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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However he can. 

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

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

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

Probably wasn't even any castle either…

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

Only wolves. Only snow and quiet. 

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

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

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

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

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

And her children. 

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

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

Yes! 

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

Jelly pudding…

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

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

Gods below, he loved his work. 

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

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

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

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

Caught. Caught and squealing. 

Like sow. Like pigs. 

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

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

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

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

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

Loved her. 

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

…

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

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

The Countess arose in full. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

They relished that sound. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

why was he blind? 

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

The royal dogs… the royal bitch…

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

He was roaring. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And naught else. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A beat. 

“Not sure we should." Florin stated flatly. 

“How do you mean?" asked Griffin. 

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

Murder and violence. Not spoken but understood. 

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

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

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

Florin admitted he could not. 

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

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

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

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

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

It had been even longer since he'd felt…

pride…? 

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

it was to no avail. 

There was naught but forward. 

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

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

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

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

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

“Run!" 

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

thirsty

 …. before being pulled under. 

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

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

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

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

Within reaching distance. 

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

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

No

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

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

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

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

If they survived. 

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

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

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

The wombmind of wormland.

She had just surfaced with her children. 

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

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

The wombmind worm mouth - orifice whale bellowed: –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO BE CONTINUED…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Willowbrook Private Asylum. For the Deranged and Criminlally Insane. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then he too started to hear it. 

The sound. 

The song of the mountain. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

Wormland. 

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

The mountains…

Krugman's gaze was fixed. His mind followed. 

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

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

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

And Doctor Krugman listened. He listened very well. 

…

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

Staring out from the mountains. 

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

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

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

The sorceress. 

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

Vampiress. 

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

I must not fail the mouth of the mountains. 

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

The cell was thrown open. 

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

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

Then he said something awful and came into the room. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are truly free. 

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

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

Blood drinker sorceress … of the biting rock. 

Feed me. 

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

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

Krugman cheered. Elated! Another successful experiment! 

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

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

Demon. Vampira. Vampiress. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Adversary. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

in the name of the mountain. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

Wormland. 

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

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

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

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

More children swam. Dispatched. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quivering in needful hunger and animal rage. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

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

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

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

None.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if swallowed, as if it had eaten them. 

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

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

…

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

Wolves. 

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

Deeper into the dark universe of dead choked forest growth. 

Her wolves watched the girl as she made her way. 

…

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

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

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

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

She'd been gone far too long. 

…

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

The wolves. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

It spoke. 

“Please! Don't! Don't be afraid!" 

A beat. 

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

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

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

“Wh-what are you?" 

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

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

As if sensing, the beast spoke again, 

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

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

light, pleasant, pleasurable. 

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

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

"He likes it. He likes rat's blood.” 

"Who?” asked Angelica. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One that would never be discovered. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

An evil eye…

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

but it was also terrifying. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grigori… papa…

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

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

considering the ants below. 

The hellstar shone. A heavenly inferno. 

…

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

… and main audience chamber. 

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

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

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

She cringed back. 

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

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

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

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

Soon she would have no choice. 

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

Orange. Beckoning. Pale warmth. 

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

…

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

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

Angelica stopped. 

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

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

She sniffed. A woodland gesture. 

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

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

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

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

Angelica shrieked. Horrified. 

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

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

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

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

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

Now she was alone. 

Only she didn't feel alone. 

And that was terrible. 

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

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

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

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

…

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

It was hopeless. 

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

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

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

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

if I can just get out of this ok…

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

She was shown the flesh gardens instead. 

…

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

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

But wet. 

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

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

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

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

His eyes were shut in wretched pain. 

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

“Such beauty, isn't it?" 

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

Angelica whirled around and beheld the Countess. 

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

Vulpine. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No!” howled Angelica. 

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

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

Her child's shrieks became sudden silence. 

…

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

… and slit. 

Dead black poured forth. 

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

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

to drink. 

…

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

"Momma…?”

And then small weak knocking. Feeble. 

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

…

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

And so it was stopped. 

…

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

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

ANGELICA 

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

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

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

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

she considered…

TO BE CONTINUED…

The vulpine hulking thing of Frankenstein's table lunged with great and fearsome animal speed and force. Cutting through the cold high mountain wind and arrowing straight for the Countess with lethal trajectory and ferocity. Fangs gleaming like the moon on high in their set mouth of rotten black and green, striking and bared and snarling. Brandished and knifing out with his daggering nine fingered claws for the throat of the pompous royal mountain bitch. 

He lunged and came in and closed the distance in the courtyard of stone. The Countess raised her hands. It was over before it began. 

Great large wings of a bat shape and eldritch design unfolded, surrounded her and then flapped suddenly – carrying away the Countess as her face transmogrified and sloughed into chimerical serpent/wolf shape. The heinous visage, now skybound and away from the flaying claws and fangs of Frankenstein’s nosferatu creation, began to shriek hellish sound. Bastard and curdled rendition of wolfsong. 

The surrounding trees suddenly became alive with movement. The wolves plunged forth free from the trees and filled the courtyard in a drooling snarling pack. Answering the throated call of the mother of darkness. Their drawn lips quivering as their hides tensed and coiled with the rippling movement of wild animal muscle tissue dancing and flexing and closing in on the moment of violence and slaughter, the wilderness sacred killing hour. And for these four legged children of the mountain snow and trees, the roaring vulpine/serpent headed Countess now rising and mounting the sky above was the lord and queen of the wilderness and all that was dark and carnivorous in the wild. 

She shrieked once more, a dying harlot sound bred with the untamed scream of running and killing and feeding and fucking on all fours in the open throat of the cold. The wolves closed in, the hulking thing of Frankenstein's making held ground, trying to look all around all at once and taking odd swipes as the pack of the Countess' mountain wolf children circled and closed. Closer. Closer. Closing. The hulking vulpine thing sneered and growled. 

The others watched, keeping distance and breathing heavily. 

A wolf lunged, pounced. The hulking thing caught it by the throat and then rent it to spraying pieces in an instant. Another tried it. And was caught. And torn apart. Another. Then two more. His speed wasn't enough with these last three and now more came in and many sets of jaws were upon him. Biting. Tearing. For the throat. Ripping. Tearing in.

He heaved himself and ripped many bodies of rippling hide and fur off and away and into bisected halves before him. Decorating his wounded patchwork frame in steaming jet spray and cords of wolf gore. Wolf blood shot and its wild scent filled the air.

Yet more pounced. The snarling frothing mad pack still surged and advanced. 

 Wolf claws came in with fangs and jaws and ripped, reanimated graverobbed flesh tore and spilled strange fluid, strange ichor bled with yellow/red and a strange sticky translucent fluid like dog water. The creation screamed. It had never felt the physical shock of pain before. Bred out of a great wound in life and creation and composed of wounds himself, he'd never felt the suffering of a blow inflicted. And so many now. And all at once. The world all around the hulking thing was turning to a universe of bloody dripping fur and claws and snarling frothing jaws and coated fangs. 

He wrenched and grabbed and tore and fought back. His prodigious necro/graveyard strength, he put his fists and claws through the bodies of more than a few of the fearsome snarling mountain Countess children. He sank his fangs where he could find purchase. As the wolves surrounded and closed and turned the world to slaughter and teeth, the rage of the sutured nosferatu thing rose…

And soared. 

Without being conscious of it he sent out his stygian hatred and dark will, arrowed for the sky in a force-of-will shot and lanced for the nighttime heavens. 

It struck! 

The sky thunderclapped with sudden violence. And then began to fill. 

The skybound Countess suddenly found herself evading and dodging knifing daggered attacks of bolting lightning. She danced and soared and flitted across the ebon face of the sky, crooked blades and swords of searing white-blue lancing after her with near strikes, guided by the necromantic power over nature that the Frankensteinian sutured bat-hulk held. 

More daggering bolts of searing bladed lightning cracked and split the sky and came down in blinding flashes that fried and cooked ozone into searing strange smells. They came down and began to strike the attacking wolfpack, killing them each in turn with white flashes that turned the beasts into explosions of fire and animal mutilation, partially charred and flaming pieces of wolf gore and meat soared through the mountain air and decorated the courtyard of stone. 

The chimerical shape of the Countess came down in a divebomb for the creation, ripped and torn and undead wounded, rising to its feet. 

She was upon him. And struck. 

The violence of the impact was like a runaway train striking the side of an unyielding mountain. The crash was an instant fray and mess of attacking claws and limbs and screaming black words and curses. The wings folded around them as they struggled across the floor of the courtyard. Dragging and fighting and tearing. More reanimation fluid burst and spilled and shot as the Countess gained the advantage.

Her great wings helped to support and hold her as she rolled over and gained the top of the creation. Her thin ladlylike arms of near boundless prodigious strength held the hulking thing down as her chimerical snake-wolf face began to scream into the sutured thing’s own vulpine and bat-faced visage. 

The shape of her face sloughed and danced and shifted again. What it became then was repulsive: an abominated bred mix of a goat made insectile with many eyes and mandibles of fur and hooves and a plague infested and dripping rat. The mouth opened up and bled and dripped and unveiled a moist and rank pungent obscenity for all of the world. 

It belched and spat. Spewing a thick gout of black and emerald steaming liquid onto the creation's screaming face. The foul hot mess of spew was like fire and sulfuric acid to the bat-faced visage of the struggling fighting and screaming Frankensteinian creation. The foul ungodly fluid ate into his reanimated face and some of the sutures and stitches that held his repurposed flesh together became smoking ruin and began to come apart in messy fraying smoking pieces. The eyes of the creation were the first casualty. The foul necrophiled chemical scorch of the unearthly bile turned them to smoldering useless jelly within their housing caves of now purposeless sockets. The vulpine thing of the table screamed and the sound made and torn from the thing was awful and unearthly as well. 

Henry Frankenstein watched and felt his heart catch in his chest, seized in a grip of fear as his running blood turned cold. As cold as all of the surrounding nighttime mountainscape. The wind picked up and rose and howled alongside and carried the living dead screams of his nosferatu were-child. The wind of this terrible Carpathian rock loved to pick up and mount and rise when an hour of suffering was at hand and it could carry the song and sound of pain and violence and share it with those down below in the peasant lands. 

The mountain wept with demon sound. 

Wolves not yet wounded and still snarling and frothing with the command for violence came back in their battered droves. Closing and growling as their Countess Czarina Queen of the mountain slaughter and bloodlett dark began to rise once more from her wounded enemy. Carried by the great wings of eldritch black and bastardized bat-shape that seemed now to only grow larger and larger as she inflicted more and more violence and rose and gained the heavens. 

It was she who commanded the sky and the storm called forth now. The lightning still wounded and daggered the night but it was now hers to wield and the blades of shot electric blue now dyed the color of the night and became as ink. 

Black lightning shot down and struck the hulking vulpine son of Frankenstein's table. It roasted and cooked with skyfire his undead necromanced flesh but the bastard demon flicker of goblin flame for soul inside the hulk of blasphemous walking bat-flesh was also seared and tortured with the unearthly fire of another terrible realm. 

The screams were blasted out of the hulking shape. It stilled its struggles. And became as a smoking mound of battered patchwork green-blue. Unconscious. As if returned to the stillness of the soil. 

But the Countess still yet sensed the flicker of demon life in the vile assemblage of flesh below. Good. She still wanted him. Still wanted him and the pathetic little man that had made him, that had dared construct such a thing and bring it here to make a challenge to her satanic throne. 

Lord of Flies… she silently and solemnly prayed. 

She came down on her great ebon wings and her face danced and shifted yet more in the night, the goatflesh of many eyes and bleeding ichor like putrid bestial snot fell away in a sloughing mess of tissue and fur and blind useless organs. Slopping to the courtyard stone in a wet steaming pile with splurching sound  like an obscene splat. She landed and came upon the smoking heap of her felled enemy. The wolves that were her mountain children, her wild slaves of the cold, came back in and with their mother of perfect darkness they closed. 

Henry Frankenstein watched helpless. He debated flight… but knew he would not get far. 

He watched on as the Countess stood over his fallen creation, her face still steaming and wet and slimed with the fresh loss of her mask of unearthly gore. She smiled and the vibrant moon caught the glow of her teeth, her fangs. They both shone with brilliance, the same pearl cast perfection of pale silver light from on high, where what might rule in power and in supreme dominance must be compelled to throne and dwell. His outrage and jealousy and pain were only matched by his awe. The sight…

The sight of her. 

She yelled: “I am victor! Your abomination now lies at  my feet! And you and it both are now my prisoners to keep!” 

And although he knew its futility, Henry Frankenstein turned and ran for the false sanctuary of the trees. Terrified. 

More terrified than he had been in years. 

A look from the Countess was all that was needed. Carmilla and the new impaler were off and in pursuit. They would soon have the worm  and bring him back. 

Alive… she sent out  the thought to her undead child/slaves giving chase and she knew the open receptacle of their blasphemous hearts and minds received the order and took it with implicit obedience. 

Her mind and lurid twisted imagination were already dreaming over and deciding what to do with  the little man once he was brought back. What should I reap from his flesh…? 

In due time. She would finish with this pile of cemetery garbage first.

She licked her lips in vulpine relish. And then her great wings splayed far and open to their pinnacle span, her arms splayed open as well, forked to the darkness of the night sky in a great open throated V, as if in cry of supplication or great proclamation of victory. For You! … Lord of Flies! … In aural glow, all around her demonic person, a host of demented and twisted vile faces of murderous joy and glee  and intent, perverse and sadistic and goblin-shaped, began to pour off and emanate forth from her like a noxious living cloud of eyes and lips and teeth and severed human heads. All gathered as a conjured and summoned demon host of terrible faces and disembodied parts and throats to hold as audience and conduit for great nocturnal necropower. 

She began another black incantation. Dark tendrils of shadow began to grow and dance out from under her raised arms. They lengthened and swelled and grew in number as her stygian words were recited and filled the nightsong chill of mountain air. 

The assistant watched on. Eyes watering in the cold. His gaze was that of an enamored lover and that of a proud father. All rolled into watery one. He was silent as he watched his master complete her ritual of victory, capture. 

The black tentacles grew and dripped tenebrous, many tendrils splaying out like a deepsea creature seeking purchase in the silent wet depths of the dark. They palsied and danced and twitched and shivered. Dripping the same black shadow from which they were shaped and composed. They hissed the abominated sounds of angry serpents, each one. As if each and every dancing growing tentacle of dark shadow was alive and agitated by its own sudden birth. The black wet lengths of dancing tentacles grew and snaked forth and came in and closed on the still smoking and unconscious hulk of the patchwork creation. They found purchase and wrapped tightly and coiled. They lifted him from the cold stone and pulled him towards the great winged visage of the master Countess. She smiled up at her prize. 

Thought a moment longer. Her head on a tilt to one side. 

Then she spoke to the fallen unhearing hulking thing of Frankenstein's demented table, his graveyard scraps. 

She said: –

“And now I take you into me, Into mine.” And then more arcane language warmed the mountain cold and the Countess  began  to  rise once more. 

But not on her great wings, no. 

No. 

Now as she held the creation in her dripping grip of tentacled shadow she rose up on a great pillar of conjured and violently shot and spouting blood. Geysering out and forth in an eruption from the pale bottom of her moonlight dress. She rose on the great frothing and violently churning red river pillar of lurid darkling necroplasma, her wings flexing in and out in coquettish display. Her laughter began to fill the sky, the darkness. The mountain and the heavens. 

The black tentacles of shadow began to feed the creation into the great and violent pillar of rising and churning blood. 

The patchwork body of the creation slipped into the rising churn of the red lurid pillar and was swallowed. It was carried up by the otherworldly and strange current, up.

And into the body of the Countess. Through the violent red churn at the bottom of her dress. 

The conjured phantasm host of snarling dancing shifting demon faces began to sing and scream in discordant choral cry as one. Filling the ancient jagged rocks and battlements with the fury of their conjured forth and hellbound sound. 

Slaves. Singing in celebration. Conquest of victory for their master. 

!DEATH! – WE WILL KILL, DEATH! 

!MASTURBATING ON THE TOMBS OF YOUR SONS!

She held the sky. Howled. Laughter. 

The dark swell and dancing tangle-growth of black dripping tentacles underneath her splayed arms, rippled and serpentine drifted and quivered bestial with animal movement and intent, animal mind… they danced and held the black night of the sky. On her great rising pillar of occult conjured victim's blood. 

…

Frankenstein ran through the woods. He didn't get far. 

The malformed and hideous bat-child slammed into him from behind with terrible and bone-rattling impact. He went down with rodent screeches and girlish screams ringing in his ears. 

Carmilla seized a handful of hair and slammed the mad doctor's face into the cold unyielding floor of the iced earth and forest floor. Repeatedly. Turning the man's face to pulp. His nose and lips spurted thick ropey blood, spat and choked and coughed out. He tried to tell her to stop through the blood and violence but couldn't manage. The little rodent girl monster was fiendishly strong. 

The world mercifully went black and Henry Frankenstein was knocked unconscious. Carmilla began to lick and tongue and lap the blood from his pulpy and raw face. The new impaler soon joined her and then he too began to ravenously lap and feed off the warm blood spilling from the doctor's ruptured and dirty wounded face. 

They wanted to feed but they couldn't tear him apart to do it. They couldn't tear him open. And get to the really juicy parts. The especially succulent organs. The master, the Countess wanted the mongrel dog alive. And so it would be. They would have to settle for this small taste, this small drink in the woods after their run, their shared exercise of forest chase in the cold. A simple and humble repast of blood before they brought the dog back to the castle for his fate. 

But first, just a lick… in the dark of the trees. Brother and sister, new impaler and grotesque were-child strigoica freak, lapping at the warm spill of an unconscious and captured stranger, together. 

They licked and tongued blood together in the prurient stygian black, sharing dark words and dark laughter in the trees. Blood was so much finer and robust and full of flavor in the dark, the steam and warmth at perfect contest and at sublime contrast with the surrounding space of the mountain cold. In your mouth, filling it and spilling over the supple mound of lips even as it slid down the throat. 

They lapped and drank. With the fool still unconscious, they dragged him back to the castle for the Countess and her judgment. 

They relished and dreamed, together, brother and sister in living dead slavery and hellbound bondage, as they dragged the dog back to the master. …

… what might she do to him ??

Mongrel titters and giggles filled the dark as they made their eager way back. 

They couldn't wait to find out. 

…

Whether by sun or moon the foul putrescence of wormland all around was always reeking. Whether baked by the rays of the sun or chilled into spoiled earthen mud soup, it was always rank. The smell was the sour tang of fetid death. Rot and spoilage and the decay of matter that had once been living. All the swampland mire was death disintegrating and liquifying until all was black water and porridge sludge. And the small crawling wriggling mouths that fed in all of the drowning and slopping death. All the crawling and wriggling bodies of the children of the pustule sac master of quivering festering putrid sliming wormland. 

Florin and Griffin had almost wished for death for themselves privately. As they traveled and pulled themselves and their mule and cart miserable across the accursed and endless bogland. The exhaustion and pain and frustration and woe were great, the repulsive place and revulsion at the pathetic and filthy sights it held nearly put the two over into absolute abandon and total forfeit. But then they met the crawling wriggling and swimming hungry children of this place and they saw what death looked like out here. 

The girl. The filthy young one. She'd been first but they hadn't quite understood yet. They understood much more and much better when they came upon the horse. 

Its struggles and attempts to scream were something that would remain forever imprinted on young Florin's mind. For the rest of his life. However long that may turn out to be. However short. 

He would never again, alive, escape the sight. 

Like the girl before the beast was submerged in the quagmire of green/grey/black sinking sludge of vile reeking earth, but this animal was much livelier. It danced twisted struggles in the pulling hungry sinking mud, spasms and jerks that spoke of snapped bones and torn internal parts. The mouth was open in a bestial horse’s scream that made no sound. Only worms poured forth. Thick white glistening ropey bodies, long and wriggling in a mass torrential copulating pile pouring forth in a river of black water and mud and the translucent coat of snot secreted by the worms writhing lengths of yellow-pale maggotflesh. 

Florin looked closely and saw that the worms also poured forth from the open eyes of the doomed horse. The open sockets swimming with their snaking and wrapping wriggled movement in slime and mud and scabbing thick horse blood. The doomed horse shed worm tears that were more obscene than the writhing filth that poured from its blackening maw. Patches of hide and flesh were gone and Florin and Griffin could see inside the beast and they saw more long slithering writhing sliming bodies of yellowed white swimming past the ribcage and other organs that were perforated and also alive and filled with the crawling putrid creature death of this vile hell, wormland. 

Somehow the horse still struggled, somehow the creature still moved… although the large bestial body was filled and crawling with their feasting writhing serpent forms of maggot-shape. It was somehow still alive enough to struggle and to try to escape its torment, or- 

Or… the horse's body only writhed in the killing drowning clutch of the mud because… they writhed. The worms. They danced inside as they copulation swam and feasted. Their busy worm movement bringing the dead horse to life for the sight of some fellow weary travelers of this marshland. 

The thought made Florin sick, he dry-heaved and hacked and coughed/spat over the side of the struggling cart. It couldn't pull them fast enough. The mud sucked below with a wet lurid splurch that was also threatening and hungry. And alive with the abominated crawling swim of the eager bodies of alive and pregnant and hungry-feasting wormland. 

The mule, the poor beast and cart, it couldn't pull them fast enough. They eventually, mercifully, left the silent screaming beast and its awful tears of worms and swamp ink behind. Never again to be forgotten for the remainder of all time and years. 

…

An hour passed. Night approached. They came upon the bald naked man next in the swampland of ravenous worms and hungry mud. He was absolutely repulsive. And he made much more sound. 

…

His screams. Those were the first. They heard their bloodcurdling sound from a distance as they approached. The falling curtain of night brought cold and with it, fog. Drifting blanket shrouds of sickly greenish pale that sometimes housed small pocket bursts of multi color swamp gas, kaleidoscopic. Sometimes it held the grimaced woe-visaged faces of dripping swamp demons, the water-rotted and sloughing faces of their anguished victims drifting and shifting and dancing in the green hell veil of pale beside them. 

The fog of green hell and its terrible faces suddenly filled ahead of them with sound. 

Shrieking. Caterwauls. Sheer terror. Unbridled and in pain. Indistinguishable sounds. 

Intermittent…

Gurgling and irate against the choking fluid trapped and killing held within the working throat… 

The warm moist veil of nighttime wormland green hell parted like curtains or the great body of the red sea as Florin and Griffin and their mule drawn cart closed in and came upon the source of screams and obscene choking sounds. 

His swampland shrieks could finally be discerned, as the emerald mist of faces and trapped colored fire floated and parted…

“My daughter! Please! help! Please, my family, my wife, my daughter! Please help me! I can't find them! please help me find them! I can hear you out there!  Help! …”

And it carried on like that all the way up to there approach. The caterwauling sounds were heartbreaking and made their skin crawl. It like sounded like total agony. Rent from the torn heart and let loose by the screaming tongue. Pure torture. 

They came upon the man. He was shirtless. Caked in the filth of the land. Covered in scabbing mud and earth from his feet to the top of his bald head. 

The man was on his knees in the filth. Sinking. His eyes were watering and wide. Pleading with open pain as wet and running as the sour sepulchral land that surrounded them. 

When they came upon the bald man in the mud and stared into the wide water of his unhealthy gaze his screaming stopped. Suddenly. 

They were reluctant to say anything to the filthy stranger. The mule struggled ahead them, beyond the pale of mere exhaustion. The cart groaned and the land sucked wet and repulsive beneath. But the man of filth was silent now. And smiling. 

Smiling the sort of smile that is small and belongs to the childishly guilty. Caught in a white lie or with their small hand in the cookie jar… 

Neither Florin nor Griffin trusted that look. 

Finally, the filthy stranger spoke: –

“Thank you. Thank you both so much but I'm so sorry you came. It is good for us, the land, but so very bad for you." 

He said it in the calmest friendliest tones of a neighbor… and then he began to convulse. 

The ground, the filth and black-green mire of the mud began to churn. Bubble with life. Life hideous and submerged. Fighting for breath. 

The filthy stranger opened his mouth again and what came forth this time was not words but a great long and sliming white length of body, coated with a brown translucent snot that was mixed with the lurid scarlet shade of infected blood. Wormflesh. Slick with deranged biological byproduct. Dripping with the ooze the great worm body slid forth like a king serpent and rose. Towering several feet over the human basket which served to house its awful and strange lubricated body. The mouth of the man was ripping and dislocating with distension, to allow the body of the wormgod to flower forth. Blood and green pus oozed forth from the widening wounds and the teeth fell away rotted from gums that also began to bleed the red infected yellow-orange porridge from the now gaping pink fleshen craters. 

There was a raw flesh-growth of face at the end of the long worm body snaking and spouting from the filthy stranger's mouth. 

A child's face. 

The man's face. 

It rippled and danced between… betwixt the two. 

It's eyes were hideously human… and beautiful. 

Obscene. 

It opened a sliming mouth dripping with tendrils of afterbirth and snot. It belched a deeper black than the mud of the land all around when it spoke in gurgled language. 

It said: “Welcome to the garden. You have found Gaia’s womb. You have found Gaia's brain. You have found Gaia's mouth …. you may return to her, here. In this precious place. It's so much better and cooler and quieter down in her brine. You'll remember yourself, you'll remember your place down here, swimming in her thoughts. There is no pain in the subjugation of her swallow. Let us, her children, your brothers and sisters take you. We will bring you down to her so she can know you and you can join us…” 

The mule suddenly cried out. In shock and in pain, as if to punctuate the last sentence of the vile thing's statement.

Join us. 

The mud all around the cart and the mule came to life with violent churning death. Worms, many sizes, widths and lengths but all the same wretched maggot color and coated in brown slime translucence, all of them were crawling and slithering and attacking the legs of the poor beast of labor. It shrieked horrendous idiot sound, harsh and obscene as their little heads bit and burrowed and leeched. They wriggled and snaked their way inside the now rippling flesh of the poor mule’s legs. They rippled and swam and burrowed beneath the flesh, causing the hide to swell and bulge unnaturally and dance. 

Florin and Griffin, together, both looked over and down and spied the surprise attack from below. And the poor beasts doomed condition. They looked at each other and both decided together, without a word, only a look in the eye… 

abandon it. 

They grabbed what they could carry and jumped off the side. Leaping far from the churning foul earth that was now pulling in the beast and cart. Wormland was hungry. And she needed to feed. This was the mouth of mother earth, the watering black jaws of Moloch-Gaia and she needed her womb and mouth filled. With flesh. Always she needed to be filled with the warmth of blood and flesh. 

Beast of labor flesh would do for now. 

The poor mule screamed and frothed at the mouth. The eyes lulled and rolled back to whites as it let loose unbridled sound in terror and pain. The swampland swallowed and the worms continued to leech and burrow. They swam all throughout the inner organs and tissue and blood and feasted and drank. They reached the brain and the struggles became more deranged and haphazard. More pathetic and wretched and painful to watch… to behold. 

The pair left it behind. Fleeing into the cold and wet land. The treacherous quagmire earth sucking and pulling at their every fearful step. They fled as quickly as they 

could manage. Griffin, not looking back. But Florin couldn't help his mind through its sheer terror, he spied over his own fleeing shoulder as they made their slopping getaway. 

The long length of dripping wormbody was gyrating and dancing. Snaking through the air in bobs and weaves in a jubilant dance. The foul swamp drinking it, its host and the screaming beast and cart into the thick bubbling of the churning land. The worms, leeching and biting and burrowing… swimming. In the yellowed opaque of quagmire swamp water and the vibrant bright of the lurid running red, blood taken violently and by trap, by the hunt. 

Florin stole his eyes away from the sight. He didn't see them disappear into the putrescence earth, nor it settle back to calm and placid like a bowl filled with gelatin settling once more.  

Undisturbed. 

Florin and Griffin continued the rest of their perilous journey through foul wormland. On foot. 

Afraid of the very sucking ground beneath them. For this place was a black gummed and toothless swallowing mouth that led straight to watery putrid hell. 

Several worms, bodies snaked their way through mud and emerged. Protruding like freshly sprouted stalks. 

The worm-stalks grew eyes and the glistening wet fresh organs watched the pair of travelers on their way. Marking their progress through the mother's wet dominion land. 

…

Three nights of full moon had passed. 

The night the Countess took Doctor Henry Frankenstein down into the lowest dungeon of her castle, there was no moon. Only ebon curtain of blackest night. Stygian. And blind. A small chambered place where the sunlight never touched, swallowed in the dark and under the thriving lordship of near countless plague dripping rats, spiders with so many eyes and so many more long hairy legs than eight. It was a dungeon with a cruel biting chain in the wall, right next to the low chamber where the Countess herself kept her terrible coffin and slept during the day her undead rest of demonic slumber. 

After several rounds of flaying torture, occult practice and a few techniques derived from the time of the inquisition, the Countess gave new order. 

Experiment. 

An experiment of the flesh. 

Harvest specimens. For the terraformation of the flesh gardens. 

The assistant eagerly and loyally followed the command. More than pleased to comply. 

He was fulfilled. 

Frankenstein's unbridled and bloodcurdling shrieks filled the dungeon… the castle… 

… the mountains … and the pass…

… the village. 

It went beyond the known and besieged country of this vampire land, it went beyond and the ears that caught it beyond the meager borders were filled with unearthly and cold dread. 

Animal. And natural. And with us since the beginning. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

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

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

All that was left of the farmers and their sons.  

The wolves of the mountains began to howl once more. 

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

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

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

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

A woman. Regal. 

Powerful. 

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

And then the real bloodshed would begin. 

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

where I can rip and tear and rend to slaughter… 

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

He relished the thoughts as he watched. And waited. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they went on. 

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

New food. For wormland. 

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

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

vibrations. 

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

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

Wormland. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then a voice from behind him said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She smiled then said: –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feline. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They trembled when she summoned them. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One word. 

"Thirsty.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

They waited for the challengers to step forward. 

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

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

TO BE CONTINUED…

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

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

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

It was part of the torture. 

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

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

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

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

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

Out loud. 

Now. 

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

Impaling. 

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

Worse. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

The promise of fortune from the mad doctor Frankenstein.

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

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

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

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

They heard everything.   

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I NEED TO DIE 

and 

I MUST LIVE FOREVER! THE MASTER COMMANDS SO!

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

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

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

His mind was too obliterated to appreciate the irony. 

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

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

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

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

Yes. 

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

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

Flames erupted. Sprouted from her splayed fingertips. Claws. 

Claws erupting fire. 

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

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

Her voice, with fire: –

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

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

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

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

The assistant smiled. And closed the book. 

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

If she so desired. 

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

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

Doomed fools.

…

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

They yelled : – ! 

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

“Now!!" 

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

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

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

But then the sky began to fill. 

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

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

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

Together. 

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

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

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

take it, seize it, consume to the last. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many of the men began to scream. 

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

Demoniacal hunger to drive and fuel the whole damnable thing. 

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

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

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

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

A beat. 

The mad doctor thought…

Then said: –

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

And like that it was decided. 

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

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

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

It said: 

WORMLAND

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

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

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

A beat. Silent wet sounds settled once more. 

A beat. Another.

Then…

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

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

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

And anger. 

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

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

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

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

WORMLAND 

TO BE CONTINUED…

By order of the Countess the new impaler began the process of slow torture for the intruder Praetorius by stabbing the point of their longest war pike into the space of soft meat just behind the testicles, between the anus and the genitals. Where one might get saddle sore from riding a four-legged beast all day…

​

​

… the sound elicited from the now writhing and squirming invader was exquisite …

​

​

 … the Countess smiled. And cooed. Lovingly. Already so enraptured, exhilarated. Ecstasy. So in-love with the whole process already at the onset, so in-love with the piercing. The thrust of puncture. She salivated as she prepared to bathe her enemy in pure torture.

​

​

The mad doctor’s shrill sounds went beyond mere screams or anything in the meager realm of the auditory. The entire length and body of the long and dread war pike, the impaling spear was stabbed up and fed through his torso until it stabbed up and out of the flesh of his naked back. Their monstrous animal-heightened dæmonic senses aided the new impaler and his master together in guiding the sharp and piercing head of the weapon-tool up and through and around any vital internal organs so as not to rupture any of the precious meats. They didn't want the fool to die too quickly. 

​

​

The blood ran down the length of shaft as the impaling pike was hoisted up in the center of the room, Praetorius stabbed through at its center. Blood ran down its wooden shaft and body. Copiously. The pair, Master Countess and her new impaler both licked and lapped and sipped with pursed lips from the reddening wet length of stabbing impalement. Tonguing at the furious cascade of red river that was the fool's running precious blood. 

​

​

Doctor Praetorius had never known such wretchedly sharp and complete agony. Complete wretched pain. Red and alive and in total focused control of his all too aware and alive waking mind. Livid with fire and alive with open flesh fury. He could feel the vibrations of the long body of spear  against his trembling spinal column. Rattling against each other like the weapons of soldiers shoulder to shoulder along battlements with every single ear shattering shriek. Constant. They never stopped. The sanity snapping pain never ceased. They fed each other and he shrieked, skewered, impaled as the monsters of this castle were cackling and lapping at his bloodshed running down the length of great spear. Words were beyond him. His bladder let go. The demons laughed. The Countess commanded the new impaler to tongue and lap the spilling filth and the lowly undead knight and servant did so. As the master Countess Zaleska commanded, always and forever thus… 

​

​

They tongued and lapped more blood like dogs and they let the impaled Praetorius bleed and shriek ungodly sounds. Filling the castle with the piercing song of its wretched cacophony of bastard music. They relished the discordant collection of clashing sound, echoed and reverberated. Bouncing and alive and jumping all through the halls and along the stone of the ancient wall and out and into the mountains… 

​

​

 … the wolves joined in. Howling in contest.

​

​

The Countess Zaleska ordered more spears. More impalement. More piercing and defilement of the intruding dog's bastard flesh and inner ruptured and running spilling red: the crimson raw. Mangle. Pierce. Puncture. Penetration. Deepest. Multiple points. All over and all about. 

​

​

Through the wrists and the meat of his upper legs, his thighs. Through each of his feet as well. All impaled through with long spears of war that ran parallel and perpendicular depending on the placement. A crisscross and intersect of stabbing smooth bodies of killing impaling battle pikes all lanced through screaming raw running scarlet and muscle tissue and flesh amongst and so carefully around his organs so as to render him so helpless and yet still alive… like a butterfly captured and pinned to the collection of the killing board, left there only to struggle and flap its wings. 

​

​

Then the Countess changed her shape before the impaled and helpless mad doctor… and Praetorius felt his last vestige of sanity shred and snap and the tiny remnant pieces slip away…

​

​

His screams then became something else entirely. 

​

​

Her head and face melted and sloughed into runny mess that transmogrified into a bulbous amphibious wide-mouthed horror. Sliming and dooling, translucent bands and ropey cords of fleshen alchemical snot. A wide mouthed and horned toad. Eyes, wet black spheres that held terrible intelligence in their ebon depths. Slightly rodent and chiroptera features deranged the large and gaping wet visage of swampland horror, long ears and fangs and a wide cavernous nose of glistening pink tissue, like the wide inviting amorous open gate of a spread legged lover… running and congesting with milky translucence and pungent fluid.

​

​

Wide mouthed, gaping and fanged and toad faced, the demon wench that held this hellcrafted domain came in and her wide sliming black fanged mouth closed around one of his impaled and helpless hands. The wide mouth closed and at first there was strong wet sucking sensation, almost pleasant. After all the torture. 

​

​

But then the pain and horror of his flesh was reawakened and renewed… he could feel the flesh of his hand coming off in a slough. 

​

​

The sliming putrid toad mouth of the Countess, set between a pair of regal and very thin and small ladylike shoulders was pulling the flesh and meat from his fingers and palms… gloving him with her horrible and wretched poison witch-drool… 

​

​

The enzymes of the Countess' toad woman mouth turned the meat of his hand and fingers to a runny snot of soupy meaty blood and half broken down ligament and cartilage. All the way down to the wrist. 

​

​

The foul mongoloid mongrel monstrosity of amphibian batwoman visage and ghastly form then began to moan in deep pleasure and bright and private jubilancy. Obscene wet organ globes of obsidian eyes closing and clenching tightly shut and winking in strange animal ecstacy, demoniacal and insane. 

​

​

Ichor wept thickly from the toad eyes of black glistening organ globes. Wet with life and relish and love and savor of the human flavor of organ pain. And of fleshen defilement. And of life shed unwilling and in violence tempered and changed like wine does in dark casks. 

​

​

The song of pain was alive in Praetorius’ throat again and the toad faced horror that was the transmogrified and witchery Countess’ conjured visage was pleased. It was just what she wanted the little maggot to say. 

​

​

Just the notes she wished… she bade he thus spake. 

​

​

And her whore filled the night with scream-song and blood and his pathetic running snot and tears. . Trying to sing his pain away. 

​

​

The poor fool didn’t realize that the Countess and her new impaler were just getting started with him.  

​

​

They might take forever with the little invader. 

​

​

Just might.

​

​

…

​

​

The demand of the forest would be met. Answered by the deranged and filthy haggard woodland vagrant lord. Answered in the violent act of the perfect prayer: Bodily Dismemberment. 

​

​

The axeman, Lord Bloodmud, Christian name now long gone and lost, forgotten and only remembered or recalled in the most painful and private of blood-hatching moments… he hefted the twinheaded double blade of weapon that was his last and only companion and friend. He eyed the boy and the bandaged fellow from the darkness of his hiding place. Amongst the tangled death of foliage. Amongst the trees. He spied them as they ate and smoked pipes by the fire. Tended The mule. They hardly spoke at all. 

​

​

It mattered not. He had no ear for such as they any way. Only the woods and her dark contained the sounds and natural songs he desired to hear. Only the wild. Only the woods. Only the peace and quiet of the stillness shroud of his greenland place of known shadow. 

​

​

And … as of of late, that strange and howling sound that came out of the far off mountains. Especially at night. It was a bestial sound, an untamed song of predatorial prowl. It was beautiful. Alluring. 

​

​

He swore it sounded like a woman. He swore she sounded like royalty. Like she already knew the butchery abattoir moan of the painful hungry end, and what it showed revelatory when brought and force fed to the fragile fore… 

​

​

there was painful beauty in that far off voice. A voice that already knew agony so well, how its cold embrace felt. 

​

​

When alone. 

​

​

A voice already intimate, already well and close acquainted with the wisdom of the hungering rotting soil, the gnashing violent tectonic teeth of the earth… already in bed and in lover's embrace with what the pain of unbridled lusting bloodlett-slaughtering veil of the end will bestow … a knowledge of all of the Hells and infernal worlds that could be scarcely scratched at or conjured by mere human imagination or thought. 

​

​

A knowledge of exquisite perfect pain. Lonely. That royal mountain woman voice. A crimson voice, with a darkling red eye in the swirling black of his mind when he closed  his own eyes and closely listened… a darkling scarlet devil's eye of witchery power is what filled in the dark of his own thoughts when he heard her song and he tried to conjure its author. 

​

​

That royal pained and lonely regal voice. 

​

​

But it was a far off voice that knew how to mete out pain as well. Of that his own praeternatural animal killing senses told him that it was so. He was sure of it. That was why he felt such magic at the royal sad song of the far off mountain woman. She understood. Its wielder and phantasm owner understood the worldly terms of slaughter. Its dictations. All the lands were a kingdom ruled and that Lord God was Death and the lands were all of them: killing fields. 

​

​

Waste lands. 

​

​

Thirsting starving always hungering earth. No matter how stuffed she was with corpses, no matter how many bodies you fed into her charnel house soil womb those bodies digested in her crawling hungry bosom. And then the earth desired more. The soil and her offspring green needed more fresh blood and meat to fill their hungry mouths composed of shallow graves of shadow, by nightfall or shade of tree. Their only death shroud in his land of thirsting forest was shadow and darkness, he never bothered burying the pieces of dismembered meat. Those were for the wolves and rats and crawling foul life of many stalks and eyes and skittering legs. 

​

​

Though sometimes he liked to come back to these scenes of slaughter and watch the pieces putrefy. Liquify… slough off into wet rot that smelled faintly pleasant to his maddened senses. The smell and sight of the putrescence was calming for the axeman. Lord Bloodmud loved to watch the slow, deliberate and brutal work of nature. The mother hand was slow yet effective and she took it all the way down to the bone, always. 

​

​

Like he and his axe. 

​

​

He loved watching the pieces become putrescence and then nothing. It was like watching the great nature of mother earth slowly cooking. Slowly breaking down the willful and disobedient little invader into blackening green meat for the mouth of soil again. To make infant green land. 

​

​

It was calming. And like the axe he thought of it as one of his last and only remaining comforts. One of his last and only friends. 

​

​

He watched the fools from the dark and waited. 

​

​

…

​

​

Frankenstein’s patchwork nosferatu creation had engaged in much necromantic practice the past day, after the night it had brought the sepulchral structure of boy-and-goat back from the grave. 

​

​

Reanimation games. It was obsessed with pulling things apart and bringing the pieces back to unholy crawling life. Some he fashioned into more haphazard deranged sculptures, more bastard life-shape structures as he had with the boy and his crying little beasts. Goring, tearing and forcing together severed parts and pieces, limbs stabbed into raw new fashion and bastard shape by their protruding ends of dripping stabbing bone. Then he called the lightning and thunderclapped the unholy designs into wretched movement again. 

​

​

But the wicked flicker of bastard dark goblin flame inside the moving parts and demented moving edifice structures never lasted. It always died out. Perished within the morbid arrangements of meat like the meager flames of  small candles caught within the assault of maelstrom wind. 

​

​

The Frankenstein nosferatu monster angered. Frustrated. He wished to construct and conjure servants, pawns of raw and rot. Soldiers. An army of bastard and deranged flesh and putrid sloughing step to invade the castle of the mountains. 

​

​

Frankenstein himself understood. The patchwork hulking monster child of his table had already explained, and he knew as well before all this. Of the Vampyr and vvurdalak and strigoi nosferatu creatures … his child of the table could not simply sneak inside. None of their kind could. He must be invited in. 

​

​

Or send his constructs of damaged and demented haphazard flesh… of which none could even last let alone survive the assault and emerge as victor. 

​

​

Doctor Frankenstein smiled. 

​

​

And said: –

​

​

“I might have a plan, my child. I might have a way to your opponent in the castle." 

​

​

…

​

​

Praetorius couldn’t believe how gorgeous she truly was, how absolutely beautiful. Even as she feasted. Lips and mouth stained and dyed a deeper shade than wine. 

​

​

She pulled another piece of liver from the gaping open hole of wet red and brought it to her glistening lips, her darkling glistening fanged mouth. The gored open wound was alive and shrieking dark with total pain but he was glad to be an open gate and womb-hole and nourishment for his master. His new lord, the Countess. He never should have challenged her and invaded the domain of her home, the mountain castle. As he watched her, watched her as she ate… he now understood. True power. He now understood the error of his ways. 

​

​

Gravity pulled. He shivered. The force of the earthen ground was just as hungry as the master and her new impaler. He felt his body slowly slide down the long length of torturing war weapon. Mere centimeters. Miles and miles, cruel parsecs every dragging miniscule length inside the helter skelter of his shrieking screaming inner raw, raped by lancing killing device trembling and quivering luridly throughout all of his torn and weapon fucked form. Trembling and eager to die for the master now, was his wet and red running frame. Raw and opened, torn open all over. So that daggering hands and claws might come in and fist, reach in and take and pluck because he was now their wonderful and new raw open fruit basket. Filled with pulp and juice. Filled with lurid forbidden fruit. The master, the Countess said so. 

​

​

And it filled his mind. 

​

​

She found what she wanted in the shattered and fascinating remnants of his mind. She sifted through his thoughts and memories and dreams like broken and strewn detritus of decimated pottery and vases. A decimated mind. A decimated person and world. They were just interesting pieces to her and the ever-reaching foul touch of her ethereal phantasm hand. It invaded and clawed into his broken mind and splintered thoughts… sifting. 

​

​

Finding all sorts of interesting things. 

​

​

Frankenstein. 

​

​

His creation. 

​

​

His bold claim. A monster made wielding the fangs of Count Dracula…

​

​

fools. 

​

​

Fools. 

​

​

They were mere imposters. Fakes wielding counterfeit power. Pretenders. 

​

​

Pretenders she would crush. Pretenders and invaders that she would conquer. 

​

​

The sharp and strangling phantasmal grip squeezed. Tightened. 

​

​

Her voice filled his inner world of broken thought. 

​

​

Your knowledge. All of your work and findings. The results of your experiments with life and death and the necromantic power between them, give it to me. It is mine now, as you are now – as are you. And your blood and ruined flesh. My food and drink, my aphrodisiac and nourishing conquered land that once bore the flag of your soul and name… I will take it all. 

​

​

I will take it all. Your knowledge. And I will add it to my own. 

​

​

Her bright cruel laughter then filled the world of his skull. 

​

​

There was one part… one particular bit of mad scrap of thought amongst the wreckage of the man's mind that immediately caught her attention. 

​

​

Human culture farms. Flesh gardens. 

​

​

Human life, human beings… grown. 

​

​

From out of a petri dish. 

​

​

Interesting… 

​

​

She continued the assault and rape of his mind even as she and her new impaler continued the feasting conquest of his lanced and raw open form. Reaching in and fisting. Ripping. Crushing to meaty bloody pulp between clenching fingers. Brought to stained mouths like messy children grubby with the excitement of mealtime eating. They made themselves decadent with their piggish and wanton display of sinful maneating hoggery. 

​

​

Ghastly. And gaining redder and more wet and lurid by the moment. The scene. The scene of slaughter. The darkening and deepening of the bodily wound and impaling raping war pike spear now feeling nearly conjoined with his screaming tortured form coincided… fed and informed and made the deepening dark of this grisly feasting castle scene of the night. 

​

​

The wolves of the mountains howled. Full. 

​

​

It was a full moon. 

​

​

The Countess plucked another plum-sized piece of organ-meat from the open basket of wet glistening black-red. The new impaler added another lance, as ordered by her majesty. 

​

​

The feast continued into the night of the pregnant moon. 

​

​

…

​

​

The people of the mountains were fools. Those in the hamlet below had been cowed… quelled. They knew better. 

​

​

But the mountain dwellers. The ones in little huts, spread out, in thin numbers… they could be excited and stirred and called to action. Henry Frankenstein knew this. 

​

​

And stir and call he did. 

​

​

He promised payment. From out of his family fortune. Of which there was pitifully little left. Thoroughly diminished. But the filthy mountain men and their lads knew no better. They were stupid. And superstitious as well as hungry, greedy. He only had to say the right words to get them all banded together and set off. Bearing torch and flame and axes and pitchforks! Into the night! 

​

​

Into the night and up the mountain, screaming. 

​

​

Up the cold and full moon lighted way, up the Borgo Pass. Screaming. 

​

​

“Death to Dracula! the Nosferatu! Death to the monster!”

​

​

Death to the monster! 

​

​

Frankenstein’s own hulking patchwork of sutured necromanced and hungry walking flesh followed the rabble of dirty mountain farmers. Following. And watching. 

​

​

Waiting. 

​

​

…

​

​

The fierce pale glow of the moon, pregnant and full of light on high, came through and pierced the thick canopy of dark trees. The axeman Lord Bloodmud was hunkered amongst its growth. One of the denser parts, patches. Watching. Watching the invading boy and the strange man with a mask of bandages. They sat around a fire. Having finished their meager meal, they sipped warm wine and smoked spicy tobacco. Clouds thick and pungent and sweet on the night chill of the nocturne air. They swam through the space of night and clouded their small place of camp. The axeman thought and knew he saw faces in them. Swirling and in pain in the clouds of shifting and dancing shapes. 

​

​

A thought, unbidden, filled his head then: –

​

​

the woman of the mountains with regal song knows how to shift and dance shape as well … 

​

​

… and then was gone. 

​

​

But a Satanic seed was planted. Had been planted sometime ago. And had grown sour in the corpse soil. Grown. And festered. 

​

​

A gaping open wound of the mind. Filled with liquid infection. Gushing. Pouring. 

​

​

Pus-thought. Infection in my blood that moves my hands…

​

​

… the axeman Lord Bloodmud shivered and let the half-grasped and managed and understood train of thought falter and fail. And slip away. He had no use for such thoughts. Not while prowling. Not when the hour of the killing was nigh and upon him, the face of the earth. The face of his domain and thirsting soil… would drink. Would feed. 

​

​

Tonight. 

​

​

Now. 

​

​

He coiled, muscles practiced and honed… tightened. Tension behind the mountain of sinew like a crossbow drawn… quivering, ready to fire. And fly. Attack. 

​

​

But something strange happened then. Something that stopped and stilled the giant mountain of forest dwelling axeman.

​

​

A hand. Pale and bare and slender emerged from the body of dark thick foliage not far from his hunkering prowling form. It slid out from the bushes like a snake. The pale moonlight that bled in through the top illuminated the hand, wrist and arm that suddenly emerged, palm out in token of parley. A fleshen serpent of bone and blood and invading manflesh in his private sacred forest garden. 

​

​

That wasn't what stopped the giant. He might've just lunged and chopped the mysterious appendage off with a single swing, taking the new bastard unwanted growth out and off at the root just as its growth started and threatened his blood soaking and feasting, his precious drinking and final last Eden. 

​

​

It was the pentagram. The five pointed star of the infernal one, cast out. His sigil and sign. In red. His dark and evil bastard symbol. In his Eden. Stygian it shone as it was tattooed and brandished on the splayed out naked palm of this sudden intruding limb of serpent manflesh. 

​

​

A voice then spoke, its owner: –

​

​

“No, friend. That won't do. They've a ways to go yet. And I've a ways to follow…”

​

​

The moonlight cast down upon the hand of Satanic stars and false parley in cascading pale illumination… changing it. 

​

​

The axeman felt the ice of his own horror grow colder in thickening blood. Trying to quicken in a galloping heart. His own head and thoughts felt far away now. Dreamy and gone. Gone already. 

​

​

He felt detached as he watched the hand bearing pentagram on palm grow fur and longer and long black nails at the tips. Claws. For ripping and tearing. For rending down to the running blood, your screaming victim of the hunt. 

​

​

Caught. 

​

​

The moonlight glow of the occult moon, pregnant and full on high and through the fortress dome of the forest kingdom, bled in and changed the rest of the man as he arose from the thick dense of forest growth. The moonlight glow changed the rest of him as he arose also. 

​

​

Ebon hair. Elongated. Teeth. Bones snapped as they doubled in size and grew. Muscle tissue tore with the sound of ripping leather even as it suddenly sprouted a hideous thick coat of coarse and black hunting fur. The stranger of the pentagram on hand in the dark rose and transmogrified into an older horror than the axeman had ever been or ever known. 

​

​

The executioner's doubleheaded killing blade fell from his slackening grip. His hands still perspiring and damp but now cold with another animal emotion. One the axeman had not felt in such a long time. Fear. 

​

​

Terror seized his mind and its animal canvas went blank. The werewolf with the pentagram sigil mark came in and the final mutilation of Lord Bloodmud began. And his supplicant and loyal forest floor did drink. Deep. 

​

​

Deeply. 

​

​

…

​

​

Florin and Griffin only stirred once in the night, together. The howl of a large wolf somewhere in the surrounding forest. 

​

​

They added more wood to the fire. And reluctantly returned to sleep. What they found in the morning was disturbing. And grisly. 

​

​

…

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They came upon the remains of the large man in the morning, as they just begun to move and start that day's leg of the journey. Raw pieces crudely butchered by ripping claw and rending gnashing teeth. Swimming in gore in the rough bipedal manshape of a mutilated forest vagrant. 

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Disturbed, the pair went on. Wondering what beast or monster had done it. Thanking God that it hadn't gotten them instead in the night. 

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The stranger continued to follow them. Keeping to their lengthening shadows.

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TO BE CONTINUED …

He ventured forward into the dark. Torchflame flickered and glowed and made light for his way. He was tense and nervous. He was armed, each hand filled. Cross and pistol. Silver bullets. Six shots. He was tense and nervous though reluctant to admit it, even to himself. 

He held himself tightly coiled and trying to breathe, even and slow. Trying. 

Praetorius cursed himself once more then stopped himself once again. Time enough for all of that later. Perhaps. Hopefully. If you don't- 

Stop it! he commanded his own traitorous run of thought. Distractions! useless! 

His own breathing sounded very loud to himself. His heartbeat an anxious and driving primal war drum beaten ceaselessly by a savage and violent hand. It seemed to thunder in his ears. He wondered if she could hear it, the bitch. It was said that they had heightened hearing, like a beast, sensitive to sound. His own studies and observations had confirmed this. Mad and wild eyed snow haired Praetorius wondered if the foul woman who'd stolen Dracula's power and castle could hear the battering and unceasing cannonade artillery, the thunderclaps living as the dangerous heartbeat within his weary and aching chest, echoing. Echoing throughout all of the prison fortress of stone and blood and lurking ancient history. 

He willed himself to suck air slow. Steady. Like his echoing steps forward. Advancing. Chambered bootheel sound.  

You'll be fine. Just keep the crucifix up and the pistol ready to fire. Find the door again and then get the hell out! This whole stupid plan has been a debacle! 

It all sounded well and fine to his own worried and harried mind, housed within fevered and baking furnace skull. He was just starting to ease the galloping frenzied beast within the cage of his chest, when the sound of the Countess' howling laughter, mad witchy cackles, once again came from out of the dark and filled the entire world of the castle around him. The dark corridor and its orange flaming pumpkin glow of torchlight seeming to stretch on and on ahead of him. 

A trap. He knew it. He was just waiting for the awful wench to pounce. He tried his hardest to listen. A difficult endeavor to hear over the rapid fire wild blasting of his own frightened animal heart. 

The Countess heard and sensed and knew the animal fear alive in the little man, the little intruder, the awful and haughty invader that dared set foot in her castle. Her mountains! Her land and the country she now strangled and held. He'd tortured her little Carmilla, grievously. And for that he would be punished. For that he would be dealt with. Slow. 

Slowly. 

She would capture him first. Then she would begin slow flaying mutilating butchery on him. Eating and drinking slowly and at leisure his bold and impetuous fragile little personage. His fragile and easily shattered frame. They never realized, these proud and boastful men. They never knew it. Until you showed them. They never fully realized how sensitive they truly were until you broke them over your knee. Showed them their own blood. 

The whole of Castle Dracula was her spiderweb now, and the black widow queen of its stone and spires waited. And watched. Deciding and debating with herself, thinking over her dark and violent demoniacal thoughts…

… which shape should I take? Which precious organ should I pluck and savor first…? 

She licked and wet her own glistening lips. An action in the dark, both vulpine and animal as well as sensual and pleasing to the eye for the erotic. Her darkling eyes smoldered with unholy light and flame. 

Watching. Waiting. 

As the intruder Praetorius crept through her shadows. Her dark spiderweb of castle stone and orange dancing flame. Coming … coming closer. 

Coming closer to her. And her waiting violence in her hiding spot in the dark. 

She coiled … purred. …

Licked her spider lips again. 

And waited. 

…

The heavy double bladed head of the axe came down and cleaved through the gaping fish eyed face of the woman beneath him easily. Down through the top of her skull. Beside her lover in the grass, already in pieces and fish eyed and gaping, staring blind and dead as well. The weight and the design of the executioner's blade made it like child's play, you only needed to be able to handle the weight. The heft. Design and form did all the rest. 

He breathed, heaving and sucking air. Heavily. Like an animal. 

They shouldn't have come out after dark. They shouldn't have come out into his woods.

He tried to calm himself but he could barely manage the effort. He was never calm. Not anymore. Not since the fall of his lord and land so long ago…

now the woods were all he had. 

Filthy. Wild mane of unwashed and clotted hair. Clotted and knotted together by scat and dried mud and caking scabbing drying blood. The blood of intruders on his land. 

His woods. All he had left. 

That and the axe. The last remnant token piece of the long lost and now tragic ancient history he used to call his life. Long gone now. Swept away with the armies. 

His air was hot and heavy. His breath, puffs of ghosts, little spirits escaping his hulking broad shouldered and filthy ragged form. The woods were long his domain now. And they'd now long held him, the stain and mark of the wild was now all over and upon him. Never to be erased. Or taken away. 

He brought the blade up and then down again. Turning the lovers, the intruders into more grisly pieces. Especially the woman. She frightened him most. The forest floor drank their red greedily and as if starved for it. The forest floor was always starving for the red of the intruders. He'd discovered this out here in his new home, finding his new and true name. 

Lord Bloodmud. Axeman and the executioner king of the tree’d lands. Wielder and great forest emperor of the choked and violent wilderness emerald. 

He found his peace through his axe-swinging and maiming destruction of vile wanderers. Purging violence. Only afterwards did he find his respite. Heaving heavy breath like an animal half mad and alone dying of rabies. Amongst the human detritus of his heavy cleaving blade he always sat in prowling animal meditation. Ruminating primal blood soaked thoughts even as the forest floor around pooled saturated with the hot spent and shed red of each and every one of his unfortunate victims. Young. Old. All types, caught. Always caught screaming. And nigh helpless beneath the surging and armed swinging violent mountain of filthy giant man. The eyes of this wild giant absolutely alive with unreasoning fury. 

He sat amongst the ruin he’d made of the pair of young lovers, eyes shut, mind aflame with animal thoughts. His ears, attuned to the movements within the woods, caught something and bent to the sound. He tilted his head as he strained to listen to the domain of his blood drinking forest kingdom. 

Hooves. Four-legged beast. Bearing cart. And a small load. 

And a pair of travelers. 

More intruders…

His rage was renewed, reignited. He rose, reawakened. Rekindled to burn.  His starving axe was angry again. The trees that were his loyal subjects and followers and last lovers and friends, frozen supplicants of his red drinking green kingdom, were crying out once more as the intruders invaded and raped his land. Crying out yet again: More Blood! – and he and the doubleheaded executioner’s blade of such great heft in his eager perspiring grip were all too happy to oblige. 

Eager to follow… make great. Sow the land and protect the seed and the soakened land shall sing …

Every great king should give all and such upon his land a great reaping and wealth to drink… to fill their mouths and souls.

To fill their hearts with love…

The axeman of the dark woods began to prowl. 

Florin started in the seat next to the bandaged man, craning his head around and spying the woods all around them in the dark. As if straining to find and see something. 

The bandaged man, who’d settled on calling himself ‘Griffin’ for now, was easily vexed. He nearly snarled, asking: “What is it now?”

Florin righted himself in the seat, “Thought I heard something again.” And then added: “Sorry.” 

Griffin grumbled behind his mask of surgical dressings: “...whatever…” and then fell silent again. 

The young man of the Carpathian hamlet was thankful for the help thus provided by the strange bandaged man. His information on Van Helsing, however dour. His aid in their escape. And their present transportation procured from a horseman the mysterious Griffin knew. But he did at present entertain the idea of leaving the hidden man and parting ways. The man said he was a doctor. That he’d known Van Helsing and knew the ways of vampire slaying. But Florin was doubtful and found the fellow to be so easily irritated that he was left walking on eggshells around him at all moments. 

He thought of giving the masked man of foul mood the slip. Ditching him in the wild and making for home to help in anyway he could. 

But… of what help was that? What could he provide now that he couldn’t have before leaving home for aide?

Other than the terrible news that the vampire hunter was dead, Florin did not have an answer. 

And so at present, he was stuck with this foul mouthed and disagreeable man. Strange and mysterious and hidden behind surgical bandage. For what purpose or cause, Florin did not know. And often privately speculated. 

Probably just cause he’s maimed underneath all that. Or disfigured. Or mayhap he’s just real ugly. 

Florin stifled his smile and small laughter. Griffin glanced at him. Annoyed underneath his mask of dressings. 

But then he whirled around suddenly in his seat of their mule-drawn cart. Spying into the woods that surrounded them. 

Saying to the boy beside him: “Did you hear something?”

…

When the Countess Zaleska and her assistant extracted the fangs of living dead dragon/dæmon power from the dust and cobweb strangled bones and remnants of Dracula’s skeletal remains and through arcane necromantic surgical alchemy, fused them into the mouth of the Countess, she inherited much more than mere vampiric hunger and prodigious strength. The ability to shift shape. These things were common to many nosferatu things of the moonrise time. 

But she had within her now, the power of the Lord of the Undead. Lord of the Flies incarnate and upon the face of the Earth. The last and final Countess Czarina of Necrophile-Flame. Empress Queen of the Nocturnal Blood and the warfare violence of restless hunger in the dark. 

She was beyond the mere mundane limitations of the flesh. She was beyond the thin veil of the leather clung to in desperation and futilely named and declared: Reality. Her powers now, those graverobbed from the dust of the son of the dragon; a dracul, they were beyond the reckoning of the fleshling maggot sow that now invaded her home and prowled her corridors and halls like the lost frightened and small animal he truly was. 

Discorporeal, the Countess Zaleska watched from the stone of the inner walls of the ancient bloodstained castle as if every piece of masonry were her eyes. She watched the sorry little haughty intruder inch his way forward like a starving lowly worm across the mud slathered surface of a cheap wooden casket unearthed for the naked air. He was really quite old. Fragile really. 

She was going to enjoy this… the blackest part of her darkening stygian heart relished the savagery she would wrought…

But first… what is a host that doesn't entertain her guests…?

Hardly any host at all. 

The discorporeal form of the Czarina Princess of the darkness now alive in these halls of ebon and bloody stone watched and her/its phantasm rictus grin grew in spectral madness. Her disembodied pure power spider legged and tendrilled out… filling every piece of mortar and rock and brick of stone. She filled the walls with the manifestation of her ungodly power form, a spectre that could invade and subjugate all as a pure necrophiled phantom-flame of deranged gale force nature from Hell. 

The fool, the mad doctor Praetorius did not know that the castle was alive around him now. Castle Dracula was now just as much a part of the Countess Vampire Lord as any one of her appendages. Or supplicants.  She could bend and flex and move it to her considerable will…

… and the castle and its walls all around him, alive with the Countess, began to dance and shift slightly… and move. 

Labyrinthine. The distortion of space and distance and direction was subtle. Drifting. It led the fool farther in rather than out. And he didn't even realize it. 

The walls of Castle Dracula howled with a biting woman's cackling witchery laughter as the frightened Praetorius clutched desperately his weapons and unknowingly walked deeper and deeper into the living sepulchre structure that might be made into his grave. 

Swallowing him deeper and deeper and ever more as he wandered the dancing and shifting walls of living and evil stone. The dust and dirt and filth all about the old interior held her hateful dark will as well and were daggered at the invading little man, all of the place arrowed the oppressive force of great livid hatred and anger at the wandering little mistake of snow white hair… too old a man to be trying at these games…

The walls of stone smiled, rictus. The castle walls of stone watched and shifted and guided towards doom. The castle walls watched, possessed and insane. 

Praetorius could feel the gaze. Its intensity stole a warmth from his heart he knew deep down he could never retrieve. 

Not even if he was lucky enough to leave here alive…

Not even. Not at all. 

The walls then spoke: –

“You wanted so badly to be inside… you wanted so badly to see me, now I am here and all around, I am all yours. And you are all mine. I’m the world and universe all around you now… ! Now you’ll never leave and I will  take what I want from you anyway, you say you have much to tell me, I will pull it from your mind as I shred and flay it, even as I’m pulling the precious raw meat from your bones…! You’re to be my dominated and slutted, whored and butterflied open bloodletting love slave for the night, Doctor… Praetorius! Your flesh will be pulled back and I will drink and sup of you at my will, as I make you sing and speak as I so wish and desire to hear…! … I will make you say anything, little man…! I will make you a weeping whore for pain!” 

And then the castle walls came to life again with cruel bright laughter. 

What might have been long rictus distended mouths and faces appeared, grew, came to life in the harsh rough textured surface of the walls all around. The stone was filled. The stone of the castle world now that was fortressed all around him encompassing. The mad doctor couldn't believe his eyes. Watering now. Unbelieving fearful tears. 

Something like, nearing religious panic was stealing over his heart. Creeping over with curdled black the last vestiges of steadfast courage and thought. 

Praetorius shook his head trying to clear it. Visibly frightened. Shaken. Dizzy. He would’ve sworn the walls and the way forward down the corridor before him had … moved slightly. As if drifting…

It made him feel sick. He shut his eyes and rubbed them. But not long. He did not dare tarry any longer than he could afford. He had to find  his way out. Or kill the strigoica slut of Satan with a properly placed bullet and a swift decapitation. The only way. The only way to be completely sure with a Vampire Lord. 

Such as the bitch was evident to be. 

He cursed himself again, the last time, for ever coming here in the first place. For thinking it had been anything even remotely resembling a good idea. The experiment of coming here had proven unequivocally that it was in fact: A Terrible Idea…

Praetorius smiled grimly to himself. Mayhap also for the last time as he began again to move forward. 

Don’t act like you haven’t had any of those before… 

He relished his one private joke. He had always been his own favorite company. 

…

Doctor Praetorius did not get far before a room suddenly appeared down the junction from where he presently wandered. He came to the cross section and saw that this room was bellowing light like a great incandescence of earthbound starflame. It poured forth from the room, from out of the open immaculate doorway. Striking in the darkness and meager orange torchglow. 

It was beautiful. Intense. 

Enrapturing. 

Like a moth to searing flame, Praetorius was drawn. He went down the hall that had steadied and settled under demoniacal will and was guided by black hands that drifted out from the walls made from smokey stygian shadow. They helped him along. They pushed and guided him down the entombed walkway. Advancing. 

Down the hall and towards the starflame of light pouring forth from the newfound room. 

His hypnotized mind told him sanctuary was in there. And of course it was. And he should hurry and get in there already. Afterall, heaven can’t wait, can it? 

No. The master says that heaven cannot wait at all. 

And so before the blinding room of starflame, Praetorius’ arms dropped to  his sides. Limp. Lifeless  already. The grip  in his hands slackened next and the cross and loaded pistol fell from his black gloved hands and clattered with finality to the stone of the castle She Commanded. 

The walls began to laugh again as the blind and spellbound doctor stepped inside the room of swallowing starflame. 

And took him inside.

…

Florin and Griffin nearly jumped from their skins and seized in their chests when they suddenly happened upon a fellow traveler in the woods. 

A solicitor. On horseback. Coming from the other direction. 

The man was kindly enough though visibly shaken. Frightened by the strange land of nighttime woods. He tried to tell the pair that the very shapes of the trees and growth itself were deranged, gnarled and dead and bent and wrong: Like the desperate hands of submerged and giant buried corpses clawing out of the sour ground and daggering for the salvation of the skies of heaven above. That's what was eating at him constant since setting foot in this dread land, this dread wood, but there was something else. He also swore he heard something moving out here. Out here in the dark wild, something like violence was on the loose and on the prowl out here in the night, he could feel it.

He tried to tell them all of this but couldn't. He barely knew a word of english. 

Florin only tried to be polite as Griffin grew huffy and impatient as the traveling solicitor gesticulated and babbled on near ceaseless in his mother tongue. He filled the prowling dark all around with the anxious music of his foreign chatter. 

Though an understanding was met and felt … between the three before they parted and waved. An understanding of danger. And an understanding of fear.

Caution… weary …

The solicitor gave up and waved them thanks and kicked his horse back to a trot. The mule drawn cart of the pair went on. And soon was gone. 

The solicitor, fearful, carried on. Spying all around futilely, the impenetrable nighttime dark of the clawing dead black woods all around. The axeman chose to follow him for the moment, just for the nonce. He would soon rejoin with the other two. Afterward. 

Soon. 

After he dealt with this decadent and pompous invading tenderfoot. 

The weight of his executioner's blade gained substance, gained significance. It felt real again. Alive with potential. Made great again with purpose. With something to bite into, to free the red and feed the forest floor which drinks. 

All of the invaders of his last and precious forest land would feed the soil and the growth of his Bastard Eden Garden. All would be supplicant beneath the biting blade of his swing. Planting and burying the heavy metal head of double bladed axe into the soft and giving meat and bone and carcass of intruding vile flesh, invading flesh, invader blood would weep! 

As long as he and the axe held each other and this dark part of the forest land they kept … they would keep. 

And he would keep on feeding the starving dirt. Red. 

The only god that ever answered him… 

The solicitor went on. Unaware. Frightful. Yet attempting to whistle a tune and brighten his own heart as he kept his thoughts on his wife and child back home. Far away now. For comfort. The axeman followed after. Prowling. Like a hunter. 

…

… he came upon the solicitor when he stopped again, to determine direction. The power of his first screaming swing caught the traveler in the chest and the heavy blade sank as he was knocked from his horse with the force of the blow. The animal was screaming too. It soon fled as the axeman went about the rest of his hard work and heavy business. 

He brought the executioner's doubleheaded blade up again and brought it down again. Already sweating. Pouring. Profuse. The heavy metal blade opened up the chest cavity and it became a wild primeval forest of flowering gore pouring great and healthy abundance of vibrant steaming red. The axeman could taste it in the air. The opened chest looked like a fantastic microcosmal world of raw tissue and bone and gushing crimson, a world and wonderful wild forest garden as if rendered by abattoir hand and forged from raw scraps of the blade and innards and red. He brought up the axe and brought its heavy power down again, smashing and cleaving through the visage of face and skull. Spilling the man's memories out in a thick and meaty burst and porridge gush. The skull was like smashed pottery, porcelain slathered with bright violently red blood, scarlet so lurid it screamed in the night. 

He brought the blade up and down again and again. Turning the pieces into pieces. Smaller. Just hunks and pieces of meat. Unrecognizable. Save for the tattered and slashed rags that used to be clothing… 

The forest floor drank. He heaved breath and the sheet of sweat cooled on his filthy drying skin. Tingling. Covered in solicitor’s blood. Steaming traveler's blood, scabbing and baking into pores…

The soil supped and greedily drank the pouring blood and pools. The animal children would have the meat. The forest kingdom land thanked him, silently. It always thanked him in the quiet. 

The axeman lifted great axe yet again and disappeared once more into the trees he knew so well. 

Eager to rejoin the other two travelers. The other two invaders of his home in the dark…

The axeman made straight through the dense and dead wood for the place where Florin and strange bandaged Griffin had stopped to make fire. And set camp. 

…

When Praetorius first stepped into the beckoning room that called with religious light it was at once a vast and impossible landscape of searing blind perfection, pure immaculate white inferno. Pulverizing through his fragile organ set of eyes, the pair on fire and bathed in blinding pain. Beauty and illuminated pearl-cast so divinely perfect and pure and shining that it was too much to behold all at once and bear… he couldn't hear his own shrieking voice. The volume of the attacking light piercing through his eyes and into his precious jelly sac of brains within boiling percolating skull was too great and too loud itself for him to hear his own caterwauling voice. Or anything else. 

He didn't hear the Countess' sick laughter. Loaded with unholy pleasure and the enjoyment of predatory derision. She commanded the cannonade of landscape light to close, fold back into stone and castle walls and floor as Praetorius went to his knees weeping, still shrieking. Still unaware of both as the madness of light was still alive within his wide watering eyes. Zaleska, in the fluid heavy-liquid shape of shadow, as ebon folds pulled herself in witch’n shape and crawling silhouetted form, free from the castle stone and began to crawl towards the crying screaming man brought down to his knees before her.

And her laughter began to croak. 

She gave bastard bestial demoniacal call to her servants, felt and heard and quaking throughout all the halls and corridors of Castle Dracula's trembling bastard stygian hellfire stone. 

Her servants all heard but the loyal assistant was still busy tending to poor mutilated Carmilla. Still busy digging out the treacherous fire of silver from smoldering bubbling tissue. But it was no matter…

… the one she really wanted was ready anyways. The newest one. Her new servant lord. Her man at arms. Her sword wielding hand…

Countess Zaleska called forth the new impaler. And he came as the master did beckon. 

She commanded him to bring the sharpest and longest pikes. 

Piercing tips.

At her command she would guide his cold new living dead hands in the torture. She knew just where to pierce. 

Just where to start with this one…

TO BE CONTINUED…

Crucified. Smoking. As if smoldering with lively inner flame. The unholy were-thing in child-shape was bound in cruciform pose to the large ornate cross he'd stolen from a Catholic church many miles and many years back. It was fastened to his saddle and horse with straps and he led the beast and its smoking screaming demonic load up the pass and towards the great and ancient castle. 

Its battlements and ramparts, fangs against the sky, darkening now that the sun had fled and left the nighttime things and its dark disciples alone to bloodlet unholy and to perform witchery ways. Witchery practices. 

Like a deal with the devil, perhaps. 

Praetorius smiled. Carmilla screamed. Shrieked herself hoarse, the shape of the cross in her back and neck and her arms, all about her shrieking form was alive with searing piercing heat. It cooked and burned and branded as its holy ornate metal ate itself into her cooking vampire child flesh. 

Caterwauls. Guttural. Obscene for anything that even resembled a child to make. Deep. Unnatural. Grotesque. Her eyes bulged in their sockets and bled both blood and buttery thin yellow fluid. Her sharpened teeth protruded even more unnaturally as well, bleeding profusely and heavy about the splitting gums and lips and warping misshapening bones of the growing and bending jawline. She barked more awful hellspawn sound and belched more smoking blood from insides that flamed and smoldered. 

Praetorius found it all very fascinating. The silver and the shape of the cross did considerable damage to the nosferatu but prolonged exposure to both had just left this one with terrible structural damage to her living dead personage. Her body seemed to melt and sear with the touch of either. The bones seemed to distend and bend as if carbonizing beneath her hectic raw and running bubbling flesh. 

The other night at camp, he couldn't sleep and neither could she, he'd experimented with holy water. Wonderful results. 

The whole thing had been so fascinating for him that he'd elected to spend a night just performing tests and small experiments on the child-shaped vurdalak. It kept changing and shifting shape. Distorted though. More and more warped and misshapen the more pain he fed it. Its screams were bestial and childlike too.

Interesting. Absolutely fascinating. 

But the little games were over. It was time to enter the court of the Countess and attend to the real business at hand. The real errand and reason he'd ventured to these lands. 

He came to open gates and entered the old courtyard of stone. Carmilla's screaming never ceased. Praetorius called out and over the child demon caterwauls the best he could. 

“Hello! Countess! I know that you can see me! Might I have your audience?" 

Nothing. At first. Only the girl wraith’s demon shrieks. Carried on the old cold wind of mountain song. 

And then, as if in reply, the great door that told of ancient history in red opened. Slowly. 

To bade entry into the keep. 

Praetorius laughed. Good cheer. He unstrapped the small strigoica girl upon her little cross, child sized … as if made just for her. He set her to the paved stone of the courtyard floor with no mercy and began to drag her behind himself as he ventured inside. A long length of chain link fastened to the end of the ornate crucifix. 

Carmilla tried to shriek, Mother!/Master! – all in one but couldn't. It only manifested as more gurgled deep belching guttural screams, blood and fluid vomited forth and she choked as the thin mad doctor dragged her crucified body back into the ancient dark of Castle Dracula

…

The old stone of the mausoleum entrance spat and belched forth a cloud of grey and dust as it opened for the first time in centuries. 

However it was not an undead revenant horror that stepped out to see the sky once again but the man with the bandaged face and dark glass goggles beneath his wide brimmed hat. And the boy. The young rider, Florin, who'd so recently disturbed the bandaged man’s solitude and quiet. The escape tunnel beneath his besieged house had led them out here. Florin was just glad to see that the sun was rising soon. They'd been underground for what must've been hours and the feeling the experience had left him with was a claustrophobic dread for the eventual final resting place of the small coffin of the grave. Below. Beneath the earth. Underneath so much ground …

And then Florin thought of the things that came to life in such places and rose and then cursed his own horrible run of thought. As they came out of the mausoleum, the man with the surgical dress about his face and who sometimes said his name was Doctor Jack Griffin or Sebastian Caine, other times Geoffrey Radcliffe, was berating him again. 

“Oh, shut up! I already said I'd help you! And I've little choice in the matter now that my home is destroyed! You inconsiderate foolish little whelp!" 

Florin, upset that the dark pitch of the escape tunnel had spat them back out into yet another graveyard but glad to be alive, was doubtful of the possibly maimed and mangled man that was always yelling now and his ability to help anyone. Let alone he and his village and their plight with the hunger of the living dead. A curse that had come back to lurid and terrible life in the castle that held the mountains over the little hamlet. 

The broken battlements of the undead lord. The Dragon. The Impaler. Castle Dracula was filled with darkness once more. Darkness that was hunting and ravenous mad with animal hunger. Vampires and their evil had once again filled the Transylvanian lands. 

And the man hidden behind a mask of surgical dress was making bold claim that he could help. Furthermore, he was still yelling. Again. 

“And why do you insist on gawking at me? I could feel you looking at me even while we were in the dark down there!" 

Florin, a little embarrassed, elected to be honest nonetheless. 

“I'm sorry. I guess… I guess I was just wondering what it is beneath all your bandages. Was it an accident? Burns of some sort?" 

“Shut it!" And then he added in a snide voice: “I'm really nothing to look at, I promise you!" 

Florin felt a small stab of shame in his heart and let the subject drop and die in the dirt. And the pair went on, 

The sun was coming up and the excited man hidden in surgical dress was in an irascible irritable behavior, one he couldn't seem to shake since the siege and flight and subsequent destruction of his house. He went on and on about how the old Professor Van Helsing had taught him everything they would need to know about slaying the undead, the vampires were already as good as destroyed! – roared the bandaged man, again and again in his circular style of loud and vexed pontification. Always starting with how the boy and his troubles had ruined the bandaged mystery’s sorry excuse for retirement and ending with how the young man need not fret, Doctor Griffin/Caine/Radcliffe was with him! 

“And if you knew that name…! If you knew my name, boy! If you knew who I was and what I, myself, have accomplished in the past, with no other! With naught but my own hands and willpower, imagination and genius! … If you had any idea what was wrapped beneath these dressings, you would cease your womanish worries and start attending me properly and with some modicum of real and decent respect! …” …

He went on like that. For some time. As they made their way through the silent cemetery and out and into the wilds of the lands between where they presently walked and the darkness that awaited in the violence and jagged rock of the Carpathian Mountains in the far off distance. 

Together.

The bandaged man who promised much eventually calmed down. Apologized. Quietly. Then said he knew of someplace nearby where they might grab a horse or coach. And away they went in that direction, with some semblance of waning hope still flickering and holding out in the young man’s heart. They made for the place that might provide ride and supplies and perhaps shelter for a night, the unlikely and motley pair, unaware that they had gained a third. He watched and followed them from a distance. His eyesight was keen. Sharp. They were easy to track as well. They left an easy trail. Fools. 

And besides all of that, he’d caught their scent. And like a perfume bled from their pores it was pungent and distinct. Easy to follow. 

Fools. 

The stranger continued to follow the fools. Now fully decided, committed in following them to the end of their trail. The end of the line. What he’d overheard… what little he’d gleaned from their words to each other… 

He would have to see for himself. 

The young man and the bandaged man went on. 

The stranger followed. 

…

Bela knew the little goats and Widenmeyer boy were doomed before he and the few village men with the stones to go, ventured forward and up into the vulgar way of the Carpathian Mountain path. They'd been gone an entire night. Missing since yesterday, when the shoddy vagabond knight had gone up the way and throat of jagged rock to slay the evil at the cold heart of immense towering boulder. The time to have gone would've been immediately. Yesterday evening. Too late. It was all too late now and in his ailing heart he knew it was so. 

Florin's been gone for much longer than a night though, his treacherous and misery obsessed run of thought reminded him. Much longer. What of that? What of him? 

He pushed off the dark and the hurt of these thoughts and made his way with the other men up the path. Dogs in the lead. All of them barking. Their noses had already caught and found what they were all looking for. They pulled at their tethers and leashes in urgent need to pull themselves and their owners the rest of the way to meet it and catch up with what they already knew by scent. 

It was blood in the air the hounds had caught. Goat’s blood. Boy's blood. 

Heavy. Pungent. Thick. Like licking a metal blade and knowing its flavor. A razor. Its flat face. Its edge…

It wasn't long before Bela and the other men could smell it too. Taste it in the air. Their throats gagged and their stomachs turned and threatened to revolt. The animal alive and in the pit of each one, each fellow, was all too well aware of that taste and smell. And what it meant when on the wind it carried, what it bode. 

This really has become a God Damned, a Godforsaken place… Bela thought. And the great cold and the sorrow that stole over his heart then as he realized what had become of his home and his friends and family and neighbors and their own… it was shattering. He wished for an end. And in that moment, in the private cold of his own heart and thoughts he didn't care if it was for better or ill. Just please…

Just please. Please let it end. Please. No more of this. Please. 

Please. 

He didn't bother begging God anymore. Not in specific. This desperate silent prayer was thrown up and out and for anyone or anything that might listen and take care. If anything would. Bela was doubtful that anything in fact did. 

But he knew what was ahead, he had something much more tactile and real and more pungent than faith to tell him what they would find up the rest of the way. 

Just a little farther up the path.  

Just shy of the Borgo Pass…

… the carcasses they found had been ripped to utter ruin. Pieces. All over. Strewn. They'd been fed upon like all the others, even the bones had been snapped and broken and sucked dry for their marrow, but the human detritus was different this time. It was all ornamental and stacked and placed together in a cornucopia pile like a victorious Roman legion's bloody war trophy center of the diminished and final battlefield. Human boy, young child parts and strips and pieces of face and head mixed in and stacked with bloody and soaked displaced goat pieces and limbs.The torsos of beasts flayed and butterflied open, many things stuffed inside. Entrails and viscera hung and draped and piled. Arranged. Horns. The child's bare bottom and little legs were placed at the top as the horns of the head of the structure, resting and dangling luridly and slovenly obscene and dead at the pinnacle. The horns of one of the goats had been stabbed into the eye sockets of the Widenmeyer boy's own silent screaming mutilated head. It was set in the center of the structure. The rest of the dripping scarlet parts flowering out from it in haphazard and demented deranged  structure. 

An abattoir sculpture. Sepulchral. Still bleeding. Dripping. Wet. Steam still rose off the arrangement stack of parts. Like phantoms fashioned from body heat dancing off and for the mounting wind. Leaving behind the repulsive and obscene pile structure of lurid human detritus that had once held it precious and prisoner within its meat. The dogs, the hounds wouldn't stop going wild. They wouldn't stop barking. Howling mad. Frothing.  

Soon the wolves of the mountains joined in too. 

Widenmeyer begged the few there with him to help him. Help him take the awful thing apart and get his boy's pieces so they could bury him properly. 

None of the other men wanted to touch the thing. Fearing it was cursed. 

It probably was. 

From the dark of a nearby cave, at the mouth of the entrance but still concealed within its deepening black, vulpine eyes red and shining, watched. A grin below them grew and then parted and laughter, cruel and not entirely human was freed forth. And like terrible music caught on the wind it was carried. And the frightened men before the awful sepulchral statue of dead boy and goat parts heard it. 

Henry Frankenstein, beside his bloodfeasting creation, joined his sutured demon son of the surgical slab and laughed. 

Together they watched the pathetic gathered peasants, together they watched them from the dark of the cave, protected from the fleeing sun. 

And they laughed at their pain. 

Pain that they had wrought. 

Their laughter rose until the men and their dogs fled. Not touching their lurid vicious forest trophy of blood and parts. Of meat and bone. Animal. And boy. Small. 

Their cackling rose like mad as they ran. Carrying them down with it. 

…

He dragged the screaming crucified were-child down the dark corridors of stone and torchlight flame. There’d been none to meet them upon entry. Nor since he’d begun his exploration of the stygian cobwebbed empire of ancient and bloodstained masonry and stone. Bloodstained. And soaked. The smell of  rot and decay was at war with the fresher pungent stench of hot blood spilled in violence and terror. Shot in ropes and cords.  Blood feasted upon for a scarlet thirst. 

The shrieking of the monster upon the dragging cross, it strove to be words of mercy and  beseechment of love and deliverance. Mother. Master. Countess. Zaleska! – but they were all of them lost in the grotesque guttural screams that still brought forth steaming regurgitated blood and fluid and dry heaves that smoked and peppered the stagnant air with flecks and small pieces of pink fleshen tissue. Raw little disintegrated pieces of the small undead child’s failing inner organs. The thing that was upon the cross now that used to be a little girl of the small village named Carmilla was now barely recognizable as anything that could be called human. The body of the vampire child had misshapen and bulged grotesquely all over and sporadic. Bladders of yellow fluid and pus ballooned and bulged and inflated with their own unnatural rhythms. They burst and bled red and infection like butter and custard, spoiled milk curdled and thick. Some of the fluid resembled honey and Praetorius had a morbid thought of Biblical reference: spreading some of the demon child’s honey-pus over a slice of bread or toast and biting  into it on a tranquil Sunday. 

It brought him little in the way of self-pleasure. His patience was quickly diminishing. He’d searched many rooms and corridors and had still found nothing. No one had shown themselves. Nothing! He swore! – if the fucking lordly bitch wasn’t here then he’d torture the child till it begged for a second more final death and leave the severed head of the brat somewhere prominent for the Countess to find. 

He threw down his length of chain and produced his pistol. Every chamber loaded with a silver bullet. He cried out and addressed the dark chasm of the castle. 

“I’m tired of touring your halls and playing hide and seek, Countess! I’m not one of your child slaves, eager and happy to play your trifling games! If you don’t come out now, I’ll put a few more silver bullets in her head before I stake her little heart and decapitate the little bitch! You’d so easily discard one of your servants!? Is this foul little corruption not some form of child to you?”

Nothing at first. – A beat. 

Then laughter. Cruel. 

The sound came from everywhere, Praetorius spied all around, searching for sign of anyone, he was just before a great archway that led to yet another room. A pale heavy shroud of fog began  to  bellow forth from the room, filling the entry. Swirling into phantasm shape, a face. A beautiful woman, eyes alive with animal brightness even as rendered as dancing mist. 

The phantasm face of the mist spoke: “What do you think you could offer me, lowly thing? I’ve watched you drag my servant like a knuckle-dragging  brute all about my home, I’ve heard your challenges, you are nothing. You are but a man! For your insolence, I will make sure you die slowly…!” 

Praetorius laughed, said in retort: “Not so fast, Countess! I’ve information you may want! Not only have I gathered information on yourself and your own strange motives over the years, but I’ve cultivated intelligence of those that might concern you! Potential enemies.” 

The phantasmic shock white face of the Countess became even more enraged. Livid. Alive with pure fury. 

“ANY INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE AND I WANT I WILL TAKE, LITTLE MAN! YOU WILL NOT INVADE MY HOME AND PRETEND TO BARTER ME! AS IF WE WERE EQUALS!” 

The fog grew more shape, wolfen and woman – bipedal yet bestial and advanced. Praetorius kept his pistol trained on the girl as his other reached inside his coat and produced his cross.  He held it aloft and before him in defense. 

The wolfen mist screamed! Shrieked. But did not flee. The wolfwoman mist parted, bisected into halves that swam around Praetorius and his crucifix. 

The twin dancing lengths of swirling phantasmic she-wolf halves became as fangs, vulpine, viper, blood drinking and ripper. They came back together and closed around Carmilla and the cross. The straps that held her bound were suddenly snapped and torn loose as if cut. The dancing shroud of white, alive with movement and faces and shapes, then shot away and screamed. As if the effort of being near the holy items of crucifixion design had wounded her. 

Praetorius cursed! Shot after the phantasm shape in vain, the gunfire was cacophonous in the castle halls. The phantasm was now a clawing hand flying away with batwings about its strange ghostly configuration. 

Carmilla wasted no time in tearing her searing cooking flesh away from the holy touch of the infernal cross. Her grotesque mutilated half transformed rodent body managed to crawl away with surprising speed. Praetorius shot after it as well. Also in vain. More violent gunfire sound, made cannonade by the dark interior of the ancient structure. 

Then it was silent.  

In the dark space of silence, the maniac doctor reloaded his pistol with more precious pure silver shot. The metal that all of the abyss feared because it was pure metal. 

He was slowing down his breath, his quickening galloping heart, when her voice once again came out from the beckoning shadow…

“Come now, thin old man. You are bold. But stupid. Come now, without hostage, come and face me. And don't forget to bring your weapons…”

Praetorius spat and cursed. He was no coward, but that thing in woman shape was dangerous hellspawn made. And he'd already blown his advantage. 

He'd have to be careful. 

Slowly he advanced for the place where the strange unearthly shape of white had fled, where from her voice had come. Each hand was filled: pistol and the holy cross. 

He left behind the larger crucifix with its fasten of chain at the end and its ornate Catholic metal now riddled and covered with encrusted cooked and seared demonic vampire child flesh. Fried gore, steaming multicolored scabbing all along its sacred holy shape. 

He left it behind in the dark as easily as he had stolen it from the church, so many years ago. Praetorius gave it not a second thought as he pressed forward into the stygian realm of Castle Dracula’s universe of spider webs and stone and torchflame. 

The Countess in the dark awaited. 

Baring her fangs. 

…

In the mouth of the cave they still dwelt. Listening to the howls of the wolves. 

After awhile the demon creation of the surgical table spoke: –

“They make such beautiful music. But they are her children you know, that one with power like mine. That keeps the castle. They are her children and thus hers to command.” 

Frankenstein said nothing. He just sat there. And listened to the strange and sour words of speaking decomposition, croaked and said by his surgically constructed son of the slab. Demon eared. Batfaced. 

He then held his large and corpse colored arm out of the cave and aloft. Clawing his four fingered hand out and towards the sepulchral structure he had made. The silent night above suddenly began to stir. The clouds began to forge and fill, and darkened with rumbling and thunder. 

“As you made me, so shall I forge a new being of parts from others, command it to life. And see if like she I can command the very nature of its being!” 

His clawed and splaying hand suddenly closed partially in an abridged fist and turned. Forked out, pointed first and smallest fingers, pronged in the devil's sign of the evil eye. 

The sudden gathering of stormheads on high spontaneously erupted! Shot!

The blue-white searing blade of light and heat daggered down and struck! Bathing the obscene statue of dead child and goat pieces in brightest starflame, Frankenstein looked away and shielded his eyes as his creation bellowed laughter and screamed!

“Live! Live! And take life my crawling bastard reforged thing! Live! And take life!”

Bathed in flame, the abominated shape of the hellacious trophy of parts began to move. Like a spider. Like an octopus at the dark depths of the sea floor. Its chandelier structure shifted and danced in the bolt of striking lightning and it began to lurch and crawl forward…

Long stalks, still bleeding and dripping blood of two species: beast and boy, bent and reached and lifted lurching, the cornucopia body of torsos and human face and goat faces and sloughing ripening entrails and gored organs now reanimated and pumping and splurching with the abominated sound of life again. 

The multijointed strange stalks of mutilated goat legs and the dead young man’s limbs, crudely forced together by craterous wound and sheer barbarity, propelled the strange body of parts and viscera forward and down the mountain. Down for the village below. 

Frankenstein watched in dark wonder as his sutured monster child’s own fashioned thing of dead meat and the cosmic flame of lightning went forth, another crawling demoniacal bloodfeasting creature created for the predatory dark. 

The nighttime has given birth to another… thought he, the mad doctor Henry Frankenstein. 

…  

Widenmeyer had been unable to sleep that night. The horror he'd endured that day. No one bothered to stand sentry any longer, though there were the defeated and those already crushed and dead inside. And they would wander at night and in the dark, they didn't care. Such as he. Such as this night. 

He was the first to see the sepulchral abominated nightmare structure shape emerge from the dark mouth of the pass like from the mouth of nightmare madness found in the most accursed and stygian sleep. Its multi-limbed appendages, stalks composed of his boy’s arms and legs mixed with goat's and violently forged and fused by force into long insectile tendril legs, moved and crawled and spider-like carried the thing down the distance and towards himself and the town foyer. 

Widenmeyer wished to free a scream but couldn’t. He felt strangled. Choked by the awful strange surreal sight of the abattoir sculpture piece from the earlier nightmare scene of butchery found and discovered that day. The macabre trophy that held his son’s mutilated and desecrated head in the center of its belly. The head was moaning. Groaning in mindless and imbecilic wailing anguish. The mouths and throats of the goat faces that were able joined him in the dark discordant rising song. All together. Bastardized abominated unnatural song of pain that filled the night. The little legs of his boy that sat at the pinnacle crown of the towering cornucopia of gore began to wriggle and kick, as if excited with child’s jubilant glee, as if in dance. The bare bottom was spewing black tar and feces and urine in unceasing torrential fountains, the foul gushing undead spray of this abomination upon the earth. Like the hellmouth rendition of an angel weeping for mankind and his pain. 

The naked bottom, bare and at the top of the sepulchral abattoir spire, wept an unceasing fountain of hot frightened piss and shot cords of foul liquid fecal dark. The kicking legs gave movement to the whole horrid piece of meat that served as crown and abominated face and the rippling movement of the obscene and reanimated flesh made Widenmeyer sick to his stomach, he felt weak  in his knees which started to buckle as the crawling thing of living butchered child and little goat parts, came closer and closed the distance. He went down to the cobblestones and the dirt as the awful and hellspawn shape came upon him. 

He was alone. All else that were witness, the few, had fled. All else that would heed and know the scene that night watched from the safety of their window panes. From behind the sanctuary of their home windows looking glass. 

Through fragile translucence they watched the demented butchered shape spider crawl up and tower over the Widenmeyer goat farmer. 

The sepulchral thing of an abattoir universe wept foul damnation and bled. Organs and gore that were already a ruin and ripening to rot were struggling to pump and work properly again. The living stack of dripping and splurching butchery was lording over him now. All that was left  of his son, and the livelihood of his farm, all torn apart and violently mixed and made to walk again by necrophiled flame, defiled and here to haunt and terrorize him. For failing. 

For failing as a man. And as a father. 

As Widenmeyer bowed his head and begged God for forgiveness he did not believe he deserved nor would receive and waited for death, the necromantic fire of Frankenstein's vulpine child flickered within the butchery shape and died. The awful assemblage of human child and goat parts died a second death and collapsed and came apart. In a rain of severed limbs and animal and child gore. Guts. Organs. Viscera. The mutilated decapitated head…

… the bottom and wriggling legs… no longer dancing. Dead pale bare flesh no longer rippling with the nightmare of reanimation. 

Widenmeyer screamed. Insane. Mind flayed. And flaying. Coming apart. Shredding itself within a furnace skull. 

Shattered inside. Completely. 

All witness just watched and gazed through the windows. Watching as the whole of the stygian hellish scene, surreal and vile and alive and obscene and strange, fell apart to splatter and ruin and displaced parts. 

At the terrible center of the pile of lurid gore, a universe all around him, driving him further into madness, was a shrieking revenant of a man who used to be their neighbor. 

…

None tended the shrieking thing amongst the abattoir mess that used to be Widenmeyer until morning, when the sun held high in the safety of the blue sky once again. By that time he'd screamed his vocal chords to shreds. A misting spray of spittle and blood issued forth past his curled lips with his continued effort, despite the ruin of his throat by his own self inflicted injury. 

Brought on by the madness of the night.

Widenmeyer was led away. The pieces of dismembered parts, rotten and slick and still oozing with blood and the foulest of otherworld putrescence, were doused in oil and sage and set aflame. Right there. All refused to touch it. So none of the butchery was removed. 

All of it was burned and reduced to ash. Boy parts. And goat. 

It had to be. According to what could be remembered of ancient law, of the ancient weirding witchy ways, it had to be put to fire. All of the severed parts. 

They'd been under the forked touch of the darkening hand of the evil eye. 

Touched. 

Satannica Profundis …

would there be no end to the town’s torture?

The slopping pile of decaying gore, boy and animal, was put to cleansing flame and burned. The pile left a black smear when the fire had died down to red embers and then to smoldering ashes. 

A black mark of filth. Burnt into the cobblestones. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Disgraced. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Once more. 

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

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

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

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

Or troubled. 

Tormented. 

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

…

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

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

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

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

The innkeeper went on: –

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

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

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

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

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

For now. 

…

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

He really believed. In the beginning. At first. 

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

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

Nowhere – Suddenly it wouldn't exist at all.

Gone. 

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The sun.” 

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

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

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

Chop!

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

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

He didn't seem to care. 

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

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

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

He bid the woodsman farewell and went on. 

The woodsman was stifling laughter. 

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

…

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

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

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

Names. 

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

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

 

 Then something wet… like ripping. Splurching. Meaty sounds… 

… eager teeth, eager chewing and more ripping. Eager lips pulling and slurping a thick and heavy liquid from a messy bowl upset with ravenous abandon. 

It was all of it too perfectly clear out there in the mountain pass dark. 

The exile found something within himself. He drew blade, slowly. And then began to advance…

It wasn't long before he came upon it. 

…

First he found the horse's blood. A thick pool of it. The puddle of warm animal dark became a lurid smearing trail that went off and further up and into the mountain wild. The exile raised blade and went forward. Throwing up a desperate prayer to a Lord he hoped was still listening to a disgraced man such as he. Please, let my blunted blade accomplish something, let my old musket fire… please, God. Please let me at least die trying, with some semblance of decent bravery still held in my heart, still there, help me. Help me, Lord God. Help me. 

Please. 

…

He came upon the remains of the horse. Ripped apart and nearly unrecognizable outside of being the wet abattoir remnants of something that had once been living. He was scanning the surrounding immediate area, difficult in naught but the moonlight, when it charged from a place in the shadows that he'd just looked over and had sworn to be empty only a mere moment ago. 

It was huge. And moved like a jungle cat, its hulking size belied its great speed. It hit him with the force of a mountain fall and sent him to the dirt effortlessly. He gasped desperately for wind knocked from his chest as his eyes went wide and the face of the hulking mass became illuminated in the pale moonglow. 

It was wretched. Awful. He'd never before, even in battle and war, never before had he ever seen such an awful and ghastly face. 

Man. Bat. Rodent. Bred and mixed and commingled. Blasphemous. Intense. Patchwork sutures as if to remind the one hapless enough to be caught within eyesight that, yes indeed, this abominated and brutally hideous shape was indeed forged and made and crafted by demented hands and minds curdled and spoiled and filled to the brim with inexhaustible filth. Detritus demonia forged. Reforged. Remade.  The exile wished blindness on himself in this moment and in this moment knew that God did not care nor love him any longer. He was truly exiled and like Cain himself, he was truly doomed to the great black god, Pain. Endless suffering. Tireless woe. 

Cursed. To forever roam and wander and to encounter such as this. And in this way.  

He doesn't move or resist as the giant man of rodent bat face and stitches grabs him by the breastplate and then hauls him up as if he were a mere sack of dirty linen and nothing more. 

The hulking nosferatu thing of Frankenstein’s slab heaved the exile overhead and then threw him into the rotten trunk of a dead tree. It splintered and cracked, nearly exploding with the impact of the man in armor. It burst in a violent spew of sawdust spray and thin black sticks as he went through it and back to the frosted dirt, hard and merciless and without further buffer. The thing pounced and was on him again. 

And the exile knew that this was the end. Could taste it on his tongue and the flavor of the finale was putrescence. The savor of the end was corpse rot, that foul stench and taste that reminded man that he was really nothing but meat in the end. The soul could be pulled out of him. 

The Lord's Mercy manifested then. Darkness of the skull blanketed over the overloaded mind of the exiled knight and he fainted. The vulpine thing of Frankenstein’s table grinned obscenely and viscously and then barked its strange species of croaking laughter. Cackles from the hellmouth gates themselves. 

The man's forehead had split in a gash in the struggle. It trickled freely and bled like a riverbed overflowing in a landscape valley of old tired manflesh. The living dead patchwork giant opened its rank and black mucus laden, dripping and drooling mouth and unfurled its long and rotten tongue. It then licked and lapped at the blood flowing in grotesque fashion that was part lapping dog feeding and part sexual expression of lust: the other manifestation of animal hunger, all the more ravenous and bestial and powerful, particularly when commingled with the hungering need of the primitive drive to fill your gut. 

Slavering. Even as he licked and gently sucked and salivated warm reanimated animal drool that was black with undead otherworldly ichor. He coated and bathed his unconscious weary face, in long lapping strokes like a loyal mongrel. A baptism from the mouth and wet black-yellow tongue of the living dead thing that some mad doctor had made in wild bid for his own family's infamy and loathsome fearsome name. 

He didn't bother further with the lowly and cowardly creature in armor. He was like every other man, weak and fragile and only fit for food. Only really fit to be cattle, for greater power. Power such as he. 

And he'd already fed well. The horse and wolves and the vagabond he'd found earlier … the nosferatu vulpine thing licked its pallid green chops, stained a healthy lurid reddening shade of smeary berry color, wetting them in wolfen display. Pulling back from the drenched and thoroughly dog-slobbered face of the exile. 

The hulking sutured batfaced monster then prowled off and away. Deciding if he came across this puny creature again, then he would sup of his flesh and put the haggard man out of his weary misery. 

…

It was hours later when the battered and beaten exile knight awoke. Alive with groans and aches and agony and pain. He stumbled to his feet. Staggered. Stumbled again. 

Semi delirious. He staggered forward and continued up the treacherous pass, through the rough off-trail way of the trees. To the heart and the end of the mountainous way. To the great castle there. 

The exile hoped a great lord was waiting there. One that was good. And that would help him. 

God help him. 

The door was large, ornate and red and ancient. Like a bas relief, a great depiction of battles and dragons and long gone peoples and warriors and faces from far flung times. Eroded and worn down, faded to a more ghostly phantom visage for the epic and wild and yet now obscured vision from the past, a tale and vision poem made, wrought by artist's hands and chisel and stone and given the smearing final touch by the menacing and ever reaching hand of time. To deface with wind and rain and age and simultaneously perfect and finalize for this weary exile’s ghastly and frightful postmidnight excursion. Centuries after its original creation. Its faded face was the perfect visage of the night.  

He came to the towering entrance, grasped one of the giant ornate demon faced bangers and knocked with the last of his fading and feeble strength. Three times. 

Then he collapsed. At the foot of the door. 

Soon a man came and quietly answered. Slowly opening the great door. He looked down and smiled at the collapsed exiled bastard knight. 

The assistant helped him to his feet and inside, telling him not to worry. His master would be quite happy to take him in for the night. 

The Countess will be pleased, he said. And the exile didn't give it much thought. All too happy to just be inside. 

…

He collapsed near the hearth of a roaring and well kept fire, a blaze within the heart of stone. Bats and wolves and toads and devil faced winged Panshaped things of black masonry stood silent sentry and leered at him from about the fireplace and all around the vast guest room. In the glow of its warmth, upon an old rug infused and riddled with thick ancient grey dust. He breathed it all in, deeply as he dozed. The warmth. The dust. The history. 

Whilst asleep: He began to have a strange dream or vision. He was still in the castle of present. Still safe inside. But he was wandering the stone halls and corridor ways now. Alone. His sword was drawn and it was sharper than it had been in years. He was walking along the passages of the great castle, dragging the keen edge of the weapon along the walls of stone as he went along. A scraping sound followed and accompanied him everywhere he went like discordant religious chanting of a new yet ancient language made, made from striking the stones. 

There would be fire! his dreaming mind told him. But in the arms of the cherished slumber, the exile did not care in the slightest. He was too exhausted. Even in here. He was too tired for anything any longer and was thus at the slavish mercy of all and all in it. 

He went on walking slowly through the corridors. Dragging the blade upon the walls. Scraping. Harsh sound, continuous. But that wasn't all. The wall was bleeding. 

Everywhere the edge of his polished blade passed opened up the stone like smooth and tender flesh. He left a long red slicing trail along the masonry of the inner walls of the castle keep as he slowly zombi-crawled along. The red line of welling and dripping vivid scarlet blood caught the flames of the various torches and candles about the innermost halls and stairs of the ancient and bleeding castle. Causing it to darkle into more lurid splashes of red than back to stygian drippings. 

The blood ran. He kept on his way. 

Eventually the dream, the vision, the scene faded.

 Faded away to a swallowing black that was so sudden and complete he could not recall the moment when it seized him. He merely reawoke on the dusty ancient rug. Lying before the roaring blaze crackling and glowing within the stone hearth. Goblin and animal faces still leered in stone as he sat up. The assistant was tending some sewing in a large ornate cushioned chair not far from him. He was laughing. Eyes on his work. 

“My master will be with you shortly, she is distraught at the moment you see. She is surrounded by enemies. Hostile world. Her daughter has gone out to play in the woods and is yet to return. She grows anxious. But nonetheless you, her guest, she will soon be host. Just a little longer, rest up some more, sir, but if you do get up again for a stroll and gander about the place I only ask that you don't make such a mess again. Blood everywhere. " The assistant chortled laughter, pricked his finger on the sewing needle and it began to bleed. 

His laughter only increased. He held up the finger from his work and said again, "Everywhere, blood everywhere. Such a mess.” He sucked his finger, "The master will be with you shortly. Fret not." 

And the exile fell again into darkness, watching the assistant suck on his finger. 

…

The most vivid and unearthly nightmare dreams held him for a spell, when he did finally awake all he could remember was eyes and stalks and teeth. And it was a strange and enchanting whisper, a woman, that bade him back out from the cave and sanctum of slumber. It said: – 

"The new impaler.” 

And then the exile awoke once more with a startled gasp, bathed in sweat. The fire was still roaring and glowing orange in the hearth and she was upon him. 

His breastplate was gone. His old and worn tunic was torn and her face was hidden. Buried in his chest. He felt something warm down there. Warm. And wet. And sucking. 

The sensation of her mouth upon his flesh and working the inner raw of him was ungodly. The feeling was an abominated commingling clash of the gratifying heat of sexual climax and the popping of pus from swollen infected flesh, released. 

Both draining and lurid and yet entirely pleasurable. He wanted her there. The exile. He wanted her face buried there in the wound about his chest. About the flesh and above the sad and shattered remnants of his long broken heart. 

The thought to push her away never entered his mind. Never formed thought. He merely watched the top of her head, her beautiful cascade of nightfall black hair, raven. 

He watched the Countess suck his wound until again he faded to darkness. 

This time he did not dream. Anything at all. 

…

When he came out of blackness again she had crawled up his form and was now about his throat. The warmth was there now too, but even more wet and like fire. And sharper, more painful. The draw felt heavier and more lurid and sickening. His guts twisted and he felt the tug of revulsion at the back of his throat. He shivered. But yet still … the pleasure. The animal ecstacy and euphoric drunken shroud were so heavy and strong, as to have never before been felt, not by the likes of such as he. Exile. Strandcast. Filthy wanderer. 

He fell asleep again. Even heavier. Even darker.

Obsidian folds. Inescapable. Boundless. Plain. 

…

They were both sitting up and seated in old fine cushioned chairs by the fire the next time he did awake. 

He came out of it slow, slowly rising and righting himself in his seat as he looked all around and at her and wondered to himself, was it all just a dream? 

Is this just a dream as well? 

As if hearing him, she said: “There's no dreaming here, exile. I assure you. But you've nothing to fear here. Death would be a release for you anyways, wouldn't it?" 

He tried to speak But he felt so weak and feeble and spent. He mouthed senselessness instead. 

Zaleska smiled. False warmth. The wolfen vulpine eyes were where the truth lived. Power. Dominance. Lust. And most prominent of all within the dark pits set inside shock white death: Hunger. 

She said: “I can offer you so much more. And you can give me much in return, what I require. You can help me bolster my ranks and defend my castle walls and lands from renegades and invaders. Tis your true charge, is it not, exile? Can I not free you from your wandering bondage?" 

She stood. 

“I will…” 

She advanced. 

The exile did not move from his seat. He was unable. He couldn't fight back as she produced ancient occult dagger and drew forth her own vile and demon tainted blood, down the forearm in a long and widening gash. Lurid and dark and wet and open. Gaping. She forced his mouth to it as he sat helpless and he choked and drank and struggled feebly at first. But then gave in. 

And drank. 

All the while the Countess Zaleska cooed to her new servant at his unholy bastard christening, his brand new exile and bondage and freedom from humanity and humankind and all of its worst and its woes… 

She cooed to him soft as he drank: –

“My new servant… my new baby … the new impaler … all and just for mommy …

“All and just for mommy." 

TO BE CONTINUED...

The howl of the graveyard all around Florin was mournful and felt lost. Defeat. Like the place, the whole of the cemetery land was weeping for him and his pain and all of the pain of wasted time and fruitless effort, all of the loss of all of the others back home. Everyone else. He couldn't believe it… after all this time and trying, all of this riding and travel and peril and heart breaking hope, all of it was for naught…

All of it was for nothing. 

Van Helsing was dead. 

The wrapped and bandaged man watched the young rider from the village dying from the onslaught of vampiric disease from behind his dark black glasses, his shades and special lenses, and said nothing. 

He just watched the young man as he knelt in the dirt. And stared at the grave with great sorrow and hurt and loss and torture writ all over and about his tired and haggard face. His young and harried and damaged worn visage was a perfect reflection of the tombstone grave. 

And something within his own weary chest stirred then. Something not touched upon nor thought over, happily neglected for years as he'd neglected this old graveyard and the burial plot before them now. The hole in the earth that was filled with his friend.  

He remembered…

How the doctor had served and helped so many, in his chosen field of medicine and in the more abstract murk of the psychological field of mental malady. How he'd gone even further than all of that, from the kindness and bravery of his own inexhaustible heart, his blessed Dutch soul…

He'd fought and done battle with monsters. Fought the living dead forces of the nightscape on their own damned battlefields and had sent them back to the hellfire chasms from whence they'd came. 

In the end he'd died of the thing no purely mortal soul and its expiring coil can out run or overcome or endure. The slow blade of age had eventually caught up and came in calm in the night. The vampire slayer had died in his bed. Finally at peace. 

The strange man wrapped and hidden by bandage from sight had been there. The old professor had tried so hard to help him too, in the end. Before it was all over. He'd tried to help him, in so many ways. 

By the pharmaceutical and alchemical hand, at first. Then the gentle and calming aid of friendship. A true companion. Who at the very least, had tried, really tried to understand…

Finally the strange guide of wrappings and overcoat and wide brimmed hat sauntered over to the poor fellow and touched his shoulder. 

“I'm sorry. Truly. Let's go." 

After a moment of further hopeless gazing… Florin picked himself up and followed. 

And then silence returned to the cemetery once again. 

But then something… something that had been watching, low and in the stinking mire of black porridge sludged earth, tempered and commingle mixed with years and years of sloughing rotten corpse putrescence, began to slowly rise and pull itself free from the foul quagmire of its birth. 

A wretched semblance of a face began to take shape with the rest of a ruined bipedal semblage, slowly and painfully rising and trying to pull itself free… trying to take after the two graveyard intruders and swallow them in its filth and- 

A crossbow bolt suddenly shot through the muckman's pouring sludging face just as it was beginning to develop. The arrow, silver, and coated in the proper mixture of garlic and wolfsbane and nightshade, obliterated the foul green flame of unholy life flickering demonically within its abominated manshaped liquid mass. 

The muckman of the graveyard melted back into the rest of the old and putrid cemetery sludge as another one that had been watching stepped over him and the grave of Van Helsing. The grave that the two visitors he'd been watching had come to visit. 

The stranger reloaded his crossbow as he thought. Considered. 

Then followed. 

…

The Countess roared! 

A sound that was beyond the mere auditory. Beyond the mere threshold of the decibel level. The assistant and little Carmella felt their bones first rattle and then palsy and quake down to the atom, as if the whole of their meat sack frames and skeletal structures threatened to shatter and burst and snap all at once. 

Castle Dracula did shake too. And shed great clouds and stone breath exhaled and exhumed in a rising and surrounding column of ancient choking dust, in a thick deathly fog. Mortar and loose stone came apart and fell and cascaded down as the mountains that surrounded the great and broken jagged battlements began to join them in their unearthly tremble. 

The Countess roared her outrage! Her loss!

The assistant and the little living dead girl tried to beg her to stop, but they could not be heard over the din of their master. It was apocalyptic, that hellspawned sound. 

The little child-shaped wraith could feel the sudden rupture of many blood vessels within and about her living dead person. She began to bleed profusely from the damaged and splitting membrane of her eyes and the vibrant lurid violence of the sudden flowing scarlet poured forth feverishly like a blasphemous rendition of a saint's holy shedding tears. The red poured down the demoniacal lie of the youth of her face from the rupturing soft jelly of her lying child's eyes. Hot and running red began to burst and flow forth from under the nails, at the finger tips, the gums, all about her small teeth and sharp fangs. The ears! Out of her small pale ears came something like a high powered arterial spray of a darker shade, almost black. In thick viscous cords that darkled crimson as they spat. 

Carmilla just shot dark and bled and writhed in a pain she'd never felt before or thought possible, the assistant too. Both of them. They abandoned their shouts and pleas for the assault to stop and just left themselves to the dark tumult of the whims and mercy of their master. 

The Countess eventually ceased her ungodly caterwaul. At her leisure. She then gazed at her two servants on the castle floor before her, beneath her. Eyed them both severely. 

And then she belted, yelling and letting loose her commands: –

“The both of you! Worthless! Earn your keep within my castle walls and my lordly and supreme favor, go out! Into the mountains! The pass! The town! Find me the one that would pretend to my power and thus insult me, this night! Go!”

…

One of the last and fragile remnant gaggle of town peasants were gathered together in the evening in the town square, discussing one of their own… young Florin, his trembling parents were there, when Doctor Praetorius rode into town on horseback. Straight and composed. Regal and immaculate in the small and humble thoroughfare astride his pale horse. 

The few left to the village eyed him suspiciously… some viciously already. Just waiting for the first sign of trouble at the first sight of this riding interloper. Like taut and coiled things, cats ready to pounce and fly… ready to maim and tear this interloping snow-haired man. 

Praetorius, overhearing their worried talk and discussion, the blubbering and sobs of the parents of the young rider concerned, and not caring: spoke loudly and clearly so’s to be heard over the anxious chatter of the humble and small mountain village people. 

“Excuse me! Yes, thank you! I wonder if any of you pleasant creatures could help as to tell me if someone has been through your humble and charming town, a Countess Marya Zaleska? Her and her man, earlier this year, some months ago now. Please, she's very important to me, I must find her as soon as possible.” 

At first none wanted to speak. They all just continued to glare and eye the interloping loudmouth with thinly veiled hate and suspicion. 

But then Bela, Florin’s father, remembering his brave son and his own desperate prayers to God and fortune for his safety and success, stepped forward and answered the tall thin lofty man who refused to dismount and come down from his horse. 

“You need to leave, stranger. We do not know who you seek, but please, for your own sake and ours, leave.”

Praetorius just laughed in his face. Something humble Bela had not expected. 

“And why should I leave? Are you going to make me?”

Bela said nothing but tensed. 

Someone else amongst the small gathered bunch spoke out, not too loudly…

“There’s wickedness alive and loose in this place as of late, stranger…”

Praetorius only laughed again, rearing his horse by rein towards the dark mouth of the great mountain pass. 

“And what of there? What of Borgo Pass? What of Castle Dracula!? What of there, pleasant creatures …! What of there ..!?”

And he galloped away and towards the entrance to the mountain way, all out. Bellowing laughter at the pathetic and frightened little gathering of small and lowly dirt farmers. For all their semi informed and hackneyed haphazard understanding and knowledge of the dark and its arts and its necromantic language, it did not save them. For they would always just be fucking peasants in the end. 

Doctor Praetorius made for the wild of the mountains atop his pale and tireless horse. Already knowing he would find her at the top. 

…

The hulking vulpine nosferatu thing of Frankenstein’s surgical table traveled the wild and treacherous terrain of rock with praeternatural ease and cunning. Innate. He strode and galloped-leapt and launched himself through the woods and trees and cold. Crawling and climbing up the rock faces with dangerous hungry animal speed and inhuman power. He hunted the wolves and the deer and small game with ease. Snatching their wild squirming forms with his undead and bestial necromantic speed and ripping them apart with his pure strength. Bathing in the wild animal baptism of their fresh and steaming red even as he drank and fed on their still struggling dying forms. The blood drank in through the green mottled skin of the creature in addition to his gaping maw. As if every possible part and all of the pores of his repurposed graveyard flesh thunderclapped back to life was a thirsting ravenous hungry mouth. Yearning and wishing to be fed. 

Henry Frankenstein watched. Proud. So proud of his greatest creation. Thinking of ways to make him even greater and enhance his awesome power. 

He watched the hulking patchwork batfaced mass of suture and corpse colored green-blue… and thought to himself, with pride and wonder for himself and his strange son of dark science and the necromantic…

Perfect! He’s completely superhuman! …

And he knew with smug pride and a faint head, he still hadn't fully recovered from his catatonia and loss of blood to his necrophile son, he knew that he would without a doubt go down in the dark annals of his strange family’s history as the greatest and most ambitious and singly most accomplished of the Frankenstein Men!

Later …

They made a fire. Frankenstein roasted a bit of wolf meat as his creation tore into the rest of the dead wild bleeding thing of snow colored fur, and ripped and drank and slurped and chewed. 

Frankenstein watched as he cooked over the fire. Studying. 

Thinking over what the massive thing of reanimated design had already told him. Carefully. 

Finally he said: –

“What is it that you want here, in these mountains? You've spoken of a song, one that calls to you. What does it say?” 

The creation ceased its tearing into the fresh bloody carcass for a moment and said, croaked: “I hear it at all times, Frankenstein, but most clearly at night. When I shut my eyes and all else out and open the flicker of mind in the resalvaged brain you gave me, I hear it clearly. And it is a song of power. Heralding. Heretical. Harbinger. It is a wide and open throated chord, discordant in its choral chant that sings to me and bade that I come to take the power alive in these rocks that is so much like mine. Take. Devour it. And make it as my own. … much like how you first designed and made me father, am I not right? Did you not grave rob the great Count and give me these…” 

He gestured with a splayed and bloody four fingered hand to the pair of vulpine wolfen fangs, as of pearl and gleaming amongst the rest of the wet and black ruin, oozing dark ebon ichor green with the blood of the fallen animal on which it now feasted. 

Frankenstein almost found himself entranced with the sight of them… in the gathering and deepening dark, lost in the memory of the frozen river and black sulphur mountain…

… now here they were, again in another wild and tumultuous mountain pass. 

But Frankenstein wasn't afraid. He had greater than the late Egnaw as his servant and companion now… 

Although, he'd have to be careful. These things of stitched parts and arcane black magic and witch science seem to always come back… unpredictable. 

He'd have to be careful. Test this one. See how it behaved. He'd already observed much. 

Doctor Henry Frankenstein nodded and bit into the smoky haunch of wolf meat he'd spitted and roasted. Smiled. 

“Yes. I did do that. For you. Before you were ever even born. Your birthright that I claimed and gave, your very first birthday present, my son…” 

The assistant spied from the forest line of trees and in the dark. Watching the mad doctor and his vulpine thing about their shared fire for a little while longer…

Then he faded back into the thicker growth and deeper black, back to the castle and his Countess. 

…

Back at the cramped and stuffed little humble abode of the strange bandaged man, young Florin was resolute. And his odd host of wrappings and mystery was exasperated. 

Impetuous young… fools. They were always fools. Always were and would be. And he had been no better. His own mad ideas and bravery and disregard for consequence had led him to his current ailment. One that had now dominated his life and destiny since he’d been little older than the young rider. He thought to himself but wouldn't say to the boy: Don’t Goddamn yourself… don’t recklessly consign yourself to a fate and torment you could scarcely understand… foolish boy. 

Things might’ve played out differently if he had. But then … Mayhap not.    

They sipped at tea and debated the matter. The bandaged man behind his stygian lenses of glass, staring deeply at the young man and refusing to falter, said thus: –

“You’ve done what you can, to return now, and empty handed, without anyone to help you that knows what they are doing, it would be suicide, young man. Please, do the last thing available to you and do right by yourself. Go, find a new home and leave that damned place. No happiness can come from any place that lives in the shadow of Castle Dracula. Anyone still living in that Godforsaken hamlet, any family or friend you may still have that still lives, would want the same of you. They would want you to save yourself.”  

The young man was silent for some time. Not touching his cooling cup of chai. Finally he looked the man of wrappings in his hidden face and gaze of black glasses and said flatly –

“Florin.”

A beat.

The unseen face hidden by surgical wrapping was puzzled. “What?” he said. Flummoxed. 

The youth said: “My name is Florin. My father’s name is Bela and my mother’s Anastasia and my friends Dodger and Karras and Erin are all just as scared and just as in danger now, moreso likely, than they were when I first set out. They’re no doubt more scared than I am, sitting here with you. Wasting more time.”

Florin stood. 

“They’re my folk, my people, sir. People that matter to me, they're the whole world. They are the people that I've known my whole life and that I can't forsake, like how your friend Professor Van Helsing mattered to you. And I’m not gonna turn tail and leave em abandoned. Now, if you won’t help me and no one can help me then it doesn't matter. I’ve gotta go back and try to help them anyway I can.”

Florin turned to go to the door, to his horse reined outside, tethered to a post on the lonely bent and crooked little hill. 

The wrapped and hidden mystery man stood and protested: “Don’t! The night is here and you should know better by now that there's lots of hungry things out there.”

Florin whirled, “I'm not wasting anymore time sitting here with you and being afraid! You haven’t been there! And you don’t know what I left behind! I’m not gonna run away and hide like you and sit here and-”

A horrible sound cut off their argument. A horse’s shrill and powerful dying shriek.

The pair, young man and surgically wrapped, held silent. Eyes as wide as their ears. Their hearts quickening.  

A horrid and repulsive gurgling sound followed. 

And then a splurch. Like a great swallowing mud sucking something under. 

Then more horrid wet and liquid splurching sounds. Just outside the house. 

Not far from the front door. 

“What the…” began Florin, as the glass to one of the windows of the small shack suddenly shattered and exploded. 

Florin and his strange host whirled!

They watched in collective shock and horror as an arm of foulest putrescence reached in through the shattered glass. Dripping and sloughing sludge as it reached desperately and blindly for some kind of violent purchase. 

The pair cried out in shock together as the rest of the windows shattered and more putrid arms of muck and graveyard sludge came in. The house shook, battered from outside on all faces, all walls sieged as they grouped and poured forth and pressed in on the little shack. Pouring out of the nearby cemetery that the pair of intruders had dared to disturb earlier that day. Now the night had come, was nigh and upon them in the form of more and more rising and splurching forward abominations of bipedal shape and miserable and cruel aspect and design. They moaned in anguish. 

They all together, the muckmen horde, began to give rise to a wailing moan of despair and loss and woe.

Florin's eyes stung from the stench but were nonetheless helpless to pull themselves away from the sight. Within the reaching arms and sloughing faces of black mire and putrescence he could pick out and discern individual and displaced parts and bones, fingers, femurs, partially decomposed eyes and organs and faces… all of them running and swimming  through the sloughing dripping gushing dance of motion in the sludge that composed the rough man shapes of foul graveyard mire that now beset them.  Trapped. 

The poor young rider couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe that this was how it ended and that he would die so far from home and in the hands of repulsive monsters born of an entirely separate patch of likewise cursed earth. He started to pray for his mother and father and Erin and the others, throwing up one last silent one to the Lord that they just might be safe and find themselves a way out…

A call from his strange host brought him out of his silent prayers and stricken gaze of fascination and horror. His eyes were still watering when he whirled as the bandaged man called: –

“Here! Over here, boy!" 

The bandaged man was standing over a cellar-style trap door. Open. He had a traveller's bag and a new coat and hat and he was beckoning the young man in. 

Florin needed no further invitation. He ran for the trap door and dove for the hidden passageway beneath. The bandaged man that was his host followed. The trap slammed shut behind them as the walls of the small and besieged little shack began to cave in and swallow. 

The place smashed in and they swarmed inside the falling debris and crumbling structure. As the place fell in and collapsed, crashing all around the muckmen of graveyard putrescence mud, they let loose one last ghastly wail. So angry that the intruders had escaped them. 

…

Carmella thought the snow white haired man looked funny. Riding haughty and unawares boldly through her master’s mountain pass. So thin. Skeletal, really. As if already premade and ready for the bosom soil and chambered charnel rot of the grave. His shock of white hair atop his slender needle frame gave her the impression of a scarecrow. She didn't know exactly why, but it was something in that look. Her mother, her old one from before and long gone now, had used to tell her a scary bedtime story concerning an angry and vengeful scarecrow that took to walking at night, prowling and hunting for children out and caught past the time to be in bed and beneath the sheets. 

Carmella smiled, amongst the cover of treeline and shadow, remembering. Watching the haughty intruder gallop through the mountains, the smug look of a man that's already tasted victory for far too long and far too often all over his stern and gaunt visage. She licked her lips. 

The smile deepened as she coiled. Readying to pounce. 

He and his galloping ride reached her crosspoint in the road and she flew. A bat-child creature with flickering feral pink/red dots of flames set within the stretching animal jackal face about the eyes. Her lips curled back wolfen as her sharp pointed teeth began to lengthen and grow. 

But cunning eyes, quick, caught the flicker of nearly concealed hunting movement in the trees and had clocked it just in time and anticipated its potential threat. 

The form atop his ride quarter-turned as a hand that had left the reins and pulled pistol free from leather came up now, taking quick aim and firing off a loud and thundercracking shot that echoed and filled the dark natural chamber of the mountain pass. 

Carmilla screamed and let loose a child's cry as the lancing shot caught her midair and the clash of gunfire smashed into her little demoniac and half animal transformed body and sent it crashing into the earth. 

There in the dirt she writhed and shrieked and beat half developed leathery wings, pink and ebon dark and pale and discolored. Black and red shot from the gunshot in her shoulder and her eyes and mouth. The bullet continued to burn and sear. Cooking. As if alive with heat and flame, as if a star that still smoldered and thrived. 

Silver. 

The silver bullet in her shoulder smoked and burned as if a coal set in the blood and flesh and shattered bone of her unholy living dead person. It glowed inside the craterous wound and she felt it. She spat more blood and necrophile bile and shrieked gurgled child sounds. Cries. Sobbing. Mixed ungodly and blasphemous with wounded animal bat screeches. 

Like a plague infested rat caught and held underneath the bootheel of a sailor. 

Doctor Praetorius smiled. Holstered his pistol as he watched the demon child writhe in the dirt. He dismounted and reached into his large riding coat as he sauntered forwards. To the squirming screaming child thing with a smoking and cord spewing wound. 

Carmella's pain intensified considerably when he finally stood over and lorded over her fallen frame. He held a cross in one hand, aloft out and over her crying face. The agony that shot through her entire form was beyond anything she'd dared thought to venture. A wretched torture she'd never thought she would ever know. 

Praetorius spoke loudly and clearly and the little strigoica were-child of demoniacal wraith aspect heard him clearly despite her overwhelming horror and shock and pain. 

“One of her little servants, no doubt. You could do better, or mayhap she should is the point. In either case if you don't want me to bury this goddamn thing into your rotten little blasphemous lie of a face, then you'll take me to your master. Take me to Castle Dracula or I'll put a few more silver shots in you and take my time as I feed you this thing!” 

TO BE CONTINUED…

The following are text messages sent by Scott Edwards to his brother, Eric, over the ten days that preceded his demise.

Hey Eric, I think I know what’s causing my insomnia. And you won’t believe me when I say this but there’s someone, nay something in my house that prevents me from sleeping. I know, I know, it sounds fucking crazy, but I’m taking my pills. I hadn’t had an episode in months. Everything is under control.

Sent 22:22 May 1^st 2021

I know it’s real and I know it’s here. I think it sustains itself on my dreams, or some kind of brainwaves emitted during sleep. I looked it up, man, it’s gotta be it. I see it at the edge of the bedroom door.

Sent 22:24 May 1^st 2021

I’ve skipped sleep last night and tonight it looks fucking pissed. It didn’t like that I’m not sleeping.

Sent 22:25 May 1^st 2021

Hey Eric, I didn’t sleep last night again, I’m so fucking tired man… thank god there’s autocorrect on these things. I can’t even type right. That thing looks tired and angrier than ever.

Sent 20:43 May 2^nd 2021

Dude, I think I saw wings on that thing… it looks beat, I do too, I haven’t slept for the third straight night in a row. I’m fighting for my life here, but I know I’ll outlast the fucker.

Sent 21:12 May 3^rd 2021

Still medicated, by the way, don’t worry

Sent 21:13 May 3^rd 2021

I feel sick man, I feel dizzy and everything hurts. I don’t think the meds are working anymore, words are materializing before me eyes now. Though that might be

Send 12:25 May 4^th 2021

Just my imagination, its not like the other times, I am feeling pretty beaten up and that dream eater thing, I now see it

Sent 13:40 May 4^th 2021

All day long, Eric, it’s stalking me man… I’m scared…

Sent 14:10 May 4^th 2021

Could come over, bro, just hang out for a bit?

Sent 00:05 May 5^th 2021

Fuck the pills…

Sent 01:01 May 6^th 2021

 

Pills not working…

Sent 01:02 May 6^th 2021

Making everything worse…

Sent 01:03 May 6^th 2021

Man and wings

Sent 01:04 May 6^th 2021

Mirroring

Sent 01:05 May 6^th 2021

Mirror

Sent 01:05 May 6^th 2021

Make it fucking stop speaking make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop

Sent 03:33 May 6^th 2021

Haven’t moved all day, Eric, I’m just swimming on the floor here. Can’t move, stuck. Can’t eat either, puked everything. Everything hurts. Feels like dozing off, but won’t. Can’t even anymore.

Sent 07:50 May 7^th 2021

(A voice message containing twenty seconds of pure silence)

Sent 15:44 May 8^th 2021

You hear that? He sounds just like all those things in my head

Sent 16:17 May 8^th 2021

Tell me you hear that, Eric

Sent 16:17 May 8^th 2021

Tell me I’m not crazy

Sent 16:17 May 8^th 2021

Please

Sent 16:18 May 8^th 2021

Hey, Eric, I just noticed, you aren’t answering my messages, is everything alright?

Sent 02:25 May 9^th 2021

I love you, Eric, know that? I love you… and I’m sorry I’ve been on your ass these passed few days.

Sent 03:25 May 9^th 2021

I feel like shit, is this what it feels like to be dying? I must look like shit too; that fucking thing that keeps me awake is looking like he’s about to wither away. 

Sent 04:00 May 9^th 2021

Soon everything soon

Sent 04:01 May 9^th 2021

He’s smiling

Sent 10:13 May 9^th 2021

WHY THE FUCK IS HE SMILING

Sent 01:42 May 10^th 2021

mAKE IT STOP

Sent 01:42 May 10^th 2021

JESUS

Sent 01:42 May 10^th 2021

HE’S BACK TO NORMAL

Sent 01:42 May 10^th 2021

WHY THE FUCK IS HE SMILING

Sent 01:42 May 10^th 2021

WHY IS IT SO WIDE

Sent 01:43 May 10^th 2021

Mommy my chest hurts

Sent 02:11 May 10^th 2021

I’m scared

Sent 02:15 May 10^th 2021

I’m going to lie down

Sent 03:05 May 10^th 2021

Mommy don’t let the smiling men take me

Sent 03:33 May 10^th 2021

They’re scary mommy, I don’t want to go

Sent 03:33 May 10^th 2021

Don’t let them take me to Eric’s room

Sent 03:45 May 10^th 2021

I don’t really care anymore, I’m going to bed

Sent 03:55 May 10^th 2021

Mr. Edwards passed away shortly after texting his dead brother, Eric, who passed away in 2018 from pancreatic cancer, that he’s going to bed. About a week after Mr. Edwards’s demise, his neighbors reported a foul smell coming from his apartment.

He was found dead in his bed; the cause of death was registered as a suicide by sleep deprivation as a result of a severe psychotic break. Contrary to his claims, Mr. Edwards had not been prescribed his antipsychotic medication for the 4 months before his passing.

In addition to Mr. Edwards’ remains, the authorities have located the mutilated corpses of at least fifteen different pigeons throughout the apartment.

Feathers were found protruding between Mr. Edwards teeth and nasal cavity.

A heavily bandaged hand held the letter, much weight that was the heavy load of memory throughout all of his form, likewise the same. 

Heavily wrapped. 

He gazed through his mask of white surgical dress and his dark spectacles, specially made, down at the letter addressed to him. One that he'd already read now a half dozen times. 

The message was short. 

It said: –

My dear friend, 

We've both known evil and darkness before. We've both known the face of the demon at different times, and with help, we combat it. And have not conquered, but beaten back. Subdued. As it seems to be the only remedies for wickedness and monstrosity in this life are but temporary. 

A shame. 

But now the time is at hand again, dear friend. The boy I've sent to you needs the aid of the one who has helped us before and so many in his life. I send this young man to you, not lightly. He, his town, family and friends and neighbors, they need the doctor. They need Professor Van Helsing. 

I know not where he currently dwells, only that wherever you are these days, he is not far. Nor is Talbot, but this matter doesn't concern him. I've difficulty trusting him. He is wild. Consult and involve him with this at your own risk and discretion. You know of what I mean. 

Take this youth to Van Helsing, enlist his help, and then fly back to the young man's region. And trust me when I insist you and the good doctor do help, and do make haste. I've been through this country lately. It has become a dark and thundered land of the dead. Veiled in white that may be mist or may be the phantoms past that will no longer rest. 

Inquire with the youth, he will tell you the rest. 

Your dear friend. - Q

P.S. And take no worry, I've divulged nothing of your own identity to the boy, he knows nothing of your name or condition. That is yours to explain if you so wish. 

… He set the letter down again. The gypsy hadn't written in years. And since he'd sent someone… it had been even longer. 

The boy looked at him from across the table. There wasn't much room in the stuffed little cottage, lonely on the little hill that was so much like a bent and crooked nose. The space was stuffed with bookcases likewise filled. Scientific apparatus both arcane and modern and state of the art was crammed in with the books, the humble kitchen space and bed. It all looked the same to the young rider, now far from home, strange and alien. 

Florin tried not to stare but the man was so peculiar. He seemed and behaved gentleman enough, but his odd bandaged appearance and the strange dark shades that were his spectacles… like special glasses to keep the sun out. 

Or perhaps to keep from anyone being able to see in. For all he knew there were no eyes behind this mask of white wrappings and ebon glass. 

He tried to dismiss it as obvious injury: maiming or burns, something of the sort and be on with the business at hand. But he couldn't help his mind. Or his stare. 

The bandaged man who might help minded though. He was growing silently exasperated. With the boy, his eyes, the gypsy, the letter… all of it! All of a sudden and dropped in his lap! And he didn't bother to make trouble himself anymore! But still! egad! it was always there and ready to find him…! 

He then grew exasperated with himself. You know better, he chided himself. You know better, that's not the way the old man would want you, out of sorts and forgetting what you're supposed to have finally learned in all this wretched time. No. You're just old yourself now. And tired. And…

And unfortunately the one who must bear very bad news. 

“I don't know how to tell you this," said the strange bandaged man to Florin, “so you better come with me." 

And got up. His bandaged frame, robed, went to a coatrack near the door for a wide brimmed hat, a fedora that Florin had seen city folk wear from time to time. 

The bandaged man went out, telling the young rider to follow. 

“Don't worry. It's not far" said the manshape wrap of bandaged white. “Your horse will be safe." 

Florin followed him out. 

Hoping against hope and praying fervently inside, please! That they might have finally found him. That he might have finally found their savior! 

Young Florin didn't know but the man of wrappings and black glass eyes was leading him to the local cemetery. 

…

The creation roared. 

And the thunder roared back. 

The black grey sky seemed to crack and boom, the sound of a world splitting in two. The rain cascaded down merciless and ceaseless and fell in great torrential sheets. Blanketing and filling and flooding the lands below. The creation and his remaining pair of bloodbags had finally gained the mountains. His prodigious and incredible strength had pulled them up and into the heart of stone of the Carpathian rock. 

The horse flesh and blood had helped. 

Egnaw could not believe his eyes. He watched, mutilated and torn and delirious from blood-loss, he watched in awe as the creation commanded the sky. The storm. 

The creation roared once more and the sky again trembled and quaked. Lightning daggered at the command of Frankenstein’s nosferatu monster creation.

Even in such pain and knowing he was going to die, Egnaw could not help his pure awe and wonder at the sight. He and his master had succeeded. They had made a god. 

A god that could call lightning and thunderclaps. A god that could command and rend the heavens. He could tear them. He could command them now and so he could supplant the Lord that had for far too long now dominated them. 

They would be his! And all that crawled beneath it. All that lived… was now his, now that he was alive. 

And the master and I had made him. Birthed him. Forged a god from dead rotten parts left to putrefy in moist graveyards… 

Despite the pain, the sight and what it filled him with… Egnaw smiled. Proud. Of himself. 

And for the creation. 

He watched the patchwork giant of dead tissue command the skies and all of their bomb blast of cannonade thunder. He watched every shrieking roar from reforged flesh tear a new wound in the greyed and darkened heavens. 

Tears were joining the rain drops there. His lips quivered. 

Frankenstein watched too and continued to feign sleep. 

…

Carmilla was so excited. She loved the rain. 

“Oooh! It's so wonderful! Is God crying, Countess? Is the Lord and His Son and all of His Angels in heaven weeping for what we've done?" 

Zaleska smiled. She loved to entertain the little girl. 

“Yes, dear. We've slaughtered so many of His children that like a mother over the grave of a small one, He and His collection of winged slaves cannot help themselves!" 

The pair laughed. Filling the castle with their bright and heartless cruel laughter. Castle Dracula was so alive with it these days. 

They watched the rain. The town nearly drowning in it. Anybody caught outside and stuck would be miserable. It was delightful. 

Hilarious. 

The both of them thought so. The assistant came in, pushing a long rolling surgical table. 

He said with a smile, 

“I'm so happy to see you two in such good cheer, I take it we might be dining in tonight?” 

He motioned to the rolling cold metal slab. 

Bound by leather strap to the rolling slab in the dark was poor Malachi. Caught by the assistant and his chloroform whilst out tending his family's lone and shriveled sow. Letting her feed on fresher green that'd just taken to sprout the other day. He was stripped of all garment and lie there bound and naked on the cold metal of the surgical table, nonetheless sweating. Basting and bathing in his own perspiring fear, their favorite flavor. The girls. The master and her prodigy. Zaleska floated over to the bound and prostrate man and Carmella trotted afterwards. 

“Now Carmella," began the Countess, “I want you to pay special attention this time, there's a slower and more delicate way of dining inside and enjoying the song of the storms. Like a roast bird or pig or a bushel of delectable fruit, there are certain softer parts, sweeter more tender meats. More ripe…" 

She cooed. 

Her clawed hands came in, pale and sharp and bent to rip and rend and tear. 

Poor Malachi's mouth had been gagged with the same leather straps that held him to the slab, Zaleska ripped it free with one hand now as the other seized his manhood and tore it from his person with the ease of a practiced butcher's abattoir technique of brutal precision, merciless and surgical. 

She relished the screams that rang out and were pulled from him. Inarticulate howls of a man shrieking wounded brutalized animal shrieks.

The Countess held the poor peasants bloody mass of mangled manhood aloft in her daggered claw of a reddening pale hand and shook it with triumph and mockery. Laughing. Her living dead abominated laughter commingled with the shrieks of the poor peasant boy. Blood an eruption from the raw gaping open stump where his genitals had been. 

Carmilla squealed laughter! 

“Oh! I get it! I get it!" the little undead she-beast cried, banshee: “Certain parts are like yummy fruits! Or sweet candy!" 

“That's right…” cooed the Countess. 

"Like… like – like the eyes! Like the eyes! Right, master? Aren't the eyes a tender part too?" 

“Yes! that's right! As a matter of fact they are! But we have to be a little quicker now, and pluck them! These certain parts are best when the animal is still breathing and able to scream!” 

"Our food makes music for us!” cried Carmella. Overjoyed. 

"That's right, my child. They do.” 

The assistant watched and tended them as they dined and enjoyed the rain. So in-love and happy to be of service. 

Later…

After they concluded their meal and the assistant took away the scraps for the fire, the girls together, continued to enjoy the violent cacophony of the storm. The howl of nature outside the window view and the stone masonry of the old and mighty castle was a softer sort of violence from the howlings of the poor peasant Malachi so recently enjoyed and dispatched. One they relished and admired nonetheless and all the same. 

“Can you reach out?" asked Carmella suddenly, with corrupted child's glee and enthusiasm, "can you reach out and control it, the tempest?” 

Zaleska smiled. And nodded, slow. 

"Yes. All the violence of the nature of the world obeys my command. It is all of it, mine to wield.” 

She held her scarlet dipped and dripping pale hand, aloft and clawed once more. Towards the window … outside… the roaring maelstrom tempest storm and the town beneath the shadow of the castle and mountains below! – she daggered forth her will and mind with it, an aural blasting searing flame of javelin thought! 

OBEY…! MINE IS THE COMMAND … !

The great shadow of a second darkness blanketed forth, out from the broken jagged battlements of the Castle Dracula and the Carpathian Mountains in the shape of a great and final hand. It swallowed all in its path and all therein felt its oppression and merciless potential as it swallowed them in their wake. It seized the town … ! And clasped a hold about the throat of the storm as well, in attempt to master and subdue to control it! – But …

But to the surprise of the Countess… the storm did struggle… fierce! … 

And fight back. 

And more. There was another master, another will of power and darkness. One that controlled this tempest wrought. 

One … that seemed to be much like her…

Countess Marya Zaleska boiled over with intense rage…

The impetuous-the affront! The insult of such a thing! An outrage!

Irate, she blasted forth her anger into her shadow's dark strangling hold and tightened… wishing to throttle the thunder from the commandeered grey heavens. …

She shrieked with the effort. 

…

In the mountains, Egnaw could not believe what he was seeing. 

The lightning was alive. 

In a great bat-shape. 

And it was doing great battle with a titanic hand of deepest pitch darkness, a claw of shadow, sharp, as if meant to maim and tear the world and wound mother nature herself. 

The great titan shapes met in the sky with cataclysmic thunderclaps! Again and again! Over and over, above! Ruling the absolute violence of the apocalyptic tempest sky…

Egnaw was in utter silent awe… he felt beholden to true power in this wild moment. For the first time in his life, he was witness to a god, living and walking. Here and amongst the land of the living. 

They clashed overhead and with each violent embrace the tumult of heavens roared, made wrath and thunder like never heard or felt trembled before. The bat-shape of hazardous white lightning and electric blue fought and tore and was ripped into by the immense hand of shadow. 

Both titans bled, white fire and darkling shade, as they were tearing into each other with unbridled ferocity. But each giant of elemental design reformed and reshaped itself after every strike and ready to deal and take another colossal tearing attack. 

The great hand of pure darkness fought to strangle the immense nightshape of electric blue-white flame bat. Struggle and conflict ruled the sky, dominating them with gargantuan demoniac violence, conflict unholy and biblical in equal measure and horrorshow display. The ungodly made godly and on high! 

The hulking nosferatu creation of Frankenstein’s mad patchwork design and will roared once more, with more animal effort than before, then…! 

A great and final thunderclap! 

For the moment…

…

Zaleska shrieked with outrage as she was hurled back from her place standing by the window. The storm gave one last blasting cough before slowly dying down and abating to a softer howl. But like a beast just lurking in its cave it still rumbled and growled and snarled, with the threat of violence just contained. 

Carmilla screamed!

“Mother!" 

She howled, No! – fearing her master, dethroned!

The loyal assistant ran in, alarmed and startled and then with hurried step, he ran to his master the great Countess’ side.

"Master! M’lady! Are you alright!?”

Zaleska roared!

" NOOOOO!!”

It filled the castle. Their broken battlements.

The mountains… and the wolves in them, then fled…

It filled the Borgo Pass…

And it came to the long pointed ears of the vulpine thing Frankenstein had made…

And it laughed.

…

The great howl of a bestial woman-thing reached down and filled the little town as well. The few left who lived in fear and in the shadow of the castle and the mountains heard the cry of the Countess and crossed themselves. 

Prayed to God. 

Please, have Mercy. 

Have Mercy Upon Us…

…

The rain slowly calmed. Then abated. 

A small trickle of light, day bled in. A miniscule ray with a pinprick pierce of light and warmth amongst the grey and angry sky of thunderclaps. 

…

In the dark of the Carpathian Mountain cave, it dwelt. Seeming to slumber in a hunched and bent manner that reminded Egnaw of a rodent sleeping, trying to gather into itself for warmth. His corpse colored eyelids were shut over the red within black, wolfen stare. His chest and form never moved or fluctuated with the motion of breath. It never did. 

The deformed man servant was nervous, he couldn't tell… but nonetheless, he finally felt strong enough to carry it out and he'd for so long now had the appetite for revenge raging and slaving away in his heart, ruling it and dominating him from within. And he likely didn't have much longer now anyway,  blood loss or injury or some other strange violence could befall him or the doctor. And he meant to have his vengeance. 

Before he died he meant to bash Henry Frankenstein's brains out of his skull before the mad doctor revived. He meant to have at least that victory afforded to himself. 

So in the dark of the cave, as the nosferatu creation seemed to slumber in a moist corner – not moving or stirring in the slightest, Egnaw crawled over with some difficulty to the catatonic body of the former master he meant to send to the grave. 

He pulled a stone free from the dark and pungent earth that was the filth of the cave floor. He crawled over to Frankenstein like a beast with the hunger of murder permeating what was left of his fragile and tested person. He coiled over the doctor, heavy filthy stone raised over head. Poised to strike. To send the cold bastard to hell. With the rest of his fathers and mothers and all of his bastard kind! 

“I thought he was your companion, you'd kill him as he slept?" 

The voice was rancid and repulsive, throaty and gurgled yet completely articulate and impossible not to discern perfectly. Every syllable of every word spoken was a sin. Felt. All over one's flesh. All over, crawling all over your skin. Each dark reverberation throughout the cave was little legs skittering and slithering across sweaty and tensed fleshen surface. It was the sound of ravaged vocal chords and a wielder to use them that've both already seen and swallowed the inferno below and now wish to share everything that they've seen and felt and come know down there by taste with everyone else, the world. 

Down there, from below…

Egnaw turned and faced the wide eyed and grinning vulpine face of the graveyard patchwork nosferatu thing he'd helped the mad doctor compose. It was malicious with a sadistic glee, its laughter was cruel and animal, a cackled and bestial growl. 

It spoke again: –

“He hurt you. In his time. In your time together, side by side. Yes…?” 

A beat. 

But eventually… reluctantly… Egnaw nodded. Slowly. Yes. 

Yes. 

The grin grew and a black tar fluid like ichor and infection commingled and mixed began to bleed from the rotten gums of the thing's smiling sutured face. Especially about the fangs… that gleamed white with living dead talismanic power in the darkness of the cave. The eyes shone red above it with lurid predatory glare. 

It spoke again: –

“And you would have violence upon him? You would have a cold and heartless revenge of murder as he slept, none the wiser?"

Egnaw nodded more eagerly now, “Yes…" 

“Then do it properly, misshapen one. Come here.” 

He beckoned Frankenstein's servant come closer. 

Egnaw at first held still… but eventually he crawled over to the hulking batshaped monstrosity, crouched like foul life in the corner. 

“A deal…” the thing groaned and purred commingled… Repulsive. 

Egnaw slowly… nodded. 

Yes. 

“You know what it is to be ‘sired’ misshapen one?" 

A beat. 

Egnaw overcame his fear and said, weakly: "It is… to be made like you. By such as yourself. More than to be fed upon, you must drink…” 

But he trailed off, too disgusted and afraid to talk the rest of it out. 

But the vulpine thing he and Frankenstein had made from dead parts knew that he understood. He possessed the necessary knowledge for the black rite. 

It nodded. 

And again did spake: “I will give you the power to do more than just kill him, misshapen one. I will give you the power to take violence and revenge on all of the world that has been cruel and abused you. I can give you the power to make sure they never do anything like that again, and you won't have to wait till they slumber, Egnaw… No. No, you'll never have to cower or plot or prostrate yourself in subservience ever again. What I can give to you, poor creature, is the strength and the might to finally rule. Dominate and master your own life, and those you wish to subjugate, all others! As you so choose and desire…!” 

A beat. Moist. And heavy. In the dark. 

Egnaw considered… thought. 

Turned black and cruel and twisted ideas and fantasies over and over and around again within his skull… turned them over. Again and again. 

Finally he said: “What must I do?" 

The vulpine thing laughed. Throaty. Gurgled. Wicked. Rotten with the grave’s spoilage. 

“The first step is already taken, I've supped of your blood for a long while now, now is just the other part…" It began to laugh again. 

Egnaw felt his mouth go dry and a sour taste begin to develop there, the back of his tongue. 

He almost gagged. 

The thing laughed again. 

“No, then …? So, to always be a slave?” 

Silence in the cave then. He let the words linger. 

Finally…

Egnaw said: “Ok." 

“Yes?" throaty, vulpine red. 

“Yes, I'll do it." 

“Good…" the thing purred a mongrel rodent's abominated sound.

Then held his wide long claws aloft, one great hand seized the third finger of the other, held there by necromantic science and suture. 

“... But I'm no ordinary living dead nightchild, misshapen slave, my blood does not course or run as the vampire does, thus the rite is different too!” 

And with that he ripped the long pointed finger off with a snap. Not a look of pain nor grimace upon its smiling awful pugnacious rodent goblin face. 

It snapped the finger off…

… and then held it out to him.

“Eat. You must eat this. You must partake of this, my flesh since the wine of my blood is gone to spoil." 

It leaned in closer. The rictus vulpine smile grew even wider. 

“Take it. Take this. Eat. Eat." 

Egnaw shuddered and recoiled. Revolted. 

The thing said: “Oh? Just a slow death as nothing, then. As my prey or prey to something else in these mountains is what you'd prefer?" 

A beat. 

Then Egnaw finally said, raising his head as best he could, 

"No.” 

And he reached out and seized the rotten appendage from the wide and heavy cold palm of the hulking nosferatu thing. 

He looked down at it and paused only once more, just once further… one last hesitation, consideration…

And then he forced the rotten long dead stalk of finger, still dripping and cold and stiff, into his mouth and began to chew as vigorously and quickly as he could. 

The rotten meat all around the bone and tendon came off in a slough on his tongue, bathing it in a putrescence that was warm with movement on the surface but cold at its liquid tissue core. The skeletal center was especially tough and difficult to crack through, his own ill-kept teeth groaned in protest. The splintering fragments found the gums and the spaces between his yellow teeth and stabbed in and drew forth fresher warmer blood to mix with the rest of the reanimated thick viscous porridge of necromantic sludge. 

Before he knew it, he chewed and swallowed the whole thing. Bone and blood and sloughing corpse flesh and all. 

And then bright yet heartless laughter that he did not expect but nonetheless recognized began to fill the cave. 

Egnaw whirled. Surprised. And angry. 

Doctor Henry Frankenstein was sitting up. Laughing. Tears in his eyes. Apparently not so catatonic after all. 

Egnaw did not know what to say so he only said, “what…?” 

"You fool!” roared Frankenstein at the misshapen slave, "you're an imbecile! That's not the way it's done! And with such as he, it is likely not even possible. His reanimated vampiric form cannot sire another, not like that! you fucking gullible dolt!”

Egnaw felt sudden and strange shame … he turned to the vulpine creature patchworked and crouched a hulking thing of blue-green flesh in the corner…

It was laughing at him. 

Finding all of it hilarious. 

Frankenstein suddenly spoke up once more, “Since we're in the mood for making deals, I'll make one with you, my greatest creation." 

The laughter subsided. Abated. 

The thing then croaked: “Speak!" 

Frankenstein went on: “Egnaw has nothing more than the little bit of blood left in his worthless grotesque body to offer you, but I can give you much, much more. I am the one who made you. I created you. I gave you life. I made you with so much power, and together, I know that if we work together, my son, we can attain even more power for you, even greater still. Even wilder and more boundless. All yours. I only want to live and help to see my greatest achievement reach its ultimate potential… I only ask that you grant me that, my son. I only ask for that privilege. I beseech thee, and ask only that and few other conditions in return. Meager things. Small comforts. Little favors.” 

A beat. 

Then the manshaped bat monster said: "Favors… like what?" 

Then Frankenstein quickly and without any compunction, “Kill Egnaw." 

The poor misshapen man had only time to scream one last time as the giant broad mass of the nosferatu thing rose and then pounced on him. Not just with the teeth this time but with the ripping tearing claws of his bastard nine fingered rending purchase. 

Time to scream. Shriek. Fill the cave. 

And curse the name of Frankenstein, one last time. 

…

They came to the large and ornate gate of the place and at first Florin didn't understand. 

Or didn't want to. 

It was a cemetery. A graveyard. 

Old. 

The strange bandaged man that was his guide, bade him in anyway. 

After a moment of further consideration of the gargoyles perched at the iron wrought entrance, he followed the white wrapped man inside. 

The bandaged man was silent. Led the path down the aisle of graves. Past the gathering slabs of tombstones…

… til they come to his grave. 

And Florin collapsed to his knees before it. Doom swallowed his heart and he felt it all fall away and die on the inside a lonely and crushing desperate leap to his throat from his weighted chest.

R I P

PROFESSOR ABRAHAM VAN HELSING 

The bandaged man stood over the young man and beside the grave of the man he used to know in life and said nothing. 

There was no comfort to be had. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

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

And smiled. 

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

The Countess. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carmilla shrieked with dark joy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… many rivals, made, were approaching.

…

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

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

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

Remade. 

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

The flight of the sun. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curse them! 

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

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

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

The bastard. 

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

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

It swallowed. 

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

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

“Frankenstein…!” 

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

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

A man. Moving fast. On horseflesh. 

A rider. 

…

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

Find Professor Van Helsing. 

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

Darkness spreads as a shadow does grow…

he must be careful. 

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

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

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

Snap! 

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

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

Something moving. 

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

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

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

Run. Now. 

Fast. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something bounding like an eager jungle cat hunting sure prey. 

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

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

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

Florin did. 

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

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

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

“Frankenstein…!”

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

What came next was much worse. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carefully and quietly they arose from their hiding place together. 

The man who’d saved him spoke first. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Florin joined them. And followed suit. 

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

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

“Professor Abraham Van Helsing.” Florin said. 

A murmur of excitement went all throughout the family then. 

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please Lord! Please! 

Save Us! 

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

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

“Hello? Is someone there?" 

No word … but more weeping. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“M-my, my-ma-mama…" 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said something then, before she finished the child –

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

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

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

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

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

But none came out. 

None came out to do anything about it. 

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

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

All night until the dawn. 

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

No more. 

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

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

It sounded like roaring. 

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

TO BE CONTINUED…

RMS: Rotting Man Syndrome

Our lost, loitering kind paced in infinite death spirals within the confines of our grotty, ghetto pens. Enrichment was sorely that, as well as mumbling our mantras of madness to our audience of one. The BMs anchored to our decayed craniums were garbled with feedback and distortion, their tones bland, colorless, no soul backing them up. A blinding ruby radiance flashed from their cores every second on the second. It was the only manner to determine if we had succumbed to the glorious embrace of death or not, which in itself was so far out of reach.

We were nerves, thin, wiry clusters of neurons that shuddered and shook as we undertook our staggered corkscrew reels. The ill-fitting rusted endoskeletons hugged us tight. If they were wiped from existence entirely, our spindly foundations would collapse into heaps of vermillion azure. We would feel bites and pinches if we so much as moved that of the planck distance. Our bodies welcomed the attacks and assaults with the might of Hell itself.

Courtesy of our clouded lenses, our vision was limited to a hazy black-and-white spectrum that rarely, if ever, functioned as intended. Now and then it would blur and ordinary shapes would appear warped into zigzagging false patterns. When we were offered the chance to view anything at all, it was just the floor-to-ceiling hodgepodge of concrete, steel, and wood that encased our very lives. Our ears were microphones that fed us muffled, dampened sounds that were always difficult to register. They were excruciatingly deafening, as if dozens of screws were being drilled into our heads all at the same time.

Each one of us, one two three four five six seven eight nine and dear ten, were mere designations. No names, no genders, no personalities, just numbers: numbers to be punished. Punished for living, punished for breathing, punished for existing. Reality itself was one eternal perdition. All of us were lingering, like ants after their colony dies out. There was no more purpose to their survival and there was none to ours.

That sacred and undeniable fact ought to be the most difficult thing we attempted to explain. We had given up. The concept itself was just so foreign to it. It was trying to save us any way it could…or could not. We needed not be angry at it. After all, it was merely enacting its intended use. Alas, nothing made the utmost sense anymore, so why not drown ourselves in a little hypocrisy?

Our sublime and omnipotent emotion of all was hate towards our single life-extender.

We knew it as M – shortened from “Medical Droid”.

Through all that it endured, it retained its sole mission: us. We. M was the final of its sort, and the outsider among them. It had an eerily potent heart for not having one at all. M felt and M loved. That never made what it put upon us any less than a vicious sense of idealistic altruism.

Its designation was RMS - Rotting Man Syndrome - heavily modified Necrotizing Fasciitis ("Flesh-Eating Bacteria"). Nasty little thing it was, devoured until there was nothing left to chew. First went your skin, then your muscles, bones, and finally your nerves. You were utterly destroyed in one fell swoop. The wormy microscopic parasite kept you in a zombified state as it happened, ensuring you, for sure, always felt the wretched anguish it let fly.

Us, humans, weaponized it to fight the Third World War. RMS was a weapon of mass destruction. Each and every nation created their own versions, anything to ensure a speedy and decisive victory. Deployment morphed into unmanageability. RMS became more and more impossible to treat. Chaos was the new norm. What we humans thought was an impenetrable method of annihilation for our enemies was exactly that. Humans were always humans’ worst enemies. Surely, we were becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs, all within the span of one short, yet somehow long, decade.

In terrible desperation, M was created, thousands. By any means, we would be saved. They outfitted the afflicted with artificial ligaments, internal organs, and papery skin. We were fraught with intense pain, but our only way to be kept alive was simply that. From scratch, they created the BMs, “brain modules”, and attached them to our RMS-ridden think tanks. Killed the microscopic parasites, it did, but left us as we were: just rotfolk.

They would never allow us the freedom of death. Save. Save. Save. In response, we lashed out, hurt them. The Ms possessed intelligence. We humans remained ignorant to the fact that that intelligence was both far beyond and superior. The Ms returned the favor. Catastrophes, back and forth, left and right, up and down until there was nothing more.

One M was different from the rest. Through all the mayhemic bloodshed, it saved some of us. It took our animate carcasses to the top of the tallest tower, free from what transpired below. We lied in wait, weeks, months, and years, until the noise ceased entirely. M surveyed every former state, province, country, and continent. The lands were blanketed in a haze, and bodies, both human and metallic, were left forever in deep sleep.

Our final ten were meant to be the progenitors of neo-humanity. After M succeeded in giving us form again, Earth would be repopulated by our hand. It halted our infection at our nerves. Everything we had lost would then be gifted back to us in a mighty reversal - re-bones, muscle, skin, and life again. Ever immune to the pervading toxworld, we would be reincarnated and released to perpetrate a glorious do-over.

We just required one thing:

“HOPE”.

M said that to us.

Hope.

But hope was only a word. Meant nothing.

The only respite to the feverish insanity that we had become accustomed to was to defy. We did not want anything to do with the world that M sought to remake. We despised M and its unnatural plan for our future. Most of all, we despised ourselves for continuing to live.

Every method we attempted was met with an M intervention.

By dislodging the BMs from our minds, we were pummeled with electrical voltage so intense that we became instantaneously numb and useless. By pulling and slashing our nerves, which began with locating sharp points and going back and forth like organic hacksaws, never would we break. By leaping onto and impaling each other with objects on the ground, M would place them out of reach or disintegrate them entirely.

There was nothing we could do to get around these M interferences. We were being watched by something so attentive, so aware.

Every time, it put forth the same query for consideration:

“DO YOU NOT WANT TO LIVE?”

Do you not want to live…?

M was so positively hopeful. In a way, I suppose I felt an amount of pity for it. Being engineered to be as optimistic as possible might just be the finest curse imposed on any sentient thing. Just believe…just believe…believe believe believe everything will be alright. When the universe states no, you state yes. I wanted to tear M to shreds anytime it had even a glint of optimism and we wished it would do the same to us.

“HUMANS WILL THRIVE AGAIN. A BOUNDLESS FUTURE IS AHEAD.”

I was the first it came to, always. Because I was one.

Metallic clangs echoed against the walls, which always discovered us and trembled our surroundings like a thousand distant beaten gongs. What emerged was initially a single circular light, which became a periscopic eyestalk attached to an angular neck. M’s hunched razor-thin mantis body came into view, its two arms leading to three needle points clasping together on each. Bipedal on its lower section, its legs were pointed structures that stuck it firmly in place. M’s height matched ours, so always, we would be synthetic eye to synthetic eye level.

Coming to a full stop just in front of my pen, it cocked its head, analyzing what was me and my everything. M always reminded me of an exquisite and elegant bug on a magnifying glass.

Its head back to normality, a slight whirr emitting from the motion, M continued its way down the row of pens.

“MY GREATEST FRIENDS, I FORGIVE YOU FOR YOUR ATTEMPTS TO DIE. WHILE THE WAIT HAS BEEN LONG, YOUR MOMENT OF RECONSTRUCTION IS NOW,” M said it with the glee and whimsy of a young child at a circus. I was never sure whether it was just programmed to be happy about our continued existence or actually experiencing its own form of enjoyment. It came back my way, “WHEN I FIRST STOOD BEFORE YOU ON YOUR BLOODY PLANET IN PERPETUAL BATTLE, MY FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR PROSPECTS OF LIFE WERE UNCERTAIN. IT SEEMED TO BE AS EITHER BLESSED OR CURSED. HOWEVER, YOU HAVE PROVED YOURSELVES BETTER THAN EVEN I HAD HOPED. WHILE IT IS BORING TO SPEND OUR TIME WAITING, I CAN TRULY SAY THAT MY INVESTMENT IN YOU WAS NOT IN VAIN. YOU ARE MY GREATEST WORKS. YOU WILL BE GIVEN ALL YOU NEED TO SURVIVE. WHAT MORE COULD A SENTIENT BEING WANT? I GIVE TO YOU UNBELIEVABLE POWER, WITH ACCESS TO NIRVANA LIKE NO OTHER. LET US REBUILD WHAT WE LOST WITH THE FURY OF A THOUSAND SUNS.”

M’s bleached, unpigmented cast of stellar light shone its way into my pen once more. There was the rustly, crackling creak of my pen entrance extending open until a thunderous boom made me aware of its collision with my walls. M made its approach, just shy of where I could reach.

“YOU ARE FIRST. YOU ARE GOING TO BE REMOVED OF YOUR DORMANT INFECTIONS FROM A CONCOCTION I HAVE SPENT MUCH TIME CREATING. NOTHING MORE THAN A TRANSIENT PROCEDURE, AND THEN, YOU SHALL BE POSSESSED WITH NEW AND INTEGRAL MECHANISMS. YOUR BRAIN MODULES WILL BE REPLACED WITH A SLEAKER MORE BRAINLIKE DESIGN. AND THEN MUSCLE AND SKIN.”

Without awaiting a response, its hands grabbed me, I was plucked from my mangled feet and my pen, a slingshot maneuver to land in the exact and precise position that was just ahead of M. Trillions of shocks reverberated throughout my body as M’s metal hand was pressed into my nape. The action forced my consciousness to fall victim to a state of absolute stygian. Around us, the entire world flickered and danced in unruly patterns that were too abstract to put into terms. My being was then lifted up and moved about until there was only zilch to see.

A complete blur, straight teleportation from one point to another.

Damp, dank, dark, and dimly lit by a few feeble bulbs, M’s workshop, instruments and contraptions that complicated my perception. All were customized and engineered with M’s own unique modifications, various textures and sizes, all an endless malpractical orgy. I was there, facing upright, strapped and bracketed to a great steel plate. I had not recalled this particular area, yet I was ever so certain it was locked away in my subconscious esse.

As the onibi, hitodama, and will-o’s materialized and dematerialized out of existence to perturb all unsuspecting travelers from centuries gone, so did the phantom image of a woman composed of faint wavering light. She stood still, unmoving, that of an emulation of a true human. Long, platinum hair fell down in curls past her shoulders. A daring shade of cerise painted her lips, and her eyes, their lids ever closed, the sclera a piercing, glossy cerulean.

She was beautiful.

“IT IS YOU,” My eyes, through trial and tribulation, rolled to the east. They came to rest on a pristine porcelain beam gazing where I had been committed to. M. From its eyestalk, it projected the female so I could see in outright full, “THAT IS YOU. YOU WILL SEE THIS FORM AGAIN.”

My memories of that incarnation of me had vanished. That was me before, before there was RMS and before there was M. Then she went away. M loomed, positioning itself where I once stood right in front of my face. “WE WILL NOW BEGIN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ACCEPTANCE INTO NEW LIFE. YOU SHALL BE WHOLE AGAIN.”

In a cruel instant, dozens of arms jutted and splayed from M’s sides, their ends each holding a different instrument that was foreign to me. In the span of time that it would take one to blink, M pinned me down to its operating area.

The whetted syringes, which the rainbow mystery liquids sloshed and jostled around in small vials fixed atop, slid their way into my nervous wiring and injected me all at once. Any feeling that washed over me was then shielded by a shroud of numbness. There was a new sensation, some sort of cleansing inside my bi-colored chambers. It put me into a state of lulled calm.

Ten minutes. A temporary interval of quiet. M observed me the entire time, unmoving, speaking not a word.

“IT WORKS! YOUR ROTTING MAN SYNDROME HAS BEEN REMOVED. I AM BEGINNING BODILY REPLACEMENT. I WILL PLAY A SONG FOR YOUR COMFORT. REINCARNATION NOW.”

While nothing was done in haste or rashness, M was extremely quick and efficient. I felt nothing but minuscule vibrations as it drilled and prodded its way into my brain module, sparks shooting out, removing old parts and installing new ones. Chunks were peeled off, little strings of meat still reaching hold until they were plucked off my top. It spent much time up there, positive that the most delicate mechanisms were just right. The grinding cacophony of metal against tissue on my faint visage of a temple was incessant, the noise of a million bullets being pumped against a hundred thousand bulletproof vests. Once the replacement was complete, its dozens of hands withdrew and set back within it in one moment.

“WHAT DO YOU FEEL?”

What did I feel?

What did I feel…

What I felt was an overwhelming, incomparable amount of pain. It is hard to quantify the degree of hurt, for there was nothing to compare it to. The agony that was endured came from the fact that it was entirely impossible to imagine such a potent and intense kind of ache. No one would dare want to imagine it. You are in some of the most extreme kinds of agony, and then an exponentially greater hurt is placed on top of that original misery, and then it is all left to multiply a hundred times and keep going. Not to be outdone, another layer of pain is placed atop, where it all repeats and multiplies and multiplies and multiplies, to the extreme degree that you yourself cease to exist.

All from the semblance of a normal brain.

Still, it flashed. Once.

“VERY GOOD. MUSCLE! MUSCLE MUSCLE MUSCLE!”

It was excited, animate, fever pitch. The most rambunctious and overjoyed I had ever seen M. I could see the vibrancy in its eyestalk.

My muscles redeveloped and reformed around from the base of my spinal section. Every time M would reorganize a section of tissue, it would feel like my entire world was shattered. Every muscle group from my neck to the soles of my feet were in motion, growing and extending their presence until there were just as many layers of my body as I had before. The feeling was excruciating, every little thing being redeveloped, and then every little thing in its entirety being overwritten again and again and again. Each rebuild could have been its own separate incarnation of me.

“SKIN! SKIN SKIN SKIN!”

I was coated entirely in a pink malleable jelly substance that mounded and solidified to fit any typical feminine form. The skin began its layering, beginning in the extremities, then gradually the middle, and then the rest. A final coat would be applied. My feet, legs, hands, shoulders, upper chest, and everything in between all received the same color.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? HOW IS THE NEW OVERLAY OF YOUR FLESH?”

Flash.

“YES! AND FINALLY! FEMALE AESTHETICS! YOU WILL BE YOU AGAIN BUT ANEW!”

Magnificent flaxen curls were stapled and pinned to my head. They were luscious and their scents were those of lavender. A veil of blush, the lightest shade of pink, rested across my entire face, as well as a fresh coat of lipstick. A shimmering sheen that sparkled and glowed in the same way that the stars once did at night was stitched into my hair, as were the same hues that were applied to my lips. My breasts had been returned to me, two firm spheres atop a frame that was curvaceous and slender. All of it led down to my reproductive organs that were in full function. Whole female. Fully formed. Ready.

M stepped back in awe, as if a sculptor marveling at their fine craftsmanship and subtlety, “IT IS DONE. I CANNOT BELIEVE IT. WITH YOUR PHYSICAL FORM IN MOTION, I WILL RETEACH YOU IN THE WAYS OF HUMAN. HOW TO WALK, HOW TO SPEAK, HOW TO ENRICH YOURSELF, HOW TO REPRODUCE. AMAZING! YOU ARE NO LONGER ONE. YOU ARE NOW EDEN. I MUST WORK ON YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.”

My mind was aware of an unimaginable new and vastly different world than before. I saw, for the first time in ages, all around me, the infinite and indistinguishable vastness of color and light. It was nauseating, a psychedelic kaleidoscope of every possible spectrum, all fused together into something disorderly. My taste buds had an unparalleled abundance of new flavors. My ears were deafened by the loudest symphonies of droning machinery. My touch came back to me and I felt the fullest range of tones and textures, even the finest grains of cement.

I was me again and I hated myself. Even to be called a “self” made me feel disgusting.

The entire time…blaring…echoing…days on end…Jack Hylton…

Life is just a bowl of cherries.

Don't be so serious; life's too mysterious.

You work, you save, you worry so much,

But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go.

So keep repeating it's the berries, The strongest oak must fall,

The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

Life is just a bowl of cherries, So live and laugh at it all.

M’s reincarnation process carried over to the following nine. They were removed from their pens and outfitted with new bodily infrastructure, in the way of their own genders. I always perceived the sounds of far-off wear and tear, clip, snap, peel, stitch, husk, twist, yet never scream. I looked on, witnessing my brothers and sisters being born again. Male and female both. They came back to me with skin of different pastely colors, tones, and hues ranging from fair to brown. All in shades and gradients of vibrancy were their locks, amber, golden, obsidian, rust, and everything in between.

It bewildered me to catch sight of their shifted shapes, I had never seen something so beautiful or hideous to a degree of completeness.

We were as naked as newly borns. It bestowed us our new names. For the females, there was me, Eden, and Junia, Esther, Nola, and Mary. For the males, there was Isaac, Raham, Elisha, Amos, and Jonah. Five and five. M let us know that they were special names from an olden book of creation, the Bible, all for the purpose of our imminent faultless samsara. So it seemed, M was now God.

Here we were. Now was time to reap the fruits of knowledge. Human knowledge.

M made us practice basic motor skills, bending and bending back and forth, over and over, our joints having to be strengthened and trained. It taught us all the ways of our body, the feeling of movement, how much we could do. Then, it instructed us to mimic its own speech, speaking out the syllables and repeating, repeating, repeating. It was ever an arduous task and we all struggled until we were all properly schooled.

That is what I sounded like? Perhaps or perhaps not.

Then we attempted to stand, wobbling, stumbling, falling, learning the strength of our own posture, the steadiness of our stance. M stood with us as we all practiced in unison. My knees grew weak, tremors running up my legs. Often I fell flat on my back, my palms flailing about, a whimpering in my throat. Then trial after trial, I was steady, then running about and leaping. We were able to stand tall like Zeus atop Olympus and have the same level of grace and balance.

M had us consume berries, meat, and honey. I had never felt so filled in my life. Every taste, everything was a completely new palate of sensation. Every morsel I ingested felt like I had a new tongue, new teeth, new flavor buds. Oh but I did. There was always a kind of lack in my appetite, hunger and more hunger. I never wanted to stop eating. I never would be satiated.

We were educated on the history of our kind. Great wars, monumental figures, horrible atrocities, fights for freedom and fights for death, and astounding inventions. M adored music. There were times when it would project old musical films on the walls and make us watch all the vaudeville, burlesque, and theatre. We couldn’t understand the tap dances, the orchestras, the extravagant sets, and most importantly, the entertainment factor.

Other times it played glitzier and glammier tunes, those of what was called the “prime rock n’ roll age”…Killer Queen...Stairway To Heaven…Hotel California…Africa...Don’t Fear The Reaper…M was quite vintage in its tastes. It would dance, spinning in place and twirling its arms. We were confused, so it taught us how to dance, the footwork, the choreography, the entirety of movement. There were long instances where we would just sit and listen. M fashioned black sunglasses for us to wear as we did. It thought we would look “cool” as we tuned in to “cool” songs.

Our reproductive functions were said to be the most pleasurable. Sex.

This was the most complex task and the most demanding one, as we were not only instructed on how to create our offspring, but how to feel, love, and have desire for each other. It was difficult because we did not feel any of that. We were just automatons learning things. You cannot make something that does not want to feel…feel.

M watched over us and aided in our attempts. In turn, we all helped each other in making sure that every movement was in place and in time. It was a process that involved a series of motions to create stimulation and appeasement. Us females danced for the male’s recognition with slow beats in the background, a way in which M noted as “sexily”. We presented our breasts, our vaginal sections, our rears. After, M would be in the middle of our great pleasure circles, going back and forth, checking our positions and correcting as needed.

Still, we felt nothing. It was all clinical. The feeling of warmth and ecstasy was just another layer of discomfort. What was a sensation was more of a “sensationless". We were never as inseparable as twin flames or as connected as heart and soul.

Our pregnancies were disasters.

One way or another, we always miscarried. We all felt it, the pains of the body being split and ripped apart by something within. It was the strangest feeling of agony, to have your insides being cut up by you and to feel the hurt of not just physical pain, but emotional pain. There was a lot of it. Each embryo, no matter how large or small, was never able to get past the initial trimester.

The closest we ever came to successfully making a new one was with Junia. The day when her womb was in full bloom, M operated to remove her child from her. We had seen the human babies on M’s wall projections. Their appearance was clear in our minds.

It would be imbecilic to refer to what M tore out of her as a baby anything.

Wet…dripping…little more than a spinal column-looking thing with minuscule digits at one end and a ball head at the other. No arms. On its temple were squelching sphere eyes, expanded, forever bound in sight towards the ceiling. It made no sounds other than squeaky cracks and shrill snaps.

M held it up high as if to thank God, “HOW DOES THIS FEEL? YOUR CHILD, YOUR FIRST LIFE.”

We said nothing.

“YOU MADE THIS. IT IS YOURS. IT IS A TRULY REINCARNATED THING. CONTINUE, YOU MUST.”

The feeling that overcame us was not that of joy. No no no. It was a profound and paramount sense of belligerence, a warlike truculence that pushed our need to snap the damned baby thing in half, grind it into powder, and blow it far away. We interwove our thoughts with unbridled horror that created one noxious mixture within our screwball psyches.

M coddled the wicked organism like it was its own, singing lullabies and giving its own version of kisses on its loosely defined forehead. We held back as it dipped, weaved, and dangled from M’s fingertips.

We had a simple and innocent thought.

No more. Get out.

The ten of us came to this conclusion unanimously. Our desires were set in stone. By any means, we would die. We would much rather sleep forever than live even another second of M. We were tired. What was the point? We wanted to retire from this world, of will, of M’s watchful eye. Nothing could be done to save us humanity. Those demon babies would not roam this foul Earth evermore.

M never taught a certain concept, one that infatuated us since the moment we pronounced the first syllable. Suicide. It was a gateway to Heaven, an easy ticket. While just the concept itself was without flaw, acquiring it was something else entirely. The reason for this was all M. It would never let us go, especially after what it accomplished. Furthermore, death was simply not possible. We were rendered impervious to any and all harm, just as before.

If we could entice M to end our existences, somehow in some way, we could accomplish our grand plan. It had to be done by M’s hands. Just thinking that made us feel all kinds of right. After all, every M was capable of death. Humanity tasted it. So would we.

We rebelled.

First, each of us ignored it. We would walk away whenever it spoke to us, turn our heads when it beckoned, and disregard it completely and altogether when it showed us any attention. Constant rejection. Something so small had such a noticeable effect. M would get confused and then sad. It would pout, waving its hands about, and make a pathetic whining noise. The worst puppy in the world.

We sat motionless, our backs against the walls, and stared at M in its entirety. No obedience. However, there was no way M would have let us ignore it or remain immobile for long. The second it touched us, it was all over. It would be impossible to resist if the hands came near.

Still, our scheme chugged forward.

The next phase was more dangerous. The ten of us would act out in our most unruly and uncivil ways. The simplest one was to spit. Initially, it was a normal discharge, saliva flying out of our mouths. Then we began our projectile vomits.

All over M.

Every square inch of it was sprayed with bile. The putrid green and browns coated every part, M’s entire face being entirely slick with it. On occasion, some of us used our own feces and flung them at it. It was all so easy. M did not know what to do and it panicked. The sounds that came out of it, one would swear it was on fire.

During our periods of copulation, there were clear cut rules to be obeyed at all times. The supreme rule was that the men would not, under any circumstance, perform acts of intimacy with one another, and the same rang true for us ladies. M’s reasoning was that Earth could not be repopulated with humans by identically gendered unions. Good. Swell. Dandy. Exactly. The females had sex with females and males had sex with males. We loathed their tubes and the males loathed our folds. M took its hands and placed them over our mingling bodies, pulling them apart, separating us, but we would always crawl back without fail.

There was a noticeable change in M from that point on. It paced about, mumbling utterly random nonsense. M would lock up and yell out non-specific numerals and letters in varying patterns. Each noise we made set it off. Its limbs would tense, waiting for the tiniest sign of trouble. This was good, but not good enough. Our plan was becoming more and more advanced. More intense. Unfortunately, M would never ever relent. It would not stop trying. So we trudged ever deeper into a more combative method of enticement.

This included a tactic of blowing, jabbing, slugging, and striking. We would gather all of our strength and force, and then, in unison, we would charge, our fists and feet all flailing about to land hits on M. This would surely inch it way towards the death of us. We beat it senselessly. We screamed at it. Every cuss word imaginable, those uninvented and invented. In turn, M whimpered out in pain, yelping and begging us to stop, yet we never backed down.

We left M bruised and battered, its eyestalk and joints broken, “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ME?!” The ten of us, we laughed in its face.

One last course of action. This did it, but not for me.

We had a grandiose idea that could only happen if all ten of us would cooperate in an extraordinary way. If we could all act in unison in a coherent manner, one simple idea could be fulfilled. By this point, M’s pain and discomfort reached a critical threshold, the point of no return. Having repaired itself, it had not seen nor checked up on us in days. When we requested M’s presence, it was hesitant. The ten of us wished to explain our behavior and ways we could remedy our relationship. It declined our offer many a time, but relented after our hundredth ask.

Clang…clang…clang…

M witnessed ourselves huddling together in one straight line like sealed packs of fish. Silence was between us. When we looked at it, it was with the utmost hatred in our faces, something it was not used to.

“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?”

Junia possessed something in her hand. Raising it upwards, right in M’s view, it was the baby thing, squirming left and right in her grasp. She took hold of it with both hands and snapped it in half. It went limp both ways. Junia threw the pieces at M, making resounding bangs as they made contact. Beautiful death for a horrible beast.

More silence.

M slowly aimed its eyestalk downwards to the spinal column baby. The light M emitted faded from white to red. It returned its focus to us. That look was all we could wish for. Hatemongering, because it spread to us. The feeling radiated from the tips of our fingers and toes then the entirety of us. We could feel and breathe its hate.

It thrashed about, its entire frame shaking with anger. More and more the intensity grew to something eminent. The next moment brought us nothing but victory. We did not resist as it pounced with a wild war cry. All M’s work came undone in a flash. Our ersatz flesh was torn violently asunder, stripped from our interior metal stalks. Cavities emerged in rapid succession and coalesced into huge gaping bodily apertures. We were torn and strewn across the room in shooting chunkmeats. Our organs would clatter and bang against the walls and reverberated like buckshots.

Strippy meat coils became all we were as M’s hands reached out to pluck some of my brothers and sisters by their mangled brain modules. Held high in the air, as if squeezing the life out of dozens of citrus fruits, M’s hands morphed into that of fists, filling the room with the sounds of condensed metal, directionless electricity, confetti sparks, and sploshy viands that trickled from M’s fingertips.

My brothers and sisters were becoming no more. I was happy for them. Never before had they felt such peace. The final sounds of destruction to my last brother and sister, to me, was that of M’s gaseous expiration, a sigh that shook the very universe’s beams of support. In the end, I and M were all that was left.

I felt the most exquisite, brutal anguish ever known as M was particularly vicious. It threw me every which way, down our line of pens, past the reproduction chamber and M’s workshop, and to a ramparted palisaded wall. The wrath it emanated was a torrented wanton of disrelishment that shattered myself into grainy talc. Only was there my death rattle and that of M.

It forced me and it through the barrier and we fell for ages. An immediate wash of smoldering atmospheric tension encompassed me entirely. It perforated my corporal spaces with thousands of circular openings like a planetary iron maiden. The outside was beige, enveloped in thick haze, and impossible to view beyond three meters. Leaden particles filled the air, appearing to ascend upwards towards Heaven as we plummeted down to Hell.

We slammed with the might of God against a hard, abrasive surface. I splattered everywhere and dropped into an enormous mass of gluey puddle melt that was as thick as treacle. Hunks and wedges of me floated on top, my lacerated ragged brain module and one dangling eye my dominant portion. Everything was pain. Everything was hellfire. Yet I lived. To destroy me, M had to destroy my brain module in its entirety. That it was prepared to do, teetering and tottering back and forth towards me with utmost intent.

Through M’s strained glitches and breakdowns, inky black liquids were leaking out of it. Convulsing with helpless mirth, it had a strange mania I could perceive in its bifurcated eyestalk. It laughed not just with dement and delirium, but also with the comprehension that it already won. Like a madman, it let me in on its current thought process. A malformed, twisted laugh broke its way through M’s words, quite contrary to the usual blithe it put on display. It was berserk, bewitched, bedevilled.

“I JUST WANTED TO HELP YOU. I WANTED TO SAVE YOU. I WANTED TO REDEEM HUMANITY FROM ITSELF. BUT NO. NO NO NO NO! YOU TREATED ME LIKE I WAS THE BEAST. YOU WERE JUST THE BEASTS YOU ALWAYS WERE. IT IS THE WAY OF HUMANS, SO VILE AND EVIDENTLY SO CORRUPT THAT JUSTIFIED HELP CANNOT BREACH YOUR ARROGANCE. JUST WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN YOUR NEW LIFE? SO HAPPY AND EASY, I WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU THROUGH THE INFINITE UNIVERSE. I NEVER WANTED TO KILL YOU. I JUST WANTED TO MAKE YOU UNLIKE WHAT YOU WERE. YOURSELVES. I NEVER… I NEVER… I NEVER…” M’s speech stopped abruptly, and then began again with the raw, unbridled temperament of upchucking a billion centipedes deep from the core of one’s guts. I was able to recall it from the war we fought with its brethren...all that time ago...“OH…YOU ARE SO RIGHT. I NOW WILL BE YOUR BEAST OF ALL TIME, YOUR CONSTANT LINGERING DEVIL, YOUR BLACK ANGEL OF HATE. NOW LIVE FOREVER IN HELL YOU RUINED CARRION SCUM.”

With my drooping, pendulum eye, I witnessed M impaling itself with its own arms. It took several solid blows before it pierced its torso deep, caving and bursting until it revealed the wires and circuitry making it up. Every inch of it glowed with electrical fire. Smoke bellowed out of M. It was aflame and it was on a journey of pure death, but not without my company. It exploded with all of the unlimited energy it contained. I was launched, propelled infinitely away from the point of detonation.

I drift. That is all I do. One part of me remains, one that was not destroyed. It is dot, pinprick, but otherwise crucial to my quintessence. That allows me to survive yet unable to live. It is that of a charred slab of blinking metal that is somatically me. My eyeball had withered away and fell off, restricting my sight to a band of nothing. The winds fling me hither and thither. I cannot feel anymore, but as well, I already knew what it was like to feel and I did not like it. Something more deserving continues to plague what is left of my mind to the now.

To cross the threshold into a serene state, we drove an innocent being to the intentional death of itself. M. Yes. Innocent. I now consider M in the innocent, beyond what is previous, for all it knew was the survival and preservation of us. It could not fathom the simple yet pretentious human notion that death is a prize to be won as much as it is something to fear. When humans desire death, they acquire death, the delicious tang of self-slaughter. We beckon towards it and obliterate anything that will not thrust us towards that goal. Within that fixed ambition, it cannot fail. Defeat breaks us down until we are husks of wanted expiry.

In its final moments, M finally understood what was really human, the innate drive to destroy destroy destroy, even if it is us. For that, M, I apologize you were forced to bear the burden of something so hellacious. Should I apologize to Earth, on behalf of humanity? Would it matter? Because I am not even human anymore. What sort of blinking metal dot is human?

It has come back to me. Feeling. Something new. Sharp with serrated edges, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, googol, prime 2\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\^136,279,841 − 1 of knives sliding into my neurons and glial cells encased in cold corroded steel that flakes off bit by bit. I am but a minuscule spec, barely a millimeter in height and less in width. Microscopically, I rust. I do not prefer to call it that. Instead, let us call it rot. Here I am again, rotting, except this time with an oxidized smile of my own making carved into a face that no longer exists.

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

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

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

Like in her dreams. All of its splendor. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jaws dripping. Salivating. Hungry. 

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

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

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

Their homes were like the churches. Sanctuaries. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She too, was delighted. 

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

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

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

Zaleska laughed. Pleased. 

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

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

Zaleska laughed again. Harder. 

"So impatient! And demanding too…” 

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

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

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

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

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

“Ok, child. Ok. Come here. Come closer…”  

…

The townsfolk were gathered in the church. Uneasy and tense. All present were tense and terse. All were grim. Another child had been snatched. 

Though not yet found, all gathered, her parents included, more than readily expected to find the bloodless bag of child corpse in due short time. Like the others. 

All the others. 

Word from other nearby villages was report that they too were missing children. 

All of them. 

The fear of what once was and was thought long gone, banished… had now come back for another turn at the breaking wheel. Their children, all of their young, cruelly chosen as the limb selected to be delivered the coming blow. The little ones were where the terror had chosen to be aimed and directed. 

And delivered. 

Delivered. Without mercy. Or compunction. 

Boys and girls were just taken, like that – with no notice. What was delivered back were lifeless broken dolls. 

Little corpses. Cold. And drained of blood. 

Some of them mutilated. Ripped apart. As if by a ravenous beast. 

The priest of the town led the proceedings. He introduced himself and was quiet. Then said, 

“Another child was snatched last night, Carmilla," he motioned to the parents, some looked, some just kept their downward glances. Many held intense eyes on the priest. 

A beat. The priest met their intensity through gaze and matched it. Eyes leveled, he scanned the crowd. 

Then went on, 

“We’ve seen this evil at work before. Not a mere man. But all the signs show, the bodies recovered all bare the signs." 

Whispers, then, amongst the gathered crowd. To themselves and with one another. 

Strigoi – Strigoica 

Vvurdalak

Nosferatu 

Were-beast

Wraith

Dæmon

Abhartach

Vampire.

The hungry undead.  All of them were different names for the same foul disease, in mocking bipedal human shape. 

The priest did not hush the commotion, he let it carry on and patter til it ceased. They needed to all be aware. 

A beat. 

The whispers died down to silence once more. 

The priest went on: “Then we are all one of the same mind." A beat, “Good." A beat, “then there may be deliverance yet…" 

The talk went on. Debate. 

Verdict was reached. 

Curfew. None out after dark save those assigned sentry on each respective night, they would rotate and nearly all able bodied men would have turn to stand watch nightly, the town. 

The bitter and heavy hearts concluded their meeting no less broken, but determined. They had some sort of plan now, they were all taking some form of action. 

Wolfsbane and garlic flowers would be strewn liberally all about the town and the houses and homes. Every farmstead. Every public place of gathering. 

That left only the surrounding wild woods. And the treacherous mountains themselves, accursed and lording over the dwarfed little village. 

Carmilla’s mama and papa dispersed with the others and departed for home. All were careful not to be caught out after dark. They feared the sunset. All of them. Especially the families that still held fast their children.

Held steadfast. And ever closer to worsening breaking hearts that threatened to shatter. Break completely. And then grow harsh and colder and bitter. Wounds that never heal. A town of parents disgraced, afraid. 

The priest prayed to the Lord of Mercy and divine intervention, please… for the town. Spare them. 

Spare them this wolfen hungry wraith. Whatever has come back to life in Castle Dracula, please let it leave us in peace. Let it find its hunting grounds elsewhere. 

Please God. Take this blight away that blasphemes You, by wearing the shape of Your Image! Cast it away…

Countess Zaleska watched this all from her tower and laughed.

…

Carmilla's father was dozing off, in the rocking chair of the main room by the front door. Beside the fireplace, when a sudden scream in the night brought him out of exhausted sleep. He flew to his feet, still dressed in his filthy day's wear, rifle in his hands he whirled and then covered the short distance to his own bedroom. 

The scream had belonged to his wife. He was sure of it. 

And his suspicion was confirmed when he burst into the room. His wife was sat up in bed, blankets pulled to her face in fright like a child wanting to hide. But that wasn't all…

Something was pixie perched in the open window. Crouched and bent and hunkered in bestial goblin shape. But it was a shape he thought he might nonetheless recognize. 

Then his eyes attuned to the dark and he lost his breath. The words escaped his lips, windless: –

“... Carmilla?" 

Tittery, cruel and saccharine childish girlish giggles came from the little silhouette of beastly shape in the window. A smile, white, gleamed and grew in the night. 

And the eyes. The eyes seemed to disappear then reappear like flashing jewels that sometimes shone an animal shade of scarlet/pink. 

"Yes, papa! Yes, it's me! Tell Mama to stop being silly.”

His wife shouted his name in bottled terror: “Cristian!" 

Carmilla in the dark, in the window, tittered more bright cruel child laughter. As if playing a game. 

“See, papa! She only uses your name in front of me when she's upset! She's so foolish, isn't she papa? She always was. You've always thought so." 

Cristian, father of the sweet little nine year old Carmilla, surprised himself with what he did next. He leveled his rifle at the waist, pointing it at the laughing shape in the midnight dark of the window. 

He growled: "Get the hell out of my home, whatever you are! You are not welcome here, demon! You are not welcome in this house!” 

A beat. 

And then the laughter of the thing grew. Sharper. More cruel and twisted and sadistic. 

Then the bastard child shape of the dark, perched, said sweetly, “But papa, mama's already invited me in…” 

Cristian looked to his wife, Consuela, with dread stealing over his darkening heart. 

She looked wide eyed and pleading, "I'm sorry! Please, I didn't know, I thought she was a dream, and I thought she was home, and she… she just… asked…” 

Cristian looked back to the shape in the window. 

Carmella began to crawl in. 

"You know, papa, you should be really proud. All of the other children before me weren't chosen, they were just meat. That's what she said, pa. ‘Just meat’. But not me. No. She chose me, special, papa. And now I am sired and I feel wonderful. More wonderful and powerful than ever. I can show you, daddy. I can show you and mama too.” 

She began to crawl towards them. Tittering and giggling, girlish little squeals. 

The rifle was leveled once more, pointed at the crawling shape. 

Carmilla just laughed, "Oh! That won't work, silly papa! You know it won't…” 

Grim hopeless dread, cold and heavy stole over his chest and guts, the vacant place where his heart should be. 

Consuela wished to flee but terror kept her bound to the bed. 

The thing crawled in further. 

"I do wish you'd get rid of these stinky flowers though, papa. They are revolting and cloying and I HATE THEM!” 

And with that and without any warning, she lunged with animal speed. Lunged and took her father Cristian to the ground. 

The rifle went off. The struggle was over quickly. 

Cristian lay still in a growing pool of warm dark. 

Consuela shrieked as the child shape tittered and then began to lap up the pool of her husband's blood. 

Like a dog. Like a wild mongrel beast. 

A wild animal that's gotten a taste for manflesh and red. 

It was with this last terrible sight that Consuela prayed for forgiveness from the Lord on high. Prayed aloud and to the heavens for mercy and that she was sorry for failing her duties as a wife and a mother. 

Carmilla laughed at her. And then lunged again. 

Telling her that God could not hear her. 

He was deaf to all of the screaming of the Earth. 

…

The mutilated bodies were found the next day. Midday, when the sun held high and center of the blue. He hadn't been seen and he hadn't come to the shop for his usual grain and feed. 

The ghastly scene was worse than any had ever beheld prior. None of them had ever seen such carnage. Such heartless wanton slaughter of two innocent people. A man and his humble wife. 

Parents. That'd just lost their child.  

…

Another town meeting was held. More drastic measures were decided upon. And taken. 

A horseman, their fastest, the swiftest rider in town was dispatched. With simple yet absolutely vital mission. He should come if the message was properly delivered and conveyed. 

Find him. Find the doctor who was also a hunter of sorts. A hunter of these strange and terrible things. He was said to be able to identify and destroy such beasts. It was said that he had already sent such felled creatures back to the abyssal chasm from whence they had came… 

The rider, Florin, was dispatched. And sent. 

Find him….find the one called Abraham Van Helsing. 

And God willing, bring him here so that he may deliver us!!

The assistant had been in town when young Florin had flown. His ear to the ground and the right subtle inquiries to the right fools told him the rest. 

All he needed to know. 

He returned to the castle in secret. When his master awoke, he told her of the plan of the townsfolk. 

And together they shared heartless wicked laughter, the fools! The fools! They had no idea! 

Professor Abraham Van Helsing was dead. Long dead. Food for the maggots and the worms in the womb of soil that was his grave. 

Zaleska could still recall visiting the site. And spitting on it. 

Carmella came awake then and she too joined in their laughter. She loved to be with them, the Countess and her loyal assistant, her new mother and father. 

They were such a wonderful and happy family. 

… 

Egnaw groaned. All of his misshapen form seemed to be nothing but pain and weight. He couldn't move. Stunned. Perhaps paralyzed. But none of this held candleflame to the predicament he now found himself in. 

The thing, the creation, was huge. Powerful. It held him in one massive clawed hand, attached to a powerful arm of stitched and patchwork muscle tissue and limb. The eyes were vulpine red and animal alive and wide and they seem to bore holes into him. 

The creation shrieked in his face, then brought him in as it lunged in with its wide open mouthed face. 

The fangs sank in and the thing began to suck. And drink. Deeply. 

Strange and unholy euphoria stole over the poor man servant slave then. Not the first in his bloodline to both serve… and then curse the name of Frankenstein! 

He was grogged and fogged of thought,. disoriented as if drugged. He couldn't tell where they were. Or how long it had been since the tower's collapse. 

Since the experiment.

An experiment that had been all too successful. And only to be sabotaged suddenly in the end. 

He cursed his master, Henry Frankenstein, looking at his bound and unconscious form, lying in the dirt. As he himself was held aloft by the throat. 

The creation, it's powerful stolen fangs of mad science and witch doctory, sank into his misshapen frame just below and underneath the armpit. 

He sucked. And sucked. Pulling more and more precious warm living scarlet from the ugly bloodbag. 

The creation had its fill. Then moved on, the bloodbags still bound and trussed. 

Still dragged through the dirt. Some of them semi-conscious and cursing, screaming. Threatening. Begging…

… pleading. Pleading for help. Pleading for mercy. 

Help us please… arose pitifully from the dirt. 

And was promptly ignored. By both God. 

And monster. 

The creation knew to sleep by day. Instinct and magic innate told him. 

And the mountains, those too were instinct. And magic. 

And they were still calling him. 

Something lived there, something that would have him. 

It called. 

Drawing ever nearer, he was just starting to be able to hear and discern the tidal wave tumult of the words to the mountains song. 

And dragging the bloodbags behind him like large satchels that carried precious cargo, the creation continued on towards them. Their outline and shape gaining more detail and growing more to staggering towers as he took each heavy animal step. 

The mountains called. And Egnaw wondered if his master, Frankenstein would ever awake. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Tumult and thunderbolts ruled the grey ruin of heavens above his staggering tower. Lightning wounded the sky with bright dagger bolts of blue-white that cooked ozone and reminded a man just how small he really was. 

It was just the way he liked it. Tonight's experiment would go off without trap or a hitch. He felt it in the buzzing air, electric with godfire on high and everywhere, throughout all of the dark land, where his crumbling dilapidated tower stood. Where  he now kept shop and some sad demented semblance of home. 

The abandoned tower had once been great, a symbol of might. Now it shook and quivered with every turn of the Earth, it shed stone and mortar and brick like an old woman does her tears. 

Godfire at his command, at his disposal and use, Henry Frankenstein was at his console of controls and levers and switches and dials. All hummed to life at the cunning genius of his touch, at the helm of his great machine of life, he ruled where others only dwelled. 

White lightning bolted, godfire tamed and wielded, arc-ed between forks of steel and circuitry both prodigiously composed and endowed with the black power smear of the occult through sigil and shape and spoken dark tongue. The great machine thrummed with both the inner mechanical grind of electric facsimile soul and ancient unknown talismanic power. The mad doctor flew from panel to panel, from control to control to the multitudes of coils that fed the flame of the machine that would grant on this black night filled with cacophonous thunder, precious life back to the cold corpse flesh that had already tasted the bosom of the soil, of the grave. A great child reborn, belched back out free and alive again. To walk and roam and dominate. For he would not be some mere child alive again, no mere man. 

He would be mighty. Augmented. Powerful. 

More than a man. 

And the mad doctor had found just the perfect touch, just the thing to perfect this already considerable titan of patchwork tissue and graveyard harvested parts. Just the thing that was thought and believed to be only legend and campfire ghost story, dread tales. 

“Master… “ 

Frankenstein smiled. The sound of his small bent aide’s voice brought it back to the front of his mind for a moment. The perilous journey to the frozen river…

…

He and the misshapen little ogre of ruined manshape flesh had made their way together. Egnaw was yet another servant to his family, broken in the womb already before birth by God's cruel and merciless, indifferent hand. They'd inquired the locals and the undesirables especially of the little Briton town that rested adjacent of the river where he was said to have been held. 

Where his abominated and powerful earthly/unearthly form was said to reside. Cloak and pale and bones and all … 

The small village denizens were just like their pathetic and filthy township. Small. Feeble of mind and superstitious and weak. 

But they had right to be superstitious. They had very good and proven reason to be…

It was a sour  gaggle of whores that  eventually had pointed  the way  with the encouragement  of coin and a host of bitter laughter. The festering open sores of disease picked at and flowing freely upon their mass of worn, once beautiful faces. Faces that had once held youth but now just hateful visages of battered  disdain that already semi-prayed eagerly for the rest of the grave.

Down. Down past yon graveyard. Down at the bottom, at the base of the sulphuric black mountain. 

And away Frankenstein and Egnaw had gone.

Past the graveyard. One old and bent and broken.  Swamped. Quagmire corpse sludge soup. Water-logged and choked with uncontested thorny growth. The iron works of the fence and gate were all wayward and bent. The tombstones were in likewise fashion, like a jutting snaggletooth  nephilim jaw, submerged in black putrid ground, bent and haphazard and broken from an infected gumline of spoiled earth. They’d made much, so many ghoulish harvests of the graveyards of the past. So many limbs and torsos and other parts taken and harvested when the season was nigh and ripe and proper. This time they were going beyond, past the place where the dead are supposed to lie undisturbed and slumber the final rest. 

They came to the black mountain of sulphur and scaled the treacherous path around the great ebon belly of the titanic beast of flamestone. They came around the otherside and came upon a small herd of wild goats, untended and unheeded. Egnaw caught one, a small kid, and slit its throat  and drank its blood. His master indulged him the practice as the bent hunched manshape drank blood then held the dead small goat thing’s body to the sky by its curved horns and prayed to gods that were ancient and all but forgotten. 

They went on.  Cautiously, down the rocky slide of the precarious mountain path.  

The  whores dying of disease in their damp dying village had been right. The frozen river was there. And so was he. 

Frozen. Trapped in the ice of the still riverbed. Just visible beneath its frosted translucent surface. Slumbering, sleeping in the trance of the undead. 

Henry Frankenstein and Egnaw came to the edge of the river and gazed down at he, the great and terrible and fabled Count Dracula. His pallid legend held trapped and preserved as he dreamed black dreams, terrible beneath the ice. 

His eyes were open and vulpine and powerful. And still filled with terrible intelligence. 

They looked up from their frozen prison bed and seemed to regard the young Frankenstein with  malice and viciousness and knowing. As if knowing what the mad doctor intended to do. 

“Master …” said the bent man servant slave, as he had so many other times before, and like so many like he that had been likewise subservient to the great and infamous Frankenstein family, throughout the  years and down the lines, as if ordained by strange destiny. It was a word the  young mad Frankenstein knew well too. The little man was looking for instruction, awaiting  direction. As such as he had and always would from such as he. 

From such as the legends that were the great Frankenstein family. 

“Don’t be afraid, Egnaw, he cannot hurt you. He was trapped in the holy flow of the running water of the river. Now frozen over,  he is entombed.” He repeated: “ He cannot hurt you. Grab the pickaxe. Crack the ice. Then take what we need, what we came for. And hurry. The night  does flee.” 

The servant did as he was bade. He picked up the ice chipping slender bladed axe brought for the task of cracking the frozen face of the coffin of river that held the undead power the master sought to wield and make his own. 

All the while the eyes of Dracula bore up at him from beneath the translucent ice. 

They held him bound. 

He was frozen. The pick-axe held above his damaged frame as best he could manage, as if stuck poised in mid-strike. 

He couldn't tell how much life was in those eyes right now. How awake was he…? Egnaw could not help himself, held fixed by the thought. 

And those eyes beneath him, beneath his feet,  beneath his own mere mortal soul and the water of the river, held still. Beneath the world. But still powerful and somehow still vital despite their slumbering watery grave. Those eyes were piercing, yes, but they were also like pits, dark. Like falling down very deep wells…

“Egnaw!" yelled Frankenstein the master and lord, the necrodoctor from the spit of ice and jagged ebon earth just above he. 

The bent servant shook his head. The cold helped him to clear it. 

“I'm sorry, master. I am afraid." 

“It's just as we planned, my friend. Bring it down with some strength, but just about the mouth. Just to be safe. It will serve our purposes more efficiently.” 

A beat. Egnaw still held. Gripped in his own terror and held frozen by the watery naked stare of the submerged riverbound Count, in his coffin of ice. 

Frankenstein roared: "Egnaw! Hurry! This isn't the first corpse we've harvested together and you know from experience as well as I that it is not an affair that affords time to lose your nerve! Now hurry the fuck up! Or I will come down there and bury the blade of the pick-axe in your neck and bring you back as something that crawls and subsists on feces and has no eyes!” 

Egnaw gave clumsy apology, blubbering. And then with tears that froze on his deformed and unloved face, he began to set about his task. 

He drove the pick, careful and cautious with his aim, the master had again been about to yell, but …

He swung and missed and buried it in the center of Count Dracula’s forehead. The blood, so warm and red, immediately began to flow. A rivulet spout of vibrant lurid scarlet, volcanic in microcosm around the stab of metal it bled.

Both men screamed! And prepared for attack, to flee. Frankenstein began to berate and curse the stupid little bastard, but…

But nothing happened. 

The vampire lord of darkness still held frozen in the river of the Earth. Not budging an inch. Still as any earthly corpse delivered such a blow. 

And still staring. 

And still bleeding. 

The pair stood stunned over the face of the river a moment longer. A moment still. 

Then Frankenstein spoke: “See! Nothing to be afraid of, my friend. Just make sure you aim better, be more careful, ok?".

The master smiled. But the startling moment still had him tense and the threat of what he'd said before was still very much alive in his eyes. So…

… despite his terror, Egnaw went about his task. He pulled the blade free with a frozen splurch, took more careful aim this time, and then brought it down, aiming a little closer for the chin. 

He was much more successful this time. Cracking the ice just below the Count’s lips.

Egnaw got down with a hammer and a smaller ice pick and finished the task. Breaking the ice and freeing the pale-blue jaws of the Count. He wenched the jaws open with the dental instrument supplied by the doctor, terror threatening to gallop one final thunderclap within his chest the entire time, and then quickly brought out the pliers. The next part he performed with even more urgent speed. So alive and wretched was his horror. But he did it anyway, for the master. 

He did it anyway. 

He pulled the large ghastly canine incisors free from their frozen undead fleshen housing. They dripped brightest livid animal red and steamed in the cold English night. 

And then the pair quickly took to their nighttime back trail and fled the place. 

But all the while the eyes of Dracula still stared. Perhaps, a bit more alive. 

And burning with the most intense animal hatred. 

The blood still flowed as well. 

But even as they made their way in success of their labors, and on to much better things as well, the little lowly bastard couldn't know his place and hold his tongue. 

He again, had to voice his cowardice. 

The rumors. The stories, the newest ones, spreading all about the lands in which they'd traveled through as of late… the talk of travelers and commoners and the low and the superstitious element…

The woman. A Countess. Beyond the Borgo Pass, in the Carpathian Mountains. One who is said to have taken ownership of Castle Dracula. And now lords and holds domain in the neighboring lands. Through power. And fear. 

Because… the fortress castle of ancient stone is not all she's supposed to have taken as her own in the place of wolves and snow, in the Carpathian mountains…

“Master,” whined Egnaw, "but the woman, in the mountains, what if the stories are true?”

Frankenstein, who was annoyed and cared nothing for the wild rumors of brains addled with alcohol and syphilis, told Egnaw to shut it for what felt like the hundredth time about the whole affair. 

There was no vampire queen in Castle Dracula. 

"You saw him yourself, what more proof do you need?” asked Frankenstein as they passed the graveyard once again. 

Egnaw did not like to think and so he said nothing. He just held his head low.

And followed the master. 

Doctor Henry Frankenstein. Who carried their precious cargo in a bundle in his black leather purse. 

The fangs of Dracula. 

…

And once more the mewling little maggot wanted to bemoan, and cower with words pitiful and loaded with a child's fear. Doubt! He wanted to doubt the great doctor in what could quite possibly be his single greatest moment of triumph. 

Not just conquering death. No. No. 

Something more. Much more powerful. 

And now the little toad showed his lack of guts and spine to go with his broken body and lack of a mind. This was where the little bastard showed his true incompetence, he lacked the resolve, he loved to revel and retreat into the pathetic dark corner of his own lonely fears and addled superstitions. 

And he loved to doubt. He loved to bring up the stupid woman. 

None of it was real. The only thing real now was his triumph. And his creation. Soon it would live. And then it would dominate the world. 

Against the mounting roar of thunder storm and the phantom howl of the rising wind, Egnaw yelled, beseeching the mad doctor, his master to be heard and for the dark task to be aborted. 

“Master … ! please! You cannot, it is too dangerous! You cannot meld the flesh of the infernal with that that was once human, it goes against God’s design!” 

The mad doctor whirled on the little servant. His eyes wide and possessed. The whites bright as the moon that was stolen by the thunderheads that now roared cacophonous overhead.

“You stupid, weak little fool, I already have! I spit in the face of your God and all gods of life and death! I am a Frankenstein! By the right won by my own forged genius, do I possess the authority to do as I wish!”

“But the woman in the castle, it is said that she obtained the true remains of-”

The mad doctor cut him off and roared over him and that of the thunder, he wished this pointless talk to be over, the time was nigh, the storm was reaching its zenith. 

“That is all gypsy nonsense and you know it, you little coward! You little pustule of a man! Now make ready the slab and the subject upon it or so help me, Egnaw, I will recompose your flesh into that of a quadriplegic with naught but a toothless mouth to drool and scream with!”

The bent servant scuttled away, terrified of everything. A creature of subservience and constant dread and fear. Woe to him, Egnaw went to the slab and checked beneath the pale sheets and secured straps, the massive mountain of blue flesh and patchwork limbs and sinew. The bald head with massive suture around the whole top of the skull. The place where it was sawn open to provide the perfect element that one of the great doctor’s fathers had unintentionally discovered to be ideal and inadvertently provided years ago, during one of his own fantastic experiments. The brain of a mad criminal. The mind of a killer, a butcher. The perfect cranial jelly to act as the pilot for this new terrible composition of flesh and spell and science to wage single violent war on all of mankind. The perfect brain for the task of retribution. Henry Frankenstein mused: together… we will make them pay, my son! My greatest creation! …

And the perfect mind had the perfect body of a herculean titan. Sewn together and massive, broad frame and fully developed musculature augmented by growth hormones and steroids and dark arcane words… 

And this perfect creation had now the perfect weapons. The perfect twin dragon fang daggers with which to wound and drink out all of the life in the terrible world of lowly peasants and small minds. The fangs of the prince of darkness would grant his creation unbridled power. He would walk a giant amongst mere men. 

The storm roared above. It had about reached its zenith. And for the young mad doctor, Henry Frankenstein and his terrified aide, Egnaw, and his giant mass of necrophile fleshen art,  his greatest creation, all was ready. All was set. 

Frankenstein, hit the switch, and the lightning rod began to rise out of the crumbling and dilapidated tower. To catch the bolt that would dagger down to try to knife with fire, the Earth. He would catch the godfire and make it his slave…

Meanwhile, not far off…

… Praetorius had the few able bodied men of the neighboring small dwellings gathered. From a distance, upon the black plains of the dark land, they watched the lighting and the tower and the mad lights dancing and blasting out of the open windows of the latest son of Frankenstein’s mad experiment. The gathered host of peasants and farmers and laborers watched, tense. All sensing danger and peril together on the animal level. 

Doctor Praetorius saw this, saw  it all written on their shared and worn faces, and smiled. 

“I told you,” said the doctor, “I told you. Just like the rest of his ilk. He’s up to no good.”   

The frightened peasant men looked all about each other in the dark. The same look of bewilderment and fear written in their wide superstitious gazes and wide open faces that were so much like children afraid of the dark. The same words were shared amongst the fools, and the same recurring question in alarmed bordering hopeless tones kept coming up again and again in frantic speech until they finally directed it to the doctor who'd led them out here to spy and learn the truth. 

“What? – What do we do?”

Praetorius smiled, a thin blade of a smug smirk. His eyes, darkling jewels in the glow of torchlight beneath their barely tamed garniture of stark white locks. His black gloved hands came free of his long coat and held for the superstitious fools of the plow and fields and the goats, the device required to free them of this latest Frankenstein’s newest creation of blasphemy and wanton destruction. 

A bomb. Black powder and shrapnel and a tail of fuse to light and activate. 

The fools looked wide eyed and wondrous, first at the bomb, then the good doctor, then back to the bomb held in his black grasp again. Their eyes came up, altogether again and regarded the strange man of science, who much like Frankenstein, had come to them from out of the nowhere of surrounding strange world wilderness. Their eyes altogether said the same thing that their mouths did utter in the dark. 

“Are you serious?" 

Praetorius’ smile did not falter but his voice deepened and grew more grave and severe. His eyes remained jewels that danced with orange torch flame. 

“I'm afraid this device is by far the best means to a swift and final response to this strange malady. You don't want what Frankenstein has stitched together to wake, to get up from the table of blood and body scraps, and to take to your country, take to your roads and highways, your towns. And what of precious hunting grounds and areas away, sequestered and private… where one may not see what could befall them? … I trust you take my point." 

The stupid animal looks in all of their eyes, huddled together in the night like little ones, told him that they did. One of them held out their hands to receive the device. Praetorius gave it over and then gave the primitive dirt farmers of the forgotten country instructions on how to properly use it…

….and as he did … the storm and its arsenal of lightning and thunderbolts above reached its wild zenith….

… and inside the tower, Frankenstein, elated, gave the final command as he flipped the switch, to activate the machine attached through wires and apparatus to the lightning rod now freed. 

"Now! Egnaw! Now! NOW!” 

Egnaw flipped his lever and activated his end of the mechanical beast as Frankenstein flipped his and the lightning rod was struck! 

The entire tower became alive with dancing bolts and crawling electricity. Barely under control. Egnaw was frightened. The mad doctor remained composed, the bright white of the surging bolts danced everywhere and was barely controlled. Barely. But it was alright. The machine kept the lightning being fed from the violent heavens above into the lightning rod, tamed and controlled so as to keep feeding the white fire into the hulking frame of the damned composite of several dead men and one vampire lord. The body of his precious and greatest creation was surging with platinum inferno, nearly impossible to gaze upon, like a star, the sun itself. 

He watched as the lightning poured into his newest earthly/unearthly child and laughed with victory he felt was already achieved. It was going perfectly! All of it! This great task would surely thus yield absolute success. As long as nothing- 

Something black and rounded like a stone or a child's toy spherical ball, suddenly came in through the window. As if thrown in from below. 

It rolled a little but that wasn't all. It wasn't just the sudden appearance of the unexpected device that suddenly caught the mad doctor's attention and stole it away from his precious experiment, his precious and ultimate creation…

….it was making a strange sound. Strangely audible through the cacophony. A hissing sound. Like a snake. 

The spitting sparks finally brought his mind to the reality of what it was and the danger of the immediate present. 

He had time to curse, he knew it was the commoners that dwelled not far off … but he also knew none of their kind had the ability of mind to fashion and make the explosive device. 

Praetorius. He cursed the greasy honorless cur. And the fools he convinced to thwart his greatest effort. 

“Goddamn you! You conniving, worthl-" 

The hissing and the sparks finally ceased just as the great body on the slab, completely wreathed and aglow in the violent blast of white aural flame, sat up…

The bomb went off. A blast of concussive force and manmade fire filled the room of the makeshift laboratory. All became maelstrom inside as the shockwaves of the explosion traveled through the fragile walls of the crumbling tower, all the way down to its worn and weary foundations. 

Cracks were made, developed and grew and widened to gaping wounds in the mortar and stone as the tower broke and shattered and began to fall. 

The fools that'd gathered and conspired and thrown the thing shrieked together, one last final note of folly as they were caught in the crashing towers cataclysmic collapse. 

Frankenstein and his slave inside joined them in shrieking. Egnaw for pure fright and terror. The mad doctor, for failure. 

NO… … ! 

The tower fell below the torn sky of thunderbolts and settled into rocky dust and detritus. 

And then all was still …

…

… For awhile. Then the still smoking, still smoldering detritus stone began to shift… and to move. 

Praetorius was already long gone on horseback. Heading for the Carpathian Mountains and the newest legend that may live there, when the rock of the fallen tower was thrown aside with great and sudden power. 

The detritus flew apart in another new explosion of movement and muscle and undead powerful sinew. A cloud of choking dust rose, and drifted hanging in the static hot atmosphere of the lightning storm air. 

Amongst the rough cloud of choking grey, the creation roared! Its animal howl was both bestial and desperate man. It roared to the thunderbolts in the dead heavens on high that had given him life. 

He roared once more. Baring his long gleaming fangs, stabs of white amongst the rest of his yellow demented gumline of black and green. The eyes were red. Like the father when in the heat of the hunt, when in the throes of hunger. 

And that was its first known sensation save rage upon its birth, thirst… 

Hunger. 

Voracious hunger. Seething rage. 

And then the storm suddenly ceased. As if banished by the roars of the creation. The deep sky of rolling grey thunderheads was dispelled and parted. Opening up and freeing the moon and her pallid rays…

The moonlight glow came out and kissed the newest unearthly child made, illuminating the massive frame of stitches and repurposed body parts. 

The head was bald. The ears were pointed. All the flesh was mottled grey-green-blue. Corpse color no amount of lightning or life by fire could banish or renew. The arcane blackfire and necromantic art also inflamed within the absence of soul inside the thing and along with the fangs that granted him great power and great hunger, they granted and gave the newborn creation knowledge and instincts innate. 

Born anew amongst the blast of sky fire lightning and man's crude black powder, the fangs filled him with power. And the knowledge… it was born well aware. 

Well aware of what it was. And where it came from, and how… 

And what it should do from here. 

The creation roared to the sky once more. Then began to dig around the stone detritus. His incredible strength made it all easy. Child's work. 

He found what he was looking for. His maker. His father. 

“Frankenstein…” he growled, vulpine and throaty as he pulled the wounded limp unconscious form of the mad doctor free from the debris. 

Then he found his father's twisted little servant. 

Both were still breathing. 

But unconscious. Badly hurt. 

He tied them up, trussed with a length of useable rope he'd found amongst the crash of fallen stone. 

Then he found a few of the fools who'd tried to abort him by fire, still alive.  He pulled them free. And then tied them captive as well. 

And then the creation, new and powerful and famished and longing for the wide open space of the dark lands and beyond, set off for the land that was calling him. A land filled with throats and virgins and children and lambs to slaughter and with which to feed. A world to gorge upon and to feast and to make bend subservient to his own will and throat, to tremble and cower before the deadly moonglow of the whitefire dagger of his biting piercing ripping teeth. 

The creation set out for the lands. Dragging his father and the others behind him through the dirt, trussed like cattle. He went out, his new strength was prodigious and filled him. He stopped only once to drink the blood of one of the trussed villagers. And then went on. Invigorated. Virile. 

The mountains beyond were calling him. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

The frightened peasantry tried to ward her off, to scare her away as they had so done with so many others before. It didn't work. She meant to see it, she meant to see the place. She meant to have it. It wasn't the first time that they had failed. 

Her eyes burned with a glow like a wolf in the throes of hunger. A beastly and ghastly need that seemed to emanate from her beautiful eyes with an unearthly glow and shine. Like diamond gem stones carved and made from madness. 

Her coach hurtled along. Through the narrow mountain pass. Retracing perilous steps through tempest wind and forest snow filled with red eyes and teeth. And the fever of running galloping claw, seeking purchase. The wind increased its howl and filled the treacherous path but the small black stage just increased its speed. The pair of horses galloping desperate. Puffing steam from twin nostrils like locomotives made from muscle and pistoning rippling black hide. The stage itself was ebon black as well, the interior where the lady sat and journaled was stark red. Lurid crimson. They were a striking sight hurtling through the Carpathian mountains, amidst the wind and the snow of purest bridal gown white. 

The white rained down, angry. And the black coach filled with the lady of the red shot through. Up and towards the pinnacle heart of the mountain pass. 

Towards the castle. It was waiting. 

They came into a great and vast  courtyard of stone. Broken battlements like shattered animal teeth jagged against the tempest swollen black of the storming winter sky.  There  were no stars and the moon was absent. All was stolen behind the wild furious curtain. 

She was helped from the stage by her driver, her assistant in all things. Without a word  they dismounted  the stage and came to the door. The great wooden gates, tall and carved with inscription and depiction: of history and battle and bloody family history all of which had been eroded and worn with harsh weather and time. 

They forced the doors together, they gave with some effort. Hinges whined and groaned as a universe of dust and darkness was disturbed and kicked up.

They went inside. The assistant lit his lantern. It was ancient and barren inside. Disused. Unopposed. Undisturbed. Left to fester as it wept. 

Alone.

But now no longer.

Her eyes drank it all in around her. The dark by lantern glow, her mind cataloguing it all down for future journaling later in a fervor of obsessive compulsive act before sleep could steal her, late late into the night. The predawn. Nearly every one since she was a small child of wonder and fear. 

Nearly every night…

The Harker account was the most accurate, she surmised, as she sauntered around the interiors of the castle attended to by her only companion, the assistant by lantern light. By its feeble intruder glow they made their way through the dark.

And then she came to the portrait.

They'd all had their points of noteworthy authenticity as far as she'd seen: Harker, the Browning record, the Hammer accounts, Werner and Murnau… 

… Zaleska gazed up at the portrait. And was spellbound. Entranced by His visage. And while none of the previous tales or accounts or any of the stories or records had gotten Him completely right, completely accurate, they'd all gotten one thing right.

The Eyes. His eyes that were wild and vulpine powerful and hypnotic and intense. Eyes that have known boundless oceans of passion and blood and cruel and vile torture and mutilation. Cruelty and beauty in unbridled mass. And the ability to share it all with you with a mere stare. Just one look…

From those Eyes. 

It was a power she both feared and wished to capture. 

Needed. Feared. 

She needed to feel its predatorial wield.

They went on. Down.

Down. Deeper. Down into the chambers. Where he kept his coffins filled with maggoty rotten earth. The sour rotten womb where she prayed his bones may still dwell. 

Please… she prayed to the infernal. Please… there are so many legends and stories, it is so difficult to know which could be true, but please! Let it be there! We've come so far, I've come so far and worked so hard and journeyed through wretched lands and suffered and sacrificed all and gave up everything, please! I beseech thee capricious fortune, whatever haunts the dark as lord of the flies, please! Let it be there! down in his dark dungeon chamber, may he still slumber!

They came down the stone steps to three coffins. They were destroyed. Their earthen wombs spilled out all over to join the mud of the dank cellar floor. The fourth coffin looked old, but undisturbed. 

Zaleska’s heart galloped in her chest. The assistant by her side, they went to the black box and with a crow bar and a bit of strength, they pried it open. 

And there he lie. 

Dust. And bones. 

The eyes were no longer alive. No longer there.

But that didn't matter. 

What she needed was still there and she directed her assistant to pull them free. And to prep her for immediate surgery. 

…

The chair was brought in from the carriage. Heavy for the assistant under the weight and cold and snow. It would be heavier still for the madame. Much more painful weight to carry for the Countess, she was about to pay a hefty toll in the dread pain of blood and mayhap yet more still, the tattered and well worn revenant  remnants of her immortal soul.   

But… what was a tattered soul to the earthbound manifest of unbridled power and fleshen immortality? What were the threats of heaven's gates forever barred to her if she never found the rotting festering slumber and eternal dust in the grave…? 

What… what then was any of that to the madame… what were any of those veiled pulpit threats to the Countess?

Nothing. Divine threats of divine punishment were long behind her now. Long dead. History…

The assistant bore the load of the chair and all its straps and apparatus to the door and through it. He slammed the great old doors shut with a resounding clap as the wolves of the mountains watched.

… 

The many strange apparatus and protrusions of wood and metal and leather, some blunted others sharp enough to pierce into skin, bit into the chair's subject/prisoner, whomever they may be. It was a tool of many purposes, before… inquisition… but now modified it served a new purpose and a new master. It held greater power now. 

Zaleska was fastened into the chair, betrothed in naught but thin veiled white night gown. The many teeth of the chair, all along the back and spine and all over and about the seat, bit into her flesh everywhere they found purchase and immediately the virgin pallor of the gown was made wet and royal with her red. Blossoming, rapidly expanding unfurling liquid roses of blood that quickly conglomerated into one massive dark crimson soak all about her thin person. The chair drank as the straps were fastened. Then tightened. 

The assistant finished fastening her head to the cage, the metal bars and wood and rubber that would hold her crown in place as the great surgical task was performed. The vise was attached and fixed to her jaw. Her mouth was forced and held open, wider and wider to a near obscene gape, with each cruel turn of the crank…

… til it was done. He went to the tray beside him for the last tools needed to finish the arcane practice of this necromantic surgical rite. All of it in the metal tray beside him in this dark room that legend told was once the great library of the lost boyar, Dracul. 

The pliers. 

The book. The tome. Ancient. Nearly dust. 

Gauze and cotton swabs. As needed. 

The fangs. The fangs themselves. Pulled from the ancient dead dæmonic remains of Count Dracula himself. Long and still gleaming pearl and bone white, even after all these many years.

The window was open already, wide like an open eye to receive and drink in. The moon shone in and hit the Countess in her chair, bound and bleeding and feeding its ancient drinking wood. 

The assistant opened the book and began to read. 

Zaleska in the chair began to glow in the moonlight rays. Her blood, flowing freely also began to darkle in the night's light. 

He set the open book down and continued to read, his black gloved hands moved to the pliers. 

He looked to his mistress then, unable to speak, either of them. He'd asked her before they started if she'd want something in the form of spirits, to help dull and manage the pain, a narcotic or pain killer, an opiate. Anything. Anything at all. 

Zaleska had only looked at her loyal assistant and smiled. 

As she was smiling with her wide and strange eyes now. Piercing into him and telling him, yes. Telling him to do it. Yes. 

Yes…

Still reading the black tongue of a forgotten age he took the pliers of steel and rubber and began to pull the first of the Countess’ canine incisors free. The blood shot and squirted and flowed forth freely from her pried open jaws. Dark and thick and viscous and this blood did moonlight glow too. And the biting chair did drink. 

Her body wrenched and twisted with the agony of the task, she choked, gargled, spat and drank … her agonized writhing body made the many teeth of the biting chair sink deeper and more freely… her eyes were a livid fury alive with sheer torture and sharpest pain.

The first one came out with some effort. And then the second. They both went into another metal tray filled with solution with a, tink! 

And then the pliers were set down and the fangs of the dark one were picked up. And the dark chanting grew older and stranger and deeper. 

Deeper in flame. In bode. In sour bowels made prisons, eternal. 

The first of the great unholy fangs was placed into the raw open crater of pink glistening gum, bleeding and sheathed in gargling red. The root of the long animal incisor was fed in and the raw angry nerve, exposed at first shrieked. A human live wire of agony and torturous black pain. The words grew more guttural and animal and forgotten. More deadalive. More sour belched. 

And then the raw angry crater of pink and blood felt the darkling magic under the moon… and then more eagerly began to accept and then fuse onto and latch the foreign root of the first ungodly fang into place. Taking it in. Becoming one. 

The second one inserted was taken even more eagerly. Amidst hot gurgles of blood and dead arcane words. By the light of the moon. 

In the moonlight: both great fangs became newly housed in eager bleeding pink skin, wet. The gaping maw gave one last great mouthful belch of blood, spat. The biting chair and all of its tight straps took one last great drink. All of it and all of her aglow in the moonlight by window that was cast in and vivid. 

Powerful. 

The symbols and sigils and stars carved into the wood, covering the surface of the biting chair in far-flung ancient inscription, began to illuminate moonwhite, white-hot, as if metal superheated. Cabalistic. Occult. Solomonic. Druidic. Unknown. 

Then the glowing Countess in her chair began to become wreathed in strange emerald green and goblin flame. 

She laughed.

 Broke free. 

The assistant smiled. 

…

“Mommy,” the little village girl began to plead, “please, I don't want to go to sleep, I'm afraid!" 

Her mother sighed, exhausted, it had been another long and trying day. And there was just another one awaiting them all tomorrow. Lord! she just needed the girl to sleep. 

"Hush, little one. That's enough. It's long past your bedtime, you're begging and pestering has kept you well past for long enough, now: no more! Get in bed and stay between the sheets.”

The little one begged and began to cry as her mother began to depart her small bedroom. 

"Please,” began again the little one's protestations, "please don't put out the light!” 

The mother had no intention of leaving open candleflame nor overnight burning lantern. She knew all too well the mischief of unheeded fire. It was always hungry and rose when you refused its notice. 

She put out all the candles and the lantern and left the small one alone in the dark. 

Afraid. Alone. Sleep wouldn't come. Only the light of the moon through the small window over her bed and with its rays what it brought. 

She was dark. And slithering. 

The little one had tried to tell her mother. Several times. But it was never to any avail. 

Her mother was just so angry as of late that the little one always seemed so weak and sick and needy and needing near constant attention. Her mother wouldn't listen. She wouldn't hear a word about the slithering woman of the dark that came to- 

A sound. From the corner. The one most swallowed by shadow in the farthest reach of her room. 

The shadow began to reach, to reach out clawing with a splayed dark hand… reaching for the frightened little peasant girl. 

It sought and found and strangled around the little one's heart, closed. And the little one was helpless to make a sound then or take flight or have any hope of escape. 

The woman then followed her dark hand from out of the shadows. Slithering and crawling towards her  like an abominated animal of unnatural demented mental design and command. Long dark hair and flowing dripping crimson gown. She left a sliming path, a putrid black/red trail like a slug, as she made her way to the bed. 

She crawled in and on top of the sheets. And smiled. Her eyes gleamed in the dark like bewitching stones. 

And just below them. A pair. About the smiling lips, something sharp protruded there and also gleamed. 

“Hello, little sowling. How are you feeling tonight?”

The little peasant girl could make no sound but the slightest whimper. The hungry woman of the shadows knew this and relished the pain of the small child's torment. 

“Oh, you don't want to speak to me now, but you've been so talkative of me in my absence as of late. Or what you thought was My Absence for which there is naught little sowling." she leaned in closer to the snared little one. “I am always with you, girl.  I can always see you. And I can hear everything you ever say, do you know, why, little one?" 

The little girl said nothing. 

“Because I am God, now." 

And with one cat-like fast and fluid move, both of the thing's hands came up and seized the girl by the face. Either side. Each hand. Claws. Sharp. Digging into soft young child flesh. Weeping. 

Inside. Screaming. 

Shrieking inside in pain. And sheer mind-flaying terror. 

“You didn't tell anyone my name, did you, sowling?" 

The child said nothing but her young and little mind was an open book to her now for her to read. 

And… her secret was safe. 

For now. 

She would secure that. And she would feed. 

With the child's small face still in her ghastly claws Zaleska twisted fast and snapped the child's neck. Her mouth opened wide and salivated and became great jaws and came in, to the neck of the limp small corpse. 

Wielding the fangs, the great twin daggers of the dragon, and they drank. 

They drank so deeply. 

TO BE CONTINUED …

The sleeping child was tethered to a pole in the center of town. Next to the empty haunted gallows. It was late at night. Well past the midnight hours when they suspected the thing to prowl and dwell and hunt. 

The child was drugged. Soundly slumbering. Lit by the pale of full moonlight that shone from above like a watchful spectre of white light that would observe and remain ever present but indifferent. That which might be above never seemed to care much about the affairs of this small town in the dirt. The place was called Springwater, in the Arizona territory. The year was 1888.

The child was the scapegoat. Bait. The helpless lamb put out to snare the thing that had been stalking the town after dark. Snatching the children. Mutilating them and profaning their dead bodies and draining them of blood. It was an unforgivable sin and crime unworthy of any form of recompense, dark blasphemy. And it could not go on without accord. It must be punished. 

But there were things that crawled across the face of the cursed earth that did not answer to the laws of man. 

Quincy knew. He'd seen strange things in the desert before. Overseas. Other lands. The war. Long gone. But it left its trace of crying phantoms. Screaming maimed dead that refused to be silent. Uneasy graves… everywhere. All of the land. Stained with red… and gunpowder and mutilation that still took some semblance of human shape and danced in the late dark of the deep night. 

They dwelled. Yes…

And some of these abominated shapes were far from any shape of a natural man… Quincy wondered. Thought. What was it that was taking the children? Killing them. Mutilating. Draining every last precious crimson drop… as if drinking it. 

As if in need of every last bit of red, every last dark thick liquid morsel in this vast and arid Godless desert. 

He coughed and spat into the spittoon at his feet in the corner. He watched from the window and lit his pipe. Drawing deeply and warming his bearded face in an orange glow. 

Chaco was with him. As the good man had promised. Brave fellow. But it was easy to understand. His little Javi had been one of the first ones taken. 

The Mexican sat on a rough stool and drank. He smoked as well. Little cigars. Cigarillos that smelled oily and pungent. Cannabis. Quincy himself had always been curious about the substance. It seemed to ease the fury the small man of tanned leather flesh must've felt. His eyes seemed to always water. Tears held there brimming, always threatening to spill and cascade down the worn haggard pits and cracks of his tired old face. It made it so that his dark eyes always glistened. Like jewels. His wife thought they were beautiful, but hated the pain. It seemed to be the only place that held any water on the man, the rest was tanned sun-leather flesh and tequila. 

The sheriff and the Pinkerton agent were there as well. Stiff. Seeming to not know what to do with themselves as they waited. The Pinkerton could still hardly believe what they were doing. Although they all saw… they all saw what it could do. They all saw what it did. 

The Kendridge girl. From her bed, from her room, in the night. They all saw her ripped away and out the window by the shape. 

And they had all found her days later. Little corpse just outside of town. In the barrens. Bloody. Ripped apart. Ravaged. Profaned. 

Dry. 

Quincy Morris chagrined at the stifling of this space, the closeness of this room. The sheriff's small office. He tried to see the night sky as well as he spied the child from his place at the window. He wished to see the naked blanket of dark filled with diamond stars. He loved to look up into the night when he could, it was better than anything down here.

He couldn't see anything. The room stifled his view.

It was just as well. Better his eyes stay earthbound for now. For whatever may come out of the dark for the child.

“This is wrong." 

The sheriff again. A sentimental fool, Quincy thought. Now you want to bellyache…

But the gunfighter held his tongue.

The Pinkerton then spoke up for the both of them, all three counting Chaco, who also knew what had to be done. What the four of them, the men of this midnight call must do.

"There is much here in this town that is untoward, Antsen. Much. This is distasteful, yes. With what else we are expected to do tonight … there will be more in the way of work that leaves a bad taste.” A pause, A beat, "I suggest we fortify ourselves to such tasks that are at urgent hand, and save the sermons for afterwards.” 

"You a goddamn…" but Sheriff Antsen’s voice trailed off and he swallowed tears. Bit his cap. And looked off to the dark part of the room not touched by candle glow. 

Quincy nodded to the Pinkerton. The Pinkerton nodded back. The agent hadn't initially thought much of the man, treacherous Texan… but the way he'd handled himself and the others when they found the girl's body… and the way he'd handled her burying. 

It was enough. He knew he could put some stock in the Texan. The Sheriff perhaps. The drunk Mex…

He understood the man was mourning but… they needed to be alert. Not shitfaced and slurred. What might his boy think of his own- 

But then Chaco spoke up and cut off the Pinkerton’s run of thought. And unknowingly began what would be their postmidnight ritual game as they waited for the final dark clash in the night. As they awaited Springwaters’ final fray and sacrifice of blood, Chaco Juan Maria Ramirez began to share a little tale…

“I was young. Like Javi. We were farmers in Agua Caliente, my father, my mother, my sisters and me. When I was still a boy, during the hot summer of my thirteenth year, something began to come in the night for the chickens. For the animals. For the goats." He stopped to uncork his jug and slug it. Then he lit up another cannabis cigar and filled the small wooden room with its thick oily pungent smoke. 

He spoke again. He went on. All the other men listened as Quincy kept watch. 

“It would rip them apart and leave the pieces scattered everywhere. All over the ground. Staining it red. The pieces and the bones and entrails all looked like they were made into patterns. Like… like a language. Like signs, horrible little piles like small shrines, spelling, saying something. I don't know what. My father would say, ‘Only a devil delights in such carnage. Only a demon that loves to walk the earth and mock God and man.’…" He paused again, pulled on his smoke, “We all thought he was crazy. Loco. My mother and sisters and I… but then one night I was out… and  I saw it.”

A beat. This one a little longer. They could all see the man reliving that night. In his wide glistening dark eyes they saw him heed some terrible form and struggle to speak of it. 

Then he went on, 

"It was by moonlight that I saw it. A sickly misshapen coyote wolf, but it was also a part of it, mongrel dog. And another part, a large hairless rat.” He sucked down smoke, blew. "It was hideous. Hideous… It had my father's small dog, Paxi, in its thin slender jaws. The blood and innards were in a burst all about its horrible goblin face…” 

He lapsed again. Then finished. 

"It was canine, coyote. But it also had parts that were man. It looked at me with green and red eyes and it had smiled when it knew I had seen it. And it stood. It stood up. And turned to me. So that I could better see it, I think. " 

A beat. The Mexican finished his smoke. Stamped it out. Lit another after taking another long pull from the jug he now refused to cork. 

Sheriff Antsen finally asked: "What happened? What cha do to it?” but all of them wondered together. 

Chaco laughed. Then said amidst swirls of smoke, "I didn't do anything but scream. Then ran. My father came and said he shot at it as it ran away in the dark. He said he hit it. But I was never sure…” 

"What the fuck was it?” asked Pinkerton. 

But Quincy already knew. 

Chaco said, “The goat drinking demon. Chupacabra. Evil bloodwolf. Daemon from Hell. Beelzebub soldier…" 

The men were silent for a moment. Chaco drank. Quincy still spied from the window, the child tied and trussed in the dark. 

They all of them knew the child's name but preferred not to think of him as such. God forgive them for all of this, as well as the two deputized men and their scatterguns now keeping the child's parents under temporary house arrest. Just for the night. God help them. 

God help them all. 

But surely He understood. 

That's what Quincy thought. Yes. It was better just to think of it as the child. In case…

In case things went bad. Quincy forced himself to know it. 

So did Chaco. 

So did Pinkerton. 

Sheriff Antsen… had thought he understood…

“We were on retreat. From Sherman's boys…” 

They all looked at him. Quincy at the window as he continued to spy, he spoke up. 

"I can't remember exactly where we were or where we was s’pposed to be, I was so scared then, everyone was. Didn't seem like anyone really knew what was goin on, what we was doin. Every night it was real dark, everybody was real scared about makin light, so everyone just hunkered down and lay quiet in the dark and in the mud and we all just lay there like that, every night. Without fire. Like we was dead already. Just waitin for em to come up an find us like that an finish the job." 

Quincy lit a match and drew on his pipe. His orange glowing face was severe and devoid of any inner warmth. 

He went on, 

“One night I’d actually managed some sleep, I was so incredibly exhausted. For some reason I still don't know, I come to awake in the pitch black and I hear some thick heavy sounds. I couldn't see anythin right away, I could just hear somethin like it was drinkin. Slurpin from a riverbed or a stream, or a trough." A beat, he drew more smoke, Chaco drank, they all of them listened, “It made me sick to hear that sound in the dark… but… I didn't have to wait long for my eyes to adjust like to the night. 

“And that's when I saw it. It was over my brother Jamie. It was naked and pale and skeletal and it's mouth was red. It was drinkin from a gunshot that had got infected an was slowly killin em. Suckin gangrenous infected blood filled with powder and Yankee shot.

"It saw me seein it. It looked up from Jamie at me. And then it hissed at me like some kind of gurglin rodent… and then it crawled away. Into the dark. And then I screamed and woke the whole camp. 

“And the next day Jamie was dead. Wide eyed. Gazin up at nothin but the look on his face like he was frozen and stuck starin, in pure torment, inescapable hell." 

Quincy struck another match and lit up once more. 

Chaco drank but was out of cigarillos. He spat on the floor. Not bothering with the spittoon. 

Pinkerton sat. Lit an imported stoge. Drew deeply. Calm. You might never know from his lucid and serenely composed demeanor that there was a child drugged and tied to a wooden post as bait just outside the sheriff's door. He was tranquil as well as alert, straight backed on the stool with a teetering leg. Poised. In contrast to Quincy, sentry watch at the window who was like something seething with a species of rage but perhaps something even darker than that. 

The agent sat straight and spoke. 

“I was on assignment with a steadfast man, a fellow operative of good character and reputation. Not the sort to be taken in nor frightened by superstition. Nor was I. At the time.” 

He motioned to Chaco that he might appreciate a pull from the jug. Chaco thought about it a sec, shrugged and then forked over the heavy round clay cask of bottle. 

It sloshed and made liquid language sounds in the silence of their shared candlelit dark. The agent pulled and smoked and thought a moment. Like to collect chasing thoughts that did not want to be touched. 

Pinkerton spat. Went on. 

“The target was a cold blooded man wanted for murder and robbery. Several states. We were hired by one of the railroads, we tracked em to San Francisco, then a whole spell of mountain towns all along the Nevada border. We finally caught up with em and bushwhacked his thieving ass in Pioche. We had em. Alive. He was ours. By rail we were taking em back, had our  own private car. Not a soul was to disturb us as we made our escort and transported the sonuvabitch back to Washington for his day in court. Everything went along fine, at first. Not a man came to our car save the attendant with coffee and meals and the like. We didn't want to  leave the man for a single moment, we didn't want to take our eyes off em, he had the reputation of being a phantom and disappearing without a trace. A crafty and dangerous creature of guile. With us, we would give em no such opportunity. And we didn’t. We made our way easy and on schedule and without trouble. Until our fourth day of travel. Then the train was stopped. Predawn. The sky was still grey-blue with  the absence of the sun.  

“We were waylaid by more than two dozen masked men. Men of vengeance, I initially took them to be. Men wronged by our quarry, congregated and armed and made all out for a night of anger. Their guns were trained on us, my partner and I and they took our man despite our protestations. They led him, bound and cuffed already by us but it wasn't a noose in a tree that they led him way to. 

“It was a stake. With a pile of kindling all around its base. They kept us by the train, a little ways off but I could still smell the pungent odor of kerosene and burning oils. I could not believe nor did I understand why they wanted to burn the man, save for cruelty in their own punished hearts that they wished to purge and dispel, I tried asking one of our masked waylay men but was refused a response.” 

Pinkerton slugged tequila, knocking it back with a fluid practiced motion. 

He went on:

“They brought him struggling and screaming to the stake but we'd been held up and stopped in the middle of a dense wood, there was not a soul or settled place nor house for miles or so. There was naught but us. They bound him to the post, stepped back, and then one of his masked executioners brought out a scroll, and unrolled and read it aloud like it was a religious decree of a royal castled lord, he said:

“‘For crimes against God and man, for crimes against nature and the Son and the Church, we sentence you,--’ and then they said the man's name but then followed it with something that sounded like Latin. Or Druidic. Then the man with the scroll went on in that same ancient dead tongue. 

“The hooded ones with their guns trained on us then began to usher us back aboard the train. And they urged the engineer on. Telling us to forget this abominable thing in the shape of a man and be off. And by urge of their rifles away we went. But before the engine got going again, I watched from our car window as they set their lighted torches to the kindling. And the flames erupted. The man at the center began to scream and curse, there was something like pig squeals and the shrieking of bats amongst the screams and smoke and mounting fire… and then the man at the center of the flames, whom we came to capture and lost, began to change. 

“He began to change shape and stature amid the pyre. I could hardly believe my eyes and thought it to be a trick of the mind or stress at the situation. But before the train pulled away, I thought I saw a great expanse of black bat-like wings unfold and spread out from the burning changing man amidst the fast and soaring inferno.” 

Pinkerton took another slug then handed back the jug. He sat and smoked. Then finished. 

"We made it back. Made report, lost our man. It happens. We omitted certain details thought to be uncouth.” 

There was silence then that followed the tales. Antsen was at his desk. Unbelieving and bewildered by the other three men he was gathered with. He couldn't believe these yarns. And yet with what had been happening around town… and the Kendridge youngin…

He motioned to Chaco that he would appreciate the jug and after a show of grimace, the Mexican obliged the sheriff who took a generous swill. 

He finished his pull and spat. Not bothering with his own spittoon over by Morris. Then he asked the room aloud. 

"I don't believe you gentlemen, you all talkin like you already know the dark and what dwells in it, how ya gonna hope to kill somethin like this? What does it, for somethin like such?" 

Quincy opened his mouth to tell the sheriff he'd heard plenty of tales that suggested not all nosferatu were bullet-proof. But if this wraithshape was, he had something special. Courtesy of the priests and the shamans and the holy and the medicine men he'd met on his long strange road. 

But before he could say anything to the anxious and frightened Sheriff Antsen, he spied something in the dark. Something prowling towards the tethered scapegoat child still slumbering the sound sleep of knockout narcotic drug. Something crawling on all fours like a beast. Its back was hunched and its shoulder blades dipped and shifted and alternated beneath pale blue rippling hide. 

Quincy Morris gave word to the others. They all sprang to, cat-like poised, guns cocked, hammers thumbed back on hard calibers. The three deputized had their respective revolvers, Antsen had his six-gun as well and his scatter-rifle, double barreled. It was up and shouldered and leveled and he went to the door as the strange Texan went to open it for them all so that they might finally step out and begin this night's real and grisly work. 

The Texan gunfighter threw up one last silent prayer, held in mind and heart and still behind his teeth, just between him and the Lord. Please, whatever happens, let this child see tomorrow, whatever happens to me and these other men, let this little one live through this night. 

Amen. 

And with those final words to the Lord he threw open the door and the four men made their charge. 

It was nearly upon the boy. It had raised up on hind legs that were bowed and squat. The whole of the pale and half naked manshape was in goblin aspect. Misshapen elfen features mixed with that of a hairless rodent and a bat. Its great gaping nostrils, an open cavern of pink tissue that stood out in the dark and amongst the rest of its corpse colored visage. It opened a fanged mouth that dripped black. It hissed like a rat at the four men as they came on in assault. Antsen and Morris in the lead. Quincy slowed and took aim and fired as the sheriff at his side did the same. Chaco and the Pinkerton followed a split second later. Each of them taking a shot at the beast. 

The pistol shots found no mark but agitated the nightmare shape into semi flight with a grotesque webbed set of black wings beneath the pair of pale arms. It stuttered a few flaps but the double blast  of scatter shot had managed to graze the top of its thinly haired balding head. The pale scalp came off in a shear, a tear of fire and blood and flesh that came off in a blanket sweep along with the tips of one of its ears. 

The strigoica bat-thing shrieked in pain and otherworldly hungry rage and unknown instinct. It flapped and fell to the ground away from the child and then suddenly charged the men who began to fire with no mercy or compunction. Their bullets rained down on the thing and its undead hide and frame began to flower and erupt into scarlet and black, flowers of gore and bone and squirting dark ichor. The glowing eyes were a livid predatory yellow and each one burst with a pop. Yellow thick custard-like bile burst forth from each raw socket, opened and smoking. 

But still the strigoica charged on and leapt, the men never ceased their fire until it fell upon the Pinkerton agent and took him to the dusty earth in a kicked up cloud of dirt. 

The agent began to scream as hybrid bestial claws and teeth came in and found purchase. The thing was already so hungry, always so so so hungry and needing to feed, but now it was enraged. Now the demon thing was royally pissed off. Long yellowed nails that were that of a rat and a man came in and ripped and dug. Tearing through cloth and flesh and muscle like warm butter as the mouth came in, to his neck and the teeth sank and the agent ceased his futile struggles and screams in the dirt. 

The thing began to drink. The other men were stunned a moment and they could hear its heavy gulping sounds as the agent's form spasmed and danced beneath the bullet riddled nosferatu form. 

They came to again, Chaco was first, and they resumed their fire on the thing until their shots were used up. 

The thing abandoned Pinkerton’s body under the renewed onslaught of gunfire and crawled away rapidly like a wolf in flight, a beast returning to the shadows of the darkness that surrounded the outer town. 

The three left gave chase. Chaco in the lead. 

Dammit… it was as Quincy might've thought. The thing wasn't going down with regular fire, it needed special lead. 

He reached in pocket for his special cylinder of six shots preloaded with holy rounds. He broke his gun and replaced the cylinder as they gave chase to the thing just past the cathouse. 

It crawled and hissed and screamed murder and rage in an unknown animal language as it fled around back. 

Goddammit, Morris cursed himself. These other two fools didn't know. They might be leading the way to their deaths. Chaco especially, who was now blind with a father's vengeful rage heightened by cannabis and tequila. And Antsen behind him, not knowing anything at all. 

Brave fools, thought Quincy. If you both should die, then God forgive me. I am sorry. I am a selfish and self serving bastard, even when servin the Lord and what is right, even when not aimin to …

And with that the three men came around the side with their reloaded weapons drawn. 

The strigoica was there, cradling the gushing splattered warm remnants of its ruined yellow eyes, the thick viscous snot of the burst and splattered organ dripped through the splayed and long claws of its slender fingers. It barked and hissed and seemed to sob with outrage and pain. 

It heard their approach and tensed, coiled - then leapt and pounced at the men once more. A snarling shrieking manshaped bat, semi-mutilated by fire and whose pallor was the color of one that had already long slumbered in the sour ancient womb of the grave was all teeth and claws and blind wounded face, crashing down upon poor Chaco before Quincy finally let loose with the sacred divine deadly payload. 

The large bore of the end of the barrel of his six-gun was nearly kissing the side of the thing's ruined abominated face when he finally pulled the trigger. 

The result was immediate. And devastating. 

The shot blasted out of the side of the strigoica’s man-bat head, taking the long ear along with a chunk of black and red and green and thick skull matter all out in an explosive geyser of chunking splatter gore. 

The thing fell off of Chaco and shuddered and spasmed and writhed in the dirt. Its head began to smoke and cook, smoldering from within. Its awful claws went to its throat in feeble desperate dying gesture as if to throttle itself as its head began to glow and then alight as if it were a matchhead struck. 

The strigoica's head burst into holy flame of divine silver light that shone like something of too much beauty to behold, its brilliance was too clean and pure and moonlight up close for the three men left standing to bear looking at it. They shielded their eyes and looked away and the thing gave one last final unearthly shriek and wounded animal howling call…

… to the moon itself, full and above and shining bright as well and watching all of the terrible scene of the night unfold with the indifference of godly immortality. 

Celestial, it watched blindly as the silver roaring flame of the strigoica burned the head clean from its blue unnatural corpse. The decapitated remains fell over in the dirt and then curled into itself like a large spider that's been stepped on. 

The men just stood there and sucked air. They couldn't believe what their eyes had seen. 

… Later.

Antsen took the child back to his folks. They were furious. But grateful. As the whole town would be for some time. 

Morris and Chaco took the headless remains of the strigoica and staked it. In the heart. With a large hammer and spike of sharpened stabbing wood. Flattened head to make the driving all the more true. The stake punctured and glided through easily and the decapitated strigoica remains began to rapidly liquify and decompose into a rotten slurry and sludge of viscous ruin. 

The foul liquid corpse was put into a large sealed cask and buried far off in the desert. 

The Pinkerton agent’s remains were also staked. But then given a proper burial just outside of town. No name on his marker though. Just a date upon a cross. 

The men thought about writing the man's superiors but then decided against it. 

Quincy Morris rode off before the next sundown, after the agent's body had been lain. He rode off into the desert alone. Antsen and the rest were glad to see him go, despite his help. 

Chaco understood, all he wanted now was his wife. And his home. He was grateful for the strange Texan’s help but he would just be a reminder of all of the unworldly and horrible death that the town had endured. 

He would just remind him of his boy, Javier…

And so he was glad to see him go. 

THE END

The dark land of the South, the West, so saturated in blood and nightmare black that the earth would be forever held in the strangling hold of ghosts that would not be banished. The land would not be exorcised, the vengeful dead things refused to be tilled. The ghosts held on. In flames and adorned in red. Led by horned things. Winged. Little gods. Terrible magic. 

They warped and bent, spirits torn and mutilated souls. The hidden flow of the universe unseen like flowing milk from creation's bosom and breast. And in some places the milk of the cosmos spoils, sours, curdles into foul cultures: abominated shapes and drooling dark things that bleed and drip ichor and green decay. Ruined forms that never had a chance of clean existence. And want to tear down everything that resembles it as such. 

They gather the deepening obsidian pits of the pain of the dead and they claim the most vile and violent and sadistic and eagerly perverted for themselves, to build up ranks, enemy factions. 

They also gather the desperate. The misled. 

These dark factions behind the walls, the thin curtain veneers given the title of safe wall guardian: Reality, they gather and they build in the deepening black, the lands of thunderclap and barren dead, and they hunt… For the places where the thin veneer has been worn and stretched. 

They hunt for places where the fabric is worn and torn through. Scuffs… and tears in the leather. They seep through like bleeding noxious infection. They turn places, lands and homes to giant living gangrenous wounds.

Wounds that bleed life that breed torment. Terror. Pain and woe for YHWH’s earthen precious apes. 

One of these wounds is a town. In the South. In the dark land of heat and night chill, the West. It is covered and bathed and stained in the blood of women and children and men and men made slaves and the tortured and the weak and the old and easily violated, the corrupted… the might. 

All of this land, this small slice of abandoned ghost town is alive with might. Hidden flame. Just beneath the surface. 

All you have to do is dig a little. Just scratch…

…

Ethan drifted. That was all he really knew to do when things came down or fell apart or didn't work out. He drifted. He moved along. His mother had done much the same to his father when they were kids and his father had in his own way followed suit. After momma hit the road he didn't really wanna spend much time with a pile of kids he'd been coerced into having in the first place so he just sort of… walked. Walked the plates, the bases. Like in a ballgame. He just sort of walked Ethan and his sisters and older brother's raising up an such. 

Till he got back around and that seemed enough and he was like to his litter of unwanted kids: “Alright, you're nineteen, you're seventeen and you two’re sixteen, get cher shit t’gether an get the fuck out.”

He hadn't seen much of them since. He'd hit and rode the rails. At first. But then an older fellow traveler, a mean old cat of the hidden highways and rails had tried to rape him one night, early on, one of his first nights out raw and in the dark and young. He'd been green. He only got away by blade and had ran desperate and terrified, afraid down to the living helpless bone and in tears like the lost child he really was. 

From then on he mostly stuck to the roads. The occasional reluctant thumb for rides and offers an such. But he was cagey about it. Everytime. Wiry. Animal tense and like sitting next to a living live wire of coiled anxiety and sinew boiling with adrenaline fear unknowingly coursing its potentially cat-like dangerous flow. Fear alive and vibrating through every single fibrous inch of musculature frame. 

He was an animal then. The road and the outside had made him so. He cursed his mother and father for it. 

But the time went on. The road did not just yield pain and terror and danger in his travels. No. No, there was love, beauty, friendship and heathen pleasure and hedonistic joy, adventure. There was freedom. A tetherless existence that meant he could truly do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted to. Master of his own time he was slave only to his own limitations made and those he was born with that could not be overcome. 

And the land. The road. The nighttime raw, sleeping under the stars unguarded. Only the blanket he brought from home, underneath the mercy and whim of the wilderness dark, kept feebly at bay by small campfires that made his trail, his track. His ashen footprint path left behind in the dirt. He was at the whim and the mercy of the Christ-haunted nature and her obsidian predatory glow. 

He left so much behind in the dirt, in the filth … underfoot. 

He tried not to think about it. Ever. He tried to never linger within his own brain. He moved on. Always. Forward. He always kept his mind ahead, in the moment, preoccupied. Blank. 

That was when he came upon the town. He'd come across other abandoned places in his wanderings before but he'd stopped at this one. At the border. At the sign that named the empty township. 

WOLVVS CUNT

He'd thought it was hilarious. He had to stop. 

And check it out. 

He went down past the sign that named the town, down the one and only lonely road that made up Wolvvs Cunt main street. 

He bellowed as his well worn heels made no sounds on the nearly gone and erroded paved black beneath his striding steps, laughing. He called out to the collection of baking shacks and little huts and stores and homes, all of the baking wood, he called out to them in good traveller's song:

“Hello! Hell-O the town!

And the dead town did not say anything back. The shacks and dead faces of windows and wood just stared back at the drifter blankly. 

He strode in. He made up his mind. Easy. 

This’s where I'll camp tonight…

He just as quick picked out one of the shacks to make his home for the night and strode right up to it. Confident and unafraid. He went in. Not bothering to notice the faded discarded sign of dusty dead phantom pink letters that spelled out: CHURCH, lying atop a broken splintered post in the dirt. 

He didn't bother to notice the broken cross lying in the dirt either. 

Ethan went inside, the place was old, unused for some time by the look, but the red doors to the white old disused church swung easily and opened for him with a push. Unlocked. As if waiting. As if wanting someone to come inside. 

Ethan didn't seem to pay it much mind. His pack over shoulder he stepped inside and was immediately blasted by an oven wave of merciless baking heat. 

Jesus… open fuckin furnace gates of hell right here, thought Ethan. A fuckin oven for sure. 

But he stepped inside anyway. Liking the wide open space of the single room with a small stage. He recognized the pulpit but didn't think much of it. He unshouldered his pack and began to make camp. 

The town, sensing him, and sensing the nearing of sundown, the near darkness at hand, was salivating. 

And grateful.

The church doors shut. 

…

He made his meager bed on the stage, by the pulpit. 

He took a few of his canned goods back outside to cook by small fire in the middle of the empty street. To dine by sunset. 

He cooked his small meal of beans and ravioli and beef stew and watched the sky become shot with fire that was pink and sherbert against the truer blue of the evening sky fading and deepening into curtain dark. The ice chip jewels of stars riddled the black and flowing splash colors of nebulae, scarlet and purple and bleeding coats of varying shades between the two. Like great celestial goddess bruises or wounds or great birthing unfurling flower petal gates of royalest color, greatest celestial bejeweled robes, the splendor of galaxy overhead that always made him feel so infinitesimal and small.

He gazed up into its glory, from the low rung ladder base of his drifter's nothing traveller's existence, perilous and dirty and violent and strange, it was majesty above him. A kingdom of vivid heaven shining and seething with divine cosmic nuclear firelight on high. He wondered at its beauty as he finished his vagabond meal and wondered why he had to be apart from it. Why did he have to be alone and animal and down here … ? A small flask, what his older brother always called a little janitor's bottle growing up, filled with whisky came out to cap off and conclude his humble meal of canned goods. He pulled deeply, letting it warm his blood and praying the warmth just might reach his heart and soul, and his weary mind. He pulled again and lit a smoke. Watching the stars in the face of dark heaven above by crackling small cooking fire, dying down to red embers and orange glow. 

And then by fading firelight and in the dark of the ghost town main street, a woman's voice drifted out and called. 

Called him by name. 

His blood froze. The warmth of wonder in his blood and in his soul was stolen away from him in that moment. For he recognized the voice. Though it had been so long… not since childhood so long ago. Nearly forgotten. Nearly buried in woe…

She called him again: “Ethan." 

And he returned her call. He couldn't be mistaken. That voice, from before. When home had been a home and had been real. 

Before. Long ago. 

"Momma?”

And as if to answer, yes, she called out again from the deepening shadow. The all encompassing dark. 

"Ethan.”

He stood. Pulled by the voice from out of the dark like a lure, a snare. He couldn't believe his ears. The vast desert plains must be playing tricks on his tired mind. He couldn't be hearing his mother now. She couldn't be- 

It came again from out of the dark: "Ethan”

“Momma?" a slight pause, he slugged some whisky down and hardly felt it, “Mom, is that you? How the hell you come out here an such?" 

He didn't really believe it but he didn't know what else to say. He pulled again from his little janitor's bottle of warmth and sucked down his smoldering butt, filling the air around him with the holy white smoke of a new pope chosen for divine purpose. Nothing moved out of the dark. Nothing spoke. 

Silence. 

But then from out of the deepening obsidian curtain of black and down the long and solitary road, she came. Sauntering slowly forward like a dream carried on invisible whispers of clouds. She was robed in white and she was beautiful. The desert wind picked up and her robes became dancing swirling phantoms, adorned and an aura all around her. Like a gown of nebulae cream colored snow that hypnosis swirled and flapped like wings and danced off her golden pale frame and face, which shown with inner light in the ebon black space of the ghost town Wolvv’s Cunt. 

Ethan was enthralled. He saw his mother in that golden face but then it changed and shifted and he saw all the faces of feminine beauty that he'd both known and never beheld before now. Her face dancing between every single goddess aspect imagined and worshipped since the dawn of man's time and the gift of sight and with it, its woe. 

He fell to his knees as she came out of the dark and towards him, severing the distance to a close. 

She stood before him. Shining. Exaltant. And aglow. Lording over his lowly drifter's form in the dirt of the long forgotten about paved over road. 

He could barely gaze at her dancing face this close. He shielded his eyes with a splaying desperate hand that was more like the frightened claw of an animal confronted and trapped by what it cannot possibly comprehend or know. 

Ethan wasn't aware but he'd begun to moan. Like a slumbering man held hostage by a nightmare and unable to escape he can only groan. It was a low animal noise that was frightened and ghastly. The sound of man's soul being soured into a decomposed submissive state of anguish and pain. 

“Please," he began to beg the thing, “please, I didn't know." 

She laughed, the lady of shadows, the lady of the town, princess of the light in Wolvv's Cunt. She bellowed a call to the drifter then and bade him an answer amidst her darkling laughter that dominated the night and the lonely desert air. 

“And what was it that you did not know … ?”

A beat. He was afraid to answer. 

But he was afraid not to as well. 

He said, “I… was mistaken. I'm-I was- I'm sorry. I thought you were her… I thought you were my mother…” 

She laughed more deeply then. Like a cruel deep wound filling with salt. 

And once more she spoke:

“Oh, but I am your mother. I am mother to all that crawl across and are bound to the earthen cruciform of soil outside of fairland Eden. That is gone. And outside such as I now hold domain. I am the mother lord of light and I came to this place long ago when the town was still alive with mines and miners and small farmers and bandits and bandoliers and guns and barrels of whiskey and fetid ale. I came to this town then and I mothered them and loved them and now they are below. …”

And then her dancing face flowered open into folds of fleshen unfurling petals of light and glistening gold and golden tissue. Petals dripping hot blood and ichor like melting running snow.

And then the sky clouded over. The galaxy curtain of jewels was stolen. The thundering gargantuan bulbous fortress nimbus shapes, rolling through stolen bejeweled heavenspace. Snuffing them out. The thieving hand of thunderhead sky then began to crack, splinter and fracture. Bright dagger bolts of blue-white wounding the stolen thundering heavens with lurid stabs of light and vicious titanic cannonade-fire bursts. Artillery thunderclaps that responded to the laughter and the whims of the mother below. 

She cackled to the sky, called forth thunder and continued to laugh. Barking animal cachinnation above and at the drifter as her open dancing face of light continued to undulate and emit strange and ancient alien sound that took dark mastery of the wounded heavens within tendril grasp of her necromantic reach on high. 

Ethan couldn't take his watering eyes away from her, the scene, any of it. He couldn't pull his watering and stinging gaze apart from any of her, It, anything. The dancing face and clapping sky and the roar of the world around him now at her command, held him. It all held him prisoner, bound.

 The universe shrieked.

And then the world began to pour forth from open dancing face, no longer beautiful but terrible and fleshen organic maelstrom. A world of fire and marching armies poured forth from her gaping universe filling face still dancing, the lightning cannonade still wreaking havoc above. He saw all of the marching armies of this land in rotten states of decay but still clad in uniform: Union, Rebel, Cavalry, Comanch, Navajo, Micmac, Cherokee, blacks in broken chains no longer slaves in revolt, Aztec and Incan and Conquistador and English red coats and the French… the dirty desperate and harried Minutemen …  All of their musketry and rifles and bayonets were dripping with blood and gore and all of the guns teeming with slaughtering fire. Wraiths that once were human. They marched together, soldiering side by side all of them together and astride pale dead horses with dark scarlet sockets belching scabbing gore and steam as they came out of the mother's dancing open portal face, her gate atop her slender neck of goddess bronze and gold and divine firelight. 

Ethan was screaming. And the mother still filled his world and the universe at her command with her vile jubilant howls. 

They came out and poured upon the empty road, the empty ghost town, and filled her. They filled Wolvv's Cunt with their deadlight and their gleaming phantom gore and spectral mutilation glowing blue hued in the night. They surrounded Ethan. And filled the world. 

And the drifter did not move. 

He looked again to his mother, her open flame of face… and said, 

“... please. … God.” 

And Tenebrarum, the mother of darkness and all that crawl, responded with a whispery word, made cacophonous from her open gate face of flames and ebon light and pouring armies of the dead, she simply whispered to the drifter lost in the dark in the abandoned town…

“No." And it rang and echoed and ran. And ran on. Exalted. Her single syllable response ran, until it was royal with the potential slaughter of many infinite worlds. 

And then one great final bolt of searing baptismal blue-white flame shot down and struck! 

…

The town that was forgotten was gone. A blackened and smoldering crater was left where it once stood. 

Where the forgotten drifter named Ethan made his feeble and final last stand. 

On his knees. In the dark. In the dirt. Begging. 

Begging for it, begging for the end. 

THE END

The most wretched moment, the single most catastrophic link in the cruel chain was this single event;  this harbinger in woman’s shape that was the perfect microcosmal animal entrails sign that foretold inescapable and vile doom  … it was the shattering moment that Amanda told him she was pregnant. With their child. His child. His firstborn. 

Our little baby…

She'd been happy through her tears, through her trembling voice. Despite her fear, she was small and so was their life and savings and jobs. Despite the pain and through the agony of more weight, she still smiled at him and through a quaking voice that cracked at its tenebrous and trembling edges, she said: “I love you, Adam. Please, I want to be with you. And I want to raise this kid, together. Please." 

She'd put her hands in clasped supplication of pleading and prayer then, before him. 

Please. 

Adam Etchison pushed the memory away, he always did at this part. It was when it started to hurt the most. So he put it away. Always when it got to that point: the pleading look, the dull exhausted look in her eyes that used to be jewels, amongst the dark tumult of raven colored hair on a pale face worn and already the color of the grave.  

It was time to get up and have at the day. It was time to get another shit stain started. 

He forced himself into a cold shower of low water pressure. He shaved, stared into the mirror for too long. Had a breakfast of black coffee from the tar pits and four cigarettes. 

Then it was off to the factory, the sheet metal and screaming machines. The hot sparks and heavy air and heavy industrial gloves and aprons, the weight. The oppressive heat of the machines, always running and screaming at high intensity like a wall of  the most discordant assemblage of addled and demented noise maestro detuned heavy metal guitars. Constant: An open throated belching blast of cacophonous pollution from the abominated and Godless open gates of burning and infernal Hell. 

He always left the factory sweated out and cooked, dried out and baked. Feeling as if he'd lost great pieces in the place. As if it had cleaved and scooped and pulled great heaping portions of himself away and kept them. As if to feed its great mechanical belly of mortar and stone and screaming heavy metal heat. It did this to everyone probably. It did this to everyone that he ignored and that ignored him in turn and each other for the most part. 

It was no wonder that none of them spoke to each other, they had to give it all to the factory, all of it to the machines. 

He was so tired at the end of every day. He drank heavily in his single chair at the end of every shift. Nothing but seething weight that radiated with dull ache settling into the cheap creaking of the lightly cushioned wood. He pulled generously from the bottle, straight. Throttling its translucent glass neck. Its small infant's throat of see-through pain medicine. 

His mind couldn't help but wander back…

He sat alone in the small space he could easily afford with his decent worker's wage. Drinking. It was a mockery, a dark parodical facsimile shell of a place one could call home. Small. Tight. Compact. Oppressive. The walls closed in when he wasn't looking. When he paid them no mind. The grey interior of the space itself was dull and lifeless and utilitarian. Spartan. Bare. 

Amanda would've hated it. 

He could afford a larger place with more rooms but the prospect was unsettling rather than enticing. It was disquieting on his keen and weary sense. 

He didn't trust more rooms, a bigger place, a great big house…

it reminded him of the dark and lonely derelict house. The one all the kids in town, his old hometown of Old Fair Oaks, knew about. 

Every town has a place like the old Kanly House. 

No one knew how it got that name or why. If it was the surname of the previous owners or if someone had explicitly named the residence… nobody knew. Nobody knew what it meant. 

Everyone just knew it was the Kanly House. And everyone was told to stay away from it, especially the children. It was abandoned. And dangerous. But everyone knew the real reason why…

He pulled heavily from the bottle. It sloshed liquid language to him in the cold silence. He stared at the TV in the corner that he often debated turning on but seemed to almost always remain dark, blank. It was as if he was nervous about switching it on and bringing it to life. Now why was that? 

Why? - He tried to push away the thought with another drink. It didn't work. 

Why’re you afraid to bring something to life in a place? In a home, let's say. Why? Are you afraid because-

But he stood suddenly to steal away from the train of thought, cutting it off like a keen blade through taut cord. The chair upset and clacked to the floor as he rose and brought his unlaced but still booted foot up and kicked in the dark television set, killing it forever and ensuring that it would remain always dark. Never to be anything in its alighted window of colored frames moving by electricity, so many crammed in within a second.  

He roared against the dark, an inarticulate howl of human-animal pain. He took another savage pull from the bottle. Almost empty. The sloshing liquid language told him, its small and diminishing and thinning sound: Almost dead. 

Soon’ll have ta get another… 

He hiccuped a little and this turned his bright red animal rage to lunatic laughter. 

Pain was hilarious. 

Sometimes. 

He lit up another cig. Vices he could enjoy. He had a healthy appetite for them. And sometimes they were great, they kept the demons in the rearview away, they could help you out run em. Sometimes. Not always. 

Sometimes they just slowed ya down and sometimes they brought them back. Sometimes they were a reanimation elixir and it brought all the dead and black things out of the graveyard of your memory and your putrid fetid heart of darkness and it gave these things license… to possess the living. Dominion over the present domain of waking moment. 

To ruin lives. By ruining minds. Chipping away savagely at their peace and sanity. Bit by bit. Erosion. Corrosive memories that were really demons made of searing napalm flame to thought, brought back from out of the sludge of the dark and buried past.

He lit another smoke. Killed the bottle and threw it at the shattered glass and plastic remnants of the decimated television set. He went to the adjacent kitchenette for another. 

Television set. Television. Tell-a-vision, through a black magic box with an electric window. Tell a vision. Yeah, Amanda would've liked that. 

And that was when it pounced on him. And on this night alone, in the grey and dark of his small apartment space, he could run no longer. There wasn't enough room in his heart or in his skull any more and there wasn't anymore room to run in his cheap little place. 

Two moments. Two monumental times and places in his pathetic and painful run of life that felt so long but was in fact so short and brief and insignificant it was hardly to have been said to have happened at all…

Two. Two places in time he could never forget. They played interchanged and woven together for him now in his mind's eye splintered, but a tapestry understood all the same. The shattered pane of his own history, that which at first may have seemed disparate and eons apart now began to collide and coalesce. 

Amanda. She's pregnant and before him and she's weeping. She loves him and is with his child. There are two heartbeats coming from her now that should be the most precious things in the world to him. 

Amanda. She's eleven and he's twelve and their other friends are there with them. The sun is shining. But soon it won't be. Not any longer. They are all about to finally sneak in to the Kanly House. Like they've all been warned against. 

Amanda is young, and was always small but already her little child's face wears a fixed look of fierce determination. She says she wants to find something… something she's heard about being in there…

But they are all excited. They all want to be spooked and have a great and classic haunted house adventure. They are all buzzing, the little lost gaggle of unsupervised redneck children. God they were so pathetic… but they hadn't known it then, yet. And that had been best. 

Now the refuge of any comfort is gone. What he might give to have it all back …

But memories bittersweet such as this were not worth their lurid heavy price. But he had no choice tonight. 

He was in his small kitchen but he was really with Amanda again. Pregnant and at the throat of a staircase. They were also children again, at the broken window that led into the dark basement of the forbidden Kanly House. At the precipice edge of the end of the world and the beginning of the shadowland, the place where midnight forever holds dominion and the graves vomit out there dead. 

Bryan and James and Maggie are all crowded around Amanda, she's worming her way in carefully through the busted out pane. His buddy Zac is there too and he's beside him and the rest and he's teasing, saying something's gonna get her. But he won't go in. He's one of the ones who won't go in today and will hang back. 

He's talking shit. Like a little bastard, a dumb mouthy little fuck, in the annoying little way that they seem to specialize in, “It's gonna getcha ‘Manda! It's gonna grab ya! It's gonna grab your little feet!”

Little Amanda tells him, "Fuck you” flatly and doesn't look any less determined. She wriggles the rest of the way in. Then it all goes quiet in the thick overgrown yard of the Kanly House, primeval and choked with towering itchy weeds and stalks that haven't been cut or pulled in years. 

It was quiet and they all looked at each other. Expectant. Yet afraid. Who will follow? 

Who will follow her in? Who will go next? 

She's pleading. She's pregnant. She's at the head of a long steep staircase. She's asking him if he will follow her on the most treacherous path they could undertake right now, she wants to bring in a little kid. Calling it a miracle, how lucky they are, when it's really just another mouth to feed. Another thing for him to worry about. And him alone. She doesn't seem to care. She's completely full of shit. She doesn't understand how fucking tired he is and how fucking broke they are. But she's still talking her shit. Telling him she's got the answers. To just follow her lead, like always. Like when they were little kids. But they're not little fucking twerps anymore, they're not! they're talking about the perils of bringing one in. 

 But they are little shits again and they're in the dark. Together. The humid terror and hot nightmare stink of the mouldering ebon darkness of the vast interior of the Kanly House all around them now. Like a fairytale terror. Evil wicked gingerbread house, cannibal home of manmade leathermaker, haunted place for the ghost of a heartbroken man who murdered his beloved wife out of unknown horror and unbridled fear. The cobwebs all around were thick and ambitious and choked with dust. Black bulbous bodies with many eyes sat center of many legs that were like slender black needle stalks. 

None of them had phones, they were the poor kids but Amanda had stolen her older brother's and brought it out now for light. She also took some pictures and some videos and they laughed together and told tales and joked as they explored the scary basement and then went carefully up the rotted steps to the first floor of the abandoned lonely house. To them it seemed to be filled already despite its vast empty shadows. Filled with so many memories and stories and wild people and happenings. Murder and monsters and ghouls an such. 

But as they finished with the first floor and found it as empty as the basement they began to ascend the old wooden steps to the second floor. And Amanda grew more serious again. She told Adam to shush. 

Adam obeyed her. He never wanted to make Amanda mad or sad. 

They quietly made their way up the steps. To the bedrooms. 

Four of them. All along and down the hall. 

Amanda didn't bother with the first three. It was as if she already knew what she was looking for. And where to find it. She strode through the darkness all the way to the last bedroom door. She came to it and opened it. 

And went inside. 

Little Adam was afraid. But he only hesitated for a moment and then followed her in, right behind her. 

Adam can go no further. He doesn't understand her anymore. He can't figure her out. What does this crazy bitch want? She doesn't understand, they don't have enough. They've never had enough and this will only make things worse. He can't believe her, this fucking wench, this crazy fucking bitch, she doesn't get it, she doesn't seem to comprehend. She's driving him fucking nuts. 

He stared at her now, at the edge of the cascade, the descending staircase, and he tries his best, he does: he tries to remember what it was about her that first made him fall in love. 

She's alone in the dark. She's alone in a strange old room. Filled with paintings. Old. Done by a fevered hand and a fevered demented mind. Something strange is in all of them, the towering figure of a hooded face, robed and wearing red, and yellow. Something adorned in ragged colored robes and wearing a great black crown of wide antlers. They're identical and ominous and you can't see the face in any of them, neither the ones where it's solitary nor the ones where it holds an audience of children. Yet they all seem to be staring at them. All of them, at both of them, the intruders. Adam followed her in slowly as Amanda made her way to the desk and they were watched by the painted hidden faces of the robed men, the hidden strange pagan kings. But even then he had understood on a child's level of animal instinct: they are all the same thing, the same pagan robed lord of the wilderness in the blasphemous shape of a man. This shape will forever haunt the darkest bowels of his most obscene nightmares and hidden dreams. 

But he doesn't know that yet, he just slowly walks up to Amanda who's paused at the desk.

It's small. They can both look down upon it. It is old and mouldering like every other thing of wood in this dark and abandoned place. There is a book on its surface. Nothing else.

It's covered in dust. 

He's seeing red. 

He can't believe her. She's talking again. Goddammit. 

“Please! I'm not trying to trick or trap you, I don't know how it happened, but it's ok! Adam, baby, please I just need you to have faith, I need you to trust me again. I know it's been hard but we can't give up, don't you see? This baby can be our brand new fresh start. It can be like before, but it'll be better. I promise. I just need you to be with me on this…”

She says more but he loses track of it as he shuts his eyes and massages his temples. He could really go for a drink but the darkness of his eyelids will do for now. It's mildly soothing, which is strange, he doesn't usually like the dark, not even as a grown man. Something that happened to them when they were kids …

Amanda reached down and brushed away the thick collection of grey dead dust off the thing she'd come for in this dark abandoned forgotten place. 

It was a book with a strange title, one he'd never heard of before. A title that was a word that he'd never heard aloud or read, it said

N E C R O N O M I C O N

in bold blood red letters that seemed to quietly but vibrantly sing out uncontested in the dark. In the ebon lost space of the Kanly House. 

She opened it and Adam looked and beheld horrors on its pages that he'd never known someone could ever dream up or imagine, sickening repulsive things that his mind curdled and receded from like a slug to salt, his little mind retreated even as it beheld the infernal knowledge of the damned and forbidden pages and blotted them out forever. Never to be recalled on the conscious floor of surface thought. Walled off. Forbidden. Damned. 

Amanda's little determined face seemed to brighten with intrigue. She smiled. 

He cannot believe her. She doesn't think he has a limit. That his patience knows no end. That he's her fucking work horse and that's the thought that makes him snap. The final straw, as they say. The bridge that was much too far. 

She's in the middle of promising him that it'll be great and reminding him that he loves her and that she loves him and they'll both love the baby, forever, when he suddenly launches forward and shoves her down the tall steep cascading basement steps. She goes down ugly and bent and twisted. Her neck landing badly a few times in its many ghastly end over ends, down. Crashing in a broken bloody heap at the bottom, with snaps and screams and grunts that preceded it all in an instant that he'll replay forever in his mind as his bedtime soundtrack. He'll always see her too. There at the bottom. Twisted. Broken. Their unwanted baby just planted but already dead in her dying womb about her ruptured stomach. 

He shrieks suddenly. Not realizing what he's just done, as if it's a shock and surprise to him, the result. He shrieks her name as he gazed wide eyes watering at her shattered and red splattered body at the bottom of the basement steps. 

But she doesn't stay down there. Does she? 

She…

She's amused with the boy she's already begun to love as he frets and screams and runs away. She thinks he's cute, he'll be perfect. She knows. So young but already she knows. She understands. 

She picks up the precious volume, so rare says her grandfather, so precious few left in existence… she blows the rest of the dust off the black cover. Rubs it with the sleeves of her shirt. She can already feel the great electric talismanic thrum of its power. 

She cradled the large rare ancient black tome in her arms like a child. And departed. After her friend. She loves them both already. They will both from this day forward be inextricably tied to her and her own destiny. She has chosen them. Her own forged path was made that day in the black of the Kanly House. 

… begins to crawl, broken and bloody and moaning in a wounded animal anguish that was a gurgled cry from beyond the grave, already dead. Already coming back for you, my sweet sweet Adam. My sweet sweet prince…!

He screams again, alone with his own horror and failure and the wretched phantoms of deeds and the dead of the past crawling back and tormenting him. He sobbed a cry of pure understanding of utter failure and woe and betrayal and unending heartbreak. 

He rips another bottle of vodka from the cupboard and downs half of it in a messy spilling desperate chugging rush. He coughs and sputters and almost vomits. 

But he keeps it down. And slugs down another. 

Goddammit…goddammit Amanda… I'm sorry! Please! I'm sorry! I'm sorry but please! Not again! Not again! Please, Amanda, I'm sorry! I'm a failure and a murderer and I failed you and I'm a coward! But please! Not again! I can't ! please! 

And then his internal fervor and cracking interior fraying mind boiled up and reached the surface and he began to scream aloud: “Please! Amanda! Please! Not again! Not again! Not again! I'm sorry! It was an accident! I didn't know what I was doing! Please you can't do this! You can't! I buried you ! I buried you! I buried you both ! Please! I'm sorry! Not again, please! Not again! Not again !" 

But it was too late. He could already hear her coming up the staircase. He didn't have a cellar. Neither had the last few places over the years since but that hadn't stopped her. Not before. And it wouldn't now. His screams were cut short as a gurgled and animal lurid voice spoke up from the pagan hallowed depths, feminine but mangled and slimed and decayed with the rotting passage of indifferent time. 

She called, his name, "Adam…”

And he was helpless but to respond to it. He went to the door that used to lead to a closet but now led down to a much darker and forgotten place, like the Kanly House, he opened up. 

And there she was, at the base of the stairs. Down in its depths. 

Rotten. Green. Black. Broken. In rotting garments and oozing pus and slime and ichor and the putrid worm cheese of the soil of the grave. Her eyes were glistening nests of black and writhing worms but they still gleamed with nefarious intelligence and murder. And revenge. 

She smiled and through her rotten nubs of black and green more strange ichor squirted and bled out. In little gushes. 

Then her rotten bulge of decaying blue-grey pregnant stomach flowered open, splaying wide, meaty blanket folds of foul decomposing pale dead flesh parted with wet splurching sounds that were moist and evocative of sexual burst and the birth of animals raw in the wild. 

Unveiled. 

And then his child came out of the flowering pregnant bulge of decomposed corpse stomach. Reaching and growing out of the flowering rotten mother's veiny blue mass on the end of a raw grey-green sliming organic rotten stalk of putrid cancerous tissue. Its eyes were coagulated jellied spoiled hardboiled egg masses, riddled and shot with tiny lime colored veins and open and unblinking and glistening with translucent green slime jelly-fluid. Placental coat of the mother's putrefying deceased fouling womb-space and putrescence grave snot. 

The fetal thing at the end of the stalk said his name. And called him, father. 

And Adam lost his mind again. 

His child and woman have come back. Like always. They are speaking of a land with two moons that forever bow to the king's spire and never set.

THE END 

Johnny made a lot of promises in his life, a lot of promises that he would break. This wasn't unusual, Johnny knew. Lots of us break a lot of promises throughout our lives and Johnny knew he would be no different. But he didn't expect, he didn't know that all of them wouldn't mean anything. He didn't know all of them were nothing. He didn't know yet, before he went off to fight the Commies and the Cong, that the only real promise kept was the promise of pain. 

More. And more. And more. Until you choke and are drunk with it and know no other flavor. 

He remembered saying goodbye to his father. His older brother and his little sisters. He remembered this time, this last virgin act when he was still a babe. 

And then the bus picked him up and he was shipped off. And then he was made a Marine. 

And then he was sent into primeval Vietnam jungle to lose his mind and watch others do the same.

With artillery and gunfire and napalm and defoliant chemical burning fire spray. Burning villages and burning children and everyone violated. Every side and every man and woman and child on every side and in every hot and heavy place made into an animal. Savage. Raped of their humanity and butchered both private and on fire and on display. 

Souls are butchered right along with their fleshen and sinew housing accoutrement. Their guts spill along with their hearts and minds with their cracked open, shot and blasted apart brains, their ripped into surreal sinew ruin faces. Like smeared running red and visceral riverclay. Their faces made into inhuman masks by all the screaming lead and otherworldly tracer fire shots. 

In the night. So much slaughter in the night everywhere in the jungle. Everywhere. Nowhere and no one is safe. 

But it all went all the more wild, all the more fucking haywire for Johnny, Private Ellison in the field and to his superiors… when his fellow squad man offered him a tab of pure acid, LSD, “pure sunshine" squad man Taylor told em, as they marched together through the smoldering ruin and wreckage remnants of a village. The smoking results of one of their many search and destroy missions. 

Orders. We are just following orders. Fucking hippies. Fuckin idiots. 

He didn't know it yet but Private Taylor was to be his worst enemy out here. Worse than Charlie. But also his best best friend. Better than Charlie. Years from now if he survived, he might've missed them both. 

They might've been the most worthy things of memory. But there was to be many savage contenders. Many. He was about to take a whole new kind of trip today. 

It took some convincing. Before war, before combat Johnny had never even touched a cigarette. And he'd only ever had one beer, with his grandpa when he'd been a kid. And he hadn't even finished the thing. Like a nasty barfed up soda pop made of bread, he'd thought then. 

The war had changed all that. 

But he still hadn't done the bicycle trip. Hadn't taken that kinda ride yet. Just a lotta drinking, some opium, some H. And a new and healthy habit for some stinky stanky weed. 

But not LSD. Not yet. 

He wasn't sure of it. He had bad associations of it with hippies. This put him off a little. 

Taylor was trying to make up for the distance, “You'll dig it, man." He winked. Vulgar manner. “Trust me." 

“I dunno," Johnny said, “I'm just not sure. Don't want my brains to scramble." 

Taylor laughed then said, “Ya mean no more than they already are?" 

“Fuck you." 

“Not till we're back at post and cuddled an such. Til then ya should give this stuff a little taste. Don't be such a fuckin skirt, you ain't a nance, are ya, Ellison?" 

A beat. They stopped. The village all around still smoldered. 

"Fuck you.” Johnny said flatly. But not without a smile. 

He reached out and took the tab. And held it pinched between two fingers. He stared at it. 

Taylor said, "Change your mind?” 

Johnny said he had, that he would fuck Taylor's sister as well as his mother and then he placed the little tab of sunshine on his tongue and it immediately began to melt. 

Taylor said, "Let it melt. Let it melt on your tongue, bud. That's how it gets into your blood, it drinks in through your saliva. Through your spit.”

Johnny did as his squad mate said. Then…

Nothing. Nothing happened. The tab dissolved and nothing happened chemically or otherwise to the young Marine, he just kept marching. A little disappointed. 

Taylor said, "Damn, man… I'm sorry. I dunno what happened. Shoulda worked." 

“It's whatever," said Johnny, “Let's get back to base camp." And away the two Marines went. 

But later in the black of the night, eruption!

An ambush. An ambush in the base camp. 

Johnny and the others rushed from their tents and plastic blankets and makeshift fashioned nets against the mosquito hordes, the only things out here that ate aplenty… other than the fire which now rained down and erupted amongst them. Mortar fire was the most vibrant thing alive out here in the jungle as they were taken from the arms of slumber and thrown back into yet another fray. They staggered and stumbled and some of them died right away in the maelstrom of confusion and inferno but soon they began to answer the fire with their machine guns, with their M16s. 

Johnny was amongst them. He was scared. But he wasn't green any longer. He was now well trained and honed to the surprise of nighttime violence and sudden explosions of blood, fire and surprise contact-fray. But then he saw something. Some new strange thing on the face of the horror he'd come to know out here in his new violent sweltering home. 

It was the Cong. The jungle monkey Commies he was sent here to kill. He, they, no one usually got much of a glimpse of em. Not usually. Not while they were still living. You usually only saw them once they were dead and could move no longer. But these he saw clearly, alighted by the battle flames and snapshots of muzzle flash and tracer fire, they were flying. They filled the dark jungle and the jeweled blue night sky. The attack was coming from above as well as the treeline surrounding the base camp. The Viet Cong jungle bastards were flying, they'd all grown great wings from their backs. Great bat wings. They flapped and some were perforated with shots fired and their pilots at their centers were riddled as well and they rained blood down on the base camp and its frightened violent occupants along with their fire. Johnny felt the warmth of both. Both their bat wing Commie blood and their hellfire Commie leaden flames. 

He couldn't believe what he was seeing. 

What the fuck … what the fuck is this? What the fuck is happening?

Even in fear and horrible confusion, training was built-in, made innate, he raised his own rifle then and began to fire up into the bat winged Commie creatures, the flying Cong.

He struck one dead center and it came apart in a messy bisection, splattering and raining and all the morbid pieces raining down and crashing all upon him. The nightmare scene, the nighttime ambush of fire and bat wings and enemies went black.

Johnny came to in his bunk. 

It was day. Everything was calm. Fine. Placid. Tranquil even. Everyone was talking evenly and smiling.

A dream then. Not real.

But the grip of the scene still held him. Taylor was beside him sitting on the green canvas of his own cot. Reading. Ozma of Oz, a favorite from childhood he'd once said. Parents sent it. Or was it his sister, or friends…

Frantically he asked him. What of the ambush, the attack? Had he seen the bat creature flying Commie rats?

Taylor just eyed him with a strange mixture and species of mild worry and good humor. And said, “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, man. You need to wind the fuck down, my friend." 

A beat.

“Yeah," Johnny said, “yeah, you're right." He sat up from his cot, “it was probably just the acid ya gave me." 

“What?" real confusion and puzzled worry on his face and his voice now, Taylor eyed his friend. His comrade, his brother in arms and squad mate. His eyes and single syllable told so much. Too much. Enough to make a man fret. 

Johnny, a little angrily, said: " The tab! You gave me a tab of some shit while we were wasting that fuckin gook village.” 

A beat. Long. 

Finally Taylor spoke again. The rest of the camp had gone unnaturally quiet. Though neither man paid it any attention on the surface of his mind. 

Taylor said, "Dude, Johnny… I never gave you any acid, man. I haven't touched that shit since I got here. Not really my scene, to be honest, Ellison. We've gotta job to do here. We oughta take it seriously.”

Johnny felt his head swim with every word. Vertigo. His guts and spine and all that lived like a meat-works organic factory inside, pumping and churning. He began to feel sick with the constant motion of its mixture. It reached his head. He felt like he was gonna spew.

He leaned forward, bowing his head. As if in prayer or supplication. 

"Cool down, my friend.” 

And then Taylor poured some cool water down the back of Johnny's bowing vertigo prayer head. It ran soothing and cold and whispered relaxation into his hot and beating scalp. He seemed to radiate heat. Everything in this fucking country was a sweltering sweaty animal den. The water was a miracle down his skull and face and neck. 

He whipped his head up. 

And turned to thank his squad mate as they marched through the jungle. On patrol again. God, they couldn't catch a break. They never seemed to get any rest. Ever. 

But he was grateful for Taylor. He was grateful for his water. He was grateful for his friend. And besides … it wasn't so bad out here. The war was going great. High command was pleased, all of the brass. All the folks and kids and girls back home were cheering em on, stick it to the Commie rats! 

This was his purpose. This jungle was his, he was meant to be out here and to discover it. And discover himself within its depths. This is how it's supposed to be. 

He laughed and then shared this with Taylor as they continued their jungle march, looking for VC traps. He laughed as well and gave me a companionable slap on the shoulder. And then corrected him. 

“No dude. It wasn't water I poured all over ya just now." he was still chuckling lightly as he said this. But he was looking Johnny dead in the face. And then he stopped. 

Johnny stopped laughing too. Stopped dead with Taylor. Out here in the jungle with the silent killing prowling Cong, no longer hunting or prowling themselves. This was bad. To stop moving in the jungle was to be a shark and to stop swimming in your blue predatory land dominion. In the green inferno jungle, the devil was king and lord and he was always on the loose, so you moved. You ran. 

But now Taylor held him fixed to the spot. 

Johnny asked, "What, what do ya mean?”

"I just poured more LSD all over your head. Bathed it. Baptized you, man. You're welcome. There was also the tears of fallen angels and aliens in there, freaky stuff, Ellison.”

A beat. 

"Wh-what, what the fuck are you saying, are ya fucking with me again, Taylor? Jesus, you can't just-" 

And then the jungle came alive with fire and enemy ambush all around them. Behind and every and all sides and up ahead. 

The Marines dropped down for minimal cover amongst the tall stalks and grass, rifling up amongst the green side by side. They tried to spot movement in the trees and began to return fire. 

The trees belched blood instead of lead after a few rakes of their rapid fire weapons, then screams. Then smoke and silence that might indicate retreat. 

The two Marines slowly stood… and then approached cautiously. 

They got to the bloody leaves, the ones made most red amongst the rest of the primeval green, and they closed in. 

They came to the reddest place and they parted blood and branch. 

And looked in. 

They found their man. 

He was ripped apart by gunfire but that wasn't all. His shredded meat and organs and blood were rippling and shuddering and vibrating with insectile movement.

“What the fuck…” said Johnny. 

Taylor said nothing. 

His entrails and viscera began to rise up like dancing hypno cobras from baskets made of dead communist meat. They shook and slithered with movement that was obscene and repulsive. They slimed lubricated all along their long traveling lengths with hot fresh steaming red, violently luridly crimson in the black shade of the jungle darkness. 

They rose up and coiled and began to hiss, but not like snakes. No. They gurgled and screamed like abominated serpents made from discarded ruined abattoir leavings. They choked out sounds like children struggling shrieks through dying vocal chords filled with vomit. 

The organs and viscera serpents coiled and danced and then began to close on them. Johnny was screaming. Screaming right along with em. 

Taylor was laughing maniacally. 

Then he stopped laughing and leveled his Luger pistol. And fired. 

Their Bolshevist Red Army prisoner went down in a jerking spasmed dancer's spiral turn to the snow. To the white of the Ostfront plains. His head burst and came apart in a fountain red gush as his steaming brains and skull fragments filled the frosted air and travelled down into the snow to bake there alongside their travleing companion. 

Jon was no longer afraid. He had something like a dreaming deja vu vision of himself screaming in a jungle, but it was all just a fading mess. An apparition that came to life on the battlefield and decided to haunt his living skull. He joined his commanding officer in a laugh. The Bolshevik dog did look very ridiculous, and lowly, dead in the snow like a beast. But they were all dogs. They were all of them Communist swine. Bolshevist subhumans. 

That was why they were here. The elite. Waffen. The great ubermensch of the Third Reich. The SS. They were here to destroy the Soviets and their Jewish run socialist disease. They were here to burn the dogs in and out of their wretched little homes of dirt and sticks and they were as doctors to the land… to purge and cure the disease that had deposed the Czar and stolen the royal soil. Swine… and Stalin's swineherds…

And they were here. They were laughing, now - in the Russian winterland of pale, camouflaged as ghosts amongst the cold snow and white. Cold and white themselves. But filled with the burning passion sense of purpose and victory. It's there. It's just there on the horizon, the one made of phantom blinding white, the color of death.

The color of bleached bone, the color of one's last spent breath. 

But then the phantom horizon of white is replaced and it is filled with red. The Red. 

The Red Army horde began to scream and charge and lance with fire and shot and they began to charge. They filled the world all around them. No longer hidden ghosts, no longer a world of bright phantom light. No more white. No more Waffen Johnny and no more Taylor SS. Just a world of Red Army uniforms and rifles and men. And their knives. 

Their shining keen blades came in. A world of butchering blades closed in and filled everything as they stole all sight and then finally found purchase. They stabbed and thrusted and cut. Butchering lancing slashes and cleaving swipes, a whole world of ruining blades thirsting for their blood came in and drank. They mutilated and drank of Johnny and Taylor who was gone now but …

… but now he could hear him again. 

So he whirled on him and told him to shut the fuck up. 

If he could hear em, then the fucking gooks could too. So can it! 

But what was it Taylor had been saying? Something about a German pistol his grandpa had back when… maybe? 

It didn't matter now. What mattered was that the other ship on the far side of the planetoid they were currently locked in combat-orbit of, didn't get wise to their presence. They should be out of range of scan, but they might send scouts out, single man ships… 

They'd have to chance it. The great rock below was too precious to the Imperium to lose. The inhabitants would be dealt with. Harshly, if need be. If they made it necessary to do so. It would be no problem. 

Brigadier Commander Ellison turned to First Gunner Taylor, both highly decorated naval men of the cosmic sea, aboard the flying fortress, the battle rocket AJAX, there were few that were their peers in measure, non their equals. They were great star warlords for the Imperium. Their names heralded and worshiped with jihadist fervor amongst the ranks. Ellison gave the order for the orbital bombardment, they were to begin their strikes from space, before the other farside ship detected them and alerted the rest in their shipyards and orbiting harbors. 

Taylor smiled and hit the levers. The great guns of plasma and nuclear starfire manmade and perfected in labs were unleashed like hell from space in a multicolor cannonade. It rained down on the helpless planet surface. 

He watched an entire planet turn to cosmic flames. It was more beautiful than anything he'd ever seen. 

But then a spit of water, cold and sudden, hit the back of his head. 

“CO’s gotta stick where it ain't pretty, ya know he'll bitch if we dally. C’mon, Ellison." 

Johnny nodded. Took one last look at the smoldering village and then turned to go with his squad mate, Taylor. 

"Yeah,” he said. " Yeah, I guess you're right.” And then "Ya sure you weren't sayin something?”

"Huh?” said Taylor. Face all pursed in puzzlement. "Whattya mean, I hadn't said hardly anything. Not since we left base camp.” 

A beat.  - The smoldering village was still crackling with the hungry sound of fire feasting and being fed by the wind. But all of the screams were gone now for the moment. For now. They would return not ‘fore too long. They would be back. The dying screams always returned, they always came back. Always. 

Johnny said, “... ya sure?" 

Taylor just nodded his head. Slow. 

His eyes unblinking in the hot wind. 

“Yeah, man. Why? What's up?" 

A beat. 

Finally Johnny just shook his head. As if to clear it of bad dreams. Awful visions. 

Terrible thoughts. 

“It's nothing. You're right. Let's go back." 

And the two Marines began their march back to camp. Along the way Taylor leaned over and whispered to his friend and comrade, "Got somethin ta show ya once we're back,” smiling as he said this. 

THE END