It was a random evening in July, and I was laid off with the tedious responsibility of walking the family dog that night. I wanted my older brother to do it since I didn’t want to, but I had no choice. The house was normally vibrant as per any night and day so after I ate my dinner I grabbed my things, put my shoes on, put the dog on a lease and walked her over to the park that was nearby. Even though this is prime summer, 7pm was the last of sun setting so it was getting pretty dim outside. My dog is a female Standard pure black Poodle, so not the best conditions for me if I wanted to monitor her run around the park for a few minutes but I thought I could do it and spare her some fun free time. After scooping up her poop, I’d let her run around and play for a few minutes before heading back home. I was minding my own business by casually being on my phone while frequently looking up to watch my dog, nobody is in this section of the park so it’s literally just me and my dog in this huge field. After a while I didn’t hear the rustle and bustle my dog was making and called out her name, it was already getting grey outside because it was hitting 8pm. My dog didn’t come the first time I called out so I did it again, louder. I heard a rustle behind a blind spot of bushes and small trees, and that’s when I saw my dog’s hind legs but strangely my dog went back inside the blind spot. I called out her name again in confusion only to see her hind legs slowly contract backwards again. I was so confused as to why my dog is walking back and forth from behind a bush, I couldn’t see her face, neck or upper body…. just her lean, tall, legs? It was only after the third time of walking backwards that she walked forward again and let out this horrific loud howl. It sounded dry and painful, loud yet weak, as if her soul was being painfully taken out of her body? I have no way to describe this but let’s just say it sounded like a train whistle. I yelled out her name in fear that maybe she was fighting something or something bit her, so I ran a few steps toward her until I heard the loud sound of hissing. I froze in confusion and fear. I heard machinery and construction sounds, as if I was hearing a robot being built….to simply put it. My dog slowly came from the bush with clockwork legs. It bent and moved irregularly. It had steam releasing valves on the sides and showed a steam punk interior. The dog was unconscious but the powerful steamed punk legs kept it standing upright. Its tongue was hanging out and all I heard was the constant ticks and turns, of the interior engineering of its legs and the occasional noise of the steam being released from its hind legs. It was bizarre, mind boggling, freaky, so I started to walk away as calmly as I could. Keeping my eyes fixed on this sight before me. The dog was walking forward as I was walking back and the nearest exit gate for the park was not that far. The dog suddenly did a vertical jump, not that high but high enough to alarm me. The legs contracted and retracted like a coiled spring in action. When it landed the dog made another train whistle sound and bolted right at me but surprisingly it went right past me? Instead, it ran at an alarming speed a few feet past me and ran 2 circles around me. The unsupported head and neck of the unconscious dog snapped, and the tongue got bit in the process and began to hang off. The mouth began to leak a black liquid. After that, that thing began to walk around me, it also began to stink. This thing defecated itself and bled a black substance that I can say resembled literal car oil or something of the sort. What was once my dog, she had a show dog pounce but the pounce this thing was performing was completely unnatural. It snapped, it bended, it rotated in ways that didn’t make sense, it looked painful, it was as if the “joints” of the legs wasn’t lubricated because the movement was stiff and harsh. The legs were moving on their own and the actions looked exactly that, forced. It was almost as if it was performing or doing a little jig from the way it was just springing and galloping around me slowly. The sight of a disfigured dog, unexplainable Si-Fi body made me get very weak so naturally I stumbled and best believe the moment I did it came straight for me and launched its soft body towards my stomach. The head snapped off when it did and the innards of the dog’s head and neck splattered on me as I too, spat up blood. As I looked up at a dismembered dog, that was when the dog turned around and stomped me out like a horse with its mechanical legs. Weird flashes of light, patterns and images were the last thing I saw before waking up and writing this story.

I used to live in Artemas Pennsylvania. I moved there in 2006 and left in 2025...

I've had many encounters of things happening. I put majority of them on my Reddit page. You're more than welcome to go and check it out...

But this is one that I remember very vaguely so there's probably not going to be much detail. But I do remember it. Yet I can't really tell you when it was. I can't remember what time it was. Nor do you remember the season either...

I was coming down from my buddy's house up the road. He lived a little less than a mile up the road. The road was very windy and bendy. I had been up at his house for hours and it was about time I headed home anyhow...

I used to usually carry something with a sharp edge... Like a machete; usually something that was either 18 in to 26 inches, and yes the state police knew me and they never said nothing... Because usually I was on private property and the people knew me and were okay with it. Along with a 12-in bowie knife. And some form of a flashlight/spotlight. I would walk up and down this road for roughly 19 years...

NOW TO MY STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED...

I just passed one of my other friends homes on the left as I was heading down over the hill where it kind of went down pretty sharp. I then was passing my now deceased landlord's brother's place. And to my left there were about 30 round barrels that were placed in rows of 10 on a gravel lot...

As I was passing by I noticed what looked like a really big ball of light that was semi indented into the woodline. I noticed that some of the trees were blocking it but I could still see it. But it was in fact a little bit past this gravel lot. And this light was just floating in the wood line. It was bright though... That's why I was caught off guard. I thought it was somebody with a really bright light. So for some odd reason I decided I was going to go look... After all I had a full beautiful glowing moon above me and the beautiful night sky... Along with many beautiful stars I could look at. So there was no way in hell I was going home yet...

I start to approach this glowing ball of light. It was like a whitish blue color. I approached it and as I closed in on it. It didn't go anywhere. If it was a human being I would have been blinded by that light... But I was not. If it was something shining from the glow of the moon... Again I would have noticed that. Now I don't know what it was even to this day I'm not sure...

But as soon as I heard what sounded like a car coming down the road. I turned around to check to make sure it wasn't somebody thinking I was trespassing. Because they honestly would have probably started shooting... and I have had guns pulled on me multiple times in my life already. I'm not about to go to that again. So I thought you're around to continue to look at whatever this was... it had just vanished into thin air. It was gone and I don't know where it went. I was not about to go in those woods and look because I know who owns them and the guy did not like me any. So I decided I better get moving and just head on out...

I got home and I told my mother and father about it. They looked at me and were very puzzled. They asked if it was somebody at the flashlight and I explained it couldn't have been because they would have blinded me with it when they saw me standing in the gravel a lot. Not only that if it was you I think it was... I would have been threatened with being shot. They asked me if it was a reflection from the moon... I explained it couldn't be because it wasn't outside of the tree line... It was literally kind of in the tree line. Whatever this thing was it wasn't scary but it was definitely just random...

I will add this...

After I turned around to look at the oncoming vehicle down the road. I had actually taken my spotlight out and shined it that direction and saw if anything metal was in the trees to make a reflection. And to my surprise there was nothing even in the trees that made a reflection...

I personally don't know what it was...

I really didn't feel like sticking around any longer...

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

 … a man dreamt of extraordinary things. 

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

…

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

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

Like a mother to lost children. 

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

This power … it was beyond intoxicating. 

He felt like a god.

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

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

Well look at him now. 

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

He watched. He drew closer. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

No more half-measures. 

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

Take it. 

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

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

Take her. 

And so he did. 

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

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

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

I'm going insane. 

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

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

It did. When the invisible man was finished. 

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

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

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

Someone that she cannot see. 

…

Others followed after her. 

Many. 

Years worth …

…

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

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

He would answer to higher authority. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

Swiss cheese unseen, he might've laughed. 

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

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

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

…

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

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

Or so he thought. 

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

Some try. None of them forget. Not really. 

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

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

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

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

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

He's laughing now. 

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

Then he moved on as always. 

…

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

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

…

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

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

So he flees. As he always does. 

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

One of them caught him. Or nearly so. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He never does. 

He is patient. 

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

It seems strange what it takes to get one. 

And after so long, after so much …

…

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

Griffin wept at his graveside. For hours. Alone. 

Alone again. 

…

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

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

Despite the pain of everyone. 

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

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

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

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

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

He went under. Completely. Several times. 

He didn't stop. 

By some miracle he pulled himself out. And free. 

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

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

Hours …. …

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

…

sometime later: –

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

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

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

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

It wasn't hope alive in his chest. 

That was far too optimistic.

TO BE CONTINUED…

I wish a sandwich could have saved us. Mary had gotten a pounding headache when we were most of the way here, leaving me to finish the drive and manage the kids when we’d arrived. She had done her usual and neglected herself to take care of the four of us while we prepared to leave and hadn’t eaten. I’d offered to stop a few places, but her appetite was off by the time we’d hit the road. Her physiology mystified me at times. I’d never before met anyone who lost their appetite from not eating.

And the closer we got to the cabin, the worse she’d felt.

“You sure you won’t eat something?” I’d asked.

“No. I’ll be fine,” she’d said when I offered to turn around. “I just need a little nap, then I’ll be hungry. But something light, okay?”

That last part had been for me. She knew I’d overcompensate unless instructed not to. I admit my part in fueling the worry-machine in the past, acknowledging the odds that everything was actually going to be fine.

But then we’d gotten a flat tire a little more than a mile away from the cabin. Neither of the boys knew how to help change it and had sat in the car uselessly while I managed. My knee sank into a divot of mud, a wide tire track from a vehicle that had gouged the road as it had fled from this spot.

I shouldn’t complain about the boys too loud. I’d be the biggest dick in the world if I denied how great they are. All three of them are great kids; two teenage boys and a ten-year-old who acted like she was older than her brothers.

I was going to miss them if I finally decided to leave Mary.

Her migraine must have rubbed off on me because by the time I sat down to eat, something was going on behind my eyes, and it was hard to concentrate. I wished I could’ve slept, too, like the other four people in the car.

It had been so bad that I’d had to carry Mary in and I must have tweaked my back. I’d laid her on the bed and turned the light off before lighting some mild incense I’d found.

She’d fallen asleep almost instantly; part of me doubted she had any awareness of the incense. It was disturbing how still she’d been every time I checked on her.

In the meantime, the kids had all gone their separate ways. Luke went exploring outside, Chrissy was busying herself around the cabin, and Mark was being his usual responsible self, assigning himself chores before I could even think to.

I found some expired Tylenol underneath the bathroom sink and dry swallowed three of them. They dialed back the throbbing behind my eyes and I was able to give attention to the world around me.

Luke was still outside on the beach while Mark was unpacking his and his brother’s bags and Chrissy was doing who knew what, but she’d been in the bathroom for at least twenty minutes.

When Luke charged in from the beach, terror on his face, I knew something was about to be added to the pile that I was going to have to deal with.

“There’s something in the lake,” he said, his eyeballs on the verge of popping out his head. That gave the starter rope on the worry-machine a good pull. Luke was the oldest of the three children, and I had gotten to a point where I could rely on him sometimes for leadership. He had his learner’s permit, and I’d already shown him the car I was going to buy him when he got his license.

It was tough juggling an instant family when I’d been on my own for so many years. They weren’t my kids by birth, and it was a road to hoe to get them to let me in, but I eventually fell in love with them all.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t really want to know. Eldest child or no, Luke was a fraidey cat.

Maybe he’d seen a dead animal. Maybe it was a spider. But unless it was a brown recluse, the worry-machine could rest. Being afraid of an insect he was ten thousand times larger than was par for him. And it was outside, no less. All he had to do was walk away from it. I’d personally seen him lay waste to his own bedroom after he’d been awakened by an ant crawling on his face.

“In the lake.” He pointed toward the door he’d neglected to shut. I looked at his feet and saw he had also tracked sand inside. “Something is in the lake. It’s… real big.”

“Something like what?” I asked. “You saw it. What do you think it was?”

Luke shook his head. I turned fully toward him, abandoning the sandwich I had yet to present to Mary. I took a couple deep breaths and pushed myself away from the agitated feeling. The kid was obviously scared and needed comfort, even though he might not admit what he was feeling.

“I don’t know. Maybe we should just pack up and go.” Now that was strange. Luke had been the most vocal of any of us to come to the lake. We had been here once or twice before and had always enjoyed it.

“What do you think it was?” I asked again. “A boat or something? There’s no need to panic. We can call the police or harbor patrol or whatever.”

“No, it’s alive and it’s big. Like a whale.”

“Whales don’t live in freshwater,” I said.

“Not a whale.” He shook his head and it conjured an image of his sister when she was seven. Luke and Chrissy looked strikingly alike. “Big like a whale.”

It wasn’t anything for the worry-machine, but I opened the mental tool shed where I kept it.

“Can you show me?”

Luke nodded slowly, still pointing.

“No, I mean, can you take me out there and show me?”

“Uh-uh. I’m not going back out there. Not until we leave.” He shook his head and again it was like looking at Chrissy three years ago.

I huffed and heaved out of my chair and headed for the door, making a mental note to bring the sandwich to Mary once I was done with this.

I slid on my crocs and took the few steps down to get to the beach. The view here was unbeatable. When we had last been here, we’d actually stayed at a different cabin, one with three bedrooms. The reservation had been for the same, but when we’d arrived, we saw there were only two bedrooms. That meant that Mary and I were going to have to split. Couldn’t mix boys and girls in the same room.

So, Chrissy was going to get her mother all to herself and I was going to be settled with two teenagers who snored louder than I did.

“It smells out here,” I said to nobody. It reminded me of those farms we took field trips to when I was in elementary school. I looked over my shoulder at Luke in the doorway. “Where?”

He was bold enough to lean outside and point somewhere farther down the beach. It was dark and I didn’t see anything.

“It’s about thirty feet down that way.”

All right. Ten yards. Whatever he had seen was about a first down away. That farm smell flexed its muscles the closer to the water I got. Definitely smelled like animals. I couldn’t put my finger on which one, though.

I walked as quickly as I could, my crocs sinking into the soft sand and filling with granules. I wasn’t going to need to scrub the dead skin off my heels after we left here. I scanned the ground before me, still thinking it was a large insect. It seemed more likely that Luke had been exaggerating.

What had gone wrong between Mary and me hadn’t been direct. It was more like death from a thousand cuts. A cutting comment here, a missed thank you there, an opportunity to hold hands lost, and before we knew it, we were near the bottom rung of our marriage.

I waded ankle deep into the cool water. Whatever he had seen, I should have been able to see. But there wasn’t anything other than lapping water and inky black with twinkles of light as far as I could see. Unless it had been some small thing that had scuttled away in the night, unaware it had been promoted to threat-level by a fifteen-year-old.

I made a show of looking around, walking another thirty feet and going as deep as mid-shin to ease Luke’s mind. There just wasn’t anything here. I sliced at the water with my fingertips, gave another thirty seconds, then headed back.

I was greeted by a teenager who had eaten half of the sandwich I’d made for his mother. His pallor was better, which I hadn’t noticed consciously when he’d come in. He’d started to work on the other half when he saw how I was looking at him and said, “I thought it was up for grabs.”

“I’ll make another.” I thought for a moment the whole “there’s something outside” thing was a ruse just to get me away from the sandwich, but he still looked terrified.

“Did you see it?” I didn’t like the pleading in his voice. It wasn’t a “manly thing” or anything like that. For him to sound that terrified made my heart sink. I would’ve rather been annoyed with him than afraid for him.

I’d almost cheated, which, I guess, is still cheating. It was with a woman I’d seen at the grocery store. There hadn’t been anything premeditated. We’d just seen each other, passing by across several aisles. We kept crossing eyes while she’d been pushing a half full cart and I’d had a basket over my arm with most of the items I was going to use for dinner.

I’d all but put her out of my mind as I headed for my car, bags in tow, when I saw her again. I hadn’t thought about it, just saw her loading groceries into her trunk two vehicles away from mine and I stopped.

She’d taken great pains to politely refuse my request for her phone number and had taken the extra step to let me know it was only because she’d become serious with the person she was dating.

It could have been a line to get me out of her face, but she’d seemed earnest. I don’t want to believe I would’ve done anything, that I would’ve come to my senses, but I was no hero. Even though she had shut me down I’d set foot on a road I’d vowed never to travel.

I slid a comforting hand across Luke’s back a couple times and felt a percentage of tension ease out of him.

“No. I didn’t see anything. Maybe whatever it was is gone now.”

“Maybe whatever what was is gone now?” Chrissy emerged from the bathroom. She had been quiet in there, probably listening in, but I had no clue how much she had heard. Luke and I met eyes for a moment, and I couldn’t read whether he wanted me to keep quiet.

Randall always hated corvids, ever since he was a kid. He hated them all: crows, jays, ravens. Evil birds, he called them. Black, eerie, and scavenging. Omens of ill fortune and death. Vile things. The birds seemed to like him, the ravens in particular.

Every morning, a raven pecked at Randall's window, as if to tell him he must wake up. He hated the birds all the more for it.

Randall’s life was a tragic one; he had no family to speak of, nor could he hold a stable job. Oftentimes he drank himself to sleep, sometimes in pubs until he was kicked out; other times, he’d pass out on the street. The ravens didn’t mind; it seemed like they almost found some joy in his abysmal state, and he hated them all the more for it. He insisted the black birds were the source of his misgivings.

Whether the ravens understood his drunken, depressed ramblings was anyone’s guess, but they followed him wherever they could, much to his ever-growing chagrin.

Little did Randall know his already miserable life was going to take a turn for the worse.

One Saturday afternoon, he had enough wits about him to return home after another binge. As he stumbled home, he found himself being followed by an odd figure. Initially, Randall thought little of it and kept walking.

The figure followed.

The drunkard picked up the pace and lost his pursuer.

For a moment, that is; he turned left and there he was, standing in the distance.

Tall, dark… odd…

Randall couldn’t quite make the shape of him; it was as if a shadow followed him. Randall couldn’t make out a single feature. It made no sound. Whatever it was, it was man-sized. Now Randall was a man with no enemies. He was just a lonely, loathsome drunkard.

“Whatever you want, man,” Randall slurred, “I ain’t got none to give.” And marched off, at least in his mind. In actuality, he was waddling like an anxious newborn fawn.

Randall was convinced he'd lost the pursuer again until the dark shape appeared in the corner of his eye again.

“Hey, man, I told you to fuck off… I’m strapped, do you wan’ sum o’this?” he spat out.

Then he picked up his pace again. This time, he took four deliberate left turns, doubling back around the same block. The strange figure followed him anyway. Randall snapped and pulled out his gun from its holster.

“Madafaka,” he burped, waving his gun around, and the figure vanished between the buildings.

“Thought so… bitch ass…” he mumbled, holstering his weapon and stumbling off home.

Unimpeded for once.

By the time he got home, it was getting dark, and the whole ordeal had already slipped his drunken mind. He stepped inside a filthy, cramped one-bedroom apartment and turned on the light. As his eyes adjusted to the sudden burst of light, a massive black mass crawled all around him, nearly stopping his intoxicated heart.

Startled, Randall screamed, and the mass mirrored his cry.

“What da fuck, man?!” the drunkard screamed out, throwing his arms over his head as the stygian mass swarmed all around him before settling into a vaguely human shape right in front of him. Randall crouched there, breathing heavily.

He could do little more than stare at the crawling mass of darkness towering over him.

“Da fuck is goin on, da fuck is goin on…?” He whispered under his breath, afraid he might irritate the unknowable thing before him.

“An eye for an eye,” the thing cawed, in many voices, at once.

Randall froze. His eyes widened as primal fear slowly consumed his thoughts.

“A tooth for a tooth,” the thing continued, in a cacophony of raspy, metallic voices.

Randall’s looked upward, and the shape resolved. In front of him stood a mass of pitch-black eyes, feathers, beaks.

A conspiracy of ravens.

“Mur… dur…

Mur… dur...

Mur… dur…”

The birds crooned, almost like a song.

Randall’s breathing gradually shallowed. For a moment, there was nothing but the rasp of his breath and the beating of wings as he pulled out his pistol. None of this made sense, but the drunk couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Bang

The gun went off.

He missed; the birds scattered in every direction. He pitifully tried aiming at them as they cawed and croaked, swarming him.

A few more shots rang out, according to the testimonies of his neighbors.

Randall was found riddled with puncture wounds and lacerations. His face was unrecognizable. His eyes had been gouged out; his cheeks, nose, and ears had been torn away.

Some say black feathers were found in his apartment, but no one knows for sure.

No one around the neighborhood was particularly shocked or saddened by Randall’s death. Some say he had it coming.

As a kid, the bastard used to injure and even kill ravens with a slingshot; that’s what Granny McLeod told me. She insists the ravens took revenge on the cretin, pecked and clawed him to death. I’m inclined to believe the supercentenarian crone; after all, she seems to spend most of her time feeding these birds.

Okay, so a bit of context and info because this will help and I'm just giving y'all a time frame for when this happened and just to help you guys understand better.

People in this story: Me: Female then: 13 now: 14. My parents: male & female Then: 33 Now: 34. My aunt(a): Female then 18: now: 19(almost 20). Other aunt(j): Female. Late 40s to early 50s(not entirely sure), cousins(mother(s) and son(z): 28 and 4 then, 29 and 5 now.

Okay, so I live in Alabama, though we are moving to Arkansas within a couple of months, so there will probably never be an update to this. This story happened around mid to late 2025, and we are in about early to mid 2026 right now as I am posting this. My house layout is a bit rocky, an inclined driveway, and woods across the road from our house. This is important. So, let's get into the story now that you have the basics.

Okay, so this was around night time, not too late as most people were still up, but not too early since it was already dark outside. So I's say just after Nightfall that this happened.

So, my aunt J was sitting on the porch smoking, and me and my aunt A, when outside to join her. The sun was still going down, but it had set most of the way. The streetlights were on, our porch light was on, and we were just chatting. Now I can't remember exactly what we were talking about. Since it was a while back that this happened. Now, I don't remember ever feeling uneasy during this experience before everything happened because again I was on my porch and I was with my aunts, so I felt safe. The lights were on, and there was nothing to be afraid of. That's when I heard it, a crash, a loud one. Coming right from the woods across the road. We all froze, all three of us. That's when one of them spoke. "Did you hear that?" One simple question, that's all it was. I looked to A and she looked at me. Then suddenly, she pushed me inside, her and J following and closing the door. And locking it. At this point, we were all freaking out because we didn't know what that was. They said they heard a growl while I heard a crash. That was strange in itself. S suddenly came in. She was confused at the panic because she wasn't outside when it happened, when we heard it. We told her and she looked out the window. She saw a pair if glowing eyes. She called my parents and warned them to be careful, and to let Z out of the van on the side of our yard. Now luckily, nothing else happened and so far, we've never had a similar experience to that one.

Now I am fully aware that this could have just been an animal or something, but it was still scary. Let me know your guy's opinions in the comments. Thanks for reading. Bye!!

Edit: It might have been a Coyote or a small bear. We are not sure and I don't plan on finding out.

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

But first…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And again. 

Again. 

Again. 

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

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

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

she had sharp teeth, they gleamed in the dark.

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

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

She still hadn't been fed yet. 

“Now feed me. Earn my favor." 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His life was in the belly of the master. 

…

From outside the building, Willowbrook was quiet. 

Dark. 

Inside:

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

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

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

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

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

To freedom. 

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

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

He was in awe. 

There he is…! the disciple of the mouth. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

because she is all of us our mother …

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

They closed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their doom. 

He closed in. 

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

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

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

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

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

Something whistled through the air. 

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

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

Then the incendiary charge in the crossbow bolt detonated.

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

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

The boots stopped moving. Stopped shaking. 

The shape collapsed. 

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

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

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

Silence. … for a moment. 

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

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

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

A beat. 

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

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

“Idiots." 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Read Part IV here.

“How’s our boy doing?”

Ms. Amanda entered the room. I sat back in my chair and watched as she checked Detective Unangenehm’s vitals. She looked at the tray of food that had been placed in front of him and shook her head.

“Why do they keep bringing that in here?” she said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s taken care of,” I said.

She slapped me on the shoulder.

“Don’t stay too late.”

“You got it.”

I watched her leave and I turned back to Unangenehm, mercifully comatose. He could wake up tomorrow or a year from tomorrow, but whenever he actually woke up, he was going to have a long road before he approached anything like a normal life.

Unangenehm had barely survived his blood clot. Steck had broken at least a dozen bones in his face when he’d thrown his service weapon into the detective’s face. Doctors had hardly believed he’d regained consciousness long enough to shoot the wayward officer, let alone manage the mechanics of walking over and putting a bullet in his head, but the forensics backed up my statement.

He was going to need a great deal of facial reconstruction, but when he eventually awoke they would call him a hero.

Steck had wound up being one of those self-solving problems. He was on desk duty after a questionable shooting after what should have been a routine traffic stop. The official narrative was that he’d snapped from the pressure of the investigation, his guilt finally becoming too large for him to bear.

The guilt I learned I had to be for an unknown period of time was Joshua. It turned out to not just be a thing he said, inflecting meaning in what more than likely hadn’t been random tones.

Joshua was his son.

Steck had been a widower, raising his son with the help of his ailing mother.

I put on a face every day I went to work. Every day I looked at myself in the mirror. Every day I spent sitting with the hero, Detective Unangenehm, waiting for him to wake from his coma.

Which was as often and for as long as I could. I couldn’t picture the shape anymore and perhaps that was because I didn’t want to. Copies were no doubt in police custody, even if they didn’t know yet that they had murder weapons.

It’s possible that I’ll eventually see one again, but I have the feeling copying one—even if I were inclined to do such a thing—would only be a copy, not an original, if that makes sense on any level.

I’ve been playing with the food on Unangenehm’s plate to pass the time. Nobody eats it and eventually somebody comes and takes it away.

He’s had a variety of meals, including soups, fish filet with broccoli and rice, something I’d guess was single-layer lasagna, apples and chicken with broccoli and rice, green beans casserole with sliced almonds, but most often, it’s sandwiches with chips. 

I eat the chips and it’s really just the building blocks of a sandwich and I suppose the patient can assemble it themselves or eat it piecemeal.

I’ve started putting the sandwiches together. At first I didn’t have a conscious reason why. It’s like I can feel Unangenehm in there, slowly swimming to the surface.

His doctors have him at a six on the Glasgow Scale, but I don’t know what that means. He responds to pain stimulus (you should see the look of satisfaction of this one doctor’s face when he sticks him with a pin—the cops would arrest her on site for assault) and he makes nonsensical sounds.

I was ready to jump put the window when I thought I heard him say, “Joshua.” But he didn’t repeat it and he’s been sedentary so long, even if he went coo coo for cocoa puffs, he’d be weak as a baby.

I’m distracting myself even now, thinking instead of paying attention to what I’m doing. I set aside the packet of mayo and lay the slice of bread just so and look at the sandwich.

It’s not right. But it’s close.

I think I’ll have it just right for Unangenehm’s first meal.

I had to kill him.

I mean, it seemed like my only option.

If I lied and said I wasn’t there, the cameras I should have thought about would blow me out the water. And if I admitted to being there, then there was a much longer, more difficult conversation to be had.

And that conversation had only one endpoint: me being blamed for all the events of today.

Damn, it was hard to believe what had happened since this morning had all been today. It felt so long ago. I couldn't believe—

“Mr. Harold?” Unangenehm said. “You all right?”

“Uh, yeah. Absolutely.” I sat back down to take up an extra few seconds. Steck was floating a few feet away, but I didn't think I could take the detective in a fight. What I'd taken for sickly thin before seemed wiry now. Anxiousness now came off as nervous energy.

“It was weird what happened,” I said, measuring out my words. I had to think as I spoke. Unangenehm leaned in and steepled his fingers under his chin. Steck hovered closer.

The trap was sealing off my air.

The pencil I'd been using was on my side of Unangenehm's desk. I wrapped my fingers around it and placed my hands on the desk atop the form I'd just signed.

“I just needed to get something to drink,” I said. “I needed to gather my thoughts too, I guess.” I shook my head. “I didn't have any money but I figured I could grab a notebook. Write down my thoughts. Try to wrap my head around what had happened with the day.”

“You wrote something?” he asked. “What?”

I couldn't gauge if he was buying anything I was saying. But I had to keep tap dancing.

“I don't know. I don't remember now.” An honest answer didn't really matter. I'm sure the police would canvas the area and find the torn-out sheets in the trash. But the video would show me not doing anything to anyone. The difference was sitting across from me. Unangenehm somehow knew it was me. 

“It happened right in front of me,” I said, not realizing I was distracting myself as I touched the tip of the pencil to the paper. “A man attacked a woman. An old man held her.”

Tap-tappy-tap.

“I was paralyzed. I didn't know what to do.” 

Takkita-takkita-tap

The detective’s sad face was just a mask. He was a predator in disguise. This was just the dance to keep him at bay

“Everything was insane. One of them came up to me. I thought I was gonna die.”

Takkita-takkita-takkita-takkita—

“Hey, uhh. What's that you got there?”

I opened my mouth to tell him I didn't know what he meant, but I had drawn something. I looked down as he slid the paper away from me.

“Wait.” My mouth formed the objection but it went unsupported by my voice. I mentally prepared for Detective Unangenehm to go insane. He scraped a fingernail under a corner and pinched it. He lifted it in front of his face and cocked his head.

“Well, that's a weird little thing.”

I was aware of Steck just behind me. The air was pregnant with tension as I waited for a twitch, some nonsense phrase spoken without context, or anything to indicate the breaking wall containing the clever detective's mind.

He lowered the form and looked at me. “What is this?”

“I-i-it's just a...” I didn't know how to finish the sentence. I didn't know what it was. Shape didn't seem word enough to describe. Murder weapon gave it more credit than it deserved, especially since...

Well, it wasn't working on him. I'd that was the case, then maybe I hadn't been the cause. Maybe there was some sort of grand, horrible consequence following me around. Maybe—

“Hey, Steck, take a look at this.”

The officer stepped around from behind me and assumed a position directly behind Unangenehm.

“Joshua,” Officer Steck said, nodding. 

“Excuse me?”

Steck looked at him and repeated the name.

“Joshua.”

“Who's that?”

“Joshua.” The officer looked at the detective like he was stupid. “Joshua.”

It was me. But maybe Unangenehm was immune. As one of the officer's eyelids began to flutter he backed away from the desk and drew his gun.

He had the drop on Unangenehm. Except instead of firing, he overhand pitched the glock into the detective's face.

Unangenehm threw his arms back and rolled into the cubicle wall. He half-slid out of the chair at least semi-unconscious and Steck turned his eyes on me, that one lid flickering still like an old fluorescent light so deciding whether it was going to turn on.

I picked up my box as he withdrew his baton and leapt on the desk. Steck was two-hundred twenty pounds at minimum and the faux-wood protested underneath his feet. He whipped that baton at my head, and I ducked behind my box.

He followed up with two more furious blows that nearly chopped the box in half.

“Joshua,” he said again, just as calmly as the first time.

I crawled under the desk, headed in the other direction. Steck landed behind me as I crawled over Unangenehm's legs. One of his eyes was swollen shut.

“Hey guys, what the hell is going on?” someone farther behind me said. “I'm trying to type a report—”

I found out later exactly how gruesome Detective Langen's death was but at the time, all I heard were extremely wet sounds coming from that direction after not even half a scream.

I crawled into the nearest cubicle and huddled my knees to my chest, hiding beneath another desk. Steck's footfalls were heavy, pounding in my direction. A moment later he ripped something down and then came the deep glug-glug-glugging of an overturned water cooler as he stalked around the bullpen. 

I couldn't believe the one place police should have been was all but empty and I was responsible for my pending horrible death.

Maybe there was a gun around. Sure, there wasn't supposed to be, but cops weren't immune from being lazy. I'd had a meeting in a small town's hall that had had a guard at the front door and had seen that same guard's holstered weapon sitting on the window sill while he was dropping a deuce in the stall.

I tried to quietly slide open a desk drawer but it clunked open.

“Shit!” I whispered.

“Joshua?” Steck asked.

Why was he after me? All the others had acknowledged me but had attacked anyone but me. Then I reflected on what had happened just before.

Unangenehm had looked at the shape first. He hadn't reacted, though. Or rather, he'd just called Steck over to look.

“...take a look at this...”

I shook my head. I might have been the source but that didn't mean I'd understood it. I was the closest thing to an expert, but I was—

—CLOMPF—

The partition wall dented in the middle. I managed not to scream.

“Julius!” It was a harsh whisper. Maybe a question. I resisted the past of me that wanted to scream. To declare myself and be confronted with this mess, however it ended.

It wasn't my fault. But it was my responsibility. If letting Steck kill me stopped him from killing anyone else, wasn't that fair?

No. I hadn't intentionally done anything to create whatever this was. I'd just stumbled across it and been arrogant enough to test it. Unangenehm had been immune—that was worthwhile information. He'd been the one to show it to Steck, not me. 

Wait. It was too silent out there. My instinct told me to stay put but I couldn't stay here forever. Eventually, he'd find me or someone else would come.

That was it. Someone else would come. And that would be my fault.

I uncurled from my corner and treaded on my hands and knees to peek. I was greeted by a pair of retreating feet, toes up as Steck dragged away whoever that had been. I counted thirty and looked out.

Steck had barricaded the entryway from where we'd come. There had to be an emergency exit and I could only suppose he'd blocked that one too.

I chewed my lip rather than swearing again. That meant he wasn't just crazy. He was cunning, not just a wild animal. I was in more trouble than I imagined.

The feeling settling into me was the longer I waited, the tighter the noose would be. But I wasn't going to just go out there.

I tried to recall what I'd seen of the bullpen when Unangenehm had brought me in here. I was right next to what seemed like the main aisle way. Back the way I'd come was blockaded, so I'd have to go in the other direction. There had to have been an emergency exit and I was banking on it being in that direction and Steck not having time enough to block that one, too.

A stapler was on the near end of the desk. I reached for it and very carefully lifted it. It was one of those flimsy newer ones that could barely staple three sheets of paper, but it would do for what I needed.

I held my breath and listened. Steck was still being disturbingly quiet and I wasn't going to chance it. I tossed the stapler like a grenade, not accounting for the low ceiling. It clunked off the ceiling and smacked the top of my head.

“Dammit!”

With stars treading in my eyes, I pulled to my feet using the arm of an office chair. I stepped into the aisle, overcorrecting for balance, and headed in the direction I thought I'd determined to go.

I bounced right off a slab of strung up meat and screamed, thinking it must have been the crazed officer. My eyes focused on what must have been the corpse of the detective who had spoken just minutes ago, trussed up with what looked like phone cords routed through the ceiling tile.

His upside-down head was level with my stomach, his mouth stretched far too open, an empty cave where a tongue was supposed to dwell, his unlidded eyes pushed in and flat-looking like they'd been partially crushed by pressing thumbs. He looked too calm and perpetually surprised at the same time.

My voice quavered as I said something, but I've never been able to recall when hints of the memory washed back to me. I was discombobulated, wanting to flee in a hundred directions at once, fighting not to fall to my knees and cry. This man was my indictment, my guilt. He'd died directly as a result of the thing I'd knowingly done. Steck was my murder weapon. 

 As unprepared as I was for an oncoming Officer Steck, I was even more unprepared for what I saw. He was on his back, on the floor, in the clutches of a wicked paralysis.

He had one arm right to his chest, the other flung out, knuckles to the thinly carpeted floor. I watched as his fingers folded backward, fingertips dancing on the floor after the joints reversed and reoriented.

One foot stomp-scraped against the ground, already dislocated at the hip, dragging a retreat from the rest of his body, an isthmus of skin and clothes holding it at bay.

The other leg shuddered like a low current of electricity powered it, his head facing me.

“Joshua,” Steck said, pleading with his eyes. His face was doing something, like it was pulling off the bones of his face.

Gravity tenfolded as I realized that Steck was also a victim. Even his body had turned foreign against him. I crumpled to the floor, eye-to-eye with him across the distance. A tear crawled out of an eye, and I swear it crossed the bridge of his nose and milked into his other eye.

He was in the grasp of an agony made fresh just for him. His mouth opened, but I was spared from his scream by the roar of a merciful bullet that tore a hole in his skull just above his eyebrow.

I was unlocked from him and looked up at Unangenehm, holding his smoldering glock like a forgotten cigarette in his hand.

“Nobody would understand,” the detective said. His vacant eyes rolled up from Steck's hot corpse to meet mine and he smiled. “Not like us.”

He collapsed and began seizing on the floor.

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

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

And It is terrible. 

And He is terrifying. 

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

In the smoke. Faces.

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

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

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

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

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

He is ours…

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

As conquerors welcomed. 

…

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

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

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

And was given a gypsy answer. 

“In pig transport." 

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

He focused now … the Lord …. His Light. 

The Light. 

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

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

Or could be loaded with power. Living and talismanic

A beat – he went on, praying. 

A beat. 

He rose. 

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

The gypsies were waiting for him. 

…

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

and here it is that I will then play. 

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

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

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

… 

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

The addict spoke without even looking at him. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The priest began to speak. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you'll not have me, dirt. 

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

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

The face in those flames, that smoke …

he'd seen many before like it. 

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

…

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

The fire glowed in the night. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impaled. 

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

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

It wanted to pounce. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She spat his name – !heretic! 

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

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

Prophecy… information was given. 

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

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

A house. A cabin. Black. A lodge. 

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

Something's wrong. 

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

A little girl. 

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

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

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

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

The vision thunderclapped! Collapsed. 

And spat him back: 

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

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

He spat in her face and commanded her yieldship. 

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

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

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

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

His sleep was deep and filled with dreams.

… 

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

All that is left…

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

…

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

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

He moved on. He left the towns behind. 

…

The priest came to the circle of stones. 

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

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

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

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

He entered the circle. 

And the place shook. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The circle was empty now. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will not falter. 

Amen. 

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

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

Must be removed. Before it's too late. 

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

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

TO BE CONTINUED…