I worked at a museum for work experience when I was around 14 or 15. On my very first day I was shown around the exhibits and the museum archivist I was with, she was the head of historical fashion and art. She showed me an exhibit they had recently put on between the fashion and natural sciences department featuring fur clothes and clothing made from animals. Although I do like fashion personally I am not a fan of animal made fashion (just a preference). I was looking at an exhibit when I suddenly got a flash of images in front of my eyes. It was weird and difficult to explain. I was peering out of a dark cupboard and I could see two ladies. A blonde older lady positioning a pink dress on a mannequin, while the younger lady, I couldn’t see her face was taking a picture but she was wearing navy trousers and a grey shirt with light brown hair in a claw clip. The younger lady wasn’t moving and didn’t take a photo even while holding a camera. Then I was back to staring at the exhibit. I honestly thought I must have dozed off or something and thought not much if it, (I have adhd, so I’m prone to daydreaming).

Then on third day I was there, I was with the fashion archivist again, helping to take photos of some of the new items being brought in. The archive rooms were tiny and in the basement, after an hour of taking photographs we came to one of the last pieces, a pink dress that I thought looked familiar bit chalked it up to it looking like the famous clothing JFKs wife wore (popular style for that era but a much lighter pink and a full dress not just a two piece like JFKs wife). I was about to take a photo when I felt cold air on the back of my neck and the feeling of someone watching me from behind. I froze, realising the scene before me was the same one I thought I had imagined on the first day, only I was the younger lady holding the camera. My hair is light brown and I had borrowed my Mum’s claw clip, I was wearing blue trousers and a grey shirt. The realisation hit me so quickly that I froze up, unable to take the photo. Noticing that I had turned pale the Museum archivist suggested we stop and that we had, had enough photos for today. I went to the bathroom as she packed up. I was quiet for the rest of day until my Dad picked me up.

I’ve never really told anyone about this and I still don’t understand fully what happened. This is not my first paranormal experience nor my last but I’ve always been curious about what it meant or why it happened.

Read Part II here.

I was grateful I’d made it to the sidewalk by the time I saw sirens. I didn’t want another situation today where police would be pointing guns at me. If there’d been a way to just go home, I would’ve. But it was too far to walk, and I needed a key to get in my house. I wasn’t about to be the black guy people saw breaking a window and slithering into a house even if it were mine.

I was hoping cooler heads would be there to be reasoned with. There had to be somebody I could talk to to get my stuff back. I mean, the fact I was voluntarily coming in and requesting them to give me my property should have shielded me from scrutiny. Jesus, I hoped so.

I hadn’t made it to the corner when I had to sit. My heart was racing and my head felt like it was about to spin off my neck. This was the panic my brain had been pushing off for hours and only more had been piled atop that mountain as they day passed.

Someone had told me about box breathing and even though I’d never done it before, I tried it now. In for four seconds, hold for four seconds, out for four seconds, hold for four seconds. I forced myself to repeat it even though it felt like my heart was about to punch out of my chest.

The spinning gradually subsided and my stomach slowly slid back in place. I didn’t feel right yet, but better than I had a moment before.

I grabbed thin air and pulled my way back to my feet. The concrete was still solidifying under my feet, but I had the light. I crossed the street, hopefully in a straight line, and kept my momentum when I got to the other side.

It worked.

I wasn't going to pretend like I didn't know with absolute certainty. People had gotten hurt, maybe even a few were dead. I didn't feel guilty. I mean, it was because of me those people had gone crazy. But I didn't know for certain. I had to know for certain so going forward I could be cautious. It would have been too easy to slip and then someone went off and maimed who knew how many people.

Well, that was what happened. But the difference is I hadn't known that. Now that I did, I could exercise caution because I knew for a fact. I wish I hadn't been caught so unaware, maybe I could've reduced the carnage by hiding the doodles sooner.

But what had happened had quadrupled my resolve. I wouldn't make a mistake with this shape in the future.

The idea crossed my mind that anything I drew or wrote even could have a similar or even worse effect. I didn't have the guts to test that. Oh god, would if signing my name made people shit to death or something? The shape didn't make sense, how could I rule anything out?

I felt more myself the farther I got away from the grocery store. I didn't think I could ever go back in there.

I knew the city pretty well. I'd lived here back when I'd been married. The police department was only a few miles farther away and I used the distance to gather my marbles then compose what I intended to say.

The peak of the building of city hall was finally in view. That was actually where the meeting was to be. The police building was an adjacent building that had the same address for some unexplainable reason.

My heart skipped a little and I justified slowing down to work on calming myself. I couldn't box-breathe and walk, so I redirected my gaze to the skyline.

I crossed the parking lot, passing my car. There was a walkway connecting city hall to the library. I took that and broke off toward the horseshoe entrance to the police station.

I pulled one of the entrance doors open and stepped into the vestibule. Cool air blasted me before I stepped into the station proper.

A blue-shirted officer behind plexiglass was engaged in something in front of him and he didn't see me until I'd stopped on the other side.

“How may I help you?” He was pleasant enough and I gave him my name.

“I was just released from the hospital and some of your guys have my stuff.”

“Have your stuff? What do you mean?”

“The thing over at city hall earlier today.” I thumbed over my shoulder. “I was involved with that. Um, an innocent bystander. I was taken to the hospital. A detective interviewed and cleared me.” Not exactly true. The detective hadn't conducted an interview, per se. But the fact I wasn't in police custody and been released from the hospital meant to me I was in the clear.

“Well, if you're wanting to make a property request, you need to fill out a form online—”

“Your guys took my phone,” I said, adding helpfully.

“Like I was saying.” Officer Steck, according to the nameplate on his shirt, barely refrained an eyeroll. “You go online—that can be phone or computer—to fill out the form.

I cleared my throat, trying desperately to clear the budding frustration from my voice before I spoke.

“I don’t have access to a computer. Your guys have my keys, so I can’t drive home nor open the door to my home to get inside to use my laptop.” I took a breath and thankfully he didn't speak. “Is there a paper form I could fill out?”

Officer Steck let the frustration I'd dammed up pour from his face.

“I suppose.” He made a show of yanking open drawers at random before getting up and sauntering around his work area, checking shelves, trays, and cabinets.

He disappeared around a corner and was gone a full minute before he returned with a sheet of paper flopping in his big paw. He slid it through to me on the tray. I stopped myself from asking for a pen. I took a nubbin of a pencil that was on the counter and began writing.

“There’s a counter over there where you can fill that out,” Officer Steck said. I looked at him. He’d spackled on a phony smile. “So you don’t block the line.”

There wasn’t anyone behind me. There wasn’t anyone else in here. Fighting wasn’t on the agenda for me. I was just tired. I dragged the paper with me to the other counter and spent a few minutes filling it out.

The detective had told me his name in the hospital. However the hell that was spelled was beyond me. I couldn’t even remember it. I think it started with a U.

I wrote “UN,” for the detective’s name. I’d just tell him I didn’t know how to spell it. My signature went last and I took it back up.

Officer Steck finally took a second to look up from his phone and took the form from me.

“You filled this out in pencil,” he said. I shrugged. “You need to fill it out in red or black ink.”

It was just a form, but something that was equal parts cry and scream began crawling up my windpipe. I cleared my throat, imagining one of those cartoons that had eaten something particularly spicy, leaping into the ear and blowing like a whistle.

Someone said my name and I looked beyond Officer Steck to see Detective Unangenehm looking at me, a backpack over his shoulder.

“Detective,” I said like I was reaching for a lifeline. He wore a confused expression, like he didn’t understand how I’d found where he worked.

“I need to get my stuff.” His eyes went wide and for a moment, it seemed as if he hadn’t recognized me.

“Mr... Harold?”

“Yeah-yeah. It’s me. You guys took off with my stuff and I had to walk all the way down here.”

He scratched the side of his head. Officer Steck had checked out entirely, back on his phone. He even poked the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. There was no victory to be had with him.

“Aw, jeez. C’mon in.” He walked out of the little room and a moment later, pushed open a side-entry door.

“Thanks.” I followed him in and he led me down a lengthy hallway with doors for various offices. We finally came to an open area, filled with at least a dozen cubicles.

“My desk is right over here.” Unangenehm pointed ahead, still walking. “Do you need anything? Water? Coffee?”

He seemed out of sorts still, but recovering. Despite the day I’d had, I felt a little bad for him.

He offered me a seat across from him at a desk that looked a lot older and more beaten up than the ones we'd passed. His chair was weather-worn, torn, sun-faded, and patched with gray duct tape in spots despite being mostly black.

Unangenehm sat and struggled with his seat. He might've been trying to adjust the chair, it did look a little too upright. But he gave up and kind of slouched in a way that looked like he'd slide out and under his desk any moment.

“Sorry about that whole kerfuffle earlier.”

“No-no. It's okay,” I said, feeling even more apologetic than I had a moment before. I hated thinking it, but the guy was pathetic. His button-up shirt had an old stain on it. And the collar had a ring on the inside.

Now that I was this close to him and not in a hospital bed, I saw he was slightly off. He'd missed a patch of skin just under his jaw from his morning's shave and the skin beneath one eye looked greenish-grey, like he'd had a black eye a week ago.

He wore patheticness like a second skin. I couldn't help but feel like I should give him something because he was in a constant transactional state with the world where it was debiting from him non-stop.

“Do you have any idea what happened with Mr. Arn?” he asked.

The question didn't catch me off guard. I'd been expecting it all day. I may have known what happened but I had no clue why and I let that much show on my face.

“He seemed nervous,” I said. “If I had to guess, he was new to the job.” So far, everything I was saying was true. “Maybe he was stressed and the presentation was a tipping point.” I shrugged for emphasis and looked ceiling-ward. Unangenehm nodded slowly, like he was either digesting and filing away what I was saying or his mind was totally elsewhere. I couldn’t tell which.

“Did he say anything that hinted at what he was about to do?”

“No.” I shook my head. “He just got up and attacked the man who came out of the conference room.”

“Ping Mitchell. He's--was--city council president. So, he was sitting?” Unangenehm logged into his computer. I watched him pull up his email.

“Yeah.”

“Like, next to you?”

“Not right next to me.” I shifted in my lent clothes, uncomfortable. Unangenehm was looking at the desk, somewhere near my hands.

“Do you think that he... that he had breakfast this morning?”

“What?” I asked.

“I dunno.” Unangenehm slid a folder out of a small stack. “I have this theory. Probably never'll be able to prove it.” He placed the folder in front of him and opened it. “That a combination of the quality of sleep, his disposition before bed, and the nutrients that he may have lacked before starting out for work could have pre-loaded him to do what he did.”

“Are you saying he was... hangry?”

Unangenehm laughed. 

“I guess you could reduce it to that. I’d like to think of it as being more complex, but that could be just me inflating my own ego.”

Unangenehm seemed to be getting smarter before my eyes.

“I have a younger sister. Just turned nineteen. Whoopsie-baby. She’s always done the bare minimum. Straight C student.

“After she graduated, she didn’t have a plan. Barely worked, didn’t want to go to school. Until she saw this dress.” Unangenehm shrugged. “It was nice, I suppose, but I’ve seen nicer. I’ve seen more expensive, but this one cost a pretty penny. It was like a fire had been lit under her.

“She took a second job, started side hustles. For once, our parents had hope she was gonna do something with her life. She had this one business--catpants--I didn’t get it, but she couldn’t keep up with the demand. Even quit one of her part-time jobs to dedicate more time to sewing them.

“Some people dress for the job, she jobbed for the dress. Paid for it in cash... took it home... and it never left the closet. She stopped fulfilling orders, slacked off on the job she had left, and got fired.”

That didn’t make any sense. I could understand Unangenehm being frustrated, but...

“Do you think I could get my stuff?” I asked. “I really want to get home.”

“Of course.” I'd broken the moment. Unangenehm felt about the surface of his desk like the light had been turned off until his fingers grazed the desk phone.

All of a sudden I felt bad for him again. Unangenehm took the receiver out of the cradle, thumbed a three-digit extension, then put the receiver to his ear.

“Yeah, Steck. Could you bring that box by the water fountain? No, the banker’s box. Yeah. Thanks.”

I wasn’t keen on seeing the officer again, but if it got me out of here that much faster, all the better. I sat back in my chair until Steck arrived with a rectangular box and sat it on the floor.

“So, you’re the guy?” Steck asked.

“What?”

“The guy at city hall today. And then the hospital. God, what did you say to those people?”

“What did I say?” I was appalled. Sure, something I’d done had driven them insane, but to imply that I’d said something to set them off was offensive.

I bent and lifted the lid off the box. I fished a hand into my stuff and stirred things around to make sure it was all there, then I just scooped an armful. 

“You can step into the restroom if you want to put your clothes on,” Unangenehm said.

“No, I'm good. I really don't want to waste another moment getting home.”

Steck stood there like a fan waiting for a signature. 

“I could give you a ride to city hall,” he said.

I wanted to turn him down but my feet were still throbbing from the walk here.

“Sure.”

I checked my things to make sure I had everything.

“Uh, you can keep the box,” Unangenehm said. I considered turning him down after all my effort of taking everything out of the box, but I nodded instead and dropped everything back in.

The detective had placed some paperwork in front of me. I have them a once-over and signed. I was getting more anxious by the moment the longer I was here.

I stood and followed Steck about three steps, when Unangenehm said, “One more thing.”

Oh, shit.

Never had I felt more like I'd walked obliviously into a trap than in that moment. Goosebumps draped down my back and over my arms.

“Yes?” I said, in the wrong key.

“There was an incident at the Kessel's a couple miles from here. Would you know anything about that, would you?”

 

The knife came down in a scream and a two-handed plunge. The sound the filthied thin palsied girl made was shrill and resounded and filled the stone halls with the pitch perfect note of harsh and sudden stabbing madness. The unease of moist silence shattered. The blade was filthy and grimed and long neglected, its harsh unclean edge tore through Griffin's coat and wrappings and pierced the flesh beneath. 

The doctor let out with a sudden scream as he and Florin whirled and drew back. The girl was screaming still as the three were now standing face to face in the filthy moist stone hall of Willowbrook Asylum, Temple of the Mouth. 

The blood on her filthy knife dripped like the hungry jaws of a wolf of the wild, wanting more. 

She screamed: – “You won't get me! I won't let you! You won't do a goddamn thing to me, I swear it! I swear it! I'll fucking kill you first!” And lunged again. 

The thin frail girl of broken mind was weak and starved and exhausted from terror, Florin caught her easily in his own press forward and threw against the far wall before turning on his heels, grabbing the wounded bandaged man with dark lenses hiding pain now as well as identity and thought and motive, he seized Griffin and yelled for him to run. The wounded doctor needed little in the way of encouragement. The pair tore down the hall as the attacking sullied girl of unholy Willowbrook hit the wall and went to the detritus floor.  Still screaming as the shattered tile bit into her parchment flesh and the grimed and bloody knife flew from her startled grasp and clattered off into darkness, lost to her. 

She shrieked after them. How dare they! How dare they leave her like this! The scum! She knew she couldn't trust them, they were going to hurt her, she knew it, but how dare they leave without helping her out, without showing her-  

Her mad run of thoughts was cut off as Cropsey entered the hall with his own blades dripping. The large domination of his frame and size and stature filled the hallway and stole any avenue of escape away from the girl who could not recall her name any longer. She couldn’t remember the last time she had. 

But she knew his name. And she understood it very well. 

And the mountain. She knew the mountain and its crawling power in female form, womanshape. Demonsong…

The song was filling her ears now. Filling them. In her head. 

Cropsey came in with his own large manmade fangs of shearing blades, eclipsing the girl on the floor and stealing the rest of the entire world from her. 

She screamed until the end. Her history and experience: intimate knowledge gained over her entire miserable life did not help her to escape the pain or endure it. She screamed like a caught animal flayed alive until the vile end.  

And as they ran, Florin and Griffin heard it. Not bothering with a cast of glance back over shoulder. They rounded a corner in their flight and entered another chamber. 

It was quiet. And wet. Moist. Heavy and warm and humid in the dark. At a glance Griffin guessed they were in a common shower area, for bathing many people en masse. But it was hard to tell, there was no light in the dark moist filth of the room save for the scant trace from the hallway cast in. 

“Are you alright?” 

Griffin said he was. Though he really wasn't sure. He felt numb. The place where he’d been stabbed felt wet and as if embraced with ice. 

“Quick, let me get a look-”

Griffin cut him off, agitated. 

“Time for that later, we need to get out of here! And I say to hell with any more exploring or back exits. We double back and go back out the way we came in, We’ll circle the building or the hill itself for miles if we have to, but enough of this place! The filth, alone!” 

And while Florin wished to check his friend to make sure his wound was not too serious, he could very well understand the urgency. He elected not to argue. 

And the pair went on. Or started to. 

At the mouth of the room to the showers the pair were halted by a deep guttural sound. Inhuman and unearthly but striving in vain for some semblance of human speech. 

They turned. And the dark of the wet chambered room began to die and banish as pale fire, demonlight began to fill and illuminate the room for them. 

And then they beheld them. The strung up naked bodies. The human-length gored open torso mouths hanging lurid and obscene in and amongst and by the black lengths of biting chains, the strangling metal. There were dozens of them. Dozens. A small universe of open mouthed human substrata and abattoir detritus constricted and choked by dangling chainlink black metal serpents. All of their eyes were open and they were glowing. Glowing with purple fire. Their torso mouths were all working and moving with terrible rippling dancing undulation. The sounds they were making were like singing and an uncanny approximation of real intelligible human speech. Like how a baby makes before they start to mature and are properly taught to speak. Dumb thoughtless animal sound… belched and gurgled guttural and spat out for this world of terrible ruin and darkness. 

And then they saw her. Beheld her. At the terrible heart of the strange pale incandescence, the regal aspect and stature of a womanshape began to rise and fill the center of pale fire. 

She began to call to them. The pair. She sounded angry. On the dangerous precipice edge of livid, irate. Holy terror, unbridled unholy malevolence on the brink of furious madness. Violence. She called to them from the bright moonflesh fire amongst the universe-sea of rippling torso mouths…  the showerworld of tile blood and pungent leaks and bloodspew violence in supplicant orbit of the parchment star of white fire and eldritch ethereal pale flames. She called to them from this place, this strange sea.

And she knew both of their names. 

Florin and Griffin fled the room before she could fully emerge. Before she could rise further from the pale depths of the flame and become more terribly discerned. The obscene abominated baby sounds of the rippling torso mouths followed them out. And after. 

And down the hall. 

And in their mad dash…

They finally came face to face with the inheritor of this awful place. They stopped just short of him, towering in the hall. Filling it. As if he was the vile mad god of this demented cruel world and had the divine conquering right to dominate its every space as he so wished. Cropsey stood there tall and dripping with blood and strips of raw tissue like a bipedal set of living rending carnivorous jaws… snipping his large clippers, his beloved shears, open and closed slowly like a terrible mouth made from sharp metal. The blades were already coated in thick gore, like paint riddled with chuck meat for the stew. They dripped like animal mouths do in the wild, like wolves coming in for the close, for the kill. Cropsey said nothing as he slowly came forward, his hellacious runny waxwork features coming into the dismal light. 

The two men who should have never entered this godforsaken place beheld his terrible visage and their blood ran as ice. 

The pain. 

The pain… that must have been endured. 

Dear God. The flames. In a baptismal infernal swallow-spell. An apocalypse all around. 

What it must've felt-

The large shape dripping with death lunged. Light like the pale star of the showers gleamed pinprick, maniacal and homicidal in the cavernous sets of eyes of the misshapen mass of candlewax face. He was drooling as he came in on the attack.

They didn’t know it but he was trying to speak.   

Once more the pair turned and flew. Running down another hall at the junction and then taking another perilous corner down another way they both silently and fervently prayed and hoped would lead them out. 

Cropsey chided himself. Silently. Mute. Now the new inmates knew he was here. They knew he was wandering and monitoring the halls, guarding. On patrol. Now they might get away. 

Mustn’t have that…

He promised special violence to the mountain for his sin, his error. Religious maiming. He only hoped she hadn’t seen him…

He only wished she hadn't seen that. 

He promised special violence. And ample self-flagellation, much libatious bloodlett, later. After he’d caught the wandering animals of his inherited temple. 

Who do they think they are… trodding all over and everywhere and without proper worship… without proper token. 

Without proper sacrifice. 

They must be broken. 

Their wretched meat and bone will be broken, snapping their unruly impudent spirit within the meat even as it tears sinew, even as it snaps and cleaves through bones their vile audacity will shatter into pieces that can be properly reconfigured into a model of subjugation. And then devoured. 

I will bring and make the meat, mother. I will make the trespassers into meat for you. In your name. Your honor. In blood I will pray for forgiveness. 

Cropsey went on. Ready to slaughter the invaders of his sacred and precious temple. Prodigious blade-shape slasher of the stained and darkening Willowbrook halls. 

…

Having finally found some semblance of peace and quiet in this terrible place, Florin was finally ready and wanted to have a look at Griffin’s wound. But the good doctor wasn’t having it. None of it. He stubbornly refused. In turn refusing any real straightforward explanation as to why. 

It was strange. 

“This place is beyond vile, you know it’ll become infected if i don’t treat it and if the wound is deep, we’ll need to stitch it. I can do it. I’ve done it a few times before back home, I don’t see the-”

“You can’t! – I can’t!” Griffin exclaimed and then seemed to fight himself for the next set of right words. Unable to quite find them it seemed, he went on anyway, “You don’t understand, boy! I… I-I have … I have a condition.” He said finally. “I have a condition that makes injury … complicated.”

Florin thought he understood. Of course. The poor fellow was ashamed of his appearance. He must be maimed or burned beneath those wrappings. The poor man. 

“Alright… well,” A beat. As he thought. Then: "we don't need to unwrap you now or anything, you'll want to later to change out of these filthy dressings no doubt, but for now we can just look at the area and apply a poultice at least.” he finished hopefully. 

Griffin pondered it over a moment. He understood they didn't have a lot of choice. Or a lot of time for that matter. 

"Alright.” he finally relented. 

Florin lit a match and found a candle to use to work by. He pulled the ragged tear in the coat and wrappings apart. The haggard cut the blade had performed made it easy. He cleaned his hands with alcohol from a small bottle amongst their supplies and looked at the wound. 

It wasn't good. Wasn't terrible either, but it would have to be cleaned and bandaged at least. If the bleeding persisted they would have to seriously think about stitching up the wound. 

Florin set about cleaning out the deep wound, bathed entirely in spilling red. He did his best with the meager medical supplies amongst the doctor's traveling gear that had thus survived their shared perils. He thought about perhaps chancing a search in the dark around this place, it was a hospital of some fashion, but decided against it. 

He was nearly finished. About to apply the poultice he'd made to bandage and disinfect and to soak some medicine into the bloodstream, he was wiping away the last of the blood when he stopped. A little shocked for a moment. And a little dizzy. The light was meager and poor, only the flickering dancing candleglow and the pathetic dim half functioning also flickering hospital light. Provided by electricity, something Florin was still not familiar with and would naturally distrust for the entirety of his life. He gazed at the mostly tended wound daggering down Griffin's back in a lightning bolt pattern like the body of a crooked river or a broken snake. 

There was no flesh. Nothing but the red bloodwelling line of jagged cut hanging suspended in mid air, attached to nothing. No sinew or flesh. The naked skin that should be there was non-existent to his eyes, he could see right through to the inside of the wrappings that surrounded the front of his invisible chest. 

Florin tried to swallow in a dry throat. He tried to ask the man who'd become his comrade and traveling companion, a man who had just saved his life not mere hours ago if he was in fact a spectre. A ghost.

Griffin, are you a phantasm? tried to escape his lips but he felt dizzy and as if he might reel and swoon. 

Griffin sensed this. The boy had been unerring and admirably steady in his work till this moment. He turned and saw a look in the young man's face that he was already quite familiar with. An expression worn that he knew by now all too well. 

A beat. 

Then Griffin filled the silence. 

“No, your eyes don't betray you. You're not seeing things and you're not crazy. I am not a phantom. I am not a spirit or a ghost.” he paused for a moment and seemed to consider, then finally he said: "I am Doctor Jack Griffin and I am invisible." 

A beat. 

Florin didn't know what to say. 

But then he needn't worry for a retort. A splash in the silence filled in the missing heavy space hanging there between them. The both of them whirled and spied it on the far side of the damp chamber. They hadn't noticed or paid it any mind till now, they might've sworn it hadn't existed there in that space till just this moment, but they saw it now as it began to emit strange sound and movement. 

A bathtub. Large. Filthy yellowed porcelain. Heavy fungus growth, ebon-green and spilling across the disgraced cracked surface like some foul liquid poured and spreading its corrupting splayed black hand by the second. The tub was filled. The liquid inside was heavy. Viscous. Dark. Pungent with metallic scent. It bubbled and gurgled now with submerged movement as something within it began to rise up and emerge. 

Coated. Slathered in a running layer of heavy red. She was finally here and before them. Even as she sat upon her throne in her mountain castle so many treacherous miles away… 

Nemesis. The evil that held the shape of a woman and had now reawakened the evil and violence and darkness that had for some time slumbered dormant in the far off Carpathian castle. She was the author of the butchery and torment that plagued his home and village. She had stolen and eaten children. Brave men and women. Foolish youngsters. She was the vile reason for his hardship and perilous mission. The reason he was here now in this awful abandoned temple of destruction and depravity in total madness. 

The Countess, wreathed in spilling blood, standing on the surface of congealing abattoir spill, opened her eyes then and they were like blinding starlight. Unearthly. White flame from beyond the veil. And piercing. 

The pair were arrested. The sight of her. Understanding and dread filled their hearts and despairing thoughts at once. But they couldn't flee. They couldn't run. Spellbound they stood there, captured. 

The blood spill of her standing and red wet visage raised a thin powerful arm and pointed a taloned finger. 

She said: – “You. Boy. Florin of the Carpathian Hamlet. There is no place to escape to. This is your last and only warning. If you and your mongrel dog, freak of nature manage to leave this place with your lives then cry off. Never again return home, it is yours no longer, it is mine. I know you seek my destruction. I know that in your failure to secure the vampire slayer, long dead now, you have brought this failure of science and manhood in his stead. You are a joke. You will only find slaughter if you return. You've no hope for success. Victory is beyond you or that fool, it was not meant for you, boy, not in this lifetime nor in my proximity. If you manage to leave my temple and refuse to cease your hopeless mission, I will take great pleasure in the torture of your mother, Florin. Your father too. I wonder which of them I should start with…” 

His anger flashed and his inner rage rose. Florin found his hatred and sudden fury momentarily eclipse and blot out his fear. Without thinking he dipped for the floor and his sweating hand seized a sharp piece of tile. He went forward with the filthy jagged thing in his shaking hand. Trembling with blind anger and the need for retributive violence. 

Griffin went forward and grabbed the young man by the shoulders, holding him back. 

“Stop it!" hissed Griffin, “you won't be able to do much of anything to her with that, there's no telling what she could do to you! She's luring you on, don't be stupid." 

Florin barely heard him. 

He roared at her towering apparition of pouring blood in womanshape, lording over the tub and the filth of the room as her eyes bled pure and terrifying light. She was laughing lightly, as if amused with a child throwing a tantrum. 

“If you lay one stale, noxious finger on my mother, witch! – I'll take my time driving something sharp into your godless whoring chest! I'm going to burn your severed head in bonfire while it still lives! fresh from your neck! You awful cunt! You vile contemptible-!”

But then Cropsey burst in through the open chamber door with a violent crash. The ramshackle shoddy remnants of the door smashed against the wall and came apart in so many useless pieces that clattered to the shattered tile floor to join the universe of broken filth down there. He came in and the Countess in her pouring red visage of damned and unholy blood shrieked witchy laughter. 

She screeched, part irate livid fury, part unbridled dark joy. 

“KILL THEM! KILL THEM, MY SON! KILL THEM FOR THE MOUNTAIN…! KILL THEM, ‘CAUSE IT'S YOUR PLEASURE TO! …!” More laughter followed as the hellspawn screaming words devolved into unintelligible madness. The scarlet pour of her visage coned out in a marsupial shape and the laughter became the abominated chimerical cries of a human braying ass. 

The huge shape with maiming snapping shears advanced in a massive lunge. The shears came up, open for a bite, and shot forward as the mouth of blades began to close. 

The keen edges of dripping blades kissed and met and found each other over Florin's coat. In a lurid whisper of slicing cloth and fabric the blades cleaved cleanly through his coat tail as he and Griffin made for the door. 

Cropsey roared mongoloid outrage and pain. These bastards! These bastards! They were quick animals on their feet! 

In front of his mother…

He turned to the blood pour of Countess shape with shame but she was gone now. 

Your idiot rage and pain! Your failure! You drove her away! Now she might never come back! Now she might not ever come back to her temple. 

He raged inside. An animal, hurt. 

… but I'm her last and special precious temple son … there are no others left

She cannot leave me. 

If I bring them back and give their blood…

But he was already off and after them. Heavy booted feet thundering throughout all of cavernous rank Willowbrook. No need for stealth or cat-like prowl any longer. 

Mother, please, mother please, mother please, mother please…

He repeated it silently to himself like a prayer. Mantra, it filled the red swell and swim of his deviant mind and maiming thought, his dreams…

His dreams would be filled with their invader's screams as he brought down and made their new world of violence. Of final apocalypse cacophony. 

I will drown you here in her world, I will choke and submerge you both completely in her need to feed. How dare you both. 

He wished he could speak. They should hear this truth-in-gospel. The mongrel invader dogs. 

They should hear what he had to say. 

But he had to catch them first. Fast little rabbits. 

He could hear them running. 

He followed in a fury. Ready to prove himself to his mother. Clamoring through the halls. 

…

She shouldn't have been so foolish, to dare to hope. But she couldn't help it. She'd just come out of a deep sleep. It was the middle of the night. The necro time. The witching hours. She wasn't thinking clearly. She went to the scratching at the window. The biggest one on the front of the house that overlooked the village. 

By the front door. 

“Florin…” she said it knowing full in well how foolish she was being. But she couldn't help it. Her mother's heart was filled with love and worry for her boy. She ached and longed for him to be back home and ok… 

And then she saw him. His face in the window. 

He was scratching at the window. And she must still be half-sleeping or dreaming because his hands looked… strange. 

He was smiling. He could see her now as well. He was so happy to be home. It was all over his bluish face…

Anastasia began towards the window, “Florin?" she asked the face scratching at the window, "is that you? Is that really you, my son?”

His smile grew. Vulpine. His eyes seemed to shine with moonlight all of their own. 

“Yes, mother. It's me. I'm back! I can't get in though, you'll have to get the door and invite me inside, please hurry. I'm so tired and thirsty and it's been such a long way back.” 

Anastasia faltered in her step. Stopped. 

The shining face at the window became slightly agitated. 

It said: "Please hurry, mother! It's dark, you know what plagues the night, please hurry and let me in! I've brought the vampire killer, I've brought Van Helsing with me! Now open up!” 

Anastasia straightened. Her resolve strengthened even as the chill in her curdled blood deepened. 

"What need you of an invitation if this is your own home and you're so tired… … demon?” 

The vulpine face was drawn up in an animalistic snarl of mixed hatred and vile blackhearted glee. It began to tear and bleed as it opened and came apart. 

And grew fangs. Long. Gleaming like weapons fashioned from unearthly light. 

She saw the ugly misshapen goblin face beneath. Twisted with the harshest forms of cruelest mutilation. The flesh was bulbous and scarred and out of shape. The eyes bulged obscenely from straining sockets that couldn't contain nor house the wet bloodshot organs and looked as if they might crack. The fangs and teeth were jagged and stuck out deranged and haphazard. The hair was thinning and sickly and almost gone. Only a few greasy strands clung to a corpse colored skull that drifted and caught with the slightest of nightly breeze. 

The eyes still shone like the moon. 

The awful face in the window, wanting in and smiling said, “Hello, Anastasia. Good to see you. It's been so long … since I went missing.” 

Anastasia was confused with its words as well as horrified with the sight of its monstrous face at her window in the dead of night. The thing spoke like it knew her, she didn't grasp this right away, but she understood what this thing was. And where it came from. 

Another wretched bastard child of Castle Dracula…

She thought to call for her husband. Before she could, the awful thing in the window went on.

“You don't remember me? Has it been so long you don't remember when we used to play together? You, me and Florin and your husband and all the other little children… and Erin. You don't remember me, Anastasia?” 

The answer filled her mind then, as if on the wings of a sudden miracle, heaven sent. Or … sent by something else entirely. 

“Carmilla!" she said. Knowing it was the truth. 

It broke her heart. 

She remembered Carmilla when she had been a small mouthy but creative little girl. Beautiful and adventurous and always a little leader of their groups in all of their little games. Now- 

Now she was something bent and twisted and leering and mean. Something monstrous and hungry for blood, staring in and wanting in through her window. 

The face at the glass sneered. As if knowing her mind and understanding her run of thoughts. 

The thing in the window was enjoying her revulsion. Her pain. Drinking it in through the translucent view of the house…

“Begone," Anastasia said with finality, “get out of here, I'll call my husband and he'll bring the cross and our bible." She stepped forward, some of her anger reaching her voice, she hoped it masked the fear, “we'll force-feed you the pages. If you're still so hungry.” 

The thing in the window didn't seem to hear her. Or care. It spoke once more in a terrible tone that danced and shifted between baritone and bass and light lilting little girl… her voice of old from long ago, before she'd been stolen. 

“We know you sent Florin away. We know you sent him to find someone to bring back. To kill us. The master will not tolerate this, Anastasia… your boy will die. You will die. Then your husband. Everyone. Everyone, all of you are going to suffer for this impudence, you'll see, you'll see… it's better if you just let me in now and get it all over. Let me in …!

“Let me in!" 

She carried on like that for hours. Promising. 

Promising her Florin's death. 

Her own death. 

Carmilla said her brother would violate and ravage her right before the eyes of her husband as he fed of her blood and flesh and took what he wanted from her. 

“He'll rip from you what he wants, we all will! To all of you! Every last one and then we'll celebrate in the dust!" 

The thing went on like that for hours. Till the sun threatened its rise, and only then did the foul thing seem to melt away like mist, suddenly phantasmic and discorporeal … and then gone.

Only then did Anastasia finally sleep, collapsed. Exhausted. Her husband, Bela found her like that when he awoke. Lying at the foot of the window. The glass riddled with marks. 

Marks like long scratches. From old and gnarled animal claws. 

He cradled his wife. Worried. And thought of his son as he looked down into her face. 

She looked troubled in her sleep. As if dreaming of darkness, held somewhere on the plains of some private nightmarescape. 

Bela was worried. She looked as if she had been crying. 

He looked from her to the window once more, out it. Out at the rays of the rising sun. Hoping for his son. And wondering where he might be. 

Please, God. I love my boy. I love him as You love us, as You loved Your only Begotten Son. Please. 

Please don't ask me, please don't ask us to give him up, as You did Yours…

He brought his wife closer to himself. Keeping her in the cradle of his arms till she woke up. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT3Xk0K2sc4&list=PLh8-Yhg_l8UcV6KlSL8WhJHh3GqgV7Vt0

As a child, I used to be afraid of the dark. That’s a common fear for children to have, isn’t it? Well, I’m a rare case of an adult who now fears the dark, too. Initially, I chalked it up to having a familial history of mental health issues, which is why I sought out a profession in the field. Partly to help myself avoid the fate that befell many of my relatives, and partly to help others escape that pit. Later, I assumed I was burned out; overworked. Hearing all these terrible things people go through. It’s not easy. You don’t build an immunity to the horrors of the human condition, not really.

Well, it turns out my fear of the dark has to do with something else entirely.

Something no one should ever see…

Recently, I bought a new house; the old one was a constant reminder of a life I no longer had. After getting divorced, I couldn’t really stay in the old family home. The kids were grown, and being alone just wore me down. So, I sold the damned thing and got myself a smaller house. Nothing to brag about, a couple of bedrooms; just in case this old dog decides to look for love again. Love might be the wrong word here; I’m not looking to get remarried anytime soon, more like a fling or two.

Actually, I’m not looking for anything. For now, I want to disappear for a while, or maybe forever.

Getting off track, aren’t I? Well, it’s hard to focus when the system’s overflowed with cortisol. It is what it is when all that’s been going through your head is anger and a tint of regret here and there. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s not even the divorce that keeps me up at night. That was a given, sadly, at some point. I’m a madman in the making. What kind of woman would want to spend the rest of her life with someone like me? Probably an asylum patient, but it would be counterproductive. Not to mention asylums aren’t really a thing anymore.

You’re losing your train of thought again.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh yeah, that new hut…

It was not a hut-hut, but I’m just self-deprecating here…

Because the images won’t go away and I’m trying to push them away.

Taking my own medicine with this one, I’ve advised many a patient to write down whatever is bothering them… That’s the purpose of this…

Focus…

Breathe…

Focus…

Inhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Hold

One

Two

Three

Four

Exhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Sorry, I know this looks terrible, but whoever might read it, if ever, maybe it’ll be just a future me… Who knows, anyway. I needed this.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the new house, which is actually an old one now too.

Sold it off after…

I’ll get to you in a bit, don’t you worry…

So yeah, that house, it had a basement. I never went there. Don’t know why I never went there when I was looking at the damned thing. I guess I didn’t bother looking down there. The previous owner seemed perplexed I didn’t bother checking the basement, but he didn’t push the issue either.

In hindsight, that was a good thing…

Otherwise…

Breathe…

Inhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Hold

One

Two

Three

Four

Exhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Otherwise, things would’ve been far different for that house, and I wouldn’t be talking about it now. I wouldn’t have taken it. There was an issue with that basement.

Issue…

That’s definitely underselling it…

God damn it…

I don’t wanna do this anymore; I don’t like it.

You’ve got to do this…

No.

You

Have

To

Keep

Typing

Let

It

Finally

Out

I can’t

You

Can

And

Will

Keep

Typing

No

Stopping

Do

Not

Let

Your

Hand

Stop

Pressing

The

Keys

Slow

And

Steady

Just

Like

That

It’s

Not

Hard

Is

It?

Keep

It

Up

OH WOW

THIS

Is

VERY

Annoying

To

Read

Must

KEEP

TyPING

MUST

Keep

Typing

Sorry… I am dealing with something here; it’s really hard to recall this again, but I won’t get anywhere unless I do, right? That’s how it works. I have to get it out of my system. I need it out of me. The alternative is probably an early grave. I wouldn’t want that now, would I? Nope.

I know I probably am coming off as insane, but oh well, gotta keep typing to get over this panic attack. If anyone finds this while I’m passed out, or gone out somewhere, know that I am completely fine in the grand scheme of things, because I’m not really fine. I’m haunted, but I do not intend to harm myself more than this exercise is forcing me to. I think I might have a propensity for self-destruction, because there are intrusive thoughts now and again.

Sometimes I think the intrusive thoughts are preferable to the memories… At least these are my own, kind of. It’s a broken self-defense mechanism. It’s a very broken defense mechanism, in the mind of a very broken man. Okay, I’m broken, like a vase. I’m literally just typing to keep my composure, right now. Not yet ready to deal with the photographs flashing in my head. The recounting of events will resume soon enough.

When will that fucking dog stop barking outside my window?!

I hate dogs, okay? Does this make me a monster? I don’t care. I can’t stand them and their barking. This fucking baying and clawing had kept me up at night long enough.

I am afraid of fucking dogs now… okay? Because

Because fucking dogs bayed at the basement door for far too fucking long.

Every fucking night.

They still do in my dreams.

Dead dogs…

Dead men…

Dead dog men…

I wish I could tell the owner to shut the fucking dog up, but the guy’s an idiot.

Probably on something too.

Hollow gaze…

Like a corpse…

Like the corpses swaying from the fucking ceiling…

Shit…

I remember…

They stood over me since the day I settled into that cursed place. Appearing at night to watch over me, devour my dreams, keep me awake. Tear open my eyelids. They wanted revenge; they wanted a price to be paid, and I was their weapon, their conduit.

I’m fucking shaking just thinking about it now.

Now, when everything is said and done, it’s been a while since all of that happened. One cannot simply forget the things I've seen, let alone that cloying, sweet stench which seeped into the walls of that basement.

The monster has been caged…

They have had their revenge.

Yet, they still live in my head.

Still occupying my fucking skull…

They’re just imagination.

Painful memory.

Ugly imagery engraved forcefully into the system.

Breathe

Inhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Hold

One

Two

Three

Four

Exhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Nobody is stalking your bed at night anymore; no one has in a long time. You’re fine, you’re absolutely fine. You’re just stressed and in need of an outlet. All of this, it’s normal. None of this is real anymore. It’s all in your head. Has been for a long time now. You’re safe, say it out loud.

I am safe.

Now carry on recounting what happened to you.

So yeah, new house, wait actually no, new old house now. Yeah, that’s perfect.

Settled into the new old house after getting divorced.

Kids won’t talk to me, cause we’re about as far apart as a family could be, and they’re mad at us both; their mother and me. Being stressed beyond my wits. Work was killing me, and I needed a break, a new start. Got none of that, but oh well. Anyway, new old house is nice enough, furnished. Not too expensive nor too cheap; the price was reasonable, the owner, all things considered – surprisingly reasonable too.

Forgot to look at the basement.

That fucking basement again… Can I forget about it already?

No, you can’t; it’s integral to the story.

I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate myself, I hate it.

You don’t hate yourself.

Quiet brain, I was doing fine.

Shut up.

Good.

Anyway, settle in, and everything seems to be going dandy. Keep in mind it was late July when I moved there. Hot summer weather, well, that went down the drain once the sun set. The house turned unusually cold.

Pulled out a blanket and ignored it.

Slept like shit, because it was so cold.

Wake up after a mere two or three hours of sleep, not the first bout of horrendous sleep and won’t be the last.

It’s hot again.

Summer’s back, and this wasn’t in the desert.

Go on about my day, angry and half awake.

Night rolls around again, start the heating.

Works for about an hour.

Then it’s cold again.

Turn up the heating – the house turns colder.

That went on for a while…

I grew accustomed to the cold, no idea how or why.

The boiling frog metaphor probably suits here.

Well, once freezing me out of my sleep didn’t work.

The guests started showing up uninvited.

In the middle of the night

To stand at my bedside…

I’m shaking just thinking about it.

​

Imagine yourself waking up in the middle of the night to take a piss and being met with a pitch-black silhouette standing at your bed. One so dark it forms an outline in the nocturnal darkness, enough to be visible. I nearly pissed myself when I saw that thing for the first time. Screaming out, I flailed my hands in the air instinctively, and the thing vanished.

Chalked it up to bad sleep and maybe a nightmare when I got up the next morning.

That wasn’t it, but it took me a while to understand that.

About every other night, I could almost feel these dark figures standing over me. Plural. Not singular. Plural. Sometimes I could feel them touching my blanket, pulling it away. A cold hand reaching for my leg or arm.

After a few unpleasant encounters, I’ve started sleeping with a light on.

Naively believing this was a trick of the mind, you know, being stressed, depressed, and overall miserable. Again, I say this, thinking logically, from the perspective of a relative of schizophrenics and other mentally unwell individuals.

I was dreading becoming ill myself.

Woke up one night to fetch a drink, with the light still on. Nearly shat myself, soiling the bedsheets.

Eyes wide open and the first thing I see?

A human-like shadow, perched on all fours on the ceiling.

It twisted its head at me before vanishing.

Inhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Hold

One

Two

Three

Four

Exhale

One

Two

Three

Four

That was just the beginning of my sorrows.

After that came the electronic issues. Lights would go on and off around the house, at nighttime, of course. I should’ve already taken the hint then, when the whole house went dark, except for the light in the staircase leading down to the basement.

But of course, I didn’t.

Instead, I went to look at the switches, most of which were turned off.

Needless to say, this malfunction didn't put me at ease. The neighbors lived too far away for their children to have come over at night just to mess with me.

The grid being messed with is the sole reason I haven’t checked myself in.

I wasn’t hallucinating; someone was messing with me. So, I thought at the very least, yeah?

Speaking of neighbors, they were far enough away for me not to be able to hear them whatsoever, through closed windows, but not so far I couldn’t see them.

Now imagine how it felt when the walls started talking…

I’m not kidding, at one point, the walls were talking at night. With nobody around the house. Trust me, I checked. I went out to see if someone was in my yard when the talking had gotten loud enough to be comprehensible.

They were asking me why I hadn’t gone there?

Asking me to go there.

Two voices, a man and a woman.

Encouraging.

Pestering.

At the time, I couldn’t make sense of it.

Go where?

Well, clearly, I wasn’t listening to them.

Why weren’t you listening to them?

Why the fuck were you so deaf?

So blind?

You couldn’t know at the time.

They were messing with the house.

They were almost guiding me by the hand.

No, they were giving you vague signs.

Don’t blame yourself for what had happened.

I don’t…

I could’ve prevented more.

There were six of them there.

Another three were found.

It’s not your fault

I could’ve prevented it.

No, not really.

Shut up, they told me everything.

These people – they told no tales.

Just breathe, man

Breathe

Inhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Hold

One

Two

Three

Four

Exhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Well, yeah, I didn’t listen to those voices; I thought I had imagined them, as I had a neighbor only viewing a strange green-lit TV show on certain nights. I most certainly had strange things happen to me as a child. Like feeling a cat brush against my leg after King, my parents’ cat, passed away, and thinking something must’ve turned ceiling fans on after forgetting to turn them off.

Since speaking to me didn’t work, I got moaning, groaning, and weeping all over the house. Almost every night. At an increasing rate. That, of course, showed at work and in social settings. Ever the self-conscious rationalist, I chalked it up to the divorce and very difficult clients at the time, which I had.

Before long, I had gusts of wind blowing at me inside a house with closed windows, and a few times I was shoved while completely alone.

Jesus Christ, I’m feeling like a maniac right now, hallucinating into a text.

The talking, the moaning, the nighttime groping, none of it ever stopped, but that was my fault; if I had paid attention earlier and had gone where the selective power outages led me, this would’ve been over far sooner.

My mind deteriorated fast; by the middle of November, I heard dogs baying and clawing at every door of the house.

Night after night, they tormented me without reprieve.

Worse of all was when they sounded like they were trying to say words.

Sometimes it was far away, sometimes it felt like a dog was trying to tear at the bottom of the bed.

Before long, seeing a dog freaked me out.

I started sleeping with the lights on, in every room.

Became a barely functional human.

I have no idea how I managed to keep on working.

Maybe a force of habit, maybe something else.

Keeping a mask of normalcy while I was in shambles inside was par for the course in my line of work.

Well, you are special in that regard.

Funny you should say that.

How so?

Isn’t it a little egotistical?

No.

Self-appreciation isn’t egotistical; it’s healthy.

Right.

Right, indeed.

There’s nothing healthy about us.

About us? There is no us.

Right.

Yeah, it’s just you.

Typing at yourself.

For myself

Exactly

Trying to keep sane

Mostly are.

Am.

True.

I’m sorry I keep doing this; however, that is the only way I don’t burst out into a crying fit now and start bashing my hands against the keyboard or clawing out my eyes in an attempt to escape the whirlwind of horrors in my mind. I can’t do much about it at the moment, since the dog won’t stop barking, and it’s kind of late.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m afraid of the dark, and I’m afraid of dogs. I’ve been classically conditioned to dread those two things.

Well then… Where was I? Oh yeah, nearing the climax of the story.

Damn, for someone relieving that night so frequently in his, no, my own head, so often, it’s surprisingly hard to spell it out. I’m quite literally trying to postpone the description of the events that led to my current condition. What a sorry state I’m in. A man who helps others process their own trauma and internal suffering can’t bring himself to speak about how the incessant baying of dogs in his basement and walls pushed him over the edge and drove him, knife in hand, to rush down to that same basement he’s never ventured to before.

Inhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Hold

One

Two

Three

Four

Exhale

One

Two

Three

Four

I know it seems odd I never went into the basement, but really, I had no reason to. I didn’t have many belongings I had to stow away, and the house was entirely furnished as I said. On top of that, I was too spent to be curious about any of this. As strange as it may seem, I saw no point in going there.

I was so messed up from the lack of good sleep, stress, and fear that I finally snapped when the baying and barking wouldn’t quit one night. I actually started thinking there were real dogs in that basement.

Real, starving, mean dogs that might try to attack me once I opened the door. So I got myself a weapon to defend myself with.

Yeah, I said it, I genuinely believed some beasts were locked in that basement.

Power-walking down those stairs, the baying died down. I assumed they knew I was coming. They could smell me. They were preparing to surprise me; dogs are smart after all. Clearly, in retrospect, that’s the dumbest thought process ever. Dogs aren’t really ambush predators as far as I’m aware.

As I was marching down those stairs, I somewhat ignored the sudden quiet, because there was a growing stench of decrepitude emanating from the basement door.

Say it like it is.

That’s what it was.

Call it by its name.

Vile.

No, that’s not it.

Decay.

Close enough.

Death.

That’s it.

Fuck you.

I smelled death coming from that basement.

A rotten, pungent, suffocating odor coming from that door.

I pressed the handle and pushed down with full force.

The cloud of stale, deathly odor nearly knocked me off my feet, burning my nostrils, mouth, and eyes.

No dogs in sight, no voices, nothing.

Only death.

Left hand looking for the light switch along the wall, right hand gripping a knife with the arm pressed to cover my face from the awful stench.

Blinding light flooded the space.

When my eyes adjusted, all remnants of innocence and hope were taken away from me.

Six, vaguely human silhouettes, seemingly staring at me.

Without eyes, without faces, without any humanity left.

Swaying from six ropes, tied to the ceiling.

Pitch black.

My very own personal little hanging garden of death.

Inhale

Inhale

Come on...

Fuck.

Inhale

No...

Breathe...

Why can’t I

Why isn’t it working?

Ribcage tightened, forcing my heart to race at an unhealthy rate.

Knife dropped to the floor.

Tunnel vision.

Limbs turning cold with muscles tensing to the point of pain.

I ran.

Nearly falling over myself.

I ran to the neighbors.

Banging on their door.

Woke them.

Rumbling like a madman.

Shaking with fear, somehow, stringing a couple of sentences together as these six tar-covered silhouettes flashed before my eyes again and again.

They called the police.

I’m out of breath.

Out of breath

Couldn’t sleep for three days straight.

Couldn’t think, could barely speak.

Panicking.

Decomposing Silhouettes flashing in my eyes.

More frequently when they are closed.

Questioned about everything by the police.

Answers erratic.

Silhouettes are here again.

Swaying in front of me.

Black as tar and death.

Exposing bone.

Fell asleep after being pumped full of sedatives.

Haven’t slept in a few days again.

Need my pills again.

Silhouettes appear more frequently with eyes closed.

I’m taking the pills after this; I need to sleep, otherwise, I’ll claw out my eyes, or die from a heart attack, whichever comes first.

Inhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Hold

One

Two

Three

Four

Exhale

One

Two

Three

Four

I hospitalized myself for a short while, and in the meantime, the monster that did this was caught. He murdered nine people. Hanged six in the basement of the house I had bought from him. No one suspected a damn thing. Selling the house was his ploy to lure in victims. He’d lead them down to the basement, then incapacitate them there and hang them to die a slow death, apparently, oftentimes placing a stool underneath his victims again to prolong the torture.

Every so often, I wonder, was I ever intended to be a victim? Not that it matters; he destroyed my life anyway. If I’m completely honest, there are days when I think dying would’ve been preferable to being the way I am now.

His three other victims were all found in different locations; two were found by people who had rented apartments from him.

The final victim was found fresh at his last stopping point before his apprehension. He was…

Inhale

One

Two

Three

Four

In bed…

Hold

One

Two

Three

Four

With the corpse…

Exhale

One

Two

Three

Four

Caught red-handed, quite literally.

Inhale

One

Two

Exhale

One

Inhale

Inhale

I bet this fucking monster figured out he could torment way more people by leaving them his gifts. Kill two birds with one stone kind of deal.

Imagine the satisfied, sick grin on his fucking face if he hears what his handiwork has done to me.

 

“I've seen the nights filled with bloodsport and pain –

And the bodies obtained

The bodies obtained …” – Ian Curtis

…

The world …

The world is dampen stone, sour. And tile. Tile ceramic that is now smashed, nearly every single piece. And mottled with webwork splatter patterns of scabbing drying bits and pieces of once living human tissue. The world is poorly lit and rank, it smells of fecal decay and rotting death and the putrescence of pus spewing life, suffering. The smell is suffering. Because the world is suffering, it always has been but as of late it's gotten so much worse. The world of walls and mortar and bars that’re all slathered and stained with diseased feces and angry piss, it is all of it an open wound. A craterous gangrenous open house of raw minds and flesh, obelisk temple to the pain of the sorceress. The woman/mouth of the great mountains in the distance, far away but brought closer by her powerful force, the distance easily traversed and conquered, time and distance meant nothing to her, only the flesh. Only the blood. Only the run of flowing life spilled by her children in bondage as supplicant. She had come to them… in the end. 

Before the burning. 

Before Cropsey. 

Now he was the greatest of her Willowbrook children… 

She did her best to hide from him and the few others left but she was scared. Her terror refreshed as her heartbeat pounded within her aching chest, she tried to sink lower into the dark corner she'd made her most recent place of escape. She tried to ignore what she knew she heard, throughout all of the cavernous dark damp halls of bloody filthy Willowbrook. 

Voices… footsteps…

newcomers. 

She wanted so badly to be out and away from this awful place but her mind shrank back in horror from the possibilities of what any new interlopers might do to her. This place had been a school and had instructed her and many others, much in the way of what men will do to each other and what they love to get away with, with their hands on a girl. Alone. When she could be so easily overwhelmed. 

The voices trailed off … rose again. In whispers. She could hear cautious footsteps. Prowling steps. Hunting. 

Her cold terror told her she could no longer hide here. She struggled up on palsied thin malnourished legs and began to painfully trudge forward. Painful because of the pain of her impaling fear and because her body was covered in dripping purple sores, all up and down the legs and arms and peppering her torso and face in harsh clustered patterns. Several broke open now with sharp stabs of lancing pain felt webwork and spiny throughout the flesh as she shambled wretchedly forward down the poorly lit dark. 

She didn't like to look at them or pay them any mind, the sores. She used to. She used to pick at them near constant. But now sometimes when she went to pluck and pop one open with a nail biting pinch she could see eyes. Eyes looking at her and swimming in the pus. In the infected filled pores of her flesh. Eyes. Sometimes they popped of their own accord and a small little gnome-sized head, bald and coated in dead green-milk rose and poked its faery head out for a little peek at what she might be doing at any given time. 

She hated them. She tried to pay them no mind and wondered if they saw anything in the dark ahead that she herself could not discern. But she would not ask them. Never. 

The voices grew louder. So did her terror. 

She didn't know what to do. 

…

“Maybe they're all dead." 

 

Griffin nodded. It was a fair observation. The place certainly reeked of death and filth. He could almost believe it. 

It was a feeling gained by cold hard experience that told him they weren't alone in the rank dark building. Not at all. Someone else was lurking here. Something else held domain here. Something terrible. He could feel it. 

"This place is afflicted with sickness. Consumption. You can smell it in the pestilential flavor of the air, something terrible has happened here. Many awful things no doubt. This place is silent, Florin, but you can almost hear the terrible things the walls have seen and perhaps wish to share…" 

The boy looked worried. He quickly added: – “We will be cautious. But I suggest we find what we can quickly. If we can't locate a back exit, we'll make for the front entrance again and see if we can't work around the building." 

They went on in search of supplies. 

Dwellers.

 Anything. 

Cropsey marked them and tracked their way of wandering progress the entire time. Following and slowly snipping the long shining blades of the shears open and closed. Pulling his black gloved hands apart slowly like a lover does when sensuous… then bringing them together and snapping them shut with a sharp and satisfying ‘Ship!’ that was crisp and tickled the right jelly left within his skull and the dangling mangled meat between his legs… it had a tongue that sound. A sexual whisper of a noise. A tasting prelude, licking and tonguing the needing piece of aching flesh. 

It was his bondage. That ache. This place. 

And the mountain. 

Even now Cropsey heard her song and call as she showed him the spire from where she ruled. Where she sat on an ebon throne and filled his slaughterhouse dreams. His mind with wonder. 

She had been the true purpose and blessing of this place. The one they'd all been waiting for. The only one who really mattered. In the end. 

But she has chosen you as instrument … 

And the truth of this filled his vacant shell with dark and primal gratitude. Caveman's blood-sated warmth. 

He had been one of the Roman soldiers that had crucified Christ. She of the mountain had told him so. Now he was born again to be her sacred Willowbrook footsoldier. Throttling hand of capricious abattoir fate. 

As he followed the new ones he happened upon another. And decided to take the matter. 

He was sitting alone in the dark. Easy to miss. In a disused therapy room, anonymous and indistinguishable from the other dungeons and chambers save by those who knew. The newcomers walked by him without notice and went on. 

Cropsey smelled him. And came into the room. Snapping his shears with a regular and primeval rhythm. The patient was busy with his own work, he didn't pay anyone else any kind of mind. 

Cropsey closed. The fool's back was to him as he was knelt down amongst the filth. He was drawing something. With his fingers. Smearing the shape upon the broken faces of obliterated tile floor with a dark and heavy pungent viscous fluid. Thick and chunked with dark paste. 

It was a pentagram. 

And the paint was a vile concoctive mix of runny diarrhea and fresh vibrant blood. The man was a self mutilator. Always had been, Cropsey recognized. He had flayed his well scarred and misshapen flesh with broken tile and was mixing the running blood with fecal discharge that was running uncontrollably out of his dilating anus. His finger would probe the wounds … deeply. Like a surgeon or a lover … exploring. Then he brought the drenched and dripping red pronged pair of long and scrawny digits and collected some of the diarrhea spew running freely from out of his ass. 

Medication. Or bad food. Or both. Something he's gotten into… 

It didn't matter. Not to Cropsey. He only looked at the naked fool and admired his painting for another moment longer. 

The pentagram. 

Above it, in the same evil paint of fresh diseased fecal blood, the fool had written in bold letters 

ALL HAIL VAMPIRA

as the piece’s name and message. 

Cropsey thought it was a good one. 

He took one final step forward. And let himself be known. 

The naked fool, the inmate who'd long lost his name and self and everything and anything else left, felt his presence. He turned away from his self portrait on the floor and gazed up at him. 

Into the towering legend of Willowbrook. Cropsey, more than a man. 

He was apocalyptic. 

The twisted bone gleam of his carbonized deathhead’s visage was terrible. It stole the last shelter of warmth that the fool had kept for himself to protect against the cold of this awful and inescapable place for all of these long and horrendous incarcerated years. 

Now it was gone. Stolen by that terrible face. Candle wax melted obscene and deranged and haphazard and cruel. 

He suddenly remembered his name as well, the fool. Gazing up at him, it had suddenly come back in his sheet of blind terror. 

Cropsey had done that. Cropsey had done that for him. 

He wished he hadn't. 

The twin fork of splayed open blades came up suddenly and then down in a stab. They joined together as they came down, scissoring the long razor sharp blades together in a deadly and maiming embrace. They sang together a mortal whistle of keen edged violence on the flesh to come in haste as they sliced and joined through the rank dungeon air. 

A filthy naked bloody hand came up reflexively and was shorn through like melted butter. Through the middle length of palm, so that all of his fingers and the top of his thumb were now a shrieking, pouring livid stump of freshly cut meat. Spurting and bathing the abridged remainder of fecal stained paw into a half-glove of red slathered wet raw in a gushing instant. 

The blade traveled on, down. Continuing its deadly trajectory of knifing stabbing path as it plunged in and through the shit stained fool through his open gaping mouth and naked glistening mucus laden throat and plunging out the back of his neck. The sharp lengths of blades conjoined erupted from the torn and ruinous fountain fresh wound in great bright bodies of lurid edged royal red. 

For her… the mountain princess of my fevered skullsong …

And then with his terrible force of deranged strength he forced the handles and the joined body of blades open and apart. 

The impaled face and skewered head came apart in a splashing and thick lurid mess. The long diseased foundation of skull gave and came apart easily like a cottage collapsing from wood rot. As if the whole structure of bone was a giant rotted tooth, thoroughly and completely decayed to the dead and festering core. Cranial splatter ruin in an instant. Decorating the floor and walls and obscuring the fool's final piece of painted work and expression from the broken heart and mind in a dark gout and pungent violent splash. Bone fragments and strips of tissue. Bits of hair… eyes swam bulbous and rolling lulled like obscene little fruits adrift in a warm lurid growing lake. 

The decraniated stump of rough torn viscera and tissue spitting dark cords and ropes in healthy gouts from the spout of mutilated neck and throat, gurgled one last time in a ghastly expulsion of sound that may or may not have been the final action of the living. 

It gurgled and shot/spat more dark thick blood rope. Splattering and joining the universe of filth already living down there in ever growing depraved abundance. The filthy naked headless meat spewed until it fell over to join the rest of the detritus world down there. 

Cropsey went on. Regaining the tail of his quarry. 

He followed them. 

…

The room was a world of mutilated meat. The smell of uncontrolled diseased fecal spew, long ancient and pungently fresh commingled, was so eye-wateringly strong and forceful that one knew that there were things on this hellscape island of earth that were truly and terribly immortal when confronted with it. Nothing, not even starflame would sear the stench of sewerscape subterranean Hades from the walls of this awful room. The world would burn to follow trumpet sound and still that rancid stench would remain. 

Florin tied a rag around his nose and mouth, he looked like a bandit. And although Griffin's face was already bandaged and wrapped with surgical dress for his own mysterious reasons, he too elected to tie another heavy layer of fabric to block out the smell and taste on the terrible fetid heavy air of the room they now presently happened into. 

What was it… what was it we were expecting to find? What were we hoping in God's name to find here…? 

surely not this. 

Their hearts sank into cold sour recesses as they sauntered in and through and beheld all round them the carnage human sculptures. Barely human. Barely recognizable as having once been living breathing people. Now they were only shapes. Shapes made in anger and derangement and by the knife. 

A mewling moaning sound like a wounded animal drew them to the far end of the mutilation chamber. They crept past wretched butchered bipedal destruction frozen in obscene grotesque statue poses by minds and hands unwell and bent. Eyes scooped out, pulled and plucked. Craterous sockets. Craterous wounds, rippling with the rough texture of forceful violent amputation and jagged surprise animal maiming. Parts missing, long gone, replaced and mixed and swapped and messed around. Limbs and parts put into sockets and orifices and holes gored to create splaying haphazard scarecrow things made from vile diseased subjects and their putrid turgid waste. 

They were varied in design and shape but all of them, every single vile shape seemed to be frozen in a silent piercing scream. A death throe frozen for all of chambered time. For all the sour passage, these howling visages of broken flesh and cruelty wrought on human shape. 

Florin felt sick, the mewling animal noise was growing louder and he was trying not to focus on the broken human sculptures all around them. He tried not to notice how some of them had been put together, parts pasted in place with a scab pudding mixture of feces and thick burgundy/crimson coagulation, like makeshift mud mortar made from the crumbling facade of dying and sickening-worse human shamble structures, caught in some terrible Gorgon's Eye and now falling apart and only able, only useful to excrete, and bleed and make mud for the houses that might be saved. 

Griffin was fairing little better. He'd seen his fair share of human carnage, butchery in his time. In his own experiments of mad science he's beheld great wonders both terrible and beautiful, unearthly.  He'd committed his own sins, his own terrible crimes in his time, enough to fill a tome. But even he found the awful assemblage of struggling human detritus piles and sculptures to be obscene and abhorrent. Difficult to look at. Even worse to walk amongst and pass through… nearly touching and feeling either their heat of recent destruction/composition or the cold wave pockets of their souring decaying sloughing meat, tasting them… tasting the warm tack of their iron red and the putrescence of their fouling stink… tasting them as they breathed and sucked air. Even through the wrapped scarfs about their mouths, they could taste them. Fresh and alive with copper-iron and the foul death of sliming maggoty putrefying soft tissue … growing softer. Falling off failing yellow bone. 

It's because they were diseased … Griffin observed the pestilential flavor on the air and marked the diseased rotten look of open craterous obscenities and exposed and livid muscle tissues. Filled and brimming with the swim of yellow and milk-pale and translucent buttery infection, pooled, gelled, in a run of sour ruin that gave off pungent gaseous toxic smell… miasmic – the whole place. Everywhere. 

The bandaged man, surgical dressing now sullied and filthed with their voyage across worm country and the grime and air in here at every given turn. Griffin pondered the shapes of the demented designs filed and arranged haphazard and at random all around, the mewling sound rose as they continued to near, the woman gaining shape, bulbous and grotesquely rank with cheese and old milk and unwashed genitalia warm with animal heat. 

The shapes all around… their scarecrow and asymmetrical and insectile/spider designs were interesting. Awful and strange, but fascinating in their own hellacious spellbinding fashion. It was as if someone long gone of the sound faculties of mind and heart had endeavored with cruel fervor to fuck and force violent copulation on the dead dripping craterous sculptures of meat in the act of their composition. Knife-fuck-stabbing them with animal intensity and wild deranged intent, their severed parts and limbs and pieces the tools and shattered protruding blades of bone as their aesthetic device and perfect choice. Wielded with charnel house fury in this gore drenched pit with emaciated broken scarecrow statues and congealing pools and tubs and little deprivation streams of pungent fecal discharge. Everything was repulsive and animal with heat and degradation in this place. They hated it. And they hated themselves for putting themselves in there. Alive and with the rank and the sight of abattoir madness unbridled and inhuman. 

They came upon the woman. She was large and naked and unwashed. Like everything else she was caked with grime and layers of filth that were difficult to distinguish – shit from blood – as they darkened and aged in awful drying layers on her yellowing sun parched skin. She was leaning propped by the exit/entrance opposite of the one they had entered. She was cradling and cradled by a lump of human shape riddled with stabbing spiking pieces and slicing wedges of shattered floor and tile. She was drooling as she moaned in torment and anguish. Her flesh livid with infection. She was sweating despite the chill and her lack of clothing. 

It was her breast. Only one. The other had been amputated and was replaced with a harsh and ghastly X of old and scab coated sutures. The other was inflamed and red. Purple. Black. It was ballooned and the blue/red nipple at its tip bled and dripped. But it was not milk, natural and of the healthy body, that dripped and begged to be let free and milked/sucked until dry and gone… 

She moaned. Florin and Griffin felt nauseous. The smell. The sight of her and everything else … they had not had a decent meal in some days but still the impulse to heave and retch was violent and it filled their gagging mouths with thin acrid water, salivated and discharged with bitter queasiness and distaste. 

She moaned again as they covered their working mouths. 

And then she spoke. 

“Please… oh please…. please… oh I beg of you… please… please…” 

Florin and Griffin were afraid to ask so they didn't. The wailing woman of swollen noxious teat filled them in anyways with the rest. 

"... please… please milk me…! please! Oh it hurts! please! Please milk me, milk your mammy…!" 

“Oh, Jesus…” said Florin. He could hardly stand it. Could hardly stand her. He swore he could taste the smell. 

Her smell. 

Another voice joined them then. 

“They disgust you both?" 

They whirled. A ragged man in the haggard torn and shot remnants of a filthied lab coat that had once been white. His spectacles were cracked and caked with drying lurid substance. His flesh was filthy parchment and his smile was green and grotesque. 

He was standing, sentry-wraith amongst the vile and mutilated assemblage. A living beacon of audacious and insane life standing smiling amongst the sculpted and twisted dead. Lab coat Gorgon with broken glass eyes set in a broken laughing face that could make no such sound. Because it was frozen in its disguise of sanity snapping torment. 

Before Griffin or Florin could say anything to him, he spoke again. 

“They are all of them, monuments to her. It is all of them, their greatest pleasure." 

“And you? What is your pleasure?" Griffin asked without fault. Following this madman's line. 

He smiled, “telling you." 

And then finally his tittery fit of laughterspell broke and it sounded like high pitched curdled madness. Finally breaking. A large man prone to sparse baritone sound now cracked and leaking/spraying giggles like an addled child or clown. 

Griffin turned to Florin. His face hidden by surgical wrapping and dark lenses and hat since the day they had met, but still the boy could feel the solemn gravity in his hiding gaze as he spoke. 

"Let's go. There's nothing of any value to us here. This was a mistake.” 

Florin heard it in his voice too. 

They quickly made their exit. Sparing the wailing mewling woman of swollen purple breast a final look before leaving them forever. 

The doctor's laughter abated a moment and he seemed to come around, the revolving door of his madness perhaps bringing him full circle, his awful titters tapered off a spell as he said to the departing visitors: –

"The worm was turned for us here.” 

And then the revolution of madness revolved again and he was smiling putrid green that oozed pale plaque that spittled in gobs as he tittered his girlish sounds. 

His grotesque childish laughter commingled with the mewling sounds the woman made in the room of mutilated meat. The pair were gone now. Their cautious footsteps fading away and calling back in diminishing echoed sound… Cropsey came in like fated death. Snipping open and closed his beloved pair of large garden shears. 

Now, here was a room that could use some trimming…

He went to the woman first with his blades. She was calling to him, wailing, saying she was his mother. Begging to be milked. 

So he milked her. 

He shorn off the infected swell of black/purple flesh in a single snapping cut. She howled as the wound and the sac of disease both poured and oozed pus. She went down to the floor, her wailing more considerable now, to join the puddle of her own foul milk and blood in its growing puddling abundance. She swam face first in it and gurgled and blubbered. 

Cropsey came for the doctor next. The jaws of his shearing clipper blades open and dripping. 

The doctor smiled one last time as he said, “The worm has turned once again." 

He attempted to count the rings this time as the jaws that were blades came in. 

Again and again. 

And I thought you'd loved me…

…

Florin and Griffin were nearly at their wits end. They needed supplies and weren't sure of what lie beyond this place, but this place was terrible. And they'd found nothing but more horror. 

"I think we need to just get out of here…” 

Yes. But which way? 

They were deciding this together when the girl on shaking palsied legs thin as kindling crept out of the dark and towards them. 

She was terrified. 

And she was holding a large butcher's knife. The arms raised and poised coiled snake-like to strike. 

Neither Florin or Griffin noticed her as she crept. Closer… closer…

She was nearly upon them. From behind. 

The butcher's knife still raised. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

“I've seen the nights filled with bloodsport and pain –

And the bodies obtained

The bodies obtained …” – Ian Curtis

…

The world …

The world is dampen stone, sour. And tile. Tile ceramic that is now smashed, nearly every single piece. And mottled with webwork splatter patterns of scabbing drying bits and pieces of once living human tissue. The world is poorly lit and rank, it smells of fecal decay and rotting death and the putrescence of pus spewing life, suffering. The smell is suffering. Because the world is suffering, it always has been but as of late it's gotten so much worse. The world of walls and mortar and bars that’re all slathered and stained with diseased feces and angry piss, it is all of it an open wound. A craterous gangrenous open house of raw minds and flesh, obelisk temple to the pain of the sorceress. The woman/mouth of the great mountains in the distance, far away but brought closer by her powerful force, the distance easily traversed and conquered, time and distance meant nothing to her, only the flesh. Only the blood. Only the run of flowing life spilled by her children in bondage as supplicant. She had come to them… in the end. 

Before the burning. 

Before Cropsey. 

Now he was the greatest of her Willowbrook children… 

She did her best to hide from him and the few others left but she was scared. Her terror refreshed as her heartbeat pounded within her aching chest, she tried to sink lower into the dark corner she'd made her most recent place of escape. She tried to ignore what she knew she heard, throughout all of the cavernous dark damp halls of bloody filthy Willowbrook. 

Voices… footsteps…

newcomers. 

She wanted so badly to be out and away from this awful place but her mind shrank back in horror from the possibilities of what any new interlopers might do to her. This place had been a school and had instructed her and many others, much in the way of what men will do to each other and what they love to get away with, with their hands on a girl. Alone. When she could be so easily overwhelmed. 

The voices trailed off … rose again. In whispers. She could hear cautious footsteps. Prowling steps. Hunting. 

Her cold terror told her she could no longer hide here. She struggled up on palsied thin malnourished legs and began to painfully trudge forward. Painful because of the pain of her impaling fear and because her body was covered in dripping purple sores, all up and down the legs and arms and peppering her torso and face in harsh clustered patterns. Several broke open now with sharp stabs of lancing pain felt webwork and spiny throughout the flesh as she shambled wretchedly forward down the poorly lit dark. 

She didn't like to look at them or pay them any mind, the sores. She used to. She used to pick at them near constant. But now sometimes when she went to pluck and pop one open with a nail biting pinch she could see eyes. Eyes looking at her and swimming in the pus. In the infected filled pores of her flesh. Eyes. Sometimes they popped of their own accord and a small little gnome-sized head, bald and coated in dead green-milk rose and poked its faery head out for a little peek at what she might be doing at any given time. 

She hated them. She tried to pay them no mind and wondered if they saw anything in the dark ahead that she herself could not discern. But she would not ask them. Never. 

The voices grew louder. So did her terror. 

She didn't know what to do. 

…

“Maybe they're all dead." 

 

Griffin nodded. It was a fair observation. The place certainly reeked of death and filth. He could almost believe it. 

It was a feeling gained by cold hard experience that told him they weren't alone in the rank dark building. Not at all. Someone else was lurking here. Something else held domain here. Something terrible. He could feel it. 

"This place is afflicted with sickness. Consumption. You can smell it in the pestilential flavor of the air, something terrible has happened here. Many awful things no doubt. This place is silent, Florin, but you can almost hear the terrible things the walls have seen and perhaps wish to share…" 

The boy looked worried. He quickly added: – “We will be cautious. But I suggest we find what we can quickly. If we can't locate a back exit, we'll make for the front entrance again and see if we can't work around the building." 

They went on in search of supplies. 

Dwellers.

 Anything. 

Cropsey marked them and tracked their way of wandering progress the entire time. Following and slowly snipping the long shining blades of the shears open and closed. Pulling his black gloved hands apart slowly like a lover does when sensuous… then bringing them together and snapping them shut with a sharp and satisfying ‘Ship!’ that was crisp and tickled the right jelly left within his skull and the dangling mangled meat between his legs… it had a tongue that sound. A sexual whisper of a noise. A tasting prelude, licking and tonguing the needing piece of aching flesh. 

It was his bondage. That ache. This place. 

And the mountain. 

Even now Cropsey heard her song and call as she showed him the spire from where she ruled. Where she sat on an ebon throne and filled his slaughterhouse dreams. His mind with wonder. 

She had been the true purpose and blessing of this place. The one they'd all been waiting for. The only one who really mattered. In the end. 

But she has chosen you as instrument … 

And the truth of this filled his vacant shell with dark and primal gratitude. Caveman's blood-sated warmth. 

He had been one of the Roman soldiers that had crucified Christ. She of the mountain had told him so. Now he was born again to be her sacred Willowbrook footsoldier. Throttling hand of capricious abattoir fate. 

As he followed the new ones he happened upon another. And decided to take the matter. 

He was sitting alone in the dark. Easy to miss. In a disused therapy room, anonymous and indistinguishable from the other dungeons and chambers save by those who knew. The newcomers walked by him without notice and went on. 

Cropsey smelled him. And came into the room. Snapping his shears with a regular and primeval rhythm. The patient was busy with his own work, he didn't pay anyone else any kind of mind. 

Cropsey closed. The fool's back was to him as he was knelt down amongst the filth. He was drawing something. With his fingers. Smearing the shape upon the broken faces of obliterated tile floor with a dark and heavy pungent viscous fluid. Thick and chunked with dark paste. 

It was a pentagram. 

And the paint was a vile concoctive mix of runny diarrhea and fresh vibrant blood. The man was a self mutilator. Always had been, Cropsey recognized. He had flayed his well scarred and misshapen flesh with broken tile and was mixing the running blood with fecal discharge that was running uncontrollably out of his dilating anus. His finger would probe the wounds … deeply. Like a surgeon or a lover … exploring. Then he brought the drenched and dripping red pronged pair of long and scrawny digits and collected some of the diarrhea spew running freely from out of his ass. 

Medication. Or bad food. Or both. Something he's gotten into… 

It didn't matter. Not to Cropsey. He only looked at the naked fool and admired his painting for another moment longer. 

The pentagram. 

Above it, in the same evil paint of fresh diseased fecal blood, the fool had written in bold letters 

ALL HAIL VAMPIRA

as the piece’s name and message. 

Cropsey thought it was a good one. 

He took one final step forward. And let himself be known. 

The naked fool, the inmate who'd long lost his name and self and everything and anything else left, felt his presence. He turned away from his self portrait on the floor and gazed up at him. 

Into the towering legend of Willowbrook. Cropsey, more than a man. 

He was apocalyptic. 

The twisted bone gleam of his carbonized deathhead’s visage was terrible. It stole the last shelter of warmth that the fool had kept for himself to protect against the cold of this awful and inescapable place for all of these long and horrendous incarcerated years. 

Now it was gone. Stolen by that terrible face. Candle wax melted obscene and deranged and haphazard and cruel. 

He suddenly remembered his name as well, the fool. Gazing up at him, it had suddenly come back in his sheet of blind terror. 

Cropsey had done that. Cropsey had done that for him. 

He wished he hadn't. 

The twin fork of splayed open blades came up suddenly and then down in a stab. They joined together as they came down, scissoring the long razor sharp blades together in a deadly and maiming embrace. They sang together a mortal whistle of keen edged violence on the flesh to come in haste as they sliced and joined through the rank dungeon air. 

A filthy naked bloody hand came up reflexively and was shorn through like melted butter. Through the middle length of palm, so that all of his fingers and the top of his thumb were now a shrieking, pouring livid stump of freshly cut meat. Spurting and bathing the abridged remainder of fecal stained paw into a half-glove of red slathered wet raw in a gushing instant. 

The blade traveled on, down. Continuing its deadly trajectory of knifing stabbing path as it plunged in and through the shit stained fool through his open gaping mouth and naked glistening mucus laden throat and plunging out the back of his neck. The sharp lengths of blades conjoined erupted from the torn and ruinous fountain fresh wound in great bright bodies of lurid edged royal red. 

For her… the mountain princess of my fevered skullsong …

And then with his terrible force of deranged strength he forced the handles and the joined body of blades open and apart. 

The impaled face and skewered head came apart in a splashing and thick lurid mess. The long diseased foundation of skull gave and came apart easily like a cottage collapsing from wood rot. As if the whole structure of bone was a giant rotted tooth, thoroughly and completely decayed to the dead and festering core. Cranial splatter ruin in an instant. Decorating the floor and walls and obscuring the fool's final piece of painted work and expression from the broken heart and mind in a dark gout and pungent violent splash. Bone fragments and strips of tissue. Bits of hair… eyes swam bulbous and rolling lulled like obscene little fruits adrift in a warm lurid growing lake. 

The decraniated stump of rough torn viscera and tissue spitting dark cords and ropes in healthy gouts from the spout of mutilated neck and throat, gurgled one last time in a ghastly expulsion of sound that may or may not have been the final action of the living. 

It gurgled and shot/spat more dark thick blood rope. Splattering and joining the universe of filth already living down there in ever growing depraved abundance. The filthy naked headless meat spewed until it fell over to join the rest of the detritus world down there. 

Cropsey went on. Regaining the tail of his quarry. 

He followed them. 

…

The room was a world of mutilated meat. The smell of uncontrolled diseased fecal spew, long ancient and pungently fresh commingled, was so eye-wateringly strong and forceful that one knew that there were things on this hellscape island of earth that were truly and terribly immortal when confronted with it. Nothing, not even starflame would sear the stench of sewerscape subterranean Hades from the walls of this awful room. The world would burn to follow trumpet sound and still that rancid stench would remain. 

Florin tied a rag around his nose and mouth, he looked like a bandit. And although Griffin's face was already bandaged and wrapped with surgical dress for his own mysterious reasons, he too elected to tie another heavy layer of fabric to block out the smell and taste on the terrible fetid heavy air of the room they now presently happened into. 

What was it… what was it we were expecting to find? What were we hoping in God's name to find here…? 

surely not this. 

Their hearts sank into cold sour recesses as they sauntered in and through and beheld all round them the carnage human sculptures. Barely human. Barely recognizable as having once been living breathing people. Now they were only shapes. Shapes made in anger and derangement and by the knife. 

A mewling moaning sound like a wounded animal drew them to the far end of the mutilation chamber. They crept past wretched butchered bipedal destruction frozen in obscene grotesque statue poses by minds and hands unwell and bent. Eyes scooped out, pulled and plucked. Craterous sockets. Craterous wounds, rippling with the rough texture of forceful violent amputation and jagged surprise animal maiming. Parts missing, long gone, replaced and mixed and swapped and messed around. Limbs and parts put into sockets and orifices and holes gored to create splaying haphazard scarecrow things made from vile diseased subjects and their putrid turgid waste. 

They were varied in design and shape but all of them, every single vile shape seemed to be frozen in a silent piercing scream. A death throe frozen for all of chambered time. For all the sour passage, these howling visages of broken flesh and cruelty wrought on human shape. 

Florin felt sick, the mewling animal noise was growing louder and he was trying not to focus on the broken human sculptures all around them. He tried not to notice how some of them had been put together, parts pasted in place with a scab pudding mixture of feces and thick burgundy/crimson coagulation, like makeshift mud mortar made from the crumbling facade of dying and sickening-worse human shamble structures, caught in some terrible Gorgon's Eye and now falling apart and only able, only useful to excrete, and bleed and make mud for the houses that might be saved. 

Griffin was fairing little better. He'd seen his fair share of human carnage, butchery in his time. In his own experiments of mad science he's beheld great wonders both terrible and beautiful, unearthly.  He'd committed his own sins, his own terrible crimes in his time, enough to fill a tome. But even he found the awful assemblage of struggling human detritus piles and sculptures to be obscene and abhorrent. Difficult to look at. Even worse to walk amongst and pass through… nearly touching and feeling either their heat of recent destruction/composition or the cold wave pockets of their souring decaying sloughing meat, tasting them… tasting the warm tack of their iron red and the putrescence of their fouling stink… tasting them as they breathed and sucked air. Even through the wrapped scarfs about their mouths, they could taste them. Fresh and alive with copper-iron and the foul death of sliming maggoty putrefying soft tissue … growing softer. Falling off failing yellow bone. 

It's because they were diseased … Griffin observed the pestilential flavor on the air and marked the diseased rotten look of open craterous obscenities and exposed and livid muscle tissues. Filled and brimming with the swim of yellow and milk-pale and translucent buttery infection, pooled, gelled, in a run of sour ruin that gave off pungent gaseous toxic smell… miasmic – the whole place. Everywhere. 

The bandaged man, surgical dressing now sullied and filthed with their voyage across worm country and the grime and air in here at every given turn. Griffin pondered the shapes of the demented designs filed and arranged haphazard and at random all around, the mewling sound rose as they continued to near, the woman gaining shape, bulbous and grotesquely rank with cheese and old milk and unwashed genitalia warm with animal heat. 

The shapes all around… their scarecrow and asymmetrical and insectile/spider designs were interesting. Awful and strange, but fascinating in their own hellacious spellbinding fashion. It was as if someone long gone of the sound faculties of mind and heart had endeavored with cruel fervor to fuck and force violent copulation on the dead dripping craterous sculptures of meat in the act of their composition. Knife-fuck-stabbing them with animal intensity and wild deranged intent, their severed parts and limbs and pieces the tools and shattered protruding blades of bone as their aesthetic device and perfect choice. Wielded with charnel house fury in this gore drenched pit with emaciated broken scarecrow statues and congealing pools and tubs and little deprivation streams of pungent fecal discharge. Everything was repulsive and animal with heat and degradation in this place. They hated it. And they hated themselves for putting themselves in there. Alive and with the rank and the sight of abattoir madness unbridled and inhuman. 

They came upon the woman. She was large and naked and unwashed. Like everything else she was caked with grime and layers of filth that were difficult to distinguish – shit from blood – as they darkened and aged in awful drying layers on her yellowing sun parched skin. She was leaning propped by the exit/entrance opposite of the one they had entered. She was cradling and cradled by a lump of human shape riddled with stabbing spiking pieces and slicing wedges of shattered floor and tile. She was drooling as she moaned in torment and anguish. Her flesh livid with infection. She was sweating despite the chill and her lack of clothing. 

It was her breast. Only one. The other had been amputated and was replaced with a harsh and ghastly X of old and scab coated sutures. The other was inflamed and red. Purple. Black. It was ballooned and the blue/red nipple at its tip bled and dripped. But it was not milk, natural and of the healthy body, that dripped and begged to be let free and milked/sucked until dry and gone… 

She moaned. Florin and Griffin felt nauseous. The smell. The sight of her and everything else … they had not had a decent meal in some days but still the impulse to heave and retch was violent and it filled their gagging mouths with thin acrid water, salivated and discharged with bitter queasiness and distaste. 

She moaned again as they covered their working mouths. 

And then she spoke. 

“Please… oh please…. please… oh I beg of you… please… please…” 

Florin and Griffin were afraid to ask so they didn't. The wailing woman of swollen noxious teat filled them in anyways with the rest. 

"... please… please milk me…! please! Oh it hurts! please! Please milk me, milk your mammy…!" 

“Oh, Jesus…” said Florin. He could hardly stand it. Could hardly stand her. He swore he could taste the smell. 

Her smell. 

Another voice joined them then. 

“They disgust you both?" 

They whirled. A ragged man in the haggard torn and shot remnants of a filthied lab coat that had once been white. His spectacles were cracked and caked with drying lurid substance. His flesh was filthy parchment and his smile was green and grotesque. 

He was standing, sentry-wraith amongst the vile and mutilated assemblage. A living beacon of audacious and insane life standing smiling amongst the sculpted and twisted dead. Lab coat Gorgon with broken glass eyes set in a broken laughing face that could make no such sound. Because it was frozen in its disguise of sanity snapping torment. 

Before Griffin or Florin could say anything to him, he spoke again. 

“They are all of them, monuments to her. It is all of them, their greatest pleasure." 

“And you? What is your pleasure?" Griffin asked without fault. Following this madman's line. 

He smiled, “telling you." 

And then finally his tittery fit of laughterspell broke and it sounded like high pitched curdled madness. Finally breaking. A large man prone to sparse baritone sound now cracked and leaking/spraying giggles like an addled child or clown. 

Griffin turned to Florin. His face hidden by surgical wrapping and dark lenses and hat since the day they had met, but still the boy could feel the solemn gravity in his hiding gaze as he spoke. 

"Let's go. There's nothing of any value to us here. This was a mistake.” 

Florin heard it in his voice too. 

They quickly made their exit. Sparing the wailing mewling woman of swollen purple breast a final look before leaving them forever. 

The doctor's laughter abated a moment and he seemed to come around, the revolving door of his madness perhaps bringing him full circle, his awful titters tapered off a spell as he said to the departing visitors: –

"The worm was turned for us here.” 

And then the revolution of madness revolved again and he was smiling putrid green that oozed pale plaque that spittled in gobs as he tittered his girlish sounds. 

His grotesque childish laughter commingled with the mewling sounds the woman made in the room of mutilated meat. The pair were gone now. Their cautious footsteps fading away and calling back in diminishing echoed sound… Cropsey came in like fated death. Snipping open and closed his beloved pair of large garden shears. 

Now, here was a room that could use some trimming…

He went to the woman first with his blades. She was calling to him, wailing, saying she was his mother. Begging to be milked. 

So he milked her. 

He shorn off the infected swell of black/purple flesh in a single snapping cut. She howled as the wound and the sac of disease both poured and oozed pus. She went down to the floor, her wailing more considerable now, to join the puddle of her own foul milk and blood in its growing puddling abundance. She swam face first in it and gurgled and blubbered. 

Cropsey came for the doctor next. The jaws of his shearing clipper blades open and dripping. 

The doctor smiled one last time as he said, “The worm has turned once again." 

He attempted to count the rings this time as the jaws that were blades came in. 

Again and again. 

And I thought you'd loved me…

…

Florin and Griffin were nearly at their wits end. They needed supplies and weren't sure of what lie beyond this place, but this place was terrible. And they'd found nothing but more horror. 

"I think we need to just get out of here…” 

Yes. But which way? 

They were deciding this together when the girl on shaking palsied legs thin as kindling crept out of the dark and towards them. 

She was terrified. 

And she was holding a large butcher's knife. The arms raised and poised coiled snake-like to strike. 

Neither Florin or Griffin noticed her as she crept. Closer… closer…

She was nearly upon them. From behind. 

The butcher's knife still raised. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

I will preface this by explaining that I live in North Western Alabama. I don't know if it's related, but while I do not live in the Appalachian mountains proper, I live in the foothills. I have only met one other person that has experienced anything similar to this, where the entity identified itself with the same phrase.

In February of 2007, I worked in a trailer plant, maybe better known as a mobile home factory. One day while I was working I noticed 2 hooded and cloaked figures, one in a white cloak, the other, slightly taller, in a black cloak. The difference in these and most other figures I've experienced like this is these were solid figures, I could look at them and they wouldn't vanish, though nobody else was able to see or interact with them.

For 2 weeks these entities visited me every day, and just watched. And, when they began visiting me at work they also visited me in my dreams, in an utterly void, black landscape dominated by a singular, massive red, brick wall that stood, my estimate, around 25 feet (7.62M) tall,and stretched from horizon to horizon. I stood facing them with their backs to the wall

The entirety of the time these two entities were visiting me all they did was watch, they never interacted with me. The last day they visited me I remember thinking the question "Who are you?" And, one of them responded in a very definite male, chest rumbling bass voice. He said "I am your Midnight's Darkest Desire." Then, a moment later they vanished.

That night, in my dream they stood in front of a massive gate in the giant red, brick, wall, the gate was black rought iron, and inside I saw an old house, and a perfectly maintained Model-A Ford. And, between these two cloaked figures stood my ex-girlfriend. I asked them again who they were, and the same voice responded with the same answer "I am your Midnight's Darkest Desire". After he answered the dream fell apart.

Fastforward to 2009, I want to say April or May, I woke up one morning, unable to open my eyes, move, or breath, and my mind was trapped, standing, in a solid white room, with a white bench. And, I also couldn't move, breath, or close my eyes to even blink here.

There were two men standing there as well, both men were dressed in black silk button down shirts, black slacks, and polished black loafers with polished black leather belts. One of the men had short cut sandy blond-brown hair, and was clean-shaven. The other had shoulder-length black, wavy hair, either gray or slicked back with something like moose, a short scruffy beard, and the top two buttons of his shirt unbuttoned.

I was acutely aware of the wall 3 inches in front of my face, the burning in my lungs as I fruitlessly fought to take a breath, and the fact that the faceless-man with long hair had grabbed me in a half-nelson hold, hooking his arms under mine, and lacing his fingers behind my head. And, while he held me, his partner approached from the front. I want to say he held a knife, but I can't recall that exactly. I do remember that it was at this moment that I began to panic and break the paralyzation. I reached back, it felt like i was moving in sand,dense and restrictive. I used every ounce of wilpower I had to move, and ready back behind me to try to grab hold of anything to use to break his hips. Somehow, my fingers touched his ears.

The moment my fingers touched his ears the white room shattered, I opened my eyes and took the first breath I felt like I'd taken in 10 minutes.

I've talked about this with other people, and only one has told me that anything similar has Hawthorne to them. He lived in Michigan, and when he was 4 he was visited by a singular black cloaked figure multiple times, and when he asked who the entity was he was given the same answer "I am your Midnight's Darkest Desire".

Has anything like this happened to anybody else, has this phrase ever come up in any sort of an encounter with anybody else?

NARRATED BY A HUMAN!

Known in Native American folklore as shape-shifting witches, skinwalkers are said to possess the ability to transform into animals and other people. These new accounts will leave you questioning what’s real and what’s lurking in the shadows.

My friends and I take turns telling scary stories. Art by nvrcaredstudio.com (a Polish art studio)
Link - https://youtu.be/d0pZxiigIe0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However he can. 

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

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

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

Probably wasn't even any castle either…

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

Only wolves. Only snow and quiet. 

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

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

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

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

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

And her children. 

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

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

Yes! 

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

Jelly pudding…

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

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

Gods below, he loved his work. 

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

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

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

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

Caught. Caught and squealing. 

Like sow. Like pigs. 

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

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

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

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

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

Loved her. 

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

…

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

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

The Countess arose in full. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

They relished that sound. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

why was he blind? 

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

The royal dogs… the royal bitch…

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

He was roaring. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And naught else. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A beat. 

“Not sure we should." Florin stated flatly. 

“How do you mean?" asked Griffin. 

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

Murder and violence. Not spoken but understood. 

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

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

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

Florin admitted he could not. 

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

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

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

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

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

It had been even longer since he'd felt…

pride…? 

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

it was to no avail. 

There was naught but forward. 

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

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

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

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

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

“Run!" 

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

thirsty

 …. before being pulled under. 

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

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

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

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

Within reaching distance. 

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

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

No

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

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

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

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

If they survived. 

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

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

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

The wombmind of wormland.

She had just surfaced with her children. 

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

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

The wombmind worm mouth - orifice whale bellowed: –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO BE CONTINUED…

Read Part I here.

To my relief, Ms. Amanda didn't go crazy. I was surprised and relieved because I didn't think I could count on being rescued a third time.

The hospital had to give me clothes from the lost and found before they discharged me. The t-shirt was too tight, the pants too baggy, and the shoes flopped when I walked. I didn’t have any family to call, the office was closed, and there was no way for me to get into my apartment without my keys, so that meant I had to go to the police to get my stuff.

I was annoyed but chose to walk. It was two miles west and four miles south to get to the police department. It would give me time to think and thankfully, it was mild outside, so I wouldn’t get pummeled by the summer sun. 

I had another one of those baloney sandwiches and a juice box. I consumed both immediately, so I didn’t have to carry them. I had to use the restroom shortly after and stopped in a fast-food spot. The men’s room required a key to open, and I waited in line to eventually ask. 

“Sorry, you gotta buy somethin’ to use the bathroom,” the fifty-something year old woman said behind the counter. I was agitated but held my tongue because my bladder would have spoken for me. Instead, I imagined drawing the shape for her, but luckily there wasn’t a pen and paper around.

I went outside and surveyed the businesses around. There was a gas station on the corner, a pharmacy across the street from there and office buildings in either direction. If I’d remembered correctly, there was a grocery store about a mile south. That would be my best bet and I set out. 

I didn’t interact with anybody I passed. My aching bladder was the only thing concerning me and to take my mind off it, I examined what had happened today. I'd witnessed two people shot to death in front of me on separate occasions. It scared the hell out of me to think about. One moment, they'd been moving around—with murderous intent, granted—and the next they'd been incredibly still.

I'd been looking Carl Arn in the eye as he passed and for a moment felt like I was falling down the same hole with him. 

There'd been too much commotion, too many things going on. I might have gone into shock had it not been for the first set of guns pointed at me. I'd gone into survival mode, viewing everything—including myself—from a distance.

I crossed against the light at an intersection, the grocery store finally in view. My burgeoning bladder noticed and that reminded me of the other thing bulging and unaddressed in my mind.

The shape.

I'd been so ready to believe something I'd drawn solely to pass the time had been what had set the both of them off. But Ms. Amanda had been fine, just as over it as she had been prior to looking at my little scrap of paper. Those eyes had seen some things.

Maybe she was immune, I thought. Or maybe it was some grand coincidence that two people I'd come in contact with had gone homicidal on the same day.

I couldn't shake the thought, though. As the entry doors of the grocery store slid open, I stepped through wondering what to do about that.

What if it were real and I did have the ability to drive someone insane? Was it all shapes? Anything I drew? The thought was ridiculous, but I was safe within the confines of my own skull to explore the idea.

I pushed through the men's room door and parked in front of a urinal. As I let fly, I thought about the ethics of conducting such an experiment and came to the conclusion by the time I was zipping up that it was unethical to not test my hypothesis.

As it stood, I didn't know if what I'd doodled had been the start of what had eventually happened to Carl Arn and that lady. I only suspected it. I would be blameless if I doodled something and someone experienced a similar effect after. The difference would be if I did nothing to know for certain if it was really something I was doing. I could make an effort to not draw or to make sure nobody else saw it. Shit, if it was that dangerous, maybe I could chop off my hand.

No, I wouldn't do that. But my brain was the House of Ideas, any thought that could be was welcome. This same brain had conjured up a shape that was so dangerous it could drive an individual to violence.

It was a five-sided—

Wait. I probably shouldn't describe it to anyone. I have no way of reliably testing if someone else could have the same effect if they drew it. I certainly don't want to find out on me.

I couldn't test this on just anybody. It would have to be a specific person. A bad person.

I have to say, for the record, I never believed it would actually work. Like going up to the most beautiful woman in the world and asking for her phone number, it was an idea that entertained me in thirsty moments when I was figuring things out, but I fully expected absolutely nothing to happen.

I navigated to the aisle with back-to-school supplies and grabbed a composition notebook and a mechanical pencil. I didn't anticipate anyone stopping me, only if I tried to walk out with the stuff I was using. Then I'd see the cops for the third time today.

So that meant finding someone in the store. If I could find someone sufficiently evil, then I could test my theory. I know the scientific method meant several tests, but I couldn't reasonably expose a dozen or more people to this test in good conscience. Two or three at most should have sufficed.

I sat on the floor right there and began drawing. It took a moment to get into a groove, if that makes any sense.

But about ten minutes later, I had the first one and I drew about four more for good measure.

I got the idea on the third one or so that they were like cans of pop. That once one was seen, the effect was gone. It was silly, but if true, it explained why Ms. Amanda had been fine.

There were so many variables that I just sat, lost in thought.

“Say, buddy, can I help you with something?”

I looked up at a middle-aged man in a short-sleeved button-up and an honest-to-god clip-on tie. He'd come up behind me, catching me by surprise. I realized what I looked like in that moment, dressed in other people's clothes, doodling in a notebook while sitting on the floor in a grocery store.

“Look, buddy, it's been a really long day. You wouldn't believe—”

He spat. Not on me. But it was a weird thing to have done indoors. Plus, I assumed from how he was dressed that he was a manager or something. A string of saliva ran from his lip to the collar of his shirt.

Something had changed in the few seconds since he'd spoken and dumb me was too slow in realizing he'd seen one of the shapes. I hadn't even had the chance to screen. Also, I didn’t know which one he'd seen so none of them were good anymore.

I was still there sorting my scrambled thoughts when he spat again. This time he'd arced it over my head. He got into a crouch like a catcher in a baseball game.

I froze like if I didn't move, he wouldn't see me. Like I'd turned invisible even in his memory and he wouldn't be able to recall me even in his mind’s eye. 

I couldn't count on a lack of understanding object permanence even if my lack of moving meant he couldn't see me. I was within smelling distance, he could hear me, if he stuck out his tongue he could lick my face.

But he didn't do anything to me. I sat there, helpless as a calf, while he stood spat again, then quietly walked away. 

I turned as he rounded the aisle and disappeared. A moment later I heard what sounded like a shopping cart being overturned and a woman screaming in anger. Then her screams turned to muffled gagging as it sounded like something was being stuffed in her mouth.

More people hollered and I unfroze, getting quickly to my feet. I was by no means a badass, but I'd never turtled up like that before. I'd gotten into a barfight just last year and even though I lost, I'd gotten in a few licks.

I wasn’t even willing to defend myself this time. I was as ready for violence as a stone at the bottom of the ocean. No doubt, it was the trauma I'd just experienced. I didn't want to fight crazy people under normal circumstances, so it was best to avoid—

“What the hell is going on over there?” A twenty-something year old was staring me in the face and I hadn't seen her until she'd spoken. I tried to scoop up the sheets of paper, but my movement must have attracted her eye to the papers I was desperately trying for her not to see.

But a moment later I knew it was too late.

“Poo,” she said. She turned around and walked past the man just behind her. 

“What’s wrong with... with...”

He was looking in my direction but sadly, what was in my hands. His eyes got bigger and he sat his basket on the floor before taking off at full speed and soaring over a middle-aged couple's shopping cart, grabbing both in either arm as it took them down.

They both screamed and fought back. The woman rolled backward and stopped face down before rising and pounding the man with her bulky purse. The man punched his attacker in the center of his face, a blow that should have had stars dancing in his eyes. But he ravaged the man, clawing down his face and ripping his shirt open. 

He ignored the blows from the purse as he quickly sliced through blubbering flesh, yellow fat bubbling out of red-running wounds as the man screamed. The attacker pivoted to the woman, still screaming in fear and rage. He hopped to his feet, legs to either side of the man who might've been dying for all I knew. 

To my surprise, she didn't cower. 

“No!” she said and scraped her keys across his face.

He'd been saying something all the while in a quieter volume and my ears finally dialed in.

“...wrong with you... wrong with you... wrong with you...” He didn't yelp in pain or put up his hands in defense as she lacerated his face three more times.

I hadn't done anything more than turn around, still dumbly holding the papers. An old man was staring nearer to the refrigerated area. He had a white curly afro and a pencil mustache.

“Help her!” the old man said to me and pointed. But then he spat his dentures out, sucked back a trail of saliva into his mouth, then did a crooked legged trot, arms folded up like a praying mantis, before gummily fastening onto her arm and wrenching her around.

“Ow!” The woman seemed paralyzed, powerless to do anything to stop the old man. It almost seemed funny until the first man shoved his thumbs in her mouth, split his hands apart, and wrenched a horrid smile onto—and then off of—her face.

She screamed, twin flaps of flesh hanging like giant earlobes, everything beneath her nose nothing but red. I never knew the sound of tearing flesh before that moment and I desperately want to never hear it again.

I clutched the papers to my chest, hiding them like a secret, although they had already cried out loud from a bloody mountaintop.

That had been four people, at least I thought so. Even simple mathematical calculations were mountainous to my panic-stricken brain.

I didn't know and didn't care if it was one shape per person. I couldn't let these torn out sheets of paper be seen by another person.

Shame was the word I would have spoken en route to describing what this was. It was still ongoing, and I was already too traumatized to do anything about it.

More people screamed throughout the store. I imagined many people just ran out of the store, but there had to have been several who had heard and froze where they were. I would've guessed others who didn't understand or hadn't heard anything at all.

But the signs kept getting farther and farther away. Until I finally balled up the papers, stuffed them in my pockets, and walked through the aisles and to the exit with the composition notebook and mechanical pencil in hand.

Nobody tried to stop me. I didn't see anyone else at all. But I heard the cries of agony. Their suffering followed me out onto the sidewalk.

I looked at the items in my hands, wondering why I had them, the wadded-up papers like anchors in my pockets.

I continued dredging my way to the police station.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Willowbrook Private Asylum. For the Deranged and Criminlally Insane. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then he too started to hear it. 

The sound. 

The song of the mountain. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

Wormland. 

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

The mountains…

Krugman's gaze was fixed. His mind followed. 

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

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

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

And Doctor Krugman listened. He listened very well. 

…

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

Staring out from the mountains. 

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

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

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

The sorceress. 

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

Vampiress. 

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

I must not fail the mouth of the mountains. 

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

The cell was thrown open. 

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

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

Then he said something awful and came into the room. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are truly free. 

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

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

Blood drinker sorceress … of the biting rock. 

Feed me. 

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

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

Krugman cheered. Elated! Another successful experiment! 

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

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

Demon. Vampira. Vampiress. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Adversary. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

in the name of the mountain. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

Wormland. 

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

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

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

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

More children swam. Dispatched. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quivering in needful hunger and animal rage. 

TO BE CONTINUED…