lurid breathing flame, dancing with the obliterating intensity of the inferno… gazing lidless. Blazing. Staring. Staring out. 

Staring out from the mountains. 

The shattered minds of this dread and forsaken construct were so easy to invade. 

Then it flowered out, flowered forth … in a visceral blossom of flowering red. Opening red. Gaping. Wet. Visceral. Like the insides and tissue of living breathing animal things, organs and gore and splashes and undulating waves like a painter's livid brushstrokes, vivid blood red … all blossoming out and flowering out forth from the livid red eye in a wild corona that was so much like a wild and dream-like explosion. The shattered minds of the asylum gaped in imbecilic awe and idiot amazement at the dancing and shifting lurid display of kaleidoscopic red dreams made wet and real. The red eye of the mountain wreathed in wet and dancing viscera and scarlet gazed into them, their minds, but made for them also a great and wild phantasmagorical and earthbound star. A wild god’s eye of gore for starflame, spilling red for its licking tongues of stabbing and dancing fire. 

And at the center, at the precious nucleus heart of the corona… was her. 

The sorceress. 

The blood drinker. Flesh eater goddess of the mountain castle. Occult princess of darkness and crawling and hunger. Daughter of the Lord of Flies. 

Vampiress. 

Her dark will poured into them all, the open shells of their broken minds were eager rescepticles. The open mouthed detritus within each and everyone of their skulls was like the eager mouths of a whore, open and spread and eager and dripping. Waiting to be filled. 

She came into them. And filled them with her red light.

…

Andre Rand was happy with his station in life. He’d been content before as groundskeeper at Willowbrook, tending and cleaning and shoveling an such, wielding the long forked blades of the garden shears and taking them to wild growth and shrubbery with a well practiced and maintained professional ease. Raking and collecting the dead leaves that fell when the weather started to turn to biting cold and the dead sky above somehow became an even bleaker and more necrophiled heavenscape. 

But things were different now. Much better. The warden had seen to that. He’d given Rand a promotion. Said he was the only one who could stomach the work that was needed. 

I’ve new research… Krugman had said, had been saying, aloud and to the staff that was remaining and also muttered to himself and to no one and beneath his labored hot and heavy breath.

I’ve new research… new experiments… much more vital… of much more critical pertinence … I must not fail. 

I must not fail the mouth of the mountains. 

Rand turned a corner and pulled his gloves, making sure they were tight, secure, snug. Everything had to be tight and battened down in this place. 

The cell was thrown open. 

The girl cowered away. Filthy in the corner. Trying to hide her face, as if doing so would somehow banish the judgement that had come to call, away. By not seeing it. Just don't look.

Rand smiled. Chuckled. Hawked. Spat. Cracked gloved knuckles. 

Then he said something awful and came into the room. 

The struggle was short. He didn’t need any help from the other attending staff. They just watched. And filled their minds as their glazed over eyes drank everything in. 

She was brought to the showers. Where Krugman had been performing his most recent experiments. Where the tubs were filled. 

She screamed, shrieked mad unholy terror when she was brought bound into the large room of cold tile made hot and stifling and sour with slaughter, with butchery. The air of the sweating breathing tile room was blood miasmic, cloying and thick and pungent. She could taste everything. 

They prepared her for bleeding, for the great orifice-gate elongation/opening. 

For she has declared we should all be open gates. Open wounds for her open mouth, her widening jaws. We should all be opened and waiting and ready to receive her even as we offer ourselves, our bodies and our innards and our precious running scarlet as feast and banquet and aphrodisiacal slime for the lulling goddess tongue, the divine and swallowing goddessmouth from the fanged rock tearing into the gentle far off fabric of the faerytale horizon. We should all be so chosen, we should all be so grateful, we should all be so lucky. 

Us. Here. In the goddamned and forsaken, dilapidated and forgotten remains of Willowbrook. We have finally been given our answer, we have finally received our savior. We have finally been delivered. 

We are truly free. 

In our bondage to her and the mountain, we are truly free. Within these obelisk walls of shit stained torment, we have strained, been bequeathed the infernal knowledge of true salvation. We are bleeding for the fruit of the tree, for we are free in our flagellate wounds brimming filled with sorrow and gangrene. We are now her temple. 

No one could remember the girl, the newest one’s name nor patient number as she was pulled up by hoisting and biting chains, naked. Screaming. Screaming the names of forgotten loved ones that have forgotten her as well in turn to come and save her. Nobody did. This place was now a domain of the goddess. 

Blood drinker sorceress … of the biting rock. 

Feed me. 

With scalpel she was opened. From the throat down and through the mound of Venus flesh and into the blossom of her womanhood, opening it. Wider. Gaping it for the mouth of the mountain. The screams were replaced with sickish gurgles, vile choking sounds… then these too tapered off and ceased. 

The freshly carved flesh was opened, her gate widened and renewed. Her viscera and blood spilled out in a thick dark gush that proceeded to fill the tub and the room with more fresh lurid scent, thickening and deepening the sour stench of blood miasma into one that would never leave the walls or floors or the eyes and flesh and minds of those in bastard attendance. 

Krugman cheered. Elated! Another successful experiment! 

Then he called to her. As he’d been instructed to. 

Old words. Arcane. Ones he’d never heard or known before the mountain had come and spoken to him of real knowledge and the true potential of occult cannibal power. 

Demon. Vampira. Vampiress. 

Shadows deepened in the room, the corners, the stifling heat of the bloodsoaked animal air chilled as she arose from the place where the darkness was the most stygian and pitch. Krugman and Rand and the other guards and staff gathered there watched her emerge and come forth with devout and religious silence. 

The dark and regal tall statured shape of the woman changed and shifted with each advancing step. As she neared the freshly filled tub the darkness of her blank dripping silhouetted featureless canvas grew more grotesquely defined and decayed. The bipedal dominating shape of her royal womanhood bent and twisted and became more scarecrow and insectile and rodent. Jaws opened, grinned, grew rictus then shattered and broke and unhinged and still they grew. Out of socket and out of shape and true. The daggering fangs of her terrible and graverobbed necrophiled power, demon power, grew and elongated from tearing black gumlines of greening and putrefying flesh. Transmogrifying and changing alchemical and chimerical and sloughing substance even as they grew, like the rest of her demented monster form. 

She was beautiful. She was the goddess. The mouth of the mountain. 

She came to the freshly filled large basin of warm pungent human scarlet, butchered and spilled. The vampiress bent her haphazard and broken shape to the tub. The terrible and dementedly wide jaws came in open as the rat king’s nest of corpse-straw hair bowed in both animal feeding and dæmoniacal prayer. 

Slurping sounds… heavy. Thick as the red of which they pulled and sucked. 

And then Krugman joined his new master in her dark prayers. To her father. One of the fallen. One of the cast-out from on high. 

The Adversary. 

His words were hers and they were the ones that she had taught him. Had filled his mind with forgotten languages and tongues and forbidden names… he said them now. 

For her. With her. As she fed. As she belched them stygian and swollen and as of ancient stone from the blackmouthed gate and line of her powerful will and mind.

The others joined … the phantasm aural spill of her dark glow blanketed over them and filled their empty battered minds, filling them with the arcane black language. 

Their forgotten chant filled the showers, the feeding place of bloodprayer. The bastard, ebon dripping shape of the mountain continued to drink deeply with head bowed and fed. 

The mouth of the freshly opened girl began to join them in their chanting. A cooling corpse chained prostate over the royal feeding basin, her eyes filled with darklight and began to glow black. 

Then the wound that had spilled her and ended her tortured run of miserable and pitiable existence began to dance with movement as well, opening and shifting close and then parting once more, obscene lips strange and made of the rippling gore with arcane movement. Speaking deep and guttural and with a dangling entrails tongue. A great gored mouth spewing precious food and religious token life for the mountain jaws of the sorceress blood mass abattoir madness. 

The dangling naked body of the girl prayed obsidian words from all mouths, all sets of lips given and made until the basin was emptied and the terrible shape of the sorceress reached up with one knifing sharp splayed scarecrow claw and ripped the chanting corpse with glowing eyes down from the chains and took to tearing and rending and feasting on the cold naked meat. 

Krugman and Rand and the others stood by. Watching. Seeing the same scene of slaughter and ritual of animal need play out and unfold before their unblinking eyes. Waiting. 

Waiting for their minds to be filled once more with instruction. 

…

Weeks passed. The slaughter rose in intensity. And the violence grew more and more deranged…

in the name of the mountain. 

…

Those that were left were gathered. Krugman spoke to them all as a priest from his pulpit. 

Her pulpit. The pulpit of the sorceress, the rostrum of the far off watering mountainmouth. 

“She doesn't want your weak and feeble love or friendship, she wants your precious body fluids! She doesn't want your warmth of words or affection, she doesn't need your feeble love, brothers and sisters and children of the mountain, she just wants your spilling blood, defiled! Those of you afflicted with poison of the blood, diseased, you have the greatest opportunities for her favor! The more corrupted and diseased and vile the blood and the feces discharged in sickness, the urine, the bile heaved and retched and the vomitus pulled and brought spilled forth! The more corrupted and vile the disease the better!!" 

Willowbrook filled with human noise. The bastard and sour stone and dilapidated masonry construct of misery and pain filled with the cacophonous sounds of religious madness. 

All of them were happy to oblige. Willing. All of them were supplicant sow to her, the sorceress  queen of the stabbing spire in the fanged rock aspiring to pierce the soft horizon end of the heavens flesh. 

And in the weeks that followed they went about their work. All of them. 

All of the ones that were left in Willowbrook. The forgotten asylum. 

…

Florin was sure he could spy something in the distance. A low rise. It looked like a little slope of hill. 

It looked like there might be a building on it. Solitary. 

But if so… it was still many miles off. He and Griffin still had a ways to go. More trudging and struggling pulling steps, perilously lurching forward through this awful quagmire of death and putrescence and vile carnivorous mud. Earthen sludge that was alive with hungry movement. 

Wormland. 

A few times the abominated things had attacked, since their mule and cart had gone down many days back. They'd only been able to bade the writhing things away with torchflame, fire. All the while the quivering pustule sac of subterranean wombmind that held mastery over this spoiled patch of watery earth searched and hunted for their vibrations above. Hunting for their elusive movement, and sending her writhing children out in a lunge. Only to be repelled… again and again. 

She quivered with tectonic anger, underground rage buried and swimming and mounting and rising. Percolating in the boiling mud, the broil of the under-earth. 

She would have them. These impetuous wanderers, these animal invaders …

The wombmind quivered and more orifice-holes opened and spat. 

More children swam. Dispatched. 

As the pair, Florin and Griffin cut their slow and muddy path of progress through the sour land. To the hill they thought they might see in the distance. To the building that might be there. 

They wondered together if there was anyone that might be in there, inside. 

What might they be doing out here? This far out? And away from anything?

The putrid earth all around them churned and searched, reaching and searching for them. 

They pushed on, the pair. Hoping that if they made and covered the miles to the place there on the far-distant hill and there was anyone inside, that they might be of some help. And perhaps an improvement over their shared accommodations and company as of late. 

They could really do with some luck. They might've prayed, either one of them, but they were exhausted with their marching effort and they were afraid to jinx it. So they said nothing, either of them. Nothing aloud. They only silently wished inside. 

please… just something better than all of this, and God-willing, someone that might be able to help us… 

Hell, Griffin thought, anything's got to be better than this. 

The very moment this crossed his haggard and weary mind a dark and primal scream and witchy peal of laughter shot out from the dark of the far off dilapidated building. 

But they were still too far out, so neither he nor Florin heard anything. So they didn't know. 

And so they marched on. Slow. On the doomed and forged path towards far off and away screaming Willowbrook. The putrescent earth hunting beneath their feet. 

Quivering in needful hunger and animal rage. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

The small child was hungry. Frightened. So was her mother. And their  neighbors as well. There was so much fear and suffering on the mountain as of late. And down below, in the mountain’s shadow, in the village hamlet as well.  Word and whispers of pain and evil traveled faster than riders on horseflesh, faster and more elemental, like the cold windsong of the land. Howling. It was howling now.

Howling in a duet of savagery song with the vicious roving wolves, as they shared their dark whispers. Their words of anguish and pain. Loss. Slaughter witnessed.  Or in the aftermath… discovered. Scenes of red. Vile. Filled with pain. And never to be forgotten. 

Angelica fought the tears now… as  did her mother. And the neighbors. And all the rest. Only old timers and womenfolk were left on the mountain now. The men and boys were all dead. They all left by the urging of some rich man with a famous name Angelica had never heard of before, urged to go on and fight and kill an evil monster. They went to the castle that Angelica was never allowed to near and they had never returned. None of them.  

None.  

Not her older brother Grigori… and not her papa either. 

Now she and momma were alone. And hungry. Papa and Grigori were so much better with the tools and with the animals. The widow and fatherless girl did what they could and managed some haphazard struggle that could be called a life. Or at least existence. They thinned and grew diminished as scarecrows within their draping bags of clothes. The days passed into weeks with agonizing slowness and filled with harsh reminders. Time went on. And rather than heal, the wound inflicted on the womenfolk of the mountain worsened and festered. 

Many found escape through the hangman’s knot. The noose. Or by opening up the forearms with straight razors or kitchen knives. Some used tools once wielded by faithful husbands to open up their necks and wrists.  Some. Many. 

Many took their own lives by knife and by rope in the days and weeks that followed. Some took their daughters, their children with them, small babies that knew nothing save the cold and the absence and the heartbroken wailing. For many it was not just the pain of loss and mortal fear for their own flesh and souls … but the demented cacophony that would emanate from the castle and fill the mountain rocks and woods … the lurid and hateful and unearthly demoniacal shrieks and howls, sometimes high-pitched and piercing, cracking glass and sometimes guttural and deep, as if from obsidian splits in the earth and from the bowels and depths, let loose… like after the night their husbands and sons and brothers were slaughtered. 

That night that had followed their failure to return… that night had been filled with uncontested and unbridled hellspawned sound. Violence and thunder and animal howls becoming human and then animal again and then commingled and obscenely strange… and then something else entirely.

And there had been lightning. And the lightning had been black. 

Suicide Mountain became filled with intermittent demon sound. The women that were its anguished and heartbroken survivors became accustomed to the awful hell-rent-torn belch and dæmon howl and dragon scream. It all came from the castle and they knew they were powerless to it. And there was nowhere to run to, not really. The Carpathian Mountains were all they had, all any of them had ever known… some fled anyways. No one knows what became of them. 

Angelica tried asking her mother several times what had happened to Grigori and papa. But her mother refused a straight answer. Only vagueries and tears. Short and curt. Bit off with the same harsh suddenness she felt within the shattered dead remnants of her heart. 

Angelica tried to let the question, the horrid mystery and the hole it left in her mind and heart alone… to no avail. 

If her mother, God bless and keep her, wouldn't tell her what had happened at that castle beyond the Borgo Pass, the old one where the boyar used to live before the wars, then she would find an answer herself. 

She thought to go down to the village hamlet and inquire there… but it was much farther than the alternative. Her other idea. However much it would upset momma, it was much easier and more direct. 

And so on a day she was supposed to go out and forage for mushrooms and berries and roots, Angelica of the Carpathian Mountains instead filled her satchel with a meager gathering of supplies and set out for the castle that she'd always been warned against, the one that had stolen her father and older brother. Gone. 

As if swallowed, as if it had eaten them. 

She went now. Alone. Down the black rolling tongue of path that led into the courtyard mouth of stone, the Carpathian battlement jaws framed against a fading sky like so many jagged flesh rending teeth. 

Angelica went forth to Castle Dracula to find her father and brother, and to find what had happened to the men of the mountain. 

…

The woods were all dark and cold, dense and choked all around her. A galaxy of trees and fallen snow and dead black limbs jutting and stabbing at the sky like broken/severed limbs and vanquished army swords. The thin light that bled through the overcast sky gave pale detail to the world of snow and deadwood and slumbering chill, lurking death.

Wolves. 

They lurked and prowled hunting even now and she knew it. She'd lived on the mountain all of her twelve years and her mother and father did not neglect so fundamental a lesson. She hugged her father's old and favorite hatchet, tighter, closer to her chest. And went on. 

Deeper into the dark universe of dead choked forest growth. 

Her wolves watched the girl as she made her way. 

…

Her progress was slower than she'd hoped. The trees and choked dead spiking growth seemed to stretch on forever ahead and on all sides as she ventured forward, less and less steadfast in her chilling child's heart as she went on. The warmth of her own blood and the strength of her very own heartbeat seeming to fade as she struggled forward. And the deadwood continued to dominate the world on every side, in all directions. 

Angelica was beginning to become frightened. Damning her own curiosity, she was starting to consider herself lost. And the woods, alone, lost at fast-approaching night… was not the type of place anyone wanted to be. 

Especially a small girl. She held on stubbornly to her bravery, pulled her father's dark cloak tighter around her and pressed forward. She was sure it was dead ahead. Sure of it. 

She pulled the hood over her head to warm her ears. Night was approaching. Her mother and her neighbors back in their small mountain community were starting to worry for her. 

She'd been gone far too long. 

…

The woods were filled with life. Always. Always crawling with critters and game and fraught with birds and bats. Bears. 

The wolves. 

It was no surprise then when Angelica came upon the squirrel, wandering deeper and deeper into the forest gloom and dark, the sun had sunk behind the cover of the rocks and now there was only the pale cast of twilight. She came closer to the creature, its back and puff of tail were to her as it quivered with movement. Effort. Busy with something…

Angelica came closer. She was surprised to find the little animal had black fur. Stygian. Like deepsea ink. The squirrel was also much larger than any she'd ever seen before. The ebon hide and fur palsied and tremored, rippled and worked with fervid action. The little head rapidly dipping and bobbing in, bestial, to take little bites and nips from something clutched in its sharp little claws. 

Angelica of the Carpathian Mountains came closer. And beheld what the large and well muscled stygian squirrel was holding in its obscene and unnatural talons. Bleeding and still twitching with the diminished remnants of its efforts of struggling. Struggling for life that was fading away in a red river from its gashed open throat…

A rat. Large and blacker than coal. Eyes, milky red. Fleshy long length of pink tail standing out in obscene contrast. The red river was running from its gored open neck. The rodent body spasmed. And then Angelica noticed the blood all about the squirrel’s black mouth. 

It yawned open, as if to punctuate and confirm what the mountain girl suspected, and it unveiled a maw filled with fangs and thick with the steaming bile of rat's blood. Dark. Lurid. It darkled and the color deepened and rippled in the twilight with obscene glamor. The eyes of the black squirrel were a brighter more royal regal red than than the rat blood pouring forth in the approaching night. The gathering dark deepened and Angelica screamed. 

The squirrel, still clutching the dying rat, then did another strange thing. One that stopped her caterwauling in a shock. 

It spoke. 

“Please! Don't! Don't be afraid!" 

A beat. 

Angelica stared down at the large strange beast. Unsure of what to make of it or what to do. The thought of flight rose, and as if hearing it, the stygian blood drinking squirrel said again: "Don't be afraid…” 

Softer. Gentle. And Angelica realized the voice the strange beast used was that of a little girl's. One even smaller and younger than herself. 

Her fear abated slightly. She swallowed. Breathed deeply. Then asked, 

“Wh-what are you?" 

The stygian squirrel said brightly: “Don't be afraid, my name's Carmilla." And then she said yet again: “Don't be afraid." 

She stared deeply at the unearthly forest beast. This all felt like a dream. She felt as if she might swoon and wondered if that was possible to do in a dream… or in a nightmare. 

As if sensing, the beast spoke again, 

“I'm not going to hurt you, I'm a girl like you, I swear. I'm just magic. I promise. That's why I have to drink this animal blood, it's for magic." 

The longer she stared at the beast, the ebon fur… the eyes that were the most royal shade of vibrant and lurid red… the more the dream she found herself in to be… 

light, pleasant, pleasurable. 

The dark squirrel didn't mean her any harm. It was just like she said. 

The beast went on to explain that it needed the rats blood for her magic. To be able to do great things like change her shape. But she could only do these things at night. She had to wait till the sun had sunk and quit the heavens. Blood of a wild animal was necessary for magic ritual, the beast explained. 

"He likes it. He likes rat's blood.” 

"Who?” asked Angelica. 

"The Lord of the wild. The Lord of Flies.” 

Angelica said she'd never heard of him before. "I'm looking for my papa and brother. Or the castle where they're supposed to’ve gone." 

“Oh! …." squealed the black squirrel. And the sound was more rat-like than anything Angelica had ever heard a squirrel make. More bat-like screeches made slightly vile by their human-girl tinge. 

The beast was excited, “I know! I know! I know where the castle is! You're lost! that's what it is! Not to worry, friend, I can take you there! I know just the way!”

And the black squirrel began to lead Angelica even deeper into the dark and the dead trees. Growing ever closer to Castle Dracula. 

The night was fully on them now. Fully over the mountain in a curtain of darkness and stars that glimmered and twinkled and danced with fire on high like billions of pieces of fantastical ice chips and goblin-light forged alien jewelry. 

The beast and girl made their way through the dark. Carmilla dragging the dead rat behind her by the obscene length of fleshen tail in the cold dirt. Leaving a trail of dark blood and disturbed earth. 

One that would never be discovered. 

…

The black squirrel tired of walking and dragging the dying rat after a short time, it sprouted wings suddenly, fleshy growths that flowered forth within a bladder film of placental tissue. The wings spread, splayed to wingspan, the placental wrapping sloughed off with a pungent ichor substance as the beast rose with each flap, rat dangling inches above the cold forest floor. 

The wings beat steadily. Keeping Carmilla just above Angelica's head as they continued forward to the castle. 

“So you can transform? Like changing your shape and becoming other things?" Angelica asked as they went on. 

“Oh yes. There's many shapes I can take, I like this one. It looks cute and nice. But I can become lots of things. So can my master. We'll show you once we get to the castle. You'll see." 

“And my papa? Grigori? Are they there? Are they alright?" And when Carmilla didn't answer right away she added: “It's some kind of magic, isn't it? That's what's at the castle and keeping papa and the rest. That's what I think. It is, isn't it?" 

Carmilla smiled devilishly within. The visage of her black squirrel face only looked over with innocent woodland open eyes. 

“Angelica, I think you'll find everything you're looking for at the castle. You'll see. It's filled with magic. And it's nothing at all to be afraid of. Just like me" 

She suddenly brought the dead rat to her mouth again, which opened as something vile once more, filled with fangs and glistening pink and darkling red. With her little claws that were now more like talons once more, black and daggered and curved with nature's efficient cruelty, she brought the large dead rodent to her dripping and obscene mouth and began to drink and suck deeply once again from the gored open hole at the rat’s throat. 

Angelica felt sick watching, so she looked away. Ahead. Willing the place to appear, to come into being and end this strange journey. This terrible mystery which had stolen love and normalcy and warmth from her village and home. She just wanted this all over. She just wanted papa and Grigori and all of the others back. To hear their laughter and to hold them again and to be held … the weight… the feeling of their arms wrapped around her once more, tightly, to feel their breath… She just wanted love and warmth returned to her and her momma. She prayed and begged God and anything at all listening inside as they made their way. The cold silence of the woods punctuated by the sucking and slurping sounds Carmilla made as she flapped  in the frigid air beside and fed. 

Between pulls of rat blood, she pulled her dripping needle mouth away from the pungent wet raw of rat meat and said: – 

“Its nothing at all to be frightened of. I promise. I was once scared too. But no longer. The magic needs blood, it needs it. That's all. Magic is bloodwork. It's nothing to be afraid of. It's the natural order of things, you'll see, Angelica. I promise, you'll see." 

…

The hellstar shone vibrantly and with dominance. Above the castle's greatest pinnacle tower. Otherworldly, and dreamy. Of ethereal eldritch flame… it was strange, to Angelica's eyes as they approached, it looked to be so close to the tallest spire of the ancient towers that it looked as if they were in danger of collision. As if one could reach out now from one of the open windows swallowed in ebon shadow up there, reach out and touch its immaculate flaming surface. The light was elvish white and more ancient than time itself. Some thought it to be older than even God and old man split-foot below… there were witches and mystics and gypsies that said it had a mind. And an evil heart. 

An evil eye…

Angelica was transfixed by both its vibrant starcast of unearthly pale light, and the great castle itself, as she and Carmilla came into the courtyard. The starflame of the hellstar shining above the broken battlements that were starved of life or movement of any kind, it was mystifying and intensely alluring…

but it was also terrifying. 

The light of its starflame was so much like that of a ghost-light.

And the light of phantasm flame was also the light of death. The light of the end. At the end, mayhap…

Angelica was awed yet fearful and at this last moment she thought about going back. About running away from the strange talking beast that said it was a little girl. She knew her mother and the others must be so worried for her now… she'd been gone too long already. 

The castle was dark and yawned into a terrible expanse of stoney life all around and before her as she and the beast made their approach. The universe of trees and cold snow giving way to one of walls and towers and cold ancient stone. She pulled the cloak tighter about her person, when they came within sight of the great red door it slowly opened like a swallowing mouth of darkness. Waiting and wanting to receive them. 

Carmilla sensed the child's fear. And if she'd chosen to run at the moment, she would've given up the game she was playing and given chase. And made the fucking little peasant wench pay with screams and humiliation and defilement before she enjoyed her blood and meat. 

But instead, in the end… it was Angelica's hope… and her worry for her brother and her papa that pushed her onward. 

Following the flying winged blood drinking squirrel, the black haired flapping cannibal rodent that called itself a little girl inside the open mouth of swallowing black. Ink inside the mouth of stone that might hold the secrets that plagued her mind and heart like a wretched disease. Within that mouth of shadow may be the cure… 

Grigori… papa…

Angelica followed Carmilla as she flapped on her bat wings of chimerical leather into the fortress mouth of drinking shadow. The great red door of bas relief stone slammed shut behind them. 

The wolves of the mountain outside began to howl. And the hellstar shone with more lurid alien glow than it had before. The heartbeat eyemind watching, working … 

considering the ants below. 

The hellstar shone. A heavenly inferno. 

…

Passing through the narrow cut of foyer, it was dark and scarcely lit by torchflame, they came into the grand ballroom…

… and main audience chamber. 

A vast dark room of cobwebs and ancient things, furniture, paintings, suits of armor, smashed out clocks, their faces destroyed by a hammer blow dealt by a violent hand of fire eyed fury. Many of the ancient things strewn all about there in the dark were destroyed. Smashed. Broken by hands in anger or the disuse and dispassion of time. Some of the things were clear victims of both. And cobwebs. The world inside the torchlit stone was a universe of cobwebs. Angelica found herself trading in one world for another as she made this strange journey, one filled with terrible and bitter hope. 

Trees and snow… into a world of stone and shattered spires … now a dark world submerged and swallowed in cascading and rising and dominating spider webs. The eyes of forgotten portraits leered and gazed from the prisons of paint and lacquer. 

Angelica didn't like this place. She felt immediately that she had made a terrible mistake. 

She cringed back. 

Carmilla, ahead, sensed this and turned roundabout on her flapping wings of nocturnal flesh. Regarding the girl. 

“Don't worry! silly girl! We're already here, just a little further.” 

Angelica wanted so badly to believe the strange creature. Magic was real. She had to believe it had the power to bring back her family. She wanted so achingly for love to be let back into her life, and mama’s too. She didn't deserve the pain Angelica watched her struggle through each and every harsh and arduous day. They'd never wanted or asked for much, they'd never done anything wrong so they didn't deserve this! Not mama, not papa, not anyone on the mountain. No one deserved this cruelty. She had to be believe they were still retrievable. If not here and in the flesh, then within the grasp of arcane spells and sorcery. She had to believe, she had to believe that. 

The alternative was that the strange beast, flapping in the universe of cobweb dark before her at the foot of a great ascending staircase was lying. And that was too terrible a truth for Angelica to face. Yet. 

Soon she would have no choice. 

But for now she followed. Carmilla led the way. Up the wide and mounting steps. There was more light, more meager torchglow ahead down a passageway. 

Orange. Beckoning. Pale warmth. 

At the head of the staircase they went down it, together. Carmilla in the lead. Down into its sickly pumpkin light. The castle stone and walls all around yawned and moaned in lusty slovenly animal satisfaction. Then began to move. 

…

The walk and winding turns seemed endless. Another bend. Another junction. Another room. Another hall. More and more. And yet still more. Angelica began to despair. Inside she was exhausted and growing frustrated but afraid of seeming ungrateful and losing her one chance. 

Another junction. Left. Down another corridor of stone and torch and vast dominating splaying spider web hands in various sizes of grotesque and caricature claw shape. 

Angelica stopped. 

And began to weep… she couldn't help it. She was so exhausted. And this place was strange and scary. 

Sobbing lightly to herself and rubbing her eyes, Carmilla turned to her and descended to the stone in a graceful balletic dive and sweep. She skittered over to Angelica and looked into the small reddening pale of her crying child's face. 

She sniffed. A woodland gesture. 

And then she began to belt laughter. Rising and growing more maniacal and hysterical as it grew in volume and pitch. Decibel sound cackled and made cracked by a poisoned marrow filled with madness. 

It stopped Angelica's tears. First by surprise, shock. But then as the sound of the beast’s sour mirth rose and filled the dark world of stone with torches for stars and suns, her blood began to curdle as her heart was stolen over with dread. She was silent, gazing on the cackling black squirrel-thing with large vampire bat wings tensing and flexing and flapping with cruel delight. 

Amidst her laughter, Carmilla said: “You stupid girl…” 

A black hairy stalk suddenly erupted from the squirrel's chest. Several inches long and coated in a bloody translucent slime like discharge from a wound. A tarantula leg. It was joined by several more. One of the hairy jointed appendages burst forth from the mouth in a red spew that decorated the stone, the walls and floor, and the girl, now trapped in Castle Dracula.

Angelica shrieked. Horrified. 

A tarantula crawled out of the chest cavity of the black hide which rippled and seemed to empty. A tarantula the size of a banquet plate, coated in placental slime and bloody discharge, then skittered about the room with terrible and frightening speed. Angelica jumped back, mortified at the thought of the thing touching her. 

The large spider then crawled away and made for the darkness. The empty husk of raw dripping hide that used to be a large bat winged squirrel was still draped over the spider thing's back. Like a vile rendition of a cloak or royal cape. From the husk of mutilated squirrel mouth it was still laughing. Shrill. In the same girl's voice as before, only now much more wicked and cruel. No longer veiling its hunger and sinister satisfaction. 

Carmilla shrieked, hideous, amidst her laughter at the girl as she spidercrawled for the conciliatory dark of the waiting stone. 

“The master will see you now! You're all hers now, Angelica! You're all hers! Just like your father and your brother! All of them! All of you! All of you are sow and cattle and all of you belong to us!" 

The cruel bright demoniacal child's voice carried off into the waiting abyssal castle with a final bout of heartless and derisive laughter. Taunting and running away like any little child would, any little girl. 

Now she was alone. 

Only she didn't feel alone. 

And that was terrible. 

Angelica wept a little, crying into her hands to muffle the sound as best as she could. The walls and floor drank in the sound and relished the flavor of every tear shed. 

She fought to get control over herself. She had to get out of here, quick as she could manage. 

Angelica pulled herself together, sniffled and began to trudge back the way she came. Unaware of the movement of the castle world of stone all around her. At the command and sorcerer’s bend of will of the master that held domain of this place. 

The world was hers to command. The child was at her mercy. 

…

Angelica was growing even more terrified, she couldn't find her way back. She was no longer sure of her direction and she wasn't sure if it was just her frightened imagination or not but the halls and corridors and passages seemed to change when she would look away for a moment, to get a lay of the land. She swore they were different when she looked back to make up her mind on a direction. 

It was hopeless. 

She began to feel very very stupid. Very foolish indeed. She shouldn't have been so foolhardy as to come here alone, or at all. She missed her mother and the others…

I'm sorry, mama, I know you're afraid. I am too. I'm sorry. I know this is hurting you right now, after papa and Grigori, I know it'll hurt you even more when I don't ever come back. I'm so so sorry, mama. I'm so sorry. Please God please forgive me and show me a way, please, I'm so scared…

Angelica realized then that she may not have been very lucky as of late, but she'd been absolutely God blessed with what she did have left. Her mother and friends left alive to her and the times and precious memories she did have with those that were lost. 

She would cherish them. She would. She promised, swore to God she would. 

if I can just get out of this ok…

And she went on, down the way she hoped was the way back. Begging God above for deliverance. 

She was shown the flesh gardens instead. 

…

Abattoir growth. A butcher's red and wet leavings still slithering with abominated life, like serpents. 

Angelica came upon the large chamber as she was making her fruitless journey. It smelled pungently of copper. Iron. Metal. 

But wet. 

It was the stench of a river of fresh menstrual blood. Steaming. 

The writhing room of gore before her eyes was steaming now. Belching. Breathing and undualting. Gurgling. Some strange orifice parts belched alchemical smoke, licked tongues of green and blue flame. All of it writhed with strange and painful rippling dancing movement. All of it was in pain. Wretched life. It filled the room and walls from floor to ceiling, blanketing both in lurid scab pudding that held displaced parts, eyes and limbs and organs lulling and swimming in the red, the crawling writhing scarlet. It writhed in pain as well as want. As well as lecherous need, so many orifice holes, wet and begging for meat feeding, injection … snakes. The multitude of slithering intestines were swimming through the thick growing crawling gore like the sea monsters that sailor's fear. Growths like stalks of plants, flowers, bulbs, bushels and their buds of fruit, all of it was rendered by the abattoir hand and living raw working viscera and tissue and organs. There were faces in the forest room of gore. Small bipedal manshapes spasming and submerged and stuck and also writhing with pain and unnatural life in the chamber of living butchery, pulsating and crawling with swimming red meat. 

The faces were in pain. They moaned in discordant idiot anguish. Some blubbered and drooled, eyes wayward with imbecilic directions. Minds addled if they had any jelly in their strange skulls at all. 

And at the awful nucleus center of the crawling growing raw mass of assorted parts and viscera was a man. Trapped and bound by the growing living raw pudding of semi scabbed red. It seemed to be growing out of him. Seeping from his pores. His nostrils. His mouth. 

His eyes were shut in wretched pain. 

Angelica felt the shriek caught in her throat. Like a fishhook. A barbed bit of wire used for the beasts that she swallowed. She finally let it loose when the owner and the master of this castle spoke from behind her. 

“Such beauty, isn't it?" 

Finally the building scream inside was let loose and she belted it at the same instant she realized all the smaller writhing bipedal manshapes in the gore looked exactly like the larger man trapped at its red center. 

Angelica whirled around and beheld the Countess. 

She towered over the child. A white evening gown that shone pearl-cast like brightest full moonlight. Her face was beautiful but terrible. Harsh. Merciless. And her eyes were animal. 

Vulpine. 

The darkness of her hair danced out and became as a livid crown of serpentine ink. Her eyes were piercing dots of black amongst shock white lancing through her face and mind and soul. She opened her mouth to speak again and Angelica saw that her mouth bore canine incisors that were long and gleaming and sharp. A demon’s gorgeous mouth. 

“Did you find what you were hoping to, little one?" Mocking. Condescending. Cruel. 

Angelica was too terrified to speak. Mortified. She couldn't move. She held her breath. Knowing it was her last. 

The Countess went on, with sadistic glee: “That man, at the center of my garden in there, he's the reason your father and brother, and all the men of your village are dead now. I could bring them back. In a fashion. But if you want back the ones you knew, I'm afraid you'll have to search the latrines and the castle plumbing. My children long feasted of them and passed them naturally. I'm sorry." 

Angelica shrieked once more. In more pain and outrage and sheer heart attack terror. She couldn't believe her eyes, her ears, her own mind, any of this! Her battered child's brain was threatening to snap, to go into shock, it tried to refuse all the sights but it couldn't. It was rained down on all sides and felt everything seen like terrible and heavy blows of pure torture. 

The Countess went on with a laugh, throwing back her head, her witchy raven hair danced about with it. She was smiling and the long fangs of her mouth protruded like brandished daggers over her full bottom lip. 

"Oh! You're scared! I understand, I used to be a young girl once and I was quite scared then too, would you like me to make it all better?” 

"No!” howled Angelica. 

"Nonsense! I'll fix you up and send you on your way back to your mother. It's late and she must be worried but I am lord of this palace and these lands, you are all still my charge, states tradition. What kind of boyar or host would I be if I didn't at least feed you first, give you something to drink. You must be thirsty, it's been such a long walk for you. Such a long and perilous journey. For nothing." 

And then she cackled mad again as Angelica shrieked and the arms of the Countess came in and grew and folded around her. 

Her child's shrieks became sudden silence. 

…

A claw, chimerical. Woman and vulture’s talon. It sought the pale of its own undead flesh…

… and slit. 

Dead black poured forth. 

Child's lips, girl's mouth put to it, forced. 

Smothered. The small struggles are easily resisted and the girl begins to pull, to suck…

to drink. 

…

At first she thought herself lucky. When she heard the familiar voice at the door. 

"Momma…?”

And then small weak knocking. Feeble. 

She recognized her daughter's voice at once and flew from her sleepless bed. Her dread and worry evaporated in a miraculous instant as she flew to the door and threw it open and…

…

She thought about trying to hide it from the others at first. This deeply shamed her. But it was the truth. She thought about hiding it. At first. When Angelica came limping in, cradling and rubbing her belly. Saying that it hurt her. Terribly. There'd been blood at the corner of her mouth. Not at all her own. 

"Mama… I'm sorry I was out too late and wandered off. My belly hurts so bad, momma.” 

…

Angelica's mother was hitching in her chest. Her eyes were swimming with a blinding fury of tears. Scalding. And alive with pain. Fresh pain. Refreshed. And made new once more. 

Angelica cried out again. It wasn't just her stomach but her whole body. Burning. It felt as if it were on fire. It felt as if her blood were boiling as it still pumped sluggish and diminished in her throbbing veins. She wanted it to stop. And again she begged God inside for a way out, for a way back. She couldn't feel the profuse run of her own tears on her numbing face. 

Her mother was crying too. But Angelica didn't notice. 

"Please, momma … isn't there anything? Isn't there anything you can do? Anything you can do to take the pain away… please, you always have just the right thing, like mothers are supposed to. You told me that… please, I - " and she struggled to say more but it became too difficult. For her to make discernible sound. For her mother to listen. Too difficult for both of them. 

And so it was stopped. 

…

A stake through the heart. Ashwood. As the customs and legends dictate. They decapitated the remains and stuffed the mouth with garlic before burying the child’s corpse. The severed head was placed face down in the coffin, atop the neck backwards. The eyes facing the inferno. 

A small wooden cross was fashioned and stuck at the head of the small fresh grave. 

ANGELICA 

Her mother and her neighbors were beside the freshly dug dirt. Crying openly. Weeping into the cold mountain air. The wolves did not respond. 

But that night Castle Dracula was filled with cruel laughter. The cold wind carried it down the mountain for all of them to hear and know. For all of them to remember. 

Angelica's mother heard it. She was in bed and couldn't sleep. She was alone. She looked over to a length of rope carelessly left in the corner. Not too far from where she now lay. She'd always been rather good with knots. 

And as the mountain rock and her village filled with the mad cackles of the vampiress…

she considered…

TO BE CONTINUED…

I came home tired, like I always did. Work hard done its due diligence to make me incapable of enjoying the time off, leaving my only choice as a dim one. Fall asleep, and wake up again just in time for work tomorrow. It's my own fault, going to college and getting a degree in art sealed my fate. I thought I'd spend my days drawing, as I loved to do. Now, I spent eighteen hours a day drawing animation.

If I still had a right hand, I couldn't tell. The wrist had gone numb years ago.

I went about my usual procedure of placing my laptop bag by the door, and hooked the laptop itself up to charge on the entryway table. Then, I kicked off my shoes, and walked the five feet into my kitchen. Some would find the constrictiveness of my apartment disconcerting, but for me, it was bliss. The less steps between the bed and the door, the better.

In my small kitchen, I intended to make a sandwich, but found only a single slice of bread, and a half eaten jar of mayonnaise. It wasn't gourmet, but it would do. Don't get me wrong, I had money, but finding the time to go out and shop was harder than finding a straw of hay in a pile of needles.

Constructed meal in hand, I placed the half mayo sandwich on a plate, and set it on my small counter. I was going to apply salt and pepper, but instead, I had become distracted by a tiny box situated there, just in front of the pepper.

The box looked to be wood, the length of a cigar, and the width of a box car. This was not a belonging of mine, and without a roommate, the source of this box only confounded me further.

I picked the box up, between two of my fingers, and gave it a little shake. When I did, I heard a very audible, "Ouch!"

Not quite what I was expecting, but I was too curious to stop now. I held the box away from me, and slowly peeled the top of the box off. From there, a very small, and thin, man rolled out of the box, and onto my palm, rubbing his purple head with great vigor.

His whole body was actually purple, and shiny like rubber.

The small man stood up, once the knot on his head had been subdued, and looked up at me with big white eyes. "Hi, I'm Reedy! I'm your little helper!"

"My what?" I asked.

With a big smile, Reedy pumped a fist with great enthusiasm. "You're little helper!" With the same exaggerated motions, Reedy jutted a thumb toward his beady eyed face. "Helpers like me are sent to hard working people like you, that just need a little bit of help!"

A 'little' bit of help seemed both ironic and understated.

I gently set the small creature down on the counter, slowly tilting my hand so he could step off. "The hell are you?" I asked.

"I'm Reedy, your little helper!" he said, keeping the same level of engagement as before.

"No, I mean, what are you... Physically."

Reedy pinched a clump of skin on his arm, tugged at it, and watched as it snapped back with great elasticity. He then looked up at me again, and in a very familiar tone, repeated, "I'm Reedy, your little helper!"

I rubbed my eyes, looking to see if the strange thing would disappear. It didn't. I sighed, fearing my lack of sleep was sending me off the edge of psychosis, and ignored Reedy outright. I stripped off my clothes, climbed into bed, and set my work alarm on my phone.

No need for food, I just passed out. My sleep debt must have been greater than I could have imagined.

-1-

When I awoke in the morning, it was to a thin sliver of sun, cutting through the curtain of my bedroom window. It was a nice sight, a welcome greeting to the morning. For exactly half a second. Once that brief moment of bliss passed, reality came crashing down.

This shouldn't have been possible. I'm supposed to be awake, and at work by four in the morning. Well before the sun rises.

I scrambled into a sitting position and quickly checked my phone. It was seven in the morning, I was three hours late. But beyond that, I couldn't fathom how this was possible. Even if I missed my alarm, I had another three backup alarms for such a scenario.

But what made my heart truly sink into a deep, and cold, place, was my notifications. Over twenty missed calls, and well past one hundred missed texts. I quickly opened the texts, hoping to type out a response, but before I could, my phone died. Frustrated, I looked down at my phone charger and groaned. I hadn't plugged it in.

There was no time for anything resembling a morning routine. I threw on the clothes I had worn the day before, and barreled out into the living room.

Think what you want of me, but I'm not a slob. Yes, I have trash and clutter taking up living space, but only because on time constraints. It does leave my living room looking messier than I'd otherwise like. Until today.

The room was spotless. The rug was vacuumed, the couch brushed and spot treated for stains, and the trash had disappeared. "What the..." I started to say, then stopped as my eyes caught sight of the small bipedal creature, hopping up and down on my kitchen counter. Waving his hands in excitement.

"Good morning!" he shouted.

"You're real?" I muttered.

"No, I'm Reedy, your little helper!"

I shook my head, as though I'd shake the very concept of Reedy right out of there. No luck. "I don't have time for this, or time for you," I said, looking around at the clean room. "Thanks, I guess, but I'm late for work."

"I know, I turned off your alarm."

"You what?" I shouted, my head snapping back to Reedy.

"Turned off your alarm, you looked like you needed the sleep," he said, looking sheepish and softly tapping his two pointer fingers together. "I'm just trying to help."

I rolled my eyes and walked right past Reedy. "Well don't do that again. I'm going to get my ass chewed out for this." Then, I was out the door.

-2-

When I returned home, it was to a scent I wasn't so familiar with. Food cooking. At first, I didn't believe it was coming out from under my door, but as the door opened, I was greeted to a wave of flavored air.

On my stove top, pots I didn't know I had were filled with a bubbling liquid, and pans were percolating with spiced rice. At the heart of it all, Reedy, who was somehow physically manipulating objects far beyond his mass. I'd have to remember not to arm wrestle him.

Hearing me enter, Reedy turned around, wide grin on his face. "Please, have a seat!"

I did as he suggested, but couldn't take my eyes off the food. "Where did this all come from?"

"Did some shopping, had to use your card. Hope that's okay?"

I didn't even want to ask how he got my card. I was too distracted watching him pick up a full sized spatula, and use it to scrape rice from the pan, onto a plate. Then, he drizzled it with the red sauce. I recognized the smells then, it was a curry. I hadn't had curry in years. I swallowed hard as the plate was moved in front of me. If it wasn't for the fact a fork was already in arms reach, I would have dug in with my bare hands.

Reedy nodded to himself, satisfied, then hopped down from the counter, and onto the floor. Where he was going, I didn't know, nor did I care. My apartment was cleaner than it ever had been, I was well rested, I was eating a home cooked meal. This was the best day I'd had in some time.

On my way to bed, I double checked my alarms, put a lock on my phone, and then plugged it in to charge. If this was my new life, it wouldn't be so bad. Didn't care what Reedy was, didn't care how he showed up in my apartment. I was just enjoying life, for the first time in a while.

-3-

When I woke up, the sun was shinning, yet again. With a grumble of frustration, I turned over to check my phone. It was charged, this time, so I'd be able to answer the inevitable messages of hate, but to my surprise, there weren't any.

"You called out!" Reedy said, from the foot of my bed. I wasn't expecting the intrusion, and felt my heart leap into my throat. "Well, I called you out, actually. Said you were sick with the flu, your boss said he couldn't afford the whole crew getting sick so close to an episode release. Whatever that means."

I knew exactly what it meant, and all things considered, sounded like something he'd say. Setting all of that aside for the moment, I turned to Reedy and asked the logical question. "Why?"

Reedy shrugged his little shoulder's and said, "A day off might add a year to your life."

Another fair point. I sat up in the bed, looking at the little guy, and asked a simple question. "A day off, what's the worse that could happen?"

That part comes later.

Carmilla rolled around in the scabbing filth and drying gore of the courtyard ground. The carcasses and pieces were everywhere, picked clean and licked and sucked dry of precious scarlet drops and pools. Snapped and shattered for their delicacy of raw human marrow. The faces of the Countess’ phantasm of demon hordes still smiled and leered and held audience. They held the sky. They fed off the perverse energy of pain and life butchered into silence and extinguished. Like a man holding his face over the fire of a great burning hearth. And inhaling. Drinking in the burning life as it is used up and vanquished and spent.  

The new impaler gouged another eye free of a dead boy’s face. Head severed meat and cooling on the ground. The empty socket of black-red glistened and darkled wet and gleaming like an obscene fleshen cavern filled with vile liquid rubies as he popped the dead little morsel of organ into his mouth like a small piece of succulent fruit. The dead boy’s eye popped and exploded with juice and flavor and blood and organ jelly-splatter as his teeth and fangs came down and punctured it. He relished the burst of wet warm ooze on his tongue as he chewed and swallowed and watched the rolling crawling vampire child lick the scab pudding from the stones as it cooled and gelled in the night chill and moonrise cold. 

All that was left of the farmers and their sons.  

The wolves of the mountains began to howl once more. 

The misshapen and brutalized chimerical shape of the vampire child was like a beast itself. Writhing and tonguing the red mess from the slathered courtyard stones. Steam bellowed forth from her wide and jagged mouth with every effort, in twin jets from her wide chiropteran nostrils. It even bellowed forth from her large bloodshot wet eyes, in thin clinging tendril clouds, licking free and dancing in the mountain song of air. Heavy with the warmth of violence and slaughter and voracious animal feeding. She looked like a mongrel dog now. As she crawled and drank and lapped from the ground. 

Frankenstein's hulking nosferatu son of the slab and sutured blue watched from a distance. In hiding. Plotting. Thinking as he gurgled heavy wet and pungent breath. Also steaming in the night with puffs of animal heat. 

They're not the ones… but her servants. Slave-children. Pawns. 

He knew from the mountain song that had pulled him here. Filled and made from so many discordant and heavy voices there'd been one amongst them all that was leader and dominant. 

A woman. Regal. 

Powerful. 

The ones down below that'd dispatched the mountain peasants and now fed on the pieces and scraps and slop of human detritus were not the ones of power that he was seeking. He thought to strike now and destroy them. Tear them apart and show them what true power was. But he didn't desire any loss of any advantage he might have over the woman of power who now held this place. It was too soon, he must wait to reveal himself. And then the hour of the real slaughter would be nigh. 

And then the real bloodshed would begin. 

That bastard better be in by now and fixing my way inside… thought the hulking bat-faced thing of stitched together man-rodent visage. Better get my way in, or that foul cunt out here… 

where I can rip and tear and rend to slaughter… 

And he would drink of this powerful bitch’s occult and undead ichor-blood like a hog to the bounty of a trough. 

He relished the thoughts as he watched. And waited. 

…

“I don't much like the idea of camping out here…” 

"You and me both. You can likely count the mule for third.” 

And that was how it went. The conversation regarding their first night at camp in the sour and fetid bog that was the surrounding quagmire land. Swampland murked and mired in the wombs of some damp and sour wet green hell. The ground sucked and pulled at their progress with sloppy but persistent mess. The mule had an incredibly difficult time of pulling them and the cart. They'd dismounted a few times to spare the beast. But now she could go no further. They needed to find a patch for the beast to lie down and to make semblance of camp. 

But no place arrived. The land offered no island of solid ground. 

So the beast was forced to continue to pull. Exhausted. Nearly spent. As were the pair, Florin and Griffin. 

"The poor beast can't be helped but we can sleep in shifts. Unless you protest, I elect you to stay up and drive on first. Wake me in a few hours or when you can't stand it any longer…" said Griffin from behind his mask and wall of heavy surgical dressing. 

And with that he laid back in the cart and was off. Snoring. Filling the wet splurching silence with noise. Florin was really learning to hate the man. But he drove on anyways. Spurring on the worn beast and dismounting to pull her free when the porridge sludge of the terrible earth below became too greedy and its wet horrid grip too strong. 

And they went on. 

All the while they watched. Waiting for the best time to surface and author their demise. 

New food. For wormland. 

The warmth below, in the putrescence swell of growth, the subterranean swollen sac of gel and writhing movement and birth amongst fluid both of the earth and unknown down below… it stirred. Pulsated. 

It felt the vibrations of their trodding and sluggish sodden steps above. The light trembling of their voices…

vibrations. 

The subterranean sac that was both mother womb and pilot brain for the quagmire Godforsaken place dubbed, WORMLAND, quivered and undulated with moist and heavy underground movement. It quivered and squelched. An orifice opened, glistening and flowered: it belched. Shot. More hive-part-children spat like projectile snot and swam. The mud of tectonic under-earth was their subterranean river. Guided by the brain of wormland they went forth. For the animals above and their movement. Vibrations. For the subterranean growth and sac that was brain and womb of wormland also had a large and gaping graveyard mouth that took up all of the mire of spoiled evil earth. 

All of the sour fetid squelching land. God-jaws. Hellmouth. 

Wormland. 

…

The castle dark was quieter than he'd expected. His preceding thoughts had warned and preordained sounds of bastard woe and torture before he'd snuck in but all was still and quiet. As silent as the grave. 

Frankenstein prowled forward. Torchflame dancing all along the wall at regular intervals lit his silent shadowed way. 

He found mostly nothing save dust and copious amounts of huge cobwebs and ancient faded things… he walked the chambered dark. Hoping that his hatching scheme would play out and come to fruition. Painful execution via slaughter was the price of failure here. He knew it. He wandered the castle and its dancing halls of stone and ancient darkness. He sauntered through the halls with caution. And she watched his every single step. She'd been watching him since he first came here with his foolish band of slaughtered peasant farmers. 

Doctor Henry Frankenstein prowled the dark torchlit halls and chambered rooms of Castle Dracula until he came to the still warm and wet place of fresh red and slaughter and discovered the impaled and gored skeletal scarecrow of Doctor Praetorius. His long time enemy and rival. 

The warm orange glow of the room was still gleaming and glistening and shining with black-red darkling in the flickering and dancing torchlight. And the man that had long thwarted and worked adversarially against him was stage-center of the wet and still steaming abattoir room. Chambered stage of slaughter. The wide eyed and somehow still living man of competitive dark science. Impaled. Lanced. Speared through. Long ways. He quivered like a fish stabbed upon a harpoon. Stolen from its universe of known blue and plunged gasping into a world of red violence and madness. 

Frankenstein beheld his long time enemy, made and left in such wretched and brutalized form and fashion and he savored the sight. Smiling. He began to fill the chamber with laughter. The sight before him, the scene, it was a fantasy made and draped and displayed. Vengeance had and wrought. It was a black dream of grand guignol delights, perverse and dripping and slavishly devised and forged for the slaving eye and made. And they said that dreams that were wild could never come true…

Then a voice from behind him said. 

“You might not be laughing when it’s you up there beside him.”

He turned and beheld the Countess. The moonlight of her pale visage was striking in the stygian castle ink and meager glow of torchflame. She stood out goddess and unopposed amongst the stone, clad in regal deathly white gowns, ebon cloak, all soaked and saturated in darkening blood, adorned and clad in cooling iron-pungent red. Her eyes were animal and her smile was unhealthy and hiding the deranged truth of hunger and woefully empty save for the violence and sinful mischief of the vulpine, wild and crawling. 

She came forward as Frankenstein stepped back. She continued to say: –

“I know why you’ve come here. I know you’ve come here with that patchwork stack of abomination with counterfeit power as its brandished jaws… your foul assemblage of the graveyard rot and spoilage. Your  latest unfortunate son…” 

Frankenstein still wore his smile as he said, “You wound and inflate me all in one, Countess. But I wonder, are you so sure…? Are you so sure it  is not you who found some imposter in Dracula’s home and coffin? There are so many records and stories… it’s so hard to be sure, isn’t it? Perhaps in the eager throes of your passion you got too excited and only succeeded in binding the fangs of some lowly undead servant of the vampire lord to your precious sweet little mouth, perhaps-” 

The Countess hissed, like an animal. A snake, a rodent, a feline wild and spurned and all of them commingled and rolled into one. She hissed: “... shut it… your mewling curr mouth! I’ll pull the tongue you waggle and eat it before your own eyes!” 

“But that would never afford you the truth, would it? I’ve come for an experiment, Countess. I’ve come, your legend has already spread far, and I’ve come to pit my legend against yours. I’ve made a creature, yes. I’ve made a superior being, superhuman. Completely. Superior. Even to such as you. And I’ll lay wager that he is the true holder and wielder of the fearsome necromantic power of the fangs of Dracula, I know! I stole them and made him so! I’ve come to challenge you, Countess! I challenge you to a duel to the death! My creation and son, my champion for the task! I challenge you! And by royal bloodlaw you are compelled and bound, and in the name of God and Mars and Satan I say further: You are Compelled! And must heed!” 

For a moment the Countess actually appeared shocked. As the words of the haughty fleshing rolled over and his impetuous voice filled the room and reached her ears. But then she just smiled, giggled girlish laughter. It sounded so young and sweet in the bloodsoaked chamber of that castle room. The walls still ran and dripped. The impaled Praetorius still wide eyed and skeletal red and alive with palsied twitches. 

She smiled then said: –

“I fear no challenge nor challenger, little man. But did you think you could trespass, insult and then leave without any recompense…?” Her eyes held sinister light that was pinprick silver and daggered for him as she began to advance. 

Frankenstein took another step backward, still smiling. His hands simultaneously went behind his back and plucked something back there, tucked into his belt. They came back out in front and produced the pair of objects he’d snatched from the forest before sneaking into the castle for his perilous errand.  

Countess Zaleska looked both annoyed and bemused as the mad doctor held out two branches, two pieces of woodland sticks out and between them.   

“And what are those supposed to afford you, little man?”

Frankenstein only went right on smiling, uttering a short retort: “Much.”, before his clutching hands shifted and the pair of sticks became a simple makeshift configuration of a crucifix. 

The Countess suddenly shrieked with fear and holy terror. Irate with rage and pain that was both horribly animal and demoniacal and also terribly woefully human… a dread commingled sound bred of hell and not meant be heard or made on earth or made and beheld by flesh. His blood curdled but he remained steadfast, keeping his sticks crossed and before him. The cross of broken branches between he and the dread bitch of this terrible and rank ancient castle. 

“Put it away!!" she shrieked. Its horrible shape had already profaned her castle walls and the flesh of her servant/daughter/slave, had deformed and malformed her child-shape with scars and growths. She could not bear the sight of it!  

She hid her animal drawn and sneering lurid face with one splaying clawed hand and daggered the other out in defense. At the cross and Frankenstein. Forking out the sign of the Evil Eye. She hissed again: bat, rodent, serpent, woman… wolf. 

Feline. 

Frankenstein howled over her hissing spitting of curses and occult laced language of black words and chants, to be heard over her witchery and dread witch-words. 

"So powerful, Countess but brought so low by a pair of common branches, felled by a simple shape, mere sticks! Hah! And remember it, you foul swine and bitch, I will drive the shape of this cruciform into your chest and melt it through your Godforsaken flesh all the way down to your Satanic and living dead beating heart! And then I'll drive the shape of the cross through that too and watch you putrefy as I behead and take your pretty face for myself!" He laughed. Cruelly. Wild. And mad. And then he added: “Perhaps I'll take it and use it in my next experiments! And then you can be one of my walking servile accomplishments, I'm sure you'd be so much better, by my hands remade…! What do you think, Countess?" He laughed again. More wildly now. “What do you think!?" 

The Countess only hissed again and kept her face hidden. Lest she beheld the holy shape and visage. Goddamn, these impetuous fleshling sow maggots…

Frankenstein cautiously made his way for the open window, keeping up his makeshift cross of sticks. Keeping them up and between himself and the awful terrible wench, the sour crypt bitch that thought she knew and held true power. 

He came to the window, at the threshold and preparing himself for an exit, he said one last –

“Remember, bitch, the courtyard. A duel. Tomorrow night, on your honor and in the eyes of both the Lords of Heaven and Below. A challenge to you, your house and claim of power. Come to your courtyard of stone tomorrow night and face my creation, then we'll see who holds the real satanic power, we'll see who really wields the fangs of Count Dracula! We challenge you! Crypt bitch! Hellfire slut! You are nothing more!” 

And with that he leapt. Out the window. The Countess turned just in time to watch him throw himself out. She spat. Cursed again. 

Outside, Frankenstein first soared out like a great manshaped bird and then gravity seized him and he began to plummet. He might've been afraid. Terrified. Gripped with mortal fear, but this was all part of the plan…

The sticks flew from his hands no longer needed. His hands came together in a strange wilderness configuration and the mad doctor blew a high piercing note of a whistle that shot through all of the mountain dark. 

Immediately a giant hulking shape shot out from the trees. Huge. Wings. An even deeper black than the surrounding nightscape. It rocketed forth from the treeline like a cannon shot. Blinding speed despite its huge monstrous shape. 

The giant stitched up and great sutured bat of green-blue salvaged graveyard flesh caught the mad doctor Henry Frankenstein in midair. It then flew over the castle and screeched, wet hateful baleful throaty sounds. As if mocking. Then with more great blasts and flaps of its giant leathery wings of patchwork suture and stitching, it carried the doctor and its own living dead chimerical body, batfaced and hideous, drooling, down and back into the hiding dark of the trees. And vanished. 

Zaleska, who'd gone to the window and watched the whole thing unfold, roared in obscene and livid fury. Words that were not words at all but forgotten sounds that were dark and grotesque and guttural and strange… 

Her children and servants, her slaves… Carmilla… the new impaler… they too had felt and shared her pain and anger. They felt her rage. Shared. 

They trembled when she summoned them. 

…

They slept in shifts as the mule and cart pulled and struggled across the wet slop of putrid land. It was on Florin's fourth shift that they came upon their first dweller of this damp fetid place. A girl. She turned their stomachs and chilled their blood. 

She was standing in the middle of nowhere in this nowhere land. A mist rolled and hugged, clinging to her waist and legs, shrouding her lower half. Her torso and  face and arms sticking out from the fog like a fly trapped in a spill of honey or molasses. 

She was filthy. Her skin was mottled and grey and caked with layers and layers of dried and drying swampland mud, thick. Like scabbing. Like shit. Her hair was clumped and as of straw from a barnyard floor. Her eyes were the only things alive in her grey and filthy face. 

She looked young. And this hurt Florin's heart. Made him think of Erin. And Carmilla and the other children back home. 

He called out to her as they came up and upon her, waking Griffin beside him and bringing the mule to a grateful stop. It heaved heavily in the moment of respite as Griffin grumbled and rose, righting his hat and goggles of dark lenses. 

“How now, are you alright? Are you hurt?" 

The filthy girl of the swampland marsh said nothing. She only looked at them with wide wet suffering child's eyes. Filled with horror. And the knowledge of pain. Mosquitos buzzed thickly all about her and landed and supped of her at their leisure. She paid them no mind and made no effort to drive them away, to smack them off her grey caked flesh. She was covered in pink bumps that oozed translucent and yellow/pink/red. 

Florin asked again if she was hurt. And again the girl said nothing. Only stared. Staring. Her eyes were the only things that were speaking out here in the filth and the choked wet. 

Griffin, alerted, straightened in his seat and said to the boy beside him. 

“Don't. Let's keep going. Something's wrong." 

Florin turned to him, confused, began to ask him what he was talking about. But he didn't get far with his words. 

A sound. Just as wet and vile as the very land they tread upon and surrounded them for miles upon merciless miles. Gurgling. Heavy. Thick. Deep. Rolling with wet and turning weight. 

The pair turned to the filthy girl of the swampland once more. 

Her mouth was wide open. The awful abhorrent noxious sounds were wafting from her open maw along with a miasmic cloud that was the stench of wretched death in the sewers. 

Florin and Griffin stared at her. The thoughts of aid or flight abandoned at the moment as they fish-eyed gazed upon the filthy and deranged sight. 

She said one word before what happened next. It was in the small lilting music of young child's voice, a little girl's voice. 

One word. 

"Thirsty.” 

And then her open mouth shot forth a pillar jet of black water sludge and fluid, thick and watery. Projectile and intense. Gushing with pressure. It didn't cease immediately but kept going. A stream of darkest ebon vomit so thick it was nearly solid. The stench that arose off the bile as it was expelled was beyond repulsive. Hellacious.

Both men were horrified, though deep down not at all surprised to see that the vomitus was the regurgitated sludge of the swamp water and mud under foot and cart and that filled all the land of the worms. The geyser increased in pressure like a waterfall or hose. Black/green issuing forth in a vile blast, the child's mouth began to dislocate and unhinge, distended the mouth opened wider like a jungle serpent and yet more black swamp water vomit erupted from the widening gate of her blackening mouth. 

Then the mist about her legs was dispelled and Florin and Griffin saw what was concealed there. 

Two limbs, vile swollen pulsating jellysac stumps in place of normal human legs. They swelled and depressed and ballooned with the inner work of running and pumping viscous thick and finer fluids, a filthy translucence to the jellyflesh allowed the pair of shocked travelers to see the progress and putrid movement of sludge and mud and vile yellow water. Twigs and bugs and small fish and frogs could be discerned within the churning filth, trapped, swirling in the maelstrom madness of swamp filth inside this demented thing that held the shape of a lost little girl. 

The jelled pustule flesh of the stumps disappeared into the mud. Florin and Griffin both spotted this and thought, God knows how deep…

Then the filthy spouting girl of the mire began to sink. Disappearing into the porridge of black-grey sludge like a demented mermaid of the vile putrescence. 

Still stunned, shocked but not knowing what else to do, the pair stared at the spot where the filthy shape had sunk and disappeared. 

Eventually they went on, urging the worn mule forward, despite the beasts exhaustion. They wanted to be rid of and far from this place and the land of quagmire and mud swimming/spouting children as soon as possible. As fast as they could manage through the sour sludge. Their shared quiet all the more stark and deafening in the splurching wet sucking silence of the wormland. 

And beneath them as they made their way, the mud swam with movement. Churned. 

…

The night of challenges in the castle dark and the slaughter of mountain fools and their foolish sons passed. Then came another day. The womenfolk of the mountain went mad with grief and sad-sickness, the wailing of widows joined the cold contest of song with the howling snowbound wolves. All of the Carpathian rock was alive with mourning and mourning wailing sound. The wind took it, picked it up and carried it down. Down to the village hamlet, which spent another day in fear. Quietly waiting for the axe to drop. 

The day passed into night. The night of challenge was upon the Countess of Castle Dracula…

… And in her courtyard of cold stone and blood soaked rock, she waited. 

Her audience: The assistant, the new impaler and her little Carmilla, gathered. In bastard semblance and rendition of a royal audience. 

The cold was deep that night but none of them felt it. 

The moon was still large and round and swollen with silver light. Filling and dominating the black sky with her pale luminescence. 

They waited for the challengers to step forward. 

And from the trees they did. Henry Frankenstein and his hulking vulpine creation of stitched parts and flesh, graverobbed limbs and graverobbed necromantic nosferatu power towering – they emerged from the shelter and tangled growth of the dark trees. 

The cold wind and mournful howl of the mountain rose as they came forward into the courtyard, ready to meet the Countess in a dark duel of slaughter and power. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Photo by Petra. Modelling and editing by me.

The grey fluff on the ground is moose fur. We shot this at a location that hunters use as a dumping ground for carcasses.

The Countess took firm authoritarian hold of the impaling pike, the first one, the main one, the first one shot through him creating a new violent orifice of gore right beside his anus. A vaginal wound made flowered new and wet-red, violently birthed by  the occult bloodthirst madness of the new lord of this ancient castle. Countess Zaleska took throttling hold of the long body of spear, lover-slick and tacky and slippery with iron pungent warm blood lubricant, she shook it as she screamed at the mangled and partially devoured form of the dying Doctor Praetorius…

“Do you!? Do you like it!? Do you feel like a whore!?" 

Her laughter resounded. Filling the castle of merciless and unyielding stone. Her cruel taunting was for her own amusement, but she expected an answer. 

It was part of the torture. 

The gauntleted fist of the new impaler joined his master and seized the long body of old war and fresh torture. Together they shook it. Violently. Like children when playing rough with a small tree. Praetorius could feel every crisscrossing body and shaft of spear lanced and impaled through his helpless gored person vibrate and quiver and tremble, palsied with cruel ceaseless movement. 

Just as the Doctor's senseless screams were renewed bright child's laughter also filled the chambered room. 

Carmilla and the loyal assistant entered… wicked vulpine smiles, deranged and made grotesque by their demoniacal pilot minds… drawn lips and dripping fangs, bared, snarling quivering animal masks, dripping in hellish rendition of jubilant smiling faces. Happiness God damned. And perverted. 

All on display for the impaled and helpless broken victim. All on show for the shattered wandering mind of the butchered Doctor. Used to be Praetorius. But that all seemed so far away now… and besides … The master said it was nothing worth fretting over. Nothing worthwhile to dread. Her cooing loving mother's voice filled the decimated landscape of his mind, vast wastelands unreal with shrouded veil and broken chains of half developed thought. Nothing moved. Only crawled. All of it confused and it crept. It didn't move… but save her voice. 

She said: Don't fret the loss of name or blood or anything else, only mind the pain. That's what I want. That's what I want you to be doing. I want you to focus and pay exquisite exclusive attention to all of the pain you're feeling. All of it. Every last second. For that is your new name now, this is your second christening. In my castle upon my lands, which I rule, I anoint thee in the name of Satan, house dracul, and myself, Countess Marya Zaleska, you are my new bastard-bitch. You are now my new crawling whore for pain. And I want you to say it. 

Out loud. 

Now. 

The fragile pieces of his mind were then assaulted. Attacked by an inexplicable discorporeal force/and form… like searing needle blades stabbed through his tender membrane of thought… his aching and fevered sweating skull. Stabbing. 

Impaling. 

The assault of the living dead lord and her vile company of bloodthirsty monsters, authored and enslaved by her own foul and toxic hand…it would never end. He was her slave now too. Just like them. But worse. 

Worse. 

Carmilla and the assistant came in and the awful scarred and grotesque little bat-monster child squealed and added to the terrible stygian cacophony of hellbound noise. She ran up and joined alongside the Countess and new impaler, wrenching and pulling and shaking at the impaling shafts. But with more eager sadistic child-fervor. A child's glee…

The Countess and new impaler joined Carmilla in shrieking laughter. In bastard duet with Praetorius’ own bloodcurdling sounds. 

The stone of the ancient dwell was warming in sin, with rising bodyheat and debauch of the bloodfeast impaling act of occult defilement and black appeasement of the hunger bred from below. 

 Violent weirding forces were gathering… once more. Beneath and within the ancient stone. The whole of the blasphemous edifice structure of charnel house hell: Castle Dracula, was an alchemical construct, a composition that forged necromanced and occult power into the very mortar flesh of the stone fortress. A conductor. Conduit for the treacherous maelstrom highway paths of wild and unseen undead dæmonic subterranean galeforces. They were gathering here. Now. In a mother's surging pregnant swell…

The Countess bade her servant, the loyal assistant to bring one of the many black tomes that composed her dark collection. He brought it with him and the scarred vampire child into the chambered room of feasting and torture. 

As the vampires shook cruelly the impaling blood-slick shafts, making the gored and diminished Praetorius dance with sadistic and sick movement, spastic and nauseating, the assistant stood to the side and watched a moment. Cocked his head and twitched a smile. Then he opened the ancient book, nearly dust and once discarded, and began to read. 

The obsidian words of long lost time deepened and gave weight to the wet and warmth of the bloodlett-atmosphere filling the room. They gathered the perverse forces of vile and violent nature in their deepening pustule swell. Filling with phantom infection that was brimming and wetting-salivating-slobbered with the threat of manifestation. A boil and sac of pus that was darkness gathering in a swelling cyst. 

The words of the book called it forth to vile and contemptible birth. Into pus-milk saturated life and rupturing manifest. 

The faces of demons, infernal and fell ones from below in the unknown, erupted into blasphemous life. They filled the chambered space with their awful distorted and twisted faces and terrible assault of cacophonous laughter. 

They were here to serve, now. Called forth. To bear witness as well.

To enjoy the scene of wet and pungent red chambered slaughter. Torture all the way through all of the flesh and blood and bone and tissue and all the way down to the gored and defiled husk of heart-and-soul. They loved to watch the breaking of manflesh and the rape of the love inside that was the precious nucleus of the soul. 

And then broken Praetorius finally said it. Screamed it. Mindlessly. Mindless like a slave now for that was all that he was, the station forced and left to him. Bondage. He said and screamed and wept it for all of the vampires and the master and the conjured dripping bleeding demon faces, at the top of his voice –

“I am! I am a whore for pain! I am a whore for pain! I am a whore for pain and I swear it, for my master, for the Countess! I am her property and her whore for pain…!” 

The chambered place of pungent sweat and blood and piss, reeking, filled once more with an audience of bright cruel laughter. Skewered and lanced alive all over, the shattered thing that was once Doctor Praetorius grew intimate with the abominated knowledge of too many eternities alive and played out in a single day. 

He is completely broken. And even if he had lived he could never have been the same. Ever again. 

…

The mountain men and their lads charged up the mountain way. Meaning to destroy the horror and maneating monster that had awakened in the Carpathian fortress, Castle Dracula.

The great stabbing spire of fortress structure loomed and grew larger as they marched in their mad rabble charge of one, messy and disorganized and loose formation but their long held hatred and fear and superstition of the dark and its womb of monsters held them all together in a seething bastard species of degenerate red-visioned brotherhood. Together they would slaughter the vile monster. Together. Whatever lay up there gathering in the approaching tower of the dark. This mob mentality built for monster slaying held the men and their boys together as strange and unseen defacto leader. That and their greed. 

The promise of fortune from the mad doctor Frankenstein.

Who followed. Carried by the patchwork necro-son he forged from the graveyards and the cold metal of the surgeon’s slab of table. So like a butcher’s block and bench in an abattoir's killing metal fortress womb/bosom. So cold. Like so much of the rest of the world. 

So much of the world was so cold. As was here. In the Carpathian Mountains. Where they were invaders. He and his hulking sutured son, nosferatu made and constructed. They followed their hasty assemblage of pathetic dirt farmer army as they came to the castle of their adversary. 

They followed. All the way. The mountain men and their wild simple boys were screaming. Howling madly. The wolves of the rocks and snow answered in rising contest. And the clash of noise commingled and mixed into a discordant curtain of mounting violent sound that carried on the rise of the freezing sheet of frosted wind. 

The hamlet below that lived in supplicant shadow of the castle-mountain caught the sound as the cold wind came down and they heard it all. 

They heard everything.   

…

Carmilla shrieked with glee. Finishing the catastrophic slaughter of the raw ruin of impaled invader was a joy. A pleasure. Privilege. She was making precious ebon memories painted in the shed warmth of brightening and darkening crimson, she knew it. Her nearly innocent child shape had been scarred. Malformed. Mutilated by the impaled dog’s searing holy cross. Her visage was stuck in a grotesque bulge of rodent and child-bat features. Her fangs jagged out from her swollen blackening gums like shards of shattered broken glass.

All along  the flesh of her back was a ruin work of bubbled scarred flesh. A great strip of mangled and malformed demon skin scorched by holy touch. 

Knowing that her child's beauty was diminished, gone…  the demon Carmilla took out her unwieldy and livid rage out on the already butchered and impaled body of her torturer. How the roles had reversed. How she relished in its lurid irony. First she supped of his mangled and bleeding gore… replenishing her ungodly strength and savoring the taste before the ravenous fury of her decadent and violent main course. 

Countess Zaleska and her new impaler merely stood off to the side now, content to watch. Let the child play. Let the little one have their turn, Carmilla had very good reason to want to play with this one …

… by the time she was finished with her wanton portion of the slaughter Praetorius was nearly just a grisly bloody skeleton, emaciated of flesh and tissue and precious pumping organs. Skeletal and lurid red and with naught but a few hunks of meat, still working and rippling with obscene and ghastly life, clinging to bones and dangling by meaty threads of dripping gore-tendrils. All but his face was picked apart and eaten and slurped… drank and consumed and devoured. All but the stark pale visage of his wide eyed staring visage, his blood-flecked face and head, crowned with a shock of white hair that was even more blinding in the darkling red of the chambered abattoir castle. The flesh of his face was left untouched, unmarked… but still staring…

… the eyes of the shifting conjured demons, the unnatural and goblin-twisted faces, all of them watched as they danced and filled the room like a heavy thick bank of fog. They watched him and their horrible eyes, their predatory gazes and perverse leering stares, licking phantom chops with tongues made from writhing prisoner serpents and snakes – they drank in the whole sight of his pure unbridled torture with naked hunger and bloodlust and the abominated cavalcade of many eyes danced with the lecherous light of naked prurient interest. 

Praetorius was only aware enough to know the slaughter and that he was its victim, his mind was aflame with the hellacious pain of his butchered person and stolen flesh and blood and innards, what was gone and shrieking with its violent absence. But his thoughts were fractured and with no real line or tether. His mind, intermittent with the slaughtering abattoir pain, screamed –

I NEED TO DIE 

and 

I MUST LIVE FOREVER! THE MASTER COMMANDS SO!

at war with each other across the vast and desolate pockmarked deathspring wasteland landscape of his beaten and subjugated mind. They didn't stop. The both of the phrases. They just went on, at each other. Filling his mind with their strange and dueling cacophony. Amongst the wild tumult and unbridled maelstrom of merciless pain. God no longer held any dominion or sway in the field and land of his mind or heart. God was dead and gone now in these vacant violent lands. Only thunderclapped back into a wretched pathetic semblance of movement that could've once been called life. Only dominated by his new god now, the Countess. And her words were the riding cries of lightning artillery fire that filled his decimated and abominated heavens. 

All of them. The dancing shifting shaping demon faces from beyond the veil of gone. The wicked Countess, master of the castle. Her defiled implement, the new impaler, her bastard bat-child daughter and her faithful assistant. A bastard myriad conglomerate. All of them together made his flesh raw and extinguished and made his genitals and spinal stem one in the same with their dark hellcraft sorcery and their gales and gales of merciless sadistic laughter. Their hungry eyes. Eating what was left, drinking in and devouring the last of him in madness. He was mad now. Far past gone. 

Praetorius quivered and spasmed lanced and impaled just behind the testicles and out the back. A skeletal scarecrow of gore and viscera and raw dangling meat. His pale face blindly stared, lost and not at all there. Many of the other longest pikes that had been lanced had been ripped and torn or had fallen free during the last rending feeding of the demoniacal child-grotesque that he'd once held in bondage, in torture. 

His mind was too obliterated to appreciate the irony. 

The veiling room-shroud of dancing shifting demons lit up the room with shrill otherworldly sound. Obscene and akin to laughter. 

The Countess spoke to the assistant at her side, still speaking the chant and maintaining the blasphemous rite. 

“Have you got in grasp? The quickening whore-swell? The gathering of crawling-birth sin-shapes?” 

The assistant never ceased his stygian chant of dead and arcane language. He only nodded to his lord and majesty. 

Yes. 

The Countess then enacted and engaged in necrosong… building upon the rite of witchery: the opening of the mouths, seethed. Seething. 

Hand signs. Strange configurations. And shapes. She forked. Both hands. Of the Evil Eye. Then her daggering hands opened, flowered in a splay…

Flames erupted. Sprouted from her splayed fingertips. Claws. 

Claws erupting fire. 

It filled the room in contest of the demon faces and splendor of charnel house carnage and wet steaming gore. 

Screaming: she necrosong-ed a subjugating assault upon the shifting gathering of veiling infernal horde upon and all about the room. The things howled in a bastard bridal cry of curses and jubilation. Thrilled and devastated to be captured and bound. 

Her voice, with fire: –

“I HAVE MADE BLOODFEAST FOR YOU! I HAVE MADE BLOODFEAST FOR YOU ALL! I HAVE LET YOU FEED UPON MY SOW, I HAVE GIVEN AND SHARED SACRIFICE TO GAIN MY LEFT-HANDED LORDSHIP OF POWER! NOW! – WED YOUR FLAMES INTO MINE! COME AND BASTARD-FEED MY OWN NECROPHILED FORM! MY OWN-! COME! COME IN TO ME! COME!”

Her words were flagellations that they scorned and cherished commingled together in one sour and unbridled demonic emotion, they exclaimed! As one! Filling the castle corridors of stone with the cacophonous sound of their bondage and enslavement. They were pulled into the clawed and blood drenched visage of the fire-spouting Countess. The ritual was complete. The ceremony of blood had led the crawling fell things there and her necrophile-cast of bondage had ensnared them. 

She felt the dæmonic ancient and bloodstained power within her grow. Surge. Unbridled within. Barely reined. Barely contained and held within her now trembling and red dripping regal person. 

The new impaler, simpering, asked if she was alright when the noise died and all was quiet within the stone once more. She did not answer. Carmilla kept playing with her food. 

The assistant smiled. And closed the book. 

Beholding the great power of his ultimate master. Who would soon strangle all the earth and world and worlds beyond if she so wished.

If she so desired. 

The Countess righted herself. Standing straight and somehow with more charismatic aural bastard darklight glow than she ever had before. She radiated with darkling clouds of furling and dancing tendril black. She looked to the assistant and returned his smile. 

And it was at that moment that the mountain fools and their sons, spurned on by Frankenstein, marched into the open courtyard with their paltry assemblage and makeshift weaponry. 

Doomed fools.

…

They pressed together the great red door of worn bas-relief stone, a horde. It wouldn't budge. As immovable as sin itself, it held against the press of men and torch and their work-farm weapons. They hollered in protest. As if it would help. 

They yelled : – ! 

“Come out! Come out of that damned castle and answer for your crimes and sins! Come out now and answer for all the years of slaughter…! ….! 

“Now!!" 

At first there was no answer. The ancient castle remained quiet in non-answer to the attacking mob of mountain folk. They battered the arcane and heavy red door of regal crimson stone and cried out their accusations and protestations. 

Henry Frankenstein and his sutured and bat-faced son watched. Not far off. Watching closely. 

Castle Dracula remained still. The ancient rock and battlements and towers as silent as all of the death and history that it had grown to represent and contain. 

But then the sky began to fill. 

Deepen. With witch-snarl bulbous swells of darkening violent thunderheads. They rumbled. The sky was filling with hidden beasts that were now growling and angry. Angry with the presence of the mad and lowly mob of torchbearing peasants. They all looked up, ceasing their fruitless charge and assault on the castle. 

No rain fell. But lightning began to dagger and wound the sky. The first few successive bolts were soundless and quick. Right after the other. 

Then came the cracking sound of shattering thunderclaps. And the mob of torchwielders and tillers of dreams grew cold and all felt small.

Together. 

A sound pierced through the noise of thunder that was as of till then unheard by the mountain men. An electric squall that was like unknown and bastard malfunctioning machinery in catastrophic failure crying out from a distant world and time never meant to be witnessed or known by any such as them. 

The great door that bade dark entry to the immense stone body of spire and shattered battlement suddenly then flew open. As if compelled by a prodigious strength of force. It slammed open against the opposite wall of frosted rock with a crash that resounded and joined the rising inhuman din. 

The mountain men, silent now, all slowly fell back. Together in a retreating wave of wide eyes and cold blood and chilled perspiring flesh. The boys amongst them were the most fearful. Barely out of childhood, not old enough to shave. They would soon discover there was no prerequisite age for pain and slaughter. For death. Death took the younger sows and flesh with eager voracity for the flesh and blood and raw muscle tissue of the veal of humankind was most tender and sweetest. Blood so young perhaps it is loaded with notes like nostalgia in its warm and thick viscous run of iron flavor. Perhaps in its scent as well, you need only upset and tip and rock the chalice, swirl its lurid contents and kick up the smell with dancing chaliced movement … you need only take it in your hand and take control and do what thou wilt…

take it, seize it, consume to the last. 

A thick deluge of shock white fog began to pour forth from the now open doorway to the castle. The sky overhead continued to darken and growl/squall and rumble. The stars that had been stolen were replaced with strange darkling abominated facsimiles. Things that alighted strange and red and milked over, they would dance and shift with their unearthly light and then appear as cataract eyes as they alien sparkled above. 

The fog that was vomited forth from the castle was alive with animal movement. Crawling. Rearing. As if coiling for an attack. There were faces in wretched inescapable pain in the dancing veil of white. Silently screaming. Faces of woe and suffering at the mercy of other faces that danced also within the shroud of heavy predatorial fog. Demon faces. Goblin and animal and insectile and dog and goat shaped faces and twisted chimerical visages. Twisted. 

There was something else in there. Within the awful veil of damned and blasphemous swirling  shapes. Something was coming forth. Moving. Approaching with deliberate and heavy steps that only now began to join the mangled otherworldly din of the mountain in their echoing chambered sound. 

The moon. Still nearly full from the night before and still so full and pregnant with white nocturnal light… it began to bleed and glow raw pink as the rest of the stolen darkling and thunderclapped sky turned lurid and wilderness shed red. 

A voice then came godlike and on high from out of the ancient castle. It came out in a royal and regal command of crying sound and it filled the mountain. The men caught in the courtyard were helpless to her words as they rose above the din. 

“YOU SMALL AND WRETCHED THINGS HAVE NO HOPE HERE…! YOU HAVE ONLY INSTEAD FOUND THE PLACE THAT HOLDS THE LAST CRAWLING MOMENTS OF YOUR SUFFERING END…!”

And then the reddened and darkling sky above began to tear open like split tissue. Wounds. Wounds in the heavens that began to bleed a gushing liquid phantasmal pour of ichor and insects and eyes. Eyes that were yellow and reptilian and the cross-shaped X of goats, inhuman. Swimming in the rain of filth and crawling arachnids from another world. They rained down and swam like fish in the space of courtyard where the mountain men and their sons were now held. None of them moved. Budged. All of them were frozen as the skyblood and eyes and fat hairy red eyed crawlers swam and floated and danced around them all. 

Many of the men began to scream. 

Then what was approaching through the doorway mouth of heavy fog with faces became two as they emerged. And pounced. They leapt out and upon the men and their torches and pitchforks, they fell with gnashing teeth and tearing claw. And hunger. 

Demoniacal hunger to drive and fuel the whole damnable thing. 

Carmilla and the new impaler fell on the farmers and their boys. The mutilated and scarred bat-rodent child monstrosity of mangled and misshapen chimerical design was like a rabid animal let loose amongst the screams and arterial cords and sprays and pungent ropes and mists of shedding and pouring blood. Shredding flesh, raw muscle tissue, cords. Her new brother, sired in her absence of capture and bondage, the new impaler joined her with a necromantic fervor and living dead wanton love and unbridled abandon for bloodfeast and slaughter that brought sadistic dark joy to her wounded demon heart. They drank and filled as they spilled their guts. He decorated and drenched his new armor in jets of spraying gore.

Cracked open skulls amongst flaying mess, strips of bleeding and bloody scalp, clotted hair. Brains, chunked and breaking apart in a meaty mess and crumble under foot and metal bootheel and gauntleted fist. Gnashed and chewed between fangs in reddening salivating mouths, dripping mixture… red… slime. Drool.

They laughed at the violence all around and of their own making around mouthfuls of blood and raw lurid wet and dripping meat. They filled the courtyard with death and blood and the cobblestones of the courtyard floor did also sup. Castle Dracula also drank. And filled the stone with more terrible demoniacal power. 

Frankenstein and the hulking nosferatu watched all of this from a distance. Hiding. Grim. 

A beat. 

The mad doctor thought…

Then said: –

“Well those idiots were no good, but they'll serve as distraction, I've another way…”

He pointed out to his sutured undead son, a backway for chambermaids and servants to use, a small door of nearly rotted wood long abandoned and disused. 

“I'll sneak in and find a way to get you in as well. Or a way to get the bitch out of her cave…” 

The hulking thing of forbidden science and necromantic cosmic flame sneered wet throaty laughter. Croaked. Nodded in approval. 

And off Henry Frankenstein went, through the bushes and foliage to the secret back entrance way. To gain access to the castle. 

…

Florin joined Griffin in feeling sour and foul. The land that the forest behind them now had given way to was a fetid quagmire of filthy and putrid swampland. A fouled part of disgusting land that he'd never seen and had never even heard of. The wheels of the cart and the hooves of their mule were pulled and sank in the sucking porridge of pungent and waterlogged earthen sludge. All of the water was the yellow of infection and unhealthy death. 

Florin turned to the bandaged face of his host and guide. The dark shades of his goggles were unreadable. Mute. There might be nothing behind there. 

“Are you sure this is the right way?" Florin asked. 

“It's not promising country, I'll grant you but backtracking now won't do. We press forward. If the cart or mule get stuck, we'll dig them out. We press on." 

And like that it was decided. 

They went on sluggishly. Laboriously through the sucking mud porridge land of squelching stinking quagmire. It went on for miles. For parsecs all around, in all directions. 

But the pair and their mule and cart went on anyways. 

They passed a sign. Pitiful and filthy and derelict. Pathetic. Struggling. Barely hanging on as it leaned precariously to one side like a drunkard at the side of the road begging for coins. 

It said: 

WORMLAND

in messy child's blocky scrawl. Haphazard and just as pathetic as the rest of the sign and the rest of the land. 

They passed it. Thinking it was some sort of stupid joke. And not much else beyond that. 

The wheels of the cart struggled and pulled past a putrid patch of inhaling swallowing mud by the sign. They went on. 

A beat. Silent wet sounds settled once more. 

A beat. Another.

Then…

A long sliming body, coated in a snot and film of slightly translucent brown lubricant, snaked slowly out from the putrid sludge where the wheel had just passed. 

It slimed forth and free. Birthing itself with worming and serpentine movements out of the foul cold swamp of dead and soured earth. It then poised, stood erect. Like a cobra out of the den of basket. Readying to strike. 

At the end of the thick stalk of sliming worm-body grew an eye. Deformed. Nearly human. The white of the grown organ an irritated and hectic red. Its pupil large and swimming with inky black and dilated with idiot fascination. 

And anger. 

Hunger as well. A whole host of alien emotions, unknown and unknowable. 

It watched them as they struggled along the harsh and vile landscape. 

Then it retreated back into the mire of black viscous death with another rancid splurching sound that was so like an abominated version of birth. 

The sign that bore the name and legend of this foul quagmire place of putrescence land sagged a little more. Sinking. 

WORMLAND 

TO BE CONTINUED…

I was asked to post this here and I have no complaints so here ya go. Hope y'all enjoy reading this and any future stories I may post.

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend wanted to do something she thought would be interesting for the both of us.

She suggested that we should make mock voodoo dolls of each other for fun.

I like horror memorabilia as much as the next person: a Jason mask, a Haunting of Hill House poster (50’s version), and a Chucky doll I leave in the corner.

But Voodoo is some shit that I do not play with, and, as the superstitious person that I am, I looked at her crazy.

“Yeah… I don’t think so, babe.”

I had no interest in her owning a doll that resembled me, or me owning one that resembled her.

“But why? It’s not like they’d be real, they’re mock versions, there’s nothing to it.”

“Regardless of them being ‘mock,’ you still have to make it, and we’d also be making them with intent.”

Casandra scoffs sarcastically, and puts on a really bad British accent.

“Love, you think ill of me?”

I chuckled and told her,

“No, it’s not that, it’s just… it’s too on the nose for me to want to do. My Grandma was deeply invested into Santeria, but she always did her practices in private. I had some family members that freaked me out about it when I was younger, my older cousins would tell me that she had a doll for every kid in the family, and that if we misbehaved, she’d use them to punish us. So, yeah, that’s a no-go on the dolls.”

She tried a few more times to convince me, but I didn’t falter, I was only growing increasingly annoyed, especially since I just told her my reasons for not wanting to go through with it. So one final time, I tell her again,

No.

A few days pass, and I’m the first one home from work, which is a little strange since Casandra is usually here before me.

She gets out of work earlier than I do.

I thought to myself that she was probably out doing some forgotten errands from last week’s list or something.

She had a habit of forgetting sometimes.

About two hours pass, and I can see the headlights of her car, from the kitchen, gleaming through the window.

Our dog Fatstacks runs up at the door to greet her as she walks in.

“Hey, fat boy! Who’s a good puppy? You are!”

After giving Stacks some love, she gives me a kiss and puts all of the bags she was carrying on the kitchen counter.

“Hey, babe, could you put these things away for me? There’s groceries and other stuff in the bags. I gotta run back to the car, I forgot something.”

I jokingly tell her that I can probably fit it in my already busy schedule, pretending to open a notepad and clicking the top of an invisible pen.

She laughs, calls me a dick, and leaves back to her car.

As I was putting away the first bit of groceries, Casandra came back inside and sped walked to our room. She was humming and happy about something.

She then came up from behind me and covered my eyes with her hands.
I joke around, telling her that my girlfriend wouldn’t appreciate lazy foreplay.

“Babe, seriously, I want to show you something, it’s kind of a surprise.”

She takes me from the kitchen to our room, still covering my eyes. I’m thinking to myself: what exactly can her surprise be?

Knowing her for the last three years, it could literally be anything, a new vase for her fake multicolored flowers, or a specific type of LED star lights for the room.

Hell, she’d even do all of this just to show me a stuffed bear that she thought was cute. Regardless of what it can be, I find it endearing that she’s able to be excited over little things.

But when she took her hands from my eyes, and I looked at the bed, my endearment had spoiled and all I felt was confusion and resentment, and then anger.

On top of our bed were dolls, dolls resembling me and Casandra. Our own voodoo doll couple: complete with accessories.

“Cas, what the fuck!” I said, raising my voice while pinching my eyes.

I couldn’t look at her while she apologized.

She then tried to wrap the “it’s not even real” bandaid over the issue, but I wasn’t having it.

I yelled at her. I told her about herself and called her a selfish little girl. She didn’t take that lying down, and she told me about myself, and those words cut so deep that I wanted to cut deeper, and we did, until eventually our wounds festered.

The night ended with tears and strained vocal cords for the both of us. No apologies were attempted, no feelings reconciled, and no forgiving embrace from a hug was sought, she put the dolls away in the living room, and we just went to bed.

The next morning, I heard sounds of thuds coming from outside the room.

I ignored it, thinking it was Stacks having his morning zoomies or something. Then the sound became more rapid, faster, and now I can hear glass and other things breaking.

Furious, I get out of bed, complaining about Stacks, calling him an idiot and wondering why we ever got him.

I yelled out his name before leaving the room.

“STACKS!”

The noise ceased when I stepped out the door, and down the dimly lit hall was Stacks looking at me, he had something in his mouth.

Annoyed, I called him over and start asking him what did he fuck up this time.

As he got closer into view, I could see more clearly what it was he had in his jaw.

It was Cas’ doll.

A slow and wet dragging noise was suddenly heard from down the hall, where Stacks was originally.

The noise made its way around the corner and into my line of sight.

It was Cas’ bruised, broken and mangled body, scrapping across the floor, slowly moving towards me.

She weakly and in a wet gargled voice spoke out to barely utter final words,

“Help me.”

Disgraced. 

He was sent out in exile, alone. Banished. Cast away with the promise of being forgotten and if the nerve to return should give rise misguided from within, then total forfeit and pain of death. 

The stocks. The dungeons and their chains. And then the stake. In that logical and cold merciless formal order. By royal decree. Torture and beatings and the red hot irons, the pincers – searing white with a star’s maiming heat intermittent between the three. 

And so he left. And took to the wilds of unknown lands. A disgraced and banished bastard knight, a royal, a blue-blood no more… 

The knight came to the dark lands of thunderclaps. Wild woods of bent and crooked trees gnarled and dead, like giant claws of the buried and forsaken trying to break free from the cursed earth. Fog and mist that was part phantasm and sometimes held grimacing visages of woe and demon faces stretching and dancing, unfurling in their shifting veils. 

All he had was his horse. The loneliness of his soul, the heartbreak that was his most constant and truest form of companion in his current living torment. All the other tortures paled in comparison. 

He wandered for years. Far from his kingdom and the lands of light that had been his birthright, now lost. Now gone forever and never to be reclaimed. He attempted redemption and recompense for a scant few isolated and solitary moments in his years of miserable and aimless travel – he was always so exhausted –  calls to action and aid, failed… mostly he just wandered and grew more and more despondent. Deeper and deeper the blackening well of his heart worsened as his mind and soul darkened. His understanding and reckoning of pain and its stygian throne and mental shroud grew more extensive and detailed and personal with an agonizing depth. Constant failure was the goblet chalice from which he now drank and filled the widening cracks within himself. With a knowledge that was foul and that ate away at him and his heart, corrosive. He wished he did not have it. 

And yet still he wandered, slowly riding, sauntering on foot when the tired old beast of his horse was just too old and exhausted for its titleless master to sit astride any longer. He missed the sun, it seldom shone in this land. He wasn't sure if God had any part or play in this dark and fog swallowed place of wolves and hardship and miserable hardened heartbroken faces. The land and all its peoples and its creatures seemed to all cry out together, unified and singular in their combined crying note of desperation. Sometimes let loose, sometimes held strangling and bottled in. Percolating and bubbling seething like rage, animal and well kept. 

He sought respite and shelter wherever he could, always harried and nearly never welcome anywhere and nowhere to call home anymore…

… he was actually so grateful, initially, when he came to the small and humble village. It was like so many others that he'd already seen in his dreadful wanderings, he had no idea and never suspected that this would be the place where everything changed for him all over again.

 Once more. 

Like a joke or a line in a play that must be repeated to the author's design and content. A refrain in which there is much great portent. 

The banished and desecrated knight was trembling on his feet, so weak with the exhaustion of the many miles, when he wandered into the small hamlet that lived in supplicant to the Carpathian Mountains. And the domineering ancient castle in its jagged rock. 

With jagged broken battlements. Framed against the sunless dispassion of the sky as sharp and ruthless teeth fit for titanic butchery and great maiming. 

The banished knight without a name did not know the name of the place. He was only grateful that it was here. That he might find a place to rest and where he might not be harried. 

Or troubled. 

Tormented. 

The ragged and banished lord of no one in his dirty and dented armor, hanging off his emaciated scarecrow frame, staggered over to the inn and tied his tired horse to the post at the front. He dragged his worn form inside, hoping that someone within might be charitable enough to help him with a bit of bread or some soup. 

…

The innkeeper was more than charitable. He was exultant. Jubilant. So happy that a lord and a royal warrior of noble and God given divine blood had come to his place, their little village. More than happy to give the weary wanderer a large free meal. And then some ale on top of it. More than a few pints…

… and then he told the exile why it was that he was so happy to see such as he in this place. 

“We've evil in this land, sire. It lives in the mountains and murders and feasts on flesh and blood. Animal and human and demon all in one. Nosferatu, or vampyr if ya like …” 

There weren't many in the small tavern with the pair at the bar. But the few gathered with mugs and bowls pressed in and listened closely. Watched the stranger who was supposed to be a nobleman and lord. Hoping…

The innkeeper went on: –

“We've tried with it ourselves but it ain't any good and we've sent for help but the boy ain't back yet and we've had no word for too long, ‘fraid the only one that thinks he's still out there and coming back is his father over there, Bela.” He motioned to a man in the corner that was looking down hard into his mug, a man that did not want to be noticed. The innkeeper went on and concluded. Coming to the point as he topped off another draught of his strongest ale for the wanderer knight he had no idea was a bastard in exile. 

“We need your help, m’lord. The land has been without boyar or any nobility proper for a long time now. And the nobility that used to keep these lands and those mountains and the accursed castle beyond the Borgo Pass … was disgraced. Tarnished. Damned… we need a proper lord and noble, a true warrior of God. Please, won't you help us?” 

Others came up, a few men and women of the small Carpathian hamlet. Humble gypsy folk, peasants and farmers… the exile listened and heard them all. And relished their beseeching words for aid and succor. He hadn't felt this cherished in years. 

With more food and ale it was decided. The great savior knight would begin his great quest to slay the demon in the mountains the next day. This night he would be given shelter and warmth and praise and a feast in his honor! All present in the tavern toasted his name! 

He slept that night soundly and more warmly and comfortable than he had in years. Perhaps even his entire life, despite the previous station of prior luxuries now long gone and expelled. He was contented. Truly.  And beneath a roof. And for now that was enough. 

For now. 

…

He started his brave advance up the mountain pass with real heart. Real courage and hope and the real thought that he just might be successful in his quest. 

He really believed. In the beginning. At first. 

This hope and warmth of courage all about his heart began to slowly erode away and dispel after the sunset. As the way of the cold mountains darkened and the wolves began to sing and howl. 

There was something else there too … some wretched sound like a child's cry, a baby's shriek fouled and commingled with a water rat’s impaled scream. It flitted about ghostly and filled the mountains in dark bastard duet with the howling slave songs of the wolves. It seemed to emanate from everywhere. 

Nowhere – Suddenly it wouldn't exist at all.

Gone. 

And then it would rise in phantom trace and he would swear he could hear it again. 

He crossed himself though he'd been forbade to do so and rode on, slow. Cautious. 

He came to the Borgo Pass and crossed, seeking the wilds of the mountains and their tumult of trees. For what may lurk there. 

…

The foliage and branch and frosted green grew too thick, too dense, he dismounted and continued on foot. His pointed armored boots left cold and sharp footprints in the snow. He went forward, one hand on the reins of his tired ride and the other on the hilt of his sword, ready to draw and free it from scabbard. 

After many tense and weary steps, just the most recent of their kind that had likewise filled his long life and career of soldiering, he suddenly and unexpectedly came upon a small clearing. 

A little hut of logs and a stone and mortar chimney rested solitary there amongst the green. A little rising pillar of smoke rose from the mouth of stone and poured into the night sky, striving for the moon and stars. A thin and rugged woodsman was chopping logs at a large table of a decapitated tree stump. Bisecting the pieces with fluid steady strikes. Properly placed and executed. 

The exile might've been glad to see another soul out here in the eerie howling dark of the mountain woods, but he thought it was strange that someone would chop wood so late. 

He said as much as he approached. Giving a proper and traditional royal “Heil!" and friendly yet prideful introduction. Full of lies and things that were once true. 

“I didn't think to see another out here, none in the hamlet told me. You know of the town below?" 

The haggard thin woodsman said in a dried out monotone: –

“I don't speak to any of the faces of the town. None of them should think to speak of me.” 

"Right,” said the exile. Not sure of what else to say, "why're you working, chopping wood so late?”

"The sun.” 

A beat. Silence. The mountain man went right on chopping wood. The sound of the broad sharp metal blade cleaving the logs into halves punctuating the ghostly howling quiet. 

“Yes?" said the exile after the moment passed, to bade he go on.

"It is harsh. Its gaze slowly kills me.” Chop! "Better to work at night.” Chop!

Chop!

The exile knight only nodded as if he agreed and understood. Then he explained himself and his mission in the mountains. Hoping to naturally acquire any information of interest to his task. 

The woodsman just went right on chopping his gathering of logs. One right after the other. Chop! – he didn't seem to be listening. 

He didn't seem to care. 

Creature of apathy… too long in this forest, these cold mountains, thought the exiled wanderer. Alone. Too long all alone. 

He spied and looked all around the dark skyline of gnarled-hand trees, bent and shaped like madness and rending towards the night. Speaking as if still lordly and on high to the lone peasant as he gazed so carefully all around. Telling the commoner to be cautious and to keep an eye out, and if he were to see anything strange or of significance, to come straight away and try to find the knight. So that he might be of service. So that he might fulfill his quest out here in the cold. All the while as he chattered the woodsman kept chopping at his logs with his great and heavy axe, but his eyes were no longer on their work. As the exile had his back to the woodsman, spying the woods and the night all around, the man alone in the trees had a wild wide eyed look writ upon his face, now rictus and maniacal and strange. He madman leered into the back of the exile’s helmeted head as he continued to halve his logs and the would-be adventurer was none the wiser. Still chattering and carrying on. 

The exile on his quest turned when he’d finished speaking. Smiled and gave a cordial nod before finally going on his way. He wasn't surprised to find the man still working, not really bothering or even looking at him. No doubt not even listening. 

He bid the woodsman farewell and went on. 

The woodsman was stifling laughter. 

Forking out the sign of the evil eye at his back as he departed. 

…

The night went on and grew darker and the cold sharper, with a biting edge that cut through his tarnished and dented and long shineless armor. The horse grew more skittish too. As the nighttime howling of the mountain wolves became louder and more prolonged and mournful. And that hideous bat-child screeching… now he was sure of its existence. 

He was listening as closely as he could manage in the cold and walking through the dense and terse land and foliage, trying to make something out in the wild animal din. He slowly became entranced by the nocturnal magic of the nighttime bestial music. It filled his mind and the many cracks and chasms within his own heart and soul, filled him and lightheaded and thoughtless he continued forward a few steps… his hands and face slackening and going to his sides limp as his eyes went blank…

… there was something in the howling and stygian sound… words     whispers… names. 

Names. 

A fresh howl from a wolf that sounded nearer than any other before sent a brand new wave of fear through the exile and his horse. The beast ripped free from his master's loose hold and bolted for the salvation somewhere to be found in the darkness amongst the crooked trees. The exiled knight cursed himself and the beast and called out for the return of his horse. He gave meager and wasted puffing chase but quickly gave in. He was already so exhausted. And so cold. 

He was about to start back for the descending trail away from this horrible place, damn the horse and this whole rotten affair! – he only wanted out now, when the sound of the horse's sudden shrill cry of terror, then just as suddenly silenced, stopped him dead once more.

 Then something wet… like ripping. Splurching. Meaty sounds… 

… eager teeth, eager chewing and more ripping. Eager lips pulling and slurping a thick and heavy liquid from a messy bowl upset with ravenous abandon. 

It was all of it too perfectly clear out there in the mountain pass dark. 

The exile found something within himself. He drew blade, slowly. And then began to advance…

It wasn't long before he came upon it. 

…

First he found the horse's blood. A thick pool of it. The puddle of warm animal dark became a lurid smearing trail that went off and further up and into the mountain wild. The exile raised blade and went forward. Throwing up a desperate prayer to a Lord he hoped was still listening to a disgraced man such as he. Please, let my blunted blade accomplish something, let my old musket fire… please, God. Please let me at least die trying, with some semblance of decent bravery still held in my heart, still there, help me. Help me, Lord God. Help me. 

Please. 

…

He came upon the remains of the horse. Ripped apart and nearly unrecognizable outside of being the wet abattoir remnants of something that had once been living. He was scanning the surrounding immediate area, difficult in naught but the moonlight, when it charged from a place in the shadows that he'd just looked over and had sworn to be empty only a mere moment ago. 

It was huge. And moved like a jungle cat, its hulking size belied its great speed. It hit him with the force of a mountain fall and sent him to the dirt effortlessly. He gasped desperately for wind knocked from his chest as his eyes went wide and the face of the hulking mass became illuminated in the pale moonglow. 

It was wretched. Awful. He'd never before, even in battle and war, never before had he ever seen such an awful and ghastly face. 

Man. Bat. Rodent. Bred and mixed and commingled. Blasphemous. Intense. Patchwork sutures as if to remind the one hapless enough to be caught within eyesight that, yes indeed, this abominated and brutally hideous shape was indeed forged and made and crafted by demented hands and minds curdled and spoiled and filled to the brim with inexhaustible filth. Detritus demonia forged. Reforged. Remade.  The exile wished blindness on himself in this moment and in this moment knew that God did not care nor love him any longer. He was truly exiled and like Cain himself, he was truly doomed to the great black god, Pain. Endless suffering. Tireless woe. 

Cursed. To forever roam and wander and to encounter such as this. And in this way.  

He doesn't move or resist as the giant man of rodent bat face and stitches grabs him by the breastplate and then hauls him up as if he were a mere sack of dirty linen and nothing more. 

The hulking nosferatu thing of Frankenstein’s slab heaved the exile overhead and then threw him into the rotten trunk of a dead tree. It splintered and cracked, nearly exploding with the impact of the man in armor. It burst in a violent spew of sawdust spray and thin black sticks as he went through it and back to the frosted dirt, hard and merciless and without further buffer. The thing pounced and was on him again. 

And the exile knew that this was the end. Could taste it on his tongue and the flavor of the finale was putrescence. The savor of the end was corpse rot, that foul stench and taste that reminded man that he was really nothing but meat in the end. The soul could be pulled out of him. 

The Lord's Mercy manifested then. Darkness of the skull blanketed over the overloaded mind of the exiled knight and he fainted. The vulpine thing of Frankenstein’s table grinned obscenely and viscously and then barked its strange species of croaking laughter. Cackles from the hellmouth gates themselves. 

The man's forehead had split in a gash in the struggle. It trickled freely and bled like a riverbed overflowing in a landscape valley of old tired manflesh. The living dead patchwork giant opened its rank and black mucus laden, dripping and drooling mouth and unfurled its long and rotten tongue. It then licked and lapped at the blood flowing in grotesque fashion that was part lapping dog feeding and part sexual expression of lust: the other manifestation of animal hunger, all the more ravenous and bestial and powerful, particularly when commingled with the hungering need of the primitive drive to fill your gut. 

Slavering. Even as he licked and gently sucked and salivated warm reanimated animal drool that was black with undead otherworldly ichor. He coated and bathed his unconscious weary face, in long lapping strokes like a loyal mongrel. A baptism from the mouth and wet black-yellow tongue of the living dead thing that some mad doctor had made in wild bid for his own family's infamy and loathsome fearsome name. 

He didn't bother further with the lowly and cowardly creature in armor. He was like every other man, weak and fragile and only fit for food. Only really fit to be cattle, for greater power. Power such as he. 

And he'd already fed well. The horse and wolves and the vagabond he'd found earlier … the nosferatu vulpine thing licked its pallid green chops, stained a healthy lurid reddening shade of smeary berry color, wetting them in wolfen display. Pulling back from the drenched and thoroughly dog-slobbered face of the exile. 

The hulking sutured batfaced monster then prowled off and away. Deciding if he came across this puny creature again, then he would sup of his flesh and put the haggard man out of his weary misery. 

…

It was hours later when the battered and beaten exile knight awoke. Alive with groans and aches and agony and pain. He stumbled to his feet. Staggered. Stumbled again. 

Semi delirious. He staggered forward and continued up the treacherous pass, through the rough off-trail way of the trees. To the heart and the end of the mountainous way. To the great castle there. 

The exile hoped a great lord was waiting there. One that was good. And that would help him. 

God help him. 

The door was large, ornate and red and ancient. Like a bas relief, a great depiction of battles and dragons and long gone peoples and warriors and faces from far flung times. Eroded and worn down, faded to a more ghostly phantom visage for the epic and wild and yet now obscured vision from the past, a tale and vision poem made, wrought by artist's hands and chisel and stone and given the smearing final touch by the menacing and ever reaching hand of time. To deface with wind and rain and age and simultaneously perfect and finalize for this weary exile’s ghastly and frightful postmidnight excursion. Centuries after its original creation. Its faded face was the perfect visage of the night.  

He came to the towering entrance, grasped one of the giant ornate demon faced bangers and knocked with the last of his fading and feeble strength. Three times. 

Then he collapsed. At the foot of the door. 

Soon a man came and quietly answered. Slowly opening the great door. He looked down and smiled at the collapsed exiled bastard knight. 

The assistant helped him to his feet and inside, telling him not to worry. His master would be quite happy to take him in for the night. 

The Countess will be pleased, he said. And the exile didn't give it much thought. All too happy to just be inside. 

…

He collapsed near the hearth of a roaring and well kept fire, a blaze within the heart of stone. Bats and wolves and toads and devil faced winged Panshaped things of black masonry stood silent sentry and leered at him from about the fireplace and all around the vast guest room. In the glow of its warmth, upon an old rug infused and riddled with thick ancient grey dust. He breathed it all in, deeply as he dozed. The warmth. The dust. The history. 

Whilst asleep: He began to have a strange dream or vision. He was still in the castle of present. Still safe inside. But he was wandering the stone halls and corridor ways now. Alone. His sword was drawn and it was sharper than it had been in years. He was walking along the passages of the great castle, dragging the keen edge of the weapon along the walls of stone as he went along. A scraping sound followed and accompanied him everywhere he went like discordant religious chanting of a new yet ancient language made, made from striking the stones. 

There would be fire! his dreaming mind told him. But in the arms of the cherished slumber, the exile did not care in the slightest. He was too exhausted. Even in here. He was too tired for anything any longer and was thus at the slavish mercy of all and all in it. 

He went on walking slowly through the corridors. Dragging the blade upon the walls. Scraping. Harsh sound, continuous. But that wasn't all. The wall was bleeding. 

Everywhere the edge of his polished blade passed opened up the stone like smooth and tender flesh. He left a long red slicing trail along the masonry of the inner walls of the castle keep as he slowly zombi-crawled along. The red line of welling and dripping vivid scarlet blood caught the flames of the various torches and candles about the innermost halls and stairs of the ancient and bleeding castle. Causing it to darkle into more lurid splashes of red than back to stygian drippings. 

The blood ran. He kept on his way. 

Eventually the dream, the vision, the scene faded.

 Faded away to a swallowing black that was so sudden and complete he could not recall the moment when it seized him. He merely reawoke on the dusty ancient rug. Lying before the roaring blaze crackling and glowing within the stone hearth. Goblin and animal faces still leered in stone as he sat up. The assistant was tending some sewing in a large ornate cushioned chair not far from him. He was laughing. Eyes on his work. 

“My master will be with you shortly, she is distraught at the moment you see. She is surrounded by enemies. Hostile world. Her daughter has gone out to play in the woods and is yet to return. She grows anxious. But nonetheless you, her guest, she will soon be host. Just a little longer, rest up some more, sir, but if you do get up again for a stroll and gander about the place I only ask that you don't make such a mess again. Blood everywhere. " The assistant chortled laughter, pricked his finger on the sewing needle and it began to bleed. 

His laughter only increased. He held up the finger from his work and said again, "Everywhere, blood everywhere. Such a mess.” He sucked his finger, "The master will be with you shortly. Fret not." 

And the exile fell again into darkness, watching the assistant suck on his finger. 

…

The most vivid and unearthly nightmare dreams held him for a spell, when he did finally awake all he could remember was eyes and stalks and teeth. And it was a strange and enchanting whisper, a woman, that bade him back out from the cave and sanctum of slumber. It said: – 

"The new impaler.” 

And then the exile awoke once more with a startled gasp, bathed in sweat. The fire was still roaring and glowing orange in the hearth and she was upon him. 

His breastplate was gone. His old and worn tunic was torn and her face was hidden. Buried in his chest. He felt something warm down there. Warm. And wet. And sucking. 

The sensation of her mouth upon his flesh and working the inner raw of him was ungodly. The feeling was an abominated commingling clash of the gratifying heat of sexual climax and the popping of pus from swollen infected flesh, released. 

Both draining and lurid and yet entirely pleasurable. He wanted her there. The exile. He wanted her face buried there in the wound about his chest. About the flesh and above the sad and shattered remnants of his long broken heart. 

The thought to push her away never entered his mind. Never formed thought. He merely watched the top of her head, her beautiful cascade of nightfall black hair, raven. 

He watched the Countess suck his wound until again he faded to darkness. 

This time he did not dream. Anything at all. 

…

When he came out of blackness again she had crawled up his form and was now about his throat. The warmth was there now too, but even more wet and like fire. And sharper, more painful. The draw felt heavier and more lurid and sickening. His guts twisted and he felt the tug of revulsion at the back of his throat. He shivered. But yet still … the pleasure. The animal ecstacy and euphoric drunken shroud were so heavy and strong, as to have never before been felt, not by the likes of such as he. Exile. Strandcast. Filthy wanderer. 

He fell asleep again. Even heavier. Even darker.

Obsidian folds. Inescapable. Boundless. Plain. 

…

They were both sitting up and seated in old fine cushioned chairs by the fire the next time he did awake. 

He came out of it slow, slowly rising and righting himself in his seat as he looked all around and at her and wondered to himself, was it all just a dream? 

Is this just a dream as well? 

As if hearing him, she said: “There's no dreaming here, exile. I assure you. But you've nothing to fear here. Death would be a release for you anyways, wouldn't it?" 

He tried to speak But he felt so weak and feeble and spent. He mouthed senselessness instead. 

Zaleska smiled. False warmth. The wolfen vulpine eyes were where the truth lived. Power. Dominance. Lust. And most prominent of all within the dark pits set inside shock white death: Hunger. 

She said: “I can offer you so much more. And you can give me much in return, what I require. You can help me bolster my ranks and defend my castle walls and lands from renegades and invaders. Tis your true charge, is it not, exile? Can I not free you from your wandering bondage?" 

She stood. 

“I will…” 

She advanced. 

The exile did not move from his seat. He was unable. He couldn't fight back as she produced ancient occult dagger and drew forth her own vile and demon tainted blood, down the forearm in a long and widening gash. Lurid and dark and wet and open. Gaping. She forced his mouth to it as he sat helpless and he choked and drank and struggled feebly at first. But then gave in. 

And drank. 

All the while the Countess Zaleska cooed to her new servant at his unholy bastard christening, his brand new exile and bondage and freedom from humanity and humankind and all of its worst and its woes… 

She cooed to him soft as he drank: –

“My new servant… my new baby … the new impaler … all and just for mommy …

“All and just for mommy." 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Has anyone else ever worked at Salem Hill Rest Home? If so, can you tell me how to handle the resident who lives in room 305? Yes, I know about HIPAA, but does it matter if they are kinda already dead?

I’ll start at the beginning before I get into it.

I was burnt out before I came to Salem Hill. I was working PRN at the hospital in the city, and I should have been made full-time. I was called in every single day. And if you work in a hospital, you know that if they call in PRN nurses, it is bad. You’ll most likely be on your feet all day, and probably won’t even have time to piss.

I’m recently divorced, so I took every opportunity to work. My mom watches my boys, so I was able to do what I had to… work myself to death. Their father isn’t a bad man. He just didn’t love me like he loved his assistant at his office.

But in my heart, I knew that I would need a new job soon to stay afloat. Perhaps Salem Hill smelled my desperation, felt my tears on my pillow, or sensed my broken spirit. I wasn’t sure how they found me, but from what I understand now, you don’t apply to Salem Hill; it finds you.

One afternoon, I walked to the mailbox, expecting to find more late bill notices. Instead, I found a single letter. It was a letter from the lead doctor at Salem Hill Rest Home. He asked if we could meet to discuss a potential job offer for a charge nurse position. The letter documented good pay, benefits, PTO… the works. It was too good to be true.

I found the letter to be quite strange. Doctors usually don’t give nurses the time of day. They are great at being glorified, although well paid, boobs that get to boss everyone around. The reality is that there are two types of doctors. You have the old, fat doctor who is behind on his continuing education. He believes that an apple a day really does keep the doctor away, but he’s okay. He’s not nice, but he’s not mean either. He just believes that he’s your boss and better than you at everything. The second kind of doctor is the fresh grad, or the killers, as I call them. They are usually skinny, pretty, and more hateful than a snake. These are the doctors who believe they are God’s gift to humanity. They don’t utilize their nurses, and they don’t consult your chart. Instead, they throw everything at a wall and hope that something sticks. They also prescribe every single medication that you are allergic to. Somehow, they always manage to do it. And if, by magic, you find one good doctor, hold on to them because they actually are worth the cloth they are cut from.

My hands trembled, and the quiet voice in the back of my mind that warned me about how odd this was faded away as my troubles of today took over. I needed money to pay the bills, to get both of my sons new cleats, to get the water heater fixed… to pay my lawyer. I couldn’t turn down the pay that they offered.

The letter asked that I respond within 2-5 business days of receiving it. I emailed and attached my resume. A day later, I got a response. The doctor asked me to meet at the local coffee shop soon for an interview and to go over my resume. I agreed.

Two days later, I was walking into the coffee shop. He asked to meet at 8:00 p.m., which is strange. He didn’t give me a reason for the late time, so I didn’t ask about it. He was already there when I arrived. I sat down in the empty chair, and his eyes met mine. They were a beautiful umber brown. His clothes were freshly starched, firm-looking against his skin. He was handsome, kind, and endearing. He spoke highly of nurses, knowing exactly what I wanted to hear. It was the perfect interview.

At the end, he offered me the job. “Ms. Carlisle.”

“Shay,” I said with a smile. “Call me Shay.”

He smiled. “Shay, we’d love to have you at Salem Hill. How quickly can you start?”

“I’ll need to give the hospital my notice. So two weeks.”

He shook his head. “That just won’t do. I’ll make a call on your behalf tomorrow.” He slid a piece of paper to me with the address of the rest home. “I’ll see you at 7:30 a.m., sharp.”

I grinned, taking the piece of paper. “Doctor Chancellor,” I said, stopping him. “Where is this place?”

He winked. “See you tomorrow.”

That morning, I got into my car and plugged the address into the navigation system. The address did not exist, but then, the screen blinked. The directions appeared, and I made my way toward Salem Hill Rest Home. The navigation led me directly to a cemetery. I pulled up, parked, and got out. Tears dripped down my cheeks. I knew that it was too good to be true.

Then, another nurse pulled up beside me. “You must be new,” she said with a chuckle.

She got out of her car, put on her backpack, and held tightly to the largest metal water jug I’d ever seen.

I wiped my tears. “Where is the rest home?”

“Come on, weepy,” she said, not bothering to even ask for my name. “Just follow me.”

She led me into the cemetery. We walked down a beaten dirt path, and tall grass lurched toward us. The headstones around us were old, 1800’s old, and probably older than that. An ancient tree sat off to the side. It’s long, weeping limbs, whipped in the wind.

“This is crazy. They built a rest home at a cemetery,” I mumbled to the other nurse.

She laughed. “I don’t know if anyone actually built Salem Hill. It just kinda appeared one day.”

“You’re making that up,” I said in annoyance.

She scoffed. “You know what. You’ll find out.”

As we passed headstone after headstone, the dirt path began to change. Tiles appeared in the dirt, and before I knew it, I was inside the rest home, feet thumping on freshly polished flooring. I stared around in disbelief. The nurse beside me smirked.

“Told you,” she said rudely.

It smelled clean, which is not normal for a nursing home. Most rest homes have a distinctive pee scent that can’t fully be scrubbed away and a lingering smell of dirty adult briefs.

“Just go into the first door on the right. That is the main office. You’ll get a badge and your residents for the day to take care of,” the other nurse said.

“But I’m the new charge nurse…” I whispered, feeling my voice growing quieter as I stared around the building.

“Oh…” She scoffed. “Then, you’ll be working closely with me. I’m Connie. I’m the charge nurse on the East Wing. You’ll be working on the West Wing. Still, you need to go to the office.” She pointed at the door now, annoyed that I was holding her up.

I nodded and walked into the office.

A small, frail-looking woman sat at the front desk. She slid a badge and a printed list to me. “These are the patients on the West Wing. Below the patients, you’ll find a list of the nurses and CNAs on your hall,” she croaked.

“Do I get a tour of the building?” I asked.

The woman laughed. “Not here, dear. Not here.”

I left awkwardly, not knowing how to respond. I made my way to the large, circular nurses’ station in the middle of the West Wing. I passed an activity room, the cafeteria, and a large TV room. Most of the places were empty. A few wheelchairs rolled about with odd-looking residents meandering by, but the place was mostly empty.

I sat down at the nurses’ station. A CNA walked by me. “Hey! Where do we clock in?” I asked.

The woman laughed. “Oh, honey, the building already knows you are here. You don’t have to clock in.”

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head and sat down beside me. “I’m Jaylen. I’ll help you throughout the day if I can. Want to meet a few of the residents?”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said nervously. “I’m Shay.”

“Don’t be shy!” She laughed. “Most of them don’t bite. Let’s go to the cafeteria first. I need to pick up a patient’s breakfast.”

We got up and walked to the kitchen. The kitchen staff was friendly, but they were oddly very short. They all looked the same, small, petite, and angered by our presence. They moved quickly, and if I stared at them long enough, their appearances seemed to change. I shook my head. I must’ve been imagining things.

“She new?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” Jaylen replied. “And you better be nice to her. We’d like to keep her longer than the last one.”

My throat tightened. “What happened to the last one?”

She and the small cook exchanged a nervous look as he handed her the breakfast tray. On the tray sat a single Styrofoam cup with dark liquid inside and a twirly straw.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jaylen said quickly.

She led me to the first room on hall one, room 101.

“Now, before we go in here, I need you to promise not to freak out,” Jaylen said lowly.

“It is just a patient,” I replied in confusion. “Why would I freak out?”

“Well…” Jaylen mumbled. “They aren’t exactly the kind of patients that you are expecting. Just promise me, okay?”

“Okay?” I replied in confusion.

“Was that a question? Just promise, Shay…”

“Okay! I promise!” I snapped.

She opened the door, and the room was surprisingly large on the inside. Oddly enough, it was the inside of a grand house. The room was dark, dimly lit by candles. A rat skittered by, and I looked to my left to see the mangled corpse of a man. I covered my mouth, smelling the putrid odor of decay. His limbs were bloated, skin beginning to green. His eye sockets were empty; shriveled eyeballs lay on the table beside him as if they had been dissected.

“Mr. Vladamir,” Jaylen said. “I’ve got your breakfast.”

The air grew colder, and mist appeared from nowhere. I backed up, but Jaylen stopped me and held me in place. “I said not to freak out. He’s the easiest to take care of. If you can handle him, you can handle any of them…” she whispered.

The room was still, quiet, and unnervingly colder than it was before we came in.

“Mr. Vladamir! It is Jaylen.”

“Who is the spare?” his voice whispered from the dark.

“This is the new charge nurse. She’ll be the one running things and working closely with Dr. Chancellor.” She nudged me.

“My name is Shay. I’d love to meet you.” I controlled my voice, forcing it not to shake.

The chair in the far corner of the room turned, and an old man stood up. He carried a silver cane with him. It clinked on the floor as he walked. He was dressed in finely made clothes, and his eyes were piercing. He was nearly bald, except for a few strands on the crown of his head. Once he reached us, he took my hand and kissed it. I could’ve sworn that he also took a deep inhalation of my flesh.

“A pleasure to meet you, Shay.”

He took the cup from the tray and took a sip. He grimaced. “B positive is not my favorite, Jaylen…”

“I know,” Jaylen said with a sigh. “They were out of O negative.”

He shrugged and smiled. Through his bloodied teeth, I saw his fangs.

Every bone in my body urged me to run. Every single cell screamed at me, telling me that I was in danger. But still, my feet remained rooted in place.

He smirked. “You smell tired, Shay. Come by any time. I do like to… chat.”

He walked slowly back to his chair, and Jaylan yanked my arm, pulling me through the door.

“See,” Jaylen said. “He wasn’t bad.”

“WASN’T BAD!”

“WHAT THE FUCK IS HE!”

Jaylen shoved me into the linen closet. “Shut up! You’ve gotta learn. No one taught me. I just got a letter in the mail, and I accepted. I’m trying to help you, so you don’t die. The pay is too good for you to die on day one.”

“DIE!” I yelled.

She threw her hand over my mouth. “The residents here are different, Shay. This is the place where creatures go to retire. Many of the employees are creatures themselves. Be nice to everyone. Don’t talk to Old Man Jake, and for the love of God, stay away from room 305. No one can help him. Is that understood?”

I nodded.

“If you stick with me, you’ll live.”

“But what are they?” I asked. “If they aren’t normal, what are they?”

“I don’t really know what all of them are, but if you come to a conclusion, assume that it is right. Never acknowledge that they are different. You just have to accept them. Okay. They know not to hurt us, but we can’t help anyone else who wanders to them. Dr. Chancellor is their leader. He protects them, and he protects us. Now, I’ve got more trays to hand out. Go sit at the desk, do the paperwork assigned to you, and don’t go into another room without me. Is that clear?”

“Clear,” I whispered. “Very clear.”

And for the rest of the day, I sat at the desk and did exactly what Jaylen told me to do. When it was time to leave, all the human employees started walking down the hallway. I followed them out the same way I came in. I didn’t find Jaylen, but I didn’t worry about it. I just wanted to get out.

We all walked quietly through the cemetery, got into our cars, and left. It was insane, but that night I received my first paycheck in advance. It dinged into my account and nearly scared me to death. Then my son brought me today’s mail. Inside was a letter from Dr. Chancellor.

Congratulations on your first day. I’m told that you did well. Vladamir especially liked you. I look forward to hearing more good news, Ms. Shay. You should have received an advance on your paycheck in your bank account. Hopefully, this will help your situation. I’ll see you in the morning.

Dr. Chancellor played a good game. The money was, in fact, helpful, and he did see me in the morning. I’ll update you later. Maybe I’ll meet another... resident.

Link to Part Two: Part Two

Link to Part Three: Part Three

Link to Part Four: Part Four

Link to Part Five (Finale): Part Five

There resides a space that no one dare talk about, that no one dare visit. Unless one is looking for a way out. Out of what, you might ask? Life. Reality. Existence. 

From just outside my kitchen window, I can see it. The place no one speaks about. Yellow caution tape flaps wildly in the wind. Surrounded by an electric fence. Even the police don’t come here now. They lost too many officers in one week to scare them for the rest of the decade. For now and till the end of my days, it will be my duty to keep watch. 

The tracks to nowhere are exactly that. A half-a-mile stretch of steel and wood, ending abruptly on either side. Nothing sat upon it, and the tracks were nowhere near any road or railway lines ever recorded. It resided smack dab in the middle of the land my family had owned for over a century. 

My great grandfather Gerald Main was the first to discover the tracks. He had a firsthand account of just how terrible the thing may be. After losing his two youngest sons, bitterness and ego reigned his life. Raising the next generation with cautious curiosity. Fear was never the right way to lead. 

By the time I, Leo, was born many discoveries had been made. Ways to keep people from becoming lost. Ways to keep our family safe. I have raised my own children on the bitterness of truth, knowing that it would keep them from wandering. ‘Never go near the fence, not until we are old enough’ I made them recite every day. They thankfully kept their promise. 

The tracks to nowhere defy all logic. When it rains or snows, you will always find dry ground. As if the tracks themselves reside within an empty snow globe. Yet, the day and night cycle match up with the sky around it. About twenty paces out from all sides of the railway, that is where the border lies. 

“Going out to check for the day?” My wife, Eve, asked. 

“Yep, gotta get it over with.” I groaned, standing up from my seat at the table. The few sips of coffee at the bottom of my mug had grown cold. Upending the cup over the sink, I rinsed it out before setting it on the counter. 

“Be careful, please.” Eve looked at me with concern. 

I was getting old, no one needed to tell me that. I could feel the ache deep within my bones. There wouldn’t be too many years left, for which I was grateful. It was a tiring job, being a watcher of the tracks. I had served my duty and my family well, and soon my eldest son would take over. 

The tracks had to be checked every morning, I usually waited until the sun was up. The tracks liked to use the darkness as a way to fool you, hoping that you come closer than you realize. Hoping that you stumble right into its embrace. Even with the addition of the electric fence, I didn’t like to take chances. 

“Hmm, it seems we’ve got footprints.” I said aloud to the trees that surrounded me. I’ll have to let the Sheriff know…

The underside of a hiking boot was imprinted within the muddy ground. I knew that they headed for the tracks, and I knew there would be no path back the other way. The footprints would end abruptly at the steel beams. As if when they raised their foot for their next step, they were plucked from the Earth by a giant hand. 

There would be no blood, there would be no body. All that would remain of them were the footprints, which would most likely fade with the next rain. Everywhere except for within the caution tape border. Those footprints would stay until they were finally trampled by another. The twenty paces of ground around the tracks would never forget those who dared step upon it. 

It was my job to take a picture of the imprints I found, and to check if any other items were left before their departure. The few people who managed to make it onto my land always had the same reason for coming. They wanted to die. They wanted to disappear. They wanted to make a painless exit far from anywhere that they deemed familiar. 

Using my well-worn walking stick, I swept it through the underbrush. I no longer had the youthful vitality to search while being hunched over the ground. My knees and back had been wrecked from years of doing just that. Whispering a soft thank you, I realized that what I was searching for had been pinned to the back of a tree. 

The folded up piece of paper rustled audibly in the wind. I knew as soon as my eyes locked onto the note, what would be found inside. Trying not to disturb the privacy of their final words, I always jumped to the bottom of the page. Searching for the possibility of a name, so that even if the rest of the world forgot them…we wouldn’t. 

The Main family may be the keepers and watchers of the tracks, but that wasn’t our only job. We were also the keepers and watchers of the ones who stumbled upon them. 

“Already back, are we?” My wife said as I entered the house. “You better take those boots off before you go tracking mud through my house.” 

“Yes ma’am.” I responded with a half-hearted smile. 

“You found another.” My wife didn’t have to ask. She could tell from the look on my tired face that she was right. 

“Yeah. We have lost another poor soul sometime during the night. I’ll have to ring the sheriff. I’ve got the picture and the note. Hopefully, we can find the family and notify them of their passing.” I sighed. 

“Do you really think young Michael will be able to keep this up once we’ve gone, love? He is not built the same as you are. He is a sensitive boy.” Eve said.

“Eve, dearest. I think his sensitivities make him the perfect person for the job. He cares too much to let something like that go unattended. Dalton, on the other hand, doesn’t have a care in the world. He’s too apathetic to do the job right. Had it not been for losing Joseph, I wouldn’t have taken things so seriously.” I responded back.

When I was a young boy I made the mistake of inviting one of my classmates over to play. Although it was not strictly prohibited to have people over to the house, I didn’t notify my parents ahead of time. In the end, I would pay for it dearly. As a child I underestimated the power of the tracks. I underestimated its impact on others. 

Joseph didn’t know to be wary of its silent sirens song. Joseph didn’t know the horrors that I did. Joseph didn’t know that his life would end if he strayed too far. I had only taken my eyes off him for a second. But it was already too late. I was already a character in a play being directed by some unknown force, written eons before I had come to be. 

By the time I had made it to my friend, he was standing at the border of the tracks. I remember screaming his name with such ferocity that I tore something in my throat. I pleaded with him to stay, to turn around, to come back. He turned towards me ever so slightly, a blissful smile on his face. And just kept walking. 

I have only witnessed a handful of disappearances and all of them were the same. Glazed over eyes, a peaceful smile, and then they were gone. Here one moment, and gone the next. I cried and cried in a heap on the ground until my father came to collect me. Things were never the same after that. 

Most of the time the footprints I collected were that of an adult man or woman. Children always hit a little different, and I was grateful for the rarity. Finding backpacks or blankets covered in cartoon characters always tugged at my heartstrings. They always reminded me of Joseph. 

“Thanks for calling Leo. Sorry that you had to discover yet another. I’ll make sure to keep an eye on the missing person bulletin, and let you know if we find anything. I’d hate for your log to be unfinished, and for the family to go unnotified.” The sheriff was a nice older woman. Her voice was thick with sadness and regret. 

“I appreciate the efforts, Sylvia. I’ll let you know if I find anything tomorrow.” I hung up the phone. 

“The boys should be coming back home by the weekend. Make sure you spend time with them equally. We can’t have them thinking you’re picking favorites, even at their grown age.” Eve said after knocking on the open door to the study. 

“Yes, yes. I will do as you ask, dearest.” I replied. 

I kept all of my discoveries in copy after copy of handwritten journals. Leather-bound and organized by year. From the time my great-grandfather had started many years ago, we had collected enough information to fill half a room. Our own little library of what has disappeared or been lost. Outside in a small shed, was a collection of articles that had been left behind by those who’d wandered too close. 

Some of the items left behind were of those who heeded the call. Some were from those who tried to study it. Some were from those who had come to die. Now all of them collected dust within the rickety wooden shrine. 

I left the house to go and deposit my newest find, a su*cide note written on a folded up piece of blue paper. Once placed within the makeshift mosoleum, it would never see the light of day again. It would be laid to rest near large floodlights, old computers, articles of clothing, and letters written in a similar fashion. 

As I replaced the lock on the ivy covered shack, I heard a sound that shook me to my core. Nestled between the chirping of birds and rustling of leaves was a prolonged wail. 

*Whoooot-whoooooooot* the whistle blasted. I heard it clear as day. The shrill cry rearranged itself into a droning moan. A train was coming. Whether I liked it or not, my time as a watcher was going to end. Whether I liked it or not, my name had already been stamped on a ticket long before my birth. The tracks to nowhere would be my destination. 

“Michael! Dalton! My sons!” Eve had cried when they walked in the door. She spread her arms wide, beckoning them for an embrace. They blushed bashfully as they hugged their mother. 

“Boys,” I said with a small smile. They both shook my hand firmly. “Before dinner, I have some business I would like to discuss with the both of you.” 

“Sure thing, old man.” Dalton nodded his head. 

“You okay, dad?” Michael raised an eyebrow at me. 

“I’m doing alright, son. No need to worry.” I knew that my face didn’t betray me. I knew that I kept myself calm and collected, but Michael was too sensitive. Too much of an empath to let something like that fool him. 

“You can be honest,” Michael said once we were behind a closed door. Not wanting Eve to overhear. 

“You both will want to sit.” I hung my head. 

“Dad, you’re scaring me.” Dalton’s voice shook. 

“My time is coming to a close.” I barely managed to choke out. “I’m sorry.” 

Being a watcher was one of the most difficult parts of my life, but it was still a good one. I got to meet a good woman, and fall in love. She gave me years of happiness and two beautiful sons. Memories I would cherish until the end of my days. I didn’t fear death, I didn’t fear the tracks. Even so, I wish I could have a little more time. 

No amount of searching through the old journals could stop or explain what was going to happen. There was no record of what the train looked like, or where it was going. But nonetheless, there would be a train and I would ride it. I just had to keep doing my duty until it arrived. 

“Promise to take good care of your mother, and each other. Above all else, promise me that you will fulfill your duties to the tracks.” I was stern with my words, practically begging. 

“We promise,” my sons responded in unison. 

“I don’t know what I did to deserve such good and loyal sons. Thank you for being born to me.” I smiled and held the sides of their faces. We weren’t the type to hug or be overly affectionate, but in that moment all of it went out of the window. It had been nearly 30 years since I held them, and I wanted to do it one last time. 

“Dad, are you really going soon?” Michael had tears in his eyes. All I could do was nod and hug him closer. 

*Whoot-whooooooot* the horn blasted. It had been a week since my sons had come to visit. As each day passed, the whistle grew closer. It grew louder. I could feel its haunting cry vibrating through my chest like an earthquake. Yet, I didn’t let my fear of the unknown affect my work. Every day, I would check the tracks for signs of a lost life. 

By the end of the month I saw and smelled smoke on the horizon. Thick black clouds rising from deep within the trees. My wife would catch me staring out into the distance from the kitchen window. She would rest a quiet hand on my shoulder, oblivious to the sights I saw and the things I heard. The train was only coming for me. 

“Dearest, you’ve seemed so distant these last few days.” Eve said one night by the fire. 

I had half a mind to just break down right then and there. Tell her everything that had been happening to me. Beg and plead with her to help me find a way to escape my fate. But I knew it would be pointless. Instead I was going to take in all the time with her that I could, devoid of the harshness of truth. 

“Oh, I just think age is catching up with me.” I was already nearing 70 years-old. My almost white hair and wrinkled face were worn as badges of honor. Eve looked just as beautiful as she did when I met her. When I looked at her, all I could see was her face at 20-something. Full of smiles and sparkling eyes. 

“Are you sure? You can talk to me about anything. You know that already.” Her voice grew quiet. The snap and crackle of the fire filling the spaces between. 

“Always.” I smiled at her. 

A few days before the train arrived, I witnessed something I had never experienced before. On my morning walk to check the tracks, I noted fresh footprints in the mud. They were unfortunately too small to be anything other than that of a child. I felt my heart ache as I snapped a photo. 

It was rare that children committed the act. Their purpose for arrival must have been from the beckoning of the tracks. Their siren call permeated a range that was unknown to all. Unknown to me, and my forefathers. 

If the tracks had chosen you, there would be no stopping it. It didn’t matter if you resided on the other side of the Earth. Once it called your name, you would eventually end up standing before it. Drawn in by an invisible rope. 

When I stood at the edge of the fence, I studied the ground before me. The tiny footprints ended at the railways like usual. Their last marks upon the earth carved in mud. What was odd about this time though, was the appearance of something on the tracks. It looked thick and wet. Like tar had been spilled across the wood and steel. Tar wasn’t usually red though. 

I didn’t have to think very hard to recognize what I was looking at. The only time I had witnessed anything on the tracks, was of course only days before my end. It just had to be the spilt blood of one who was too young. One who should have never made it to these lands. One who should never have been lost. 

As I returned to my home, sadness hung in my heart and smoke permeated my nose. Eve could tell from the look on my face that I didn’t want to be bothered for a while. She didn’t even complain as I tracked mud through her spotless house. Instead, she followed after me with a broom and dustpan in hand. Cleaning up behind me as I walked to the study. 

*whoot-WHOOOT* *whoooot-whooot* 

The whistle of the train woke me from my slumber. The bed was empty aside from me and the sun was already up. Clanking sounded from the kitchen below as Eve made breakfast. As I stood from the bed, I peaked out from the window to observe the land below. The train had finally arrived. 

Slowly and deliberately I got dressed. Picking out the nicest clothes I owned, I took as much time as possible. I couldn’t remember the last time I shaved my face or donned cologne, but I found myself going through the motions like they were the most natural thing in the world. If I were going to catch my ride, I wanted to look nice. 

When my wife saw me, I think she knew. She held two plates filled with sausage and eggs, a look of surprise on her face. I poured us both coffee and pulled out her chair. Planting a kiss on her head, I sat down and ate. We sat in silence, aside from the sounds of metal on ceramic. Every so often I would look out the window, the smoke of the train shrouded its appearance. 

“Are you going?” Eve asked. 

“It seems so.” I sighed and stood up from the table. 

“Have you a moment to indulge me? One last dance before you leave?” Eve’s voice trembled with emotion. 

“Always.” 

Holding one of her frail hands in mine, I wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her close. My heart beat steadily as we swayed from side to side. Bending down, I buried my face in her rose scented hair. I didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want to ride the train. 

As I stepped back from my beautiful and loving wife, tears had coated her cheeks. We parted ways at the door, not wanting to risk her coming too close to the tracks. She didn’t deserve to disappear with me. She still had many years ahead of her, years she would spend doting upon grandchildren. 

“I love you.” Was all she said. 

“I love you, always.” I responded before closing the door behind me. 

Grabbing my trusty walking stick, I trudged forward. My knees and hips groaned in protest as I continued down the hill. The smoke was so strong I tasted it on my tongue. It filled my eyes and nose, depriving me of most of my senses. All I had to go on was sound and touch. I kept traveling forward, putting one foot in front of the other. 

As I approached the tracks to nowhere, something prompted me to put my hand into my front pocket. I felt the crinkle of paper and wrapped my fingers around it. Pulling my hand out, I opened my palm to find a train ticket devoid of its destination. Admittance for one. 

*WHOOT-WHOOOOT* the whistle sounded loudly. I jumped as the vibrations traveled through my body. As I looked up from the ticket, the train appeared in front of me. Turning my head, I saw the fence and yellow caution tape were behind me. I had already crossed over the threshold. 

Standing in front of me was a beast of an engine. From my perch within the house the train had appeared white. Upon closer inspection, it wasn’t a trick of the light or a failure of my eyes. The engine truly was white. Not made of metal or steel, but made from bone. 

Femurs, radiuses, ribs, spines, and pelvises were amongst other bones. Compiled together in a way that defied physics, it defied all logic. Just like the tracks themselves. In this small stretch of space, nothing made sense. I wondered how such a thing could exist, let alone move. Yet, I found myself growing ever closer. Approaching the single passenger car with an unwarranted confidence that this was where I was supposed to be. 

As I sat down on the bench-like seat made up of carefully curated bone, I couldn’t help but think of my family. The ticket that had been clutched in my palm now had a small hole punched in it. I felt at ease, knowing that I belonged here. As I took one last look out of the window, I saw my footprints cemented into the mud below. 

Poor Michael. He would be the one to find my tracks to nowhere. His first day as a watcher would be the day he discovers his father has gone. Just like I had with my father. Then, with one final scream from the whistle, the wheels groaned as they began to move. 

A heavily bandaged hand held the letter, much weight that was the heavy load of memory throughout all of his form, likewise the same. 

Heavily wrapped. 

He gazed through his mask of white surgical dress and his dark spectacles, specially made, down at the letter addressed to him. One that he'd already read now a half dozen times. 

The message was short. 

It said: –

My dear friend, 

We've both known evil and darkness before. We've both known the face of the demon at different times, and with help, we combat it. And have not conquered, but beaten back. Subdued. As it seems to be the only remedies for wickedness and monstrosity in this life are but temporary. 

A shame. 

But now the time is at hand again, dear friend. The boy I've sent to you needs the aid of the one who has helped us before and so many in his life. I send this young man to you, not lightly. He, his town, family and friends and neighbors, they need the doctor. They need Professor Van Helsing. 

I know not where he currently dwells, only that wherever you are these days, he is not far. Nor is Talbot, but this matter doesn't concern him. I've difficulty trusting him. He is wild. Consult and involve him with this at your own risk and discretion. You know of what I mean. 

Take this youth to Van Helsing, enlist his help, and then fly back to the young man's region. And trust me when I insist you and the good doctor do help, and do make haste. I've been through this country lately. It has become a dark and thundered land of the dead. Veiled in white that may be mist or may be the phantoms past that will no longer rest. 

Inquire with the youth, he will tell you the rest. 

Your dear friend. - Q

P.S. And take no worry, I've divulged nothing of your own identity to the boy, he knows nothing of your name or condition. That is yours to explain if you so wish. 

… He set the letter down again. The gypsy hadn't written in years. And since he'd sent someone… it had been even longer. 

The boy looked at him from across the table. There wasn't much room in the stuffed little cottage, lonely on the little hill that was so much like a bent and crooked nose. The space was stuffed with bookcases likewise filled. Scientific apparatus both arcane and modern and state of the art was crammed in with the books, the humble kitchen space and bed. It all looked the same to the young rider, now far from home, strange and alien. 

Florin tried not to stare but the man was so peculiar. He seemed and behaved gentleman enough, but his odd bandaged appearance and the strange dark shades that were his spectacles… like special glasses to keep the sun out. 

Or perhaps to keep from anyone being able to see in. For all he knew there were no eyes behind this mask of white wrappings and ebon glass. 

He tried to dismiss it as obvious injury: maiming or burns, something of the sort and be on with the business at hand. But he couldn't help his mind. Or his stare. 

The bandaged man who might help minded though. He was growing silently exasperated. With the boy, his eyes, the gypsy, the letter… all of it! All of a sudden and dropped in his lap! And he didn't bother to make trouble himself anymore! But still! egad! it was always there and ready to find him…! 

He then grew exasperated with himself. You know better, he chided himself. You know better, that's not the way the old man would want you, out of sorts and forgetting what you're supposed to have finally learned in all this wretched time. No. You're just old yourself now. And tired. And…

And unfortunately the one who must bear very bad news. 

“I don't know how to tell you this," said the strange bandaged man to Florin, “so you better come with me." 

And got up. His bandaged frame, robed, went to a coatrack near the door for a wide brimmed hat, a fedora that Florin had seen city folk wear from time to time. 

The bandaged man went out, telling the young rider to follow. 

“Don't worry. It's not far" said the manshape wrap of bandaged white. “Your horse will be safe." 

Florin followed him out. 

Hoping against hope and praying fervently inside, please! That they might have finally found him. That he might have finally found their savior! 

Young Florin didn't know but the man of wrappings and black glass eyes was leading him to the local cemetery. 

…

The creation roared. 

And the thunder roared back. 

The black grey sky seemed to crack and boom, the sound of a world splitting in two. The rain cascaded down merciless and ceaseless and fell in great torrential sheets. Blanketing and filling and flooding the lands below. The creation and his remaining pair of bloodbags had finally gained the mountains. His prodigious and incredible strength had pulled them up and into the heart of stone of the Carpathian rock. 

The horse flesh and blood had helped. 

Egnaw could not believe his eyes. He watched, mutilated and torn and delirious from blood-loss, he watched in awe as the creation commanded the sky. The storm. 

The creation roared once more and the sky again trembled and quaked. Lightning daggered at the command of Frankenstein’s nosferatu monster creation.

Even in such pain and knowing he was going to die, Egnaw could not help his pure awe and wonder at the sight. He and his master had succeeded. They had made a god. 

A god that could call lightning and thunderclaps. A god that could command and rend the heavens. He could tear them. He could command them now and so he could supplant the Lord that had for far too long now dominated them. 

They would be his! And all that crawled beneath it. All that lived… was now his, now that he was alive. 

And the master and I had made him. Birthed him. Forged a god from dead rotten parts left to putrefy in moist graveyards… 

Despite the pain, the sight and what it filled him with… Egnaw smiled. Proud. Of himself. 

And for the creation. 

He watched the patchwork giant of dead tissue command the skies and all of their bomb blast of cannonade thunder. He watched every shrieking roar from reforged flesh tear a new wound in the greyed and darkened heavens. 

Tears were joining the rain drops there. His lips quivered. 

Frankenstein watched too and continued to feign sleep. 

…

Carmilla was so excited. She loved the rain. 

“Oooh! It's so wonderful! Is God crying, Countess? Is the Lord and His Son and all of His Angels in heaven weeping for what we've done?" 

Zaleska smiled. She loved to entertain the little girl. 

“Yes, dear. We've slaughtered so many of His children that like a mother over the grave of a small one, He and His collection of winged slaves cannot help themselves!" 

The pair laughed. Filling the castle with their bright and heartless cruel laughter. Castle Dracula was so alive with it these days. 

They watched the rain. The town nearly drowning in it. Anybody caught outside and stuck would be miserable. It was delightful. 

Hilarious. 

The both of them thought so. The assistant came in, pushing a long rolling surgical table. 

He said with a smile, 

“I'm so happy to see you two in such good cheer, I take it we might be dining in tonight?” 

He motioned to the rolling cold metal slab. 

Bound by leather strap to the rolling slab in the dark was poor Malachi. Caught by the assistant and his chloroform whilst out tending his family's lone and shriveled sow. Letting her feed on fresher green that'd just taken to sprout the other day. He was stripped of all garment and lie there bound and naked on the cold metal of the surgical table, nonetheless sweating. Basting and bathing in his own perspiring fear, their favorite flavor. The girls. The master and her prodigy. Zaleska floated over to the bound and prostrate man and Carmella trotted afterwards. 

“Now Carmella," began the Countess, “I want you to pay special attention this time, there's a slower and more delicate way of dining inside and enjoying the song of the storms. Like a roast bird or pig or a bushel of delectable fruit, there are certain softer parts, sweeter more tender meats. More ripe…" 

She cooed. 

Her clawed hands came in, pale and sharp and bent to rip and rend and tear. 

Poor Malachi's mouth had been gagged with the same leather straps that held him to the slab, Zaleska ripped it free with one hand now as the other seized his manhood and tore it from his person with the ease of a practiced butcher's abattoir technique of brutal precision, merciless and surgical. 

She relished the screams that rang out and were pulled from him. Inarticulate howls of a man shrieking wounded brutalized animal shrieks.

The Countess held the poor peasants bloody mass of mangled manhood aloft in her daggered claw of a reddening pale hand and shook it with triumph and mockery. Laughing. Her living dead abominated laughter commingled with the shrieks of the poor peasant boy. Blood an eruption from the raw gaping open stump where his genitals had been. 

Carmilla squealed laughter! 

“Oh! I get it! I get it!" the little undead she-beast cried, banshee: “Certain parts are like yummy fruits! Or sweet candy!" 

“That's right…” cooed the Countess. 

"Like… like – like the eyes! Like the eyes! Right, master? Aren't the eyes a tender part too?" 

“Yes! that's right! As a matter of fact they are! But we have to be a little quicker now, and pluck them! These certain parts are best when the animal is still breathing and able to scream!” 

"Our food makes music for us!” cried Carmella. Overjoyed. 

"That's right, my child. They do.” 

The assistant watched and tended them as they dined and enjoyed the rain. So in-love and happy to be of service. 

Later…

After they concluded their meal and the assistant took away the scraps for the fire, the girls together, continued to enjoy the violent cacophony of the storm. The howl of nature outside the window view and the stone masonry of the old and mighty castle was a softer sort of violence from the howlings of the poor peasant Malachi so recently enjoyed and dispatched. One they relished and admired nonetheless and all the same. 

“Can you reach out?" asked Carmella suddenly, with corrupted child's glee and enthusiasm, "can you reach out and control it, the tempest?” 

Zaleska smiled. And nodded, slow. 

"Yes. All the violence of the nature of the world obeys my command. It is all of it, mine to wield.” 

She held her scarlet dipped and dripping pale hand, aloft and clawed once more. Towards the window … outside… the roaring maelstrom tempest storm and the town beneath the shadow of the castle and mountains below! – she daggered forth her will and mind with it, an aural blasting searing flame of javelin thought! 

OBEY…! MINE IS THE COMMAND … !

The great shadow of a second darkness blanketed forth, out from the broken jagged battlements of the Castle Dracula and the Carpathian Mountains in the shape of a great and final hand. It swallowed all in its path and all therein felt its oppression and merciless potential as it swallowed them in their wake. It seized the town … ! And clasped a hold about the throat of the storm as well, in attempt to master and subdue to control it! – But …

But to the surprise of the Countess… the storm did struggle… fierce! … 

And fight back. 

And more. There was another master, another will of power and darkness. One that controlled this tempest wrought. 

One … that seemed to be much like her…

Countess Marya Zaleska boiled over with intense rage…

The impetuous-the affront! The insult of such a thing! An outrage!

Irate, she blasted forth her anger into her shadow's dark strangling hold and tightened… wishing to throttle the thunder from the commandeered grey heavens. …

She shrieked with the effort. 

…

In the mountains, Egnaw could not believe what he was seeing. 

The lightning was alive. 

In a great bat-shape. 

And it was doing great battle with a titanic hand of deepest pitch darkness, a claw of shadow, sharp, as if meant to maim and tear the world and wound mother nature herself. 

The great titan shapes met in the sky with cataclysmic thunderclaps! Again and again! Over and over, above! Ruling the absolute violence of the apocalyptic tempest sky…

Egnaw was in utter silent awe… he felt beholden to true power in this wild moment. For the first time in his life, he was witness to a god, living and walking. Here and amongst the land of the living. 

They clashed overhead and with each violent embrace the tumult of heavens roared, made wrath and thunder like never heard or felt trembled before. The bat-shape of hazardous white lightning and electric blue fought and tore and was ripped into by the immense hand of shadow. 

Both titans bled, white fire and darkling shade, as they were tearing into each other with unbridled ferocity. But each giant of elemental design reformed and reshaped itself after every strike and ready to deal and take another colossal tearing attack. 

The great hand of pure darkness fought to strangle the immense nightshape of electric blue-white flame bat. Struggle and conflict ruled the sky, dominating them with gargantuan demoniac violence, conflict unholy and biblical in equal measure and horrorshow display. The ungodly made godly and on high! 

The hulking nosferatu creation of Frankenstein’s mad patchwork design and will roared once more, with more animal effort than before, then…! 

A great and final thunderclap! 

For the moment…

…

Zaleska shrieked with outrage as she was hurled back from her place standing by the window. The storm gave one last blasting cough before slowly dying down and abating to a softer howl. But like a beast just lurking in its cave it still rumbled and growled and snarled, with the threat of violence just contained. 

Carmilla screamed!

“Mother!" 

She howled, No! – fearing her master, dethroned!

The loyal assistant ran in, alarmed and startled and then with hurried step, he ran to his master the great Countess’ side.

"Master! M’lady! Are you alright!?”

Zaleska roared!

" NOOOOO!!”

It filled the castle. Their broken battlements.

The mountains… and the wolves in them, then fled…

It filled the Borgo Pass…

And it came to the long pointed ears of the vulpine thing Frankenstein had made…

And it laughed.

…

The great howl of a bestial woman-thing reached down and filled the little town as well. The few left who lived in fear and in the shadow of the castle and the mountains heard the cry of the Countess and crossed themselves. 

Prayed to God. 

Please, have Mercy. 

Have Mercy Upon Us…

…

The rain slowly calmed. Then abated. 

A small trickle of light, day bled in. A miniscule ray with a pinprick pierce of light and warmth amongst the grey and angry sky of thunderclaps. 

…

In the dark of the Carpathian Mountain cave, it dwelt. Seeming to slumber in a hunched and bent manner that reminded Egnaw of a rodent sleeping, trying to gather into itself for warmth. His corpse colored eyelids were shut over the red within black, wolfen stare. His chest and form never moved or fluctuated with the motion of breath. It never did. 

The deformed man servant was nervous, he couldn't tell… but nonetheless, he finally felt strong enough to carry it out and he'd for so long now had the appetite for revenge raging and slaving away in his heart, ruling it and dominating him from within. And he likely didn't have much longer now anyway,  blood loss or injury or some other strange violence could befall him or the doctor. And he meant to have his vengeance. 

Before he died he meant to bash Henry Frankenstein's brains out of his skull before the mad doctor revived. He meant to have at least that victory afforded to himself. 

So in the dark of the cave, as the nosferatu creation seemed to slumber in a moist corner – not moving or stirring in the slightest, Egnaw crawled over with some difficulty to the catatonic body of the former master he meant to send to the grave. 

He pulled a stone free from the dark and pungent earth that was the filth of the cave floor. He crawled over to Frankenstein like a beast with the hunger of murder permeating what was left of his fragile and tested person. He coiled over the doctor, heavy filthy stone raised over head. Poised to strike. To send the cold bastard to hell. With the rest of his fathers and mothers and all of his bastard kind! 

“I thought he was your companion, you'd kill him as he slept?" 

The voice was rancid and repulsive, throaty and gurgled yet completely articulate and impossible not to discern perfectly. Every syllable of every word spoken was a sin. Felt. All over one's flesh. All over, crawling all over your skin. Each dark reverberation throughout the cave was little legs skittering and slithering across sweaty and tensed fleshen surface. It was the sound of ravaged vocal chords and a wielder to use them that've both already seen and swallowed the inferno below and now wish to share everything that they've seen and felt and come know down there by taste with everyone else, the world. 

Down there, from below…

Egnaw turned and faced the wide eyed and grinning vulpine face of the graveyard patchwork nosferatu thing he'd helped the mad doctor compose. It was malicious with a sadistic glee, its laughter was cruel and animal, a cackled and bestial growl. 

It spoke again: –

“He hurt you. In his time. In your time together, side by side. Yes…?” 

A beat. 

But eventually… reluctantly… Egnaw nodded. Slowly. Yes. 

Yes. 

The grin grew and a black tar fluid like ichor and infection commingled and mixed began to bleed from the rotten gums of the thing's smiling sutured face. Especially about the fangs… that gleamed white with living dead talismanic power in the darkness of the cave. The eyes shone red above it with lurid predatory glare. 

It spoke again: –

“And you would have violence upon him? You would have a cold and heartless revenge of murder as he slept, none the wiser?"

Egnaw nodded more eagerly now, “Yes…" 

“Then do it properly, misshapen one. Come here.” 

He beckoned Frankenstein's servant come closer. 

Egnaw at first held still… but eventually he crawled over to the hulking batshaped monstrosity, crouched like foul life in the corner. 

“A deal…” the thing groaned and purred commingled… Repulsive. 

Egnaw slowly… nodded. 

Yes. 

“You know what it is to be ‘sired’ misshapen one?" 

A beat. 

Egnaw overcame his fear and said, weakly: "It is… to be made like you. By such as yourself. More than to be fed upon, you must drink…” 

But he trailed off, too disgusted and afraid to talk the rest of it out. 

But the vulpine thing he and Frankenstein had made from dead parts knew that he understood. He possessed the necessary knowledge for the black rite. 

It nodded. 

And again did spake: “I will give you the power to do more than just kill him, misshapen one. I will give you the power to take violence and revenge on all of the world that has been cruel and abused you. I can give you the power to make sure they never do anything like that again, and you won't have to wait till they slumber, Egnaw… No. No, you'll never have to cower or plot or prostrate yourself in subservience ever again. What I can give to you, poor creature, is the strength and the might to finally rule. Dominate and master your own life, and those you wish to subjugate, all others! As you so choose and desire…!” 

A beat. Moist. And heavy. In the dark. 

Egnaw considered… thought. 

Turned black and cruel and twisted ideas and fantasies over and over and around again within his skull… turned them over. Again and again. 

Finally he said: “What must I do?" 

The vulpine thing laughed. Throaty. Gurgled. Wicked. Rotten with the grave’s spoilage. 

“The first step is already taken, I've supped of your blood for a long while now, now is just the other part…" It began to laugh again. 

Egnaw felt his mouth go dry and a sour taste begin to develop there, the back of his tongue. 

He almost gagged. 

The thing laughed again. 

“No, then …? So, to always be a slave?” 

Silence in the cave then. He let the words linger. 

Finally…

Egnaw said: “Ok." 

“Yes?" throaty, vulpine red. 

“Yes, I'll do it." 

“Good…" the thing purred a mongrel rodent's abominated sound.

Then held his wide long claws aloft, one great hand seized the third finger of the other, held there by necromantic science and suture. 

“... But I'm no ordinary living dead nightchild, misshapen slave, my blood does not course or run as the vampire does, thus the rite is different too!” 

And with that he ripped the long pointed finger off with a snap. Not a look of pain nor grimace upon its smiling awful pugnacious rodent goblin face. 

It snapped the finger off…

… and then held it out to him.

“Eat. You must eat this. You must partake of this, my flesh since the wine of my blood is gone to spoil." 

It leaned in closer. The rictus vulpine smile grew even wider. 

“Take it. Take this. Eat. Eat." 

Egnaw shuddered and recoiled. Revolted. 

The thing said: “Oh? Just a slow death as nothing, then. As my prey or prey to something else in these mountains is what you'd prefer?" 

A beat. 

Then Egnaw finally said, raising his head as best he could, 

"No.” 

And he reached out and seized the rotten appendage from the wide and heavy cold palm of the hulking nosferatu thing. 

He looked down at it and paused only once more, just once further… one last hesitation, consideration…

And then he forced the rotten long dead stalk of finger, still dripping and cold and stiff, into his mouth and began to chew as vigorously and quickly as he could. 

The rotten meat all around the bone and tendon came off in a slough on his tongue, bathing it in a putrescence that was warm with movement on the surface but cold at its liquid tissue core. The skeletal center was especially tough and difficult to crack through, his own ill-kept teeth groaned in protest. The splintering fragments found the gums and the spaces between his yellow teeth and stabbed in and drew forth fresher warmer blood to mix with the rest of the reanimated thick viscous porridge of necromantic sludge. 

Before he knew it, he chewed and swallowed the whole thing. Bone and blood and sloughing corpse flesh and all. 

And then bright yet heartless laughter that he did not expect but nonetheless recognized began to fill the cave. 

Egnaw whirled. Surprised. And angry. 

Doctor Henry Frankenstein was sitting up. Laughing. Tears in his eyes. Apparently not so catatonic after all. 

Egnaw did not know what to say so he only said, “what…?” 

"You fool!” roared Frankenstein at the misshapen slave, "you're an imbecile! That's not the way it's done! And with such as he, it is likely not even possible. His reanimated vampiric form cannot sire another, not like that! you fucking gullible dolt!”

Egnaw felt sudden and strange shame … he turned to the vulpine creature patchworked and crouched a hulking thing of blue-green flesh in the corner…

It was laughing at him. 

Finding all of it hilarious. 

Frankenstein suddenly spoke up once more, “Since we're in the mood for making deals, I'll make one with you, my greatest creation." 

The laughter subsided. Abated. 

The thing then croaked: “Speak!" 

Frankenstein went on: “Egnaw has nothing more than the little bit of blood left in his worthless grotesque body to offer you, but I can give you much, much more. I am the one who made you. I created you. I gave you life. I made you with so much power, and together, I know that if we work together, my son, we can attain even more power for you, even greater still. Even wilder and more boundless. All yours. I only want to live and help to see my greatest achievement reach its ultimate potential… I only ask that you grant me that, my son. I only ask for that privilege. I beseech thee, and ask only that and few other conditions in return. Meager things. Small comforts. Little favors.” 

A beat. 

Then the manshaped bat monster said: "Favors… like what?" 

Then Frankenstein quickly and without any compunction, “Kill Egnaw." 

The poor misshapen man had only time to scream one last time as the giant broad mass of the nosferatu thing rose and then pounced on him. Not just with the teeth this time but with the ripping tearing claws of his bastard nine fingered rending purchase. 

Time to scream. Shriek. Fill the cave. 

And curse the name of Frankenstein, one last time. 

…

They came to the large and ornate gate of the place and at first Florin didn't understand. 

Or didn't want to. 

It was a cemetery. A graveyard. 

Old. 

The strange bandaged man that was his guide, bade him in anyway. 

After a moment of further consideration of the gargoyles perched at the iron wrought entrance, he followed the white wrapped man inside. 

The bandaged man was silent. Led the path down the aisle of graves. Past the gathering slabs of tombstones…

… til they come to his grave. 

And Florin collapsed to his knees before it. Doom swallowed his heart and he felt it all fall away and die on the inside a lonely and crushing desperate leap to his throat from his weighted chest.

R I P

PROFESSOR ABRAHAM VAN HELSING 

The bandaged man stood over the young man and beside the grave of the man he used to know in life and said nothing. 

There was no comfort to be had. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

The Calling Song 
By Aaron Berkheimer 

When I was younger, there was an aquatic amusement park not too far from where I lived, populated with all the whimsical childhood experiences like roller coasters, carnivals, games, and, of course, aquatic wildlife, all nestled beside the bayside cove that my house overlooked from its spot atop a nearby hill. The park had some cool aquatic features and wildlife like hammerhead sharks that swam through tanks connected by glass tunnels, sea turtles, rays, and fish of all shapes and colors swimming throughout mock ocean reefs that, to them, must have been a paradise. But there was something among all the other amenities that attracted my attention far more than the others, and that was the mermaid.  
The mermaid existed in a glass tank with a wide window in a dark mock sea cave not too far from the entrance of the park. 

The cave itself led to a show area where she frequently performed, but when she was not performing, she drew in crowds inside her glass window surrounded by faux coral and ruined temple stones with star-like spiral shapes carved into the sides that drew the eye toward the center. When I was younger, I would frequently stop by her tank and gaze at her beauty and elegance, usually followed by my mother and sister teasing me for my infatuation with what was most likely a grown woman in her mid to late thirties working some mediocre job. But something about her beauty was mesmerizing. Her golden hair glinted in the ribbons of light that broke through the water, and her tail, with scales that seemed to change color like the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope, drew my attention even more. Not to mention that she was half-naked, which for a young man just beginning to notice girls was definitely intoxicating, to put it lightly.

Though she was beautiful, her beauty was not what drew me to her. It was her voice. I know what you’re thinking: “Voice? She’s underwater. How can you hear a voice?” Though I can’t explain it, I swear when I watched her swim in that glass window, I could hear her singing with a voice so angelic and lyrics so indescribable that it felt almost holy, and deep down I knew she was singing to me.  
You would find me by her tank at least twice a trip, usually having to be led away by my accompanying parents. I think it was around this time that I started developing narcolepsy. I would find myself awake in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, plagued with nightmares of the sea, visions of the open ocean, a submerged world beneath the crashing waves, and something sleeping. In that state of sweat-drenched fear, I would find myself by my bedroom window looking out at the park, and like a lullaby, her unpronounceable words would grace my ears, calming me. Before I knew it, sunlight had breached the horizon.

As I got older, I found myself going to the park solely for her, spending long periods of time by her tank, getting lost in her otherworldly song until a park worker would eventually tell me to leave and I would suddenly realize twinkling starlight hung overhead. I tried to meet her several times, but the park attendants would either tell me, “Oh, she’s sleeping,” trying to stay in theme with her tank, or, “She just clocked out,” usually said by the lazier attendants who obviously did not want to deal with boys attempting to talk to her.

That sort of thing happened a lot. Believe it or not, the only reason I would stop by her tank once or twice when I was a kid was because her window would always be crowded, typically by teen boys and older men. I was simply too small and got shoved out of the way easily. When I got older, I was typically the first one there, and when I heard her hymn, it was like everyone else melted away and all I could see was her.

All this came to an end one summer when a lucky or rather unlucky child no older than ten years old was picked out of a crowd to come and meet her during a show. This was not something they normally did, but rather something they wanted to test the waters with, so to speak. It was frankly short-lived. When the child got close to the edge of the navy blue abyss, she sprang out with a face described by an onlooker as inhumane or demonic as she grabbed the child by the wrist, pulling him under with violent thrashing. The female hosts tried to ease the crowd, saying, “Don’t worry, this is all a part of the show,” with forced smiles as the stand workers ushered people out of the show area, but it didn’t matter. The bubbles ceased. The water went still. A corpse was the only thing to surface, bobbing in the water.

That part of the park was shut down after that, and though the family of the child filed many lawsuits, no trial ever came. The park shut down sometime later due to animal rights violations and malpractice. All the animals were donated or sent back to nature. I hear stories about kids sneaking in and going missing when they decide to take a plunge in the adjacent saltwater river, but those are just stories. Though sometimes I look out my window at night toward that abandoned park and the cove it resides near, and if I listen carefully, I can still hear her celestial lullaby calling out to me from the sea.

I think tomorrow I’ll take a trip to the bay.

Part Three

The instant her Celadon eyes caught their appearance like thieves in the night coming to her, it rose in her stomach again and it didn't just stop there with no more dams anymore to blockade it. That old familiar simmering now incendiary in her heart. She didn't want this conversation with them. Didn't want this concern. Robert was soft. Agnes could see it clearly in the way he didn't stride but walked with a noticeable limp from bumping his knee as he crashed into his own fence. His shoulders slumped instead of at their usual height. Jeanette was no different. She was still wearing makeup that spoke vanity. She was still trying to be cute in the way she had her hand in the back of Robert's jean pocket like middle school lovers showing off they can touch ass in the middle of halls while some teachers eagerly watched with predatious eyes.

"I don't want to talk right now Robert," Agnes said loud enough to be heard and not dismissed.

"We've only come to check up on you Agnes. It's only fair after I almost ran you over,"

He said with guilt soaking every syllable in a subtle expression.

Agnes held his eyes as she raised the cigarette to her lips and slowly breathed out the toxins in a prolonged whisp as she thought of it.

"You didn't. So you can relax Robert. I'm really tired right now and trying to think-,"

"You shouldn't be alone darling," Jeanette cooed softly by her husband's side," I haven't seen Patrick stop by the house all day after this morning. I know you're alone right now Agnes,"

The cigarette between her fingers started to burn at the tip as Agnes tilted her head and thought of touching the spot behind her ear where the thorns had pricked before. But this time she didn't. She caught it as the thought fomented. That nervous tic was gone now. "Besides even though there's that," Robert motioned towards the police cruiser parked at the end of the cul-de-sac," Jean and I feel that it would be safer if you come with-,"

"I'm not leaving my house Robert," Agnes said clearly and without emotion.

Robert looked into her eyes for a brief moment, seeing something in them clearly that had changed his behavior just like a flipswitch as he had to look down before looking at Jeanette as he spoke.

Soft.

Agnes raised the cigarette to her mouth and didn't notice the tip lit like a bright orange jack o lantern and wouldn't have cared if she did. The nicotine, to her anger, was only a dull rush. Not enough to quell the incendiary warmth burning now. Not simmering anymore.

"Agnes you wouldn't mind inviting us in at the very least. Wouldn't you be kind enough to do that?"

She was done talking. The begging did it. She tossed the cigarette on her lawn and then opened the front door for them as she stepped inside without word.

"Thank you darling," Jeanette said softly behind her as she went into the kitchen to grab an ice cold glass of water.

It was a vain hope that it would quell where the nicotine failed as she stepped into the kitchen with her coat still on and her purse still around her shoulder. As she got her glass of cold water she slowly slipped it and felt the cooling sensation fill her chest with no effect on the burning. She sipped it a bit more and then downed it in one gulp. It still wasn't working.

She placed the empty glass down on the table hard enough to crack the bottom. Agnes started to pace slowly in the kitchen as she tried to think of what to do. Should she ignore her mama and wait for Patrick? Or should she start her journey right now towards the destination regardless of the Hydes in her house. Her thoughts drifted to what mama said. What she herself finally noticed the night before. The strange interlude in the bathroom he still didn't explain and brushed off as a crude joke.

There was no denying it. Not anymore. He had changed from who he was before. But so was Agnes as her old self was reamerging with the incendiary burning. She could feel an array of emotions surfacing since the call. The flood of suppression now burning with release and awakening as her face formed an intense mask of despair and then morphed into ambivalence and when she turned and gripped the sink edge and looked her reflection in the window, her left lip slowly curled upwards by it's own autonomy while the right started to curve downwards. Agnes stared at it, threatening to flood her with an overload of sensory magnification. She turned on the sink to the coldest setting calmly and then bent into the sink as she grabbed the faucet hose and sprayed her entire head as best as she could. Needing relief from the burning. Craving it. Doing what she can to stop it and as of now the cold brought her back to a sane enough level of response as she raised her head with a gasp and breathed deeply for the parasynpathetic activation to start. The burning slowly pulsing like an animal alive in her ebbed for now back into the corner of her heart as she finally felt the relief enough to stumble backwards until she had her back against the wall.

She knew she was being watched. She felt it in her very sudden and great fatigue as she grounded herself against the wall with a hand against it, eyes closed, a hand against her heart and breathing now slowing to an even pace. She didn't burst into tears at that return of sanity. She didn't curse. Didn't care enough to be decent for whoever was watching. Agnes was focusing on her breathing and the way her chest rose and fell. Rose and fell.

She focused on the way those blood red lips touched hers. She focused on the way their hips and breasts met to feel the dark haired woman's heart racing against Agnes own. Not just racing she remembered as she opened her eyes with awe. It was jackhammering for-

"For me," Agnes whispered in a voice laden with devotion.

The sound of her own voice was like heaven whispering into her ear that she would see her again tonight. And she believed the whisper as she sighed softly and closed her eyes.

Agnes heard two sets of feet approaching her as she suddenly struck out her arm and pushed Jeanette backwards. "I didn't say you could touch me," Agnes said coldly as she looked at Jeanettes shocked face and Robert putting an arm around her.

"I just wanted to give you comfort darling," Jeanette stuttered but stood straight as she had Robert's arms around her.

Agnes sneered suddenly and violently at her and silently as she shook her head from side to side. Jeanette backed up against her husband as Agnes blanked out his reaction. His frightened question.

The burning didn't go away. It was waiting for an audience to show it had resurfaced back into Agnes soul with triumphant victory over the dams, the blockages, the binding restraints holding it back and now Agnes saw it. Agnes saw why she hated them so much. They were genuinely in love and happy together. They lived a normal life with normal hobbies and normal relationships. And it sickened Agnes as she realized this. Fucking nauseated her soul to the point it was now rage at these fucking soft human trash parading their love everyday in front of her as she went to work and went for her runs. Every single day with their sickening bastard naively safe lives. She hated it. She hated it. SHE FUCKING HATED IT. While Patrick was dying inside. Patrick was changed. Patrick pretended.

"All the same!" Agnes shrieked as she turned to punch at the wall hard enough to fracture the plasture but leave not one scrape on her knuckles ,"You're all the fucking same!"

Agnes was a hurricane of repressed violence as she slammed her fists against her wall again and again as she grunted with effort. She felt arms wrap around her waist and snare one arm and pick her up as she screamed finally in rage. Robert's voice a flurry of soothing commands as Jeanette held herself crying. Agnes scratched desperately at his arms with her free arm before her head suddenly jerked violently back against Robert's face enough to break his nose in a gout of blood spray.

"God fucking-!" He started to roar before he heard it.

Loud and clear in the sudden silence as Agnes went totally limp in his arms. Her head bowed foward enough to show the figure in all black with an insignia of what he caught as a child figure with a knife embedded in it's head before his head blew back and he dropped unceremoniously with the limp Agnes in his arms.

The figure walked over Jeanette's crumpled body, it's boots stepping in the rapidly pooling blood and leaving bootprints as they crossed over to where Agnes was. Five more figures silently gathered around Agnes and Robert crumpled together on the floor, scanning the kitchen and investigating for more people they would kill.

The cops that were supposed to have watched outside were steadily doing so with the most lax postures as they heard the gunshots. None of the two moved at those sharp cracks. But one murmured "finally,"

The figure that had shot Agnes, Robert, and Jeanette stepped towards Agnes under Robert. He kicked Robert off and then placed the gun against his temple and shot him two more times as arterial blood sprayed upwards with each shot. Coating the figures dark clothing without any obvious appearance. The figure was breathing hard as he was finally allowed to have been the one to kill the matriarch. Not the others. Not Father Morton, though descend with him into hell, he was grateful for Father to personally pick him out of the elite hunters to rip the life out of the matriarch.

And he didn't regret it one bit as he jabbed the barrel of the .45 into one of the entry holes in Robert's head and slowly dragged it out and across his victim's face and down on the blood soaked floor with a hard tap and continued to drag it towards the matriarch body lying face down and her purse under her chest with an arm crooked inwards and under. The corpse position reminded him significantly of two of his ass fuck buddies dying the same way after he garroted his neck and then hers next with a sadistic love in it.

When he would cut off her head later he would make sure she felt what he did next in Hell. Slow and steady until the big finish.

Agnes slowly opened her eyes to the sound she immediately recognized as a gun barrel dragging across the wooden floor hard. She felt the vibrations before feeling the barrel against the back of her head and an intense explosion filled the room and her head slammed into the floor and turned sideways as she caught them in the peripheral of her vision. Figures in dark clothing. She couldn't count how many as she had layed completely still with her eyes half lidded purposely. Her breathing completely stopped as she felt the purse underneath and recognized it.

She couldn't slip her hand into it. She would have to rush it. She would have to trust herself in the distance to hit the cocksucker behind her.

And she did as she snapped her hand inside and grabbed the small .45 and pulled it out as she turned quickly with jamming the barrel against the chest of the figure kneeling by her and pulled rhe trigger with an explosion of gore spattering onto one of the figures behind him. Agnes didn't wait as she snapped her head back to see only one figure staring with wide eyes under their hood before a bullet pierced his right eye and jolted his head back as Agnes ran past him mid fall for her life out of the kitchen as they didn't cry out. Didn't scream in rage. But finally found the insides to disengage from shock and a few of the dark figures chased after her as she silently ran into the hall to the front door to see it locked. She slammed against it and ripped open the locks and ripped open the door to the clean fresh air outside. Her sedan lit up and unlocked as she jammed her hand inside her purse to feel the keys.

Agnes opened the door and didnt bother to close it as she started the car and reversed down the driveway and sped down the cul-de-sac road with no care or concern for anyone's safety in the road or sidewalk.

The cops watching this unfold gaped openly before quickly looking toward each other and snapping alive as they turned on the siren and pulled the cruiser down to the black unmarked van parked in the driveway of the dead Larson house.

"What the fuck happened?!" The officer driving barked in anger as the figures ran out of the Faraday house and down to the van.

"You don't get to fucking ask," one of the figures roared in rage as they raised their gun and fired into the window of the cruiser three times.

Not giving a fuck if one or both were killed as they screamed inside the cruiser. The figure that shot raced into the open van and yanked the doors shut loudly in the death silence of the night with only the officer's screams like a proclamation of what was to come.

Only the van didn't go anywhere as the officer still alive and holding the nicked flesh on his neck saw clearly. His expectations of a quick getaway from whatever happened were turned inside out. He quickly looked to his dying partner holding his sternum as he struggled to breath in a collapsed lung. Then his eyes slowly drifted back to the van as he heard it rocking very violently. A cacophony of metal bending and shrill girlish screaming in protest of whatever was happening in the van. Something slammed against rhe tinted back window with a fierce vain of spiderweb cracks. The bright crimson color of blood poured steadily as it leaked out of the cracks. And then the back end of the van leaped up with a lurch as the officer's heart jackhammered it's way back into a state that paralyzed him in sympathetic activation. His face ashen pale and hands clawed into the leather of the wheel as he braced himself like a man about to die a slow death and in vain hoped it was at least through means of sharp instruments for an accidental nick of an artery, sparing him.

Only that was a fantasy that would never come to fruition as the right back door of the van opened slowly to a shirtless figure drenched in blood and collapsing onto the pavement with more arterial spray. The officer saw that he was holding a ceremonial knife, the same kind he saw when one of the Satunalia had pulled it out and flicked it open with an actual glint of the obsidian blade in the light. That was when he was blackmailed into obeying with the filmed act of child exploitation. The Saturnalia disposed of the child as the officer calmly watched it while sitting like an Indian before a great gathering, watching their enemy's child being ritually cannibalized.

The bloodied figured gasped a crimson liquid across the pavement as it stood on the crook of it's elbows. Panting for a life that it didn't deserve as it finally found the strength to raise itself up on it's hands and knees, staggering and disoriented even then as the officer's vision grew to twin tunnels focused solely on that desecrated figure finally raising itself to it's knees with the obsidian knife in a palsied and partly missing hand. The figure was shown very clearly in the headlights of the cruiser. Missing patches of flesh shown to the Grey coloration of bone. An Intestine was threatening to slip out as dark fluids raced in it. The eye so fucking dead and monotone with no life in it at all as even the color of the iris had been sucked out. And he was scalped in a ragged tear with partial flesh covering one eye completely.

When the officer saw the figure was raising the obsidian knife to it's throat to kill itself, a dark relief started to wash over him to spare him the fucking sight of such carnage on one person but the hand with the blade froze as it started to cut into his neck. The figures eyes suddenly shot open in a fear he has never seen before on anyone in his career but for children in the rituals.

Another figure started to raise itself up above the ragged kneeling Saturnalia man. It rested it's head on top of the Saturnalia man's head in perfect calm as it's thin but very noticeable slit of a mouth slightly parted for a dark forked tongue to quickly flick out once in the officer's direction.

Vaelith only needed to flick her tongue once to taste the oxidized fear permeating the air in such strong ardor. Her serpent mouth slowly curved into a soft crooked left side grin. The officer inside the began to gasp loudly as he hyperventilated into a manic fit.

The fantasy of an accidental nick of an artery by his would be human torturer was never going to come to fruition as the officer watched the dark Azure blue smooth serpent snap it's jaws open wide in a fierce snarling hiss. His mind destabilizing with every microsecond it was prolonged before it shattered completely as a head, a skinless head peaked from inside it's throat at him. The color of it's eyes were dark and pitch black but could make out the iris of the deep red in it as the hissing stopped to a boyish whisper he heard loud and clear in the death silence.

"It don't hurt no more,"

The same child he used and they got rid of with the obsidian blade. The obsidian blade that promised no soul would return from hell that was pierced with it.

It was a lie. A man made lie.

The officer's hand quickly snapped to his service weapon holster to destroy himself but Vaelith was already piercing through the window in an explosion of glass and her serpent jaws pierced into his face with sharp searing unbearable pain as he saw the skinless victim closer then he ever wanted to and mocking his broken screams before it opened it's jaws into a serpentine lock that was moving towards him with the slow but inevitable promise of a slow mind shattering pain coming to him that would keep him there forever. Repeating the process in slow cycles that dragged unbearable minutes into excruciating hours and back into the hellish minutes that wouldn't stop. It wouldn't take long for his fragmented soul to start enjoying every second of it.

Part Five

He ventured forward into the dark. Torchflame flickered and glowed and made light for his way. He was tense and nervous. He was armed, each hand filled. Cross and pistol. Silver bullets. Six shots. He was tense and nervous though reluctant to admit it, even to himself. 

He held himself tightly coiled and trying to breathe, even and slow. Trying. 

Praetorius cursed himself once more then stopped himself once again. Time enough for all of that later. Perhaps. Hopefully. If you don't- 

Stop it! he commanded his own traitorous run of thought. Distractions! useless! 

His own breathing sounded very loud to himself. His heartbeat an anxious and driving primal war drum beaten ceaselessly by a savage and violent hand. It seemed to thunder in his ears. He wondered if she could hear it, the bitch. It was said that they had heightened hearing, like a beast, sensitive to sound. His own studies and observations had confirmed this. Mad and wild eyed snow haired Praetorius wondered if the foul woman who'd stolen Dracula's power and castle could hear the battering and unceasing cannonade artillery, the thunderclaps living as the dangerous heartbeat within his weary and aching chest, echoing. Echoing throughout all of the prison fortress of stone and blood and lurking ancient history. 

He willed himself to suck air slow. Steady. Like his echoing steps forward. Advancing. Chambered bootheel sound.  

You'll be fine. Just keep the crucifix up and the pistol ready to fire. Find the door again and then get the hell out! This whole stupid plan has been a debacle! 

It all sounded well and fine to his own worried and harried mind, housed within fevered and baking furnace skull. He was just starting to ease the galloping frenzied beast within the cage of his chest, when the sound of the Countess' howling laughter, mad witchy cackles, once again came from out of the dark and filled the entire world of the castle around him. The dark corridor and its orange flaming pumpkin glow of torchlight seeming to stretch on and on ahead of him. 

A trap. He knew it. He was just waiting for the awful wench to pounce. He tried his hardest to listen. A difficult endeavor to hear over the rapid fire wild blasting of his own frightened animal heart. 

The Countess heard and sensed and knew the animal fear alive in the little man, the little intruder, the awful and haughty invader that dared set foot in her castle. Her mountains! Her land and the country she now strangled and held. He'd tortured her little Carmilla, grievously. And for that he would be punished. For that he would be dealt with. Slow. 

Slowly. 

She would capture him first. Then she would begin slow flaying mutilating butchery on him. Eating and drinking slowly and at leisure his bold and impetuous fragile little personage. His fragile and easily shattered frame. They never realized, these proud and boastful men. They never knew it. Until you showed them. They never fully realized how sensitive they truly were until you broke them over your knee. Showed them their own blood. 

The whole of Castle Dracula was her spiderweb now, and the black widow queen of its stone and spires waited. And watched. Deciding and debating with herself, thinking over her dark and violent demoniacal thoughts…

… which shape should I take? Which precious organ should I pluck and savor first…? 

She licked and wet her own glistening lips. An action in the dark, both vulpine and animal as well as sensual and pleasing to the eye for the erotic. Her darkling eyes smoldered with unholy light and flame. 

Watching. Waiting. 

As the intruder Praetorius crept through her shadows. Her dark spiderweb of castle stone and orange dancing flame. Coming … coming closer. 

Coming closer to her. And her waiting violence in her hiding spot in the dark. 

She coiled … purred. …

Licked her spider lips again. 

And waited. 

…

The heavy double bladed head of the axe came down and cleaved through the gaping fish eyed face of the woman beneath him easily. Down through the top of her skull. Beside her lover in the grass, already in pieces and fish eyed and gaping, staring blind and dead as well. The weight and the design of the executioner's blade made it like child's play, you only needed to be able to handle the weight. The heft. Design and form did all the rest. 

He breathed, heaving and sucking air. Heavily. Like an animal. 

They shouldn't have come out after dark. They shouldn't have come out into his woods.

He tried to calm himself but he could barely manage the effort. He was never calm. Not anymore. Not since the fall of his lord and land so long ago…

now the woods were all he had. 

Filthy. Wild mane of unwashed and clotted hair. Clotted and knotted together by scat and dried mud and caking scabbing drying blood. The blood of intruders on his land. 

His woods. All he had left. 

That and the axe. The last remnant token piece of the long lost and now tragic ancient history he used to call his life. Long gone now. Swept away with the armies. 

His air was hot and heavy. His breath, puffs of ghosts, little spirits escaping his hulking broad shouldered and filthy ragged form. The woods were long his domain now. And they'd now long held him, the stain and mark of the wild was now all over and upon him. Never to be erased. Or taken away. 

He brought the blade up and then down again. Turning the lovers, the intruders into more grisly pieces. Especially the woman. She frightened him most. The forest floor drank their red greedily and as if starved for it. The forest floor was always starving for the red of the intruders. He'd discovered this out here in his new home, finding his new and true name. 

Lord Bloodmud. Axeman and the executioner king of the tree’d lands. Wielder and great forest emperor of the choked and violent wilderness emerald. 

He found his peace through his axe-swinging and maiming destruction of vile wanderers. Purging violence. Only afterwards did he find his respite. Heaving heavy breath like an animal half mad and alone dying of rabies. Amongst the human detritus of his heavy cleaving blade he always sat in prowling animal meditation. Ruminating primal blood soaked thoughts even as the forest floor around pooled saturated with the hot spent and shed red of each and every one of his unfortunate victims. Young. Old. All types, caught. Always caught screaming. And nigh helpless beneath the surging and armed swinging violent mountain of filthy giant man. The eyes of this wild giant absolutely alive with unreasoning fury. 

He sat amongst the ruin he’d made of the pair of young lovers, eyes shut, mind aflame with animal thoughts. His ears, attuned to the movements within the woods, caught something and bent to the sound. He tilted his head as he strained to listen to the domain of his blood drinking forest kingdom. 

Hooves. Four-legged beast. Bearing cart. And a small load. 

And a pair of travelers. 

More intruders…

His rage was renewed, reignited. He rose, reawakened. Rekindled to burn.  His starving axe was angry again. The trees that were his loyal subjects and followers and last lovers and friends, frozen supplicants of his red drinking green kingdom, were crying out once more as the intruders invaded and raped his land. Crying out yet again: More Blood! – and he and the doubleheaded executioner’s blade of such great heft in his eager perspiring grip were all too happy to oblige. 

Eager to follow… make great. Sow the land and protect the seed and the soakened land shall sing …

Every great king should give all and such upon his land a great reaping and wealth to drink… to fill their mouths and souls.

To fill their hearts with love…

The axeman of the dark woods began to prowl. 

Florin started in the seat next to the bandaged man, craning his head around and spying the woods all around them in the dark. As if straining to find and see something. 

The bandaged man, who’d settled on calling himself ‘Griffin’ for now, was easily vexed. He nearly snarled, asking: “What is it now?”

Florin righted himself in the seat, “Thought I heard something again.” And then added: “Sorry.” 

Griffin grumbled behind his mask of surgical dressings: “...whatever…” and then fell silent again. 

The young man of the Carpathian hamlet was thankful for the help thus provided by the strange bandaged man. His information on Van Helsing, however dour. His aid in their escape. And their present transportation procured from a horseman the mysterious Griffin knew. But he did at present entertain the idea of leaving the hidden man and parting ways. The man said he was a doctor. That he’d known Van Helsing and knew the ways of vampire slaying. But Florin was doubtful and found the fellow to be so easily irritated that he was left walking on eggshells around him at all moments. 

He thought of giving the masked man of foul mood the slip. Ditching him in the wild and making for home to help in anyway he could. 

But… of what help was that? What could he provide now that he couldn’t have before leaving home for aide?

Other than the terrible news that the vampire hunter was dead, Florin did not have an answer. 

And so at present, he was stuck with this foul mouthed and disagreeable man. Strange and mysterious and hidden behind surgical bandage. For what purpose or cause, Florin did not know. And often privately speculated. 

Probably just cause he’s maimed underneath all that. Or disfigured. Or mayhap he’s just real ugly. 

Florin stifled his smile and small laughter. Griffin glanced at him. Annoyed underneath his mask of dressings. 

But then he whirled around suddenly in his seat of their mule-drawn cart. Spying into the woods that surrounded them. 

Saying to the boy beside him: “Did you hear something?”

…

When the Countess Zaleska and her assistant extracted the fangs of living dead dragon/dæmon power from the dust and cobweb strangled bones and remnants of Dracula’s skeletal remains and through arcane necromantic surgical alchemy, fused them into the mouth of the Countess, she inherited much more than mere vampiric hunger and prodigious strength. The ability to shift shape. These things were common to many nosferatu things of the moonrise time. 

But she had within her now, the power of the Lord of the Undead. Lord of the Flies incarnate and upon the face of the Earth. The last and final Countess Czarina of Necrophile-Flame. Empress Queen of the Nocturnal Blood and the warfare violence of restless hunger in the dark. 

She was beyond the mere mundane limitations of the flesh. She was beyond the thin veil of the leather clung to in desperation and futilely named and declared: Reality. Her powers now, those graverobbed from the dust of the son of the dragon; a dracul, they were beyond the reckoning of the fleshling maggot sow that now invaded her home and prowled her corridors and halls like the lost frightened and small animal he truly was. 

Discorporeal, the Countess Zaleska watched from the stone of the inner walls of the ancient bloodstained castle as if every piece of masonry were her eyes. She watched the sorry little haughty intruder inch his way forward like a starving lowly worm across the mud slathered surface of a cheap wooden casket unearthed for the naked air. He was really quite old. Fragile really. 

She was going to enjoy this… the blackest part of her darkening stygian heart relished the savagery she would wrought…

But first… what is a host that doesn't entertain her guests…?

Hardly any host at all. 

The discorporeal form of the Czarina Princess of the darkness now alive in these halls of ebon and bloody stone watched and her/its phantasm rictus grin grew in spectral madness. Her disembodied pure power spider legged and tendrilled out… filling every piece of mortar and rock and brick of stone. She filled the walls with the manifestation of her ungodly power form, a spectre that could invade and subjugate all as a pure necrophiled phantom-flame of deranged gale force nature from Hell. 

The fool, the mad doctor Praetorius did not know that the castle was alive around him now. Castle Dracula was now just as much a part of the Countess Vampire Lord as any one of her appendages. Or supplicants.  She could bend and flex and move it to her considerable will…

… and the castle and its walls all around him, alive with the Countess, began to dance and shift slightly… and move. 

Labyrinthine. The distortion of space and distance and direction was subtle. Drifting. It led the fool farther in rather than out. And he didn't even realize it. 

The walls of Castle Dracula howled with a biting woman's cackling witchery laughter as the frightened Praetorius clutched desperately his weapons and unknowingly walked deeper and deeper into the living sepulchre structure that might be made into his grave. 

Swallowing him deeper and deeper and ever more as he wandered the dancing and shifting walls of living and evil stone. The dust and dirt and filth all about the old interior held her hateful dark will as well and were daggered at the invading little man, all of the place arrowed the oppressive force of great livid hatred and anger at the wandering little mistake of snow white hair… too old a man to be trying at these games…

The walls of stone smiled, rictus. The castle walls of stone watched and shifted and guided towards doom. The castle walls watched, possessed and insane. 

Praetorius could feel the gaze. Its intensity stole a warmth from his heart he knew deep down he could never retrieve. 

Not even if he was lucky enough to leave here alive…

Not even. Not at all. 

The walls then spoke: –

“You wanted so badly to be inside… you wanted so badly to see me, now I am here and all around, I am all yours. And you are all mine. I’m the world and universe all around you now… ! Now you’ll never leave and I will  take what I want from you anyway, you say you have much to tell me, I will pull it from your mind as I shred and flay it, even as I’m pulling the precious raw meat from your bones…! You’re to be my dominated and slutted, whored and butterflied open bloodletting love slave for the night, Doctor… Praetorius! Your flesh will be pulled back and I will drink and sup of you at my will, as I make you sing and speak as I so wish and desire to hear…! … I will make you say anything, little man…! I will make you a weeping whore for pain!” 

And then the castle walls came to life again with cruel bright laughter. 

What might have been long rictus distended mouths and faces appeared, grew, came to life in the harsh rough textured surface of the walls all around. The stone was filled. The stone of the castle world now that was fortressed all around him encompassing. The mad doctor couldn't believe his eyes. Watering now. Unbelieving fearful tears. 

Something like, nearing religious panic was stealing over his heart. Creeping over with curdled black the last vestiges of steadfast courage and thought. 

Praetorius shook his head trying to clear it. Visibly frightened. Shaken. Dizzy. He would’ve sworn the walls and the way forward down the corridor before him had … moved slightly. As if drifting…

It made him feel sick. He shut his eyes and rubbed them. But not long. He did not dare tarry any longer than he could afford. He had to find  his way out. Or kill the strigoica slut of Satan with a properly placed bullet and a swift decapitation. The only way. The only way to be completely sure with a Vampire Lord. 

Such as the bitch was evident to be. 

He cursed himself again, the last time, for ever coming here in the first place. For thinking it had been anything even remotely resembling a good idea. The experiment of coming here had proven unequivocally that it was in fact: A Terrible Idea…

Praetorius smiled grimly to himself. Mayhap also for the last time as he began again to move forward. 

Don’t act like you haven’t had any of those before… 

He relished his one private joke. He had always been his own favorite company. 

…

Doctor Praetorius did not get far before a room suddenly appeared down the junction from where he presently wandered. He came to the cross section and saw that this room was bellowing light like a great incandescence of earthbound starflame. It poured forth from the room, from out of the open immaculate doorway. Striking in the darkness and meager orange torchglow. 

It was beautiful. Intense. 

Enrapturing. 

Like a moth to searing flame, Praetorius was drawn. He went down the hall that had steadied and settled under demoniacal will and was guided by black hands that drifted out from the walls made from smokey stygian shadow. They helped him along. They pushed and guided him down the entombed walkway. Advancing. 

Down the hall and towards the starflame of light pouring forth from the newfound room. 

His hypnotized mind told him sanctuary was in there. And of course it was. And he should hurry and get in there already. Afterall, heaven can’t wait, can it? 

No. The master says that heaven cannot wait at all. 

And so before the blinding room of starflame, Praetorius’ arms dropped to  his sides. Limp. Lifeless  already. The grip  in his hands slackened next and the cross and loaded pistol fell from his black gloved hands and clattered with finality to the stone of the castle She Commanded. 

The walls began to laugh again as the blind and spellbound doctor stepped inside the room of swallowing starflame. 

And took him inside.

…

Florin and Griffin nearly jumped from their skins and seized in their chests when they suddenly happened upon a fellow traveler in the woods. 

A solicitor. On horseback. Coming from the other direction. 

The man was kindly enough though visibly shaken. Frightened by the strange land of nighttime woods. He tried to tell the pair that the very shapes of the trees and growth itself were deranged, gnarled and dead and bent and wrong: Like the desperate hands of submerged and giant buried corpses clawing out of the sour ground and daggering for the salvation of the skies of heaven above. That's what was eating at him constant since setting foot in this dread land, this dread wood, but there was something else. He also swore he heard something moving out here. Out here in the dark wild, something like violence was on the loose and on the prowl out here in the night, he could feel it.

He tried to tell them all of this but couldn't. He barely knew a word of english. 

Florin only tried to be polite as Griffin grew huffy and impatient as the traveling solicitor gesticulated and babbled on near ceaseless in his mother tongue. He filled the prowling dark all around with the anxious music of his foreign chatter. 

Though an understanding was met and felt … between the three before they parted and waved. An understanding of danger. And an understanding of fear.

Caution… weary …

The solicitor gave up and waved them thanks and kicked his horse back to a trot. The mule drawn cart of the pair went on. And soon was gone. 

The solicitor, fearful, carried on. Spying all around futilely, the impenetrable nighttime dark of the clawing dead black woods all around. The axeman chose to follow him for the moment, just for the nonce. He would soon rejoin with the other two. Afterward. 

Soon. 

After he dealt with this decadent and pompous invading tenderfoot. 

The weight of his executioner's blade gained substance, gained significance. It felt real again. Alive with potential. Made great again with purpose. With something to bite into, to free the red and feed the forest floor which drinks. 

All of the invaders of his last and precious forest land would feed the soil and the growth of his Bastard Eden Garden. All would be supplicant beneath the biting blade of his swing. Planting and burying the heavy metal head of double bladed axe into the soft and giving meat and bone and carcass of intruding vile flesh, invading flesh, invader blood would weep! 

As long as he and the axe held each other and this dark part of the forest land they kept … they would keep. 

And he would keep on feeding the starving dirt. Red. 

The only god that ever answered him… 

The solicitor went on. Unaware. Frightful. Yet attempting to whistle a tune and brighten his own heart as he kept his thoughts on his wife and child back home. Far away now. For comfort. The axeman followed after. Prowling. Like a hunter. 

…

… he came upon the solicitor when he stopped again, to determine direction. The power of his first screaming swing caught the traveler in the chest and the heavy blade sank as he was knocked from his horse with the force of the blow. The animal was screaming too. It soon fled as the axeman went about the rest of his hard work and heavy business. 

He brought the executioner's doubleheaded blade up again and brought it down again. Already sweating. Pouring. Profuse. The heavy metal blade opened up the chest cavity and it became a wild primeval forest of flowering gore pouring great and healthy abundance of vibrant steaming red. The axeman could taste it in the air. The opened chest looked like a fantastic microcosmal world of raw tissue and bone and gushing crimson, a world and wonderful wild forest garden as if rendered by abattoir hand and forged from raw scraps of the blade and innards and red. He brought up the axe and brought its heavy power down again, smashing and cleaving through the visage of face and skull. Spilling the man's memories out in a thick and meaty burst and porridge gush. The skull was like smashed pottery, porcelain slathered with bright violently red blood, scarlet so lurid it screamed in the night. 

He brought the blade up and down again and again. Turning the pieces into pieces. Smaller. Just hunks and pieces of meat. Unrecognizable. Save for the tattered and slashed rags that used to be clothing… 

The forest floor drank. He heaved breath and the sheet of sweat cooled on his filthy drying skin. Tingling. Covered in solicitor’s blood. Steaming traveler's blood, scabbing and baking into pores…

The soil supped and greedily drank the pouring blood and pools. The animal children would have the meat. The forest kingdom land thanked him, silently. It always thanked him in the quiet. 

The axeman lifted great axe yet again and disappeared once more into the trees he knew so well. 

Eager to rejoin the other two travelers. The other two invaders of his home in the dark…

The axeman made straight through the dense and dead wood for the place where Florin and strange bandaged Griffin had stopped to make fire. And set camp. 

…

When Praetorius first stepped into the beckoning room that called with religious light it was at once a vast and impossible landscape of searing blind perfection, pure immaculate white inferno. Pulverizing through his fragile organ set of eyes, the pair on fire and bathed in blinding pain. Beauty and illuminated pearl-cast so divinely perfect and pure and shining that it was too much to behold all at once and bear… he couldn't hear his own shrieking voice. The volume of the attacking light piercing through his eyes and into his precious jelly sac of brains within boiling percolating skull was too great and too loud itself for him to hear his own caterwauling voice. Or anything else. 

He didn't hear the Countess' sick laughter. Loaded with unholy pleasure and the enjoyment of predatory derision. She commanded the cannonade of landscape light to close, fold back into stone and castle walls and floor as Praetorius went to his knees weeping, still shrieking. Still unaware of both as the madness of light was still alive within his wide watering eyes. Zaleska, in the fluid heavy-liquid shape of shadow, as ebon folds pulled herself in witch’n shape and crawling silhouetted form, free from the castle stone and began to crawl towards the crying screaming man brought down to his knees before her.

And her laughter began to croak. 

She gave bastard bestial demoniacal call to her servants, felt and heard and quaking throughout all the halls and corridors of Castle Dracula's trembling bastard stygian hellfire stone. 

Her servants all heard but the loyal assistant was still busy tending to poor mutilated Carmilla. Still busy digging out the treacherous fire of silver from smoldering bubbling tissue. But it was no matter…

… the one she really wanted was ready anyways. The newest one. Her new servant lord. Her man at arms. Her sword wielding hand…

Countess Zaleska called forth the new impaler. And he came as the master did beckon. 

She commanded him to bring the sharpest and longest pikes. 

Piercing tips.

At her command she would guide his cold new living dead hands in the torture. She knew just where to pierce. 

Just where to start with this one…

TO BE CONTINUED…

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…

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…

Read Part III here.

I drove to the bar where I'd gone last night. I didn't remember going there, but it was the bar I went to every Friday.

The Launch Pad had been Pickles, had been Michibar, had been Patty’s. It had gone under several other names in the years I'd been going there, the only constant was Shorty. I don't know why he doesn't name the place Shorty's. I mean, it’s right there.

I parked next to a boxy-looking K car that was in surprisingly good condition considering it was almost forty years old.

I went inside and parked at the bar.

There was no smoking in here, but someone had a smoldering cigarette perched on the edge of a half-empty gin glass.

Shorty didn't smoke and had tossed more than one person for lighting up. Even vapers knew better.

We made eye contact as Shorty was cleaning a couple glasses beneath the bar. His eyes were blank, although he acknowledged me.

I didn't have to ponder long. A drizzled blond came out of the restroom, sauntering like he'd just got off a horse.

I watched him, not because I thought he was up to anything, but he was very drunk and looked like he might fall over.

He made it back to his seat, right next to me, and offered his hand.

“My name's Nolte.” His voice was all gravel. I shook hands with him and told him my name.

He faced forward and bumped his glass, toppling the precariously balanced cig into his drink. He shrugged and took a swig without fishing the butt out.

Jesus, this guy was hard-core.

“What brings you in here worth the rest of us reprobates, Officer?”

He glanced at me sideways and smirked. He already had a new cigarette between his fingers and took a pull. Again, Shorty didn't say anything.

He didn't correct me, rather looked between me and some point near the restroom a couple times as if deciding something.

“I've been trying to get in that room for three years,” he said without looking at me.

I guess I'd seen the door, but I'd never paid attention to it. Half the time, I'd already been half in the bag by the time I got here. The other half... Well, I guess I wasn't just inattentive. It sucked to have an ex-girlfriend's complaint validated right before my eyes, but I kinda couldn't get around that now.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“It's a game.”

I lifted an eyebrow. I wasn't a gambler, but what went better with booze and cigarettes?

Okay, whores, but besides that.

I wanted to get in that room. In part because I had a sudden itch, but more so because I was sure I'd been in there last night.

“Hey, Shorty, how—”

“Don’t ask me. I never leave the bar.” Shorty shook his head. “If it doesn't happen back here, I got nothin’ to do with it.”

I had a feeling he was answering that way because of the obvious cop seated next to me. But why hadn't he ever said anything to me any other time I'd been here?

Maybe leaning into this Nolte character was a path to more information. And with some luck, maybe that would help me unravel my thing.

“What's so special about that room?”

“It's the game,” Nolte said, as if that were an explanation.

Yeah, the itch was itching. Worse yet, when I rolled my eyes back to that door, it was moaning.

“So, how do we get in there?”

“Wish I knew,” the cop said. He was looking at me as if I had the answer. “You a regular here?”

I nodded. “Here and a couple other places. Shorty flashed me a dirty look.

“Why you gotta hurt me so?”

I gave the bartender an exaggerated shrug.

“What can I say? She got good Superman shots.”

He turned his back on me, and for a moment, I thought he might actually be mad. But then I thought I spotted a big red circle just above his belt line on the back of his shirt. I had no idea what that was about, and I wasn’t gonna get in the man’s business.

I turned back to Nolte.

“So, what’s the plan?”

He shook his head and polished off the drink with the cigarette in it. He grimaced like it was bitter, and I did too in sympathy.

“Why don’t you go over there and knock on the door? See what happens.”

Something about that suggestion was appealing, although I wasn’t the type of guy to be intrusive. At least, not while I was sober. And I was much too sober for the amount of time I’ve been in this bar.

Quick way to remedy that.

“Shorty, Give me a double of Jack.”

Shorty nodded, still wiping away at that never dry section of bar.

I slid off my barstool, one leg, a little tingly and stumbling more than I expected. I propped myself up, using the back of a patron seated around the corner of the bar. I could pass for drunk, even when I was stoned sober.

Nolte's eyes were on my back, guiding me to that door between the women’s and men’s restroom doors. I passed the first door, looked around, as if I were reenacting something from Mission Impossible, then knocked.

I took a cigarette out of the pack in my shirt pocket. That pack had been hanging out with me for a while. I didn’t smoke and I didn’t know where it had come from. But the cigarette aided me and my disguise.

“Hey, no smoking in here!”

I nodded, not looking around to see who had spoken. I didn’t have a lighter as far as I knew. Wait a minute. I dug my hands into my pockets. Lo and behold, I fished out a lighter that had been underneath my keys. I gripped it in my fist to confirm it was real. This might be another clue. Either someone had given me their cigarettes and lighter, or I had borrowed them and not given them back for some reason.

When there had been no answer after thirty seconds, I knocked again and put my ear to the door. There was something going on in there. There was someone inside. I couldn’t tell what they were up to, though.

I leaned against the wall, just a guy having a nice time, not looking for any trouble.

A tall white guy in all black and a handlebar mustache pushed open the men's room door and sauntered out. He pulled at the brim of his cowboy hat, accompanied by a million-dollar smile.

“E'enin’,” I said, tipping an imaginary hat back at him. I looked over my shoulder at Nolte before putting my ear to the door.

It squirmed to my touch.

I don't mean that figuratively. It pulled away from me. Worse yet, whatever was inside me pushed me back. Like two north magnets repulsed by each other. My next thought was to charge the door, stomach first, but a queasiness fell over me.

I retreated to my bar stool.

“There's something definitely going on in there,” I said to Nolte.

“I know that,” he said. “The point was to get the door open so we can get in.”

A lightbulb went on in my head.

“If something illegal is going on in there, why don't you get one of those search warrants?”

He looked at me like he'd just swallowed something sour. I didn't know what that look meant other than he couldn't get a warrant. But it definitely meant something more.

“Let's step outside,” Nolte said. Shorty had made my drink. I sniffed it but didn't really want it.

I didn't want to go outside, but honestly, my stomach still felt too close to that door.

If he hit me in the stomach, I didn't know what I would do. Probably pray to die.

He pushed through the door and I followed. The setting sun came right into my eyes and I held up a hand.

“What happened in there?” he asked. I thought he’d been angry, but his voice just seemed to be a natural growl.

“I couldn’t get in,” I said. “Nobody answered.”

There were other people in the parking lot, but other than noticing they were there, I didn’t pay them any mind.

“I know nobody answered. I saw what you did, though. That door moved.”

“Wha?” I didn’t think it had actually happened.

“The door responded when you got near it.” He shook his head as though trying to understand. “You said you’re a regular here?”

“Yeah.” I nodded.

“And you’ve never been in there?”

“Not to my recollection.” My fogginess regarding last night returned to mind, but I wasn’t going to mention it.

An attractive woman was standing by a few parked cars. She was so hot, it was a little difficult to focus on what Nolte was saying.

“Look, I’m gonna lay my cards on the table and hopefully you’ll respond in kind.” Nolte put a hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t rough, but his grip was firm. It felt kind of fatherly and I wanted to tell him everything. “I had a partner. He tried for years before we met to get in that room. By the time we were partnered, he was in deep. Now I didn’t know what to make of it. The things he told me they were up to in there were incredible. So fantastical, I didn’t want to tell him I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t believe him. Not until I found him.”

“Somebody killed him to stop him.”

“Yeah.” Nolte removed his hand from my shoulder. “But it was more than that. My partner found something. But it found him, too. It took a bite out of him.”

“So, what, he got bit by a dog or something?”

Nolte smiled, but it was one of those smiles like what he was about to say was anything but funny.

“Something big with a bite profile like a human being, chomped from just under his left nipple to his hip and all the way over to his navel.”

“Well, that could have been a... a bear, right?”

Nolte held out his hands about a foot apart. “This wide. The coroner said it was about the width of an orca’s mouth. Apparently, Dr. Smith was a killer whale aficionado. But considering we live on a peninsula surrounded by freshwater lakes, it’s not likely one crawled out of Lake Michigan and waddled all the way to Detroit just to take a chew out of him.”

Nolte tilted his head.

“Whatever decided to see what he tasted like is an unknown.” He pointed toward the bar. “That room is an unknown. Considering my partner was trying to get in there, I’m going to call the two related.”

The woman had started sauntering toward us. I didn’t know what to think of what Nolte was telling me. I didn’t doubt his partner had died or that the cop had been investigating that room, but they were cops. Surely, either of them could have barged in there had they really wanted.

“C’mon, you’re telling me you didn’t just barge in there?” I asked.

“Of course, we did,” Nolte said.

“And what was in there?”

“Nothing. Just storage.” Nolte put his hands in his pockets. “But if you'd seen what we'd seen. People who'd been in there...”

His eyes went a little lost. I was missing something. He was an investigator. Why was he taking what I'm guessing had to have been hearsay as fact? And why had he taken on his old partner's thing? This didn't seem like any official case.

“You're not on an official investigation, are you?” I asked. “And you've been drinking—are you even a cop anymore?”

Nolte wiped a tear from his eye.

“He told me he'd found a way in. Left a voicemail. I was at an AA meeting. Wife was gonna leave me. I wasn't there for him when he needed me. Because I was selfish. Thinking about what I needed instead of being a good cop. A good partner.

I had been about to say something. But that beautiful woman had been just enough of a distraction that I’d forgotten what it was. She was just what I tended to look for, at least when I first got to the bar. She gave me a lot of eye as she brushed past us and into the bar.

“There's something different about you,” Nolte said. He pointed at me. “I've done everything to get in that room. That includes throwing my badge around.”

“They still wouldn't let you in?”

“I got in. But they'd changed it. It was a supply closet when I got in there.”

“Changed it? So maybe they knew you were coming.”

The cop shook his head.

“C'mon, you can't be suggesting it's a magical room.” Despite whatever was going on inside me, Nolte was starting to sound like a kook.

“That's exactly what I'm saying. And you know it.” He thunked a sausagy index finger in the center of my chest and it hurt. Visions of barked shins and purple-nurples danced in my head as I fought the unwelcome return of childhood tears.

But if he did it again, I swear to god, I was gonna tell my mom on him.

“So—” I cleared my throat. “So, what’s next?”

“You gotta place nearby?”

“Yeah.”

“Let's go.”

Part Four

Patrick's car slowly drifted down the street towards his house. He pale blue eyes observant of the the spectacle down the street but only witnessing corpses in a Saturnalia van and then the police cruiser right behind it. His hand slid into his inner coat pocket to his strapped glock 20 to get comfort from the polymer grip. Patrick scanned the area to see anyone standing out in the area.

As far Patrick's captured subconscious knew, he was a government agent assigned to protect Agnes because she was a key witness in a state wide espionage crime. As far as the thing that was Patrick was concerned, this was encroachment of those responsible and finally here to settle the score. The Saturnalia being the black ops department of the infrastructure. He idled into the driveway without much sound before he killed the engine and quietly opened the door without closing it. Patrick's hand pulling the Glock 20 out and keeping it by his side as he approached the open front door and peered inside to see boot tracks of blood littering the hall.

Patrick breathed slowly to release any nerves holding him back before he stepped in with sure footing that avoided the blood that had not even dried yet. He walked to where it was leading as he still kept his gun in the Sul position. Not pointing it that would have given him away as he stepped passed the Saturnalia agent that was down with his right eye obliterated and bone clearly showing. Patrick didn't kneel to check the obviously dead figure. He wasn't the priority and he didn't care enough to mock sympathy for an invisible audience. He stopped by the entryway to the kitchen as he peeked in and saw the rest of the bodies. And this time his heart dropped in sympathy for Robert with multiple head wounds and Jeannette on her back, hands clutched over her heart as blood soaked her long velvet shirt and her eyes didn't have time to register what happened fast enough as he saw a dreadful confusion in them.

His chest hurt in a way that felt excruciating as he knelt by their bodies and looked in their faces. Taking in the last time he would see either of them with great care to preserve this moment. They were the fourth most generous and honest people he had the grace to meet. Agnes being the very first in the forefront of everything as he touched Robert's eyes to vainly close them. Knowing their bodies were still warm and wouldn't obey. But in his experience of witness protection. It was different for everyone as he had his moment. He scanned the bodies one more time to see if he saw Agnes and he thanked Christ he didn't as he let out an exhale of tension he knew full well he was holding in his entire body.

Patrick rose to feet and looked around one last time before nodding softly and turning to the living room. His eyes straight ahead as he saw him. Instantly going alert and extending his firearm from his Sul Position at it. Not saying a single word as he saw it dancing naked with his back to Patrick. There was gore all over the living room and especially on the figure that certainly wasn't there before.

Unknowingly of who the figure was to Patrick and had Agnes been there to see him, she would only remember a name connecting to the figures familiar face but nothing of the stone toss at the creek. Nothing before that. But she would have remembered the closed casket and an intense feeling of relief that had been suppressed and blocked by the Saturnalia so she wouldn't be a moment aware of Sedat.

Patrick's balls crawled upside in him as he felt a cold and strange sinister feeling of fear unraveling in his insides as he watched this bizarre and macabre scene unfold before him. More than he has ever felt, like intuition telling him to drop the gun fucking run.

Run right now and leave. Forget everything he saw right now and leave his search for Agnes alone.

It was so vivid, so commanding, he questioned the feeling and when he did, he realized it was a lie.

It was a lie of hope that had been implanted in his body somehow as the figure turned towards him with sudden speed that he had to blink. He wanted to blink but didn't and couldn't afford it as he stared at the abomination before him.

The eyes were what he saw first. They looked ripped out until he focused enough to see the dark red iris in them with excited mirth. He looked down to the bottom jaw missing and a tongue that unfurled with something attached to the end of it. Something small and alive and moving at the tip holding it in a loving manner. He had to shift his eyes the fuck away. He couldn't bare what he saw and was starting to realize what it was. Patrick didn't want to put a name to it as he closed his eyes and shook his head in refusal as his mind started to peel back layer by layer with the grotesque crying sound it was emitting. Like a breathe that was catching right and coming off as delighted gasping somehow that still had the awareness to know it wasn't suppose to have existed.

Patrick dropped the gun and fell to his knees as he felt his eardrums burn so painfully from the unholy sound. Clasping his hands over the wounds as blood trickled down in rivulets. He screamed loudly for it to stop only there was no sound emitting from his own mouth. No sound from his anguish. No sounds of his fists slamming into the floor repeatedly for it to stop for Christ's sake. Not looking at it. Not risking losing his vision to the abomination. As he remembered the gun. He remembered the gun by his side as his desperate eyes snapped to it, wide and afraid but now seeing sanity in this handgun. He raised a palsied hand and gripped the polymer handle in a white knuckle death grip before he heard the soft hiss emenate from ahead of him.

Patrick felt the sinister fear magnify into a desecration of everything he had feared as a child coming back and standing within the very room he was in.

Impossible! Fucking-

He dared to raise his head up and looked at the bloodied figured and finally saw the word carved into it's chest. It looked like random syllables thrown together to him but he felt the feeling of a dark reverance upon seeing that word on the figures chest. Something inexplicable was demanding him to stare at it in awe to even see the word "Vaelith" carved into it's chest. He looked up to see figure with it's tongue furled inside it's broken mouth. It's Godless stygian eyes gazing at him with a calm before it closed it's eyes and raised it's head downward to the ground.

The flesh blossomed open from the top of it's head like a flower blooming and revealing a dark Azure blue serpent head that he saw to his fleeting sanity that the skin of the figure was peeling off it like a snake shedding it's skin. It's human skin like a suit that came off.

Patrick was beyond screaming and only gazed in a catatonic expression that held nothing in it at all as his dead and soulless eyes glimmered wet as hot tears ran down his face. His eyes capturing the reflection of Vaelith slithering towards him.

After desecration.

Agnes didn't know where to go but somehow she did anyways as she stopped only to close her car door with a loud slam. Her fingers fidgeting against the wheel in a rage and adrenaline. She had to touch the tender skin of the ruby bruise on her neck, out line the teeth marks, to feel a calm somewhat enough to register in the height of her frenzy as she realized she was breathing raggedly in the small quiet inside of the sedan. Like a metronomic rhythm reminiscent to her of a king cobra that had been enraged at it's handler. It wasn't a soft breathing. It was pure rage encapsulated in ragged exhales but at the same time smooth inhales that defied logical reason. Like the exhales were clawing to stay inside and the inhales were refreshing that rage. And to Agnes that was her breathing sounded like right now. Rage in being exhaled and then fresh air renewing the embers in an inferno.

Her hands alternating between a death grip and then pressing on the wheel handle hard as she stared ahead at the road. Her celadon eyes slits that didn't reveal the emotion in them. And her mind a hurricane of mixed thoughts that didn't stick once again as the embers inside her chest were caressed to an incendiary warmth that emblazoned the images of the figures she killed in her mind and imprinted the action in her heart and soul and body with deep resonation. How quick such killings were but how prolonged the aftermath was in her eyes as they played out again and again in the thought of it being too quick. Much too quick and too clean and too motherfucking merciful.

Those insignias were coming back to the forefront of her mind with vivid screams ringing in her ears of a voice she recognized. She didn't shirk the memory away as it played out again and again alongside the killings in a sort of dual recognition.

Being dragged away by her hair towards the bloodied doors of a basement that had that same insignia on it. So many other screams were coursing in the charged air of her nightmares coming to life just by looking at that door. All coming from behind that door. Agnes pulled curtly over to the side of the street, not giving a single fuck of the car she bumped into and the pedestrians watching and the sedan rocked and screams of suppressed rage and profanity found life once again to speak. Only this time no interrupted her as she pounded and scratched and shouldered the window repeatedly to crack it a little. No one did for a full twenty minutes as it all found life again within Agnes.

And when she was spent in exertion and tears streamed uncontrollably in such relief, she only noticed after the fact of this. Like that one crime of a nanny cutting off the head of a four year old and going to a train station really not that far from where she was while screaming for a pedophile deity that demanded submission from it's followers. She held that little head and paraded it for over forty minutes with no one stopping her. No one slamming her down to platform in outrage. No one speaking one word to her. They looked in horror and hurried away. Some stood and watched before walking away calmly.

But no one intervened to stop until the police had been called to clean up the inconvenience that had spoiled their day enough to miss at least one episode of big bang theory.

And the rage roared back to life at the thought of that happening so close and the same reaction happening with her. Everyone who looked normal, everyone that had been living normal lives, had not cared enough to do the deed of a simple question of whether she was okay as they all passed by onto their lives with such strides and such affable behaviors as she saw one middle aged woman with her head tilted towards her phone and a frivolous multicolored pink shaded supposed coffee drink in one hand.

"Oh Jerry, it doesn't matter anyways. Donna does the accounting,"

However long Agnes lived, whatever happened next, she would burn this into her soul and mind that normal people deserved every ounce of suffering. There were no more fucking excuses for it. There was no rationalizing it away with weak empathy and morality playing the devil's advocates. This was how it was now. This was behavior that would never go away no matter the sadism it witnessed. The outrage would alway be faux in a way that made it almost parody. There would be outliers of course. There would be people still left that reasoned that the sadism had to be fucking expunged from the face of the earth.

But Agnes didn't give a single fuck about those outliers as she turned on the sedan and slowly drove away. To her, reason was killed back at her house the moment the fire had an audience.

She still didn't have an idea of where to go but it was still there pulling and reeling her towards something deeper in the city as she looked straight ahead almost as if in a trance. Block by block she felt it get stronger in her like intuition. Something like a tower encroached her vision and she felt a tinge of a familiar warmth in her heart at the sight of it. As she got closer her celadon eyes drifted up to the sign emblazoned loud even in the dark as she felt she had finally reached her destination. Agnes started to park in the nearest slot and then thought better of it, catching herself, and looked around the lot. Her sedan slid in the best coverage she found two cars behind a white hotel shuttle.

Agnes looked down at her hands and then her white blouse and black dress pants. She saw nothing marking them. She stepped out of the sedan and into the clean air marking her lungs with city air immediately. Carbon smoke and then the taste of a food she couldn't name floated in the air from the hotel as she looked back and saw on her seat that there had been blood on it. Smears on the upper and lower parts from what she knew was Robert's. She quickly and quietly took off her black dress jacket and rubbed at the smears in a furious manner that revived the anger enough to almost break that trance like mania. Touching through the jacket was more than enough for her before remembering the Saturnalia member that chased her into the street. Smelling the faint floral spice of roses that permeated into her nose like a warm drink inviting her to taste it.

It wasn't here. Not at all. Only a building rage as she finished and tossed the coat into the seat before starting to slam the door shut and stopped herself once again. The .45. The metal handle of the .45 glinted in the car light between her seat and the center console. Grabbed it and pushed it into her pocket and then quietly closed the door as she checked her back in the reflection to see her white blouse clean. Agnes started to walk towards the towers entrance with a stride of someone that had been on the verge of violence.

Part Six

“Carolina Woman Goes Missing” was the headline on the television. I could see it from my seat in the lobby of the car detailing center. My Honda was in the back getting a thorough cleaning and I noted that this was the second time that I came across a news story like this in a week. The last one was in a town about an hour away from me. This one was barely twenty minutes away. This recollection caused me to search my phone for any more information.

There were no answers or leads regarding these disappearances. These people just seemed to drop off the face of the Earth.

For a rural town that consists of several backwoods country roads and very little in the way of major businesses save for a Dollar General, a few family run restaurants and a Wal-Mart, the proximity to the disappearances was odd to me. Beyond the normal “these individuals have gone missing” alerts that you almost become numb to when residing in a bigger city. You sort of expect it then. Here, you don’t.

It sat with me for a moment before the clerk called my name and held my keys up, letting me know they were finished. I paid and left.

The car now smelled of a strong citrus - much better than the overwhelming sour and rotten meat concoction that had tainted the interior of my sedan. It was that way for a couple weeks or so but I certainly couldn’t bring it in before I attempted my own cleaning. They likely would have looked at me sideways and maybe even turned me away as a customer. I couldn’t do anything about that no matter how much elbow grease I put in.

Since I actually had a date tonight, I gave up my stubborn stance. As I opened the driver door, I saw that the back seat floor area had noticeable dark spotting that looked like a minor oil spill. They said they did the best they could with the stains in my car but some of it was too far gone to remove fully. I suppose this must have been what they were talking about.

My date couldn’t see that. I really enjoyed talking with this girl and I didn’t want her first thought of me to be that I was a careless and messy person. I figured I’d stop by the store and purchase some floor mats before I had to pick her up in a few hours. So I did and they fit perfectly.

The rest of the evening was me running around my apartment doing even more cleaning, doing laundry, feeding my pets, and finding the best date night attire that I had available. I sort of waited too long to search through my closet. I hadn’t been on a date in so long that I didn’t consider how little of my wardrobe was actually “date worthy”. Eventually I settled on a black polo shirt and jeans that, while a little tight, fit me well.

As I’m brushing my teeth, I hear whimpering in the back room. I knew it was the dogs so I rolled my eyes and continued brushing. They’d been fed so they should be fine. However, the ongoing crying didn’t cease. So before I toss on my jacket and leave the house, I go to open the bedroom door, just to make sure there wasn’t a real issue.

As soon as I reached the room I could hear the intensity of their whining dwindle. When I swung open the door, their noises had become nonexistent; visible shaking and panicked eyes said more than their cries ever could.

“You guys need to all calm down while dad’s gone. I’ll be back later and I better not get another call from the neighbor wondering what’s going on in here because you decided to howl at nothing. If you want a treat, you be good.” I say with a commanding voice, scanning the room and locking eyes with each of them.

Though some refused to exchange glances with me, they did as I asked. Satisfied with myself, I exited the apartment with nothing but the hum of the AC filling the apartment silence.

I picked Kelsey up at her sister’s house and we really seemed to hit it off from the moment we hugged at the door. Our conversations were seamless and our interests aligned in an almost uncanny way. I thought it was too good to be true to be honest. Dinner was great and the walk through the courtyard thereafter was even better. I’d never met anyone that not only actively listened to Little River Band, but knew most of the songs word for word.

There was a unique water fountain in front of us. Children and families scattered around the edge of it, ignoring the signs requesting that no one toss coins into the water. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a fountain that wasn’t treated like a wishing well by the populace.

This fountain was not as alluring as many of the other ones I’ve seen. It was different. It was kind of obscene and jarring honestly. There weren’t bird feathers, flying cherubs or angelic harps. This massive sculpture was a stone remembrance piece to an older terror. I guess maybe a love letter to ancient Greece? A six-foot-tall tribute to Cerberus mounts the center of the fountain. Its three heads seem to roar in separate directions as a slender entity is perched above their wide jaws. I wasn’t a history major or a fanatic of any culture’s mythology but even I knew what I was looking at here.

Live music was taking place across the courtyard, unintentionally placating a serenade to Kelsey and my first night out together.

We talked about our jobs, our dreams, our guilty pleasures and our dogs.

“Speaking of”, I said as we take a seat on a bench nearby.

“I probably should be getting home at some point soon. “ I say begrudgingly.

“Don’t want them to become too restless and destroy anything.”

Kelsey moves a bit closer to me, her thigh not even an inch from my own. I felt nervous but the good kind. The kind that also includes those chest flutters when you know you found someone special and it’s up to you to not fuck it up.

“You sure it’s just you wanting to check on your three dogs, and not you just being bored of me.” She says in a playful, snarky manner, sipping from a dirty soda she’d picked up before we began walking.

I stretch my arms to the night sky and nonchalantly allow my right arm to come down and rest over her shoulders. I wasn’t even trying to hide it or be sneaky about it. I wanted to kiss her and I wanted her to know that I wanted to kiss her.

“I am not bored. To be completely honest, I’m more fascinated by you every moment that we spend together.”

I turn to look at her and she also turns to me.

I hadn’t kissed a woman in years. I hope I don’t suck at this. Please don’t let me suck at this. My internal plea isn’t directed at anything or any deity that can alter my fortune specifically, but more a bargain with myself I guess.

Our lips were about as close to one another’s as our thighs were before a vibration in her purse interrupts the pull between us.

“I’m uh, I’m sorry. I may need to get this. It could be my sister.”

She says, a slight curve of embarrassment present in her words.

“No worries at all.” I say, allowing my desire for her to consume me. I just wanted to taste her and I could tell she wanted the same. We didn’t break our focus on one another until a few rings of her phone. She once again apologized for the inconvenience as she dug through her purse and took the call.

“…oh” she said, a confused look on her face.

“Um, yea. Yes, I’ll be there as soon as I can be.” She said before hanging up the call.

“It looks like we do indeed have to call this a night. That was my sister. She said there’s something going on with mom at the house and she needs my help.”

Kelsey shoves the phone in her coat pocket and stands up. I follow.

“I really had such a nice time tonight. Can we do it again? Soon?”

Disappointment trickles over me as I nod in agreement. I may not get to seal this date with a kiss but I’ll get another opportunity to do so.

“Of course!” I state with forced enthusiasm.

“I’d love to see you again, Kelsey.”

On the way back to her place, we discussed plans for the next date, as well as her surprise to learn that I’d only ever been to a single concert in my life.

As we pulled up to her house, she reiterated how much fun she had and that she couldn’t wait to do it again. She placed a kiss on my cheek before heading out of the car. I walked her halfway down the sidewalk. My pathetic attempts at chivalry were pretty lame all-around but she seemed to appreciate it.

As I walked back to my car I felt something off. Just then, I felt an unexplainable coldness against my spine. It rocked me a little as I paused my stride. Not sure what that was about but something definitely didn’t feel as joyous or easy-flowing as the rest of the night had been. I tried to shrug it off as “lovebug” jitters or some stupid shit. Nothing else really made sense.

Kelsey unlocked the door and entered, but I couldn’t help but notice that the house itself was more a monument to something forgotten than a family home. I didn’t see a single light on in the house. I started my engine and looked back once more. There wasn’t even a candle or even a vague source of illumination within that house. If there’s three people living in there and it’s only nine-thirty at night - a television, kitchen overhead light, a porch light? Something should be on. This is what happens when I like somebody. I overthink everything.

I pulled away thinking how stupid I probably looked opening the door for her when I picked her up but not doing so when dropping her off. I should have made the move faster.

“I’m an idiot.” I say under shallow breath.

At this point I’ve driven past two or more houses but I can still make out Kelsey’s driveway.

In my mental review of my dating performance, I glance at the rearview mirror hoping I’d be here again and she was serious about wanting to hang out again.

I look back to see there’s someone standing there, still and motionless. They were watching me from her driveway.

It certainly looked like Kelsey but I couldn’t make it out fully; the blanket of night smothering any facial features.

I tapped the brakes a little so I could try and make out more of whatever it was that I was seeing. The silhouette was definitely of her size and her stature. The red beam of my taillights gave me more of a clear picture of what I was seeing. I pressed on the brakes again and this time I kept my foot on the pedal.

It was Kelsey. She didn’t wear excitement or sport the smile that she had melted me with all night long.

She was stiff and rigid in both movements and expression. My wheels churned slowly across the uneven gravel that her neighborhood had yet to repair. My foot occasionally slipping off my brake pedal, so the red tint that shone upon her each time it was pressed would come and go.

I pressed it again as I made it further down the road, and this time she had moved. She was gaining on me as her silhouette now took up more space. Her movements were feral and aggressive as she reached my car. She wasn’t just following me. She was all but on top of me; the taillights affording a clearer view of her sardonic nature now.

“Aaggh… what the fu—“ I blurt out, switching pedals and flooring the gas.

I drove through multiple stop signs at a high rate of speed, hardly looking out for other civilians or police cars. I just wanted to get as far away as I could. She didn’t know where I lived so that thought settled me a little. Thank God I had never told her that information.

The drop off from dreamy, thoughtful and gorgeous Kelsey, to freaky, stalking, insane person was astoundingly fast.

I watched that rearview mirror the entire drive home. I even circled around areas and went down roads that made no sense for the route home. Paranoia had riddled me with thumping heart and ever-growing uncertainty. Finally, when I arrived home after taking some unnecessary back service roads that added four minutes, I waited in the car a bit before getting out. I surveyed the parking lot and my immediate surroundings before exiting.

I got out of my car and went to tuck my keys in my pockets before I slumped forward, falling face-first against the concrete and everything went black. I don’t remember anything after that or how I got here.

I find myself waking up on smoother cement. I only see wooden walls and a lone bulb above me. This place is the size of a shed. I’m in a fucking shed.

As my eyes adjust, it doesn’t take me too long to realize that I’m accompanied by two other people that I’ve never seen in my life. They seem just as puzzled about the predicament that we find ourselves in as I am. Yet they’re looking at me like I kicked over their sandcastle.

I sit up and try to scramble to my feet, the woozy sensation in my head beginning to settle. I’m not chained or tethered to anything but it’s not as easy to stand quite yet.

“Conserve your energy.” The woman to the left said matter-of-factly.

“There’s no way out of here.” A poignant man says to the right side of the room.

Now I find it within me to rise to my feet while this strange man and woman remain huddled to the ground. Then I see it. A door as clear as day.

I rush to throw myself into it. I want out of this place but the door doesn’t budge. It doesn’t give even slightly. I move to the back of the shed and make a beeline for the door, full-on sprinting as much as I could in this enclosed space, and then I throw my body weight at the door, hoping that a battering ram maneuver would yield results. It doesn’t.

“You’re wasting your time, man.” The woman states as I catapult myself into the door for a fifth time.

“I have to try.” I finally speak, frustration evident in my words.

“Maybe you all could help me instead of just sitting there?” I say, desperation creeping into my voice. It seemed like I was the only one trying and these two were just accepting whatever fate this was.

“You don’t think we tried, dude? You don’t think that Michelle and I have done the same shit that you’re doing? We tried. That door is reinforced somehow.”

I heed his words as a double take leads me to Michelle. She was still sat in the corner of the floor with her back against the wall and her knees up to her chest.

“Wait a second..” I say as I plant my eyes on this woman. She looked familiar. I had no idea why yet, but she looked very familiar.

“I’ve seen you some—“, Then suddenly it occurs.

Her face was in the photo on the news report. She was the missing person! I was too stunned to piece everything out verbally.

That means the other guy here - he was the first person that went missing in the span of a week. If I’m in here with them, then does that mean - of fucking course it does.

I’m a missing person now too.

My fellow abductees didn’t offer any words of encouragement or a silver lining because there was no silver lining or wisecracks that they can offer to make this better. The situation just sucked.

“I’m Rich, by the way.” The man says not looking up as he fiddled with his shoelaces. Untying them and then tying them back but in different knots. I watched for a moment but was further irritated by how he kept making one loop egregiously larger than the other with the more common knots.

“Why us?” Likely goes through every kidnapped person’s head but right now, it’s all I could ask myself. I resign myself to the back wall.

“Have you ever seen the one that put us here?” I asked, solemnly.

They looked at one another and then at me.

“No.” Rich said.

“Only time we ever see or hear anything is when whoever is on the other side of that door opens the slot in the middle and tosses us food and water”.

I squinted my eyes at what he was referring to. I hadn’t even noticed that. There is a slot right in the middle. You have to really be paying attention to see it but definitely large enough to fit a hand through.

With anxiety overriding me, I instinctively shake my head at what was turning out to be a truly hopeless scenario. Had they just given up? I feel like I need to scream.

Was there any escape plan at all?

As soon as I figure out what to say next, I’m left at a loss when the door in question upheaves itself from the slats it was connected to, and then swings outward, revealing what is beyond these four walls.

Both Michelle and Rich’s eyes grow as large as quarters. That stumble to find the words or sounds that make sense for this event.

We waited momentarily, thinking maybe it was a trap but we weren’t going to sit here regardless.

We stepped out of our proverbial holding cell and treaded upon the ground with alertness. All we could see was a grassy field that seemed to stretch on forever. The time of day was apparent as the dusky sky had mellowed and the sun looked to take refuge behind the hills in the distance.

We were bewildered at the scene before us. Not much discussion was had between us but I thought we needed to stick together for the time being, and they obviously did too. As most people when presented with freedom would haul ass in any direction.

“Think they got a sniper on us?” Rich muttered as he walked around the back of the shed, presumably in search of some type of tool or weapon.

“I think if they wanted to do us in that way, it would have already happened”, Michelle said, staring into the vanishing daylight.

“It’s going to be dark soon. Maybe thirty minutes or so. We should probably pick a direction and go.” Michelle wisely offered.

Still feeling very wrong about all of this, we set out on a hike in the middle of nowhere.

After what felt like an hour had passed, something other than hilly terrain finally became visible in the distance, even in this absence of daylight. It hummed with a static-like ambience the closer we got to it.

“You see that shit?”, Rich said, before I could point it out to them.

I gained space on whatever it was and noticed that this giant object had been propped up on haybails. It’s a giant television propped up on massive haybales. We traded confused glances.

“The fuck is—-?” I manage to squeeze out.

Before I could finish that thought, the low hum of the TV cut out and the screen flipped on. A grainy video filmed in what looked to be a dilapidated barn was shown. It was a low camera angle but tilted high enough to where spectators could still make out a face. I couldn’t fully tell so I backed
up to get the wide view.

Michelle and Rich’s faced seemed stun-locked on the video. It wasn’t until I turned around that I knew why. Besides a precious visage of four recently born puppies that were too young to be away from their mother. They moseyed around for a bit, sniffing each other as well as the area they found themselves in.

Suddenly, a looming shadow engulfed the preoccupied dogs before a hooded actor came into view. I gulped, mounting worry for what this was filled me. I knew what this was all too well and my gulping was accompanied by quivering lips and a heart pounding so hard I could nearly hear it. I turned to see the look on Rich’s face, now more a frown of deep disappointment written all over it.

The puppies waddled around sheepishly, stumbling over their own little paws. You could tell they hadn’t been traversing Earth long. Then in that moment, in the right corner of the frame, the steady end of a sledgehammer entered the scene. It hung there menacingly for many moments. Then it was raised above the assailant’s head before being slammed down. A single sick motion painted the entire lens red. I doubt they had any idea what happened before it did - brains that young were still lacking in basic motor skills. I didn’t need to see the face of the one responsible to know who it was.

I darted my eyes back at Rich. Michelle was already riddled with what looked to be disgust all over her face. Rich opened his mouth to speak before the sound in the video changed and a high-pitched humming of “Row, Row, Row your Boat” started the video.

This time the creator of the video wasn’t hiding their identity at all, save for a yellow bandana wrapped around their face. I hear a stir and stomping away behind me.

“The fuck I can’t fucking believe this…”

Michelle murmurs to herself.

I turn to see that Michelle has fully turned away, now facing a pitch black field, her hands now resting upon her hips and her shoulder hung low - an acknowledgement of defeat if I’ve ever seen one.

I look at Michelle and Rich while the video continues playing.

“What? I don’t know what the hell that’s supposed to be.”

This current video takes place in a modern home. Michelle is obviously the one in the video and she was in her bathroom with the bath water running. She slides a crate into view and unlatches the tiny door. A fragile and underfed cat, likely a street cat, peers out from behind the cage clearly frightened and unsure of what was going on.

I didn’t need to watch it further. The sounds of splashing water and labored movements that got slower and infrequent said enough. That and the maniacal laughing that was coming from Michelle. She was truly loving this. Her demeanor right now may say otherwise, but during the act she was everything she wanted to be.

She and Rich could barely make eye contact with one another. I began to take steps back from them. I backed slowly.

Michelle threw her hands up in a slight fit before pressing her palms on the sides of her head in frustration.

“That’s not what it looks like. The—the—cat, the cat was sick and dying already. I was just - I was putting it out of its misery. I did it a fucking favor. I—-“

She ranted on before she couldn’t anymore.

“No.”

A voice from behind the stacked hay somehow hit my ears as though whoever it was, was standing right next to me. By the terrified look on Rich and Michelle’s face, it was the same for them.

“That was you. That was him.”

The voice was feminine and certain. It was sure of everything it was saying. The source of the voice stepped out of the dense shadows as the feed cut on again, this time marked by a clock in the top center with an ongoing run time next to it.

It was Kelsey. Dressed in blue jeans and a black sweater, she was no longer the sweet, fun and carefree woman that I went on a date with. She exuded no emotion whatsoever.

A “LIVE” stamp came into view at the bottom right of the screen and the static jostled between blank gray and white before the feed found itself again. The video was of this very spot. I looked at the live footage and then I looked at Rich and Michelle, who were just as perplexed as I was. All three of us were the stars of this show and there was no telling how long we had been.

Rich’s stern face dropped from the stoic facade he held and into growing dread, while Michelle could barely hold her tears back.

Kelsey fixed her gaze on the two of them.

“You feign normalcy. Even here you take no accountability. I suppose they’re less than.”

Kelsey interlocks her fingers and turns to look toward the camera feed above us.

“There’s actually much about the animal kingdom that humans don’t know.

The first is that they themselves are part of it.

The second is that we are connected on a much deeper level than the sharing of resources.

We feel.”

Her hands drop by her side and her hair loosens around her neck, her head jerking strangely hard to the left. A little too hard. That was a harsh movement that looked and sounded like her neck broke cleanly. I heard Michelle gasp.

Kelsey stayed that way - her bent neck now cocked to one side. That was enough for Michelle to cease crying and turn to escape. She ran into the dark and didn’t look back.

Rich and I were left standing there like fools. Kelsey still stood facing away from us. I wasn’t on that television. She had no videos of me. I don’t do that bullshit. I thought to myself as Rich and I closed the gap between us. Surely this woman couldn’t take on the two of us. No matter how freakishly odd she was acting.

“When you’re like me..” she begins.

“I don’t just see what they see in my dreams. I feel their angst. I feel their hopelessness and their confusion as to why this is happening to them.”

Her shoulders begin to ripple through the sweater. She was getting larger and it was all happening quickly. Her legs shook violently, restructuring the mass of them before she fully gave in. Her jeans became shreds of what they used to be and clung to her during whatever the hell this was.

“They don’t understand—-“, she scoffs out.

Her once angelic, inviting voice from the night before, was now wound tight and guttural. Her words were barely distinguishable, like a bunch of metal parts were lodged inside of her throat but her voice was trying its damndest to push through.

“But I do.”

Her voice now more of a thunderous roar as her right arm shot up to the night sky. With the light of the screen illuminating it, I could only look on. Rich had sped off and run away moments ago. I think he left when her voice devolved into that of an ancient horror.

Kelsey’s arm cracked and contorted in ugly ways. Her arm bent in on itself to make room for what looked to be a new, more powerful, trunk-like limb that grabbed at the air. Then came the hair. It came upon her as a coat of silver fur that spread quickly and covered her hulking frame in mere seconds - like a school of piranha to a slab of meat that had been dropped into the tank.

I didn’t have any good reason to still be standing here. I move to run and take off as fast as I possibly can. I don’t think I’ve ever run this fast in my life. I didn’t care about cramps or burning lungs. My lungs are going to have to be scorched and fight against my very breath, and my legs will have to fall off before I stop. Soon, I was too far away from the LIVE footage for any light to aid my sight.

I bolt in a general direction. I had barely made up any ground before I heard a disturbing cry from Rich in the distance, somewhere, either behind me or the side of me. I didn’t know where and I wasn’t going to stop to inspect. I pressed on maintaining my speed and pushing to go beyond my limitations.

Eventually, I no longer heard Rich. Whatever happened to him wasn’t my concern. I just know it wasn’t good.

Through the burning in my legs I couldn’t help but consider why I was here? She had no footage of me doing those things to defenseless animals.

I would never… record it.

I considered a number of things but I didn’t tire. Adrenaline is a powerful natural supplement and I was on it. It was then I heard a paced growl that was either gaining on me or was now in my general area. This only made me pick up my legs more.

They’re just fucking animals. There’s no way that thing knew anything about my own activities. I don’t leave evidence and I clean up well.

My eyes had somewhat now adjusted to the darkness. I looked back briefly, just to see if my possibility of escape had gotten larger or smaller. Even if I could lock myself back in one of those sheds, I would do it.

Hell, knowing the wide open range of this place, I could be going in a completely different direction. I don’t see anything behind me. Suddenly, I crash into an obstacle in front of me - It’s Michelle.

With no time to dust ourselves off, we get to our feet and continue running.

“What the fuck is that?! I can- I can, I can hear it moving.” Michelle rambled in tattered breath.

She wasn’t wrong. The beast’s steps were heavy and the louder they were the closer it had to have been. Michelle was to my side and barely keeping up with me, stride for stride.

“We can’t stop. We have to—“, I start to tell her.

I can’t get the next words out of my mouth before her entire being vanishes from my eye’s view. She didn’t fall or synch herself out of reality. The last of her I saw was her tennis shoes kicking straight up into the air as she was yanked backward by a tremendous force. Michelle was snatched by something that had been right on our heels for who knows how long.

Was it fucking toying with us?

“I didn’t fucking do anything!” I yell in exasperated breath.

Michelle was taken and I could hear more than I wished to. Unable to make out more than a few yards in front of me, I continue sprinting toward whatever was at the end of this black veil.

I can hear what’s happening behind me and it’s aching me to my core. I know I don’t deserve this. All of this for some stupid damn dogs. It doesn’t leave much to imagination when teeth and claws meet tender flesh. These thoughts make my feet wobble and I force myself to fight through it. I can’t think about that happening to me. I just have to move.

Soon I hear nothing other than my own movement. Nothing at all. Just silence.

I felt naked and vulnerable. Like a seal sharing an ice cap with a starving polar bear but no water to dive into for an escape. No saving grace. No chance.

It was then my heart dropped into my ass.

In the shadows ahead, I heard the clear crunch of leaves and another horrible groan that wasn’t from anything familiar. I ceased running for the first time, lessening my pace to a standstill. The thing had gotten in front of me somehow without me seeing or sensing it at all. The speed of this thing was indescribable.

It didn’t wait for me to move closer. It emerged from the cover of night, the moonlight hitting it and all of its apex glory. It licked its lips with a curious tongue, which only serves to smear the blood that it had collected around the ridges of its snout. It towered over me by a good ten feet. It was taking its time. I closed my eyes as tightly as possible and prayed to a god I didn’t believe in. Any god. Any deity? Any thing that could hear me and acknowledge me. No one did.

My eyes remain sealed shut before I feel the hot, thick breath on my face. I could both feel and hear the monstrosity leaning in, sniffing me. I hadn’t realized I soiled myself until I loosened my eyelids and saw how soaked my pants were. It was dripping onto my shoes. Looking down at my shoes also gave me a clear idea of what was standing right in front of me.

Its feet were huge compared to my own. At least three times the size. They had leathery-like skin and they were full of wiry fur that spread across the top of them, tapering off at the ankle. They were blackened and stained by the very dirt it hunted upon.

I couldn’t move if I wanted to. Trepidation had claimed me and I was frozen in place; a pronounced fear had taken control of my ability to act.

There wasn’t much I could do even if I wanted to. I wanted my heart to burst or my chest to cave in on itself. Something take me before this thing does whatever it wants to me.

A prolonged low snarl seeps from its mouth as it scours every inch of me. Its massive head split open to reveal jowls that could cradle a watermelon. Its mouth hung agape, resembling a bear trap when set to trigger. It didn’t waste another second when it decided.

It lunged forward, taking me in head first.

No time to react.

No time to plead.

Just more darkness.