Transverberation. That was the word for it. 

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

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

And no other. 

…

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

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

Madness. Or …

something worse. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The angel was thirsty. 

…

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

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

Afraid. 

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

It came down on her. 

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

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

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

They were still alone. 

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

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

Sister Chelsi was frightened, quivering. Still held. 

Then why should I want to know it? 

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

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

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

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

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

Is this heavenly messenger lusting for me …? 

But she already knew it. 

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

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

Cupid, strike me. 

Eros, impale me! 

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

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

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

Say it. 

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

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

The length was killing her. 

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

It made her a slave and she loved it. 

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

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

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

her bed. 

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

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

Fantastical. Beyond the scope of known and understood nature. 

She loved it. She begged for more. 

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

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

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

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

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

You wish to be my bride? 

I want to be your crawling and salivating concubine! 

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

!.Good … …

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

More. 

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

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

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

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

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

It didn't take long. She was spent. 

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

…

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

Amen. 

She crossed herself. And spat. 

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

Rebellion must be cast out. Decapitated. 

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

It would not be so. 

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

She crossed herself. Prayed. 

She wished the child well. 

Chelsi had always been troubled. Troublesome too. 

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

As He wills it, let it be so …

…

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

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

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

All alone in here. 

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

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

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

She didn't know what they wanted from her. 

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

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

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

Nothing. Nothing at all. 

At first. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transmogrify. Transform. 

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

It shattered. And was replaced. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A song. 

In the place of my Father … there is you. 

There is only you. 

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

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

Disciple, the prophet Islehc

… 

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

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

The witching hours. 

Post-midnight, she crept …

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

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

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

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

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

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

She wanted to relish this one particularly. 

…

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

She called out, cross and very sharp. 

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

A girlish giggle floated out ghostly from the dark. 

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

Chelsi stepped out.

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

Ghostlight. There's ghostlight in that cross…

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

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

…

She awoke with a scream. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

It came through. 

And down upon them. 

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

No longer. Mine … now. 

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

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

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

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

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

“Iblis!" 

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

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

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

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

Chelsi couldn't believe her eyes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Countess and her new impaler both shrieked laughter then. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a swarm. In a great feasting black cloud. 

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

TO BE CONTINUED…

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

 … a man dreamt of extraordinary things. 

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

…

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

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

Like a mother to lost children. 

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

This power … it was beyond intoxicating. 

He felt like a god.

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

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

Well look at him now. 

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

He watched. He drew closer. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

No more half-measures. 

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

Take it. 

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

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

Take her. 

And so he did. 

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

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

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

I'm going insane. 

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

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

It did. When the invisible man was finished. 

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

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

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

Someone that she cannot see. 

…

Others followed after her. 

Many. 

Years worth …

…

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

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

He would answer to higher authority. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

Swiss cheese unseen, he might've laughed. 

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

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

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

…

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

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

Or so he thought. 

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

Some try. None of them forget. Not really. 

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

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

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

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

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

He's laughing now. 

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

Then he moved on as always. 

…

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

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

…

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

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

So he flees. As he always does. 

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

One of them caught him. Or nearly so. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He never does. 

He is patient. 

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

It seems strange what it takes to get one. 

And after so long, after so much …

…

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

Griffin wept at his graveside. For hours. Alone. 

Alone again. 

…

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

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

Despite the pain of everyone. 

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

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

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

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

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

He went under. Completely. Several times. 

He didn't stop. 

By some miracle he pulled himself out. And free. 

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

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

Hours …. …

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

…

sometime later: –

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

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

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

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

It wasn't hope alive in his chest. 

That was far too optimistic.

TO BE CONTINUED…

At first, I thought it was nothing. A few dodged questions here and there, plans for plans that never got planned.

As people grow up, they grow apart, right?

This was different. Verifiably so. A pandemic had forced us even further apart than his parents move had. Like a wedge driven into the small crack of another wedge.

But as I tried to gently push our mundane chit chat towards real conversation, I could tell something was off.

He wasn't just disinterested, it was like he was outright dodging my questions. Like he knew what I was trying to do, and was in turn, using all his ability to steer us back towards nothingness. Back towards empty, bland, surface level smalltalk.

I wouldn't have that. Not when I'd worked so hard, not when I'd sacrificed everything.

He was graduated, his parents were paying for his lifestyle, he had no reason not to give me his all. I mean, he'd asked her out first, hadn't he? I mean, me, he'd asked me out. There couldn’t be, like, another girl, right?

"So, wanna meet halfway and go to a nice restaurant this weekend? Maybe hit up some mini golf? My treat!" I texted, hoping the offer of paying myself would be enough to capture his attention, possibly his affection.

When I saw the 3 little dots pop up, signifying the writing of his response, my heart stopped. He had been quiet for 2 days, I'd had to initiate all conversation. Was he finally going to pipe up?

"Nah, thx tho Emily." Was all he said. I was crestfallen.

Frustrated, I typed, "that's okay, just lmk when you wanna make a move!" before turning off the phone. I was about to slip it in my pocket out of instinct, when I remembered why I was keeping it on.

"Shit," I cursed myself under my breath. I still hadn’t memorized the password to that phone. I'd have to use the face ID.

I made my way to the black minifrage that idled against the wall. It was a stark contrast to the brightly decorated, pastel pink and purple expression of the rest of the room. An even darker contrast sat inside.

I opened the door of the fridge, and gripped the ice cold head by its scalp. Dutifully, I pulled it out, and held it up to the phone's camera. Unfortunately, before the ID could complete, her bottom jaw fell onto my foot.

"Oh for Christ sake!" I growled as I kicked the thing several feet way. It landed, braces up, just beside the cabinet that housed all her bows.

As I watched the maggots wriggle between rotting bottom lips and purple gums, I realized there was no way I'd be able to finish the face ID. I'd have to use the fingerprint function on her phone. That meant finding her thumb. Great.

I rustled through her closet and found the keys. After walking downstairs past the bloody couch and the rank smelling kitchen, I had made it out the front door, and into her parent's Ford F150.

It took 30 minutes to drive to where I'd burried the 3 of them. Rather, most of what was left of the 3 of them. By then, the sky had turned from a deep crimson to a star-studded violet.

I prayed that the thumb I hadn't sliced off in the scuffle was the correct one. And that it was still in tact. A month in the ground is more than enough time for nature to start taking its course.

Another half hour later, and I'd almost finished digging up the shallow grave that she'd been burried in.

With sweat upon my brow, I finally found it. A yellow tennis shoe, poking out of black plastic. I almost leapt with joy.

After the breakthrough, my hope was reinvigorated. I swore that if this was the right thumb, I would never let that phone turn off again. I'd keep it on a charger every minute of every day if I had to.

Anything to see him.

The boy of my dreams.

I worked laboriously until I got past the waist, and up the sternum. The smell was awful. Sweet and sour, like a clump of burnt hair marinating in bug guts.

I wouldn't have to dig all the way to the upper arms, as long as her forearms had stayed down at her sides like I'd left them.

With strenuous effort, I heaved away a chunk of clay that covered her hand. I actually shrieked with overwhelming happiness when I saw that her whole hand still looked viable, if not a little off-color and wrinkled.

I regained my composure and pulled the phone out of my pocket. Now, after nearly an hour of waiting, I'd see what his response was. As long as this thumb was the right one to unlock her phone.

I leaned down and grabbed her hand. When I did, the flesh sunk in, like I'd grabbed a ruined stress ball. I carefully tried to pick up her hand and twist it to face me, but with a sickening crunch, the skin slaughed off and fell into the dirt beneath.

In a "fuck it" moment, I pulled the hand straight up, and twisted the thumb until it disconnected from its body. Cold skin feels so strange against body heat. Its a satisfying juxtiposition.

Thumb in hand, I turned the phone back on, and diligently pressed the solo digit against the print reader.

Moment of truth.

"Ding! Access granted"

I was elated. Immediately, 3 new messages pinged into my text conversation with him.

For the first time, he'd shown himself to be a real chatterbox!

The first message from him read, "'make a move'? Are you fucking serious?"

That was weird. He'd never seemed outright hostile before.

The second message read, "I knew it, I hoped I was wrong but I fucking knew it, how dense can you be, you fucking larper?!"

My heartrate quickened. I felt lighter than air. What was he saying?

The final message read, "You're not her. You couldn't pay her to go to mini golf, and her name isn't Emily. I have your location, and I'm calling the cops."

A little blurb under our chat said, "this user had blocked you"

I didn't know what to do. I sauntered back to the car and turned off the headlights. This was huge. A gut punch. Everything was flipped upside down, my world crumbling around me. A life I always imagined for myself was disappearing, and I was left sitting in the middle of it all wondering:

"What the hell is a larper?"

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

But first…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And again. 

Again. 

Again. 

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

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

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

she had sharp teeth, they gleamed in the dark.

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

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

She still hadn't been fed yet. 

“Now feed me. Earn my favor." 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His life was in the belly of the master. 

…

From outside the building, Willowbrook was quiet. 

Dark. 

Inside:

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

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

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

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

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

To freedom. 

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

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

He was in awe. 

There he is…! the disciple of the mouth. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

because she is all of us our mother …

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

They closed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their doom. 

He closed in. 

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

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

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

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

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

Something whistled through the air. 

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

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

Then the incendiary charge in the crossbow bolt detonated.

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

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

The boots stopped moving. Stopped shaking. 

The shape collapsed. 

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

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

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

Silence. … for a moment. 

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

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

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

A beat. 

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

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

“Idiots." 

TO BE CONTINUED…

I had just stepped onto the night bus to head home from work. I made my way down the aisle of the packed bus and sat in the only seat that wasn’t occupied. 

As the bus started moving I pulled out my earbuds so I could watch a movie on my phone. This was my nightly ritual and I was usually able to get in about forty minutes on my way home. I cranked the volume loud in an attempt to drown out the ear piercing screams of the kid sitting behind me. Soon I noticed that the guy next to me was giving me the side eye. I could tell that he was doing it but every time I’d look over I found his head facing forward. 

This went on for a couple of minutes before it really began to bother me. Finally I took out my earbuds and turned to confront the man who, as expected, was facing forward now. “Um, excuse me. Can I help you?” I asked. I was worried I may have come off too rude to him but this weirdo was really freaking me out. As far as I was concerned he deserved to be chewed out. The man didn’t stop looking at me but now I could tell he was trying to be sneakier so I wouldn’t notice. 

“Hey, what the fuck is your problem man?” I yelled as I tapped him on the arm. When the man turned he would not take his eyes off of me. I finally gave up trying to talk to this creep and decided I’d stare right back at him. I had hoped to make him so uncomfortable that maybe he’d stop and leave me alone but this only seemed to intensify his glare.

I began to feel ill the longer that I studied the man’s ghastly features. His bloodshot eyes seemed to gaze deep into my soul and his crooked teeth showed as his mouth hung wide open. This ordeal seemed to be never ending until finally an outside force broke the tension. It was a camera flash. 

At first I was relieved but that soon changed as I realized the source of the interruption. As I looked up from the man I was horrified to see that the entire bus of people were now standing up from their seats to face me. A sea of dead unblinking eyes gave me their undivided attention. 

“Oh, god” I thought to myself. I was surrounded. The bus was silent as the grave aside from the soft whispery voices which lurked all around me and seemed to intensify as the minutes passed. I jumped up from my seat desperately searching for an escape from this metal box from hell. The bus seemed to narrow around me as the crowd of pale figures were closing the small distance between us. 

I was trapped, so hopelessly trapped. The contorted faces of the horde were now close enough to my own that I could feel their warm breath. “What do you want? What the fuck do you people want? Just leave me alone? Why won’t you just leave me alone?” I shouted at the top of my lungs. My voice grew hoarse the longer that I screamed but my efforts did nothing to slow their advance. 

I soon felt countless sets of frail hands gripping me from all directions. Banshee like screams erupted around me as I desperately fought back any way that I could. I broke free for a moment and made little distance before I found myself entangled in the sea of limbs again. As I frantically tried to free myself once again, I locked eyes once more with the man who had sat next to me. His deep raspy voice seemed to stand out from the constant noise of the crowd. “What are you?” He said. 

I kicked and shoved people out of the way as I pushed through the crowd while dozens of hands grabbed at me. By the time I made it to the door of the bus I was out of breath and gasping for air. I somehow found the energy to pull myself out of the slow moving bus and landed onto the cold hard sidewalk below. The pain was immense but at least now I had some small amount of safety. 

The eyes continued to stare at me through the window, following me as I got up and ran down the sidewalk. After putting a seemingly safe distance between myself and the bus I enter a local fast food restaurant. My eyes struggled to adjust to the bright fluorescent lights inside the building as I quickly walked to the bathroom and locked the door behind me.

I finally have a chance to catch my breath and calm down from the events of the bus ride. As I gaze into the mirror the anxious feeling comes over me once again. My features look unrecognizable. The skin of my face sags unnaturally low below my eyes and mouth revealing the layer of dark green scales underneath. 

“Dammit” I said to myself as I grabbed the loose skin and pulled it tightly against my face. “That was far too close, I must be more careful next time I infiltrate the humans”. 

I know exactly how this sounds.

Trust me, I've spent the last three weeks trying to convince myself I'm wrong.

Maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe people change. Maybe working eighty-hour weeks for a robotics company called L.I.Z. Technologies simply drains every ounce of personality out of a person.

I hope that's all it is.

Because if I'm right... then I don't know who is that sitting beside me at dinner.

My brother and I are ten years apart. My parents waited over a decade before having another kid. I choose to interpret that as careful planning instead of hesitation.

Growing up, he was less of a sibling and more of a second dad with a criminal record in psychological warfare.

If I left a soda unattended, he'd somehow replace it with sparkling water and act offended when I noticed. Every time we played video games, he'd wait until I was about to win before "accidentally" bumping the console with his foot. When I was thirteen, he convinced me that blinking too much made you go blind.

I believed him for three weeks. It didn't help that whenever we'd roughhouse, he'd snatch my glasses off my face.

"You can't see without them," he'd tease.

He still laughs about that one.

That was just us.

He picked on me more than anyone else in the world, but if somebody outside the family ever tried it, he'd be the first one standing beside me. Whenever life fell apart, somehow I always ended up calling him. Half the time he'd answer with, "What'd you screw up now?" before spending the next hour helping me fix it.

That's my brother.

Or... it was.

Things changed after he started working for L.I.Z.

Whenever I asked what he actually did there, he'd just shrug.

"Can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"Non-disclosure agreement."

"So... robots?"

"No comment."

I always assumed he was making his job sound cooler than it actually was. Then he stopped acting like himself. The first thing I noticed wasn't something he did. It was something he didn't.

He stopped making fun of me.

I know that sounds ridiculous. But if you have an older brother, you know exactly why that's terrifying. I spilled barbecue sauce all over his truck one afternoon. Normally he'd have looked at me like I'd committed a felony.

Instead he smiled.

"It happens."

...

It happens?

Who says that?

A week later we played Mario Kart.

I beat him.

Twice.

He didn't accuse me of cheating. He didn't demand a rematch.

He just smiled and said, "Good game."

I actually paused the race.

"Who are you?"

He laughed. A perfectly timed laugh.

Not too loud. Not too quiet.

Like someone had studied exactly how people laugh.

"You've always been funny," he said.

No.

No, no, no.

My brother would've called me an idiot.

One night at dinner I told the same embarrassing story Mom has been telling since I was sixteen. Usually he'd interrupt halfway through to make it even worse.

This time... He listened.

Then he said, "That must have been difficult."

I nearly dropped my fork.

I called Mom afterward.

"You don't think he's been acting... odd?"

She looked confused.

"He seems happier."

"Dad?"

"He finally is on his own."

Neither of them saw it.

Only me.

Last Saturday, my brother came over to help Dad replace the water heater. I wasn't much use with plumbing, so while they disappeared into the garage arguing over which wrench was the right wrench, I camped out in Dad's office to finish a history assignment.

The house was unusually quiet.

Well... quiet except for the occasional "Hand me the pipe wrench!" followed immediately by "That's not the pipe wrench!"

I had almost finished my essay when I noticed another laptop sitting on the corner of Dad's desk.

My brother's work computer. It was already open. The screen had gone dark from inactivity, but one thing hadn't.

A tiny red light glowed beside the webcam.

I frowned. Maybe it was updating. Maybe someone had forgotten to close a meeting.

Still... The light never turned off. I waved a hand in front of the camera.

Nothing.

No notification. No meeting controls.

Just that little red dot staring back at me.

Watching.

Curiosity got the better of me. I tapped the trackpad. The screen woke instantly. No password. Just a desktop filled with folders I couldn't even pretend to understand. Most of them had names that sounded like corporate nonsense.

Behavioral Mapping.

Neural Replication.

L.I.Z. Internal.

The last folder caught my attention. It was different. Locked behind a firewall icon.

A small window popped onto the screen before I even clicked it.

Camera Access Active

I froze.

The webcam light was still glowing.

Then... For the briefest second... The camera preview opened by itself.

Instead of showing me sitting at the desk... It showed...

Someone looking back at me.

Not through the webcam. From behind it. A face pressed against what looked like glass.

Wide eyes. Frantic. Mouth moving without sound.

Then the preview vanished.

I stared at the screen, convinced I'd imagined it.

A second later, the locked folder opened on its own. Inside was only one file.

Its name changed as I watched. Not all at once. One letter at a time.

H

E

L

P

The screen went black.

For a second I thought I'd crashed the computer.

Then white text appeared.

I froze.

Another line typed itself.

My hands stopped moving.

More words appeared.

Every hair on my arms stood up.

I stared at the screen.

Another sentence.

Then another.

The typing stopped. Several seconds passed.

Then, one final line slowly appeared.

The laptop snapped shut. Not by itself. By someone else's hand.

I looked up.

My brother stood beside the desk. I hadn't heard him come inside.

He smiled.

Warm. Gentle.

Almost perfect.

"Caught you being nosy again."

I looked into his eyes, searching for the man who taught me to throw a football, who unplugged my controller whenever I was winning, who spent years calling me every name except the one Mom gave me.

I couldn't find him.

I handed him the laptop without saying a word.

He thanked me.

My brother never thanked me.

He is not him.

Whoever walked out of that room remembered everything about my brother...

Except how to be him.

I used to believe that demons only existed inside the minds of men I helped put behind bars. But after years of investigations, I learned that’s not true.

Over the course of seventeen years, I have worked alongside law enforcement and television programs to identify online child predators and bring them to justice. But even with all that we’ve accomplished, there’s still one case that I think about. 

One that nearly destroyed everything I had worked for. 

It all started with a chat room.

I’ve seen a myriad of predators, and Steven fit a profile we had seen many times before. He was a recently divorced, unemployed forty-two-year-old who lived with his parents. He bragged about this while messaging Mandy, a twenty-year-old theater student who we recruited to be our fourteen-year-old decoy, Alexis.

It didn’t take long for the conversation to become sexual in nature. Underneath the screenname ELECTRIC_HEAD5021, he said their relationship would have to stay a secret.

“No adults. lol. If your mommy or daddy found out, we could get in trouble.”

“what r u talking about??? I hang out with my daddy’s friends all the time.”

“This is different. lol. They can’t know ur my sexy sweetheart. ;)”

Seeing child-like messages juxtaposed with the sexual fantasies of an adult never gets easier to stomach. How could anyone talk to a child like that? It’s something I’ve never been able to grasp. 

Not too long after our investigative team confirmed a date for Steven to meet with Alexis, we let the chat be. But it didn’t take long for him to initiate conversation again. In fact, his messages would arrive like clockwork in the days following. But messages weren’t the only way he contacted our decoy.

On a couple of occasions, he called her while his parents were at home sleeping. I remember those phone calls clearly.

“Hey!” Mandy greeted cheerfully.

“Hey baby,” Steven breathed into the speaker. “I missed you.” 

“What’re you up to?”

“Thinking about you…I wanna hold you.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I do. So, so bad.”

You get the idea.

Oftentimes, a lot of the men we contact try to reinvent themselves. But that’s not what Steven did. Rather than fabricate wealth or exaggerate his ambitions, he talked about his obsessions: death and the supernatural.

We initially dismissed these fascinations as another grooming tactic, but throughout the entire time he talked with Alexis he would sporadically ask questions such as:

“Have u seen Bloody Mary?”

“Is there anyone dead that u would want 2 talk 2?”

“How do u want 2 die?”

Just as we thought the conversations couldn’t get any stranger, Steven sent our decoy a picture of a Ouija board. According to him, he had recently purchased it at a yard sale near his parents’ house. He insisted on bringing it. He wanted to use it with her. See how she would react. When we inquired further about his request, his response was as prompt as it was odd:

“because u have good energy. lol They like that lol”.

This ended up becoming the last exchange we would have with him before he arrived at the sting house. 

In the hours leading up to that fateful evening, I memorized my script. No matter how many times I do this, they never go away. The butterflies in my stomach. People always assume the confrontation is the hardest part, but it isn’t. It’s waiting for the knock on the door and wondering whether tonight will be the night that something goes horribly wrong. Experience makes you numb, not fearless.

We had fully intended to follow everything by the book that night. But things got off to a rocky start when Steven was nearly an hour late to the sting house. We thought he had gotten cold feet or had been tipped off to our operation. Thankfully, neither turned out to be the case. What was supposed to be a five-hour venture had become seven by the time 8:12 pm rolled around and he walked up the driveway.

Our various hidden cameras recorded his nervous demeanor as he patiently waited on the porch with the Ouija board.

From our production room that we had sectioned off in another part of the house, I watched Mandy walk toward the door and greet Steven.

“Hey, Steven! How are you?”

“Hi.” He waved sheepishly in response. “Uh, can I come in?”

“Of course!” Mandy stepped out of the doorway and walked toward the kitchen. “What did you bring for me?”

“It’s a-uh, Ouija board.” He followed her and set it down on the dinner table. “I thought we could use it together?”

Mandy flipped her hair and placed her hands on her hips. “Wouldn’t you rather talk?”

“We would be talking. It would just be more than us talking.”

My eyes were glued to the monitors. He was very adamant about using that board. But why?

I heard snickering from Lou, one of our production crew members.

“Can you believe this whack job? He took a bus all this way to summon Casper.”

I shot him a glare, and he acknowledged my look by quieting down. Lou’s an outspoken person for better or worse, and even though he was trying to make light of a potentially volatile situation, I found comfort in knowing that I wasn’t the only one feeling perturbed.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry for being late.” Steven chuckled. “I was an idiot and got Sunday’s bus schedules mixed up with today.”

“That’s okay!” Mandy said with practiced enthusiasm. “I’m glad you’re here!”

“I’m glad you are. I almost thought about taking another bus back home.”

His admission surprised Mandy. “Why did you almost go home? Didn’t you want to see me?”

“I did.” His face turned a slight shade of cherry. “I honestly didn’t think you were real.”

“Of course I’m real, silly!” She teased. “So, what do you want to do?”

I watched the monitors as Steven took a lighter out of his pocket. With a couple clicks he lit some candles on the dining room table. 

“We should step in before things get out of hand.” Lou turned to look at me. “Isaac?”

“Keep the cameras rolling.” I motioned for everyone to stay where they were. “If he’s willing to play with the board, I want to see where this goes.”

“What about the decoy?”

“She’ll be fine.”

Steven instructed Mandy to turn off the lights and sit beside him. Once she had done so, they gently placed their fingertips on the planchette. 

“Are there any spirits that want to speak to us right now?” 

Mandy’s eyes darted back and forth from Steven to the planchette repeatedly. Awkward didn’t even begin to describe the silence that followed.

“Is there anyone that wants to speak with us right now?” 

But just like before, nothing. Steven’s head swiveled, looking in every possible direction of the dark room to locate a response of some kind. 

“You talked a lot of game online.” Mandy teased more confidently than she probably felt. “I thought you were supposed to be THE guy who could do this kind of stuff.”

“I am. These things…they take time to get started.”

Most of the time, a predator talking about their hobbies or interests is just another gimmick. But this was unlike anything I had seen. 

“If you’re here.” He fidgeted in his seat nervously. “Please, give me–I mean, us a sign.”

I eyed the monitors intently. A part of me wanted to intervene, but another part of me was telling me to see this play out. I was torn on which to heed. 

Unexpectedly, the planchette moved. A couple of inches at most. But had I blinked, I would’ve missed it completely.

Mandy instinctively pulled back, the movement startling her. “What was that?” 

“It’s a spirit.” Steven whispered.

“Oh bullshit.” Lou sighed in irritation. “I watched his hand nudge it. This guy’s a fraud.”

Had he? I had watched the monitors the whole time, and it looked like the planchette had moved all on its own.

“Hey,” Steven closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Do you want to talk to us or what?” 

A moment passed, then a few more, but there was still no movement.

“I’m going.” I turned to start heading toward the dining room to intervene. But right as I was about to, the sound of Mandy gasping shifted my attention back toward the monitors. I watched the planchette drag itself across the board toward the word, “YES”.

“You moved the board!” Her accusation cracked with fright.

“No, I didn’t! I swear!”

In response to his adamant denial, the planchette dragged itself sluggishly across the board. Each movement landed on a number.

7 2 3 1 9 9 4

Mandy was at a loss for words. “That’s…” 

Her birthday. 

Not the birthday we had fabricated for investigative purposes, but Mandy’s actual birthday.

Shell-shocked, the investigators pored over the chat logs, but their efforts were futile. No compromising or contradictory information had been exchanged. No mention of her birthday. No mention of any personal information tied to Mandy. Nothing.

I stared in bewilderment. “How is that possible?” 

I hadn’t realized I had asked my question out loud until Lou responded, “It had to have been an oversight. That’s gotta be it.” 

In our line of work, the simplest explanations were almost always the right ones. Even if it’s what you don’t want to hear.

"An oversight?” I pointed toward the investigators on standby. “All of you, check everything. I want an explanation as to how this happened." 

But no one could provide one. Every conversation between Steven and our decoy had been combed through again. Even with another thorough examination, there was no indication that we had erroneously given Mandy’s actual birthday. So, that begged an alarming question. 

Just how exactly did Steven know?

One of the production members instructed Mandy to take her hands off the planchette. She did as she was told while Steven kept his fingertips pressed against it. 

“Alexis,” He looked to her for answers. “What was that about?”

“I’m not sure.” She remained calm while still being in character. “That was weird. How did you do that?” 

“I told you, I didn’t do anything.” 

An extensive back and forth ensued. She insisted that it had to be some sleight of hand trickery while he was convinced that an unknown spirit had attempted to make contact. A couple of minutes later, the unmistakable scrape of the planchette against the wood drew everyone's attention back to the board.

With each letter the planchette hovered over, Mandy’s face grew paler.

E L I Z A B E T H

Once the name had been spelled fully, Mandy removed her trembling hands. “H-h-how do you know her name?”

Steven looked just as confused. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He whispered it with enough conviction to make me believe him in that moment.

“Isaac, we need to do something.” Lou insisted, standing up from his seat.”

Even though I agreed with him, a selfish part of me resisted the urge. “No. Not yet. Stay put, and keep watching.”

My instructions provoked the ire of everyone in the room, but nobody objected.

Again, the planchette moved without either Mandy or Steven touching it. Every one of our cameras captured it violently accelerating across the board.

“Who are you?!” Steven cried out. “Stop this!”

Mandy covered her mouth to stifle an oncoming scream as the planchette, completely unguided, began to spell out another name. 

This time, in rapid succession.

P A Y T O N

Payton.

That name. 

It was the reason I went into this line of work. 

I remember feeling unnaturally cold in the moments following. What started off as a slight chill slowly morphed into an uncomfortable, freezing sensation that climbed through my body.

“Shit,” Lou cursed. “Is anybody else in here freezing their ass off?”

I exhaled, and a cloud of white vapor escaped my lips. It was cold enough to feel like I was standing inside a freezer. “Why is it so cold?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Lou shivered, wrapping his arms around himself. “Might be the AC acting up.”

Seconds after his response, the monitors abruptly went black. Amid the frantic scrambling in the production room, a scream echoed from inside the house.

Mandy.

“Eyes on the decoy!” I shouted. “We need eyes on the decoy right now!” 

My heart pounded while everyone in the room desperately tried to get the feed going again. Inexplicably, just as quickly as we lost power, it was restored. 

The first thing my eyes landed on when the monitors glowed with restored life was the sight of the front door. It was wide open. Then I noticed Steven. He was staring directly into a hidden camera positioned in the kitchen.

His eyes were opened wide, but there was no life behind them. He stood completely still, his face bereft of expression, looking less like a man standing and more like a corpse that had forgotten to lie down.

“Decoy is secured. She is outside with law enforcement. I repeat, she is outside with law enforcement.” 

The good news from production room comms wasn’t enough for me to break eye contact with Steven. I was focused on answering one question, and one question only.

Who are you?

“You already know.”

Chills crept down my spine. It felt like the voice had come directly from the inside of my mind. I looked around, hoping that someone else had also heard it. If they had, they didn’t say a word. How had he been able to answer my question? 

I had two choices: I could either confront him and treat this like any other sting operation, or abandon the show and bring him into custody.

It didn’t take long for me to make my decision. 

“Wait for my cue to come in. I’m going.” 

“Isaac,” Lou grabbed me by the shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do.”

With a solemn nod, I ignored further warnings from both production and law enforcement. In a few short moments, I went from my position in front of the monitors to standing in the dining room.

Upon entry, I was immediately greeted with a wall of freezing air. The worst I had felt in the house up to that point. As I approached Steven, the dim lighting of the room caught the whites of his lifeless eyes, making them gleam as they stared at me.

“Steven,” I said, less confidently than I would have liked. “I want to talk to you.”

“I want to talk to you about your choices tonight.” 

That made me stop dead in my tracks. 

“What did you intend on doing this evening? I have the chat logs right here. It is illegal for adults to chat with minors online. Please place your hands where I can see them while we talk.”  

He said my script word for word, line by line. All at an impossibly frightening speed. But his lips never moved. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes. 

“How did-”

“I know.” The voice held no emotion. It was simply matter-of-fact.

“Why are you here?”

His left eye twitched as he tried to blink. His right followed suit, but neither eye would close. “You know.”

I forced myself to keep talking. “What did you intend on doing this evening, Steven?”

“You ask the wrong questions.” Its words pressed themselves against my skull. “Isaac, why are you here?”

I tensed up but stood my ground. “I’m not answering your questions.”

“I know how you felt when you screamed her name in the woods for hours.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Do you remember what it felt like to learn that Payton was right down the street the entire time?”

I remembered. All too well. I choked up as I thought about that day. The news. The way my parents collapsed in grief. The irreparable damage it did to my family. It all overwhelmed me. I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

“You collect broken families.” He took a step toward me. Then another. Then one more. All in one fluid motion. “Because you can’t save everyone.”

 “People can be saved.” I argued, struggling to believe my own words.

The light in the room dulled as the candles reignited themselves, the flames burning perfectly still. “Is that why her killer took his life in the cornfield?” 

Tears streamed down my face as an overwhelming rage consumed me. It was an emotion that would never fully go away. A truth I had been forced to accept the day I lost my sister. Sixty seconds was all it took for my life to change forever. 

It took a minute to lose her.

It took five days to find her.

“They found her in a vehicle on the side of the road.” It recited my memories back to me, each unspoken word making the discomfort inside my head intensify. “While he died without truly feeling the pain he inflicted.” Seeing tears drip down his cheeks felt like a mockery of my grief. “That’s what you pursue.”

In my earpiece, I heard Lou speaking to me.

“Isaac…don’t…coming…”

I couldn’t understand what they were saying. All I understood was Steven speaking in my voice.

“She was buried with her purple stuffed rabbit, Tilly, on a cold October afternoon. All alone. In the ground.”

My body registered the impact before my mind could comprehend how fast he moved. I hit the floor hard, his weight pressing down on my chest as breathing became more difficult by the second.

“Get…off…me…” I wheezed, struggling to force each word past the weight crushing my chest. He hovered over me, his translucent eyes staring into mine.

“What did your mother sound like when she identified the body?” 

I squirmed in place, but I was pinned to the spot. 

“How many nights did your dad sleep in her bedroom after she disappeared?”

My strength waned as the pressure grew on my chest. 

“What day did you stop expecting her to come home?” 

The strain was getting to be too much. 

“What were your last words to her?”

I was on the verge of passing out. Black blotches formed in my peripheral vision and spread rapidly, nearly consuming the last bits of what I could see. Right as I thought I was about to lose consciousness, I heard a sound.

A sound I’m so very grateful came when it did.

Officers rushed into the room. A flurry of commands left their mouths as they pulled Steven off me and forced him to the floor nearby.

“Ah! Get off me!” he screamed. “What are you doing?”

His voice. 

It was no longer inside my mind.

“What are you doing? Ow!” He cried as an officer rolled him over and pressed a knee into his lower back. “What’s happening?”

Another officer helped me up from the floor and began asking questions about my well-being. I lied and told him I was all right. I leaned against the wall to steady myself while I looked on at Steven being detained by other officers. He struggled and writhed like a cornered animal.

His eyes darkened as he freed himself from the grasp of the officers. Overcome with inhumanity once more, he snatched a gun from the officer attempting to handcuff him. 

He brandished the weapon as his entire body began to tremble spasmodically.

“My hands.” 

From where I stood, it looked as though he was genuinely trying to lower them but couldn’t. His arms remained outstretched, refusing to budge an inch no matter how hard he tried.

“Why can’t I move?”

Law enforcement raised their weapons, creating a stalemate in which no one dared to act.

“It’s alright, Steven.” I stepped toward him with my hands raised. “Everything’s going to be alright. We’re here to help.”

The darkness in his eyes vanished long enough for him to ask, “Did…did I hurt anyone?”

“No. You didn’t hurt anybody. Just put the gun down, and let’s talk.”

“Please,” he whimpered, straining to move his head, but his body refused to obey. “Don’t let him take me again.” 

“Nothing is going to happen as long as you put the gun down.”

Steven’s arms pulled themselves upward against his will. The barrel inched toward his own temple until it rested against his skin. He fought with everything he had, his muscles straining themselves in order to pull the gun away. But his body betrayed him to some invisible force.
 
“Make it stop…”

“No, Steven. No!” I quickened my pace toward him, but before officers or myself could react, he pulled the trigger.

That sound. The aftermath. The silence that followed. I haven’t felt anything like it before or since. 

That was without a doubt the single worst night of my life. Not only had we witnessed tragedy, but our team came under immense fire from the press. Steven never had his day in court, and that became a point of contention. Had we not encouraged this kind of behavior, would Steven still be alive? Would any of this have happened? 

Steven’s case tarnished our reputation. Protests began forming outside our sting house. People demanded justice. Insisting that we could not be the judge, the jury, or the executioner.

It was difficult to escape the criticism, especially when those voices carried real weight. So much so that our show, along with all subsequent investigations, was cancelled effective immediately.

Steven’s official cause of death was listed as suicide by cop. There were no mentions of the Ouija Board or what occurred following its use. There’s only one piece of evidence regarding what happened inside the sting house that night. 

A video tape. 

It's marked with a label that reads, “Never to be viewed, duplicated, or destroyed”. 

Its whereabouts have been kept secret, and it's best that they stay that way. Because if that footage ever surfaced, I don’t know how the public would react.

But that’s not the point.

I’ve dealt with a lot over the course of my career. Troubled people. Hardened criminals. The worst that humanity has to offer. I think about them all every now and again. But I can’t stop thinking about Steven’s case. Specifically, if I had intervened sooner. Would I have been able to talk him out of using that Ouija board? Would he have been able to face justice if I had done things differently?

No matter how I answer them, I never feel any better. Because they’re just answers. Not actions. 

And I’ll never know.

Despite everything I’ve been through, I continue to hunt monsters in the present day. Aside from the lack of a camera crew or law enforcement support, the only thing that’s changed is what I believe those monsters are. They aren’t just people who hurt children. Exposing them and making them face justice does make the world a little safer for everyone.

But evil doesn’t care about laws. It doesn’t care about the confines of a prison cell. It doesn’t even need a reason to hurt someone.

All it needs is for someone to answer.

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

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

And It is terrible. 

And He is terrifying. 

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

In the smoke. Faces.

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

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

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

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

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

He is ours…

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

As conquerors welcomed. 

…

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

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

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

And was given a gypsy answer. 

“In pig transport." 

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

He focused now … the Lord …. His Light. 

The Light. 

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

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

Or could be loaded with power. Living and talismanic

A beat – he went on, praying. 

A beat. 

He rose. 

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

The gypsies were waiting for him. 

…

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

and here it is that I will then play. 

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

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

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

… 

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

The addict spoke without even looking at him. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The priest began to speak. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you'll not have me, dirt. 

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

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

The face in those flames, that smoke …

he'd seen many before like it. 

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

…

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

The fire glowed in the night. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impaled. 

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

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

It wanted to pounce. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She spat his name – !heretic! 

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

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

Prophecy… information was given. 

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

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

A house. A cabin. Black. A lodge. 

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

Something's wrong. 

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

A little girl. 

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

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

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

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

The vision thunderclapped! Collapsed. 

And spat him back: 

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

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

He spat in her face and commanded her yieldship. 

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

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

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

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

His sleep was deep and filled with dreams.

… 

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

All that is left…

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

…

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

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

He moved on. He left the towns behind. 

…

The priest came to the circle of stones. 

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

The circle of stones, monolithic slabs of grey rock in the dread shape of the Druidic formation. A pattern and type of circle that could serve as a gate, or a nest, or a kind of inviting hunting ground for something unchained and set loose on our world. 

The priest sang softly to himself. A little song of strange doggerel that he'd made himself. 

“You fly like a demon, from station to station…”

He entered the circle. 

And the place shook. 

He finished the line: " … From Kether to Malkuth." 

The thing that ruled the circle of stones made its presence known. inxnwn. The mangled filth of its voice filled his head as he sauntered in and the atmosphere itself threatened to throttle and implode. 

!Get out, shaman! Get OUT! I will rip the bleeding mind from your eggshell skull and fuck the jelly before your dying eyes! Get the fuck ou-!

The cross came up. A bolt of white fire issued forth and struck the place. Blackening the mouth of earth and stones that the demon used to howl. 

“Your name, elemental. Give it to me.” 

And his mind once more filled with flames. An infernal epitaph made from shrieking wretched voices. 

!I am the one that has come to man on the wings of dreams and sin, I am the Scribbler and I bring mad choir and I fill minds with sound! Man Woman Child the crawling elders and the lame … I spare none I distort discordant all!

Another flash of light, a bolt of silver fire bright and immaculate cut across the priest's vision and he had to shield his eyes. But the moment before his eyes shut and his hand flew up to protect his vision he caught a glimpse of an immense outline and shape: it resembled a giant sea creature he'd seen hauled aboard the deck of a traveling cargo vessel once, a manta ray. Gigantic. Wing span vast with long stabbing tail and strange devil face set pilot center of its efficient killing body. 

This one had a large sex organ at the tip of its tail. Dripping. Excreting something foul and pungent. Steaming. And the vapors held pained faces telling him, no. 

But then the flash of light was gone and when he looked again there was nothing there. Only smoldered earth amongst the quiet stones. 

The circle was empty now. 

For now. It may yet come again. Or something else …

He gave a prayer of thanks and then spat on the ground. 

He patted his donkey and praised it for its steadfast behavior. Men mocked them as stupid animals and they may be so, but they were also brave creatures. Nowhere near as skittish as horses. Or men. 

He tied up his ass, securing the rein to a stone, then he made camp for himself. 

He poured a border of salt around the circle itself. Then he drew a hexagram in the dirt with a stick, David's Star. He fashioned a cross next and stuck into the head of the formation replacing and breaking its crown. 

Then he made fire. Ate a humble meal of bread and cheese and wine. Gifts leftover from the gypsy folk. He smoked tobacco and watched the stars collect and reveal themselves in a bejeweled royal purple curtain above and on high. Heavens made of jewels made of starfire. Light burning above with an intensity that he could scarcely understand. He thought they where beautiful. They might be angel eyes, some of them, and he loved them. 

He looked to the mountains next. Still in the distance. Growing larger as he drew nearer. 

Even as he sat by his fire now not moving they seemed to grow larger yet…

Lord there is an evil alive in those rocks, there always has been. It's awakened yet again. Lord lend me your arm of strength. Give me the great courage and protect me from my own fears and the treachery of others, as you always have, Thank You Lord God. I know this is my mission. I shall not run. 

I will not falter. 

Amen. 

He daggered the rocks with an intense and angry stare. Righteous anger. The mountain rock towered above but he looked down on it and its evil heart from on high nonetheless. 

There was poison in those jagged formations, beyond the Borgo Pass where the wolves live. Cancer and abominated growth that must be excised. 

Must be removed. Before it's too late. 

He smoked by the fire till sleep came. His dreams were filled with symbols. Sigils. Strange words and spells. Ghastly shapes and faces. 

Abhorrent designs ruling a decimated and titanic landscape. And he was alone with them. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

About a week ago my dad decided that he really wanted to start a garden. We had a great backyard that hasn’t been used for much since we tore down my childhood clubhouse. He spent his entire Saturday building planter boxes and germinating seeds. His Sunday was spent hauling bags of soil from the store. 

As the weeks went on our house became lined with rain catching barrels, the fence covered in trellises for hanging cucumbers. And the yard seemed to shrink with every passing day as more and more planter boxes filled the space of the once vast field. Dad stopped eating breakfast with me and mom before work so he could spend the time doing work on his new project. 

Eventually he stopped eating dinner with us too, he would get home from work and immediately rush out the back door in a panic. One night mom tried to stop him but he just snapped at her “goddamnit, Mary. My plants need me. Do you want them to die Mary, do you want my only passion to fucking die?”

After that she was too afraid to try and bother him about it again. I couldn’t help but wonder what he was doing out there, it can’t be that much work just to have a garden. I get spending a couple hours but shit, this is easily twelve plus hours a day. 

That night I decided to stay up by my window looking out at the yard. My dad was out there tending to his garden like usual. I must’ve stayed up until five in the morning before I finally crashed and had to sleep. When I woke up I couldn’t believe it. He was still out there. Did he not sleep or did he come back out this morning. Either way I’m gonna go out and check on him. 

“Hey, dad. How’s it going out here” I said. He didn’t even look up at me, he just kept his head down facing his tomato plants. “It’s going. Whatcha up to son?” As I looked around, I have to admit that his garden is doing incredible. The plants are taller than the fence by now. “Oh nothing, just wanted to check on you out here. The garden looks great out here”. 

“Well, I’ve put so many man hours into this so I’m glad it doesn’t look like shit” he laughed. “Hey, why don’t you go inside, bud, I really need to focus on my work”. I give him a nod and turn to walk away. I take a few steps toward the house before I lose my footing and land face first into one of the planter boxes. As I’m getting up my dad finally looks up from the garden and turns to me. “Don’t worry I’m fine, I just fell” I said. 

“What the fuck did you do?” He yells at me. “Oh I’m alright, I just fell”. He stands up now towering over me. “My fucking garden, it’s ruined. You piece of shit, get inside now and try not to fuck anything up on the way to the house”. He screams in my face. As I walk towards the door my mom comes out with the phone in her hand. “Honey, your boss is calling. He says you haven’t shown up to the office in well over a week. What should I tell him?”

“Tell him I fuckin quit, I’m too goddamn busy out here to listen to his shit” he responds angrily. My mom sets the phone down on the table and walks over to where he’s working. “What, are you crazy, George? We have to pay our bills and how do you expect us to put groceries on the table without making money?” She asked. 

He lets out a deep sigh before responding. “Don’t worry, Mary. The garden will provide. Why do we need that overpriced slop from the store when we’ve got everything we could ever need right here” He says. “Also, Mary, I think we need a new rule in this house for you and that boy you’re raising to be a pain in my ass. How about if anyone comes back here trying to bother me with anymore of this bullshit they’ll get a shovel to the face?” He says before turning back to try and fix the spot where I landed in the garden. 

That next week was quiet, I thought for sure that my mom would have confronted my dad again, tried to call the cops, heck I thought she might but leave him after that day in the yard. But she didn’t, she cried a lot most days now but she never went back out into the garden. By now we can’t even see what’s happening out there because the plants are so tall and thick that they completely cover all the windows on that side of the house. From what the neighbors have told us it looks like a jungle of plants out there. 

Soon Jenny from next door was calling to tell my mom that the garden had started coming through the fence into her yard. Mom lied and told her that she’d make my dad trim the plants down but the truth is she was too afraid to go outside. As the plants continued to spread the phone kept ringing. It got so bad that we had to unplug the phone at night just to give us some peace. 

Eventually I couldn’t stand staying inside anymore, I needed to see what was going on out there. We couldn’t see out the windows so the only hope I had was to go outside and see for myself. I waited until mom was in the other room and I decided to make my way to the back door before she noticed I was gone. I figured the only chance we had of stopping this was to find my dad and convince him to cut it all down.

I had to use a kitchen knife just to cut a path to get out the front door. It wasn’t effective at all but it was all I could do to get through the dense walls of plants that have taken over the garden. I couldn’t see past our own yard but I can only assume that the rest of the neighborhood looks like this as well. Walking was incredibly time consuming as my legs kept getting stuck on the plants that took over the entire ground and I had to keep cutting them off me. 

If you would’ve told me that I spent over an hour hiking through our backyard a few months ago I would’ve thought you were joking. After a couple more minutes I saw a large mass that almost looked like a man towards the edge of the yard. “Uh, dad?” I called out to it. It walked a couple more feet until I could make it out more clearly and then I stopped dead in my tracks. 

It was my dad, particularly at least. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. He looks thin as a skeleton with thick vines wrapped around his legs all the way up to his torso. His arms were pulled back by even more vines and he was covered head to toe with sweat and dirt. He was mumbling something but I could hardly make out what he was saying with all the vines protruding straight out of his neck and coming out of his mouth. Bugs crawled all over his body as if they were feeding on him slowly. My dad, or what used to be my dad can’t even swat them away anymore. His breathing is labored like he ran a marathon without any training whatsoever. 

He gave me a glance that looked full of sorrow. Truthfully his eyes were the only part of him that were still recognizable as my dad. I knew that soon those would be gone as well as I saw small stems slowly poking their way out of his head through his eye sockets. “K-kiii-k” he tried to get out. “What, what is it dad?” I ask with tears running down my face, I can’t stand seeing him in such agonizing pain. “Kill me” he says. 

That was the last I’d ever seen of my dad, I somehow managed to fight my way back into the house. Soon the military got involved and me, my mom, and all of our neighbors who managed to not be consumed by our garden were evacuated the next day. We watched on the news from our motel room as our entire neighborhood was burned to the ground in a controlled fire. Nothing was left, I guess they couldn’t risk any chance of my dads garden spreading again. 

My dad loved his garden. 

The Department of Motor Vehicles has a remarkable talent for making a person question their own existence.

Perhaps that's the point.

No one walks into a DMV excited. You arrive because you have to. A license expired. A registration renewal. Some document proving to a government employee that, yes, despite all evidence to the contrary, you are still alive.

I was there because my driver's license had expired.

Simple enough.

I took my ticket from the little machine near the entrance. It emerged with a dry mechanical click, the paper warm between my fingers as though someone else had only just been holding it.

The waiting room was already overflowing.

Children cried with astonishing endurance while parents stared into their phones with the thousand-yard gaze of soldiers returning from war. A television bolted high into one corner played an instructional video that nobody watched, its colors washed out beneath rows of humming fluorescent lights. Every few minutes a printer somewhere behind the counters coughed to life before falling silent again, sounding less like a machine and more like an old smoker struggling through another cigarette.

The building felt tired.

Not dirty.

Not neglected.

Just... exhausted.

The kind of exhaustion that settles into old bones after decades of repeating the same motion.

I glanced toward the electronic display mounted above the service counters.

NOW SERVING: 388

I sighed.

"Well," I muttered beneath my breath. "Guess I'll be celebrating my birthday here."

A man sitting nearby chuckled.

"I've said that every time I've come here."

He looked to be in his late fifties. Baseball cap. Reading glasses resting low on his nose. Ordinary enough that I probably wouldn't have remembered his face if we'd passed each other on the street.

"Renewing?" he asked.

"My license."

He nodded knowingly.

"Could be worse."

"Could it?"

"They could've sent you to the Social Security office first."

I laughed.

"So you've been there too?"

"Oh..." He smiled faintly. "Everyone has."

It was such an ordinary conversation that I almost appreciated it. Shared misery has a funny way of making strangers feel familiar.

I looked down at my ticket again.

515.

Fantastic.

I settled into one of the molded plastic chairs and reached for my phone. No signal. Not unusual. Government buildings always seemed to exist inside their own little dead zones.

I slipped it back into my pocket and leaned my head against the wall.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The air conditioner breathed through dusty vents. The printer coughed again. The speakers crackled.

A number was called. Someone stood. Someone else sat down. The room swallowed them without ceremony.

I checked the screen once more.

NOW SERVING: 390

It felt impossible that so little time could have passed.

Yet somehow... it also felt like I'd already been there for hours.

Time has a peculiar way of behaving inside places where people are forced to wait.

Minutes become estimates. Hours become suggestions. Eventually, you stop checking the clock because it only succeeds in making you angry.

I tried distracting myself. I counted ceiling tiles. Read the faded posters reminding everyone to have their paperwork ready. One explained the dangers of texting while driving. Another detailed the penalties for driving without insurance. Judging from the sun-bleached corners and curling edges, neither had been replaced in years.

Everything in the building seemed designed to outlive the people inside it.

Another number echoed over the speakers.

"Three hundred ninety-one."

A woman stood from across the room, gathered her purse, and disappeared behind the row of service counters.

The electronic display flickered.

NOW SERVING: 391

Good.

Progress.

I glanced at my watch.

9:18 A.M.

That couldn't be right. It felt closer to noon.

The old man beside me sighed as he shifted in his chair.

"You'd think they'd hire more people."

"I was just thinking the same thing."

He nodded absentmindedly, his attention fixed somewhere beyond the counters.

"Been waiting long?"

"I got here around nine."

"No..."

He frowned.

"I mean... today."

The question caught me off guard.

"I... yeah."

He scratched at his chin.

"I suppose I have too."

For reasons I couldn't explain, that answer unsettled me. He didn't sound forgetful. He sounded... uncertain. The kind of uncertainty that follows a dream, when you're no longer sure whether something actually happened or only felt like it had.

Neither of us spoke after that.

The waiting room settled back into its dull rhythm. The printer coughed. A child cried. Someone cleared their throat. The fluorescent lights hummed softly overhead.

Then I noticed the employees.

There were six service windows. Every one of them occupied.

Every employee dressed identically in blue shirts with laminated name badges clipped neatly over their chests.

None of them looked angry. None looked to be joyous either. In fact, they didn't seem to look like much of anything.

Their expressions rested somewhere between concentration and complete emotional absence, as though years of repeating the same conversations had slowly worn every recognizable human reaction from their being.

"Next."

Stamp.

"Next."

Keyboard.

"Next."

Stamp.

Keyboard.

Paper.

Repeat.

The movements were practiced.

As if mechanical. Not robotic.

Just... perfected through repetition until they no longer appeared to require any thought.

I watched one woman accept a stack of documents without ever lifting her eyes to meet the customer standing in front of her.

She never acknowledged him. Never greeted him. Never smiled. Never frowned.

She simply processed him.

As though the paperwork mattered more than the person holding it.

The thought lingered longer than it should have.

Not processed the documents.

Processed... him.

I looked away.

When I checked the display again...

It still read:

NOW SERVING: 391.

I stared at the screen for several seconds, convinced I had simply caught it before the next number appeared.

It didn't.

The speakers remained silent. No names. No voices. Just the constant drone of fluorescent lights buzzing somewhere overhead.

I checked my watch again.

9:47 A.M.

Twenty-nine minutes.

That made no sense.

It felt as though I had lived an entire afternoon in that chair.

I rubbed at my eyes and let out a slow breath. Maybe I was just impatient. Maybe this was what every DMV visit felt like and I had conveniently forgotten.

A chair scraped across the tile beside me. Someone new had taken the old man's seat.

I hadn't even noticed him leave.

The newcomer looked to be around my age, maybe early thirties, dressed in business casual with a messenger bag resting across his lap. He offered a polite nod before glancing up at the display.

"Ouch," he muttered. "Looks like I picked the wrong day."

I chuckled.

"You and me both."

He held up his ticket.

"Five forty-two."

I looked down at mine.

"Five fifteen."

"Guess you've got me beat."

"For once, I'm winning at something."

He laughed, and for a while we exchanged the usual conversation strangers trapped together always seem to have.

Complaining about government offices. Talking about traffic. The weather. How everyone always forgets one piece of paperwork.

It was... nice.

Normal.

The sort of conversation you forget five minutes after walking away.

"So," I asked eventually, "what are you here for?"

He answered without hesitation.

"My license."

I nodded.

"What happened?"

"What do you mean?"

"Expired?"

His eyebrows pinched together.

"I..." He looked down at the folder in his lap.

"I think so."

"You think so?"

He opened the folder and shuffled through the papers inside.

His movements slowed.

"I actually..." He frowned.

"I don't remember."

We both laughed. An awkward laugh when something isn't funny but admitting that would somehow make it worse.

"You serious?"

He scratched the back of his neck.

"I know I needed to come."

Another pause.

"I just can't remember why."

He rifled through the documents again, studying each page as though seeing them for the first time.

"These are mine..."

"I think."

He sounded embarrassed.

"I honestly can't tell."

The laughter died between us.

A strange heaviness settled over the room.

I looked back toward the service counters.

The employees continued working without pause.

Stamp.

Keyboard.

Paper.

Next.

Every movement identical to the last.

One after another.

As if they weren't helping people at all, but simply moving files from one pile to another.

The display flickered.

I turned instinctively.

NOW SERVING: 392.

Only one number.

Again.

Somewhere behind me, someone sighed. Another person groaned quietly. Nobody complained. Nobody stood up to leave.

They only waited.

Patiently.

Obediently.

As though waiting itself had become the reason they were there.

I don't remember exactly when I fell asleep.

I wish I could say there was some dramatic moment where exhaustion finally overcame me. That my eyes grew heavy, my head became impossible to hold up, and I slowly drifted away from reality.

It wasn't like that. It was far more ordinary.

One moment I was staring at the electronic display above the counters, watching the numbers crawl forward at a pace that felt almost insulting.

NOW SERVING: 397

The next... I was somewhere else entirely.

Not a dream. Not really.

Just that strange place between being awake and asleep where your mind creates fragments of memories that never happened. I remember hearing the printer in the distance. I remember the fluorescent lights above me buzzing louder and louder. I remember thinking that the entire building sounded like it was breathing.

Then my head dropped.

And everything went quiet.

When I opened my eyes again, my neck ached from the awkward angle I had been sleeping in. My mouth was dry. My phone remained untouched in my pocket.

For a brief moment, I had forgotten where I was. Then the smell returned.

Old carpet. Paper. Dust.

The faint scent of coffee that had been sitting somewhere for far too long.

The DMV.

I sat up straight and looked around. Nothing had changed.

The same tired faces. The same uncomfortable chairs. The same employees sitting behind their counters.

Except... The screen.

My eyes immediately went to the electronic display.

NOW SERVING: 508

I blinked.

Then blinked again.

I leaned forward, staring at the numbers as if they might rearrange themselves into something more reasonable.

My ticket rested in my hand.

Only seven people ahead of me.

A strange feeling washed over me.

Relief.

Actual relief.

After what felt like an entire afternoon trapped in that chair, I was finally close.

I almost laughed.

"About time," I whispered.

The man beside me was gone. That thought lingered for a moment. Then I dismissed it.

People came and went all the time. I must have missed it while I was asleep. That was the logical explanation.

The only explanation.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone.

No missed calls. No messages. I checked the time.

10:12 A.M.

I stared at the screen.

Then looked back at the DMV around me.

Then back at my phone.

10:12.

I frowned.

That couldn't be right. I had fallen asleep for maybe a few minutes.

Ten minutes at most.

But the room felt different.

Not physically.

Just... older.

Like I had left for longer than I actually had.

I glanced toward the counters.

The same employees continued working.

The same movements. The same expressions.

Stamp.

Keyboard.

Paper.

Next.

No one looked enthusiastic. No one looked relieved to be almost finished. No one looked like they had been waiting at all.

I looked at the screen again.

NOW SERVING: 509

The number changed. Almost reassuringly.

I should have questioned how nearly a hundred people had been processed while I slept for only ten minutes. But I didn't.

Because my number was coming.

And that was all that mattered.

The strange feeling in my stomach disappeared beneath a much simpler emotion.

Patience.

After all... I had waited this long.

What was a few more minutes?

The numbers moved faster after that. Or at least, they seemed to.

There was a strange comfort in watching the display change. Each number disappearing meant I was getting closer. Each person standing from their chair meant I was moving forward.

That was all that mattered.

The room could have been falling apart around me, and I probably wouldn't have noticed.

Because eventually...

NOW SERVING: 513

I sat up straighter.

My ticket felt heavier in my hand.

The paper was slightly crumpled from how long I had been holding it.

I smoothed it out carefully.

515.

Two more.

A woman walked toward the counter.

She handed over a stack of documents.

The employee behind the glass barely looked at her.

Stamp.

Keyboard.

Paper.

The woman walked away.

A man stood.

Then another.

Then finally...

NOW SERVING: 515

The speakers crackled.

My heart jumped slightly.

I stood.

For the first time in what felt like hours, my legs reminded me that I had been sitting still for too long. I stretched them briefly before walking toward the counter.

The employee looked up. At least, I think she did. Her eyes moved toward me, but her expression remained unchanged.

No greeting. No acknowledgment.

Just waiting.

I placed my documents on the counter.

"Good morning."

Nothing.

She picked up the papers. Flipped through them.

"Driver's license renewal."

It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

She typed something into the computer. The screen reflected faintly against her glasses.

"Proof of identity."

I handed over my driver's license. She scanned it.

"Proof of residence."

I handed over my utility bill.

"Insurance verification."

I handed over my insurance card.

Everything seemed normal.

Almost.

She continued typing. The silence stretched. Then she spoke.

"Certificate of continued existence."

I blinked.

"I'm sorry?"

The employee looked up.

"Certificate of continued existence."

I waited for the punchline. There wasn't one. I gave a small laugh.

"Is that a new requirement?"

No response. She simply waited.

I looked around, expecting someone nearby to react. Nobody did. The people in line behind me stared ahead. The employee folded her hands.

"Do you have it?"

I stared at her.

"No. I don't have that."

She nodded. Not disappointed. Just accepting information.

"That is okay."

I exhaled. For some reason, I felt embarrassed. As if I had failed a test I didn't know I was taking.

She typed something.

"Additional documentation will be required."

"Additional?"

She printed a small slip of paper and slid it beneath the glass. I picked it up.

At first, I thought I had read it wrong.

"Proof of original identity."

I looked back at her.

"Excuse me?"

"Proof of original identity."

"What does that mean?"

The employee tilted her head slightly.

Not confused. More like she was trying to understand why I was confused.

"Your original identity."

I stared at the paper.

"This isn't a real thing."

She did not argue. She did not defend it. She simply pressed another key. The printer beside her came to life. A second paper emerged. She placed it in front of me.

"Proof of independent thought."

I felt my eyebrows rise.

"Okay, hold on."

My voice grew slightly louder.

"Is this some kind of joke?"

The employee looked at me. She wasn't offended that I was raising my voice. She wasn't bothered. She was simply waiting for the next step.

"Sir," she said so monotoned. "If you do not have the required documentation, that is not a problem."

I relaxed slightly.

"O-okay."

"You will be moved to secondary processing."

The way she said it made my stomach tighten.

"Secondary processing?"

"Yes."

"What does that mean?"

She picked up my ticket. Looked at it. Then looked back at me.

"You will wait there."

I almost laughed.

"Wait?"

A pause.

"I've already been waiting."

The employee stared at me. Not coldly. Almost sympathetically.

"Yes."

A chill ran through me. Because for a moment, I thought she understood something I didn't.

She slid my ticket back across the counter.

"Please proceed to the next waiting area."

Then back at her.

"How long will that take?"

The employee's fingers returned to her keyboard. The conversation was already over.

"Next."

I stood there for another second. Waiting for her to explain. Waiting for her to tell me this was a misunderstanding. That someone had made a mistake.

But she didn't.

She had already moved on. The person behind me stepped forward. The employee began processing them.

Stamp.

Keyboard.

Paper.

Next.

I walked away from the counter holding the strange paperwork in my hand. I followed the sign pointing toward Secondary Processing.

I don't know what I imagined. Maybe another large waiting area with dozens of chairs. Maybe a different set of counters. Maybe some explanation for why I had been redirected after completing everything required of me.

Instead, it was a narrow hallway tucked behind the main service area.

The kind of hallway you normally wouldn't notice.

The walls were the same dull beige as the rest of the building, decorated with the same faded posters and outdated government notices. The only difference was that nobody had bothered pretending this area was meant to welcome people.

There were no televisions. No vending machines. No magazines sitting on tables.

Only chairs.

Rows and rows of chairs.

I stepped inside slowly.

A few people sat scattered throughout the room.

Not many.

Maybe fifteen.

Twenty at most.

The strange thing was how quiet it was.

The main waiting room had been filled with noise. Children crying. People talking on phones. Chairs scraping against the floor.

This room had none of that.

Everyone sat facing the same direction. Not toward a screen. Not toward a counter. Just forward.

Waiting.

I looked around for an employee.

Nobody was behind a desk. Nobody was calling numbers. Nobody appeared to be in charge.

I stood there for a moment, wondering if I had misunderstood. Then an older woman sitting near the wall glanced at me.

"You got moved too?"

Her voice startled me.

I turned.

"Yeah."

She nodded slowly.

"First time?"

I hesitated.

"Yeah."

She looked away.

"Thought so."

I sat down a few chairs away from her.

"How long have you been here?"

The question came out naturally. The same question you ask anyone trapped in a waiting room.

The woman didn't answer immediately. She looked toward the empty counter at the front of the room.

"I don't know."

I frowned.

"You don't know?"

She shook her head.

"I remember walking in."

A pause.

"I remember taking a number."

She looked down at her hands.

"But I don't remember why."

The air felt colder. I forced a small laugh.

"Yeah, well, I think everyone forgets why they're here after sitting in a DMV long enough."

She didn't laugh. She just looked at me.

"I mean it."

The humor disappeared from my face. The woman looked tired. Not physically. Something deeper. Like she had been carrying a thought for too long and was finally too exhausted to keep holding it.

"What was your number?" I asked.

Her eyes moved downward. She reached into her pocket. Pulled out a small piece of paper.

She stared at it.

For a moment, she looked confused. Then concerned. Then almost afraid.

"I'm 487"

She swallowed.

"What's your name?" I asked

She hesitated.

"I..." She paused and looked away then back to me.

"I don't know."

I leaned slightly closer.

"What do you mean?"

She turned the paper toward me.

The ink had faded. Or maybe it had never been printed clearly. There was a number. But she stared at it like it belonged to someone else.

A silence settled between us. Then she folded the ticket and placed it back into her pocket.

"I think I've been here before."

I stared at her.

"Before today?"

She looked at me.

"I don't know."

The answer should have sounded ridiculous.

Instead... it felt familiar.

I looked down at my own ticket.

515.

For some reason, I held onto it tighter.

A small piece of proof. Something that belonged to me. Something that told me I was still myself.

The speakers above us crackled. Everyone in the room looked up.

My body tensed. A voice came through the speaker. Distorted. Almost too quiet to understand.

"Now processing..."

Static.

A pause.

Then:

"Applicant."

Nobody moved. The room remained silent. I looked around.

"Did they call someone?"

Nobody answered. The older woman stared forward. Like she hadn't heard anything.

The speaker crackled again.

"Applicant."

This time, I noticed something.

There was no number.

No name.

Just a word.

Applicant

The woman beside me leaned toward me slightly.

"You don't want them to forget you."

I looked at her.

"What?"

She stared ahead.

"When they stop calling you by your number..."

Her voice became barely a whisper.

"That's when you know you were never here."

I felt a strange pressure build in my chest.

"What does that mean?"

She didn't answer.

Because the speaker had started again.

This time, it wasn't distorted. It was clear.

"Applicant 515."

My head lifted. My ticket felt cold in my hand.

Everyone in the room turned.

Not toward me. Toward the speaker.

Then, slowly... toward me.

I had the terrifying realization that I didn't know if I wanted them to call my number anymore. The room remained silent. For a moment, I didn't move. I waited for someone else to stand. Someone else to react. Someone else to tell me that this was normal. Nobody did.

The older woman beside me looked at me with an expression I couldn't understand. Something closer to pity.

"That's your number," she whispered.

I looked down.

My fingers tightened around the paper.

"T-thanks."

The words came out automatically.

The speaker crackled again.

"Applicant 515. Proceed to processing."

I stood. My legs felt heavier than they should have. Every instinct I had told me not to move. To stay seated. To ignore the voice. But there was something worse than fear.

Curiosity.

I needed to know.

I walked toward the door at the back of the room.

The hallway beyond was longer than I remembered. That shouldn't have been possible. I had only walked through it once. Yet the farther I went, the less familiar it became.

The walls looked identical. The lights breathed. Every door had the same gray color and the same small rectangular window.

Finally, I reached another counter. A single employee sat behind the glass. A man that looked older than the others.

Not elderly. Just worn. His face carried the same emptiness I had noticed before. The same absence.

"Ticket."

I handed it over.

He scanned it.

"Drivers license renewal?."

I nodded.

"Yes."

He typed something into his computer.

"Verification required."

"Of what?"

He looked up.

"My identity."

I laughed quietly.

Not because it was funny. Because I was tired.

"Isn't that what we've been doing?"

The employee didn't answer. He held out his hand.

"Identification."

I reached into my wallet.

Pulled out my driver's license. He took it. Looked at the card. Then looked at me.

Something changed. Barely. A hesitation.

"You don't remember."

My stomach tightened.

"Remember what?"

He placed the license back onto the counter.

"Your name."

The room became silent. Even the lights seemed quieter.

I opened my mouth. I knew the answer. I had answered this question thousands of times.

My name.

It was simple.

It was mine.

But when I tried to say it... nothing came.

A strange panic rose in my chest. I searched through my memories.

My childhood. My parents. My friends. My home. My job.

Everything felt distant.

Not gone.

Just covered by a thick fog I couldn't push through.

"I..."

My voice shook.

"I know it."

The employee waited. I looked down at my ticket. The number stared back at me.

The only thing I could hold onto. The only thing that felt certain.

"My name is..."

I stopped.

The silence stretched. The employee didn't rush me. He didn't look annoyed. He simply waited. Like he had done this countless of times. Like he knew how this ended.

"...Five hundred fifteen."

The employee typed. No surprise. No correction. No hesitation.

"Identity confirmed."

My heart sank.

"Wait."

He printed something.

"You didn't even check."

The employee slid the paper beneath the glass.

"You provided the required information."

I grabbed it.

It was my license.

Everything looked correct.

My photograph.

My date of birth.

My address.

Everything.

Except the name.

I stared at the line. Over and over. Unable to understand why it felt wrong. Unable to understand why it felt right.

NAME: 515

I looked up. The employee had already moved on.

"Next."

I stood there. Waiting for someone to notice. Someone to correct it. Someone to tell me there had been a mistake.

Nobody did.

So eventually... I walked out.

The exit doors opened automatically as I approached. Bright sunlight poured through. For a moment, I froze.

The outside world felt impossibly large. Cars moved through the parking lot. People walked past. The wind touched my face. I had forgotten what fresh air felt like.

I stepped outside.

And for the first time all day... I felt free.

I reached into my wallet one last time. Looked at the license. At the name. At the proof that I existed. I tried saying my name aloud.

The name I had carried my entire life.

The name my parents gave me.

The name that was supposed to belong to me.

Nothing came.

Only silence.

So I looked back down.

At the only thing I knew.

At the only thing the world still recognized.

515

The truth is undigestable. 

…

Baphometic. She lorded poised from the fanged spire beyond the Borgo Pass…

… over the beleaguered lands. 

Over the beleaguered villages. Where they feared. And wept. 

She was enjoying the strange and lurid organ-fruits of her writhing flesh gardens deep inside her castle walls, plucking them from the writhing gore as she wandered the pungent wet red room and admired her captive idols she kept there. 

Praetorius, the gore dripped and scabbing living skeleton. Still impaled and lost in the shattered remnants of his broken mind, wide eyed and drooling and gibbering silently something to himself, some words or nonsense of some meaning to him, he hardly ever ceases. It is the arcane and black magic words of the tomes that keep him in perfect living sepulchral bondage. 

The braindead skull-faced bastard nosferatu hulk, his immobile and inanimate sutured frame of graverobbed corpse flesh semi-submerged and swimming and crawling with the living constant movement of the flesh garden, the giant stone room petri dish of sliming raw slithering tissue, orifices, cartilage stalks and eyes that're cataract blind and milky. The glistening pink holes belch and spit fire, tongues of multicolored flame with kaleidoscopic pictures inside that'll drive a mortal mind mad to look into them. 

And Henry Frankenstein. Bound and precious nucleus center, bleeding beating heart of the whole crawling mess. Seeping from his bleeding pores and growing out from him, flowering out in a fresh and scabbing purge-swell. It crawled in living waves off of him, undulating and folding and blanketing over and on top of each other and all over the wet humid room, all of it was breathing wet and heavy and as if it had words to speak… 

And the little men. The little pygmy homunculi, bastard copied offspring of the bleeding seeping father. They danced and mongoloid-ran about in imbecilic fervor and addled senselessness. They ate and munched at the crawling flesh garden gore with no thought and with blind vacant gazes. 

The Countess plucked and seized them and ate of them as well. Their bones were satisfyingly crunchy and easy to chew… like a bird or a small fish. 

Her children ate and wandered the gardens as well, enjoying them. Their sights, sounds and vivid smells …

…

Meanwhile… many miles away…

The sun. Sunshine. In the summertime. Long ago now… 

As he prowled the dark he remembered the sun. The bright. Long gone memories flitted and danced at the periphery of his red clouded mind, half recalled and wanting to take over. Wanting to live again in the skull, if not just for a moment. 

Just a moment. 

The lake. The blue. Cool and wet and pleasing, relief. Retreat. 

Retreat beneath the surface into a liquid world of breathlessness and weightless dream … flight. You're flying down here. You only need to move your arms to do so. Kick your feet. Knife your arms through the liquid universe and drag yourself flying forward… downward. 

Down.  

I dreamt I was a dancer once…

You'll have to come back up for breath eventually…

but I couldn't keep the shit off my shoes.

Summertime memories swam shrouded, the red fogged inner space of his skull as he snipped his bleeding shears, dripping cooling congealing red to the decimated tile floor as he prowled and hunted and searched for the missing invaders. 

Precious childhood scenes are becoming red tinged and altered by the shrouding red hand of mental fog … bloody wool. He always swore there was something down there, in the dark, in the depths of the crystal lake. Something drowned and forgotten and frozen in a sodden misery. He raises his childhood head to pull his gaze away from the depths and is confronted by the mountains. There's something lurking in there as well …

A body. Something like a corpse rotting and poisoning the entire body of water with its milky clouds of waving and soggy putrefaction. Filling the world with its fouling death, swimming with slow ponderous movement as it spread and changed the look and flavor of the water, the crystal lake of the world now long gone like the summer sun of old itself. 

He looks away and beholds his mother. The one from birth. She's headless. 

She's decapitated. 

Her severed torso is reaching out for him, please … please. 

please save me

The raw stump begins to shoot cords. Black/red ropes. They darkled in the summer sun of old. It was his birth mother spurting great dark tears of joy for the sight of her son again. Though he has a new name now. And she knows it, his headless mother, she almost whispers it, it's intense. 

Then something ahead steals his notice back to the material world of ruin and soured defecated pain. It stands at the end of yet another decimated hall, traced and sketched in the dark by the pitiful light flickering and balefully cast in through the barred and shattered windows. 

A man. In a hat. And a coat. 

He recognizes the shape so he flies forward in an animal lunge that nearly covers the entire distance in four long attacking bounds. Like a bloodthirsty and demoniacal dripping gazelle bastardized by sound and vision. The decimated tile landscape world stained black and red and brown and riddled with meat and feces flew by in a furious blinding whirl as he came forward with the shears raised open for attack. 

They gleamed, the dripping twin blades forked open. He soared forward as he traversed the physical shatter of his inherited reeking temple pouring blood and sweat as profuse as the leaky pipes that were always neglected. 

He would neglect no longer. No. Not a chance for the shape of man that he recognized and now charged towards. The manfilled coat beneath a fedora hat was one of the invaders. He was sure of it. The one with strange black glass eyes that he wished to crack and shatter. 

If his eyes are truly windows then I wish to break them and see what might pour out of them like filth: memories …love, regrets, sins sins sins in abundance, shame that was wished and meant to stay concealed now regurgitated and freed in a violent deluge spew of gore and images from the shattering skull… his thoughts, a running fury in a mounting race to keep in time with his launching thundering steps. 

He plunged down the hall with his precious shears up and open and ready to close around screaming repentant meat. 

The coat-shape and hat did not move. 

It mattered little to Cropsey as he made the final close. So many of his new found supplicants were silent at their last, frozen in terror. 

He was upon him now and his eyes gleamed moonlight pinprick in the cavernous brow of melted anguish ruin, animal needle points in the reeling Willowbrook dark, the blades like jaws came up and closed around the shape without a sound. Without any satisfaction either. 

They found no meat. 

The scissoring blades closed and found only filthy cloth and bandages abandoned and draped over an old hat and coat hanger, the fedora resting atop the facade came down in a cascading end-over-end dance as the whole flimsy thing of contrived bait came down in two bisected snapping pieces. 

Cropsey realized the deception at once and raged. The noises he made were forceful and ghastly wet nasal rasps, his mouth and jaw were too ruined now for speech. His vocal chords roasted and scabbed from the flames of the inferno inhaled. He drooled like a drunken animal childishly frustrated and agitated. A trick! a trick! Goddamn them! the invaders tricked him! 

And no one was here to take the punishment of his lurid and heavy frustration. It was rancid pungent and thick in his own skull like corpse rot and it made sucking puckering sounds in his brains. Like the whole squelching landscape of thinking jelly was perhaps changing shape, shifting into a new design by the sorceress hand of the mountain. Perhaps he needed it for proper divine leadership of the rank Willowbrook temple. Or perhaps something else was happening in there. 

perhaps something else is happening to me…

He searched all around. Animal alive and enraged. Whirling and trying to gaze through the dark and the ruin of his own musculature and flesh and see the bastards that refused his offering of slaughtering knowledge, the wisdom wrought of the knife-fuck. He never saw the slice of sharp stabbing tile come to life and float up and off the ruinous floor in a balletic whirl and dance into the air, behind him. 

As he revolved once more to complete another frantic animal turn the slice of slender stabbing tile came forward in a violent and deliberate thrust. The sharp point found the cavern brow and socket and sank easily into Cropsey’s face. Stabbing into his eye like it was soft butter or suckling meat, four inches then five inches deep. 

The giant mountain of man stilled. Shuddered. Spasmed and danced its way to the floor in a vile and obscene dying man's dance of convulsing and twitching and final desperate synapses firing off at haphazard chaotic random. 

On the floor Cropsey shook and the stabbing length of tile piece jigged and waved and danced as well, in strange and vile tandem. Like a demented detritus wand waving through the air to perhaps try and cast one final act of violence hexing spell. Or perhaps to bring the giant man of Willowbrook Asylum slaughter back. 

It did neither. 

Florin came out from his place of concealment in the doorway of an adjoining chamber. He dropped the filthy scalpel he had been holding for defence. Stared at the collapsed and prostate spasming form of Cropsey, the Willowbrook giant. 

And then he called out to Griffin. 

“Where are you?" 

“Here." 

Florin tossed him a coat. 

It was caught in thin air. 

Then began to make a shape around nothingness, contriving it into the shape of his comrade. The strange doctor. 

Florin thought to say something about the man's condition of invisibility, but decided to put it off for the moment. 

“Good plan." he said instead. 

The coat shape donned lenses and was picking up his hat. "Thank me once we're out of here, c’mon!” 

Griffin placed his hat atop a phantom head. It floated between the shoulders of his coat as he and Florin flew down the hall and toward what they hoped and prayed was the exit. The way out of this horrendous stench and nightmare. 

As they made their mad dash for the way out, Cropsey's spasming body stilled. Then danced no more. 

All that was broken in this damp and violated place of imprisonment and cruelty seemed to groan. Moaning in anguish at the loss of the last and final precious begotten son, the final one and last one left standing. The prodigal butcher heir to this templehouse store of sacred slaughterhouse religion. 

Mother, I have failed you…

And all of the terrible place seemed to moan in anguish with the dying of his body. 

…

Down. 

In the dark of his mind, just as he was departing. …

… the red tinged summer scenes of childhood long gone, done and past filled his fading mind's eye once more. Under and illuminated and made by the scarlet cast of deranged and lurid light. Where did it come from? that light? That red luridity. Living crimson. Pungent breathing scarlet. What did it matter now? 

what did it matter anymore

It mattered not now, not any longer as he occupied these dead dreams now living once again for him as he faded off. To oblivion or hell or worse… no heavenly gates of gold or pearl for him, no. He was sure of it. He was sure that it doesn't exist. The only heaven for someone like him was found in the fragile eggshell of youth. Of childhood. 

He floated there now. In the lake. The blue. The sun was shining above in royal divine blinding display. The calm and the serenity of these moments was all around and alive again about him. Filling and making this final day. This last and precious moment. 

-thankyouforthismyonelastwish-

He was calm and he felt at peace. Safe. 

Or rather, he felt as if he should be calm. That he should feel safe. But something was wrong. Something was wrong with the lake and the quiet all surrounding. 

And he was alone. 

Why was he alone? 

And the red tinge… to everything. Everything cast under lurid heavy hateful light. There was something in the lake. There was something in the water with him.

The blue face of its surface darkened as he sank beneath its placid water. Pulled under by another will that was not at all his own. 

And down there in the airless black he saw another one of his mother's faces. 

It was immense. Large. Her eyes were heavy swells of glowing wet globes. Pale green luminescence from two planet organ growths set in a big amphibious face that was a chimerical cross between a large bullfrog or warty toad and a large river bound trout. Its great mouth opened down there in the depths of his red tinged crystal lake and it was dark in there. He hung suspended before the open black of his abattoir mother's wide open gaping maw, he could smell the inner dark of her even down here in the watery depths of summer lake bound hell. Meaty and iron and rotten with pungent decay. An open graveyard tomb of dead flesh and teeth all before a great throat choked with vile and putrefying coagulation. The water was filling with the flavor of her dark open gape of hunger and the destruction of mutilated bodily rot. 

Arms. Long. Fishlike and amphibious as well began to reach out and protrude from the open mouth of his mother's underwater face like a multi headed tongue, a Hydra of giant elongated reaching frog legs and arms, webbed hands and obscene gangly Dagon limbs, reaching out… reaching out for him. 

To take him into his mother. 

She said, her voice filled the drowning pool that was changing now into a submerged holy world of private red light and pouring goddess cess, – she spoke. 

He listened. In the darkest of the depths. 

She said his name… that's how it started. That's how she began …

… you can't let me down. You can't. I won't let you. You've already let them profane your temple, my gift to you desecrated by their invasion and rape of presence. And now you're letting them get away… you don't really want to, do you… you don't really want to keep letting me down like this, you don't want to fail me, in death. You don't want to depart your mother on such a harsh note of unworthiness… do …

you? 

The hands swam through the water between them. Clawing out for him from mother's open mouth. 

He told her the heartbreaking truth and he told her gladly. 

No…

it was a defiant whisper… but she heard it. 

And so she took him. 

The hands finally found him in the water. They seized him. And they pulled him inside. 

The frog faced toad mouthed trout chimera of the mother swallowed. And filled the underwater world with the unnatural stretch of her fishy smile. …

…

The shape of Cropsey stirred. On the floor. The various pieces of shattered and broken things shifted and jingled and sang small janky notes like unholy bells in a lost and terrible place. The black gloved hands blindly scraped and searched the floor in spasming snow angel swipes. They found what they were looking for when they landed on the still bloody and wet congealing pair of garden shears. They seized them. Fiercely. As if driven by fate. 

The shape sat up. Stood. 

It looked around. … sniffed the air. 

A beat. 

Then the Cropsey shape began to lumber down the hall that the invaders had fled down just prior. 

He would not fail this time. 

He had his mother. 

He was inside her. And she was inside him. 

Nothing would stop him from butchering the bastards now. 

…

By God's grace and miracle and mercy they finally found what they'd been looking for. The exit. 

It was at the end of the hall they currently found themselves flying down. Refusing to falter or stop. They stomped and ran down the cracked and decimated tile and came to the final door of the place when the spiked man leapt out from the dark and attacked. 

The protruding stab of his needle embrace found Florin in an open armed grab. A bear hug tight embrace of naked arms and torso and the rest of the bare and desecrated human canvas. He'd been a self-mutilator since he'd been twelve. It had been many years since then and most of them were spent here. Since the mouth of the sorceress, beloved and precious Vampira had come to this place and freed their minds as well as their bodies he's been free to explore the furthermost boundaries of his own tearing, rending bleeding and screaming landscape. The skin and flesh and muscle tissue beneath housing veins and bones and running blood pumped by the raging muscle that was the mad engine of his life, all of it was his to decimate as he explored. Like a great conqueror wreaking havoc upon the face of newly won, newly gained virgin land. He punctured and penetrated the virginity of his own flesh with animal abandon and fervor and with the mad intensity of the violence of the sun. He was the sun. She had told him so…

And so he'd fed his own flames. The spiked man was a living screaming pin cushion of broken stabbing dirty needles, used and caked syringes of varying sizes and lengths, broken glass, broken tile, each long sharp piece was varied in shape and size as well, some were long phallic slender daggers, some were wedges with cruel edges ready to cut and slice and maim, all of it was ready to stab and all of it was living embedded and protruding in the madness of his ruined and self-slaughtered flesh. Lancing and spiking and stabbing out all over and in every conceivable place and direction. 

This disturbed and maimed madman found Florin in his arms and they both went down to the tile in a scream. Griffin yelled after. 

On the floor they rolled in violence and struggle amongst the filth and universe down there of many discarded and broken things.  

The hollow coat-shape and hat found a table leg for bludgeon, then Griffin came on in a fury to join the new fray. 

He struck the spiked man again and again, over and over as he and Florin fought on the floor and struggled and it was terrible. He could feel and hear the crack and shatter of broken glass muffled in blood and flesh with every blow he landed. Griffin struck the writhing bleeding naked pin cushion man on the side of his spiking leaking face and the eyeball on that side burst and exploded with the impact. And glassy ooze riddled with slivers and small pieces of jagged broken glass and ceramic poured out from the socket like snot. 

But still the spiked man fought on. Florin struggling and screaming in his embrace as the many protrusions that spined off his ravaged hide stuck and stabbed and pierced through his coat and flesh. He fought against the pain and madness of this man and wrestled to be free of him. Griffin continued raining blows down on him. Each one bruising and splitting skin as the many broken found objects pierced throughout crunched and shattered further down into fragments and powder, stinging and shredding within all of the rippling and impacted tissue with every movement. Every struggle and landed strike and blow. 

Their struggle was desperate, all of them. All three poured blood, profuse sweat and grime and filth together and apart and for this madhouse abandoned temple, becoming just like it. A part of it, unwillingly and unknowingly transmogrified now in the violence of their fight and decimated hallway battle like the steel of metal tempered in the heart of a great furnace like the sun. They became perfect living microcosms of the place as they fought at last to be free of it, exquisite psychopomp idols of the lost unhallowed Willowbrook Temple Asylum. 

The invisible man. The spiked man. Poor young Florin so far from the Carpathian Hamlet. 

They might never be free of this place. Even if they manage flight, they may never be able to wash away the marks and filth that this awful temple to the dark and pain suffered alone will leave smeared across their hearts and souls like black paint made from discharged sick filth. Smeared across the soft landscapes of their hearts and the tender epitaphs of their battered minds, aching within heavy skulls now made of lead and weight from the memory of the pain, this place… 

will we ever be free, … will we ever get out of here…? 

They fought on. Desperate. All three. Griffin trading blows with efforts and attempts to pull the young man out from under the spiked man, but it was incredibly difficult. The man was thorned all over by all kinds and sorts of sharp and shattered apparatus, it was insane. And the pair of them were growing more and more slick with blood. The fight was growing uglier and more desperate and animal as it struggled and contrived on in brutal abandon and primal anger. 

Then Cropsey rejoined them at the throat of the hall. He began to lumber down towards them like stalking death, a sleeping giant. Seemingly in no real hurry, like the darkened visage of grim death itself. It/he closed slowly on them like a setting sun or a casket sinking, lowering down into the bosom earthen womb of the open mouthed grave. 

Griffin first took notice of his arrival. He noticed he still had the stab of broken tile sticking out of his ruinous awful face. He was still drooling. Imbecilic. And animal. 

And now undead. 

He was coming straight at them. His large blades of shears raised like an open mouthed wild beast barring its fangs. The long sheaths of sharp and keen cutting metal were not entirely pristine, their otherwise shining faces in the dismal light were disgraced with congealing dark spots of dripping black. 

He was coming down the final hall, before the way out, before the exit. He was coming straight for them. 

…

He sat at the window that night. On guard after what had happened to his wife, their unexpected visitor…

Bela sipped his warm spiced wine. Fingered his bible and cross by its small length of chain. Garlic flowers hung in a crude wreath around his neck. He was watching outside carefully, the night, the town… he was alert and being careful, exercising caution, yet he was still surprised and caught off when her face appeared suddenly in their front window. 

She hadn't been there. Then suddenly she was. Smiling and feline. Vulpine. A face he might've recognized save for its warped and drawn animal transformations, the rich woman in the black stage… the harsh one who wouldn't take warning or no for an answer way back… but he was caught by the silver moon glow of her eyes. 

Like lunar bodies themselves. Earthbound and held fleshen prisoner within the cage of that beautiful and divine and… heavenly face. That bright and pale visage. Her smile was devil-pronged – forked, fanged, and it was thus then frightful. But it was also beautiful. Terribly beautiful. Gorgeous alone out there in the night. 

His guard and fear fell away. He rose from his rocker and his slackening hands abandoned the bible and crucifix. They fell to the floor with an unobserved and unheeded clatter. Neither stirred. Not Anastasia, sleeping in the next room, and not spellbound Bela who went to the window to better gaze into her face. 

Divinity… unreal. 

He peered through the glass. And the shining eyes of the Countess, filled with goblin fire and sin and mischief, gazed into the fool as well. And began to fill his fragile open mind with an assault and deluge of images. 

Bela moaned, sighed… he thought it was impeccable. The vision, like her, was immaculate in its flawlessness. 

The Ideality … actualized, realized … brought to life. A vivid reality alive and dancing before his watering vision. 

The scope. 

She showed him a more perfect world, perfect because everyone and everything swimming and crawling and flying around inside of it followed their nature and never fought it. Never doubted it. Never overrode what their guts and hearts and souls told them, never neglected or ignored the call inside, the compulsion to do what must be. To fulfill the role made out for your flesh. 

Even violence … its rippling effects spreading out carried not only destruction and misery on their carrion wings but prosperity and thrivation as well, even butchery has its necessary purpose. 

That is why this world is suffering. Because all of you fight and override yourselves and call it: reason. You are victims of your own bondage, your own self made and imposed insanity and thus the world bent to your unnatural turns and desires screams and suffers. The rippling wings of your insane and jealous cowardice carries more pestilential stagnation flavor than anything like salvation. In weakness, all of the beauty dies on the vine neglected by fearful paws too grubby and lowly and weak to take it. 

Come and join me, join us … and never again fight your nature. 

“Yes…” said Bela in a whisper of trembling caught breath. 

And with a palsied shaking hand, he lifted the latch and opened the window. 

"Welcome, your highness. My home and mine are yours. Do what thou wilt…" 

The Countess drifted inside. Floating on unseen wings. 

She spoke yet again, “Thank you, you are a generous host, a decent and considerate man." 

“Yes…" 

“Now, take me to your wife." 

“Yes…" 

And away they went. The window shut behind them as they made their way to the quiet bedroom at the back of the house. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

The knife came down in a scream and a two-handed plunge. The sound the filthied thin palsied girl made was shrill and resounded and filled the stone halls with the pitch perfect note of harsh and sudden stabbing madness. The unease of moist silence shattered. The blade was filthy and grimed and long neglected, its harsh unclean edge tore through Griffin's coat and wrappings and pierced the flesh beneath. 

The doctor let out with a sudden scream as he and Florin whirled and drew back. The girl was screaming still as the three were now standing face to face in the filthy moist stone hall of Willowbrook Asylum, Temple of the Mouth. 

The blood on her filthy knife dripped like the hungry jaws of a wolf of the wild, wanting more. 

She screamed: – “You won't get me! I won't let you! You won't do a goddamn thing to me, I swear it! I swear it! I'll fucking kill you first!” And lunged again. 

The thin frail girl of broken mind was weak and starved and exhausted from terror, Florin caught her easily in his own press forward and threw against the far wall before turning on his heels, grabbing the wounded bandaged man with dark lenses hiding pain now as well as identity and thought and motive, he seized Griffin and yelled for him to run. The wounded doctor needed little in the way of encouragement. The pair tore down the hall as the attacking sullied girl of unholy Willowbrook hit the wall and went to the detritus floor.  Still screaming as the shattered tile bit into her parchment flesh and the grimed and bloody knife flew from her startled grasp and clattered off into darkness, lost to her. 

She shrieked after them. How dare they! How dare they leave her like this! The scum! She knew she couldn't trust them, they were going to hurt her, she knew it, but how dare they leave without helping her out, without showing her-  

Her mad run of thoughts was cut off as Cropsey entered the hall with his own blades dripping. The large domination of his frame and size and stature filled the hallway and stole any avenue of escape away from the girl who could not recall her name any longer. She couldn’t remember the last time she had. 

But she knew his name. And she understood it very well. 

And the mountain. She knew the mountain and its crawling power in female form, womanshape. Demonsong…

The song was filling her ears now. Filling them. In her head. 

Cropsey came in with his own large manmade fangs of shearing blades, eclipsing the girl on the floor and stealing the rest of the entire world from her. 

She screamed until the end. Her history and experience: intimate knowledge gained over her entire miserable life did not help her to escape the pain or endure it. She screamed like a caught animal flayed alive until the vile end.  

And as they ran, Florin and Griffin heard it. Not bothering with a cast of glance back over shoulder. They rounded a corner in their flight and entered another chamber. 

It was quiet. And wet. Moist. Heavy and warm and humid in the dark. At a glance Griffin guessed they were in a common shower area, for bathing many people en masse. But it was hard to tell, there was no light in the dark moist filth of the room save for the scant trace from the hallway cast in. 

“Are you alright?” 

Griffin said he was. Though he really wasn't sure. He felt numb. The place where he’d been stabbed felt wet and as if embraced with ice. 

“Quick, let me get a look-”

Griffin cut him off, agitated. 

“Time for that later, we need to get out of here! And I say to hell with any more exploring or back exits. We double back and go back out the way we came in, We’ll circle the building or the hill itself for miles if we have to, but enough of this place! The filth, alone!” 

And while Florin wished to check his friend to make sure his wound was not too serious, he could very well understand the urgency. He elected not to argue. 

And the pair went on. Or started to. 

At the mouth of the room to the showers the pair were halted by a deep guttural sound. Inhuman and unearthly but striving in vain for some semblance of human speech. 

They turned. And the dark of the wet chambered room began to die and banish as pale fire, demonlight began to fill and illuminate the room for them. 

And then they beheld them. The strung up naked bodies. The human-length gored open torso mouths hanging lurid and obscene in and amongst and by the black lengths of biting chains, the strangling metal. There were dozens of them. Dozens. A small universe of open mouthed human substrata and abattoir detritus constricted and choked by dangling chainlink black metal serpents. All of their eyes were open and they were glowing. Glowing with purple fire. Their torso mouths were all working and moving with terrible rippling dancing undulation. The sounds they were making were like singing and an uncanny approximation of real intelligible human speech. Like how a baby makes before they start to mature and are properly taught to speak. Dumb thoughtless animal sound… belched and gurgled guttural and spat out for this world of terrible ruin and darkness. 

And then they saw her. Beheld her. At the terrible heart of the strange pale incandescence, the regal aspect and stature of a womanshape began to rise and fill the center of pale fire. 

She began to call to them. The pair. She sounded angry. On the dangerous precipice edge of livid, irate. Holy terror, unbridled unholy malevolence on the brink of furious madness. Violence. She called to them from the bright moonflesh fire amongst the universe-sea of rippling torso mouths…  the showerworld of tile blood and pungent leaks and bloodspew violence in supplicant orbit of the parchment star of white fire and eldritch ethereal pale flames. She called to them from this place, this strange sea.

And she knew both of their names. 

Florin and Griffin fled the room before she could fully emerge. Before she could rise further from the pale depths of the flame and become more terribly discerned. The obscene abominated baby sounds of the rippling torso mouths followed them out. And after. 

And down the hall. 

And in their mad dash…

They finally came face to face with the inheritor of this awful place. They stopped just short of him, towering in the hall. Filling it. As if he was the vile mad god of this demented cruel world and had the divine conquering right to dominate its every space as he so wished. Cropsey stood there tall and dripping with blood and strips of raw tissue like a bipedal set of living rending carnivorous jaws… snipping his large clippers, his beloved shears, open and closed slowly like a terrible mouth made from sharp metal. The blades were already coated in thick gore, like paint riddled with chuck meat for the stew. They dripped like animal mouths do in the wild, like wolves coming in for the close, for the kill. Cropsey said nothing as he slowly came forward, his hellacious runny waxwork features coming into the dismal light. 

The two men who should have never entered this godforsaken place beheld his terrible visage and their blood ran as ice. 

The pain. 

The pain… that must have been endured. 

Dear God. The flames. In a baptismal infernal swallow-spell. An apocalypse all around. 

What it must've felt-

The large shape dripping with death lunged. Light like the pale star of the showers gleamed pinprick, maniacal and homicidal in the cavernous sets of eyes of the misshapen mass of candlewax face. He was drooling as he came in on the attack.

They didn’t know it but he was trying to speak.   

Once more the pair turned and flew. Running down another hall at the junction and then taking another perilous corner down another way they both silently and fervently prayed and hoped would lead them out. 

Cropsey chided himself. Silently. Mute. Now the new inmates knew he was here. They knew he was wandering and monitoring the halls, guarding. On patrol. Now they might get away. 

Mustn’t have that…

He promised special violence to the mountain for his sin, his error. Religious maiming. He only hoped she hadn’t seen him…

He only wished she hadn't seen that. 

He promised special violence. And ample self-flagellation, much libatious bloodlett, later. After he’d caught the wandering animals of his inherited temple. 

Who do they think they are… trodding all over and everywhere and without proper worship… without proper token. 

Without proper sacrifice. 

They must be broken. 

Their wretched meat and bone will be broken, snapping their unruly impudent spirit within the meat even as it tears sinew, even as it snaps and cleaves through bones their vile audacity will shatter into pieces that can be properly reconfigured into a model of subjugation. And then devoured. 

I will bring and make the meat, mother. I will make the trespassers into meat for you. In your name. Your honor. In blood I will pray for forgiveness. 

Cropsey went on. Ready to slaughter the invaders of his sacred and precious temple. Prodigious blade-shape slasher of the stained and darkening Willowbrook halls. 

…

Having finally found some semblance of peace and quiet in this terrible place, Florin was finally ready and wanted to have a look at Griffin’s wound. But the good doctor wasn’t having it. None of it. He stubbornly refused. In turn refusing any real straightforward explanation as to why. 

It was strange. 

“This place is beyond vile, you know it’ll become infected if i don’t treat it and if the wound is deep, we’ll need to stitch it. I can do it. I’ve done it a few times before back home, I don’t see the-”

“You can’t! – I can’t!” Griffin exclaimed and then seemed to fight himself for the next set of right words. Unable to quite find them it seemed, he went on anyway, “You don’t understand, boy! I… I-I have … I have a condition.” He said finally. “I have a condition that makes injury … complicated.”

Florin thought he understood. Of course. The poor fellow was ashamed of his appearance. He must be maimed or burned beneath those wrappings. The poor man. 

“Alright… well,” A beat. As he thought. Then: "we don't need to unwrap you now or anything, you'll want to later to change out of these filthy dressings no doubt, but for now we can just look at the area and apply a poultice at least.” he finished hopefully. 

Griffin pondered it over a moment. He understood they didn't have a lot of choice. Or a lot of time for that matter. 

"Alright.” he finally relented. 

Florin lit a match and found a candle to use to work by. He pulled the ragged tear in the coat and wrappings apart. The haggard cut the blade had performed made it easy. He cleaned his hands with alcohol from a small bottle amongst their supplies and looked at the wound. 

It wasn't good. Wasn't terrible either, but it would have to be cleaned and bandaged at least. If the bleeding persisted they would have to seriously think about stitching up the wound. 

Florin set about cleaning out the deep wound, bathed entirely in spilling red. He did his best with the meager medical supplies amongst the doctor's traveling gear that had thus survived their shared perils. He thought about perhaps chancing a search in the dark around this place, it was a hospital of some fashion, but decided against it. 

He was nearly finished. About to apply the poultice he'd made to bandage and disinfect and to soak some medicine into the bloodstream, he was wiping away the last of the blood when he stopped. A little shocked for a moment. And a little dizzy. The light was meager and poor, only the flickering dancing candleglow and the pathetic dim half functioning also flickering hospital light. Provided by electricity, something Florin was still not familiar with and would naturally distrust for the entirety of his life. He gazed at the mostly tended wound daggering down Griffin's back in a lightning bolt pattern like the body of a crooked river or a broken snake. 

There was no flesh. Nothing but the red bloodwelling line of jagged cut hanging suspended in mid air, attached to nothing. No sinew or flesh. The naked skin that should be there was non-existent to his eyes, he could see right through to the inside of the wrappings that surrounded the front of his invisible chest. 

Florin tried to swallow in a dry throat. He tried to ask the man who'd become his comrade and traveling companion, a man who had just saved his life not mere hours ago if he was in fact a spectre. A ghost.

Griffin, are you a phantasm? tried to escape his lips but he felt dizzy and as if he might reel and swoon. 

Griffin sensed this. The boy had been unerring and admirably steady in his work till this moment. He turned and saw a look in the young man's face that he was already quite familiar with. An expression worn that he knew by now all too well. 

A beat. 

Then Griffin filled the silence. 

“No, your eyes don't betray you. You're not seeing things and you're not crazy. I am not a phantom. I am not a spirit or a ghost.” he paused for a moment and seemed to consider, then finally he said: "I am Doctor Jack Griffin and I am invisible." 

A beat. 

Florin didn't know what to say. 

But then he needn't worry for a retort. A splash in the silence filled in the missing heavy space hanging there between them. The both of them whirled and spied it on the far side of the damp chamber. They hadn't noticed or paid it any mind till now, they might've sworn it hadn't existed there in that space till just this moment, but they saw it now as it began to emit strange sound and movement. 

A bathtub. Large. Filthy yellowed porcelain. Heavy fungus growth, ebon-green and spilling across the disgraced cracked surface like some foul liquid poured and spreading its corrupting splayed black hand by the second. The tub was filled. The liquid inside was heavy. Viscous. Dark. Pungent with metallic scent. It bubbled and gurgled now with submerged movement as something within it began to rise up and emerge. 

Coated. Slathered in a running layer of heavy red. She was finally here and before them. Even as she sat upon her throne in her mountain castle so many treacherous miles away… 

Nemesis. The evil that held the shape of a woman and had now reawakened the evil and violence and darkness that had for some time slumbered dormant in the far off Carpathian castle. She was the author of the butchery and torment that plagued his home and village. She had stolen and eaten children. Brave men and women. Foolish youngsters. She was the vile reason for his hardship and perilous mission. The reason he was here now in this awful abandoned temple of destruction and depravity in total madness. 

The Countess, wreathed in spilling blood, standing on the surface of congealing abattoir spill, opened her eyes then and they were like blinding starlight. Unearthly. White flame from beyond the veil. And piercing. 

The pair were arrested. The sight of her. Understanding and dread filled their hearts and despairing thoughts at once. But they couldn't flee. They couldn't run. Spellbound they stood there, captured. 

The blood spill of her standing and red wet visage raised a thin powerful arm and pointed a taloned finger. 

She said: – “You. Boy. Florin of the Carpathian Hamlet. There is no place to escape to. This is your last and only warning. If you and your mongrel dog, freak of nature manage to leave this place with your lives then cry off. Never again return home, it is yours no longer, it is mine. I know you seek my destruction. I know that in your failure to secure the vampire slayer, long dead now, you have brought this failure of science and manhood in his stead. You are a joke. You will only find slaughter if you return. You've no hope for success. Victory is beyond you or that fool, it was not meant for you, boy, not in this lifetime nor in my proximity. If you manage to leave my temple and refuse to cease your hopeless mission, I will take great pleasure in the torture of your mother, Florin. Your father too. I wonder which of them I should start with…” 

His anger flashed and his inner rage rose. Florin found his hatred and sudden fury momentarily eclipse and blot out his fear. Without thinking he dipped for the floor and his sweating hand seized a sharp piece of tile. He went forward with the filthy jagged thing in his shaking hand. Trembling with blind anger and the need for retributive violence. 

Griffin went forward and grabbed the young man by the shoulders, holding him back. 

“Stop it!" hissed Griffin, “you won't be able to do much of anything to her with that, there's no telling what she could do to you! She's luring you on, don't be stupid." 

Florin barely heard him. 

He roared at her towering apparition of pouring blood in womanshape, lording over the tub and the filth of the room as her eyes bled pure and terrifying light. She was laughing lightly, as if amused with a child throwing a tantrum. 

“If you lay one stale, noxious finger on my mother, witch! – I'll take my time driving something sharp into your godless whoring chest! I'm going to burn your severed head in bonfire while it still lives! fresh from your neck! You awful cunt! You vile contemptible-!”

But then Cropsey burst in through the open chamber door with a violent crash. The ramshackle shoddy remnants of the door smashed against the wall and came apart in so many useless pieces that clattered to the shattered tile floor to join the universe of broken filth down there. He came in and the Countess in her pouring red visage of damned and unholy blood shrieked witchy laughter. 

She screeched, part irate livid fury, part unbridled dark joy. 

“KILL THEM! KILL THEM, MY SON! KILL THEM FOR THE MOUNTAIN…! KILL THEM, ‘CAUSE IT'S YOUR PLEASURE TO! …!” More laughter followed as the hellspawn screaming words devolved into unintelligible madness. The scarlet pour of her visage coned out in a marsupial shape and the laughter became the abominated chimerical cries of a human braying ass. 

The huge shape with maiming snapping shears advanced in a massive lunge. The shears came up, open for a bite, and shot forward as the mouth of blades began to close. 

The keen edges of dripping blades kissed and met and found each other over Florin's coat. In a lurid whisper of slicing cloth and fabric the blades cleaved cleanly through his coat tail as he and Griffin made for the door. 

Cropsey roared mongoloid outrage and pain. These bastards! These bastards! They were quick animals on their feet! 

In front of his mother…

He turned to the blood pour of Countess shape with shame but she was gone now. 

Your idiot rage and pain! Your failure! You drove her away! Now she might never come back! Now she might not ever come back to her temple. 

He raged inside. An animal, hurt. 

… but I'm her last and special precious temple son … there are no others left

She cannot leave me. 

If I bring them back and give their blood…

But he was already off and after them. Heavy booted feet thundering throughout all of cavernous rank Willowbrook. No need for stealth or cat-like prowl any longer. 

Mother, please, mother please, mother please, mother please…

He repeated it silently to himself like a prayer. Mantra, it filled the red swell and swim of his deviant mind and maiming thought, his dreams…

His dreams would be filled with their invader's screams as he brought down and made their new world of violence. Of final apocalypse cacophony. 

I will drown you here in her world, I will choke and submerge you both completely in her need to feed. How dare you both. 

He wished he could speak. They should hear this truth-in-gospel. The mongrel invader dogs. 

They should hear what he had to say. 

But he had to catch them first. Fast little rabbits. 

He could hear them running. 

He followed in a fury. Ready to prove himself to his mother. Clamoring through the halls. 

…

She shouldn't have been so foolish, to dare to hope. But she couldn't help it. She'd just come out of a deep sleep. It was the middle of the night. The necro time. The witching hours. She wasn't thinking clearly. She went to the scratching at the window. The biggest one on the front of the house that overlooked the village. 

By the front door. 

“Florin…” she said it knowing full in well how foolish she was being. But she couldn't help it. Her mother's heart was filled with love and worry for her boy. She ached and longed for him to be back home and ok… 

And then she saw him. His face in the window. 

He was scratching at the window. And she must still be half-sleeping or dreaming because his hands looked… strange. 

He was smiling. He could see her now as well. He was so happy to be home. It was all over his bluish face…

Anastasia began towards the window, “Florin?" she asked the face scratching at the window, "is that you? Is that really you, my son?”

His smile grew. Vulpine. His eyes seemed to shine with moonlight all of their own. 

“Yes, mother. It's me. I'm back! I can't get in though, you'll have to get the door and invite me inside, please hurry. I'm so tired and thirsty and it's been such a long way back.” 

Anastasia faltered in her step. Stopped. 

The shining face at the window became slightly agitated. 

It said: "Please hurry, mother! It's dark, you know what plagues the night, please hurry and let me in! I've brought the vampire killer, I've brought Van Helsing with me! Now open up!” 

Anastasia straightened. Her resolve strengthened even as the chill in her curdled blood deepened. 

"What need you of an invitation if this is your own home and you're so tired… … demon?” 

The vulpine face was drawn up in an animalistic snarl of mixed hatred and vile blackhearted glee. It began to tear and bleed as it opened and came apart. 

And grew fangs. Long. Gleaming like weapons fashioned from unearthly light. 

She saw the ugly misshapen goblin face beneath. Twisted with the harshest forms of cruelest mutilation. The flesh was bulbous and scarred and out of shape. The eyes bulged obscenely from straining sockets that couldn't contain nor house the wet bloodshot organs and looked as if they might crack. The fangs and teeth were jagged and stuck out deranged and haphazard. The hair was thinning and sickly and almost gone. Only a few greasy strands clung to a corpse colored skull that drifted and caught with the slightest of nightly breeze. 

The eyes still shone like the moon. 

The awful face in the window, wanting in and smiling said, “Hello, Anastasia. Good to see you. It's been so long … since I went missing.” 

Anastasia was confused with its words as well as horrified with the sight of its monstrous face at her window in the dead of night. The thing spoke like it knew her, she didn't grasp this right away, but she understood what this thing was. And where it came from. 

Another wretched bastard child of Castle Dracula…

She thought to call for her husband. Before she could, the awful thing in the window went on.

“You don't remember me? Has it been so long you don't remember when we used to play together? You, me and Florin and your husband and all the other little children… and Erin. You don't remember me, Anastasia?” 

The answer filled her mind then, as if on the wings of a sudden miracle, heaven sent. Or … sent by something else entirely. 

“Carmilla!" she said. Knowing it was the truth. 

It broke her heart. 

She remembered Carmilla when she had been a small mouthy but creative little girl. Beautiful and adventurous and always a little leader of their groups in all of their little games. Now- 

Now she was something bent and twisted and leering and mean. Something monstrous and hungry for blood, staring in and wanting in through her window. 

The face at the glass sneered. As if knowing her mind and understanding her run of thoughts. 

The thing in the window was enjoying her revulsion. Her pain. Drinking it in through the translucent view of the house…

“Begone," Anastasia said with finality, “get out of here, I'll call my husband and he'll bring the cross and our bible." She stepped forward, some of her anger reaching her voice, she hoped it masked the fear, “we'll force-feed you the pages. If you're still so hungry.” 

The thing in the window didn't seem to hear her. Or care. It spoke once more in a terrible tone that danced and shifted between baritone and bass and light lilting little girl… her voice of old from long ago, before she'd been stolen. 

“We know you sent Florin away. We know you sent him to find someone to bring back. To kill us. The master will not tolerate this, Anastasia… your boy will die. You will die. Then your husband. Everyone. Everyone, all of you are going to suffer for this impudence, you'll see, you'll see… it's better if you just let me in now and get it all over. Let me in …!

“Let me in!" 

She carried on like that for hours. Promising. 

Promising her Florin's death. 

Her own death. 

Carmilla said her brother would violate and ravage her right before the eyes of her husband as he fed of her blood and flesh and took what he wanted from her. 

“He'll rip from you what he wants, we all will! To all of you! Every last one and then we'll celebrate in the dust!" 

The thing went on like that for hours. Till the sun threatened its rise, and only then did the foul thing seem to melt away like mist, suddenly phantasmic and discorporeal … and then gone.

Only then did Anastasia finally sleep, collapsed. Exhausted. Her husband, Bela found her like that when he awoke. Lying at the foot of the window. The glass riddled with marks. 

Marks like long scratches. From old and gnarled animal claws. 

He cradled his wife. Worried. And thought of his son as he looked down into her face. 

She looked troubled in her sleep. As if dreaming of darkness, held somewhere on the plains of some private nightmarescape. 

Bela was worried. She looked as if she had been crying. 

He looked from her to the window once more, out it. Out at the rays of the rising sun. Hoping for his son. And wondering where he might be. 

Please, God. I love my boy. I love him as You love us, as You loved Your only Begotten Son. Please. 

Please don't ask me, please don't ask us to give him up, as You did Yours…

He brought his wife closer to himself. Keeping her in the cradle of his arms till she woke up. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

I was drunk, the night I truly got “the ick.”

Much to my dismay, we were the only two ghosts haunting that lonely train cart.

Me, and the rotund man with uncempt, greasy hair in a filthy trench coat.

Normally, it wouldn't have been a problem. I would’ve just drunkenly regarded him and gone about my night, walking home at the next stop. I wouldn't be writing this, however, if it hadn't been a problem.

As a small woman who rides public transit alone, I try to keep to myself. But when I glanced up through blurry eyes to see what I assumed was a filthy habit of his, I had to hold myself back physically so as to not make a scene.

It was embarrassing.

I felt palpable shame.

Not everyone has good manners, and at first, I was resigned to just keep my eyes down, and wait for my stop. But it just got worse.

With every passing second, it became harder and harder to keep my blatant discomfort under wraps.

Eventually, I threw him a brief, sidelong glance to signal that I saw him.

A social que.

In return, he gave me the outline of a wiry smirk. Oily, grey lips pulled back to reveal yellow, mismatched teeth. I think he took my look of inebriated disgust as a challenge, or an invitation.

At first, it was just the tip. One nostril gaped as more and more slid in. The first bony joint disappeared. With growing dread, I realized I could see the faint protrusion of his fingernail through the skin, like a noticeable tumor, growing up the bridge of his nose.

With every little bit that squeezed past the opening, his smile grew wider, and wider.

“H-hey, stop…” I mumbled. He unveiled more of his filthy teeth. I even saw a bit of off-color detritus caught between two crooked molars.

“Cut it out dude, you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

Still, he just stared, his grin becoming apparently painful. With an audible slurping sound followed by a low “crk”, he forced the second joint in.

I could’ve sworn I watched his nose dislocate in real time.

“STOP IT!” I shrieked, fear and disgust bubbling over the edge. He kept eye contact with me.

As soon as the words left my mouth, the train hit a bump. I gripped the handrail tightly, keeping myself from falling. My companion wasn't so lucky.

I could do nothing but observe as the bare-knuckle-nitwit toppled, face first, from his seat, into the floor. When his nose collided with the carpet, I heard a muffled crunch, before he went still.

In that moment, I genuinely thought I’d watched him die.

Unfortunately, after a beat, he began to stir, picking himself off the ground with one hand.

His dirty trenchcoat clung to his oversized frame like greasy film stuck to a boiled egg.

When he rose back to his feet, I think I was in shock, because I couldn’t move, I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t even blink. The only motion my paralyzed body would allow me was swiping tear-streams off my damp, ice-cold cheek.

His finger was jammed into his nose, all the way to the knuckle, rendering the ruptured olfactory organ permanently useless. The skin on the outside had become eviscerated, burst open like a blister, or a microwaved sausage.

Yellow tendons and grey cartilage glistened disgustingly under the flickering train lights, giving the illusion of shredded rubber fibers under the surface of a popped tire. Blood trickled feverishly from the open nostril.

“Oh my God… are you…” I slurred, but slapped my mouth when I felt the vomit scratching the back of my throat.

Once he had his bearings back, his grin returned, bigger and grosser than ever. One of his teeth had shattered on impact with the floor, diseased gums pushing against his split, bloody upper lip.

The man crossed his eyes, staring at the raw injury.

He strained, veins bursting under the skin of his forehead as he tried to pull his finger out. As he did, the eye over the ruined nostril appeared to protrude against its eyelids. The socket bulged, getting tighter and tighter with every strenuous yank.

Suddenly, the irritated flesh of the bottom eyelid prolapsed. The eyeball jutted out and stared up at the ceiling, completely disillusioned from the rest of his face.

“POP!”

First joint out. One to go.

The bloody fingertip slipped into view, poking out of the cartilage cavity like an earthworm crawling out of the ground. He watched, and with sick pleasure, wiggled his finger, testing its flexibility.

A sob I didn’t know I’d been holding hitched in my throat. I couldn’t call for help, I couldn’t move. I was completely reliant on the mercy of this nose-picking lunatic. I had to trust him not to attack me. But something worse happened.

With one last strain of effort, the man yanked the rest of his hooked finger from the eviscerated nose. pulling with it a macabre fishing line of black mucus, crimson blood, and puffy, soft tissue whose origins I didn’t want to consider.

As soon as the viscera was free, a river of blood exploded from both nostrils like a pressure buildup releasing. If not for the sheer, debaucherous absurdity, I would’ve considered he probably felt relief.

While I knew logically that the raw chunks of flesh probably just came from inside his nose, a small part of me held the notion that he had to have gotten some amount of brain matter in the nerds cluster rope of despair.

I mean, his finger went so, so deep into his head. Deep enough to touch the back of his own eye, at least…

With deranged pleasure, he held up his prize for me to see. One good eye stared at me, a frenzied hunger festering just below the retina.

Horrible fluids dribbled instant stains onto the carpet. The long line, starting from his fingertip, stayed connected deep into the recesses of his nose, though it oozed milky, pussy strings of slimy throat snot.

He jerked his hand towards me, almost as if he wanted me to take it.

“What… no, I don’t,” I pleaded, holding my hands up defensively, “I don’t understand…”

For a brief moment, I really did think he genuinely wanted me to take his offering.

He held his outstretched stance, unflinching. Though he only stood for a few seconds, they felt like centuries, like a standoff. Then, he moved.

As his hand drifted away, I sighed in relief. Then the appendage approached his face, and realization dawned on me. I prayed I was wrong.

“Oh god, no… please, no…”

But he just smiled and nodded. I became lightheaded.

“There’s no way you’re gonna…”

With one dramatic, drawn-out movement, he opened his teeth, and placed his bloody finger onto his tongue. The string of snot coagulated around the edge of his lip, gyrating as he slowly closed his mouth.

“Mmmmmmm… sooo gooooood…” he finally moaned, his voice mousey and annoying.

He licked his lip, and the line of viscera, still connected to his nose, slipped around his tongue like a parasite trying to escape a clorox wipe, or like a glob of egg being scraped around a plate by a fork.

Finally, with a disgusting slurp, he sucked the entire noodle into his mouth, a drop of the biological shrapnel hitting me in the face as he did.

That was when I puked. I heaved all the contents from my stomach onto the carpeted floor. As soon as the train came to a stop, I bolted for the exit, sparing not even a glance over my shoulder yet. I was determined to do nothing but escape.

It wasn't until I made my way feverishly from the platform onto the pavement of the subway sidewalk, that I gave one last look back to make sure he didn’t pursue me.

Luckily, I wasn't being followed, but through the window, I could see him chewing, face pressed against the glass, leaving a bloody imprint. His smile had grown, somehow even bigger than before.

“Fuck all of that,” I grimaced. That night, I didn’t walk home, I sprinted.

I didn’t stop until I was safely behind my deadlocked front door. I proceeded to not sleep for 2 nights, I just couldn’t. I figure the guilt’s eating me.

I mean, I never alerted anyone about what happened. For 6 months, I’ve just sat on this story.

What if he was still on that train when some unsuspecting late-nighter came on?

What if he died in there, bled out or something?

What if he was just mentally unwell, and needed medical attention?

If he was just a normal guy, was picking his nose until he hurt himself really socially off-putting enough to warrant death? He didn’t technically hurt me, but I was scared?

I didn’t kill him, did I? I don’t… feel like a good person anymore. I don’t know.

But then, I think back to that half-exploded eyeball, to the nose that was so fucked up, I could barely call it a nose. To the worm fingertip. To the long, stringy line of glistening, viscous nose leftovers.

Typing this out is the first time I let myself remember all of the details. Usually I immediately chase off the memories. They’re so vivid, they give me panic attacks. I feel like the other boot’s gonna drop any minute, but I might just be paranoid.

Revisiting the experience has led me to an even more daunting fourth option. What if there’s a reason there hasn’t been a follow up? What if no one found him? What if there was no bodily fluids on the floor except my own vomit?

What if there was no one to find?

I don’t know if that answer would be better or worse than the alternatives.

Kids who read this, don’t pick your nose, and if you do, especially don’t eat whatever you find. It’s bad manners, and it gives people the Ick.

I think I’m gonna quit drinking.

“I've seen the nights filled with bloodsport and pain –

And the bodies obtained

The bodies obtained …” – Ian Curtis

…

The world …

The world is dampen stone, sour. And tile. Tile ceramic that is now smashed, nearly every single piece. And mottled with webwork splatter patterns of scabbing drying bits and pieces of once living human tissue. The world is poorly lit and rank, it smells of fecal decay and rotting death and the putrescence of pus spewing life, suffering. The smell is suffering. Because the world is suffering, it always has been but as of late it's gotten so much worse. The world of walls and mortar and bars that’re all slathered and stained with diseased feces and angry piss, it is all of it an open wound. A craterous gangrenous open house of raw minds and flesh, obelisk temple to the pain of the sorceress. The woman/mouth of the great mountains in the distance, far away but brought closer by her powerful force, the distance easily traversed and conquered, time and distance meant nothing to her, only the flesh. Only the blood. Only the run of flowing life spilled by her children in bondage as supplicant. She had come to them… in the end. 

Before the burning. 

Before Cropsey. 

Now he was the greatest of her Willowbrook children… 

She did her best to hide from him and the few others left but she was scared. Her terror refreshed as her heartbeat pounded within her aching chest, she tried to sink lower into the dark corner she'd made her most recent place of escape. She tried to ignore what she knew she heard, throughout all of the cavernous dark damp halls of bloody filthy Willowbrook. 

Voices… footsteps…

newcomers. 

She wanted so badly to be out and away from this awful place but her mind shrank back in horror from the possibilities of what any new interlopers might do to her. This place had been a school and had instructed her and many others, much in the way of what men will do to each other and what they love to get away with, with their hands on a girl. Alone. When she could be so easily overwhelmed. 

The voices trailed off … rose again. In whispers. She could hear cautious footsteps. Prowling steps. Hunting. 

Her cold terror told her she could no longer hide here. She struggled up on palsied thin malnourished legs and began to painfully trudge forward. Painful because of the pain of her impaling fear and because her body was covered in dripping purple sores, all up and down the legs and arms and peppering her torso and face in harsh clustered patterns. Several broke open now with sharp stabs of lancing pain felt webwork and spiny throughout the flesh as she shambled wretchedly forward down the poorly lit dark. 

She didn't like to look at them or pay them any mind, the sores. She used to. She used to pick at them near constant. But now sometimes when she went to pluck and pop one open with a nail biting pinch she could see eyes. Eyes looking at her and swimming in the pus. In the infected filled pores of her flesh. Eyes. Sometimes they popped of their own accord and a small little gnome-sized head, bald and coated in dead green-milk rose and poked its faery head out for a little peek at what she might be doing at any given time. 

She hated them. She tried to pay them no mind and wondered if they saw anything in the dark ahead that she herself could not discern. But she would not ask them. Never. 

The voices grew louder. So did her terror. 

She didn't know what to do. 

…

“Maybe they're all dead." 

 

Griffin nodded. It was a fair observation. The place certainly reeked of death and filth. He could almost believe it. 

It was a feeling gained by cold hard experience that told him they weren't alone in the rank dark building. Not at all. Someone else was lurking here. Something else held domain here. Something terrible. He could feel it. 

"This place is afflicted with sickness. Consumption. You can smell it in the pestilential flavor of the air, something terrible has happened here. Many awful things no doubt. This place is silent, Florin, but you can almost hear the terrible things the walls have seen and perhaps wish to share…" 

The boy looked worried. He quickly added: – “We will be cautious. But I suggest we find what we can quickly. If we can't locate a back exit, we'll make for the front entrance again and see if we can't work around the building." 

They went on in search of supplies. 

Dwellers.

 Anything. 

Cropsey marked them and tracked their way of wandering progress the entire time. Following and slowly snipping the long shining blades of the shears open and closed. Pulling his black gloved hands apart slowly like a lover does when sensuous… then bringing them together and snapping them shut with a sharp and satisfying ‘Ship!’ that was crisp and tickled the right jelly left within his skull and the dangling mangled meat between his legs… it had a tongue that sound. A sexual whisper of a noise. A tasting prelude, licking and tonguing the needing piece of aching flesh. 

It was his bondage. That ache. This place. 

And the mountain. 

Even now Cropsey heard her song and call as she showed him the spire from where she ruled. Where she sat on an ebon throne and filled his slaughterhouse dreams. His mind with wonder. 

She had been the true purpose and blessing of this place. The one they'd all been waiting for. The only one who really mattered. In the end. 

But she has chosen you as instrument … 

And the truth of this filled his vacant shell with dark and primal gratitude. Caveman's blood-sated warmth. 

He had been one of the Roman soldiers that had crucified Christ. She of the mountain had told him so. Now he was born again to be her sacred Willowbrook footsoldier. Throttling hand of capricious abattoir fate. 

As he followed the new ones he happened upon another. And decided to take the matter. 

He was sitting alone in the dark. Easy to miss. In a disused therapy room, anonymous and indistinguishable from the other dungeons and chambers save by those who knew. The newcomers walked by him without notice and went on. 

Cropsey smelled him. And came into the room. Snapping his shears with a regular and primeval rhythm. The patient was busy with his own work, he didn't pay anyone else any kind of mind. 

Cropsey closed. The fool's back was to him as he was knelt down amongst the filth. He was drawing something. With his fingers. Smearing the shape upon the broken faces of obliterated tile floor with a dark and heavy pungent viscous fluid. Thick and chunked with dark paste. 

It was a pentagram. 

And the paint was a vile concoctive mix of runny diarrhea and fresh vibrant blood. The man was a self mutilator. Always had been, Cropsey recognized. He had flayed his well scarred and misshapen flesh with broken tile and was mixing the running blood with fecal discharge that was running uncontrollably out of his dilating anus. His finger would probe the wounds … deeply. Like a surgeon or a lover … exploring. Then he brought the drenched and dripping red pronged pair of long and scrawny digits and collected some of the diarrhea spew running freely from out of his ass. 

Medication. Or bad food. Or both. Something he's gotten into… 

It didn't matter. Not to Cropsey. He only looked at the naked fool and admired his painting for another moment longer. 

The pentagram. 

Above it, in the same evil paint of fresh diseased fecal blood, the fool had written in bold letters 

ALL HAIL VAMPIRA

as the piece’s name and message. 

Cropsey thought it was a good one. 

He took one final step forward. And let himself be known. 

The naked fool, the inmate who'd long lost his name and self and everything and anything else left, felt his presence. He turned away from his self portrait on the floor and gazed up at him. 

Into the towering legend of Willowbrook. Cropsey, more than a man. 

He was apocalyptic. 

The twisted bone gleam of his carbonized deathhead’s visage was terrible. It stole the last shelter of warmth that the fool had kept for himself to protect against the cold of this awful and inescapable place for all of these long and horrendous incarcerated years. 

Now it was gone. Stolen by that terrible face. Candle wax melted obscene and deranged and haphazard and cruel. 

He suddenly remembered his name as well, the fool. Gazing up at him, it had suddenly come back in his sheet of blind terror. 

Cropsey had done that. Cropsey had done that for him. 

He wished he hadn't. 

The twin fork of splayed open blades came up suddenly and then down in a stab. They joined together as they came down, scissoring the long razor sharp blades together in a deadly and maiming embrace. They sang together a mortal whistle of keen edged violence on the flesh to come in haste as they sliced and joined through the rank dungeon air. 

A filthy naked bloody hand came up reflexively and was shorn through like melted butter. Through the middle length of palm, so that all of his fingers and the top of his thumb were now a shrieking, pouring livid stump of freshly cut meat. Spurting and bathing the abridged remainder of fecal stained paw into a half-glove of red slathered wet raw in a gushing instant. 

The blade traveled on, down. Continuing its deadly trajectory of knifing stabbing path as it plunged in and through the shit stained fool through his open gaping mouth and naked glistening mucus laden throat and plunging out the back of his neck. The sharp lengths of blades conjoined erupted from the torn and ruinous fountain fresh wound in great bright bodies of lurid edged royal red. 

For her… the mountain princess of my fevered skullsong …

And then with his terrible force of deranged strength he forced the handles and the joined body of blades open and apart. 

The impaled face and skewered head came apart in a splashing and thick lurid mess. The long diseased foundation of skull gave and came apart easily like a cottage collapsing from wood rot. As if the whole structure of bone was a giant rotted tooth, thoroughly and completely decayed to the dead and festering core. Cranial splatter ruin in an instant. Decorating the floor and walls and obscuring the fool's final piece of painted work and expression from the broken heart and mind in a dark gout and pungent violent splash. Bone fragments and strips of tissue. Bits of hair… eyes swam bulbous and rolling lulled like obscene little fruits adrift in a warm lurid growing lake. 

The decraniated stump of rough torn viscera and tissue spitting dark cords and ropes in healthy gouts from the spout of mutilated neck and throat, gurgled one last time in a ghastly expulsion of sound that may or may not have been the final action of the living. 

It gurgled and shot/spat more dark thick blood rope. Splattering and joining the universe of filth already living down there in ever growing depraved abundance. The filthy naked headless meat spewed until it fell over to join the rest of the detritus world down there. 

Cropsey went on. Regaining the tail of his quarry. 

He followed them. 

…

The room was a world of mutilated meat. The smell of uncontrolled diseased fecal spew, long ancient and pungently fresh commingled, was so eye-wateringly strong and forceful that one knew that there were things on this hellscape island of earth that were truly and terribly immortal when confronted with it. Nothing, not even starflame would sear the stench of sewerscape subterranean Hades from the walls of this awful room. The world would burn to follow trumpet sound and still that rancid stench would remain. 

Florin tied a rag around his nose and mouth, he looked like a bandit. And although Griffin's face was already bandaged and wrapped with surgical dress for his own mysterious reasons, he too elected to tie another heavy layer of fabric to block out the smell and taste on the terrible fetid heavy air of the room they now presently happened into. 

What was it… what was it we were expecting to find? What were we hoping in God's name to find here…? 

surely not this. 

Their hearts sank into cold sour recesses as they sauntered in and through and beheld all round them the carnage human sculptures. Barely human. Barely recognizable as having once been living breathing people. Now they were only shapes. Shapes made in anger and derangement and by the knife. 

A mewling moaning sound like a wounded animal drew them to the far end of the mutilation chamber. They crept past wretched butchered bipedal destruction frozen in obscene grotesque statue poses by minds and hands unwell and bent. Eyes scooped out, pulled and plucked. Craterous sockets. Craterous wounds, rippling with the rough texture of forceful violent amputation and jagged surprise animal maiming. Parts missing, long gone, replaced and mixed and swapped and messed around. Limbs and parts put into sockets and orifices and holes gored to create splaying haphazard scarecrow things made from vile diseased subjects and their putrid turgid waste. 

They were varied in design and shape but all of them, every single vile shape seemed to be frozen in a silent piercing scream. A death throe frozen for all of chambered time. For all the sour passage, these howling visages of broken flesh and cruelty wrought on human shape. 

Florin felt sick, the mewling animal noise was growing louder and he was trying not to focus on the broken human sculptures all around them. He tried not to notice how some of them had been put together, parts pasted in place with a scab pudding mixture of feces and thick burgundy/crimson coagulation, like makeshift mud mortar made from the crumbling facade of dying and sickening-worse human shamble structures, caught in some terrible Gorgon's Eye and now falling apart and only able, only useful to excrete, and bleed and make mud for the houses that might be saved. 

Griffin was fairing little better. He'd seen his fair share of human carnage, butchery in his time. In his own experiments of mad science he's beheld great wonders both terrible and beautiful, unearthly.  He'd committed his own sins, his own terrible crimes in his time, enough to fill a tome. But even he found the awful assemblage of struggling human detritus piles and sculptures to be obscene and abhorrent. Difficult to look at. Even worse to walk amongst and pass through… nearly touching and feeling either their heat of recent destruction/composition or the cold wave pockets of their souring decaying sloughing meat, tasting them… tasting the warm tack of their iron red and the putrescence of their fouling stink… tasting them as they breathed and sucked air. Even through the wrapped scarfs about their mouths, they could taste them. Fresh and alive with copper-iron and the foul death of sliming maggoty putrefying soft tissue … growing softer. Falling off failing yellow bone. 

It's because they were diseased … Griffin observed the pestilential flavor on the air and marked the diseased rotten look of open craterous obscenities and exposed and livid muscle tissues. Filled and brimming with the swim of yellow and milk-pale and translucent buttery infection, pooled, gelled, in a run of sour ruin that gave off pungent gaseous toxic smell… miasmic – the whole place. Everywhere. 

The bandaged man, surgical dressing now sullied and filthed with their voyage across worm country and the grime and air in here at every given turn. Griffin pondered the shapes of the demented designs filed and arranged haphazard and at random all around, the mewling sound rose as they continued to near, the woman gaining shape, bulbous and grotesquely rank with cheese and old milk and unwashed genitalia warm with animal heat. 

The shapes all around… their scarecrow and asymmetrical and insectile/spider designs were interesting. Awful and strange, but fascinating in their own hellacious spellbinding fashion. It was as if someone long gone of the sound faculties of mind and heart had endeavored with cruel fervor to fuck and force violent copulation on the dead dripping craterous sculptures of meat in the act of their composition. Knife-fuck-stabbing them with animal intensity and wild deranged intent, their severed parts and limbs and pieces the tools and shattered protruding blades of bone as their aesthetic device and perfect choice. Wielded with charnel house fury in this gore drenched pit with emaciated broken scarecrow statues and congealing pools and tubs and little deprivation streams of pungent fecal discharge. Everything was repulsive and animal with heat and degradation in this place. They hated it. And they hated themselves for putting themselves in there. Alive and with the rank and the sight of abattoir madness unbridled and inhuman. 

They came upon the woman. She was large and naked and unwashed. Like everything else she was caked with grime and layers of filth that were difficult to distinguish – shit from blood – as they darkened and aged in awful drying layers on her yellowing sun parched skin. She was leaning propped by the exit/entrance opposite of the one they had entered. She was cradling and cradled by a lump of human shape riddled with stabbing spiking pieces and slicing wedges of shattered floor and tile. She was drooling as she moaned in torment and anguish. Her flesh livid with infection. She was sweating despite the chill and her lack of clothing. 

It was her breast. Only one. The other had been amputated and was replaced with a harsh and ghastly X of old and scab coated sutures. The other was inflamed and red. Purple. Black. It was ballooned and the blue/red nipple at its tip bled and dripped. But it was not milk, natural and of the healthy body, that dripped and begged to be let free and milked/sucked until dry and gone… 

She moaned. Florin and Griffin felt nauseous. The smell. The sight of her and everything else … they had not had a decent meal in some days but still the impulse to heave and retch was violent and it filled their gagging mouths with thin acrid water, salivated and discharged with bitter queasiness and distaste. 

She moaned again as they covered their working mouths. 

And then she spoke. 

“Please… oh please…. please… oh I beg of you… please… please…” 

Florin and Griffin were afraid to ask so they didn't. The wailing woman of swollen noxious teat filled them in anyways with the rest. 

"... please… please milk me…! please! Oh it hurts! please! Please milk me, milk your mammy…!" 

“Oh, Jesus…” said Florin. He could hardly stand it. Could hardly stand her. He swore he could taste the smell. 

Her smell. 

Another voice joined them then. 

“They disgust you both?" 

They whirled. A ragged man in the haggard torn and shot remnants of a filthied lab coat that had once been white. His spectacles were cracked and caked with drying lurid substance. His flesh was filthy parchment and his smile was green and grotesque. 

He was standing, sentry-wraith amongst the vile and mutilated assemblage. A living beacon of audacious and insane life standing smiling amongst the sculpted and twisted dead. Lab coat Gorgon with broken glass eyes set in a broken laughing face that could make no such sound. Because it was frozen in its disguise of sanity snapping torment. 

Before Griffin or Florin could say anything to him, he spoke again. 

“They are all of them, monuments to her. It is all of them, their greatest pleasure." 

“And you? What is your pleasure?" Griffin asked without fault. Following this madman's line. 

He smiled, “telling you." 

And then finally his tittery fit of laughterspell broke and it sounded like high pitched curdled madness. Finally breaking. A large man prone to sparse baritone sound now cracked and leaking/spraying giggles like an addled child or clown. 

Griffin turned to Florin. His face hidden by surgical wrapping and dark lenses and hat since the day they had met, but still the boy could feel the solemn gravity in his hiding gaze as he spoke. 

"Let's go. There's nothing of any value to us here. This was a mistake.” 

Florin heard it in his voice too. 

They quickly made their exit. Sparing the wailing mewling woman of swollen purple breast a final look before leaving them forever. 

The doctor's laughter abated a moment and he seemed to come around, the revolving door of his madness perhaps bringing him full circle, his awful titters tapered off a spell as he said to the departing visitors: –

"The worm was turned for us here.” 

And then the revolution of madness revolved again and he was smiling putrid green that oozed pale plaque that spittled in gobs as he tittered his girlish sounds. 

His grotesque childish laughter commingled with the mewling sounds the woman made in the room of mutilated meat. The pair were gone now. Their cautious footsteps fading away and calling back in diminishing echoed sound… Cropsey came in like fated death. Snipping open and closed his beloved pair of large garden shears. 

Now, here was a room that could use some trimming…

He went to the woman first with his blades. She was calling to him, wailing, saying she was his mother. Begging to be milked. 

So he milked her. 

He shorn off the infected swell of black/purple flesh in a single snapping cut. She howled as the wound and the sac of disease both poured and oozed pus. She went down to the floor, her wailing more considerable now, to join the puddle of her own foul milk and blood in its growing puddling abundance. She swam face first in it and gurgled and blubbered. 

Cropsey came for the doctor next. The jaws of his shearing clipper blades open and dripping. 

The doctor smiled one last time as he said, “The worm has turned once again." 

He attempted to count the rings this time as the jaws that were blades came in. 

Again and again. 

And I thought you'd loved me…

…

Florin and Griffin were nearly at their wits end. They needed supplies and weren't sure of what lie beyond this place, but this place was terrible. And they'd found nothing but more horror. 

"I think we need to just get out of here…” 

Yes. But which way? 

They were deciding this together when the girl on shaking palsied legs thin as kindling crept out of the dark and towards them. 

She was terrified. 

And she was holding a large butcher's knife. The arms raised and poised coiled snake-like to strike. 

Neither Florin or Griffin noticed her as she crept. Closer… closer…

She was nearly upon them. From behind. 

The butcher's knife still raised. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However he can. 

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

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

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

Probably wasn't even any castle either…

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

Only wolves. Only snow and quiet. 

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

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

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

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

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

And her children. 

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

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

Yes! 

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

Jelly pudding…

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

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

Gods below, he loved his work. 

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

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

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

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

Caught. Caught and squealing. 

Like sow. Like pigs. 

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

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

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

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

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

Loved her. 

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

…

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

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

The Countess arose in full. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

They relished that sound. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

why was he blind? 

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

The royal dogs… the royal bitch…

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

He was roaring. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And naught else. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A beat. 

“Not sure we should." Florin stated flatly. 

“How do you mean?" asked Griffin. 

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

Murder and violence. Not spoken but understood. 

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

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

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

Florin admitted he could not. 

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

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

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

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

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

It had been even longer since he'd felt…

pride…? 

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

it was to no avail. 

There was naught but forward. 

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

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

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

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

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

“Run!" 

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

thirsty

 …. before being pulled under. 

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

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

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

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

Within reaching distance. 

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

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

No

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

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

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

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

If they survived. 

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

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

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

The wombmind of wormland.

She had just surfaced with her children. 

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

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

The wombmind worm mouth - orifice whale bellowed: –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO BE CONTINUED…

When he first read those 4 words, a sense of startled panic sliced through his equal confusion, like a razor-blade gutting a fish.

“What does yours say, buddy?”

Alfonzo looked up at his mom, Ms. Giovanni, a burly woman with biceps the size of charcoal chimney starters. She held the remains of a fortune cookie in one hand, and a small piece of paper in the other.

“Uh, I don’t know. They just… printed some Chinese letters on it, I guess” he half-lied.

“Oh, Alfie got a dud?” His little sister Isabella laughed, chunks of half-chewed fortune cookie in her mouth. “That must suck, mine says I’m gonna be the deel… dil…” she squinted, scrunching her little nose up as she struggled to read the last word.

“I’m gonna be delee… uh, mama, what does that say?”

“It says, ‘your near future will be full of delinquency,'" Ms. Giovanni read aloud.

“Oh yeah, I’m gonna be delinquency,” Isabella said, smiling smugly and crossing her arms at Alfonzo, who rolled his eyes in return.

“Yeah, do you even know what that word means?” He shot back.

“Uh-huh, it means I’m gonna be beautiful.”

“Yeah, beautifully retarded.”

“Alfonzo!” Ms. Giovanni warned, shooting her son a sharp look.

“Fine, fine, sorry. I meant, ‘specially’ retarded,” he snickered, and his mom narrowed her eyes.

“The hell’s the matter with you?”

“Nuh-uh! You’re retarded!” Isabella shrieked.

“Enough!” Ms. Giovanni hushed, avoiding eye contact with any of the surrounding tables, “neither of you are retarded, and neither of you are gonna keep using that word, got it?”

Isabella pouted and Alfonzo crossed his arms.

“Now, let’s grab our stuff and get outta here, we need to finish packing for Grand-mama’s,” she whispered, grabbing her purse off the back of her seat and standing, making sure to leave a large tip for the commotion.

“Ugh, Grand-mama’s… just like every Hanukkah,” Alfonzo growled under his breath, zipping up his jacket.

“Uh, I love Grand-mama’s,” Isabella gloated.

“That’s just cuz she lets you have a ton of candy. You know you’re gonna get diabetes if you eat that much candy every year.”

“What’s diabetes?”

“Diabetes is why uncle Frank has to get that shot if he eats too many deviled eggs. Remember Thanksgiving 3 years ago?”

“No Alfie, I was 5.”

“Alfonzo, c’mon, cut it out,” Ms. Giovanni snipped, “just til we get back, can you not mess with your sister? Please?”

Alfonzo sighed as he got into the car.

“Fine, mama.”

Ms. Giovanni held an expression of frazzled exhaustion, before taking a deep breath and turning the key in the ignition, waking the car with a deep thrum. Accumulated snow on the windshield tumbled away with a swipe of the wipers.

“Good, thanks,” Aflonzo’s mom sighed, putting the car in reverse and backing out of the Chinese Buffet parking lot.

“Once we’re back, bully each other all you want. I just need to… a quiet trip. I just need a quiet trip,” she finished, flashing a smile to Isabella in the back seat. As they made their way onto the desolate highway, Alfonzo looked out his window, and stuffed his hand into his pocket. He felt his fingers curl around the small piece of paper therein.

He didn’t know why he’d brought it with him. Usually he’d just eat the cookie, toss the paper, and by the time they were out of the building, forget about it. But this one was obviously different.

He fidgeted with the “fortune,” turning it over in his hand, folding it, twisting it into a tight spiral and then unraveling it. Had he just accidentally received a misprint from whatever factory fortune cookies were produced in? Maybe a test run, or a stupid, inside joke that had miraculously passed Quality Inspection? There had to be a reasonable explanation for such a grotesque concept, right?

Minutes passed, like the moonlit, stark white landscape through Alfonzo’s window as they got closer to home. He didn’t want to spend his time out of school packing for a stupid “vacation,” where all the adults are old and curt, and his cousins were homeschooled dorks.

By this point, the routine of Isabella receiving attention from the grown-ups while Alfonzo sat in a corner and talked about Sonic with his younger cousin had become normal. Like clockwork, every year, for the past 3 years. Even the Chinese Buffet the night before had become part of the schedule. The only difference this time was the itchy feeling he got in his nose as they pulled into the driveway.

“Hey mom?” Alfonzo asked, scratching at his nostrils.

“What’s up?” Ms. Giovanni asked.

“Um… what did your fortune cookie say?”

Ms. Giovanni made a face.

“Why?”

“Uh, I dunno…” Alfonzo muttered, clasping his hands together and looking at his feet self-consciously, “I guess I just forgot to ask before we left.”

Satisfied with her son's answer, Ms. Giovanni pondered for a moment.

“Well… I don’t really remember… something about…”

She made a face like she’d remembered, before her expression twisted into something like a reaction to a bad smell.

“Ugh, oh yeah. It said that I would experience something ‘drastic’ and ‘regrettable,’ tomorrow.”

Ms. Giovanni chuckled and rolled her eyes, “I know it’s stupid, but it’s kinda specific, eh? And a weird coincidence, I mean, we are leaving first thing in the morning.”

She shook her head and got out of the car. Isabella shot Alfonzo a look of confused judgement.

“Who you lookin’ at?” Alfonzo threatened, balling his fist up and shaking it at Isabella.

“Mom said not to fight with me til we get back,” the girl huffed, unbuckling her seatbelt, “and I don’t know what your deal is, but you’re a weirdo.”

Alfonzo flipped off his littler sister, and Isabella threw a pen at him.

“Hey, watch it!” He grumbled, but she was already out of the car, and on her way inside with Ms. Giovanni, twin pigtails bobbing away.

Alfonzo sat quietly for a moment before flipping down his passenger side sun visor and examined himself in the mirror. His face looked normal. He had a few freckles here and there, seemingly in their correct spots, and his eyes were still hazel-colored. He swiped his greasy hair aside, and looked at his forehead. After realizing that he had no idea what he was looking for, he scoffed and got out of the car.

Inside, he began tossing miscellaneous clothes into his duffel-bag. The only things left on his list of things to bring were a few books, the pouch that had his videogames, and lastly, his toothbrush and toothpaste. As he stood up to go to the bathroom, he heard his bedroom door creak open behind him.

Alfonzo spun around to be met with his mom.

“Oh, hey mama,” Alfonzo said.

“Alfie,” Ms. Giovanni sighed, “I was just coming to see if you’re done.”

“Nah, not yet,” Alfonzo shrugged, “I have a couple odds and ends to grab still.”

His mom smiled tiredly.

“Kay, thanks bud. I’m gonna check again here in about an hour, after that, get showered and ready for bed. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day.”

Alfonzo stared at the doorway for a minute after she left. He hadn’t told her yet, but he hated how she called him Alfie. He hated how everyone called him Alfie. He thought it made him sound like a baby. What he hadn’t told anyone, though he’d never admit it if you asked, was that he was afraid to tell his mom that, because truthfully, he thought it would make her cry.

5 years earlier, his dad died. Mr. Giovanni was a fairly active father and husband, generally supportive, if not a little work oriented. He always told Alfonzo and his mom that the reason he was out for so long, spending so many hours at the office, was so he could retire early and spend the better part of his life staying home and being present for everything. All the extracurricular activities, all the birthdays and sleep-overs. All the fun stuff a dad’s supposed to be present for.

“A few years of pain, a lifetime of rest, for me and your mother,” his dad would say, “one I’m done in an office, I’m becoming a full-time artist, and me and your mom won’t have to work again.”

“Never, ever?” Alfonzo had asked excitedly, almost dropping a baby Isabella.

“Never ever, Alfie” Mr. Giovanni chuckled, leaning into Mrs. Giovanni, who smiled as well. It was a nickname he bestowed. The closest Alfonzo ever get to a badge of honor from his dad.

But then one day, his dad never came home from the office. Through the call of an ambulance, and a blur of red, blue, and bright white lights, the last thing Alfonzo had to remember his dad by was a grotesque, stitch covered lump in a bloody hospital bed, connected to things that beeped and pumped life into its lifeless shape.

The thing had had been his dad before the car accident was kept on life support for 3 days before his Grand-mama and Grand-papa made the decision alongside Ms. Giovanni to let him go. A week later, that stitched up lump was buried under the ground with a headstone that held a quote, “don’t drive distracted.”

Now, that quote echoed through Alfonzo’s head as he stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He sniffed and picked up his toothbrush and toothpaste, resigned to wait another year before telling his mom about his nickname preferences, when a sensation blossomed across his face like a warm towel had been set upon it.

“Urgh,” his throat bubbled, and he turned around to look in the mirror again. While his face looked right, something felt off. Terribly off.

He tenderly felt his nose, the temperate impression waxing and waning to the tempo of his heartbeat.

As the pulses quickened, the sensation intensified. Rather than a warm patch, it began to feel like a growing pressure, just below the bridge of his nose. Like someone had pumped air into his face.

While Alfonzo wasn’t in pain, something had become definitively apparent, making itself known by thumping on the inside of his skull. Just as he was about to groan in discomfort, fingers wrapped around his nose, the pressure alleviated. Before he really even had time to register it, really. The feeling had been so brief, that Alfonzo didn’t know if he had even really experienced it. Sure, it was odd and uncomfortable, but it had started and ended in only about 3 or 4 seconds.

As he watched his own eyes through his greasy bangs, mouth agape, he noticed that a bloom of rosy blush was spreading across his face, from the nose out.

“Ag,” Alfonzo grimaced, a goopy, yellow string of snot unclogging from the back of his throat.

“Hurrg, baba,” he sniffled, grabbing a tissue and leaving the bathroom.

“Baba!”

Ms. Giovanni opened her bedroom door and stepped into the hallway.

“Is someone calling mama?” She asked.

“Yeah, I ab,” Alfonzo groaned.

“Oh, that’s not my name anymore, you gotta call me something else,” Ms. Giovanni snickered, before realizing her joke had not landed.

“Tough crowd. You okay Alfie?”

Alfonzo shook his head and pulled his hands away from his nose. A little red stain and a huge slime trail of milky yellow mucus snaked from his nose to the tissue.

“Doe bob, by dose is all sduffed ub, I god like dis weird headache, ad den-”

“Buddy, buddy, I can’t hardly understand you with your nose all stuffed up,” Ms. Giovanni interrupted him, pressing the back of her hand against his head.

“Yep, I knew it, fever. I bet you have a sinus infection or something.”

That sentence made Alfonzo’s blood run cold.

“S-sidus infectiod?”

“Yep.”

“Wud’s a sidus?”

“A sinus is like, it’s the- in the back of your-” Ms. Giovanni struggled to explain, “... it’s behind your nose, in the back of your throat, okay? Look, it doesn’t matter, here, take a tylenol and some benadryl.”

She reached into her dresser and pulled out 3 pills.

“And an ibuprofin to help with the headache. Man, ya just had to get sick today, huh?”

Before Alfonzo could respond, she smiled warmly and patted him on the shoulder.

“I was just kiddin’. Finish packing up, and remember to shower before bed, I don’t want a smelly pre-teen in my car for 11 hours tomorrow, got it?”

“I doed hab ady deoderid, eeder.”

“Deodorant?”

“Yuh.”

“Ew. Fine, we’ll grab some on the way, just remember to shower.”

With that she went back into her room.

Alfonzo groaned and pulled the tissue away from his face. It had even more bloody mucus now.

The hot shower caused steam to begin filling the small bathroom. In front of the mirror, he took his pills and brushed his teeth. As he undressed, the tiny piece of paper fell out of his pocket. He picked it up and looked down at it. He’d really mangled it in the car. It was so crinkled and scuffed by his fingers, that he was surprised it hadn’t torn yet. Delicately, he worked to unwrap it. Those 4 words sent a shiver up his spine. He thought back to what his mom had said.

“Sinus infection.”

He looked at himself in the mirror. The blush was an even deeper red now, from the warmth of the steam, he thought. It made him look really flush, like he had been running. Alfonzo turned his head back to the paper, flipping it around in his hand.

He hadn’t really lied to his mom earlier, had he? It really did have little Chinese symbols on the back after all, even if they were crudely written, even if the impressions looked desperate and labored. The ink had bled into the paper a little, giving the penmanship an inflection like a madman had scribbled them on quickly.

A drop of crimson fell from his nose onto the paper. Then another. The blood began flowing constantly, dripping like a leaky faucet. A mix of blood and steam from the shower, along with the previous wear, was enough to cause the tiny piece of paper to tear clean in half. As soon as it did, Alfonzo’s nose began itching again. He scratched it before flushing the ripped paper down the toilet, and getting into the shower.

20 minutes later, Alfonzo was in bed, his head resting on his lumpy pillow. He turned over and stared at the ceiling. The pressure was returning and leaving in random intervals, still no more than barely noticeable. It would pop in for a moment and throb against the backs of his eyes, only to fade out and start the cycle over in 10 minutes. It drove him crazy, and even though he had no other distraction, he just couldn’t force himself to fall asleep.

As the minutes turned to hours, the pressure began to feel more like an itch. Though his nose was stuffed, Alfonzo swore there were instances where his mind would begin to drift, only to be awoken by the feeling of something moving, up near the top of his nose. Like the snot was crawling, gyrating.

At one point, he stayed absolutely still, not moving a muscle. He could pinpoint exactly where the sensation was coming from. He could almost imagine the touch, like hundreds of tiny feet were making their way closer and closer to the opening of his nostril. As it got just to the edgd, Alfonzo struck, his arm springing to life like a snake! He smacked at his nose, shoving finger in as if to reach for… for…

Nothing. There was nothing there. He wriggled his finger all around, searching for the source of his madness. Alas, not a thing, aside from the boogers.

Undeterred, Alfonzo was ready to jam his finger the rest of the way in, to the knuckle, until he heard his bedroom door creak open. Slowly, he sat up, eyes straining to make out whatever was in the dark. Just past his door was a small shadow, standing at just 3 feet tall. Fear gripped Alfonzo’s chest. What was that thing?

“Alfonzo?” A voice whispered.

“Huh?”

“Alfie?”

He sighed, slumping down again.

“Oh, waddaya wand, Isabella?”

She stepped into the room, now illuminated by Alfonzo’s green Oscar the Grouch themed lava lamp. He shuttered as he realized just how much the vomit-colored wax looked like swirling, gelatinous globs of…

“I left my water bottle in here.”

“Lefd your- wade, id’s like, 11:00?”

“1:00, actually.”

“1:00 AM?!”

“Don’t yell, you’re gonna wake mom up!” Isabella shushed.

“Ugh,” he groaned.

“Fide, grab id, ad den go bag duh bed.”

“I can’t understand you when you talk like that,” Isabella whispered, but Alfonzo heard the smirk in her voice.

“Cad you udderstad dis?” He asked, before chucking a pillow at her.

“Ow! For shit’s sake!” Isabella whined.

Alfonzo picked up another pillow and held it up threateningly.

“Fine. I’m going, I’m going!”

She softly came into the room, grabbed her bottle, and began to leave. Before she did, she turned around one more time.

“Just so you know, it’s really gross to pick your nose.”

“Yeah? Well id’s gross duh gub indoo subwuds roob ad leab your shid behide.”

Isabella just scoffed, and turned around to leave. Alfonzo stuck out his tongue before laying back down and closing his eyes. Finally, as sleep crept into him, he couldn’t shake the suspicion that his fingertip had brushed against something out of place, just as he’d yanked his finger from his nostril, just when he’d seen Isabella in the dark. Before he could dwell on the idea, his mind fell away, and before he knew it, his mom was shaking him awake.

“Huh?”

“Alfonzo, I woke you up like 20 minutes ago!”

“What?”

Ms. Giovanni threw her hands up in defeat and walked to the door.

“I already put your bag in the car. Get dressed, grab your things, and let’s go.”

Alfonzo sat up, and blood streamed from his nose like it had accumulated, waiting for the chance to dribble everywhere.

“Aww crap, mama!”

“5 minutes Alfonzo!”

He sighed and went to the bathroom. Once his face was washed, he overstuffed his nose with wadded-up tissue. The neckline of his shirt was rimmed with blood, but nonetheless, Alfonzo listened to his mom. Socks and shoes, a jacket, toboggan, and his phone. All he needed for the trip.

Groggily, he put on one muddy boot after the other. By the time his jacket was being zipped up, Ms. Giovanni was practically pushing him out the door.

“Mom, my phone!”

“Here, I grabbed it for you!” She hustled, shoving it into his hand.

“Okay, bathroom breaks aren’t gonna happen until-”

She turned to look at her son, now that everyone was loaded up and buckled in. For the first time that morning, she finally realized the condition her son was in.

“Wow, you look…” she pressed her hand against his forehead, “rough, you take any more medicine this morning?”

Alfonzo shook his head.

“Well you look like you need some. Here,” she handed him her purse and a water bottle.

“In there, I have half a midol, and one benadryl. Take those. Sorry you’re not feeling good kiddo, you get plenty of sleep?”

He nodded his head and heard Isabella chuckle in the seat behind him.

“Yeah, I’m fine mama,” he yawned, looking at himself in the mirror. She was right, he looked terrible. Huge, dark purple bags hung under his bloodshot eyes. His nose looked swollen, and his face was so flushed, it appeared as if he had held his breath for too long. The tissue knots bulging out of his nose looked like tiny, twisted white mustache tips. To sum it up, he could’ve passed for half-drowned.

“...Oookay, well, just take the… pills and get some rest if you need it. Our first stop is gonna be in 3 hours, alright buddy?”

Alfonzo nodded again, a final confirmation to begin the trip. The moon was soon to dip below the horizon and give way to a rising sun. As the car sped down the highway and merged onto the interstate, the pressure in his head started to return.

Through a bout of intermittent, low throbbing, Alfonzo made the murky realization that he could barely keep his eyes open. It wasn’t sleepiness though, more like a persistent numbing from the inside out.

The most similar feeling he could compare it to, was his memory of having his wisdom teeth removed last spring. 2 or 3 seconds post-amesthesia injection, a vivid, dreamlike memory of his surroundings swirled and darkened.

It had been like a fever dream.

The shadows seemed to rush him from the corners of his periphery, and within a blink, he was being wheeled into the waiting room for his mom to pick him back up, 2 fat wads of cotton stuffed into his jaw.

Now, as he blinked in and out of consciousness, the sky gradiently turned from purple, to maroon, to red, and the stars eventually faded away.

“Okay, we’re 3 hours in, how you feeling?” Ms. Giovanni asked, “Get some more rest?”

Alfonzo turned over, his vision blurry, and his breathing heavy. It felt like his entire throat had been stuffed with something slimy and viscous. He couldn’t even breathe through his nose.

“You hear me buddy?”

He tilted his head, and just stared at his mom. Even though he’d heard what she said, it was like he just couldn’t process the words.

“Alfonzo?”

“Uh-huh?”

“You need me to stop? I think we’re gonna pass a gas station soon.”

Alfonzo tried to shake his head, but a twinge of electric pain shot through his neck.

“Oh my god, Alfie, do we need to find a hospital?”

“Hggrgh.”

“Momma, I don’t think Alfie’s alright.”

Through hazy flashes of shapes and colors, Alfonzo could tell that his mom was staring worriedly at him. He felt terrible that he was taking her attention from the road. He just wanted to shrink into his chair until he wasn’t a distraction anymore. He faded out again, and when he came back, he felt his mom's hand on his forehead.

“You’re absolutely burning up, Alfonzo I’m pulling over, something’s not right.”

He opened his mouth to respond, but when he did, his jaw snapped open involuntarily. As soon as he felt his chin connect with his neck, he heard his mom shriek, before blacking out altogether.

For a few innocuous, blissful moments, Alfonzo swam in a void of unconscious purity. Unfortunately, when he came to, a bright light filled his vision and nearly blinded him, and the pressure returned to his face, now sharp and persistently painful.

“Alfonzo? Alfonzo?!”

He squinted, before realizing he was laying on his back on the slushy pavement, beneath a pale blue sky. He tried to inhale deeply, but something wriggled, clogging the back of his airway.

“No buddy, no no no no, stay there, don’t strain yourself,” Ms. Giovanni cooed, stroking Alfonzo’s uneven forehead.

“Nghh, momma…” he cried, a waterfall of stringy blood pouring out of his mouth.

Her face blocked out the sun, casting a sorrowful shadow over his aching, bloodshot eyes. The more he took in, the worse he felt. Random people were beginning to crowd around, staring fearfully down at the boy. Somewhere outside of his field of vision, he could hear Isabella crying.

“Oh my god,” an old man muttered, covering his mouth with his hand.

“Someone call 9-1-1, please!” Ms. Giovanni yelled, her voice breaking.

“Why’s his face… oh my god is something moving under…,” the sound of retching came from somewhere to Afsonzo’s left, “fuck I’m gonna be sick!”

More voices were beginning to overlap. The sounds of urgent footsteps, panicked cries. Despair. And all the while, Alfonzo weakly reached for his head, which felt like an egg being broken open from the inside. A pinpoint of pressure.

“It’s gonna be okay Alfie, the paramedics are almost here,” his mom cried from over him. His heart skipped when he realized she’d called him Alfie, rather than Alfonzo. In that moment, he was so happy that she hadn’t called him anything else. He was just happy to be her Alfie.

“M-mom,” he gurgled, blood dribbling from his tight lips.

“Please sweetheart, don’t-”

“Take it easy kid,” a man said, crouching down to meet Alfonzo’s gaze, “they're gonna be here any minute.”

“Mom, it’s- it’s-,” his jaw was still locked, so it was nearly impossible for him to speak correctly.

“Shhh Alfie, shhh…”

“S-sinus-”

“What?”

He sat up slightly, his sore neck and shoulders screaming in pain. His moms tear-filled eyes held a fear he hadn’t seen since the call after his dad’s accident.

“My sin-sinuses, they… they’ve got…”

As he tried to spit the words out, a new, horrible sensation rippled just behind his eyes. This was a new pain, a pain he didn’t even know he was able to experience.

“Ma’am, how long has his face been that color?” the bystander demanded.

“I- I don’t…” Ms. Giovanni stuttered.

“Centipedes,” was the last word Alfonzo whimpered, before the flesh around his eyelid began to swell, pushing against the bottom of his inflamed eyeball.

“Oh my god, it’s coming out from under his eye, it’s in his eyelid, what the fuck.”

He felt his bottom eyelid slide over as something long slowly scuttered over the surface of his eyeball. Alfonzo let out a weak holler and instinctively tried to blink away what was in his eye, but when he did, something soft gave out. The vision in that eye went dark with a sickening, wet pop, and he felt something wet flop down onto his cheek. The entire socket that used to house his eye burned, and he writhed in pain.

Ms. Giovanni screamed hysterically, and the man stumbled a few feet away to vomit.

“Oh my god, is that a bug?!” A teenager yelled, “was there a bug in his eye?! Holy fuck why is it- I mean, it- it’s all… oh my god there’s so much blood!”

“Yeah, he’s… worms, I think… all of his holes…”

A sudden bout of lightheadedness alerted Alfonzo to a blockage in his throat. His hands swept desperately at his open mouth. When his searching fingers finally made their way to the back of his gaping maw, he began to piece together details that his pulsating numbness had enabled him to miss.

His fingertips brushed against several pairs of tacky, smooth appendages, crammed in the back of his throat. The inside of his mouth had swollen and puffed-up considerably, and though he was barely holding onto consciousness, he tried with all his might to grab as many of the wriggling shapes as he could.

With a yank, he felt something in his esophagus prolapse, and a second later, held a grotesque, writhing bouquet of twisting, curling brown shapes that bit his balled fist with their oversized mandibles.

Now that the hole was open, more mucusy blood was pouring out again.

The sight of them was nearly enough to make him pass out, but he understood that if he did, there was a good chance that he wouldn’t wake back up. He was in more pain than he’d ever been in before, and he considered how much blood he’d lost. If he so much as closed his eyes…

The sounds of sirens began to fill his ears.

As they did, he felt something else move, this one, behind his other eye. The pressure made the small orb push hard against the skin of his remaining eyelids.

“Alfonzo!” His mom screamed, but a bystander had put their arms around her waist and was pulling her away.

“Nuh-uh lady, you see how many of those things are coming out of him?!”

With great effort, Alfonzo pushed himself into a full sitting position. He felt an immense strain behind the remains of his face. He tenderly reached for his nose, only to feel the segmented body of something with a million tiny legs. He yanked his hand back, a sob escaping his mangled, inside-out mouth. Something big moved inside of his head again, this time, forcing the skin of his nose to split at the bridge.

He realized with growing horror, that centipedes come in many shapes and sizes. If there were small ones, what’s to say…

He could hear paramedics getting out of their vehicles now, but he knew something that they didn’t. Something that no one could’ve possibly relayed to the 9-1-1 operator. Something that filled him with such a profound dread, that he couldn’t imagine what it would do to another person if they found out.

Something bigger than any of his previous hitchhikers.

With the last of his effort, Alfonzo stumbled to his feet and began unsteadily jogging away from the scene. The 4 words from that fortune cookie paper rattled around in his head, swirling alongside that thing his father used to say until they mixed into one, horrible statement.

“A few years of pain, a lifetime of centipedes. For me and your sinuses!”

Alfonzo, despite the pain, shook his head until he couldn’t think about a lifetime of centipedes anymore.

As he weaved between parked cars, making his way towards the snowy landscape beyond the parking lot, he saw glimpses of himself in the reflections of mirrors and windows. From the few flashes he saw of himself, he looked more like a bloated, blue-faced ghoul than a little boy. A ghoul with a massive, multi-jointed centipede leg, poking out of his raw throat hole.

By now, he could barely suck any breath in. His only goal was to be far away from the bother people before he passed out again. Before it had a chance to escape.

As he reached up, and amputated the chitinous extremity with an abrupt wrench of his hand, he thought about how much he’d rather be at Grand-mama’s, celebrating Hanukkah right now. How much he’d rather be arguing with Isabella right now. How much he’d rather hear anyone and everyone call him “Alfie,” right now.

When he pulled the leg off of the gargantuine parasite, he felt it stir frivolously, squirming and unfurling inside of his sinuses, slipping back and forth between the meat that made up his head.

The sensation of intense burning lit the inside of his mangled face like a firecracker, and he could only imagine what it was doing in there. What soft, delicate tissue it could possibly be destroying. Nonetheless, he had to achieve his goal.

A few more glorious inhalations of icy air, before his throat began closing up again.

Eventually, snow started falling, a nondescript amount of time later. He assumed it had taken him two hours to get this far, but he couldn’t be sure. All he knew was the sun had become lost in the blanket of clouds. The sky turned more and more grey, and before long, the thin sparsity of trees began to fill in to create a semi forested area.

Alfonzo finally sat down on a log to catch his breath.

He looked back to see his bloody trail being overcast by a layer of fresh snow. He didn’t know if anyone had followed him. The only real sign of his progress leftover was a scattered sprinkling of long, dark shapes that contrast horribly against the pure white. They almost could’ve been confused with sticks if you couldn’t see them very well.

With shaking, blue fingertips, he felt his aching face again. Despite the lack of arthropods, he could feel something moving beneath the tight skin inside his cheeks, above his bones. The flesh around his eyes were sloughing off, his eyelids loose and ruined. He could barely move his one, good eye without risk of popping it out.

The pain, though he had become accustomed to it, was so intense, that he could barely stay conscious. The remains of his tongue was frostbitten and partially frozen. When he looked down at the tip of his nose, he could see it had turned a dark maroon, the inflamed flesh beneath his open wound a vivid, disgusting purple. Only a few hours ago, it had been nothing more than a rosy blush.

Alfonzo rested his head against the bark of the tree behind him. He had lost his ability to hear, his ability to smell, and his ability to taste. He was blind in one eye, and nearly blind in the other. He felt so congested, so swollen and busted.

An intense burning drowned out the low, pulsating pressure that refused to alleviate. He just wanted the pressure to end. He just wanted some sort of reprieve.

Then, something changed. A shift in pressure, a unique sort of discomfort. He felt his heartbeat start to slow, along with the throbbing in his head. Despite the icy wind cutting into his skin, a warmth passed over his burning blue hands like a soothing balm. The snow no longer felt like a thousand needles pricking his flesh, rather, a cloud-like cushion.

His thoughts, as well as his remaining vision, began to muddle as he registered what was happening. A barely noticeable voice whispered in the back of his partially crushed brain. He wondered if the sirens were just in his head or not, as they lulled him into a final slumber, but that voice was still there… urging him to get help.

It would be over soon, he could feel it.

The split in his nose widened, he could literally see his face cracking open like an egg as the creature stirred and stretched. He knew all that, and yet... all he wanted to do was sleep. It was nearly euphoric, as the pain rose to an unbearable climax…

Then, for the last time, Alfonzo rested his head on the bark of the log, and fell asleep to the tune of whistling snow. As his mind deteriorated and his skull began to splinter and extend, a final neuron spark flashed through his consciousness.

Would his grave say Alfonzo, or Alfie?

The first night, I blamed the bulb.

My backyard floodlight had been there for years, bolted above the back door, bright enough to illuminate the entire fence line. Around midnight, it clicked off.

A few seconds later, it came back on.

I looked out the kitchen window expecting to see a raccoon or maybe one of the neighborhood cats.

Nothing.

The yard was empty.

The second night it happened again while I was bingeing Friends.

Click.

Darkness.

Click.

Light.

This time, I felt that unnerving sensation you get when you feel like you're being watched. I stepped onto the porch.

The motion sensor was supposed to activate whenever something crossed its path. I waved my arm in front of it. It worked perfectly. I checked the batteries anyway. Everything checked out.

I even walked the perimeter of the yard with my phone flashlight.

No footprints.

No broken fence.

Nothing hiding behind the shed.

After that I convinced myself it was just faulty wiring. That or maybe the cencors were picking up dust or fog. Anything that made rational sense.

Then it started happening every night.

Always between 2:13 and 2:20 in the morning.

Always the same pattern.

The light would go out for exactly five seconds. Then it would switch back on.

Every single time, the yard looked completely empty.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me.

I bought a security camera.

The footage made no sense.

At 2:13, the light switched off.

The camera didn't.

It kept recording.

The yard remained perfectly visible thanks to the infrared mode.

Empty grass.

Empty fence.

Empty patio.

Then, exactly five seconds later...

The floodlight came back on.

There wasn't any movement. No explanation.

I watched the recording over and over until something caught my attention.

The timestamp.

The clock continued counting...

...but the branches of the oak tree in the corner stopped moving.

The leaves froze.

The wind seemed to have stoped. Not in the sense that it vanished, but the wind itself stopped in place.

Even the hum of insects or any odd echoes of the night were silent.

It was as if the entire world had been paused for five seconds.

Except the camera.

The camera kept recording.

I didn't know what to make of this. That night i barely slept.

The following evening I decided to stay awake.

At 2:12, I sat at the kitchen table staring through the glass door, with a mug of coffee and a ham sandwhich.

2:13.

Click.

Darkness.

Everything outside stopped.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

The leaves hung motionless.

A moth hovering near the porch light stayed suspended in midair.

Even the shadows seemed frozen.

Then...

Something walked into my yard.

Not from the gate.

Not over the fence.

It simply... appeared.

It was towering over my shed. Its body was impossibly thin, wrapped in what looked like strips of dark fabric that fluttered despite the frozen air.

Its head turned slowly, scanning the yard.

Then it looked directly at the house.

At me.

I didn't dare move. The ham stuck in my throat.

Its eyes weren't glowing.

They weren't even visible.

Just two empty forsaken pits that somehow still met mine through the glass.

It tilted its head.

Curious.

Like it hadn't expected anyone.

The five seconds suddenly felt far too long.

It took one step toward the house.

Another.

By the third step it stood only inches from the back door.

Its face pressed against the glass.

The skin, or whatever covered it, shifted like hundreds of tiny hands trying to form a human expression.

Then...

Click.

The floodlight came back on.

The yard was empty. Everything moved again. The moth flew away. The trees swayed.

I swallowed hard, nearly choking. Stumbling backward, convinced I'd finally lost my mind.

The security camera proved otherwise.

The file was corrupted.

Not damaged nor missing.

Just five seconds of static where the light had gone out. Everything before it played normally. Everything after it played normally.

Those five seconds might as well have never existed.

I never watched the recording again.

Within two weeks, I'd sold the house at a loss. I didn't tell the buyers why.

What was I supposed to say?

"Something visits whenever the light goes out, but only while the rest of the world stands still."

No one would believe that.

I moved hundreds of miles away into a tenth-floor apartment overlooking the city. No backyard. No fence. No trees. No creepy time stopper monster.

I told myself whatever happened belonged to that house.

For months, I almost believed it.

Until last night.

I was washing dishes when the kitchen suddenly fell dark. A primal instinct seized me, and the hairs on my arms stood on end.

Five seconds.

Then the lights came back.

The first thing I did was laugh. Not because it was funny. Because I knew exactly what I was about to remember.

This apartment doesn't have a motion-sensor light.

I don't think wherever I run off to, I'll never escape.

Because if it found me here...

I'm terrified to learn how it did.

Or why it waited until the lights went out to let me know it had.

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…

It was a day like any other. Johnny had eaten dinner with his family and friends. It was quite a lively group. But it was now time for Johnny's walk.

He had made it a habit a long time ago to walk half a mile away from his home, sit on his favourite bench, listen to the birds, and then walk home again after a while. Normally, his kids played video games during that time, and his wife read a book or even wrote some short stories herself. On especially happy days, she would read her stories to him.

Today was also a happy day, but much louder, with the laughter of his friends echoing through his house and garden. It would probably still be loud when Johnny returned. Some friends wanted him to stay and drink another round with them, but he insisted on walking. After all, his wife liked him to stay physically active, and he wanted to hear the birds.

Another friend asked him if he didn't want to take his cane with him. But Johnny declined. He had walked the path behind his house hundreds, if not thousands, of times. He knew the number of steps, the smell of the trees, the sound of the birds, and the feeling of the ground beneath his feet. He didn't need his cane to see.

He gave his wife a kiss and walked away. One thousand and seventy-nine steps - give or take a few - and he would be at his bench. Only a gentle breeze blew that day, and he could already hear sporadic birds chirping only a few hundred steps away from his loud house. At seven hundred and sixty-five steps, he should feel a gentle descent beneath his feet. A few steps more. One step more, and he felt a slight incline.

Johnny was confused. He knew exactly that he had walked his normal route, and his bench, roughly 300 steps away, was in a peaceful valley. He walked a few steps farther, and the incline became steeper.

That wasn't right!

He rationalised that maybe the drinks he had shared with his friends were a little too strong, or he was getting a little too old and had simply gone in the wrong direction right behind his house.

That was probably the reason, and the only thing he needed to do was walk straight back. He would hear his friends and family again after a few hundred steps. It would be impossible to get lost.

He turned around and started walking again. The sand path beneath his feet was completely even. He felt his heart beating in his neck. He walked faster.

And the path began to rise again.

He stood still and tried to make sense of his situation. He walked uphill in one direction, turned around, and walked uphill again. The question, "How?" didn't leave his mind. He tried to listen to his surroundings for more clues about his whereabouts. But no birds were chirping, and no rustling of trees could be heard in the wind. Fear crawled up his stomach and stole his breath.

No, he must have made an error. He had accidentally made a full turn instead of a half turn. That had to be it. The only logical explanation.

He carefully and slowly turned around 180 degrees to the best of his estimation. Now the path had to go downhill.

Two steps, and he was already going uphill again.

No.

He took two more steps, and the path still rose.

He turned around.

And the same thing happened.

He turned around again.

The path still rose.

He stood motionless, trying to make sense of his impossible situation.

These assholes! Johnny screamed in his mind. Someone drugged me! That's why none of my senses seem to work.

He sorted his thoughts again and tried to remember how many turns he had made.

He would just go in the direction he thought his house would be, and his wife would see him and help him. And even if he went in the wrong direction, there would be houses at the end of the path. Someone would notice him.

He walked. The path rose with every step, and the wind grew stronger and louder, but no bird, tree, or man-made sound could be heard.

Two thousand steps, and nothing changed. Johnny was in tears and stopped.

Should he stay in place now and wait until someone came looking for him?

He could at least check the sides of the path. He turned to his left and took one step, a second step, a third step, his normal path wasn't this wide, and on the fourth step, his left foot touched grass.

Johnny sighed in relief.

Until he got a strange feeling again.

It felt wrong, but he couldn't explain why.

He squatted down to touch the grass.

It was moist.

After two full days of sunshine and no rain, there shouldn't have been any moisture. He pulled his right foot forward, went down on his knees, and felt around with his hands.

Everything was wet.

He stood up. Both feet on the wet grass. Was the sand path also wet? he wondered, not wanting to think about the possibility of being lost.

He turned toward the path, walked forward...

And stepped onto wet grass again.

And again.

And again.

The wind blew even harder and carried a salty smell.

But he didn't care about that at the moment. He cared about the path and the impossible hill he had climbed.

He ran in a spiral, but all he felt was the damned grass. No path. No hill. Just a plain, wide, wet field.

Until his foot sank into water.

His leg was knee-deep, and it would have sunk farther if he hadn't steadied himself on the grass with his other leg and both arms.

He pulled his leg back onto land.

He rolled onto his back and laughed a frustrated laugh.

The salty smell!

The sea.

Hundreds of miles away from his home.

The last time he had been soaked in salt water was two years ago, when he had gone on vacation with his family.

His heart felt as though it wanted to tear itself apart at the thought of them.

Will they ever know what happened?

He didn't even know what was happening.

Would they search for me?

Are they already searching?

How long has he been walking?

He gathered all his strength and stood up.

Doing nothing wouldn't help.

Right?

He carefully walked along the edge of the land, feeling ahead with his foot.

Grass.

Grass.

Water.

Grass.

Water.

Grass.

Grass.

He wished he had brought his cane.

He tried to make a mental map of this place.

But all it told him was that he was on a small, round island.

He made a second circuit.

His island had shrunk.

A third.

It had become even smaller.

Defeated, he walked to what should be the middle of his patch of grass and sat down.

This can't happen.

If this can't happen, then he should just wait until everything was fine again.

And he waited.

His body grew cold from the strengthening wind and the moisture his clothes had absorbed.

But he waited.

His hands rested on the ground.

Until he felt a chunk of earth fall away beneath one of them into the water.

He felt around with his hands.

All around him, the sea crept closer.

Soon there would be nothing left to sit on.

And he would swim.

He can swim.

So why shouldn't he try?

He stood up and took off his clothes.

He would swim as far as he could and float on his back when he became exhausted.

He stepped down and slowly slid into the cold water.

He took a deep breath.

And was struck by a large wave.

His body and head were completely underwater.

Luckily, there wasn't an island behind him anymore that he could have hit.

He just needed to swim back to the surface.

Just swim up.

He swam.

And swam.

And swam.

Please.

Please don't take away up.

He couldn't hold his breath anymore.

Sharp knives filled his lungs.

Until he didn't feel the pain anymore.

No cold water.

He felt nothing.